An option (if you have time / money and the interesting courses are not too full) is to take easy courses and audit interesting courses.
That way you get the educational benefit without a hit to the GPA. Usually people auditing get lower scheduling priority, though, so if the class is full, then auditing it may not be possible.
I had to keep a 3.2 GPA to keep it; losing the scholarship would have meant leaving my fine institution and maybe finishing up my degree at Frank's University and Muffler Shop in Dismal Seepage, Wyoming.
Even the usual driven-student annoyances (project members that don't pull their weight, difficult tests in non-curved classes, etc.) took on a whole new dimension of fear and anger back then.
This course would have interested me, if they'd have had it back then, but taking an un-passable course (especially if it was not known to be un-passable in advance) would have been unthinkable.
(I think as a result of me and people like me panicing when they got 40's on physics tests freshman year (not realizing that that's not bad when the highest grade in the class is a 48), they changed the rules so that you only had to not flunk out freshman year, though you still had to keep the 3.2 in subsequent years).
The point is: Since everyone can get broadcast TV, people feel they have the right to complain about the content.
With cable TV / satellite radio etc., they are subscription services that you have to specifically ask for and pay for. Since they're subscription services, the provider invests in pretty-good infrastructure to block people who haven't paid from seeing it.
The logic is that on a subscription service, if you don't like the content / don't want it in your house, you can simply unsubscribe. Broadcast TV can't be "blocked" from your house (except by not allowing anyone in the house to have receivers:-)
Unfortunately, this leads to homeownership being a thing of the past.
If you have to move every few years to follow the job market around the country, you'd lose too much money in broker fees. Also, you'd probably end up "buying high" and "selling low" all the time; you move to Raleigh, the job market dries up, sell at a loss, move to Austin where jobs are, that dries up, sell at a loss,...
Tell me how to move where the jobs are, overcoming those countries' barriers to immigration. Tell me how to structure my lifestyle so I can keep moving as the jobs flow around the globe.
*sound of crickets chirping*
The thing that you don't seem to understand is that giving companies freedom to do whatever they like, when they have tremendous wealth and are explicitly amoral (don't tell me you've never told someone "a corporation must continually increase profits for its shareholders, and all other considerations must be secondary"), is bad for society.
Explain to me why corporations are immune from the tragedy-of-the-commons problem. Explain to me, using factors that exist today, how this system can lead to anything else other than a very small plutocracy and a whole world of peasantry. (Hint: "start your own business that's not destroying society" is a red herring: because of capitalist competitive factors, any corporation that is not as aggressive as it possibly can be in the pursuit of profits will get crushed by society-destroying competition).
Unfortunately, if you believe that no set of humans is "better" than any other, if you also believe that capitalism will continue to dominate, and that trade will get freer, you can only come to one conclusion:
The entire world will drop to current-Third-World standards of living, and stay there.
Why? Because any work that doesn't require physical presence (which will only become a larger percentage of total work) will go wherever it is cheapest. If the influx of money starts to raise standards of living (and wages) in the target area, then *whoosh* all of those jobs will move to somewhere cheaper. No country will be able to climb out of that hole, because their economy will quickly move elsewhere.
The (ever smaller) upper strata won't care; they'll have enough money to live as they want. Everyone else, get ready to find out what "dirt poor" is really like. (I wish I could figure out how to prepare for that...)
Historically, the "Bastille Day Factor" would work against this (i.e. ignore the poor masses enough and heads roll), but I don't think even that can help us these days (with modern technology, it wouldn't take a very large army to suppress an entire world's worth of peasants).
I have a good work-around for this. Rather than hating the immigrants / offshore folks, simply hate the corporations who do this in search of ever-increasing profits, and the system that requires corps to behave this way.
I believe (like the Baptists believe in Revelations) that the U.S.-style capitalism is going to lead inexorably to economic collapse.
Obviously, the people who take the jobs can't be blamed; they need to eat. (Although I sometimes feel guilty that, by working for a for-profit company, I'm helping to destroy society.)
There's something the "who cares about boot time, because it's Linux" crowd is missing - laptops.
Mine gets rebooted twice a day or so. (Suspend isn't as useful as it used to be, because the latch is broken, so it doesn't stay all the way "shut").
The best thing I was able to do for the boot time was to clear the mount-counts and last-fsck times on the filesystems, then set them all to fsck at reasonably large (180 or more), staggered, prime intervals. That way, almost all boots require 0 fsck's, and (for all practical purposes) none require more than one. (They're ext3 anyway...)
It's Debian Woody, so no worry about extraneous time spent on autodetecting / autoconfiguring anything:-)
Unfortunately (especially for me), generalization does not typically help you gain employment.
Usually, to get most any job, you must have N years' experience doing the exact same job. You may be proficient in Scheme, but unless you've been paid for a few years to work in Scheme, you'll never get past the HR droid at a company looking to hire a Scheme developer.
I learned calculus (at the college freshman level; my high school was way too rural back then for anything like calculus courses) from the OSU Calculus&Mathematica
program and thought it was great.
The advantage was being able to learn the principles of which you speak, without having to get bogged down in the mechanical aspects. For example, we'd be given a problem, we'd have to figure out the relevant equations and set up a system of simultaneous equations to solve (this is the real principle), then let the computer do the crunching to arrive at the solution.
(We also had paper-and-pencil tests where we had to demonstrate knowledge of the principles and a little of the mechanical stuff).
There's no good reason to require different passwords for services that are under the same administrative control (such as your company's email and domain).
I like Yaps (Yet Another Password Safe) for the Palm Pilot. All my passwords go there; the db is Blowfish-encrypted, so its passphrase is the only one that I absolutely have to commit to memory.
For one of my Web apps I did a sessionid-generation routine that just alphanumericizes some bytes from/dev/urandom. When I need a new password I just run that and pick the first N or so characters (maybe replacing one or two with puncuation, depending on mood).
This contains its own upside, though: only OSS can put work into features without worrying about pissing off corporate backers / interests: the best examples I can think of are Mozilla's early inclusion of pop-up blocking, and MythTV's early inclusion of commercial detection.
This bothers me as well - many systems that used to be IVR's ("Press 1 for foo, 2 for bar,...") have went for voice recognition systems instead ("If you want something else, say 'other service'...).
For me, this means instead of choosing from a menu (which I don't mind), now I have to get the @#*%! machine to understand me. I know what is driving it (marketers have heard that people don't like touch-tone IVR's), but IMO they've created a system that's worse.
Better to have "press or say 1", that way people get to talk, the speech recognition works better for the more limited and well-tested vocabulary of numbers, and people like me who don't mind pressing buttons get less frustration.
Re:Maybe they need to get voice sussed out first
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 1
Do what I do at home: use VoicePulse Connect using the IAX2 protocol to a server running Asterisk at your location. (The regular VoicePulse service is done the same way, the Asterisk servers are just there).
Now you have Total Control of all that stuff (insert evil-genius maniacal cackle).
For example, I just use VP for outgoing long distance - outgoing local and incoming cone via my BellSouth landline via a Digium FXO card. Incoming calls don't even ring my phones (Plain Old Phones driven off a Digium FXS card) unless the caller-ID number is on a list. All others just go straight to voicemail.
Also, if I call from my cellphone, it'll tell me how many pending messages I have and let me press 1 to ring the phones (with a distinctive ring) or 2 to check voicemail (yes, I know CID can be spoofed...) My next project is to write a notification script that will page our cellphones if a message is left and is still there 15 minutes later (so, if someone is home and checks the message quickly, no need to page the cellphones).
In-progress: friends and family getting custom voicemail messages, and accounts to call us over IP with the Firefly IAX softphone software. (insert Tim Allen grunting)
We've done this with Korean customers as well. It eliminates the "low-level" issue (in both directions) of comprehending the accents so that we can always tell what words people are saying. (Sure, we still have "higher-level" issues of parsing the sentences for meaning, but this is easier when you can understand the words themselves).
I have a lot of trouble with this in my day job when supporting overseas customers.
I've gotten many a bug report that, despite all of the puzzling-over that myself and a Taiwanese guy can do, we literally can't figure out.
Also, since these customers tend to be 12 hours out of phase with us, we have to reply "huh?" and they send more info, which kills a day.
(Disclaimer: Some of this trouble is because of atrocious bug-reporting skills that are orthogonal to language skills; even if "I see packet loss" is a perfectly formed English sentence, typically I need a little more than that to go on!)
My interpretation of this is that the economy is doing well - for business. My local paper reported this a while back based on state corporate income tax revenues.
The reason ordinary people don't think the economy is doing well is because it isn't for them - the economic growth is all going to investors. Shrug. That's what capitalism is all about. We can just eat cake.
Re:Tech jobs in Northern Virginia ??
on
Massive Layoffs At AOL
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I personally agree with you about the economic collapse... my belief is that the U.S. will degenerate into a small amount of ultra-rich and everyone else roaming the streets foraging for food. However...
When the unemployment runs out, the jobless do stop getting counted.
This is incorrect. Unemployment stats come from surveys using random sampling. People who are actively looking for work but can't find it are counted (but people who gave up looking are not). See:
http://www.snopes.com/science/stats/unemploy.htm
We don't actually need to attribute such greed to the government; in (at least some) places (sorry, I forget the primary source), the way red-light cameras are deployed is that the private company that makes them installs them, free of charge to the city, in return for a percentage of the generated revenue.
Therefore, it's in the camera's manufacturer's best interest to make the system really sensitive, introduce a false positive here and there, etc.
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I've heard the claim that better pre-natal nutrition makes a huge difference in the physical condition of a society's people.
That way you get the educational benefit without a hit to the GPA. Usually people auditing get lower scheduling priority, though, so if the class is full, then auditing it may not be possible.
I had to keep a 3.2 GPA to keep it; losing the scholarship would have meant leaving my fine institution and maybe finishing up my degree at Frank's University and Muffler Shop in Dismal Seepage, Wyoming.
Even the usual driven-student annoyances (project members that don't pull their weight, difficult tests in non-curved classes, etc.) took on a whole new dimension of fear and anger back then.
This course would have interested me, if they'd have had it back then, but taking an un-passable course (especially if it was not known to be un-passable in advance) would have been unthinkable.
(I think as a result of me and people like me panicing when they got 40's on physics tests freshman year (not realizing that that's not bad when the highest grade in the class is a 48), they changed the rules so that you only had to not flunk out freshman year, though you still had to keep the 3.2 in subsequent years).
With cable TV / satellite radio etc., they are subscription services that you have to specifically ask for and pay for. Since they're subscription services, the provider invests in pretty-good infrastructure to block people who haven't paid from seeing it.
The logic is that on a subscription service, if you don't like the content / don't want it in your house, you can simply unsubscribe. Broadcast TV can't be "blocked" from your house (except by not allowing anyone in the house to have receivers :-)
If you have to move every few years to follow the job market around the country, you'd lose too much money in broker fees. Also, you'd probably end up "buying high" and "selling low" all the time; you move to Raleigh, the job market dries up, sell at a loss, move to Austin where jobs are, that dries up, sell at a loss, ...
Tell me how to move where the jobs are, overcoming those countries' barriers to immigration. Tell me how to structure my lifestyle so I can keep moving as the jobs flow around the globe.
*sound of crickets chirping*
The thing that you don't seem to understand is that giving companies freedom to do whatever they like, when they have tremendous wealth and are explicitly amoral (don't tell me you've never told someone "a corporation must continually increase profits for its shareholders, and all other considerations must be secondary"), is bad for society.
Explain to me why corporations are immune from the tragedy-of-the-commons problem. Explain to me, using factors that exist today, how this system can lead to anything else other than a very small plutocracy and a whole world of peasantry. (Hint: "start your own business that's not destroying society" is a red herring: because of capitalist competitive factors, any corporation that is not as aggressive as it possibly can be in the pursuit of profits will get crushed by society-destroying competition).
The entire world will drop to current-Third-World standards of living, and stay there.
Why? Because any work that doesn't require physical presence (which will only become a larger percentage of total work) will go wherever it is cheapest. If the influx of money starts to raise standards of living (and wages) in the target area, then *whoosh* all of those jobs will move to somewhere cheaper. No country will be able to climb out of that hole, because their economy will quickly move elsewhere.
The (ever smaller) upper strata won't care; they'll have enough money to live as they want. Everyone else, get ready to find out what "dirt poor" is really like. (I wish I could figure out how to prepare for that...)
Historically, the "Bastille Day Factor" would work against this (i.e. ignore the poor masses enough and heads roll), but I don't think even that can help us these days (with modern technology, it wouldn't take a very large army to suppress an entire world's worth of peasants).
I believe (like the Baptists believe in Revelations) that the U.S.-style capitalism is going to lead inexorably to economic collapse.
Obviously, the people who take the jobs can't be blamed; they need to eat. (Although I sometimes feel guilty that, by working for a for-profit company, I'm helping to destroy society.)
The Beverly Hillbillies once had an episode with a cold cure from Granny. It had never failed once, when taken according to directions:
Take one teaspoon of cold cure, get plenty of rest, drink plenty of fluids, and in 7-10 days, your cold's gone!
Mine gets rebooted twice a day or so. (Suspend isn't as useful as it used to be, because the latch is broken, so it doesn't stay all the way "shut").
The best thing I was able to do for the boot time was to clear the mount-counts and last-fsck times on the filesystems, then set them all to fsck at reasonably large (180 or more), staggered, prime intervals. That way, almost all boots require 0 fsck's, and (for all practical purposes) none require more than one. (They're ext3 anyway...)
It's Debian Woody, so no worry about extraneous time spent on autodetecting / autoconfiguring anything :-)
Usually, to get most any job, you must have N years' experience doing the exact same job. You may be proficient in Scheme, but unless you've been paid for a few years to work in Scheme, you'll never get past the HR droid at a company looking to hire a Scheme developer.
I learned calculus (at the college freshman level; my high school was way too rural back then for anything like calculus courses) from the OSU Calculus&Mathematica program and thought it was great.
The advantage was being able to learn the principles of which you speak, without having to get bogged down in the mechanical aspects. For example, we'd be given a problem, we'd have to figure out the relevant equations and set up a system of simultaneous equations to solve (this is the real principle), then let the computer do the crunching to arrive at the solution.
(We also had paper-and-pencil tests where we had to demonstrate knowledge of the principles and a little of the mechanical stuff).
Good question... I haven't tried sending or receiving faxes yet (that's what the fax machine at work is for :-)
I like Yaps (Yet Another Password Safe) for the Palm Pilot. All my passwords go there; the db is Blowfish-encrypted, so its passphrase is the only one that I absolutely have to commit to memory.
For one of my Web apps I did a sessionid-generation routine that just alphanumericizes some bytes from /dev/urandom. When I need a new password I just run that and pick the first N or so characters (maybe replacing one or two with puncuation, depending on mood).
This contains its own upside, though: only OSS can put work into features without worrying about pissing off corporate backers / interests: the best examples I can think of are Mozilla's early inclusion of pop-up blocking, and MythTV's early inclusion of commercial detection.
For me, this means instead of choosing from a menu (which I don't mind), now I have to get the @#*%! machine to understand me. I know what is driving it (marketers have heard that people don't like touch-tone IVR's), but IMO they've created a system that's worse.
Better to have "press or say 1", that way people get to talk, the speech recognition works better for the more limited and well-tested vocabulary of numbers, and people like me who don't mind pressing buttons get less frustration.
Now you have Total Control of all that stuff (insert evil-genius maniacal cackle).
For example, I just use VP for outgoing long distance - outgoing local and incoming cone via my BellSouth landline via a Digium FXO card. Incoming calls don't even ring my phones (Plain Old Phones driven off a Digium FXS card) unless the caller-ID number is on a list. All others just go straight to voicemail.
Also, if I call from my cellphone, it'll tell me how many pending messages I have and let me press 1 to ring the phones (with a distinctive ring) or 2 to check voicemail (yes, I know CID can be spoofed...) My next project is to write a notification script that will page our cellphones if a message is left and is still there 15 minutes later (so, if someone is home and checks the message quickly, no need to page the cellphones).
In-progress: friends and family getting custom voicemail messages, and accounts to call us over IP with the Firefly IAX softphone software. (insert Tim Allen grunting)
We've done this with Korean customers as well. It eliminates the "low-level" issue (in both directions) of comprehending the accents so that we can always tell what words people are saying. (Sure, we still have "higher-level" issues of parsing the sentences for meaning, but this is easier when you can understand the words themselves).
I've gotten many a bug report that, despite all of the puzzling-over that myself and a Taiwanese guy can do, we literally can't figure out.
Also, since these customers tend to be 12 hours out of phase with us, we have to reply "huh?" and they send more info, which kills a day.
(Disclaimer: Some of this trouble is because of atrocious bug-reporting skills that are orthogonal to language skills; even if "I see packet loss" is a perfectly formed English sentence, typically I need a little more than that to go on!)
The reason ordinary people don't think the economy is doing well is because it isn't for them - the economic growth is all going to investors. Shrug. That's what capitalism is all about. We can just eat cake.
I agree... I've never understood why so many people seem to be in a hurry to get to work.
Therefore, it's in the camera's manufacturer's best interest to make the system really sensitive, introduce a false positive here and there, etc.