I graduated a year and a half ago with a degree in Physics. When I started off college I was really planning the whole PhD track thing, and went very hardcore into my major. Somewhere arround junior year I learned perl to build some automated tools for the campus' helpdesk that I was then running.
I realized after a couple of months that I was writing code, and reading programming books, to RELAX. Soon after that I realized that if I was going to do this stuff to relax anyway, I ought to maybe figure out a way to get paid for it. In this labor market, that is a pretty easy thing to do.
What I found back at school, as well as in the working world, is that the set of Hackers and the set of CS majors really have a very limitted intersection. (apologies to exceptions to my experience) The people back at school that would really could be classified as Hackers, were from majors like Bio, Physics, Earth Science, and Russian. Very few from CS.
What I have found at work is that the people that are really knowledgable, and adaptable, tend not to be CS majors at all. The two people that I respect the most at work are a high school graduate, and a dropped out phyics/engineering major.
Now I know that the huge burden of student loans taht I had to carry to get through school probably did nudge me towards a job where I could pay off those loans in a reasonable ammount of time. But I really do think that the love of writing good code and learning more about how the world works, is what brought me to my current job. Anyone coming to the computer industry just cause there is money in it, is not someone I want on my team.
All I think the modern need for computer skills is doing is bringing the hackers that used to be in physics/engineering and letting them apply their skills in the computer software industry, vs. just hardware hacks that they used to do. There will always be people that pick a career based on income, but those people will not really be happy after a few years, and really should be weeded out .
Now exuse me while I go back to my robotics book.:)
Although I strongly believe that we are forcing way too many critters into extinction long before their time, there are certain problems with cloning extinct species.
If a particular species of creature dies off, it is generally do more to a change in its environment than over hunting or the like. Bringing back that species into an ecosystem that is not the same one that it previously existed in could be very dangerous. Cane Toads in Austrialia, or Zebra Muscles in Lake Champlain are examples where a single species of creature got moved into a foreign ecosystem and very bad things are happening because of it.
Although the ecosystem where these things are being reintroduced may not be that different than the one that they left, (Having been gone for only 80 years) we should be very careful about bringing back such creatures, lest we make an already screwed up ecosystem even worse.
From my meager understanding of web servers, it is not surprising that Apache came in a bit behind IIS when servering static pages. My experience is that for true static content many webservers like IIS and Lotus Go, are faster. Where apache gets major kudos is when running cgi, as the fork and exec of the script environment seems much better. Try running a good hunky perl program on each request and see what you get.:)
The other thing is that although I am a big fan of linux on powerful machines, its greatest charm is that you can run it on a 486 with 16 megs of ram, and have a relatively well behaved web server that can stay up for 60+ days with no user intervention.
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I graduated a year and a half ago with a degree in Physics. When I started off college I was really planning the whole PhD track thing, and went very hardcore into my major. Somewhere arround junior year I learned perl to build some automated tools for the campus' helpdesk that I was then running.
:)
I realized after a couple of months that I was writing code, and reading programming books, to RELAX. Soon after that I realized that if I was going to do this stuff to relax anyway, I ought to maybe figure out a way to get paid for it. In this labor market, that is a pretty easy thing to do.
What I found back at school, as well as in the working world, is that the set of Hackers and the set of CS majors really have a very limitted intersection. (apologies to exceptions to my experience) The people back at school that would really could be classified as Hackers, were from majors like Bio, Physics, Earth Science, and Russian. Very few from CS.
What I have found at work is that the people that are really knowledgable, and adaptable, tend not to be CS majors at all. The two people that I respect the most at work are a high school graduate, and a dropped out phyics/engineering major.
Now I know that the huge burden of student loans taht I had to carry to get through school probably did nudge me towards a job where I could pay off those loans in a reasonable ammount of time. But I really do think that the love of writing good code and learning more about how the world works, is what brought me to my current job. Anyone coming to the computer industry just cause there is money in it, is not someone I want on my team.
All I think the modern need for computer skills is doing is bringing the hackers that used to be in physics/engineering and letting them apply their skills in the computer software industry, vs. just hardware hacks that they used to do. There will always be people that pick a career based on income, but those people will not really be happy after a few years, and really should be weeded out .
Now exuse me while I go back to my robotics book.
Although I strongly believe that we are forcing way too many critters into extinction long before their time, there are certain problems with cloning extinct species.
If a particular species of creature dies off, it is generally do more to a change in its environment than over hunting or the like. Bringing back that species into an ecosystem that is not the same one that it previously existed in could be very dangerous. Cane Toads in Austrialia, or Zebra Muscles in Lake Champlain are examples where a single species of creature got moved into a foreign ecosystem and very bad things are happening because of it.
Although the ecosystem where these things are being reintroduced may not be that different than the one that they left, (Having been gone for only 80 years) we should be very careful about bringing back such creatures, lest we make an already screwed up ecosystem even worse.
From my meager understanding of web servers, it is not surprising that Apache came in a bit behind IIS when servering static pages. My experience is that for true static content many webservers like IIS and Lotus Go, are faster. Where apache gets major kudos is when running cgi, as the fork and :)
exec of the script environment seems much better. Try running a good hunky perl program on each request and see what you get.
The other thing is that although I am a big fan of linux on powerful machines, its greatest charm is that you can run it on a 486 with 16 megs of ram, and have a relatively well behaved web server that can stay up for 60+ days with no user intervention.