"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.

If the company relied on one programmer to handle everything, beware.

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.

It's always a little amazing to see how people cheer on the leaks and cracks when they appear in a closed system, yet continue to support these closed systems with their money and attention when open systems are available.

It's just this very weird disconnect in consumer psychology. You don't have to crack a PC (yet) to do what you want with it. But you make a computer small and flat and suddenly you find yourself having to pay $1+ for every little program, from a collection of programs that somebody else has decided you shall have access to. You don't see the "fuck the man" attitude at the store, you only see it when a Scandinavian high schooler comes up with a crack for your game console and the manufacturer tells you you can't have it.

I just don't get it. How many years past DeCSS are we and banging our heads against the same wall?

Who here got to go to Comic-con this year?

Efficiency in wireless communication is something of a purple elephant, mostly due to interference concerns that aren't at issue in wired Ethernet transactions. True, wired connections will have the occasional collision (though this is largely solved by modern algorithms and operating systems) but digital transmissions over an analog medium are difficult enough when they aren't running into each other in the air. And then you have other interference introduced by microwaves, whether from devices like cell phones, microwaves, or sunspots. It's a very noisy environment!

The concept of using algebra is a unique step forward in this field. Most here would agree, if you're in a crowded cafe and trying to carry on a conversation, it's easier to shout "Pythagoreas" than to talk about squares and triangles. But with computers it happens to be exactly the opposite because they're designed to compute -- it's what they do and what they like to do. So feed it generalities and, often, it can come up with specifics, much like the Monty Hall Paradox.

The next step appears to be to move from algebraics to broad descriptions of the type of data you want to download. This is waiting on computers with a great deal more processing power and perhaps emergent AI, but there will come a time where instead of feeding a bunch of packets over a noisy channel the Internet will simply say to your computer "short film with 20-something actor wondering whether to marry now or enjoy life for a while longer" and your system will fill in the rest, completing the transfer mathematically. This is down the road a ways, but newer technology such as lossy compression for data is already available and potentially lucrative for those who are willing to think outside of the conventional box and try something with a few more holes in it.

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?