Mod parent up. If you're really a talented programmer, it should show in a phone interview, so really your biggest hurdle is getting to the point where you can talk to a real developer. Have any friends that work at software companies? They may be able to get you into a phone interview.

Also, put a lot of effort into your resume. Make sure it shows how you stand out from everyone else that got a CS degree from your school. If you have worked on open source projects, put them on your resume. If you did well on a large project for a class, put it on your resume. If you programmed for an extracurricular activity, put it on your resume. Make sure it's clear that you have put significant effort into these things, and can actually work on a code base larger than a weekly coding assignment.

I do both; I'll usually take notes with pen and paper, but if there's a lot of math and I feel like my handwriting isn't going to be legible enough, I'll do them in LaTeX. If I can't remember the syntax for something, I make some up, comment it, and come back to it later.

CD-Rs cost $10? You must be thinking of blu-ray.

More importantly, look at their summaries of the bills they're protesting.

The bills would:

• Prohibit cities from moving money between broadband and other divisions. So, Wilson citizens can't expect to see any of their subscription fees go to pave streets and build basketball courts. Does that make sense?
• Ban cities from pricing service below the cost of providing the service. We don't use this practice.

The second one makes sense, from a free-market perspective. This would make sure that cities are actually competing with the corporations, and the cities aren't driving out corporations by funneling taxes into broadband.

The first one, however, combined with the second one, means that the city broadband departments can ONLY charge what it costs to keep it running/upgrade it. Otherwise, they'll just be racking up money and not be able to spend it. This seems like it would be worse for broadband companies - citizens are guaranteed a service with no markup. Any price over the actual cost of bandwidth, power, and repair would go into upgrading and expanding the network, rather than some executive's bank account.

I am not an aeronautical engineer, but I'd guess energy output is roughly proportional to either wind speed times radius, or wind speed times radius squared.

So yeah. Small windmills which can only use a small amount of the wind are not going to harvest as much energy as a bigger windmill.

So you're suggesting we present several e-mails, some legitimate and one spam, and say "pick the spam e-mail" (Or the inverse, many spam and one legitimate) The problem with this is that spam filtering is a pretty well-solved problem; well-trained Bayesian filters do a pretty good job. Assuming a liberal 1% error on your Bayesian filter, there's a 1-in-a-million chance that the filter will mess up 3 times in a row.

As some folks have already commented, we're not regressing 30 years, any more than using an internal combustion engine (which has been around for about a century) is a regression. We're just using a technology we've been using all along. This is _not news_.

I'm put off by the summary and the title - it makes it seem as if it's going to encourage managers to consider everyone underneath him just another part of the "herd".

When CD-ROMs were new, most people's hard drives were a fraction of what could be held on a CD. The first computer my family had with a CD drive had a 250 meg hard drive. When you could start burning CDs for realistic prices, the average hard drive was probably a few gigabytes; you could back up all your data on two or three CDs.
When DVD burners became available, hard drives were usually a few dozen GB; it took somewhere around 10 DVDs to back up all of your data.
When Blu-ray burners became available, it wasn't uncommon for hard drives to be 500 GB, so 20 Blu-rays to back up your data.

Yes, Blu-ray burners will become cheaper, and yes, blu-ray discs will become cheaper, but by the time they do, we'll be seeing 2 and 3TB hard drives for $100. The $/GB of Blu-ray might drop below hard drives for a while.

Then, hard drives will continue to advance with Moore's law, and by the time the next generation of optical discs come out (which will probably be 150 GB/layer, based on the ~5x ratio of each disc type to the previous), you'll be able to buy 2-digit terabyte hard drives for $100.

Conclusion: Blu-ray is already obsolete, at least for data archival. Hard drives are going to win for the next few years.

There's a nifty program called fseventer which lets you watch file changes in real time.

Mod parent up. Digital cable is compressed more than over-the-air broadcasts, at least when the station only has one channel. When I watch digital cable, I notice a lot of compression artifacts that aren't there in OTA DTV.

The flip side to this is that digital cable doesn't cut out when you look at it the wrong way.

Required reading: How Hard Could It Be?: Thanks or No Thanks

"Simply because one programmer's idea translated visibly and directly into a lot of money didn't mean that the other team members weren't adding just as much value to the business, albeit in a less direct way."

Honestly, can't the summary tell us at least "Why Windows Must (and Will) Go Open Source?" The summary doesn't explain why, it simply counters one reason why not.

They could try, but they'd be caught within a week, I'm sure. The FCC is very serious about their airwaves, and Hams are too.

The local hams would just make it into a Fox hunt game.

Keep in mind that what is a "good thing" was judged from Microsoft's point of view.

If more people use .NET for web stuff, more people buy Visual Studio.