When I was getting my feet wet with standard stuff like SQL, JavaScript/DOM, HTML, etc. I found devguru.com to be very helpful. It's a great quick reference for several common languages/formats (mostly web-oriented). I think it's one of the best for legacy stuff like ADO, ASP, or VBScript.
I don't think anybody likes doing unpaid work, but when there's a lot of cash on the line, I can't blame employers for wanting to test the product. Just as long as it's a realistic assessment and not something stupid like asking someone to code something difficult and obscure on paper, without Google, it seems reasonable to me. It's like dipping your pinkie into the bag of cocaine for a taste before handing over the suitcase full of money, right?
Researchers conclude that in first case it's because it's how you view yourself and second case it's how you view others and there is racial prejudice. Sounds like psychobabble to me.
Well... In the first case, social psychologists tell us that the likelihood you'll perform a second favor after the first is due to trying to appear consistent. There is a strong bias toward consistent behavior in humans (look at the apparent success of the Republican "flip-flopper" label). The phenomenon is well established in a number of studies.
On the second point, I don't seem to remember the "Door-in-the-face" technique being a gauge of how you view others, but I guess that makes sense in this context. The DITF works through guilt. Perhaps the more you relate to the other person, the more you can imagine being in their situation, and the more guilt/empathy you feel?
A researcher by the name of Robert Cialdini has written some really accessible books on the social psychology of persuasion for business people and students of human nature.
...However, the Hispanic population is so Republican I doubt seriously you could find a hundred Hispanic Democrats in the whole state.
True only in the Miami (Cuban) area of the state, as far as I know. I've lived in a few parts of Florida for over a decade and except for the Cubans, who really know how to hold a grudge over the Bay of Pigs, most of the states' hispanics are Democratic leaning.
Well... Not to start an argument, but what we're talking about is actually a systemic problem, not necessarily a lack of desire or curiosity. The average person (and average is terrifyingly dim --ask a psychologist that's administered an I.Q. test) just doesn't have the bandwidth (mental or temporal) to deal with all the complexities of modern life and all the things an educated person used to know. [insert dated reference to VCRs blinking "12:00" here]
Simply put, we need better humans. Perhaps a direct Wikipedia-brain interface would put things right again?
> If you *can* try it before you buy it (using a cracked version), > you often just don't buy either... I know I never did. It was all > about the money... I could get it for free so why pay for it? > Even if it was a crappy game, I'd still get a cracked version and > play it.
Well... Maybe when I was in high school. Now that I'm an adult, if I like it, I pay for it. I still want to try before I buy, but if the product delivers, I feel like I owe somebody for the good work. And occasionally I feel like a company _owes me_ for some total crap I was suckered into buying previously (you know who you are). DRMed software that doesn't work (thanks Ubisoft) especially makes me wish I'd pirated the app. instead.
This reminded me of a funny/ typical/ stupid/ aggravating thing at work a few weeks ago. I pointed out a security vulnerability in one of our intranet apps during a meeting to discuss the next release. Despite exasperating efforts to educate --and a heated argument over the correct term-- a project manager insisted on spreading the word to upper management that we had a "security breach." But in the war with management (and those who THINK they're above us on the org. chart), I guess it's all about the power struggle.
If you don't work with idiots, count yourself lucky.
At the heart of this quixotic refusal to acknowledge certain parts of reality is the literal interpretation of the Holy Bible. How do fundamentalists know that six days isn't a much longer period of time on God's schedule anyway? Planets don't all rotate on a 24-hour clock.
And if it's so imperative that every single chapter and verse be strictly interpreted, how do you account for the different translations? And why are other things like the "four corners of the earth" (cf. Ezekiel 7:2, Isaiah 11:12, Revelations 7:1, Revelations 20:8) conveniently taken metaphorically? (I'm assuming ID proponents don't still think the world is flat.)
If you can just be sensible enough to concede that you don't know how God did all the magic in Genesis, then there's no reason to deny evolution. Perhaps that's just part of His species-building toolkit?
Let's say that instead of someone beating the shit out of me, they're coming at me with a knife -- except that they're a surgeon performing a medical procedure I opted into. Is it still the police officer's job to "protect" me from something I'm doing by choice?
Of course not. But then, embryos certainly don't opt into the euphemistic "medical procedure" being performed upon them.
If I may throw a little reductio ad absurdum your way... Why stop with embryos? Who's protecting all those innocent little spermatozoa you're mercilessly destroying in that spermicidal lubed condom? Oh the humanity!
If only the good people on the right worried more about the living and less about small clumps of cells, undifferentiated from a developing rat. It is stunning how quickly they lose interest in helping other human beings just as soon as they've left the womb.
I mean, if I ordered a burrito yesterday, and my neighbor ordered one today, and his two friends ordered one the next day, does that mean in 40 more days, all one trillion people on earth will have had one?
Ah, no... You see, you are confusing burrito consumption with burrito technology. If only we were on MySpace, I could demonstrate with an 2GB animated graph of "Mexican" food products introduced by Taco Bell over the last three decades. Notice the exponential, accelerating curve of synergistic fast food wonders?
You know, comparing Bush to Stalin, Hitler, or Genghis Khan is one of the best ways to alienate listeners from any discussion.
All it does is establish that you're a batshit-insane loony-tunes motherfucker who has no concept of reality.
I agree. No way to start a conversation. Besides, those are lousy comparisons. He's a lot more like Warren Harding, with really creepy friends --or one of the mentally handicapped criminals he let go to the electric chair while governor of Texas.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with the historical record of those you mentioned, and add in Chairman Mao, the Khmer Rouge, Francisco Franco, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and a number of other popular icons of the lefty loonybin, and then come back and tell me how you justify putting a sitting president among them.
Oh, we're familiar. We liberal elites read quite a bit, actually. Enough to know that American liberalism is a far cry from the extreme ideologies of the men you mention. And isn't this kind of hyperbolic comparison you just railed against?
> I don't think there really is anything remotely approaching an unbiased news source.
I place a little more faith in the BBC and NPR, since the burden of corporate sponsorship isn't there. But... human reporters are subjective creatures; the best you can do is to get your news from multiple sources and attempt to triangulate the truth from there. Sadly, with modern media consolidation, this isn't always easy. (Do a little experiment and grab a news story that's several days old. You may find the exact same piece in many different print, television, and Internet news sources.)
> You cannot force someone else to follow a particular coding practice > when your coders do not do so themselves.
It's shamefully pervasive. In my years of developing software for Windows, I've rarely seen other developers NOT running Windows as admin. --basically developing apps. completely blind as to what permissions they may or may not need. (I finally got religion 5-6 years ago after a nasty virus.) Now, every time I log in, I get several ugly little error messages due to HP drivers and other startup bits and pieces not having God access under a normal user account. I think Win developers --QA and project owners too-- need to feel some personal UAC pain.
In the end, it all comes down to individual perception. Sit ten guys down with thirty pictures, and you're going to get 10 different #1's. Maybe you can teach a program to be able to say who it thinks is hot, whatever use that is. Perhaps we're approaching this problem from the wrong angle? Beauty is a subjective thing --but everyone knows ugly when they see it! We should focus our efforts on developing systems that can identify the LEAST ugly woman in the room.
I've got to agree that as techies we often discount the huge contributions of the business-centric employees that we only see in the occasional meeting (making technically challenged comments we'll probably snicker at later). The two worlds rarely understand (or even see) the work entailed in the others' job. Being occasionally stuck somewhere in between gives me a big appreciation of what you do.
On the other hand, it seems a little ironic that you're complaining about techies' "ignorant comments" and your "ridiculous hours" and you being on call "for things [we] can't even imagine." There may be some IS/IT staff that just put in their eight hours, but I've yet to work in such a place. Most of us put in a lot of hours outside the office just to keep up with changing technology. Many of us are on the short leash of a BlackBerry at all hours too. For things you probably can't imagine.
You claim that since you are "directly responsible for procuring 100% of the business" that you "trump [us] anyday" (sic.). Unless you're so phenomenally talented you can sell thin air, you've got to realize that we're all co-dependent. Business needs us both. And we'll both get paid just as much as we can convince others to pay us.
Airing violent murders when children are watching? Still OK. Exactly. This is all a big non-issue, if you ask me. I can think of several deaths in last few years caused by imitating WWF wrestlers or [pick any random action hero with a gun], but I don't think I've ever heard of harsh language killing anyone. Sex is also comparatively harmless. (YMMV)
I had a real wake-up call with my one-year old last year. I didn't think he understood much of what was on T.V., but just flipping through the channels and seeing an some anime fighting really freaked him out. We've known since the 60's that kids imitate aggressive behavior, but it must sell toys or wars or something, since the issue isn't even on the radar. Maybe we're getting so civilized that we need more and more vicarious violence just to feel alive?
As a parent who will be dealing with these issues soon, I don't think it's so simple. No matter how great I am at controlling the rugrat's access to media in my house, I won't be able to follow him around to his friends' places. Forcing him to stay inside all day and home schooling really aren't realistic solutions either.
Obviously, there is no measure too extreme to guarantee the MPAA's profits. Why doesn't Mr. Glickman really get to the root of the problem and demand that all personal computers be destroyed? These horrible devices are allowing evil pirates to rob him of huge piles of money that other people have worked so hard to earn. If only they could be replaced by completely closed systems, controlled by the MPAA/RIAA...
top executives at most companies fail to recognize the value of IT, having a tendency to think of information technology as a basic utility, like plumbing... Is this why management is always shitting on our work?
what's to stop some nefarious employer requiring mandatory scans for every employee? Legislation, I hope. You mean like the legislation that prevents employers from knowing that you smoked weed last weekend?
If they can rape you of a little more of your private life and privacy, you'd better believe they will.
everyone from left to right has to respect a guy who survived five years of torture. Is that how long he's been carrying water for a guy that derailed his candidacy with dirty tricks like push polling?
I thought Bush's claims in the primaries of 2000 that McCain had lost his mind were just nasty politics, but after McCain's embrace of Bush around 2004, I'm not so sure.
It'll be tricky to distance himself enough from W. before November.
I was raised having to listen to bands like Nirvana (the only ones I liked), Pearl Jam, Silverchair, Thearpy?, NiN, Smashing Pumpkins and all that alternative/grunge (sorry if I do not know the *specific* genre) until I vomited because my older brother used to play it all day long. <sarcasm type="GoodNatured">Wow, you really had it rough --it's truly an inspiration to us all that you were able to overcome such a traumatic upbringing.</sarcasm>
I was the first child in my household and the soundtrack was non-stop Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and the Carpenters. I didn't even know how awful it was, until I was old enough to have friends with musical taste. I'm just damned lucky it didn't drive me to suicide.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was getting my feet wet with standard stuff like SQL, JavaScript/DOM, HTML, etc. I found devguru.com to be very helpful. It's a great quick reference for several common languages/formats (mostly web-oriented). I think it's one of the best for legacy stuff like ADO, ASP, or VBScript.
I don't think anybody likes doing unpaid work, but when there's a lot of cash on the line, I can't blame employers for wanting to test the product. Just as long as it's a realistic assessment and not something stupid like asking someone to code something difficult and obscure on paper, without Google, it seems reasonable to me. It's like dipping your pinkie into the bag of cocaine for a taste before handing over the suitcase full of money, right?
Well... In the first case, social psychologists tell us that the likelihood you'll perform a second favor after the first is due to trying to appear consistent. There is a strong bias toward consistent behavior in humans (look at the apparent success of the Republican "flip-flopper" label). The phenomenon is well established in a number of studies.
On the second point, I don't seem to remember the "Door-in-the-face" technique being a gauge of how you view others, but I guess that makes sense in this context. The DITF works through guilt. Perhaps the more you relate to the other person, the more you can imagine being in their situation, and the more guilt/empathy you feel?
A researcher by the name of Robert Cialdini has written some really accessible books on the social psychology of persuasion for business people and students of human nature.
True only in the Miami (Cuban) area of the state, as far as I know. I've lived in a few parts of Florida for over a decade and except for the Cubans, who really know how to hold a grudge over the Bay of Pigs, most of the states' hispanics are Democratic leaning.
If you want to be informed you can.
Well... Not to start an argument, but what we're talking about is actually a systemic problem, not necessarily a lack of desire or curiosity. The average person (and average is terrifyingly dim --ask a psychologist that's administered an I.Q. test) just doesn't have the bandwidth (mental or temporal) to deal with all the complexities of modern life and all the things an educated person used to know. [insert dated reference to VCRs blinking "12:00" here]
Simply put, we need better humans. Perhaps a direct Wikipedia-brain interface would put things right again?
> If you *can* try it before you buy it (using a cracked version),
> you often just don't buy either... I know I never did. It was all
> about the money... I could get it for free so why pay for it?
> Even if it was a crappy game, I'd still get a cracked version and
> play it.
Well... Maybe when I was in high school. Now that I'm an adult, if I like it, I pay for it. I still want to try before I buy, but if the product delivers, I feel like I owe somebody for the good work. And occasionally I feel like a company _owes me_ for some total crap I was suckered into buying previously (you know who you are). DRMed software that doesn't work (thanks Ubisoft) especially makes me wish I'd pirated the app. instead.
This reminded me of a funny/ typical/ stupid/ aggravating thing at work a few weeks ago. I pointed out a security vulnerability in one of our intranet apps during a meeting to discuss the next release. Despite exasperating efforts to educate --and a heated argument over the correct term-- a project manager insisted on spreading the word to upper management that we had a "security breach." But in the war with management (and those who THINK they're above us on the org. chart), I guess it's all about the power struggle.
If you don't work with idiots, count yourself lucky.
At the heart of this quixotic refusal to acknowledge certain parts of reality is the literal interpretation of the Holy Bible. How do fundamentalists know that six days isn't a much longer period of time on God's schedule anyway? Planets don't all rotate on a 24-hour clock.
And if it's so imperative that every single chapter and verse be strictly interpreted, how do you account for the different translations? And why are other things like the "four corners of the earth" (cf. Ezekiel 7:2, Isaiah 11:12, Revelations 7:1, Revelations 20:8) conveniently taken metaphorically? (I'm assuming ID proponents don't still think the world is flat.)
If you can just be sensible enough to concede that you don't know how God did all the magic in Genesis, then there's no reason to deny evolution. Perhaps that's just part of His species-building toolkit?
If I may throw a little reductio ad absurdum your way... Why stop with embryos? Who's protecting all those innocent little spermatozoa you're mercilessly destroying in that spermicidal lubed condom? Oh the humanity!
If only the good people on the right worried more about the living and less about small clumps of cells, undifferentiated from a developing rat. It is stunning how quickly they lose interest in helping other human beings just as soon as they've left the womb.
+1 Flamebait mods?
> I don't think there really is anything remotely approaching an unbiased news source.
I place a little more faith in the BBC and NPR, since the burden of corporate sponsorship isn't there. But... human reporters are subjective creatures; the best you can do is to get your news from multiple sources and attempt to triangulate the truth from there. Sadly, with modern media consolidation, this isn't always easy. (Do a little experiment and grab a news story that's several days old. You may find the exact same piece in many different print, television, and Internet news sources.)
> You cannot force someone else to follow a particular coding practice
> when your coders do not do so themselves.
It's shamefully pervasive. In my years of developing software for Windows, I've rarely seen other developers NOT running Windows as admin. --basically developing apps. completely blind as to what permissions they may or may not need. (I finally got religion 5-6 years ago after a nasty virus.) Now, every time I log in, I get several ugly little error messages due to HP drivers and other startup bits and pieces not having God access under a normal user account. I think Win developers --QA and project owners too-- need to feel some personal UAC pain.
"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."
--George W. Bush
Austin, TX
11/22/2000
This Bushism explains a lot, doesn't it?
I've got to agree that as techies we often discount the huge contributions of the business-centric employees that we only see in the occasional meeting (making technically challenged comments we'll probably snicker at later). The two worlds rarely understand (or even see) the work entailed in the others' job. Being occasionally stuck somewhere in between gives me a big appreciation of what you do.
On the other hand, it seems a little ironic that you're complaining about techies' "ignorant comments" and your "ridiculous hours" and you being on call "for things [we] can't even imagine." There may be some IS/IT staff that just put in their eight hours, but I've yet to work in such a place. Most of us put in a lot of hours outside the office just to keep up with changing technology. Many of us are on the short leash of a BlackBerry at all hours too. For things you probably can't imagine.
You claim that since you are "directly responsible for procuring 100% of the business" that you "trump [us] anyday" (sic.). Unless you're so phenomenally talented you can sell thin air, you've got to realize that we're all co-dependent. Business needs us both. And we'll both get paid just as much as we can convince others to pay us.
I had a real wake-up call with my one-year old last year. I didn't think he understood much of what was on T.V., but just flipping through the channels and seeing an some anime fighting really freaked him out. We've known since the 60's that kids imitate aggressive behavior, but it must sell toys or wars or something, since the issue isn't even on the radar. Maybe we're getting so civilized that we need more and more vicarious violence just to feel alive?
As a parent who will be dealing with these issues soon, I don't think it's so simple. No matter how great I am at controlling the rugrat's access to media in my house, I won't be able to follow him around to his friends' places. Forcing him to stay inside all day and home schooling really aren't realistic solutions either.
Childhood is getting shorter all the time.
Obviously, there is no measure too extreme to guarantee the MPAA's profits. Why doesn't Mr. Glickman really get to the root of the problem and demand that all personal computers be destroyed? These horrible devices are allowing evil pirates to rob him of huge piles of money that other people have worked so hard to earn. If only they could be replaced by completely closed systems, controlled by the MPAA/RIAA...
If they can rape you of a little more of your private life and privacy, you'd better believe they will.
I thought Bush's claims in the primaries of 2000 that McCain had lost his mind were just nasty politics, but after McCain's embrace of Bush around 2004, I'm not so sure.
It'll be tricky to distance himself enough from W. before November.
I should have known better than to bait the Neil Diamond fans. They're not the forgiving type.
I was the first child in my household and the soundtrack was non-stop Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, and the Carpenters. I didn't even know how awful it was, until I was old enough to have friends with musical taste. I'm just damned lucky it didn't drive me to suicide.
Anything short of implanting a GPS and an omni-directional, wireless camera up everyone's ass is just begging for the terrorists to win.
Ya see... Terrorists hate our freedoms. No freedom, no impetus for terrorism, right?
A closely monitored citizen is a safe citizen!