It's worth pointing out the the HP49/50 series CAS has a "step by step" mode that usually outputs enough intermediate steps to satisfy a lazy calculus teacher. It will inform the user when it is performing a substitution, though I believe the user is still required to tell the calculator when to use integration by parts.
The big problem with standardizing on a specific calculator model is that it makes it too transparently obvious that the test isn't properly testing any of the skills and knowledge that the class is supposed to impart in the first place. The test is no longer about math, it is about a calculator. Scores then reflect how efficiently and accurately students can perform certain algorithms with the calculator, with a woefully small contribution from identifying which algorithm the problem calls for. From such a test, it is really a small step to remove the student entirely. It just looks bad to do that.
What non-free (as in payware) TI software are you referring to? The software to transfer apps to the calculator has always been free with the appropriate hardware, and I've always gotten the impression that verified teachers can get calculator simulators for free from TI. As for on-calculator applications, TI does sell some, but only to a very very tiny fraction of their userbase, and it seems that most people who have such apps get them bundled with special edition calculators.
Any decent math curriculum is going to require students to occasionally move beyond symbolic manipulation and use some concrete numbers. It is necessary for students to generally know what numbers to expect to come out of the square root, logarithm, and trigonometric functions. However, asking students to use slide rules and to look up values in tables on a regular basis is a cruel waste of their time.
Re:That's because HP calculators are too powerful.
on
TI vs. Calculator Hackers
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· Score: 2, Informative
While math classes like calculus and ODEs typically ban calculators from tests, there are still all kinds of chemistry, physics, and engineering classes where a 50g is both allowed and incredibly useful for homework and tests. More than any other feature, the efficient units system in the 50g really helped me in physics and was a great check that my calculations were correct.
Students still need calculators, and handheld technology is progressing as fast as ever. Graphing calculators these days are just low-end pdas with keyboards and smaller screens. If anything, it's easier for graphing calculators to differentiate themselves these days. For example, HP's graphing calculators include ARM processors and SD slots while TI is still using 68k and Z80. On the other hand, the TI-89 has a much higher resolution screen than any HP.
The TI calculator division is all about placating teachers and standardized testing agencies. If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.
It's not TI that's the control freaks - it's the teachers.
The impressive part of this isn't the 3d reconstruction (that's been done many times before, though perhaps not on this scale), it's that they've done it with such a disorganized, incomplete data set as flikr. Using Google Street View data (particularly with the locations already known) would be computationally much easier, but requires paying people to drive around with cameras on the roof.
What if you're running two applications that both are capable of monopolizing all your cpu time? How will your app know that it's only going to get 50% of the available cpu time form the OS, so it should only start threads for half the cpus?
GCD decides how many threads a collection of tasks should be split across. If an app running on an 8-core machine wants to run 100 tasks, then they could be spread across anywhere from 1 to 8 threads, depending on what else is running. Since it's the OS that knows what else is running, it can make more intelligent decisions about how many threads should be running.
Blocks are the closest C will probably ever get to first-class functions. They're close enough that you can reap most of the benefits of first class functions.
Considering that the whole point of Snow Leopard was to refine the internal structure of the operating system and introduce new features for developers, it should come as no surprise that there are far more/. appropriate stories about it than the more eye-candy oriented releases.
Did you think that Moore's law would apply to solid-state accelerometers? Most of the cost of an Xbox 360 or PS3 came from the high-end CPUs and GPUs, whereas the Wii's chipset was already at rock-bottom price. Also, Nintendo doesn't sell their stuff at a loss.
If you care about emphasis surviving conversion to plain text, why not just break down and use ASCII art to indent the paragraph and put a box around it? That wouldn't have to kill readability, but it could make the paragraph very conspicuous.
According to the code you cite, bold, italic, colored, or merely larger are all acceptable ways to make a section conspicuous, whereas the only mention of all caps is for headings. There is no technological justification for using all caps for body text that is required to be emphasized, and it could be said that doing so is actually rather nefarious, given that all caps is second only to poor color choice as a way to make text both noticeable and unreadable.
If we just wanted people to be away from the rest of us we'd send them on vacation. Instead we send them to prison, which is supposed to act as a deterrent, and it's not a deterrent if it isn't a shitty place to be.
We send them to prison because Australia got a military.
Prisons don't need to be degrading to be deterrent. A reasonable amount of forced labor, combined with the inherent lack of freedom, should be sufficient. (And if certain other comments are accurate, then it is sufficient when properly implemented.)
What is it about the words "cruel and unusual punishments" that is so hard for you to fathom?
Prisons aren't about punishments or retribution or degradation. They're about removing criminals from the society they threaten, and rehabilitating them if possible.
How we treat our inmates reflects more on us than on them. If we have no qualms about doing things to inmates for the express purpose of stripping them of their dignity and humanity, it is because we have already lost ours.
That county has the lowest rate of repeat offenders. They know that his jail is hell and they definitely don't want to go back there.
is not sufficient to justify this claim:
Joe Arpaio treats criminals the way they should be treated.
His methods may work, but they are almost certainly harsher than they need to be, and possibly excessively so (which would make them unconstitutional). The fact his questionable methods are tolerated is interesting, given that Americans like to cling to the concept of a "moral high ground", which you can't really do when you can't even confidently state that your actions are legal, let alone moral. Only slightly less interesting are the parallels between Arpaio's reign and the Bush administration's torture policy.
In other words, it could be that Ruby and Python developers tend to have odd work-weeks that aren't the standard Mon-Fri boring crap.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that is even remotely possible as an explanation? Sure, TFA isn't a rigorous analysis, but that doesn't mean that it's interpretation of the data isn't reasonable (particularly because it is a reasonable conclusion). Nor does the existence of unreasonable interpretations such as yours devalue the submitter's interpretation. If you actually RTFA, you see that he only claims that the data supports his hypothesis. He does not claim to reject any other hypothesis (despite acknowledging their existence and even soliciting them), and he does not claim that his analysis proves his hypothesis. (The summary pretty much does, but we can hardly hold that against the author of TFA without knowing what the editors did to the submission.)
... if I were to turn in a pdf of my LaTeX compiled work, I believe my boss just might shoot me.
Why is that? If the document isn't meant to be collaboratively edited but is technical enough or complex enough that LaTeX is the best way to prepare it, then a PDF should be fine. If, on the other hand, the document is meant to be edited frequently by many people, somebody should explain to your boss that Word isn't really very good for that, either. The only common circumstance I can think of where your boss would really have cause to shoot you is if you obfuscate even the simplest document in LaTeX.
Python is far too popular for that argument to work anymore. If Google has no trouble finding smart people who know Python, then it probably won't be hard enough for you to find them to justify letting that influence the choice of language. Besides, can you really risk forcing your programmers to use a less suitable language in order to possibly reduce maintenance costs in the future? Don't cripple version 1 for the sake of (possibly) making it easier to get from version 1 to version 2.
Which edition of the Dragon book are you referring to? The original one is just a compilers book from the 1980's, and it probably not a good reference for a discussion of modern dynamic languages, as non-static typing and weakly typed languages were beyond the scope of a traditional compilers course back then. If the new edition of the Dragon book (which covers JIT, garbage collection, and other concepts that have reached the mainstream since the 80's) still conflates static typing and strong typing, then you might have a case.
Most of those are beyond the comprehension of the typical Java programmer, or at least, they can't see why they would be particularly useful. Hence why Java has gone so long without them. It is only in that past few years, with the JVM being clearly established as an important platform independent of the Java language, that there's been demand for support for things like that in the JVM and by extension in the lingua franca of the JVM.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth pointing out the the HP49/50 series CAS has a "step by step" mode that usually outputs enough intermediate steps to satisfy a lazy calculus teacher. It will inform the user when it is performing a substitution, though I believe the user is still required to tell the calculator when to use integration by parts.
The big problem with standardizing on a specific calculator model is that it makes it too transparently obvious that the test isn't properly testing any of the skills and knowledge that the class is supposed to impart in the first place. The test is no longer about math, it is about a calculator. Scores then reflect how efficiently and accurately students can perform certain algorithms with the calculator, with a woefully small contribution from identifying which algorithm the problem calls for. From such a test, it is really a small step to remove the student entirely. It just looks bad to do that.
What non-free (as in payware) TI software are you referring to? The software to transfer apps to the calculator has always been free with the appropriate hardware, and I've always gotten the impression that verified teachers can get calculator simulators for free from TI. As for on-calculator applications, TI does sell some, but only to a very very tiny fraction of their userbase, and it seems that most people who have such apps get them bundled with special edition calculators.
Any decent math curriculum is going to require students to occasionally move beyond symbolic manipulation and use some concrete numbers. It is necessary for students to generally know what numbers to expect to come out of the square root, logarithm, and trigonometric functions. However, asking students to use slide rules and to look up values in tables on a regular basis is a cruel waste of their time.
While math classes like calculus and ODEs typically ban calculators from tests, there are still all kinds of chemistry, physics, and engineering classes where a 50g is both allowed and incredibly useful for homework and tests. More than any other feature, the efficient units system in the 50g really helped me in physics and was a great check that my calculations were correct.
Students still need calculators, and handheld technology is progressing as fast as ever. Graphing calculators these days are just low-end pdas with keyboards and smaller screens. If anything, it's easier for graphing calculators to differentiate themselves these days. For example, HP's graphing calculators include ARM processors and SD slots while TI is still using 68k and Z80. On the other hand, the TI-89 has a much higher resolution screen than any HP.
The TI calculator division is all about placating teachers and standardized testing agencies. If it's too easy to install custom software in a relatively undetectable fashion, then the calculators won't be approved for testing and classroom use.
It's not TI that's the control freaks - it's the teachers.
The impressive part of this isn't the 3d reconstruction (that's been done many times before, though perhaps not on this scale), it's that they've done it with such a disorganized, incomplete data set as flikr. Using Google Street View data (particularly with the locations already known) would be computationally much easier, but requires paying people to drive around with cameras on the roof.
What if you're running two applications that both are capable of monopolizing all your cpu time? How will your app know that it's only going to get 50% of the available cpu time form the OS, so it should only start threads for half the cpus?
GCD decides how many threads a collection of tasks should be split across. If an app running on an 8-core machine wants to run 100 tasks, then they could be spread across anywhere from 1 to 8 threads, depending on what else is running. Since it's the OS that knows what else is running, it can make more intelligent decisions about how many threads should be running.
Blocks are the closest C will probably ever get to first-class functions. They're close enough that you can reap most of the benefits of first class functions.
There are plenty of ARM processors with a great MIPS/W rating. Just not a great FLOPS/W rating, which is what keeps them out of supercomputers.
A precedent is still a precedent even if it's not legally binding.
Considering that the whole point of Snow Leopard was to refine the internal structure of the operating system and introduce new features for developers, it should come as no surprise that there are far more /. appropriate stories about it than the more eye-candy oriented releases.
Did you think that Moore's law would apply to solid-state accelerometers? Most of the cost of an Xbox 360 or PS3 came from the high-end CPUs and GPUs, whereas the Wii's chipset was already at rock-bottom price. Also, Nintendo doesn't sell their stuff at a loss.
If you care about emphasis surviving conversion to plain text, why not just break down and use ASCII art to indent the paragraph and put a box around it? That wouldn't have to kill readability, but it could make the paragraph very conspicuous.
According to the code you cite, bold, italic, colored, or merely larger are all acceptable ways to make a section conspicuous, whereas the only mention of all caps is for headings. There is no technological justification for using all caps for body text that is required to be emphasized, and it could be said that doing so is actually rather nefarious, given that all caps is second only to poor color choice as a way to make text both noticeable and unreadable.
If we just wanted people to be away from the rest of us we'd send them on vacation. Instead we send them to prison, which is supposed to act as a deterrent, and it's not a deterrent if it isn't a shitty place to be.
We send them to prison because Australia got a military.
Prisons don't need to be degrading to be deterrent. A reasonable amount of forced labor, combined with the inherent lack of freedom, should be sufficient. (And if certain other comments are accurate, then it is sufficient when properly implemented.)
What is it about the words "cruel and unusual punishments" that is so hard for you to fathom?
Prisons aren't about punishments or retribution or degradation. They're about removing criminals from the society they threaten, and rehabilitating them if possible.
How we treat our inmates reflects more on us than on them. If we have no qualms about doing things to inmates for the express purpose of stripping them of their dignity and humanity, it is because we have already lost ours.
Some Americans actually agree with what's inscribed on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.
This:
That county has the lowest rate of repeat offenders. They know that his jail is hell and they definitely don't want to go back there.
is not sufficient to justify this claim:
Joe Arpaio treats criminals the way they should be treated.
His methods may work, but they are almost certainly harsher than they need to be, and possibly excessively so (which would make them unconstitutional). The fact his questionable methods are tolerated is interesting, given that Americans like to cling to the concept of a "moral high ground", which you can't really do when you can't even confidently state that your actions are legal, let alone moral. Only slightly less interesting are the parallels between Arpaio's reign and the Bush administration's torture policy.
In other words, it could be that Ruby and Python developers tend to have odd work-weeks that aren't the standard Mon-Fri boring crap.
Do you have any evidence to suggest that is even remotely possible as an explanation? Sure, TFA isn't a rigorous analysis, but that doesn't mean that it's interpretation of the data isn't reasonable (particularly because it is a reasonable conclusion). Nor does the existence of unreasonable interpretations such as yours devalue the submitter's interpretation. If you actually RTFA, you see that he only claims that the data supports his hypothesis. He does not claim to reject any other hypothesis (despite acknowledging their existence and even soliciting them), and he does not claim that his analysis proves his hypothesis. (The summary pretty much does, but we can hardly hold that against the author of TFA without knowing what the editors did to the submission.)
... if I were to turn in a pdf of my LaTeX compiled work, I believe my boss just might shoot me.
Why is that? If the document isn't meant to be collaboratively edited but is technical enough or complex enough that LaTeX is the best way to prepare it, then a PDF should be fine. If, on the other hand, the document is meant to be edited frequently by many people, somebody should explain to your boss that Word isn't really very good for that, either. The only common circumstance I can think of where your boss would really have cause to shoot you is if you obfuscate even the simplest document in LaTeX.
Python is far too popular for that argument to work anymore. If Google has no trouble finding smart people who know Python, then it probably won't be hard enough for you to find them to justify letting that influence the choice of language. Besides, can you really risk forcing your programmers to use a less suitable language in order to possibly reduce maintenance costs in the future? Don't cripple version 1 for the sake of (possibly) making it easier to get from version 1 to version 2.
Which edition of the Dragon book are you referring to? The original one is just a compilers book from the 1980's, and it probably not a good reference for a discussion of modern dynamic languages, as non-static typing and weakly typed languages were beyond the scope of a traditional compilers course back then. If the new edition of the Dragon book (which covers JIT, garbage collection, and other concepts that have reached the mainstream since the 80's) still conflates static typing and strong typing, then you might have a case.
Most of those are beyond the comprehension of the typical Java programmer, or at least, they can't see why they would be particularly useful. Hence why Java has gone so long without them. It is only in that past few years, with the JVM being clearly established as an important platform independent of the Java language, that there's been demand for support for things like that in the JVM and by extension in the lingua franca of the JVM.