If you want to learn more about programming, there's no substitute for writing code.
In real life, programming happens differently than in classes. Someone, for instance, needs to understand your code enough to be sure you're going down the right track and not incorporating too many bugs. That person with a broader view may be a manager or just a more senior programmer. In any case, you'll most likely start writing code with clearly defined problems and marching orders on how to solve the problem. The people you work with and work for will need to gain trust in your abilities before giving you more leeway. Simply put, you'll be a programmer.
Down the road, you may show some talent for defining problems, enumerating potential solutions, and writing code without being given prior guidance. At that point, you'll be a developer.
For some people, the road doesn't stop there. A very few can look at a large, hairy problem, and design systems that achieve desired results. That may mean a system of interoperating code modules, or interoperating applications, or applications that interact across different computers. Those people are architects.
Perhaps you'll take a detour in the vicinity of being a developer. Rather than pulling stuff out of thin air to create your own code, you'll decide you enjoy hunting down and squashing bugs. If that's the case, you could go into sustaining engineering. While some people find it boring, others find it pays the bills adequately without needing quite so many late nights and weekends spent coding as other types of programming work.
At the beginning of a career in programming, your options are wide open. Start doing some coding, and see what parts you enjoy the most. Find a job that lets you do as much of the fun parts as you can. Enjoying what you're doing will do a lot to help you keep going.
Help smart kids learn as much as they can
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
It looks to me as if this discussion is polarizing mainly along the lines of pro-establishment types saying "we need more money" and pro-free enterprise types saying we need more choice & competition.
Here's a thought. What if we took the top 20% of children out of public schools, and put them into private schools focused on teaching them as much as they desire about math, science, music, art, literature, history, etc., etc., etc.?
While the bottom 50% of any population might be well served by "no child left behind" styles of education, the best scientists and artists certainly aren't. And being around a bunch of geeks and freaks probably isn't doing anything positive for the self-esteem of the less accomplished students. So, let's separate the two groups.
If the current educational establishment is correct, and money is the big stumbling block, then teachers with 20% smaller classes ought to have an easier time getting results out of the remaining kids. Oh, wait, I can see it now. First, we'll be accused of segregation, because a nation of lawyers can't stand to see an opportunity for a class action lawsuit pass them by, and the parents of kids stuck in public school will have nothing to lose by participating. In the meantime, a decline in test scores will be blamed on the fact that we took all the smart kids away. Then, we'll be hit up for more money because of the huge burden of teaching less gifted kids, even though there are fewer kids in public schools than there used to be.
Okay, enough sarcasm for a bit.
I think the elephant in the room is an element of free enterprise that is opposed to paying teachers for performance, or pruning out bad teachers, or making educational systems more cost effective -- unions. In California, for instance, all teachers are required by law to donate a significant portion of their salary to the union, even if they aren't members.
Now, many unions have done quite a lot to benefit their members over the years. Teachers unions that make it impossible to fire under-performing teachers, for instance, provide a level of job security that is pretty much unmatched by any other field. Remember, though, that the unions exist to benefit their members, not to benefit society as a whole.
If you want to clean up government, including the educational system, start by making it possible to fire people for misconduct or ineptitude. Let each teacher choose whether they prefer to pay union dues or keep the money for themselves. I imagine there are good potential teachers out there who would prefer to make money for themselves rather than union bosses.
Back to my original point, the way for any country to make progress in science, math, or the arts is to allow everyone to learn as much as possible. That goes hand-in-hand with America's entrepreneurial attitude toward most things, but runs directly counter to the prevailing socialist attitude found in most school systems. We need to fix the disconnect if we hope to make any significant progress.
Warner and BMI confirmed for the BBC that they've been in discussions with YouTube. That's a far cry from saying they confirmed that they've agreed to distribute music videos through YouTube.
Record labels are among the greediest, most money-hungry companies on the planet. They aren't going to just hand over the content for YouTube to distribute for free. They also aren't likely to hand over the content for YouTube to distribute cheaply.
Sorry, but Steve Chen is either dreaming, smoking crack, or knowingly talking out of his butt.
There are many underground power lines and transformers in San Francisco. Every few months, a transformer explodes, sending manholes flying and injuring pedestrians with hot gasses and debris. Perhaps that's a function of the age of the equipment coupled with earthquakes adding to the wear and tear over the years. In any case, when underground power gear fails, the confined spaces channel the force of any gasses or explosions in a way that concentrates the impact on bystanders.
When overhead lines and equipment fail, the risk to bystanders is primarly due to falling shrapnel and live wires. At least people have a chance of seeing those coming and jumping out of the way.
If I had a choice, I would rather take my chances on overhead lines.
Okay, so you see a guy hanging around outside, and you give him a cup of coffee. He drinks it. Then he has to urinate, so he comes inside. Now, you've got a bigger quandry. Do you let him use the "customers only" bathroom, or do you try to make him buy something first?
Meanwhile, if the guy was creeping out coffee shop workers or customers while spending weeks or months in his car, how will they feel if he spends overly long in the bathroom?
In the article, the store manager described the guy hanging out in the parking lot for three months as "borderline creepy." Actually, it's loitering, and that's something the guy could have reasonably expected to be charged with.
I don't know offhand whether "creepy guy issued summons for loitering outside coffee shop" is big enough news to get written up in Vancouver, Washington, but I hope not. That's probably why the story reads the way it does. Written this way, the story gave at least one reporter and a friend (a.k.a. mister computer expert) a plausible excuse for buying coffees as a business expense, and driving around while "working on a story." I think we've all had days like that, and wish we had them more often.
>not everyone should have all-building access Also true.
However, those two items don't support your contention that MS is taking a lax attitude to physical security. Scoble didn't say that every employee has access to every server room. He didn't even say for certainty that he does. Allowing employees open access to all work spaces provides a much larger benefit to freedom of collaboration than the slight added risk inherent in letting people into office buildings that they don't necessarily need to visit. Frankly, I see the slight risk as being very much worth giving people more chances to work together and a chance to feel valued and trusted.
California collected far more in income taxes this year than previously expected, to the tune of $2.2 billion. Much of that surplus has been attributed to Google, its employees, and its shareholders.
The rise in income tax payments goes hand in hand with a rise in net worth for a lot of people in the Bay Area, most of whom are both smart and talented. I would expect to see a number of newly wealthy people head out and create new startups of their own.
People who continue to think that Silicon Valley's heyday is over, never to return, are wrong. The Bay Area is already bouncing back, in part due to the factors mentioned in the article. Technical jobs are already more plentiful than technical workers. Any IT person in Silicon Valley who wants to change employers can do so, and will get a raise in the process.
I wouldn't count Silicon Valley out any time soon.
The US military does it. Going to https://www.mol.usmc.mil/ in either IE or Firefox asks if you want to trust the cert.
I'm not sure about IIS, but openssl certainly has a mechanism for signing your own ssl certs, as do load balancers with ssl acceleration support. Commercial, "trusted" ssl certs seem to be useful primarily for preventing security warning popups.
From my own experience with Equifax (currently GeoTrust & soon to be Verisign thanks to acquisitions and consolidation) I know that it took them years to get their root certificate added into the Java keystore. Any application using a not-very-current version of the jdk will still generate errors when faced with GeoTrust certs. Buying certs from a smaller CA with less penetration into end-user keystores can be little or no better than signing certs yourself.
From my viewpoint, the only two viable options are paying top dollar for the certs that will work for most people or signing your own. Which option to go with is largely a budget issue.
Perhaps I should have worded it as "...2, 4, or 6-year contracts at prenegotiated salaries during which they can't quit without repaying the cost of the education they've received."
Frankly, without my initial, cynical wording, it really wouldn't be indentured servitude, at least not in the very-nearly-slavery sense. Rather, it would be the exchange of labor for education, at the end of which the worker would have both training and experience, two things an entry-level worker would benefit from having.
BTW, even Wikipedia mentions that "[indentured servitude] was the legal basis of the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were learned." Master tradesmen didn't simply train apprentices out of the goodness of their hearts. Without the commitment of service in exchange for room, board, and training, mighty few masters would have taught their trade secrets to anyone.
Honestly, I think unions and tenure are two of the big reasons why America's educational system is steadily deteriorating.
In California, a large part of educational spending goes to the teacher's union, and to the cost of negotiating with the union, rather than to the teachers themselves or to the cost of books and supplies.
Tenure, meanwhile, promotes freedom of expression and thought at the expense of the freedom to hire and fire teachers based on performance. One major lesson being learned by students today is how to maintain the status quo, or at least a protracted, downward slide.
Private schools, which aren't similarly burdened, are seeing a growing demand for their services, while public schools are closing down, even though the overall population keeps rising. That's gotta tell you something about the perceived value of a public education.
Most elementary, junior high, and high school teachers in America are government employees. That's bad enough. To make matters worse, they're given a checklist of things they must teach (and answers that students must regurgitate) in order to continue being employed.
Now, I don't have high expectations for civil servants in general, but I can't escape the conclusion that teachers are set up to fail. The ones I know work far more hours than any of their governmental supervisors. Given that the vast majority of their time remains focused on mandatory teaching & testing subjects, they have little time for motivating anyone.
Sadly, the only thing in American society that seems to evolve more slowly than the education system is the legislative baggage that mandates how teaching is supposed to be done. For many school systems, educating young people is being replaced by years of babysitting, with diplomas handed out mostly on the basis of acceptable attendance percentages for a suffient number of years.
Perhaps what we'll see in the future is a more entreprenurial version of way the military operates. Employers could foot the bill for training employees in skills that matter for their specific jobs. In exchange, employees would sign 2, 4, or 6-year contracts for long hours in low-paying jobs during which they can be fired but can't quit.
Seriously, doing whatever you want to do is fine. Just decide up front what you are or aren't willing to do, and make it stick. Forget lying to people, or slowly raising rates to chase them off. Go ahead and do what you want to do -- just don't make everyone else read your mind in the meantime.
In the process, you can be as gentle or as forceful as you want to be, as long as you're honest with everyone involved.
"I must get my degree because no one respects my nearly 10 years of experience and flawless work ethic..."
Oh, please. To start, grow up and lose the whiny attitude.
I'll bet you haven't gotten the jobs you want because you come across poorly in interviews. Similarly, if none of your contract jobs have grown into full-time work, it's likely because, having seen you in action, no one wants you on their team.
Try being a winner instead of a whiner. Conduct yourself with some class. Improve the atmosphere of each workplace you enter, rather than poisoning it. Do everything you can to add value to the companies you interact with, and maybe they'll consider adding some greenbacks to your wallet.
I've hired lots of people for sysadmin jobs. With very few exceptions, they've either had no degree or a degree in an unrelated field. I primarily look for the right attitude and team fit. Skills can be taught. Integrity can't.
In the Grand Challenge, cars didn't race against one another to try to be the first across the line. They raced to try to complete the course in the shortest elapsed time.
According to the Darpa web site, Stanford won the race by finishing with an elapsed time of 6 hours and 53 minutes. They could still have won if they crossed the finish line after the CMU vehicle, as long as their elapsed time was still shorter.
CMU's Sandstorm finished in 7 hours and 4 minutes.
CMU's H1ghlander finished in 7 hours and 14 minutes.
Which is more likely, members of Congress understanding technological issues well enough to make rational, informed decisions and enact well-written legislation, or those same politicians going with whatever is pitched by the best funded set of lobbyists?
Call me crazy, but I can't picture a whole lot of Congressmen being technically literate enough to fully understand the issues described in the article. That's going to drastically limit their ability to predict the ramifications of the potential solutions.
I love that the Quake4 mainstream settings showed that each of the test systems ended up being GPU bound. That kinda makes it hard to take any of the graphics-based benchmark numbers seriously.
I wish the article reported numbers for the Intel chips that compare results with hyperthreading enabled vs. disabled. On servers, we routinely need to disable hyperthreading because it slows things down.
Personally, though, I don't think it matters much. I can't picture me plunking down my own cash for an Intel-powered system any time this decade.
Slashdot Mirror
>"Alpha/Beta/Release" aren't subjective names.
It's nice to know someone still believes in fairy tales.
>Version numbers have been hijacked by marketdroids...
That, at least, is true.
Perhaps you mistyped a detail. The original IBM PC had one or two 5 1/4 inch 160KB floppy drives, but no hard drives.
The IBM PC XT added a 5MB or 10MB hard drive. Later models had 20MB or 30MB drives. They each had one floppy drive.
If you want to learn more about programming, there's no substitute for writing code.
In real life, programming happens differently than in classes. Someone, for instance, needs to understand your code enough to be sure you're going down the right track and not incorporating too many bugs. That person with a broader view may be a manager or just a more senior programmer. In any case, you'll most likely start writing code with clearly defined problems and marching orders on how to solve the problem. The people you work with and work for will need to gain trust in your abilities before giving you more leeway. Simply put, you'll be a programmer.
Down the road, you may show some talent for defining problems, enumerating potential solutions, and writing code without being given prior guidance. At that point, you'll be a developer.
For some people, the road doesn't stop there. A very few can look at a large, hairy problem, and design systems that achieve desired results. That may mean a system of interoperating code modules, or interoperating applications, or applications that interact across different computers. Those people are architects.
Perhaps you'll take a detour in the vicinity of being a developer. Rather than pulling stuff out of thin air to create your own code, you'll decide you enjoy hunting down and squashing bugs. If that's the case, you could go into sustaining engineering. While some people find it boring, others find it pays the bills adequately without needing quite so many late nights and weekends spent coding as other types of programming work.
At the beginning of a career in programming, your options are wide open. Start doing some coding, and see what parts you enjoy the most. Find a job that lets you do as much of the fun parts as you can. Enjoying what you're doing will do a lot to help you keep going.
It looks to me as if this discussion is polarizing mainly along the lines of pro-establishment types saying "we need more money" and pro-free enterprise types saying we need more choice & competition.
Here's a thought. What if we took the top 20% of children out of public schools, and put them into private schools focused on teaching them as much as they desire about math, science, music, art, literature, history, etc., etc., etc.?
While the bottom 50% of any population might be well served by "no child left behind" styles of education, the best scientists and artists certainly aren't. And being around a bunch of geeks and freaks probably isn't doing anything positive for the self-esteem of the less accomplished students. So, let's separate the two groups.
If the current educational establishment is correct, and money is the big stumbling block, then teachers with 20% smaller classes ought to have an easier time getting results out of the remaining kids. Oh, wait, I can see it now. First, we'll be accused of segregation, because a nation of lawyers can't stand to see an opportunity for a class action lawsuit pass them by, and the parents of kids stuck in public school will have nothing to lose by participating. In the meantime, a decline in test scores will be blamed on the fact that we took all the smart kids away. Then, we'll be hit up for more money because of the huge burden of teaching less gifted kids, even though there are fewer kids in public schools than there used to be.
Okay, enough sarcasm for a bit.
I think the elephant in the room is an element of free enterprise that is opposed to paying teachers for performance, or pruning out bad teachers, or making educational systems more cost effective -- unions. In California, for instance, all teachers are required by law to donate a significant portion of their salary to the union, even if they aren't members.
Now, many unions have done quite a lot to benefit their members over the years. Teachers unions that make it impossible to fire under-performing teachers, for instance, provide a level of job security that is pretty much unmatched by any other field. Remember, though, that the unions exist to benefit their members, not to benefit society as a whole.
If you want to clean up government, including the educational system, start by making it possible to fire people for misconduct or ineptitude. Let each teacher choose whether they prefer to pay union dues or keep the money for themselves. I imagine there are good potential teachers out there who would prefer to make money for themselves rather than union bosses.
Back to my original point, the way for any country to make progress in science, math, or the arts is to allow everyone to learn as much as possible. That goes hand-in-hand with America's entrepreneurial attitude toward most things, but runs directly counter to the prevailing socialist attitude found in most school systems. We need to fix the disconnect if we hope to make any significant progress.
Perhaps the merger would produce pure, concentrated evil.
Actually, the investigation was the Chair of the Board of Directors, not the Board as a whole or the CEO.
I was totally bummed out when they got stuck in limbo with no label. Back in the day, I had all their albums on cassette.
They're an excellent, albeit obscure, example of how legal issues with virtually no merit can kill a band's career.
Warner and BMI confirmed for the BBC that they've been in discussions with YouTube. That's a far cry from saying they confirmed that they've agreed to distribute music videos through YouTube.
Record labels are among the greediest, most money-hungry companies on the planet. They aren't going to just hand over the content for YouTube to distribute for free. They also aren't likely to hand over the content for YouTube to distribute cheaply.
Sorry, but Steve Chen is either dreaming, smoking crack, or knowingly talking out of his butt.
...to see an article on /. saying something positive about a Microsoft product.
I guess we'll start seeing flames any minute now...
There are many underground power lines and transformers in San Francisco. Every few months, a transformer explodes, sending manholes flying and injuring pedestrians with hot gasses and debris. Perhaps that's a function of the age of the equipment coupled with earthquakes adding to the wear and tear over the years. In any case, when underground power gear fails, the confined spaces channel the force of any gasses or explosions in a way that concentrates the impact on bystanders.
When overhead lines and equipment fail, the risk to bystanders is primarly due to falling shrapnel and live wires. At least people have a chance of seeing those coming and jumping out of the way.
If I had a choice, I would rather take my chances on overhead lines.
Okay, so you see a guy hanging around outside, and you give him a cup of coffee. He drinks it. Then he has to urinate, so he comes inside. Now, you've got a bigger quandry. Do you let him use the "customers only" bathroom, or do you try to make him buy something first?
Meanwhile, if the guy was creeping out coffee shop workers or customers while spending weeks or months in his car, how will they feel if he spends overly long in the bathroom?
In the article, the store manager described the guy hanging out in the parking lot for three months as "borderline creepy." Actually, it's loitering, and that's something the guy could have reasonably expected to be charged with.
I don't know offhand whether "creepy guy issued summons for loitering outside coffee shop" is big enough news to get written up in Vancouver, Washington, but I hope not. That's probably why the story reads the way it does. Written this way, the story gave at least one reporter and a friend (a.k.a. mister computer expert) a plausible excuse for buying coffees as a business expense, and driving around while "working on a story." I think we've all had days like that, and wish we had them more often.
>Not everyone should have admin
True.
>not everyone should have all-building access
Also true.
However, those two items don't support your contention that MS is taking a lax attitude to physical security. Scoble didn't say that every employee has access to every server room. He didn't even say for certainty that he does. Allowing employees open access to all work spaces provides a much larger benefit to freedom of collaboration than the slight added risk inherent in letting people into office buildings that they don't necessarily need to visit. Frankly, I see the slight risk as being very much worth giving people more chances to work together and a chance to feel valued and trusted.
California collected far more in income taxes this year than previously expected, to the tune of $2.2 billion. Much of that surplus has been attributed to Google, its employees, and its shareholders.
The rise in income tax payments goes hand in hand with a rise in net worth for a lot of people in the Bay Area, most of whom are both smart and talented. I would expect to see a number of newly wealthy people head out and create new startups of their own.
People who continue to think that Silicon Valley's heyday is over, never to return, are wrong. The Bay Area is already bouncing back, in part due to the factors mentioned in the article. Technical jobs are already more plentiful than technical workers. Any IT person in Silicon Valley who wants to change employers can do so, and will get a raise in the process.
I wouldn't count Silicon Valley out any time soon.
Microsoft does it. Going to https://licensing.microsoft.com/ in Firefox asks whether or not you want to trust the certificate.
The US military does it. Going to https://www.mol.usmc.mil/ in either IE or Firefox asks if you want to trust the cert.
I'm not sure about IIS, but openssl certainly has a mechanism for signing your own ssl certs, as do load balancers with ssl acceleration support. Commercial, "trusted" ssl certs seem to be useful primarily for preventing security warning popups.
From my own experience with Equifax (currently GeoTrust & soon to be Verisign thanks to acquisitions and consolidation) I know that it took them years to get their root certificate added into the Java keystore. Any application using a not-very-current version of the jdk will still generate errors when faced with GeoTrust certs. Buying certs from a smaller CA with less penetration into end-user keystores can be little or no better than signing certs yourself.
From my viewpoint, the only two viable options are paying top dollar for the certs that will work for most people or signing your own. Which option to go with is largely a budget issue.
-DaveU
Perhaps I should have worded it as "...2, 4, or 6-year contracts at prenegotiated salaries during which they can't quit without repaying the cost of the education they've received."
Frankly, without my initial, cynical wording, it really wouldn't be indentured servitude, at least not in the very-nearly-slavery sense. Rather, it would be the exchange of labor for education, at the end of which the worker would have both training and experience, two things an entry-level worker would benefit from having.
BTW, even Wikipedia mentions that "[indentured servitude] was the legal basis of the apprenticeship system by which skilled trades were learned." Master tradesmen didn't simply train apprentices out of the goodness of their hearts. Without the commitment of service in exchange for room, board, and training, mighty few masters would have taught their trade secrets to anyone.
Honestly, I think unions and tenure are two of the big reasons why America's educational system is steadily deteriorating.
In California, a large part of educational spending goes to the teacher's union, and to the cost of negotiating with the union, rather than to the teachers themselves or to the cost of books and supplies.
Tenure, meanwhile, promotes freedom of expression and thought at the expense of the freedom to hire and fire teachers based on performance. One major lesson being learned by students today is how to maintain the status quo, or at least a protracted, downward slide.
Private schools, which aren't similarly burdened, are seeing a growing demand for their services, while public schools are closing down, even though the overall population keeps rising. That's gotta tell you something about the perceived value of a public education.
Most elementary, junior high, and high school teachers in America are government employees. That's bad enough. To make matters worse, they're given a checklist of things they must teach (and answers that students must regurgitate) in order to continue being employed.
Now, I don't have high expectations for civil servants in general, but I can't escape the conclusion that teachers are set up to fail. The ones I know work far more hours than any of their governmental supervisors. Given that the vast majority of their time remains focused on mandatory teaching & testing subjects, they have little time for motivating anyone.
Sadly, the only thing in American society that seems to evolve more slowly than the education system is the legislative baggage that mandates how teaching is supposed to be done. For many school systems, educating young people is being replaced by years of babysitting, with diplomas handed out mostly on the basis of acceptable attendance percentages for a suffient number of years.
Perhaps what we'll see in the future is a more entreprenurial version of way the military operates. Employers could foot the bill for training employees in skills that matter for their specific jobs. In exchange, employees would sign 2, 4, or 6-year contracts for long hours in low-paying jobs during which they can be fired but can't quit.
Seriously, doing whatever you want to do is fine. Just decide up front what you are or aren't willing to do, and make it stick. Forget lying to people, or slowly raising rates to chase them off. Go ahead and do what you want to do -- just don't make everyone else read your mind in the meantime.
In the process, you can be as gentle or as forceful as you want to be, as long as you're honest with everyone involved.
You're very unlikely to still feel the same way in another 18 years.
Ten years ago, I felt much like you do. Now, however, I'm much happier to have made the transition to management.
They key difference? Instead of just working at a cool place, I'm able to help make it even cooler for a whole lot of people.
Oh, please. To start, grow up and lose the whiny attitude.
I'll bet you haven't gotten the jobs you want because you come across poorly in interviews. Similarly, if none of your contract jobs have grown into full-time work, it's likely because, having seen you in action, no one wants you on their team.
Try being a winner instead of a whiner. Conduct yourself with some class. Improve the atmosphere of each workplace you enter, rather than poisoning it. Do everything you can to add value to the companies you interact with, and maybe they'll consider adding some greenbacks to your wallet.
I've hired lots of people for sysadmin jobs. With very few exceptions, they've either had no degree or a degree in an unrelated field. I primarily look for the right attitude and team fit. Skills can be taught. Integrity can't.
True. At least, that's what's specified in the official rules.
In the Grand Challenge, cars didn't race against one another to try to be the first across the line. They raced to try to complete the course in the shortest elapsed time .
According to the Darpa web site, Stanford won the race by finishing with an elapsed time of 6 hours and 53 minutes. They could still have won if they crossed the finish line after the CMU vehicle, as long as their elapsed time was still shorter.
CMU's Sandstorm finished in 7 hours and 4 minutes.
CMU's H1ghlander finished in 7 hours and 14 minutes.
Lovely.
Which is more likely, members of Congress understanding technological issues well enough to make rational, informed decisions and enact well-written legislation, or those same politicians going with whatever is pitched by the best funded set of lobbyists?
Call me crazy, but I can't picture a whole lot of Congressmen being technically literate enough to fully understand the issues described in the article. That's going to drastically limit their ability to predict the ramifications of the potential solutions.
I love that the Quake4 mainstream settings showed that each of the test systems ended up being GPU bound. That kinda makes it hard to take any of the graphics-based benchmark numbers seriously.
I wish the article reported numbers for the Intel chips that compare results with hyperthreading enabled vs. disabled. On servers, we routinely need to disable hyperthreading because it slows things down.
Personally, though, I don't think it matters much. I can't picture me plunking down my own cash for an Intel-powered system any time this decade.