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Quote:
Early in the next century, Dean hopes his new concoction, which he says is "in the idea and invention stage," will be ready for the public: a sleek tablet that is magazine-size, inexpensive, programmable, and voice-activated. He expects his unnamed dream pad, which will run on a 24-hour battery, to provide everything a PC does, including streaming audio and video, word processing, and spreadsheets. It will even have a port for old fogies who can't give up their keyboards. And it will wirelessly put the Internet and other information at your fingertips.
End Quote.

Of course the article never mentions Transmeta, but I bet this web pad would be powered by Crusoe. Here's the link for the article.

(I want to reply to this article in two ways, so I'll make two different posts.)

You're severely underrating Chicago. I live and work here, and I think it's a great city with potential. They've carefully nurtured the city during the Long Boom, and we expect that the population will have grown in the 90s for the first time in 50 years. There's more housing in and near downtown than in a couple of generations. The worst vestiges of "urban removal" are being corrected, and the Loop is once again vibrant.

Ameritech has no unlimited local calling

Wrong. As you can see in this chart of Illinois Ameritech rates, Band A (and the Chicago area has poor DSL and ISDN access.

In 2000, DSL is readily available almost anywhere in the metro region, as dslreports.com shows. You may not always get a choice of providers, but it is available, and the fact that Ameritech sat this particular revolution out ought to be grating on them as they sleep. Your information is just out of date. (Rhythms claims that they'll have half the country DSL-covered by sometime next year, anyway.)

Commonwealth Edison can't keep the damn lights on in the summer, because their transmission and distribution systems are crud and Edison doesn't seem to realize this.

I'm not sure it's the network so much as the management. After the embarrassing downtown Chicago outage this year (my building was affected; I was inbound to work, but my coworkers had to walk down 20 floors), they hired a new team. I'm not defending them; I just don't think that frustration over a power utility is unique, and would point out that stress on a system is a sign of rapid growth.

Local regulations require that Ethernet cable be strung through metal conduit,

I believe this is true in the city, but I'm certain it's not true everywhere in the metro area. The bigger problem is dealing with the unions. You have to have a licensed electrician on site if you're a big shop.

So, despite having several major universities with very good CS departments (University of Chicago, Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Loyola University), not one but two nearby national research laboratories, and recently starting up a new communications center in the old Donnelly Directory building,

I won't quibble with this list, but I could add to it.

Chicago will probably never become a center of computer business. Chicago has Motorola in the suburbs and that's about as good as it's going to get.

Besides Motorola (which is not only the top high-tech company here, but the biggest company in Chicagoland period), there's: System Software Associates, Tellabs, CDW, Anixter, Whittman-Hart (bought USWeb), Comdisco, DeVry, Galileo, Tribune Corp. (AOL partner), US Cellular, yesmail.com, Hewitt Associates, and Zebra Technologies. Other companies from around here have been bought up: US Robotics (3Com), Platinum (CA), Whitewater Group (Symantec), and others I can't recall.

No, we're not flashy like Silicon Valley, but unlike some of those SV startups, we have people who've worked their whole careers right inside all those boring, low-tech businesses that are trying to get wired right now. I think it's more likely that Chicago will continue to be a center of this kind of boring "infrastructure" high-tech, as opposed to VC-attracting, Superbowl- one-shot- advertising, gone-by-next-year SV firms.

As an example, Hewitt is well-known as a human resources consulting firm. They've built a worldwide reputation, but they found themselves stagnating. The last few years they've turned their HR software and expert systems into the foundation for many human-resources intranet sites, which has turned into a thriving side business. Will it get them dot-com street cred? Nah. Will it pay the light bill? You bet.

US News profiles Chicago high-tech market

On the other hand, Chicago has very good resources for another industry entirely: biotech.

I agree with you here, where I don't agree is that this is overlooked. Try Chicago Biotech Network, a city-funded virtual incubator, and their parent organization says "The agricultural biotechnology revolution began in Illinois, and now there are over 1,280 biotechnology, biomedicine, pharmaceutical firms located here." I don't think that's overlooked.

ask, what kind of geeks can we attract to this city?

I think this is a good point. I just think you undersold Chicago, and didn't catch that even in the computer industry, there are different kinds of geeks ... maybe we're not web geeks here, but we are wiring geeks, manufacturing geeks, and appliance geeks.
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Both Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News have had thought-provoking articles on this topic recently.

Hmm... Hilton Hotels designing a Lunar hotel.

Warwick is effusive about the possibilities and has even suggested that gun owners could get implanted to keep them from entering schools or other areas where heavily armed people may be unwelcome.

Although it might be a little extreme to start limiting classes of people from public places, I thought it was one of the most valuable ideas! The idea behind a "Smart Gun" isn't new. If you had an ID chip, and a chip-reading-enabler on your gun, it would reduce the chances of you or your family member being shot with it. Or you could put a chip detector on the gun cabinet, so that if a child found the combination, he/she would still be safe.

Perhaps guns that wouldn't work without the owner's (living, I hope) chip would be less likely to be stolen and used in a criminal manner.

• The Top Four really are superb, but the people who say "choose based on field" are also right. If any of CMU, MIT, Berkeley, or Stanford cover your field and you can get in, move heaven and earth to go to one of them.
• If the Top Four don't take you, try for a school that has several people working in the field you're interested in. Check out their recent publications and see if they're cool; if possible talk to them to find out whether you like them or they're assholes. Talk to their current grad students. Try for a school that has a reputation (easy measure: they consistently get papers into the top conference in the field). Avoid a school that has only one prof in your field: if you hate him/her, or if the research s/he's doing two years from now isn't fun, you're screwed.
• An experienced, understanding advisor at your current school is invaluable.
• Know thyself. Why do you want a graduate degree? The person who said "go straight to work" was partly right. An MS is quick and easy to get, and it will pay off in industry (lots of people are impressed). A Ph.D. is a very specialized degree, and not tremendously useful unless you want to go into research or academia. (Exception: in some consulting positions the prestige factor helps.)
• It is very hard for most people to return to school after time outside. I'm not talking about forgetting how to study, I'm talking about having a life, kids, and car payments. Most people never try, and of those who try, most never finish.
• A Master's usually takes two years. I did it in one under abnormal circumstances; I know a guy who took eleven (full-time!). A Ph.D. in CS usually takes from 4 to 7 years depending on the school and advisor. I know of a guy who did it in 3 (and regrets going so fast) and one who took 13.
• When you're looking for a job after getting a Ph.D., many things matter. Some of the important ones are the quality of your dissertation, the number of publications you have, the name of your school, the names of your references, and the content of your reference letters. All of those are affected to some degree by your choice of school. Employers also care about you, of course (make sure your interview is great!), but the above items are harder to fix late in the game.
• Early in your graduate career, it can be good to do internships at industrial research labs. This approach gives you good dissertation ideas, and also gives you a wider base to draw on when it's time to get reference letters.

Enough random advice. Here are some books and URLs:

• Tomorrow's Professor: Preparing for Academic Careers in Science and Engineering, by Richard M. Reis. This book contains absolutely essential advice, starting with how to pick a graduate school and ending with advice on surviving your first year as a professor. If you are thinking about grad school, or in it, this book is a MUST! I only wish it had been written before the last year of my doctorate. Even so, it made a huge difference in my eventual success. I owe my current job to many people, but Dr. Reis is unquestionably one of them.
• A Ph.D. is Not Enough: A Guide to Survival in Science, by Peter J. Feibelman. This book has some very realistic, sometimes cynical advice for prospective scientists.
• How to be a Professor: Some Good Books is a Web site devoted to helping people adjust to academia. For a prospective grad student, it can also serve as an introduction to what to expect.
• Rank PhD Programs in Computer Science from CRA gives graduate-program rankings, though they're somewhat dated. (Take all rankings with a grain of salt, though.) The Computing Research Assocation is a useful resource in general (check out their salary survey).
• The US News rankings are also useful.

As usual, I've run on and on, so I'll close with a wish for your success and one last thought: grad school was the most fun thing I ever did!

If you're interested in computer graphics, especially real-time computer graphics (read Virtual Reality), seriously consider the University of North Carolina. Besides the fact that we have been studying this field for almost 30 years and we're ranked very high, we also have an SGI Reality Monster all to ourselves :-). Seriously, though, take a look at any year's SIGGRAPH proceedings and you'll see a large number of papers from UNC. So, when you think graphics, think North Carolina.

Tanner Lovelace
Ph.D. Student
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

It all depends on what you want to do ...

Are you looking to get a more focused education in some area of CS?
If so, which area?
If not, then you're in it for the money?
If you want money in CS then (short term) get the job, screw grad school, or (long term) get a masters from just about anywhere (ok, ok, upper tier schools can open upper tier jobs, but it's not the only way) while getting job experience (intern/co-op).

Figure out why you want the degree (for "the challenge" is not that good a reason, you might be happier with a challenging job instead). Check US News Online and see where the good schools are. Ask your professors where they went, what they think, what they'd do different.

Good luck.

(for the record, I'm a PhD student studying graphics at UNC Chapel Hill)

The funny thing is, Catholic dogma now holds that evolution is "more than just a theory". Re: the Pope's letter to Scientists, 1996. Couldn't find the original text on vatican.va, but here is a reputable reference: USNews: pope supports evolution

Sure if you're looking for the skill set du jour (which is of course dictated by the Bay Area). Not every single programming job involves the internet or e-commerce.

If you want programmers that are familiar with financial or commodities applications (there is some pretty high tech stuff being done in this area), you're not going to find them in Silicon Valley. Try New York or Chicago.

There are whole high tech areas in Austin and Boston. The number of programmers outside the Bay Area far outweighs the number inside. Only the people inside the Bay Area think they are the center of the high-tech universe. And there are other sources for venture capital than the Bay Area.

The Bay Area economy is eventually going to collapse upon itself. There is an article in last week's U.S. News and World Report about the housing shortage and how the skyrocketing rents and house prices are causing extreme pressure on those whose salaries are not based on technology.