I can't tell if that's an improvement over the "This is how MS Office works" ICT training that most UK students get now. I had to teach myself relational database basics and a few programming languages while in school because the school didn't have the courses (or the teachers) to push a real syllabus.
When I was 14, our High School comp-sci teacher had the good sense to realize that about 6 of us (out of a graduating class of 200ish) were sufficiently advanced that there was nothing he could teach us in a traditional lecture and homework format, they actually let us have an hour a day of "independent study comp-sci" in place of sleeping through yet another pointless class. Though we weren't required to, most IS people did most of the lecture projects anyway... as I recall, I produced 3 lines of code that executed all the functionality of the semester project - which was taking an average of 15 pages for most people to do when they did it according to the teacher's guidance. He was having them convert numerical bases, from base 10 to base 2, base 2 to base 16, base 16 to base 8, etc.
Information Science is a basic science, like any other, and in our world has a lot more immediate practical applications. It should be taught. Why can my son, very bright, in the 8th grade, tell me the layers of the atmosphere and the earths crust and evolution and basic physics, but can't tell me the difference between a bit and a byte? That's crazy.
Bits and bytes matter less and less, they're becoming the sub-atomic particles of Computer Science, interesting to some of the theory guys, but all the practical stuff is made up of bigger chunks. Or, that's the theory, at least. I still manipulate bits in my C++ code, but then, using C++ makes me somewhat archaic, too.
Read the Pi schtick - they are all about changing computer instruction into something cool, and getting away from making everybody into electronic secretaries.
Funnily enough, mortality rates should be higher outside of Europe, due to a gene that survivors of the Black Plague passed on. It should make those people more resistant to this flu as well. So my chances aren't all that bad probably.
Although it's never a bad idea to start stockpiling canned goods and tissues;)
I plan on being a cannibal... No need to stock up and no one ever thinks of cannibalism right from the start. Sort of gives you a leg up on everyone else really.
If the social backlash doesn't get you first, the diseases of your dinner will likely take you down before you have a chance to procreate... most cannibals in nature tend to eat the young and tasty _ahem_ healthy.
or nature finds its own way to such a 'killer virus'
In my opinion, the difference between a killer asteroid and a killer plague is that you can search the sky with telescopes for the first, but you can search every jungle on Earth with microscopes and still not see the second one coming.
Someone has probably already crafted a similar version in a distant private or military research lab anyway. Its better that it got out and fixes are prepared.
Actually various independently crafted versions may be different enough that a "cure" for one is ineffective against another.
True enough, but having practice in developing "solutions" for dozens of similar problems is a lot better than starting from sulfa drugs and trying to work your way up.
Limbaugh listeners aren't hoping it will go away, they are certain that it is all a lie, a liberal plot to get grant money to study the problem and other such nonsense. There's no need to hope for the tooth fairy to go away, is there?
stories of Welfare Queens do well over there, even if the people telling them would be very hard pressed to actually find one.
They are all too easy to find in the U.S. of A. I think the thing that is right with Euro welfare / wrong with US welfare is that US welfare kind of kicks you while you are down, we are so politically concerned with people getting something "they don't deserve" that people get habituated into poverty because they really can't get themselves out - sure, some have kids that get scholarships, some work their way up to the top, and hey, some win the lottery, but the system here seems to work to keep most of the poor, poor. I suppose somebody has to work at McDonalds and keep the cost of fries down to 0.99.
Places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, and Germany are phenomenal when it comes to variety and choice in job.
Perhaps a bit of world travel and turning off Fox News would do you good.
All I heard from the Danes, and Germans while I traveled there was how oppressive their taxes were, from the day they started working until the day they retired - everybody else gets a posh life, but if you work, you're working to support that posh life for the kids and seniors and disabled and pregnant and otherwise not-working people. There really was a lot of resentment, especially from the Germans with their shorter workweeks and 6+ weeks per year of paid vacation. Oh, and the Germans also liked to bitch about how nothing ever gets done during summer holiday time, like, literal shutdown of non-essential functioning for several months.
The Swedes didn't talk much (the only ones that did talk actually lived in the US and were just visiting, true Swedes didn't talk at all), the French (Parisians) were too busy being rude to actually relate anything of meaning, and I didn't travel in Finland, so I guess it's not surprising that I didn't meet many Finns.
One little error -- your list is upside down. You don't need sales and marketing unless you have a product, and you con't need accounting until you've made sales.
1) A product 2) Sales and marketing 3) Accounting
The order of the list was intentional. Product ideas are like (name your favorite body part), everybody has one, or two. Most people who go into business focus on being able to execute the product/service better than the competition, but without Sales, it's all irrelevant, or a money losing hobby. And, if sales only focuses on investment and your investors are foolish enough to back you without real-sales, that's a short runway that I've been on too many times. Then, no matter what your business, if you ignore accounting, it's going to be a huge drain on the financial health, from paying too much in taxes (and penalties), to unexpected cash outages. Accounting becomes very important when you are near the survival line, which most small businesses seem to be most of the time.
Almost all small (<5 employees) businesses I know outsource this to an accounting company, it's a very standardized service provided at a modest price. Really, the only two functions you should care about is making the product and selling the product. Setting prices and controlling costs is of course still your job, but leave the accounting and tax reporting to someone else.
When I did my own, the computation of taxes etc. was the small part for me - the pain for me was getting _correct_ 1099s from the employers, keeping track of expenses, etc. Essentially, collecting all the inputs to the accounting function was more hassle for me than doing the addition and form filling.
I have the same problem. I have self taught my self how to program. Seriously if you want to learn how to code these days there are tons of internet tutorials. It's almost more efficient to learn and produce some results.
My suggestion is to produce as many commercial products as possible and add it to your resume. I personally made 20 iphone apps. Most people just assume I have an engineering or comp sci degree.
I call B.S. If you really have authored 20 iPhone apps, where is your self-serving plug-link in your sig?
Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard and it is much more rewarding, especially for a computer geek now in internet age.
Having worked in various sized companies, from self-employed through 10, 20 and 500-1000 people, it became apparent to me that all businesses need:
1) Sales and Marketing 2) Accounting 3) A product
If you have no interest in 1) or 2), being self-employed is not for you. Also, when taking into account what you get paid for your "Product" as a coder, bear in mind the hours invested in Sales, Marketing, and Accounting for essentially zero compensation..
Said in the tone of "Plastics" from The Graduate: "Contacts."
If you've got no paper (diplomae), there is no other way to get paid what you are worth. Your prospective employer needs to know what you are able to do for them before they commit to pay you. Also, the fact that you haven't put up with the standard Academia B.S. calls into question whether or not you will put up with the standard workplace B.S. You need personal contacts who can vouch for your abilities and work ethic over a beer.
Actually, people with lots of degrees can benefit from that too, if they want to get good jobs without having to move across the country.
Folks, it's a measly $8/month for unlimited TV and movies. How enticing is that? You know what's even cheaper? GETTING OFF YOUR BUTTS AND MOVING! Instead of asking the family "What do you want to watch tonight?" ask "Where should we walk to tonight?"
You know, when I get home from work in the winter, it's dark, and usually cold. I do like to get the kids out when I can, but pushing it against the dark and cold leads to sick kids as often as not. And, so, then, we can hop in the auto and pop round to, well, where? The shopping mall? A restaurant? Just the petrol cost will dwarf $8/month.
Golden Girls quote: "What did we do before we sat around like dolts staring at the Television?" "Oh, I remember when I was a kid, we sat around like dolts staring at the Radio."
Get a hobby, build a workshop, wash your dishes by hand and mop the floor - yeah, these are all good alternatives, but for the hours between 6 and 10pm, there's not a lot of decent outdoor activity available in the winter.
They need more content...I watched nearly all the good movies over one winter off work.
The "watch it now" content started at about 10% of the catalog, and it was a fair cross section (of the 500 movies in our queue, 50 showed up in "watch it now")
The difference between disc by mail and watch it now is that you can only get maybe a half-dozen discs by mail per week (3 at a time, assuming you're not "watching" them the minute they arrive and running across town to get them back in the mail before the 6pm last pickup). With watch it now, you can binge on 6 movies a day, or more if you want.
Mostly I like the watch it now for TV series, and I gladly traded down to 2 discs at a time + watch it now from 3 at a time, even though watch it now is limited, it's got more content than I can handle (whole series like Star Trek: TNG, 24, Hawaii Five-O, etc. etc. hundreds and hundreds of episodes.)
Anytime I ran any kind of "rational valuation" calculation on NFLX based on subscribers, income, potential for growth, etc. the market seemed to be out-pricing my ideas by a factor of 3 to 7... NFLX has been a very expensive stock for a very long time, I'm surprised it took this long for the bubble to deflate.
Still a good business model, when they aren't spouting off idiotic ideas about breaking it.
Some dark matter candidates are, according to theory, their own anti-particle. The only reason it is not a more explode-y space is that dark matter interacts very weakly with other matter, including itself, and therefore has not been identified yet.
That would make dark matter very lonely. If it interacts weakly, wouldn't there need to be more of it to account for the effects that dark matter was invented to explain?
I imagine they have expanded WebOS for printers to interface to most other OSs, and this is what they don't want to lose, even if there are no WebOS devices that need to print anymore.
Considering what these chicks get paid, we should all be so terribly exploited!
Hint: I know some make four figures per hour.
Yeah, and Cindy Crawford made 5 figures per day... that's the carrot, for every one of them, there's 100 more trying to "make it" and hoping they can at least land a rich husband. It's a pretty sad scene, all told.
For sufficiently imprecise definition of "no one". What you means is no one you personally care about.
Scary thing is, a community of 10,000 people could use and love a service, come to depend on it as part of their lives, but 20,000 just isn't enough eyeballs to pay the bills with advertising. Maybe Google should open an option for conversion of dying services to subscription basis instead of (addition to?) advertising?
If a cop beats a protester to death for no apparent reason and it is covered by several independent video cameras, he's a lot more likely to answer for his actions than if it was merely witnessed by 50 protesters who were also being beaten.
And just how many OWS protesters have been beaten to death so far by the cops? About zero maybe?
Unfortunately the worst penalty the cop is likely to face is either a paid vacation known as "administrative leave" or maybe the loss of his job.
I've seen the administrative leave thing happen, for shooting a guy in the back six times (yes, he died) - justification was that the guy threw a brick at the house, 100' behind the shooter and around a corner.
Generally, if there's video tape, they don't get away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't tell if that's an improvement over the "This is how MS Office works" ICT training that most UK students get now. I had to teach myself relational database basics and a few programming languages while in school because the school didn't have the courses (or the teachers) to push a real syllabus.
When I was 14, our High School comp-sci teacher had the good sense to realize that about 6 of us (out of a graduating class of 200ish) were sufficiently advanced that there was nothing he could teach us in a traditional lecture and homework format, they actually let us have an hour a day of "independent study comp-sci" in place of sleeping through yet another pointless class. Though we weren't required to, most IS people did most of the lecture projects anyway... as I recall, I produced 3 lines of code that executed all the functionality of the semester project - which was taking an average of 15 pages for most people to do when they did it according to the teacher's guidance. He was having them convert numerical bases, from base 10 to base 2, base 2 to base 16, base 16 to base 8, etc.
Information Science is a basic science, like any other, and in our world has a lot more immediate practical applications. It should be taught. Why can my son, very bright, in the 8th grade, tell me the layers of the atmosphere and the earths crust and evolution and basic physics, but can't tell me the difference between a bit and a byte? That's crazy.
Bits and bytes matter less and less, they're becoming the sub-atomic particles of Computer Science, interesting to some of the theory guys, but all the practical stuff is made up of bigger chunks. Or, that's the theory, at least. I still manipulate bits in my C++ code, but then, using C++ makes me somewhat archaic, too.
Read the Pi schtick - they are all about changing computer instruction into something cool, and getting away from making everybody into electronic secretaries.
Raspberry Pi has a new blog post, and you heard it echoed here first...
Hehe for the short duration that it would be? :)
Funnily enough, mortality rates should be higher outside of Europe, due to a gene that survivors of the Black Plague passed on. It should make those people more resistant to this flu as well. So my chances aren't all that bad probably.
Although it's never a bad idea to start stockpiling canned goods and tissues ;)
I plan on being a cannibal... No need to stock up and no one ever thinks of cannibalism right from the start. Sort of gives you a leg up on everyone else really.
If the social backlash doesn't get you first, the diseases of your dinner will likely take you down before you have a chance to procreate... most cannibals in nature tend to eat the young and tasty _ahem_ healthy.
or nature finds its own way to such a 'killer virus'
In my opinion, the difference between a killer asteroid and a killer plague is that you can search the sky with telescopes for the first, but you can search every jungle on Earth with microscopes and still not see the second one coming.
Someone has probably already crafted a similar version in a distant private or military research lab anyway. Its better that it got out and fixes are prepared.
Actually various independently crafted versions may be different enough that a "cure" for one is ineffective against another.
True enough, but having practice in developing "solutions" for dozens of similar problems is a lot better than starting from sulfa drugs and trying to work your way up.
Rush Limbaugh and hoping it will go away.
Limbaugh listeners aren't hoping it will go away, they are certain that it is all a lie, a liberal plot to get grant money to study the problem and other such nonsense. There's no need to hope for the tooth fairy to go away, is there?
stories of Welfare Queens do well over there, even if the people telling them would be very hard pressed to actually find one.
They are all too easy to find in the U.S. of A. I think the thing that is right with Euro welfare / wrong with US welfare is that US welfare kind of kicks you while you are down, we are so politically concerned with people getting something "they don't deserve" that people get habituated into poverty because they really can't get themselves out - sure, some have kids that get scholarships, some work their way up to the top, and hey, some win the lottery, but the system here seems to work to keep most of the poor, poor. I suppose somebody has to work at McDonalds and keep the cost of fries down to 0.99.
Places like Denmark, Finland, Sweden, France, and Germany are phenomenal when it comes to variety and choice in job.
Perhaps a bit of world travel and turning off Fox News would do you good.
All I heard from the Danes, and Germans while I traveled there was how oppressive their taxes were, from the day they started working until the day they retired - everybody else gets a posh life, but if you work, you're working to support that posh life for the kids and seniors and disabled and pregnant and otherwise not-working people. There really was a lot of resentment, especially from the Germans with their shorter workweeks and 6+ weeks per year of paid vacation. Oh, and the Germans also liked to bitch about how nothing ever gets done during summer holiday time, like, literal shutdown of non-essential functioning for several months.
The Swedes didn't talk much (the only ones that did talk actually lived in the US and were just visiting, true Swedes didn't talk at all), the French (Parisians) were too busy being rude to actually relate anything of meaning, and I didn't travel in Finland, so I guess it's not surprising that I didn't meet many Finns.
One little error -- your list is upside down. You don't need sales and marketing unless you have a product, and you con't need accounting until you've made sales.
1) A product
2) Sales and marketing
3) Accounting
The order of the list was intentional. Product ideas are like (name your favorite body part), everybody has one, or two. Most people who go into business focus on being able to execute the product/service better than the competition, but without Sales, it's all irrelevant, or a money losing hobby. And, if sales only focuses on investment and your investors are foolish enough to back you without real-sales, that's a short runway that I've been on too many times. Then, no matter what your business, if you ignore accounting, it's going to be a huge drain on the financial health, from paying too much in taxes (and penalties), to unexpected cash outages. Accounting becomes very important when you are near the survival line, which most small businesses seem to be most of the time.
2) Accounting
Almost all small (<5 employees) businesses I know outsource this to an accounting company, it's a very standardized service provided at a modest price. Really, the only two functions you should care about is making the product and selling the product. Setting prices and controlling costs is of course still your job, but leave the accounting and tax reporting to someone else.
When I did my own, the computation of taxes etc. was the small part for me - the pain for me was getting _correct_ 1099s from the employers, keeping track of expenses, etc. Essentially, collecting all the inputs to the accounting function was more hassle for me than doing the addition and form filling.
I have the same problem. I have self taught my self how to program. Seriously if you want to learn how to code these days there are tons of internet tutorials. It's almost more efficient to learn and produce some results.
My suggestion is to produce as many commercial products as possible and add it to your resume. I personally made 20 iphone apps. Most people just assume I have an engineering or comp sci degree.
I call B.S. If you really have authored 20 iPhone apps, where is your self-serving plug-link in your sig?
Being self-employed or running a business isn't all that hard and it is much more rewarding, especially for a computer geek now in internet age.
Having worked in various sized companies, from self-employed through 10, 20 and 500-1000 people, it became apparent to me that all businesses need:
1) Sales and Marketing
2) Accounting
3) A product
If you have no interest in 1) or 2), being self-employed is not for you. Also, when taking into account what you get paid for your "Product" as a coder, bear in mind the hours invested in Sales, Marketing, and Accounting for essentially zero compensation..
Said in the tone of "Plastics" from The Graduate: "Contacts."
If you've got no paper (diplomae), there is no other way to get paid what you are worth. Your prospective employer needs to know what you are able to do for them before they commit to pay you. Also, the fact that you haven't put up with the standard Academia B.S. calls into question whether or not you will put up with the standard workplace B.S. You need personal contacts who can vouch for your abilities and work ethic over a beer.
Actually, people with lots of degrees can benefit from that too, if they want to get good jobs without having to move across the country.
Folks, it's a measly $8/month for unlimited TV and movies.
How enticing is that? You know what's even cheaper? GETTING OFF YOUR BUTTS
AND MOVING! Instead of asking the family "What do you want to watch
tonight?" ask "Where should we walk to tonight?"
You know, when I get home from work in the winter, it's dark, and usually cold. I do like to get the kids out when I can, but pushing it against the dark and cold leads to sick kids as often as not. And, so, then, we can hop in the auto and pop round to, well, where? The shopping mall? A restaurant? Just the petrol cost will dwarf $8/month.
Golden Girls quote: "What did we do before we sat around like dolts staring at the Television?" "Oh, I remember when I was a kid, we sat around like dolts staring at the Radio."
Get a hobby, build a workshop, wash your dishes by hand and mop the floor - yeah, these are all good alternatives, but for the hours between 6 and 10pm, there's not a lot of decent outdoor activity available in the winter.
They need more content...I watched nearly all the good movies over one winter off work.
The "watch it now" content started at about 10% of the catalog, and it was a fair cross section (of the 500 movies in our queue, 50 showed up in "watch it now")
The difference between disc by mail and watch it now is that you can only get maybe a half-dozen discs by mail per week (3 at a time, assuming you're not "watching" them the minute they arrive and running across town to get them back in the mail before the 6pm last pickup). With watch it now, you can binge on 6 movies a day, or more if you want.
Mostly I like the watch it now for TV series, and I gladly traded down to 2 discs at a time + watch it now from 3 at a time, even though watch it now is limited, it's got more content than I can handle (whole series like Star Trek: TNG, 24, Hawaii Five-O, etc. etc. hundreds and hundreds of episodes.)
Anytime I ran any kind of "rational valuation" calculation on NFLX based on subscribers, income, potential for growth, etc. the market seemed to be out-pricing my ideas by a factor of 3 to 7... NFLX has been a very expensive stock for a very long time, I'm surprised it took this long for the bubble to deflate.
Still a good business model, when they aren't spouting off idiotic ideas about breaking it.
Some dark matter candidates are, according to theory, their own anti-particle. The only reason it is not a more explode-y space is that dark matter interacts very weakly with other matter, including itself, and therefore has not been identified yet.
That would make dark matter very lonely. If it interacts weakly, wouldn't there need to be more of it to account for the effects that dark matter was invented to explain?
I imagine they have expanded WebOS for printers to interface to most other OSs, and this is what they don't want to lose, even if there are no WebOS devices that need to print anymore.
Considering what these chicks get paid, we should all be so terribly exploited!
Hint: I know some make four figures per hour.
Yeah, and Cindy Crawford made 5 figures per day... that's the carrot, for every one of them, there's 100 more trying to "make it" and hoping they can at least land a rich husband. It's a pretty sad scene, all told.
It's just another SPAM arms race, the fact that nobody is challenging the reviewers yet is why it's so easy.
They cancel them because no one really uses them.
For sufficiently imprecise definition of "no one". What you means is no one you personally care about.
Scary thing is, a community of 10,000 people could use and love a service, come to depend on it as part of their lives, but 20,000 just isn't enough eyeballs to pay the bills with advertising. Maybe Google should open an option for conversion of dying services to subscription basis instead of (addition to?) advertising?
If a cop beats a protester to death for no apparent reason and it is covered by several independent video cameras, he's a lot more likely to answer for his actions than if it was merely witnessed by 50 protesters who were also being beaten.
And just how many OWS protesters have been beaten to death so far by the cops? About zero maybe?
OWS is still pretty new, give them time...
Unfortunately the worst penalty the cop is likely to face is either a paid vacation known as "administrative leave" or maybe the loss of his job.
I've seen the administrative leave thing happen, for shooting a guy in the back six times (yes, he died) - justification was that the guy threw a brick at the house, 100' behind the shooter and around a corner.
Generally, if there's video tape, they don't get away with it.