Hard to say. The first job I got as a result of being recommended by someone, was about 6 years after I started working. Sure, longer than just getting a degree but it's not clear I could have accomplished the same feat within 2 years of graduating from a degree program. Also, I didn't have any student loans. Unfortunately, I spent many years battling lower wages due to not having a degree even though I was mentoring degree holding junior employees who were being paid more than I was.
The best piece of advice I received as a young man was "A degree shows people you can be taught. Work experience shows people you can be employed."
I began my 28 year career in software development shortly after that conversation. I make good money on long term contracts. I am a senior developer. I do not have a degree.
Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure this is no longer a plausible scenario and why I'm encouraging my son to either develop instant world-peace solving brilliance, or resign himself to another 4 years of post secondary education.
Yet more displays of terrible logic on your part. My data points disagree with yours, therefore I must be a big-pharma shill...
Laying it out in plain english: You used 3 data points to conclude the flu shot was bullshit. I countered with 10 equally useless data points that conflicted with yours. You throw a hissy fit.
My wife, my son, and I have received the flu shot at least 10 times each and none of us have ever come down with the flu so using your logic, I can confirm that the flu shot is 100% effective...
Or perhaps your logic is wrong and your data points probably fabricated.
I'm the quintessential old guy. I've been in the IT industry in one form or another for going on 30 years now. I am self-taught and did not get a university degree. I made a name for myself and of the 6 jobs I've had, I've never had to write a resume. My jobs always came to me and I've never been unemployed for more than a few days.
Having said that, those days are over. Unfortunately, the only thing a degree is useful for these days is to bypass the HR filters and you need that if you haven't already developed the kind of reputation that has you bypassing HR. Anything you learn while getting your degree is second only to the primary purpose which is to not get your resume thrown out before it's even looked at. While you're getting your degree, work for non-profits and open source projects... Build yourself some credibility in the community because that will provide multiple avenues for increased employment (either through remote contract gigs, or some hiring manager recognizing the work you've done and taking a flyer on you)...
postgrey was awesome. Now not so much. Most spammers nowadays seem to do multiple identical runs through the lists... I used to track how much postgrey was helping and I would say now it's barely useful.
When you're a startup, you're always on finite time/funding. We were focused on product development in order to stay competitive. Redirecting our efforts to litigation or IP sale was the choice we didn't make. Ultimately we ran out of money before we could get the next rev of our product out.. Our business died down much sooner than anticipated.
I have two patents both of which had active startups behind them. Neither of them worked out. Am I saying I didn't make mistakes? No; I made plenty of mistakes. But I'm simply saying that a patent really isn't a useful thing, in my experience..
I was told it was unlikely to kill me but would inconvenience me. I was advised that it was ok for me to continue, and to just find the level that kept me ticking properly.
Disclosure: I have no familiarity with your software. Disclosure2: I am predisposed to hating forums.
I'm from the days of the internet where discussions were had on mailing lists and usenet. Forums didn't exist.
The problem with forums is:
- In order to read a discussion, I must endure N page loads. - Each page load has a bazillion assets (smileys, avatars, buttons, menus) - Each asset that is not cached is a TCP session. Laggy or poor network connections make for a slow forum experience. - I can't read forums offline. - Forums are almost universally impossible to participate in on a smart-phone. - No easy way to read only what's new since the last time I visited (for a half dozen or so forums that I have no choice but to visit) - With email, I can choose the user agent of my desires. With a forum, I am stuck with some other idiots idea of how I should sort through information. - I can sort through a few hundred mailing list posts in a few minutes and easily drill down to what I'm interested in. With a forum, I can't sort through a few hundred new posts in under an hour. - I can file away e-mails that are of long-term interest to me, in my own filing system. It is futile to bookmark interesting forum posts because forum software changes and hence, URLs change over time.
You are wrong. Anyone can copy your patented work and market it if they have a larger legal budget than you do.
I (and my business partner at the time) came up with a unique way to solve a problem. We patented it, and began selling product. We sold several thousand instances of said product and a big US company (we were a Canadian company) came along and duplicated our product, and began selling their copy for less than our parts cost. We had our lawyer send a nastygram, including our patent for reference. We received a reply from their legal department that said "We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated "... Our lawyer said that was lawyer speak for "come and get us, if you dare.". The best we could do was prevent them from exporting their product into Canada but since 95% of our customers were US based, we were screwed and eventually went out of business. It was estimated that it would take 5-10 years to fight and probably on the order of $1M.
About 6 years ago I worked at a place that had a bitchin' espresso machine. I became a sort of self-taught Barista and my coffee intake went up significantly... Then I changed jobs and lost access to the Espresso machine. I was drinking black tea during the day then.. Suddenly one day my heart started racing at 240bpm... It did so for about 15 minutes and then stopped. Saw a doctor and it happened several times but the doctor said they needed to catch it in progress. We never did catch it so doctor took me off Alcohol, Coffee and a proper diet.. I went a year without incident. So I added back Alcohol... A few months later, I added back Coffee and then within a couple months, I was out camping and had a serious bout of it. My heart beat at 240bpm for about 45 minutes before we decided to get me to a hospital which was a 1.5hr drive away... I walked into the hospital and my heart was still beating at 240bpm... They hooked me up and knew immediately that it was a Supra-Ventricular Tachy-Cardia... It can be caused by low electrolytes and in my case, caffeine... I still drink coffee but I limit myself to 3tbsp of grounds in the morning (in a french press, with boiling water)... I can cause an incident by drinking somewhat more than my daily allotment of coffee for a couple days in a row but if I stay within my established limit, then I stay incident free...
Because we were raised by our parents to be polite and share (we're Canadians) so we spent our terminal time wisely and then released the terminal so others could have their turn. We didn't stand by helplessly wringing our hands. We stood by and worked on our code in line so as to minimize our time at the terminals. These foreign students did all of their thinking and debugging at the terminal. They were useless in the exams which were not at terminals. Personally, I did less standing in line and more dialing in to one of the 300baud modems but I was one of the lucky few to have my own computer.
In my university days, the foreign students were a sizable cabal that avoided the rest of us; steadfastly refused to reciprocate when we tried to introduce ourselves to them, and were openly hostile when it came to 'terminal room etiquette'... We were a group of about 15 who worked together studying, assignments, projects, etc... They hogged terminals constantly, while taking shifts; instead of freeing them up to the many people lined up outside (there's only so many VT-102's you can put on an 11/780 and sitll have it work)...
I also was diagnosed with sleep apnea... I was routinely waking up 1-4 times every night thinking I had to pee... It turns out my brain was waking up my body due to low O2 saturation, then the conscious part of my brain was saying "why am I awake? It must be because I have to pee" so I would...
My sleep study showed that I stopped breathing 262 times in the short 4 hours of sleep with the recorder... So the 'cure' was CPAP which I just knew wasn't going to work for me... I went to a different sleep clinic and they prescribed a dental appliance which looks like this:
It brings the lower jaw forward which helps prevent constriction of your airway when you relax during sleep. It has an adjustment screw so you can fine tune it. You start with the screw all the way relaxed to become accustomed to wearing the appliance, and then slowly over time you turn it forward until you start to sleep well. Then you do a followup sleep study so they can compare and check the adjustment.
I can travel with it, no sore throat in the morning, no whirring next to the bed, etc.
The first night I had the appliance in, with the adjustment screw all the way relaxed, my wife kept waking up in a panic to check whether I was still breathing. I was no longer snoring and because that was a sound that was so pervasive in our marriage, she had trouble sleeping without hearing my snoring...
Now after two years, I consistently sleep through the night and get a solid 7-8 hours each night. I no longer feel a need to nap in the afternoons or evenings. I can't say my memory is back to normal, though... But I put that down to my advanced age.
After telling my dad about it, he got an appliance as well. He tried CPAP when he was first diagnosed but after a month or two of trying it, he was sleeping worse because of the damn machine and hoses and mask so he gave it up. The dental appliance changed his life. He's going on 18 months with it and his health has improved, his weight has improved, and he's finding it easier to keep his blood sugar under control.. The sleep clinic that initially prescribed and sold him the CPAP machine claimed to have heard of the dental appliances but said they didn't work so CPAP was the only solution. So he came into town and went to the clinic that I went to, to get his dental appliance.
So if you can't tolerate CPAP, then consider talking to the sleep clinic about the dental appliances. Note: they're quite expensive and they're not the same as the cheap "boil and bite" ones, which don't last very long and don't allow you to adjust the offset of the lower jaw.
You could eliminate the error entirely by arranging the runners in a circle and put the pistol in the center. Make it up to the judges whether the runners face in or out.
Ok, so it hasn't been unseasonably warm yet but this weekend it's forecasted to be fairly toasty. I have an acreage with my own well. Having recently replaced the old oil burning furnace with a high-efficiency nat.gas furnace, I had the HVAC guy install a chiller coil in the plenum for an extra $150. The water I pull out of my 10gpm well comes out at 8C so I plumbed the well water through the chiller coil in my furnace (after removing the orifice), and hooked a solenoid up to the furnace so when the thermostat calls for cooling, well water runs through the chiller coil and blows cool air through the house. The output goes to a sprinkler on the roof of the house which further cools the house. The output of the eaves runs to a drip irrigation setup which irrigates the plants and garden... Eventually, the water ends up back in the ground. Along with some awnings in front of the SW view windows, the house stays fairly cool for the price of pulling the water out of the ground (and with a variable frequency drive well pump controller, it's also fairly economical). It's possibly more economical to run an actual compressor with refrigerant for shorter duty cycles. Not sure.
Except they won't let you buy what you want. Back in the 70's there was a popular TV show that I enjoyed watching when I was a kid. Go ahead, try to find a DVD set of "WKRP in Cincinnatti"... My wife's cousin came over and lamented how she could only find the 1st season on DVD but the music wasn't what was in the original show... I relayed that I had also been hoping to buy the DVD set... So I went to TPB and downloaded the full series with original music.
WKRP is credited for popularizing many songs back then and helping artists rise to fame. However, the reason there are no DVD sets of WKRP is allegedly because of the difficulty in licensing the music from the content providers. When WKRP shows are aired in re-runs, they are aired with crappy sound-alike music... In many episodes, the songs are contextual so part of the plot is ruined when they removed the music.
As the cherry topping, I introduced my 10yo son to WKRP and he devoured all of the episodes, watching some of them twice and three times; with original music... He enjoys the music and has been buying it from iTunes...
Agreed. We started teaching our son ASL when he was 6mos. He signed his first sign at 8mos (milk). By a year, he was telling us what he wanted to eat at mealtime and asking questions like "where is my bear?".. Even after he became verbal and even today (almost 11 yo) he still uses some of his retained ASL to communicate when his mouth is full or when he's too far away to yell ("Mom! 5 more minutes!")...
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Iran doesn't want nukes buts wants money. Money that it can get from selling Nukes to some other party? Like Al Qaeda, for example...
Hard to say. The first job I got as a result of being recommended by someone, was about 6 years after I started working. Sure, longer than just getting a degree but it's not clear I could have accomplished the same feat within 2 years of graduating from a degree program. Also, I didn't have any student loans. Unfortunately, I spent many years battling lower wages due to not having a degree even though I was mentoring degree holding junior employees who were being paid more than I was.
The best piece of advice I received as a young man was "A degree shows people you can be taught. Work experience shows people you can be employed."
I began my 28 year career in software development shortly after that conversation. I make good money on long term contracts. I am a senior developer. I do not have a degree.
Unfortunately, I'm fairly sure this is no longer a plausible scenario and why I'm encouraging my son to either develop instant world-peace solving brilliance, or resign himself to another 4 years of post secondary education.
I keep waiting for these things to appear at Home Depot ...
Yet more displays of terrible logic on your part. My data points disagree with yours, therefore I must be a big-pharma shill...
Laying it out in plain english: You used 3 data points to conclude the flu shot was bullshit. I countered with 10 equally useless data points that conflicted with yours. You throw a hissy fit.
My wife, my son, and I have received the flu shot at least 10 times each and none of us have ever come down with the flu so using your logic, I can confirm that the flu shot is 100% effective...
Or perhaps your logic is wrong and your data points probably fabricated.
I was just about to post most of this... Kudos for your thoroughness...
ihnp4 me harder!!
> sexual outlet (e.g. marriage).
you're not married are you?
I'm the quintessential old guy. I've been in the IT industry in one form or another for going on 30 years now. I am self-taught and did not get a university degree. I made a name for myself and of the 6 jobs I've had, I've never had to write a resume. My jobs always came to me and I've never been unemployed for more than a few days.
Having said that, those days are over. Unfortunately, the only thing a degree is useful for these days is to bypass the HR filters and you need that if you haven't already developed the kind of reputation that has you bypassing HR. Anything you learn while getting your degree is second only to the primary purpose which is to not get your resume thrown out before it's even looked at. While you're getting your degree, work for non-profits and open source projects... Build yourself some credibility in the community because that will provide multiple avenues for increased employment (either through remote contract gigs, or some hiring manager recognizing the work you've done and taking a flyer on you)...
postgrey was awesome. Now not so much. Most spammers nowadays seem to do multiple identical runs through the lists... I used to track how much postgrey was helping and I would say now it's barely useful.
When you're a startup, you're always on finite time/funding. We were focused on product development in order to stay competitive. Redirecting our efforts to litigation or IP sale was the choice we didn't make. Ultimately we ran out of money before we could get the next rev of our product out.. Our business died down much sooner than anticipated.
I have two patents both of which had active startups behind them. Neither of them worked out. Am I saying I didn't make mistakes? No; I made plenty of mistakes. But I'm simply saying that a patent really isn't a useful thing, in my experience..
I was told it was unlikely to kill me but would inconvenience me. I was advised that it was ok for me to continue, and to just find the level that kept me ticking properly.
Disclosure: I have no familiarity with your software.
Disclosure2: I am predisposed to hating forums.
I'm from the days of the internet where discussions were had on mailing lists and usenet. Forums didn't exist.
The problem with forums is:
- In order to read a discussion, I must endure N page loads.
- Each page load has a bazillion assets (smileys, avatars, buttons, menus)
- Each asset that is not cached is a TCP session. Laggy or poor network connections make for a slow forum experience.
- I can't read forums offline.
- Forums are almost universally impossible to participate in on a smart-phone.
- No easy way to read only what's new since the last time I visited (for a half dozen or so forums that I have no choice but to visit)
- With email, I can choose the user agent of my desires. With a forum, I am stuck with some other idiots idea of how I should sort through information.
- I can sort through a few hundred mailing list posts in a few minutes and easily drill down to what I'm interested in. With a forum, I can't sort through a few hundred new posts in under an hour.
- I can file away e-mails that are of long-term interest to me, in my own filing system. It is futile to bookmark interesting forum posts because forum software changes and hence, URLs change over time.
Forums are a scourge on the intarwebs...
And I believe you're standing on my lawn.
You are wrong. Anyone can copy your patented work and market it if they have a larger legal budget than you do.
I (and my business partner at the time) came up with a unique way to solve a problem. We patented it, and began selling product. We sold several thousand instances of said product and a big US company (we were a Canadian company) came along and duplicated our product, and began selling their copy for less than our parts cost. We had our lawyer send a nastygram, including our patent for reference. We received a reply from their legal department that said "We acknowledge receipt of your letter dated "... Our lawyer said that was lawyer speak for "come and get us, if you dare.". The best we could do was prevent them from exporting their product into Canada but since 95% of our customers were US based, we were screwed and eventually went out of business. It was estimated that it would take 5-10 years to fight and probably on the order of $1M.
You forgot "cat > /vmunix"
About 6 years ago I worked at a place that had a bitchin' espresso machine. I became a sort of self-taught Barista and my coffee intake went up significantly... Then I changed jobs and lost access to the Espresso machine. I was drinking black tea during the day then.. Suddenly one day my heart started racing at 240bpm... It did so for about 15 minutes and then stopped. Saw a doctor and it happened several times but the doctor said they needed to catch it in progress. We never did catch it so doctor took me off Alcohol, Coffee and a proper diet.. I went a year without incident. So I added back Alcohol... A few months later, I added back Coffee and then within a couple months, I was out camping and had a serious bout of it. My heart beat at 240bpm for about 45 minutes before we decided to get me to a hospital which was a 1.5hr drive away... I walked into the hospital and my heart was still beating at 240bpm... They hooked me up and knew immediately that it was a Supra-Ventricular Tachy-Cardia... It can be caused by low electrolytes and in my case, caffeine... I still drink coffee but I limit myself to 3tbsp of grounds in the morning (in a french press, with boiling water)... I can cause an incident by drinking somewhat more than my daily allotment of coffee for a couple days in a row but if I stay within my established limit, then I stay incident free...
A suicidal performance artist using it to have himself anonymously murdered.
Because we were raised by our parents to be polite and share (we're Canadians) so we spent our terminal time wisely and then released the terminal so others could have their turn. We didn't stand by helplessly wringing our hands. We stood by and worked on our code in line so as to minimize our time at the terminals. These foreign students did all of their thinking and debugging at the terminal. They were useless in the exams which were not at terminals. Personally, I did less standing in line and more dialing in to one of the 300baud modems but I was one of the lucky few to have my own computer.
In my university days, the foreign students were a sizable cabal that avoided the rest of us; steadfastly refused to reciprocate when we tried to introduce ourselves to them, and were openly hostile when it came to 'terminal room etiquette'... We were a group of about 15 who worked together studying, assignments, projects, etc... They hogged terminals constantly, while taking shifts; instead of freeing them up to the many people lined up outside (there's only so many VT-102's you can put on an 11/780 and sitll have it work)...
I also was diagnosed with sleep apnea... I was routinely waking up 1-4 times every night thinking I had to pee... It turns out my brain was waking up my body due to low O2 saturation, then the conscious part of my brain was saying "why am I awake? It must be because I have to pee" so I would...
My sleep study showed that I stopped breathing 262 times in the short 4 hours of sleep with the recorder... So the 'cure' was CPAP which I just knew wasn't going to work for me... I went to a different sleep clinic and they prescribed a dental appliance which looks like this:
http://www.sleepandhealth.com/sites/www.sleepandhealth.com/files/images/Article_images/TAP.jpg
It brings the lower jaw forward which helps prevent constriction of your airway when you relax during sleep. It has an adjustment screw so you can fine tune it. You start with the screw all the way relaxed to become accustomed to wearing the appliance, and then slowly over time you turn it forward until you start to sleep well. Then you do a followup sleep study so they can compare and check the adjustment.
I can travel with it, no sore throat in the morning, no whirring next to the bed, etc.
The first night I had the appliance in, with the adjustment screw all the way relaxed, my wife kept waking up in a panic to check whether I was still breathing. I was no longer snoring and because that was a sound that was so pervasive in our marriage, she had trouble sleeping without hearing my snoring...
Now after two years, I consistently sleep through the night and get a solid 7-8 hours each night. I no longer feel a need to nap in the afternoons or evenings. I can't say my memory is back to normal, though... But I put that down to my advanced age.
After telling my dad about it, he got an appliance as well. He tried CPAP when he was first diagnosed but after a month or two of trying it, he was sleeping worse because of the damn machine and hoses and mask so he gave it up. The dental appliance changed his life. He's going on 18 months with it and his health has improved, his weight has improved, and he's finding it easier to keep his blood sugar under control.. The sleep clinic that initially prescribed and sold him the CPAP machine claimed to have heard of the dental appliances but said they didn't work so CPAP was the only solution. So he came into town and went to the clinic that I went to, to get his dental appliance.
So if you can't tolerate CPAP, then consider talking to the sleep clinic about the dental appliances. Note: they're quite expensive and they're not the same as the cheap "boil and bite" ones, which don't last very long and don't allow you to adjust the offset of the lower jaw.
You could eliminate the error entirely by arranging the runners in a circle and put the pistol in the center. Make it up to the judges whether the runners face in or out.
Ok, so it hasn't been unseasonably warm yet but this weekend it's forecasted to be fairly toasty. I have an acreage with my own well. Having recently replaced the old oil burning furnace with a high-efficiency nat.gas furnace, I had the HVAC guy install a chiller coil in the plenum for an extra $150. The water I pull out of my 10gpm well comes out at 8C so I plumbed the well water through the chiller coil in my furnace (after removing the orifice), and hooked a solenoid up to the furnace so when the thermostat calls for cooling, well water runs through the chiller coil and blows cool air through the house. The output goes to a sprinkler on the roof of the house which further cools the house. The output of the eaves runs to a drip irrigation setup which irrigates the plants and garden... Eventually, the water ends up back in the ground. Along with some awnings in front of the SW view windows, the house stays fairly cool for the price of pulling the water out of the ground (and with a variable frequency drive well pump controller, it's also fairly economical). It's possibly more economical to run an actual compressor with refrigerant for shorter duty cycles. Not sure.
Except they won't let you buy what you want. Back in the 70's there was a popular TV show that I enjoyed watching when I was a kid. Go ahead, try to find a DVD set of "WKRP in Cincinnatti"... My wife's cousin came over and lamented how she could only find the 1st season on DVD but the music wasn't what was in the original show... I relayed that I had also been hoping to buy the DVD set... So I went to TPB and downloaded the full series with original music.
WKRP is credited for popularizing many songs back then and helping artists rise to fame. However, the reason there are no DVD sets of WKRP is allegedly because of the difficulty in licensing the music from the content providers. When WKRP shows are aired in re-runs, they are aired with crappy sound-alike music... In many episodes, the songs are contextual so part of the plot is ruined when they removed the music.
As the cherry topping, I introduced my 10yo son to WKRP and he devoured all of the episodes, watching some of them twice and three times; with original music... He enjoys the music and has been buying it from iTunes...
Agreed. We started teaching our son ASL when he was 6mos. He signed his first sign at 8mos (milk). By a year, he was telling us what he wanted to eat at mealtime and asking questions like "where is my bear?".. Even after he became verbal and even today (almost 11 yo) he still uses some of his retained ASL to communicate when his mouth is full or when he's too far away to yell ("Mom! 5 more minutes!")...