It depends; do you mean "network engineer" as in the guy who buys hardware from Cisco, places it around the building & operates it, or do we mean the guy that designs/programs the hardware or develops new networking protocols?
For the former, a tech/trade school & some certs are more than enough; for the later, research-oriented graduate work is probably req'd.
While I agree with the general idea of not trying to specialize too much during undergrad, it might be worth looking into studying EE or CompE as an undergrad, depending on what aspect of network the AP wants to get into.
If you're more interested in the theoretical aspects of networking & routing, CS is the place to be, but it seems like a field where EE/CE type work is done; the theoretical problems are generally solved, it's just a matter of implementing them in hardware
Actually, the pure fuunctional languages are a subset of declarative languages, as are logic programming languages and constraint programming languages. Liberal use of !s in a Prolog program gives you very functional-like program flow.
I'm 25. When I was younger, I refused to deal with analogs, think they were old fashioned. Then I lost my digital & had to borrow one of my dad's analog Seikos for a while.
I tend to mar faceplates. I don't care how ruggedly built they are, they *will* get scratched. If the watch is a $30 digital watch, it's no big deal. If it's a $200 analog watch, I do care.
You know, it's not too hard to find watches with decent crystals. Your $30 POS probably has a plastic one, slightly more expensive & you get glass and after paying a few hundred you finally get to sapphire crystals. Sapphire is close to diamond in hardness so it's not going to scratch at all (my Dad's been an aircraft mechanic his whole life, and the sapphire-crystalled Seikos he has last -years- doing that kind of work with almost no visible damage to the face).
Generally, when you get a new chip like this, the first ones aren't going to OC well at all; production is still in the early stages & they're lucky to get chips that make the higher speed bins. It's generally when the processor gets more established & good processors are marked down to lower grades than they're good for that you find good OCers.
Now, I'll assume you're talking about the initial P4 launch (Willamette). This is nowhere near as embarrasing as that was. The Prescott is only a few percent slower than the Northwood at the same speeds and works in (most) existing motherboards. The Willamette, OTOH, when it was launched, required new motherboards & RAM and was getting beaten horribly at benchmarks by chips with a significantly lower clock speeds.
While upgrading from a Northwood rig to a Prescott rig would be silly unless you're making a significant clock speed jump too, the Northwood looks respectable. If you consider that projected prices on them are somewhat lower than Northwood, it all balances out.
I'm no expert in this area at all, but by increasing the number of steps in the pipeline it may be a preliminary move to bring the Paladium/Longhorn/DRM into the chip level. A better chip is sure to come, but it's going to be a chip with some erie strings attached
Uh... no.
If you'd actually bothered to read up on CPU architecture & the press releases, Paladium is actually slated to -reduce- the number of pipeline stages by a factor of 3 and Longhorn plans on moving several of the early steps into software. I've seen some prototypes of Palladium systems running pre-release versions of Longhorn and we're looking at only 5-6 steps in the pipeline.
You make it sound like Intel is stupid & trying to screw over the consumer with this product. I'm by no means an Intel fanboy, but you're kinda off base.
If you look at the benches, the Prescott cores generally aren't too much slower than Northwoods and the areas where they lag the most are the ones that SSE3 looks like it should alleviate.
The Prescott delivers respectable performance and will end up costing less at the same clock speeds than Northwood. We're not looking at an event like the original P4 launch where the new chip was not only slower but also more expensive & required hardware upgrades to use.
The Prescott is not being marketed as an upgrade to Northwood systems; while I'm sure Intel would love you to replace your 3.2C with a 3.2E, they're not suggesting it be done. They're just introducing it now so they can ramp up production before the Northwood gets phased out.
As far as the 775 socket goes, Athlon64 is also kinda waiting for a new packaging to reach its full capabilities; the A64 & A64FX lines are going to be moving to a unified socket that'll give the A64 access to dual-channel memory.
Twisted is fairly big on XPish development techniques. They're big proponents of test-first design and, when possible, like to do pair programming.
The problem is that, generally, pair programming is not really possible for most OSS projects, where developers are spread across the globe & communicating by the net. They've been kicking aroudn the idea of a networked multi-user text editor tho..
I'm glad I didn't have to write that. While never having used the systems myself, I could tell all the other posters are off base.
As far as the OP is concerned, I don't know of any particular programs that'd help, but searching freshmeat or sourceforge for 'xBase' seems to come up with some relevant looking projects.
You'll need a good introductory book on programming. Since you're probably not worrying about polishing up your resume, and you seem to be more interested in learning, you should take a look at:
"The Little Schemer" or "The Little LISPer" by Daniel Friedman.
personally, I don't think these books are worth much for anyon who has a clue about programming; they're far too basic & treat simple concepts like big ideas. Good for beginners, not so good for somebody who wants to pick something up. Lisp/Scheme are worthwhile languages, but these books don't cut the mustard.
Learn assembly language, it's a poor man's computer architecture course. Try to make a small graphics program (draw some primitives [lines and circles]) with assembly. Of course, you can't do that in Windows (unless you call some Win32 libraries or are VERY good.
Actually, 2000 & XP will emulate your basic PC hardware if you try accessing things like a generic VGA card.
First Order Logic" by Raymond Smullyan
This book essentially covers the mathematics of automated theorem proving...
Good call. 'Real CS' (as opposed to Software Engineering, IT or simply programming) is all about mathematical logic; a good introduction to discrete math is useful too. Once you really get down to it, the basic idea of automated reasoning is to do complex (semantic) mathematical reasoning by (primarily) syntactic operations. If you want to get picky, you can argue that even numerical computations are performed by simple character manipulations.
This all brings up an important question; does the article poster -really- want to get into CS, or does he want to get into computing? Both have merit & opportunities for a trained medical professional, but the more you get into CompSci, the more you realize it's really a weird offshoot of discrete mathematics (which you'd quickly realize once you start looking at formal models of computation). Unfortunately, nobody really wants CSists, they simply want ITers, sofware engineers & programmers, unless you've got a fairly high-level understanding of theory & research skills.
Of course, there are plenty of people from other disciplines in CS; I'm currently in a PhD program and I'd say at least half of the PhD students here came from non-CS backgrounds. Granted, there are a fair number of interdisciplinary research projects in the dept (pysics/engineering, bio-med, linguistics & pure-theory for the math geeks) going on here, but going into a solid theory class when your primary mathematical background ends at an applied calculus class (ie - no rigorous work in proofs & formal systems) is rough.
While correctness is undoubtedly of value in the medical community, there's a fundamental differnce between being Right & being mathematically rigorous & correct. Biology & medicine are fields where you can often get by with simply showing some statistics, CS generally requires complete mathematical correctness (though I must grant, experimental algorithm design is a growing field); imagine having to prove that a treatment will never have ill side-effects & completely heal every patient it's applied to before you can get it accepted.
Of course, if you still insist on going into CS, feel free to come here; the department seems to like freaks.
An even better idea would be to pick up enough CS to get into something like bioinformatics or a specifically medical related field of research. Having gone through enough schooling to get an MD, it would be insane to throw it all away and go into a generic computing position.
While I do do know an MD (from China) who has gone into graduate CS studies, she did it with a heavy bias toward bio-chem related work. If you look at the industry, bioinformatics or even getting places HIPPA compliant is a good subfield; generic IT/programming jobs are, as many other posters have said, getting outsourced and cut back at an alarming rate.
Go with what you already know and add a computing angle to it. Throwing away 10yr of eduacation would be absurd.
There's a difference between having all the packages and just being able to install the system. The first 2 disks cover 99% of the software that anyone else uses; everything past that is just packages that you're probably never even going to think of using.
If I were going for a college degree these days, and it just had to be in some tech area, I'd be looking for something on the leading edge. Say maybe nanotechnology or genetic engineering. Though such a thing would still be a gamble.
I have to assume when you talk about a 'college degree' we're talking about a Bachelor's degree. You're not going to find a BS in nanotech or GE; not only are they still areas that are still only the subjects of heavy research (PhD or ambitious MS stuff) but they also require a lot of background in the fields they draw from. If we're talking about PhD-level research positions, you're still doing OK in most fields, as long as you pick the right sub-field.
No comparison; Altivec is going to smoke the XP2500+'s vector capabilities.
Athlon64 not only doubles the number of registers, allows you to easily move 64bit values around and gives you more memory bandwidth but it also adds the SSE2 vector extensions. Considering that the Athlon has a pretty nice FPU unit already, sounds like most of the points where your G5 surpassses the AMD chip have been addressed.
I cann't give any definate benchmarks; short of having equally good vectorizing compilers or equally good hand-tuned vector optimizations, we really can't compare the 2 archs on this kind of work.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends; do you mean "network engineer" as in the guy who buys hardware from Cisco, places it around the building & operates it, or do we mean the guy that designs/programs the hardware or develops new networking protocols?
For the former, a tech/trade school & some certs are more than enough; for the later, research-oriented graduate work is probably req'd.
While I agree with the general idea of not trying to specialize too much during undergrad, it might be worth looking into studying EE or CompE as an undergrad, depending on what aspect of network the AP wants to get into.
If you're more interested in the theoretical aspects of networking & routing, CS is the place to be, but it seems like a field where EE/CE type work is done; the theoretical problems are generally solved, it's just a matter of implementing them in hardware
Actually, the pure fuunctional languages are a subset of declarative languages, as are logic programming languages and constraint programming languages. Liberal use of !s in a Prolog program gives you very functional-like program flow.
I'm 25. When I was younger, I refused to deal with analogs, think they were old fashioned. Then I lost my digital & had to borrow one of my dad's analog Seikos for a while.
He never got that watch back.
It's not polite to ask the details of somebody's sex life in public.
You know, it's not too hard to find watches with decent crystals. Your $30 POS probably has a plastic one, slightly more expensive & you get glass and after paying a few hundred you finally get to sapphire crystals. Sapphire is close to diamond in hardness so it's not going to scratch at all (my Dad's been an aircraft mechanic his whole life, and the sapphire-crystalled Seikos he has last -years- doing that kind of work with almost no visible damage to the face).
Hrmm... Well, if you consider /. a trial-run at a system for collaborative intelligence, I think we failed it.
Generally, when you get a new chip like this, the first ones aren't going to OC well at all; production is still in the early stages & they're lucky to get chips that make the higher speed bins. It's generally when the processor gets more established & good processors are marked down to lower grades than they're good for that you find good OCers.
My first response was to say that the OS isn't really going to care about the new instructions, but then I looked to see what was actually in SSE3...
Hyperthreading specific instructions?
Anyone got any real info on them; from what I've read so far, the specifics of what SSE3 can do are kinda fuzzy...
not quite :
Athlon64 - the consumer level chip. limited to single-chan. memory
Athlon64 FX - Opteron targeted at single-proc workstations.
Opteron - A64 FX with SMP capabilities.
First off, Prescott -is- a P4.
Now, I'll assume you're talking about the initial P4 launch (Willamette). This is nowhere near as embarrasing as that was. The Prescott is only a few percent slower than the Northwood at the same speeds and works in (most) existing motherboards. The Willamette, OTOH, when it was launched, required new motherboards & RAM and was getting beaten horribly at benchmarks by chips with a significantly lower clock speeds.
While upgrading from a Northwood rig to a Prescott rig would be silly unless you're making a significant clock speed jump too, the Northwood looks respectable. If you consider that projected prices on them are somewhat lower than Northwood, it all balances out.
Uh... no.
If you'd actually bothered to read up on CPU architecture & the press releases, Paladium is actually slated to -reduce- the number of pipeline stages by a factor of 3 and Longhorn plans on moving several of the early steps into software. I've seen some prototypes of Palladium systems running pre-release versions of Longhorn and we're looking at only 5-6 steps in the pipeline.
You make it sound like Intel is stupid & trying to screw over the consumer with this product. I'm by no means an Intel fanboy, but you're kinda off base.
If you look at the benches, the Prescott cores generally aren't too much slower than Northwoods and the areas where they lag the most are the ones that SSE3 looks like it should alleviate.
The Prescott delivers respectable performance and will end up costing less at the same clock speeds than Northwood. We're not looking at an event like the original P4 launch where the new chip was not only slower but also more expensive & required hardware upgrades to use.
The Prescott is not being marketed as an upgrade to Northwood systems; while I'm sure Intel would love you to replace your 3.2C with a 3.2E, they're not suggesting it be done. They're just introducing it now so they can ramp up production before the Northwood gets phased out.
As far as the 775 socket goes, Athlon64 is also kinda waiting for a new packaging to reach its full capabilities; the A64 & A64FX lines are going to be moving to a unified socket that'll give the A64 access to dual-channel memory.
Twisted is fairly big on XPish development techniques. They're big proponents of test-first design and, when possible, like to do pair programming.
The problem is that, generally, pair programming is not really possible for most OSS projects, where developers are spread across the globe & communicating by the net. They've been kicking aroudn the idea of a networked multi-user text editor tho..
I'm glad I didn't have to write that. While never having used the systems myself, I could tell all the other posters are off base.
As far as the OP is concerned, I don't know of any particular programs that'd help, but searching freshmeat or sourceforge for 'xBase' seems to come up with some relevant looking projects.
personally, I don't think these books are worth much for anyon who has a clue about programming; they're far too basic & treat simple concepts like big ideas. Good for beginners, not so good for somebody who wants to pick something up. Lisp/Scheme are worthwhile languages, but these books don't cut the mustard.
Actually, 2000 & XP will emulate your basic PC hardware if you try accessing things like a generic VGA card.
Good call. 'Real CS' (as opposed to Software Engineering, IT or simply programming) is all about mathematical logic; a good introduction to discrete math is useful too. Once you really get down to it, the basic idea of automated reasoning is to do complex (semantic) mathematical reasoning by (primarily) syntactic operations. If you want to get picky, you can argue that even numerical computations are performed by simple character manipulations.
This all brings up an important question; does the article poster -really- want to get into CS, or does he want to get into computing? Both have merit & opportunities for a trained medical professional, but the more you get into CompSci, the more you realize it's really a weird offshoot of discrete mathematics (which you'd quickly realize once you start looking at formal models of computation). Unfortunately, nobody really wants CSists, they simply want ITers, sofware engineers & programmers, unless you've got a fairly high-level understanding of theory & research skills.
Of course, there are plenty of people from other disciplines in CS; I'm currently in a PhD program and I'd say at least half of the PhD students here came from non-CS backgrounds. Granted, there are a fair number of interdisciplinary research projects in the dept (pysics/engineering, bio-med, linguistics & pure-theory for the math geeks) going on here, but going into a solid theory class when your primary mathematical background ends at an applied calculus class (ie - no rigorous work in proofs & formal systems) is rough.
While correctness is undoubtedly of value in the medical community, there's a fundamental differnce between being Right & being mathematically rigorous & correct. Biology & medicine are fields where you can often get by with simply showing some statistics, CS generally requires complete mathematical correctness (though I must grant, experimental algorithm design is a growing field); imagine having to prove that a treatment will never have ill side-effects & completely heal every patient it's applied to before you can get it accepted.
Of course, if you still insist on going into CS, feel free to come here; the department seems to like freaks.
An even better idea would be to pick up enough CS to get into something like bioinformatics or a specifically medical related field of research. Having gone through enough schooling to get an MD, it would be insane to throw it all away and go into a generic computing position.
While I do do know an MD (from China) who has gone into graduate CS studies, she did it with a heavy bias toward bio-chem related work. If you look at the industry, bioinformatics or even getting places HIPPA compliant is a good subfield; generic IT/programming jobs are, as many other posters have said, getting outsourced and cut back at an alarming rate.
Go with what you already know and add a computing angle to it. Throwing away 10yr of eduacation would be absurd.
[blockquote]That's not to say there haven't been some really smart crooks, the smartest of which we likely know nothing of...[/blockquote]
What do you mean? We voted them into office...
Oh, wait. You said smart, not successful.
There's a difference between having all the packages and just being able to install the system. The first 2 disks cover 99% of the software that anyone else uses; everything past that is just packages that you're probably never even going to think of using.
I have to assume when you talk about a 'college degree' we're talking about a Bachelor's degree. You're not going to find a BS in nanotech or GE; not only are they still areas that are still only the subjects of heavy research (PhD or ambitious MS stuff) but they also require a lot of background in the fields they draw from. If we're talking about PhD-level research positions, you're still doing OK in most fields, as long as you pick the right sub-field.
DSP code, eh?
So you probably want something like... umm...
Vector Processing?
XP2500+ does MMX, SSE & 3DNow!
G5 has Altivec
No comparison; Altivec is going to smoke the XP2500+'s vector capabilities.
Athlon64 not only doubles the number of registers, allows you to easily move 64bit values around and gives you more memory bandwidth but it also adds the SSE2 vector extensions. Considering that the Athlon has a pretty nice FPU unit already, sounds like most of the points where your G5 surpassses the AMD chip have been addressed.
I cann't give any definate benchmarks; short of having equally good vectorizing compilers or equally good hand-tuned vector optimizations, we really can't compare the 2 archs on this kind of work.
192.168.0.101
login : "snake"
password : "" (empty)
Personally I think the big win with SFU is NFS/NIS integration for Windows.
"one could see how the P4 was helped by the 2M L3 cache in the P4 "EE"."
Umm... not much at all, really.
Hrmm... if only such a thing existed and was compatable with another major client's network.