It was far easier for bad smelling men with obsessive interests back then to get laid. So either girls must have been nicer, or said bad smelling men;)
Hehee. You seem to mistake the softeware sales person for the software enginieer. That software sales person has as much to do with a software engineer as someone who's selling snake oil has with an apothecary or chemical engineer.
The software engineer just wants to deliver a working product and be left alone with useless and stupd customer and management requirements. No chemical enigineer gets the request that his new clean and powerful fuel needs to configurable to taste like twinkies or beef or any taste the customer likes, and also that it shouldn't be possible to burn things with it. Yet, those are the sort of requirement every software engineer has to deal every day with.
And what does that mean? Basically that we are struck with C for over 30 years already, and that reliance and dependence on that language, despite all the benefits if gave us, for being the reasonably fast language available everywhere and reasonably know by many, it also severely limits further progress. There is virtually no new programming technique or paradigm or even any real new syntacitcal construct since the times of C. And even worse, C has only a fraction of all this available. So I'd like to say, it's about time there comes some movement in the programming language front. Of all the "big new" programming languages that came up in the last 15 years, from Java, to C# to Ruby to Python, to OCAML, none had anything particularly new, that pushed the limits of expressiveness. People need to learn new ways of programming, making use of all the power the modern hardware gives us. But that certainly cannot be done by dumbing the interface between programmer and hardware down.
A government institution (on top of that highly interconnected with corporations and the business world) being held accountable for something? Where do you come from? That would render the whole concept of government useless you filthy anarchist;)
I think it's funny, that you all jump on the the church part, and leave corporations and states out of the way. You may have probably noticed from my original post, that the only difference between shady enterprise and corporation, between criminbal organization and state, between sect and church, the only difference between all this is the diffference in power. And the difference between those 3 categories, the economic, the political and the religious is only in their incentive and motivations it gives to the people participating in it. They are all ultimately after power, yet corporations use materialistic gain and greed as their main tools, religious groups use moral superiority and mindgames as their main tools, and criminal organizations use social state and violence as their main tools. Although they all borrow a little from each other.
What can I say. Might doesn't make right. It just determines and arbitrates what happens. It doesn't make right, it just makes real. The question of right and wrong is moot when you are outside math. And I don't really care about America anymore. They might be the 800pound gorilla now. But it's misbehaving in NY now, and the planes have arrived at the skyscraper already;)
Ideals are nice. The biggest slaughterers were idealists. From Cromwell to Hitler to Stalin to Mao.
Oh, criminals have always been the backbone of society. It's just that they are only called criminals, when they get in the way of the biggest boss. And the biggest boss always calles himself state. That's how states came into being in the first place: the biggest and meanest boss/cartel of the area squished all opposition and called itself state. And a revolution comes up, when another boss/cartel thinks it is stronger, and if it succeeds, declares it's own rules law.
And yes, Team America is satire. But you don't seem to get what satire is. It always has a true core, and most of the time it is just an over the top absurd, maybe even bitter, accusation. The means may be nonsense. The message is real.
But well, I'm assuming you are American. Those always have problems getting the truth and meanings behind words. But you gotta cut them some slack, considering what they where required to believe and take for granted by their political/economical/cultural leaders in the last years. Well, decades. They actually still believe they are a peaceful country, and have always been. Despite there being no decade in the last 150 years when the US wasn't a major player in a full blown war or major armed conflict.
Well, you need those kind of people. Those kind of people are the backbone of our society. Prolific tools, with no own means of judgement. As the guy said for himself at the end of the story, he wants to join th army. The kind of people shady companies and crime syndicates and sects are relying on and exploiting to fuck with people are the same kind of people governments, "good" corporations and churches are relying on to fuck with people and exploit them.
If I could I would come up with a nice Team America Dick/Pussy/Asshole imagery. But well.
Well, most in-company products are failures too. The difference is, in bigger companies, there are always people who learned how to label utter failures to success, for the sake of their career, leading to generations of users and programmers having to deal with it making their lifes worse. In smaller companies, an utter failure leads to closing down (and that happens a lot!) and severley hitting/damaging/destroying the lifes of those involved in the company. In open projects an utter failure leads to a "So what, it sucks. Lets move on."
Oh...letting yourself being percecuted for soem ficzional character...that happens all the time. Hallicunations happen all the time. People claiming to have seen something for some personal benefit (material or psychological), all those things happen all the time. All accoutn of Jesus can be tracked back to some small unimportant fanatical sect in Jerusalem. And a fanatical sect is a pretty good guess for a group that may see things that weren't there, or that may say things that are of benefit for them or anything like that. Account of Diogenes has been given by several different people of differing background in different cities all over Greece. And quite a few of them were pretty famous and reknown in their time and even today. And still there is doubt.
Well, I won't say Jesus definitely didn't exist. It's just that it isn't an overly convincing case.
Diogenes met and conversed regularly a lot of very famous and influential people in his lifetime. But in the end he was just an eccentric bum as Jesus. The difference is, written accoutn of him started already in his lifetime, and there many different independent sources. Jesus' contact to acknowledged people was a little limited in his lifetime. Pilate and Some priests were the top of it. And virtually everyone he met became known in the world because they were connected to Jesus. Alexander the Great and Platon, to name only two, became reknown on their own merit. And both gave account of Diogenes. Yet still serious historians consider him possibly only a legend.
And after all, I don't know why it is so important wether they existed or not. They are real in a lot of peoples minds, and this is what counts. This is their influence. Probably the biggest influence any bum could have.
You are aware that your sig line is originally attributed to Diogenes of Sinope. And Tyler and Diogenes have really really much in common (to the point where you could say Chuck wanted to create a Diogenes with a masterplan and cool fighting skills). Except that Diogenes was a real person (in both senses, he wasn't the imaginary evil twin of anyone and also not a character in some fictional work). At least there are more indications for Diogenes to have actually existed than for Jesus.
Oh, I wasn't referring to the sharing part. I was referring to the "just mem-mapping into memory" part. That certainly won't work with bytecode and is the very reason Java and.Net applications always take so long to load.
The sharing is is for sure. Java shares all the classes in one VM instance, and old dlls are also shared. The problem with Windows is just that they have even less discipline (and means) in organizing their files, libraries and executebales, in short:ressources than the Unix world. So it's not really uncommon for several Windows applications to use their very own private copy of the same dll. Or to install dlls in system wide library locations that never get used by any other application (and are a pain to get rid of). This even more blatant lack of discipline and means to enforce it (like a central packaging/installation/deinstallation system, or even something as trivial as a file hierarchy standard, or labrary naming conventions) is what is th4e main source of the Windows cancerous growth, and the many many places you have to attack the system.
Well, but with Vista this advantage will be gone again, and.Net bytecode will be translated, although all it will ever run on is x86 systems. And on top of that you need the whole.Net framework and everything else. I always ask myself how an operating system with zero apps can take up several GB of space. Maybe it's because a Windows Graphics driver package of NVidia or ATI is as big as the whole kernel source code, where all all hardware support is implemented in.
Well, Compressing RISC in a proper way isn't that hard. ARM Thumb does a pretty good job of this. Also the TriCore chips do that pretty well. It's even more efficient than ia32 as far as I know.
POWER doesn't have a compressed instruction set. But it still scales seamlessly from the tiny embedded to the biggest iron with all inbetween. And you can seamlessly and transparently intermix 32bit and 64bit addressing instructions, without having to switch modes or do anything like that. Have 32bit code but a 64 bit processor? No problem running it at the same time without an emulation layer (like you need for amd64, when you want to run ia32 code). Happening all the time on MacOS X with PPC.
I can give you a list of advabntages of other architecture over x86.
- your already mentioned interrupt handling - effectively using Registers for argument passing - no need for real mode switch to access firmware/Bios - thread switches in less than 50 cycles - a memory table lookup in less than 50 cycles, or occasionally even COW and dirty pages flushing without table lookup at all
Just compare the virtual memory handling and the interrupt handling and the parameter passing the task switch sections in the linux kernel for the different architectures. You will see the x86 versions for each problem to be by far the messiest and most manpower intensive and least maintainable versions. Several times worse. And when you compare the boot cose (which admitably only gets executed once though) it is a difference of several orders of magnitude. Hell, they even have a very own whole assembler in the Linux build tools just for writing those 20 instruction needed to boot it. Because no proper compiler or assemble would use those instructions anymore for anything.
That's exactly my point. All the effort that has to put into it just to make it still work at all. And it's not just on the R&D of intel that all this effort has to be taken. This register starved PU and this horrible MMU. It funny how many design papers you read of people who really wanted to be inventive and bring up some clean designs. And in the introduction of those papers it's almost always a good bet to to expect finding some sententence in the spirit of "Well, we'd just rather do it this and this way, to have a clean and efficient flexible design, but due to the xxx restriction of the x86 architecture, whhich is the dominant on the market, we have to do the following suboptimal workarounds:" and then comes a list. Those kind of sentences I have read in Java whitepapers (x46 is the very reason it's a stack engine), in the L4 kernel documents, in quite a few comments in compilers and the list goes on. Up to about 15 years ago x86 was ok. Up to about 10 years ago it was bearable. Everr since then it's a mere roadblock for software and hardware development. One that had to be steered around with much efford on a daily basis. Mos people just don't notice it anymore, because they got used to it. Intel builds Ford Ts. The have a big advantage in manufactoring methods and and in economy of scale. And it sure has it's merits. Bet even the Ford T wasn't built for 20 years. If Ford did what Intel does we'd still have to start the car at the front with a lever. And actually we do. We start in real mode.
Well, yes, it is basically the API that stayed the same. But there is still a major difference to software APIs. It's much more costly to make that translations. In C++ you can often make wrapper classes, and a good compiler compiles them away and you basically barely see any difference at runtime. On a chip every translation of each instruction has to be done each time. And just the logic to impement that takes a big amount of die space, and is of course a source of heat and errors too. And all this additionally to the instruction side effect problems you mentioned before. If you have the source, migrating to another processor is not that much work (except on close to hardware operating system stuff, but even that is a very small amoutn of each modern OS). And more importantly, it is work that is only done once, and not a billion times each second for each instruction and burning energy. If you don't have the source, and you really need to run windows 3.0. Well, then do it on a i486, that's more than enough for that.
Well, that's what you get when you stick to crufted designs and try to keep them at all costs although there are known better archtectures. It's just like code: it gets unmaintainable over time.
I'm pretty lucky with my job. I get pwid very well, I'm not that easy to replace, colleagues are ok or great for the most part. Higher management is making lots of stupid decisions and cleanung up after other peoples messes isn't that much fun. But overall I have it it pretty well. But the only reason I have this job, is because I didn't take any other job until I got this one. I had no job for almost 2 years after graduating. I did program and learn on for myself, helped a little on some open source projects, went on backpacking tours etc. But I never went for a crappy job, just because I needed the money. I was living from what I have accumulated during studies (sounds strange, but I actually had lots of money left after studying, that's what happens when you are a geek and barely go out;) ). I was living for to years off the money I now make in one month. If I had taken a crap job, I wouldn't have learned that much about myself and also I wouldn't have aquired the exact skills I needed to get this current job. And most important of all, I wouldn't have had the open eyes and perspective to even see the opportunity. So...accept that there will be meager times financially, and that there are more important things than that. Doing things you hate on other peoples terms just for the money is self-destructive prostitution. Doing things you love on other peoples terms just for the money is just prostitution. I may prostitute myself now. But at least it will allow me not having to work for money anymore in a few years.
Well, I'm aware that there are varying degrees of math in economics classes. But my interpretation of this incident was like this:
1. I know she is smart, and she was actually quite good in math at school. 2. She comes to me to help her grasping the math of her final courses. 3. I thought what she came for to me was easy basic stuff, that was built on already in the first semester of my classes
That has 2 possible interpretations. 1. It was a tough economics course, since she, as smart girl, has problems with it. That means tough economics courses are beginners engineering courses. 2. It was an easy economics course, and she is not so smart after all. That means, since she was one of the best of her year, economists are not so bright overall and in general (always with the possible exceptions that are there for every rule and generalization).
Well, people react not only poorly to you, when you are right. People always react poorly when someone else logically proves them he is right and/or they are wrong. Having to give in to logic makes almost all people always feel like being cheaply tricked, since they cannot reasonably do anything against it.
People want emotion and passion and feel good about themselves. Not reason and logic. That's why Bush wins elections.
So I won't say this is specifically something black encounter. But well, as a German with blond hair blue eyes and a face of a concentration camp doctor I get my fair share of comments too.
No offense. But from my experience, getting through economics studies is far easier. When I was in my 1st semester for computer science an old friend was just about to write her final tests for diploma admission. Last semester economics studies. And she came to me for help her with the mathmatics. So let me say: the mathmatics that is needed to pass through economics classes is a trivial subset of the math skills needed to be even considered for allowence to begin studying computer science. And no, she is not stupid, she is rather smart (and was one of the best in her year) and is really good at her job now (6 years later). She manages development projects in India and Southeast Asia for a charity foundation. So she is also one of the rare cases of someone studying economics and not being in it for the money. So, as much as I like her and respect her for what she does, she is still a prime example of how the toughest parts of an economy study is trivial base requirements for engineering studies.
Slashdot Mirror
It was far easier for bad smelling men with obsessive interests back then to get laid. So either girls must have been nicer, or said bad smelling men ;)
If someone cannot do it in a real database, then he has no business trying to do it in Access.
If you can't do it in a spreadsheet, you need a real database. Simple as that.
Hehee. You seem to mistake the softeware sales person for the software enginieer. That software sales person has as much to do with a software engineer as someone who's selling snake oil has with an apothecary or chemical engineer.
The software engineer just wants to deliver a working product and be left alone with useless and stupd customer and management requirements. No chemical enigineer gets the request that his new clean and powerful fuel needs to configurable to taste like twinkies or beef or any taste the customer likes, and also that it shouldn't be possible to burn things with it. Yet, those are the sort of requirement every software engineer has to deal every day with.
And what does that mean? Basically that we are struck with C for over 30 years already, and that reliance and dependence on that language, despite all the benefits if gave us, for being the reasonably fast language available everywhere and reasonably know by many, it also severely limits further progress. There is virtually no new programming technique or paradigm or even any real new syntacitcal construct since the times of C. And even worse, C has only a fraction of all this available.
So I'd like to say, it's about time there comes some movement in the programming language front. Of all the "big new" programming languages that came up in the last 15 years, from Java, to C# to Ruby to Python, to OCAML, none had anything particularly new, that pushed the limits of expressiveness. People need to learn new ways of programming, making use of all the power the modern hardware gives us. But that certainly cannot be done by dumbing the interface between programmer and hardware down.
A government institution (on top of that highly interconnected with corporations and the business world) being held accountable for something? Where do you come from? That would render the whole concept of government useless you filthy anarchist ;)
I think it's funny, that you all jump on the the church part, and leave corporations and states out of the way.
You may have probably noticed from my original post, that the only difference between shady enterprise and corporation, between criminbal organization and state, between sect and church, the only difference between all this is the diffference in power.
And the difference between those 3 categories, the economic, the political and the religious is only in their incentive and motivations it gives to the people participating in it. They are all ultimately after power, yet corporations use materialistic gain and greed as their main tools, religious groups use moral superiority and mindgames as their main tools, and criminal organizations use social state and violence as their main tools. Although they all borrow a little from each other.
What can I say. Might doesn't make right. It just determines and arbitrates what happens. It doesn't make right, it just makes real. The question of right and wrong is moot when you are outside math. ;)
And I don't really care about America anymore. They might be the 800pound gorilla now. But it's misbehaving in NY now, and the planes have arrived at the skyscraper already
Ideals are nice. The biggest slaughterers were idealists. From Cromwell to Hitler to Stalin to Mao.
Oh, criminals have always been the backbone of society. It's just that they are only called criminals, when they get in the way of the biggest boss. And the biggest boss always calles himself state. That's how states came into being in the first place: the biggest and meanest boss/cartel of the area squished all opposition and called itself state. And a revolution comes up, when another boss/cartel thinks it is stronger, and if it succeeds, declares it's own rules law.
And yes, Team America is satire. But you don't seem to get what satire is. It always has a true core, and most of the time it is just an over the top absurd, maybe even bitter, accusation. The means may be nonsense. The message is real.
But well, I'm assuming you are American. Those always have problems getting the truth and meanings behind words. But you gotta cut them some slack, considering what they where required to believe and take for granted by their political/economical/cultural leaders in the last years. Well, decades. They actually still believe they are a peaceful country, and have always been. Despite there being no decade in the last 150 years when the US wasn't a major player in a full blown war or major armed conflict.
Well, you need those kind of people. Those kind of people are the backbone of our society. Prolific tools, with no own means of judgement. As the guy said for himself at the end of the story, he wants to join th army. The kind of people shady companies and crime syndicates and sects are relying on and exploiting to fuck with people are the same kind of people governments, "good" corporations and churches are relying on to fuck with people and exploit them.
If I could I would come up with a nice Team America Dick/Pussy/Asshole imagery. But well.
Well, most in-company products are failures too.
The difference is, in bigger companies, there are always people who learned how to label utter failures to success, for the sake of their career, leading to generations of users and programmers having to deal with it making their lifes worse.
In smaller companies, an utter failure leads to closing down (and that happens a lot!) and severley hitting/damaging/destroying the lifes of those involved in the company.
In open projects an utter failure leads to a "So what, it sucks. Lets move on."
Oh...letting yourself being percecuted for soem ficzional character...that happens all the time. Hallicunations happen all the time. People claiming to have seen something for some personal benefit (material or psychological), all those things happen all the time.
All accoutn of Jesus can be tracked back to some small unimportant fanatical sect in Jerusalem. And a fanatical sect is a pretty good guess for a group that may see things that weren't there, or that may say things that are of benefit for them or anything like that.
Account of Diogenes has been given by several different people of differing background in different cities all over Greece. And quite a few of them were pretty famous and reknown in their time and even today. And still there is doubt.
Well, I won't say Jesus definitely didn't exist. It's just that it isn't an overly convincing case.
Diogenes met and conversed regularly a lot of very famous and influential people in his lifetime. But in the end he was just an eccentric bum as Jesus. The difference is, written accoutn of him started already in his lifetime, and there many different independent sources. Jesus' contact to acknowledged people was a little limited in his lifetime. Pilate and Some priests were the top of it. And virtually everyone he met became known in the world because they were connected to Jesus. Alexander the Great and Platon, to name only two, became reknown on their own merit. And both gave account of Diogenes. Yet still serious historians consider him possibly only a legend.
And after all, I don't know why it is so important wether they existed or not. They are real in a lot of peoples minds, and this is what counts. This is their influence. Probably the biggest influence any bum could have.
You are aware that your sig line is originally attributed to Diogenes of Sinope. And Tyler and Diogenes have really really much in common (to the point where you could say Chuck wanted to create a Diogenes with a masterplan and cool fighting skills). Except that Diogenes was a real person (in both senses, he wasn't the imaginary evil twin of anyone and also not a character in some fictional work). At least there are more indications for Diogenes to have actually existed than for Jesus.
Not to take anything away from the movie...
Oh, I wasn't referring to the sharing part. I was referring to the "just mem-mapping into memory" part. That certainly won't work with bytecode and is the very reason Java and .Net applications always take so long to load.
The sharing is is for sure. Java shares all the classes in one VM instance, and old dlls are also shared. The problem with Windows is just that they have even less discipline (and means) in organizing their files, libraries and executebales, in short:ressources than the Unix world. So it's not really uncommon for several Windows applications to use their very own private copy of the same dll. Or to install dlls in system wide library locations that never get used by any other application (and are a pain to get rid of).
This even more blatant lack of discipline and means to enforce it (like a central packaging/installation/deinstallation system, or even something as trivial as a file hierarchy standard, or labrary naming conventions) is what is th4e main source of the Windows cancerous growth, and the many many places you have to attack the system.
Well, but with Vista this advantage will be gone again, and .Net bytecode will be translated, although all it will ever run on is x86 systems. And on top of that you need the whole .Net framework and everything else. I always ask myself how an operating system with zero apps can take up several GB of space. Maybe it's because a Windows Graphics driver package of NVidia or ATI is as big as the whole kernel source code, where all all hardware support is implemented in.
Well, Compressing RISC in a proper way isn't that hard. ARM Thumb does a pretty good job of this. Also the TriCore chips do that pretty well. It's even more efficient than ia32 as far as I know.
POWER doesn't have a compressed instruction set. But it still scales seamlessly from the tiny embedded to the biggest iron with all inbetween. And you can seamlessly and transparently intermix 32bit and 64bit addressing instructions, without having to switch modes or do anything like that. Have 32bit code but a 64 bit processor? No problem running it at the same time without an emulation layer (like you need for amd64, when you want to run ia32 code). Happening all the time on MacOS X with PPC.
I can give you a list of advabntages of other architecture over x86.
- your already mentioned interrupt handling
- effectively using Registers for argument passing
- no need for real mode switch to access firmware/Bios
- thread switches in less than 50 cycles
- a memory table lookup in less than 50 cycles, or occasionally even COW and dirty pages flushing without table lookup at all
Just compare the virtual memory handling and the interrupt handling and the parameter passing the task switch sections in the linux kernel for the different architectures. You will see the x86 versions for each problem to be by far the messiest and most manpower intensive and least maintainable versions. Several times worse. And when you compare the boot cose (which admitably only gets executed once though) it is a difference of several orders of magnitude. Hell, they even have a very own whole assembler in the Linux build tools just for writing those 20 instruction needed to boot it. Because no proper compiler or assemble would use those instructions anymore for anything.
That's exactly my point. All the effort that has to put into it just to make it still work at all. And it's not just on the R&D of intel that all this effort has to be taken. This register starved PU and this horrible MMU. It funny how many design papers you read of people who really wanted to be inventive and bring up some clean designs. And in the introduction of those papers it's almost always a good bet to to expect finding some sententence in the spirit of "Well, we'd just rather do it this and this way, to have a clean and efficient flexible design, but due to the xxx restriction of the x86 architecture, whhich is the dominant on the market, we have to do the following suboptimal workarounds:" and then comes a list. Those kind of sentences I have read in Java whitepapers (x46 is the very reason it's a stack engine), in the L4 kernel documents, in quite a few comments in compilers and the list goes on.
Up to about 15 years ago x86 was ok. Up to about 10 years ago it was bearable. Everr since then it's a mere roadblock for software and hardware development. One that had to be steered around with much efford on a daily basis. Mos people just don't notice it anymore, because they got used to it. Intel builds Ford Ts. The have a big advantage in manufactoring methods and and in economy of scale. And it sure has it's merits. Bet even the Ford T wasn't built for 20 years. If Ford did what Intel does we'd still have to start the car at the front with a lever. And actually we do. We start in real mode.
Well, yes, it is basically the API that stayed the same. But there is still a major difference to software APIs. It's much more costly to make that translations. In C++ you can often make wrapper classes, and a good compiler compiles them away and you basically barely see any difference at runtime. On a chip every translation of each instruction has to be done each time. And just the logic to impement that takes a big amount of die space, and is of course a source of heat and errors too. And all this additionally to the instruction side effect problems you mentioned before.
If you have the source, migrating to another processor is not that much work (except on close to hardware operating system stuff, but even that is a very small amoutn of each modern OS). And more importantly, it is work that is only done once, and not a billion times each second for each instruction and burning energy.
If you don't have the source, and you really need to run windows 3.0. Well, then do it on a i486, that's more than enough for that.
Well, that's what you get when you stick to crufted designs and try to keep them at all costs although there are known better archtectures. It's just like code: it gets unmaintainable over time.
I'm pretty lucky with my job. I get pwid very well, I'm not that easy to replace, colleagues are ok or great for the most part. Higher management is making lots of stupid decisions and cleanung up after other peoples messes isn't that much fun. But overall I have it it pretty well. But the only reason I have this job, is because I didn't take any other job until I got this one. I had no job for almost 2 years after graduating. I did program and learn on for myself, helped a little on some open source projects, went on backpacking tours etc. But I never went for a crappy job, just because I needed the money. I was living from what I have accumulated during studies (sounds strange, but I actually had lots of money left after studying, that's what happens when you are a geek and barely go out ;) ). I was living for to years off the money I now make in one month. If I had taken a crap job, I wouldn't have learned that much about myself and also I wouldn't have aquired the exact skills I needed to get this current job. And most important of all, I wouldn't have had the open eyes and perspective to even see the opportunity.
So...accept that there will be meager times financially, and that there are more important things than that. Doing things you hate on other peoples terms just for the money is self-destructive prostitution. Doing things you love on other peoples terms just for the money is just prostitution. I may prostitute myself now. But at least it will allow me not having to work for money anymore in a few years.
Well, I'm aware that there are varying degrees of math in economics classes. But my interpretation of this incident was like this:
1. I know she is smart, and she was actually quite good in math at school.
2. She comes to me to help her grasping the math of her final courses.
3. I thought what she came for to me was easy basic stuff, that was built on already in the first semester of my classes
That has 2 possible interpretations.
1. It was a tough economics course, since she, as smart girl, has problems with it. That means tough economics courses are beginners engineering courses.
2. It was an easy economics course, and she is not so smart after all. That means, since she was one of the best of her year, economists are not so bright overall and in general (always with the possible exceptions that are there for every rule and generalization).
Well, people react not only poorly to you, when you are right. People always react poorly when someone else logically proves them he is right and/or they are wrong. Having to give in to logic makes almost all people always feel like being cheaply tricked, since they cannot reasonably do anything against it.
People want emotion and passion and feel good about themselves. Not reason and logic. That's why Bush wins elections.
So I won't say this is specifically something black encounter.
But well, as a German with blond hair blue eyes and a face of a concentration camp doctor I get my fair share of comments too.
No offense. But from my experience, getting through economics studies is far easier. When I was in my 1st semester for computer science an old friend was just about to write her final tests for diploma admission. Last semester economics studies. And she came to me for help her with the mathmatics. So let me say: the mathmatics that is needed to pass through economics classes is a trivial subset of the math skills needed to be even considered for allowence to begin studying computer science.
And no, she is not stupid, she is rather smart (and was one of the best in her year) and is really good at her job now (6 years later). She manages development projects in India and Southeast Asia for a charity foundation. So she is also one of the rare cases of someone studying economics and not being in it for the money.
So, as much as I like her and respect her for what she does, she is still a prime example of how the toughest parts of an economy study is trivial base requirements for engineering studies.