I'm not denying the usefulness of Google search, I'm only pointing out that the "old ways" still have an interest, and that it might be useful to still teach them, you never know when things like that might come in handy.
My point is that it's not a new vs. old thing. Like good programming skills are language-agnostic, good research skills are largely independent of the medium. Ultimately, people doing good research with new tools are generally doing the same thing as in the old days; they just get the information they need faster.
But you know what? The only thing that you have to keep private is your private key. That's why you must always generate the key pair locally. Public keys are supposed to be distributed widely. There's no harm in anyone in the middle seeing it in transit. They're not learning anything that you want to be kept secret.
Ah, the beauty of the man in the middle attack! The problem is, how do your contacts know they're using *your* public key? If the ISP can successfully intercept everything on all ends (and they could if they cared enough), then they replace your public key with theirs, decrypt incoming traffic using their own public key and re-encrpyt it with your public key. Total bummer.
Now, what about the case where you have generated the key pair and want to get it made into a certificate? In order to do this, you have to transmit the bare public key to the certificate authority. That's okay too. You encrypt it with the public key of the authority, contained in a root certificate which by definition is trusted, meaning that you have it already.
So that helps...except there has to be some ultimate thing you trust. That would be the root certificate. Question is, how do you get that? Can't be online, let's imagine your ISP redirects all traffic destined to Verisign to themselves. It's very much a regressive problem. You have to trust something, but if you're using encryption you probably aren't in the trust business.
You're right, I wasn't being facetious - you want secure communications with someone, you need a secure way of getting something truly trusted. You need to start with something you know is good. And that's why I maintain that the best way to do it is with one-time pads that you've exchanged, in person, with someone you trust completely.
And no, I'm not paranoid, because they are out to get me. That makes me cautious.;)
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
Your ISP: the ultimate man in the middle. You want real security, hand deliver your public key to all your contacts after first encrypting *it*. With a one-time pad. Which you then proceed to burn. And eat the ashes.
One thing that annoys me in these posts is all these Johnny Come Lately people who have just started to hate SCO as a result of their actions against Linux. I've been actively hating SCO ever since I had to use their piece of crap OS in 1993 on a 286 PC.
Then as you surely know, they aren't really the same SCO as that one.
Capital costs, which cover the base amount of bandwidth available to everyone, are relative to the size of the pipe, not how it's used.
But with similar things like electricity, the necessary size of the pipe is determined by peak traffic. So they have an incentive to charge more to people who use a lot during peak traffic (which is one reason why commercial access will always be more expensive). You've got a chicken and egg problem there, but in the end traffic determines the pipe. So if people downloading pr0n movies are causing more pipes to be needed, then they should pay for them.
I don't want to discount the challenges of managing a shared resource, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we could have a fare regime (pun intended) that charges for available bandwidth, and which is perfectly manageable for all concerned.
To flesh this out a little, there's nothing to stop a provider from offering a base level of service - say, 5 Mbps - and allowing higher burst rates, but charging extra for the time the user operated at the higher rate.
Let's walk before we run. Right now we have a flat rate, the cost for which is getting pushed by excessive users. They're just now looking at variable pricing. Perhaps if that works they'll look at other options. Methinks consumers might not like your version because of the 'bill surprise' effect. It would certainly require the customer to have the ability to throttle his OWN connection, so he doesn't accidentally get charged extra because he happened to get a surprisingly good connection.
I honestly wonder why corporations don't see that what's good for the customer is good for them? Maybe I need to get a Harvard MBA in order to un-learn all these naive assumptions....
Well, give them some credit, this story shows they're trying. They realize that 95% of their customers could save on their bill by charging the 5% of bandwidth leeches proportionately what they use. Then again, I expect that the customer is so bad at actually recognizing what's good for him that the problem isn't as easy as you think. After all, if it were that easy we wouldn't need marketeers. 'Course, I still want to shoot ours anyway, but I digress...
And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
Why, because of the absurd notion that you should get what you pay for - and vice versa? Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
So you think enough of google to apply, don't get hired, then assume that when you're not hired it's because of your age? Ever consider you just didn't cut it?
Or anyone who moves around a lot, whether they're traveling or working mobile around the city. Lightweight + small form factor = something you can fit into a backpack or any other bag you use, while not weighing you down
Is a 12" laptop that huge that it weighs you down? Certainly we shall see, but I think it's dubious whether this thing will catch on.
Now that I think about it, students fit this profile pretty well too.
Except for the price tag part (for the demo'd version, about $3K). Unless we're talking about trust-fund babies, I can't see students affording this thing.
Shame about the price though, at $1800 I think I'd rather just lug my Powerbook.
Yup. And remember, $1800 is with the standard HDD and no optical drive.
I'm not sure if there's any in the market now but LG and Samsung announced they would produce dual HD-DVD/ Blu Ray players as far back as 2006.
Personally I thought that was the way it was going to go - two formats jockeying for position for years to come, and everyone ending up with dual format players.
Maybe eventually, but for now the sticker shock on that option is a little rough. From amazon:
LG BH200 Super Blu Blu-Ray HD DVD Combo Player. Buy new: $799.99
That seems to be more expensive than simply buying one of each. That might work eventually, but I think one or the other of them will win before the majority of people have those things.
If you are not willing to accept those tradeoffs then you are not the target market for the MacBook Air. Might I suggest a MacBook or a MacBook Pro?
I think the implicit question is, "who is the tarket market?" Does anyone care that much about thickness that they're willing to give up a removeable battery, hard drive space, an optical drive, and pay a ton more?
For me, getting the flash drive for, say $200 extra would be OK, but not $1000. Methinks this is an idea a year or two before its time. Maybe some crazy early adopters will go for it, but that's all I see.
And I suppose people should stick with MS because nobody wants to install an alternative OS that only gets a fraction of the big-name applications? Nobody likes having two damn OSes to make sure they can run the software they want.
Good example. Computer hardware/software incompatibility is a major deterrent to adoption of other platforms. If there were no other consideration, no one would use Apple/Linux because using MS is very convenient. As we all know, however, there are many problems with the MS platform that drives a lot of people (myself included) to other competitors. These problems, for a minority of people, are enough to outweigh the convenience of knowing that you can run the vast majority of the software out there. Still, most people would (apparently) rather have the convenience.
So the question is, is there a sufficiently huge technical distinction between HD-DVD and Blu-ray that it outweighs the pain in the ass of having competing formats? Unless I'm missing something, I say it isn't even close.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
See my analysis. In theory, having different ideas might lead to better products. But it's different for media format wars where the content is the ultimate product, not the format technology. The average consumer can't distinguish, or possibly care, about the technical merits of the two platforms. In fact, I'd say the main reason that they exist is because the two sides each decided to fight it out so they could try to control the market, not because they thought either format was miles above the other. So this is what we have now, a format war. Not good for anybody except the ultimate winner, and certainly bad for consumers.
So here's the situation: right now, the market is harmed in that consumers benefit by *not* buying a player, instead waiting to see who wins (and someone will win; looks like blu-ray). Any benefit to the market would come from having two different technologies to battle to the death, with the winner presumably having better technical merit. The question is, does the difference in superior technology make up for the temporary invonvenience to consumers? In theory, that could be worth it. In DC vs. AC, it *was* worth it. In reality, here the technical distinction of the two players here is thin, and the differences have more to do with politics and studio deals than with any technology. That's why people just want someone to win, because the players are effectively identical to us.
In other words, get over your pissing contest boys, I want a player that I know will have movies made for it for the next 10 years.
I don't think the studios want different prices...
I don't know who Joel is (and his page is throwing a 503), but it's well known that it's Jobs fighting for the $.99 standard. The studios want to charge higher prices for new releases.
I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc.
Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?
Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.
By quality, do you mean bitrate or a more subjective quality of the material? If the latter, the studios most certainly want variable pricing. It's Jobs that's forcing the uniform $0.99 pricing.
Imagine how people will feel when they find out half of their "co-workers" are just shell scripts.
You tell my boss that I put in 1 hour of work a day setting up shell scripts that run for the other 7, while still getting more done than most of my coworkers, and I'll punch you in your ass.
Christ, they'd probably promote the script and put it in charge of me, then where would I be?
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
Even if we had fusion, I don't think it would generate that much helium, would it? I don't have time to do the math, but that's the whole point of fusion, right, that it generates massive amounts of energy (potentially) from relatively little fuel.
I had, in one of my classes, built an interface to GOCR (not Jack Black's band but the Gnu Optical Character Recognition project). This was a while ago. It was in C and it was shitty. I mean really shitty.
I kinda wished I had checked in that interface as I'm sure it's lost somewhere on the university network now. What if she had actually used it?
Well...if it sucked that bad, she probably would have shown you the door when you admitted writing it!;)
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I doubt it. I'm guessing you don't know what the *real* bottom of the career ladder is, at about minimum wage. Entry-level jobs I've seen pay about $12-15 an hour for basic office jobs for recent grad types, which isn't fantastic, but it ain't terrible if you majored in philosophy or something. Compare that to $6-8 an hour which is the real bottom of the career ladder, for high-schoolers.
If your bachelors degree truly gave you nothing beyond high school, that's your fault. Any number of opportunities exist during those four (or more) years to get some real experience doing something useful in for form of research, internships, etc.
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I'm not denying the usefulness of Google search, I'm only pointing out that the "old ways" still have an interest, and that it might be useful to still teach them, you never know when things like that might come in handy.
My point is that it's not a new vs. old thing. Like good programming skills are language-agnostic, good research skills are largely independent of the medium. Ultimately, people doing good research with new tools are generally doing the same thing as in the old days; they just get the information they need faster.
When I was your age...I use the Mark I eyeball, grep, emacs, and of course, the little gray cells.
(and GET OFF MY LAWN).
They have lawns at the old folks' homes these days?
'If it sells, well, then we can come another day,' Come again?
I think that means his wife is cutting him off until he gets that damned thing out of the house.
But you know what? The only thing that you have to keep private is your private key. That's why you must always generate the key pair locally. Public keys are supposed to be distributed widely. There's no harm in anyone in the middle seeing it in transit. They're not learning anything that you want to be kept secret.
Ah, the beauty of the man in the middle attack! The problem is, how do your contacts know they're using *your* public key? If the ISP can successfully intercept everything on all ends (and they could if they cared enough), then they replace your public key with theirs, decrypt incoming traffic using their own public key and re-encrpyt it with your public key. Total bummer.
Now, what about the case where you have generated the key pair and want to get it made into a certificate? In order to do this, you have to transmit the bare public key to the certificate authority. That's okay too. You encrypt it with the public key of the authority, contained in a root certificate which by definition is trusted, meaning that you have it already.
So that helps...except there has to be some ultimate thing you trust. That would be the root certificate. Question is, how do you get that? Can't be online, let's imagine your ISP redirects all traffic destined to Verisign to themselves. It's very much a regressive problem. You have to trust something, but if you're using encryption you probably aren't in the trust business.
You're right, I wasn't being facetious - you want secure communications with someone, you need a secure way of getting something truly trusted. You need to start with something you know is good. And that's why I maintain that the best way to do it is with one-time pads that you've exchanged, in person, with someone you trust completely.
And no, I'm not paranoid, because they are out to get me. That makes me cautious. ;)
Looking for information is a skill in itself, and provides all kind of background information on the subject you are looking for; you may not be directly interested in all the information, but knowledge of it cannot hurt. With a simple Google search, you find much less complete information, because you are targeting way more your searches.
By that standard, then we should also throw out the card catalog, because it might be too efficient at helping me find what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the old system I call "throw all the books on the floor and pick one at random". I bet you find all kinds of interesting information you don't need.
Others have said it, but I'll repeat it: there's a difference between the skill of searching and the search medium. Google (or another more field-apropriate search engine), used well, is a starting point - it will be much better than non-online searches. Once you find something promising, following references in the article you're reading will probably be more fruitful. Just like in the old times.
If the cranky old farts who are complaining had bothered to ask younger but somewhat accomplished researchers how they work, I bet that would be the usual system. It's what I do. I'm 30 and am in the age group that spanned the digitization of search - I'm familiar with traditional search methods. For the most part, they suck. I also have pretty good Google-fu skills, and I know that playing keyword soup all day only gets you so far. I use search engines to find a useful paper, and then use its references to find others. This method did just fine for my Ph.D. research, and now it's working for me as a professional.
"Ground pounder" has been a nickname for infantry at least as far back as the Vietnam War.
Thanks for clearing that up. I thought it was a nickname for the kinds of boys they don't let in the military.
So if modern encryption techniques are so secure, what is to stop everyone from encrypting all their traffic?
Once that happens, how does AT&T propose to filter traffic it can not examine?
Your ISP: the ultimate man in the middle. You want real security, hand deliver your public key to all your contacts after first encrypting *it*. With a one-time pad. Which you then proceed to burn. And eat the ashes.
One thing that annoys me in these posts is all these Johnny Come Lately people who have just started to hate SCO as a result of their actions against Linux. I've been actively hating SCO ever since I had to use their piece of crap OS in 1993 on a 286 PC.
Then as you surely know, they aren't really the same SCO as that one.
Why not state it plainly? They've decided to form an organization to pool resources and pay off politicians.
They did. PAC == "Politically Acceptable Corruption"
Capital costs, which cover the base amount of bandwidth available to everyone, are relative to the size of the pipe, not how it's used.
But with similar things like electricity, the necessary size of the pipe is determined by peak traffic. So they have an incentive to charge more to people who use a lot during peak traffic (which is one reason why commercial access will always be more expensive). You've got a chicken and egg problem there, but in the end traffic determines the pipe. So if people downloading pr0n movies are causing more pipes to be needed, then they should pay for them.
I don't want to discount the challenges of managing a shared resource, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we could have a fare regime (pun intended) that charges for available bandwidth, and which is perfectly manageable for all concerned. To flesh this out a little, there's nothing to stop a provider from offering a base level of service - say, 5 Mbps - and allowing higher burst rates, but charging extra for the time the user operated at the higher rate.
Let's walk before we run. Right now we have a flat rate, the cost for which is getting pushed by excessive users. They're just now looking at variable pricing. Perhaps if that works they'll look at other options. Methinks consumers might not like your version because of the 'bill surprise' effect. It would certainly require the customer to have the ability to throttle his OWN connection, so he doesn't accidentally get charged extra because he happened to get a surprisingly good connection.
I honestly wonder why corporations don't see that what's good for the customer is good for them? Maybe I need to get a Harvard MBA in order to un-learn all these naive assumptions....
Well, give them some credit, this story shows they're trying. They realize that 95% of their customers could save on their bill by charging the 5% of bandwidth leeches proportionately what they use. Then again, I expect that the customer is so bad at actually recognizing what's good for him that the problem isn't as easy as you think. After all, if it were that easy we wouldn't need marketeers. 'Course, I still want to shoot ours anyway, but I digress...
And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
Why, because of the absurd notion that you should get what you pay for - and vice versa? Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
So you think enough of google to apply, don't get hired, then assume that when you're not hired it's because of your age? Ever consider you just didn't cut it?
One can only hope that they will be using this to replace the database that comes in Open Office.
I figured MS was paying them to include the current one to make Access look good by comparison.
Or anyone who moves around a lot, whether they're traveling or working mobile around the city. Lightweight + small form factor = something you can fit into a backpack or any other bag you use, while not weighing you down
Is a 12" laptop that huge that it weighs you down? Certainly we shall see, but I think it's dubious whether this thing will catch on.
Now that I think about it, students fit this profile pretty well too.
Except for the price tag part (for the demo'd version, about $3K). Unless we're talking about trust-fund babies, I can't see students affording this thing.
Shame about the price though, at $1800 I think I'd rather just lug my Powerbook.
Yup. And remember, $1800 is with the standard HDD and no optical drive.
I'm not sure if there's any in the market now but LG and Samsung announced they would produce dual HD-DVD/ Blu Ray players as far back as 2006. Personally I thought that was the way it was going to go - two formats jockeying for position for years to come, and everyone ending up with dual format players.
Maybe eventually, but for now the sticker shock on that option is a little rough. From amazon:
LG BH200 Super Blu Blu-Ray HD DVD Combo Player. Buy new: $799.99
That seems to be more expensive than simply buying one of each. That might work eventually, but I think one or the other of them will win before the majority of people have those things.
If you are not willing to accept those tradeoffs then you are not the target market for the MacBook Air. Might I suggest a MacBook or a MacBook Pro?
I think the implicit question is, "who is the tarket market?" Does anyone care that much about thickness that they're willing to give up a removeable battery, hard drive space, an optical drive, and pay a ton more?
For me, getting the flash drive for, say $200 extra would be OK, but not $1000. Methinks this is an idea a year or two before its time. Maybe some crazy early adopters will go for it, but that's all I see.
And I suppose people should stick with MS because nobody wants to install an alternative OS that only gets a fraction of the big-name applications? Nobody likes having two damn OSes to make sure they can run the software they want.
Good example. Computer hardware/software incompatibility is a major deterrent to adoption of other platforms. If there were no other consideration, no one would use Apple/Linux because using MS is very convenient. As we all know, however, there are many problems with the MS platform that drives a lot of people (myself included) to other competitors. These problems, for a minority of people, are enough to outweigh the convenience of knowing that you can run the vast majority of the software out there. Still, most people would (apparently) rather have the convenience.
So the question is, is there a sufficiently huge technical distinction between HD-DVD and Blu-ray that it outweighs the pain in the ass of having competing formats? Unless I'm missing something, I say it isn't even close.
Why, exactly? One would think that competition in ideas and standards would be just as healthy as a competition in the products themselves.
See my analysis. In theory, having different ideas might lead to better products. But it's different for media format wars where the content is the ultimate product, not the format technology. The average consumer can't distinguish, or possibly care, about the technical merits of the two platforms. In fact, I'd say the main reason that they exist is because the two sides each decided to fight it out so they could try to control the market, not because they thought either format was miles above the other. So this is what we have now, a format war. Not good for anybody except the ultimate winner, and certainly bad for consumers.
So here's the situation: right now, the market is harmed in that consumers benefit by *not* buying a player, instead waiting to see who wins (and someone will win; looks like blu-ray). Any benefit to the market would come from having two different technologies to battle to the death, with the winner presumably having better technical merit. The question is, does the difference in superior technology make up for the temporary invonvenience to consumers? In theory, that could be worth it. In DC vs. AC, it *was* worth it. In reality, here the technical distinction of the two players here is thin, and the differences have more to do with politics and studio deals than with any technology. That's why people just want someone to win, because the players are effectively identical to us.
In other words, get over your pissing contest boys, I want a player that I know will have movies made for it for the next 10 years.
I don't think the studios want different prices...
I don't know who Joel is (and his page is throwing a 503), but it's well known that it's Jobs fighting for the $.99 standard. The studios want to charge higher prices for new releases.
See:
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2006/04/22/3710
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/7436.cfm
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/record-companies-criticize-apple-itunes-pricing/
I've never heard consumers complain about price wars in the past... airlines, PCs, etc. Isn't that a big part of what capitalism is all about? While there are two competing solutions, since they have many similar features on a technical level, they're forced to compete on price. This tends to be GOOD for the consumer, at least in the short term. (In the longer term, it can be bad as lower margins can squeeze out smaller startup competitors in the field.)
That totally misses the point. We're talking *standards*, not *manufacturers*. Having multiple manufacturers who are competing for the exact same market is fantastic. But it doesn't help capitalism to have multiple standards; if anything, it fragments the market and makes competition more difficult.
Even then, IF players on the market could play either disc, then sure, competition between standards would be OK. But nobody likes hardware/disc incompatibility. Nobody likes buying a player that only gets half the movies released for it. Nobody likes having to have two damned disc players to make sure they can play what they want. And nobody likes buying a disc player whose maker loses the format war, meaning you spent hundreds of dollars for something that becomes a dinosaur in a year. Do you then go buy another disc player? Do you leave the player hooked up in your entertainment system forever even though it can only play the 5 movies you bought, or do you go re-buy those movies?
Basically, what's happening now is nobody wants to get caught up in the HD-DVD vs Blu-ray pissing contest, so a whole lot of people who otherwise would have bought a player by now are getting sick of the crap and want someone to win. That doesn't mean we want to see only one manufacturer making players; far from it. I'd like to see tons of manufacturers competing directly on the basis of a single standard. I'd like to get a better disc player than the one I have now, but I don't want to get in the middle of this crap.
Price the content based on quality
By quality, do you mean bitrate or a more subjective quality of the material? If the latter, the studios most certainly want variable pricing. It's Jobs that's forcing the uniform $0.99 pricing.
Imagine how people will feel when they find out half of their "co-workers" are just shell scripts.
You tell my boss that I put in 1 hour of work a day setting up shell scripts that run for the other 7, while still getting more done than most of my coworkers, and I'll punch you in your ass.
Christ, they'd probably promote the script and put it in charge of me, then where would I be?
Want to replace the helium lost and create cleaner, more abundant energy? Now is a good time to pour some more money into fusion research to try and get over the hump and create sustainable fusion reactions.
Even if we had fusion, I don't think it would generate that much helium, would it? I don't have time to do the math, but that's the whole point of fusion, right, that it generates massive amounts of energy (potentially) from relatively little fuel.
I had, in one of my classes, built an interface to GOCR (not Jack Black's band but the Gnu Optical Character Recognition project). This was a while ago. It was in C and it was shitty. I mean really shitty.
I kinda wished I had checked in that interface as I'm sure it's lost somewhere on the university network now. What if she had actually used it?
Well...if it sucked that bad, she probably would have shown you the door when you admitted writing it! ;)
I can completely empathize. It took me a good five years to come to terms with the fact that I'd essentially been had and would now need to choose between going out and starting up the career ladder as if I'd just graduated high school with essentially no advantage, or going to grad school on the other hand (i.e. school for many more years and at great expense) to gain at least some measurable advantage for myself with all the hard work I'd done.
I doubt it. I'm guessing you don't know what the *real* bottom of the career ladder is, at about minimum wage. Entry-level jobs I've seen pay about $12-15 an hour for basic office jobs for recent grad types, which isn't fantastic, but it ain't terrible if you majored in philosophy or something. Compare that to $6-8 an hour which is the real bottom of the career ladder, for high-schoolers.
If your bachelors degree truly gave you nothing beyond high school, that's your fault. Any number of opportunities exist during those four (or more) years to get some real experience doing something useful in for form of research, internships, etc.