I'm horrified to see that none of you included duct tape on your list of things to have for Y2K (especially so soon after the Slashdot 10 Ten Hacks story).
For you MacGyver fans, you'll probably also want to include a Swiss Army knife and possibly some potatoes (as a source of electricity and food).
We're testing out using Blackberry's to replace our regular Alpha Numeric pagers. In general, I like the idea, but there are a few of problems.
1 - The pager volume is too low nor does it periodically remind you that you have unread messages. I sometimes don't hear the pager beeping. In addition, my regular pager will every few minutes let out a short beep (or vibrate if you have it set to that) if you have any unviewed pages. This way if you missed the initial page or didn't have you pager on you when a page came in, you'll get notified. The blackberry doesn't do this. You basically have to keep checking to see if you missed a page come in.
2 - I hit dead zones/low signal strength in a lot of weird place. Most notably, in the office, I get anywhere between 0-3% signal strength reported in a lot of places.
3 - Sometimes email takes days to reach the pager. Admittedly, e-mail is not a guaranteed delivery service, but it happens way too often with the Blackberry. This problem is mostly likely related to #2 above.
NOTE: When you first get one of these, expect to first couple of batteries to drain quickly. I believe it charges an on-board battery that's basically used to keep the info on the Blackberry intact when the AA dies.
On the plus side (this is more a service provided by BellSouth than something inherent in the Blackberry), you can send a voice mail message. You tell it the number to dial and type in a message and the recipient gets a call on their phone with a text-to-speech output of your message. It's a computer generated voice and pronunciation can get garbled depending on what's in your message, but can be useful if you need to send a message when you can't get to a phone and the recipient doesn't have email. -- Winston Yen
I agree that Luke was a whiney brat, but for some reason or other, I didn't wish that he got killed. Sometimes I would wish that he'd shut up, but not die.:)
Anyway, is Anakin supposed to be like Luke exactly? I haven't kept up with all the books, rumors, etc. that might have shed a little more light on young Anakin, but I always thought of him as being more on the cocky, overconfident side. Something like the character of Maverick from TopGun, except instead of bouncing back from a bad situation, he slips over to the Dark Side. (I guess I'm getting this impression from Obi-Wan's comment saying Luke's father was a great fighter pilot in Star Wars.)
I hope not. I haven't seen that many movies of Leo's, but I haven't been particularly impressed.
He just doesn't strike me as the young adult version of Anakin Skywalker, unless Anakin is supposed to come off as whining, everyone wished he would get killed type. -- Winston Yen
I think the college experience can help prepare you in some non-technical aspects of work place. College was my first real taste of working with a group on a project as well as giving a presentation/talk in front of an audience. I'd much rather look like an idiot in college and gain some experience than screw up in front of my bosses at work.
In addition, I know some companies require you to have a college degree (in any major) before they'll hire you (full-time employee - I think it's usually a little more lenient for consultants). Of course, exceptions are always made if your really good at what you do.
In my case, I got a BS in Engineering and a MS in Computer Science. While I don't remember/use 90% of what I was taught, I still feel getting the BS was a worthwhile experience for the reasons stated above. In addition, it was through a friend I met in college that I got my current job.
One thing to note, the college I went to was tuition free, so the monetary factor wasn't as important in my case.
The MS in CS, I'll grant, was a big pile of crap. Part of it was the lack of courses relevant to my interests. Another part, was my choice of schools. I was interested more in network protocols, design and management. The school, it turned out, was geared towards programmers doing research work - mostly database work, distributed processing and user interfaces. (I was working full-time and going to school part-time.) However, by the time I decided it was a waste, I was about two-thirds of the way through, so it would have been silly not to finish and at least be able to put it down on my resume.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoon!!!!!
-- Winston Yen
I'm horrified to see that none of you included duct tape on your list of things to have for Y2K (especially so soon after the Slashdot 10 Ten Hacks story).
For you MacGyver fans, you'll probably also want to include a Swiss Army knife and possibly some potatoes (as a source of electricity and food).
-- Winston Yen
We're testing out using Blackberry's to replace our regular Alpha Numeric pagers. In general, I like the idea, but there are a few of problems.
1 - The pager volume is too low nor does it periodically remind you that you have unread messages. I sometimes don't hear the pager beeping. In addition, my regular pager will every few minutes let out a short beep (or vibrate if you have it set to that) if you have any unviewed pages. This way if you missed the initial page or didn't have you pager on you when a page came in, you'll get notified. The blackberry doesn't do this. You basically have to keep checking to see if you missed a page come in.
2 - I hit dead zones/low signal strength in a lot of weird place. Most notably, in the office, I get anywhere between 0-3% signal strength reported in a lot of places.
3 - Sometimes email takes days to reach the pager. Admittedly, e-mail is not a guaranteed delivery service, but it happens way too often with the Blackberry. This problem is mostly likely related to #2 above.
NOTE: When you first get one of these, expect to first couple of batteries to drain quickly. I believe it charges an on-board battery that's basically used to keep the info on the Blackberry intact when the AA dies.
On the plus side (this is more a service provided by BellSouth than something inherent in the Blackberry), you can send a voice mail message. You tell it the number to dial and type in a message and the recipient gets a call on their phone with a text-to-speech output of your message. It's a computer generated voice and pronunciation can get garbled depending on what's in your message, but can be useful if you need to send a message when you can't get to a phone and the recipient doesn't have email.
-- Winston Yen
I agree that Luke was a whiney brat, but for some reason or other, I didn't wish that he got killed. Sometimes I would wish that he'd shut up, but not die. :)
Anyway, is Anakin supposed to be like Luke exactly? I haven't kept up with all the books, rumors, etc. that might have shed a little more light on young Anakin, but I always thought of him as being more on the cocky, overconfident side. Something like the character of Maverick from TopGun, except instead of bouncing back from a bad situation, he slips over to the Dark Side. (I guess I'm getting this impression from Obi-Wan's comment saying Luke's father was a great fighter pilot in Star Wars.)
-- Winston Yen
I hope not. I haven't seen that many movies of Leo's, but I haven't been particularly impressed.
He just doesn't strike me as the young adult version of Anakin Skywalker, unless Anakin is supposed to come off as whining, everyone wished he would get killed type.
-- Winston Yen
I think the college experience can help prepare you in some non-technical aspects of work place. College was my first real taste of working with a group on a project as well as giving a presentation/talk in front of an audience. I'd much rather look like an idiot in college and gain some experience than screw up in front of my bosses at work.
In addition, I know some companies require you to have a college degree (in any major) before they'll hire you (full-time employee - I think it's usually a little more lenient for consultants). Of course, exceptions are always made if your really good at what you do.
In my case, I got a BS in Engineering and a MS in Computer Science. While I don't remember/use 90% of what I was taught, I still feel getting the BS was a worthwhile experience for the reasons stated above. In addition, it was through a friend I met in college that I got my current job.
One thing to note, the college I went to was tuition free, so the monetary factor wasn't as important in my case.
The MS in CS, I'll grant, was a big pile of crap. Part of it was the lack of courses relevant to my interests. Another part, was my choice of schools. I was interested more in network protocols, design and management. The school, it turned out, was geared towards programmers doing research work - mostly database work, distributed processing and user interfaces. (I was working full-time and going to school part-time.) However, by the time I decided it was a waste, I was about two-thirds of the way through, so it would have been silly not to finish and at least be able to put it down on my resume.