Re:Is it any wonder I didn't get laid in Universit
on
Women Leaving I.T.
·
· Score: 1
As a woman, few things are funnier than hearing (or reading) what slashdot nerds think we want.
When I was in school (in a CS department, no less), I didn't like the guys because of a general inexperience with dealing with girls. It's college. EVERY GUY needs to get laid or they'll explode. That's part of being in the age group.
I don't think this is a troll at all, it is a real valid point.
Sorry, but I have trouble respecting a guy who is obviously putting his love of this game ahead of making sure his family is legitimatly supported. It's selfish and irresponsible. Someone who chooses this as a valid means of living is really living in the now. What about the future of this game? What will he do when people get bored playing it? Will he just jump into the next MMOPRPG game and start from scratch? Wouldn't there be a bit of a lag time then when he isn't earning any income while the next big thing catches on and he is getting enough experience in the game to generate these items? What does he do for insurance for his family? Is he making enough money to plan for college for his daughter?
If he was a single, childless guy or a college student, I'd commend his entrepeunurial spirit. If his wife had an excellent job and he wanted to do this, that would make sense, but I didn't see anything in that article to indicate she even works. When you are the sole provider for your family, that sometimes requires you to put your hobbies aside so you can take care of your responsibilities first.
Wow. Hate to be the one to break it to you, but I promise that you will look back on this "busy semester" in ten years and think "Boy, did I ever have it easy back when I was in college.". Trust me - I did, and I had a schedule that sounds very similar to yours.
College can be stressful, and it can seem like you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders, but take a step back, breathe deeply, and enjoy. There is time to enjoy things and experience non-academic and non-work related activities. It is all a matter of time management.
Given the types to ride the bus
That's an example of what I mean by you thinking only losers ride public transport.
There is a bit of difference between not wanting to ride public transportation because you think people on it are "losers" and not wanting to ride public transportation because you are concerned about your personal safety.
When I first moved to Chicago, I was a little concerned about the public transportation, mainly about my safety. The fact that someone sitting next to me on the bus may be a loser never entered my mind. It didn't take me long to get over the safety concerns, because a car just isn't practical. The chore of walking to my car (probably parked 4 or 5 blocks away from my apartment), sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, driving down streets that are too narrow and always have people double parked, fighting with cabs and/or buses, then arriving at my destination only to begin the never-ending search for parking is very overwhelming compared to paying your $1.50 and taking the L to where you need to get to. My decision to do so has nothing to do with how I perceive my fellow passengers, just as most people I know who don't like to take public transportation do not base that decision on how cool they may seem if they are seen on a bus.
I use public transportation every single day. I also use my car pretty frequently too. It doesn't have to be one or the other. There are times when public transportation is not feasible, due to my destination or the safety concerns of taking it at certain hours. But I seriously doubt that there are that many people out there refusing to take a public transportation system that is available to them because they may be perceived as a loser.
But maybe we have to start looking at how cities are designed, so people can live closer to work.
Most American cities never had this issue when they were designed and built 100-150 years ago. Suburbia simply did not exist until the GIs came back from WWII and the following baby boom necessitated more housing options. You can design practical cities all you want, but there will always be someone who finds they like living in once community while working in a different one. The only way to correct the transportation issues between the two is to force people to work within the community where they live or to live within the community where they work. Neither one is an attractive solution to most Americans.
Ford currently has in the neighborhood 95,000 employees in the US. Yet they are paying pensions and health-care costs for and additional 107,000 retirees and their dependents. And Ford is actually in a better position than rival GM for pension payouts. I have some stats that a business school professor gave to me, but I don't want to post them until I can find sources to substantiate them.
The steel industry has already felt the pressure of this. I don't know if it was the reason for it's collapse, but it certainly contributed. It sucks for all involved - the company and the shareholders, the people who didn't save anything else and rely 100% on a pension that disappears after a company bankrupts, and especially the consumer, who has to foot the bill.
When I'm 65, the only thing I know I'll have for certain is the money I saved myself.
That's interesting, because I'm pretty sure I get "International Call" popping up on mine. I only get an occasional european call, but I can't honestly recall how it pops up. I usually am aware when someone is going to be calling me internationally and am expecting the call. If it comes from Canada, I get something along the lines of "Ontario Call". I agree, it would be nice if there was some universal standard on this. I doubt many telemarkets would be calling me from Europe, so I would be willing to pick up something that said "German Call" or what have you.
Caller ID has been working 100% for me for the past few years, and it only costs $1 a month. It is quite simple - if you show up as "Out of Area" or "Unknown Caller", there is not possibly anything that we have to talk about. You know who I am when I pick up the phone - I need to have the same information on you before I determine if I choose to communicate with you or not.
I'll sign up, but I doubt that it will work too well. I did a little bit of telemarketing work while in college for some beer money, and let's just say that the place I worked for would not give two shits about this fine. I think they really stretched the boundaries of the law, and they'll probably find a way to do so with this. Enforcement will be difficult. If they call me even though I'm on the list, they are banking on the fact that I don't care enough to follow up on it. And if one call gets through to you once every six months, are you really going to be enraged enough to file a complaint? And once you do file the complaint, you know it will be caught up in beauracratic BS for quite some time before any action comes out of it.
I think we had the same professor. He wouldn't accept anything if it wasn't in nroff or troff.
I got so used to it that I forgot who I was writing up an assignment for one night when I was working on an English Lit term paper. I'm sure the grad assistant is still having nightmares about that file I emailed her.
I just keep coming back to this option. Nothing beats it. Of course, when I was in college 10 years ago, I would go back to my dorm room and transfer all my pen and paper notes to a computer. I recently have gone back to school part time to get a Master's, and after one session of trying to take notes on my laptop, I returned to the old reliable.
And if Fosters is available where you are, STAY AWAY FROM IT. They call it an "Australian" beer, I dont know why, nobody here drinks the stuff;)
I've heard this over and over. I had one Aussie describe it as "the Blatz of Australia". I've brewed my own beer for almost 7 or 8 years, and while I consider myself somewhat of a beer snob, I still enjoy a good Fosters now and then, as long as it's draft, not that crap in the oil can. I don't drink it because it magically makes me feel Australian, although I'm sure that's what they are going for with that lame ass ad campaign that should have been put to bed 10 years ago. It is just a simple, easy to drink lager with a bit more bite and flavor than domestic US brands like Bud or Miller. Often times, a small neighborhood pub will only offer a couple of things on tap, Fosters being the most 'exotic' choice. It's a much better alternative.
Corona is supposedly the shit beer of Mexico, but we drink that like fish in the US too. I think it comes down to the sad but true fact that other countries' crap beers still blow the mass market US beers out of the water.
Exactly. Drinking Guiness fast does not lead to making you any more sick than chugging a Bud. Simply an Urban Myth. I've done it a few times to prove it can be done. If a small woman can chug a guiness and be none the worse for the wear, there is no reason everybody else can as well. Try it sometime. I think some of you will be surprised when you don't fall to the floor puking.
However, the act of chugging a stout will punish me severly the next day, even if I drank nothing else. I can't say the same for a lighter ale or lager. I don't know if I would classify how I feel as a hangover or not, but I am sure friendly with the porcelin god.
Roger that. One of my biggest hobbies is playing bar games. But you are right - I don't play foosball for the opportunity to beat a machine. I do it because it is something fun to do with friends when you may or may not be intoxicated.
Chess is a thinking game. The idea of a machine being able to out think or out strategize a human fosters competition, so that's where the excitement in that lies. Foosball is simply hand eye coordination. I have no doubts that a machine will eventually be able to out manuever me in hitting a ball with a little plastic man on a rod. It his hardly the technical coup of a computer beating one of the best chess players in the world.
Excellent choice. This is a great project that is full of a wealth of wonderful literature choices. I highly recommend Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It's a pretty quick read, but full of thought provoking ideas of modernism and imperialism.
If you are looking for some decent non-fiction, philisophical reads, take a look at Immanuel Kant. His works are not currently in project gutenberg, but can be downloaded here - http://books.mirror.org/gb.kant.html.
Of course, if you are still stuck on needing a good geek read, you can always download the first 100,000 prime numbers from project gutenberg and memorize away.
Good job for your girlfriend. When I was an undergrad, I had a roommate who was majoring in art history and she worked harder than ANYONE I knew going for a more technical or scientific degree, including myself. I would have never been able to handle some of the work she had.
It takes all types to make the world go around. I'm growing bored of the elitest attitude that so many geeks sport twoards people who move towards a fine arts or a liberal arts field. Lazy and geek are not mutually exclusive just as it is possible for people who aren't in an engineering field to actually be *gasp* intelligent. Sorry for the rant. It's not directed at anyone specifically, just an overall attitude I've seen lately.
It is possible to stay on topic while adding more variables to the argument. Next time I will use more complete sentences to keep everyone focused.
The point I was making is simply this - if they cheated or did not cheat on the benchmarks, does it really make a difference? For some, sure. But for me and probably a good chunk of people out there, the slight extra edge that NVIDIA may or may not have given themselves in this benchmark isn't going to be enough to make me run out and purchase the new geforce over the radeon unless I wanted to particpate in the "I have the fastest graphics card available as of 3:00 this afternoon" pissing contest. The few extra FPS nvidia can boast by rigging this benchmark will not help me become a better gamer, nor will it help most people become better gamers. So what's the point of becoming enraged over something like this? Even if you are one of the lucky few who can tell the difference between a great card and a slightly less great card, has this really altered your opinion so much of your choice of video cards?
You make an excellent point. I am tired of spending way too much money trying to reach that holy grail of gaming. The slight improvement in hardware isn't going to change the fact that I'm only a mediocre gamer. The best gamers are going to kick my ass regardless of what hardware they use. I don't need to spend $400 every six months to be reminded of that.
I really didn't get the impression from the article that he was referring to real hackers. Instead, he was using the term to describe people who love to code.
This is sort of a personal pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people use this term to describe their writing code or tweaking a kernel or something. Since the term "hacker" has a negative conotation associated with it by society, it is hard to explain to a non-geek what you are doing. If I tell my parents that I spent the weekend hacking a linux kernel, I then have to spend an hour explaining that I'm not doing anything wrong and I am not going to be calling them from jail.
I'm all for utilizing technology to simplify and improve our quality of life, but come on. Walk your ass out to the curb and raise your arm over your head. If you rather spend 10 minutes fucking around with your GPS just so you can find the 2 cabbies who are geeky enough to use it, have fun. More power to you. But as far as I'm concerned, it's the equivalent of coding 10,000 lines just to produce "Hello, World".
Why is an entry level job like support desk considered aiming lower for a college grad? Sure, it isn't glamorous work, but not so long ago, that's what many college grads had to do - work crap helpdesk jobs for a couple of months to prove themselves. It's not like you came from a $100k+ a year job with 10 years of experience or anything. In a year, maybe it'll be aiming lower. For a recent grad, it's called paying your dues.
He more than developed the technology, he developed the weapon itself. If he didn't design the V2, those people killed by V2s wouldn't have been killed by V2s. (simple enough?),
So are you saying that the engineer who develops the car is responsible for the death that results when someone drives it drunk or runs a red light? This can go back and forth as a discussion about who is responsible - the maker of the weapon or the people who use the weapon.
It is an argument that does not translate well to your original point and just manages to highlight it's major flaw: von Braun developed a v2 out of his loyalty to his country, just as many of our troops in Iraq may or may not be for the war effort, but it is their duty to serve the country. Mitnick, however, committed his crimes for his own benefit. There was no loyalty to anyone but himself when he acted out. He may know more about security than anyone out there, but you can count me in the group of people who wouldn't trust a convicted burglar to come over and setup a security system for my house.
Also, if you want to be critical of von Braun, you have your pick of very compelling arguments, including his use of slave labor to build his v2, and his lack of remorse for doing so. Both of which are a lot more moving than the argument of the v2 killing a lot of people.
If you bend over backwards for a poorly-paying job, then the client will expect everyone to bend over for peanuts, and if you don't do it, they'll find someone dumber to do it. There is a market value for consultant work and people have to stick to it, otherwise cheap labor will ruin the industry for all of us.
No, it is attitudes like this that is ruining the industry for all of us. You are there to support the customer - not the other way around. It is techies who are getting too big for their britches and forgetting that there is always someone who knows more and always someone willing to do a little more for a little less that are ruining it for all of us.
The two Indian engineers will be able to support many more people and relieve them from poverty whereas the American engineer would probably waste a large part of his money on the unnecessary things in life. ::snipped:: Long live capitalism!
Capitalism doesn't care what the American engineer spends his money on. The unnecessary things in life are what makes capitalism flourish.
Slashdot Mirror
As a woman, few things are funnier than hearing (or reading) what slashdot nerds think we want.
When I was in school (in a CS department, no less), I didn't like the guys because of a general inexperience with dealing with girls. It's college. EVERY GUY needs to get laid or they'll explode. That's part of being in the age group.
Sorry, but I have trouble respecting a guy who is obviously putting his love of this game ahead of making sure his family is legitimatly supported. It's selfish and irresponsible. Someone who chooses this as a valid means of living is really living in the now. What about the future of this game? What will he do when people get bored playing it? Will he just jump into the next MMOPRPG game and start from scratch? Wouldn't there be a bit of a lag time then when he isn't earning any income while the next big thing catches on and he is getting enough experience in the game to generate these items? What does he do for insurance for his family? Is he making enough money to plan for college for his daughter?
If he was a single, childless guy or a college student, I'd commend his entrepeunurial spirit. If his wife had an excellent job and he wanted to do this, that would make sense, but I didn't see anything in that article to indicate she even works. When you are the sole provider for your family, that sometimes requires you to put your hobbies aside so you can take care of your responsibilities first.
College can be stressful, and it can seem like you've got the weight of the world on your shoulders, but take a step back, breathe deeply, and enjoy. There is time to enjoy things and experience non-academic and non-work related activities. It is all a matter of time management.
That's an example of what I mean by you thinking only losers ride public transport.
There is a bit of difference between not wanting to ride public transportation because you think people on it are "losers" and not wanting to ride public transportation because you are concerned about your personal safety.
When I first moved to Chicago, I was a little concerned about the public transportation, mainly about my safety. The fact that someone sitting next to me on the bus may be a loser never entered my mind. It didn't take me long to get over the safety concerns, because a car just isn't practical. The chore of walking to my car (probably parked 4 or 5 blocks away from my apartment), sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, driving down streets that are too narrow and always have people double parked, fighting with cabs and/or buses, then arriving at my destination only to begin the never-ending search for parking is very overwhelming compared to paying your $1.50 and taking the L to where you need to get to. My decision to do so has nothing to do with how I perceive my fellow passengers, just as most people I know who don't like to take public transportation do not base that decision on how cool they may seem if they are seen on a bus.
I use public transportation every single day. I also use my car pretty frequently too. It doesn't have to be one or the other. There are times when public transportation is not feasible, due to my destination or the safety concerns of taking it at certain hours. But I seriously doubt that there are that many people out there refusing to take a public transportation system that is available to them because they may be perceived as a loser.
But maybe we have to start looking at how cities are designed, so people can live closer to work.
Most American cities never had this issue when they were designed and built 100-150 years ago. Suburbia simply did not exist until the GIs came back from WWII and the following baby boom necessitated more housing options. You can design practical cities all you want, but there will always be someone who finds they like living in once community while working in a different one. The only way to correct the transportation issues between the two is to force people to work within the community where they live or to live within the community where they work. Neither one is an attractive solution to most Americans.
Ford currently has in the neighborhood 95,000 employees in the US. Yet they are paying pensions and health-care costs for and additional 107,000 retirees and their dependents. And Ford is actually in a better position than rival GM for pension payouts. I have some stats that a business school professor gave to me, but I don't want to post them until I can find sources to substantiate them.
The steel industry has already felt the pressure of this. I don't know if it was the reason for it's collapse, but it certainly contributed. It sucks for all involved - the company and the shareholders, the people who didn't save anything else and rely 100% on a pension that disappears after a company bankrupts, and especially the consumer, who has to foot the bill.
When I'm 65, the only thing I know I'll have for certain is the money I saved myself.
That's interesting, because I'm pretty sure I get "International Call" popping up on mine. I only get an occasional european call, but I can't honestly recall how it pops up. I usually am aware when someone is going to be calling me internationally and am expecting the call. If it comes from Canada, I get something along the lines of "Ontario Call". I agree, it would be nice if there was some universal standard on this. I doubt many telemarkets would be calling me from Europe, so I would be willing to pick up something that said "German Call" or what have you.
I'll sign up, but I doubt that it will work too well. I did a little bit of telemarketing work while in college for some beer money, and let's just say that the place I worked for would not give two shits about this fine. I think they really stretched the boundaries of the law, and they'll probably find a way to do so with this. Enforcement will be difficult. If they call me even though I'm on the list, they are banking on the fact that I don't care enough to follow up on it. And if one call gets through to you once every six months, are you really going to be enraged enough to file a complaint? And once you do file the complaint, you know it will be caught up in beauracratic BS for quite some time before any action comes out of it.
I got so used to it that I forgot who I was writing up an assignment for one night when I was working on an English Lit term paper. I'm sure the grad assistant is still having nightmares about that file I emailed her.
good times....good times......
I just keep coming back to this option. Nothing beats it. Of course, when I was in college 10 years ago, I would go back to my dorm room and transfer all my pen and paper notes to a computer. I recently have gone back to school part time to get a Master's, and after one session of trying to take notes on my laptop, I returned to the old reliable.
I've heard this over and over. I had one Aussie describe it as "the Blatz of Australia". I've brewed my own beer for almost 7 or 8 years, and while I consider myself somewhat of a beer snob, I still enjoy a good Fosters now and then, as long as it's draft, not that crap in the oil can. I don't drink it because it magically makes me feel Australian, although I'm sure that's what they are going for with that lame ass ad campaign that should have been put to bed 10 years ago. It is just a simple, easy to drink lager with a bit more bite and flavor than domestic US brands like Bud or Miller. Often times, a small neighborhood pub will only offer a couple of things on tap, Fosters being the most 'exotic' choice. It's a much better alternative.
Corona is supposedly the shit beer of Mexico, but we drink that like fish in the US too. I think it comes down to the sad but true fact that other countries' crap beers still blow the mass market US beers out of the water.
However, the act of chugging a stout will punish me severly the next day, even if I drank nothing else. I can't say the same for a lighter ale or lager. I don't know if I would classify how I feel as a hangover or not, but I am sure friendly with the porcelin god.
Chess is a thinking game. The idea of a machine being able to out think or out strategize a human fosters competition, so that's where the excitement in that lies. Foosball is simply hand eye coordination. I have no doubts that a machine will eventually be able to out manuever me in hitting a ball with a little plastic man on a rod. It his hardly the technical coup of a computer beating one of the best chess players in the world.
If you are looking for some decent non-fiction, philisophical reads, take a look at Immanuel Kant. His works are not currently in project gutenberg, but can be downloaded here - http://books.mirror.org/gb.kant.html.
Of course, if you are still stuck on needing a good geek read, you can always download the first 100,000 prime numbers from project gutenberg and memorize away.
It takes all types to make the world go around. I'm growing bored of the elitest attitude that so many geeks sport twoards people who move towards a fine arts or a liberal arts field. Lazy and geek are not mutually exclusive just as it is possible for people who aren't in an engineering field to actually be *gasp* intelligent. Sorry for the rant. It's not directed at anyone specifically, just an overall attitude I've seen lately.
The point I was making is simply this - if they cheated or did not cheat on the benchmarks, does it really make a difference? For some, sure. But for me and probably a good chunk of people out there, the slight extra edge that NVIDIA may or may not have given themselves in this benchmark isn't going to be enough to make me run out and purchase the new geforce over the radeon unless I wanted to particpate in the "I have the fastest graphics card available as of 3:00 this afternoon" pissing contest. The few extra FPS nvidia can boast by rigging this benchmark will not help me become a better gamer, nor will it help most people become better gamers. So what's the point of becoming enraged over something like this? Even if you are one of the lucky few who can tell the difference between a great card and a slightly less great card, has this really altered your opinion so much of your choice of video cards?
You make an excellent point. I am tired of spending way too much money trying to reach that holy grail of gaming. The slight improvement in hardware isn't going to change the fact that I'm only a mediocre gamer. The best gamers are going to kick my ass regardless of what hardware they use. I don't need to spend $400 every six months to be reminded of that.
This is sort of a personal pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people use this term to describe their writing code or tweaking a kernel or something. Since the term "hacker" has a negative conotation associated with it by society, it is hard to explain to a non-geek what you are doing. If I tell my parents that I spent the weekend hacking a linux kernel, I then have to spend an hour explaining that I'm not doing anything wrong and I am not going to be calling them from jail.
I'm all for utilizing technology to simplify and improve our quality of life, but come on. Walk your ass out to the curb and raise your arm over your head. If you rather spend 10 minutes fucking around with your GPS just so you can find the 2 cabbies who are geeky enough to use it, have fun. More power to you. But as far as I'm concerned, it's the equivalent of coding 10,000 lines just to produce "Hello, World".
I think you are forgetting Dreamcast. Now and forever, the best console ever.
Why is an entry level job like support desk considered aiming lower for a college grad? Sure, it isn't glamorous work, but not so long ago, that's what many college grads had to do - work crap helpdesk jobs for a couple of months to prove themselves. It's not like you came from a $100k+ a year job with 10 years of experience or anything. In a year, maybe it'll be aiming lower. For a recent grad, it's called paying your dues.
He more than developed the technology, he developed the weapon itself. If he didn't design the V2, those people killed by V2s wouldn't have been killed by V2s. (simple enough?),
So are you saying that the engineer who develops the car is responsible for the death that results when someone drives it drunk or runs a red light? This can go back and forth as a discussion about who is responsible - the maker of the weapon or the people who use the weapon.
It is an argument that does not translate well to your original point and just manages to highlight it's major flaw: von Braun developed a v2 out of his loyalty to his country, just as many of our troops in Iraq may or may not be for the war effort, but it is their duty to serve the country. Mitnick, however, committed his crimes for his own benefit. There was no loyalty to anyone but himself when he acted out. He may know more about security than anyone out there, but you can count me in the group of people who wouldn't trust a convicted burglar to come over and setup a security system for my house.
Also, if you want to be critical of von Braun, you have your pick of very compelling arguments, including his use of slave labor to build his v2, and his lack of remorse for doing so. Both of which are a lot more moving than the argument of the v2 killing a lot of people.
If you bend over backwards for a poorly-paying job, then the client will expect everyone to bend over for peanuts, and if you don't do it, they'll find someone dumber to do it. There is a market value for consultant work and people have to stick to it, otherwise cheap labor will ruin the industry for all of us.
No, it is attitudes like this that is ruining the industry for all of us. You are there to support the customer - not the other way around. It is techies who are getting too big for their britches and forgetting that there is always someone who knows more and always someone willing to do a little more for a little less that are ruining it for all of us.
Ok, maybe show the occasional Furturama EP now and then.
Already done. Channel 296 at 11:00pm Eastern Sunday through Thursday. If Murdoch tries to take this from me, he can bite my shiney metal ass.
if Dell will send those sharp-as-a-knife interns to pick them up.
The two Indian engineers will be able to support many more people and relieve them from poverty whereas the American engineer would probably waste a large part of his money on the unnecessary things in life.
::snipped::
Long live capitalism!
Capitalism doesn't care what the American engineer spends his money on. The unnecessary things in life are what makes capitalism flourish.