The one major flaw with becoming the expert on the things no one else knows (or is interested in) is that these are often skills that are very hard to transfer to another job. If your company survives, and you survive the company, great. In today's corporate world however, this seems to be a very poor bet to make. However if not, good luck prominently listing "DOS expert" on your resume, much less finding the small niche of companies that would actually find this to be a positive.
The rest of your advice is mix of common sense "duhs" mixed with nonsense. A role model indeed - someone who's hair disappears when drug tests roll around (I presume you also bathe in nair), works (lazily) on outdated tech (and likely has a distored view about their own job security and position), offers "date a geekier girl" as a shining nugget of relationship wisdom, and keeps a few bottles of clean urine in the fridge... hmmm! I'm glad you seem to have found what works for you, and though I'm no workaholic materialist freak, I'd suggest there are better "guides to happiness" around.
I'd have to disagree with your runs like a charm sentiment. I also run the DRI drivers. While I get 1100+ running a glxgears demo, the only game I actually use them for is an occasional game of Quake I.
In Windows, running Fuhquake with all the fancy GL extras (rocket trails, explosions, yadda) and 24-bit textures, my 1.2 Ghz Athon and Radeon 7200 (All in Wonder) is as ridiculously fast as you'd expect for a game this old. Under linux, the 24-bit textures alone are unusable. On large levels, things stutter all the way down into the 10-15 fps range. To really keep it smooth, I need to dump pretty much all the fancy GL effects and play what basically was vanilla GL quake in 1997.
Living in the bustling metropolis of Lawrence Kansas in 1996, my 4 roomates (and a few other friends who came over constantly) were so eager for the bandwidth we had two cablemodems installed (primarily for Quake!). Unfortunately we didn't luck out as early adopters - the service was beyond terrible, and frankly nearly unusable for a good couple years despite intense complaints from us and others. I can't recall the price, but I don't think it was more than $50/month
In 1998, I moved to Austin Texas, and though there were no real offerings of DSL or Cable here yet, there were a few apartment complexes with one or more T1s running to them, of which I moved into. It was excellent service for a mere 24.95 per month. I then spent a couple years in the Hill Country about 45 miles outsie of Austin, and had Direcway 2-way Satellite for $55/month (plus a few hundred for (my choice) purchasing the equipment. For all the bad I have heard, I was happy with their service. Latency was enormous (no gaming), but downstream I'd average 50-60k/sec, though upstream was slow as dirt (5-6k)... worked in all weather except strong storms.
Now I have DSL for $26/month here in 2004 back within the Austin City Limits. So when I still hear of people without any sort of broadband connection, it's somewhat mind-boggling:).
It's rather mind blowing that with as many charities and truly good causes there are out there, people would actually send large sums of money to a random woman who just ran up her debt wildy. Never underestimate the stupidity of common folk, or why people SPAM the masses looking for suckers.
A follow up to my own previous post after doing a little researching...
http://users.telenet.be/aldatillian/VARIOUS/Data%2 0Removal%20and%20Erasure%20from%20Hard%20Disk%20Dr ives.htm
If this article is to be believed, then my suspicions were correct. To highlight, according to this article, an electon microscope might allow you to recover 30-40% of the bits of each character on the hard disk. At the blinding speed of 1 bit per second. I'd say this pretty much means overwritting data with a good algorithmn effectively does wipe it out, after all.
Additionally this article references the difficultiles in transferring platters between hard disks, and in short, that unless one has very carefully removed the platter, its virtually impossible to get it working somewhere else. This goes a long way against the grandparent posters statement that there are (unreferenced) folks out there that have "pefected" techniques of not just transferring a platter, but one that has been physically mangled!
I read semi-thoroughly through the first section of the article you mentioned but didn't gather just how the use of an electronic microscope (or anything else) makes it possible to make sense of randomized data. Unfortunately the article provides a lot of links but some of them are fluff - such as:
"Recent developments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology"
Where there is no link to the article describing this Technique, but simply to www. nist.gov.
Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how all this works could elaborate a little more. If I overwrite a section of hard disk with a 7-pass algorithmn, what exactly is an electronic microscope going to be able to do to help figure out what was there? I assume there must be a way to see whats been there before (how?) and then somehow detect the chronological order to differentiate whatever the original data was versus the overwritten junk (how?). This article doesn't mention either, nor does it provide a link explaining either (that I found anyway).
A little deeper explanation of how a hard disk is put together, and how one might be able to unearth was on a healthy sector after it's been overwritten 7 times would be appreciated. Though I don't obviously know any facts, I find it very difficult to believe there's really any useful or effective technique by simply reading this article. Without a deeper understanding of how hard drives are put together, it would seem a rather impossible task to take a section of overwritten hard disk and make sense of what was once there.
"and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004. According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
These numbers are regarding the first 6 months of 2004, and April-July 2004 respectively. Did pets.com just experience another layoff? The boom has been over for some time -- I'd surmise these lost jobs had zero to do with the boom being over. I think the self-reassuring comments about "Well these are all Devry grads" or "These were just holdovers from 2000" can be just about completely put to rest, sorry folks.
I type 85-90 wpm with 95%+ accuracy sustained for quite awhile. In short bursts (say, a 5 minute online typing test) I can hit right around 100 - but then my stamina gives out. I have my own messy unformal method -- as many have posted, just using computers many of us develop 80+ wpm typing skills with high accuracy on our own. Again, I dont use 10 fingers, but I have no need of ever looking at the keyboard regardless of the key. I have considered from time to time attempting to learn to "properly" type, as I dont make full use of all my fingers, and I have a feeling it might be less stress on my hands/wrists, which have been suffering in the last couple years due to all the computer use as well as playing bass guitar...
That said part of the reason I haven't bothered beyond laziness, and the frustration of typing so slowly (and inaccurately) in my brief attempts to retrain my mind, is that I do virtually nothing which requires me to keep up an insane typing pace -- if I were writing stories daily, sure, but most of what I do is programming, and its not as if ones programming speed is limited by how fast you can punch things... the main gains (IMO) there are to spend the time to whatever flavor of editor in depth to take as many shortcuts as possible.
2 days ago or so -- I've been on slow saga recently to go revisit RPG's I'd missed (or quit)... First Baldur's Gate II and Throne of Bhaal, then Star Wars KOTOR, and now to NWN...
First let me just say those who disparge NWN and praise Star Wars KOTOR just have their Star Wars fanboy blinders on. Having started NWN just a day or two after finishing KOTOR (yes I know, backward Chronologically, but I wanted a switch from fantasy after plowing through BGII+Throne of Bhaal for Weeks:) ) the similarities are amazing. The way henchman/party members have stories which expand (and are only accessible as you gain levels), the way dialog is handled, to the engine itself - though KOTOR is certainly prettier and in a few ways cleaner, its obvious its the same thing. While KOTOR has better graphics, and far more voice acting (I am somewhat thankful NWN switches to just reading more often - the sheer amount in KOTOR had me reading and skipping the voice acting shortly into the game anyway - it just took waaay too long to actually listen), both are 3rd edition D&D (KOTOR stripped down to appeal to console gamers), feats and skills to match (although in KOTOR, skills are laughably useless). NWN is certainly a lot more in depth... but really the two games are remarkably similar.
I am only partway into Chapter 2 in NWN and so far have found it to be really good. I don't quite get where people who enjoyed BG I and II are coming from when they say they don't like the game -- you start of rather slow (just as your first level character in BG I was very weak), but things pick up quickly and the loads of quests, dialog is everywhere, and ala KOTOR, your alignment can shift during the game (though to more useful/desirable effect in KOTOR it seems). Anyway just the first of four chapters in NWN took me forever, and I have so far throught it was great. It seems to have at least as much story and oomph as BG II, and I haven't yet dabbled playing online. I imagine that might be a disappointment given I have played pen and paper RPGs forever (though not many recently), but who knows with as much time as people have had to develop modules and develop communities by this point.
Anyway the single player campaign in NWN to me is so far, so good, and I look forward to seeing some "amateur" work once I complete it, as well as begin dabbling in multiplayer. In comparing BGII+Throne of Bhaal, KOTOR, and NWN, so far I'd say NWN is my favorite, though I enjoyed them all... those that find large differences aren't really looking too deeply at the games, though - NWN is far more expandible and multiplayer friendly of the three:).
In the semi-near future, one could maybe see a (few) experimental teams of special forces wearing advanced getups like this, but I suspect the common solider is going to be wearing about the same stuff he has been (more or less) for nearly half a century now.
Maybe someone more in the know could comment, but from snippets I've gathered, current soliders aren't even outfitted with any sort of bullet-proof body armor -- you get a flak jacket, but that has no chance of stopping bullets. I've stumbled upon stories of familes pooling their resources to buy more elaborate body armor... seems rather far fetched to think that if the US doesn't currently outfit soliders with bulletproof armor of whatever type that in the near term any appreciable number are going to be wearing incredible advanced (and even more expensive) super-solider get-up.
"Now, on to my point, which you sidestepped. the wealthy are NO MORE responsible for righting the ills of the world than anyone else. Wealth does not come with an addendum that requires charity"
What exactly did a sidestep - you're inventing arguments and asking me to defend them. See below.
"Now, here is the part where you are being disingenuous. You may not have stated that it was Gates' responsibility, but you implied it, and if questioned, I guarantee you would admit to believing it. The fact that I refuted you before you could say it just means I skipped a step. Sorry about that."
Once again, you're confused. As I originally said, I think the existance of such an absurdly wealthy individual human is a sad commentary on our society. I said nothing about Bill Gates the person, nor what I think his moral obligations are. You didn't skip a step - you skipped my point.
"Now, why on earth would you think I would want your sympathy? I like the system that made Gates' rich. It means that people like you can't take what I work hard for. Wealth distribution is anathema to me, and if I believed in hell, I think that would be the economic policy there."
I'm sorry, I sometimes misuse the word sympathy in place of pity. Anyway, I think its pretty amusing that "people like me" are grasping for your wealth. I suspect you don't work hard, and stastically, chances are very high you're in a lower tax bracket than I am. All hail Teddy Roosevelt -- it sounds like if you believed in heaven, it'd be a run by a bunch of chimps beating the crap out of each other to establish power.
"Why? Since when is it reasonable to expect people to NOT acquire wealth?"
There could be a long answer to this question, but I'll save it for another day. You might remember native american societies who found the notion of owning land to be unthinkable. I am not going to get into a debate about capitalism or economics other than to say, I find the notion of one person controlling as much money as Bill Gates does absurd.
"Why is it sad that the man made a fortune and has set his family up for life? Why is it his job to help people who can't (or won't) help themselves?"
You miss the point completely, then add more confusion by arguing "Its not his job to help people who can't (or won't)" help themselves". It makes it seem like your refuting me, when I didn't say anything about "helping people", Bill Gates responsibility to do so, or anything of the sort. Very "insightful".
Anyway, if you feel Bill Gates contributions to the world justify a governmental and economic system which allows him to control such a ridiculous fortune, which 200 years from now following the status quo, will likely be an even vaster fortune controlled by relatives who just happen to be named Gates, my sympathies. IMO, this is just one more item on the list of why the super-technologically advanced aliens who're checking us out have absolutely zero interest in establishing relations with us:).
While unfortunate, I think it's a far sadder commentary about our current society that one single man holds such incredibly excessive wealth in a world where hundreds of millions struggle to simply survive.
Not to mention that this will more than likely just be passed on generation to generation for some time to come, producing William Gates VII the incredibly rich Senator from Washington, etc, who'll be shining beacons of the ever widening gap between the rich and poor. While we may ignore the sins of the fathers, it's very interesting children ARE entitled to their enduring economic power, which in the case of the super-rich in our society, is basically a train with no stop.
Anyway, attempting to evoke empathy about the rough spots encountered by being the richest man on the planet is really distrubing. When spending moments reflecting on the tribulations of your fellow humans, I think there are probably at least 3 or 4 billion people that are far more worthy of your consideration than Bill Gates.
I've known three people who've gotten the surgery (an uncle and two friends), and all have been successes in correcting to 20/20 vision. All three have also had minor side-effects (halos at night, etc), many of which are discussed here. Though my uncle CAN drive at night, he avoids it at nearly all costs. Despite this and other "relatively" minor problems, all three say they're very happy and would do it again.
People who get this surgery done hope for and want a good outcome. Having also just spent a good sum of money on something pretty risky, they're almost zealous about how great it is -- and, if you ask me, overly dismissive of what I'd consider to be some more than minor side-effects that seem all too common. You can see it in many of the stories posted in response to this story - "I couldn't see for crap for 3 months, and I see halos at night now, BUT I'D DO IT AGAIN" -- yadda. I think it's psychological defense to tell yourself how great it is to overcome the fact there are definitely noticable side-effects I'd have a very hard time living with.
The other scary thing to me is the level of marketing and hoopla that goes behind it. It's a great way to make money, and I've been solicited during virtually every visit to an Opthamologist I've made in the last couple years by either the Doctor or their assistant. It's rather disturbing. I also find it funny that many folks seem to equate expensive with "good". From what I have read, this is a rather simple procedure for doctor/"surgeon"...whats making it possible and actually doing the work is a very expensive laser. The side-effects of the procedure seem (like poorer night-vision, halos, etc) to be quite uniform regardless of which doctor or the money spent.
Anyway, I sit here with my really cheap soft-contacts and see 20/20 perfectly with no halos nor discomfort and wonder what exactly all the hoopla is about. While there are risks with contacts, its quite a bit smaller than with surgery, and far easier to correct if something does happen.
To those who risk arguably their most important sense, blow a few thousand dollars and gain comfort by picking a surgeon based on how expensive their are, my best wishes. Same goes with referrals - many operations are a seeming success, but problems arise later. Or then there are the dolts who, IMO, are telling a horror story but end with "I was extremely satisified" and can be safely be put into the success stories of Doctor X. Good luck.
Not in Texas -- and I'd be surprised to hear it was different in any other state in the US. I can't remember the legal term, but any employer can terminate you for any or no reason whatsoever. The only thing this potentially effects is whether you'll be eligible for unemployment.
1) What if cowboy developer leaves the company?
2) What if cowboy developer must for whatever reason be moved to another project?
3) What if despite the fact Cowboy member is a complete utter genius, he still makes a critical mistake?
I worked at a company where most development was "guy in a room" and it was not a good experience. This is not to say people don't need to be left alone for long periods (and your allusion towards pointless meetings is not the point - this isn't about PHBs and other easy to attack mismangement nonsense).
I don't care who you are, even less experienced people will have useful input into a different or better way of doing things. Period.
Regardless of that though, even if you have suceeded at perfectly dividing a project and modularizing it so well that its possible for everyone to work completely independently, other developers who may have the fortune of attempting to grok your code for whatever reason another day will get to the punch a lot faster if they're on board more intimately with whats going on in reasonable chunks rather than asked to figure out 6 months worth of code written in a box
Anyway I could relate many tales of watching these solo-projects resulting in disasters and rather extreme mistakes from developers with a ton of experience. And while I've certainly seen extreme quality of people working completely solo, integrating this into a larger project is almost always more difficult if anyones heavily isolated.
You attack this as not trusting you, and more to the point, an attack on your ego. Thats pretty much the heart the matter - you've got an ego problem. You know what you're doing, let me do it, and screw off -- (or fire me if it doesnt work). That last line is priceless - one can sort of imagine a 4 year old going through a temper tantrum. Teamwork and good communication are flat essential to any large project. Cowboys who're irratated at reasonable input, critque (and forced to justify their choices, as well as let everyone else who may have to work on this stuff later in on the "secret") need to learn to check their wittle egos and learn to play nice in the sandbox.
I recently uncovered my Baldurs Gate II CD collection I'd bought a few years ago and realized I'd never gotten more than halfway through the game and decided to a swing at it again. I figured, this is a fairly old game with no required use of 3D, let's see what I can do to get it running on Linux (I dual boot) and I'd never used Wine.
I found Transgaming's version of Wine and figured, this seems like this would be the fast, easy way to go - and found a page which listed BG II as basically "mostly working" with Transgamings version of WineX - with the notable exception the expansion pack (Throne of Bhaal) did NOT work. Then I ran into the fact to just make the attempt to getting Transgamings Winex to work "fairly well" with this 3 year old non-3D accelerated title, I'd need to fork over $5/month. Needless to say after spending half an hour tracking this info down, I just rebooted into windows and installed it there.
I might consider paying $5/month for something I used very often, but a one off shot at a 3 year old game - I don't think so. Honestly it'd take a rather high level of gaming to justify even considering it, and my impression from researching the ability to run BG II left me with the impression there would likely be a lot of issues with plenty of games out there. Anyway, emulating games doesn't seem to lend themselves to a subscription based model at all, but what do I know.
In the Wired article cited, Indian companies were either loathe or prohibited outright from disclosing their foreign clients by said clients. I'd say it's rather logical to figure the same companies probably aren't wild about reporting large (or large increases) in outsourcing to the government and fudge the figures.
I worked as one of two junior programmers at a startup (now dead), which at its height had approximately 10 or 11 people on the software side of things), and 5-6 of those were PhDs (and 6 or so hardware guys, I think half also had PhDs). Most all of these guys had very impressive resumes/CVs, and were being paid enormous salaries... though some were light on working in industry
Anyway, we were a small startup and I had heavy interaction with basically all members of both the software/hardware teams working on basically parallel processing. To make a long story short, having a PhD didn't lead to a correlation between being good at implementation OR design, or really anything. Out of 5-6, only one was truly good at actually programming/implementing, but I figured their strength was in their ability to help out designing some of the horrendously big and complicated stuff, and the algorithms underlying. However after over 2 years of work at this company, many code reviews, design meetings, etc, it was pretty clear having a PhD in EE/Comp Sci didn't particularly mean you had a handle on algorithms or design, either. I still vividly remember a presentation over a design prototype one of the PhDs had developed on his own (approximately 1-2 months of solo work) that was absolutely ripped to shreds at the most fundamental levels during a code review meeting. It was actually embarrasing to be in the room.
Anyway, my experience there pretty much killed whatever mystique or respect I previously had behind having a PhD. To me it seems to mean you 1) Did a research project, which may or may not have been relevant to anything at one point 2) Had 5+ years to do it 3) May or may not have learned a lot about the subject. I don't mean to belittle it, but I think in general theres a *lot* more fluff surrounding a PhD than meat.
I guess the key their is that you enjoyed reading UNIX and C documentation, and then enjoyed applying the knowledge you've learned.
If you happen to enjoy something that will "get you ahead"(tm) in life, that's wonderful. It's my experience that the vast majority of people prefer passive entertainment - like games (or TV, or movies, or drinking with friends) over studying unix documentation. Or, spending 4+ hours a day playing a musicial instrument, or sculpting, or whatever other "active" hobby out there... the unfortunate reality is, not all these active hobbies equate to "getting ahead" anyway.
So what's "doing OK" mean? I suppose you mean you've achieved greater notoriety and financial success, good for you and your ambition. In the end of course, that doesn't matter at all, it's simply a matter of happiness. And if playing Rogue between phonecalls instead of studying C documentation, advanced physics, or playing your backpack guitar is more fun for you, what's the problem? A lack of ambition isn't a bad thing in my book - indeed, many of the most unhappy people I have met are the most ambitious, as they never quite have enough.
I recently installed Gentoo and I'm quite happy, just a few notes...
1) The desktop guide leads you to install/configure alsa AFTER you've installed KDE/X, which AFAIK means you have to also install the OSS compatibility layer to get sound to work in KDE (or anything) you might have compiled earlier as Gentoo's by default "USE"'s oss, not alsa. In my case, I re-emerged kde-multimedia and thus re-compiled it with the alsa flag - a rather long recompilation for something I could/should have been led to do earlier (IMO).
2) My sound sucks. At first in the interest of just getting things to work, I used my onboard VIA-crapola sound -- everything was loaded with hissing, pops and clicks, weird time-delay when multiple things are going on, etc. So I installed my SB Audigy Plantinum - and to my surprise all the pops, clicks, hiss, and weirdness persisted. Going from alsa to oss compatibility and back (through major recompliations) makes no difference.
2) If your windows system partition is a dynamic disk it WILL NOT WORK with grub - it will not recognize it. You must use lilo. The gentoo install guide makes a mention of "some people still use lilo because they're used to it" and "lilo works in some cases where grub does not". Indeed - and a dynamic disk in windows is one of them. This is a thing with grub, not windows, but a word to the wise, it would have saved me an hour or two of searching around archived mailing lists.
3) I installed Gentoo on a 1.3 Ghz athlon, so it's certainly not bleeding edge -- KDE alone took ~14 hours or so to compile on my system. Throw in bootstrapping, X, openoffice, etc, whew. Anyway everything does work as advertised (minus my sound issues and gripe with the way the gentoo desktop-install guide leads you to do sound), but it does take a damn long time to setup a gentoo system, period:).
All Computer Science and Electrical Engineering majors at the University of Texas are required to take EE316 (Digital Logic Design) at the University of Texas. The class textbook was written by the professor of the course (Charles Roth) and with software included costs approxmiately $140 new.
The Text is on its fifth edition and I believe a lot of the changes are for no reason other than to force students to buy new books. At the beginning of the semester (the only time one sees one of the professors in this self-paced class), the other overseeing professor made it a point to encourage everyone to write in the book when answering homework problems -- quite obviously so students would not be able to sell them back. I thought that was bad enough when I swallowed the price myself, but they even had the gall to send out an e-mail to all sections of the class saying everyone had an important decision to make: Whether or not to sell back the text! And of course, it was a good idea not to as this book is a valuable reference to keep, yadda.
Anyway it sort of sickened me that the profs of the course were so brazen about it. It's an excellent text, no doubt, and it has to be since the class is self-paced (meaning, the textbook is your only real source of instruction), but its horrendously overpriced and updated to new editions with odd frequency. If all thats not enough, a 20 page "course supplement" must also be purchased for the class to nick you for another 5 dollars - why this is not availible as a PDF (or whatever) it pretty obvious.
Anyway, perhaps authors dont make much from texts, but Charles Roth at UT-Austin appears to be doing his best to pad his retirement (which is coming soon). As for me, fortunately this book will be good for at least another semester, so fortunately I will be able to get back some of the $140 I spent on this book... if I ever need a reference, I'll go buy a copy of a previous edition for $5 from one of the hoardes of prior EE or CS students at UT who got nailed on a semester a new edition was coming out...
I go to UT-Austin, and we're up there on the list for wireless access (rightly so). The submitted nailed it on the head though - laptops are pretty common now among CS students, but most people use them to do just about anything other than pay attention in class.
I have one heavy programming class where I definitely wish I had a laptop to take notes, as the professor will often throw up examples it'd be nice to compile on the fly during lecture... of course, he posts the code that evening on the class website....
Anyway, I suppose its neat to be able to connect to the internet from anywhere on campus, but I dont think its a boon to productivity or terribly helpful. Pretty much anywhere I might consider bringing a laptop to work on a programming project/paper/etc has a computer lab in it already, and I dont think there many students/profs/faculty who need to check their e-mail every 5 minutes, or while eating at the food court, etc.
I'm going to have to research more numbers to throw hard facts around, but I still maintain out-of-state tuition with no financial aid doesn't completely fund the cost of an undergraduate.
Also an interesting note in that article ".S. universities have long provided fellowships and other aid to foreign graduate students, since competition for these students is greater. Today, about 40% of the country's 240,000 foreign graduate students receive such help."
I did manage to find one hard demographic -- 67% of the University of Texas Engineering graduate students are foreign. Unforunately I dont have a breakdown by engineering department yet, but theres really no doubt when broken down to just the EE department that numbers going to be significantly higher. I still find it both amazing and disturbing american's are a minority in the engineering graduate program at a public university.
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I'm doing pretty well actually!
The one major flaw with becoming the expert on the things no one else knows (or is interested in) is that these are often skills that are very hard to transfer to another job. If your company survives, and you survive the company, great. In today's corporate world however, this seems to be a very poor bet to make. However if not, good luck prominently listing "DOS expert" on your resume, much less finding the small niche of companies that would actually find this to be a positive.
The rest of your advice is mix of common sense "duhs" mixed with nonsense. A role model indeed - someone who's hair disappears when drug tests roll around (I presume you also bathe in nair), works (lazily) on outdated tech (and likely has a distored view about their own job security and position), offers "date a geekier girl" as a shining nugget of relationship wisdom, and keeps a few bottles of clean urine in the fridge... hmmm! I'm glad you seem to have found what works for you, and though I'm no workaholic materialist freak, I'd suggest there are better "guides to happiness" around.
I'd have to disagree with your runs like a charm sentiment. I also run the DRI drivers. While I get 1100+ running a glxgears demo, the only game I actually use them for is an occasional game of Quake I.
In Windows, running Fuhquake with all the fancy GL extras (rocket trails, explosions, yadda) and 24-bit textures, my 1.2 Ghz Athon and Radeon 7200 (All in Wonder) is as ridiculously fast as you'd expect for a game this old. Under linux, the 24-bit textures alone are unusable. On large levels, things stutter all the way down into the 10-15 fps range. To really keep it smooth, I need to dump pretty much all the fancy GL effects and play what basically was vanilla GL quake in 1997.
Living in the bustling metropolis of Lawrence Kansas in 1996, my 4 roomates (and a few other friends who came over constantly) were so eager for the bandwidth we had two cablemodems installed (primarily for Quake!). Unfortunately we didn't luck out as early adopters - the service was beyond terrible, and frankly nearly unusable for a good couple years despite intense complaints from us and others. I can't recall the price, but I don't think it was more than $50/month
:).
In 1998, I moved to Austin Texas, and though there were no real offerings of DSL or Cable here yet, there were a few apartment complexes with one or more T1s running to them, of which I moved into. It was excellent service for a mere 24.95 per month. I then spent a couple years in the Hill Country about 45 miles outsie of Austin, and had Direcway 2-way Satellite for $55/month (plus a few hundred for (my choice) purchasing the equipment. For all the bad I have heard, I was happy with their service. Latency was enormous (no gaming), but downstream I'd average 50-60k/sec, though upstream was slow as dirt (5-6k)... worked in all weather except strong storms.
Now I have DSL for $26/month here in 2004 back within the Austin City Limits. So when I still hear of people without any sort of broadband connection, it's somewhat mind-boggling
It's rather mind blowing that with as many charities and truly good causes there are out there, people would actually send large sums of money to a random woman who just ran up her debt wildy. Never underestimate the stupidity of common folk, or why people SPAM the masses looking for suckers.
A follow up to my own previous post after doing a little researching...
2 0Removal%20and%20Erasure%20from%20Hard%20Disk%20Dr ives.htm
If this article is to be believed, then my suspicions were correct. To highlight, according to this article, an electon microscope might allow you to recover 30-40% of the bits of each character on the hard disk. At the blinding speed of 1 bit per second. I'd say this pretty much means overwritting data with a good algorithmn effectively does wipe it out, after all.
http://users.telenet.be/aldatillian/VARIOUS/Data%
Additionally this article references the difficultiles in transferring platters between hard disks, and in short, that unless one has very carefully removed the platter, its virtually impossible to get it working somewhere else. This goes a long way against the grandparent posters statement that there are (unreferenced) folks out there that have "pefected" techniques of not just transferring a platter, but one that has been physically mangled!
I read semi-thoroughly through the first section of the article you mentioned but didn't gather just how the use of an electronic microscope (or anything else) makes it possible to make sense of randomized data. Unfortunately the article provides a lot of links but some of them are fluff - such as:
"Recent developments at the National Institute of Standards and Technology"
Where there is no link to the article describing this Technique, but simply to www. nist.gov.
Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how all this works could elaborate a little more. If I overwrite a section of hard disk with a 7-pass algorithmn, what exactly is an electronic microscope going to be able to do to help figure out what was there? I assume there must be a way to see whats been there before (how?) and then somehow detect the chronological order to differentiate whatever the original data was versus the overwritten junk (how?). This article doesn't mention either, nor does it provide a link explaining either (that I found anyway).
A little deeper explanation of how a hard disk is put together, and how one might be able to unearth was on a healthy sector after it's been overwritten 7 times would be appreciated. Though I don't obviously know any facts, I find it very difficult to believe there's really any useful or effective technique by simply reading this article. Without a deeper understanding of how hard drives are put together, it would seem a rather impossible task to take a section of overwritten hard disk and make sense of what was once there.
"and the number of programmers, analysts, and support specialists has fallen 15% since the first six months of 2004. According to IT World, the number of employed Software Engineers fell by 15% from April to July of 2004 (from 856,000 to 725,000)."
These numbers are regarding the first 6 months of 2004, and April-July 2004 respectively. Did pets.com just experience another layoff? The boom has been over for some time -- I'd surmise these lost jobs had zero to do with the boom being over. I think the self-reassuring comments about "Well these are all Devry grads" or "These were just holdovers from 2000" can be just about completely put to rest, sorry folks.
I type 85-90 wpm with 95%+ accuracy sustained for quite awhile. In short bursts (say, a 5 minute online typing test) I can hit right around 100 - but then my stamina gives out. I have my own messy unformal method -- as many have posted, just using computers many of us develop 80+ wpm typing skills with high accuracy on our own. Again, I dont use 10 fingers, but I have no need of ever looking at the keyboard regardless of the key. I have considered from time to time attempting to learn to "properly" type, as I dont make full use of all my fingers, and I have a feeling it might be less stress on my hands/wrists, which have been suffering in the last couple years due to all the computer use as well as playing bass guitar... That said part of the reason I haven't bothered beyond laziness, and the frustration of typing so slowly (and inaccurately) in my brief attempts to retrain my mind, is that I do virtually nothing which requires me to keep up an insane typing pace -- if I were writing stories daily, sure, but most of what I do is programming, and its not as if ones programming speed is limited by how fast you can punch things... the main gains (IMO) there are to spend the time to whatever flavor of editor in depth to take as many shortcuts as possible.
2 days ago or so -- I've been on slow saga recently to go revisit RPG's I'd missed (or quit)... First Baldur's Gate II and Throne of Bhaal, then Star Wars KOTOR, and now to NWN...
:) ) the similarities are amazing. The way henchman/party members have stories which expand (and are only accessible as you gain levels), the way dialog is handled, to the engine itself - though KOTOR is certainly prettier and in a few ways cleaner, its obvious its the same thing. While KOTOR has better graphics, and far more voice acting (I am somewhat thankful NWN switches to just reading more often - the sheer amount in KOTOR had me reading and skipping the voice acting shortly into the game anyway - it just took waaay too long to actually listen), both are 3rd edition D&D (KOTOR stripped down to appeal to console gamers), feats and skills to match (although in KOTOR, skills are laughably useless). NWN is certainly a lot more in depth... but really the two games are remarkably similar.
:).
First let me just say those who disparge NWN and praise Star Wars KOTOR just have their Star Wars fanboy blinders on. Having started NWN just a day or two after finishing KOTOR (yes I know, backward Chronologically, but I wanted a switch from fantasy after plowing through BGII+Throne of Bhaal for Weeks
I am only partway into Chapter 2 in NWN and so far have found it to be really good. I don't quite get where people who enjoyed BG I and II are coming from when they say they don't like the game -- you start of rather slow (just as your first level character in BG I was very weak), but things pick up quickly and the loads of quests, dialog is everywhere, and ala KOTOR, your alignment can shift during the game (though to more useful/desirable effect in KOTOR it seems). Anyway just the first of four chapters in NWN took me forever, and I have so far throught it was great. It seems to have at least as much story and oomph as BG II, and I haven't yet dabbled playing online. I imagine that might be a disappointment given I have played pen and paper RPGs forever (though not many recently), but who knows with as much time as people have had to develop modules and develop communities by this point.
Anyway the single player campaign in NWN to me is so far, so good, and I look forward to seeing some "amateur" work once I complete it, as well as begin dabbling in multiplayer. In comparing BGII+Throne of Bhaal, KOTOR, and NWN, so far I'd say NWN is my favorite, though I enjoyed them all... those that find large differences aren't really looking too deeply at the games, though - NWN is far more expandible and multiplayer friendly of the three
In the semi-near future, one could maybe see a (few) experimental teams of special forces wearing advanced getups like this, but I suspect the common solider is going to be wearing about the same stuff he has been (more or less) for nearly half a century now.
Maybe someone more in the know could comment, but from snippets I've gathered, current soliders aren't even outfitted with any sort of bullet-proof body armor -- you get a flak jacket, but that has no chance of stopping bullets. I've stumbled upon stories of familes pooling their resources to buy more elaborate body armor... seems rather far fetched to think that if the US doesn't currently outfit soliders with bulletproof armor of whatever type that in the near term any appreciable number are going to be wearing incredible advanced (and even more expensive) super-solider get-up.
"Did I get it?"
No.
"Now, on to my point, which you sidestepped. the wealthy are NO MORE responsible for righting the ills of the world than anyone else. Wealth does not come with an addendum that requires charity"
What exactly did a sidestep - you're inventing arguments and asking me to defend them. See below.
"Now, here is the part where you are being disingenuous. You may not have stated that it was Gates' responsibility, but you implied it, and if questioned, I guarantee you would admit to believing it. The fact that I refuted you before you could say it just means I skipped a step. Sorry about that."
Once again, you're confused. As I originally said, I think the existance of such an absurdly wealthy individual human is a sad commentary on our society. I said nothing about Bill Gates the person, nor what I think his moral obligations are. You didn't skip a step - you skipped my point.
"Now, why on earth would you think I would want your sympathy? I like the system that made Gates' rich. It means that people like you can't take what I work hard for. Wealth distribution is anathema to me, and if I believed in hell, I think that would be the economic policy there."
I'm sorry, I sometimes misuse the word sympathy in place of pity. Anyway, I think its pretty amusing that "people like me" are grasping for your wealth. I suspect you don't work hard, and stastically, chances are very high you're in a lower tax bracket than I am. All hail Teddy Roosevelt -- it sounds like if you believed in heaven, it'd be a run by a bunch of chimps beating the crap out of each other to establish power.
"Why? Since when is it reasonable to expect people to NOT acquire wealth?"
:).
There could be a long answer to this question, but I'll save it for another day. You might remember native american societies who found the notion of owning land to be unthinkable. I am not going to get into a debate about capitalism or economics other than to say, I find the notion of one person controlling as much money as Bill Gates does absurd.
"Why is it sad that the man made a fortune and has set his family up for life? Why is it his job to help people who can't (or won't) help themselves?"
You miss the point completely, then add more confusion by arguing "Its not his job to help people who can't (or won't)" help themselves". It makes it seem like your refuting me, when I didn't say anything about "helping people", Bill Gates responsibility to do so, or anything of the sort. Very "insightful".
Anyway, if you feel Bill Gates contributions to the world justify a governmental and economic system which allows him to control such a ridiculous fortune, which 200 years from now following the status quo, will likely be an even vaster fortune controlled by relatives who just happen to be named Gates, my sympathies. IMO, this is just one more item on the list of why the super-technologically advanced aliens who're checking us out have absolutely zero interest in establishing relations with us
While unfortunate, I think it's a far sadder commentary about our current society that one single man holds such incredibly excessive wealth in a world where hundreds of millions struggle to simply survive.
Not to mention that this will more than likely just be passed on generation to generation for some time to come, producing William Gates VII the incredibly rich Senator from Washington, etc, who'll be shining beacons of the ever widening gap between the rich and poor. While we may ignore the sins of the fathers, it's very interesting children ARE entitled to their enduring economic power, which in the case of the super-rich in our society, is basically a train with no stop.
Anyway, attempting to evoke empathy about the rough spots encountered by being the richest man on the planet is really distrubing. When spending moments reflecting on the tribulations of your fellow humans, I think there are probably at least 3 or 4 billion people that are far more worthy of your consideration than Bill Gates.
I've known three people who've gotten the surgery (an uncle and two friends), and all have been successes in correcting to 20/20 vision. All three have also had minor side-effects (halos at night, etc), many of which are discussed here. Though my uncle CAN drive at night, he avoids it at nearly all costs. Despite this and other "relatively" minor problems, all three say they're very happy and would do it again.
People who get this surgery done hope for and want a good outcome. Having also just spent a good sum of money on something pretty risky, they're almost zealous about how great it is -- and, if you ask me, overly dismissive of what I'd consider to be some more than minor side-effects that seem all too common. You can see it in many of the stories posted in response to this story - "I couldn't see for crap for 3 months, and I see halos at night now, BUT I'D DO IT AGAIN" -- yadda. I think it's psychological defense to tell yourself how great it is to overcome the fact there are definitely noticable side-effects I'd have a very hard time living with.
The other scary thing to me is the level of marketing and hoopla that goes behind it. It's a great way to make money, and I've been solicited during virtually every visit to an Opthamologist I've made in the last couple years by either the Doctor or their assistant. It's rather disturbing. I also find it funny that many folks seem to equate expensive with "good". From what I have read, this is a rather simple procedure for doctor/"surgeon"...whats making it possible and actually doing the work is a very expensive laser. The side-effects of the procedure seem (like poorer night-vision, halos, etc) to be quite uniform regardless of which doctor or the money spent.
Anyway, I sit here with my really cheap soft-contacts and see 20/20 perfectly with no halos nor discomfort and wonder what exactly all the hoopla is about. While there are risks with contacts, its quite a bit smaller than with surgery, and far easier to correct if something does happen.
To those who risk arguably their most important sense, blow a few thousand dollars and gain comfort by picking a surgeon based on how expensive their are, my best wishes. Same goes with referrals - many operations are a seeming success, but problems arise later. Or then there are the dolts who, IMO, are telling a horror story but end with "I was extremely satisified" and can be safely be put into the success stories of Doctor X. Good luck.
Not in Texas -- and I'd be surprised to hear it was different in any other state in the US. I can't remember the legal term, but any employer can terminate you for any or no reason whatsoever. The only thing this potentially effects is whether you'll be eligible for unemployment.
A response to this and your response:
1) What if cowboy developer leaves the company? 2) What if cowboy developer must for whatever reason be moved to another project? 3) What if despite the fact Cowboy member is a complete utter genius, he still makes a critical mistake? I worked at a company where most development was "guy in a room" and it was not a good experience. This is not to say people don't need to be left alone for long periods (and your allusion towards pointless meetings is not the point - this isn't about PHBs and other easy to attack mismangement nonsense).
I don't care who you are, even less experienced people will have useful input into a different or better way of doing things. Period.
Regardless of that though, even if you have suceeded at perfectly dividing a project and modularizing it so well that its possible for everyone to work completely independently, other developers who may have the fortune of attempting to grok your code for whatever reason another day will get to the punch a lot faster if they're on board more intimately with whats going on in reasonable chunks rather than asked to figure out 6 months worth of code written in a box
Anyway I could relate many tales of watching these solo-projects resulting in disasters and rather extreme mistakes from developers with a ton of experience. And while I've certainly seen extreme quality of people working completely solo, integrating this into a larger project is almost always more difficult if anyones heavily isolated.
You attack this as not trusting you, and more to the point, an attack on your ego. Thats pretty much the heart the matter - you've got an ego problem. You know what you're doing, let me do it, and screw off -- (or fire me if it doesnt work). That last line is priceless - one can sort of imagine a 4 year old going through a temper tantrum. Teamwork and good communication are flat essential to any large project. Cowboys who're irratated at reasonable input, critque (and forced to justify their choices, as well as let everyone else who may have to work on this stuff later in on the "secret") need to learn to check their wittle egos and learn to play nice in the sandbox.
I recently uncovered my Baldurs Gate II CD collection I'd bought a few years ago and realized I'd never gotten more than halfway through the game and decided to a swing at it again. I figured, this is a fairly old game with no required use of 3D, let's see what I can do to get it running on Linux (I dual boot) and I'd never used Wine.
I found Transgaming's version of Wine and figured, this seems like this would be the fast, easy way to go - and found a page which listed BG II as basically "mostly working" with Transgamings version of WineX - with the notable exception the expansion pack (Throne of Bhaal) did NOT work. Then I ran into the fact to just make the attempt to getting Transgamings Winex to work "fairly well" with this 3 year old non-3D accelerated title, I'd need to fork over $5/month. Needless to say after spending half an hour tracking this info down, I just rebooted into windows and installed it there.
I might consider paying $5/month for something I used very often, but a one off shot at a 3 year old game - I don't think so. Honestly it'd take a rather high level of gaming to justify even considering it, and my impression from researching the ability to run BG II left me with the impression there would likely be a lot of issues with plenty of games out there. Anyway, emulating games doesn't seem to lend themselves to a subscription based model at all, but what do I know.
In the Wired article cited, Indian companies were either loathe or prohibited outright from disclosing their foreign clients by said clients. I'd say it's rather logical to figure the same companies probably aren't wild about reporting large (or large increases) in outsourcing to the government and fudge the figures.
I worked as one of two junior programmers at a startup (now dead), which at its height had approximately 10 or 11 people on the software side of things), and 5-6 of those were PhDs (and 6 or so hardware guys, I think half also had PhDs). Most all of these guys had very impressive resumes/CVs, and were being paid enormous salaries... though some were light on working in industry
Anyway, we were a small startup and I had heavy interaction with basically all members of both the software/hardware teams working on basically parallel processing. To make a long story short, having a PhD didn't lead to a correlation between being good at implementation OR design, or really anything. Out of 5-6, only one was truly good at actually programming/implementing, but I figured their strength was in their ability to help out designing some of the horrendously big and complicated stuff, and the algorithms underlying. However after over 2 years of work at this company, many code reviews, design meetings, etc, it was pretty clear having a PhD in EE/Comp Sci didn't particularly mean you had a handle on algorithms or design, either. I still vividly remember a presentation over a design prototype one of the PhDs had developed on his own (approximately 1-2 months of solo work) that was absolutely ripped to shreds at the most fundamental levels during a code review meeting. It was actually embarrasing to be in the room.
Anyway, my experience there pretty much killed whatever mystique or respect I previously had behind having a PhD. To me it seems to mean you 1) Did a research project, which may or may not have been relevant to anything at one point 2) Had 5+ years to do it 3) May or may not have learned a lot about the subject. I don't mean to belittle it, but I think in general theres a *lot* more fluff surrounding a PhD than meat.
I guess the key their is that you enjoyed reading UNIX and C documentation, and then enjoyed applying the knowledge you've learned.
If you happen to enjoy something that will "get you ahead"(tm) in life, that's wonderful. It's my experience that the vast majority of people prefer passive entertainment - like games (or TV, or movies, or drinking with friends) over studying unix documentation. Or, spending 4+ hours a day playing a musicial instrument, or sculpting, or whatever other "active" hobby out there... the unfortunate reality is, not all these active hobbies equate to "getting ahead" anyway.
So what's "doing OK" mean? I suppose you mean you've achieved greater notoriety and financial success, good for you and your ambition. In the end of course, that doesn't matter at all, it's simply a matter of happiness. And if playing Rogue between phonecalls instead of studying C documentation, advanced physics, or playing your backpack guitar is more fun for you, what's the problem? A lack of ambition isn't a bad thing in my book - indeed, many of the most unhappy people I have met are the most ambitious, as they never quite have enough.
I recently installed Gentoo and I'm quite happy, just a few notes... :).
1) The desktop guide leads you to install/configure alsa AFTER you've installed KDE/X, which AFAIK means you have to also install the OSS compatibility layer to get sound to work in KDE (or anything) you might have compiled earlier as Gentoo's by default "USE"'s oss, not alsa. In my case, I re-emerged kde-multimedia and thus re-compiled it with the alsa flag - a rather long recompilation for something I could/should have been led to do earlier (IMO).
2) My sound sucks. At first in the interest of just getting things to work, I used my onboard VIA-crapola sound -- everything was loaded with hissing, pops and clicks, weird time-delay when multiple things are going on, etc. So I installed my SB Audigy Plantinum - and to my surprise all the pops, clicks, hiss, and weirdness persisted. Going from alsa to oss compatibility and back (through major recompliations) makes no difference.
2) If your windows system partition is a dynamic disk it WILL NOT WORK with grub - it will not recognize it. You must use lilo. The gentoo install guide makes a mention of "some people still use lilo because they're used to it" and "lilo works in some cases where grub does not". Indeed - and a dynamic disk in windows is one of them. This is a thing with grub, not windows, but a word to the wise, it would have saved me an hour or two of searching around archived mailing lists.
3) I installed Gentoo on a 1.3 Ghz athlon, so it's certainly not bleeding edge -- KDE alone took ~14 hours or so to compile on my system. Throw in bootstrapping, X, openoffice, etc, whew. Anyway everything does work as advertised (minus my sound issues and gripe with the way the gentoo desktop-install guide leads you to do sound), but it does take a damn long time to setup a gentoo system, period
All Computer Science and Electrical Engineering majors at the University of Texas are required to take EE316 (Digital Logic Design) at the University of Texas. The class textbook was written by the professor of the course (Charles Roth) and with software included costs approxmiately $140 new. The Text is on its fifth edition and I believe a lot of the changes are for no reason other than to force students to buy new books. At the beginning of the semester (the only time one sees one of the professors in this self-paced class), the other overseeing professor made it a point to encourage everyone to write in the book when answering homework problems -- quite obviously so students would not be able to sell them back. I thought that was bad enough when I swallowed the price myself, but they even had the gall to send out an e-mail to all sections of the class saying everyone had an important decision to make: Whether or not to sell back the text! And of course, it was a good idea not to as this book is a valuable reference to keep, yadda. Anyway it sort of sickened me that the profs of the course were so brazen about it. It's an excellent text, no doubt, and it has to be since the class is self-paced (meaning, the textbook is your only real source of instruction), but its horrendously overpriced and updated to new editions with odd frequency. If all thats not enough, a 20 page "course supplement" must also be purchased for the class to nick you for another 5 dollars - why this is not availible as a PDF (or whatever) it pretty obvious. Anyway, perhaps authors dont make much from texts, but Charles Roth at UT-Austin appears to be doing his best to pad his retirement (which is coming soon). As for me, fortunately this book will be good for at least another semester, so fortunately I will be able to get back some of the $140 I spent on this book... if I ever need a reference, I'll go buy a copy of a previous edition for $5 from one of the hoardes of prior EE or CS students at UT who got nailed on a semester a new edition was coming out...
I go to UT-Austin, and we're up there on the list for wireless access (rightly so). The submitted nailed it on the head though - laptops are pretty common now among CS students, but most people use them to do just about anything other than pay attention in class.
I have one heavy programming class where I definitely wish I had a laptop to take notes, as the professor will often throw up examples it'd be nice to compile on the fly during lecture... of course, he posts the code that evening on the class website....
Anyway, I suppose its neat to be able to connect to the internet from anywhere on campus, but I dont think its a boon to productivity or terribly helpful. Pretty much anywhere I might consider bringing a laptop to work on a programming project/paper/etc has a computer lab in it already, and I dont think there many students/profs/faculty who need to check their e-mail every 5 minutes, or while eating at the food court, etc.
I'm going to have to research more numbers to throw hard facts around, but I still maintain out-of-state tuition with no financial aid doesn't completely fund the cost of an undergraduate.
Also an interesting note in that article ".S. universities have long provided fellowships and other aid to foreign graduate students, since competition for these students is greater. Today, about 40% of the country's 240,000 foreign graduate students receive such help." I did manage to find one hard demographic -- 67% of the University of Texas Engineering graduate students are foreign. Unforunately I dont have a breakdown by engineering department yet, but theres really no doubt when broken down to just the EE department that numbers going to be significantly higher. I still find it both amazing and disturbing american's are a minority in the engineering graduate program at a public university.