If you are lucky enough to be in IL or another state with a top-rated uni in CS with an articulation initiative, go to community college, get the requirements there, and get in. That's what I did. Of course, this was about 2.5 years ago, but, hey, it worked for me.

So, many people keep wondering why use SUA vs Cygwin?

Well, first off the basic thing is speed. SUA has kernel hooks for syscall translation. It's able to do many of the POSIX syscalls in a much quicker fashion than Cygwin. Cygwin, on the other hand, does *everything* for POSIX syscalls in userland, causing it to be slow (for example, a fork, at times can take *seconds* to complete).

So, SUA is much better this way... problem is, it's tricky to get things to compile for it, I never did get things building reliably for it. Cygwin has a full suite of programs already built, and it's much easier to build existing Linux/UNIX/POSIX programs for than SUA.

Being a Windows user who needs *NIX tools for many processing tasks, what do I use? Cygwin. Easier to set up and get running. The speed drives me insane, though. My login script, which runs many programs before bringing up my bash prompt will take 5-6 seconds.

Ideal solution: Hyper-V or some other VM software running a VM in the background that I can get a terminal to, that has filesystem access to my system drives too.

No wonder you're replying as an AC...

Most Universities have *very* well stocked libraries that are catered to the colleges. At my Uni we have millions of books at our disposal, *all* of the peer-reviewed journals for the fields taught and it's all kept up-to-date.

As far as the peer group is concerned, I'm about a half a year behind most of my immediate peers, and they are *all* going off to prestigious jobs in the bay and in Seattle.

Structure is an important part of the curriculum here, and while structure may not suit some, it's a good approach for most when coming to learn a diverse and complex field. CS and computer engineering are both extremely diverse, and without some structure to learn the basics and roots, you will have a much poorer experience.

Experts. Flat out. I have interacted with some of the most amazing professors in their fields. People like Jeff Erickson and Sanjay Patel. The *real* experts are not only patient, but understanding, and when you have a need to go to them, they help you to the best of their ability.

Time. You have four years where you're exploring academia. You can prod and poke at areas of interest to find what suits you. To find out what you want to make your name in. You can even pick a spot and explore further. It's rewarding for those who are willing. I actually returned after poo-pooing it the first time around. I'm so glad I did.

> Quick tip: when you attend a technical interview, answering the questions correctly doesn't get you the job. Being amazed at how much the interviewer knows does.

Wow... never at any of the places that I interviewed at was this true, and I've corrected interviewers on some points at times on some things (and got the job). Good people *never* feel threatened by someone who's smarter than them, in fact they welcome that person. I surround myself with people who are smarter than I am daily.

Good people will learn from the smarter people, not edge them out; they will work cooperatively to get the job done and get it done as well as possible.

From being someone who's been on both sides of the interview, both before and after education at a top school, I can say what you're claiming is quite BS except at poorly run places.

They don't? Gee... I guess I should put my projects in the bin then. I accomplished a pretty neat OS and CPU while I was in some classes; for required classes. My OS *almost* had DooM running and my CPU was written between me and a friend (our third party was pretty useless) was a pipelined CPU with cache, gshare predictor, BTB, etc built from bare logic components.

Class projects sure can show passion when you internalize them and take them seriously. When interviewing about these projects I talk about them with quite a bit of zeal.

<quote><p>
Applications you've made because of a school project will not count.</p></quote>

Well, I think it depends on the project. Sure, the maze solver for my data structures class isn't all too impressive, but for my software systems class the project is "write an OS" and for my computer organization class the project is "here's some gates, make a pipelined 16-bit CPU with x points of advanced features". Those two projects alone, if done well, are impressive on a resume.

> Maybe [snip]

Or, no.

Thing is, early computers were immensely different than the computers we have today. Addressing modes weren't fully thought out, instruction sets were esoteric and more suited for hand assembly, and even just getting information to/from memory wasn't quite what you'd expect. Both delay-line and drum memory were delay based, you had to have extremely tight timings to get the word you wanted.

Linux leverages many modern conveniences and paradigms. Without heavy modification, it cannot run on anything older than a M68000/i80386 processor with appropriate support hardware, and the older you go, the more you have to gut, change and cripple.

http://imgur.com/xhAvC - yeah, systems programming at 6AM can get kinda whacky.

It's a header file for a standardized interface. All this stuff needs to be the same for any *NIX-like operating system to be *NIX-like, otherwise, you're making an incompatible operating system. To make source-compatible operating systems you need to have common interfaces, and those interfaces lie in the header files. Saying that this is copyright infringement is like saying that they patented a hole in the wall as a way of getting in and out of a room.

Hell no. Being in a highly competitive degree program at one of the best schools in the nation for it, cheaters not only hurt themselves in the long run, but everyone else in the class. In my analog signals class, there is a large contingent that cheats on the homework and artificially inflates their grades. This class is also heavily curved, and since analog signals are not my strong suit, I ended up getting bit by the cheaters by dragging my letter grade down.

Cheaters in a university very rarely hurt just themselves.