Perhaps if you boil it down to the two fundamental college choices ('go to college' vs. 'don't go to college') - then there is a significant impact to future earning potential. This is doubly true in low income families, as academic based scholarships can make / break the decision about going to college.
Too bad nobody offered you $350 in small chunks as incentives to do well in school. Sounds like it could have made a massive difference in your life.
I had my own incentive system at home during my formative education years : get good grades and I didn't get an ass whipping. Not sure I approve of the method, but it got good results.
1. Don't spend money you don't have. 2. Balance your checkbook to the penny. 3. Don't create race conditions - the bank controls the flow, so you lose all race conditions. 4. Until the check you deposit clears, you don't have that money. See #1, above. 5. If you're on the fiscal bleeding edge of zero, live like a poor person for one month to build up a buffer.
I heard a story a few years ago about a pilot instructor (small single engine private planes like a Cessna 152) flying with his advanced students and, on one of the last sets of checkout flights, during final approach he would pull a lighter out, light it and hold it up in front of the student - not enough to prevent the student from seeing anything important, but enough to be a constant significant distraction.
Land an airplane while there's a fire in the cockpit - if you can do that, you're ready to command your own plane regardless of circumstances.
Let the cops raid that one a few times, see what happens. There's a black family living there but they don't take no shit from cops. He's the kind of man that would say 'Do you know who I am? I'll have your badge!' with enough authority that the cops would back down, I betcha.
Windows XP doesn't use anything beyond 4G (4096MB) Also it needs to stuff the video memory overlay (and a few other memory overlays that I don't remember at this time) somewhere in there so if the video card has 256M on it, it reduces the memory available to the OS by 256M.
That said, 3.5G or thereabouts is -plenty- of memory for XP on a home user's box.
I focused on XP because that's the most widely used OS for machines in the P4 range over the past decade.
Regarding whether it's better to host in the cloud or buy your own environment - I often ask when designing a software solution to process a given business requirement 'Does this need to be repeatable (forever, using different datasets) or is this a one time run?' If they only want the answers to a problem once against a single data set, I can crank out a one-pass solution with about 1/10th the time (and effort, and cost) that it would take me to engineer a long term solution that I can hand over to their business users to use forever using different data sets.
I would take the same stance on something applicable to cloud computing. If you only need the results from a small limited set of runs or you will only run it a very small portion of the time, it makes sense to lease someone else's environment. If you are going to need this solution as part of your day to day business and it runs wide open 24x7 - it's probably more cost effective to procure your own environment.
Need a massive render farm to do a proof of concept showing a four minute preview of Toy Story 4? Cloud computing. Need a massive render farm to actually generate every CGI frame for every movie Disney or Lucas is going to produce the next four years? Buy your own environment.
I took a few minutes to RTFA and the software equivalent of scholastic olympics today are pretty much the same as they were in 1984 when my team took second place at the state level. It is a medium low level software engineering test demonstrated via a few medium low level implementations.
They are looking for two things: Can you read the requirements and come up with an appropriate algorithm? Can you implement the algorithm in their favorite language (pretty much any language in common use)?
The CPU time limit is to keep people from using bogo-sort (ie, randomize the data and then check if it is sorted, repeat until it's actually sorted.) If the students understand how to break a problem down and implement it using a standard approach, they will beat the CPU time limit. Even if they use bubble sort.
The real thing they are up against is the design and implementation time limit - I'm guessing they have three or four problems and four hours per team. The libraries they are allowed to use are basically nonexistent, meaning they software they are expected to write is going to be a software implementation of some algorithm, and they aren't going to be able to Google for syntax assistance so they need to be fluent in their language. They will have access to hardcopy manuals and manuals in electronic format, but that will just slow them down.
Given the limit on imported packages and code complexity (not to mention source code size - no more than 40,000 characters (which is ultra-overkill - it would take a week to hand write 40k worth of source code for an application that actually needs 40k worth of source code)) compile time will be negligible. A few seconds tops. Don't worry about compile times for this competition, worry about the time to actually come up with the algorithm and then to implement it in the correct syntax.
They aren't doing any serious object oriented coding because everything is in one class, and because they're allowing Borland's Pascal (well technically Delphi but they are using is as a super powerful Turbo Pascal. This means implementing simple algorithms.
If you want your kids to succeed in this arena, here's the best toolset to train them. Two piece of paper, a pencil, and a few crayons. Verbally describe a simple problem for them. Explain it only once. As you are explaining it to them, have them take notes on one piece of paper and capture the requirements. On the second piece of paper, using the crayons diagram their solution. A sort can be diagrammed by drawing boxes and arrows showing how things move around. String manipulation or array manipulation can be diagrammed by drawing a word with numbers below it and arrows above it showing how the elements are moved around. Teach them to understand the problem, come up with a practical approach, and then code it in the basic syntax in any language.
Because I expect the problems to have solutions that would be simpler if the language has iterators, and since they are disallowing pretty much all of the good Java external packages to do those things - I'm going to suggest a language with simple pointers - either Pascal or C/C++. Rearranging arrays (of characters, structures, or whatever) is trivial in either of those languages, and rearranging or iterating over an array is the perfect example of algorithm design and implementation typical of this type of challenge.
Bullshit. I've been shooting pistols since before the first Glock 17 came out and after tens of thousands of rounds shot from several G17's, a G20 (the 10mm, my favorite), an H&K USP.45, a Walther P99 in 9mm, I compete in a tactical team from time to time - and I still can't rack the slide with one hand. So a) not on 'most semi-autos' and b) no it's not 'actually pretty easy'.
That said, it takes a special kind of stupid to leave a loaded and ready to fire pistol where a three year old can get at it, and even more stupid to let the kid eat a bullet when you're standing three feet away.
That's funny - see my post above that breaks down estimates by developer skill level. I'm seeing a lot of guys that say 8x their estimate and a lot of guys (including you) that say 3x my estimate. Personally I'm hoping my estimates are all correct when a 2x factor is used...
You will get better at it as you do it more. Here's a piece I wrote a while back that explains my perspective on estimates. And evidently when I wrote that one I was quoting myself from a year before that.
Simple guideline - ask the developer and adjust. Then adjust for team size.
Newbie : 8x as long as estimated. Seasoned Developer : 3x as long. Elite Veteran : 2x as long.
Reasoning behind the time estimate guidelines:
New programmer fresh out of college: Take his estimate and multiply by 8x. Yes he could get it done in 1 day, assuming he got so cranked up on caffeine his eyes stopped blinking and he worked on that (and nothing else) for 24 hours straight. In the real world a newbie can dedicate about 2 real hours doing a particular task each day, the rest is spent coming up to speed on corporate coding standards and libraries, email, breaks, and not 'in the groove'. Also, you are expecting him to document it, unit test it, get it into revision control and deployed to the shared test environment but he didn't account for those in his estimate - his estimate was only for time to code the actual lines of code.
Veteran programmer of average skill, single person project : multiply his estimate by 3x. A third of his day is spent hand-holding the newbie, and another third is spent hand-holding management. The other third is spent programming, but luckily he knows to pad the schedule some (not enough, but some.)
Veteran programmer of uber skill, single person project : multiply his estimate by 2x. This is as good as it gets. A uber veteran programmer knows to leave his email client closed and his door closed so he can stay in the zone. He knows to pad the schedule more than he really thinks he should. And it still takes him twice as long as he expected, primarily because he doesn't account for the turnaround times from other people he needs to do things for him (DBA to do something to the database, sysadmin to do something in active directory, etc.)
Multiple people working on the same project : increase the timeline by a factor of 1.2 per additional person. If two people ought to be able to do it in 10 days it will take 12. If 11 people (10 additional) ought to be able to do it in 10 days it will take... 1.2^10 = about 6, so 10 x (1.2^10) = roughly 60 days = 12 weeks = 3 months.
Make it legal (and not impossible) for regular people in California to get certified to carry handguns and to protect them from prosecution when they use deadly force to prevent / stop these things from happening, and I will be the first one to step up to save the next gang rape victim. Until / unless that happens, forget it. Know why you don't read about these kinds of things in Texas or Florida - because they hand out CHL's like candy and the law lets people use deadly force to stop rape.
And yea, real handguns with full capacity magazines too - not those wussy 'CA Legal' handguns with five bullets or whatever in them.
When I feel that a cop's intent is to do good, I will call the cops. When I honestly feel that cops are driven by a visceral emotion to do good - their true underlying motivation being only to do good, I will call the cops.
In today's world of reality, however, there is no fucking way I am going to volunteer myself to have any interaction whatsoever with a cop. No fucking way. I watched a dozen different youtube videos of a cop in Oakland grab a black young man sitting there minding his own business, handcuff him face down on the ground, and then shoot him in the back. Dead. Traffic lights that have the yellow light length shortened to increase the number of tickets written. Motorcycle cops sitting on the far side of overpasses with their laser guns trying to catch someone driving 56 in a 55. Cops arresting people for DUI because they were riding a riding mower on their own property after two beers.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps if you boil it down to the two fundamental college choices ('go to college' vs. 'don't go to college') - then there is a significant impact to future earning potential.
This is doubly true in low income families, as academic based scholarships can make / break the decision about going to college.
Too bad nobody offered you $350 in small chunks as incentives to do well in school.
Sounds like it could have made a massive difference in your life.
I had my own incentive system at home during my formative education years : get good grades and I didn't get an ass whipping. Not sure I approve of the method, but it got good results.
1. Don't spend money you don't have.
2. Balance your checkbook to the penny.
3. Don't create race conditions - the bank controls the flow, so you lose all race conditions.
4. Until the check you deposit clears, you don't have that money. See #1, above.
5. If you're on the fiscal bleeding edge of zero, live like a poor person for one month to build up a buffer.
I heard a story a few years ago about a pilot instructor (small single engine private planes like a Cessna 152) flying with his advanced students and, on one of the last sets of checkout flights, during final approach he would pull a lighter out, light it and hold it up in front of the student - not enough to prevent the student from seeing anything important, but enough to be a constant significant distraction.
Land an airplane while there's a fire in the cockpit - if you can do that, you're ready to command your own plane regardless of circumstances.
One kilobyte (1024 bytes) is 2^10. One megabyte is 2^20. One gigabyte is 2^30.
FTFY
Actually 1024 ohms definitely is a perfect 1 kilo ohm resistor, worthy of a gold fourth stripe.
Citation
(And let's be serious here - do these people actually say kibibyte and mebibyte, etc?)
A guy I used to work with did.
Once.
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Let the cops raid that one a few times, see what happens.
There's a black family living there but they don't take no shit from cops.
He's the kind of man that would say 'Do you know who I am? I'll have your badge!' with enough authority that the cops would back down, I betcha.
Windows XP doesn't use anything beyond 4G (4096MB)
Also it needs to stuff the video memory overlay (and a few other memory overlays that I don't remember at this time) somewhere in there so if the video card has 256M on it, it reduces the memory available to the OS by 256M.
That said, 3.5G or thereabouts is -plenty- of memory for XP on a home user's box.
I focused on XP because that's the most widely used OS for machines in the P4 range over the past decade.
So if a plane turns off his GPS transponder, he becomes invisible.
Nifty plan there Senate.
Luck for us we can always rely on enemy planes to keep their GPS transponders on when flying to Pearl Harbor.
Regarding whether it's better to host in the cloud or buy your own environment - I often ask when designing a software solution to process a given business requirement 'Does this need to be repeatable (forever, using different datasets) or is this a one time run?' If they only want the answers to a problem once against a single data set, I can crank out a one-pass solution with about 1/10th the time (and effort, and cost) that it would take me to engineer a long term solution that I can hand over to their business users to use forever using different data sets.
I would take the same stance on something applicable to cloud computing. If you only need the results from a small limited set of runs or you will only run it a very small portion of the time, it makes sense to lease someone else's environment. If you are going to need this solution as part of your day to day business and it runs wide open 24x7 - it's probably more cost effective to procure your own environment.
Need a massive render farm to do a proof of concept showing a four minute preview of Toy Story 4? Cloud computing.
Need a massive render farm to actually generate every CGI frame for every movie Disney or Lucas is going to produce the next four years? Buy your own environment.
Somehow I don't think the guys running the Conflicker botnet are particularly concerned with the practical implementation of ethical computing.
Republicans are opposed because it's socialism. The same kind of socialism that drove the economies of North Korea and Soviet Russia into the ground.
This will not end well.
Same goes for hookers.
Or so I've heard.
I took a few minutes to RTFA and the software equivalent of scholastic olympics today are pretty much the same as they were in 1984 when my team took second place at the state level. It is a medium low level software engineering test demonstrated via a few medium low level implementations.
They are looking for two things:
Can you read the requirements and come up with an appropriate algorithm?
Can you implement the algorithm in their favorite language (pretty much any language in common use)?
The CPU time limit is to keep people from using bogo-sort (ie, randomize the data and then check if it is sorted, repeat until it's actually sorted.) If the students understand how to break a problem down and implement it using a standard approach, they will beat the CPU time limit. Even if they use bubble sort.
The real thing they are up against is the design and implementation time limit - I'm guessing they have three or four problems and four hours per team. The libraries they are allowed to use are basically nonexistent, meaning they software they are expected to write is going to be a software implementation of some algorithm, and they aren't going to be able to Google for syntax assistance so they need to be fluent in their language. They will have access to hardcopy manuals and manuals in electronic format, but that will just slow them down.
Given the limit on imported packages and code complexity (not to mention source code size - no more than 40,000 characters (which is ultra-overkill - it would take a week to hand write 40k worth of source code for an application that actually needs 40k worth of source code)) compile time will be negligible. A few seconds tops. Don't worry about compile times for this competition, worry about the time to actually come up with the algorithm and then to implement it in the correct syntax.
They aren't doing any serious object oriented coding because everything is in one class, and because they're allowing Borland's Pascal (well technically Delphi but they are using is as a super powerful Turbo Pascal. This means implementing simple algorithms.
If you want your kids to succeed in this arena, here's the best toolset to train them. Two piece of paper, a pencil, and a few crayons. Verbally describe a simple problem for them. Explain it only once. As you are explaining it to them, have them take notes on one piece of paper and capture the requirements. On the second piece of paper, using the crayons diagram their solution. A sort can be diagrammed by drawing boxes and arrows showing how things move around. String manipulation or array manipulation can be diagrammed by drawing a word with numbers below it and arrows above it showing how the elements are moved around. Teach them to understand the problem, come up with a practical approach, and then code it in the basic syntax in any language.
Because I expect the problems to have solutions that would be simpler if the language has iterators, and since they are disallowing pretty much all of the good Java external packages to do those things - I'm going to suggest a language with simple pointers - either Pascal or C/C++. Rearranging arrays (of characters, structures, or whatever) is trivial in either of those languages, and rearranging or iterating over an array is the perfect example of algorithm design and implementation typical of this type of challenge.
Bullshit. I've been shooting pistols since before the first Glock 17 came out and after tens of thousands of rounds shot from several G17's, a G20 (the 10mm, my favorite), an H&K USP .45, a Walther P99 in 9mm, I compete in a tactical team from time to time - and I still can't rack the slide with one hand. So a) not on 'most semi-autos' and b) no it's not 'actually pretty easy'.
That said, it takes a special kind of stupid to leave a loaded and ready to fire pistol where a three year old can get at it, and even more stupid to let the kid eat a bullet when you're standing three feet away.
That's funny - see my post above that breaks down estimates by developer skill level. I'm seeing a lot of guys that say 8x their estimate and a lot of guys (including you) that say 3x my estimate.
Personally I'm hoping my estimates are all correct when a 2x factor is used...
You will get better at it as you do it more. Here's a piece I wrote a while back that explains my perspective on estimates. And evidently when I wrote that one I was quoting myself from a year before that.
Simple guideline - ask the developer and adjust. Then adjust for team size.
Newbie : 8x as long as estimated.
Seasoned Developer : 3x as long.
Elite Veteran : 2x as long.
Reasoning behind the time estimate guidelines:
New programmer fresh out of college: Take his estimate and multiply by 8x. Yes he could get it done in 1 day, assuming he got so cranked up on caffeine his eyes stopped blinking and he worked on that (and nothing else) for 24 hours straight. In the real world a newbie can dedicate about 2 real hours doing a particular task each day, the rest is spent coming up to speed on corporate coding standards and libraries, email, breaks, and not 'in the groove'. Also, you are expecting him to document it, unit test it, get it into revision control and deployed to the shared test environment but he didn't account for those in his estimate - his estimate was only for time to code the actual lines of code.
Veteran programmer of average skill, single person project : multiply his estimate by 3x. A third of his day is spent hand-holding the newbie, and another third is spent hand-holding management. The other third is spent programming, but luckily he knows to pad the schedule some (not enough, but some.)
Veteran programmer of uber skill, single person project : multiply his estimate by 2x. This is as good as it gets. A uber veteran programmer knows to leave his email client closed and his door closed so he can stay in the zone. He knows to pad the schedule more than he really thinks he should. And it still takes him twice as long as he expected, primarily because he doesn't account for the turnaround times from other people he needs to do things for him (DBA to do something to the database, sysadmin to do something in active directory, etc.)
Multiple people working on the same project : increase the timeline by a factor of 1.2 per additional person. If two people ought to be able to do it in 10 days it will take 12. If 11 people (10 additional) ought to be able to do it in 10 days it will take ... 1.2^10 = about 6, so 10 x (1.2^10) = roughly 60 days = 12 weeks = 3 months.
And today we have entire web sites dedicated to precious snowflakes.
I didn't say I agreed with it.
I just said that's how it's done according to ITIL protocol.
And if you've heard the words 'process' or 'process improvement' at your workplace, odds are someone reading about ITIL is behind it all.
Actually that behavior is codified in ITIL.
The first report of a problem is an incident.
Multiple reports of the same problem constitute an issue.
First tier support staff handle incidents.
The big dogs in the back handle issues.
Whoops - just read TFA. He's the other Apple guy. But close enough.
I wonder if the help desk at Toyota is hiring, because I just passed their test.
Here's a clue this particular caller might have known what he was talking about : his said 'Hi, my name is Steve Jobs.'
Make it legal (and not impossible) for regular people in California to get certified to carry handguns and to protect them from prosecution when they use deadly force to prevent / stop these things from happening, and I will be the first one to step up to save the next gang rape victim. Until / unless that happens, forget it. Know why you don't read about these kinds of things in Texas or Florida - because they hand out CHL's like candy and the law lets people use deadly force to stop rape.
And yea, real handguns with full capacity magazines too - not those wussy 'CA Legal' handguns with five bullets or whatever in them.
When I feel that a cop's intent is to do good, I will call the cops.
When I honestly feel that cops are driven by a visceral emotion to do good - their true underlying motivation being only to do good, I will call the cops.
In today's world of reality, however, there is no fucking way I am going to volunteer myself to have any interaction whatsoever with a cop. No fucking way.
I watched a dozen different youtube videos of a cop in Oakland grab a black young man sitting there minding his own business, handcuff him face down on the ground, and then shoot him in the back. Dead.
Traffic lights that have the yellow light length shortened to increase the number of tickets written.
Motorcycle cops sitting on the far side of overpasses with their laser guns trying to catch someone driving 56 in a 55.
Cops arresting people for DUI because they were riding a riding mower on their own property after two beers.
Sorry, but no.