Price is alway an issue. You are using the space so you should invest in decent storage capacity. I personally spin about 15 SATA drives off of a single raid card.
I recomend the following: Build a decent NAS head with the following recipe and share it out to all your other devices.
buy a 4U case with ~ 20 drive bays that link to a SATA bus ~$300 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219041)
-You may need to mod the case if the port multiplier is SAS instead if SATA buy a high point RAID controller in the 2000 class or higher (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115049) (32 drives max with 4 port port multipliers and mini sas - 4 sata cable) Start with 4x 2TB drives (RAID 5, 3 + hot spare) 1 gigabit ethernet hub
then attach it to a cheap cpu with a good amount of ram and gigabit ethernet. Stick the storage kit in the garage and run cat 6. Put the hub in the house and wire it to any machine playing back HD video, for the rest I find you can get away with wireless G.
You are looking at about a 1K investment in kit for storage. For OS I'd use your favorite flavor of linux, gentoo for me but I recomend deb or ubuntu for other people, that supports lvm. This way you can add new drives and expand the storage dynamically. You can expand ext3 or ext4 easilly, you just can't shrink them. In my opinion there no need to go exotic with the FS.
Once you set up the storage share is both via nfs to anything playing high def content and samba for everyone else. Then sit back, relax and enjoy.
I have a G2 on T-Mobile. Put cyanogen on it and use any carrier. That does involve rooting the phone, but if you buy a phone fro mthier list of supported devices its really really easy. http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
The funny part is, that as written there is nothing wrong with the statement:
"Calling R a programming language is like calling Mathematica or Matlab a language...."
Since by strict definition they are Turing Complete. So yes R is equivalent to Mathlab and Mathmatica, they are programming languages. I'm inferring by inflection that this isn't what the author intends say.
If I understand the intent of the original comment, the statement aptly show the difference between those use use programming languages and people who know what they are and how they work. Hobbes' and slashdotmsiriv's comments have the flavor of people who have written or know much about a programming languages internals. daknapp appears to be saying "This doesn't look like anything I've used, must not be a programming language".
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln
I did my senior project in college on this in 1998... At that time I was looking at something from MIT called the exo-kernel and comparing it to some 2.4 version of the linux kernel. Back in 1998 the problem was mainly that nobody had invested in that particular mirco-kernel technology, unlike say mach, because it was a research project. In my conclusion, it was clear I could not do a meaningful comparison of complex applications on both OSes due to its lack of maturity. But there was one thing that was clear, the design philosophy behind the micro kernel allowed a much more flexible way to interact with the hardware.
The time it would take to design an implement a what the equivalent of driver would be were smaller. In the end it puts more flexibility into the hands of the application designer with the kernel taking care of just the bare minimum. The initial work at the time reported a 10x improvement in performance since you could customize so much of how the hardware resources were being used. This of course comes at a price, in addition to developing the application, you need to develop the drivers it uses, possibly increasing the time to write anything significant.
But in the end, flexability was key, and you can see some of the microkernel design philosophies start to seep into the linux kernel. Take a look at kernel modules for example. The code is already being abstracted out, now if it just effectively was designed to run in userspace.
My thoughts are that in the end the microkernel will win do to the fact that I can engineer a more complex OS that is cheaper to change, not because it is faster. Tis is the compromise that was made with compilers vs. machine language programming. In the end I think Tanenbaum will win, linux will become a microkernel out of necessity, and Linus as it turns out would have gotten a good grade from Dr. Tanenbaum. He just would have handed his final project in 40 years late by the time it happens.
I have one. It puts me ahead im my field, and has opened up oppertunities that I would not otherwise have. If you can stick it out and get the degree from a decent univerisity then it will pay for itself. If you go full time the degree will cost less since you can usually get a teaching position (TA), and where I went they waived tuition for TAs. In addition, when you have one people care less about certifications, they assume you'll get up to speed on your own. Hey they know your capable, after all you have an MS.
Not everything is an earnings analysis, you need to look beyond the pure balance sheet. The finances of it make it look like you won't break even for a long time. In my opinion, what the earnings analysis leaves out is the other jobs you become qualified for. So when oppertunities dry up, you still have skill sets that are applicable. This causes more continued employment. I've had situations, where if I didn't have the skills I learned in grad school I would have been quickly downsized. So factor in continous employment to the earnings equation. Think about it, only 10-15% of people get advanced degrees. If you come to the interview with one, it almost instantly puts you in the top 85-90% of candidates in terms of skill in the interviewer's mind.
Did you know that the SEC and the PCAOB are very aware of the cost of compliance. To this end the SEC exempts about 50% of smaller business (those with a market cap 70 mill) from the rigor required for 404 compliance. The article is based on an out of context quote. In addition, this is one small group complaining, not how the law is actually applied. You can refer to the PCAOB web site and read or view the discussions and advisory group meetings to have a greater understanding about the exemptions, from the source, not a disgruntled business owner.
6 250 GB SATA drives ~ $700 cheap MB & CPU & mem ~ $100 (Less if your a better bargin hunter) case and power ~ $50 2 4 channel SATA controlers ~ $30 coffee ~ $20 Gentoo Linux ~ free
If you are more than just a desktop user it can be done in a few hours for ~$880 in parts.. well less now since 250 GB drives have dropped in price. The SATA drivers are a bit dogy on my setup, I'm still looking into why. But for playing mp3 and movies its not a problem at all. I only run into issues where there is alot of R/W disk IO. One of the drives decides to drop out of the array if I run squid on the raid partition or try to do transcoding. So, serving stuff up it does pretty well. If the array is thrasing do to writes I run into problems. For what most of us would use it for though I'm willing to wait till the raid or SATA drivers are fixed for about $500 in savings.
I spent more time putting the HW together than I did configuring the disks. If you have any kind of know how DIY, there are free tools for everything else they describe. If you want wireless add another couple of bucks for a wireless card.
sad day, this should have been fought harder by the scientific community. I fear for the future. This needs to be reversed because it is wrong. We can ill afford to have a generation so egregously misled.
If you are a part of the community at large, ridicule them, don't give them jobs, don't offer them scholarships. Give their degree no wieght, shun them. Let the parents feel the sting of their decsion as their children cannot find jobs and cannot go to college. Anything else is an endorsement of their perversion of science.
This is in a sense damning the children for the sins of the father... desperate times however....
Think of it, the mozilla process is open to public scrunity. I can go over to the bug list and look at all the documented flaws.
How many people have access to IE's bug list? Remember, if a critical bug is reported to MS, they may choose not to release it to the public. For all we know there may be 100 critical flaws documented.... but they've only admited to 8 or so publicly.
Unless the two products are compared in a like manner, (full disclosure), symantec's comparison is little more than marketing propaganda to gain attention. That is unless they have secret operatives with access to the internal MS bug DB.
As much as the people you will meet. Reasons why the Ivy Leagues are so sought after is as much the education as the people you will associate with. People are more likely to hire someone they know, even if only vaguely.
When deciding who you may want to switch too, take a look at what companies they have close associations to and if they do things you are interested in. If there are alot of U of whatever grads at the company you are appying to, it will give you a leg up.
To evaluate your current situation, look at who's gradating this year and what jobs they are getting. If 90% of CS majors are getting Help Desk Jobs and you want to be a programmer you may want to consider switching.
In college I had a professor that graded assignments but didn't count them toward you grade. There was no incentive to cheat and you could learn from your mistakes. Exams were your whole grade. I know this approach is possible, this was a math class and relates very well to the manner in which algorithms are normally taught.
When I was teaching I did it differently, 80% of the grade was in-class quizzes and tests I proctored. The remaining %20 were programs. And I stated at the begining of class, if they look alike you and the person you cheated from get 0 and I'll probably fail you for the semester.
Both techniques produced very low instances of cheating by taking away the incentive. Risk vs reward is somthing most students understand.
Brookhaven National Labs is awsome man. I interned there one summer and forcefields are the least of their toys. The place is out in the middle of Long Island NY and looks almost totally harmless from the outside. Inside they have all the latest and greatest science tools, everything from nuclear reactors to partical accelators. 10 Years ago they figured out how to do 3D medical imaging like you see in science fiction movies and methods to do surgury with radiation beams. If your ever out that way sign up for the tour, its enlightening.
Atlas Shruged by Ayn Rand
Its an intersting perspective on capatialism, and it is a sci-fi book. You get cultural goodness and tech in the same basket. Granted things mainly get as advanced as a really uber railroad, but consider the publish date:). The line I like from the book the most so far, to paraphrase:
"What is you saw atlas, the god who holds up the world bleeding and struggling under the wieght of the world? What if the harder he struggled the hevier the world got? What would he do?.....
Shrug."
Or if your political bend is a little differnt, "The Moon is a Harsh mistress" by Heinlien. Both good sci-fi... both good reads.
The artical almost described my Middle/High School to a tee even though it wasn't. Fortunalty for me I had two advantages: later in high school I was able to find persuits that were rewarding and not just a sham of the education system and I was bigger than many of the bullies. It was awkward, I was still apart of the social ridicule but most people were scared to pick on me physically. I remember clearly once the playground bully decided to try to take my lunch money, so I sat there for 5 minutes with him in a headlock trying to figure out what to do next. I clearly didn't want to hurt him. How, exactly do you explain that to the lunch lady, he tried to take my lunch money so I beat him up...
I do know that one of the thing that did help were the Advanced Placement classes. About junior year when college seemed more real, there was a little respect for people taking those classes. Things turned around a little then, but it wasn't till college that I started to enjoy school.
Interesting comentery though, we lock up our teenagers because we haven't figured out a way to make them econmically usable in society, and this is the result. Thats a tough one to solve.
Yep, its that time of year again. Time to mourn my singleness with copious amounts of alcohol. For me its not that I can't talk to women, I just find that the one that have anything interesting to say are usually already taken:P. To all the guys out there feeling desprate... hold out for the right one, I've been down the wrong path before, being single sux but it beats being with the wrong one. May you all be having a better Valintines then I will!
I live in an apartment so I cannot fly a flag of my own, but my heart and thoughts are with our astronauts. Their selflessness, sacrifice, and courage will not be forgotten. They are the ones who rushed in where angels feared to tread to preserve our place in the stars. I am an american and I mourn openly and cry freely for our our fallen hero's. My flag flys at half mast in my heart.
-Darkseer
Do what ever it take to get an interview. There are usually two parts, the business cheese and the tech interview. The firs guy just makes sure you don't just drool on yourself. The tech interview is the key, if you impress the second guy who is usually already an admin, your probably a lock. That has been my experience.
I too had a similar experience. Sounds like you just need to see more of what computer science is about. The classroom is a great place to learn a good set of skills, but I found it really doens't get interesting unitl later, in the real world or grad school. Consider this, I've run into a variety of people in my career and in my graduate studies that I consider true masters of their craft. They all had one thing in common, they could leverage their skills to do somthing fun or interesting. While your still dealing with off by one errors, when you fix that error and look at the whole puzzle that you've been working on you feel a definite wave of coolness wash over you. Nobody I know of likes to hunt down null pointer exceptions, however, if fixing the exception makes some hot new JSP render a kick'en page....the results are definitely worth it. My advise is: take a look at what kinds of things you can do with computers...if you think you would enjoy being the creator of such things stick with it, otherwise move on. Write a program for yourself to do somthing cool, remind yourself why you started this in the first place.
I've been on both side of the equation as both a teacher of CS and a student, I can say that this is one of the most difficult problems both teachers and students face besides the homework:) On the student's side is the age old question "Whats considered cheating?". Is it ok to copy a printf or cout so that you can use some cool formatting or just get an idea of how those funtions work? In other words, where is the line between original thought and reference material, how much help is too much. As a teacher, my reservation about assigning group work was determining who did what. Did one person work tirelessly on this for a week or was there equal contribution. Then there is the additional burdon/art of balancing the groups so that everyone has a chance to complete the project and the quicker students don't take the attitude "I would have gotten an A if it wasn't for my groupmates". Often you have to sacrifice the interesting projects to become somthing easier because at this stage of the game its as important to work well with others as it is be be knowledgable in CS. All in all its an art, and it depends on what the teacher is trying to teach. I know its a cop out but its true, the value of doing a group assignment is taken on a class by class basis usually. The teacher has to trust the students to "play nice" so they get somthing out of it because in the end, and this is the scary part, there is no real way to tell who did what when the instructor is so far removed from the teams interactions and creative process.
First of all what does this have to do with code red? The virus is self replicating and the creater was using a, from what I've been reading, unpublished exploit. After the first 50, 60, or some small amount of computers are compromised the thing pretty much runs itself. Theoretically this could have all started with manually cracking one computer and no human intervention after that. Not publising would not have stopped the spread. Its not like 20,000 little crackers were tirelessly manually installing code red on a zillion different computers and then telling their friends how to do it. At least if the exploit is published, the poor slob who gets hit with this virus first has some idea what to look for. IIS is out there and you can't stop people from reverse engineering it no matter haow many laws you pass. The best wepon we have is to keep the "good guys" as well informed as possible. I want to know when the vendor knows, maybe I can't fix it but I sure as hell don't want to be flying blind. < sarcasm > Yeah, lets intentionally limit the information I have access to so I can be even more unprepared when a virus hits.</sarcasm >....riiiiiight good move.
I had no choice, My program only allowed a CS degree. Even as I look back though, it was the better choice. I had the opertunity to see the fundamentals of how the computer works and that give me an edge over my collegues. The classic example I like to give:
Your writting a program that parses a config file, and refereces this file many times. Due to abstraction and different programming tricks it is equally easy to read the file once and put it into an interal datastructure, or read the file everytime you need somthing from the config file. Both methods took about the same # of lines of code.
The collegue of mine who originally wrote the code chose to read the file everytime we needed a config parameter. Eventually we integrated and we were suffering a huge performance loss. I knew exactly why, back in OS we learned that disk operations are orders of magnitude slower than memory operations because they are mechnaical.
Most experienced programmers will laugh at this and say, "Of course you idiot, file I/O is expensive, duh". But thats the key, I wasn't an experienced programmer, this was my first attempt at programming in the large. Knowing the fundamentals of how the computer works I was able to reason out why I was having a problem. I knew the why not just the how.
CIS allows you to become an experienced user,
CS allows you to become a better hacker.
The fact remains the people who are good at what they do don't need a college degree to prove it. However, I can't believe I'm saying this, there is the idea of broadening your horizions. If you can go to a half way decent institution odds are you'll meet some really smart people. Reguardless of what their major or area of research they may inspire you to do somthing you normally would not. I was a computer geek through my very recent college years, but I also acted, preformed music, helped build set for a play. There were people smart and interesting enough to convince me to remove myself from in front of the computer screen. I like to think of myself a s a decent computer guy, but because of college I learned how to do more than drink beer and code. I like to think my life is more interesting because of it. The same cannot be said for everyones experience in college, but it worked for me.
I work for a consulting company who just implemented CVS for a client. The were using VSS and had to be shown the light. They were actually loosing productivity do to currupt version databases and VSS's oh so discriptive data files. This book helped me and others easily learn the intracacies of CVS and implement CVS in a sane manner for both remote and local development. I highly recommed it to anyone doing Config Management work!! The watches section was especially useful for what we were doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Price is alway an issue. You are using the space so you should invest in decent storage capacity. I personally spin about 15 SATA drives off of a single raid card.
I recomend the following:
Build a decent NAS head with the following recipe and share it out to all your other devices.
buy a 4U case with ~ 20 drive bays that link to a SATA bus ~$300 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811219041)
-You may need to mod the case if the port multiplier is SAS instead if SATA
buy a high point RAID controller in the 2000 class or higher (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115049) (32 drives max with 4 port port multipliers and mini sas - 4 sata cable)
Start with 4x 2TB drives (RAID 5, 3 + hot spare)
1 gigabit ethernet hub
then attach it to a cheap cpu with a good amount of ram and gigabit ethernet. Stick the storage kit in the garage and run cat 6. Put the hub in the house and wire it to any machine playing back HD video, for the rest I find you can get away with wireless G.
You are looking at about a 1K investment in kit for storage. For OS I'd use your favorite flavor of linux, gentoo for me but I recomend deb or ubuntu for other people, that supports lvm. This way you can add new drives and expand the storage dynamically. You can expand ext3 or ext4 easilly, you just can't shrink them. In my opinion there no need to go exotic with the FS.
Once you set up the storage share is both via nfs to anything playing high def content and samba for everyone else. Then sit back, relax and enjoy.
I have a G2 on T-Mobile. Put cyanogen on it and use any carrier. That does involve rooting the phone, but if you buy a phone fro mthier list of supported devices its really really easy.
http://www.cyanogenmod.com/
-Darkseer
The funny part is, that as written there is nothing wrong with the statement:
"Calling R a programming language is like calling Mathematica or Matlab a language. ..."
Since by strict definition they are Turing Complete. So yes R is equivalent to Mathlab and Mathmatica, they are programming languages. I'm inferring by inflection that this isn't what the author intends say.
If I understand the intent of the original comment, the statement aptly show the difference between those use use programming languages and people who know what they are and how they work. Hobbes' and slashdotmsiriv's comments have the flavor of people who have written or know much about a programming languages internals. daknapp appears to be saying "This doesn't look like anything I've used, must not be a programming language".
"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." -- Abraham Lincoln
I did my senior project in college on this in 1998... At that time I was looking at something from MIT called the exo-kernel and comparing it to some 2.4 version of the linux kernel. Back in 1998 the problem was mainly that nobody had invested in that particular mirco-kernel technology, unlike say mach, because it was a research project. In my conclusion, it was clear I could not do a meaningful comparison of complex applications on both OSes due to its lack of maturity. But there was one thing that was clear, the design philosophy behind the micro kernel allowed a much more flexible way to interact with the hardware.
The time it would take to design an implement a what the equivalent of driver would be were smaller. In the end it puts more flexibility into the hands of the application designer with the kernel taking care of just the bare minimum. The initial work at the time reported a 10x improvement in performance since you could customize so much of how the hardware resources were being used. This of course comes at a price, in addition to developing the application, you need to develop the drivers it uses, possibly increasing the time to write anything significant.
But in the end, flexability was key, and you can see some of the microkernel design philosophies start to seep into the linux kernel. Take a look at kernel modules for example. The code is already being abstracted out, now if it just effectively was designed to run in userspace.
My thoughts are that in the end the microkernel will win do to the fact that I can engineer a more complex OS that is cheaper to change, not because it is faster. Tis is the compromise that was made with compilers vs. machine language programming. In the end I think Tanenbaum will win, linux will become a microkernel out of necessity, and Linus as it turns out would have gotten a good grade from Dr. Tanenbaum. He just would have handed his final project in 40 years late by the time it happens.
I have one. It puts me ahead im my field, and has opened up oppertunities that I would not otherwise have. If you can stick it out and get the degree from a decent univerisity then it will pay for itself. If you go full time the degree will cost less since you can usually get a teaching position (TA), and where I went they waived tuition for TAs. In addition, when you have one people care less about certifications, they assume you'll get up to speed on your own. Hey they know your capable, after all you have an MS.
Not everything is an earnings analysis, you need to look beyond the pure balance sheet. The finances of it make it look like you won't break even for a long time. In my opinion, what the earnings analysis leaves out is the other jobs you become qualified for. So when oppertunities dry up, you still have skill sets that are applicable. This causes more continued employment. I've had situations, where if I didn't have the skills I learned in grad school I would have been quickly downsized. So factor in continous employment to the earnings equation. Think about it, only 10-15% of people get advanced degrees. If you come to the interview with one, it almost instantly puts you in the top 85-90% of candidates in terms of skill in the interviewer's mind.
Don't leave home without one.
Did you know that the SEC and the PCAOB are very aware of the cost of compliance. To this end the SEC exempts about 50% of smaller business (those with a market cap 70 mill) from the rigor required for 404 compliance. The article is based on an out of context quote. In addition, this is one small group complaining, not how the law is actually applied. You can refer to the PCAOB web site and read or view the discussions and advisory group meetings to have a greater understanding about the exemptions, from the source, not a disgruntled business owner.
you posted it seconds before I was about to. Thanks...
End result: ~ 1 TB RAID 5
6 250 GB SATA drives ~ $700
cheap MB & CPU & mem ~ $100 (Less if your a better bargin hunter)
case and power ~ $50
2 4 channel SATA controlers ~ $30
coffee ~ $20
Gentoo Linux ~ free
If you are more than just a desktop user it can be done in a few hours for ~$880 in parts.. well less now since 250 GB drives have dropped in price. The SATA drivers are a bit dogy on my setup, I'm still looking into why. But for playing mp3 and movies its not a problem at all. I only run into issues where there is alot of R/W disk IO. One of the drives decides to drop out of the array if I run squid on the raid partition or try to do transcoding. So, serving stuff up it does pretty well. If the array is thrasing do to writes I run into problems. For what most of us would use it for though I'm willing to wait till the raid or SATA drivers are fixed for about $500 in savings.
I spent more time putting the HW together than I did configuring the disks. If you have any kind of know how DIY, there are free tools for everything else they describe. If you want wireless add another couple of bucks for a wireless card.
sad day, this should have been fought harder by the scientific community. I fear for the future. This needs to be reversed because it is wrong. We can ill afford to have a generation so egregously misled.
If you are a part of the community at large, ridicule them, don't give them jobs, don't offer them scholarships. Give their degree no wieght, shun them. Let the parents feel the sting of their decsion as their children cannot find jobs and cannot go to college. Anything else is an endorsement of their perversion of science.
This is in a sense damning the children for the sins of the father... desperate times however....
Think of it, the mozilla process is open to public scrunity. I can go over to the bug list and look at all the documented flaws.
How many people have access to IE's bug list? Remember, if a critical bug is reported to MS, they may choose not to release it to the public. For all we know there may be 100 critical flaws documented.... but they've only admited to 8 or so publicly.
Unless the two products are compared in a like manner, (full disclosure), symantec's comparison is little more than marketing propaganda to gain attention. That is unless they have secret operatives with access to the internal MS bug DB.
As much as the people you will meet. Reasons why the Ivy Leagues are so sought after is as much the education as the people you will associate with. People are more likely to hire someone they know, even if only vaguely.
When deciding who you may want to switch too, take a look at what companies they have close associations to and if they do things you are interested in. If there are alot of U of whatever grads at the company you are appying to, it will give you a leg up.
To evaluate your current situation, look at who's gradating this year and what jobs they are getting. If 90% of CS majors are getting Help Desk Jobs and you want to be a programmer you may want to consider switching.
In college I had a professor that graded assignments but didn't count them toward you grade. There was no incentive to cheat and you could learn from your mistakes. Exams were your whole grade. I know this approach is possible, this was a math class and relates very well to the manner in which algorithms are normally taught.
When I was teaching I did it differently, 80% of the grade was in-class quizzes and tests I proctored. The remaining %20 were programs. And I stated at the begining of class, if they look alike you and the person you cheated from get 0 and I'll probably fail you for the semester.
Both techniques produced very low instances of cheating by taking away the incentive. Risk vs reward is somthing most students understand.
Brookhaven National Labs is awsome man. I interned there one summer and forcefields are the least of their toys. The place is out in the middle of Long Island NY and looks almost totally harmless from the outside. Inside they have all the latest and greatest science tools, everything from nuclear reactors to partical accelators. 10 Years ago they figured out how to do 3D medical imaging like you see in science fiction movies and methods to do surgury with radiation beams. If your ever out that way sign up for the tour, its enlightening.
Atlas Shruged by Ayn Rand Its an intersting perspective on capatialism, and it is a sci-fi book. You get cultural goodness and tech in the same basket. Granted things mainly get as advanced as a really uber railroad, but consider the publish date :). The line I like from the book the most so far, to paraphrase:
"What is you saw atlas, the god who holds up the world bleeding and struggling under the wieght of the world? What if the harder he struggled the hevier the world got? What would he do? .....
Shrug."
Or if your political bend is a little differnt, "The Moon is a Harsh mistress" by Heinlien. Both good sci-fi... both good reads.
I do know that one of the thing that did help were the Advanced Placement classes. About junior year when college seemed more real, there was a little respect for people taking those classes. Things turned around a little then, but it wasn't till college that I started to enjoy school.
Interesting comentery though, we lock up our teenagers because we haven't figured out a way to make them econmically usable in society, and this is the result. Thats a tough one to solve.
Yep, its that time of year again. Time to mourn my singleness with copious amounts of alcohol. For me its not that I can't talk to women, I just find that the one that have anything interesting to say are usually already taken :P. To all the guys out there feeling desprate... hold out for the right one, I've been down the wrong path before, being single sux but it beats being with the wrong one. May you all be having a better Valintines then I will!
I live in an apartment so I cannot fly a flag of my own, but my heart and thoughts are with our astronauts. Their selflessness, sacrifice, and courage will not be forgotten. They are the ones who rushed in where angels feared to tread to preserve our place in the stars. I am an american and I mourn openly and cry freely for our our fallen hero's. My flag flys at half mast in my heart.
-Darkseer
Do what ever it take to get an interview. There are usually two parts, the business cheese and the tech interview. The firs guy just makes sure you don't just drool on yourself. The tech interview is the key, if you impress the second guy who is usually already an admin, your probably a lock. That has been my experience.
I too had a similar experience. Sounds like you just need to see more of what computer science is about. The classroom is a great place to learn a good set of skills, but I found it really doens't get interesting unitl later, in the real world or grad school. Consider this, I've run into a variety of people in my career and in my graduate studies that I consider true masters of their craft. They all had one thing in common, they could leverage their skills to do somthing fun or interesting. While your still dealing with off by one errors, when you fix that error and look at the whole puzzle that you've been working on you feel a definite wave of coolness wash over you. Nobody I know of likes to hunt down null pointer exceptions, however, if fixing the exception makes some hot new JSP render a kick'en page....the results are definitely worth it. My advise is: take a look at what kinds of things you can do with computers...if you think you would enjoy being the creator of such things stick with it, otherwise move on. Write a program for yourself to do somthing cool, remind yourself why you started this in the first place.
I've been on both side of the equation as both a teacher of CS and a student, I can say that this is one of the most difficult problems both teachers and students face besides the homework :) On the student's side is the age old question "Whats considered cheating?". Is it ok to copy a printf or cout so that you can use some cool formatting or just get an idea of how those funtions work? In other words, where is the line between original thought and reference material, how much help is too much. As a teacher, my reservation about assigning group work was determining who did what. Did one person work tirelessly on this for a week or was there equal contribution. Then there is the additional burdon/art of balancing the groups so that everyone has a chance to complete the project and the quicker students don't take the attitude "I would have gotten an A if it wasn't for my groupmates". Often you have to sacrifice the interesting projects to become somthing easier because at this stage of the game its as important to work well with others as it is be be knowledgable in CS. All in all its an art, and it depends on what the teacher is trying to teach. I know its a cop out but its true, the value of doing a group assignment is taken on a class by class basis usually. The teacher has to trust the students to "play nice" so they get somthing out of it because in the end, and this is the scary part, there is no real way to tell who did what when the instructor is so far removed from the teams interactions and creative process.
First of all what does this have to do with code red? The virus is self replicating and the creater was using a, from what I've been reading, unpublished exploit. After the first 50, 60, or some small amount of computers are compromised the thing pretty much runs itself. Theoretically this could have all started with manually cracking one computer and no human intervention after that. Not publising would not have stopped the spread. Its not like 20,000 little crackers were tirelessly manually installing code red on a zillion different computers and then telling their friends how to do it. At least if the exploit is published, the poor slob who gets hit with this virus first has some idea what to look for. IIS is out there and you can't stop people from reverse engineering it no matter haow many laws you pass. The best wepon we have is to keep the "good guys" as well informed as possible. I want to know when the vendor knows, maybe I can't fix it but I sure as hell don't want to be flying blind. < sarcasm > Yeah, lets intentionally limit the information I have access to so I can be even more unprepared when a virus hits.< /sarcasm >....riiiiiight good move.
Your writting a program that parses a config file, and refereces this file many times. Due to abstraction and different programming tricks it is equally easy to read the file once and put it into an interal datastructure, or read the file everytime you need somthing from the config file. Both methods took about the same # of lines of code.
The collegue of mine who originally wrote the code chose to read the file everytime we needed a config parameter. Eventually we integrated and we were suffering a huge performance loss. I knew exactly why, back in OS we learned that disk operations are orders of magnitude slower than memory operations because they are mechnaical.
Most experienced programmers will laugh at this and say, "Of course you idiot, file I/O is expensive, duh". But thats the key, I wasn't an experienced programmer, this was my first attempt at programming in the large. Knowing the fundamentals of how the computer works I was able to reason out why I was having a problem. I knew the why not just the how.
CIS allows you to become an experienced user,
CS allows you to become a better hacker.
The fact remains the people who are good at what they do don't need a college degree to prove it. However, I can't believe I'm saying this, there is the idea of broadening your horizions. If you can go to a half way decent institution odds are you'll meet some really smart people. Reguardless of what their major or area of research they may inspire you to do somthing you normally would not. I was a computer geek through my very recent college years, but I also acted, preformed music, helped build set for a play. There were people smart and interesting enough to convince me to remove myself from in front of the computer screen. I like to think of myself a s a decent computer guy, but because of college I learned how to do more than drink beer and code. I like to think my life is more interesting because of it. The same cannot be said for everyones experience in college, but it worked for me.