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Comment Re:Work Experience, then your masters. (Score 1) 834

Internships are extremely valuable _once you know what you want to do_. They're less so when you're still feeling around (eg, freshman and sophmore years). People who have their BS probably fall into the former category, or at least I hope they do.

Your biological clock might not be ticking, but life seldom goes as people plan it will.

Comment Re:Insightful fact... (Score 1) 289

First, not a teacher. We're provided use of the application for checking our own work.

Second: the term "black box" would be appropriate if the output was a simple percentage of plagiarism with no explanation. By revealing _how_ that number was come to, the internal process of the box to derive it has been revealed (which is to say, it's comparing your work to a lot of other work in the app's DB). "Black box" is a purely colloquial term with no single formal definition - calling me out on using it is ludicrous.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_box

Comment Re:Work Experience, then your masters. (Score 1) 834

To provide a counter-argument, my wife has a BS in ME _and_ a MS in ME, which she got in rapid succession. Her work in graduate school is _extremely_ relevant to her current job, which she got shortly after finishing up school. Your generalization that intern/co-op experience isn't good enough is almost hilarious - you don't think employers care that you worked a few summers for a major aerospace or electronics firm? I rather think that they do, because those references can be _very_ helpful in determining the quality of an applicant.

Now, let me provide another bit of advice from personal experience: going back to a good school full-time once you've started working is extremely difficult at best for most people. I'm not saying it's not doable, but if you've got a spouse and possibly kids you need to help support, the option is difficult to exercise. _If you want a graduate degree, best to do it up front._ You may not have the chance later.

Personally, I didn't care to go for an MS in CS (or an MA in Economics), but I did wind up going part-time for an MBA. It is not a ton of fun to back to school at this stage of my life, useful and interesting as it may be.

Comment Re:Insightful fact... (Score 4, Interesting) 289

The tools are fairly good, but, in my experience, they'll always report 3-7% or so of your paper as plagiarized, just because it's pretty difficult to write about _anything_ without unknowingly using previously written words. I would _hope_ that anyone who would pursue disciplinary action from such a tool's results would at least take a look to see if the sections being flagged are consequential.

I have no idea how good they are with catching paraphrasing, though... it strikes me that the semi-intelligent plagiarizers would be doing that more than a straight copy and paste. There's also the "acceptable vs unacceptable" distinction to be made.

Comment Re:The reason is the same as it has always been (Score 1) 425

Forget "handles multiple cores". Just multi-threading the emulator is not nearly as difficult as you propose. The problem is that you've got to discretely manage those threads _plus_ those SPEs. Sorry, but it's a ton of work for a feature that's not really going to add a lot or help very many people.

FYI, most of those "custom emulators" are just ports of existing ones, like SNES9X. And most of them don't work as well as their PC brethren anyways.

Comment Re:The reason is the same as it has always been (Score 2, Informative) 425

The parent here makes it sound like you should be able to just write a few lines of code and set a compile flag to have your program start using the SPEs on the Cell. That's completely untrue - you'd need to write some very specific, very custom code to use them, as they're basically just very fancy DSPs with regards to C coding.

As a point of reference, no one's ported x264 to use the Cell for encoding, and that's the sort of application that the Cell is supposed to be very good with. IIRC, part of the issue was that each SPE only has 256kb of cache on it, which is rather marginal for high resolution rendering (you can't fit a whole 1080p frame into the SPE).

Comment Re:Go look for another job. (Score 1) 681

I can see why you'd post that anonymously - it's illegal as hell to do what you're doing. Not to mention _stupid_, given that there's no scientific evidence that having religion makes you worse at doing your job.

I am reasonably sure I was discriminated against on religious grounds against by an interviewer at one state college I applied to work at. To this day, I'm still not sure I made the right decision to let it go, but it's jerks like you who make this world a worse place (and hurt your own employer doing it).

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