If you are an IEEE member, you can find that at the IEEE Salary Guide. It accounts for industry, employer type, and cost-of-living adjustment. I used it when negotiating my starting salary. I told them how I computed the number, and they gave me exactly what I asked, which my recently graduated peers considered high for the area.
'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.'
This is ultimately an Advertiser business.
What exactly do you think Google is? They are an extravagantly successful advertising company that just happens to provide search and email as a means to attract an audience. It would seem that Eric Schmidt knows what he's talking about.
Why can't people just prefer apple, and not be fanatical about it? Oh, right, because then that wouldn't justify the increased expense.
My wife's Windows laptop forgets that our wireless access point is WPA once a week. It degrades in speed over time and requires yearly reinstalls. It likes to forget how to talk to our laser printer, so I have to reinstall the drivers about every three months. It takes forever to become usable after sleep mode.
I have been abused by Windows machines long enough. I prefer my Mac because I do not need to spend time fussing with it.
Although I confess that I may have spent too much time in school, I can say that I had an opportunity to read and study a lot of books in both electrical engineering and computer engineering. My personal favorites are:
Microelectronic Circuits by Sedra and Smith: There are lots of books about analog amplifier design. However, I have found this one to provide a comprehensive survey of component level analog design with op-amps, BJTs, and FETs. It provides lots of examples and doesn't usually "leave the exercise to the reader."
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson: The bible of computer architecture, written by two of the biggest names in the field. I'm not familiar with the latest version, but the previous edition took the most interesting and useful concepts from over 3000 papers and narrowed it down to a reasonable text. Contains everything you ever wanted to know about performance analysis, pipelines, out-of-order issue, and caches, backed by benchmarking from real machines and theoretical maximums from simulated machines.
Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein: Hardly an introductory book, this book contains 99.9% of the algorithms or data structures you are going to need. Personally, I don't like the exercises, but the sheer reference value makes this text necessary.
And in fact, how did the manage to pay for it all ONLY borrowing $30k?
The parent didn't say it was easy.
My brother-in-law got his B.S. in electrical engineering while repairing computers out of his dump of a used mobile home. My sister worked as a cocktail waitress at a casino while getting her nursing degree, even with the crazy hours of her practicums. I lucked out and only had to work my ass off in high school to get a full scholarship at a low-prestige university.
I don't claim to know how hard it was for my brother-in-law or my sister, but they did it without loans by working very hard and living a meager existence. No parties. Occasional fruit to avoid scurvy.
If you want to pay for a brand name college, I'm not going to stop you. Their are plenty of schools like the University of Minnesota that have great engineering programs and although I can't walk into an interview and drop a name like MIT, I don't mind proving I'm worth what you want to pay.
/applause
My personal experience is that the prestige doesn't matter after getting an interview. Talented and motivated students can learn anywhere, and they have a way of demonstrating that when given a chance.
Peer review is an incestuous process that works for a while but eventually engenders ridiculously hideous monsters. I don't know about you, but most of my articles were double-blind. I didn't know who my reviewers were, and they didn't know who I was.
since your a gen Y i'll make something clear from the start - you aren't the boss, you are starting from the lowest point possible. the janitor has more cred than you do.
This is truly the case. In my lab, we have no expectations for the undergrads. In fact, undergrads tend to slow down the people around them more than help them. Many graduate students do not like working with undergrads for this very reason. This is not universally true, but this is the expectation that will likely be placed upon you at your arrival.
This is both a curse and an opportunity. It sucks because you will be given little real work to do. It is likely that you will lack the deep scientific knowledge to do the clever work and lack the experience to do the grunt work efficiently. However, if you work your butt off at the beginning, you just might impress somebody, which is where the opportunity comes in. Nobody expects you to be useful. If you prove yourself useful (or better yet, creative), you can parlay that lab position into a magnificent lab experience and great job references.
My advice? You are not special (yet), so don't act like it. Learn humility and proper lab technique but don't ever let a grad student take credit for your work when it works out correctly. Academic labs are meritocracies, so as long as you do good work, the rest will follow.
Most importantly, read Ph.D. Comics because it is all true.
If you are planning on having a few minutes' worth of UPS backup then why would you need to write to the hard drive continuously? Keep the hard drive spun down (saving power). If the system is being shut down, or AC power fails, then spin up the drive and make a backup of your ramdisk, thus being ready to restore when the power comes back up.
DRAM consumes roughly 10 W/GB when banks are put into standby mode. A disk consumes 5-15 W, depending on the rotational speed. Power is the limiting factor for 1 TB of RAM. It would take ~10 kW/TB. Until you can significantly drop the power consumption of memory, there's no way you get close to 1 TB. Even at a 100x reduction in power, you're still talking about 100 W/TB.
Now, they've worked for most of the time they've been at University, and haven't truly been able to get all the benefits of dedicated study, and they are faced with more of the same.
I can't speak for other disciplines, but the majority of engineering students get funding that covers tuition (and sometimes fees) and provides a stipend. You still need a roommate, but it's manageable. The wisdom that I have heard is that you shouldn't do graduate school in engineering unless you can do it on someone else's money.
Interestingly, American graduate students often find more funding opportunities that international students. In fact, Americans qualify as underrepresented minorities in some graduate programs. My first three years of Ph.D. were funded by a minority fellowship, despite being a white male.
Disclaimer: I'm a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, so this advice may not be useful for other degree programs.
Wonderfully, it seems the RIAA is picking a bunch of colleges with both the money and the staff to assist in defending their students.
Unfortunately, it has been my experience that universities have money for everything except the students. (Yes, I attend one of the universities in the notice.)
Imagine not needing elaborate schemes like virtual memory paging
The ability to use a full 4GB virtual address space (i386) is only one of the major features of virtual memory. An equally important goal of virtual memory is process isolation. That is, the illusion that a process has exclusive access to the full memory. Prior to virtual memory, programs had to know what other programs were running and stay out of their physical address spaces. Virtual memory drastically simplifies the lives of millions of programmers everywhere because you don't need to know the memory locations needed by other programs.
Virtual memory isn't going away due to increasing the size of memory.
Suddenly every single thing that a character was supposedly able to do was governed by a skill associated with a number... taking away a vital element of creativity that in my opinion is a vital core of any real RPG.
...only if your DM wants it to be. We regularly play fast and loose with the rules, allowing us to spend more time with the role-playing aspect.
The replies to this comment seem to be along the lines of "they don't teach that at my university, so you're wrong." As a clarification to the parent, it should be noted that the CS 503 course taught at Purdue (cide1's and my university) has a lab where you have to implement a scheduler, a full virtual memory subsystem with demand paging, and a file system in the Xinu operating system on real hardware. If you break something, the only feedback you get is three beeps and a new boot prompt about 30 seconds later. No debugger. Non-deterministic execution. Minimal crash information. Anger, hate, and suffering. It's remarkably similar to my experience with Linux kernel hacking.
The CS 503 course provides a (relative to Linux) small implementation effort that provides a sample of what programming in a major OS kernel is like. From that perspective, cide1's comment is dead on. You can't expect a college course to give you the full story. At some point, you're going to have to teach yourself. Personally, I am content that I can read "Understanding the Linux Kernel" and "Linux Kernel Development" and understand all the different concepts without having to refer to another book.
in college that gave very hard tests. Intel Assembly class. For a midterm, we had to decipher Object-Oriented Assembly, and decipher self-modifying code. After 3 weeks of introduction to Assembly.
From my teaching experience, exams like this are awful because you generally know who really knows the material regardless of what test you give. You need some Mickey Mouse problems to see who actually knows the fundamentals and some simpler application problems to see who can apply the fundamentals. Hence, you need to discern who sort of knows the material from who should be taking your course again.
Honestly, I have no problem assigning a lot of A's and B's as long at the people who don't know the fundamentals have to take the course again. After all, they're the ones who will wind up hurting people or costing their employers millions (or billions) of dollars.
For the 2-hour final, he got up at the 1-hour point, and yelled: "The test is over. All pencils down." We just sat there dumbfounded for about 10 seconds, and then he said, "Just kidding. I always wanted to do that."
Professors who play games with their students should be severely disciplined by the department. Playing games is disrespectful to students, abusive of the professor's authority, and childish. Unfortunately, most large degree programs simply don't care.
The Zimbardo Prison Experiment at Stanford in 1971 illustrated that normal people can become exceptionally cruel under circumstances where one group dominates another. These were just random students. By the end of it, even Professor Zimbardo had joined in. It took an outside colleague to end the experiment.
The guards were given no specific training on how to be guards. Instead they were free, within limits, to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners.
The guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked, took the beds out, forced the ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion into solitary confinement, and generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners.
The guards again escalated very noticeably their level of harassment, increasing the humiliation they made the prisoners suffer, forcing them to do menial, repetitive work such as cleaning out toilet bowls with their bare hands. The guards had prisoners do push-ups, jumping jacks, whatever the guards could think up, and they increased the length of the counts to several hours each.
There were three types of guards. First, there were tough but fair guards who followed prison rules. Second, there were "good guys" who did little favors for the prisoners and never punished them. And finally, about a third of the guards were hostile, arbitrary, and inventive in their forms of prisoner humiliation. These guards appeared to thoroughly enjoy the power they wielded, yet none of our preliminary personality tests were able to predict this behavior. The only link between personality and prison behavior was a finding that prisoners with a high degree of authoritarianism endured our authoritarian prison environment longer than did other prisoners.
I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was "off." Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.
Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other's shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality. Once she countered the power of the situation, however, it became clear that the study should be ended.
Like most people, I'm disgusted by the actions of those guards at Abu Ghraib. However, the suggestion that the guards at Abu Ghraib would have signed up anyway is contrary to experimental data. The prison environment converted normal Stanford undergraduates into abusive prisoners and a well-established professor into a vindictive superintendent.
If it makes you feel better, I would say that about 70% of the graduate students in my ECE program use LaTeX. The only ones that use Word have old, crusty advisors, and they are slowly being converted by feature-creep in the thesis formatting guidelines.
arbuably, just installing 8 GB of RAM or whatever might be more economical and effective
...at a tremendous power cost. That much RAM will consume (280 mA/1GB x 1.8V x 8GB) ~5 W when idle and (560 mA/1GB x 1.8V x 8GB) ~8 W when busy, as opposed to a flash drive that uses milliwatts. Datasheet available here.
I wonder if we in the near future will see hybrid systems with flash-based drives for applications and swap space, and hard disk drives for data storage.
Most likely. It's just one more layer in the memory hierarchy and can be integrated with the hard disk. IIRC, there are already prototypes with flash as a disk cache.
My wife and I almost didn't make it because of Fallout 2. I would get up in the morning at 7:30, work all day, hang out with her (then my girlfriend) until around 10:30, and go back to my dorm room to play Fallout 2 until 3:30 AM. Her taking a weekend trip to her parents' house, allowing me to play the final 35 hours was the only reason we made it.:)
Well, guitar hero is for people to pretend that they can play guitars and are rock stars. It serves its purpose remarkably well. It is SQUARELY aimed at people who can't play guitar, but enjoy the fantasy of being on a stage, "wailing" on their "axe".
Many of us who play guitar still really love Guitar Hero. Yes, it's totally different, but in a ridiculously fun way that allows you to share your hobby with people with no discernible musical talent.
... and to actually be able to play lead on Free Bird.:)
If one cannot put 2000 calories (on average) in one's belly every day that is poverty. I've met many such people. I can introduce you to them if you think they don't exist. There are 28 million such people in the USA.
Actually, THIS is definition of poverty in the United States. No mention of caloric intake is provided, although the income thresholds are based on the food budget of the average American family. Since you mention hunger, this link provides some analysis of poverty with respect to hunger.
The Census Bureau reports that 35.9 million persons "lived in poverty" in 2003.
...
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2002, 13 percent of poor families and 2.6 percent of poor children experienced hunger at some point during the year. In most cases, their hunger was short term. Eighty-nine percent of the poor reported that their families had "enough" food to eat, while only 2 percent said they "often" did not have enough to eat.
That's approximately 4.7 million who experienced hunger and 718,000 who experienced it frequently. Both those numbers are significantly lower than your claim of 28 million. It is regrettable that people go without adequate food in the United States, but in a population of 300 million, it is impossible to eliminate completely.
The TI-89 is nowhere near the level of Mathematica or Maple in terms of symbolic manipulation. I'm rather certain that it can't calculate residues, integrate a variety of basic functions like gaussians, do decent discrete or continuous fourier transforms without external packages, and so on.
Of course not, but you can't carry Maple or Mathematica in the palm of your hand or pay less than $150. I could do nearly everything in my undergrad electrical engineering curriculum on my TI-89. It was the best money I ever spent. The symbolic integration alone was worth the money when I started doing analog signal processing. It may not calculate all types of crazy residues, but it can calculate residues of polynomials, which has done everything I've needed outside of my graduate-level complex analysis course. It will certainly compute a definite integral of a Gaussian. I haven't done a Fourier integral in a while, but I recall doing quite a bit without any packages, although I had to know how to setup the integral myself.
People who can't figure out how to solve equations that the TI-89 can solve probably need to be taking more math courses rather than relying on the calculator, which will only hurt them in the future.
I wasn't allowed to use a calculator when I took calculus. I got my A's and moved on. I can do virtually anything the TI-89 can do by hand. With my calculator, I spend much more time doing engineering and a lot less time doing grunt work that I learned in my previous courses. I'm beyond proving myself. Outside of the classroom, the result you get is more important than the tedious steps it takes to get there.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't find starting salaries though.
If you are an IEEE member, you can find that at the IEEE Salary Guide. It accounts for industry, employer type, and cost-of-living adjustment. I used it when negotiating my starting salary. I told them how I computed the number, and they gave me exactly what I asked, which my recently graduated peers considered high for the area.
'These are ultimately consumer businesses and if you piss off enough of them, you will not have any more.'
This is ultimately an Advertiser business.
What exactly do you think Google is? They are an extravagantly successful advertising company that just happens to provide search and email as a means to attract an audience. It would seem that Eric Schmidt knows what he's talking about.
Why can't people just prefer apple, and not be fanatical about it? Oh, right, because then that wouldn't justify the increased expense.
My wife's Windows laptop forgets that our wireless access point is WPA once a week. It degrades in speed over time and requires yearly reinstalls. It likes to forget how to talk to our laser printer, so I have to reinstall the drivers about every three months. It takes forever to become usable after sleep mode.
I have been abused by Windows machines long enough. I prefer my Mac because I do not need to spend time fussing with it.
Erroneous. Google does not make you take a personality test.
I'm sure that's why you opted to apply and interview with them.
Although I confess that I may have spent too much time in school, I can say that I had an opportunity to read and study a lot of books in both electrical engineering and computer engineering. My personal favorites are:
And in fact, how did the manage to pay for it all ONLY borrowing $30k?
The parent didn't say it was easy.
My brother-in-law got his B.S. in electrical engineering while repairing computers out of his dump of a used mobile home. My sister worked as a cocktail waitress at a casino while getting her nursing degree, even with the crazy hours of her practicums. I lucked out and only had to work my ass off in high school to get a full scholarship at a low-prestige university.
I don't claim to know how hard it was for my brother-in-law or my sister, but they did it without loans by working very hard and living a meager existence. No parties. Occasional fruit to avoid scurvy.
If you want to pay for a brand name college, I'm not going to stop you. Their are plenty of schools like the University of Minnesota that have great engineering programs and although I can't walk into an interview and drop a name like MIT, I don't mind proving I'm worth what you want to pay.
My personal experience is that the prestige doesn't matter after getting an interview. Talented and motivated students can learn anywhere, and they have a way of demonstrating that when given a chance.
Price-matching. It prevents you from having to choose between stores. Pick the price-matching store of your choice and pay the lowest price.
This is truly the case. In my lab, we have no expectations for the undergrads. In fact, undergrads tend to slow down the people around them more than help them. Many graduate students do not like working with undergrads for this very reason. This is not universally true, but this is the expectation that will likely be placed upon you at your arrival.
This is both a curse and an opportunity. It sucks because you will be given little real work to do. It is likely that you will lack the deep scientific knowledge to do the clever work and lack the experience to do the grunt work efficiently. However, if you work your butt off at the beginning, you just might impress somebody, which is where the opportunity comes in. Nobody expects you to be useful. If you prove yourself useful (or better yet, creative), you can parlay that lab position into a magnificent lab experience and great job references.
My advice? You are not special (yet), so don't act like it. Learn humility and proper lab technique but don't ever let a grad student take credit for your work when it works out correctly. Academic labs are meritocracies, so as long as you do good work, the rest will follow.
Most importantly, read Ph.D. Comics because it is all true.
I can't speak for other disciplines, but the majority of engineering students get funding that covers tuition (and sometimes fees) and provides a stipend. You still need a roommate, but it's manageable. The wisdom that I have heard is that you shouldn't do graduate school in engineering unless you can do it on someone else's money.
Interestingly, American graduate students often find more funding opportunities that international students. In fact, Americans qualify as underrepresented minorities in some graduate programs. My first three years of Ph.D. were funded by a minority fellowship, despite being a white male.
Disclaimer: I'm a Ph.D. student in computer engineering, so this advice may not be useful for other degree programs.
The ability to use a full 4GB virtual address space (i386) is only one of the major features of virtual memory. An equally important goal of virtual memory is process isolation. That is, the illusion that a process has exclusive access to the full memory. Prior to virtual memory, programs had to know what other programs were running and stay out of their physical address spaces. Virtual memory drastically simplifies the lives of millions of programmers everywhere because you don't need to know the memory locations needed by other programs.
Virtual memory isn't going away due to increasing the size of memory.
In other words, engineering is a constant struggle between technological progress and evolution. Unfortunately, evolution is winning.
(I'm sure someone else said this before me, but I can't remember who.)
The replies to this comment seem to be along the lines of "they don't teach that at my university, so you're wrong." As a clarification to the parent, it should be noted that the CS 503 course taught at Purdue (cide1's and my university) has a lab where you have to implement a scheduler, a full virtual memory subsystem with demand paging, and a file system in the Xinu operating system on real hardware. If you break something, the only feedback you get is three beeps and a new boot prompt about 30 seconds later. No debugger. Non-deterministic execution. Minimal crash information. Anger, hate, and suffering. It's remarkably similar to my experience with Linux kernel hacking.
The CS 503 course provides a (relative to Linux) small implementation effort that provides a sample of what programming in a major OS kernel is like. From that perspective, cide1's comment is dead on. You can't expect a college course to give you the full story. At some point, you're going to have to teach yourself. Personally, I am content that I can read "Understanding the Linux Kernel" and "Linux Kernel Development" and understand all the different concepts without having to refer to another book.
From my teaching experience, exams like this are awful because you generally know who really knows the material regardless of what test you give. You need some Mickey Mouse problems to see who actually knows the fundamentals and some simpler application problems to see who can apply the fundamentals. Hence, you need to discern who sort of knows the material from who should be taking your course again.
Honestly, I have no problem assigning a lot of A's and B's as long at the people who don't know the fundamentals have to take the course again. After all, they're the ones who will wind up hurting people or costing their employers millions (or billions) of dollars.
Professors who play games with their students should be severely disciplined by the department. Playing games is disrespectful to students, abusive of the professor's authority, and childish. Unfortunately, most large degree programs simply don't care.
Like most people, I'm disgusted by the actions of those guards at Abu Ghraib. However, the suggestion that the guards at Abu Ghraib would have signed up anyway is contrary to experimental data. The prison environment converted normal Stanford undergraduates into abusive prisoners and a well-established professor into a vindictive superintendent.
If it makes you feel better, I would say that about 70% of the graduate students in my ECE program use LaTeX. The only ones that use Word have old, crusty advisors, and they are slowly being converted by feature-creep in the thesis formatting guidelines.
My wife and I almost didn't make it because of Fallout 2. I would get up in the morning at 7:30, work all day, hang out with her (then my girlfriend) until around 10:30, and go back to my dorm room to play Fallout 2 until 3:30 AM. Her taking a weekend trip to her parents' house, allowing me to play the final 35 hours was the only reason we made it. :)
Many of us who play guitar still really love Guitar Hero. Yes, it's totally different, but in a ridiculously fun way that allows you to share your hobby with people with no discernible musical talent.
Actually, THIS is definition of poverty in the United States. No mention of caloric intake is provided, although the income thresholds are based on the food budget of the average American family. Since you mention hunger, this link provides some analysis of poverty with respect to hunger.
That's approximately 4.7 million who experienced hunger and 718,000 who experienced it frequently. Both those numbers are significantly lower than your claim of 28 million. It is regrettable that people go without adequate food in the United States, but in a population of 300 million, it is impossible to eliminate completely.
Of course not, but you can't carry Maple or Mathematica in the palm of your hand or pay less than $150. I could do nearly everything in my undergrad electrical engineering curriculum on my TI-89. It was the best money I ever spent. The symbolic integration alone was worth the money when I started doing analog signal processing. It may not calculate all types of crazy residues, but it can calculate residues of polynomials, which has done everything I've needed outside of my graduate-level complex analysis course. It will certainly compute a definite integral of a Gaussian. I haven't done a Fourier integral in a while, but I recall doing quite a bit without any packages, although I had to know how to setup the integral myself.
I wasn't allowed to use a calculator when I took calculus. I got my A's and moved on. I can do virtually anything the TI-89 can do by hand. With my calculator, I spend much more time doing engineering and a lot less time doing grunt work that I learned in my previous courses. I'm beyond proving myself. Outside of the classroom, the result you get is more important than the tedious steps it takes to get there.