If you don't know how to interview potential hires, and you wish to be a good professional, explain to your employer that you are not qualified as an interviewer. Interviewing is not a job for anyone as it requires specific skills and knowledge. Ask your employer to hire specialised consultants.
I do use Dvorak, although not completely stopped using Qwerty yet. There are many ergonomic and health benefits in using Dvorak. By the way, it's Dvorak, not DVORAK.
As a student having experienced both traditional lectures, distant learning, and e-learning, I would be very interested in learning through Second Life, and I believe that it could help me to better retain the material in my long-term memory. Remember, though, that users are the creators of the SL universe, and therefore the designers of an SL educational programme must have a good understanding of SL in order to fully use its capabilities.
I think every programmer should know Assembly and understand hardware. Many employers don't share this viewpoint, but I don't think you should limit your knowledge to what employers are asking for.
I have had the opportunity to meet Dr Hauser via a direct transatlantic videoconference link with Harvard, while he was presenting his newest research conclusions to our private university here in EU. He explained to us the Web questionaire he used, his methodology, and various moral dilemmas he devised to find patterns in moral judgement, and how brain damage to specific areas of the brain altered this judgement. I think that from his findings it is obvious that there is physiological basis of morality, but I am afraid that many people may confuse judgement with behaviour. Hauser's research (at least the part he presented to us) focuses on moral judgement, which may not predict moral behaviour in all cases, so have this in mind when you delve into his research, that judgement and behaviour are two different things. Hauser demonstrated that all humans share common moral judgement, but the actual behaviour exhibited may not correspond to it due to various situational factors.
The solution is simple for non-confidential data: If the data were of no interest to anyone then we wouldn't need to archive them. Since they are archived, there must be at least 1 person on this planet who is interested in these data (the archiver), but such uniqueness is rare in humans (we enjoy to mimmick each other, including each other's interests), and therefore if there is 1 person who is interested in something there must be some more people who share the same interest. Why should the archiver spend so much effort in archiving their data if there are others who are interested in them, too? Let's share the effort among all interested persons by using a peer-to-peer system. With multiple copies of every bit of the archived information spanned across thousands of hard disks, the information will be much safer than a bunch of tapes at a library.
For technical IT books I recommend Safari. It has saved me a lot of money since now I can read all new IT technical books online and I don't have to buy dead trees anymore. It has also saved me a lot of space on my library, and the search feature allows me to find quickly what I need. For learning a new language, Safari is surpassed only by open-source, and if you combine the two you can learn C# as fast as you count 1, 2, 3.
If you are a programmer, you have to have specs. If you are an analyst or architect (or a consultant), you must engage in requirements gathering and business analysis, finding out what your client wants and how they do their work right now. If you work as an employee, consult your job description. Note that requirements gathering is a specialised process, and is very difficult if you have to design software for professional or scientific use (such as accountancy software or engineering applications), so it would be a good idea to cooperate with a specialist (e.g. an accountant) or read some introductory books about accountancy so that you can understand what your clients does right now. Oh, and good luck!
I am unimpressed. The device looks like Flybook for double the price (I own two of them). They even have the same screen resolution and the same CPU. I would expect more originality and innovation from Paul Allen.
Go to university. If you can't, take some distance learning courses from such universities like OU. You could also try to become self-employed by fixing your neighbours's PCs, etc.
Get the degree in any way you can. Certs can wait for later.
You CAN get a well-paying job without a degree, but you should aim higher than that. Don't be so tempted to join the rat race. I don't have a good opinion for people whose only aspiration in life is to get an income, marry, have kids, and then die in oblivion. As a young adult you should aim high, and this means being ambitious and trying to do something meaningful with your life (such as: becoming a scientist or artist, starting an innovative business, or doing something remarkable). Money is a vehicle for success, not a measure of success, so don't think that a well-paying job is the best you can get or that your self-worth is dictated by your income. Have a (realistic) ambition and work towards it in the long term.
Some people believe that if you get into the university and you don't get a PhD and a research career then you are a failure, even if you managed to find a well-paying job in the industry.
Other people (particularly managers in the industry) believe that whoever isn't into the industry has failed miserably in their lives, even if they work as researchers in universities.
You have to understand that universities were not designed for getting you jobs, although they can help with that a lot. The primary and traditional purpose of the university system is to facilitate the creation of researchers, scientists, scholars, and educated people, with the ultimate goal being the progression of knowledge, science, and the arts.
In the same manner, the job market is definitely not designed to give university graduates an income. In a job, you sell your skills, not your knowledge or your education. Furthermore, most companies couldn't care less about the promotion of science and the arts.
Although these two worlds have different objectives, they are often inter-related in the modern era: We see universities changing their curriculum after industry input, and companies requiring university degrees in order to hire you. This happens because education does have a positive impact onto one's abilities and aptitudes, and many of them are transferable to the workplace. This inter-relation is accelerating today mainly due to the emergence of the knowledge worker and the great advancement of science that has turned uneducated people unable to function in our society. Guess whose achievement is that.
But don't let this inter-relation fool you: Deep inside them, universities sincerely believe that the industry is a place for failed people, and companies believe that universities are inherently inferior. School and university are two different worlds in war with each other (school trying to promote knowledge, industry trying to get more workers at a young age so that they can pay them less).
Universities have changed our world for the better: Graduates engage in research and advance our knowledge of the world every day. When you go to your cubicle to write some boring Java or COBOL for a banking application that your employer wants to sell for a profit, a researcher in the other side of the world is working hard inside their laboratory trying to figure out how they could make the machine you are programming to learn by itself without human intervention (and when they succeed, and they eventually will, you may be out of a job).
Skills and jobs are ephemeral. Knowledge is eternal. If you just know how to write some Java, you may get a job now but when Ruby comes in you may be at risk of getting fired unless you update your skillset. If you know the fundamentals, however, and in computer science this means being a good mathematician, you'll be in such a position to quickly grasp any new language that becomes hot in the industry (of course, a good mathematician or computer scientist has more interesting things to do than fixing an employer's network or writing business applications in Visual Basic, but the important thing I want to stress here is that
Google is your friend. See also this: "a common example of this is fluorescent lights which many individuals with Asperger's find extremely disturbing."
Lower-quality fluorescent lamps flicker a lot, see Wikipedia. It is also known that autistic people and those with Asperger's syndrome can't work well under fluorescent lighting.
The free encyclopedia will not be published in any one place. It will consist of all web pages that cover suitable topics, and have been made suitably available. These pages will be developed in a decentralized manner by thousands of contributors, each independently writing articles and posting them on various web servers. No one organization will be in charge, because such centralization would be incompatible with decentralized progress.
Wikipedia as we know it today can fail if Wikimedia Foundation can't support the project for any reason (of course, thanks to GFDL, the Wikipedia articles will never disappear as long as people find them interesting). We need a way to decentralise Wikipedia, both financially (right now people donate to the Foundation which then decides how to spend the money), and from a hosting perspective (servers around the world can fail and require a single organisation to manage them. A P2P Wikipedia wouldn't need an organisatiion to support the project). We must find a way to run the project without the support of anyone but individuals caring for the project.
Short version: Wikipedia is nice but having a single organisation responsible for its success could prove problematic someday.
If you think about it, even FSF and EFF, and any kind of formal organisation, could some day be problematic in achieving the spirit of the founders's true goals. Is the present America what the US founders envisioned? It may be close but not exactly what they wanted to create. Unfortunately formal organisations can, in some cases, work in a way against the spirit or the practices of their founders for various reasons (usually for money to support themselves and grow as organisations). When you have a vision and you create a company or a not-for-profit organisation to continue your vision after your death you must know that the organisation you created and the people who will enter into it will inevitably someday have their own interests that may supersede the spirit of your vision. You create a vehicle to support your vision, but the vehicle (and every individual passenger-member) has its own will and its own self-interests.
Of course, it may be the case that the only practical way in the present society to run a project like this is to have an organisation supporting it.
And I am afraid that the only practical way to ensure the continuation of Wikipedia as we know it, is to allow the private for-profit sector support the project in exchange for some (preferably text-based) advertising (that should be clearly labelled as such).
First allow some ads, then try to de-centralise it.
Decentralisation can start by creating a P2P app that would allow any individual to become a "Wikipedia super-node", offering Wikipedia articles for serving to other P2P users that act as consumers (simple nodes).
Country is for emotionally stable and jazz is for intellectuals. Hmmmm. Tell me please, dear psychologists, what is my personality if I don't listen to any music at all?
People who have have played with a properly configured modern GNU/Linux desktop (either with Gnome or KDE) for an hour and still believe that Windows is better are stupid and deserve to be slaves of Microsoft for ever.
Some smart people dislike GNU/Linux when they see it for the first time, but this has to do with the fact that the system was not properly configured, or that they were trapped into using some particular software or hardware that only runs on Windows. This isn't Linux's fault: It's the hardware and some software companies that don't support GNU/Linux. The fact is, however, that the free software community has created good or even superior alternatives to many commercial software applications. There are still some areas that our software lacks some features or some drivers for particular hardware devices, but we are working on this.
GNU/Linux is better because it allows any user to influence the system as they like: You can ask the developers implement a feature, you can pay a developer to do it for you, or you can learn programming and code it by yourself. Try doing that with Microsoft.
By the way, no one told anyone that they should switch to a new OS overnight. They can dual-boot, or they can use a second PC with GNU/Linux on it, and gradually get acquainted with GNU/Linux. If they are smart, they will quickly learn it and use it for most of their needs, and only keep a Windows partition for a limited set of hardware and software that need Windows to run (if emulation doesn't work or they prefer not to use emulation, that is).
Windows today is useful only as a secondary OS for a limited number of compatibility purposes, and GNU/Linux becomes more and more popular every day. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows becomes history within 5 years. Such a counterproductive OS it is, it deserves it.
I am currently with GoDaddy because it offers private domain registrations - my email and address are replaced by GoDaddy's email and address in whois lookups, and therefore it keeps spammers away from my inbox. What other registrars offer this private registration service?
Free software is driven by a community. If you find a bug that prevents you from doing work, stop whining and do something about it: Give money to a developer to focus on it and fix it, write a detailed bug report, or learn programming and fix it by yourself. If you don't help the free software community in any way you can, you will remain a slave of Microsoft for ever.
A degree is good for everyone, no matter whether you are 30, 50, 70, or 90, and no matter whether you can actually use it for a career. The purpose of a degree is to broad your mind and make you think better and become a better human. Degrees are not designed to help you feed your stomach; this is what a job is for. While a degree that can be useful for jobs is of course better, I think you should pay attention to your mind and your education first (especially considering that you have successfully penetrated the job market), and not surrender your education to your employer's needs. Of course, if you can find a degree that is good both for your education and your career, it's better (as all win-win situations).
In choosing a degree you have to take into account:
Your primary concern must be your personal interest in the degree's subject. You can't learn something if it feels boring.
Your second concern must be the degree's educational worth and the university's reputation. Is it a real degree from a real university? Does it involve academic theories, abstract concepts, and preferably some research component? Remember that degrees are given by universities, not companies. If you want vocational training take the certification route.
Your third concern must be the value of the degree in the real world: Can the degree open up new opportunities in the academic or professional job markets? Could you become a professor or an engineer with that degree?
Your fourth concern must be how easily you can combine the degree with your life. Is it an online programme that lets you work while studying? Is the university near your home? Does the lectures weekly programme suit you? Is it offered in a language you know? (if not you may have to learn the language first), and are you able to pay for it? (if not you might prefer to work and earn money first, then enrol to university).
I recommend Oxford's Software Engineering programme and the Open University (UK). If you decide to take the certification route I would suggest to take university certificates in addition to professional certificates (like Cisco's CCNP). For example I have found this company and O'Reilly Learning offer vocational training programmes with non-academic continuing education certificates issued by real universities.
I wonder whether there are better ways at protecting spacecraft from the space environment than stretching the limits of materials science. I wonder whether we could form an artificial atmosphere around a spacecraft, and save on materials, as the artificial atmosphere would be designed to protect the spacecraft in a similar way that our atmosphere protects the planet.
Remember that the true motive behind most companies is to make you give them your money, and in many companies quality isn't a priority. It's no surprise that many security products have bugs. I would trust more a security method or tool released by the security community itself, without the involvement of PHBs.
IT combined with bureaucracy, be it in government or corporations, is a recipe for disaster. IT is about information, and information wants to be free, and we all know that information can't flow in bureaucracies.
Slashdot Mirror
If your project captures my interest, I can provide you free web hosting and other supporting infrastructure (eg a CVS or SVN server).
If you don't know how to interview potential hires, and you wish to be a good professional, explain to your employer that you are not qualified as an interviewer. Interviewing is not a job for anyone as it requires specific skills and knowledge. Ask your employer to hire specialised consultants.
I do use Dvorak, although not completely stopped using Qwerty yet. There are many ergonomic and health benefits in using Dvorak. By the way, it's Dvorak, not DVORAK.
I personally use WestHost for VPS and EasySpeedy for dedicated, and I am happy from both of them.
As a student having experienced both traditional lectures, distant learning, and e-learning, I would be very interested in learning through Second Life, and I believe that it could help me to better retain the material in my long-term memory. Remember, though, that users are the creators of the SL universe, and therefore the designers of an SL educational programme must have a good understanding of SL in order to fully use its capabilities.
I think every programmer should know Assembly and understand hardware. Many employers don't share this viewpoint, but I don't think you should limit your knowledge to what employers are asking for.
I have had the opportunity to meet Dr Hauser via a direct transatlantic videoconference link with Harvard, while he was presenting his newest research conclusions to our private university here in EU. He explained to us the Web questionaire he used, his methodology, and various moral dilemmas he devised to find patterns in moral judgement, and how brain damage to specific areas of the brain altered this judgement. I think that from his findings it is obvious that there is physiological basis of morality, but I am afraid that many people may confuse judgement with behaviour. Hauser's research (at least the part he presented to us) focuses on moral judgement, which may not predict moral behaviour in all cases, so have this in mind when you delve into his research, that judgement and behaviour are two different things. Hauser demonstrated that all humans share common moral judgement, but the actual behaviour exhibited may not correspond to it due to various situational factors.
The solution is simple for non-confidential data: If the data were of no interest to anyone then we wouldn't need to archive them. Since they are archived, there must be at least 1 person on this planet who is interested in these data (the archiver), but such uniqueness is rare in humans (we enjoy to mimmick each other, including each other's interests), and therefore if there is 1 person who is interested in something there must be some more people who share the same interest. Why should the archiver spend so much effort in archiving their data if there are others who are interested in them, too? Let's share the effort among all interested persons by using a peer-to-peer system. With multiple copies of every bit of the archived information spanned across thousands of hard disks, the information will be much safer than a bunch of tapes at a library.
For technical IT books I recommend Safari. It has saved me a lot of money since now I can read all new IT technical books online and I don't have to buy dead trees anymore. It has also saved me a lot of space on my library, and the search feature allows me to find quickly what I need. For learning a new language, Safari is surpassed only by open-source, and if you combine the two you can learn C# as fast as you count 1, 2, 3.
If you are a programmer, you have to have specs. If you are an analyst or architect (or a consultant), you must engage in requirements gathering and business analysis, finding out what your client wants and how they do their work right now. If you work as an employee, consult your job description. Note that requirements gathering is a specialised process, and is very difficult if you have to design software for professional or scientific use (such as accountancy software or engineering applications), so it would be a good idea to cooperate with a specialist (e.g. an accountant) or read some introductory books about accountancy so that you can understand what your clients does right now. Oh, and good luck!
I am unimpressed. The device looks like Flybook for double the price (I own two of them). They even have the same screen resolution and the same CPU. I would expect more originality and innovation from Paul Allen.
Go to university. If you can't, take some distance learning courses from such universities like OU. You could also try to become self-employed by fixing your neighbours's PCs, etc.
Get the degree in any way you can. Certs can wait for later.
You CAN get a well-paying job without a degree, but you should aim higher than that. Don't be so tempted to join the rat race. I don't have a good opinion for people whose only aspiration in life is to get an income, marry, have kids, and then die in oblivion. As a young adult you should aim high, and this means being ambitious and trying to do something meaningful with your life (such as: becoming a scientist or artist, starting an innovative business, or doing something remarkable). Money is a vehicle for success, not a measure of success, so don't think that a well-paying job is the best you can get or that your self-worth is dictated by your income. Have a (realistic) ambition and work towards it in the long term.
Some people believe that if you get into the university and you don't get a PhD and a research career then you are a failure, even if you managed to find a well-paying job in the industry.
Other people (particularly managers in the industry) believe that whoever isn't into the industry has failed miserably in their lives, even if they work as researchers in universities.
You have to understand that universities were not designed for getting you jobs, although they can help with that a lot. The primary and traditional purpose of the university system is to facilitate the creation of researchers, scientists, scholars, and educated people, with the ultimate goal being the progression of knowledge, science, and the arts.
In the same manner, the job market is definitely not designed to give university graduates an income. In a job, you sell your skills, not your knowledge or your education. Furthermore, most companies couldn't care less about the promotion of science and the arts.
Although these two worlds have different objectives, they are often inter-related in the modern era: We see universities changing their curriculum after industry input, and companies requiring university degrees in order to hire you. This happens because education does have a positive impact onto one's abilities and aptitudes, and many of them are transferable to the workplace. This inter-relation is accelerating today mainly due to the emergence of the knowledge worker and the great advancement of science that has turned uneducated people unable to function in our society. Guess whose achievement is that.
But don't let this inter-relation fool you: Deep inside them, universities sincerely believe that the industry is a place for failed people, and companies believe that universities are inherently inferior. School and university are two different worlds in war with each other (school trying to promote knowledge, industry trying to get more workers at a young age so that they can pay them less).
Universities have changed our world for the better: Graduates engage in research and advance our knowledge of the world every day. When you go to your cubicle to write some boring Java or COBOL for a banking application that your employer wants to sell for a profit, a researcher in the other side of the world is working hard inside their laboratory trying to figure out how they could make the machine you are programming to learn by itself without human intervention (and when they succeed, and they eventually will, you may be out of a job).
Skills and jobs are ephemeral. Knowledge is eternal. If you just know how to write some Java, you may get a job now but when Ruby comes in you may be at risk of getting fired unless you update your skillset. If you know the fundamentals, however, and in computer science this means being a good mathematician, you'll be in such a position to quickly grasp any new language that becomes hot in the industry (of course, a good mathematician or computer scientist has more interesting things to do than fixing an employer's network or writing business applications in Visual Basic, but the important thing I want to stress here is that
Google is your friend. See also this: "a common example of this is fluorescent lights which many individuals with Asperger's find extremely disturbing."
Lower-quality fluorescent lamps flicker a lot, see Wikipedia. It is also known that autistic people and those with Asperger's syndrome can't work well under fluorescent lighting.
Richard Stallman had the original idea of The Free Universal Encyclopedia and Learning Resource, but he intended this encyclopedia to be decentralised. I quote from RMS's proposal:
The free encyclopedia will not be published in any one place. It will consist of all web pages that cover suitable topics, and have been made suitably available. These pages will be developed in a decentralized manner by thousands of contributors, each independently writing articles and posting them on various web servers. No one organization will be in charge, because such centralization would be incompatible with decentralized progress.Wikipedia as we know it today can fail if Wikimedia Foundation can't support the project for any reason (of course, thanks to GFDL, the Wikipedia articles will never disappear as long as people find them interesting). We need a way to decentralise Wikipedia, both financially (right now people donate to the Foundation which then decides how to spend the money), and from a hosting perspective (servers around the world can fail and require a single organisation to manage them. A P2P Wikipedia wouldn't need an organisatiion to support the project). We must find a way to run the project without the support of anyone but individuals caring for the project.
Short version: Wikipedia is nice but having a single organisation responsible for its success could prove problematic someday.
If you think about it, even FSF and EFF, and any kind of formal organisation, could some day be problematic in achieving the spirit of the founders's true goals. Is the present America what the US founders envisioned? It may be close but not exactly what they wanted to create. Unfortunately formal organisations can, in some cases, work in a way against the spirit or the practices of their founders for various reasons (usually for money to support themselves and grow as organisations). When you have a vision and you create a company or a not-for-profit organisation to continue your vision after your death you must know that the organisation you created and the people who will enter into it will inevitably someday have their own interests that may supersede the spirit of your vision. You create a vehicle to support your vision, but the vehicle (and every individual passenger-member) has its own will and its own self-interests.
Of course, it may be the case that the only practical way in the present society to run a project like this is to have an organisation supporting it.
And I am afraid that the only practical way to ensure the continuation of Wikipedia as we know it, is to allow the private for-profit sector support the project in exchange for some (preferably text-based) advertising (that should be clearly labelled as such).
First allow some ads, then try to de-centralise it.
Decentralisation can start by creating a P2P app that would allow any individual to become a "Wikipedia super-node", offering Wikipedia articles for serving to other P2P users that act as consumers (simple nodes).
Country is for emotionally stable and jazz is for intellectuals. Hmmmm. Tell me please, dear psychologists, what is my personality if I don't listen to any music at all?
People who have have played with a properly configured modern GNU/Linux desktop (either with Gnome or KDE) for an hour and still believe that Windows is better are stupid and deserve to be slaves of Microsoft for ever.
Some smart people dislike GNU/Linux when they see it for the first time, but this has to do with the fact that the system was not properly configured, or that they were trapped into using some particular software or hardware that only runs on Windows. This isn't Linux's fault: It's the hardware and some software companies that don't support GNU/Linux. The fact is, however, that the free software community has created good or even superior alternatives to many commercial software applications. There are still some areas that our software lacks some features or some drivers for particular hardware devices, but we are working on this.
GNU/Linux is better because it allows any user to influence the system as they like: You can ask the developers implement a feature, you can pay a developer to do it for you, or you can learn programming and code it by yourself. Try doing that with Microsoft.
By the way, no one told anyone that they should switch to a new OS overnight. They can dual-boot, or they can use a second PC with GNU/Linux on it, and gradually get acquainted with GNU/Linux. If they are smart, they will quickly learn it and use it for most of their needs, and only keep a Windows partition for a limited set of hardware and software that need Windows to run (if emulation doesn't work or they prefer not to use emulation, that is).
Windows today is useful only as a secondary OS for a limited number of compatibility purposes, and GNU/Linux becomes more and more popular every day. I wouldn't be surprised if Windows becomes history within 5 years. Such a counterproductive OS it is, it deserves it.
I am currently with GoDaddy because it offers private domain registrations - my email and address are replaced by GoDaddy's email and address in whois lookups, and therefore it keeps spammers away from my inbox. What other registrars offer this private registration service?
Make sure the people who work on your booth are and look happy.
Free software is driven by a community. If you find a bug that prevents you from doing work, stop whining and do something about it: Give money to a developer to focus on it and fix it, write a detailed bug report, or learn programming and fix it by yourself. If you don't help the free software community in any way you can, you will remain a slave of Microsoft for ever.
A degree is good for everyone, no matter whether you are 30, 50, 70, or 90, and no matter whether you can actually use it for a career. The purpose of a degree is to broad your mind and make you think better and become a better human. Degrees are not designed to help you feed your stomach; this is what a job is for. While a degree that can be useful for jobs is of course better, I think you should pay attention to your mind and your education first (especially considering that you have successfully penetrated the job market), and not surrender your education to your employer's needs. Of course, if you can find a degree that is good both for your education and your career, it's better (as all win-win situations).
In choosing a degree you have to take into account:
I recommend Oxford's Software Engineering programme and the Open University (UK). If you decide to take the certification route I would suggest to take university certificates in addition to professional certificates (like Cisco's CCNP). For example I have found this company and O'Reilly Learning offer vocational training programmes with non-academic continuing education certificates issued by real universities.
I wonder whether there are better ways at protecting spacecraft from the space environment than stretching the limits of materials science. I wonder whether we could form an artificial atmosphere around a spacecraft, and save on materials, as the artificial atmosphere would be designed to protect the spacecraft in a similar way that our atmosphere protects the planet.
Remember that the true motive behind most companies is to make you give them your money, and in many companies quality isn't a priority. It's no surprise that many security products have bugs. I would trust more a security method or tool released by the security community itself, without the involvement of PHBs.
IT combined with bureaucracy, be it in government or corporations, is a recipe for disaster. IT is about information, and information wants to be free, and we all know that information can't flow in bureaucracies.