The fact that you're wondering which to work at means you should work at Microsoft. I'm not going to clarify why. You'll figure it out. Or you won't. But you're way past old enough to know why already, and you don't.
SHUT UP! Everybody just SHUT UP! This is NOT the time to examine or question these results! This is the time to show your boss this scientific, scholarly article and get him to decide to give you a great honking big expensive Apple screen!
Now Sshhh! Sshhh! Quiet.
Print. Walk to office, walk through door, show boss article, exit through door, walk back to desk, sit down, go back to reading slashdot.
Not sure about this, because I've never had a resume come through that did it, but this has been my thinking for some time: Apologize for your certs.
Lower-end certs hurt you with techies. Most of us think that the lower-end certs are goten by people who cannot get jobs, and people who cannot get jobs are people who don't blow away prosspective employers or have working friends who can help them in, or who do have working friends whom they do not impress.
That means, if you have a cert in A+ or Security+ or Network+ or MCSE or Java developing whatever, you're more likely to be a loser than someone who doesn't have them.
But certs are a great way to get past the screeners who see your resume and don't have tech experience. They also make it easier to get found on a Monster search or some similar resume site.
So put the certs on your resume, but APOLOGIZE FOR THEM: Add a few words before the list of certs like "These certificates are much less important than my experience, but some employers value them:"
HR won't read that ANYHOW. They'll do a pattern search to find you, then skim your resume and pass it up to people who'll cringe when they see your certs, but who will sigh with happy comfort when they read right above it that you don't put a lot of stock in certificates and that you have experience in the things they tested on.
The only place this might hurt you is at a company where the techs have low-end certs and value them. That is: a company of losers who you don't want to work with. I know it's not a 100% rule, but it's close enough that you're going to get more out of apologizing than not.
Ok, the Daily Show part is... well, horrifying, but he says he's using the same criteria he used in 1998 to 2000. So he has quantitative data from THEN. I want to know how far news has decended since then (if it has). How much less substance is there now than then?
"We can't wait for this to hit the streets (probably some time after Vista's release) -- not necessarily because we want to use any of the functions, we're just complete posers. Imagine the looks you'd get on the train! -RR"
Comments like: "That's the biggest damn PDA I've ever seen." or "Shit, guy, you should buy a video Ipod."
No, the way to stop terrorism against the United States is to ignore them. Stop showing what they do on TV. That won't stop poeple trying to kill other people, but it'll sure slow down people killing RANDOM other people to get headlines. A terorist is someone who'll do anything to get change through fear.
Islamic militants (you can argue that they're NOT following Islam) will still be an issue -- but they won't be global terrorists. They do regional terror, against, for instance Israel, because they'll know that word of mouth works, there, but they won't have any impact on the United States.
How about a law which requires a statement of what percentage of Americans are killed by terrorists each year on any report of a terrorist activity? "You're X times more likely to be killed skiing than by a terrorist." at the end of each broadcast.
Again, that wouldn't stop Islamic murders. But the rate of random violence would go down, and we could act rationally against these guys, since we wouldn't be afraid all the time.
I know this is obvious and that it's occurred to most of you, but this morning, I finally came to understand. This morning it just struck me that I know where most of Al Qaeda is hiding. Yeah, sure, some of them are in Pakistan, I suppose, but the bulk of them, the real threat to us, the important actors of the "Caliphate" -- we know right where they are. Rounding them up would be trivial.
They're in congress.
The aim of the terrorist is not to kill people, though he does as a means to an end, and not even to create terror, though that's the job description, just as the job of a firefighter is not to fight fires, but to cause the safety of all FROM fires by any means including fighting it. No, the job of the terrorist is to cause change. And in this case, it's to cause us to turn into a repressive, militaristic regiem, and create open warfare between Islam and the West. Al Qaeda pushes these terrorists to do this so that the heads of Al Qaeda can acquire power.
Our leaders want more power in the same way the Caliphate does, and act in active (I assume non-conversational) collaboration with them. They have an arrangement. I assume they never spoke about it, but the partnership has been established and is followed, and it works and they love each other. The Islamic arm of Al Qaeda would disappear if our government pursued it quietly, and asked American news media to downplay it. Al Qaeda without its American wing is puny.
Both wings are willing to destroy anything which keeps them from power. In the end, they'll destroy each other, after all this escalates, but that'll be a long time coming, and right now we, our freedoms, our traditions as a country, our principals, our friendships -- all these are but bugs on their windshield.
SciFi is never right. Never. In the whole, that is. Bits come out right, and if we ignore all the wrongness, that makes them look clever, but it's just a point or two taken out of context for most works. The same sort of cherry picking, in a more extreme form, makes bible prophesy look reliable.
SciFi folks may do a better job of predicting than the average schmoe, but they don't do fantastically well. This is because technology changes and we're all living in bonazaland. (Marshall McLuhan's term for the fact that we're all living in the world of our youth, mentally, and the fact that it is impossible for us to see the world the way the kids do.) We don't see what's already happening.
Also, when we do make a look into the future, we cannot see far enough. When computers first appeared, the world expected them to be huge and brilliant. SciFi had them running planets. Meaning one big computer, running a planet. Who guessed that they'd still be stupid, 50 years later, but so small and so cheap that they run coke machines?
Further, when technology changes, it has a ripple effect. Things change all around it. That coke machine now has a computer in it. It knows what was bought at what time. Who thinks about the little things like that in toto? One or two may occur to a writer, or even fifty. But thousands of such small effects? And together, they change society.
But SciFi is right now and then, and we take those points out of context and those POINTS appear brilliant. HG Wells described the use of the atomic bomb. Never mind that he thought that, because of nuclear decay, it would keep exploding for years.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient. Look in various totalitarian countries (like or own, more and more) for bits and pieces which appear. Nothing on the whole, but lots of bits.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Varley looks horribly dated, these days, because he wrote about tech and sex. Well, sex hasn't changed, so he still describes a future, there (though it seems more like a wet dream than a possible future) but the tech in his books looks impossible or silly, now. This is a man who eschewed word processors while writing SciFi -- Talk about Bonazaland.
Philip K. Dick still seems current, since Phil didn't even know how light bulbs work. All his work is about society and ethics and the nature of reality. It ain't coming true, but it still grabs ya!
No, we don't have that luxury. The machines have to go (they are broken, and absurdly easy to stuff). And we need to hold their feet to the fire NOW because paper ballots are not destroyed right after an election. Some (for instance the 2004 vote in Ohio will be destroyed in a few months). The evidence goes away.
And a stuffed ballot ensures that a person and a local organization who LIKES stuffing and protecting stuffers will be in power.
We need to clean up American elections starting today. (Unless we could somehow figure out how to start that proces in the 1970's. Or the 1870's. Or well, you get the idea.)
Does anyone know if other countries have such laws?
It seems difficult to get such laws because the political machine depends so much on the big lie. Politicians would be undermining themselves to pass such legislation.
On the same day that we see a story that says over 50% of business students cheat, we see an article in which:
Network equipment manufacturers lie, because they want to sell equipment.
Bobby Rush lies, because he's selling his community out to the phone lobby by pushing a law which will "Improve competition between VoIP Intenet-based telephone services and local telephone services" (by adding more restrictions to VoIP companies, which means less competition for the local phone companies, not more). He has the audacity to promote a law which will "Allow localities to retain control of their rights-of-way and ensure local jurisdictions still receive the franchise fees they collected under the current system. Additionally, the FCC will be authorized to step in if a locality tries to unfairly use its rights-of-way authority to block new competitors from entering the local market." which is simple doublespeak, since it claims to give rights but also codifies the giving of them away.
The Telcos lie, because they claim no restrictions will be made, while at the same time DESPERATELY fighting any restrictions on their ability to restrict, which wouldn't hurt them at all if they WEREN'T lying.
Nobody in consumer-friendly (read TV) national news simply calls them on this obvious stuff, because they're in tight with advertisers and telcos advertise.
And if all the above didn't curdle your toes, the average schmoe in business school thinks that mirepresentation is just fine.
Ditto. My posture improved drastically when I was using a rowing machine. Back exercises and stomach exercises. The back ones help you keep pulling backward, and the stomach ones give you bulk in front so the back has less work to do.
Your answer proves the point. Unless you know about it, you don't know whether you're safe in a given language. In this case, the programmer was using perl. Yes, you can change language to avoid the problem, but if you don't know there's a problem because you have no idea about byte ordering differences, you're either leaning on others because you have mysterious bugs you cannot fix, or you're stuck in your playpen, designed by someone else to protect you from your ignorance.
The syntax of peeks and pokes always annoyed me, but you're wrong.
This stuff rears it's head over and over, and if people knew it, they'd work faster and smarter and without bothering ME.
Example from last week: Read a binary file, byte by byte, and you need to know about big-endian/little endian differences. A little playing with peek and poke would have trained 'em and I could have spent more time on something else.
Computer people should know how computers work. Using the old analogy about how you don't need to know how the car works to drive one: We're not drivers, here, we're mechanics/designers. We should know how the car works. Would you want your children driving cars designed by people who didn't know how they worked? I know, I know, it's all little black boxes, and we can design a car the same way -- only the sports model will have to be the size of a Winnebago to hold all that abstraction -- kind of like software, today.
Best phone purchase I ever made. Sends an "out-of-service" tone every time you pick up the phone or the answering machine does. Takes a month or so, and then most of them stop calling. After all, it's not like they all call you, they pay a few companies to call you. The few companies want to cut costs, so they drop your number -- it's out of service, anyhow, right?
I get a lot of job applicants at my company for Java programming positions. They have CS degrees. Some have masters. They can talk for hours about MVC and Hibernate and rattle off IDEs and frameworks they use.
Around 90% of them (yes, NINETY PERCENT) cannot write a simple rescursive function. Around 80% have trouble writing a for loop.
It's like night and day when you give them the problem. Some bang out the recursive function in 30 seconds, and they do equally well with a for loop. (Often the recursive function comes faster because the task lends itself to recursion.) But that's the 10% that we get interested in. The rest get the door. And it's demoralizing, because we've just talked for 30 minutes and been impressed by their buzzword command and talk of past experience.
It's notably awful watching the masters degree holders fail in the same way.
CS is not making programmers. I'm not sure it ever did. Maybe programmers have always made themselves. But clearly the crop of students I'm seeing now are not programmers. They are not interested or capable of understanding algorythms and lines of code. They assemble parts. I think of them more as web designers, but a level deeper in the guts.
I've found myself wondering out loud if CS has become the same sort of catch-all "I don't know what I want to do so I'll do this" as law school. We've all seen people go to law school after college because they don't know what to do. They finish, and then drop out of lawyering quickly to go into some job which works better for them, given that they can no longer put off the job market by schooling.
A further worry is that CS is now the law school for second-tier people. Good in English or History? Go to law school. Not good with anything? Get a masters in CS. But then, for most, that decision is coming in late high school/early college, rather than after college/before the job market, as most CS folk I see have CS undergraduate degrees (sometimes accompanied by a masters).
If programmers always educate themselves, then maybe we have roughly the same number of good programmers coming from CS departments now as we did in 1980, just along with a huge bunch of also-rans, now.
If you look at all programmer job applicants, maybe you'd find the same competance in a fixed NUMBER of applicants as in 1980, but that only the percentage of bad programmers has increased, as more people go through CS.
I'm left wondering with the taste in my mouth of someone spewing smoke to sell me something.
The connection between proofing photocopies (which just don't work that way -- you can get a smudge, but you CANNOT get the wrong character) and mistrusting Internet reliability (which CAN go down and DOES go down, albeit rarely) is specious. One is not understanding, and the other is understanding and knowing damn well that there are vulnerabilities.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you're wondering which to work at means you should work at Microsoft. I'm not going to clarify why. You'll figure it out. Or you won't. But you're way past old enough to know why already, and you don't.
You'll be happier at Microsoft.
SHUT UP! Everybody just SHUT UP! This is NOT the time to examine or question these results! This is the time to show your boss this scientific, scholarly article and get him to decide to give you a great honking big expensive Apple screen!
Now Sshhh! Sshhh! Quiet.
Print. Walk to office, walk through door, show boss article, exit through door, walk back to desk, sit down, go back to reading slashdot.
Not sure about this, because I've never had a resume come through that did it, but this has been my thinking for some time: Apologize for your certs.
Lower-end certs hurt you with techies. Most of us think that the lower-end certs are goten by people who cannot get jobs, and people who cannot get jobs are people who don't blow away prosspective employers or have working friends who can help them in, or who do have working friends whom they do not impress.
That means, if you have a cert in A+ or Security+ or Network+ or MCSE or Java developing whatever, you're more likely to be a loser than someone who doesn't have them.
But certs are a great way to get past the screeners who see your resume and don't have tech experience. They also make it easier to get found on a Monster search or some similar resume site.
So put the certs on your resume, but APOLOGIZE FOR THEM: Add a few words before the list of certs like "These certificates are much less important than my experience, but some employers value them:"
HR won't read that ANYHOW. They'll do a pattern search to find you, then skim your resume and pass it up to people who'll cringe when they see your certs, but who will sigh with happy comfort when they read right above it that you don't put a lot of stock in certificates and that you have experience in the things they tested on.
The only place this might hurt you is at a company where the techs have low-end certs and value them. That is: a company of losers who you don't want to work with. I know it's not a 100% rule, but it's close enough that you're going to get more out of apologizing than not.
Ok, the Daily Show part is ... well, horrifying, but he says he's using the same criteria he used in 1998 to 2000. So he has quantitative data from THEN. I want to know how far news has decended since then (if it has). How much less substance is there now than then?
Pictures? Plans? Website?
I'd like to see what you've done, and I'm sure others would, too.
"We can't wait for this to hit the streets (probably some time after Vista's release) -- not necessarily because we want to use any of the functions, we're just complete posers. Imagine the looks you'd get on the train! -RR"
Comments like: "That's the biggest damn PDA I've ever seen." or "Shit, guy, you should buy a video Ipod."
Where can we download a copy of their mission? I wanna try it!
That said, of course, if the US had a copy of their mission, they'd know the plan and how to guard it pretty well.
No, the way to stop terrorism against the United States is to ignore them. Stop showing what they do on TV. That won't stop poeple trying to kill other people, but it'll sure slow down people killing RANDOM other people to get headlines. A terorist is someone who'll do anything to get change through fear.
Islamic militants (you can argue that they're NOT following Islam) will still be an issue -- but they won't be global terrorists. They do regional terror, against, for instance Israel, because they'll know that word of mouth works, there, but they won't have any impact on the United States.
How about a law which requires a statement of what percentage of Americans are killed by terrorists each year on any report of a terrorist activity? "You're X times more likely to be killed skiing than by a terrorist." at the end of each broadcast.
Again, that wouldn't stop Islamic murders. But the rate of random violence would go down, and we could act rationally against these guys, since we wouldn't be afraid all the time.
I know this is obvious and that it's occurred to most of you, but this morning, I finally came to understand. This morning it just struck me that I know where most of Al Qaeda is hiding. Yeah, sure, some of them are in Pakistan, I suppose, but the bulk of them, the real threat to us, the important actors of the "Caliphate" -- we know right where they are. Rounding them up would be trivial.
They're in congress.
The aim of the terrorist is not to kill people, though he does as a means to an end, and not even to create terror, though that's the job description, just as the job of a firefighter is not to fight fires, but to cause the safety of all FROM fires by any means including fighting it. No, the job of the terrorist is to cause change. And in this case, it's to cause us to turn into a repressive, militaristic regiem, and create open warfare between Islam and the West. Al Qaeda pushes these terrorists to do this so that the heads of Al Qaeda can acquire power.
Our leaders want more power in the same way the Caliphate does, and act in active (I assume non-conversational) collaboration with them. They have an arrangement. I assume they never spoke about it, but the partnership has been established and is followed, and it works and they love each other. The Islamic arm of Al Qaeda would disappear if our government pursued it quietly, and asked American news media to downplay it. Al Qaeda without its American wing is puny.
Both wings are willing to destroy anything which keeps them from power. In the end, they'll destroy each other, after all this escalates, but that'll be a long time coming, and right now we, our freedoms, our traditions as a country, our principals, our friendships -- all these are but bugs on their windshield.
They're part of the same thing. They're Al Qaeda.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/200609 27_kip_hawley_idio
No, I think he though lights were sent as communication from a Vast Active Living Intelligence System. But those lights were always pink.
And which ex-wife? He had something like five of them...
Great writer though.
Cars going far cheap, less emissions (moved to the power plant, and off the road). Great, yes. Fine.
But what about powering my LAPTOP with this? Finally, I'd be able to play games on the thing for the whole FLIGHT!
SciFi is never right. Never. In the whole, that is. Bits come out right, and if we ignore all the wrongness, that makes them look clever, but it's just a point or two taken out of context for most works. The same sort of cherry picking, in a more extreme form, makes bible prophesy look reliable.
SciFi folks may do a better job of predicting than the average schmoe, but they don't do fantastically well. This is because technology changes and we're all living in bonazaland. (Marshall McLuhan's term for the fact that we're all living in the world of our youth, mentally, and the fact that it is impossible for us to see the world the way the kids do.) We don't see what's already happening.
Also, when we do make a look into the future, we cannot see far enough. When computers first appeared, the world expected them to be huge and brilliant. SciFi had them running planets. Meaning one big computer, running a planet. Who guessed that they'd still be stupid, 50 years later, but so small and so cheap that they run coke machines?
Further, when technology changes, it has a ripple effect. Things change all around it. That coke machine now has a computer in it. It knows what was bought at what time. Who thinks about the little things like that in toto? One or two may occur to a writer, or even fifty. But thousands of such small effects? And together, they change society.
But SciFi is right now and then, and we take those points out of context and those POINTS appear brilliant. HG Wells described the use of the atomic bomb. Never mind that he thought that, because of nuclear decay, it would keep exploding for years.
For SciFi that gets things right, the key is to look for SciFi without Sci. Orwell, for instance: 1984 is amazingly prescient. Look in various totalitarian countries (like or own, more and more) for bits and pieces which appear. Nothing on the whole, but lots of bits.
At the other end of the spectrum, John Varley looks horribly dated, these days, because he wrote about tech and sex. Well, sex hasn't changed, so he still describes a future, there (though it seems more like a wet dream than a possible future) but the tech in his books looks impossible or silly, now. This is a man who eschewed word processors while writing SciFi -- Talk about Bonazaland.
Philip K. Dick still seems current, since Phil didn't even know how light bulbs work. All his work is about society and ethics and the nature of reality. It ain't coming true, but it still grabs ya!
No, we don't have that luxury. The machines have to go (they are broken, and absurdly easy to stuff). And we need to hold their feet to the fire NOW because paper ballots are not destroyed right after an election. Some (for instance the 2004 vote in Ohio will be destroyed in a few months). The evidence goes away.
And a stuffed ballot ensures that a person and a local organization who LIKES stuffing and protecting stuffers will be in power.
We need to clean up American elections starting today. (Unless we could somehow figure out how to start that proces in the 1970's. Or the 1870's. Or well, you get the idea.)
Does anyone know if other countries have such laws?
It seems difficult to get such laws because the political machine depends so much on the big lie. Politicians would be undermining themselves to pass such legislation.
Here's Bobby Rush's bill: http://www.benton.org/benton_files/HR%205252%20COP E_0.pdf
On the same day that we see a story that says over 50% of business students cheat, we see an article in which:
Network equipment manufacturers lie, because they want to sell equipment.
Bobby Rush lies, because he's selling his community out to the phone lobby by pushing a law which will "Improve competition between VoIP Intenet-based telephone services and local telephone services" (by adding more restrictions to VoIP companies, which means less competition for the local phone companies, not more). He has the audacity to promote a law which will "Allow localities to retain control of their rights-of-way and ensure local jurisdictions still receive the franchise fees they collected under the current system. Additionally, the FCC will be authorized to step in if a locality tries to unfairly use its rights-of-way authority to block new competitors from entering the local market." which is simple doublespeak, since it claims to give rights but also codifies the giving of them away.
The Telcos lie, because they claim no restrictions will be made, while at the same time DESPERATELY fighting any restrictions on their ability to restrict, which wouldn't hurt them at all if they WEREN'T lying.
Nobody in consumer-friendly (read TV) national news simply calls them on this obvious stuff, because they're in tight with advertisers and telcos advertise.
And if all the above didn't curdle your toes, the average schmoe in business school thinks that mirepresentation is just fine.
Typo there, I'm sure: They have fought tooth and nail AGAINST true municipal internet services, not for.
Ditto. My posture improved drastically when I was using a rowing machine. Back exercises and stomach exercises. The back ones help you keep pulling backward, and the stomach ones give you bulk in front so the back has less work to do.
Ok, she's got a nice leg there, but look at that BEEHIND! Damn! Baby!
Your answer proves the point. Unless you know about it, you don't know whether you're safe in a given language. In this case, the programmer was using perl. Yes, you can change language to avoid the problem, but if you don't know there's a problem because you have no idea about byte ordering differences, you're either leaning on others because you have mysterious bugs you cannot fix, or you're stuck in your playpen, designed by someone else to protect you from your ignorance.
The syntax of peeks and pokes always annoyed me, but you're wrong.
This stuff rears it's head over and over, and if people knew it, they'd work faster and smarter and without bothering ME.
Example from last week: Read a binary file, byte by byte, and you need to know about big-endian/little endian differences. A little playing with peek and poke would have trained 'em and I could have spent more time on something else.
Computer people should know how computers work. Using the old analogy about how you don't need to know how the car works to drive one: We're not drivers, here, we're mechanics/designers. We should know how the car works. Would you want your children driving cars designed by people who didn't know how they worked? I know, I know, it's all little black boxes, and we can design a car the same way -- only the sports model will have to be the size of a Winnebago to hold all that abstraction -- kind of like software, today.
Best phone purchase I ever made. Sends an "out-of-service" tone every time you pick up the phone or the answering machine does. Takes a month or so, and then most of them stop calling. After all, it's not like they all call you, they pay a few companies to call you. The few companies want to cut costs, so they drop your number -- it's out of service, anyhow, right?
Buy it at radioshack. It's cheap.
http://www.telezapper.com/
I get a lot of job applicants at my company for Java programming positions. They have CS degrees. Some have masters. They can talk for hours about MVC and Hibernate and rattle off IDEs and frameworks they use.
Around 90% of them (yes, NINETY PERCENT) cannot write a simple rescursive function. Around 80% have trouble writing a for loop.
It's like night and day when you give them the problem. Some bang out the recursive function in 30 seconds, and they do equally well with a for loop. (Often the recursive function comes faster because the task lends itself to recursion.) But that's the 10% that we get interested in. The rest get the door. And it's demoralizing, because we've just talked for 30 minutes and been impressed by their buzzword command and talk of past experience.
It's notably awful watching the masters degree holders fail in the same way.
CS is not making programmers. I'm not sure it ever did. Maybe programmers have always made themselves. But clearly the crop of students I'm seeing now are not programmers. They are not interested or capable of understanding algorythms and lines of code. They assemble parts. I think of them more as web designers, but a level deeper in the guts.
I've found myself wondering out loud if CS has become the same sort of catch-all "I don't know what I want to do so I'll do this" as law school. We've all seen people go to law school after college because they don't know what to do. They finish, and then drop out of lawyering quickly to go into some job which works better for them, given that they can no longer put off the job market by schooling.
A further worry is that CS is now the law school for second-tier people. Good in English or History? Go to law school. Not good with anything? Get a masters in CS. But then, for most, that decision is coming in late high school/early college, rather than after college/before the job market, as most CS folk I see have CS undergraduate degrees (sometimes accompanied by a masters).
If programmers always educate themselves, then maybe we have roughly the same number of good programmers coming from CS departments now as we did in 1980, just along with a huge bunch of also-rans, now.
If you look at all programmer job applicants, maybe you'd find the same competance in a fixed NUMBER of applicants as in 1980, but that only the percentage of bad programmers has increased, as more people go through CS.
I'm left wondering with the taste in my mouth of someone spewing smoke to sell me something.
The connection between proofing photocopies (which just don't work that way -- you can get a smudge, but you CANNOT get the wrong character) and mistrusting Internet reliability (which CAN go down and DOES go down, albeit rarely) is specious. One is not understanding, and the other is understanding and knowing damn well that there are vulnerabilities.
This is puffery.