My first job was a janitor at a pre-school. I had to clean the restrooms for the potty training kids. Believe it or not, the little girls weren't all THAT much better than they boys. Needless to say, I don't mind being in IT, really...
There ARE worse jobs out there. IT people just have more time to bitch about it.;)
I thought the screen was the part on the iPods that broke most often... If that's true, (and it was in my case) I really hope they have better design to go with that larger screen.
"They did not have the confidence that proprietary [applications] would allow them to be interoperable with other organizations..."
To think I would live to see that line. What an age we live in. And to think that there are now people posting on/. who will argue about it. Where's my time machine when I need it?
Well, if you really want to see the price drop dramatically, just buy one. As my good friend Murphy will attest, you'll see a dramatic price drop the day after your "30-day-we'll-beat-any-price" guarentee runs out.
There are a few posts here to the affect that "optimization is limited completely by the original machines." When I was doing GAs, we would select the top few performers, and:
1. "Breed" them with each other.
2. "Breed" them with totally random data.
No matter how well your select your original machines, there's practically always room for improvement (otherwise, why use a GA in the first place?) Unless you are REALLY good at selecting your first few machines, the random data really is powerfull. Case in point, after a few million itterations, a GA designed to play Othello randomly generated the top performer. It was completely different than any other machine but capable of consistantly beating (granted by a very small margin) both other machines and people.
Unions aren't designed for the benefit of the whole only the benefit of their members. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing if your in the union but if your not, good luck finding a job.
Let's face it. If the tech people had a union, that you could either choose to join or not, then there would people on both sides - those who joined and those who did not. Now look at it from a management perspective. They already have a benefits / 401k package that the HR department put together, they have procedures for handling how to do just about anything. Now they find out they need a computer dude. Do you REALLY think they would actually take their time when choosing between some guy who isn't in a union, and someone who will increase the amount of paperwork and other stuff they have to do? I wouldn't. The cost justification just isn't there. Unions breed laziness, and management knows that.
For those who care, I'm in a union, because I work for an educational institution; I've seen what unions do to the management and each other, and I can understand why they wouldn't be interested in hiring from them. I spend a great deal of time with my union rep having them explain to my why it's not OK for me to be "better at my job than my co-workers are at theirs." I'm not making this up!
Let's go a step further... I work as tech support, systems analyst, db designer and server admin. I think plenty of IT people have as diverse a collage of responsibilities as I do. Where would we fit in to the union? Can you really design a job description for every conceivable position, including all combinations thereof? Not only that, the union would have to figure out what you would get paid regardless of geographical area. I'd wager that most/.ers are from large towns, where the cost of living is higher. Would you really want to make the same wage that bubba in po-dunk Arkansas is making?
If it was possible for me to work at my current job without being a union working, I would jump at it without thinking - but since they negotiate the benefits, etc for all employees, I have no say.
Incidentally, there are other people who do exactly what I am doing, but work for grants rather than for "the system." The grants get renewed every 4 years, and these people have been doing what they were doing for as long as I have, and they even tell me I'm better at my job than they are at theirs. They make half again what I make, since they are able to renegotiate their contracts.
I'll let you decide who you'd rather be, but I know for a fact which camp I'm in.
Hmm... As for the "Isn't the EU trying to slap M$ on the wrist and force them to not sell their OS in Europe unless they eliminate MediaPlayer(R)?" parallels... INAL, but that wouldn't take place untill M$'s lawyers have exausted all possible lanes of litigation, would it?
My question is this: How long until some moron in D.C. decides that this means there are "alternatives" and try to make MP3 files illegal?
It's kind of a wussy mod, but I took on of those dual-aligator-clamp holders for soldering and rigged it to push the X button on my "turbo'd" controller. My Final Fantasy characters can now level up without causing undue stress on my carpel tunnel.
"I mean, people act like some other systems don't have vulnerabilities; actually all the forms of Unix as well as Linux have had more vulnerabilities per line of code."
You know, I can think of at least two ways to take this.;)
If you have a reviewer that actually takes the time to go through the whole program, the concept of:
'more features, faster, more relyable' doesn't seem to work. I mean, if it were truely the case, isn't there zero additional overhead for selling the newest version of that software? With hardware, you can sell a 'stripped down version' to avoid the manufacturing overhead, but with software...?
Yeah, you would be surprised how often this idea gets kicked around. The problem is that there is no hard evidence to support it. The attrition rate for students that take courses here at De Anza Community College in on campus web-hybrids is no different from standard classes. The technology is not the barrier. We use WebCT (an enterprise course management system) but the are open source alternatives as well. A cool perl/mysql open source system who's name eludes me at the moment comes to mind. A good set of tools to facilitate communication is all that is required.
The problem is NOT the tools, but the course design. To say you cannot successfully use computers to teach english because someone once had a few bad classes doing it is like saying all cars are uncomfortable because I drove from LA to DC in a 1987 Civic Hatchback!
I run the tech support for all distance learning courses here, and I have on average 2 out of our 13,000+ students/year that flat out cannot handle the technology. Not to stereotype these people, but they are invariably part of the 'back to school at 55' crowd. Bottom line IMHO: Your modern day students don't have the same learning curve you had.
OK. I had a hard time driving around SF yesterday because of people doing more or less the same thing. On the one hand, they are blocking access to cyber places - and on the other they are blocking access to real ones. I was wondering if anyone could explain the logic behind protesting a war that is already started? Does anyone really believe that our government is going to stop and say, "Gee, we better stop this war so that those guys from Berkley will move off the Altimont Expressway..."
All I can see here is people giving Saddam (or what's left of his regime) fuel for his fight. He can say, "Look, the American people don't believe what their government is doing. Stop surendering and kill kill kill!!!" This would cause more loss of life to american soldiers. So... Can anyone explain what the protesters are hoping to get out of this? (Other than a permanent record...)
-anocelot
At least they are doing something they're good at.
on
Cisco to Acquire Linksys
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Call me crazy (OK, you're crazy!) but it seems to me that Cisco is getting a little more bang for their buck here then simply acquiring new market share by finally doing something that investors are conformable with. i.e. Acquisition.;)
The biggest news here is that cisco will finally be able to enter a complete solution into the content delivery market. A company can provide online content with massive high-end cisco name brand stuff, and use the acquired linksys stuff to give them the other end of the pipeline as a complete package.
As more local telco companies are looking at providing high-speed internet access, this becomes very interesting indeed.
Damn it Beavis! Why didn't this rumor come out last month! Seriously, though...
The PS2 goes for $250.00ish at Fry$ and I thought that sounded better than spending $500.00 to upgrade my desktop so I could play the latest games. Well, after the console, some games, memory chips and controlers I was up to around $500.00. The only thing that kept my wife from strangeling me was the game ICO. She thinks all PS2 games will be that pretty. If the PS3 is gonna be that great and that quick - I hope they wait 20 years before releasing the ps4!
Slashdot Mirror
There ARE worse jobs out there. IT people just have more time to bitch about it. ;)
I thought the screen was the part on the iPods that broke most often... If that's true, (and it was in my case) I really hope they have better design to go with that larger screen.
AC: Proudly being Modded from 0 to Troll in .02 seconds!
To think I would live to see that line. What an age we live in. And to think that there are now people posting on /. who will argue about it. Where's my time machine when I need it?
;)
Hmm... Let's see. All you have to do is wait for a government employee to do their job... (I can make furn, I R one.)
Um, the size of the government? I work for the government, and I don't think there's a "possibly" about it. It would DEFINATELY take years.
On the other hand, perhaps they have something prior to XP, and they just need an excuse to upgrade their web browsers. ;)
Well, if you really want to see the price drop dramatically, just buy one. As my good friend Murphy will attest, you'll see a dramatic price drop the day after your "30-day-we'll-beat-any-price" guarentee runs out.
There are a few posts here to the affect that "optimization is limited completely by the original machines." When I was doing GAs, we would select the top few performers, and:
1. "Breed" them with each other.
2. "Breed" them with totally random data.
No matter how well your select your original machines, there's practically always room for improvement (otherwise, why use a GA in the first place?) Unless you are REALLY good at selecting your first few machines, the random data really is powerfull. Case in point, after a few million itterations, a GA designed to play Othello randomly generated the top performer. It was completely different than any other machine but capable of consistantly beating (granted by a very small margin) both other machines and people.
Let's face it. If the tech people had a union, that you could either choose to join or not, then there would people on both sides - those who joined and those who did not. Now look at it from a management perspective. They already have a benefits / 401k package that the HR department put together, they have procedures for handling how to do just about anything. Now they find out they need a computer dude. Do you REALLY think they would actually take their time when choosing between some guy who isn't in a union, and someone who will increase the amount of paperwork and other stuff they have to do? I wouldn't. The cost justification just isn't there. Unions breed laziness, and management knows that.
For those who care, I'm in a union, because I work for an educational institution; I've seen what unions do to the management and each other, and I can understand why they wouldn't be interested in hiring from them. I spend a great deal of time with my union rep having them explain to my why it's not OK for me to be "better at my job than my co-workers are at theirs." I'm not making this up!
Let's go a step further... I work as tech support, systems analyst, db designer and server admin. I think plenty of IT people have as diverse a collage of responsibilities as I do. Where would we fit in to the union? Can you really design a job description for every conceivable position, including all combinations thereof? Not only that, the union would have to figure out what you would get paid regardless of geographical area. I'd wager that most /.ers are from large towns, where the cost of living is higher. Would you really want to make the same wage that bubba in po-dunk Arkansas is making?
If it was possible for me to work at my current job without being a union working, I would jump at it without thinking - but since they negotiate the benefits, etc for all employees, I have no say.
Incidentally, there are other people who do exactly what I am doing, but work for grants rather than for "the system." The grants get renewed every 4 years, and these people have been doing what they were doing for as long as I have, and they even tell me I'm better at my job than they are at theirs. They make half again what I make, since they are able to renegotiate their contracts.
I'll let you decide who you'd rather be, but I know for a fact which camp I'm in.
Hmm... As for the "Isn't the EU trying to slap M$ on the wrist and force them to not sell their OS in Europe unless they eliminate MediaPlayer(R)?" parallels... INAL, but that wouldn't take place untill M$'s lawyers have exausted all possible lanes of litigation, would it? My question is this: How long until some moron in D.C. decides that this means there are "alternatives" and try to make MP3 files illegal?
Installing....
ERROR. 2gb Virus found! Halting Installation....
...which is more than I can say for my /. karma...
Um...
Why was that modded funny? I *acutally* do this.
Come to think of it, this would make a good /. reader poll...
*snickers*
If we want to be victorious in the open source/Linux vs. SCO, then we must hold ourselves higher than supporting DOS attacks against SCO.
Um, you do realize that most of us are joking, right? Most of us believe it's funny, but can't really 'support' it.
(Mainly because we don't know the author's paypal email address.)
"I mean, people act like some other systems don't have vulnerabilities; actually all the forms of Unix as well as Linux have had more vulnerabilities per line of code."
;)
You know, I can think of at least two ways to take this.
Since a few people have brought this up...
If you have a reviewer that actually takes the time to go through the whole program, the concept of: 'more features, faster, more relyable' doesn't seem to work. I mean, if it were truely the case, isn't there zero additional overhead for selling the newest version of that software? With hardware, you can sell a 'stripped down version' to avoid the manufacturing overhead, but with software...?
Plus you have the problem of the learning curve
Yeah, you would be surprised how often this idea gets kicked around. The problem is that there is no hard evidence to support it. The attrition rate for students that take courses here at De Anza Community College in on campus web-hybrids is no different from standard classes. The technology is not the barrier. We use WebCT (an enterprise course management system) but the are open source alternatives as well. A cool perl/mysql open source system who's name eludes me at the moment comes to mind. A good set of tools to facilitate communication is all that is required.
The problem is NOT the tools, but the course design. To say you cannot successfully use computers to teach english because someone once had a few bad classes doing it is like saying all cars are uncomfortable because I drove from LA to DC in a 1987 Civic Hatchback!
I run the tech support for all distance learning courses here, and I have on average 2 out of our 13,000+ students/year that flat out cannot handle the technology. Not to stereotype these people, but they are invariably part of the 'back to school at 55' crowd. Bottom line IMHO: Your modern day students don't have the same learning curve you had.
OK. I had a hard time driving around SF yesterday because of people doing more or less the same thing. On the one hand, they are blocking access to cyber places - and on the other they are blocking access to real ones. I was wondering if anyone could explain the logic behind protesting a war that is already started? Does anyone really believe that our government is going to stop and say, "Gee, we better stop this war so that those guys from Berkley will move off the Altimont Expressway..."
All I can see here is people giving Saddam (or what's left of his regime) fuel for his fight. He can say, "Look, the American people don't believe what their government is doing. Stop surendering and kill kill kill!!!" This would cause more loss of life to american soldiers. So... Can anyone explain what the protesters are hoping to get out of this? (Other than a permanent record...)
-anocelot
Call me crazy (OK, you're crazy!) but it seems to me that Cisco is getting a little more bang for their buck here then simply acquiring new market share by finally doing something that investors are conformable with. i.e. Acquisition. ;)
The biggest news here is that cisco will finally be able to enter a complete solution into the content delivery market. A company can provide online content with massive high-end cisco name brand stuff, and use the acquired linksys stuff to give them the other end of the pipeline as a complete package.
As more local telco companies are looking at providing high-speed internet access, this becomes very interesting indeed.
The PHP people would show up after the conference was over... :)
I think it might be an obfuscation of a common addage:
"Where there is smoke - there is fire."
Damn it Beavis! Why didn't this rumor come out last month! Seriously, though... The PS2 goes for $250.00ish at Fry$ and I thought that sounded better than spending $500.00 to upgrade my desktop so I could play the latest games. Well, after the console, some games, memory chips and controlers I was up to around $500.00. The only thing that kept my wife from strangeling me was the game ICO. She thinks all PS2 games will be that pretty. If the PS3 is gonna be that great and that quick - I hope they wait 20 years before releasing the ps4!