Why not consider C++ or Java instead? Better to learn to thinkin the OO patterns to start with instead of having to come to it later.Having moved from FORTRAN to Algol to Pascal to C and Ada the jump from an unstructured Language (e.g. FORTRAN) to a Block Structured one (e.g. Pascal & C) was mild. But the change to OO really does take a bit of wrapping your mind around things. The younger guys who basically never learned functional decomposition and block structured programming seem to to do OO more naturally. For me I still have to think, the patterns for C++ after a year or so are only now slowly getting ingrained in my style, I still tend to think the old way and write C in C++ if I don't watch myself.
The other advantage is that Java and C++ can be had for free with nice helpful IDEs. The Eclipse CDT (http://www.eclipse.org/ ) with cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) provides a fairly full IDE (and you can tailor it's key interface to EMACS:-) ). Eclipse also looks to be a fair Java IDE and there is also netbeans (http://www.netbeans.org/).
As a book I would suggest one I have enjoyed using in its online form, Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel (http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP 2e.html). It has the advantage that there is also a second volume that takes you into using more advanced features (fancy templating, STL, and some more complicated patterns) that they can look into or you could use as a follow on.
Friend I think you've been had. I started at $25k when I started my carreer which was in 1983. I think I see your problem
$40k per year starting which is twice that locally for a CS grad
Obviously there isn't much call for software engineers wherever you are in GA (or you have boatloads of them hanging around depressing the market). Around these parts (New England) $50-70K is the going rate for a fresh caught B.S./B.A. Computer Science grad from a reputable school. I'll bet it is higher in the N.Y. and Palo Alto areas (of course so is the cost of living). I'd say it is time for a change of scenery for you unless you're deeply wedded to where you are. And even then I knew engineers over in Huntsville Alabama that were making almost as good cash as me and their houses cost a 1/2 what my first one did and had 3x the square feet.
Also, sadly, writing textbooks and being an adjunct or part time professor(even at a decent school) is a really good technique for starving to death. Go find some part of the Military Industrial complex to work for. I guarantee that at least your job won't be outsourced to India:-) and as someone else noted the pay is good and 40 hrs a week means 40 hrs a week, not 80 (or when you do 80 at least the pay you for it).
I hate to say this, but if the power is out your oil heat is out too. You need electricity to move the hot air or hot water at a minimum. Also most modern burners have an arc/spark to cause the oil to burn. Remember #2 fuel oil is bacically diesel fuel with dye added so you can't use it in your diesel car or truck without paying tax. Diesel hardly burns if you throw a lit match in it, it is much less volatile than Gasoline or Kerosene so it needs all the help it can get to combust when not under pressure. This also does imply that biodiesel could be burned for heating.
And as for why burn oil, the alternative is to use electric heating, with electricity derived from renewable resource perhaps boosted with passive or active solar. Anything solar is a loser in Scandanavia due to how far north they are and how little sunlight there is in the heating season. Electric heating is massively innefficient. You have transmission losses, and then your heating basically by straight resistive heating coils (think nichrome or the like in your toaster. Oil furnaces (especially modern ones) are amazingly efficient and getting maximal BTU's out of the Oil.
I think part of the issue with the writer was that he may have been a big fish in a little pond at his high school. He'd been given good grades to encourage him and avoid damaging his ego. Then he went to a large engineering school (I'm betting CalTech or MIT) where they get to
pick each year from 5000 valedictorians with 1500+ (now 2250+) SAT
scores. Then he's a little fish in a big pond and the professors are out to sort people out
As an example let me recount something from my engineering education.
I went to WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the other engineering school in Massachusetts) in the early '80s.
I had an experience similar to the one sammy baby noted in his discrete math class. In my case I was in an advanced Statistics class. We had a final test that was 6 proofs. As the 1.5 hours went on the proffessor would tone in with "Don't do Number 3 you don't know how to solve it" or "Don't try number 5 I don't know how to prove it."
By the end of the testing period 4 of the 6 questions had been
eliminated leaving only two relatively easy softballs (numbers 4 and 6 I think). Luckily I'd learned how to take a timed test and so had noticed the early problems were bears and moved on until I hit the questions I could answer. I'd aced those two questions whereas the others had pounded their heads against insoluble problems for most of the class and then had to scramble to do the remaining workable problems. On top of that my 100 screwed the curve. It didn't make me real popular in that class:-).
The moral of this tale is that 90% of what you need to succeed in an engineering school is decent study skills. Sadly if you're gifted you may never need to develop them given the pablum that's taught in high schools today and given the major grade inflation. Then when you need some decent study skills in college you're dead, because thats not something the professors have the time (or inclination) to teach.
I suspect that was the authors situation.
Yes a gun type bomb won't work with Plutonium (See The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes for vague detail why). However, until you have some Pu to work with and do criticality tests you don't know that. Thus a drawing of one is not so out of line as some pie in the sky dreaming.
More odd seeming to me is calling the material Plutonium. Looking at an online Periodic table http://www.webelements.com/ at plutonium shows a discovery date of 1940 at Berkely by bombardment in a cyclotron so it is vaguely possible that the name was in the literature before the Manhattan project gets underway in 1941 and people start self censoring their submissions to journals on atomic fission and related info (again CF The Making of the Atomic Bomb ).
What this document does tell us is (if real) is that the Germans had started thinking about the bomb in detail, but had only theoretical knowledge of plutonium. They clearly had no practical experimental knowledge or this design would be out the window. This still matches with what had been thought of their program previously.
The real liability problem is probably battery disposal. The initial EV1s used lead acid batteries (PbA), and lots of them. The lead is a disposal issue, so GM wants to know where it ends up (that was why lease instead of buy too). The advanced batteries were to be NIMH, but my suspicion is they only made a couple of those as demos as the NIMH cost would be prohibitive vs good old boring PbA especially back a few years ago when these things were made.
A Gnome ROUGE? Not only do we have gnomes protesting in their underwear but we have cross dressing protesting gnomes. I think this classifies as To Much Information...Its gonna scar me for life I tell ya...
Umm thats a sucker bet friend. Remember the president of IBM (Watson?) who thought there'd be no need for more than a handful of computers? Remember Ken Olsen (founder of DEC) who wondered who'd want a personal computer? Remember Bill Gates who wondered why you'd need more than 640K (that one may be apocryphal)? We programmers are masters at wasting CPU cycles:-). Adding to an old saw, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too fast a processor.
Fmaxwell in general I agree with you that there is not much to see here. The central obstruction is on a par with a schmidt-cassegrain (SCT). For optical use (i.e. sticking your eye at the eyepiece) this will matter alot especially on targets like the moon, planets, or double stars where contrast matters. It shouldn't be too bad on faint fuzzies (galaxies, nebulae etc) and that 18" aperature doesn't hurt.
He also complains that collimation in on an SCT is critical. It is critical but not particularly hard to do as there is only one variable to play with (as opposed to two in a newtonian). Once collimated most SCT's hold collimation well. Because his design gets reassembled every time he's going top probably tweak collimation every time he sets up.
One point where I disagree is on your statement about astrophotography. Film Astrophotography requires long exposures (and a well aligned equatorial mount). CCD astrophotography has some folks that use lots of short (order of a couple seconds) exposures that are then derotated and and aligned and then digitally composited. I'm still not sure this scope would be a winner for that as it might tend to shake especially if there's wind and once you have all the heavy imaging hardware at the focal point.
First to be more correct the only HIGHLY profitable division is the camera/printer division. The Big Box folks and the PC folks made profits last quarter, just nothing to write home to mom about. Of course that beats losing money any day.
One issue no one talks about is retention of the workers that replace the US folks. People are brought here, trained and then sent back home overseas (otherwise their cost is not that much lower). All in all they're decent developers, I wouldn't mind having them on my team if they were here and some are truly excellent. However in many cases they jump ship to other jobs as soon as they get back overseas as the training greatly increases their worth (even they like bigger salaries:-)). Often they do this without training a replacement and after their opposite number here in the states has left/been laid off. This leaves the employer holding the bag, so buyer beware this model works only to a point... I wouldn't want to bet the business on it like some seem to want to do.
When I was a senior in college in the early '80s (yes Im a fossil, get over it:-)) I interviewiewed with the NSA. It sounds like things haven't changed much. You first interviewed at the college (WPI in my case) and then they'd bring you down to Maryland for 2 days at some later point if someone found you interesting. You arrived at BWI and were picked up with a bunch of other college seniors by a gent in a van who was pretty clearly ex military (not a lot of folks with wicked short haircuts and that classic bodybuilder look in the early '80s). Everyone was taken to a hotel in Columbia Maryland. The first day was almost totally tests, the MMI (Michigan Multiphasic Indicator, the paper ancestor to the 500 question computer test), the same stupid questions about parents, and the interview with a psycholgist. Then some interviews at sites where people who were interested you interviewed you. This was almost the same as my interviews at Wang, DEC, Data General etc. but for one little difference. To get to the interviewers desk we had to go through an area where people were working on stuff that required clearance. The guy found a another person in the hall and had them stay with me. Then he went in and you could hear him saying, "Uncleared person coming through". He then came out and got me, as we walked through it cold be seen that most of the desks were clear of papers and the VT-100 clone terminals on a couple of the desks were powered off. Leaving 20 minutes later was a similar process. The second day was at FANNEX in Baltimore this had the dreaded polygraph. It was sureal to say the least. In the application you had to state what experiences you had had with illegal drugs. Unlike a recent president I had inhaled, and had listed my assorted miscreant behavior on the forms (actually needing a seperate sheet). This got me throuroughly questioned on the polygraph. Last thing was having finger prints done as part of the security clearance. I had worked a couple summers in delis and had (and have) a rather distinctinve scar on my left index finger from a cut cleaning a slicer. The young woman (20's?) in a naval uniform that took the prints looked at my left hand prints and said jokingly, "Don't commit any crimes or if you do don't do it left handed, they'll pick you up in a flash...". That was the only bit of humor (besides interacting with fellow interviewees) in the whole trip. Reading the paper it doesn't sound like they've changed much even the polygraph chair sounded familiar. The whole experience left me wanting to sing the chorus of "Alice's Restaurant" on the way out (and see if I couldn't coax it out of some of the others). Never did get an offer, but I can't say I'm disappointed now some 20 years later.
>Brilliant scheme that is so simple. Try before >you buy, get em hooked while they're young. Win >their loyalty now and they will come back as >paying customers in the future.
Man that sounds like drug dealers dealing out crack, "Here, here's a sample to see if you like it". Only thing is a crack habit is probably cheaper than a Maya one...
Still it is nice of them to make it so you're able to mess with the real software without emptying the cookie jar.
In your comment you said >Most software developers graduated in CS for >the money That reminds me of a scene in Casablanca
Renault: What brought you to Casablanca? Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters. Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert. Rick: I was misinformed
I imagine that those particular CS grads are similarly disappointed...
I think your conclusion is correct. AGP 8x & potentially 16x will not be replaced by PCI express in the near term. However, I think your logic overstates the case. In a modern 3d card most work is done either by directly writing the commands in the FIFO on the card (Usually via AGP fast write), or by building a list of commands in a buffer in host memory (mapped into the cards memory in AGP addrss space) that form a ring buffer. Registers in the card are updated (via the fast write, or through ordinary PCI writes) and the card then DMA's this information across (this is simplified, there can be several kinds of indirection here). In general the frame buffer is accessed directly only when no convenient command set is available to perform the task at hand. As the cards have gotten more sophistacated the number of reasons to fall back to twiddling the bits in the frame buffer has dwindled. The reason is that optimally you'd like to do everything through the command buffers as switching to writing the frame buffer directly can have major overhead (particularly you need to not interfere with the drawing engine's writing the frame buffer so you need to wait for it to finish). There are still some places that even high end cards probably fall back to banging the frame buffer and some things (e.g. video) are still most easily handled in this fashion so AGP will hold out for a while because of this disadvantage of PCI express. It will also hang on because the video vendors already have an immense investment in AGP and the need for the increased bandwidth is not quite as critical as that of making a profit:-).
Yup up early enough to have to wait through the agricultural program that was on at what 5:30? Colonel Bleep came on at 6:00 then Thunderbirds at 6:30 (alright so its marionettes not animation, sue me). I lived for Underdog and Secret Squirrel (I'm obviously a tad older than some folks here:-) ), and then Looney tunes, Bugs and Road Runner as well as the others. My mom and dad woud get up about Underdog time and laugh to some of that (and often NOT the parts I did, HMMMM I'll bet there were innuendo's that went right over my head) just as hard as I did. They'd seen many of the Bugs ones before the movies they went to as kids. That's what you did on rainy saturdays before tv if you lived in a city, you got 25c from mom and saw a double feature and a newsreel and shorts as well as a couple cartoons and got popcorn to boot and you were out of Mom's hair until noon.
One theme I keep seeing here is that New stuff is bad and the old stuff is better. I think Sturgeons Law applies (90% of everything is Crap), we get to see the best of the 30's, 40's and 50's shorts. When Cartoon network runs their June Bugs (presuming they do) with 95% of all the Bugs cartoons (there are a few with folks in black face that even they don't show) Tivo or tape it and watch. There is a lot of good, but a lot of dreck too. We just get to see the winnowed out gems like Duck Season or What's Opera Doc, or the Bunny of Seville and miss the lame ones.
There are some pretty good new cartoons that are fun to watch and you can let kids watch without too much trouble. Square Bob Sponge Pants, The Fairly Odd parents and Power Puff Girls all have some great shows along with the dreck, and I'm laughing at stuff that go right over my 7 and 10 year olds heads just like my Mom and Dad did with Underdog.
I think the other theme I've seen is the dumbing down of Kids TV. When my first girl was a toddler (about 96-97) Sesame street was a riot, Smashing pumpkins might show up or Maria Callas or someonesinging Send Slimey to the moon (to the tune of fly me to the moon). Somewhere along the way the decided to refocus to smaller kids with Elmo's World and all of a sudden it became Teletubbies without half the intellect (and believe you me Teletubbies is not big on intellect).
PBS seems scizophrenic, they still have some great stuff (watch Between the Lions with a near reader, or Cyberchase with a first grader and they'll have fun and you'll get a laugh or two in the process), but somewhere along the way they lost their way too. Witness Barney, Dragontales, Sagwa and a bunch of other PC garbage that is neither educational nor entertaining.
The big issue is that the Old Sesame Street seemed to know that there were parents watching, and there were intentional complex interplays going on that amused the parents but the Kids loved too. That seems to be the thing with any GOOD kids TV, avoid talking down to them but also remember they aren't adults in small clothes. Some stuff is just plain innappropriate (let them be kids for a bit, adulthood lasts an awful long time).
When some of the modern shows manage to walk that fine line they buck the trend and may end up being classics that my two girls will be introducing to their kids just like I introduced Bugs and Road Runner to mine.
Now if I could just find Underdog and see what was so darn funny to my Dad...
Re:Really bright... but really close to the sun
on
A Comet To Watch
·
· Score: 1
It gets worse, rumors are that with the latest orbits it will be southern hemisphere only from late January to early April. When it gets back to northern hemisphere visibility it'll be low near Orion (who sets just after sunset in April). It's orbit is awful close to the Sun. Seems like it might really start to dump gases and material on the way by and break up. If it does when it comes back to Northern Hemisphere it'll be a beaut. Only thing is it'll be a 1 shot phenomenon if that happens. If it doesn't break up and survives its close encounter of the hot kind then it'll be a binocular/telescope object in April...
Yup this doesn't look good for our heros. It appears they have some piece of script that they're trying to resurrect by inserting a Hollywood "name" (Smith) and then attract Sci-Fi hardliners by preending to have it related to a famous author/book (Asimov/I Robot). The crying shame is that there was a darn good screenplay of Isaac Asimov by Harlan Ellison (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/det ail/-/044 6670626/qid=1039015459/sr=1-20/ref=sr_1_20/103-857 0570-9683852?v=glance&s=books) though that looks to be long out of print.
Ah well the only thing that could save this dreck is if they play it camp and have Will Smith dress up in drag and play Susan Calvin....
M@ I have a sneaking suspicion you're no where near 40 and have good eyesight. I'm over 40 and have poor (though well corrected) eyesight. Reading on my laptop works but that sucker is big (and as noted equal in cost to at least 100-200 paperbacks). Any PDA's I've looked at (Palm, visor, even the HP Jornada's and COMPAQ Ipaq's) still have relatively low resolution and are hard to read on with older eyes with presbyopic tendencies. Lousy printing is 600-1200 DPI, decent press stuff is 2400 DPI plus. Screens have busted the 100dpi barrier pretty regularly for a while now, but we're still an order of magnitude off from good quality printing. I can easily read 8pt type in a book, on a pda 8pt type would be an inscrutable blob. This is not to say online books are not useful. For things where your access is less linear (dictionaries, how to's, technical stuff, the Bible etc.) the ability to search for things or have linked indices is a real win. I have also enjoyed Baen's free library ( http://www.baen.com/library/) during lunch breaks, but for most purposes I suspect that the reports of the death of paper printing are premature.
First the bad news for my fellow HP employees (I'm an ex Digital ex Compaq employee now HP). The business world has gotten nasty in the last 10-15 years. Lifetime employment is gone, you had just been sheltered from this change a little longer than the rest of us. The world changes more quickly now and a company that isn't agile is in trouble. This ride is NOT going to be real fun for a while. I've been there, done that got the t-shirt with the acquisition of Digital.
Now the good news. When Compaq bought Digital they were 20K people and we were ~80K. Most of the people you're getting in Services and the Northeast are Dec/Digital folks. We're a heck of a lot more like HP than you think. Most of us still live by Ken Olsen's old motto "Do the Right thing". That's our culture, its been suppressed for a while, but even several years of Compaq couldn't kill it.
Looking at the folks I've been meeting from the HP side this looks like it might be the beginning of something very interesting if we can keep it stuck together for a bit and we all stop crying in our beers and act.
Slashdot Mirror
The other advantage is that Java and C++ can be had for free with nice helpful IDEs. The Eclipse CDT (http://www.eclipse.org/ ) with cygwin (http://www.cygwin.com/) provides a fairly full IDE (and you can tailor it's key interface to EMACS :-) ). Eclipse also looks to be a fair Java IDE and there is also netbeans (http://www.netbeans.org/).
As a book I would suggest one I have enjoyed using in its online form, Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel (http://www.mindview.net/Books/TICPP/ThinkingInCPP 2e.html). It has the advantage that there is also a second volume that takes you into using more advanced features (fancy templating, STL, and some more complicated patterns) that they can look into or you could use as a follow on.
$40k per year starting which is twice that locally for a CS grad
Obviously there isn't much call for software engineers wherever you are in GA (or you have boatloads of them hanging around depressing the market). Around these parts (New England) $50-70K is the going rate for a fresh caught B.S./B.A. Computer Science grad from a reputable school. I'll bet it is higher in the N.Y. and Palo Alto areas (of course so is the cost of living). I'd say it is time for a change of scenery for you unless you're deeply wedded to where you are. And even then I knew engineers over in Huntsville Alabama that were making almost as good cash as me and their houses cost a 1/2 what my first one did and had 3x the square feet.
Also, sadly, writing textbooks and being an adjunct or part time professor(even at a decent school) is a really good technique for starving to death. Go find some part of the Military Industrial complex to work for. I guarantee that at least your job won't be outsourced to India
I hate to say this, but if the power is out your
oil heat is out too. You need electricity to move the hot air
or hot water at a minimum. Also most modern burners have an arc/spark
to cause the oil to burn. Remember #2 fuel oil is bacically diesel
fuel with dye added so you can't use it in your diesel car or truck
without paying tax. Diesel hardly burns if you throw a lit match in it,
it is much less volatile than Gasoline or Kerosene so it needs all the help
it can get to combust when not under pressure. This also does imply
that biodiesel could be burned for heating.
And as for why burn oil, the alternative is to use electric heating,
with electricity derived from renewable resource perhaps boosted
with passive or active solar. Anything solar is
a loser in Scandanavia due to how far north they are and how little
sunlight there is in the heating season. Electric heating is
massively innefficient. You have transmission losses, and then your heating basically
by straight resistive heating coils (think nichrome or the like in your toaster.
Oil furnaces (especially modern ones) are amazingly efficient and
getting maximal BTU's out of the Oil.
As an example let me recount something from my engineering education. I went to WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute, the other engineering school in Massachusetts) in the early '80s. I had an experience similar to the one sammy baby noted in his discrete math class. In my case I was in an advanced Statistics class. We had a final test that was 6 proofs. As the 1.5 hours went on the proffessor would tone in with "Don't do Number 3 you don't know how to solve it" or "Don't try number 5 I don't know how to prove it." By the end of the testing period 4 of the 6 questions had been eliminated leaving only two relatively easy softballs (numbers 4 and 6 I think). Luckily I'd learned how to take a timed test and so had noticed the early problems were bears and moved on until I hit the questions I could answer. I'd aced those two questions whereas the others had pounded their heads against insoluble problems for most of the class and then had to scramble to do the remaining workable problems. On top of that my 100 screwed the curve. It didn't make me real popular in that class :-).
The moral of this tale is that 90% of what you need to succeed in an engineering school is decent study skills. Sadly if you're gifted you may never need to develop them given the pablum that's taught in high schools today and given the major grade inflation. Then when you need some decent study skills in college you're dead, because thats not something the professors have the time (or inclination) to teach. I suspect that was the authors situation.
More odd seeming to me is calling the material Plutonium. Looking at an online Periodic table http://www.webelements.com/ at plutonium shows a discovery date of 1940 at Berkely by bombardment in a cyclotron so it is vaguely possible that the name was in the literature before the Manhattan project gets underway in 1941 and people start self censoring their submissions to journals on atomic fission and related info (again CF The Making of the Atomic Bomb ).
What this document does tell us is (if real) is that the Germans had started thinking about the bomb in detail, but had only theoretical knowledge of plutonium. They clearly had no practical experimental knowledge or this design would be out the window. This still matches with what had been thought of their program previously.
The real liability problem is probably battery disposal. The initial EV1s used lead acid batteries (PbA), and lots of them. The lead is a disposal issue, so GM wants to know where it ends up (that was why lease instead of buy too). The advanced batteries were to be NIMH, but my suspicion is they only made a couple of those as demos as the NIMH cost would be prohibitive vs good old boring PbA especially back a few years ago when these things were made.
A Gnome ROUGE? Not only do we have gnomes protesting in their underwear but we have cross dressing protesting gnomes. I think this classifies as To Much Information...Its gonna scar me for life I tell ya...
Umm thats a sucker bet friend. Remember the :-). Adding to an old saw, you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too fast a processor.
president of IBM (Watson?) who thought there'd be no need for more than a handful of computers? Remember Ken Olsen (founder of DEC) who wondered who'd want a personal computer? Remember Bill Gates who wondered why you'd need more than 640K (that one may be apocryphal)? We programmers are masters at wasting CPU cycles
Fmaxwell in general I agree with you that there is not much to see here. The central obstruction is on a par with a schmidt-cassegrain (SCT). For optical use (i.e. sticking your eye at the eyepiece) this will matter alot especially on
targets like the moon, planets, or double stars where contrast matters. It shouldn't be too bad on faint fuzzies (galaxies, nebulae etc) and that 18" aperature doesn't hurt.
He also complains that collimation in on an SCT
is critical. It is critical but not particularly hard to do as there is only one variable to play with (as opposed to two in a newtonian). Once collimated most SCT's hold collimation well. Because his design gets reassembled every time he's going top probably tweak collimation every time he sets up.
One point where I disagree is on your statement about astrophotography. Film Astrophotography requires long exposures (and a well aligned equatorial mount). CCD astrophotography has some folks that use lots of short (order of a couple seconds) exposures that are then derotated and and aligned and then digitally composited. I'm still not sure this scope would be a winner for that as it might tend to shake especially if there's wind and once you have all the heavy imaging hardware at the focal point.
First to be more correct the only HIGHLY profitable division is the camera/printer division. The Big Box folks and the PC folks made profits last quarter, just nothing to write home to mom about. Of course that beats losing money any day.
:-)). Often they do this without training a replacement and after their opposite number here in the states has left/been laid off. This leaves the employer holding the bag, so buyer beware this model works only to a point... I wouldn't want to bet the business on it like some seem to want to do.
One issue no one talks about is retention of the workers that replace the US folks. People are brought here, trained and then sent back home overseas (otherwise their cost is not that much lower). All in all they're decent developers, I wouldn't mind having them on my team if they were here and some are truly excellent. However in many cases they jump ship to other jobs as soon as they get back overseas as the training greatly increases their worth (even they like bigger salaries
When I was a senior in college in the early '80s (yes Im a fossil, get over it :-)) I interviewiewed with the NSA. It sounds like things haven't changed much. You first interviewed at the college (WPI in my case) and then they'd bring you down to Maryland for 2 days at some later point if someone found you interesting. You arrived at BWI and were picked up with a bunch of other college seniors by a gent in a van who was pretty clearly ex military (not a lot of folks with wicked short haircuts and that classic bodybuilder look in the early '80s). Everyone was taken to a hotel in Columbia Maryland. The first day was almost totally tests, the MMI (Michigan Multiphasic Indicator, the paper ancestor to the 500 question computer test), the same stupid questions about parents, and the interview with a psycholgist. Then some interviews at sites where people who were interested you interviewed you. This was almost the same as my interviews at Wang, DEC, Data General etc. but for one little difference. To get to the interviewers desk we had to go through an area where people were working on stuff that required clearance. The guy found a another person in the hall and had them stay with me. Then he went in and you could hear him saying, "Uncleared person coming through". He then came out and got me, as we walked through it cold be seen that most of the desks were clear of papers and the VT-100 clone terminals on a couple of the desks were powered off. Leaving 20 minutes later was a similar process. The second day was at FANNEX in Baltimore this had the dreaded polygraph. It was sureal to say the least. In the application you had to state what experiences you had had with illegal drugs. Unlike a recent president I had inhaled, and had listed my assorted miscreant behavior on the forms (actually needing a seperate sheet). This got me throuroughly questioned on the polygraph. Last thing was having finger prints done as part of the security clearance. I had worked a couple summers in delis and had (and have) a rather distinctinve scar on my left index finger from a cut cleaning a slicer. The young woman (20's?) in a naval uniform that took the prints looked at my left hand prints and said jokingly, "Don't commit any crimes or if you do don't do it left handed, they'll pick you up in a flash...". That was the only bit of humor (besides interacting with fellow interviewees) in the whole trip. Reading the paper it doesn't sound like they've changed much even the polygraph chair sounded familiar. The whole experience left me wanting to sing the chorus of "Alice's Restaurant" on the way out (and see if I couldn't coax it out of some of the others). Never did get an offer, but I can't say I'm disappointed now some 20 years later.
You said:
>Brilliant scheme that is so simple. Try before >you buy, get em hooked while they're young. Win >their loyalty now and they will come back as >paying customers in the future.
Man that sounds like drug dealers dealing out crack, "Here, here's a sample to see if you like it". Only thing is a crack habit is probably cheaper than a Maya one...
Still it is nice of them to make it so you're able to mess with the real software without emptying the cookie jar.
In your comment you said
>Most software developers graduated in CS for >the money
That reminds me of a scene in Casablanca
Renault: What brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Renault: The waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed
I imagine that those particular CS grads are similarly disappointed...
I think your conclusion is correct. AGP 8x & potentially 16x will not be replaced by PCI express in the near term. However, I think your logic overstates the case. In a modern 3d card most work is done either by directly writing the commands in the FIFO on the card (Usually via AGP fast write), or by building a list of commands in a buffer in host memory (mapped into the cards memory in AGP addrss space) that form a ring buffer. Registers in the card are updated (via the fast write, or through ordinary PCI writes) and the card then DMA's this information across (this is simplified, there can be several kinds of indirection here). In general the frame buffer is accessed directly only when no convenient command set is available to perform the task at hand. As the cards have gotten more sophistacated the number of reasons to fall back to twiddling the bits in the frame buffer has dwindled. The reason is that optimally you'd like to do everything through the command buffers as switching to writing the frame buffer directly can have major overhead (particularly you need to not interfere with the drawing engine's writing the frame buffer so you need to wait for it to finish). There are still some places that even high end cards probably fall back to banging the frame buffer and some things (e.g. video) are still most easily handled in this fashion so AGP will hold out for a while because of this disadvantage of PCI express. It will also hang on because the video vendors already have an immense investment in AGP and the need for the increased bandwidth is not quite as critical as that of making a profit :-).
Yup up early enough to have to wait through the agricultural program that was on at what 5:30? Colonel Bleep came on at 6:00 then Thunderbirds at 6:30 (alright so its marionettes not animation, sue me). I lived for Underdog and Secret Squirrel (I'm obviously a tad older than some folks here :-) ), and then Looney tunes, Bugs and Road Runner as well as the others. My mom and dad woud get up about Underdog time and laugh to some of that (and often NOT the parts I did, HMMMM I'll bet there were innuendo's that went right over my head) just as hard as I did. They'd seen many of the Bugs ones before the movies they went to as kids. That's what you did on rainy saturdays before tv if you lived in a city, you got 25c from mom and saw a double feature and a newsreel and shorts as well as a couple cartoons and got popcorn to boot and you were out of Mom's hair until noon.
One theme I keep seeing here is that New stuff is bad and the old stuff is better. I think Sturgeons Law applies (90% of everything is Crap), we get to see the best of the 30's, 40's and 50's shorts. When Cartoon network runs their June Bugs (presuming they do) with 95% of all the Bugs cartoons (there are a few with folks in black face that even they don't show) Tivo or tape it and watch. There is a lot of good, but a lot of dreck too. We just get to see the winnowed out gems like Duck Season or What's Opera Doc, or the Bunny of Seville and miss the lame ones.
There are some pretty good new cartoons that are fun to watch and you can let kids watch without too much trouble. Square Bob Sponge Pants, The Fairly Odd parents and Power Puff Girls all have some great shows along with the dreck, and I'm laughing at stuff that go right over my 7 and 10 year olds heads just like my Mom and Dad did with Underdog.
I think the other theme I've seen is the dumbing down of Kids TV. When my first girl was a toddler (about 96-97) Sesame street was a riot, Smashing pumpkins might show up or Maria Callas or someonesinging Send Slimey to the moon (to the tune of fly me to the moon). Somewhere along the way the decided to refocus to smaller kids with Elmo's World and all of a sudden it became Teletubbies without half the intellect (and believe you me Teletubbies is not big on intellect).
PBS seems scizophrenic, they still have some great stuff (watch Between the Lions with a near reader, or Cyberchase with a first grader and they'll have fun and you'll get a laugh or two in the process), but somewhere along the way they lost their way too. Witness Barney, Dragontales, Sagwa and a bunch of other PC garbage that is neither educational nor entertaining.
The big issue is that the Old Sesame Street seemed to know that there were parents watching, and there were intentional complex interplays going on that amused the parents but the Kids loved too. That seems to be the thing with any GOOD kids TV, avoid talking down to them but also remember they aren't adults in small clothes. Some stuff is just plain innappropriate (let them be kids for a bit, adulthood lasts an awful long time).
When some of the modern shows manage to walk that fine line they buck the trend and may end up being classics that my two girls will be introducing to their kids just like I introduced Bugs and Road Runner to mine.
Now if I could just find Underdog and see what was so darn funny to my Dad...
It gets worse, rumors are that with the latest orbits it will be southern hemisphere only from late January to early April. When it gets back to northern hemisphere visibility it'll be low near Orion (who sets just after sunset in April). It's orbit is awful close to the Sun. Seems like it might really start to dump gases and material on the way by and break up. If it does when it comes back to Northern Hemisphere it'll be a beaut. Only thing is it'll be a 1 shot phenomenon if that happens. If it doesn't break up and survives its close encounter of the hot kind then it'll be a binocular/telescope object in April...
Yup this doesn't look good for our heros. It appears they have some piece of script that they're trying to resurrect by inserting a Hollywood "name" (Smith) and then attract Sci-Fi hardliners by preending to have it related to a famous author/book (Asimov/I Robot). The crying shame is that there was a darn good screenplay of Isaac Asimov by Harlan Ellisont ail/-/044 6670626/qid=1039015459/sr=1-20/ref=sr_1_20/103-857 0570-9683852?v=glance&s=books) though that looks to be long out of print.
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/de
Ah well the only thing that could save this dreck is if they play it camp and have Will Smith dress up in drag and play Susan Calvin....
M@ I have a sneaking suspicion you're no where near 40 and have good eyesight. I'm over 40 and have poor (though well corrected) eyesight. Reading on my laptop works but that sucker is big (and as noted equal in cost to at least 100-200 paperbacks). Any PDA's I've looked at (Palm, visor, even the HP Jornada's and COMPAQ Ipaq's)
still have relatively low resolution and are hard to read on with older eyes with presbyopic tendencies. Lousy printing is 600-1200 DPI, decent press stuff is 2400 DPI plus. Screens have busted the 100dpi barrier pretty regularly for a while now, but we're still an order of magnitude off from good quality printing. I can easily read 8pt type in a book, on a pda 8pt type would be an inscrutable blob. This is not to say online books are not useful. For things where your access is less linear (dictionaries, how to's, technical stuff, the Bible etc.) the ability to search for things or have linked indices is a real win. I have also enjoyed Baen's free library ( http://www.baen.com/library/) during lunch breaks, but for most purposes I suspect that the reports of the death of paper printing are premature.
First the bad news for my fellow HP employees (I'm an ex Digital ex Compaq employee now HP). The business world has gotten nasty in the last 10-15 years. Lifetime employment is gone, you had just been sheltered from this change a little longer than the rest of us. The world changes more quickly now and a company that isn't agile is in trouble. This ride is NOT going to be real fun for a while. I've been there, done that got the t-shirt with the acquisition of Digital.
Now the good news. When Compaq bought Digital they were 20K people and we were ~80K. Most of the people you're getting in Services and the Northeast are Dec/Digital folks. We're a heck of a lot more like HP than you think. Most of us still live by Ken Olsen's old motto "Do the Right thing". That's our culture, its been suppressed for a while, but even several years of Compaq couldn't kill it.
Looking at the folks I've been meeting from the HP side this looks like it might be the beginning of something very interesting if we can keep it stuck together for a bit and we all stop crying in our beers and act.