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- Do a design on paper before you open an editor.

I think I've been taught the opposite by forcing me to draw a schema for all my "Hello world!"/"Let's add two numbers" projects. Teaching ADA basics would help :>

- Don't get addicted to caffeine

Of course... and we shouldn't do allnighters either, and everything should be done before the deadline, and the customer should be happy the first time they see a working app...

I really don't know what is covered in USA colleges. I'm from PUT and CS here covers a bit of everything: algorithmic/math skills(including continuous and discrete math, statistics and the probabilistic theory), computer basics (from basic RLC electronics through programming 8080's by hand to parallel programming and OS inner workings), database basics (mostly Oracle SQL + db theory), lots of different programming languages (asm,C,C++,Java,Prolog,Pascal/Delphi, LISP basics) and some other stuff including computer graphics(mostly OpenGL + how to write a basic software 3D engine), typography (how to properly format our documentation)...

And there's the final project for our BSc/engineer degree, which is not "like a real-life project" it is a real-life project (companies order some kind of software from PUT, and we cover everything from customer interaction to small scale deployment), thankfully the customers are usually already experienced so the specifications reflect the expectations.

We learn to use SVN/CVS, debuggers and other programming tools by the way, when writing our projects.

It is not common knowledge, and stats mean more than quoting a wikipedia article(which doesn't state postgres performs better, it states performance is "comparable"). My understanding of the "common knowledge" is that mysql offers better performance, postgres has better sql standard compliance and more features. Common knowledge would dictate that more features would slow down performance. For instance, extra data integrity checks every time inserts, updates or deletes are performed would be an extra feature, but it would come at the expense of speed.

You are just propagating myths - how about real comparisons of performance, like these?

http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/wiki/index.php/Mysql _vs_postgres (mysql tested faster)

http://www-css.fnal.gov/dsg/external/freeware/pgsq l-vs-mysql.html (mysql tested faster)

I'm not a MySQL fanboy or anything, but I totally agree. There must be a reason why major, database-heavy sites like Slashdot or Wikipedia are based on MySQL.

Here is an interesting link.

http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/wiki/index.php/Mysql _vs_postgres

CREATE TABLE a ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, number INT NOT NULL, category VARCHAR(10), description VARCHAR(255) );
INSERT INTO a VALUES ( . . . );
SELECT * FROM a;
SELECT * FROM a ORDER BY 4;
DELETE FROM a;

For that kind of a uber-simple benchmark, I'd say that a plaintext file would have clearly won.

At least do some JOINs, they exist in every database using application I've ever seen, bar those created for MySQL which doesn't really support JOINs very efficiently.

there is a short (decent) comparison at this url.
From my point of view (web application developer, Ozone framework author and the author of a few rich-content websites I can say for sure: I am more than happy to discover PostgreSQL. Why? More Oracle-like, transactions, nested transactions, views, sql-schema... I doubt MySQL 5.0 will come even close to the standard of PosgtreSQL.
Some can say MySQL is fast. No, it is not. When you run more than 100 users at once PostgreSQL is faster. MySQL has stupid table-locking mechanism that decreases performance significantly under high load.
I would say: PostgreSQL seems to be slower, is not perfectly optimized, but much better goals in its design were used. And one of the goals ic SQL conformance. MySQL is FAR from the SQL standard.
If you want to migrate from MySQL to e.g. Oracle - it is a pain. But PG is much closer to it.
IMHO PostgreSQL is an industry-standard database and we use it for almost every project now. We have used MySQL some time ago and believe me - the difference is huuuuuge. PG is a real database. MySQL seems like a table-managing-application ;-)

best regards - michal

traffic map of polish educational backbone. 10 gbit/s in most cities.

you should really check out framsticks.

you can even see the current generation walk or crawl in 3d.
one of the coolest programs ever

some screenshots here

you should really check out framsticks.

you can even see the current generation walk or crawl in 3d.
one of the coolest programs ever

some screenshots here

A milliondollar supercomputer isn't necessary to run a genetic algorithm; you can get amazing results with only 2GHz to play with.

That first video on his site reminds me of a couple programs I've seen that do this sort of stick evolution. IIRC, the programs also have a distributed computing type function where they exchange what they evolve with other clients. If anyone's interested:

Framsticks

They're fun programs to try out. Framsticks is still under active development but the Golem Project is no more. Although I believe you can still download the last Golem client from their website.

Both sites should contain relevant articles/research on stick evolution for anybody who wants to learn more.

This is a pretty cool experiment in ALife/Evolution/etc. And it's got pretty 3d graphics & physics, too

Framsticks

Some of the people who believe this is not a form of evolution might find this program helps to explain how it works. Seems like evolution to me. Just because in the article the body was pre-designed, doesn't mean the mind wasn't evolved.

Sometimes we cannot avoid lower-bitrate mp3s (such as those from mp3.com). However, there are some decent xmms plugins designed to improve playback of audio. You might want to check out the Crystality Plugin. It seems to give me quite a boost in quality on my sound hardware (Altec Lansing ACS295).

http://www.frams.poznan.pl/

Both interesting and beautiful.
--

It's interesting playing with programs that evolve. After a while, you begin to realize that there seems to be an upper limit to what you can get with genetic algorithms. Roughly, it's optimization, yes; progress, no. Fairly soon you get all the things that are easy to find, but you never seem to get big improvements, because those require a set of favorable mutations to happen all at once. The odds against this are huge, so it doesn't happen. This is comparable to what biologists see; organisms vary and evolve, but within limits. Biologists assume that once in a great while there's a big change that's an improvement, but it hasn't been observed. As I once told the genetic algorithm group at Stanford, we're missing something important here, and whomever figures this one out will get a Nobel prize.

I have no idea what the answer to that one is, but it probably involves something in a genome that works like a subroutine, macro, rule, or template, so you don't have to re-evolve an improvement to reuse it. John Koza at Stanford has genetic algorithms with subroutines, but they didn't do as much as had been hoped.

As a pure speculation, and one that's heretical biologically, it's worth thinking about the possibility that biological evolution was Lamarkian in the era after viruses but before immune systems, and that's why there was a period during which lots of new species emerged.