My uncle has a sailing boat, and his Toughbook works pretty well under bad weather conditions, using gloves, etc... definitely a plus.
He hasn't really tested it to its limits, but a regular laptop wouldn't have been an option (especially under regatta conditions). And with the OZI Explorer + GPS combo, it's a huge advantage.
I liked Final Fantasy 8 and 9 specifically (and the Tactics series - didn't play the famed 7), and I liked the stories a lot.
So FFVIII was almost a movie in the amount of cutscenes, but I liked it that way. And compared to other games (maybe not the RPG genre) it had a lot of storyline.
The gameplay actually seemed a bit repetitive at times (especially summoning):P
For some of us in the 3rd world, $100k is not "little money", I wouldn't make that much in 10 years as a salaried worker (which I don't expect to be for 10 years, going independant is the only way to make decent money in my country).
OF COURSE I'd take that H1B visa in a heartbeat if it was offered to me (a coworker got one and earns about $80k a year, he's really, really good so I think it was not a "waste" of your H1B visas).
Delphi and Pascal are other puzzlers. Pascal is great as a teaching language, but there are later iterations of that family of languages - Modula-2 and Modula-3 - that arguably provide better rigor if rigor is what you are after. And I see no obvious reason to use Pascal or related languages if you're not after truly rigorous code. At the local public university (Universidad de la República, Uruguay), the 1st programming course used Pascal (you don't need much for the basics, pseudocode would do just as well), and the second used Modula-2 (no idea if they switched to Modula-3 or whatever by now).
Wikimedia Germany (the German Wikimedia chapter) spent a lot of time and energy pulling this project together and was able to get the weight of publishing powerhouse Bertelsmann behind the project. Furthermore, they helped Bertelsmann to understand and support our mission because the GFDL would require Bertelsmann to contribute the changes back to Wikipedia. This makes this a unique endeavor in the publishing world and could be considered a success just for getting this off the ground.
Title: The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia in one volume ("Das Wikipedia
Lexikon in einem Band")
Size: 993 pages
Illustrations: approx. 1,000
Keywords and definitions: approx. 50,000
Index: WIKIPEDIA's most frequently accessed keywords
Content: Abstracts/first paragraph of the online-edition; countries given with basic key facts
Format: 17 x 24 cm
Get-up: Hardcover, four-colour
Target retail price (VAT included): EUR 19.95
Publication date: Autumn 2008
The book is only in German for the German market but we will be watching this innovative project closely because...who knows? You can't change the world unless you push the limits and try to break existing paradigms. Much of the credit for this arrangement belongs to Mathias, Arne and everyone involved with the German chapter - they did all the hard work. Danke!
Time to celebrate with some schnitzel and a large Dunkel (or an Apelsaft, if you prefer)!
I'm a huge fan of 4:3 too, I think most of the extra space on widescreen format is wasted. I'm looking for a monitor and I'm not happy to find that there are almost no non-wide alternatives. I'll probably settle for a 1680x1050 too, but I'd be very happy to trade for those 150 pixels.
I don't understand why somebody tagged the parent Funny... I value my time very highly, and I should be paid A LOT to even consider a job that would require wasting 4 hours of my life EVERY DAY.
I moved from a house with 2000 square meters of garden (that's a lot) to a small apartment building, and saved 1 and 1/2 hs of commuting each way every day, and I consider the tradeoff worth it. I could only appreciate the garden on weekends anyway.
I thought it was me... good to know I'm not the only one whose Firefox blocks whenever some stupid Flash takes too long to render. The NBA boxscores page did that to me for a while.
I agree, I don't install unauthorized software but I grind my teeth every time I have to do something that would take a tenth of the time using "unauthorized" software:(
Unfortunately, I know that my position here is expendable (I'm subcontracted) and it's cheaper for the company not to give me any privileges and have me "waste" time, than to let me be productive (after all, I'm VERY cheap for them - and no, it's not that easy switching jobs, I'm from Uruguay not the US or wherever ).
This already happened in my country (Uruguay) for other stuff: we call chewing gum "chicles" after the Addam's Chiclets brand , and running/tennis shoes "championes" after the Champion brand (that term's unique to Uruguay I think, in Argentina they use the term "zapatillas").
Re: Sarah Chayes
She is also a NY Times reporter and is therefore a partisan hack.
There is NO FUCKING WAY she would have driven the road when the Taliban were in power.
Period. Not to mention, there are fatwas (religious edicts) forbidding women from driving cars in Saudi Arabia (even from sitting in front seats I think), so I guess Afghanistan would be far worse.
That said, what I read from the media and Wikipedia doesn't sound bad, at the very least she's corageous (Peace Corps in Morocco, Kosovo and now Afghanistan??). And I thought most Slashdot readers thought the Government is always composed of criminals to some degree (according to Ayn Rand followers). Add to that a Muslim fundamentalist country, and I'm pretty sure it's not the government I would want - better than before? don't know. But war has a habit of promoting extremists at the expense of the middle-of-the-road types. (slightly OT: that could explain Bush to some degree, even if the US's war is more perceived than real).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chayes
The guy just told you that you could be beaten and incarcerated for not being fingerprinted, and you're worried about the USA? That sounds like willful ignorance to me. FYI, for a foreigner, it's worse in the USA.
My father (who's from Uruguay like me, and a board member of a prominent international organization) has visited both Japan and the US, and from what he described, the process is far more denigrating in the US.
Not to mention tales of people from my country being abused, incarcerated and returned from the US, while no-one that I know of has been turned away from Japan.
Cool story... we have huge glass walls, and they've become extensions to the whiteboard:) with UML-like notation and stuff... some people say "hey you remind me of the "A Beautiful Mind" movie (I've never watched it, I hope it's for good).
Wow, I remember looking forward to my dad's trips, because he would bring me and my younger brother sets of Legos... and once he brought a grey castle (probably further down the road, 1987 or so, but we had all of the Lego brochures with all the new sets, we got to wonder which of those he would bring, it was fun:) )...
No, it did not turn into an Engineering degree for me (though I did start it), but my brother used to build sets and imagine movies with the Lego pieces as actors... 15 years later he actually studied film directing (until reality settled and now he makes ads like most of them:P )
Heh, I live in Uruguay (3rd world country - more like 2nd world actually), and we have 100% tax on new cars and income tax (that starts at 400 dollars, no kidding ) + 25% VAT.
And yes, expect to pay 25.000 dollars for a Kia (that's why Indian and Chinese automakers are making BIG inroads here, an Indian-made Maruti is 10.000 dollars, "only" twice as much as in India)..
And also similar (a bit lower) prices for gas than in Denmark...
BBC is great, it is unfortunately only available on a limited way over here (Uruguay) but I loved watching Top Gear & other shows (some are sadly only for UK or Canada audiencie).
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing. I'm not the OP, but I'm interested because I, too, have been in tech support, SQA, network administration and now programming.
I didn't like SQA, did well in tech support but wanted to move on, worked for 2 years as a Network Admin and decided it wasn't my career track, then asked - and got - a switch to programmer within the company when I got my degree, which is where I've been the last 6 months.
I'm not certain what I want my career path to be, I like problem solving and I like understanding the business side as well as the technical side of things, but I'm not the kind of hardcore programmer or network support guy that spends his free time hacking a program or trying out stuff in his home lab ( I did, and sometimes still do, a little of both, but it's not my favorite way of spending "free" time ).
I guess I want to be either into consulting or management, but I'm not that good on the people skills side of things (not that bad either, but I had a trainee when I switched from networking to programming and I was a terrible boss/mentor ).
Maybe the OP feels that way, and I'm interested in both the general answers to the OP and of course any advice on my particular situation:)
More subtly here in Australia the number for emergency services is 000, but we have had critically ill people receive delayed medical care because people have dialed 911 after watching American TV. Police in my country (Uruguay) just gave up and changed the emergency number to 911... really, a poll showed that over half the country believed that it was !!! (instead of pretty obscure local numbers, which was actually quite useless sometimes - if you weren't in your neighbourhood, chances of knowing the police number were slim to none)
I haven't attended a first aid course ever... It would have been fun to practise mouth-to-mouth with the girls in my high school class:)
Matters of life and death are not ruled by bargain-seeking behavior
By this reasoning, the price of food should be nearly infinite. Without good food and healthcare you die, after all. Just one point I mentioned earlier: demand for better healthcare is different than demand for food in that if you can afford better healthcare, you will want it, to the point of much better equipment, more expensive medicine, etc.. (I mistakenly assumed that saying that it is inelastic, actually the literature says it is - see link 1 -, but ), while there is such a thing as too much food, even is some is better than others "Once you meet your basic caloric needs, any additional money in your pocket is likely to be spent on other things than food." (see second link)
Quoting "The proposed demand specification
explains why the empirical estimates of the price elasticity of demand for medical
services could exhibit a wide range. We analyze how medical insurance can result in
a market failure and evaluate ideas that can correct some of the distortions in resource
allocation for medical services." Another important quote: "the demand for health care is inelastic at high prices, is elastic for some price range and becomes inelastic at relatively low prices"
I honestly can't imagine what it would be like to have a job where if what's immediately in front of me is blocked, then I am blocked from working. I won't lie, like someone said, there's always documentation to do... but in my line of work, if my manager is not present (he's on holidays right now), I have a hard time getting more work, not because there isn't any work to do, but because we work with very sensitive (financial and ID-related) information, and unlike my boss, I'm not trusted with that information alone; likewise I can't just go to the desks of people using our programs (I don't have access to the production environment, not even with a non-privileged account, nor the DB)
I'm not invited to meetings where work is scheduled and stuff is coordinated with the company (that sucks and is a major reason I'm considering leaving), etc... not to mention I'm subcontracted and don't even get the benefits "real" employees get:( .
OTOH the pay's above average for my country, and not being able to take on responsibilities means little stress, and the time spent training me means I'm not a high risk to get laid off.
Slashdot Mirror
My uncle has a sailing boat, and his Toughbook works pretty well under bad weather conditions, using gloves, etc... definitely a plus.
He hasn't really tested it to its limits, but a regular laptop wouldn't have been an option (especially under regatta conditions). And with the OZI Explorer + GPS combo, it's a huge advantage.
I liked Final Fantasy 8 and 9 specifically (and the Tactics series - didn't play the famed 7), and I liked the stories a lot.
:P
So FFVIII was almost a movie in the amount of cutscenes, but I liked it that way. And compared to other games (maybe not the RPG genre) it had a lot of storyline.
The gameplay actually seemed a bit repetitive at times (especially summoning)
For some of us in the 3rd world, $100k is not "little money", I wouldn't make that much in 10 years as a salaried worker (which I don't expect to be for 10 years, going independant is the only way to make decent money in my country).
OF COURSE I'd take that H1B visa in a heartbeat if it was offered to me (a coworker got one and earns about $80k a year, he's really, really good so I think it was not a "waste" of your H1B visas).
Original source http://blog.wikimedia.org/ apparently.
Wikimedia Germany (the German Wikimedia chapter) spent a lot of time and energy pulling this project together and was able to get the weight of publishing powerhouse Bertelsmann behind the project. Furthermore, they helped Bertelsmann to understand and support our mission because the GFDL would require Bertelsmann to contribute the changes back to Wikipedia. This makes this a unique endeavor in the publishing world and could be considered a success just for getting this off the ground.
Title: The Wikipedia Encyclopaedia in one volume ("Das Wikipedia Lexikon in einem Band")
Size: 993 pages
Illustrations: approx. 1,000
Keywords and definitions: approx. 50,000
Index: WIKIPEDIA's most frequently accessed keywords
Content: Abstracts/first paragraph of the online-edition; countries given with basic key facts
Format: 17 x 24 cm
Get-up: Hardcover, four-colour
Target retail price (VAT included): EUR 19.95
Publication date: Autumn 2008
The book is only in German for the German market but we will be watching this innovative project closely because...who knows? You can't change the world unless you push the limits and try to break existing paradigms. Much of the credit for this arrangement belongs to Mathias, Arne and everyone involved with the German chapter - they did all the hard work. Danke!
Time to celebrate with some schnitzel and a large Dunkel (or an Apelsaft, if you prefer)!
Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business Development
I'm a huge fan of 4:3 too, I think most of the extra space on widescreen format is wasted. I'm looking for a monitor and I'm not happy to find that there are almost no non-wide alternatives.
I'll probably settle for a 1680x1050 too, but I'd be very happy to trade for those 150 pixels.
I don't understand why somebody tagged the parent Funny... I value my time very highly, and I should be paid A LOT to even consider a job that would require wasting 4 hours of my life EVERY DAY.
I moved from a house with 2000 square meters of garden (that's a lot) to a small apartment building, and saved 1 and 1/2 hs of commuting each way every day, and I consider the tradeoff worth it. I could only appreciate the garden on weekends anyway.
I also hate Vista's new file explorer. I'll have to look into the Directory Opus you mention (is it something like XTree Gold ? :) )
I thought it was me... good to know I'm not the only one whose Firefox blocks whenever some stupid Flash takes too long to render. The NBA boxscores page did that to me for a while.
I'm not the OP but I'd kill for U$ 400 for 3 day's work. Hell, for a week's work. I live in Uruguay btw :P (I make about U$ 800/month before taxes).
:)
And yes, I should REALLY look into getting some of those outsourcing jobs you people in the US worry about
I agree, I don't install unauthorized software but I grind my teeth every time I have to do something that would take a tenth of the time using "unauthorized" software :(
Unfortunately, I know that my position here is expendable (I'm subcontracted) and it's cheaper for the company not to give me any privileges and have me "waste" time, than to let me be productive (after all, I'm VERY cheap for them - and no, it's not that easy switching jobs, I'm from Uruguay not the US or wherever ).
This already happened in my country (Uruguay) for other stuff: we call chewing gum "chicles" after the Addam's Chiclets brand , and running/tennis shoes "championes" after the Champion brand (that term's unique to Uruguay I think, in Argentina they use the term "zapatillas").
There is NO FUCKING WAY she would have driven the road when the Taliban were in power.
Period. Not to mention, there are fatwas (religious edicts) forbidding women from driving cars in Saudi Arabia (even from sitting in front seats I think), so I guess Afghanistan would be far worse.
That said, what I read from the media and Wikipedia doesn't sound bad, at the very least she's corageous (Peace Corps in Morocco, Kosovo and now Afghanistan??). And I thought most Slashdot readers thought the Government is always composed of criminals to some degree (according to Ayn Rand followers). Add to that a Muslim fundamentalist country, and I'm pretty sure it's not the government I would want - better than before? don't know. But war has a habit of promoting extremists at the expense of the middle-of-the-road types. (slightly OT: that could explain Bush to some degree, even if the US's war is more perceived than real). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Chayes
Thanks for the recommendation, I for one will be checking it out :) (I mean, it's free)
:)
Nice publicity by TOR - I've been buying their stuff for years, it's good to have something free for a change
My father (who's from Uruguay like me, and a board member of a prominent international organization) has visited both Japan and the US, and from what he described, the process is far more denigrating in the US.
Not to mention tales of people from my country being abused, incarcerated and returned from the US, while no-one that I know of has been turned away from Japan.
Cool story... we have huge glass walls, and they've become extensions to the whiteboard :) with UML-like notation and stuff... some people say "hey you remind me of the "A Beautiful Mind" movie (I've never watched it, I hope it's for good).
A very good story ran on Wired a short while back, "Hacking our five senses", and what he described is part of the story:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html
Also check out
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/cyborg_mann_041012.html
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2002/03/50976
And the story on Slashdot itself
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/03/155204
Wow, I remember looking forward to my dad's trips, because he would bring me and my younger brother sets of Legos... and once he brought a grey castle (probably further down the road, 1987 or so, but we had all of the Lego brochures with all the new sets, we got to wonder which of those he would bring, it was fun :) )...
:P )
No, it did not turn into an Engineering degree for me (though I did start it), but my brother used to build sets and imagine movies with the Lego pieces as actors... 15 years later he actually studied film directing (until reality settled and now he makes ads like most of them
Heh, I live in Uruguay (3rd world country - more like 2nd world actually), and we have 100% tax on new cars and income tax (that starts at 400 dollars, no kidding ) + 25% VAT.
And yes, expect to pay 25.000 dollars for a Kia (that's why Indian and Chinese automakers are making BIG inroads here, an Indian-made Maruti is 10.000 dollars, "only" twice as much as in India)..
And also similar (a bit lower) prices for gas than in Denmark...
I described my country's health system in another post, at least you can choose a doctor if you don't mind waiting. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=423562&cid=22107328
Norway is often brought up, but it's as bad an example as the Arab states, and for the same reason: oil. They can afford to be socialist.
"Wealth from oil and gas in the North Sea, first tapped in the early 1970s, subsidizes public health and welfare programs"
http://www3.nationalgeographic.com/places/countries/country_norway.html
BBC is great, it is unfortunately only available on a limited way over here (Uruguay) but I loved watching Top Gear & other shows (some are sadly only for UK or Canada audiencie).
I've worked in tech support, network operations, sys admin, and as a programmer.
It sounds like you haven't really enjoyed much of anything you're doing. Why else would you change positions so often? Seven years is a pretty short time to have 4 different jobs in vastly different areas. Why do you want to be a manager, and why do you think you'd be any good at it? If your answer is "to make more money/be more accomplished", you've chosen the wrong path.
I'd say the first step in getting a management job is to show that you can do a job for more than 2 years without more "ladder" climbing. I'm not the OP, but I'm interested because I, too, have been in tech support, SQA, network administration and now programming.
I didn't like SQA, did well in tech support but wanted to move on, worked for 2 years as a Network Admin and decided it wasn't my career track, then asked - and got - a switch to programmer within the company when I got my degree, which is where I've been the last 6 months.
I'm not certain what I want my career path to be, I like problem solving and I like understanding the business side as well as the technical side of things, but I'm not the kind of hardcore programmer or network support guy that spends his free time hacking a program or trying out stuff in his home lab ( I did, and sometimes still do, a little of both, but it's not my favorite way of spending "free" time ).
I guess I want to be either into consulting or management, but I'm not that good on the people skills side of things (not that bad either, but I had a trainee when I switched from networking to programming and I was a terrible boss/mentor ).
Maybe the OP feels that way, and I'm interested in both the general answers to the OP and of course any advice on my particular situation
I haven't attended a first aid course ever... It would have been fun to practise mouth-to-mouth with the girls in my high school class
By this reasoning, the price of food should be nearly infinite. Without good food and healthcare you die, after all.
Just one point I mentioned earlier: demand for better healthcare is different than demand for food in that if you can afford better healthcare, you will want it, to the point of much better equipment, more expensive medicine, etc.. (I mistakenly assumed that saying that it is inelastic, actually the literature says it is - see link 1 -, but ), while there is such a thing as too much food, even is some is better than others "Once you meet your basic caloric needs, any additional money in your pocket is likely to be spent on other things than food." (see second link)
Here's a nice paper http://www.math.ilstu.edu/krzysio/HealthCare.pdf "Rising Health Care Expenditures: A Demand-Side Analysis"
Quoting "The proposed demand specification explains why the empirical estimates of the price elasticity of demand for medical services could exhibit a wide range. We analyze how medical insurance can result in a market failure and evaluate ideas that can correct some of the distortions in resource allocation for medical services." Another important quote: "the demand for health care is inelastic at high prices, is elastic for some price range and becomes inelastic at relatively low prices"
The quote about food I took out of http://www.iowafarmbureau.com/programs/commodity/information/tmjune06.pdf
I'm not invited to meetings where work is scheduled and stuff is coordinated with the company (that sucks and is a major reason I'm considering leaving), etc... not to mention I'm subcontracted and don't even get the benefits "real" employees get
OTOH the pay's above average for my country, and not being able to take on responsibilities means little stress, and the time spent training me means I'm not a high risk to get laid off.