Messages

31

General Discussion / Re: Theoretically longest sentence

« on: January 21, 2011, 06:49:52 pm »

Why can't you have an infinite sentence?

"Turn left, then right, then left, then right, then left, then right..."

The above is an infinite sentence. It would make sense in an infinite maze.

32

General Discussion / Remote Desktop from Snow Leopard to Windows XP

« on: January 20, 2011, 10:42:55 pm »

So I'm trying to remote desktop from my MacBook (Snow Leopard) into my work computer (WinXP).

I installed Cisco AnyConnect VPN Client and I connect to my work without problem.

However, once connected, I don't seem to feel the "presence" of a VPN. I don't see any computers on the network (nothing in the Places drop-down in my Finder) and I can't ping my work computer either.

It's so very frustrating... am I using my VPN client incorrectly? Do I have route network traffic through the tunnel? (Maybe ifconfig route etc.) If my work computer were sleeping / on standby right now, would that be a problem (would it not respond to a ping while asleep / on standby)?

I'd greatly appreciate any help.

33

General Discussion / Re: One space or two spaces after a period?

« on: January 20, 2011, 07:35:26 pm »

I always do one space.

It's interesting to note that the concept of a single unit of whitespace (colloquially, a "space") doesn't make any sense in a hand-written letter. Thus, whatever standards exist for this issue are pretty "young" so to speak - much more recent than other standards pertaining to writing. So perhaps it's understandable there isn't a wide consensus on this issue.

Also: this thread deserves a poll.

34

General Discussion / Re: College Education

« on: January 19, 2011, 11:10:25 pm »

I suppose I can now actually respond to this thread with a story that only a handful of x86ers know.

I started full-time college as a junior in high school because my school didn't offer the right courses for me and, most importantly, was overrun with douchebags. Because of my upbringing and interests, I wanted to be an MD. All my previous teachers thought it would be  a good academic fit, and it was what occupied my brain since childhood. I started my college tenure intending to get a BS in neuroscience. After a couple of biology classes in which all I did was memorize things, I got irritated. After exclaiming "Fuck it" and throwing my hands up to the heavens, it had already been two full years.

The nice part was that those two years were tuition-covered by the state of Minnesota's wonderful PSEO program. During this time I started doing my first University research (as a lab bitch -- er, "data analyst") and started networking with people that are still my closest friends. In comes my official undergrad career, in which I started as a BS in biomedical engineering. I looked through the required courses, and despite a strong interest in Chemistry and synthesis/materials science, I didn't want to go through all the other prerequisites that would never have grasped my interest. I knew I had to switch. But to what?

This past summer (2010) I switched into the Computer Science program. After breezing through Scheme and Java while gaining official exposure to data structures and algorithms that I would not have picked up otherwise, I knew CS was going to be the best fit for me.

I originally intended a math double major, but after taking a basic proof class I realized I hated it. I can't write "for every n in N" every line, I have better shit to worry about. Additionally, the math that was being taught was just "memorize these proofs and regurgitate these theorems", nothing about the logical approach one should take in dealing with math issues.

CS instead let me blend my love for math and computers and actually manages to keep my interest. I've gone to almost all my lectures, which I have an absolutely dysmal record of doing. The joy that you get from solving a complex problem or debugging a piece of code is unbeatable. Additionally, because I'm so far "ahead" in my university career, I have lots of fre etime to take courses I want. Instead of a math double major, I will be getting a minor in math and probably a second minor in chemistry.

Will I do grad school? I'm not sure. Research and being a professor/teacher sounds interesting, but not with how the country is set up to "reward" those that choose an educational vocation. Will I work in industry? Doubtful. I work as a systems admin and do day-to-day programming for an on-campus department where I deal with all kinds of server issues (both from a distributed computational cluster standpoint and from your run-of-the-mill LAMP/etc servers). It's interesting, but the IT field is going to be absolutely dysmal to work in. With the advent of cheap labor coming in combined with the cluelessness of managers that think IT is just another high-level secretary, it's a hard road.

Still, I have two years (and a semester) to figure out what I want to do, so I'm in no rush.

You should look into bioinformatics. I was told by a medical researcher that it's a big deal these days. It pays a lot, and it's very interesting. I don't know much about it, but I know that it mixes biology, math, and computer science.

It might be something that you study in grad school as opposed to undergrad. In that case, your background in bio and your major in CS will be a huge plus for you if you end up applying for it.

35

General Discussion / Re: College Education

« on: January 17, 2011, 12:18:08 am »

I'm in my 3rd year of undergrad in Computer Engineering at UT Dallas and so far I think the college experience has been more valuable than the actual courses I've taken. Living away from home taught me how to talk to and meet new people, how to manage my money, and also how to manage my time (I work part time along with taking classes full time). I've definitely grown up a lot more in college than I did during high school, but maybe that's due to me living away from my parents? I don't know.

But as far as how relevant my courses have been, I would say hardly at all. Here's why: I did a technical internship with Fidelity Investments at their Dallas data center last summer, for which I was to help implement and manage tools for their storage division. Everything was completely new to me, I had no clue what a SAN or NAS was or how to work with them because those terms never showed up in any of my courses. I literally had to sit in my cube and read books for a week straight to learn this stuff, all my co-workers there also had similar degrees such as CS or EE and they all told me they had to start from scratch when they first got there as well.

Maybe I'm just in the wrong place, maybe If I landed at Intel or AMD I would actually get to use the stuff I learned about crystalline structure and energy band gaps of semi-conductors. But so far my courses have not been very useful to me.

That's interesting. I know exactly what you mean - the college experience has put us on our own. For me, I actually moved to my university when I first got here. I was kicked out of home senior year of high school. So now I live here year-long, not going back for vacations. It helps to have an apartment in the area - and it's nice that students here tend to get apartments as upperclassmen.

I also learned how to talk to people and make new friends. I made some very good friends, too, who moved with me into my apartment, and some of whom will live with me in my next.

My one problem was that due to all the drama toward my end of high school, I got derailed from my career track, the math/comp sci/physics emphasis I took on high school, and majored in English literature because I thought it would make me better, help me internalize my experience. It maybe did that, but I am much farther behind in my career right now than I would be had I not gotten off-track.

So now I will continue to work IT jobs (and hopefully programming jobs) while finishing college, (it's nice they pay well), and then afterward see what kinds of software dev. / systems admin jobs are out there and whether I need to go back to school to get a Master's in CS. I would also like to study some thorough EE and CS sometime after I get out of college. It's an experience that I always wanted of which I kind of robbed myself.

Falcon, I think what matters is not that you didn't apply things you learned in school to your job, but that you got the job in the first place. You likely got it from a result of your studies, your classes taken in CE. When you get your degree you will have employers take you on because of that degree. But there are A LOT of other college students who aren't getting any jobs at all after they graduate. These are people who didn't get a technical degree or develop a lucrative skillset, or plan on going to grad school. So even if you don't apply what you learn, you will still get the jobs because of your degree, and that's why a career-guided degree matters so much - it separates the people who can get the jobs from those who can't. So you should be happy that you have that degree, because eventually you and your friends will all be graduated and you'll be the only one with a job.

Also, the circuit stuff related to computers is extremely cool, and there are so many software engineers / IT specialists who wish they knew about it, but never studied it. Even if you don't use it, it's still great to know, and really informs the Big Picture.

36

General Discussion / College Education

« on: January 15, 2011, 11:44:00 pm »

[Inspired by nslay's discussion on college in "Story of a Professional Cheater"]

For those who have completed their college education, how do you look back on it? What are you glad of, and what are your regrets? What did you major in? Do you wish you had majored in something else?

For me, I studied English literature, and I have three more quarters after this one until I graduate. As I look back, I don't know whether I should have majored in comp sci. The jobs I will be seeking will be "computer jobs", whether they be software dev., systems admin or IT. (I currently work a job in IT with a touch of admin. and software dev.) And it would have really given me a leg up to major in comp sci. At the same time, I majored in English because I wanted to do something different, and because I really do prefer to learn comp sci on my own, individually, so that it's like slowly uncovering a mystery.

I know that Myndfyre majored in poli sci / psychology. Myndfyre, are you glad that you did that? Do you have any regrets? They are not exactly the degrees that a software company are looking for in programmers, but at the same time you seem to be very successful and employable as a software engineer.

For those who majored in comp sci, (I just saw all your thoughts in the recent thread about college, which brings this post to mind), how was your experience? Are you glad you did it? How much did it do in your career?

37

General Discussion / Re: Story from a professional cheater

« on: January 15, 2011, 03:17:57 pm »

The article sounds halfway honest and highly fabricated. You can't verify any of it.

Also:

I work at an online company that generates **tens of thousands of dollars a month** by creating original essays based on specific instructions provided by cheating students.

[...]

In the midst of this great recession, business is booming. At busy times, during midterms and finals, my company's staff of roughly **50** writers is not large enough to satisfy the demands of students who will pay for our work and claim it as their own.

Since he said "tens of thousands of dollars a month" we can assume his company makes less than $100,000 / mo. For hypothetical reasons, let's say the company makes $100,000/mo. There are 50 writers, as he mentions. That means that the most a writer could hope to earn in a month would be

$100,000 / 50 = $2,000.

It is probably less, since the head person is also probably taking a cut, but since we don't know about that we'll leave it out.

My point is that this "ghost writer" / "shadow scholar" / "academic mercenary" is making less than $24k/yr. working full-time for an online cheating support group. And that's without health benefits.

That's a dirt-poor salary and he sounds like a huge loser. No wonder he's trying to write a book about his experience - he wants a way out.

What's more likely? That a person with his skill set is working a $24k/yr salary job without benefits, or that the article is unreliable? One can see through this reducto ad absurdum that there's some key information missing here... It doesn't help that the article is anonymous and absolutely nothing can be verified.

Maybe the whole article is a lie.

38

General Discussion / Re: Windows 7 vs OS X vs Unix

« on: January 11, 2011, 12:27:02 am »

2008 called. It wants it's cancelled project back.

4th grade called.  It wants its correct possessive punctuation enforced.

I hate English.

Maybe you should pick up Klingon?

39

General Discussion / Re: Windows 7 vs OS X vs Unix

« on: January 09, 2011, 12:32:18 pm »

Also, are you able to get Starcraft, Starcraft II, etc. working on your iMac and Macbook Pro?

I'm not sure I understand this question. All Blizzard games are Mac-native.

Actually... Starcraft does not run on my model of Macbook. Has to do with the video card or something (this time I am using "video card" correctly :-)

I think this might describe the problem:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080902171037AAkPQrB

40

General Discussion / Re: Windows 7 vs OS X vs Unix

« on: January 09, 2011, 12:53:58 am »

The inherent instability of Windows was pretty much absent from the NT line, which is why I've been using NT since Windows 2000 (when it became viable for a gamer).

As far as Win7 goes, I use it at work and at home.  I dual-boot with OS X in both environments - at work I have a MacBook Pro, and at home I have my iMac.

From a usability perspective, I like Windows far, far better.  I just don't understand Mac fans' attachment to their desktop environment.  They do have some pretty cool animation capabilities with Cocoa, but things like only being able to resize windows from the bottom right corner drives me crazy.  Not being able to Cmd+Tab to a specific top-level window, just to an application, drives me crazy.

And of course, I program in .NET.  All of the Mac guys at the office prefer to code in Visual Studio whenever possible - the programming environment is definitely awesome.  

I'm starting to think now that I should get Windows 7 on my Macbook Pro as a second partition. (Or maybe VM?) I didn't think the drivers would work out that well, but, you seem to have it running smoothly.

I was planning to build some computers when I get the money for it... and I was thinking about putting some SSD drives in there. From what I know of SSD, it is a million times faster in reads (exaggeration) but also a good deal slower in writes. Is this true in your experience? Does the time you save on reads beat the time you lose on writes? And is it really that bad on writes?

Also, are you able to get Starcraft, Starcraft II, etc. working on your iMac and Macbook Pro?

41

General Discussion / Re: USB Cable that Accepts Multiple Video Card Formats

« on: January 07, 2011, 02:18:21 am »

Anybody could know that, a mind as brilliant as my own need not worry about peasant things!

I'm sorry if I came across like that, but it's not fun to be insulted.

42

General Discussion / Re: USB Cable that Accepts Multiple Video Card Formats

« on: January 06, 2011, 09:48:03 pm »

When you've used laptops exclusively for the past four years, never play video games, and don't own any cameras etc. with removable media, you know jack shit about hardware.

It's also kind of a boring subject. It doesn't take a first-rate mind (let alone a third-rate mind) to do the hardware side of things... I'd say it's comparable to memorizing dates from a history book, with less dates involved.

43

General Discussion / Windows 7 vs OS X vs Unix

« on: January 06, 2011, 07:57:12 pm »

Probably a lot of threads like this, but I'd like to hear your opinions.

Personally, I've never touched Windows 7. My experience is in OS X and Unix.

I think that OS X is basically a lesser version of Unix. The OS X layer of Unix is very unremarkable - nobody uses or cares about Carbon, Objective-C, XCode, etc. It adds no functional power to Unix, which is sad because it takes a very powerful kernel as its starting point. What OS X does, instead, is make Unix painless. So it's OK for the end-user but useless in a server-side/software dev. environment.

Unix, in its unadulterated forms (BSD, Linux, etc) is small, powerful, and reliable. Its advantage over OS X is basically

      OS X = Unix + Garbage
      => OS X is worse for all its garbage

Its advantage over Windows 98, NT, XP is clear: Unix applications, unlike Windows applications, don't crash the system when they crash. Windows 98, NT, and XP simply allow applications too much access to the operating system so that, when they crash, they often drag the OS down with them.

But what about Windows 7? I've never touched it. If a process is going haywire, is it able to do a better job disposing of the process than its predecessors? Unix is able to do this by restricting kernel access much more than previous Windows releases... has Windows 7 done the same? I wonder how the boot-up and login speed compare to that of Linux.

Furthermore, how is Windows 7 as a server? Does its size (the kernel + its libraries must be at least twice the size of a Linux kernel) often rule it out of consideration? Clearly, Windows 7 is a good platform for Software Dev, since I've been hearing that .NET is basically the best programming environment (overtaking Eclipse/Spring/Java). But what about as a server? Another thing that probably rules it out as a server would be the security vulnerabilities... from all the application vulnerabilities to something like the NetBIOS spoofing that iago wrote about.

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General Discussion / Re: USB Cable that Accepts Multiple Video Card Formats

« on: January 06, 2011, 07:37:23 pm »

It would greatly help to post what he wants to do with whatever he's looking for because from what you've posted it's difficult to discern what exactly he's referring to.  It's not clear to me what he wants from saying "USB cable that accepts multiple video card formats/brands/etc." with the latter part "multiple video card formats/brands/etc" being rather ambiguous without knowing his intended purpose for whatever it is he's looking for.

Also, not clearly stating what the expected input/output source (i.e. USB) doesn't help to deduce what he's looking for.

He could be wanting anything from a simple adapter/converter to a KVM.  Even then adapting/converting USB input to VGA/DVI/HDMI output (or vice versa) doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me without knowing what he's trying to accomplish.

It reads video data from a video card onto a computer through a USB adapter. It can accept multiple types of video cards - I'm talking about the memory cards you have on videocameras.

You're using the term "video card" in a horribly ambiguous and incorrect way.  As deadly has mentioned, an USB SD/compact flash/etc etc memory card reader is what your friend wants.  Please stop using the terminology "video card" in the manner you are, while you can store "video" on such a memory card, it's able to store more than just "video"...  I've met technologically handicapped sorority chicks who know the difference between an actual video card and flash memory storage they use for their digital camera.  Seriously I didn't think you were as technologically ignorant and impaired as my 80 year old grandmother, so I think you're just trolling.  

Grow up, please?

I've never once owned a videocamera, let alone transferred data from a videocamera to a computer. I didn't know what the "memory card" for a video camera was called. I see now that it is just a standard memory card.

(In fact, I've never used a memory card in my entire life.)

You should really learn not to insult people without good reason. In fact, I can't really think of a good reason *ever* to insult a person. It doesn't get you anywhere.

Yeah, those card readers are pretty common.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=69&name=Card-Readers

Is this what you're talking about?

That's exactly it. He's looking for a 7-in-1 card reader or something like that. I'm curious... are there card readers specific to videocameras, or do videocameras use pretty standard memory cards?

45

General Discussion / Re: USB Cable that Accepts Multiple Video Card Formats

« on: January 05, 2011, 08:24:18 pm »

It would greatly help to post what he wants to do with whatever he's looking for because from what you've posted it's difficult to discern what exactly he's referring to.  It's not clear to me what he wants from saying "USB cable that accepts multiple video card formats/brands/etc." with the latter part "multiple video card formats/brands/etc" being rather ambiguous without knowing his intended purpose for whatever it is he's looking for.

Also, not clearly stating what the expected input/output source (i.e. USB) doesn't help to deduce what he's looking for.

He could be wanting anything from a simple adapter/converter to a KVM.  Even then adapting/converting USB input to VGA/DVI/HDMI output (or vice versa) doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me without knowing what he's trying to accomplish.

It reads video data from a video card onto a computer through a USB adapter. It can accept multiple types of video cards - I'm talking about the memory cards you have on videocameras.