The few people I know who had it were happy with it. I like the idea of integrating it all. Sprint could do it, you could have one long distance, wireless, local and broadband solution, they should have thrown wireless in. I'd love to have one bill in the $100-$150 range that covered all of my communication needs; if they were smart they'd ink a deal with DirecTV or Echostar to provide DBS as part of the one bill package.. I think the cost issues people are raising are a little beside the point. I think that to get a comprehensive package like that it is going to cost on the order of $100 or more a month. Part of the reasons all these broadband companies are biting the dust is because they were selling something for nothing. In most places, good DSL really costs more than $40 or $50, it jsut can't be that cheap to build out and run and if a few companies chanrge those kinds of prices for it then all the others have to follow suit.
I think it's a pretty cool and good idea. It's in the same vein as the disposable conventional cameras, I thought those were stupid and they are huge money makers for the film companies. I can get an APS camera that will take decent, not great or really even good pictures but decent ones (the smaller negative makes them more grainy) do the zooming and stuff, take 3 sizes of picture and be drop in loadable for somewhere between ~$70 and ~$400 depending on features and quality. Or I can buy a $5 disposable and for a lot of uses the disposable is much nicer even though it doesn't take great pictures. The way I see it, if I'm climbing a mountain and something goes wrong and I have to start dropping balast, I'd rather lose a $5 or even $10 disposable than my $200 (3 years ago) Nikon APS camera. If I'm on the bike and take a digger, I'd rather break the little kodak throw away then anything I've spent real money on and plan on keeping, which is ironic because when I bought the $200 Nikon instead of the $300 tiny Cannon elf my thinking was that I didn't want to spend that much money because I wanted something I wouldn't mind replacing as much. I wanted to take it every where, or so the intention was.
Now I've got a wicked sweet digital camera and I love it. It's a blast because you get nearly instant gratification and you can email the pictures to the relatives the same day rather than waiting to develop them and then scan them or pay for copies. Unless you're some kind of photgraphy buff, a 2-4Mpixel camera is going to be more than good enough for most of your uses, you snap the pics, download them to the computer, put them on the web or email them to the fam and then you take some more. It's highly cool. The only problems I see, a) still complex to get pictures in to the computer, your average grandmother is going to have some issues. b) Still a bit costly. c) this one is only a partial problem but my 3MPixel camera takes pictures that are too big for most uses, I've written a bunch of scripts to down sample them before I put them on the web or mail them and I usually use the compressed mode on the camera, the typical fun snaps user doesn't need 2048 x 1024 x 32bpp TIFF
I think this is an awsome idea. The pictures are going to be of lesser quality, no question about that. But if my grandmother can get them transfered to a CD (presumably, she could go to the drug story, drop off the camera, shop for 10 minutes and then pick up the disc) at minimal cost and the initial outlay is minimal then it starts getting interesting. Assuming there isn't a deposit or something, that would be the camera I'd take scuba diving and on the bike, or just leave in the glove box of the car in case there is a kodak moment. It's not going to be the geek's camera, those of us who pay attention and are technologically minded are still going to fork out the dough and get a nicer digital camera just like we have with conventional cameras but for people who just want to take pictures and share them with their families I bet this is the wave of the future.
If they make vending machines that put the pictures on to CDs right then and there then forget about it, they will essentially replace cameras. There maybe some screwing around with the prices but the economics are just too good. You have any idea how much a photo developing machine costs? You could build a digital camera vending machine out of off the shelf parts, from that fact alone there is economic insentive to make this happen. Also if you look at the digicam market over the last few years, they've steadily got better but the costs haven't really dropped that much, I think you can build the lower res cameras for dirt cheap these days. This idea as incarnated may not work but I think the bigger idea of disposable digicams is a winner.
And if it lowers the margin of entry for one company to start producing more linux apps because there is a "commercial" compiler then it is a good thing.
gcc isn't too shabby though and it is getting better all the time. It's not an easy market to enter and dominate.
Okay here was the idea I had 8 years ago and couldn't get funding for... I was going to start a business that started businesses. It would work like this. I would scour the country for smallish towns (places like eastern Colorado, Nebraska, Kansas, New Mexico, Wyoming, and the like are ideal) I worked the numbers and to make it resonable you want the towns to be around 10,000 people. I would step in to said towns and create an ISP business for them. It would work like so, I hire some local highschool kids, we trench cat-5 up to every house in the area, and we build a town W/LAN. In the process we would hook up a T3 to the local library, city building, or highschool which would be shared by all the residents via the LAN. The city would create a business to maintain said network (I was figuring that some teachers or librarians in the area could take that on) I would train the people to run the show. Then it would be up to the city how to pay that business, sales tax, $20-50 a month tax, something like that; my prejections where that with fairly reasonable fees the city could even cut a profit on this. I would charge a nominal fee for installation and then my business would be the network experts who step in and fix problems when they are beyond the scope of the new city ISP. The thinking was that there are going to be a lot of smallish towns where broadband is going to be hard to get. I was also thinking that there could be lot's of tie-ins with things like online voting for city elections, free web sites for local businesses, etc.. The idea wasn't without some flaws, notably the training of the personel to run the network and then with bandwidth demands you'd need something far larger than a couple T1s or a T3 which make the idea of an ISP business a little impractical (note the crash in the ISP market and all the consolidation) unless you're a bandwidth provider.
Oh well, at least they are doing it now somewhere.
Of beating a single Microsoft and not 2 or 3 little government broken up MickySofts... Linux and all that is good is still making headway, MS is strong and it won't be easy but we can't be stopped.
Also in a sick way, I think that there are things that can be imposed that are far worse than breakup. The feds can come up with a concent decree that ties MS's hands pretty bad and then a single judge can oversee that it is imposed properly. I just don't see Balmer and Gates asking someone if they can do something or getting slapped on the hand if they do something they shouldn't. They are egomaniacs.
Cost is part of the free market as well. Often more important than quality. Nice of you to ignore his main point, there are other technologies and there isn't really any excuse for not investing in them.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Silly rabbit. That's a mov. Now the tricky part is if you in 16bit mode or 32bit mode. You're loading 0x21cd4c in to a register. I don't know what's so special about that number though.
I can pretty much tell what kernel you're running by looking at the first 200 bytes or so. (They change the boot every major revision)
Can they? Or can they just take my idea and get some other people to sign the papers and claim to be inventor? If they can force you, how do they go about doing it? A court order or something?
I should clarify. From a compiler's perspective, Lisp has no syntax. Parsing it is cake. You can give it bad data but it's not like you're trying to evaluate an expression and determine implicitely what it means. (no if/else binding)
Incidentally, the last compiler I worked on had an intermediate language after parsing that looked amazingly close to lisp.
First off, it's probably the best modeling language to date. Far superior to Booch or OMT. It can be complex to master it but within 15 minutes a complete novice can read a UML diagram and get the gest of it.
Secondly, if you're only doing high level modelng then GML is fine. Napkins are probably good documents for this too, or perhaps the back of an envelope. One of the fundamental assumptions to UML is that there is a group or a team doing the work and so the diagrams are designed to transmit a very large amount of information. A full and complete UML diagram specifies how the code is to be implemented, it's a complete design, member variables and functions are all listed and all you have to do is fill in the blanks. This is a big deal, you can give such a design to any coder and he should be able to implement it.
This all hinges on the value of design which is a dying art in many ways. Sure you want to get good code fast and you will probably end up rewriting things but there are still times and places for good solid design. I've seen a couple projects when one or two people built a full UML design doc and spent a couple months doing it and then a team of 10 people implemented the code in days. I think we all see ourselves as software designers as much as developers and that's not the most attractive way to work but there is still a time and a place for it.
but I meet Sam at LokiHack99 and I can testify that he is a game expert and knows what it should be like.
I would think that it would be the game programmer's API by game programmers. Loki uses if for their stuff and that's proof enough to me that it's good.
Okay, so I've had a few on fat Tuesday and maybe I don't get it but what the business does Blizzard have making movies?
forget this trademark bullshit. DOn't they make computer games? And now they think they can make a movie? New Line was probably doing them a favor to keep from embarassing themselves.
I have a plan.. I know it will not fail. (for you Lotar fans out there)
Seriously though, over the last 8 years and especially recently we've been shown just what a great country the USA is. For as little as $5000 you can spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom in the Whitehouse. I assume that includes chats with the president, possibly a family dinner with the first family or maybe a state dinner and a breakfast, I'm certain you are given exposure to the various staff members who help run the show and influence policy. On the surface this make our democracy look cheap and false, I think the reality of it is much better though because in my eyes, a dork like me, or any one of us for that matter, could have a slice of the president's time simply by giving him $5,000 - $10,000. I'm an active follower of politics and I have written letters to my congress people, I have called their offices, I even went to a union meeting once where they were trying to unionize IBM so that I could meet my congress person. When there is a bad patent or some kind of liberty threatening bill on the books I write a letter and make a phone call or two and so far I have yet to see any real results from that. For all I know my congress people haven't even read the letters or been given the phone messages. Now if I spend some cash on the president I can rest easy (in the Lincoln bedroom, no less) and be confident that the president of the most powerful country on the planet has heard my issues. I know that nothing may come of them but at least he heard them. Further, it looks like if you spend a little more they will let you drive a nuclear attack sub and do some drills with the crew. That's absolutely amazing, any one of us, for a modest fee, can talk to the president and or drive a nuclear sub and do an "e-blow," regardless of your race, creed, or whatever.
So here is my proposal. We put together a slashdot raffle. Tickets cost $1 a piece and you can buy as many as you'd like to have. With the many thousands of dollars we raise we buy one night at the Whitehouse and one ride on a nuclear sub. We send RMS to the Whitehouse to lobby for us and some lucky slashdotter, picked at random, get's to drive the sub. It sounds like a win-win situation to me and I'm certain we could raise the minimum needed, slashdot has tens of thousands of viewers.
the Playstations 2 is the PSX2, never, under any circumstances should it be referred to as the PS/2. PS/2 brings up bad memories of MCA and other nasties.
This is the first step the living in the world of Terminator! Better go buy some German Shepherds so that you can tell when the real humans come to your house or when the termintor robots do..
I'll agree with that. Pentium-III nad Celeron chips have a unique CPU ID in them. AMD chips and the PIV would have had that if it was ever used.
The capability has been there but not used.
I'm not for this in any way except that it makes it harder to pirate MS software or preload it in any IT type of fashion and that then makes alternatives look more attractive. With some of the tricks they've been pulling lately, trying to audit with threats and then strongly suggesting that people buy their mega-expensive site license pack (I know of 4 companies that have been intimidated by them in to spending 10s of millions of dollars) making it harder to pirate their stuff is a good thing. I don't want my company to be forced in to buying a $25million MS everything pack which then forces any alternatives out in to the cold.
AIX, Solaris, H-Pukes, OS/390, OS/400, and numerous others all have versions that are hardware matched. They read the CPU ID and only work on one machine. Nothing new.
The people that get screwed by this are those who like to tinker or play. Sure I own a Win98 CD and I've installed in on 5 or 6 machines (one at a time, of course) and I've rebuilt machines. Most people don't do any of that though. This is only a hiccup for us geeks who would actually delete windows and then put it back on there.
On the scale from 1 to badass they are playa's. If I ever become a billionaire or even a 10millionaire I'm going to have one. They are kind of slow an steady, fairly quite, smooth, and really big and cool looking.
When you ride in to town in your blimp, people take notice. Plus, I think non-German blimps just give off a really friendly and happy energy. It's not some aggressive looking lear jet.
I've done three OS projects now. I was one of the first two classes (I'm not sure if it was the second year or the first) at CMU to do Yalnix. I TAed a course in Nachos at a different university and I worked through the minix stuff for my own edification..
I hope Satya still runs it at CMU. He is truely the best of the best, a brilliant OS expert and among the best professors I've ever worked with, he can take difficult concepts and make them into very easy to understand ones and do it completely and in a nearly poetic way. If you can take his course, take it. Anyhow, when I did yalnix they gave you a virtual machine and told you how to compile code for it and that was it. I believe we did 5 projects, 1) was the standard freeby, had to debug a multithreaded queue application. 2) was a serial terminal driver, only difficult if you didn't know how it was supposed to work and had to grapple with understand that as well as writing the code. 3) Was where it hit the fan, we implemented the kernel here, 5 or 6 weeks, we implemented the syscalls, the scheduler, and the memory managment. 4) Kind of a lob, you made yalnix run arbitrary ELF-sparc code, I don't remember if this was intended to be a project of if they did some resheduling and gave us another freeby because of the difficulty of the first. This project essentially meant adding a few syscalls and pluging in some ELF code that they gave us. 5) we implemented the yalnixfs, this was a (bitch**bitch) yalnix wasn't multithreaded so we needed to invent a technique for dealing with it (lot's of goto's and a state tracker) Part 3 was the scariest and part 5 was the hardest. At the end Juan Leon, the TA that year, was talking about figuring out ways to reduce the pain/knowledge gained ratio, he thought it was way too hard for what we learned. It was one of the few projects at CMU I was really proud of, I always learned stuff in classes but that class kicked my ass at times and I was very happy to do as well as I did and I felt like I learned a lot.
I think Nachos and Minix are potentially harder projects, the class I did Nachos with had it pretty easy. Minix works on real hardware and the development cycle and tool chain can be a problem as well as just understanding your hardware, I know sparc and alpha well but I'm not an x86 guru and it's not the most logical architecture, there are lot's of special rules that you only learn from experience. It may be bias but I think yalnix was the best one of the three, CMU made it very hard but it was doable and you really learned the concepts by implementing them. Further, the OS class at CMU is the best I have seen. Again, my hat is off to Satya and Leon, I think the class was a good balance between real world implementation and concept; Satya pretty much taught the state of the art concepts in lecture even though the Yalnix OS is very primitive in a lot of ways. I think the OS class in general is a difficult one, they could give you Linux and ask you to screw around with various components, that could be incredibly easy or incredibly difficult. They could give you most of a kernel and ask you to implement a few syscalls and change the MM stuff. They could give you disk space and an editor and make you do the whole thing. Dialing in a good pain/signal ratio is hard. I would expect CMU to possibly make it easier, the general theme when I was there was that the school promoted a geek and hacker culture and not enough of an entrepreneural one and that there were 3 girls in SCS and 200+ guys and that wasn't right. (there were more female professors in SCS than students) The compiler class was similar, both OS and compiler pretty much took a semester of my undivided attention to get A's.
Most good sized cities have them. They often do laser shows for the adults to enjoy after a few night caps...;)
I've generally enjoyed planetarium shows, good astronomers giving them can often tie a lot of things together, anthropology and all sort of cool stuff have a lot to do with stars.
Slashdot Mirror
The few people I know who had it were happy with it. I like the idea of integrating it all. Sprint could do it, you could have one long distance, wireless, local and broadband solution, they should have thrown wireless in. I'd love to have one bill in the $100-$150 range that covered all of my communication needs; if they were smart they'd ink a deal with DirecTV or Echostar to provide DBS as part of the one bill package.. I think the cost issues people are raising are a little beside the point. I think that to get a comprehensive package like that it is going to cost on the order of $100 or more a month. Part of the reasons all these broadband companies are biting the dust is because they were selling something for nothing. In most places, good DSL really costs more than $40 or $50, it jsut can't be that cheap to build out and run and if a few companies chanrge those kinds of prices for it then all the others have to follow suit.
Now I've got a wicked sweet digital camera and I love it. It's a blast because you get nearly instant gratification and you can email the pictures to the relatives the same day rather than waiting to develop them and then scan them or pay for copies. Unless you're some kind of photgraphy buff, a 2-4Mpixel camera is going to be more than good enough for most of your uses, you snap the pics, download them to the computer, put them on the web or email them to the fam and then you take some more. It's highly cool. The only problems I see, a) still complex to get pictures in to the computer, your average grandmother is going to have some issues. b) Still a bit costly. c) this one is only a partial problem but my 3MPixel camera takes pictures that are too big for most uses, I've written a bunch of scripts to down sample them before I put them on the web or mail them and I usually use the compressed mode on the camera, the typical fun snaps user doesn't need 2048 x 1024 x 32bpp TIFF
I think this is an awsome idea. The pictures are going to be of lesser quality, no question about that. But if my grandmother can get them transfered to a CD (presumably, she could go to the drug story, drop off the camera, shop for 10 minutes and then pick up the disc) at minimal cost and the initial outlay is minimal then it starts getting interesting. Assuming there isn't a deposit or something, that would be the camera I'd take scuba diving and on the bike, or just leave in the glove box of the car in case there is a kodak moment. It's not going to be the geek's camera, those of us who pay attention and are technologically minded are still going to fork out the dough and get a nicer digital camera just like we have with conventional cameras but for people who just want to take pictures and share them with their families I bet this is the wave of the future.
If they make vending machines that put the pictures on to CDs right then and there then forget about it, they will essentially replace cameras. There maybe some screwing around with the prices but the economics are just too good. You have any idea how much a photo developing machine costs? You could build a digital camera vending machine out of off the shelf parts, from that fact alone there is economic insentive to make this happen. Also if you look at the digicam market over the last few years, they've steadily got better but the costs haven't really dropped that much, I think you can build the lower res cameras for dirt cheap these days. This idea as incarnated may not work but I think the bigger idea of disposable digicams is a winner.
gcc isn't too shabby though and it is getting better all the time. It's not an easy market to enter and dominate.
Oh well, at least they are doing it now somewhere.
Also in a sick way, I think that there are things that can be imposed that are far worse than breakup. The feds can come up with a concent decree that ties MS's hands pretty bad and then a single judge can oversee that it is imposed properly. I just don't see Balmer and Gates asking someone if they can do something or getting slapped on the hand if they do something they shouldn't. They are egomaniacs.
Cost is part of the free market as well. Often more important than quality. Nice of you to ignore his main point, there are other technologies and there isn't really any excuse for not investing in them.
Was your depature good? Daniel Vogel also left. Is Loki in a good position or did you leave because of some problem. What's the deal?
And what do you think PDF is? It's Postscript Level 3.
Silly rabbit. That's a mov. Now the tricky part is if you in 16bit mode or 32bit mode. You're loading 0x21cd4c in to a register. I don't know what's so special about that number though.
I can pretty much tell what kernel you're running by looking at the first 200 bytes or so. (They change the boot every major revision)
Here's one for you: fc fa
Can they? Or can they just take my idea and get some other people to sign the papers and claim to be inventor? If they can force you, how do they go about doing it? A court order or something?
Incidentally, the last compiler I worked on had an intermediate language after parsing that looked amazingly close to lisp.
Also, it's not functional like someone tried to point out. You can use it like a functional language but generally it isn't.
It's good stuff, you can't say your a real CS guy until you've done a fair amount of lisp.
Secondly, if you're only doing high level modelng then GML is fine. Napkins are probably good documents for this too, or perhaps the back of an envelope. One of the fundamental assumptions to UML is that there is a group or a team doing the work and so the diagrams are designed to transmit a very large amount of information. A full and complete UML diagram specifies how the code is to be implemented, it's a complete design, member variables and functions are all listed and all you have to do is fill in the blanks. This is a big deal, you can give such a design to any coder and he should be able to implement it.
This all hinges on the value of design which is a dying art in many ways. Sure you want to get good code fast and you will probably end up rewriting things but there are still times and places for good solid design. I've seen a couple projects when one or two people built a full UML design doc and spent a couple months doing it and then a team of 10 people implemented the code in days. I think we all see ourselves as software designers as much as developers and that's not the most attractive way to work but there is still a time and a place for it.
I would think that it would be the game programmer's API by game programmers. Loki uses if for their stuff and that's proof enough to me that it's good.
There are lot's of things that use it also.
forget this trademark bullshit. DOn't they make computer games? And now they think they can make a movie? New Line was probably doing them a favor to keep from embarassing themselves.
Seriously though, over the last 8 years and especially recently we've been shown just what a great country the USA is. For as little as $5000 you can spend the night in the Lincoln bedroom in the Whitehouse. I assume that includes chats with the president, possibly a family dinner with the first family or maybe a state dinner and a breakfast, I'm certain you are given exposure to the various staff members who help run the show and influence policy. On the surface this make our democracy look cheap and false, I think the reality of it is much better though because in my eyes, a dork like me, or any one of us for that matter, could have a slice of the president's time simply by giving him $5,000 - $10,000. I'm an active follower of politics and I have written letters to my congress people, I have called their offices, I even went to a union meeting once where they were trying to unionize IBM so that I could meet my congress person. When there is a bad patent or some kind of liberty threatening bill on the books I write a letter and make a phone call or two and so far I have yet to see any real results from that. For all I know my congress people haven't even read the letters or been given the phone messages. Now if I spend some cash on the president I can rest easy (in the Lincoln bedroom, no less) and be confident that the president of the most powerful country on the planet has heard my issues. I know that nothing may come of them but at least he heard them. Further, it looks like if you spend a little more they will let you drive a nuclear attack sub and do some drills with the crew. That's absolutely amazing, any one of us, for a modest fee, can talk to the president and or drive a nuclear sub and do an "e-blow," regardless of your race, creed, or whatever.
So here is my proposal. We put together a slashdot raffle. Tickets cost $1 a piece and you can buy as many as you'd like to have. With the many thousands of dollars we raise we buy one night at the Whitehouse and one ride on a nuclear sub. We send RMS to the Whitehouse to lobby for us and some lucky slashdotter, picked at random, get's to drive the sub. It sounds like a win-win situation to me and I'm certain we could raise the minimum needed, slashdot has tens of thousands of viewers.
Age does matter, I believe the saying goes "15 get's you 20.."
the Playstations 2 is the PSX2, never, under any circumstances should it be referred to as the PS/2. PS/2 brings up bad memories of MCA and other nasties.
Bush also dones't have a mandate for his agenda and if he want's to have a second term then he will preserve the status quo.
This is the first step the living in the world of Terminator! Better go buy some German Shepherds so that you can tell when the real humans come to your house or when the termintor robots do..
The capability has been there but not used.
I'm not for this in any way except that it makes it harder to pirate MS software or preload it in any IT type of fashion and that then makes alternatives look more attractive. With some of the tricks they've been pulling lately, trying to audit with threats and then strongly suggesting that people buy their mega-expensive site license pack (I know of 4 companies that have been intimidated by them in to spending 10s of millions of dollars) making it harder to pirate their stuff is a good thing. I don't want my company to be forced in to buying a $25million MS everything pack which then forces any alternatives out in to the cold.
The people that get screwed by this are those who like to tinker or play. Sure I own a Win98 CD and I've installed in on 5 or 6 machines (one at a time, of course) and I've rebuilt machines. Most people don't do any of that though. This is only a hiccup for us geeks who would actually delete windows and then put it back on there.
On the scale from 1 to badass they are playa's. If I ever become a billionaire or even a 10millionaire I'm going to have one. They are kind of slow an steady, fairly quite, smooth, and really big and cool looking.
When you ride in to town in your blimp, people take notice. Plus, I think non-German blimps just give off a really friendly and happy energy. It's not some aggressive looking lear jet.
I hope Satya still runs it at CMU. He is truely the best of the best, a brilliant OS expert and among the best professors I've ever worked with, he can take difficult concepts and make them into very easy to understand ones and do it completely and in a nearly poetic way. If you can take his course, take it. Anyhow, when I did yalnix they gave you a virtual machine and told you how to compile code for it and that was it. I believe we did 5 projects, 1) was the standard freeby, had to debug a multithreaded queue application. 2) was a serial terminal driver, only difficult if you didn't know how it was supposed to work and had to grapple with understand that as well as writing the code. 3) Was where it hit the fan, we implemented the kernel here, 5 or 6 weeks, we implemented the syscalls, the scheduler, and the memory managment. 4) Kind of a lob, you made yalnix run arbitrary ELF-sparc code, I don't remember if this was intended to be a project of if they did some resheduling and gave us another freeby because of the difficulty of the first. This project essentially meant adding a few syscalls and pluging in some ELF code that they gave us. 5) we implemented the yalnixfs, this was a (bitch**bitch) yalnix wasn't multithreaded so we needed to invent a technique for dealing with it (lot's of goto's and a state tracker) Part 3 was the scariest and part 5 was the hardest. At the end Juan Leon, the TA that year, was talking about figuring out ways to reduce the pain/knowledge gained ratio, he thought it was way too hard for what we learned. It was one of the few projects at CMU I was really proud of, I always learned stuff in classes but that class kicked my ass at times and I was very happy to do as well as I did and I felt like I learned a lot.
I think Nachos and Minix are potentially harder projects, the class I did Nachos with had it pretty easy. Minix works on real hardware and the development cycle and tool chain can be a problem as well as just understanding your hardware, I know sparc and alpha well but I'm not an x86 guru and it's not the most logical architecture, there are lot's of special rules that you only learn from experience. It may be bias but I think yalnix was the best one of the three, CMU made it very hard but it was doable and you really learned the concepts by implementing them. Further, the OS class at CMU is the best I have seen. Again, my hat is off to Satya and Leon, I think the class was a good balance between real world implementation and concept; Satya pretty much taught the state of the art concepts in lecture even though the Yalnix OS is very primitive in a lot of ways. I think the OS class in general is a difficult one, they could give you Linux and ask you to screw around with various components, that could be incredibly easy or incredibly difficult. They could give you most of a kernel and ask you to implement a few syscalls and change the MM stuff. They could give you disk space and an editor and make you do the whole thing. Dialing in a good pain/signal ratio is hard. I would expect CMU to possibly make it easier, the general theme when I was there was that the school promoted a geek and hacker culture and not enough of an entrepreneural one and that there were 3 girls in SCS and 200+ guys and that wasn't right. (there were more female professors in SCS than students) The compiler class was similar, both OS and compiler pretty much took a semester of my undivided attention to get A's.
I've generally enjoyed planetarium shows, good astronomers giving them can often tie a lot of things together, anthropology and all sort of cool stuff have a lot to do with stars.