A PhD with no Unix experience? What's that all about? He graduated in philosophy or something and wrote his papers in word or something?
Or something. It may surprise you to learn that most doctoral programs involve absolutely no direct use of Unix technology (e.g. literature, economics, languages, political science, history, psychology, philosophy, business administration, communication, education, theology, sociology, etc). Many PhD candidates in the hard sciences might use Unix only peripherally, perhaps as mere "users" who never even see a shell prompt (let alone having a shell preference). In fact, universities typically allow PhD candidates to do all of their personal computing using tools such as Windows or Mac OS (even pre-X), and in olden days (i.e. before the 1990s), it was actually acceptable to produce one's dissertation without a computer at all, instead using a kind of mechanical word processor/printer combo called a "type-writer". Although this leaves many PhD recipients woefully unprepared for the booming Bangalore job market, a substantial number of them manage to find employment nontheless.
Re:I hate college
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
which sucks for college students looking for a job.
A college student* shouldn't be looking for the kind of job that requires a degree. You probably can't handle both school and a job of that sort at the same time, and even if you manage to get by at it, it'll suck. You'll hate it, and your boss and profs won't like it much either.
Instead college students should look for jobs that don't expect you to focus your mental energies on them, the kind you can completely forget about when you're in class or studying for an exam. College jobs are for A) money and B) work experience (i.e. showing up, following instructions, etc.) not to be confused with job experience (i.e. x years of Java.NET). If you can get it in an organization that does work in you intended field, all the better, but that's gravy.
*Unless you're a current student looking for a job for after graduation, in which case you will have the degree, so the complaint is moot.
Because of the fisheye distortion on their cameras, the high-speed movies of their travels make them seem a bit like The Little Prince, walking about his tiny planet. I thought Mars was bigger than that.
Comparing the cost of driving your car to the ER with an ambulance is patently ridiculous on the face of it. For something you'd otherwise drive there for, damn right you'd take a cab, or more likely borrow a car instead. And how often a year do you go to the ER, anyway? SF's public transit system may be "one of the best", but its geography is also one of the most challenging to get around (I recall some kind of bay or something in the middle of it...?) so that kinda evens it out.
In most cases, if public transportation isn't practical, it's because people are making it impractical, both for themselves (e.g. living in one suburb and working in another, driving across town to shop at Walmart instead of local stores) and for the rest of the community (e.g. spending money on more highways for individual cars instead of more bus routes that directly connect Popular Point A with Popular Point B).
For one thing, I think you're mentally comparing a Cadillac-level public transit system with Yugo-level private cars. Yes, the cost to build a new public transit system using busses is substantial, but not nearly as costly as subways, light rail, trolleys, etc. We recently passed a millage to expand and revamp our bus system, and it's a pretty trivial increase to our local taxes. My car insurance alone went up more that year. One bus burns less fuel and puts less wear and tear on the infrastructure (i.e. "streets") than the 10-20 cars it can replace. It also provides indirect savings to the rest of the community, such as more parking available (i.e. less expensive) downtown.
Compared to tossing a fleet of subsidized cars at the problem, as you suggest... I'd say it's a bargain.
Seriously, I've never really understood this fetish people have for mint-condition vehicles. My last car had a noticeable dent in one of its side panels for years. I saved a small fortune by not having it restored to factory condition. And yet its "car" functionality was completely unaffected. And since the guy I ended up selling it to just wanted a means of transportation (not a penis substitute), this "defect" didn't even affect its resale value. And when you're talking about a vehicle the drivers won't even own... why should anyone care if there's a ding in the door?
Public transportation is more convenient and cheaper.
It depends.
Public transit's definitely better for getting to work and back in bad weather. (In good weather, I take my bike, which is even better.) But it's worse for running errands, visiting friends and family, or trips out of town. Which are pretty much the only uses I have for a car. Compared to the thousands of dollars I've put into buying, insuring, and maintaining an automobile, one of these services would be a huge bargain! Hell, even taking a bus to the car-share lot would be worth it.
Your suggestion was "constructive" only to someone technologically adept enough to not need the suggestion. For the majority of people who are being told "Try the GIMP; it's a great replacement for Photoshop," them coming back to say, "um, no it isn't," your suggestion was dismissive and useless. "Go learn a skill which you may have no aptitude for, and that you have no other use for (but which I personally found fun and easy, so you will too), so you can fix what's wrong with it yourself." I'm not going to learn carpentry and rebuild my new desk because it turns out to be too big for my office; I'm going to take it back, get a smaller one, and get back to doing the stuff I want to be doing.
While it does change the version on that one tarball, who's gonna maintain it, add new features, fix bugs? If it ain't in the mainline, merging in patches is a whole lot of work, just to keep a "name change" branch.
I'm not talking about a branch; I'm talking about a repackaging. Whenever you wanted to issue a new release (the target audience for this wouldn't want nightly tarballs; they'd want an annual or maybe quarterly setup.exe), you'd just download the latest STABILE source, apply a few cosmetic changes to "fix" the name (a pretty consistent patch), and you'd be done. Kind of like what AOL's been doing with Mozilla/Netscape.
Yes, it's a nontrivial amount of work, but if someone really feels that the GIMP's name is a serious drawback, periodically updating a rebranded version of it for a mainstream user base a few times a year shouldn't be that difficult a burden.
To all those here suggesting that the name of the program be changed: It ain't gonna happen. The devs love "GIMP" for all the reasons you hate it.
But if you really feel strongly about it, you can do it anyway. Ye olde GPL makes it easy. Just pick a better name, download the source code, do a global search-and-replace of "GIMP" with "____", make a new splash screen (I recommend using ____), recompile it, put it on the web at www.____.org, and start promoting the heck out of it. This doesn't require lots of programming expertise (like all the other "fix it yourself" suggestions), but it'll address the problem of the name.
If you want a separate context menu, invent one. C is not a difficult language to grasp. Then you can map the existing menu to one of the side-buttons of your mouse and be happy.
That's an excellent suggestion. I'll pass it along to the art instructors and graphic design students I work with. They're always looking for tech problems to solve... why, just the other day, one of them asked me for suggestions on how to get his Zip disk out of the drive when it didn't show up on his desktop.
NeoOffice/J works so well for me that I find myself wondering why people bother with the OS X/X11 version. The hacking-free font handling especially is much nicer. At least until an OS-X-native version of OOo2 can be produced, I'd suggest NeoOffice/J as the version for slightly adventurous but non-hacker Mac users.
When I was in high school, you could get the more technologically-inclined students' attention by offering them an opportunity to sit in front of a computer (actually located in the same room), type commands, and maybe even code some simple programs in Fortran. We also got to map line drawings onto a grid (I did Snoopy), key in corresponding characters on punch cards, and have the computer print the result on continuous-form greenbar. The lucky ones got to run a "banner" program which would churn out a text message in large format, horizonally across several feet of greenbar. I'm sure that'd still be a big hit.
I'm all for a student-responsive institution, but one of the things a college is expected to do is to expose students to things they don't know about. If they knew everything, they wouldn't be students. When I started college back during the late Cretaceous, the school started offering all students something called "e-mail". It wasn't something the Duran-Duran/Journey/Quiet-Riot-listening student body were asking for, but a fair number of us found it pretty useful. Being pro-active isn't a bad thing.
Yeah, I tried it here too, here being a small liberal arts college. We did a student referendum though, and it turned out 47% for Firefox to 53% for IE... Next semester maybe...
Thanks for reminding me why I like working at a liberal, arts college (note the comma). (OK, it's actually a semi-autonomous college within a big state university). It's (usually) much easier to get things done around here.
Last August when Firefox was approaching 1.0, my coworker and I just decided to put it on all the Windows lab images, and make it the default browser. We left IE there, of course, to avoid students thinking we hadn't "installed the internet". (My coworker wanted to disguise Firefox as IE, but I didn't think that was wise.) We left ye olde IE in the dock (next to Safari) on the Macs for the same reason. No complaints (in part because the by-habit IE users didn't have to change their ways), and our spyware infestation rate on the Win boxes went down substantially.
I can't believe I have this bigoted, religious wingnut's stuff on my shelves. Every one of them's going in the trash tomorrow.
Nothing like a little more bigoted zealotry to even the score, eh?
If Pohl's offensive beliefs show up in his work, then condemn the work itself as offensive, judging it on its merits or lack thereof. If they don't show up, then... judge it on its merits or lack thereof. Leave the author out of it. For all we know, Bill Shakespeare went around telling cruel jokes about bouggerers, but that wouldn't make Hamlet itself any less worthy of praise.
If you don't want to buy Pohl's books because you don't want to do business with him, that's a legitimate form of economic activism. (I shop the same way myself... still can't bring myself to buy Coors, and I avoid Amway like the plague.) But throwing out whatever books of his you already possess (sending them to the incinerator, perhaps?), simply because he wrote them, is little better than labeling a painting "degenerate" because of who created it.
You might want to be a little more specific in that recommendation. Men who still want to become fathers should probably avoid it. Men whose female partners are post-menopausal, who are chronically celebate, or who are exclusively homosexual might not want to bother, no matter how convenient and affordable. And it's definitely not for women.
Gee, I don't remember that many mom-and-pop ISPs in the early-to-mid 1980s, just a smattering of BBSes on Fidonet and a few commercial services like CompuServe and The Source... which couldn't even route e-mail to/from the internet. In fact, the whole notion of commercial usage for the internet was still pretty controversial in the period of time we're talking about. Methinks you're confusing this with the 1990s, which was the decade Gore spent either in (or running for) the executive branch.
This method replaces value-based edge detection with depth-based edge detection, but to get a "proper" line drawing, you'd want to combine the two. That's because line art usually draws both kinds of discontinuities. i.e. We draw a line at the outer edge of an object, regardless of value/color change (which is what this technique does), but we also draw a line between the red and green stripes on an ugly Christmas sweater, despite the fact that there's no depth difference (what traditional edge detection does). So you'd want to add a direct flash exposure to capture the flat color differences, and process that as well.
> There are plenty of 10-15 hour a week IT jobs
Can I have some ideas? Seriously--I'm getting out of IT as a career next year and going back to school, but I'm going to need some part-time income while I'm at it, and I might as well use the skills I've got.
I have no idea what he's talking about, as I was in a similar situation a while back, and struggled to find a part-time job to keep me fed. What I'd suggest is looking for small-to-medium-sized businesses that want to hire an IT person but can't afford one... but could afford half of one. Another possibility would be something like NerdsOnSite.com (or one of their imitators) or working in the support department of a computer store.
(Don't ask what subject I'm going back to school for--I already nearly gave my mother a heart attack, and I can't be held responsible for random Slashdotters.)
I'll never forget my dad's face when I explained that "going back to college" didn't mean "CS grad school", but "art school".:)
Slashdot Mirror
Or something. It may surprise you to learn that most doctoral programs involve absolutely no direct use of Unix technology (e.g. literature, economics, languages, political science, history, psychology, philosophy, business administration, communication, education, theology, sociology, etc). Many PhD candidates in the hard sciences might use Unix only peripherally, perhaps as mere "users" who never even see a shell prompt (let alone having a shell preference). In fact, universities typically allow PhD candidates to do all of their personal computing using tools such as Windows or Mac OS (even pre-X), and in olden days (i.e. before the 1990s), it was actually acceptable to produce one's dissertation without a computer at all, instead using a kind of mechanical word processor/printer combo called a "type-writer". Although this leaves many PhD recipients woefully unprepared for the booming Bangalore job market, a substantial number of them manage to find employment nontheless.
A college student* shouldn't be looking for the kind of job that requires a degree. You probably can't handle both school and a job of that sort at the same time, and even if you manage to get by at it, it'll suck. You'll hate it, and your boss and profs won't like it much either.
Instead college students should look for jobs that don't expect you to focus your mental energies on them, the kind you can completely forget about when you're in class or studying for an exam. College jobs are for A) money and B) work experience (i.e. showing up, following instructions, etc.) not to be confused with job experience (i.e. x years of Java.NET). If you can get it in an organization that does work in you intended field, all the better, but that's gravy.
*Unless you're a current student looking for a job for after graduation, in which case you will have the degree, so the complaint is moot.
Because of the fisheye distortion on their cameras, the high-speed movies of their travels make them seem a bit like The Little Prince, walking about his tiny planet. I thought Mars was bigger than that.
Comparing the cost of driving your car to the ER with an ambulance is patently ridiculous on the face of it. For something you'd otherwise drive there for, damn right you'd take a cab, or more likely borrow a car instead. And how often a year do you go to the ER, anyway? SF's public transit system may be "one of the best", but its geography is also one of the most challenging to get around (I recall some kind of bay or something in the middle of it...?) so that kinda evens it out.
In most cases, if public transportation isn't practical, it's because people are making it impractical, both for themselves (e.g. living in one suburb and working in another, driving across town to shop at Walmart instead of local stores) and for the rest of the community (e.g. spending money on more highways for individual cars instead of more bus routes that directly connect Popular Point A with Popular Point B).
For one thing, I think you're mentally comparing a Cadillac-level public transit system with Yugo-level private cars. Yes, the cost to build a new public transit system using busses is substantial, but not nearly as costly as subways, light rail, trolleys, etc. We recently passed a millage to expand and revamp our bus system, and it's a pretty trivial increase to our local taxes. My car insurance alone went up more that year. One bus burns less fuel and puts less wear and tear on the infrastructure (i.e. "streets") than the 10-20 cars it can replace. It also provides indirect savings to the rest of the community, such as more parking available (i.e. less expensive) downtown.
Compared to tossing a fleet of subsidized cars at the problem, as you suggest... I'd say it's a bargain.
Seriously, I've never really understood this fetish people have for mint-condition vehicles. My last car had a noticeable dent in one of its side panels for years. I saved a small fortune by not having it restored to factory condition. And yet its "car" functionality was completely unaffected. And since the guy I ended up selling it to just wanted a means of transportation (not a penis substitute), this "defect" didn't even affect its resale value. And when you're talking about a vehicle the drivers won't even own... why should anyone care if there's a ding in the door?
It depends.
Public transit's definitely better for getting to work and back in bad weather. (In good weather, I take my bike, which is even better.) But it's worse for running errands, visiting friends and family, or trips out of town. Which are pretty much the only uses I have for a car. Compared to the thousands of dollars I've put into buying, insuring, and maintaining an automobile, one of these services would be a huge bargain! Hell, even taking a bus to the car-share lot would be worth it.
Your suggestion was "constructive" only to someone technologically adept enough to not need the suggestion. For the majority of people who are being told "Try the GIMP; it's a great replacement for Photoshop," them coming back to say, "um, no it isn't," your suggestion was dismissive and useless. "Go learn a skill which you may have no aptitude for, and that you have no other use for (but which I personally found fun and easy, so you will too), so you can fix what's wrong with it yourself." I'm not going to learn carpentry and rebuild my new desk because it turns out to be too big for my office; I'm going to take it back, get a smaller one, and get back to doing the stuff I want to be doing.
I'm not talking about a branch; I'm talking about a repackaging. Whenever you wanted to issue a new release (the target audience for this wouldn't want nightly tarballs; they'd want an annual or maybe quarterly setup.exe), you'd just download the latest STABILE source, apply a few cosmetic changes to "fix" the name (a pretty consistent patch), and you'd be done. Kind of like what AOL's been doing with Mozilla/Netscape.
Yes, it's a nontrivial amount of work, but if someone really feels that the GIMP's name is a serious drawback, periodically updating a rebranded version of it for a mainstream user base a few times a year shouldn't be that difficult a burden.
But if you really feel strongly about it, you can do it anyway. Ye olde GPL makes it easy. Just pick a better name, download the source code, do a global search-and-replace of "GIMP" with "____", make a new splash screen (I recommend using ____), recompile it, put it on the web at www.____.org, and start promoting the heck out of it. This doesn't require lots of programming expertise (like all the other "fix it yourself" suggestions), but it'll address the problem of the name.
That's an excellent suggestion. I'll pass it along to the art instructors and graphic design students I work with. They're always looking for tech problems to solve... why, just the other day, one of them asked me for suggestions on how to get his Zip disk out of the drive when it didn't show up on his desktop.
So don't. An Xserve isn't a "Mac"; it's an IBM-PPC server running a version of Unix called OS-X. Tell him that.
NeoOffice/J works so well for me that I find myself wondering why people bother with the OS X/X11 version. The hacking-free font handling especially is much nicer. At least until an OS-X-native version of OOo2 can be produced, I'd suggest NeoOffice/J as the version for slightly adventurous but non-hacker Mac users.
When I was in high school, you could get the more technologically-inclined students' attention by offering them an opportunity to sit in front of a computer (actually located in the same room), type commands, and maybe even code some simple programs in Fortran. We also got to map line drawings onto a grid (I did Snoopy), key in corresponding characters on punch cards, and have the computer print the result on continuous-form greenbar. The lucky ones got to run a "banner" program which would churn out a text message in large format, horizonally across several feet of greenbar. I'm sure that'd still be a big hit.
I'm all for a student-responsive institution, but one of the things a college is expected to do is to expose students to things they don't know about. If they knew everything, they wouldn't be students. When I started college back during the late Cretaceous, the school started offering all students something called "e-mail". It wasn't something the Duran-Duran/Journey/Quiet-Riot-listening student body were asking for, but a fair number of us found it pretty useful. Being pro-active isn't a bad thing.
Thanks for reminding me why I like working at a liberal, arts college (note the comma). (OK, it's actually a semi-autonomous college within a big state university). It's (usually) much easier to get things done around here.
Last August when Firefox was approaching 1.0, my coworker and I just decided to put it on all the Windows lab images, and make it the default browser. We left IE there, of course, to avoid students thinking we hadn't "installed the internet". (My coworker wanted to disguise Firefox as IE, but I didn't think that was wise.) We left ye olde IE in the dock (next to Safari) on the Macs for the same reason. No complaints (in part because the by-habit IE users didn't have to change their ways), and our spyware infestation rate on the Win boxes went down substantially.
So does that make New New York the new old New Amsterdam?
Nothing like a little more bigoted zealotry to even the score, eh?
If Pohl's offensive beliefs show up in his work, then condemn the work itself as offensive, judging it on its merits or lack thereof. If they don't show up, then... judge it on its merits or lack thereof. Leave the author out of it. For all we know, Bill Shakespeare went around telling cruel jokes about bouggerers, but that wouldn't make Hamlet itself any less worthy of praise.
If you don't want to buy Pohl's books because you don't want to do business with him, that's a legitimate form of economic activism. (I shop the same way myself... still can't bring myself to buy Coors, and I avoid Amway like the plague.) But throwing out whatever books of his you already possess (sending them to the incinerator, perhaps?), simply because he wrote them, is little better than labeling a painting "degenerate" because of who created it.
You might want to be a little more specific in that recommendation. Men who still want to become fathers should probably avoid it. Men whose female partners are post-menopausal, who are chronically celebate, or who are exclusively homosexual might not want to bother, no matter how convenient and affordable. And it's definitely not for women.
Gee, I don't remember that many mom-and-pop ISPs in the early-to-mid 1980s, just a smattering of BBSes on Fidonet and a few commercial services like CompuServe and The Source... which couldn't even route e-mail to/from the internet. In fact, the whole notion of commercial usage for the internet was still pretty controversial in the period of time we're talking about. Methinks you're confusing this with the 1990s, which was the decade Gore spent either in (or running for) the executive branch.
I don't think it applies to System 7. :)
Seriously, I wouldn't expect to see it applied to OS <=10.1
Or you could hire an underemployed illustrator. :(
Can I have some ideas? Seriously--I'm getting out of IT as a career next year and going back to school, but I'm going to need some part-time income while I'm at it, and I might as well use the skills I've got.
I have no idea what he's talking about, as I was in a similar situation a while back, and struggled to find a part-time job to keep me fed. What I'd suggest is looking for small-to-medium-sized businesses that want to hire an IT person but can't afford one... but could afford half of one. Another possibility would be something like NerdsOnSite.com (or one of their imitators) or working in the support department of a computer store.
(Don't ask what subject I'm going back to school for--I already nearly gave my mother a heart attack, and I can't be held responsible for random Slashdotters.)
I'll never forget my dad's face when I explained that "going back to college" didn't mean "CS grad school", but "art school". :)
My grandmother's on a respirator, you insensitive clod!