Its because on some phones, the GPS map data is stored server side.
I know my old Pantech Slate offered this, I could download a GPS application, but all of the maps and roads were stored on a server at AT&T, and it wouldn't work outside of a data connection via the cell service.

Interships really vary in pay.

I applied for several a few years ago when I was a junior in college.

Many payed 10-12$ an hour doing crap work. Others payed the better part of $20 and were still crap work.
Really depends on the company and the level of student they expect to get in.

I was 2.5 years in my college degree when I applied at a computer shop as an intern, this was in 2007. They offered me $4 an hour, UNDER THE TABLE. I laughed, grabbed my resume back out of the bosses hands and walked out. That was half of what minimum wage was.

Ok, maybe I should rephrase what I was trying to say.

I'm not necessarily saying he should brownnose. But try to get on his good side, and if this means picking a crap job over a cake job, then do it. Make yourself visible. The majority of managers don't see the guy that sits in the corner and makes beautiful code, but the guy sweating and working they think is working his butt off.

And have worked here about 2.5 years now, including my year as an intern. It was alot of fun, and I learned an immense amount.

Plain and simple, kiss your bosses ass. If your lucky enough to be liked, you may end up getting a job offer when your hired, and in this economy, you'd be considered lucky.

Expect to be doing alot of grunt work. Your coworkers are going to use you as a "gopher". Don't take it personally, but also be insistant on wanting to learn their jobs, not just get their coffee. Alot of people are going to be afraid to give you an indepth look at what they do, their afraid if someone else knows their job, they'll be fired. This not much you can really do about it, besides just pick up what you can from the sidelines.

Be outgoing, and don't slack. If that means working through lunch everyday, it'll be worth it in the end when you come away with a better knowledge of whats going on.

Try to ask intelligent questions. You'll catch people off guard and look alot more intelligent by asking "How could I use cat and grep in order to do..." instead of "Whats grep?"

I do think I should folow this up with a bit more of an explanation of my beliefs as far as where this is heading for universities.

I cringe every time I see Devry's school of video game design add come on the TV. Its two college age guys sitting on a couch, playing a game. something is said like "oh, we need to tweak this a bit more here" and he does something with the controller, then they go back to playing the game.

I was in a game design degree, and it was hilarious seeing the incoming freshman and their beliefs as to what the courses were going to be like. They were convinced they'd get to play games non-stop and not do any real world work. 90% of them game in with the idea they were going to be video game testers and make 100k a year sitting around playing World of Warcraft.

To make it worse, the school got a big grant and spent it on Dell XPS's and a bunch of games for one of the labs. The idea was to get us together, form frienships, and have some fun in between doing homework. It failed miserably and pretty much gave students the idea they could sit around and play games during class. They tried locking the lab down, saying games were off-limits before some time like 8pm. Again, students threw a fit, convinced it was their right to use school property to sit around and play games.

I think games are a great way to teach people how to program. It lets you have some fun while learning the concepts.
But teaching it like a trade, and telling students "oh, you can graduate and go work for Sony or EA" is wrong. Market it as a CS curriculum, not as a video game programming trade curriculum.

Exactly. See my parent post about 3 above yours.

I learned matrix math, working with vectors and 3d points and so on from using it to work in OpenGL, Direct3D and later Ogre. It wasn't something abstract, because I could make a change, and see the result on screen. This helped me to connect together what was going on and what the final output would be, and helped me to grasp a much better understanding of it.

I have a bachelors degree in Game design, and using games was a big part of how programming was taught at my school.

A lot of people are going to say "but how are they going to learn, games are complex, etc etc"

They don't have to be. A few examples from how I learned...

In my networking fundamentals, we covered opening sockets, threading to take care of the sockets, passing information back and forth, etc. At the point in a normal course, you'd probably do something like...make a lame chat client, or an FTP program or something. Instead the professor said, ok, I want you to make a game that uses these concepts to pass information between computers. I wrote a pong game that used a client / server type setup. One computer ran the server and both ran the clients. The server computed all the stuff and returned data to the clients on where to place the ball, paddles, and the score. I also had a lot of fun doing it.

Another good one. For my programming fundamentals class (eg, first class the freshman took to learn programming) they used python. After we covered the basics, such as arrays, if statements, loops, and so on, we got into user input. Then the instructor turned us loose on a simple header he'd made that let you move ASCII characters around the screen and asked us to make a simple game, such as a maze the user had to move through via the directional keys. It was amazing, because the next class students came in with some really awesome games using pretty complex stuff they'd looked up and taught themselves. By the end of the year long series of classes, freshman were making sprite based games on par with Super Mario Brothers 3 and other scrolling type games using PyGame.

I also learned Direct3D and OpenGL and wrote a few simple games with them to learn how to work with a rather complex API. Then we picked up Ogre and a physics engine (I can't remember the name off the top of my head). My final project was a bowling game that head realistic physics, and you controlled the spin and movement of the ball via the mouse. I showed it to my current employeer (I started out as a co-op) during my interview, and it really set me apart. Granted my job requires very little programming, but it still really made me stand out when I was able to show them something flashy, rather than a program that did a lot in the background but not much in the userland end of things. Not that theres anything wrong with that, but people tend to like flashy cool looking things.

I'm not a "dirty" person, but I also don't wash my hands all the time (of course I do after taking a crap, but thats a bit different).

Antibacterial soaps have only landed us in more trouble, since the bacteria left are resistant to them. I do like the idea of the new alcohol based cleaners though, since they aren't antibacterial.

I don't stress out about making sure my pork is cooked all the way through, I don't scrub down my kitchen with bleach every day, and I also never get sick.
Compare this to others I know that are neat freaks, and tend to get really sick a few times a year and seem to get horribly sick every time they eat something a bit off. I've eaten the same shitty chinese food or tacos as someone else and while they were getting violently ill and had the shits for a few days, I didn't feel a thing.

Agreed. I have a bachelors in game design. About a year before I graduated I came to my senses and realized I didn't want to work for 80 hours a week, sleep under my desk, and get carpal tunnel by 25. Not only that, but I realized that the type of programming I'd be doing is BORING. Its not like you get to play the game when your tweaking on a game engine, and you never finish it yourself. Its not the same sense of accomplishment you feel when you write a 50 line perl script that does some cool data translation or something.

I thought it was funny that every year about 100 kids would come in to the program, and each year you'd see about half of them gone. 50, 25, and down to about 12 by the junior year.

I always think its funny whenever this subject comes up on a forum like this, everyone thats not seen it done before calls everyone else an idiot.

When I was younger my dad showed me how to dowse with a coat hanger bent into an L shape. We were looking for the sewage line from the back of our house, because we'd just moved there and didn't know where the septic tanks were at. After walking around for a bit, I noticed the rod started lining up a certain way every time I walked past a certain spot. I showed my dad, he did the same thing, then we dug there and found the septic line.

I was maybe 10 years old, I had no knowlege of septic lines, the lay of the land, etc. All I was told was "hold this rod like this and walk around and you'll see it do something funny eventually." All we knew was that the line left the back of the house somewhere, and went towards a field, it could have been anywhere within about an acre of area.

I'm sure some of you don't believe it, but it works well enough I've seen DOT personel use it to find water lines under roads.

Agreed, but work is picking up most of the tab.

I like IT type stuff, but I realized I don't really enjoy programming which is what my undergrad mostly is.
I figured management might be a decent direction to head, since I know and understand the lingo, the technology, and could actually make some informed decisions.

Ok, caught me. But its not normal "unsecured" debt, like I said if they aren't payed you cannot bankrupt out of them.

I'll be graduating next summer with a Masters in IT Management. (Undergrad in Simulation Design Engineering)
75k or so in loans, and the year I went to college they jacked up the interest rate to 6.8%.

And to everyone saying its unsecured debt needs to actually look into their facts. Student Loans can not be bankrupt on, if I don't pay, the gubmint will dock my pay. Which actually is a better deal that paying the loans, the max they can dock is 15% per check, and my loans will be way more than that to actually pay.

The loans are government backed, they should be no interest.

great idea, until the mesh collects ice on it, gets too heavy for its supports, and is sucked into the engine. Engines are designed to take a bird strike, but not a big ball of ice and wire mesh.