It seems like DSL may not be a major source of broadband service, the phone companies are too greedy, lazy and short sited to see the future. Fortunately we have many other options, cable modem is inceasingly available, even in outlying and rural areas, and tho way satellite systems still exist and work just fine. It is good that the baby bells are anxiuos to hasten there own demise, they refuse to understand that copper cable will not sustan a monoply.
MM
The trick is to make sure that the floating point precision used in the code is much greater than the precision required for you algorithm, genrally good algorithms will converge to machine precision which will have many more sig figs than that required by the solution.
MM
I've used everthing for computational projects fro VBA to Fortran, as well as C, C++, and Java. It really depends on what your doing, what the end use is, and what your existent code base is. There are still a lot of peaple using FORTRAN, it ain't pretty but it works, the NAG libraries are pretty satndard, and very powerful, widely used in computational physics, CFD etc. For really simple and ad-hoc problems why not use Excel? it does matrix inversions etc, and is really easy to use.
Also I've used C and C++, for math libraries you can get the source code from "Numerical Recipes in C".
Also I've written orbital simulation software in Java, people may scoff but the clean OO features of Java make it great to work with and maintain, compile to native code for max performance.
I started in comp physics 12 years ago, but the tools we have today are really incredible and we have tons of options, I guess its a tough call as what to use, everyone needs to use there own judgement, but at leat keep an open mind and look at all the new tools, API's etc we to choose from.
Happy coding.
Mark
Software developers are potrayed as accurately as:
- The Naval Officers in Top Gun / Hunt for Red October / Crimson Tide.
- Cops in Lethal Weapon n.
etc, at least we have a fictional heroic archetype, which is more than most professions.
Mark
It seems as though the trend in the history of science has been extending terrestial phenomenae, this has been happened on all the other branches of science except life sciences, thus we should not discount the discovery of perhaps not extra-terrestial life but at least ET organic chemistry.
Lets see, a very complex software project written by a bunch of Indians on an M$ platform, given the general shodiness of Indian programmers and the problematic MS platform, this should be a multi-year debacle, I'll be watching the BBC for humar value as the disaster unfolds. Also how long before the public revolts against this type of suviellance for taxation. The Indian Times article said "Indians are very technically profficient" if this were true companies would not have to hire consultants like me to clean up all the messes made by Indian programmers, when will they ever learn cheap work is not good, good work is not cheap.
MM
Notice how there are not half a milllion foreign truck drivers in the country even though anyone can drive a truck, probably has something to do with the Teamsters. Without a Union were at the mercy of big corporations and the gov't who clearly have do not have our interest in mind.
MM
You are correct, a lot of idiots have flooded the industry, a good solution would be to get rid of the idiots, we could round up all the idiots aka as H1-B's, and send them back where they came from.
MM
You generally have to be licensed for many other types of engineering, so why not softwarwe? perhaps if we had licensing, the industry would not be over-run with a bunch sketchy H1-B's.
MM
It seems like all the workmanship problems in the industry are software related, not hardware. As many of you have seen, much of the code out there sucks. If we had more certification, then there would be a tangible difference between sketchy H1-B's who claim (usually incorreclty) that they can write code, and those who are competent coders. No other industry has such a lack of standards as our, we need some way to discriminate between those who are competent, and those who aren't.
MM
Remember the good old days before coding and climbing were 'extreme'... Its seems as though the XP methodology ignores the common sense approach that a small group of motivated talented people with a bit of leadership is what you need, no amount methodology replaces these things. I don't think people who are really good developers can work in the environment XP requires, its to limited and suffocating. Maybe some day management will understand that the secret to good code is people, and not just the latest fad in methodology.
MM
Based on some rather crude metrics OS X doesn't seem so bad for its rated clock speed. My Power PC crunches out SETI@home pacs faster than windows boxes at simular clock speed. Running unix stuff on the Darwin shells seems OK, get the performance I would expect from MySQL, Tomcat etc, some of the Desktop gadgetry seems slow (like IE). I general I find it makes a great dev server, less hassle than Solaris, simular performance for less $$ than Solaris.
Mark
MM
A consequence of Godel's theorem (Godels's thm basically says no logical system can be both consisitent and complete) is that we will never be able to build a truly intelligent machine based an digital logic, it will never be able to 'think outside the box'. It seems as though we need a fundamentally new approach for AI, as there is more to it than RAM and flops. Some day we will have AI, but I do not think we have a vision yet of how we will get there, strong AI by 2029 sounds a bit ambitious to say the least.
MM
On the discharge side of a shop vacuum (such that it is blowing) put an large funnel, this makes a diffuser. Though the air is blowing out, objects will be sucked into the diffuser because the higher air velocity in the back of the diffuser creates a lower pressure, (Bernoulli principle, conservation of energy). Counter intuitive, and cool, one of my favorite demos when I taught physics. Another cool demo is how to make a Magneto-Hydrodynamic engine in a petri - dish, a battery current causes the water to swirl, email for details.
MM
If all programmers new math there would be too much competition for those of us who do, not to many H1 - B's that can do physics simulation, stocahstic analysis etc., I'm glad an old dude can still find a niche in the post dot-com apacolypse.
Mark
Another mad soloist looking for a twisted project, good luck! hopefully you'll learn something. Check out Java3D, its very OO and easy to use, covers almost all platforms, also you can compile to native code for most platforms (Windows, Solaris), so you can get performance out of it. There are a bunch of loaders, and x-tra API's for free, also check out Jon Barrilleaux's 3D User Interface book and framework.
MM
Used to use Fortran a lot, its good for crunching numbers, but the lack of OO is a big down-side its hard to write clean maintainable code. Also its hard to interface Fortran with other software. I see your point about C/C++ as error prone, especially if you're not used to it. My current preference for scientific stuff is to do it in Java and compile to native code, this allows the use of a very nice clean OO language, native code complilation can give simular performance to C code, best of both worlds.
Mark
Good work is not cheap, cheap work is not good. It has been my experience that the off shore Indian programmers are generally not very competent, and they tend to lack both work ethic and honesty. I think in the long term you will be disappointed by the quality of the work you recieve, and that your company would be far better served by hiring competent domestic programmers.
Mark
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like DSL may not be a major source of broadband service, the phone companies are too greedy, lazy and short sited to see the future. Fortunately we have many other options, cable modem is inceasingly available, even in outlying and rural areas, and tho way satellite systems still exist and work just fine. It is good that the baby bells are anxiuos to hasten there own demise, they refuse to understand that copper cable will not sustan a monoply. MM
The trick is to make sure that the floating point precision used in the code is much greater than the precision required for you algorithm, genrally good algorithms will converge to machine precision which will have many more sig figs than that required by the solution. MM
Then don't talk to Americans, go somwhere else and spray.. MM
I've used everthing for computational projects fro VBA to Fortran, as well as C, C++, and Java. It really depends on what your doing, what the end use is, and what your existent code base is. There are still a lot of peaple using FORTRAN, it ain't pretty but it works, the NAG libraries are pretty satndard, and very powerful, widely used in computational physics, CFD etc. For really simple and ad-hoc problems why not use Excel? it does matrix inversions etc, and is really easy to use. Also I've used C and C++, for math libraries you can get the source code from "Numerical Recipes in C". Also I've written orbital simulation software in Java, people may scoff but the clean OO features of Java make it great to work with and maintain, compile to native code for max performance. I started in comp physics 12 years ago, but the tools we have today are really incredible and we have tons of options, I guess its a tough call as what to use, everyone needs to use there own judgement, but at leat keep an open mind and look at all the new tools, API's etc we to choose from. Happy coding. Mark
Software developers are potrayed as accurately as: - The Naval Officers in Top Gun / Hunt for Red October / Crimson Tide. - Cops in Lethal Weapon n. etc, at least we have a fictional heroic archetype, which is more than most professions. Mark
It seems as though the trend in the history of science has been extending terrestial phenomenae, this has been happened on all the other branches of science except life sciences, thus we should not discount the discovery of perhaps not extra-terrestial life but at least ET organic chemistry.
Lets see, a very complex software project written by a bunch of Indians on an M$ platform, given the general shodiness of Indian programmers and the problematic MS platform, this should be a multi-year debacle, I'll be watching the BBC for humar value as the disaster unfolds. Also how long before the public revolts against this type of suviellance for taxation. The Indian Times article said "Indians are very technically profficient" if this were true companies would not have to hire consultants like me to clean up all the messes made by Indian programmers, when will they ever learn cheap work is not good, good work is not cheap. MM
Notice how there are not half a milllion foreign truck drivers in the country even though anyone can drive a truck, probably has something to do with the Teamsters. Without a Union were at the mercy of big corporations and the gov't who clearly have do not have our interest in mind. MM
What skills do H1-B's have save lying and stealing? ( writing crappy buggy code cut and pasted off the web does not count as a skill!) MM
What skills to H1-B's have save lying and stealing? MM
You are correct, a lot of idiots have flooded the industry, a good solution would be to get rid of the idiots, we could round up all the idiots aka as H1-B's, and send them back where they came from. MM
You generally have to be licensed for many other types of engineering, so why not softwarwe? perhaps if we had licensing, the industry would not be over-run with a bunch sketchy H1-B's. MM
It seems like all the workmanship problems in the industry are software related, not hardware. As many of you have seen, much of the code out there sucks. If we had more certification, then there would be a tangible difference between sketchy H1-B's who claim (usually incorreclty) that they can write code, and those who are competent coders. No other industry has such a lack of standards as our, we need some way to discriminate between those who are competent, and those who aren't. MM
Remember the good old days before coding and climbing were 'extreme'... Its seems as though the XP methodology ignores the common sense approach that a small group of motivated talented people with a bit of leadership is what you need, no amount methodology replaces these things. I don't think people who are really good developers can work in the environment XP requires, its to limited and suffocating. Maybe some day management will understand that the secret to good code is people, and not just the latest fad in methodology. MM
Based on some rather crude metrics OS X doesn't seem so bad for its rated clock speed. My Power PC crunches out SETI@home pacs faster than windows boxes at simular clock speed. Running unix stuff on the Darwin shells seems OK, get the performance I would expect from MySQL, Tomcat etc, some of the Desktop gadgetry seems slow (like IE). I general I find it makes a great dev server, less hassle than Solaris, simular performance for less $$ than Solaris. Mark MM
A consequence of Godel's theorem (Godels's thm basically says no logical system can be both consisitent and complete) is that we will never be able to build a truly intelligent machine based an digital logic, it will never be able to 'think outside the box'. It seems as though we need a fundamentally new approach for AI, as there is more to it than RAM and flops. Some day we will have AI, but I do not think we have a vision yet of how we will get there, strong AI by 2029 sounds a bit ambitious to say the least. MM
Become a climbing bum, live in poverty and see the world, coding and climbing coexist wonderfully
On the discharge side of a shop vacuum (such that it is blowing) put an large funnel, this makes a diffuser. Though the air is blowing out, objects will be sucked into the diffuser because the higher air velocity in the back of the diffuser creates a lower pressure, (Bernoulli principle, conservation of energy). Counter intuitive, and cool, one of my favorite demos when I taught physics. Another cool demo is how to make a Magneto-Hydrodynamic engine in a petri - dish, a battery current causes the water to swirl, email for details. MM
If all programmers new math there would be too much competition for those of us who do, not to many H1 - B's that can do physics simulation, stocahstic analysis etc., I'm glad an old dude can still find a niche in the post dot-com apacolypse. Mark
Another mad soloist looking for a twisted project, good luck! hopefully you'll learn something. Check out Java3D, its very OO and easy to use, covers almost all platforms, also you can compile to native code for most platforms (Windows, Solaris), so you can get performance out of it. There are a bunch of loaders, and x-tra API's for free, also check out Jon Barrilleaux's 3D User Interface book and framework. MM
Java compiled to native code can be both clean and high performance. Mark
Used to use Fortran a lot, its good for crunching numbers, but the lack of OO is a big down-side its hard to write clean maintainable code. Also its hard to interface Fortran with other software. I see your point about C/C++ as error prone, especially if you're not used to it. My current preference for scientific stuff is to do it in Java and compile to native code, this allows the use of a very nice clean OO language, native code complilation can give simular performance to C code, best of both worlds. Mark
Good work is not cheap, cheap work is not good. It has been my experience that the off shore Indian programmers are generally not very competent, and they tend to lack both work ethic and honesty. I think in the long term you will be disappointed by the quality of the work you recieve, and that your company would be far better served by hiring competent domestic programmers. Mark