I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.
I said "the situation is very much like a mechanic where I have a wide range of tools I use to solve a problem, but the only thing that anyone cares about is that at some point, I used a wrench for something...without really caring about what the problem actually was."
Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...but it's not about that, it's about how you solved that problem.
And later in the year, when the corporation I worked for lost 10 million because one of their customers went bankrupt, I, by chance, got to sit in on a bigwigs meeting.
After announcing the loss and accompanying layoffs, he actually followed it by saying "And I don't think suggesting thin clients will help us out of this one."
Man, it was so hard to keep from laughing...next time I hear that, and it sounds like I will hear that again, I think I'll just risk my job and have a big belly laugh.
Hi, I'm a Mac. I'd rather pay a lot of money for a proprietary closed source piece of software used to make a document, than to download a free piece of software (and hopefully donate a few bucks) that can make an equally good document, because if the software interface I use to make documents does not exactly and precisely match the look of my environment, I am incapable, and even paralyzed, at even the thought of making such documents with such an unfashionable looking interface.
Try not talking about your tech support experience, not showing it on your resume at all. Try talking about open source projects that I only hope you've been involved in, or independent projects. I worked in a computer lab when I was in college working toward my software engineering degree. That was even more useless than doing tech support, I guarantee.
That said, from my professional experience as a developer and consultant, there are two people I always make good with: The QA manager, and the Tech Support manager. Those are the guys who will give you the insights you need to make your project suck a whole lot less than it would if you called all the shots, and anyone who disagrees with that is a fool. Your time doing tech support will definitely force you to see software/hardware development in a way that is a little different, but just as valuable, as any other developer.
I got my start doing stuff like this on the PalmOS Symbol handheld scanners back in 1999. I've done this same stuff for years on various handhelds running mobile OS's. As long as you can scan a freaking barcode, you can store that info and hit that website when you sync...whether it's through a wired connection, a wireless connection, it doesn't matter.
You can reinvent something 10 years later that people have done for years, and now it is a "killer app". If Google does it, apparently, idiots pay attention and it is suddenly, somehow, feasible and marketable.
For everyone who thinks Barack Obama is a corporate whore and they think that McCain is a better choice:
1. McCain and Sarah Palin are good buddies with the guy who calls the Internet a series of tubes, Ted Stevens.
2. McCain and especially his running mate feel strongly that their religious beliefs should definitely play into any decision on science, going so far as to use their own personal religious beliefs to define their scientific policy in the past. Despite what they tell you this week.
3. McCain and Palin have been solidly against Net Neutrality since the very beginning, and are solidly funded by the major telcos.
Really? I thought the part about encrypting your personal thumb drive and how it would probably prevent you from doing something as stupid as using it for an unattended install...or at least encrypting your personal directory...made enough sense. Or maybe you didn't get that particular point?
I mean, ragging on the poor schmuck who botched his installs at this point is probably redundant, but offering a halfways decent idea up to every other smug schmuck ragging on the unemployed guy while inviting bad karma down upon themselves is probably worth a whole lot more.
Getting taxed by a Democratic administration, then I'm okay with that...because I sure am not anywhere near his tax bracket then, and I think I make a pretty good living compared to most other folks in my community. I wouldn't mind it at all if Scott Adams takes a tax hit and even a bit of that cash is used to fix the potholes in the street that causes me to have flat tires that cost me considerably more than I'd pay in taxes relatively to get my wheels fixed.
That said, it's painfully obvious that by reading replies to this story, what party the posters belong to. When your side is on the losing side of a study, you whine and bitch, when your side is on the winning side, you lavish praise. Personally, I think it's really interesting that only 3% of those economists call themselves libertarians, while almost half define themselves as Democrats.
Seriously, it worked great for me. I could work flexible hours later at night doing carding at bars. I was provided with free diet soda and was paid. Never gets dull, and every night you get great stories you can tell your friends at work while you look and feel like a zombie.:)
It made me plenty of extra cash when I was going through some lower paying contracts, and most bars will take anyone who doesn't have a raging case of halitosis and shows up when expected.
This logic is just so rad. It's like saying "My firewall already has 20 ports open, what's so bad about having another few seemingly insignificant ports open for no reason at all?"
The reason it's bad is because it's another way for someone to harvest personal information off your phone for apparently no real reason at all. It's crap like this that makes me feel just fine having my little fugly Palm Centro. I don't have to have yet another security hole because Apple felt taking a screenshot would make for a cool bit of eye-candy.
People know how to clear their browser cache and those who care clear it regularly. Pictures you took are going to be saved, because you intended to take them and you probably intend to save them too, along with your files. But taking a snapshot for no real good reason at all and not telling your customers about it sucks. That's why it's a problem.
Well, at least it's not like what some Apple fanboys do...when something is found wrong with an Apple product, they immediately compare it with a Microsoft product and say "it's still better". That's basically like saying "At least it's not complete crap."
Whoops, meant to say microSD cards. I swear, the SD "standards" are the only confusing thing I've ever encountered in regards to my Palm phones, and they have adapters for that. So it's really not a huge deal.
I have a Palm Centro with a touchscreen. The screen may be small, but I have the option of using a keyboard or a touchscreen. It's simple and it works and it doesn't get me into car accidents when I use it on the road from time to time in an emergency.
It just freaking works. I have a VPN client for it and a remote desktop client for it. I can surf newsgroups, instant message, email, have a greatly functional and easy to use calendar and todo list, and there are like a zillion apps out there that do pretty much everything, and a good number of them are free, OSS, or both. It's a cinch to program for, it's just C or C++ and you can use Eclipse, VSS (if you have to), Codewarrior, or whatever.
It doesn't impress your snobby friends, but whatever. When they're struggling to do stuff that I've already done, or when their batteries are dead and my phone, which hasn't been hooked to a charger in days is still working, then who cares. Yeah, it doesn't have an operating system that gets updated regularly. So what? It works and it doesn't have as many vulnerable parts that need to be service pack updated every 6 months. The phone didn't cost me any more than 30 bucks when I traded in my old phone, and that's because I missed out on the free trade in deal that I had for a month because my old Treo was working fine enough that I didn't care, until I realized I had moved to miniSD cards.
IANAL, but that all information gathered by a third party that does not have a private investigator license (or court appointed warrant, whatever) is inadmissible as far as I know. You can gather all the information you want, but whether or not you can use it against someone in a court of law would require gathering that evidence through proper channels, I'd think.
However, holding onto that gathered information and using it in other ways would fall under an entirely different law. But rendering that information inadmissible in court would force the RIAA's corporate spies to follow the law or be essentially useless except for building a case for just cause for a warrant.
Oh, I can think of something worse. They could have had Ballmer shaking his ass. That would have made me and anyone else subjected to that commercial wretch, and I would feel nauseous whenever I see a churro from there on out.
I saw an ad recently with Ballmer's face, and it scared the hell out of me. I realized that Microsoft gained its fame because Bill Gates looks to average people as a trustworthy geek who might help them with their modem or spreadsheets. Ballmer, however, looks like someone who might scream at you for making his coffee wrong or not doing your spreadsheets correctly.
But they're competing against mobile OS's like WinMob, Symbian, and Palm that have been around for about 10-14 years now. They've been doing Bluetooth for about 6-7 years. It's no longer a special, cutting edge feature...it's just expected by companies looking to port their applications. If it's not there, companies don't port their applications and don't support the phone. Customers of said company get marketed into buying the phone, find out that the app they need for their job doesn't work, they return the phone and are upset about it. I've seen this before years ago with the Motorola Q, when a company I worked for did not want to port their app to a non-touch screen device. They're going to have to deliver that Bluetooth API pretty quick if they don't want to tank their OS right out of the gate...some of the largest penetration of non-Apple smartphones are into vertical industries where the application provider really makes or breaks the success of a platform.
Except that instead of keeping a few scripts to themselves, they try to sell ALL of them. Even if they totally suck. It's even moreso for cheap, low-budget games. People's expectations these days are high...really, really high. Everything that doesn't meet those expectations, they can play those on their cell phone and figure they can get a freeware version anyway. Take your cheap games and position them for the cellphone/smartphone market instead of trying to compete even with outdated stuff like Unreal and Oblivion, Guild Wars...or even the newer stuff. (I'm always 2-3 years behind on games, mostly because I wait until they're heavily modded first).
A network editing its content to "improve reality"? Incredible!
Well, there WAS that whole thing with that Katie Couric interview with John McCain where they basically realized McCain was rambling in an answer, so they cut and pasted another one of his answers over that one to make him sound more coherant...but nah. No way!
ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX...you wonder if the people running the show at any of those stations ever read 1984. You wonder if they ever creep themselves out with some of the stuff they pull to improve ratings. News shows ARE the new sitcoms. They know that sitcoms get more viewers than the news, so they've made the news like sitcoms or staged "reality" shows. It's not about the truth, it's about the money, buddy.
Replacing one word with another without taking into account the differences in definition between the two is completely ignorant.
What I'm gathering you're trying to say, however, is that in the US, the attempt to repress the struggle between two sides by way of the so called "War on Terror" is Orwell's definition of pacifism. Therefore, you are likening Bush to Hitler as a result of his stating on numerous occasions that if "you're not with me, you're against me".
As far as "moveon.org" goes, it's a freaking social club for Democrats. That's all it is. They have bake sales to raise money to put ads defending their candidates on the TV. The Republicans have lots of those organizations too. One of them is called "Freedom's Watch". Now THOSE are some creepy dudes, and their name sounds like it was taken directly from another certain black arm band wearing militia. Code Pink has a dramatic name, but their reasoning is that they believe the Iraq War to be an illegal and Unconstitutional occupation that is causing the deaths of US soldiers for entirely unclear, vague reasons. And they have plenty of evidence to back up that claim that the Bush Administration cannot refute. ANSWER? CAIR? All more of the above.
Oh yeah, and Orwell was an admitted Socialist as well. Check out Road to Wigan Pier. Ayn Rand hated him, you know. And the Bushies LOVE their Ayn Rand.
Yeah, because I work all week with geeks all day long just so I can hang out with them after work on the weekend. Yeah...no.
Give me the old scene any day of the week. The social scene is about unwinding and meeting interesting people who help you expand your mind, not a bunch of people who think exactly like you and only are willing to challenge you in a game of Warcraft or in a heated discussion about design patterns and antipatterns. If you can't do that at work, then yeah, maybe you need that kind of interaction...but most don't because they get it all day long. Unless you're unemployed, of course.
And I suppose you'd like to start a free service that provides full fraud prevention, identity verification services, and a full "paper" trail with signatures along with a classifieds ad section, right?
It's a freaking classified ads site. It's not that much different than your local newspaper. Stop thinking that it's eBay, it's not. People were scamming each other through the newspaper in the old days, too. The only good thing about the newspaper is that there's a paper trail if you decide to suck it up, admit you were conned, and sic a lawyer on someone. Even then, the percentage of cases that had a positive outcome was pretty low.
It's free. When you go to outdoor flea market, you can get scammed. It's the same principle. If they provided all those services, it'd cease to be free and open.
Obviously, there's a magical solution as well if there's a FOSS solution to providing wireless internet access to a very large area. It may involve a combination of wireless access point implants that generate a large scale wifi cloud.
Just because it's/. doesn't mean you need to stick "FOSS" in your question. It's the most overused and abused acronym around these parts. It costs money to set up wireless routers, pay the electric bill, get them connected to a provider, and pay that bill as well. We just had our free metro wi-fi turned off because even pumping ads at people wasn't enough to pay for it. Sorry, Libertarians, you're going to need a government solution for this one. Unless the tribe pays the bill or some corporation that has a lot of extra money they don't want to give to their employees is willing to donate it.
Youtube has many remediation options that weren't available to usenet that can be used to whack out the spam. All it took on usenet most of the time was to change your handle a couple times, use a few different email addresses, and flood until your cheap account was blocked...then get a new account and start over again. With youtube, users can notify the admins and get spam yanked...though there's plenty of spam there right now anyway, it wouldn't take much to make it much easier to be user-policed (the comments already have with their thumbs up/down moderation system).
They've tried and still couldn't get down to 100 bucks.
It's not as easy as you'd think. People seem to forget all the money spent in labor, quality control, setbacks due to your primary source of computer components, aka, backs of freight trucks...
Slashdot Mirror
I had this discussion with a recruiter the other day that was adamant about me inserting every single language and tool they wanted into every job description I had.
I said "the situation is very much like a mechanic where I have a wide range of tools I use to solve a problem, but the only thing that anyone cares about is that at some point, I used a wrench for something...without really caring about what the problem actually was."
Anyone can sit down, surf the web, find some sample code, stick it into a project, and then site that you used said tool in your resume...but it's not about that, it's about how you solved that problem.
And later in the year, when the corporation I worked for lost 10 million because one of their customers went bankrupt, I, by chance, got to sit in on a bigwigs meeting.
After announcing the loss and accompanying layoffs, he actually followed it by saying "And I don't think suggesting thin clients will help us out of this one."
Man, it was so hard to keep from laughing...next time I hear that, and it sounds like I will hear that again, I think I'll just risk my job and have a big belly laugh.
Hi, I'm a Mac. I'd rather pay a lot of money for a proprietary closed source piece of software used to make a document, than to download a free piece of software (and hopefully donate a few bucks) that can make an equally good document, because if the software interface I use to make documents does not exactly and precisely match the look of my environment, I am incapable, and even paralyzed, at even the thought of making such documents with such an unfashionable looking interface.
Try not talking about your tech support experience, not showing it on your resume at all. Try talking about open source projects that I only hope you've been involved in, or independent projects. I worked in a computer lab when I was in college working toward my software engineering degree. That was even more useless than doing tech support, I guarantee.
That said, from my professional experience as a developer and consultant, there are two people I always make good with: The QA manager, and the Tech Support manager. Those are the guys who will give you the insights you need to make your project suck a whole lot less than it would if you called all the shots, and anyone who disagrees with that is a fool. Your time doing tech support will definitely force you to see software/hardware development in a way that is a little different, but just as valuable, as any other developer.
I got my start doing stuff like this on the PalmOS Symbol handheld scanners back in 1999. I've done this same stuff for years on various handhelds running mobile OS's. As long as you can scan a freaking barcode, you can store that info and hit that website when you sync...whether it's through a wired connection, a wireless connection, it doesn't matter.
You can reinvent something 10 years later that people have done for years, and now it is a "killer app". If Google does it, apparently, idiots pay attention and it is suddenly, somehow, feasible and marketable.
For everyone who thinks Barack Obama is a corporate whore and they think that McCain is a better choice:
1. McCain and Sarah Palin are good buddies with the guy who calls the Internet a series of tubes, Ted Stevens.
2. McCain and especially his running mate feel strongly that their religious beliefs should definitely play into any decision on science, going so far as to use their own personal religious beliefs to define their scientific policy in the past. Despite what they tell you this week.
3. McCain and Palin have been solidly against Net Neutrality since the very beginning, and are solidly funded by the major telcos.
Really? I thought the part about encrypting your personal thumb drive and how it would probably prevent you from doing something as stupid as using it for an unattended install...or at least encrypting your personal directory...made enough sense. Or maybe you didn't get that particular point?
I mean, ragging on the poor schmuck who botched his installs at this point is probably redundant, but offering a halfways decent idea up to every other smug schmuck ragging on the unemployed guy while inviting bad karma down upon themselves is probably worth a whole lot more.
Getting taxed by a Democratic administration, then I'm okay with that...because I sure am not anywhere near his tax bracket then, and I think I make a pretty good living compared to most other folks in my community. I wouldn't mind it at all if Scott Adams takes a tax hit and even a bit of that cash is used to fix the potholes in the street that causes me to have flat tires that cost me considerably more than I'd pay in taxes relatively to get my wheels fixed.
That said, it's painfully obvious that by reading replies to this story, what party the posters belong to. When your side is on the losing side of a study, you whine and bitch, when your side is on the winning side, you lavish praise. Personally, I think it's really interesting that only 3% of those economists call themselves libertarians, while almost half define themselves as Democrats.
Seriously, it worked great for me. I could work flexible hours later at night doing carding at bars. I was provided with free diet soda and was paid. Never gets dull, and every night you get great stories you can tell your friends at work while you look and feel like a zombie. :)
It made me plenty of extra cash when I was going through some lower paying contracts, and most bars will take anyone who doesn't have a raging case of halitosis and shows up when expected.
This logic is just so rad. It's like saying "My firewall already has 20 ports open, what's so bad about having another few seemingly insignificant ports open for no reason at all?"
The reason it's bad is because it's another way for someone to harvest personal information off your phone for apparently no real reason at all. It's crap like this that makes me feel just fine having my little fugly Palm Centro. I don't have to have yet another security hole because Apple felt taking a screenshot would make for a cool bit of eye-candy.
People know how to clear their browser cache and those who care clear it regularly. Pictures you took are going to be saved, because you intended to take them and you probably intend to save them too, along with your files. But taking a snapshot for no real good reason at all and not telling your customers about it sucks. That's why it's a problem.
Well, at least it's not like what some Apple fanboys do...when something is found wrong with an Apple product, they immediately compare it with a Microsoft product and say "it's still better". That's basically like saying "At least it's not complete crap."
Whoops, meant to say microSD cards. I swear, the SD "standards" are the only confusing thing I've ever encountered in regards to my Palm phones, and they have adapters for that. So it's really not a huge deal.
I have a Palm Centro with a touchscreen. The screen may be small, but I have the option of using a keyboard or a touchscreen. It's simple and it works and it doesn't get me into car accidents when I use it on the road from time to time in an emergency.
It just freaking works. I have a VPN client for it and a remote desktop client for it. I can surf newsgroups, instant message, email, have a greatly functional and easy to use calendar and todo list, and there are like a zillion apps out there that do pretty much everything, and a good number of them are free, OSS, or both. It's a cinch to program for, it's just C or C++ and you can use Eclipse, VSS (if you have to), Codewarrior, or whatever.
It doesn't impress your snobby friends, but whatever. When they're struggling to do stuff that I've already done, or when their batteries are dead and my phone, which hasn't been hooked to a charger in days is still working, then who cares. Yeah, it doesn't have an operating system that gets updated regularly. So what? It works and it doesn't have as many vulnerable parts that need to be service pack updated every 6 months. The phone didn't cost me any more than 30 bucks when I traded in my old phone, and that's because I missed out on the free trade in deal that I had for a month because my old Treo was working fine enough that I didn't care, until I realized I had moved to miniSD cards.
IANAL, but that all information gathered by a third party that does not have a private investigator license (or court appointed warrant, whatever) is inadmissible as far as I know. You can gather all the information you want, but whether or not you can use it against someone in a court of law would require gathering that evidence through proper channels, I'd think.
However, holding onto that gathered information and using it in other ways would fall under an entirely different law. But rendering that information inadmissible in court would force the RIAA's corporate spies to follow the law or be essentially useless except for building a case for just cause for a warrant.
Hey, at least he's not linking through his blog anymore.
I put together and drive cars that look like 1950's alien spaceships. It's just my thing, you know.
Oh, I can think of something worse. They could have had Ballmer shaking his ass. That would have made me and anyone else subjected to that commercial wretch, and I would feel nauseous whenever I see a churro from there on out.
I saw an ad recently with Ballmer's face, and it scared the hell out of me. I realized that Microsoft gained its fame because Bill Gates looks to average people as a trustworthy geek who might help them with their modem or spreadsheets. Ballmer, however, looks like someone who might scream at you for making his coffee wrong or not doing your spreadsheets correctly.
But they're competing against mobile OS's like WinMob, Symbian, and Palm that have been around for about 10-14 years now. They've been doing Bluetooth for about 6-7 years. It's no longer a special, cutting edge feature...it's just expected by companies looking to port their applications. If it's not there, companies don't port their applications and don't support the phone. Customers of said company get marketed into buying the phone, find out that the app they need for their job doesn't work, they return the phone and are upset about it. I've seen this before years ago with the Motorola Q, when a company I worked for did not want to port their app to a non-touch screen device. They're going to have to deliver that Bluetooth API pretty quick if they don't want to tank their OS right out of the gate...some of the largest penetration of non-Apple smartphones are into vertical industries where the application provider really makes or breaks the success of a platform.
Except that instead of keeping a few scripts to themselves, they try to sell ALL of them. Even if they totally suck. It's even moreso for cheap, low-budget games. People's expectations these days are high...really, really high. Everything that doesn't meet those expectations, they can play those on their cell phone and figure they can get a freeware version anyway. Take your cheap games and position them for the cellphone/smartphone market instead of trying to compete even with outdated stuff like Unreal and Oblivion, Guild Wars...or even the newer stuff. (I'm always 2-3 years behind on games, mostly because I wait until they're heavily modded first).
A network editing its content to "improve reality"? Incredible!
Well, there WAS that whole thing with that Katie Couric interview with John McCain where they basically realized McCain was rambling in an answer, so they cut and pasted another one of his answers over that one to make him sound more coherant...but nah. No way!
ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX...you wonder if the people running the show at any of those stations ever read 1984. You wonder if they ever creep themselves out with some of the stuff they pull to improve ratings. News shows ARE the new sitcoms. They know that sitcoms get more viewers than the news, so they've made the news like sitcoms or staged "reality" shows. It's not about the truth, it's about the money, buddy.
Replacing one word with another without taking into account the differences in definition between the two is completely ignorant.
What I'm gathering you're trying to say, however, is that in the US, the attempt to repress the struggle between two sides by way of the so called "War on Terror" is Orwell's definition of pacifism. Therefore, you are likening Bush to Hitler as a result of his stating on numerous occasions that if "you're not with me, you're against me".
As far as "moveon.org" goes, it's a freaking social club for Democrats. That's all it is. They have bake sales to raise money to put ads defending their candidates on the TV. The Republicans have lots of those organizations too. One of them is called "Freedom's Watch". Now THOSE are some creepy dudes, and their name sounds like it was taken directly from another certain black arm band wearing militia. Code Pink has a dramatic name, but their reasoning is that they believe the Iraq War to be an illegal and Unconstitutional occupation that is causing the deaths of US soldiers for entirely unclear, vague reasons. And they have plenty of evidence to back up that claim that the Bush Administration cannot refute. ANSWER? CAIR? All more of the above.
Oh yeah, and Orwell was an admitted Socialist as well. Check out Road to Wigan Pier. Ayn Rand hated him, you know. And the Bushies LOVE their Ayn Rand.
Yeah, because I work all week with geeks all day long just so I can hang out with them after work on the weekend. Yeah...no.
Give me the old scene any day of the week. The social scene is about unwinding and meeting interesting people who help you expand your mind, not a bunch of people who think exactly like you and only are willing to challenge you in a game of Warcraft or in a heated discussion about design patterns and antipatterns. If you can't do that at work, then yeah, maybe you need that kind of interaction...but most don't because they get it all day long. Unless you're unemployed, of course.
And I suppose you'd like to start a free service that provides full fraud prevention, identity verification services, and a full "paper" trail with signatures along with a classifieds ad section, right? It's a freaking classified ads site. It's not that much different than your local newspaper. Stop thinking that it's eBay, it's not. People were scamming each other through the newspaper in the old days, too. The only good thing about the newspaper is that there's a paper trail if you decide to suck it up, admit you were conned, and sic a lawyer on someone. Even then, the percentage of cases that had a positive outcome was pretty low. It's free. When you go to outdoor flea market, you can get scammed. It's the same principle. If they provided all those services, it'd cease to be free and open.
Obviously, there's a magical solution as well if there's a FOSS solution to providing wireless internet access to a very large area. It may involve a combination of wireless access point implants that generate a large scale wifi cloud.
/. doesn't mean you need to stick "FOSS" in your question. It's the most overused and abused acronym around these parts. It costs money to set up wireless routers, pay the electric bill, get them connected to a provider, and pay that bill as well. We just had our free metro wi-fi turned off because even pumping ads at people wasn't enough to pay for it. Sorry, Libertarians, you're going to need a government solution for this one. Unless the tribe pays the bill or some corporation that has a lot of extra money they don't want to give to their employees is willing to donate it.
Just because it's
Youtube has many remediation options that weren't available to usenet that can be used to whack out the spam. All it took on usenet most of the time was to change your handle a couple times, use a few different email addresses, and flood until your cheap account was blocked...then get a new account and start over again. With youtube, users can notify the admins and get spam yanked...though there's plenty of spam there right now anyway, it wouldn't take much to make it much easier to be user-policed (the comments already have with their thumbs up/down moderation system).
They've tried and still couldn't get down to 100 bucks. It's not as easy as you'd think. People seem to forget all the money spent in labor, quality control, setbacks due to your primary source of computer components, aka, backs of freight trucks...