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Comment Guarantees (Score 5, Informative) 260

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.

Comment Re:Not Much You Can Do About That (Score 1) 197

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.

Comment Re:I call bullshit (Score 1) 233

No you don't. You just need to read the published paper and attempt to reproduce what the paper reports. (A good scientific paper includes enough information to make the work it reports on reproducible.)

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.

Comment Re:Absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Score 2) 233

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....

Comment Re:What ISN'T NP-Hard? (Score 1) 212

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.

Comment Re:What ISN'T NP-Hard? (Score 1) 212

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

Comment Re:Great (Score 1) 232

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!

Comment Re:Memory? (Score 1) 452

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.

Comment Baltimore Area (Score 1) 614

I work a bit south of Baltimore. We felt it here for about 30 seconds. Of course my office is next to shipping and I thought maybe they'd finally lost it and knocked all the shelves over in an attempt to crush me finally. But nope.. earth quake. They've evacuated a number of office buildings in downtown Baltimore from what my wife is saying (she was sent home). Her brother said he felt it as far as Ft. Wayne IN as well.

Comment Re:This ain't about you or what you want (Score 1) 897

Actually, Seatbelts and automotive safety took off once Murphy(yes of Murphy's law) showed the army how many men it was losing to automobile crashes and how many could be saved by seatbelts. Thus the saftey of automobiles was born. Plus having the shit sued out of you because you didn't make your car as safe as possible has some pretty good economic motivation behind it. Surprisingly enough most people don't want to drive death traps if they can avoid it.

Comment Re:You need different kinds of people (Score 1) 487

Nerd moment. Best raid leader I ever played with was the MT. He delegated subleaders, but if there's one person who relies on healers and dps not to die time and time again.. it's the MT. The MT has to know the encounter, the movements, the timings, etc etc. The dps are dependent on the MT to not lose aggro, but the MT is dependent on them to not go nuts and draw aggro. The healers have to keep the MT up or they die, but they also have to watch other people. But what probably made this guy the best was that if he didn't know a fight, but someone else did, he'd put ego aside to learn things. So he was exactly what this article calls for, an expert who was willing to delegate when needed, but had a good core knowledge of the system.

Further nerd moment, having played as both a tank and dps... The needs of the healers and the dps really are secondary to those of the tank. Without a tank nothing happens, without healing there can be no tanking, and without dps ... well unless the fight has a timer... things just take longer.

To bring it back to the article, you need people with vision and skill running things, the only problem with having an engineer run the show is if he's got an ego and no social skills. But frankly I'd rather have an engineer in charge than someone from accounting or sales.

Comment Objectivity (Score 3, Informative) 358

Whatever happened to posting stories that aren't filled with FUD and hate? Maybe HTML5 is more standards compliant and more widely available on other things... like say... Mobile devices... Which are probably one of the places many people would want to access the 'cloud' from. Or perhaps silverlight is too heavy for the task of being a portal UI... Whatever happened to using the right tool for the right job?

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