I have to agree with you that the website is a bit unnecessary, but it was relatively late in the piece. After the spammer had had account disconected. Perhaps at that point he should have examined his past actions, instead of continuing his email & phone stupidy.
He was behaving very stupidly in a public forum, if not, then the website wouldn't be so damaging to him. What makes it worse is he picked a known anti-spammer to be stupid in front of. Its like doing donughts in front of a police car, your asking for a reaction.
500/month is not a large scale spam operation which makes it even more mind-boglingly stupid to send two to the same anti-spammer.
Your comparison with ~16/month required by the DOLE is much more like targeted job-hunting. I would have been hard pressed to find 20 a week worth sending out last time I was looking. 500/month is far too high to think they're all going to someone who may be interested.
I'm currently working writting embedded Forth. My previous jobs were C++ desktop stuff.
The things that I think helped me getting this job were a good level of hardware knowledge (I was a motherboard tech with IBM for a year) and specific skills relevant to the current position (Forth and good maths as I have a physics degree). It also helped that there are very few Forth programmers in Australia so my employers had few applicants, especially as the R&D office is in a rural area.
I hope to use this position to gain embedded skills that are transportable to future work, so I dont mind the daily 140km round trip.
I have friends who do embedded work, and most of them come from an electronic engineeering background. They have a much closer skill fit than pure CS degrees normally do.
Most of the embedded jobs advertised, when I was last looking, wanted Embedded C & Unix experience or experience with a particular technology (ie networking, phones, etc). They dont ever seem to advertise for graduate programmers.
From an employers point of view (I used to be R&D manager for a small company) new graduates are a risk. Some complete their degree, but dont really like to code and you only find out once you've hired them. Also there is a lot not taught about professional proggramming in Universities, so there will be a learning curve. For these reasons you try to hire experienced people for the more critical or demanding areas, and let graduates prove themselves elsewhere first.
With all this in mind you might do best to try and find a position where you can prove your programming skills, and pick up some technology
skills on the way, so your second job is in the embbeded area.
Small companies will probably allow you more scope for learning and taking on new duties, so a regular programming job with a small shop that also does embedded work may be good.
>what I don't understand is why AMD decides to limit their chips to the performance of the top Intel chip.
At the moment the Intel P4 chips are on a 0.13 micron core, while the AMD XP's are on a 0.18 I think. AMD probably want to maximise their profits from the current line before replacing it with a 0.13 line, which they are working on for the future.
Since AMD currently have the fastest chip they have no reason to rush to the 0.13 core, until they can no longer keep up with the P4's. This will eventually happen as the 0.13 micron P4 cores can potentially be used at much higher clock speeds, as they dissipates much less heat, and use much less power.
The first time the email was recieved it was ignored. It was the second time that it was reported to the ISP. Also the fact that it has been received all over the world seems to indicate this is way beyond just a simple mistake. He was intentionally and repeatedly sending his resume to people he had no reason to think might have work for him. It was spam, and very stupid spam as far as I can see.
As an Australian I have to agree completely with you. I'd like to change our faulty political system for the US sytem. Our has the weakness such that an independant senator can hold the balance of power and influence policy so we get crap internet censorship laws, which will most likely be reversed when that balance of power is reversed. It also passes gun laws supported by the majority of the country. We like the fact we have far lower rates of violent crime and acidental deaths from guns.
Shit of course we would much rather have a system where the election process is so expensive that only corporate funding and hence bias will get you into office so you can pass laws that can be vetoed by your president.
If you missed the sarcasm please insert 'I dont need no stinking US imperialism'.
By the way, the majority of Australians dont feel a need for guns, so the gun laws affected relatively few people. Also you can still get licences to own fire arms if you have a professional or sporting reason, we just restrict the type and storage of the weapons. Seems a rational compromise to me. Of course a lot of the rants from the US come from people who probably do not accept the view that there is a role for government to enfore such rational compromises on individuals for the greater good. However the majority here do.
I'll allow your basic principle for the sake of argument, although I dont agree, mostly because it has been used as an excuse to treat the asylum seekers in an inhuman manner.
The problems with our current system are many
- the asylum seekers are kept locked up for great lengths of times; two or three years
- most (around 90%) are found to be genuine refugees and accepted as permanant residents
- its expensive, about A$50,000 a year per person and we miss out on the economic benifits we could have had from them if they had been out in the community earlier
- the majority of our illegal immigrants arrive by plane and are US & UK tourists overstaying holiday visa's, so when we target boat-people we are missing the real problem, or maybe we are just being rasist
- some of the asylum seekers have been severly traumatised, and have risked a long sea voyage on unseaworthy boats, piracy, rape, murder etc to get to Australia, locking them up for another few years, means we deny them the chance to build a new life and repair some of the damage
- there have been local studies that have shown that after a short 2-3 year period, refugees tend to be a positive for our economy.
- we need the population, I'd like to know that if I needed it I'll get an old age pension, like I'm happy to pay for, for others, through my taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree with you that the website is a bit unnecessary, but it was relatively late in the piece. After the spammer had had account disconected. Perhaps at that point he should have examined his past actions, instead of continuing his email & phone stupidy.
He was behaving very stupidly in a public forum, if not, then the website wouldn't be so damaging to him. What makes it worse is he picked a known anti-spammer to be stupid in front of. Its like doing donughts in front of a police car, your asking for a reaction.
500/month is not a large scale spam operation which makes it even more mind-boglingly stupid to send two to the same anti-spammer.
Your comparison with ~16/month required by the DOLE is much more like targeted job-hunting. I would have been hard pressed to find 20 a week worth sending out last time I was looking. 500/month is far too high to think they're all going to someone who may be interested.
Peter
I'm currently working writting embedded Forth. My previous jobs were C++ desktop stuff.
The things that I think helped me getting this job were a good level of hardware knowledge (I was a motherboard tech with IBM for a year) and specific skills relevant to the current position (Forth and good maths as I have a physics degree). It also helped that there are very few Forth programmers in Australia so my employers had few applicants, especially as the R&D office is in a rural area.
I hope to use this position to gain embedded skills that are transportable to future work, so I dont mind the daily 140km round trip.
I have friends who do embedded work, and most of them come from an electronic engineeering background. They have a much closer skill fit than pure CS degrees normally do.
Most of the embedded jobs advertised, when I was last looking, wanted Embedded C & Unix experience or experience with a particular technology (ie networking, phones, etc). They dont ever seem to advertise for graduate programmers.
From an employers point of view (I used to be R&D manager for a small company) new graduates are a risk. Some complete their degree, but dont really like to code and you only find out once you've hired them. Also there is a lot not taught about professional proggramming in Universities, so there will be a learning curve. For these reasons you try to hire experienced people for the more critical or demanding areas, and let graduates prove themselves elsewhere first.
With all this in mind you might do best to try and find a position where you can prove your programming skills, and pick up some technology
skills on the way, so your second job is in the embbeded area.
Small companies will probably allow you more scope for learning and taking on new duties, so a regular programming job with a small shop that also does embedded work may be good.
Hope some of this is helpful
Peter
>what I don't understand is why AMD decides to limit their chips to the performance of the top Intel chip.
At the moment the Intel P4 chips are on a 0.13 micron core, while the AMD XP's are on a 0.18 I think. AMD probably want to maximise their profits from the current line before replacing it with a 0.13 line, which they are working on for the future.
Since AMD currently have the fastest chip they have no reason to rush to the 0.13 core, until they can no longer keep up with the P4's. This will eventually happen as the 0.13 micron P4 cores can potentially be used at much higher clock speeds, as they dissipates much less heat, and use much less power.
The first time the email was recieved it was ignored. It was the second time that it was reported to the ISP. Also the fact that it has been received all over the world seems to indicate this is way beyond just a simple mistake. He was intentionally and repeatedly sending his resume to people he had no reason to think might have work for him. It was spam, and very stupid spam as far as I can see.
As an Australian I have to agree completely with you. I'd like to change our faulty political system for the US sytem. Our has the weakness such that an independant senator can hold the balance of power and influence policy so we get crap internet censorship laws, which will most likely be reversed when that balance of power is reversed. It also passes gun laws supported by the majority of the country. We like the fact we have far lower rates of violent crime and acidental deaths from guns.
Shit of course we would much rather have a system where the election process is so expensive that only corporate funding and hence bias will get you into office so you can pass laws that can be vetoed by your president.
If you missed the sarcasm please insert 'I dont need no stinking US imperialism'.
By the way, the majority of Australians dont feel a need for guns, so the gun laws affected relatively few people. Also you can still get licences to own fire arms if you have a professional or sporting reason, we just restrict the type and storage of the weapons. Seems a rational compromise to me. Of course a lot of the rants from the US come from people who probably do not accept the view that there is a role for government to enfore such rational compromises on individuals for the greater good. However the majority here do.
Peter
I'll allow your basic principle for the sake of argument, although I dont agree, mostly because it has been used as an excuse to treat the asylum seekers in an inhuman manner.
The problems with our current system are many
- the asylum seekers are kept locked up for great lengths of times; two or three years
- most (around 90%) are found to be genuine refugees and accepted as permanant residents
- its expensive, about A$50,000 a year per person and we miss out on the economic benifits we could have had from them if they had been out in the community earlier
- the majority of our illegal immigrants arrive by plane and are US & UK tourists overstaying holiday visa's, so when we target boat-people we are missing the real problem, or maybe we are just being rasist
- some of the asylum seekers have been severly traumatised, and have risked a long sea voyage on unseaworthy boats, piracy, rape, murder etc to get to Australia, locking them up for another few years, means we deny them the chance to build a new life and repair some of the damage
- there have been local studies that have shown that after a short 2-3 year period, refugees tend to be a positive for our economy.
- we need the population, I'd like to know that if I needed it I'll get an old age pension, like I'm happy to pay for, for others, through my taxes.
Peter
I wonder how long till we outgrow Mars too...