"a bit on the advanced side" is an understatement when you're posting in a thread that contains posts about books that "you can get by without calculus"...
if anyone is thinking of buying a l&l text: they're great classics of physics but, while the level does vary from book to book, they all tend to assume that you have a decent mathematical background. they're also fairly old, so you might have to look elsewhere for recent developments.
i suspect most/. readers would be better off with either feynamn's popular books or his lectures (already mentioned a thousand times above).
One data point - we've worked a month of 6-day weeks and will be working another before this project is out of the door. At that point I will be resigning (they're welcome to fire me before this - I'm only staying that long because I want to get my code done).
Any managers reading this - make sure that your employees are desperately in debt (actually quite common here in Chile) before pushing for this kind of thing, because that's the only reason I can think of that would stop me from walking out... (and I otherwise have a good relationship with my boss).
I'm lead programmer on this project - it's a small company, their future plans will be hosed when I leave...
(And a big thanks to my partner for providing the financial support that lets me do this!)
Apologies if self-linking in a thread like this is bad taste, but the post above mentions Dijkstras "A Discipline of Computer Programming". If anyone reads that book and is curious about the programs, they may be interested in an interpreter for the language that was used - http://www.acooke.org/jara/egg
I should add a quote from that book: None of the programs in this monograph, needless to say, has been tested on a machine. (and, of course, all the ones I tested worked)
Why? Speaking and acting are two different things. Theres an old saying "sticks and bones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" that makes the difference clear.
More importantly, free speech is considered a right because it is useful - because the advantages of people being able to say what they want is more important that the disadvantages. Ant the whole idea of rights is that they let you do things that would otherwise be illegal.
In other words, a right is a permission to do something without limits. This is obvious if you think about it - who needs a right to free speech to say things everyone agrees about? You can say things like that anyway, without the need for the protection from prosecution that a right gives.
Im working on a system like that at the moment. The reason is historical - back-ends tend to be legacy (VB or Cobol or whatever someone decided years back). Front ends are newer and, if the architecture separates the two nicely, can be in a different language (hence Java).
So systems like that do exist, if not for the reason given in the previous post (speed).
PS And "back-end" can be a relative term. The VB back end to the Java code might be a front-end to even older stuff in Cobol or RPG (AS/400) (shudder).
The review talks about the difference between Xerces and JAXP. I thought Xerces implemented JAXP - could someone explain how they are two different approaches?
Jobs and companies vary hugely. If I were you, I'd start checking job adverts and writing your CV. You could even put in your CV that one of your objectives is to work in an environment with a structured approach to software development - and ask about it at interviews.
While rubberhose looks like an excellent piece of work, it's not true that encrypted file systems are useless without deniability. Encrypted file systems are often used commercially so that if the hardware is stolen commerical secrets are not made public. In such a situation it's unlikely that the user will be tortured to reveal the password.... (for example, I work at home, and all my source and email is on encrypted disks - my employers understand that I will give up the password at the slightest hint of danger, but still want encryption).
http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.html is the standard data processing package in American/British astronomy (and possibly Europe too these days). I just noticed it is packaged inside Debian...
Although aimed at astronomy, it would be useful general image processing (particularly good at automating procedures over many images).
What languages have you used? That sounds very much like you've only used procedural-ish languages. I consider myself a decent programmer (and I speak Spanish pretty well too:-), but could only make that claim about languages with very similar backgrounds. Could you really produce decent programs (ie not procedural programs battling against the language) in, say, Haskell or Prolog?
That's it? Lisp is no good because you can't fit comments into S-expressions?
A Lisp comment comes after a semi-colon and it's trivial to put one at the end of a line. Also, it's traditonal to write programs as collections of fairly short functions (if you're used to Java or C, for example, the OO part of Lisp breaks the code up into the equivalent of methods rather than classes), so comments above code are also usually visible.
But more than that, why on earth is this rated as 4? Sure, Lisp's time may have passed - but if so, there must be a better argument than that!
I feel the same sometimes (I'm a software engineer that also likes to hack at home). So I take a break. I continue doing my day job, but in the evenings I do something else. This last year I stopped hacking and learnt to play bass (and designed and built a valve amp for it) - now I'm itching to get back to the computer in my free time (in fact, I'm wanting to combine the two by writing music software).
In your position I'd stick with the degree, but do something else as well. If you organise your life and work when you need to work (instead of being pissed off and wasting time) you'll find plenty of free time to do something different.
He was right to complain. You said yourself that your worst case estimates should really have been your average case estimates. If you expected problems to occur, why did you stick them in the worst case?
What do you do all day? From what I've read on Cryptome it's clear you remain interested in Architecture - do you still have any professional involvement (info in the on-site BIO tails off at 98)? If not, how do you pay the bills? How did you get from architecture to cryptome? Do you have any interest in computers and the internet other than as a tool (would you consider yourself a hacker, in the positive sense)?
I know, it's more than one question, but they're all in the same direction. I'm curious about the guy.
A good background read is Andrew Hodge's excellent biography of Turing - covers both the life of this founding father of computing and the early british crypto effort (which used the first electical computers, more or less).
On a similar vein - look for postdocs from science subjects. Many researchers go into computing after doing their PhD because (like me) computing was the best bit of their research. If their research involved a lot of computing then they understand both programming and research.
One word of warning - their programming skills may not be that good (a CS education is some use;-). So if you can find someone who's also had a few years experience in industry, you might find that they are better programmers.
Anyway, to find postdocs, advertise with the local university careers service.
I should have added that it's confusing because there's also the ".NET runtime" (like a cross between the JVM and COM). But still,.NET is more than that - it's a "vision" of XML services. At least, it's pretty clear that's the message we were supposed to get from the conference.
IMHO (after going to a MS/NET Developers conference) C# is like Java..NET (which is not C#) is a general vision of XML based services on the Internet - including support in a wide variety of DB and server products for XML and related protocols (Soap et al).
Slashdot Mirror
"a bit on the advanced side" is an understatement when you're posting in a thread that contains posts about books that "you can get by without calculus"...
/. readers would be better off with either feynamn's popular books or his lectures (already mentioned a thousand times above).
if anyone is thinking of buying a l&l text: they're great classics of physics but, while the level does vary from book to book, they all tend to assume that you have a decent mathematical background. they're also fairly old, so you might have to look elsewhere for recent developments.
i suspect most
One data point - we've worked a month of 6-day weeks and will be working another before this project is out of the door. At that point I will be resigning (they're welcome to fire me before this - I'm only staying that long because I want to get my code done).
Any managers reading this - make sure that your employees are desperately in debt (actually quite common here in Chile) before pushing for this kind of thing, because that's the only reason I can think of that would stop me from walking out... (and I otherwise have a good relationship with my boss).
I'm lead programmer on this project - it's a small company, their future plans will be hosed when I leave...
(And a big thanks to my partner for providing the financial support that lets me do this!)
Apologies if self-linking in a thread like this is bad taste, but the post above mentions Dijkstras "A Discipline of Computer Programming". If anyone reads that book and is curious about the programs, they may be interested in an interpreter for the language that was used - http://www.acooke.org/jara/egg
I should add a quote from that book: None of the programs in this monograph, needless to say, has been tested on a machine. (and, of course, all the ones I tested worked)
there have to be limits
Why? Speaking and acting are two different things. Theres an old saying "sticks and bones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" that makes the difference clear.
More importantly, free speech is considered a right because it is useful - because the advantages of people being able to say what they want is more important that the disadvantages. Ant the whole idea of rights is that they let you do things that would otherwise be illegal.
In other words, a right is a permission to do something without limits. This is obvious if you think about it - who needs a right to free speech to say things everyone agrees about? You can say things like that anyway, without the need for the protection from prosecution that a right gives.
Im working on a system like that at the moment. The reason is historical - back-ends tend to be legacy (VB or Cobol or whatever someone decided years back). Front ends are newer and, if the architecture separates the two nicely, can be in a different language (hence Java).
So systems like that do exist, if not for the reason given in the previous post (speed).
PS And "back-end" can be a relative term. The VB back end to the Java code might be a front-end to even older stuff in Cobol or RPG (AS/400) (shudder).
The review talks about the difference between Xerces and JAXP. I thought Xerces implemented JAXP - could someone explain how they are two different approaches?
Thanks, Andrew
Jobs and companies vary hugely. If I were you, I'd start checking job adverts and writing your CV. You could even put in your CV that one of your objectives is to work in an environment with a structured approach to software development - and ask about it at interviews.
Good luck.
Yes, they exist (at least for some languages) - search for "code coverage tools" on google
While rubberhose looks like an excellent piece of work, it's not true that encrypted file systems are useless without deniability. Encrypted file systems are often used commercially so that if the hardware is stolen commerical secrets are not made public. In such a situation it's unlikely that the user will be tortured to reveal the password.... (for example, I work at home, and all my source and email is on encrypted disks - my employers understand that I will give up the password at the slightest hint of danger, but still want encryption).
http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf-homepage.html is the standard data processing package in American/British astronomy (and possibly Europe too these days). I just noticed it is packaged inside Debian...
Although aimed at astronomy, it would be useful general image processing (particularly good at automating procedures over many images).
What languages have you used? That sounds very much like you've only used procedural-ish languages. I consider myself a decent programmer (and I speak Spanish pretty well too :-), but could only make that claim about languages with very similar backgrounds. Could you really produce decent programs (ie not procedural programs battling against the language) in, say, Haskell or Prolog?
ditto!
You get used to it ;-)
Seriously, it becomes natural. Just like using RPN HP calculators (which is kind of similar)
That's it? Lisp is no good because you can't fit comments into S-expressions?
A Lisp comment comes after a semi-colon and it's trivial to put one at the end of a line. Also, it's traditonal to write programs as collections of fairly short functions (if you're used to Java or C, for example, the OO part of Lisp breaks the code up into the equivalent of methods rather than classes), so comments above code are also usually visible.
But more than that, why on earth is this rated as 4? Sure, Lisp's time may have passed - but if so, there must be a better argument than that!
I feel the same sometimes (I'm a software engineer that also likes to hack at home). So I take a break. I continue doing my day job, but in the evenings I do something else. This last year I stopped hacking and learnt to play bass (and designed and built a valve amp for it) - now I'm itching to get back to the computer in my free time (in fact, I'm wanting to combine the two by writing music software).
In your position I'd stick with the degree, but do something else as well. If you organise your life and work when you need to work (instead of being pissed off and wasting time) you'll find plenty of free time to do something different.
He was right to complain. You said yourself that your worst case estimates should really have been your average case estimates. If you expected problems to occur, why did you stick them in the worst case?
I'd be annoyed too.
Wow. Didn't expect this to be rated so high. Thanks. If it does get through, could you fix my capitalization?!
What do you do all day? From what I've read on Cryptome it's clear you remain interested in Architecture - do you still have any professional involvement (info in the on-site BIO tails off at 98)? If not, how do you pay the bills? How did you get from architecture to cryptome? Do you have any interest in computers and the internet other than as a tool (would you consider yourself a hacker, in the positive sense)?
I know, it's more than one question, but they're all in the same direction. I'm curious about the guy.
Incidentally, Haskell can also use indentation to indicate structure.
Isn't it old news? I remember reading about something very similar from Xerox about 5 years ago. What's new?
A good background read is Andrew Hodge's excellent biography of Turing - covers both the life of this founding father of computing and the early british crypto effort (which used the first electical computers, more or less).
PS What (and where) is the job? I might be interested ;-) CV at http://www.andrewcooke.free-online.co.uk/andrew/in dex.html
On a similar vein - look for postdocs from science subjects. Many researchers go into computing after doing their PhD because (like me) computing was the best bit of their research. If their research involved a lot of computing then they understand both programming and research. One word of warning - their programming skills may not be that good (a CS education is some use ;-). So if you can find someone who's also had a few years experience in industry, you might find that they are better programmers.
Anyway, to find postdocs, advertise with the local university careers service.
I should have added that it's confusing because there's also the ".NET runtime" (like a cross between the JVM and COM). But still, .NET is more than that - it's a "vision" of XML services. At least, it's pretty clear that's the message we were supposed to get from the conference.
IMHO (after going to a MS /NET Developers conference) C# is like Java. .NET (which is not C#) is a general vision of XML based services on the Internet - including support in a wide variety of DB and server products for XML and related protocols (Soap et al).