First the two non profits. Non Profit jobs require a combination of degree and knowing someone who already works there. Since there's no incentive to work hard -- actually knowing how to do your job might not matter as much. Acedemia falls into this category IMO, and I think it's the best for a lot of CS people. Research can be rewarding and a lot of fun.
Government jobs are all about knowing someone on the inside. Nothing else seems to matter. Once you're in, you're in, then it's all political. The worst kind.
Mega Corps are all about degrees and knowing people, and in the lower ranks mostly knowing people. Large companies like these can afford to hire dipshits (who are usually someone's nephew, cousin or friend) who don't know how to do anything, and get paid for it. They use money and politics to do business (instead of product quality.)
I work in the For Profit *competitive* sector, where it's all about how good you are. If we can't compete with the other companies, we don't eat. A degree might help presuade a potential client, but it's all about actually getting the job done and done right (quickly), degree or not.
It's always good to have a degree in anything from anywhere. It's always best to be professional no matter what you do.
I don't think it would be possible to get stuck on the top of the hill. If you stood around and watched the ride for a while, you would see that sometimes the train wouldn't make it over the hill, and come back to be launched again.
I think it would be like trying to balance a pencil up-right. Sure, it could be done, but very, very, very rarely.
I work for a company that installs distribution control systems (like large conveyor systems). The "get the most powerful machines" mentality is 100% dominant in this sector, because the people who decide what to buy (from what I've dealt with) don't know anything at all about computers. All they know is it has to be Windows XP and it has to be fast. Of course, it doesn't. They argue that if they buy a powerful system now, they won't have to upgrade for a long time. The fact is, every time they "upgrade", they always end up buying new machines anyway. It happens every time. And I'm not talking about servers either. At the last job we did, the company bought 40 2.5GHz machines with Windows XP for the client machines. All each machine does is run one program we write, and sits idle 99.9% of the time.
They could run the software we write on a 233MHz and you wouldn't notice a difference. You could even run it on Linux (it's written in Java.) But suits seem to have a different way of thinking.
For people who have never taken real stat classes in college (or never learned it on their own) R will seem like a useless language. Most other languages can handle basic statistics computations.
Statistics is a whole lot more than means and averages. When I took my first real stat class, everything I knew about statistics was literally covered on the first half of the first page. I was totally blown away by what you could do with statistics.
R is for hardcore stat folk who know a bit about programming, not programmers who need to do a little basic computation.
I've seen a number of posts stating the XOR is unbreakable. Hopefully they're just joking and didn't get modded as such, because I've read in several places that XOR sucks. A quick Google revealed the following.
And I quote: XOR encryption is trivially simply to implement and equally trivial to break.
XOR encryption should not be utilized for any data which you would want to protect.
I could go grab my Applied Cryptography book and make sure, but it's out of arms reach right now.
The software was video (MPEG) editing/compression. The majority of people dealing with MPEG (DivX) formats are movie pirates - since you can't legally copy DVDs, right? Or am I missing something?
I quote from the reviews: None of the my DV cameras output in DiVX, or AVI, or mpeg for that matter. The content that I create comes in through Firewire as a.DV file. So my question is what is this software good for?
I've installed Win 3.1, 95, 98, NT4 and 2000, Linux (Slackware 9.1, then 10), Solaris 10, FreeBSD and Plan9 -- and I've never had a problem with any of them. I don't know why he couldn't get Fedora to work. Guess maybe it helps to know what you're doing.
This guy installed every operating system out there on his Mac OS X using Virtual PC. His website includes screen shots of each OS, plus what he had to do to get it working. I would like to see a public archive of OS images people can download and try (minus proprietary stuff). That would be pretty cool.
Don't worry about the math. It's usually the easiest course in your university schedule - and I tell you that as someone who failed high school math classes constantly and who dropped out of high school because of math (that's a long story, though). Math *is* your friend. How's that? You can be guaranteed that if you do all your homework, you will get an A+ in the course. That's it. No reading, no stupid assignments which get marked by TAs who know less than you, nothing. It doesn't even matter how good or bad your teacher is. Just do all your homework and you'll get an A+. It's a non-linear relationship, do 50% of your homework (every second assigned problem) and you'll get a B+. Do 25% of your homework and you'll get a C+.
I wish that were true. I did all my homework for my math classes and really studied my ass off, and the best I could do in some of them was a C. I'm no math expert, but I guess it depends on where you went to school at and who your professors are/were.
Statisitics: Ugh. Mostly just plug numbers into equations and know what they mean. Not difficult, just boring.
Again, it depends on what you took. I had to take two high level statistics classes for my Systems Analysis degree, and I must say those were my favorite math classes by far. I called it "Applied Calculus". The first class covered probability, and the second class actually covered statistics. What I had thought about statistics before I took the class was more along the line of means and averages. Those topics were covered on the first page of the first chapter, then it took off. Really, I learned more about calc in that class than in my calc classes because suddenly calc became useful.
If I were to ever go back to school and get a different degree, I would major in Statistics.
Zoomtown is not yet 3/1 MbPS, though they claim to be making the changes. RoadRunner has changed to 3, but it's not available in Northern Kentucky. Additionally, not everybody lives in town -- most rural communities out here don't have anything.
Unfortunately, some areas use Hamilton City power, so I doubt it's available to them.
I went to H2K2 and found it to be fairly dull. Some things to point out:
Internet connectivity was worse than dialup. We (my brother and I) had to go to Bryant Park and hop on NYC wireless to get online.
The panels were dull and uninformative. I actually fell asleep through most of them.
You're supposed to mix and meet people, but they had all the tables "reserved" for specific 2600 groups. If you weren't in a 2600 group, then you had to find space in the other room with all the POS machines.
There is, of course, an elitist mentality among many of the attendees, which makes conversations about technology a little difficult.
There were two things that I did enjoy while I was there. One was the lockpicking session: I've never seen someone so good at picking locks before. The other was this hysterical documentary about script kiddies called Owned, which I'd like to have a copy of but can't seem to find anywhere.
But just being in Manhattan alone is worth the trip. That's one hell of an amazing city.
Exactly. I see what you're saying, and I've thought that for a long time. The whole left vs. right; Democrat vs. Republican argument is just a distraction: meanlingless drivel.
I don't anymore but I used to use an old 286 to dial into my universities dial-pool (14kbps) and start a telnet session into a Linux machine, where I did all my homework. The machine itself was one of those old IBM "portable" computers with a built in mono-orange screen. By portable, I mean 50lbs portable, in that it sat on my lap and kept me warm at night. They've shut down the direct telnet on dialup so I can't do that anymore, and since then the minimum modem speed is higher, but it was fun while it lasted. What fun it was on IRC channels when they'd ask "what'r you on?" and I'd say "a 286".
Caltech spent nearly $200,000 per student per year? What the HELL are they spending it on?!
My guess is that businesses jack up the prices for universities. Primary example: books. If a book is going to be sold to a class, they jack the prices *way* up, into the ~$100 range, because they know people are going to be required to buy them. I would guess that it would be similar with other items as well.
I would think that calling people would have a bigger effect than emailing, don't you? Somebody calling me leaves more of an impression than if they just send a couple of angry emails.
Slashdot Mirror
First the two non profits. Non Profit jobs require a combination of degree and knowing someone who already works there. Since there's no incentive to work hard -- actually knowing how to do your job might not matter as much. Acedemia falls into this category IMO, and I think it's the best for a lot of CS people. Research can be rewarding and a lot of fun.
Government jobs are all about knowing someone on the inside. Nothing else seems to matter. Once you're in, you're in, then it's all political. The worst kind.
Mega Corps are all about degrees and knowing people, and in the lower ranks mostly knowing people. Large companies like these can afford to hire dipshits (who are usually someone's nephew, cousin or friend) who don't know how to do anything, and get paid for it. They use money and politics to do business (instead of product quality.)
I work in the For Profit *competitive* sector, where it's all about how good you are. If we can't compete with the other companies, we don't eat. A degree might help presuade a potential client, but it's all about actually getting the job done and done right (quickly), degree or not.
It's always good to have a degree in anything from anywhere. It's always best to be professional no matter what you do.
I don't think it would be possible to get stuck on the top of the hill. If you stood around and watched the ride for a while, you would see that sometimes the train wouldn't make it over the hill, and come back to be launched again.
I think it would be like trying to balance a pencil up-right. Sure, it could be done, but very, very, very rarely.
A lot of people only know maybe one or two programming languages. So when you say "use the best tool for the job", the look bewildered.
I work for a company that installs distribution control systems (like large conveyor systems). The "get the most powerful machines" mentality is 100% dominant in this sector, because the people who decide what to buy (from what I've dealt with) don't know anything at all about computers. All they know is it has to be Windows XP and it has to be fast. Of course, it doesn't. They argue that if they buy a powerful system now, they won't have to upgrade for a long time. The fact is, every time they "upgrade", they always end up buying new machines anyway. It happens every time. And I'm not talking about servers either. At the last job we did, the company bought 40 2.5GHz machines with Windows XP for the client machines. All each machine does is run one program we write, and sits idle 99.9% of the time.
They could run the software we write on a 233MHz and you wouldn't notice a difference. You could even run it on Linux (it's written in Java.) But suits seem to have a different way of thinking.
For people who have never taken real stat classes in college (or never learned it on their own) R will seem like a useless language. Most other languages can handle basic statistics computations.
Statistics is a whole lot more than means and averages. When I took my first real stat class, everything I knew about statistics was literally covered on the first half of the first page. I was totally blown away by what you could do with statistics.
R is for hardcore stat folk who know a bit about programming, not programmers who need to do a little basic computation.
There was a good discussion about quantum crypto on The Cryptography Mailing List last month.
I've seen a number of posts stating the XOR is unbreakable. Hopefully they're just joking and didn't get modded as such, because I've read in several places that XOR sucks. A quick Google revealed the following.
Hack-FAQ
And I quote: XOR encryption is trivially simply to implement and equally trivial to break. XOR encryption should not be utilized for any data which you would want to protect.
I could go grab my Applied Cryptography book and make sure, but it's out of arms reach right now.
The software was video (MPEG) editing/compression. The majority of people dealing with MPEG (DivX) formats are movie pirates - since you can't legally copy DVDs, right? Or am I missing something?
I quote from the reviews: None of the my DV cameras output in DiVX, or AVI, or mpeg for that matter. The content that I create comes in through Firewire as a .DV file. So my question is what is this software good for?
Were any guns used in the 9/11 attacks? Thank you.
How can you compare a gun to a nuclear bomb?
This guy installed every operating system out there on his Mac OS X using Virtual PC. His website includes screen shots of each OS, plus what he had to do to get it working. I would like to see a public archive of OS images people can download and try (minus proprietary stuff). That would be pretty cool.
Don't worry about the math. It's usually the easiest course in your university schedule - and I tell you that as someone who failed high school math classes constantly and who dropped out of high school because of math (that's a long story, though). Math *is* your friend. How's that? You can be guaranteed that if you do all your homework, you will get an A+ in the course. That's it. No reading, no stupid assignments which get marked by TAs who know less than you, nothing. It doesn't even matter how good or bad your teacher is. Just do all your homework and you'll get an A+. It's a non-linear relationship, do 50% of your homework (every second assigned problem) and you'll get a B+. Do 25% of your homework and you'll get a C+.
I wish that were true. I did all my homework for my math classes and really studied my ass off, and the best I could do in some of them was a C. I'm no math expert, but I guess it depends on where you went to school at and who your professors are/were.
Statisitics: Ugh. Mostly just plug numbers into equations and know what they mean. Not difficult, just boring.
Again, it depends on what you took. I had to take two high level statistics classes for my Systems Analysis degree, and I must say those were my favorite math classes by far. I called it "Applied Calculus". The first class covered probability, and the second class actually covered statistics. What I had thought about statistics before I took the class was more along the line of means and averages. Those topics were covered on the first page of the first chapter, then it took off. Really, I learned more about calc in that class than in my calc classes because suddenly calc became useful.
If I were to ever go back to school and get a different degree, I would major in Statistics.
Just my 2 cents worth.
That's a pretty pointless video clip.
Zoomtown is not yet 3/1 MbPS, though they claim to be making the changes. RoadRunner has changed to 3, but it's not available in Northern Kentucky. Additionally, not everybody lives in town -- most rural communities out here don't have anything.
Unfortunately, some areas use Hamilton City power, so I doubt it's available to them.
I bet this will be big in Northern Kentucky.
It should be noted that these are the same people who did Fanimatrix.
I went to H2K2 and found it to be fairly dull. Some things to point out:
There were two things that I did enjoy while I was there. One was the lockpicking session: I've never seen someone so good at picking locks before. The other was this hysterical documentary about script kiddies called Owned, which I'd like to have a copy of but can't seem to find anywhere.
But just being in Manhattan alone is worth the trip. That's one hell of an amazing city.
Exactly. I see what you're saying, and I've thought that for a long time. The whole left vs. right; Democrat vs. Republican argument is just a distraction: meanlingless drivel.
Well said.
I don't anymore but I used to use an old 286 to dial into my universities dial-pool (14kbps) and start a telnet session into a Linux machine, where I did all my homework. The machine itself was one of those old IBM "portable" computers with a built in mono-orange screen. By portable, I mean 50lbs portable, in that it sat on my lap and kept me warm at night. They've shut down the direct telnet on dialup so I can't do that anymore, and since then the minimum modem speed is higher, but it was fun while it lasted. What fun it was on IRC channels when they'd ask "what'r you on?" and I'd say "a 286".
Great. Something else to mistake as a can of deodorant early in the morning.
My guess is that businesses jack up the prices for universities. Primary example: books. If a book is going to be sold to a class, they jack the prices *way* up, into the ~$100 range, because they know people are going to be required to buy them. I would guess that it would be similar with other items as well.
I would think that calling people would have a bigger effect than emailing, don't you? Somebody calling me leaves more of an impression than if they just send a couple of angry emails.
Let them hear the tone of concern in your voice!
Think back to all the bad things CEOs have done in the past, and the price they paid for doing them.
This is how business is done in the U.S. They'll walk away with millions and never be heard from again.
Excellent. These are the rare posts that I read Slashdot for. Thank you. Where did you find out who Aimster was operated by?
Here's another one.
Right on!