I have a high school diploma from over 20 years ago. I have never had any other degrees, certifications, or any other form of expensive piece of paper that promises for me that I'm not incompetent.
So I've had to rely on you know... actually working in order to show my competency.
I make now a comparatively enormous amount of money doing a job that's also done by two collegues; both of whom have PhDs. The qualifications for the job are a graduate degree in the field or a closely related one, OR equivalent experience.
I've got the equivalent experience, evidently.
So yes, it is indeed possible to do pretty much what you want without any sort of degree at all (the usual academic exceptions apply here), but the caveat is that you have to actually do a lot of work. And that's the trick, see? The WORK part is the part that a lot of people tend to shy away from. That, and the patience part.
It works in my favor though, and in the favor of anyone willing to do their ten-thousand-hours-to-expert bit. Enough people are unwilling to put in any kind of meaningful work in order to get any sort of meaningful result that I seem to have become a commodity. So don't everyone suddenly get motivated, I'm not retiring for another 20 years at least.
The best way that I can possibly explain it is that it is a device that has been absolutely brilliantly designed for human use; you already know how exactly how to use it before you pick it up. It does precisely what you expect it to in every circumstance.
I'm sorry that it's not a netbook, though if you want one of those, you're in luck: the exist and you can go get one.
You know, the EU has a lot of nerve coming down on google for "privacy violations"; the same body who seems to have exactly no problem at all with Britain's blatant and constant violations, and they've actually been a MEMBER of the EU since 1973.
All politics, no substance, this. Moot, meaningless, next.
+5 insightful? Really? What has happened to you, Slashdot?
I've had the opportunity to play with an iPad for a couple of hours, no lie. I went into it extremely skeptical, thinking it was just a glorified e-book reader. But being the kind of person who likes to actually have a personal experience before giving my uninformed opinion on the internets, I couldnt refuse the offer.
I came out of those couple of hours wanting one, and I will have one the minute they come out. It really is an amazing machine, despite what quite a number of non-experienced nay-sayers say.
The authenticity of certs no longer matter, and I'm frankly astonished that neither mozilla nor slashdot has ever heard of ssl taps, an *enormous number* of which are currently active in Chinese public networks.
It's a man-in-the middle thing, and I run them at work. They're very easy to configure, and if you really know what you're doing, you can "legitimately" fake the identity of any cert you want, and every single byte of your traffic is sniffable to whoever runs the tap.
Funny you picked "mortgage" as your example, as nearly all US mortgages are "living documents", in that your interest rate changes and therefore what you pay for your house will never be anything close to what you think you originally bought it for.
HAN? Are you freaking kidding me? I've been in what eventually became the "IT" field for twenty five years, and if I see one more goddamn contrived acronym, I'm quitting and raising sheep. I mean it.
"Either you're a professional developer and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users, or you're a hack."
Bingo:
Firefox 3.6, Windows XP SP3, 14 tabs open, two on flash pages: 1.2GB memory used Opera 10.10, Windows XP SP3, 14 tabs open to the identical pages: 330GB memory used
I came to the conclusion some time ago that I was still using firefox because I was attached to the Netscape/Mozilla name, psychologically. Firefox really didn't do anything that a number of other browsers don't do at least as well, usually better, so I jumped ship and started using Opera. No crashes, no whacked out memory leaks carried over from MOSAIC for pete's sake, and flash works just fine.
As I still cannot get a 3G nor an Edge signal to sustain itself for more than literally 10 seconds...
Right in front of City Hall in Downtown Manhattan. They *say* they've upgraded their NYC network and added capacity, but my signal strength (as noted by decibel, not bars) has remained absolutely consistently horrible everywhere in the Financial District, Gramercy Park, all of the Village, and both the Upper East and Upper West Sides.
I've been through fifteen buyouts in my career, big and small. I know therefore that absolutely nothing that anyone involved with this purchase should be taken as truth.
They're likely, based on my experience with all manner of corporate buyout, going to replace the old Solaris silverbacks with their own people, sooner rather than later.
Are you old enough to remember the Compaq/DEC buyout? Digital Unix will continue, they said. It's DEC's best product, they said. And it did, kind of, when it got its name changed to Tru64.
Then they ignored it until it pretty much died. Oh, it's still around and will be supported until 2012, so HP says. Then the lights get shut off and that's the end of it.
When was the last time you actually saw a Tru64 machine?
To launch headlong into the most expensive, unworkable, unreasonable, ill-thought, entirely not-researched solutions. I'm not talking so much about the brain scan here; Harvard came up with the idea that PTSD could be detected in the brain, along with bi polar disorder and a few other conditions which might have detectable pathologies, and it's a very good idea.
What's a very bad idea is the notion that PTSD can be stopped, or at least mitigated with chemical or mechanical tools. Once you already have PTSD, or indeed any disorder on the dissociative scale (Howell, Chu), then there is some good evidence that pharmaceuticals can help mitigate some, but not all of the symptoms. Currently those pharmaceuticals fall into two major classes: sedative-hypnotics and atypical antipsychotics. Sedative-hypnotics, particularly benzodiazepines, cause massive problems with the creation of short term memories. Atypical antipsychotics have a host of horrible side effects, from flattened affect to tardive dyskenisia-- which is the permanent, uncontrolled flexing of small muscles, like facial tics, thumb-wiggles and circles, and shuffling gait. In short, they should not be used for any condition which is not treatable by any other means.
Also, there is no evidence (as has been noted by Harvard, at least) that there is any sort of genetic pre-disposition to the development of PTSD, or any other environmentally caused dissociative disorder. That is a dead end.
Furthermore, there is also absolutely no evidence that the pre-dosing of atypical antipsychotics or sedatives have any effect whatsoever on the development of PTSD, and in fact in both cases may very probably result in soldiers with far less willingness to shoot the enemy in the face than the military requires.
The fact is that the Pentagon is and has always created an enormous mess out of the minds that manage to survive their plans, and there's simply no way around it. It would be really great, I think, to come up with some way to make war more palatable for the people who have to be in it, but somehow the very root of the notion seems disingenuous.
I don't know who that heavy hitter was, unless you're referring to Douglas Adams (which would be weird, because he was never wrong about his facts), but whoever it was didn't have much of an idea of the nature and course of the internets, from ASCII pr0n at DARPA, through usenet pr0n, through pr0n-serving irc bots, through broken Real Media pr0n, all the way to the Ajax pr0n you're looking at in the window next to this one, you naughty boy.
Early on in the internet years, when there was no real commercial input or entity that had anything to do with it, it WAS used by researchers and academics at *zero* cost to them. (It did cost the schools and organizations a pretty penny at the time though).
THEN commercialism came in, and I remember it very well. We were all very upset because we thought the commercial entities would end up ruining the internet with advertising and porn.
And we were right, that's precisely what they did.
So we built I2, so that our research and academic traffic wouldn't have to compete with your damn pr0n traffic and double-clickvertisements. And it worked; it did in fact eliminate advertisements, but we still had to compete with student/faculty pr0n. We hardly noticed it though, when we weren't looking at it.
So social networks (unless you're counting IRC and Usenet) and commercial internet activity had absolutely nothing to do with the ability for researchers and academics to use the net at next to little cost; it was the summation of social networking and commercial traffic that *forced them off I1 and onto I2*.
What are you talking about? Ten years ago, less than 20 percent of power stations were accessible remotely via any other method than analog modem via ISDN backtrace and caller ID. Now theres a web interface to every one of them, that any idiot can bust into and shut off a city.
And I mean that.
The breakage is recent, and can be rolled back. Roll it the hell back.
As always, the biggest problem here is the one that you're showcasing strongly: the "its just too HARD" modality. Yeah, its really hard. Do it anyway. Period.
It discriminates against them because kindle-only and kindle/limited ed. volumes, which are assigned routinely by colleges and universities, generally do not come in braille.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a high school diploma from over 20 years ago. I have never had any other degrees, certifications, or any other form of expensive piece of paper that promises for me that I'm not incompetent.
So I've had to rely on you know... actually working in order to show my competency.
I make now a comparatively enormous amount of money doing a job that's also done by two collegues; both of whom have PhDs. The qualifications for the job are a graduate degree in the field or a closely related one, OR equivalent experience.
I've got the equivalent experience, evidently.
So yes, it is indeed possible to do pretty much what you want without any sort of degree at all (the usual academic exceptions apply here), but the caveat is that you have to actually do a lot of work. And that's the trick, see? The WORK part is the part that a lot of people tend to shy away from. That, and the patience part.
It works in my favor though, and in the favor of anyone willing to do their ten-thousand-hours-to-expert bit. Enough people are unwilling to put in any kind of meaningful work in order to get any sort of meaningful result that I seem to have become a commodity. So don't everyone suddenly get motivated, I'm not retiring for another 20 years at least.
Actually, thats exactly what Reddit* did some years ago, and it continues to work like a charm to this day.
find /usr/ports/* >> notmalware.txt
I'm not making an argument, im pointing out a massive hypocrisy that is clearly embedded in politics.
The best way that I can possibly explain it is that it is a device that has been absolutely brilliantly designed for human use; you already know how exactly how to use it before you pick it up. It does precisely what you expect it to in every circumstance.
I'm sorry that it's not a netbook, though if you want one of those, you're in luck: the exist and you can go get one.
You know, the EU has a lot of nerve coming down on google for "privacy violations"; the same body who seems to have exactly no problem at all with Britain's blatant and constant violations, and they've actually been a MEMBER of the EU since 1973.
All politics, no substance, this. Moot, meaningless, next.
+5 insightful? Really? What has happened to you, Slashdot?
I've had the opportunity to play with an iPad for a couple of hours, no lie. I went into it extremely skeptical, thinking it was just a glorified e-book reader. But being the kind of person who likes to actually have a personal experience before giving my uninformed opinion on the internets, I couldnt refuse the offer.
I came out of those couple of hours wanting one, and I will have one the minute they come out. It really is an amazing machine, despite what quite a number of non-experienced nay-sayers say.
The authenticity of certs no longer matter, and I'm frankly astonished that neither mozilla nor slashdot has ever heard of ssl taps, an *enormous number* of which are currently active in Chinese public networks.
It's a man-in-the middle thing, and I run them at work. They're very easy to configure, and if you really know what you're doing, you can "legitimately" fake the identity of any cert you want, and every single byte of your traffic is sniffable to whoever runs the tap.
Funny you picked "mortgage" as your example, as nearly all US mortgages are "living documents", in that your interest rate changes and therefore what you pay for your house will never be anything close to what you think you originally bought it for.
HAN? Are you freaking kidding me? I've been in what eventually became the "IT" field for twenty five years, and if I see one more goddamn contrived acronym, I'm quitting and raising sheep. I mean it.
"Either you're a professional developer and you deal with the slightly older APIs/compilers to serve your users, or you're a hack."
Bingo:
Firefox 3.6, Windows XP SP3, 14 tabs open, two on flash pages: 1.2GB memory used
Opera 10.10, Windows XP SP3, 14 tabs open to the identical pages: 330GB memory used
I came to the conclusion some time ago that I was still using firefox because I was attached to the Netscape/Mozilla name, psychologically. Firefox really didn't do anything that a number of other browsers don't do at least as well, usually better, so I jumped ship and started using Opera. No crashes, no whacked out memory leaks carried over from MOSAIC for pete's sake, and flash works just fine.
Mind if I compile my own? It's really the only way to fly.
Yes indeed. I can see it now: "Made in Tibet by the four monks we haven't gotten around to executing yet"
I know I don't agree with this. The burden rests with me personally actually, to simply continue not using Firefox.
As I still cannot get a 3G nor an Edge signal to sustain itself for more than literally 10 seconds...
Right in front of City Hall in Downtown Manhattan. They *say* they've upgraded their NYC network and added capacity, but my signal strength (as noted by decibel, not bars) has remained absolutely consistently horrible everywhere in the Financial District, Gramercy Park, all of the Village, and both the Upper East and Upper West Sides.
Lies and more goddamn lies.
Let them have it. Seriously. You don't want to be remembered forever for the creation of the most annoying feminine hygiene meme in the universe.
There are security engineering professors now? How long have I been asleep?
I've been through fifteen buyouts in my career, big and small. I know therefore that absolutely nothing that anyone involved with this purchase should be taken as truth.
They're likely, based on my experience with all manner of corporate buyout, going to replace the old Solaris silverbacks with their own people, sooner rather than later.
Are you old enough to remember the Compaq/DEC buyout? Digital Unix will continue, they said. It's DEC's best product, they said. And it did, kind of, when it got its name changed to Tru64.
Then they ignored it until it pretty much died. Oh, it's still around and will be supported until 2012, so HP says. Then the lights get shut off and that's the end of it.
When was the last time you actually saw a Tru64 machine?
Man, we had a great run. I'll never forget you, old BSD horse.
Dear Apple:
Buy ZFS from Oracle right now. Thanks in advance.
To launch headlong into the most expensive, unworkable, unreasonable, ill-thought, entirely not-researched solutions. I'm not talking so much about the brain scan here; Harvard came up with the idea that PTSD could be detected in the brain, along with bi polar disorder and a few other conditions which might have detectable pathologies, and it's a very good idea.
What's a very bad idea is the notion that PTSD can be stopped, or at least mitigated with chemical or mechanical tools. Once you already have PTSD, or indeed any disorder on the dissociative scale (Howell, Chu), then there is some good evidence that pharmaceuticals can help mitigate some, but not all of the symptoms. Currently those pharmaceuticals fall into two major classes: sedative-hypnotics and atypical antipsychotics. Sedative-hypnotics, particularly benzodiazepines, cause massive problems with the creation of short term memories. Atypical antipsychotics have a host of horrible side effects, from flattened affect to tardive dyskenisia-- which is the permanent, uncontrolled flexing of small muscles, like facial tics, thumb-wiggles and circles, and shuffling gait. In short, they should not be used for any condition which is not treatable by any other means.
Also, there is no evidence (as has been noted by Harvard, at least) that there is any sort of genetic pre-disposition to the development of PTSD, or any other environmentally caused dissociative disorder. That is a dead end.
Furthermore, there is also absolutely no evidence that the pre-dosing of atypical antipsychotics or sedatives have any effect whatsoever on the development of PTSD, and in fact in both cases may very probably result in soldiers with far less willingness to shoot the enemy in the face than the military requires.
The fact is that the Pentagon is and has always created an enormous mess out of the minds that manage to survive their plans, and there's simply no way around it. It would be really great, I think, to come up with some way to make war more palatable for the people who have to be in it, but somehow the very root of the notion seems disingenuous.
War is fucking hell.
How much does the Tokyo Rail System cost, anyhow?
I don't know who that heavy hitter was, unless you're referring to Douglas Adams (which would be weird, because he was never wrong about his facts), but whoever it was didn't have much of an idea of the nature and course of the internets, from ASCII pr0n at DARPA, through usenet pr0n, through pr0n-serving irc bots, through broken Real Media pr0n, all the way to the Ajax pr0n you're looking at in the window next to this one, you naughty boy.
Early on in the internet years, when there was no real commercial input or entity that had anything to do with it, it WAS used by researchers and academics at *zero* cost to them. (It did cost the schools and organizations a pretty penny at the time though).
THEN commercialism came in, and I remember it very well. We were all very upset because we thought the commercial entities would end up ruining the internet with advertising and porn.
And we were right, that's precisely what they did.
So we built I2, so that our research and academic traffic wouldn't have to compete with your damn pr0n traffic and double-clickvertisements. And it worked; it did in fact eliminate advertisements, but we still had to compete with student/faculty pr0n. We hardly noticed it though, when we weren't looking at it.
So social networks (unless you're counting IRC and Usenet) and commercial internet activity had absolutely nothing to do with the ability for researchers and academics to use the net at next to little cost; it was the summation of social networking and commercial traffic that *forced them off I1 and onto I2*.
</history>
What are you talking about? Ten years ago, less than 20 percent of power stations were accessible remotely via any other method than analog modem via ISDN backtrace and caller ID. Now theres a web interface to every one of them, that any idiot can bust into and shut off a city.
And I mean that.
The breakage is recent, and can be rolled back. Roll it the hell back.
As always, the biggest problem here is the one that you're showcasing strongly: the "its just too HARD" modality. Yeah, its really hard. Do it anyway. Period.
Securing the electrical grid is very, very simple. Do not allow remote access to it, *period*.
There, I just saved you 8.5 million dollars.
It discriminates against them because kindle-only and kindle/limited ed. volumes, which are assigned routinely by colleges and universities, generally do not come in braille.