The pay sucks, but you can often beg for a bite to eat. Of course, you don't need to make as much money since your expenses will be quite low once you've given up everything but the robes (just think, no more car insurance or property tax). World peace is certainly a challenging enough problem to tackle, and the 10,000 steps you take (to start with) should keep you in fine shape...
Regarding the comment about identical hashes from identical rips in the original post...
The assumption made by aSiTiC is that they are tracking arbitrary files ripped and tagged by an unknown individual. Given this context, it does seem like it would be hard to tell a legitimately ripped MP3 versus one "obtained" via file swapping.
However, it would be a far easier task to track MP3 files which have been purposely "altered" to produce a distinctive hash that is different from the hash produced with an MP3 ripped from the original CD.
Done this way, it becomes far easier for the RIAA to prove that the MP3s you have were obtained improperly, since they are different from proper rips and, further, are identical to "known" illegal copies.
Anyway, for what it's worth, this is my guess as to what the RIAA is actually tracking.
If they made those HHK keyboards with a trackpoint in the middle, I'd buy two. The trackpoint is the best mouse I've ever used, simply for the reason that I don't have to leave typing position to do a bit of mousing.
However, I'm a programmer who has been addicted to Emacs for nearly a decade, so I do much less mousing than the average computer user (i.e. web surfer). So, instead of the uber-cool HHK, I use the Mighty Mouse 84 Key, http://www.pckeyboard.com/surfer.html, and remap Ctrl and Caps Lock (I like Backspace where it is, though).
Further, I have this baby connected through an Outlook Apex KVM to a Linux x86 PC, a Windows 2000 box, an Ultra 10 (via a PS2->Sun converter), and a Blue-and-White Mac (via a PS2->USB converter), which leaves half of my ports open for various systems in development. Pure programming perfection. Hack on!
As an alternative to the standard QWERTY model and the Unicode keyboard I've proposed, we should also have a binary keyboard for those minimalists (aka vi users) in the crowd. All you really need are 0, 1, and Enter.
It doesn't really matter whether or not this patent is so generic that it simply describes the field of programming or whether the claims are completely covered by prior art.
The real point, and the true crime being committed by the PTO, is that, once the application is granted, Microsoft has been given the right to take you to court if it appears that you may have infringed upon this patent.
How many small to medium-sized institutions (companies, governments, etc.) can afford to stand up to a legal barrage from something with pockets as deep as Microsoft?
Have any of you read the Conclusion?...it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described...
Doesn't a patent only cover the specific claims in the disclosure?
Hmmm, I've got a half terabyte of RAID 5 disk system that I would contribute to help hold this data...which I would do simply for access and the right to use the information. Just how large is the pile of data in its entirety?
Oh, yes. I am not kidding. The gameage potential for that much cubic volume of one of the most famous cities in the world would provide awesome potential for any genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG).
Actually, inspired by the fine legacy of New York landlords through history;-}, it would be cool to build a disk farm large enough to hold the map in its entirety, paying for the hardware and bandwidth by renting out apartments in the virtual online world derived from the data.
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, yes. First we fake Manhattan, then we'll fake Berlin. (So terribly sorry, Leonard, I won't let it happen again...)
Do not try to follow this "Uberman's Sleep Cycle"! What is being described here is exactly what the nuerological disorder narcolepsy does to a person. In fact, it may be exactly this sort of stress that triggers a genetically latent disposition towards narcolepsy.
Narcolepsy is a disorder of the chemical triggering of dreaming for which there is currently no known cure. People with this problem naturally go from waking to dreaming in a few minutes after going to sleep. The result is that they get very little of the deepest sleep that is needed to really be rested.
Note that the person who wrote about this "Uberman's Sleep Cycle" even claimed the uncontrollable need to take naps every several hours after doing this to himself. This sort of thing is dangerous!
Uncontrollable drowsiness is inconvenient at best (falling asleep at work, in class, during conversations at dinner parties) and fatal at worst (falling asleep at the wheel is the number one cause of auto accidents...yes, it outranks drunk driving).
I am a narcoleptic, and I can tell you that the consequences of having a screwed up sleep mechanism are not fun. If you actually manage to "adjust yourself", you can also reasonably expect other effects such as sleep paralysis, extreme hallucinations (trust me; you don't want this...psychedelics can be fun, but real hallucinations are generally quite disconcerting), and cataplexy (dream seizures which cause you to momentarily lose control of your muscles...with effects ranging from mildly embarrasing to quite dangerous).
From the perspective of someone who has narcolepsy and has experienced some of the horrors that it can cause to your life, I implore you not to do this to yourself. Healthy sleep is very important for a healthy mind and body, and it is unwise to risk your ability to get good sleep for the rest of your life.
Nope, wrong again. The English construct "either...or" should be converted to the "exclusive or" operator in logic.
So, if we ignore the implication of magnitude of difference in the original statement (which I will because I am lazy), the proper translation of the statement is
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) xor IQ(ass) > IQ(me))
where
(Gates == Bill Gates),
(me == the original poster), and
(ass == a donkey).
The proper transformation of the xor is
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) and not IQ(ass) > IQ(me))
or
(IQ(ass) > IQ(me) and not IQ(Gates) > IQ(me))
which is equivalent to
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) and IQ(me) >= IQ(ass))
or
(IQ(ass) > IQ(me) and IQ(me) >= IQ(Gates))
which, finally, simplifies to
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) >= IQ(ass))
or
(IQ(ass) > IQ(me) >= IQ(Gates))
.
Now, regardless of my opinions about Bill's ethics, I believe that he is probably more intelligent than a donkey (I'll make no assumptions about the status of our original poster with regards to the animal). On the other hand, this may not necessarily be true, as I think I may have just shown that it is possible to be quite a smart ass.
And, now that the logic lesson is over, I am going to submit this gratuitously non-sequitorial post with the full belief that no one but a moderator will ever read it and that it has been written solely for my own amusement.;-}
Further, the delays got worse as you added more songs...I would estimate that it took up to five minutes to boot when fully loaded with MP3s.
It was pretty obvious to me that they were rebuilding the master lists on every boot and rebuilding the interface scroll widgets whenever you switched around.
The boot delay was particularly stupid because they had a hard drive available for static storage of the playlists!
Also, since it could only display four or five items in a list at a time, it should have been very quick to switch menus (ie draw the visible four items immediately and continue building the scroll widget, if necessary, in the background).
Basically, the Nomad sucked in practical use and Creative failed to fix their UI problems after much time and grumbling by their customer base, so I finally disassembled it to salvage the hard drive for something useful.
On the bright side, I guess this should be a comforting sign of job security to me as an embedded software developer. I cannot imagine ever being so brain dead that I would write crap as obviously broken as this.
Seriously, do NOT buy the new Nomad Jukebox from Creative. Even if they have fixed some of their issues with this new model, they have already shown themselves to be totally irresponsible about their initial QA as well as continued support of products that they have already sold.
My intuition says that the amount of data involved here might be more of a problem than the computations that generate it. I believe the figure stated was 35 times the amount of info contained in the Library of Congress. Remember that, in addition to books, a copy of all periodicals published (music and film, too, right?) must be sent to the LoC...
It takes a mighty whopping I/O system to deal with that amount of data. On the other hand, regardless of your take on the RIAA and Napster, that whole ordeal has shown us that massively distributed data storage systems can be quite capable. However, WAN transfer speeds would probably decimate your performance.
You must note that one of the hardest problems in bulding a massive cluster is the performance of the interconnect. If you start looking at the price breakdown of some of the commercial cluster racks available these days, I think you'll be surprised at the percentage of the price devoted to its internal network infrastructure (those Myrinet ports are not cheap).
Anyway, I've got a great idea! Let's see if ETI-style processing can take on the big iron! We'll just build our own Distributed.Net style nuclear simulation and benchmark it against LANL's...;-}
How many times do you think you'll be able to say "First Amendment" before the spooks come knocking at your door? Of course, there is also the small problem of obtaining quality input data; maybe, if we asked nicely, they'd let us use some of their input sets...
Are you saying that someone thinks it's a good idea to build in a huge denial of service bug into every piece of open source networking and security software?
Is this guy on Microsoft's payroll?
How about this. He can build the little wrapper that does this and break his own programs if he wants; he can even make a patch to allow people to./configure it in, but this bug should be left out of my binaries as well as the standard distributions.
Just imagine the nightmare of combining this bug with standard distributions. All of the sudden, all of my servers die at the same time.
I would love trying to explain this at work. "Uh, yeah, sorry. No one can get work done while I update all of the networking binaries with the latest version. You all needed a vacation anyway, right? What broke? Well, most of the software was actually fairly secure, but all of the BozoBSD 6.9 installations hit their automatic expiration this morning and stopped working."
Seriously, folks, this is a bad idea. It smacks up there with forcing me to write N lines of comments for every line of code. This really doesn't create better software. Instead, it causes software to cost more for the same (or lesser) quality and obscures the salient commentary with loads of arbitrary text intended only to fill a quota.
How about a review policy instead? Perhaps you should institute a company policy that requires your admins to regularly review the relevant software on your critical systems and sign off on whether they have freshened them with updated versions.
In order for a true one time pad to be useful for communication, it must be known by both the sending and receiving parties. As we all know, any secret known by more than one person is subject to compromise.;-}
I'm glad to see someone with some sense comment on this rather than fly off with yet another OS X versus Linux rant.
Note that the post indicated that they are adding cross-compiler support to their GnuPro tool chain. The main target of this tool is embedded people (which is why you would want a cross compiler).
Regarding the comments about Apple extensions to GCC regarding Altivec, it is likely that what Cygnus/Red Hat is doing is folding in those very changes.
All of you web surfer, word processor, gimp'in, rippin' and burnin' (i.e. desktop apps) types out there need to remember that the PowerPC is heavily used in the embedded industry.
The reason it is used so much is the very reason why Apple could make the cute Cube. They run very low wattage (and, thus, heat) for their relative power. There are many application areas where a chip that must have 35+ dBA cooling just to keep from frying itself is just not acceptable.
One should note that the power and heat characteristics of the x86 line are so poor that Intel doesn't really attempt to compete using them in the embedded market. For this, they eviscerated DEC in order to kill the Alpha and gain the StrongArm as their embedded offering.
One person mentioned that compilers have difficulty automatically extracting parallelism. They are correct. However, the embedded arena is one of those areas where people will regularly hand-optimize critical sections of code in order to meet performance or economic goals.
Desktop users must remember that embedded processors outweigh workstation processors by many orders of magnitude. This is big business, and the code involved is very interesting. However, your brand new car is not as obvious of a computing platform as your brand new laptop.
If you have been consulting for at least two years without a degree and expect to continue doing so, consider joining the IEEE. Two years after joining, you qualify for a group rate on health insurance. Buying your own bennies is not so bad if you're making the bucks.
No, I don't work for the IEEE or an insurance agency, but I do pay for my own health insurance through a group plan. Compared to my average yearly net, subsidizing my own insurance is minor. On the other hand, my priorities are all wrong, since I would rather have first class health insurance than a first class automobile.
Perhaps this is part of the difference between an MIS background and a CS background? (Okay, it's thin, but I needed something to keep this post vaguely on topic.)
Anyway, the IEEE insurance is also a good option for any techie to consider long term, since having external coverage prevents this from being the reason you continue working for an employer you should have left for every other reason or from being moved over to an innefectual HMO because it looked better on an accountant's bottom line.
Having a transparent version control system behind my filesystem is an interesting idea that I've mused over a number of times in the past (of course, you might not want this for certain rapidly changing, unimportant data).
However, there are certain flaws to CVS that speak against using it as the VCS. In particular, its biggest flaw, the inability to cope with directory structure modification, is even worse for this use than for software development.
I'm curious how your system at work deals with this. I do a similar thing as well, but only for/etc and a few other areas which carry system configuration; these never change in structure. I can't imagine how you cope with user directories.
It's an expensive commercial product, but, if I were going to go this route (and had the budget to justify it), I would want to use something like Rational's ClearCase.
ClearCase manages structure changes quite robustly and is presented as a filesystem to begin with. The view concept is powerful. If it were combined with regular automatic version set labelling, you could quickly go check out the state of your filesystem from any particular day by simply using a different rule set.
Actually, to wander slightly more off topic, does anyone know of a SCM/VCS that provides ClearCase's capabilities for a cheapskate's budget?
One common theme that I read in the replies is the question of whether Oracle (or any RDBMS or DB in general) is appropriate for your situation. In light of this sort of response, it might be appropriate to reconsider what you are attempting to accomplish rather than focusing on how you've decided (perhaps prematurely) to solve it.
This is a list of requirements I've read and inferred from your post (with definite emphasis on the inference part...check me if I'm incorrect in any of these). Whatever solution you put in place:
1) must appear identical at application level to existing information topology
2) must protect you from failure of any node in the underlying storage system
3) is desired to provide you the ability to perform rollbacks
4) must be of enterprise-level robustness from day one
5) must have adequate performance at current level of (tens of?) terabytes of storage
6) should be able to scale up in size and complexity of topology from current (you are unlikely to start using less space and suddenly have simpler systems, correct?)
6) must be maintainable for years into the future by network administrators of average skill (you do not want to become irreplaceable in this role; it may provide job security, but it sure limits potential for advancement and personal growth)
7) should be deployable with minimum downtime (perhaps zero?)
I know that you've already been swamped with replies regarding your question about CS schools, but, being in the situation (and an insomniac as well), I thought I'd offer my opinions.
The number one thing I want to tell you is: go to college. I don't mean a technical school, nor do I mean a community college. What you want is the full-blown, people moving away to live there, university experience.
Why? It has nothing to do with the classes you'll take nor the skills you will acquire. Nor does it have anything to do with the infamous parties (although being able to code clearly with a serious hangover is a great job skill:).
My suggestion has to do with people, because you'll be surrounded by lots of them. You will live with them, study with them, party with them, cry with them, laugh with them, and even love some of them. You will never forget them, and some of them will become life-long friends.
There's a population density thing going on, you see. You find yourself surrounded so many young, smart, zany, hungry, healthy, vibrant people all day, every day. All of this zest and sheer vigor for life pushes you to become better in so many ways. It really is amazing...so much so that you must at least give it a try.
However, consider it just that when you get to college, a trial. I have also met many who didn't thrive in the situation. They only hurt themselves, those who insisted on staying and weren't ready for the experience. If you don't like it, don't just stumble and shove your way through. Go away for a while and do something else. That way, when you are a different person later in life (you will be), if you want to go back, you will have left the doors open.
Okay, okay, I know you wanted to hear advice on the technical aspects of schools. Being a geek (I presume) you've kind of waded through the previous bits of dribble rolling your eyes and laughing at me. So let me get to it.
Take fewer classes and work a part-time job while going through school. Don't get just any job. Get a technical job doing programming. There is enough of a dearth of talent out there that, if you sell yourself honestly and aggressively, you should be able to find something that will challenge you and stretch you.
I know many will not like my piece of advice (the dean of my school explicitly advised the opposite on the first day of freshman classes). It WILL take you longer to get through school this way, and it WILL be even more difficult juggling your responsibilities.
The advantage is that you will be forced to do a different kind of learning at work. You will be required to just "pick up" some of those practical skills you listed. You may well even get paid to do so. Further, as you progress through the theory at school, you will see more and more why it is useful as you are thrown into real situations and begin to benefit from its application (it really is amazing how much easier it is to write a little command parser after a language/compilers course than that first naive ad hoc attempt).
Concentrate on learning how to learn. Good teachers of any subject are really rather rare. In order to be qualified to be a professor, you have to be good at writing papers (especially grant proposals). You don't necessarily need to be good at either the craft of programming nor at conveying the theory to a lecture hall. However, it's funny how this is one of the greatest skills that you can obtain at the University. Learn how to be your own best teacher out of self-defense.
Do try to get a degree, if you want to continue programming through your career. I may be wrong, but I see a problem brewing. Right now, due to a couple of factors (Y2K and Internet boom), there is an incredible demand for programmers. Kids are walking out of school with a bachelor's degree and no experience into 50K jobs. A CS degree has become the new MBA, and people are flocking to get one regardless of whether they actually enjoy it in practice. So, right now, there are plenty of jobs. But, I see a time coming when there are more "qualified" individuals than jobs. In this scenario, it behooves you to have a degree as your "license to practice". When jobs become scarce, it may well become a necessary qualification, regardless of skill and experience.
Okay, if you really are thinking about college now, how do you choose? There really are two major types of computer curricula: IT and CS. Information Technology (IT), is the common name for a business school type of computer degree. They will teach you some basic programming, some specific computer skills, and a general business-oriented background (economics, accounting, administration, etc.). This is great if you want to become the type of systems analyst that puts together commodity hardware and shrink-wrapped software for businesses. It's also fairly good, assuming the program has enough networking classes, if you want to become a system administrator (or especially a webmaster). I don't know, but I don't believe this category fits you.
There are really also two basic types of Computer Science department: Liberal Arts and Engineering. The former are rooted in the Mathematics departments of their Univeristies (CS largely grew up in the early days as a specialized branch of applied math). The latter are often rooted (with Computer Engineering) in the Electrical Engineering departments of their Universities.
Because of accreditation (DO go to an accredited school, even if you choose a technical college), the bulk of your core courses will be the same regardless of which type of CS program it is. However, the Engineering variety will often have more emphasis on applied theory than pure theory, and vice versa for the Mathematics variety.
You should absolutely visit every college you are seriously considering. The amount of money you are talking about spending deserves some legwork. Would you consider buying a $25,000 car (that's fairly cheap for college, mind you) without at least looking at it first?
Consider taking your car for a test drive as well. Go to the CS department and ask to sit in on several classes. Check out beginning as well as upper-level classes. This way, you get an idea of the range of classes and get to meet some of the professors and/or graduate students. Talk to these people. Ask them about the kinds of projects they are working on. If you already have particular interests, find professors and students who specialize in that. Don't be shy.
Go to the University book store. Look at the texts for all of the CS courses. This is perhaps the quickest way to get an idea of the overall curriculum. Remember, good teachers are rare, so you may have to largely be teaching yourself from these books. Also, note down the prices. These are likely to be some of the most expensive texts you will buy for your classes, so you can get a good worst-case estimate on your total book cost from this.
I have one final piece of advice to give you. Buy yourself a computer. It is a fairly trivial cost compared to the total price of college, but no computer science student should go without. Administering your own box is a great learning experience in itself, and sometimes you absolutely need the flexibility and control in deciding which programs are available, how things are structured, and when it is available. It is a horrible feeling to be pulling an all-nighter in the labs and to get stuck because you don't have the permissions to fix something. Besides, schools generally get uptight when you bring a coffee maker into the lab.
Speaking of which, dawn has arrived...it's time for my morning brew and some hacking on my data structures project. Good luck, and, whatever you do, enjoy it.
Bingo! In fact, it doesn't really prevent individuals from exporting strong crypto. The primary effect is essentially that businesses cannot sell strong crypto nor products having strong crypto as a component.
This is an incredibly dangerous economic position. A significant portion of the gross national product is computer-related. Increasingly, the money is in network-enabled products.
Spread spectrum phones and the like show that the average consumer is catching the whiff that their privacy is important (note that the same encryption that protects the terrorist from the law protects my sister from a tech-savvy stalker with a scanner).
If I were an IT manager at a large corporation, I would not even consider a networking product without good encryption. Increasingly, information equals money, and I would not want my competitors to be able to snoop.
Q.E.D. The government of the U.S. has denied its corporations the right to participate in one of the largest software markets of the next century. From the perspective of a software/hardware engineer, I'm quite seriously considering emigrating. Any suggestions on destination?
Slashdot Mirror
The pay sucks, but you can often beg for a bite to eat. Of course, you don't need to make as much money since your expenses will be quite low once you've given up everything but the robes (just think, no more car insurance or property tax). World peace is certainly a challenging enough problem to tackle, and the 10,000 steps you take (to start with) should keep you in fine shape...
Regarding the comment about identical hashes from identical rips in the original post...
The assumption made by aSiTiC is that they are tracking arbitrary files ripped and tagged by an unknown individual. Given this context, it does seem like it would be hard to tell a legitimately ripped MP3 versus one "obtained" via file swapping.
However, it would be a far easier task to track MP3 files which have been purposely "altered" to produce a distinctive hash that is different from the hash produced with an MP3 ripped from the original CD.
Done this way, it becomes far easier for the RIAA to prove that the MP3s you have were obtained improperly, since they are different from proper rips and, further, are identical to "known" illegal copies.
Anyway, for what it's worth, this is my guess as to what the RIAA is actually tracking.
If they made those HHK keyboards with a trackpoint in the middle, I'd buy two. The trackpoint is the best mouse I've ever used, simply for the reason that I don't have to leave typing position to do a bit of mousing.
However, I'm a programmer who has been addicted to Emacs for nearly a decade, so I do much less mousing than the average computer user (i.e. web surfer). So, instead of the uber-cool HHK, I use the Mighty Mouse 84 Key, http://www.pckeyboard.com/surfer.html, and remap Ctrl and Caps Lock (I like Backspace where it is, though).
Further, I have this baby connected through an Outlook Apex KVM to a Linux x86 PC, a Windows 2000 box, an Ultra 10 (via a PS2->Sun converter), and a Blue-and-White Mac (via a PS2->USB converter), which leaves half of my ports open for various systems in development. Pure programming perfection. Hack on!
As an alternative to the standard QWERTY model and the Unicode keyboard I've proposed, we should also have a binary keyboard for those minimalists (aka vi users) in the crowd. All you really need are 0, 1, and Enter.
What we really need is a keyboard with a seperate key for every Unicode character.
No offense intended, but this is a naive stance.
It doesn't really matter whether or not this patent is so generic that it simply describes the field of programming or whether the claims are completely covered by prior art.
The real point, and the true crime being committed by the PTO, is that, once the application is granted, Microsoft has been given the right to take you to court if it appears that you may have infringed upon this patent.
How many small to medium-sized institutions (companies, governments, etc.) can afford to stand up to a legal barrage from something with pockets as deep as Microsoft?
Have any of you read the Conclusion? ...it is to be understood that the invention defined in the appended claims is not necessarily limited to the specific features or acts described...
Doesn't a patent only cover the specific claims in the disclosure?
Hmmm, I've got a half terabyte of RAID 5 disk system that I would contribute to help hold this data...which I would do simply for access and the right to use the information. Just how large is the pile of data in its entirety?
;-}, it would be cool to build a disk farm large enough to hold the map in its entirety, paying for the hardware and bandwidth by renting out apartments in the virtual online world derived from the data.
Oh, yes. I am not kidding. The gameage potential for that much cubic volume of one of the most famous cities in the world would provide awesome potential for any genre of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG).
Actually, inspired by the fine legacy of New York landlords through history
Bwah ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, yes. First we fake Manhattan, then we'll fake Berlin. (So terribly sorry, Leonard, I won't let it happen again...)
c0,d1
Do not try to follow this "Uberman's Sleep Cycle"! What is being described here is exactly what the nuerological disorder narcolepsy does to a person. In fact, it may be exactly this sort of stress that triggers a genetically latent disposition towards narcolepsy.
Narcolepsy is a disorder of the chemical triggering of dreaming for which there is currently no known cure. People with this problem naturally go from waking to dreaming in a few minutes after going to sleep. The result is that they get very little of the deepest sleep that is needed to really be rested.
Note that the person who wrote about this "Uberman's Sleep Cycle" even claimed the uncontrollable need to take naps every several hours after doing this to himself. This sort of thing is dangerous!
Uncontrollable drowsiness is inconvenient at best (falling asleep at work, in class, during conversations at dinner parties) and fatal at worst (falling asleep at the wheel is the number one cause of auto accidents...yes, it outranks drunk driving).
I am a narcoleptic, and I can tell you that the consequences of having a screwed up sleep mechanism are not fun. If you actually manage to "adjust yourself", you can also reasonably expect other effects such as sleep paralysis, extreme hallucinations (trust me; you don't want this...psychedelics can be fun, but real hallucinations are generally quite disconcerting), and cataplexy (dream seizures which cause you to momentarily lose control of your muscles...with effects ranging from mildly embarrasing to quite dangerous).
From the perspective of someone who has narcolepsy and has experienced some of the horrors that it can cause to your life, I implore you not to do this to yourself. Healthy sleep is very important for a healthy mind and body, and it is unwise to risk your ability to get good sleep for the rest of your life.
Nope, wrong again. The English construct "either...or" should be converted to the "exclusive or" operator in logic.
So, if we ignore the implication of magnitude of difference in the original statement (which I will because I am lazy), the proper translation of the statement is
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) xor IQ(ass) > IQ(me))
where (Gates == Bill Gates), (me == the original poster), and (ass == a donkey).
The proper transformation of the xor is
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) and not IQ(ass) > IQ(me)) or (IQ(ass) > IQ(me) and not IQ(Gates) > IQ(me))
which is equivalent to
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) and IQ(me) >= IQ(ass)) or (IQ(ass) > IQ(me) and IQ(me) >= IQ(Gates))
which, finally, simplifies to
(IQ(Gates) > IQ(me) >= IQ(ass)) or (IQ(ass) > IQ(me) >= IQ(Gates)) .
Now, regardless of my opinions about Bill's ethics, I believe that he is probably more intelligent than a donkey (I'll make no assumptions about the status of our original poster with regards to the animal). On the other hand, this may not necessarily be true, as I think I may have just shown that it is possible to be quite a smart ass.
And, now that the logic lesson is over, I am going to submit this gratuitously non-sequitorial post with the full belief that no one but a moderator will ever read it and that it has been written solely for my own amusement. ;-}
Further, the delays got worse as you added more songs...I would estimate that it took up to five minutes to boot when fully loaded with MP3s.
It was pretty obvious to me that they were rebuilding the master lists on every boot and rebuilding the interface scroll widgets whenever you switched around.
The boot delay was particularly stupid because they had a hard drive available for static storage of the playlists!
Also, since it could only display four or five items in a list at a time, it should have been very quick to switch menus (ie draw the visible four items immediately and continue building the scroll widget, if necessary, in the background).
Basically, the Nomad sucked in practical use and Creative failed to fix their UI problems after much time and grumbling by their customer base, so I finally disassembled it to salvage the hard drive for something useful.
On the bright side, I guess this should be a comforting sign of job security to me as an embedded software developer. I cannot imagine ever being so brain dead that I would write crap as obviously broken as this.
Seriously, do NOT buy the new Nomad Jukebox from Creative. Even if they have fixed some of their issues with this new model, they have already shown themselves to be totally irresponsible about their initial QA as well as continued support of products that they have already sold.
My intuition says that the amount of data involved here might be more of a problem than the computations that generate it. I believe the figure stated was 35 times the amount of info contained in the Library of Congress. Remember that, in addition to books, a copy of all periodicals published (music and film, too, right?) must be sent to the LoC...
;-}
It takes a mighty whopping I/O system to deal with that amount of data. On the other hand, regardless of your take on the RIAA and Napster, that whole ordeal has shown us that massively distributed data storage systems can be quite capable. However, WAN transfer speeds would probably decimate your performance.
You must note that one of the hardest problems in bulding a massive cluster is the performance of the interconnect. If you start looking at the price breakdown of some of the commercial cluster racks available these days, I think you'll be surprised at the percentage of the price devoted to its internal network infrastructure (those Myrinet ports are not cheap).
Anyway, I've got a great idea! Let's see if ETI-style processing can take on the big iron! We'll just build our own Distributed.Net style nuclear simulation and benchmark it against LANL's...
How many times do you think you'll be able to say "First Amendment" before the spooks come knocking at your door? Of course, there is also the small problem of obtaining quality input data; maybe, if we asked nicely, they'd let us use some of their input sets...
Are you saying that someone thinks it's a good idea to build in a huge denial of service bug into every piece of open source networking and security software?
./configure it in, but this bug should be left out of my binaries as well as the standard distributions.
Is this guy on Microsoft's payroll?
How about this. He can build the little wrapper that does this and break his own programs if he wants; he can even make a patch to allow people to
Just imagine the nightmare of combining this bug with standard distributions. All of the sudden, all of my servers die at the same time.
I would love trying to explain this at work. "Uh, yeah, sorry. No one can get work done while I update all of the networking binaries with the latest version. You all needed a vacation anyway, right? What broke? Well, most of the software was actually fairly secure, but all of the BozoBSD 6.9 installations hit their automatic expiration this morning and stopped working."
Seriously, folks, this is a bad idea. It smacks up there with forcing me to write N lines of comments for every line of code. This really doesn't create better software. Instead, it causes software to cost more for the same (or lesser) quality and obscures the salient commentary with loads of arbitrary text intended only to fill a quota.
How about a review policy instead? Perhaps you should institute a company policy that requires your admins to regularly review the relevant software on your critical systems and sign off on whether they have freshened them with updated versions.
Actually, you are only mostly correct.
;-}
In order for a true one time pad to be useful for communication, it must be known by both the sending and receiving parties. As we all know, any secret known by more than one person is subject to compromise.
I'm glad to see someone with some sense comment on this rather than fly off with yet another OS X versus Linux rant.
Note that the post indicated that they are adding cross-compiler support to their GnuPro tool chain. The main target of this tool is embedded people (which is why you would want a cross compiler).
Regarding the comments about Apple extensions to GCC regarding Altivec, it is likely that what Cygnus/Red Hat is doing is folding in those very changes.
All of you web surfer, word processor, gimp'in, rippin' and burnin' (i.e. desktop apps) types out there need to remember that the PowerPC is heavily used in the embedded industry.
The reason it is used so much is the very reason why Apple could make the cute Cube. They run very low wattage (and, thus, heat) for their relative power. There are many application areas where a chip that must have 35+ dBA cooling just to keep from frying itself is just not acceptable.
One should note that the power and heat characteristics of the x86 line are so poor that Intel doesn't really attempt to compete using them in the embedded market. For this, they eviscerated DEC in order to kill the Alpha and gain the StrongArm as their embedded offering.
One person mentioned that compilers have difficulty automatically extracting parallelism. They are correct. However, the embedded arena is one of those areas where people will regularly hand-optimize critical sections of code in order to meet performance or economic goals.
Desktop users must remember that embedded processors outweigh workstation processors by many orders of magnitude. This is big business, and the code involved is very interesting. However, your brand new car is not as obvious of a computing platform as your brand new laptop.
Okay, I've expelled enough air for now. Later...
If you have been consulting for at least two years without a degree and expect to continue doing so, consider joining the IEEE. Two years after joining, you qualify for a group rate on health insurance. Buying your own bennies is not so bad if you're making the bucks.
No, I don't work for the IEEE or an insurance agency, but I do pay for my own health insurance through a group plan. Compared to my average yearly net, subsidizing my own insurance is minor. On the other hand, my priorities are all wrong, since I would rather have first class health insurance than a first class automobile.
Perhaps this is part of the difference between an MIS background and a CS background? (Okay, it's thin, but I needed something to keep this post vaguely on topic.)
Anyway, the IEEE insurance is also a good option for any techie to consider long term, since having external coverage prevents this from being the reason you continue working for an employer you should have left for every other reason or from being moved over to an innefectual HMO because it looked better on an accountant's bottom line.
Having a transparent version control system behind my filesystem is an interesting idea that I've mused over a number of times in the past (of course, you might not want this for certain rapidly changing, unimportant data).
/etc and a few other areas which carry system configuration; these never change in structure. I can't imagine how you cope with user directories.
However, there are certain flaws to CVS that speak against using it as the VCS. In particular, its biggest flaw, the inability to cope with directory structure modification, is even worse for this use than for software development.
I'm curious how your system at work deals with this. I do a similar thing as well, but only for
It's an expensive commercial product, but, if I were going to go this route (and had the budget to justify it), I would want to use something like Rational's ClearCase.
ClearCase manages structure changes quite robustly and is presented as a filesystem to begin with. The view concept is powerful. If it were combined with regular automatic version set labelling, you could quickly go check out the state of your filesystem from any particular day by simply using a different rule set.
Actually, to wander slightly more off topic, does anyone know of a SCM/VCS that provides ClearCase's capabilities for a cheapskate's budget?
One common theme that I read in the replies is the question of whether Oracle (or any RDBMS or DB in general) is appropriate for your situation. In light of this sort of response, it might be appropriate to reconsider what you are attempting to accomplish rather than focusing on how you've decided (perhaps prematurely) to solve it.
This is a list of requirements I've read and inferred from your post (with definite emphasis on the inference part...check me if I'm incorrect in any of these). Whatever solution you put in place:
1) must appear identical at application level to existing information topology
2) must protect you from failure of any node in the underlying storage system
3) is desired to provide you the ability to perform rollbacks
4) must be of enterprise-level robustness from day one
5) must have adequate performance at current level of (tens of?) terabytes of storage
6) should be able to scale up in size and complexity of topology from current (you are unlikely to start using less space and suddenly have simpler systems, correct?)
6) must be maintainable for years into the future by network administrators of average skill (you do not want to become irreplaceable in this role; it may provide job security, but it sure limits potential for advancement and personal growth)
7) should be deployable with minimum downtime (perhaps zero?)
I know that you've already been swamped with replies regarding your question about CS schools, but, being in the situation (and an insomniac as well), I thought I'd offer my opinions.
:).
The number one thing I want to tell you is: go to college. I don't mean a technical school, nor do I mean a community college. What you want is the full-blown, people moving away to live there, university experience.
Why? It has nothing to do with the classes you'll take nor the skills you will acquire. Nor does it have anything to do with the infamous parties (although being able to code clearly with a serious hangover is a great job skill
My suggestion has to do with people, because you'll be surrounded by lots of them. You will live with them, study with them, party with them, cry with them, laugh with them, and even love some of them. You will never forget them, and some of them will become life-long friends.
There's a population density thing going on, you see. You find yourself surrounded so many young, smart, zany, hungry, healthy, vibrant people all day, every day. All of this zest and sheer vigor for life pushes you to become better in so many ways. It really is amazing...so much so that you must at least give it a try.
However, consider it just that when you get to college, a trial. I have also met many who didn't thrive in the situation. They only hurt themselves, those who insisted on staying and weren't ready for the experience. If you don't like it, don't just stumble and shove your way through. Go away for a while and do something else. That way, when you are a different person later in life (you will be), if you want to go back, you will have left the doors open.
Okay, okay, I know you wanted to hear advice on the technical aspects of schools. Being a geek (I presume) you've kind of waded through the previous bits of dribble rolling your eyes and laughing at me. So let me get to it.
Take fewer classes and work a part-time job while going through school. Don't get just any job. Get a technical job doing programming. There is enough of a dearth of talent out there that, if you sell yourself honestly and aggressively, you should be able to find something that will challenge you and stretch you.
I know many will not like my piece of advice (the dean of my school explicitly advised the opposite on the first day of freshman classes). It WILL take you longer to get through school this way, and it WILL be even more difficult juggling your responsibilities.
The advantage is that you will be forced to do a different kind of learning at work. You will be required to just "pick up" some of those practical skills you listed. You may well even get paid to do so. Further, as you progress through the theory at school, you will see more and more why it is useful as you are thrown into real situations and begin to benefit from its application (it really is amazing how much easier it is to write a little command parser after a language/compilers course than that first naive ad hoc attempt).
Concentrate on learning how to learn. Good teachers of any subject are really rather rare. In order to be qualified to be a professor, you have to be good at writing papers (especially grant proposals). You don't necessarily need to be good at either the craft of programming nor at conveying the theory to a lecture hall. However, it's funny how this is one of the greatest skills that you can obtain at the University. Learn how to be your own best teacher out of self-defense.
Do try to get a degree, if you want to continue programming through your career. I may be wrong, but I see a problem brewing. Right now, due to a couple of factors (Y2K and Internet boom), there is an incredible demand for programmers. Kids are walking out of school with a bachelor's degree and no experience into 50K jobs. A CS degree has become the new MBA, and people are flocking to get one regardless of whether they actually enjoy it in practice. So, right now, there are plenty of jobs. But, I see a time coming when there are more "qualified" individuals than jobs. In this scenario, it behooves you to have a degree as your "license to practice". When jobs become scarce, it may well become a necessary qualification, regardless of skill and experience.
Okay, if you really are thinking about college now, how do you choose? There really are two major types of computer curricula: IT and CS.
Information Technology (IT), is the common name for a business school type of computer degree. They will teach you some basic programming, some specific computer skills, and a general business-oriented background (economics, accounting, administration, etc.). This is great if you want to become the type of systems analyst that puts together commodity hardware and shrink-wrapped software for businesses. It's also fairly good, assuming the program has enough networking classes, if you want to become a system administrator (or especially a webmaster). I don't know, but I don't believe this category fits you.
There are really also two basic types of Computer Science department: Liberal Arts and Engineering. The former are rooted in the Mathematics departments of their Univeristies (CS largely grew up in the early days as a specialized branch of applied math). The latter are often rooted (with Computer Engineering) in the Electrical Engineering departments of their Universities.
Because of accreditation (DO go to an accredited school, even if you choose a technical college), the bulk of your core courses will be the same regardless of which type of CS program it is. However, the Engineering variety will often have more emphasis on applied theory than pure theory, and vice versa for the Mathematics variety.
You should absolutely visit every college you are seriously considering. The amount of money you are talking about spending deserves some legwork. Would you consider buying a $25,000 car (that's fairly cheap for college, mind you) without at least looking at it first?
Consider taking your car for a test drive as well. Go to the CS department and ask to sit in on several classes. Check out beginning as well as upper-level classes. This way, you get an idea of the range of classes and get to meet some of the professors and/or graduate students. Talk to these people. Ask them about the kinds of projects they are working on. If you already have particular interests, find professors and students who specialize in that. Don't be shy.
Go to the University book store. Look at the texts for all of the CS courses. This is perhaps the quickest way to get an idea of the overall curriculum. Remember, good teachers are rare, so you may have to largely be teaching yourself from these books. Also, note down the prices. These are likely to be some of the most expensive texts you will buy for your classes, so you can get a good worst-case estimate on your total book cost from this.
I have one final piece of advice to give you. Buy yourself a computer. It is a fairly trivial cost compared to the total price of college, but no computer science student should go without. Administering your own box is a great learning experience in itself, and sometimes you absolutely need the flexibility and control in deciding which programs are available, how things are structured, and when it is available. It is a horrible feeling to be pulling an all-nighter in the labs and to get stuck because you don't have the permissions to fix something. Besides, schools generally get uptight when you bring a coffee maker into the lab.
Speaking of which, dawn has arrived...it's time for my morning brew and some hacking on my data structures project. Good luck, and, whatever you do, enjoy it.
Cheers,
c0d1
Bingo! In fact, it doesn't really prevent individuals from exporting strong crypto. The primary effect is essentially that businesses cannot sell strong crypto nor products having strong crypto as a component.
This is an incredibly dangerous economic position. A significant portion of the gross national product is computer-related. Increasingly, the money is in network-enabled products.
Spread spectrum phones and the like show that the average consumer is catching the whiff that their privacy is important (note that the same encryption that protects the terrorist from the law protects my sister from a tech-savvy stalker with a scanner).
If I were an IT manager at a large corporation, I would not even consider a networking product without good encryption. Increasingly, information equals money, and I would not want my competitors to be able to snoop.
Q.E.D. The government of the U.S. has denied its corporations the right to participate in one of the largest software markets of the next century. From the perspective of a software/hardware engineer, I'm quite seriously considering emigrating. Any suggestions on destination?