When I went back to Philly Community College[1][2] in 1978, I got into a track for an Associate's Degree... in Data Processing.[3] There were a *lot* of folks taking DP. That was, of course, before the escalation of titles (that's a sanitary engineer, not a janitor). I also have an ex who's library science degree title included information systems
mark, BS, CIS[4], 1995
1. Phila., PA, USA 2. CCP, just one C short of being the Soviet Union 3. Which I didn't get, because I didn't want to take accounting, so I got a plain AA 4. Computer and Information Systems
They're cheaper, and since the kids will be required to carry them to and from school, weigh less than your average brick of a laptop.
I've had the Ubuntu netbook remix on my HP mini (110, I think) for a couple-three years, and it's just fine (other than the Ubuntu annoyance that it doesn't delete the 3+ previous kernel by default).
Who don't believe in ethics, morals, or (un-)enlightened self-interest.
I think the closest you can manage is in research. I'd *love* to work for NASA, but with budget cutting.... Consider other research institutions (I, for example, work for a federal contractor at a very much non-military site - we're, um, life sciences). There are some companies, as well: folks have mentioned gaming cos, though the hot game from the US DoD is not exactly what you want. There's non-military aerospace, or even one of the new civilian space companies.
Oh, and, of course, the chemical industry, though I don't know how you'd feel about the petrochemical industry. There's also transportation, from auto co's to mapping companies.
The market isn't as large, but there are options.
Oh, and I decided a few years ago to relocate (AGAIN, dammit!) from Chicago to DC, to support the agency I support, rather than get a third-shit, er, shift job supporting a trading firm.
The old joke: after hearing about the actor Hugh Grant's legal trouble after his involvement with the prostitute Divine, Bill Gates picked her up. Afterwards, he said, "So *that's* why they call you Divine!"
She responded with, "So that's why they call you microsoft".
So, you want management to spring money for a treadmill, or whatever, in *addition* to your desk and chair? Just to add to the noise already, where so many jobsites are going for lower cube walls, because managers are enamored of "bullpens" (and how many of *them* don't have offices with doors)?
No, what comes next is the old Dilbert cartoon: Velcro on our backs, and they'll stick us to the walls for cheaper office space.
Excerpt: American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking standardized tests.
On a morning visit to a Northern California middle school, I saw not a single student. The principal showed me around campus, but I didn’t see or hear students talking, playing, or moving about. The science lab was empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an academic lockdown. A volunteer manned a table filled with cupcakes, a small reward for students at day’s end.
This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores. I wondered what kind of tests the students were taking. The California Department of Education’s STAR website has sample test questions, and I started looking through them randomly. Soon, I came across the following reading comprehension question about the proper use of a microscope, shown in the illustration below. Proper Care and Use of a Microscope diagram
As I examined the test question, two things became apparent.
The test has become a teaching tool. Since students weren’t expected to know from experience what a microscope is, the test must explain what a microscope does, what the parts are named, and how to use it.
It failed to convey that the whole purpose of having a microscope is to see things that you can’t see with the naked eye. --- end excerpt ---
And while we're at it, tell me how many kids, or adults in the US, "don't believe" in evolution. Or spending more money on basic research (something corporations *don't* do). Or how many characters on TV are competant to clean their toasters without getting electrocuted.
Sorry, I *think* I've met a few folks who think that way... but not 95+% of the folks I've met in my life, and that includes living around the country, east coast, midwest, and Texas.
I just do not believe those results.
Like to see the form of the question, and whether there was a bias in the way they were phrased.
... what software they're running for the 911 center.
Let me say that someone I know very well worked for the vendor who supplied the hardware and software for the City of Chicago 911 system in the late nineties. They heard that the vendor, PRC, which was first part of Litton, but sold around 2000 to Northrop-Grumman, had sold the system, Altaris, based on a prototype, *then* they had to make it actually work. By '97, they had, mostly, and it was to upgrades and enhancements. All of this ran on DEC Alpha failover clusters. By 2000, it ran really, really well.
IIRC, they said that NYC was looking at the software for their use.
Lessee, article says DEC, er, Compaq, um, HP for hardware, and Northop-Grumman for software..... Wonder what enhancements NYC wanted that were worth that much... oh, I know, they wanted it ported from C to Java-on-rails, or whatever.....
a) They don't want to pay for experienced people b) They don't want to spend a penny for training for recent grads c) HR departments
1) don't know what they're hiring for, and don't *want* to know
2) think that anyone who's out of work is "not fresh"*, and so not worth looking at
* In 2004 or 5, I had an idiot on the phone who told me exactly that, even though I was exactly described by the ad. When I asked if she took a year off to have a baby, if she'd no longer be "fresh", and so unhireable forever. She actually said, "I never thought of it that way". Yes, they really *are* that stupid.
mark, who, a year or so later, finally found someone desperate enough to hire in spite of me not being "fresh"
Ignorant and ideological, in just a few words. It goes capitalism->socialism, since the latter came *in* *response* to capitalism. Try reading Marx's Captial, with his analysis and description of "unbridled capitalism" that existed in the 1800s... and the the right wing in the US is trying to reinstate now.
Socialism and the Labor (sorry, Labour, for you Canadians, Aussies, and Brits) are why you, personally, have a) holiday, b) weekends, c) any benefits from your job whatsoever, beyond the right of your boss to tell you "whatever it takes", and insist you work 60 or 80 hours weeks.
To quote Chaz Mulligan in Zelazny's Stand on Zanzibar, you're an ignorant idiot.
Let's start with ignorance: corporate management frequently has no idea you can buy linux support... or that they may already have people in house with that knowledge. And the eternal "no one ever lost their job by recommending IBM, er, Microsoft"
For home users, the amount of FUD is massive. Just the other week, I happened to hear a public radio talk show, the Kojo Naambi show, who apparently has a weekly computer segment. They had a techie... who when someone texted in to suggest open source software, said that he'd looked at open office, and it had a terrible interface, and that what did you expect for something that was free.
Terrible interface? In what way? And is it worse than The Ribbon idiocy?
Home users also have a lot of inertia. How many years do they run the same o/s without even security upgrades? What's going to push them to go buy or install a new o/s? And the stores - buy a new computer without Windows? Huh?
Which distro? I've worked with a few, and the obvious to me answer is a stable one, NOT a cutting edge one. I *loathe* fedora, for example, and gnome 3 is S0 K3WL F0R K1DZ. Actually *do* something other than play with the eye candy?
And Ubuntu's descent into k3wl with Unity is a take aim with.45 with both hands, shoot foot. Now shoot other foot. I mean, menus that disappear with a wave like a sheet in the wind? That pop up with an explosion? That's certainly the way it is on a 14 yr old's of my aquaintance....
OpenSuSE or RHEL or CentOS. Yeah, they may be a few years behind the latestgreatest... but they tend to be very, very stable. They don't have 80 updates this week... and another 20 on Friday. They may not support the hardware that came out this week... but if it came out six months ago, there's a really good chance it's supported.
Finally, I've had my computer-challanged fiancee on my CentOS box, and she's had as few or fewer problems than she has on the Vista box she has at home (yes, I'm *trying* to get her to go to Win 7, if she *has* to stay in Windows, but there's that $100+ on an o/s to spend....)
So, what's the issue with "which distro"? Just look at what's used most.
Neither in the piece that I skimmed, nor in anyone's comments, has addressed the biochemicals observed in space, both in the solar system and out of it (lessee, it was a few years ago that astronomers noted a nebula with alcohol in it, leading/. readers to suggest that fratboys will be pushing to head that way asap). Further, I belive probes have found evidence of earth-bacteria out there.
"My name is Kimball Kinneson
I lead the Lensman band
Although we're few in number
Our abilities are great..
We play with stars and planets,
Catch comets in a net
And use a supernova
To light a cigarette.
Has *anyone* ever fought back asserting that by Article 1, section 8(8) specifically says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors", and since trolls is neither the author nor inventor, nor to they use the material of the patent to produce the product of the patent, their claim to the patent is invalid?
For the guy studying for his MBA in Australia... I don't *care* what they teach you. A few years ago, I was arguing with a friend's now-ex who taught HR at Loyola in Chicago. I expounded on how HR screws us all, and she was outraged, saying that's *not* what they teach.
Doesn't matter, this is what they *do*. Back when I was first in college, long before some of you were born, the business course was considered a mickey mouse program. Jumping to less than 10 years ago, a friend who teaches in various Catholic colleges around the US half the year, went down the food chain of majors who took his "science for non-science majors", and the next to the bottom of the food chain, were the business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them".
Their ego, and their "I know how to run a company, I have a degree in it!", when they don't know what they're running, or what those who they're managing *do* (like Dilbert's PHB), *don't* know what they're doing, and move on, leaving wreckage behind them.
The reality is that most of them think, or act like they think, that running a software house is like running a steel mill is like running an insurance company is like running a gas station convenience store... and run it that way.
The real problem is the MBA degree, which i've been saying for 30 years is destroying the US. They're the ones with "long-term thinking" == "next quarter".
In terms specifically of IT, I recently realized that the major problem was the complete idiocy, started AFAIK in the 80's, of declaring each part of the company "profit" or "cost" centers. Everywhere I've worked, if they had that, they kept trying to make IT a "profit" center... meaning charging other divisions for the work, leading to:
a) other divisions buying their own equipment and software
b) other divisions creating half-baked software to get around paying IT to do it, which is why you find
mind-bogglingly big spreadsheets instead of databases, and
c) cut spending by IT on hardware, software, and, I mean, why would you want to spend all that money on
experienced people, we can hire two or three folks right out of college who are "fresh", or maybe outsource
it to Asia or eastern Europe for a quarter the price.....
I mean, really - is the question whether he "illegally" imported them for resale? Does that actually count if they're used, and he's selling used books?
mark "how about my large collection of used books?"
I had to deal with gnome 3 when I had to "upgrade" one of my user's system to FC 15, and *loathe* it: screens of icons that vanish unless you roll over them, transparency - it's all eye candy for the sake of eye candy. It also goes vehemently against the *Nix & F/OSS idea that you do things the way *you* want to do them, not the way M$ (or whoever) wants you to do them.
The concept that "screen real estate is valuable" seems to have passed them by. I'll put up with everything being fullscreened on my netbook, *NOT* on anything else.
And, of course, the idea that you might want to use your processing power for, um, doing things, or work, rather than spending so many cycles doing *nothing* other than running eye candy also passed them by.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless, like my system, you have black-ICE installed....
mark "geez, slashdotters don't even read anymore...."
Dear snotnoses:
When I went back to Philly Community College[1][2] in 1978, I got into a track for an Associate's Degree... in Data Processing.[3] There were a *lot* of folks taking DP. That was, of course, before the escalation of titles (that's a sanitary engineer, not a janitor). I also have an ex who's library science degree title included information systems
mark, BS, CIS[4], 1995
1. Phila., PA, USA
2. CCP, just one C short of being the Soviet Union
3. Which I didn't get, because I didn't want to take accounting, so I got a plain AA
4. Computer and Information Systems
Right, for rich private schools.
Or haven't you noticed the slashing of public education over the last dozen years?
mark
They're cheaper, and since the kids will be required to carry them to and from school, weigh less than your average brick of a laptop.
I've had the Ubuntu netbook remix on my HP mini (110, I think) for a couple-three years, and it's just fine (other than the Ubuntu annoyance that it doesn't delete the 3+ previous kernel by default).
No no gnome3, PLEASE!
mark
Who don't believe in ethics, morals, or (un-)enlightened self-interest.
I think the closest you can manage is in research. I'd *love* to work for NASA, but with budget cutting.... Consider other research institutions (I, for example, work for a federal contractor at a very much non-military site - we're, um, life sciences). There are some companies, as well: folks have mentioned gaming cos, though the hot game from the US DoD is not exactly what you want. There's non-military aerospace, or even one of the new civilian space companies.
Oh, and, of course, the chemical industry, though I don't know how you'd feel about the petrochemical industry. There's also transportation, from auto co's to mapping companies.
The market isn't as large, but there are options.
Oh, and I decided a few years ago to relocate (AGAIN, dammit!) from Chicago to DC, to support the agency I support, rather than get a third-shit, er, shift job supporting a trading firm.
mark
The old joke: after hearing about the actor Hugh Grant's legal trouble after his involvement with the prostitute Divine, Bill Gates picked her up. Afterwards, he said, "So *that's* why they call you Divine!"
She responded with, "So that's why they call you microsoft".
mark
So, you want management to spring money for a treadmill, or whatever, in *addition* to your desk and chair? Just to add to the noise already, where so many jobsites are going for lower cube walls, because managers are enamored of "bullpens" (and how many of *them* don't have offices with doors)?
No, what comes next is the old Dilbert cartoon: Velcro on our backs, and they'll stick us to the walls for cheaper office space.
mark
Excerpt:
American kids should be building rockets and robots, not taking
standardized tests.
On a morning visit to a Northern California middle school, I saw not a
single student. The principal showed me around campus, but I didn’t see or
hear students talking, playing, or moving about. The science lab was
empty, as were the library and the playground. It was not a school
holiday: It was a state-mandated STAR testing day. The school was in an
academic lockdown. A volunteer manned a table filled with cupcakes, a
small reward for students at day’s end.
This is what the American public school looks like in 2012, driven by
obsessive adherence to standardized testing. The fate of children, their
schools, and their teachers are based on these school test scores. I
wondered what kind of tests the students were taking. The California
Department of Education’s STAR website has sample test questions, and I
started looking through them randomly. Soon, I came across the following
reading comprehension question about the proper use of a microscope, shown
in the illustration below.
Proper Care and Use of a Microscope diagram
As I examined the test question, two things became apparent.
The test has become a teaching tool. Since students weren’t expected
to know from experience what a microscope is, the test must explain
what a microscope does, what the parts are named, and how to use it.
It failed to convey that the whole purpose of having a microscope is
to see things that you can’t see with the naked eye.
--- end excerpt ---
And while we're at it, tell me how many kids, or adults in the US, "don't believe" in evolution. Or spending more money on basic research (something corporations *don't* do). Or how many characters on TV are competant to clean their toasters without getting electrocuted.
mark
Actually, I think we need Dr. Flexi Jerkoff....
mark
Sorry, I *think* I've met a few folks who think that way... but not 95+% of the folks I've met in my life, and that includes living around the country, east coast, midwest, and Texas.
I just do not believe those results.
Like to see the form of the question, and whether there was a bias in the way they were phrased.
mark
... what software they're running for the 911 center.
Let me say that someone I know very well worked for the vendor who supplied the hardware and software for the City of Chicago 911 system in the late nineties. They heard that the vendor, PRC, which was first part of Litton, but sold around 2000 to Northrop-Grumman, had sold the system, Altaris, based on a prototype, *then* they had to make it actually work. By '97, they had, mostly, and it was to upgrades and enhancements. All of this ran on DEC Alpha failover clusters. By 2000, it ran really, really well.
IIRC, they said that NYC was looking at the software for their use.
Lessee, article says DEC, er, Compaq, um, HP for hardware, and Northop-Grumman for software..... Wonder what enhancements NYC wanted that were worth that much... oh, I know, they wanted it ported from C to Java-on-rails, or whatever.....
mark "deponent sayeth not"
a) They don't want to pay for experienced people
b) They don't want to spend a penny for training for recent grads
c) HR departments
1) don't know what they're hiring for, and don't *want* to know
2) think that anyone who's out of work is "not fresh"*, and so not worth looking at
* In 2004 or 5, I had an idiot on the phone who told me exactly that, even though I was exactly described by the ad. When I asked if she took a year off to have a baby, if she'd no longer be "fresh", and so unhireable forever. She actually said, "I never thought of it that way". Yes, they really *are* that stupid.
mark, who, a year or so later, finally found someone desperate enough to hire in spite of me not being "fresh"
Prescreen *everything* for three months. *Then* send the bill for doing so to the MPAA and the RIAA.
mark "but I thought you were opposed to unfunded mandates!"
Ignorant and ideological, in just a few words. It goes capitalism->socialism, since the latter came *in* *response* to capitalism. Try reading Marx's Captial, with his analysis and description of "unbridled capitalism" that existed in the 1800s... and the the right wing in the US is trying to reinstate now.
Socialism and the Labor (sorry, Labour, for you Canadians, Aussies, and Brits) are why you, personally, have a) holiday, b) weekends, c) any benefits from your job whatsoever, beyond the right of your boss to tell you "whatever it takes", and insist you work 60 or 80 hours weeks.
To quote Chaz Mulligan in Zelazny's Stand on Zanzibar, you're an ignorant idiot.
mark
Let's start with ignorance: corporate management frequently has no idea you can buy linux support... or that they may already have people in house with that knowledge. And the eternal "no one ever lost their job by recommending IBM, er, Microsoft"
For home users, the amount of FUD is massive. Just the other week, I happened to hear a public radio talk show, the Kojo Naambi show, who apparently has a weekly computer segment. They had a techie... who when someone texted in to suggest open source software, said that he'd looked at open office, and it had a terrible interface, and that what did you expect for something that was free.
Terrible interface? In what way? And is it worse than The Ribbon idiocy?
Home users also have a lot of inertia. How many years do they run the same o/s without even security upgrades? What's going to push them to go buy or install a new o/s? And the stores - buy a new computer without Windows? Huh?
Which distro? I've worked with a few, and the obvious to me answer is a stable one, NOT a cutting edge one. I *loathe* fedora, for example, and gnome 3 is S0 K3WL F0R K1DZ. Actually *do* something other than play with the eye candy?
And Ubuntu's descent into k3wl with Unity is a take aim with .45 with both hands, shoot foot. Now shoot other foot. I mean, menus that disappear with a wave like a sheet in the wind? That pop up with an explosion? That's certainly the way it is on a 14 yr old's of my aquaintance....
OpenSuSE or RHEL or CentOS. Yeah, they may be a few years behind the latestgreatest... but they tend to be very, very stable. They don't have 80 updates this week... and another 20 on Friday. They may not support the hardware that came out this week... but if it came out six months ago, there's a really good chance it's supported.
Finally, I've had my computer-challanged fiancee on my CentOS box, and she's had as few or fewer problems than she has on the Vista box she has at home (yes, I'm *trying* to get her to go to Win 7, if she *has* to stay in Windows, but there's that $100+ on an o/s to spend....)
So, what's the issue with "which distro"? Just look at what's used most.
mark
Neither in the piece that I skimmed, nor in anyone's comments, has addressed the biochemicals observed in space, both in the solar system and out of it (lessee, it was a few years ago that astronomers noted a nebula with alcohol in it, leading /. readers to suggest that fratboys will be pushing to head that way asap). Further, I belive probes have found evidence of earth-bacteria out there.
It's all over the place....
mark
Yes! And who needs asteroids....
"My name is Kimball Kinneson
I lead the Lensman band
Although we're few in number
Our abilities are great..
We play with stars and planets,
Catch comets in a net
And use a supernova
To light a cigarette.
- Poul Anderson
mark
ROTFL!
Let me assure you that there really are people in Texas who think *everyone* else (ok, *maybe* not Louisiana) are Yankees.
mark
Has *anyone* ever fought back asserting that by Article 1, section 8(8) specifically says "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors", and since trolls is neither the author nor inventor, nor to they use the material of the patent to produce the product of the patent, their claim to the patent is invalid?
mark
"You don't have permission to access that page on this server".
mark
For the guy studying for his MBA in Australia... I don't *care* what they teach you. A few years ago, I was arguing with a friend's now-ex who taught HR at Loyola in Chicago. I expounded on how HR screws us all, and she was outraged, saying that's *not* what they teach.
Doesn't matter, this is what they *do*. Back when I was first in college, long before some of you were born, the business course was considered a mickey mouse program. Jumping to less than 10 years ago, a friend who teaches in various Catholic colleges around the US half the year, went down the food chain of majors who took his "science for non-science majors", and the next to the bottom of the food chain, were the business majors, who "didn't get it, but didn't let that worry them".
Their ego, and their "I know how to run a company, I have a degree in it!", when they don't know what they're running, or what those who they're managing *do* (like Dilbert's PHB), *don't* know what they're doing, and move on, leaving wreckage behind them.
The reality is that most of them think, or act like they think, that running a software house is like running a steel mill is like running an insurance company is like running a gas station convenience store... and run it that way.
mark
The real problem is the MBA degree, which i've been saying for 30 years is destroying the US. They're the ones with "long-term thinking" == "next quarter".
In terms specifically of IT, I recently realized that the major problem was the complete idiocy, started AFAIK in the 80's, of declaring each part of the company "profit" or "cost" centers. Everywhere I've worked, if they had that, they kept trying to make IT a "profit" center... meaning charging other divisions for the work, leading to:
a) other divisions buying their own equipment and software
b) other divisions creating half-baked software to get around paying IT to do it, which is why you find
mind-bogglingly big spreadsheets instead of databases, and
c) cut spending by IT on hardware, software, and, I mean, why would you want to spend all that money on
experienced people, we can hire two or three folks right out of college who are "fresh", or maybe outsource
it to Asia or eastern Europe for a quarter the price.....
mark "then there's HR...."
I mean, really - is the question whether he "illegally" imported them for resale? Does that actually count if they're used, and he's selling used books?
mark "how about my large collection of used books?"
Ars Technica is also at fault: neither LSD nor ecstacy are narcotics; they're psychedelics.
Narcotics put you to sleep, y'know....
mark
I had to deal with gnome 3 when I had to "upgrade" one of my user's system to FC 15, and *loathe* it: screens of icons that vanish unless you roll over them, transparency - it's all eye candy for the sake of eye candy. It also goes vehemently against the *Nix & F/OSS idea that you do things the way *you* want to do them, not the way M$ (or whoever) wants you to do them.
The concept that "screen real estate is valuable" seems to have passed them by. I'll put up with everything being fullscreened on my netbook, *NOT* on anything else.
And, of course, the idea that you might want to use your processing power for, um, doing things, or work, rather than spending so many cycles doing *nothing* other than running eye candy also passed them by.
mark, who runs all 600k IceWM at home