Or even blaming Apple, but for a slightly different reason: Blame Apple for consistently delivering products that don't require much thought to get going.
Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that users who are accustomed to drag and drop software installs might not be able to handle wrangling beta software that works at such a low level.
This guy lived at Wal-Mart during his Spring Break.
Yeah, the headline says he spent Spring Break at WalMart. And I thought, wow, how do you spend a week at WalMart. Turns out he spent 41 hours at WalMart. Still quite a feat, but hardly Spring Break.
Street racing has been around since before cars. My Grandfather used to tell stories of racing the streets on horseback. Never heard of any buggies getting totalled, though...
Ah ! Now that you explain that, it seems obvious that's what you meant. Doh! Well, Kaplan paid $15 or $20 an hour, which was darned good money for a poor college student, as I was at the time. Problem was getting enough hours to make it pay...
Well, you could parlay those scores into a job at Kaplan:
They pay quite well. As I recall, they offered substantially more than minimum wage for teaching their courses. You had to get above the 92nd percentile or something to qualify to teach. I didn't enjoy my experience in Blacksburg, though. The woman that ran the Kaplan office there was always trying to short our hours, and get us to do stuff off the clock. My impression is that the larger offices in larger cities were much more reasonable.
Ought to be able to clear _much_ better than minimum from them...
I hear you. But I usually am not good at taking tests. I scored pretty average on the SAT's in high school, and weaseled through undergrad with a gentlemanly C. So the GRE scores surprised me. I can only figure that the hangover fixed it so my my mind didn't wander during the test. I only had enough brain energy to concentrate on the questions, instead of staring out the window wondering why I wasn't mountain biking.
Still, I don't think I'll keep trying this method of test taking...
So there I was, living in South Dakota, working in restaurants, thinking that my brain was atrophying. It was.
So I decided to take the GRE's and see about grad school, to try to keep my grey matter nimble. I read one of those guides, it seemed straight-forward, so I signed up.
I had to drive out to Sheridan, WY to take the test, since they weren't offering one in SD anytime soon. I drove out the night before, found a hotel, and drove around looking for a place to have a nice leisurely dinner, maybe a glass of wine, relax, and then get a good night's sleep.
I saw the "Beaver Creek Saloon", clearly an upstanding establishment, judging by the very shiny signs and exterior. I walked up, pulled open the door, and saw: A bar, not a restaurant. (Ok, the name saloon should have clued me in). It was full of bikers and hippies, all having a good time, and staring at the door to see who the hell was coming in.
Not a tourist joint. Very much a local joint.
So, doing what I had to, I walked in. Ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon. ("Heinekin? F&^k that sh*t! Pabst Blue Ribbon, boy!")
Many adventures ensued, including my first pickled egg, a tiger tattoo on a woman named Cheyenne, a near brawl at a nearby cowboy bar, and other tales unrelated to the test.
Needless to say, I had no dinner, no glass of wine. But I did have a lot of beer, and then made it back to the hotel.
I got up the next day, hit a Perkins where I consumed a pitcher of coffee, a pitcher of orange juice, 6 egg yolks, and a piece of toast.
I shakily walked into the test, sat down, and blasted through it. I figured I did all right.
My test scores came back: I'd aced the quantitative and analytical sections, and nearly aced the verbal. 99th percentile. Holy crap!
So I went to Kaplan and taught GRE classes for awhile.
I'm pretty sure standardized exams are a load of crap.
I was attending grad school at Virginia Tech, working towards a PhD in Economics (no, I never finished it).
The professors there relished their difficult exams. Every exam was scheduled to take 2 hours. But they would let us all stay and keep working on the exams well after the time period was up. I remember one micro-economics exam that took 7 hours. Seven hours!
During that exam, I noticed that the two Lithuanians kept getting up to go to the bathroom. Turned out they were writing answers on the stall walls and trading them.
Meanwhile, a Chinese student in the back corner kept fiddling with her paper. Va Tech is on the Honor System, so the prof kept leaving the room, and wasn't there for large chunks of time. Someone finally complained to him about the Chinese girl, and sure enough, she had all of her notes from the semester out, and claimed she was using the back of them for scratch paper.
So the prof took them to make an Honor Court case.
Later that night, Chinese girl and her buddy sneak into the prof's office and take the evidence !
I found out about this later because I was sitting on the Honor Court, and as I started hearing about the case, a bell went off in my head. "Umm, is this about the graduate Econ department?"
Honor Court: "Why, yes it is. How did you know?"
Me: "Because I am in that department. I'd heard rumors. I know these people."
Honor Court: "Oh, well then you should leave. Sorry!"
I always find it amusing that the Chinese girl transferred to the Marketing department, where I guess they don't care so much about cheating.
I had to do it to my truck, once (1998 Dodge Ram 1500). There's a sensor in the rear differential that tells the truck stuff about RPMs and the like. It got eaten by the rear diff, and all the dash gauges went crazy, like the speedometer reading backwards, like it was possessed, or something.
But if I pulled it over to the side of the road, turned it off, and turned it on again, it would work fine. For a little while.
I work for a small company (~35 employees) that never made the technological leap at the end of the 90's. I'm doing "radical" stuff here: Improving the network (replacing switches with hubs), reducing SPAM, helping get better reports out of the accounting software...
"What?", you say, "That's so last century!"
But the fact remains, there are a lot of companies out there that can benefit from our expertise, and they continue to be grateful.
Not getting the respect you deserve? Go be a big fish in a small pond - It's great for the ego. Small businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and others can still benefit from technological improvements, and still show their appreciation for the geek in the cluttered office.
We're in some bizarr-o land, where everything is different from the folks around us. We're on Allegheny Power. But you made a good point: I could see if they have any offerings. There are no cable providers on our ridge (the one that the Appalachian Trail is on, that US-50 goes over to get to Winchester). As far as I kow, the only opportunities are dial-up and satellite. Although, at work, in Leesburg, we have wireless access through a local company. When I have a minute, the very helpful folks over there offered to see if we could set up something on the Winchester side of the ridge.
Yep - But I live about 6 miles as the crow flies form the CO of my phone company, and our "neighborhood" is a five mile long road with the houses spread out to around a 1/4 mile between them. Verizon's CEO says he's going to put fiber to every home, but I'll bet we'll be about last, and I'll be gone by then. So, no cable, no DSL, and maybe a 24K dial-up connection, when the lines aren't trashed from the mouse urine and moisture. I'm more hopeful for wireless or cell based access.
That said, I'm perfectly content to come home at night to my house on the ridge top, sit in the hot tub, and look out across the sparkling lights of the Shenandoah Valley. Who needs DSL?
Hmmm... Simplistic, perhaps, but not idiotic. But then, most knee-jerk reactions are simplistic.
From an economic viewpoint (that is, the view of the average economist), your response would seem accurate. But let's look a little closer. Take West by God Virgina (USA) for example: Large portions of WV are depressed economically, with few job options. Working at McDonalds isn't an option - There isn't one at which to work. So we suggest that they move away. But look at the options economically:
1. Live in a depressed community, surrounded by your friends and family.
2. Move away to some place where you don't know anyone and you have to take a job that doesn't pay very well or give satisfaction.
Neither one is very attractive, really.
It's easy to point the finger at other groups and say, "Bah! Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!"
It's even easier to say that when you yourself have successfully done that. But really, it is a problem of society, to try to improve educational opportunitues, and try to break the cycles that groups get stuck in.
[dismount soap box]
Either way, it's not so simple as it appears at first glance.
With banner ads, even. "DarkMailer - not for newbies"...
So I clicked on the Dark Mailer ad, thinking it'd be good for charging them some ad money, and was amused instead:
If you have installed a cracked version on your computer by mistake, we suggest you format your hard drive and reinstall Windows. Delete the cracked version and download Dark Mailer from this site.
These things get named, and you think, "Wow, someone is broadcasting from their iPod, that's cool!" [Reads article] "WTF? Why do they call it a Podcast?"
I remember when I first heard of 'bots, your friendly little program buddy that will go wandering around the 'net, doing little things, then coming back with information, or whatever. I thought, "Cool! I'll start one of these 'bot things going, log off, come back in the morning, and see what it's found!" [Reads more about 'bots...] "Oh. So it's just a program that you run on your machine that scans IP addresses. w00t."
Umm... Isn't this one of their support pages? And so wouldn't the effect of the keyword stuffing be to make the appropriate pages more likely to show up when looking for support answers?
So maybe this is just a case of them trying to do something to make their support work better?
Slashdot Mirror
It's obvious: Blizzard covered up everything's eyes...
Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that users who are accustomed to drag and drop software installs might not be able to handle wrangling beta software that works at such a low level.
Wow, I thought I lived a long way from a movie theater.
Or are you driving an RV to the movie theater?
Yeah, the headline says he spent Spring Break at WalMart. And I thought, wow, how do you spend a week at WalMart. Turns out he spent 41 hours at WalMart. Still quite a feat, but hardly Spring Break.
Guessing:
"Fat Old Politicians"?
"Freaky Omniscient Paladins"?
"Flatulence On Parade"?
"Fallacious Optometrist Propagandists"?
Street racing has been around since before cars. My Grandfather used to tell stories of racing the streets on horseback. Never heard of any buggies getting totalled, though...
Ha ! That's just what they tell you. You know how in IT we have a selection of pat answers that we give when we know a problem is temporary?
"It's Windows..."
"Sunspots..."
"Power glitch..."
Well, the rest of the company has those, too. When HR or corporate admin is giving you excuses, they sound like:
"Federal regulation..."
"Well, you know how the CEO is..."
"Oh, it's that ISO9000 thing..."
And the winner: "We're afraid of a lawsuit."
Ah ! Now that you explain that, it seems obvious that's what you meant. Doh! Well, Kaplan paid $15 or $20 an hour, which was darned good money for a poor college student, as I was at the time. Problem was getting enough hours to make it pay...
They pay quite well. As I recall, they offered substantially more than minimum wage for teaching their courses. You had to get above the 92nd percentile or something to qualify to teach. I didn't enjoy my experience in Blacksburg, though. The woman that ran the Kaplan office there was always trying to short our hours, and get us to do stuff off the clock. My impression is that the larger offices in larger cities were much more reasonable.
Ought to be able to clear _much_ better than minimum from them...
I hear you. But I usually am not good at taking tests. I scored pretty average on the SAT's in high school, and weaseled through undergrad with a gentlemanly C. So the GRE scores surprised me. I can only figure that the hangover fixed it so my my mind didn't wander during the test. I only had enough brain energy to concentrate on the questions, instead of staring out the window wondering why I wasn't mountain biking.
Still, I don't think I'll keep trying this method of test taking...
So I decided to take the GRE's and see about grad school, to try to keep my grey matter nimble. I read one of those guides, it seemed straight-forward, so I signed up.
I had to drive out to Sheridan, WY to take the test, since they weren't offering one in SD anytime soon. I drove out the night before, found a hotel, and drove around looking for a place to have a nice leisurely dinner, maybe a glass of wine, relax, and then get a good night's sleep.
I saw the "Beaver Creek Saloon", clearly an upstanding establishment, judging by the very shiny signs and exterior. I walked up, pulled open the door, and saw: A bar, not a restaurant. (Ok, the name saloon should have clued me in). It was full of bikers and hippies, all having a good time, and staring at the door to see who the hell was coming in.
Not a tourist joint. Very much a local joint.
So, doing what I had to, I walked in. Ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon. ("Heinekin? F&^k that sh*t! Pabst Blue Ribbon, boy!")
Many adventures ensued, including my first pickled egg, a tiger tattoo on a woman named Cheyenne, a near brawl at a nearby cowboy bar, and other tales unrelated to the test.
Needless to say, I had no dinner, no glass of wine. But I did have a lot of beer, and then made it back to the hotel.
I got up the next day, hit a Perkins where I consumed a pitcher of coffee, a pitcher of orange juice, 6 egg yolks, and a piece of toast.
I shakily walked into the test, sat down, and blasted through it. I figured I did all right.
My test scores came back: I'd aced the quantitative and analytical sections, and nearly aced the verbal. 99th percentile. Holy crap!
So I went to Kaplan and taught GRE classes for awhile.
I'm pretty sure standardized exams are a load of crap.
The professors there relished their difficult exams. Every exam was scheduled to take 2 hours. But they would let us all stay and keep working on the exams well after the time period was up. I remember one micro-economics exam that took 7 hours. Seven hours!
During that exam, I noticed that the two Lithuanians kept getting up to go to the bathroom. Turned out they were writing answers on the stall walls and trading them.
Meanwhile, a Chinese student in the back corner kept fiddling with her paper. Va Tech is on the Honor System, so the prof kept leaving the room, and wasn't there for large chunks of time. Someone finally complained to him about the Chinese girl, and sure enough, she had all of her notes from the semester out, and claimed she was using the back of them for scratch paper.
So the prof took them to make an Honor Court case.
Later that night, Chinese girl and her buddy sneak into the prof's office and take the evidence !
I found out about this later because I was sitting on the Honor Court, and as I started hearing about the case, a bell went off in my head. "Umm, is this about the graduate Econ department?"
Honor Court: "Why, yes it is. How did you know?"
Me: "Because I am in that department. I'd heard rumors. I know these people."
Honor Court: "Oh, well then you should leave. Sorry!"
I always find it amusing that the Chinese girl transferred to the Marketing department, where I guess they don't care so much about cheating.
But if I pulled it over to the side of the road, turned it off, and turned it on again, it would work fine. For a little while.
Thanks! I'll be here all night.
Try the veal.
"In Darwin Australia, Intelligent Designers troll for _you_!"
No more coffee for me...
I work for a small company (~35 employees) that never made the technological leap at the end of the 90's. I'm doing "radical" stuff here: Improving the network (replacing switches with hubs), reducing SPAM, helping get better reports out of the accounting software...
"What?", you say, "That's so last century!"
But the fact remains, there are a lot of companies out there that can benefit from our expertise, and they continue to be grateful.
Not getting the respect you deserve? Go be a big fish in a small pond - It's great for the ego. Small businesses, not-for-profit organizations, and others can still benefit from technological improvements, and still show their appreciation for the geek in the cluttered office.
Totally 3-D when you were in combat situations, and weird enough to keep a number of 12-year olds dumbfounded for an entire summer.
No one I knew had ever seen anything like it when it came out.
We're in some bizarr-o land, where everything is different from the folks around us. We're on Allegheny Power. But you made a good point: I could see if they have any offerings. There are no cable providers on our ridge (the one that the Appalachian Trail is on, that US-50 goes over to get to Winchester). As far as I kow, the only opportunities are dial-up and satellite. Although, at work, in Leesburg, we have wireless access through a local company. When I have a minute, the very helpful folks over there offered to see if we could set up something on the Winchester side of the ridge.
That said, I'm perfectly content to come home at night to my house on the ridge top, sit in the hot tub, and look out across the sparkling lights of the Shenandoah Valley. Who needs DSL?
[Oh, wait, I do. Dang.]
From an economic viewpoint (that is, the view of the average economist), your response would seem accurate. But let's look a little closer. Take West by God Virgina (USA) for example: Large portions of WV are depressed economically, with few job options. Working at McDonalds isn't an option - There isn't one at which to work. So we suggest that they move away. But look at the options economically:
1. Live in a depressed community, surrounded by your friends and family.
2. Move away to some place where you don't know anyone and you have to take a job that doesn't pay very well or give satisfaction.
Neither one is very attractive, really.
It's easy to point the finger at other groups and say, "Bah! Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps!"
It's even easier to say that when you yourself have successfully done that. But really, it is a problem of society, to try to improve educational opportunitues, and try to break the cycles that groups get stuck in.
[dismount soap box]
Either way, it's not so simple as it appears at first glance.
That only works if you have both cable and DSL in your area...
But you're right: FOr areas that have both, it ought to do some good.
For references:
Get a buddy at another employer to call your current boss and ask for a reference. That way you'll know what kind of references the guy is giving.
So I clicked on the Dark Mailer ad, thinking it'd be good for charging them some ad money, and was amused instead:
If you have installed a cracked version on your computer by mistake, we suggest you format your hard drive and reinstall Windows. Delete the cracked version and download Dark Mailer from this site.
Beware teh cracked SPAM software!
These things get named, and you think, "Wow, someone is broadcasting from their iPod, that's cool!" [Reads article] "WTF? Why do they call it a Podcast?"
I remember when I first heard of 'bots, your friendly little program buddy that will go wandering around the 'net, doing little things, then coming back with information, or whatever. I thought, "Cool! I'll start one of these 'bot things going, log off, come back in the morning, and see what it's found!" [Reads more about 'bots...] "Oh. So it's just a program that you run on your machine that scans IP addresses. w00t."
So maybe this is just a case of them trying to do something to make their support work better?