You can get cheap FPGA boards these days too. The only barriers most people will face is motivation and the knowledge of what to learn and when to learn it. The trick is to optimize happiness and earningsat the intersection of the two that best fit the lifestyle choices you probably don't know you will have to make earlier in your career :)

I concur with the parent. I recently purchased and read through all four of his most popular novels: Elantris and the Mistborn Trilogy. Sanderson's default writing style is actually shorter and less descriptive... but then for first books you don't always get the luxury of killing an entire forest to describe a bedroom.

That said I have read the annotations for most of his books, Brandon's blog posts regarding his writing (cruise to his website and read up if your remotely interested) and the entire WoT series again. I have decided that with the amount of information Jordan left behind (plot) a writer of Sanderson's talent can pull it off. Sanderson has a much shorter paragraph length on average and his stories had great potential plot wise, he just chose to keep the stories shorter, though he has the vision of the grand epic. The real challenge will be nailing the details and tying up all of the plot threads on a coherent manner. The writing style, I think, Sanderson probably fell into after a few months of writing. Since Sanderson has already managed reasonably complex plots and seems to be keeping it all together (based on his blog posts) I hold high hopes for the completion of this series.

This is a series I started reading in early high school and have treasured to this day. Some books are better than others, but this series is THE epic fantasy story of the last 20 years. It is more of a brute force presence in the fantasy fiction world than something someone did decades ago like Tolkien. Jordan has defined an entire decade of writers and readers that have had to come to terms with his stories when they contemplate the fantasy epic. When an author sits down and thinks of a plot and story for a fantasy epic it is, in my opinion, Tolkien and Jordan that you struggle with: how do you do something different? How do you spin threads of a story of epic length while making the same old good triumphs of evil (epicly!) enjoyable? There are a lot of other great writers in the epic fantasy space and I don't mean to reduce it to the two most well known.... but they are where they are for a reason.

Anyhow... my rambling is done. I highly recommend Elantris and or the Mistborn trilogy. Though I suspect that most of us that have been eagerly waiting have already begun studying up on the man to finish up Jordan's legacy.

Wait.... you just replied to yourself. Buddy you need to take it easy. These self held discussions on the merits of goat breeds are a little frightening.

Yeah, you can fool it but you would definitely end up inflating the data. Properly done crypto should leave the data completely indistinguishable from random noise. If I can determine your data is encrypted and somehow different from random noise then you have implemented your cryptography improperly. However, if you scan a disk and, using statistical frequency analysis, find bits of random noise floating around that is not a common event. Compressed files are pretty easy to test for, even though they do start approaching noise in their randomness compared to a regular file format like HTML. Basically in order to attain proper cryptographic properties you can't cheat and use some method of crypto that is not random. What you could do is properly spread out the random data enough and intersperse it with regular patterns to make it resemble something else. You would basically end up with a data hiding routine. Small messages are the easiest to hide. Ala steganography. A lot of work has been done in that arena.

I realize you may have known some or all of this (crypto and the breaking of it is just fancy statistics for the most part!) Just elaborating on the idea a bit for others. I work in infosec so I love crypto :)

You need to be.

Yes there is ageism at some companies... maybe even in general. You don't want to work at those places because you will likely be treated like a drone anyway. If you are truly passionate about computer science go for it. Become a lethal ninja of the computing sciences. You will probably have to work harder than the whiz kid peers you will meet in college, but you are older and wiser. Go in there, expand your brain, kick ass and just ignore everyone that says this is crazy (it kind of is).

You may have to work harder than a lot of people in the industry to make up for your lack of experience, but if you really love doing this you won't really notice. Just go for it. If you have little holding you down in terms of financial obligations (family, mortgage) you are even better off. If you work hard and show your value you can find good work in this industry. And if your previous experience can be applied to a specific industry you have a huge leg up :)

So to paraphrase Duke Nuke'em -- Fuck emm all, let god sort it out. This is a great time to be in school with the recession as well...

I have been around the block a couple of times by now and you will definitely encounter ageism from time to time. I just ignore it and show my worth and that is that.

As a frequent traveler it is easy to begin to obsess over bags a bit. You basically live with these things and they are like a portable house to you. How convenient, comfortable and easy they make your life is important. And from an absolute perspective things like airport security are a non event. So what if it takes me an extra 3 minutes? Even if it took an extra 3 minutes and you took 100 flights / year that is only a mere 300 minutes! Well convenience in travel matters. There is something nice about slipping through everything as quickly as possible and being on about your business. The central focus of all of these activities is your bag. I am a minimalist. I just have a big bag with a few pockets and I just dump stuff into it. Sturdy and strong so I know it won't fall apart and the rest is trim, but I still compartmentalize things meticulously to deal with airport security.

Side rant: It is all a bunch of bullshit security theater, but I have learned first hand that it is not wise to make a big deal of it. Being followed and harassed by a TSA supervisor threatening to have you arrested is OH so entertaining. I one day, rightly, pointed out a particular rule of theirs to a screening agent who was doing something he should not have been doing and the situation ended with me barely avoiding being arrested and followed by an overzealous supervisor who was quietly stalking behind me and listened to me muttering rather unkind things about the TSA. He then proceeded to flip out telling me not to say another word! Check your ideals of privacy and freedom at the door of the airport. A good bag just makes this process easier.

Thank you! I was scratching my head over this one. I think someone smacked the grand parent with a lead filled whiffle ball bat. A context switch is, generally, when you go from kernel mode to user mode. Windows and Linux both have rather beefy kernels that implement a lot of functionality (and force context switches). And even with a micro kernel where you theoretically have a small amount of kernel code you still end up forcing context switches indirectly a lot because some things just HAVE to be done by the kernel to maintain OS and security integrity. You could crunch numbers, render JavaScript and HTML all day and never hit a syscall after you have loaded things into memory and done your business with your system calls. I call bunk. In fact I just actually read the article and the things they were testing in the JS engine are almost purely user mode code. I can't see the test items invoking system calls much at all. I think there is a compiler optimization issue at the heart of this thing and the scope of the test was to narrow to ferret it out. I would want to see lots of different compilers and compile options in a rather comprehensive comparison from one system to the next. This was a narrow "gotcha" kinda test.

One of the genuinely GOOD uses of the meme and what??? no mod points. How far has /. fallen? :>