just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S.
Does anybody here know exactly which laws - and what search results - they are referring to, relative to the U.S.? I never knew Google removed any results in the U.S. I find that idea a little unsettling, to be honest. What is the U.S. strong-arming Google into hiding???
create yet *another* OSS license???? Surely one of the existing ones would have been sufficient... it's not like there aren't 900000 gazillion to pick from.
Georgetown University that a wartime president has the lawful authority to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mail messages without court approval."
Somebody needs to tell this jackass that WE'RE NOT F%#KING AT WAR!!! Unless I missed it when Congress issued a declaration of war, but somehow I doubt I slept through that.
Just because a few morons in DC make up a fancy sounding name like the "War on Terror" or "War on Drugs" does not mean that we are magically at war.
Thing is, most of those libertarian hard scientists become liberals or conservatives when they eventually get girlfriends and reproduce, and see the value in cooperating with other humans rather than hiding out in their parent's basements alone.
Well, you've just proven that you don't understand anything about (L|l)ibertarianism. Nothing about being a (l|L)ibertarian is imcompatible with "cooperating with other humans rather than hiding out in their parent's basements alone."
(L|l)ibertarians only assert that no one can be **forced** to cooperate with anyone else. People are free to **voluntarily** cooperate with whomever they choose, for whatever end they choose. Or they are also free to hide out in the basement, if that is what they **choose**.
That's the essense of (L|l)ibertarianism distilled into a nutshell: no one can use force or fraud to compell someone else to take any action, or to take their property, or otherwise violate their rights. Voluntary cooperation for the "greater good" of groups is absolutely accepted and encouraged.
We should eliminate the entire social welfare system. This includes eliminating AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the rest. Individuals who are unable to fully support themselves and their families through the job market must, once again, learn to rely on supportive family, church, community, or private charity to bridge the gap.
I think families, churches, communities and private charities fulfilling the role of social welfare certainly constitutes "cooperating with other humans."
'Cause, you know one thing that libertarianism creates? Legalized Enron.
Wrong. (L|l)ibertarianism does not accept the use of fraud to steal money from people. The only real controversy about this is among (L|l)ibertarians who don't always agree on exactly how to regulate companies to prevent Enron type incidents. At either rate, the current system didn't prevent Enron from stealing a bazillion dollars and raping many retirement funds, and most of those people will never get their money back. So how exactly would moving to a (L|l)ibertarian model make an Enron any worse than it already is?
I should add however, that (L|l)ibertarians would hold that an individual has a responsibility to do "due diligence" on any investment, and we do generally see a distinction between being defrauded and just being (or acting) stupid and then expecting somebody to bail you out. Investments are not guaranteed to increase in value, they all have risk... so anyone who invests in stock has to understand this and should not expect a refund anytime they lose money because they made poor decisions. Now clearly Enron did defraud people, but at the same time, there *were* warning signs that should have warned smart investors away from Enron before the stock crashed. Some analysts were issuing warnings some time before the big fall. See "The Smartest Guys In The Room", "Power Failure", or "Conspiracy of Fools" for more details.
I don't see how anybody could disagree with the fact that these features enhance a user's experience on the web, and they would simply not be possible without AJAX or some other still undiscovered technology.
My problem isn't so much with the label "Web 2.0" (although I do think it's pretty vacuous), but AJAX is a brutal, nasty hack. Worse, it's a brutal, nasty hack layered on top of even more brutal hacks. Consider this: TCP, the protocol that HTTP is built on, is a connection-oriented protocol so it's inherently stateful. HTTP is a stateless protocol, built on top of a stateful protocol. We then turn around and layer statefulness back on top of HTTP using hacks like cookies and URL re-writing. And we only need AJAX because we don't have a persistent connection to the server so we can constantly update the server with info and receive notifications of changes to the underlying model. Uuuggghhh.
But for more of my rant on this subject, see: my blog.
On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage.
They provide another value: they allow me to browse titles from many different publishers - and compare and contrast them, and review comments on them - at one central, easily searchable location. Eg, I got to Amazon.com and search for 'Java' and get a big list of java books, as opposed to going to www.awprofessional.com, www.samspublishing.com, www.mkp.com, www.wiley.com, etc., etc. and doing many different searches, etc.
I don't mind buying direct from the publisher, but in practice I rarely do, for that exact reason. Often I don't know - ahead of time - *who* publishes the book I'm looking for, because I often don't even know the title of the book I'm looking for.
If all Slashdot is becoming is an advert for American technology and a mouthpiece for racists, I'm seriously going to have to think about removing it from my daily routine.
For what it's worth, we're not all bigots, rascists and jingoists. Some of us even abhor the entire notion of country states and celebrate the sovereignty of the individual, and welcome ideas like free-trade, unrestricted travel, and the ability to live, work and learn wherever you want (as long as you don't violate anyone else's rights in doing so). Unfortunately we're the minority here (and probably everywhere else too).
Assuming that missile has a nuclear warhead, what difference does it make if they have access to GPS / Galileo or not? You don't exactly need precise targeting when you're launching a weapon with that much destructive power. Precision to within a few miles should be sufficient...
The United States of America is the greatest country in the history of the world. This Earth belongs to the US, the rest just live here.
No, the United States used to be a great country, to the extent that it even makes sense to have "countries" or "states." Now, the US has now become a fascist theocracy / police-state with a government that is so corrupt that it would be a compliment to call our capital a cesspool.
The US isn't even close to being the most free nation in the world anymore, which is terribly sad. We spend soooo much time talking about how we're "bringing freedom and liberty to Iraq" while bleeding fundamental liberties here in the US at an alarming rate. As someone put it "If Iraq needs a Constitution let's send them ours, we're not using it anymore."
In Australia, it's popular for young professionals to move to the UK for up to 10 years, to cash in on the higher wages. Many plan on moving home with enough savings to live comfortably, although many don't come back.
Do Australians get special consideration on getting UK work visas? I (an American) looked into the requirements to get a visa to work in the UK a few years back, and it looked pretty onerous. I notice that they do give special preference to certain nations though, but unfortunately the US isn't one of them. Which struck me as odd, actually. The US and UK have a fairly tight relationship, I would have expected it to be easier for Americans and Brits to work in each other's countries...
Then that's a really stupid thing to do. It's bad for the health and effectiveness of the workers/emergency personnel in question. How well would you do your job with a case of endless jet-lag?
Yes it is.. I worked rotating shifts when I was a 911 dispatcher, and it sucked. Well, at least it sucked the first two days or so back on, after a shift change. When you are still trying to get your body to adapt to the new cycle and you have that "jet lag" feeling. Of course this is exactly what you DON'T want 911 dispatchers or EMTs or Firefighters to be experiencing. And I'm honestly not sure what the supposed justification is for doing the rotating shifts. All I know is that our 911 center quit doing it and went to assigned permanent shifts, right before I left. Some people didn't like the change because they didn't want to get stuck working all nights or all days, but most people wanted to get away from the rotation.
What any of this has to do with/. I have no idea. Mod me down fuckers, I've got karma to burn and I'm blacklisted from moderating anywayzzzzzzzz.
Anyway does anyone really believe that god got worried about the postings here or could it be that ad revenue is down? If there is anything we learned from the internet it is that companies only respond to protests by their users when they are feeling the result in their wallets.
You have to wonder how much the emergence of Digg has to do with this? I don't think there's any question that Digg is taking some non-trivial number of page views away from Slashdot... maybe this spurt of effort by Taco is an effort to stop the bleeding?
Of course, that's the wonderful thing about competition in a free-market. If we, the readers and users of Slashdot, decide our needs aren't being met, we're free to pick up and relocate elsewhere anytime we choose./. has to compete or die, like everybody else.
Articles should continue to be submitted as they always have and/. editors should continue to select stories as they always have. Except at the point that a story is accepted it should be moved not to the frontpage but to the sandbox. In the sandbox, stories would be modded up or down by moderators who choose to use their points for such activities. After a time limit, maybe a few hours, stories above X can be moved to the frontpage and stories below X are discarded (the totals should be a net total and cutoff points me need to be tweaked). If space becomes an issue then stories are promoted based on which ones have the highest score. In this way the eds maintain a lot of control, as they should, but the mods also have a lot of input on what makes it to the frontpage.
When it was around, modfoo worked that way (well, something pretty close to that, anyway). Unfortunately the site never achieved the critical mass of users necessary, and was eventually abandoned. But I agree, a system of that nature would be a big improvement.
The people who complain that an article is a 'slashad', quite frankly, need to put up or shut up. If they have better news to share, then share it.
Yeah, we've tried that. The really interesting stories get rejected. A good example is this Virgina Tech HPC Challenge, which I submitted to Slashdot shortly after it was announced. Now if you want to talk about "News for Nerds" how much more appropriate can you get than an HPC programming contest, which is awarding multiple $1000.00 and $500.00 cash prizes?
I believe that E-bay's "developer contest" made it to the/. front-page, but this didn't. What? Is it bigger news because E-Bay is a commercial company? Which is "nerdier" some crap using E-Bay's web-services API, or real low-level programming using parallel algorithms on parallel machines or beowulf clusters?
And that's just one example, I know of plenty others that I've submitted, and judging by the comments, plenty of other people have had the same problem.
Which is one more argument for asking Slashdot to give us access to the "pending stories" queue. I bet there are some real gems that get rejected.
Slashdot is primarily about the stories, not the forum. If a good story should be published, publish it. Who cares if the forum becomes a cesspool?
I disagree. Digg is all about the stories... Slashdot is much more about the community, comments and discussion. Just poke around Digg sometime when the "meta subject" of Digg vs. Slashdot comes up.. you'll see dozens of comments to the same effect: "Sure I get stories faster at Digg, but Digg's comments system sux0rs and so I go to Slashdot for comments and discussion."
And that's the truth... if all you care about are the stories, why bother with Slashdot at all? Nearly everything posted on Slashdot is posted on Digg, and usually sooner. Really, the only thing that makes Slashdot distinct is the community and the comments. You don't get well known F/OSS community personalities like Howard Lewis Shipp, Eric Raymond, Miguel de Icaza, etc. posting comments on Digg. And their comments system does suck compared to Slashdot.
God knows, Slashdot has it's problems, but I can't imagine how anybody honestly feels that Slashdot is only about the stories. You can get stories from any number of RSS feeds or blogs besides/.
From a submitters perspective it just looks like the spammers run the place when you submit, get rejected and a week later, the same story is picked up when submitted by the usual suspects.
Yep... I for one have submitted several stories that were rejected, only to be posted a few hours later, or the next day, when submitted by somebody else.
It is pretty clear that there is a preference system going on when these same spammers get so many submissions accepted. Their submissions are not very good, so it is not a quality thing,
Absolutely.
As it now stands, slashdot is endorsing and favoring spammers and karma whores.
Thirdly, avoid any service that processes on the PC Charge platform. Their integration sucks.
PC Charge is crap. Stay as far away from it as possible. We wasted a simply ungodly amount of time and money waiting for them to get their support for First Data's internet protocol working. At one point they were sending us a new build about twice a week, insisting "this is the one that will work." It *never* worked and we finally switched to different software.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. My motivation in "either/or" is the decision to stay in school another 2 years or get work experience. I failed to make that clear and understand the confusion.
Ok, I understand what you're asking a little better now. It's still hard to come up with a conclusive answer. There are just so many factors to weigh. It's kind of just a judgement call... do you think you can find a job *now* with just the education + experience you have, and will that job make you happy? Vs. weighing what job you might qualify for if you wait the extra two years and finish the other degree. And then you might consider taking a job and going back to school part-time while working. The great thing about it is, if you're smart and hard-working, you'll likely be able to stay gainfully employed and advance your career, regardless of which choice you make.
And if you decide to enter the job market immediately nothing stops you from going back to school later and getting the degree.
Yeah, but there's only one recognized party - Demopublican - in NC anyway, so what's the point in looking it up? Oh, right, you can also be "unaffiliated." Whoopty-f'in-do!
If you where going to hire someone to manage your information systems would you see a benefit in them having a specialized education as opposed to 3 or 4 years of experience?"
Do you see those two things as mutually exclusive? What about once the guy with the specialized degree has 3-4 years of experience? Then the choice might be "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 3-4 years of experience and no degree" or "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 5-6 years of experience and a general degree," etc, etc, ad infinitum.
It seems like every time the issue of education and / or certification comes up on Slashdot, somebody inevitably frames the question this way "experience *versus* education." That's a gross over simplification and completely ignores so many aspects of the real world dynamic. Hiring decisions are made based on many factors, in my experience, and I don't think you can safely generalize many of these things the way slashdotters tend too.
Of course, I'm not really answering your question, am I? I suppose not, but I guess my point is to look at the big picture and try and estimate how all the pieces will fit together both now and in the future.
FWIW, if I were reviewing resumes to hire for such a position, somebody with that degree, from Carnegie-Mellon, would be a strong candidate to go in the "interview this guy" pile. And that's really all education, resumes, etc. are for... to get you in the door for an interview. Once you're there, then the onus is on you to sell yourself. The exact nature of your degree, experience, etc. are just details... what a hiring manager wants to know (as well as possible) is "can this guy do the job, and will this guy fit in here?"
Slashdot Mirror
not "energy drinks" per se, but I like these to keep me going for all night coding sessions:
1) Coffee - use Millstone Foglifter or Columbian Supremo beans
2) Cherry Vanilla Coke
3) Tropicana Twister - various flavors
4) plain old h20
Of the actual "energy drink" brands, I like the taste of the Monster stuff, but I rarely drink 'em.
just as we already do in those rare instances where we alter results in order to comply with local laws in France, Germany and the U.S.
Does anybody here know exactly which laws - and what search results - they are referring to, relative to the U.S.? I never knew Google removed any results in the U.S. I find that idea a little unsettling, to be honest. What is the U.S. strong-arming Google into hiding???
create yet *another* OSS license???? Surely one of the existing
ones would have been sufficient... it's not like there aren't 900000 gazillion
to pick from.
Ow wait.. that's right.. that was LAST week's "future". So, shall we take bets on next week's "future"?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Gopher 3.1 is the future.
This should have been in the summary, but I didn't put it in, because I did not realize this had been discussed a few months ago:
3 6&from=rss.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/08/23372
Not exactly a dupe, since at the time of that story, the code wasn't yet available as open source. So consider this a follow-up to the above story.
Georgetown University that a wartime president has the lawful authority to eavesdrop on Americans' telephone calls and e-mail messages without court approval."
Somebody needs to tell this jackass that WE'RE NOT F%#KING AT WAR!!! Unless I missed it when Congress issued a declaration of war, but somehow I doubt I slept through that.
Just because a few morons in DC make up a fancy sounding name like the "War on Terror" or "War on Drugs" does not mean that we are magically at war.
What a freaking asshat.
Thing is, most of those libertarian hard scientists become liberals or conservatives when they eventually get girlfriends and reproduce, and see the value in cooperating with other humans rather than hiding out in their parent's basements alone.
Well, you've just proven that you don't understand anything about (L|l)ibertarianism. Nothing about being a (l|L)ibertarian is imcompatible with "cooperating with other humans rather than hiding out in their parent's basements alone."
(L|l)ibertarians only assert that no one can be **forced** to cooperate with anyone else. People are free to **voluntarily** cooperate with whomever they choose, for whatever end they choose. Or they are also free to hide out in the basement, if that is what they **choose**.
That's the essense of (L|l)ibertarianism distilled into a nutshell: no one can use force or fraud to compell someone else to take any action, or to take their property, or otherwise violate their rights. Voluntary cooperation for the "greater good" of groups is absolutely accepted and encouraged.
Just to look at one small example, see the Libertarian Party position on Welfare and Poverty and look at a snippet:
We should eliminate the entire social welfare system. This includes eliminating AFDC, food stamps, subsidized housing, and all the rest. Individuals who are unable to fully support themselves and their families through the job market must, once again, learn to rely on supportive family, church, community, or private charity to bridge the gap.
I think families, churches, communities and private charities fulfilling the role of social welfare certainly constitutes "cooperating with other humans."
'Cause, you know one thing that libertarianism creates? Legalized Enron.
Wrong. (L|l)ibertarianism does not accept the use of fraud to steal money from people. The only real controversy about this is among (L|l)ibertarians who don't always agree on exactly how to regulate companies to prevent Enron type incidents. At either rate, the current system didn't prevent Enron from stealing a bazillion dollars and raping many retirement funds, and most of those people will never get their money back. So how exactly would moving to a (L|l)ibertarian model make an Enron any worse than it already is?
I should add however, that (L|l)ibertarians would hold that an individual has a responsibility to do "due diligence" on any investment, and we do generally see a distinction between being defrauded and just being (or acting) stupid and then expecting somebody to bail you out. Investments are not guaranteed to increase in value, they all have risk... so anyone who invests in stock has to understand this and should not expect a refund anytime they lose money because they made poor decisions. Now clearly Enron did defraud people, but at the same time, there *were* warning signs that should have warned smart investors away from Enron before the stock crashed. Some analysts were issuing warnings some time before the big fall. See "The Smartest Guys In The Room", "Power Failure", or "Conspiracy of Fools" for more details.
I don't see how anybody could disagree with the fact that these features enhance a user's experience on the web, and they would simply not be possible without AJAX or some other still undiscovered technology.
My problem isn't so much with the label "Web 2.0" (although I do think it's pretty vacuous), but AJAX is a brutal, nasty hack. Worse, it's a brutal, nasty hack layered on top of even more brutal hacks. Consider this: TCP, the protocol that HTTP is built on, is a connection-oriented protocol so it's inherently stateful. HTTP is a stateless protocol, built on top of a stateful protocol. We then turn around and layer statefulness back on top of HTTP using hacks like cookies and URL re-writing. And we only need AJAX because we don't have a persistent connection to the server so we can constantly update the server with info and receive notifications of changes to the underlying model. Uuuggghhh.
But for more of my rant on this subject, see: my blog.
On the producer/consumer gap, companies like Amazon aren't as useless as you make them out to be. What Amazon is is an aggregator. Amazon buys in bulk from the authors/publishers. That lets the author deal with one buyer rather than having to maintain a full-blown e-commerce site for the relatively low volume of books that any one author sells. Then Amazon turns around and runs a full-blown e-commerce site for all the authors/publishers they stock, which lets them spread the fixed costs out over a much larger volume than any one author/publisher could manage.
They provide another value: they allow me to browse titles from many different publishers - and compare and contrast them, and review comments on them - at one central, easily searchable location. Eg, I got to Amazon.com and search for 'Java' and get a big list of java books, as opposed to going to www.awprofessional.com, www.samspublishing.com, www.mkp.com, www.wiley.com, etc., etc. and doing many different searches, etc.
I don't mind buying direct from the publisher, but in practice I rarely do, for that exact reason. Often I don't know - ahead of time - *who* publishes the book I'm looking for, because I often don't even know the title of the book I'm looking for.
If all Slashdot is becoming is an advert for American technology and a mouthpiece for racists, I'm seriously going to have to think about removing it from my daily routine.
For what it's worth, we're not all bigots, rascists and jingoists. Some of us even abhor the entire notion of country states and celebrate the sovereignty of the individual, and welcome ideas like free-trade, unrestricted travel, and the ability to live, work and learn wherever you want (as long as you don't violate anyone else's rights in doing so). Unfortunately we're the minority here (and probably everywhere else too).
Yeah, that'll come in handy for Chinese missiles.
Assuming that missile has a nuclear warhead, what difference does it make if they have access to GPS / Galileo or not? You don't exactly need precise targeting when you're launching a weapon with that much destructive power. Precision to within a few miles should be sufficient...
The United States of America is the greatest country in the history of the world. This Earth belongs to the US, the rest just live here.
No, the United States used to be a great country, to the extent that it even makes sense to have "countries" or "states." Now, the US has now become a fascist theocracy / police-state with a government that is so corrupt that it would be a compliment to call our capital a cesspool.
The US isn't even close to being the most free nation in the world anymore, which is terribly sad. We spend soooo much time talking about how we're "bringing freedom and liberty to Iraq" while bleeding fundamental liberties here in the US at an alarming rate. As someone put it "If Iraq needs a Constitution let's send them ours, we're not using it anymore."
There is a video available of a talk he gave at MIT, might be interesting for people who haven't read the book.
In Australia, it's popular for young professionals to move to the UK for up to 10 years, to cash in on the higher wages. Many plan on moving home with enough savings to live comfortably, although many don't come back.
Do Australians get special consideration on getting UK work visas? I (an American) looked into the requirements to get a visa to work in the UK a few years back, and it looked pretty onerous. I notice that they do give special preference to certain nations though, but unfortunately the US isn't one of them. Which struck me as odd, actually. The US and UK have a fairly tight relationship, I would have expected it to be easier for Americans and Brits to work in each other's countries...
Then that's a really stupid thing to do. It's bad for the health and effectiveness of the workers/emergency personnel in question. How well would you do your job with a case of endless jet-lag?
/. I have no idea. Mod me down fuckers, I've got karma to burn and I'm blacklisted from moderating anywayzzzzzzzz.
Yes it is.. I worked rotating shifts when I was a 911 dispatcher, and it sucked. Well, at least it sucked the first two days or so back on, after a shift change. When you are still trying to get your body to adapt to the new cycle and you have that "jet lag" feeling. Of course this is exactly what you DON'T want 911 dispatchers or EMTs or Firefighters to be experiencing. And I'm honestly not sure what the supposed justification is for doing the rotating shifts. All I know is that our 911 center quit doing it and went to assigned permanent shifts, right before I left. Some people didn't like the change because they didn't want to get stuck working all nights or all days, but most people wanted to get away from the rotation.
What any of this has to do with
Anyway does anyone really believe that god got worried about the postings here or could it be that ad revenue is down? If there is anything we learned from the internet it is that companies only respond to protests by their users when they are feeling the result in their wallets.
/. has to compete or die, like everybody else.
You have to wonder how much the emergence of Digg has to do with this? I don't think there's any question that Digg is taking some non-trivial number of page views away from Slashdot... maybe this spurt of effort by Taco is an effort to stop the bleeding?
Of course, that's the wonderful thing about competition in a free-market. If we, the readers and users of Slashdot, decide our needs aren't being met, we're free to pick up and relocate elsewhere anytime we choose.
Articles should continue to be submitted as they always have and /. editors should continue to select stories as they always have. Except at the point that a story is accepted it should be moved not to the frontpage but to the sandbox. In the sandbox, stories would be modded up or down by moderators who choose to use their points for such activities. After a time limit, maybe a few hours, stories above X can be moved to the frontpage and stories below X are discarded (the totals should be a net total and cutoff points me need to be tweaked). If space becomes an issue then stories are promoted based on which ones have the highest score. In this way the eds maintain a lot of control, as they should, but the mods also have a lot of input on what makes it to the frontpage.
When it was around, modfoo worked that way (well, something pretty close to that, anyway). Unfortunately the site never achieved the critical mass of users necessary, and was eventually abandoned. But I agree, a system of that nature would be a big improvement.
The people who complain that an article is a 'slashad', quite frankly, need to put up or shut up. If they have better news to share, then share it.
/. front-page, but this didn't. What? Is it bigger news because E-Bay is a commercial company? Which is "nerdier" some crap using E-Bay's web-services API, or real low-level programming using parallel algorithms on parallel machines or beowulf clusters?
Yeah, we've tried that. The really interesting stories get rejected. A good example is this Virgina Tech HPC Challenge, which I submitted to Slashdot shortly after it was announced. Now if you want to talk about "News for Nerds" how much
more appropriate can you get than an HPC programming contest, which is awarding multiple $1000.00 and $500.00 cash prizes?
I believe that E-bay's "developer contest" made it to the
And that's just one example, I know of plenty others that I've submitted, and judging by the comments, plenty of other people have had the same problem.
Which is one more argument for asking Slashdot to give us access to the "pending stories" queue. I bet there are some real gems that get rejected.
Slashdot is primarily about the stories, not the forum. If a good story should be published, publish it. Who cares if the forum becomes a cesspool?
/.
I disagree. Digg is all about the stories... Slashdot is much more about the community, comments and discussion. Just poke around Digg sometime when the "meta subject" of Digg vs. Slashdot comes up.. you'll see dozens of comments to the same effect: "Sure I get stories faster at Digg, but Digg's comments system sux0rs and so I go to Slashdot for comments and discussion."
And that's the truth... if all you care about are the stories, why bother with Slashdot at all? Nearly everything posted on Slashdot is posted on Digg, and usually sooner. Really, the only thing that makes Slashdot distinct is the community and the comments. You don't get well known F/OSS community personalities like Howard Lewis Shipp, Eric Raymond, Miguel de Icaza, etc. posting comments on Digg. And their comments system does suck compared to Slashdot.
God knows, Slashdot has it's problems, but I can't imagine how anybody honestly feels that Slashdot is only about the stories. You can get stories from any number of RSS feeds or blogs besides
From a submitters perspective it just looks like the spammers run the place when you submit, get rejected and a week later, the same story is picked up when submitted by the usual suspects.
Yep... I for one have submitted several stories that were rejected, only to be posted a few hours later, or the next day, when submitted by somebody else.
It is pretty clear that there is a preference system going on when these same spammers get so many submissions accepted. Their submissions are not very good, so it is not a quality thing,
Absolutely.
As it now stands, slashdot is endorsing and favoring spammers and karma whores.
Well said.
Thirdly, avoid any service that processes on the PC Charge platform. Their integration sucks.
PC Charge is crap. Stay as far away from it as possible. We wasted a simply ungodly amount of time and money waiting for them to get their support for First Data's internet protocol working. At one point they were sending us a new build about twice a week, insisting "this is the one that will work." It *never* worked and we finally switched to different software.
Thank you for taking the time to respond to my question. My motivation in "either/or" is the decision to stay in school another 2 years or get work experience. I failed to make that clear and understand the confusion.
Ok, I understand what you're asking a little better now. It's still hard to come up with a conclusive answer. There are just so many factors to weigh. It's kind of just a judgement call... do you think you can find a job *now* with just the education + experience you have, and will that job make you happy? Vs. weighing what job you might qualify for if you wait the extra two years and finish the other degree. And then you might consider taking a job and going back to school part-time while working. The great thing about it is, if you're smart and hard-working, you'll likely be able to stay gainfully employed and advance your career, regardless of which choice you make.
And if you decide to enter the job market immediately nothing stops you from going back to school later and getting the degree.
So THAT'S why I'm on the no-fly list
No, that's because you ordered those Paladin Press, Delta Press, and IMS catalogs.
In my county in NC, if you want a party affiliation all you need to do is look it up on the public records website:f m
http://www.co.durham.nc.us/common/PublRecordsdB.c
Yeah, but there's only one recognized party - Demopublican - in NC anyway, so what's the point in looking it up? Oh, right, you can also be "unaffiliated." Whoopty-f'in-do!
If you where going to hire someone to manage your information systems would you see a benefit in them having a specialized education as opposed to 3 or 4 years of experience?"
Do you see those two things as mutually exclusive? What about once the guy with the specialized degree has 3-4 years of experience? Then the choice might be "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 3-4 years of experience and no degree" or "a guy with a specialized degree and 3-4 years of experience, vs. a guy with 5-6 years of experience and a general degree," etc, etc, ad infinitum.
It seems like every time the issue of education and / or certification comes up on Slashdot, somebody inevitably frames the question this way "experience *versus* education." That's a gross over simplification and completely ignores so many aspects of the real world dynamic. Hiring decisions are made based on many factors, in my experience, and I don't think you can safely generalize many of these things the way slashdotters tend too.
Of course, I'm not really answering your question, am I? I suppose not, but I guess my point is to look at the big picture and try and estimate how all the pieces will fit together both now and in the future.
FWIW, if I were reviewing resumes to hire for such a position, somebody with that degree, from Carnegie-Mellon, would be a strong candidate to go in the "interview this guy" pile. And that's really all education, resumes, etc. are for... to get you in the door for an interview. Once you're there, then the onus is on you to sell yourself. The exact nature of your degree, experience, etc. are just details... what a hiring manager wants to know (as well as possible) is "can this guy do the job, and will this guy fit in here?"