I use Python for most of my real scripting needs (i.e. any script that goes into a file and is over 10 lines long). I find Python to be a much easier language to think in and write. The biggest attraction of Perl for me is as a better awk and sed. Almost all of my Perl uses are of the sort "perl -pe 'xxxx'" . It seems the book is aimed at users like me.
Bit of an unfair generalisation. I'm sure everyone tries hard to win. Nevertheless, the Russians and Chinese have been winning these contests of late and you shouldn't discredit them by (effectively) saying: "Us Americans didn't try".
Heh. You should say "Us Indians didn't try." I am now at a US grad school, but when I took part I was studying in India. Actually, the Americans I've seen prepare for it take it more seriously than we did. But then, in our defence, we had no clue what the thing was about-- we were one of the first Indian teams to even try. Later Indian teams have done better.
You see, it's not only the Americans who are easily convinced that the Rest of the World is smarter than them;-)
I participated in the ACM World finals when I was in college. Take it from me, the contest has exactly zero to do with the general state of CS education in a country. 3 kids are picked from each college. Each World finalist team is almost always very smart and quite capable of winning it. But the winners, of late, have overwhelmingly been Chinese or Russians or East Europeans. What differentiates them from the rest is that they actually prepare very hard for it-- with actuve faculty and school encouragement-- because they think it's a big deal. Most others just show up, expecting to have fun. You see, ACM finals require you to have a lot of practice in certain idiomatic programming problems and an ability to code map any new problem to one of the standards and code it up quickly. So you can be very smart and good at CS, but you might still lose.
ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people. Nope.
I believe that programming will remain a well-paying job in the long term. What's going to change is that to have a job always in one geographic location you'll either need to be *very* good or be willing to learn new stuff continually. Often, the two go together. Knowledge-intensive job opportunities-- not just programming-- are more and more opening up themselves to worldwide competition. Here's a simple scenarios: suppose that in 1996 the USA had 100 software jobs that paid $100K each. 50 of these required mainstream skills-- Java, C/C++ etc. And the rest 50 required specialized skills-- CAD or bioinformatics or crypto etc. In 2010, suppose 25 of these have moved out.
One of your options would be to move with the job, across the world. If you are willing, you'll have a blast, enjoying the best opportunities worldwide.
But suppose that you don't want to move outside the US. However, in 2010, the US only has 30 of the jobs with mainstream skills and 45 of the jobs with specialized skills (it's easier to move overseas jobs with mainstream skills). To get the job in the US, you either need to have very good mainstream skills-- so you can get one of the 30 mainstream jobs-- or be willing to learn so you can get the specialized jobs that are available in the US.
If you can learn continually and strive to improve your skills, though, you'll live well. It's the old saw really-- just work hard.
I don't get Cowboy Neal's editorializing- half the fun of watching a movie is watching it on the big screen, with nice sound and popcorn. I only watch movies on dvd when I don't think it'll be worth paying $9.25+ (in boston) for a movie ticket. Though it's true that the fraction of movies I watch on dvd rose quite a bit last year, but that's the netflix effect.
Movie quality might be a factor in lower box office collections, but easy, cheap availability of DVDs is too.
and more power to you, for understanding what your users need. As a user, not an admin, I can't understand why such puny email quotas are being enforced. Storage is relatively cheap. Moreover, being miserly with it is a great way to get your users grumbling. Storage issues, especially for email, is one of the few things that quickly get annoying if you put very restrictive limits on how much your users can have.
I am a graduate student now and was in a bioinformatics company before coming here. In industry, as well as here, I deal with large documents and datasets the easiest way of transferring which is often email. Yes, I can use ftp, scp or simply upload things to shared sites. But they are not convenient for everybody. Email is the most convenient. So get out of my way, and let me use it as I want to. At my job, our group members regulalrly got hell for being "data hogs"- both on the backed-up network share as well email attachments. And when you are dealing with genomic data, you can't help but use data. The admins just didn't get it. And every hour spent talking to my boss, asking him to talk to the admins' boss about increasing quota, resulted in two hours worth of wasted effort. In contrast, my current IT admins are much more get-out-of-users-way with storage issues. We get 500 megs and they are nice about increasing it, if you need.
ven a issue with a
I speak as a user who has always been somewhat hated by the ad
The action that is suspect is the fact that the staff, after being requested the price, first spoke on a walkie-talkie in an unintelligable language before delivering the price. This leads one to suspect that perhaps the unintelligable conversation was regarding the price. Even more so when you take into account that the staff members at both stores appeared to be of identical nationality which makes it likely that the unintelligable conversation was between them.
Okay, here are two scenarios:
1. Apu calls Manjula (who's in backroom, catching up on paperwork and mail). The conversation goes like this: [in Hindi] "wifey, what's the price on this Samsung K-6DV VCR- the sticker is missing. And dinner is still at 7pm, right ? Very good". To the listener it sounds like "oo iii K-SeeexDeeeVeee ooo eee verrry goood"
2. Apu calls Sanjay (who's in the other store). The conversation goes like this: [in Hindi] "Yo dude, what price on the K-6DV should I charge this sucker? And we still on for getting the hooker over tonight, right? Very good". To the listener it sounds like "oo iii K-SeeexDeeeVeee ooo eee verrry goood"
Its not racist at all. Many cultures of eastern origin consider lying and deception a normal part of dealing with strangers, particularly in business transactions. It is one of the many reasons their cultures are total failures, with recent population growth allowed purely due to technology invented in Europe. It is also one of the reasons such primitive cultures value family connections above all else, those are the only relationships they trust.
There are specific cultural reasons for this behavior, and anyone who ignores them in furthering the grand egalitarian myth will be taken as a fool.
Since the mods rated the parent's drivel as insightful, my reply is certainly going to be modded down as troll. But still, here goes:
The grandparent made a xenophobic point about VCRs, the parent expanded that to a discourse on lying, primitive cultures. A little-too-ambitious exercise in generalization, but hey- whatever example works for buttressing your point, you use it. Right?
As far as VCR incident is considered, many of these mom-and-pop stores don't have bar-coded price-tags, they have small stickers with price on them. If the sticker comes off, you've to do a price-check by looking up your records. Isn't it possible- indeed, likely- that the clerk just called somebody inside the store to look up the price? That the two stores colluded on price fixing of the VCR is quite unlikely, for the simple reason that electronic items like VCRs have a lot of sellers with a lot of competition (Best Buy, anyone ?). Price-collusion happens when there are only a few sellers who control the market. And, even if that were the case, do you seriously think the shop-owners would be so dumb as to blatantly discuss prices- won't they just quietly meet once a week and fix the prices?
As for the parent's tirade over lying, primitive cultures- sir, exactly what is your fucking point? Population growth due to Western Thought? That doesn't even make sense. Still, look here: you'll see that the asian countries (primarily, China and India) have always had a lot higher population than other places. It's not because of Western thought- it's the large tracts of fertile land, stupid! As far as lying and deceit in Eastern cultures, I am not sure if you realize that all the major philosophies/religions of the East (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc.) depict themselves as a "Search for the Truth". Do you seriously think they even approve of lying?!!
And before the parent returns to make more silly arguments, here's an example how I ould turn the claim around. I could make silly arguments like this: "Western Thought revels in the use of treachery and falsehood as acceptable acts". One of Western's civilization's most cherished stories is the story of Helen of Troy. And in this story, the lying side wins by doing that most unhonorable of war behaviours: stop war to propose friendship, gain the other side's trust, use that trust to gain entrance, and then destroy everything/everybody in sight. Clearly, if this story is so popular, it must indicate that Western Thought is a philosophy of evil, backstabbing bastards, right? As you can see, arguments about the quality of some culture, motivated by your prejudices and based on well-selected examples are rather silly. Please avoid them.
As to lying and deceit in business, has the parent been living inside a hole for the last few years? Of late, Western business hasn't exactly been a beacon of Truth, Justice, and All That. And no, it is not the fault of "Western Thought". Nor of any influence from lying, primitive "Eastern Cultures". It's just that wads of cash and moral rectitude seem not to go together very well.
There are quite a few reasons for this, some of which others have pointed out as well:
1. A success-to-attempt ratio of 1:12 is probably incorrect, but even if it were true it's not drastically different from other ventures of similar type elsewhere (Hollywood, Music Albums, heck- even startups)
2. The bulk of the music industry used to be financed by only a few people and controlled by a few film houses. They could diversify their risks and cover all minor losses with one major hit. They have actually gotten quite good at marketing the really big budget movies, almost like Hollywood.
3. Way too many Indians are film-crazy (there are fan-clubs and temples devoted to specific artists). Thus, you'll often people (aka suckers) who made their money elsewhere and are willing to sink some of that money into movie-financing, just to have some of the Bollywood glamour rub off on them and brag about having invited XYZ to their daughter's wedding.
4. Finally, as others have already pointed out, there *is* some truth to the whole money-laundering angle. There used to be more mob money in Bollywood but it's decreasing. Actually, I think this was for the same reason as #3-- the mafia people rather liked the idea of hobnobbing with actors and (particularly) actresses.
Good grammer is only helpful to get a message across. I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum.
Yes, it is a damn forum. But you are doing exactly what you are doing when you writing an academic paper-- communicating your ideas. And it is *your* job to communicate your ideas well, not *my* job to try and parse garbage because you, as the person writing the blurb, can't be bothered to correct your spellings. Your bad-spelling and l33t-speak distract me from your ideas. Your loss.
You bitch about the people who try to correct you. I agree they are wrong- they are wasting their time. If you cared enough, you'd have learned by now. My strategy would be to silently assume you are stupid and discount whatever you say. If you really are smart, I'll ultimately appreciate your opinions, but not right away. Prejudiced? Yes. My loss? Probably not. There are few people who are smart and yet don't say things reasonably correctly. Chances are, you are not one of them.
Note that this is not inconsistent with the claim that "it's OK to be lax on Slashdot, because this is not an article in Science/Nature." You wouldn't write "BTW" on an academic paper, but in informal communication I think it's OK. l33t-speak and mis-spellings, on the other hand, are almost never OK.
Well, the good news is that you're allowed to chop off the offenders hands when caught.
OK troll, I'll bite. Indian Penal Code is essentially based on the British Penal Code. I don't know which penal code allows for chopping-off hands of criminals (maybe your country's?) but certainly not India's. It is actually one of the more enlightened penal codes. India does have the death penalty but it is rarely used (see this BBC story
Not that the idiots who did this should get any leeway. They should be made an example of.
aah....the benefits of not RTFA-ing.
go read the article or its mirror- it's up there in one of the comments- you'll find he does both the things you do and more. he actually has a nice graphic that evaluates each spam-detection method b y network cost, memory usage, cpu usage, efficiency etc. and yes, his aim too is to get rid of emails before having to get their DATA.
Because if the hacker has encrypted the files with a random passphrase and assuming this passphrase isn't the same for all the computers he attacks, it is highly unlikely a security company will be able to easily decrypt the files.
That is what is particularly scary about this. What if the hacker went offline-- even if you are willing to pay the money, you can't get to the files. They are as good as deleted
Dude, you've never coded in a commercial environment , have you ? Or are all your company's projects meant to be compiled by a specific version of gcc only, regardless of the OS and architecture?
I use gcc exclusively these days, but it's for my research. Back when I was working, we had to code for both VC++ and g++ . Atleast, the ones of us who worked on core-engine code. Fixing some moron's VC++ -specific idiocy sucked.
But long live AI-- atleast, machine learning. Nobody tries to design an all-encompassing intelligence. People tried that for too long (think John McCarthy) and it didn't work.
People used to work on trying to copy how the brain work. Now they don't. They instead try on coming up with robust models of just recreating the results of the brain (e.g., human vision). These latter methods are filled with lots of statistics. Funnily enough, some neuroscientists/cognition people are finding that the brain somehow seems to be doing similar things.
Actually, the parent is underselling the case for top-tier universities. Having a degree from a top-tier school can only be an advantage to your career.
In most of the posts here, the poster's arguments for not transferring are post-facto. But just because they did well without some specific advantage doesn't mean you shouldn't give yourself that advantage. Who knows where it'll help!
The arguments in other posts go like this: "I went to no-name-given State U and, look -- I am doing OK." Or, if they are even more macho: "Look, I didn't even go to school." Good for them! Now ask these people to look around and see if the number of people from top-tier schools isn't disproportionately higher. There is a reason why that is true:
The top-tier schools provide a better education; that is why they are "top-tier", duh! Better education translates into more capable workers
Because they are ranked highly, such schools often have very talented students. Smart peers can do wonders for your own abilities, knowledge and outlook.
The best jobs are highly coveted; employers (read HR) will often apply a pre-filtering based on the degrees of each applicant. Experience does matter , but if you can also get the degree- why not!
For better or for worse, a certain amount of degree-discrimination occurs in many of the best companies. Google is notorious for only hiring from the top-schools; they often reject people who are experienced but don't have sexy degrees.
BTW, when I say "top-tier" I don't meant just the top-whatever as per USNews Review. What I mean are schools recognized for their CS programs (e.g., in CS terms U Waterloo in Canada will probably beat Harvard, but not MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU etc).
For once, it was a well-written review, devoid of either childing errors or put-on verbiage.
However, I think his final grade for the book ("good") is too harsh. Having read the description that he gave before that, I'd have gone for somewhere between "very good" to "excellent".
yeah, it is sad that nobody in the indian media points out how failed a democracy india has. they are far too busy pointing that the 3 mostimportantpeople in the current indian govt are from the minority communities. of course, this is a lot more than can be said of the more "successful" democracies around.
btw, your argument about the indian state not having done enough for its people is right. but a big part of the reason is where india started from in 1947 and that it takes more effort to feed/clothe/house a billion people than it takes to feed/clothe/house malaysia or singapore or taiwan.
mod parent up! I wish atleast the *submitter* would RTFA before randomly making up facts. From the actual article:
"Mr Saha was killed in a bomb attack in the south-western city of Khulna in Bangladesh. He was travelling by rickshaw when a bomb was thrown at him, killing him instantly......
Mr Saha is the second BBC contributor to lose his life in Bangladesh.
Shamsur Rahman, was shot in the neighbouring town of Jessore in 2000.
The Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, has promised an investigation into Mr Saha's death."
If you think CMU sold out by letting Gates give money, you are mistaken. Gates has been a major giver for many of the major new CS Dept buildings in many campuses. And no, there are usually no strings attached from Bill Gates. Here's the current list, AFAIR:
Stanford CS: Gates Bldg
MIT EECS: (half only) Gates Tower in the Stata Center (Bldg 32). The brand spanking new Gehry building
Harvard CS: Maxwell Dworkin. Harvard has a standing policy of not naming buildings after living people and Bill Gates usually wants his dad's name at the doorside. So they instead put the maiden names of Gates' and Balmer's moms on the building
Berkeley's Soda Hall, their current CS abode, is probably too old. I won't be surprised if they too got a CS building named Gates Hall.
Of the other univs in the top-10, UIUC has the Seibel Center. Dunno about Princeton, UTexas, Cornell and the others...
Slashdot Mirror
What question in a fan's mail will receive the answer: "Please do not write to me again" ?
I use Python for most of my real scripting needs (i.e. any script that goes into a file and is over 10 lines long). I find Python to be a much easier language to think in and write. The biggest attraction of Perl for me is as a better awk and sed. Almost all of my Perl uses are of the sort "perl -pe 'xxxx'" . It seems the book is aimed at users like me.
Heh. You should say "Us Indians didn't try." I am now at a US grad school, but when I took part I was studying in India. Actually, the Americans I've seen prepare for it take it more seriously than we did. But then, in our defence, we had no clue what the thing was about-- we were one of the first Indian teams to even try. Later Indian teams have done better.
You see, it's not only the Americans who are easily convinced that the Rest of the World is smarter than them ;-)
ACM contest is fun but that doesn't mean that the winners are the world's best CS people. Nope.
One of your options would be to move with the job, across the world. If you are willing, you'll have a blast, enjoying the best opportunities worldwide.
But suppose that you don't want to move outside the US. However, in 2010, the US only has 30 of the jobs with mainstream skills and 45 of the jobs with specialized skills (it's easier to move overseas jobs with mainstream skills). To get the job in the US, you either need to have very good mainstream skills-- so you can get one of the 30 mainstream jobs-- or be willing to learn so you can get the specialized jobs that are available in the US.
If you can learn continually and strive to improve your skills, though, you'll live well. It's the old saw really-- just work hard.
Movie quality might be a factor in lower box office collections, but easy, cheap availability of DVDs is too.
and more power to you, for understanding what your users need. As a user, not an admin, I can't understand why such puny email quotas are being enforced. Storage is relatively cheap. Moreover, being miserly with it is a great way to get your users grumbling. Storage issues, especially for email, is one of the few things that quickly get annoying if you put very restrictive limits on how much your users can have.
I am a graduate student now and was in a bioinformatics company before coming here. In industry, as well as here, I deal with large documents and datasets the easiest way of transferring which is often email. Yes, I can use ftp, scp or simply upload things to shared sites. But they are not convenient for everybody. Email is the most convenient. So get out of my way, and let me use it as I want to. At my job, our group members regulalrly got hell for being "data hogs"- both on the backed-up network share as well email attachments. And when you are dealing with genomic data, you can't help but use data. The admins just didn't get it. And every hour spent talking to my boss, asking him to talk to the admins' boss about increasing quota, resulted in two hours worth of wasted effort. In contrast, my current IT admins are much more get-out-of-users-way with storage issues. We get 500 megs and they are nice about increasing it, if you need. ven a issue with a I speak as a user who has always been somewhat hated by the ad
The action that is suspect is the fact that the staff, after being requested the price, first spoke on a walkie-talkie in an unintelligable language before delivering the price. This leads one to suspect that perhaps the unintelligable conversation was regarding the price. Even more so when you take into account that the staff members at both stores appeared to be of identical nationality which makes it likely that the unintelligable conversation was between them.
Okay, here are two scenarios:
1. Apu calls Manjula (who's in backroom, catching up on paperwork and mail). The conversation goes like this: [in Hindi] "wifey, what's the price on this Samsung K-6DV VCR- the sticker is missing. And dinner is still at 7pm, right ? Very good". To the listener it sounds like "oo iii K-SeeexDeeeVeee ooo eee verrry goood"
2. Apu calls Sanjay (who's in the other store). The conversation goes like this: [in Hindi] "Yo dude, what price on the K-6DV should I charge this sucker? And we still on for getting the hooker over tonight, right? Very good". To the listener it sounds like "oo iii K-SeeexDeeeVeee ooo eee verrry goood"
Which do you think is more likely ?
Its not racist at all. Many cultures of eastern origin consider lying and deception a normal part of dealing with strangers, particularly in business transactions. It is one of the many reasons their cultures are total failures, with recent population growth allowed purely due to technology invented in Europe. It is also one of the reasons such primitive cultures value family connections above all else, those are the only relationships they trust.
There are specific cultural reasons for this behavior, and anyone who ignores them in furthering the grand egalitarian myth will be taken as a fool.
Since the mods rated the parent's drivel as insightful, my reply is certainly going to be modded down as troll. But still, here goes:
The grandparent made a xenophobic point about VCRs, the parent expanded that to a discourse on lying, primitive cultures. A little-too-ambitious exercise in generalization, but hey- whatever example works for buttressing your point, you use it. Right?
As far as VCR incident is considered, many of these mom-and-pop stores don't have bar-coded price-tags, they have small stickers with price on them. If the sticker comes off, you've to do a price-check by looking up your records. Isn't it possible- indeed, likely- that the clerk just called somebody inside the store to look up the price? That the two stores colluded on price fixing of the VCR is quite unlikely, for the simple reason that electronic items like VCRs have a lot of sellers with a lot of competition (Best Buy, anyone ?). Price-collusion happens when there are only a few sellers who control the market. And, even if that were the case, do you seriously think the shop-owners would be so dumb as to blatantly discuss prices- won't they just quietly meet once a week and fix the prices?
As for the parent's tirade over lying, primitive cultures- sir, exactly what is your fucking point? Population growth due to Western Thought? That doesn't even make sense. Still, look here: you'll see that the asian countries (primarily, China and India) have always had a lot higher population than other places. It's not because of Western thought- it's the large tracts of fertile land, stupid! As far as lying and deceit in Eastern cultures, I am not sure if you realize that all the major philosophies/religions of the East (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism etc.) depict themselves as a "Search for the Truth". Do you seriously think they even approve of lying?!!
And before the parent returns to make more silly arguments, here's an example how I ould turn the claim around. I could make silly arguments like this: "Western Thought revels in the use of treachery and falsehood as acceptable acts". One of Western's civilization's most cherished stories is the story of Helen of Troy. And in this story, the lying side wins by doing that most unhonorable of war behaviours: stop war to propose friendship, gain the other side's trust, use that trust to gain entrance, and then destroy everything/everybody in sight. Clearly, if this story is so popular, it must indicate that Western Thought is a philosophy of evil, backstabbing bastards, right? As you can see, arguments about the quality of some culture, motivated by your prejudices and based on well-selected examples are rather silly. Please avoid them.
As to lying and deceit in business, has the parent been living inside a hole for the last few years? Of late, Western business hasn't exactly been a beacon of Truth, Justice, and All That. And no, it is not the fault of "Western Thought". Nor of any influence from lying, primitive "Eastern Cultures". It's just that wads of cash and moral rectitude seem not to go together very well.
There are quite a few reasons for this, some of which others have pointed out as well:
1. A success-to-attempt ratio of 1:12 is probably incorrect, but even if it were true it's not drastically different from other ventures of similar type elsewhere (Hollywood, Music Albums, heck- even startups)
2. The bulk of the music industry used to be financed by only a few people and controlled by a few film houses. They could diversify their risks and cover all minor losses with one major hit. They have actually gotten quite good at marketing the really big budget movies, almost like Hollywood.
3. Way too many Indians are film-crazy (there are fan-clubs and temples devoted to specific artists). Thus, you'll often people (aka suckers) who made their money elsewhere and are willing to sink some of that money into movie-financing, just to have some of the Bollywood glamour rub off on them and brag about having invited XYZ to their daughter's wedding.
4. Finally, as others have already pointed out, there *is* some truth to the whole money-laundering angle. There used to be more mob money in Bollywood but it's decreasing. Actually, I think this was for the same reason as #3-- the mafia people rather liked the idea of hobnobbing with actors and (particularly) actresses.
Look at the photo with the WaPo article (hint: look at the license plate).
Good grammer is only helpful to get a message across. I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum.
Yes, it is a damn forum. But you are doing exactly what you are doing when you writing an academic paper-- communicating your ideas. And it is *your* job to communicate your ideas well, not *my* job to try and parse garbage because you, as the person writing the blurb, can't be bothered to correct your spellings. Your bad-spelling and l33t-speak distract me from your ideas. Your loss.
You bitch about the people who try to correct you. I agree they are wrong- they are wasting their time. If you cared enough, you'd have learned by now. My strategy would be to silently assume you are stupid and discount whatever you say. If you really are smart, I'll ultimately appreciate your opinions, but not right away. Prejudiced? Yes. My loss? Probably not. There are few people who are smart and yet don't say things reasonably correctly. Chances are, you are not one of them.
Note that this is not inconsistent with the claim that "it's OK to be lax on Slashdot, because this is not an article in Science/Nature." You wouldn't write "BTW" on an academic paper, but in informal communication I think it's OK. l33t-speak and mis-spellings, on the other hand, are almost never OK.
Well, the good news is that you're allowed to chop off the offenders hands when caught.
OK troll, I'll bite. Indian Penal Code is essentially based on the British Penal Code. I don't know which penal code allows for chopping-off hands of criminals (maybe your country's?) but certainly not India's. It is actually one of the more enlightened penal codes. India does have the death penalty but it is rarely used (see this BBC story
Not that the idiots who did this should get any leeway. They should be made an example of.
aah....the benefits of not RTFA-ing.
go read the article or its mirror- it's up there in one of the comments- you'll find he does both the things you do and more. he actually has a nice graphic that evaluates each spam-detection method b y network cost, memory usage, cpu usage, efficiency etc. and yes, his aim too is to get rid of emails before having to get their DATA.
Because if the hacker has encrypted the files with a random passphrase and assuming this passphrase isn't the same for all the computers he attacks, it is highly unlikely a security company will be able to easily decrypt the files.
That is what is particularly scary about this. What if the hacker went offline-- even if you are willing to pay the money, you can't get to the files. They are as good as deleted
Dude, you've never coded in a commercial environment , have you ? Or are all your company's projects meant to be compiled by a specific version of gcc only, regardless of the OS and architecture? I use gcc exclusively these days, but it's for my research. Back when I was working, we had to code for both VC++ and g++ . Atleast, the ones of us who worked on core-engine code. Fixing some moron's VC++ -specific idiocy sucked.
People used to work on trying to copy how the brain work. Now they don't. They instead try on coming up with robust models of just recreating the results of the brain (e.g., human vision). These latter methods are filled with lots of statistics. Funnily enough, some neuroscientists/cognition people are finding that the brain somehow seems to be doing similar things.
In most of the posts here, the poster's arguments for not transferring are post-facto. But just because they did well without some specific advantage doesn't mean you shouldn't give yourself that advantage. Who knows where it'll help!
The arguments in other posts go like this: "I went to no-name-given State U and, look -- I am doing OK." Or, if they are even more macho: "Look, I didn't even go to school." Good for them! Now ask these people to look around and see if the number of people from top-tier schools isn't disproportionately higher. There is a reason why that is true:
- The top-tier schools provide a better education; that is why they are "top-tier", duh! Better education translates into more capable workers
- Because they are ranked highly, such schools often have very talented students. Smart peers can do wonders for your own abilities, knowledge and outlook.
- The best jobs are highly coveted; employers (read HR) will often apply a pre-filtering based on the degrees of each applicant. Experience does matter , but if you can also get the degree- why not!
- For better or for worse, a certain amount of degree-discrimination occurs in many of the best companies. Google is notorious for only hiring from the top-schools; they often reject people who are experienced but don't have sexy degrees.
BTW, when I say "top-tier" I don't meant just the top-whatever as per USNews Review. What I mean are schools recognized for their CS programs (e.g., in CS terms U Waterloo in Canada will probably beat Harvard, but not MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, CMU etc).For once, it was a well-written review, devoid of either childing errors or put-on verbiage.
However, I think his final grade for the book ("good") is too harsh. Having read the description that he gave before that, I'd have gone for somewhere between "very good" to "excellent".btw, your argument about the indian state not having done enough for its people is right. but a big part of the reason is where india started from in 1947 and that it takes more effort to feed/clothe/house a billion people than it takes to feed/clothe/house malaysia or singapore or taiwan.
mod parent up! I wish atleast the *submitter* would RTFA before randomly making up facts. From the actual article: "Mr Saha was killed in a bomb attack in the south-western city of Khulna in Bangladesh. He was travelling by rickshaw when a bomb was thrown at him, killing him instantly. .....
Mr Saha is the second BBC contributor to lose his life in Bangladesh.
Shamsur Rahman, was shot in the neighbouring town of Jessore in 2000.
The Bangladeshi Prime Minister, Khaleda Zia, has promised an investigation into Mr Saha's death."
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/wtf/kite.html
and this guy did this with a real cheapo camera
- Stanford CS: Gates Bldg
- MIT EECS: (half only) Gates Tower in the Stata Center (Bldg 32). The brand spanking new Gehry building
- Harvard CS: Maxwell Dworkin. Harvard has a standing policy of not naming buildings after living people and Bill Gates usually wants his dad's name at the doorside. So they instead put the maiden names of Gates' and Balmer's moms on the building
Berkeley's Soda Hall, their current CS abode, is probably too old. I won't be surprised if they too got a CS building named Gates Hall.Of the other univs in the top-10, UIUC has the Seibel Center. Dunno about Princeton, UTexas, Cornell and the others...
Slashdot has a topic for Apple Utilities too..but not for Python..