Java, C#, and JavaScript all have graphics and canvas component libraries. All these libraries render graphics differently on different systems. In the C++ universe, programmers have had to use 3rd-party libs like Qt, so a C++ standard library for graphics is long overdue.
No student loan debt from grad school
on
Is a Postdoc Worth it?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Graduate students in STEM fields typically do not accumulate student loan debt from grad school. In fact, many STEM U.S. grad students work and get paid as TAs or as RAs (research assistants). From talking to dozens of other CS PhDs, the pay is about 23K/year (which is about what I got). That amount is enough to get by when you're a PhD student.
Low-salary 95K/year postdoc was well worth it
on
Is a Postdoc Worth it?
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· Score: 0, Interesting
When I graduated with my CS PhD back in the early 2000's, I couldn't find a single job due to some combination of the dot-com bust and my being not ready for industry. I was lucky enough to get a postdoc position with IBM Research. The salary was average (only $95K/year) compared to software engineers, but the experience was great. My manager hid all politics from me, and I wasn't subject to the rigors of performance reviews. Ten years later, I've had a relatively decent career, and having IBM Research on my resume sure does look good.
At large corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and others, there are always two tracks: management and individual contributor. You can reach the same levels of seniority and pay in either track. At the top of the management track, you can excel to be a director and then VP, etc. At the top of the individual contributor track, you can reach principal engineer, then distinguished engineer, etc.
LOL. I work as a software engineer and have 12 patent applications submitted in my career. Each one of these represents at least 6 months' worth of research and development, so I know what the value of a patent is. How many patents do you have? 0? You probably have NOTHING because you haven't done a day's worth of original work in your life. You live off doing the same old database, the same old website, the same old crap and have nothing to contribute to society. You say "keep other corporations from being successful." You mean to "keep other corporations from copying and/or making the same old database, website, or other crap." I pity you, your children, and your children's children.
I find Groklaw to be filled with amateur web sleuths who have nothing better to do with their time than to shake their angry fists at successful corporations. A better source of information on patent law is FOSS Patents.
The last several days the whining from the pro-Android fanboys has been incessant. When will it stop? I haven't observed this much whining since elementary school. Waaaa. I broke a rule and got punished for it. The rules aren't fair. Waaaaahhh. PROTIP: Go grow up and learn to live in an adult's world.
This is not correct. In the US at research universities, a grad student is paid about $25K a year, and it includes almost full tuition coverage. Medical, dental, etc. are also included. The biggest loss vis-a-vis working full-time is the loss of the full-time salary, but since the PhD student is typically around age 23-29, the loss is reasonable since one isn't make all that much in that age range. In fact, after finishing the PhD, the salary should be substantially higher to make up for the loss in wages during that time. I made $95K in my first job after finishing my PhD, and my salary by my mid-to-late 30s has already made up the difference. However, the one area where I cannot make up the difference is 401k annual contributions with company match, but one can do "catch-up" contributions when one gets to 50.
I have a PhD in CS from a top-20 US university and now work in an industry research lab. Like most PhD recipients, I started grad school right after college and finished before starting my professional career. I would say getting the PhD is the single best decision I ever made, and looking back at my high school and college trajectory, it now seems like it was an inevitability. I always wanted to work in technology research, hack on software prototypes, work on R&D projects for a large influential company, and make more money. I've gotten all those, and I'm grateful for the opportunities. I make about 25% to 50% more in base salary than my friends who went to the same grad school but graduated with a MS degree. I also have more technical freedom at work because I have the publications and track record to back up what I'm saying. In the couple of times I sent my resume out for a new job (e.g. Google, MSFT, Facebook), I've gotten callbacks within 48 hours.
I do agree with some of the other unwashed heathens here who have only MS degrees that you can indeed get a great job with just a MS degree. But why limit yourself? Also, I agree that not all PhD programs are the same. I've seen some PhDs from 3rd tier universities work as test engineers.
So in the end, I would say that you should get a PhD only if you can land at a CS grad school top-20 university. It is not worth your time getting a PhD from a university outside of this group. If you do get in, establish your area of expertise by publishing a lot of papers at top-tier conferences in order to strengthen your case for getting an interview at a lab like MSR. I recommend you do your dissertation in a field that has high value to companies, like machine learning or IR.
By the way, never take out a loan for grad school. If you work as a TA or research assistant, you will get paid while you attend school. The national average seems to be about $25k/year according to all my PhD colleagues.
The iPhone 3GS, which was released in June 2009, is still being sold as Apple's low-end iPhone (usually for $0.99 on a contract), and it runs the current iOS 5. When iOS 6 is released this Fall, the 3GS will run that as well. Yes, there are features that are not available, such as Siri. Now look at Windows Phone. The flagship Nokia Lumia 900 was released in January of 2012, just six months ago, and now it will not be able to run WinPhone 7.
Yahoo! is targeted to mainstream, normal people, so perhaps you are not in that demographic. yahoo.com is easily in the top-10 of highest-traffic websites in the world.
Yahoo! sells exactly what Google sells: eyeballs and pageviews to advertisers. The difference is that Yahoo! gets its eyeballs from properties, whereas Google gets them from search results.
Java creator James Gosling stated that Google totally slimed Sun and favors Oracle in the trial. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are in the right,” he wrote on his blog. “We were all really disturbed, even [former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz] just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”
The career choice of attaining a PhD seems simultaneously humourous, praise-worthy, and worthy of sympathy from those on the outside. But as someone who has a CS PhD from a top-20 U.S. university and is now fast approaching 40, I can honestly say it's the single best decision I've ever made. I'm skilled in my chosen fields, make over $200K for a large Bay Area company, and can attack any new project with confidence and thoroughness (and my managers know this). My only real regret is not studying harder in undergrad to get into a top-5 PhD program.
only to be thwarted by indifferent professors, lazy undergrads and the ever-present fear that they'll never graduate
I mostly agree with the original statements. Some professors are frankly very indifferent, and undergrad students are exceptionally lazy, particularly for Spring quarter classes. However, there shouldn't really be a fear of not graduating; it's just a matter of putting together a coherent set of high-calibre research publications.
This past weekend between Friday and Sunday, Apple sold 3 million new iPad units (aka the iPad 3). Looks like customers made the decision of buying an integrated system over a DIY system. And honestly, who cares? Apple has gone to great lengths to produce a device that efficiently crams electronics and a battery into something that's 0.37" thick. Why would I want to mess around with that?
Microsoft is not releasing the XBox 720 because they are afraid of Linux and openness. As we all know, Microsoft is a dying company and Linux is the future. Linux will dominate the living room and video games because it is open, and open always wins. Is there a bug in a videogame? Not a problem because there are dozens, no hundreds of programmers who will pounce on that bug and fix it. Microsoft knows it has already lost the game to Linux. They are scared like little girly-men.
Microsoft has a product that you may have heard of. It's called Exchange. Both Apple and Google pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use Exchange ActiveSync. It mutually benefits all sides (seller and buyer). Now Apple has products that you may have heard of. They're called iOS patents, which are a proxy for the iOS features. Google and its minions should pay a licensing fee to use them. That is how capitalism works. If you think that's crazy, then I know where you stand, comrade.
Slashdot Mirror
Java, C#, and JavaScript all have graphics and canvas component libraries. All these libraries render graphics differently on different systems. In the C++ universe, programmers have had to use 3rd-party libs like Qt, so a C++ standard library for graphics is long overdue.
Graduate students in STEM fields typically do not accumulate student loan debt from grad school. In fact, many STEM U.S. grad students work and get paid as TAs or as RAs (research assistants). From talking to dozens of other CS PhDs, the pay is about 23K/year (which is about what I got). That amount is enough to get by when you're a PhD student.
When I graduated with my CS PhD back in the early 2000's, I couldn't find a single job due to some combination of the dot-com bust and my being not ready for industry. I was lucky enough to get a postdoc position with IBM Research. The salary was average (only $95K/year) compared to software engineers, but the experience was great. My manager hid all politics from me, and I wasn't subject to the rigors of performance reviews. Ten years later, I've had a relatively decent career, and having IBM Research on my resume sure does look good.
Seems like yesterday. Get off my lawn.
At large corporations such as Microsoft, Google, and others, there are always two tracks: management and individual contributor. You can reach the same levels of seniority and pay in either track. At the top of the management track, you can excel to be a director and then VP, etc. At the top of the individual contributor track, you can reach principal engineer, then distinguished engineer, etc.
Amount of money spent on lobbying in Washington, D.C., in 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-03-06/samsung-s-patent-spat-with-apple-spurs-u-s-lobbying-push.html
LOL. I work as a software engineer and have 12 patent applications submitted in my career. Each one of these represents at least 6 months' worth of research and development, so I know what the value of a patent is. How many patents do you have? 0? You probably have NOTHING because you haven't done a day's worth of original work in your life. You live off doing the same old database, the same old website, the same old crap and have nothing to contribute to society. You say "keep other corporations from being successful." You mean to "keep other corporations from copying and/or making the same old database, website, or other crap." I pity you, your children, and your children's children.
I find Groklaw to be filled with amateur web sleuths who have nothing better to do with their time than to shake their angry fists at successful corporations. A better source of information on patent law is FOSS Patents.
Preemptive "stop it, you immature clod."
The fact you can only resize a window by dragging the bottom-righthand corner is just one example.
I really disliked that as well, but as of Lion (2011), they added the feature to drag any side of the window to resize it.
As far as Linux desktops go, KDE and Gnome are not brilliant, and not as good as the Windows/OS X experience, but they are certainly more than usable.
Continuing to use a desktop environment as just "usable" is why we can't have nice things.
Here's how to fix the Linux desktop:
Those are just some minor suggestions.
The last several days the whining from the pro-Android fanboys has been incessant. When will it stop? I haven't observed this much whining since elementary school. Waaaa. I broke a rule and got punished for it. The rules aren't fair. Waaaaahhh. PROTIP: Go grow up and learn to live in an adult's world.
... and if the app isn't free, then Android users will make it free. You know what I'm talking about. Also, Android users vote for Romney.
This is not correct. In the US at research universities, a grad student is paid about $25K a year, and it includes almost full tuition coverage. Medical, dental, etc. are also included. The biggest loss vis-a-vis working full-time is the loss of the full-time salary, but since the PhD student is typically around age 23-29, the loss is reasonable since one isn't make all that much in that age range. In fact, after finishing the PhD, the salary should be substantially higher to make up for the loss in wages during that time. I made $95K in my first job after finishing my PhD, and my salary by my mid-to-late 30s has already made up the difference. However, the one area where I cannot make up the difference is 401k annual contributions with company match, but one can do "catch-up" contributions when one gets to 50.
I have a PhD in CS from a top-20 US university and now work in an industry research lab. Like most PhD recipients, I started grad school right after college and finished before starting my professional career. I would say getting the PhD is the single best decision I ever made, and looking back at my high school and college trajectory, it now seems like it was an inevitability. I always wanted to work in technology research, hack on software prototypes, work on R&D projects for a large influential company, and make more money. I've gotten all those, and I'm grateful for the opportunities. I make about 25% to 50% more in base salary than my friends who went to the same grad school but graduated with a MS degree. I also have more technical freedom at work because I have the publications and track record to back up what I'm saying. In the couple of times I sent my resume out for a new job (e.g. Google, MSFT, Facebook), I've gotten callbacks within 48 hours.
I do agree with some of the other unwashed heathens here who have only MS degrees that you can indeed get a great job with just a MS degree. But why limit yourself? Also, I agree that not all PhD programs are the same. I've seen some PhDs from 3rd tier universities work as test engineers. So in the end, I would say that you should get a PhD only if you can land at a CS grad school top-20 university. It is not worth your time getting a PhD from a university outside of this group. If you do get in, establish your area of expertise by publishing a lot of papers at top-tier conferences in order to strengthen your case for getting an interview at a lab like MSR. I recommend you do your dissertation in a field that has high value to companies, like machine learning or IR.
By the way, never take out a loan for grad school. If you work as a TA or research assistant, you will get paid while you attend school. The national average seems to be about $25k/year according to all my PhD colleagues.
The iPhone 3GS, which was released in June 2009, is still being sold as Apple's low-end iPhone (usually for $0.99 on a contract), and it runs the current iOS 5. When iOS 6 is released this Fall, the 3GS will run that as well. Yes, there are features that are not available, such as Siri. Now look at Windows Phone. The flagship Nokia Lumia 900 was released in January of 2012, just six months ago, and now it will not be able to run WinPhone 7.
Are you 15 years old or something? Microsoft has long shown that it wants to destroy all competing platforms that compete with Windows.
Guess what? Linux is a platform. Guess what? Linux competes with Windows on the server end.
My guess is that you are one of those millennials who has no idea about history beyond what you had for lunch.
Yahoo! is targeted to mainstream, normal people, so perhaps you are not in that demographic. yahoo.com is easily in the top-10 of highest-traffic websites in the world.
Yahoo! sells exactly what Google sells: eyeballs and pageviews to advertisers. The difference is that Yahoo! gets its eyeballs from properties, whereas Google gets them from search results.
Java creator James Gosling stated that Google totally slimed Sun and favors Oracle in the trial. “While I have differences with Oracle, in this case, they are in the right,” he wrote on his blog. “We were all really disturbed, even [former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz] just decided to put on a happy face and tried to turn lemons into lemonade, which annoyed a lot of folks at Sun.”
The career choice of attaining a PhD seems simultaneously humourous, praise-worthy, and worthy of sympathy from those on the outside. But as someone who has a CS PhD from a top-20 U.S. university and is now fast approaching 40, I can honestly say it's the single best decision I've ever made. I'm skilled in my chosen fields, make over $200K for a large Bay Area company, and can attack any new project with confidence and thoroughness (and my managers know this). My only real regret is not studying harder in undergrad to get into a top-5 PhD program.
only to be thwarted by indifferent professors, lazy undergrads and the ever-present fear that they'll never graduate
I mostly agree with the original statements. Some professors are frankly very indifferent, and undergrad students are exceptionally lazy, particularly for Spring quarter classes. However, there shouldn't really be a fear of not graduating; it's just a matter of putting together a coherent set of high-calibre research publications.
they know they will die if they don't get more subscription readers
Amazing analysis. A company will go out of business if they don't make money.
It must suck for you to be so low in the 99%. Good luck in life.
This past weekend between Friday and Sunday, Apple sold 3 million new iPad units (aka the iPad 3). Looks like customers made the decision of buying an integrated system over a DIY system. And honestly, who cares? Apple has gone to great lengths to produce a device that efficiently crams electronics and a battery into something that's 0.37" thick. Why would I want to mess around with that?
Microsoft is not releasing the XBox 720 because they are afraid of Linux and openness. As we all know, Microsoft is a dying company and Linux is the future. Linux will dominate the living room and video games because it is open, and open always wins. Is there a bug in a videogame? Not a problem because there are dozens, no hundreds of programmers who will pounce on that bug and fix it. Microsoft knows it has already lost the game to Linux. They are scared like little girly-men.
Microsoft has a product that you may have heard of. It's called Exchange. Both Apple and Google pay a licensing fee to Microsoft to use Exchange ActiveSync. It mutually benefits all sides (seller and buyer). Now Apple has products that you may have heard of. They're called iOS patents, which are a proxy for the iOS features. Google and its minions should pay a licensing fee to use them. That is how capitalism works. If you think that's crazy, then I know where you stand, comrade.