I think that perhaps this recession could be a natural thing. All of the female CS students really have a passion for learning about computers and technology. This is something that wasn't taught to them, but something that they pretty much have always had. Certainly, you can't expect every group of people to have the same likes and dislikes of every other group, so it could just be that at this point in time there are less females interested in CS than before. I think the only thing that we really need to watch out for is females who are interested in CS but feel like they can't do well because of their sex.
For me personally, getting into college and being able to afford it was not a very big deal. However, how many children out there never even consider college because they think they can't afford it? Sure it may not be impossible to get a degree, but what I was really hitting on was the idea of how hard it is to get a scholarship and make college affordable.
"Nope, unless you are rich, really smart and a minority,
or play ball, you don't get a degree in the U.S."
There is a lot of truth in this statement. I just graduated high school in the summer of 03 and I can say that it is very difficult for a white male to get a decent sholarship for academics. I really don't mind the large amount of scholarships for minorities so much as I do the huge amounts that are given out for athletics. You often hear politicians or other say how we need a renewed interest in math and science in the US, but public high school seems almost contrary to this. Why would you concentrate on math or science when you can play football, do well and go to a great school for almost free? Then what are the chances of these players becoming professionals? Not very good. I think America needs to put more effort into promoting academics or else all of the development and new idea generation will take place over seas.
As a current CS major at university, I think that most people coming from high school have a general misconception of what CS is and what it involves. I think people still look upon computer science as an insanely lucrative field that is fairly simple to master. However, I think they are quickly shocked once they start to learn that it really is a difficult major. At my university upperclassmen speak of how some of the more advanced CS courses are famous for causing people to switch majors. For instance, one class started with two sections of about 50-75 people each and by the middle of the term they were down to around 12-15 each. This drop was very shocking to me, at least.
I have always had a passion for computers and technology and I can't really see my doing anything else with my life. However, I sense a lack of this passion from many of the CS majors. In one of my classes we had mock interviews and some of the questions revolved around general ideas of technology and things that you probably wouldn't pick up in class. I was surprised by how many people couldn't answer the questions or didn't seem to really care about anything that wasn't taught in lecture. I have always paid attention to technology and things going on in the computing industry, but I seem to be in the minority among my fellow CS majors. I can't imagine choosing a major simply because it seems lucrative, but it seems that many choose CS for that reason.
"One might actually consider variable stars as messages from outer space..."
I don't think I would really consider a pulsar to be a message, since they are created through a very simple physical event. When the star collapses on itself, its rotational speed must increase in order to conserve energy, thus it spins quickly with an practically standard period. If you want to think about this in another way, just look at ice skaters (or you can even try this on a swivle chair): when they spin around with their arms out and then quickly bring them in, their angular speed increases, just like when a star collapses on itself.
I have RC2 installed on my system and I haven't had any problems yet. No BSODs, no crashes of other software that I use, and I have even been playing Doom 3 with no problems. To me it seems that RC2 was pretty stable. Now I might just be one of the lucky 2 of 5 that works and it might have something to do with the fact that my system only has quality hardware and drivers installed, but I am pretty happy with RC2. In fact, I have even noticed an increased performance in my wireless connection. It seems to me that the installation of the final SP2 should go pretty smoothly, at least on my system anyway.
Well...whenever I tried to play online games, I would often have connection problems. I found out that this could be solved by turning off the Wireless Zero Config (or something similar) service. Hope that helps.
I've had often the same experience with Linux. I'm no idiot when it comes to computers, as I am a CS major. However, I could always get Linux installed but never working the way I wanted. Usually in about a week I had the system so messed up I needed to reinstall. Often it would take much tweeking just to get simple things like wireless and sound working. That is why I bought an Apple laptop. I can use most Unix tools and also install most Unix apps if I please, but I don't have to touch any of it if I don't want to. So far OS X has worked beautifully, the joy of a modern working os and all the power of unix.
Well, its not so much that I'm surprised that SP2 is stable, I expect that seeing how XP is stable without it. What I was surprised about was that the BETA of SP2 was very stable.
I've had the SP2 RC2 on my box for some time now. I'm actually surprised by how stable it has been. I've even been able to play Doom 3 with no crashes. I can't really say how the security improvements are, but the one thing that I have noticed is that wireless networking seems to have improved much. Also, it doesn't seem like the firewall was working too well (at least for outbound traffic).
As I was reading the only thing I could think about was James Bond standing on top of a building and spying on someone's conversation using the Bluetooth rifle...now that is an awesome hack.
You know, until a few months ago, I never realized how man businesses there are that are not willing to give up their old hardware/software. I came to this realization when I went for an interview with a company who sells services to companies looking for solutions. One of their products that they were working on takes output from old COBOL and other programs and creates a mondern interface using XML that can be presented through a browser or whatever. When the user gives this modern interface input, this input is then given back to the old program to allow it to process it. I never even knew there was such a large market for software of this type. So, I'm guessing that taking the old hardware and emulating it would probably be the logical next step.
"I'd bet they put it nowhere. L2 and L3 caches are a kludge, and, if they really achieve huge chip-to-chip bandwidth, they just might not need the cache hierarchy. This is reminiscent of old CPUs, where the system RAM ran at an acceptably large fraction of the speed of the CPU, so there was no L2 cache at all."
To me, it would seem like some sort of cache would still be needed. As I understand things, even if a slow bus was eliminated, it still takes the RAM much longer to look up data than the CPU is capable of reading at. Now, of course one could always use high speed memory like they use for the cache, but this kind of memory is so much more expensive than normal RAM that I doubt it will ever be feasable to have a computer's main memory comprised entirely of very fast cache-like memory.
The only thing I can think of is that either the authors have no idea about how computers or the technology that drives them works or they think the same thing of their audience. I really have no idea if it is commonly thought by the masses that a virus/worm would stop spreading once the author is caught. People might think this, but/. is definetly the wrong place to find out:)
I wish that Apple would find some way to use this idea to make the desktop more efficient. Right now, expose is great, and the genie effects and all are cool, but I would like some 3D innovation that really shows the benefits of having a 3D window system. So far, the only thing along this line that I have seen was from a MS demostration of Avalon, where now a command similar to alt-tab will have all the windows on the system rotate along the z-axis (into the screen) so what you see is like a spaced out stack of cards. I didn't get to see the animation is person but it looked like it might have some potential. Now before anyone respons saying "you forgot OS X's cube user switching or the new iChat video stuff" I would say those ideas are neat and certainly look good, but I want something that will really help with productivity and benefit the way the window manager is used.
I have read rumors that soon Intel will switch their main desktop processors over to a design similar to that of Pentium-M, which is currently much more efficient per a clock than Pentium IVs. If this is true, they would definetly have to go back on their "Ghz are so important" campaign. Personally, I rather have effiecient processors than ones that are power hungry and give off lots of heat.
Yes, I don't really like device lock in, which is why my library collection is in MP3. Even when I do want more music, I usually buy the CD and rip it myself. I have only a few songs from iTMS, just to test it out. They sound good and have a lower bit rate then what I normally encode at (my mp3s are 192 kbps but the AACs are 128 kbps and sound pretty darn good). The thing is, in the future if I want something that isn't from Apple to play my songs on, I do not want to have to convert my entire library (and lose much quality) or rip all my cds again.
Ok...with the exception of that. You got me there. However, it doesn't work when say...you want to get a wireless card working with Linux. Also, at one point I did have a version of apt-get working with red hat RPMs. However, if you wanted something that was not on the list, it was still a pain to install. My point is, despite apt-get, it is still not as easy as dragging a file to a folder. How many non-geeks will know to use apt-get?
Like you said, I don't really see what the big deal is. If anyone out there really wants to put Real's crap on their iPod then I say let them. I feel sorry for the people that think Real has good software. Posts in the previous article about Real mention the underhanded things that they do, and I know from experience how crappy their software is. However, I don't think Real is doing anything wrong in this case. They simply made a program that will allow users to play their music on the iPod. It is not as if they went and messed around with the encoding of songs downloaded from iTMS.
The thing that really gets me about Apple is that they made stuff actually work. I do like Apple's gui, but I would have been happy using KDE or Gnome if thats what it came too. However, the one thing, in my mind, that they have done for *nix that no one else has is made it easy to use. If you plug something in, chances are it will work. Installing something? No problem, either drag it to the apps folder or just run the install program (the link to which is often made painfully obvious when the cd loads). I have used linux in the past, and never has it been overly easy to install anything. If someone could create a linux distro that came even close to OS X, it would be a huge success, IMHO.
"Two interesting things about the charges are that they were apparently set in motion by a complaint by our friends at the MPAA and the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP. Is copyright infringment now a terrorist act?"
No, copyright infringment is not a terrorist act, but the Patriot Act gives the FBI freedom to do pretty much as they please not matter what the circumstances are and that is why the Patriot Act is a Bad Thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that perhaps this recession could be a natural thing. All of the female CS students really have a passion for learning about computers and technology. This is something that wasn't taught to them, but something that they pretty much have always had. Certainly, you can't expect every group of people to have the same likes and dislikes of every other group, so it could just be that at this point in time there are less females interested in CS than before. I think the only thing that we really need to watch out for is females who are interested in CS but feel like they can't do well because of their sex.
*sizzle*...ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
That is the sound of a man destined to never have children.
For me personally, getting into college and being able to afford it was not a very big deal. However, how many children out there never even consider college because they think they can't afford it? Sure it may not be impossible to get a degree, but what I was really hitting on was the idea of how hard it is to get a scholarship and make college affordable.
"Nope, unless you are rich, really smart and a minority, or play ball, you don't get a degree in the U.S."
There is a lot of truth in this statement. I just graduated high school in the summer of 03 and I can say that it is very difficult for a white male to get a decent sholarship for academics. I really don't mind the large amount of scholarships for minorities so much as I do the huge amounts that are given out for athletics. You often hear politicians or other say how we need a renewed interest in math and science in the US, but public high school seems almost contrary to this. Why would you concentrate on math or science when you can play football, do well and go to a great school for almost free? Then what are the chances of these players becoming professionals? Not very good. I think America needs to put more effort into promoting academics or else all of the development and new idea generation will take place over seas.
As a current CS major at university, I think that most people coming from high school have a general misconception of what CS is and what it involves. I think people still look upon computer science as an insanely lucrative field that is fairly simple to master. However, I think they are quickly shocked once they start to learn that it really is a difficult major. At my university upperclassmen speak of how some of the more advanced CS courses are famous for causing people to switch majors. For instance, one class started with two sections of about 50-75 people each and by the middle of the term they were down to around 12-15 each. This drop was very shocking to me, at least.
I have always had a passion for computers and technology and I can't really see my doing anything else with my life. However, I sense a lack of this passion from many of the CS majors. In one of my classes we had mock interviews and some of the questions revolved around general ideas of technology and things that you probably wouldn't pick up in class. I was surprised by how many people couldn't answer the questions or didn't seem to really care about anything that wasn't taught in lecture. I have always paid attention to technology and things going on in the computing industry, but I seem to be in the minority among my fellow CS majors. I can't imagine choosing a major simply because it seems lucrative, but it seems that many choose CS for that reason.
"One might actually consider variable stars as messages from outer space..."
I don't think I would really consider a pulsar to be a message, since they are created through a very simple physical event. When the star collapses on itself, its rotational speed must increase in order to conserve energy, thus it spins quickly with an practically standard period. If you want to think about this in another way, just look at ice skaters (or you can even try this on a swivle chair): when they spin around with their arms out and then quickly bring them in, their angular speed increases, just like when a star collapses on itself.
I have RC2 installed on my system and I haven't had any problems yet. No BSODs, no crashes of other software that I use, and I have even been playing Doom 3 with no problems. To me it seems that RC2 was pretty stable. Now I might just be one of the lucky 2 of 5 that works and it might have something to do with the fact that my system only has quality hardware and drivers installed, but I am pretty happy with RC2. In fact, I have even noticed an increased performance in my wireless connection. It seems to me that the installation of the final SP2 should go pretty smoothly, at least on my system anyway.
Well...whenever I tried to play online games, I would often have connection problems. I found out that this could be solved by turning off the Wireless Zero Config (or something similar) service. Hope that helps.
I've had often the same experience with Linux. I'm no idiot when it comes to computers, as I am a CS major. However, I could always get Linux installed but never working the way I wanted. Usually in about a week I had the system so messed up I needed to reinstall. Often it would take much tweeking just to get simple things like wireless and sound working. That is why I bought an Apple laptop. I can use most Unix tools and also install most Unix apps if I please, but I don't have to touch any of it if I don't want to. So far OS X has worked beautifully, the joy of a modern working os and all the power of unix.
Well, its not so much that I'm surprised that SP2 is stable, I expect that seeing how XP is stable without it. What I was surprised about was that the BETA of SP2 was very stable.
I've had the SP2 RC2 on my box for some time now. I'm actually surprised by how stable it has been. I've even been able to play Doom 3 with no crashes. I can't really say how the security improvements are, but the one thing that I have noticed is that wireless networking seems to have improved much. Also, it doesn't seem like the firewall was working too well (at least for outbound traffic).
I can throw my new GPU right into the box, close the case and not have to worry about anything else!
As I was reading the only thing I could think about was James Bond standing on top of a building and spying on someone's conversation using the Bluetooth rifle...now that is an awesome hack.
You know, until a few months ago, I never realized how man businesses there are that are not willing to give up their old hardware/software. I came to this realization when I went for an interview with a company who sells services to companies looking for solutions. One of their products that they were working on takes output from old COBOL and other programs and creates a mondern interface using XML that can be presented through a browser or whatever. When the user gives this modern interface input, this input is then given back to the old program to allow it to process it. I never even knew there was such a large market for software of this type. So, I'm guessing that taking the old hardware and emulating it would probably be the logical next step.
"I'd bet they put it nowhere. L2 and L3 caches are a kludge, and, if they really achieve huge chip-to-chip bandwidth, they just might not need the cache hierarchy. This is reminiscent of old CPUs, where the system RAM ran at an acceptably large fraction of the speed of the CPU, so there was no L2 cache at all."
To me, it would seem like some sort of cache would still be needed. As I understand things, even if a slow bus was eliminated, it still takes the RAM much longer to look up data than the CPU is capable of reading at. Now, of course one could always use high speed memory like they use for the cache, but this kind of memory is so much more expensive than normal RAM that I doubt it will ever be feasable to have a computer's main memory comprised entirely of very fast cache-like memory.
The only thing I can think of is that either the authors have no idea about how computers or the technology that drives them works or they think the same thing of their audience. I really have no idea if it is commonly thought by the masses that a virus/worm would stop spreading once the author is caught. People might think this, but /. is definetly the wrong place to find out :)
And all this time I thought people who wrote worms had to sit there and manually enter IP address for the worm to attack next!
I would have destroyed the world by now but my fricken incompetent evil empire but my "laser" on the Dark Side of the moon.
I wish that Apple would find some way to use this idea to make the desktop more efficient. Right now, expose is great, and the genie effects and all are cool, but I would like some 3D innovation that really shows the benefits of having a 3D window system. So far, the only thing along this line that I have seen was from a MS demostration of Avalon, where now a command similar to alt-tab will have all the windows on the system rotate along the z-axis (into the screen) so what you see is like a spaced out stack of cards. I didn't get to see the animation is person but it looked like it might have some potential. Now before anyone respons saying "you forgot OS X's cube user switching or the new iChat video stuff" I would say those ideas are neat and certainly look good, but I want something that will really help with productivity and benefit the way the window manager is used.
I have read rumors that soon Intel will switch their main desktop processors over to a design similar to that of Pentium-M, which is currently much more efficient per a clock than Pentium IVs. If this is true, they would definetly have to go back on their "Ghz are so important" campaign. Personally, I rather have effiecient processors than ones that are power hungry and give off lots of heat.
Yes, I don't really like device lock in, which is why my library collection is in MP3. Even when I do want more music, I usually buy the CD and rip it myself. I have only a few songs from iTMS, just to test it out. They sound good and have a lower bit rate then what I normally encode at (my mp3s are 192 kbps but the AACs are 128 kbps and sound pretty darn good). The thing is, in the future if I want something that isn't from Apple to play my songs on, I do not want to have to convert my entire library (and lose much quality) or rip all my cds again.
Ok...with the exception of that. You got me there. However, it doesn't work when say...you want to get a wireless card working with Linux. Also, at one point I did have a version of apt-get working with red hat RPMs. However, if you wanted something that was not on the list, it was still a pain to install. My point is, despite apt-get, it is still not as easy as dragging a file to a folder. How many non-geeks will know to use apt-get?
Like you said, I don't really see what the big deal is. If anyone out there really wants to put Real's crap on their iPod then I say let them. I feel sorry for the people that think Real has good software. Posts in the previous article about Real mention the underhanded things that they do, and I know from experience how crappy their software is. However, I don't think Real is doing anything wrong in this case. They simply made a program that will allow users to play their music on the iPod. It is not as if they went and messed around with the encoding of songs downloaded from iTMS.
The thing that really gets me about Apple is that they made stuff actually work. I do like Apple's gui, but I would have been happy using KDE or Gnome if thats what it came too. However, the one thing, in my mind, that they have done for *nix that no one else has is made it easy to use. If you plug something in, chances are it will work. Installing something? No problem, either drag it to the apps folder or just run the install program (the link to which is often made painfully obvious when the cd loads). I have used linux in the past, and never has it been overly easy to install anything. If someone could create a linux distro that came even close to OS X, it would be a huge success, IMHO.
"Two interesting things about the charges are that they were apparently set in motion by a complaint by our friends at the MPAA and the FBI invoked a provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain financial records from his ISP. Is copyright infringment now a terrorist act?"
No, copyright infringment is not a terrorist act, but the Patriot Act gives the FBI freedom to do pretty much as they please not matter what the circumstances are and that is why the Patriot Act is a Bad Thing.