I really think you have to consider the position of the department and the University before you whine too much about not getting accepted. The competitive department admissions system is not fundamentally different from any other UW department where there is more supply than demand;
Yah, but do they have to make the application secret? I mean come on, what, are they worried that we will all write such stunning essays if given time and that they will be forced to accept us all based on our impassioned papers?
As a current undergraduate student (a few quarters away from graduation) in the department, I wish there was a little more humility in the department also, and that they did more to engage students,
You should come to Western, they give us free pizza all the time!:-D Seriously though, every quarter there is a faculty student meeting where students get to voice any problems or concerns they have, (mostly people come for the free pizza though), lots of odd one off stuff like that.
It is discouraging to see people with good grades and no real passion for the field, some of whom plan to go to professional school in unrelated fields, have the upper hand over people who really care about CS and computing but have (relatively) lower grades.
You know, I wouldn't mind if the UW said, "Hey, you know what, we want people who are passionate about Computer Science, here is what we expect from you:" and made a nice bullet list, with exepecations like "Independent software development work done", "A displayed interest and knowledge about computers as a whole and not just about programming in particular", you know things like that.
This way those of us who have been studying computer since we were nine might get rewarded a bit, ya know? It doesn't seem fair for international students who come from countries that study Calculus as HS material who then come over to our College system, freaking ace all of our (relativly) retarded math and science courses, get high ass GPAs, and just want a good paycheck out of it all.
As someone who's been on the other side of this issue, let me ask you: if I can accept 25 students to the program, and there are 50 applicants with a GPA of 4.0, who should get in?
Look at it from India's side of the issue:
If Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is urging his own country to increase Computer Science enrollement, and the largest University in his home state is stupid enough to be turning down students due to limited capacity, right after Bill Gates made a large donation to the Computer Science department at that very University, hey, guess what, Bill, come on over here!
Politicians are too stupid to realize:
Education is linked to the economy. You cut or underfund education, you cut the economy.
But seriously - students with GPAs below 3.4/3.5 will most likely NOT do very well in those departments.
Last time I checked, science departments usually have slightly lower grades, a 3.2 or 3.3 is rather good.
Honestly, taking Calc, Physics, Chem, and some throw away English or History course, getting a 3.2 or 3.3 is rather good.
I know students with a 3.6 who couldn't get in though, so...
You figure with all this funding the UW is getting from MS, that they would have made their new building with room to grow, instead of (apparently?) just the size that they needed for their current demands.
Their Computer Science department acts like a bunch of elitest pricks when it comes to acceptence.
(The following is true of when I was applying a year ago)
Their applications form is SECRET and only available online for two weeks, during which you have to fill it out, answering all of their questions, and turn it back in.
How selective are they? Stories of students with a 4.0 GPA not being accepted into the school (transfering from Community College) abound. I knew students with a 3.4/3.5 GPA who were not accepted. Insane.
To have a snowballs chance in hell of getting into the department you had best have all of your math and science courses completed, the department apparently did NOT want anyone who would take any more than the minimum amount of time coming in there.
Still with all of these rules and regulations in place the department "has to" turn down dozens of students (if not hundreds...) every year.
Fuck, how do you EXPECT students to go into CS with that type of a bull-shit attitutude?
Compare this to Western Washington University, go up there, hey look, the head of the department met with me, teaches a transition course for students over the summer (and offers to, for free, go over material online with students as well who are not yet enrolled but plan on doing so) so that they can suceed in the department, and all in all, the entire department treats their students like actual people rather than machines.
So Microsoft spends a ton of money on algorithms research? Their apps are still slow bloatware.
To an extent, yes, but some of their algorithms are rather nice, have you tried out a tablet PC lately? It can do for the first time what no computer could do before:
Read really bad human hand writing (ie: mine)
Understand really cruddy spoken words.
I did not expect speech recon to ever work; now it goes. Handwriting recon that actually can understand my scribbled? Wonderful.
Now the software that implements those algorithms is written in.Net, and yes, it is huge bloatware, no argument about that there.
HCI? Their interfaces are still painful to use.
Actually they are VERY nice. You would not believe the number of small details that Microsoft has put into each new release and update of their Explorer UI.
Does Microsoft occasionally release brain-dead and dumb UIs? Yes they do, Office XP is a great example of this, but they also FIX their dumb UI mistakes, Office 2003 is a great example of that! I hated Office, until I saw 2003, powerful as heck! Now does it still have some UI flaws? Yes it does, but it is easy to see that Microsoft may a definite effort to improve it from XP.
Visual Studio 6, was OK UI wise, the first incarnation of Visual Studio.NET sucked, 2003 is a lot better.
Microsoft also wises up about crud installation, on occasion. For awhile the MSDN Library by default installed a copy of some Radio Webcasts that sucked up around a gig (or more) of space. That went on for a year or so then Microsoft wizened up and decided to ditch a lot of the default MSDN installation material and instead bundle it as an optional "extras" pack.
Security? Using Windows is still pretty much the equivalent of leaving your PC out on the front lawn with a sign saying, "Steal My Computer."
First off, remember, Microsoft gets to "update its distribution" to non-MSDN members, about once every 2 or 3 years.
Compare an unpatched Windows XP box to an unpatched Redhat box from 2001 or so. Will XP still be less secure? Likely so, but the difference will not be that much different. Also compare how long it takes a new XP user running as Admin to kill their box (w/o the net) to how long it takes a new *nix user running as root to kill their box.
(I remember just five or six years ago when I tried out Mandrake, back with ext2, when my machine crashed / power surge / whatever, upon next boot I was dumped to a shell and told to run something called fsck, not knowing what the heck was going on back then, I reinstalled. And that was a "newbie" distribution!)
Windows XP actually shipped with a lot of services and daemons running by default (it shouldn't have, and SP2 distributions do not ship with nearly so many enabled out of the box), this caused many problems, and still does, but a fresh SP2 copy will last at least for a bit on the net, and SP2 behind even a cheesy NAT firewall can withstand a few days (maybe...)
On the security plus side, Windows has ACL, which provide much finer grained security than Unix's simplified security model. There are also places in *nix land that piss poor security advice is given in tutorial documentation!
A few weeks back I was setting up an Apache system with Bugzilla and MySQL, lo and behold, the installation tutorial said use user nobody, I did, to get things to work right I had to set the entire bugzilla directory to 777, the local *nix guru came up to me "what are you doing! User nobody is very dangerous! And change those permissions!".
Well it turns out you can create another user, another group, run Apache under that user who belongs to that group, and just give that user/group read execute permissions on most of the files, but damned if the tutorial docs said anything! In fact the checksetup.pl scr
Back when it was Phoenix it started up fast, ran fast, it was wonderful. Now it is slooooooow to boot, sucks up Memory.
Just my imagination? Not really, I had an old Phoenix install on my machine, ran it, and was amazed by the speed. Reminded me of why I originally started to like it.
Comparing Mozilla to Firefox, same memory usage (within a few megs) and about the same startup time on any machine without lots of RAM (admitedly on my faster machines with 512+ RAM, Firefox is signifigently faster than plain ol' Moz)
I meant that even though their current driver download doesn't support your card, do you still have the previous one that did? It appears you do. Also, I too once had a problem with making Nvidia's accelerated drivers work with Linux. When you tried to use the old accelerated drivers, did your screen either get to the desktop then lockup when you did anything or hang on the white screen that says "Nvidia?" It kept doing that to me, and I found out that it needed to compile it's own kernel interface module. Does that help?
Apparently Linux does not support my older Nvidia drivers (in change log), go figure...
As for X/Kde eating 36% CPU idling on 1.5Ghz+ machines,
Well it's idling with buttloads of eye candy, idle in terms of me not touching the mouse.
Also, even if Nvidia doesn't support your card anymore, do you have the hardware drivers for it? That might be part of the problem.
What does that mean exactly?
In the latest version of their drivers, Nvidia dropped support for the Geforce 256 SDR, ("Legacy" chipset), the newer Linux kernels do not support the older drivers without lots of patches and such applied to them, and even when applied, I still can't get accelleration working!
Sucks.
And I'm using an aging 1.57 Ghz Athlon with 256MB of ram. ps aux shows X, Konsole and Konqueror consuming a combined 2% cpu, about as much as my mp3 player. Did you try Linux on a Pentium-150?
Two machines, one of them a 2.6GHZ Celeron with 256MB of RAM, and the other a 1.5Ghz Athlonw ith 512MB of RAM, same results on both. 1024x768 res, 85hz.
As far as I know of my personal experience of young (who said n00b:p ?) KDE developer, KDE is not so bloated.
Listen, I tried total immersion in a KDE based environment for 6 months straight. No Windows at all.
A few weeks ago I had to go back to my Windows 2003 system, and you know what?
SO MUCH MORE FREAKING PRODUCTIVE. Programs start up faster, windows appear faster, loading an explorer window is no longer a 2 or 3 second action. I push a button, my window is there!
When running KDE, X eats 36% of my CPU just drawing my screen.
Window's doesn't use much of anything.
(And on a separate note: FUCK Nvidia for dropping support for my video card and FUCK ati for not supporting my OTHER video card!)
You are not supposed to be typing on your laptop keyboard when sitting at a desk anyways, it is bad for your posture, wrists, and neck. Either the monitor is to low, or the keyboard is to high, but at least when you raise your laptop up, you can attach a separate keyboard to the laptop and then utilize the computer properly.
I just bought the first ed last quarter for my Unix programming class, now I am going to have to go out and buy another ed just so I don't have something quite so freaking historic on my bookshelf.
This is a good money saving idea. And it will save paper and make it easier to do homework from home
No it won't!
Have you ever TRIED working out a math problem on a computer? Hint: IT SUCKS.
Here is how the average "e-homework" assignment goes:
Student is given homework on website
Student prints out homework from website and staples it together.
Student does homework on paper
Student transcribes homework from paper to "e-homework answers sheet"
Student now has to file away paper and/or throw it away, hard to file since they are just web printouts, throw it away, some instructors remove homework from the website once the homework is due! Makes studying for tests all but impossible.
Stupid stupid STUPID idea.
Oh and laptops SUCK for doing actual work on. The screens rock, but the ergonomics are horrible!
There is a lot of truth in this, but I think C makes it a little too easy to shoot yourself in the knee by accident. Personally, I prefer languages that allow you to do anything but requires you to announce your intentions, for instance with explicit typecasts when you mix variable types that do usually not mix.
battle with the compiler, you have to declare things EXACTLY in the proper place, in the proper order, it is a BITCH. I honestly thinkt that the language has features that no one aside from the implementers are quite sure what they do.
Now don't get me wrong, as long as you plan on staying away from OO, Ada95 is a WONDERFUL language. Code in it is VERY readable, and VERY obvious. The compiler even catches spelling errors of variable names! (Rather than C's approach which is to give you 50 "undeclared variable" errors.)
Ada95 was written to do everything for you, but in the end, it makes YOU do everything exactly ITS way. Sure, if you master this one way of doing things, your productivity will go up. I have no doubt about it. Your code will be readable, easily debugged, and likely even pretty efficent. (Ada95's compiler is actually rather good in terms of code efficently, an array of 8 bools takes up 1 byte!)
The thing here is, there are three ways to get around the "humans are too dumb to understand complex systems" problem:
Make a language simple enough that there are not any really "complex" features built in (C).
Make a language that handles the stupid little details for you, freeing up the programmer's mind to work on the more complicated problems that exist (Scheme, Java, C# to some extent).
Make a B&D language that forces the programmer into one train of thought and one methodology of doing things (Ada).
Of coures there is C++'s approach:
Make the programmer jump through a thousand hoops to use the features that they want, and break inexplicibly until they jump through the hoops just right.
Movielink is an overall fantastic service that has with excellent value IMHO. My only gripe is the limited selection.
It does sound like prices have decreased a bit since last time I looked into things.
Sounds like a nice deal, though the 24hr viewing period is kind of weird, I figure a 72hour or something deal would be better, the cost to them would be nil, unless the studios are acting weird about things.
Isn't that the argument so many pirates use to rationalize their actions? IE, "If only the RIAA had offered music online for my convenience and pleasure, I wouldn't have to use Kazaa!"
There is a certain penalty for getting caught pirating material, and there is also a risk (chance) of getting caught.
Combined together, these two values form the "value" that a person is spending on their action of piracy (or any illegal act for that matter).
If you make movie downloads online cost less than this value, the person will purchase the movie instead.
Reducing the value of the movie download (such as loading it up with DRM crud, or making it only viewable for one day, or making the quality really low) means you will have to further reduce the price. Current online movie rental services hideously bog down their users with unnecessary crud and thus do not have a very high level of success. This is to be expected, as not very many people place a $7 value on having 24 hour viewing privileges for a movie on their 17 inch screen.
Compare this to services like iTunes in which the sheer convenience of the service adds to the value already present in rather reasonable prices. iTunes and other services like it enjoy success because they place legal downloads at a price lower than the users threshold for piracy.
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Odd, so from Graduate school you get a Post-Graduate degree. ...
;) )
Oh well, heh. CS people didn't name the things (then again if we did they would be TLAs with each word being at least 9 letters long.
Yah, but do they have to make the application secret? I mean come on, what, are they worried that we will all write such stunning essays if given time and that they will be forced to accept us all based on our impassioned papers?
You should come to Western, they give us free pizza all the time!
You know, I wouldn't mind if the UW said, "Hey, you know what, we want people who are passionate about Computer Science, here is what we expect from you:" and made a nice bullet list, with exepecations like "Independent software development work done", "A displayed interest and knowledge about computers as a whole and not just about programming in particular", you know things like that.
This way those of us who have been studying computer since we were nine might get rewarded a bit, ya know? It doesn't seem fair for international students who come from countries that study Calculus as HS material who then come over to our College system, freaking ace all of our (relativly) retarded math and science courses, get high ass GPAs, and just want a good paycheck out of it all.
Look at it from India's side of the issue:
If Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, is urging his own country to increase Computer Science enrollement, and the largest University in his home state is stupid enough to be turning down students due to limited capacity, right after Bill Gates made a large donation to the Computer Science department at that very University, hey, guess what, Bill, come on over here!
Politicians are too stupid to realize:
Education is linked to the economy. You cut or underfund education, you cut the economy.
Last time I checked, science departments usually have slightly lower grades, a 3.2 or 3.3 is rather good.
Honestly, taking Calc, Physics, Chem, and some throw away English or History course, getting a 3.2 or 3.3 is rather good.
I know students with a 3.6 who couldn't get in though, so...
You figure with all this funding the UW is getting from MS, that they would have made their new building with room to grow, instead of (apparently?) just the size that they needed for their current demands.
If I may ask, what is post-graduate? I thought that PhD was as high as a person could go?
Oh getting into the school is not an issue, getting into the CS department is a pain in the arse!
Oh the CE ones are questionable, I am talking about the full fledged XP ones.
:)
Then again they dedicate enough of your CPU to it, they SHOULD recognize what is going on!
As I said, the stuff IS bloated, but what it can do is also quite amazing.
Their Computer Science department acts like a bunch of elitest pricks when it comes to acceptence.
(The following is true of when I was applying a year ago)
Their applications form is SECRET and only available online for two weeks, during which you have to fill it out, answering all of their questions, and turn it back in.
How selective are they? Stories of students with a 4.0 GPA not being accepted into the school (transfering from Community College) abound. I knew students with a 3.4/3.5 GPA who were not accepted. Insane.
To have a snowballs chance in hell of getting into the department you had best have all of your math and science courses completed, the department apparently did NOT want anyone who would take any more than the minimum amount of time coming in there.
Still with all of these rules and regulations in place the department "has to" turn down dozens of students (if not hundreds...) every year.
Fuck, how do you EXPECT students to go into CS with that type of a bull-shit attitutude?
Compare this to Western Washington University, go up there, hey look, the head of the department met with me, teaches a transition course for students over the summer (and offers to, for free, go over material online with students as well who are not yet enrolled but plan on doing so) so that they can suceed in the department, and all in all, the entire department treats their students like actual people rather than machines.
So Microsoft spends a ton of money on algorithms research? Their apps are still slow bloatware.
To an extent, yes, but some of their algorithms are rather nice, have you tried out a tablet PC lately? It can do for the first time what no computer could do before:
.Net, and yes, it is huge bloatware, no argument about that there.
Read really bad human hand writing (ie: mine)
Understand really cruddy spoken words.
I did not expect speech recon to ever work; now it goes. Handwriting recon that actually can understand my scribbled? Wonderful.
Now the software that implements those algorithms is written in
HCI? Their interfaces are still painful to use.
Actually they are VERY nice. You would not believe the number of small details that Microsoft has put into each new release and update of their Explorer UI.
.NET sucked, 2003 is a lot better.
Does Microsoft occasionally release brain-dead and dumb UIs? Yes they do, Office XP is a great example of this, but they also FIX their dumb UI mistakes, Office 2003 is a great example of that! I hated Office, until I saw 2003, powerful as heck! Now does it still have some UI flaws? Yes it does, but it is easy to see that Microsoft may a definite effort to improve it from XP.
Visual Studio 6, was OK UI wise, the first incarnation of Visual Studio
Microsoft also wises up about crud installation, on occasion. For awhile the MSDN Library by default installed a copy of some Radio Webcasts that sucked up around a gig (or more) of space. That went on for a year or so then Microsoft wizened up and decided to ditch a lot of the default MSDN installation material and instead bundle it as an optional "extras" pack.
Security? Using Windows is still pretty much the equivalent of leaving your PC out on the front lawn with a sign saying, "Steal My Computer."
First off, remember, Microsoft gets to "update its distribution" to non-MSDN members, about once every 2 or 3 years.
Compare an unpatched Windows XP box to an unpatched Redhat box from 2001 or so. Will XP still be less secure? Likely so, but the difference will not be that much different. Also compare how long it takes a new XP user running as Admin to kill their box (w/o the net) to how long it takes a new *nix user running as root to kill their box.
(I remember just five or six years ago when I tried out Mandrake, back with ext2, when my machine crashed / power surge / whatever, upon next boot I was dumped to a shell and told to run something called fsck, not knowing what the heck was going on back then, I reinstalled. And that was a "newbie" distribution!)
Windows XP actually shipped with a lot of services and daemons running by default (it shouldn't have, and SP2 distributions do not ship with nearly so many enabled out of the box), this caused many problems, and still does, but a fresh SP2 copy will last at least for a bit on the net, and SP2 behind even a cheesy NAT firewall can withstand a few days (maybe...)
On the security plus side, Windows has ACL, which provide much finer grained security than Unix's simplified security model. There are also places in *nix land that piss poor security advice is given in tutorial documentation!
A few weeks back I was setting up an Apache system with Bugzilla and MySQL, lo and behold, the installation tutorial said use user nobody, I did, to get things to work right I had to set the entire bugzilla directory to 777, the local *nix guru came up to me "what are you doing! User nobody is very dangerous! And change those permissions!".
Well it turns out you can create another user, another group, run Apache under that user who belongs to that group, and just give that user/group read execute permissions on most of the files, but damned if the tutorial docs said anything! In fact the checksetup.pl scr
Back when it was Phoenix it started up fast, ran fast, it was wonderful. Now it is slooooooow to boot, sucks up Memory.
Just my imagination? Not really, I had an old Phoenix install on my machine, ran it, and was amazed by the speed. Reminded me of why I originally started to like it.
Comparing Mozilla to Firefox, same memory usage (within a few megs) and about the same startup time on any machine without lots of RAM (admitedly on my faster machines with 512+ RAM, Firefox is signifigently faster than plain ol' Moz)
Apparently Linux does not support my older Nvidia drivers (in change log), go figure...
Well it's idling with buttloads of eye candy, idle in terms of me not touching the mouse.
Well originally WinFS was planned for NT4, then 2000, then XP, then, well, you get the idea. :)
Really MS should just buy the rights to the BeOS's old file system from Palm.
Well that is not saying much...
What does that mean exactly?
In the latest version of their drivers, Nvidia dropped support for the Geforce 256 SDR, ("Legacy" chipset), the newer Linux kernels do not support the older drivers without lots of patches and such applied to them, and even when applied, I still can't get accelleration working!
Sucks.
Two machines, one of them a 2.6GHZ Celeron with 256MB of RAM, and the other a 1.5Ghz Athlonw ith 512MB of RAM, same results on both. 1024x768 res, 85hz.
Excuse me? That is the ONE feature of Longhorn that I (and many other people I have talked to) really wanted.
Imagine, instead of trying to find where you stashed those vacation photos two years ago, you just type in
May 2003 vacation pictures.
Hey, look what comes up!
Listen, I tried total immersion in a KDE based environment for 6 months straight. No Windows at all.
A few weeks ago I had to go back to my Windows 2003 system, and you know what?
SO MUCH MORE FREAKING PRODUCTIVE. Programs start up faster, windows appear faster, loading an explorer window is no longer a 2 or 3 second action. I push a button, my window is there!
When running KDE, X eats 36% of my CPU just drawing my screen.
Window's doesn't use much of anything.
(And on a separate note: FUCK Nvidia for dropping support for my video card and FUCK ati for not supporting my OTHER video card!)
....
You are not supposed to be typing on your laptop keyboard when sitting at a desk anyways, it is bad for your posture, wrists, and neck. Either the monitor is to low, or the keyboard is to high, but at least when you raise your laptop up, you can attach a separate keyboard to the laptop and then utilize the computer properly.
I just bought the first ed last quarter for my Unix programming class, now I am going to have to go out and buy another ed just so I don't have something quite so freaking historic on my bookshelf.
Source code is then printed out and returned to the student, heh.
Electronic Submission of source code I do understand though, it lets the Unix Gurus pass it through their test scripts.
Poor Windows profs got to get a TA to test it by hand for them, heh.
No it won't!
Have you ever TRIED working out a math problem on a computer? Hint: IT SUCKS.
Here is how the average "e-homework" assignment goes:
Stupid stupid STUPID idea.
Oh and laptops SUCK for doing actual work on. The screens rock, but the ergonomics are horrible!
I finished up a course with an old Unix Wizard this spring (Author of bc, etc), and he made us compile everything with -Wall
Single warning, zero on the assignment.
- There is a lot of truth in this, but I think C makes it a little too easy to shoot yourself in the knee by accident. Personally, I prefer languages that allow you to do anything but requires you to announce your intentions, for instance with explicit typecasts when you mix variable types that do usually not mix.
battle with the compiler, you have to declare things EXACTLY in the proper place, in the proper order, it is a BITCH. I honestly thinkt that the language has features that no one aside from the implementers are quite sure what they do.Now don't get me wrong, as long as you plan on staying away from OO, Ada95 is a WONDERFUL language. Code in it is VERY readable, and VERY obvious. The compiler even catches spelling errors of variable names! (Rather than C's approach which is to give you 50 "undeclared variable" errors.)
Ada95 was written to do everything for you, but in the end, it makes YOU do everything exactly ITS way. Sure, if you master this one way of doing things, your productivity will go up. I have no doubt about it. Your code will be readable, easily debugged, and likely even pretty efficent. (Ada95's compiler is actually rather good in terms of code efficently, an array of 8 bools takes up 1 byte!)
The thing here is, there are three ways to get around the "humans are too dumb to understand complex systems" problem:
Of coures there is C++'s approach:
Make the programmer jump through a thousand hoops to use the features that they want, and break inexplicibly until they jump through the hoops just right.
It does sound like prices have decreased a bit since last time I looked into things.
Sounds like a nice deal, though the 24hr viewing period is kind of weird, I figure a 72hour or something deal would be better, the cost to them would be nil, unless the studios are acting weird about things.
I have a UPS supply.
:)
Power goes off, whatever, I keep on gaming.
I have my Computer, Monitor, and Cable Modem plugged into the UPS.
There is a certain penalty for getting caught pirating material, and there is also a risk (chance) of getting caught.
Combined together, these two values form the "value" that a person is spending on their action of piracy (or any illegal act for that matter).
If you make movie downloads online cost less than this value, the person will purchase the movie instead.
Reducing the value of the movie download (such as loading it up with DRM crud, or making it only viewable for one day, or making the quality really low) means you will have to further reduce the price. Current online movie rental services hideously bog down their users with unnecessary crud and thus do not have a very high level of success. This is to be expected, as not very many people place a $7 value on having 24 hour viewing privileges for a movie on their 17 inch screen.
Compare this to services like iTunes in which the sheer convenience of the service adds to the value already present in rather reasonable prices. iTunes and other services like it enjoy success because they place legal downloads at a price lower than the users threshold for piracy.