Without a love of hard science and mathematics you will never be more than a mediocre programmer.
The hacker spirit is an undying desire to know; a hacker never settles for 'black box' explanations or shies away from knowledge because it's too hard.
What confuses me most is how you reconcile your proclaimed love for algorithms with your disdain for mathematics: that portion of CS, more than any other, is pure mathematics. I ask you to check your claim and trying to read, and more importantly grasp the essence, of Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" without a strong background in mathematics.
I ask you to check your claim and try to design, and truly understand the workings of, a simple full adder circuit without a fair knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Without a love of physics and math you can never become more than a code monkey, the desk jockey equivalent of a construction worker, who can put pre-assembled bits and pieces together but will never gain any true mastery of the material or progress above the millions of other mindless bromides.
Not so! I'm the president of the International April Pranksters Association and we define April fools day as 12:00AM-12:00PM Local Time.
Don't Believe me? Then check our website.
Oh, you can't find it? uhm, it's undergoing technical difficulties now
No hits on google? well, that's because... it's those damn terrorist hackers! it's the cyber-terrorists fault. damn cyber-terrorism.
"Buffalo"
Just go to this site:
http://www.kfc.com/buffalosnacker/
and enter the code buffalo to get a free sandwich (they'll mail the coupon to you after you sell them your soul)
If memory serves, babbage did get his difference machine working. It was only his analytical machine that couldn't get built. The design (and Ada's programs) were both fine, it's just that they didn't have the machining accuracy or funds to make one.
I graduated from HS 3 years ago, and they had DDR and some kind of bike hooked up to a playstation for my Junior and Senior years (the HS is in a western suburb of Chicago).
The thing is, that almost no one ever used them...
The kids who really wanted to get into shape used the weight room, treadmills, and other 'traditional' excercise machines and the kids who didn't want to get into shape weren't going to be fooled by such an obvious ploy.
We were required to wear pulse monitors and our grade depended on our average bpm (I think something around 170+ was an A...). They were easily 'hackable,' so the lazy kids just had them display the last person who got an A's statistics when the teacher came around to collect scores.
No amount of technology is ever going to get people into shape who don't want to be. Working out, almost by definition, involves hard work. People who want to get in shape will manage to regardless of how few tools are available, and people who want to avoid it will always be able to do so (in fact, I think these high tech toys are easier to cheat with).
It's on the expensive side, but it is extremely fast and it works well. Instead of trying to teach you grammar and memorize conjugation rules and nouns, it immerses you in a Spanish environment so you learn in the same fashion a native spanish speaker would have at first (only sped up 100x).
To the best of my knowledge, Rosetta is even what the US military and Diplomatic Corp use for language training (although anyone with first hand experience feel free to correct me).
All the article says is that (in Germany) money you invest in foriegn films is tax deductible, while you pay normal taxes on the profits.
In Germany income taxes work like this (2004): " a zero tax rate on taxable income up to 7,664 " a marginal tax rate rising form 16% to 45% on taxable income between 7,664 and 52.152 " a marginal tax rate of 45% on taxable income over 52.152"
And money invested in films just doesn't count as taxable income.
So, let's say someone in germany makes a 10 million a year (they would have to make a lot to invest 10+ million euros in a movie). Then, let's say they invest 5 million in a movie that flops, and get no money back. If they never invested, they would have 5.5 million euros left after taxes. Losing 5 million euros, they only 2.25 million euros left.
Run the numbers, it is impossible for a german to have a net gain in his take home income on a film that looses money.
However, if the same German investor invests 5 million euros, and gets back 6 million, at the end of the year they end up with 6.05 million euro(a.505 million euro gain after over no investment, or a 3.8 million euro gain over the movie that tanks). It is clearly in the investors best interest invest in a movie that will make money.
Dear god, this isn't even hard math. I mean I did these numbers in 30 seconds without a calculator using nothing more than junior high algebra.
At worst, this trick could help someone defer taxes for a bit, it's no incentive to flop movies.
I have worked with some bioinformatics clusters, and each machine usually was in two seperate networks.
One was a high latency high bandwidth switched network (I reccomend GigE since it has good price/performance) and one was a low latency low bandwidth network just for passing messages between CPUs. The application should be able to pass off thoroughput intensive stuff (file transfers and the like) to the high latency network, and keep the low latency network clear for inter-cpu communication.
The low latency network depends on your precise application. I've seen everything from a hypercube topolgy w/ GigE (for example with 16 machines in the grid, you need 4 gigE connections for the hypercube per computer. It always seemed to me that the routing in software would be really high latency, but people smarter than me tell me it's low latency so it's worth looking into). Personally, I just use a 100mbit line with a hub (i tried with switch, but it actually introduced more latency at less than 10% saturation since few collisions were taking place anyways) for the low latency connect. The 100mbit line is never close to saturated for my application, but it really depends on what you need.
The big thing is make sure your software is smart enough to understand what the two networks are for, and not try to pass a 5 gig file over your low latency network.
Oh, and I definetly agree. If you are dealing with more than $10K-20k it's definetly worth it to find a consultant in that field to at least help with the design, if not the implementation.
I'm confused... I thought the Xbox360 had 1 teraflop, and the ps3 had 2 teraflops of computing power. Now it says a teraflop machine takes a room? From the pictures it seems like the xbox and ps3 are both well under 1 ft^3. Floating point operations/sec isn't like MHz. Higher always means better... if it can do more operations/sec that by definition means it is faster.
Usually the key to things is not the actual implementation used, but the algorithm behind it. This tool can't possibly ensure that some binary wasn't made by someone who looked at the open source version, and just reimplemented the same ideas. There are so many different ways of doing the same thing that this would be trivial. All this does is mean that someone who wants to use GPL code in their closed project must change a few stylistic things around. Open Source software, OTOH, is open to a much higher level of scrutiny, since anyone can see exactly what is going on underneath the hood.
It will still be fun to run it against old software though;-)
I'm currently in a 4-year program at UIUC. For 95% of the things a network admin needs to do, a two year trade school is sufficient. But you learn a lot of useful skills, and learn how things work on a lower level, in a university. For example, in the networking lab class we write our own TCP/IP stack from scratch, so we really understand how things work better. Or in our OS design class we write a software RAID 0+1 driver module for linux. A university degree also makes it a lot easier to get your first job in today's competitive job market.
1 gbps is more bandwidth than an OC-48, which run for about 700,000 US dollars/month. I understand that consumers will only use a tiny fraction of their allocated bandwidth, and they don't demand the level of stability that an enterprise line needs. Still, you've got to figure that the ISP need to dedicate at least 50mbps of bandwidth to each customer (approx a DS3), and that would still be about $15,000 a month.
Back in the 19th century major companies had a 'Vice President of Power', like we have a VP of IT. Then, a few companies started making all the electricity in one place, and rolling it out to where it was needed. It's always more efficient that way (economies of scale, and diminishing marginal return can become negligble with proper managment). Do you think IT will become just another commodity like electricity or water?
makes a profit charging 2cents per megabyte(figure $0.6/song on avg). Now, a cd will have about 15 songs, and an artist gets about $1 per cd, or $.07 per song. A fair price, in my opinion, would be about $.20 a song. $.07 to the artist, $.06 to the distributor, and $.07 to whoever took the risk, and fronted the money for the artist to record his album.
Two services I'm subscribed to are http://saltwaterchimp.com/ and http://everyshowsucks.com/. These basically have 10 streaming ad free channels each, with only good shows. They are $5 a piece per month, hitting your $10/month limit.
Look at what other respected professors use (at other universities) and evaluate those options. They have massive resources at their disposal, so they should have made a good choice. You can then choose what best suits your particular teaching style.
Just to note, I am not an Electrical Engineer (but will be in 3 years). From what little I've read, it seems like branch prediction allows the cpu to prefetch data it will need. Smart math people keep coming up with better and better general purpose algorithms. But these new algorithms need more and more logic behind them, adding to CPU complexity a lot. Now, my question is once we have an n-core cpu, would it be possible to optimize your main cpu set up for general purpose use, the second for video enconding, the third for games, and so on. Then when you run software, it will know (or you tell it), what CPU to run on. It seems that if the CPU designers knew what kind of code would be running, they could optimize branch prediction algorithms better for that task. It seems like misses are extremely expensive, and that something like this would help. It would be the next best thing to having an FPGA on your chip that automatically reconfigured itself for whatever algorithm you need.
5 years from now some *nix (most likely the latest iteration of MacOS) on parallel cell CPUs.
10 years, a unified virtual machine so applications will be OS independent(I think by Microsoft)
15 years Computing will be a commodity. I will pay $N a month for computer usage (based on what specs I want my computer to have). There will be ubiquitous dumb terminals (everywhere from home, to work, to school) each will have a massive (by today's standards) data pipe. You authenticate and it will become your computer. Your desktop of choice, your files, your preferences. There will be few massive datacenters, so everything is amazingly scalable and centralized. If I want to do video editing, I will have access to supercomputers worth of power while I need it, and while word processing I will use almost nothing. Right now, it looks like Google will run these datacenters.
I live in urbana myself (an EE undergrad at uiuc), and a massive wireless network already covers most of the campus. It's called UIUCnet, and once connected you don't get internet, but are 'quarantined' in a subnet with only access to a VPN server. Just connect using the Cisco VPN client(our school has a site license, students get it free) and authenticate with your student information.
As an aside, UIUCnet has 11mbit/s 802.11b, and 54 mbit/s 802.11a. Anyone know why they don't just use 802.11g? Almost no one has 802.11a out of the box anymore.
Back in Elementary school(I'm an undergrad now) the advanced classes commonly used games or videos to teach. The fact of the matter is that these are the few things I remember learning in Elementary School. We had one cool game about rafting down the Amazon (I still know the region's geography, wildlife, and native tribes fairly well). We also used an Oregon Trail game, which taught a bit of history, and a fair amount of planning. Another fun one had us mantain a hypothetical ecosystem. I think that exposing us to interactive games, and teaching us planning/foresight at such a young age was immensley helpful. Everyone in that class with me got accepted (some couldn't afford to go) to a school that excels in their area of interest. I'm in the Electrical Engineering program at UIUC (best school for the price since I'm instate) Most of us had over 1400 on the SAT (Average is closer to a 1000), and are suceeding at what we do.
These type of decisions are made by people who understand business but have no understanding of the gaming industry. Are they really arrogant enough think that with a 2-year MBA they understand the needs of a specific industry better than content to producers who have been in it since the 80's.
Producing for their peers is exactly what they should be doing. Coders peers will be among the most discerning critics. Only by pushing each other to new levels will Game producers ever achieve the next level of realism.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
First they buy netscape, for several billion dollars. Then, they buy nullsoft and stifle it's ability to innovate (destroying WASTE, censoring their work, etc). Then, they create a new low-end ISP for $10/month using netscapes name, while dropping their broadband which have much more potential in the future. Finally they release a new browser and mediaplayer that doesn't use any of their multibillion dollar aquisitions. Is it just me, or does it seem like this is a case where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing? Or is it just plain old stupidity
This theory seems to bring together several loose threads floating around. First, were the rumors last week that IBM was selling it's PC division to some firm in Asia. Next, was the fact that these new cell Processors will be amazing, but Windows doesn't like anything but x86. IMHO, it seems that IBM is planning on selling their wintel PC division, and own the PC market later with cell processors run a new improved Mac OS.
Think about it, the only reason Macs never caught on were because people didn't use them at work (didn't want to learn something new for home), and they were too expensive (Apple couldn't take advantage of Economies of Scale the same way Dell can). IBM will make Macs rollout well in large enterprises. People will be able to buy them for their home. And they will be orders of magnitude faster than their Wintel counterparts which are stuck on x86.
I don't want to say it, but the combination of a new hardware platform(Power Cells), and a viable alternative in the corporate and home enviroment [IBM/Mac], and the server market [IBM/Linux] may spell the end of the Windows monoculture.
Or I may just be getting my hopes up. I'm allowed to dream, aren't I?
Slashdot Mirror
I honestly can't tell if the parent is hilariously funny or pitiably naive ...
Without a love of hard science and mathematics you will never be more than a mediocre programmer.
The hacker spirit is an undying desire to know; a hacker never settles for 'black box' explanations or shies away from knowledge because it's too hard.
What confuses me most is how you reconcile your proclaimed love for algorithms with your disdain for mathematics: that portion of CS, more than any other, is pure mathematics. I ask you to check your claim and trying to read, and more importantly grasp the essence, of Knuth's "Art of Computer Programming" without a strong background in mathematics.
I ask you to check your claim and try to design, and truly understand the workings of, a simple full adder circuit without a fair knowledge of quantum mechanics.
Without a love of physics and math you can never become more than a code monkey, the desk jockey equivalent of a construction worker, who can put pre-assembled bits and pieces together but will never gain any true mastery of the material or progress above the millions of other mindless bromides.
Not so! I'm the president of the International April Pranksters Association and we define April fools day as 12:00AM-12:00PM Local Time. Don't Believe me? Then check our website. Oh, you can't find it? uhm, it's undergoing technical difficulties now No hits on google? well, that's because ... it's those damn terrorist hackers! it's the cyber-terrorists fault. damn cyber-terrorism.
"Buffalo" Just go to this site: http://www.kfc.com/buffalosnacker/ and enter the code buffalo to get a free sandwich (they'll mail the coupon to you after you sell them your soul)
If memory serves, babbage did get his difference machine working. It was only his analytical machine that couldn't get built. The design (and Ada's programs) were both fine, it's just that they didn't have the machining accuracy or funds to make one.
I graduated from HS 3 years ago, and they had DDR and some kind of bike hooked up to a playstation for my Junior and Senior years (the HS is in a western suburb of Chicago).
...
...). They were easily 'hackable,' so the lazy kids just had them display the last person who got an A's statistics when the teacher came around to collect scores.
The thing is, that almost no one ever used them
The kids who really wanted to get into shape used the weight room, treadmills, and other 'traditional' excercise machines and the kids who didn't want to get into shape weren't going to be fooled by such an obvious ploy.
We were required to wear pulse monitors and our grade depended on our average bpm (I think something around 170+ was an A
No amount of technology is ever going to get people into shape who don't want to be. Working out, almost by definition, involves hard work. People who want to get in shape will manage to regardless of how few tools are available, and people who want to avoid it will always be able to do so (in fact, I think these high tech toys are easier to cheat with).
http://www2.rosettastone.com/en/?a=b
It's on the expensive side, but it is extremely fast and it works well. Instead of trying to teach you grammar and memorize conjugation rules and nouns, it immerses you in a Spanish environment so you learn in the same fashion a native spanish speaker would have at first (only sped up 100x).
To the best of my knowledge, Rosetta is even what the US military and Diplomatic Corp use for language training (although anyone with first hand experience feel free to correct me).
All the article says is that (in Germany) money you invest in foriegn films is tax deductible, while you pay normal taxes on the profits.
.505 million euro gain after over no investment, or a 3.8 million euro gain over the movie that tanks). It is clearly in the investors best interest invest in a movie that will make money.
In Germany income taxes work like this (2004):
" a zero tax rate on taxable income up to 7,664
" a marginal tax rate rising form 16% to 45% on taxable income between 7,664 and 52.152
" a marginal tax rate of 45% on taxable income over 52.152"
And money invested in films just doesn't count as taxable income.
So, let's say someone in germany makes a 10 million a year (they would have to make a lot to invest 10+ million euros in a movie). Then, let's say they invest 5 million in a movie that flops, and get no money back. If they never invested, they would have 5.5 million euros left after taxes. Losing 5 million euros, they only 2.25 million euros left.
Run the numbers, it is impossible for a german to have a net gain in his take home income on a film that looses money.
However, if the same German investor invests 5 million euros, and gets back 6 million, at the end of the year they end up with 6.05 million euro(a
Dear god, this isn't even hard math. I mean I did these numbers in 30 seconds without a calculator using nothing more than junior high algebra.
At worst, this trick could help someone defer taxes for a bit, it's no incentive to flop movies.
I have worked with some bioinformatics clusters, and each machine usually was in two seperate networks.
One was a high latency high bandwidth switched network (I reccomend GigE since it has good price/performance) and one was a low latency low bandwidth network just for passing messages between CPUs. The application should be able to pass off thoroughput intensive stuff (file transfers and the like) to the high latency network, and keep the low latency network clear for inter-cpu communication.
The low latency network depends on your precise application. I've seen everything from a hypercube topolgy w/ GigE (for example with 16 machines in the grid, you need 4 gigE connections for the hypercube per computer. It always seemed to me that the routing in software would be really high latency, but people smarter than me tell me it's low latency so it's worth looking into). Personally, I just use a 100mbit line with a hub (i tried with switch, but it actually introduced more latency at less than 10% saturation since few collisions were taking place anyways) for the low latency connect. The 100mbit line is never close to saturated for my application, but it really depends on what you need.
The big thing is make sure your software is smart enough to understand what the two networks are for, and not try to pass a 5 gig file over your low latency network. Oh, and I definetly agree. If you are dealing with more than $10K-20k it's definetly worth it to find a consultant in that field to at least help with the design, if not the implementation.
I'm confused ... I thought the Xbox360 had 1 teraflop, and the ps3 had 2 teraflops of computing power. Now it says a teraflop machine takes a room? From the pictures it seems like the xbox and ps3 are both well under 1 ft^3. Floating point operations/sec isn't like MHz. Higher always means better ... if it can do more operations/sec that by definition means it is faster.
Usually the key to things is not the actual implementation used, but the algorithm behind it. This tool can't possibly ensure that some binary wasn't made by someone who looked at the open source version, and just reimplemented the same ideas. There are so many different ways of doing the same thing that this would be trivial. All this does is mean that someone who wants to use GPL code in their closed project must change a few stylistic things around. Open Source software, OTOH, is open to a much higher level of scrutiny, since anyone can see exactly what is going on underneath the hood. It will still be fun to run it against old software though ;-)
I'm currently in a 4-year program at UIUC. For 95% of the things a network admin needs to do, a two year trade school is sufficient. But you learn a lot of useful skills, and learn how things work on a lower level, in a university. For example, in the networking lab class we write our own TCP/IP stack from scratch, so we really understand how things work better. Or in our OS design class we write a software RAID 0+1 driver module for linux. A university degree also makes it a lot easier to get your first job in today's competitive job market.
1 gbps is more bandwidth than an OC-48, which run for about 700,000 US dollars/month. I understand that consumers will only use a tiny fraction of their allocated bandwidth, and they don't demand the level of stability that an enterprise line needs. Still, you've got to figure that the ISP need to dedicate at least 50mbps of bandwidth to each customer (approx a DS3), and that would still be about $15,000 a month.
Back in the 19th century major companies had a 'Vice President of Power', like we have a VP of IT. Then, a few companies started making all the electricity in one place, and rolling it out to where it was needed. It's always more efficient that way (economies of scale, and diminishing marginal return can become negligble with proper managment).
Do you think IT will become just another commodity like electricity or water?
makes a profit charging 2cents per megabyte(figure $0.6/song on avg). Now, a cd will have about 15 songs, and an artist gets about $1 per cd, or $.07 per song. A fair price, in my opinion, would be about $.20 a song. $.07 to the artist, $.06 to the distributor, and $.07 to whoever took the risk, and fronted the money for the artist to record his album.
Two services I'm subscribed to are http://saltwaterchimp.com/ and http://everyshowsucks.com/. These basically have 10 streaming ad free channels each, with only good shows. They are $5 a piece per month, hitting your $10/month limit.
Look at what other respected professors use (at other universities) and evaluate those options. They have massive resources at their disposal, so they should have made a good choice. You can then choose what best suits your particular teaching style.
Just to note, I am not an Electrical Engineer (but will be in 3 years). From what little I've read, it seems like branch prediction allows the cpu to prefetch data it will need. Smart math people keep coming up with better and better general purpose algorithms. But these new algorithms need more and more logic behind them, adding to CPU complexity a lot. Now, my question is once we have an n-core cpu, would it be possible to optimize your main cpu set up for general purpose use, the second for video enconding, the third for games, and so on. Then when you run software, it will know (or you tell it), what CPU to run on. It seems that if the CPU designers knew what kind of code would be running, they could optimize branch prediction algorithms better for that task. It seems like misses are extremely expensive, and that something like this would help. It would be the next best thing to having an FPGA on your chip that automatically reconfigured itself for whatever algorithm you need.
5 years from now some *nix (most likely the latest iteration of MacOS) on parallel cell CPUs. 10 years, a unified virtual machine so applications will be OS independent(I think by Microsoft) 15 years Computing will be a commodity. I will pay $N a month for computer usage (based on what specs I want my computer to have). There will be ubiquitous dumb terminals (everywhere from home, to work, to school) each will have a massive (by today's standards) data pipe. You authenticate and it will become your computer. Your desktop of choice, your files, your preferences. There will be few massive datacenters, so everything is amazingly scalable and centralized. If I want to do video editing, I will have access to supercomputers worth of power while I need it, and while word processing I will use almost nothing. Right now, it looks like Google will run these datacenters.
I live in urbana myself (an EE undergrad at uiuc), and a massive wireless network already covers most of the campus. It's called UIUCnet, and once connected you don't get internet, but are 'quarantined' in a subnet with only access to a VPN server. Just connect using the Cisco VPN client(our school has a site license, students get it free) and authenticate with your student information. As an aside, UIUCnet has 11mbit/s 802.11b, and 54 mbit/s 802.11a. Anyone know why they don't just use 802.11g? Almost no one has 802.11a out of the box anymore.
Back in Elementary school(I'm an undergrad now) the advanced classes commonly used games or videos to teach. The fact of the matter is that these are the few things I remember learning in Elementary School. We had one cool game about rafting down the Amazon (I still know the region's geography, wildlife, and native tribes fairly well). We also used an Oregon Trail game, which taught a bit of history, and a fair amount of planning. Another fun one had us mantain a hypothetical ecosystem. I think that exposing us to interactive games, and teaching us planning/foresight at such a young age was immensley helpful. Everyone in that class with me got accepted (some couldn't afford to go) to a school that excels in their area of interest. I'm in the Electrical Engineering program at UIUC (best school for the price since I'm instate) Most of us had over 1400 on the SAT (Average is closer to a 1000), and are suceeding at what we do.
These type of decisions are made by people who understand business but have no understanding of the gaming industry. Are they really arrogant enough think that with a 2-year MBA they understand the needs of a specific industry better than content to producers who have been in it since the 80's. Producing for their peers is exactly what they should be doing. Coders peers will be among the most discerning critics. Only by pushing each other to new levels will Game producers ever achieve the next level of realism.
This technique will allow transistors to react 24% faster. That doesn't neccesarily translate into faster cpus. For example, if this makes transistors run hotter, they will have to lower density. Furthermore, Intel already uses a version of this.
First they buy netscape, for several billion dollars. Then, they buy nullsoft and stifle it's ability to innovate (destroying WASTE, censoring their work, etc). Then, they create a new low-end ISP for $10/month using netscapes name, while dropping their broadband which have much more potential in the future. Finally they release a new browser and mediaplayer that doesn't use any of their multibillion dollar aquisitions. Is it just me, or does it seem like this is a case where the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing? Or is it just plain old stupidity
This theory seems to bring together several loose threads floating around. First, were the rumors last week that IBM was selling it's PC division to some firm in Asia. Next, was the fact that these new cell Processors will be amazing, but Windows doesn't like anything but x86. IMHO, it seems that IBM is planning on selling their wintel PC division, and own the PC market later with cell processors run a new improved Mac OS. Think about it, the only reason Macs never caught on were because people didn't use them at work (didn't want to learn something new for home), and they were too expensive (Apple couldn't take advantage of Economies of Scale the same way Dell can). IBM will make Macs rollout well in large enterprises. People will be able to buy them for their home. And they will be orders of magnitude faster than their Wintel counterparts which are stuck on x86. I don't want to say it, but the combination of a new hardware platform(Power Cells), and a viable alternative in the corporate and home enviroment [IBM/Mac], and the server market [IBM/Linux] may spell the end of the Windows monoculture. Or I may just be getting my hopes up. I'm allowed to dream, aren't I?