Started running this week, and - checks pulse - I'm not dead yet. Might start to weight lift once I move back into my apartment, a friend of mine runs a weight lifting club. Depends on whether I can find the time. This week I also got most of my grades back from Canada, and if I'm correct I got 90s on three courses and 80% on the fourth. Couldn't be more happy! AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT: 'People' always say they wish they'd started saving up and investing when they were in their early twenties. If all goes to plan I will graduate without student debt and with something left next year. Would it be smart to start investing / looking for investment options before I even enter the work force? edit: I'm working on a data thing for kleinbl00. Which means I'm manipulating >500mb of data in an application that doesn't yet support multi-core processing... :
It would be smart to keep your cash liquid because you might need to eat it for a while. No aspersions cast on your talent, but when real unemployment for college grads is over one in four, having a cushion allows you to think more strategically. I haven't been able to run in like a week and it's f'ing killing me. Stupid head cold.
Trust me: as someone working for a university that manages a GIS lab, please, for the love of god, learn both. The amount of time, money, and effort we put into maintaining the ArcGIS software is absolutely staggering. I am a huge proponent of FOSS, so I put qGIS on everything. Hopefully (I actually know they do) students use both and learn them alongside each other, eventually contributing to q more so it improves more, and leads to more open software being used in engineering fields. If I die knowing AutoDesk and ESRI died because the FOSS equivalents of their software were better and preferred, I will die a happy man.
I can only imagine your pain. Had some license problems myself and they're a pain to solve. I do intend to learn it, if only to have it in my skillset. But I've been putting it off because I wasn't much impressed the last time I tried it. It's been more than a year, though, so I might as well check it out again. Do you have some quality resources to get to know qGIS? P.S. I'm contemplating upgrading my PC to make it beefier for ArcGIS 10.3 and up, what do you recommend? Currently have an i5 2500k and AMD HD6950. Do you think they'll add multicore / GPU rendering to 'regular' ArcGIS soon or will they keep it locked in the new ArcGIS Pro?
Knowing ESRI, they'll keep it locked. But I haven't been up on their updates lately outside of what we get, so you could be in luck on that front. But as for upgrading, you probably don't need to much of the GPU side of things. If you're upgrading anyway, I'd say go for it so you have something fun to play with if you're into gaming. CPU is what you really want to focus on. I wasn't sure if an i5 2500k would be enough for what you're working with, but that is fairly low powered among what I've worked with, so I decided to look up some opinions and came across this absolutely fantastic comment from a GIS Consultant on reddit about all of his suggestions. As someone else said in the thread though, definitely go for an SSD if you can. That just makes things worlds better.
Saved the comment! I built my own gaming rig in 2011. At the time, Battlefield 3 just came out, and I can still run that on the max settings. It's still holding up pretty great as a gaming rig after 3.5 years. But there's a chance I might go into this, a 2-year GIS master, where you work mainly from home running GIS. Still, I love the SSD in my laptop, so I'm definitely gonna look into that.