Most people wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer to do machine and tool making, or a civil engineer to dig holes, unless he was also so qualified. One alternative is for universities to have separate tracts for applied programmers and students who are more interested in the theoretical end of CS.
Sidetracking a little, I just read a rant (allegedly) from a late Japanese engineer specializing in nuclear facilities who died in 1990s. He complained that the engineers who drew the designs were oblivious to the mistakes the technicians would make on the ground -- loose screws, poorly fitted parts, etc. that would lead to nuclear disasters like the one Japan might be having now.
And I believe this is what would happen if "CS" people simply designed systems and left the implementation to "programmers". And computer systems are usually much, much more complicated than most physical, mechanical systems. Which is why sane companies hire top "CS" talent to write code as a programmer, instead outsourcing it to code-monkeys. The implementation matters, and those who thought otherwise were punished by products that turned out to be crap.
My personal experience is that even at the design, architectural level, there's not a real need for actual maths in software development. People with good maths are generally better at relevant things such as logic, identifying solvable subproblems, etc. but the actual maths is not generally used. Where I do see a lot of maths is in academic CS papers, where proofs of optimality require those maths (some of those proofs are rather spectacular displays of maths, or so I've heard... I've never been good/interested enough in maths to drill into these things). But going heavy on maths just to train people to publish academic CS papers seems to be rather.... missing the whole picture.
1. Undergrad comp sci is for the fundamentals of comp sci, not the latest marketing buzzwords like "cloud computing";
There is a lot of fundamentals in distributed systems/algorithms/computing. And as far as I understand it, it doesn't depend on any established branch of "mathematics".
Sure, you can always find courses on "cloud computing" that teaches you how to create Amazon EC2 instances, call remote APIs and so on, but there is a lot of difficult things in there, which, I presume from your maths background, probably didn't appreciate.
Agreed. My claim is that people do practice Chinese medicine in a scientific/evidence-based way, although admittedly fraudsters selling snake-oil are easier to find.
For example, as far as I understand it, there is active scientific research on extracting the active ingredients of many herbs used in Chinese medicine. (traditionally they are simmered in pots until the resulting liquid becomes concentrated, which becomes the medicine to be drinked)
Those who have been treated by real Chinese medicine, as opposed to the snake oil imitations, would beg to differ. Sure, it's not more advanced than modern western medicine, but it's not based on superstition at all.
Western "medicine" was no better until a few decades ago. And even today many health problems are still treated along the lines of "we don't know how to treat this, so take this pill as it seems to work on 20% of the patients, um.... unless it's placebo".
The interesting thing is, how can you truly believe in anything that you cannot understand? How can you say with any conviction (beyond "blind" faith) that God is "good", without understanding his actions?
Unlike the atheists around here I don't tend to get too fidgety when people believe in weird things (I'm sure I believe in lots of things that people find weird), I am just amused at how people try to rationalize their beliefs unnecessarily....
Here in Hong Kong the Internet speed to US is visibly affected. It's worse than 56k speeds.
My ISP felt OK two hours ago, but I saw other people on other ISPs complaining on Facebook. I think the local ISPs traded some bandwidth or something.
There was indeed reports of broken cables. I remember a few years ago when there was a quake in the Pacific near Taiwan, the Internet was unusable for a day or two. Makes us think how fragile the Internet infrastructure can be when we depend on too many "cloud" services being available:-/
In the very unlikely event that NP=P, what people "believe" in doesn't mean much. A proof that NP=P is groundbreaking enough to invalidate almost everybody's "beliefs" in the field of computational complexity.
Besides, I don't think the encryption algorithms are "believed" to be "harder" than NPC problems. Nobody has the faintest idea whether there'll be a 18billion year setup time, or a O(N^10000) for the "harder" problems in P if NP=P. The discussion of what really follows if NP=P is pretty moot actually.
Would somebody with half a clue PLEASE mod this post down???
It's just mis-information of the worst kind -- to lay people (even for CS grads that didn't take any computational complexity courses) it sounds right except that it isn't.
I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).
Just like how Chess AI is relevant to consumers now.
I don't recall gcc -O3 and -O0 having a factor of 10 difference for most tasks. And Javascript definitely isn't close to C performance, even unoptimized.
Besides, gcc -O3 can actually be somewhat slower than -O2, which is why almost nobody uses -O3 except for the Gentoo zealots.
Hong Kong is not a democracy by any western standards. Half of the legislature is what we call the "functional constituency", which has a voter base of about 3% of the whole population. A few of those seats are exclusively selected by "corporate votes", no real people voting. For example, the legislator in the "finance" constituency only has to secure votes from a few dozen BANKS to get a seat. (You thought just lobbying by corporations was bad enough?)
The government directly reports to the Central Government of the People's Republic of China, and the head of government in Hong Kong is elected by a small group of about 800 people. Note, you're talking about a city of 7+ million people.
Not that the state of affairs was any better under British rule -- for a long time, the legislature was appointed until it switched to a system similar to that of today, and the Governor of Hong Kong was appointed by the British government.
In short, Hong Kong is not, and was never a democracy.
---
As for Taiwan, I am less familiar with its political history. But I am not aware that there was significant "outside" help. The people in Taiwan wanted democracy, and the then president Lee Teng-Hui gave what they wanted, and now they are pretty proud to be the only place in "China" where democracy is practiced.
The country is positioned to become in a few decades the dominant country on a very small Earth. With that comes naturally the roles of world police, judge, and executioner. Further, there is a long term trend towards the infamously named "One World Order", that is, a supernational level of government.
I've had more hardware troubles with Windows than with Linux for quite a long time.
What are you, a time traveler from 2000?
You do know that your Android phone runs Linux, don't you?
I mean, you truly are a MS Fanboy when you can't even see how Microsoft is the true failure for the last decade. Sure, you can continue to believe what you believe, I just thought you might appreciate a reality check once in a while.
I don't know about GPL3, since it has patent clauses in it and I haven't read it much.
But in the case of most other OSS licenses, you are simply giving permission to others to use your work. The work may be encumbered by some other things, patents, or even things like the DMCA. But they don't prevent anybody from releasing code under a free license. It's just that you and users of your code might get sued for patent infringement. Having a patent issue in your code may cause people to avoid your code, but it doesn't invalidate the license itself.
In case your lawyer gives bad advice, I'd suggest you double check with the "original maintainer" whether he had copied (or "adopted") code from elsewhere, and do a diff or something against the mtr sources.
If the original maintainer misrepresented his ownership of the winmtr code, you probably have a claim against him.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people wouldn't hire a mechanical engineer to do machine and tool making, or a civil engineer to dig holes, unless he was also so qualified. One alternative is for universities to have separate tracts for applied programmers and students who are more interested in the theoretical end of CS.
Sidetracking a little, I just read a rant (allegedly) from a late Japanese engineer specializing in nuclear facilities who died in 1990s. He complained that the engineers who drew the designs were oblivious to the mistakes the technicians would make on the ground -- loose screws, poorly fitted parts, etc. that would lead to nuclear disasters like the one Japan might be having now.
And I believe this is what would happen if "CS" people simply designed systems and left the implementation to "programmers". And computer systems are usually much, much more complicated than most physical, mechanical systems. Which is why sane companies hire top "CS" talent to write code as a programmer, instead outsourcing it to code-monkeys. The implementation matters, and those who thought otherwise were punished by products that turned out to be crap.
My personal experience is that even at the design, architectural level, there's not a real need for actual maths in software development. People with good maths are generally better at relevant things such as logic, identifying solvable subproblems, etc. but the actual maths is not generally used. Where I do see a lot of maths is in academic CS papers, where proofs of optimality require those maths (some of those proofs are rather spectacular displays of maths, or so I've heard... I've never been good/interested enough in maths to drill into these things). But going heavy on maths just to train people to publish academic CS papers seems to be rather.... missing the whole picture.
1. Undergrad comp sci is for the fundamentals of comp sci, not the latest marketing buzzwords like "cloud computing";
There is a lot of fundamentals in distributed systems/algorithms/computing. And as far as I understand it, it doesn't depend on any established branch of "mathematics".
Sure, you can always find courses on "cloud computing" that teaches you how to create Amazon EC2 instances, call remote APIs and so on, but there is a lot of difficult things in there, which, I presume from your maths background, probably didn't appreciate.
It's a buffer overflow trick that causes the built-in C++ interpreter to run the code that was being typed. :)
Agreed. My claim is that people do practice Chinese medicine in a scientific/evidence-based way, although admittedly fraudsters selling snake-oil are easier to find.
For example, as far as I understand it, there is active scientific research on extracting the active ingredients of many herbs used in Chinese medicine. (traditionally they are simmered in pots until the resulting liquid becomes concentrated, which becomes the medicine to be drinked)
Those who have been treated by real Chinese medicine, as opposed to the snake oil imitations, would beg to differ. Sure, it's not more advanced than modern western medicine, but it's not based on superstition at all.
Western "medicine" was no better until a few decades ago. And even today many health problems are still treated along the lines of "we don't know how to treat this, so take this pill as it seems to work on 20% of the patients, um.... unless it's placebo".
The interesting thing is, how can you truly believe in anything that you cannot understand? How can you say with any conviction (beyond "blind" faith) that God is "good", without understanding his actions?
Unlike the atheists around here I don't tend to get too fidgety when people believe in weird things (I'm sure I believe in lots of things that people find weird), I am just amused at how people try to rationalize their beliefs unnecessarily....
Here in Hong Kong the Internet speed to US is visibly affected. It's worse than 56k speeds.
My ISP felt OK two hours ago, but I saw other people on other ISPs complaining on Facebook. I think the local ISPs traded some bandwidth or something.
There was indeed reports of broken cables. I remember a few years ago when there was a quake in the Pacific near Taiwan, the Internet was unusable for a day or two. Makes us think how fragile the Internet infrastructure can be when we depend on too many "cloud" services being available :-/
but it's a pretty significant problem if you're using half as much broccoli as the author intended
From my experience, it's not.
In the very unlikely event that NP=P, what people "believe" in doesn't mean much. A proof that NP=P is groundbreaking enough to invalidate almost everybody's "beliefs" in the field of computational complexity.
Besides, I don't think the encryption algorithms are "believed" to be "harder" than NPC problems. Nobody has the faintest idea whether there'll be a 18billion year setup time, or a O(N^10000) for the "harder" problems in P if NP=P. The discussion of what really follows if NP=P is pretty moot actually.
Would somebody with half a clue PLEASE mod this post down???
It's just mis-information of the worst kind -- to lay people (even for CS grads that didn't take any computational complexity courses) it sounds right except that it isn't.
Where are my fucking mod points.....
In other parts of the world where people are more polite, it is not a common idiom.
You talk that way where I live and you get a punch on your face
If that's true, it speaks more about the politeness of the people where you live, instead of the people who utter four letter words.
In other parts of the world where people are more polite, it is not a common gesture to punch people in the face.
Care to name a few?
Not rhetorical, just genuinely curious, though the disclaimer is that I generally share the same impression as the GP.
I do not remember Apple building a computer system that could play Jeopardy (yes, that technology will be relevant to consumers in the future, whether or not Apple decides to exploit it).
Just like how Chess AI is relevant to consumers now.
There is no reason they can move to Solar, wind, and nuclear without having 100 years of burning coal and oil.
Reason: Coal is still cheaper.
I don't know how the hell Apple pulls it off
Unless if you ask the collective minds of the hoards of Apple Haters on Slashdot that is.
Interesting. I didn't know they got Javascript to run that fast...
Admittedly I haven't been following the bleeding edge stuff on the Javascript performance front...
Are you sure about this?
I don't recall gcc -O3 and -O0 having a factor of 10 difference for most tasks. And Javascript definitely isn't close to C performance, even unoptimized.
Besides, gcc -O3 can actually be somewhat slower than -O2, which is why almost nobody uses -O3 except for the Gentoo zealots.
What?!
Hong Kong is not a democracy by any western standards. Half of the legislature is what we call the "functional constituency", which has a voter base of about 3% of the whole population. A few of those seats are exclusively selected by "corporate votes", no real people voting. For example, the legislator in the "finance" constituency only has to secure votes from a few dozen BANKS to get a seat. (You thought just lobbying by corporations was bad enough?)
The government directly reports to the Central Government of the People's Republic of China, and the head of government in Hong Kong is elected by a small group of about 800 people. Note, you're talking about a city of 7+ million people.
Not that the state of affairs was any better under British rule -- for a long time, the legislature was appointed until it switched to a system similar to that of today, and the Governor of Hong Kong was appointed by the British government.
In short, Hong Kong is not, and was never a democracy.
---
As for Taiwan, I am less familiar with its political history. But I am not aware that there was significant "outside" help. The people in Taiwan wanted democracy, and the then president Lee Teng-Hui gave what they wanted, and now they are pretty proud to be the only place in "China" where democracy is practiced.
If only living up to campaign promises had a cost.
I mean, most people don't break promises just to be an asshole. Politicians certainly don't like to be seen as promise breaking assholes.
There's got to be some reason or significant resistance to shutting it down.
http://totallylookslike.icanhascheezburger.com/2008/09/29/vint-cerf-totally-looks-like-the-architect/
Interesting coincidence I found out recently. Might be well known to those who is familiar with him, but it got a laugh out of me.
You are full of bullshit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#Random_UUID_probability_of_duplicates
The country is positioned to become in a few decades the dominant country on a very small Earth. With that comes naturally the roles of world police, judge, and executioner. Further, there is a long term trend towards the infamously named "One World Order", that is, a supernational level of government.
Only in your single minded American world view.
I've had more hardware troubles with Windows than with Linux for quite a long time.
What are you, a time traveler from 2000?
You do know that your Android phone runs Linux, don't you?
I mean, you truly are a MS Fanboy when you can't even see how Microsoft is the true failure for the last decade. Sure, you can continue to believe what you believe, I just thought you might appreciate a reality check once in a while.
I don't know about GPL3, since it has patent clauses in it and I haven't read it much.
But in the case of most other OSS licenses, you are simply giving permission to others to use your work. The work may be encumbered by some other things, patents, or even things like the DMCA. But they don't prevent anybody from releasing code under a free license. It's just that you and users of your code might get sued for patent infringement. Having a patent issue in your code may cause people to avoid your code, but it doesn't invalidate the license itself.
IANAL.
In case your lawyer gives bad advice, I'd suggest you double check with the "original maintainer" whether he had copied (or "adopted") code from elsewhere, and do a diff or something against the mtr sources.
If the original maintainer misrepresented his ownership of the winmtr code, you probably have a claim against him.
I am not a lawyer. Good luck.