There are few things in CS that are new these days, definitively very few since the 80's. Pretty much all we tend to do is rehash the old stuff in a new package. I personally find that pretty boring. One of the questions that I asked myself when I was younger was: how can I be creative? For some reason that it was, and it still is, a very important question to me.
In a field where rehashing is the norm, how do you keep being creative? You need to challenge all that is given, ask yourself: why do we do things like that? Who decided? When? Does it still hold true today? Can I do it differently? Would it be worth it? Many times we do what we do just because we have always been doing like that. Pure habit and resistance to think out of the box.
What do we need to think out of the box in a world of numbers? Math.
Without a deep understanding of the mathematical foundation of the methods and algorithms we use, there is no way of ever do anything creative in this field.
So, it is up to you: What kind of programmer you want to be?
Amazing, as soon as we discover something new about our universe, there, we have this irresistible urge to go and mess with it, even if we understand nothing at all about it. Would it be possible to just hold on for a minute and see if the "use" of this new knowledge might be less obvious, less appropriated by our perennial self-serving attitude? Something entirely new presents to us, and we respond in the same way as the neolithic man. Or a monkey. Duh.
Similar story here, my company needs to manage some 20 email accounts, we had an in-home based system based on OSX Server, very nice to administer, also I had a mirrored RAID system that never crashed, but backing things up was such a pain that I eventually switched to an off site provider.
This was a couple of years ago, when IMAP was not very popular yet, I selected the provider on the basis of IMAP. They were very fussy and used to throttle our bandwidth - and we had a paying business account.
When gmail offered IMAP I switched to google free enterprise and never looked back. BTW: I could never figure out what would the paying service actually give me. Maybe for larger organizations...
Please make sure you read the SQL specification and the Xquery specification WELL before you say something like this
(i.e. that XMl queries will be translated into
relational queries).
Slashdot Mirror
When I read "Study Confirms No Link Between MMR Vaccine and Autism", it sounds that "the final truth" has been found out about something.
Is it really the case?
Wouldn't it be more accurate to instead say something like: "One Study Finds No Correlation Between MMR Vaccine and Autism"?
Nah.
Did you know that you could sing PI, in extended precision?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZSHr5E7fZY
- Fabio
There are few things in CS that are new these days, definitively very few since the 80's. Pretty much all we tend to do is rehash the old stuff in a new package. I personally find that pretty boring. One of the questions that I asked myself when I was younger was: how can I be creative? For some reason that it was, and it still is, a very important question to me.
In a field where rehashing is the norm, how do you keep being creative?
You need to challenge all that is given, ask yourself: why do we do things like that? Who decided? When? Does it still hold true today? Can I do it differently? Would it be worth it? Many times we do what we do just because we have always been doing like that. Pure habit and resistance to think out of the box.
What do we need to think out of the box in a world of numbers? Math.
Without a deep understanding of the mathematical foundation of the methods and algorithms we use, there is no way of ever do anything creative in this field.
So, it is up to you: What kind of programmer you want to be?
Amazing, as soon as we discover something new about our universe, there, we have this irresistible urge to go and mess with it, even if we understand nothing at all about it.
Would it be possible to just hold on for a minute and see if the "use" of this new knowledge might be less obvious, less appropriated by our perennial self-serving attitude?
Something entirely new presents to us, and we respond in the same way as the neolithic man. Or a monkey. Duh.
how am I supposed to read this?
- Fabio
Similar story here, my company needs to manage some 20 email accounts, we had an in-home based system based on OSX Server, very nice to administer, also I had a mirrored RAID system that never crashed, but backing things up was such a pain that I eventually switched to an off site provider.
This was a couple of years ago, when IMAP was not very popular yet, I selected the provider on the basis of IMAP. They were very fussy and used to throttle our bandwidth - and we had a paying business account.
When gmail offered IMAP I switched to google free enterprise and never looked back. BTW: I could never figure out what would the paying service actually give me. Maybe for larger organizations...
- Fabio
That was my reaction too, big, long donkey ears for the reviewer...
bash is GPL and zsh is Berkeley, Apple seemed to be afraid of GPL at the beginning and has taken a more practical stance more recently...
Please make sure you read the SQL specification and the Xquery specification WELL before you say something like this
(i.e. that XMl queries will be translated into
relational queries).
It's plain false.
Best regards.
Dana