As someone who was also fucked over by VT's CS program, I have to strongly disagree with the conclusion of this article.
If you plan to do business programming, you will need just about none of the math they teach in CS.
If you are weak in math, I would strongly recommend NOT majoring in CS at a school that likes to masturbate their math professors at every turn.
Discrete math was the only math I took that really was useful. Sure, it might help to understand the basics of differentiation and integration, but I've never found much use for it in all my programming.
The only time it's ever come up in "real life" is in my pursuits of electronics as a hobby, and even then, you can usually find someone who's already done the math for you, and you just plug and chug.
Imagine if your car radio could stay locked on a signal with a directional antenna as you drive around, even exploiting reflections and multipath for optimum reception.
All with no moving parts, and sub-millisecond times to "rotate" the antenna..
Like one of those advanced phased arrays that the military uses, but in something the size of a hand held radio.
Good luck, Popular distros of Linux with KDE and Gnome are every bit as demanding as Windows, often more.
If you can dispense with Gnome and KDE (especially KDE), then you can use older hardware though. At least you have that option with Linux, instead of being forced into using a particular GUI and browser.
You can have a battery of 6 volt 1 ampere and one with 500 volt 40 mA... They simply would not have the same puissance. And, if forced, I would rather touch the second...
You'd rather touch the one that could kill you instead of the one that wouldn't hurt much even if you licked it?
It's dependant on frequency. DC will clamp, low frequency AC will pretty much screw your heart over. Very high frequency AC can't do anything except give you RF burns, the skin effect keep it from doing much to your insides.
If you can tolerate very obselete packages, Debian is best for something you don't have physical access to, since they test their dist-upgrade path well (as opposed to Fedora, where it might work, but no one is really making it a priority).
If you'd done any research, you'd have found that those nessus hits were false positives, because Red Hat backports security fixes. The products will report a vulerable version, but they are not vulnerable because RH fixed them.
Nessus just looks at the version, because trying the actual expoit is too risky on running systems, many exploits crash the system (or at least the daemon) in the process of exploiting them.
Wanna bet? Have you taken a look around at the number of camera your typical wal mart supercenter has? I can think of at least a dozen cameras in a typical wal mart, probably more that are more hidden from view.
Like I told the other guy, I wasn't talking about kernel messages or boot messages anyway.
And yes, if the user is so ignorant that they "just want to use a computer", then their system administrator should hide messages from them, and also never give them the root password.
Only if you (stupidly) picked to boot into runlevel 5.
Is typing startx so much trouble?
Booting into 5 means you lose valuable console messages. If a program just dissapears, there's usually an error message on the console you started X from, unless you boot into 5.
The only time I think it's appropriate to boot to runlevel 5 is for a computer lab or kiosk environment, or some other situation where you don't want the user seeing anything but X.
It's also good to point out that things aren't generally made radioactive by being irradiated.
They can become contaminated by radioactive dust, which might make them seem that they became radioactive from being exposed to radiation.
It takes generally very high energy radiation (or neutrons flying around) for something non-radioactive to become so.
BTW- Other raidation than gamma occurs naturally, it's just that much of the exposure that's public health people care about is gamma or X-ray, because alpha and beta are pretty benign unless you are consuming the source internally.
One example that's in your basement right now is Radon, which is an Alpha emitter that you breathe in. Smoking cigarettes is also a big exposure to radiation when compared to other sources.
If they could only use some kind of marker on the objects in there, so they could easily detect them using some kind of "detector" that they use on people leaving the area...
I got it! They can slap an RFID on everything in there!
*she used another word, but perhaps that was just a translation problem..
Likely not, a dosimeter is a device that measures your total exposure, like an odometer in a car, a counter or survey meter measures your current rate of exposure. A dosimeter function is (easily) done by most digital counters or meters, since all it has to do is count the rate*time.
If you want to get your own meter to take with you on one of these vacations, make sure to get one that measures 1-1000mrem/hr, there are lots out there that only measure ranges too low or too high to be of use in this situation (i.e. that cheap victoreen civil defense survey meter from ebay is useless). Expect to pay at least a few hundred bucks for a meter.
You probably won't want to stay in a situation of 1000mrem/hour very long, that's hundreds of times normal background dose.
With WinXP Pro I reformat when I do major hardware changes, and thats it.
Like this is much improvement? You've been able to take a hard disk out of a Red Hat box since 7.3 or maybe earlier, and barring any exotic or complex hardware, boot it in a completely new box like nothing happened.
That's a marketing reason, and the precise purpose of kernel taint anyway, the pragmatic reason for avoiding something you can't debug, and the ideological reason of encouraging open hardware specs (which in turn is also pragmatic!).
The point is the driver will crash equally well whether it lies about being GPL or not.
Yeah but they feed, clothe and house you right? Well, and stick you in the middle of some desert so you can get killed so Halliburton can make a buck, but I digress.:)
Those of us who refuse to get degrees for whatever reason should stand up about the emperor's new clothes.
Degrees are a perception, and that's it. Skills come from the ability to really learn and synthesize, something that is not a real requirement when getting a (4 year) degree, which is more about the ability to suck up and regurgitate.
I went to college for 4 years (two different majors). Big waste of time and money. Grades never were bad or anything, I just quit. I saw the economy going to shit and decided to get a job while I still could. Best choice I ever made.
I submitted a story when Lindows announced their IPO a week ago. Rejected.
Anyway, Lindows (not linspire) is going IPO. They've said that they are going to keep using the Lindows name for their company, and the Linspire name only as a name for their software products in some countries.
Slashdot Mirror
They need you, the computer scientist, to write their software for them.
Doubtful... besides, writing programs for mathematicians isn't a career, unless you work for the NSA or something.
I think it's safe to say 95% of the programmers out there write business, desktop, or server apps. None of which require much math past the basics.
The other 5% that write game engines, AI, crypto... let them learn the fucking higher math. Most of that math can be learned as you go along anyway.
Being able to write well is much more important for a programmer in the real world, and yet only a class or two is usually devoted to that.
As someone who was also fucked over by VT's CS program, I have to strongly disagree with the conclusion of this article.
If you plan to do business programming, you will need just about none of the math they teach in CS.
If you are weak in math, I would strongly recommend NOT majoring in CS at a school that likes to masturbate their math professors at every turn.
Discrete math was the only math I took that really was useful. Sure, it might help to understand the basics of differentiation and integration, but I've never found much use for it in all my programming.
The only time it's ever come up in "real life" is in my pursuits of electronics as a hobby, and even then, you can usually find someone who's already done the math for you, and you just plug and chug.
Imagine if your car radio could stay locked on a signal with a directional antenna as you drive around, even exploiting reflections and multipath for optimum reception.
All with no moving parts, and sub-millisecond times to "rotate" the antenna..
Like one of those advanced phased arrays that the military uses, but in something the size of a hand held radio.
Good luck, Popular distros of Linux with KDE and Gnome are every bit as demanding as Windows, often more.
If you can dispense with Gnome and KDE (especially KDE), then you can use older hardware though. At least you have that option with Linux, instead of being forced into using a particular GUI and browser.
You can have a battery of 6 volt 1 ampere and one with 500 volt 40 mA... They simply would not have the same puissance. And, if forced, I would rather touch the second...
You'd rather touch the one that could kill you instead of the one that wouldn't hurt much even if you licked it?
It's dependant on frequency. DC will clamp, low frequency AC will pretty much screw your heart over. Very high frequency AC can't do anything except give you RF burns, the skin effect keep it from doing much to your insides.
Still won't kill you.
It's no more dengerous than the several 100k volts you build up walking across a carpet and then grounding yourself through your new video card.
As the other poster said, it's too risky.
If you can tolerate very obselete packages, Debian is best for something you don't have physical access to, since they test their dist-upgrade path well (as opposed to Fedora, where it might work, but no one is really making it a priority).
The community wrote it.
If you don't trust them, then why the hell are you running the software they wrote?
If you'd done any research, you'd have found that those nessus hits were false positives, because Red Hat backports security fixes. The products will report a vulerable version, but they are not vulnerable because RH fixed them.
Nessus just looks at the version, because trying the actual expoit is too risky on running systems, many exploits crash the system (or at least the daemon) in the process of exploiting them.
Wanna bet? Have you taken a look around at the number of camera your typical wal mart supercenter has? I can think of at least a dozen cameras in a typical wal mart, probably more that are more hidden from view.
Two, one to screw in the lightbulb, and the other to write a design document about how it will be implemented and maintained.
Bash is excellent for learning programming.
And even Windows people can get it free with cygwin.
Like I told the other guy, I wasn't talking about kernel messages or boot messages anyway.
And yes, if the user is so ignorant that they "just want to use a computer", then their system administrator should hide messages from them, and also never give them the root password.
I'm wasn't ever talking about boot messages.
I'm talking about messages from your GUI programs that crash, or from X itself.
It's not surprising that you don't even know what I'm talking about, since running in runlevel 5 hides all that from you.
Only if you (stupidly) picked to boot into runlevel 5.
Is typing startx so much trouble?
Booting into 5 means you lose valuable console messages. If a program just dissapears, there's usually an error message on the console you started X from, unless you boot into 5.
The only time I think it's appropriate to boot to runlevel 5 is for a computer lab or kiosk environment, or some other situation where you don't want the user seeing anything but X.
It's also good to point out that things aren't generally made radioactive by being irradiated.
They can become contaminated by radioactive dust, which might make them seem that they became radioactive from being exposed to radiation.
It takes generally very high energy radiation (or neutrons flying around) for something non-radioactive to become so.
BTW- Other raidation than gamma occurs naturally, it's just that much of the exposure that's public health people care about is gamma or X-ray, because alpha and beta are pretty benign unless you are consuming the source internally.
One example that's in your basement right now is Radon, which is an Alpha emitter that you breathe in. Smoking cigarettes is also a big exposure to radiation when compared to other sources.
If they could only use some kind of marker on the objects in there, so they could easily detect them using some kind of "detector" that they use on people leaving the area...
I got it! They can slap an RFID on everything in there!
*she used another word, but perhaps that was just a translation problem..
Likely not, a dosimeter is a device that measures your total exposure, like an odometer in a car, a counter or survey meter measures your current rate of exposure. A dosimeter function is (easily) done by most digital counters or meters, since all it has to do is count the rate*time.
If you want to get your own meter to take with you on one of these vacations, make sure to get one that measures 1-1000mrem/hr, there are lots out there that only measure ranges too low or too high to be of use in this situation (i.e. that cheap victoreen civil defense survey meter from ebay is useless). Expect to pay at least a few hundred bucks for a meter.
You probably won't want to stay in a situation of 1000mrem/hour very long, that's hundreds of times normal background dose.
With WinXP Pro I reformat when I do major hardware changes, and thats it.
Like this is much improvement? You've been able to take a hard disk out of a Red Hat box since 7.3 or maybe earlier, and barring any exotic or complex hardware, boot it in a completely new box like nothing happened.
But that's still not a compatibility reason.
That's a marketing reason, and the precise purpose of kernel taint anyway, the pragmatic reason for avoiding something you can't debug, and the ideological reason of encouraging open hardware specs (which in turn is also pragmatic!).
The point is the driver will crash equally well whether it lies about being GPL or not.
Yeah but they feed, clothe and house you right? Well, and stick you in the middle of some desert so you can get killed so Halliburton can make a buck, but I digress. :)
Why post anonymously with all the weak language?
Those of us who refuse to get degrees for whatever reason should stand up about the emperor's new clothes.
Degrees are a perception, and that's it. Skills come from the ability to really learn and synthesize, something that is not a real requirement when getting a (4 year) degree, which is more about the ability to suck up and regurgitate.
I went to college for 4 years (two different majors). Big waste of time and money. Grades never were bad or anything, I just quit. I saw the economy going to shit and decided to get a job while I still could. Best choice I ever made.
Better to standardize on Firefox rather than have the desktop environment people keep churning out half-assed browsers like Konq and Nautilus.
I submitted a story when Lindows announced their IPO a week ago. Rejected.
Anyway, Lindows (not linspire) is going IPO. They've said that they are going to keep using the Lindows name for their company, and the Linspire name only as a name for their software products in some countries.