Yup. I built and installed a working DSRC system in 2006. Supposedly, large-scale deployment was scheduled to start in 2008. Oops. The major problem was that the chief sparkplug for the whole idea got sick and died. Without him pushing the project, it stagnated.
Times have changed. Languages are essentially irrelevant; if you have a reasonable background, you can pick up whatever languages (note plural) you need.
The question a couple of years ago was "what libraries?" There's probably a library that does what you want; use whatever language it's written in. Yeah, I know, everything eventually reduces to C, but like most things, it ain't that simple.
The question now is "what frameworks?" Nowadays, you don't develop programs from scratch; you start with a framework and build on it. Using Ruby on Rails? Write in Ruby. Using Django? Write in Python. Node? Write in JavaScript. Hadoop? Write in Java.
That said, the only two languages that it's really necessary to be fluent in are C and JavaScript. C is, of course, the language that most of the rock-bottom stuff is written in. A lot of systems produce C as intermediate code, and, as a result, a lot of C-isms tend to sneak into places you wouldn't expect. Learn your pointers. JavaScript is the only language that will run inside a Web browser *; if your code touches a browser, it will use JavaScript.
* Yeah, I know; Java applets. I don't know which is more painful -- writing them or using them.
IIRC, the last actual one-on-one dogfight an American fighter was involved in was in Vietnam. Everything since then has been long-range missiles and control from AWACS planes. And air-to-air missiles can be carried by drones as easily as air-to-ground.
In pure dogfighting capability, the latest from MiG and Sukhoi would eat the lunch of anything we have, or are likely to have in the near future. We could buy them from the Russians for a lot less than we could build our own.
Another issue is that the US doesn't build "fighters". The planes we call "fighters" are actually light attack bombers. Very fast and maneuverable attack bombers, true. But that dual role is one reason why they're so bloody expensive. The Russian planes are real "fighters" -- short range and no particular capability for lugging JDAMs around.
So let the ion engine guys have some fun designing a "space tug". Pick up junk and tow it to a nice stable orbit somewhere, probably just outside geostationary orbit. Later, when we need a counterweight for a space elevator, we have a nice big hunk of mass that's already just sitting there.
For smaller stuff (paint chips and so on) I like the idea of a big sponge (open-cell foam) in an eccentric orbit. It'd make a few dozen orbits, pick up junk on the way, and then re-enter naturally (big == air resistance in LEO). It'd probably be really pretty, too.
In WWII, somebody had the bright idea of putting calibration marks on contact lenses for aircraft spotters. The markings might as well have not been there. Turns out, if something isn't moving relative to the retina, the brain tunes it out, and it disappears. (That's why your eyes are always making little jiggling motions -- keeps the image moving on the retina.)
Now, if they have something that will project an image directly onto the retina, *that* would be something...
As others have pointed out, the main Java GUI (SWING) is a real pig. This is a result of Java's "compile once, run anywhere" philosophy colliding with different OS GUIs.
The other problem is that Java's startup time is ridiculous. Load the VM, load the code, load the libraries (*lots* of libraries!), verify the libraries and the code, initialize the libraries (lots of.properties files!) and the code, and then run.
Once the startup hooplah is over, Java code is quite reasonably fast. Benchmarks either minimize the startup time by, say, running 10,000 iterations of a loop, or eliminating it entirely by using "flying start" techniques.
The first linked article above is gibberish. The second one is a minor rewrite of the first. The website of LaserPowerSystems (ahem!) does not inspire confidence.
Trying to squeeze some sense out of the article, I'd guess that they claim that, by using a laser to heat up a hunk of metallic thorium, they can get it dense enough to fission by itself. Perhaps the laser is related to a neutron generator? I'd also guess that "250MW" is a typo for "250KW".
Or maybe it's just a bunch of buzzwords strung together in hopes of attracting some scientifically illiterate venture capital.
The problem is not with the C language. NULL terminated strings are just fine for printing status messages and suchlike, which is all they were intended for. The problem is using C to write text-bashing programs. In C, you have to spend a lot of time and effort checking string lengths, allocating and deallocating buffers, worrying about character sets and funny characters ("magic cookies", anyone?), dealing with byte order, and all sorts of other cruft that should be handled by the compiler.
IMHO, the first really useful language that was designed for text bashing was PERL, or perhaps Microsoft BASIC (I've used SED and AWK. Bleagh. I've not used SNOBOL so I can't say anything about it.)
I hit some random website (I don't remember which one) and suddenly my CPU usage pegged and the Java console popped up. The output on the console implied that a Java applet was mining bitcoins. Of course, I killed the browser process immediately.
A few years ago, I designed a Java "CPU leech" applet that would do things like this. Wasn't particularly difficult. I never actually built it; somebody else obviously did.
I wonder how many of these things are out there that are smart enough to throttle their CPU usage.
Pop music is engineered to be played on cheap equipment. After all, that's what most people have. Practically nobody has ever heard Michael Jackson without a ton of electronics between them. You want a real comparison, use classical or jazz, where folks know what a *real* live performance sounds like.
It's also notable that the people who liked the lower bit rate recording said "more bass == better". "More bass" has been the "gold standard" in pop music for a good number of years -- the harder it punches you in the stomach, the "better" it is.
Election fraud? No. Severe intimidation of possible opponents? Yes. Intimidation of critical journalists? Yes.
The people he brutalizes in his jail are Hispanic. This plays very well with his electoral base -- and costs the county a fortune in civil rights judgments.
All current OSs ship with a boatload of encryption. E-mail programs can handle S-MIME. Browsers use SSL/TLS. OSX and Linux come with gpg/pgp to verify signatures. Even Windows can encrypt folders.
So what's the point? It's already there. Use it.
Also, if you've attracted enough attention that They will notice that you've renamed SooperSekret.exe to BoringWorkStuff.exe (or JuicyStuff.encrypted to GameBackup.dat), you're screwed anyway.
TFA says that 12% of e-mail users "clicked on spam". I take this to mean a URL in a spam e-mail. I'm surprised it's that low -- haven't you ever wanted to see what's on the other end of some of the weirder spams?
But does anybody actually *buy* anything from spam? Has anybody actually come out and said "Yes, I bought a fake Rolex watch from a spammer"? I'd suspect that anybody dumb enough to give a credit card to a spammer is already living in a cardboard box. Who would buy a prescription drug from somebody who can't spell it?
(I'm not talking about fraud -- there have been plenty of news reports about people falling for everything from crude 419s to elaborate phishing scams.)
In general, spam looks a lot more like a DDOS attack than marketing.
1. "Here There Be Dragons" may be anathema to a working quant like Taleb, but it's a magnet for research.
2. Don't assume you'll spend your entire working life refining your dissertation. Don't get too specialized -- a good general background will let you move wherever you want. Remember, most current quants started out as physicists.
3. Quants are the financial equivalents of Palace Astrologers -- they tell the Powers that Be what they want to hear. The current mess is not so much the result of bad analysis as bad management decisions. Prepare to have your results misunderstood, misrepresented, and just pain misused.
4. As others have said, follow your heart. Life's too short to waste on something that *might* make you a lot of money if things don't change radically in the next few years. Which they will -- the current financial system is broken, and all the pieces haven't hit the floor yet. Depending on your own attitudes, this is either exciting or terrifying.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. I built and installed a working DSRC system in 2006. Supposedly, large-scale deployment was scheduled to start in 2008. Oops.
The major problem was that the chief sparkplug for the whole idea got sick and died. Without him pushing the project, it stagnated.
Another industry we can outsource to China! Look at all the money we'll save!
Times have changed. Languages are essentially irrelevant; if you have a reasonable background, you can pick up whatever languages (note plural) you need.
The question a couple of years ago was "what libraries?" There's probably a library that does what you want; use whatever language it's written in. Yeah, I know, everything eventually reduces to C, but like most things, it ain't that simple.
The question now is "what frameworks?" Nowadays, you don't develop programs from scratch; you start with a framework and build on it. Using Ruby on Rails? Write in Ruby. Using Django? Write in Python. Node? Write in JavaScript. Hadoop? Write in Java.
That said, the only two languages that it's really necessary to be fluent in are C and JavaScript. C is, of course, the language that most of the rock-bottom stuff is written in. A lot of systems produce C as intermediate code, and, as a result, a lot of C-isms tend to sneak into places you wouldn't expect. Learn your pointers. JavaScript is the only language that will run inside a Web browser *; if your code touches a browser, it will use JavaScript.
* Yeah, I know; Java applets. I don't know which is more painful -- writing them or using them.
IIRC, the last actual one-on-one dogfight an American fighter was involved in was in Vietnam. Everything since then has been long-range missiles and control from AWACS planes. And air-to-air missiles can be carried by drones as easily as air-to-ground.
In pure dogfighting capability, the latest from MiG and Sukhoi would eat the lunch of anything we have, or are likely to have in the near future. We could buy them from the Russians for a lot less than we could build our own.
Another issue is that the US doesn't build "fighters". The planes we call "fighters" are actually light attack bombers. Very fast and maneuverable attack bombers, true. But that dual role is one reason why they're so bloody expensive. The Russian planes are real "fighters" -- short range and no particular capability for lugging JDAMs around.
So let the ion engine guys have some fun designing a "space tug". Pick up junk and tow it to a nice stable orbit somewhere, probably just outside geostationary orbit. Later, when we need a counterweight for a space elevator, we have a nice big hunk of mass that's already just sitting there.
For smaller stuff (paint chips and so on) I like the idea of a big sponge (open-cell foam) in an eccentric orbit. It'd make a few dozen orbits, pick up junk on the way, and then re-enter naturally (big == air resistance in LEO). It'd probably be really pretty, too.
In WWII, somebody had the bright idea of putting calibration marks on contact lenses for aircraft spotters. The markings might as well have not been there. Turns out, if something isn't moving relative to the retina, the brain tunes it out, and it disappears. (That's why your eyes are always making little jiggling motions -- keeps the image moving on the retina.)
Now, if they have something that will project an image directly onto the retina, *that* would be something ...
As others have pointed out, the main Java GUI (SWING) is a real pig. This is a result of Java's "compile once, run anywhere" philosophy colliding with different OS GUIs.
The other problem is that Java's startup time is ridiculous. Load the VM, load the code, load the libraries (*lots* of libraries!), verify the libraries and the code, initialize the libraries (lots of .properties files!) and the code, and then run.
Once the startup hooplah is over, Java code is quite reasonably fast. Benchmarks either minimize the startup time by, say, running 10,000 iterations of a loop, or eliminating it entirely by using "flying start" techniques.
Nope. Worldwide economic collapse, yes. Nuclear war, no.
Those who stay behind get automatic nominations for a Darwin Award.
... Outsource support and system management to Mumbai. What could possibly go wrong?
The first linked article above is gibberish. The second one is a minor rewrite of the first. The website of LaserPowerSystems (ahem!) does not inspire confidence.
Trying to squeeze some sense out of the article, I'd guess that they claim that, by using a laser to heat up a hunk of metallic thorium, they can get it dense enough to fission by itself. Perhaps the laser is related to a neutron generator? I'd also guess that "250MW" is a typo for "250KW".
Or maybe it's just a bunch of buzzwords strung together in hopes of attracting some scientifically illiterate venture capital.
How about a shooter where, when your character dies, it reformats your hard disk?
The problem is not with the C language. NULL terminated strings are just fine for printing status messages and suchlike, which is all they were intended for. The problem is using C to write text-bashing programs. In C, you have to spend a lot of time and effort checking string lengths, allocating and deallocating buffers, worrying about character sets and funny characters ("magic cookies", anyone?), dealing with byte order, and all sorts of other cruft that should be handled by the compiler.
IMHO, the first really useful language that was designed for text bashing was PERL, or perhaps Microsoft BASIC (I've used SED and AWK. Bleagh. I've not used SNOBOL so I can't say anything about it.)
I hit some random website (I don't remember which one) and suddenly my CPU usage pegged and the Java console popped up. The output on the console implied that a Java applet was mining bitcoins. Of course, I killed the browser process immediately.
A few years ago, I designed a Java "CPU leech" applet that would do things like this. Wasn't particularly difficult. I never actually built it; somebody else obviously did.
I wonder how many of these things are out there that are smart enough to throttle their CPU usage.
The Government has already outsourced its computer security to Microsoft.
Pop music is engineered to be played on cheap equipment. After all, that's what most people have. Practically nobody has ever heard Michael Jackson without a ton of electronics between them. You want a real comparison, use classical or jazz, where folks know what a *real* live performance sounds like.
It's also notable that the people who liked the lower bit rate recording said "more bass == better". "More bass" has been the "gold standard" in pop music for a good number of years -- the harder it punches you in the stomach, the "better" it is.
And, most importantly
Think of it as impedance matching.
[snicker]
How many passwords do you think a system like this has?
If it'd been me, I'd have given them the root password to the network admin box. Let them have fun getting into anything else ....
Election fraud? No. Severe intimidation of possible opponents? Yes. Intimidation of critical journalists? Yes.
The people he brutalizes in his jail are Hispanic. This plays very well with his electoral base -- and costs the county a fortune in civil rights judgments.
Note -- not prison, jail.
The people in his jail are waiting trial or serving time for misdemeanors. Hardly the civilization- devouring monsters of Sheriff Joe's imagination.
All current OSs ship with a boatload of encryption. E-mail programs can handle S-MIME. Browsers use SSL/TLS. OSX and Linux come with gpg/pgp to verify signatures. Even Windows can encrypt folders.
So what's the point? It's already there. Use it.
Also, if you've attracted enough attention that They will notice that you've renamed SooperSekret.exe to BoringWorkStuff.exe (or JuicyStuff.encrypted to GameBackup.dat), you're screwed anyway.
Peak electric use is during the day. Cars will mostly charge at night.
They're using surplus capacity; no new plants needed.
TFA says that 12% of e-mail users "clicked on spam". I take this to mean a URL in a spam e-mail. I'm surprised it's that low -- haven't you ever wanted to see what's on the other end of some of the weirder spams?
But does anybody actually *buy* anything from spam? Has anybody actually come out and said "Yes, I bought a fake Rolex watch from a spammer"? I'd suspect that anybody dumb enough to give a credit card to a spammer is already living in a cardboard box. Who would buy a prescription drug from somebody who can't spell it?
(I'm not talking about fraud -- there have been plenty of news reports about people falling for everything from crude 419s to elaborate phishing scams.)
In general, spam looks a lot more like a DDOS attack than marketing.
1. "Here There Be Dragons" may be anathema to a working quant like Taleb, but it's a magnet for research.
2. Don't assume you'll spend your entire working life refining your dissertation. Don't get too specialized -- a good general background will let you move wherever you want. Remember, most current quants started out as physicists.
3. Quants are the financial equivalents of Palace Astrologers -- they tell the Powers that Be what they want to hear. The current mess is not so much the result of bad analysis as bad management decisions. Prepare to have your results misunderstood, misrepresented, and just pain misused.
4. As others have said, follow your heart. Life's too short to waste on something that *might* make you a lot of money if things don't change radically in the next few years. Which they will -- the current financial system is broken, and all the pieces haven't hit the floor yet. Depending on your own attitudes, this is either exciting or terrifying.