You work from home only talk to your mentor over the internet, which seems like it might distract from the learning experience. I've telecommuted before, and while it might seem convenient at first, there are numerous related to communication, and being able to go home at the end of the day and be a psycologically non-work space that detract from those advantages.
Well, assuming your mentor is willing, you could always talk to him/her on the phone once in a while -- it doesn't have to be only over the net. As far as trouble separating work-space from non-workspace, if you have an issue with this try going somewhere else when you want to work, i.e. a library or a park with wifi nearby (this is the summer of code, you might as well spend some time outside). There are issues with telecommuting to be sure, but there are ways you can make it easier on yourself. Plus there's a big difference between telecommuting for a summer and the psychological wear that can come from telecommuting for many years.
just how good it will look on a resume.
This obviously depends on the type of jobs you're looking for and which particular company you're applying for a job at. There are some jobs where having worked on ffmpeg, nmap or Freenet would be very impressive and some jobs where the person looking at your application will have no idea what those projects are. For the latter, obviously an internship at IBM or wherever would look better.
Another thing is that not everybody interested in SoC is necessarily getting a degree closely related to Computer Science. If you're getting a degree in chemical engineering and planning on looking for job in that field, then an internship at a company in that field might look better on a resume than participating in SoC.
That said, I think it makes more sense to be concerned about which one you enjoy more, SoC or an internship, rather than which one would look best on your resume. That's a personal opinion though.
Isn't this the sort of business practice that led to the dot com boom in the first place? They're going to give everything away and hope that advertising money eventually catches up.
Business models which rely on ad revenue to pay for content users receive for free is not necessarily a bad model. These models are often blamed for the dotcom boom/bust, but undeniably they can work. There are a ton of successful sites that have built a steady revenue stream solely from ads -- you're on one right now.
There are, however, two reasons why these models can fail. Firstly is that the model does not work for every site, some sites have content that is too expensive to be covered solely by ads (i.e. a site streaming DVD quality movies would not be able to cover itself with only ad revenue) and some sites don't have particularly expensive content, but because of its content (or rather the userbase its content attracts) their site isn't as attractive to good advertisers. At the height of the boom, the viability of the "pay for it with ads" model was sometimes not seen as limited in this sense, it was taken (stupidly) as being universal and applied to businesses where it was entirely inadequate
The second reason why the model can fail is that it's impossible to know for sure whether your ad revenue will be able to cover the cost of your content. No matter how much your research and put time into making good estimates, you can never know for sure whether a business will work. Even if a business looks like it should work on paper, there might be some costs or other aspects that you didn't and/or couldn't anticipate. Just because you have a good business model doesn't mean you have a good business.
I hear a lot of people lamenting the current growth of a new tech bubble. While there are many bad things that come from tech bubbles, I think everybody's forgetting the good stuff that comes as well. In particular I'm thinking of all the stuff that companies start giving away for free or for supercheap, whether its because they think they can cover their costs with ad revenues, because they want to build users or just because they've got VC to burn and no business plan, tech startups just love to give people free shit and I think that's awesome.
Er, forgive my leap to conclusions here, but isn't this basically gambling?
It depends on how you define the word gambling. Going by the dictionary, a gamble would be betting on an uncertain outcome, but often people reserve "gamble" for something that relies purely on chance. For instance, some people might refer to investing in the stock market as gambling because the outcome is uncertain, but many people would abstain from referring to it as such because the outcome is, at least partly, controlled by skill, i.e. picking and diversifying your investments to control and balance the risk you're taking.
No, but you have to be able to convince people that the money you're printing has value and it's a lot easier to do this if you have something to back it (Gold, silver, a copy of the Beatles' "Yesterday and Today" with the butcher cover, etc.). You're right it's not necessary though, most currency used in the world is not backed.
I wonder how American Express gets away with its travelers' checks then. Maybe it's the signatures? They're effectively cash, though up to the recipient to honor them.
Not really, they're just checks. Sure, they're not like personal checks because they'll never bounce, but they're like cashiers checks or money orders. The thing that makes traveler's checks (American Express or otherwise) not cash is that if I pay you with a traveler's check, you can't just bring that check to store and use it to pay for something, you have to cash it at a bank first.
While the grandparent post's list of sites was full of shit, Google does in fact use LAMP for some things. I've never heard of the P standing for PHP in anything they've done though, only Python. You're right though, they obviously don't use one approach and I think that's a good thing.
Java on the other hand - if anything - tends to be over-engineered.
Exactly, Java is too smart for its own good, it's a nerd language and nobody likes nerds. Not even programming nerds. Java is like that guy in your CS class that dressed up as Brian Kernighan for halloween -- even the geeks think he's gone a little overboard.
I saw a 4 minute, 720x480 AVI go from 890MB to 15MB with virtually no loss in quality.
You're absolutely right that the codec FLVs use is very capable, but this comparison is meaningless. Are you saying you made an FLV of an uncompressed AVI or one compressed with Divx? How much is "virtually no loss in quality"? In my experience I've found FLV to be pretty comparable to Divx or any of the other current high-compression video codecs.
I think the fact that Ruby and Python have interactive interpreters makes them great places to start. Just like many of the old basic interpreters, you can just punch in commands and see what happens. You don't have to open a file, edit it, save it, close it, run it, and then repeat all that when you get errors, you can just type in a command and see what happens -- you get the errors immediately and you even have a command history so you can bring the last line you typed right back up, edit it and try again.
it could be noted that HTML, because of how commonplace it is, is the gateway language to keyboard hacking.
This rings terrifically true in my case. I'm 20 now and this is very close to how I got into programming.
I started making HTML pages in a WYSIWYG editor when I was about 15 because it was easy and after doing this for a few months I learned HTML from reading the sources to pages I had made. I soon dumped WYSIWYGs in favor of writing pages by hand. I sought out web tutorials and dabbled in Javascript. I had programmed a *little* with VB before, but Javascript was the first language with C-style syntax I had ever used. Soon after I started playing with PHP on a linux box my brother had setup. Writing and running PHP scripts on this server required I learn about using Unix and from this point everything began to snowball and I began to hurtle ever deeper into computer nerdom. At this point, it's reached depths unspeakable, i.e. writing assembly for microcontrollers. Unix is addictive. I swear, if kids were all running *nix and had the development tools right at their fingertips (particularly I'm thinking of python and ruby interpreters) there would be a lot more kids programming today. It's just like bundling a BASIC interpreter with an Apple IIe -- sure, most people will never touch it, but it's easy for a kid to fall into it, maybe they get bored one day or maybe one of their friends show them something simple and cool they programmed and they want to do it too. It doesn't take much.
the problem is that there IS no BASIC interpreter shipped with windows or Mac OSX
No, but OSX has plenty of other (better) choices. I mean, OSX now comes, out of the box, with perl, python, ruby, PHP and TCL installed, not to mention applescript, javascript and the various shell scripting languages (bash, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh). I'm sure there are more that somebody could point out as well.
22% of all US computer programmers, or 100,000 people
So the total number of US computer programmers is less than a half million? That seems really low, does anybody know where they might have gotten this data?
Slashdot Mirror
Go to "Save as" and select the type ".txt". You'll never have to worry about formatting isssues ever again.
Another thing is that not everybody interested in SoC is necessarily getting a degree closely related to Computer Science. If you're getting a degree in chemical engineering and planning on looking for job in that field, then an internship at a company in that field might look better on a resume than participating in SoC.
That said, I think it makes more sense to be concerned about which one you enjoy more, SoC or an internship, rather than which one would look best on your resume. That's a personal opinion though.
There are, however, two reasons why these models can fail. Firstly is that the model does not work for every site, some sites have content that is too expensive to be covered solely by ads (i.e. a site streaming DVD quality movies would not be able to cover itself with only ad revenue) and some sites don't have particularly expensive content, but because of its content (or rather the userbase its content attracts) their site isn't as attractive to good advertisers. At the height of the boom, the viability of the "pay for it with ads" model was sometimes not seen as limited in this sense, it was taken (stupidly) as being universal and applied to businesses where it was entirely inadequate
The second reason why the model can fail is that it's impossible to know for sure whether your ad revenue will be able to cover the cost of your content. No matter how much your research and put time into making good estimates, you can never know for sure whether a business will work. Even if a business looks like it should work on paper, there might be some costs or other aspects that you didn't and/or couldn't anticipate. Just because you have a good business model doesn't mean you have a good business.
Tech bubbles are awesome.
I hear a lot of people lamenting the current growth of a new tech bubble. While there are many bad things that come from tech bubbles, I think everybody's forgetting the good stuff that comes as well. In particular I'm thinking of all the stuff that companies start giving away for free or for supercheap, whether its because they think they can cover their costs with ad revenues, because they want to build users or just because they've got VC to burn and no business plan, tech startups just love to give people free shit and I think that's awesome.
No, but you have to be able to convince people that the money you're printing has value and it's a lot easier to do this if you have something to back it (Gold, silver, a copy of the Beatles' "Yesterday and Today" with the butcher cover, etc.). You're right it's not necessary though, most currency used in the world is not backed.
While the grandparent post's list of sites was full of shit, Google does in fact use LAMP for some things. I've never heard of the P standing for PHP in anything they've done though, only Python. You're right though, they obviously don't use one approach and I think that's a good thing.
The Web != The Internet
Also, just to further nitpick, I don't think Wargames even had the internet in it -- he found WOPR by dialing it up directly.
At the time I went to post, the other post wasn't visible yet, slashdot takes a couple minutes to update after posts are made.
Youtube mirrors:
DareDevil
Wheee!
Fox Fever
This is Hot
Give me the the soap
I think the fact that Ruby and Python have interactive interpreters makes them great places to start. Just like many of the old basic interpreters, you can just punch in commands and see what happens. You don't have to open a file, edit it, save it, close it, run it, and then repeat all that when you get errors, you can just type in a command and see what happens -- you get the errors immediately and you even have a command history so you can bring the last line you typed right back up, edit it and try again.
I started making HTML pages in a WYSIWYG editor when I was about 15 because it was easy and after doing this for a few months I learned HTML from reading the sources to pages I had made. I soon dumped WYSIWYGs in favor of writing pages by hand. I sought out web tutorials and dabbled in Javascript. I had programmed a *little* with VB before, but Javascript was the first language with C-style syntax I had ever used. Soon after I started playing with PHP on a linux box my brother had setup. Writing and running PHP scripts on this server required I learn about using Unix and from this point everything began to snowball and I began to hurtle ever deeper into computer nerdom. At this point, it's reached depths unspeakable, i.e. writing assembly for microcontrollers. Unix is addictive. I swear, if kids were all running *nix and had the development tools right at their fingertips (particularly I'm thinking of python and ruby interpreters) there would be a lot more kids programming today. It's just like bundling a BASIC interpreter with an Apple IIe -- sure, most people will never touch it, but it's easy for a kid to fall into it, maybe they get bored one day or maybe one of their friends show them something simple and cool they programmed and they want to do it too. It doesn't take much.
That is... visionary!
Yep, nothing makes a program faster than adding a virtual machine and making everything an object!
This patent is a streaming pile of crap.