Lets ignore the morally correct point that fighting fire with fire isn't actually legal.
Hmm.... That sounded a whole lot like you are using morality and legality as synonyms. That's far from the truth. In fact, in a surprisingly large number of situations, they are antonyms.
And I'm pretty sure the ACLU would be all over this type of thing if what you and others are saying.
And there's the hallmark of a true liberal. You don't have to think for yourself because "I'm sure someone else would have pointed this out if it were true.
Grow a fucking pair, be a man, do your own research.
Obviously, an uneducated person such as yourself, would marvel at the solutions to trivial problems (that you do understand) by people you see around you. This is not however all that there is in the world.
I'm kind of laughing at that, as will my coworkers when I pass this along to them on Monday morning.... Suggesting that someone who has the job title "Engineer" is actually smarter than we are? That's laughable, and provably so. In the last 3 jobs I've had, the "engineers" called up my department when they were stumped and needed help. And they were always really silly (stupid) questions.
Yeah, engineers are smart guys, right up until they have to deal with something that requires a little thinking.... That's where people like me come in....
Over the years, I've had the opportunity to know many, many people who would qualify as "rich". By that I mean having 5 or 10 million in the bank....
Not a single one of them accumulated that money through technology. It was all through mundane crap like payphones, video game machines, soda machines, condom machines in truck stop bathrooms, etc....
Point is that there are a LOT of rich people out there. But only the ones like Gates and Zuckerberg ever make the news. The vast majority of wealthy people got right doing things that no "smart" person would ever even consider, simply because it was just such a dumb idea.
At my advanced age, I've come to the conclusion that the key to getting rich is simply being too dumb to realize that your idea is stupid, and going for it anyway....
I find it a bit disingenuous that someone who dropped out of business school can generalize their experience to apply to college as a whole, particularly for people who work in engineering disciplines. I can think of several people I know who simply could not even work in the professions they're in without having gone to school, since there's no way to either gain that knowledge or to get licensed in that field without having done so.
Yes, those professions certainly do exist. I apologize for my lack of clarity in my comments.
Given that this is slashdot, and that I'm in IT, and have been for almost 30 years, and over that time have come to expect that most of the people I communicate with on slashdot are in a similar line of work, my comments have been focussed toward that audience.
Obviously, you can't become an doctor or a dentist without jumping through the academic hoops. There is no "self taught" path into certain professions.
But the truth is that IT work is pretty much nothing more than a trade these days. Whether your a sysadmin, a developer, or a networking guy, it's perfectly reasonable to "self-teach" all of that stuff. And in my experience, which is extensive, the self taught people are always, always, better than the people who "took a class". Or "have a degree".
The most skilled, smartest, most talented guy I've ever worked with spent 20 years as the manager of a lumber yard while he did this stuff as a hobby. The things he knows would humble anyone reading this.
Out of the three of you, I think the main point is this:
What do each of you still owe on your student loans?
Given that you landed in pretty much the same career position, at pretty similar ages (based on your own telling....), it seems to me that would be a pretty good guage of the value of a degree....
My suggestion would be that tradesmen not have licensing requirements at all. If I want to hire someone to wire up my kitchen when I remodel it, and I'm satisfied that he knows what he's doing, and I'm satisfied with the price that he's asking.... It's none of the state's goddamn business what sort of agreement we come to.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it works in the US, too....
You post an ad that requires:
1.) 25 years experience administering Windows Server 2012. 2.) 35 years experience administering RedHat Enterprise. 3.) 15 years experience performing open heart surgery. 4.) 20 years experience as an Air Force fighter pilot.
Once that ad fails to attract any "local talent", an Indian agency will send over a resume that magically satisfies all of the requirements, even the impossible ones, and "Bingo!", now you have your H1B indentured servant.
Based on your defensive posture, I can only draw two possible conclusions.
1.) You are currently a student enrolled in one of those ridiculously priced "leading universities" or.... 2.) You are a professor who either works for one of them, or earned your degree there.
After nearly 3 decades in this line of work, I have never met a coworker or colleague who considered their time in college to be anything other than a gigantic waste of huge sums of money. And that includes colleagues with Masters and Doctorates from "leading universities".
I know a few. Not many, but a few. I don't see them as exceptionally intelligent, they've just spent a lot of time and hard work getting educated about their field. I'll admit, the stuff they know, they know very well, and a great deal of it baffles me.
But to me "intelligence" is not measured by how well you know what you've had training for, it's measured by how well you can solve problems in areas where you've had no training at all. And based on that criteria, I have to give carpenters and mechanics very high scores.
I love it when liberals get butt hurt. They get SO catty.
It's fun, isn't it? This probably makes me an asshole, but sometimes when I'm bored I provoke them just so I can sit back and laugh at their response....
There's a 4th... that you actually do learn useful skills. I've taken classes in computer modeling & simulation, operations research, data mining, and machine learning. I use quite a bit of this all the time at work and I find it's been helpful to have been given a solid foundation in the subjects - this makes it much easier to explore and learn more on my own.
But, I've been taking these classes for fun and out of interest - I already have a masters degree, so the possibility of an additional degree doesn't help me much.
Yeah, of course you can learn things in college. Once you graduate and spend 10 years in the workforce, especially in a technology related field, everything you spent those ridiculous sums of money to learn will be outdated, obsolete knowledge. You'll have to keep learning on your own to keep up with the evolution of the technology in your field.
And if you can do that, you can probably spend $1000 at Barnes & Noble and learn every bit as much of the *important* stuff as you'll get from a $75,000 trip through a university.
You talk like someone who's been immersed in academia for too long.
Had you spent some time in the real world, perhaps you would have learned why, in many cases, real world examples are the most accurate predictor of what your experience will be.
Data and analysis are fine, right up to the point where they collide with reality. At that point, I'll take "anecdotal evidence" from someone who has been there and done it over predictions made by someone who knows a lot of fancy math any day of the week.
And THAT is a piece of wisdom that they won't teach you in college. You only pick that one up after a few decades of actually dealing with reality and noticing how little the world cares about what the data, analysis, and models say should happen.
Yes, you can go to college and become successful. What I'm saying is that it's not the college education that made you successful, as much as certain groups would like everyone to believe that. Success comes from skill. Either skill at a particular vocation, or skill at playing corporate politics. Neither of those skills can be mastered in a university setting, mastery comes from actually doing it in the real world.
Heh... I spent 3 1/2 years at a 2 year business school studying programming. Yeah, I partied a bit more than I probably should have. Never did bother to finish up those last 3 classes and get my degree, since I found a good job, which was the goal I had in mind in the first place.
Since then I've had a mostly successful career in IT. I say "mostly" because things got pretty rough these past few years during the recession, but I'm back on track now and making more than I ever have. During my career, I haven't used *one single thing* that I learned in college. Everything I've done that I actually got paid for has been self-taught. In fact, in my current role as a Linux sysadmin for a very large ISP, I spend all day working with things that didn't even exist until I had been out of college for a good 7 years. Even the coding I do, and I do plenty, doesn't benefit much from my programming classes. Aside from bash scripts, everything I write is OO, and that was only just starting to be talked about when I was in school. C++ didn't start getting taken seriously until several years after I was done.
Never, not even once, in over 25 years, has my lack of a college degree even been mentioned in a job interview.
College is valuable (potentially) in only 3 ways:
1.) To get your foot in the door for that first job. IMHO, getting that first job without a degree may be a lot of work, but far less work (and far cheaper) than a degree.
2.) To prove to people of a certain mindset that you "can play the game". It's proof that you can jump through hoops, even when they're ridiculous.
3.) The social aspect. This is the most valuable part. You have 4 years to start building your "network".
It has nothing to do with showing that you can do a job, because college does NOT prepare you to do "real world" work. For the most part, it doesn't even teach you useful skills. Maybe a few "general concepts" that you can apply, but that's about it.
just because you're a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, doesn't mean you're dumb. Likewise, going to college doesn't mean you're smart.
Some of the smartest people I know are tradesman. I don't know a lot of plumbers, but I know electricians, carpenters, and mechanics who are absolute geniuses.
And some of the biggest morons I know have PHDs. They may know a whole lot about their field of study, but that's ALL they know. College professors, in particular, seem to be very unaware of reality and completely lacking in common sense.
It's really strange that we need to come up with neuter terms for everything.
Is it really unexpected, though?
We live in a world where it's considered inappropriate to acknowledge the very real fact that not all people are exactly the same.
If you're talking about the one black guy in a group of 10 other white people, you can't do the obvious and convenient thing and just say "Check out the cool jacket the black guy is wearing". You're supposed to be "PC" and refer to him as "the third tallest guy in that group", or some similar silly bullshit.
I tried to be at least halfway PC for awhile, but it's really gotten the the point of silliness. Fuck it, I refuse to play along. There are different races. They do exist. Men and women are not identical. Sure, we may all be capable in the workplace, but there are still differences.
It would be much healthier if we could all acknowledge our differences and get on with more important things instead of being expected to pretend that human beings are all stamped from the same cookie cutter.
Pretending that reality is offensive is neither healthy nor productive.
OK, true enough, as far as I know there were never any 186 PC motherboards made, but there was an upgrade card. The card had the CPU and some supporting electronics, plugged into an ISA slot and then had an adapter on a ribbon cable that plugged into the original CPU socket in place of the 8086 CPU.
There was a slight performance improvement, but not much. But I got the card secondhand for cheap, so wasn't expecting much anyway.
Oh, yeah, that driver that managed to get a gigabit nic to run at a megabit, that was a Vista driver which explicitly did NOT support XP. And out of the 30 or so I downloaded and tried, it was the only one that gave even a sniff of network connectivity....
I did some contract work for a large international company about a year ago. For reasons I still cannot fathom, the company was still standardized on WinXP. (If things have gone according to plan, they have upgraded to Win7 by now).
One of the tasks I was assigned was setting up workstations for some engineers who were feeling the pain of the 3.5 GB memory limit, and getting all their software to run.
So here we are, 9 or so years ago since the release of XP64, and even with all updates applied it was still not a usable OS. Never mind the challenges of getting legacy 32-bit stuff to run, I got that handled. The deal breaker was that the only available driver that would even work with the very common nic couldn't seem to get it to run over 1 mbit.... Also, IE (a corporate requirement) really loved to crash for no discernable reason. In the end, it turned out that the only way to even come close to a usable system was to run 32-bit software, and it had to be set to "Run as Administrator". (Which, of course, defeats the entire purpose of running a 64-bit OS)
Maybe there's some magician out there that could have got it running well. I'm primarily a Linux guy, the last time I qualified as a Windows guru we still had "Program Manager" and hadn't yet heard of the Start button. But I do know a few things, including how to make use of Google, and I did a LOT of research on how to solve these nagging, idiotic problems. The conclusion I was left with is that 64-bit XP is simply an unfinished product. They slapped it together in a rush, and moved on to working on Vista before they could be troubled with fixing any of the broken shit.
I know all the google reader users are upset about its demise, but the fact is there just weren't very many of you at all. Sure, the ones that were out there are being very vocal right now, but that doesn't imply large numbers.
I tried, several times, to use google reader for exactly the purpose you describe. Each time I found that there are other tools, both on the PC and Android, that do the same in a better, less clumsy way.
I think anyone who is doing harm to another country, whether it is with a rifle and boots, or with a keyboard and an internet connection is fair game.
I agree with this, but it is still a matter of degrees. The level of retaliation should be at least somewhat in scale with the potential damage the hacker could do. Robbing some bank accounts is one thing, disabling the cooling system in a nuclear reactor is something else.
And, of course there's the problem if positively identifying the real attacker. But once that's done with certainty, then yes, they're every bit as fair game as someone charging at citizens with a rifle.
Personally, I think this one has an excellent chance of sticking around for the same reason that Voice is sticking around. It's a great feature for Android.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets ignore the morally correct point that fighting fire with fire isn't actually legal.
Hmm.... That sounded a whole lot like you are using morality and legality as synonyms. That's far from the truth. In fact, in a surprisingly large number of situations, they are antonyms.
And I'm pretty sure the ACLU would be all over this type of thing if what you and others are saying.
And there's the hallmark of a true liberal. You don't have to think for yourself because "I'm sure someone else would have pointed this out if it were true.
Grow a fucking pair, be a man, do your own research.
You disgust me.
Fast charging + wireless charging + ubiquitous charging stations
In other words, it would work great in an alternate universe.
Obviously, an uneducated person such as yourself, would marvel at the solutions to trivial problems (that you do understand) by people you see around you. This is not however all that there is in the world.
I'm kind of laughing at that, as will my coworkers when I pass this along to them on Monday morning.... Suggesting that someone who has the job title "Engineer" is actually smarter than we are? That's laughable, and provably so. In the last 3 jobs I've had, the "engineers" called up my department when they were stumped and needed help. And they were always really silly (stupid) questions.
Yeah, engineers are smart guys, right up until they have to deal with something that requires a little thinking.... That's where people like me come in....
First, an admission: I'm getting old....
Over the years, I've had the opportunity to know many, many people who would qualify as "rich". By that I mean having 5 or 10 million in the bank....
Not a single one of them accumulated that money through technology. It was all through mundane crap like payphones, video game machines, soda machines, condom machines in truck stop bathrooms, etc....
Point is that there are a LOT of rich people out there. But only the ones like Gates and Zuckerberg ever make the news. The vast majority of wealthy people got right doing things that no "smart" person would ever even consider, simply because it was just such a dumb idea.
At my advanced age, I've come to the conclusion that the key to getting rich is simply being too dumb to realize that your idea is stupid, and going for it anyway....
I find it a bit disingenuous that someone who dropped out of business school can generalize their experience to apply to college as a whole, particularly for people who work in engineering disciplines. I can think of several people I know who simply could not even work in the professions they're in without having gone to school, since there's no way to either gain that knowledge or to get licensed in that field without having done so.
Yes, those professions certainly do exist. I apologize for my lack of clarity in my comments.
Given that this is slashdot, and that I'm in IT, and have been for almost 30 years, and over that time have come to expect that most of the people I communicate with on slashdot are in a similar line of work, my comments have been focussed toward that audience.
Obviously, you can't become an doctor or a dentist without jumping through the academic hoops. There is no "self taught" path into certain professions.
But the truth is that IT work is pretty much nothing more than a trade these days. Whether your a sysadmin, a developer, or a networking guy, it's perfectly reasonable to "self-teach" all of that stuff. And in my experience, which is extensive, the self taught people are always, always, better than the people who "took a class". Or "have a degree".
The most skilled, smartest, most talented guy I've ever worked with spent 20 years as the manager of a lumber yard while he did this stuff as a hobby. The things he knows would humble anyone reading this.
Out of the three of you, I think the main point is this:
What do each of you still owe on your student loans?
Given that you landed in pretty much the same career position, at pretty similar ages (based on your own telling....), it seems to me that would be a pretty good guage of the value of a degree....
My suggestion would be that tradesmen not have licensing requirements at all. If I want to hire someone to wire up my kitchen when I remodel it, and I'm satisfied that he knows what he's doing, and I'm satisfied with the price that he's asking.... It's none of the state's goddamn business what sort of agreement we come to.
Yeah, that's pretty much how it works in the US, too....
You post an ad that requires:
1.) 25 years experience administering Windows Server 2012.
2.) 35 years experience administering RedHat Enterprise.
3.) 15 years experience performing open heart surgery.
4.) 20 years experience as an Air Force fighter pilot.
Once that ad fails to attract any "local talent", an Indian agency will send over a resume that magically satisfies all of the requirements, even the impossible ones, and "Bingo!", now you have your H1B indentured servant.
Since most employers don't care about a degree once you have a couple decades of experience, there's no reason to bother lying about it.
Based on your defensive posture, I can only draw two possible conclusions.
1.) You are currently a student enrolled in one of those ridiculously priced "leading universities"
or....
2.) You are a professor who either works for one of them, or earned your degree there.
After nearly 3 decades in this line of work, I have never met a coworker or colleague who considered their time in college to be anything other than a gigantic waste of huge sums of money. And that includes colleagues with Masters and Doctorates from "leading universities".
I know a few. Not many, but a few. I don't see them as exceptionally intelligent, they've just spent a lot of time and hard work getting educated about their field. I'll admit, the stuff they know, they know very well, and a great deal of it baffles me.
But to me "intelligence" is not measured by how well you know what you've had training for, it's measured by how well you can solve problems in areas where you've had no training at all. And based on that criteria, I have to give carpenters and mechanics very high scores.
I love it when liberals get butt hurt. They get SO catty.
It's fun, isn't it? This probably makes me an asshole, but sometimes when I'm bored I provoke them just so I can sit back and laugh at their response....
There's a 4th... that you actually do learn useful skills. I've taken classes in computer modeling & simulation, operations research, data mining, and machine learning. I use quite a bit of this all the time at work and I find it's been helpful to have been given a solid foundation in the subjects - this makes it much easier to explore and learn more on my own.
But, I've been taking these classes for fun and out of interest - I already have a masters degree, so the possibility of an additional degree doesn't help me much.
Yeah, of course you can learn things in college. Once you graduate and spend 10 years in the workforce, especially in a technology related field, everything you spent those ridiculous sums of money to learn will be outdated, obsolete knowledge. You'll have to keep learning on your own to keep up with the evolution of the technology in your field.
And if you can do that, you can probably spend $1000 at Barnes & Noble and learn every bit as much of the *important* stuff as you'll get from a $75,000 trip through a university.
Yeah.... I do know those differences.
You talk like someone who's been immersed in academia for too long.
Had you spent some time in the real world, perhaps you would have learned why, in many cases, real world examples are the most accurate predictor of what your experience will be.
Data and analysis are fine, right up to the point where they collide with reality. At that point, I'll take "anecdotal evidence" from someone who has been there and done it over predictions made by someone who knows a lot of fancy math any day of the week.
And THAT is a piece of wisdom that they won't teach you in college. You only pick that one up after a few decades of actually dealing with reality and noticing how little the world cares about what the data, analysis, and models say should happen.
Yes, you can go to college and become successful. What I'm saying is that it's not the college education that made you successful, as much as certain groups would like everyone to believe that. Success comes from skill. Either skill at a particular vocation, or skill at playing corporate politics. Neither of those skills can be mastered in a university setting, mastery comes from actually doing it in the real world.
Heh... I spent 3 1/2 years at a 2 year business school studying programming. Yeah, I partied a bit more than I probably should have. Never did bother to finish up those last 3 classes and get my degree, since I found a good job, which was the goal I had in mind in the first place.
Since then I've had a mostly successful career in IT. I say "mostly" because things got pretty rough these past few years during the recession, but I'm back on track now and making more than I ever have. During my career, I haven't used *one single thing* that I learned in college. Everything I've done that I actually got paid for has been self-taught. In fact, in my current role as a Linux sysadmin for a very large ISP, I spend all day working with things that didn't even exist until I had been out of college for a good 7 years. Even the coding I do, and I do plenty, doesn't benefit much from my programming classes. Aside from bash scripts, everything I write is OO, and that was only just starting to be talked about when I was in school. C++ didn't start getting taken seriously until several years after I was done.
Never, not even once, in over 25 years, has my lack of a college degree even been mentioned in a job interview.
College is valuable (potentially) in only 3 ways:
1.) To get your foot in the door for that first job. IMHO, getting that first job without a degree may be a lot of work, but far less work (and far cheaper) than a degree.
2.) To prove to people of a certain mindset that you "can play the game". It's proof that you can jump through hoops, even when they're ridiculous.
3.) The social aspect. This is the most valuable part. You have 4 years to start building your "network".
It has nothing to do with showing that you can do a job, because college does NOT prepare you to do "real world" work. For the most part, it doesn't even teach you useful skills. Maybe a few "general concepts" that you can apply, but that's about it.
just because you're a plumber, or a carpenter, or an electrician, doesn't mean you're dumb. Likewise, going to college doesn't mean you're smart.
Some of the smartest people I know are tradesman. I don't know a lot of plumbers, but I know electricians, carpenters, and mechanics who are absolute geniuses.
And some of the biggest morons I know have PHDs. They may know a whole lot about their field of study, but that's ALL they know. College professors, in particular, seem to be very unaware of reality and completely lacking in common sense.
It's really strange that we need to come up with neuter terms for everything.
Is it really unexpected, though?
We live in a world where it's considered inappropriate to acknowledge the very real fact that not all people are exactly the same.
If you're talking about the one black guy in a group of 10 other white people, you can't do the obvious and convenient thing and just say "Check out the cool jacket the black guy is wearing". You're supposed to be "PC" and refer to him as "the third tallest guy in that group", or some similar silly bullshit.
I tried to be at least halfway PC for awhile, but it's really gotten the the point of silliness. Fuck it, I refuse to play along. There are different races. They do exist. Men and women are not identical. Sure, we may all be capable in the workplace, but there are still differences.
It would be much healthier if we could all acknowledge our differences and get on with more important things instead of being expected to pretend that human beings are all stamped from the same cookie cutter.
Pretending that reality is offensive is neither healthy nor productive.
Actually, I had a PC running an 80186.
OK, true enough, as far as I know there were never any 186 PC motherboards made, but there was an upgrade card. The card had the CPU and some supporting electronics, plugged into an ISA slot and then had an adapter on a ribbon cable that plugged into the original CPU socket in place of the 8086 CPU.
There was a slight performance improvement, but not much. But I got the card secondhand for cheap, so wasn't expecting much anyway.
Oh, yeah, that driver that managed to get a gigabit nic to run at a megabit, that was a Vista driver which explicitly did NOT support XP. And out of the 30 or so I downloaded and tried, it was the only one that gave even a sniff of network connectivity....
I did some contract work for a large international company about a year ago. For reasons I still cannot fathom, the company was still standardized on WinXP. (If things have gone according to plan, they have upgraded to Win7 by now).
One of the tasks I was assigned was setting up workstations for some engineers who were feeling the pain of the 3.5 GB memory limit, and getting all their software to run.
So here we are, 9 or so years ago since the release of XP64, and even with all updates applied it was still not a usable OS. Never mind the challenges of getting legacy 32-bit stuff to run, I got that handled. The deal breaker was that the only available driver that would even work with the very common nic couldn't seem to get it to run over 1 mbit.... Also, IE (a corporate requirement) really loved to crash for no discernable reason. In the end, it turned out that the only way to even come close to a usable system was to run 32-bit software, and it had to be set to "Run as Administrator". (Which, of course, defeats the entire purpose of running a 64-bit OS)
Maybe there's some magician out there that could have got it running well. I'm primarily a Linux guy, the last time I qualified as a Windows guru we still had "Program Manager" and hadn't yet heard of the Start button. But I do know a few things, including how to make use of Google, and I did a LOT of research on how to solve these nagging, idiotic problems. The conclusion I was left with is that 64-bit XP is simply an unfinished product. They slapped it together in a rush, and moved on to working on Vista before they could be troubled with fixing any of the broken shit.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I know all the google reader users are upset about its demise, but the fact is there just weren't very many of you at all. Sure, the ones that were out there are being very vocal right now, but that doesn't imply large numbers.
I tried, several times, to use google reader for exactly the purpose you describe. Each time I found that there are other tools, both on the PC and Android, that do the same in a better, less clumsy way.
Then after said removal they can account for their crimes.
Yeah, 'cuz that's never full of controversy.
(Gitmo....)
I think anyone who is doing harm to another country, whether it is with a rifle and boots, or with a keyboard and an internet connection is fair game.
I agree with this, but it is still a matter of degrees. The level of retaliation should be at least somewhat in scale with the potential damage the hacker could do. Robbing some bank accounts is one thing, disabling the cooling system in a nuclear reactor is something else.
And, of course there's the problem if positively identifying the real attacker. But once that's done with certainty, then yes, they're every bit as fair game as someone charging at citizens with a rifle.
Personally, I think this one has an excellent chance of sticking around for the same reason that Voice is sticking around. It's a great feature for Android.