I finished my (roughly) Master's degree in CS when I was 28. Only to go on to a Ph.D., finishing in 2003 and pretty much immediately getting a very interesting and challenging job. I definitely, absolutely don't regret going through the universities, it was a wonderful time, and I learned a *lot* that I would not have picked up otherwise. I also don't regret going into a programming job where I've been learning a lot of *other* things I didn't pick up at university. The two complement each other and make for a very strong mix; I can definitely tell the difference in programming quality between those who've had an education and those who've just picked it up -- the latter tend to make more random hacks and create unscalable, hard-to-maintain code. Yes, I know there are numerous exceptions both ways, but that's my experience. You aren't likely to "happen to" pick up big-O notation in the workplace, and useful project planning is rarely taught usefully in universities.
If you like the trading aspect, you *must* try Traders of Genoa. It's almost nothing but trading/auctioning/haggling, and very well done. Taught me to haggle for real-life things. Doesn't work with less that three people, though, and best with four or five.
I totally disagree. There's typically many possible places, out of which up to a handful tend to be interesting, either to help your people or to harm other player's people (making cities harder to finish) or - in particular - managing the fields. There is *so* much strategy in who gets what fields and how do you manage to get your meeple onto a big field that's already taken. Having only one *possible* placement of a tile is really, really rare, except at the very start if you don't use River or Count expansion. It's all about the fields, baby, it's all about the fields.
I can easily imagine having a terabyte on a single disk. In fact, LaCie, Hitachi and Seagate already sell such, among others. Disks are cheap and getting cheaper. Flash memory is more expensive, but getting cheaper even faster. I'm waiting for when the savings in mechanical breakdowns, power, heat and space makes flash memory more economical for petabyte storage than tapes and harddisks. Mechanical storage is for wusses:)
Now that we've had all the jokes and funnies, how about somebody actually translating bill in question? I know a bit of French, but not enough to cover legalese.
I Denmark, we have all-paper ballots, and it just works. Never heard any accusations of cheating, not even from our most extreme parties (like those to the left of the communists), polls results are in within a few hours, there's a nice big paper trail. And before someone says 'Denmark is just a small country', there's nothing in the system that doesn't scale linearly. And no expensive machines required, either.
> *Disclaimer* I dislike the Recording industry with a passion*disclaimer* > > But you are saying that choosing what you put into your own body > is somehow worse than infringing on the rights of an artist to make a profit from their hard work .
No, he's saying that choosing what you put into your own body[1] is somehow worse than choosing what to do with an item you've bought -- even without infringing any rights.
-Lars
[1] Which may lead to hospitalization or disability, costing the state $many.
Or he's commuting in *gasp* something other than a car! Trains are a fairly logical place to have wireless access installed, buses less so, it's happening in planes (but hopefully that's not part of his commute). Wouldn't want him browsing while biking or rollerskating, though. Could be a little pocket-input-device-in-front-of-eye-monitor like I saw in 2000 at Sun which would be useful while walking.
I and many others in.dk regularly take large bags into shops. Simply because new bags cost significant money, we reuse old ones. So there are other reasons for entering shops with large bags.
That aside, I still think it sets a dangerous precedent. Having a gun in your house surely does not mean you premeditated that murder in self-defense when you got burgled?
While I'm glad that such a (seemingly) bad journalist has been kicked, there's a couple problems...
By removing all her articles from LBN, they are in effect doing history revision. If I want to see just what she wrote to decide for myself how bad she was, I can't do that. They're removing evidence from public view.
Also, we're seeing nice double standards of the Open Source community: When someone we don't like publish personal details on someone we do like, it's stalking. But when someone we do like do the same to someone we don't like (e.g. spammers), it's a strike for freedom. It doesn't matter if they've done good or bad, publishing personal details like that is stalking.
Still trying to find the article that this whole thing is about while I can, but LBN is rather slow. Not readily seen at her page on LBN.
1. There are not "more versions of XML" than there are of anything. There's exactly one version of XML.
It being version 1.0, I guess. Or was that 1.1? Oops.
Not that I don't like XML in its proper places, but that statement was factually wrong. And I think launchd sounds great, esp. for the queue management thing.
I just want to say that perhaps I haven't been paying attention, but 2.7GHz PowerPC? That's faster than the fastest AMDs I see in the shops, and PPC is supposed to be very fast for its Hz. Maybe it's gone away with the G5 line? Any comparisons anywhere?
Which points to a problem with this test. What if you tell them to count tosses of a ball, and then have a man in gorilla suit dance in the background. (See UIUC experiment recently) If they fail to notice him, what can you say about him? Is he not there? Is he tossing a ball? Is he a ball? Is he being tossed? The very fact of it being a test environment changes the perceptions, and thus invalidates the test.
I go by the First Rule of Optimization: "Don't Do It" (occasionally, I will follow the Second Rule of Optimization: "Don't Do It Yet"). Two reasons:
1) Hand-optimized code tends to be harder to write, debug, understand, and maintain. 2) The compiler frequently does a better job anyway. Try comparing the standard strcpy function (while (*s != 0) *t++ = *s++;) with one that uses array indexing (while (s[i] != 0) { t[i] = s[i]; i++; }) using gcc -O3. On some versions and CPUs, the array-indexing code will actually use fewer instructions because the compiler gets more chances for optimization when you tell it that you're working with arrays. Pointer manipulation is for stupid compilers.
Of course, compilers cannot save you from bad design. Make sure to think about your O() factors.
We can handle that. Of course, there's there matter of delivery times, and the global weather control station is just *crammed* with requests right now. We expect your extra 30F will arrive late July, perhaps early August. We hope you will enjoy our service and look forward to dealing with you again.
How many American families will have to do without their third car, or maybe their second, or even *gasp* use public transportation! And think of the third-worldness of not having a TV in every room. And heaven forbid you can't get Cheez-Its at 3AM.
Most Americans are incredibly spoiled and could cut back consumption by a huge amount without getting even *close* to third world status.
Assuming global warming is a fact, these cutbacks would give the human race a much better chance at surviving without depriving Americans of basic necessities.
If global warming is not a fact, it will reduce your dependence on foreign oil to possibly nil, thereby freeing up a lot of the military budget for, say, tax cuts or better schools.
When you see a sign on the highway saying "Missing bridge ahead", you don't keep cruising and say "I assume that's not a fact". Not if you value your life, at least.
One of the "other things": Exclusive sales contracts.
It is for instance very common for universities in the US to give Coca-Cola or PepsiCo an exclusive contract on selling drinks on the premises in return for some miniscule support for the university.
I believe UIUC got $40.000, about a dollar per student. If real competition had been in effect, this could have been saved on about a weeks worth of drinks for most students. They should have a "Real competition in the drinks market" fee of $1/year/student:)
I always wanted to at least have the contract allow sales of locally-produced drinks. Then the big players can be reduced to one, but good local stuff can still be had.
Probably the thing I miss the most in Linux/Unix is the general lack of intelligent configuration. Not auto-configuration, but configuration programs that do just a little thinking of their own to come up with good suggestions.
I also frequently bemoan the lack of a good printer discovery service. It ought to be easy to ask what printers are accessible, even Windows can do that. But no, you have to type in the queue name or even IP address (good luck with that when the IP is dynamic). Grr...
P.S. Pet peeve: Configuration windows that lets you choose from one item only and don't notice that it might as well be skipped.
IMHO, the most important thing to come away from CS studies with an understanding of the fundamentals of CS, which you can get at any good place. As many other have mentioned, in terms of getting a job experience is the best thing, the next best thing is being convincing in your application & interview. A fancy-name degree won't help you if you seem uninterested or uninformed, but there are things a good CS school will teach you that real-life experience will take much longer to. Vice-versa, of course, but if you can't get a job without either experience or a degree, in your position a degree is obviously easier.
For that matter, I would beware of places that explicitly look for big-name degrees, as that means they put more stock in formalism and paperwork than in actual merit.
In short: Stick with your place, learn stuff -- both practical and theoretical, and get involved with activities that can further your knowledge and give you some of the experience that the courses themselves don't offer. Oh, and have fun.
Agreed. Just checked a CF bulb. It claims to be the equivalent of a 50-60W bulb at 600 lumen. And that's running at 12W. So I'm getting twice their output with less wattage from a bulb that I can get these days for about $6. I'm *so* not impressed.
Slashdot Mirror
I finished my (roughly) Master's degree in CS when I was 28. Only to go on to a Ph.D., finishing in 2003 and pretty much immediately getting a very interesting and challenging job. I definitely, absolutely don't regret going through the universities, it was a wonderful time, and I learned a *lot* that I would not have picked up otherwise. I also don't regret going into a programming job where I've been learning a lot of *other* things I didn't pick up at university. The two complement each other and make for a very strong mix; I can definitely tell the difference in programming quality between those who've had an education and those who've just picked it up -- the latter tend to make more random hacks and create unscalable, hard-to-maintain code. Yes, I know there are numerous exceptions both ways, but that's my experience. You aren't likely to "happen to" pick up big-O notation in the workplace, and useful project planning is rarely taught usefully in universities.
If you like the trading aspect, you *must* try Traders of Genoa. It's almost nothing but trading/auctioning/haggling, and very well done. Taught me to haggle for real-life things. Doesn't work with less that three people, though, and best with four or five.
I totally disagree. There's typically many possible places, out of which up to a handful tend to be interesting, either to help your people or to harm other player's people (making cities harder to finish) or - in particular - managing the fields. There is *so* much strategy in who gets what fields and how do you manage to get your meeple onto a big field that's already taken. Having only one *possible* placement of a tile is really, really rare, except at the very start if you don't use River or Count expansion. It's all about the fields, baby, it's all about the fields.
I can easily imagine having a terabyte on a single disk. In fact, LaCie, Hitachi and Seagate already sell such, among others. Disks are cheap and getting cheaper. Flash memory is more expensive, but getting cheaper even faster. I'm waiting for when the savings in mechanical breakdowns, power, heat and space makes flash memory more economical for petabyte storage than tapes and harddisks. Mechanical storage is for wusses:)
-Lars
Now that we've had all the jokes and funnies, how about somebody actually translating bill in question? I know a bit of French, but not enough to cover legalese.
-Lars
I Denmark, we have all-paper ballots, and it just works. Never heard any accusations of cheating, not even from our most extreme parties (like those to the left of the communists), polls results are in within a few hours, there's a nice big paper trail. And before someone says 'Denmark is just a small country', there's nothing in the system that doesn't scale linearly. And no expensive machines required, either.
-Lars
> *Disclaimer* I dislike the Recording industry with a passion*disclaimer*
>
> But you are saying that choosing what you put into your own body
> is somehow worse than infringing on the rights of an artist to make a profit from their hard work .
No, he's saying that choosing what you put into your own body[1] is somehow worse than choosing what to do with an item you've bought -- even without infringing any rights.
-Lars
[1] Which may lead to hospitalization or disability, costing the state $many.
Wow! There goes my last reason not to go over to the Dark Side.
-Darth Lars
Or he's commuting in *gasp* something other than a car! Trains are a fairly logical place to have wireless access installed, buses less so, it's happening in planes (but hopefully that's not part of his commute). Wouldn't want him browsing while biking or rollerskating, though. Could be a little pocket-input-device-in-front-of-eye-monitor like I saw in 2000 at Sun which would be useful while walking.
-Lars
> Russia [is] probably just about as good a candidate as any to hold real weight in space.
In space, you hold real mass. Which means the catholics are going to control space. Of course, in Soviet Russia space, real mass holds you.
-Lars
Now that's safety! I can't wait for somebody to fall off and be too startled/confused/dumb to get out of the way when the skis return.
-Lars
In the US, how do you know the votes aren't miscounted? There's no paper trail in many places.
-Lars
And once you have the self-assembled weapons platform, you just pray that it's IFF system can tell you from everybody else.
And anyways, readers of the Honor Harrington books will know why such a system would be next to useless without an active spacefleet. Hint: Rocks.
-Lars
I and many others in .dk regularly take large bags into shops. Simply because new bags cost significant money, we reuse old ones. So there are other reasons for entering shops with large bags.
That aside, I still think it sets a dangerous precedent. Having a gun in your house surely does not mean you premeditated that murder in self-defense when you got burgled?
-Lars
While I'm glad that such a (seemingly) bad journalist has been kicked, there's a couple problems...
By removing all her articles from LBN, they are in effect doing history revision. If I want to see just what she wrote to decide for myself how bad she was, I can't do that. They're removing evidence from public view.
Also, we're seeing nice double standards of the Open Source community: When someone we don't like publish personal details on someone we do like, it's stalking. But when someone we do like do the same to someone we don't like (e.g. spammers), it's a strike for freedom. It doesn't matter if they've done good or bad, publishing personal details like that is stalking.
Still trying to find the article that this whole thing is about while I can, but LBN is rather slow. Not readily seen at her page on LBN.
-Lars
1. There are not "more versions of XML" than there are of anything. There's exactly one version of XML.
It being version 1.0, I guess. Or was that 1.1? Oops.
Not that I don't like XML in its proper places, but that statement was factually wrong. And I think launchd sounds great, esp. for the queue management thing.
-Lars
I just want to say that perhaps I haven't been paying attention, but 2.7GHz PowerPC? That's faster than the fastest AMDs I see in the shops, and PPC is supposed to be very fast for its Hz. Maybe it's gone away with the G5 line? Any comparisons anywhere?
-Lars
Which points to a problem with this test. What if you tell them to count tosses of a ball, and then have a man in gorilla suit dance in the background. (See UIUC experiment recently) If they fail to notice him, what can you say about him? Is he not there? Is he tossing a ball? Is he a ball? Is he being tossed? The very fact of it being a test environment changes the perceptions, and thus invalidates the test.
-Lars
I go by the First Rule of Optimization: "Don't Do It" (occasionally, I will follow the Second Rule of Optimization: "Don't Do It Yet"). Two reasons:
1) Hand-optimized code tends to be harder to write, debug, understand, and maintain.
2) The compiler frequently does a better job anyway. Try comparing the standard strcpy function (while (*s != 0) *t++ = *s++;) with one that uses array indexing (while (s[i] != 0) { t[i] = s[i]; i++; }) using gcc -O3. On some versions and CPUs, the array-indexing code will actually use fewer instructions because the compiler gets more chances for optimization when you tell it that you're working with arrays. Pointer manipulation is for stupid compilers.
Of course, compilers cannot save you from bad design. Make sure to think about your O() factors.
-Lars
We can handle that. Of course, there's there matter of delivery times, and the global weather control station is just *crammed* with requests right now. We expect your extra 30F will arrive late July, perhaps early August. We hope you will enjoy our service and look forward to dealing with you again.
Sincerely, Global Weather Control, Inc.
How many American families will have to do without their third car, or maybe their second, or even *gasp* use public transportation! And think of the third-worldness of not having a TV in every room. And heaven forbid you can't get Cheez-Its at 3AM.
Most Americans are incredibly spoiled and could cut back consumption by a huge amount without getting even *close* to third world status.
Assuming global warming is a fact, these cutbacks would give the human race a much better chance at surviving without depriving Americans of basic necessities.
If global warming is not a fact, it will reduce your dependence on foreign oil to possibly nil, thereby freeing up a lot of the military budget for, say, tax cuts or better schools.
When you see a sign on the highway saying "Missing bridge ahead", you don't keep cruising and say "I assume that's not a fact". Not if you value your life, at least.
-Lars
One of the "other things": Exclusive sales contracts.
It is for instance very common for universities in the US to give Coca-Cola or PepsiCo an exclusive contract on selling drinks on the premises in return for some miniscule support for the university.
I believe UIUC got $40.000, about a dollar per student. If real competition had been in effect, this could have been saved on about a weeks worth of drinks for most students. They should have a "Real competition in the drinks market" fee of $1/year/student:)
I always wanted to at least have the contract allow sales of locally-produced drinks. Then the big players can be reduced to one, but good local stuff can still be had.
-Lars
Probably the thing I miss the most in Linux/Unix is the general lack of intelligent configuration. Not auto-configuration, but configuration programs that do just a little thinking of their own to come up with good suggestions.
I also frequently bemoan the lack of a good printer discovery service. It ought to be easy to ask what printers are accessible, even Windows can do that. But no, you have to type in the queue name or even IP address (good luck with that when the IP is dynamic). Grr...
P.S. Pet peeve: Configuration windows that lets you choose from one item only and don't notice that it might as well be skipped.
-Lars
IMHO, the most important thing to come away from CS studies with an understanding of the fundamentals of CS, which you can get at any good place. As many other have mentioned, in terms of getting a job experience is the best thing, the next best thing is being convincing in your application & interview. A fancy-name degree won't help you if you seem uninterested or uninformed, but there are things a good CS school will teach you that real-life experience will take much longer to. Vice-versa, of course, but if you can't get a job without either experience or a degree, in your position a degree is obviously easier.
For that matter, I would beware of places that explicitly look for big-name degrees, as that means they put more stock in formalism and paperwork than in actual merit.
In short: Stick with your place, learn stuff -- both practical and theoretical, and get involved with activities that can further your knowledge and give you some of the experience that the courses themselves don't offer. Oh, and have fun.
-Lars
Agreed. Just checked a CF bulb. It claims to be the equivalent of a 50-60W bulb at 600 lumen. And that's running at 12W. So I'm getting twice their output with less wattage from a bulb that I can get these days for about $6. I'm *so* not impressed.
-Lars