I can personally vouch for the fact that not all gay employees joined the "Gayglers" (I did, but I know quite a few who didn't.) I don't see why "Greyglers" should be any different.
And for those of you making comments about how people over 40 are incapable of being creative or good programmers, I have to say that my experience speaks differently. Some of the best programmers I've ever met (and worked with) were the older ones. Then again, I've seen some superstar young programmers too, so I'm not ready to say that you have to be old to program well. That said, even many of the great young programmers I've worked with were less productive simply because they had to take time to learn how to work on a large project and maintain someone else's code.
This is a student's programming contest, right? Why are you even concerned about compile time or "startup" time?
As far as compile time goes, if any sort of program you can write to solve a toy problem that's one of the problems in a competition like this actually takes a long time to compile (remember, you're not actually allowed to include that much code, according to the rules) you're doing something weird.
As far as "startup" time, I'm assuming how much time you mean the interpreter takes to start, which seems like even less of an issue, because the rules explicitly state that the time limit might be increased, at the judges' discretion, for interpreted languages.
Your classification of speeds might be relevant for some sort of question other than "what language should I use for this programming contest?" but given the rules of this particular contest, I think a better characterization of what is "slow" and "not slow" depends on whether the student can manage to code an efficient solution.
These days I would probably choose python for something like this, even though Pascal was my first language. Python's used a bit more extensively than Pascal, so you might as well teach something that will have applicability outside of the bounds of a contest (it also happens to be a fairly easy language to learn, and for people used to developing in interpreted environments, allows for quicker development time because of the lack of a compile phase in the testing cycle.)
Sawzall is essentially designed around the mapreduce framework. It's impossible to *not* write a mapreduction in Sawzall. The way it works:
Your program is written to process a single record. The magic part happens when you output: you have to output to special tables. Each of these table types has a different way that it combines data emitted to it.
So, during the map phase, your program is run in parallel on each input record. During the reduce phase, the reduction happens according to the way the output tables do whatever operation was specified.
There was some work to be done having enough different output tables to do everything that was useful, especially since you might want to take the output and plug it in as the input to another phase of mapreduction.
One of the biggest reasons this was a major innovation for Google was that it let some of the people who weren't really programmers still come up with useful programs, because the Sawzall language was pretty simple (especially when combined with some of the library functions that had been implemented to do common sorts of computations.) There were also some interesting ways in which the security model was implemented, but as far as I know they haven't been published yet.
There certainly are plenty of other technical things that can be done to improve a system like MapReduce (and I know that many of them were in various forms of experimentation when I left the company) but at least some of them are highly dependent on Google's infrastructure, and not really relevant to a general discussion. (I suspect that the papers linked above might have some hints, but it has been a while since I looked at them.)
I'm not denying that math is important -- the fact that we're talking about it using computers which require an intimate understanding of silicon semiconductor physics demonstrates that. But Joe Average didn't design the computer. But can you really, with a straight face, tell me that most people have any use for math beyond basic arithmetic?
Wow.
Yes. I can tell you, with a straight face, that people have a use for math beyond basic arithmetic.
Let me describe the curriculum I went through in high school.
One of the first things that you learn beyond basic arithmetic is algebra. Algebra is useful in that it allows you to think about things as generalizations, and you learn that there are rules that you can use to manipulate equations that will take you from some statement A that is true to some new statement B that is true, which is true for anything that you plug into it.
So there's a nice abstract lesson that just by knowing some relatively simple rules, you can often reduce complicated descriptions into something a bit less complicated.
The next year was geometry. This class centered on the concept of proof. This is, perhaps, the most important thing in the math curriculum beyond arithmetic, but in order to get to this point, you really have to understand the lesson I just talked about from algebra. But this time, rather than talking about manipulating equations, we're talking about manipulating statements. Starting from some set of things that we know is true, we can reason things out by applying rules to come up with new things that must be true.
And if we actually understand how this process works, we can analyze other people's arguments to understand why their reasoning is flawed. I can think of some world leaders that I would like to have learned these particular lessons.
The next course I took was named pre-calculus (which I suppose shows the lack of creativity in my school district.) While it's fairly easy to brush this one off as just trigonometry, a lot of the stuff in that class was useful for modeling real-world situations. Still, here's where we started getting into the stuff that isn't really applicable unless you use math a lot.
And of course I'll lose the argument completely if I pretend that understanding calculus is really something that's going to impact Joe Average's life. (Although honestly, knowing some basic physics and calculus goes a long way for helping explain a lot about the way the world works.)
* Sure, dealing with that amount of data is a pain. I speak from experience (I used to be the guy in charge of analyzing Google's logs, until the beginning of 2006.) But it's certainly possible to do it. (I will make the observation that the default Apache web log format is unnecessarily hard to parse, so you can save yourself some effort with some configuration.)
* I will never trust Alexa (or pretty much every other company that monitors web traffic). When I checked on the numbers back in early 2001, the numbers were so wrong as to be completely laughable (one of my first projects at Google was to try and come up with some reasonably correct answer. I'm not sure I actually succeeded, but I came up with something....)
You say that your college education focused on being able to learn "popular" languages, and then proceed to list a bunch of languages that I'd say is more commercial than anything else... My opinion is that a CS degree is useless without exposure to the major programming paradigms, including objected oriented programming, imperative programming, functional programming, logic programming, etc. Show me someone who only learned C++, Java, and VB, and there's no way I'd hire him to do anything but the most simple programming job. I don't actually care what languages a college grad has, but I do care that they know how to learn a new programming language.
I had a class like the one you describe when I was in school. The year I took it, I feel it was a completely useless class (and it ended up being one of my worst grades, incidentally...) My opinion is that the best way to teach this sort of thing is in an experiential way, which really has to be part of a project that takes longer than a single semester. At Harvey Mudd College, this was accomplished in the senior year of the CS Major through a clinic project; that basically puts ~4 students together for a year, working on a project from proposal to completion. I think the best educational experience that pertains to the real world is given to the student team leader on these projects, so I really wish that it was possible to give everyone that experience. (Alas, clinic is an expensive program to run, both in terms of financial resources and in the time given by faculty and students.)
If I was in charge of the curriculum, I'd say don't spend too much time on "the process". Spend enough time to give an outline of how it works so that students won't completely be stuck, but time is much better spent giving students skills that will improve their coding, thinking, and communication skills. There are too many programmers out there who don't have an idea of what run-time complexity their code has, or who can't write in grammatical complete sentences. And more math (especially classes where (gasp) you have to prove theorems) never hurts logical thinking skills.
Then again, perhaps my perspective is skewed as to what one should require of a programmer. I honestly believe that if more computer science programs trained programmers with a more complete theoretical background (the kind of programmer that looks attractive to the recruiters at Google, for example), then software would be generally more usable and less buggy.
Since I no longer work there, I can't really speak to the quality of the food these days, except I can make the observation that it's harder to cook for thousands of people than for hundreds of people.
In the early days, the food was *great*. There wasn't much of a selection, but as Charlie started cooking for more people, it improved. I don't know if I believe that it was enough of a reason to get a job there, but it was definitely the best company-supplied food I've ever eaten. That said, I did go out to lunch at least once a week, just for the change of scenery. And to avoid the long lines. (See, even when you've got it good you come up with something to complain about.)
Then I moved to New York. I was so disappointed with lunch there. (It has since improved substantially, but I doubt it will ever get to the level of Charlie's cooking.) Not only that, but for a while, lunch was only available 4 days a week (the official story being that Sergey wanted to encourage people to explore the restaurants in New York. Which generally meant exploring the takeout lunch place next door, so that didn't work so well.) What were the differences? Mountain View had food that was cooked onsite from organic ingredients and was actually healthy. The other offices (and I visited Santa Monica and Kirkland as well) had catered food that tended not to be.
I enjoy my food. Eating Charlie's food was an experience worth comparing to restaurants in New York. And it was impossible to beat the price. But as far as the best food available anywhere, it's always a good idea to get some variety in your life.
The last time I ate lunch in Mountain View (a few months ago) the food was still miles better than my college dining hall. The last time I ate in New York it was worse.
So my advice: if you're going to go work at Google, in an office outside of Mountain View, do it because of the people you'll be working with and the projects you'll be working on (which are worth it), not because of the free food. Chances are anywhere else you'd work would pay you enough for food anyways, so really, it's not *that* big a deal.
The law trumps what's in those contracts. There are certain kinds of discrimination that are illegal.
Basically, just imagine the words "except anything that we can't enforce because of the law." Just because something's in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable.
For example, a woman might get fired because she's a woman. Even if she signed a contract that said she could be fired because she was a woman, that wouldn't be enforceable: it's illegal to make employment decisions based on gender. (Now, proving that she was fired for being a woman is a bit more difficult, so in practice it's possible to get fired for being a woman... But it happens less often than otherwise because it's illegal.)
(In some jurisdictions, it's illegal to make employment decisions based on sexual orientation. But there's no such restriction in federal law, so it's still legal to be fired simply for being gay in many places.)
When did "I'm worried that the US might be going down the path that might turn us into a totalitarian state" turn into anti-American sentiment? The fact that some people start screaming that you're being so unamerican and should start censoring yourself seems contrary to the entire concept of free speech.
I don't like the current US administration. Does that make me anti-American? The US has a long history of people protesting the power structure from the inside; when did dissent become unamerican? Are we going back to 1798? Should we pass new Alien and Sedition Acts? (Yes, we had examples of dissent against the sitting president as far back as 1798... And some of the dissenters were people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; if you're going to start considering this sort of thing anti-American, I have to wonder where you get your concept of America from.) I like this country; I don't like people telling me to shup up and support something just because we're at war...
So yeah, censorship is wrong. Just remember that's what you're doing when you accuse people of having "anti-American" sentiment. (Oh yeah, and it's wrong in Iran too. And Iran has plenty of examples of bad behaviors... As far as this "scale" and "context" and "perspective": why not complain that slashdot doesn't publish stories about all the other evil things that happen in Iran?)
Umm, Google has won Webbys before. Just about every year in recent memory. (One of them sat in my apartment overnight a couple of years ago.) So unless Google has repeatedly shut down, I'd say that your rule is a little bogus...
It's better than the version of the interface where k moved down, and j moved up. I never use j and k when I use vi, and it still messed with my head...
Sorry... "An engineer that takes politics into account will accomplish nothing?" That's something that, as a practicing engineer, I have to disagree with. If more engineers actually viewed their works in the social context that they'll eventually be released into, we might have some better products out there instead of the same old buggy crap and horribly designed user interfaces.
Ask many of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project what their opinion was of engineers who don't take into account the social context of their inventions. Just pick your battles: not developing something because somebody's going to subvert your idealistic view of the world and make some money might not be the right decision, but not developing something because it will be used to harm people somewhere might.
--
Greg
wishing that more engineering schools subscribed to Harvey Mudd College's mission statement
BTW, "X Windows" is not the proper name, just something people call X because it sounds like MS Windows;)
If this is really true, it really helps the Lindows case: it's evidence that "Windows" is becoming something that generically identifies a windowing system. It doesn't matter if that's not the proper name or not; if people are using "Windows" to refer to any kind of OS/windowing system then it has become generic usage.
(Typical Slashdot disclaimer: IANAL)
On a somewhat unrelated note, I recall being confused about the distinction between X Windows and MS Windows way back in the day I started learning how to program my dad's Compaq 386. I occasionally saw references to it in PC Magazine... Or maybe that was Byte...
It seems unlikely that quantum computers will be able to answer the halting problem. I believe that with non-deterministic Turing Machines, you can pretty much model the behavior of quantum computers. What I know for certain is that non-deterministic TM's and deterministic TM's are equivalent: they can compute exactly the same kinds of things (usually a NTM can compute it in fewer steps than a TM...) The main consequence of this is that if a problem is undecidable for regular Turing Machines (like the halting problem), it is also necessarily undecidable for non-deterministic Turing Machines.
While I'm not entirely sure about this, I do think it ought to be possible to create a Turing Machine that did what a quantum computer did; it would just take exponential time to run where the quantum computer took only linear time.
Humans can _always_ solve halting problems? I'm not convinced of this one... I'd ask you to prove this to me, but really, if you were able to prove something like that statement, you'd be able to solve the halting problem... I'd agree that it's often true that humans can solve the halting problem. Then again, it's often true that Turing Machines can solve some instances of the halting problem... Is there some clever argument that I'm missing here?
This really isn't an excuse not to vote. Get an absentee ballot; then all you have to do is mail it in.
I voted in the last election even though I was 350 miles away from the polling place on election day. Try it next time. (Not that anything I voted for won... Oh well. Maybe if I keep convincing my friends to vote, it'll make a difference.)
But what happens when something goes wrong with Windows? You're prepared to talk her through fixing a corrupt registry with regedit? Didn't think so... No, but I'd trust my dad to get over there and reinstall Windows... It's a lot easier to find someone who can reinstall Windows than it is to find someone who can fix a bad Linux install, and my dad's not quite there yet. I'm working on it, though...
Re:To the "Worst Episode Ever" people... (sorta ot
on
X-Files FPS Episode
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· Score: 1
I think it's kind of funny that the same thing happened about thirty years ago, during the last season of Star Trek. During that season, they knew they weren't going to get another season (they'd been given one of the crappiest time slots possible...) and the writers wrote some really crazy story lines. A lot of them were trying to start some kind of discussion (the examples that come to mind are discussions of discrimination based on skin color...) I think that whenever a television show starts trying to address social issues like this, to avoid sounding preachy they have to go overboard.
I'm glad that the X-Files people are having a good time with it. I'm also glad that I watched it in a dorm lounge here at college, where we made snide comments whenever something funny happened. ("Can you texture-wrap her?")
We need to convince new computer users to run Linux? I'm sorry, but I don't think that's a viable option at this point.
Consider the case of my grandmother. A couple of years ago, she bought her first computer. Running Windows 95, I configured her computer so that she could dial up to an ISP, check her e-mail, and even use Netscape.
When the computer boots up, she sees a nice friendly screen with the Windows logo. She can even play some games on it.
There's no way I could do this with Linux. If I was willing to put in a great deal of time, I probably could have come up with a setup so that she could do everything in X. But I'm her resident Linux expert, and I live 400 miles away. What happens when something goes wrong? I'm not about to tell my grandmother over the phone how to use vi to edit her/etc/passwd to fix something.
I have no problem telling my friends who live down the hall in my dorm to run Linux; I don't think it's reasonable to expect people like my grandmother to run Linux. I think Linux is great, but we've got a long way to go before we can get people like my grandmother using it, and that's the kind of thing that this article's talking about.
We don't need to get new users to "learn Linux"... We need to get it so that they don't have to. While there's been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, it's just not there yet.
I have to disagree with the statement that pro-choicers are denying that fetuses are human. The more convincing arguments I've heard that abortion is okay in some situations have done so while conceding that fetuses are human, too.
If you're interested in reading such an argument, look into "A Defense of Abortion: A Compromise View" by Thomson. It's an essay about abortion. She basically argues that even though in general, people have a right to live, there are situations in which it is morally permissible to kill them. The most obvious example of this is self defense: if somebody is coming at you, and about to kill you, and the only way you can think of to defend yourself involves killing him, most people agree that it's all right to kill him.
In her article, she tries to extend this argument, and goes about showing that most of the conventional arguments that say that abortion is wrong rely on faulty arguments.
If you're interested in this subject, I'd recommend you look into this article.
Reality: Free Operating System Does Not Mean Low Total Cost of Ownership
It does if "when we speak of free software, we speak of freedom, not price". Unless the latest version of NT comes with working source code, I can't tweak the OS, or any underlying components to my liking. ---------------
Microsoft doesn't care about free software, and many corporations don't either. They care about how much money they're spending. The point MS was trying to make here is that TCO is less for NT than for UNIX. Since Linux is about as easy to administer as any other UNIX-ish system, it follows that it costs about as much money to hire someone to maintain your servers.
I think it's important to address the points that they bring up, rather than talking about the benefits of free software. We all believe that free software will cost less in the long run, because people will find (and patch) the bugs in it. Unfortunately, I don't think there have been any studies done to quantify this...
The only other point in this post I had a problem with was citing Beowulf as a clustering technology for high availability for Linux. Beowulf is a clustering technology, but the point isn't to get high availability. Beowulf doesn't provide anything like high availability; it just makes it possible to tie a bunch of processors together so that you can throw a lot of computer at a problem. This doesn't give you anything when the master node of your cluster fails...
I've had my share of being ill-treated because I was smarter than everyone else in school. I started reading at an early age, and in public elementary school, the answer to that was to let me go a grade ahead for reading. It's hard to get respect as a kindergardener in a first grade classroom, and this didn't stop until I was in third grade and moved to a different school.
It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I finally felt accepted by my peers, and I think that a lot of that is because I had a twin brother who was a lot more socially acceptable. He was involved in sports, and never had a problem with fitting in. I was just one of those freaks that scored perfectly on the standardized tests; someone people went to for help with their trigonometry but not much else.
I think I'm lucky in that my parents allowed their children to be themselves. The three of us (I have an older brother, too) managed to turn out all right... My oldest brother graduated from college into a nice job in the Silicon Valley. I'm still in school, at a school where just about everyone fits into some kind of nerd/geek/freak stereotype. I looked at the picture that a previous poster had of himself; it doesn't look too different from what a lot of people around Harvey Mudd would wear. I'm glad that I've managed to get myself into this school, where it's okay to be yourself.
I realize that many slashdotters have decided that a college education isn't necessary to get a good job in the computer industry. But there's more to college than career prospects. It may be enticing to go into the job market and get a high-paying job right out of high school (or even without finishing high school...) Personally, though, I feel that the experience that I've had here at Harvey Mudd College has helped me realize that there are a lot of people out there like me.
I think that's really the most important thing to remember. Find some real friends and stick with them; it doesn't matter what everybody else thinks. There's more to life than high school... Just keep that in mind.
This was kind of weird, since Margaret Wertheim actually cam to speak at my school about this book. Some of her arguments were actually quite interesting.
The subtitle of this book is "A History of Space from Dante to the Internet." In Medieval times, people thought of themselves in terms of two different kinds of space: located in physical space, and located in "spiritual" space. People felt that they needed to have some kind of a "place" where their soul existed. The medieval conception of the universe was that the universe ended somewhere past the solar system, at the sphere of the fixed stars.
That description was probably a bit cryptic, but the gist of it is that when modern science came around, people suddenly started believing that the universe extends infinitely in every direction. This removed the possibility of "spiritual" space existing outside of the physical universe; if the physical universe never ends, where is the outside?
Margaret Wertheim's thesis is that some people are starting to believe that "cyberspace" is a real space, that some people are viewing in spiritual terms. After all, you can sit down in front of a computer, and visit someone's web site. In some sense, you really are in a different place. You're still physically sitting in your chair, but some aspect of you has "surfed" over to a faraway place. Maybe it's not your soul that has traversed this great distance, but some aspect of your consciousness has.
At any rate, at the end of her presentation, she said that she did not believe that cyberspace could end up being spiritual fulfilling. Some people may be thinking of cyberspace in terms that are highly suggestive of the Christian view of heaven (some part of you will be immortal, etc.) but as Wertheim said, being stuck in a world of "frat boys' pages discussing God and Nietzsche sounds more like hell than heaven." I'd have to say I agree with that.
However, I do also think she has a point. When we think of going to the Internet, we do think of "going" somewhere; in most people's mind, the Internet is a place. We can analyze it down to its nodes and network wires, but the Internet is more than that. There's something we've built up inside our minds that has some level of reality to it. Now I think I'm done "visiting" slashdot. I think I'll go back to the real world...
Slashdot Mirror
I used to work at Google.
I can personally vouch for the fact that not all gay employees joined the "Gayglers" (I did, but I know quite a few who didn't.) I don't see why "Greyglers" should be any different.
And for those of you making comments about how people over 40 are incapable of being creative or good programmers, I have to say that my experience speaks differently. Some of the best programmers I've ever met (and worked with) were the older ones. Then again, I've seen some superstar young programmers too, so I'm not ready to say that you have to be old to program well. That said, even many of the great young programmers I've worked with were less productive simply because they had to take time to learn how to work on a large project and maintain someone else's code.
This is a student's programming contest, right? Why are you even concerned about compile time or "startup" time?
As far as compile time goes, if any sort of program you can write to solve a toy problem that's one of the problems in a competition like this actually takes a long time to compile (remember, you're not actually allowed to include that much code, according to the rules) you're doing something weird.
As far as "startup" time, I'm assuming how much time you mean the interpreter takes to start, which seems like even less of an issue, because the rules explicitly state that the time limit might be increased, at the judges' discretion, for interpreted languages.
Your classification of speeds might be relevant for some sort of question other than "what language should I use for this programming contest?" but given the rules of this particular contest, I think a better characterization of what is "slow" and "not slow" depends on whether the student can manage to code an efficient solution.
These days I would probably choose python for something like this, even though Pascal was my first language. Python's used a bit more extensively than Pascal, so you might as well teach something that will have applicability outside of the bounds of a contest (it also happens to be a fairly easy language to learn, and for people used to developing in interpreted environments, allows for quicker development time because of the lack of a compile phase in the testing cycle.)
http://research.google.com/archive/sawzall.html
Sawzall is essentially designed around the mapreduce framework. It's impossible to *not* write a mapreduction in Sawzall. The way it works:
Your program is written to process a single record. The magic part happens when you output: you have to output to special tables. Each of these table types has a different way that it combines data emitted to it.
So, during the map phase, your program is run in parallel on each input record. During the reduce phase, the reduction happens according to the way the output tables do whatever operation was specified.
There was some work to be done having enough different output tables to do everything that was useful, especially since you might want to take the output and plug it in as the input to another phase of mapreduction.
One of the biggest reasons this was a major innovation for Google was that it let some of the people who weren't really programmers still come up with useful programs, because the Sawzall language was pretty simple (especially when combined with some of the library functions that had been implemented to do common sorts of computations.) There were also some interesting ways in which the security model was implemented, but as far as I know they haven't been published yet.
There certainly are plenty of other technical things that can be done to improve a system like MapReduce (and I know that many of them were in various forms of experimentation when I left the company) but at least some of them are highly dependent on Google's infrastructure, and not really relevant to a general discussion. (I suspect that the papers linked above might have some hints, but it has been a while since I looked at them.)
Wow.
Yes. I can tell you, with a straight face, that people have a use for math beyond basic arithmetic.
Let me describe the curriculum I went through in high school.
One of the first things that you learn beyond basic arithmetic is algebra. Algebra is useful in that it allows you to think about things as generalizations, and you learn that there are rules that you can use to manipulate equations that will take you from some statement A that is true to some new statement B that is true, which is true for anything that you plug into it.
So there's a nice abstract lesson that just by knowing some relatively simple rules, you can often reduce complicated descriptions into something a bit less complicated.
The next year was geometry. This class centered on the concept of proof. This is, perhaps, the most important thing in the math curriculum beyond arithmetic, but in order to get to this point, you really have to understand the lesson I just talked about from algebra. But this time, rather than talking about manipulating equations, we're talking about manipulating statements. Starting from some set of things that we know is true, we can reason things out by applying rules to come up with new things that must be true.
And if we actually understand how this process works, we can analyze other people's arguments to understand why their reasoning is flawed. I can think of some world leaders that I would like to have learned these particular lessons.
The next course I took was named pre-calculus (which I suppose shows the lack of creativity in my school district.) While it's fairly easy to brush this one off as just trigonometry, a lot of the stuff in that class was useful for modeling real-world situations. Still, here's where we started getting into the stuff that isn't really applicable unless you use math a lot.
And of course I'll lose the argument completely if I pretend that understanding calculus is really something that's going to impact Joe Average's life. (Although honestly, knowing some basic physics and calculus goes a long way for helping explain a lot about the way the world works.)
2 points:
* Sure, dealing with that amount of data is a pain. I speak from experience (I used to be the guy in charge of analyzing Google's logs, until the beginning of 2006.) But it's certainly possible to do it. (I will make the observation that the default Apache web log format is unnecessarily hard to parse, so you can save yourself some effort with some configuration.)
* I will never trust Alexa (or pretty much every other company that monitors web traffic). When I checked on the numbers back in early 2001, the numbers were so wrong as to be completely laughable (one of my first projects at Google was to try and come up with some reasonably correct answer. I'm not sure I actually succeeded, but I came up with something....)
You say that your college education focused on being able to learn "popular" languages, and then proceed to list a bunch of languages that I'd say is more commercial than anything else... My opinion is that a CS degree is useless without exposure to the major programming paradigms, including objected oriented programming, imperative programming, functional programming, logic programming, etc. Show me someone who only learned C++, Java, and VB, and there's no way I'd hire him to do anything but the most simple programming job. I don't actually care what languages a college grad has, but I do care that they know how to learn a new programming language.
I had a class like the one you describe when I was in school. The year I took it, I feel it was a completely useless class (and it ended up being one of my worst grades, incidentally...) My opinion is that the best way to teach this sort of thing is in an experiential way, which really has to be part of a project that takes longer than a single semester. At Harvey Mudd College, this was accomplished in the senior year of the CS Major through a clinic project; that basically puts ~4 students together for a year, working on a project from proposal to completion. I think the best educational experience that pertains to the real world is given to the student team leader on these projects, so I really wish that it was possible to give everyone that experience. (Alas, clinic is an expensive program to run, both in terms of financial resources and in the time given by faculty and students.)
If I was in charge of the curriculum, I'd say don't spend too much time on "the process". Spend enough time to give an outline of how it works so that students won't completely be stuck, but time is much better spent giving students skills that will improve their coding, thinking, and communication skills. There are too many programmers out there who don't have an idea of what run-time complexity their code has, or who can't write in grammatical complete sentences. And more math (especially classes where (gasp) you have to prove theorems) never hurts logical thinking skills.
Then again, perhaps my perspective is skewed as to what one should require of a programmer. I honestly believe that if more computer science programs trained programmers with a more complete theoretical background (the kind of programmer that looks attractive to the recruiters at Google, for example), then software would be generally more usable and less buggy.
disclaimer: I used to work at Google.
Since I no longer work there, I can't really speak to the quality of the food these days, except I can make the observation that it's harder to cook for thousands of people than for hundreds of people.
In the early days, the food was *great*. There wasn't much of a selection, but as Charlie started cooking for more people, it improved. I don't know if I believe that it was enough of a reason to get a job there, but it was definitely the best company-supplied food I've ever eaten. That said, I did go out to lunch at least once a week, just for the change of scenery. And to avoid the long lines. (See, even when you've got it good you come up with something to complain about.)
Then I moved to New York. I was so disappointed with lunch there. (It has since improved substantially, but I doubt it will ever get to the level of Charlie's cooking.) Not only that, but for a while, lunch was only available 4 days a week (the official story being that Sergey wanted to encourage people to explore the restaurants in New York. Which generally meant exploring the takeout lunch place next door, so that didn't work so well.) What were the differences? Mountain View had food that was cooked onsite from organic ingredients and was actually healthy. The other offices (and I visited Santa Monica and Kirkland as well) had catered food that tended not to be.
I enjoy my food. Eating Charlie's food was an experience worth comparing to restaurants in New York. And it was impossible to beat the price. But as far as the best food available anywhere, it's always a good idea to get some variety in your life.
The last time I ate lunch in Mountain View (a few months ago) the food was still miles better than my college dining hall. The last time I ate in New York it was worse.
So my advice: if you're going to go work at Google, in an office outside of Mountain View, do it because of the people you'll be working with and the projects you'll be working on (which are worth it), not because of the free food. Chances are anywhere else you'd work would pay you enough for food anyways, so really, it's not *that* big a deal.
The law trumps what's in those contracts. There are certain kinds of discrimination that are illegal.
Basically, just imagine the words "except anything that we can't enforce because of the law." Just because something's in a contract doesn't mean it's enforceable.
For example, a woman might get fired because she's a woman. Even if she signed a contract that said she could be fired because she was a woman, that wouldn't be enforceable: it's illegal to make employment decisions based on gender. (Now, proving that she was fired for being a woman is a bit more difficult, so in practice it's possible to get fired for being a woman... But it happens less often than otherwise because it's illegal.)
(In some jurisdictions, it's illegal to make employment decisions based on sexual orientation. But there's no such restriction in federal law, so it's still legal to be fired simply for being gay in many places.)
When did "I'm worried that the US might be going down the path that might turn us into a totalitarian state" turn into anti-American sentiment? The fact that some people start screaming that you're being so unamerican and should start censoring yourself seems contrary to the entire concept of free speech.
I don't like the current US administration. Does that make me anti-American? The US has a long history of people protesting the power structure from the inside; when did dissent become unamerican? Are we going back to 1798? Should we pass new Alien and Sedition Acts? (Yes, we had examples of dissent against the sitting president as far back as 1798... And some of the dissenters were people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison; if you're going to start considering this sort of thing anti-American, I have to wonder where you get your concept of America from.) I like this country; I don't like people telling me to shup up and support something just because we're at war...
So yeah, censorship is wrong. Just remember that's what you're doing when you accuse people of having "anti-American" sentiment. (Oh yeah, and it's wrong in Iran too. And Iran has plenty of examples of bad behaviors... As far as this "scale" and "context" and "perspective": why not complain that slashdot doesn't publish stories about all the other evil things that happen in Iran?)
Umm, Google has won Webbys before. Just about every year in recent memory. (One of them sat in my apartment overnight a couple of years ago.) So unless Google has repeatedly shut down, I'd say that your rule is a little bogus...
Re: j moves down, k moves up being bad:
It's better than the version of the interface where k moved down, and j moved up. I never use j and k when I use vi, and it still messed with my head...
Ask many of the people who worked on the Manhattan Project what their opinion was of engineers who don't take into account the social context of their inventions. Just pick your battles: not developing something because somebody's going to subvert your idealistic view of the world and make some money might not be the right decision, but not developing something because it will be used to harm people somewhere might.
--
Greg
wishing that more engineering schools subscribed to Harvey Mudd College's mission statement
Yeah, my watch conveys information in its movement too... It's nice to know that time hasn't started slipping backwards.
tick.
tick.
BTW, "X Windows" is not the proper name, just something people call X because it sounds like MS Windows ;)
If this is really true, it really helps the Lindows case: it's evidence that "Windows" is becoming something that generically identifies a windowing system. It doesn't matter if that's not the proper name or not; if people are using "Windows" to refer to any kind of OS/windowing system then it has become generic usage.
(Typical Slashdot disclaimer: IANAL)
On a somewhat unrelated note, I recall being confused about the distinction between X Windows and MS Windows way back in the day I started learning how to program my dad's Compaq 386. I occasionally saw references to it in PC Magazine... Or maybe that was Byte...
It seems unlikely that quantum computers will be able to answer the halting problem. I believe that with non-deterministic Turing Machines, you can pretty much model the behavior of quantum computers. What I know for certain is that non-deterministic TM's and deterministic TM's are equivalent: they can compute exactly the same kinds of things (usually a NTM can compute it in fewer steps than a TM...) The main consequence of this is that if a problem is undecidable for regular Turing Machines (like the halting problem), it is also necessarily undecidable for non-deterministic Turing Machines.
While I'm not entirely sure about this, I do think it ought to be possible to create a Turing Machine that did what a quantum computer did; it would just take exponential time to run where the quantum computer took only linear time.
Humans can _always_ solve halting problems? I'm not convinced of this one... I'd ask you to prove this to me, but really, if you were able to prove something like that statement, you'd be able to solve the halting problem... I'd agree that it's often true that humans can solve the halting problem. Then again, it's often true that Turing Machines can solve some instances of the halting problem... Is there some clever argument that I'm missing here?
This really isn't an excuse not to vote. Get an absentee ballot; then all you have to do is mail it in.
I voted in the last election even though I was 350 miles away from the polling place on election day. Try it next time. (Not that anything I voted for won... Oh well. Maybe if I keep convincing my friends to vote, it'll make a difference.)
But what happens when something goes wrong with Windows? You're prepared to talk her through fixing a corrupt registry with regedit? Didn't think so... No, but I'd trust my dad to get over there and reinstall Windows... It's a lot easier to find someone who can reinstall Windows than it is to find someone who can fix a bad Linux install, and my dad's not quite there yet. I'm working on it, though...
I think it's kind of funny that the same thing happened about thirty years ago, during the last season of Star Trek. During that season, they knew they weren't going to get another season (they'd been given one of the crappiest time slots possible...) and the writers wrote some really crazy story lines. A lot of them were trying to start some kind of discussion (the examples that come to mind are discussions of discrimination based on skin color...) I think that whenever a television show starts trying to address social issues like this, to avoid sounding preachy they have to go overboard.
I'm glad that the X-Files people are having a good time with it. I'm also glad that I watched it in a dorm lounge here at college, where we made snide comments whenever something funny happened. ("Can you texture-wrap her?")
We need to convince new computer users to run Linux? I'm sorry, but I don't think that's a viable option at this point.
/etc/passwd to fix something.
Consider the case of my grandmother. A couple of years ago, she bought her first computer. Running Windows 95, I configured her computer so that she could dial up to an ISP, check her e-mail, and even use Netscape.
When the computer boots up, she sees a nice friendly screen with the Windows logo. She can even play some games on it.
There's no way I could do this with Linux. If I was willing to put in a great deal of time, I probably could have come up with a setup so that she could do everything in X. But I'm her resident Linux expert, and I live 400 miles away. What happens when something goes wrong? I'm not about to tell my grandmother over the phone how to use vi to edit her
I have no problem telling my friends who live down the hall in my dorm to run Linux; I don't think it's reasonable to expect people like my grandmother to run Linux. I think Linux is great, but we've got a long way to go before we can get people like my grandmother using it, and that's the kind of thing that this article's talking about.
We don't need to get new users to "learn Linux"... We need to get it so that they don't have to. While there's been a lot of progress over the last couple of years, it's just not there yet.
I have to disagree with the statement that pro-choicers are denying that fetuses are human. The more convincing arguments I've heard that abortion is okay in some situations have done so while conceding that fetuses are human, too.
If you're interested in reading such an argument, look into "A Defense of Abortion: A Compromise View" by Thomson. It's an essay about abortion. She basically argues that even though in general, people have a right to live, there are situations in which it is morally permissible to kill them. The most obvious example of this is self defense: if somebody is coming at you, and about to kill you, and the only way you can think of to defend yourself involves killing him, most people agree that it's all right to kill him.
In her article, she tries to extend this argument, and goes about showing that most of the conventional arguments that say that abortion is wrong rely on faulty arguments.
If you're interested in this subject, I'd recommend you look into this article.
Reality: Free Operating System Does Not Mean Low Total Cost of Ownership
It does if "when we speak of free software, we speak of freedom, not price". Unless the latest version of NT comes with working source code, I can't tweak the OS, or any underlying components to my liking.
---------------
Microsoft doesn't care about free software, and many corporations don't either. They care about how much money they're spending. The point MS was trying to make here is that TCO is less for NT than for UNIX. Since Linux is about as easy to administer as any other UNIX-ish system, it follows that it costs about as much money to hire someone to maintain your servers.
I think it's important to address the points that they bring up, rather than talking about the benefits of free software. We all believe that free software will cost less in the long run, because people will find (and patch) the bugs in it. Unfortunately, I don't think there have been any studies done to quantify this...
The only other point in this post I had a problem with was citing Beowulf as a clustering technology for high availability for Linux. Beowulf is a clustering technology, but the point isn't to get high availability. Beowulf doesn't provide anything like high availability; it just makes it possible to tie a bunch of processors together so that you can throw a lot of computer at a problem. This doesn't give you anything when the master node of your cluster fails...
I've had my share of being ill-treated because I was smarter than everyone else in school. I started reading at an early age, and in public elementary school, the answer to that was to let me go a grade ahead for reading. It's hard to get respect as a kindergardener in a first grade classroom, and this didn't stop until I was in third grade and moved to a different school.
It wasn't until my senior year of high school that I finally felt accepted by my peers, and I think that a lot of that is because I had a twin brother who was a lot more socially acceptable. He was involved in sports, and never had a problem with fitting in. I was just one of those freaks that scored perfectly on the standardized tests; someone people went to for help with their trigonometry but not much else.
I think I'm lucky in that my parents allowed their children to be themselves. The three of us (I have an older brother, too) managed to turn out all right... My oldest brother graduated from college into a nice job in the Silicon Valley. I'm still in school, at a school where just about everyone fits into some kind of nerd/geek/freak stereotype. I looked at the picture that a previous poster had of himself; it doesn't look too different from what a lot of people around Harvey Mudd would wear. I'm glad that I've managed to get myself into this school, where it's okay to be yourself.
I realize that many slashdotters have decided that a college education isn't necessary to get a good job in the computer industry. But there's more to college than career prospects. It may be enticing to go into the job market and get a high-paying job right out of high school (or even without finishing high school...) Personally, though, I feel that the experience that I've had here at Harvey Mudd College has helped me realize that there are a lot of people out there like me.
I think that's really the most important thing to remember. Find some real friends and stick with them; it doesn't matter what everybody else thinks. There's more to life than high school... Just keep that in mind.
The subtitle of this book is "A History of Space from Dante to the Internet." In Medieval times, people thought of themselves in terms of two different kinds of space: located in physical space, and located in "spiritual" space. People felt that they needed to have some kind of a "place" where their soul existed. The medieval conception of the universe was that the universe ended somewhere past the solar system, at the sphere of the fixed stars.
That description was probably a bit cryptic, but the gist of it is that when modern science came around, people suddenly started believing that the universe extends infinitely in every direction. This removed the possibility of "spiritual" space existing outside of the physical universe; if the physical universe never ends, where is the outside?
Margaret Wertheim's thesis is that some people are starting to believe that "cyberspace" is a real space, that some people are viewing in spiritual terms. After all, you can sit down in front of a computer, and visit someone's web site. In some sense, you really are in a different place. You're still physically sitting in your chair, but some aspect of you has "surfed" over to a faraway place. Maybe it's not your soul that has traversed this great distance, but some aspect of your consciousness has.
At any rate, at the end of her presentation, she said that she did not believe that cyberspace could end up being spiritual fulfilling. Some people may be thinking of cyberspace in terms that are highly suggestive of the Christian view of heaven (some part of you will be immortal, etc.) but as Wertheim said, being stuck in a world of "frat boys' pages discussing God and Nietzsche sounds more like hell than heaven." I'd have to say I agree with that.
However, I do also think she has a point. When we think of going to the Internet, we do think of "going" somewhere; in most people's mind, the Internet is a place. We can analyze it down to its nodes and network wires, but the Internet is more than that. There's something we've built up inside our minds that has some level of reality to it. Now I think I'm done "visiting" slashdot. I think I'll go back to the real world...