> They accept those who apply.
That's not true when I applied for a PhD program in CS a few years back my entry was denied because I didn't have all the points in the GRE (like 600 - 600 - and whatever). Interestingly the same year association administering the tests pulled out of India and China because there was some cheating. Any correlation?
The next year I lost my job and started working in the lab of an Indian professor -- I applied again for the program but after three months of not getting paid I found a paying job outside the lab. Interestingly I never got an acceptance letter nor a rejection letter. So when the program was about to start I inquired about my status and was told no decision had been made yet. The next day I got a rejection letter. I learned later that this was due to me abandoning the lab because I actually couldn't work longer for free. However the industry partner I worked with during this time was pretty mad at the department that they didn't accept me because my work was PhD quality (and I think consequently pulled funding).
The school is one of the Top 10 computer science programs in the US (it's an excellent school!) and my wife was enrolled in an MD/PhD program at the same school so another school was not really an option (unlike you enjoy distance relationships:-)
Ok, to be honest, I am pretty happy with my job... so it was probably ok for me not to attend the program but it leaves a bad after taste...
Yes --
If you ever want to go to grad school grades will definetly help.
In my opinion work is anyway overrated so stay in school as long as you can:-)
You said you have money saved for two years -- so do a trip around the world once you are done with the better grades...
G.
If Apple and Google are really that big friends they might add Google Gears (http://gears.google.com/) to it -- then you would have offline usage. Apollo would be another option... (and given they use WebKit). Somebody innovative could always come up with a Database/Filesystem running on cookies for JS. Also don't forget all the web based Operating Systems like YourOS or so...
Another question is if they support Java -- then you could do more offline stuff...
By the way most places I go (home, work) have "free" Wifi and the places in between have cell phone coverage. It would be more interesting to know if their Phone can do Phone calls via Wifi (probably not;-( in case I ever end up at a place where there is only Wifi...
Another way to organize thoughts would be to use an online notebook like e-nnovate's http://www.e-nnovate.com/. Those products are probably a lot better if you need to organize your thougts later on or try to use templates to automate recurring reserach or data acquisition...
I remember when they demonstrated their C++ IDE back in the day (about 1994 or so) -- you could run your program in Debug, fix something, and without recompiling it would use the new code. Something which was revolutionary then and I haven't encountered until now on the Linux world. (I know MS Visusal Studio can do it -- but the generated code has trouble with Linux).
Another Gem was Cosmo Creator the very first HTML wysiwyg editor (something like a relief if you were using emacs' HTML mode). Anyway I played around but it never clicked for me. Another thing which really clicked was that every user could have his picture (taken with the Indy cam) and use that at login (click on the picture, type in password,...).
Needless to say that OpenGL, OpenInventor and to some extend Performer were little gems all on their own. I am currently struggling with VTK and, believe me, I could work better with Inventor in 1995 then what VTK does today (needless to say that VRML is also a better standard for output than whatever VTK uses;-) I almost got a job doing Performer stuff...
Now I have a R5000 Indy (are is for RISC and, yes, MIPS used to be the processor for embedded stuff) in my house, but the Irix 6.4 I am trying to install never really boots up -- maybe one long night and I will figure it out. Irix by the way was and probably still is the best GUI operating system. All the icons where real photos -- cool, very cool.
How did the company decline? There were essentially three major decisions done wrong:
They hired some Italian CEO whou couldn't speak Italian. Listen, if you are Italian and you can't speak your own language what does this say about yourself --
That CEO pulled the plug on MIPS and spun it out (MIPS Technologies). The business model was to subsidise the development of high end MIPS processors to be used in SGI's hardware with the sale of older ones in volume to the embedded market. By selling the MIPS unit this model was obsolete and they had to embrace Itanic.
And the other bad decision was to sell a Windows NT SGI. Terrific hardware, the best backplane ever, but who needs Windows NT?? I pointed that out to the SGI reps and they made fun of me -- sometimes I hate it when I am right. With their resources focused on the Windows thing they aboslutely missed the boat on Linux. A Linux workstation together with 4DWM (SGI's windows mananger) and all the other stuff would have been big in 1996 and probably still is...
With the risk of making myseld ridiculous: During my college years when other people had maybe posters of H&M models I had posters of most of the SGI models... With SGI, or Silicon Graphics, in chapter 11 also a part of myself died. Rest in peace!!
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> They accept those who apply. That's not true when I applied for a PhD program in CS a few years back my entry was denied because I didn't have all the points in the GRE (like 600 - 600 - and whatever). Interestingly the same year association administering the tests pulled out of India and China because there was some cheating. Any correlation? The next year I lost my job and started working in the lab of an Indian professor -- I applied again for the program but after three months of not getting paid I found a paying job outside the lab. Interestingly I never got an acceptance letter nor a rejection letter. So when the program was about to start I inquired about my status and was told no decision had been made yet. The next day I got a rejection letter. I learned later that this was due to me abandoning the lab because I actually couldn't work longer for free. However the industry partner I worked with during this time was pretty mad at the department that they didn't accept me because my work was PhD quality (and I think consequently pulled funding). The school is one of the Top 10 computer science programs in the US (it's an excellent school!) and my wife was enrolled in an MD/PhD program at the same school so another school was not really an option (unlike you enjoy distance relationships:-) Ok, to be honest, I am pretty happy with my job... so it was probably ok for me not to attend the program but it leaves a bad after taste...
Yes -- If you ever want to go to grad school grades will definetly help. In my opinion work is anyway overrated so stay in school as long as you can:-) You said you have money saved for two years -- so do a trip around the world once you are done with the better grades... G.
If Apple and Google are really that big friends they might add Google Gears (http://gears.google.com/) to it -- then you would have offline usage. Apollo would be another option... (and given they use WebKit). Somebody innovative could always come up with a Database/Filesystem running on cookies for JS. Also don't forget all the web based Operating Systems like YourOS or so...
Another question is if they support Java -- then you could do more offline stuff...
By the way most places I go (home, work) have "free" Wifi and the places in between have cell phone coverage. It would be more interesting to know if their Phone can do Phone calls via Wifi (probably not;-( in case I ever end up at a place where there is only Wifi...
Another way to organize thoughts would be to use an online notebook like e-nnovate's http://www.e-nnovate.com/. Those products are probably a lot better if you need to organize your thougts later on or try to use templates to automate recurring reserach or data acquisition...
Another Gem was Cosmo Creator the very first HTML wysiwyg editor (something like a relief if you were using emacs' HTML mode). Anyway I played around but it never clicked for me. Another thing which really clicked was that every user could have his picture (taken with the Indy cam) and use that at login (click on the picture, type in password, ...).
Needless to say that OpenGL, OpenInventor and to some extend Performer were little gems all on their own. I am currently struggling with VTK and, believe me, I could work better with Inventor in 1995 then what VTK does today (needless to say that VRML is also a better standard for output than whatever VTK uses;-) I almost got a job doing Performer stuff...
Now I have a R5000 Indy (are is for RISC and, yes, MIPS used to be the processor for embedded stuff) in my house, but the Irix 6.4 I am trying to install never really boots up -- maybe one long night and I will figure it out. Irix by the way was and probably still is the best GUI operating system. All the icons where real photos -- cool, very cool.
How did the company decline? There were essentially three major decisions done wrong:
- They hired some Italian CEO whou couldn't speak Italian. Listen, if you are Italian and you can't speak your own language what does this say about yourself --
- That CEO pulled the plug on MIPS and spun it out (MIPS Technologies). The business model was to subsidise the development of high end MIPS processors to be used in SGI's hardware with the sale of older ones in volume to the embedded market. By selling the MIPS unit this model was obsolete and they had to embrace Itanic.
- And the other bad decision was to sell a Windows NT SGI. Terrific hardware, the best backplane ever, but who needs Windows NT?? I pointed that out to the SGI reps and they made fun of me -- sometimes I hate it when I am right. With their resources focused on the Windows thing they aboslutely missed the boat on Linux. A Linux workstation together with 4DWM (SGI's windows mananger) and all the other stuff would have been big in 1996 and probably still is...
With the risk of making myseld ridiculous: During my college years when other people had maybe posters of H&M models I had posters of most of the SGI models... With SGI, or Silicon Graphics, in chapter 11 also a part of myself died. Rest in peace!!