Discrete maths:
- Simple set theory, boolean logic etc. Computers are binary discrete systems, so this is a must.
- Graph theory, very useful for search problems and a lot in AI.
- Information and coding theory. Used a lot in systems, eg. for checksums, compression and cryptology.
- Group theory. Has some advanced applications in cryptology.
Linear algebra:
- 3d computer graphics is basically all linear algebra. Vectors, Matrixes, quarterions etc.
- Also very useful in signals processing.
Calculus:
- Used a lot in signals processing algorithms, including in neural nets, and hardware engineering/electronics
Formal logic:
- Used a lot in formal systems verification, and compiler theory
I think Christopher Alexander sums it up beautiful in his Patterns book, in the 'Gradual stiffening of design' pattern.
He observes that only in-experienced craftpeople plan out things down to the minute detail to begin with. This causes them to get lost in the details and not able to recover from an problems during the building stage.
Experienced people all employ processes that may start out with a rough high level design, but the detailed design only gets determined as the construction process matures.
The idea is that a more fluid design allows you to both absorb errors or any problems or new insights that may occur during the actual build process.
The same thing applies for software engineering. There is a nice balance to be found somewhere between the bondage-and-discipline approach and the XP style design-as-you-go. The type and size of the project also have to be taken into account.
> Anybody can purchase it as soon as it goes public. > Of course, the value is going to jump many > thousands of percent in the first minute of > trading,
No it's not, the whole idea of a Dutch auction IPO is to avoid that.
> This concept of interactive musical and visual
> integrated together was originally concieved by
> Kandinsky, which he referred to as "Synestasia."
Kadinisky was a famous synaesthesic, but he didn't invent the term, the phenomenon had been known about by psychologists since the 19th century. Synaesthesic incidently literally means 'the mixing of the senses'. Any senses may be mixed - not just sight and sound.
Synaesthesics experience correspondences between the senses, Kadinsky could literally 'hear' sounds when he looked at colours. Other synaestheics, such as Richard Feynmann always see certain symbols (such as particular algebraic symbols) in different colours.
Video game art seem to be a popular trend amoungst the art 'establishment' at the moment.
Velvet Strike and a couple of other video game-based installations were part of the 2004 Whitney biennial. Also there have been a number of exhibitions of classic arcade games at various art galleries around New York in the last year or so.
> Note also that anyone can write a database system > with complete transactional integrity: you simply > lock the whole database for every single operation > and run only one query or update at a time, one > after the other.
It's a bit more complex than that.
Transactions have to satisfy all four ACID properties.
What you mention will implement the 'I' (isolatation) and 'C' (consistency), but won't make them atomic (all or nothing, ie. support for rollback), or durable (fault tolerant).
The first four problems are natural outcomes of what you'd expect if you left a bunch of coders alone to work on projects unburdened by user or employer expectations.
Most programmers are happiest writing new features (as deemed by ourselves), preferrably using the coolest technology possible. We don't like fixing bugs, maintaining old code, designing UIs or writing documentation.
We shouldn't find it unexpected that there is a lot of feature rich but buggy, incomplete and poorly documented open source software out there.
> suspect that there isn't one single reason for > the poor quality of user interfaces, but here > are some explanations I've heard roaming the > Open Source circles: geeks value integrity over > beauty; the gender gap in Open Source > communities; it's intuitive to the programmers > so why would they fix it? (see Programming for > the Self), the belief that a pretty user > interface can always be designed later once > they're done the real work, the belief that user > interface design isn't real work, and several > others.
I think the two main reasons:
1) Open source developers just don't think about usability - they think about functionality. It's kinda of like a blind spot that naturally develops when you spend all day coding.
2) Good user interface design is very hard. It is a skill that most developers don't have.
When you see a slick application like the Apple i-Apps or pro graphics and video programs, the reason they're nice is that they were designed by usability specialists, who are following interface guidelines and testing the interfaces on actual users.
There are just not enough of these people in the the open source community.
There is nothing in this book that isn't on the developer cd documentation or online.
'Cocoa in a nutshell' contains a short introductory chapter on Obj-C, one on the Foundation library, one on App-Kit, one on Quartz and a few others, they're okay but not great.
If you want to learn Obj-C you'd be better of reading:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/C on ceptual/ObjectiveC/
After that the rest of the book is a big Javadoc-style API reference to all of Cocoa.
If you really need it in dead-tree form then maybe it's useful, but otherwise look at:
http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Coco a
> Unless we want every corporation to get the > control over us the RIAA has, we need to draw a > line in the sand. But most of us don't give a > damn.
Sun isn't the RIAA.
You seem to be aligning the 'Free' Software movement with the movement against Corporate control of our lives. Is this really valid?
If you want to align this debate with another - then maybe a more appropriate on is debate about unborn children. Most people are not completely pro-choice or pro-life, they recognise there is a middle ground balance between the rights of the child and the rights of the parents. The FSF reminds me of the rabid pro-lifers. The line in the sand you're trying to draw it not realistic or ethical.
I think there is a emerging concensus that the most 'ethical' software license tries to find a balance between protecting the rights of the producers of software to protect and gain the benefits of their work (without being ripped off) and the rights of the consumer to use software in as many ways as possible (including using it in proprietary systems).
The balance of power has shifted too far towards the producers of software but that doesn't mean the other extreme is the best route to follow.
> We're like the drowning person who flails at his > rescuer. And until someone else steps up to > carry the torch, RMS is our rescuer. RMS is the > King.
It's this sort of ideological cult-of-personality stuff just puts people off the FSF.
> If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java > platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features > without even noticing. By the time you find this > out, you may have been using them for months, and > redoing the work could take more months.
You could say the same thing for GCC.
It's possible you link to a proprietary library without noticing. It's the same with any development platform. Does this mean you should avoid using the GNU compiler?
The reality is that standard Java is so feature-rich and there are so many open-source libraries and frameworks around you very rarely (if ever) need to resort to using proprietary libraries (Sun or not).
> Unfortunately, if that happens it will only bring > the age of gov't mandated hardware DRM
That's definitely the way things are headed.
Software DRM is doomed from the beginning - you can always intercept the data after it gets decrypted or alternatively gain access to the decryption keys (like in this example) - since they have to be stored somewhere.
Hardware based DRM schemes won't ever be completely secure either but they're going to be a lot trickier to crack than software ones.
The author of the article wonders why UNIX and Linux are not mentioned much in the main Info Systems textbooks.
Well the reason is that the same reason that most Accounting textbooks don't talk about SAP and most Relational Database textbooks don't mention Oracle, Sybase or DB2 - it's because university textbooks (for better or worse) try to teach universal high-level concepts - in this case the role of information systems in business, not the low-level details of how the information systems are implemented.
The underlying assumption of the blog seems to be that you need to write apps in Java or C#/Mono to compete with Microsoft on the desktop in the future...
This is just is not true - look at OS X, most of Apple's apps are written in Obj-C which is just C with a few OO extensions.
Most developers like to think about low-level technologies but in the end it's usability and what apps are available (not what they're written in) that really count.
> There are many other languages available for Mac > OS X but I would say that C, C++, and Objective-C > are by far the most used.
True, although Apple seem to be trying to promote Java along with Obj-C as the main languages for Cocoa programming. C++ is used also in some places such as the IOKit device driver framework.
Obj-C is in some ways a much nicer language to program than Java or C# too because it supports true Smalltalk-style dynamic binding and untyped objects whereas Java and C# are both strongly typed. This may sound like a bad idea, but it improves code reuse and generally makes code a lot more flexible. You can avoid unnessarily complex class hierarchies and some clunky designs. It also allows for funky features such as message forwarding and categories (dynamic extension of classes as runtime).
I think the original poster is half-right though - C is dying for business/enterprise development, but C and C++ are still the main languages for writing any high performance GUI app or system software.
> Because we're the world experts in free-market
> capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when
> everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the
> most liberal of the industrialized countries.
If that's true, why did the US come only 10th on the Heritage Foundation and WSJ Index of Economic Freedom'?
> Science shouldn't operate on the principle of PAY to play. Anyone should have access to any and all information for free.
True, another area that should apply to is scientific journals. It's hard to see how they can jusitify such high annual subscriptions in an age where electronic publishing is so cheap.
When it comes to the cost of an annual subscription for scientific or medical journals, there are "lots of titles in the $5,000 area and 20 that stand out above that level," said Sam Mizer, manager of the Sciences Serials Department. These subscriptions include a balance of journal packages as well as single titles. The top 10 priciest:
* Tetrahedron full package: $23,061
* Nuclear Physics A-B: $19,396
* Brain Research: $16,344
* Physica A-E: $16,177
* Journal of Comparative Neurology: $15,294 [most expensive single title]
* Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. A-B: $14,697
* Surface Science package: $14,219
* Physics Letters A-B: $13,843
* Biochimica et Biophysica Acta: $11,362
* Journal of Chromatography A-B: $11,109
> For instance you have wasps that make a hole in > the ground, fly away to find some insect larva, > bring it to their hole, sedate the larva, lay an > egg in it, put it in the hole and close the hole.
True, just in terms of being able to recognise objects and navigate around the world, insects are so much more advanced than any current robot it's a joke to compare them.
Bush also said the soil of the moon "contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air.". Presumably he thinks we will need some breathable air on Earth after all he's done to lower air cleanliness standards!
The sad thing is that this new space initiative has little to do with the true desire to explore new frontiers and everything to do with maintaining space dominance over China, India and anyone else who wants to challenge the US as the world's sole superpower.
> What I am saying is that one shouldn't accept such
> a disfunctional signal-to-noise ratio. I teach
> comp at the University of Michigan, so I am saying
> this from deep within the jungle. 90% (or more) of
> what is talked about in the humanities could
> qualify as grade-a crap. That scares me. I think
> something needs to be done.
I think nothing needs to be done, because this type of literary criticism 'theory' is rapidly going out of vogue. The fashion has to eventually implode sometime.
Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.
From Chomsky's comments...
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.
> What does NYC have that Boston (and, for that
> matter, any other city) doesn't?
Excitement and energy basically.
Don't get me wrong, I like Boston, I don't want to diss it - you can have a good time there - is it a nice city. But it is also extremely homogenous, quiet and conservative compared to New York - whenever i come back from there it's a bit of relief - a bit like returning from a small town to a city.
Slashdot Mirror
Discrete maths:
- Simple set theory, boolean logic etc. Computers are binary discrete systems, so this is a must.
- Graph theory, very useful for search problems and a lot in AI.
- Information and coding theory. Used a lot in systems, eg. for checksums, compression and cryptology.
- Group theory. Has some advanced applications in cryptology.
Linear algebra:
- 3d computer graphics is basically all linear algebra. Vectors, Matrixes, quarterions etc.
- Also very useful in signals processing.
Calculus:
- Used a lot in signals processing algorithms, including in neural nets, and hardware engineering/electronics
Formal logic:
- Used a lot in formal systems verification, and compiler theory
I think Christopher Alexander sums it up beautiful in his Patterns book, in the 'Gradual stiffening of design' pattern.
He observes that only in-experienced craftpeople plan out things down to the minute detail to begin with. This causes them to get lost in the details and not able to recover from an problems during the building stage.
Experienced people all employ processes that may start out with a rough high level design, but the detailed design only gets determined as the construction process matures.
The idea is that a more fluid design allows you to both absorb errors or any problems or new insights that may occur during the actual build process.
The same thing applies for software engineering.
There is a nice balance to be found somewhere between the bondage-and-discipline approach and the XP style design-as-you-go. The type and size of the project also have to be taken into account.
> Anybody can purchase it as soon as it goes public.
> Of course, the value is going to jump many
> thousands of percent in the first minute of
> trading,
No it's not, the whole idea of a Dutch auction IPO is to avoid that.
> This concept of interactive musical and visual
> integrated together was originally concieved by
> Kandinsky, which he referred to as "Synestasia."
Kadinisky was a famous synaesthesic, but he didn't invent the term, the phenomenon had been known about by psychologists since the 19th century. Synaesthesic incidently literally means 'the mixing of the senses'. Any senses may be mixed - not just sight and sound.
Synaesthesics experience correspondences between the senses, Kadinsky could literally 'hear' sounds when he looked at colours. Other synaestheics, such as Richard Feynmann always see certain symbols (such as particular algebraic symbols) in different colours.
Here's a few links here and here.
Video game art seem to be a popular trend amoungst the art 'establishment' at the moment.
Velvet Strike and a couple of other video game-based installations were part of the 2004 Whitney biennial. Also there have been a number of exhibitions of classic arcade games at various art galleries around New York in the last year or so.
> Note also that anyone can write a database system
> with complete transactional integrity: you simply
> lock the whole database for every single operation
> and run only one query or update at a time, one
> after the other.
It's a bit more complex than that.
Transactions have to satisfy all four ACID properties.
What you mention will implement the 'I' (isolatation) and 'C' (consistency), but won't make them atomic (all or nothing, ie. support for rollback), or durable (fault tolerant).
I think the article is pretty accurate.
The first four problems are natural outcomes of what you'd expect if you left a bunch of coders alone to work on projects unburdened by user or employer expectations.
Most programmers are happiest writing new features (as deemed by ourselves), preferrably using the coolest technology possible. We don't like fixing bugs, maintaining old code, designing UIs or writing documentation.
We shouldn't find it unexpected that there is a lot of feature rich but buggy, incomplete and poorly documented open source software out there.
> suspect that there isn't one single reason for
> the poor quality of user interfaces, but here
> are some explanations I've heard roaming the
> Open Source circles: geeks value integrity over
> beauty; the gender gap in Open Source
> communities; it's intuitive to the programmers
> so why would they fix it? (see Programming for
> the Self), the belief that a pretty user
> interface can always be designed later once
> they're done the real work, the belief that user
> interface design isn't real work, and several
> others.
I think the two main reasons:
1) Open source developers just don't think about usability - they think about functionality. It's kinda of like a blind spot that naturally develops when you spend all day coding.
2) Good user interface design is very hard. It is a skill that most developers don't have.
When you see a slick application like the Apple i-Apps or pro graphics and video programs, the reason they're nice is that they were designed by usability specialists, who are following interface guidelines and testing the interfaces on actual users.
There are just not enough of these people in the the open source community.
There is nothing in this book that isn't on the developer cd documentation or online.
C on ceptual/ObjectiveC/
o a
'Cocoa in a nutshell' contains a short introductory chapter on Obj-C, one on the Foundation library, one on App-Kit, one on Quartz and a few others, they're okay but not great.
If you want to learn Obj-C you'd be better of reading:
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/
After that the rest of the book is a big Javadoc-style API reference to all of Cocoa.
If you really need it in dead-tree form then maybe it's useful, but otherwise look at:
http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/Coc
> Unless we want every corporation to get the
> control over us the RIAA has, we need to draw a
> line in the sand. But most of us don't give a
> damn.
Sun isn't the RIAA.
You seem to be aligning the 'Free' Software movement with the movement against Corporate control of our lives. Is this really valid?
If you want to align this debate with another - then maybe a more appropriate on is debate about unborn children. Most people are not completely pro-choice or pro-life, they recognise there is a middle ground balance between the rights of the child and the rights of the parents. The FSF reminds me of the rabid pro-lifers. The line in the sand you're trying to draw it not realistic or ethical.
I think there is a emerging concensus that the most 'ethical' software license tries to find a balance between protecting the rights of the producers of software to protect and gain the benefits of their work (without being ripped off) and the rights of the consumer to use software in as many ways as possible (including using it in proprietary systems).
The balance of power has shifted too far towards the producers of software but that doesn't mean the other extreme is the best route to follow.
> We're like the drowning person who flails at his
> rescuer. And until someone else steps up to
> carry the torch, RMS is our rescuer. RMS is the
> King.
It's this sort of ideological cult-of-personality stuff just puts people off the FSF.
From Stallman's article..
> If you develop a Java program on Sun's Java
> platform, you are liable to use Sun-only features
> without even noticing. By the time you find this
> out, you may have been using them for months, and
> redoing the work could take more months.
You could say the same thing for GCC.
It's possible you link to a proprietary library without noticing. It's the same with any development platform. Does this mean you should avoid using the GNU compiler?
The reality is that standard Java is so feature-rich and there are so many open-source libraries and frameworks around you very rarely (if ever) need to resort to using proprietary libraries (Sun or not).
What event, short of a natural catastrophe such as a hurricane or earthquake is *not* preventable, given the knowledge that it might happen?
> Unfortunately, if that happens it will only bring
> the age of gov't mandated hardware DRM
That's definitely the way things are headed.
Software DRM is doomed from the beginning - you can always intercept the data after it gets decrypted or alternatively gain access to the decryption keys (like in this example) - since they have to be stored somewhere.
Hardware based DRM schemes won't ever be completely secure either but they're going to be a lot trickier to crack than software ones.
The author of the article wonders why UNIX and Linux are not mentioned much in the main Info Systems textbooks.
Well the reason is that the same reason that most Accounting textbooks don't talk about SAP and most Relational Database textbooks don't mention Oracle, Sybase or DB2 - it's because university textbooks (for better or worse) try to teach universal high-level concepts - in this case the role of information systems in business, not the low-level details of how the information systems are implemented.
> One Java developer recently quoted in JDJ
> remarked: "I use a Mac, it's like Linux with class
> and QA." (or something close to)
That wasn't just any Java developer - it was James Gosling (the main architect of Java).
Is ease of development really holding back Gnome?
The underlying assumption of the blog seems to be that you need to write apps in Java or C#/Mono to compete with Microsoft on the desktop in the future...
This is just is not true - look at OS X, most of Apple's apps are written in Obj-C which is just C with a few OO extensions.
Most developers like to think about low-level technologies but in the end it's usability and what apps are available (not what they're written in) that really count.
> There are many other languages available for Mac
> OS X but I would say that C, C++, and Objective-C
> are by far the most used.
True, although Apple seem to be trying to promote Java along with Obj-C as the main languages for Cocoa programming. C++ is used also in some places such as the IOKit device driver framework.
Obj-C is in some ways a much nicer language to program than Java or C# too because it supports true Smalltalk-style dynamic binding and untyped objects whereas Java and C# are both strongly typed. This may sound like a bad idea, but it improves code reuse and generally makes code a lot more flexible. You can avoid unnessarily complex class hierarchies and some clunky designs. It also allows for funky features such as message forwarding and categories (dynamic extension of classes as runtime).
I think the original poster is half-right though - C is dying for business/enterprise development, but C and C++ are still the main languages for writing any high performance GUI app or system software.
There are 10 alpha-numeric digits - i don't know if they avoid zero, but if they do that means:
35^10 = 2758547353515625 possible codes
divide by 100 million and you get 1 chance in 27585473.
> Because we're the world experts in free-market
> capitalism. We're the ones who made it work when
> everyone else failed. Our economy is by far the
> most liberal of the industrialized countries.
If that's true, why did the US come only 10th on the Heritage Foundation
and WSJ Index of Economic Freedom'?
> Science shouldn't operate on the principle of PAY to play. Anyone should have access to any and all information for free.
g e_Street_ Journal/vol24/24GSJ19c.html
True, another area that should apply to is scientific journals. It's hard to see how they can jusitify such high annual subscriptions in an age where electronic publishing is so cheap.
From:
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Geor
Top 10 priciest periodicals
When it comes to the cost of an annual subscription for scientific or medical journals, there are "lots of titles in the $5,000 area and 20 that stand out above that level," said Sam Mizer, manager of the Sciences Serials Department. These subscriptions include a balance of journal packages as well as single titles. The top 10 priciest:
* Tetrahedron full package: $23,061
* Nuclear Physics A-B: $19,396
* Brain Research: $16,344
* Physica A-E: $16,177
* Journal of Comparative Neurology: $15,294 [most expensive single title]
* Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. A-B: $14,697
* Surface Science package: $14,219
* Physics Letters A-B: $13,843
* Biochimica et Biophysica Acta: $11,362
* Journal of Chromatography A-B: $11,109
> For instance you have wasps that make a hole in
> the ground, fly away to find some insect larva,
> bring it to their hole, sedate the larva, lay an
> egg in it, put it in the hole and close the hole.
True, just in terms of being able to recognise objects and navigate around the world, insects are so much more advanced than any current robot it's a joke to compare them.
Really?
Bush also said the soil of the moon "contains raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air.". Presumably he thinks we will need some breathable air on Earth after all he's done to lower air cleanliness standards!
The sad thing is that this new space initiative has little to do with the true desire to explore new frontiers and everything to do with maintaining space dominance over China, India and anyone else who wants to challenge the US as the world's sole superpower.
> What I am saying is that one shouldn't accept such
> a disfunctional signal-to-noise ratio. I teach
> comp at the University of Michigan, so I am saying
> this from deep within the jungle. 90% (or more) of
> what is talked about in the humanities could
> qualify as grade-a crap. That scares me. I think
> something needs to be done.
I think nothing needs to be done, because this type of literary criticism 'theory' is rapidly going out of vogue. The fashion has to eventually implode sometime.
See Theory Is Finished" in the NY Times 'The Year In Ideas' feature.
For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed
Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.
From Chomsky's comments...
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.
> What does NYC have that Boston (and, for that
> matter, any other city) doesn't?
Excitement and energy basically.
Don't get me wrong, I like Boston, I don't want to diss it - you can have a good time there - is it a nice city. But it is also extremely homogenous, quiet and conservative compared to New York - whenever i come back from there it's a bit of relief - a bit like returning from a small town to a city.