In undergrad (CS) I did more math than was required, and honours math at that. When I started grad school I was introduced to a transform we were using to analyze medical images. There's an article somewhere where I'm quoted as saying that some smart grad student is going to come along some day and improve the algorithm for calculating that transform so that it's actually practical. It turns out the smart grad student didn't come along, so I had to do it. That involved a lot of calculus, both continuous and discrete. Now I mostly develop new medical image processing techniques and analyze data, which involves fairly high level statistics. Statistics is all calculus and, when you get further on, calculus and linear algebra.
You say you want to be a game programmer? Here are some of the papers from SIGGRAPH this year. Take a read through some of them. This one might be a good place to start... most of the authors are from Pixar. How much math do you see? How much math do you understand? These are the algorithms you'll be working with by the time you graduate. Note that there isn't a lot of continuous calculus in these (but a lot of discrete!). Somebody has already done much of the hard work of discretizing it for you. That's not always the case.
You can probably get away with not learning any math and being a run of the mill code monkey. If you want to be good at what you do though, learn the math.
Nonsense. You may seldom actually program something that depends directly on continuous calculus, but computing is founded on it's cousin, discrete calculus. New algorithms are also frequently expressed in continuous math and translating them into discrete math for implementation is an art in itself. Actual computers (and the networks that connect them) are, of course, electrical, and depend heavily on calculus.
Neither do the Americans. There are several exceptions to their freedom of speech amendment. Since one of those exceptions is "fighting words," hate speech could certainly be an exception to freedom of speech in the US. Courts' opinions have prevented that from happening, but it is not written in law.
Um... no. I know everyone likes to believe this, but it's baloney.
Translation: I want to know everything right now, putting in as little effort as possible, and I firmly believe that everybody who knows better and warns me this is a bad idea is wrong. If you want to teach children (including adults who need instant gratification) how to code, you give them Logo. If you want to teach someone to be a decent programmer you give them a learning language that requires they develop a few good habits. Otherwise you end up with the average MatLab programmer. Giving your program a name and typing 'begin' and 'end' isn't really that demanding.
Turbo Pascal was an extension of the Pascal standard. Saying it didn't follow the standard is kind of like saying GCC doesn't follow the C standard because it's not strictly a K&R C compiler.
There are some very large studies that place pretty strict upper limits on the possible health effects. Limits that are well within the you'd-probably-be-better-off-worrying-about-almost-anything-else range.
Actually, very few studies have shown links between RF and negative health effects. Some have shown possible effects of RF in petrie-dishes, but nothing definitively harmful.
And yes, even those are not particularly reproducible or reliable.
All you came up with is "The Heart MD Institute?" You can do better than a crazy who can't even get basic facts correct. There are a few (a very few) studies in the actual scientific literature that show some "non-thermal" effects. They might be false positives or flawed, and don't actually show any danger, but at least try to be scientific.
Absolutely. We need ways of turning out skilled developers, which means not downgrading university computer science programs to cater to industry and churn out mass produced code monkeys.
You probably read the replies further up in this thread. Even to much of Slashdot, things like assembler are obsolete, arcane knowledge that nobody needs to learn anymore. They forget that someone has to write the compilers and interpreters they use.
You've explained exactly why BASIC is a poor learning language and Pascal is a good one. Yes, you SHOULD worry about structuring your code, especially when you're learning. Beginners should never be exposed to the option to use things like GOTO.
Pascal was verbose enough to be easily readable (and learnable) and powerful enough to do whatever you wanted. I don't understand why you say it wasn't powerful enough for "experts." The Turbo/Borland/etc. Pascal compilers that people actually used were just as powerful as C compilers. More so... Turbo Pascal and up was fully object oriented. Mac OS was written in Pascal. There were also a LOT of Delphi applications, many of which are still around.
I guess you missed the part in my post that you replied to where I said "after the iPhone was released, they modified their new phone, in many different ways, to be more like the iPhone."
The document that is the subject of the article, an internal Samsung document, shows that they DID modify some of their new phones to be more iPhone-like. Whether they did so enough to be illegal is the subject of the trial.
No. Capitalism recognizes only demand. It doesn't distinguish between needs and wants. Our overall economy, and our individual jobs with it, have shifted from mostly providing for our needs to providing for our wants. The capitalist "worth" of a job is simply how much someone will pay for it.
For example, a great many people are now so rich that they can pay someone to cook for them and wait on them. This was not true in the past. In the past there was a much smaller demand for cooks and waiters. As we've gotten collectively richer, such servants, although certainly not essential, have become very much in demand.
So you think that because Samsung still makes phones that don't look like the iPhone it means they didn't copy the iPhone for some of their devices? Your logic astounds.
In the case this story is about, Apple is suing Samsung primarily over design patents and trade dress. There are a few utility patents in there too, but the case is primarily about whether Samsung copied Apple's design.
The utility patents, while they do exist, almost never seem to be mentioned. The ones that are mentioned are pretty specific. They are not "No a blue print but a concept. Not even the concept of an internal combustion engine but the concept of an engine. And the patents they submit provide nothing that a skilled craftsman can use to build a device."
Yes, there is. As you say, it's complicated. That's why this has gone to a judge to decide. However, if you find yourself copying down to the competitor's packaging, you're probably stepping over the line.
Apple's claims against Samsung aren't nearly as general as many of the Slashdot crowd would have you believe. The rule they taught us in high school about avoiding plagiarism would probably serve you perfectly well: do research, look at what lots of others have said (made), then close the books (put away the competitor's products) and write your own.
Which is why we need to stop the training-ification of universities. The average code monkey probably doesn't need to know assembly, and shouldn't be forced to learn it. But computer scientists and more skilled computer related positions benefit from knowing how computers actually work.
Have you programmed in a functional language? The things are like magic. When you get something working it's amazing, but getting there is a test of your worthiness.
It's far better to teach someone, even a biologist, basic concepts and then point them towards a {$PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE} tutorial or text than it is to teach them a particular language. I teach a Programming for Science Graduate Students (mostly neuroscience) class that does just that. I strongly encourage them to check out Python, but lots of them end up using MatLab.
Sure. But not because they're taught. Like my first day of grad school when my supervisor told me "I heard about this language called Python. It sounds cool. You should learn it and then teach the rest of us."
Yes. And I think it's a good thing. Universities are supposed to be about education, not training. If you want training, go to a tech school.
Universities teaching something that's not the latest hot industry language means that students will learn at least a couple of languages and hopefully in the process learn how to learn languages, rather than being a trained drone.
In undergrad I learned (officially) Pascal, C, C++, Java, Prolog, x86 assembler, Motorola assembler, a couple varieties of Motorola microcontroller assembler, VB, Perl, PHP, Javascript and a bunch of things some people might call programming languages like HTML, XML, SQL, etc. Oh, and built and programmed machines (using both wires and simulation) that ran on my own machine code and assembler definition.
Now I hear people complaining bitterly about having to learn a new language.
Slashdot Mirror
In undergrad (CS) I did more math than was required, and honours math at that. When I started grad school I was introduced to a transform we were using to analyze medical images. There's an article somewhere where I'm quoted as saying that some smart grad student is going to come along some day and improve the algorithm for calculating that transform so that it's actually practical. It turns out the smart grad student didn't come along, so I had to do it. That involved a lot of calculus, both continuous and discrete. Now I mostly develop new medical image processing techniques and analyze data, which involves fairly high level statistics. Statistics is all calculus and, when you get further on, calculus and linear algebra.
You say you want to be a game programmer? Here are some of the papers from SIGGRAPH this year. Take a read through some of them. This one might be a good place to start... most of the authors are from Pixar. How much math do you see? How much math do you understand? These are the algorithms you'll be working with by the time you graduate. Note that there isn't a lot of continuous calculus in these (but a lot of discrete!). Somebody has already done much of the hard work of discretizing it for you. That's not always the case.
You can probably get away with not learning any math and being a run of the mill code monkey. If you want to be good at what you do though, learn the math.
If you want to know anything more about statistics than which button to press, you need to know calculus.
Nonsense. You may seldom actually program something that depends directly on continuous calculus, but computing is founded on it's cousin, discrete calculus. New algorithms are also frequently expressed in continuous math and translating them into discrete math for implementation is an art in itself. Actual computers (and the networks that connect them) are, of course, electrical, and depend heavily on calculus.
If you want to command all credibility you should probably stick to "orthogonal."
Neither do the Americans. There are several exceptions to their freedom of speech amendment. Since one of those exceptions is "fighting words," hate speech could certainly be an exception to freedom of speech in the US. Courts' opinions have prevented that from happening, but it is not written in law.
Translation: I want to know everything right now, putting in as little effort as possible, and I firmly believe that everybody who knows better and warns me this is a bad idea is wrong. If you want to teach children (including adults who need instant gratification) how to code, you give them Logo. If you want to teach someone to be a decent programmer you give them a learning language that requires they develop a few good habits. Otherwise you end up with the average MatLab programmer. Giving your program a name and typing 'begin' and 'end' isn't really that demanding.
You should probably watch this.
Turbo Pascal was an extension of the Pascal standard. Saying it didn't follow the standard is kind of like saying GCC doesn't follow the C standard because it's not strictly a K&R C compiler.
Determining there is a difference between two things because one is significantly different than a reference and the other is not.
He also doesn't say what was compared. And the result is pretty marginal. Interesting, but definitely not the law of nature he implies.
There are some very large studies that place pretty strict upper limits on the possible health effects. Limits that are well within the you'd-probably-be-better-off-worrying-about-almost-anything-else range.
Actually, very few studies have shown links between RF and negative health effects. Some have shown possible effects of RF in petrie-dishes, but nothing definitively harmful.
And yes, even those are not particularly reproducible or reliable.
All you came up with is "The Heart MD Institute?" You can do better than a crazy who can't even get basic facts correct. There are a few (a very few) studies in the actual scientific literature that show some "non-thermal" effects. They might be false positives or flawed, and don't actually show any danger, but at least try to be scientific.
Absolutely. We need ways of turning out skilled developers, which means not downgrading university computer science programs to cater to industry and churn out mass produced code monkeys.
You probably read the replies further up in this thread. Even to much of Slashdot, things like assembler are obsolete, arcane knowledge that nobody needs to learn anymore. They forget that someone has to write the compilers and interpreters they use.
You've explained exactly why BASIC is a poor learning language and Pascal is a good one. Yes, you SHOULD worry about structuring your code, especially when you're learning. Beginners should never be exposed to the option to use things like GOTO.
Pascal was verbose enough to be easily readable (and learnable) and powerful enough to do whatever you wanted. I don't understand why you say it wasn't powerful enough for "experts." The Turbo/Borland/etc. Pascal compilers that people actually used were just as powerful as C compilers. More so... Turbo Pascal and up was fully object oriented. Mac OS was written in Pascal. There were also a LOT of Delphi applications, many of which are still around.
I guess you missed the part in my post that you replied to where I said "after the iPhone was released, they modified their new phone, in many different ways, to be more like the iPhone."
The document that is the subject of the article, an internal Samsung document, shows that they DID modify some of their new phones to be more iPhone-like. Whether they did so enough to be illegal is the subject of the trial.
Not necessarily the same people, but a similar one-number approach.
"it would be the MBAs and investment banks telling the Facebook founders to get out"
Now. Don't forget, it was the MBAs and institutional investors who bought and priced Facebook shares at a ridiculous valuation.
"while it would be the uneducated mom-and-dad investors investing"
Investing in what? I don't follow.
No. Capitalism recognizes only demand. It doesn't distinguish between needs and wants. Our overall economy, and our individual jobs with it, have shifted from mostly providing for our needs to providing for our wants. The capitalist "worth" of a job is simply how much someone will pay for it.
For example, a great many people are now so rich that they can pay someone to cook for them and wait on them. This was not true in the past. In the past there was a much smaller demand for cooks and waiters. As we've gotten collectively richer, such servants, although certainly not essential, have become very much in demand.
So you think that because Samsung still makes phones that don't look like the iPhone it means they didn't copy the iPhone for some of their devices? Your logic astounds.
In the case this story is about, Apple is suing Samsung primarily over design patents and trade dress. There are a few utility patents in there too, but the case is primarily about whether Samsung copied Apple's design.
http://cdn0.sbnation.com/podcasts/apple-samsung-lawsuit.pdf
The utility patents, while they do exist, almost never seem to be mentioned. The ones that are mentioned are pretty specific. They are not "No a blue print but a concept. Not even the concept of an internal combustion engine but the concept of an engine. And the patents they submit provide nothing that a skilled craftsman can use to build a device."
That's around the time a few universities were switching over, but the vast majority didn't jump the Pascal ship until a few years later.
Yes, there is. As you say, it's complicated. That's why this has gone to a judge to decide. However, if you find yourself copying down to the competitor's packaging, you're probably stepping over the line.
Apple's claims against Samsung aren't nearly as general as many of the Slashdot crowd would have you believe. The rule they taught us in high school about avoiding plagiarism would probably serve you perfectly well: do research, look at what lots of others have said (made), then close the books (put away the competitor's products) and write your own.
Which is why we need to stop the training-ification of universities. The average code monkey probably doesn't need to know assembly, and shouldn't be forced to learn it. But computer scientists and more skilled computer related positions benefit from knowing how computers actually work.
Brilliant. Now I remember why I still read the comments.
Have you programmed in a functional language? The things are like magic. When you get something working it's amazing, but getting there is a test of your worthiness.
It's far better to teach someone, even a biologist, basic concepts and then point them towards a {$PROGRAMMING_LANGUAGE} tutorial or text than it is to teach them a particular language. I teach a Programming for Science Graduate Students (mostly neuroscience) class that does just that. I strongly encourage them to check out Python, but lots of them end up using MatLab.
Sure. But not because they're taught. Like my first day of grad school when my supervisor told me "I heard about this language called Python. It sounds cool. You should learn it and then teach the rest of us."
Yes. And I think it's a good thing. Universities are supposed to be about education, not training. If you want training, go to a tech school.
Universities teaching something that's not the latest hot industry language means that students will learn at least a couple of languages and hopefully in the process learn how to learn languages, rather than being a trained drone.
In undergrad I learned (officially) Pascal, C, C++, Java, Prolog, x86 assembler, Motorola assembler, a couple varieties of Motorola microcontroller assembler, VB, Perl, PHP, Javascript and a bunch of things some people might call programming languages like HTML, XML, SQL, etc. Oh, and built and programmed machines (using both wires and simulation) that ran on my own machine code and assembler definition.
Now I hear people complaining bitterly about having to learn a new language.