i understand that you need sleep to function. i posit that it might be the case that you need *less* sleep for the same amount of function (energy, alertness), if physical activity was part of your day. i know it's the case for me that there are 3 factors i can tune and a couple i can't that affect how much sleep a "rested" me needs (not nodding off at work, in good spirits by default).
tunables: - amount of intoxicants i consume. alcohol is not the worst offender here. can make a difference of up to +2 hours in my "how long do i sleep before i wake up naturally" number - getting some exercise: at about 45 minutes, i take an hour off needed sleep to feel right. it also serves similar to a cup of coffee--doing it at 4am will rarely leave me able to sleep before 6am.
untunables: - sickness - stress both lead to more sleep needed, or less good sleep being gotten in the same amount of time.
i am a sounds sleeper, so the following statement doesn't apply. but perhaps it is relevant to your situation, even if you've never realized it? are you getting good sleep? do you have apnea, do you have a dark room, a comfy relaxing bed, a quiet place? could be that moving off the main street would be all it takes for 6 hours of sleep to feel as good as 8.
yup, this thread has my vote too. but you needn't follow anyone's formula, just find a way to work some miles into your life. i eat as much as i want and frequently drink a 6-pack of beer in an evening, and if i am a couch potato i swell up in short order. my office is less than a mile from home, so riding to/from work doesn't really put a dent in the waistline. however, there are times when i take the long way, and almost every day i do something other than go to work--be that go out to dinner, go shopping, go to friends' homes, the movies, whatever. and i ride there.
i grant you i have it super-easy since i moved to the most cycle-friendly city in the world, but i came from texas where i was frequently threatened by drivers and heat stroke and i did it there, too. definitely start with some advice from a local as to routes, or at least read http://bicyclesafe.com/ so you don't make any dumb moves or take any suboptimal routes (the interstate? almost always suboptimal.)
definitely do ramp up slowly (anything is better than nothing) to minimize discouragement and keep discomfort manageable. definitely do get a bike that's in decent shape--need not be expensive, needs be maintained regularly like a car (or maybe even more so--i pump up my bike tires weekly and reapply lube...welll..should be monthly). get appropriate clothing--this may not be spandex, but it is also probably not your work clothing. the pain you feel from the exercise shouldn't be surface or joint pain, it should be muscle pain. if you get joint pain, you might need to adjust the fit of the bike; surface pain suggests different clothing (i chafe between the thighs unless i wear spandex, be it under my clothes or exclusively, for instance). as well, bike sizing matters--every bike is not right for every person, and riding a badly sized one can injure you. so a little professional or amateur help (i hang out on some local general-interest message boards and offer to help people pick something sane from craigslist; i know others do the same in other locales. or just go to a bike shop & pay for the advice.)
these things will keep your riding more pleasant & safe.
this site (smallnetbuilder) is the best i found doing research on similar topics recently. i am less concerned with bandwidth so was more interested in what's behind the curtain and featuresets which is covered well, but they certainly also have some bandwidth charts, including performance w/use of jumbo frames (which sounds like it might be of interest to you).
There are a lot of things wrong with the school system and high school is just the first time that you can effectively and easily do something about it. Paul Graham describes several of the problems with school in this essay, but it boils down to: schools are full of disrespect for students and busy work and forced curriculum, rather than open to interesting learning opportunities. School feels like jail and freedom...well...looks pretty good.
Theres a book about unschooling that I've been reading and would probably encourage my kids to try it, if only I were the type to have kids:
The preface and a couple of chapters are online at that site. It speaks volumes to me about what my high school wasn't: interesting, a collection of information that is still catalogued in my head lo these many years later, and self-directed. Oh, and being a dork in high shcool didn't help the comfort level. At least I had a few good teachers.
well, since all of the (high-end) PC's we were looking at for snort boxen had severe problems pushing even 5Gbit/s (not GByte) of traffic in/out over the PCI busses simultaneously, you hit a bottleneck pretty quickly there, even before you get to 25TB with your disk sizes. at 500GB disks you get pretty close, but you're at the ceiling already. while a decent (not even cutting-edge) machine could push a Gbit to the server pretty easily, the server, no matter how beefy, needs a ton of internal bandwidth to gather/process/serve the data timely-like. if he only needs 100mbit/s of data service then he's golden =)
or did you mean to specify a GBit switch in between the clients/big box?
also, agree with yours and others' proclamation that administration will not be trivial. be sure to spec at least 6 months of your time in writing/debugging scripts to automate the detection and RMA of dead drives, and find a vendor who will ship based on an automated mail you can send out about failed disks, rather than waiting on turnaround from you pulling the drive and the delivery making a round trip.
FYI, i browsed the web on my palm IIIx. i had a CDPD modem for it (still have it, don't still use it--they kept raising the rates on unlimited data transfer). in fact, i still use my palmIIIx because i am a klutz and a loser and break/lose my palm frequently. replacement cost is down to $20 from ebay...
it's true, how could i forget the scenery! too bad my window faces the generator building instead of the sidewalk, but this just makes me enjoy walking all over campus to run errands (mail stuff, use the libraries/gym, go to lunch, etc)
i've worked at the university of texas at austin in several departments for about 8 years doing technical work, and still work for the university now. i have worked for about a year and a half in a couple of startups, and done some conslutting on the side over the past 10 years, so i am not speaking totally from within a vacuum of outside experience.
i started out as a student worker, with very little (3 months) outside experience, but with a healthy curiosity and a few years of hacking on stuff on my own time. i have since graduated, been promoted 4 times, achieved approximately an 5-fold salary increase, and changed departments twice. i've had a net very positive experience working at the university, and recommend it to anyone who is not already on the dot-com-dollars treadmill.
however, i think it's a lot like any other job, for the most part--if you can stand the salary, and you like your boss and co-workers and most importantly enjoy what you do, all the piddly shit like appeasing the bureaucracy and occasionally getting trumped by a PhD kind of falls by the wayside.
since i'm basically getting paid the same thing i was as a worker at the startups i was at (minus sometimes worthless stock options and signing bonuses), i include only the pros and cons that are university specific--for instance, i've always had flex time and an extremely casual dress code (tshirts and sandals have always been allowed), both in industry and in academia. and of course, you have to evaluate your situation; i've always worked for research-heavy departments, but a job at the student union (doing the same kind of work) carries a different sort of interaction potential--not so many people who are actually into learning, more morons and bureaucrats.
pros: - 40 hour work week. i love my work, but even more than that, i love having a life outside of work. i actually get *paid* for any overtime and it is almost never mandatory.
- great job security. if they even want to fire me for any reason not related to breaking the law, they have to give me a year's notice (they have to lodge a complaint that i am told about, and let it sit for a year before i can be dismissed).
- cool toys. we get donations of the darnedest things. i was probably the first person in my state to run linux on a pentium pro (got a prerelease box from intel to do benchmarking on. that took a researcher one day, after which he told me to do whatever i wanted with it). we have some huge clusters, and sun is constantly trying to donate interesting (if not amazing) things to us, like a cluster of thin clients and a beefy server to back them up.
- very relaxed atmosphere; there are deadlines but there aren't many of them and they're rarely hard. nobody has ever said "your failure to deliver on time is costing us $X!"
- some free tuition (currently a $6000/year value if you play the system for all it's worth), potentially leading to a degree if you want it to.
- working in an environment where the value of learning is well-understood, and continued education is encouraged and to some degree funded. i mostly just enjoy working with smart people, and with people who are motivated to learn about solutions to their problems instead of having me solve the problems for them.
- access to all of the resources of the university: gym, olympic swimming and diving center, libraries, libraries, libraries, museums, university-only events (mo rocca once came to speak; you needed a university ID to get in, for instance. usually concerts, plays, sporting events, etc are cheaper for university personell in addition to students). as well, the university subscribes to a lot of services (lexis nexis, encyclopaedia britannica online, OED online, online magazine/research repositories, etc) to which i automatically get access.
- best 401k plan i've been offered. vests after a few years and gives a 2.3% * (years employed at any salary) * (highest average annua
irix: http://freeware.sgi.com/ this was provided by sgi via actual sgi paid employees. it's now about a year out of date, but irix is basically end-of-lifed already by SGI (details available to the curious, but more than is relevant here). i like their inst packages because they provide the patches they needed to get the default source to build.
aix: http://www.bullfreeware.com/ this is provided by a third party hardware vendor, and looks fairly up to date. i haven't used it in years but used to about 8 years ago with reasonable success.
and as mentioned above the solaris sites are very up to date.
i'm a sysadmin for UT's computer science unix machines and our longterm plan is to stay with linux and solaris. we've already junked IRIX, HPUX, and AIX a long time ago. there are a couple of reasons for this continuing two-forked path:
monoculture is bad. people say this all the time on slashdot; nobody likes a windows-only world. linux monoculture is maybe not just as bad, but it's not a win. anyone who tries to build some of the stuff from sourceforge on non-linux platforms and discovers it to be completely linux-centric and non-portable will probably agree with me here--we want code that runs on unix, not code that runs on linux, and students will matriculate hopefully with a broader sense of what that can mean with more opportunities available to them. furthermore, solaris has been 64bit for far longer than (mainstream) linux so even though linux is catching up now, there was a time when the platform gap was even larger and more "useful" in a research-and-education sense. finally stuff like timing cache hits and instructions-per-clock-cycle become more interesting when you have some true platform contrast.
sun's pricing is still competitive for us (they do a lot of matching donations and cheating on already-low edu prices to make it so) and in certain niche markets (thin clients, >=16-way servers), they are just easier to cope with than trying to homebrew a sufficiently sturdy solution (we use their thin clients in labs that are unlocked 24/7, for instance.)
do students massively prefer the PC's to the sunblades and sunrays? sure. many professors care less. but do we want to limit any of them to a single platform? definitely not.
that's why i unsubscribed--i actually didn't probably download an average of 90 songs a month at $15/month over the ~2.5 years i was a subscriber, but as soon as they announced that they were limiting things (they gave subscribers a month or so of warning), i downloaded about 15GB worth and then told them to fuck off.
i don't think getting less for more money is very cool...
My question is, "How long will it take to get an accredited degree from this univeristy?"
well, my sister is a student there (or rather,is going to be as soon as school starts) and to hear her tell it, the
program is X years long and you have exactly
X years to do it before you are kicked out.
i thought X=4, but they may have finagled it
into a 5-year "plan" during the past year
of planning (the 30 "pre-freshmen"
guess what? it may exist, but only as much as the pine d'music and the mambox--the review you cite is nice and apparently by a third party, but clicking on the manufacturer link from that page shows that you can "reserve" your unit this week, but they won't ship til may. while it's the cheapest (and has the biggest anti-skip buffer) of any of the 3 products, i refuse to call it other than vaporware/hypeware until i can go "click" and have one shipping to me within 24 hours.
I really had an interesting talk with one of my professors a couple of days ago and pretty much found that all the major universities are using Windows type development models for their CS programs.
really? i find your professor's statement hard to believe. my understanding of the way that people teach computer science at major universities (i attend one of the 5 largest universities in the US, and am enrolled in their top-10 CS program) and certainly my direct experience is that you are taught theory: how to program, how to reason, and how to problem solve in different domains. certainly, there are the low-credit "c++" or "lisp" classes where all you are learning is a language, and the professor can (but hasn't, in my direct experience) specify a compiler/IDE for you to use---but mostly one is asked to submit code that complies to the relevant standards so that any compiler can compile them, and that has certainly always included unix compilers. in fact, the only class in which i was required to stray from unix compilers (from "pc" to "gcc/g++" to "clisp") was the assembly languange & computer architecture class, in which we were forced to use an assembler that only barely ran under the Mac emulator executor and forced me to hit the lab to use an actual Mac.
i hate to call your professor wrong without meeting the guy, but CS is more about how to think than how to implement a solution, and there is no good reason to be platform-specific during the learning process. (there are several bad reasons: TA/professor laziness, microsoft has subsidized all of your labs on campus and there are only windows machines available for development, etc)
of course, i could be misreading your post, and you could mean "Windows type development models" to be something completely different than "development required to be under a Windows OS"...if so i hope you'll correct me =)
Slashdot Mirror
i understand that you need sleep to function. i posit that it might be the case that you need *less* sleep for the same amount of function (energy, alertness), if physical activity was part of your day. i know it's the case for me that there are 3 factors i can tune and a couple i can't that affect how much sleep a "rested" me needs (not nodding off at work, in good spirits by default).
tunables:
- amount of intoxicants i consume. alcohol is not the worst offender here. can make a difference of up to +2 hours in my "how long do i sleep before i wake up naturally" number
- getting some exercise: at about 45 minutes, i take an hour off needed sleep to feel right. it also serves similar to a cup of coffee--doing it at 4am will rarely leave me able to sleep before 6am.
untunables:
- sickness
- stress
both lead to more sleep needed, or less good sleep being gotten in the same amount of time.
i am a sounds sleeper, so the following statement doesn't apply. but perhaps it is relevant to your situation, even if you've never realized it? are you getting good sleep? do you have apnea, do you have a dark room, a comfy relaxing bed, a quiet place? could be that moving off the main street would be all it takes for 6 hours of sleep to feel as good as 8.
luck++;
yup, this thread has my vote too. but you needn't follow anyone's formula, just find a way to work some miles into your life. i eat as much as i want and frequently drink a 6-pack of beer in an evening, and if i am a couch potato i swell up in short order. my office is less than a mile from home, so riding to/from work doesn't really put a dent in the waistline. however, there are times when i take the long way, and almost every day i do something other than go to work--be that go out to dinner, go shopping, go to friends' homes, the movies, whatever. and i ride there.
i grant you i have it super-easy since i moved to the most cycle-friendly city in the world, but i came from texas where i was frequently threatened by drivers and heat stroke and i did it there, too. definitely start with some advice from a local as to routes, or at least read http://bicyclesafe.com/ so you don't make any dumb moves or take any suboptimal routes (the interstate? almost always suboptimal.)
definitely do ramp up slowly (anything is better than nothing) to minimize discouragement and keep discomfort manageable. definitely do get a bike that's in decent shape--need not be expensive, needs be maintained regularly like a car (or maybe even more so--i pump up my bike tires weekly and reapply lube...welll..should be monthly). get appropriate clothing--this may not be spandex, but it is also probably not your work clothing. the pain you feel from the exercise shouldn't be surface or joint pain, it should be muscle pain. if you get joint pain, you might need to adjust the fit of the bike; surface pain suggests different clothing (i chafe between the thighs unless i wear spandex, be it under my clothes or exclusively, for instance). as well, bike sizing matters--every bike is not right for every person, and riding a badly sized one can injure you. so a little professional or amateur help (i hang out on some local general-interest message boards and offer to help people pick something sane from craigslist; i know others do the same in other locales. or just go to a bike shop & pay for the advice.)
these things will keep your riding more pleasant & safe.
good luck!
this site (smallnetbuilder) is the best i found doing research on similar topics recently. i am less concerned with bandwidth so was more interested in what's behind the curtain and featuresets which is covered well, but they certainly also have some bandwidth charts, including performance w/use of jumbo frames (which sounds like it might be of interest to you).
There are a lot of things wrong with the school system and high school is just the first time that you can effectively and easily do something about it. Paul Graham describes several of the problems with school in this essay, but it boils down to: schools are full of disrespect for students and busy work and forced curriculum, rather than open to interesting learning opportunities. School feels like jail and freedom...well...looks pretty good.
Theres a book about unschooling that I've been reading and would probably encourage my kids to try it, if only I were the type to have kids:
The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education.
The preface and a couple of chapters are online at that site. It speaks volumes to me about what my high school wasn't: interesting, a collection of information that is still catalogued in my head lo these many years later, and self-directed. Oh, and being a dork in high shcool didn't help the comfort level. At least I had a few good teachers.
well, since all of the (high-end) PC's we were looking at for snort boxen had severe problems pushing even 5Gbit/s (not GByte) of traffic in/out over the PCI busses simultaneously, you hit a bottleneck pretty quickly there, even before you get to 25TB with your disk sizes. at 500GB disks you get pretty close, but you're at the ceiling already. while a decent (not even cutting-edge) machine could push a Gbit to the server pretty easily, the server, no matter how beefy, needs a ton of internal bandwidth to gather/process/serve the data timely-like. if he only needs 100mbit/s of data service then he's golden =)
or did you mean to specify a GBit switch in between the clients/big box?
also, agree with yours and others' proclamation that administration will not be trivial. be sure to spec at least 6 months of your time in writing/debugging scripts to automate the detection and RMA of dead drives, and find a vendor who will ship based on an automated mail you can send out about failed disks, rather than waiting on turnaround from you pulling the drive and the delivery making a round trip.
FYI, i browsed the web on my palm IIIx. i had a CDPD modem for it (still have it, don't still use it--they kept raising the rates on unlimited data transfer). in fact, i still use my palmIIIx because i am a klutz and a loser and break/lose my palm frequently. replacement cost is down to $20 from ebay...
i had a very similar experience with IBM's internship crew. i told them to take that job and shove it and have never looked back...
it's true, how could i forget the scenery! too bad my window faces the generator building instead of the sidewalk, but this just makes me enjoy walking all over campus to run errands (mail stuff, use the libraries/gym, go to lunch, etc)
i've worked at the university of texas at austin in several departments for about 8 years doing technical work, and still work for the university now. i have worked for about a year and a half in a couple of startups, and done some conslutting on the side over the past 10 years, so i am not speaking totally from within a vacuum of outside experience.
i started out as a student worker, with very little (3 months) outside experience, but with a healthy curiosity and a few years of hacking on stuff on my own time. i have since graduated, been promoted 4 times, achieved approximately an 5-fold salary increase, and changed departments twice. i've had a net very positive experience working at the university, and recommend it to anyone who is not already on the dot-com-dollars treadmill.
however, i think it's a lot like any other job, for the most part--if you can stand the salary, and you like your boss and co-workers and most importantly enjoy what you do, all the piddly shit like appeasing the bureaucracy and occasionally getting trumped by a PhD kind of falls by the wayside.
since i'm basically getting paid the same thing i was as a worker at the startups i was at (minus sometimes worthless stock options and signing bonuses), i include only the pros and cons that are university specific--for instance, i've always had flex time and an extremely casual dress code (tshirts and sandals have always been allowed), both in industry and in academia. and of course, you have to evaluate your situation; i've always worked for research-heavy departments, but a job at the student union (doing the same kind of work) carries a different sort of interaction potential--not so many people who are actually into learning, more morons and bureaucrats.
pros:
- 40 hour work week. i love my work, but even more than that, i love having a life outside of work. i actually get *paid* for any overtime and it is almost never mandatory.
- great job security. if they even want to fire me for any reason not related to breaking the law, they have to give me a year's notice (they have to lodge a complaint that i am told about, and let it sit for a year before i can be dismissed).
- cool toys. we get donations of the darnedest things. i was probably the first person in my state to run linux on a pentium pro (got a prerelease box from intel to do benchmarking on. that took a researcher one day, after which he told me to do whatever i wanted with it). we have some huge clusters, and sun is constantly trying to donate interesting (if not amazing) things to us, like a cluster of thin clients and a beefy server to back them up.
- very relaxed atmosphere; there are deadlines but there aren't many of them and they're rarely hard. nobody has ever said "your failure to deliver on time is costing us $X!"
- some free tuition (currently a $6000/year value if you play the system for all it's worth), potentially leading to a degree if you want it to.
- working in an environment where the value of learning is well-understood, and continued education is encouraged and to some degree funded.
i mostly just enjoy working with smart people, and with people who are motivated to learn about solutions to their problems instead of having me solve the problems for them.
- access to all of the resources of the university: gym, olympic swimming and diving center, libraries, libraries, libraries, museums, university-only events (mo rocca once came to speak; you needed a university ID to get in, for instance. usually concerts, plays, sporting events, etc are cheaper for university personell in addition to students). as well, the university subscribes to a lot of services (lexis nexis, encyclopaedia britannica online, OED online, online magazine/research repositories, etc) to which i automatically get access.
- best 401k plan i've been offered. vests after a few years and gives a 2.3% * (years employed at any salary) * (highest average annua
irix: http://freeware.sgi.com/ this was provided by sgi via actual sgi paid employees. it's now about a year out of date, but irix is basically end-of-lifed already by SGI (details available to the curious, but more than is relevant here). i like their inst packages because they provide the patches they needed to get the default source to build.
aix: http://www.bullfreeware.com/ this is provided by a third party hardware vendor, and looks fairly up to date. i haven't used it in years but used to about 8 years ago with reasonable success.
and as mentioned above the solaris sites are very up to date.
do students massively prefer the PC's to the sunblades and sunrays? sure. many professors care less. but do we want to limit any of them to a single platform? definitely not.
that's why i unsubscribed--i actually didn't probably download an average of 90 songs a month at $15/month over the ~2.5 years i was a subscriber, but as soon as they announced that they were limiting things (they gave subscribers a month or so of warning), i downloaded about 15GB worth and then told them to fuck off.
i don't think getting less for more money is very cool...
well, my sister is a student there (or rather,is going to be as soon as school starts) and to hear her tell it, the program is X years long and you have exactly X years to do it before you are kicked out.
i thought X=4, but they may have finagled it into a 5-year "plan" during the past year of planning (the 30 "pre-freshmen"
guess what? it may exist, but only as much as the pine d'music and the mambox--the review you cite is nice and apparently by a third party, but clicking on the manufacturer link from that page shows that you can "reserve" your unit this week, but they won't ship til may. while it's the cheapest (and has the biggest anti-skip buffer) of any of the 3 products, i refuse to call it other than vaporware/hypeware until i can go "click" and have one shipping to me within 24 hours.
really? i find your professor's statement hard to believe. my understanding of the way that people teach computer science at major universities (i attend one of the 5 largest universities in the US, and am enrolled in their top-10 CS program) and certainly my direct experience is that you are taught theory: how to program, how to reason, and how to problem solve in different domains. certainly, there are the low-credit "c++" or "lisp" classes where all you are learning is a language, and the professor can (but hasn't, in my direct experience) specify a compiler/IDE for you to use---but mostly one is asked to submit code that complies to the relevant standards so that any compiler can compile them, and that has certainly always included unix compilers. in fact, the only class in which i was required to stray from unix compilers (from "pc" to "gcc/g++" to "clisp") was the assembly languange & computer architecture class, in which we were forced to use an assembler that only barely ran under the Mac emulator executor and forced me to hit the lab to use an actual Mac.
i hate to call your professor wrong without meeting the guy, but CS is more about how to think than how to implement a solution, and there is no good reason to be platform-specific during the learning process. (there are several bad reasons: TA/professor laziness, microsoft has subsidized all of your labs on campus and there are only windows machines available for development, etc)
of course, i could be misreading your post, and you could mean "Windows type development models" to be something completely different than "development required to be under a Windows OS"...if so i hope you'll correct me =)