I had credits as old as 1991 (summer enrichment program at a local commuter college) accepted for transfer. I've also heard stories of credits expiring after ten years, but I think that may be an urban legend. It is certainly not how it was handled at my school (University of Wyoming)
You hear all sorts of stories about college that turn out to be urban legends. I was talking with my sister-in-law about how she wanted to go back to school to earn her accounting degree, but she sighed and said, "But I can't go to college, because my high school diploma is a G.E.D." Now, I know several people who have earned a G.E.D. and gone on to earn doctorate degrees! But because she fell for some urban legend carelessly passed on to her, she had never even bothered to check into going back to school. I feel really sorry for her, because she's lost a lot of time.
I'll second everything the parent poster said. I finished my bachelor's degree in December, eleven and a half years after I started. I'm really proud of that silly piece of paper.
Since I graduated, my boss has written my recommendations for graduate study, so I know finishing up has increased my stature at work. If you're a techie, get that degree. It really helps your career.
Although I doubt we'll see it, whether we see it or not, I'm going to make the bold prediction that in 2005, Slashdot users will continue to complain that Apple hardware is too expensive.
The real names and teams of the players sort of "complete the fantasy". I would imagine the video game players who imagine themselves leading Brett Farve and the Green Bay Packers to victory might have a hard time getting pumped to control Bert Harve and the Bean Bay Sackers. We all *know* that superior gameplay should be enough, but the value of that NFL license cannot be overestimated.
If Patrick wants someone to prescribe high-dose antibiotics designed to kill germs that might be commonly found in the mouth, perhaps he can get his dad to write the prescription. I have a heart murmur, and before every trip to the dentist's chair, my dentist writes me a prescription for and makes me take a mega-dose of amoxicillin (I'm not sure how much in terms of mg, but it's 4 pills). Heck, I forgot to do it once, and he pulled some pills out of a drawer and gave them to me. His dad can prescribe this stuff...
They have to update the photos and illustrations to keep up with changing fashion trends. It's a well-know fact that people can't learn if the people in their textbooks are dressed like rejects from What's Happening.
If you do install OS X, make sure you update the firmware first. If you don't, you're likely to end up with no video, and no easy/cheap way to fix it. The 350 and 400 mhz iMacs were er.. problematic in this regard.
You can fix it by reinstalling OS 9 (or, I think, just booting off an OS 9 CD) and applying the firmware patch. I thought I'd killed my 350 in the process of replacing the Panther Developer Preview (which ran fine w/o the firmware update) with the retail version (which did not), but it was no big deal to get it working again.
without apple themselfs getting involved using their hw for this would probably be not that easy(to get some company to do the offer, support & etc using their parts doesn't seem that likely - clusters built out of them aren't that common).
What, are you kidding? I suppose you think these guys sit on their hands all day long.
An IPO is *supposed* to be a financing event. It's only with the dotcom boom that a perception has arisen that the IPO is when you "cash-out" of a company. Traditionally, a company would consider an IPO to raise cash for expansion - it's a means to and end, not an end in itself.
The way Google is conducting their IPO indicates that they view it as a traditional financing event - the higher the IPO price, the more money that's available to the company to expand and grow. In Netscape's IPO, for example, the stock may have closed at $80 at the end of the first trading day, but Netscape itself only realized the $14/share that the offering was priced at. You can bet your bottom dollar that despite all the hype, someone was getting his butt chewed for leaving $66/share on the table. Google's auction doesn't eliminate the possibility of something like this happening, but it does reduce it significantly.
I'd love to let go of some of our customers, but the nature of our product is facilitating a data exchange between customers, so letting customers go would diminish the value of our product. Plus, the customers who are "trouble" are also the same ones who are likely to have data to report to us.
We have a well developed set of internal procedures, but this particular piece of spy-crud was one we hadn't run across before. I do have a "field guide to American Spyware" that I distribute to all our sales reps and customer service folks, but some calls still end up back in the tech department. We'd rather be writing code than doing tech support, no doubt, but ultimately keeping the customers happy keeps our business growing - and it is growing - we've had record volume the last two months and are on pace to break records again this month.
That would be easy, except that we deliver many of our products in crowded, cutthroat markets to people who usually have little in the way of on-site or corporate tech help. We differentiate ourselves on service and ease-of-use, since we have no hope of competing with the industry "big boys" on straight price. In fact, we buy many of our products from the "big boys", repackage them, add our own unique data, and deliver the whole ball of wax in an easy-to-read format.
Simply telling them "that's not our fault" isn't going to cut it. If we're not providing the best experience possible, our customers can easily take their business to our competitors. And then, I'd be Asking Slashdot about where I could find a new job.
The fact is that most of the "low-end" computer users use MS products because they're the easiest to install - especially since they came preinstalled on the computer. Asking them to download and install software is beyond the capabilities of many of our users. I don't like it, but I have to play the cards I'm dealt - and right now those cards say that 90%+ of my customers are using IE. And unfortunately, when those customers are trying to use my product and spyware prevents them from doing so, it falls on me to fix it. If I don't, one of my competitors will.
Holy frigging rebates Batman, I'm gonna get me a software voucher!
Let's see, it's only good for MS software, and I get $15 for Windows 98 and $9 for Office - $24 - SWEET! I can finally grab that copy of Microsoft Bob I've been itching to pick up. And with the $10 I've got left, I'll score a copy of "Return of Arcade" for Windows 3.1. This is gonna be AWESOME! Thanks, Bill - All is forgiven! Please send my vouchers soon!
Manned aircraft aren't the only things that move faster than the speed of sound. In fact, since the pilot is now the limiting factor in most aircraft designs, the Army may have more use than the Air Force for hypersonic simulations - for SAMs and Patriot-type interceptor missiles that will have a flight envelope that is largely unexplored since an unmanned machine can withstand g-forces that would cause a pilot to blackout or worse.
But there is a disk image of the old "Oregon Trail" game for Apple II floating around the net, that has saved on it, a "tombstone" from a player who died surprisingly early in the game. The headstone reads:
peperony and cheese
I grin everytime I play Oregon Trail. I love it when the barely literate attempt humor. What do you want on your Tombstone, indeed.
I see a bunch of folks in this thread talking about how certifications and education are worthless, because they're quickly obsoleted in the fast paced, quickly changing world of IT. I call bullshit. Most certifications are worthless because the cert's exam questions become compromised rendering the test invalid. The people running the GMAT manage to put out a new test every thirty days, I don't understand why MS, Novell, and Cisco can't do the same thing.
For that matter, I've never understood why people are happy to post their "braindumps" of memorized exam questions on the Internet. The people you're feeding answers to are the same people you're going to be competing with for jobs. You're flooding the same market you want to compete in!
I've been in the fast, quickly changing world of IT since 1993, and for all that's changed, many "tried and true" tricks still work. They might need to be updated, but the concepts are similar. For example, suppose back in 1994 I had a bunch of identical machines I wanted to configure quickly. I'd pull out the old laplink cables, pull out my special floppy that would copy the disk from my working configured "master" to the "clones". In 2003, I use a network and Ghost software, but it's pretty much the same. In 1996, I made a firewall with a floppy disk and an old 386. I needed a router in a pinch a few weeks ago, and I made one with a bootable linux CD.
In IT, understanding a few basic concepts will get you a long way. Until earlier this year, I'd never touched Windows XP - we hadn't used it at work, and I have Macs at home. But when a few Windows XP computers showed up in the office and on customer's desktops during support sessions, did I throw my hands up and whine, "Omigod! The fast pace of the quickly changing field of IT has obsoleted my skills and left me behind!" No, I didn't - I applied what I'd learned from previous Microsoft operating systems and *I* *figured* *it* *out*.
If you took someone off the street and taught him Windows NT 4.0 inside and out, then gave him a computer with XP or Server 2003 on it, it's not like he's going to be completely lost because the tech blew right past him. He can take the skills he's already picked up, and apply them as he learns a new system. Same thing with certifications. If I've been using and am certified on Netware 4 (and I mean CNE-level, not a CNA), then I'll probably be able to get the hang of Netware 5 pretty quickly, even if my certificate doesn't say so.
A certification, or any sort of technical training is valuable if you learn its main lesson - how to think when looking at a particular manufacturer's products. If you think the goal of the certification process is the piece of paper, you've missed the whole point. The problem with most technical cetification testing programs is how easily they can be "gamed". Someone who's learned what's really supposed to be taught by the certification process is invaluable. Someone who's memorized the answers off a few dozen braindump sites will be near useless.
When Windows 98 came out, there was a new feature (that before had pretty much been limited to Matrox cards with a special driver) that would let you use multiple PCI and AGP video cards in the same motherboard with multiple monitors. At first glance, this seems like pretty much the same idea.
The article seems to claim that the cards will be able to split processing duties, even if they're not from the same manufacturer. That particular claim seems very dubious to me for some reason. Other than integrating two PCI-Express slots on a motherboard, I'm not sure Alienware has achieved anything here. Of course, should Alienware want to send me one of these to try out, I'll be happy to post my review on Slashdot.
It's not that there is a G5 iMac now...
on
G5 in an iMac
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's not that there is a G5 iMac now, they just don't want to have to update their survey when one comes out (hopefully) sometime around WWDC in June.
WWDC should be interesting, since the G5 boxes are overdue for a speedbump, and the iLamp, er, iMac LCD, is also overdue for a refresh. However, since the current iMac's motherboard is based on the powerbook's, I'm not 100% positive that there will be a G5 iMac announced in San Francisco.
One of the few pieces of advice that I treasure was given to me by a co-worker as I was starting out. He told me:
"When given the choice between making more money and staying where you are, consider everything you love about your current situation. Consider your co-workers, your friends, and everything that depends on you at your current job.
Then quit being such an idiot and take the money."
I pass this onto you, and all of Slashdot, in the hopes that you will find it useful.
Sarbanes-Oxley has nothing to do with your college's wireless network, or private data, or any of that. It's about corporate governance and reporting requirements for large public corporations. Mods, YHBT. YHL. (again!) HAND!
I think it's less "out-flank Apple" and more "out and out copy Apple". But by the time we start seeing the Microsoft Music Store, OS X 10.4 will probably be shipping, and we should also see higher clocked G5's, and maybe even G5's in the iMac line. There are some very compelling reasons to consider switching, not least of which is that when you use a Mac, you get to enjoy Microsoft's upcoming "innovations" months before Microsoft's customers do.
Yeah, I know, it's blatant Apple partisanship, but who really wants to be stuck waiting until 2006 for Longhorn to catch up to Panther, when it's likely that Apple will have released Tiger, plus Lion, Ocelot, and Tabbycat by the time the damn thing actually ships?
I'll second that. Especially if your Mac is a notebook. Then, when you need to run some Windows app and you're away from home, it will be with you, not running headless on your home LAN hundreds of miles away.
Slashdot Mirror
You hear all sorts of stories about college that turn out to be urban legends. I was talking with my sister-in-law about how she wanted to go back to school to earn her accounting degree, but she sighed and said, "But I can't go to college, because my high school diploma is a G.E.D." Now, I know several people who have earned a G.E.D. and gone on to earn doctorate degrees! But because she fell for some urban legend carelessly passed on to her, she had never even bothered to check into going back to school. I feel really sorry for her, because she's lost a lot of time.
I'll second everything the parent poster said. I finished my bachelor's degree in December, eleven and a half years after I started. I'm really proud of that silly piece of paper.
Since I graduated, my boss has written my recommendations for graduate study, so I know finishing up has increased my stature at work. If you're a techie, get that degree. It really helps your career.
Although I doubt we'll see it, whether we see it or not, I'm going to make the bold prediction that in 2005, Slashdot users will continue to complain that Apple hardware is too expensive.
The real names and teams of the players sort of "complete the fantasy". I would imagine the video game players who imagine themselves leading Brett Farve and the Green Bay Packers to victory might have a hard time getting pumped to control Bert Harve and the Bean Bay Sackers. We all *know* that superior gameplay should be enough, but the value of that NFL license cannot be overestimated.
If Patrick wants someone to prescribe high-dose antibiotics designed to kill germs that might be commonly found in the mouth, perhaps he can get his dad to write the prescription. I have a heart murmur, and before every trip to the dentist's chair, my dentist writes me a prescription for and makes me take a mega-dose of amoxicillin (I'm not sure how much in terms of mg, but it's 4 pills). Heck, I forgot to do it once, and he pulled some pills out of a drawer and gave them to me. His dad can prescribe this stuff...
They have to update the photos and illustrations to keep up with changing fashion trends. It's a well-know fact that people can't learn if the people in their textbooks are dressed like rejects from What's Happening.
The movie will be called Star Wars: Episode VII: The Blatant Grab For Cash
You can fix it by reinstalling OS 9 (or, I think, just booting off an OS 9 CD) and applying the firmware patch. I thought I'd killed my 350 in the process of replacing the Panther Developer Preview (which ran fine w/o the firmware update) with the retail version (which did not), but it was no big deal to get it working again.
What, are you kidding? I suppose you think these guys sit on their hands all day long.
An IPO is *supposed* to be a financing event. It's only with the dotcom boom that a perception has arisen that the IPO is when you "cash-out" of a company. Traditionally, a company would consider an IPO to raise cash for expansion - it's a means to and end, not an end in itself.
The way Google is conducting their IPO indicates that they view it as a traditional financing event - the higher the IPO price, the more money that's available to the company to expand and grow. In Netscape's IPO, for example, the stock may have closed at $80 at the end of the first trading day, but Netscape itself only realized the $14/share that the offering was priced at. You can bet your bottom dollar that despite all the hype, someone was getting his butt chewed for leaving $66/share on the table. Google's auction doesn't eliminate the possibility of something like this happening, but it does reduce it significantly.
I'd love to let go of some of our customers, but the nature of our product is facilitating a data exchange between customers, so letting customers go would diminish the value of our product. Plus, the customers who are "trouble" are also the same ones who are likely to have data to report to us.
We have a well developed set of internal procedures, but this particular piece of spy-crud was one we hadn't run across before. I do have a "field guide to American Spyware" that I distribute to all our sales reps and customer service folks, but some calls still end up back in the tech department. We'd rather be writing code than doing tech support, no doubt, but ultimately keeping the customers happy keeps our business growing - and it is growing - we've had record volume the last two months and are on pace to break records again this month.
That would be easy, except that we deliver many of our products in crowded, cutthroat markets to people who usually have little in the way of on-site or corporate tech help. We differentiate ourselves on service and ease-of-use, since we have no hope of competing with the industry "big boys" on straight price. In fact, we buy many of our products from the "big boys", repackage them, add our own unique data, and deliver the whole ball of wax in an easy-to-read format.
Simply telling them "that's not our fault" isn't going to cut it. If we're not providing the best experience possible, our customers can easily take their business to our competitors. And then, I'd be Asking Slashdot about where I could find a new job.
The fact is that most of the "low-end" computer users use MS products because they're the easiest to install - especially since they came preinstalled on the computer. Asking them to download and install software is beyond the capabilities of many of our users. I don't like it, but I have to play the cards I'm dealt - and right now those cards say that 90%+ of my customers are using IE. And unfortunately, when those customers are trying to use my product and spyware prevents them from doing so, it falls on me to fix it. If I don't, one of my competitors will.
Holy frigging rebates Batman, I'm gonna get me a software voucher!
Let's see, it's only good for MS software, and I get $15 for Windows 98 and $9 for Office - $24 - SWEET! I can finally grab that copy of Microsoft Bob I've been itching to pick up. And with the $10 I've got left, I'll score a copy of "Return of Arcade" for Windows 3.1. This is gonna be AWESOME! Thanks, Bill - All is forgiven! Please send my vouchers soon!
You have the list with 92 million screennames? Ex----cellent, Smathers.
Manned aircraft aren't the only things that move faster than the speed of sound. In fact, since the pilot is now the limiting factor in most aircraft designs, the Army may have more use than the Air Force for hypersonic simulations - for SAMs and Patriot-type interceptor missiles that will have a flight envelope that is largely unexplored since an unmanned machine can withstand g-forces that would cause a pilot to blackout or worse.
*Completely* off-topic, mod as such... :-)
But there is a disk image of the old "Oregon Trail" game for Apple II floating around the net, that has saved on it, a "tombstone" from a player who died surprisingly early in the game. The headstone reads:
peperony and cheese
I grin everytime I play Oregon Trail. I love it when the barely literate attempt humor. What do you want on your Tombstone, indeed.
I see a bunch of folks in this thread talking about how certifications and education are worthless, because they're quickly obsoleted in the fast paced, quickly changing world of IT. I call bullshit. Most certifications are worthless because the cert's exam questions become compromised rendering the test invalid. The people running the GMAT manage to put out a new test every thirty days, I don't understand why MS, Novell, and Cisco can't do the same thing.
For that matter, I've never understood why people are happy to post their "braindumps" of memorized exam questions on the Internet. The people you're feeding answers to are the same people you're going to be competing with for jobs. You're flooding the same market you want to compete in!
I've been in the fast, quickly changing world of IT since 1993, and for all that's changed, many "tried and true" tricks still work. They might need to be updated, but the concepts are similar. For example, suppose back in 1994 I had a bunch of identical machines I wanted to configure quickly. I'd pull out the old laplink cables, pull out my special floppy that would copy the disk from my working configured "master" to the "clones". In 2003, I use a network and Ghost software, but it's pretty much the same. In 1996, I made a firewall with a floppy disk and an old 386. I needed a router in a pinch a few weeks ago, and I made one with a bootable linux CD.
In IT, understanding a few basic concepts will get you a long way. Until earlier this year, I'd never touched Windows XP - we hadn't used it at work, and I have Macs at home. But when a few Windows XP computers showed up in the office and on customer's desktops during support sessions, did I throw my hands up and whine, "Omigod! The fast pace of the quickly changing field of IT has obsoleted my skills and left me behind!" No, I didn't - I applied what I'd learned from previous Microsoft operating systems and *I* *figured* *it* *out*.
If you took someone off the street and taught him Windows NT 4.0 inside and out, then gave him a computer with XP or Server 2003 on it, it's not like he's going to be completely lost because the tech blew right past him. He can take the skills he's already picked up, and apply them as he learns a new system. Same thing with certifications. If I've been using and am certified on Netware 4 (and I mean CNE-level, not a CNA), then I'll probably be able to get the hang of Netware 5 pretty quickly, even if my certificate doesn't say so.
A certification, or any sort of technical training is valuable if you learn its main lesson - how to think when looking at a particular manufacturer's products. If you think the goal of the certification process is the piece of paper, you've missed the whole point. The problem with most technical cetification testing programs is how easily they can be "gamed". Someone who's learned what's really supposed to be taught by the certification process is invaluable. Someone who's memorized the answers off a few dozen braindump sites will be near useless.
But can it run Linux?
Also, does it play Ogg?
Not if you're still using that 386. If you're running a slightly newer platform, though, google for DOSbox - I suspect it will meet your needs.
When Windows 98 came out, there was a new feature (that before had pretty much been limited to Matrox cards with a special driver) that would let you use multiple PCI and AGP video cards in the same motherboard with multiple monitors. At first glance, this seems like pretty much the same idea.
The article seems to claim that the cards will be able to split processing duties, even if they're not from the same manufacturer. That particular claim seems very dubious to me for some reason. Other than integrating two PCI-Express slots on a motherboard, I'm not sure Alienware has achieved anything here. Of course, should Alienware want to send me one of these to try out, I'll be happy to post my review on Slashdot.
It's not that there is a G5 iMac now, they just don't want to have to update their survey when one comes out (hopefully) sometime around WWDC in June.
WWDC should be interesting, since the G5 boxes are overdue for a speedbump, and the iLamp, er, iMac LCD, is also overdue for a refresh. However, since the current iMac's motherboard is based on the powerbook's, I'm not 100% positive that there will be a G5 iMac announced in San Francisco.
"When given the choice between making more money and staying where you are, consider everything you love about your current situation. Consider your co-workers, your friends, and everything that depends on you at your current job.
Then quit being such an idiot and take the money."
I pass this onto you, and all of Slashdot, in the hopes that you will find it useful.
Sarbanes-Oxley has nothing to do with your college's wireless network, or private data, or any of that. It's about corporate governance and reporting requirements for large public corporations. Mods, YHBT. YHL. (again!) HAND!
I think it's less "out-flank Apple" and more "out and out copy Apple". But by the time we start seeing the Microsoft Music Store, OS X 10.4 will probably be shipping, and we should also see higher clocked G5's, and maybe even G5's in the iMac line. There are some very compelling reasons to consider switching, not least of which is that when you use a Mac, you get to enjoy Microsoft's upcoming "innovations" months before Microsoft's customers do.
Yeah, I know, it's blatant Apple partisanship, but who really wants to be stuck waiting until 2006 for Longhorn to catch up to Panther, when it's likely that Apple will have released Tiger, plus Lion, Ocelot, and Tabbycat by the time the damn thing actually ships?
I'll second that. Especially if your Mac is a notebook. Then, when you need to run some Windows app and you're away from home, it will be with you, not running headless on your home LAN hundreds of miles away.