An engineer is a graduate of an engineering school.
Many places take it one step further. In Canada, an "engineer" is someone who has professional licensure in engineering. IIRC, they were trying to do the same in Texas. I honestly think this is a good idea.
The president of the IEEE gave a talk at my campus a few years back. He suggested that engineers were not respected (and compensated) for their skills because of the public's perception of engineers. This included two parts. First, engineers are usually portrayed as the source of the hero's problem in movies. Now, part of this is because engineers' lives aren't usually that interesting, and little can be done about this. Second, many people call themselves "engineers" who are not actually qualified to be engineers. The argument is that you can train someone to do something complicated, but an engineer has the understanding to invent many complicated things. I've met lots of people who have "engineer" job titles that don't actually do any engineering. Electricians, mechanics, and plumbers are not electrical, mechanical, and hydraulics engineers, respectively. In contrast, a physician is a physician. If a radiology technician tries to diagnose someone, it's going to cost somebody a buttload of cash.
A graduate of the computer science department is not an engineer, they are a programmer.
I think a better statement would be "Graduates of a computer science department are not engineers, they are mathemeticians." That said, if someone can prove they know software engineering by getting licensed, they are an engineer. I'm not talking about being certified to administer a database. I'm talking about designing complicated programs, proving algorithmic complexity, and optimizing for the range of applications from embedded to high-performance systems. A lot of that sounds like CS, and if they can prove it, a CS can be a PE (professional engineer).
/Not a CS or a PE, but an EIT (Engineer in Training)
Final Fantasy, let's face facts, it won because it's Final Fantasy. No one would be hyped for it to the same degree if it had been "Naked Empire XII" or anything else that didn't say Final Fantasy. Going by PLAYER reviews on Gamefaq, most people seem to be bored silly by the gambits and lack of story.
Personally, I really like FFXII. Once you get past the suspension of disbelief about magic and crystals, it doesn't require a large stretch of the imagination. Certainly better than a 6 year old summoner from FFIX, a group of angry teenagers in FFVIII, and whatever the hell that was in FFX-2. It's a story about a power-hungry dictator and a group of notable people clamoring for revenge. Think about Gladiator. There wasn't an elaborate plot in that movie, but it was great.
I'm annoyed at the grab to sell strategy guides by providing no hints whatsoever about the Zodiac Spear chests, but aside from that, I think the game is great.
I'm 26.
That's exactly what this file sounds like to me. Although, unlike the CRT sitting next to me, this sound effect gives me a "pressure" feeling between my ears.
2. Turning a machine on and off many times can be harmful, so it is said. Others say it's a myth. I don't know who to believe, but it seems feasible that this could be so.
My experience in power management research suggests that you don't have to worry about disks dying from frequent shutdowns. My crappy Dell laptop has handled hundreds of thousands of shutdowns over the past three years, and it still works perfectly. Same goes with my IBM DeskStar 3.5" drive. No, this is not definitive proof. However, I guarantee that I put my hardware through more stress than 99.9% of the people out there, so it should be worth something.
I have no comment on processor, motherboard, and memory thermal stress. I'll leave that one to someone else.
When you try and fill a 10g pipe with a single tcp session, the congestion avoidance mechanisms of tcp will prevent you from filling the pipe. Essentially the sender will ramp up the rate of packets very quickly initially until the receiver sends back a congestion notification. The sender will then cut the send rate *in half*, and climb it back up very slowly - 1 extra byte per round-trip if memory serves (don't quote me on that). This works great for 100m, but to climb from 5g to 10g takes about 30 minutes if you have a cross-US round-trip-time (RTT).
99% correct. It's one packet per ACK (or often, every two ACKs), rather than 1 byte. However, it still takes a long time to get back to 10g. Your description of the congestion control mechanism is otherwise correct.
* single-classroom style -- many students learn in ways that do not work with a single classroom and oral lectures, which is the style almost all high schools use. Almost never are students allowed independent study, and even if they only learn from reading, they are still required to sit in class, which is a complete waste for them
They had independent study at my high school. It was called study hall. Everyone went out of their way to avoid study hall, including honors students.
* forced attendance -- by forcing people to attend, there is no motivation to make the most out of it. There is no real opportunity cost to being in the classroom, making a high percentage of people there unmotivated to learn.
The motivation behind attending school is the opportunity to change your station in life. I went to a public school in Mississippi. Of the top of my graduating class, we had a student go from living in a trailer park to a full ride at LSU and later to medical school. We had someone escape an abusive family life to become an officer in the US Air Force and go on to law school. Personally, I got a full ride through my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering.
* separation of teaching from learning -- mostly in real life, people become experts and learn things when they turn around and teach others. Almost never are high school students given the chance to teach what they learn, and almost never are their rewards for them in teaching others.
There were plenty of opportunities for me to teach people outside of school. It even gave me an opportunity to date the hot girl because she thought I was friendly.
* national curricula -- teachers have almost no flexibility on what they teach or the ability to customize lessons for what students really need to learn. Learning is an interactive process that drawn a person to a new understanding from their current one. Set teaching standards eliminate the ability of teachers to understand what their students know now and customize the lessons for maximal learning.
This is where extracurricular activities step up. I did quiz bowl, Mu Alpha Theta, math and science team, and symphonic band. Each of these offered an opportunity to learn things outside of the classroom. No, they weren't taught in class. Yes, they required extra effort. However, the opportunities were there for everyone.
* lack of content applicability -- most lessons in high school are useless and disconnected from real world applications. They are abstracted and meaningless for students who dont experience how to apply what they learn. Mostly, high school has become a babysitting exercise to keep people out of the work force as long as possible to remove competition for existing workers.
You're right that lessons are rarely applied to real-world situations. From my own experience, however, you couldn't realistically expect anybody to do engineering without understanding algebra, trigonometry, pre-calculus, physics, and chemistry. Sure, you could teach it in college, but engineering programs would take at least one more year as high school prerequisites were covered. Likewise, you couldn't expect people to communicate effectively without grammar. People make comparisons of Iraq to Vietnam, but how would teenagers know what that meant if they didn't study history?
The biggest things that I learned in public high school were how to deal with less intelligent people and how to avoid exploitation. These would have been impossible to learn if I had used an alternative educational path. Notice they're both social. My ability to work with people has opened more opportunities for me than all of my technical qualifications combined.
I guess that makes the high school system "broken" because it doesn't teach students everything, but it gave me enough opportunities that I could be successful on my own. If today's children are unwilling to make the most of their opportunities, then yes, I would like to biggie size my order.
Toit mentions wanting to take a.45 to his TV every time he sees some particular Cheerios commercial, just because it takes a tone of the father correcting his nutritional mistakes at his wife's suggestion.
I believe it was the suggestion that the father was stupid, not the idea of taking a suggestion from a woman. Personally, I have no problem with suggestions. However, implying that your spouse is stupid, particularly in front of your children, shows a tremendous amount of disrespect towards someone you love. It is not a gender issue. I would never consider doing that to my wife.
For the group of you folks who fall in line with Toit's attitude, face this fact: After hundreds of years of you men telling us women to shut up and get in line, your type is being phased out, whether you like it or not.
Most men I know wouldn't tell their women to get in line and wouldn't stand for a woman telling them to do it. For that matter, the men I know wouldn't stand by and watch another man tell another woman to get in line, either.
The world does not need your crap anymore, nor does it need the sterotypical southern belle attitude some women used to have, either.
My family is Southern (specifically, from Mississippi). I assure you that their "Southern Belle attitudes" are merely unflappable manners. I have no idea what insult you are trying to throw here. My family wears their manners as a badge of honor.
My mother sent me to an etiquette course in 3rd grade (along with the rest of my class) to teach me how to be a "Southern gentleman." It involved a five course meal, complete with holding doors for the girls, seating them first, and standing when the girls left the table. Personally, that sounds like teaching boys to be respectful to girls.
Do not confuse "Southern" with "redneck." The two are not synonyms, especially when describing how they treat other people.
Rather, all need to move away from the extremes toward some common, middle ground where men AND women can be happy.
I would contend that mutual respect is that middle ground you describe. I would further contend that mutual respect includes humoring men who enjoy sports, competitiveness, hunting, etc. instead of suggesting that these hobbies are a bad thing. Unfortunately, these hobbies are considered "macho" by many people.
In summary, I agree with the spirit of your argument, but I would like to suggest that the "macho" you describe does not describe a man. It describes an asshole, and yes, Toit is probably one of those.
The reasons for this trend are unclear, said researchers at the New England Research Institutes in Waterdown, Mass. They noted that neither aging nor certain other health factors, such as smoking or obesity, can fully explain the decline.
From TFA: "[Google] has traditionally focused a lot on candidates' academic performance and favored those who went to elite schools"
Nice to know that the new hotness is still the same old and busted.
Stanford and Berkeley are in their back yard, and the founders are Stanford grads. Personally, I think it sounds like a reasonable idea. I disagree with it, but it seems reasonable enough.
No, I'm not an "elite school" grad. I have a B.S.E.E. from the University of Arkansas.
I work for a university engineering department and we have a real problem with grad students, particularly foriegn grads, doing that. They get in the masters program without any clear idea why. They aren't interested in research, they jsut want a master's degree. They see it as just another hoop to jump through to get more money.
I helped out with grad student orientation this year and saw the exact same thing. However, at my university, we have a non-thesis Master's option in the ECE program. The number of international students pursuing the non-thesis option was astounding. I keep waiting for them to figure out that "I didn't do a thesis" is probably considered a poor response to "What was your thesis about?"
Yes, servers have large banks of RAM. However, Linux performs dirty page writeback every five seconds to avoid congestion on disk writes.
Without onboard flash, the disk must service the request. The 3.5" disk in my office machine must be shutdown for at least 30 seconds to save energy. A sensible timeout (provably 2-competitive) is 60 seconds. Servers have higher performance disks than my desktop, so their timeout is going to be longer than that. The disk can never shut down and save energy due to dirty page writeback. Sure, you could disable dirty page writeback by turning on laptop_mode, but you would encounter a serious performance hit on your first demand miss.
With the onboard flash, the writes are serviced but the disk is still able to remain idle and shut down. Since servers tend to access files according to a Zipf distribution, the idleness will significantly increase because the most commonly written files are likely to remain resident in the flash and not produce disk accesses. Furthermore, the most common accesses will only have to be written to disk once because overwrites will be serviced in the flash cache, whereas current approaches would require the disk to service each overwrite. Hence, significant energy savings are likely using onboard flash.
Lest anyone think they actually ran "several scientific application kernels" on the Cell/AMD/Intel chips, what they actually did was run simulations of several different tasks such as FFT and matrix multiplication.
Simulation makes computer architecture research possible because researchers don't have access to prototype hardware. If we insisted that all experiments run on real hardware, the only people who could possibly do research are Intel, AMD, and IBM because they have access to the fab and masks to make modifications. Worse, it would take months and tremendous financial resources to test whether an idea even works.
Any good architecture course goes over how to properly configure simulation parameters to make a practical comparison. The guys at Berkeley spent time trying to tune those DMA numbers because they went to the trouble to make a comparison. They have some truly talented architects at Berkeley, so I'm sure they have the experience to guide their numbers.
Of course, this is all a moot point, since the numbers are so far in Cell's favor that I doubt the DMA transfer rate would make a damn bit of difference.
They don't want the truth to come out, to tarnish Sam Walton's reputation with reality.
Okay... I don't shop at Wal-Mart. I shop at Target. Wal-Mart's business practices are damn near inexcusable. However, I did do my undergrad at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, so I can say these things.
The Walton family donated $50 million to outfit the University of Arkansas's business school with new classrooms and faculty positions.
The Walton family donated $300 million (pending matching funds, which were later met) to found an honors college, complete with endowments for scholarships and tenured faculty positions. At the time, it was the largest gift in the history of American higher education. (Maybe still, but I don't know with the renovations going on at Oklahoma State's athletic complex.)
Is it a pittance compared to the billions that Wal-Mart makes every year? Probably, but Wal-Mart has definitely improved the quality of education at my former school. In my book, that indicates that the Waltons can't be the horsemen of the apocalypse.
My IBM ThinkPad R40 has been a tank. The one time I needed something done on it (NIC plug came loose), IBM sent me a next-day air box (by next day air) and had my laptop back to me in two days (one of which was spent in next-day air).:)
However, I ordered a new battery for my Thinkpad R40 and a Mini-PCI wireless card (damn BIOS lock!) from Lenovo. They (a) sent me a battery that didn't fit with my R40 and (b) sent me a wireless card that failed the BIOS check. I spent forever on the phone with customer service to get a RMA. Service was unsatisfactory compared to IBM.
Having lost hope in the last good PC vendor, my next machine will be a Macintosh.
A more proper comparison would be how the energy* consumed by a MP3 codec ASIC compares to the energy of the AAC player processor. Sure, a really fast processor may take p% of the time that a dedicated chip requires. However, if the ASIC consumes less than p% of the power of the processor, you lose by using the processor to decode the codec. After all, the listener doesn't care about 1 us versus 2 us versus 5 us decode time. Decode time just has to be inperceptible to the human ear. The question that we can't answer, of course, is what these percentages are.
*Note for our younger readers: Energy = Power * Time
Even then, you could reprogram the miniguns in the final area to shoot at Horrigan instead. Then, you hardly have to worry about getting critically hit by his minigun by getting all personal with H2H.
Now throwing weapons might be a true challenge. Really, what do you do until you get the grenades?:) (Haven't played the game in about 3 years)
Americans is one of the most ethnocentric nations in the world. Look at your media, mostly white people.
Which "white people" are you referring to? Are we referring to traditional anchors like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings? Or are we referring to Julie Chen, Connie Chung, Bryant Gumbel, Stuart Scott, Robin Roberts, etc.? Or are we referring to "white people" like George Stephanopolos (Greek)?
Do Americans watch movies made in other nations?
A question that is opinionative at best. Numbers? I can't speak for everyone, but in my household, we have no less than 17 movies written, produced, and directed in other countries, and every one of those cost twice what a comparable Hollywood film would have cost. Maybe that has something to do with it. And of course, nobody watches anime and kids don't watch Pokemon et al. Were you referring to those art house flicks that nobody buys from Hollywood, either?
Do you see minority male actors in romantic leads?
You mean like Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Jamie Foxx? I notice that you conveniently left out the minority female actors, which removes Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, and company.
Do you see a white male in almost every movie, regardless of location or story?
Yes. Statistically, males constitute ~50% of the world's population, and (as you have assumed that all movies Americans watch are made in Hollywood) 75.1% of Americans are white. Statistically speaking, 3 out of every 8 people in a movie should be white males. Of course, we have "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods," and white people can't possibly be undeprived enough to live in "bad neighborhoods."
Fact is, white Americans have a harder time putting themselves in the shoes of another race, or nation even.
I'll agree that your average American has a hard time putting himself in the shoes of other nations. Beyond that, I call bullshit. Large number of wealthy Americans don't have to put themselves in the shoes of others, and yes, white people make more money on average than minorities. This implies that many white people don't have to put themselves in the shoes of others.
As someone who didn't achieve "majority" status until going off to college, let me enlighten you. I was raised in a town which is 60.4% black and attended a school that was ~65% black.
When you are a minority -- black, white or polka-dotted -- it's easy to play the role of a victim. I was roughed up in hallways for dressing well on days that I had to attend an off-campus school activity. Several students tried to "out black" me (to steal a Chris Rock term) to do things for them or let them see my homework. Intimidation was a very commonly used tactic. Don't tell me that racism is white people keeping minorities down. It was even worse in Mississippi because, despite being a healthy majority, several (not all) of these black people felt that I owed them something because I am white, despite the fact that my family was too poor to have ever owned more land than needed for subsistence, let alone own a slave.
I also had the opportunity to spend 3 years on a U.S. military base in the Tokyo area. It was shortly after Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, meaning that the area had lots of Filipinos. As a result, my on-base high school was approximately 70% Filipino. Everyone still broke into their ethnic groups, and sure enough, the Filipino kids imposed their will on the white, black, and Japanese kids. The point is that the majority gets to push people around until it begins to impose on the protected rights
Allow me to tell you the story of a guy named Jeff. I'm a Ph.D. student working with this guy, who is a masters student. This guy has "free stuff" down to an art. Seriously, nobody can top Jeff in terms of free stuff.
For example, he showed up at a College of Engineering open house event for homecoming. While he was there, he got some free cookies. Then, he walked up to the stadium and parlayed said cookies into football tickets from some cute girl. Bam! Free football tickets!
Jeff goes to DAC (Design Automation Conference) in Anaheim. Conference admission is a couple hundred bucks. Dude comes back with close to $1000 in free stuff from the vendor show, including flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
College of Engineering career fair rolls around. I ask him to pick me up a highlighter while he's out because I'm reading papers. He comes back with no less than 20 of them. Oh yeah, he's also gotten laundry detergent for a couple of weeks, enough Easy Mac to feed him for a couple of weeks, more office supplies than the entire lab could use in a semester, and tons more stuff. He replaced the items on his bookshelf with the free booty from multiple trips.
We built a tower out of no less than 200 packs of bubble gum from a Wrigley's promotional stand.
Jeff walks around campus and records dates and times of free food flyers into his cell phone. Then, he goes back to his office and enters them into an Outlook calendar. The only time this guy pays for food is when I invite him out to eat with the rest of the group.
He says the key is to be completely shameless. I've seen him walk right up to the organizer of a booth and flat out ask him for a box of stuff. Then, after getting the box (much to my dismay), he'll turn around and ask for a box for his officemate. He'll walk right up to displays and dump the entire contents of the display into a bag. Most people are too polite to stop him, so he gets away with it.
Good link. That put a lot of the Cold War propaganda to bed.
Not huge parts of the world. It could deal a big blow to many major cities though.
In a back-of-the-envelope calculation, let's assume that the top 300 cities in the world get bombed. That's a billion people affected by nuclear weapons. Even a 10% mortality rate is a hellacious death toll. On top of that, Hurricane Katrina showed us what can happen to major cities in disasters. Several tens of percent will die as a result of starvation, disease, fallout, etc. in the aftermath, suggesting death tolls in the hundreds of millions and global economic collapse.
According to Google Maps, it seems that Purdue is composed mostly of cheap drunks.:) Sorry, Doug!:)
Seriously though, it's my experience that diversity depends heavily on the level of education. The undergrad computer architecture class that I teach is about 60% white, 25% Indian, and 15% Asian. (No hispanics or blacks, and only one girl out of 64). As one of my sibling posts mentions, I don't know for sure if they are American or not, but given the demographics of Indiana and the rest of the midwest, I think the margin of error is pretty low. My undergrad at the University of Arkansas had similar numbers, although we had a few more girls.
In contrast, the graduate school is amazingly international, and yes, I am very sure of that. Case in point, I have had exactly 3 out of 7 classes in my Ph.D. program where the professor was American. 25% Americans (I am certain about that) in my distributed systems course this semester. Similar trends in my other courses, although I don't remember the numbers. I can honestly say that my research group is the only one I know with four Americans in it. Hell, I'm going to school on a minority fellowship, and I'm a white male! When I did undergrad research, the group (composed mostly of grad students) I worked in had 5 Americans out of 23. Whether it's Americans not getting advanced degrees or sheer numbers of Asian and Indian students coming overseas for their education, there is no doubt. Grad school is an exercise in diversity and ethnic relations.
On the bright side, I learned Go, and they learned about football. Unfortunately, I believe the point of diversity is still not being achieved. The administrative point of view is that diversity brings people of different backgrounds together to suggest different ideas and lead to better research. The fact is that the Chinese students hang out together, the Korean students hang out together, the Indian students hang out together, and the American students hang out together. The only time the groups seem to interact is when they have to because everyone seems to be too uncomfortable stepping out of their comfort zone to talk about homework, research, or whatever with the other groups.
In the words of Tyler Durden, "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." Simply admitting tons of international students does not provide the diversity goal that the administration wants. It requires an active role on the parts of the students. I know several international students who have gotten involved in student organizations and experience American culture. In exchange, they decorated the student lounge, and ECE celebrated Chinese New Year. We're working together through HKN (ECE Honors Organization) to improve cooperation between international and domestic students. However, these people constitute a minority of students, and breaking the self-imposed segregation is hard.
Yes, this has gotten off on a rant, but the point is that there are a lot of international students in engineering, this is not a bad thing, but the way it works out in practice is clearly suboptimal.
The purpose of this book and other like it are to teach the reader the basics of doing something, and overall they tend to do this fairly well.
I bought this book for my wife who spent her more formative years in front of a Windows machine and was given a Sun workstation in her new research group. It is by no means perfect or complete. However, it gave her enough information, so she could ask an intelligent question such that she didn't feel stupid when asking for help. Six months later, she isn't l33t, but she's functionally literate in UNIX.
However, the Vatican regularly declared heresy against anyone who challenged the accepted "facts" of the Universe.
I have a friend at a Catholic seminary right now. He's told me that they actually teach some watered-down versions of some really difficult sciences, so priests can avoid a lot of the mistakes that the church has made in the past. He actually had an introductory course in quantum mechanics!
On the whole, a good parent post. No flames required.:)
You're not going to have any luck getting them to vote. They won't even take free money.
Seriously, our ECE honors organization has a lounge in the basement of the EE building that sells food and drinks and turns a good profit. We figure that EEs and CompEs aren't very social by nature, so every couple of weeks, we go out to a local resturant, bar, etc. and give everybody who shows up $3 to subsidize their food. The idea is to get people out of the lab and have a good time. Our student organization finance office requires that we get signatures of everybody who shows up to guarantee that we aren't just pocketing the cash. We don't take any personal information, and you don't even have to sign the form legibly. A large number of people won't sign the form to get the free money because they keep waiting for the other foot to drop.
Jokes about EEs being so uncool that you have to pay people to hang out with them aside...
You'll never get students to actually do something later, even if you give them all sorts of free stuff, unless they were going to do it, anyway. Once they get the free stuff, you have no further bargaining capacity, and they have no further incentive to oblige you.
There's a reason people are willing to work in their tech group for the low wages - it's because they learn a LOT.
...and because living in Bentonville, Arkansas is cheap. Everyone seems to translate those crappy salaries to wherever they're from. For a back of the envelope calculation, compared to some major cities, Bentonville is 81% cheaper than Los Angeles, 137% cheaper than San Francisco, 23% cheaper than Dallas, and 54% cheaper than New York (Brooklyn). I went to college in Northwest Arkansas for 4 years. Trust me, it's really, really cheap and actually a really nice area, particularly if you like outdoor activities.
My sister-in-law works in Wal-Mart's fashion design department and lives quite comfortably on $35,000/year while her husband goes to grad school. She actually likes her job, contrary to what many people may assume. If you're in the home office, it really isn't too bad.
It's always fashionable to slam Wal-Mart, but people really miss some of the decent things they do. For example, since I started there in 1998, the Waltons have donated no less than $563 million to the University of Arkansas. They basically paid for the new honors college. The Waltons may have anti-competitive business practices, frown on unions, and do many other unsettling things, but you can't argue that they aren't trying to make up for it by giving away large amounts of money. I won't forget that their contributions to university scholarships paid for my (and my wife's) education.
That said, I still shop at Target, until they actually open at least a third of those 40-some-odd checkout lanes.:)
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Many places take it one step further. In Canada, an "engineer" is someone who has professional licensure in engineering. IIRC, they were trying to do the same in Texas. I honestly think this is a good idea.
The president of the IEEE gave a talk at my campus a few years back. He suggested that engineers were not respected (and compensated) for their skills because of the public's perception of engineers. This included two parts. First, engineers are usually portrayed as the source of the hero's problem in movies. Now, part of this is because engineers' lives aren't usually that interesting, and little can be done about this. Second, many people call themselves "engineers" who are not actually qualified to be engineers. The argument is that you can train someone to do something complicated, but an engineer has the understanding to invent many complicated things. I've met lots of people who have "engineer" job titles that don't actually do any engineering. Electricians, mechanics, and plumbers are not electrical, mechanical, and hydraulics engineers, respectively. In contrast, a physician is a physician. If a radiology technician tries to diagnose someone, it's going to cost somebody a buttload of cash.
I think a better statement would be "Graduates of a computer science department are not engineers, they are mathemeticians." That said, if someone can prove they know software engineering by getting licensed, they are an engineer. I'm not talking about being certified to administer a database. I'm talking about designing complicated programs, proving algorithmic complexity, and optimizing for the range of applications from embedded to high-performance systems. A lot of that sounds like CS, and if they can prove it, a CS can be a PE (professional engineer).
I'm annoyed at the grab to sell strategy guides by providing no hints whatsoever about the Zodiac Spear chests, but aside from that, I think the game is great.
I'm 26. That's exactly what this file sounds like to me. Although, unlike the CRT sitting next to me, this sound effect gives me a "pressure" feeling between my ears.
I have no comment on processor, motherboard, and memory thermal stress. I'll leave that one to someone else.
In case you were wondering, TCP Reno's expected bandwidth is inversely proportional to RTT. For more information, see the following paper: Modeling TCP Throughput: A Simple Model and its Empirical Validation (PDF).
The biggest things that I learned in public high school were how to deal with less intelligent people and how to avoid exploitation. These would have been impossible to learn if I had used an alternative educational path. Notice they're both social. My ability to work with people has opened more opportunities for me than all of my technical qualifications combined.
I guess that makes the high school system "broken" because it doesn't teach students everything, but it gave me enough opportunities that I could be successful on my own. If today's children are unwilling to make the most of their opportunities, then yes, I would like to biggie size my order.
My mother sent me to an etiquette course in 3rd grade (along with the rest of my class) to teach me how to be a "Southern gentleman." It involved a five course meal, complete with holding doors for the girls, seating them first, and standing when the girls left the table. Personally, that sounds like teaching boys to be respectful to girls.
Do not confuse "Southern" with "redneck." The two are not synonyms, especially when describing how they treat other people.
I would contend that mutual respect is that middle ground you describe. I would further contend that mutual respect includes humoring men who enjoy sports, competitiveness, hunting, etc. instead of suggesting that these hobbies are a bad thing. Unfortunately, these hobbies are considered "macho" by many people.In summary, I agree with the spirit of your argument, but I would like to suggest that the "macho" you describe does not describe a man. It describes an asshole, and yes, Toit is probably one of those.
No, I'm not an "elite school" grad. I have a B.S.E.E. from the University of Arkansas.
Without onboard flash, the disk must service the request. The 3.5" disk in my office machine must be shutdown for at least 30 seconds to save energy. A sensible timeout (provably 2-competitive) is 60 seconds. Servers have higher performance disks than my desktop, so their timeout is going to be longer than that. The disk can never shut down and save energy due to dirty page writeback. Sure, you could disable dirty page writeback by turning on laptop_mode, but you would encounter a serious performance hit on your first demand miss.
With the onboard flash, the writes are serviced but the disk is still able to remain idle and shut down. Since servers tend to access files according to a Zipf distribution, the idleness will significantly increase because the most commonly written files are likely to remain resident in the flash and not produce disk accesses. Furthermore, the most common accesses will only have to be written to disk once because overwrites will be serviced in the flash cache, whereas current approaches would require the disk to service each overwrite. Hence, significant energy savings are likely using onboard flash.
Therefore, this would be useful for servers.
Any good architecture course goes over how to properly configure simulation parameters to make a practical comparison. The guys at Berkeley spent time trying to tune those DMA numbers because they went to the trouble to make a comparison. They have some truly talented architects at Berkeley, so I'm sure they have the experience to guide their numbers.
Of course, this is all a moot point, since the numbers are so far in Cell's favor that I doubt the DMA transfer rate would make a damn bit of difference.
Is it a pittance compared to the billions that Wal-Mart makes every year? Probably, but Wal-Mart has definitely improved the quality of education at my former school. In my book, that indicates that the Waltons can't be the horsemen of the apocalypse.
However, I ordered a new battery for my Thinkpad R40 and a Mini-PCI wireless card (damn BIOS lock!) from Lenovo. They (a) sent me a battery that didn't fit with my R40 and (b) sent me a wireless card that failed the BIOS check. I spent forever on the phone with customer service to get a RMA. Service was unsatisfactory compared to IBM.
Having lost hope in the last good PC vendor, my next machine will be a Macintosh.
*Note for our younger readers: Energy = Power * Time
Now throwing weapons might be a true challenge. Really, what do you do until you get the grenades? :) (Haven't played the game in about 3 years)
Which "white people" are you referring to? Are we referring to traditional anchors like Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Peter Jennings? Or are we referring to Julie Chen, Connie Chung, Bryant Gumbel, Stuart Scott, Robin Roberts, etc.? Or are we referring to "white people" like George Stephanopolos (Greek)?
A question that is opinionative at best. Numbers? I can't speak for everyone, but in my household, we have no less than 17 movies written, produced, and directed in other countries, and every one of those cost twice what a comparable Hollywood film would have cost. Maybe that has something to do with it. And of course, nobody watches anime and kids don't watch Pokemon et al. Were you referring to those art house flicks that nobody buys from Hollywood, either?
You mean like Denzel Washington, Will Smith, and Jamie Foxx? I notice that you conveniently left out the minority female actors, which removes Halle Berry, Vanessa Williams, Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz, and company.
Yes. Statistically, males constitute ~50% of the world's population, and (as you have assumed that all movies Americans watch are made in Hollywood) 75.1% of Americans are white. Statistically speaking, 3 out of every 8 people in a movie should be white males. Of course, we have "good neighborhoods" and "bad neighborhoods," and white people can't possibly be undeprived enough to live in "bad neighborhoods."
I'll agree that your average American has a hard time putting himself in the shoes of other nations. Beyond that, I call bullshit. Large number of wealthy Americans don't have to put themselves in the shoes of others, and yes, white people make more money on average than minorities. This implies that many white people don't have to put themselves in the shoes of others.
As someone who didn't achieve "majority" status until going off to college, let me enlighten you. I was raised in a town which is 60.4% black and attended a school that was ~65% black.
When you are a minority -- black, white or polka-dotted -- it's easy to play the role of a victim. I was roughed up in hallways for dressing well on days that I had to attend an off-campus school activity. Several students tried to "out black" me (to steal a Chris Rock term) to do things for them or let them see my homework. Intimidation was a very commonly used tactic. Don't tell me that racism is white people keeping minorities down. It was even worse in Mississippi because, despite being a healthy majority, several (not all) of these black people felt that I owed them something because I am white, despite the fact that my family was too poor to have ever owned more land than needed for subsistence, let alone own a slave.
I also had the opportunity to spend 3 years on a U.S. military base in the Tokyo area. It was shortly after Mt. Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines, meaning that the area had lots of Filipinos. As a result, my on-base high school was approximately 70% Filipino. Everyone still broke into their ethnic groups, and sure enough, the Filipino kids imposed their will on the white, black, and Japanese kids. The point is that the majority gets to push people around until it begins to impose on the protected rights
For example, he showed up at a College of Engineering open house event for homecoming. While he was there, he got some free cookies. Then, he walked up to the stadium and parlayed said cookies into football tickets from some cute girl. Bam! Free football tickets!
Jeff goes to DAC (Design Automation Conference) in Anaheim. Conference admission is a couple hundred bucks. Dude comes back with close to $1000 in free stuff from the vendor show, including flash drives, MP3 players, etc.
College of Engineering career fair rolls around. I ask him to pick me up a highlighter while he's out because I'm reading papers. He comes back with no less than 20 of them. Oh yeah, he's also gotten laundry detergent for a couple of weeks, enough Easy Mac to feed him for a couple of weeks, more office supplies than the entire lab could use in a semester, and tons more stuff. He replaced the items on his bookshelf with the free booty from multiple trips.
We built a tower out of no less than 200 packs of bubble gum from a Wrigley's promotional stand.
Jeff walks around campus and records dates and times of free food flyers into his cell phone. Then, he goes back to his office and enters them into an Outlook calendar. The only time this guy pays for food is when I invite him out to eat with the rest of the group.
He says the key is to be completely shameless. I've seen him walk right up to the organizer of a booth and flat out ask him for a box of stuff. Then, after getting the box (much to my dismay), he'll turn around and ask for a box for his officemate. He'll walk right up to displays and dump the entire contents of the display into a bag. Most people are too polite to stop him, so he gets away with it.
(Just thought I'd add to the discussion.) :)
Seriously though, it's my experience that diversity depends heavily on the level of education. The undergrad computer architecture class that I teach is about 60% white, 25% Indian, and 15% Asian. (No hispanics or blacks, and only one girl out of 64). As one of my sibling posts mentions, I don't know for sure if they are American or not, but given the demographics of Indiana and the rest of the midwest, I think the margin of error is pretty low. My undergrad at the University of Arkansas had similar numbers, although we had a few more girls.
In contrast, the graduate school is amazingly international, and yes, I am very sure of that. Case in point, I have had exactly 3 out of 7 classes in my Ph.D. program where the professor was American. 25% Americans (I am certain about that) in my distributed systems course this semester. Similar trends in my other courses, although I don't remember the numbers. I can honestly say that my research group is the only one I know with four Americans in it. Hell, I'm going to school on a minority fellowship, and I'm a white male! When I did undergrad research, the group (composed mostly of grad students) I worked in had 5 Americans out of 23. Whether it's Americans not getting advanced degrees or sheer numbers of Asian and Indian students coming overseas for their education, there is no doubt. Grad school is an exercise in diversity and ethnic relations.
On the bright side, I learned Go, and they learned about football. Unfortunately, I believe the point of diversity is still not being achieved. The administrative point of view is that diversity brings people of different backgrounds together to suggest different ideas and lead to better research. The fact is that the Chinese students hang out together, the Korean students hang out together, the Indian students hang out together, and the American students hang out together. The only time the groups seem to interact is when they have to because everyone seems to be too uncomfortable stepping out of their comfort zone to talk about homework, research, or whatever with the other groups.
In the words of Tyler Durden, "Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken." Simply admitting tons of international students does not provide the diversity goal that the administration wants. It requires an active role on the parts of the students. I know several international students who have gotten involved in student organizations and experience American culture. In exchange, they decorated the student lounge, and ECE celebrated Chinese New Year. We're working together through HKN (ECE Honors Organization) to improve cooperation between international and domestic students. However, these people constitute a minority of students, and breaking the self-imposed segregation is hard.
Yes, this has gotten off on a rant, but the point is that there are a lot of international students in engineering, this is not a bad thing, but the way it works out in practice is clearly suboptimal.
To me, that makes the book worth it.
On the whole, a good parent post. No flames required. :)
Seriously, our ECE honors organization has a lounge in the basement of the EE building that sells food and drinks and turns a good profit. We figure that EEs and CompEs aren't very social by nature, so every couple of weeks, we go out to a local resturant, bar, etc. and give everybody who shows up $3 to subsidize their food. The idea is to get people out of the lab and have a good time. Our student organization finance office requires that we get signatures of everybody who shows up to guarantee that we aren't just pocketing the cash. We don't take any personal information, and you don't even have to sign the form legibly. A large number of people won't sign the form to get the free money because they keep waiting for the other foot to drop.
Jokes about EEs being so uncool that you have to pay people to hang out with them aside...
You'll never get students to actually do something later, even if you give them all sorts of free stuff, unless they were going to do it, anyway. Once they get the free stuff, you have no further bargaining capacity, and they have no further incentive to oblige you.
My sister-in-law works in Wal-Mart's fashion design department and lives quite comfortably on $35,000/year while her husband goes to grad school. She actually likes her job, contrary to what many people may assume. If you're in the home office, it really isn't too bad.
It's always fashionable to slam Wal-Mart, but people really miss some of the decent things they do. For example, since I started there in 1998, the Waltons have donated no less than $563 million to the University of Arkansas. They basically paid for the new honors college. The Waltons may have anti-competitive business practices, frown on unions, and do many other unsettling things, but you can't argue that they aren't trying to make up for it by giving away large amounts of money. I won't forget that their contributions to university scholarships paid for my (and my wife's) education.
That said, I still shop at Target, until they actually open at least a third of those 40-some-odd checkout lanes. :)