A PhD doesn't really guarantee you anything. It can also be detrimental depending on what you want to do as some companies consider it too much or too expensive. You'll be better off starting in a Masters program and then deciding if you you really see a need or feel the desire to go for the PhD. A PhD is a LOT of work and time.

Really unless you plan to go into academia or hard core research I'd steer clear.

I have the same issue. Sleep study confirmed and everything. I was working with a clinical behavioral psychologist to improve some, but life went crazy and my sleep is back to pretty much being shit.

Light therapy did help some though. I need to get back on trying that.

People are basically assclowns about it though.

That's the ideal and idyllic world. In many areas there's a ton of hidden parameters and secret sauce that doesn't get reported. I found this to be especially true in robotics and machine vision and other computer science papers.

I spent a year and a half working on trying to replicate results from one paper. Total failure. A few years later I was talking to one of the researchers and sure enough, the results only worked in that one case for that one data set and pretty much had no real chance of working any other way. That's pretty much the straw that broke my brain. The entire time it was my fault the results weren't being reproduced....

Game developers and application developers are some of the biggest reasons for the current state of OpenGL actually. Devs wanted openGL to give them more freedom like DirectX or for things to be more closely aligned to openGL ES for compatibility reasons. Hell, if you look around a bit you'll find devs who want openGL to let them get even more low level than they can now for beter performance. All that fixed functionality came with a performance price and often forced the developers to play tricks to get the effects they wanted.

To your direct complaints,

Texture loading was always a pain and often neccesitated going to outside libraries(based upon data formats), but texturing has barely changed in the new opengl other than the use of shaders to do the look up.

The basic lighting equations and material properties that openGL used are easy to find and can be implemented in shaders in about 15 minutes(hell the orange books should have most of them already implemented).

Matix math libraries have been available for ages and if that is still too much effort, there are libraries like GLM which have almost line for line direct replacements for the openGL matrix commands.

OpenGL shaders should mostly be cross platform. The real problems they had probably had to do with various extensions or features not being supported across all hardware or the hardware having different limitations. OpenGL specifies the minimums to be standard compliant but hardware can have different maximums and algorithms can change based upon those maximums.

Yes there is now a bit more up front cost to using a the Core profile of openGL, but the flexibility and performance gains are honestly worth it.

Correcting myself, NP-Hard isn't just the numerical version of NP-Complete. But rather the set of problems which are at least as hard as NP. NP-Hard includes the numerical versions. Sigh.

The numerical version of many NP-Complete decision problems are often NP-Hard.

I'd love to know what you consider the most basic algorithms. There are entire classes of problems which are polynomial and are not "basic". I also think you don't understand what it even means to be NP-Hard (which is just the numerical version of being NP-Complete.) Also to show that something is NP-Hard is equivalent to showing something is NP-Complete, which means you show there is a Polynomial time reduction to another problem in the appropriate class. Seriously, how did this get modded insightful.

Honestly, I don't think you even begin to understand complexity spaces or how they work.

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

Offer up your daughters to placate them? So they don't rape your angelic guests?

Huh,

I've carried a 2 dollar bill in the back of my wallet for years as a good luck charm.

Maybe I'm siphoning the luck away from these other people.

Deploy the Deathwatch! The Ordo Xenos protects.

Oh sure you've ruled out binary and unary, but you haven't eliminated ternary, hex, octal, and just about any other counting system. Won't somebody please think of the Slashdotters!

I had firefox 6 clock in at just under 4GB of ram with about 60 to 90 tabs open before the stuttering got so bad I started closing things. It went down to 2.2 GB after I closed about half the tabs. It's common for me to have even more tabs open across multiple windows given the way I use the browser, but I must say that was the first time I've seen it stutter at 4GB like that. Usually it would sit around 2GB of ram with anywhere from 100 to 200 tabs open.

So with 39 tabs open I'm happy to see just 390MB of usage right now on FF7. Usually we'd be approaching 700MB already.

Either you are not looking hard enough or restricting yourself too much for the job you are looking for, i.e., certain location or research position. With a Masters in CS you should have a slight advantage over the BS people, but need to demonstrate it in interviews. If you want a research position, stay in school and get the PhD.

Widen what you are looking for and not take the IT position, unless you can't move away from your current location and have other responsibilities. Just because it would be easier and more convenient right now, doesn't mean it's the best in the long term. Life isn't always nice and easy.
I would look into contract work first, to get some experience, before taking a straight up IT support job. The east coast has tons of software contract placement agencies. Many times these jobs can be converted to full time.

WIthout fax, paperwork heavy businesses (like my Flex administrator who needs substantiation on everything!) would need someone at the other end trained to open thousands of emails and print them all out on their end every day. Faxes save that time consuming step and a body. The majority of office workers cannot work off digital copies of long documents. Fax doesn't really have a place with one-on-one and small business communication, but I highly doubt the corporate world will ever replace it with the digital alternative, unless it is the one button solution that automatically prints your faxed emails when received. It's not the sending part that's the problem; everyone is just tied to hard copy.