qebab - Slashdot User

Comment Re:So lets see... (Score 1) 971

by qebab on Tuesday March 25, 2008 @08:07AM (#22855478) Attached to: Does It Suck To Be An Engineering Student?

The intensity and challenge of an engineering course is actually a big part of why I enjoy mine. The part about the course being harder may well be true; judging from the people I know who take non-engineering courses definitely seem to be stuck working a lot less than I do, but then, I do not think they enjoy their education to the same extent as me. I feel that I am lucky study something I really enjoy.

On the other hand, we have had some subjects that I absolutely could not become interested in, and these are also the harder ones to get good grades in. I get fairly decent grades in the subjects that are close to my heart. It is easier to get motivation to work with them, and I seem to have developed a bit of intuition for them. I read a lot, but I could never have studied literature. I know a fair bit about history, but I could never have studied it. There's no doubt about there being a rather big workload on an engineering course, but I feel that I've ended up doing something I was meant for. That's worth spending time on. This is a comforting thought whenever I feel that I have more work than I have time.

And also, I'm fine with engineering courses being stricter on grades than other courses, if that is indeed true. It wouldn't do if anyone could be put in charge of building a bridge that thousands of people would drive across every year. Or if anyone could be put in charge of designing an airplane. My point here is that competence is very, very important in a lot of the jobs that engineers get. That there are large differences in the grades is a good thing. I doubt anyone would die over a bad book, or a bad movie, but a bad plane or a bad bridge may well kill a lot of people.

I also wish to add that the I respect 'the soft majors', and I know a lot of smart people who take these courses, and I even know a guy who studies philosophy but would probably get great grades in a computer science course. That is, if they study these courses because they are interested in them, not because they want to waste 5 years at an university before they grow up for real.

Python 3.0 To Be Backwards Incompatible 438

Posted by kdawson on Friday February 01, 2008 @01:21PM from the it's-broke-jim dept.

Stony Stevenson writes "Organizations using Python will be affected in a major way by changes in store for the language over the course of the next twelve months, Linux.conf.au attendees were told this morning. The Python development community is working towards a new, backwards-incompatible version of the language, version 3.0, which is slated for release in early 2009. Anthony Baxter, the release manager for Python and a senior software engineer at Google Australia, said "We are going to break pretty much all the code. Pretty much every program will need changes." Baxter also added another tidbit for attendees, saying that Python accounts for around 15 percent of Google's code base."

Vint Cerf on Why TCP/IP Was So Long in Coming 83

Posted by Zonk on Wednesday January 30, 2008 @04:01PM from the we-built-this-city-on-ip-and-stone dept.

whitehartstag writes "TCP/IP is 25 years old this year. Vint Cerf says there was a long development cycle for both TCP/IP and for X.25, and we'd have been using TCP/IP much sooner if TCP/IP had been more marketable. 'Over the years, we can come up with many examples both of where the best technology did (or did not) win and of how marketing has defined a service. For example, many of the "best" features of frame relay, such as the ability to use Switched Virtual Circuits (SVC) in addition to Permanent Virtual Circuits (PVC) were never widely marketed because the pricing was too complex. Rather, the PVC was a simple replacement for a leased line at a fraction of the cost with better performance.'"

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