Pushing the romance analogy, I tried to love Microsoft but they never came up with a 32-bit clean version of QuickBASIC. I tried to make things up, but then they dropped QuickBASIC entirely for VB!
My web hosting includes a Jabber server. While looking around I found Fire for Mac OS X. Most of my buddies are on Yahoo!, AOL, and ICQ so it meets my needs. Running under Linux is not an issue right now as I have a shell account and use a Mac as my main working machine -- use Photoshop fairly heavily to prepare graphics for web sites.
Thanks for the tip about Gaim, I will give it a try. Looks like it connects to more services than Fire.
To return to the thread though, it is really frustrating to be a member of a support group on Yahoo! with members who feel the need for live chat and for most of said members to be unable to use the chat room Yahoo! provides.
I have participated several Yahoo! groups and have found them wonderful. Unfortunately the chat rooms only work for people using certain versions of Windows, and not for all browsers.
I think for this to take off, Yahoo! will need to start developing for a wider base of operating systems and software.
Disclaimer - I am a long time UNIX, Macintosh, and Linux user
There is a grain of truth in what you say -- if you substitute "opportunities" for $. When a field is expanding there are more opportunities. Once it matures, cronyism and "good ole boys" networks start to kick in.
I am female and a double geek - started out as an analytical chemist then switched to IT in the early 1990s. After a few years of bumping your head against the glass ceiling, switching fields starts to look good.
I am wondering if this will resolve into a conflict between manufacturers of expensive drugs and an expensive vaccine. Seems like there is a lot of vested interest in the current drugs.
I agree with the "should" completely. When I was able, I rode in the streets and pushed my bike on sidewalks. I was explaining what I observed in others.
Competition for space on sidewalks will continue to be an issue while there is a perception that riding anything (including bicycles) in the streets in urban areas is dangerous.
I have mitochondrial myopathy (see MDA and UMDF) and started using a three-wheel electric scooter in January 2000 after a major setback from catching the flu. My equipment has a dial that you can set for maximum speed, so it is much easier to match the pace of pedestrian traffic than if you ride a bike. Does anyone know of you can do the same with a Segway?
Speaking as someone who has has physical contact with a car making a right turn on red in a crosswalk, the extra height would be a distinct advantage over motorized wheelchairs for visibility.
Any time something gets labeled "medical equipment" the price tag goes way up. Being able to adapt regular consumer goods would seem to be a plus as well.
With few exceptions, the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously, so it is not at all unusual for it to be awarded to people who made significant contributions decades earlier.
The down side is that sometimes getting nominated for the Nobel means community recognition that an intended recipient is getting close to the end of their life.
I used to do that for Calculus I classes, but even then, two students somehow got a copy of a draft of and exam from my locked office. They outraged when I told them they were to make an appointment to see the Dean when I handed the papers back. They had both answered a question I dropped and hadn't even read the problems. There was even an unrelated calculation and a phone number I had jotted in the margin.
That is something I have never resolved, what to do about students (and faculty too!) who are determined to play the system or cheat instead of learning.
Using one or more air cleaners with HEPA filters and activated carbon to keep your indoor air clean helps a lot. Get the highest capacity unit you can afford. My current favorite is Austin Air. If VOC's are especially troublesome, consider an additional filter unit with activated carbon. If you are living in a sick building, it might be necessary to move. The air cleaners can only do so much.
As to the computer hardware, I would be most suspicious of the cables and other flexible parts. They will have more plasticizer than the rigid parts. I have had mixed success with wiping down especially stinky cables with alcohol.
Next be suspicious of parts that get hot, like the circuit boards and power supply.
I have used the strategy of buying used equipment, just make sure it wasn't previously owned by a smoker.
For new equipment, my strategy is to burn it in, i.e. buy hardware in the summer and run it constantly with the windows open.
Also be careful with laser printers. The toner can release styrene (the monomer) which can sensitize you. By heating the paper, they release noxious material from what was put in the paper on purpose as well as what the cellulose fiber absorbs during storage.
Most allergists will tell you to kill your cat. If you sincerely believe ritual sacrifice resolves health problems, consider it. If you try to boost the efficacy of this approach by using a human victim, be warned that you will probably end up in jail.
The typical allergist will run a bunch of scratch tests. When you show no reaction, they will inject the material. When there is still no reaction (but you react to histamine) and you still have severe allergy symptoms and start naming names of compounds you recognize in the air (I have two degrees in chemistry) they will tell you those are irritants, not allergens. So, the post that said they test for almost everything was highly exaggerated. They test for known allergens, especially those that are known from the time when most people lived on farms. Your "irritants" are produced by big companies who can afford to lobby your government.
There I just saved you a couple grand that you can put toward buying a good air filter.
Despite what is in a lot of the comments posted, your chemical sensitivity (or chronic fatique or fibromyalgia) is probably quite real, but don't dismiss the idea that it may be a symptom of an underlying condition. In my case, it was mitochondrial disease.
You will also find that a lot of medical personnel will tell you your problems are in your head instead of trying to help, especially if they don't get it right with the first guess.
Be warned that way too many physicians get through school by using frat files, cheating on exams, and cramming instead of trying to understand basic principles of biology and chemistry and getting good at problem solving. Hopefully you will find ones who took their education seriously before the others cause permanent harm.
I am not from Brazil, but see that the Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are the first and fourth most active Linux meetup groups in the world. How did you get introduced to Linux?
Perhaps this is a good time to consider the evolution of the university system in Western civilization.
In the middle ages, organized religions needed literate people to preserve scripture. As trade developed, universities needed to produce people who could keep accounts, interpret laws, and communicate in a variety of languages. With the industrial revolution, training in the sciences and engineering became important to produce technological inventions and infrastructure.
More recently there has been another major paradigm change -- that universities need to operate as businesses.
Thus, at least in everyday operations, universities now seek to follow in technology rather than lead. To keep enrollment (income) up, some promise vocational training rather than traditional learning. The goal is to produce consumers of existing technology for the benefit of major corporations. That Stanford administrators, along with those of many other well-respected institutions, chose the course of imitating what they perceived as accepted business practices is just another symptom of this change.
That the faculty IT experts whose knowledge was ignored or actually scorned chose to stay and continue to teach is a compliment to their dedication.
I hope that university administrators stop trying to be pale imitations of business organizations and that society wakes up to the fact that we need to subsidize education to encourage able and independent thinkers.
Given that you are committed to attending college, the best thing is to tackle it like you do other things. Learn the system, its flaws and weaknesses as well as its strengths.
Speaking as someone who attended college (scored in the 99+ percentile on a GRE) and graduate school and who has taught college courses, I have several specific recommendations:
Try to develop an interest in your courses independent of the grading system. If you get into the subject, you never have to cram for exams.
Get to know your fellow students -- sometimes you learn as much from them as from instructors.
Tutor other students - more palatable than dry learning plus explaining something to someone else makes you learn it better.
Use the opportunity to broaden your interests.
Don't try to do everything perfectly the first time. College is a friendly environment for making the kinds of mistakes that encourage better learning.
If you are forced to choose, try to "learn how to learn" rather than gaining specific technical expertise. Once you become adept at learning new things, you can keep up with technology by visiting the library or reading technical documentation.
Sometime near Junior year, you should advance from looking for answers to learning how to ask questions, to evaluating which questions are appropriate.
Business and accounting are fairly straightforward math (arithmetic) but compound interest gets a bit more complicated. Statistics are helpful for marketing as well as scientific applications. Knowledge of Cartesian coordinate systems is very helpful for screen graphics. Database design is pretty much set theory and logic.
My experience has been that about 90% of the effort is building the user interface and error trapping although my math background (differential and integral calculus, differential equations, probability and statistics, matrix algebra, etc.) has been reassuring.
Fortran was my first programming language too, in 1969 (yikes!) with punched cards. I mainly used it to crunch numerical data and it was quite useful as long as you had a mainframe or two available. I switched to using BASIC because it came with the minicomputer in the lab, my kid's Apple II, etc.
I think a major strength of BASIC was that it was so ubiquitious that people could play around with it and had the luxury of making mistakes and learning from them. That is something that wasn't an option on mainframes.
Yeah, like life is a science experiment, just most kids don't think of it that way. I used to teach science and math and think it was a big mistake to separate them from everyday life -- i.e. chemistry is what goes on in your kitchen, not just in test tubes!
Unfortunately, now that schools are subjected to evaluation by paper and pencil tests, not long term success of students, it might be a survival skill to make rote learning more efficient.
I fully agree. It has been a while since I worked at a walk-up help desk, but from what I heard, much of the public believes that the government or some other official body made Microsoft the standard for operating systems and that there are no alternatives, i.e. they accepted that Microsoft is a monopoly years ago.
A smaller group are aware of alternatives but are afraid of retribution or that they won't be able to communicate with anyone else if they exercise their ability to choose.
It is rather humbling, but those of us in the IT community are in the position of mice who have to share a cage with an elephant. We count ourselves lucky if we only lose a tail or paw, especially when we see colleagues who are totally squished when trod upon or suffocated under a pile of dung no matter how loyal they are to the elephant. We know the elephant will eventually topple (ala Cringely), but that too will be painful as he will probably squish quite a few more of us when he falls.
If you are trying to read the previous pulpit he refers to, the link to it on http://www.pbs.org/cringely/oldhat.html appears to be broken, but the story is at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030821. html.
But try to get the customer to do a thorough documentation of the problem, preferably in writing. Many times the act of writing a detailed email message, composing a voice mail message, or filling out their own request form the customer will realize what is wrong and often fix it themselves and feel good about being in control.
If the customer isn't able to resolve the problem themselves, you then have enough details that you can often solve the problem quickly.
Slashdot Mirror
Pushing the romance analogy, I tried to love Microsoft but they never came up with a 32-bit clean version of QuickBASIC. I tried to make things up, but then they dropped QuickBASIC entirely for VB!
My web hosting includes a Jabber server. While looking around I found Fire for Mac OS X. Most of my buddies are on Yahoo!, AOL, and ICQ so it meets my needs. Running under Linux is not an issue right now as I have a shell account and use a Mac as my main working machine -- use Photoshop fairly heavily to prepare graphics for web sites.
Thanks for the tip about Gaim, I will give it a try. Looks like it connects to more services than Fire.
To return to the thread though, it is really frustrating to be a member of a support group on Yahoo! with members who feel the need for live chat and for most of said members to be unable to use the chat room Yahoo! provides.
I have participated several Yahoo! groups and have found them wonderful. Unfortunately the chat rooms only work for people using certain versions of Windows, and not for all browsers.
I think for this to take off, Yahoo! will need to start developing for a wider base of operating systems and software.
Disclaimer - I am a long time UNIX, Macintosh, and Linux user
There is a grain of truth in what you say -- if you substitute "opportunities" for $. When a field is expanding there are more opportunities. Once it matures, cronyism and "good ole boys" networks start to kick in.
I am female and a double geek - started out as an analytical chemist then switched to IT in the early 1990s. After a few years of bumping your head against the glass ceiling, switching fields starts to look good.
I am wondering if this will resolve into a conflict between manufacturers of expensive drugs and an expensive vaccine. Seems like there is a lot of vested interest in the current drugs.
What about Access?
I used to sit at a help desk. One morning someone called and said they were having a problem with Microsoft Excess.
My answer? "Don't we all?"
PS - It did turn out to be an Excel question.
I agree with the "should" completely. When I was able, I rode in the streets and pushed my bike on sidewalks. I was explaining what I observed in others.
Fear of death is the main reason given when I ask people who ride on sidewalks. This is in Milwaukee WI USA, YMMV.
Competition for space on sidewalks will continue to be an issue while there is a perception that riding anything (including bicycles) in the streets in urban areas is dangerous.
I have mitochondrial myopathy (see MDA and UMDF) and started using a three-wheel electric scooter in January 2000 after a major setback from catching the flu. My equipment has a dial that you can set for maximum speed, so it is much easier to match the pace of pedestrian traffic than if you ride a bike. Does anyone know of you can do the same with a Segway?
Speaking as someone who has has physical contact with a car making a right turn on red in a crosswalk, the extra height would be a distinct advantage over motorized wheelchairs for visibility.
Any time something gets labeled "medical equipment" the price tag goes way up. Being able to adapt regular consumer goods would seem to be a plus as well.
With few exceptions, the Nobel prize is not awarded posthumously, so it is not at all unusual for it to be awarded to people who made significant contributions decades earlier.
The down side is that sometimes getting nominated for the Nobel means community recognition that an intended recipient is getting close to the end of their life.
I have an old university email account. I never cease to be amazed at how much of the spam is for mail order college degrees.
I used to do that for Calculus I classes, but even then, two students somehow got a copy of a draft of and exam from my locked office. They outraged when I told them they were to make an appointment to see the Dean when I handed the papers back. They had both answered a question I dropped and hadn't even read the problems. There was even an unrelated calculation and a phone number I had jotted in the margin.
That is something I have never resolved, what to do about students (and faculty too!) who are determined to play the system or cheat instead of learning.
Using one or more air cleaners with HEPA filters and activated carbon to keep your indoor air clean helps a lot. Get the highest capacity unit you can afford. My current favorite is Austin Air. If VOC's are especially troublesome, consider an additional filter unit with activated carbon. If you are living in a sick building, it might be necessary to move. The air cleaners can only do so much.
As to the computer hardware, I would be most suspicious of the cables and other flexible parts. They will have more plasticizer than the rigid parts. I have had mixed success with wiping down especially stinky cables with alcohol.
Next be suspicious of parts that get hot, like the circuit boards and power supply.
I have used the strategy of buying used equipment, just make sure it wasn't previously owned by a smoker.
For new equipment, my strategy is to burn it in, i.e. buy hardware in the summer and run it constantly with the windows open.
Also be careful with laser printers. The toner can release styrene (the monomer) which can sensitize you. By heating the paper, they release noxious material from what was put in the paper on purpose as well as what the cellulose fiber absorbs during storage.
Most allergists will tell you to kill your cat. If you sincerely believe ritual sacrifice resolves health problems, consider it. If you try to boost the efficacy of this approach by using a human victim, be warned that you will probably end up in jail.
The typical allergist will run a bunch of scratch tests. When you show no reaction, they will inject the material. When there is still no reaction (but you react to histamine) and you still have severe allergy symptoms and start naming names of compounds you recognize in the air (I have two degrees in chemistry) they will tell you those are irritants, not allergens. So, the post that said they test for almost everything was highly exaggerated. They test for known allergens, especially those that are known from the time when most people lived on farms. Your "irritants" are produced by big companies who can afford to lobby your government.
There I just saved you a couple grand that you can put toward buying a good air filter.
Despite what is in a lot of the comments posted, your chemical sensitivity (or chronic fatique or fibromyalgia) is probably quite real, but don't dismiss the idea that it may be a symptom of an underlying condition. In my case, it was mitochondrial disease.
You will also find that a lot of medical personnel will tell you your problems are in your head instead of trying to help, especially if they don't get it right with the first guess.
Be warned that way too many physicians get through school by using frat files, cheating on exams, and cramming instead of trying to understand basic principles of biology and chemistry and getting good at problem solving. Hopefully you will find ones who took their education seriously before the others cause permanent harm.
Good luck!
Have you run into any pre-med students lately?
I am not from Brazil, but see that the Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are the first and fourth most active Linux meetup groups in the world. How did you get introduced to Linux?
Maybe Microsoft has reason for fear?
Perhaps this is a good time to consider the evolution of the university system in Western civilization.
In the middle ages, organized religions needed literate people to preserve scripture. As trade developed, universities needed to produce people who could keep accounts, interpret laws, and communicate in a variety of languages. With the industrial revolution, training in the sciences and engineering became important to produce technological inventions and infrastructure.
More recently there has been another major paradigm change -- that universities need to operate as businesses.
Thus, at least in everyday operations, universities now seek to follow in technology rather than lead. To keep enrollment (income) up, some promise vocational training rather than traditional learning. The goal is to produce consumers of existing technology for the benefit of major corporations. That Stanford administrators, along with those of many other well-respected institutions, chose the course of imitating what they perceived as accepted business practices is just another symptom of this change.
That the faculty IT experts whose knowledge was ignored or actually scorned chose to stay and continue to teach is a compliment to their dedication.
I hope that university administrators stop trying to be pale imitations of business organizations and that society wakes up to the fact that we need to subsidize education to encourage able and independent thinkers.
Given that you are committed to attending college, the best thing is to tackle it like you do other things. Learn the system, its flaws and weaknesses as well as its strengths.
Speaking as someone who attended college (scored in the 99+ percentile on a GRE) and graduate school and who has taught college courses, I have several specific recommendations:
Good luck!
Business and accounting are fairly straightforward math (arithmetic) but compound interest gets a bit more complicated. Statistics are helpful for marketing as well as scientific applications. Knowledge of Cartesian coordinate systems is very helpful for screen graphics. Database design is pretty much set theory and logic.
My experience has been that about 90% of the effort is building the user interface and error trapping although my math background (differential and integral calculus, differential equations, probability and statistics, matrix algebra, etc.) has been reassuring.
Fortran was my first programming language too, in 1969 (yikes!) with punched cards. I mainly used it to crunch numerical data and it was quite useful as long as you had a mainframe or two available. I switched to using BASIC because it came with the minicomputer in the lab, my kid's Apple II, etc.
I think a major strength of BASIC was that it was so ubiquitious that people could play around with it and had the luxury of making mistakes and learning from them. That is something that wasn't an option on mainframes.
Yeah, like life is a science experiment, just most kids don't think of it that way. I used to teach science and math and think it was a big mistake to separate them from everyday life -- i.e. chemistry is what goes on in your kitchen, not just in test tubes!
Unfortunately, now that schools are subjected to evaluation by paper and pencil tests, not long term success of students, it might be a survival skill to make rote learning more efficient.
I fully agree. It has been a while since I worked at a walk-up help desk, but from what I heard, much of the public believes that the government or some other official body made Microsoft the standard for operating systems and that there are no alternatives, i.e. they accepted that Microsoft is a monopoly years ago.
A smaller group are aware of alternatives but are afraid of retribution or that they won't be able to communicate with anyone else if they exercise their ability to choose.
It is rather humbling, but those of us in the IT community are in the position of mice who have to share a cage with an elephant. We count ourselves lucky if we only lose a tail or paw, especially when we see colleagues who are totally squished when trod upon or suffocated under a pile of dung no matter how loyal they are to the elephant. We know the elephant will eventually topple (ala Cringely), but that too will be painful as he will probably squish quite a few more of us when he falls.
Yeah, wasn't the original Trojan horse considered a gift too?
... that don't sag around the ankles, swim suits that are easy to get off when wet, a 32-bit clean version of Microsoft QuickBASIC.
If you are trying to read the previous pulpit he refers to, the link to it on http://www.pbs.org/cringely/oldhat.html appears to be broken, but the story is at http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030821. html.
But try to get the customer to do a thorough documentation of the problem, preferably in writing. Many times the act of writing a detailed email message, composing a voice mail message, or filling out their own request form the customer will realize what is wrong and often fix it themselves and feel good about being in control.
If the customer isn't able to resolve the problem themselves, you then have enough details that you can often solve the problem quickly.