That was hands down the best software engineering course I took. The entire course is a series of short, intense team projects to develop an escalating series of more complex software products- starting from a simple day planner and working up to a networked multiplayer game, with graphics and all. This was back in 2000, and it was really all about learning new concepts like MVC and other design patterns and applying them on the fly.
The most important aspects by far were the small teams and the fast pace, both of which are perfect training for doing anything fun when you get out- like starting software companies. Technologies and methodologies change, understanding design and how to work with people under intense deadlines is always useful.
I have been part of a sensory deprivation experiment for the past four months, and was unaware of the rumors about this so-called "mac mini." I like that slashdot is filling the important niche of news outlets that are looking out for those of us in the sensory deprivation and/or cave dwelling community.
Come to think of it, weren't you in the sensory deprivation experiment with me?
I agree completely- Matlab is the bomb, and if you have to use loops in a Matlab program, you're a twit- it's a MATRIX based language. Use the matrices.
Aphex Twin's "Richard D. James" album is probably my favorite electronic album ever. It is simply the most beautiful music I have ever heard in any genre.
Other favorites are:
Autechre, especially "Chiastic Slide" if you can get your hands on it.
Squarepusher, "Feed Me Weird Things" is must-own.
Christian Klein- check out his stuff, more serious than Daft Punk, but still lots of fun.
Plaid - utterly fantastic. I saw them a couple of months ago when they came to Austin, just great.
Four Tet- check out his "Pause" - it's pretty new, but really good stuff.
Damn, I could go on forever, but that should get you started. Enjoy.
A Markov process is basically a series of random variables where the value of random variable X^(i+1) only depends on X^i. The idea is that if you want to predict the value of X^(i+1), all of the information you could possibly use is in the value of X^i.
Lots of processes are Markovian- for instance, a random walk. If you're at point x at time t, then you know that there's a fifty-fifty chance you will be at x-1 or x+1 at time t+1. Knowing all of the previous points along the random walk won't help you predict the next point any better than that.
Adkinson claims that the "5 movie studios and 7 record labels" should be plenty to create a competitive market. He argues that there is no real monopoly beyond that which is expressly allowed by copyright itself.
This argument felt funny to me, and it didn't take me long to realize why- there is something of a "critical mass" phenomenon when it comes to monopolies. You can have a monopoly in one big thing (e.g., operating systems) OR you can have a large number of small monopolies (e.g., in music.) The power of the record labels emerges from a single entity that has so many small monopolies at its control. This is what skews the market, as opposed to the ideal- a large number of small monopolies in the hands of many people.
Any claims that the movie studios are anything less than an oligopoly is absolutely ludicrous. If I did a survey of 1000 people, how many of them could tell me what record label she's on? Does it even matter? Of course not. It's not even the entertainment industry. It's the copyright industry.
I thought that this article about IBM and open source was much more interesting than the IBM buying Sun article. It shows how masterfully IBM has used open source to make de facto standards out of its versions of web service protocols, like UDDI and SOAP, at least in as far as they apply to Java.
Get with the program, Slashdot. IBM buying Sun has nothing to do with hardware and operating systems, and it has everything to do with web services and Java.
the roughly equivalent phrase is "basz meg"- although the usage differs. It's more like the sort of thing your grandma would say if she dropped her fork at the dinner table.
On the other hand, maybe I just have a foul-mouthed grandma.
Free, only runs Javascript when you specifically click on a link (no pop-ups or pop-unders), filters out those big ads (like the ones on/.), fa-diddily-ast, and only for OS X.
I wish I could share with you how great it is. Go buy a Mac and get Omniweb and find out for yourself.
Yes, it does- but you are assuming a) that MS will let Mono fly, and b) that AOL doesn't really care so much about their own Liberty Alliance based solution.
I think everyone is focusing on the idea of an "AOLinux" way too much. In my mind, this is all about fubaring.Net.
Think about it..Net must scare the hell out of AOL and it's Liberty Alliance pals. AOL is apparently developing its own version of web services called "Magic Carpet."
I read a research report by Gartner that labeled Linux as the most serious impediment to the success of.Net, since it runs on Windows servers.
I think this whole thing might be about AOL supporting a (largely) server-side distro in order to stymie.Net in favor of it's own version of web services, which will not have silly platform restrictions.
I think AOL sees that MS is making a mistake by trying to move into a new market (web services) by building off of a market in which they don't have anywhere near a monopoly (web servers.) God knows they're not technically competent enough to pull off that sort of thing without a monopoly to support themselves.
...it was accompanied by 1) a significant increase in the definition of "fair use," and b) a serious reduction in the length of copyrights.
I like the musicians I listen to enough to pay them for their work. And I have little interest in making massive copies of the latest albums to distribute on the net for free. I understand that these people need to get paid for the investment they make in artists.
So they can put DRM stuff in my CD burner, I'm cool with that. But the trade off for them doing so is that they have to release their choke hold on creative works. I want copyrights that last for an absolute maximum of 10 years before the work goes into the public domain. I want to burn my sister one of my CDs for her birthday. I want to be able to remix tunes and post them on the Internet. Or add a soundtrack to my home movies.
Basically, if the content industry wants all of this additional ability to protect their copyright, I want something in return: COMPULSORY LICENSING. I have no issue with paying a nominal fee to these people so that I can remix their music and post it online as my own work. That seems rather fair to me.
It breaks down like this: copy protection is going to happen. There's too much money in it for the tech companies. Now as I see it, we have two choices here- we can either 1) fight this legislation, and spend valuable game playing time figuring out how to crack the latest encryption schemes, or b) utilize this opportunity to get some copyright laws that make sense.
I use an open-source data analysis package called Weka.
It was developed in Java, and it's quite easy to modify and extend as you see fit. Solid documentation available on the website. Excellent CLI, decent GUI, decent graphics. Really useful for doing basic statistical analysis and using some of the more interesting machine learning techniques.
At Duke, almost all of the really important CS courses- software design and implementation, operating systems- are almost entirely team based. The most important thing in doing well in those classes is putting together the right team of people.
This has upsides and downsides, of course. Upside: being forced to trust people to do good work, because your grade depends on it. Downside: being forced to trust people to do good work, because your grade depends on it. It's a double-edged sword to be sure, but as you pointed out, that's what it's like in the real world, except you replace your grade with your job.
Fortunately, as it is in the real world, the TAs and professors make an effort to figure out who really did what on the project, and that affects the grades accordingly.
Personally, I think teamwork is something that you learn in any number of different ways, through sports or activities or whatever. The skills involved transcend disciplines. I think you would gain just as much benefit from learning how to code well in your classes, and learning how to be part of a team with the other parts of your life.
I ran Robocode under the OS X terminal using the Linux install/run options, worked like a charm, although it seems that the text in the preferences window got cut off for some reason. If you're using a G4, I highly recommend maxing out the FPS and watching the game fly.
All kidding aside, that was exactly how I felt when my offer at Sapient was rescinded in March during their layoffs. As part of my signing an I-won't-sue-you agreement, I got a fat check in the mail for having done absolutely no work.
After the initial ecstasy comes the hard fall- you realize that there aren't alot of really interesting cool jobs out there right now for people coming right out of college, and that real job searches involve sending out 10 resumes for every one reply- quite a long way from the free food and playstations during the fall info sessions and cushy recruiting weekends.
And the worst part is when you realize that you have become emotionally involved with the company. The idea of working there starts to seep into how you view yourself, and you really care what happens to it. The unsigning is like breaking up with a girlfriend and having her give you an import Beta Band CD- great gift, but you'd really rather have your girlfriend back. The money was only about 1/8th of the reason you wanted to work there.
I'm going to break the general trend of comments which are telling these kids to suck it up and get used to getting shit on because they are young.
The National Science Foundation offers a wide variety of grants for undergraduates and high school students to perform research at major academic institutions. I did one at Carnegie Mellon's computer science department after my sophomore year at college, and it was fantastic. My mentor basically handed me a problem that didn't have a clear solution, and told me to find one. I got to draw on the resources of some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world to assist me. A good friend of mine spent 9 months working at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, and is co-authoring two papers, one of which he is lead author on.
A couple of cautions: not all of these programs are amazing, but they are reviewed every couple of years, so the overall quality is pretty high. Two, academia has its own variety of office politics and things that suck (think grant writing)- but there are many institutions out there that give smart, young people a chance to prove themselves, which I believe is what you want most. I would highly recommend looking into these opportunities at the NSF website. Best of luck to all of you.
Slashdot Mirror
That was hands down the best software engineering course I took. The entire course is a series of short, intense team projects to develop an escalating series of more complex software products- starting from a simple day planner and working up to a networked multiplayer game, with graphics and all. This was back in 2000, and it was really all about learning new concepts like MVC and other design patterns and applying them on the fly.
The most important aspects by far were the small teams and the fast pace, both of which are perfect training for doing anything fun when you get out- like starting software companies. Technologies and methodologies change, understanding design and how to work with people under intense deadlines is always useful.
She gave us all hope that cold fusion was possible and that there could be physicists who look like Elisabeth Shue.
I have been part of a sensory deprivation experiment for the past four months, and was unaware of the rumors about this so-called "mac mini." I like that slashdot is filling the important niche of news outlets that are looking out for those of us in the sensory deprivation and/or cave dwelling community.
Come to think of it, weren't you in the sensory deprivation experiment with me?
One of the things a level 5 leader does is to encourage comment.
Wow, you've read Good to Great. Is it safe to assume you are the CEO of a Fortune 500 company?
I'd be curious to hear which of these places you found interesting, stories from your travels, etc., etc.
Did anyone else find the writer's fawning, adjective-heavy style irritating, even for a Slashdot article?
I agree completely- Matlab is the bomb, and if you have to use loops in a Matlab program, you're a twit- it's a MATRIX based language. Use the matrices.
Aphex Twin's "Richard D. James" album is probably my favorite electronic album ever. It is simply the most beautiful music I have ever heard in any genre.
Other favorites are:
Autechre, especially "Chiastic Slide" if you can get your hands on it.
Squarepusher, "Feed Me Weird Things" is must-own.
Christian Klein- check out his stuff, more serious than Daft Punk, but still lots of fun.
Plaid - utterly fantastic. I saw them a couple of months ago when they came to Austin, just great.
Four Tet- check out his "Pause" - it's pretty new, but really good stuff.
Damn, I could go on forever, but that should get you started. Enjoy.
A Markov process is basically a series of random variables where the value of random variable X^(i+1) only depends on X^i. The idea is that if you want to predict the value of X^(i+1), all of the information you could possibly use is in the value of X^i.
Lots of processes are Markovian- for instance, a random walk. If you're at point x at time t, then you know that there's a fifty-fifty chance you will be at x-1 or x+1 at time t+1. Knowing all of the previous points along the random walk won't help you predict the next point any better than that.
Adkinson claims that the "5 movie studios and 7 record labels" should be plenty to create a competitive market. He argues that there is no real monopoly beyond that which is expressly allowed by copyright itself.
This argument felt funny to me, and it didn't take me long to realize why- there is something of a "critical mass" phenomenon when it comes to monopolies. You can have a monopoly in one big thing (e.g., operating systems) OR you can have a large number of small monopolies (e.g., in music.) The power of the record labels emerges from a single entity that has so many small monopolies at its control. This is what skews the market, as opposed to the ideal- a large number of small monopolies in the hands of many people.
Any claims that the movie studios are anything less than an oligopoly is absolutely ludicrous. If I did a survey of 1000 people, how many of them could tell me what record label she's on? Does it even matter? Of course not. It's not even the entertainment industry. It's the copyright industry.
It's not the links that makes people mad. It's the cache.
I thought that this article about IBM and open source was much more interesting than the IBM buying Sun article. It shows how masterfully IBM has used open source to make de facto standards out of its versions of web service protocols, like UDDI and SOAP, at least in as far as they apply to Java.
Get with the program, Slashdot. IBM buying Sun has nothing to do with hardware and operating systems, and it has everything to do with web services and Java.
the roughly equivalent phrase is "basz meg"- although the usage differs. It's more like the sort of thing your grandma would say if she dropped her fork at the dinner table.
On the other hand, maybe I just have a foul-mouthed grandma.
Free, only runs Javascript when you specifically click on a link (no pop-ups or pop-unders), filters out those big ads (like the ones on /.), fa-diddily-ast, and only for OS X.
I wish I could share with you how great it is. Go buy a Mac and get Omniweb and find out for yourself.
...and Microsoft has Xenix.
Coincidence? I think not.
Yes, it does- but you are assuming a) that MS will let Mono fly, and b) that AOL doesn't really care so much about their own Liberty Alliance based solution.
I think everyone is focusing on the idea of an "AOLinux" way too much. In my mind, this is all about fubaring .Net.
Think about it. .Net must scare the hell out of AOL and it's Liberty Alliance pals. AOL is apparently developing its own version of web services called "Magic Carpet."
I read a research report by Gartner that labeled Linux as the most serious impediment to the success of .Net, since it runs on Windows servers.
I think this whole thing might be about AOL supporting a (largely) server-side distro in order to stymie .Net in favor of it's own version of web services, which will not have silly platform restrictions.
I think AOL sees that MS is making a mistake by trying to move into a new market (web services) by building off of a market in which they don't have anywhere near a monopoly (web servers.) God knows they're not technically competent enough to pull off that sort of thing without a monopoly to support themselves.
...it was accompanied by 1) a significant increase in the definition of "fair use," and b) a serious reduction in the length of copyrights.
I like the musicians I listen to enough to pay them for their work. And I have little interest in making massive copies of the latest albums to distribute on the net for free. I understand that these people need to get paid for the investment they make in artists.
So they can put DRM stuff in my CD burner, I'm cool with that. But the trade off for them doing so is that they have to release their choke hold on creative works. I want copyrights that last for an absolute maximum of 10 years before the work goes into the public domain. I want to burn my sister one of my CDs for her birthday. I want to be able to remix tunes and post them on the Internet. Or add a soundtrack to my home movies.
Basically, if the content industry wants all of this additional ability to protect their copyright, I want something in return: COMPULSORY LICENSING. I have no issue with paying a nominal fee to these people so that I can remix their music and post it online as my own work. That seems rather fair to me.
It breaks down like this: copy protection is going to happen. There's too much money in it for the tech companies. Now as I see it, we have two choices here- we can either 1) fight this legislation, and spend valuable game playing time figuring out how to crack the latest encryption schemes, or b) utilize this opportunity to get some copyright laws that make sense.
I use an open-source data analysis package called Weka.
It was developed in Java, and it's quite easy to modify and extend as you see fit. Solid documentation available on the website. Excellent CLI, decent GUI, decent graphics. Really useful for doing basic statistical analysis and using some of the more interesting machine learning techniques.
At Duke, almost all of the really important CS courses- software design and implementation, operating systems- are almost entirely team based. The most important thing in doing well in those classes is putting together the right team of people.
This has upsides and downsides, of course. Upside: being forced to trust people to do good work, because your grade depends on it. Downside: being forced to trust people to do good work, because your grade depends on it. It's a double-edged sword to be sure, but as you pointed out, that's what it's like in the real world, except you replace your grade with your job.
Fortunately, as it is in the real world, the TAs and professors make an effort to figure out who really did what on the project, and that affects the grades accordingly.
Personally, I think teamwork is something that you learn in any number of different ways, through sports or activities or whatever. The skills involved transcend disciplines. I think you would gain just as much benefit from learning how to code well in your classes, and learning how to be part of a team with the other parts of your life.
I ran Robocode under the OS X terminal using the Linux install/run options, worked like a charm, although it seems that the text in the preferences window got cut off for some reason. If you're using a G4, I highly recommend maxing out the FPS and watching the game fly.
All kidding aside, that was exactly how I felt when my offer at Sapient was rescinded in March during their layoffs. As part of my signing an I-won't-sue-you agreement, I got a fat check in the mail for having done absolutely no work.
After the initial ecstasy comes the hard fall- you realize that there aren't alot of really interesting cool jobs out there right now for people coming right out of college, and that real job searches involve sending out 10 resumes for every one reply- quite a long way from the free food and playstations during the fall info sessions and cushy recruiting weekends.
And the worst part is when you realize that you have become emotionally involved with the company. The idea of working there starts to seep into how you view yourself, and you really care what happens to it. The unsigning is like breaking up with a girlfriend and having her give you an import Beta Band CD- great gift, but you'd really rather have your girlfriend back. The money was only about 1/8th of the reason you wanted to work there.
I'm going to break the general trend of comments which are telling these kids to suck it up and get used to getting shit on because they are young.
The National Science Foundation offers a wide variety of grants for undergraduates and high school students to perform research at major academic institutions. I did one at Carnegie Mellon's computer science department after my sophomore year at college, and it was fantastic. My mentor basically handed me a problem that didn't have a clear solution, and told me to find one. I got to draw on the resources of some of the most brilliant computer scientists in the world to assist me. A good friend of mine spent 9 months working at Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California, and is co-authoring two papers, one of which he is lead author on.
A couple of cautions: not all of these programs are amazing, but they are reviewed every couple of years, so the overall quality is pretty high. Two, academia has its own variety of office politics and things that suck (think grant writing)- but there are many institutions out there that give smart, young people a chance to prove themselves, which I believe is what you want most. I would highly recommend looking into these opportunities at the NSF website. Best of luck to all of you.