He sounds like someone who couldn't hack it and now decides to bitch about it. Frankly I can't believe this guy is willing to say he failed "Discrete Math" on the web! Of all the math I had to learn discrete was the easiest. In fact I remember my alarm not going off, runing to the exam hall 1 hour late and very stressed, did my exam in 2 hours instead of 3 and feeling like shit and still passing.
Let me put my own experience here for those who are still in University to think over and maybe learn. I didn't do well in the beginning of my undergrad either but by the end of it I was doing very well because of a few things I learned.
You got to be the most persistent bastard ever if you want good grades. So the TA sucks at explaining, so the Prof writes one equation and talks 45 minutes without adding any more notes. It doesn't matter this is your first taste of adult life, it sucks and you will learn to live with it. No matter how bad your TA is they can still help you out a bit but you need to meet them half way. Some of the ideas being taught are difficult and everyone has a slightly different way of understanding them. That's why you can't expect the TAs to be able to explain the ideas well. The Z transform of this or that is so familar to them they have no idea you still don't remember how it's done. So write down whatever they say, ask questions and if you still don't understand ask more. And always do your readings! Before class if you can manage it.
Reading things 5 times can help. It's interesting how people never seems to learn this fact. It works like this: 1st time you are confused and annonyed by the end of reading, 2nd time you make out what hey are trying to say, 3rd time you start to get it, 4th you got it, 5th you are crystal. The difference between that kid that gets 99% every exam and you might just be that he was reading his text book over and over and only tried once and gave up. Depending on how smart you aren and how much affinity you have with the topic in question you might only need to read once or you might need to do it 10 times over the course of 2 to 3 days. If you have been to your classes and made sure you did understand what they taught before you should be able to work out, maybe with a little help from your smartie pant friends, what they are trying to teach you now.
Speaking of classes you are most likely not one of those people who can do without them. So go to them. They help structure your time so instead of playing games at home all day you actually maybe learn a little.
Don't expect you are smart. Few are ever that bright that engineering is a breeze. This Kern guy's basically complaining how hard it is when to my eyes the problem isn't his University so much as his high school building up his expectation and giving him a false sense that he's really smart. He also thinks he's motivated enough and can do the math. Well I think he's lying to himself cause if you failed discrete where u learn things like graph theory.. how can u expect to learn harder math where you do have to calculate? Also so he got a D it's no big deal he could have retook it and got something better. Almost everyone I know in engineering at a bad grade at some point or another.
Cost is still cost no matter where it comes from. And telling the VP that you save them so much a year always gets you brownie points no matter where that savings goes. It doesn't even matter if what you did to save them money actually sucks vs what you did before. As long as they hear a lot of the good and don't noice the bad you are golden.
At anyrate here are some reason why lower power is becoming more and more important. First all large datacenters costs tons to cool. You are talking huge air conditioning units running 24/7. Everytime you add a rack to your server room you come that much closer to having to spend a large chunk of money upgrading your cooling. You also come that much closer to having to upgrade your power systems. Server rooms aren't usually just plug it into wall kind of deal. You actually get large power conditioning in professional datacenters. The point is you don't just save on the power the servers themselves actually use but also on cooling and the power conditioning. Also the less power a server uses the cooler it runs the more you can pack into a rack without worrying about them over heating. That also saves you money cause it means you can put that many more servers in the space you have before you need a cheque to pay of an expansion or relocation to a large facility.
When you force, in my case, 3 to 4 people to work together you get 1 or 2 person doing all the work and the rest doing the writing up or work unrelated to their major.
In my case I did all the work on the actual electronics design and firmware programming and they wrote up stuff and messed around in the shop building the mechanical bits (badly).
3G is a completed waste of time in Hong Kong. All the large providers are offering it but the phones are huge and even here the cost is quite high to use any of the rich media services like videophone. The basic rate plans are already double the GSM plans for the same amount of minutes and you get free 30 minutes of video calls a month. You can get the news for free and that's about it. They are going to offer the World Cup on it but seriously considering the world cup's going to be happening around midnight here who would be busy enough to need to watch it on the go?
Works with a pocket pc and a GPRS enabled cell phone with bluetooth. It has been quite useful for us here . For example lets going fishing tomorrow but wait what's the weather like? Oh here we go just fire up the GPRS and PDA and you can surf for basic stuff.
They outsource (it's not really out sourcing when it's the same company doing the hiring overseas) some jobs. The people who got downsized here need to find work so they fill the job market with supply. The end result is cheaper workers there and cheaper workers here. And the rich boss gets to keep all the money for themselves. It's comparative adventage all right for the people in poewr.
Geez ever tried the Motorola V3? I have one and at how thin this thing is it's already pretty hard to hold. It's wide and long so it actually quite comfortable but you'll be worrying about your hands slipping. Frankly I think with this phone it's about as thin and it's going to get.
Sorry to burst your bubble but genetic algorithms and genetic design research have done exactly just that, design complex systems that works just as well and in many cases better then the human designed version.
First of all all that talk in the paper about north-south trade strikes me as somewhat racist. It is also misleading because China isn't in the southen hemisphere.
The paper in general sees engineering and science as the only factors effecting the US's global status. That is a very narrow point of view and makes the authery seems like he's trying to fit the situation to a conclusion rather then finding the conclusion from studying the situation. There are many more factors effecting the well being of the economy in the United States. For example the paper fails to mention that globally the US dominates cultural exports. Sure bollywood makes more films but only Hollywood films get watched all over the world. US fast food chains are the only ones that are truly global. In TV BBC world is the only non-american channel I can think of that you might expect to find anywhere you might go holidaying in the world. On the other hand I am sure you can find either MTV or MTV like music video channels all over the globe.
Moved from Canada back to my birthplace of Hong Kong so I can get an engineering job. Sucks to love what you do rather then the money sometimes...
But here's what I see. It took just 2 years for the government here to force all the taxies to move to LPG to reduce polution. I am betting when hydrogen comes it would be about 2 years as well. In Canada it takes decades to built new terminal at airports or subway lines. People here expects and don't complain about working 12 hours a day without overtime pay (lucky for me i am gonig to work for a government funded firm so no 12 hour days). It's the same in China and Taiwan when it come to people and work.
I think it's scary how in North America it's hard to find entry level engineering jobs. If you don't have entry level jobs you don't have opportunities to train your work force for more complex jobs. There's grad school but not everyone wants to or make it into grad school. So the end reasult is a lack of people when the current corp of experienced people gets old and retire. I am not too concerned cause if I get my experiences here that just means I can command some seriously good pay when people start to retire.
The bright side is that you can always be an expat working in China for high tech firms. You might not get paid as well as in North America. But the cost of living is also a lot lower and if China continues to grow and you get into the property market now when the prices are resonable... you can set yourself up for a nice retirement back in NA just from properties alone.
I would venture to suggest that CS degrees are devalued because computers technologies are becoming commodities. I will give an example of my own experience as a BSc Computer Engineer.
When I graduated in 2004 I was recruited by a Canadian celluar company into their IT department. For me I was hired into the operations side so sysadmin and tech support kind of work. Along with me various people from UofT and Waterloo were hired into the development side of IT. From talking with the people hired as developers I found out that during the interviews no one was interested in their knowledge of basic CS theories. Sure they asked about QA and software engineer questions. They also asked very hard questions about SQL. But there were nothing about O(n) or anything like that in the exam given during the interview.
For this company it's not suprising as is it all about data in from Oracle and then data out to web applications. In almost all cases they are dealing with O(n) complexity. All the hardwork for sorting etc are done already by Oracle inside their DB.
It's all part of the trend in computing. When PCs ran DOS people had to know how to program at quite low levels. You want a GUI? You had to built some sort of a GUI. Then came windows and GUIs were a matter of programming to an API. Of course then most people used C or C++ which needed you to do some sort of memory managment. Then came JAVA which removed even the need to do memory managment.
I am generalizing a bit but the point is that successive generation of technology made creating applications more simple. Add to that the fact that there are more and more software houses developing turn key solution for what used to be custom applications. And you have on one hand a reduction of skills required of developers. On the other hand a reduction of number of jobs because these software houses can market their wares world wide making increasing competition and reducing the number of firms making software. In turn this means there are fewer programming jobs needing people with lower skill levels.
For me finding this out was pretty much the last straw. The last thing I want was to be a replacable cog. So I found a job doing hardware work instead. I feel a little more secure as they still haven't managed to make hardware/firmware development something anyone can do. My advice to anyone about to enter University is: Pick a subject that deals in the physical world. Software's too easily virtualized into simplicity.
3G does not specify the radio technology to be used. As such who cares what radio they are using. 3G is about flexibiity as you can use whatever radio tech u want (including 802.11 if it pleases u) and you can use either circuit switched or packet switched core networks. So in that aspect unless they are going to come up with the whole of their own 3rd generation specs they'll not be preventing use of 3G just making their own radio.
Re:Good gaming laptops?
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 1
Let me stand on a soap box for a bit.
First gaming and laptop don't get well together. Now matter what they try to sell you.
Secondly at college you'll most likely end up online 24/7 sucking the juice of p2p. Which is what many of my friends did (I just graduated). I haven't seen anyone's desktop die cause of being on too much but at least 5 laptops have died after being used 24/7 for a few months or so.
Last but seriously not least are you sure you want something you will bring to the library that you can play games on? Grades before games. I didn't do as well as I could in University because I play ed too much games in the first 2 years. And I know of many people who isn't finishing for at least another 2 years or even getting kicked out cause of games.
Might sound like something your parents would say but best if you don't play that much games....
Well tis more difficult to clean up the reactor then a single bomb. The bomb left radiation all over but it's in the open. Sending even robots into the reactor would surely kill the electronics within minutes so you couldn't very well do meaningful work there.
Doesn't matter what oracle did. There stuff are expensive and difficult for most people to setup.
With the DB FS built into the OS programmers with new ideas can quickly try something out. This can result in some very neat applications.
So it would be a great thing if LINUX can have a optional easy to install DB FS or a efficent built in one. Either way if it's done quickly and well it can bring along a whole new species of applications.
I think they are thinking you can bring more lines into a power facility if your facility can be upgraded to handle more power via these new "valves".
Additionally just because these rods are superconductive in some conditions doesn't mean they are totally non-conductive when they are in other situatons. So in theory you might be able to have a 2 state valve which would allow them to drop the voltage at the existing circuit breakers preventing arcing. The use of these "valve" to aid existing circuit breakers is what this story was about.
I am annonyed. Why is a "Ask slashdot" post being made by a anonymouse coward?
First off I don't know that many people who thinks "Ask slashdot" is productive to getting any good response.
Anyone who bases their business decisions on a "ask slashdot" should be shot. Cause that's a very good way to utterly fuck up your business/project/thingie/life.
Few if anyone here is going to give you a 20 page reply about what they use and why they used it. Without a detailed report any response you get would be no better then doing research on your own.
So please for the sake of not making slashdot a dumb and stupid place stop posting these kinds of questions!
Slashdot Mirror
He sounds like someone who couldn't hack it and now decides to bitch about it. Frankly I can't believe this guy is willing to say he failed "Discrete Math" on the web! Of all the math I had to learn discrete was the easiest. In fact I remember my alarm not going off, runing to the exam hall 1 hour late and very stressed, did my exam in 2 hours instead of 3 and feeling like shit and still passing.
Let me put my own experience here for those who are still in University to think over and maybe learn. I didn't do well in the beginning of my undergrad either but by the end of it I was doing very well because of a few things I learned.
You got to be the most persistent bastard ever if you want good grades. So the TA sucks at explaining, so the Prof writes one equation and talks 45 minutes without adding any more notes. It doesn't matter this is your first taste of adult life, it sucks and you will learn to live with it. No matter how bad your TA is they can still help you out a bit but you need to meet them half way. Some of the ideas being taught are difficult and everyone has a slightly different way of understanding them. That's why you can't expect the TAs to be able to explain the ideas well. The Z transform of this or that is so familar to them they have no idea you still don't remember how it's done. So write down whatever they say, ask questions and if you still don't understand ask more. And always do your readings! Before class if you can manage it.
Reading things 5 times can help. It's interesting how people never seems to learn this fact. It works like this: 1st time you are confused and annonyed by the end of reading, 2nd time you make out what hey are trying to say, 3rd time you start to get it, 4th you got it, 5th you are crystal. The difference between that kid that gets 99% every exam and you might just be that he was reading his text book over and over and only tried once and gave up. Depending on how smart you aren and how much affinity you have with the topic in question you might only need to read once or you might need to do it 10 times over the course of 2 to 3 days. If you have been to your classes and made sure you did understand what they taught before you should be able to work out, maybe with a little help from your smartie pant friends, what they are trying to teach you now.
Speaking of classes you are most likely not one of those people who can do without them. So go to them. They help structure your time so instead of playing games at home all day you actually maybe learn a little.
Don't expect you are smart. Few are ever that bright that engineering is a breeze. This Kern guy's basically complaining how hard it is when to my eyes the problem isn't his University so much as his high school building up his expectation and giving him a false sense that he's really smart. He also thinks he's motivated enough and can do the math. Well I think he's lying to himself cause if you failed discrete where u learn things like graph theory.. how can u expect to learn harder math where you do have to calculate? Also so he got a D it's no big deal he could have retook it and got something better. Almost everyone I know in engineering at a bad grade at some point or another.
Cost is still cost no matter where it comes from. And telling the VP that you save them so much a year always gets you brownie points no matter where that savings goes. It doesn't even matter if what you did to save them money actually sucks vs what you did before. As long as they hear a lot of the good and don't noice the bad you are golden.
At anyrate here are some reason why lower power is becoming more and more important. First all large datacenters costs tons to cool. You are talking huge air conditioning units running 24/7. Everytime you add a rack to your server room you come that much closer to having to spend a large chunk of money upgrading your cooling. You also come that much closer to having to upgrade your power systems. Server rooms aren't usually just plug it into wall kind of deal. You actually get large power conditioning in professional datacenters. The point is you don't just save on the power the servers themselves actually use but also on cooling and the power conditioning. Also the less power a server uses the cooler it runs the more you can pack into a rack without worrying about them over heating. That also saves you money cause it means you can put that many more servers in the space you have before you need a cheque to pay of an expansion or relocation to a large facility.
When you force, in my case, 3 to 4 people to work together you get 1 or 2 person doing all the work and the rest doing the writing up or work unrelated to their major.
In my case I did all the work on the actual electronics design and firmware programming and they wrote up stuff and messed around in the shop building the mechanical bits (badly).
3G is a completed waste of time in Hong Kong. All the large providers are offering it but the phones are huge and even here the cost is quite high to use any of the rich media services like videophone. The basic rate plans are already double the GSM plans for the same amount of minutes and you get free 30 minutes of video calls a month. You can get the news for free and that's about it. They are going to offer the World Cup on it but seriously considering the world cup's going to be happening around midnight here who would be busy enough to need to watch it on the go?
Works with a pocket pc and a GPRS enabled cell phone with bluetooth. It has been quite useful for us here . For example lets going fishing tomorrow but wait what's the weather like? Oh here we go just fire up the GPRS and PDA and you can surf for basic stuff.
However, today it's something a little different.
They outsource (it's not really out sourcing when it's the same company doing the hiring overseas) some jobs. The people who got downsized here need to find work so they fill the job market with supply. The end result is cheaper workers there and cheaper workers here. And the rich boss gets to keep all the money for themselves. It's comparative adventage all right for the people in poewr.
Geez ever tried the Motorola V3? I have one and at how thin this thing is it's already pretty hard to hold. It's wide and long so it actually quite comfortable but you'll be worrying about your hands slipping. Frankly I think with this phone it's about as thin and it's going to get.
Key is city planning. Take a look at high density places like Hong Kong and Japan. If you built vertically u can have a much denser city.
Even Discovery's being taken over by the jocks. Monster this monster that and biker built off. Where's good programs that they used to show?
Sorry to burst your bubble but genetic algorithms and genetic design research have done exactly just that, design complex systems that works just as well and in many cases better then the human designed version.
First of all all that talk in the paper about north-south trade strikes me as somewhat racist. It is also misleading because China isn't in the southen hemisphere.
The paper in general sees engineering and science as the only factors effecting the US's global status. That is a very narrow point of view and makes the authery seems like he's trying to fit the situation to a conclusion rather then finding the conclusion from studying the situation. There are many more factors effecting the well being of the economy in the United States. For example the paper fails to mention that globally the US dominates cultural exports. Sure bollywood makes more films but only Hollywood films get watched all over the world. US fast food chains are the only ones that are truly global. In TV BBC world is the only non-american channel I can think of that you might expect to find anywhere you might go holidaying in the world. On the other hand I am sure you can find either MTV or MTV like music video channels all over the globe.
Agreed.
Moved from Canada back to my birthplace of Hong Kong so I can get an engineering job. Sucks to love what you do rather then the money sometimes...
But here's what I see. It took just 2 years for the government here to force all the taxies to move to LPG to reduce polution. I am betting when hydrogen comes it would be about 2 years as well. In Canada it takes decades to built new terminal at airports or subway lines. People here expects and don't complain about working 12 hours a day without overtime pay (lucky for me i am gonig to work for a government funded firm so no 12 hour days). It's the same in China and Taiwan when it come to people and work.
I think it's scary how in North America it's hard to find entry level engineering jobs. If you don't have entry level jobs you don't have opportunities to train your work force for more complex jobs. There's grad school but not everyone wants to or make it into grad school. So the end reasult is a lack of people when the current corp of experienced people gets old and retire. I am not too concerned cause if I get my experiences here that just means I can command some seriously good pay when people start to retire.
The bright side is that you can always be an expat working in China for high tech firms. You might not get paid as well as in North America. But the cost of living is also a lot lower and if China continues to grow and you get into the property market now when the prices are resonable... you can set yourself up for a nice retirement back in NA just from properties alone.
I would venture to suggest that CS degrees are devalued because computers technologies are becoming commodities. I will give an example of my own experience as a BSc Computer Engineer.
When I graduated in 2004 I was recruited by a Canadian celluar company into their IT department. For me I was hired into the operations side so sysadmin and tech support kind of work. Along with me various people from UofT and Waterloo were hired into the development side of IT. From talking with the people hired as developers I found out that during the interviews no one was interested in their knowledge of basic CS theories. Sure they asked about QA and software engineer questions. They also asked very hard questions about SQL. But there were nothing about O(n) or anything like that in the exam given during the interview.
For this company it's not suprising as is it all about data in from Oracle and then data out to web applications. In almost all cases they are dealing with O(n) complexity. All the hardwork for sorting etc are done already by Oracle inside their DB.
It's all part of the trend in computing. When PCs ran DOS people had to know how to program at quite low levels. You want a GUI? You had to built some sort of a GUI. Then came windows and GUIs were a matter of programming to an API. Of course then most people used C or C++ which needed you to do some sort of memory managment. Then came JAVA which removed even the need to do memory managment.
I am generalizing a bit but the point is that successive generation of technology made creating applications more simple. Add to that the fact that there are more and more software houses developing turn key solution for what used to be custom applications. And you have on one hand a reduction of skills required of developers. On the other hand a reduction of number of jobs because these software houses can market their wares world wide making increasing competition and reducing the number of firms making software. In turn this means there are fewer programming jobs needing people with lower skill levels.
For me finding this out was pretty much the last straw. The last thing I want was to be a replacable cog. So I found a job doing hardware work instead. I feel a little more secure as they still haven't managed to make hardware/firmware development something anyone can do. My advice to anyone about to enter University is: Pick a subject that deals in the physical world. Software's too easily virtualized into simplicity.
This article provides no information what so ever. The motor just sounds like an AC induction motor which isn't new at all.
Geez anonymous cowards....
It's just a funny story could be totally false for all we know. But who cares.
Secondly 3 foot isn't that long. With practice you can draw a katana pretty quick and that 4 foot plus depending on your height.
The article has one mistake I can see so far.
3G does not specify the radio technology to be used. As such who cares what radio they are using. 3G is about flexibiity as you can use whatever radio tech u want (including 802.11 if it pleases u) and you can use either circuit switched or packet switched core networks. So in that aspect unless they are going to come up with the whole of their own 3rd generation specs they'll not be preventing use of 3G just making their own radio.
Let me stand on a soap box for a bit.
First gaming and laptop don't get well together. Now matter what they try to sell you.
Secondly at college you'll most likely end up online 24/7 sucking the juice of p2p. Which is what many of my friends did (I just graduated). I haven't seen anyone's desktop die cause of being on too much but at least 5 laptops have died after being used 24/7 for a few months or so.
Last but seriously not least are you sure you want something you will bring to the library that you can play games on? Grades before games. I didn't do as well as I could in University because I play ed too much games in the first 2 years. And I know of many people who isn't finishing for at least another 2 years or even getting kicked out cause of games.
Might sound like something your parents would say but best if you don't play that much games....
Well tis more difficult to clean up the reactor then a single bomb. The bomb left radiation all over but it's in the open. Sending even robots into the reactor would surely kill the electronics within minutes so you couldn't very well do meaningful work there.
funny you should mention yellow liquid.
e oarchive /FunnyOrOdd/CarsonBottleDrop.wmv.zip
There is actually a video online, let me see if i can find it, of some dude picking up glow fuel jug filled with piss with a RC helicopter.
He the flew the chopper high up and did a nice flip to set the container falling. Results.. eh as expected..
Ahh here it is. enjoy.
http://www.augustoheli.com/videostuff/vid
Good maybe they'll send suicide animal rights bomber to kill Saddam next time when he gasses all the US mules.
The pizza pizza here provides their deliver guys with a car. So that cost is non-existance for them.
As a bunch of students we don't tip much...
Doesn't matter what oracle did. There stuff are expensive and difficult for most people to setup.
With the DB FS built into the OS programmers with new ideas can quickly try something out. This can result in some very neat applications.
So it would be a great thing if LINUX can have a optional easy to install DB FS or a efficent built in one. Either way if it's done quickly and well it can bring along a whole new species of applications.
I think they are thinking you can bring more lines into a power facility if your facility can be upgraded to handle more power via these new "valves".
Additionally just because these rods are superconductive in some conditions doesn't mean they are totally non-conductive when they are in other situatons. So in theory you might be able to have a 2 state valve which would allow them to drop the voltage at the existing circuit breakers preventing arcing. The use of these "valve" to aid existing circuit breakers is what this story was about.
Stop the finger pointing and stand up with your freaking user name you cowards. Like the man/woman/dog/thingie that you are.
I am annonyed. Why is a "Ask slashdot" post being made by a anonymouse coward?
First off I don't know that many people who thinks "Ask slashdot" is productive to getting any good response.
Anyone who bases their business decisions on a "ask slashdot" should be shot. Cause that's a very good way to utterly fuck up your business/project/thingie/life.
Few if anyone here is going to give you a 20 page reply about what they use and why they used it. Without a detailed report any response you get would be no better then doing research on your own.
So please for the sake of not making slashdot a dumb and stupid place stop posting these kinds of questions!