Excel is nice for quickly hacking something together, and I understand that at some point people will get the idea to do more complicated stuff with it, but that doesn't change that it isn't the right tool for anything that ever requires to be changed when working large-scale with data.
You should tell that to the PhD statisticians I know down the hall who find Excel to be a powerful and useful tool. They happily gave up a couple IDEs when Excel came along, but I'm sure they'd be interested. Oh, and it's harder than rocket science.
I know I'm poised to make a huge breakthrough, unfortunately I can never seem to make it over that last hurdle, which is, you know.. to make the actual breakthrough.
Utah... poised.... cold fusion.... there's a joke there somewhere...
The question I have about US government support of open source is this:
A HUGE library of public domain mathematical software, mostly FORTRAN, was written by US Gov. researchers over the years, for example in use in climatology.
The affordability of my (academic) research depends entirely on the government's public domain coding policies stretching back as long as computers and acadamia have mixed.
I hear Grues are taking lessons from Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts, and have learned that if they wrap a towel around their head, it's pitch black for you, too.
The other half was the Radio Shack "100 in 1" electronics kits, where you could wire together a few resistors and capacitors and make a beep. And a different beep. And then a radio.
After a few months on one of those, I started tearing apart all my broken electonic football games, an EE friend of the family salvaged an old oscilloscope and there was no going back. The big plus was, with a few NAND-gate chips pre-VLSI, the connection between electonic beeps and computer logic was apparent and cool.
So, anyone starting the kids with a few resistors?
"It should be pointed out that when an article is declared a "work of the U.S. Government" it is not simply that the copyright cannot be transferred to the AMS, but rather, that the work is declared public domain and no copyright protection exists for it at all. Despite numerous articles published each year in AMS journals that have been declared U.S. Government works by the authors, the AMS attempts to carry on its role of steward of the authors' intellectual property for these articles by trying to ensure that the scientific integrety of the work is preserved in any reuse and that proper attribution is given the original authors."
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists.
This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
Of course you failed. Obviously, half of you were supposed to rapidly deploy buggy software via sourceforge while the other half "fixed" the problems. Or don't you know more about Dilbert than us professionals?:)
My rule of thumb is to charge 30% more for contracting than for salary ( salary / 1920 * 1.3 to get hourly rate).
I did the calcs at two diff. jobs over the last four years, and the break-even point was around 25% in one, 35% in the other (extra salary needed to buy missing benefits: health, paid vacation, retirement).
Anybody reading this article who actually thinks these pivot tables sound "powerful" should look into some of the real row-based data mining tools out there.
Good lord, I think I can deduct an hour of slashdot browsing. Extremely useful, thanks!
'push these buttons and out pops a report in this format is NOT an explanation'.
Okay, the format isn't magical, it's just a table. The magic-ish is the interface for changing it, basically, you can drag and drop ("pivot") your data categories (columns) and quickly say: okay, lets sum by widgets. Now by gadgets. Now by widgets that are gadgets.
All this can be done on the SQL command line. But this is one place where drag and drop works better than the command line (and I'm a sworn CLI addict for most things).
The un-magic about Excel pivot tables is that your're limited to 64k rows of data. In using these from Oracle, much of the trick is writing the base query to get a result down to 64K lines, then pivoting the results.
And at that point, you never write "one plus one equals two" ever again, if you ever did.
This is true for primatives.
But for even slightly more complex tasks ("Find all the people who live in New York, and add their votes."), natural language is about as good. As the tasks get more complex, natural language ("Look for your friend in this picture, then see who's standing next to him.") quickly describes things that are formal language headaches.
For those of you that don't understand what evangelical is: spreading the word peacefully, not by grabbing people by the ear and kicking them in the head when they don't agree with you.
When the born-agains in Washington stop banging me in the ass with laws that affect me based on their religious viewpoints, I'll stop. For pre-Crusade ideas, I'll take a stop at the Department of "Justice" where Ashcroft is threatened by a statue's breasts.
Slashdot Mirror
You should tell that to the PhD statisticians I know down the hall who find Excel to be a powerful and useful tool. They happily gave up a couple IDEs when Excel came along, but I'm sure they'd be interested. Oh, and it's harder than rocket science.
Utah... poised.... cold fusion.... there's a joke there somewhere...
A HUGE library of public domain mathematical software, mostly FORTRAN, was written by US Gov. researchers over the years, for example in use in climatology.
The affordability of my (academic) research depends entirely on the government's public domain coding policies stretching back as long as computers and acadamia have mixed.
Indeed.
I hear Grues are taking lessons from Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts, and have learned that if they wrap a towel around their head, it's pitch black for you, too.
"Six to base. He picked up the rabbit we left. We have access. Repeat. We have access."
ok. [ dPHP/dt ] / [PHP(2003)] = +0.03
The other half was the Radio Shack "100 in 1" electronics kits, where you could wire together a few resistors and capacitors and make a beep. And a different beep. And then a radio.
After a few months on one of those, I started tearing apart all my broken electonic football games, an EE friend of the family salvaged an old oscilloscope and there was no going back. The big plus was, with a few NAND-gate chips pre-VLSI, the connection between electonic beeps and computer logic was apparent and cool.
So, anyone starting the kids with a few resistors?
NGIIALWIA! ("It's one of the classic blunders of all time").
"It should be pointed out that when an article is declared a "work of the U.S. Government" it is not simply that the copyright cannot be transferred to the AMS, but rather, that the work is declared public domain and no copyright protection exists for it at all. Despite numerous articles published each year in AMS journals that have been declared U.S. Government works by the authors, the AMS attempts to carry on its role of steward of the authors' intellectual property for these articles by trying to ensure that the scientific integrety of the work is preserved in any reuse and that proper attribution is given the original authors."
I'm a US government scientist, just found out that journals must have two types of copyright agreements, don't know if this is universal:
1. For most people, all rights go to [journal].
2. If more than X co-authors are US. government employees, the work must be Public Domain.
I believe this is forced on the journals as the price of accepting work from government scientists. This, is a Good Thing the government is doing (for once) over publishing industry. Don't know if this is universal across agencies, journals, sorry if the above paraphrase is impeferfect (legalese isn't in front of me right now).
...should be enough for anyone.
It's about time we thought of the programmers! Let's bioengineer ourselves to have 16 fingers, and adopt hex for counting.
Of course you failed. Obviously, half of you were supposed to rapidly deploy buggy software via sourceforge while the other half "fixed" the problems. Or don't you know more about Dilbert than us professionals? :)
I did the calcs at two diff. jobs over the last four years, and the break-even point was around 25% in one, 35% in the other (extra salary needed to buy missing benefits: health, paid vacation, retirement).
Unfortunately, DVDs also give them way more control.
Good lord, I think I can deduct an hour of slashdot browsing. Extremely useful, thanks!
Okay, the format isn't magical, it's just a table. The magic-ish is the interface for changing it, basically, you can drag and drop ("pivot") your data categories (columns) and quickly say: okay, lets sum by widgets. Now by gadgets. Now by widgets that are gadgets.
All this can be done on the SQL command line. But this is one place where drag and drop works better than the command line (and I'm a sworn CLI addict for most things).
The un-magic about Excel pivot tables is that your're limited to 64k rows of data. In using these from Oracle, much of the trick is writing the base query to get a result down to 64K lines, then pivoting the results.
They're more like guidelines.
This is true for primatives.
But for even slightly more complex tasks ("Find all the people who live in New York, and add their votes."), natural language is about as good. As the tasks get more complex, natural language ("Look for your friend in this picture, then see who's standing next to him.") quickly describes things that are formal language headaches.
Bwa ha ha. The foot was just the beginning... now it's Smegvay versus Vroomba to Take Over The World!
Let me ouch! let me ow!Let me "Target the nerd!!! ouch! oof! ow! oof! ooh! count the ways.
I'd rather have 100% of my pictures in 50% condition than 50% of my pictures in 100% condition. More fun for the grandkids!
Okay, now I need a tinfoil hat.
"When will you tell him you replaced his hard drive with an etch-a-sketch?"
When the born-agains in Washington stop banging me in the ass with laws that affect me based on their religious viewpoints, I'll stop. For pre-Crusade ideas, I'll take a stop at the Department of "Justice" where Ashcroft is threatened by a statue's breasts.