The fact that Kent state is in Kent (almost an hour from Cleveland if mapquest is to be believed) and not Cleveland might have something to do with that. It's a lot closer to Akron than it is to Cleveland.
I know. It's the companies I have interviews with that constantly talk of how "passionate" and "dedicated" their staff is that expect you to work 70-80 hours per week for a tiny salary. The ones who actually have a good work-life balance tend also to be the ones that pay a sane rate.
I agree that this is a gross overstepping of boundries.
It should also be mentioned that there is another large difference between cell phones and school lockers. The school owns the lockers. They do not own the cell phones in question.
I know that you probably meant that as a joke, but to in all seriousness, I've trained since I was a little kid. There have been times when people have tried to cause me severe bodily harm (in one case a guy tried to split my head open), and I'm still here.
I don't stand there and brag about what I've done or what I know, and I generally try to find another way out of situations like that, but if it comes down to it, I get by.
Since someone else has already covered the movement portion fairly well, I'll skip over that and go to the rest of your post.
The wannabe badasses are the ones who always brag about "how good" they are. They talk a great deal and generally don't have a whole heck of a lot behind it. You'll find that most well-trained martial artists tend to be rather calm and low-key about the whole thing. They don't tend to care if people think they're tough or not.
The problem with doing it for sport is that sport fighting does things for the sake of points and there are a whole lot of things that are blatantly illegal. If you try to fight in real life like you do in a tournament, chances are very good that you will end up in a hospital or a morgue really fast if the other person is actually used to fighting. The mindsets of someone who does it for sport and someone who does it for serious reasons tend to be completely different.
The right reasons for training martially? Self-defense (and defending others) is one. Contrary to what you seem to think, self confidence, dicipline, health, and the ability to clear your mind are also very valid reasons (not to mention nice benefits) for serious martial training.
And remember, part of martial training is knowing that fighting isn't the answer to every situation where some people think it is.
But, you never can tell. I know a lot of coders who take all sorts of martial arts. Most of them involve swords which won't do much good in prison, though.
Actually, the same techniques you use with a sword translate quite well to pretty much any other weapon - stick, rolled up newspaper, etc. Even just your fists.
The lines of attack are the same with any rigid weapon and most of the movements are as well. The problem is that almost nobody ever teaches that fact because most people who train martially do it for the wrong reasons (namely to be a badass or to compete). Those types of schools are often refered to as McDojos.
(Spoken as someone who's trained far too much martially)
Funny. I run Eclipse on a laptop with 512 ram and generally use several other apps at the same time (winamp, acrobat, thunderbird, and occasionally firefox) without any trouble at all.
I find it weird that a lot of intro programming classes never cover debuggers. Like I said before, I was introduced to them by a friend shortly after I started my CS degree back in 98. Before that, it was a painful sequence of couts.
gdb was okay when I didn't have any other alternative, but I really grew to perfer a graphical debugger. It tended to be easier for me to do the "at a glance" thing with one.
About the only time I ever do test output lines anymore are to check and make sure that certain things happen properly if I'm designing a gui. In that case, they can still be rather useful.
The frightening thing is that I really don't have any problem believing these sort of stories because I've seen so many myself and have known other people who have seen even more.
I guess in the case of the guy I knew, it was all he could do to explain (with a straight face) to the very nice little old lady why that wouldn't work and assure her that they would refund her money if she didn't want to get a computer so that she could actually use their service. (They really were a decent bunch of guys until they were bought by a company that was then bought by Earthlink)
He then calmly walked out of her house and drove a short distance away until he was out of sight and then pulled over before allowing himself to bawl his eyes out from laughing so hard. We'd all heard horror stories of that sort before, but never exprienced one quite like that until then.
Thanks for the info. Glad to know there's one out there.
At the moment, most of my scripts are simple enough that I just bang them out on a standard text editor (notepad or pico depending on the system). That's basically the only reason that I haven't looked for a plugin.
The main reason I learned ruby was as a replacement for perl because it doesn't have any real quirks on windows and it's a whole lot easier to read.
I think about the only setup for Eclipse that I had to do was to unzip it where I wanted it and set a home directory. I've done other things to it later as I needed to do more advanced things, but as far as just getting it up and running so I could write working code, that was basically it.
I was actually really surprised, because I thought it would be more of a pain to get working. I'll grant you that a full-featured IDE can be a bit intimidating for more novice users or for people who don't have to program all that much, but most of us need to grow into a fuller dev environment at some point just because of the kind of work that we do. I think my tipping point was being introduced to the graphical debugger in Visual Studio 6 back when I was learning C++ after I had been doing all of my dev work in xemacs on Solaris and using couts for debugging purposes.
I was kind of wondering about the JCreator comment myself. The only real complaint I have with Eclipse is that it sometimes takes too long for the code-complete menu to pop up, but that's basically a minor annoyance at best because it's got to be the best free (as in money) IDE for Java that I've found. I'm even considering seeing if there's a Ruby plugin (I think there is. I just haven't been bothered to find it)
I don't think I know anyone who actually uses JCreator. Most of the other devs I know use Eclipse and one or two use NetBeans.
When I graduated a couple of years ago, people were just really starting to get laptops instead of desktops in my dept. Half the time they still ended up in the labs in order to ask questions of the other people there even if they had a laptop.
In my case, I got a laptop because I was never at home (which was 45 minutes away) and my desktop was getting so old that it really wasn't suited to some of the coding that I was doing at the time anyway, so either way I was stuck in the labs. The ability to work when I had a few extra minutes without having to run literally across campus to the lab was just really nice.
Being one of the people that they always asked questions of, I took great pleasure in the peace and quiet that was to be found in the local coffee shop when I really needed to get work done. It's not that I disliked answering the questions. It was just that there were times when I really needed to concentrate on what I was doing and some underclassmen did not understand that telling them I was busy meant that I was actually busy. It went so far as to cause me to make up a little sign that said "Busy!" which I placed beside myself when I couldn't be bothered.
However, I quickly became addicted to the hot chocolate at the coffee shop (which I swear that they had to lace with something because it was the best I'd ever had), so I guess everything has a price =]
I can't vouch for the 5.25 in a 3.5 drive, but I know someone who got called in on a service call to a sheriff's dept in order to remove a business card sized cd from a 3.5" floppy drive.
Not all of the NIC in the box stories are bull or pranks. Back when I was still on dialup (cicra 1998 or 1999), I knew most of the techs that worked for the ISP. I met up with one of them right after work, and he had a priceless expression on his face of the "humanity hurts my head" sort.
It turns out that this older lady had just gotten their service and made a call because she couldn't get online. They walk her though the basic steps of asking her if she had a network card and if it was plugged into the wall.
Still no luck. After a while, they sent someone around to her house (it was a small town. Total population was something like 5,000) to see if they could sort things out because it was taking too long on the phone.
They got to her house and found that she did indeed have a modem, and it was in fact plugged into a standard phone line which was then plugged into the wall. However, she did not have a computer. She had bought the modem and set it on top of her television...
Some of these stories are so strange that you just can't make them up.
Yes, BestBuy tends to ignore their customers unless you come in for one very specific thing because you need it about an hour ago so you can't wait for delivery from an online retailer. In this case, you have blue shirts swarming around you trying to upsell you on everything.
The fact that I dress fairly nicely most of the time just seems to scream "comission" at them.
"I need it right now" is about the only reason I ever go there. The other reason is the occasional loss leader like burnable media priced cheaper than I can get it anywhere else.
I can't really comment on the "creepy IT person is hitting on me" part because I usually end up being the one that gets approached. I tend to read people fairly well. It's just one of those things.
As for the rampant screams of "sexual harassment", some of them are deserved, yes, but a lot of those situations arise because people don't tell the person in question that something they are doing is making you uncomfortable. It really comes down to people taking responsibility for themselves and working things out first instead of running to HR right away and saying something that may in fact be blown completely out of proportion.
Talk to that person first. If they don't stop, then go to HR or whatever the next step should be.
I'm a pragmatic (and generally pretty polite) person. If I'm doing something that somebody isn't comfortable with, chances are very good that if they tell me, I'll stop doing it (unless there is very good reason for what I am doing).
Chances are that there are a fair number of members of the opposite sex at companies where the average slashdotters work. They may not work in the same department, but they are indeed there.
I don't know about you, but I often enjoy talking to people who don't do the same things professionally that I do. It helps me keep perspective on things and makes sure I get out on occasion. If all of my friends (including girlfriends that I have had) were into all of the same things that I was, I'd be bored out of my skull.
At my alma mater, Microsoft *hated* our origional license agreement. We got it all for free. Everything from Windows to Office to the pro versions of Visual Studio. All you had to do was go to the library and ask.
They changed it a few years ago. Now pretty much anything they want is $20. That's a heck of a far cry from the $99 that you claim.
Actually, if you think about it, it makes sense for a couple of reasons. He can't actively work for them for a year. This means two things:
1) If they had announced his position now, by the time he actually got the ability to work for them, the landscape may have changed and they will either have to put him somewhere else (to cries of "Google is teh evil" because they said one thing and did another) or keep him in the position which they origionally stated, thus keeping him out of a position in which he may have been even more productive.
2) If they announced his position now, that gives the competition time to plan around him. This is especially true of Microsoft, because they know him best since he worked for them for so long. They know how he thinks and the kind of direction he will attempt to give Google (which will depend on the position he fills). That is not something you want your opponant to know.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that Kent state is in Kent (almost an hour from Cleveland if mapquest is to be believed) and not Cleveland might have something to do with that. It's a lot closer to Akron than it is to Cleveland.
I know. It's the companies I have interviews with that constantly talk of how "passionate" and "dedicated" their staff is that expect you to work 70-80 hours per week for a tiny salary. The ones who actually have a good work-life balance tend also to be the ones that pay a sane rate.
Minors can not gerenally enter into legally binding agreements. Their parents have to sign off on it as well.
I agree that this is a gross overstepping of boundries.
It should also be mentioned that there is another large difference between cell phones and school lockers. The school owns the lockers. They do not own the cell phones in question.
I know that you probably meant that as a joke, but to in all seriousness, I've trained since I was a little kid. There have been times when people have tried to cause me severe bodily harm (in one case a guy tried to split my head open), and I'm still here.
I don't stand there and brag about what I've done or what I know, and I generally try to find another way out of situations like that, but if it comes down to it, I get by.
Since someone else has already covered the movement portion fairly well, I'll skip over that and go to the rest of your post.
The wannabe badasses are the ones who always brag about "how good" they are. They talk a great deal and generally don't have a whole heck of a lot behind it. You'll find that most well-trained martial artists tend to be rather calm and low-key about the whole thing. They don't tend to care if people think they're tough or not.
The problem with doing it for sport is that sport fighting does things for the sake of points and there are a whole lot of things that are blatantly illegal. If you try to fight in real life like you do in a tournament, chances are very good that you will end up in a hospital or a morgue really fast if the other person is actually used to fighting. The mindsets of someone who does it for sport and someone who does it for serious reasons tend to be completely different.
The right reasons for training martially? Self-defense (and defending others) is one. Contrary to what you seem to think, self confidence, dicipline, health, and the ability to clear your mind are also very valid reasons (not to mention nice benefits) for serious martial training.
And remember, part of martial training is knowing that fighting isn't the answer to every situation where some people think it is.
But, you never can tell. I know a lot of coders who take all sorts of martial arts. Most of them involve swords which won't do much good in prison, though.
Actually, the same techniques you use with a sword translate quite well to pretty much any other weapon - stick, rolled up newspaper, etc. Even just your fists.
The lines of attack are the same with any rigid weapon and most of the movements are as well. The problem is that almost nobody ever teaches that fact because most people who train martially do it for the wrong reasons (namely to be a badass or to compete). Those types of schools are often refered to as McDojos.
(Spoken as someone who's trained far too much martially)
Funny. I run Eclipse on a laptop with 512 ram and generally use several other apps at the same time (winamp, acrobat, thunderbird, and occasionally firefox) without any trouble at all.
I find it weird that a lot of intro programming classes never cover debuggers. Like I said before, I was introduced to them by a friend shortly after I started my CS degree back in 98. Before that, it was a painful sequence of couts.
gdb was okay when I didn't have any other alternative, but I really grew to perfer a graphical debugger. It tended to be easier for me to do the "at a glance" thing with one.
About the only time I ever do test output lines anymore are to check and make sure that certain things happen properly if I'm designing a gui. In that case, they can still be rather useful.
The frightening thing is that I really don't have any problem believing these sort of stories because I've seen so many myself and have known other people who have seen even more.
I guess in the case of the guy I knew, it was all he could do to explain (with a straight face) to the very nice little old lady why that wouldn't work and assure her that they would refund her money if she didn't want to get a computer so that she could actually use their service. (They really were a decent bunch of guys until they were bought by a company that was then bought by Earthlink)
He then calmly walked out of her house and drove a short distance away until he was out of sight and then pulled over before allowing himself to bawl his eyes out from laughing so hard. We'd all heard horror stories of that sort before, but never exprienced one quite like that until then.
Thanks for the info. Glad to know there's one out there.
At the moment, most of my scripts are simple enough that I just bang them out on a standard text editor (notepad or pico depending on the system). That's basically the only reason that I haven't looked for a plugin.
The main reason I learned ruby was as a replacement for perl because it doesn't have any real quirks on windows and it's a whole lot easier to read.
I think about the only setup for Eclipse that I had to do was to unzip it where I wanted it and set a home directory. I've done other things to it later as I needed to do more advanced things, but as far as just getting it up and running so I could write working code, that was basically it.
I was actually really surprised, because I thought it would be more of a pain to get working. I'll grant you that a full-featured IDE can be a bit intimidating for more novice users or for people who don't have to program all that much, but most of us need to grow into a fuller dev environment at some point just because of the kind of work that we do. I think my tipping point was being introduced to the graphical debugger in Visual Studio 6 back when I was learning C++ after I had been doing all of my dev work in xemacs on Solaris and using couts for debugging purposes.
I was kind of wondering about the JCreator comment myself. The only real complaint I have with Eclipse is that it sometimes takes too long for the code-complete menu to pop up, but that's basically a minor annoyance at best because it's got to be the best free (as in money) IDE for Java that I've found. I'm even considering seeing if there's a Ruby plugin (I think there is. I just haven't been bothered to find it)
I don't think I know anyone who actually uses JCreator. Most of the other devs I know use Eclipse and one or two use NetBeans.
When I graduated a couple of years ago, people were just really starting to get laptops instead of desktops in my dept. Half the time they still ended up in the labs in order to ask questions of the other people there even if they had a laptop.
In my case, I got a laptop because I was never at home (which was 45 minutes away) and my desktop was getting so old that it really wasn't suited to some of the coding that I was doing at the time anyway, so either way I was stuck in the labs. The ability to work when I had a few extra minutes without having to run literally across campus to the lab was just really nice.
Being one of the people that they always asked questions of, I took great pleasure in the peace and quiet that was to be found in the local coffee shop when I really needed to get work done. It's not that I disliked answering the questions. It was just that there were times when I really needed to concentrate on what I was doing and some underclassmen did not understand that telling them I was busy meant that I was actually busy. It went so far as to cause me to make up a little sign that said "Busy!" which I placed beside myself when I couldn't be bothered.
However, I quickly became addicted to the hot chocolate at the coffee shop (which I swear that they had to lace with something because it was the best I'd ever had), so I guess everything has a price =]
The last computer I bought from Dell (in fact the last computer I have bought for myself) was my laptop a couple of years ago.
Shipping was a whopping $0. As far as I know, it still is.
I can't vouch for the 5.25 in a 3.5 drive, but I know someone who got called in on a service call to a sheriff's dept in order to remove a business card sized cd from a 3.5" floppy drive.
Not all of the NIC in the box stories are bull or pranks. Back when I was still on dialup (cicra 1998 or 1999), I knew most of the techs that worked for the ISP. I met up with one of them right after work, and he had a priceless expression on his face of the "humanity hurts my head" sort.
It turns out that this older lady had just gotten their service and made a call because she couldn't get online. They walk her though the basic steps of asking her if she had a network card and if it was plugged into the wall.
Still no luck. After a while, they sent someone around to her house (it was a small town. Total population was something like 5,000) to see if they could sort things out because it was taking too long on the phone.
They got to her house and found that she did indeed have a modem, and it was in fact plugged into a standard phone line which was then plugged into the wall. However, she did not have a computer. She had bought the modem and set it on top of her television...
Some of these stories are so strange that you just can't make them up.
Yes, BestBuy tends to ignore their customers unless you come in for one very specific thing because you need it about an hour ago so you can't wait for delivery from an online retailer. In this case, you have blue shirts swarming around you trying to upsell you on everything.
The fact that I dress fairly nicely most of the time just seems to scream "comission" at them.
"I need it right now" is about the only reason I ever go there. The other reason is the occasional loss leader like burnable media priced cheaper than I can get it anywhere else.
I can't really comment on the "creepy IT person is hitting on me" part because I usually end up being the one that gets approached. I tend to read people fairly well. It's just one of those things.
As for the rampant screams of "sexual harassment", some of them are deserved, yes, but a lot of those situations arise because people don't tell the person in question that something they are doing is making you uncomfortable. It really comes down to people taking responsibility for themselves and working things out first instead of running to HR right away and saying something that may in fact be blown completely out of proportion.
Talk to that person first. If they don't stop, then go to HR or whatever the next step should be.
I'm a pragmatic (and generally pretty polite) person. If I'm doing something that somebody isn't comfortable with, chances are very good that if they tell me, I'll stop doing it (unless there is very good reason for what I am doing).
Chances are that there are a fair number of members of the opposite sex at companies where the average slashdotters work. They may not work in the same department, but they are indeed there.
I don't know about you, but I often enjoy talking to people who don't do the same things professionally that I do. It helps me keep perspective on things and makes sure I get out on occasion. If all of my friends (including girlfriends that I have had) were into all of the same things that I was, I'd be bored out of my skull.
Quite frankly, it is absolutely none of HR's business whom I happen to be dating. My personal life is just that - Mine and *personal*.
This habit of some companies thinking that they own every aspect of your life really annoys the hell out of me.
She was indeed in charge of Microsoft Bob. In fact, it was the only thing at Microsoft that she was ever in charge of.
You can also blame her for Clippy (which was sort of pioneered in Bob). =]
At my alma mater, Microsoft *hated* our origional license agreement. We got it all for free. Everything from Windows to Office to the pro versions of Visual Studio. All you had to do was go to the library and ask.
They changed it a few years ago. Now pretty much anything they want is $20. That's a heck of a far cry from the $99 that you claim.
Actually, if you think about it, it makes sense for a couple of reasons. He can't actively work for them for a year. This means two things:
1) If they had announced his position now, by the time he actually got the ability to work for them, the landscape may have changed and they will either have to put him somewhere else (to cries of "Google is teh evil" because they said one thing and did another) or keep him in the position which they origionally stated, thus keeping him out of a position in which he may have been even more productive.
2) If they announced his position now, that gives the competition time to plan around him. This is especially true of Microsoft, because they know him best since he worked for them for so long. They know how he thinks and the kind of direction he will attempt to give Google (which will depend on the position he fills). That is not something you want your opponant to know.
Gone camping lately? Some of the high end gear is extremely expensive.