"Like some Slashdot users, I began attending university last month for computer science. The experience represents my first time away from home and I'm almost constantly with my peers, many of whom are also computer science students. Recently, I have become cognizant of the many negative opinions associated with a 'normal' person's perspective of what a nerd is like. Conversing with my college computer science peers (many of whom are quite nerdy), I have noticed that many of them are extremely arrogant. Upon introspection, I have come to the realization that I am also very similar to them and am very curious, but worried. I have noticed similar personality characteristics on Slashdot. Where does this nerd arrogance come from? How can it be rectified? I am concerned that, if I do not abolish these annoying tendencies, I may have trouble later on in life with my career and relationships. Has anybody run into problems in life with the arrogance that seems to be so prevalent with nerds? If so, how did you handle the situation?"

You might start by dialing back the flowery and mostly unnecessary vocab. Eschew obfuscation!

Who ARE you? Just, wow.

Not sure how those questions would indicate, you didn't specify. I could see some thinking "recent" technology means "good", but my personal experience provides little evidence to correlate "new technology" with good. I could even make a case that it's a red flag. (I worked on a disastrous project where by fiat we had to develop with .NET. Horrible)

Code reviews? Meh. Some think they're doing code review, they're not... or they're horrible at it.

I always ask what their turnover is, and why the position being filled was vacated. YMMV.

my memory on when I first got adsl may be fuzzy. It well could have been dialup... even worse! :-)

Was it slackware? Can't remember for sure.

Anyway, I remember downloading the dist, in "sections" (e.g., X11), each spanning a number of floppy disks with a grand total of 70+ floppies. Then from there I installed linux. If all went well, it usually took about a day to get it up and running, start (download) to finish (first full boot). (Keep in mind, this was in the day of ADSL.) Horrible.

These days, I grab random different ones I've seen recent reviews for and download and boot just for fun. Typically I just download the iso's and point a virtual CD drive from vmware or some virtual pc and boot and install. Much nicer, usually less than an hour.

Faves: Suse, Mandrake->Mandriva, Knoppixware (to save friends and family lost corrupted Windows data), Ubuntu (3 years ago, not today). Mint.

shouldn't sound be added to make is sound more real??

How does this affect the butterfly effect? This could be chaos!

There are few if any issues w/Apple having monopoly in phones.

The issue comes up when Apple (or any other Microsoft) uses their monopoly in one area to leverage their position in another (think "shutting off the air supply to Netscape").

Yes!

substitute in his thesis,

and substitute to:

and you have a perfect argument for me and the school system not requiring History.

Even better,

and we've eliminated the need for any required subjects.

"I am not good at", or "I don't want to" are not good arguments for not requiring learnin'.

(-e**(i*pi) st post)

I'm going to jump off-topic here, but gawd, I wish I had mod points to mod parent up. Knocking Gartner down a peg (hurray) and an Arlo Guthrie cameo in the same post. Love it. Okay, mod me down.

Does this mean panhandlers now need cell phones?

Not sure that that's even legal -- would be surprised if it held up in court.

I worked with a group that insisted on naming printers and servers with a rigid scheme to identify:

• city
• building
• floor
• wing
• room

Said it was dumb. Six months later when we moved across the lake to downtown Seattle, with all of the named equipment, they agreed.

Use creative names, and it doesn't hurt if they're a little fun. Contrary to popular belief, the names catch on, become easy to remember and everyone knows which host/printer/machine you're talking about.

Flex was already open source.. They are just pushing the responsibility of maintaining it to the community. Now if they were open sourcing the Flash Player, I would commend them for that as it could ease the pain a little of those stuck relying on this legacy technology.