People keep on talking like you have to choose between a school that offers a good liberal arts education, and one that offers a kick-ass CS education.
I got my master's in CS at Brown, and from what I can tell it excels in both liberal arts and CS. If you go somewhere like Brown, the choice between how deeply you focus on CS vs. how broadly you educate yourself is a function of your semester-to-semester class choices, not your school.
I wonder what other schools are like Brown in this regard.
Harvard? I don't see many CS publications from Harvard, but maybe I'm not looking at the right research topics.
Stanford? Unquestionable CS credentials, but how are they with liberal arts? Pretty good I imagine.
Remember that the point of attending a university is to get a *well rounded* education.
It seems to me that the point of attending a university can be whatever you want it to be. I don't think there's some mystical "they" out there that gets to define what students should desire from their college years. There are benefits to well-rounded educations, there are benefits to technically focused educations. I say tell the OP some of the pros and cons of each, and let him decide what the "point" of his education is.
So they're basically saying: "Since we've done a lot of successful standards before, there can't possibly be anything wrong with how this one was carried out."
No, no, no. They're saying: "This was approved with the same process as all our other standards. So imagine how many other ISO standards are complete BS!"
As an undergrad, I wouldn't sweat the liberal arts vs. tech-focused issue too much, as long as it's a solid program.
Where it really matters is grad school. You'll tend to find that the serious CS grad programs (MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U. Mich., etc.) have the professors who know how to get published, and know how to attract lots of research funding. It's these professors who are most qualified to teach you how to be a very successful researcher. Not that it's impossible at smaller or less established schools (UConn, etc.), but your odds are lower.
In RI, we pay a "use tax". If you buy something in-state, it's covered by the "sales tax" (7.5%). I suspect it's an un-Constitutional form of inter-state commerce taxation by RI, but there you have it.
Am I the only person who thinks that nature is unfair, and thus inherently immoral; moreover, that no higher authority has the right to define fairness, thus existence itself is immoral? Any human's continued existence is a contribution toward nature, thus the only moral path for every human is to commit suicide ASAP.
Is a particle motion simulator a abnormally easy test case?
When I was getting up to speed on IBM Cell programming, IBM had a programmer's tutorial (excellently written, btw). The example problem they used for their chapter(s?) on code tuning were a particle simulator. It was a wonderful example problem, because it showed how to vectorize a program. But then when we went to vectorize our own algorithm, it didn't fit the Cell's vector programming instructions nearly as cleanly, so in the end we didn't get nearly the performance increase due to vector instructions as did the particle simulator.
So I'm thinking that just even though CUDA can do a good job with particle motion simulations, we shouldn't remotely assume that it's good for particular algorithms for which each of us is responsible.
"People are unwittingly trusting the information they find on Wikipedia, yet experience has shown it can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or misleading,"
As opposed to what: Newspapers? Schools' history books? It's a bit silly to criticize only Wikipedia and none of the other sources accepted by schoolteachers.
I just flipped a coin ten times. The most likely outcome is 5 heads, and the fact that I got 7 does not show that the usual model is in any way inaccurate.
I disagree on two counts. First, when you say the likely outcome is 5 heads, your asserting that the mean of the PDF for the coin is 0.5. I.e., your model includes a mean of 0.5 as a detail. Because you're taking that as an established fact, no matter how many heads you got in a row could change your mind about the PDF's true mean - you've already taken a mean of 0.5 as a given.
But I was making a very different point in my OP. The particular baseball stat is a "state of nature". It happened. If we assume that the universe is deterministic, then it's nonsensical to assign a probability other than 1.0 to that event. Any model that produces an answer other than 1.0 for that event is probably replacing a variable that in the real world has a fixed value, with a random variable. Thus, the researchers had to introduce an inaccuracy in their model in order to make anything about their outcome be uncertain. It's more of a modeling issue than a probability issue.
C++ is a rather complex language, but simplifying it won't help. The problem is that low quality education is rampant.
I think you're having a "Tastes great / less filling" argument. Good education can somewhat prepare a person to learn and use an overly complex language. A bad education leaves a person less prepared to do so.
Having programmed in C++ for many years, and having lived through its evolution to include its nightmarish template system with its nearly incomprehensible error messages even for types as simple as strings, I'm ready to at least blame the language design. Feel free to also blame CS education if you've seen bad examples of it.
"The congressional policy and agency practice of relying on the marketplace instead of regulation to maximize consumer welfare has been proven by experience (including the Comcast customer experience) to be enormously successful,"
Comcast's "marketplace" justification doesn't work. Their implication is that having a market means you have competition. But Comcast has a licensed monopoly on the cable network, and some telephone company has a monopoly on the telephone network. That's a market with, at the very most, one competitor.
Normally we bemoan that with class-action suits, lawyers get rich and the plaintiffs get very little.
In this case, I think I'll be happy as long as the RIAA gets badly bruised. The only way this could turn out badly is if the class-action lawyers accept a payoff by the RIAA before discovery happens.
The new rules also require an independent backup power source for the voice recorders to allow continued recording for nine to 11 minutes if all aircraft power sources are lost or interrupted.
What does it mean when people say this? I assume the FAA doesn't mind at all if the battery backup lasts longer than 11 minutes. So what's the true battery-duration requirement: 9 minutes? 11 minutes?
What I mean here is that programs don't typically announce the structure of the full computation ahead of time.
I believe that any Turing-complete language is subject to the halting problem. So for Turing-complete languages, you can't rely on automated tools to calculate the structure of all possible runs of some arbitrary problem.
Re:he is right, but it depends on the application
on
Panic in Multicore Land
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Hi David,
I looked at your thesis. Could you explain something? Why is it that so many computer science publications from the Netherlands are written in English? Is it because English is commonly spoken in universities there, or is it just that English is the standard language for computer science publications?
The horrors! How are the teams at Microsoft going to fit bloat in them, then!?!
Actually, it's been a good exercise to have to work under those constraints. I found that a tight environment like that forced me to carefully reconsider the design of my code and my algorithm. It probably lead to an implementation that not only had fewer lines of code, but was also more readable, than the original version.
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Damnit! Now my undead highschool Latin teacher is going to kick my ass...
Yes... excellent. Smithers! Summon the undead Greek poets!
The weirdest thing was when I marched around the stage chanting, "Bureaucrats! Bureaucrats! Bureaucrats! Bureaucrats!"
Have it owned by the mafia?
They're in the UK, so I believe the proper term for them is "boffins".
People keep on talking like you have to choose between a school that offers a good liberal arts education, and one that offers a kick-ass CS education.
I got my master's in CS at Brown, and from what I can tell it excels in both liberal arts and CS. If you go somewhere like Brown, the choice between how deeply you focus on CS vs. how broadly you educate yourself is a function of your semester-to-semester class choices, not your school.
I wonder what other schools are like Brown in this regard.
It seems to me that the point of attending a university can be whatever you want it to be. I don't think there's some mystical "they" out there that gets to define what students should desire from their college years. There are benefits to well-rounded educations, there are benefits to technically focused educations. I say tell the OP some of the pros and cons of each, and let him decide what the "point" of his education is.
No, no, no. They're saying: "This was approved with the same process as all our other standards. So imagine how many other ISO standards are complete BS!"
It's a new low for /. when "First!" appears in a story title.
As an undergrad, I wouldn't sweat the liberal arts vs. tech-focused issue too much, as long as it's a solid program.
Where it really matters is grad school. You'll tend to find that the serious CS grad programs (MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Brown, U. Mich., etc.) have the professors who know how to get published, and know how to attract lots of research funding. It's these professors who are most qualified to teach you how to be a very successful researcher. Not that it's impossible at smaller or less established schools (UConn, etc.), but your odds are lower.
In RI, we pay a "use tax". If you buy something in-state, it's covered by the "sales tax" (7.5%). I suspect it's an un-Constitutional form of inter-state commerce taxation by RI, but there you have it.
Is a particle motion simulator a abnormally easy test case?
When I was getting up to speed on IBM Cell programming, IBM had a programmer's tutorial (excellently written, btw). The example problem they used for their chapter(s?) on code tuning were a particle simulator. It was a wonderful example problem, because it showed how to vectorize a program. But then when we went to vectorize our own algorithm, it didn't fit the Cell's vector programming instructions nearly as cleanly, so in the end we didn't get nearly the performance increase due to vector instructions as did the particle simulator.
So I'm thinking that just even though CUDA can do a good job with particle motion simulations, we shouldn't remotely assume that it's good for particular algorithms for which each of us is responsible.
As opposed to what: Newspapers? Schools' history books? It's a bit silly to criticize only Wikipedia and none of the other sources accepted by schoolteachers.
I guess I'm a dork for enjoying the second-order kind of humor in that statement.
I disagree on two counts. First, when you say the likely outcome is 5 heads, your asserting that the mean of the PDF for the coin is 0.5. I.e., your model includes a mean of 0.5 as a detail. Because you're taking that as an established fact, no matter how many heads you got in a row could change your mind about the PDF's true mean - you've already taken a mean of 0.5 as a given.
But I was making a very different point in my OP. The particular baseball stat is a "state of nature". It happened. If we assume that the universe is deterministic, then it's nonsensical to assign a probability other than 1.0 to that event. Any model that produces an answer other than 1.0 for that event is probably replacing a variable that in the real world has a fixed value, with a random variable. Thus, the researchers had to introduce an inaccuracy in their model in order to make anything about their outcome be uncertain. It's more of a modeling issue than a probability issue.
Shouldn't we say that the probability of it happening was 1.0, because it did happen?
It seems to me that if their experiments report anything else, then either their models are erroneously inaccurate, or they got something else wrong.
I think you're having a "Tastes great / less filling" argument. Good education can somewhat prepare a person to learn and use an overly complex language. A bad education leaves a person less prepared to do so.
Having programmed in C++ for many years, and having lived through its evolution to include its nightmarish template system with its nearly incomprehensible error messages even for types as simple as strings, I'm ready to at least blame the language design. Feel free to also blame CS education if you've seen bad examples of it.
Am I the only person who's wondering WTF a database connection string is doing in a word processing document?
I'm starting to understand why the spec is 6000 pages long.
Comcast's "marketplace" justification doesn't work. Their implication is that having a market means you have competition. But Comcast has a licensed monopoly on the cable network, and some telephone company has a monopoly on the telephone network. That's a market with, at the very most, one competitor.
Normally we bemoan that with class-action suits, lawyers get rich and the plaintiffs get very little.
In this case, I think I'll be happy as long as the RIAA gets badly bruised. The only way this could turn out badly is if the class-action lawyers accept a payoff by the RIAA before discovery happens.
What does it mean when people say this? I assume the FAA doesn't mind at all if the battery backup lasts longer than 11 minutes. So what's the true battery-duration requirement: 9 minutes? 11 minutes?
I believe that any Turing-complete language is subject to the halting problem. So for Turing-complete languages, you can't rely on automated tools to calculate the structure of all possible runs of some arbitrary problem.
Hi David,
I looked at your thesis. Could you explain something? Why is it that so many computer science publications from the Netherlands are written in English? Is it because English is commonly spoken in universities there, or is it just that English is the standard language for computer science publications?
Actually, it's been a good exercise to have to work under those constraints. I found that a tight environment like that forced me to carefully reconsider the design of my code and my algorithm. It probably lead to an implementation that not only had fewer lines of code, but was also more readable, than the original version.