Especially if he's competitive topcoder may appeal to him. It has alot of practice problems which are hard enough he would need to learn something, and he'll have a score as some feedback.
The real question here is wether the radar gun is ineffective (in which case stop using them). Or did the cop do something naughty (in which case legal action should be taken against him).
Talent is not required for this sort of thing. Most schools computers are so poorly protected that anyone who tried could gain access to them relatively easily.
And remember... you only catch the stupid criminals.
"According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era"
Umm, very good as judged by who?
Obviously he OSS people don't judge it to be enough "better" than free alternatives to justify its price. If you come out with a tool which is "better enough" to justify its price then I will buy it.
I'm one of those guys who HATES Msoft... but if they came out with a version of VC++ ported to linux and with the windows specific junk torn out I would buy it. I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it! (It's one of the few things they have done which I actually consider to be very good)
But making an IDE/Editor which is $150 better than emacs is pretty damn hard.
Wether or not he had a will there will be someone who gains ownership of his possessions. In that case the laptop belongs to them... not to the deceased.
As for hotmail et. al. you should probably hire a lawyer to pen a letter to the companies in question describing the situation. The transfer of ownership shouldn't be too difficult.
I have a bunch of old windows software which won't run on windows xp... at least not without a lot of tweaking. To be honest backwards compatibility has always been shaky with windows.
Have you tried loading old win95 powerpoint slides in a new version of ppt?
After seeing a long line of similar reviews of "secure" products. Shouldn't these companies be open to legal action? At least false advertising if not something else.
"to make effective use of multicore hardwre today, you need a PhD in computer science." BAH!
I don't have a PhD and yet I can program multi core. Threading, message passing, heterogeneous or homogeneous. What is really required is thought. Now I realize a good part of the population is opposed to thought... but sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet.
The most basic skill in computer science is breaking a problem down into smaller pieces.
If you have multiple processors then you simple break your problem down into pieces for each core. Granted some problems don't decompose well, but many do.
This is really an old topic and an old story. the 1986 computer privacy act was the start of it all. Every since then computer crimes generally carry larger penalties than murder.
Look at any of the famous "hacker" cases of the late 80's/early 90's
To prove to HR that you're good doesn't require work experience. If you are a new grad there are a few very important things you can add to your resume. Roughly in order of importance these are... 1. Technical Internship 2. Proven OSS experience (easily proven through commit logs and forum activity) 3. Individual directed study 4. Just about any other real job. Mc Donalds or Starbucks doesn't count, but Fix-it, tech support, and lab techs all would count.
I've helped hire over 30 people in the last 5 years and these are the things which are commonly being looked for in new grads.
One of the few things we can be sure of is change. Expecially in the business word needs change, requirments change, models change. This in itself will keep developers in business.
Take for example turbo tax. Are the tax rules going to stay still?
In addition to this there are still quite a few problems that have not been solved. Recognition, translation, simulation...
As long as we use computers who aren't in themselves intelligent, we will need CS.
I once had a candidate apply for a senior software positon. Their resume looked good, 10 years industry experience, c, c++, yadda yadda. When I started asking questions we got some interesting information though. First of all he had recieved a degree in EE 18 years ago. Since then he had taken exactly one CS course, in C++. To top if off here is how the questioning went wrt. hash tables.
Are you familiar with hash tables? Yes. When would you use a hash table? When you needed to put things into it and take things out. What are the performance characteristics of a hash table? They are fast. When would you use a hash table instead of another data structure? When you wanted to put things into it and take things out. Could you give me an example of when a hash table would be a bad choice? They are always fast.
It went on from there.
Even though it was obvious he wasn't suitable for a software positons it isn't your job as a prospective employer to help him with his interviewing skills.
Now I have been known to make exceptions for recent college grads or foreigners who aren't familiar with the country.
Your job is to fill a position in your company. Nothing else. Mean, but thats the way it is.
Look at it this way. To design a high end chip... * software for synthesis, implementation, timing/physical/formal verification, OPC, power/temp analysis and all the other stuff runs in the millions of dollars. * 20 engineers working for 3 years + benefits/managers/other overhead ~10 million dollars. * mask costs 100's of thousands of dollars.
so getting to the first chip runs at least 15-20 million dollars and for something like the core2 duo it's closer to 500 -1000 million.
Here are some numbers concerning spec/Ghz. IBM/s chips are very good performers / clock and the increased clock should do wonders. Intel's P4 for instance was terrible on a per clock basis.
With Intel's chips that was becoming increasingly true. But for IBM's power processors more clock does indeed mean faster. The Power line already outperformed Intel per clock. With the increase in clock things may get very interesting.
Algorithms in C, Parts 1-5 (Bundle): Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms (3rd Edition) by Robert Sedgewick
The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth
Two seminal works on the subject. It really depends on your needs however. Nearly anything you would need can be built off of the subjects in those books, but for more specialized datastructures you will probably have to move to specialized books.
I know tyan has several opteron motherboards with 8 dimm slots and at least one with 16 (Thunder K8QS Pro (S4882)). Those may be a good starting place.
As a side note, I did some testing in college dealing with ramdisks and in general running a filesystem off of a ramdisk is actually slower than from disk. The linux filesystem buffer is very good and will cahce the information in ram anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if we look back 10 years at someone who got a tattoo of tux...
Linux is quickly closing on 20 years, and is likely to keep going for quite some time yet.
Especially if he's competitive topcoder may appeal to him.
It has alot of practice problems which are hard enough he would need to learn something, and he'll have a score as some feedback.
The real question here is wether the radar gun is ineffective (in which case stop using them). Or did the cop do something naughty (in which case legal action should be taken against him).
Talent is not required for this sort of thing. Most schools computers are so poorly protected that anyone who tried could gain access to them relatively easily.
And remember... you only catch the stupid criminals.
Personally I think it is a shame that you get less prison time for murder than you do for hacking into your schools computers.
"According to De Goes, selling a source-code editor, even a very good one, is all but impossible in the post-open source era"
Umm, very good as judged by who?
Obviously he OSS people don't judge it to be enough "better" than free alternatives to justify its price.
If you come out with a tool which is "better enough" to justify its price then I will buy it.
I'm one of those guys who HATES Msoft... but if they came out with a version of VC++ ported to linux and with the windows specific junk torn out I would buy it. I'd pay hundreds of dollars for it! (It's one of the few things they have done which I actually consider to be very good)
But making an IDE/Editor which is $150 better than emacs is pretty damn hard.
Impressive performance yes... but a supercomputer? Hardly!
Next article will be "hey, I overclocked my Q6600 and now it's a supercomputer."
Realistically this is a rather normal computer with a rather fast coprocessor.
My kingdom for some mod points!
Oh my... I think i actually went blind as soon as that hit the screen.
Wether or not he had a will there will be someone who gains ownership of his possessions. In that case the laptop belongs to them... not to the deceased.
As for hotmail et. al. you should probably hire a lawyer to pen a letter to the companies in question describing the situation. The transfer of ownership shouldn't be too difficult.
New cars don't advertise being able to run on leaded fuel.
More importantly... many companies have documents which are quite old. Not being able to load those old documents properly can be a major problem.
I have a bunch of old windows software which won't run on windows xp... at least not without a lot of tweaking. To be honest backwards compatibility has always been shaky with windows.
Have you tried loading old win95 powerpoint slides in a new version of ppt?
After seeing a long line of similar reviews of "secure" products. Shouldn't these companies be open to legal action? At least false advertising if not something else.
"to make effective use of multicore hardwre today, you need a PhD in computer science."
BAH!
I don't have a PhD and yet I can program multi core. Threading, message passing, heterogeneous or homogeneous. What is really required is thought. Now I realize a good part of the population is opposed to thought... but sometimes you just gotta bite the bullet.
The most basic skill in computer science is breaking a problem down into smaller pieces.
If you have multiple processors then you simple break your problem down into pieces for each core. Granted some problems don't decompose well, but many do.
This is really an old topic and an old story. the 1986 computer privacy act was the start of it all.
Every since then computer crimes generally carry larger penalties than murder.
Look at any of the famous "hacker" cases of the late 80's/early 90's
To prove to HR that you're good doesn't require work experience. If you are a new grad there are a few very important things you can add to your resume. Roughly in order of importance these are...
1. Technical Internship
2. Proven OSS experience (easily proven through commit logs and forum activity)
3. Individual directed study
4. Just about any other real job. Mc Donalds or Starbucks doesn't count, but Fix-it, tech support, and lab techs all would count.
I've helped hire over 30 people in the last 5 years and these are the things which are commonly being looked for in new grads.
One of the few things we can be sure of is change. Expecially in the business word needs change, requirments change, models change. This in itself will keep developers in business.
Take for example turbo tax. Are the tax rules going to stay still?
In addition to this there are still quite a few problems that have not been solved. Recognition, translation, simulation...
As long as we use computers who aren't in themselves intelligent, we will need CS.
I once had a candidate apply for a senior software positon. Their resume looked good, 10 years industry experience, c, c++, yadda yadda. When I started asking questions we got some interesting information though. First of all he had recieved a degree in EE 18 years ago. Since then he had taken exactly one CS course, in C++. To top if off here is how the questioning went wrt. hash tables.
Are you familiar with hash tables?
Yes.
When would you use a hash table?
When you needed to put things into it and take things out.
What are the performance characteristics of a hash table?
They are fast.
When would you use a hash table instead of another data structure?
When you wanted to put things into it and take things out.
Could you give me an example of when a hash table would be a bad choice?
They are always fast.
It went on from there.
Even though it was obvious he wasn't suitable for a software positons it isn't your job as a prospective employer to help him with his interviewing skills.
Now I have been known to make exceptions for recent college grads or foreigners who aren't familiar with the country.
Your job is to fill a position in your company. Nothing else. Mean, but thats the way it is.
That worthy aspect would be the particularly application you intend on running. This is also the only relevent benchmark.
In general clock speed is useless unless comparing different speeds of the same processor. For certain tasks a 500Mhz alpha will woop and 2000Ghz P4.
The sophistication of your compiler is much more important than clockspeed of the processor.
Look at it this way. To design a high end chip...
* software for synthesis, implementation, timing/physical/formal verification, OPC, power/temp analysis and all the other stuff runs in the millions of dollars.
* 20 engineers working for 3 years + benefits/managers/other overhead ~10 million dollars.
* mask costs 100's of thousands of dollars.
so getting to the first chip runs at least 15-20 million dollars and for something like the core2 duo it's closer to 500 -1000 million.
the next wafer only costs a measly 10k
So what if the nvidia g80 is theoritically capable of 520 gigaflops?
:)
I had hoped the majority of slashdotters would be able to see past the flops myth by now.
Here are some numbers concerning spec/Ghz.
IBM/s chips are very good performers / clock and the increased clock should do wonders.
Intel's P4 for instance was terrible on a per clock basis.
proc Ghz specint2000 specint/Ghz specfp2000 specfp/Ghz
opteron 3.0 2119 706.3 2365 788.3
Intel P4 3.8 1834 483.4 2091 550.2
Intel Core 2 2.66 2848 1070.6 2673 1004.8
IBM Power5 2.1 1747 831.9 3324 1582.8
please forgive the nasty table
With Intel's chips that was becoming increasingly true. But for IBM's power processors more clock does indeed mean faster. The Power line already outperformed Intel per clock. With the increase in clock things may get very interesting.
Algorithms in C, Parts 1-5 (Bundle): Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching, and Graph Algorithms (3rd Edition) by Robert Sedgewick
The Art of Computer Programming, by Donald E. Knuth
Two seminal works on the subject. It really depends on your needs however. Nearly anything you would need can be built off of the subjects in those books, but for more specialized datastructures you will probably have to move to specialized books.
My first computer was a Commodore 16. Got it back in 1986.
I was coding on it for almost 2 years before I got a storage device
I know tyan has several opteron motherboards with 8 dimm slots and at least one with 16 (Thunder K8QS Pro (S4882)). Those may be a good starting place.
As a side note, I did some testing in college dealing with ramdisks and in general running a filesystem off of a ramdisk is actually slower than from disk. The linux filesystem buffer is very good and will cahce the information in ram anyway.