Depends on your type of government. The more you move toward socialism, the more the government is concerned with creating jobs through this sort of hackery.
Once you start protecting industries purely because they employ people, you're in trouble.
Right now in the US, it's the automakers. The traditional rationale for protecting them is because our national security requires the manufacturing base (in case we have to switch it over to tanks, for example).
But when the government props an industry up, it becomes less efficient. Recessional trimming is necessary to keep businesses from institutional bloat; it forces them to explore alternatives, improve their products, and to trim their workforce. If they never have to do that, then they'll never be competitive with companies that do.
Agreed. Internships are there for looking impressive on your CV, not for making you rich. If you get paid, so much the better, but it's better to do something awesome and not get paid, than to get paid for doing something lame.
Cost of Living comparison sites are good. That'll give you an idea of the comparison between two jobs in different places...One may be offering 50% more, but that 50% more may actually be a net loss depending on the cost of living.
Demographic information can give you average salaries, but you MUST weigh that in terms of the cost of living. Don't take a job for the national average salary in a city where the cost of living is twice the national average. You can get lots of salary information on Google.
I'd say there is no definite source. You're going to have to weigh and consider what you need, and what the job is worth to you. Don't be afraid to take less for a job that has great experience/training opportunities, and don't be afraid to ask for more if the job looks like hell on earth.
The article makes it sound a lot more benign than it actually is. "We'll come up with great ideas, and let people use 'em for a fee!"
The problem is, as Edison is famous for saying, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Having a good idea is the easy part. Making it work in the real world is where all the problems crop up.
Making someone pay for the privilege of solving all the problems that you're too lazy/incompetent to solve? That just sucks.
Wow, actually that makes perfect sense. Democrats suck, Republicans are mindless, socialists are hairy lunatics, and the best way to get rid of a libertarian is to nuke the site from orbit...It's the only way to be sure.
//Thinks the vampire movies have been coming out for a while now, actually.
Sure, because a fuzzy blend of eastern thought and western existentialism is valuable for anyone.
Fine. Decent book. But it's got zip to do with CS, or even much with logic, and that's the exact sort of statement that lets demagogues dismiss philosophy as nothing but intellectual fluff.
The best "science" course I ever had was a philosophy course on the philosophy of science...Never, ever had a foundational course in science that really hit the heart of the scientific method in the same way.
It's real easy to miss the forest for the trees. Having a good course on the why gives you an amazing depth of perception on the how.
Say rather that all mathematics stems from philosophy and you'll be more correct. The foundation of modern mathematical thought was a philosophical work called the Principia Mathematica. Deductive logic is pretty much the foundation of all programming languages, its relevant to chip architecture, everything.
As far as ethics go, I'm more ambivalent. There is no great ethical theory out there these days, it's just varying forms of crappy, intellectually bankrupt relativism. Kant may have had his problems, but at least he was trying.
The thing, and you talked about this in your post, that pisses me off most is the people who decide that all philosophy is about long dead philosophers, and fuzzy-headed problems without real solutions. The cogito is shit. It's a linguistic oddity, and it has nothing to do with the world.
I majored in philosophy, and the logic classes I had were brain-crushingly difficult. The theory classes I had were very heavy on the theory of cognition, perception, semantics. I took some ethics (because it interested me), and I took a couple of fluffy 18th century philosophy courses, but the vast majority of what I studied was very modern.
And when I picked up CS people looked at my indifferent math grades and predicted I wouldn't be able to handle programming because my background was in a froofy liberal art. I didn't have a single class where my programming scores weren't in the top 5% of my class. In principles of programming languages; 8 languages in 16 weeks, my average score was 40 points over the fucking curve.
I don't keep up much with philosophy these days...A book every now and then, and that's about it. But there isn't a day that I'm not thankful for the the tools I developed in studying it.
The thing that always seemed weird to me is that they don't have the basic-stuff price inflation that Best Buy and CC have...If you buy a long USB extension at BB or CC, you're going to have to take out a mortgage on your house, because the damn thing will cost a mint.
At Radio Shack it'll be 1/5th the cost of either of the others. I give 'em my business for that alone.
Heh. The Circuit City in my town is next to a boarded up Kroger and a boarded up Toys'R'Us, near a closed Applebees and a furniture store that got hit by a tornado earlier this year, and has never repaired...In case you're wondering, yes, it is on the list of stores to be closed.
They're not always in a better part of town, though in my town the only alternative is Best Buy and not any sort of local store (excepting a specialty audio/stereo store).
SO true. I've been working behind "irreplaceable" people for years, and the period of chaos and readjustment that follows their departure generally smooths into a whole new era of productivity.
If you write stuff that only you can support, if you spend your time keeping users ignorant and helpless, if you don't believe in documentation...you need to go, because you are a HUGE problem.
My personal soapbox is always nice. In the old days, when cpu cycles were crazy valuable, people were very careful to set up their jobs to not hog too many cycles.
These days, that's not so much the case, and when resources are plentiful, it doesn't NEED to be the case. But if you have a lot of things going you need to be able to prevent everything from trying to run at 100%...Don't need some reporting job crapping on a critical process.
I agree with you in the sense of "If you need to do something but you don't know the name of the command, man pages suck." Threads like this are always valuable because even experts don't know every command.
On the other hand, man pages are a nice handy reference for each command, they often come with a "related commands" section which is handy, and I've worked with a lot of operating systems and never seen anything better.
Yep, I just got my marching orders from the Hippie Gestapo. We're on our way to your house with tofu, solar panels, and one of those thingies that makes your shower use less water.
Try to lock us out, and we'll sit on your front porch smoking grass and singing kum-bai-ya and make your property values plummet.
Is that really the best you've got? What's the worst case there? Oh noes, energy efficiency!
Whereas the Right gets us involved in stupid wars, alienates our allies, crushes our economy, tries to pervert the teaching of science in public schools, and illegally detains and tortures POWs in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention.
Let's not pretend it's been a 7 year slide. Stocks were already trending down in 2000, so if you bought in 2001, and sold in 2007, you did pretty well.
It's funny how you can support something for years, and as soon as it gets popular, some whiny little bitch will come along and sneer at you for "jumping on the bandwagon."
I would have simply preferred that he'd spent more time trying to push his own plans, and less time trying to prove something by the record. Fact is fact; neither one of them has previous presidential experience, so any appeal to the historical record isn't going to get you much.
I was hacking on Palin earlier this year and someone else pointed out that she had more executive experience than all the others combined, which is absolutely true, but it doesn't mean that she will do a better job, or even that executive experience is necessary for the job.
What it boils down to for me is a simple process. I want to know what the candidates plans are. Now consistently Obama said things that I thought were forward looking and interesting. I didn't always agree with them; I don't like his trade policy much at all, for example, but I could respect an intelligent and informed plan.
McCain on the other hand, consistently pushed things I thought were discredited or intellectually weird. Using bailout money to buy bad mortgages. The gas tax repeal. The pure dishonesty on the tax issue; portraying his opponent as a socialist for voting to reverse tax cuts that McCain himself had voted against in the first place!
But far more than pushing his ideas, he pushed the idea that there was something "scary" about his opponent, an assertion with zero fact to back it up. That was the cornerstone of his campaign, frankly. My opponent is scary. My opponent hangs out with terrorists. My opponent is a socialist.
The fact that he spent so much time on ad hominem and flimsy strawman arguments suggests to me that his positions have too little substance to stand on their own. So I vote Obama.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your type of government. The more you move toward socialism, the more the government is concerned with creating jobs through this sort of hackery.
Once you start protecting industries purely because they employ people, you're in trouble.
Right now in the US, it's the automakers. The traditional rationale for protecting them is because our national security requires the manufacturing base (in case we have to switch it over to tanks, for example).
But when the government props an industry up, it becomes less efficient. Recessional trimming is necessary to keep businesses from institutional bloat; it forces them to explore alternatives, improve their products, and to trim their workforce. If they never have to do that, then they'll never be competitive with companies that do.
Because nothing says "Good System!" like using your lobbying clout to get the government to shut down your more efficient competition.
If you can't compete, then you shouldn't be in the game.
Agreed. Internships are there for looking impressive on your CV, not for making you rich. If you get paid, so much the better, but it's better to do something awesome and not get paid, than to get paid for doing something lame.
Cost of Living comparison sites are good. That'll give you an idea of the comparison between two jobs in different places...One may be offering 50% more, but that 50% more may actually be a net loss depending on the cost of living.
Demographic information can give you average salaries, but you MUST weigh that in terms of the cost of living. Don't take a job for the national average salary in a city where the cost of living is twice the national average. You can get lots of salary information on Google.
I'd say there is no definite source. You're going to have to weigh and consider what you need, and what the job is worth to you. Don't be afraid to take less for a job that has great experience/training opportunities, and don't be afraid to ask for more if the job looks like hell on earth.
YEA! It's totally misleading because C is SO much less than K! I mean 30,000K is only 29,726.85C! That guy is such a jackass!
One of the hazards of the trade is that some software may cease to be supported. This goes double for OSS, where the developers are often unpaid.
The source is available. If you have to have it, pick it up yourself and keep the project going.
The article makes it sound a lot more benign than it actually is. "We'll come up with great ideas, and let people use 'em for a fee!"
The problem is, as Edison is famous for saying, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Having a good idea is the easy part. Making it work in the real world is where all the problems crop up.
Making someone pay for the privilege of solving all the problems that you're too lazy/incompetent to solve? That just sucks.
Wow, actually that makes perfect sense. Democrats suck, Republicans are mindless, socialists are hairy lunatics, and the best way to get rid of a libertarian is to nuke the site from orbit...It's the only way to be sure.
//Thinks the vampire movies have been coming out for a while now, actually.
Sure, because a fuzzy blend of eastern thought and western existentialism is valuable for anyone.
Fine. Decent book. But it's got zip to do with CS, or even much with logic, and that's the exact sort of statement that lets demagogues dismiss philosophy as nothing but intellectual fluff.
The best "science" course I ever had was a philosophy course on the philosophy of science...Never, ever had a foundational course in science that really hit the heart of the scientific method in the same way.
It's real easy to miss the forest for the trees. Having a good course on the why gives you an amazing depth of perception on the how.
Say rather that all mathematics stems from philosophy and you'll be more correct. The foundation of modern mathematical thought was a philosophical work called the Principia Mathematica . Deductive logic is pretty much the foundation of all programming languages, its relevant to chip architecture, everything.
As far as ethics go, I'm more ambivalent. There is no great ethical theory out there these days, it's just varying forms of crappy, intellectually bankrupt relativism. Kant may have had his problems, but at least he was trying.
The thing, and you talked about this in your post, that pisses me off most is the people who decide that all philosophy is about long dead philosophers, and fuzzy-headed problems without real solutions. The cogito is shit. It's a linguistic oddity, and it has nothing to do with the world.
I majored in philosophy, and the logic classes I had were brain-crushingly difficult. The theory classes I had were very heavy on the theory of cognition, perception, semantics. I took some ethics (because it interested me), and I took a couple of fluffy 18th century philosophy courses, but the vast majority of what I studied was very modern.
And when I picked up CS people looked at my indifferent math grades and predicted I wouldn't be able to handle programming because my background was in a froofy liberal art. I didn't have a single class where my programming scores weren't in the top 5% of my class. In principles of programming languages; 8 languages in 16 weeks, my average score was 40 points over the fucking curve.
I don't keep up much with philosophy these days...A book every now and then, and that's about it. But there isn't a day that I'm not thankful for the the tools I developed in studying it.
That's how I got my start as well. Symbolic logic is vastly more relevant to programming than most people realize.
The thing that always seemed weird to me is that they don't have the basic-stuff price inflation that Best Buy and CC have...If you buy a long USB extension at BB or CC, you're going to have to take out a mortgage on your house, because the damn thing will cost a mint.
At Radio Shack it'll be 1/5th the cost of either of the others. I give 'em my business for that alone.
Heh. The Circuit City in my town is next to a boarded up Kroger and a boarded up Toys'R'Us, near a closed Applebees and a furniture store that got hit by a tornado earlier this year, and has never repaired...In case you're wondering, yes, it is on the list of stores to be closed.
They're not always in a better part of town, though in my town the only alternative is Best Buy and not any sort of local store (excepting a specialty audio/stereo store).
That didn't do anything...All I got was:
tcl>format C:*.*
C:*.*
SO true. I've been working behind "irreplaceable" people for years, and the period of chaos and readjustment that follows their departure generally smooths into a whole new era of productivity.
If you write stuff that only you can support, if you spend your time keeping users ignorant and helpless, if you don't believe in documentation...you need to go, because you are a HUGE problem.
My personal soapbox is always nice. In the old days, when cpu cycles were crazy valuable, people were very careful to set up their jobs to not hog too many cycles.
These days, that's not so much the case, and when resources are plentiful, it doesn't NEED to be the case. But if you have a lot of things going you need to be able to prevent everything from trying to run at 100%...Don't need some reporting job crapping on a critical process.
So yea, job priority: nice, renice, getpriority, and setpriority
I agree with you in the sense of "If you need to do something but you don't know the name of the command, man pages suck." Threads like this are always valuable because even experts don't know every command.
On the other hand, man pages are a nice handy reference for each command, they often come with a "related commands" section which is handy, and I've worked with a lot of operating systems and never seen anything better.
Yep, I just got my marching orders from the Hippie Gestapo. We're on our way to your house with tofu, solar panels, and one of those thingies that makes your shower use less water.
Try to lock us out, and we'll sit on your front porch smoking grass and singing kum-bai-ya and make your property values plummet.
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!
Is that really the best you've got? What's the worst case there? Oh noes, energy efficiency!
Whereas the Right gets us involved in stupid wars, alienates our allies, crushes our economy, tries to pervert the teaching of science in public schools, and illegally detains and tortures POWs in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention.
Yea. God. Dems in the White House. Scaaaaary.
And in 2007 it was 14,000.
Let's not pretend it's been a 7 year slide. Stocks were already trending down in 2000, so if you bought in 2001, and sold in 2007, you did pretty well.
It's funny how you can support something for years, and as soon as it gets popular, some whiny little bitch will come along and sneer at you for "jumping on the bandwagon."
I would have simply preferred that he'd spent more time trying to push his own plans, and less time trying to prove something by the record. Fact is fact; neither one of them has previous presidential experience, so any appeal to the historical record isn't going to get you much.
I was hacking on Palin earlier this year and someone else pointed out that she had more executive experience than all the others combined, which is absolutely true, but it doesn't mean that she will do a better job, or even that executive experience is necessary for the job.
What it boils down to for me is a simple process. I want to know what the candidates plans are. Now consistently Obama said things that I thought were forward looking and interesting. I didn't always agree with them; I don't like his trade policy much at all, for example, but I could respect an intelligent and informed plan.
McCain on the other hand, consistently pushed things I thought were discredited or intellectually weird. Using bailout money to buy bad mortgages. The gas tax repeal. The pure dishonesty on the tax issue; portraying his opponent as a socialist for voting to reverse tax cuts that McCain himself had voted against in the first place!
But far more than pushing his ideas, he pushed the idea that there was something "scary" about his opponent, an assertion with zero fact to back it up. That was the cornerstone of his campaign, frankly. My opponent is scary. My opponent hangs out with terrorists. My opponent is a socialist.
The fact that he spent so much time on ad hominem and flimsy strawman arguments suggests to me that his positions have too little substance to stand on their own. So I vote Obama.
Fallacies have nothing to do with "truth".
Fallacies are logical situations where you can put truth in one side and get false out the other. In a valid deductive argument this is impossible.
What you're talking about isn't even logic. It's not even inductive logic. It's statistics and probability.
The argument from ignorance is very simple:
A v B
~A
Therefore B
A and B have independent truth values, so the attempt to promote the truth of B by proving A to be false is invalid.