How much math does that involve? Split up the things that can be done in parallel and throw more horsepower at it.
This was not summing a bunch of numbers. It was behavioral analysis. Math way beyond my understanding and yet I was very good at calculus and linear algebra in college. They were doing mostly statistical stuff. I couldn't even read the formulas.
It wasn't a research job; it was a for profit business. And the algorithms delt with processing massive quantities of response data: 100 million records and billions of transactions and that was only a months's worth of data. We were worked on increasing that to 6 months.
There were three types of jobs related to this processing. Yes, one was a pure research type of job but the others were not.
#1. Created pure theory and developing analytic algorithms. High level math degree required.
#2. Understood, read, and made suggestions for optimizing analytic algorithms. Implemented algorithms in code. Math degree required.
#3. Implemented support modules. Needed a general understanding of analytic algorithms. Math degree not required but desired.
Of course we also had a 4th code monkey type (admin web developer), but they were no where near the pay scale of the 3 I listed.
By the way, the original algorithm processed 8 million users, hundreds of millions of transactions in about 12 hours. After we rewrote major portions, it was doing 100 million users, billions of transactions in about 8-10 hours using a high end massively parallel database as well as dozens of linux data processing hosts.
Your comment makes sense, but my previous job goes against what you said.
Performance and business analytics require math. A lot of it. After our initial puny attempts, the company went out and hired people with master's and doctorate degrees in math and the analytics has become a lot more accurate and complex.
If I were just starting out in CS, I'd get the 2nd degree in math. It's easy to generate data. It's hard to analyze it.
Rather than talk about the number of columns in a flat file, I think the issue should be more about why we are still using flat files to write source code in the first place. Why are we still doing this? Why not a programming mark up language akin to way that HTML is a presentation language?
A flat file is essentially a block of code and in every project you'll find it uses multiple files to create sets of blocks of code that when compiled together produces an executable.
I see no logical difference between these blocks of code stored as separate flat source files and HTML files. Each permit cross referencing and inclusion of other blocks of code from other files or sources:
#include/require/use/import/function/class versus frame/iframe/img/script/link/object/background.
Both of those methodologies merge together separate files, compile them, and produce a single form of output: an executable file or a rendered canvas in your browser.
Multiple input files -> compilation -> single output
Your comment makes the assumption that marked up files are somehow different from source code files (let's say C++ or Java files). They're very similar in the process. It's in the technical details where they differ: the language grammar and what problem the language is designed to solve.
If you were to say "ahh, but the real difference is cross referencing over the open internet", well the corollary with a compiled language is launching an external process, using a remote procedure call, or communicating with a proprietary protocol using a socket.
In that way people could display code to their preferences and this entire issue would be moot.
They can if your application supports skins or embeds an HTML engine inside it.
I'm not concerned about other developers having to get used to reading a long line format (>80 cols). A good programmer can read code in any type of commonly used format. The ones who bitch are the ones who can't be flexible, however I find excessively wrapped lines to be the most obnoxious format anyway.
My co-workers just have to deal with it. Their screen size is the same as mine so tough cookies. Since they commonly insert code into my stuff breaking my format such as inserting 2-space indented code inside my 4-space indented code, I have less reason to respect their 80-column formatting.
I also don't use multiple windows so I don't stack side by side. I just maximize my shell to full size and run screen. Usually I have 5 to 20 shells running under it. screen is definitely the most underrated application there is. I find it far better to flip 2 files on top of each other instead of comparing side by side, because your eyes don't have to move as far. Plus you don't lose your scroll buffer when your shell or PC hiccups.
Getting back to the topic. The 80 column requirement is absolutely retarded in my mind. Should we code using monocrome monitors because that's how it used to be? Uhh. No thanks. Besides, I don't buy the printing argument. I can print files >80 cols using a smaller font, which is easier to read anyway. You can also print in landscape orientation. The only time I've found a need to print source code is for code reviews, which none of the companies I've worked for did or did right. They were small high-pressure "push the code now!" type of companies, and I know a lot of other companies still operate that way so coding standards are low on their priority list. And no, those companies I worked for will not change their business model to suit your expectation of CMM > 1.
I just hope that if at the last minute if they decide to become "the good guys" that the collective voice of humanity calls BS. They have gone way to far, far to long.
The industry collective is kind of like a thinking entity. It sees new technology and new media channels and it's scared. It wants everything to stay the same--stay stable. Maintain the status quo to avoid disruptive change.
I guess the current young crop of musician wannabes will just have to give up those crazy dreams, cut their hair, and get an office job. No one left to rage against "the man". Nothing but musak in the elevators.
The RIAA owns the copyrights on recordings. Publishing companies own the rights to music and lyrics. If it's an "unauthorized public performance," it's ASCAP and BMI -- who represent the rights of composers and songwriters -- who get you. Not the record companies. Not the RIAA.
I don't understand why it doesn't fall under fair use for educational purposes. Learning to play guitar is a form of education. It's not a public performance in the form of a concert or playing in a bar.
Getting paid a wage that pays basic bills (power, gas, water, medical, food) solves a lot of problems for the average worker. It also means you can focus on your job without constantly pining/searching for something better or worrying about getting or being sick. That strikes me as a formula for a worker that appreciates his/her job instead of dreading it.
Costco's $17/hour is incredible. When I was 18 I was making $3.35/hr.
From what I hear it has the same UI problems as the first smartphones. Having to write down numbers for example as there is no cut and paste or hyper-linking of phone numbers in text. Lot's of little quirks have been ironed out over the years; I've been running homebrew ROMs on my mine, so I've seen it at it's worst and at it's best. From reading about people using it, some of the UI is an improvement but it needs work in many places.
Thought of something else.
I say let the Lemm... errr... early adopters work that out. They'll find the glitches, complain to Apple, and Apple will probably get around to fixing the problems. Meanwhile, I lay in wait lurking for the right time to buy. Maybe a year from now, or two. The price drops, the bugs are fixed and I move in for the buy.
Or...
A competitor wakes up and pushes out a better phone, a more reliable one, for 1/3rd the price. Either way, I'll have options if I wait. $500 is beyond my threshold.
Sometimes there are benefits to being a late adopter and not feeling the need to own the current fashion device.:D
Just stop making it sound like you are the first to be doing it!:-)
I think Job's attitude is they're the first to do it in style. Style is half packaging and half marketing. It may also be fancy bullshit, but that strategy sells units. People like it.
Anyway.
I'm glad to see phones (in general) feature complex functionality and come with applications previously found on the desktop. There'll be a day when your cell phone is your laptop. Plug in a standard keyboard, mouse, and monitor and away you go. No need to sync data or applications, and the programs are the exact same version running on the same machine that you use in the office, or commuting on the plane, or giving a presentation. Your laptop will always be in your pocket. We're only a few years away from that. Phones like the Treo, Blackberry, and iPhone are the precursors.
Fire Hazard. If there were an emergency and the power went out, the last thing you want is haphazarly placed immobile objects (in the dark, no less) slowing you down on your way out the door.
A lot of stores already have physical barriers in front of the doors with gaps too narrow for the cart, but wide enough for patrons to fit through (well, most people anyway), which can already clog up with abandoned carts, so avoiding a fire hazard isn't priority one.
No, aimbot cheaters use the advantage their aimbot gives them to turn what would usually be a strategic disadvantage into a comical sequence of headshots.
There are a set of aimbot strategies. Not just one. Camping in a remote spot with an aimbot is one, particularly in line of site of a respawn point. I've seen happen a thousand times.
Ones that I can think of are aimbotting:
from a "crow's nest"
near a respawn point
near a flag point, regeneration point, home base point, etc
from upper level walkways shooting down or vice versa
by lurking on the fringe and pegging off those fighting
by blitzing a fight (as you mentioned)
from the other side of an opaque surface (windows, water, foliage, very dark shadow, corner edge)
by running the map and pegging off opponents randomly
from the opposite side of the map when line of sight is possible
by appearing to play "legitimately" to mask your cheat
Several CS aimbots require fullbright coloured models and actually do screenscrape.
And the models would be server-side where you can't paint them a special color for the aimbot to target, which was the point of the previous post regarding John Carmack's statement.
With just a video stream, there's no way the aimbot could calculate the vertical angle to the opponent because it can't assume he's at the same elevation as you. The aimbot also doesn't know whether you're looking up or down so it doesn't know your vertical viewing angle.
For it to work, you'd have to get yourself level with the enemy and look straight 90 degrees to the ground, otherwise you're guaranteed to miss. Missing several times in a row by consistently shooting over or under someone by a few feet will arouse suspicion and you'd be labeled a cheater very quickly. Being forced to get level eliminates a major strategy of aimbot cheaters: camp in a distant high spot that's difficult to get to and provides you cover.
By the way, some games let you view left and right without turning so in that case the horizontal angle toward the opponent would also be unknown.
Aimbots really only work when it has access to game state, which is position and velocity of you and the opponent as well as your viewing angle. Those require a client-side game.
Why didn't they just build the device to always lock when there's no signal? A transmitter in the store emits a continuous signal that keeps the wheels unlocked. When you take it out of the parking lot and go out of signal range, the wheels lock up.
Why, for fucks sakes, does anyone need to print anything these days?
I guess you don't do your own taxes with tax software. Gotta print signature forms to send to the IRS and archiving copies for the file cabinet. As you know hard drives crash and CD/DVDs oxidize. Paper copies will outlast me.
I also needed to print copies of electronic receipts and paper billing statements to put in the 2006 tax drawer to explain all those deductions.
I also run into hospital, insurance, rebate, and government forms needing printing, copying, signing, and snail-mailing. Just 3 weeks ago it was a passport application. Before that it was a birth certificate request form. Before that photocopying an employee contract for a new job. And then were the rebate forms for various products purchased over the year.
Oh did I mention I was taking a night course? Needed to print several essays I wrote to hand in to the professor. Requirements: printed on 8.5x11 legal paper, double-spaced, 1 in margins, and title page. Oh. And wait until your kids start doing school reports. TONS of printed projects, papers, reports, essays, drawings, research, etc.
There are an uncountable number of things in need of printing if you run a typical household. Running to the office or Kinkos for every print job is not feasible. I guess you're still single living in an apartment with no responsibilities?
Slashdot Mirror
I misspoke. I should have said analytic comparisons instead of transactions.
It wasn't a research job; it was a for profit business. And the algorithms delt with processing massive quantities of response data: 100 million records and billions of transactions and that was only a months's worth of data. We were worked on increasing that to 6 months.
There were three types of jobs related to this processing. Yes, one was a pure research type of job but the others were not.
#1. Created pure theory and developing analytic algorithms. High level math degree required.
#2. Understood, read, and made suggestions for optimizing analytic algorithms. Implemented algorithms in code. Math degree required.
#3. Implemented support modules. Needed a general understanding of analytic algorithms. Math degree not required but desired.
Of course we also had a 4th code monkey type (admin web developer), but they were no where near the pay scale of the 3 I listed.
By the way, the original algorithm processed 8 million users, hundreds of millions of transactions in about 12 hours. After we rewrote major portions, it was doing 100 million users, billions of transactions in about 8-10 hours using a high end massively parallel database as well as dozens of linux data processing hosts.
Your comment makes sense, but my previous job goes against what you said.
Performance and business analytics require math. A lot of it. After our initial puny attempts, the company went out and hired people with master's and doctorate degrees in math and the analytics has become a lot more accurate and complex.
If I were just starting out in CS, I'd get the 2nd degree in math. It's easy to generate data. It's hard to analyze it.
I tell the truth. I'm not concerned with your fragile sensibilities.
http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Girls-Easy-Geena-Davi
I see no logical difference between these blocks of code stored as separate flat source files and HTML files. Each permit cross referencing and inclusion of other blocks of code from other files or sources:
#include/require/use/import/function/class versus frame/iframe/img/script/link/object/background.
Both of those methodologies merge together separate files, compile them, and produce a single form of output: an executable file or a rendered canvas in your browser.
Multiple input files -> compilation -> single output
Your comment makes the assumption that marked up files are somehow different from source code files (let's say C++ or Java files). They're very similar in the process. It's in the technical details where they differ: the language grammar and what problem the language is designed to solve.
If you were to say "ahh, but the real difference is cross referencing over the open internet", well the corollary with a compiled language is launching an external process, using a remote procedure call, or communicating with a proprietary protocol using a socket.
They can if your application supports skins or embeds an HTML engine inside it.
I'm not concerned about other developers having to get used to reading a long line format (>80 cols). A good programmer can read code in any type of commonly used format. The ones who bitch are the ones who can't be flexible, however I find excessively wrapped lines to be the most obnoxious format anyway.
My co-workers just have to deal with it. Their screen size is the same as mine so tough cookies. Since they commonly insert code into my stuff breaking my format such as inserting 2-space indented code inside my 4-space indented code, I have less reason to respect their 80-column formatting.
I also don't use multiple windows so I don't stack side by side. I just maximize my shell to full size and run screen. Usually I have 5 to 20 shells running under it. screen is definitely the most underrated application there is. I find it far better to flip 2 files on top of each other instead of comparing side by side, because your eyes don't have to move as far. Plus you don't lose your scroll buffer when your shell or PC hiccups.
Getting back to the topic. The 80 column requirement is absolutely retarded in my mind. Should we code using monocrome monitors because that's how it used to be? Uhh. No thanks. Besides, I don't buy the printing argument. I can print files >80 cols using a smaller font, which is easier to read anyway. You can also print in landscape orientation. The only time I've found a need to print source code is for code reviews, which none of the companies I've worked for did or did right. They were small high-pressure "push the code now!" type of companies, and I know a lot of other companies still operate that way so coding standards are low on their priority list. And no, those companies I worked for will not change their business model to suit your expectation of CMM > 1.
Some would consider that hell.
We're watching a media industry commit a slow suicide. When it dies, they'll blame it on those who merely wanted to hear and view their product.
Getting paid a wage that pays basic bills (power, gas, water, medical, food) solves a lot of problems for the average worker. It also means you can focus on your job without constantly pining/searching for something better or worrying about getting or being sick. That strikes me as a formula for a worker that appreciates his/her job instead of dreading it.
f ederal_minimum_wage_increases.svg
Costco's $17/hour is incredible. When I was 18 I was making $3.35/hr.
FYI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:History_of_US_
I suppose a USB/VGA converter could be used, although the resolution sucks for anything but presentations on a projector. 800x480.
Thanks.
The N800 does look like an interesting tablet.
I say let the Lemm... errr... early adopters work that out. They'll find the glitches, complain to Apple, and Apple will probably get around to fixing the problems. Meanwhile, I lay in wait lurking for the right time to buy. Maybe a year from now, or two. The price drops, the bugs are fixed and I move in for the buy.
Or...
A competitor wakes up and pushes out a better phone, a more reliable one, for 1/3rd the price. Either way, I'll have options if I wait. $500 is beyond my threshold.
Sometimes there are benefits to being a late adopter and not feeling the need to own the current fashion device.
Anyway.
I'm glad to see phones (in general) feature complex functionality and come with applications previously found on the desktop. There'll be a day when your cell phone is your laptop. Plug in a standard keyboard, mouse, and monitor and away you go. No need to sync data or applications, and the programs are the exact same version running on the same machine that you use in the office, or commuting on the plane, or giving a presentation. Your laptop will always be in your pocket. We're only a few years away from that. Phones like the Treo, Blackberry, and iPhone are the precursors.
...so many slashdot readers are praying for iPhone to go down in flames.
Who cares. It's another product. It'll make some people happy, some not. Don't get so wrapped up in the drama.
(And no, I won't provide links or references. This is my opinion. I don't have to prove it.)
With just a video stream, there's no way the aimbot could calculate the vertical angle to the opponent because it can't assume he's at the same elevation as you. The aimbot also doesn't know whether you're looking up or down so it doesn't know your vertical viewing angle.
For it to work, you'd have to get yourself level with the enemy and look straight 90 degrees to the ground, otherwise you're guaranteed to miss. Missing several times in a row by consistently shooting over or under someone by a few feet will arouse suspicion and you'd be labeled a cheater very quickly. Being forced to get level eliminates a major strategy of aimbot cheaters: camp in a distant high spot that's difficult to get to and provides you cover.
By the way, some games let you view left and right without turning so in that case the horizontal angle toward the opponent would also be unknown.
Aimbots really only work when it has access to game state, which is position and velocity of you and the opponent as well as your viewing angle. Those require a client-side game.
Why didn't they just build the device to always lock when there's no signal? A transmitter in the store emits a continuous signal that keeps the wheels unlocked. When you take it out of the parking lot and go out of signal range, the wheels lock up.
Seems a bit more prank proof that way.
I also needed to print copies of electronic receipts and paper billing statements to put in the 2006 tax drawer to explain all those deductions.
I also run into hospital, insurance, rebate, and government forms needing printing, copying, signing, and snail-mailing. Just 3 weeks ago it was a passport application. Before that it was a birth certificate request form. Before that photocopying an employee contract for a new job. And then were the rebate forms for various products purchased over the year.
Oh did I mention I was taking a night course? Needed to print several essays I wrote to hand in to the professor. Requirements: printed on 8.5x11 legal paper, double-spaced, 1 in margins, and title page. Oh. And wait until your kids start doing school reports. TONS of printed projects, papers, reports, essays, drawings, research, etc.
There are an uncountable number of things in need of printing if you run a typical household. Running to the office or Kinkos for every print job is not feasible. I guess you're still single living in an apartment with no responsibilities?
Better hide that Red Bull can at the next tournament.