(1) CMU is an excellent school, and Pittsburgh is a cool place (or so I've heard), so you need not worry.
(2) I was deferred by MIT on early action, but they accepted me anyway, so I wouldn't fret too much yet.
(3) It's too late to do anything that might affect your admission chances, short of winning a Nobel Prize or curing cancer, or the like.
(4) To get into a school like MIT you need practically straight A's, graduating in the top 1% of your class, lots of honors classes, evidence that you may someday be a world-class mathematical, engineering, or scientific thinker, above 700 on all your SAT scores, recommendations that all say you are god-like, an interview that goes extremely well, lots of extracurricular activities, preferably with some involving charity work, the right combination of certifiable geek credentials and well-roundedness, and an inspired application essay. And even then it's a crap shoot.
(5) Although an MIT education will certainly help maximize your intellectual potential, it might also subject you to a lifetime of prost-traumatic stress syndrome. You might very well find that CMU is more to your liking.
The cool thing about MIT is that they own the entire 18.0.0.0/8 Class A address space, so every device on campus has a public IP. And all computers (even student machines) are connected directly to the Internet - no NAT, no firewall, no protocol limitations, no bandwidth caps.
how is that a 'cool' thing? I realize most students at MIT can probably secure themselves, but an institution not enforcing a firewall or NATs is asking for trouble.
It's a cool thing because you can actually get your research done without being hampered by onerous firewalls.
Sure, you have to be careful about setting up software firewalls on your desktop computers, and not enabling unneeded services. But dealing with this is much eaiser than dealing with the issue of just not being able to do what you need to to get your job done due to intrusive security measures out of your control.
It strikes me as strange that people think that you should have more capabilities on your Comcast cable modem connection than you should on your university research desktop.
Weather forecasts are never anywhere near accurate enough to worry about that. Does it really make a difference to you when the forecast goes from 73 degrees Fahrenheit to 74 degrees Fahrenheit?
No, but it makes a distinct difference to my comfort level when I set the thermostat.
|>oug
P.S. Metric is a great idea, only base 10 sucks. If we would only switch to base 8, then metric would be perfect.
Division by zero is an error condition for good reasons. When a program encounters a division by zero then you get a flashing red sign saying that something unexpected happened
I don't think the issues are quite so clear cut. For instance, the first launch of the Ariane 5 rocket self-destructed due to an arithmetic overflow. I've been told that if the overflow had just been ignored, the rocket would have worked fine. (Or at least would have not failed for this reason.)
I've always thought the slogan "Save the Planet" to be pretty stupid. Like we're really going to do any real harm to the planet? Or even mother nature? Certainly not with the technology we have today in any case. There have been volcano eruptions in the Earth's past that have released energy far in excess of the energy in all the nuclear weapons of all countries put together. Likewise for asteroid impacts.
What we can and might easily do is make the Earth's environment incapable of sustaining human life. But that will just make the world safe for the ants and kudzu. Life will go on, just perhaps without us.
You're going to call up every company for every product that you buy? And then expect to reach someone who will know the answer? And even if they do know the answer, you expect them to give you a truthful one?
If they don't it's fraud. They can be sued.
If someone catches them and can prove it, both of which are relatively unlikely. Companies do illegal and imoral things all the time, and if they get caught, they pay the fine and mark it down as a cost of doing business.
If having lead in your hair caused any diseases, companies would stop to keep from getting sued.
Yeah, right. On Planet Slughead, maybe. On Earth on the other hand, they don't stop until the actual cost of getting sued ends up being more expensive than the cost of continuing business as usual.
The last time I used a hair dye with lead acetate in it, I could taste the lead in my mouth within a minute or two of putting the dye on my head. Does that sound safe to you? And the toxic fumes from a new carpet once made me sick for two years following exposure.
I barely read the labels anymore -- I do read the ingredients but I even take that with a grain of salt (no pun intended). For me, I have to see how my body is affected by a new product, and if I don't feel right, I'll not consume that product.
I'm having a really hard time not rolling my eyes here. Your idea of the epitomy of consumer safety is to try something and see how it makes you feel??? Do you actually know anything about science? There are plenty of things that will make you feel great today and kill you in a week or in twenty years.
It's generally in a company's best interests to keep it's customers alive. Something about repeat business, they tell me.
It's generally in a company's best interests to maximize its profits. If some fraction of a company's customers happen to die due to a badly designed gas tank, get sick from lead poisoning in their hair dye, or what have you, then that's just a cost of doing business. Your life means absolutely nothing to the typical corporation, other than how it affects its bottom line. I.e., kill off too many of your customers, yes, that would probably be bad for the bottom line. Kill of only enough of them so that the cost of losing those customers is less than the cost of increasing the safety of your product, then that number of deaths is the obviously correct business decision to the typical corporation.
A hydrogen economy won't work, hydrogen is only good for storage. Give up, people.
That's quite a strawman you're propping up there! Proponents of a hydrogen economy propose using hydrogen as a means of storing energy produced in a variety of manners, including wind, solar, geothermal, hydrodynamic, etc. Did you even read the article?
The posting that you are responding to claims that we shouldn't generate the hyrdrogen at the source of the energy production, but rather convert it to electricity and then use the electricity to generate hydrogen at the gas station, or whatever. I'd beg to differ on that point myself, but that's hardly an argument against a viable hydrogen economy!
If I am concerned with labeling, I will call the manufacturer of the product and ASK.
You're going to call up every company for every product that you buy? And then expect to reach someone who will know the answer? And even if they do know the answer, you expect them to give you a truthful one?
Without regulation, your hair dye would contain toxic amounts of lead. Oh, wait a minute -- it currently does! Sure, you have a point, the regulations are highly flawed. But without them, it is clear that corporations would try and succeed in getting away with murder.
To fix the regulations so that they actually work, vote your bum of a corporate lackey representative out of office and tell him or her why.
Every one that I've interviewed (and yes a pool of 5 is statistically significant, even if it is a very small representation of a population) has an ego the size of a planet and actually seems to have got a very poor education with respect to usable, practical science.
That's probably because MIT has a very significant humanities requirement.... (That was a joke, btw, even though it is true.)
The joke around Boston is that you hire Northeastern grads to get the work done, MIT grads to be your CTOs, and Harvard grads to run the companies.
The joke is not quite true, since so many companies in Massachusetts have been started by MIT grads, but there's a kernel of truth. Northeastern trains people in skills that are immediately useful. MIT tries to give its students the fundamentals that back science and engineering in general, rather than training in specific technologies. In this manner it is hoped (and I think rightfully so, I might add) that even though the graduates are not as immediately productive as Northeastern graduates, they can always continue to easily learn whatever new methods, techologies, and ideas come down the road, and hence over their lifetimes, will always be current and productive.
So, a Northeastern CS grad is sure to graduate knowing Java and relational databases and to have implemented an airline reservation system as a class project, an MIT CS grad might end up graduating only knowing Lisp and Modern Alegebra and have implemented a Modula II compiler as their class project. (Actually, for quite some time MIT grads would have learned Java for training in concurrent programming, but I'm making a point, so facts be damned.)
Regarding ego, anyone who graduates from MIT is smart, and they're going to know they're smart. MIT is also a very humbling experience, though, since it puts you through quite a wringer. Almost anyone who goes to MIT is going to have met people even smarter than themselves and is going to have seen that there's so much to learn, they couldn't possibly know it all.
Regarding your hiring practices, it is well known in the Boston area that there certainly are companies who would prefer to hire Northeastern grads. On the other hand, most MIT grads have no problem finding jobs. I certainly have never had such a problem.
I've never met anyone who got into MIT on the basis of money. And even if they somehow did, they'd flunk out the first semester if they weren't really damned smart and already had an excellent high-school level education.
I hardly think Apple is flawless. For instance, I think that only being able to resize a window from one corner is inane. I think that having the menu bar at the top of the screen and not having a focus-follows-mouse mode are very annoying. I can't stand the fact that I can't easily run "native" Mac applications remotely, like I can with X applications.
I could go on and on. Your little worry is so far down my list of annoyances that it is not even on my radar.
I want my music player to do playback and recording in a format unencumbered by any DRM so I can create and share as I see fit. Apple doesn't give me that,
This is patently false. iPods and iTunes will both play unencumbered mp3s, and iTunes is perfectly happy to rip CDs to unencumbered mp3s.
I have many gigabytes of music on my computer that I ripped from my own CDs. There's not a single DRM-encumbered track on my computer, and I play them all with iTunes, iPods, and mp3 CD-ROMs made with single click burning from iTunes. (My car stereo plays mp3 CD-ROMs.)
Furthermore, iTunes' restriction that it won't copy mp3s off of an iPod and onto a computer is merely proforma to mollify the recording industry. There is nothing built into the iPod to prevent you from copying mp3s off of it and onto your computer. In fact, there are a number of free programs out there that let you do precisely this.
Indeed, all of this is very, very scary. Some sort of malware once put links to kiddie porn on the desktop of an account I almost never log into (the default XP account). Who knows how many months these links were there before I noticed! Of course I deleted the links as soon as I found them and figured out what they were, but for all I know, I'm now on some sex criminal watchlist, guilty until proven innocent.
Dude, are you trying to further make miserable the lives of those with RSI? We need those caps locks keys for typing in variables and the like that are in all caps.
Of course, without some sort of immediate feedback that one has entered caps lock mode, such a key indeed causes despair, but it is that lack of immediate feedback that is the problem, not the key itself. On old fashioned typewriters, you could easily feel when you were pressing caps lock. Computer manufacturers went about trying to drive everybody insane by removing this sensory feedback. (New technology always seems to be two steps forward, one step back -- if that.) Sun Microsystems made issues even worse by swapping the location of Control and CapsLock, so that when moving from one keyboard to another, you never know what you are going to get.
My Kinesis Contour Keyboard solves the problem elegantly by making a distinctive double buzz sound when you enter caps lock mode and a single buzz when you exit caps lock mode. Also, the keyboard is completely remappable, so you can put whatever key wherever you want it, or remove a key from the mapping altogether.
I suggest that this feedback and flexibility is what your movement should aim for, rather than trying to further cripple the rest of us.
Could you please explain your reasoning in a bit more depth. As I understand things, equal temperament is required if you want to modulate keys. And it saves you the cost of having to have a different instrument for every key you might want to play in. But harmony is perfectly possible in perfect temperment.
Now perhaps Debussy, Mussorgsky, etc., were very fond of modulating keys -- I don't know. It is Bach, though, who is most famous for it, and harmony is not generally considered to be Baroque music's strong point.
|>oug
Re:That's an easy one.
on
IBM Opts for AMD
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're underestimating traders.
I think not. Wall Street has shown time and time again that they are generally sheep with absolutely no ability to predict the future.
This criticism, however, applies just as much to the average Slashdot participant.
Cygwin and M$'s Windows Services for Unix are "Unix-like". This is in direct contrast to Linux, which is so Unix-like that for all intents and purposes it is Unix. The same cannot be said for Cygwin, for example.
Jesus H, anybody who knows anything knows that Linux is not UNIX, and nobody besides a few noobs has ever suggested that Linux was UNIX.
Well, this n00b has been using Unix for 27 years, I can assert most assuredly that Linux *is* Unix. Perhaps not by legal trademark, but by functionality it is, and in that regard, it's closer to Unix than many varieties of Unix(tm) are to Unix.
Next you're going to be telling us that BSD also isn't Unix....
Slashdot Mirror
(1) CMU is an excellent school, and Pittsburgh is a cool place (or so I've heard), so you need not worry.
(2) I was deferred by MIT on early action, but they accepted me anyway, so I wouldn't fret too much yet.
(3) It's too late to do anything that might affect your admission chances, short of winning a Nobel Prize or curing cancer, or the like.
(4) To get into a school like MIT you need practically straight A's, graduating in the top 1% of your class, lots of honors classes, evidence that you may someday be a world-class mathematical, engineering, or scientific thinker, above 700 on all your SAT scores, recommendations that all say you are god-like, an interview that goes extremely well, lots of extracurricular activities, preferably with some involving charity work, the right combination of certifiable geek credentials and well-roundedness, and an inspired application essay. And even then it's a crap shoot.
(5) Although an MIT education will certainly help maximize your intellectual potential, it might also subject you to a lifetime of prost-traumatic stress syndrome. You might very well find that CMU is more to your liking.
|>oug
I think an example needs to be made of these kids -- they should be tried as adults!
I'm worried, however, that then the Florida legal system might disappear in a puff of logic....
|>oug
Sure, you have to be careful about setting up software firewalls on your desktop computers, and not enabling unneeded services. But dealing with this is much eaiser than dealing with the issue of just not being able to do what you need to to get your job done due to intrusive security measures out of your control.
It strikes me as strange that people think that you should have more capabilities on your Comcast cable modem connection than you should on your university research desktop.
|>oug
|>oug
P.S. Metric is a great idea, only base 10 sucks. If we would only switch to base 8, then metric would be perfect.
|>oug
http://www.bookofparagon.com/Mathematics/PerspexM
he addresses this very question.
|>oug
I've always thought the slogan "Save the Planet" to be pretty stupid. Like we're really going to do any real harm to the planet? Or even mother nature? Certainly not with the technology we have today in any case. There have been volcano eruptions in the Earth's past that have released energy far in excess of the energy in all the nuclear weapons of all countries put together. Likewise for asteroid impacts.
What we can and might easily do is make the Earth's environment incapable of sustaining human life. But that will just make the world safe for the ants and kudzu. Life will go on, just perhaps without us.
Fuck the planet -- save the humans!
|>oug
Yeah, right. On Planet Slughead, maybe. On Earth on the other hand, they don't stop until the actual cost of getting sued ends up being more expensive than the cost of continuing business as usual.
The last time I used a hair dye with lead acetate in it, I could taste the lead in my mouth within a minute or two of putting the dye on my head. Does that sound safe to you? And the toxic fumes from a new carpet once made me sick for two years following exposure.
|>oug
|>oug
|>oug
The posting that you are responding to claims that we shouldn't generate the hyrdrogen at the source of the energy production, but rather convert it to electricity and then use the electricity to generate hydrogen at the gas station, or whatever. I'd beg to differ on that point myself, but that's hardly an argument against a viable hydrogen economy!
|>oug
Without regulation, your hair dye would contain toxic amounts of lead. Oh, wait a minute -- it currently does! Sure, you have a point, the regulations are highly flawed. But without them, it is clear that corporations would try and succeed in getting away with murder.
To fix the regulations so that they actually work, vote your bum of a corporate lackey representative out of office and tell him or her why.
|>oug
The joke around Boston is that you hire Northeastern grads to get the work done, MIT grads to be your CTOs, and Harvard grads to run the companies.
The joke is not quite true, since so many companies in Massachusetts have been started by MIT grads, but there's a kernel of truth. Northeastern trains people in skills that are immediately useful. MIT tries to give its students the fundamentals that back science and engineering in general, rather than training in specific technologies. In this manner it is hoped (and I think rightfully so, I might add) that even though the graduates are not as immediately productive as Northeastern graduates, they can always continue to easily learn whatever new methods, techologies, and ideas come down the road, and hence over their lifetimes, will always be current and productive.
So, a Northeastern CS grad is sure to graduate knowing Java and relational databases and to have implemented an airline reservation system as a class project, an MIT CS grad might end up graduating only knowing Lisp and Modern Alegebra and have implemented a Modula II compiler as their class project. (Actually, for quite some time MIT grads would have learned Java for training in concurrent programming, but I'm making a point, so facts be damned.)
Regarding ego, anyone who graduates from MIT is smart, and they're going to know they're smart. MIT is also a very humbling experience, though, since it puts you through quite a wringer. Almost anyone who goes to MIT is going to have met people even smarter than themselves and is going to have seen that there's so much to learn, they couldn't possibly know it all.
Regarding your hiring practices, it is well known in the Boston area that there certainly are companies who would prefer to hire Northeastern grads. On the other hand, most MIT grads have no problem finding jobs. I certainly have never had such a problem.
|>oug
I've never met anyone who got into MIT on the basis of money. And even if they somehow did, they'd flunk out the first semester if they weren't really damned smart and already had an excellent high-school level education.
|>oug
|>oug
I hardly think Apple is flawless. For instance, I think that only being able to resize a window from one corner is inane. I think that having the menu bar at the top of the screen and not having a focus-follows-mouse mode are very annoying. I can't stand the fact that I can't easily run "native" Mac applications remotely, like I can with X applications.
I could go on and on. Your little worry is so far down my list of annoyances that it is not even on my radar.
|>oug
I have many gigabytes of music on my computer that I ripped from my own CDs. There's not a single DRM-encumbered track on my computer, and I play them all with iTunes, iPods, and mp3 CD-ROMs made with single click burning from iTunes. (My car stereo plays mp3 CD-ROMs.)
Furthermore, iTunes' restriction that it won't copy mp3s off of an iPod and onto a computer is merely proforma to mollify the recording industry. There is nothing built into the iPod to prevent you from copying mp3s off of it and onto your computer. In fact, there are a number of free programs out there that let you do precisely this.
|>oug
Indeed, all of this is very, very scary. Some sort of malware once put links to kiddie porn on the desktop of an account I almost never log into (the default XP account). Who knows how many months these links were there before I noticed! Of course I deleted the links as soon as I found them and figured out what they were, but for all I know, I'm now on some sex criminal watchlist, guilty until proven innocent.
|>oug
I love my Kinesis!
Yes, indeed Kinesis Contour Keyboards are mana from heaven!
|>oug
Dude, are you trying to further make miserable the lives of those with RSI? We need those caps locks keys for typing in variables and the like that are in all caps.
Of course, without some sort of immediate feedback that one has entered caps lock mode, such a key indeed causes despair, but it is that lack of immediate feedback that is the problem, not the key itself. On old fashioned typewriters, you could easily feel when you were pressing caps lock. Computer manufacturers went about trying to drive everybody insane by removing this sensory feedback. (New technology always seems to be two steps forward, one step back -- if that.) Sun Microsystems made issues even worse by swapping the location of Control and CapsLock, so that when moving from one keyboard to another, you never know what you are going to get.
My Kinesis Contour Keyboard solves the problem elegantly by making a distinctive double buzz sound when you enter caps lock mode and a single buzz when you exit caps lock mode. Also, the keyboard is completely remappable, so you can put whatever key wherever you want it, or remove a key from the mapping altogether.
I suggest that this feedback and flexibility is what your movement should aim for, rather than trying to further cripple the rest of us.
Could you please explain your reasoning in a bit more depth. As I understand things, equal temperament is required if you want to modulate keys. And it saves you the cost of having to have a different instrument for every key you might want to play in. But harmony is perfectly possible in perfect temperment.
Now perhaps Debussy, Mussorgsky, etc., were very fond of modulating keys -- I don't know. It is Bach, though, who is most famous for it, and harmony is not generally considered to be Baroque music's strong point.
|>oug
This criticism, however, applies just as much to the average Slashdot participant.
|>oug
Cygwin and M$'s Windows Services for Unix are "Unix-like". This is in direct contrast to Linux, which is so Unix-like that for all intents and purposes it is Unix. The same cannot be said for Cygwin, for example.
|>oug
Are you going to tell me with a straight face that Linux is more disimilar to BSD than OS X is to say HP-UX or than AIX is to Version 7?
Any claims that Linux is not Unix are merely a false dichotomy aimed at perpetuating certain trademarks. They have no technical merit.
|>oug
Next you're going to be telling us that BSD also isn't Unix....
|>oug