Theft deprives the original owner of the property use of said property.
Ever heard of theft of services? It's not a very difficult notion, but let's try a few simple examples to make sure you understand:
- You go to the doctor. He saves your life. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the doctor of any property. - You go to your broker. He doubles your investment. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the broker of any property. - You go to your lawyer. He prevents your ex from taking your house, kids, and savings. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the lawyer of any property. - You go to work. You take credit for your friend's good idea and get promoted instead, because this does not deprive your friend of any property. - You lift a game off IRC. It gives you pleasure for a week. You justify this because it does not deprive the retailer, wholesaler, publisher, and shareholders of any property.
Oh, and note "shareholders" may include the programmers and it may include yourself, if you have any mutual funds.
last time i checked most seven year olds are still learning how to read in first and second grade
Do tell, when was the last time you checked?
Reading is taught in first grade. Ergo, most new first-graders can't read. But a lot of them get the hang of it by the end of the year -- especially girls, whose verbal skills are generally about two years ahead of boys the same age. By the third grade, minimal reading competence is expected, and we're still talking about 9-year-olds here.
In third grade I was already calling my friends on the telephone regularly. With IM having supplanted the phone almost entirely among kids, reading skills are going to see a sorely needed renaissance in the near future.
Read my comment again. "Learning the material" quickly is a great skill but that's job training, not education.
The best course I ever took was Art History. "Learning the material" would've involved memorizing 1500 works of art. The teacher knew better than to try that. Instead, he forced us to think -- harder, deeper, broader, and faster than I ever thought possible. In the end, my brain had gained a new mode of operation, one that most engineers don't have. Repeat this process with a dozen other "useless" subjects, and the result is that today I'm a well-paid kernel developer and my friends who went to a techy college are unemployed Javaheads.
Oh, and the whole class ended up remembering the artwork, too. But that was incidental, see.
By the way, professors learn new stuff by going to conferences. Or, if it's a totally new subject, they may start with a book -- and then walk down the hall and chat with the author. And yes, they've even been known to attend classes.
I'm not motivated by some 55 year-old has been that can't keep up with the literature.
This is empirically true in that it's pretty common; a burnout is a burnout. But there's no intrinsic link between teaching ability and academic reputation. What shame is there for a 55-year-old to decide that she's written enough journal papers and would prefer to have fun nurturing the next generation instead? Would you refuse to learn from someone who has something to say, on the grounds that you'd rather read a book than listen to a talented but non-famous lecturer?
I'm not motivated by her telling me that, "hey, this is A quality. Big thumbs up!"
Can't resist the anecdote: I personally know students who've received papers back containing comments that were longer than the paper itself. How's that for motivation?
More to the point, how do students who had involved professors do vs. students who didn't have involved professors.... The number of independent variables you include is staggering.
Perhaps it wasn't obvious that I was simplifying. This is a Slashdot post, not a college counseling seminar -- for anyone interested, I urge you to do the research yourself. Start with soc.college.admissions, The Hidden Ivies (Greene's Guides), and Looking Beyond the Ivy League (Loren Pope). No, I don't have a grudge against the Ivies; I went to one.
But sure, "involved professors" are not the only positive factor at a small college. That's hardly saying their influence is negligible. A small college, which has no graduate school, does not produce major research. Its entire existence revolves around teaching, usually in small classes, and it attracts those who enjoy doing so. Quoting from memory, ~80% of college professors claim to be primarily interested in teaching, versus ~30% of university professors. College professors spend ~55% of their time on class-related work; university professors spend ~20%, much of which is devoted to graduate students.
Along with these aggregate statistics I could also go on for hours with students' individual experiences and anecdotes like the one above. Again, for those interested, some of that can be found in the books mentioned above.
Finally, your other points should be addressed, briefly:
The criteria for performance are objective. Examples include MCAT scores, law/med school admit rates, NSF fellowship recipients. Examples do not include fudgeable measures like inflated grades.
Peer groups can be very effective and academics have known it for years. Some schools and/or teachers leverage this by fostering collaboration. Most don't care. And a sad minority actively discourages it. I've seen all these approaches and their predictable results.
Socio-economic and racial factors: Good point; I should try to find some direct studies. Nevertheless, the results still hold up when you compare only schools with matching demographics (which is most of them, due to affirmative action and need-based financial aid).
Resources and facilities tend to be an advantage of large universities so I'm not sure why you brought this up.
And I'll have to remind you that someone has to write the books. Who is it that writes them?
Of course the books are written by high-prestige professors at high-prestige universities. These places are optimized for research and publication, i.e., for training graduate slaves^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents.
For exactly the same reason, they are not optimized for undergraduate college study.
Your comments are all spot-on, but I want to make this clarification: college is not university. Undergraduate and graduate education are completely different animals, and it sounds like you're talking about graduate study here:
Most colleges have very little in the areas of cutting edge equipment and "second rate" PhD's, that don't publish much or are not the leaders in thier fields. They are what I call teaching PhD's.
A "teaching PhD" is in fact exactly what you want for an undergraduate education. There are plenty of "second rate" PhDs who settle for teaching because they couldn't cut it in academic circles. But don't denigrate the many, many outstanding professors who teach because that's their main interest.
Facilities, resources, prestige, research... these qualities help define the best U.S. graduate institutions -- and for the same reason these places are the least optimized for the undergraduate experience. As one professor advised his new freshmen, "Leave Berkeley as soon as possible and transfer to a good liberal arts college. We train graduate students here. We do not educate undergraduates. Training and education are different things."
Although teacher feedback is important, teachers' effort and participation in your education is almost unnecessary.
Utterly untrue. Are you asserting that if you took a class with an interested and involved professor, that you would gain zero benefit over the same class taught by an apathetic jerk of otherwise equal qualifications?
All evidence points to the contrary. Graduates of small, high-quality, close-knit colleges outperform graduates of large, impersonal universities in almost all fields including science and engineering. What's more, these small colleges are usually less selective than the big prestige schools, taking B or C high-school students and turning out top performers. In other words, a good education doesn't just teach you stuff, it should literally make you smarter. If all you got out of school was that the book is your "teacher," then your tuition was little more than an expensive library card.
It sounds like this worked out very well for you, but that's merely making the best out of a bad situation. Your thoughtful advice should be heeded only by people who attend a school where professors won't -- or can't -- contribute to the improvement of their students. (This includes every online school I know of, although I would love to know if there are any exceptions.)
Very good points. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie studios were convicted of price-fixing (like the RIAA was!). But anime is a somewhat different story. Despite anime's growing popularity, most of the US companies that release it are small-fry in the entertainment world -- only a few years ago, a title that sold 50,000 copies would have been considered a major success. Therefore, anime (in the US) has historically been priced pretty much in line with demand.
Thus, the steadily growing market for anime has produced steadily declining prices for anime. The average MSRP of an anime release may not vary that much, but the number of episodes does. These days, a 26-episode season is most often released in 6 volumes. Not long ago, the average number was 8 volumes; before that, 13 volumes. This is hardly a trend that correlates with the MPAA's fixed pricing; indeed, anime today is still more expensive than a Hollywood flick of the same length. It is also much more expensive than American TV series on DVD.
Many US anime companies are well-connected to the community, and it shows in their approach to the market. Amusingly, AD Vision recently stretched Noir from 6 discs to 7, bucking the downward trend in a shrewd bid to milk a potentially popular title. TokyoPop did the opposite this week, pushing out the last 13 episodes of their poorly-received St. Tail in a single $40 package. AnimEigo, as an extreme case, sometimes won't even start production until they get enough preorders to break even.
Anyway, a quick browse of some Canadian retailers seems to bear this out; the street price of anime is about $35CDN, comparable to the $25US we pay here. Price-fixing increases piracy because the cost of goods is kept artificially higher than the market's opinion. If anime is priced as demand, then anime piracy boils back down to mere petulance.
Would anyone in their right mind pay $1440 just to watch a TV show?
You don't have any basis for making this judgment. A 26-episode anime series costs about $180 here, retail. Why is that "too much" but a $70 bootleg boxset isn't? Prices have nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the market and what it will pay. Notably, DVDs in Japan cost twice as much as they do here, and they still sell plenty.
If I can't afford to pay that much, then I'll simply do without. Or maybe I'll save up for a while. These are concepts that seem to be lost on people these days. Worst case, I'll rent or borrow, but as a collector I prefer to plan ahead and budget for purchases.
Incidentally, the packaging you get on bootlegs is only "relatively nice" if you don't read Japanese. The printing on even the best reproductions is near-illegible compared to originals. The low-quality papers will also begin to degrade much faster.
There's Tom and Jerry Kids, Flinstones Kids, A Pup named Scooby, Tiny Toons and so on.
I've a (much younger) sibling who watches all of these, and generally I couldn't agree more. But I must defend Tiny Toons. It had its ups and downs, but at its best it was a well-written, well-acted, risk-taking show. This isn't nostalgia speaking; I try to catch an episode now and again, and while the "downs" are more painful than I remember, the "ups" are as good as ever.
Tiny Toons does capitalize on the old Warner icons, but it does so mainly for brand-recognition -- this was essentially Warner's entry into the television cartoon market. There are a few purely derivative characters that bring nothing new to the table, but overall Tiny Toons was its own show and made no pretense of being otherwise. People who insist on drawing that comparison are always disappointed. It's a spinoff, not a ripoff.
The one true similarity between the two is their orchestral soundtrack. In fact, Carl Stalling's original studio was renovated just to house this show's 30-piece orchestra -- which would go on to provide music for Warner's other animated TV series. The composer, the late Richard Stone, remarked in 1999, "it's been unbelievable that we've been able to work with a full orchestra every week for the past nine years, which is unheard of for television in general, let alone animation." (paraphrased slightly)
For those who keep count, Tiny Toon Adventures also won the Emmy for "Best Animated Series" twice out of three nominations.
Oh, and yes, there was pornographic fanart and fanfiction before the show even finished its run...
Look, all I was doing was to tell the guy that listening to the advice of authority is well and good, but not at the expense of your own damn experience.
Exactly. Because personal experience is always objective and reproducible, unlike controlled testing which is subjective and unreliable.
Uhhh, I dunno what Microsoft OSes you are tlaking about
Well, clearly not, since I never said anything specifically about their OSes.
Is robustness at the application level less important? A mission-critical service must be trustworthy from end to end. A dependable OS with an undependable application is undependable. The only thing the client sees is an outage.
But we can talk about the OS, too, if you like. Did you bother to look at the link to CMU's Ballista? It's quite an eye-opener. Their methodology is to try every system call with every combination of bad arguments. All major Unix flavors, plus WinNT/2000/XP, fail miserably. There are hundreds of calls that will crash your application if you feed them the wrong input. Several Unices actually had some total system crashes -- yes, initiated from user space and 100% reproducible.
Notably, Linux and NT-lineage Windows had no crash-level failures (not of this type anyway), but they were no better than anyone else when it came to application aborts. Let me say this again: the OS crashes your application. In several cases, the system call actually hangs the application, requiring a manual kill.
but the new ones, teh current ones, teh ones based on the NT kernel (2k/XP) are quite robust.
The whole point of my original post was that robustness is a concept distinct from reliability and availability, hm? And I have no idea why you went off on a rant about security. Would you like to rephrase your assertion?
This is true for mission-critical systems, as you say, where no risk is tolerable.
But in general, software should be resilient in the face of unexpected conditions, including user modifications.
This is called robustness, and it generally revolves around checking your inputs for validity before acting on them, so that unexpected results don't have a chance to occur.
Robustness is not the same as reliability or availability. Those things are hard; robustness is both easy to implement and easy to verify, and there is no excuse for doing it any other way.
It's worth noting that Microsoft policy is (or was?) to disable all such checks before shipping, "for performance reasons."
The trouble is, the more accustomed users become to bugs, the harder it is to get them reported and fixed.
This is absolutely and shockingly true. Microsoft is almost singlehandedly responsible for the widespread cultural mentality that faulty software is okay.
You'll find this notion all over the place but the worst part is seeing it in the upcoming generation. I work with teenagers, bright kids who are totally immersed in technology. Yet almost none of them understand why I complain about Windows all the time. If I tell them that a real OS doesn't crash and is not permitted to crash... they laugh -- or glare -- and say, you're crazy.
Funny that no one has mentioned any of the embedded systems that have had a broad, tangible impact on everyday life...
- DVD video, Dolby Digital audio - Fly-by-wire aviation - CAT, PET, MRI - Automobile controllers - Routers and switches, to say nothing of ESS and its descendants - Toys - Credit card readers, ATMs
Plus a dozen others on the tip of my tongue, and those are just the ones I'm aware of. Anyone care to post something about power grids and other infrastructure? How about applications in manufacturing, business, medicine, art, military, construction?
More generally, the well-known When Things Start to Think generally illustrates the kind of dramatic effects that can occur when you add just a bit of intelligence into a mundane object (or process).
Roberts' company is Caspian Networks and here is a link to their QoS and scalability claims...
Let's not read the marketing fluff on the website. It goes without saying that engineering is always wondering, "Okay, what did marketing say this time?" At least, that's what we did at my previous, defunct router startup.
Caspian isn't really pushing their scalability story anyway. Now it's more about their flow-based QoS, and that's not even new. They're just doing it in hardware. Or so says the telecom tabloid.
You're kidding, right? If people had the faintest ability to accurately answer that kind of questions, they wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
Plenty of good replies to this already. But you bring to mind an anecdote:
Sure you don't do every experiment to learn about it, but you need a grounding first. (Anyone care to tell me how to prove H has 1 electron, 1 proton, and no neutrons, without equipement byond what a science classrom could afford).
Obviously, you don't do these kinds of experiments in an elementary school science class. That's why you learn about them instead. And you learn about how they came up with the idea. And, very importantly, you learn why they thought it was important.
I learned about particle physics in fifth grade, after finding a random castoff library book called "Explaining the Atom" (by Hecht). It was equal parts history and science, and spent as much time describing the "raisins in a bun" model as it did discrediting it and bringing in the real facts. The perspective was incredibly effective on my young mind. Like all good education, it improved my thinking skills... in this case, enough to tackle Feynman's book on quantum electrodynamics by seventh grade (the one for laymen, not a real physics text!).
Not to mention that "easier to read" almost inevitably means "more text". Which means spending more time reading the same material.
No. Well-written almost invariably means less text. Concise and clear writing takes tremendous time and effort, and the result is powerful, efficient, effective communication.
On the other hand, boring writing is almost always substandard writing. And that means substandard communication.
The worst of both worlds is when a poor (or hurried) writer tries to liven things up or dumb things down. Then the text does get longer, and is still not improved. This is what frustrates you.
You aren't seriously asserting that the "bright Asian kid" phenomenon is composed of study abroad students?
Here in suburban Massachusetts, I'd quickly guess about 70% of the Chinese high school population was born here. Most of the rest moved here before they were 10. And very few are aliens, i.e., they are residents or citizens. In some regions, such as southern California, there are towns populated entirely by, ahem, Chinese-Americans.
Incidentally, as a "bright Asian kid" myself, I'm not a fan of the effect. It is a result of upbringing. But it's rooted in the rote-focused schooling that our parents came out of, and is ineffective in a good college setting.
Your critique of high school is astute, but the condescending attitude is pretty much unjustified.
An Effort to make the books more "readable"? Thats fucked up. They are just accomidating the lowest common denominator, the kids who havent grasped the basic skills of reading and comprehension.
"Readable" means superior communication. Do you claim that an interesting, lively, clear, memorable sentence is of no use? I guarantee that even a highly intelligent reader will prefer and benefit from it. In point of fact, good writing is almost always shorter than its boring equivalent. We are not talking about dressing up textbooks with baby talk.
If you do not value communication, expect to have some trouble advancing in your career.
Some kids arent college material, lets not kid ourselves. Put them in a program where they can get that low level management job at the local K-mart and lets be done with it.
This might be true. But neither you nor your high school are even remotely qualified to judge that. There is very little correlation between those who excel in school and those who succeed in life (however you like to measure that, I've not room to go into more detail here).
A person's intellect often does not mature until college, and the despicable public school environment has a lot to do with it. Fortunately, the brain doesn't stop growing until well past age 20. Experience shows that if you take that unglamorous B- high school senior and drop them into a good teaching college, they're likely to outperform the shiny happy Ivy grads in both the workforce and academia.
How do we know this? Because most of the good teaching colleges aren't very hard to get into. They're not famous, but they produce over 50% of the scientists in this country.
But that leaves thousands of equally promising students who feel doomed to mediocrity because they hear comments like yours -- coming from teachers, parents, and society. All because they can't distinguish themselves in the flawed school system that you yourself have criticized. As a final insult, their reward is to be shuffled off into a state university that resembles nothing so much as the high school that has served them so well.
Students still demand courses that look good on resumes.
Have you ever interviewed a new grad?
Every hotshot college grad learns very quickly that the "practical" skills you learn in school are worth squat. I've only been out of school for a few years but I code ten times faster and better than I did then, no exaggeration -- and that's still ten times worse than the best of my cow-orkers.
Which is why I always prefer to see a solid courseload in fundamentals and theory. Then I know I've got someone who can think, design, do research, and (depending on the project) get up to speed fast. Code monkeys are a dime a dozen.
Token ring is stil around, and some newer technologies are based on it.
Fibre Channel.
Well, it's not a literal descendent of Token Ring (is it?). But it's certainly a loop topology. And frequently, the primary cost of deploying a Fibre Channel SAN is in training Ethernet-centric people to administer it properly. (Indeed, the nascent iSCSI market is driven less by a distaste for expensive FC switches than by an aversion to sending one's admins to FC boot camp for six weeks.)
Incidentally... why a loop? Isn't the concept outdated? Not if you're a storage transport that needs to enforce fairness.
In particular: continue your education, but not necessarily in just CS.
If you're an undergraduate, diversify. Find time to take some challenging nontechnical classes (or just audit them -- but do the work!). Take a non-CS internship where your CS can be applied -- bioinformatics has come up several times. If you're graduating, look into related fields.
Many of the replies in this (the "continuing education") thread mention that many, if not most, technical/professional jobs from 20 years ago don't even exist today. Put another way: 20 years from now, most of today's jobs won't exist either. This has been true since the early 1900s.
The notion of a lifelong "career" no longer exists. You are not going to climb the corporate ranks to a comfortable retirement. Someday you will need to adapt, probably radically, probably more than once.
The alternative: how many times have we heard horror stories of poor engineers flipping burgers because of the big ol' nasty recession? Well, maybe I'll be one of them someday, if my company goes under. But if a person is smart enough to write code or design chips, it sure seems like they should be able to go out and land $30k as a secretary, or $35k as a high school teacher, or $45k as a landscaper, or join the Peace Corps, or get elected to a local office, or repair televisions.
Use your time at college to train your mind to handle multiple disciplines, and to excel at learning new ones. Too many engineers do the opposite, chaining their powerful intellect to a single specialty.
So, back to the topic: you could, as usual, use your internship to get a leg up on jobs after graduation. Or you could use it as a low-risk foray into a different field, in case you need to switch careers ten years down the line.
Or, pay an actual human being to do your taxes. I've never done it but I understand they know all about the loopholes and stuff.
That's sometimes a nice bonus, but there is one overwhelmingly compelling reason to let a human handle your taxes: the IRS.
When the IRS screws up, you are the one who takes the fall -- unless you're willing to fight, and fight, and fight, to get the mistake corrected. It took me two years to settle a dispute, during which the IRS stalled, gave conflicting answers, stalled again, gave wrong answers, stalled some more for good measure...
They do expect you to give up, even if you're right.
My tax preparer was invaluable. He knew the procedures, the paperwork, and the relevant bits of the tax code. He could mostly tell when they were bluffing. I did make a couple dozen phone calls (they'll only talk to the taxpayer), but on important ones he'd listen in. At one point he and his boss drove down to the state IRS office to consult with a director.
Now, I'm not full of praise for the guy. He wasn't thrilled about it, but got the job done well. I doubt he would've been willing to dig into the mess if I had done the taxes myself, asking for help only after the problems started.
Slashdot Mirror
Theft deprives the original owner of the property use of said property.
Ever heard of theft of services? It's not a very difficult notion, but let's try a few simple examples to make sure you understand:
- You go to the doctor. He saves your life. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the doctor of any property.
- You go to your broker. He doubles your investment. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the broker of any property.
- You go to your lawyer. He prevents your ex from taking your house, kids, and savings. You stiff him on payment because this does not deprive the lawyer of any property.
- You go to work. You take credit for your friend's good idea and get promoted instead, because this does not deprive your friend of any property.
- You lift a game off IRC. It gives you pleasure for a week. You justify this because it does not deprive the retailer, wholesaler, publisher, and shareholders of any property.
Oh, and note "shareholders" may include the programmers and it may include yourself, if you have any mutual funds.
--
Dum de dum.
last time i checked most seven year olds are still learning how to read in first and second grade
Do tell, when was the last time you checked?
Reading is taught in first grade. Ergo, most new first-graders can't read. But a lot of them get the hang of it by the end of the year -- especially girls, whose verbal skills are generally about two years ahead of boys the same age. By the third grade, minimal reading competence is expected, and we're still talking about 9-year-olds here.
In third grade I was already calling my friends on the telephone regularly. With IM having supplanted the phone almost entirely among kids, reading skills are going to see a sorely needed renaissance in the near future.
--
Dum de dum.
Read my comment again. "Learning the material" quickly is a great skill but that's job training, not education.
The best course I ever took was Art History. "Learning the material" would've involved memorizing 1500 works of art. The teacher knew better than to try that. Instead, he forced us to think -- harder, deeper, broader, and faster than I ever thought possible. In the end, my brain had gained a new mode of operation, one that most engineers don't have. Repeat this process with a dozen other "useless" subjects, and the result is that today I'm a well-paid kernel developer and my friends who went to a techy college are unemployed Javaheads.
Oh, and the whole class ended up remembering the artwork, too. But that was incidental, see.
By the way, professors learn new stuff by going to conferences. Or, if it's a totally new subject, they may start with a book -- and then walk down the hall and chat with the author. And yes, they've even been known to attend classes.
--
Dum de dum.
I'm not motivated by some 55 year-old has been that can't keep up with the literature.
... The number of independent variables you include is staggering.
This is empirically true in that it's pretty common; a burnout is a burnout. But there's no intrinsic link between teaching ability and academic reputation. What shame is there for a 55-year-old to decide that she's written enough journal papers and would prefer to have fun nurturing the next generation instead? Would you refuse to learn from someone who has something to say, on the grounds that you'd rather read a book than listen to a talented but non-famous lecturer?
I'm not motivated by her telling me that, "hey, this is A quality. Big thumbs up!"
Can't resist the anecdote: I personally know students who've received papers back containing comments that were longer than the paper itself. How's that for motivation?
More to the point, how do students who had involved professors do vs. students who didn't have involved professors.
Perhaps it wasn't obvious that I was simplifying. This is a Slashdot post, not a college counseling seminar -- for anyone interested, I urge you to do the research yourself. Start with soc.college.admissions, The Hidden Ivies (Greene's Guides), and Looking Beyond the Ivy League (Loren Pope). No, I don't have a grudge against the Ivies; I went to one.
But sure, "involved professors" are not the only positive factor at a small college. That's hardly saying their influence is negligible. A small college, which has no graduate school, does not produce major research. Its entire existence revolves around teaching, usually in small classes, and it attracts those who enjoy doing so. Quoting from memory, ~80% of college professors claim to be primarily interested in teaching, versus ~30% of university professors. College professors spend ~55% of their time on class-related work; university professors spend ~20%, much of which is devoted to graduate students.
Along with these aggregate statistics I could also go on for hours with students' individual experiences and anecdotes like the one above. Again, for those interested, some of that can be found in the books mentioned above.
Finally, your other points should be addressed, briefly:
The criteria for performance are objective. Examples include MCAT scores, law/med school admit rates, NSF fellowship recipients. Examples do not include fudgeable measures like inflated grades.
Peer groups can be very effective and academics have known it for years. Some schools and/or teachers leverage this by fostering collaboration. Most don't care. And a sad minority actively discourages it. I've seen all these approaches and their predictable results.
Socio-economic and racial factors: Good point; I should try to find some direct studies. Nevertheless, the results still hold up when you compare only schools with matching demographics (which is most of them, due to affirmative action and need-based financial aid).
Resources and facilities tend to be an advantage of large universities so I'm not sure why you brought this up.
And I'll have to remind you that someone has to write the books. Who is it that writes them?
Of course the books are written by high-prestige professors at high-prestige universities. These places are optimized for research and publication, i.e., for training graduate slaves^H^H^H^H^H^Hstudents.
For exactly the same reason, they are not optimized for undergraduate college study.
--
Dum de dum.
Your comments are all spot-on, but I want to make this clarification: college is not university. Undergraduate and graduate education are completely different animals, and it sounds like you're talking about graduate study here:
Most colleges have very little in the areas of cutting edge equipment and "second rate" PhD's, that don't publish much or are not the leaders in thier fields. They are what I call teaching PhD's.
A "teaching PhD" is in fact exactly what you want for an undergraduate education. There are plenty of "second rate" PhDs who settle for teaching because they couldn't cut it in academic circles. But don't denigrate the many, many outstanding professors who teach because that's their main interest.
Facilities, resources, prestige, research... these qualities help define the best U.S. graduate institutions -- and for the same reason these places are the least optimized for the undergraduate experience. As one professor advised his new freshmen, "Leave Berkeley as soon as possible and transfer to a good liberal arts college. We train graduate students here. We do not educate undergraduates. Training and education are different things."
--
Dum de dum.
Although teacher feedback is important, teachers' effort and participation in your education is almost unnecessary.
Utterly untrue. Are you asserting that if you took a class with an interested and involved professor, that you would gain zero benefit over the same class taught by an apathetic jerk of otherwise equal qualifications?
All evidence points to the contrary. Graduates of small, high-quality, close-knit colleges outperform graduates of large, impersonal universities in almost all fields including science and engineering. What's more, these small colleges are usually less selective than the big prestige schools, taking B or C high-school students and turning out top performers. In other words, a good education doesn't just teach you stuff, it should literally make you smarter. If all you got out of school was that the book is your "teacher," then your tuition was little more than an expensive library card.
It sounds like this worked out very well for you, but that's merely making the best out of a bad situation. Your thoughtful advice should be heeded only by people who attend a school where professors won't -- or can't -- contribute to the improvement of their students. (This includes every online school I know of, although I would love to know if there are any exceptions.)
--
Dum de dum.
Very good points. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie studios were convicted of price-fixing (like the RIAA was!). But anime is a somewhat different story. Despite anime's growing popularity, most of the US companies that release it are small-fry in the entertainment world -- only a few years ago, a title that sold 50,000 copies would have been considered a major success. Therefore, anime (in the US) has historically been priced pretty much in line with demand.
Thus, the steadily growing market for anime has produced steadily declining prices for anime. The average MSRP of an anime release may not vary that much, but the number of episodes does. These days, a 26-episode season is most often released in 6 volumes. Not long ago, the average number was 8 volumes; before that, 13 volumes. This is hardly a trend that correlates with the MPAA's fixed pricing; indeed, anime today is still more expensive than a Hollywood flick of the same length. It is also much more expensive than American TV series on DVD.
Many US anime companies are well-connected to the community, and it shows in their approach to the market. Amusingly, AD Vision recently stretched Noir from 6 discs to 7, bucking the downward trend in a shrewd bid to milk a potentially popular title. TokyoPop did the opposite this week, pushing out the last 13 episodes of their poorly-received St. Tail in a single $40 package. AnimEigo, as an extreme case, sometimes won't even start production until they get enough preorders to break even.
Anyway, a quick browse of some Canadian retailers seems to bear this out; the street price of anime is about $35CDN, comparable to the $25US we pay here. Price-fixing increases piracy because the cost of goods is kept artificially higher than the market's opinion. If anime is priced as demand, then anime piracy boils back down to mere petulance.
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Would anyone in their right mind pay $1440 just to watch a TV show?
You don't have any basis for making this judgment. A 26-episode anime series costs about $180 here, retail. Why is that "too much" but a $70 bootleg boxset isn't? Prices have nothing to do with you, and everything to do with the market and what it will pay. Notably, DVDs in Japan cost twice as much as they do here, and they still sell plenty.
If I can't afford to pay that much, then I'll simply do without. Or maybe I'll save up for a while. These are concepts that seem to be lost on people these days. Worst case, I'll rent or borrow, but as a collector I prefer to plan ahead and budget for purchases.
Incidentally, the packaging you get on bootlegs is only "relatively nice" if you don't read Japanese. The printing on even the best reproductions is near-illegible compared to originals. The low-quality papers will also begin to degrade much faster.
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There's Tom and Jerry Kids, Flinstones Kids, A Pup named Scooby, Tiny Toons and so on.
I've a (much younger) sibling who watches all of these, and generally I couldn't agree more. But I must defend Tiny Toons. It had its ups and downs, but at its best it was a well-written, well-acted, risk-taking show. This isn't nostalgia speaking; I try to catch an episode now and again, and while the "downs" are more painful than I remember, the "ups" are as good as ever.
Tiny Toons does capitalize on the old Warner icons, but it does so mainly for brand-recognition -- this was essentially Warner's entry into the television cartoon market. There are a few purely derivative characters that bring nothing new to the table, but overall Tiny Toons was its own show and made no pretense of being otherwise. People who insist on drawing that comparison are always disappointed. It's a spinoff, not a ripoff.
The one true similarity between the two is their orchestral soundtrack. In fact, Carl Stalling's original studio was renovated just to house this show's 30-piece orchestra -- which would go on to provide music for Warner's other animated TV series. The composer, the late Richard Stone, remarked in 1999, "it's been unbelievable that we've been able to work with a full orchestra every week for the past nine years, which is unheard of for television in general, let alone animation." (paraphrased slightly)
For those who keep count, Tiny Toon Adventures also won the Emmy for "Best Animated Series" twice out of three nominations.
Oh, and yes, there was pornographic fanart and fanfiction before the show even finished its run...
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Look, all I was doing was to tell the guy that listening to the advice of authority is well and good, but not at the expense of your own damn experience.
Exactly. Because personal experience is always objective and reproducible, unlike controlled testing which is subjective and unreliable.
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Uhhh, I dunno what Microsoft OSes you are tlaking about
Well, clearly not, since I never said anything specifically about their OSes.
Is robustness at the application level less important? A mission-critical service must be trustworthy from end to end. A dependable OS with an undependable application is undependable. The only thing the client sees is an outage.
But we can talk about the OS, too, if you like. Did you bother to look at the link to CMU's Ballista? It's quite an eye-opener. Their methodology is to try every system call with every combination of bad arguments. All major Unix flavors, plus WinNT/2000/XP, fail miserably. There are hundreds of calls that will crash your application if you feed them the wrong input. Several Unices actually had some total system crashes -- yes, initiated from user space and 100% reproducible.
Notably, Linux and NT-lineage Windows had no crash-level failures (not of this type anyway), but they were no better than anyone else when it came to application aborts. Let me say this again: the OS crashes your application. In several cases, the system call actually hangs the application, requiring a manual kill.
but the new ones, teh current ones, teh ones based on the NT kernel (2k/XP) are quite robust.
The whole point of my original post was that robustness is a concept distinct from reliability and availability, hm? And I have no idea why you went off on a rant about security. Would you like to rephrase your assertion?
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This is true for mission-critical systems, as you say, where no risk is tolerable.
But in general, software should be resilient in the face of unexpected conditions, including user modifications.
This is called robustness, and it generally revolves around checking your inputs for validity before acting on them, so that unexpected results don't have a chance to occur.
Robustness is not the same as reliability or availability. Those things are hard; robustness is both easy to implement and easy to verify, and there is no excuse for doing it any other way.
It's worth noting that Microsoft policy is (or was?) to disable all such checks before shipping, "for performance reasons."
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The trouble is, the more accustomed users become to bugs, the harder it is to get them reported and fixed.
This is absolutely and shockingly true. Microsoft is almost singlehandedly responsible for the widespread cultural mentality that faulty software is okay.
You'll find this notion all over the place but the worst part is seeing it in the upcoming generation. I work with teenagers, bright kids who are totally immersed in technology. Yet almost none of them understand why I complain about Windows all the time. If I tell them that a real OS doesn't crash and is not permitted to crash... they laugh -- or glare -- and say, you're crazy.
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Funny that no one has mentioned any of the embedded systems that have had a broad, tangible impact on everyday life...
- DVD video, Dolby Digital audio
- Fly-by-wire aviation
- CAT, PET, MRI
- Automobile controllers
- Routers and switches, to say nothing of ESS and its descendants
- Toys
- Credit card readers, ATMs
Plus a dozen others on the tip of my tongue, and those are just the ones I'm aware of. Anyone care to post something about power grids and other infrastructure? How about applications in manufacturing, business, medicine, art, military, construction?
More generally, the well-known When Things Start to Think generally illustrates the kind of dramatic effects that can occur when you add just a bit of intelligence into a mundane object (or process).
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Roberts' company is Caspian Networks and here is a link to their QoS and scalability claims...
Let's not read the marketing fluff on the website. It goes without saying that engineering is always wondering, "Okay, what did marketing say this time?" At least, that's what we did at my previous, defunct router startup.
Caspian isn't really pushing their scalability story anyway. Now it's more about their flow-based QoS, and that's not even new. They're just doing it in hardware. Or so says the telecom tabloid.
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How about asking the couples why they split up.
You're kidding, right? If people had the faintest ability to accurately answer that kind of questions, they wouldn't have the problem in the first place.
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Plenty of good replies to this already. But you bring to mind an anecdote:
Sure you don't do every experiment to learn about it, but you need a grounding first. (Anyone care to tell me how to prove H has 1 electron, 1 proton, and no neutrons, without equipement byond what a science classrom could afford).
Obviously, you don't do these kinds of experiments in an elementary school science class. That's why you learn about them instead. And you learn about how they came up with the idea. And, very importantly, you learn why they thought it was important.
I learned about particle physics in fifth grade, after finding a random castoff library book called "Explaining the Atom" (by Hecht). It was equal parts history and science, and spent as much time describing the "raisins in a bun" model as it did discrediting it and bringing in the real facts. The perspective was incredibly effective on my young mind. Like all good education, it improved my thinking skills... in this case, enough to tackle Feynman's book on quantum electrodynamics by seventh grade (the one for laymen, not a real physics text!).
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Not to mention that "easier to read" almost inevitably means "more text". Which means spending more time reading the same material.
No. Well-written almost invariably means less text. Concise and clear writing takes tremendous time and effort, and the result is powerful, efficient, effective communication.
On the other hand, boring writing is almost always substandard writing. And that means substandard communication.
The worst of both worlds is when a poor (or hurried) writer tries to liven things up or dumb things down. Then the text does get longer, and is still not improved. This is what frustrates you.
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You aren't seriously asserting that the "bright Asian kid" phenomenon is composed of study abroad students?
Here in suburban Massachusetts, I'd quickly guess about 70% of the Chinese high school population was born here. Most of the rest moved here before they were 10. And very few are aliens, i.e., they are residents or citizens. In some regions, such as southern California, there are towns populated entirely by, ahem, Chinese-Americans.
Incidentally, as a "bright Asian kid" myself, I'm not a fan of the effect. It is a result of upbringing. But it's rooted in the rote-focused schooling that our parents came out of, and is ineffective in a good college setting.
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Your critique of high school is astute, but the condescending attitude is pretty much unjustified.
An Effort to make the books more "readable"? Thats fucked up. They are just accomidating the lowest common denominator, the kids who havent grasped the basic skills of reading and comprehension.
"Readable" means superior communication. Do you claim that an interesting, lively, clear, memorable sentence is of no use? I guarantee that even a highly intelligent reader will prefer and benefit from it. In point of fact, good writing is almost always shorter than its boring equivalent. We are not talking about dressing up textbooks with baby talk.
If you do not value communication, expect to have some trouble advancing in your career.
Some kids arent college material, lets not kid ourselves. Put them in a program where they can get that low level management job at the local K-mart and lets be done with it.
This might be true. But neither you nor your high school are even remotely qualified to judge that. There is very little correlation between those who excel in school and those who succeed in life (however you like to measure that, I've not room to go into more detail here).
A person's intellect often does not mature until college, and the despicable public school environment has a lot to do with it. Fortunately, the brain doesn't stop growing until well past age 20. Experience shows that if you take that unglamorous B- high school senior and drop them into a good teaching college, they're likely to outperform the shiny happy Ivy grads in both the workforce and academia.
How do we know this? Because most of the good teaching colleges aren't very hard to get into. They're not famous, but they produce over 50% of the scientists in this country.
But that leaves thousands of equally promising students who feel doomed to mediocrity because they hear comments like yours -- coming from teachers, parents, and society. All because they can't distinguish themselves in the flawed school system that you yourself have criticized. As a final insult, their reward is to be shuffled off into a state university that resembles nothing so much as the high school that has served them so well.
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Students still demand courses that look good on resumes.
Have you ever interviewed a new grad?
Every hotshot college grad learns very quickly that the "practical" skills you learn in school are worth squat. I've only been out of school for a few years but I code ten times faster and better than I did then, no exaggeration -- and that's still ten times worse than the best of my cow-orkers.
Which is why I always prefer to see a solid courseload in fundamentals and theory. Then I know I've got someone who can think, design, do research, and (depending on the project) get up to speed fast. Code monkeys are a dime a dozen.
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Token ring is stil around, and some newer technologies are based on it.
Fibre Channel.
Well, it's not a literal descendent of Token Ring (is it?). But it's certainly a loop topology. And frequently, the primary cost of deploying a Fibre Channel SAN is in training Ethernet-centric people to administer it properly. (Indeed, the nascent iSCSI market is driven less by a distaste for expensive FC switches than by an aversion to sending one's admins to FC boot camp for six weeks.)
Incidentally... why a loop? Isn't the concept outdated? Not if you're a storage transport that needs to enforce fairness.
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In particular: continue your education, but not necessarily in just CS.
If you're an undergraduate, diversify. Find time to take some challenging nontechnical classes (or just audit them -- but do the work!). Take a non-CS internship where your CS can be applied -- bioinformatics has come up several times. If you're graduating, look into related fields.
Many of the replies in this (the "continuing education") thread mention that many, if not most, technical/professional jobs from 20 years ago don't even exist today. Put another way: 20 years from now, most of today's jobs won't exist either. This has been true since the early 1900s.
The notion of a lifelong "career" no longer exists. You are not going to climb the corporate ranks to a comfortable retirement. Someday you will need to adapt, probably radically, probably more than once.
The alternative: how many times have we heard horror stories of poor engineers flipping burgers because of the big ol' nasty recession? Well, maybe I'll be one of them someday, if my company goes under. But if a person is smart enough to write code or design chips, it sure seems like they should be able to go out and land $30k as a secretary, or $35k as a high school teacher, or $45k as a landscaper, or join the Peace Corps, or get elected to a local office, or repair televisions.
Use your time at college to train your mind to handle multiple disciplines, and to excel at learning new ones. Too many engineers do the opposite, chaining their powerful intellect to a single specialty.
So, back to the topic: you could, as usual, use your internship to get a leg up on jobs after graduation. Or you could use it as a low-risk foray into a different field, in case you need to switch careers ten years down the line.
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Lessig's day job at Stanford is creating the very IP parasites he rails on about.
Right, because the worst possible way to make an impact on the legal profession is to be involved its creation.
(Trolls these days, huh? Not even the pretense of plausibility.)
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Or, pay an actual human being to do your taxes. I've never done it but I understand they know all about the loopholes and stuff.
That's sometimes a nice bonus, but there is one overwhelmingly compelling reason to let a human handle your taxes: the IRS.
When the IRS screws up, you are the one who takes the fall -- unless you're willing to fight, and fight, and fight, to get the mistake corrected. It took me two years to settle a dispute, during which the IRS stalled, gave conflicting answers, stalled again, gave wrong answers, stalled some more for good measure...
They do expect you to give up, even if you're right.
My tax preparer was invaluable. He knew the procedures, the paperwork, and the relevant bits of the tax code. He could mostly tell when they were bluffing. I did make a couple dozen phone calls (they'll only talk to the taxpayer), but on important ones he'd listen in. At one point he and his boss drove down to the state IRS office to consult with a director.
Now, I'm not full of praise for the guy. He wasn't thrilled about it, but got the job done well. I doubt he would've been willing to dig into the mess if I had done the taxes myself, asking for help only after the problems started.
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