I believe you have to ponder on what exactly you want to learn and don't base your decisions on what you already know but rather what is that the interest you and the discipline/field/science that triggers your curiosity, your imagination and challenges your spirit.
Computer Science is a vast field and doesn't matter wich direction you choose to further you education, it will certainly complement it.
Don't settle for the cookie-cutters, seem a dream, prove real.
While carrots may go fine with meatloaf, the new disciplines and sciences you may master will give rise to a new you.
What saddens me the most is that there's a new cry out there stating that we all have to either, buy more hardware and software and/or become more savvy administrators to connect safely to the internet. The true of the matter is that, yes, a reasonably safe-non-hackable OS can be created and sold to the masses. Heck, I can grab Mandrake Move and connect to the Internet and when Im done browsing and reading my email from some on-line service turn the machine off and puff!! THe system is clean as a whistle. It appears we don't lack the resources, we lack the understanding.
For years I griped at the ever-so-ugly web mapping services navigational tools. Google nail it right on the head! The grid refreshes and the edges instead of the nasty blank-hiccup of all the other mapping services. Clearly all the other mapping services have been doing their stuff for years..then comes Google with a beta and whammy! The old services get caught with their pants down. I well deserved tip of the hat for Google.
Start we Fedora. There. Your problem has been solved.
Install Apache, Install Wordpress and off you go! A better than average server at ZERO cost!
Later on you will find out that Wordpress works across all the major distros, and so Apache.
It is true that M$ usera are accustom to be spoon fed with state-of-the-art manuals and wizards that facilitate their work. This is not the case in the *nix world.
You run a government agency in Brasil. You use your budget to:
A. Pay a team of OSS programmers for IT support and in the meantime create jobs and promote domestic-grown-owned-designed and controlled IT resources.
B. Pay for comercial software licenses and thus cut jobs and have the Brasilian tax-payer money go to some trans-national company and meanwhile turn your back on domestic-grown-own-designed IT resources.
MS will shove enough free or discounted mackerel down your throat so you don't learn how to fish and remain somewhat hungry.
Im right behind you. Divx is out there and is going strong. I just bought a PHILLIPS DIVX player for the TV and it plays ALL my DIVXs w/ negligeable loss of quality on a standard TV.
Apple? No problem, DIVX for OSX. Windows? No problem, DIVX for XP. Linux? No problem, DIVX for most popular distros. No computer? No problem Videos Players are coming up with divx support.
Don't get caught between the APPLE vs. MICROSOFT codec wars, use DIVX and live to share your videos for generations to come.
My project wound down in October. Since then I've been doing documentation and non-programming duties.
Yesterday I had to add a line to a file. A simple unix command that a few months ago I could have spitted out like second nature...
was gone!
I walked aimlessly through the cube-maze string at blank faces trying to remember but I couldn't.
Was that a cat command? set? awk?
I asked some gurus and referred my to the >> command. Than I sat back in front of my white board and gently and swiftly the line emerged from my dry marker.
>echo "my line" >> myFile
Panick receded and was replaced with cautious optimism.
The understand the nature of volatile memory one has to read./ for a few months, fall in Love or perhaps read Thomas Mann "Magic Mountain".
Remember those IBMs adds?
on
Linux, Inc.
·
· Score: 1
The cute blond kid on those IBM comercials? Linux remains out of the desktop mainstream. Perhaps if they used a another character like Kip, the Brother of Napoleon Dynamite as the "Linux Boy".
The main problem I have faced with development projects were groups/teams work on different environments is:
Having to deal with compatiblity issues on my own due to a variety of environments and having this workload not properlly being tagged as part of the development of the product (just-fix-it-don't-want -to-hear-about-it syndrome).
In the embedded arena, powerful+expensive tools like Windriver Tornado tackle this problem quite well. Support..support..support.
Whith less sophisticated tools the amount of work related to tackle down compatibility issues (works fine in my system thank-you-very-much) is usually ignored and management tends to squint to much attempting to assess/understand the overall impact...(is that really a problem?).
That being said, multiplataform development is not a curse but a given in the embedded development arena.
The solution is again, buy expensive tools were the paid support takes care of cross-plataform issues or build a well-disciplined cross-department environment control group/resolution team.
Ditto here. I gave an honest shot to get WI-FI working on my HP PAvillion z220 w/pcmcia card and failed. I even dloaded the latest orinoco wi-fi drivers which activate my card all right but the traffic is dropped/ignored.
Plus R.H 9.0 apmd (advance power management ) couldn't figure out the bios to administer battery power. Basically I was pulled back to windows.
WI-FI and Linux is reminiscent of soundcards and Linux in most of the 90's. I bought the HP Pavillion explicitly to run RH 9.0 and now Im back to XP battling patches and spyware.
My advise to those who want to run unix-like OS on a laptop...by a Mac.
The article got me reminiscent of Blade Runner.. Tyrell: Would you like to be modified? Roy: Stay here. -- I had in mind something a little more radical. Tyrell: What-- What seems to be the problem? Roy: Death. Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you-- Roy: I want more life, fucker. Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established. Roy: Why not? Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks. Roy: What about EMS recombination. Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table. Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells. Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you. Roy: But not to last. Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize! Roy: I've done questionable things. Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time. Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for
*IMHO I don't aproove of aproaching the self-termination of life as a "bug" or a on/off feature. Self termination is an intrinsic and fundamental element of the whole design.
I have an imac G3 blue (egg shape) and I'm glad to point out that the number one feature which keeps me in awe is that is fanless. You can stream your media from a Linux server running appletalk buried somewhere in your basement, manually spin down the hard drive, and literally hear your own breathing while playing i-tunes. After 3 years still a work-of-art.
BTW How fast can you flip bits without blinking?
on
Where's My 10 Ghz PC?
·
· Score: 1
How fast can you flip bits without blinking?
The confluence of physics and information theory flows form the central maxim of quantum mechanics:at bottom, nature is discrete. A physical system can be described usinfg a FINITE number of bits. Each particle in the system acts like the logic gate of a computer.Its spin "axis" can point in one of two directions, therby encoding a bit, and can flip over, thereby performing a simple computational operation. The system is also discrete in time. It takes a minimumn amount of time to flip a bit. The exact amount is given by the theorem named after two pioneers of the physics of information processing, Norman Margolus of MIT and Lev Levitin of BU. This theorem is related ot the Heisenber uncertainty principle, which describes the inherent trad-offs in measuring physical quantities, such as position and momentum or time and energy. The theorem says that the time it takes to flip a bit, t, depends on the amount of energy you apply, E. The more energy you apply,the shorter the time can be. Mathematically, the rule is t>= h/4E where h is the Planck's constant, the main parameter of quantum theory. For example, one type of experimental quantum computer stores bits on protons and uses magnetic fields to flip them. The operations take place in the minimum time allowed by the Margolus-Levitin theorem. From this theorem, a huge variety of conclusions can be drawn, from the limits on the geometry of spacetime to the computational capacity of the universe as a whole.
Quantum mechanics predicts that spactime is discrete. Distance and intervals cannot be measured to INFINITE precision; on small scales, spacetime is bubbly and foamy. The maximum ammount of information (matter) that can be put into a region of space depends on how small the bits are, and the CANNOT be smaller than foamy cells.
Physicists have long assumed that the size of this cells is the Planck lenght (lp) of 10E-35 meter, which is the distance at wich both quantum fluctuations and gravitational effects are important. If so, the foamy nature of spacetime will always be too minisucle to observe.
Seth Lloy and Y.Jack NG excerpt taken from Scientific Amercian Nov 2004 Black Hole Computers.
And while waiting, I'll load an e-book about coffee tables on it and then place it on my coffee table in my living room and then add itty-bitty cork pad to my i-pod and voila! Ill get a coffee-table-coaster for my coffee table which plays tunes and has a coffee table e-book whose hard cover used to turn into a coffee table. Yowzaaa!
I level it with you. Ipod sucks if you have Linux, no support there. I also recoiled to the idea of being forced to used X-BRAND software to manage any device, then again..I didn't bough the ipod, it was a gift (he, he). The wheel thing allows you to zoom through your list at variable speeds without having to press anything or lifting your thumb, It's a "infinite scroll". IT's quite ingeneous. Then comes the bullshit factor. I wear my ipod-mini with the arm band at the health-club and heads do turn..its just a darn cute little gadget, quaint and yet....powerful. But never mind that, all my music files are MP3's stored in a linux box read only ext2 partition running samba over my LAN. No way I'm letting apple or ANY company for that matter manage my music. Cheers.
I have an i-pod mini. Plug it to a DELL GX280 USB 2.0 interface running MS Windows XP... bam! I have a 4 GIG mass storage device in drive F: drag/drop file and state-of-the-art itunes to manage the music. I plug the same ipod in the apple imac USB 2.0 interface and bam! I have 4 GIG mass storage drag/drop device and state-of-the-art itunes to manage the music. Calling Creative Zen or RCA Lyra the ipod-killer is like calling a Cadillac the RollsRoyce of automobiles.
Unless you are one of the hackers in the X-Files trying to solve supernatural phenomena, the vicissitudes of the marasmic hacker-dude life in the SDP are at best dull and inconsequential. The real excitement comes with the dream of the ever--so-more-elusive life outside the net.
Also The Register reports that Bush campaign volunteers were instructed not to talk over the phone to anyone outside the US regarding the campaign. We had the "iron curtain" but hopefully I will go into history coining the following expression: "political intranet". The Interenet was already showing signs of regional divisions but this example may go for the records.
I'm considering to put the cooling aluminum laptop tray in the freezer overnight so I can get at least 30 min of work in the morining in my damn HP Pavillion ze4042 without the damn thing turning on the cpu fan that makes more noise than my neighboors leaf-blower. The laptop cooling trays are worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe you have to ponder on what exactly you want to learn and don't base your decisions on what you already know but rather what is that the interest you and the discipline/field/science that triggers your curiosity, your imagination and challenges your spirit.
Computer Science is a vast field and doesn't matter wich direction you choose to further you education, it will certainly complement it.
Don't settle for the cookie-cutters, seem a dream, prove real.
While carrots may go fine with meatloaf, the new disciplines and sciences you may master will give rise to a new you.
What saddens me the most is that there's a new cry out there stating that we all have to either, buy more hardware and software and/or become more savvy administrators to connect safely to the internet.
The true of the matter is that, yes, a reasonably safe-non-hackable OS can be created and sold to the masses. Heck, I can grab Mandrake Move and connect to the Internet and when Im done browsing and reading my email from some on-line service turn the machine off and puff!! THe system is clean as a whistle.
It appears we don't lack the resources, we lack the understanding.
Watch Oliver Stone "Wall Street".
an Aldous Huxley and Orwell and the Soilent Green and the Farenheit 451 and The Illustrated Man and T. Gilliam's Brazil and Planet of the Apes and
Bender's good'ol fear of ROBOT HELL!!!
To study in human behaviour and AI one MUST study all religions (the good ones and the not so good ones too).
Relgion and science fiction blends well. Is the marketing and sponsoring whats makes it go weird.
Dr. Zeus Dr. Zeus!!!!
Mr Taylor:
The loaded gun argument goes as follows:
"Guns aren't unsafe, people makes them unsafe"
Is Windows MS a loaded gun?
Thank you.
For years I griped at the ever-so-ugly web mapping services navigational tools. Google nail it right on the head! The grid refreshes and the edges instead of the nasty blank-hiccup of all the other mapping services.
Clearly all the other mapping services have been doing their stuff for years..then comes Google with a beta and whammy! The old services get caught with their pants down.
I well deserved tip of the hat for Google.
Start we Fedora. There. Your problem has been solved.
Install Apache, Install Wordpress and off you go! A better than average server at ZERO cost!
Later on you will find out that Wordpress works across all the major distros, and so Apache.
It is true that M$ usera are accustom to be spoon fed with state-of-the-art manuals and wizards that facilitate their work. This is not the case in the *nix world.
Yet,
my favorite motto for the OSS/*nix world is:
"You do the work, you reap the benefits"
You run a government agency in Brasil.
You use your budget to:
A. Pay a team of OSS programmers for IT support and in the meantime create jobs and promote domestic-grown-owned-designed and controlled IT resources.
B. Pay for comercial software licenses and thus cut jobs and have the Brasilian tax-payer money go to some trans-national company and meanwhile turn your back on domestic-grown-own-designed IT resources.
MS will shove enough free or discounted mackerel down your throat so you don't learn how to fish and remain somewhat hungry.
Im right behind you.
Divx is out there and is going strong.
I just bought a PHILLIPS DIVX player for the TV and it plays ALL my DIVXs w/ negligeable loss of quality on a standard TV.
Apple? No problem, DIVX for OSX.
Windows? No problem, DIVX for XP.
Linux? No problem, DIVX for most popular distros.
No computer?
No problem Videos Players are coming up with divx support.
Don't get caught between the APPLE vs. MICROSOFT codec wars, use DIVX and live to share your videos for generations to come.
My project wound down in October. Since then I've been doing documentation and non-programming duties.
./ for a few months, fall in Love or perhaps read Thomas Mann "Magic Mountain".
Yesterday I had to add a line to a file.
A simple unix command that a few months ago I could have spitted out like second nature...
was gone!
I walked aimlessly through the cube-maze string at blank faces trying to remember but I couldn't.
Was that a cat command? set? awk?
I asked some gurus and referred my to the >> command. Than I sat back in front of my white board and gently and swiftly the line emerged from my dry marker.
>echo "my line" >> myFile
Panick receded and was replaced with cautious optimism.
The understand the nature of volatile memory one has to read
The cute blond kid on those IBM comercials?
Linux remains out of the desktop mainstream.
Perhaps if they used a another character like Kip, the Brother of Napoleon Dynamite as the "Linux Boy".
The main problem I have faced with development projects were groups/teams work on different environments is:
Having to deal with compatiblity issues on my own due to a variety of environments and having this workload not properlly being tagged as part of the development of the product (just-fix-it-don't-want -to-hear-about-it syndrome).
In the embedded arena, powerful+expensive tools like Windriver Tornado tackle this problem quite well. Support..support..support.
Whith less sophisticated tools the amount of work related to tackle down compatibility issues (works fine in my system thank-you-very-much) is usually ignored and management tends to squint to much attempting to assess/understand the overall impact...(is that really a problem?).
That being said, multiplataform development is not a curse but a given in the embedded development arena.
The solution is again, buy expensive tools were the paid support takes care of cross-plataform issues or build a well-disciplined cross-department environment control group/resolution team.
Either way costs money.
cheers.
Ditto here.
I gave an honest shot to get WI-FI working on my HP PAvillion z220 w/pcmcia card and failed. I even dloaded the latest orinoco wi-fi drivers which activate my card all right but the traffic is dropped/ignored.
Plus R.H 9.0 apmd (advance power management ) couldn't figure out the bios to administer battery power. Basically I was pulled back to windows.
WI-FI and Linux is reminiscent of soundcards and Linux in most of the 90's. I bought the HP Pavillion explicitly to run RH 9.0 and now Im back to XP battling patches and spyware.
My advise to those who want to run unix-like OS on
a laptop...by a Mac.
The article got me reminiscent of Blade Runner..
Tyrell: Would you like to be modified?
Roy: Stay here. -- I had in mind something a little more radical.
Tyrell: What-- What seems to be the problem?
Roy: Death.
Tyrell: Death. Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you--
Roy: I want more life, fucker.
Tyrell: The facts of life. To make an alteration in the evolvment of an organic life system is fatal. A coding sequence cannot be revised once it's been established.
Roy: Why not?
Tyrell: Because by the second day of incubation, any cells that have undergone reversion mutations give rise to revertant colonies like rats leaving a sinking ship. Then the ship sinks.
Roy: What about EMS recombination.
Tyrell: We've already tried it. Ethyl methane sulfonate as an alkylating agent a potent mutagen It created a virus so lethal the subject was dead before he left the table.
Roy: Then a repressive protein that blocks the operating cells.
Tyrell: Wouldn't obstruct replication, but it does give rise to an error in replication so that the newly formed DNA strand carries the mutation and you've got a virus again. But, uh, this-- all of this is academic. You were made as well as we could make you.
Roy: But not to last.
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal son. You're quite a prize!
Roy: I've done questionable things.
Tyrell: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time.
Roy: Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you in heaven for
*IMHO I don't aproove of aproaching the self-termination of life as a "bug" or a on/off feature. Self termination is an intrinsic and fundamental element of the whole design.
Must we go through it again? The funniest joke was not found by mathematicians but by Ernest Scribbler, writer of jokes.
On topic thought I don't mind a computer telling me what to listen to (Apple's Shuffle).
Let me cap this with a joke.
Q: How can you tell a male-cell from a female-cell.
A: Pull down the "genes".
He just followed rules:
Rule 052 "Never ask when you can take"
Rule 058 "There is no substitute for success"
Rule 146 "Competition and fair play are mutually exclusive"
I have an imac G3 blue (egg shape) and I'm glad to point out that the number one feature which keeps me in awe is that is fanless. You can stream your media from a Linux server running appletalk buried somewhere in your basement, manually spin down the hard drive, and literally hear your own breathing while playing i-tunes. After 3 years still a work-of-art.
How fast can you flip bits without blinking?
The confluence of physics and information theory flows form the central maxim of quantum mechanics:at bottom, nature is discrete. A physical system can be described usinfg a FINITE number of bits. Each particle in the system acts like the logic gate of a computer.Its spin "axis" can point in one of two directions, therby encoding a bit, and can flip over, thereby performing a simple computational operation.
The system is also discrete in time. It takes a minimumn amount of time to flip a bit. The exact amount is given by the theorem named after two pioneers of the physics of information processing, Norman Margolus of MIT and Lev Levitin of BU. This theorem is related ot the Heisenber uncertainty principle, which describes the inherent trad-offs in measuring physical quantities, such as position and momentum or time and energy.
The theorem says that the time it takes to flip a bit, t, depends on the amount of energy you apply, E.
The more energy you apply,the shorter the time can be. Mathematically, the rule is
t>= h/4E
where h is the Planck's constant, the main parameter of quantum theory.
For example, one type of experimental quantum computer stores bits on protons and uses magnetic fields to flip them. The operations take place in the minimum time allowed by the Margolus-Levitin theorem.
From this theorem, a huge variety of conclusions can be drawn, from the limits on the geometry of spacetime to the computational capacity of the universe as a whole.
Quantum mechanics predicts that spactime is discrete. Distance and intervals cannot be measured to INFINITE precision; on small scales, spacetime is bubbly and foamy. The maximum ammount of information (matter) that can be put into a region of space depends on how small the bits are, and the CANNOT be smaller than foamy cells.
Physicists have long assumed that the size of this cells is the Planck lenght (lp) of 10E-35 meter, which is the distance at wich both quantum fluctuations and gravitational effects are important. If so, the foamy nature of spacetime will always be too minisucle to observe.
Seth Lloy and Y.Jack NG
excerpt taken from Scientific Amercian Nov 2004
Black Hole Computers.
And while waiting, I'll load an e-book about coffee tables on it and then place it on my coffee table in my living room and then add itty-bitty cork pad to my i-pod and voila! Ill get a coffee-table-coaster for my coffee table which plays tunes and has a coffee table e-book whose hard cover used to turn into a coffee table. Yowzaaa!
I level it with you.
Ipod sucks if you have Linux, no support there.
I also recoiled to the idea of being forced to used X-BRAND software to manage any device, then again..I didn't bough the ipod, it was a gift (he, he).
The wheel thing allows you to zoom through your list at variable speeds without having to press anything or lifting your thumb, It's a "infinite scroll". IT's quite ingeneous.
Then comes the bullshit factor. I wear my ipod-mini with the arm band at the health-club and heads do turn..its just a darn cute little gadget, quaint and yet....powerful.
But never mind that, all my music files are MP3's stored in a linux box read only ext2 partition running samba over my LAN. No way I'm letting apple or ANY company for that matter manage my music.
Cheers.
I have an i-pod mini.
Plug it to a DELL GX280 USB 2.0 interface running MS Windows XP...
bam! I have a 4 GIG mass storage device in drive F:
drag/drop file
and state-of-the-art itunes to manage the music.
I plug the same ipod in the apple imac USB 2.0 interface and bam! I have 4 GIG mass storage drag/drop device and state-of-the-art itunes to manage the music.
Calling Creative Zen or RCA Lyra the ipod-killer is like calling a Cadillac the RollsRoyce of automobiles.
Unless you are one of the hackers in the X-Files trying to solve supernatural phenomena, the vicissitudes of the marasmic hacker-dude life in the SDP are at best dull and inconsequential. The real excitement comes with the dream of the ever--so-more-elusive life outside the net.
Also The Register reports that Bush campaign volunteers were instructed not to talk over the phone to anyone outside the US regarding the campaign.
We had the "iron curtain" but hopefully I will go into history coining the following expression:
"political intranet".
The Interenet was already showing signs of regional divisions but this example may go for the records.
I'm considering to put the cooling aluminum laptop
tray in the freezer overnight so I can get at least
30 min of work in the morining in my damn HP Pavillion ze4042 without the damn thing turning on the cpu fan that makes more
noise than my neighboors leaf-blower.
The laptop cooling trays are worthless.
pp
___ = bb
tt