>>Wanted: Programmers. Must be fluent in C/C++, Haskell, Eiffel, perl, Python, Ruby, Oberon and Common Lisp. Experience in Intercal a plus.
You just described most of the jobs in my last Dice.com search. Apparently noone out in the corporate world sticks to a standard--or they are just looking for the top dog, guru type only right now.
Don't you worry about flipping one of those? My friend had a CJ7 (I think) and we nearly flipped on the way to go skiing when we hit a patch of ice. I never rode in it again. AFAIK though he still has it and uses it for daily transport (he's in a different state), so maybe I am out to lunch on this.
When I needed an off-road vehicle, I couldn't afford one. Now that I can afford one, I don't need it. Irony is lovely.
>>In Poland it is generally considered rude to talk about yourself the way Americans like to talk - "I am Dexter, the genius-boy, I am the best in my class etc.". You should rather say "Well, I had lot of luck with that test, but let's talk about the weather now". Probably that's why you have better economy and better technology. But maybe - just maybe - we have better childhood?
I guess it depends on how your grew up. My parents always taught us humility, so when I aced a Trigonometry test, I generally just said something like "Well I really, really had to study hard for this test and expected to do horrible." Or when people told me I was smart, I'd try to beg off saying things like "No, not really. I just study hard". I actually didn't like talking about how well I did in case my friends did bad.
But maybe I was a weird case. I do remember the competition being pretty fierce in high school, but less so in University.
>>International calls (a) mostly require somebody to actually BE there, and (b) cost a non-trivial amount of money, normally.
So how come lately most of my telemarketer calls come from people with Indian accents (presumably in India, considering some of the stories I have seen on this)?
Re:It sounds like your job can't be oursourced
on
Giant Sucking Noise
·
· Score: 1
Close, the company posts a 105,000 dollar profit for that group, compounded by all the groups they did this with and Wall Street rewards them by increasing their share price a 1/4 point (or whatever).
Which is essentially the CEO's raise for the quarter (plus bonuses from the board for making the company profits).
>>After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor
Yeah but until that delta is reduced and things kick in as you predict (which I agree with), the people who get laid-off in the 'West' with no other jobs are in trouble.
Short-term it sucks, but probably in the long-term there will be an equilibrium. All other things being equal, of course.
One thing I have learned is to not invest a lot of prideful ownership in a particular design decision I make. When reviewed by the team, it invariably gets modified somewhat, sometimes outright rejected. Taking ownership of a subproject (in my case) is one thing, but you have to be malleable enough to "give them what they want". Otherwise you end up beating your head against a wall.
Oh and lose any aversion to eat crow is also a good idea. At some point you will pronounce "There is no way I made that mistake" only to see your log-in in the RCS/CVS log.
Well I have a thing with treating CELEBRITIES as celebrities. What have these people done other than bounce a basketball, look pretty, act or sing a tune? Entertainment is fine and dandy, but why do we give these people such fame and fortune?
Consider a normal channel surfing evening at my house after work--there are at least 3 shows on the 15 channels I get that are "Celebrity News" shows. Celebrity Justice, Extra, blah blah blah, ad nauseum. Plus all the sports shows, sports broadcasts, movies about sports, etc.
I turn to PBS and get to see a show of a camera flying around the Parthenon--it looks good, but damn it is short on intellectual fiber. I refuse to pay for cable, because I honestly don't want to support cable companies anymore (plus I am cheap).
Why aren't the guys working on new medical breakthroughs profiled and given celebrity status? Or heck, the teachers who challenge children to reach beyond the classroom and expand their knowledge? Why is it I have to see a musical hack like Britney Spears every night, when there are better musicians playing at my local pub(albeit much plainer looking ones)?
In short I am sick of our Celebrity society and really wished we could make some changes away from such a fanboy culture.
Not sure if a response to your post is the proper place to put this, but it sparked my response so...
>>How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
>>This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Each state sets it own standards. When I shot in Connecticut, I had to take a firearms safety course, take a written test, pass a shooting test, get fingerprinted, and be interviewed by a law enforcement officer. They only way I could legally go to the range was to get a concealed weapons permit (thus everything above).
In California I had to take a written test (gunsafety, laws, etc). New regs start in 2003 that I believe require on to recite basic gun safety rules and show the gun merchant that you can properly and safely handle a gun. Its all a bit murkey.
Now I can not get a concealed weapons permit in California without the approval of my local sheriff. None of the sheriffs in the Bay Area issue such permits (unless you are US Senator), but the state laws allow me to go back and forth to the range provided I follow certain laws--gun locked in a separate container from the ammo, and both locked in the trunk of my car.
Other states have different laws--every person in Vermont can carry a concealed weapon (not just residents, visitors too). This may be chaning soon, I don't know.
>>Gun inspections like car inspections would probably be too difficult for existing guns.
Why? Guns don't have many moving parts and I have shot guns that are 50 years old using modern ammo. No problems. If you keep your gun clean and oiled per manufacturer's reqs, there is hardly any reason for it to 'wear-out'. My guess is only poorly maintained guns would fail such inspections.
Re:IDE Raid, inexpensive but major hassle
on
IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 1
So you are one of those people I pass when I walk into Fry's? And are still there when I walk out?
Oh I forgot, you could also take a side trip to see the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro or see one of Nature's great engineering feats--The Carlsbad Caverns outside Carlsbad. While in New Mexico you can also see the "longest tram" in the world (billed that way anyhow, I doubt it is--there is one in Venezuela that is 8 miles) in Albuquerque.
There are also numerous places that claim to be the oldest continually inhabitated cities in the US--Taos Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo. Both might lose out to Old Oraibi in Arizona, but they are pretty interesting in their own way, especially Acoma with its location on the top of a mesa.
So you could hit some pretty interesting places if you go to New Mexico, at least from what I remember when I tripped all over the desert when i lived there.
You can visit the Trinity Site in New Mexico (first atomic bomb detonation, if you are into that sort of thing), but only 2 times a year--April and October. At least you don't need reservations. Of course there is probably not much to see there. My brother has been out there to photograph the place for a newspaper article. Not much to photograph, and you can't grab any Trinitite (the glass made by the blast) so it might be a bit ho-hum, but considering the few times it is open and low turnout each year, you can be one of the few people to ever see this place.
Cool! I will have to inflict this on my brother's dying ME-based Gateway when it arrives from CheapBytes. My 56K modem can't handle downloading that iso.
Wonder if it will handle my other brother's dying Dell laptop with such aplomb? Worth a try I guess.
A good hardware modem is not that expensive. I got one and use it on several of my linux boxes. I know, I know an extra expense (since the winmodem probably came with the computer) but if you ever build your own tower it will be useful then as well.
'pon' works like a charm from my command-line Debian laptop with it.
Everyone I have talked to said RAM solves a lot of perceived slowness for OS X.
I have an iBook (700 MHz, 384MB) and there are still a few window operations that seem to take a slightly longer time than I am used to from my Win2K, 800 MHz, 512MB tower at work. Opening system preferences seems to be the one area I consistently notice. But the Finder is much quicker compared to using Win Explorer (not IE) for file system access.
Overall, I am pretty happy with my iBook. Project Builder is nice and I like having most of my command line tools available (with Fink most everything is available). I do kind of miss my debian laptop that croaked on me before I bought this, but I certainly don't miss the compile times on it (P75 are slow even using terminal-only).
I have been using Mozilla 1.1 on Win2K for a little while now and absolutely prefer it to IE6. I really like the tab view (reduces window clutter) and the popup blocker. It *seems* to load pages quicker, but I sometimes get "Page contains no data" errors somewhat frequently. Haven't really investigated why.
On my iBook at home I am running Chimera as well. The only problem I have found with that is checking hockey box scores (to see if I crawled outta my fantasy league basement) on ESPN tends to cause the program to quit. My guess is the scripting they use on their site, but I am not sure. I will probably try to recreate this weekend and check to see if there is a bug listed for this or not. But it is lean and quick, so it still wins out over IE on OS X. My only problem is my bank site requires IE so for online banking I have to switch to that.
He is leaning out the side of a helicopter taking these photos? How about mounting this on the bottom of the copter in a rattle-free housing and having the photos taken automatically at specfic time intervals.
This is like a Barney Rubble story of aerial photography.
Wow, sounds almost exactly like my experience, except I never got X working on my laptop, mostly because I lost the docs and did not have a clue what the vidcard was. Not a big deal though.
The first distro I installed was Debian. I heard about Linux, went to a bookstore and bought O'Reilly's "Learning Debian GNU/Linux" because it came with an install CD.
I was installing it on a P75 laptop without a CD drive. Copied the floppy disk images over and installed the base system that way--used a hardware modem for all the GNU parts. The installer seemed archaic, but it got the job done and I used that laptop (with its 840 MB harddrive) for another year or so before the hardware crapped out. I learned how to use emacs, gcc, bash, apache and various other programs on that little laptop. Tried to compile my first kernel on it and gave up after letting it run all night (I guess I needed more patience).
But the biggest thing I learned was how to mine the web for help on how to fix things myself. There was no support line for debian and I didn't want to get tons of RTFM responses, so I RTFM. And in the process learned a ton about how linux works. Still a lot more to learn, but that is part of the fun.
Trial by fire I guess, but I don't really see why it can't be your first distro. Of course I never got X working and that was one VERY nice thing about installing Red Hat on my creaky old Celery box.
Language is fluid. If the common usage becomes "viri", no amount of hemming and hawing is going to stop it.
I know what "viri" refers to, whether the etymology supports its usage or not. "Viruses" sounds to me like things spread by school children sneezing on water fountains.
Slashdot Mirror
Too bad it is so close to Long Island, Connecticut and New York City. If anything went wrong, that is a lot of people in harm's way.
>>Wanted: Programmers. Must be fluent in C/C++, Haskell, Eiffel, perl, Python, Ruby, Oberon and Common Lisp. Experience in Intercal a plus.
You just described most of the jobs in my last Dice.com search. Apparently noone out in the corporate world sticks to a standard--or they are just looking for the top dog, guru type only right now.
>>You should probably be on the sidewalk anyway, whenever possible.
That is illegal in most cities and states. Not in Palo Alto, CA (in case you ever visit and have a bike), but most places I know of.
>>used Jeep cjX
Don't you worry about flipping one of those? My friend had a CJ7 (I think) and we nearly flipped on the way to go skiing when we hit a patch of ice. I never rode in it again. AFAIK though he still has it and uses it for daily transport (he's in a different state), so maybe I am out to lunch on this.
When I needed an off-road vehicle, I couldn't afford one. Now that I can afford one, I don't need it. Irony is lovely.
>>In Poland it is generally considered rude to talk about yourself the way Americans like to talk - "I am Dexter, the genius-boy, I am the best in my class etc.". You should rather say "Well, I had lot of luck with that test, but let's talk about the weather now". Probably that's why you have better economy and better technology. But maybe - just maybe - we have better childhood?
I guess it depends on how your grew up. My parents always taught us humility, so when I aced a Trigonometry test, I generally just said something like "Well I really, really had to study hard for this test and expected to do horrible." Or when people told me I was smart, I'd try to beg off saying things like "No, not really. I just study hard". I actually didn't like talking about how well I did in case my friends did bad.
But maybe I was a weird case. I do remember the competition being pretty fierce in high school, but less so in University.
>>International calls (a) mostly require somebody to actually BE there, and (b) cost a non-trivial amount of money, normally.
So how come lately most of my telemarketer calls come from people with Indian accents (presumably in India, considering some of the stories I have seen on this)?
Close, the company posts a 105,000 dollar profit for that group, compounded by all the groups they did this with and Wall Street rewards them by increasing their share price a 1/4 point (or whatever).
Which is essentially the CEO's raise for the quarter (plus bonuses from the board for making the company profits).
>>After awhile they become almost as expensive as the native labor
Yeah but until that delta is reduced and things kick in as you predict (which I agree with), the people who get laid-off in the 'West' with no other jobs are in trouble.
Short-term it sucks, but probably in the long-term there will be an equilibrium. All other things being equal, of course.
One thing I have learned is to not invest a lot of prideful ownership in a particular design decision I make. When reviewed by the team, it invariably gets modified somewhat, sometimes outright rejected. Taking ownership of a subproject (in my case) is one thing, but you have to be malleable enough to "give them what they want". Otherwise you end up beating your head against a wall.
Oh and lose any aversion to eat crow is also a good idea. At some point you will pronounce "There is no way I made that mistake" only to see your log-in in the RCS/CVS log.
In Palo Alto CA (close to the Segway story cities), bikes are specifically allowed on sidewalks, so check your local ordinances just to be sure.
RANT
Well I have a thing with treating CELEBRITIES as celebrities. What have these people done other than bounce a basketball, look pretty, act or sing a tune? Entertainment is fine and dandy, but why do we give these people such fame and fortune?
Consider a normal channel surfing evening at my house after work--there are at least 3 shows on the 15 channels I get that are "Celebrity News" shows. Celebrity Justice, Extra, blah blah blah, ad nauseum. Plus all the sports shows, sports broadcasts, movies about sports, etc.
I turn to PBS and get to see a show of a camera flying around the Parthenon--it looks good, but damn it is short on intellectual fiber. I refuse to pay for cable, because I honestly don't want to support cable companies anymore (plus I am cheap).
Why aren't the guys working on new medical breakthroughs profiled and given celebrity status? Or heck, the teachers who challenge children to reach beyond the classroom and expand their knowledge? Why is it I have to see a musical hack like Britney Spears every night, when there are better musicians playing at my local pub(albeit much plainer looking ones)?
In short I am sick of our Celebrity society and really wished we could make some changes away from such a fanboy culture.
Not sure if a response to your post is the proper place to put this, but it sparked my response so ...
END RANT
>>How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
>>This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Each state sets it own standards. When I shot in Connecticut, I had to take a firearms safety course, take a written test, pass a shooting test, get fingerprinted, and be interviewed by a law enforcement officer. They only way I could legally go to the range was to get a concealed weapons permit (thus everything above).
In California I had to take a written test (gunsafety, laws, etc). New regs start in 2003 that I believe require on to recite basic gun safety rules and show the gun merchant that you can properly and safely handle a gun. Its all a bit murkey.
Now I can not get a concealed weapons permit in California without the approval of my local sheriff. None of the sheriffs in the Bay Area issue such permits (unless you are US Senator), but the state laws allow me to go back and forth to the range provided I follow certain laws--gun locked in a separate container from the ammo, and both locked in the trunk of my car.
Other states have different laws--every person in Vermont can carry a concealed weapon (not just residents, visitors too). This may be chaning soon, I don't know.
>>Gun inspections like car inspections would probably be too difficult for existing guns.
Why? Guns don't have many moving parts and I have shot guns that are 50 years old using modern ammo. No problems. If you keep your gun clean and oiled per manufacturer's reqs, there is hardly any reason for it to 'wear-out'. My guess is only poorly maintained guns would fail such inspections.
So you are one of those people I pass when I walk into Fry's? And are still there when I walk out?
Oh I forgot, you could also take a side trip to see the VLA (Very Large Array) near Socorro or see one of Nature's great engineering feats--The Carlsbad Caverns outside Carlsbad. While in New Mexico you can also see the "longest tram" in the world (billed that way anyhow, I doubt it is--there is one in Venezuela that is 8 miles) in Albuquerque.
There are also numerous places that claim to be the oldest continually inhabitated cities in the US--Taos Pueblo and Acoma Pueblo. Both might lose out to Old Oraibi in Arizona, but they are pretty interesting in their own way, especially Acoma with its location on the top of a mesa.
So you could hit some pretty interesting places if you go to New Mexico, at least from what I remember when I tripped all over the desert when i lived there.
You can visit the Trinity Site in New Mexico (first atomic bomb detonation, if you are into that sort of thing), but only 2 times a year--April and October. At least you don't need reservations. Of course there is probably not much to see there. My brother has been out there to photograph the place for a newspaper article. Not much to photograph, and you can't grab any Trinitite (the glass made by the blast) so it might be a bit ho-hum, but considering the few times it is open and low turnout each year, you can be one of the few people to ever see this place.
>>the author calls his 700MHz Duron system with 384MB RAM a "medium-range" system.
You're right. It is a unpowered desktop system, not even poking the bottom of low-end server systems.
Your systems are archaic junkers.
Cool! I will have to inflict this on my brother's dying ME-based Gateway when it arrives from CheapBytes. My 56K modem can't handle downloading that iso.
Wonder if it will handle my other brother's dying Dell laptop with such aplomb? Worth a try I guess.
A good hardware modem is not that expensive. I got one and use it on several of my linux boxes. I know, I know an extra expense (since the winmodem probably came with the computer) but if you ever build your own tower it will be useful then as well.
'pon' works like a charm from my command-line Debian laptop with it.
>>Who do real anarchists vote for?
More paving stones.
Everyone I have talked to said RAM solves a lot of perceived slowness for OS X.
I have an iBook (700 MHz, 384MB) and there are still a few window operations that seem to take a slightly longer time than I am used to from my Win2K, 800 MHz, 512MB tower at work. Opening system preferences seems to be the one area I consistently notice. But the Finder is much quicker compared to using Win Explorer (not IE) for file system access.
Overall, I am pretty happy with my iBook. Project Builder is nice and I like having most of my command line tools available (with Fink most everything is available). I do kind of miss my debian laptop that croaked on me before I bought this, but I certainly don't miss the compile times on it (P75 are slow even using terminal-only).
I have been using Mozilla 1.1 on Win2K for a little while now and absolutely prefer it to IE6. I really like the tab view (reduces window clutter) and the popup blocker. It *seems* to load pages quicker, but I sometimes get "Page contains no data" errors somewhat frequently. Haven't really investigated why.
On my iBook at home I am running Chimera as well. The only problem I have found with that is checking hockey box scores (to see if I crawled outta my fantasy league basement) on ESPN tends to cause the program to quit. My guess is the scripting they use on their site, but I am not sure. I will probably try to recreate this weekend and check to see if there is a bug listed for this or not. But it is lean and quick, so it still wins out over IE on OS X. My only problem is my bank site requires IE so for online banking I have to switch to that.
He is leaning out the side of a helicopter taking these photos? How about mounting this on the bottom of the copter in a rattle-free housing and having the photos taken automatically at specfic time intervals.
This is like a Barney Rubble story of aerial photography.
Wow, sounds almost exactly like my experience, except I never got X working on my laptop, mostly because I lost the docs and did not have a clue what the vidcard was. Not a big deal though.
>>Debian is NOT for first time linux users
The first distro I installed was Debian. I heard about Linux, went to a bookstore and bought O'Reilly's "Learning Debian GNU/Linux" because it came with an install CD.
I was installing it on a P75 laptop without a CD drive. Copied the floppy disk images over and installed the base system that way--used a hardware modem for all the GNU parts. The installer seemed archaic, but it got the job done and I used that laptop (with its 840 MB harddrive) for another year or so before the hardware crapped out. I learned how to use emacs, gcc, bash, apache and various other programs on that little laptop. Tried to compile my first kernel on it and gave up after letting it run all night (I guess I needed more patience).
But the biggest thing I learned was how to mine the web for help on how to fix things myself. There was no support line for debian and I didn't want to get tons of RTFM responses, so I RTFM. And in the process learned a ton about how linux works. Still a lot more to learn, but that is part of the fun.
Trial by fire I guess, but I don't really see why it can't be your first distro. Of course I never got X working and that was one VERY nice thing about installing Red Hat on my creaky old Celery box.
Language is fluid. If the common usage becomes "viri", no amount of hemming and hawing is going to stop it.
I know what "viri" refers to, whether the etymology supports its usage or not. "Viruses" sounds to me like things spread by school children sneezing on water fountains.