What's more important than the money, though the money is fun, is to combine this with some form of contest-winning award that people can proudly feel happy about and can use it to bragg and boost up a CV if they need to show some objective evidence of expertise or something.
Make it a contest; contests are fun, and issue some prize certificates.
I had just bought my smartly oversized black pants the day before, and I had this very important business client at work who's just arrived and was led into my office by the receptionist, as I rose to enthausiastically shake hands with him and exchange warm cliches, I then sat down again to only hear my pants being torn by the velocity of my weight and the snaky arm of the antique chair that accidentally got into my pocket. Talk about creating first impressions!!...
After the meeting I still had other clients at work that afternoon so I rushed home to quickly change and return before they arrive, only to piss off some drivers at a traffic jam and be stopped by a gray-haired cop who after approaching me froze for a few seconds with a gaze of alarmed puzzlement to see what must've looked like I had my pants unzipped, my boxers visible, and my hand on my groin.
Talk about misfortune on an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon...
Yup, Bin Laden is the son of a billionare, he's got an MBA(!) and he runs a multi-million dollar global terror "franchise" that outsources its operations to "local allies" who'll supply services under the "brand name".
Last straw for me! If this isn't proof enough the world is a darn big capitalist shithole, I don't know what is.
What's most troubling about this offshore outsourcing trend is that it seems to be becoming an anchor strategy for the creatively-challenged professional manager, in much the same way downsizing was many years ago.
It used to be that when you're screwing up, unable to come up with a relevant and viable product or service that people want, and your business performance is less than impressive, your safe and thoughtless way out of the mess was to downsize, kick out a few employees and glee with a grin about the cost-cutting you have achieved, the boost in efficiency that you'll proudly present as elegant numbers on sheets that'll increase your profits and shareholder value.
Now it seems that offshoring is heading that way; "have problem, will offshore!".
In the previous game a couple of days ago or so he won against the machine by playing in a way that was described by chess critics as "silly"; he just abandoned traditional chess and constructed a wall of pawns that just confused the computer.
Back in 1989-90 I had a somewhat expensive top of the range chess computer, which price was more than the monthly wage of my dad's chauffeur; (he was into chess too, played against me at times and against the machine, and when he asked me how much it cost i couldn't answer him.. anyway...) the only way i was able to win against that machine was by using nothing other than pawns and knights and by building a wall of pawns. I had an encyclopedia of chess openings and nothing worked against the machine other than that, well, not at my level. Several games later the machine had learnt how to break my wall-building manouvres and it never worked afterwards.
Re:Imagine this other African language.....
on
Whistle While You Work
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I have seen those africans who communicated through clicking sounds on a TV documentary; the most bizarre thing!... some standing elder was apparently lecturing almost 40 young men during some tribal ritual, and all he was doing was clicking... so bizarre...
As for the link your provided, i couldn't easily find the thing you were referring to, but what attracted my attention was this...
In Latin derived languages, such as Spanish, French, and Italian, the word order is not usually as important. Meaning is primarily determined by the endings of words (that is suffixes). In a very different kind of language, Mandarin Chinese, meaning is primarily changed by tone. The same word can mean radically different things depending on how it is pronounced. For instance, the word ma can have four distinct tones:...
Now that might be true for written French, but i might be less inclined to agree for spoken French, at least for us non-native speakers who have a hard time with the subtleties of pronounciation; Those of you guys who have always thought of french as "the language of love" might be in for a surprise if you ever use it as such, as I discovered when I was courting my French ex-wife many years ago. For example, it appears that the French use the word "my chick" as a term of endearment both ways, male to female and female to male, so when i reciprocated its use i was taught the following...
poussin= chick
boisson = drink
poisson = fish
Now imagine the following conversation, which actually happened....
me filled with affectionate emotion, saying it in french:- "i love you, my chick"
My French ex-wife:- "oh my god, you're calling me your fish!"
- "stop spoiling the moment"
- "i can't help it, you're calling me your fish, how romantic is that!"
- "okay..." (me trying again to correct my pronounciation for the umpteenth time, in french)... "my chick..."
- "argh, now you're calling me your drink!"
There was also another word that was even worse; i can't remember it now now but it had 4 different meanings eventhough it sounded much the same to me when pronounced with only the most suble of differences, just one of them was a term of endearment and the 3 others were far less flattering... i just couldn't ever get it right...
i don't know why you feel you have to clarify time and again that you do not condone or approve or whatever... the nazis were a product of a situation and an era... the "final solution" if such a thing existed was a result of the age of reason that saw such a course of action as rational... the catholic church and pope weren't even vocal enough about it... now some people continue to deny much of the atrocities and say they were grossly exagerated... i don't know about that, maybe, maybe not... but i know one thing... losers tend to be vilified and winners write history books...
Just consider for example the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments; google for it... For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 illiterate black men who were lied to and a disease such as syphilis was deliberately allowed to take its awful course on them without treatment. here
While you're at it you might wanna also google for the CIA mind control experiments during the cold war... they experimented on soldiers and mental patients, gave them high doses of drugs, hundreds of electric shock treatments per individual within a few days... and stuff like that...
most importantly, had you or the person you responded to been living in nazi germany, you would've probably done the same. Just see the Milgram experiments... google for them if you don't trust the source
don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty
when asteroids used to hit the americas and siberia people made very little of it... for one, humanity's population was tiny, there was hardly any communication between geographically distant places, and people thought weird astronomical events were the signs of god's wrath... nowadays, however, the americas are full of people, vaccinations and medicine have prolonged life and reduced mortality to the extent that the population is booming and filling up the land, people move around a lot and the communication made events that hit places 1000s of miles away seem like they're news we care about, that by the time a next asteroid hits the earth it'll be a major, major catastrophe..
that said though, we needn't worry, 'cos god's angels in heavens up there will be protecting us!
probably 'cos most US coders are busy trying to keep their jobs... than take part in a coding contest... for real... US workers, not just US coders, are some of the most overworked in the world, slavery aside, and take the least amount of leave... some Europeans have the 35 hours weeks as law... that leaves them able to do much else...
it's interesting that they consider MP3 still a worthwhile domain. They hold download.com, news.com, search.com... they generally seem to have an affection for generic domain names. I guess those consumer devices experts at c|net believe mp3 isn't going away anytime soon. I wonder what this says for windows media audio, aac and ogg vorbis.
just a question; why does it mean that he's subpoened... i thought that he was being subpoened as a witness, but now that he needs legal representation, is he being a defendent...
what are they hoping to do subpoening him... and what are they accusing him of...
Stallman says the Boston-based Free Software Foundation, which he founded in 1985, has nothing to do with SCO's lawsuit. "SCO is suing IBM for violating a contract. We don't even know what the contract said. In terms of the resolution of that lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation is entirely uninvolved," he says.
i don't know if that's a good position or situation for them to take or if that'd help the case. I mean, i guess it's important that SCO loses the case but then if it's a matter of a contract and what the contract says then maybe IBM might be in trouble if it proves that they've violated a contract regardless of what else. Of course, i think the keyword here is *violated* 'cos i think that what people are angry about is that SCO has not been forthcoming about what violation has happened.
Poorer nations such as Brazil, India, South Africa, China and Saudi Arabia,
Who'd want to see china or saudi arabia have any say in the internet... Those 2 nations cited as examples have the most notorious anti-internet policies that come to mind... both have tried to actively limit internet penetration into their population for years and when that failed they tried to severely filter and censor it, and harrass and prosecute their citizens whom they might consider "agitators" or a cause for public "disorder" or civil "unrest" or a threat to "state security"; such charges are often thrown at people whose only crime is an interest in universal human rights.
Keep the Chinese and Saudis away from any thing to do with the running of the internet; if it was up to them then those over 3 billion pages would become no more than... er... i don't know how many but just consider that the chinese banned even google!
i guess it qualifies as "coolest" since the definition of cool these days seems almost synonymous with music. maybe i'm odd, but i don't see why so many people believe the hype that music is so essential to life. I swear some people say stupid things like "music is my life" as if it's a cool thing and kids define themselves by the music they like. people who have different tastes in music now seem to belong to different "crowds". "what bands do you like" and "are you in a band" seem to have become almost as standard cliches as "hello" and "how are you". This is insane. "come see my band play", groupie girls stupidly having their lame thing over "band boys" and the slut-izisation of american teenagers under peer-pressure that makes giving head to someone who's in a band an admirable and eviable thing is pure degradation of minds through the incessant brainwashing brought upon them by MTV & co and other industry-driven glamourization of music.
get a grip people, music isn't essential, isn't that glamorous, and it's a sad sad state of affairs that it occupies such a big share of the national entertainment culture. It's even more than entertainment for some.
micropayment has to include the ISP providers too in some form or another; why pay extra for stuff on the internet when you're already paying for an ISP.
i think it's in the hands of ISPs or someone to sort out a deal with them, so that people pay for the content they use through their ISP bill... that may entice people if there's a chance that the bill for some of them might be less than they already pay.
However, a major problem with that might happen to be privacy. Your ISP will have a list of sites you've visited - well, they probably already do - and then the folks who use anonymous services such as proxies and etc.
yes it's kinda like saying that to be able to use a pen and paper one has to understand the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology involved in the process of reading and writing, and perhaps also the physics and chemistry of ink and the manufacturing process of paper.
i don't know, maybe we're just being harsh on him. Maybe all he's saying is that if people knew how to program they'd be able to do lots of things more easily, and that i'd agree with.
I do regret that i'm not better at programming and i wish it was something i knew pretty well. Well, i sorta do but i stopped at the point of learning the advanced bits like OOP, which i understand a little of but not enough to use it usefully. Everything i learnt i am yet to find use for.
That said though, i think scripting languages are more worthy of knowing that a lot of the junk that they feed to kids. I do think that by the time they graduate out of high school, all kids should know python.
my first post disagreed with the article as learning programming languages itself wasn't very useful to me, however, learning the thinking that learning to program promotes is good; for example, how to simplify things into variables and work out an algorithm whereby those variables interact with each other, and how a complex problem might be decomposed into a series of smaller ones, and how things like encapsulation and subroutines and extreme programming etc....
The concepts behind programming i find useful in life even if i don't write a single script.
i'm a non-tech guy; i learnt a few scripting languages and i stopped at realizing that they weren't really ever going to be useful to me.
Almost anything i need to do there's a tool on download.com or sourceforge.net that'll do it, and professionally the world no longer need jacks-of-all-trades, if there is a choice between me doing something or giving it to someone else who'll do nothing else than it day after day and gain the efficiency required then i'll just give it to another person.
It's almost as cheap giving the occasional job to a programmer and concentrating on my discipline than it is for me to learn programming.
if reading accounts of prisoners' rape incident is considered awful an awful experience, how about experience of the victims themselves who endure the real horror of the incident.
likewise, anyone who's ever had a diarrhea and the intense discomfort of it will appreciate that those who analyze stool samples, albeit it doesn't seem a glamorous job, are doing valuable work.
I don't think such jobs are awful; they probably are full of opportunities for job satisfaction. At least in knowing that you're doing something that might help others. It's way better than being a tech worker slaving to enrich some capitalists.
probably one of those 70s revival thingies like those retro-wood stereos that we've been seeing... i'm sure those who do it are driven to it mostly thanks to fashion rather than genuine interest
personally i still prefer playing vexed on my Clie... i've been stuck on one of the levels for weeks if not months now and can't figure it out...
Slashdot Mirror
What's more important than the money, though the money is fun, is to combine this with some form of contest-winning award that people can proudly feel happy about and can use it to bragg and boost up a CV if they need to show some objective evidence of expertise or something.
Make it a contest; contests are fun, and issue some prize certificates.
I had just bought my smartly oversized black pants the day before, and I had this very important business client at work who's just arrived and was led into my office by the receptionist, as I rose to enthausiastically shake hands with him and exchange warm cliches, I then sat down again to only hear my pants being torn by the velocity of my weight and the snaky arm of the antique chair that accidentally got into my pocket. Talk about creating first impressions!!...
After the meeting I still had other clients at work that afternoon so I rushed home to quickly change and return before they arrive, only to piss off some drivers at a traffic jam and be stopped by a gray-haired cop who after approaching me froze for a few seconds with a gaze of alarmed puzzlement to see what must've looked like I had my pants unzipped, my boxers visible, and my hand on my groin.
Talk about misfortune on an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon...
..that now even Al-Qaeda does it!!
Yup, Bin Laden is the son of a billionare, he's got an MBA(!) and he runs a multi-million dollar global terror "franchise" that outsources its operations to "local allies" who'll supply services under the "brand name".
Last straw for me! If this isn't proof enough the world is a darn big capitalist shithole, I don't know what is.
What's most troubling about this offshore outsourcing trend is that it seems to be becoming an anchor strategy for the creatively-challenged professional manager, in much the same way downsizing was many years ago.
It used to be that when you're screwing up, unable to come up with a relevant and viable product or service that people want, and your business performance is less than impressive, your safe and thoughtless way out of the mess was to downsize, kick out a few employees and glee with a grin about the cost-cutting you have achieved, the boost in efficiency that you'll proudly present as elegant numbers on sheets that'll increase your profits and shareholder value.
Now it seems that offshoring is heading that way; "have problem, will offshore!".
Amazing!
what more needs to be said...
in the good ol' medical tradition, the developers of the vaccine should've been the first to take it.
In the previous game a couple of days ago or so he won against the machine by playing in a way that was described by chess critics as "silly"; he just abandoned traditional chess and constructed a wall of pawns that just confused the computer.
Back in 1989-90 I had a somewhat expensive top of the range chess computer, which price was more than the monthly wage of my dad's chauffeur; (he was into chess too, played against me at times and against the machine, and when he asked me how much it cost i couldn't answer him.. anyway...) the only way i was able to win against that machine was by using nothing other than pawns and knights and by building a wall of pawns. I had an encyclopedia of chess openings and nothing worked against the machine other than that, well, not at my level. Several games later the machine had learnt how to break my wall-building manouvres and it never worked afterwards.
I have seen those africans who communicated through clicking sounds on a TV documentary; the most bizarre thing!... some standing elder was apparently lecturing almost 40 young men during some tribal ritual, and all he was doing was clicking... so bizarre...
As for the link your provided, i couldn't easily find the thing you were referring to, but what attracted my attention was this...
In Latin derived languages, such as Spanish, French, and Italian, the word order is not usually as important. Meaning is primarily determined by the endings of words (that is suffixes). In a very different kind of language, Mandarin Chinese, meaning is primarily changed by tone. The same word can mean radically different things depending on how it is pronounced. For instance, the word ma can have four distinct tones:...
Now that might be true for written French, but i might be less inclined to agree for spoken French, at least for us non-native speakers who have a hard time with the subtleties of pronounciation; Those of you guys who have always thought of french as "the language of love" might be in for a surprise if you ever use it as such, as I discovered when I was courting my French ex-wife many years ago. For example, it appears that the French use the word "my chick" as a term of endearment both ways, male to female and female to male, so when i reciprocated its use i was taught the following
poussin= chick
boisson = drink
poisson = fish
Now imagine the following conversation, which actually happened....
me filled with affectionate emotion, saying it in french
My French ex-wife
- "stop spoiling the moment"
- "i can't help it, you're calling me your fish, how romantic is that!"
- "okay..." (me trying again to correct my pronounciation for the umpteenth time, in french)... "my chick..."
- "argh, now you're calling me your drink!"
There was also another word that was even worse; i can't remember it now now but it had 4 different meanings eventhough it sounded much the same to me when pronounced with only the most suble of differences, just one of them was a term of endearment and the 3 others were far less flattering... i just couldn't ever get it right...
i don't know why you feel you have to clarify time and again that you do not condone or approve or whatever... the nazis were a product of a situation and an era... the "final solution" if such a thing existed was a result of the age of reason that saw such a course of action as rational... the catholic church and pope weren't even vocal enough about it... now some people continue to deny much of the atrocities and say they were grossly exagerated... i don't know about that, maybe, maybe not... but i know one thing... losers tend to be vilified and winners write history books...
Just consider for example the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments; google for it... For forty years between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 illiterate black men who were lied to and a disease such as syphilis was deliberately allowed to take its awful course on them without treatment. here
While you're at it you might wanna also google for the CIA mind control experiments during the cold war... they experimented on soldiers and mental patients, gave them high doses of drugs, hundreds of electric shock treatments per individual within a few days... and stuff like that...
most importantly, had you or the person you responded to been living in nazi germany, you would've probably done the same. Just see the Milgram experiments
don't exonerate yourself; given the situation, we're all guilty
check this out
when asteroids used to hit the americas and siberia people made very little of it... for one, humanity's population was tiny, there was hardly any communication between geographically distant places, and people thought weird astronomical events were the signs of god's wrath... nowadays, however, the americas are full of people, vaccinations and medicine have prolonged life and reduced mortality to the extent that the population is booming and filling up the land, people move around a lot and the communication made events that hit places 1000s of miles away seem like they're news we care about, that by the time a next asteroid hits the earth it'll be a major, major catastrophe..
that said though, we needn't worry, 'cos god's angels in heavens up there will be protecting us!
probably 'cos most US coders are busy trying to keep their jobs... than take part in a coding contest... for real... US workers, not just US coders, are some of the most overworked in the world, slavery aside, and take the least amount of leave... some Europeans have the 35 hours weeks as law... that leaves them able to do much else...
it's interesting that they consider MP3 still a worthwhile domain. They hold download.com, news.com, search.com... they generally seem to have an affection for generic domain names. I guess those consumer devices experts at c|net believe mp3 isn't going away anytime soon. I wonder what this says for windows media audio, aac and ogg vorbis.
just a question; why does it mean that he's subpoened... i thought that he was being subpoened as a witness, but now that he needs legal representation, is he being a defendent...
what are they hoping to do subpoening him... and what are they accusing him of...
Stallman says the Boston-based Free Software Foundation, which he founded in 1985, has nothing to do with SCO's lawsuit. "SCO is suing IBM for violating a contract. We don't even know what the contract said. In terms of the resolution of that lawsuit, the Free Software Foundation is entirely uninvolved," he says.
i don't know if that's a good position or situation for them to take or if that'd help the case. I mean, i guess it's important that SCO loses the case but then if it's a matter of a contract and what the contract says then maybe IBM might be in trouble if it proves that they've violated a contract regardless of what else. Of course, i think the keyword here is *violated* 'cos i think that what people are angry about is that SCO has not been forthcoming about what violation has happened.
It looks like a monowheel
Be sure to check the 1932 Dynosphere.
Poorer nations such as Brazil, India, South Africa, China and Saudi Arabia,
Who'd want to see china or saudi arabia have any say in the internet... Those 2 nations cited as examples have the most notorious anti-internet policies that come to mind... both have tried to actively limit internet penetration into their population for years and when that failed they tried to severely filter and censor it, and harrass and prosecute their citizens whom they might consider "agitators" or a cause for public "disorder" or civil "unrest" or a threat to "state security"; such charges are often thrown at people whose only crime is an interest in universal human rights.
Keep the Chinese and Saudis away from any thing to do with the running of the internet; if it was up to them then those over 3 billion pages would become no more than
i guess it qualifies as "coolest" since the definition of cool these days seems almost synonymous with music.
maybe i'm odd, but i don't see why so many people believe the hype that music is so essential to life. I swear some people say stupid things like "music is my life" as if it's a cool thing and kids define themselves by the music they like. people who have different tastes in music now seem to belong to different "crowds". "what bands do you like" and "are you in a band" seem to have become almost as standard cliches as "hello" and "how are you". This is insane.
"come see my band play", groupie girls stupidly having their lame thing over "band boys" and the slut-izisation of american teenagers under peer-pressure that makes giving head to someone who's in a band an admirable and eviable thing is pure degradation of minds through the incessant brainwashing brought upon them by MTV & co and other industry-driven glamourization of music.
get a grip people, music isn't essential, isn't that glamorous, and it's a sad sad state of affairs that it occupies such a big share of the national entertainment culture. It's even more than entertainment for some.
micropayment has to include the ISP providers too in some form or another; why pay extra for stuff on the internet when you're already paying for an ISP.
i think it's in the hands of ISPs or someone to sort out a deal with them, so that people pay for the content they use through their ISP bill... that may entice people if there's a chance that the bill for some of them might be less than they already pay.
However, a major problem with that might happen to be privacy. Your ISP will have a list of sites you've visited - well, they probably already do - and then the folks who use anonymous services such as proxies and etc.
yes it's kinda like saying that to be able to use a pen and paper one has to understand the neuroanatomy and neurophysiology involved in the process of reading and writing, and perhaps also the physics and chemistry of ink and the manufacturing process of paper.
i don't know, maybe we're just being harsh on him. Maybe all he's saying is that if people knew how to program they'd be able to do lots of things more easily, and that i'd agree with.
I do regret that i'm not better at programming and i wish it was something i knew pretty well. Well, i sorta do but i stopped at the point of learning the advanced bits like OOP, which i understand a little of but not enough to use it usefully. Everything i learnt i am yet to find use for.
That said though, i think scripting languages are more worthy of knowing that a lot of the junk that they feed to kids. I do think that by the time they graduate out of high school, all kids should know python.
i've seen this story in the media over a year ago; why is it coming on slashdot now...
my first post disagreed with the article as learning programming languages itself wasn't very useful to me, however, learning the thinking that learning to program promotes is good; for example, how to simplify things into variables and work out an algorithm whereby those variables interact with each other, and how a complex problem might be decomposed into a series of smaller ones, and how things like encapsulation and subroutines and extreme programming etc....
The concepts behind programming i find useful in life even if i don't write a single script.
i'm a non-tech guy; i learnt a few scripting languages and i stopped at realizing that they weren't really ever going to be useful to me.
Almost anything i need to do there's a tool on download.com or sourceforge.net that'll do it, and professionally the world no longer need jacks-of-all-trades, if there is a choice between me doing something or giving it to someone else who'll do nothing else than it day after day and gain the efficiency required then i'll just give it to another person.
It's almost as cheap giving the occasional job to a programmer and concentrating on my discipline than it is for me to learn programming.
if reading accounts of prisoners' rape incident is considered awful an awful experience, how about experience of the victims themselves who endure the real horror of the incident.
likewise, anyone who's ever had a diarrhea and the intense discomfort of it will appreciate that those who analyze stool samples, albeit it doesn't seem a glamorous job, are doing valuable work.
I don't think such jobs are awful; they probably are full of opportunities for job satisfaction. At least in knowing that you're doing something that might help others. It's way better than being a tech worker slaving to enrich some capitalists.
probably one of those 70s revival thingies like those retro-wood stereos that we've been seeing... i'm sure those who do it are driven to it mostly thanks to fashion rather than genuine interest
personally i still prefer playing vexed on my Clie... i've been stuck on one of the levels for weeks if not months now and can't figure it out...