Well yeah, I'll grant you that, 42 is over the hill. I'm not going to be a namedropper, but my mentor here at Berkeley was on the admissions committee at Chicago and is now on the GRE board for one of the subject exams, so I think he's pretty authoritative, Mr. Anonymous Coward. He's advising his best students to wait a year or two, maybe more. My neighbor from back home, a tenured associate professor of anthropology at Stanford, has made his three very bright daughters, all who went to top-teir small liberal arts colleges, wait a few years to see if they really want to go through with their Ph.D.
On the whole, even you agree that arrogance is the biggest impediment to education across the board - an arrogant 42 year old is just as inflexible as an arrogant 22 year old - but I stand by my opinion that very, very few people fresh out of a Bachelor's program are ready for the realities of graduate work. I know too many burnouts who went that route - they get to 25, and realize they don't like their subject at all. Somebody who's worked in the field for a few years and comes back is much likely to be a determined, serious student, rather than some kid who's going to graduate school just because he or she knows nothing else.
I realize, as well, that as a young man about to finish his Bachelor's, I have a lot of that hubris, which is why I'm going to work for a few years and get my shit together.
Publications will get you very far in academia, because they understand them better than many other aspects of the private sector. But whenever you make a transition, you need to think of how you're going to interpret field work to an academic, or academic work to a businessman, because sometimes they have trouble understanding each other's worlds and where (say) your field experience places you relative to somebody who's worked in a university lab for seven years.
I'm pointing out that what the Portuguese Finance Ministry is doing is great for an economy of that size, approximately equivalent to one of our states, for which we have to file separate tax forms. Our federal government is too big and ponderous to ever organize something like this, so I prefer Turbotax to help me get my deductions and exemptions right. A community project is possible, but not really concievably useful.
Right on. Every graduate admissions guru I've talked to from computer science to humanities to law says they prefer somebody with field experience as opposed to (exposing my personal bias here) a snot-nosed 22 year-old who thinks they're God's gift to the university. Arrogant people are very hard to teach.
Seconded. Exponential growth is fundamentally unsustainable.
People had fantastic expectations about their earnings. Guess what? Work is hard. My girlfriend worked at a coffee shop in an affluent area of Oakland from 1998 to 2002, where she got minimum wage plus tips. Dot-com bust hit, and suddenly people were applying for jobs at her store asking for (I shit you not) 18 to 25 dollars an hour to work as a regular, part-time barista.
Now, these traumatically sheltered beings were probably made the [correct] assumption right that somebody working a busy espresso bar tries as hard as they did pushing HTML and memos around at Oracle for $60000 a year. I myself have worked at a $15k per week coffee shop, and it was repetitive, hectic, and took a lot out of me, but I wouldn't describe it as "hard." The hours were flexible, work ended when I walked out the door, the the staff was full of love, and it was a great way to meet people. I'd go back and work part time while pursuing my career if I wasn't in school. But, what I'm doing now (balancing a part time tech job and a full load at a university) is pretty damn hard, because splitting my head between Perl and Spenserian stanzas pretty much consumes my every waking thought, my social life stinks, and the times are frequent when I have to ask my girlfriend for space.
I like working hard, and I'm going to keep working hard. People need to realize that $50 an hour jobs don't just fall in your lap.
I sextuple that. Newegg has parts from reputable manufacturers at rock-bottom prices. I especially like the wide availability of OEM hardware, as I have little time to deal with gigantic pretty $20 boxes. Ever since I worked in retail, I learned to hate big boxes, and I still do.
That's really cool. Something like that would definitely be implementable over here for state tax returns. Maybe (especially in a state such as California, which is in a huge budgetary crisis) actually collecting the taxes they have at the current rate would mean, for instance, less cuts in services. I can't see it happening very soon on the federal level though. For one, the scale is just too vast, which is why there are so many 3rd parties involved. Second, when you buy Turbotax you're basically buying their expertise, and I don't think a community OSS project will have that kind of committment to detail. The last thing I need is an audit because I used -O3 during compile time.
My job uses dreamweaver extensively. It's a crime against God and man, plus, as you say, it's pretty hard to learn. In fact, my situation is even worse because we use a 9x version on our XP machines that crashes on an hourly basis.
What concerns me about the templates is that they're an excuse, at least in my experience, for shitty web designers to produce equally shitty, unmaintainable code through a WYSIWYG editor. Includes are a good way to go (catting a file into the output stream does not consume any resources worth mentioning, and it's a bigger waste of resources in the eyes of somebody trying to maintain the code if you have a bunch of redundent HTML). That way, they can just look at the
that they're worried about, and they can even edit that in dreamweaver.
Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.
Sorry if I sounded biased. One of my friends just got back from volunteer teaching in a rural area of India, and I was a bit inflamed by (some) of her experiences there. And I hate it when people make poor analogies.
Premise: the RIAA's members own the preponderence of the music distributed by iTunes.
If RIAA telling Steve Jobs what to do [with music] is equivalent to Bill Gates telling Steve Jobs what to do [with operating systems], this then implies that Bill Gates owns OS X. Bill Gates does not own OS X, therefore your analogy is false.
Furthermore, somewhere recently on slashdot there was an article about Apple's DRM which supported my statement.
Well, yeah, I'm not in love with that per se, but it's worth pointing out that the RIAA required iTunes to use DRM, and that the iPod plays all sorts of non-encrypted files.
I think the more salient issue is that Apple is a bit further away ideologically from actually putting some shit in the BIOS that prevents you from booting another OS. Their asses were saved by BSD. Hell, forget Ideology: they're a hardware company. They don't give a rat's behind if you put linux on the box (I don't know why you would in the first place, since, in terms of applications and hardware support, OS X is a superset of Linux, but I think they get a kick out of people hacking their boxes), they've already made off with the money and don't need to rely on shitty software and compulsory upgrades for their cash.
Granted, their hardware platform is pretty much a controlled, closed deal. But I don't think that is nearly as evil as what's happening on the other side of the line.
Japan has been, since the Shogunate, a pretty centralized operation and a land mass about equal to that of California. It has one ethnic group, Okinawans and other tiny minorities aside. Until the arrival of missionaries, the dominant religions (Shintoism and Buddhism) got along ok. By contrast, India is a large nation with many languages, violently opposing religions (Hinduism and Islam).
Americans see the (academically speaking) creme de la creme of India, and sometimes we forget that most of India, both in land mass and population, is third world. Look at a street in Tokyo, then look at one in Calcutta. If that isn't a big enough contrast, just look down. Better yet, just take a deep breath and smell. Japan was able to do what it did, IMHO, because it was able to educate and modernize itself quickly and pervasively. Whether India can do that, or even if it is willing to do that (They throw away their best engineers, who graduated from a massive, publicly-funded university system! Does this sound like a sane government to you?), remains to be seen.
One of my coworkers floats in the same circles as this guy. Apparently he's the type of person people try not to talk to at parties but who gets invited anyway for absolutely inscrutible reasons.
Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships
these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.
The customer, the one with no computer knowlegde, faced a monopoly, he had no choice. And he would probably have followed the same path if he was presented alternatives. (Unix never focused on jo six-pack; Mac did well but was more expensive). Until now, MS was the only choice for Mr. Customer.
I would chalk up another thing: Most people 25-40 barely know what an operating system is, let alone know it is replaceable. Most people 14-25 aren't that far ahead. Since I've been using computers since I was 8, this comes as a shock to me, and I think it's something often overlooked by geeks.
For example, even a rather computer-literate librarian I know thinks, "You buy a PC, it runs Windows; you buy a Mac, it runs MacOS; you buy a Sun server, it runs SunOS." When I started talking about FreeBSD and Linux, she looked at me as if I was talking about turning her Vespa into a dishwasher. They don't get that PCs are designed to be open, and all you have to do is write GRUB to the MBR, and it WILL boot up. This is one of the biggest challenges facing the open-source movement. Look at the sticker on my girlfriend's Dell: "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP," which in many respects is a fallacy, but customers often interpret it as "Designed ONLY for Microsoft."
Computers are presented like a calculator, a typewriter, a gaming station, an Internet access point.
Absolutely. (If you weren't a geek) you wouldn't think of an "operating system" with respect to your calculator, would you? How many computer users do you think know how an IC works? They're still operating from the abacus metaphor. And http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html has some good stuff in it regrading this kind of false metaphor.
In a perfect world, he would have shot him twice in the forehead and been patted on the back by your local police officer. In this one, he would be tried for murder by the family of this "victim" and, if in a liberal area, convicted. IANAL, but self defense is a hard one to plea; I understand the burden of proof is fearing for your life and having no other recourse, or something to that effect, depending on the state.
From the perspective of the boys in blue, who neither serve nor protect, going after the highly organized and well-armed gang element responsible for most urban violent crime just doesn't pay the bills. And rather than tackle urban poverty and drug dependence, usually the root of the problem, affluent, influential citizens would rather let the inner cities rot, build prisons instead of schools and infrastructure, and simply escape to idyllic suburbs.
I don't know much about the internal politics and holdings of the print moguls, but I do know that there is only really one newspaper in San Francisco since the buyout years ago, overlooking the alternative publications like SF Weekly and The Guardian.
I agree about the results. IMHO, the article has the wrong spin. It should say, "Rip-roaring success of Craigslist optimizes matching between job seekers and employers." Because that's what's good for the economy and the people, right?
Craigslist does one major thing right: minimalism. Other job search engines are absurdly baroque, each trying to out-glam the other and employ an army of barely-competent ASP monkeys at the same time. Craigslist has virtually no graphics and runs bloody fast, and the layout is no more complex than it needs to be: geographic area, then job field, then job. That's it. It even beats print for readability, with the lack of ads and instantaneous response.
Don't count on it just yet. The article says that the companies will provide copies of the license on the internet to review before you buy and place labels on the outside of the box. So it may just be that your next Dell box has a big nasty looking Surgeon General's warning on it.
I think a lot of people are more concerned with Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative, which, according to GNU advocates, means your computer essentially does not belong to you - that is, they have ultimate say over what code you run and what you do not. EULAs, especially shrink-wrap ones are a conveniant way to slip this in. By opening, say, a brand new computer with TC built in, you would be agreeing to the EULA, therefore signing over your rights to your own machine. This isn't a problem for most consumers, but I think all would, if they knew about it, be very angry at having it shoved down their throats.
As I recall, shrink-wrap EULAs were a key part of the DMCA, so if this is a step towards taking that down, rock on.
Slashdot Mirror
Well yeah, I'll grant you that, 42 is over the hill. I'm not going to be a namedropper, but my mentor here at Berkeley was on the admissions committee at Chicago and is now on the GRE board for one of the subject exams, so I think he's pretty authoritative, Mr. Anonymous Coward. He's advising his best students to wait a year or two, maybe more. My neighbor from back home, a tenured associate professor of anthropology at Stanford, has made his three very bright daughters, all who went to top-teir small liberal arts colleges, wait a few years to see if they really want to go through with their Ph.D.
On the whole, even you agree that arrogance is the biggest impediment to education across the board - an arrogant 42 year old is just as inflexible as an arrogant 22 year old - but I stand by my opinion that very, very few people fresh out of a Bachelor's program are ready for the realities of graduate work. I know too many burnouts who went that route - they get to 25, and realize they don't like their subject at all. Somebody who's worked in the field for a few years and comes back is much likely to be a determined, serious student, rather than some kid who's going to graduate school just because he or she knows nothing else.
I realize, as well, that as a young man about to finish his Bachelor's, I have a lot of that hubris, which is why I'm going to work for a few years and get my shit together.
Nobody named Gonzales in the Chinese government. He's talking about the United States.
Publications will get you very far in academia, because they understand them better than many other aspects of the private sector. But whenever you make a transition, you need to think of how you're going to interpret field work to an academic, or academic work to a businessman, because sometimes they have trouble understanding each other's worlds and where (say) your field experience places you relative to somebody who's worked in a university lab for seven years.
I'm pointing out that what the Portuguese Finance Ministry is doing is great for an economy of that size, approximately equivalent to one of our states, for which we have to file separate tax forms. Our federal government is too big and ponderous to ever organize something like this, so I prefer Turbotax to help me get my deductions and exemptions right. A community project is possible, but not really concievably useful.
Right on. Every graduate admissions guru I've talked to from computer science to humanities to law says they prefer somebody with field experience as opposed to (exposing my personal bias here) a snot-nosed 22 year-old who thinks they're God's gift to the university. Arrogant people are very hard to teach.
Seconded. Exponential growth is fundamentally unsustainable.
People had fantastic expectations about their earnings. Guess what? Work is hard. My girlfriend worked at a coffee shop in an affluent area of Oakland from 1998 to 2002, where she got minimum wage plus tips. Dot-com bust hit, and suddenly people were applying for jobs at her store asking for (I shit you not) 18 to 25 dollars an hour to work as a regular, part-time barista.
Now, these traumatically sheltered beings were probably made the [correct] assumption right that somebody working a busy espresso bar tries as hard as they did pushing HTML and memos around at Oracle for $60000 a year. I myself have worked at a $15k per week coffee shop, and it was repetitive, hectic, and took a lot out of me, but I wouldn't describe it as "hard." The hours were flexible, work ended when I walked out the door, the the staff was full of love, and it was a great way to meet people. I'd go back and work part time while pursuing my career if I wasn't in school. But, what I'm doing now (balancing a part time tech job and a full load at a university) is pretty damn hard, because splitting my head between Perl and Spenserian stanzas pretty much consumes my every waking thought, my social life stinks, and the times are frequent when I have to ask my girlfriend for space.
I like working hard, and I'm going to keep working hard. People need to realize that $50 an hour jobs don't just fall in your lap.
I sextuple that. Newegg has parts from reputable manufacturers at rock-bottom prices. I especially like the wide availability of OEM hardware, as I have little time to deal with gigantic pretty $20 boxes. Ever since I worked in retail, I learned to hate big boxes, and I still do.
That's really cool. Something like that would definitely be implementable over here for state tax returns. Maybe (especially in a state such as California, which is in a huge budgetary crisis) actually collecting the taxes they have at the current rate would mean, for instance, less cuts in services. I can't see it happening very soon on the federal level though. For one, the scale is just too vast, which is why there are so many 3rd parties involved. Second, when you buy Turbotax you're basically buying their expertise, and I don't think a community OSS project will have that kind of committment to detail. The last thing I need is an audit because I used -O3 during compile time.
My job uses dreamweaver extensively. It's a crime against God and man, plus, as you say, it's pretty hard to learn. In fact, my situation is even worse because we use a 9x version on our XP machines that crashes on an hourly basis.
What concerns me about the templates is that they're an excuse, at least in my experience, for shitty web designers to produce equally shitty, unmaintainable code through a WYSIWYG editor. Includes are a good way to go (catting a file into the output stream does not consume any resources worth mentioning, and it's a bigger waste of resources in the eyes of somebody trying to maintain the code if you have a bunch of redundent HTML). That way, they can just look at the
that they're worried about, and they can even edit that in dreamweaver.Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.
Gads.
Well I guess my cutesy logical waxings fail me once again. But I'm still right.
All the more reason to go north! Pretty soon Belgium will do as well in the Arctic as in the Congo.
Sorry if I sounded biased. One of my friends just got back from volunteer teaching in a rural area of India, and I was a bit inflamed by (some) of her experiences there. And I hate it when people make poor analogies.
Premise: the RIAA's members own the preponderence of the music distributed by iTunes.
If RIAA telling Steve Jobs what to do [with music] is equivalent to Bill Gates telling Steve Jobs what to do [with operating systems], this then implies that Bill Gates owns OS X. Bill Gates does not own OS X, therefore your analogy is false.
Furthermore, somewhere recently on slashdot there was an article about Apple's DRM which supported my statement.
Well, yeah, I'm not in love with that per se, but it's worth pointing out that the RIAA required iTunes to use DRM, and that the iPod plays all sorts of non-encrypted files.
I think the more salient issue is that Apple is a bit further away ideologically from actually putting some shit in the BIOS that prevents you from booting another OS. Their asses were saved by BSD. Hell, forget Ideology: they're a hardware company. They don't give a rat's behind if you put linux on the box (I don't know why you would in the first place, since, in terms of applications and hardware support, OS X is a superset of Linux, but I think they get a kick out of people hacking their boxes), they've already made off with the money and don't need to rely on shitty software and compulsory upgrades for their cash.
Granted, their hardware platform is pretty much a controlled, closed deal. But I don't think that is nearly as evil as what's happening on the other side of the line.
Wasn't there a movie where Canada started a war with the US for that very reason?
Japan has been, since the Shogunate, a pretty centralized operation and a land mass about equal to that of California. It has one ethnic group, Okinawans and other tiny minorities aside. Until the arrival of missionaries, the dominant religions (Shintoism and Buddhism) got along ok. By contrast, India is a large nation with many languages, violently opposing religions (Hinduism and Islam).
Americans see the (academically speaking) creme de la creme of India, and sometimes we forget that most of India, both in land mass and population, is third world. Look at a street in Tokyo, then look at one in Calcutta. If that isn't a big enough contrast, just look down. Better yet, just take a deep breath and smell. Japan was able to do what it did, IMHO, because it was able to educate and modernize itself quickly and pervasively. Whether India can do that, or even if it is willing to do that (They throw away their best engineers, who graduated from a massive, publicly-funded university system! Does this sound like a sane government to you?), remains to be seen.
One of my coworkers floats in the same circles as this guy. Apparently he's the type of person people try not to talk to at parties but who gets invited anyway for absolutely inscrutible reasons.
Props to Conan for his good improv skills and ability to work a crowd, but doesn't it say something weird about our age that Microsoft itself can't keep its own product from going down at a major technology trade show, and that the crowd finds this acceptable, even funny? Remember, Microsoft's product is on warships these days. Would the crowd have also been yucking like a bunch of doped-up Amsterdam tourists if this had been wargames off the coast of England, and HMS Windows had given them a GPF when they tried to launch a missile? Please, boys: don't believe your own hype, and for God's sake, don't let anybody with a pulse take Ballmer seriously for a nanosecond.
I would chalk up another thing: Most people 25-40 barely know what an operating system is, let alone know it is replaceable. Most people 14-25 aren't that far ahead. Since I've been using computers since I was 8, this comes as a shock to me, and I think it's something often overlooked by geeks.
For example, even a rather computer-literate librarian I know thinks, "You buy a PC, it runs Windows; you buy a Mac, it runs MacOS; you buy a Sun server, it runs SunOS." When I started talking about FreeBSD and Linux, she looked at me as if I was talking about turning her Vespa into a dishwasher. They don't get that PCs are designed to be open, and all you have to do is write GRUB to the MBR, and it WILL boot up. This is one of the biggest challenges facing the open-source movement. Look at the sticker on my girlfriend's Dell: "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP," which in many respects is a fallacy, but customers often interpret it as "Designed ONLY for Microsoft."
Absolutely. (If you weren't a geek) you wouldn't think of an "operating system" with respect to your calculator, would you? How many computer users do you think know how an IC works? They're still operating from the abacus metaphor. And http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html has some good stuff in it regrading this kind of false metaphor.
I have one of those!
In a perfect world, he would have shot him twice in the forehead and been patted on the back by your local police officer. In this one, he would be tried for murder by the family of this "victim" and, if in a liberal area, convicted. IANAL, but self defense is a hard one to plea; I understand the burden of proof is fearing for your life and having no other recourse, or something to that effect, depending on the state.
From the perspective of the boys in blue, who neither serve nor protect, going after the highly organized and well-armed gang element responsible for most urban violent crime just doesn't pay the bills. And rather than tackle urban poverty and drug dependence, usually the root of the problem, affluent, influential citizens would rather let the inner cities rot, build prisons instead of schools and infrastructure, and simply escape to idyllic suburbs.
I don't know much about the internal politics and holdings of the print moguls, but I do know that there is only really one newspaper in San Francisco since the buyout years ago, overlooking the alternative publications like SF Weekly and The Guardian.
I agree about the results. IMHO, the article has the wrong spin. It should say, "Rip-roaring success of Craigslist optimizes matching between job seekers and employers." Because that's what's good for the economy and the people, right?
Craigslist does one major thing right: minimalism. Other job search engines are absurdly baroque, each trying to out-glam the other and employ an army of barely-competent ASP monkeys at the same time. Craigslist has virtually no graphics and runs bloody fast, and the layout is no more complex than it needs to be: geographic area, then job field, then job. That's it. It even beats print for readability, with the lack of ads and instantaneous response.
DMCA says that it's illegal to circumvent copy protection:)
Don't count on it just yet. The article says that the companies will provide copies of the license on the internet to review before you buy and place labels on the outside of the box. So it may just be that your next Dell box has a big nasty looking Surgeon General's warning on it.
I think a lot of people are more concerned with Microsoft's Trusted Computing Initiative, which, according to GNU advocates, means your computer essentially does not belong to you - that is, they have ultimate say over what code you run and what you do not. EULAs, especially shrink-wrap ones are a conveniant way to slip this in. By opening, say, a brand new computer with TC built in, you would be agreeing to the EULA, therefore signing over your rights to your own machine. This isn't a problem for most consumers, but I think all would, if they knew about it, be very angry at having it shoved down their throats.
As I recall, shrink-wrap EULAs were a key part of the DMCA, so if this is a step towards taking that down, rock on.