IIRC, when I first saw a video about these things, one of the problems is that when a motor boat goes by they will jump out of the water high and hard enough to injure people in the boat. In the video they were flying outta the water by the hundreds. All you gotta do is set up your nets to catch them in mid-air and "drive around" in your boat. No harm to the native species at all.
I would prefer that all sites offer the option of registering with your real name via a charge to a real credit card, NOT a debit or gift card. The money could go to the site or even to a charity. Then, if I had registered in such a manner, I would have the option of filtering out all non-registered users and even threads proceeding from their comments. It should be easy to click a button to turn the filter on and off, directly within the reading interface.
Then I could block most of the trolls when I want and easily see other comments if I am willing to weed through the trolls.
All sites should have downvoting but also have mechanisms to detect and de-register malicious downvoters, whether working alone or as an organized mob. Unregistered people should not be able to downvote registered people.
Sites should also offer white-lists, both manual and automatic. Only someone with good karma or badges or whatever should be able to vote at all.
I'm seriously thinking of droppping/. And doing all of my forum messaging through StackExchange.
...and stop trying to take over the internet by adding proprietary extensions to said standards. Stop trying to push MS server or development products by tweaking the browser to work better with said products.
The browser wars are over. MS won the battle but is loosing the war. They need to drop the insurgency and learn to play nice if they want to play at all.
My grandkids will TELL you that they know the difference between games and real life. But then they play-fight a hell of a lot more rough than my brother & I did, partially because they are imitating the characters in their games, as is evidenced by the fact that they quote the games as they are literally kicking each other in the ribs as hard as they can. They compete to see who can make the closest imitation of some attack move while the "victim" endures the pain and risk of injury without complaint because the victims of the attacks in the games aren't really people so they don't / can't complain. Yes, they take turns being non-person punching bags because that is how it works in the games they spend every possible minute playing.
Now these are smart kids, aged 6 & 8, with normal empathy in other situations. But when they start acting out their games in "meat-space" they really do loose perspective and end up going overboard and often hurt one another.
My mom used to spend a lot of time explaining the whys and wherefores of everything she didn't want us to do. Bottom line? We stopped doing it just so we wouldn't have to listen to her drone on again.
Then you end up with a massive pile of disorganized crap written in a thousand different voices for a thousand different audiences. If a company can't be bothered to hire a good technical writer to create an organized, consistent documentation system then I am not interested in their product. If a FLOSS project can't/won't attract the same, then I figure their product is probably crap too.
If you truly believe your product is good but you won't invest in good documentation, then you are (at the worst) signing your projects death warrant or (at the least) "hiding your light under a bushel" and drastically limiting its success.
Even if a FLOSS project doesn't pay a single developer, if it can't attract a good technical writer then it should hire one if it ever hopes to really be taken seriously. Even if all those developers are just doing it for practice and don't expect to commercialize the project at all, good documentation will cause that project to rise to the top and really help build the professional reputations of those developers.
It's legal now. Unfortunately, almost none of the real-estate agencies have modernized and there is no real incentive to do so. I used to do some IT consulting work for a real-estate agency so I looked up all the legal stuff and offered to get them all set up. They weren't interested in anything other than nursing along their decrepit old PCs.
Not true. Bill Clinton signed a law making digital signatures as binding as "real" ones. I don't recall the rewuired formats or technologies, but I have "signed" many forms by just typing my name and typing "I agree."
What you aren't taking into account is that it can take years and hundreds of person-hours building up that social network in the first place. If you are new in town, just starting in an industry, or didn't spend four years at Stanford carefully planning who you partied with, then that whole "work your social network" rap is practically worthless.
I was the IT manager of a hospital. The HIPAA rules apply. You can't repeat what you hear and you can't read what you weren't supposed to see. Seriously, learn to not even focus your eyes on private information. However, there is nothing wrong with using what you hear to help you make decisions about what you should do, such as leaving a business that is in financial trouble or setting aside some server space for that expansion someone is planning but didn't think to consult with IT about.
I agree. I like tools but I prefer them to fully expose what they are doing and why. I don't want my tools to hide the complexity, just reduce the tedious redundancy of implementing that complexity.
Slashdot reminds me of just how ignorant and yet unjustifiably arrogant and egotistical most tech nerds are. It sickens me to see so many people without the slightest degree of empathy or ability to understand that their limited experience is not (can not) be the be-all-end-all of reality.
There are a large variety of vision problems. Many make it difficult to change focus quickly or at all. How something as basic as this can escape so many people would be funny if it weren't so indicative of a general trend of horrible education and willful ignorance.
I know. If it weren't for idiots and trolls then/. wouldn't be/.. But if your traditions suck, then maybe you should really try to ditch them.
...is often used as a bullying tactic. The bully acts as if the victim is so much like a woman or like a gay man (often just because of the victim's size or build) that the bully just "can't resist" making advances toward the victim. These "advances" are often made loudly and publicly, with great fanfair, thus to emasculate the victim.
Because companies are regularly sued simply for not having something in thier policy. This applies to EPA, OSHA, and other regulations, in addition to sexual harrassment. You, are correct, redundancy is a bit of a waste of time and paper. However, if a company does not have a policy against X, then the law assumes they allow it (or at least do nothing to prevent it).
It is a false assumption that "people have no motivation to lie in a confidential study." People could lie to make themselves feel better. People lie to themselves all the time. Repeating that lie in an "official study" will definitely cement that false belief more firmly in thier head. Several studies have shown this. Some people could give false answers in a study, especially one of this nature, because they believe others will not be brave enough to come forward. So the respondant fudges the truth to, in their thinking, skew the results further toward what they think the "real" results should be. In other words, they ruin the survey by trying to "fix" it. Still other people may lie just to screw up the results, just for the hell of it. Yes, even young women.
Finally, there are many women who do not understand what sexual harrassment really is. These women tell dirty jokes, then get upset when the man laughing the loudest is not attractive to them. Women who act flirty and touchy one day, then the next day complain about that same man being flirty and touchy back. Many women believe that sexual harrassment is absolutely ANYTHING that makes them feel uncomfortable in ANY way. But this is too subjective. That is why "harassment" is defined as a continuing pattern of behavior that continues even AFTER someone has been asked to stop. Remember, this pattern must be either one person doing lots of things, or lots of things being done to one specific person or group by another specific group. A "pattern," in this context, is NOT establshed by a survey that shows lots of different disconnected people feeling uncomfortable about what happened in a lot of different, disconnected, situations. Many social researchers conflate these two definitions of "pattern" in order to gain more sympathy for their cause. This is called, "the fallacy of equivication."
This false belief in the sanctity of confidential surveys has got to stop if the "soft sciences" ever hope to gain the respect of "real scientists." There are means to control for various forms of false reporting but it requires designing your study very carefully from the beginning; A lot more than just using follow up interviews (Who is going to say, "Yeah, I lied in that study my professor required me to participate in for part of my grade"?).
This study was a great start. But all it really shows is that there is something that needs to be investigated further. Not to say that steps shouldn't be taken to aleviate the problem, if and where it exists. Just that you can't claim to have anything more than a vague grasp of the problem without a better study.
This is exactly why I don't do IT any more. All the responsibility to keep things working, no authority to make users or departments not screw things up, none of the credit when things go smoothly, but all of the blame when anything goes wrong (no matter who caused it), every department's poorly planned extra computer expenses come out of your budget, all that unpaid overtime means you are barely making minimum wage, you are constantly reminded that your job is hanging in the balance, AND you are expected to keep taking expensive certification classes on your own dime just for the priviledge of bending over for one more year.
"The fact that people in other countries are lining up to do the same work for cheap is concrete proof that it isn't as difficult work as you think."
No, it is only concrete proof that $19,000 seems like a lot of money to someone who comes from a country, most of which lives in abject poverty. Now that Chinese factory workers are demanding better pay, Chinese companies are moving jobs back to the U.S. When poverty levels finally start to drop in India then Indian IT workers will start to demand better pay.
The W3C is not a 501(c)(3) organization. They are a regular corporation that just doesn't happen to make a profit, so no taxes. It is actually easier that way.
I honestly think we multiple types of programmers, and we should stop trying to put them all in the same bucket. Most programming now days is not rocket science and a lot of programmers need an ego check.
Agreed. They don't call every job for people who make stuff out of wood "woodworker." There are framers and carpenters and cabinet makers and furniture builders...
We are lucky that we are still in the era when computer programming is new and the education system doesn't "get it" yet. In another generation or two, this will almost all be commodity work and programmers will be no more special than bookkeepers or plumbers or good cabinet makers. Sure, not everyone will know how to do it but how many programmers can fix their frikkin toilet, let alone plumb an entire house?
...because the electric motors that are available inexpensively for retrofit into a car often have a limited speed range where they have a useful torque to power-usage ratio. It's pretty funny to see someone shifting an old VW with an electric motor, but I have seen it.
Others have said it, so I am just adding my "vote."
If you haven't finished the philosophy degree, then go ahead and finish that (as you have time and money) because any degree is better than none. As someone who is "this close" to finishing my degree, sometimes I feel that hurts me more than if I had never started. (Yes, when I get some money, I will finish mine too.)
Don't waste your time or money on a CS degree. In my meager experience, for real-world programming, they don't teach much more than can be learned from some good books. Of course good books are hard to find too. Read reviews and ask friends for recommendations. A lot of programming books start strong and turn to crap about half-way through. If you start finding lots of errors and you are spending more time figuring out the errors than learning, move on to a different book. Come back to the bad book after you know more and take it as a challenge to solve those problems. But don't burn yourself out beating your head against a bad book if you just don't know enough to figure out the errors. You will kill your momentum. And momentum is key in education.
After you have a solid foundation in the programming language of your choice, start learning ancillary stuff like build systems, software testing, and how to deploy your programs to end users as a single installable file. None of this was taught at the universities I went to but they are really important in the professional world. I wish there was more information about this kind of stuff and that it was organized in some reasonable fashion. Unfortunately, it seems most of this info is buried in forums all over the internet.
After you have learned one language pretty well, start learning other languages too. The more the merrier. Then go back and pick up some advanced techniques in your earlier languages.
As you study, work on finding ways to actually show how much you know. Either in sample programs, contributions to open source projects, or certifications. Remember, "experience" does not mean that you got paid. So, if you have been diligently writing code for open source projects for a year, then you can say you have a year of experience. (Sure, plenty of people dink around for a year and call it "experience" but that shows up pretty fast in interviews.)
Look for "entry level" or "intern" jobs. They are rare but they are out there. There are some companies that almost exclusively hire junior programmers because they can pay them less and the company's business model does not require high level programming skills, just churning out a bunch of almost identical stuff. However, you may not find these companies where you live right now. Be willing to search all over and relocate. There is a company in College Station, TX that will hire you if you are willing to learn Microsoft.NET.
It is not always necessary for an article to be well written for it to have a good idea at its core. As a technical writer and former network manager, who spent over a decade on Usenet giving and reading advice, and has also studied education - I know that the success rate of any advice is very audience dependent. If your audience is going to be regular people, then you have to give advice that regular people can or will follow. If your audience is tech people, then you can be more technical. Duh. Sometimes the best advice about giving advice about technical things is to offer two versions. One for regular people and another for technical people. Subtly let the regular people know when they can stop reading. Try not to be too insulting.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, when I first saw a video about these things, one of the problems is that when a motor boat goes by they will jump out of the water high and hard enough to injure people in the boat. In the video they were flying outta the water by the hundreds. All you gotta do is set up your nets to catch them in mid-air and "drive around" in your boat. No harm to the native species at all.
I would prefer that all sites offer the option of registering with your real name via a charge to a real credit card, NOT a debit or gift card. The money could go to the site or even to a charity. Then, if I had registered in such a manner, I would have the option of filtering out all non-registered users and even threads proceeding from their comments. It should be easy to click a button to turn the filter on and off, directly within the reading interface.
Then I could block most of the trolls when I want and easily see other comments if I am willing to weed through the trolls.
All sites should have downvoting but also have mechanisms to detect and de-register malicious downvoters, whether working alone or as an organized mob. Unregistered people should not be able to downvote registered people.
Sites should also offer white-lists, both manual and automatic. Only someone with good karma or badges or whatever should be able to vote at all.
I'm seriously thinking of droppping /. And doing all of my forum messaging through StackExchange.
...and stop trying to take over the internet by adding proprietary extensions to said standards. Stop trying to push MS server or development products by tweaking the browser to work better with said products.
The browser wars are over. MS won the battle but is loosing the war. They need to drop the insurgency and learn to play nice if they want to play at all.
My grandkids will TELL you that they know the difference between games and real life. But then they play-fight a hell of a lot more rough than my brother & I did, partially because they are imitating the characters in their games, as is evidenced by the fact that they quote the games as they are literally kicking each other in the ribs as hard as they can. They compete to see who can make the closest imitation of some attack move while the "victim" endures the pain and risk of injury without complaint because the victims of the attacks in the games aren't really people so they don't / can't complain. Yes, they take turns being non-person punching bags because that is how it works in the games they spend every possible minute playing.
Now these are smart kids, aged 6 & 8, with normal empathy in other situations. But when they start acting out their games in "meat-space" they really do loose perspective and end up going overboard and often hurt one another.
My mom used to spend a lot of time explaining the whys and wherefores of everything she didn't want us to do. Bottom line? We stopped doing it just so we wouldn't have to listen to her drone on again.
Then you end up with a massive pile of disorganized crap written in a thousand different voices for a thousand different audiences. If a company can't be bothered to hire a good technical writer to create an organized, consistent documentation system then I am not interested in their product. If a FLOSS project can't/won't attract the same, then I figure their product is probably crap too.
If you truly believe your product is good but you won't invest in good documentation, then you are (at the worst) signing your projects death warrant or (at the least) "hiding your light under a bushel" and drastically limiting its success.
Even if a FLOSS project doesn't pay a single developer, if it can't attract a good technical writer then it should hire one if it ever hopes to really be taken seriously. Even if all those developers are just doing it for practice and don't expect to commercialize the project at all, good documentation will cause that project to rise to the top and really help build the professional reputations of those developers.
It's legal now. Unfortunately, almost none of the real-estate agencies have modernized and there is no real incentive to do so. I used to do some IT consulting work for a real-estate agency so I looked up all the legal stuff and offered to get them all set up. They weren't interested in anything other than nursing along their decrepit old PCs.
Not true. Bill Clinton signed a law making digital signatures as binding as "real" ones. I don't recall the rewuired formats or technologies, but I have "signed" many forms by just typing my name and typing "I agree."
What you aren't taking into account is that it can take years and hundreds of person-hours building up that social network in the first place. If you are new in town, just starting in an industry, or didn't spend four years at Stanford carefully planning who you partied with, then that whole "work your social network" rap is practically worthless.
Could you please tell us what field you are in and what kind of union you are a member of?
I was the IT manager of a hospital. The HIPAA rules apply. You can't repeat what you hear and you can't read what you weren't supposed to see. Seriously, learn to not even focus your eyes on private information. However, there is nothing wrong with using what you hear to help you make decisions about what you should do, such as leaving a business that is in financial trouble or setting aside some server space for that expansion someone is planning but didn't think to consult with IT about.
you go to where the volcano is if you want to study it as safely as possible.
I agree. I like tools but I prefer them to fully expose what they are doing and why. I don't want my tools to hide the complexity, just reduce the tedious redundancy of implementing that complexity.
Slashdot reminds me of just how ignorant and yet unjustifiably arrogant and egotistical most tech nerds are. It sickens me to see so many people without the slightest degree of empathy or ability to understand that their limited experience is not (can not) be the be-all-end-all of reality.
There are a large variety of vision problems. Many make it difficult to change focus quickly or at all. How something as basic as this can escape so many people would be funny if it weren't so indicative of a general trend of horrible education and willful ignorance.
I know. If it weren't for idiots and trolls then /. wouldn't be /.. But if your traditions suck, then maybe you should really try to ditch them.
...is often used as a bullying tactic. The bully acts as if the victim is so much like a woman or like a gay man (often just because of the victim's size or build) that the bully just "can't resist" making advances toward the victim. These "advances" are often made loudly and publicly, with great fanfair, thus to emasculate the victim.
Because companies are regularly sued simply for not having something in thier policy. This applies to EPA, OSHA, and other regulations, in addition to sexual harrassment. You, are correct, redundancy is a bit of a waste of time and paper. However, if a company does not have a policy against X, then the law assumes they allow it (or at least do nothing to prevent it).
It is a false assumption that "people have no motivation to lie in a confidential study." People could lie to make themselves feel better. People lie to themselves all the time. Repeating that lie in an "official study" will definitely cement that false belief more firmly in thier head. Several studies have shown this. Some people could give false answers in a study, especially one of this nature, because they believe others will not be brave enough to come forward. So the respondant fudges the truth to, in their thinking, skew the results further toward what they think the "real" results should be. In other words, they ruin the survey by trying to "fix" it. Still other people may lie just to screw up the results, just for the hell of it. Yes, even young women.
Finally, there are many women who do not understand what sexual harrassment really is. These women tell dirty jokes, then get upset when the man laughing the loudest is not attractive to them. Women who act flirty and touchy one day, then the next day complain about that same man being flirty and touchy back. Many women believe that sexual harrassment is absolutely ANYTHING that makes them feel uncomfortable in ANY way. But this is too subjective. That is why "harassment" is defined as a continuing pattern of behavior that continues even AFTER someone has been asked to stop. Remember, this pattern must be either one person doing lots of things, or lots of things being done to one specific person or group by another specific group. A "pattern," in this context, is NOT establshed by a survey that shows lots of different disconnected people feeling uncomfortable about what happened in a lot of different, disconnected, situations. Many social researchers conflate these two definitions of "pattern" in order to gain more sympathy for their cause. This is called, "the fallacy of equivication."
This false belief in the sanctity of confidential surveys has got to stop if the "soft sciences" ever hope to gain the respect of "real scientists." There are means to control for various forms of false reporting but it requires designing your study very carefully from the beginning; A lot more than just using follow up interviews (Who is going to say, "Yeah, I lied in that study my professor required me to participate in for part of my grade"?).
This study was a great start. But all it really shows is that there is something that needs to be investigated further. Not to say that steps shouldn't be taken to aleviate the problem, if and where it exists. Just that you can't claim to have anything more than a vague grasp of the problem without a better study.
This is exactly why I don't do IT any more. All the responsibility to keep things working, no authority to make users or departments not screw things up, none of the credit when things go smoothly, but all of the blame when anything goes wrong (no matter who caused it), every department's poorly planned extra computer expenses come out of your budget, all that unpaid overtime means you are barely making minimum wage, you are constantly reminded that your job is hanging in the balance, AND you are expected to keep taking expensive certification classes on your own dime just for the priviledge of bending over for one more year.
"The fact that people in other countries are lining up to do the same work for cheap is concrete proof that it isn't as difficult work as you think."
No, it is only concrete proof that $19,000 seems like a lot of money to someone who comes from a country, most of which lives in abject poverty. Now that Chinese factory workers are demanding better pay, Chinese companies are moving jobs back to the U.S. When poverty levels finally start to drop in India then Indian IT workers will start to demand better pay.
The W3C is not a 501(c)(3) organization. They are a regular corporation that just doesn't happen to make a profit, so no taxes. It is actually easier that way.
I don't think that reference means what you think it means.
I honestly think we multiple types of programmers, and we should stop trying to put them all in the same bucket. Most programming now days is not rocket science and a lot of programmers need an ego check.
Agreed. They don't call every job for people who make stuff out of wood "woodworker." There are framers and carpenters and cabinet makers and furniture builders...
We are lucky that we are still in the era when computer programming is new and the education system doesn't "get it" yet. In another generation or two, this will almost all be commodity work and programmers will be no more special than bookkeepers or plumbers or good cabinet makers. Sure, not everyone will know how to do it but how many programmers can fix their frikkin toilet, let alone plumb an entire house?
...because the electric motors that are available inexpensively for retrofit into a car often have a limited speed range where they have a useful torque to power-usage ratio. It's pretty funny to see someone shifting an old VW with an electric motor, but I have seen it.
Others have said it, so I am just adding my "vote."
If you haven't finished the philosophy degree, then go ahead and finish that (as you have time and money) because any degree is better than none. As someone who is "this close" to finishing my degree, sometimes I feel that hurts me more than if I had never started. (Yes, when I get some money, I will finish mine too.)
Don't waste your time or money on a CS degree. In my meager experience, for real-world programming, they don't teach much more than can be learned from some good books. Of course good books are hard to find too. Read reviews and ask friends for recommendations. A lot of programming books start strong and turn to crap about half-way through. If you start finding lots of errors and you are spending more time figuring out the errors than learning, move on to a different book. Come back to the bad book after you know more and take it as a challenge to solve those problems. But don't burn yourself out beating your head against a bad book if you just don't know enough to figure out the errors. You will kill your momentum. And momentum is key in education.
After you have a solid foundation in the programming language of your choice, start learning ancillary stuff like build systems, software testing, and how to deploy your programs to end users as a single installable file. None of this was taught at the universities I went to but they are really important in the professional world. I wish there was more information about this kind of stuff and that it was organized in some reasonable fashion. Unfortunately, it seems most of this info is buried in forums all over the internet.
After you have learned one language pretty well, start learning other languages too. The more the merrier. Then go back and pick up some advanced techniques in your earlier languages.
As you study, work on finding ways to actually show how much you know. Either in sample programs, contributions to open source projects, or certifications. Remember, "experience" does not mean that you got paid. So, if you have been diligently writing code for open source projects for a year, then you can say you have a year of experience. (Sure, plenty of people dink around for a year and call it "experience" but that shows up pretty fast in interviews.)
Look for "entry level" or "intern" jobs. They are rare but they are out there. There are some companies that almost exclusively hire junior programmers because they can pay them less and the company's business model does not require high level programming skills, just churning out a bunch of almost identical stuff. However, you may not find these companies where you live right now. Be willing to search all over and relocate. There is a company in College Station, TX that will hire you if you are willing to learn Microsoft .NET.
Good Luck.
It is not always necessary for an article to be well written for it to have a good idea at its core. As a technical writer and former network manager, who spent over a decade on Usenet giving and reading advice, and has also studied education - I know that the success rate of any advice is very audience dependent. If your audience is going to be regular people, then you have to give advice that regular people can or will follow. If your audience is tech people, then you can be more technical. Duh. Sometimes the best advice about giving advice about technical things is to offer two versions. One for regular people and another for technical people. Subtly let the regular people know when they can stop reading. Try not to be too insulting.