Yawn. B.A. vs. B.S. means nothing. My university offered Computer Science through the College of Letters and Sciences, and only offered a B.A. Of course, that was the only thing that the entire college offered. You would get a B.A. in Physics just as you would get a B.A. in Music or Art History. The B.A. vs. B.S. distinction is entirely BS (sorry, couldn't resist).
Furthermore, at most schools, at least most good schools, algorithms is only a small part of the study of CS. When I got my degree, I studied lots of things, including algorithms, data structure, computability theory, electrical engineering (very basic), computer architecture, compilers, databases, artificial intelligence, and probably a couple classes I can't even begin to remember. Yes, a true software engineering course was missing, but heck, it was years ago.
As for our little "fresh out of school" guy, well, get a job. Seriously. Nobody expects you to be able to solve the world's problems straight out of school. You're a junior guy. Go get a job, and work on interesting things. You'll first be a grunt, and if you're good, your understanding of how things work, and your responsibilities, will both increase over time. You'll eventually have the experience necessary to solve the problems you want to solve.
Actually, Nintendo is probably safe. If I remember correctly, they are supporting 480p TV in 16:9 aspect ratio. That, realistically, will support the vast majority of gamers just fine.
IMHO, HDTV provides 4 major video improvements over "Standard Def" TV, or more precisely, over standard NTSC TV. These are: 1: Improved color model and accuracy. NTSC color is hideous (people say NTSC stands for Never The Same Color). HD's color system allows more accurate color, and more precise changes in the color from pixel to pixel. 2: Progressive Scan 3: Widescreen aspect ratio 4: More scan lines.
Of these, more scan lines is actually the least important. Unless your TV is huge, you really don't see a huge difference between 480p and 1080p until you're far closer than you would be for watching TV or gaming. Even still, motion covers a plethora of sins. It's hard to discern fine detail at all in a moving image. Static images, sure, but not moving ones.
Wii, with a 16x9 progressive scan 480p image will be just fine once people sit down and play it. It may not look as sexy on the spec sheet, but in reality, it will work great. The guys with 108 inch TV's might be able to say "My PS3 looks so much better", but the vast majority of the population, with 42" TV's and smaller, will really say "looks fine to me".
I switch back and forth between keyboards on a regular basis. The thing that I find that helps is to have different types of keyboards. I actually bind my expectations to the keyboard shape. When I walk up to a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, I expect it to be Dvorak, because that's what I use at home and work. When I walk up to a standard rectangular keyboard, I expect it to be QWERTY. I get in real trouble if the rectangular keyboard is Dvorak, takes me a while to readjust my mind to the other map.
I have used a Dvorak Keyboard for years now. In fact, I put the dvorak map on the MS Natural keyboard (the original, not the crappy ones they build now), and it works great. I can touch type on both Dvorak and QWERTY.
I have found that I don't type any faster on the dvorak map, but my hands are less tired after a day of work than they would be on a qwerty. Highly unscientific, I know, but it works for me.
One thing that I find interesting is that I bind by keyboard. If I sit down in front of a MS Natural keyboard, I expect it to be Dvorak. If I sit down in front of a standard (rectangular) layout keyboard, I start typing QWERTY. It's actually kinda difficult for me to type in Dvorak on a standard keyboard; I find I have to stop and think about it a lot.
I've been doing this for about 15 years now, and there's no way I'd ever want to go back to QWERTY. I'm very happy with where I am, my wrists don't hurt (except after the occassional gaming marathon, but I think that that's mouse related), and I'm fluent enough with both to switch back and forth reliably.
I do wish that MS would start building the original Natural keyboard again. That was a great product. Raised up in the front, which really seem to keep me happy. The newer ones raise in the back, which does nothing for me.
Ken Hamidi is a crank. He got fired years ago by Intel, and has been on a tirade against them ever since. I've heard that even his attorney has told him that he needs serious help. There are many things wrong with Intel, but Hamidi doesn't really hit them on the head.
I had a great experience with my Lasik. I did it exactly a year ago today, and I've been very happy since then. I've had no complications, no haloing, starbursting, or anything.
I did do the new Wavefront analysis, and apparently that was quite useful for my eyes. My prescription wasn't exceptionally bad before (-2.25, -2.5, something like that).
One of the most important things is to pick a reputable place to have it done. Lot's of eye places really use Lasik and PRK as a cash cow. I went to the local medical school (Casey Eye Institute at the Oregon Health Sciences University). They had a good reputation, and they didn't seem to just grind people out the way other places do.
Make sure you talk to people who've been there before you. My place gave seminars before you took the surgery, and were fairly honest about the risks. They gave it all a positive spin, and would cite statistics for how well they've done if you asked (of course, there's no real way to check them out, but....). Be aware of the risks, and make a knowledgable decision.
I wish people would start forwarding these letters that come from SCO without any proof of infringement to the various States' Attorneys General for investigation of fraud and extortion. You'd think 50 criminal investigations would bring SCO to it's knees.
Maybe you should consider schools that have a history, rather than a very new school. An older school will have a reputation, and more access to funds via it's financial aid offices.
You should also be careful about picking a school based on (as you put it) your "rather biased educational interests". As a someone who hasn't graduated from high school yet, your interests are very likely to change over the next few years of your life, as you set out into the world and see things that are different from where you grew up. Don't shortchange yourself by picking a school that is tailored to your current interests, and won't be able to support your future ones.
Also, don't shortchange yourself by isolating your interests into the tech sector. Make sure you can explore the full range of academic subjects that are available at a good school. You'll never get a chance like this again.
I've got a SliMP3, and let me tell you, not having to turn the *#&$ TV on just to listen to music is a huge win. And not having to run anything on an XP box is a huger win. I just run the SliMP3 server on my linux file/mail/web/music server and be done with it.
Not only that, you caused so much hate mail to be received that it crashed our mail servers and cost our sales and marketing teams hours of time wading through mail, and caused our IT team hours of overtime work bringing everything else alive. We'll be deducting those charges from your paycheck until we've recovered the costs.
I'd love to see the review of the guy who singlehandedly guaranteed that nobody who reads slashdot will be purchasing Belkin products in the near future.
"So, Mr. Deming, your feature brought us $100,000 in revenue from subscriptions to our parental control feature, but it antagonized 100,000 potential customers, and caused a 5% decrease in overall sales. You will not be receiving a raise this year. Or next year. Or the following year......"
Shouldn't be a problem. This is aimed at people who want to migrate away from MS. They should already have Excel on their machines, they just won't in the future.
So, the FTC slaps them around for sending fraudulent messages to every domain owner, and they run screaming from the business. When the antitrust suits start raining fire on them, think they'll sell the network backbone business as well? $21 billion investment in NSI, yeah there's a smart move. What a bunch of idiots....
I found it from at least 5 different sources on Limewire. Maybe the title track was released separately, but it seems that they've already been defeated. Like that's a big surprise.
IANAL, but I dated on once, so take this for what it's worth. This appears to me to be a clear violation of anti-trust laws. Verisign is using their monopoly position as the root DNS to create business opportunities which are not available to others. Verisign can create a nearly infinite number of domains for free, and sell advertising on all those domains. Any of their competition would have to pay for those domains (in fact, would have to pay Verisign). If this isn't abuse of a monopoly position, nothing is. Somebody should sue them under the Sherman Anti-Trust act and get an immediate injunction against them.
And how many people out there still have VCR's that are flashing 12:00? Seriously, connecting a phone line can be too complicated for some people, especially since most homes don't have a phone jack next to the cable line. Plus, don't forget that you have to program it up to know what your area code is, how to dial, etc, etc, etc. My Replay took about 20 minutes to get fully set up the first time I turned it on. A lot of consumers don't have the patience for that.
With Mystro, you should be able to just plug it into the cable jack and connect it to the TV. The cable company will do the rest. You bet your patooty that it will be talking back up the cable line. It has to, actually, your shows are stored in the cable system rather than on the local box. Thus, to watch last nights Baywatch, you have to go to the up the network and tell the network to start downloading your show.
Mystro also has one other big advantage, you can potentially get the whole library of stuff that's been shown. If you missed Baywatch three weeks ago, you can potentially go back and watch arbitrary episodes. Of course, they have to get the rights to let you do that, but still, you don't have to worry about your disk filling up, shows coming on at the same time, power failures, etc.
Any lawyer who didn't ask for a summary judgement against the other side is an idiot. You might get lucky, and at worst, you go to trial, just like you'd planned to do anyhow.
Not really. Sysmark is designed to measure the performance that you would see on "typical" desktop applications. Open benchmarks are frequently only microkernels which tell you a little bit about how the processor will handle one piece of code, but very little about how it will actually work on a real application. Remember Bytemarks? Those were a popular, semi-open benchmark (you could get the code, but you couldn't recompile it and still use it in a benchmark result), but they didn't represent anything real. SPEC does a decent job of indicating who has the best processor/compiler pair, on compute bound engineering type workloads, but it is not incredibly predictive of desktop performance on interactive apps compiled with random compilers.
An open source benchmark would probably not tell much useful at all.
Send mail to: commissionermason@FEC.gov
and let him know how assinine you think this decision is. If he receives enough hate mail, he may rethink this stupid decision.
Remember, be polite, and don't flame. Save that for the SMS messages for his phone (wish I knew the number).
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn.
B.A. vs. B.S. means nothing. My university offered Computer Science through the College of Letters and Sciences, and only offered a B.A. Of course, that was the only thing that the entire college offered. You would get a B.A. in Physics just as you would get a B.A. in Music or Art History. The B.A. vs. B.S. distinction is entirely BS (sorry, couldn't resist).
Furthermore, at most schools, at least most good schools, algorithms is only a small part of the study of CS. When I got my degree, I studied lots of things, including algorithms, data structure, computability theory, electrical engineering (very basic), computer architecture, compilers, databases, artificial intelligence, and probably a couple classes I can't even begin to remember. Yes, a true software engineering course was missing, but heck, it was years ago.
As for our little "fresh out of school" guy, well, get a job. Seriously. Nobody expects you to be able to solve the world's problems straight out of school. You're a junior guy. Go get a job, and work on interesting things. You'll first be a grunt, and if you're good, your understanding of how things work, and your responsibilities, will both increase over time. You'll eventually have the experience necessary to solve the problems you want to solve.
Not really.
PC gamers sit 2 feet from their screen.
Console gamers sit 5 to 15 feet away from their screens.
It's a very different way of interacting with your game.
Heck, when I play games on my PC, I hardly ever play more than about 1280x1024 resolution. Beyond that, it doesn't provide significant improvements.
Actually, Nintendo is probably safe. If I remember correctly, they are supporting 480p TV in 16:9 aspect ratio. That, realistically, will support the vast majority of gamers just fine.
IMHO, HDTV provides 4 major video improvements over "Standard Def" TV, or more precisely, over standard NTSC TV. These are:
1: Improved color model and accuracy. NTSC color is hideous (people say NTSC stands for Never The Same Color). HD's color system allows more accurate color, and more precise changes in the color from pixel to pixel.
2: Progressive Scan
3: Widescreen aspect ratio
4: More scan lines.
Of these, more scan lines is actually the least important. Unless your TV is huge, you really don't see a huge difference between 480p and 1080p until you're far closer than you would be for watching TV or gaming. Even still, motion covers a plethora of sins. It's hard to discern fine detail at all in a moving image. Static images, sure, but not moving ones.
Wii, with a 16x9 progressive scan 480p image will be just fine once people sit down and play it. It may not look as sexy on the spec sheet, but in reality, it will work great. The guys with 108 inch TV's might be able to say "My PS3 looks so much better", but the vast majority of the population, with 42" TV's and smaller, will really say "looks fine to me".
I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but isn't it ironic that DNF in some racing (skiing, at least, not sure about others) means "Did Not Finish"....
Eric
I switch back and forth between keyboards on a regular basis. The thing that I find that helps is to have different types of keyboards. I actually bind my expectations to the keyboard shape. When I walk up to a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, I expect it to be Dvorak, because that's what I use at home and work. When I walk up to a standard rectangular keyboard, I expect it to be QWERTY. I get in real trouble if the rectangular keyboard is Dvorak, takes me a while to readjust my mind to the other map.
Probably helps to be a touch typer too....
I have used a Dvorak Keyboard for years now. In fact, I put the dvorak map on the MS Natural keyboard (the original, not the crappy ones they build now), and it works great. I can touch type on both Dvorak and QWERTY.
I have found that I don't type any faster on the dvorak map, but my hands are less tired after a day of work than they would be on a qwerty. Highly unscientific, I know, but it works for me.
One thing that I find interesting is that I bind by keyboard. If I sit down in front of a MS Natural keyboard, I expect it to be Dvorak. If I sit down in front of a standard (rectangular) layout keyboard, I start typing QWERTY. It's actually kinda difficult for me to type in Dvorak on a standard keyboard; I find I have to stop and think about it a lot.
I've been doing this for about 15 years now, and there's no way I'd ever want to go back to QWERTY. I'm very happy with where I am, my wrists don't hurt (except after the occassional gaming marathon, but I think that that's mouse related), and I'm fluent enough with both to switch back and forth reliably.
I do wish that MS would start building the original Natural keyboard again. That was a great product. Raised up in the front, which really seem to keep me happy. The newer ones raise in the back, which does nothing for me.
Squeezbox rocks big time. I've got two (actually, 1 Squeezebox, and one older SliMP3). They work great, and you can hack them when they don't.
Eric
Ken Hamidi is a crank. He got fired years ago by Intel, and has been on a tirade against them ever since. I've heard that even his attorney has told him that he needs serious help. There are many things wrong with Intel, but Hamidi doesn't really hit them on the head.
I had a great experience with my Lasik. I did it exactly a year ago today, and I've been very happy since then. I've had no complications, no haloing, starbursting, or anything.
I did do the new Wavefront analysis, and apparently that was quite useful for my eyes. My prescription wasn't exceptionally bad before (-2.25, -2.5, something like that).
One of the most important things is to pick a reputable place to have it done. Lot's of eye places really use Lasik and PRK as a cash cow. I went to the local medical school (Casey Eye Institute at the Oregon Health Sciences University). They had a good reputation, and they didn't seem to just grind people out the way other places do.
Make sure you talk to people who've been there before you. My place gave seminars before you took the surgery, and were fairly honest about the risks. They gave it all a positive spin, and would cite statistics for how well they've done if you asked (of course, there's no real way to check them out, but....). Be aware of the risks, and make a knowledgable decision.
Cool, I can see it now. The next arena for BattleBots is....
Mars.
Somebody call the cable networks.....
Eric
I wish people would start forwarding these letters that come from SCO without any proof of infringement to the various States' Attorneys General for investigation of fraud and extortion. You'd think 50 criminal investigations would bring SCO to it's knees.
Maybe you should consider schools that have a history, rather than a very new school. An older school will have a reputation, and more access to funds via it's financial aid offices.
You should also be careful about picking a school based on (as you put it) your "rather biased educational interests". As a someone who hasn't graduated from high school yet, your interests are very likely to change over the next few years of your life, as you set out into the world and see things that are different from where you grew up. Don't shortchange yourself by picking a school that is tailored to your current interests, and won't be able to support your future ones.
Also, don't shortchange yourself by isolating your interests into the tech sector. Make sure you can explore the full range of academic subjects that are available at a good school. You'll never get a chance like this again.
My Yahoo mail account collects (easily) 50-80 spams per day. Only 40 per day per user, they've got it easy.
I've got a SliMP3, and let me tell you, not having to turn the *#&$ TV on just to listen to music is a huge win. And not having to run anything on an XP box is a huger win. I just run the SliMP3 server on my linux file/mail/web/music server and be done with it.
Not only that, you caused so much hate mail to be received that it crashed our mail servers and cost our sales and marketing teams hours of time wading through mail, and caused our IT team hours of overtime work bringing everything else alive. We'll be deducting those charges from your paycheck until we've recovered the costs.
I'd love to see the review of the guy who singlehandedly guaranteed that nobody who reads slashdot will be purchasing Belkin products in the near future.
"So, Mr. Deming, your feature brought us $100,000 in revenue from subscriptions to our parental control feature, but it antagonized 100,000 potential customers, and caused a 5% decrease in overall sales. You will not be receiving a raise this year. Or next year. Or the following year......"
The actual quote (from the VP of Marketing at OSIsoft) was "I expect to build applications as smart as Outlook". He's a real underachiever, isn't he?
Shouldn't be a problem. This is aimed at people who want to migrate away from MS. They should already have Excel on their machines, they just won't in the future.
So, the FTC slaps them around for sending fraudulent messages to every domain owner, and they run screaming from the business. When the antitrust suits start raining fire on them, think they'll sell the network backbone business as well? $21 billion investment in NSI, yeah there's a smart move. What a bunch of idiots....
I found it from at least 5 different sources on Limewire. Maybe the title track was released separately, but it seems that they've already been defeated. Like that's a big surprise.
IANAL, but I dated on once, so take this for what it's worth. This appears to me to be a clear violation of anti-trust laws. Verisign is using their monopoly position as the root DNS to create business opportunities which are not available to others. Verisign can create a nearly infinite number of domains for free, and sell advertising on all those domains. Any of their competition would have to pay for those domains (in fact, would have to pay Verisign). If this isn't abuse of a monopoly position, nothing is. Somebody should sue them under the Sherman Anti-Trust act and get an immediate injunction against them.
Eric
eric at koldware dot SpamThisSucker dot com
And how many people out there still have VCR's that are flashing 12:00? Seriously, connecting a phone line can be too complicated for some people, especially since most homes don't have a phone jack next to the cable line. Plus, don't forget that you have to program it up to know what your area code is, how to dial, etc, etc, etc. My Replay took about 20 minutes to get fully set up the first time I turned it on. A lot of consumers don't have the patience for that.
With Mystro, you should be able to just plug it into the cable jack and connect it to the TV. The cable company will do the rest. You bet your patooty that it will be talking back up the cable line. It has to, actually, your shows are stored in the cable system rather than on the local box. Thus, to watch last nights Baywatch, you have to go to the up the network and tell the network to start downloading your show.
Mystro also has one other big advantage, you can potentially get the whole library of stuff that's been shown. If you missed Baywatch three weeks ago, you can potentially go back and watch arbitrary episodes. Of course, they have to get the rights to let you do that, but still, you don't have to worry about your disk filling up, shows coming on at the same time, power failures, etc.
Any lawyer who didn't ask for a summary judgement against the other side is an idiot. You might get lucky, and at worst, you go to trial, just like you'd planned to do anyhow.
Not really. Sysmark is designed to measure the performance that you would see on "typical" desktop applications. Open benchmarks are frequently only microkernels which tell you a little bit about how the processor will handle one piece of code, but very little about how it will actually work on a real application. Remember Bytemarks? Those were a popular, semi-open benchmark (you could get the code, but you couldn't recompile it and still use it in a benchmark result), but they didn't represent anything real. SPEC does a decent job of indicating who has the best processor/compiler pair, on compute bound engineering type workloads, but it is not incredibly predictive of desktop performance on interactive apps compiled with random compilers.
An open source benchmark would probably not tell much useful at all.
Remember, be polite, and don't flame. Save that for the SMS messages for his phone (wish I knew the number).