I have slashdot set as the homepage in my browser.
Guess that makes me one of the three percent? And this makes me a troll how? Not to say I won't ante up the bux, but come on, saying that everyone who loads a lot of pages is a worthless turd is a little extreme.
Seriously. The worst thing you can do at your age is say "I am only interested in X, all my life shall be X, and yea verily it is good." College is a time of experimentation (yes yes, wine women and song, but I mean specifically in terms of fields of study). Math is a great tool in tons of other fields, so you should at least dabble in a few other fields of study while you're an undergrad. You never know, you might end up developing a love for physics or the philosophy of formal logic. My math skills are nothing to brag about, but I'm really happy as a computational chemist[1] to have linear algebra, for example. (Actually that's what I was doing in academia, right now I'm "slumming" as a programmer.) My ex-roommate got a BSc math and just went to grad school in south africa taking a curricula in applied oceanography. You might even pull an Escher and become an artist. So when you're 17 or 18, don't be rigid about your path in life. Heck, when you're 30 don't be that way. Life is full of possibilities...
On an IMHO level: making a living as an academic is hard.
The pure pursuit of knowledge is great, and vital in the long run, but sometimes it's hard to pay the bills, you know? So, again IMHO, you might be better off finding a career that uses a lot of math but in an applied setting (like as a scientific programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, lots of interesting code, fair bit of math, and you might indirectly be saving lives with every line of code you write).
[1] many jokes about "chemist math", the dirty secret of most chemists is that we all suck balls at anything more complex than a partial derivative. except for the physical chemists, but they all wear black and mope in the corner...;-)
ICBW but i think glasscode might be what you're after. haven't tried it myself, just ran across it about a year ago...
the real reason you aren't linking to it:
on
Do You Like Your Job?
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· Score: 3, Funny
this is slashdot. you're a network admin. the real reason is you don't want your pager to go off, telling you in shrill tones that every router you own has just gone Tits Up due to inbound traffic...;-) You can be honest here, you're among friends.
(And yeah, I agree with you, working in a casual atmosphere rules. It's worth the pay cut if you have to take it, to show up wearing what you want and know that you have a good chance of making it through the day without getting screamed at.)
that's the gravatic ACCELERATION constant he gave, so yeah, the units are in m/sec^2.:-) [yes, that means things fall faster (in the limit of being without drag) the longer they fall, if you haven't taken a physics course]
Hell, I first parsed it as blowing a hole through an old IBM dinousaur with an RPG-7 or the like so you could see your linux server from your office without herniating yourself moving the IBM kit.:-) Then again, I haven't had any coffee yet this morning...
easy, use Slackware. They just recently stopped provision to an all floppy disk install (if you need that get 7.1). I've run it (7.1, 8 would be probably the same but I'd have to do a net install) comfortably on a 486dx2-50 with 12 megs of ram (laptop, no cdrom) and a 200 meg hard disk. No X11, but all the network tools I need plus gcc and perl and vim to hack code... Heck, the only time I every noticed how "slow" it was was when I decided to compile a newer kernel (that took, like, two days;-)). If it doesn't have to be Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD work pretty well in small places too...
boot disks, further implications
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Like I just posted over on the newsforge forum, this would be a godsend for companies that use DOS for their firmware/bios/eeprom flash utilities (perfectly understandably, you don't need or want the memory protection of something more sophisticated than DOS if your goal is to do dangerous, illegitimate, obscene things to various memory-mapped fiddly bits;-) ). Why? The ability to distribute fully functional dos disks without license hassles, because more and more mainstream i386 users are losing the ability to boot to DOS (i.e. they're transitioning to NT-based Microsoft products or Unix-based things).
[I rehearsed what I was going to say probably every ten minutes for about four months. On the bus. In the shower. In class. During exams. Etc. Etc. Etc.]
it was developed to take the intellectual challenge out of crashing the system, thus removing any motivation to do so (for the old school hackers anyway, not the testosterone-pissfest-let'sfuckshitup 14-year old script kiddies of today:-/). ISTR i learned of it reading Steven Levy's _Hackers_, but ICBW... see ITS on jargon.org for some background on the OS it was "featured" in.
So basically y'all just invited 150,000 trolls to your wedding. [mental image of a bunch of large green people fidgeting in white tuxedo/dress outfits under the watchful eyes of a squadron of truncheon[1]-armed moderators... and the single most popular wedding present would be fairly predictable]
:-)
Kidding aside, w00t! Congratulations! I did the bent knee thing, but for a twist I hid the ring in her clothes so I pulled it out of her pocket instead of mine...
I mean, 800+ comments on a marriage proposal located in a site aimed at unix nrrds... and not even one pun about linking or ld(1)?!?
Kidding aside, congratulations to the future Mr. & Mrs. Taco.:-) Now you get to discover what a logistical nightmare something as conceptually simple as wanting to be together forever can turn into. Have I mentioned that I hate caterers, photographers, and members of the clergy? If you find yourselves getting stressed out, just take a step back mentally and remind yourselves that the day is all about the lasting emotional intangibles, not what kind of flowers are on the reception tables...
All the others, like you said, are perfectly reasonable, especially given the zero-monetary-cost nature of the service. It's just the potential of being kicked without notice and then losing all your stuff that is the double-whammy. Either by itself wouldn't be so bad. It'd be nice of them to either:
Give you X days warning your account is about to be revoked, with instructions on how to pull your content, or...
Send you a fait accompli notice and say "go here to download a tarball of all your stuff, you have X days to do so before it is deleted". (The only non-completely-trivial part of this would be bundling in the content in the project's forums and whatnot, and that's probably just a few sql dump-to-file statements...)
I think the GNU project is running something called Savannah which is basically sourceforge's engine running on their server. Yep: http://savannah.gnu.org/ Disclaimer: I really know nothing about the service save that it exists, RTFFinePrint. For all I know, there is an "All Your src Are Belong To Us" clause in the user agreement.
take a look at WxWindows. It's also been ported to work with other languages such as Perl and Python. IMHO it's prettier-looking than Tk and nicer-feeling to code in (more OO).
cost wise that sounds much like Texas. The IT industry is moderately healthy here, mainly from "old school" IT job sources like sysnet admin for big companies (Houston, Dallas, etc.). Plus there are the state and.edu jobs in Austin, with a smattering of startups here and there (mainly Austin and Dallas).
Hrm, well, I do seem to recall reading on Usenet more than once that the SGI Origin 2000 double stacks had a little space between the two nodes and that said space got pretty toasty when the cabinet was closed... Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that SGI hardware was abused in some form or fashion...
If that's the same game as San Francisco Rush 2049, then pick up a dreamcast (what, $49 new now?) and play it...:-) [I like that game a lot, mainly for the new physics engine. Note that the 'new' attaches to the physics, as well as the programming code...;-) "Why do I fall up and sideways when I explode?"]
About three years ago I had the pleasure to own a Quantum3d Obsidian X-24. It was two vodoo-2/12 meg cards on one full-length pci card. By full length I mean it just barely fit into my case... It weighed a good many pounds, had a jet black PCB and basically screamed "I Am A Graphics Badass!" at the top of it's silicon lungs...:-) That card is still running fine in a friend's computer, cranking out the frames in Unreal Tournament and the like...
I'm in sort of the same boat. I have had some formal training in CS but not a lot (the bulk of my school time has been spent making things go boom or turn pretty colors (chemistry)). I hack perl for a living, here's two books (one perl specific, one not) that have helped me out a lot:
I agree that a book on the formal aspect of Computer Science (possibly including software engineering) for practicing programmers from other educational backgrounds would be absolutely cool. Before the CS degree holders turn their noses up too high about liberal arts major web bums, I'd like to remind them that many scientists become "Accidental Programmers" these days... We have the desire and skill to absorb the formal underpinnings of this craft, but we may not have the resources (time, money) to do so.
The book ideally would give each topic enough detail to bring the reader from unfamiliarity up to moderate skill, enough to comprehend the titles listed in the (ideally) well-populated Further Reading section... What topics? Um, dunno. Hire a couple of respected CS profs to talk it out. Look at a good uni's core CS curricula. What language? Um, dunno. I'd say pseudocode first with perhaps an implementation src repository (cd, web) in something rather universal like C. Heck, if you want to appeal to the Open Source community, give people the ability to contribute implementations ("click here to download the lisp implementations, here for the C ones, here for befunge,...";-) ).
Especially a book that started with "how to fit the bits together", going on through "how to use fitted bits to solve problems". Using a cohesive example throughout the entire book is a technique I like very much (e.g. building an electronic shopkeeping system [canonical pet store?], including the web commerce side, inventory management, employee scheduling, blah blah). EJB is one field that I think from my own stabs at it really, REALLY needs a simplification tome, i.e. a book that presents an easily digestible chunk of knowledge to the beginner. Currently trying to learn EJB feels somewhat like the old joke about IBM's technical manuals (maybe it was Digital's VMS sysmanuals, I don't recall, this was way before my time): "How many technical manuals for $foo do I need to read? All of them. Which one should I read first? All of them."
Centralized Adventure Archive Network?:-) Yes, I can see that as being a rocking project. I don't think that it would be all that hard to build from scratch if need be. Taking the maximal features implementation route, you could provide something like sourceforge for the module creators (homepage, file management, maybe a mailing list, bug tracking, yaddayadda). Taking the minimal features implementation, you could have a categorized listing with links to where-ever the module developer is hosting their stuff (geocities, yahoogroups for mailinglist, sourceforge, whoever) with maybe a local cache of their latest version. The latter route I could build from scratch in a weekend (openbsd, apache, perl, postgresql; those are the ingredients I'd pick).
I am soooo looking forward to this game. I'll even spend money on hardware to play it if my current desktop isn't brawny enough (celeron 450 with a tnt 1, hehe it was a rocking game machine about three years ago).
WRT module development that's not on win32, does anyone think that the community could come up with tools? By that I mean, if BW could release the "specs" on how to do this or if it's something more intricate than knowing how to write a particular file...
When you consider that their problem space was a lot narrower than what, say, the developers of NetBSD have to cover (many many more arches, two decades of incremental features, etc. etc.), it's no wonder that their code will be more easily digestible to a newbie. Think about it via an analogy: when you're in undergrad differential equations, probably every thing you touch was a solved problem in early 19th century Europe. This simplicity is what makes it manageable so you can study more recent and more complex things (I remember the first time I was in a chem course and we started talking about things that had happened in the last five years. It was electrifying, but that had nothing on the awesome knowledge in later courses that what we were working on was _on the frontier as it was right then_. That's heady stuff...)
Holy cow, that's so cool! I mean, those were being written (the latest of them), when I was being born! It's like talking to your ancestors or something...:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I have slashdot set as the homepage in my browser. Guess that makes me one of the three percent? And this makes me a troll how? Not to say I won't ante up the bux, but come on, saying that everyone who loads a lot of pages is a worthless turd is a little extreme.
Seriously. The worst thing you can do at your age is say "I am only interested in X, all my life shall be X, and yea verily it is good." College is a time of experimentation (yes yes, wine women and song, but I mean specifically in terms of fields of study). Math is a great tool in tons of other fields, so you should at least dabble in a few other fields of study while you're an undergrad. You never know, you might end up developing a love for physics or the philosophy of formal logic. My math skills are nothing to brag about, but I'm really happy as a computational chemist[1] to have linear algebra, for example. (Actually that's what I was doing in academia, right now I'm "slumming" as a programmer.) My ex-roommate got a BSc math and just went to grad school in south africa taking a curricula in applied oceanography. You might even pull an Escher and become an artist. So when you're 17 or 18, don't be rigid about your path in life. Heck, when you're 30 don't be that way. Life is full of possibilities...
On an IMHO level: making a living as an academic is hard. The pure pursuit of knowledge is great, and vital in the long run, but sometimes it's hard to pay the bills, you know? So, again IMHO, you might be better off finding a career that uses a lot of math but in an applied setting (like as a scientific programmer in the pharmaceutical industry, lots of interesting code, fair bit of math, and you might indirectly be saving lives with every line of code you write).
[1] many jokes about "chemist math", the dirty secret of most chemists is that we all suck balls at anything more complex than a partial derivative. except for the physical chemists, but they all wear black and mope in the corner... ;-)
ICBW but i think glasscode might be what you're after. haven't tried it myself, just ran across it about a year ago...
this is slashdot. you're a network admin. the real reason is you don't want your pager to go off, telling you in shrill tones that every router you own has just gone Tits Up due to inbound traffic... ;-) You can be honest here, you're among friends.
(And yeah, I agree with you, working in a casual atmosphere rules. It's worth the pay cut if you have to take it, to show up wearing what you want and know that you have a good chance of making it through the day without getting screamed at.)
that's the gravatic ACCELERATION constant he gave, so yeah, the units are in m/sec^2. :-) [yes, that means things fall faster (in the limit of being without drag) the longer they fall, if you haven't taken a physics course]
Hell, I first parsed it as blowing a hole through an old IBM dinousaur with an RPG-7 or the like so you could see your linux server from your office without herniating yourself moving the IBM kit. :-) Then again, I haven't had any coffee yet this morning...
easy, use Slackware. They just recently stopped provision to an all floppy disk install (if you need that get 7.1). I've run it (7.1, 8 would be probably the same but I'd have to do a net install) comfortably on a 486dx2-50 with 12 megs of ram (laptop, no cdrom) and a 200 meg hard disk. No X11, but all the network tools I need plus gcc and perl and vim to hack code... Heck, the only time I every noticed how "slow" it was was when I decided to compile a newer kernel (that took, like, two days ;-)). If it doesn't have to be Linux, NetBSD or OpenBSD work pretty well in small places too...
Like I just posted over on the newsforge forum, this would be a godsend for companies that use DOS for their firmware/bios/eeprom flash utilities (perfectly understandably, you don't need or want the memory protection of something more sophisticated than DOS if your goal is to do dangerous, illegitimate, obscene things to various memory-mapped fiddly bits ;-) ). Why? The ability to distribute fully functional dos disks without license hassles, because more and more mainstream i386 users are losing the ability to boot to DOS (i.e. they're transitioning to NT-based Microsoft products or Unix-based things).
It must be pretty hard to find a red velvet smoking jacket that has provision for a fin, much less a pimp hat that would work for a Sphyrna Lewini...
(I don't know what species of shark these are, I just picked that one randomly.)
He completely retyped it at least 15 times. :-)
[I rehearsed what I was going to say probably every ten minutes for about four months. On the bus. In the shower. In class. During exams. Etc. Etc. Etc.]
it was developed to take the intellectual challenge out of crashing the system, thus removing any motivation to do so (for the old school hackers anyway, not the testosterone-pissfest-let'sfuckshitup 14-year old script kiddies of today :-/). ISTR i learned of it reading Steven Levy's _Hackers_, but ICBW... see ITS on jargon.org for some background on the OS it was "featured" in.
So basically y'all just invited 150,000 trolls to your wedding. [mental image of a bunch of large green people fidgeting in white tuxedo/dress outfits under the watchful eyes of a squadron of truncheon[1]-armed moderators... and the single most popular wedding present would be fairly predictable]
Kidding aside, w00t! Congratulations! I did the bent knee thing, but for a twist I hid the ring in her clothes so I pulled it out of her pocket instead of mine...
[1] Five use only, patent pending,
I mean, 800+ comments on a marriage proposal located in a site aimed at unix nrrds ... and not even one pun about linking or ld(1) ?!?
:-) Now you get to discover what a logistical nightmare something as conceptually simple as wanting to be together forever can turn into. Have I mentioned that I hate caterers, photographers, and members of the clergy? If you find yourselves getting stressed out, just take a step back mentally and remind yourselves that the day is all about the lasting emotional intangibles, not what kind of flowers are on the reception tables...
Kidding aside, congratulations to the future Mr. & Mrs. Taco.
I think the GNU project is running something called Savannah which is basically sourceforge's engine running on their server. Yep: http://savannah.gnu.org/ Disclaimer: I really know nothing about the service save that it exists, RTFFinePrint. For all I know, there is an "All Your src Are Belong To Us" clause in the user agreement.
take a look at WxWindows. It's also been ported to work with other languages such as Perl and Python. IMHO it's prettier-looking than Tk and nicer-feeling to code in (more OO).
cost wise that sounds much like Texas. The IT industry is moderately healthy here, mainly from "old school" IT job sources like sysnet admin for big companies (Houston, Dallas, etc.). Plus there are the state and .edu jobs in Austin, with a smattering of startups here and there (mainly Austin and Dallas).
Hrm, well, I do seem to recall reading on Usenet more than once that the SGI Origin 2000 double stacks had a little space between the two nodes and that said space got pretty toasty when the cabinet was closed... Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that SGI hardware was abused in some form or fashion...
If that's the same game as San Francisco Rush 2049, then pick up a dreamcast (what, $49 new now?) and play it... :-) [I like that game a lot, mainly for the new physics engine. Note that the 'new' attaches to the physics, as well as the programming code... ;-) "Why do I fall up and sideways when I explode?"]
About three years ago I had the pleasure to own a Quantum3d Obsidian X-24. It was two vodoo-2/12 meg cards on one full-length pci card. By full length I mean it just barely fit into my case... It weighed a good many pounds, had a jet black PCB and basically screamed "I Am A Graphics Badass!" at the top of it's silicon lungs... :-) That card is still running fine in a friend's computer, cranking out the frames in Unreal Tournament and the like...
I'm in sort of the same boat. I have had some formal training in CS but not a lot (the bulk of my school time has been spent making things go boom or turn pretty colors (chemistry)). I hack perl for a living, here's two books (one perl specific, one not) that have helped me out a lot:
I agree that a book on the formal aspect of Computer Science (possibly including software engineering) for practicing programmers from other educational backgrounds would be absolutely cool. Before the CS degree holders turn their noses up too high about liberal arts major web bums, I'd like to remind them that many scientists become "Accidental Programmers" these days... We have the desire and skill to absorb the formal underpinnings of this craft, but we may not have the resources (time, money) to do so.
The book ideally would give each topic enough detail to bring the reader from unfamiliarity up to moderate skill, enough to comprehend the titles listed in the (ideally) well-populated Further Reading section... What topics? Um, dunno. Hire a couple of respected CS profs to talk it out. Look at a good uni's core CS curricula. What language? Um, dunno. I'd say pseudocode first with perhaps an implementation src repository (cd, web) in something rather universal like C. Heck, if you want to appeal to the Open Source community, give people the ability to contribute implementations ("click here to download the lisp implementations, here for the C ones, here for befunge, ..." ;-) ).
Especially a book that started with "how to fit the bits together", going on through "how to use fitted bits to solve problems". Using a cohesive example throughout the entire book is a technique I like very much (e.g. building an electronic shopkeeping system [canonical pet store?], including the web commerce side, inventory management, employee scheduling, blah blah). EJB is one field that I think from my own stabs at it really, REALLY needs a simplification tome, i.e. a book that presents an easily digestible chunk of knowledge to the beginner. Currently trying to learn EJB feels somewhat like the old joke about IBM's technical manuals (maybe it was Digital's VMS sysmanuals, I don't recall, this was way before my time): "How many technical manuals for $foo do I need to read? All of them. Which one should I read first? All of them."
I am soooo looking forward to this game. I'll even spend money on hardware to play it if my current desktop isn't brawny enough (celeron 450 with a tnt 1, hehe it was a rocking game machine about three years ago).
WRT module development that's not on win32, does anyone think that the community could come up with tools? By that I mean, if BW could release the "specs" on how to do this or if it's something more intricate than knowing how to write a particular file...
When you consider that their problem space was a lot narrower than what, say, the developers of NetBSD have to cover (many many more arches, two decades of incremental features, etc. etc.), it's no wonder that their code will be more easily digestible to a newbie. Think about it via an analogy: when you're in undergrad differential equations, probably every thing you touch was a solved problem in early 19th century Europe. This simplicity is what makes it manageable so you can study more recent and more complex things (I remember the first time I was in a chem course and we started talking about things that had happened in the last five years. It was electrifying, but that had nothing on the awesome knowledge in later courses that what we were working on was _on the frontier as it was right then_. That's heady stuff...)
Holy cow, that's so cool! I mean, those were being written (the latest of them), when I was being born! It's like talking to your ancestors or something... :-)