The dollar figures on these "average starting salaries" need to be taken with a shakerful of salt. In many parts of the country, a Comp Sci degress and 15 years of experience still won't get you $48,656.
I spent most of last year job hunting, so I have some idea of what people in various industries around here (W.Mich.) are paying. And it's not just that I'm unqualified for any of the good jobs; I'm also counting the jobs I didn't even get interviewed for. Only a few of the jobs I applied for even broke $40K.
Assembly is actually one of the simplest languages around.
In fact, assembly is so simple that (with a little pre-processing by an "assembler") even a CPU can understand it.
Any frosh/soph CS student who can't follow assembly should find a different major. Quickly.
Re:Maybe time to drop this "securitier than thou"
on
Remotely Crash OpenBSD
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I'd find the OpenBSD crew's haughty "more secure than thou" attitude a lot more annoying if it weren't for the fact that their track record actually justifies it. The fact that you can still count the number of remote exploits using a two-bit register is pretty impressive.
That's the whole point of copyright, intellectual property, etc: it's up to the creator. He doesn't have to apply the scientific method to validate the approach if he doesn't care to. If he wants to apply a highly subjective "It sold OK and I made enough money to satisfy me" test to the experiment, that's his call.
I prefer a link to a site in [insert non-English language here] over no link at all. Those who can read it... will. Those who cannot read it... won't*, and they'll be no worse off.
*Actually they'll probably use Babelfish or Google's translation service to figure it out, if they're truly interested.
If it's a process, I don't want it patented. If it's important to your business, keep it a trade secret.
That would undermine the social benefit of the patent process: making these processes available for the public to use. In the long run, patents benefit more people than trade secrets do.
I believe that there are some rare exceptions, but generally patents are not renewable under U.S. law. That would defeat the Constitutional purpose of patents, which is to give inventors exclusive rights "for limited Times" in exchange for making the details of their inventions available to the public to use after expiration.
Copyrights used to have a one-time renewal, which was later made automatic and then effectively redundant (because Congress is now in the habit of "renewing" copyrights by extending the duration of the term every couple decades).
Only trademarks can be maintained indefinitely, by continuing to use them, and challenging anyone who trespasses on them.
The parody defence under "Fair Use" only applies to copyright. Google's cease-and-desist letter is all about their trademarks, which are a rather different beast from copyrights. Using someone else's trademarks (or something "confusingly similar", and I expect that's how this would be judged) on a similar product/service is almost certainly going to put you on the wrong end of a court ruling.
Also, Google really doesn't have much choice but to go after Booble, even if they had enough sense of humor to tolerate it. If they fail to "defend" their trademarks like this, their trademark protection would lapse, and every other sound-alike or look-alike variation on their trademark would also be availble for anyone to use.
I guess you missed the key point of the article: that irregular spelling genuinely hinders the usefulness of services that rely on text searching. The idea of "correct" spellings wouldn't have been accepted by the public if they didn't find some value in it. The ability to search eBay for a "watch" and find all the watches is one such example.
P.S. The bit about how people whose languages don't have standardised spellings, speak with creativity, blah, blah? Now that's pretentious.
Offering a free spelling-suggestion service on a search engine doesn't "make people spell better". At best it's a nice aid for those who want to use it, but it doesn't change the fact that people with poor spelling are flooding the net with misspelled web pages, e-mail messages, and chats. Type "dictionery" into Google and it'll suggest "dictionary", but it'll also get you thousands of hits.
"Before the Internet came along, poor spelling by the public was by and large not exposed,"
Just as importantly, it wasn't reinforced. Kind of like the lady who felt reassured by seeing "chandaleer" on hundreds of web sites, people whose reading consists primarily of web pages, e-mail, and chat (rather than books vetted by proofreaders) are learning to spell incorrectly. It's like the blind leading the blind. I've got nothing against spelling changes in principle; language is going to evolve. But this seems more like a case of language forking, almost geometrically.
Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that "Thomas Smith" and "Tomas Smythe" were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.
Hey, if the dork's stupid and impulsive enough to wage a DDOS attack against SCO (not grasping how that'd actually play out in the press), I figure he's stupid enough to fall for ye olde decimal/percentage trick. But now you people have gone and spoiled it. {sigh}
For five years while getting my second degree, I worked part-time for US$1100/month (after taxes). That's with no dependents, no car payments, no cable TV, no pizza deliveries, etc. but with a 3-bedroom apartment in the city, and SDSL (offset by some webhosting business I did). Obviously that's not possible in cities where that won't even get you a studio apartment, but a lot of people could live on a lot less than they think.
Last I checked, as long as you're over 18 years of age (and so is everyone else involved), it's perfectly legal to make gay porn.
I was underemployed for several years, working part-time while I went for a second degree. I swallowed my pride and got a paper route (which meshed nicely with both my class and day-job schedules). Good daily exercise, and better money per hour than the day job. I didn't actually make gay porn (I'd have to lose some weight for that), but I did sell it, online. Again, no big blow to my pride there.
The rules vary from state to state, but the ones I'm aware of (such as Michigan) do not prohibit you from starting a business while collecting unemployment benefits. Looking for a job may be your "full-time job", but "moonlighting" is allowed... even encouraged.
The first catch is that you must continue seeking a "real" job to collect benefits from the state. If they ask, you need to produce the names of places you've applied, interviewed, etc. You need to have "get a job" as Plan A.
The second catch is that if you make money from some other source, they'll reduce your benefits according to a formula, and if that income reaches a certain level, you can't collect at all. For example, there were a few weeks during my months on the dole that consulting gigs exceeded those limits, so I simply didn't collect for those weeks. I was working on Plan B there.
The two aren't mutually incompatible. In fact, in just about any region where unemployment is bad (e.g. the United States) you'll see "feel good" articles in the paper about people who used this strategy and a year after getting laid off, are now eking out a living with their own business instead of eking out a living with lousy McEconomy job. (Me, I ended up doing the latter.)
Collecting unemployment does not necessarily prohibit you from starting a business (or other income-producing activities). The rules vary from state to state, but here in Michigan there are really just two catches:
You have to still be looking for a "real" job to continue collecting benefits. If they ask, you need to be able to demonstrate that you've been doing that (e.g. by producing names of places you've submitted apps, interviewed, whatever). Working on starting a business in the meantime "in case I don't find anything" is fine.
If you are making money from odd jobs (which is really the same thing as starting a small business, just the scale and scope is different), that typically reduces the amount of benefits, and if you make too much in a given period, you can't collect from the state. (I picked up a few consulting jobs while on Unemployment, and those weeks I just didn't claim benefits.)
Dell's offering a $200 rebate on the comes-with-Windows model at the moment, but if you set that aside, roughtly equivalent sample configurations are priced as follows:
Well, I know I'm not a "people person"; given a choice between spending time out with people, vs. with a book (reading or writing it) or an interesting tech problem to solve, I'll take the latter. But I am friendly and sociable when dealing with people, and confident about my abilities without being arrogant about it. Lecturing me about my "attitude" from a few comments when I'm venting online is a bit out of line.
The problem I have isn't so much that I'm failing the interviews (though of course I've had some that I didn't "win") but that I'm not being invited to them after I send the resume, or (more often) I'm not finding the job openings to begin with. So I've put much attention on my resume and cover letters, knowing that they have to be perfect.
Granted, my professional "network" sucks, fixing that would help, but that's easier said than done when your job isolates you from anyone outside the company, and... well, you have no network to add to. (Heck, getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened in that respect, because I could start using ex-co-workers as references.) So again, I'm depending on my resume.
bullshit questions like "what is your greatest weakness".
Like checking for the ability to use commas and spaces correctly, checking for the ability to answer a question that requires basic self-awareness is a good way to screen out the candidates you don't want to bother with.
Slashdot Mirror
The dollar figures on these "average starting salaries" need to be taken with a shakerful of salt. In many parts of the country, a Comp Sci degress and 15 years of experience still won't get you $48,656. I spent most of last year job hunting, so I have some idea of what people in various industries around here (W.Mich.) are paying. And it's not just that I'm unqualified for any of the good jobs; I'm also counting the jobs I didn't even get interviewed for. Only a few of the jobs I applied for even broke $40K.
In fact, assembly is so simple that (with a little pre-processing by an "assembler") even a CPU can understand it.
Any frosh/soph CS student who can't follow assembly should find a different major. Quickly.
I'd find the OpenBSD crew's haughty "more secure than thou" attitude a lot more annoying if it weren't for the fact that their track record actually justifies it. The fact that you can still count the number of remote exploits using a two-bit register is pretty impressive.
The author is.
That's the whole point of copyright, intellectual property, etc: it's up to the creator. He doesn't have to apply the scientific method to validate the approach if he doesn't care to. If he wants to apply a highly subjective "It sold OK and I made enough money to satisfy me" test to the experiment, that's his call.
The supposed recycling plan negates the whole point of the product: the convenience of not having to return them.
*Actually they'll probably use Babelfish or Google's translation service to figure it out, if they're truly interested.
That would undermine the social benefit of the patent process: making these processes available for the public to use. In the long run, patents benefit more people than trade secrets do.
Copyrights used to have a one-time renewal, which was later made automatic and then effectively redundant (because Congress is now in the habit of "renewing" copyrights by extending the duration of the term every couple decades).
Only trademarks can be maintained indefinitely, by continuing to use them, and challenging anyone who trespasses on them.
Also, Google really doesn't have much choice but to go after Booble, even if they had enough sense of humor to tolerate it. If they fail to "defend" their trademarks like this, their trademark protection would lapse, and every other sound-alike or look-alike variation on their trademark would also be availble for anyone to use.
You'll just have to settle for a probability cloud in the general vicinity of where a real quantum physicist might be located at any instant.
...a CD drive?
P.S. The bit about how people whose languages don't have standardised spellings, speak with creativity, blah, blah? Now that's pretentious.
Offering a free spelling-suggestion service on a search engine doesn't "make people spell better". At best it's a nice aid for those who want to use it, but it doesn't change the fact that people with poor spelling are flooding the net with misspelled web pages, e-mail messages, and chats. Type "dictionery" into Google and it'll suggest "dictionary", but it'll also get you thousands of hits.
Just as importantly, it wasn't reinforced. Kind of like the lady who felt reassured by seeing "chandaleer" on hundreds of web sites, people whose reading consists primarily of web pages, e-mail, and chat (rather than books vetted by proofreaders) are learning to spell incorrectly. It's like the blind leading the blind. I've got nothing against spelling changes in principle; language is going to evolve. But this seems more like a case of language forking, almost geometrically.
Ironically, the internet seems to be taking us back a few centuries, to the days before English spellings were standardized by the likes of Webster and other lexicographers. Which was fine back when all parsing of text was done by humans, who could easily figure out that "Thomas Smith" and "Tomas Smythe" were the same person. But as this article points out, it can be a problem when more literal computers are concerned.
Hey, if the dork's stupid and impulsive enough to wage a DDOS attack against SCO (not grasping how that'd actually play out in the press), I figure he's stupid enough to fall for ye olde decimal/percentage trick. But now you people have gone and spoiled it. {sigh}
If you're out there, e-mail me. Let me turn you in, and I'll give you .50%!
For five years while getting my second degree, I worked part-time for US$1100/month (after taxes). That's with no dependents, no car payments, no cable TV, no pizza deliveries, etc. but with a 3-bedroom apartment in the city, and SDSL (offset by some webhosting business I did). Obviously that's not possible in cities where that won't even get you a studio apartment, but a lot of people could live on a lot less than they think.
I've seen that one! Did you write the script?
I was underemployed for several years, working part-time while I went for a second degree. I swallowed my pride and got a paper route (which meshed nicely with both my class and day-job schedules). Good daily exercise, and better money per hour than the day job. I didn't actually make gay porn (I'd have to lose some weight for that), but I did sell it, online. Again, no big blow to my pride there.
The first catch is that you must continue seeking a "real" job to collect benefits from the state. If they ask, you need to produce the names of places you've applied, interviewed, etc. You need to have "get a job" as Plan A.
The second catch is that if you make money from some other source, they'll reduce your benefits according to a formula, and if that income reaches a certain level, you can't collect at all. For example, there were a few weeks during my months on the dole that consulting gigs exceeded those limits, so I simply didn't collect for those weeks. I was working on Plan B there.
The two aren't mutually incompatible. In fact, in just about any region where unemployment is bad (e.g. the United States) you'll see "feel good" articles in the paper about people who used this strategy and a year after getting laid off, are now eking out a living with their own business instead of eking out a living with lousy McEconomy job. (Me, I ended up doing the latter.)
- Dell Dimension 2400N: 2.4GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 80GB HD, CD-ROM, no monitor, FreeDOS: $369
- Dell Dimension 2400: 2.4GHz Celeron, 256MB RAM, 80GB HD, CD-ROM, no monitor, Windows XP: $599
The arithmetic is left as an exercise for the reader.According to their news entries, this is new for US customers, but it's been available to Canadians for a while.
The problem I have isn't so much that I'm failing the interviews (though of course I've had some that I didn't "win") but that I'm not being invited to them after I send the resume, or (more often) I'm not finding the job openings to begin with. So I've put much attention on my resume and cover letters, knowing that they have to be perfect.
Granted, my professional "network" sucks, fixing that would help, but that's easier said than done when your job isolates you from anyone outside the company, and... well, you have no network to add to. (Heck, getting laid off was the best thing that ever happened in that respect, because I could start using ex-co-workers as references.) So again, I'm depending on my resume.
Like checking for the ability to use commas and spaces correctly, checking for the ability to answer a question that requires basic self-awareness is a good way to screen out the candidates you don't want to bother with.