Have any of you ever worked with any firms you felt represented your interests well?
Never.
In every experience I've had where I was sent as an applicant to a company via a recruiter, the recruiter had always doctored up my resume, and tried to push me into being dishonest about my experiences (such as making a little bit of experience with something sound more like a lot of experience with something).
I've also noticed (being on the interviewing side) that most recruiters don't know squat about tech skills - even if they are a supposed specialized "tech recruiter". It seems they simply look for the buzz-words/buzz-acronyms on a resume, and send it to you if they think there is a match.
I'd be VERY careful about selecting a recruiter from which to get applicants.
Let me share a true anecdote: In my first year of college, I took a âoewestern traditionsâ class in which we were one day having a lively debate about the affects of TV/movie violence on society. There were the typical extreme liberals speaking out about how it had absolutely no affects, etc. And there were the typical extreme conservatives with the opposite view.
After a considerable amount of discussion, a young lady (19 or 20 year old) stood up and shared her personal experience on this topic. It turns out she grew up in the middle of no-where New Mexico (or somewhere - I forget exactly where) and there has no broad-cast television in the area, and her parents didnâ(TM)t get a satellite dish. So here whole life growing up, she had no exposure to TV or movies except 2 or 3 times when she was visiting her grandma or something like that. So she goes off to âoethe big cityâ for college, and gets a dorm-mate who watches TV a lot. The first evening in the room, she became entranced with what was happening in the show (some prime-time Cop show if I remember right) and sat and watched. She said that after only 10 minutes of viewing she felt âoeemotionally sickâ, and after about 30 minutes (after watching a few people get shot) she actually threw up! She then said that after living with her roommate for a few months, she only got slightly bothered by such scenes, and after a full year it didnâ(TM)t bother her at all.
I think this (along with all of the studies, etc.) is direct proof that exposure to scenes of violence is âoedesensitizingâ. Does it mean that watching TV will eventually turn her into a killer? Of course not. But it does mean that her âoepsycheâ no longer panics at the sight of violence, and I donâ(TM)t think that it would be too big of a stretch to say that somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind there is a conditioning that thinks assigns less of a âoebadness levelâ than it once did to acts of insult others, curse at others, slapping others, etc..
In the end, this same conditioning is happening to all of us. Luckily, most of us have a lot of counter-conditioning to keep our âoemoralsâ system on the side of still thinking treating someone badly is in fact bad. But letâ(TM)s face it, if we never saw someone strike out in anger, never heard anyone curse at someone else, wouldnâ(TM)t we really be less likely to do those things ourselves? Just like so many studies show that someone exposed to domestic violence as a kid is more likely to inflict it as an adult - our brains simply learn patterns of behaviors. Thatâ(TM)s why weâ(TM)re so good at becoming addicted to things.
I'd like it if mozilla was able to remember how many tabs I have open, and what URLS are in each - much like my XSession is remembered, and my programming IDE remembers the files I have open.
This would be a great convenience - every time I opened Mozilla, I would get 5 or 6 tabs created - one loadig slashdot, one loading my source forge project, one loading my web-mail site, etc.
Does this functionality exist, and I'm just unaware of it?
The band "Iceburn" aka "The Iceburn Collective", is my favorite. It's an amazing blend (fusion) of Metal, Jazz and Classical. Think Miles Davis + Igor Stravinsky + Black Sabbath -- then think even cooler. Can you tell I like them?
They're one of those bands who's music demands full attention - it doesn't really work as background music, and you can just listen to a part of an album. A few of their albums (or 'pieces') are a full 79 minutes, others are 40 to 60 minutes. They take 3-4 listenings to acquire the "taste" of them - but so does any great music. If you're a Metal fan I recommend starting with the album "Firon" - which actually does have individual (but related) songs, if you're a fusion fan, I'd recommend starting with "The Polar Bear Suite" or "Meditavolutions", if you just want a good first look at them, I'd recommend "Hephaestus" - which is my personal favorite. Don't listen to a 30 second online clip and pass judgment! Also beware that there is HUGE varience in their style from one album to the next - some very "metally" others mostly "fusiony"
Their albumns are on independent labels (non-RIAA) so they're a tad hard to find - though many of the albums are available on Amazon right now (I just checked). You can also order directly from Revelation Records (if you're getting one of Iceburn's albums on that label - which is most of them).
You may also want to check out the band "Engine Kid" - which is also on the Revelation label. They're kind of similar, but much noisier, if you like that sort of thing.
I've got several albums that have ~30 tracks on them, but they're really a single, continuous piece of music (you couldn't stand to listen to any one track by itself - they aren't individual songs, rather something like "movements" of a larger piece).
With this service, would I pay $30 for such an album? or $1 ? Right now I pay $10.99 for it to Revelation Records.
Some years back I worked for a company that had several large HP plotters. If you're not familiar with them, they are basically large ink-jet printers, capable of printing on sheets 48-inches wide and up to tens of feet long. They're obviously useful for printing CAD drawings, GIS maps, etc.. And highly-precise ones can cost big $$$ (precise meaning the scale of the drawing that ends up on the paper is accurate to less than.01" of distortion over the 48" width of the paper) - at the time at least, these plotters cost over $10k each.
Anyway, we grew out of our office space, and we therefore rented new space, and started moving. Myself and another college-age guy were in charge of moving all the computer equipment, since we were the "geeks". We took a couple of these plotters - which stand about 4 feet tall, 5 feet long, and only about 8 or 10 inches deep - and all of the mechanics are along the top - so they're tall and narrow, and very top-heavy - and loaded them into the back of a small pick-up truck, and headed down the road. Being a dumb 20-year old (and driving like one) we zipped around a corner, and both plotters lauched themselves over the side of the pickup-bed and bounced across the road. Needless to say, we nearly crapped our pants!
We stopped to pick the "garbage" up out of the street, so it would be out of the way of other cars - we assumed that the plotters were a complete loss, and that we were going to have a fun discussion with our boss. We placed them back in the pickup truck (including many broken-off pieces of their plastic cases, a few gears, belts, etc.)
Well, we got them into the new office space, set them up, and snapped back together all of the parts that we could. To our amazement, not only did they "power up", but they actually worked! And not only that, their callibration wasn't off by a hair! In my mind, this was absolutely amazing (and a god-send)!
Aside from looking ugly (cracked, scuffed, and holy cases), there was no problem, and (according to my former co-workers) they went on to work for several years.
I've never been a fan of Hewlett-Packard PCs, but their plotters and printers sure hold high respect in my mind.
This leads to an interesting idea of Open Source licensing...
Does anyone know of an OSS license that includes some statement to the effect of: "This software is free for use, redistribution, and modification by any entity for any purpose, as long as any form of it is never used for military purposes." ???
Actually, if you take the time to read this fairly-lengthly article, the idea that an "inferiority complex" is the cause of the torment nerds are put through, is pretty well argued un-true... or at least he shows it to be only a minor contributor to the hell that is a nerd's life.
I'd suggest that _everyone_ should take the time to read this article as I did (for once!) - it has some very good and strongly made points - that everyone should understand in order to dispell the mythical causes of this situation, so we can all help improve it. He also includes some suggestions on how to fix things.
We do have standards / conventions that we ask everyone to follow, and as I said, most of us do. However, there are a few people who think they can work in a cave and make their own "black boxes" - regardless of how many times we try to educate them on the correct ways to do things - and they even nod their heads and say "yeah, I'll do it that way", but then don't.
I've seen people like this at other places I've worked too - the typical "cowboy coder". I think this is a prime example of the taking the idea "I can make my component a black box, and whatever I do won't affect anyone else" way too far.
Or maybe it's simply "I don't care what you think, I'm going to do everything my way" gone way to far... but even then, it's justified with the "black box" idea.
While there's definite benefits of treating software components as "black boxes", I agree with the asker of the question that there are some definite negative side-effects.
For instance, we've got a couple of developers that just don't know how to work with the team, and figure that they can go sit in their dark cubes and code away their component as a black box that with simply fit in with everybody elses stuff. Common problems that arise are:
Different logging schemes
Different configuration schemes
Different admin-alerting mechanisms
Components that don't match the design pattern that all other components follow - thus making them harder to understand.
Components that expect some type of "global" data to exist, that simply doesn't.
These issues have led to no end of grief for those of us who do communicate with each other about what they're doing.
Abstraction is great!, but you still need to make sure everything fits together correctly, and not just at the interface level.
I build a house in a new neighborhood, which was outfitted by Qwest with pure fiber to every home. At first I thought this was cool... but four years later, nobody's offering any type of service on it (other than dial-tone) and I can't get DSL because my line's not copper.
Fortunately, some local guys (about a mile away) have set up a 802.11b service, so I can get my Mbps... otherwise I'd be screwed!
Actually, when I said "rumors" was the way in which information spreads through society, it was both a joke and a real comment.
I think if you want to understand paterns in a society, you need to understand how rumors work - especially the way "truth" changes (loss of info, gain of false info, exageration of certain points of view, etc.) as it is passed from person to person.
Even in non-human groups, this is true - think about a herd of elk. If one elk standing on the outside thinks that it smells the presence of another animal in the area, it will snort and/or move into the herd a bit. This creates a ripple affect through the herd that may or may not trigger a stampede, based on the way the other elk interpret the actions of the first.
I'm not a psychologist or anthropologist or behavioralist, but I think it's obvious that there can be no reasonable study of how a society acts without having understanding of how perceptions of the same information varies from person to person, and of how it is therefore 'retransmited' to others.
Anyway, I'd have to say that most if not all of what I know is complete hear-say, including what school teachers have taught me.
Slashdot Mirror
Have any of you ever worked with any firms you felt represented your interests well?
Never.
In every experience I've had where I was sent as an applicant to a company via a recruiter, the recruiter had always doctored up my resume, and tried to push me into being dishonest about my experiences (such as making a little bit of experience with something sound more like a lot of experience with something).
I've also noticed (being on the interviewing side) that most recruiters don't know squat about tech skills - even if they are a supposed specialized "tech recruiter". It seems they simply look for the buzz-words/buzz-acronyms on a resume, and send it to you if they think there is a match.
I'd be VERY careful about selecting a recruiter from which to get applicants.
ICANN is an interesting study in how a ruling regime can usurp a democratic institution and turn it into an autarchy.
Thanks! ...I've been looking for some real-life examples of how to achieve this!
Let me share a true anecdote: In my first year of college, I took a âoewestern traditionsâ class in which we were one day having a lively debate about the affects of TV/movie violence on society. There were the typical extreme liberals speaking out about how it had absolutely no affects, etc. And there were the typical extreme conservatives with the opposite view.
After a considerable amount of discussion, a young lady (19 or 20 year old) stood up and shared her personal experience on this topic. It turns out she grew up in the middle of no-where New Mexico (or somewhere - I forget exactly where) and there has no broad-cast television in the area, and her parents didnâ(TM)t get a satellite dish. So here whole life growing up, she had no exposure to TV or movies except 2 or 3 times when she was visiting her grandma or something like that. So she goes off to âoethe big cityâ for college, and gets a dorm-mate who watches TV a lot. The first evening in the room, she became entranced with what was happening in the show (some prime-time Cop show if I remember right) and sat and watched. She said that after only 10 minutes of viewing she felt âoeemotionally sickâ, and after about 30 minutes (after watching a few people get shot) she actually threw up! She then said that after living with her roommate for a few months, she only got slightly bothered by such scenes, and after a full year it didnâ(TM)t bother her at all.
I think this (along with all of the studies, etc.) is direct proof that exposure to scenes of violence is âoedesensitizingâ. Does it mean that watching TV will eventually turn her into a killer? Of course not. But it does mean that her âoepsycheâ no longer panics at the sight of violence, and I donâ(TM)t think that it would be too big of a stretch to say that somewhere in the deep recesses of her mind there is a conditioning that thinks assigns less of a âoebadness levelâ than it once did to acts of insult others, curse at others, slapping others, etc..
In the end, this same conditioning is happening to all of us. Luckily, most of us have a lot of counter-conditioning to keep our âoemoralsâ system on the side of still thinking treating someone badly is in fact bad. But letâ(TM)s face it, if we never saw someone strike out in anger, never heard anyone curse at someone else, wouldnâ(TM)t we really be less likely to do those things ourselves? Just like so many studies show that someone exposed to domestic violence as a kid is more likely to inflict it as an adult - our brains simply learn patterns of behaviors. Thatâ(TM)s why weâ(TM)re so good at becoming addicted to things.
I ran this same simulation many times, as a kid. I had to call over the neighbor kids to have them play the parts of the Martians.
I'd guess the number is very near ZERO.
Actually the court order is to put Sun's version of the JVM into Windows - exactly to fix this type of stupid problem.
It's MICROSOFT'S JAVA IMPLEMENTATION.
The problem is NOT Java.
The problem is (and always has been) Micro$oft's purposely broken version of Java.
I've also just found out that this is coming in the next release of Mozilla (it's in the nightly builds now).
This would be a great convenience - every time I opened Mozilla, I would get 5 or 6 tabs created - one loadig slashdot, one loading my source forge project, one loading my web-mail site, etc.
Does this functionality exist, and I'm just unaware of it?
and you CAN'T just listen to a part of an album.
Only the best music on the planet! ;-)
The band "Iceburn" aka "The Iceburn Collective", is my favorite. It's an amazing blend (fusion) of Metal, Jazz and Classical. Think Miles Davis + Igor Stravinsky + Black Sabbath -- then think even cooler. Can you tell I like them?
They're one of those bands who's music demands full attention - it doesn't really work as background music, and you can just listen to a part of an album. A few of their albums (or 'pieces') are a full 79 minutes, others are 40 to 60 minutes. They take 3-4 listenings to acquire the "taste" of them - but so does any great music. If you're a Metal fan I recommend starting with the album "Firon" - which actually does have individual (but related) songs, if you're a fusion fan, I'd recommend starting with "The Polar Bear Suite" or "Meditavolutions", if you just want a good first look at them, I'd recommend "Hephaestus" - which is my personal favorite. Don't listen to a 30 second online clip and pass judgment! Also beware that there is HUGE varience in their style from one album to the next - some very "metally" others mostly "fusiony"
Their albumns are on independent labels (non-RIAA) so they're a tad hard to find - though many of the albums are available on Amazon right now (I just checked). You can also order directly from Revelation Records (if you're getting one of Iceburn's albums on that label - which is most of them).
You may also want to check out the band "Engine Kid" - which is also on the Revelation label. They're kind of similar, but much noisier, if you like that sort of thing.
I've got several albums that have ~30 tracks on them, but they're really a single, continuous piece of music (you couldn't stand to listen to any one track by itself - they aren't individual songs, rather something like "movements" of a larger piece).
With this service, would I pay $30 for such an album? or $1 ? Right now I pay $10.99 for it to Revelation Records.
Some years back I worked for a company that had several large HP plotters. If you're not familiar with them, they are basically large ink-jet printers, capable of printing on sheets 48-inches wide and up to tens of feet long. They're obviously useful for printing CAD drawings, GIS maps, etc.. And highly-precise ones can cost big $$$ (precise meaning the scale of the drawing that ends up on the paper is accurate to less than .01" of distortion over the 48" width of the paper) - at the time at least, these plotters cost over $10k each.
Anyway, we grew out of our office space, and we therefore rented new space, and started moving. Myself and another college-age guy were in charge of moving all the computer equipment, since we were the "geeks". We took a couple of these plotters - which stand about 4 feet tall, 5 feet long, and only about 8 or 10 inches deep - and all of the mechanics are along the top - so they're tall and narrow, and very top-heavy - and loaded them into the back of a small pick-up truck, and headed down the road. Being a dumb 20-year old (and driving like one) we zipped around a corner, and both plotters lauched themselves over the side of the pickup-bed and bounced across the road. Needless to say, we nearly crapped our pants!
We stopped to pick the "garbage" up out of the street, so it would be out of the way of other cars - we assumed that the plotters were a complete loss, and that we were going to have a fun discussion with our boss. We placed them back in the pickup truck (including many broken-off pieces of their plastic cases, a few gears, belts, etc.)
Well, we got them into the new office space, set them up, and snapped back together all of the parts that we could. To our amazement, not only did they "power up", but they actually worked! And not only that, their callibration wasn't off by a hair! In my mind, this was absolutely amazing (and a god-send)!
Aside from looking ugly (cracked, scuffed, and holy cases), there was no problem, and (according to my former co-workers) they went on to work for several years.
I've never been a fan of Hewlett-Packard PCs, but their plotters and printers sure hold high respect in my mind.
...Wooops, I suck... here's a better link: Snowball Fight Shooting
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-a p-snowball-shooting0225feb25,0,2226125.story?coll= sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Does anyone know of an OSS license that includes some statement to the effect of: "This software is free for use, redistribution, and modification by any entity for any purpose, as long as any form of it is never used for military purposes." ???
Actually, if you take the time to read this fairly-lengthly article, the idea that an "inferiority complex" is the cause of the torment nerds are put through, is pretty well argued un-true... or at least he shows it to be only a minor contributor to the hell that is a nerd's life.
I'd suggest that _everyone_ should take the time to read this article as I did (for once!) - it has some very good and strongly made points - that everyone should understand in order to dispell the mythical causes of this situation, so we can all help improve it. He also includes some suggestions on how to fix things.
We do have standards / conventions that we ask everyone to follow, and as I said, most of us do. However, there are a few people who think they can work in a cave and make their own "black boxes" - regardless of how many times we try to educate them on the correct ways to do things - and they even nod their heads and say "yeah, I'll do it that way", but then don't.
I've seen people like this at other places I've worked too - the typical "cowboy coder". I think this is a prime example of the taking the idea "I can make my component a black box, and whatever I do won't affect anyone else" way too far.
Or maybe it's simply "I don't care what you think, I'm going to do everything my way" gone way to far... but even then, it's justified with the "black box" idea.
While there's definite benefits of treating software components as "black boxes", I agree with the asker of the question that there are some definite negative side-effects.
For instance, we've got a couple of developers that just don't know how to work with the team, and figure that they can go sit in their dark cubes and code away their component as a black box that with simply fit in with everybody elses stuff. Common problems that arise are:
- Different logging schemes
- Different configuration schemes
- Different admin-alerting mechanisms
- Components that don't match the design pattern that all other components follow - thus making them harder to understand.
- Components that expect some type of "global" data to exist, that simply doesn't.
These issues have led to no end of grief for those of us who do communicate with each other about what they're doing.Abstraction is great!, but you still need to make sure everything fits together correctly, and not just at the interface level.
I build a house in a new neighborhood, which was outfitted by Qwest with pure fiber to every home. At first I thought this was cool... but four years later, nobody's offering any type of service on it (other than dial-tone) and I can't get DSL because my line's not copper.
Fortunately, some local guys (about a mile away) have set up a 802.11b service, so I can get my Mbps... otherwise I'd be screwed!
These types of incidents may be good in the long run - if it makes law makers "wake up" to the problem of spam.
...We can only hope... Perhaps we could even start bombarding law makers with spam ourselves? - that would raise their awareness!
Does anybody know where documentation can be found on how "risk assessment" is done for this type of insurance?
This would be a very interesting way to gauge what software and network hardware an establishment should/should not be using.
It would be very interesting to see where Microsoft products fall in the mix.
Actually, when I said "rumors" was the way in which information spreads through society, it was both a joke and a real comment.
I think if you want to understand paterns in a society, you need to understand how rumors work - especially the way "truth" changes (loss of info, gain of false info, exageration of certain points of view, etc.) as it is passed from person to person.
Even in non-human groups, this is true - think about a herd of elk. If one elk standing on the outside thinks that it smells the presence of another animal in the area, it will snort and/or move into the herd a bit. This creates a ripple affect through the herd that may or may not trigger a stampede, based on the way the other elk interpret the actions of the first.
I'm not a psychologist or anthropologist or behavioralist, but I think it's obvious that there can be no reasonable study of how a society acts without having understanding of how perceptions of the same information varies from person to person, and of how it is therefore 'retransmited' to others.
Anyway, I'd have to say that most if not all of what I know is complete hear-say, including what school teachers have taught me.
How does information spread through society?
Rumors.
"Don't wish for a new enemy, you won't know what tricks are up its sleeves!"