Yes, I agree. People should have no preference whatsoever vis a vis the outward appearance of their auto-mobile contrivances, as it is sure to lead to dangerous driving behavior.
And if you want something native, Apple has iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
BUT
Pages is useless. No, I don't really mean that... It has a lot of nice features. I love the layout of the way it handles comments and changes for collaborative document creation. I like its styles sidebar (unlike the tiny little shitty "Inspector" in Word). It has a very nice, non-obtrusive-but-powerful UI (as one would expect, from Apple). But it just plain can't do tables for shit. This, actually, is also why I didn't use OO.o on Windows, and why I couldn't switch to Linux when I got off Windows. Nothing does tables with the power and flexibility of Word.
And Numbers? Seriously, now. It's a toy. And, worse still, it follows that evil design philosophy that says spreadsheets are a way to make pretty tables. They aren't. They're calculating and information manipulation machines. When I'm in Excel, there's no mistaking the fact that I'm working with information. I only engage the formatting tools to keep information straight. They should never be fronted.
Finally, however, what prevents iWork from being a viable alternative to MS Office is the same thing that stymies OO.o: It isn't MS Office. It just plain makes no sense to use these products in any context where someone else might need to work on them. Unless you ran a company and could set the standard, neither are a real option. I get away with using Keynote, but that's it.
Both iWork and OO.o have some really compelling features that I miss in MS Office, but ultimately, MS Office runs the world. And I, at least, am forced to live in the world.
Math doesn't get chixx. And that's all life is about (I'm not joking). I was pretty good at math, but I wanted the chixx, so into the arts I went. You have to be pretty smart to make it there, and it gets you popularity.
My big mistake wasn't doing what a lot of people do: re-tool in college. In grad school, I finally gave in to statistics, but it was rough getting back into math after so many years hiding it in my closet.
In all honesty? I don't think there's a math problem at all in the US. None at all. Or, rather, it's not worse than other countries. Other countries force students to pass more standardized tests, that's all. They lose the math as soon as they don't have to take the tests anymore (I live in Japan; believe me).
The thing the US education really had going for it was the degree of autonomy it offered. It seemed to be designed to foster development of the individual and interest in subjects that they can really get into in college... Now when I talk to friends of mine who are teaching in the states, they describe a death march to the tests. Living in Japan, I know that this does not produce well-rounded people, and it doesn't even produce very smart ones.
People will learn whatever they need to learn when they need to learn it, unless they just really like it. Very few people like math, and this has a lot to do with the fact that chixx don't dig it. But hey, here I am, getting paid to do stats for other researchers, after basically quitting formal math education when I was 17. I needed stats for my research, so I sat down with some books and taught myself. There was no reason before that.
So, to conclude, math is never going to be popular, but the US, as a society, really isn't that bad at it. Just look at the subprime meltdown. That could only have been pulled off by people so good at math that they could use it to tell whatever crazy story they wanted!
No offense, but I think you may just suck at it. I've not done battery replacements, but I've done 3 hard drive replacements and it's no problem at all. The secret tool I've found to be the best is a guitar pick. Actually, two. They don't scratch or break any of the plastic.
Okay, once more with feeling: "It is not illegal now, and never has been illegal, for customs agents of any country to search anything they Damn Well Please for any reason they Damn Well Please."
And nice try with that "and many other time periods." You still just Godwinned it.*;-)
* Which is not to say it isn't appropriate in this context, because it totally is.
?I fly in and out of the US a couple times a year. Never once have they looked at my laptop, and never once have I seen them look at anyone's laptop. Hundreds of people streaming through customs, and not one, ever, being asked to show them their laptop.
Of course, we know they DO, sometimes, look at laptops, but I think they have to have a reason to be suspicious. If you come through sweating bullets from Cambodia, yeah, they might decide they want a peek at your "My Pictures" folder.
I'm not defending the policy; I think it's bullshit. But I'm also saying it almost never happens, so people might want to do a cost-benefit analysis before doing something like encrypting the whole hard drive with Truecrypt.
4. Will the entire economy go belly-up because some whiny voters who don't understand that this is a financially extinction-level event decide to get all moralistic instead of being pragmatic and fixing it, while making sure it can't happen again, like the liquidity trap of the Great Depression and the S&L fracas can't happen again?
Huh? Why would the JET Programme make me any more of an English teacher than my round eyes already do?;-p
Yeah, I basically decided if I was going to be forced into this industry, I'd do it right and get paid. I usually think it was a good move. I enjoy my job and I'm a part of a major governmental research project on speaking assessment. Pay is decent, time off is great, and I like living in Japan. It's not what I planned on, but it's not too shabby.
The fundamental problem is not your background or your lack of abilities; it's the fact that you aren't easily pigeonholed into a certain category.
Hiring is hard work. HR people are confronted with myriad options, and they have no idea who is going to be good or not. So they start making up purity laws, like Kosher, for applicants. They are based on virtually nothing, and lead to injustice and perplexing stupidity, but if they follow them they get pretty good people, and so they're scared of ever looking beyond those magical rules, because as far as they know, those are the only things keeping them from accidentally hiring someone who poops in the coffee maker and wipes the Exchange server. So they cling ever tighter to their arbitrary little fucking rules, and people like you suffer.
See, the fundamental problem is that the fundamental problem isn't you. It's them. It's HR people. It's people whose entire fucking job is to sort pieces of paper into "interview" and "trash." Then they'll call the people in the "interview" pile in and ask them stupid questions that have little to do with the job, and which require skillful lying to answer "correctly." They will then use their keen secretarial insight into those people and into whatever the company does--isn't it something about megabits or something?--to recommend a small subset of those people to actually talk to someone who does the job at hand.
That person doesn't have any idea how to hire people either, so he applies his own magical tonics and incantations.
In the end, they get someone who does a Pretty Good Job, and who doesn't poop in the coffee maker.
But of course they get someone who's pretty good. Just about anyone with the minimal requirements of the job will do as well as anyone else. You won't even know how good or bad someone is until a year or so into their employment. They could basically hire anyone with a basic background in whatever and have the same success rate.
But, then again, I'm pretty bitter. I went through the same kind of thing, but my stigmatizing factor was 2 years teaching English in Japan. I wasn't interested in teaching very much, but I wanted the immersion experience so I could improve my Japanese. But after that, I found that it was a resume-killer. Every single interview started like this: "So why did you go to Japan for 2 years?" "Well, as you can see, my minor was Japanese, and I really wanted to spend some time improving it." "Okay... Well then, could you explain to me why, with an education background, you think you would be able to do this menial entry level data entry position that you've sunk to applying for?" "Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that for five years before I went to Japan I was in IT, with increasing responsibility. Also, it might have something to do with the bachelor's degree I have with honors. It might also have something to do with the fact that I'm not a complete moron." "Well... We'll let you know. We don't really need any Japanese teachers."
(Cue a chorus of people screaming, "Well if that's the way you talk to interviewers, no wonder!" --I'm fantasizing here, folks!)
Ultimately, I just went back to school and became an English teacher, out of desperation. Since no one could look past that, I decided I'd let them pigeon hole me, so I could eat. I now teach English at a university in Japan. Pay is good; time off is great. Not as stable as I'd like, but at least I don't have to explain my resume anymore.
Finally, I'm assuming you're American? I have not observed this stigma at all in my British friends' lives. I've watched them change entire industries with ease, just by being smart. But it's a small sample, so I might be wrong about that.
A lot of people here are going to tell you it's your fault, that you're not doing something right. But that's because they have jobs already and think they deserved them. They didn't. Or, rather, didn't deserve them any more than the vast majority of applicants. The selection process is nigh random, and I think you're right that your tech support experience is not letting you past a filter...
I have no advice; only commiserations. Good luck to you.
Say you want to carry them because you want to be able to kill people who annoy or frighten you. Don't claim they are no more dangerous than "pointy sticks".
--Except that:
1) He didn't claim anything.
2) He didn't even imply that they were equal. He pointed out a "slippery slope" problem, moving from the most obviously dangerous, to the ludicrously least dangerous--his point being that if we try to eliminate dangerous items from society, it gets pretty silly pretty quickly.
Please make sure you understand the rhetorical structure of the post you're replying to before you jump down someone's throat.
What forms are you talking about? Teacher evals? I have 10 years total in uni as a student, and 4 as a lecturer, and I've never felt "encouraged" or even considered "encouraging." I don't know anyone who has. When we ask you to rate our teaching, it is a university requirement, to be sure, but also, we really want to know.
Thanks, and not at all sarcastically, I think you've just reinforced what I said. I didn't think I needed to do anything else other than ace my classes, which I did. I didn't mean to end up in academia (although I have to admit it has really grown on me, even though it's the only place where you have to spend more money to get a raise, while being an employee).
What did I do aside from classes? I had a band I was very, very serious about. Turned out my bandmates weren't so serious and abandoned me as soon as I felt we were on the cusp of some really good opportunities. Whether we were or not, I can't say, even now. But yeah, that's what I sunk all of my non-study time into. If I had it all to do again... Dumb as it sounds... I still wouldn't have done internships; I would have gotten a different band. It still wouldn't work out, but I'm afraid it's the way I am wired. I never do it the right way; I always do it the hard way. And given the chance I'd do it the same way again.
That doesn't mean I can't give some good advice to my students now. If they think they can beat the odds, that's their curse--or blessing.
these are increasingly just becoming a way of life, much like television and books, to an increasing amount of the population. Is watching 2 hours of TV after work escapism? Is reading a novel? What about a nice solitary hike (not as exercise, but just to blow the stink off)?
Thank you. I am an English teacher (language, not lit.), but even I am sick of people putting these things on a hierarchy of "best" to "worst" (and always putting gaming at the bottom!).
Reading is escapist. What it has going for it, though, is that it's cheap. A book can give you quite a few hours of entertainment for as little as free, if there's a good library nearby.
Television is escapist. What it has going for it is that it is popular and gives you something to talk about with other people the next day. I don't particularly like sports, but I always watch big games like the World Cup or the Super Bowl, just so that I can join in conversations the next day at work. Those are always a lot more fun than the watching, IMO.
Gaming is escapist or highly social. I'll admit, however, that I prefer to play alone. To me, it's the same as reading a book. But EverCrack players do it for the socialization. I love to play online games (BF2 with the Project Reality mod) with people on the PC or the Xbox (Chrome Hounds), especially since everything has VOIP now. That's a social experience.
Of all the hobbies I've discussed here, only reading is an almost purely solitary act. Finding someone else who is reading or has read what you're reading is a lot harder than someone who saw the game last night, or finding someone on a game server. No one is going to argue about the intricacy of stories told in these media (John Carmack was wrong when he observed that no one asks for basketball to have a story--it's the story that people love about sports)--books win. But the "loner" stigma of video gamers is wholly undeserved--they are the most social of the bunch!
This is not good advice. This is the advice I was given (well, not the "leftover money" bit--who has leftover money in college?), and compared to my friends who didn't take it and went to expensive schools, things have been a lot harder for me.
I teach university now, and let me tell you, after many years of being in college and several years on a faculty, how college works:
The point is not the classes per se. It is very true that, education-wise, just about any decent school is going to be the same there. Learning (and I say this as a teacher) is a lot more about what you do than it is about what the teacher does. About all I can do as a teacher is hone, year after year, my tricks for explaining things. But these tricks come up like once or twice a semester. I can also do my best to choose materials that are going to give you the opportunity to learn. That's the trick of course design (and to be honest, I'm not very good at it--I let the people who are design my syllabi and just make tweaks for personal preference--mine or the students). If the point of college was to learn, the mystique of places like Harvard or Oxford or whatever would have gone away long ago.
No, here's the real point of university: networking. And brand recognition.
I had a friend who went to Harvard. His classes did not seem any different or better than mine at a cheap state university (Go Rams!). However, that guy walked out of Harvard into a job at MSNBC. I walked out and... Couldn't find a job for a few months... Then got a short-term job... Then crashed... Then had to go to grad school so I could get a job... Then got a short-term uni job... And now I'm getting another.
Could I have done his job? Yeah, of course. But what got him there was the name value of Harvard and the contacts the school has. That, my friends, is worth the money.
See, I believe that the "if you go to college, you'll get a better job" thing is a total anachronism. Back in the old days, only the super-wealthy or super-smart could go. So if you were a middle-class or poor kid who proved himself and got in with all these rich contacts, of course you got a good job. You were Dickie Jr.'s roommate from college. Dickie spent the rest of his life sportfishing and snorting cocaine off of debutantes, but you got a well-paying and interesting lifelong job.
This isn't the case when everyone goes, or if you go to a cheaper/smaller/less-famous place. You don't meet Dickie Jr.; you meet Dirk, the kid from Grand Island, NE, who likes Purple Passion and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You don't have a contact with the owner of National Widget; you have a contact with the owner of Dirk Sr.'s feedlot.
I got a great education, no doubt about that. But the contacts have been very hard to build from scratch. People can cry "cronyism," but let's be honest: if you were looking for a person with X skillset, and your son was close with someone who had that skillset, would you take a chance on a stranger or take the guy or girl you know? Most people want a safe bet more than anything, so they go with the safe choice: a known value.
Now, I'm not even saying it has to be one of these A-list schools, necessarily, but you need to make sure that the department you are getting into is well-respected. My big, cheap state university is well-respected and well-connected in a number of fields. But I wasn't in them.
This is what high schoolers should be told. Go for the most famous school you can get into, even if you have to go into major debt. You will probably go into debt regardless, at least if you go somewhere expensive you'll have a job to pay that debt off.
If you're reading this and you're in a relatively unknown school: You can still build a network, but you're going to have to do it by hand. Get out there and start doing those damn internships, unpaid or not. I didn't understand why I should go to work for no money, especially when my grades were so good
Seriously folks, why in god's name would a company help you take away business from them? Why?
As a society, we value a free market and competition. But those are anathema to businesses. They don't want competition, because they're not in a friendly little game of "who can make the coolest stuff;" they are in the game of "who continues to have food on the table." Individually, there is probably not a single person at Apple who doesn't understand the importance of competition to innovation. But at the business level, it's not about innovation; it's about making money.
The only reason we are lucky enough to have a modicum of competition, ladies and gentlemen, is that our governments require it. We break up monopolies and we put regulations on companies so they don't end up enslaving people like they did before the New Deal. It is not those companies' responsibility to make sure that someone can undercut their profits; it's their responsibility to make as much money as they possibly can for their shareholders and employees. It is government's job to step in every once in awhile to set some ground rules if it would be in everyone's best interest to do so.
If you want to force every company to actually expend time and energy making sure they create ways for other companies to compete with them, then you're going to have to get some legislation written up and passed to do that, because no company on earth wants to spend their money on making sure other people make money. But we all know such a bill would never even be written, let alone passed. Because it is patently insane.
Apple's product is its smooth user experience. It creates this by severely limiting options. You want to do X, Y or Z? Well, according to Apple's market research, you're in a tiny minority and your demographic isn't worth enough to justify opening this, that, or the other, which may end up allowing other companies to gobble some of their profits. That's business. If they find that enough people are finding restrictions frustrating, and the experience is therefore not smooth, and this seems to be losing them sales, then the economics of the situation will change, and so will Apple's policy. As it is now, their number-crunchers have (rightly, I suspect) determined that the danger to the bottom line of opening the platform is greater than the potential benefit of all 4,000 people in the world who wouldn't buy the product otherwise going down to the Apple Store and picking one up.
This isn't a free-market calamity, folks. Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones, just on the iPhone. I think if you'll be honest with yourself, the real problem is that you want one, but the closed platform bugs you, and that makes you blather on about freedom and standards instead of just shrugging your shoulders and buying something else.
In short, suck it up. Apple is a company and they can do whatever the hell they want. They want their phone to be linked to the whole iTunes/iTMS service package so they can deliver a complete experience at the cost of choice? Fine; it's their product. They don't want to sell competing products through their service? Of course they don't; that's their prerogative. You don't like it? Then don't buy one, or buy one and jailbreak it. But don't whine and complain. It's a luxury product, for chrissakes.
Apple isn't being the "bad guy" here; they're just doing their jobs.
Huh? When I was delivering pizzas I got money for gas/maintenance from Domino's, plus minimum wage, plus tips. A dollar a pizza (this was in 1994) was awesome.
I didn't get pissed if I didn't get tipped, but most people tipped, and that meant that the job paid well enough to justify the long nights.
You should tip the driver, because driving food around all night and still managing a smile at the door (well, I always smiled) is actually pretty tiring and stressful, as is finding hard addresses. But if you don't, it's not like he's losing money on the proposition.
Yes, you could type in hiragana/katakana, but I know exactly no one who does. I don't know why. I thought I was being a lazy gaijin by typing in Roman characters, but then I found out that only a few serious secretaries or whatnot actually use the kana keyboard, which is unfortunate, I think, because it about doubles the number of keystrokes required, but whatever. I don't have to learn a new keyboard to type in Japanese.
So let's type "Nihongo" in a Japanese word processor, on a computer:
1) Type "n" -- "n" shows up on the screen
2) Type "i" -- The "n" disappears and is changed to the hiragana character for the sound/ni/. This is the sound, not the kanji.
3) Type "h" -- "h" shows up.
4) Type "o" -- changes to the character for/ho/
5) Type "n" -- "n" shows up
6) Type "g" -- The previous "n" changes to the character for/n/, and "g" shows up
7) Type "o" -- The "g" disappears and turns into the character for/go/.
Now, all of this is underlined. That means it's not really set yet. So we hit space bar.
The characters for the sounds/ni-ho-n-go/ change to the kanji for the word that means Japanese language, as that is the most likely candidate for that string of sounds. If there were some other word with the same reading (I can't think of any) that I used frequently, that would be the computer's first guess.
If we need a different kanji, we hit the space bar again. If it's still not right, we hit it again and a little menu comes up that we can select from.
This is how it has worked for at least 10 years; before that, I don't know.
You actually don't have to convert to kanji after every word. If you just keep typing, it'll start converting behind you, to the most likely kanji. I find this dangerous, however, because you don't pay as much attention and you end up with gibberish sometimes. I tend to do a whole phrase at a time before hitting spacebar.
For cellphones, Japanese is already a lot easier to input than English. --So much so that my gaijin friends and I usually text in Japanese. Because the syllabary is organized by leading consonant and then following vowel (i.e. "ka" "ki" "ku" "ke" "ko"), you just tap that key until you get the sound you want (the "2" key for the/k/ sounds) and it starts predicting right away. Not just words, but entire phrases.
If, for example, I tap "1" twice for/i/, it comes up with the sentence "Ima doko," which means "where are you now?" --A very common thing to text to someone you're meeting.
I don't know how it works for Chinese, but I suspect it is similar. I am very suspicious about the claims of the summary that Asians, presumably with their wacky writing systems, need many keys for their impenetrable Oriental scribblings. But all I really know well is Japanese, and we do fine over here with QWERTY, and even handle the number pad as an input device better than alphabetic languages.
It's funny; one of the reasons I switched to the Mac was that I looked at Vista and thought, "well if I'm going to be running OSX, I might as well run the real thing."
What Microsoft needs to realise is not that Apple is gaining on it because it "just works", it is gaining because it works at all, unlike many aspects of Vista.
Whoah. This doesn't happen often, especially not on Slashdot, but you just led me to a personal epiphany and a whole new way of looking at things.
I bought a MacBook a year ago, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I needed a new laptop that ran MS Office, and I didn't want to get one with Vista on it. I figured that if I didn't like OSX, I'd just set my Boot Camp partition to be the default startup and run XP on it.
I found that I basically never booted into XP. I found OSX and the suite of apps you get with a Mac to be a breeze to use. I started saying things like "It (really) Just Works."
Now that I've been on it awhile, the honeymoon is over, but I'm still happy to be using it as my primary OS. I had tried to argue that it was because things just worked, but actually, yes, what I should have been saying and being more honest with myself about is that the issue isn't about it working well, it's about it working at all.
I still keep an XP gaming partition going on this Mac Pro, but every time I boot it up, I find some irritating little problem that needs fixing. It forgot my default sound device again. Java is bugging me about an update. XP is complaining that my AVG isn't updated (it's doing it now; shut up!). And then when I start up a game, it crashes. Fiddle fiddle fiddle while talking to my buddy on Skype, who is fiddling with other stuff because he's having in-game VOIP woes, despite the fact that it worked last night...
When you use something every day, you get used to this. But when you get onto a platform that doesn't need babysitting, it starts to really stand out. It isn't that OSX and the Mac and Apple are GREAT; it's that Windows is AWFUL. It's not that iMovie is GREAT; it's that MovieMaker is AWFUL.
This computer and OSX drive me crazy sometimes too, of course, but it's not a constant barrage of things requiring my attention or requiring me to make workarounds for or requiring me to look for other solutions for. Apple is gaining ground not by doing a fantastic job, but by being minimally competent at their job while the competition does... What is MS even doing over there? It's shameful!
A case in point is the revised Zune
The Xbox360 is another example, in my opinion anyway, of where MS is doing a fine job. Same department, right? Maybe the gaming/music wing of MS can take over the rest and start delivering compelling products that work right. Apple is starting to get a little controlling and ugly, but that's what happens when you get too comfortable in your market. We'd all benefit from MS doing a better job on Windows, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I agree. People should have no preference whatsoever vis a vis the outward appearance of their auto-mobile contrivances, as it is sure to lead to dangerous driving behavior.
And if you want something native, Apple has iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
BUT
Pages is useless. No, I don't really mean that... It has a lot of nice features. I love the layout of the way it handles comments and changes for collaborative document creation. I like its styles sidebar (unlike the tiny little shitty "Inspector" in Word). It has a very nice, non-obtrusive-but-powerful UI (as one would expect, from Apple). But it just plain can't do tables for shit. This, actually, is also why I didn't use OO.o on Windows, and why I couldn't switch to Linux when I got off Windows. Nothing does tables with the power and flexibility of Word.
And Numbers? Seriously, now. It's a toy. And, worse still, it follows that evil design philosophy that says spreadsheets are a way to make pretty tables. They aren't. They're calculating and information manipulation machines. When I'm in Excel, there's no mistaking the fact that I'm working with information. I only engage the formatting tools to keep information straight. They should never be fronted.
Finally, however, what prevents iWork from being a viable alternative to MS Office is the same thing that stymies OO.o: It isn't MS Office. It just plain makes no sense to use these products in any context where someone else might need to work on them. Unless you ran a company and could set the standard, neither are a real option. I get away with using Keynote, but that's it.
Both iWork and OO.o have some really compelling features that I miss in MS Office, but ultimately, MS Office runs the world. And I, at least, am forced to live in the world.
YMMV.
Finally someone gets it.
Math doesn't get chixx. And that's all life is about (I'm not joking). I was pretty good at math, but I wanted the chixx, so into the arts I went. You have to be pretty smart to make it there, and it gets you popularity.
My big mistake wasn't doing what a lot of people do: re-tool in college. In grad school, I finally gave in to statistics, but it was rough getting back into math after so many years hiding it in my closet.
In all honesty? I don't think there's a math problem at all in the US. None at all. Or, rather, it's not worse than other countries. Other countries force students to pass more standardized tests, that's all. They lose the math as soon as they don't have to take the tests anymore (I live in Japan; believe me).
The thing the US education really had going for it was the degree of autonomy it offered. It seemed to be designed to foster development of the individual and interest in subjects that they can really get into in college... Now when I talk to friends of mine who are teaching in the states, they describe a death march to the tests. Living in Japan, I know that this does not produce well-rounded people, and it doesn't even produce very smart ones.
People will learn whatever they need to learn when they need to learn it, unless they just really like it. Very few people like math, and this has a lot to do with the fact that chixx don't dig it. But hey, here I am, getting paid to do stats for other researchers, after basically quitting formal math education when I was 17. I needed stats for my research, so I sat down with some books and taught myself. There was no reason before that.
So, to conclude, math is never going to be popular, but the US, as a society, really isn't that bad at it. Just look at the subprime meltdown. That could only have been pulled off by people so good at math that they could use it to tell whatever crazy story they wanted!
No offense, but I think you may just suck at it. I've not done battery replacements, but I've done 3 hard drive replacements and it's no problem at all. The secret tool I've found to be the best is a guitar pick. Actually, two. They don't scratch or break any of the plastic.
Okay, once more with feeling: "It is not illegal now, and never has been illegal, for customs agents of any country to search anything they Damn Well Please for any reason they Damn Well Please."
And nice try with that "and many other time periods." You still just Godwinned it.* ;-)
* Which is not to say it isn't appropriate in this context, because it totally is.
?I fly in and out of the US a couple times a year. Never once have they looked at my laptop, and never once have I seen them look at anyone's laptop. Hundreds of people streaming through customs, and not one, ever, being asked to show them their laptop.
Of course, we know they DO, sometimes, look at laptops, but I think they have to have a reason to be suspicious. If you come through sweating bullets from Cambodia, yeah, they might decide they want a peek at your "My Pictures" folder.
I'm not defending the policy; I think it's bullshit. But I'm also saying it almost never happens, so people might want to do a cost-benefit analysis before doing something like encrypting the whole hard drive with Truecrypt.
4. Will the entire economy go belly-up because some whiny voters who don't understand that this is a financially extinction-level event decide to get all moralistic instead of being pragmatic and fixing it, while making sure it can't happen again, like the liquidity trap of the Great Depression and the S&L fracas can't happen again?
Answer: Yes.
Huh? Why would the JET Programme make me any more of an English teacher than my round eyes already do? ;-p
Yeah, I basically decided if I was going to be forced into this industry, I'd do it right and get paid. I usually think it was a good move. I enjoy my job and I'm a part of a major governmental research project on speaking assessment. Pay is decent, time off is great, and I like living in Japan. It's not what I planned on, but it's not too shabby.
The fundamental problem is not your background or your lack of abilities; it's the fact that you aren't easily pigeonholed into a certain category.
Hiring is hard work. HR people are confronted with myriad options, and they have no idea who is going to be good or not. So they start making up purity laws, like Kosher, for applicants. They are based on virtually nothing, and lead to injustice and perplexing stupidity, but if they follow them they get pretty good people, and so they're scared of ever looking beyond those magical rules, because as far as they know, those are the only things keeping them from accidentally hiring someone who poops in the coffee maker and wipes the Exchange server. So they cling ever tighter to their arbitrary little fucking rules, and people like you suffer.
See, the fundamental problem is that the fundamental problem isn't you. It's them. It's HR people. It's people whose entire fucking job is to sort pieces of paper into "interview" and "trash." Then they'll call the people in the "interview" pile in and ask them stupid questions that have little to do with the job, and which require skillful lying to answer "correctly." They will then use their keen secretarial insight into those people and into whatever the company does--isn't it something about megabits or something?--to recommend a small subset of those people to actually talk to someone who does the job at hand.
That person doesn't have any idea how to hire people either, so he applies his own magical tonics and incantations.
In the end, they get someone who does a Pretty Good Job, and who doesn't poop in the coffee maker.
But of course they get someone who's pretty good. Just about anyone with the minimal requirements of the job will do as well as anyone else. You won't even know how good or bad someone is until a year or so into their employment. They could basically hire anyone with a basic background in whatever and have the same success rate.
But, then again, I'm pretty bitter. I went through the same kind of thing, but my stigmatizing factor was 2 years teaching English in Japan. I wasn't interested in teaching very much, but I wanted the immersion experience so I could improve my Japanese. But after that, I found that it was a resume-killer. Every single interview started like this: "So why did you go to Japan for 2 years?" "Well, as you can see, my minor was Japanese, and I really wanted to spend some time improving it." "Okay... Well then, could you explain to me why, with an education background, you think you would be able to do this menial entry level data entry position that you've sunk to applying for?" "Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that for five years before I went to Japan I was in IT, with increasing responsibility. Also, it might have something to do with the bachelor's degree I have with honors. It might also have something to do with the fact that I'm not a complete moron." "Well... We'll let you know. We don't really need any Japanese teachers."
(Cue a chorus of people screaming, "Well if that's the way you talk to interviewers, no wonder!" --I'm fantasizing here, folks!)
Ultimately, I just went back to school and became an English teacher, out of desperation. Since no one could look past that, I decided I'd let them pigeon hole me, so I could eat. I now teach English at a university in Japan. Pay is good; time off is great. Not as stable as I'd like, but at least I don't have to explain my resume anymore.
Finally, I'm assuming you're American? I have not observed this stigma at all in my British friends' lives. I've watched them change entire industries with ease, just by being smart. But it's a small sample, so I might be wrong about that.
A lot of people here are going to tell you it's your fault, that you're not doing something right. But that's because they have jobs already and think they deserved them. They didn't. Or, rather, didn't deserve them any more than the vast majority of applicants. The selection process is nigh random, and I think you're right that your tech support experience is not letting you past a filter...
I have no advice; only commiserations. Good luck to you.
The Dark Ages called; they want their economic model back.
Say you want to carry them because you want to be able to kill people who annoy or frighten you. Don't claim they are no more dangerous than "pointy sticks".
--Except that:
1) He didn't claim anything.
2) He didn't even imply that they were equal. He pointed out a "slippery slope" problem, moving from the most obviously dangerous, to the ludicrously least dangerous--his point being that if we try to eliminate dangerous items from society, it gets pretty silly pretty quickly.
Please make sure you understand the rhetorical structure of the post you're replying to before you jump down someone's throat.
What forms are you talking about? Teacher evals? I have 10 years total in uni as a student, and 4 as a lecturer, and I've never felt "encouraged" or even considered "encouraging." I don't know anyone who has. When we ask you to rate our teaching, it is a university requirement, to be sure, but also, we really want to know.
It's simple. You were never meant to have a voice.
Not YOU, in particular, but US.
I wish a great many Americans could not vote, actually, because they pick evil morons.
Ladies and gentlemen, please RTFA:
Frayne in recent years has laid claim to 40 online addresses that combine a city name and year, including Tokyo2016.com.
This guy is a squatter, plain and simple, and deserves to be slapped down.
Thanks, and not at all sarcastically, I think you've just reinforced what I said. I didn't think I needed to do anything else other than ace my classes, which I did. I didn't mean to end up in academia (although I have to admit it has really grown on me, even though it's the only place where you have to spend more money to get a raise, while being an employee).
What did I do aside from classes? I had a band I was very, very serious about. Turned out my bandmates weren't so serious and abandoned me as soon as I felt we were on the cusp of some really good opportunities. Whether we were or not, I can't say, even now. But yeah, that's what I sunk all of my non-study time into. If I had it all to do again... Dumb as it sounds... I still wouldn't have done internships; I would have gotten a different band. It still wouldn't work out, but I'm afraid it's the way I am wired. I never do it the right way; I always do it the hard way. And given the chance I'd do it the same way again.
That doesn't mean I can't give some good advice to my students now. If they think they can beat the odds, that's their curse--or blessing.
these are increasingly just becoming a way of life, much like television and books, to an increasing amount of the population. Is watching 2 hours of TV after work escapism? Is reading a novel? What about a nice solitary hike (not as exercise, but just to blow the stink off)?
Thank you. I am an English teacher (language, not lit.), but even I am sick of people putting these things on a hierarchy of "best" to "worst" (and always putting gaming at the bottom!).
Reading is escapist. What it has going for it, though, is that it's cheap. A book can give you quite a few hours of entertainment for as little as free, if there's a good library nearby.
Television is escapist. What it has going for it is that it is popular and gives you something to talk about with other people the next day. I don't particularly like sports, but I always watch big games like the World Cup or the Super Bowl, just so that I can join in conversations the next day at work. Those are always a lot more fun than the watching, IMO.
Gaming is escapist or highly social. I'll admit, however, that I prefer to play alone. To me, it's the same as reading a book. But EverCrack players do it for the socialization. I love to play online games (BF2 with the Project Reality mod) with people on the PC or the Xbox (Chrome Hounds), especially since everything has VOIP now. That's a social experience.
Of all the hobbies I've discussed here, only reading is an almost purely solitary act. Finding someone else who is reading or has read what you're reading is a lot harder than someone who saw the game last night, or finding someone on a game server. No one is going to argue about the intricacy of stories told in these media (John Carmack was wrong when he observed that no one asks for basketball to have a story--it's the story that people love about sports)--books win. But the "loner" stigma of video gamers is wholly undeserved--they are the most social of the bunch!
This is not good advice. This is the advice I was given (well, not the "leftover money" bit--who has leftover money in college?), and compared to my friends who didn't take it and went to expensive schools, things have been a lot harder for me.
I teach university now, and let me tell you, after many years of being in college and several years on a faculty, how college works:
The point is not the classes per se. It is very true that, education-wise, just about any decent school is going to be the same there. Learning (and I say this as a teacher) is a lot more about what you do than it is about what the teacher does. About all I can do as a teacher is hone, year after year, my tricks for explaining things. But these tricks come up like once or twice a semester. I can also do my best to choose materials that are going to give you the opportunity to learn. That's the trick of course design (and to be honest, I'm not very good at it--I let the people who are design my syllabi and just make tweaks for personal preference--mine or the students). If the point of college was to learn, the mystique of places like Harvard or Oxford or whatever would have gone away long ago.
No, here's the real point of university: networking. And brand recognition.
I had a friend who went to Harvard. His classes did not seem any different or better than mine at a cheap state university (Go Rams!). However, that guy walked out of Harvard into a job at MSNBC. I walked out and... Couldn't find a job for a few months... Then got a short-term job... Then crashed... Then had to go to grad school so I could get a job... Then got a short-term uni job... And now I'm getting another.
Could I have done his job? Yeah, of course. But what got him there was the name value of Harvard and the contacts the school has. That, my friends, is worth the money.
See, I believe that the "if you go to college, you'll get a better job" thing is a total anachronism. Back in the old days, only the super-wealthy or super-smart could go. So if you were a middle-class or poor kid who proved himself and got in with all these rich contacts, of course you got a good job. You were Dickie Jr.'s roommate from college. Dickie spent the rest of his life sportfishing and snorting cocaine off of debutantes, but you got a well-paying and interesting lifelong job.
This isn't the case when everyone goes, or if you go to a cheaper/smaller/less-famous place. You don't meet Dickie Jr.; you meet Dirk, the kid from Grand Island, NE, who likes Purple Passion and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You don't have a contact with the owner of National Widget; you have a contact with the owner of Dirk Sr.'s feedlot.
I got a great education, no doubt about that. But the contacts have been very hard to build from scratch. People can cry "cronyism," but let's be honest: if you were looking for a person with X skillset, and your son was close with someone who had that skillset, would you take a chance on a stranger or take the guy or girl you know? Most people want a safe bet more than anything, so they go with the safe choice: a known value.
Now, I'm not even saying it has to be one of these A-list schools, necessarily, but you need to make sure that the department you are getting into is well-respected. My big, cheap state university is well-respected and well-connected in a number of fields. But I wasn't in them.
This is what high schoolers should be told. Go for the most famous school you can get into, even if you have to go into major debt. You will probably go into debt regardless, at least if you go somewhere expensive you'll have a job to pay that debt off.
If you're reading this and you're in a relatively unknown school: You can still build a network, but you're going to have to do it by hand. Get out there and start doing those damn internships, unpaid or not. I didn't understand why I should go to work for no money, especially when my grades were so good
The answer of course is B.
[citation needed]
Agreed. Then I won't have to keep explaining to tiresome dolts like you why I prefer a computer that works right.
Seriously folks, why in god's name would a company help you take away business from them? Why?
As a society, we value a free market and competition. But those are anathema to businesses. They don't want competition, because they're not in a friendly little game of "who can make the coolest stuff;" they are in the game of "who continues to have food on the table." Individually, there is probably not a single person at Apple who doesn't understand the importance of competition to innovation. But at the business level, it's not about innovation; it's about making money.
The only reason we are lucky enough to have a modicum of competition, ladies and gentlemen, is that our governments require it. We break up monopolies and we put regulations on companies so they don't end up enslaving people like they did before the New Deal. It is not those companies' responsibility to make sure that someone can undercut their profits; it's their responsibility to make as much money as they possibly can for their shareholders and employees. It is government's job to step in every once in awhile to set some ground rules if it would be in everyone's best interest to do so.
If you want to force every company to actually expend time and energy making sure they create ways for other companies to compete with them, then you're going to have to get some legislation written up and passed to do that, because no company on earth wants to spend their money on making sure other people make money. But we all know such a bill would never even be written, let alone passed. Because it is patently insane.
Apple's product is its smooth user experience. It creates this by severely limiting options. You want to do X, Y or Z? Well, according to Apple's market research, you're in a tiny minority and your demographic isn't worth enough to justify opening this, that, or the other, which may end up allowing other companies to gobble some of their profits. That's business. If they find that enough people are finding restrictions frustrating, and the experience is therefore not smooth, and this seems to be losing them sales, then the economics of the situation will change, and so will Apple's policy. As it is now, their number-crunchers have (rightly, I suspect) determined that the danger to the bottom line of opening the platform is greater than the potential benefit of all 4,000 people in the world who wouldn't buy the product otherwise going down to the Apple Store and picking one up.
This isn't a free-market calamity, folks. Apple does not have a monopoly on smart phones, just on the iPhone. I think if you'll be honest with yourself, the real problem is that you want one, but the closed platform bugs you, and that makes you blather on about freedom and standards instead of just shrugging your shoulders and buying something else.
In short, suck it up. Apple is a company and they can do whatever the hell they want. They want their phone to be linked to the whole iTunes/iTMS service package so they can deliver a complete experience at the cost of choice? Fine; it's their product. They don't want to sell competing products through their service? Of course they don't; that's their prerogative. You don't like it? Then don't buy one, or buy one and jailbreak it. But don't whine and complain. It's a luxury product, for chrissakes.
Apple isn't being the "bad guy" here; they're just doing their jobs.
Huh? When I was delivering pizzas I got money for gas/maintenance from Domino's, plus minimum wage, plus tips. A dollar a pizza (this was in 1994) was awesome.
I didn't get pissed if I didn't get tipped, but most people tipped, and that meant that the job paid well enough to justify the long nights.
You should tip the driver, because driving food around all night and still managing a smile at the door (well, I always smiled) is actually pretty tiring and stressful, as is finding hard addresses. But if you don't, it's not like he's losing money on the proposition.
Okay, here's how hit works:
Yes, you could type in hiragana/katakana, but I know exactly no one who does. I don't know why. I thought I was being a lazy gaijin by typing in Roman characters, but then I found out that only a few serious secretaries or whatnot actually use the kana keyboard, which is unfortunate, I think, because it about doubles the number of keystrokes required, but whatever. I don't have to learn a new keyboard to type in Japanese.
So let's type "Nihongo" in a Japanese word processor, on a computer:
1) Type "n" -- "n" shows up on the screen /ni/. This is the sound, not the kanji.
/ho/
/n/, and "g" shows up
/go/.
2) Type "i" -- The "n" disappears and is changed to the hiragana character for the sound
3) Type "h" -- "h" shows up.
4) Type "o" -- changes to the character for
5) Type "n" -- "n" shows up
6) Type "g" -- The previous "n" changes to the character for
7) Type "o" -- The "g" disappears and turns into the character for
Now, all of this is underlined. That means it's not really set yet. So we hit space bar.
The characters for the sounds /ni-ho-n-go/ change to the kanji for the word that means Japanese language, as that is the most likely candidate for that string of sounds. If there were some other word with the same reading (I can't think of any) that I used frequently, that would be the computer's first guess.
If we need a different kanji, we hit the space bar again. If it's still not right, we hit it again and a little menu comes up that we can select from.
This is how it has worked for at least 10 years; before that, I don't know.
You actually don't have to convert to kanji after every word. If you just keep typing, it'll start converting behind you, to the most likely kanji. I find this dangerous, however, because you don't pay as much attention and you end up with gibberish sometimes. I tend to do a whole phrase at a time before hitting spacebar.
For cellphones, Japanese is already a lot easier to input than English. --So much so that my gaijin friends and I usually text in Japanese. Because the syllabary is organized by leading consonant and then following vowel (i.e. "ka" "ki" "ku" "ke" "ko"), you just tap that key until you get the sound you want (the "2" key for the /k/ sounds) and it starts predicting right away. Not just words, but entire phrases.
If, for example, I tap "1" twice for /i/, it comes up with the sentence "Ima doko," which means "where are you now?" --A very common thing to text to someone you're meeting.
I don't know how it works for Chinese, but I suspect it is similar. I am very suspicious about the claims of the summary that Asians, presumably with their wacky writing systems, need many keys for their impenetrable Oriental scribblings. But all I really know well is Japanese, and we do fine over here with QWERTY, and even handle the number pad as an input device better than alphabetic languages.
It's a very poor ripoff of MAC OS.
It's funny; one of the reasons I switched to the Mac was that I looked at Vista and thought, "well if I'm going to be running OSX, I might as well run the real thing."
What Microsoft needs to realise is not that Apple is gaining on it because it "just works", it is gaining because it works at all, unlike many aspects of Vista.
Whoah. This doesn't happen often, especially not on Slashdot, but you just led me to a personal epiphany and a whole new way of looking at things.
I bought a MacBook a year ago, mostly out of curiosity, but also because I needed a new laptop that ran MS Office, and I didn't want to get one with Vista on it. I figured that if I didn't like OSX, I'd just set my Boot Camp partition to be the default startup and run XP on it.
I found that I basically never booted into XP. I found OSX and the suite of apps you get with a Mac to be a breeze to use. I started saying things like "It (really) Just Works."
Now that I've been on it awhile, the honeymoon is over, but I'm still happy to be using it as my primary OS. I had tried to argue that it was because things just worked, but actually, yes, what I should have been saying and being more honest with myself about is that the issue isn't about it working well, it's about it working at all.
I still keep an XP gaming partition going on this Mac Pro, but every time I boot it up, I find some irritating little problem that needs fixing. It forgot my default sound device again. Java is bugging me about an update. XP is complaining that my AVG isn't updated (it's doing it now; shut up!). And then when I start up a game, it crashes. Fiddle fiddle fiddle while talking to my buddy on Skype, who is fiddling with other stuff because he's having in-game VOIP woes, despite the fact that it worked last night...
When you use something every day, you get used to this. But when you get onto a platform that doesn't need babysitting, it starts to really stand out. It isn't that OSX and the Mac and Apple are GREAT; it's that Windows is AWFUL. It's not that iMovie is GREAT; it's that MovieMaker is AWFUL.
This computer and OSX drive me crazy sometimes too, of course, but it's not a constant barrage of things requiring my attention or requiring me to make workarounds for or requiring me to look for other solutions for. Apple is gaining ground not by doing a fantastic job, but by being minimally competent at their job while the competition does... What is MS even doing over there? It's shameful!
A case in point is the revised Zune
The Xbox360 is another example, in my opinion anyway, of where MS is doing a fine job. Same department, right? Maybe the gaming/music wing of MS can take over the rest and start delivering compelling products that work right. Apple is starting to get a little controlling and ugly, but that's what happens when you get too comfortable in your market. We'd all benefit from MS doing a better job on Windows, I think.
Please take your free market utopia back to the Middle Ages, where it worked so well.