Let me get my Tony Robbins on and say: You have the power to make it how you want it -- your employment is a business deal between you and your employer. And you don't have to be a slave, make it better for yourself, because no one else can do it quite like you, and no one else will do it for you, but you.
I'm hired as a "web developer" by title, and last November, my team lost our sysadmin (he quit -- well actually got a job that paid twice as much or so he claimed). We work with production systems which must serve our customers 24/7, so that guy played a pretty critical role in our department. The company decided to not hire another one, and use a consultant. Seeing I was the only guy on the team who had experience with both production systems and linux, I became the de facto guy to look after the systems. That meant carrying a pager and being called on to work on systems at their beck and call, not to mention I'm still around available as a developer. In other words: I have written enough crappy code that half my life is dedicated to maintaining it, and that world doesn't stop spinning. (that and I work for a smaller company so, having tasks bleed is part for a course)
My job description didn't include anything about carrying a pager sending me dreaded Nagios messages in the middle of the night, nor did I intend for it to... When I had started the job 2.5 years before I made sure to critically evaluate what the other developers on the team had to say about their hours, and made it clear with my boss what my role would be. At first, I was pretty steamed, my hire letter specifically said that I "could schedule no appointment to discuss compensation", and I was expected to do it. I felt punished for competence: You are able to do this, so you must do this as well -- without recompense.
But I turned it around. I started saving extra money to sock away for a rainy day -- specifically to save up to the point where I could tell my boss with authority: to make a deal or I have to hit the road. You can do the same thing: save money, or find another job offer.
Then I broke my contract, asked directly for a raise, and said that my job description had gone severely out of bounds from where it started and that I needed to be justly compensated for it and would like to have my job title, job description and financial compensation adjusted to match. It took 3 months for the company to come back to me. I had to reiterate this to my boss 3 times as well, once a month I did. I had formulated my plans for negotiating, but, I had no chance to negotiate. They came back to me and said "congratulations you got the biggest raise, percent wise in company history! but our HR consulting firm shows that web developers don't make a lot of money..." hand shake, end of story -- I wasn't satisfied.
I went home, did my homework, compared what the HR consulting firm had to say with what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ( www.bls.gov ) had to say compared, and compared my roles with what they had listed (and stats work the same way they always do: I have my biases and clearly I saw that I was worth more than they said!). I went back to my boss the next morning and told him straight up: "Your HR consulting firm, and my HR consulting firm, don't match up... The thing is: I do actually want my job, and I do want to help and I want the deal to be good for both parties. I think I can offer you a better deal as a consultant". Maybe you can't afford to do that, but, I am a single guy and I would've wanted to.
There was no way they wanted that, I had proved my worth, AND I had shown that I put a value on myself and my time. They wanted to have me as a regular salaried employee -- I can only guess their reasons, but I'm sure it has to do with being ready and able to take on new tasks instead of getting a bill for everything they ask you to do [however a power negotiating tool, no?].
So in short: I got what I wanted, more money and now I flex my time and my place at my job (what he couldn'
That, and a code example. You send us a code example after the phone interview, and before the in person interview. Basically, we're looking to see that you "don't do anything blatantly jack-ass". Also helps when you comment your code.
Then, as part of the interview process, we have a few questions we ask you to write essays for. One is based on design of a product we already built, one is based on design of a product we're currently building, and third... Is actually a riddle. My project manager came up with this idea, his thinking is "Let's see what kind of inductive/deductive reasoning this guy will use". Sounds like a good idea.
Turns out? All this crap is worthless. Case in point... We have a guy fresh out of college (no experience in the trenches) who we interview, and later get hired. His code is quite beautiful at a glance (not breaking down every line to profile it or anything), plenty of comments, nice style, etc. His essays are OK, they're passable.
But, he sits down, and we've got -multitude- problems. Let's start with one example: We're web developers, and in the first couple weeks, he needed to modify UI. In this case, he needed to use a few images for something. What kind of images did he put into our repo for versioning? BITMAPS! No, no, not a proper raster file-types like a PNG or a JPG, a bitmap -- BMP. Just cause Professor Dinglethorpe requires you to comment and indent your code properly doesn't mean you have a clue what really happens when you get down to production.
But, the real problem? COMMUNICATION! The kid just can't freakin' communicate with us. If he were bad AND would take the time to talk to us about what he's working on, we could stand it. We'd know what was happening when he did jacked up stuff in the code, and we later have to maintain his mess.
However, he doesn't take time to communicate with anyone. He's too busy leaving important meetings to take phone calls from his ultra insecure live-in girlfriend who calls him 18 times a day (for such important things as "Should we make lentil soup tonight?" and "What are we going to name this cat?"), reading I can has cheezburger and the failblog. Meanwhile, he slips under the radar. Our company plays to your competency level. So while I have taken on huge projects, become a stand-in for our system administrator, and the liason between customer service and information services (a pretty important role, they buy the important bugs -first-) -- this kid is getting assigned tasks like "We need to put hyphens between these words per the marketing dept". Good thing we get paid the same. Nice to get paid the same as the guy who's mastered reading I can has cheezburger. He can has cheeseburger, and I'll be the one to shove it up his... nose.
So, don't believe a technical test is going to determine if the next guy you work with is legitimate, and competent. If he can't communicate, and he has no work ethic -- frankly, you're screwed.
You know to treat a shell script differently than a PNG, right? Of course! Before I read about MBTI, I didn't know that PEOPLE could be different too -- I just never thought about it!
What I liked about this article was the view on Introverts. I'm an extravert, who before learning more about MBTI -- Thought that introversion was too, some anti-social kind of tendency. However, after learning more: Some of the most socially savvy people that I know are introverts. Me and my extravert cohorts are very social -- however, that's mitigated by the fact that we're also great at shooting our mouthes off, and speaking far too early.
Certain things used to really get me riled up: Someone not saying hi when I walked into a room, someone being critical of your actions in a group project, someone choosing the cold hard decision in stead of the warm fuzzy decision. Then, I read up on MBTI and I went, "EUREKA! -That's- why they see it differently".
Also, it really helped me see what ticked me off about some people (which in some cases -- was similarities to my own personality type) and helped me see the -great- parts about them, and to communicate using those parts, and really help them shine, and help my perception of them.
Back to Instant messaging, here's me, and take it at what it's worth: 1. I'm ENFP. 2. I -hate- AIM (sometimes). I feel -so- committed to talking on it, it's like once it's open, I have to talk to 17 people, have a full conversion from "Yo sup" to full convo, to full closure. It's just too... Real. 3. I -love- IRC (all the time). I get lots and lots and lots of communication, I can jump from channel to channel and topic to topic. I meet people I love, people I hate. I can jump on, I can jump off. I can end 15 convos at once by saying "bbiab!" and I can start 30 convos at once by saying "I'm not sure if I want to use VIM or EMacs".
So... With that said, while I liked the article a lot... I don't think that the E/I preference is the only one that comes into play when it comes to online communication. For example, from my perception, IRC has this "Perceiver" quality that I love, lots and lots of communication -- without a lot of commitment.
Also, a couple books to recommend that got me sparked into "type watching": "Type Talk" by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen "The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language" by Paul D. Tieger,Barbara Barron-Tieger (note, these are introductory books to the topic)
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$ MBTI ~/home/slashdotreader: ENFP (Extravert iNtuitive Feeler Perceiver) An idealist who's focus is on making other people happy, turns work into fun and includes others, tends to take a lot personally
$ MBTI/home/mybrother/home/mybrother: INTJ (Introvert iNtuitive Thinker Judger) Always gets the big picture, a conceptualizing master-mind personality, quite pensive and also brilliant, focuses less on the feeling of the group at large
$ MBTI/home/my_manager/home/myboss: ISTJ (Introvert Sensing Thinker Judger) The traditionalist who's bound to "do the right thing", has the details down pat before opening their mouth.
The worst security? Man, it might be easier to say the best security. At a cellphone store with my brother, he looks at a blackberry and says "...it's overkill, but, probably handy if you need to get online all the time, check email etc". So, I take my PSP out of my pocket, and in about 15 seconds, I show him gmail. Every idiot seems to have unsecured wireless.
The best security ever, was with my same brother. I woke up early while staying at his place, and wanted to check my mail. I dipped outside to see what networks I could find. Everything was secured but one, and it seemed their ISP was down. So I said to my brother: "Only one jerk in this neighborhood didn't secure their wireless... and they have a flakey ISP, so I couldn't get online", he says: "Oh, that's me".
Of course, from checking my mail on the road, there are now items in my sent folder with such subjects as "Do you have the north korea nuclear salesman's number?" and "Cheap anthrax mailing services" and "Increase your volume by 6000%"
If you happen to be someone in the porn industry, and want to get past this -- couldn't you just slice up the image (e.g. make a 4x4 grid of the image, and have it appear together on a given page) ? I bet that would stop this in it's tracks.
Maybe they banned a game that has to do with graffiti, because...
A. The people who have something worth putting graffiti on, are tax payers
B. If the property is not owned directly by tax payers, it's owned by the government (e.g. bridges)
I'm not saying it's right to ban the game, I'm just thinking that's possibly why they care more about a game with graffiti than one with violence.
I once worked for a company, we were using DB2 EEE. We were developing an application for proof of concept, and... Installing DB2 (across multiple machines for paralell processing) was a little bit like having my teeth pulled (i'd say "compared to MySQL" but, i've never used mysql in paralell -- if you can [i'm not sure]). But when that was done, I was quite impressed with DB2. We were though, working with very large databases. I really became quite a fan of it, and my eyes opened wide when i saw this topic headline.
Since then I've stopped "working for the man" and am a self employed developer. What's my database of choice? MySQL. I wasn't involved in paying for DB2 EEE, but, I did hear a rumor around the water cooler that it costed $20k / Year / Processor. Which, as a small business person is quite a bit out of reach. After my good experiences with DB2, I would consider giving this a whirl. In fact when i first saw this topic I thought "Yes! I get DB2 for free!" then I started thinking "Holy guacamole... reworking code for days/weeks on end to interface with a different DB system". Plus... I don't work with really huge databases anymore.
I once heard an urban legend that MySQL is faster than DB2 with queries on tables that are less than 250k rows. If that's the case... It's really a rare table for me these days that has 250k+ rows (and when I do have that many records in a table, it's usually not data that i need access to quickly, but for historical puposes).
I will however, give it a try with some small (more-or-less-for-fun) projects. Being self employed, I'm not so worried about having the specific "resume points" from using it, but... More or less curious to give it another try.
One of the most impressive additions to DB2 that I know of is the DB2 Spatial Extender, which "[adds to DB2] a set of advanced spatial data types that represent geometries such as points, lines, and polygons and many functions and features that interoperate with those new data types." I believe it's marketed towards and tailored to GIS people, but I had fun experimenting with it while developing a project that needed to store 3d cartesian coordinates.
Brilliant idea!!! I remember having a GM (specifically for Rifts, a Palladium RPG) in my paper RPG days who decided he'd take our character sheets and not let us see them. We had turned the game into such a hack and slash nightmare that he got sick of mastering the game for us. The second he took our character sheets and we stopped worrying about comparing our numbers... We started to ROLE PLAY so much more than role dice for 10 hours at a time and kicking tires on how much SDC (structural damage capacity for those not familiar with Palladium games) our armor could take.
I can't explain the left vs. right brain espects of it, but... The author and artist Betty Edwards can and does in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (which, imho is a great read for any accomplished artists, and also any person who'd like to improve their skills in drawing from observation)
I think some good additional reading would be the essay "I, Pencil". It is an essay about capitalism, but... I definitely think it applies here.
Milton Friedman had to say about this essay:
Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."
People cooperate without coersion on open source projects. There are a variety of reasons why they may do so, one of which is certainly... Economics.
Speaking of the UK/OZ/NZ "maths", I have an Aussie client who refers to any mathematics I do (for him) as "sums" (doesn't matter if it's addition or what). Granted, he's not a mathematician (neither am, i'm a programmer and rely on mathworld to remind me of all the math I didn't pay attention to in school while busy oogling over girls I couldn't get with), but he is quite a shrewd businessman.
Speaking of school and math... I was in highschool less than 10 years ago, and we were allowed to use graphing/programmable calculators for our math classes (including tests). I consistantly failed math tests. Not because I would get the answers wrong, quite the contrary -- I would get all the answers right. Using the programming capabilities of my calculator, I would write small applications to essentially do my homework and complete tests with speed. The teachers failed me due to the fact that I didn't show my work. Then treated me like a wise guy when I started to print out the application code prior to tests and hand it in along with the completed tests. Oddly, it turns out... I do math and programming every day in the "real world", so it's too bad that they didn't embrace the method I had for completing my tasks. (Later on I found out that, other kids would use the programming cabilities of their calculators just to make crib sheets for science courses... so I really think it was a good way to apply my calculator in class in the long run, and it was overlooked by my teachers).
Also... Another point is, if you're a street smart person who maybe doesn't directly use mathematics... You DO rely on others for your mathematics needs at some point. If it's just the cash register at 7/11 or if you hire a team of programmers, somehow, somewhere you DO rely on math and it's a part of your everyday life. I believe mathematics were developed by mankind out of sheer necessity and to describe things in everyday life ("How many units of grain will we need for the winter given a population of X people?", "How far is it from point A to point B?", etc etc) and you are doing some amount of math in your head throughout the day.
Lastly... Turns out that the word "sums" is being used properly by my client according to merriam-webster, check out Sums, defintition 5b
I think they overlook many of the positive benefits of edutainment software. The main benefit that I see is that it might encourage a child to -want- to learn, instead of being forced to learn. A lot of education seems to force feed you the information instead of having you DISCOVER the information. I think children should "Learn how to learn" as much or more than they should be spoon fed information.
Also... I think it would've been more accurate if they had studied more than one program. Other/. programmers will agree: Not all programs are created equal.
I once heard an anecdotal tale... Of an accountant, who had his wife balance the household checkbook (as a favor, so he wouldn't have to do the household paperwork as well as the paperwork from the house). 20 Years after she had been balancing the checkbook... The husband found out that she had been rounding to whole dollar amounts!!!
In a hurried rush, he went through their records, and rebalanced the checkbook... After 20 years of rounding the difference he found: $.07 in their favor:)
"Meet The Feebles" co-written and directed by Peter Jackson, now -that- is imaginative.... And there's only one way to describe it if you haven't seen it -- Muppets on crack.
Meet the Feebles is also a commentary on evolution. Just as the Beetles evolved from bubble-gum music to psychadelic music, muppets evolved from polite entertainment for children into coke sniffing, prostitute banging adult entertainers:)
I have a feeling if there was an easy way to pay them $.50 to read an issue (just like dropping a few quarters into a "newspaper machine"), they'd give us more reasons to keep coming back, and to keep reading their content (and to get us to go through -more- content to see their advertisements).
I know plenty of online newspapers/magazines have a way to pay for a subscription, but... I like the "newspaper machine" model -- I don't get a paper daily cause i like to pick and choose between papers.
The other great thing about the physical "newspaper machines" is that... You can pay the $.X and grab out more than one paper. Which is especially handy if you need to cover up cat puke, miscellaneous liquid spills & pizza dropped onto the floor, so you can get back to the slinging code.
Warning: Blender may cause you to be violent!!
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
...If you participate in 'Blender Battles', which you should if you're interested in blender.
And don't forget the elysiun forums, which are in invaluable source of blender knowledge, and... Also another place where you can put up your dukes in some friendly blender competition.
While I'm at it, don't forget #smc (stands for "speed modeling competitions") on freenode.
Re:Volunteerism and private enterprise win again
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 0
Private enterprise == socialism
(if you consider private to mean "owned by everyone, with your name on the paperwork")
Private enterprise == facsicm
(if you consider private to mean "owned by the government, with your name on the paperwork")
"Morfik offers ground-breaking Javascript Synthesis Technology ('JST') that allows developers to use a visual design environment and a high-level language of their choice to create applications comprised purely of HTML and Javascript"
Is this really going to sell developers on the concept? I develop web applications, and I don't know about the rest of my peer developers, but... I actually go to a length to AVOID javascript, don't you? Javascript tends to just gives me more cross browser issues. My paradigm is -- "do it all on the server side".
On the flip side of the coin there are some interesting contemporary uses of javascript / DHTML (e.g. gmail).
But, I choose to avoid JS... There's the old saying "Developing an application takes only 10% of a project's time" (The other 90% is maintenance if you weren't sure;) Or possibly 20% kicking tires with other geeks, 10% cursing the clients, and 60% maintenance), i feel with JS it's 1%.
I notice everyone calling it "cursing"... Is it just where I live, but... Mostly people I know call it "swearing".
According to m-w.com, they can be used in an equivolent fashing, but... to me...
A "curse" is something you get in an MMORPG, a "swear" is something like fuck or cunt or fiddlesticks. (I live in the northeast usa jftr, a nd of course jk on the fiddlesticks, ha)
I learned in highschool that the typical current set of swear words are older english, words that were used before the french influence on our language...
Consider that swear words are often quick "grunt" type sounds compared to the "flowery" (if-you-will) french/latin sounding words...
A quick m-w.com lookup shows that most of the words are derived from middle english, and other words such as fuck are derived from northern european languages, such as fuck (sweeden/holland).
I also believe (although I do not have a source readily available) when france overtook the british courts -- they mandated the use of french in the courts, which I believe to be related to contemporary swearing and the phrase "Excuse my french".
Agreed, i can't live without firefox (even the minor security flaws still outweigh how terrible MSIE is [in my experience]). If they don't add some fuel to the fire......how can the developers afford more delectable microwaveable frozen foods & delightful caffeinated to keep slinging away?
Time to throw these guys a bone! *thumbs up*
Slashdot Mirror
Let me get my Tony Robbins on and say: You have the power to make it how you want it -- your employment is a business deal between you and your employer. And you don't have to be a slave, make it better for yourself, because no one else can do it quite like you, and no one else will do it for you, but you.
I'm hired as a "web developer" by title, and last November, my team lost our sysadmin (he quit -- well actually got a job that paid twice as much or so he claimed). We work with production systems which must serve our customers 24/7, so that guy played a pretty critical role in our department. The company decided to not hire another one, and use a consultant. Seeing I was the only guy on the team who had experience with both production systems and linux, I became the de facto guy to look after the systems. That meant carrying a pager and being called on to work on systems at their beck and call, not to mention I'm still around available as a developer. In other words: I have written enough crappy code that half my life is dedicated to maintaining it, and that world doesn't stop spinning. (that and I work for a smaller company so, having tasks bleed is part for a course)
My job description didn't include anything about carrying a pager sending me dreaded Nagios messages in the middle of the night, nor did I intend for it to... When I had started the job 2.5 years before I made sure to critically evaluate what the other developers on the team had to say about their hours, and made it clear with my boss what my role would be. At first, I was pretty steamed, my hire letter specifically said that I "could schedule no appointment to discuss compensation", and I was expected to do it. I felt punished for competence: You are able to do this, so you must do this as well -- without recompense.
But I turned it around. I started saving extra money to sock away for a rainy day -- specifically to save up to the point where I could tell my boss with authority: to make a deal or I have to hit the road. You can do the same thing: save money, or find another job offer.
Then I broke my contract, asked directly for a raise, and said that my job description had gone severely out of bounds from where it started and that I needed to be justly compensated for it and would like to have my job title, job description and financial compensation adjusted to match. It took 3 months for the company to come back to me. I had to reiterate this to my boss 3 times as well, once a month I did. I had formulated my plans for negotiating, but, I had no chance to negotiate. They came back to me and said "congratulations you got the biggest raise, percent wise in company history! but our HR consulting firm shows that web developers don't make a lot of money..." hand shake, end of story -- I wasn't satisfied.
I went home, did my homework, compared what the HR consulting firm had to say with what the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics ( www.bls.gov ) had to say compared, and compared my roles with what they had listed (and stats work the same way they always do: I have my biases and clearly I saw that I was worth more than they said!). I went back to my boss the next morning and told him straight up: "Your HR consulting firm, and my HR consulting firm, don't match up... The thing is: I do actually want my job, and I do want to help and I want the deal to be good for both parties. I think I can offer you a better deal as a consultant". Maybe you can't afford to do that, but, I am a single guy and I would've wanted to.
There was no way they wanted that, I had proved my worth, AND I had shown that I put a value on myself and my time. They wanted to have me as a regular salaried employee -- I can only guess their reasons, but I'm sure it has to do with being ready and able to take on new tasks instead of getting a bill for everything they ask you to do [however a power negotiating tool, no?].
So in short: I got what I wanted, more money and now I flex my time and my place at my job (what he couldn'
That, and a code example. You send us a code example after the phone interview, and before the in person interview. Basically, we're looking to see that you "don't do anything blatantly jack-ass". Also helps when you comment your code.
Then, as part of the interview process, we have a few questions we ask you to write essays for. One is based on design of a product we already built, one is based on design of a product we're currently building, and third... Is actually a riddle. My project manager came up with this idea, his thinking is "Let's see what kind of inductive/deductive reasoning this guy will use". Sounds like a good idea.
Turns out? All this crap is worthless. Case in point... We have a guy fresh out of college (no experience in the trenches) who we interview, and later get hired. His code is quite beautiful at a glance (not breaking down every line to profile it or anything), plenty of comments, nice style, etc. His essays are OK, they're passable.
But, he sits down, and we've got -multitude- problems. Let's start with one example: We're web developers, and in the first couple weeks, he needed to modify UI. In this case, he needed to use a few images for something. What kind of images did he put into our repo for versioning? BITMAPS! No, no, not a proper raster file-types like a PNG or a JPG, a bitmap -- BMP. Just cause Professor Dinglethorpe requires you to comment and indent your code properly doesn't mean you have a clue what really happens when you get down to production.
But, the real problem? COMMUNICATION! The kid just can't freakin' communicate with us. If he were bad AND would take the time to talk to us about what he's working on, we could stand it. We'd know what was happening when he did jacked up stuff in the code, and we later have to maintain his mess.
However, he doesn't take time to communicate with anyone. He's too busy leaving important meetings to take phone calls from his ultra insecure live-in girlfriend who calls him 18 times a day (for such important things as "Should we make lentil soup tonight?" and "What are we going to name this cat?"), reading I can has cheezburger and the failblog. Meanwhile, he slips under the radar. Our company plays to your competency level. So while I have taken on huge projects, become a stand-in for our system administrator, and the liason between customer service and information services (a pretty important role, they buy the important bugs -first-) -- this kid is getting assigned tasks like "We need to put hyphens between these words per the marketing dept". Good thing we get paid the same. Nice to get paid the same as the guy who's mastered reading I can has cheezburger. He can has cheeseburger, and I'll be the one to shove it up his... nose.
So, don't believe a technical test is going to determine if the next guy you work with is legitimate, and competent. If he can't communicate, and he has no work ethic -- frankly, you're screwed.
$ file daily.sh
/home/slashdotreader/www/images/spacer.gif: PNG image data, 1x1, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
/home/slashdotreader: ENFP (Extravert iNtuitive Feeler Perceiver) An idealist who's focus is on making other people happy, turns work into fun and includes others, tends to take a lot personally
/home/mybrother /home/mybrother: INTJ (Introvert iNtuitive Thinker Judger) Always gets the big picture, a conceptualizing master-mind personality, quite pensive and also brilliant, focuses less on the feeling of the group at large
/home/my_manager /home/myboss: ISTJ (Introvert Sensing Thinker Judger) The traditionalist who's bound to "do the right thing", has the details down pat before opening their mouth.
daily.sh: Bourne-Again shell script text executable
$ file ~/www/images/spacer.png
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You know to treat a shell script differently than a PNG, right? Of course! Before I read about MBTI, I didn't know that PEOPLE could be different too -- I just never thought about it!
What I liked about this article was the view on Introverts. I'm an extravert, who before learning more about MBTI -- Thought that introversion was too, some anti-social kind of tendency. However, after learning more: Some of the most socially savvy people that I know are introverts. Me and my extravert cohorts are very social -- however, that's mitigated by the fact that we're also great at shooting our mouthes off, and speaking far too early.
Certain things used to really get me riled up: Someone not saying hi when I walked into a room, someone being critical of your actions in a group project, someone choosing the cold hard decision in stead of the warm fuzzy decision. Then, I read up on MBTI and I went, "EUREKA! -That's- why they see it differently".
Also, it really helped me see what ticked me off about some people (which in some cases -- was similarities to my own personality type) and helped me see the -great- parts about them, and to communicate using those parts, and really help them shine, and help my perception of them.
Back to Instant messaging, here's me, and take it at what it's worth:
1. I'm ENFP.
2. I -hate- AIM (sometimes). I feel -so- committed to talking on it, it's like once it's open, I have to talk to 17 people, have a full conversion from "Yo sup" to full convo, to full closure. It's just too... Real.
3. I -love- IRC (all the time). I get lots and lots and lots of communication, I can jump from channel to channel and topic to topic. I meet people I love, people I hate. I can jump on, I can jump off. I can end 15 convos at once by saying "bbiab!" and I can start 30 convos at once by saying "I'm not sure if I want to use VIM or EMacs".
So... With that said, while I liked the article a lot... I don't think that the E/I preference is the only one that comes into play when it comes to online communication. For example, from my perception, IRC has this "Perceiver" quality that I love, lots and lots of communication -- without a lot of commitment.
Also, a couple books to recommend that got me sparked into "type watching":
"Type Talk" by Otto Kroeger and Janet M. Thuesen
"The Art of Speed Reading People: How to Size People Up and Speak Their Language" by Paul D. Tieger,Barbara Barron-Tieger
(note, these are introductory books to the topic)
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$ MBTI ~
$ MBTI
$ MBTI
The worst security? Man, it might be easier to say the best security. At a cellphone store with my brother, he looks at a blackberry and says "...it's overkill, but, probably handy if you need to get online all the time, check email etc". So, I take my PSP out of my pocket, and in about 15 seconds, I show him gmail. Every idiot seems to have unsecured wireless.
The best security ever, was with my same brother. I woke up early while staying at his place, and wanted to check my mail. I dipped outside to see what networks I could find. Everything was secured but one, and it seemed their ISP was down. So I said to my brother: "Only one jerk in this neighborhood didn't secure their wireless... and they have a flakey ISP, so I couldn't get online", he says: "Oh, that's me".
Of course, from checking my mail on the road, there are now items in my sent folder with such subjects as "Do you have the north korea nuclear salesman's number?" and "Cheap anthrax mailing services" and "Increase your volume by 6000%"
A convenience store is privately owned -- how can they get away with having a camera in there?
The double standard is unfair, if the government can do it, so should we.
-Signed, Concerned NH-ite (who'd -still- choose living here over any other state)
If you happen to be someone in the porn industry, and want to get past this -- couldn't you just slice up the image (e.g. make a 4x4 grid of the image, and have it appear together on a given page) ? I bet that would stop this in it's tracks.
Maybe they banned a game that has to do with graffiti, because...
A. The people who have something worth putting graffiti on, are tax payers
B. If the property is not owned directly by tax payers, it's owned by the government (e.g. bridges)
I'm not saying it's right to ban the game, I'm just thinking that's possibly why they care more about a game with graffiti than one with violence.
I once worked for a company, we were using DB2 EEE. We were developing an application for proof of concept, and... Installing DB2 (across multiple machines for paralell processing) was a little bit like having my teeth pulled (i'd say "compared to MySQL" but, i've never used mysql in paralell -- if you can [i'm not sure]). But when that was done, I was quite impressed with DB2. We were though, working with very large databases. I really became quite a fan of it, and my eyes opened wide when i saw this topic headline.
Since then I've stopped "working for the man" and am a self employed developer. What's my database of choice? MySQL. I wasn't involved in paying for DB2 EEE, but, I did hear a rumor around the water cooler that it costed $20k / Year / Processor. Which, as a small business person is quite a bit out of reach. After my good experiences with DB2, I would consider giving this a whirl. In fact when i first saw this topic I thought "Yes! I get DB2 for free!" then I started thinking "Holy guacamole... reworking code for days/weeks on end to interface with a different DB system". Plus... I don't work with really huge databases anymore.
I once heard an urban legend that MySQL is faster than DB2 with queries on tables that are less than 250k rows. If that's the case... It's really a rare table for me these days that has 250k+ rows (and when I do have that many records in a table, it's usually not data that i need access to quickly, but for historical puposes).
I will however, give it a try with some small (more-or-less-for-fun) projects. Being self employed, I'm not so worried about having the specific "resume points" from using it, but... More or less curious to give it another try.
One of the most impressive additions to DB2 that I know of is the DB2 Spatial Extender, which "[adds to DB2] a set of advanced spatial data types that represent geometries such as points, lines, and polygons and many functions and features that interoperate with those new data types." I believe it's marketed towards and tailored to GIS people, but I had fun experimenting with it while developing a project that needed to store 3d cartesian coordinates.
Brilliant idea!!! I remember having a GM (specifically for Rifts, a Palladium RPG) in my paper RPG days who decided he'd take our character sheets and not let us see them. We had turned the game into such a hack and slash nightmare that he got sick of mastering the game for us. The second he took our character sheets and we stopped worrying about comparing our numbers... We started to ROLE PLAY so much more than role dice for 10 hours at a time and kicking tires on how much SDC (structural damage capacity for those not familiar with Palladium games) our armor could take.
I can't explain the left vs. right brain espects of it, but... The author and artist Betty Edwards can and does in her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (which, imho is a great read for any accomplished artists, and also any person who'd like to improve their skills in drawing from observation)
I think some good additional reading would be the essay "I, Pencil". It is an essay about capitalism, but... I definitely think it applies here.
Milton Friedman had to say about this essay:
Leonard Read's delightful story, "I, Pencil," has become a classic, and deservedly so. I know of no other piece of literature that so succinctly, persuasively, and effectively illustrates the meaning of both Adam Smith's invisible hand--the possibility of cooperation without coercion--and Friedrich Hayek's emphasis on the importance of dispersed knowledge and the role of the price system in communicating information that "will make the individuals do the desirable things without anyone having to tell them what to do."
People cooperate without coersion on open source projects. There are a variety of reasons why they may do so, one of which is certainly... Economics.
Speaking of the UK/OZ/NZ "maths", I have an Aussie client who refers to any mathematics I do (for him) as "sums" (doesn't matter if it's addition or what). Granted, he's not a mathematician (neither am, i'm a programmer and rely on mathworld to remind me of all the math I didn't pay attention to in school while busy oogling over girls I couldn't get with), but he is quite a shrewd businessman.
Speaking of school and math... I was in highschool less than 10 years ago, and we were allowed to use graphing/programmable calculators for our math classes (including tests). I consistantly failed math tests. Not because I would get the answers wrong, quite the contrary -- I would get all the answers right. Using the programming capabilities of my calculator, I would write small applications to essentially do my homework and complete tests with speed. The teachers failed me due to the fact that I didn't show my work. Then treated me like a wise guy when I started to print out the application code prior to tests and hand it in along with the completed tests. Oddly, it turns out... I do math and programming every day in the "real world", so it's too bad that they didn't embrace the method I had for completing my tasks. (Later on I found out that, other kids would use the programming cabilities of their calculators just to make crib sheets for science courses... so I really think it was a good way to apply my calculator in class in the long run, and it was overlooked by my teachers).
Also... Another point is, if you're a street smart person who maybe doesn't directly use mathematics... You DO rely on others for your mathematics needs at some point. If it's just the cash register at 7/11 or if you hire a team of programmers, somehow, somewhere you DO rely on math and it's a part of your everyday life. I believe mathematics were developed by mankind out of sheer necessity and to describe things in everyday life ("How many units of grain will we need for the winter given a population of X people?", "How far is it from point A to point B?", etc etc) and you are doing some amount of math in your head throughout the day.
Lastly... Turns out that the word "sums" is being used properly by my client according to merriam-webster, check out Sums, defintition 5b
Umm.... the forgot to ask those smokers what other computer issues make them light up a butt. Being an IT smoker let me start to list them...
while (true) {
print "users";
}
I think they overlook many of the positive benefits of edutainment software. The main benefit that I see is that it might encourage a child to -want- to learn, instead of being forced to learn. A lot of education seems to force feed you the information instead of having you DISCOVER the information. I think children should "Learn how to learn" as much or more than they should be spoon fed information.
/. programmers will agree: Not all programs are created equal.
Also... I think it would've been more accurate if they had studied more than one program. Other
I once heard an anecdotal tale... Of an accountant, who had his wife balance the household checkbook (as a favor, so he wouldn't have to do the household paperwork as well as the paperwork from the house). 20 Years after she had been balancing the checkbook... The husband found out that she had been rounding to whole dollar amounts!!!
:)
In a hurried rush, he went through their records, and rebalanced the checkbook... After 20 years of rounding the difference he found: $.07 in their favor
Peter Jackson is from New Zealand :)
"Meet The Feebles" co-written and directed by Peter Jackson, now -that- is imaginative.... And there's only one way to describe it if you haven't seen it -- Muppets on crack.
:)
Meet the Feebles is also a commentary on evolution. Just as the Beetles evolved from bubble-gum music to psychadelic music, muppets evolved from polite entertainment for children into coke sniffing, prostitute banging adult entertainers
I have a feeling if there was an easy way to pay them $.50 to read an issue (just like dropping a few quarters into a "newspaper machine"), they'd give us more reasons to keep coming back, and to keep reading their content (and to get us to go through -more- content to see their advertisements).
I know plenty of online newspapers/magazines have a way to pay for a subscription, but... I like the "newspaper machine" model -- I don't get a paper daily cause i like to pick and choose between papers.
The other great thing about the physical "newspaper machines" is that... You can pay the $.X and grab out more than one paper. Which is especially handy if you need to cover up cat puke, miscellaneous liquid spills & pizza dropped onto the floor, so you can get back to the slinging code.
...If you participate in 'Blender Battles', which you should if you're interested in blender.
And don't forget the elysiun forums, which are in invaluable source of blender knowledge, and... Also another place where you can put up your dukes in some friendly blender competition.
While I'm at it, don't forget #smc (stands for "speed modeling competitions") on freenode.
Private enterprise == socialism (if you consider private to mean "owned by everyone, with your name on the paperwork") Private enterprise == facsicm (if you consider private to mean "owned by the government, with your name on the paperwork")
Looks easy to replace the batteries... If you carry a soldering iron around with you :)
It's a.... cluster fudge!
From morfik.com (on the index, first blurb):
;) Or possibly 20% kicking tires with other geeks, 10% cursing the clients, and 60% maintenance), i feel with JS it's 1%.
"Morfik offers ground-breaking Javascript Synthesis Technology ('JST') that allows developers to use a visual design environment and a high-level language of their choice to create applications comprised purely of HTML and Javascript"
Is this really going to sell developers on the concept? I develop web applications, and I don't know about the rest of my peer developers, but... I actually go to a length to AVOID javascript, don't you? Javascript tends to just gives me more cross browser issues. My paradigm is -- "do it all on the server side".
On the flip side of the coin there are some interesting contemporary uses of javascript / DHTML (e.g. gmail).
But, I choose to avoid JS... There's the old saying "Developing an application takes only 10% of a project's time" (The other 90% is maintenance if you weren't sure
I notice everyone calling it "cursing"... Is it just where I live, but... Mostly people I know call it "swearing".
According to m-w.com, they can be used in an equivolent fashing, but... to me...
A "curse" is something you get in an MMORPG, a "swear" is something like fuck or cunt or fiddlesticks. (I live in the northeast usa jftr, a nd of course jk on the fiddlesticks, ha)
I learned in highschool that the typical current set of swear words are older english, words that were used before the french influence on our language...
Consider that swear words are often quick "grunt" type sounds compared to the "flowery" (if-you-will) french/latin sounding words...
Obscene - Mostly Polite
Fuck - Copulate
Shit - Defecate
Piss - Urinate
Dick,cock - Penis
Cunt - Vagina
A quick m-w.com lookup shows that most of the words are derived from middle english, and other words such as fuck are derived from northern european languages, such as fuck (sweeden/holland).
I also believe (although I do not have a source readily available) when france overtook the british courts -- they mandated the use of french in the courts, which I believe to be related to contemporary swearing and the phrase "Excuse my french".
"What the copulate?" (polite french for WTF)
Agreed, i can't live without firefox (even the minor security flaws still outweigh how terrible MSIE is [in my experience]). If they don't add some fuel to the fire... ...how can the developers afford more delectable microwaveable frozen foods & delightful caffeinated to keep slinging away?
Time to throw these guys a bone! *thumbs up*