I had a similar issue. I never thought I could switch hands, but I was desperate. It was awkward for a long time, but it worked. The bonus is that a couple of years later, when my "art hand" had fully recovered, I found that I had two art hands, which has been wonderful
Learning Java is remarkably valuable. An easy way to start is with a cool tool called BlueJ from bluej.org. It's a "teaching IDE" that's used to teach people programming who have never programmed before. There's a textbook that comes with it. It's been used by literally millions of people all over the world.
If you use ZFS with SSDs, it scales very nicely. There isn't a bottleneck at a raid controller. You can slam a pile of controllers into a chassis if you have bandwidth problems because you've bought 100 SSDs - by having the RAID management outside the controller, ZFS can unify the whole lot in one giant high performance array.
This may be sacrilegious in this crowd, but fear of patent suits is one of the major (perhaps *the* major) reasons that many companies don't open source more software. Device drivers are one of the most common areas where this problem crops up: if they open sourced their drivers, others would have lots of material to base a patent suit on. What others don't know about, they can't sue about. It sucks, but the system is what it is.
If you don't take the money, this is what will happen: you're clearly doing something they want. If you turn down your offer, they'll just have to reinvent it. They'll probably even be ethical and clean about it so you won't be able to sue for IP theft. But you'll end up as a few geeks with principles trying to compete with someone who has real resources. At that point, you're toast.
I strongly recommend "Feynman's Lost Lecture", a reconstruction of a lecture that Richard Feynman once gave that was a proof of Newton's equations as applied to planetary motion. All of Kepler's laws are derived during the course of the lecture. When Feynman prepared for this lecture, he set himself the challenge of doing it all without using advanced calculus, and restricting himself to "high school" mathematics. It's brilliant and totally do-able for (bright) high school students.
Absolutely the best teaching tool is BlueJ (from bluej.org). It's got a great textbook and is used is thousands of schools all over the world. The kids love it. A related tool that's wonderful can be found at greenfoot.org: teaching kids to program by writing behaviors for video games. Alice.org has another great one.
This is why projects should always use GPL licenses: it protects against corporate takeovers like this. You wouldn't get the tasty job, but the community is better off.
I once had to do essentially this in a slightly unusual situation: the server room was by an outside wall, and on the other side of the wall they were about to put in a new lawn. We just dug down extra deep (about 4 feet) and got about 100 feet of 6' diameter corrugated plastic drainpipe (intended to be buried, the corrugations make it somewhat flexible), covered it with dirt+lawn, and finally put a fan on one end and recirculated the server room air through this. Only had to buy a fan and the pipe, and the long-term power bills were almost zero (just the fan). And it's incredibly reliable.
1. I'd totally flush X11. It's a 20 year old design that has become a boat anchor for building excellent desktop apps. 2. Build some excellect desktop apps. eg. Gimp & Blender need total overhauls to make them professionally credible.
I'd leave server-side stuff alone: Linux is in excellent shape there.
I had a pretty large X10 setup that was always a problem. When I found Insteon I read the whitepapers, tried a few switches, then ripped all my X10 stuff out and replaced it with Insteon. It retrofits as easily as X10 (easier in the case of lights controlled by multiple switches). It does both RF and powerline networking. Decent adaptive mesh routing to get around interference in either mode. Positive ACKs. Large address space. Solid as a rock. I'm very happy.
Companies get sued if someone else finds out that a patent is being infringed. Adaptec, NVidea, et al would be exposing themselves to patent suits if they described how their stuff works. One of the hidden advantages of being proprietary is that then no one knows how you're doing what you're doing, so it's then hard for outsiders to put together a patent infringement lawsuit.
The fact that, as chrismaeda said, CMU is "so far from the action" turns out to be a good thing: people actually stick around and finish their degrees. One of the biggest problems at schools like Stanford and MIT is that students often get job offers before they finish. It's a really nice community that puts a lot of effort into being a community. There's so much stuff going on (theory, AI, robotics, systems,....) that the interactions are great. I got a PhD there and loved it. One of CMU's odder problems is convincing students to actually graduate and leave... They like it too much.
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I had a similar issue. I never thought I could switch hands, but I was desperate. It was awkward for a long time, but it worked. The bonus is that a couple of years later, when my "art hand" had fully recovered, I found that I had two art hands, which has been wonderful
Learning Java is remarkably valuable. An easy way to start is with a cool tool called BlueJ from bluej.org. It's a "teaching IDE" that's used to teach people programming who have never programmed before. There's a textbook that comes with it. It's been used by literally millions of people all over the world.
If you use ZFS with SSDs, it scales very nicely. There isn't a bottleneck at a raid controller. You can slam a pile of controllers into a chassis if you have bandwidth problems because you've bought 100 SSDs - by having the RAID management outside the controller, ZFS can unify the whole lot in one giant high performance array.
Sandboxes are a tried and true idea, they work well. It's about time
This may be sacrilegious in this crowd, but fear of patent suits is one of the major (perhaps *the* major) reasons that many companies don't open source more software. Device drivers are one of the most common areas where this problem crops up: if they open sourced their drivers, others would have lots of material to base a patent suit on. What others don't know about, they can't sue about. It sucks, but the system is what it is.
If you don't take the money, this is what will happen: you're clearly doing something they want. If you turn down your offer, they'll just have to reinvent it. They'll probably even be ethical and clean about it so you won't be able to sue for IP theft. But you'll end up as a few geeks with principles trying to compete with someone who has real resources. At that point, you're toast.
I strongly recommend "Feynman's Lost Lecture", a reconstruction of a lecture that Richard Feynman once gave that was a proof of Newton's equations as applied to planetary motion. All of Kepler's laws are derived during the course of the lecture. When Feynman prepared for this lecture, he set himself the challenge of doing it all without using advanced calculus, and restricting himself to "high school" mathematics. It's brilliant and totally do-able for (bright) high school students.
by Jon Bentley. It's easy to be fast.
I've had phenomenal success with OpenSolaris. ZFS is the coolest way to run a whitebox JBOD. The box I built can easily drive a GigE to saturation.
Absolutely the best teaching tool is BlueJ (from bluej.org). It's got a great textbook and is used is thousands of schools all over the world. The kids love it. A related tool that's wonderful can be found at greenfoot.org: teaching kids to program by writing behaviors for video games. Alice.org has another great one.
This is why projects should always use GPL licenses: it protects against corporate takeovers like this. You wouldn't get the tasty job, but the community is better off.
I once had to do essentially this in a slightly unusual situation: the server room was by an outside wall, and on the other side of the wall they were about to put in a new lawn. We just dug down extra deep (about 4 feet) and got about 100 feet of 6' diameter corrugated plastic drainpipe (intended to be buried, the corrugations make it somewhat flexible), covered it with dirt+lawn, and finally put a fan on one end and recirculated the server room air through this. Only had to buy a fan and the pipe, and the long-term power bills were almost zero (just the fan). And it's incredibly reliable.
Any of the "Tales of Known Space" series by Larry Niven; "Tar Aym Krang" by Alan Dean Foster.
1. I'd totally flush X11. It's a 20 year old design that has become a boat anchor for building excellent desktop apps.
2. Build some excellect desktop apps. eg. Gimp & Blender need total overhauls to make them professionally credible.
I'd leave server-side stuff alone: Linux is in excellent shape there.
The classic paper is David Goldberg's "Everything a Computer Scientist needs to know about Floating Point", online at http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h tml
I had a pretty large X10 setup that was always a problem. When I found Insteon I read the whitepapers, tried a few switches, then ripped all my X10 stuff out and replaced it with Insteon. It retrofits as easily as X10 (easier in the case of lights controlled by multiple switches). It does both RF and powerline networking. Decent adaptive mesh routing to get around interference in either mode. Positive ACKs. Large address space. Solid as a rock. I'm very happy.
Companies get sued if someone else finds out that a patent is being infringed. Adaptec, NVidea, et al would be exposing themselves to patent suits if they described how their stuff works. One of the hidden advantages of being proprietary is that then no one knows how you're doing what you're doing, so it's then hard for outsiders to put together a patent infringement lawsuit.
check out 5,651,107. Predates by a decade.
Read http://java.sun.com/people/jag/StandardsPhases/ind ex.html
The fact that, as chrismaeda said, CMU is "so far from the action" turns out to be a good thing: people actually stick around and finish their degrees. One of the biggest problems at schools like Stanford and MIT is that students often get job offers before they finish. It's a really nice community that puts a lot of effort into being a community. There's so much stuff going on (theory, AI, robotics, systems, ....) that the interactions are great. I got a PhD there and loved it. One of CMU's odder problems is convincing students to actually graduate and leave... They like it too much.