One of my professors, who happens to be among the top engineering faculty we have said something interesting when I was talking with him in office hours... He used to measure his performance by the grades his students got, then realized that if the student is motivated, they'll learn and come to class and pay attention. If they don't want to pay attention, then they're not self-motivated enough to make it anyway. If they fail, that's because they didn't take full advantage of the class. Let it be said he teaches upper-division courses, and really, if you make it that far you should be motivated enough to pay attention in class instead of facebooking anyway.

Me too. Let's see Microsoft get a patch out that fast. ;)

I'd have to disagree. At least at my University, there's a very hard emphasis on things like basic data structures, classic computing algorithms and the hardware-software connection. Perhaps that's just because I'm studying for a computer engineering degree rather than just CS, but many of the classes even on the 200-level have at least half the course dedicated to classical CS stuff. You can't get past your third semester in CS without knowing how to effectively write and manipulate classes, BSTs, manual memory management. In sophomore year, we do microcomputer organization and you can't get past without being able to write at least rudimentary assembly.

The life of software is very much in its documentation and how the future programmers who touch it will use it. If millions of people are "harassing" the programmer, maybe that speaks volumes about their code. Good code is self-documenting, and where necessary, accompanied by verbose commenting. An superbly fast algorithm is near useless to anyone but the original coder if it is so obfuscated and ill-documented that nobody else can understand it.

This is the reason I don't contribute. It's like suddenly being handed the US economy and saying "fix it!"

If the user is trying out Linux and doesn't want to worry about losing settings and data with different distributions? Also, the partitioning would be invisible to the user unless they are fiddling with things, and if they then discover they needed separate partitions, it's easier to have it done already than backing up data and wasting time...

Unfortunately, the old public school system I went to did just that. not kidding. school-name-classroom-IP. for every computer.

I hope IBM won't be working with NSA on this one too!

âoeDiscovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thoughtâ. --Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Fuji brought it back (because of a massive uproar) after changing the formula a little bit. I personally don't like the tones in the new film as much. :\

Oh yea, remember that 2002 or whatever make of The Time Machine? With the fragmented moon? Lets just hope this time it doesn't come crashing down on Earth.

I seem to notice a slight difference-between-DSL-and-cable difference.

I've been running it for a few months now, and haven't had a single issue.

We'll use 4096-bit integers. 4096 ought to be enough for anyone!

Aren't pulsars directional? How would you see the pulsar if it isn't currently flashing in your direction... They have set orbits and would have a plane where they will be invisible. Not that we'll ever get that far as humans, but it does seem like a major show-stopper.