I presume from your question that you already know how to program, you are just looking for a way to get more experience where people actually pay you for it.
My advice is for you to redefine your job. It is no longer to test software but to write software that tests software. "Test Engineer" is (I think) a term that is currently popular to describe that job. Hitting web services? That is straightforward enough to test. GUIs? Look into scripting the accessibility harness. Web sites? Google for "Watir".
If you arn't sure where to start write down a list of the more annoying or repetitive QA tasks you did today.
I'm currently a college student. The current senior class' views are probably what you would expect. They know copyright infringement is illegal but they don't particularly care and go on downloading their movies and music anyway. Their attitudes are similar to their ones on alcohol; don't get caught.
The freshman however, can not even *conceive* of it being wrong. It's like talking to someone who thinks the posted Speed Limit isn't the law and if you say it is they refuse to believe you even after being pulled over. If this one anecdote is part of a greater trend it does not bode well for any buisness that relies on copyright
There are currently 290 open bugs with the mlk keyword. What gives you the expertise to judge that they are not significant? And that is for true leaks only, not other memory related bugs. There are critical crash bugs like #263160 that are memory related and have not been fixed in years.
Now that said things are improving, the developers are paying attention, and I look forward to improvements in FF3. But it has been people insisting that there aren't bugs are everything is fine for years while that was plainly not the case that made this situation so much more unpleasant than it had to be. FF works for you on your system with your habits (and I'm happy that's great!). For others it is barely functional between crashes and performance degradation. But like I said, now that the problems are being recognized they are starting to be fixed, and that is as it should be. Just stop pretending that because things are fine for you they must be for everyone.
Yes solar variation can affect earth's climate. However, solar variation since 1750 is a much smaller forcing than Greenhouse gasses. See the IPCC TAR section 6.13.
I don't know why this off topic speculation was modded at +5.
Most green house gasses stay in the atmosphere for a long time (10-100 years). "Smog" stays up for a much shorter period of time so we would have to keep pumping ever larger amounts of it into the atmosphere daily to offset the green house gasses. That is very unlikely to tenable for a significant length of time.
Peter Norvig (who I presume most readers are familar with) was interested in just that question: how can you quantify scientific consensus? So he did exactly what anyone should do when faced with such a problem:
When faced with a controversy like this, the great thing is that you can do your own research. If you suspect Oreskes or Peiser (or both) might be biased, you can look at the data yourself.
There is no reason to have partisan hack papers think for you when you can do it yourself.
Eric Raymond once wrote an article called "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". Its often considered rude to just reply with a link to it, but it is applicable in this case.
You read an article on a scientific topic you were not familiar with. It was published in a British tabloid by an (informed) laymen, not a scientific journal. You yourself question the political slant of the publication. Now, faced with something you didn't understand did you ask questions of yourself? Did you try to understand it? Did you research terms you didn't know Did you read the IPCC report yourself to see what it said? Did you find summaries of what Hansen actually said? Did you Google "medieval warm period? Did you in any way try to think for yourself?
No, you submitted a quick story to Slashdot and asked other people to do your thinking for you. It's a dense 2400 word article based on a 40 page report. Do you really think people just sit around all day waiting for the chance to write a 50 page analysis for someone?
A thoughtful educated layman understanding of climate change is not difficult to achieve. This is not something where scientists (whatever their views) are mystics whose minds we can not hope to know. There is no reason for you or anyone else here to feel helpless or powerless before Al Gore or a British tabloid writer.
Now, if you are honestly interested in understanding climate change I can recommend some resources for you:
- Global Warming: The Complete Briefing - The Discovery of Global Warming
The entire 2001 IPCC report is available online: http://www.ipcc.ch/activity/tar.htm The Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary are both perfectly readable for someone with a standard/. math and science background.
realclimate.com and climateaudit.org will satisfy your urges to learn more of the immaturity of some adult scientists than you ever wanted to know.
An extended list of primers: http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/09/primer-on-sou rces-for-global-warming.html
Someone else linked this page of common arguments: http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
Among people who disagree with the scientific consensus Richard Lindzen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen) has interesting things to say.
Are there a lot of things wrong with that article? Yes. If you study the sources you will be able to answer that question not only this time, but next time as well.
Peter Norvig (who most here are probably familiar with) was faced with a simlar problem. He heard conflicting reports on the level of scientific consensus that exists on climate change. So he looked at the data himself and drew his own conclusions (http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html). He is a model to emulate.
Actually the Ross and Wright book really is the worst collegiate mathmatics textbook I have ever used.
But the parent's point about getting a solid foundating in Mathmatics and Language is a good one and will certainly serve you well if you if you are unsure where to start.
If you have not read it allready I belive you will find Eric Raymond's How to Become a Hacker essay useful.
Finally, if you are still unsure where to start install one of the more technically included Linux distributions (such as Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware) and set it up to do whatever you find interesting.
I really doubt someone is gonna come up with an app that can filter IPs more efficiently than iptables. Try running one of the pared down lists (without all.edu blocked for instance).
If there are no phone lines or other infrastructure, where are they getting their electricity for all this WiFi from? Do they all have solar cells as well?
I took the "A" version last year and it was a complete joke. The longest code I had to write was about one line. As for more general "Computer Science" type questions I don't recall anything much more than "gee what is this loop doing" or "whoah, data is usually stored in bytes." On the plus side my teacher did an excellent job teaching us C and C++ (2 semester courses) so that by the time I got to college I skipped cs I and was far ahead of everyone in cs II.
I took a US Political Science course my senior year. Since it was full of people from the honors history classes we basically read Plato and discussed interesting current events, doing very little of the "these are the three branches of gov't" stuff that we were "suposed" to be doing. Most of the kids basically studied for the exam on their own and did fine, and we all had the amazing opportunity of reading "The Republic" in high school.
As someone coming from C to C++ I tentativly endorse the bastardized classes the College Board provided. A lot of my fellow students now who started with C++ can't keep data structures straight because they never had to deal with the gritty stuff, they were just told that "magic happens." The wannabe STL stuff allowed me to see what was going on behind the scenes, understand what this "class" stuff was all about, and then use the real STL far more effectivly when I started to use it for latter classes.
I don't expect one program to do everything (well unless its EMACS). But you are right that there are some audio formats that still need work. However, for most users (most of their audio is in mp3 or some ogg) I think foobar2000 is already better than winamp.
You mean like foobar2000? A no frills music player started by people who left Nullsoft when Winamp became bloated and dropped any focus on music playing infavor of skins?
Slashdot Mirror
I presume from your question that you already know how to program, you are just looking for a way to get more experience where people actually pay you for it.
My advice is for you to redefine your job. It is no longer to test software but to write software that tests software. "Test Engineer" is (I think) a term that is currently popular to describe that job. Hitting web services? That is straightforward enough to test. GUIs? Look into scripting the accessibility harness. Web sites? Google for "Watir".
If you arn't sure where to start write down a list of the more annoying or repetitive QA tasks you did today.
I'm currently a college student. The current senior class' views are probably what you would expect. They know copyright infringement is illegal but they don't particularly care and go on downloading their movies and music anyway. Their attitudes are similar to their ones on alcohol; don't get caught.
The freshman however, can not even *conceive* of it being wrong. It's like talking to someone who thinks the posted Speed Limit isn't the law and if you say it is they refuse to believe you even after being pulled over. If this one anecdote is part of a greater trend it does not bode well for any buisness that relies on copyright
There are currently 290 open bugs with the mlk keyword. What gives you the expertise to judge that they are not significant? And that is for true leaks only, not other memory related bugs. There are critical crash bugs like #263160 that are memory related and have not been fixed in years.
Now that said things are improving, the developers are paying attention, and I look forward to improvements in FF3. But it has been people insisting that there aren't bugs are everything is fine for years while that was plainly not the case that made this situation so much more unpleasant than it had to be. FF works for you on your system with your habits (and I'm happy that's great!). For others it is barely functional between crashes and performance degradation. But like I said, now that the problems are being recognized they are starting to be fixed, and that is as it should be. Just stop pretending that because things are fine for you they must be for everyone.
Yes solar variation can affect earth's climate. However, solar variation since 1750 is a much smaller forcing than Greenhouse gasses. See the IPCC TAR section 6.13.
I don't know why this off topic speculation was modded at +5.
Most green house gasses stay in the atmosphere for a long time (10-100 years). "Smog" stays up for a much shorter period of time so we would have to keep pumping ever larger amounts of it into the atmosphere daily to offset the green house gasses. That is very unlikely to tenable for a significant length of time.
Eric Raymond once wrote an article called "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". Its often considered rude to just reply with a link to it, but it is applicable in this case.
/. math and science background.
u rces-for-global-warming.html
You read an article on a scientific topic you were not familiar with. It was published in a British tabloid by an (informed) laymen, not a scientific journal. You yourself question the political slant of the publication. Now, faced with something you didn't understand did you ask questions of yourself? Did you try to understand it? Did you research terms you didn't know Did you read the IPCC report yourself to see what it said? Did you find summaries of what Hansen actually said? Did you Google "medieval warm period? Did you in any way try to think for yourself?
No, you submitted a quick story to Slashdot and asked other people to do your thinking for you. It's a dense 2400 word article based on a 40 page report. Do you really think people just sit around all day waiting for the chance to write a 50 page analysis for someone?
A thoughtful educated layman understanding of climate change is not difficult to achieve. This is not something where scientists (whatever their views) are mystics whose minds we can not hope to know. There is no reason for you or anyone else here to feel helpless or powerless before Al Gore or a British tabloid writer.
Now, if you are honestly interested in understanding climate change I can recommend some resources for you:
- Global Warming: The Complete Briefing
- The Discovery of Global Warming
The entire 2001 IPCC report is available online:
http://www.ipcc.ch/activity/tar.htm
The Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary are both perfectly readable for someone with a standard
realclimate.com and climateaudit.org will satisfy your urges to learn more of the immaturity of some adult scientists than you ever wanted to know.
An extended list of primers:
http://mustelid.blogspot.com/2005/09/primer-on-so
Someone else linked this page of common arguments:
http://gristmill.grist.org/skeptics
Among people who disagree with the scientific consensus Richard Lindzen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen) has interesting things to say.
Are there a lot of things wrong with that article? Yes. If you study the sources you will be able to answer that question not only this time, but next time as well.
Peter Norvig (who most here are probably familiar with) was faced with a simlar problem. He heard conflicting reports on the level of scientific consensus that exists on climate change. So he looked at the data himself and drew his own conclusions (http://www.norvig.com/oreskes.html). He is a model to emulate.
Actually the Ross and Wright book really is the worst collegiate mathmatics textbook I have ever used.
But the parent's point about getting a solid foundating in Mathmatics and Language is a good one and will certainly serve you well if you if you are unsure where to start.
If you have not read it allready I belive you will find Eric Raymond's How to Become a Hacker essay useful.
Finally, if you are still unsure where to start install one of the more technically included Linux distributions (such as Debian, Gentoo, or Slackware) and set it up to do whatever you find interesting.
Good Luck!
I think most guys go for the drunkest.
Can you post a copy of your pretty graph?
He said that the latest nightly has been working fine all day.
I really doubt someone is gonna come up with an app that can filter IPs more efficiently than iptables. Try running one of the pared down lists (without all .edu blocked for instance).
But iptables runs just fine.
pine
Still isn't a trilogy.
Database maintenance is currently taking place. Some items such as comment posting and moderation are currently unavailable.
;-)
That could have had something to do with it
If there are no phone lines or other infrastructure, where are they getting their electricity for all this WiFi from? Do they all have solar cells as well?
Do you have a link to that FFVI demo on the N64?
I took the "A" version last year and it was a complete joke. The longest code I had to write was about one line. As for more general "Computer Science" type questions I don't recall anything much more than "gee what is this loop doing" or "whoah, data is usually stored in bytes." On the plus side my teacher did an excellent job teaching us C and C++ (2 semester courses) so that by the time I got to college I skipped cs I and was far ahead of everyone in cs II.
I took a US Political Science course my senior year. Since it was full of people from the honors history classes we basically read Plato and discussed interesting current events, doing very little of the "these are the three branches of gov't" stuff that we were "suposed" to be doing. Most of the kids basically studied for the exam on their own and did fine, and we all had the amazing opportunity of reading "The Republic" in high school.
As someone coming from C to C++ I tentativly endorse the bastardized classes the College Board provided. A lot of my fellow students now who started with C++ can't keep data structures straight because they never had to deal with the gritty stuff, they were just told that "magic happens." The wannabe STL stuff allowed me to see what was going on behind the scenes, understand what this "class" stuff was all about, and then use the real STL far more effectivly when I started to use it for latter classes.
A suprisingly good show. And perhaps due to MGM refusing to release it for people to buy most of the episodes are floating about.
Supported input formats:
;-)
* MPEG-4 AAC
* MP3
* MP2
* Musepack
* Ogg Vorbis
* WAV
* AIFF
* VOC
* AU
* SND
* CDDA
* FLAC
* Monkey's Audio
* WavPack
* Speex
* Mod
* SPC
* TFMX
* Shorten
* OptimFROG
* LPAC
* WMA
* AC3
* PSF
* NSF
* SID
* XA
* Matroska
picky picky...
I don't expect one program to do everything (well unless its EMACS). But you are right that there are some audio formats that still need work. However, for most users (most of their audio is in mp3 or some ogg) I think foobar2000 is already better than winamp.
Ya a clutter free web page without any flash or an obnoxious green color scheme... oh the horror!
You mean like foobar2000? A no frills music player started by people who left Nullsoft when Winamp became bloated and dropped any focus on music playing infavor of skins?