I think it depends on whether you want to be a software engineer, or a computer scientist.
I've done programming for manufacturing, IT services,.com product/service providers, and military employers. I have a bachelor's in math+cs, master's in cs, and I'm working toward a PhD in cs. Here's what I've found...
For software engineering, I had nearly no need for math. I mean, you might do a little back-of-envelope multiplication to estimate disk storage needs or batch job durations, but that was it. The hard work for those jobs was making good software / database designs, avoiding concurrency / threading issues, etc.
For the military work, that's when I went from being mostly a developer to being mostly a computer scientist. THAT'S where the heavy math came in to play. Heavy statistics (for making sense of sensors), diff. eq. / vector calculus (for dealing with physics models), optimization theory (for planning future actions), etc.
I still haven't figured out why high school programming teachers stress so heavily the connection between math and programming. For most software engineering jobs, you could have stopped at high-school Pre-Calculus. Just not if you want to be a computer scientist.
The Univeristy of Rhode Island is trying to teach this kind of stuff I believe. It's not the worlds most prestigious graduate program, but I think they've been doing the forensics stuff for a few years, so the instruction in that topic might be well developed.
The scope of patents is actually "the useful arts" Arts (in 18th century parliance) aren't just aesthetic works like painting and music. The term actually means a 'way of doing something'. This is found in Article 1 Secion 8 of the U.S. Consitution:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
It's apparent that Thomas Jefferson had this understanding that patents can include ways of doing things, because he was apparently pissed off for the same reason we are. Here's a Jefferson quote from this article:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_02 /b3966086.htm/
A man "has a right to use his knife to cut his meat, a fork to hold it; may a patentee take from him the right to combine their use on the same subject?" -- Thomas Jefferson
I really do think strict constructionism is the only correct approach to the constitution. And I'm mostly convinced that abortion is murder. And I think gay marriage is not a guaranteed freedom in the Constitution. (Perhaps there are other reasons for permittting it however.) For these reasons I am, no... was, pro-Republican.
But how do I weigh those really important issues against what Bush + the Republican congress has done to us? The deficits make me fear for my childrens' future. I think global free trade is probably a bad idea. His appointment of the inept guy to run FEMA prior to Katrina was truly, in my mind, a case of graft deserving of impeachment. And his administration's acceptance of torture, or near torture, as a good idea make me want to vomit - forget about have him represent my country. And of course there was the administrations basically dropping Microsoft's antitrust abuse culpability when Bush came into office.
It's so hard to balance these issues. Will we ever have a president we can feel really good about again? This all makes me so sad...
I guess Apple will just have to boil the frog, then.
Elbow out the accessory companies one company or accessory at a time, until they lose the critical mass they need to stay in the business. And do it slowly so that won't mount a unified reponse against Apple, such as a multi-complainant antitrust suit.
Then this is the most wonderful thing imaginable. If Christianity is true, then the possibility of eternal life is real, doing something good is meaningful beyond just how it makes you feel, etc.
I realize this is flamebate with the average Slashdot crowd, but since you guys normally appreciate contrarian views on a topic.
Things won't entirely fail, but they'll sometimes be a lot more of a hassle...
1) The two domain registrars can sync with mirror eachother's databases. Then the only glitches occur when the China and the U.S. have an active disagreement: they both want to register the same name to different parties, or China (most likely) wants to suppress from its people a DNS entry maintained by the U.S.
2) As long as IP#s and routers remain configured properly, you can always fall back on using IP#s rather than DNS names when there's a naming problem. This can be inconvenient for users and webmasters, but it should work in most cases.
I too find registration a PITA, and worrisome because there are no guarantees about how the information will be used. But I'm growingly worried about NOT registering. Here's why...
A friend of mine is an editor for a large newspaper in a major US city. He tells me that newspapers are in serious trouble financially, significantly because of decreased ad revenue. People are reading paper newspapers less and online news sources more. From what I can tell he's not just bellyaching - newspapers are laying off lots of reporters.
I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth. By not registering for sites like the NYT, we make it harder for that newspaper to get ad revenue, which ultimately jeopardizes its ability to investigate the Bushs, Rumsfelds, and Nixons of the world.
This touches on the issue of mind / brain duality.
Is our mind something that's simply a meta-effect of the brain, so that for instance if you view/control my brain you can fully know / control my mind?
Also note that the answer to this has serious implications for free will, the justice of retributive punishment, etc.
I agree with you only to a point. If it were possible for a child to conduct a fairly normal life and only view choice if he/his parents wanted him to see it, that would be one thing.
But imagine a world where playing in your back yard, watching TV at 3 pm, or going to school will all expose a child to porn. That would be a case where without legal protections, kids would have to live extremely outlandish lives in order to avoid porn. And here's just a wild guess: if parents *did* try to shelter their kids from porn in such an environment by taking the necessary measures, people like you would call them child abusers and fundamentalists. Just a guess.
So my point is, it's one thing to permit porn for people who actively seek to view it. But with absolutely no enforcement of decency in public places, it's basically impossible for kids to have a decent childhood. Unless your view of a good childhood is for kids to enjoy porn, in which case I'm guessing you're not a parent.
The ultimate solution to this involve the application of Bayesian-based... ((ring ring)) Hold on. Yeah, I'm talking to slashdot. No, nothing serious. I'm good, how are you? No, I don't think we more bread. She said WHAT? Wow, ok, I think you'll need to give Steve a call and let him know that our plans for Saturday need to change. No, I said Steve. STEVE. S - T - E - V - E. Yes. No I haven't filed taxes yet, but I did order the Michigan module for TurboTax. Yeah, 4-6 weeks, but it's usually a lot faster. Yeah, I can wait while you let the cat in. I said YEAH, GO AHEAD. I'LL WAIT. So anyway, did you have a chance to wash our dark laundry last night? No, I can get that on the way home. So what about...
If you don't have laws like this in the US then you're mugs.
What makes you think people like us have any control over the laws? It has been a long, long time since the republic was what the founders had in mind.
You're close to correct. The Cell processor does have a bunch of cores that are basically DSPs (no virtual memory, etc.) BUT there's also another core that's basically a full-blown Power processor. That core is meant to rule the others.
So while you do still have to program differently for a cell with 8+1 cores than you would for a computer with 9 Power processors, it's still not like being stuck with just 9 DSPs.
And when someone is swinging a sledgehammer towards your head, it would be wrong to stop him because for all you know he's planning on stopping it at the last minute.
I agree with your concerns, but there are two sides to the coin. Probably some terrorist acts can only be stopped if we're given a good bit of warning (because even NSA / CIA / FBI / Homeland Security folks are only human). It would be disappointing to have my kids killed in an attack because we were unwilling to scrub the web looking for early warning signs of that attack.
Again, I'm not advocating either extreme, I'm just pointing out that you only argued one side of the issue.
I've thought before about the general point you're making, though. When I was considering it, I was thinking of Muslims. I was wondering about how some Muslims could call Islam a religion of peace, and yet seem to feel no special obligation to fight against other people, who also call themselves Muslims, and who fly planes into buildings.
Ethically speaking, I eventually concluded that just because some wackos claim to belong to the same group you do, that doesn't confer on you any special obligation to be the one to clean their clocks or to correct them. If we *did* require that, it would be something akin to collective punishment or guilt by (false) association. So it's very irritating when the good people of a group don't make it clear to us outsiders how they're different from that group's wackos. But I don't think the good people from the group have any more obligation to clear up the confusion of outsiders than someone outside the group has a responsibility to.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it depends on whether you want to be a software engineer, or a computer scientist.
.com product/service providers, and military employers. I have a bachelor's in math+cs, master's in cs, and I'm working toward a PhD in cs. Here's what I've found...
I've done programming for manufacturing, IT services,
For software engineering, I had nearly no need for math. I mean, you might do a little back-of-envelope multiplication to estimate disk storage needs or batch job durations, but that was it. The hard work for those jobs was making good software / database designs, avoiding concurrency / threading issues, etc.
For the military work, that's when I went from being mostly a developer to being mostly a computer scientist. THAT'S where the heavy math came in to play. Heavy statistics (for making sense of sensors), diff. eq. / vector calculus (for dealing with physics models), optimization theory (for planning future actions), etc.
I still haven't figured out why high school programming teachers stress so heavily the connection between math and programming. For most software engineering jobs, you could have stopped at high-school Pre-Calculus. Just not if you want to be a computer scientist.
The Univeristy of Rhode Island is trying to teach this kind of stuff I believe. It's not the worlds most prestigious graduate program, but I think they've been doing the forensics stuff for a few years, so the instruction in that topic might be well developed.
500 years after alchemy became chemisty, and we can only turn gold into lead???
The photos of her almost make me want to stop being a geek *man*.
It's apparent that Thomas Jefferson had this understanding that patents can include ways of doing things, because he was apparently pissed off for the same reason we are. Here's a Jefferson quote from this article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_02 /b3966086.htm/
Missle system kills security leaks!
(Sorry, I'm really sorry. I can't stop.)
This is so hard for me...
I really do think strict constructionism is the only correct approach to the constitution. And I'm mostly convinced that abortion is murder. And I think gay marriage is not a guaranteed freedom in the Constitution. (Perhaps there are other reasons for permittting it however.) For these reasons I am, no... was, pro-Republican.
But how do I weigh those really important issues against what Bush + the Republican congress has done to us? The deficits make me fear for my childrens' future. I think global free trade is probably a bad idea. His appointment of the inept guy to run FEMA prior to Katrina was truly, in my mind, a case of graft deserving of impeachment. And his administration's acceptance of torture, or near torture, as a good idea make me want to vomit - forget about have him represent my country. And of course there was the administrations basically dropping Microsoft's antitrust abuse culpability when Bush came into office.
It's so hard to balance these issues. Will we ever have a president we can feel really good about again? This all makes me so sad...
I guess Apple will just have to boil the frog, then.
Elbow out the accessory companies one company or accessory at a time, until they lose the critical mass they need to stay in the business. And do it slowly so that won't mount a unified reponse against Apple, such as a multi-complainant antitrust suit.
Then this is the most wonderful thing imaginable. If Christianity is true, then the possibility of eternal life is real, doing something good is meaningful beyond just how it makes you feel, etc.
I realize this is flamebate with the average Slashdot crowd, but since you guys normally appreciate contrarian views on a topic.
Things won't entirely fail, but they'll sometimes be a lot more of a hassle...
1) The two domain registrars can sync with mirror eachother's databases. Then the only glitches occur when the China and the U.S. have an active disagreement: they both want to register the same name to different parties, or China (most likely) wants to suppress from its people a DNS entry maintained by the U.S.
2) As long as IP#s and routers remain configured properly, you can always fall back on using IP#s rather than DNS names when there's a naming problem. This can be inconvenient for users and webmasters, but it should work in most cases.
Apple runs iTunes. Disney produces some content. Serious risk of antitrust action.
I too find registration a PITA, and worrisome because there are no guarantees about how the information will be used. But I'm growingly worried about NOT registering. Here's why...
A friend of mine is an editor for a large newspaper in a major US city. He tells me that newspapers are in serious trouble financially, significantly because of decreased ad revenue. People are reading paper newspapers less and online news sources more. From what I can tell he's not just bellyaching - newspapers are laying off lots of reporters.
I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth. By not registering for sites like the NYT, we make it harder for that newspaper to get ad revenue, which ultimately jeopardizes its ability to investigate the Bushs, Rumsfelds, and Nixons of the world.
This touches on the issue of mind / brain duality.
Is our mind something that's simply a meta-effect of the brain, so that for instance if you view/control my brain you can fully know / control my mind?
Also note that the answer to this has serious implications for free will, the justice of retributive punishment, etc.
I agree with you only to a point. If it were possible for a child to conduct a fairly normal life and only view choice if he/his parents wanted him to see it, that would be one thing.
But imagine a world where playing in your back yard, watching TV at 3 pm, or going to school will all expose a child to porn. That would be a case where without legal protections, kids would have to live extremely outlandish lives in order to avoid porn. And here's just a wild guess: if parents *did* try to shelter their kids from porn in such an environment by taking the necessary measures, people like you would call them child abusers and fundamentalists. Just a guess.
So my point is, it's one thing to permit porn for people who actively seek to view it. But with absolutely no enforcement of decency in public places, it's basically impossible for kids to have a decent childhood. Unless your view of a good childhood is for kids to enjoy porn, in which case I'm guessing you're not a parent.
This sTorY is unsUbstantiaTEd. MovE alonG. MOve aLoNG.
The ultimate solution to this involve the application of Bayesian-based... ((ring ring)) Hold on. Yeah, I'm talking to slashdot. No, nothing serious. I'm good, how are you? No, I don't think we more bread. She said WHAT? Wow, ok, I think you'll need to give Steve a call and let him know that our plans for Saturday need to change. No, I said Steve. STEVE. S - T - E - V - E. Yes. No I haven't filed taxes yet, but I did order the Michigan module for TurboTax. Yeah, 4-6 weeks, but it's usually a lot faster. Yeah, I can wait while you let the cat in. I said YEAH, GO AHEAD. I'LL WAIT. So anyway, did you have a chance to wash our dark laundry last night? No, I can get that on the way home. So what about...
I had an orgasm just watching the video. Can you imagine how embarassing that would be if I used the thing 8 hours a day in an office???
You're close to correct. The Cell processor does have a bunch of cores that are basically DSPs (no virtual memory, etc.) BUT there's also another core that's basically a full-blown Power processor. That core is meant to rule the others.
So while you do still have to program differently for a cell with 8+1 cores than you would for a computer with 9 Power processors, it's still not like being stuck with just 9 DSPs.
And when someone is swinging a sledgehammer towards your head, it would be wrong to stop him because for all you know he's planning on stopping it at the last minute.
I agree with your concerns, but there are two sides to the coin. Probably some terrorist acts can only be stopped if we're given a good bit of warning (because even NSA / CIA / FBI / Homeland Security folks are only human). It would be disappointing to have my kids killed in an attack because we were unwilling to scrub the web looking for early warning signs of that attack.
Again, I'm not advocating either extreme, I'm just pointing out that you only argued one side of the issue.
Say, dat's a nice email message you got there. It would be a shame if some spam filter caught it. ;)
I'm not Christian.
I've thought before about the general point you're making, though. When I was considering it, I was thinking of Muslims. I was wondering about how some Muslims could call Islam a religion of peace, and yet seem to feel no special obligation to fight against other people, who also call themselves Muslims, and who fly planes into buildings.
Ethically speaking, I eventually concluded that just because some wackos claim to belong to the same group you do, that doesn't confer on you any special obligation to be the one to clean their clocks or to correct them. If we *did* require that, it would be something akin to collective punishment or guilt by (false) association. So it's very irritating when the good people of a group don't make it clear to us outsiders how they're different from that group's wackos. But I don't think the good people from the group have any more obligation to clear up the confusion of outsiders than someone outside the group has a responsibility to.
For the record, not all religious people ignore empirical evidence. The Bush administration is NOT the thinking Christian's wet dream.
Google does not do evil. :)