I just graduated from college (heading off to a summer job and then CMU for a PhD), and my parents and grandparents paid my way all the way though (barring the money I got from a summer job). I worked my ass off. I didn't party, though I did train karate and cook and sew. I got an honors degree. I have publications. I have a spot in a top CS grad school. I worked, but I wouldn't have been able to take research jobs if I hadn't been supported by my parents. Does that make me lazy? My parents paid for me, and for a lot of my friends, and I don't see them being lazy. I see them working hard to get into grad school (admissions was HARD for CS PhD's this year), and I see them working hard to find jobs.
If you're lazy, you're lazy. It's all about motivation. I know people who pay their way through who dropped out not because they couldn't pay for it, or because they spent too much time working, but because they weren't motivated enough. UC Berkeley tuition may be cheap, but I wouldn't call the housing around here affordable by any stretch of the imagination. Hours spent working for the rent may be better spent working on your classes, or for a prof. Take your head out of the sand.
If you're not too bothered by what I consider rather disgusting living conditions, you live in the co-ops... that's the only "cheap" housing in town. You can only get dorms for a year, unless you get REALLY lucky, and that was $750/month+net+phone last I checked. Now I'm in a 2 bedroom apartment 30 min walk from campus (well, from any part I'm interested in) on Northside, and it's nearly $1700/month.
Berkeley's a great area in many ways, though I didn't like living on southside, but it is expensive.
Um... nick's a grad student. he's not disgruntled. he's about to get his PhD, just finishing up the thesis. I'd also submit that dismissing people is not always a good idea, and dismissing all grad students is certainly not a good idea. I'm willing to bet a lot of money that there are some of em who are smarter than you are, at any rate, just as there are certainly some who are more intelligent than I.
Lea
Re:Leads to decrease in iMac sales
on
iPod on Windows
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
I'm seeing a lot more geeks buying macs with OS X. It runs LaTeX, and all those other geeky things I need to run, and the hardware's damn nice (I have an iBook with a CDRW/DVD drive -- for $1200, that's a pretty sweet deal). The interface is pretty and nice to use, though I miss focus-follows-mouse. It's pretty, but it's also the best laptop for the least money. My X20 is sitting on a shelf right next to me while I use the iBook, because it's simply nice to use, and has the capabilities I need. I don't run VirtualPC, I don't run Office, I don't run IE. The point is that I'm not rabid, I'm a geek, and I feel no pain because this is, under it all, a BSD box. It's becoming far more dangerous to make generalizations of the sort -- geeks like nice hardware too, and OS X has opened up Apple's stuff as a serious option.
I was replying to a comment implying seatbelts are completely safe, which they are not. Neither are airbags, but they provide an aggregate risk alleviation.
Completely offtopic, but as an anecdote, my grandmother was killed by a seatbelt, while wearing it correctly. Long story, short, seat belt, crash, chest crushed, icky death.
First of all, you get a complete control over the layout. Secondly, you don't have to read tons of manuals in order to use it.
I don't know exactly what you've done, but as someone who's had to do papers in both word and latex, let me respectfully point out that making a word document look the same (or even have the same number of pages) on multiple computers, let alone multiple versions of Word, is something that made me tear my hair out. You want control, you use TeX. Period. You want a lot of control, but ease of use, you use LaTeX. You want total and complete frustration because your paper is a different number of pages depending on the computer, splits text in the dumbest places (leaves orphan headers), and so on ad nauseum, you use Word. You don't get control with Word. Even when you've micromanaged the text. I spent a week doing this, and vowed never to use Word again, and thus to never submit to this conference. (The conference I was submitting to was a bit out of my area, in any case, and is completely out now.)
There are advantages to dating guys with geek toys. For example, this means that I have wireless at my place, his place, the CS department at Berkeley, and my parent's place.
The specs seem like they'd be more of a problem. If he doesn't want to focus his attention on ME and what I'm telling him while having a conversation, that isn't much of a conversation, is it? Doesn't make for much of a relationship, does it? Now, I need time to work and play by myself just as much as the next gal/guy (or even more so when I'm carrying a graduate courseload, plus the rest of an undergraduate's, plus research), but mixing it with the glasses is just not a good idea.
Not any more! (at least at Berkeley) They have the dorms (all of them) capped to something like 20MBs right now, and campus has been capped as well. The internet bill is about $50,000/month, which is an awful lot for a public university, even if it is a huge,sucessful public university. Ahwell, I'm heading off to grad school somewhere where they give ALL the grad students desks in offices, so hey.
Buying from IBM is a good idea in general, I've found, especially with laptops. Except for my last one (an X series that has had a series of display problems) I've had very few problems, especially considering how I treat them (thrown in a backpack, used up to 20 hours a day). Now I've had my first serious problem (backlight burnt out), called tech support at 10pm, and they had a box to me to ship it back in by 10:30am!
My friends who have had any other brand of laptop (bar Apple's G3s and Titaniums -- which haven't been around long enough to have a lot of wear) have had the runaround happen every which way, and had them fixed in an unsatisfactory manner. It's even worse with desktops: hard drives that fail on a regular basis, video cards that go poof, and crappy sound hardware.
Ahwell. People say I'm insane to only use laptops, but they hang around longer than the Gateways and HPs I've seen!
Yes, some of the teams are like yours (do you work at GM:P), but some of them are not. A lot of the non-engineer bots suck, but some of them are quite well done. The team I came from does quite well every year, and they're entirely student-run. The team I supervised one year did quite well in regionals, but didn't have the money to make it to nationals -- they had to break up the entry fee among themselves, since they didn't manage any corporate sponsorship, which yes, means no engineers. (The answer to your question is: college students)
I know the rationale for letting this continue is that some students "aren't as well prepared" as those from more affluent areas, and that this allows them a way to participate, and that they "might learn something." I don't see that going on on the engineer-led teams. I've never been on one, but I see that you agree with me:). But still, for such an expensive (and badly webcast) event, many students get the experience of being cheerleaders, nothign more, while some students get the experience of designing and building a robot, and learning a LOT in the process. Shouldn't we be striving for the latter? Restricting companies to money and shop time (and help) might help, but it's unlikely to happen.
Some of them are done by the engineers, some are not. And you're not going to be able to guess, always, without knowing the team. The GM teams, sure, they're engineer-built, that one Baxter team, etc. But there are some that are not, like the team I came from, who does very well every year.
And trust me, while you get motors, and wheels, you don't get any of the other parts. You get odds and ends. There is NOT enough stuff in there to build a robot. You need metal, you need to work it (unless you're one of the PVC teams). There's a lot of design and implementation work there -- it's just a question of who is doing it.
You have a point, but as someone who has participated in this more than once, it's a rather idealistic one. Most teams are actually run by the engineers: design, construction, programming, everything. Students are relegated to cheerleaders during the competition. And General Motors isn't the only offender. When my team made it to the semi-finals, most teams were shocked, simply becasue we were not engineer-built. (we had some engineers, mostly from Xerox PARC, but they were mainly there in a supervisory capactiy -- as in "there must be an adult in the shop" and to conduct design reviews) I realize that not all of the teams have the necessary background for this sort of work, but it really isn't teaching them much of anything. It's tolerated becasue "they might learn something, and that's better than nothing", which has the effect of discouraging other teams from designing and building their own robots.
As for females, I was one of them. You will see women on these teams, but most often as cheerleaders, on both the engineer-built and the student-built teams. I'm not making any statements about who chose that role for them, simply noting that there are very few women who are, for example, drivers or part of the pit crews. And if you are part of the pit crew, people from OTHER TEAMS will not pay attention to you and push you out of the way in an effort to look at your robot (information gathering, not real curiosity). I simply hope they don't treat their own members like that.
And it's not that the companies donate kits. They donate money (part of which goes to pay the entry fee, and if you pay the entry fee, you get the kit -- which is NOT all the materials you need); they donate engineer's time; they donate use of their shops.
It's true that pneumatics are included in the parts given the teams, but given the weight constraints on the robot and the type of pneumatic components that are given, it's considered death to use the pneumatics, even if you know how.
Flying's a complicated thing. Maintenance is even more complicated. Losing your transportation for a few weeks per year for inspections (not to mention actual maintenance) would be less than optimal. Radar won't solve your collision problem, though they can warn people. Getting close to another aircraft could rob you of your lift or suck you towards them. What if you can't land right away? There are many, many things that influence gas usage. Headwinds and tailwinds, for example, which of course change during flight. Weather conditions make everything far more complicated than you can imagine. What if it's cloudy? Can't go to work without quite a lot of training. What if it's icy? Sure as hell can't go to work without a lot of very expensive equipment. Heck, the basic airplane, gasoline, and maintenance are VERY expensive. Look at what it costs to operate even a small aircraft per hour (these figures typically have maintenance, amortized over yearly flying time, included).
I'm not even going to get into the many, many other factors that you haven't taken into account here. What I will recommend is that you look into it before you recommend it to others. There is a reason there is training required, and a LOT more than is needed to drive a car. Navigating in 3D is actually quite complicated. My father owns several aircraft, and I've spent quite a lot of my life co-piloting and helping with maintenance, so I have some basis for my opinion here.
It's not that I wouldn't like this to come about, but I think it's not likely to happen anytime in the next 25 years, at the very least.
oh dear me no, it's far more complicated than that. I won't get into details, but basically you create a "force field" by vibrating the table in the right x, y, and \theta... this hasn't been worked on enough, as I see it.
I'm actually not working for PARC right now (UC Berkeley instead -- crypto is fun!), but I don't see how putting that in my.sig would encourage other women in any case. Feel free to email me to discuss this. (put an informative subject so I don't delete it as part of the massive purges on that account)
The movies aren't faked. I used to work for the same professor (John Canny), and I saw the table in action. It's pretty cool stuff, though it could go a lot farther with some more math work on the field created.
Yes, the table is real. Yes, it works. Yes, it could be better. This is research... this is expected!
Lea (who used to work on cs theory and robotics, and now works on cs theory and crypto)
I've never had to use MS software at work. SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, Linux, and HP-UX, but not any form of Windows. So there are places where you can use what you need to -- granted that this was all in research, and at NASA/AMES, UC Berkeley, and XEROX-PARC.
*shrug*
what this says to me is that I was right -- research is a great area to be in for all sorts of unexpected reasons.
According to the polls that have been done a few times, it's something like 95% male around here. The really scary part about this is that the percentage of women I've seen around online has gone up quite a lot since I've been around, at least.
And another good way to find female/. posters is go look in the archives for stories dealing with women in computing/gaming/etc. A lot of people seem to come out of the woodwork for stories like that, since I would suppose they are more qualified to comment than the other 95% of the/. readership.
obligatory on-topic part which is also sorta related to the parent:
I voted (via absentee ballot, since I have a math midterm today) for Gore, mostly becasue, for some odd reason, I have a great liking for women's rights. There is a huge, mostly unpublicised backlash against rights gained several decades ago that I personally think are simply logical. (I'm an engineering major. I like being an engineering major. I like being able to get a PhD. I also like being able to make my own choices about how/when I can have a family.) If Bush is elected, I really really do not want to see certain of the groups who are backing him (and miraculously keeping quiet about it -- think Christian Coalition) coming out of the woodwork. There are of course other reasons, but that is a main one -- and one that does not seem to be thought about by many people I know. Then again, most of the people I know are guys.
Oh yes, in answer to your question, I am of the female gender.
try IBM. they sell laptops with Corel Linux on em, or so their laptop page says (I was specifically looking at the T-series... may be different for other ones, and the IBM site gets pissy at Mozilla, so I can't give you a link). IBM should really be the first stop for anyone looking to install a non-MS OS on a laptop. I'm typing this on a Linux-running TP 570... it's beautiful. I don't even own any copies of windows anymore, besides the unused ones they won't give me a refund for!
Slashdot Mirror
I just graduated from college (heading off to a summer job and then CMU for a PhD), and my parents and grandparents paid my way all the way though (barring the money I got from a summer job). I worked my ass off. I didn't party, though I did train karate and cook and sew. I got an honors degree. I have publications. I have a spot in a top CS grad school. I worked, but I wouldn't have been able to take research jobs if I hadn't been supported by my parents. Does that make me lazy? My parents paid for me, and for a lot of my friends, and I don't see them being lazy. I see them working hard to get into grad school (admissions was HARD for CS PhD's this year), and I see them working hard to find jobs.
If you're lazy, you're lazy. It's all about motivation. I know people who pay their way through who dropped out not because they couldn't pay for it, or because they spent too much time working, but because they weren't motivated enough. UC Berkeley tuition may be cheap, but I wouldn't call the housing around here affordable by any stretch of the imagination. Hours spent working for the rent may be better spent working on your classes, or for a prof. Take your head out of the sand.
Lea
If you're not too bothered by what I consider rather disgusting living conditions, you live in the co-ops... that's the only "cheap" housing in town. You can only get dorms for a year, unless you get REALLY lucky, and that was $750/month+net+phone last I checked. Now I'm in a 2 bedroom apartment 30 min walk from campus (well, from any part I'm interested in) on Northside, and it's nearly $1700/month.
Berkeley's a great area in many ways, though I didn't like living on southside, but it is expensive.
Lea
Perhaps it's just me, but Volvos seem a much better choice: big, heavy, better gas milage, and without that annoying flipping thing.
But hey, Volvos are just sexy.
Lea
Um... nick's a grad student. he's not disgruntled. he's about to get his PhD, just finishing up the thesis. I'd also submit that dismissing people is not always a good idea, and dismissing all grad students is certainly not a good idea. I'm willing to bet a lot of money that there are some of em who are smarter than you are, at any rate, just as there are certainly some who are more intelligent than I.
Lea
I'm seeing a lot more geeks buying macs with OS X. It runs LaTeX, and all those other geeky things I need to run, and the hardware's damn nice (I have an iBook with a CDRW/DVD drive -- for $1200, that's a pretty sweet deal). The interface is pretty and nice to use, though I miss focus-follows-mouse. It's pretty, but it's also the best laptop for the least money. My X20 is sitting on a shelf right next to me while I use the iBook, because it's simply nice to use, and has the capabilities I need. I don't run VirtualPC, I don't run Office, I don't run IE. The point is that I'm not rabid, I'm a geek, and I feel no pain because this is, under it all, a BSD box. It's becoming far more dangerous to make generalizations of the sort -- geeks like nice hardware too, and OS X has opened up Apple's stuff as a serious option.
Lea
I was replying to a comment implying seatbelts are completely safe, which they are not. Neither are airbags, but they provide an aggregate risk alleviation.
Lea
Completely offtopic, but as an anecdote, my grandmother was killed by a seatbelt, while wearing it correctly. Long story, short, seat belt, crash, chest crushed, icky death.
Lea
I don't know exactly what you've done, but as someone who's had to do papers in both word and latex, let me respectfully point out that making a word document look the same (or even have the same number of pages) on multiple computers, let alone multiple versions of Word, is something that made me tear my hair out. You want control, you use TeX. Period. You want a lot of control, but ease of use, you use LaTeX. You want total and complete frustration because your paper is a different number of pages depending on the computer, splits text in the dumbest places (leaves orphan headers), and so on ad nauseum, you use Word. You don't get control with Word. Even when you've micromanaged the text. I spent a week doing this, and vowed never to use Word again, and thus to never submit to this conference. (The conference I was submitting to was a bit out of my area, in any case, and is completely out now.)
Lea
There are advantages to dating guys with geek toys. For example, this means that I have wireless at my place, his place, the CS department at Berkeley, and my parent's place.
The specs seem like they'd be more of a problem. If he doesn't want to focus his attention on ME and what I'm telling him while having a conversation, that isn't much of a conversation, is it? Doesn't make for much of a relationship, does it? Now, I need time to work and play by myself just as much as the next gal/guy (or even more so when I'm carrying a graduate courseload, plus the rest of an undergraduate's, plus research), but mixing it with the glasses is just not a good idea.
Lea
Not any more! (at least at Berkeley) They have the dorms (all of them) capped to something like 20MBs right now, and campus has been capped as well. The internet bill is about $50,000/month, which is an awful lot for a public university, even if it is a huge,sucessful public university. Ahwell, I'm heading off to grad school somewhere where they give ALL the grad students desks in offices, so hey.
Lea
In this case, it was a buffer overflow, and every previous version of the machine worked, becasue there were mechanical failure interlocks.
So the machine failed once every 1024 times, or some such. It makes it a little hard to know if that hasn't come around yet...
Lea
Buying from IBM is a good idea in general, I've found, especially with laptops. Except for my last one (an X series that has had a series of display problems) I've had very few problems, especially considering how I treat them (thrown in a backpack, used up to 20 hours a day). Now I've had my first serious problem (backlight burnt out), called tech support at 10pm, and they had a box to me to ship it back in by 10:30am!
My friends who have had any other brand of laptop (bar Apple's G3s and Titaniums -- which haven't been around long enough to have a lot of wear) have had the runaround happen every which way, and had them fixed in an unsatisfactory manner. It's even worse with desktops: hard drives that fail on a regular basis, video cards that go poof, and crappy sound hardware.
Ahwell. People say I'm insane to only use laptops, but they hang around longer than the Gateways and HPs I've seen!
Lea
I don't know about you, but personally I find those shirts vaguely insulting. Little tight glittery teeshirt saying "I my geek"...
I still think it would be funny if my boyfriend wore one, but he refuses. Not that I blame him.
Lea
Yes, some of the teams are like yours (do you work at GM :P), but some of them are not. A lot of the non-engineer bots suck, but some of them are quite well done. The team I came from does quite well every year, and they're entirely student-run. The team I supervised one year did quite well in regionals, but didn't have the money to make it to nationals -- they had to break up the entry fee among themselves, since they didn't manage any corporate sponsorship, which yes, means no engineers. (The answer to your question is: college students)
:). But still, for such an expensive (and badly webcast) event, many students get the experience of being cheerleaders, nothign more, while some students get the experience of designing and building a robot, and learning a LOT in the process. Shouldn't we be striving for the latter? Restricting companies to money and shop time (and help) might help, but it's unlikely to happen.
I know the rationale for letting this continue is that some students "aren't as well prepared" as those from more affluent areas, and that this allows them a way to participate, and that they "might learn something." I don't see that going on on the engineer-led teams. I've never been on one, but I see that you agree with me
Lea
Some of them are done by the engineers, some are not. And you're not going to be able to guess, always, without knowing the team. The GM teams, sure, they're engineer-built, that one Baxter team, etc. But there are some that are not, like the team I came from, who does very well every year.
And trust me, while you get motors, and wheels, you don't get any of the other parts. You get odds and ends. There is NOT enough stuff in there to build a robot. You need metal, you need to work it (unless you're one of the PVC teams). There's a lot of design and implementation work there -- it's just a question of who is doing it.
Lea
You have a point, but as someone who has participated in this more than once, it's a rather idealistic one. Most teams are actually run by the engineers: design, construction, programming, everything. Students are relegated to cheerleaders during the competition. And General Motors isn't the only offender. When my team made it to the semi-finals, most teams were shocked, simply becasue we were not engineer-built. (we had some engineers, mostly from Xerox PARC, but they were mainly there in a supervisory capactiy -- as in "there must be an adult in the shop" and to conduct design reviews) I realize that not all of the teams have the necessary background for this sort of work, but it really isn't teaching them much of anything. It's tolerated becasue "they might learn something, and that's better than nothing", which has the effect of discouraging other teams from designing and building their own robots.
As for females, I was one of them. You will see women on these teams, but most often as cheerleaders, on both the engineer-built and the student-built teams. I'm not making any statements about who chose that role for them, simply noting that there are very few women who are, for example, drivers or part of the pit crews. And if you are part of the pit crew, people from OTHER TEAMS will not pay attention to you and push you out of the way in an effort to look at your robot (information gathering, not real curiosity). I simply hope they don't treat their own members like that.
And it's not that the companies donate kits. They donate money (part of which goes to pay the entry fee, and if you pay the entry fee, you get the kit -- which is NOT all the materials you need); they donate engineer's time; they donate use of their shops.
Lea
It's true that pneumatics are included in the parts given the teams, but given the weight constraints on the robot and the type of pneumatic components that are given, it's considered death to use the pneumatics, even if you know how.
Lea
Flying's a complicated thing. Maintenance is even more complicated. Losing your transportation for a few weeks per year for inspections (not to mention actual maintenance) would be less than optimal. Radar won't solve your collision problem, though they can warn people. Getting close to another aircraft could rob you of your lift or suck you towards them. What if you can't land right away? There are many, many things that influence gas usage. Headwinds and tailwinds, for example, which of course change during flight. Weather conditions make everything far more complicated than you can imagine. What if it's cloudy? Can't go to work without quite a lot of training. What if it's icy? Sure as hell can't go to work without a lot of very expensive equipment. Heck, the basic airplane, gasoline, and maintenance are VERY expensive. Look at what it costs to operate even a small aircraft per hour (these figures typically have maintenance, amortized over yearly flying time, included).
I'm not even going to get into the many, many other factors that you haven't taken into account here. What I will recommend is that you look into it before you recommend it to others. There is a reason there is training required, and a LOT more than is needed to drive a car. Navigating in 3D is actually quite complicated. My father owns several aircraft, and I've spent quite a lot of my life co-piloting and helping with maintenance, so I have some basis for my opinion here.
It's not that I wouldn't like this to come about, but I think it's not likely to happen anytime in the next 25 years, at the very least.
Lea
oh dear me no, it's far more complicated than that. I won't get into details, but basically you create a "force field" by vibrating the table in the right x, y, and \theta... this hasn't been worked on enough, as I see it.
Lea
I'm actually not working for PARC right now (UC Berkeley instead -- crypto is fun!), but I don't see how putting that in my .sig would encourage other women in any case. Feel free to email me to discuss this. (put an informative subject so I don't delete it as part of the massive purges on that account)
Lea
spinning is easier than moving them, in many ways.
Lea
The movies aren't faked. I used to work for the same professor (John Canny), and I saw the table in action. It's pretty cool stuff, though it could go a lot farther with some more math work on the field created.
Yes, the table is real. Yes, it works. Yes, it could be better. This is research... this is expected!
Lea (who used to work on cs theory and robotics, and now works on cs theory and crypto)
I've never had to use MS software at work. SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, Linux, and HP-UX, but not any form of Windows. So there are places where you can use what you need to -- granted that this was all in research, and at NASA/AMES, UC Berkeley, and XEROX-PARC.
*shrug*
what this says to me is that I was right -- research is a great area to be in for all sorts of unexpected reasons.
Lea
According to the polls that have been done a few times, it's something like 95% male around here. The really scary part about this is that the percentage of women I've seen around online has gone up quite a lot since I've been around, at least.
/. posters is go look in the archives for stories dealing with women in computing/gaming/etc. A lot of people seem to come out of the woodwork for stories like that, since I would suppose they are more qualified to comment than the other 95% of the /. readership.
And another good way to find female
obligatory on-topic part which is also sorta related to the parent:
I voted (via absentee ballot, since I have a math midterm today) for Gore, mostly becasue, for some odd reason, I have a great liking for women's rights. There is a huge, mostly unpublicised backlash against rights gained several decades ago that I personally think are simply logical. (I'm an engineering major. I like being an engineering major. I like being able to get a PhD. I also like being able to make my own choices about how/when I can have a family.) If Bush is elected, I really really do not want to see certain of the groups who are backing him (and miraculously keeping quiet about it -- think Christian Coalition) coming out of the woodwork. There are of course other reasons, but that is a main one -- and one that does not seem to be thought about by many people I know. Then again, most of the people I know are guys.
Oh yes, in answer to your question, I am of the female gender.
Lea
try IBM. they sell laptops with Corel Linux on em, or so their laptop page says (I was specifically looking at the T-series... may be different for other ones, and the IBM site gets pissy at Mozilla, so I can't give you a link). IBM should really be the first stop for anyone looking to install a non-MS OS on a laptop. I'm typing this on a Linux-running TP 570... it's beautiful. I don't even own any copies of windows anymore, besides the unused ones they won't give me a refund for!
Lea