Do the minor! I graduated with a CS major and English minor, and stepped right into a well-paying Tech Writing job. Having a CS background is one thing, having that background AND the ability to string sentences together is a priceless skill in today's basement-geek market.
One of my favourite things about Nethack is the ability to do conduct challenges. This feature gives Nethack a lot of replay value. There have been some crazy ascensions posted to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. For example, check out this Atheist, Pacifist Ascension. Or this Extinctionist. Or this absolutely unbelievable Vegan, Atheist, Illiterate, Weaponless, Wishless, Genoless, Polyless Monk. Great fun, I tell you. Anyone know of ascensions more impressive than these? Post them!
Excellent. That's exactly how I've always felt about UW students. They're nothing special. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single famous UW grad. Not famous in the sense that they started a business, or that they've done well fiscally for themselves. I mean famous. A household name. A Dijkstra or a Stallman. I can't think of any, can you?
After being surrounded by innumerable UW students in the last 5 years, I'm more than thrilled to see their self-congratulatory egos shattered by the hammer of reality. There's a common fallacy among UW CS/CE/EE students that goes like this:
1. School X is good 2: I go to school X 3. Therefore, I am good.
But many of the UW grads I've worked with don't know their heads from their asses. Ask anyone who has ever TA'd CS 354 (the third-year Operating Systems class), and who has had students ask them what a heap is, for example. And yet, they'll strut around school, thinking about how companies will stumble over each other in offering them cushy jobs with huge salaries, free Odwalla, etc.
Waterloo has no academic integrity. As someone who just graduated from UW's Comp Sci program two weeks ago, I can tell you that UW's once-esteemed CS program is starting to resemble a diploma factory. The university admins have increased their quota for industry-pandering by 1000% since I first joined the school. All of a sudden, perfectly good courses started getting tainted by the touch of Java (the AI course comes to mind, switching to Java because it "looks better on a resume" than Scheme), phasing out theory courses, and generally eliminating academic mainstays like Lisp, ML, and the like. And now C#? I'd heard this rumour quite some time ago, and I feared it would come true. Luckily it's only the Comp/Elec Eng program (which tends to focus on industry more than theory) affected; were MS forcing C# on Comp Sci students, the program would be reduced to a joke. I just hope my newly acquired degree doesn't become completely worthless in the next few years.
Re:They'll look for...
on
Gaming Zone?
·
· Score: 2
Of course it happens. It happens in all aspects of life where effort and concentration is required. Do we need an expensive research study to confirm what we already know? Gaming is not fundamentally different than these other activities you cite...it's prolonged activity of a specific type. Of COURSE certain conditions increase performance. I thought we figured this out years ago.
I choose to believe that those who mock it simply cannot comprehend its beauty. I'm finishing my CS degree in 5 days, and that book has taught me more than most of my courses combined. A thorough reading of SICP (and doing the problems too) is probably better training than most undergraduate CS degrees.
I, too, cut my teeth on the Atari ST...520 ST to be exact, no hard drive. I had an attachment to that machine that bordered on the criminally insane. Remember programs like Degas and Neochrome (paint programs)? How about the great games like Dungeon Master, Bloodwych, Rick Dangerous, Vengeance of Excalibur (I think it was called), Targhan, Switchblade...I could go on and on. I'm surprised at the quality of these games given the hardware capabilities...they were quite impressive graphically and otherwise!
How about the demoscene...anyone remember Punish Your Machine? How about those old Lost Boys demos? MAN. I'd kill for a PC port of these things...
This is practically art. Just reading this guy's solution was amazing, the way he reasoned about each step, and just the IDEA of it. Absolutely unbelievable.
However, I'd like to see more difficult languages. Has anyone done LISP? Has anyone even ATTEMPTED Haskell or ML?
All things considered, UW isn't a bad school. I'm in my last year of undergrad there (Computer Science), and it does provide a very wide-reaching CS education, with ample possibility to explore specialized areas in your final year.
Unfortunately, the city ot Waterloo itself is a pretty drab place with not much to do, and the surrounding student ghettos are pretty unsightly. I can't think of any fourth-year students who aren't counting down the days before they graduate.
Most people overlook Canada when it comes to being a tech "hotbed", but there are lots of great companies up here. Ottawa (Corel, Alcatel, Nortel [!]), Waterloo (RIM, Open Text), Burnaby BC (Electronic Arts), Toronto (guh...I dunno), and Montreal (Softimage, Discreet, Zero Knowledge) are the cities I'd be choosing to set up shop. Ottawa in particular has a wealth of (struggling) tech companies over in the west end, as well as the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Canada: not just for doughnuts anymore!
Even if you'd rather the link opened in a new window, it's still non-standard browser behaviour. The user should trust certain things of their browser, one of which is that links should work the same way every time you click one, unless specified otherwise. So if a user wants a new window, let them spawn one, otherwise follow the well-understood usability conventions of the web.
Here is the best defense of Microsoft I've read so far. This article makes several excellent points about the moral flaws of antitrust law and the weak arguments against MS's business practices. Have a look and tell me what you think.
I think Katz writes a good piece here. This movie was without a doubt the worst film in the history of mankind. I, without anything better to do, could pull a better film out of a monkey's ass.
I remember my first CS course...CS 134. Ahh yes, the beauty that is Pascal. The beauty of a sexy built-in "string" type. The pragmatism of the "var" and "type" sections. Ahhh. Excuse me as I wipe the tears creeping down my flushed cheek...sigh... I'm so pissed that C eclipsed Pascal in terms of popularity. What a fabulously sexy language. And more importantly, the beauty that was the Borland Turbo Pascal compiler for DOS. Ohhh. The greatest compiler ever (Borland Turbo C for DOS was equally sexy). Unfortunately, the U Waterloo CS department forced us to use a Pascal-like language, Modula-3, for several of our subsequent CS courses. A sexy language in itself, but nowhere near as simple and elegant as Pascal... Mr. Wirth, you've done us proud. Well, me anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Do the minor! I graduated with a CS major and English minor, and stepped right into a well-paying Tech Writing job. Having a CS background is one thing, having that background AND the ability to string sentences together is a priceless skill in today's basement-geek market.
Does anyone else think the female terminator is a bit of a cliche Hollywood trick?
Four words: The Next Karate Kid
One of my favourite things about Nethack is the ability to do conduct challenges. This feature gives Nethack a lot of replay value. There have been some crazy ascensions posted to rec.games.roguelike.nethack. For example, check out this Atheist, Pacifist Ascension. Or this Extinctionist. Or this absolutely unbelievable Vegan, Atheist, Illiterate, Weaponless, Wishless, Genoless, Polyless Monk. Great fun, I tell you. Anyone know of ascensions more impressive than these? Post them!
Excellent. That's exactly how I've always felt about UW students. They're nothing special. In fact, I'm hard-pressed to think of a single famous UW grad. Not famous in the sense that they started a business, or that they've done well fiscally for themselves. I mean famous. A household name. A Dijkstra or a Stallman. I can't think of any, can you?
After being surrounded by innumerable UW students in the last 5 years, I'm more than thrilled to see their self-congratulatory egos shattered by the hammer of reality. There's a common fallacy among UW CS/CE/EE students that goes like this:
1. School X is good
2: I go to school X
3. Therefore, I am good.
But many of the UW grads I've worked with don't know their heads from their asses. Ask anyone who has ever TA'd CS 354 (the third-year Operating Systems class), and who has had students ask them what a heap is, for example. And yet, they'll strut around school, thinking about how companies will stumble over each other in offering them cushy jobs with huge salaries, free Odwalla, etc.
Waterloo has no academic integrity. As someone who just graduated from UW's Comp Sci program two weeks ago, I can tell you that UW's once-esteemed CS program is starting to resemble a diploma factory. The university admins have increased their quota for industry-pandering by 1000% since I first joined the school. All of a sudden, perfectly good courses started getting tainted by the touch of Java (the AI course comes to mind, switching to Java because it "looks better on a resume" than Scheme), phasing out theory courses, and generally eliminating academic mainstays like Lisp, ML, and the like. And now C#? I'd heard this rumour quite some time ago, and I feared it would come true. Luckily it's only the Comp/Elec Eng program (which tends to focus on industry more than theory) affected; were MS forcing C# on Comp Sci students, the program would be reduced to a joke. I just hope my newly acquired degree doesn't become completely worthless in the next few years.
Of course it happens. It happens in all aspects of life where effort and concentration is required. Do we need an expensive research study to confirm what we already know? Gaming is not fundamentally different than these other activities you cite...it's prolonged activity of a specific type. Of COURSE certain conditions increase performance. I thought we figured this out years ago.
...any possible excuse to play more games, eh? I'd chalk this one up to pseudoscience.
I choose to believe that those who mock it simply cannot comprehend its beauty. I'm finishing my CS degree in 5 days, and that book has taught me more than most of my courses combined. A thorough reading of SICP (and doing the problems too) is probably better training than most undergraduate CS degrees.
SICP.
(Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, a fine book that'll teach you more about programming than should be allowed by law)
The MS category has some real toughies, like:
"y do u think u r smart"
"y do u wanna work at Microsoft?"
and a great catalyst for catastrophe...
"If you could remove any of the 50 states, which state would it be and why?"
These toughies are gonna keep me up all night!
I, too, cut my teeth on the Atari ST...520 ST to be exact, no hard drive. I had an attachment to that machine that bordered on the criminally insane. Remember programs like Degas and Neochrome (paint programs)? How about the great games like Dungeon Master, Bloodwych, Rick Dangerous, Vengeance of Excalibur (I think it was called), Targhan, Switchblade...I could go on and on. I'm surprised at the quality of these games given the hardware capabilities...they were quite impressive graphically and otherwise!
How about the demoscene...anyone remember Punish Your Machine? How about those old Lost Boys demos? MAN. I'd kill for a PC port of these things...
Am I the only guy who thought it was going to zoom in on Disneyworld?
This is absolutely the last straw. I'm switching over to Yahoo right this second!
This is practically art. Just reading this guy's solution was amazing, the way he reasoned about each step, and just the IDEA of it. Absolutely unbelievable.
However, I'd like to see more difficult languages. Has anyone done LISP? Has anyone even ATTEMPTED Haskell or ML?
...for the most unhelpful interview of all time!
Seriously, you'd think these guys would take the time to answer with something other than a one-liner for each question....
All things considered, UW isn't a bad school. I'm in my last year of undergrad there (Computer Science), and it does provide a very wide-reaching CS education, with ample possibility to explore specialized areas in your final year.
Unfortunately, the city ot Waterloo itself is a pretty drab place with not much to do, and the surrounding student ghettos are pretty unsightly. I can't think of any fourth-year students who aren't counting down the days before they graduate.
I find the accent to be a lot less like "aboot" and more like "aboat". Anyway, yeah, I know. I'm asleep at the keyboard here.
Most people overlook Canada when it comes to being a tech "hotbed", but there are lots of great companies up here. Ottawa (Corel, Alcatel, Nortel [!]), Waterloo (RIM, Open Text), Burnaby BC (Electronic Arts), Toronto (guh...I dunno), and Montreal (Softimage, Discreet, Zero Knowledge) are the cities I'd be choosing to set up shop. Ottawa in particular has a wealth of (struggling) tech companies over in the west end, as well as the Ottawa Linux Symposium. Canada: not just for doughnuts anymore!
Even if you'd rather the link opened in a new window, it's still non-standard browser behaviour. The user should trust certain things of their browser, one of which is that links should work the same way every time you click one, unless specified otherwise. So if a user wants a new window, let them spawn one, otherwise follow the well-understood usability conventions of the web.
Sounds like you're really reaching for a way to get in the obligatory Katz insult...
Here is the best defense of Microsoft I've read so far. This article makes several excellent points about the moral flaws of antitrust law and the weak arguments against MS's business practices. Have a look and tell me what you think.
Anyone else? Man, one of my favourite PC games.
I think Katz writes a good piece here. This movie was without a doubt the worst film in the history of mankind. I, without anything better to do, could pull a better film out of a monkey's ass.
If it can't be done in Scheme, it can't be done at all!
I remember my first CS course...CS 134. Ahh yes, the beauty that is Pascal. The beauty of a sexy built-in "string" type. The pragmatism of the "var" and "type" sections. Ahhh. Excuse me as I wipe the tears creeping down my flushed cheek...sigh... I'm so pissed that C eclipsed Pascal in terms of popularity. What a fabulously sexy language. And more importantly, the beauty that was the Borland Turbo Pascal compiler for DOS. Ohhh. The greatest compiler ever (Borland Turbo C for DOS was equally sexy). Unfortunately, the U Waterloo CS department forced us to use a Pascal-like language, Modula-3, for several of our subsequent CS courses. A sexy language in itself, but nowhere near as simple and elegant as Pascal... Mr. Wirth, you've done us proud. Well, me anyway.