1. Remember that you will probably not graduate with a 4.0. Your first C is going to hurt, especially if you were an A student in high school. Just keep going.
2. Don't worry about the impact of switching majors or programs. I started my school in the computer engineering program, hated it ~2.5 years in, and switched around a bit. I'm now graduating with a degree in pure mathematics. Study what you love -- the jobs will come.
I'm afraid I'm starting to ramble, so let me get to the main point -- what you study means nothing after you graduate. Where you study means (almost) nothing. What matters is who you meet along the way, and your actual accomplishments while in university.
Study what you love. Meet facility, upperclassmen, and other students. Work on writing something cool and useful. You will get more out of school than if you spent your time grinding for a perfect GPA.
I think that's focusing in the wrong direction. The costs involved set a high-enough barrier for the first world, let alone impoverished countries.
The focus should be on simplifying the technology these communities need and making it more robust, as well as showing people in the community how to repair and maintain it.
Not to mention that this technology would represent another point of failure -- sure, you could print out parts for the well, but what happens when the roof over the printer fails and everything gets soaked by a monsoon.
Thing is, the 'printers' are expensive but getting much cheaper, and the materials are very cheap. It's not a panacea by any means, but a versatile low-volume manufacturing facility might have greater value than a specialized high volume one in places with mediocre industrial and commercial infrastructure.
I see your point 100%, but these are basically the same arguments people made about cellphones and they turned out to be better option than trying to deploy the simple and robust technology of landlines. I suggest ad-hoc communication and manufacturing technology may be the best thing in an ad-hoc economy.
>A versatile low-volume manufacturing facility might have greater value than a specialized high volume one in places with mediocre industrial and commercial infrastructure.
I would imagine you are correct. However, conventional manufacturing practices are not solely high volume operations, and can be implemented with fewer resources.
>[T]hese are basically the same arguments people made about
cellphones and they turned out to be better option than trying to deploy the simple and robust technology of landlines.
Cellphones don't cost $15k per village, nor do they require training to use special computer programs, or a constant supply of raw materials.
If they did, you can bet that they wouldn't turn out to be a better option ;)
>I suggest ad-hoc communication and manufacturing technology may be the best thing in an ad-hoc economy.
I agree, provided the technology becomes sufficiently inexpensive and robust.
But for today, use that cash to leave the community with an extra pallet of parts, instruction on how to maintain the well, and the rest to educate the people.
Ultimately, I share your optimistic view. The technology will be there someday. We just can't force it in the meantime.
> Cellphones don't cost $15k per village, nor do they require training to use special computer programs, or a constant supply of raw materials.
Really? How much does a cell tower, a reliable power supply for same, etc cost? For widely spaced villages, I'd certainly think this cost would be well over $15K per village. Hell, I can't put a 50K sq ft office building size, cell phone repeater system in for $15K.
(I'd expect widely spaced villages would be the common case in areas where cell deployment is cheaper than copper lines.)
The cost and simplicity argument is a valid one. On the other hand the reality is already a different one: People in Africa use mobile phones much more than we in the West. Even banking is managed via cell phones. So 3d printers might allow the to leap frog the industrial society stage. It's the same with alternative energy: They don't need nuclear power plants down there, solar and wind is often enough.
If Facebook exposes your account information to everyone when your friends tag you in their photos, and you have tagged photos set private, that's a definite leak of data.
However, if memory serves, Facebook does not link back to your account if friends tag you in their photos, and you have tagged photos marked as private.
I may misunderstand your problem, but I fail to see where Facebook is leaking any information.
>It's good to understand this - High School and continued education matter, because nobody is getting a good union job at the factory any more.
I think that's a very important distinction that you have mentioned.
There will always be positions for skilled professionals. I'd go one step beyond that and say that there will also always be positions for unskilled workers in fields that must remain local - construction, food preparation, etc.
Other unskilled workers need to be careful -- white or blue collar.
Timely article, after I (a mechanically disinclined person) just replaced the thermostat on my '93 Camry -- a simple job for most, but hard for me. And a very interesting read.
>The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.
I think that most programmers can agree that mastering programming is much of the same -- struggling with and finally mastering the known - and unknown - limitations of the tools we are using. In that regard, we are doing exactly what the mechanic does.
You could rightly argue that the knowledge the mechanic gets can be applied in far more places -- bolts hold the world together, and understanding how to properly loosen one can come in handy. That tricky LDAP bug I solved yesterday doesn't apply to many other places.
The article goes on to discuss the process of rebuilding an engine -- an intricate, hands on task. But the description also points to the mental problem solving that takes place. The mechanic must have a mental model of an engine, so that seeing a small distortion or a slight bend raises an alarm of future problems. Programmers use those same mental models on a daily basis.
My father always says that you don't pay a mechanic to fix your car. You pay a mechanic for their knowledge - their ability to recognize odd operating conditions, their ability to know the internal processes and figure out where the system is failing. That's a good mechanic, and that sounds like a good programmer to me.
I'm not trying to claim that all programmers could be good mechanics, or that the opposite is true -- I almost needed a good mechanic to replace my thermostat, and that's about as simple as it gets! I just think that much more overlap exists between these fields than we might believe.
>Apple did not invent the phone, mp3 player, video player, application store, etc. They just perfected and skillfully crafted hypes around them. Microsoft did not invent the Office suite, IDE's or the hardware acceleration layer, but they did perfect and deploy them through aggressive business strategies.
Is your claim that a company must invent something from whole cloth to be "innovative"?
No, but that's not how they run their business. You shouldn't expect Microsoft or Apple to be innovative, you should expect them to make a better product than everyone else and/or market it better than everyone else.
Amazon.com did invent Cloud Computing, Philips did invent the CD, Sun did invent Java, Toyota did invent the hybrid, AT&T did invent the cell phone, Xerox did invent the GUI. Those are the companies that run on innovation.
A refinement on Doug Engelbart's work at SRI. (Edit: Though many of the researchers working for him later went to PARC, I find no evidence that Engelbart himself ever did.)
Now here's the real question. If inventing a new type of laserdisc that's five inches wide is innovation, why isn't inventing a GUI-based computer system that costs half as much as a Star and a third as much as a Lisa? If inventing a new object oriented language with C style syntax is an innovation, why isn't inventing a smartphone with a multitouch screen and unprecedented amounts of storage space?
Off topic of the main thread, but isn't the attack mentioned in that post still problematic if you can't reliably act as a MITM for a whole session, but you can disrupt the session long enough to confuse both sides into agreeing on an insecure session key?
If you can manipulate a DH exchange, you definitely have bigger problems than forgetting to check DH parameters. It's worth noting that DH is one of those crypto building blocks that by itself provides basically no security (for instance, DH in SSL/TLS is secure because it's backed by an RSA trust anchor). It's just a tool for making other crypto primitives more flexible.
Agreed. Still, I can't decipher the IKE spec, but does it really prevent this - i.e. do any of the other building blocks actually prevent the conversation from continuing using a compromised shared key?
