I'm a college senior and thinking about taking a year (or ten) off before going to graduate school. The advice I have gotten from all of my professors about this is that I should seriously consider a year off, for a multitude of reasons. The chance to spend a year in the Real World before you turn 26 was a major one, but another point many of my professors made probably applies to your decision, too.
They said that the graduation rate among grad students who took a year off was much higher.
There was a lot of speculation as to why this is, but most of the hypotheses can be boiled down to two possibilities: either the students who go straight on to college are more burnt out because they haven't not been in school since they were 6, or the students who took a year off had an extra year to mature, got some time to think about why they want to go to college, and were in generall much better prepared to get a 4 year degree.
I think that both of these hypotheses are correct. I know far to many kids at my school who got pushed into college right after high school when they didn't want to go right away, didn't know if they wanted to go at all, or didn't even have a good idea why they would be going to college in the first place. The lucky ones figured it all out in a month or two, and the rest have this amazing tendency to bomb out or drop out.
As for the crap that people feed you about it looking bad to admissions counsellors and potential employers, don't listen to a word of that crap. A year off gives you a great chance to impress the pants off of college admissions counsellors - just go volunteer somewhere or do something else useful rather than spending the whole year in your parents' house playing GTA3 and eating Doritos. As for employers, I don't think any employer is going to scrutinize a year off of college as long as you do well otherwise - they're going to be much more concerned with how you handled yourself during college. To that end, it's MUCH better to take a year off before college than a year off in the middle of college.
Seriously, though, when you listen to the advice people give you, make sure you are getting advice from informed sources. Like you said, most the people who are outspoken about this didn't take a year off and have no idea what they are talking about - they're just parroting crap they fuzzily remember hearing from someone else who didn't know what they were saying and were parroting crap they fuzzily remember hearing from someone else. They're probably also assuming you want to take a year off for a chance to goof off - if that's true, I wouldn't recommend doing it, but if you're taking a year off to do something that will enrich your life, teach you anything, or that year off will in some other way set you better off in life, by all means, take it.
Because Wine is a wrapper - it doesn't implement the various GUI calls on Windows, it simply translates them to equivalent calls (or strings of calls) for X. If the XBox doesn't have these calls at all, you'd have to reimplement them from the ground up. The knowledge the Wine project has on the Windows API would be useful for this, but the Wine code most likely wouldn't.
Sysadmins have been surviving all sorts of automating technologies, such as DHCP, for a long time. There are always more things for them to do. Unless Sun is going to start making their servers about as configurable as, say, anything running PalmOS, sysadmins will stick around. If they do make their servers that unconfigurable, sysadmins will still stick around, since I can't believe even the worst PHB's could remain unconvinced that buying a piece of crap like that would be a Bad Idea.
And I've been in these arguments a lot. And although there are maybe four or five Linux users out there who use it for purely technical or monetary reasons, everyone else I have talked to tends to wrap a nice tortilla of dogma around a meaty rational filling (or the other way around).
Just 'cos it's true doesn't mean it can't be a dogma.
. . . about Microsoft using its market dominance to price-gouge the hell out of customers. Changing the contract for large purchases who only use Microsoft Office to increase the price, for example. The customers end up just taking it because they don't see any alternative to Microsoft Office.
Sadly, there honestly isn't a great alternative in many cases. I'm a huge Open Source guy, but realistically, I still can't see a good alternative to Excel yet, for example.
But as soon as OpenOffice.org irons out a few kinks and starts building a reputation (especially for its rather good Office compatibility features), I think the market is going to drop out for Microsoft. Their licensing practises are only building enemies, even in die-hard Windows-only shops (sometimes, I think, especially in Windows-only shops), and when a lot of people realize that choice has returned to the market, they'll make a decision, and it's not going to be the one that costs $300 per license.
~Shop runs UNIX machines ~Base and upgrade costs on UNIX boxen are high, and Management complains of high TCO on UNIX, too. ~Shop migrates to cheaper x86 hardware running Windows NT ~Management and a few staff love Windows, the rest hate it for religious reasons. ~Windows-hating, UNIX-loving staff starts setting up Linux boxen 'guerrilla style,' shows Linux boxen working successfully to other employees. ~When employee support is high, Linux solution to task Foo is shown to Mgmt by members of staff that miss UNIX. ~Mgmt. chooses to accept or deny Linux solution. ~If Linux solution is accepted and works properly with few hitches, Linux takes over. If there are problems, shop keeps running Windows.
Nowadays, everyone I talk to wants to talk about framerates. 1280x1024 is a given for screen resolution, and colordepths surpassed the limits of human perception long ago. Of course, the framerates people talk about have surpassed what they can see, too, since they're usually talking 90+ fps on computers whose monitors can only do 70-odd hz at 1280x1024 and they tend to be using their own out-of-the-box visual input and processing hardware, where persistence of vision starts taking care of things around 30fps, making anything faster only useful if something is moving across the screen quickly enough to go in huge jumps at lower framerates.
The last time I was wowed by anything of that sort was when I plugged a Playstation 2 into a 5' wide HDTV and fired up Gran Turismo 3 on a 16x9 screen aspect ratio. From about 8 feet away from the screen, it doesn't look pixellated anymore, whereas a console sending out a standard TV signal looks terrible on a screen that large, let alone the distortion from the wider screen.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
Custom ringtones. The superloud volume setting doesn't help anything, but even at low volume, hearing the first four bars of the chorus to "Ode to Joy", "Ramblin' Man", or anything by N'Sync played over and over on what sounds like a PC Squeaker is enough to make seriously consider my opinions on public execution and eugenics programs.
A person on a cell phone in a store, mall, or on the street draws attention to themself. Maybe as we gaze in their direction, we're just noticing the stupid things that people do everyday
You mean like talking on a cell phone at a store, mall, or on the street?
If you let FTP traffic through. malicious code will get in through there. If you leave port 80 open, malicious code will get through there. If you leave port 23 open, malicious code will get in through there. If you let e-mail in, even if you virus-scan it, malicious code will get in. If there is a single floppy disk drive on your network, malicious code will get in. Same for CD-ROM drives.
Firewalls can make things inconvenient for people (users as well as crackers), but there is always a balance that must be met between how much inconvencience the users can tolerate and how important it is to inconvenience crackers. That balance is never going to lean very far towards the 'inconveniencing crackers' side.
I mentioned in my first post that it was probably a bad driver or somesuch. That is usually the case in the Win9x series, too. My complaint is that I think the OS should handle buggy drivers and such more gracefully. I probably don't need to throw in any standard Linux user digs like pointing out how buggy kernel modules I install (or write) don't cause the whole system to hang. . .
My brother built a new computer, and XP REFUSES to work with his whiz-bang 120GB hard drive if he tries to run with NTFS. Strangely enough, FAT32 poses no problems, and Linux and BeOS are fine.
As for the 0 crashes/lockups, I'm honestly not experiencing that. The machine I'm using right now is XP (we're switching over to it at work because the boss decided we weren't wasting enough money yet), and I'm experiencing at least one crash/lockup a day. Plus, the thing seems to have that good ol' Windows 98 lock-up-every-time-you-try-to-shut-down-or-reboot problem. Granted, it's likely a bad driver that is causing the problems and not the OS itself, but then again you'd think the OS would be able to handle errors like these a bit more gracefully. . .
Wow, that's about as good as two days ago, when my local paper put an article on the front page of the business section stating that greed played a part in the Enron accounting scandal.
Good job, boys. You sure scooped the whole industry on that one!//////////////BREAKING NEWS/////////////// President Kennedy has been shot!//////////////BREAKING NEWS///////////////
In other news. . .
Graphic artists drive the Wacom tablet market, nerds drive the Linux market, and morons drive the news media market.
A zombie process sticks around until either its parent dies without it being assigned a new parent or until its parent checks its exit status (the 'performing an autopsy' the previous poster mentioned).
The metaphor extends a bit more, because you can't kill a zombie process the way you can kill normal processes - because you can't kill something that's already dead =)
You can't fit everything you might need on one floppy, so it's hard to create a Swiss Army Rescue Disk.
Of course, that's why God gave us zipdisks. . .
Let's take a quick vote on that
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 2
How many people who are reading this post own DVD players and continue to purchase DVDs?
(massive show of hands)
How many of you are still holding out on your refusal to buy into this consumer-abusive technology?
(5 or 6 people, 10 tops, raise their hands)
How many of you are actuallly so radical that you refuse to purchase audio CD's controlled by the RIAA because you despise their business practises and treatment of artists? I answering this question, I only want to see the hands of people who would continue to not purchase CD's if all the filesharing networks in the whole world suddenly disappeared.
(hundreds of hands raise as I ask the question, but all of them go back down as I state the disclaimer.)
How many of your run Windows?
(Even most the hardass Slashdot-edition Linux Twinks, including me, are forced to admit they own and occasionally use at least one copy and leave their hands down.)
Nope, doesn't look like it's destroying the technology to me. Looks like it's just taking the technology in the direction large corporations with no respect for the rights of the consumer want it to go. Unfortunately, we all seem to value getting to see Yoda on methamphetamine and getting to play the Latest New Video Game that's exactly like the last Latest New Video Game only with Different Pictures more than we value our own dignity, so it's probably going to keep going that way.
Please forgive me, maybe I made too large of a logical jump for some people.
The implication wasn't that any rules that apply to filenames should apply to passwords, too. I was saying that, if people have a difficult time with the fact that 'foo' 'FOO' and 'Foo' are three different words in a filesystem context, it would seem that they would have similar problems with passwords.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that would mean that passwords should be case-insensitive, too. This problem is even worse on passwords, where one isn't given a list to choose from and actually has to memorize the case of characters.
Personally, though, I think that's a bad idea. The little piece of BOFH in me says any user who can't remember letter case has a lot of learning to go through before they should be allowed to use an expensive piece of equipment such as a computer, and the case-sensitivity of passwords is an excellent automated way to ensure that this is in fact what happens.
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I've always thought people who think you have to be able to drive to use a drive-up ATM are complete and total gits.
If someone invented a technique to graft a person's ass to a bucket seat, Americans would be lining up out into the street to get it done.
I'm a college senior and thinking about taking a year (or ten) off before going to graduate school. The advice I have gotten from all of my professors about this is that I should seriously consider a year off, for a multitude of reasons. The chance to spend a year in the Real World before you turn 26 was a major one, but another point many of my professors made probably applies to your decision, too.
They said that the graduation rate among grad students who took a year off was much higher.
There was a lot of speculation as to why this is, but most of the hypotheses can be boiled down to two possibilities: either the students who go straight on to college are more burnt out because they haven't not been in school since they were 6, or the students who took a year off had an extra year to mature, got some time to think about why they want to go to college, and were in generall much better prepared to get a 4 year degree.
I think that both of these hypotheses are correct. I know far to many kids at my school who got pushed into college right after high school when they didn't want to go right away, didn't know if they wanted to go at all, or didn't even have a good idea why they would be going to college in the first place. The lucky ones figured it all out in a month or two, and the rest have this amazing tendency to bomb out or drop out.
As for the crap that people feed you about it looking bad to admissions counsellors and potential employers, don't listen to a word of that crap. A year off gives you a great chance to impress the pants off of college admissions counsellors - just go volunteer somewhere or do something else useful rather than spending the whole year in your parents' house playing GTA3 and eating Doritos. As for employers, I don't think any employer is going to scrutinize a year off of college as long as you do well otherwise - they're going to be much more concerned with how you handled yourself during college. To that end, it's MUCH better to take a year off before college than a year off in the middle of college.
Seriously, though, when you listen to the advice people give you, make sure you are getting advice from informed sources. Like you said, most the people who are outspoken about this didn't take a year off and have no idea what they are talking about - they're just parroting crap they fuzzily remember hearing from someone else who didn't know what they were saying and were parroting crap they fuzzily remember hearing from someone else. They're probably also assuming you want to take a year off for a chance to goof off - if that's true, I wouldn't recommend doing it, but if you're taking a year off to do something that will enrich your life, teach you anything, or that year off will in some other way set you better off in life, by all means, take it.
Because Wine is a wrapper - it doesn't implement the various GUI calls on Windows, it simply translates them to equivalent calls (or strings of calls) for X. If the XBox doesn't have these calls at all, you'd have to reimplement them from the ground up. The knowledge the Wine project has on the Windows API would be useful for this, but the Wine code most likely wouldn't.
Sysadmins have been surviving all sorts of automating technologies, such as DHCP, for a long time. There are always more things for them to do. Unless Sun is going to start making their servers about as configurable as, say, anything running PalmOS, sysadmins will stick around. If they do make their servers that unconfigurable, sysadmins will still stick around, since I can't believe even the worst PHB's could remain unconvinced that buying a piece of crap like that would be a Bad Idea.
And I've been in these arguments a lot. And although there are maybe four or five Linux users out there who use it for purely technical or monetary reasons, everyone else I have talked to tends to wrap a nice tortilla of dogma around a meaty rational filling (or the other way around).
Just 'cos it's true doesn't mean it can't be a dogma.
. . . about Microsoft using its market dominance to price-gouge the hell out of customers. Changing the contract for large purchases who only use Microsoft Office to increase the price, for example. The customers end up just taking it because they don't see any alternative to Microsoft Office.
Sadly, there honestly isn't a great alternative in many cases. I'm a huge Open Source guy, but realistically, I still can't see a good alternative to Excel yet, for example.
But as soon as OpenOffice.org irons out a few kinks and starts building a reputation (especially for its rather good Office compatibility features), I think the market is going to drop out for Microsoft. Their licensing practises are only building enemies, even in die-hard Windows-only shops (sometimes, I think, especially in Windows-only shops), and when a lot of people realize that choice has returned to the market, they'll make a decision, and it's not going to be the one that costs $300 per license.
Red Hat wouldn't want to risk having Apple sue them for stealing the 'look and feel' of one of their advertising campaigns.
The story goes something like this:
~Shop runs UNIX machines
~Base and upgrade costs on UNIX boxen are high, and Management complains of high TCO on UNIX, too.
~Shop migrates to cheaper x86 hardware running Windows NT
~Management and a few staff love Windows, the rest hate it for religious reasons.
~Windows-hating, UNIX-loving staff starts setting up Linux boxen 'guerrilla style,' shows Linux boxen working successfully to other employees.
~When employee support is high, Linux solution to task Foo is shown to Mgmt by members of staff that miss UNIX.
~Mgmt. chooses to accept or deny Linux solution.
~If Linux solution is accepted and works properly with few hitches, Linux takes over. If there are problems, shop keeps running Windows.
Nowadays, everyone I talk to wants to talk about framerates. 1280x1024 is a given for screen resolution, and colordepths surpassed the limits of human perception long ago. Of course, the framerates people talk about have surpassed what they can see, too, since they're usually talking 90+ fps on computers whose monitors can only do 70-odd hz at 1280x1024 and they tend to be using their own out-of-the-box visual input and processing hardware, where persistence of vision starts taking care of things around 30fps, making anything faster only useful if something is moving across the screen quickly enough to go in huge jumps at lower framerates.
The last time I was wowed by anything of that sort was when I plugged a Playstation 2 into a 5' wide HDTV and fired up Gran Turismo 3 on a 16x9 screen aspect ratio. From about 8 feet away from the screen, it doesn't look pixellated anymore, whereas a console sending out a standard TV signal looks terrible on a screen that large, let alone the distortion from the wider screen.
Other than that, I am starting to get the feeling that the biggest limit on what games can do nowadays isn't what the hardware they are being run on is capable of, whether it is a console or some gee-whiz computer with some overclocked GeForce card with Peltier cooling. It seems to me that the limiting factor is more how much time the artists on a game's production team can afford to put into the models - going back to games like GT3 and GTA3, it looks like the polygon count on any one screen is oftentimes well below the capability of the hardware.
The reason why humans talk so much is because of the danger that if their lips stop moving, their brains might start moving.
I think this explains it all. . .
Custom ringtones. The superloud volume setting doesn't help anything, but even at low volume, hearing the first four bars of the chorus to "Ode to Joy", "Ramblin' Man", or anything by N'Sync played over and over on what sounds like a PC Squeaker is enough to make seriously consider my opinions on public execution and eugenics programs.
A person on a cell phone in a store, mall, or on the street draws attention to themself. Maybe as we gaze in their direction, we're just noticing the stupid things that people do everyday
You mean like talking on a cell phone at a store, mall, or on the street?
If you let FTP traffic through. malicious code will get in through there. If you leave port 80 open, malicious code will get through there. If you leave port 23 open, malicious code will get in through there. If you let e-mail in, even if you virus-scan it, malicious code will get in. If there is a single floppy disk drive on your network, malicious code will get in. Same for CD-ROM drives.
Firewalls can make things inconvenient for people (users as well as crackers), but there is always a balance that must be met between how much inconvencience the users can tolerate and how important it is to inconvenience crackers. That balance is never going to lean very far towards the 'inconveniencing crackers' side.
And our official stance on that issue is that anyone who can't be taught how to save documents in rich text format needs to go back to high school.
I mentioned in my first post that it was probably a bad driver or somesuch. That is usually the case in the Win9x series, too. My complaint is that I think the OS should handle buggy drivers and such more gracefully. I probably don't need to throw in any standard Linux user digs like pointing out how buggy kernel modules I install (or write) don't cause the whole system to hang. . .
My brother built a new computer, and XP REFUSES to work with his whiz-bang 120GB hard drive if he tries to run with NTFS. Strangely enough, FAT32 poses no problems, and Linux and BeOS are fine.
As for the 0 crashes/lockups, I'm honestly not experiencing that. The machine I'm using right now is XP (we're switching over to it at work because the boss decided we weren't wasting enough money yet), and I'm experiencing at least one crash/lockup a day. Plus, the thing seems to have that good ol' Windows 98 lock-up-every-time-you-try-to-shut-down-or-reboot problem. Granted, it's likely a bad driver that is causing the problems and not the OS itself, but then again you'd think the OS would be able to handle errors like these a bit more gracefully. . .
Wow, that's about as good as two days ago, when my local paper put an article on the front page of the business section stating that greed played a part in the Enron accounting scandal.
//////////////BREAKING NEWS/////////////// //////////////BREAKING NEWS///////////////
Good job, boys. You sure scooped the whole industry on that one!
President Kennedy has been shot!
In other news. . .
Graphic artists drive the Wacom tablet market, nerds drive the Linux market, and morons drive the news media market.
A zombie process sticks around until either its parent dies without it being assigned a new parent or until its parent checks its exit status (the 'performing an autopsy' the previous poster mentioned).
The metaphor extends a bit more, because you can't kill a zombie process the way you can kill normal processes - because you can't kill something that's already dead =)
kernel, mount, daemon, zombie, thread, named pipe, kill (especially Kill : The Command), jiffies, etc, etc.
You can't fit everything you might need on one floppy, so it's hard to create a Swiss Army Rescue Disk.
Of course, that's why God gave us zipdisks. . .
How many people who are reading this post own DVD players and continue to purchase DVDs?
(massive show of hands)
How many of you are still holding out on your refusal to buy into this consumer-abusive technology?
(5 or 6 people, 10 tops, raise their hands)
How many of you are actuallly so radical that you refuse to purchase audio CD's controlled by the RIAA because you despise their business practises and treatment of artists? I answering this question, I only want to see the hands of people who would continue to not purchase CD's if all the filesharing networks in the whole world suddenly disappeared.
(hundreds of hands raise as I ask the question, but all of them go back down as I state the disclaimer.)
How many of your run Windows?
(Even most the hardass Slashdot-edition Linux Twinks, including me, are forced to admit they own and occasionally use at least one copy and leave their hands down.)
Nope, doesn't look like it's destroying the technology to me. Looks like it's just taking the technology in the direction large corporations with no respect for the rights of the consumer want it to go. Unfortunately, we all seem to value getting to see Yoda on methamphetamine and getting to play the Latest New Video Game that's exactly like the last Latest New Video Game only with Different Pictures more than we value our own dignity, so it's probably going to keep going that way.
If I'm busy, I will let the answering machine pick up the regular phone. If it's something important, I can always call back right away.
Of course, this always creates some issues with guests when I do this. The look of excruciating pain on their faces is priceless. . .
That won't work any better than being outside the US has helped foreign companies from dodging the DMCA in the past. . .
Please forgive me, maybe I made too large of a logical jump for some people.
The implication wasn't that any rules that apply to filenames should apply to passwords, too. I was saying that, if people have a difficult time with the fact that 'foo' 'FOO' and 'Foo' are three different words in a filesystem context, it would seem that they would have similar problems with passwords.
Only they don't.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but that would mean that passwords should be case-insensitive, too. This problem is even worse on passwords, where one isn't given a list to choose from and actually has to memorize the case of characters.
Personally, though, I think that's a bad idea. The little piece of BOFH in me says any user who can't remember letter case has a lot of learning to go through before they should be allowed to use an expensive piece of equipment such as a computer, and the case-sensitivity of passwords is an excellent automated way to ensure that this is in fact what happens.