I don't ordinarily favor "me too" posts, but this one says almost exactly what I would have: Stay in your small college, ace your Bachelor's degree, and if you want a big-name degree, get it in grad school. And I'm not just saying this to vindicate myself, I'm telling you to avoid mistakes I made.:-)
I also believe it's the student, not the school. The really top-flight CS schools (e.g., Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Cornell) can help give you a boost, but mostly you're going to have to teach yourself anyway. If you're top-notch material yourself, you should concentrate on kicking butt at whatever school is most affordable for you and graduate debt-free.
That's pretty much what selling a commodity is all about: scraping by on pennies of profit and hoping for lots of volume. When your product is completely interchangable with somebody else's, it's very hard to compete on anything but price. That's why premium brands go to so much trouble to differentiate their products, even if the difference is as minor as a cosmetic flourish and a $100 million branding campaign. If you can't afford a $100 million branding campaign, you're stuck racing all your competitors to the bottom. It's awesome for the consumer, but sucks to be the manufacturer.
In the common parlance, "ferret" refers to the domestic ferret, mustela furo. The cartoon mascot is clearly a black-footed ferret, mustela nigripes which despite the similar name is only obliquely related, sort of like a dog being related to a coyote.
The telltale signs are the cream-colored body and black-tipped extremities. Domestic ferrets in the most common sable pattern are colored somewhat more like a siamese cat: the legs and tail are solid black, and the hair is darker overall.
What's the difference? The domestic ferret is a fun-loving domestic species native to Europe and a popular family pet. The black-footed ferret is a fierce North American weasel that savagely devours cute, cuddly prairie dogs and takes over their homes. So they got the image right, but the name is wrong.
Shawnmchorse and all you other typing speed demons, you're fast becasue you're already plugged into the computing world; you have to type fast to keep up. The article is more about kids who are being shut out of computing because they don't have the KB skills to get in the door yet.
I touch-type in two different systems; my SO hunts and pecks at amazing speed. Both of us are the product of using computers for over 20 years (and, probably more importantly, MUDs and IM for over 10).
Should young kids start being introduced to basic keyboard skills in school? Absolutely! We don't need to mass-produce 60-WPM touch-typists, but we owe it to the kids to teach the skills they need to effectively use computers.
Ken Brown may utterly fail to make his point that Linus didn't write the first Linux kernel himself, but he is correct about one thing.
The US government should not fund the development of any GPL software. The government is an instrument of the people, and software it creates should be in the public domain, usable by anybody for any purpose.
I have to disagree with you. Back when I had NT4, I could defrag my drive and be back to >90% fragmentation in three weeks. My XP box is less than two months old, the drive is only 35% full, and my file fragmentation is 50%. In my experience, NTFS fragments like nobody's business.
Death defying: By most measures, bicycling is much safer than riding in a car. Depending on who you ask, it's between 2 and 10 times safer per mile traveled to ride a bicycle. Here's a nice summary of bicycle safety statistics.
Sweaty and smelly: I prefer to think of it as "fragrant". Just kidding. My office has a fitness center with showers. Come to think of it, my last 3 offices had showers. Yours might, too.
10 miles: That's a long haul. It takes a lot of commitment to spend 2 hours per day commuting on a bicycle. But you get a lot of admiration when you do it.:-)
Insane drivers: Even insane drivers are usually pretty good around bikes. I ride daily on some very narrow, crowded streets, and every once in a while, someone passes a bit too close to me. That hasn't happened since I started riding further out from the curb ("taking the lane"). You will also find that the optimum route for a bicycle may be very different from a car. Expressways are not significantly faster than residential side streets for a bike, so I choose the latter when feasible.
No sidewalks: A bicycle does not belong on the sidewalk.
Narrow streets without shoulders: Unless you're talking about narrow little alleys, there will be opportunities for cars to pass you safely. And if there aren't, just ride right out in the lane and let them suffer. They're the ones ruining the environment, not you.:-)
Chewing a live extension cord: I don't see it in the tables, but I'm willing to bet it's more dangerous per million miles of travel. A live wire can throw you across the room, but you can cycle across town.
Cycle infrastructure: Cycle lanes have become increasingly common in big cities in the US. Many places that had no cycle lanes when I was young have them now. If you want to see a really well-developed bicycle infrastructure, go to Holland. You can pretty much ride from one end of the country to another on bicycle lanes.
You say he likes computers, games, music, and gagetry. For under $100. Seems to me like a copy of DDR and a couple of dance pads fits the bill perfectly. And it's good for you, too!
It's not cricket to turn off SSE2 because SSE2 is faster at scalar floating-point than the X87 unit. Intel decided to sacrifice a bit on the X87 and put the FP muscle into SSE2 for the P4. Vector or scalar, if you're compiling floating point code on the P4, you should use SSE2.
Re:Ugh...Fry's hax0r3d by Ch1n353 $199 specials...
on
Sun's Last Stand
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· Score: 1
"Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server."
You want him to spend a few hundred dollars over $200 for a single machine? He'd be better off buying 3 cheapo machines for $600 and running an array of cheap servers. Any single machine might fail, but the odds of one of the machines being up are way better than your single, reliable machine.
The problem with secrets is, it makes it too easy for someone with power to screw someone without it. History has shown, over and over again, that secrecy inevitably leads to abuse. Transparency is the key to honesty. The only way to protect the rights of individuals from being trampled is to forbid the government to keep secrets except in matters of extremest urgency. The end does not justify the means.
"The most unethical thing that a business can do, is FAIL."
I totally disagree. The most unethical thing a business can do is screw its customers. If you don't respect your customers enough to deal fairly and honestly with them, you shouldn't be in business. After that, there are plenty of other ethical priorities that should come before failure. Like backstabbing their partners. Committing fraud. Breaking the law. Pulling BS dodgy accounting tricks to cheat the IRS. If a company has to do any of these things to avoid going under, then they should go under.
It doesn't matter how many bits the processor is. The benefit of a 64-bit processor is that it handles bigger stuff, not that it does anything faster. If you took all the transistors used to extend the data word size from 32 bits to 64 and used them for speed optimizations, you'd probably have a much faster processor. You want to go 64-bit when you are handling huge numbers or need huge memory (more then 4 GB).
I could guess that the reason for requring MacOS 8.6 is that's the oldest version that will support CarbonLib.
Another golden oldie space game renewed
on
The Long-Awaited MOO!
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· Score: 5, Informative
For those of you who have Macs (and consider Masters of Orion only the second best space game), the classic Spaceward Ho! version 5.0 shipped recently. Think of it as the core essential fun gameplay elements of MOO without all the extra complicated junk. Main attractions of the new version are TCP/IP Internet play, and it's now MacOS X native. This is my second-favorite computer game of all time.
I learned about this virus *from my mom* an hour before it was posted on Slashdot. If that isn't a sign that this site has jumped the shark, I don't know what is.;-)
Delivery drivers make good short-term income
on
Careers After Tech?
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· Score: 1
Pizza delivery driver was the best-paying job I ever had pre-BS, at least in the short term. In the long term, it netted out to zero due to car maintenance and increased insurance premiums. But when you're 18, taking an advance against future earnings isn't such a bad proposition.
"Even the professionals that use the Mac are, in my six years of experience in the graphics field, less technically inclined on average..."
You said it: *in the graphics field*. My field is computer engineering, and I went to two universities that used Macs in their engineering schools. While it is true that many of my Mac-using friends are just ordinary users who don't want the added complication of Windows, quite a few others are totally gonzo, hard-core techies that also know Windows and Unix better than most people who primarily use those platforms. In addition to being a 15-year Mac user, I myself have a degree in computer engineering and over 5 years' experience of daily use of Windows and 10 years' daily use of Unix.
"Taking an application that was intended to be run on an operating system that is designed for advanced users, and running it on an operating system that is designed for less advanced users..."
I have no idea which operating system you are talking about. The only time I ever felt the Mac was designed for "less advanced users" was before I got to know it. Just because the Mac is accessible to inexpert users does not in any way mean it is limited to them, or lowers the ceiling of capability. I believe the Mac is designed for ALL users, and few indeed are the times that I have ever felt limited by it. In fact, the things holding me back on the Mac right now are my own limitations and preconceptions. The system is capable of much more than I demand of it.
Network transparency is pretty awesome. Being able to run an app on any machine and put its GUI on any other machine is way cool.
But, for my needs, VNC totally blows away X11's network transparency for bottom-line usefulness. Being able to pick up right where I left off absolutely rocks.
So, for me, "have to use VNC" is not exactly a consolation prize -- it's more like the Grand Prize. Network transparency would be just the icing on the cake.
"There is no way that a 1GHz G4 competes with an Athlon MP 2000, and most of the other components are comparable."
Would you say your Athlon MP 2000 (which runs around 1500 MHz) is comparable to an Intel Pentium 4 2000? If you do, then you must concede the possibility that the PowerPC G4 1000 may likewise be comparable.
If the Athlon can overcome a 33% clock speed deficit, the PowerPC may be able to overcome a 50% clock speed deficit.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't ordinarily favor "me too" posts, but this one says almost exactly what I would have: Stay in your small college, ace your Bachelor's degree, and if you want a big-name degree, get it in grad school. And I'm not just saying this to vindicate myself, I'm telling you to avoid mistakes I made. :-)
I also believe it's the student, not the school. The really top-flight CS schools (e.g., Berkeley, CMU, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Cornell) can help give you a boost, but mostly you're going to have to teach yourself anyway. If you're top-notch material yourself, you should concentrate on kicking butt at whatever school is most affordable for you and graduate debt-free.
What, precicely, can PocketPC devices do that Palm OS devices cannot? I don't mean trivial stuff like this_app, I mean classes of activities.
I'm curious, because I'd gotten the impression that Palm OS was way more useful than PocketPC.
That's pretty much what selling a commodity is all about: scraping by on pennies of profit and hoping for lots of volume. When your product is completely interchangable with somebody else's, it's very hard to compete on anything but price. That's why premium brands go to so much trouble to differentiate their products, even if the difference is as minor as a cosmetic flourish and a $100 million branding campaign. If you can't afford a $100 million branding campaign, you're stuck racing all your competitors to the bottom. It's awesome for the consumer, but sucks to be the manufacturer.
In the common parlance, "ferret" refers to the domestic ferret, mustela furo. The cartoon mascot is clearly a black-footed ferret, mustela nigripes which despite the similar name is only obliquely related, sort of like a dog being related to a coyote.
The telltale signs are the cream-colored body and black-tipped extremities. Domestic ferrets in the most common sable pattern are colored somewhat more like a siamese cat: the legs and tail are solid black, and the hair is darker overall.
What's the difference? The domestic ferret is a fun-loving domestic species native to Europe and a popular family pet. The black-footed ferret is a fierce North American weasel that savagely devours cute, cuddly prairie dogs and takes over their homes. So they got the image right, but the name is wrong.
Shawnmchorse and all you other typing speed demons, you're fast becasue you're already plugged into the computing world; you have to type fast to keep up. The article is more about kids who are being shut out of computing because they don't have the KB skills to get in the door yet.
I touch-type in two different systems; my SO hunts and pecks at amazing speed. Both of us are the product of using computers for over 20 years (and, probably more importantly, MUDs and IM for over 10).
Should young kids start being introduced to basic keyboard skills in school? Absolutely! We don't need to mass-produce 60-WPM touch-typists, but we owe it to the kids to teach the skills they need to effectively use computers.
95% of us prefer women.
Ken Brown may utterly fail to make his point that Linus didn't write the first Linux kernel himself, but he is correct about one thing.
The US government should not fund the development of any GPL software. The government is an instrument of the people, and software it creates should be in the public domain, usable by anybody for any purpose.
I have to disagree with you. Back when I had NT4, I could defrag my drive and be back to >90% fragmentation in three weeks. My XP box is less than two months old, the drive is only 35% full, and my file fragmentation is 50%. In my experience, NTFS fragments like nobody's business.
Yes, I was kidding. There are no narrow streets in Texas, nobody lives only 10 miles from where the work, and nobody drives only 65.
You live in Texas, don't you? ;-)
Let's look at your objections in turn:
Death defying: By most measures, bicycling is much safer than riding in a car. Depending on who you ask, it's between 2 and 10 times safer per mile traveled to ride a bicycle. Here's a nice summary of bicycle safety statistics.
Sweaty and smelly: I prefer to think of it as "fragrant". Just kidding. My office has a fitness center with showers. Come to think of it, my last 3 offices had showers. Yours might, too.
10 miles: That's a long haul. It takes a lot of commitment to spend 2 hours per day commuting on a bicycle. But you get a lot of admiration when you do it. :-)
Insane drivers: Even insane drivers are usually pretty good around bikes. I ride daily on some very narrow, crowded streets, and every once in a while, someone passes a bit too close to me. That hasn't happened since I started riding further out from the curb ("taking the lane"). You will also find that the optimum route for a bicycle may be very different from a car. Expressways are not significantly faster than residential side streets for a bike, so I choose the latter when feasible.
No sidewalks: A bicycle does not belong on the sidewalk.
Narrow streets without shoulders: Unless you're talking about narrow little alleys, there will be opportunities for cars to pass you safely. And if there aren't, just ride right out in the lane and let them suffer. They're the ones ruining the environment, not you. :-)
Chewing a live extension cord: I don't see it in the tables, but I'm willing to bet it's more dangerous per million miles of travel. A live wire can throw you across the room, but you can cycle across town.
Cycle infrastructure: Cycle lanes have become increasingly common in big cities in the US. Many places that had no cycle lanes when I was young have them now. If you want to see a really well-developed bicycle infrastructure, go to Holland. You can pretty much ride from one end of the country to another on bicycle lanes.
You say he likes computers, games, music, and gagetry. For under $100. Seems to me like a copy of DDR and a couple of dance pads fits the bill perfectly. And it's good for you, too!
Television is bad. Don't waste your money on something bad. Don't pay for TV. Don't even watch TV.
It's not cricket to turn off SSE2 because SSE2 is faster at scalar floating-point than the X87 unit. Intel decided to sacrifice a bit on the X87 and put the FP muscle into SSE2 for the P4. Vector or scalar, if you're compiling floating point code on the P4, you should use SSE2.
"Really, for a few hundred dollars more, you could have something other than a disposable server."
You want him to spend a few hundred dollars over $200 for a single machine? He'd be better off buying 3 cheapo machines for $600 and running an array of cheap servers. Any single machine might fail, but the odds of one of the machines being up are way better than your single, reliable machine.
The problem with secrets is, it makes it too easy for someone with power to screw someone without it. History has shown, over and over again, that secrecy inevitably leads to abuse. Transparency is the key to honesty. The only way to protect the rights of individuals from being trampled is to forbid the government to keep secrets except in matters of extremest urgency. The end does not justify the means.
"The most unethical thing that a business can do, is FAIL."
I totally disagree. The most unethical thing a business can do is screw its customers. If you don't respect your customers enough to deal fairly and honestly with them, you shouldn't be in business. After that, there are plenty of other ethical priorities that should come before failure. Like backstabbing their partners. Committing fraud. Breaking the law. Pulling BS dodgy accounting tricks to cheat the IRS. If a company has to do any of these things to avoid going under, then they should go under.
It doesn't matter how many bits the processor is. The benefit of a 64-bit processor is that it handles bigger stuff, not that it does anything faster. If you took all the transistors used to extend the data word size from 32 bits to 64 and used them for speed optimizations, you'd probably have a much faster processor. You want to go 64-bit when you are handling huge numbers or need huge memory (more then 4 GB).
I could guess that the reason for requring MacOS 8.6 is that's the oldest version that will support CarbonLib.
For those of you who have Macs (and consider Masters of Orion only the second best space game), the classic Spaceward Ho! version 5.0 shipped recently. Think of it as the core essential fun gameplay elements of MOO without all the extra complicated junk. Main attractions of the new version are TCP/IP Internet play, and it's now MacOS X native. This is my second-favorite computer game of all time.
I learned about this virus *from my mom* an hour before it was posted on Slashdot. If that isn't a sign that this site has jumped the shark, I don't know what is. ;-)
Pizza delivery driver was the best-paying job I ever had pre-BS, at least in the short term. In the long term, it netted out to zero due to car maintenance and increased insurance premiums. But when you're 18, taking an advance against future earnings isn't such a bad proposition.
"Even the professionals that use the Mac are, in my six years of experience in the graphics field, less technically inclined on average..."
You said it: *in the graphics field*. My field is computer engineering, and I went to two universities that used Macs in their engineering schools. While it is true that many of my Mac-using friends are just ordinary users who don't want the added complication of Windows, quite a few others are totally gonzo, hard-core techies that also know Windows and Unix better than most people who primarily use those platforms. In addition to being a 15-year Mac user, I myself have a degree in computer engineering and over 5 years' experience of daily use of Windows and 10 years' daily use of Unix.
"Taking an application that was intended to be run on an operating system that is designed for advanced users, and running it on an operating system that is designed for less advanced users..."
I have no idea which operating system you are talking about. The only time I ever felt the Mac was designed for "less advanced users" was before I got to know it. Just because the Mac is accessible to inexpert users does not in any way mean it is limited to them, or lowers the ceiling of capability. I believe the Mac is designed for ALL users, and few indeed are the times that I have ever felt limited by it. In fact, the things holding me back on the Mac right now are my own limitations and preconceptions. The system is capable of much more than I demand of it.
Network transparency is pretty awesome. Being able to run an app on any machine and put its GUI on any other machine is way cool.
But, for my needs, VNC totally blows away X11's network transparency for bottom-line usefulness. Being able to pick up right where I left off absolutely rocks.
So, for me, "have to use VNC" is not exactly a consolation prize -- it's more like the Grand Prize. Network transparency would be just the icing on the cake.
"There is no way that a 1GHz G4 competes with an Athlon MP 2000, and most of the other components are comparable."
Would you say your Athlon MP 2000 (which runs around 1500 MHz) is comparable to an Intel Pentium 4 2000? If you do, then you must concede the possibility that the PowerPC G4 1000 may likewise be comparable.
If the Athlon can overcome a 33% clock speed deficit, the PowerPC may be able to overcome a 50% clock speed deficit.