I worked over the summer on a large-scale SAP deployment with Lockheed Martin as an intern.
SAP is possibly the most boring system every created. The summer taught me to hate business, working for a business, business software, and IT basically all at once.
Now it looks like my life is taking a turn towards long-term intellectual stimulation and poverty in grad school and beyond.
Engineering was too hard for me, but since I have a high opinion of myself, the problem isn't me. So I suppose it should be easier for everyone. I mean, if can't do it, really nobody can.
Give me a break. I'm a CS major at Berkeley, I've been in classes with plenty of people who can't hack it. The reason fewer people are going into engineering is that they can drink their way through four years of a poli-sci degree, get all A's anyway, and go to law school to make much more money. If people were paid more, if jobs were secure and not being shipped off to India, if science weren't as demonized as it seems to be in this country, if tech companies treated their workers better (I'm looking at you Electronic Arts) then maybe we'd have more engineers.
Re:Sweep of Time?
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There was a sort of expansion/reissue of Civilization 2 called Civilization: Test of Time. I remember that it introduced the concept of having multiple boards in the game, so you could play the regular campaign and when you launched your spaceship to Alpha Centauri, the game wouldn't stop. It would land on a completely different board, complete with some aliens, who would also come back and land on Earth. It was a little silly though, when you would get periodic rankings of all the civilizations throughout the game and the aliens would be listed along with their earthbound counterparts.
It was a cool concept for sure. There were also total conversions of the game to a full on fantasy setting (a weird Tolkein/Norse mix) and a full alien world, all taking advantage of the multiple boards thing. I guess the package didn't sell well enough, or was too confusing with the expansion pack and Gold edition for Civ II also out, which it contained neither of.
The list isn't terrible, there are some great shows in there that I'd forgotten about: Sliders, at least the first few seasons of it, Alien Nation, Babylon 5, MST3K), but Stargate: Atlantis? I liked the original series basically only because of Richard Dean Anderson, but Atlantis has just got nothing. It's like comparing CSI and CSI:Miami, the former has great characters in fairly improbable situations, the latter has a bunch of dull characters in poorly-written, completely improbably situations. They also kill a lot more people in both Atlantis and CSI:Miami, I guess that's supposed to make the show more exciting.
Also Farscape missing is a crime.
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_ 06riven.html
Read a couple paragraphs down. As of the release of Riven, the first sequel to Myst, the game had sold 3.1 million copies, more than twice the number of copies as Doom 2, the distant second-place best-selling game.
I don't know if this is real or not, but I'd like to see some more opinions on it and maybe the other side of the story, if it exists. You think something this serious would get on the news.
Or well, with what I read in the link, maybe it's the kind of stuff that gets hidden.
I'm an undergrad CS major at Berkeley, so I can say that you are absolutely wrong, at least with your choice of school. The CS departments at hundreds of other universities might be churning out people with CS degrees that are really Software Engineering or Information Technology degrees, but Berkeley is not. That's why it's consistently ranked as one of the best places for CS, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
As far as your specific examples, I learned about all of those in my first 2 years here with the exception of "Rice's theorem", but I'm taking Theory and Algorithms next semester so I imagine I'll hear about it then. The software engineering buzzwords you used, however, I know what "reflection" is but have no idea what the other stuff is at all.
I leave it up to everyone else to judge what is more important. If you wish to do research as I do, then I think it is important to learn the first half, but if you're working as a code monkey somewhere, the second half is probably better. If you can't understand that they are two completely different things, then God help you.
...and it was already hard to find a girlfriend.
More seriously, the trend is definitely apparent here at Berkeley. The intro classes were over 250 students three years ago, and are now a shade over 100. The major that accepted only 30% of students then will take anyone with a B average now.
It's good news for me though if this means less competition for grad school slots.
We already do wear RFID tags, kind of. All the ID cards here at Berkeley have RFID strips in them, which you can activate in order to gain access to buildings after hours. The discussion here tends to make me think that people don't understand what RFID is. You have to physically put the tag within a foot or so of a reader for it to work, it's not like a little homing beacon where "they" sit up in a control room somewhere and plot out the movements of every student on campus.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked over the summer on a large-scale SAP deployment with Lockheed Martin as an intern. SAP is possibly the most boring system every created. The summer taught me to hate business, working for a business, business software, and IT basically all at once. Now it looks like my life is taking a turn towards long-term intellectual stimulation and poverty in grad school and beyond.
But does it run...
Imagine a Beow...
Ahem. My apologies.
Engineering was too hard for me, but since I have a high opinion of myself, the problem isn't me. So I suppose it should be easier for everyone. I mean, if can't do it, really nobody can. Give me a break. I'm a CS major at Berkeley, I've been in classes with plenty of people who can't hack it. The reason fewer people are going into engineering is that they can drink their way through four years of a poli-sci degree, get all A's anyway, and go to law school to make much more money. If people were paid more, if jobs were secure and not being shipped off to India, if science weren't as demonized as it seems to be in this country, if tech companies treated their workers better (I'm looking at you Electronic Arts) then maybe we'd have more engineers.
There was a sort of expansion/reissue of Civilization 2 called Civilization: Test of Time. I remember that it introduced the concept of having multiple boards in the game, so you could play the regular campaign and when you launched your spaceship to Alpha Centauri, the game wouldn't stop. It would land on a completely different board, complete with some aliens, who would also come back and land on Earth. It was a little silly though, when you would get periodic rankings of all the civilizations throughout the game and the aliens would be listed along with their earthbound counterparts. It was a cool concept for sure. There were also total conversions of the game to a full on fantasy setting (a weird Tolkein/Norse mix) and a full alien world, all taking advantage of the multiple boards thing. I guess the package didn't sell well enough, or was too confusing with the expansion pack and Gold edition for Civ II also out, which it contained neither of.
...so 9 out of 10 of us are always right. Thankfully for the rest of us, those crazy left-handed people have shorter lifespans: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-handed#.22Disapp earing.22_Left-Handers/
Best. Moderation. Ever.
Dead?
The list isn't terrible, there are some great shows in there that I'd forgotten about: Sliders, at least the first few seasons of it, Alien Nation, Babylon 5, MST3K), but Stargate: Atlantis? I liked the original series basically only because of Richard Dean Anderson, but Atlantis has just got nothing. It's like comparing CSI and CSI:Miami, the former has great characters in fairly improbable situations, the latter has a bunch of dull characters in poorly-written, completely improbably situations. They also kill a lot more people in both Atlantis and CSI:Miami, I guess that's supposed to make the show more exciting. Also Farscape missing is a crime.
It's all about appealing to the hive mentality of movie-goers.
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1997/11/cov_ 06riven.html
Read a couple paragraphs down. As of the release of Riven, the first sequel to Myst, the game had sold 3.1 million copies, more than twice the number of copies as Doom 2, the distant second-place best-selling game.
Most copies sold. Not so hard to come up with...
I don't know if this is real or not, but I'd like to see some more opinions on it and maybe the other side of the story, if it exists. You think something this serious would get on the news. Or well, with what I read in the link, maybe it's the kind of stuff that gets hidden.
I'm an undergrad CS major at Berkeley, so I can say that you are absolutely wrong, at least with your choice of school. The CS departments at hundreds of other universities might be churning out people with CS degrees that are really Software Engineering or Information Technology degrees, but Berkeley is not. That's why it's consistently ranked as one of the best places for CS, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels.
As far as your specific examples, I learned about all of those in my first 2 years here with the exception of "Rice's theorem", but I'm taking Theory and Algorithms next semester so I imagine I'll hear about it then. The software engineering buzzwords you used, however, I know what "reflection" is but have no idea what the other stuff is at all.
I leave it up to everyone else to judge what is more important. If you wish to do research as I do, then I think it is important to learn the first half, but if you're working as a code monkey somewhere, the second half is probably better. If you can't understand that they are two completely different things, then God help you.
...and it was already hard to find a girlfriend. More seriously, the trend is definitely apparent here at Berkeley. The intro classes were over 250 students three years ago, and are now a shade over 100. The major that accepted only 30% of students then will take anyone with a B average now. It's good news for me though if this means less competition for grad school slots.
Hah, you missed the best part. Click on the technical specs and you find out that it runs DOS.
We already do wear RFID tags, kind of. All the ID cards here at Berkeley have RFID strips in them, which you can activate in order to gain access to buildings after hours. The discussion here tends to make me think that people don't understand what RFID is. You have to physically put the tag within a foot or so of a reader for it to work, it's not like a little homing beacon where "they" sit up in a control room somewhere and plot out the movements of every student on campus.