I can agree that IT jobs can be boring. They can also be LOW PAYING at the same time! I worked as a computer operator (what a waste of time). It was so boring and low paying. I just HAD to quit to consider my future for a while and try working for myself. I'd say I'm a computer geek and worked on computers for 10 years now, but dropped out of college before finishing my computer engineering/science degree. I'd say I've wasted my life pursuing a computer career. I still like computers though %P
I'm now frustrated with my life! I can see what some others mean about people who are not computer geeks studying computers in college but don't really have any interest in computers other than making some money. I can say, and my girlfriend would probably readily admit, that I have far more practical programming and other computer knowledge than she does, and she has a masters degree in computer science and is now currently working on her doctoral dissertation for business/computer science! When it comes to how to use Linux, Windows or programming, she has to always get my help. These people just do book learning and barely have to ever really touch a real computer and use real software. A real computer geek learns some theory in class, but then spends a lot of their own time hacking around with a computer learning actual practical things. I can see how people could go all through college and have all the theory from dry old books then be asked to sit in front of a computer and do something and not have a clue. Instead, they have to rely on some college dropout like me, who doesn't get paid crap, to actually get anything done. Well, I'm just a bitter loser I guess! Enjoy your boring sorry jobs while your stupid idiot managers tell you what to do. Maybe I'll end up working at McDonalds soon and whatever I know is useless stuff that will be obsolete tomorrow. Soon people will be obsolete technology!:)
I spent a great deal of time (5-6 years, but skipping a couple semesters) in college working to become a computer engineer, then switched down to computer science after taking a lot of extra classes I didn't need. Well, I don't know what exactly happened but after about 120 credits completed I was still about 50 to 60 credits away from being finished.
I went to a community college for the first 100 hours. Those credits transferred to a state university. Getting to the university was an hour and a half commute:(
After about 4 years, when I had to start commuting it got to be a real pain. I tried to do as much as possible at the community college since it was nearby. Some semesters I got really bad schedules. I had taken all the math/calc, physics, statics, dynamics, chemistry, statistics, thermodynamics, and linear alegbra. Then when it came around to taking CS classes, there was only one session/section offered per semester for the CS Intro class, and it was always full when I tried to get into it! Therefore, I could never take any CS core classes that required the Intro to CS class as a prerequisite!
In the end, I learned a lot of cool things which I'll never get any use of except on my own time for my own little projects. Essentially I took everything you could except the CS core classes. I was even accepted into the Phi Theta Kappa honor society (3.5+ gpa). I did get an AA degree. But not finishing a BS, I wasted a lot of time and didn't get much job experience either (worked for an ISP for awhile). The result is I'm not much better to employers than someone who is right out of high school.
My advice is either have a clear plan about getting your degree or don't waste your time. I'd say go straight to a university and don't waste your time in a community college. Move from home and live on campus or near campus - do not figure you can drive a long way and be a good student. The key words are "waste time", and you can certainly do a lot of that in college. A problem with going to a community college or a small branch campus of a university is that they don't offer all the classes you need to finish your degree. You will end up taking a lot of what you can at the comm college, but then you will have an unbalanced load of classes once you transfer to a university to try to finish. What you want, is to go straight to the university and balance your load of classes - take some hard and some easy and do, I mean DO, make sure you get into the CS intro class as soon as you can and start taking the CS core parallel with the math and science. I took loads of nothing but calc/chemistry and physics type stuff for a couple years or more. That is NOT the way to do it! You will definitely want to take the easier CS stuff balanced with the hard mathematics-intensive classes. This is all pretty much common sense but I didn't follow common sense I suppose!
Now I am unemployed after quiting a job I hated and that any loser could do. It was a job where I saw computer professionals all around me making at least 2x what I was making. If you want to know, it was working as a computer operator at a hospital in a noisy cold machine room just monitoring a bunch of screens. That is not the kind of computer job anyone should want. So, I would say to not accept working as a computer operator in your career because that position is only filled by idiots like me. The real positions to get are working as at least a systems, network, or database administrator. Working as a programmer is fine too, but some programmers have come to really hate their work when it ends up being a job of maintaining legacy code.
All I do now is work on my own website, which nobody goes to: comptechnews
Finally, before you think computers are everything, consider other careers. Computers is a fast moving, stressful, and highly technical field that burns people out. Some people will find a better lifestyle doing something else.
Humans may evolve into a digital essence. Brains stored digitally and executing on extremely fast computers. The essence is then able to be uploaded into machines/bodies to give corporal form. Space travel or travel in general would be a matter of data transmission of the essence. At the destination, the essence is executed (you wake up) and uploaded into a newly generated machine/body.
Yeah, it has the 8k tuple limit and you can recompile to have it use 16k or 32k. There are other ways to work around the tuple limit, like breaking anything more than 8k into chunks.
Despite the 8k limit, I managed to make a message board with postgres and php that has no message size limit. The message board of mine could really use some people to hammer on it! Its new so I hope to find bugs and fix them.
It looks like they got those DB/2 results on a system with 128 Xeon CPUs and a system price tag of just $14,232,696!
I wonder how well DB/2 would do on the same hardware as the Postgres tests. Major difference in hardware here.:)
The press release about Postgres says:
Xperts ran the benchmark tests on Compaq Proliant ML350 servers with 512 mb of RAM and two 18.2 Gb hard disks, equipped with Intel Pentium III processors and Red Hat Linux 6.1 and Windows NT operating systems.
I'm already getting up to 90 frames per second without it even at 1280x1024 in a window on a 1600x1200 KDE desktop. Maybe now I will see the 130+ fps that all the reviews talk about.
The performance is good. One little thing bothers me is that the mouse and keyboard movement seems a little smoother when I play Q3a in Windoze. Maybe I need to tweak some kbd and mouse device settings but its not really a big deal. I never run Windows anymore if that says anything.;-)
Sales of Linux 3d games should have been expected to be low prior to XFree86 4.0 and its DRI hardware GL acceleration. Maybe within another year, when the new XFree4 DRI supports more video cards, sales will pick up. Right now, you still have to be a bit of a hacker to even get hardware acceleration to work in Linux. Just go read the article at Tom's Hardware about NVIDIA 3D Under Linux and you will get an idea of what you have to fiddle with just to get it to work.
Nevertheless, I'm running Quake3 under Linux with a GeForce256 DDR and its working fine. I'd like to improve its performance a little if I could by applying the AGPGART kernel patch. Actually, I tried to patch kernel 2.2.16 with the AGPGART patch for 2.2.16 and could not see any option for it in make menuconfig afterwards. Instructions that I found said that after you patch the kernel, you'd see options about enabling it under character devices but I didn't see anything so I deleted the source and went back to a plain 2.2.16. If anyone knows exactly how to patch and enable the 2.2.16 kernel for agpgart, please send me an email - thanks. I'm thinking about upgrading to a 2.4.0 test kernel to see if I can get it that way but before I can think about running a 2.4.0 kernel, I have to upgrade some other system software first.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried to play at blacknova but it was EXTREMELY slow! Is that normal or is it suddenly flooded with slashdotters?
Denny's in the middle of the night. The board I was on did that too. :)
What is it with BBSers and Denny's in the wee hours of the night!?
I can agree that IT jobs can be boring. They can also be LOW PAYING at the same time! I worked as a computer operator (what a waste of time). It was so boring and low paying. I just HAD to quit to consider my future for a while and try working for myself. I'd say I'm a computer geek and worked on computers for 10 years now, but dropped out of college before finishing my computer engineering/science degree. I'd say I've wasted my life pursuing a computer career. I still like computers though %P
:)
I'm now frustrated with my life! I can see what some others mean about people who are not computer geeks studying computers in college but don't really have any interest in computers other than making some money. I can say, and my girlfriend would probably readily admit, that I have far more practical programming and other computer knowledge than she does, and she has a masters degree in computer science and is now currently working on her doctoral dissertation for business/computer science! When it comes to how to use Linux, Windows or programming, she has to always get my help. These people just do book learning and barely have to ever really touch a real computer and use real software. A real computer geek learns some theory in class, but then spends a lot of their own time hacking around with a computer learning actual practical things. I can see how people could go all through college and have all the theory from dry old books then be asked to sit in front of a computer and do something and not have a clue. Instead, they have to rely on some college dropout like me, who doesn't get paid crap, to actually get anything done. Well, I'm just a bitter loser I guess! Enjoy your boring sorry jobs while your stupid idiot managers tell you what to do. Maybe I'll end up working at McDonalds soon and whatever I know is useless stuff that will be obsolete tomorrow. Soon people will be obsolete technology!
$$
I spent a great deal of time (5-6 years, but skipping a couple semesters) in college working to become a computer engineer, then switched down to computer science after taking a lot of extra classes I didn't need. Well, I don't know what exactly happened but after about 120 credits completed I was still about 50 to 60 credits away from being finished.
I went to a community college for the first 100 hours. Those credits transferred to a state university. Getting to the university was an hour and a half commute :(
After about 4 years, when I had to start commuting it got to be a real pain. I tried to do as much as possible at the community college since it was nearby. Some semesters I got really bad schedules. I had taken all the math/calc, physics, statics, dynamics, chemistry, statistics, thermodynamics, and linear alegbra. Then when it came around to taking CS classes, there was only one session/section offered per semester for the CS Intro class, and it was always full when I tried to get into it! Therefore, I could never take any CS core classes that required the Intro to CS class as a prerequisite!
In the end, I learned a lot of cool things which I'll never get any use of except on my own time for my own little projects. Essentially I took everything you could except the CS core classes. I was even accepted into the Phi Theta Kappa honor society (3.5+ gpa). I did get an AA degree. But not finishing a BS, I wasted a lot of time and didn't get much job experience either (worked for an ISP for awhile). The result is I'm not much better to employers than someone who is right out of high school.
My advice is either have a clear plan about getting your degree or don't waste your time. I'd say go straight to a university and don't waste your time in a community college. Move from home and live on campus or near campus - do not figure you can drive a long way and be a good student. The key words are "waste time", and you can certainly do a lot of that in college. A problem with going to a community college or a small branch campus of a university is that they don't offer all the classes you need to finish your degree. You will end up taking a lot of what you can at the comm college, but then you will have an unbalanced load of classes once you transfer to a university to try to finish. What you want, is to go straight to the university and balance your load of classes - take some hard and some easy and do, I mean DO, make sure you get into the CS intro class as soon as you can and start taking the CS core parallel with the math and science. I took loads of nothing but calc/chemistry and physics type stuff for a couple years or more. That is NOT the way to do it! You will definitely want to take the easier CS stuff balanced with the hard mathematics-intensive classes. This is all pretty much common sense but I didn't follow common sense I suppose!
Now I am unemployed after quiting a job I hated and that any loser could do. It was a job where I saw computer professionals all around me making at least 2x what I was making. If you want to know, it was working as a computer operator at a hospital in a noisy cold machine room just monitoring a bunch of screens. That is not the kind of computer job anyone should want. So, I would say to not accept working as a computer operator in your career because that position is only filled by idiots like me. The real positions to get are working as at least a systems, network, or database administrator. Working as a programmer is fine too, but some programmers have come to really hate their work when it ends up being a job of maintaining legacy code.
All I do now is work on my own website, which nobody goes to: comptechnews
Finally, before you think computers are everything, consider other careers. Computers is a fast moving, stressful, and highly technical field that burns people out. Some people will find a better lifestyle doing something else.Anyway, good luck.
Humans may evolve into a digital essence. Brains stored digitally and executing on extremely fast computers. The essence is then able to be uploaded into machines/bodies to give corporal form. Space travel or travel in general would be a matter of data transmission of the essence. At the destination, the essence is executed (you wake up) and uploaded into a newly generated machine/body.
Yeah, it has the 8k tuple limit and you can recompile to have it use 16k or 32k. There are other ways to work around the tuple limit, like breaking anything more than 8k into chunks.
Despite the 8k limit, I managed to make a message board with postgres and php that has no message size limit. The message board of mine could really use some people to hammer on it! Its new so I hope to find bugs and fix them.
No, I didn't. Thanks. I will try it again. :)
;-)
I'm already getting up to 90 frames per second without it even at 1280x1024 in a window on a 1600x1200 KDE desktop. Maybe now I will see the 130+ fps that all the reviews talk about.
The performance is good. One little thing bothers me is that the mouse and keyboard movement seems a little smoother when I play Q3a in Windoze. Maybe I need to tweak some kbd and mouse device settings but its not really a big deal. I never run Windows anymore if that says anything.
Sales of Linux 3d games should have been expected to be low prior to XFree86 4.0 and its DRI hardware GL acceleration. Maybe within another year, when the new XFree4 DRI supports more video cards, sales will pick up. Right now, you still have to be a bit of a hacker to even get hardware acceleration to work in Linux. Just go read the article at Tom's Hardware about NVIDIA 3D Under Linux and you will get an idea of what you have to fiddle with just to get it to work.
Nevertheless, I'm running Quake3 under Linux with a GeForce256 DDR and its working fine. I'd like to improve its performance a little if I could by applying the AGPGART kernel patch. Actually, I tried to patch kernel 2.2.16 with the AGPGART patch for 2.2.16 and could not see any option for it in make menuconfig afterwards. Instructions that I found said that after you patch the kernel, you'd see options about enabling it under character devices but I didn't see anything so I deleted the source and went back to a plain 2.2.16. If anyone knows exactly how to patch and enable the 2.2.16 kernel for agpgart, please send me an email - thanks. I'm thinking about upgrading to a 2.4.0 test kernel to see if I can get it that way but before I can think about running a 2.4.0 kernel, I have to upgrade some other system software first.
:) It had a scene with some kind of laser beam transport. Amusing science fiction.