Sorry, but I think you're totally wrong in believing they can even remotely claim to be "scientific". I just read the faq and it says enough. Bear with me please while I reproduce part of their faq.
Q: "Why do the all the world Governments say the Earth is round?"
A: It's a conspiracy
Q: "What about NASA? Don't they have photos to prove that the Earth is round?"
A: NASA is part of the conspiracy too. The photos are faked.
Q: "Why has no-one taken a photo of the Earth that proves it is flat?"
A: The government prevents people from getting close enough to the Ice Wall to take a picture.
Q: "How did NASA create these images with the computer technology available at the time?"
A: Since NASA did not send rockets into space, they instead spent the money on developing advanced computers and imaging software instead
PLEASE NOTE This means that pictures confirming the roundness or flatness of the Earth DO NOT IN THEMSELVES CONSTITUTE VALID PROOF
Q: "What is the motive behind this conspiracy?"
A: The motive is unknown although it is probably money
Q: "If you're not sure about the motive, why do you say there is a conspiracy?"
A: Well it's quite simple really; if the earth is in fact flat, then the governments must be lying when they say it isn't.
Q: "The government could not pull off the conspiracy successfully"
A: Actually, they could.
Q: "How are the world governments organized enough to carry out this conspiracy?"
A: They only appear to be disorganized to make the conspiracy seem implausible.
In summary the flat-earthers won't allow any direct satellite imagery as evidence because "it's fake".
So why is this satellite imagery a fake? It's a conspiracy! A conspiracy by whom? Governments! All of them! Errm... how do you know? Well... *if* the Earth is flat *and* the Governments say it's not, *then* it's a conspiracy, see? Oh yes... and we happen to know that the Earth is flat, which proves that there is this conspiracy.
Well... there you have it: simple logical fallacy (circular reasoning).
Sorry, but that's quite enough to prove "Flat Earth" irredeemable crackpottery and abolish all and any of their claims to scientific work.
So... yes... China would be interested in any intelligence it can get its hands on. From innocuous material from open sources to more valuable material, likewise from open sources. But also the more clandestine stuff. From pure industrial espionage to scientific and military espionage. But then so would numerous other countries (see e.g. http://www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/t-nsiad-96-114.pdf). Like Russia, France, Japan, Korea, Israel, South-Africa. Just Google for "economic espionage in the US" and marvel. Have I forgotten anyone? Join the queue on the right please and don't shove! Just about every country in the world gathers economic, industrial, and military intelligence. Starting with the good old US of A of course.
What I mean to say is that there's no reason to be especially paranoid about the Chinese spying on individual travelers to the Olympics, but every reason to be cautious.
China as a country has an active espionage operation in the US, and there is no reason why they would *not* analyze a small surge of electronic communications from Americans abroad through the web. After all... they have state-of-the-art routers (courtesy of Cisco, 3Com, Sun, HP etc.) that can filter out the more interesting communications as they happen.
Although I can't imagine why a bunch of Olympic-goers would be in a position to yield more interesting data than the scores of people working in the Valley, at Sandia, Livermore, and everyone and his grandmother here who uses MS Windows and a browser that's happy to execute any Javascript it comes across etc. etc..
But even so,... it's probably not a good idea to use an unencrypted network connection from your Beijing hotel room to the company you work for. Especially if someone might be interested in that company. Or in examining the structure of the computer system at the other end, and the communication between them. And surely no-one would be daft enough to log into company machines from abroad without at least the protection of a VPN, right?
Let's at least make Chinese intelligence collectors *work* for their money . No need to make them a present of passwords or hosts, or to alert them to insecure communication protocols into US servers. Whilst there is no need to get paranoid, there's no reason to give them a presents either.
And let's not forget that the risk from non-state sources, shall we? Americans who have the means to visit the Beijing Olympics are, from the point of view of the average Chinese, obscenely rich. And suddenly there will be a few thousand of them in the city. Being foreigners they will be *much* less likely to have the Chinese policy actively investigate any complaints they may have about their credit-cards being plundered by unspecified third parties. Especially if they only find out after their return, right?
I think that perhaps we should simply interpret the warning as a low-key reminder that it's more than likely that China will be interested in anything they can get at without risk and with minimal effort, and that there will be scores of people with good technical knowledge who regard them as extraordinarily rich. So why not warn people that they should take sensible precautions against exposing the more gaping security holes when they surf the web from their Beijing hotel room?
The report does say that the test subjects never had hands-on experience with the OS.
Having a hands-off experience with an OS is like examining a car in the showroom: its mileage is just great as long as you don't start the engine.
In addition, my guess is that that Microsoft ensured favourable test conditions (top-of-the-line hardware, plenty of Ram, hardware graphics acceleration, and a nice clean install without crapware).
This "Mojave" demonstration might be good publicity though, but only as long as people don't start to question what exactly was shown and whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions. For one thing seems pretty obvious: Microsoft didn't use a $498 Dell computer from Wallmart as a test platform.
From your post I gather that you will primarily use self-study. As regards reading material I suggest you have a look here:
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~thooft/theorist.html
Prof. 't Hooft is a Nobel-prize winner in physics and he has put together a page with "open source" reading material on physics which he recommends to anyone with aspirations of becoming a theoretical physicist.
As an aspiring astronomer your profile will strongly resemble that of a theoretical physicist. And you'll certainly need to know about just about everything he lists on that page: from classical mechanics, optics, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, plasma physics, plain old electromagnetism, to electronics. 't Hooft lists freely downloadable high-quality reading material on just about every topic!
And although you didn't ask, don't forget the computational side of things! Most astronomers I know are heavy computer users and very good programmers.
So make sure you know about Fortran and the libraries that are written in it (e.g. have a look at http://www.netlib.org/liblist.html and acquaint yourself with Lapack, Sparsepack, fftpack, cephes etc). Many of those routines can also be found in Matlab, Octave, Scilab, etc., but if you need full control and a standalone executable on a big supermini you might have to go back to Fortran and C++), And make sure (well... I hardly need tell a mathematics undergraduate but I can't omit it) that you know about Maple and/or Mathematica.
But... if I may be so bold... whilst reading and self-study are an indispensable element of learning physics they are rarely sufficient. You'll also need to learn a special way of thinking that sometimes comes hard to people with a background in mathematics. Which is to know when and where to cut corners and use approximations, and sometimes even go beyond the mathematics you know.
Think of Paul Dirac (of the Dirac Delta function). His "function" isn't a function at all, it's a distribution, and trying to think of it as a function will lead you to contradictions. But Dirac set up a formalism using it (and got the properties right !) without knowing about distributions (they were invented later partly to put what he had done on a firm mathematical basis). He simply let mathematical firmness go hang at the appropriate moment. Now I'm not comparing you to Dirac (and I'm certainly not encouraging you to take liberties with mathematics), but Dirac was a physicist first and a mathematician second. That's what I mean. Someone suggested the Feynman Lectures... they're great (if sometimes a tough read) exactly because Feynman makes this very point.
You see... in Physics, the physics comes first and the mathematics second; meaning that in thinking about physics problems you'll have to think in terms of physics (of course greatly helped by the mathematical formalisms in which physical laws are couched) but if you'll need to be able to think through a physical line argument without necessarily working through all the maths. Physicists do this as a second nature, and you'll need to learn how.
Well... about KDE taking the "right" path. By and large I'm not that pessimistic. What I think people are finding out is that the MS-Windows' GUI isn't all that stupid and it takes quite a lot of work to make something that's just as good.
KDE is built on top of Trolltech's QT framework, which I think is a good thing, and Trolltech just updated to QT 4.0.
So one way or another KDE will have to follow suit. This means a top-to-bottom rework anyway if you want to take advantage of all new QT4.0 features (which you probably want to since they're genuine improvements). So it's going to take a lot of time anyway, ok?
Now one of the things in KDE's reply that struck me as informative was that bit about porting KDE 3.x to QT 4.0. They could have done that, but then they would probably have ended up with two binary-incompatible versions of KDE 3.x, which would also have been very confusing. So they decided to make a clean break of it and went for KDE 4.0. Perhaps that takes even more time than reworking KDE 3.x, but it should be cleaner and it gives KDE the opportunity to correct previous design flaws (like the scalability issue they mentioned). So far so good. That shouldn't affect the way KDE is going, just the pace at which it's traveling.
Another thing that I've missed in KDE 3.x are folders (you know: like the ones you have in MS Windows; you open the folder, it shows you your icons and you can lick on them to launch things). Now in KDE 4.x, "folder lookalikes" have been introduced. They can call 'em plasmoids and containers if they want, but we're not fooled. They're just folders. And they're a good idea. So that's the second thing KDE 4.x has going for it.
In addition there are the looks of the thing. Personally I was quite happy with the Windows NT look, but KDE may be legitimately concerned that they will be seen as laggards if they don't sport glitzy whiz-bang graphics. And then some with that "drape your desktop around a cube" thingy. *shrugs* Whatever. As long as they're happy and *I* can banish the darn thing at the drop of an option parameter. As far as I understand from KDE's response, KDE 4 will be backward compatible. I.e. configurable so that you essentially don't notice the difference. I like that! Perhaps that's another thing that militates for KDE 4.0.
Another reasonable remark from KDE is that FOSS developers like to develop new and exciting features rather than polish dull old ones (something I can totally understand: if I'm to do dreary-but-exacting maintenance programming that's so much like work that I'd want to get paid for it). That, the KDE response states, is a difference between FOSS and commercial development that has bitten KDE (and other projects) in the past. Basically it's the price we end-users pay to get something for nothing: development is led partly by "what is fun for developers" rather than "what would users and project managers most like to see".
Fair enough I'd say. Especially since there is no way I'm going to spend even a single minute of my time on helping to develop a window manager for Linux (barring some beta testing), so I'll wait patiently until KDE gets it right. I'm happy to forget about the whole thing until it's done and done well (just don't wrongfoot me again like you did with KDE 4.0, ok?), even if it takes another 3 years.
And if they don't get it right in that timeframe? Well... there's always KDE 3, MS Windows, the Linux command-line for servers, or perhaps even Gnome.
Looking at KDE's reply I think I can see that they realise that end-users don't necessarily want to work with their new gee-wiz effects, and that they're prepared to make things configurable so that we don't have to. So what's the rush?
KDE 4.0 wasn't what I might have thought it was, I didn't try KDE 4.1, and I'm patiently waiting for SuSE to incorporate KDE 4.2 or so. That's when I'll have another look at KDE 4.
Wise words! Just wait patiently for the KDE developers to sort things out and make sure you have an alternative.
However I firmly believe that KDE really messed up when it comes to mamaging user expectations.
Call something KDE 4.0 and people will believe it's fully functional ready to roll. And find themselves sorely disappointed. Call it "KDE 4.0 Developer Release" and people will understand what it is and is not.
One thing that irks me in KDE's reply though is that they give the impression that they clearly communicated what KDE 4.0 was and was not. I disagree. I visited kde.org a few times to find precisely that information, and it simply wasn't there.
That's why I was so happy with SuSE's honest and up-front statement about KDE 4.0 (see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=528652&cid=23135548 ) that told me everything KDE.org didn't. No amount of post-furor explanations will take that away.
When all is said and done, KDE 4 is the fruit of an enormous amount of effort and dedication, and I respect that. I really hope the KDE project continues to develop and polish their work, and I will wait patiently until they do, although I'm pretty sure I'll have to wait for at least another year before KDE 4.2 is out: debugged, polished, and enhanced.
This doesn't mean however that I will be using KDE 4.1 any time soon (except for beta testing, which I feel I'm obliged to do). It will be KDE 3.5.x for me until they get it right.
The harsh truth of the matter is that end-users are unforgiving when it comes to user-interfaces, and that for all its internal faults I consider the MS Windows GUI to be pretty good (better than KDE 3 and KDE 4 in its present state). Just look at folders: MS Windows had them from the beginning and KDE 4 only now introduced them (calling them plasmoids and containers) and is struggling a bit to make them all work.
Ah well, why complain? I'm in a luxurious position: I have something that works (MS Windows and KDE 3.5.x), I have something a bit in-between (Wine 1.0), and I have something that promises to be better but only requires to be patient and wait for another year or so (KDE 4.2, KDE 4.3). And yes, perhaps KDE will be forked, perhaps not. I don't care because I certainly won't be involved in forking it.
So what's not to like? The only thing I shouldn't do is mistake KDE 4.1 beta for an end-user ready product. That's all.
Well... I'm afraid that only applies to an extremely limited subset of all software written.
Can you imagine a demonstration of a payslip program on a website? Do you think the com[any you made it for would think it a good idea? Would it allocate resources to it? Would it allow you to hook up a live version of this program (even on a dummy dataset) to a website in your spare time? I don't. And I'm afraid the same holds for all administrative software. Or inventory management software. Or any other custom software.
The only type of software I can imagine being showcased in this manner is scientific software, or screen-shots of software your company wants to showcase for some reason (potential sales, PR).
But perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Some companies allow part of their in-house software to be open-sourced. Then they will actually want people to know about it, and you have a lot more freedom to show it off.
Perhaps it's a sign that the IT industry is growing up. Writing software is becoming much more like engineering and a lot less like pioneering.
Engineering in all its facets (from civil engineering to mechanical engineering to chemical engineering) is sometimes considered "boring" too.
From what I understand this is because you need a lot of background knowledge, and unless you're extremely good you won't find much scope for technical innovation. You'll primarily be applying knowledge, not inventing it.
E.g. in the case of structural engineering using standard components, standard materials, and standard constructions. It's only when you work for a specialised engineering design company that you get to do state-of-the-art finite element calculations on brand-new structures. Other companies just use standard design rules to dimension standard components in standard structures, the trick being to satisfy all requirements in the cheapest possible way in the least possible time. Day in day out.
So you'll generally have to find expression for your creativity by getting things done on time and within budget instead pushing the envelope, and as soon as you're doing that you'll tend to shy away from wild innovation.
With software development there simply is a lot of (to me elegant and beautiful, to others dead and boring) scientific background knowledge you should have (algorithms, data-structures, compiler design, finite automata, complexity theory, concurrency theory, discrete mathematics, and numerical mathematics) supplemented by more applied knowledge like the principles of software engineering, in-depth knowledge of at least three programming languages (C, C++, Java), some experience with the object hierarchy underlying modern GUIs, and probably a lot I forgot.
And when you've done all that and appear for your first job, you may find you'll be on some project team and entrusted with responsibility for building component X of subsystem Y according to specifications someone will give you. You write your code, construct your test-cases, and verify correctness, document your functions, check in your code, and rush off to the next specification you'll implement because you've got to meet productivity standards or you're out.
This might seem a little pessimistic, and I'm sure that in many companies who use a seat-of-the-pants approach to software engineering things are more exciting. Like being given a huge poorly documented codebase to maintain. But generally speaking I don't think it is. There is (thankfully) an awful lot of this engineering-type work in software production, and only those who excel will, in time, become the lead programmers, designers, and system architects who actually dream up and shape end products.
Some people, and especially those who dream of designing a new supercool system to fly aircraft do indeed find the prospect of maintaining payslip applications on mainframes, automatic teller machine software, book-ordering software and inventory management systems, and crufty little custom data-entry packages boring. And perhaps they're right.
As I see it, most software engineering tends to be a bit unspectacular when done right, and excitement mostly enters the equation if you make serious mistakes. Of course there will be exceptions, like the Mars landers. But not everyone can be a programmer at NASA.
This sort of reply might fly on Slashdot, but it's a mean-spirited attempt at being funny and absolutely misunderstands the difference between plagiarism and sharing ideas. I think it ought to be modded both "redundant" and "troll".
In fact, confusing this sort of question with plagiarism would mean that you would consider reading trade journals, talking to practitioners, and reading Open Source coding as "plagiarism" too. In fact, posting on slashdot might, to some limited extent, be considered part of "talking to practitioners".
Whatever people answer here, it won't be anything near what you can put into a Ph.D. thesis because you can't, in any significant way, prove or demonstrate that the ideas thrown up idea are valid. If you could, it would have been published it already and the originator would be a well-known software engineering theoretician. At the very most it's a suggestion for a line of research; all the hard work (telling real from bogus and understanding why) is yet to be done.
I wonder if the tool market really is dead and whether it's not the editor market that's gone totally flat. I suspect the latter.
Let me explain by example. The article talks about UNA, a collaborative editor.
To me UNA's core feature is that you can have the same project and even the same file open between multiple people, and you immediately see each other's changes. I see the HMI part of UNA (an the editor you can work without having to use your mouse) as "frills".
The opening post quite rightly states that it's extremely hard to get people to change editors... they're too used to them and any change there is a hard sell.
But a tool to share a project in real-time is something else I'd say. I wonder if there would have been a viable market for UNA if it just limited itself to keep files synchronised (in real-time) between collaborating programmers but allowed third-party editors access to the files and forced them to reflect edits from other people. You'd need a hook in your editor to have it accept changes from others on the fly, but that's all.
You might then offer your own special UNA editor with full support for this sort of thing but that would be "frills".
Of course I understand that anyone not in a paying project will have a hard time ponying up the money for commercial tools (like e.g. Rational Rose, Purify, Intel's performance tuning compilers etc.). When confronted with a choice between spending thousands of dollars on tools, or using whatever is available as Open Source I'll generally work under Linux and use Open Source tools like Valgrind. In that situation I don't really care so much about free as in speech, but I do care about free as in beer.
But still... I think that there would be interest in systems that allow file-sharing, provided they allow people to use their own familiar editors.
Am I alone in thinking that the good old US of A is looking for someone to have their next scrap with in case Al Quaeda peters out early?
For about 40 years now all kinds of utility companies have wiped their collective backsides with the idea that any kind of information processing system that has any kind of actuator needs to be thoroughly secured. After all, when was the last time you casually strolled into a waterworks or a power plant? All those things are locked down, if not guarded.
Has it come to the point that without an "enemy" we cannot bring ourselves to put decent security all IT equipment connected to public utility companies that has actuators?
Ah well... I guess that if even the military can't be bothered to maintain elementary password discipline across their IT installations no-one else can.
if they are prepared to allow the err... "informal" private sector to participate.
All they need to offer is:
- a blanket reprieve from all previously committed computer-related offences
- $50,000
- strict anonymity
And they can start testing their GUI-encrusted prototype for all Windows PC's (all builds) with helpful advice from professionals, as soon as their credit-card payment clears (although I strongly advise them to use a prepaid credit card).
you have to make sure you aren't the first or even among the first to install Miscrosoft software. So shy away from anything Microsoft named "1.0", or even "x.0".
It doesn't matter if we're talking about OS, tools, Office, or service packs. You should *always* let somebody else go first, and wait for an "x.1" version.
for everyone involved in terrorism or counter-terrorism.
I'm by no means an expert, but I feel slightly uneasy when I see this sort of book appear on Amazon. I tend to get the impression that it's quite a valuable resource for the discerning terrorist or terrorist instructor.
After all, having a systematic and handy compendium of how people are going to be looking for you is of great use when you're trying not to be found, right? And when you're trying to write the manual for a terrorist's course, yes?
Why is it really necessary to put this sort of knowledge in the public domain? I mean, does Joe Public really need to know? Will our net security be increased if he does know? Did anybody ever make a trade-off between informing our (admittedly rather uninformed and clumsy) officials by making this knowledge public versus the danger of informing would-be terrorists about how people will be looking for them?
I wonder. Is there anyone knowledgeable able to comment?
Where exactly did Microsoft "drop the ball" with developers?
According to the article there are three types of developers: (I) the ones who bang Excel macros and Access databases together with VB (not very many), (II) in-house developers for large companies who program in whatever language is in demand (the vast majority), and (III) craftsmen-programmers who look for clean orthogonal programming tools and also program in their spare time (a few).
The article goes on to argue that Microsoft catered very well for categories (I) and (II), and not at all for category (III.)
Since I believe that the programmers who make stand-alone third-party applications mostly belong to category (II) I absolutely don't see how or why Microsoft supposedly "dropped the ball" for any developers except category (III). The article points to the messy API's of Win32 and the shadows that projects unto the.NET framework. Ok, fair enough, but who cares?
Not the end-users and not the managers. And they're the ones who determine where the money, and hence the bulk of the development effort goes. That means that what end-users actually see and care about, their _applications_ will continue to be in plentiful supply for MS-Windows.
Sorry, but the author will have to do a lot better to convince me that Microsoft shot itself in the foot as regards development effort. It's not the smartest thing that Microsoft could have done to alienate the craftsmen-programmers but I don't see how that puts a dent in their business.
I believe that the root of the problem isn't the laser pointers... it's the Australians that are the problem.
Australians simply have, being descended from deported criminals, certain inborn criminal tendencies which now reveal themselves in the abuse of laser pointers against trauma helicopters. So it's clearly unsafe to let them get their hands on one.
No chance of anything like that happening here of course.
I was struck by the usefulness and honesty of one of the comments on the SuSE 11.0 release site.
This one:
"To make a long story short: KDE 4.0 is not and never was meant to replace 3.5.x for regular users. The main goals were porting to Qt4 and creating the frameworks to create all the things announced for KDE 4. Frameworks are unfortunately hardly visible to the user, so most things that use them, like plasmoids, panel-functionality etc., will only appear after the frameworks are in place, i.e. starting with 4.1." (see http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/announcing-opensuse-110-beta-1/)
Now that's a useful comment for an end-user like me. It honestly tells me what's not in the package and what not to expect, and it does so in an up-front manner in three short sentences. As such it's a relief from the way you have to dig for this sort of information on the KDE webpage (see http://www.kde.org/).
Don't get me wrong, I like the KDE desktop... but I just don't want to know about (or have to dig through) the details of how the desktop is evolving. Let alone the vagaries of all those applets starting with a K. This announcement is end-user friendly in that it gets to the heart of the matter (i.e. I can try KDE 4 in SuSE 11.0 if I want to beta-test it, but it won't give me anything new) without me having to wade through pages of details... or worse an install. My compliments.
Well... that's an interesting assertion. Especially in the light of Microsoft's repeated denials that it had no documentation about its SMB client-server protocol that it could disclose to the EU. Closely followed by a deluge of graphics-pdf based documentation (a subtle move: no cross-referencing possible) which was characterized by Taeus as "designed to maximize pagecount while minimizing the amount useful information".
We do know that after being hit with a $600,000,000 fine Microsoft suddenly proved able to produce all the required documentation, and produce it in such a way that it is actually of use.
So err... can we conclude that Microsoft's earlier protestations were less than sincere, that they had the documentation all along, and that the only way of getting Microsoft's compliance in documenting something is to slap a huge fine on it? It would be good to know...
I am asking if anyone has seen this documentation because I'm afraid that, Microsoft being Microsoft, this so-called "documentation" will be of the same type as the "documentation" that Microsoft tried to foist off to the the EU in its dispute about documentation of its client-server communication protocol.
The documentation that was characterized as an independent auditor as "designed to maximize page count while minimizing the amount of useful information".
Looking at the article in "The Register" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/microsoft_posts_protocol_documents/), which states that "Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007."
They released "sketchy versions of tech documentation", did they? Is it just me, or do we have to get acutely suspicious at the mention of the word "sketchy"?
I mean, Microsoft has always been dead set against releasing any kind of specifications, and has repeatedly (and officially) claimed that such specifications were impossible, infeasible, or generally not available. Then, after being hit with a $ 600,000,000 fine they suddenly proved able to document the communication protocol after all, to the satisfaction of the Samba programming team.
What are the odds that the current crop of Microsoft documentation is a useless, incomplete, obfuscated mess? After all, Microsoft's interest isn't so much to publish documentation, as in creating a PR image that it's doing so. And there's nothing like a hefty page count for doing that.
Therefore... has anyone knowledgeable actually seen this documentation? If so what's the quality?
I'm not certain I quite understand this complaint. To me a textbook is a source of knowledge, not a novel. I don't mind if it's in black and white, but I do mind if the author can't write. I don't own many of those: I generally browse books in the library or in the bookshop before deciding to buy them, so I weed out ones I don't like.
In Mathematics, textbooks tend to be written in a "Definition, Definition, (Theorem - proof)^n, exercise" format. A bit dry, unless you're really interested in the subject already. That's why you need professors: to make the subject matter come alive in their lectures, point out connections, and explain what the thinking behind the theorems is. A case in point would be "Rudin, W., Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd edn. (Wiley). Hard work, but a deserved classic in its field. Unfortunately grossly overpriced nowadays.
Looking at e.g. textbooks in Physics, Civil Engineering and Transport Planning I find the ones I have seen quite good. If I might mention one example of a physics textbook I find really beautiful, it would be "E. Hecht, A. Zajac, Optics, 2nd edn. (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990)".
What I really hate are books with "Calculus" in the title. Invariably bloated and overpriced, set in an irritatingly large font, trying to teach the mechanics of entry-level mathematics at a snail's pace with distracting colours and usually impossible to use as a decent reference when you need to know something. Perhaps it's a matter of taste.
4. "Professors are Rarely Encouraging"
Well... I'm afraid that what you are describing in a professor who is an inept disinterested teacher. Unfortunately they exist, especially when it comes to teaching large classes the very basics. But that varies by University (and by department of course... and per individual). I don't think I've met any of those at MIT though, but that's an extreme. I know it's hard to assess the quality of a University before you've been to one. The only suggestion I can give is work hard, make sure your grades transfer to a "good" University, and switch if yours is disappointing.
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
Well... where I work we have regular lectures where real-world companies present themselves and their career opportunities. I tend to advise students to be good at what they do and to gain some degree of (documented) mastery of all related tools: from writing to programming to project management to organising to photography to wielding a wrench, and to take *at least* one student placement with a real engineering firm before they graduate. I'm sorry to say I'm not up to speed on resume padding and that my plans don't include acquiring expertise in that field.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Well... true to a large extent. In Engineering, Mathematics, and the Sciences the success criterion is fairly objective: mastery of a well-defined subject so that you can recognise problems and solve them by applying the theory you've studied, and a way of examining problems so that your notes have value to those who read them.
All depending on subject and University of course. Have you ever seen the amount of homework and study that medical students go home with? Terrible! All those bones and organs and muscles and feedback mechanisms and diseases they have to learn... and learn to perfection before they even *see* a patient. And Law students? Ouch... I'd really think twice before enrolling in a (good) Law course.
But as regards the Arts, I'm not sure. I've seen really erudite writings (by students !) on Art History, Contemporary Literature, Old English, and some absolute trash Arts subjects I won't be specific about here. It all depends on the quality of the instructor and the school: if the school is perepared to let students fail sub-par work, and the teachers are good
...know anyone with an unsecured WIFI router you don't like? Just drive by with your laptop and have a bit of harmless fun with those FBI links. Success guaranteed.
Whatever gives companies the idea they have a moral right to control their network / Internet connection just because they happen to own them?
Sounds weird to me... and to most Milennium generation employees.
As a liberated individual you control whatever you have access to, right? And it's up to those companies to negotiate for whatever they want to happen on their networks, right?
Besides... if I can't connect to Skype, Facebook, and Youtube I should be compensated! And I should *always* be able to connect my PDA, my IPod, my USB stick, and my own laptop. So there!
Slashdot Mirror
In summary the flat-earthers won't allow any direct satellite imagery as evidence because "it's fake".
So why is this satellite imagery a fake? It's a conspiracy! A conspiracy by whom? Governments! All of them! Errm ... how do you know? Well ... *if* the Earth is flat *and* the Governments say it's not, *then* it's a conspiracy, see? Oh yes ... and we happen to know that the Earth is flat, which proves that there is this conspiracy.
Well ... there you have it: simple logical fallacy (circular reasoning).
Sorry, but that's quite enough to prove "Flat Earth" irredeemable crackpottery and abolish all and any of their claims to scientific work.
See e.g. here: http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1130/p01s01-usfp.html
So ... yes ... China would be interested in any intelligence it can get its hands on. From innocuous material from open sources to more valuable material, likewise from open sources. But also the more clandestine stuff. From pure industrial espionage to scientific and military espionage. But then so would numerous other countries (see e.g. http://www.loyola.edu/dept/politics/intel/t-nsiad-96-114.pdf). Like Russia, France, Japan, Korea, Israel, South-Africa. Just Google for "economic espionage in the US" and marvel. Have I forgotten anyone? Join the queue on the right please and don't shove! Just about every country in the world gathers economic, industrial, and military intelligence. Starting with the good old US of A of course.
What I mean to say is that there's no reason to be especially paranoid about the Chinese spying on individual travelers to the Olympics, but every reason to be cautious.
China as a country has an active espionage operation in the US, and there is no reason why they would *not* analyze a small surge of electronic communications from Americans abroad through the web. After all ... they have state-of-the-art routers (courtesy of Cisco, 3Com, Sun, HP etc.) that can filter out the more interesting communications as they happen.
Although I can't imagine why a bunch of Olympic-goers would be in a position to yield more interesting data than the scores of people working in the Valley, at Sandia, Livermore, and everyone and his grandmother here who uses MS Windows and a browser that's happy to execute any Javascript it comes across etc. etc..
But even so, ... it's probably not a good idea to use an unencrypted network connection from your Beijing hotel room to the company you work for. Especially if someone might be interested in that company. Or in examining the structure of the computer system at the other end, and the communication between them. And surely no-one would be daft enough to log into company machines from abroad without at least the protection of a VPN, right?
Let's at least make Chinese intelligence collectors *work* for their money . No need to make them a present of passwords or hosts, or to alert them to insecure communication protocols into US servers. Whilst there is no need to get paranoid, there's no reason to give them a presents either.
And let's not forget that the risk from non-state sources, shall we? Americans who have the means to visit the Beijing Olympics are, from the point of view of the average Chinese, obscenely rich. And suddenly there will be a few thousand of them in the city. Being foreigners they will be *much* less likely to have the Chinese policy actively investigate any complaints they may have about their credit-cards being plundered by unspecified third parties. Especially if they only find out after their return, right?
I think that perhaps we should simply interpret the warning as a low-key reminder that it's more than likely that China will be interested in anything they can get at without risk and with minimal effort, and that there will be scores of people with good technical knowledge who regard them as extraordinarily rich. So why not warn people that they should take sensible precautions against exposing the more gaping security holes when they surf the web from their Beijing hotel room?
Having a hands-off experience with an OS is like examining a car in the showroom: its mileage is just great as long as you don't start the engine.
In addition, my guess is that that Microsoft ensured favourable test conditions (top-of-the-line hardware, plenty of Ram, hardware graphics acceleration, and a nice clean install without crapware).
This "Mojave" demonstration might be good publicity though, but only as long as people don't start to question what exactly was shown and whether or not Microsoft provided unrealistically favourable test conditions. For one thing seems pretty obvious: Microsoft didn't use a $498 Dell computer from Wallmart as a test platform.
Alternatively I expect someone totally bored and with a sense of humour at work.
As an aspiring astronomer your profile will strongly resemble that of a theoretical physicist. And you'll certainly need to know about just about everything he lists on that page: from classical mechanics, optics, special and general relativity, quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, plasma physics, plain old electromagnetism, to electronics. 't Hooft lists freely downloadable high-quality reading material on just about every topic!
And although you didn't ask, don't forget the computational side of things! Most astronomers I know are heavy computer users and very good programmers.
So make sure you know about Fortran and the libraries that are written in it (e.g. have a look at http://www.netlib.org/liblist.html and acquaint yourself with Lapack, Sparsepack, fftpack, cephes etc). Many of those routines can also be found in Matlab, Octave, Scilab, etc., but if you need full control and a standalone executable on a big supermini you might have to go back to Fortran and C++), And make sure (well ... I hardly need tell a mathematics undergraduate but I can't omit it) that you know about Maple and/or Mathematica.
But ... if I may be so bold ... whilst reading and self-study are an indispensable element of learning physics they are rarely sufficient. You'll also need to learn a special way of thinking that sometimes comes hard to people with a background in mathematics. Which is to know when and where to cut corners and use approximations, and sometimes even go beyond the mathematics you know.
Think of Paul Dirac (of the Dirac Delta function). His "function" isn't a function at all, it's a distribution, and trying to think of it as a function will lead you to contradictions. But Dirac set up a formalism using it (and got the properties right !) without knowing about distributions (they were invented later partly to put what he had done on a firm mathematical basis). He simply let mathematical firmness go hang at the appropriate moment. Now I'm not comparing you to Dirac (and I'm certainly not encouraging you to take liberties with mathematics), but Dirac was a physicist first and a mathematician second. That's what I mean. Someone suggested the Feynman Lectures ... they're great (if sometimes a tough read) exactly because Feynman makes this very point.
You see ... in Physics, the physics comes first and the mathematics second; meaning that in thinking about physics problems you'll have to think in terms of physics (of course greatly helped by the mathematical formalisms in which physical laws are couched) but if you'll need to be able to think through a physical line argument without necessarily working through all the maths. Physicists do this as a second nature, and you'll need to learn how.
KDE is built on top of Trolltech's QT framework, which I think is a good thing, and Trolltech just updated to QT 4.0.
So one way or another KDE will have to follow suit. This means a top-to-bottom rework anyway if you want to take advantage of all new QT4.0 features (which you probably want to since they're genuine improvements). So it's going to take a lot of time anyway, ok?
Now one of the things in KDE's reply that struck me as informative was that bit about porting KDE 3.x to QT 4.0. They could have done that, but then they would probably have ended up with two binary-incompatible versions of KDE 3.x, which would also have been very confusing. So they decided to make a clean break of it and went for KDE 4.0. Perhaps that takes even more time than reworking KDE 3.x, but it should be cleaner and it gives KDE the opportunity to correct previous design flaws (like the scalability issue they mentioned). So far so good. That shouldn't affect the way KDE is going, just the pace at which it's traveling.
Another thing that I've missed in KDE 3.x are folders (you know: like the ones you have in MS Windows; you open the folder, it shows you your icons and you can lick on them to launch things). Now in KDE 4.x, "folder lookalikes" have been introduced. They can call 'em plasmoids and containers if they want, but we're not fooled. They're just folders. And they're a good idea. So that's the second thing KDE 4.x has going for it.
In addition there are the looks of the thing. Personally I was quite happy with the Windows NT look, but KDE may be legitimately concerned that they will be seen as laggards if they don't sport glitzy whiz-bang graphics. And then some with that "drape your desktop around a cube" thingy. *shrugs* Whatever. As long as they're happy and *I* can banish the darn thing at the drop of an option parameter. As far as I understand from KDE's response, KDE 4 will be backward compatible. I.e. configurable so that you essentially don't notice the difference. I like that! Perhaps that's another thing that militates for KDE 4.0.
Another reasonable remark from KDE is that FOSS developers like to develop new and exciting features rather than polish dull old ones (something I can totally understand: if I'm to do dreary-but-exacting maintenance programming that's so much like work that I'd want to get paid for it). That, the KDE response states, is a difference between FOSS and commercial development that has bitten KDE (and other projects) in the past. Basically it's the price we end-users pay to get something for nothing: development is led partly by "what is fun for developers" rather than "what would users and project managers most like to see".
Fair enough I'd say. Especially since there is no way I'm going to spend even a single minute of my time on helping to develop a window manager for Linux (barring some beta testing), so I'll wait patiently until KDE gets it right. I'm happy to forget about the whole thing until it's done and done well (just don't wrongfoot me again like you did with KDE 4.0, ok?), even if it takes another 3 years.
And if they don't get it right in that timeframe? Well ... there's always KDE 3, MS Windows, the Linux command-line for servers, or perhaps even Gnome.
Looking at KDE's reply I think I can see that they realise that end-users don't necessarily want to work with their new gee-wiz effects, and that they're prepared to make things configurable so that we don't have to. So what's the rush?
KDE 4.0 wasn't what I might have thought it was, I didn't try KDE 4.1, and I'm patiently waiting for SuSE to incorporate KDE 4.2 or so. That's when I'll have another look at KDE 4.
However I firmly believe that KDE really messed up when it comes to mamaging user expectations.
Call something KDE 4.0 and people will believe it's fully functional ready to roll. And find themselves sorely disappointed. Call it "KDE 4.0 Developer Release" and people will understand what it is and is not.
One thing that irks me in KDE's reply though is that they give the impression that they clearly communicated what KDE 4.0 was and was not. I disagree. I visited kde.org a few times to find precisely that information, and it simply wasn't there.
That's why I was so happy with SuSE's honest and up-front statement about KDE 4.0 (see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=528652&cid=23135548 ) that told me everything KDE.org didn't. No amount of post-furor explanations will take that away.
When all is said and done, KDE 4 is the fruit of an enormous amount of effort and dedication, and I respect that. I really hope the KDE project continues to develop and polish their work, and I will wait patiently until they do, although I'm pretty sure I'll have to wait for at least another year before KDE 4.2 is out: debugged, polished, and enhanced.
This doesn't mean however that I will be using KDE 4.1 any time soon (except for beta testing, which I feel I'm obliged to do). It will be KDE 3.5.x for me until they get it right.
The harsh truth of the matter is that end-users are unforgiving when it comes to user-interfaces, and that for all its internal faults I consider the MS Windows GUI to be pretty good (better than KDE 3 and KDE 4 in its present state). Just look at folders: MS Windows had them from the beginning and KDE 4 only now introduced them (calling them plasmoids and containers) and is struggling a bit to make them all work.
Ah well, why complain? I'm in a luxurious position: I have something that works (MS Windows and KDE 3.5.x), I have something a bit in-between (Wine 1.0), and I have something that promises to be better but only requires to be patient and wait for another year or so (KDE 4.2, KDE 4.3). And yes, perhaps KDE will be forked, perhaps not. I don't care because I certainly won't be involved in forking it.
So what's not to like? The only thing I shouldn't do is mistake KDE 4.1 beta for an end-user ready product. That's all.
Can you imagine a demonstration of a payslip program on a website? Do you think the com[any you made it for would think it a good idea? Would it allocate resources to it? Would it allow you to hook up a live version of this program (even on a dummy dataset) to a website in your spare time? I don't. And I'm afraid the same holds for all administrative software. Or inventory management software. Or any other custom software.
The only type of software I can imagine being showcased in this manner is scientific software, or screen-shots of software your company wants to showcase for some reason (potential sales, PR).
But perhaps I'm too pessimistic. Some companies allow part of their in-house software to be open-sourced. Then they will actually want people to know about it, and you have a lot more freedom to show it off.
Engineering in all its facets (from civil engineering to mechanical engineering to chemical engineering) is sometimes considered "boring" too.
From what I understand this is because you need a lot of background knowledge, and unless you're extremely good you won't find much scope for technical innovation. You'll primarily be applying knowledge, not inventing it.
E.g. in the case of structural engineering using standard components, standard materials, and standard constructions. It's only when you work for a specialised engineering design company that you get to do state-of-the-art finite element calculations on brand-new structures. Other companies just use standard design rules to dimension standard components in standard structures, the trick being to satisfy all requirements in the cheapest possible way in the least possible time. Day in day out.
So you'll generally have to find expression for your creativity by getting things done on time and within budget instead pushing the envelope, and as soon as you're doing that you'll tend to shy away from wild innovation.
With software development there simply is a lot of (to me elegant and beautiful, to others dead and boring) scientific background knowledge you should have (algorithms, data-structures, compiler design, finite automata, complexity theory, concurrency theory, discrete mathematics, and numerical mathematics) supplemented by more applied knowledge like the principles of software engineering, in-depth knowledge of at least three programming languages (C, C++, Java), some experience with the object hierarchy underlying modern GUIs, and probably a lot I forgot.
And when you've done all that and appear for your first job, you may find you'll be on some project team and entrusted with responsibility for building component X of subsystem Y according to specifications someone will give you. You write your code, construct your test-cases, and verify correctness, document your functions, check in your code, and rush off to the next specification you'll implement because you've got to meet productivity standards or you're out.
This might seem a little pessimistic, and I'm sure that in many companies who use a seat-of-the-pants approach to software engineering things are more exciting. Like being given a huge poorly documented codebase to maintain. But generally speaking I don't think it is. There is (thankfully) an awful lot of this engineering-type work in software production, and only those who excel will, in time, become the lead programmers, designers, and system architects who actually dream up and shape end products.
Some people, and especially those who dream of designing a new supercool system to fly aircraft do indeed find the prospect of maintaining payslip applications on mainframes, automatic teller machine software, book-ordering software and inventory management systems, and crufty little custom data-entry packages boring. And perhaps they're right.
As I see it, most software engineering tends to be a bit unspectacular when done right, and excitement mostly enters the equation if you make serious mistakes. Of course there will be exceptions, like the Mars landers. But not everyone can be a programmer at NASA.
In fact, confusing this sort of question with plagiarism would mean that you would consider reading trade journals, talking to practitioners, and reading Open Source coding as "plagiarism" too. In fact, posting on slashdot might, to some limited extent, be considered part of "talking to practitioners".
Whatever people answer here, it won't be anything near what you can put into a Ph.D. thesis because you can't, in any significant way, prove or demonstrate that the ideas thrown up idea are valid. If you could, it would have been published it already and the originator would be a well-known software engineering theoretician. At the very most it's a suggestion for a line of research; all the hard work (telling real from bogus and understanding why) is yet to be done.
Let me explain by example. The article talks about UNA, a collaborative editor.
To me UNA's core feature is that you can have the same project and even the same file open between multiple people, and you immediately see each other's changes. I see the HMI part of UNA (an the editor you can work without having to use your mouse) as "frills".
The opening post quite rightly states that it's extremely hard to get people to change editors ... they're too used to them and any change there is a hard sell.
But a tool to share a project in real-time is something else I'd say. I wonder if there would have been a viable market for UNA if it just limited itself to keep files synchronised (in real-time) between collaborating programmers but allowed third-party editors access to the files and forced them to reflect edits from other people. You'd need a hook in your editor to have it accept changes from others on the fly, but that's all.
You might then offer your own special UNA editor with full support for this sort of thing but that would be "frills".
Of course I understand that anyone not in a paying project will have a hard time ponying up the money for commercial tools (like e.g. Rational Rose, Purify, Intel's performance tuning compilers etc.). When confronted with a choice between spending thousands of dollars on tools, or using whatever is available as Open Source I'll generally work under Linux and use Open Source tools like Valgrind. In that situation I don't really care so much about free as in speech, but I do care about free as in beer.
But still ... I think that there would be interest in systems that allow file-sharing, provided they allow people to use their own familiar editors.
For about 40 years now all kinds of utility companies have wiped their collective backsides with the idea that any kind of information processing system that has any kind of actuator needs to be thoroughly secured. After all, when was the last time you casually strolled into a waterworks or a power plant? All those things are locked down, if not guarded.
Has it come to the point that without an "enemy" we cannot bring ourselves to put decent security all IT equipment connected to public utility companies that has actuators?
Ah well ... I guess that if even the military can't be bothered to maintain elementary password discipline across their IT installations no-one else can.
All they need to offer is:
- a blanket reprieve from all previously committed computer-related offences
- $50,000
- strict anonymity
And they can start testing their GUI-encrusted prototype for all Windows PC's (all builds) with helpful advice from professionals, as soon as their credit-card payment clears (although I strongly advise them to use a prepaid credit card).
It doesn't matter if we're talking about OS, tools, Office, or service packs. You should *always* let somebody else go first, and wait for an "x.1" version.
I'm by no means an expert, but I feel slightly uneasy when I see this sort of book appear on Amazon. I tend to get the impression that it's quite a valuable resource for the discerning terrorist or terrorist instructor.
After all, having a systematic and handy compendium of how people are going to be looking for you is of great use when you're trying not to be found, right? And when you're trying to write the manual for a terrorist's course, yes?
Why is it really necessary to put this sort of knowledge in the public domain? I mean, does Joe Public really need to know? Will our net security be increased if he does know? Did anybody ever make a trade-off between informing our (admittedly rather uninformed and clumsy) officials by making this knowledge public versus the danger of informing would-be terrorists about how people will be looking for them?
I wonder. Is there anyone knowledgeable able to comment?
According to the article there are three types of developers: (I) the ones who bang Excel macros and Access databases together with VB (not very many), (II) in-house developers for large companies who program in whatever language is in demand (the vast majority), and (III) craftsmen-programmers who look for clean orthogonal programming tools and also program in their spare time (a few).
The article goes on to argue that Microsoft catered very well for categories (I) and (II), and not at all for category (III.)
Since I believe that the programmers who make stand-alone third-party applications mostly belong to category (II) I absolutely don't see how or why Microsoft supposedly "dropped the ball" for any developers except category (III). The article points to the messy API's of Win32 and the shadows that projects unto the .NET framework. Ok, fair enough, but who cares?
Not the end-users and not the managers. And they're the ones who determine where the money, and hence the bulk of the development effort goes. That means that what end-users actually see and care about, their _applications_ will continue to be in plentiful supply for MS-Windows.
Sorry, but the author will have to do a lot better to convince me that Microsoft shot itself in the foot as regards development effort. It's not the smartest thing that Microsoft could have done to alienate the craftsmen-programmers but I don't see how that puts a dent in their business.
Just to see how it's done, have a look at the way the Italian Government handled things (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7376608.stm).
See? Now *that's* what I call disclosure. Those piddly efforts in California don't even come close.
Australians simply have, being descended from deported criminals, certain inborn criminal tendencies which now reveal themselves in the abuse of laser pointers against trauma helicopters. So it's clearly unsafe to let them get their hands on one.
No chance of anything like that happening here of course.
This one:
"To make a long story short: KDE 4.0 is not and never was meant to replace 3.5.x for regular users. The main goals were porting to Qt4 and creating the frameworks to create all the things announced for KDE 4. Frameworks are unfortunately hardly visible to the user, so most things that use them, like plasmoids, panel-functionality etc., will only appear after the frameworks are in place, i.e. starting with 4.1." (see http://news.opensuse.org/2008/04/18/announcing-opensuse-110-beta-1/)
Now that's a useful comment for an end-user like me. It honestly tells me what's not in the package and what not to expect, and it does so in an up-front manner in three short sentences. As such it's a relief from the way you have to dig for this sort of information on the KDE webpage (see http://www.kde.org/).
Don't get me wrong, I like the KDE desktop ... but I just don't want to know about (or have to dig through) the details of how the desktop is evolving. Let alone the vagaries of all those applets starting with a K. This announcement is end-user friendly in that it gets to the heart of the matter (i.e. I can try KDE 4 in SuSE 11.0 if I want to beta-test it, but it won't give me anything new) without me having to wade through pages of details ... or worse an install. My compliments.
We do know that after being hit with a $600,000,000 fine Microsoft suddenly proved able to produce all the required documentation, and produce it in such a way that it is actually of use.
So err ... can we conclude that Microsoft's earlier protestations were less than sincere, that they had the documentation all along, and that the only way of getting Microsoft's compliance in documenting something is to slap a huge fine on it? It would be good to know ...
The documentation that was characterized as an independent auditor as "designed to maximize page count while minimizing the amount of useful information".
Looking at the article in "The Register" (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/08/microsoft_posts_protocol_documents/), which states that "Microsoft today lifted the lid on 14,000 pages of sketchy versions of tech documentation for core software code. On show for the first time in public are underlying protocols for Office 2007, Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007."
They released "sketchy versions of tech documentation", did they? Is it just me, or do we have to get acutely suspicious at the mention of the word "sketchy"?
I mean, Microsoft has always been dead set against releasing any kind of specifications, and has repeatedly (and officially) claimed that such specifications were impossible, infeasible, or generally not available. Then, after being hit with a $ 600,000,000 fine they suddenly proved able to document the communication protocol after all, to the satisfaction of the Samba programming team. What are the odds that the current crop of Microsoft documentation is a useless, incomplete, obfuscated mess? After all, Microsoft's interest isn't so much to publish documentation, as in creating a PR image that it's doing so. And there's nothing like a hefty page count for doing that.
Therefore ... has anyone knowledgeable actually seen this documentation? If so what's the quality?
5. "Awful Textbooks"
I'm not certain I quite understand this complaint. To me a textbook is a source of knowledge, not a novel. I don't mind if it's in black and white, but I do mind if the author can't write. I don't own many of those: I generally browse books in the library or in the bookshop before deciding to buy them, so I weed out ones I don't like.
In Mathematics, textbooks tend to be written in a "Definition, Definition, (Theorem - proof)^n, exercise" format. A bit dry, unless you're really interested in the subject already. That's why you need professors: to make the subject matter come alive in their lectures, point out connections, and explain what the thinking behind the theorems is. A case in point would be "Rudin, W., Principles of Mathematical Analysis, 3rd edn. (Wiley). Hard work, but a deserved classic in its field. Unfortunately grossly overpriced nowadays.
Looking at e.g. textbooks in Physics, Civil Engineering and Transport Planning I find the ones I have seen quite good. If I might mention one example of a physics textbook I find really beautiful, it would be "E. Hecht, A. Zajac, Optics, 2nd edn. (Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, 1990)".
What I really hate are books with "Calculus" in the title. Invariably bloated and overpriced, set in an irritatingly large font, trying to teach the mechanics of entry-level mathematics at a snail's pace with distracting colours and usually impossible to use as a decent reference when you need to know something. Perhaps it's a matter of taste.
4. "Professors are Rarely Encouraging"
Well ... I'm afraid that what you are describing in a professor who is an inept disinterested teacher. Unfortunately they exist, especially when it comes to teaching large classes the very basics. But that varies by University (and by department of course ... and per individual). I don't think I've met any of those at MIT though, but that's an extreme. I know it's hard to assess the quality of a University before you've been to one. The only suggestion I can give is work hard, make sure your grades transfer to a "good" University, and switch if yours is disappointing.
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
Well ... where I work we have regular lectures where real-world companies present themselves and their career opportunities. I tend to advise students to be good at what they do and to gain some degree of (documented) mastery of all related tools: from writing to programming to project management to organising to photography to wielding a wrench, and to take *at least* one student placement with a real engineering firm before they graduate. I'm sorry to say I'm not up to speed on resume padding and that my plans don't include acquiring expertise in that field.
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Well ... true to a large extent. In Engineering, Mathematics, and the Sciences the success criterion is fairly objective: mastery of a well-defined subject so that you can recognise problems and solve them by applying the theory you've studied, and a way of examining problems so that your notes have value to those who read them.
All depending on subject and University of course. Have you ever seen the amount of homework and study that medical students go home with? Terrible! All those bones and organs and muscles and feedback mechanisms and diseases they have to learn ... and learn to perfection before they even *see* a patient. And Law students? Ouch ... I'd really think twice before enrolling in a (good) Law course.
But as regards the Arts, I'm not sure. I've seen really erudite writings (by students !) on Art History, Contemporary Literature, Old English, and some absolute trash Arts subjects I won't be specific about here. It all depends on the quality of the instructor and the school: if the school is perepared to let students fail sub-par work, and the teachers are good
...know anyone with an unsecured WIFI router you don't like? Just drive by with your laptop and have a bit of harmless fun with those FBI links. Success guaranteed.
Sounds weird to me ... and to most Milennium generation employees.
As a liberated individual you control whatever you have access to, right? And it's up to those companies to negotiate for whatever they want to happen on their networks, right?
Besides ... if I can't connect to Skype, Facebook, and Youtube I should be compensated! And I should *always* be able to connect my PDA, my IPod, my USB stick, and my own laptop. So there!