CS degrees apply to 1% of the jobs out there and are pointless for the other 99% of jobs out there. At most places they want you to code a project by a deadline and be able to drop that project at 80% complete and start working on another project at their whim. Those are the important skills to most of the employers.
Give me specs for 3 projects. Let me rough them up. Then I meet with the users. They a) think of things they forgot, b) outright change things, c) tell me where I'm on target. Then I do a month's work and show them where I am at. They repeat their bit (a,b,c). if (a,b) stops, then we assign a firm deadline and priorities between the projects. We repeat the monthly meetings until projects finish.
---
What happens lately is much the same except. a) add 20 hours a week of SOX compliance and useless paperwork (file it on a hard drive and it is never looked at again). b) All this new "coaching and maximizing performance" crap (My goal: Give me work and let me finish it- I'm a flunky, not a manager- why are you wasting my time on CMP). c) Constantly one of the three projects (often as far as 80% complete) is postponed and some new wonder project is red-lined for installation.
Compare that to a little web browsing and slashdotting, and the difference in time wasted is an order of magnitude.
I lose way more time to SOX compliance than I lose to non-work web activities.
I lose more time to PMO than I do to SOX compliance (there was one horrible 4 week period where I basically billed yet wasn't allowed to work because no projects were approved- yup- I couldn't even check out stuff and do things i knew needed doing because it wasn't an approved project).
Then there are cancelled projects.
Then there are super-rush projects that get replaced by another super-rush project without ever being installed.
It makes you wonder.
Give me a project- give me a due date, and get out of my way- please. Seriously, my productivity is down 75% since 1998- I spend over half my time on paperwork. Maybe 10% of my time on non-work activities during working hours (and if a project is going to miss deadline then I work non-working hours to make it come in on the deadline).
unrealistic profits locked in by unreasonable laws.
You don't see terrorists cutting in on industries with profit margins of 7 to 10 percent.
Legalize drugs -now- before we completely destroy south and central america (and mexico). The drug cartels/terrorists are approaching the wealth of small nations now because of these insane laws.
Legalize resale of medicine and intellectual property. If it sells for $4 -anywhere- in the world, then it the highest it sells for should be the cost of transport plus $4. If there is a false law artificially raising the price of a good, then it is supporting terrorism.
That's pretty amazing, considering all three chinese -legal- immigrants I have worked with in the last year have significant communication skills. When you lay the issue of "face" over the top of miscommunication, it becomes almost impossible sometimes.
But... 10% is 10%. That covers a lot of faults. The thing that is going to change is that 10% is rising very rapidly now. Raises of 20 to 40 percent are not uncommon. And loyalty is very low (as it should be- if I could get a 20% raise for quitting, I would be hard put to stay without a raise).
I think it will take 8 to 10 years before it is too expensive to offshore- and at that point, there will be a smaller pool of americans willing to work in IT and -maybe- salaries and job security will improve.
I find that people are as moral as they can afford to be.
In college people have very little money.
I disagree and say that $15 to $20 is not a reasonable price for most people.
It is not unreasonable for me- I make a great living. But it is wrong and invites piracy to charge such a high price that a majority of people in an area can never afford it.
It also galls me that an impoverished american can't buy the DVD for $15 but the middle-class chinese competing with me for a job can buy it for $1.50.
1) Go to school 5 years. Work your bloody ass off. All nighters, miss 4 years of fun. 2) Spend 50 grand or more. 3) Your lucky! Get a job for 51k 4) After 2 years you are laid off. 5) Get next job for 51k per year. 6) After 2 years repeat... only now it takes longer to get another job. 7) Get a job in a shop with 50% indian contracters for 47k.
Happened to my friend- sharp as a tack, good work ethic, current skils.
Then there is my other bud.
4) Oops- your skill turns out to be suddenly obsolete- leave the field with 40k debt.
OR...
1) get a business degree. easy degree, lots of spare time for fun. 2) build up a lot less debt 3) Get a job for less money- but you don't get laid off. 4) After 5 years, you are making 51k, never unemployed 5) After 5 years, you have 5 years of experience that will count-- it won't be invalidated by a technology shift.
Or... 1) You are a CS Genius 2) get the degree & debt. 3) Get courted by several companies. 4) Get a great job.
But it ONLY works these days if you are a bloody genius. CS needs to come -EASY- to you to make it these days. You need to leave work and eagerly go home to spend another 3 to 5 hours hacking on the latest stuff just for the fun of it. You need to be the kind of person who sees bad documentation and knows what the person who wrote it meant for it to mean even tho it is wrong.
--- This will change in another 8 to 10 years-- but it's utterly insane to enter the field during this period unless you are both sharp as a tack and completely in love with computers. Even then- you may need a lucky break and I -STRONGLY- advise you to intern (and hope you get a good internship).
I guess since I'm not competing with indians and chinese willing to able to work for a tenth of my salary that I should pay full prices.
Oh wait... I AM competing with indians and chinese who are able to charge less because they get everything at a discount while I pay full price for everything.
So since I AM competing with them, then there should not be artificial laws preventing me from being able to purchase a) DVD's , b) medicine, c) Windows software at the enormously discounted prices they are paying which allows them to undercut me.
What happened? 1) I got such a backlog that there was no point in getting them right away. 2) They "broke" and started a new pattern a couple years ago-- low, then high- and then low, then REALLY low- then unbelievably low at holidays like laborday and christmas.
Since I didn't have to see them right away... I refuse to pay over $10 for a dvd in most cases and will buy $5 dvd's first-- if I run out of money, no $10 dvd's.
Plus DVD's are not worth as much so folks are okay to loan them- so we all loan ours back and forth (no big if one is lost unless its out of print).
Now- rental places are selling them for $5.50 used- you buy, put it through the cleaner and so far 100% work- for prices of $5 a piece (about 3 months after first release).
Plus used on Amazon.
$5 would increase my sales and my dollars spent marginally. My time is worth more than $5/copy.
I have absolutely -NO- problem if someone wants to sell a product for a million dollars more than the cost to produce it.
Where I strongly disagree is when they get artificial laws passed so they can sell that product to someone else for five dollars and resell of that item to me for ten dollars is prohibited. It is an insane situation.
It gets even worse when the cost to produce the item is 5 dollars, and I pay 50 dollars while they pay 2 dollars. I'm subsidizing their ability to get the item by being grossly overcharged. This happens a LOT with medicine.
Funny thing is-- in the J.C. Penneys advertisement about two months ago, you could -clearly- see the panty model was shaved downstairs through her panties. And this was distributed in a national ad in my local newspaper.
By virtue of this new law, that would be a crime.
I wish they would get over their obsession with nudity- once you see a couple thousand naked people, it starts to lose its novelty value.
If you mean "very little money" then you can get a lot of quiet out of those gaskets and some inexpensive ($12) fans.
If you mean "no money", then there is this little switch on the back. You flip it into "quiet" mode and your webserver will stop making any noise and will not generate any heat. Even better, it consumes no electricity in quiet mode.
And even when you dont. There was a recent article about a couple who lived on curve who had a driver (think he was drunk) mistake the accelerator for the brake approaching the curve and plowed through their bedroom at about 50mph kill both of them asleep in bed pretty much instantly.
For intelligent people, military service can open a lot of doors that would otherwise be blocked to them.
Re:The problem of nerve impulse conduction
on
An Alternate Human
·
· Score: 1
We could probably design redundant pathways for higher bandwidth.
Also, there is no reason you couldn't design in a set of eyes near the brain and a second set of eyes on stalks. You could have a set of cat eyes for night time and a set of lizard eyes for the day time too.
I can make it into a car analogy just to finish things off if you like.
B)
*and there is a bug above. I should have said
1) It is evil to kill humans actively protecting mutants 2) It is not evil to kill humans who support mutant killers but do not kill mutants. 3) It is probably not evil to kill humans who let others kill mutants but do nothing to stop it.
--- It's complicated since it is a social action- not a direct action.
And he's only really evil if you look at it from a certain angle.
Humans who implicitly support those killing mutants are "innocent" and it is evil to kill them and only those "actively" killing mutants can be defended against.
This is like the islamic charity organizations that provide support for the surviving family members of suicide bombs or the members of any group that attacks another group and who do not actively attempt to stop that attack.
So magneto killing those who permit others to kill mutants isn't really evil. Only when he kills humans who are actively protecting humans and resisting those killing mutants would he be evil.
If we drive cars for 10 million years and at least a few times a year someone who later reproduces survives because of any type of advantage, then that advantage will become more common.
If we drive cars for 1,000 years and have such violent accidents that 99% of drivers are killed before they can reproduce but 1% survive and reproduce-- then those traits that allowed them to survive will almost certainly predominate by the end of the time span.
If they survive and don't reproduce, then it's almost as if they didn't survive- but they *might* help their cousin reproduce more by giving them a loan and some of their genes are shared with their cousin.
Slashdot Mirror
So that's worth $1,050 plus tax?
Wish I had that kind of money to blow. I make good money but the difference between DVD and HD is not worth five bucks to me.
Couldn't the build a list of popular programs with outbound access and build those into a default "approved" list?
And just like adblockers for firefox and safepeer, they could then grow that list over time.
Why can private individuals do something easily while a huge corporation cannot?
I'll second that.
CS degrees apply to 1% of the jobs out there and are pointless for the other 99% of jobs out there. At most places they want you to code a project by a deadline and be able to drop that project at 80% complete and start working on another project at their whim. Those are the important skills to most of the employers.
My preferred work method is:
Give me specs for 3 projects.
Let me rough them up.
Then I meet with the users. They a) think of things they forgot, b) outright change things, c) tell me where I'm on target.
Then I do a month's work and show them where I am at. They repeat their bit (a,b,c). if (a,b) stops, then we assign a firm deadline and priorities between the projects.
We repeat the monthly meetings until projects finish.
---
What happens lately is much the same except.
a) add 20 hours a week of SOX compliance and useless paperwork (file it on a hard drive and it is never looked at again).
b) All this new "coaching and maximizing performance" crap (My goal: Give me work and let me finish it- I'm a flunky, not a manager- why are you wasting my time on CMP).
c) Constantly one of the three projects (often as far as 80% complete) is postponed and some new wonder project is red-lined for installation.
Compare that to a little web browsing and slashdotting, and the difference in time wasted is an order of magnitude.
I lose way more time to SOX compliance than I lose to non-work web activities.
I lose more time to PMO than I do to SOX compliance (there was one horrible 4 week period where I basically billed yet wasn't allowed to work because no projects were approved- yup- I couldn't even check out stuff and do things i knew needed doing because it wasn't an approved project).
Then there are cancelled projects.
Then there are super-rush projects that get replaced by another super-rush project without ever being installed.
It makes you wonder.
Give me a project- give me a due date, and get out of my way- please. Seriously, my productivity is down 75% since 1998- I spend over half my time on paperwork. Maybe 10% of my time on non-work activities during working hours (and if a project is going to miss deadline then I work non-working hours to make it come in on the deadline).
It is unfortunate but true that 5 to 10% of society is going to be severely impacted by legal drugs, gambling, alchohol, prostitution, smoking, etc.
Do we destroy the rest of society to protect those 5 to 10%?
Because increasingly- that's what we are doing.
unrealistic profits locked in by unreasonable laws.
You don't see terrorists cutting in on industries with profit margins of 7 to 10 percent.
Legalize drugs -now- before we completely destroy south and central america (and mexico). The drug cartels/terrorists are approaching the wealth of small nations now because of these insane laws.
Legalize resale of medicine and intellectual property. If it sells for $4 -anywhere- in the world, then it the highest it sells for should be the cost of transport plus $4. If there is a false law artificially raising the price of a good, then it is supporting terrorism.
That's pretty amazing, considering all three chinese -legal- immigrants I have worked with in the last year have significant communication skills. When you lay the issue of "face" over the top of miscommunication, it becomes almost impossible sometimes.
But... 10% is 10%. That covers a lot of faults. The thing that is going to change is that 10% is rising very rapidly now. Raises of 20 to 40 percent are not uncommon. And loyalty is very low (as it should be- if I could get a 20% raise for quitting, I would be hard put to stay without a raise).
I think it will take 8 to 10 years before it is too expensive to offshore- and at that point, there will be a smaller pool of americans willing to work in IT and -maybe- salaries and job security will improve.
I find that people are as moral as they can afford to be.
In college people have very little money.
I disagree and say that $15 to $20 is not a reasonable price for most people.
It is not unreasonable for me- I make a great living. But it is wrong and invites piracy to charge such a high price that a majority of people in an area can never afford it.
It also galls me that an impoverished american can't buy the DVD for $15 but the middle-class chinese competing with me for a job can buy it for $1.50.
You are so clueless, it's sad.
1) Go to school 5 years. Work your bloody ass off. All nighters, miss 4 years of fun.
2) Spend 50 grand or more.
3) Your lucky! Get a job for 51k
4) After 2 years you are laid off.
5) Get next job for 51k per year.
6) After 2 years repeat... only now it takes longer to get another job.
7) Get a job in a shop with 50% indian contracters for 47k.
Happened to my friend- sharp as a tack, good work ethic, current skils.
Then there is my other bud.
4) Oops- your skill turns out to be suddenly obsolete- leave the field with 40k debt.
OR...
1) get a business degree. easy degree, lots of spare time for fun.
2) build up a lot less debt
3) Get a job for less money- but you don't get laid off.
4) After 5 years, you are making 51k, never unemployed
5) After 5 years, you have 5 years of experience that will count-- it won't be invalidated by a technology shift.
Or...
1) You are a CS Genius
2) get the degree & debt.
3) Get courted by several companies.
4) Get a great job.
But it ONLY works these days if you are a bloody genius. CS needs to come -EASY- to you to make it these days. You need to leave work and eagerly go home to spend another 3 to 5 hours hacking on the latest stuff just for the fun of it. You need to be the kind of person who sees bad documentation and knows what the person who wrote it meant for it to mean even tho it is wrong.
---
This will change in another 8 to 10 years-- but it's utterly insane to enter the field during this period unless you are both sharp as a tack and completely in love with computers. Even then- you may need a lucky break and I -STRONGLY- advise you to intern (and hope you get a good internship).
Of course you are correct.
I guess since I'm not competing with indians and chinese willing to able to work for a tenth of my salary that I should pay full prices.
Oh wait... I AM competing with indians and chinese who are able to charge less because they get everything at a discount while I pay full price for everything.
So since I AM competing with them, then there should not be artificial laws preventing me from being able to purchase a) DVD's , b) medicine, c) Windows software at the enormously discounted prices they are paying which allows them to undercut me.
I have over 400 dvds and the my cost distribution is something like this..
$25 1 (Time Bandits)
$20 11
$15 150 (Most frequent "first day" sale price)
$10 120
$5 120
Not so impressive but now lets consider time.
In the last year:
$5 50
$10 20
$15 3
$20 0
$25 0
What happened?
1) I got such a backlog that there was no point in getting them right away.
2) They "broke" and started a new pattern a couple years ago-- low, then high- and then low, then REALLY low- then unbelievably low at holidays like laborday and christmas.
Since I didn't have to see them right away... I refuse to pay over $10 for a dvd in most cases and will buy $5 dvd's first-- if I run out of money, no $10 dvd's.
Plus
DVD's are not worth as much so folks are okay to loan them- so we all loan ours back and forth (no big if one is lost unless its out of print).
Now- rental places are selling them for $5.50 used- you buy, put it through the cleaner and so far 100% work- for prices of $5 a piece (about 3 months after first release).
Plus used on Amazon.
$5 would increase my sales and my dollars spent marginally. My time is worth more than $5/copy.
I have absolutely -NO- problem if someone wants to sell a product for a million dollars more than the cost to produce it.
Where I strongly disagree is when they get artificial laws passed so they can sell that product to someone else for five dollars and resell of that item to me for ten dollars is prohibited. It is an insane situation.
It gets even worse when the cost to produce the item is 5 dollars, and I pay 50 dollars while they pay 2 dollars. I'm subsidizing their ability to get the item by being grossly overcharged. This happens a LOT with medicine.
And another thing- just because I didn't bloviate on for 10 pages doesn't mean there isn't a lot of hard thinking behind my original statement.
So by your argument...
EVERYTHING should be priced relative to a person's earnings.
A person should be charged.. say... 2 hours for a movie.
So a person that makes 3 cents an hour would pay 6 cents and a person that makes 300 dollars an hour would pay 600 dollars-- for the same product.
So a person that was unemployed and making 0 cents per hour would have a right to take ANYTHING they wanted for free.
I don't know-- doesn't seem like your argument holds up worth SQUAT.
If oranges are sold for 10 cents 2 miles from here then the cost of an orange would be 10 cents plus the cost of moving the orange 2 miles.
DVD's should basically be 1.50 every where else in the world too then.
I have a friend who won four tickets to the superbowl in such a lottery and bought them for some large amount of money (whatever the cover price was).
He was a HUGE football fan and was very happy to win the tickets.
And then he sold them in sets of two for 1400, and 1000 bucks (2400 total).
As big of a fan as he was, $2400 and a new big screen TV was preferable to watching it live.
And I guess many would make that choice.
Funny thing is-- in the J.C. Penneys advertisement about two months ago, you could -clearly- see the panty model was shaved downstairs through her panties. And this was distributed in a national ad in my local newspaper.
By virtue of this new law, that would be a crime.
I wish they would get over their obsession with nudity- once you see a couple thousand naked people, it starts to lose its novelty value.
that I got a good laugh out of it.
Seriously-- scalpers were selling the tickets for these prices. I think that is what it is really about.
Well there is no money and no money...
If you mean "very little money" then you can get a lot of quiet out of those gaskets and some inexpensive ($12) fans.
If you mean "no money", then there is this little switch on the back. You flip it into "quiet" mode and your webserver will stop making any noise and will not generate any heat. Even better, it consumes no electricity in quiet mode.
And even when you dont. There was a recent article about a couple who lived on curve who had a driver (think he was drunk) mistake the accelerator for the brake approaching the curve and plowed through their bedroom at about 50mph kill both of them asleep in bed pretty much instantly.
For intelligent people, military service can open a lot of doors that would otherwise be blocked to them.
We could probably design redundant pathways for higher bandwidth.
Also, there is no reason you couldn't design in a set of eyes near the brain and a second set of eyes on stalks. You could have a set of cat eyes for night time and a set of lizard eyes for the day time too.
hehe.
I can make it into a car analogy just to finish things off if you like.
B)
*and there is a bug above. I should have said
1) It is evil to kill humans actively protecting mutants
2) It is not evil to kill humans who support mutant killers but do not kill mutants.
3) It is probably not evil to kill humans who let others kill mutants but do nothing to stop it.
---
It's complicated since it is a social action- not a direct action.
And he's only really evil if you look at it from a certain angle.
Humans who implicitly support those killing mutants are "innocent" and it is evil to kill them and only those "actively" killing mutants can be defended against.
This is like the islamic charity organizations that provide support for the surviving family members of suicide bombs or the members of any group that attacks another group and who do not actively attempt to stop that attack.
So magneto killing those who permit others to kill mutants isn't really evil. Only when he kills humans who are actively protecting humans and resisting those killing mutants would he be evil.
Two variables are involved...
how strong is the selective pressure.
the time span.
If we drive cars for 10 million years and at least a few times a year someone who later reproduces survives because of any type of advantage, then that advantage will become more common.
If we drive cars for 1,000 years and have such violent accidents that 99% of drivers are killed before they can reproduce but 1% survive and reproduce-- then those traits that allowed them to survive will almost certainly predominate by the end of the time span.
If they survive and don't reproduce, then it's almost as if they didn't survive- but they *might* help their cousin reproduce more by giving them a loan and some of their genes are shared with their cousin.