Question - How many Imperial grads does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer - Only one, but they'd do it just as well as someone who went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Really, do it now. Do it tomorrow! You're young with no wife, no kids and no major debts (mortgage and college.)
You will almost certainly fail (~90%) but there is a small chance you might succeed modestly (~9%) or even succeed wildly and become pretty wealthy (1%) but in almost any of these cases, you will equip yourself more fully for life during and beyond college than any of your peers.
This is exactly how I learned assembly language back in the dim and distant days of the mid-eighties. My ZX Spectrum manual has the Z80 opcode to hex listing in the back, and I went from there. A wave of nostaligia overcame me when I read your post.
For what it is worth, Ian Watmore has given at least one interview where he's said that it the scheme won't fly see this article in El Reg. That said, if it goes ahead, Accenture is very likely to be one of the big players bidding.
The Labour Theory of Value has been shown to be largely a pile of crap: Something is worth what people will pay, not what is _should_ be worth according to subjective beliefs.
I do agree though that this leads to some wierd (and undeserved) results.
Yes - but on the other hand, for every person who was proclaimed to be full of crap but was actually a genius, there really were 999 people who were, in fact, just full of crap.
a perceptive, informative and well argued post. I salute you. Perhaps I should have titled my post a little more carefully but it was written in between eating lunch and returning to work (I'm doing some Java coding amusingly enough.)
I agree with the point that Java is not the fastest language on the planet - windowing, for example, takes up a lot of time - but in these cases I wouldn't recommend the use of Java for just this reason. In such cases I would also argue that a 5% - 10% performance improvement isn't going to make enough of a difference, however there are certainly some cases where it will. If something is running that slowly then the chances are that your solution is a poor one.
The other thing I should have said in the first post is that optimisation for speed is not always a bad thing depending on the nature of the optimisation: Your example of looping is an excellent one - I rewrote one of my old perl scripts recently and managed to get an increase in performance of about an order of magnitude, simply by moving a complex hash declaration, which only needed to be compiled once, outside the main loop. This, I feel, is different from improvements to certain functions used in code, which are largely incremental in nature. The first is simply better design rather than tinkering with nonstandard ways of doing things.
I certainly would benefit from more exposure to profiling issues; how to spot them and deal with them.
flippant comment but let's think about this for a second: The majority of the time the alleged efficiency advantage is small or, as is generally the case, a pointless optimisation. Java coders seem to have the major efficiency/speed hangup - they use it to lord it over scripting programmers but they want/lack/desire the swiftness of C. (And yes, I do program in Java.)
To my mind, this is approching the problem from entirely the wrong direction: CPU time and CPU power are far cheaper than developer time and designer time. Therefore, rather than use some cobbled-together hack, use the standard implementations and take the performance hit.
This will be cheaper, probably 95% as efficient and, most importantly, be 195% easier to maintain or change at a later date. Consider the big picture rather than a single aspect.
NB - YMMV, for certain apps, it really does make sense to break all of the above ideas and principles, but if you REALLY need it to run that fast, you should be using C anyway.
...the fact that you'll force the business guys, engineers and tech dudes to hang out and live together, which may just breed a bit more understanding between the different groups: I mean imagine a business grad who appreciates the subtleties of letting the techs make the technical decisions and techs who understand that the business guys aren't completely clueless and do (usually) have reasons for the decisions they make.
You have just delineated one of the basic tenets of science - repeatability.
Your second argument is specious - no scientific theory is even proven correct, they are merely continuing to demonstrate that, under given circumstances, they aren't wrong.
Elgon
Re:Good idea for nuclear waste?
on
Going Up?
·
· Score: 1
Shooting nuclear waste into the sun (or even just into orbit) is a complete waste of time as this takes more energy to do than you ever get out of the material in the first place. OTOH, the nuclear indstry is so highly subsidided that it would be able to afford to do this if such a space elevator were to be build - can anyone say "Perverse Incentives?"
Kevin Warwick does this sort of thing - I don't really believe that it is purely a publicity stunt, but receiving emotions via an implant in his arm? Please, talk to the hand 'cause the face don't wanta know.
I do think that he believes passionately in what he does but he does let his enthusiasm (and perhaps his desire for research grants) get the better of his judgement sometimes.
Slashdot Mirror
Question - How many Imperial grads does it take to change a lightbulb?
Answer - Only one, but they'd do it just as well as someone who went to Oxford or Cambridge.
Really, do it now. Do it tomorrow! You're young with no wife, no kids and no major debts (mortgage and college.)
You will almost certainly fail (~90%) but there is a small chance you might succeed modestly (~9%) or even succeed wildly and become pretty wealthy (1%) but in almost any of these cases, you will equip yourself more fully for life during and beyond college than any of your peers.
Best of luck.
Elgon
This is exactly how I learned assembly language back in the dim and distant days of the mid-eighties. My ZX Spectrum manual has the Z80 opcode to hex listing in the back, and I went from there. A wave of nostaligia overcame me when I read your post.
Ah, salad days.
Elgon
I thought that it was Hooke rather than Leibnitz. vid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants
Elgon
Ummm....
Except that Andersen Consulting split from Arthur Andersen in 1989 to become a separate business unit, and demerged completely in January 2001.
Elgon
Elgon
Ah, ever the flaming Yank troll. It's Perl, not PERL by the way!
Elgon
Ummmm...
...???
How about plain old...
grep hack *
Elgon
...U.S. District Judge Victor Marreo announced his early retirement from the judicial circuit, citing "Personal Reasons".
Elgon
The Labour Theory of Value has been shown to be largely a pile of crap: Something is worth what people will pay, not what is _should_ be worth according to subjective beliefs.
I do agree though that this leads to some wierd (and undeserved) results.
Elgon
Yes - but on the other hand, for every person who was proclaimed to be full of crap but was actually a genius, there really were 999 people who were, in fact, just full of crap.
Elgon
"A'nal nathrach, orth' bhais's bethad, do che'l de'nmha. "
Someone's been watching John Boorman's "Excalibur" far too much! Still, it's a good tagline.
Elgon
Damn few, I'm willing to bet.
Elgon
Perlmonks
Elgon
The only Swarovski crystal accessory I want comes gift wrapped in a 30mm tube, perfect for pointing rifles at distant targets very accurately!
Elgon
maraist,
a perceptive, informative and well argued post. I salute you. Perhaps I should have titled my post a little more carefully but it was written in between eating lunch and returning to work (I'm doing some Java coding amusingly enough.)
I agree with the point that Java is not the fastest language on the planet - windowing, for example, takes up a lot of time - but in these cases I wouldn't recommend the use of Java for just this reason. In such cases I would also argue that a 5% - 10% performance improvement isn't going to make enough of a difference, however there are certainly some cases where it will. If something is running that slowly then the chances are that your solution is a poor one.
The other thing I should have said in the first post is that optimisation for speed is not always a bad thing depending on the nature of the optimisation: Your example of looping is an excellent one - I rewrote one of my old perl scripts recently and managed to get an increase in performance of about an order of magnitude, simply by moving a complex hash declaration, which only needed to be compiled once, outside the main loop. This, I feel, is different from improvements to certain functions used in code, which are largely incremental in nature. The first is simply better design rather than tinkering with nonstandard ways of doing things.
I certainly would benefit from more exposure to profiling issues; how to spot them and deal with them.
Elgon
Okay,
flippant comment but let's think about this for a second: The majority of the time the alleged efficiency advantage is small or, as is generally the case, a pointless optimisation. Java coders seem to have the major efficiency/speed hangup - they use it to lord it over scripting programmers but they want/lack/desire the swiftness of C. (And yes, I do program in Java.)
To my mind, this is approching the problem from entirely the wrong direction: CPU time and CPU power are far cheaper than developer time and designer time. Therefore, rather than use some cobbled-together hack, use the standard implementations and take the performance hit.
This will be cheaper, probably 95% as efficient and, most importantly, be 195% easier to maintain or change at a later date. Consider the big picture rather than a single aspect.
NB - YMMV, for certain apps, it really does make sense to break all of the above ideas and principles, but if you REALLY need it to run that fast, you should be using C anyway.
Elgon
Elgon
...the fact that you'll force the business guys, engineers and tech dudes to hang out and live together, which may just breed a bit more understanding between the different groups: I mean imagine a business grad who appreciates the subtleties of letting the techs make the technical decisions and techs who understand that the business guys aren't completely clueless and do (usually) have reasons for the decisions they make.
Elgon
You have just delineated one of the basic tenets of science - repeatability.
Your second argument is specious - no scientific theory is even proven correct, they are merely continuing to demonstrate that, under given circumstances, they aren't wrong.
Elgon
Shooting nuclear waste into the sun (or even just into orbit) is a complete waste of time as this takes more energy to do than you ever get out of the material in the first place. OTOH, the nuclear indstry is so highly subsidided that it would be able to afford to do this if such a space elevator were to be build - can anyone say "Perverse Incentives?"
Elgon
Yep, spot on except that you wouldn't expect glycine to be optically active because it doesn't have a stereogenic centre - the R group is a hydrogen.
And as for the sulphur, damn those Cahn-Ingold-Prelog precendece rules!
Elgon
Kevin Warwick does this sort of thing - I don't really believe that it is purely a publicity stunt, but receiving emotions via an implant in his arm? Please, talk to the hand 'cause the face don't wanta know.
I do think that he believes passionately in what he does but he does let his enthusiasm (and perhaps his desire for research grants) get the better of his judgement sometimes.
Elgon
Well, if he existed he'd probably be grateful that their name was associated with such a damn'd good webserver but that's just my opinion.
Elgon
Elgon