Wow. Umm, throwing TAOCP at someone who's never programmed but wants to is a bit like throwing an aerodynamics book at someone who wants to fly. Sure, it will tell you how to fly, but it won't get you much anywhere unless you have a solid mathematical background and really good machinist skills. Seriously. I postulate that someone who has a decent math background has also seen some sort of programming in their life. That said, the amount of Sigmas, Pis, and Integral symbols in TAOCP is enough to scare someone way away from programming if they haven't seen such notation before. Don't get me wrong; I love the stuff, and I own and read all three volumes, but it's not something you want unless you have programming experience and/or strong interest in mathematics and preferably both.
It depends on how things are setup. It depends on whether or not Level 3 stopped advertising those routes or if they started blocking traffic. If they stopped advertising the routes, that traffic should go over a different AS path than it previously did. In my case, it is, as 'show ip bgp' confirms.
The author is spot on in quite a few respects - engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence.
This is very true. I'm a MechE (though I plan on changing that tomorrow... more on that later) and I don't consider the material exceptionally hard, but very tedious and time consuming. I've come to a point where I'm absolutely bored with the material and have decided I am not studying enough mathematics to interest me. My grades are fine, I have a 4.0/4.0 in MechE, but I'm bored to death. Fortunately, my school offers a "roll your own" engineering degree, where you can take classes from all the different engineering programs, and that's what I plan on doing. It's not an accredited program (how could it be, it varies from student to student...) but you get to do what you love. That's what matters for me.
It's really rather amusing. The same thing I'm sure exists in other technical majors (math, physics, etc.), but typically, since engineering curriculum starts from the first semester rather than where you have some time to declare your major as being a technical one when you're just enrolled in a normal college, you see a lot of fluff in engineering early on. People are there because their counsellor told them it's a good thing to go into... or... they took AP Physics and did ok and their teacher recommended engineering. Silly stuff like that brings people into engineering.
I'd love to quantify the drop off... but there's obviously a big one after first semester and an almost as big one after first year. At Rutgers, we all took an English 101 type course. Conveniently, they group engineers with other engineers. I felt like a jerk for doing it, but I basically picked out those who I knew wouldn't make it, and sure enough, I haven't seem them around. I didn't even need to know about their technical prowess; sometimes you can just tell.
Yep. After I finished my first year, and then after I finished my second year, and even thereafter, people said things like, "Oh, at least your through the hard part." I typically laugh and say "It only gets harder." People have a hard time believing that. Telling them that it's not unheard of for seniors to drop out with one class left doesn't seem to change their thinking either.
Re:Its a matter of perspective
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It's not money that matters, it's passion.
This is very true. When I started engineering school, all freshmen had to take some orientation lectures to learn about the profession that is engineering, etc. After going over some starting salaries for engineers, the dean who was lecturing said in closing, "But, no matter what, knowing what you'll make after graduation is not enough to get you through it. I promise you that. If you're here for solely the money, you will not make it. You need to be here because you enjoy it."
Thank you for shedding some light on the FUD. It reminds me of how when the Anthrax outbreak happened a couple of years ago, the government contracted a company in New York to quietly produce 300 million doses of Variola (Smallpox) vaccine. Did anyone know while it was happening? No. Would people have freaked if they heard something about Smallpox* being produced in New York? Yes.
* The fact is that the vaccine for Smallpox is actually not Smallpox, but another human hosted pox virus similar and mostly not deadly.
Along that vein, a professor I once had built his own system for the Rutgers Physics Department. They've since switched to PRS in that lecture hall, but all the details of the project can be found here.
UMDNJ is having some issues as of late. First, they're under investigation by the FBI for financial "problems." Then, someone breaks in and steals the very files the FBI was using as part of its investigation. And now, this. Pretty soon and they're going to be assimilated into the Borg that is Rutgers University. At least we don't lose mice...
Yes, I know of the "bus problem," which is why redundancy is useful so that in the event that someone doesn't at least have a vague idea of how you have things set up (and someone should in a place that needs 1,000,000 accounts), they have some time to figure out what it is you're doing rather than watching your "nines" trickle away as they stare at a burning heap of plastic and solder.
I guess we come from different scenarios. I'm accustomed to things like a database being stored on a SAN with its transaction log on another disk which is also mirrored miles away (yay dark fiber) and then tapes of the database are taken offsite on a regular basis.
No doubt things are difficult. No one said managing 1,000,000 email accounts was supposed to be easy. But if it needs to be reliable, it needs to be reliable.
For my little mail server, even if it did catch fire, I could build a new one in under an hour. This is no different than a cluster of machines... if one dies, you simply replace it and move on. (with a properly oversized cluster nobody will notice one machines failure.
What happens when you're half a world away and your server dies? Who fixes it? It's completely different from a cluster. Clusters are designed to have redudnancy built in. Sorry, but anyone with your view of "stability" and "reliability" hasn't a clue about running services that need to stay up.
Do they really wanna start this war? In the end, people they're paying good money to are going to be fighting against a relatively big army of tinkerers who have no problem spending all their free time defeating crap like this. Plenty of EEs need senior projects.
! ip access-list extended block_china
deny ip 1.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! One for each
deny ip 2.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! of China's
deny ip 3.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! Blocks
permit ip any any ! interface Vlan100
ip access-group block_china in !
I won't have any trouble applying that. Know why? It's my choice.
Even engineering licensing is much more rigorous than any of these IT Certificates, but businness has frowned so much on the apprenticeship and work necessary to get licensed that in many fields (including almost anything computer related) most of the engineers aren't licensed.
Well, that's to be expected. Engineers can be held personally liable in the event of death or injury. I.E. if I spec a W8x24 beam instead of a W24x94 because I miscalculated the minimum section modulus by an order of magnitude, I'm going to hurt people. Due to this, the licensing is made difficult to ensure you're not just book smart but have experience and such before being able to work on your own and legally say "this is good."
You're a crackhead. Quantum physics IN ITS ESSENCE states that the best we can do at prediction is a probability distribution. There is no "yet." You don't need experiments to tell you this. It's all math. Read about square wells if interested. Think of it is a coin flipping. We can create a probability distribution for it flipping heads or tails (i.e. 50/50). Just because we know the distribution doesn't mean we can predict individual events. Think of uncertainty as the same way. Sometimes we have a pretty good idea of where a particle will be (for instance), but that still doesn't mean we KNOW where it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Says the undocumenting Anonymous Coward...
Don't forget The Art of Computer Programming
Wow. Umm, throwing TAOCP at someone who's never programmed but wants to is a bit like throwing an aerodynamics book at someone who wants to fly. Sure, it will tell you how to fly, but it won't get you much anywhere unless you have a solid mathematical background and really good machinist skills. Seriously. I postulate that someone who has a decent math background has also seen some sort of programming in their life. That said, the amount of Sigmas, Pis, and Integral symbols in TAOCP is enough to scare someone way away from programming if they haven't seen such notation before. Don't get me wrong; I love the stuff, and I own and read all three volumes, but it's not something you want unless you have programming experience and/or strong interest in mathematics and preferably both.
Maybe because capitalizing starting with a second word is stupid?
Before the 'sudo apt-get dist-upgrade,' 'sudo apt-get update' should be run.
It depends on how things are setup. It depends on whether or not Level 3 stopped advertising those routes or if they started blocking traffic. If they stopped advertising the routes, that traffic should go over a different AS path than it previously did. In my case, it is, as 'show ip bgp' confirms.
Well, while not the same as directly marketing it as such, let's remember it was introduced by Steve Jobs by pulling it out of his jeans' pocket.
The author is spot on in quite a few respects - engineering is more a test of endurance than intelligence.
This is very true. I'm a MechE (though I plan on changing that tomorrow... more on that later) and I don't consider the material exceptionally hard, but very tedious and time consuming. I've come to a point where I'm absolutely bored with the material and have decided I am not studying enough mathematics to interest me. My grades are fine, I have a 4.0/4.0 in MechE, but I'm bored to death. Fortunately, my school offers a "roll your own" engineering degree, where you can take classes from all the different engineering programs, and that's what I plan on doing. It's not an accredited program (how could it be, it varies from student to student...) but you get to do what you love. That's what matters for me.
It's really rather amusing. The same thing I'm sure exists in other technical majors (math, physics, etc.), but typically, since engineering curriculum starts from the first semester rather than where you have some time to declare your major as being a technical one when you're just enrolled in a normal college, you see a lot of fluff in engineering early on. People are there because their counsellor told them it's a good thing to go into... or... they took AP Physics and did ok and their teacher recommended engineering. Silly stuff like that brings people into engineering.
I'd love to quantify the drop off... but there's obviously a big one after first semester and an almost as big one after first year. At Rutgers, we all took an English 101 type course. Conveniently, they group engineers with other engineers. I felt like a jerk for doing it, but I basically picked out those who I knew wouldn't make it, and sure enough, I haven't seem them around. I didn't even need to know about their technical prowess; sometimes you can just tell.
Yep. After I finished my first year, and then after I finished my second year, and even thereafter, people said things like, "Oh, at least your through the hard part." I typically laugh and say "It only gets harder." People have a hard time believing that. Telling them that it's not unheard of for seniors to drop out with one class left doesn't seem to change their thinking either.
It's not money that matters, it's passion.
This is very true. When I started engineering school, all freshmen had to take some orientation lectures to learn about the profession that is engineering, etc. After going over some starting salaries for engineers, the dean who was lecturing said in closing, "But, no matter what, knowing what you'll make after graduation is not enough to get you through it. I promise you that. If you're here for solely the money, you will not make it. You need to be here because you enjoy it."
Thank you for shedding some light on the FUD. It reminds me of how when the Anthrax outbreak happened a couple of years ago, the government contracted a company in New York to quietly produce 300 million doses of Variola (Smallpox) vaccine. Did anyone know while it was happening? No. Would people have freaked if they heard something about Smallpox* being produced in New York? Yes.
* The fact is that the vaccine for Smallpox is actually not Smallpox, but another human hosted pox virus similar and mostly not deadly.
Along that vein, a professor I once had built his own system for the Rutgers Physics Department. They've since switched to PRS in that lecture hall, but all the details of the project can be found here.
It often gets the name "suicide cable" by those familiar with such things.
Remind me again, who else sells OS X computers? If using OS X is a "lifestyle," then so be it.
This is the year 2005, not the year 2000. Java isn't so kludgy anymore.
Yes, it is.
UMDNJ is having some issues as of late. First, they're under investigation by the FBI for financial "problems." Then, someone breaks in and steals the very files the FBI was using as part of its investigation. And now, this. Pretty soon and they're going to be assimilated into the Borg that is Rutgers University. At least we don't lose mice...
Yes, I know of the "bus problem," which is why redundancy is useful so that in the event that someone doesn't at least have a vague idea of how you have things set up (and someone should in a place that needs 1,000,000 accounts), they have some time to figure out what it is you're doing rather than watching your "nines" trickle away as they stare at a burning heap of plastic and solder.
I guess we come from different scenarios. I'm accustomed to things like a database being stored on a SAN with its transaction log on another disk which is also mirrored miles away (yay dark fiber) and then tapes of the database are taken offsite on a regular basis.
No doubt things are difficult. No one said managing 1,000,000 email accounts was supposed to be easy. But if it needs to be reliable, it needs to be reliable.
For my little mail server, even if it did catch fire, I could build a new one in under an hour. This is no different than a cluster of machines... if one dies, you simply replace it and move on. (with a properly oversized cluster nobody will notice one machines failure.
What happens when you're half a world away and your server dies? Who fixes it? It's completely different from a cluster. Clusters are designed to have redudnancy built in. Sorry, but anyone with your view of "stability" and "reliability" hasn't a clue about running services that need to stay up.
Do they really wanna start this war? In the end, people they're paying good money to are going to be fighting against a relatively big army of tinkerers who have no problem spending all their free time defeating crap like this. Plenty of EEs need senior projects.
Not my choice? Really? That's funny.
!
ip access-list extended block_china
deny ip 1.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! One for each
deny ip 2.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! of China's
deny ip 3.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 any ! Blocks
permit ip any any
!
interface Vlan100
ip access-group block_china in
!
I won't have any trouble applying that. Know why? It's my choice.
Since I'm lazy, could I get those IP blocks in comma separated CIDR notation? Thanks!
T-Mobile has unlimited data for $20/month. Good luck getting a signal, though.
Even engineering licensing is much more rigorous than any of these IT Certificates, but businness has frowned so much on the apprenticeship and work necessary to get licensed that in many fields (including almost anything computer related) most of the engineers aren't licensed.
Well, that's to be expected. Engineers can be held personally liable in the event of death or injury. I.E. if I spec a W8x24 beam instead of a W24x94 because I miscalculated the minimum section modulus by an order of magnitude, I'm going to hurt people. Due to this, the licensing is made difficult to ensure you're not just book smart but have experience and such before being able to work on your own and legally say "this is good."
You're a crackhead. Quantum physics IN ITS ESSENCE states that the best we can do at prediction is a probability distribution. There is no "yet." You don't need experiments to tell you this. It's all math. Read about square wells if interested. Think of it is a coin flipping. We can create a probability distribution for it flipping heads or tails (i.e. 50/50). Just because we know the distribution doesn't mean we can predict individual events. Think of uncertainty as the same way. Sometimes we have a pretty good idea of where a particle will be (for instance), but that still doesn't mean we KNOW where it is.
Haha, my thoughts exactly. My mod points just expired. Truly, this was the only useful comment in the whole thread.