I am reading all these DSL horror stories and shaking my head.
Up here in Canada, we have it so much better. DSL is cheap -- really cheap. I paid $40/month (US$25) for ADSL. This is with PPPoE. If you pay a bit more, or go with dsl.ca instead of the local monopoly, you can get static IPs and stuff. As well, Bell has a deal with our university where students get 10% off DSL.
My install in September took four days. Four days! When I was with Telocity in San Francisco, it took 87 days. I am not exaggerating.
In fall 1999, when DSL first came to our area, Bell screwed up our order three times and it took us six weeks. (Most people got theirs in two.) I was very upset then, but service was great once it arrived.
Right now, I have Rogers@Home. They are as flaky as a two-dollar pastry. We were down two or three times over the weekend.
c'mon, this guy called Mach an operating system, ferchrissakes.
It's a kernel -- he should know better, especially if he plans to write about it.
Paul
letter-writing campain? also: bad press
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 1
maybe sean's dad should post the name and snail mail address of the school officials (no, not their home addresses) and start a letter-writing campaign.
five hundred politely-worded letters would hopefully cause them to at least consider their errors.
also, as in any case, find a friendly local reporter who is willing to listen to your story and write up a blurb on it, or go on the air.
If you aren't sure, get a CSc degree. If you aren't good at Math, get a CSc degree, a CEng degree is four years of math.
Ummm... you obviously haven't been paying attention to the University of Waterloo. Here, CS is part of the math faculty. All CS majors are required to take three calculus courses, three algebra courses, two statistics courses, a combinatorics and optimization course, and two more math courses (I took logic and differential equations).
It's important for a CSer to have a strong math background -- after all, a good chunk of any algoirthms course is graph theory, anyway.:-)
A few weeks ago I got a check for 25 cents from Illinois Bell. The check was drawn on a bank in Lake Lillian, Minnesota. Do you know how obscure Lake Lillian is? (Of course you do. You know everything. I'm just asking rhetorically.) It's so obscure it's not in the Minnesota key to my road map book, which includes such metropolises as Dundas, population 422. It's so obscure the person I talked to at the Minnesota tourism office couldn't find it on her computer (she said to call back when Jerry gets back from lunch).
[snip]
when i was at shad valley a few years ago, our computer science people talked about finite state machines, turing machines and other cs theory stuff. [as a cs major, i didn't run into that sort of stuff until third year.]
at the time, we looked at the ideas, found them confusing and foreign, we asked why. the explanation -- and a good one -- was that a strong problem-solving background will always be useful. had they taught us the 1996 idea du jour, we would have skills that were no longer useful.
so in that vein, spend a good chunk (but not all) of your time giving him or her a basis for learning.
that said, i'm a big believer in learning by doing (works for me). have the kid build a web site (i.e. backend), learn OOP (I like Python), work on some ACM contest problems and stuff.
have the kid learn other stuff, too. maybe they're the next john lennon or william gibson (i.e. music, writing, design) or whatever.
Rogers AT&T, (Rogers = one of Canada's cable monpolies) just issued a press release saying they're going GSM, too.
There was some chatter about this on alt.cellular.fido; Fido is currently Canada main GSM provider. (Technically Microcell Connections own this network.)
Gee, all this talk about normalizing and denormalizing reminds me of the BCNF question on my databases midterm.:-)
There are methods for determing (theoretically) nice ways of breaking up tables to eliminate redundancy and ensure lossless joins. Look up Boyce-Codd Normal Form, 3rd Normal Form, et cetera.
Of course, if your DB gets real large, you may not want to do joins anyway.
A couple years ago, Bell Canada had a service called "name that number." You'd dial 1-areacode-555-1313, and for 75 cents a pop, a machine would spell out who owned the line.
They discontinued it without telling anyone; I only found out when I tried it and it didn't work.
Slashdot Mirror
Up here in Canada, we have it so much better. DSL is cheap -- really cheap. I paid $40/month (US$25) for ADSL. This is with PPPoE. If you pay a bit more, or go with dsl.ca instead of the local monopoly, you can get static IPs and stuff. As well, Bell has a deal with our university where students get 10% off DSL.
My install in September took four days. Four days! When I was with Telocity in San Francisco, it took 87 days. I am not exaggerating.
In fall 1999, when DSL first came to our area, Bell screwed up our order three times and it took us six weeks. (Most people got theirs in two.) I was very upset then, but service was great once it arrived.
Right now, I have Rogers@Home. They are as flaky as a two-dollar pastry. We were down two or three times over the weekend.
Paul
It's a kernel -- he should know better, especially if he plans to write about it.
Paul
maybe sean's dad should post the name and snail mail address of the school officials (no, not their home addresses) and start a letter-writing campaign.
five hundred politely-worded letters would hopefully cause them to at least consider their errors.
also, as in any case, find a friendly local reporter who is willing to listen to your story and write up a blurb on it, or go on the air.
schools hate bad press.
Paul
I do this, and I have received spam from slashdot and ebay, so i deleted the slashdot alias.
ironic, no?
Paul
Waterloo, Waterloo, rah rah rah :-)
2001 #4
2000 #2
1999 #1
1998 #3
1997 #5
1996 #3
1995 #7
1994 #1
1993 #7
We've been in the top 10 every year for the past nine years. MIT only placed ahead of us once. How many people outside of Canada even know we exist?
Everything is so US-centric.
Paul
where'd you go to school? I'm a Waterloo CS guy. I would say code is nowhere near 90% of what I've done (I'm in my fourth year).
These are the CS courses I've taken:
I think a great quote to describe this subject is "real computer scientist don't use computers."
Paul
We (Waterloo) still don't have a wireless network.
Here's who does:
Grumble, grumble. So much for us being a high tech school.
Paul
Ummm
It's important for a CSer to have a strong math background -- after all, a good chunk of any algoirthms course is graph theory, anyway.
Paul
Anyway, I found Cecil Adam's column, Why are rebate checks drawn on obscure banks in the middle of nowhere?, which is a really interesting read.
Paul
done.
Paul
knowledge forum -- developed at OISE/UT. i was there once upon a time. :)
Paul
Paul
at the time, we looked at the ideas, found them confusing and foreign, we asked why. the explanation -- and a good one -- was that a strong problem-solving background will always be useful. had they taught us the 1996 idea du jour, we would have skills that were no longer useful.
so in that vein, spend a good chunk (but not all) of your time giving him or her a basis for learning.
that said, i'm a big believer in learning by doing (works for me). have the kid build a web site (i.e. backend), learn OOP (I like Python), work on some ACM contest problems and stuff.
have the kid learn other stuff, too. maybe they're the next john lennon or william gibson (i.e. music, writing, design) or whatever.
Paul
There was some chatter about this on alt.cellular.fido; Fido is currently Canada main GSM provider. (Technically Microcell Connections own this network.)
Paul
There are methods for determing (theoretically) nice ways of breaking up tables to eliminate redundancy and ensure lossless joins. Look up Boyce-Codd Normal Form, 3rd Normal Form, et cetera.
Of course, if your DB gets real large, you may not want to do joins anyway.
Paul
Well, if you have 4 GB of RAM and 50 GB of disk space, you might be able to find out. :-)
Paul
Paul
ResExcellence has the scoop.
Paul
way to go!
Paul
You have code that reads:
tell application "Finder"
select file "Internet Preferences" of disk "foo"
end tell
In theory, there are other dialects of AppleScript besides English, but I haven't used a non-English Mac OS to check.
Paul
I counted 19 errors.
Paul
A couple years ago, Bell Canada had a service called "name that number." You'd dial 1-areacode-555-1313, and for 75 cents a pop, a machine would spell out who owned the line.
They discontinued it without telling anyone; I only found out when I tried it and it didn't work.
A quick search on google turned up:
It's interesting how all the telcos introduced and withdrew the service around the same time.
Paul
function checkCookie () {
writeCookie ('mstrChck', 'hasyobrowsagotskillz');
return( readCookie ('mstrChck') == 'hasyobrowsagotskillz' );
}
Paul
Paul