You won't really need it most of the time. But when you do, you do. I've encountered multiple problems that I just couldn't solve without advanced math (whatever that may be). I've run into serious give-up-on-the-project kind of problems due to my limited math knowledge. The first is creating a proper equalizer (and some other cool stuff that requires DSP). While I could probably follow some basic instructions to get what I need, I just don't feel comfortable in this field at all and am currently going to great lengths (in the form of a big stack of books:p) now to get my complex analysis and DSP knowledge to a workable level.
The second is properly comparing performance test results for a rather large application. This requires some serious statistics and quite a few tricks. I've given up on this and have left it to a mathematician.
To get back to the question. Advanced Math is not that important - most software engineers hardly ever need it. But that's because they don't work on interesting stuff. All interesting stuff requires lots of cool maths. 3d engines, image and video processing, software synthesizers, mp3 players, performance testing, big indices, ray tracers and even database systems are all built around some rather cool maths. If you don't plan to ever touch such things (in other words, you're going to develop some rather boring business software like most of us do:p), you could consider dropping it. But you're probably going to be sorry every now and then.
I have three reasons for reading/posting this. The first is that eog is broken since I recently upgraded Ubuntu; I should be wading through thousands of pictures right now, but can't. The other is that I cannot switch virtual desktops anymore since the upgrade so I'm stuck on this one.
I've been using Ubuntu for years on multiple boxes and I've never experienced an upgrade that did not totally kill my tediously constructed desktop configuration and a handful of applications I Just Need.
Which brings me to the third and final reason for being here: I'm too lazy to get up and fetch the Debian netinstall disk. I'd rather see Ubuntu disappear entirely so I won't be tempted to make the mistake of installing it ever again.
I visited Germany recently and enjoyed the graffiti tremendously. While there's some utter crap, I found the graffiti to be of significantly higher quality than what I typically encounter in my home country.
Less graffiti probably means more tourists (...)
I highly doubt that - possibly even on the contrary. Graffiti is an important part of what makes Berlin Berlin.
"Consuming one alcoholic beverage does not make a person an unsafe driver"
Yes it does. It about doubles the drivers chance of getting involved in a car accident during several hours after consumption of said beverage.
I find the attitude in the comments here rather odd - yet another apparent cultural difference between Americans en Europeans. Where I live (Europe, obviously), you're considered an idiot if you drink and drive, no matter what the law says. Apparently that's not the case in America, where drinking up to the legal limit appears to somehow be considered somewhat of an inalienable right. It is not; it is merely a practical limit.
And wtf is this shit
"NTSB officials said it wasn't their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner."
What the fuck? By all means it should be the intention of an organization that aims to improve safety to reduce factors that have been proven to double the risk of an accident. What is this? Are all Americans all alcoholics?!
I use Debian because it works. I don't know of an alternative that can say that. I've used Ubuntu for a year or 2 on 4 different boxes because I mistakenly thought it had not become just as stable as Debian. Boy was I wrong; all of those Ubuntu boxes now run Debian again since none of them managed to survive an upgrade without totally fucking up all kinds of things. I have one Debian box that I installed back in 1999 or so. I still works flawlessly.
The additional user friendlyness provided by Ubuntu is dwarfed by their ridiculously broken upgrade rubbish.
I can think of at least four reasons: - Contrary to popular belief, the effect of things like the Great Recession on the fossil fuel consumption of the entire world is not that big. - Probably the ocean is another big factor here; it absorbs CO2 at a rate proportional to the atmospheric concentration. This proces levels out a lot of the the change over a much longer period. - What does not really help to provide insight into fluctuations in the anthropological CO2, is the fact the even though it is huge over the long term, seasonal fluctuations completely dwarf the human contribution of CO2 on the shorter term. - These graphs are cumulative; the value is not dictated by what happens now, it is the sum of what happened in a very long time. You would probably would be able to find the Great Recession in non-cumulative graphs, but even there it wouldn't make a big impression.
I think he's wrong. While escaping our planet is a great way of increasing our chances of survival as a species in the extremely long run, even if we completely destroy the ecosystem that keeps us alive, planet earth is still a vastly less hostile environment than just about the entire known universe.
Leaving Earth really won't help us at all. Only finding an exact copy Earth will help us. And chances of doing so are pretty much zero. We might find something that provides us with energy, resources and a magnetic field, though, but finding a place were we'd be able to breathe outside, even after terraforming the hell out of it, is an unrealistic goal. And even then, I'd rather be locked up in a biosphere on a dead planet earth than on some foreign world.
And even that would be pretty damn hard; possibly the biggest hurdle to take would be to create a proper artificial self-sustaining isolated ecosystem to keep us alive. I don't think we've managed to do that yet, though ESA, amongst others, is working on that.
Nuclear power does not prevent deaths. Not a single one. In fact, it causes quite a few deaths. It is just plain wrong to attribute lives saved by not burning coal to nuclear power.
However, that does not mean that the 0.04 people assumed to die per terawatthour of nuclearly produced electricity isn't the lowest of all possible sources of power, as this less propagandaish source states:
And it also doesn't mean that switching to more nuclear power would continue this trend. Furthermore, it does not mean that all fossil plants/mining cause that many deaths.
In fact, the use of placebos in controlled studies may even harm their outcome due to this placebo effect. A good controlled medicine-effectiveness study should therefore consist of at 3 groups: one getting the drug, one getting the placebo and one getting nothing at all.
Not only that, but diesel vehicles don't emit any of soot at all. In countries mandating proper filters, that is. Emission from such diesel cars is so clean that smells like burned methane; it is basically nothing but steam and CO2. On top of that, diesel emits less CO2 than gasoline.
So? Fracking is bad? Or some idiot running a sewage plant got dollarsigns in his eyes and signed a deal his plant couldn't handle without breaking the law?
Still sounds great. It's probably still more CO2-efficient to do it this way than to refine the oil shale to gasoline and diesel and use it in combustion engines. However, doing it like Estonia does and facilitating the introduction of electric vehicles provides a path to actual clean cars. Investing in new combustion engines most certainly does not.
"in some strange way my brain had been conditioned to think of modeled data in a relational way"
The relational model is not much more or less than the mathematically sound way of dealing with sets and relations between their items in ways that enforce and maintain consistency. There is no alternative to that. It's not merely the status quo, as the article states. Even when designing a datamodel for storage in a NoSQL database, the rules of the relational model are best taken into account.
The only sound reason for deviating from the relational model and its rules is that your (reasonably priced) relational database server has shortcomings, typically related to dealing with large datasets in clusters, situations in which relational database solutions typically don't scale well and a compromise is needed.
Note that NoSQL has its place and I have encountered and worked on projects in which there was just no alternative, but I wouldn't trust my precious data to any developer that chooses NoSQL over a proper datamodel for arguments other than those mentioned above, because they're bound to be wrong.
I don't get how anybody educated in computer science fails to understand this.
In order for it to be a dwarf planet, it must be in our solar system; apparently dwarf planets are defined as "celestial bodies in direct orbit of the Sun."
Furthermore, the major difference between a planet and a dwarf planet is that the former must have cleared its orbital region of other objects. Obviously we cannot know for sure whether that is the case for this celestial body. Therefore this may very well not be a planet either!
I have a 1996 car. Sometimes things break or I want to alter something which requires modifications. Often, I turn to the service manual. If, while following the directions in it, something goes horrible wrong, I wouldn't even consider holding the manufacturer of the car responsible. That's what you should do too: deal with it. Take your loss, don't use outdated equipment or have it serviced/modified/upgraded by professionals that have insurance that covers these kinds of risks, which happens to be the single most important thing that makes professionals professionals.
There's absolutely nothing newsworthy in this post. Apart from the poster calling Overly Attached Girlfriend Overly Obsessed Girlfriend while getting the abbreviation right...
How is proprietary software that only runs on proprietary operating systems, is "in early development status" and does something that existing open source software does much better news for nerds or stuff that matters? Did I overlook the advertorial tag?
LOL WTF. I'm surprised you even ask such questions. Quite obviously, such a person is to be treated as a normal human being. Duh. It's probably going to be much more intelligent and normal than quite a lot of "normal" humans.
Nevertheless, it's rather unethical for other reasons. That's why we must not allow this. Not trying this would be at least equally unethical, though:P I hope this scientist carries on and makes it happen. Probably nobody'd ever know and the resulting child will be relatively normal human.
Berkeley published an article that's comparable to the sfgate-article linked here. It is not comparable to the publication in Nature, which is locked behind a paywall.
Why exactly would universities need a subscription to private journals in order to be able to share publications amongst eachother?! The only effect this has, is that they divert some money to things like JSTOR and probably a lot of journal subscriptions.
Also your assumption that this is not relevant to non-university research is baseless. How can we discuss this properly on slashdot if the information is not publically available? The cost of all required relevant subscriptions to find publications in certain fields is way too high for me. Besides that, hiding such publications from the world makes it very difficult to search within them using e.g. Google. Even worse, since all good publications are hidden, this mechanism favors disinformation. And also worse, less eyes get to see the publications so less people get inspired to do more research and less feedback is given. Thereby it harms quality of and progress in science on a global scale.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature, means corn...
If this research was really worthwhile, they'd have published their paper publicly instead of in some elitist magazine. This kind of behavior by scientists is exactly what late Aaron Swartz denounced. Once again important research stays hidden within the confines of paywall-locked information-vaults. Great...
Slashdot Mirror
You won't really need it most of the time. But when you do, you do. I've encountered multiple problems that I just couldn't solve without advanced math (whatever that may be). I've run into serious give-up-on-the-project kind of problems due to my limited math knowledge. The first is creating a proper equalizer (and some other cool stuff that requires DSP). While I could probably follow some basic instructions to get what I need, I just don't feel comfortable in this field at all and am currently going to great lengths (in the form of a big stack of books:p) now to get my complex analysis and DSP knowledge to a workable level.
The second is properly comparing performance test results for a rather large application. This requires some serious statistics and quite a few tricks. I've given up on this and have left it to a mathematician.
To get back to the question. Advanced Math is not that important - most software engineers hardly ever need it. But that's because they don't work on interesting stuff. All interesting stuff requires lots of cool maths. 3d engines, image and video processing, software synthesizers, mp3 players, performance testing, big indices, ray tracers and even database systems are all built around some rather cool maths. If you don't plan to ever touch such things (in other words, you're going to develop some rather boring business software like most of us do:p), you could consider dropping it. But you're probably going to be sorry every now and then.
I have three reasons for reading/posting this. The first is that eog is broken since I recently upgraded Ubuntu; I should be wading through thousands of pictures right now, but can't. The other is that I cannot switch virtual desktops anymore since the upgrade so I'm stuck on this one.
I've been using Ubuntu for years on multiple boxes and I've never experienced an upgrade that did not totally kill my tediously constructed desktop configuration and a handful of applications I Just Need.
Which brings me to the third and final reason for being here: I'm too lazy to get up and fetch the Debian netinstall disk. I'd rather see Ubuntu disappear entirely so I won't be tempted to make the mistake of installing it ever again.
I visited Germany recently and enjoyed the graffiti tremendously. While there's some utter crap, I found the graffiti to be of significantly higher quality than what I typically encounter in my home country.
Less graffiti probably means more tourists (...)
I highly doubt that - possibly even on the contrary. Graffiti is an important part of what makes Berlin Berlin.
"Consuming one alcoholic beverage does not make a person an unsafe driver"
Yes it does. It about doubles the drivers chance of getting involved in a car accident during several hours after consumption of said beverage.
I find the attitude in the comments here rather odd - yet another apparent cultural difference between Americans en Europeans. Where I live (Europe, obviously), you're considered an idiot if you drink and drive, no matter what the law says. Apparently that's not the case in America, where drinking up to the legal limit appears to somehow be considered somewhat of an inalienable right. It is not; it is merely a practical limit.
And wtf is this shit
"NTSB officials said it wasn't their intention to prevent drivers from having a glass of wine with dinner."
What the fuck? By all means it should be the intention of an organization that aims to improve safety to reduce factors that have been proven to double the risk of an accident. What is this? Are all Americans all alcoholics?!
I use Debian because it works. I don't know of an alternative that can say that. I've used Ubuntu for a year or 2 on 4 different boxes because I mistakenly thought it had not become just as stable as Debian. Boy was I wrong; all of those Ubuntu boxes now run Debian again since none of them managed to survive an upgrade without totally fucking up all kinds of things. I have one Debian box that I installed back in 1999 or so. I still works flawlessly.
The additional user friendlyness provided by Ubuntu is dwarfed by their ridiculously broken upgrade rubbish.
I can think of at least four reasons:
- Contrary to popular belief, the effect of things like the Great Recession on the fossil fuel consumption of the entire world is not that big.
- Probably the ocean is another big factor here; it absorbs CO2 at a rate proportional to the atmospheric concentration. This proces levels out a lot of the the change over a much longer period.
- What does not really help to provide insight into fluctuations in the anthropological CO2, is the fact the even though it is huge over the long term, seasonal fluctuations completely dwarf the human contribution of CO2 on the shorter term.
- These graphs are cumulative; the value is not dictated by what happens now, it is the sum of what happened in a very long time. You would probably would be able to find the Great Recession in non-cumulative graphs, but even there it wouldn't make a big impression.
It's about time somebody legalized 9gag, failblog, kuvaton, fukung and all those other great sites that make up the apex of the internet;-)
I think he's wrong. While escaping our planet is a great way of increasing our chances of survival as a species in the extremely long run, even if we completely destroy the ecosystem that keeps us alive, planet earth is still a vastly less hostile environment than just about the entire known universe.
Leaving Earth really won't help us at all. Only finding an exact copy Earth will help us. And chances of doing so are pretty much zero. We might find something that provides us with energy, resources and a magnetic field, though, but finding a place were we'd be able to breathe outside, even after terraforming the hell out of it, is an unrealistic goal. And even then, I'd rather be locked up in a biosphere on a dead planet earth than on some foreign world.
And even that would be pretty damn hard; possibly the biggest hurdle to take would be to create a proper artificial self-sustaining isolated ecosystem to keep us alive. I don't think we've managed to do that yet, though ESA, amongst others, is working on that.
Nuclear power does not prevent deaths. Not a single one. In fact, it causes quite a few deaths. It is just plain wrong to attribute lives saved by not burning coal to nuclear power.
However, that does not mean that the 0.04 people assumed to die per terawatthour of nuclearly produced electricity isn't the lowest of all possible sources of power, as this less propagandaish source states:
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/03/deaths-per-twh-by-energy-source.html
Or this one:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2012/06/10/energys-deathprint-a-price-always-paid/
And it also doesn't mean that switching to more nuclear power would continue this trend. Furthermore, it does not mean that all fossil plants/mining cause that many deaths.
This is bullshit territory.
This is not fraud. The placebo-effect is very real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Placebo_effect_and_the_brain
In fact, the use of placebos in controlled studies may even harm their outcome due to this placebo effect. A good controlled medicine-effectiveness study should therefore consist of at 3 groups: one getting the drug, one getting the placebo and one getting nothing at all.
So.. anybody in China reading this kind enough to put up a mirror?
Not only that, but diesel vehicles don't emit any of soot at all. In countries mandating proper filters, that is. Emission from such diesel cars is so clean that smells like burned methane; it is basically nothing but steam and CO2. On top of that, diesel emits less CO2 than gasoline.
So? Fracking is bad? Or some idiot running a sewage plant got dollarsigns in his eyes and signed a deal his plant couldn't handle without breaking the law?
Still sounds great. It's probably still more CO2-efficient to do it this way than to refine the oil shale to gasoline and diesel and use it in combustion engines. However, doing it like Estonia does and facilitating the introduction of electric vehicles provides a path to actual clean cars. Investing in new combustion engines most certainly does not.
"in some strange way my brain had been conditioned to think of modeled data in a relational way"
The relational model is not much more or less than the mathematically sound way of dealing with sets and relations between their items in ways that enforce and maintain consistency. There is no alternative to that. It's not merely the status quo, as the article states. Even when designing a datamodel for storage in a NoSQL database, the rules of the relational model are best taken into account.
The only sound reason for deviating from the relational model and its rules is that your (reasonably priced) relational database server has shortcomings, typically related to dealing with large datasets in clusters, situations in which relational database solutions typically don't scale well and a compromise is needed.
Note that NoSQL has its place and I have encountered and worked on projects in which there was just no alternative, but I wouldn't trust my precious data to any developer that chooses NoSQL over a proper datamodel for arguments other than those mentioned above, because they're bound to be wrong.
I don't get how anybody educated in computer science fails to understand this.
All hail Edgar F. Codd!
In order for it to be a dwarf planet, it must be in our solar system; apparently dwarf planets are defined as "celestial bodies in direct orbit of the Sun."
Furthermore, the major difference between a planet and a dwarf planet is that the former must have cleared its orbital region of other objects. Obviously we cannot know for sure whether that is the case for this celestial body. Therefore this may very well not be a planet either!
I have a 1996 car. Sometimes things break or I want to alter something which requires modifications. Often, I turn to the service manual. If, while following the directions in it, something goes horrible wrong, I wouldn't even consider holding the manufacturer of the car responsible. That's what you should do too: deal with it. Take your loss, don't use outdated equipment or have it serviced/modified/upgraded by professionals that have insurance that covers these kinds of risks, which happens to be the single most important thing that makes professionals professionals.
There's absolutely nothing newsworthy in this post. Apart from the poster calling Overly Attached Girlfriend Overly Obsessed Girlfriend while getting the abbreviation right...
Can't get my head around this... why would you want to run MSSQL every minute? It's not that unstable.
How is proprietary software that only runs on proprietary operating systems, is "in early development status" and does something that existing open source software does much better news for nerds or stuff that matters? Did I overlook the advertorial tag?
LOL WTF. I'm surprised you even ask such questions. Quite obviously, such a person is to be treated as a normal human being. Duh. It's probably going to be much more intelligent and normal than quite a lot of "normal" humans.
Nevertheless, it's rather unethical for other reasons. That's why we must not allow this. Not trying this would be at least equally unethical, though:P I hope this scientist carries on and makes it happen. Probably nobody'd ever know and the resulting child will be relatively normal human.
Yes, yes, I'm aware they're commonly used in medicine, banking and law museums. Since you still use it, I suppose you work in such a museum?
The only thing broken here is the Java browser plugin made by Oracle, which has no use whatsoever outside of museums. Java is not broken.
Berkeley published an article that's comparable to the sfgate-article linked here. It is not comparable to the publication in Nature, which is locked behind a paywall.
Why exactly would universities need a subscription to private journals in order to be able to share publications amongst eachother?! The only effect this has, is that they divert some money to things like JSTOR and probably a lot of journal subscriptions.
Also your assumption that this is not relevant to non-university research is baseless. How can we discuss this properly on slashdot if the information is not publically available? The cost of all required relevant subscriptions to find publications in certain fields is way too high for me. Besides that, hiding such publications from the world makes it very difficult to search within them using e.g. Google. Even worse, since all good publications are hidden, this mechanism favors disinformation. And also worse, less eyes get to see the publications so less people get inspired to do more research and less feedback is given. Thereby it harms quality of and progress in science on a global scale.
The discovery, published in the journal Nature, means corn...
If this research was really worthwhile, they'd have published their paper publicly instead of in some elitist magazine. This kind of behavior by scientists is exactly what late Aaron Swartz denounced. Once again important research stays hidden within the confines of paywall-locked information-vaults. Great...
By the way, Berkeley itself already published about this in November.
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/11/08/more-bang-for-the-biofuel-buck/