Wow, this is this first time I've wanted to respond to slashdot post with a biblical parable.
Here's the short version:
Guy needs help havesting. He hires 10 day workers for X money to do the work. Around noon, he goes out and snatches another 10 to do work. At 2, he gets 10 more. At the end of the day, he's happy. He pays X money to each person.
The people working all day are pissed. "Why do those guys get the same reward for less work?" they ask. The land owner replies, "I told you that you would get X for your labor, and you got it. Our arrangement was fair."
Boom. You paid for content. You got it. Life was good. If someone else is given it as an incentive to play later, that's fine.
I tried to factor my response to this point, into my post. I value discussing what I read, with other intelligent folks. I could join a book club or something - which I've done - but university is really a unique setting that fosters this.
There's also the writting aspect. While writing essays should give me better written communication skills, it's also valuable for making you sit down and think.
I could do many of these things with a library card, some friends and some effort, but frankly, I'm too lazy. In a university setting, I'm going to fail if I don't do the reading. That goes a long way for me.
Don't know about you, but I didn't go to college for the degree or the job - although I needed both. I went because it was a place where I could learn a lot. I could study the Bolshlivek revolution with other students one hour while learning to think like an engineer the next.
I went to a university instead of ITT tech because I viewed the experience as more than job training. ITT tech is better at that.
I think it is impressive if you're coming out of one of the top 5-10 programs - CMU, MIT, Standford...
Once you get past that point, there is a really big tier of "good" programs. Unless your school has a reputation as being particularly, bad, I just wouldn't worry about it. You may have to sell your learning experiences as part of your interviews, but that should be natural anyway.
Regardless, once you've been in industry for a short while, your experience there becomes far more important than your technical education.
Good question. Why are they collecting this information? It seems pretty obvious to me. You find out who goes to college and do they stay there more than a year and cross reference that back to schools and test results.
If "high performing" students \ school systems consistently see short college stays, they might interpret that (rightly or wrongly) as a problem. Perhaps these schools are failing to really prepare studens for college.
It'd be interesting to see if schools that have been focusing hard on getting their students to pass standardized tests are failing in their duty to teach kids to think well. That might only really become apparent when those students fail at university. That would prompt a welcome rethinking of NCLB's measuring techniques.
Reading the article, it looks like they have totally differant aims. Those don't seem that evil either. Not that useful, but not that evil.
Do I have concerns about this policy? Sure. Are there some reasonable reasons for collecting the information? Absolutely.
I pay my 15 bucks at theatres for my wife and I to go see the short version. I then pay some more to buy the long version for keeps. If they didn't make the long version, I'd be buying the short one. I don't spend much more to get a version I'll like better and for something to compliment some of my favorite books, it's just not a big deal.
Just because someone is making money does not mean that they are evil.
Interesting to note that Toms hasn't posted on this yet. I wonder how long they will take to get it to the review done to their satisfaction? Good for them.
Fair enough for a day out of the house. But if you don't buy every animated film, my bet is that the more tolerable of them are more likely to find their way into the DVD collection. - I could be wrong though.
I agree with you to some extent. But to play devil's advocate here, others would suggest that a CA lawsuit of this type will merely raise the price of the next XBox and Nintendo and Sony will also have to figure in this kind of risk when they price the US versions of their products as well. MS might just accept this as the cost of doing business and raise prices.
Re:If you are so smart...
on
Cube Farm
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· Score: 1
If the school was half way competent in the engineering disciplines, it really should have been fine. You're looking at a few top schools CMU, Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT and after that, a large number of very good schools.
But let's face it, in college we mostly learn to communicate and to think. Learning to program needs to be done at internships, at home and at work.
College programming classes should give a good foundation in theory, but that's just about it.
Re:Disenchantment
on
Cube Farm
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· Score: 2, Informative
I guess I had the good fortune of being taught be relatively smart people.
If you form your own company, good for you.
For me, I started off a company where I was being lead by people who were not trained in the field and whose senior programmer had decided that it was that time in his career when he didn't want to learn any major new technologies. I felt superior there because I was an OO programmer and the status quo was functional and kinda crappy. I couldn't go anywhere interesting there so I jumped ship and looked for a differant job letting my wife support me a bit.
I found a place where I quickly realized that I was a pretty bad programmer who had a whole lot to learn. That's what I've been doing since. I look back and I probably wasn't better than the senior programmer at job 1. I just had the ambition to be better than him and the environment wasn't conducive to me learning my weaknesses or improving.
That's what it's about for me. Find somewhere you, as a junior guy, will get some mentoring by capable people.
I've never used BT to steal something. I can't imagine how any attacks on the guys stealing things are going to impact how I see BT. Heck, there might even be more bandwidth out there.
Nah, when one judge does something that big, it goes to three judges and if it's really interesting, it goes to 9 judges after that. So yeah, if 13 "activist" judges get together, someone would have to ammend a state or federal constitution.
Crap, my pastor had an excellent point here. What's embarrassing is that while the divorce rates for straight couples climb, we have an example of people fighting to be a family.
If you stand for family values, you should encourage couples to make a stand and say that they're going to be together, as a familiy, for the long term.
As for polygamy, I don't think it's going happen. There's no push for it. It would probably poll at around.5% and would be cast quickly. That said, I really couldn't care less.
My marriage is great. I don't fear any redefinition of marriage by the state somehow harming or trivializing it. My marriage is a relationship between God my wife, and me. Anything the state does just affects my taxes.
It stuns me how religious people can get so riled up by the actions of a secular government permitting things. When the government tries to close your church, that's when to get pissed.
I think that few state legislatures at this point would pass a law fully outlawing abortion either. I think the most common opinion in suburbia (which is rather middle of the road on abortion) is that abortion is generally a bad thing. We should have less of it. Outlawing it entirely is going to far. Waiting periods, parental consent, no "partial-birth" abortions and forced distribution of standard pamphlets describing the risks of the procedure as well greatness of adoption are encourgaded.
In other words, they want to see the practice reduced and limited not abolished.
Of course probably 50% of the public is a die hard on either side.
No kidding, next he'll tell me that it's wrong for me to try to uninstall cripple / emacs on other people's computers in an effort to bring vi glory to the world.
Yeah, I agree that sports isn't a good fit. But not everyone needs to be a star, they just need to be important. Take Planetside for example. You can have a blast just being a grunt in the army or a pilot who spends most of his time ferrying other people around.
As long as you have a critical role to play, you're going to be entertained. That said, it's pretty rare that when you stumble towards a base in the middle of nowhere, you'll find anyone there. Noone's interested in guard duty when the odds of an attack are small.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, this is this first time I've wanted to respond to slashdot post with a biblical parable.
Here's the short version:
Guy needs help havesting. He hires 10 day workers for X money to do the work. Around noon, he goes out and snatches another 10 to do work. At 2, he gets 10 more. At the end of the day, he's happy. He pays X money to each person.
The people working all day are pissed. "Why do those guys get the same reward for less work?" they ask. The land owner replies, "I told you that you would get X for your labor, and you got it. Our arrangement was fair."
Boom. You paid for content. You got it. Life was good. If someone else is given it as an incentive to play later, that's fine.
I tried to factor my response to this point, into my post. I value discussing what I read, with other intelligent folks. I could join a book club or something - which I've done - but university is really a unique setting that fosters this.
There's also the writting aspect. While writing essays should give me better written communication skills, it's also valuable for making you sit down and think.
I could do many of these things with a library card, some friends and some effort, but frankly, I'm too lazy. In a university setting, I'm going to fail if I don't do the reading. That goes a long way for me.
Don't know about you, but I didn't go to college for the degree or the job - although I needed both. I went because it was a place where I could learn a lot. I could study the Bolshlivek revolution with other students one hour while learning to think like an engineer the next.
I went to a university instead of ITT tech because I viewed the experience as more than job training. ITT tech is better at that.
I think it is impressive if you're coming out of one of the top 5-10 programs - CMU, MIT, Standford...
Once you get past that point, there is a really big tier of "good" programs. Unless your school has a reputation as being particularly, bad, I just wouldn't worry about it. You may have to sell your learning experiences as part of your interviews, but that should be natural anyway.
Regardless, once you've been in industry for a short while, your experience there becomes far more important than your technical education.
Good question. Why are they collecting this information? It seems pretty obvious to me. You find out who goes to college and do they stay there more than a year and cross reference that back to schools and test results.
If "high performing" students \ school systems consistently see short college stays, they might interpret that (rightly or wrongly) as a problem. Perhaps these schools are failing to really prepare studens for college.
It'd be interesting to see if schools that have been focusing hard on getting their students to pass standardized tests are failing in their duty to teach kids to think well. That might only really become apparent when those students fail at university. That would prompt a welcome rethinking of NCLB's measuring techniques.
Reading the article, it looks like they have totally differant aims. Those don't seem that evil either. Not that useful, but not that evil.
Do I have concerns about this policy? Sure. Are there some reasonable reasons for collecting the information? Absolutely.
I pay my 15 bucks at theatres for my wife and I to go see the short version. I then pay some more to buy the long version for keeps. If they didn't make the long version, I'd be buying the short one. I don't spend much more to get a version I'll like better and for something to compliment some of my favorite books, it's just not a big deal.
Just because someone is making money does not mean that they are evil.
How is valve keeping you from using anything in the box as a coaster?
No that was them. Hence the title of the post.
Interesting to note that Toms hasn't posted on this yet. I wonder how long they will take to get it to the review done to their satisfaction? Good for them.
Fair enough for a day out of the house. But if you don't buy every animated film, my bet is that the more tolerable of them are more likely to find their way into the DVD collection. - I could be wrong though.
By the same token, programming to interfaces is often preferable to subclassing.
Maybe, but to some degree parents need to decide what movies they are going to go to and more importantly purchase.
Decent movies - Lion King, Little Mermaid, Alladdin, Toy story, etc would be tolerable to have to watch on a regular basis.
The Lion King 1.5.... maybe not.
Kids do drive a good chunk of the money being spent, but let's not forget whose wallet the money is coming out of.
I agree with you to some extent. But to play devil's advocate here, others would suggest that a CA lawsuit of this type will merely raise the price of the next XBox and Nintendo and Sony will also have to figure in this kind of risk when they price the US versions of their products as well. MS might just accept this as the cost of doing business and raise prices.
If the school was half way competent in the engineering disciplines, it really should have been fine. You're looking at a few top schools CMU, Stanford, Cal Tech, and MIT and after that, a large number of very good schools.
But let's face it, in college we mostly learn to communicate and to think. Learning to program needs to be done at internships, at home and at work.
College programming classes should give a good foundation in theory, but that's just about it.
I guess I had the good fortune of being taught be relatively smart people.
If you form your own company, good for you.
For me, I started off a company where I was being lead by people who were not trained in the field and whose senior programmer had decided that it was that time in his career when he didn't want to learn any major new technologies. I felt superior there because I was an OO programmer and the status quo was functional and kinda crappy. I couldn't go anywhere interesting there so I jumped ship and looked for a differant job letting my wife support me a bit.
I found a place where I quickly realized that I was a pretty bad programmer who had a whole lot to learn. That's what I've been doing since. I look back and I probably wasn't better than the senior programmer at job 1. I just had the ambition to be better than him and the environment wasn't conducive to me learning my weaknesses or improving.
That's what it's about for me. Find somewhere you, as a junior guy, will get some mentoring by capable people.
I've never used BT to steal something. I can't imagine how any attacks on the guys stealing things are going to impact how I see BT. Heck, there might even be more bandwidth out there.
Nah, when one judge does something that big, it goes to three judges and if it's really interesting, it goes to 9 judges after that. So yeah, if 13 "activist" judges get together, someone would have to ammend a state or federal constitution.
Crap, my pastor had an excellent point here. What's embarrassing is that while the divorce rates for straight couples climb, we have an example of people fighting to be a family.
.5% and would be cast quickly. That said, I really couldn't care less.
If you stand for family values, you should encourage couples to make a stand and say that they're going to be together, as a familiy, for the long term.
As for polygamy, I don't think it's going happen. There's no push for it. It would probably poll at around
My marriage is great. I don't fear any redefinition of marriage by the state somehow harming or trivializing it. My marriage is a relationship between God my wife, and me. Anything the state does just affects my taxes.
It stuns me how religious people can get so riled up by the actions of a secular government permitting things. When the government tries to close your church, that's when to get pissed.
I think that few state legislatures at this point would pass a law fully outlawing abortion either. I think the most common opinion in suburbia (which is rather middle of the road on abortion) is that abortion is generally a bad thing. We should have less of it. Outlawing it entirely is going to far. Waiting periods, parental consent, no "partial-birth" abortions and forced distribution of standard pamphlets describing the risks of the procedure as well greatness of adoption are encourgaded.
In other words, they want to see the practice reduced and limited not abolished.
Of course probably 50% of the public is a die hard on either side.
Glad to someone else caught the reference. That was a thing of beauty.
Heh, I'm actually fairly editor agnostic, but it seemed like a mandatory slashdot post.
Kind of like saying, "I for one welcome our new TV controlling overlords." or something about soviet russia turning us off.
No kidding, next he'll tell me that it's wrong for me to try to uninstall cripple / emacs on other people's computers in an effort to bring vi glory to the world.
But there the language gap is more significant than it is in India.
Huh, is this inherintly redundant of did others say this? I tried to scan up the page first. Oh well.
Yeah, I agree that sports isn't a good fit. But not everyone needs to be a star, they just need to be important. Take Planetside for example. You can have a blast just being a grunt in the army or a pilot who spends most of his time ferrying other people around.
As long as you have a critical role to play, you're going to be entertained. That said, it's pretty rare that when you stumble towards a base in the middle of nowhere, you'll find anyone there. Noone's interested in guard duty when the odds of an attack are small.