They certainly charge enough more. SATA drives run about $0.50 per gig. Comparable Fibre Channel drives run about $3 per gig. A sensible person would expect the Fibre Channel drive to be as much as 6 times as reliable, but per the article there is no difference.
Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say [...] That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88% [but] annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%.
If you're a hardware guy and sure of it, CE will give you a better grounding in both engineering in general and digital hardware design in particular. If you want to build robots and routers, go CE. As a CS grad, I only had one course in digital electronics. There are a lot of physical devices I'd like to be able to build but I just don't know where to start.
The price you pay for CE is missed coursework in things like user interfaces and artificial intelligence. If computing research, teaching or pure software development is in your future, you'll feel the want of those extra CS courses.
You can always have your cake and eat it too: take an extra year and go dual-major.
As for jobs prospects, don't worry about it. Either degree qualifies you for an entry-level job in the field of your choice. Intel won't frown at your choice of CS. Microsoft won't frown at your choice of CE. The real question is: what do you want to learn first-hand from the talented professors at college and what do you want to pick up later from a book?
First, change companies. Take a tech support position at a small company at which other employees do the kind of technical work you're interested in.
Then, once you're at the new job, hang out with the folks doing the kind of work you want to do and identify and volunteer for small projects that can help them. If you're actually good at it then your job responsibilities will shift and they'll hire someone else to do tech support.
The "small company" part is important. Large companies hire staff for well defined positions. Small companies hire staff to do whatever needs doing.
If you strike a deal with a company to use their products, it's very common for them to certify you in their use for free.
A couple years ago I completed such a free course in operating a particular network management package. It was a pretty useless course telling me nothing that I couldn't figure out for myself, but my employer wanted me to take it. You won't find it on my resume because its not important.
By putting something on your resume, you're declaring: This is an important factor in your decision to hire me. When you put the equivalent of "Certified Toaster Repairman" on there, it tells me that either your skill level is so mediocre as to make that important, your breadth of skill is so narrow that you have extra space or your judgement is critically lacking. Or all of the above.
Raw intellect, creativity, and motivation aren't measured via any piece of paper
Of course not. They can, however, be measured by your attitudes toward that piece of paper.
What you choose to tell me on your resume tells me a lot about what I can expect if I hire you. I once had a Senior Network Engineer applicant with a list of about a dozen certs including Kentrox CSU/DSU configuration. Of all the things he could have told me about himself, that made the cut. For those not in the know, CSU/DSUs are trivial devices. Its like putting "Certified toaster repairman" on your resume. Worse, really: its like putting "Certified Krups Toaster Repairman" on your resume, implying that you'd need more training to work on another brand.
Needless to say, he didn't get the job. I don't need someone who felt he had to go to school to learn how to configure a CSU/DSU.
Northern Virginia. Its not The Hub of the Internet any more (there are too many), but its still the largest hub.
Math is a tough degree to sell as qualfying you for a network engineering job. Don't get me wrong: its a fine degree. But its not an applied science and its not engineering. A BS in Math is generally a prelude to an MS in Math, not a career. The MS or PhD in Math then leads to all sorts of interesting careers in analysis.
Also, in all fairness it depends on where you want to get a job. Small companies want folks who are good at what they do and have a flexible mind so that the work gets done. Large companies, especially government contractors, want someone with the proper pedigree so that when it fails (as it will) its not their fault.:P
Get a degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, whichever you find more interesting. Then go do the job you want to do. I've never even heard of a degree in "network engineering," and the last you want on your resume is something that makes a prospective employer say, "What the heck is that?"
Or if you don't want a 4-year degree then go the certs route. But understand that by skipping the degree you're skipping a lot of non-computer knowledge that you'll suffer for and limiting your future job prospects. Guys with certs only get no respect. More often than not, its because they don't deserve it.
I see. So a republican house and a republican senate architect and pass the damn thing but its Clinton's fault because with all of his attention and his advisors' attention consumed by the Lewinsky scandal he failed to make an issue of an obscure copyright bill.
You know, there are companies out there that specialize in network-level content filtering. Porn filtering mostly, but they generally have a filtering set for workplace issues available as well. If you can't talk the guy out of it, consider buying a product that's actually designed to do the job.
Yes, however you wouldn't be breaking the law by using "clit" to break Microsoft.lit files and have your computer read them out loud. More importantly, someone could throw a reader into the same.zip file as "clit" and legally distribute it.
That's cute, but before it could be signed it was first passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate.
There's a word for introducing a bill that has no hope of being passed: grandstanding.
Instead, Boucher has produced a bill that actually has a decent chance of becoming law. That would be great since it gives a number of circumvention devices a legal way to exist and be distributed.
In two years maybe we'll have a Democratic president and then he'll be in a position to pass a more sweeping bill.
Is it shoplifting if you merely conceal that expensive jewelry in your purse and head for the exit or do you have to walk all the way out of the store first?
What if he stayed at his 4th job for 5 years? Did that pole just get significantly shorter?
Of course. Then he's worked 1 job in 5 years with some rough spots before. When the record is still 3 jobs in 16 months, I'll let someone else take the chance on him.
Contract work is a different story, of course, but if you're in to contract work you should list it that way on your resume. Several years as a consultant. Contracts with A, B, and C.
Sit there and tell me you wouldn't switch jobs for that much of a pay increase.
I'd figure out an accurate measure of what my skills are worth and then switch jobs once when I found the right one.
If someone offered significantly more money than my skill level, I'd look for the hitch. My skills aren't improving at a rate of 40% per 5 months and neither are yours. I don't care to work for an incompetent company, nor take on job responsibilities that I can't handle.
You've had 3 jobs in 16 months and you're considering a 4th? That's about 5 months in each job. It takes about 3 months before you're producing more work than the rest of the staff time you consume learning. It takes about 6 before you're producing at the level I hired you for.
No interview for you. I wouldn't touch you with a 10 foot pole even if you had exactly the skills I need. If you're not going to stay at least a couple years, you're not worth the effort.
This is kinda silly. On the fiber side, a pair of fibers is rarely used to transmit more than about 40 gbps, fiber has proven to handle speeds closer to a terabit and its trivial to run multiple fibers in parallel. We won't run out of fiber capacity on the trunks this century, let alone this year.
The equipment side is a little harder, but only a little. It turns out its relatively hard to switch more than 10 gbps. Doable, but hard. So what? If A connects to B, B connects to C and B is overwhelmed with too much traffic then you add a connection from A to C so that the traffic moving from A to C doesn't have to pass through B. There's always a way to split the traffic instead of increasing the individual trunk. Always.
Read the article. Its not going 700 light years. Its going 4 light years. To the next nearest star. Over the course of 700 years. Because without some technology for which the scientific groundwork has not been found, you can't carry enough fuel and accelerate enough to go 4 light years in less than about 700 years.
I think both of these ideologies (Cannibals, Nazis) are Earth-bound concepts
I think morality and ethics are human concepts, earthbound or otherwise. Barring the impending extinction of the race, I see little value in deliberately creating a closed society whose environmental limitations require that their morals be retrogressive and deficient.
Many of the children living in parents basements [...] are the result of environmental factors (loosing a job, loosing a second income/spouse, becoming the outcome of their own bad judgement), not poor genetics
Precisely. Despite good genetics and the best education money can buy you still get a substantial number of Paris Hiltons.
would have to be dropped off at the nearest planet
What planet? RTFA, its 700 years to get from our solar system to the next nearest solar system. We're not talking light-speed here, we're talking about fusion-driven generation ship.
Out of necessity (resource conservation, crew harmony) individuals deemed "untreatable" would have to be [...] euthanized.
Ding ding ding! Correct. Any children incapable of becoming highly productive crew would have to be killed as soon as the deficiency was identified. And you can't just space the bodies -- you can't afford to lose the biomass. What starts as necessity becomes culture and tradition. At the end of the journey 50 generations later you end up with a starship crewed by CANNIBAL NAZIS.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but we're not going to get there on a generation ship. Not as human beings anyway.
The theory fails right here, before you even consider the technologies and supplies needed to make a 700 year trip. The problem (and please pardon my elitism) is that maybe 1% of people born are capable of being trained to do the jobs that the ark environment requires. That's fine in the first generation when you can populate the ark with choices from the top 1/100th of a percent of the billions of souls on the planet but grown children who still live in their parents' basement is one hell of a problem for the ark in generation two.
1. Patents expire X years after the invention, not X years after approval. Get rid of the incentive to drag the process out.
2. Add (or enforce) a requirement that a patent must describe the invention in a manner comprehensible to someone with expert skills in the field and in sufficient detail to allow that expert to implement the patent. A finding by a court that the applicant has failed either of these two duties is grounds for invalidating the patent in court.
3. Allow anyone to challenge the obviousness of a patent during the application process by asking the PTO to convene an experts panel. The challenger and applicant both must post an X thousand dollar bond. The PTO then selects 5 experts in the appropriate field from universities, industry, etc. 4 or 5 of the 5 experts must find that in their professional opinion the patent is novel. If they do not, the patent is rejected and the challenger gets a refund. The applicant's bond is used to pay for the panel. If they find that its novel then the challenger's bond pays for the panel and the applicant gets a refund.
IANAL, but isn't this "pre-lawsuit settlement opportunity" plain-old extortion? "We know you did something illegal. Pay now and we won't bring it to light."
Explain that in concrete terms. Explain exactly how making a system call allows one ot inject malicious code. Please.
The math is straightforward.
Every line of code (or programming command if you prefer) has some probability of containing a mistake exploitable by a hacker. That applies not just to the code you write, but also to the code in every library called by every library that you call. The probability of an exploitable mistake in your program overall is the sum of the probabilities for each line.
More system calls implies more code implies a larger sum.
Slashdot Mirror
They certainly charge enough more. SATA drives run about $0.50 per gig. Comparable Fibre Channel drives run about $3 per gig. A sensible person would expect the Fibre Channel drive to be as much as 6 times as reliable, but per the article there is no difference.
Disk Drive Failures 15 Times What Vendors Say [...] That should mean annual failure rates of 0.88% [but] annual replacement rates were between 2% and 4%.
0.88 * 15 = 4?
So its going to be a "moonbounce" only it'll actually be on the moon?
CE is 50% CS and 50% EE.
If you're a hardware guy and sure of it, CE will give you a better grounding in both engineering in general and digital hardware design in particular. If you want to build robots and routers, go CE. As a CS grad, I only had one course in digital electronics. There are a lot of physical devices I'd like to be able to build but I just don't know where to start.
The price you pay for CE is missed coursework in things like user interfaces and artificial intelligence. If computing research, teaching or pure software development is in your future, you'll feel the want of those extra CS courses.
You can always have your cake and eat it too: take an extra year and go dual-major.
As for jobs prospects, don't worry about it. Either degree qualifies you for an entry-level job in the field of your choice. Intel won't frown at your choice of CS. Microsoft won't frown at your choice of CE. The real question is: what do you want to learn first-hand from the talented professors at college and what do you want to pick up later from a book?
This is an easy one.
First, change companies. Take a tech support position at a small company at which other employees do the kind of technical work you're interested in.
Then, once you're at the new job, hang out with the folks doing the kind of work you want to do and identify and volunteer for small projects that can help them. If you're actually good at it then your job responsibilities will shift and they'll hire someone else to do tech support.
The "small company" part is important. Large companies hire staff for well defined positions. Small companies hire staff to do whatever needs doing.
If you strike a deal with a company to use their products, it's very common for them to certify you in their use for free.
A couple years ago I completed such a free course in operating a particular network management package. It was a pretty useless course telling me nothing that I couldn't figure out for myself, but my employer wanted me to take it. You won't find it on my resume because its not important.
By putting something on your resume, you're declaring: This is an important factor in your decision to hire me. When you put the equivalent of "Certified Toaster Repairman" on there, it tells me that either your skill level is so mediocre as to make that important, your breadth of skill is so narrow that you have extra space or your judgement is critically lacking. Or all of the above.
And by God you're proud of it too. That's fantastic!
Raw intellect, creativity, and motivation aren't measured via any piece of paper
Of course not. They can, however, be measured by your attitudes toward that piece of paper.
What you choose to tell me on your resume tells me a lot about what I can expect if I hire you. I once had a Senior Network Engineer applicant with a list of about a dozen certs including Kentrox CSU/DSU configuration. Of all the things he could have told me about himself, that made the cut. For those not in the know, CSU/DSUs are trivial devices. Its like putting "Certified toaster repairman" on your resume. Worse, really: its like putting "Certified Krups Toaster Repairman" on your resume, implying that you'd need more training to work on another brand.
Needless to say, he didn't get the job. I don't need someone who felt he had to go to school to learn how to configure a CSU/DSU.
Northern Virginia. Its not The Hub of the Internet any more (there are too many), but its still the largest hub.
:P
Math is a tough degree to sell as qualfying you for a network engineering job. Don't get me wrong: its a fine degree. But its not an applied science and its not engineering. A BS in Math is generally a prelude to an MS in Math, not a career. The MS or PhD in Math then leads to all sorts of interesting careers in analysis.
Also, in all fairness it depends on where you want to get a job. Small companies want folks who are good at what they do and have a flexible mind so that the work gets done. Large companies, especially government contractors, want someone with the proper pedigree so that when it fails (as it will) its not their fault.
Get a degree in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, whichever you find more interesting. Then go do the job you want to do. I've never even heard of a degree in "network engineering," and the last you want on your resume is something that makes a prospective employer say, "What the heck is that?"
Or if you don't want a 4-year degree then go the certs route. But understand that by skipping the degree you're skipping a lot of non-computer knowledge that you'll suffer for and limiting your future job prospects. Guys with certs only get no respect. More often than not, its because they don't deserve it.
I see. So a republican house and a republican senate architect and pass the damn thing but its Clinton's fault because with all of his attention and his advisors' attention consumed by the Lewinsky scandal he failed to make an issue of an obscure copyright bill.
You know, there are companies out there that specialize in network-level content filtering. Porn filtering mostly, but they generally have a filtering set for workplace issues available as well. If you can't talk the guy out of it, consider buying a product that's actually designed to do the job.
Yes, however you wouldn't be breaking the law by using "clit" to break Microsoft .lit files and have your computer read them out loud. More importantly, someone could throw a reader into the same .zip file as "clit" and legally distribute it.
That's cute, but before it could be signed it was first passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and the Republican-controlled Senate.
There's a word for introducing a bill that has no hope of being passed: grandstanding.
Instead, Boucher has produced a bill that actually has a decent chance of becoming law. That would be great since it gives a number of circumvention devices a legal way to exist and be distributed.
In two years maybe we'll have a Democratic president and then he'll be in a position to pass a more sweeping bill.
Is it shoplifting if you merely conceal that expensive jewelry in your purse and head for the exit or do you have to walk all the way out of the store first?
What if he stayed at his 4th job for 5 years? Did that pole just get significantly shorter?
Of course. Then he's worked 1 job in 5 years with some rough spots before. When the record is still 3 jobs in 16 months, I'll let someone else take the chance on him.
Contract work is a different story, of course, but if you're in to contract work you should list it that way on your resume. Several years as a consultant. Contracts with A, B, and C.
Sit there and tell me you wouldn't switch jobs for that much of a pay increase.
I'd figure out an accurate measure of what my skills are worth and then switch jobs once when I found the right one.
If someone offered significantly more money than my skill level, I'd look for the hitch. My skills aren't improving at a rate of 40% per 5 months and neither are yours. I don't care to work for an incompetent company, nor take on job responsibilities that I can't handle.
You've had 3 jobs in 16 months and you're considering a 4th? That's about 5 months in each job. It takes about 3 months before you're producing more work than the rest of the staff time you consume learning. It takes about 6 before you're producing at the level I hired you for.
No interview for you. I wouldn't touch you with a 10 foot pole even if you had exactly the skills I need. If you're not going to stay at least a couple years, you're not worth the effort.
This is kinda silly. On the fiber side, a pair of fibers is rarely used to transmit more than about 40 gbps, fiber has proven to handle speeds closer to a terabit and its trivial to run multiple fibers in parallel. We won't run out of fiber capacity on the trunks this century, let alone this year.
The equipment side is a little harder, but only a little. It turns out its relatively hard to switch more than 10 gbps. Doable, but hard. So what? If A connects to B, B connects to C and B is overwhelmed with too much traffic then you add a connection from A to C so that the traffic moving from A to C doesn't have to pass through B. There's always a way to split the traffic instead of increasing the individual trunk. Always.
700 lightyear path to wherever.
Read the article. Its not going 700 light years. Its going 4 light years. To the next nearest star. Over the course of 700 years. Because without some technology for which the scientific groundwork has not been found, you can't carry enough fuel and accelerate enough to go 4 light years in less than about 700 years.
I think both of these ideologies (Cannibals, Nazis) are Earth-bound concepts
I think morality and ethics are human concepts, earthbound or otherwise. Barring the impending extinction of the race, I see little value in deliberately creating a closed society whose environmental limitations require that their morals be retrogressive and deficient.
Many of the children living in parents basements [...] are the result of environmental factors (loosing a job, loosing a second income/spouse, becoming the outcome of their own bad judgement), not poor genetics
Precisely. Despite good genetics and the best education money can buy you still get a substantial number of Paris Hiltons.
would have to be dropped off at the nearest planet
What planet? RTFA, its 700 years to get from our solar system to the next nearest solar system. We're not talking light-speed here, we're talking about fusion-driven generation ship.
Out of necessity (resource conservation, crew harmony) individuals deemed "untreatable" would have to be [...] euthanized.
Ding ding ding! Correct. Any children incapable of becoming highly productive crew would have to be killed as soon as the deficiency was identified. And you can't just space the bodies -- you can't afford to lose the biomass. What starts as necessity becomes culture and tradition. At the end of the journey 50 generations later you end up with a starship crewed by CANNIBAL NAZIS.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but we're not going to get there on a generation ship. Not as human beings anyway.
many generations of men and women
The theory fails right here, before you even consider the technologies and supplies needed to make a 700 year trip. The problem (and please pardon my elitism) is that maybe 1% of people born are capable of being trained to do the jobs that the ark environment requires. That's fine in the first generation when you can populate the ark with choices from the top 1/100th of a percent of the billions of souls on the planet but grown children who still live in their parents' basement is one hell of a problem for the ark in generation two.
How would you fix the patent system?
1. Patents expire X years after the invention, not X years after approval. Get rid of the incentive to drag the process out.
2. Add (or enforce) a requirement that a patent must describe the invention in a manner comprehensible to someone with expert skills in the field and in sufficient detail to allow that expert to implement the patent. A finding by a court that the applicant has failed either of these two duties is grounds for invalidating the patent in court.
3. Allow anyone to challenge the obviousness of a patent during the application process by asking the PTO to convene an experts panel. The challenger and applicant both must post an X thousand dollar bond. The PTO then selects 5 experts in the appropriate field from universities, industry, etc. 4 or 5 of the 5 experts must find that in their professional opinion the patent is novel. If they do not, the patent is rejected and the challenger gets a refund. The applicant's bond is used to pay for the panel. If they find that its novel then the challenger's bond pays for the panel and the applicant gets a refund.
IANAL, but isn't this "pre-lawsuit settlement opportunity" plain-old extortion? "We know you did something illegal. Pay now and we won't bring it to light."
Explain that in concrete terms. Explain exactly how making a system call allows one ot inject malicious code. Please.
The math is straightforward.
Every line of code (or programming command if you prefer) has some probability of containing a mistake exploitable by a hacker. That applies not just to the code you write, but also to the code in every library called by every library that you call. The probability of an exploitable mistake in your program overall is the sum of the probabilities for each line.
More system calls implies more code implies a larger sum.