I'm sold. Based on your experience, would this course be approachable for self-study by individuals without 3 years of CS education? The MIT page[1] suggests the intended audience for the class are seniors and graduate students (M.Eng and PhD).

[1] http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2012/general.html

In my opinion, the 3 years of CS has more to do with age of the student than actual learning. With a requisite level of maturity, this should not be a problem.

I wish I'd studied xv6 in my early teens. It would've answered many of my inexperienced questions and served as a guide for how to write quality code and architect large systems.

For what it's worth, I was able to learn xv6 just by working hard to understand everything fully. Effort seems to matter more than prerequisites. Plus it was a fun challenge.

Also, please feel free to email me (sillysaurus2 at gmail) if I can be of assistance to anyone, e.g. by talking about some nuance of unix architecture or about anything at all. Intensive self-study can sometimes feel overwhelming, so feel free to message me for encouragement.

Are SCIFs terrible work environments for software developers specifically or does that assessment apply to other roles in the same environment? What made it so terrible?

Reading about the "conference table technique" was a bit too specific and caused me to promptly close the tab.

I vividly remember reading that several years ago when it was first put online someplace. o_O

CTRL+F didn't find it. Which one is it?

At the very bottom of the document (complete with diagrams, no less).

Too specific for what? Was it used in an actual political assassination?

Using peer pressure to encourage others into working all night without pay can be called "pizza parties", "hackathons", or even plain old "exploitation". Tomato, tuhmahto. --- EDIT: Added clarification

Wasn't Microsoft Research working on a technology similar to the 'hyperphoto'? It collated numerous photographs of the same location and allowed the viewer to navigate through multiple dimensions of the space.

You mean this: http://photosynth.net/

based on this: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/Ph...