Why do you have to have a diploma in one year? A college degree in CS requires more than just taking computer courses. The idea is to get an education. To have read not just Knuth or Dijstra, but Shakespeare and Austin. Not just understand MP3 format, but know the difference between a fugue and a prelude. You get the idea.
Being a well rounded person will make you a better developer. You can't just know technology, but also you need the gain understanding how technology fits into the bigger picture.
Learn stuff that will not be obsolete in three years. This takes time. Enjoy the journey.
I dunno, maybe actually pay for something instead of freeloading? I'm sure that's an unheard of concept, but you should try it sometime. Its very rewarding!
But what if these "freeloaders" are running a food bank and use donated machines. They could spent $300 to upgrade to Win XP, or they could feed a homeless/poor family for a month.
Which one would you pick?
Anyway, did you stop to think that the people who pay for these cable modem services don't want an idiot on the same network as them creating a virtual traffic jam with his server? This is the exact online analogue to real estate zoning laws [lp.org]. People deserve to be protected from their neighbor setting up a big retail business right next to them, attracting tons of traffic and general degradation of life for the people who live there.
Not exactly. You can hog more bandwith just downloading MP3s and MPG files, than I ever could by running a web server.
The TOS agreements given by the cable companies are discriminatory towards people who want to provide "content". I don't want to download Brittney Spears MP3s, I want to distribute my own recordings for free via my own servers.
The ISPs should be charging for bandwith - as this is the thing that's limited - and not worry about what runs of my own servers.
For example, a Yes/No dialog appeared on the screen so I naturally hit "Y" on the keyboard instead of clicking the button. It didn't work. I also found myself trying to hit ALT-F4 to close the current window...it didn't work either
It really matters more what you are used to. I'm a long time Emacs/Unix/Bash user, who is forced to used Windows machines for something.
Guess how many time I press Ctl-E to go to end of line, and get some bizzare behavior. Or maybe try to paste piece of text with the middle button of the mouse.
Linux key mapping can be customized as you like. Can Windows'?
My real question is about VMS. Didn't they have a fairly 'unique' way of representing the filesystem. If I recall, when you log in, you are dumped to your home directory which is effectively the root of the filesystem while everything else branches off of your home directory.
Actually the standard for VMS file names is this: devicename:[dir.subdir1.subdir2]
So your home directory might be: DBA1:[USERS.YOU].
You could play games with logical names so that you, as a user, did not have to know about actual devices, but I thought this was pretty akward.
The Unix file system is a lot easier to deal with.
Because life isn't fair, and Internet access isn't a right, it's a product
That's right. Internet access is a product and I want to pay for the product. The product in this case is bandwidth and quality of service.
I'm willing to pay for that. Why should I pay more, for using less as a typical VPN/bussiness user, that some teenager who stays all day on Gnutella downloading videos?
I read this book few weeks ago and found it pretty shallow, not much info, although few interesting ideas. If you are looking for more depth I recomend: Turles, Termites and Traffic Jams by Mitchel Resnick. Resnick is a professor at MIT doing research on these things and is the author of StarLogo - a massively parallel version of LOGO.
The catch is that the music they have there is not the top fourty really popular stuff, but more off-beat, less well know things.
However, they do have lots of really good stuff. For example most of the recordings of Bill Evans, lost of albums by Elvis Costello, all records of my favorite guitaris Emily Remler, lost of good blues (i.e. all recordings of Lightin' Hopkings, latest album by Sue Foley, Albert King, Hot Tuna).
Also all files are encoded at 128 bits. Finally, to get the $10/month rate you've got to sign up for a year.
I've used the service for few months now and I must have downloaded about 30 CDs of stuff.
Engineers would be useless without science to provide new raw materials.
Engineers have to build things to get paid by their customers. If the things work reasonably well and don't fall down, engineers get paid.
Engineers use science when available. If it's not, engineers hack - they base their results on trial and error (BTW, note that most engineering disciplines spent a lot of time analyzing failures).
Sometimes engineers use science that's wrong. Sometimes they get away with it (if large enough safety factors are applied) and sometimes not.
My favorite story comes from the book "Design Paradigms" by Henry Petrosky (sp?). Galileo's formula for the strength of the cantilever beam was wrong. Yet it was used in construction of bridges for few hundred years. Only when the engineers tried to reduce the cost by shaving the safety factors and bridges started to fall down, someone went and looked back at the math and discovered the mistake.
If you have a decent sound card (not the eMachine I am using) then the digital-analog-digital damage is going to be far less
than the mp3 or ogg encoding will do.
Hm... looks like you are trafficing in a method to bypass a copy protection mechanism. Off to jail with you!
People do all kinds of sick things and transmission of pictures of such things is not illegal. For example, transmission pictures of mutilated bodies are not illegel. But don't you think that being killed is worse!
What if availability of kiddie porn pictures actually made people less likely to molest real kids? What if the pictures are paintings or doctored up photographs?
Is trasmission of a photograph of a crime also a crime?
Freedom of speech would still exist if it hadn't been so seriously abused.
If I can't abuse it, it ain't freedom! We're talking about "speech", not hitting people with a car!!! Remember "stick and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me".
That's cool. I do something similar. I have an old Pentium 120 with a 6Gig drive as my music server. It sits in my basement, runs RH 7.0 and exports music directory via NFS.
In my office I hook up my laptop to the stereo and run XMMS to play files from the NFS drive.
Perhaps the sound quality can be better with a custom player, as opposed to a computer sound card.
Their first album, which admittedly was pretty rough, was
recorded in 2 days. Their second album (Hatebreeder) is a wonderful symphony of high-speed power rock and melody which
sounds good and was recorded in a week. While I don't know the recodring budget they had, I can assure that it wasn't
anything in the $500K region.
I agree. $500K recording budget seems ridiculous. For example the classis jazz record "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis, was recorded in two three hour sessions. The musicians were playing live, and what's on the record is the first complete take of each number.
This album has consistently sold well since it was made back in '59.
So, the bottom line is, if the musicians are good, it takes no time to record great music.
In traditional engineering disciplines, the laws of physics apply and do not change. On these laws, best practices have been
built. No matter where you apply these practices, you can be sure the laws supporting them are just as they were before and
will be tomorrow. This covers most of the work we consider "engineering."
Even in traditional engineering disciplines knowing the laws of physics may not help much. For example, consider civil engineers who try to control floods. We understand the basic physical process (i.e. gravity pulls water down), but the system of rivers etc, interacting with the weather is chaotic, and there is no scientific theory that tell us where to build dams to stop floods.
The problem is that engineers are asked to build things, whether the science to help them exists or not.
Engineers try to ensure that this technology
is used is as safe a fashion as possible. Minimization of risk. Planes stay in the air, bridges don't fall down, the water is safe to
drink.
I think engineers are also driven by the cost/economy of the designs they create. It's a balance of conflicting requirements.
For example, if you study the history of bridge building, you'll find that Galileo's formula for the strength of the cantilever bean was wrong. Yet bridge builders used it successfully, because of large safety factors they used.
But the requirement to reduce costs, reduced the safety factors, until bridges started failing. Only then someone reexamined the formula they all used and discovered an error.
Engineering is not science. Engineering uses science, if it is available, to accomplish it's goals. Here are some relevant quotes. First from To Engineer is Human:
Structural engineering is the science and art of designing and making, with economy and elegance, buildings, bridges, frameworks, and other similar structures so that they can safely resist the forces to which they may be subjected.
And the second from the current (Nov 19) issue of The New Yorker from an article about the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Center:
"It is a tremendous responsibility, being an engineer," he said, his voice breaking. "It's a very imperfect process. It's not so beatiful as science."
But my favorite quote about engineering and science is the one that says:
A scientists discovers what is, an engineer builds what never was.
I realize that the current hierarchical system of directories and files might not be the best possible way of organizing things, but at least it allows me to store related stuff together in the same place.
Try working in SmallTalk (try Squeak for an open source implementation) and see how code and comments are organized. SmallTalk work is done inside it's own environment, without the need to step out to the base O/S file system. In fact Squeak has been used as the O/S on some small devices.
The chronological limitation of a physical notebook is what I hate the most about them! I always find myself wanting to take part of this page and part of that and move it into another section where etc. etc. Being able to do that is what I like about my computer.
That's why I use a Wiki to keep my notes on my computer. It's a simple interface, I can rearrange it as I like and I can search it.
Voice interaction is a classic example of something that can be thought of as "cool" until you have an open plan office with 30 people talking at their computers.
I just can't wait until all those laptops have voice activation, so I can get up on my morning train and yell: "format C:" !!!
Slashdot Mirror
Being a well rounded person will make you a better developer. You can't just know technology, but also you need the gain understanding how technology fits into the bigger picture.
Learn stuff that will not be obsolete in three years. This takes time. Enjoy the journey.
But what if these "freeloaders" are running a food bank and use donated machines. They could spent $300 to upgrade to Win XP, or they could feed a homeless/poor family for a month. Which one would you pick?
Not exactly. You can hog more bandwith just downloading MP3s and MPG files, than I ever could by running a web server.
The TOS agreements given by the cable companies are discriminatory towards people who want to provide "content". I don't want to download Brittney Spears MP3s, I want to distribute my own recordings for free via my own servers.
The ISPs should be charging for bandwith - as this is the thing that's limited - and not worry about what runs of my own servers.
It really matters more what you are used to. I'm a long time Emacs/Unix/Bash user, who is forced to used Windows machines for something.
Guess how many time I press Ctl-E to go to end of line, and get some bizzare behavior. Or maybe try to paste piece of text with the middle button of the mouse.
Linux key mapping can be customized as you like. Can Windows'?
Actually the standard for VMS file names is this: devicename:[dir.subdir1.subdir2] So your home directory might be: DBA1:[USERS.YOU].
You could play games with logical names so that you, as a user, did not have to know about actual devices, but I thought this was pretty akward.
The Unix file system is a lot easier to deal with.
That's right. Internet access is a product and I want to pay for the product. The product in this case is bandwidth and quality of service.
I'm willing to pay for that. Why should I pay more, for using less as a typical VPN/bussiness user, that some teenager who stays all day on Gnutella downloading videos?
Why should that matter? Do you pay more for bus/train/toll because you are going to work, instead of to the movies?
You should pay for the service you're getting: bandwidth, IP address and quality of service. What you do with it is non of the ISP's bussiness.
Sort of. It's Logo with thousands of turtles running at the same time (in 2-D). Intial implementation was on a Connection Machine.
However, they do have lots of really good stuff. For example most of the recordings of Bill Evans, lost of albums by Elvis Costello, all records of my favorite guitaris Emily Remler, lost of good blues (i.e. all recordings of Lightin' Hopkings, latest album by Sue Foley, Albert King, Hot Tuna).
Also all files are encoded at 128 bits. Finally, to get the $10/month rate you've got to sign up for a year.
I've used the service for few months now and I must have downloaded about 30 CDs of stuff.
Engineers have to build things to get paid by their customers. If the things work reasonably well and don't fall down, engineers get paid.
Engineers use science when available. If it's not, engineers hack - they base their results on trial and error (BTW, note that most engineering disciplines spent a lot of time analyzing failures).
Sometimes engineers use science that's wrong. Sometimes they get away with it (if large enough safety factors are applied) and sometimes not.
My favorite story comes from the book "Design Paradigms" by Henry Petrosky (sp?). Galileo's formula for the strength of the cantilever beam was wrong. Yet it was used in construction of bridges for few hundred years. Only when the engineers tried to reduce the cost by shaving the safety factors and bridges started to fall down, someone went and looked back at the math and discovered the mistake.
...richie
Hm... looks like you are trafficing in a method to bypass a copy protection mechanism. Off to jail with you!
Yes (two kids 14 and 10).
People do all kinds of sick things and transmission of pictures of such things is not illegal. For example, transmission pictures of mutilated bodies are not illegel. But don't you think that being killed is worse!
What if availability of kiddie porn pictures actually made people less likely to molest real kids? What if the pictures are paintings or doctored up photographs?
Is trasmission of a photograph of a crime also a crime?
If I can't abuse it, it ain't freedom! We're talking about "speech", not hitting people with a car!!! Remember "stick and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me".
In my office I hook up my laptop to the stereo and run XMMS to play files from the NFS drive.
Perhaps the sound quality can be better with a custom player, as opposed to a computer sound card.
I agree. $500K recording budget seems ridiculous. For example the classis jazz record "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis, was recorded in two three hour sessions. The musicians were playing live, and what's on the record is the first complete take of each number.
This album has consistently sold well since it was made back in '59.
So, the bottom line is, if the musicians are good, it takes no time to record great music.
Even in traditional engineering disciplines knowing the laws of physics may not help much. For example, consider civil engineers who try to control floods. We understand the basic physical process (i.e. gravity pulls water down), but the system of rivers etc, interacting with the weather is chaotic, and there is no scientific theory that tell us where to build dams to stop floods.
The problem is that engineers are asked to build things, whether the science to help them exists or not.
I think engineers are also driven by the cost/economy of the designs they create. It's a balance of conflicting requirements.
For example, if you study the history of bridge building, you'll find that Galileo's formula for the strength of the cantilever bean was wrong. Yet bridge builders used it successfully, because of large safety factors they used.
But the requirement to reduce costs, reduced the safety factors, until bridges started failing. Only then someone reexamined the formula they all used and discovered an error.
And the second from the current (Nov 19) issue of The New Yorker from an article about the chief structural engineer of the World Trade Center:
But my favorite quote about engineering and science is the one that says:
Try working in SmallTalk (try Squeak for an open source implementation) and see how code and comments are organized. SmallTalk work is done inside it's own environment, without the need to step out to the base O/S file system. In fact Squeak has been used as the O/S on some small devices.
That's why I use a Wiki to keep my notes on my computer. It's a simple interface, I can rearrange it as I like and I can search it.
I just can't wait until all those laptops have voice activation, so I can get up on my morning train and yell: "format C:" !!!