"If you couldn't get into Java then you're gonna be banging your head against the wall on a daily basis with the kind of problems sysadmins face. No, they don't necessarily write any code, but the analytical skills required to learn to program are the same as debugging complex interactions between software."
One of my friends loves using computers and wants to get a "computer job", but the Comp Sci classes he's tried to sign up for have Math pre-reqs and he's lousy at that. "Do you really have to do a lot of math in your job?" he's asked me, and I admitted that I don't. But (I gently explained) the same kinds of problem-solving skills that intermediate-level math is about are the same kinds of skills you need to be a good tech geek. You need to know how to attack problems and you need to enjoy them. He just likes doing hacks and tweaks he reads about on the web... which isn't enough.
Similarly, I haven't done any real coding (except HTML and related technologies) in well over a decade, but the 4 years I spent cranking out Fortran, Pascal, COBOL, C, Prolog, Lisp, etc. in college were good "exercise" for what I do now as a sysadmin/tech-support guy. You don't necessarily have to get that kind of experience in class; if my friend were the sort to teach himself even HTML, or if he'd ever opened up his computer to fix (rather than just upgrade) it, I might have encouraged him. But if you're not already looking for that sort of trouble in your spare time, you're not going to be effective (or happy) dealing with it on the job.
"Doom let us know PC computers could be serious entertainment and be fun in the home."
Or from my perspective, it showed that PC games could be just a stupid and boring as the worst arcade machine or console game... like playing duh-football but without the exercise. Come to think of it, maybe I should care who John Romero is, if he's responsible for PC gaming developing its obsession with eye candy, polygon rendering, and frames per second over... ideas. It means he's why I no longer give a damn about the game industry.
Nice try, but I'm 41. I know of Doom (I had a few friends who were really into it back in the mid-90s), but I couldn't care less about it. The provincial assumption that every nerd knows or cares about the FPS gaming subculture and its "important" figures is the fallacy I'm pointing out. Maybe if the original submitter had enough sense of perspective to explain who this John person was before gasping about how he's not just the legend everyone knows him as, I wouldn't find it so thoroughly absurd.
Oh, I know that I'm nobody important. But no one's talking breathlessly about me as if I were somebody. I'm not making fun of Mr. Romero necessarily, just commenting on the poor perspective of the people who imagine that the demigods of their subcult are so legendary that they need no introduction.
What's the use of training a child (who is against them) to take naps when they aren't allowed to have them in the future workplace!
Naptime isn't for the benefit of the children, but for the teacher. The fact that it reduces the chances of her strangling any of them is the main ancillary benefit they receive.
I've got a buddy who uses VOIP, and I can assure you: the quality of his phone calls to me has not doubled. It's all the same old "Dude, there's this chick on tv right now, I'm not sure which channel, who is like majorly hot. Turn it on!"
25hours/week would be just right both in the amount of money and time.
I once had a job which I tried to negotiate down to 30 hours/week with a proportionate pay cut, but they wouldn't go for it; they wanted me there 8-12+1-5/M-F. {shrug}
My current job is 32 hours/week, which is darn near perfect... except for the fact that being <40 means it doesn't include benefits, which means I'm actually missing out on affordable insurance, vacation pay, etc. They're saving a small fortune, while I get a mere 8 hours/week I wouldn't have otherwise. Not quite the fair trade I was hoping for.
Both employers are stuck with this obsolete fixation on "full time = 40 hours/week", rather than letting the hours fit the job and the employee's needs, and matching the full pay package to the amount of time worked. This kind of bureaucratic inflexibility can't be efficient, and is probably contributing the whole unemployment problem, in which some people are working too much, and others aren't working at all.
Neophilia is actually a sexual paraphilia describing those who are attracted to Keanu Reeves. Attempts by fundamentalist members of the Screen Actors Guild to "cure" it by exposing Neophiles to good-looking and expressive actors have so far been unsuccessful.
Spelling simplification will happen, and is already happening. Sure, your English Composition will still circle it with a red pen, but "thru" is making its way into print. Your dictionary probably flags "donut" as merely a variant spelling. And as digital self-publication becomes more common, you can count on this process to speed up. The difference between this and some "spelling simplification movement" is that the former is natural, growing out of public consensus... unlike unintelligible gibberish such as "dikshunery". That's worse than the metric system; it's more like Esperanto: an abstract out-of-touch ideal that simply doesn't work in the real world, because it really and truly is not worth the trouble.
But why would the levels at the artic drop more? If you fill a bowl 1/2 full with water and spin slowly around and observer the water levels, then add more water and repeat, you wouldn't see the water levels at the edge lower on the 2nd try. They'd be higher.
In this analogy, the water levels at the edge would correspond to the water at the equator, and those levels being higher is actually consistent with what he was describing.
Oh, and I think you mean centripetal force.
Not likely, since centripetal force is whatever pulls a revolving object inward. Suggesting that it (in this case, gravity) is responsible for lifting water upward at the equator is a bit nonsensical. Centrifugal force, while a technically incorrect term (since it's really the combined effect of angular momentum and inertia), is what does that.
Er, the usual age for buying "adults only" videos and reading material is 18, and 21-18=3. (NC17-rated movies are another matter; MPAA ratings have no legal standing.)
However there are some jurisdictions where you have to be 21 to buy hardcore porn, making for the irony that an 18-year-old would not be permitted to buy a copy of the DVD in which he and/or she stars.
The start-ups would all be happening in France except that they don't have a word for "entrepreneur".
No, really! Type that into Babelfish and ask for an English-to-French translation, and it spits the same word back at you. OK, maybe it's in French dictionaries, but it's obviously one of those words that they're always borrowing from other languages (e.g. the days of the week sound suspiciously like the Italian names).
I can't claim to have been on the web quite as long as Dr. Fun (I only date back to Netscape 1.0N), but I do remember when this was literally the webcomic. All the kewl netheads knew about it.
You mean maybe all those fiscal conservatives who call for a flat tax aren't crazy after all?
The people who are crazy(*) are the so-called fiscal conservatives who think that someone's seriously going to turn down a second income (or a better-paying job) because he'll only be able to keep some of the additional money as take-home pay. Have you ever actually heard someone say, "No, boss, I don't want that raise; because even though I'd take home more money, I'd be paying more in taxes." With a properly indexed progressive-tax-indexing system (i.e. no huge "gotcha" plateaus, and with the higher tax rate only applying to the amount earned above each plateaus), progressive taxation is pretty painless, and has no discernable effect on "incentive to work harder".
(*) Assuming they actually believe it, and aren't just using this an argument to justify why they shouldn't have to pay their fair share of taxes. Most of the demagogues who make this claim aren't stupid enough to believe it themselves; they just hope that you are.
I have been waiting like forever for a kitten that I can like use for like body piercing, yknow? Now they finally come up with one that's like hypoallergenic, so my mom won't like freak out...
I'm assuming that you want to do this because the userbase is mostly laptop-based.
Actually, we (the college where I do tech support) do have an environment with a lot of laptop users, and we're in the process of making them almost ubiquitous. But we still have a fully wired network and have no intention of changing that. When a student sits down in a classroom and hauls out his 'Book, he plugs it into the wall. We might have to settle for wireless in the antique granite building we're expanding into next year, due to the cost of retrofitting an historic building that barely accommodates plain old telephone service, but I'm still going to push for as much copper as I can get over there, both for my sake and that of our students.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you couldn't get into Java then you're gonna be banging your head against the wall on a daily basis with the kind of problems sysadmins face. No, they don't necessarily write any code, but the analytical skills required to learn to program are the same as debugging complex interactions between software."
One of my friends loves using computers and wants to get a "computer job", but the Comp Sci classes he's tried to sign up for have Math pre-reqs and he's lousy at that. "Do you really have to do a lot of math in your job?" he's asked me, and I admitted that I don't. But (I gently explained) the same kinds of problem-solving skills that intermediate-level math is about are the same kinds of skills you need to be a good tech geek. You need to know how to attack problems and you need to enjoy them. He just likes doing hacks and tweaks he reads about on the web... which isn't enough.
Similarly, I haven't done any real coding (except HTML and related technologies) in well over a decade, but the 4 years I spent cranking out Fortran, Pascal, COBOL, C, Prolog, Lisp, etc. in college were good "exercise" for what I do now as a sysadmin/tech-support guy. You don't necessarily have to get that kind of experience in class; if my friend were the sort to teach himself even HTML, or if he'd ever opened up his computer to fix (rather than just upgrade) it, I might have encouraged him. But if you're not already looking for that sort of trouble in your spare time, you're not going to be effective (or happy) dealing with it on the job.
- Apache: a Free server for a networking protocol (HTTP) introduced in the early 1990s.
- Linux: a Free operating system modeled after an OS introduced in the early 1970s.
Yeah, in the context of the last 25 years, I think one of those is more of an innovation than the other."Doom let us know PC computers could be serious entertainment and be fun in the home."
Or from my perspective, it showed that PC games could be just a stupid and boring as the worst arcade machine or console game... like playing duh-football but without the exercise. Come to think of it, maybe I should care who John Romero is, if he's responsible for PC gaming developing its obsession with eye candy, polygon rendering, and frames per second over... ideas. It means he's why I no longer give a damn about the game industry.
I'm still trying to figure out why I'd care. (Not really, because I don't.) Sorry.
"You might be too young to know who John is."
Nice try, but I'm 41. I know of Doom (I had a few friends who were really into it back in the mid-90s), but I couldn't care less about it. The provincial assumption that every nerd knows or cares about the FPS gaming subculture and its "important" figures is the fallacy I'm pointing out. Maybe if the original submitter had enough sense of perspective to explain who this John person was before gasping about how he's not just the legend everyone knows him as, I wouldn't find it so thoroughly absurd.
Oh, I know that I'm nobody important. But no one's talking breathlessly about me as if I were somebody. I'm not making fun of Mr. Romero necessarily, just commenting on the poor perspective of the people who imagine that the demigods of their subcult are so legendary that they need no introduction.
I honestly have no idea who this man is. Really. The name doesn't even look familiar. (No, I'm not asking.)
Imagine a Beowulf cluster^H^H^H^H^H^H^H platoon of them!
What's the use of training a child (who is against them) to take naps when they aren't allowed to have them in the future workplace!
Naptime isn't for the benefit of the children, but for the teacher. The fact that it reduces the chances of her strangling any of them is the main ancillary benefit they receive.
I've got a buddy who uses VOIP, and I can assure you: the quality of his phone calls to me has not doubled. It's all the same old "Dude, there's this chick on tv right now, I'm not sure which channel, who is like majorly hot. Turn it on!"
25hours/week would be just right both in the amount of money and time.
I once had a job which I tried to negotiate down to 30 hours/week with a proportionate pay cut, but they wouldn't go for it; they wanted me there 8-12+1-5/M-F. {shrug}
My current job is 32 hours/week, which is darn near perfect... except for the fact that being <40 means it doesn't include benefits, which means I'm actually missing out on affordable insurance, vacation pay, etc. They're saving a small fortune, while I get a mere 8 hours/week I wouldn't have otherwise. Not quite the fair trade I was hoping for.
Both employers are stuck with this obsolete fixation on "full time = 40 hours/week", rather than letting the hours fit the job and the employee's needs, and matching the full pay package to the amount of time worked. This kind of bureaucratic inflexibility can't be efficient, and is probably contributing the whole unemployment problem, in which some people are working too much, and others aren't working at all.
Neophilia is actually a sexual paraphilia describing those who are attracted to Keanu Reeves. Attempts by fundamentalist members of the Screen Actors Guild to "cure" it by exposing Neophiles to good-looking and expressive actors have so far been unsuccessful.
Spelling simplification will happen, and is already happening. Sure, your English Composition will still circle it with a red pen, but "thru" is making its way into print. Your dictionary probably flags "donut" as merely a variant spelling. And as digital self-publication becomes more common, you can count on this process to speed up. The difference between this and some "spelling simplification movement" is that the former is natural, growing out of public consensus... unlike unintelligible gibberish such as "dikshunery". That's worse than the metric system; it's more like Esperanto: an abstract out-of-touch ideal that simply doesn't work in the real world, because it really and truly is not worth the trouble.
Who needs anonymity? Pseudonymity ought to be enough for most people.
In the past I've been spanked over "controversial" things I've published online, so I use a pseudonym for that sort of thing.
But why would the levels at the artic drop more? If you fill a bowl 1/2 full with water and spin slowly around and observer the water levels, then add more water and repeat, you wouldn't see the water levels at the edge lower on the 2nd try. They'd be higher.
In this analogy, the water levels at the edge would correspond to the water at the equator, and those levels being higher is actually consistent with what he was describing.
Oh, and I think you mean centripetal force.
Not likely, since centripetal force is whatever pulls a revolving object inward. Suggesting that it (in this case, gravity) is responsible for lifting water upward at the equator is a bit nonsensical. Centrifugal force, while a technically incorrect term (since it's really the combined effect of angular momentum and inertia), is what does that.
That's 4 years after you can buy porn.
Er, the usual age for buying "adults only" videos and reading material is 18, and 21-18=3. (NC17-rated movies are another matter; MPAA ratings have no legal standing.)
However there are some jurisdictions where you have to be 21 to buy hardcore porn, making for the irony that an 18-year-old would not be permitted to buy a copy of the DVD in which he and/or she stars.
Press [F8] and startup in Safe Mode.
The start-ups would all be happening in France except that they don't have a word for "entrepreneur".
No, really! Type that into Babelfish and ask for an English-to-French translation, and it spits the same word back at you. OK, maybe it's in French dictionaries, but it's obviously one of those words that they're always borrowing from other languages (e.g. the days of the week sound suspiciously like the Italian names).
I can't claim to have been on the web quite as long as Dr. Fun (I only date back to Netscape 1.0N), but I do remember when this was literally the webcomic. All the kewl netheads knew about it.
You mean maybe all those fiscal conservatives who call for a flat tax aren't crazy after all?
The people who are crazy(*) are the so-called fiscal conservatives who think that someone's seriously going to turn down a second income (or a better-paying job) because he'll only be able to keep some of the additional money as take-home pay. Have you ever actually heard someone say, "No, boss, I don't want that raise; because even though I'd take home more money, I'd be paying more in taxes." With a properly indexed progressive-tax-indexing system (i.e. no huge "gotcha" plateaus, and with the higher tax rate only applying to the amount earned above each plateaus), progressive taxation is pretty painless, and has no discernable effect on "incentive to work harder".
(*) Assuming they actually believe it, and aren't just using this an argument to justify why they shouldn't have to pay their fair share of taxes. Most of the demagogues who make this claim aren't stupid enough to believe it themselves; they just hope that you are.
I have been waiting like forever for a kitten that I can like use for like body piercing, yknow? Now they finally come up with one that's like hypoallergenic, so my mom won't like freak out...
Whales can communicate with probes in outer space, you id10t! Didn't you see ST4:TVH?
"the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services."
...spam, phishing, viruses, DDOS, adverts....
Yes, but they look like cute little elephants. :)
I'm assuming that you want to do this because the userbase is mostly laptop-based.
Actually, we (the college where I do tech support) do have an environment with a lot of laptop users, and we're in the process of making them almost ubiquitous. But we still have a fully wired network and have no intention of changing that. When a student sits down in a classroom and hauls out his 'Book, he plugs it into the wall. We might have to settle for wireless in the antique granite building we're expanding into next year, due to the cost of retrofitting an historic building that barely accommodates plain old telephone service, but I'm still going to push for as much copper as I can get over there, both for my sake and that of our students.