I can predict that the "hardest" SAS related part of the course will be
1) Getting your data into SAS 2) Transforming your data so that it is ready for analysis.
Once your data is in the format expected by the statistical functions, then all you probably will have to do is call a statistical procedure and read the output. A 2-line long procedure call may involve an incredibly complex statistical estimator and give you output complete with estimates, standard errors, and graphs..
This is actually easier than doing the same homework in matlab. Sure in matlab its easier to get 1+1, but it has very few statistics functions beyond probability distributions and the most elementary stuff, so you have to code all statistics routines yourself.
Yes.. very odd, non-conventional programming paradigms. The core of the systems seems to have been invented at the time when modern computers didn't exist.
The good thing about SAS is that it implements tons of statistics procedures (a lot more than say MATLAB) which are relatively easier to access than the same functions in GNU R. Doing any kind of standard (e.g. any Masters-level) statistics or econometrics in it is a breeze and this is why so many businesses are standardized on SAS. Academic statisticians and economists tend to like SAS too for things that are already implemented in it. But programming your own custom procedures in SAS is a pain in a butt..
SAS also beats other software in management of large data sets. The DATA step is odd, but it works where R or MATLAB would not work.
Popular science/math/statistics applications generally have a very high market persistence... They are like well entrenched programming languages, which is actually what they are. People and organizations have invested an incredible amount of effort into software development, training, etc, to abandon a software packages like this one overnight. SAS software is a kludge of GUI tools written around a core SAS engine that was written at the time when modern computers didn't exist (and it shows), and yet this software is still going strong pretty amazingly. More recently, GNU R and STATA have become viable competitors for the raw statistics portion of SAS (they can't touch its business applications), and SAS might have lost a small market share in that area, but I really doubt it's on its way to die. Only time will show.
I strongly disagree. What is the point of exploring the universe in great detail, if humanity is going to live and die on Earth? Just spend what is necessary in order to figure out external risks like asteroid impacts and save the rest for more advanced navel gazing technologies.
I strongly disagree. Not all of science is meant beforehand to have practical applications. Otherwise, there would be no point in spending money on research on say the formation of galaxies or tectonic mechanics because such endeavors have no obvious, tangible benefit for the humanity. Besides, unmanned space exploration costs a fraction of the cost of the projects like ISS.
I don't fully believe that the public opinion influences the direction of the space program much. I don't remember when it was the last time that a politician run an election campaign that emphasized the space program. Usually, it's the elected president who sets the direction of the program, subject to congressional approval. So, what should matter most is the opinion of the congress. I am pretty sure the members of the congress have a better judgement of the costs and benefits of sending the humans into the space compared to the kid (who can't vote anyways) who thinks one day he will be doing science in space.
There is no doubt that SAAB of the 90s could not exist on its own. It was too small to be able to compete effectively with companies like BMW, Volvo, or the Japanese. However, back then it was not completely hopeless. The one who really drove this brand into the ground was GM. They simply starved the company of R&D funding, or engines, or genuine platforms, and engaged instead of stupid, blatant brand engineering, thus alienating hardcore Saab fans without attracting any new customers.
Consider this, in the whole 10 years or so under GM management, the only truly new Saab was the current 9-3. The old 9-3 was a continuation of a 1990s Saab 900. But the most outrageous problem with Saab's product lineup is that GM refused to update Saab's flagship product the Saab 9-5 for about 10 years. Instead, they did a slight resking in mid-2000s hoping that this would be enough. But that was not enough. Saab 9-5 was not competitive even in year 2000. Instead of bring real new product, GM management decided to rebadge the the Subaru Impreza and sell it as a Saab 9-2. Then also reskinned a Chevy Trail Blazer and tried to sell it as Saab 9-7 instead of trying to fund the development of Saab's own CUV concept car which existed as a paper drawing since early years of this decade. Frankly, if you look at Saab's decline under GM, it's not different from what we were seeing happening to Ford, Mercury, Chevy, and Pontiac. That is the "American" was of doing car business. Buying multiple brands, rebadging 15 year old designs and trying to sell them under 5 different brand names, etc. This is why GM ended up going bankrupt this year.
.. given that sending humans to Mars is pretty much a 99.99% waste of everyone's resources. As well all know, can do science research on Mars at a fraction of the cost of sending a space shuttle into a week lond trip around earth, much less the cost of the human mission that has a chance of reaching Mars. And don't tell me the B.S. about colonizing Mars. Earth will remain hospitable for life for hundreds of millions of years. If there is going to be some kind of catastrophe on Earth, it's far more likely that we could deal with it on earth (at least to extent of saving the human race) than making Mars, which is a dead wasteland right now, viable for continuing human life.
Stop taking vacation trips to save the planet. Stop watching movies, listening music, etc. Walk or bike 2-4 hours (one way) to work to save the planet. Eat as little possible and stop exercising to conserve the energy. Euthanize all patients who can't pay off the medical bill.
In fact, let's just euthanize ourselves to save the planet.
I could be wrong, but I think the primary reason they release so fast is because the OpenBSD team does not attempt to bundle all of existing open source software with their OS like say Debian is trying to do. In *BSD distros, there is the core OS that includes essentially only the operating system and some utilities, and then there is the ports collection. I believe a serious bug in some port package will not halt the release process of a BSD distribution, at least for non-essential ports.
I think you're lucky to have even those language courses offered. At my school, CS department only taught Java and Lisp (barely). All advanced courses are about abstract concepts rather than specific languages. Of course, to be able to succeed in the program you need to know how to program in a variety of languages. However, specific languages is something that you learn on your own. That's how the good CS departments operate. Once you understand the abstract concepts, picking up a new language should be easy on your own. This is how it's done in the real world.
Removing own.bash_history file is automatically a grounds for suspicion of malevolent behavior. And if someone suspects your account of malevolent activity, recovering the contents of the deleted.bash_history file from the disk is often possible. HISTFILE= is a much better, stealthier option. In the later case, nothing gets logged on the disk at all, and so no trace of activity is present on the disk. (Of course, there are more esoteric ways of monitoring someones activity, such as the process accounting files, and real security logging software.. but most sysadmins of course do not bother to do use that).
Bugatti's car business was dead since the 50s, and was not resurrected until 90s. By 90s, there was not much of the car company left except for the brand name. There was no continuity. Moreover, the Bugatti of the 90s probably would go out of business if VW did not buy them. So to me, it's a relatively new brand, but albeit one that has made more than enough noise to be taken as a serious sports car maker.
I really doubt that the Halo car effect will help VW recover the money it has sunk into Bugatti, much less make any profit off it. For one, I don't think they want to move Bugatti brand down in the market. VW already has plenty of higher volume sports car brands. Moving down market, means Bugatti will be competing with VW's own Porsche, Lamborghini, and Audi's supercars like Audi R8. Staying up-market also doesn't seem to make much sense. No matter how much they charge for a single car, they will never recover the costs sunk into it.
State constitution never gave the right for gays to get married to begin with, since it was never the intention of the original authors to protect the gay marriage. Yes, it does not spell it out, because more than 150 years ago, it could not occur to the founders of the state of California that today people will try to abuse the language of the constitution to get the state to recognize gay marriage. To make Prop 8 unconstitutional, its opponents first need to actually amend the constitution to protect gay marriage.
The inclusion of San Francisco was stupid. IT jobs are relatively plentiful and if you work in IT, you will afford to live in San Francisco. Moreover, who says you have to live in San Francisco to work there? There are plenty of commute possibilities. Live elsewhere in the peninsula, East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland, etc), Marin County, etc.. Yes, life is expensive, but also very cool. The reverse is also possible (some people who live in San Francisco work in east bay, etc).
It's just mind numbing how could one possibly put San Francisco on the same list with those truly depressing rust-belt cities.
This will never work. Just like businesses, most people care about their bottom line. Any Midwestern autoworker would sign under your post, and yet look at their spending habits outside of buying (heavily discounted) American cars. I bet they don't think twice about buying the cheapest jeans or kitchenware made in china while shopping at some mega retailer.
Re:What is this nonsense?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Education has been switching to Linux/Windows/Macs away from Solaris and SPARC for about a decade now, at least definitely on the desktops, both research and instructional. Many IT servers and most high performance computing servers had been switching to x86 based solutions (usually Linux) too. When Sun introduced the dreadful Ultra 5/Ultra 10 family it was a clear writing on the wall, that the party is over, that the SPARC workstations won't last for long in the places they they to be common place in the 90s. There are still a few system administrators in the academia who insist on inflicting the Sun Rays upon their users but they are the minority. Yes Sun flip-flopped on Solaris x86 and waited too long with the introduction of x86 hardware. At the same time all the academic software vendors (Matlab, Mathematica, etc), dropped the support of Solaris on x86 because even before Sun's flip-flop this platform saw pretty weak sales of their products. When Sun changed course, it was too late. Most academic/research/technical users started the process of switching to Linux or other non-sun solutions.
Likewise, defense contractors, such as the aerospace companies, had been moving their engineering desktops from Sun and other proprietary workstation vendors to Linux for a long time now. I suspect the situation is similar in the oil industry.
You have a CS degree. Go get a job! Yes, this is not the greatest market ever, but working for a couple of years is the best way to find out what kind of career is the best for you. There are of course tons of graduate degree programs where a CS graduate would fit: industrial engineering, operations research, statistics, financial engineering, MIS/CIS, and of course CS, MBA, and law. All of these could lead to good jobs and lucrative careers, if you work hard on it. For what its worth, if you play your cards right, you could get a decent job without these degrees.
The cold war never ended for either China or Russia. Both are still engaged in it.
The cold war never ended because we are engaging them. We sold weapons to Taiwan against China's objections. We have military bases in Korea, Japan, Vietnam who knows where else. Our navy ships and air force send out their patrols as close as about 100-200miles off Chinese coast. As long as such activity persists on the US part, China has a full moral right to arm itself to teeth. With regards to CO2 emissions, China's _per capita_ emissions are still like 1/5th of the US number. I am all for cap and trade, but China should be allowed a quota of about 3-5 times of the US one based on total population.
Russian security establishment might have been behind the attacks on Georgian infrastructure during a brief but violent war between these two countries when hundreds of people were dying. Is this supposed to be shocking news?
2. Outsourcing has not gone away. IBM's a perfect example, as are many of the other professional services firms. India is rapidly moving up the food chain, and even advanced dev jobs are moving elsewhere very quickly. The best strategy is to get involved with a small company who doesn't have the resources to manage an outsourcing engagement.
The best strategy against outsourcing should be "not being a deadwood". Always stay ahead of the curve. Make best use of true and proved technologies. but also be ready to learn new things as they come up. Show with your work that your work is crucial to the division.
Slashdot Mirror
I can predict that the "hardest" SAS related part of the course will be
1) Getting your data into SAS
2) Transforming your data so that it is ready for analysis.
Once your data is in the format expected by the statistical functions, then all you probably will have to do is call a statistical procedure and read the output. A 2-line long procedure call may involve an incredibly complex statistical estimator and give you output complete with estimates, standard errors, and graphs..
This is actually easier than doing the same homework in matlab. Sure in matlab its easier to get 1+1, but it has very few statistics functions beyond probability distributions and the most elementary stuff, so you have to code all statistics routines yourself.
Yes.. very odd, non-conventional programming paradigms. The core of the systems seems to have been invented at the time when modern computers didn't exist.
The good thing about SAS is that it implements tons of statistics procedures (a lot more than say MATLAB) which are relatively easier to access than the same functions in GNU R. Doing any kind of standard (e.g. any Masters-level) statistics or econometrics in it is a breeze and this is why so many businesses are standardized on SAS. Academic statisticians and economists tend to like SAS too for things that are already implemented in it. But programming your own custom procedures in SAS is a pain in a butt..
SAS also beats other software in management of large data sets. The DATA step is odd, but it works where R or MATLAB would not work.
Popular science/math/statistics applications generally have a very high market persistence... They are like well entrenched programming languages, which is actually what they are. People and organizations have invested an incredible amount of effort into software development, training, etc, to abandon a software packages like this one overnight. SAS software is a kludge of GUI tools written around a core SAS engine that was written at the time when modern computers didn't exist (and it shows), and yet this software is still going strong pretty amazingly. More recently, GNU R and STATA have become viable competitors for the raw statistics portion of SAS (they can't touch its business applications), and SAS might have lost a small market share in that area, but I really doubt it's on its way to die. Only time will show.
I strongly disagree. What is the point of exploring the universe in great detail, if humanity is going to live and die on Earth? Just spend what is necessary in order to figure out external risks like asteroid impacts and save the rest for more advanced navel gazing technologies.
I strongly disagree. Not all of science is meant beforehand to have practical applications. Otherwise, there would be no point in spending money on research on say the formation of galaxies or tectonic mechanics because such endeavors have no obvious, tangible benefit for the humanity. Besides, unmanned space exploration costs a fraction of the cost of the projects like ISS.
I don't fully believe that the public opinion influences the direction of the space program much. I don't remember when it was the last time that a politician run an election campaign that emphasized the space program. Usually, it's the elected president who sets the direction of the program, subject to congressional approval. So, what should matter most is the opinion of the congress. I am pretty sure the members of the congress have a better judgement of the costs and benefits of sending the humans into the space compared to the kid (who can't vote anyways) who thinks one day he will be doing science in space.
There is no doubt that SAAB of the 90s could not exist on its own. It was too small to be able to compete effectively with companies like BMW, Volvo, or the Japanese. However, back then it was not completely hopeless. The one who really drove this brand into the ground was GM. They simply starved the company of R&D funding, or engines, or genuine platforms, and engaged instead of stupid, blatant brand engineering, thus alienating hardcore Saab fans without attracting any new customers.
Consider this, in the whole 10 years or so under GM management, the only truly new Saab was the current 9-3. The old 9-3 was a continuation of a 1990s Saab 900. But the most outrageous problem with Saab's product lineup is that GM refused to update Saab's flagship product the Saab 9-5 for about 10 years. Instead, they did a slight resking in mid-2000s hoping that this would be enough. But that was not enough. Saab 9-5 was not competitive even in year 2000. Instead of bring real new product, GM management decided to rebadge the the Subaru Impreza and sell it as a Saab 9-2. Then also reskinned a Chevy Trail Blazer and tried to sell it as Saab 9-7 instead of trying to fund the development of Saab's own CUV concept car which existed as a paper drawing since early years of this decade. Frankly, if you look at Saab's decline under GM, it's not different from what we were seeing happening to Ford, Mercury, Chevy, and Pontiac. That is the "American" was of doing car business. Buying multiple brands, rebadging 15 year old designs and trying to sell them under 5 different brand names, etc. This is why GM ended up going bankrupt this year.
http://englishrussia.com/?p=998
Will it run Fedora 12 or should I switch to something lighter?
.. given that sending humans to Mars is pretty much a 99.99% waste of everyone's resources. As well all know, can do science research on Mars at a fraction of the cost of sending a space shuttle into a week lond trip around earth, much less the cost of the human mission that has a chance of reaching Mars. And don't tell me the B.S. about colonizing Mars. Earth will remain hospitable for life for hundreds of millions of years. If there is going to be some kind of catastrophe on Earth, it's far more likely that we could deal with it on earth (at least to extent of saving the human race) than making Mars, which is a dead wasteland right now, viable for continuing human life.
We can do more to save the planet.
Stop taking vacation trips to save the planet.
Stop watching movies, listening music, etc.
Walk or bike 2-4 hours (one way) to work to save the planet.
Eat as little possible and stop exercising to conserve the energy.
Euthanize all patients who can't pay off the medical bill.
In fact, let's just euthanize ourselves to save the planet.
I could be wrong, but I think the primary reason they release so fast is because the OpenBSD team does not attempt to bundle all of existing open source software with their OS like say Debian is trying to do. In *BSD distros, there is the core OS that includes essentially only the operating system and some utilities, and then there is the ports collection. I believe a serious bug in some port package will not halt the release process of a BSD distribution, at least for non-essential ports.
I think you're lucky to have even those language courses offered. At my school, CS department only taught Java and Lisp (barely). All advanced courses are about abstract concepts rather than specific languages. Of course, to be able to succeed in the program you need to know how to program in a variety of languages. However, specific languages is something that you learn on your own. That's how the good CS departments operate. Once you understand the abstract concepts, picking up a new language should be easy on your own. This is how it's done in the real world.
Removing own .bash_history file is automatically a grounds for suspicion of malevolent behavior. And if someone suspects your account of malevolent activity, recovering the contents of the deleted .bash_history file from the disk is often possible. HISTFILE= is a much better, stealthier option. In the later case, nothing gets logged on the disk at all, and so no trace of activity is present on the disk. (Of course, there are more esoteric ways of monitoring someones activity, such as the process accounting files, and real security logging software.. but most sysadmins of course do not bother to do use that).
Bugatti's car business was dead since the 50s, and was not resurrected until 90s. By 90s, there was not much of the car company left except for the brand name. There was no continuity. Moreover, the Bugatti of the 90s probably would go out of business if VW did not buy them. So to me, it's a relatively new brand, but albeit one that has made more than enough noise to be taken as a serious sports car maker.
I really doubt that the Halo car effect will help VW recover the money it has sunk into Bugatti, much less make any profit off it. For one, I don't think they want to move Bugatti brand down in the market. VW already has plenty of higher volume sports car brands. Moving down market, means Bugatti will be competing with VW's own Porsche, Lamborghini, and Audi's supercars like Audi R8. Staying up-market also doesn't seem to make much sense. No matter how much they charge for a single car, they will never recover the costs sunk into it.
I believe disabling bash's history logging into a file is as easy as typing :
HISTFILE=
at the prompt. In other words, he was probably one command line away from being detected..
State constitution never gave the right for gays to get married to begin with, since it was never the intention of the original authors to protect the gay marriage. Yes, it does not spell it out, because more than 150 years ago, it could not occur to the founders of the state of California that today people will try to abuse the language of the constitution to get the state to recognize gay marriage. To make Prop 8 unconstitutional, its opponents first need to actually amend the constitution to protect gay marriage.
The inclusion of San Francisco was stupid. IT jobs are relatively plentiful and if you work in IT, you will afford to live in San Francisco. Moreover, who says you have to live in San Francisco to work there? There are plenty of commute possibilities. Live elsewhere in the peninsula, East Bay (Berkeley, Oakland, etc), Marin County, etc.. Yes, life is expensive, but also very cool. The reverse is also possible (some people who live in San Francisco work in east bay, etc).
It's just mind numbing how could one possibly put San Francisco on the same list with those truly depressing rust-belt cities.
Vote with your wallets
This will never work. Just like businesses, most people care about their bottom line. Any Midwestern autoworker would sign under your post, and yet look at their spending habits outside of buying (heavily discounted) American cars. I bet they don't think twice about buying the cheapest jeans or kitchenware made in china while shopping at some mega retailer.
Education has been switching to Linux/Windows/Macs away from Solaris and SPARC for about a decade now, at least definitely on the desktops, both research and instructional. Many IT servers and most high performance computing servers had been switching to x86 based solutions (usually Linux) too. When Sun introduced the dreadful Ultra 5/Ultra 10 family it was a clear writing on the wall, that the party is over, that the SPARC workstations won't last for long in the places they they to be common place in the 90s. There are still a few system administrators in the academia who insist on inflicting the Sun Rays upon their users but they are the minority. Yes Sun flip-flopped on Solaris x86 and waited too long with the introduction of x86 hardware. At the same time all the academic software vendors (Matlab, Mathematica, etc), dropped the support of Solaris on x86 because even before Sun's flip-flop this platform saw pretty weak sales of their products. When Sun changed course, it was too late. Most academic/research/technical users started the process of switching to Linux or other non-sun solutions.
Likewise, defense contractors, such as the aerospace companies, had been moving their engineering desktops from Sun and other proprietary workstation vendors to Linux for a long time now. I suspect the situation is similar in the oil industry.
Would this distribution be appropriate to run on a PC with a Pentium III (1000) processor PC?
It currently runs 6.
You have a CS degree. Go get a job! Yes, this is not the greatest market ever, but working for a couple of years is the best way to find out what kind of career is the best for you. There are of course tons of graduate degree programs where a CS graduate would fit: industrial engineering, operations research, statistics, financial engineering, MIS/CIS, and of course CS, MBA, and law. All of these could lead to good jobs and lucrative careers, if you work hard on it. For what its worth, if you play your cards right, you could get a decent job without these degrees.
The cold war never ended for either China or Russia. Both are still engaged in it.
The cold war never ended because we are engaging them. We sold weapons to Taiwan against China's objections. We have military bases in Korea, Japan, Vietnam who knows where else. Our navy ships and air force send out their patrols as close as about 100-200miles off Chinese coast. As long as such activity persists on the US part, China has a full moral right to arm itself to teeth. With regards to CO2 emissions, China's _per capita_ emissions are still like 1/5th of the US number. I am all for cap and trade, but China should be allowed a quota of about 3-5 times of the US one based on total population.
Russian security establishment might have been behind the attacks on Georgian infrastructure during a brief but violent war between these two countries when hundreds of people were dying. Is this supposed to be shocking news?
2. Outsourcing has not gone away. IBM's a perfect example, as are many of the other professional services firms. India is rapidly moving up the food chain, and even advanced dev jobs are moving elsewhere very quickly. The best strategy is to get involved with a small company who doesn't have the resources to manage an outsourcing engagement.
The best strategy against outsourcing should be "not being a deadwood". Always stay ahead of the curve. Make best use of true and proved technologies. but also be ready to learn new things as they come up. Show with your work that your work is crucial to the division.