You are not alone in this. My little brother is 14 years younger than me and seems to be doing harder stuff than I was doing in school. Not by much, but just a bit more. This is most likely due to the fact that they use technology a bit more, so they can focus less on repetition and more on concepts.
Btw... Wasn't the internet supposed to make getting access to primary resources easy? The first thing I thought when I read this was "this is probably some group with an agenda to increase education funding." The article hardly mentioned the group who wrote the paper, nor did they link to it (They seem to be a neutral group).
Its a lot like asking a black jack dealer why he doesn't go and open up his own casino. It takes an immense amount of infrastructure and capital.
I work in finance, I was at GS for some time (I did not work in algos/electronic trading though), and prior to that worked for another large bank on an electronic trading app that traded on its own, and made a nice sum of money each day. I was not the originator of this app, but I did maintain/enhance it for awhile.
The markets produce torrents of data. These torrents of data need to be analyzed in real time, using producing some sort of meta data, and then all of this data needs to be routed/packaged and sent to the appropriate components to act on. This requires a *lot* of computing power. The data itself is quite expensive- direct market feeds are many thousands of dollars per month (relying on yahoo won't cut it- you need as little latency as possible. The software infrastructure is difficult to write- it needs to be massively scalable. You need lots of capital as well. Unless you are using an absolutely risk free algo, which even if it looks like it is on paper, it is most likely NOT, you need a really large bank account to live past those "oops" moments and times when your algo is not working. On top of this, the guys that are good at coming up with algorithms and the guys that are good at building the infrastructure are rarely the same person. If you made a video game comparison, John Carmack is a badass engine programmer, but he also needs to rely on artists to make his games work.
Algorithmic trading in itself is generally not a main revenue driver. It is usually a nice chunk of change on the side, or a cost reducer, but I don't know of any shops (not to say that there aren't any people out how there who may) that use algorithmic trading as the bread and butter of their business. Hence the guys that do this tend to live in large banks.
Also keep in mind that finance tends to pay very well. If you are a revenue producer, there is really no bound on what your comp for the year can be. It is very difficult to get a startup going in NYC for the very reason that most of the best developers are in finance working for banks making very comfortable livings.
Interestingly enough, I am at a startup that is not necessarily doing what is considered "algorithmic trading" but something similar, and we needed to be backed up by VC's because it costs so much to get up and running in the financial world (I didn't even get into the SEC requirements). So in some sense you could consider me one of those guys that "just went out and did it on his own." I do not plan on putting in an order for a yacht any time soon.
I agree, perhaps I can make a convincing argument as to why though.
They have changed their story. Their first story was a lot better. The fact that they are now changing their story makes me and I am sure the SEC call their bluff.
Anyway, their first explanation (revealed in a multi-page NYTimes article) was that the data supplied by the mortgage lenders was wrong. And this makes some sense- For years the model worked like this: Loan officers went and made loans, verified income, assets, their credit rating, etc. and made sure that the borrower could afford the loan. The interest charged depended on which tier of credit healthiness they were put into, and these loans were later resold to banks. The banks would package these up in a group and ship them off to Moody's and Fitch, who would then give them a credit score to say how likely each package was to default. A higher default rate would mean that a buyer would demand a higher interest rate return. What Moody's essentially did at this point was take the Loan Officer data and rate the tier of loans based on macro conditions in the market (general direction of the real estate market, rate of defaults by the tiers of borrowers, etc.) Their story is that they took the Loan Officers' word that these mortgages were affordable to the people they made the loans to, and this was not true. I can *kind of* understand this to a point, for years this is how the system worked, and it worked well, so I can understand that a slip in their standards would go unnoticed for awhile. However, there was signs all over the F'ing place that things were seriously wrong. "Option Arms" aka negative amortization loans (you owe *more* money after each month, not less) were used all over the place, incomes didn't even begin to match up with what these people owed each month.
To use the car analogy, imagine you were getting cars from Honda for years, and they worked as expected. If Honda started to cut corners here and there, you might not notice for awhile. But the drop in quality in the mortgage borrowers would be akin to Honda dropping off cars that were billowing out white smoke as you drove them off the lot. You would have to have your head in the sand and screaming lalala I can't hear you to not notice that something was wrong. At what point these companies switched from being duped to negligent is subjective, and that is what will be hotly contested in the months to come.
As an aside, lets talk about who these brokers are that were making these loans. I graduated in 2002, in more or less the trough of the downturn, at least from a hiring perspective. Yet a lot of the lets say, "not so academic" people I knew, the comm and psych majors were all getting hired at mortgage companies, which astounded me because many of them had no idea what an interest rate even was, let alone knew how to calculate a payment from one. But they went through a week long training course, put on a suit and tie or some stilettos and a skirt, and started calling people, pushing products they didn't understand, using the pitch script they were handed in training. And it worked, I was insanely jealous that some of these, pardon my french, dumbass jocks, were making 90k a year out of school while I was making less than half that putting in crazy hours at an entry level programming job. Some of them figured out what was going on, but they were so drunk on the money that they didn't care anymore.
As a final point, lets talk about the "coding errors." I have no inside knowledge, but I work in the industry, and I am pretty sure what they mean is that the models they use to predict the expected returns (which are all written in code these days) had a problem, and the code was probably entirely to spec but the spec was wrong. Of course it is much easier to spin it as a "bug" that some "programmer" made, rather than admit that the very core of their business was based on flawed assumptions. These models are tested extensively in any halfway decently run group, and usually run through a vigorous set of what-if scenarios to see how likely it is they would lose value.
I bought the Easton Press leather-bound version of the LOTR trilogy (+ hobbit + Silmarillion) and I must say I was quite disappointed myself. I don't know what I was expecting, but for $60 a book I was expecting to be quite impressed and I well, was not. And whats worse is, they were so expensive, I don't even want to take them out of the house to read them.
On top of that they will not stop sending me boatloads of junkmail hawking their products in expensive color catalogs. And I am sure they sold my name off to several other lists as well, as all of a sudden I am getting ads in the mail for collectible coins, civil war figurines, etc.
I am glad you are happy with their stuff, I just figured I would provide another opinion before someone decides to go out and spend a lot of money based on your endorsement only to be disappointed like I was.
This seems kind of gimmicky. The price point makes it unlikely that any home users will purchase it when it is cheaper to buy a usb harddrive, but the form factor and hardware make it impractical for an enterprise setting where it doesn't make any real sense in a large distributed network.
Though I suppose it could be good for a small office setting with file sharing needs...
So theres that..
This product in particular is weak and I am not sure why this review in particular made the front page, but I do have a NAS box of a different sort that works quite well, at least for my purposes. I live in NYC, and so my apartment is not much larger than a shoebox, and I got rid of my desktop awhile back in favor of just keeping a much smaller laptop. Laptops have small drives though, and I wanted more storage. A small NAS box fit the need perfectly- I got one by Synology that is a BYOD (Bring Your Own Disks) so it is upgradable and also supports RAID. The model I bought was fancy and runs linux and has a built in Apache, FTP, Windows Media Server, among other things and it runs linux... so you can hack around with it as need be- essentially it works as a miniature, quiet, low power server, which is exactly what I wanted. It sits next to my router and I never think about it. I put in some big disks and actually use it as a backup server for my laptop as well.
In a family setting, if you convinced everyone to put their data on the shared disk as opposed to their local pc, you mitigate the risk of one of their machines breaking and them losing all of their stuff.
These devices fit my needs perfectly, and I think as we see home networks grow and solid state drives proliferate, we will probably see more of these drives- SSD's will hold the OS and apps, and the NAS will hold all your MP3's, movies, etc- possibly with them being able to be accessed by the tv's and audio equipment in your house. It exists today on high end niche equipment, whether it will become easy enough to use to catch on with the masses is still kind of a question mark.
If you use the facilities provided by the STL and BOOST (most notably shared_ptr), C++ is not a whole lot different than Java these days. Java went a little too far in my opinion on being nice to the programmers while giving up performance. Modern C++ hits the sweet spot in my opinion.
If only the standards committee could get off its arse and progress as quickly as BOOST does....
I would agree with you so long as "whatever he wants" means he has his choice of Fast Food, Retail, or whichever coffee house he wants to work in.
You can pick on CS as a career for a lot of things, but my Liberal Arts friends are still barely making rent 5 years out of college, while I on the other hand am making a very comfortable living and have a well stocked 401k, an investment portfolio and plan on taking the current collapse in the real estate market to buy a co-op or condo in or around Manhattan. If I had to do it all over again would I have chosen CS? Maybe/probably not, but I don't have the slightest bit of envy for my "social science" friends that all just got laid off from their jobs pushing mortgages.
"Knowledge of dead societies" and $3 will get you a cup of coffee.
We spend more on rockets than entire countries produce in a year. $16 billion dollars is a lot of money no matter how you look at it. I am a geek, and space exploration is good and all, but I think $16 billion is more than enough to spend thanks. Remember, this is not imaginary money, this is your money coming out of YOUR paycheck every month. Personally I would rather see some of that money spent on developing alternative energy technologies. NASA's funding in real dollars is less than its 1966 peak where it had a stated mission of going to the moon and an unstated mission of developing ICBM technology, but NASA is actually receiving funding (in real terms) that is well above its 1980's levels, and on par with most of the 1990's.
Do you realize that NASA has some of the best PR people in the planet? If anyone dares to suggest even a budget increase that is not to their liking, immediately a press release is sent out about how one of the cheaper and most successful missions is "unfortunately going to have to be cut off. budget cuts you know?" If things started getting a little tight in your town's government, is the first thing they turn off the water supply? F no. If your mayor suggested that he would be run out of office and possibly hanged. Nobody even blinks when NASA does this though. NASA plays slashdotters who are supposed to be smarter than that like fiddles.
Next time you read an article about how they have to eliminate the voyager project that only costs about $4million dollar a year and has been running for 20+ years as the probes exit the solar system ask yourself if there are really competent people running the show or maybe they are just saying this to grab some headlines and stir up outrage.
Basic: Basic programming building blocks- variables, statements, control of execution flow with if/then/else and goto
DOS: directory structures, command line navigation, computer architecture (and how bad design time decisions can lead to decades worth of headaches)
Turbo Pascal: Not too familiar w/ Pascal anymore, but if IIRC, you should have learned how to use functions, namespaces, and the modular programming model.
Microsoft C Programming: Event driven programming models, resource handles, GUI development issues- how to expose just enough complexity to make things useful without cluttering the screen, and the C aspect... you learned the syntax underpinning just about every other major language since and the basics of using structures, pointers, handling memory, the list could go on for pages.
Gopher/Telnet: How plain text internet protocols generally work- and if anything you learned some cool tricks to do a raw telnet session on port 25 and spoof email from the boss.
Pine: Email concepts/netiquette. Was Pine really so hard to learn anyway?
Windows 95 registry: Eh probably the least portable skill here- you at least learned to be comfortable with digging into a blackbox OS and looking under its skirt. The registry is still in use in XP, not so sure about vista, so this is a skill you will get at least 15 years of use out of.
Bea Tuxedo: not too familiar w/ this product, but if I remember correctly, its all about virtualization, which is now one of the hottest new technologies in the sysadmin/IT world.
Sounds like you learned a hell of a lot. Sure none of these are all that employable *today* but couple that background with a weekend spent with a Java book and I would employ you with a 6 figure salary in a second over some newly minted sun certified ITT Tech grad.
I bought a near mint condition yellow '02 ninja for $1800 about two years ago, and recently sold it for $1500 (probably could have gotten the original $1800, but somehow that just felt wrong).
I am glad you saw it as good-intentioned humor in it and didn't take offense. I posted AC so as not to start a flamewar (and tip off to my boss the amount of time I spent writing a Slashdot response!).
Or also the fact that even on an entry level tennis will still cost you about $200 to get into- two rackets, plus some balls- assuming you even have a tennis court near you- I sure did not have one in walk/bicycle range. Its also kind of tough to play at night, or by yourself, etc. etc.
I think the OP is just jealous that they haven't come out with "Shaking Your Cane At Kids to Get Off Your Lawn" complete with a Cane accessory for the Wii yet.
Until I hear the whole story, including this kid's background, I would not pass judgment on the teacher or the school. This sounds eerily like the stories some kids used to tell along the lines of "I got detention just for sneezing!" which on the surface sounds like some idiot power-crazed teacher wronging a well meaning student. Then you get the back story, he was acting up in class, and being asked to control himself several times, then lets out an over-exaggerated (even if it was a naturally reflexive) sneeze intended to get more attention, which is the last straw to the teacher who then writes him up. But his version of the story is "all I did was sneeze, and I got detention!" which one or two of his buddies will corroborate, and that is what spreads around.
Somehow, it was always the disruptive students with histories of disruption that somehow ended up the victim of such events. I have a feeling this kid circumvented IT policies probably not for the first time, installed Firefox, showed off his 1337 skills to the class, who then caused a distraction by saying "ooh cool" followed up by "can you show me how to do that?!", the teacher then found out, and then said "close that and use IE" to which the student did not comply, probably at least twice, while basking in his badassness and attention from his classmates, then the fed-up teacher finally gave him detention.
I used to work in Derivatives Market Making, specifically in their connectivity group. Latency is a *very* big deal. Arbitrage aside, essentially market making works like this- whoever has the best price gets the trade. For the sake of simplicity, lets assume everyone prices an option the same way all the time. Lets also assume that everyone can also price an option at the same exact speed. A new price tick comes in, forcing the options to all reprice at once. The guy who gets his quote out there first is going to capture whatever orders are out there at the new price, and thus capture the bid/ask spread.
When I left, we were looking at sub 10ms and things like colocation to reduce it further, not anywhere near the microsecond level, but thats where things are headed.
Are you kidding? Maybe its just here in NY, but the Treo is one of the more popular phones around. Nowhere near the Razor, but I have seen 10x as many Treos as I have iPhones.
That being said, I have a Treo 650, and am sorely disappointed with it. I thought it would be awesome to have expandable memory to play MP3's from... until I realized it has one of those mini jacks, for which you have to pay an extra $12 to get an adapter to use with your normal set of headphones (which falls out easily, and is even more easily lost). This was all well and good since by expandable memory, they meant expandable up to 2 gigs- since for some inexplicable reason larger ones are not recognized.
Then there is all that great third party software I heard so much about- I found one decent ebook reader, and thats about it, and an emulator that works well enough except for the fact that it only recognizes the top "system" type buttons as mappable keys. So much crappy payware exists for this phone, but how about an app that will download some RSS feeds and update them for me in the morning so I can catch up on the way to work? (I did start writing something to do this, but just don't have the free time these days). And all of these programs tend to treat the memory card as some sort of strange foreign device whereas in my opinion I just assumed it would seamlessly integrate with the phone's internal storage.
The third party software being shoddy wouldn't even be so bad if the phone application didn't freeze up all the time. And this is one of those cases where you really wish the whole phone froze up so you didn't have to realize that its not that your family and friends don't love you and no one has called you all day, its just that your phone appears to be functioning in every way except... the whole making and receiving calls part.
But most of all... I have had the thing for about a year, and its just falling apart- screws are falling out, some keys are not working, making texting a real pain in the ass, and that was the original huge draw in the first place. I actually went to a Cingular store just to make sure I didn't get a really good Chinese knockoff or something- they said it was legit though.
Luckily the battery life is excellent- this thing can still go a week without a charge... if only the damn thing could work for a week straight! A kind of amusing thing is that when I first got it, I was only worried about the touch screen going bad on me. Thats the only thing that works pretty much flawlessly on the thing.
What software do you use, and where do you get your books from? One of the main reasons I bought a Treo was to use it as an E-book reader, and I have been very disappointed. I have tried e-reader, adobe reader, plucker, and a few others, but found them all to be disappointing- either annoying conversion programs are required, or the text is just unbearable to read (scrolling every 5 lines or so gets old quick).
Just to let you know, Linux has used a similar strategy since at least the 2.4 kernels (probably earlier too, but I can only say for sure for 2.4+, as thats what we looked at in my systems programming class when I was in school).
It is a better way to use memory... If you have 2 gigs of RAM, and you just closed Winamp or Office, why not just leave the dll's and exe's loaded in memory in case you reopen them instead of going to the disk. If you need to load a large dataset, just delete the pointers to that memory- its ram, you are talking about microsecond responses here, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no penalty for keeping data in RAM. Perhaps a better way to say it is, is that there is no method nor reason to "nullify" RAM.
If anything, its kind of silly that it was *not* being used all this time.
Indeed. When AOL went unlimited access I couldn't wait to just play NWN 24/7. I think it took all of two weeks before they started charging extra for games at that point.
I just moved from Manhattan, in Battery Park City, which did not exist 30 years ago. I was about a half mile from the old AT&T headquarters, and a large scary skyscraper they own with no windows that is allegedly filled with all of their telecom equipment, as well as being a mere 5 blocks from Wall St and the heart of the financial district. I don't know how many people live in Battery Park City, but my building had about 500 residents alone, and I was surrounded by highrises.
I now live across the river in Jersey City, which pretty much existed entirely of abandoned factories and docks in 1990. They started building a city here from the ground up in the mid-late 90's, and the process continues today, with high rise apartment and offices building popping up like weeds.
I only had and have 10 down 1 up broadband for $40. Where is my 100MB Connection?!
By these arguments (age of infrastructure, population density, "last mile difficulty") I should have 10 GBPS for about 5 cents a month, but I have the same bandwidth as just about everyone else.
I think the poster is way off. When you work in finance, you get fingerprinted because of SEC requirements (when they investigate insider trading or other wrongdoing, they often fingerprint the documents used so you can't say someone forged your signature). She probably falls under the class of employee requiring this because she has access to some sort of non-public information or real time market data not generally available to the public. I don't see anything to get heated over here. This is standard practice in finance.
I am not trying to flame here, but you sound like someone who just got through CS 101.
Throw in multithreading, and all that niceness goes out the window. Or how about random memory corruption problems? How about when the dump file is corrupted, or it only occurs in the release (aka non-debug) version of the executable? Or the crash happens in a third party library that you don't have the source to, or only in extreme/odd situations that are very difficult to reproduce in your environment...
Your assertion is not true. The ghettos only arose in the 50's/60's because before that, they were called "slums" and were filled with tenements. They were also filled with people who were considered of such a low class, that few ever wrote about them, or attempted to rally for their cause. That all started around the turn of the century (How the other half lives), and social programs took a lot longer to really take hold, and the ghettos we speak of today consist of housing projects built by the government.
Just because we didn't call them ghettos doesn't mean they didn't exist. America was the land of opportunity, yeah, but for many people, notably the irish, it was a place where they wouldn't starve.
Urban areas used to be a requirement back in the days when communication was difficult and expensive. These days when you can make a long distance phone call for a few cents a minute, instantaneously email specs/documents/blueprints, etc. instantly, and can video conference with reasonable quality at a cheap price, there is not much real need to be in the high rent areas of a city.
Well as a Wii owner that was initially very excited about the Wii, I have to agree with the parent poster. Zelda is great, Wii Sports is fun, but after a week or so, only with friends. I have played Wario Ware, and I really wasn't all that impressed. I just bought Wii Play, which was hardly worth the $5 premium on a wiimote to buy. Excite truck? The controls are not good, and the game is nothing special at all. FPS's ported to the Wii just don't seem like a good idea. It is a different kind of system, and it needs different kinds of games. I have no interest in playing an FPS on the Wii. Red Steel... I have not played, mostly because three other friends of mine told me to not even bother.
I think the Wii will eventually be a great console, but as of right now, there are not a whole lot of games out there. I don't think you are right to just dismiss his claims and call it sour grapes, especially since most Wii owners I know also have a 360 or a PS3.
We have similar backgrounds, I grew up on LI, went to a state school upstate, I worked up there briefly and then went back to LI and worked in the city (and have continued to do so ever since).
You don't say why specifically you are unhappy being upstate- Is it because you miss your friends/family? You find the area too small and boring? You find everyone around you to be too close minded and conservative? etc... The reason why I mention this, is because you may be surprised that NYC is no cakewalk either. You probably make a very comfortable living, and in a year or two could buy a modest house. That nice salary you landed in the city suddenly doesn't seem so great when you have to pay city tax, pay $6+ for lunch each day, pay obscene amounts for rent (or $400+/month to commute), and just about everything else. Living in a city also has the unique way of making you very lonely when there are millions of people around you every day and you don't really know anyone. It makes it 2x worse.
That said, my advice would be to take whatever they are giving you, but don't extend your contract. Keep looking. the market is hot right now, but it usually takes a few months to find a job, especially if you are far away. Since you are only a year out, you can probably still get into the new summer hire programs many companies offer, some of which may not start until September or even later. July is not that far off.
The ROI on huge schools may not be that attractive, this is true. However, keep in mind that the "name" is going to be on your resume, and perhaps your office wall, for the rest of your life. With a name like MIT on your degree, you won't ever have a problem getting your foot in the door. I wouldn't settle. You will also never find yourself in an interview room saying things like "Somewhere U?, oh that's a well regarded school in $REGION for engineering..." while the interviewer's eyes just kind of glaze over.
CMU is a great name, and for CS, definitely a "top-tier" school. I wouldn't lose a minute of sleep over getting a degree from CMU. Unless you are going into research, CMU will provide you all the opportunities you could ever want if you do well there. Even if you want to do research, CMU will not be a handicap in any way.
If you don't plan on going into research, your degree matters very little after 2-3 years out of school. At that point, your experience and accomplishments in the actual workplace matter 10x more than what you did in college. In fact, the best people I have worked with don't have a college degree at all, and every peer I can remember working with has agreed with me that what you learn in college is really insignificant compared with what you learn on the job.
Lastly, you are a senior, its february. Its WAY too late to be asking this question, unless you can start some open source project tonight that will instantly attract 100k users tomorrow. Really you should know this, and the fact that this has somehow not occurred to you is a little odd for someone that I presume is an honors student and has been thinking about college for the latter half of high school. You should have been asking this question last year, and then you would have had some control over the situation. But to try to answer your question, to get into MIT, you need to already have achieved something. Despite what is often batted around, the people who do the best in college and get the most out of it know what they want to do when going in, and use it as a launching point for their career. Those who go "to find themselves" often spend too much time looking, and come out with nothing but a degree.
My background: I was also an honors kid in high school looking at top tier schools, ended up going to a state school on a scholarship, ended up not doing so well there (I mean not poorly, but nothing exceptional), but I am currently working at a top tier investment banks working on front office trading systems.
Slashdot Mirror
You are not alone in this. My little brother is 14 years younger than me and seems to be doing harder stuff than I was doing in school. Not by much, but just a bit more. This is most likely due to the fact that they use technology a bit more, so they can focus less on repetition and more on concepts.
Btw... Wasn't the internet supposed to make getting access to primary resources easy? The first thing I thought when I read this was "this is probably some group with an agenda to increase education funding." The article hardly mentioned the group who wrote the paper, nor did they link to it (They seem to be a neutral group).
Anyway, the link to the horse's mouth is here:
http://www.reform.co.uk/thevalueofmathematics_214.php
Its a lot like asking a black jack dealer why he doesn't go and open up his own casino. It takes an immense amount of infrastructure and capital.
I work in finance, I was at GS for some time (I did not work in algos/electronic trading though), and prior to that worked for another large bank on an electronic trading app that traded on its own, and made a nice sum of money each day. I was not the originator of this app, but I did maintain/enhance it for awhile.
The markets produce torrents of data. These torrents of data need to be analyzed in real time, using producing some sort of meta data, and then all of this data needs to be routed/packaged and sent to the appropriate components to act on. This requires a *lot* of computing power. The data itself is quite expensive- direct market feeds are many thousands of dollars per month (relying on yahoo won't cut it- you need as little latency as possible. The software infrastructure is difficult to write- it needs to be massively scalable. You need lots of capital as well. Unless you are using an absolutely risk free algo, which even if it looks like it is on paper, it is most likely NOT, you need a really large bank account to live past those "oops" moments and times when your algo is not working. On top of this, the guys that are good at coming up with algorithms and the guys that are good at building the infrastructure are rarely the same person. If you made a video game comparison, John Carmack is a badass engine programmer, but he also needs to rely on artists to make his games work.
Algorithmic trading in itself is generally not a main revenue driver. It is usually a nice chunk of change on the side, or a cost reducer, but I don't know of any shops (not to say that there aren't any people out how there who may) that use algorithmic trading as the bread and butter of their business. Hence the guys that do this tend to live in large banks.
Also keep in mind that finance tends to pay very well. If you are a revenue producer, there is really no bound on what your comp for the year can be. It is very difficult to get a startup going in NYC for the very reason that most of the best developers are in finance working for banks making very comfortable livings.
Interestingly enough, I am at a startup that is not necessarily doing what is considered "algorithmic trading" but something similar, and we needed to be backed up by VC's because it costs so much to get up and running in the financial world (I didn't even get into the SEC requirements). So in some sense you could consider me one of those guys that "just went out and did it on his own." I do not plan on putting in an order for a yacht any time soon.
I agree, perhaps I can make a convincing argument as to why though.
They have changed their story. Their first story was a lot better. The fact that they are now changing their story makes me and I am sure the SEC call their bluff.
Anyway, their first explanation (revealed in a multi-page NYTimes article) was that the data supplied by the mortgage lenders was wrong. And this makes some sense- For years the model worked like this: Loan officers went and made loans, verified income, assets, their credit rating, etc. and made sure that the borrower could afford the loan. The interest charged depended on which tier of credit healthiness they were put into, and these loans were later resold to banks. The banks would package these up in a group and ship them off to Moody's and Fitch, who would then give them a credit score to say how likely each package was to default. A higher default rate would mean that a buyer would demand a higher interest rate return. What Moody's essentially did at this point was take the Loan Officer data and rate the tier of loans based on macro conditions in the market (general direction of the real estate market, rate of defaults by the tiers of borrowers, etc.) Their story is that they took the Loan Officers' word that these mortgages were affordable to the people they made the loans to, and this was not true. I can *kind of* understand this to a point, for years this is how the system worked, and it worked well, so I can understand that a slip in their standards would go unnoticed for awhile. However, there was signs all over the F'ing place that things were seriously wrong. "Option Arms" aka negative amortization loans (you owe *more* money after each month, not less) were used all over the place, incomes didn't even begin to match up with what these people owed each month.
To use the car analogy, imagine you were getting cars from Honda for years, and they worked as expected. If Honda started to cut corners here and there, you might not notice for awhile. But the drop in quality in the mortgage borrowers would be akin to Honda dropping off cars that were billowing out white smoke as you drove them off the lot. You would have to have your head in the sand and screaming lalala I can't hear you to not notice that something was wrong. At what point these companies switched from being duped to negligent is subjective, and that is what will be hotly contested in the months to come.
As an aside, lets talk about who these brokers are that were making these loans. I graduated in 2002, in more or less the trough of the downturn, at least from a hiring perspective. Yet a lot of the lets say, "not so academic" people I knew, the comm and psych majors were all getting hired at mortgage companies, which astounded me because many of them had no idea what an interest rate even was, let alone knew how to calculate a payment from one. But they went through a week long training course, put on a suit and tie or some stilettos and a skirt, and started calling people, pushing products they didn't understand, using the pitch script they were handed in training. And it worked, I was insanely jealous that some of these, pardon my french, dumbass jocks, were making 90k a year out of school while I was making less than half that putting in crazy hours at an entry level programming job. Some of them figured out what was going on, but they were so drunk on the money that they didn't care anymore.
As a final point, lets talk about the "coding errors." I have no inside knowledge, but I work in the industry, and I am pretty sure what they mean is that the models they use to predict the expected returns (which are all written in code these days) had a problem, and the code was probably entirely to spec but the spec was wrong. Of course it is much easier to spin it as a "bug" that some "programmer" made, rather than admit that the very core of their business was based on flawed assumptions. These models are tested extensively in any halfway decently run group, and usually run through a vigorous set of what-if scenarios to see how likely it is they would lose value.
I bought the Easton Press leather-bound version of the LOTR trilogy (+ hobbit + Silmarillion) and I must say I was quite disappointed myself. I don't know what I was expecting, but for $60 a book I was expecting to be quite impressed and I well, was not. And whats worse is, they were so expensive, I don't even want to take them out of the house to read them.
On top of that they will not stop sending me boatloads of junkmail hawking their products in expensive color catalogs. And I am sure they sold my name off to several other lists as well, as all of a sudden I am getting ads in the mail for collectible coins, civil war figurines, etc.
I am glad you are happy with their stuff, I just figured I would provide another opinion before someone decides to go out and spend a lot of money based on your endorsement only to be disappointed like I was.
Though I suppose it could be good for a small office setting with file sharing needs...
This product in particular is weak and I am not sure why this review in particular made the front page, but I do have a NAS box of a different sort that works quite well, at least for my purposes. I live in NYC, and so my apartment is not much larger than a shoebox, and I got rid of my desktop awhile back in favor of just keeping a much smaller laptop. Laptops have small drives though, and I wanted more storage. A small NAS box fit the need perfectly- I got one by Synology that is a BYOD (Bring Your Own Disks) so it is upgradable and also supports RAID. The model I bought was fancy and runs linux and has a built in Apache, FTP, Windows Media Server, among other things and it runs linux... so you can hack around with it as need be- essentially it works as a miniature, quiet, low power server, which is exactly what I wanted. It sits next to my router and I never think about it. I put in some big disks and actually use it as a backup server for my laptop as well.So theres that..
In a family setting, if you convinced everyone to put their data on the shared disk as opposed to their local pc, you mitigate the risk of one of their machines breaking and them losing all of their stuff.
These devices fit my needs perfectly, and I think as we see home networks grow and solid state drives proliferate, we will probably see more of these drives- SSD's will hold the OS and apps, and the NAS will hold all your MP3's, movies, etc- possibly with them being able to be accessed by the tv's and audio equipment in your house. It exists today on high end niche equipment, whether it will become easy enough to use to catch on with the masses is still kind of a question mark.
If you use the facilities provided by the STL and BOOST (most notably shared_ptr), C++ is not a whole lot different than Java these days. Java went a little too far in my opinion on being nice to the programmers while giving up performance. Modern C++ hits the sweet spot in my opinion.
If only the standards committee could get off its arse and progress as quickly as BOOST does....
I would agree with you so long as "whatever he wants" means he has his choice of Fast Food, Retail, or whichever coffee house he wants to work in.
You can pick on CS as a career for a lot of things, but my Liberal Arts friends are still barely making rent 5 years out of college, while I on the other hand am making a very comfortable living and have a well stocked 401k, an investment portfolio and plan on taking the current collapse in the real estate market to buy a co-op or condo in or around Manhattan. If I had to do it all over again would I have chosen CS? Maybe/probably not, but I don't have the slightest bit of envy for my "social science" friends that all just got laid off from their jobs pushing mortgages.
"Knowledge of dead societies" and $3 will get you a cup of coffee.
- NASA is VASTLY underfunded, with it's funding being cut on key projects year by year
NASA's budget is around $16 billion dollars, which is more than Jordan's entire GDP and about another 100 countries as well according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)
We spend more on rockets than entire countries produce in a year. $16 billion dollars is a lot of money no matter how you look at it. I am a geek, and space exploration is good and all, but I think $16 billion is more than enough to spend thanks. Remember, this is not imaginary money, this is your money coming out of YOUR paycheck every month. Personally I would rather see some of that money spent on developing alternative energy technologies. NASA's funding in real dollars is less than its 1966 peak where it had a stated mission of going to the moon and an unstated mission of developing ICBM technology, but NASA is actually receiving funding (in real terms) that is well above its 1980's levels, and on par with most of the 1990's.
Do you realize that NASA has some of the best PR people in the planet? If anyone dares to suggest even a budget increase that is not to their liking, immediately a press release is sent out about how one of the cheaper and most successful missions is "unfortunately going to have to be cut off. budget cuts you know?" If things started getting a little tight in your town's government, is the first thing they turn off the water supply? F no. If your mayor suggested that he would be run out of office and possibly hanged. Nobody even blinks when NASA does this though. NASA plays slashdotters who are supposed to be smarter than that like fiddles.
Next time you read an article about how they have to eliminate the voyager project that only costs about $4million dollar a year and has been running for 20+ years as the probes exit the solar system ask yourself if there are really competent people running the show or maybe they are just saying this to grab some headlines and stir up outrage.
Are you sure its all obsolete?
Basic:
Basic programming building blocks- variables, statements, control of execution flow with if/then/else and goto
DOS:
directory structures, command line navigation, computer architecture (and how bad design time decisions can lead to decades worth of headaches)
Turbo Pascal:
Not too familiar w/ Pascal anymore, but if IIRC, you should have learned how to use functions, namespaces, and the modular programming model.
Microsoft C Programming:
Event driven programming models, resource handles, GUI development issues- how to expose just enough complexity to make things useful without cluttering the screen, and the C aspect... you learned the syntax underpinning just about every other major language since and the basics of using structures, pointers, handling memory, the list could go on for pages.
Gopher/Telnet:
How plain text internet protocols generally work- and if anything you learned some cool tricks to do a raw telnet session on port 25 and spoof email from the boss.
Pine:
Email concepts/netiquette. Was Pine really so hard to learn anyway?
Windows 95 registry:
Eh probably the least portable skill here- you at least learned to be comfortable with digging into a blackbox OS and looking under its skirt. The registry is still in use in XP, not so sure about vista, so this is a skill you will get at least 15 years of use out of.
Bea Tuxedo:
not too familiar w/ this product, but if I remember correctly, its all about virtualization, which is now one of the hottest new technologies in the sysadmin/IT world.
Sounds like you learned a hell of a lot. Sure none of these are all that employable *today* but couple that background with a weekend spent with a Java book and I would employ you with a 6 figure salary in a second over some newly minted sun certified ITT Tech grad.
I bought a near mint condition yellow '02 ninja for $1800 about two years ago, and recently sold it for $1500 (probably could have gotten the original $1800, but somehow that just felt wrong).
I am glad you saw it as good-intentioned humor in it and didn't take offense. I posted AC so as not to start a flamewar (and tip off to my boss the amount of time I spent writing a Slashdot response!).
Cheers!
-K
Or also the fact that even on an entry level tennis will still cost you about $200 to get into- two rackets, plus some balls- assuming you even have a tennis court near you- I sure did not have one in walk/bicycle range. Its also kind of tough to play at night, or by yourself, etc. etc.
I think the OP is just jealous that they haven't come out with "Shaking Your Cane At Kids to Get Off Your Lawn" complete with a Cane accessory for the Wii yet.
I agree and just want to chime in.
Until I hear the whole story, including this kid's background, I would not pass judgment on the teacher or the school. This sounds eerily like the stories some kids used to tell along the lines of "I got detention just for sneezing!" which on the surface sounds like some idiot power-crazed teacher wronging a well meaning student. Then you get the back story, he was acting up in class, and being asked to control himself several times, then lets out an over-exaggerated (even if it was a naturally reflexive) sneeze intended to get more attention, which is the last straw to the teacher who then writes him up. But his version of the story is "all I did was sneeze, and I got detention!" which one or two of his buddies will corroborate, and that is what spreads around.
Somehow, it was always the disruptive students with histories of disruption that somehow ended up the victim of such events. I have a feeling this kid circumvented IT policies probably not for the first time, installed Firefox, showed off his 1337 skills to the class, who then caused a distraction by saying "ooh cool" followed up by "can you show me how to do that?!", the teacher then found out, and then said "close that and use IE" to which the student did not comply, probably at least twice, while basking in his badassness and attention from his classmates, then the fed-up teacher finally gave him detention.
I used to work in Derivatives Market Making, specifically in their connectivity group. Latency is a *very* big deal. Arbitrage aside, essentially market making works like this- whoever has the best price gets the trade. For the sake of simplicity, lets assume everyone prices an option the same way all the time. Lets also assume that everyone can also price an option at the same exact speed. A new price tick comes in, forcing the options to all reprice at once. The guy who gets his quote out there first is going to capture whatever orders are out there at the new price, and thus capture the bid/ask spread.
When I left, we were looking at sub 10ms and things like colocation to reduce it further, not anywhere near the microsecond level, but thats where things are headed.
Are you kidding? Maybe its just here in NY, but the Treo is one of the more popular phones around. Nowhere near the Razor, but I have seen 10x as many Treos as I have iPhones.
That being said, I have a Treo 650, and am sorely disappointed with it. I thought it would be awesome to have expandable memory to play MP3's from... until I realized it has one of those mini jacks, for which you have to pay an extra $12 to get an adapter to use with your normal set of headphones (which falls out easily, and is even more easily lost). This was all well and good since by expandable memory, they meant expandable up to 2 gigs- since for some inexplicable reason larger ones are not recognized.
Then there is all that great third party software I heard so much about- I found one decent ebook reader, and thats about it, and an emulator that works well enough except for the fact that it only recognizes the top "system" type buttons as mappable keys. So much crappy payware exists for this phone, but how about an app that will download some RSS feeds and update them for me in the morning so I can catch up on the way to work? (I did start writing something to do this, but just don't have the free time these days). And all of these programs tend to treat the memory card as some sort of strange foreign device whereas in my opinion I just assumed it would seamlessly integrate with the phone's internal storage.
The third party software being shoddy wouldn't even be so bad if the phone application didn't freeze up all the time. And this is one of those cases where you really wish the whole phone froze up so you didn't have to realize that its not that your family and friends don't love you and no one has called you all day, its just that your phone appears to be functioning in every way except... the whole making and receiving calls part.
But most of all... I have had the thing for about a year, and its just falling apart- screws are falling out, some keys are not working, making texting a real pain in the ass, and that was the original huge draw in the first place. I actually went to a Cingular store just to make sure I didn't get a really good Chinese knockoff or something- they said it was legit though.
Luckily the battery life is excellent- this thing can still go a week without a charge... if only the damn thing could work for a week straight! A kind of amusing thing is that when I first got it, I was only worried about the touch screen going bad on me. Thats the only thing that works pretty much flawlessly on the thing.
An avid reader on palms?
What software do you use, and where do you get your books from? One of the main reasons I bought a Treo was to use it as an E-book reader, and I have been very disappointed. I have tried e-reader, adobe reader, plucker, and a few others, but found them all to be disappointing- either annoying conversion programs are required, or the text is just unbearable to read (scrolling every 5 lines or so gets old quick).
Just to let you know, Linux has used a similar strategy since at least the 2.4 kernels (probably earlier too, but I can only say for sure for 2.4+, as thats what we looked at in my systems programming class when I was in school).
It is a better way to use memory... If you have 2 gigs of RAM, and you just closed Winamp or Office, why not just leave the dll's and exe's loaded in memory in case you reopen them instead of going to the disk. If you need to load a large dataset, just delete the pointers to that memory- its ram, you are talking about microsecond responses here, and to the best of my knowledge, there is no penalty for keeping data in RAM. Perhaps a better way to say it is, is that there is no method nor reason to "nullify" RAM.
If anything, its kind of silly that it was *not* being used all this time.
Indeed. When AOL went unlimited access I couldn't wait to just play NWN 24/7. I think it took all of two weeks before they started charging extra for games at that point.
I just moved from Manhattan, in Battery Park City, which did not exist 30 years ago. I was about a half mile from the old AT&T headquarters, and a large scary skyscraper they own with no windows that is allegedly filled with all of their telecom equipment, as well as being a mere 5 blocks from Wall St and the heart of the financial district. I don't know how many people live in Battery Park City, but my building had about 500 residents alone, and I was surrounded by highrises.
I now live across the river in Jersey City, which pretty much existed entirely of abandoned factories and docks in 1990. They started building a city here from the ground up in the mid-late 90's, and the process continues today, with high rise apartment and offices building popping up like weeds.
I only had and have 10 down 1 up broadband for $40. Where is my 100MB Connection?!
By these arguments (age of infrastructure, population density, "last mile difficulty") I should have 10 GBPS for about 5 cents a month, but I have the same bandwidth as just about everyone else.
These arguments just don't hold up.
I think the poster is way off. When you work in finance, you get fingerprinted because of SEC requirements (when they investigate insider trading or other wrongdoing, they often fingerprint the documents used so you can't say someone forged your signature). She probably falls under the class of employee requiring this because she has access to some sort of non-public information or real time market data not generally available to the public. I don't see anything to get heated over here. This is standard practice in finance.
I am not trying to flame here, but you sound like someone who just got through CS 101.
Throw in multithreading, and all that niceness goes out the window. Or how about random memory corruption problems? How about when the dump file is corrupted, or it only occurs in the release (aka non-debug) version of the executable? Or the crash happens in a third party library that you don't have the source to, or only in extreme/odd situations that are very difficult to reproduce in your environment...
I could go on... but I think you get the idea.
Your assertion is not true. The ghettos only arose in the 50's/60's because before that, they were called "slums" and were filled with tenements. They were also filled with people who were considered of such a low class, that few ever wrote about them, or attempted to rally for their cause. That all started around the turn of the century (How the other half lives), and social programs took a lot longer to really take hold, and the ghettos we speak of today consist of housing projects built by the government.
Just because we didn't call them ghettos doesn't mean they didn't exist. America was the land of opportunity, yeah, but for many people, notably the irish, it was a place where they wouldn't starve.
Urban areas used to be a requirement back in the days when communication was difficult and expensive. These days when you can make a long distance phone call for a few cents a minute, instantaneously email specs/documents/blueprints, etc. instantly, and can video conference with reasonable quality at a cheap price, there is not much real need to be in the high rent areas of a city.
Well as a Wii owner that was initially very excited about the Wii, I have to agree with the parent poster. Zelda is great, Wii Sports is fun, but after a week or so, only with friends. I have played Wario Ware, and I really wasn't all that impressed. I just bought Wii Play, which was hardly worth the $5 premium on a wiimote to buy. Excite truck? The controls are not good, and the game is nothing special at all. FPS's ported to the Wii just don't seem like a good idea. It is a different kind of system, and it needs different kinds of games. I have no interest in playing an FPS on the Wii. Red Steel... I have not played, mostly because three other friends of mine told me to not even bother.
I think the Wii will eventually be a great console, but as of right now, there are not a whole lot of games out there. I don't think you are right to just dismiss his claims and call it sour grapes, especially since most Wii owners I know also have a 360 or a PS3.
We have similar backgrounds, I grew up on LI, went to a state school upstate, I worked up there briefly and then went back to LI and worked in the city (and have continued to do so ever since).
You don't say why specifically you are unhappy being upstate- Is it because you miss your friends/family? You find the area too small and boring? You find everyone around you to be too close minded and conservative? etc... The reason why I mention this, is because you may be surprised that NYC is no cakewalk either. You probably make a very comfortable living, and in a year or two could buy a modest house. That nice salary you landed in the city suddenly doesn't seem so great when you have to pay city tax, pay $6+ for lunch each day, pay obscene amounts for rent (or $400+/month to commute), and just about everything else. Living in a city also has the unique way of making you very lonely when there are millions of people around you every day and you don't really know anyone. It makes it 2x worse.
That said, my advice would be to take whatever they are giving you, but don't extend your contract. Keep looking. the market is hot right now, but it usually takes a few months to find a job, especially if you are far away. Since you are only a year out, you can probably still get into the new summer hire programs many companies offer, some of which may not start until September or even later. July is not that far off.
Just a few angles on the subject....
The ROI on huge schools may not be that attractive, this is true. However, keep in mind that the "name" is going to be on your resume, and perhaps your office wall, for the rest of your life. With a name like MIT on your degree, you won't ever have a problem getting your foot in the door. I wouldn't settle. You will also never find yourself in an interview room saying things like "Somewhere U?, oh that's a well regarded school in $REGION for engineering..." while the interviewer's eyes just kind of glaze over.
CMU is a great name, and for CS, definitely a "top-tier" school. I wouldn't lose a minute of sleep over getting a degree from CMU. Unless you are going into research, CMU will provide you all the opportunities you could ever want if you do well there. Even if you want to do research, CMU will not be a handicap in any way.
If you don't plan on going into research, your degree matters very little after 2-3 years out of school. At that point, your experience and accomplishments in the actual workplace matter 10x more than what you did in college. In fact, the best people I have worked with don't have a college degree at all, and every peer I can remember working with has agreed with me that what you learn in college is really insignificant compared with what you learn on the job.
Lastly, you are a senior, its february. Its WAY too late to be asking this question, unless you can start some open source project tonight that will instantly attract 100k users tomorrow. Really you should know this, and the fact that this has somehow not occurred to you is a little odd for someone that I presume is an honors student and has been thinking about college for the latter half of high school. You should have been asking this question last year, and then you would have had some control over the situation. But to try to answer your question, to get into MIT, you need to already have achieved something. Despite what is often batted around, the people who do the best in college and get the most out of it know what they want to do when going in, and use it as a launching point for their career. Those who go "to find themselves" often spend too much time looking, and come out with nothing but a degree.
My background: I was also an honors kid in high school looking at top tier schools, ended up going to a state school on a scholarship, ended up not doing so well there (I mean not poorly, but nothing exceptional), but I am currently working at a top tier investment banks working on front office trading systems.