t's traditional. Samuel Huntington, the first President of the United States, wasn't elected by popular vote either.
The "president of congress" is not the "president". If you watch C-SPAN sometime, you will notice that people keep on talking to "Mr. President", asking for more time for their speech, or to hold some vote, or for a quorum call, or who knows what else; Bush is not in the room at the time.
If you have a bachelor's degree, then you should start out as an officer. A 2nd lieutenant
makes about $27,000. If you have a degree in computer science and don't suck, you will get promoted very quickly.
Are you sure about that? Also, random or not, the military is certainly a waste of money that no one needs.
The military is of paramount importance.
Why?
Because other countries have militaries too, and sometimes other countries aren't run by the nicest people in the world.
>High-speed porn will not help the economy.
And I disagree on that one as well.
Time you spend jacking off in front of your computer, is time that you are not being a productive and vibrant element of the national economy.
OK then, the moment the population feels the need for millions of low-valued lawyers and accountants, then you start to develop those professions. But, right now, we don't need low-IP professions. I have no fear of being sued or audited? Do you?
The more money you handle, the more likely you are to arrive in a situation where you need lawyers and accountants.
When I need one, I will pay one.
Since this produces work for lawyers and accountants, more people naturally try to go into those fields in order to make money.
Welcome to Econ 101.
And yes, I have found occasional need for an accountant, and even for a lawyer.
The point was not to fund the loans, but to fund the programs. We need to make it accessible to anyone that desires it. Right now, if I wanted to be an engineer, I have to be admitted to an engineering program. Those aren't easy to get into. Why? Because there aren't enough engineering programs around the country, and so they set ridiculously high standards for admissions. This discourages even more people from applying. Should there be 10x many more engineering programs (supply) the pace of development would pick up.
We do not need to make it accessable to anyone who desires it, just to anyone who whould be capable of it.
And in spite of those "ridiculously high standards for admissions", lots of people who do get in manage to flunk out, because it is too hard.
Some people just aren't intelligent enough.
Also, you can't get government loans to pay off all your school costs.
Life isn't a free ride, nor should it be.
I manage to live off of my loans.
I have to live rather meagerly, and my parents have to pay for some things still, like clothing, but that is okay.
That may be the case in YOUR business investments:) But believe it or not, there actually have been businesses that were successfully run by MBAs.
Much of the internet bust was because of venture capitalists giving money to people with "a really great idea" and no business plan.
They saw people making money, and they didn't see any production costs, so they thought they should be able to make money for nothing, just because of the magical internet.
They invested in something they didn't understand.
>This won't happen with your plan. You forgot to
>steal people's underwear.
No need to steal- You just discourage them from desiring it.
You apparently didn't catch the reference:
Steal underwear.
???
Profit.
Your whole post had the same basic format.
Sorta like discouraging people from killing, and encouraging them to do something more productive instead.
Like planting flowers?
Or how about looking at sunsets?
Or even long walks in the park?
Wouldn't that just be
groovy?
I would say cut the $500 billion military budget and use for something more useful than killing random foreigners.
They aren't random.
Spend $200 billions developing an high-bandwith communications infrastructure to every citizen.
High-speed porn will not help the economy.
Develop an National University level educational program that takes advantage of that infrastructure. The programs would be tailored for creative intellectual property development. It doesn't have to be high-tech engineering/science. Just stuff that people could use to come up with new ideas. Must include business-like entrepreneurial training (marketing/management...). It could be cooking school for chefs to come up with new recipes, it could be engineering programs, it could be the arts, and so on... Avoid churning out low-ip degrees, like accounting or law.:)
We have the best higher-level educational system on the planet. Less lawyers and accountants sounds like a good idea, until you have to pay for a lawyer or an accountant because you have been sued or audited. Then you will wish that this country was awash with them.
Allow every US citizen to get a new degree to raise their educational level. Call it the "Everybody-gets-a-new-job" program. Fund it with $200 billion. This could fund 10 million people a year at $20,000/person/year.
I am already going to school on government loans, and anybody who can get passing grades can get government loans too.
Create a $200 billion venture capital fund. This could be used as seed capital for 200,000 new starup businesses. (that's a lot of businesses..) Allocate funds to new companies based on ideas developed from educational program. The new businesses could be things like restaurants or engineering firms or movie studios, for example... Points for companies that can create more US jobs. Each new company probably could hire 10 people/million dollar investment. That would add about 2 million jobs.
I thought we would have learned by now that blindly throwing money at MBA's with "a brilliant new idea" is not good investment practices.
Profit.
This won't happen with your plan.
You forgot to steal people's underwear.
When the press-conference of NASA was given about their revolutionairy findings, CNN was the only channel (at least here in The Netherlands) that paid attention to it. But as soon as it became clear that they had found indications for water, and NOT little green man, they immediately switched to other news. I think they only showed about 4 minutes of the press-conference. That shows how much (or lack of) interest the press and most of the public have in this mission. And I think it's sad, looking at the importance of it all.
No, that's not sad, that is an appropriate response. Water? I thought we already know there was water there, in the polar ice caps. How is this new information, really? If they had found even the remnants of even the most basic bacteria, everybody would still be talking about it. Instead they said that there used to be water in that area. Big deal. Why don't they hold a press conference and announce their big huge discovery:
"Ladies and gentleman, after hundreds of millions of dollars and years of effort, we have discovered that Mars has rocks." And just 300 meters? That is about the length of a city block. The vast majority of people who watch CNN are more interested in Laci Peterson, and that might not be something wrong with the people watching CNN. If NASA wants press coverage, they should do something worth that press coverage, like Air Force test pilots, all named "Buzz", playing golf on mars: now that would be cool.
Only on Slashdot is an entire article posted about the command line being the "best newbie interface." The rest of the modern, non-UNIX-obsessed computing world laughs in response. Riiiight...the command-line is the best interface for newbies...
I would have to agree with you. People can be trained to use the command line, even if they have never used a computer before, but plenty of people have used a graphical interface and never even seen a command line.
What I actually view as the most intuitive interface is an actual dialog, the program asking you simple questions, and you responding with simple answers. This can easily be non-graphical, but it doesn't have to be. The main problem with this is it's lack of flexibility.
As an example of what I mean:
Which sort of numbers would you like to do math on:
integers (..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3,...)
rational numbers (a/b)
real numbers (..., -3.12345, 0.227, 12e97,...)
complex numbers (a+bi)
?
4 Please enter a complex number (a):4+3i Please enter a second complex number (b):9-12i
a+b =...
a-b =...
a*b =...
And so forth. This is the easist sort of interface to deal with, assuming that you know what the program is even talking about. You don't really need to know anything except how to use the keyboard. The only problem is, unless a system can handle a wide variaty of inputs, and basically comprehend the English language (or whatever native language of the user), this will be way to inflexible for most things.
Or does being a wage slave in a 'democracy' that continously erodes our rights whilst we all sit and munch fried chicken watching the pap that the mass media serves us *not* count as servile surrender?
There is no massive government conspiracy designed to:
keeping you in a low paying job,
forcing you to eat fast food,
or forcing you to watch NBC.
That is your own ineptness is action.
Welcome to reality.
However, he is proposing something different, which is that you use "gravity" to provide free propulsive power in a repeatable cycle. That's not going to work.
Sure it is. You just set up a gravitational potential energy collector (GPEC) to charge a bunch of batteries to power the plane with. There already is a massive fully-operational GPEC near Las Vegas, and the government plans to build more.
It's unfortunate that Intel didn't publicise it as a positive thing (increased compatability) but it's not like they lied or withheld the information.
No kidding. I was expecting a slightly modified "consumer-grade" Itanium, possibly renamed the Pentium-64 or some such, and then AMD having to scrap their 64-bit chip to copy the Itanium. That's what I would have done if I were Intel. Think about it: no real development costs, lots of new development cost for your only real competitor, and the ability to pitch the 8086 finally. The only real cost would be a new advertising campaign, and manufacturing facility conversion.
I ask these questions not (just) to be a smartass, but because I have recently gone back to school and am wondering what the best course of action is. I know what sorts of skills my company (and related companies in the area) are after, and I don't see any such thing offered at the universities.
As much as it goes against my generally libertarian tendencies (not to be confused with the marginal political party of the same name), there should be a real, state-run certification system, just like there is for plumbers or electricians. As it is, I would recommend a comp sci degree if you can handle all of the math, and you could always resort to getting a sysadmin job afterwords when the job market isn't good. If you can't handle the math, then a comp sci degree is a very bad idea. Probably a business degree would take you farther than an MIS, if you already have real world experience as a sysadmin.
"Real Education" comes from experience. You can't buy it (even from the hallowed halls of academia).
Quite right. A good university will take your money and flunk you without a second thought.
I work for a big fat fortune 500 company.
Most people do.
Every summer, we get interns from local colleges. Most of them have, or are finishing up master's degrees in IT or comp sci.
A degree in "IT" or "MIS" or "CIS" or whatever else a college wants to call it is worthless. Those are people who take courses in Microsoft Word.
A few of them will talk your ear off about compiler design or some interesting theory about parsers, etc. While this is all well and good for 'around the water cooler' conversations, when it comes to carrying out real tasks (ie. the mail server is throwing errors, go check it out) they don't know what to do.
A computer science degree is not designed to prepare you to run some mail server. A computer science degree is designed to prepare you to be able to write a mail server. For that sort of thing, you need all sorts of theory.
Someone with ANY experience, or at least some technical training (like an MCSA or MCSE or whatever) would at least know where the event log is and be able to make an educated guess as to what's going on.
An MCSA or MCSE would only know wher it was on a Windows server. I would really hate to see the results of some MCSE triying to fix Sendmail.
Then, of course, that is the whole point of internships, to get these folks the experience they need to actually be able to do something productive. (and it gives us first crack at offering them a job)
Quite true, but most of that "real world experience" is in regards to an office environment in general, which is a rather strange place to someone who has been in college for the last four years. It is not supposed to be OJT.
Someone with an MCSE and zero experience is no better (or worse) off than someone with a Master's and zero experience.
Someone with a M.S. in computer science has already written hundreds (possibly thousands) of pages of code covering a wide array of subjects that has all been reviewed by people who have spent many years in the field. They may have produced a thesis, which represents about a year of work in something non-trival and mostly original. An MCSE managed to pass a test.
First off, as a FreeBSD user, I must quote the venerable Nelson: "Ha, haaa!"
What I want to know is the percentage of professionally installed and maintained servers that was actually vulnerable.
Now, on a more serious note, my belief as to why Linux fared worse than your average BSD is this: Linux is often the first foray into the world of Unix for people these days, including a lot of people not particularly qualified to run a server. BSD is generally viewed as less friendly to new users (a not entirely incorrect view) and therefore sees a lot less MCSE's looking to pad their resume. Given a good administrator, there should be no real difference between a Linux and a BSD server, since most of the stuff past the kernel level is exactly the same anyway.
Operators function as verbs.
Variables and constants function as nouns.
I won't be happy with any programming language until I can split an infinitive in it.
Re:So .... what's their plan of action?
on
ISS May Have A Leak
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· Score: 4, Informative
Ugh... three different units of measurement for the same thing in one sentence. Does anyone know the SI units for confusion?
The S.I. unit for pressure would be kg/(m sec**2), normally referred to as Pascal, or Pa for short.
1 mmHg ~= 133.32 Pa.
1 psi ~= 6894.8 Pa.
1 atm = 101325 Pa.
1 bar = 1e5 Pa, therefore 1 mbar = 100 Pa.
Would you also like to know torr, inHg, and inH2O?
How can you tell a mathematician from an engineer? A mathematician won't use units anywhere in an equation, whereas the engineer will use 6 different units for the same thing in the same equation, just to make things interesting.
Re:So .... what's their plan of action?
on
ISS May Have A Leak
·
· Score: 5, Informative
1000 times? they don't have to wait that long.25psi is 1/58th of an atmosphere, in 30 days they would be down to.5 atmospheres, which seems like it would be getting pretty dangerous to me.
They are losing 2 mmHg daily, which is 0.03867 psi daily.
Normal atmospheric pressure is 760 mmHg, and 0.5 atm is 380 mmHg.
If this leak is at a constant rate (which might not be true) then it will take 190 days to get down to 0.5 atm, which is about half a year.
Also, I suspect that a healthy man could be subjected to well below 0.5 atm, especially if the pressure were reduced so gradually.
It depends upon how you define "cost". There is a very high cost for the 1st unit of a drug - which covers all the research and infrastructure requirements. After that, the incremental cost of producing more units is usually pretty low.
You have to amortize the cost of development over the whole run. The production costs for most medicine, or technology for that matter, are generally only a small percentage of the cost. Computer software is on the extreme end of this example, with practically no unit production cost at all, but huge development cost.
If Americans are allowed to import their drugs freely from countries like Canada, then something like this will happen. Don't get me wrong though, I support the plans to re-import drugs. Why should we pay for Canadians' drugs? Let's break it now.
Yes, but why don't we have plans to switch away from fossil fuels? Why don't we have plans to make a more self-reliant society? Why don't we have plans to benefit all of mankind?
It's kind of sad to look back at the ignoble plans we have made and realize that we haven't really changed.
Why don't we have plans to give everybody in the world flowers, and a puppy? Its sad to look back at the ignoble plans we have made and realize that not everybody has seen a rainbow yet.
The prices of drugs in Canada are lower because of government caps on prices. So in a sense, it is not free trade.
Some drugs are actually sold below cost because of the caps.
The drug companies end up treating them as loss leaders, because they couldn't get away legally with selectively not selling certian drugs.
The easy way for a company to deal with this would be to only officially be a medical research company, and have each individual drug spun off with it's own company.
That way, Merck (or whoever) could license Viagra to ViagraCorp, which would choose not to do business in countries where it can't turn a profit, but the cheaper medications' companies would still continue business there.
This way the bigger company would not be violating Canadian laws, and wouldn't even be subject to Canadian laws, since all of it's transactions would be with newly formed American companies (ViagraCorp, TylenolCorp, etc,).
Canadians would be forced to fix their legislation, or do without.
Ah yes, the infamous Darwin equation:
Cd = log(Nf ** Sbac) / Nf,
where Nf is the number of firearms within 100 meters,
Sbac is the summation of the blood-alchohol content of all the people in 100 meters,
Then Cd is the Darwin coefficient, an estimation of the likelyhood of Natural selection playing itself out amongst the group.
Some guy that is friends with an obvious gun nutcase...
I think it is safe to assume that they weren't friends, and that they most definitely aren't now.
I am a gun owner, and several of my friends are gun owners, and while I have gone shooting with some of them on occasion, it is generally the case that we don't use each other as the targets.
Re:to a less-than-interesting reply
on
Exporting Myself?
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I don't think I wasted their time. If they didn't want to respond, they didn't have to.
...
If you think you wasted your time, that's your problem.
No, I think you wasted my time, and yes, that is my problem.
But hey, what is Slashdot for, if not wasting time?
However, you are probably a troll, who would post something nasty no matter what I said.
Yeah sure, that's right, I'm a troll.
People like you all over Slashdot are happy to attack details (relevant or otherwise) and ignorantly go off on tangents about which you know little or nothing, while blatantly ignoring or baselessly refuting key issues.
I think you are the one blatantly ignoring key issues.
Let's have a little more information, in order to get at why you have had such issues with success.
18 November 2001:
I sometimes dream of mixing languages to get the best from each. However, wherever I work, the boss tends to pick out everything for me, which usually means VB on a completely Microsoft platform.
So you were a VB "programmer".
20 November 2001:
I used to work for a company whose star product was an AI-drive porn-filtering web proxy. Our biggest prospective clients were the governments of China and Saudi Arabia. They didn't want just a porn filter, though; they wanted to block plenty of religious and political sites, too. Fortunately, the filtering software never even worked in the first place.
So, you had no issues working for people who were doing something that you apparently find immoral, and also have no issues with your employer failing.
22 November 2001:
I used to be employable without a college degree. Since last fall nobody will even interview me. Now I'm wasting two years and thousands of dollars in a small university where I'm learning next to nothing, just so I can get a damn B.S. so someone might hire me.
So, as a high-and-mighty VB programmer with roughly 3 years experience at this point, went to college for a computer science degree, thinking you were wasting your time and not learning anything, and were only there to try to get hired.
28 December 2001
Before last year, I could find work without a degree. However, I found that since October 2000, nobody even wants to interview me. So, I'm back in college for a BS of CS. The fastest I could possibly complete it would be in 2 years, but since I'm trying to work at the same time, it will take me 3. C'est la vie.
So you rushed through your degree as fast as possible.
11 February 2002:
Before the bubble burst, I had a measly B.A. in Spanish, but I still got hired at startups for various jobs, mostly web-oriented stuff like search engines. I made as much as $650/wk for a short while, which ain't too shabby for where I live.
So, I've decided to use up my remaining financial aid (even though it will add to my debt) to return to college for a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm hardly learning anything, since I already learned plenty on the job. (Unfortunately, my university does not count life experience for college credit.) Some professors have even told me that I am capable of teaching their classes, but that won't get me out of the credit requirements.
So you think you already learned plenty as a VB programmer.
I am sure the average VB programmer is qualified to teach computer science classes, yeah right.
I suspect that the only thing you are qualified to teach is Freshman Spanish (which would pay $30,000 in the right area, by the way).
It will allow you full acceleration and power anytime you want it for a maximum of 20 seconds (should be plenty for emergency situations), then it will throttle you back and reduce speed to the regular limit in the chip and wouldn't allow full acceleration again for 2 minutes after.
And what if I have a valid reason to exceed the posted speed limit for longer than 20 seconds?
As an example, my father was rushed to the hospital by his father when he was a kid, after he got his big toe cut off, at around 100-mph the whole trip. With your contraption, he could have bled to death on the way there.
It cracked me up how much people harped on how "crappy" the standard of living is in other countries. The fact is the worst home I ever has was in Pennsylvania, complete with cockroaches, mold, and even sulphur and fecal matter in the water. One guy said that I was "naive"...well, the fact I didn't mention that I have lived in other countries before doesn't mean I didn't.
I am glad you were entertained.
That is the sort of conditions expected in India or Mexico;
That is hardly common in Pennsylvania;
perhaps you should have considered moving somewhere down the block?
It is very easy to break a lease if you can factually claim to such negligence on the part of the landlord, and even get the building condemned in the process.
Why did you stay there?
Were you not paying rent?
I also didn't mention that I started working professionally in programming in 1998, after a few years of hobby programming--I'm no spring chicken. I've continued to program as a hobby during my downtime. I signed up with Monster in its first year, and it's never been any help to me.
5 years of experience is by no means a veteran.
I didn't mention that I have a son. For me, working isn't all about glamor and a huge $30K salary. (Yes, that is good money for where I live.) It's about making enough money to live on and support him. I'm afraid the local mini-marts don't provide that kind of paycheck.
That is by no means a lofty salary, you can make $30,000 driving a semi: perhaps you should consider a career change?
Do you really want your son raised in whatever country you plan on moving to?
The one piece of advice I keep getting that seems to ring true is about personal networking...which is why I'm looking forward to relying on nepotism, as soon as I find an influential relative.
Nepotism is for incompetents.
I don't hold it against anybody who gave me useless advice because I didn't tell them everything about myself. But like I said, I was looking for general answers, and I largely got what I wanted.
My, how gracious of you.
Did you ever think that maybe they should hold it against you for wasting their time?
Slashdot Mirror
The "president of congress" is not the "president". If you watch C-SPAN sometime, you will notice that people keep on talking to "Mr. President", asking for more time for their speech, or to hold some vote, or for a quorum call, or who knows what else; Bush is not in the room at the time.
If you have a bachelor's degree, then you should start out as an officer. A 2nd lieutenant makes about $27,000. If you have a degree in computer science and don't suck, you will get promoted very quickly.
The military is of paramount importance. Why? Because other countries have militaries too, and sometimes other countries aren't run by the nicest people in the world.
>High-speed porn will not help the economy.
And I disagree on that one as well.
Time you spend jacking off in front of your computer, is time that you are not being a productive and vibrant element of the national economy.
OK then, the moment the population feels the need for millions of low-valued lawyers and accountants, then you start to develop those professions. But, right now, we don't need low-IP professions. I have no fear of being sued or audited? Do you?
The more money you handle, the more likely you are to arrive in a situation where you need lawyers and accountants. When I need one, I will pay one. Since this produces work for lawyers and accountants, more people naturally try to go into those fields in order to make money. Welcome to Econ 101. And yes, I have found occasional need for an accountant, and even for a lawyer.
The point was not to fund the loans, but to fund the programs. We need to make it accessible to anyone that desires it. Right now, if I wanted to be an engineer, I have to be admitted to an engineering program. Those aren't easy to get into. Why? Because there aren't enough engineering programs around the country, and so they set ridiculously high standards for admissions. This discourages even more people from applying. Should there be 10x many more engineering programs (supply) the pace of development would pick up.
We do not need to make it accessable to anyone who desires it, just to anyone who whould be capable of it. And in spite of those "ridiculously high standards for admissions", lots of people who do get in manage to flunk out, because it is too hard. Some people just aren't intelligent enough.
Also, you can't get government loans to pay off all your school costs.
Life isn't a free ride, nor should it be. I manage to live off of my loans. I have to live rather meagerly, and my parents have to pay for some things still, like clothing, but that is okay.
That may be the case in YOUR business investments :) But believe it or not, there actually have been businesses that were successfully run by MBAs.
Much of the internet bust was because of venture capitalists giving money to people with "a really great idea" and no business plan. They saw people making money, and they didn't see any production costs, so they thought they should be able to make money for nothing, just because of the magical internet. They invested in something they didn't understand.
>This won't happen with your plan. You forgot to
>steal people's underwear.
No need to steal- You just discourage them from desiring it.
You apparently didn't catch the reference:
- Steal underwear.
- ???
- Profit.
Your whole post had the same basic format.Sorta like discouraging people from killing, and encouraging them to do something more productive instead.
Like planting flowers? Or how about looking at sunsets? Or even long walks in the park? Wouldn't that just be groovy?
They aren't random.
Spend $200 billions developing an high-bandwith communications infrastructure to every citizen.
High-speed porn will not help the economy.
Develop an National University level educational program that takes advantage of that infrastructure. The programs would be tailored for creative intellectual property development. It doesn't have to be high-tech engineering/science. Just stuff that people could use to come up with new ideas. Must include business-like entrepreneurial training (marketing/management...). It could be cooking school for chefs to come up with new recipes, it could be engineering programs, it could be the arts, and so on... Avoid churning out low-ip degrees, like accounting or law. :)
We have the best higher-level educational system on the planet. Less lawyers and accountants sounds like a good idea, until you have to pay for a lawyer or an accountant because you have been sued or audited. Then you will wish that this country was awash with them.
Allow every US citizen to get a new degree to raise their educational level. Call it the "Everybody-gets-a-new-job" program. Fund it with $200 billion. This could fund 10 million people a year at $20,000/person/year.
I am already going to school on government loans, and anybody who can get passing grades can get government loans too.
Create a $200 billion venture capital fund. This could be used as seed capital for 200,000 new starup businesses. (that's a lot of businesses..) Allocate funds to new companies based on ideas developed from educational program. The new businesses could be things like restaurants or engineering firms or movie studios, for example... Points for companies that can create more US jobs. Each new company probably could hire 10 people/million dollar investment. That would add about 2 million jobs.
I thought we would have learned by now that blindly throwing money at MBA's with "a brilliant new idea" is not good investment practices.
Profit.
This won't happen with your plan. You forgot to steal people's underwear.
No, that's not sad, that is an appropriate response. Water? I thought we already know there was water there, in the polar ice caps. How is this new information, really? If they had found even the remnants of even the most basic bacteria, everybody would still be talking about it. Instead they said that there used to be water in that area. Big deal. Why don't they hold a press conference and announce their big huge discovery: "Ladies and gentleman, after hundreds of millions of dollars and years of effort, we have discovered that Mars has rocks." And just 300 meters? That is about the length of a city block. The vast majority of people who watch CNN are more interested in Laci Peterson, and that might not be something wrong with the people watching CNN. If NASA wants press coverage, they should do something worth that press coverage, like Air Force test pilots, all named "Buzz", playing golf on mars: now that would be cool.
I would have to agree with you. People can be trained to use the command line, even if they have never used a computer before, but plenty of people have used a graphical interface and never even seen a command line.
What I actually view as the most intuitive interface is an actual dialog, the program asking you simple questions, and you responding with simple answers. This can easily be non-graphical, but it doesn't have to be. The main problem with this is it's lack of flexibility. As an example of what I mean:
Which sort of numbers would you like to do math on:
- integers (..., -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3,
...)
- rational numbers (a/b)
- real numbers (..., -3.12345, 0.227, 12e97,
...)
- complex numbers (a+bi)
? 4Please enter a complex number (a): 4+3i
Please enter a second complex number (b): 9-12i
a+b =
a-b =
a*b =
And so forth. This is the easist sort of interface to deal with, assuming that you know what the program is even talking about. You don't really need to know anything except how to use the keyboard. The only problem is, unless a system can handle a wide variaty of inputs, and basically comprehend the English language (or whatever native language of the user), this will be way to inflexible for most things.
There is no massive government conspiracy designed to:
- keeping you in a low paying job,
- forcing you to eat fast food,
- or forcing you to watch NBC.
That is your own ineptness is action. Welcome to reality.Sure it is. You just set up a gravitational potential energy collector (GPEC) to charge a bunch of batteries to power the plane with. There already is a massive fully-operational GPEC near Las Vegas, and the government plans to build more.
No kidding. I was expecting a slightly modified "consumer-grade" Itanium, possibly renamed the Pentium-64 or some such, and then AMD having to scrap their 64-bit chip to copy the Itanium. That's what I would have done if I were Intel. Think about it: no real development costs, lots of new development cost for your only real competitor, and the ability to pitch the 8086 finally. The only real cost would be a new advertising campaign, and manufacturing facility conversion.
As much as it goes against my generally libertarian tendencies (not to be confused with the marginal political party of the same name), there should be a real, state-run certification system, just like there is for plumbers or electricians. As it is, I would recommend a comp sci degree if you can handle all of the math, and you could always resort to getting a sysadmin job afterwords when the job market isn't good. If you can't handle the math, then a comp sci degree is a very bad idea. Probably a business degree would take you farther than an MIS, if you already have real world experience as a sysadmin.
Quite right. A good university will take your money and flunk you without a second thought.
I work for a big fat fortune 500 company.
Most people do.
Every summer, we get interns from local colleges. Most of them have, or are finishing up master's degrees in IT or comp sci.
A degree in "IT" or "MIS" or "CIS" or whatever else a college wants to call it is worthless. Those are people who take courses in Microsoft Word.
A few of them will talk your ear off about compiler design or some interesting theory about parsers, etc. While this is all well and good for 'around the water cooler' conversations, when it comes to carrying out real tasks (ie. the mail server is throwing errors, go check it out) they don't know what to do.
A computer science degree is not designed to prepare you to run some mail server. A computer science degree is designed to prepare you to be able to write a mail server. For that sort of thing, you need all sorts of theory.
Someone with ANY experience, or at least some technical training (like an MCSA or MCSE or whatever) would at least know where the event log is and be able to make an educated guess as to what's going on.
An MCSA or MCSE would only know wher it was on a Windows server. I would really hate to see the results of some MCSE triying to fix Sendmail.
Then, of course, that is the whole point of internships, to get these folks the experience they need to actually be able to do something productive. (and it gives us first crack at offering them a job)
Quite true, but most of that "real world experience" is in regards to an office environment in general, which is a rather strange place to someone who has been in college for the last four years. It is not supposed to be OJT.
Someone with an MCSE and zero experience is no better (or worse) off than someone with a Master's and zero experience.
Someone with a M.S. in computer science has already written hundreds (possibly thousands) of pages of code covering a wide array of subjects that has all been reviewed by people who have spent many years in the field. They may have produced a thesis, which represents about a year of work in something non-trival and mostly original. An MCSE managed to pass a test.
First off, as a FreeBSD user, I must quote the venerable Nelson: "Ha, haaa!"
What I want to know is the percentage of professionally installed and maintained servers that was actually vulnerable.
Now, on a more serious note, my belief as to why Linux fared worse than your average BSD is this: Linux is often the first foray into the world of Unix for people these days, including a lot of people not particularly qualified to run a server. BSD is generally viewed as less friendly to new users (a not entirely incorrect view) and therefore sees a lot less MCSE's looking to pad their resume. Given a good administrator, there should be no real difference between a Linux and a BSD server, since most of the stuff past the kernel level is exactly the same anyway.
I really hope you are inflating that number, that would pay for a whole year of real education.
Operators function as verbs. Variables and constants function as nouns.
I won't be happy with any programming language until I can split an infinitive in it.
The S.I. unit for pressure would be kg/(m sec**2), normally referred to as Pascal, or Pa for short. 1 mmHg ~= 133.32 Pa. 1 psi ~= 6894.8 Pa. 1 atm = 101325 Pa. 1 bar = 1e5 Pa, therefore 1 mbar = 100 Pa. Would you also like to know torr, inHg, and inH2O?
How can you tell a mathematician from an engineer? A mathematician won't use units anywhere in an equation, whereas the engineer will use 6 different units for the same thing in the same equation, just to make things interesting.
They are losing 2 mmHg daily, which is 0.03867 psi daily. Normal atmospheric pressure is 760 mmHg, and 0.5 atm is 380 mmHg. If this leak is at a constant rate (which might not be true) then it will take 190 days to get down to 0.5 atm, which is about half a year. Also, I suspect that a healthy man could be subjected to well below 0.5 atm, especially if the pressure were reduced so gradually.
Well, you probably weigh at least 75kg, that much stardust would have a really high street value.
You have to amortize the cost of development over the whole run. The production costs for most medicine, or technology for that matter, are generally only a small percentage of the cost. Computer software is on the extreme end of this example, with practically no unit production cost at all, but huge development cost.
If Americans are allowed to import their drugs freely from countries like Canada, then something like this will happen. Don't get me wrong though, I support the plans to re-import drugs. Why should we pay for Canadians' drugs? Let's break it now.
Yes, but why don't we have plans to switch away from fossil fuels? Why don't we have plans to make a more self-reliant society? Why don't we have plans to benefit all of mankind?
It's kind of sad to look back at the ignoble plans we have made and realize that we haven't really changed.
Why don't we have plans to give everybody in the world flowers, and a puppy? Its sad to look back at the ignoble plans we have made and realize that not everybody has seen a rainbow yet.
Some drugs are actually sold below cost because of the caps. The drug companies end up treating them as loss leaders, because they couldn't get away legally with selectively not selling certian drugs.
The easy way for a company to deal with this would be to only officially be a medical research company, and have each individual drug spun off with it's own company. That way, Merck (or whoever) could license Viagra to ViagraCorp, which would choose not to do business in countries where it can't turn a profit, but the cheaper medications' companies would still continue business there. This way the bigger company would not be violating Canadian laws, and wouldn't even be subject to Canadian laws, since all of it's transactions would be with newly formed American companies (ViagraCorp, TylenolCorp, etc,). Canadians would be forced to fix their legislation, or do without.
Ah yes, the infamous Darwin equation:
Cd = log(Nf ** Sbac) / Nf,
where Nf is the number of firearms within 100 meters,
Sbac is the summation of the blood-alchohol content of all the people in 100 meters,
Then Cd is the Darwin coefficient, an estimation of the likelyhood of Natural selection playing itself out amongst the group.
I think it is safe to assume that they weren't friends, and that they most definitely aren't now. I am a gun owner, and several of my friends are gun owners, and while I have gone shooting with some of them on occasion, it is generally the case that we don't use each other as the targets.
I don't think I wasted their time. If they didn't want to respond, they didn't have to.
...
If you think you wasted your time, that's your problem.
No, I think you wasted my time, and yes, that is my problem. But hey, what is Slashdot for, if not wasting time?
However, you are probably a troll, who would post something nasty no matter what I said.
Yeah sure, that's right, I'm a troll.
People like you all over Slashdot are happy to attack details (relevant or otherwise) and ignorantly go off on tangents about which you know little or nothing, while blatantly ignoring or baselessly refuting key issues.
I think you are the one blatantly ignoring key issues. Let's have a little more information, in order to get at why you have had such issues with success.
18 November 2001: I sometimes dream of mixing languages to get the best from each. However, wherever I work, the boss tends to pick out everything for me, which usually means VB on a completely Microsoft platform.
So you were a VB "programmer".
20 November 2001: I used to work for a company whose star product was an AI-drive porn-filtering web proxy. Our biggest prospective clients were the governments of China and Saudi Arabia. They didn't want just a porn filter, though; they wanted to block plenty of religious and political sites, too. Fortunately, the filtering software never even worked in the first place.
So, you had no issues working for people who were doing something that you apparently find immoral, and also have no issues with your employer failing.
22 November 2001: I used to be employable without a college degree. Since last fall nobody will even interview me. Now I'm wasting two years and thousands of dollars in a small university where I'm learning next to nothing, just so I can get a damn B.S. so someone might hire me.
So, as a high-and-mighty VB programmer with roughly 3 years experience at this point, went to college for a computer science degree, thinking you were wasting your time and not learning anything, and were only there to try to get hired.
28 December 2001 Before last year, I could find work without a degree. However, I found that since October 2000, nobody even wants to interview me. So, I'm back in college for a BS of CS. The fastest I could possibly complete it would be in 2 years, but since I'm trying to work at the same time, it will take me 3. C'est la vie.
So you rushed through your degree as fast as possible.
11 February 2002: Before the bubble burst, I had a measly B.A. in Spanish, but I still got hired at startups for various jobs, mostly web-oriented stuff like search engines. I made as much as $650/wk for a short while, which ain't too shabby for where I live.
So, I've decided to use up my remaining financial aid (even though it will add to my debt) to return to college for a B.S. in Computer Science. I'm hardly learning anything, since I already learned plenty on the job. (Unfortunately, my university does not count life experience for college credit.) Some professors have even told me that I am capable of teaching their classes, but that won't get me out of the credit requirements.
So you think you already learned plenty as a VB programmer. I am sure the average VB programmer is qualified to teach computer science classes, yeah right. I suspect that the only thing you are qualified to teach is Freshman Spanish (which would pay $30,000 in the right area, by the way).
And what if I have a valid reason to exceed the posted speed limit for longer than 20 seconds? As an example, my father was rushed to the hospital by his father when he was a kid, after he got his big toe cut off, at around 100-mph the whole trip. With your contraption, he could have bled to death on the way there.
It cracked me up how much people harped on how "crappy" the standard of living is in other countries. The fact is the worst home I ever has was in Pennsylvania, complete with cockroaches, mold, and even sulphur and fecal matter in the water. One guy said that I was "naive"...well, the fact I didn't mention that I have lived in other countries before doesn't mean I didn't.
I am glad you were entertained. That is the sort of conditions expected in India or Mexico; That is hardly common in Pennsylvania; perhaps you should have considered moving somewhere down the block? It is very easy to break a lease if you can factually claim to such negligence on the part of the landlord, and even get the building condemned in the process. Why did you stay there? Were you not paying rent?
I also didn't mention that I started working professionally in programming in 1998, after a few years of hobby programming--I'm no spring chicken. I've continued to program as a hobby during my downtime. I signed up with Monster in its first year, and it's never been any help to me.
5 years of experience is by no means a veteran.
I didn't mention that I have a son. For me, working isn't all about glamor and a huge $30K salary. (Yes, that is good money for where I live.) It's about making enough money to live on and support him. I'm afraid the local mini-marts don't provide that kind of paycheck.
That is by no means a lofty salary, you can make $30,000 driving a semi: perhaps you should consider a career change? Do you really want your son raised in whatever country you plan on moving to?
The one piece of advice I keep getting that seems to ring true is about personal networking...which is why I'm looking forward to relying on nepotism, as soon as I find an influential relative.
Nepotism is for incompetents.
I don't hold it against anybody who gave me useless advice because I didn't tell them everything about myself. But like I said, I was looking for general answers, and I largely got what I wanted.
My, how gracious of you. Did you ever think that maybe they should hold it against you for wasting their time?