Problems with eye contact, physical contact, or loud noises indicate something on the autistic spectrum, which is not at all uncommon among techies. I have some of the same problems, probably to a lesser degree, but you should _see_ me start running in circles when someone touches me uninvited. It's an entirely involuntary initial reaction, though most can learn to "tame" the response in a hurry with experience.
It's not all that funny for those folks to be kicked into freak-mode by sudden noises, especially if you know what the problem is. But I guess people are destined to find causing pain for others funny. Witness the Road Runner and the Coyote.
Actually, 40wpm won't cut it for me either. I'm used to typing 120wpm, any slower and I loose the thoughts in my head. I got a Psion 5mx because I can type about 40-50wpm on it and it frustrates me.
I'd like to see a very portable solution that will allow for this kind of speed, without a year-long learning curve, which can be stowed away in favor of handwriting recognition. If the device would have to be the size of a Newton or a bit smaller to make it happen, so be it. I don't want a laptop with fliptop, though.
Some kind of system similar to a stenography machine, with machine-assisted word completion, would be nice if it could get accurate enough at predicting one's patterns.
Read some Robert Anton Wilson. Not the first or only to propose the idea, but in situation of unequal power the information only flows one way, from the power source to the power sink, and no meaningful feedback will come from the party with less power.
This destroys the self-correcting nature possible in a system where information flows both ways.
Basically "what he said" but presented by a fantastically arcane, silly author that's simultaneously full of wisdom and bullcrap.
Even in the situations where they claim to be testing one's abilities, they're more often testing one's abilities to spit back a memorized answer from one particular system, where a 5-minute period of time with the manuals or actual system, without any destructive actions, could bring about the same result.
I have memory difficulties but have never failed to figure out a *N*X box after being placed in front of it, or in front of its 20' of manuals. Within a week of starting work in a *N*X shop I've always become a valued expert resource for the team, even on systems I'd never seen before starting the job.
But in this economy the smarts in the hiring department were shoved aside, because so much of the boom-time workforce was full of people who claimed "No problem, I can just learn that" without being able to deliver. Right now, those of us whose learning/execution style leans towards pattern recognition and understanding of the architecutre are getting the short end of the stick, because they want to ask a few poorly-worded, poorly-constructed test questions that supposedly boil down everything one would know. I've even caught some of them not knowing their _expected_ correct answer was not _really_ a correct answer!
Of course there are some environments in which this won't cut it. Hiring just _one_ person to be at the head of a support structure for a given vendor's *N*X is one example, that person should have enough background to answer from memory immediately. But even things so simple as filesystem mounting is different between vendors, and in 95% of the cases the differences between in-house policies at different companies are much more important than what particular commands/files are used on one vendor's system.
Nice to see that the problem-solving and architecture-understanding skills have been stomped out of the market, in favor people who can emulate a raw keyword search through a textfile.
I agree with what you're trying to say here, but you got one minor detail wrong.
<humor-impaired satire=TRUE pov="G. W. Bush">
The Taliban are not his base. The Taliban consists of dark-skinned, idolatrist, statue-smashing _bad_ fundamentalists. Those for-igg-in-erz are in league with Satan and deserve whatever missiles we send in their direction.
His base consists rather of white, conservative, G*D-fearing _good_ fundamentalists.
</humor-impaired>
See the difference? Other than that, I agree with you.
Keep in mind that XP has another (possible) function: to further merge the consumer and server lines of Windows.
They've tried before, or half-tried, but never succeeded in doing this, but I personally think it would be a great change if they could finally come out with an OS using the NT/2000 kernel, yet having the game and media capabilities users expect from a basic 98 or ME install.
Yes, it's mostly a cosmetic and packaging issue, but politically if they call it NT or 2000 consumers are going to associate it with all the compatibility problems they had before. I'm sure there will be lots of problems with XP as well, but if Microsoft can convince the majority of users to shift to XP, and stick with their decision, they can eventually stop developing two seperate kernels. The difference between server and consumer OS will become merely a software packaging issue, not a kernel issue.
Of course I have no idea whether they'll really succeed, but I for one would gladly trade some performance and efficiency for such a merge. Of course they stand to make us trade off freedoms as well, if they go to time-based licensing.
I can certainly see them making sure that it's available on a free UNIX platform, but then again, who knows what's _free_ to them. It might be available on OS X (That's an Open Source Platform! It's Close Enough!) and require OS X GUI features to run properly.
I can't see them making the.NET port itself _free_ under any definition of free accepted by the GNU-folk. Maybe even as far as shared-source, but definitely not free in the sense that you can do what you will with it.
Of course I've had the opposite problem, where I haven't been able to interview with anyone banging two neurons together for the past several months. I get questions that are obvious off a script, with several possible answers based on what assumptions you make about the poorly worded questions, and can't give the one scripted answer character for character, and get passed over. There's a shortage of clue among the admins themselves, and among the people who are trying to hire them right now, which just makes the problem 42 times worse.
And in fact the technical side of the problem pales in comparison to the financial and political sides. As long as money! money! money! can flow towards abusers of the mail systems, they will find, and be able to afford, methods of circumventing any legal or technical action against them.
This can be taken as either a cut or a compliment, depending on your own partisan tendencies, but I love Slackware precisely _because_ of its simpler package handling and its closeness to a BSD-style system. I've run Slackware boxen when requiring Linux boxen amidst *BSD boxen, and the admins have lots easier time adjusting to its ways of doing things.
There's another possible conspiracy attached to this . . .
They can make _real_ sure that there are instructions on their Pentiums that behave slightly differently, and that the CLR doesn't generate valid or efficient code for AMD processors.
Actually, it's entirely possible that he's good at it, and wants no part of the management or software-design chain. I'm in a similar position; I am autistic, and have zero chance of effectively managing other people, and have refused promotions explaining my disabilities in interpersonal interaction.
Yes, it does reduce the number of jobs available to me, because 10 years of experience without promotion within company (just side-shifting jobs when one company wants says "take promotion or be fired") but the jobs I get are much more satisfying to me.
I _do_ end up as a technical resource consulted by everyone from bottom to top of company, and have good market and product research skills, my strategic abilities on the _software_ and _hardware_ end make up for my lack of in-company promotion.
I've been uneployed since Jan 1, and looking for work since then. The biggest problem is not lack of _any_ work, since I could certainly find a different line of work, sell my (not excessively priced) house and move into an apartment with a friend, and survive. The biggest problem is in _finding_ open positions, and in actually _communicating with intelligent life_ on the hiring end.
I have applied for many jobs for which I'm incredibly well qualified, and been turned down for various reasons. Many times they won't hire someone with my qualifications even at entry-level salaries because they believe I'll hop to the next available job when the market picks up.
Other times I can't get someone on their end that can even understand my thrice-simplified, dubmed-down resume, since during the beginning of the.com squeeze last year most companies replaced techies in the hiring chain with marketroids and suits, because they thought MBAs would be more concerned with the flow of money into their coffers and less concerned with the needs of the other technies.
And don't even try recruiters right now. Get a clueless recruiter talking to the clueless people on the hiring end, and you're better off walking door-to-door in the more developed areas of town. Even the best recruiters I can find have a hard time understanding my resume, which most techies and even non-technies from other fields have told me is very easy to understand. Filter job-search language through three levels of uneducated indirection and the childhood game of Telephone takes on an entirely new meaning.
But I've seen things pick up significantly in the last month or so, only if you have _real_ skills to offer. I think many companies over-compensated and realized that technical position
!=.COM position, and many companies have struggled to fill the _truly_ skilled positions since December or January. If you see the same company posting the same job again and again, they could just be trolling to build their resume files, or they could really be desperate! Go seek them out at their headquarters and demand to see someone on the hiring side, and ask if their position is for real, and ask for something reasonably but substantially more than they initially want to pay, and you might get a reasonably mellow job with a good salary even now.
Actually, there are a few good reasons to get a Pentium box over an Athlon, especially if one is doing multimedia work involving PCI bus mastering. It's not a fault of Athlon processors, but rather the common motherboards that it runs on; bus-mastering fails to work right for Pro Tools and other venerable recording software/hardware combinations.
Granted, there are very _few_ and _far between_ reasons to go with a Pentium III, but give the benefit of the doubt until you know the person's reasons. I got a Pentium III 800 system recently, and I'm very happy for recording work, Athlon systems of similar speed on most known Athlon motherboards would cause my software to crash, and nobody is quite able to predict which boards will work right.
Sometimes disconnections and the like are due to local phone company suckage and can not be circumvented even if you have good technical skills at your ISP.
I worked with small ISPs trying to go head-on with the local phone companies in rural Wisconsin, and believe me, even though it's illegal for them to pull the kind of BS they did, they can get away with it.
THey'd do things like randomly disconnect all our dialup lines every few months, and take a few weeks to fix it; introduce bursts of noise on our dialup lines; and this on top of their incompetence.
If you have the money, knowledge, and guts to try, attempt to bypass dial-up lines. If you can supply broadband access to cable and DSL users, in addition to wireless, you might have a chance. But these are infrastructure-heavy items. Just don't assume that because the existing service has lots of disconnects that you can do anything about the dialup end of it.
It's "common knowledge" among most Protestant
denominations that respect or veneration for Mary and saints is idolatry. And that observation of the Sacrament is actually worship of the god Ba'al. It must be true! Jack Chick said so!
Anyway, might it be possible that pornography is
exploitation in _some_ sense, only because we're so hung up? Our society is full of exploitations. Hell, working for a wage in the office is exploitation of a sort; but in most cases one has a choice to work elsewhere. It's the cases where someone has no choice that most people consider "exploitation". While that may be true in many cases in pornography, I doubt it's true in all cases.
But of course the Discovery Channel, The Knowledge
Network, and PBS are inherently bad, because
they're run by those All-Out Slashdot-Liberal
types who have no fear for the High-Holy Kozmik
Avenger God of the Holy Book
I'd be willing to bet that, statistically speaking, the folks who are most _for_ the V-chip
are those who are most _against_ TV in general for going against bible-truth, and they've already made a decision to not turn the TV on except to see the local tele-preacher.
I support no content management system that _isn't_ run by an independent agency. I like the idea of individuals who _really_ want content filtering contracting with an independent agency to filter programs, or perhaps with more than one. Set a default-deny policy, and pay someone to tell you what you should watch, someone who shares your beliefs. This would satisfy the die-hard proponents of filtering, while demonstrating through its expense and inconvenience how difficult it is to find one standard which everyone can adhere to.
Re:Good, The New Workers need to unionise.
on
The Jungle
·
· Score: 1
And I'll say to you: Horseshit. I'm far from
a manager, and I've had to deal with this situation. Can't touch it because the union is
responsible for it. I'm not even going to bother
mentioning details for your perusal, because I
know it's commonplace. Yes, it is used as an
excuse by lots of manager-types, but it's real
just as often as it's a fabrication.
Actually, even the "trivial" applications of human talents (i.e. the unimportant "arts", which everyone can accomplish without difficulty *not*) require application of memory. In fact, I'd say my musical studies were the _one_ area in my college education where I still _was_ required to memorize and analyze. It was much more challenging than the computer science curriculum I went through.
The computer science curriculum required memorization of facts at the discrete math level, but past that it was based entirely on analysis and application. The music program required memorization of pieces and lots more memorization of seemingly trivial facts about composers, theoretical systems, and even memorization of the accepted view on certain aesthetic issues. Not that it didn't contain its share of bullshit, but were it not for my arts education my memory would have atrophied long ago.
Could any of these recent actions qualify Apple for the renewed fury of the GNU project? Not that it would keep individuals from compiling for it, but still . . .
There was a _long_ time where Apple's "look-and-feel" stance got them boycotted by the GNU project. Been done before, could be done again if they step over the line. Guess it's a good thing they decided to base OS X on BSD licensed software.
I wonder if there's _any_ GNU package in there, as part of the utilities.
I find it dismaying for another reason. I think that consciousness can be explained given high enough of a "meta-viewpoint". But I don't understand how "mirror neurons" can't just fall out of any pattern of learning. Just because the same gate is triggered in a CPU, or the same subroutine is called in a program, doesn't mean that there is some connection between the two points utilizing these structures. Except that they share a common path.
It seems to me that if there is any kind of logical connection between watching something happen and performing the action itself, you can find the same paths being fired for both. That fails to take into account all the differences in the brain between observation and performance. It seems a natural consequence of the fact that we can recognize activities and learn to imitate.
The article seems to just present this in fluffy language.
And that's all fine and nice, until a support drone decides that _you_ are the one who's being "troublesome" for doing something innocent. "In case we need it" is an invalid excuse.
With the general level of tech support out there, everyone is in danger of being labeled a hacker at some point. You can't trust that the drones know what they're doing, and all it takes is one mistake on their part to mess everything up in a legal sense. Guess who wins if a customer tries to take legal action against Sprint with less than a few million dollars and a team of five lawyers.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not all that funny for those folks to be kicked into freak-mode by sudden noises, especially if you know what the problem is. But I guess people are destined to find causing pain for others funny. Witness the Road Runner and the Coyote.
I'd like to see a very portable solution that will allow for this kind of speed, without a year-long learning curve, which can be stowed away in favor of handwriting recognition. If the device would have to be the size of a Newton or a bit smaller to make it happen, so be it. I don't want a laptop with fliptop, though.
Some kind of system similar to a stenography machine, with machine-assisted word completion, would be nice if it could get accurate enough at predicting one's patterns.
This destroys the self-correcting nature possible in a system where information flows both ways.
Basically "what he said" but presented by a fantastically arcane, silly author that's simultaneously full of wisdom and bullcrap.
I have memory difficulties but have never failed to figure out a *N*X box after being placed in front of it, or in front of its 20' of manuals. Within a week of starting work in a *N*X shop I've always become a valued expert resource for the team, even on systems I'd never seen before starting the job.
But in this economy the smarts in the hiring department were shoved aside, because so much of the boom-time workforce was full of people who claimed "No problem, I can just learn that" without being able to deliver. Right now, those of us whose learning/execution style leans towards pattern recognition and understanding of the architecutre are getting the short end of the stick, because they want to ask a few poorly-worded, poorly-constructed test questions that supposedly boil down everything one would know. I've even caught some of them not knowing their _expected_ correct answer was not _really_ a correct answer!
Of course there are some environments in which this won't cut it. Hiring just _one_ person to be at the head of a support structure for a given vendor's *N*X is one example, that person should have enough background to answer from memory immediately. But even things so simple as filesystem mounting is different between vendors, and in 95% of the cases the differences between in-house policies at different companies are much more important than what particular commands/files are used on one vendor's system.
Nice to see that the problem-solving and architecture-understanding skills have been stomped out of the market, in favor people who can emulate a raw keyword search through a textfile.
<humor-impaired satire=TRUE pov="G. W. Bush">
The Taliban are not his base. The Taliban consists of dark-skinned, idolatrist, statue-smashing _bad_ fundamentalists. Those for-igg-in-erz are in league with Satan and deserve whatever missiles we send in their direction.
His base consists rather of white, conservative, G*D-fearing _good_ fundamentalists.
</humor-impaired>
See the difference? Other than that, I agree with you.
They've tried before, or half-tried, but never succeeded in doing this, but I personally think it would be a great change if they could finally come out with an OS using the NT/2000 kernel, yet having the game and media capabilities users expect from a basic 98 or ME install.
Yes, it's mostly a cosmetic and packaging issue, but politically if they call it NT or 2000 consumers are going to associate it with all the compatibility problems they had before. I'm sure there will be lots of problems with XP as well, but if Microsoft can convince the majority of users to shift to XP, and stick with their decision, they can eventually stop developing two seperate kernels. The difference between server and consumer OS will become merely a software packaging issue, not a kernel issue.
Of course I have no idea whether they'll really succeed, but I for one would gladly trade some performance and efficiency for such a merge. Of course they stand to make us trade off freedoms as well, if they go to time-based licensing.
I can't see them making the .NET port itself _free_ under any definition of free accepted by the GNU-folk. Maybe even as far as shared-source, but definitely not free in the sense that you can do what you will with it.
Of course I've had the opposite problem, where I haven't been able to interview with anyone banging two neurons together for the past several months. I get questions that are obvious off a script, with several possible answers based on what assumptions you make about the poorly worded questions, and can't give the one scripted answer character for character, and get passed over. There's a shortage of clue among the admins themselves, and among the people who are trying to hire them right now, which just makes the problem 42 times worse.
And in fact the technical side of the problem pales in comparison to the financial and political sides. As long as money! money! money! can flow towards abusers of the mail systems, they will find, and be able to afford, methods of circumventing any legal or technical action against them.
This can be taken as either a cut or a compliment, depending on your own partisan tendencies, but I love Slackware precisely _because_ of its simpler package handling and its closeness to a BSD-style system. I've run Slackware boxen when requiring Linux boxen amidst *BSD boxen, and the admins have lots easier time adjusting to its ways of doing things.
They can make _real_ sure that there are instructions on their Pentiums that behave slightly differently, and that the CLR doesn't generate valid or efficient code for AMD processors.
Actually, it's entirely possible that he's good at it, and wants no part of the management or software-design chain. I'm in a similar position; I am autistic, and have zero chance of effectively managing other people, and have refused promotions explaining my disabilities in interpersonal interaction.
Yes, it does reduce the number of jobs available to me, because 10 years of experience without promotion within company (just side-shifting jobs when one company wants says "take promotion or be fired") but the jobs I get are much more satisfying to me.
I _do_ end up as a technical resource consulted by everyone from bottom to top of company, and have good market and product research skills, my strategic abilities on the _software_ and _hardware_ end make up for my lack of in-company promotion.
I have applied for many jobs for which I'm incredibly well qualified, and been turned down for various reasons. Many times they won't hire someone with my qualifications even at entry-level salaries because they believe I'll hop to the next available job when the market picks up.
Other times I can't get someone on their end that can even understand my thrice-simplified, dubmed-down resume, since during the beginning of the .com squeeze last year most companies replaced techies in the hiring chain with marketroids and suits, because they thought MBAs would be more concerned with the flow of money into their coffers and less concerned with the needs of the other technies.
And don't even try recruiters right now. Get a clueless recruiter talking to the clueless people on the hiring end, and you're better off walking door-to-door in the more developed areas of town. Even the best recruiters I can find have a hard time understanding my resume, which most techies and even non-technies from other fields have told me is very easy to understand. Filter job-search language through three levels of uneducated indirection and the childhood game of Telephone takes on an entirely new meaning.
But I've seen things pick up significantly in the last month or so, only if you have _real_ skills to offer. I think many companies over-compensated and realized that technical position != .COM position, and many companies have struggled to fill the _truly_ skilled positions since December or January. If you see the same company posting the same job again and again, they could just be trolling to build their resume files, or they could really be desperate! Go seek them out at their headquarters and demand to see someone on the hiring side, and ask if their position is for real, and ask for something reasonably but substantially more than they initially want to pay, and you might get a reasonably mellow job with a good salary even now.
Granted, there are very _few_ and _far between_ reasons to go with a Pentium III, but give the benefit of the doubt until you know the person's reasons. I got a Pentium III 800 system recently, and I'm very happy for recording work, Athlon systems of similar speed on most known Athlon motherboards would cause my software to crash, and nobody is quite able to predict which boards will work right.
Take a guess. Perhaps the DA _is_ part of Scientology? They have well-placed pawns everywhere else, why not there?
I worked with small ISPs trying to go head-on with the local phone companies in rural Wisconsin, and believe me, even though it's illegal for them to pull the kind of BS they did, they can get away with it.
THey'd do things like randomly disconnect all our dialup lines every few months, and take a few weeks to fix it; introduce bursts of noise on our dialup lines; and this on top of their incompetence.
If you have the money, knowledge, and guts to try, attempt to bypass dial-up lines. If you can supply broadband access to cable and DSL users, in addition to wireless, you might have a chance. But these are infrastructure-heavy items. Just don't assume that because the existing service has lots of disconnects that you can do anything about the dialup end of it.
For further information, contact Styx. They have a cute little ditty about the Plexiglass Toilet.
Anyway, might it be possible that pornography is exploitation in _some_ sense, only because we're so hung up? Our society is full of exploitations. Hell, working for a wage in the office is exploitation of a sort; but in most cases one has a choice to work elsewhere. It's the cases where someone has no choice that most people consider "exploitation". While that may be true in many cases in pornography, I doubt it's true in all cases.
I hear that both articles use the word "the". That makes it obvious plagiarism. This is a troll, albeit a sarcastic one.
I'd be willing to bet that, statistically speaking, the folks who are most _for_ the V-chip are those who are most _against_ TV in general for going against bible-truth, and they've already made a decision to not turn the TV on except to see the local tele-preacher.
I support no content management system that _isn't_ run by an independent agency. I like the idea of individuals who _really_ want content filtering contracting with an independent agency to filter programs, or perhaps with more than one. Set a default-deny policy, and pay someone to tell you what you should watch, someone who shares your beliefs. This would satisfy the die-hard proponents of filtering, while demonstrating through its expense and inconvenience how difficult it is to find one standard which everyone can adhere to.
And I'll say to you: Horseshit. I'm far from a manager, and I've had to deal with this situation. Can't touch it because the union is responsible for it. I'm not even going to bother mentioning details for your perusal, because I know it's commonplace. Yes, it is used as an excuse by lots of manager-types, but it's real just as often as it's a fabrication.
The computer science curriculum required memorization of facts at the discrete math level, but past that it was based entirely on analysis and application. The music program required memorization of pieces and lots more memorization of seemingly trivial facts about composers, theoretical systems, and even memorization of the accepted view on certain aesthetic issues. Not that it didn't contain its share of bullshit, but were it not for my arts education my memory would have atrophied long ago.
There was a _long_ time where Apple's "look-and-feel" stance got them boycotted by the GNU project. Been done before, could be done again if they step over the line. Guess it's a good thing they decided to base OS X on BSD licensed software.
I wonder if there's _any_ GNU package in there, as part of the utilities.
It seems to me that if there is any kind of logical connection between watching something happen and performing the action itself, you can find the same paths being fired for both. That fails to take into account all the differences in the brain between observation and performance. It seems a natural consequence of the fact that we can recognize activities and learn to imitate.
The article seems to just present this in fluffy language.
With the general level of tech support out there, everyone is in danger of being labeled a hacker at some point. You can't trust that the drones know what they're doing, and all it takes is one mistake on their part to mess everything up in a legal sense. Guess who wins if a customer tries to take legal action against Sprint with less than a few million dollars and a team of five lawyers.