I joined NetFlix this past year and had a rather bad experience. My primary reason for joining was to gain access to anime rentals, as the only place in Atlanta that rents anime (that I know of) only has vhs.
But I digress, the big problem i ran into is their queue system. It sounds good, queue up the ones you want and they will send the highest one available as it becomes available. The problem is if your high demand ones are at all popular they will almost never get to you.
The flaw in their system is that they WILL send you a lower priority one when it becomes available. if you have you X number checked out they won't send you anything until you check something back in, then they will send out your highest rated available one - again generally not the one you want most as they tend to be in demand from everyone.
After a few months I realized I could buy the DVD's i wanted for the same price as i was spending either A) waiting with nothing extra in my queue for a specific couple movies, or B) watching lots of movies i don't especially want to but am vaguely interested in so stuck in my queue.
So, yeah, is a great deal if you don't especially care about getting a specific movie, but just one or two of a selection, but if you want some specific movies (which with their vast lit of titles is what attacted me) it is not so hot - especially if you want ones that are typically in high demand, but are not carried sufficiantly in Blockbuster (ie, most anime).
Actually a strong argument can be played for playing on Linux instead of Windows, at least for Quake 3 engine based games. Just today The Register posted an article discussing how Quake 3 on Linux (on a p4-2.2) achieved significantly higher (80.2 vs 72.7) framerates with identical hardware (dual boot machine)
While Windows is still the general platform of choice for gaming because that is where games are, don't knock Linux games when they perform better than the same game on Windows
My favorite bit looking at it is the "Shop the Official Olympic Store" link in the upper right (image link) which is actually a link to... http://www.msnbc.com from which there is no obvious connection to any "Official Olympic Store."
UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Kendall Scott. This very short (185 pages including index) book sums up UML diagrams and the uses of them in the most succinct clear manner I have ever found. It is designed as a reference, but works well as an introduction. It presumes you know object-oriented development, basic Jave/C++ syntax, and whatnot - pretty safe assumptions for someone who needs to learn UML, and a godsend for people tired of having to wade past descriptions of basic concepts in every other book that has been supposedly written for a "Professional" (poke at Wrox is on purpose)
Personally I would consider this article to be a troll.
Befor eyou mod me down as a troll, think for a moment. The software engineering world is completely dominated by OOP concepts, and the foundations of OOP (encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism) save thousands of man hours / year / developer when people understand how they actually work.
The reason I call the article a troll is the highly C based leanings of the/. crowd. The most vocal people here still wish they were allowed to hate KDE, and love only gnome (C based Gnome, C++ based KDE) and the language of implementation carries over to general principles for most people
And before someone says it, yes you can do OOP in ANSI C, but it is ugly as sin (basically function points on structs for methods, etc).
I faced an almost identical problem recently but managed to work around going back for (another) BS. Assuming you have a bachelors (which you imply through ommission, making a point of having "no formal CS education"), getting into and finishing a Master's program is probably your ideal path.
This is, in fact, not terribly difficult. Most programs don't exactly leep for joy over people with primarily work experioence, but if you are willing to take 4-6 undergrad level classes, or demonstrate competence in them by test) and can do reasonably well on the GRE Computer Science Subject Test (brush up on your theory!), you can get into mid-range schools without a lot of difficulty.
There are quite a few benefits of going straight to a master's degree as well: an MSCS is *very* respected on a resume, managers generally give more credit to a Master's than it warrants (unless they have one, and MBA's don't count), it is generally a much shorter program (9-12 classes compared to 24-32 for a BS) and doesn't force you to take the assorted crap you are not interested in (disclaimer: I hold an undergrad degree in English, and believe in a LA education, if done right it is the best thing for you - most people use the flexibility to avoid challenge though, and they discredit it), and finally, the MS classes tend to be a whole lot more interesting than undergrad classes, and the students and profs are a lot more interested in learning/teaching than the typical undergrad.
I wish you luck.
-Frums
For those too lazy^H^H^H^H busy to read, best is..
on
WinXP Security Flaw
·
· Score: 1
"This is the first network-based, remote compromise that I'm aware of for Windows desktop systems," said Scott Culp, manager of Microsoft's security response center. "Every Windows XP user needs to immediately take action." He called it a "very serious vulnerability."
Whitfield Diffie can hardly be considered a Sun pawn, and all of the trolls implying that he is, and that this article is garbage, are just that: meanigless trolls.
Diffie is a highly respected researcher in cryptography and security. As the article points out, in a funny way, "Diffie is also the co-inventor of public-key cryptography." The Diffie-Hellman algorithm was the first publicly known instance of public-key cryptography, AND is still used today by the like of PGP and GPG. (I say publicly known because there is some evidence that the NSA and other state security outifits in China and Britain) had created or at least researched public-key cryptography. It is safe to assume that the Diffie and Hellman knew nothing about these efforts however when they published their origin al paper, whose exact title I cannto remember but is somehting like "ideas for cryptography")
The problem with these analogies is that they are all wrong
Sklyarov wrote the software and the company sold it. So, imagine you are a photographer in a country that allows the sale of porn with 16 year olds. You take pictures and get paid for it. The company sells their magazines in America. You visit america for a conference on risque photography and get arrested.
-Frums
Re:so let me get this straight...
on
Mob Software
·
· Score: 1
Actually, this is a common myth. The Mythical Man-Month did a pretty good job of dispelling it.
Yes, fewer people can develop more software faster than lots of people in most circumstances.
Old Article on slashdot. Was bashed really hard back then. Will get bashed really hard again. HTML is not going anywhere very fastm and CURL has more hoels than ActiveX
So, just so that ppl understand. The chip that is on their 128meg DIMM is actually only a 256Mbit chip, or to put it in nice terms, each chip can hold 256kbytes.
What it does is use a shitload of them.
Kingston does a better job of explaining it so I will let them.
I wonder which of these two has better technical support, installation speed, etc.
AT&T Broadband has the worst support I have ever encountered, period. Perfect example is when I tried to cancel my service, I waited on hold for 1.2 hours. Gave up, repated that with times ranging from 20 minutes to 2 hours, still never got through to customer support. Wound up sending em a letter and moving, I hope they canceled it. They have never asked for the cable modem back though.
The people are actually mentioned, in a slapdash way - Ekert and Mauchly are the people primarily credited for it. They worked on Eniac as well.
Though since we are mentioning people, we all must bow before John Von Neumann who just so happened to suggest silly things like serial computation (ie, computing htings in order (believe it or not this was NOT how the early designs worked, parallel computing predates serial computing) and using binary numbers in cmputers.
Sorry I didn't include them when I submitted the story. Consider me chastised.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to be a snit, but there is: Fortran still mops the floor with C or C++ for most numerical processing tasks.
-Frums
I joined NetFlix this past year and had a rather bad experience. My primary reason for joining was to gain access to anime rentals, as the only place in Atlanta that rents anime (that I know of) only has vhs.
But I digress, the big problem i ran into is their queue system. It sounds good, queue up the ones you want and they will send the highest one available as it becomes available. The problem is if your high demand ones are at all popular they will almost never get to you.
The flaw in their system is that they WILL send you a lower priority one when it becomes available. if you have you X number checked out they won't send you anything until you check something back in, then they will send out your highest rated available one - again generally not the one you want most as they tend to be in demand from everyone.
After a few months I realized I could buy the DVD's i wanted for the same price as i was spending either A) waiting with nothing extra in my queue for a specific couple movies, or B) watching lots of movies i don't especially want to but am vaguely interested in so stuck in my queue.
So, yeah, is a great deal if you don't especially care about getting a specific movie, but just one or two of a selection, but if you want some specific movies (which with their vast lit of titles is what attacted me) it is not so hot - especially if you want ones that are typically in high demand, but are not carried sufficiantly in Blockbuster (ie, most anime).
-Frums
Actually a strong argument can be played for playing on Linux instead of Windows, at least for Quake 3 engine based games. Just today The Register posted an article discussing how Quake 3 on Linux (on a p4-2.2) achieved significantly higher (80.2 vs 72.7) framerates with identical hardware (dual boot machine)
While Windows is still the general platform of choice for gaming because that is where games are, don't knock Linux games when they perform better than the same game on Windows
-Frums
Actually, just checked and it still does. I have no idea where you got your link.
Then it has been recently changed, mine took me to MSNBC
My favorite bit looking at it is the "Shop the Official Olympic Store" link in the upper right (image link) which is actually a link to... http://www.msnbc.com from which there is no obvious connection to any "Official Olympic Store."
*sigh*
-Frums
UML Distilled by Martin Fowler and Kendall Scott. This very short (185 pages including index) book sums up UML diagrams and the uses of them in the most succinct clear manner I have ever found. It is designed as a reference, but works well as an introduction. It presumes you know object-oriented development, basic Jave/C++ syntax, and whatnot - pretty safe assumptions for someone who needs to learn UML, and a godsend for people tired of having to wade past descriptions of basic concepts in every other book that has been supposedly written for a "Professional" (poke at Wrox is on purpose)
-Frums
Personally I would consider this article to be a troll.
Befor eyou mod me down as a troll, think for a moment. The software engineering world is completely dominated by OOP concepts, and the foundations of OOP (encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism) save thousands of man hours / year / developer when people understand how they actually work.
The reason I call the article a troll is the highly C based leanings of the /. crowd. The most vocal people here still wish they were allowed to hate KDE, and love only gnome (C based Gnome, C++ based KDE) and the language of implementation carries over to general principles for most people
And before someone says it, yes you can do OOP in ANSI C, but it is ugly as sin (basically function points on structs for methods, etc).
-Frums
FINANCE
Winner: Mr Thomas Weisel, Founder and Chairman, Thomas Weisel Partners, USA.
I love it when a guy who is basically named "Weasel" wins a finance award. It reminds me way to much of the old law firm saw, "Dewie, Cheayum, & Howe"
-Frums
I faced an almost identical problem recently but managed to work around going back for (another) BS. Assuming you have a bachelors (which you imply through ommission, making a point of having "no formal CS education"), getting into and finishing a Master's program is probably your ideal path.
This is, in fact, not terribly difficult. Most programs don't exactly leep for joy over people with primarily work experioence, but if you are willing to take 4-6 undergrad level classes, or demonstrate competence in them by test) and can do reasonably well on the GRE Computer Science Subject Test (brush up on your theory!), you can get into mid-range schools without a lot of difficulty.
There are quite a few benefits of going straight to a master's degree as well: an MSCS is *very* respected on a resume, managers generally give more credit to a Master's than it warrants (unless they have one, and MBA's don't count), it is generally a much shorter program (9-12 classes compared to 24-32 for a BS) and doesn't force you to take the assorted crap you are not interested in (disclaimer: I hold an undergrad degree in English, and believe in a LA education, if done right it is the best thing for you - most people use the flexibility to avoid challenge though, and they discredit it), and finally, the MS classes tend to be a whole lot more interesting than undergrad classes, and the students and profs are a lot more interested in learning/teaching than the typical undergrad.
I wish you luck.
-Frums
"This is the first network-based, remote compromise that I'm aware of for Windows desktop systems," said Scott Culp, manager of Microsoft's security response center. "Every Windows XP user needs to immediately take action." He called it a "very serious vulnerability."
Emphasis mine.
Hmm, Snort has signatures written for all of these =)
Whitfield Diffie can hardly be considered a Sun pawn, and all of the trolls implying that he is, and that this article is garbage, are just that: meanigless trolls.
Diffie is a highly respected researcher in cryptography and security. As the article points out, in a funny way, "Diffie is also the co-inventor of public-key cryptography." The Diffie-Hellman algorithm was the first publicly known instance of public-key cryptography, AND is still used today by the like of PGP and GPG. (I say publicly known because there is some evidence that the NSA and other state security outifits in China and Britain) had created or at least researched public-key cryptography. It is safe to assume that the Diffie and Hellman knew nothing about these efforts however when they published their origin al paper, whose exact title I cannto remember but is somehting like "ideas for cryptography")
-Frums
Heh, you don't mess with USAA =) Something to be said for having the baddest gang in the country behind your credit card...
-Frums
-Frums
Sklyarov wrote the software and the company sold it. So, imagine you are a photographer in a country that allows the sale of porn with 16 year olds. You take pictures and get paid for it. The company sells their magazines in America. You visit america for a conference on risque photography and get arrested.
-Frums
Actually, this is a common myth. The Mythical Man-Month did a pretty good job of dispelling it.
Yes, fewer people can develop more software faster than lots of people in most circumstances.
Old Article on slashdot. Was bashed really hard back then. Will get bashed really hard again. HTML is not going anywhere very fastm and CURL has more hoels than ActiveX
Link to trailer in quicktime format.
The hint on the page is the big ole Quicktime word ;)
So, just so that ppl understand. The chip that is on their 128meg DIMM is actually only a 256Mbit chip, or to put it in nice terms, each chip can hold 256kbytes.
What it does is use a shitload of them.
Kingston does a better job of explaining it so I will let them.
16k molecular scale chips are a big deal.
AT&T Broadband has the worst support I have ever encountered, period. Perfect example is when I tried to cancel my service, I waited on hold for 1.2 hours. Gave up, repated that with times ranging from 20 minutes to 2 hours, still never got through to customer support. Wound up sending em a letter and moving, I hope they canceled it. They have never asked for the cable modem back though.
-FrumsExcuse me, but he used Sendmail as an example of the RIGHT WAY to do open source projects, specifically because it is not GPL.
Read the article instead of skimming for keywords like the /. editors do ;)
-Frums
The people are actually mentioned, in a slapdash way - Ekert and Mauchly are the people primarily credited for it. They worked on Eniac as well.
Though since we are mentioning people, we all must bow before John Von Neumann who just so happened to suggest silly things like serial computation (ie, computing htings in order (believe it or not this was NOT how the early designs worked, parallel computing predates serial computing) and using binary numbers in cmputers.
Sorry I didn't include them when I submitted the story. Consider me chastised.
One of the big joys of writing an emulator will be emulating +0 and -0 and their inequivalency. The joys of integers before 2's complement...