Only if you absolutely need the processing power, and need it today.
A (true) cautionary tale: company A develops some software for company B. Company B provides several high-end big money machines (multiple pentiums, hot-swappable SCSI raid array, rack mounted, etc).
The development process (which goes through a couple phases) takes more than two years. When the project is done, Company B will probably abandon the servers because (relative to what's available today) the machines are no longer worth the shipping costs it would take to come and get them.
The moral of the story is a corollary to Moore's law: the power of today's high-end super computer will very soon be mached by tomorrow's mid-range workstation (and then low-end home system, and then embedded chips...)
My Palm VII has more RAM in it than the main frame machine I wrote code for as an undergrad < mumble> years ago...
Yes. Yes, yes, YES!!! To my way of thinking, having a job that I enjoy going to every day is (ok, almost) as good as being independently wealthy and doing what I want. Sure, it's cliché, but there's a profound truth in that old saw that money can't buy you happiness.
If you want to be a developer, go write code. If you want to make a fortune, persue your career with that goal in mind. Either way, I would be very careful of getting caught up in the IPO lotto. As others have observed, there's lots of risks:
A company that hasn't gone public might never; their options might never be worth anything...
Even if the company does go public, the stock market is a notoriously unpredictable beast; there's no telling what your shares might end up worth
Even if the company goes public and your options are worth a lot of money, you will have to work through a long vesting period before you really own them. And 5 years can be a long time to hate your job.
There's got to be lots of companies out there saying "thars gold in them thar internet IPOs", and most of them have got to be more cluefull than LinuxOne. Do you really want to spend a long period of time working for a company with the primary goals of 1) Going through a successful IPO, 2) Making sure the stock price stays as high as possible, and 3) Very little else?
Some quotes on the subject, by people more eloquent than me:
When a distinguished, but elderly scientist
states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right.
When he states that something is impossible,
he is very probably wrong.
Arthur C. Clarke's - First Law
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-George Bernard Shaw
I can't speak for other/.-ers, but I'm not really interested in people who want to talk about what can't be done...
I'm not sure how "geeky" these people are, but certainly they had a strong influence on how I (and every slashdotter) live our lives:
Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorem proves that there is a limit on what computers can do
William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, inventors of the transistor
JFK, for insisting that we "send a man to the moon, and return him safely to the earth"
Jack Kirby and Robert Noyce, who (independently) invented the integrated circuit
John McCarthy -- while John Backus was inventing Fortran and Grace Hopper was inventing Cobol, he came up with Lisp. While Backus and Hopper certainly deserve their own due, it still boggles me that a language like Lisp traces its roots right back to the earliest days of high level languages.
BTW, I would highly recommend computer.org/history as a very cool "History Of Computing" website.
Cold weather made the sealant material brittle, causing it to crack prior to Challenger's launch
Cold weather did not made the O rings brittle, it made them less malleable. And the O rings were fine until the boosters starting to flex during launch. Check out What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman, which contains (among other things) Dr. Feynman's account of his experience on the NASA comittee charged with finding out why Challenger exploded.
[The Broken God has] been out of print for a while now
In the US. Those in the UK (or with lots of disposable income) might wish to check out a mazon.co.uk, which lists The Broken God as "usually dispatched in 24 hours"
The infomarco home page claims they have technology which connects people who have questions with people who have answers, in radically new ways.
Maybe they do, but I sure didn't see it. Of course, the site is just getting started, but so far, the site seems to be geared toward queries that can be asked in a single question ("How do I cast (sic) a long to a string", "Let me know if you find any bugs on this site").
The same sort of questions that can be answered by a careful search on deja.com, or your favorite search engine, probably with no more work that it would take to turn up the answer on infomarco.
Something like this might work if infomarco would be willing to work as a "reference librarian" type service (or even a "research assistant" type service for those with more complex problems and deeper pockets). As it is, it seems like all they want is to be deja-ebay.com...
How about countries that used to be in the old Soviet Bloc for firewalls? Of course, it would have to be explaned to people too young to remember when "Iron Curtain" used to be a regularly featured phrase on the nightly news.
You could use the names of the Great Lakes for gateway machines (think St. Lawrence Seaway). This has the extra bonus that you can name the biggest & beefiest of the lot "Superior":-)
You can also use county/parish names (boring, but there's lots of choices, so not much danger of running out).
Also, a note on long names -- at the school I did my grad work at, they aliased all computer names to their 3-letter prefix. So instead of typing "telnet bougainvillea" (the naming theme was desert plants, btw), you just type "telnet bou", and you're there.
-y, typing from Yosemite, which started out in the "Ship names from Star Trek" group, but also works in "national parks" and "Looney Tunes" categories.
Sure, the 1st amendment gives USAns the right of free speech. Katz seems to be arguing that speach should also be free of unpleasant consequences.
Or is he saying that free speech doesn't include disagreeing with others? If Jesse Ventura says "people who support organized religion are weak-minded and needy", that's free speech. If I say he's wrong, why that's censorship! And God forbit if I suggest I'd rather not have a Governor who takes such a dim view of an important part of my life!
Katz writes "Americans have always embraced freedom until somebody says something they don't like". Pots & kettles, Jon. Pots & kettles.
-y, apparently still under "the hoary grip of ideologues, educators, clergymen and dogmatic politicians"
As someone whose gone down the grad school path and lived to tell about it, I can recommend getting an MS as an excellent way to spend a couple three years really focused on getting some depth in CS that you don't really get as an undergrad (at least it was true in my case).
IMO, there's little reason to get a PHD if you don't want to do research and/or teach at the college level. If you do want a PHD, be warned it's lots of years of hard work for very little pay (when I was in school, TAs & RAs were paid on a scale that capped out under $13k/year!). You really need to be a True Believer to go this route.
Also, you might go into industry and work on a graduate degree part time. But then you have the problem of coding 40 hours a week (probably more, unless you're very lucky) before even starting school work -- it's easy to get burned out fast.
Bottom line: your career (if it's going to be successful long-term) is going to be a process of continuing education, and an MS is a good way to start off, even though it does mean a few more years before you have a salary that doesn't suck.
Slashdot Mirror
A (true) cautionary tale: company A develops some software for company B. Company B provides several high-end big money machines (multiple pentiums, hot-swappable SCSI raid array, rack mounted, etc).
The development process (which goes through a couple phases) takes more than two years. When the project is done, Company B will probably abandon the servers because (relative to what's available today) the machines are no longer worth the shipping costs it would take to come and get them.
The moral of the story is a corollary to Moore's law: the power of today's high-end super computer will very soon be mached by tomorrow's mid-range workstation (and then low-end home system, and then embedded chips...)
My Palm VII has more RAM in it than the main frame machine I wrote code for as an undergrad < mumble> years ago...
Yes. Yes, yes, YES!!! To my way of thinking, having a job that I enjoy going to every day is (ok, almost) as good as being independently wealthy and doing what I want. Sure, it's cliché, but there's a profound truth in that old saw that money can't buy you happiness.
If you want to be a developer, go write code. If you want to make a fortune, persue your career with that goal in mind. Either way, I would be very careful of getting caught up in the IPO lotto. As others have observed, there's lots of risks:
- A company that hasn't gone public might never; their options might never be worth anything...
- Even if the company does go public, the stock market is a notoriously unpredictable beast; there's no telling what your shares might end up worth
- Even if the company goes public and your options are worth a lot of money, you will have to work through a long vesting period before you really own them. And 5 years can be a long time to hate your job.
There's got to be lots of companies out there saying "thars gold in them thar internet IPOs", and most of them have got to be more cluefull than LinuxOne. Do you really want to spend a long period of time working for a company with the primary goals of 1) Going through a successful IPO, 2) Making sure the stock price stays as high as possible, and 3) Very little else?-y
Modern media are in (to a distressingly large degree) in love with fear mongering. It produces ratings.
- Kurt Gödel, whose incompleteness theorem proves that there is a limit on what computers can do
- William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, inventors of the transistor
- JFK, for insisting that we "send a man to the moon, and return him safely to the earth"
- Jack Kirby and Robert Noyce, who (independently) invented the integrated circuit
- John McCarthy -- while John Backus was inventing Fortran and Grace Hopper was inventing Cobol, he came up with Lisp. While Backus and Hopper certainly deserve their own due, it still boggles me that a language like Lisp traces its roots right back to the earliest days of high level languages.
BTW, I would highly recommend computer.org/history as a very cool "History Of Computing" website.Cold weather did not made the O rings brittle, it made them less malleable. And the O rings were fine until the boosters starting to flex during launch. Check out What Do You Care What Other People Think?, by Richard Feynman, which contains (among other things) Dr. Feynman's account of his experience on the NASA comittee charged with finding out why Challenger exploded.
In the US. Those in the UK (or with lots of disposable income) might wish to check out a mazon.co.uk, which lists The Broken God as "usually dispatched in 24 hours"
The infomarco home page claims they have technology which connects people who have questions with people who have answers, in radically new ways.
Maybe they do, but I sure didn't see it. Of course, the site is just getting started, but so far, the site seems to be geared toward queries that can be asked in a single question ("How do I cast (sic) a long to a string", "Let me know if you find any bugs on this site").
The same sort of questions that can be answered by a careful search on deja.com, or your favorite search engine, probably with no more work that it would take to turn up the answer on infomarco.
Something like this might work if infomarco would be willing to work as a "reference librarian" type service (or even a "research assistant" type service for those with more complex problems and deeper pockets). As it is, it seems like all they want is to be deja-ebay.com...
-y
How about countries that used to be in the old Soviet Bloc for firewalls? Of course, it would have to be explaned to people too young to remember when "Iron Curtain" used to be a regularly featured phrase on the nightly news.
:-)
You could use the names of the Great Lakes for gateway machines (think St. Lawrence Seaway). This has the extra bonus that you can name the biggest & beefiest of the lot "Superior"
You can also use county/parish names (boring, but there's lots of choices, so not much danger of running out).
Also, a note on long names -- at the school I did my grad work at, they aliased all computer names to their 3-letter prefix. So instead of typing "telnet bougainvillea" (the naming theme was desert plants, btw), you just type "telnet bou", and you're there.
-y, typing from Yosemite, which started out in the "Ship names from Star Trek" group, but also works in "national parks" and "Looney Tunes" categories.
np: Pretenders, "Pretenders"
*I've* never seen Lara Croft sit down at a keyboard.
I'm pretty sure I saw her using a laptop during one of those inter-level movies.
At the end of the first level of TR2. (Disclaimer: I just finished the level yesterday, so it's fresh in my mind)
np: King Crimson "In The Court Of The Crimson King"
Sure, the 1st amendment gives USAns the right of free speech. Katz seems to be arguing that speach should also be free of unpleasant consequences.
Or is he saying that free speech doesn't include disagreeing with others? If Jesse Ventura says "people who support organized religion are weak-minded and needy", that's free speech. If I say he's wrong, why that's censorship! And God forbit if I suggest I'd rather not have a Governor who takes such a dim view of an important part of my life!
Katz writes "Americans have always embraced freedom until somebody says something they don't like". Pots & kettles, Jon. Pots & kettles.
-y, apparently still under "the hoary grip of ideologues, educators, clergymen and dogmatic politicians"
IMO, there's little reason to get a PHD if you don't want to do research and/or teach at the college level. If you do want a PHD, be warned it's lots of years of hard work for very little pay (when I was in school, TAs & RAs were paid on a scale that capped out under $13k/year!). You really need to be a True Believer to go this route.
Also, you might go into industry and work on a graduate degree part time. But then you have the problem of coding 40 hours a week (probably more, unless you're very lucky) before even starting school work -- it's easy to get burned out fast.
Bottom line: your career (if it's going to be successful long-term) is going to be a process of continuing education, and an MS is a good way to start off, even though it does mean a few more years before you have a salary that doesn't suck.