To extend that, why allow an unskilled user to buy a PC in the first place? I'd be very happy to see people required to own computing licenses before they were allowed to own or operate a PC.
True enough - but BTX is also good news for people who don't buy top-of-the-line equipment, as the adoption of newer standards and equipment tends to drive down the prices of older technology.:) Maybe once BTX becomes more widespread, I'll finally upgrade my system from its present 750MHz Duron and 384MB RAM.
Re:Broken checkouts, now it's the ATMs turn
on
Windows ATMs by 2005
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· Score: 1
That sounds more like a problem with the employees at the grocery store that manage the machines than with the machines themselves. How much technical support does it take to fix a crash (at least at a reboot-and-see-if-it-works-now level) or a "mouse not found" error, really?
. ..when FDISK or CHKDSK or any other disk utility that provides numbers on free space comes back with "19.4 GB" when someone bought a "20 GB" drive. Naturally, they wonder where the other ".6 GB" went. I've had to explain to people that the other.6 GB never existed, because computers count 1GB as 1,073,741,824 Bytes, not 1,000,000,000 bytes.
Why are you trying to create a need for an internet tax? I have a better idea: let me keep my money and do what I want with it, rather than letting the government spend it in ways I'll have no control over.
Did you RTFA? The program structures are different as well, not just the code. In other words, the developers for each company used different processes and came up with different software designs to produce the same end-product functionality.
My supervisor in my current location actually spent time as a training instructor down at Keesler. According to him, instructors do go through a one-week training course on how to write test material. Again, no one's perfect; and there's no AFSC for test-writers.:-)
You'll also find agreement that the CDCs are flawed. Unfortunately, there isn't much better available given that there are still locations where airmen won't have access to computers, VCRs, or other more effective media for correspondence courses. I suppose one could make the courses available through satellite uplink. . . but that raises the problem of cost-effectiveness: in other words, would the benefits of providing the face-to-face correspondence outweigh the costs?
Regardless,the CDCs for the 3C0X2 AFSC, and probably the 3C0X1 and 3C2X1 AFSCs as well, need to be updated or possibly rewritten. On that point I will certainly agree. In the meantime, when you do encounter situations where, as you say, "the correct answer is not necessarily the right answer," it might help to get with your supervisor and, together, fill out a course feedback form. Alternately, you might be able to track down the NCO who's in charge of the course material and contact him/her directly.
I don't know if you'll see this reply, given that it's a couple days after your initial post. Mostly, I'm curious: if you could do anything you wanted to change the curriculum or the training methods, what would you do? With what would you replace CDCs, and what sort of material would you teach in the tech school classrooms?
I know several of the training instructors who teach the computer programming course at Keesler. Their purpose is not to teach programming languages, but rather, programming concepts. While the syntax behind IF statements and LOOP structures differs from one language to another--and it doesn't vary much at all between Ada and VB--the logic that determines when you should use an IF or a LOOP, or whether you should use a FOR LOOP or a WHILE LOOP, is the same regardless of language.
I don't think the training system is perfect--but I've been through the process (Tech. School, 5-level CDCs, 7-level CDCs, Tech. School again). Like the promotion system, it's far from perfect--but it is at least fair in that everyone suffers through it equally. Still, if you (or anyone else!) has a suggestion that may improve the system, share it. I'm willing to walk it forward; and if others are willing to do so as well, you might see a change while you're still in the service.
I find these comments offensive. No more royalties from 20+ years ago. Damnit! I'm not working any more, I should be getting paid still!
Orson Scott Card is old enough to remember when you could get a retirement outside of working for the government. If government workers are entitled to getting money after they've stopped working, why should authors' or artists' entitlement be any less?
Not at all. The Chinese are attempting manned space missions with the ultimate goal of landing on the moon. The United States are attempting manned space missions with the ultimate goal of. . . what? More manned space missions? There is no driving vision behind American manned space flight--we go just to say that we are there. People don't applaud the action without a context--they applaud the vision, and the audacity required to realize it.
It's not true to say we couldn't do anything. We are actively tracking near earth objects, and estimates I've heard say we currently know about a third to a half of them fairly accurately.
You can know the orbital motions of 99.9% of NEOs, but the last 0.1% that you don't--and can't--know, can still kill every human on Earth. I think the best argument for manned space exploration is that it would, in the very long term, provide for the continued survival of the human species should some global killer strike unexpectedly.
Actually, it sounds like a problem with Shockwave Flash: namely, that you have the flash player installed. Between uninstalling that and using Mozilla, you'll rarely have to put up with any advertisements, ever.
Then don't put your manufacturing facilities in the neighborhood of Earth - put them in Lagrange orbits, maybe. At the rate we're going now, by the time an asteroid takes matters into its own hands, we'll still be arguing about how to get something up into space. ..
Where do those word-of-mouth sources get their information from? Someone has to buy the CD and be plagued with crap. Besides, they play one track on the radio that might be really good and then the rest of the album sounds like the band was learning to play during those recordings.
In that case, I use the "three-song" rule: if the radio stations play three songs from the same artist's CD, and I like all three, then I'll put the money down and take my chances. Alternately, I make the trip down to FYE, which is a local music store that does allow you to sample music. I've seen Barnes and Noble stores that have music samplers, too. Hell, who knows, maybe you could even get a promotional copy of a single if you wrote a letter to a producer and/or the artist and asked for one--I doubt it, but then, I've never tried it.
There're also artists' music sites, many of which have streaming audio and/or video. Launchcast also carries a decent selection. Sorry, no, it's not the whole CD--but if someone wants the whole CD for free for "sampling" purposes, I have to question her motives in the first place.
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
Based on what, exactly? I'll grant you there's a significant overhead in establishing the infrastructure for a space-centric economy. But once you have the orbital platforms and once you have access to the natural resources available in the asteroid belt, the cost of manufacturing and exploration drops through the floor.
If you aren't up on your tech, you're novel will be picked apart and you labelled a hack.
While this may be true in the hard science fiction genre, I don't think it's the same story for science fiction in general. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Farscape, etc., are all very popular among the general population; and even among the relatively small groups who can spot the scientific irregularities or impossibilities in each series, the character development and storylines are compelling enough that most of us forgive them their inconsistencies.
Sometimes the best way to dismiss an inconsistency in the technology is to use technobabble (Berman has probably trademarked the word "phase") or to avoid the technical issues entirely (we may never see a technical manual for a White Star or even an Omega-class destroyer).
Of course, in hard science fiction, where the technology is the center of the story, that sort of sidestepping is impossible. But it works, and it can work fairly well (if it's done properly), in the other science fiction genres.
While I'm at it, let me propose some changes to our lovely mandatory sentencing guidelines. How about $10,000 per incident for jaywalking, which is much less serious than copyright infringement ($150,000 per incident). What should be the penalty for smoking in the non somking area?
Sounds about like what Giuliani was trying to do in New York City, actually. . .:)
OK, fine. Then I want my money back for all of the piece-of-shit CD's I purchased because I had no means of sampling the music first due to them prohibiting me from listing before buying.
You seem to think you have some entitlement to only good music. By this mindset, people should never lose money on stock transactions - or someone else should be held accountable if they do. Of course, the mindset itself is baloney.
Any purchase is a risk, whether it's a CD, a mutual fund. a house, or anything else. If you have some information to act upon, you can mitigate your risk by only buying something that gives you a good return on your investment. If you buy a CD and it's crap, suck it up: don't buy any more CDs from the same group, and let everyone you know that they should avoid the same CD. This is known as word-of-mouth advertising, and it's the most effective form of advertising available. Alternately, listen to word-of-mouth from others before you buy the CD in the first place. Then you have more information to work with and can decide whether you still want to buy the CD.
The other points you made were good ones: the execs should be responsible for the crap they peddle to Clear Channel and other radio networks, and they should be held legally responsible for price-fixing CDs. But don't blame them for the crap CDs in your library: they didn't hypnotize you or posess you; you chose to buy the CD.
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Leo: You're gonna die.
Virgo: You're gonna die.
Scorpio: You're gonna die fuckin'!
To extend that, why allow an unskilled user to buy a PC in the first place? I'd be very happy to see people required to own computing licenses before they were allowed to own or operate a PC.
True enough - but BTX is also good news for people who don't buy top-of-the-line equipment, as the adoption of newer standards and equipment tends to drive down the prices of older technology. :) Maybe once BTX becomes more widespread, I'll finally upgrade my system from its present 750MHz Duron and 384MB RAM.
That sounds more like a problem with the employees at the grocery store that manage the machines than with the machines themselves. How much technical support does it take to fix a crash (at least at a reboot-and-see-if-it-works-now level) or a "mouse not found" error, really?
. . .when FDISK or CHKDSK or any other disk utility that provides numbers on free space comes back with "19.4 GB" when someone bought a "20 GB" drive. Naturally, they wonder where the other ".6 GB" went. I've had to explain to people that the other .6 GB never existed, because computers count 1GB as 1,073,741,824 Bytes, not 1,000,000,000 bytes.
Life is like an exploded clown: it's really funny until you figure out what just happened.
...and then it's truly fscking hilarious. :)
[NO CARRIER]
Why do the aliens always go after the people who use dialup..?
Why are you trying to create a need for an internet tax? I have a better idea: let me keep my money and do what I want with it, rather than letting the government spend it in ways I'll have no control over.
Did you RTFA? The program structures are different as well, not just the code. In other words, the developers for each company used different processes and came up with different software designs to produce the same end-product functionality.
My supervisor in my current location actually spent time as a training instructor down at Keesler. According to him, instructors do go through a one-week training course on how to write test material. Again, no one's perfect; and there's no AFSC for test-writers. :-)
You'll also find agreement that the CDCs are flawed. Unfortunately, there isn't much better available given that there are still locations where airmen won't have access to computers, VCRs, or other more effective media for correspondence courses. I suppose one could make the courses available through satellite uplink. . . but that raises the problem of cost-effectiveness: in other words, would the benefits of providing the face-to-face correspondence outweigh the costs?
Regardless,the CDCs for the 3C0X2 AFSC, and probably the 3C0X1 and 3C2X1 AFSCs as well, need to be updated or possibly rewritten. On that point I will certainly agree. In the meantime, when you do encounter situations where, as you say, "the correct answer is not necessarily the right answer," it might help to get with your supervisor and, together, fill out a course feedback form. Alternately, you might be able to track down the NCO who's in charge of the course material and contact him/her directly.
I don't know if you'll see this reply, given that it's a couple days after your initial post. Mostly, I'm curious: if you could do anything you wanted to change the curriculum or the training methods, what would you do? With what would you replace CDCs, and what sort of material would you teach in the tech school classrooms?
I know several of the training instructors who teach the computer programming course at Keesler. Their purpose is not to teach programming languages, but rather, programming concepts. While the syntax behind IF statements and LOOP structures differs from one language to another--and it doesn't vary much at all between Ada and VB--the logic that determines when you should use an IF or a LOOP, or whether you should use a FOR LOOP or a WHILE LOOP, is the same regardless of language.
I don't think the training system is perfect--but I've been through the process (Tech. School, 5-level CDCs, 7-level CDCs, Tech. School again). Like the promotion system, it's far from perfect--but it is at least fair in that everyone suffers through it equally. Still, if you (or anyone else!) has a suggestion that may improve the system, share it. I'm willing to walk it forward; and if others are willing to do so as well, you might see a change while you're still in the service.
I find these comments offensive. No more royalties from 20+ years ago. Damnit! I'm not working any more, I should be getting paid still!
Orson Scott Card is old enough to remember when you could get a retirement outside of working for the government. If government workers are entitled to getting money after they've stopped working, why should authors' or artists' entitlement be any less?
Not at all. The Chinese are attempting manned space missions with the ultimate goal of landing on the moon. The United States are attempting manned space missions with the ultimate goal of. . . what? More manned space missions? There is no driving vision behind American manned space flight--we go just to say that we are there. People don't applaud the action without a context--they applaud the vision, and the audacity required to realize it.
We need more reasons besides "because its there" to justify spending billions of taxpayer dollars.
Why? It worked well enough for Iraq.
It's not true to say we couldn't do anything. We are actively tracking near earth objects, and estimates I've heard say we currently know about a third to a half of them fairly accurately.
You can know the orbital motions of 99.9% of NEOs, but the last 0.1% that you don't--and can't--know, can still kill every human on Earth. I think the best argument for manned space exploration is that it would, in the very long term, provide for the continued survival of the human species should some global killer strike unexpectedly.
He could get an H-1B visa, evidently.
Actually, it sounds like a problem with Shockwave Flash: namely, that you have the flash player installed. Between uninstalling that and using Mozilla, you'll rarely have to put up with any advertisements, ever.
Well, yeah, that's why you write, rather than calling or E-mailing. Politicos still understand the value of the written word.
Then don't put your manufacturing facilities in the neighborhood of Earth - put them in Lagrange orbits, maybe. At the rate we're going now, by the time an asteroid takes matters into its own hands, we'll still be arguing about how to get something up into space. . .
Angry but well-reasoned. :) Senator Schlamiel isn't likely to read an incoherent rant.
Where do those word-of-mouth sources get their information from? Someone has to buy the CD and be plagued with crap. Besides, they play one track on the radio that might be really good and then the rest of the album sounds like the band was learning to play during those recordings.
In that case, I use the "three-song" rule: if the radio stations play three songs from the same artist's CD, and I like all three, then I'll put the money down and take my chances. Alternately, I make the trip down to FYE, which is a local music store that does allow you to sample music. I've seen Barnes and Noble stores that have music samplers, too. Hell, who knows, maybe you could even get a promotional copy of a single if you wrote a letter to a producer and/or the artist and asked for one--I doubt it, but then, I've never tried it.
There're also artists' music sites, many of which have streaming audio and/or video. Launchcast also carries a decent selection. Sorry, no, it's not the whole CD--but if someone wants the whole CD for free for "sampling" purposes, I have to question her motives in the first place.
It's difficult, expensive and risky to move mass from the surface of the Earth into near orbit and prohibitively expensive to move it further than that. A Mars expedition looks more and more infeasable and the old space themes of colonizing the moon or Mars or mining the asteriods are proving to be just so much wishful thinking.
Based on what, exactly? I'll grant you there's a significant overhead in establishing the infrastructure for a space-centric economy. But once you have the orbital platforms and once you have access to the natural resources available in the asteroid belt, the cost of manufacturing and exploration drops through the floor.
If you aren't up on your tech, you're novel will be picked apart and you labelled a hack.
While this may be true in the hard science fiction genre, I don't think it's the same story for science fiction in general. Babylon 5, Star Trek, Farscape, etc., are all very popular among the general population; and even among the relatively small groups who can spot the scientific irregularities or impossibilities in each series, the character development and storylines are compelling enough that most of us forgive them their inconsistencies.
Sometimes the best way to dismiss an inconsistency in the technology is to use technobabble (Berman has probably trademarked the word "phase") or to avoid the technical issues entirely (we may never see a technical manual for a White Star or even an Omega-class destroyer).
Of course, in hard science fiction, where the technology is the center of the story, that sort of sidestepping is impossible. But it works, and it can work fairly well (if it's done properly), in the other science fiction genres.
While I'm at it, let me propose some changes to our lovely mandatory sentencing guidelines. How about $10,000 per incident for jaywalking, which is much less serious than copyright infringement ($150,000 per incident). What should be the penalty for smoking in the non somking area?
Sounds about like what Giuliani was trying to do in New York City, actually. . . :)
OK, fine. Then I want my money back for all of the piece-of-shit CD's I purchased because I had no means of sampling the music first due to them prohibiting me from listing before buying.
You seem to think you have some entitlement to only good music. By this mindset, people should never lose money on stock transactions - or someone else should be held accountable if they do. Of course, the mindset itself is baloney.
Any purchase is a risk, whether it's a CD, a mutual fund. a house, or anything else. If you have some information to act upon, you can mitigate your risk by only buying something that gives you a good return on your investment. If you buy a CD and it's crap, suck it up: don't buy any more CDs from the same group, and let everyone you know that they should avoid the same CD. This is known as word-of-mouth advertising, and it's the most effective form of advertising available. Alternately, listen to word-of-mouth from others before you buy the CD in the first place. Then you have more information to work with and can decide whether you still want to buy the CD.
The other points you made were good ones: the execs should be responsible for the crap they peddle to Clear Channel and other radio networks, and they should be held legally responsible for price-fixing CDs. But don't blame them for the crap CDs in your library: they didn't hypnotize you or posess you; you chose to buy the CD.