i was a LS-120 fan personally. poor misunderstood superdisk....

depends on the sector. writing webapps for fedex? yeah, they don't care. developing an entity recogniser for a question-answering system? or an automated arabic/english translator? or a voice or image recognition algorithm? it starts to be important. ;)

for the record, i don't have mine yet. and i worked for nearly a decade in the corporate and/or DoD space before i even contemplated grad school. (and very glad i did)

it's a shame thinkgeek stopped making that t-shirt. always was one of my favorites. :)

what pipe are you smoking? there was nothing on the market in 1998 even remotely close to being able to handle was google's crawlers and indexers needed.

also, to think google was ignorant of the history of distributed file research is mind-boggling. as you said, it's standard fair in any graduate level CS program. for my school, it was a required course for even the masters.

the beauty of gfs was that it knew *which* constraints in which theories they needed to design for, and which they could simplify for performance reasons. they purposely relaxed what traditionally constitutes a file system to achieve an order of magnitude more scalability than anyone had previously ever been able to achieve.

also, google almost single-handedly made it OK to be a phd in the commercial sector again. (for which i'm eternally grateful) and i would be willing to be they have the world's highest percent-grad-education in their workforce.

http://www.google.com/search?q=quake

i don't see any porn....

why not use floats for your left/right values, allowing you to partition your space without requiring the rewrite of all left/right values downwind of your insert?

it also depends on how cold it is. basements extend beyond the frost line, and prevent freezing-expanding-thawing-contracting soil from tearing your house to shreds over a few winters time. every house i knew growing up (upstate NY) had a basement.

of course, people often forget *why* the war started 30-40 years ago: forced desegregation

since she was 8? =P

my parents did the same thing, but i wish they hadn't. at 14 (when your grades really started to count) doing all the BS busy-work homework schools shove at you was much less interesting than the girls sitting around me, or the p.t. job that paid me.

that's funny. my math grades would usually go up. (vector calc and diffeq, most notably) i used to intentionally deprive myself of sleep before major exams.

i would have tried non-negative matrix factorization personally.

3 years ago i would have agreed with you, but then i paused my decade-long programming career to start my masters/phd. and i have to tell you, it's a misconception that couldn't be more wrong. the theory-side of CS i have learned (just from my master's classes no less) puts to shame the programmer i was at the end of my last full-time gig.