Majored in math, away from it for a year
on
Prime Obsession
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· Score: 2, Insightful
After working at Initech for a year and not using any of my math skills, this was a welcome dip in the math kiddie pool.
I would probably need to do a few laps before I could go playing around near the high-dive again or anything. I don't think this speaks to my grasp of the subject or my intelligence, but to my complete abandonment of study for a long period.
This wouldn't be a book to get someone that works in a heavily mathematical field, but its a great choice for the coder in your live that likes math but has to write boring code all day to pay the bills.
That's in the US. Chernobyl is a very different story.
While we have a very good record of dealing with potential distasters adn we have very good systems in place, the fact remains that nuclear material is far more dangerous than coal.
If a terrorist flies a plane into a coal plant and a nuclear plant, which do you think will cause more people to freak out?
Similarly, if we are shipping the waste from a coal plant and a nuclear plant for storage, and both trucks/trains/boats blow up, which do you think will cause people run like hell?
This is the kind of catastrophe I'm talking about.
I'm not really worried about nuclear accidents occurring from day-to-day life.
I'm talking about direct output into the environment.
The difference between nuclear and coal/oil is that with nuclear we contain almost all pollutants, and don't release them into the general environment. With coal/oil, we clean things up a bit, but then let it go where the wind may take it.
I'd rather have all my pollution in one place where it can be accounted for.
While the damage caused by a nuclear catastrophy is much larger than that of a coal or oil burning plant, isn't the day-to-day pollution from a nuclear plant going to be far less than that of other non-renewable energy sources?
Yes, we should be looking to renewable sources, but its just not cost effective right now. Invest in the distance future with renewable research, and invest in the present with nuclear.
It's sad, Java was really ahead of its time on this one. Applets were a really good idea. "Wow , a way to safely run apps on the client machine!" It's too bad that the implementation was so poor early on.
Java did it right the second time around, but everyone seems to have missed it. Java Web Start is a much better way of creating limited Mini-Apps.
Though I responded to your thread, it was more of a question to the general populace.
If you didn't design the app, then its not your fault, is it?
The solution to your problem is to call the developer and complain. If they don't do anything about it, then your solution is to switch applications.
The reason that Java is perceived as a bad platform compared to Windows is that Sun's engineers don't go through all of the major applications written in Java and re-engineer the platform to behave as each application expected.
That is, if you write an app that inadvertantly depends on non-standard behavior in SP1, and it becomes really popular, MS will generally make it so that SP2 behaves the same way that SP1 did for your application. This is because users will largely blame MS for the app's problems and not the developer that didn't follow standards in the first place.
There was a story about this practice a while ago and how it might be changing with Longhorn.
Anyways, the point is that if you don't follow the standards Sun isn't going to save you. That might be detrimental to their image, but its not really their fault. Its users like you that don't know any better that perpetuate this misconception.
I built a few client apps that were deployed on a few different VM versions, though most were Win32 (1.3, 1.4, 1.4.2). I deployed to Macs without a problem.
Development was a snap, I got the whole application off the ground with relatively little problems because of the usefulness of Java's built-in API. Of course, when performance tuning I did rewrite the functionality of some of those API classes, but I'm sure you have to do that in any language.
Yes, the MS JVM is total crap, but that's what Sun got a huge settlement for. It was put in place by Microsoft in an attempt to shut down Java with a crappy install base.
Java is all about following standards. As long as you do that, your apps run pretty well.
This app that I wrote required a lot of Swing specialization and user interaction, displayed custom images, etc. It wasn't a trivial application.
So, I guess my question is, do you guys just not follow the standards? What is it that you're doing to break your apps so much?
Someone was talking about using lightweight components with heavyweight components, which I know from experience is a real beast to get working, but other than that, what is it exactly that's breaking all the time?
I'm talking about client-side apps here. I haven't used an applet in forever. Most applications on the web are jsp apps, so you are totally shielded from its Javaness.
I was Mathematical Explorations and Joy of Math. I didn't really want to do double math but I had that was just what I got. I had fun anyways. Keep track of people, they'll be great for jobs later on!
I just graduated from University of Missouri - Columbia in December. We have about a 5-1 PC to Mac ratio in the general computer labs. However, we also have some mac-only and Linux-only (redhat, I believe) labs. I'm pretty impressed with how diverse everything is.
Of course, no one really uses the Linux or Mac computers when they aren't required to for classes, and this is probably the reason that schools don't buy them.
I'm guessing by this guy's definition, I would also qualify as nontraditionally bright, the difference though, is that while I was probably one of the 2 smartest guys in my high school, it didn't mean crap because I didn't have the work ethic to back it up.
Rather than measuring your intelligence, measure your worth. That is, intelligence * work ethic = worth.
I tend to think while I was within the top 1% in my school in terms of intelligence, but class rank places me in the correct place in terms of worth. I had very little work ethic and did just enough to get by (top 5%).
That attitude carried over into College. lds is right. I probably should have gone to a better College. I went the extra mile in most of my CS classes because I enjoyed the subject material so much, but in all the other classes, I got B's and C's because they were just getting in the way of my CS.
I'm not trying to say that your HS rank determines your worth. I'd say your worth is determined by the amount you get done. My worth just happens to correlate with my class rank, but in HS and college I really got next to nothing done outside of the bare minimum required by my teachers/professors.
It wasn't until my senior year in college when I got a job that utilized my CS skills that I finally started getting stuff accomplished.
Its not your intelligence that matters, its what you do with it.
One of the major java design points was write-once run anywhere. Now, I know that scores of you will say this is total BS, and I agree with you in principle. However, I've graduated into the wonderful world of J2EE development, and let me just say that the J2EE world is much better about this sort of thing.
I mean, sure websphere crashes all the time and is slow, but at least I can drop my WAR file into any J2EE compliant container and it does its business.
However, if Java is open-sourced GPL style, we open the possibility of forking which is totally bad news. That is to say, purposeful incompatibilities between VMs is bad news. I've heard the idea kicked around that Sun should require compatibility testing similar to J2EE to qualify for the Java monicker, and I think that's a pretty swell idea. If you want to create your own forked version of Java, then call it StarBux or something, just make it obvious to us developers that you are not standards compliant and at least we'll have no one to blame but ourselves when others can't run our stuff.
Of course, the coolest thing about open sourcing Java will be increased presence on the Linux platform. All I need now is warcraft III on Linux and I'll have no reason to use Windows ever again!
More money for me!
on
Geeks and Poker?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, I'm not really THAT great, but the I do enjoy game theory, as it was my emphasis in my Math degree, so Poker comes fairly naturally to me.
I love its popularity. The more that play, the more I can win!
This isn't really a green technology. Green would be just using bikes. It takes fossil fuels to power those bikes, and even if you used solar/wind/water/geothermal/hamster power, you are still increasing the overall raw/hazardous materials requirements versus people-powered bikes.
China used to be cool. Now they suck.
Dude, judging by your email, you're working for a bs company doing bs work. Sadly, I'm not in St. Louis now because of all the dumbass employers there. However, I am with a good company now. I'm going to guess that you went to SMSU or something. Yeah, you're cooler than someone with 14 years experience and an MS.
Here's the story at my University. We have 2 different CS degrees: BS and BA. The BA was a wuss degree. It was much less rigorous for software courses and had a lot of business classes. It was basically an MIS degree. The BS had very rigorous software and math requirements, and had absolutely no business classes. In fact, a BS CS major got you an automatic Math minor. It was 6 more Math classes to get the major, so I got. One extra semester, no biggie.
I don't think that I'll ever use my math degree in industry, but as a person, not just as a software developer, Math is important. We use it everywhere, and its one of the last areas that you can major in that you can take your learned skills and apply them in nearly every industry.
If I wasn't such a great developer and so in love with the field, I'd have no problem applying for almost any entry level position because of my Math background. Math has given me such a broad subject base and good problem solving skills that I'm pretty sure I could be good at just about anything given about 6 months to learn the job.
This is the case for most Math majors I know. Many were supplementing their degree with a Math degree as I had, and they all could probably have gone into any field and been successful.
But Sun's license allows you to redistribute source, as long as you keep things compliant with their open standard. Java is basically Free software now. They just don't want any forking going on.
I can't say that I blame them. A lot of Java's value would be lost with a major split. That's what the whole M$ suit was all about.
Yeah, the Sims sure did introduce some innovation. So did the Sims Livin' large, the Sims Hot Date, and the Sims' Funeral parlor.
While the Sims was pretty groundbreaking, what did that broken ground yield? A bunch of annoying add-ons. That's all the gaming industry has been reduced to.
You do bring up a few good orignal games. But here's the problem. You've listed 4 original games out of like 4000000 that have been released this year. And how many of those original games did people buy? Sure, Animal Crossing is a million seller, but GTA Vice City is a 9 million seller. The idiot masses prefer killing whores to killing monotony.
There are so few original games out there.
The movie industry is going through the same problem. Think of the most successful movies made recently. Most of them are remakes of extremely successful comics/books/older movies/older tv shows. There's not a lot of innovation going on.
You know why?
Cost. How much does it cost to develop a really graphically satisfying game? Millions of dollars. I'm not even talking about a game that is fun to play. I'm just talking about satisfying the minimum graphical requirements that gamers today require.
In the glory days of the Genesis/SNES, two geeks could mortgage their house, buy a development kit from Sega for 20K, spend 6 months developing an awesome title, and be succeessful.
You're not going to see many small groups of developers attempting that on these new consoles.
The other problem is consolidation. EA, Activision, and the like have sucked all the innovation out of the industry by buying up all of the competition.
Basically the problem with videogames are that they've gone mainstream. Don't you remember when being into videogames had you pegged as a nerd? You never heard of games being mentioned on TV, in movies, or in commercials, unless the people playing them are caricatures of what we used to be as preteens/teenagers.
Now that publishers have to play to the large audience of slackjawed morons, they have to dumb down game difficulty, turn up the eye-candy, and of course sprinkle in plenty of T&A.
Videogames peaked with the SNES. I still own the newest consoles (GCN, GBA, etc), but I'll never have the same love for gaming that I did then. I realize that a good portion of this is nestalgia, but its also quality.
Slashdot Mirror
After working at Initech for a year and not using any of my math skills, this was a welcome dip in the math kiddie pool.
I would probably need to do a few laps before I could go playing around near the high-dive again or anything. I don't think this speaks to my grasp of the subject or my intelligence, but to my complete abandonment of study for a long period.
This wouldn't be a book to get someone that works in a heavily mathematical field, but its a great choice for the coder in your live that likes math but has to write boring code all day to pay the bills.
My mom got one (I don't know where from) for me in the mid-90s.
I guess it speaks to how big of a loser I am because I stayed home on saturday nights when I was 15 and built crazy rollercoasters.
They, for one, should welcome their Earthling overlords!
Come on, this is an OBVIOUS family game.
The only downside is that everyone can't play it at once, but this is fun for everyone from ages 5-95.
That's in the US. Chernobyl is a very different story.
While we have a very good record of dealing with potential distasters adn we have very good systems in place, the fact remains that nuclear material is far more dangerous than coal.
If a terrorist flies a plane into a coal plant and a nuclear plant, which do you think will cause more people to freak out?
Similarly, if we are shipping the waste from a coal plant and a nuclear plant for storage, and both trucks/trains/boats blow up, which do you think will cause people run like hell?
This is the kind of catastrophe I'm talking about.
I'm not really worried about nuclear accidents occurring from day-to-day life.
I'm talking about direct output into the environment.
The difference between nuclear and coal/oil is that with nuclear we contain almost all pollutants, and don't release them into the general environment. With coal/oil, we clean things up a bit, but then let it go where the wind may take it.
I'd rather have all my pollution in one place where it can be accounted for.
While the damage caused by a nuclear catastrophy is much larger than that of a coal or oil burning plant, isn't the day-to-day pollution from a nuclear plant going to be far less than that of other non-renewable energy sources?
Yes, we should be looking to renewable sources, but its just not cost effective right now. Invest in the distance future with renewable research, and invest in the present with nuclear.
Can you expound? I'm interested in decompiling and I'm ok at Java, so I'd like to try out one of these.
It's sad, Java was really ahead of its time on this one. Applets were a really good idea. "Wow , a way to safely run apps on the client machine!" It's too bad that the implementation was so poor early on.
Java did it right the second time around, but everyone seems to have missed it. Java Web Start is a much better way of creating limited Mini-Apps.
Though I responded to your thread, it was more of a question to the general populace.
If you didn't design the app, then its not your fault, is it?
The solution to your problem is to call the developer and complain. If they don't do anything about it, then your solution is to switch applications.
The reason that Java is perceived as a bad platform compared to Windows is that Sun's engineers don't go through all of the major applications written in Java and re-engineer the platform to behave as each application expected.
That is, if you write an app that inadvertantly depends on non-standard behavior in SP1, and it becomes really popular, MS will generally make it so that SP2 behaves the same way that SP1 did for your application. This is because users will largely blame MS for the app's problems and not the developer that didn't follow standards in the first place.
There was a story about this practice a while ago and how it might be changing with Longhorn.
Anyways, the point is that if you don't follow the standards Sun isn't going to save you. That might be detrimental to their image, but its not really their fault. Its users like you that don't know any better that perpetuate this misconception.
I built a few client apps that were deployed on a few different VM versions, though most were Win32 (1.3, 1.4, 1.4.2). I deployed to Macs without a problem.
Development was a snap, I got the whole application off the ground with relatively little problems because of the usefulness of Java's built-in API. Of course, when performance tuning I did rewrite the functionality of some of those API classes, but I'm sure you have to do that in any language.
Yes, the MS JVM is total crap, but that's what Sun got a huge settlement for. It was put in place by Microsoft in an attempt to shut down Java with a crappy install base.
Java is all about following standards. As long as you do that, your apps run pretty well.
This app that I wrote required a lot of Swing specialization and user interaction, displayed custom images, etc. It wasn't a trivial application.
So, I guess my question is, do you guys just not follow the standards? What is it that you're doing to break your apps so much?
Someone was talking about using lightweight components with heavyweight components, which I know from experience is a real beast to get working, but other than that, what is it exactly that's breaking all the time?
I'm talking about client-side apps here. I haven't used an applet in forever. Most applications on the web are jsp apps, so you are totally shielded from its Javaness.
I was Mathematical Explorations and Joy of Math. I didn't really want to do double math but I had that was just what I got. I had fun anyways. Keep track of people, they'll be great for jobs later on!
I'm from St. Charles, and went in 97.
Were you there for MSA?
If so, what was your major?
I just graduated from University of Missouri - Columbia in December. We have about a 5-1 PC to Mac ratio in the general computer labs. However, we also have some mac-only and Linux-only (redhat, I believe) labs. I'm pretty impressed with how diverse everything is. Of course, no one really uses the Linux or Mac computers when they aren't required to for classes, and this is probably the reason that schools don't buy them.
I couldn't agree more.
I'm guessing by this guy's definition, I would also qualify as nontraditionally bright, the difference though, is that while I was probably one of the 2 smartest guys in my high school, it didn't mean crap because I didn't have the work ethic to back it up.
Rather than measuring your intelligence, measure your worth. That is, intelligence * work ethic = worth.
I tend to think while I was within the top 1% in my school in terms of intelligence, but class rank places me in the correct place in terms of worth. I had very little work ethic and did just enough to get by (top 5%).
That attitude carried over into College. lds is right. I probably should have gone to a better College. I went the extra mile in most of my CS classes because I enjoyed the subject material so much, but in all the other classes, I got B's and C's because they were just getting in the way of my CS.
I'm not trying to say that your HS rank determines your worth. I'd say your worth is determined by the amount you get done. My worth just happens to correlate with my class rank, but in HS and college I really got next to nothing done outside of the bare minimum required by my teachers/professors.
It wasn't until my senior year in college when I got a job that utilized my CS skills that I finally started getting stuff accomplished.
Its not your intelligence that matters, its what you do with it.
One of the major java design points was write-once run anywhere. Now, I know that scores of you will say this is total BS, and I agree with you in principle. However, I've graduated into the wonderful world of J2EE development, and let me just say that the J2EE world is much better about this sort of thing.
I mean, sure websphere crashes all the time and is slow, but at least I can drop my WAR file into any J2EE compliant container and it does its business.
However, if Java is open-sourced GPL style, we open the possibility of forking which is totally bad news. That is to say, purposeful incompatibilities between VMs is bad news. I've heard the idea kicked around that Sun should require compatibility testing similar to J2EE to qualify for the Java monicker, and I think that's a pretty swell idea. If you want to create your own forked version of Java, then call it StarBux or something, just make it obvious to us developers that you are not standards compliant and at least we'll have no one to blame but ourselves when others can't run our stuff.
Of course, the coolest thing about open sourcing Java will be increased presence on the Linux platform. All I need now is warcraft III on Linux and I'll have no reason to use Windows ever again!
Actually, I'm not really THAT great, but the I do enjoy game theory, as it was my emphasis in my Math degree, so Poker comes fairly naturally to me.
I love its popularity. The more that play, the more I can win!
This isn't really a green technology. Green would be just using bikes. It takes fossil fuels to power those bikes, and even if you used solar/wind/water/geothermal/hamster power, you are still increasing the overall raw/hazardous materials requirements versus people-powered bikes. China used to be cool. Now they suck.
Take 5 minutes to go to the house of representatives and write your rep about your feelings on this topic (only if you hate the DMCA, that is).
lol...business... What are you doing reading /.?
Dude, judging by your email, you're working for a bs company doing bs work. Sadly, I'm not in St. Louis now because of all the dumbass employers there. However, I am with a good company now. I'm going to guess that you went to SMSU or something. Yeah, you're cooler than someone with 14 years experience and an MS.
I double-majored in CS and Math.
Here's the story at my University. We have 2 different CS degrees: BS and BA. The BA was a wuss degree. It was much less rigorous for software courses and had a lot of business classes. It was basically an MIS degree. The BS had very rigorous software and math requirements, and had absolutely no business classes. In fact, a BS CS major got you an automatic Math minor. It was 6 more Math classes to get the major, so I got. One extra semester, no biggie.
I don't think that I'll ever use my math degree in industry, but as a person, not just as a software developer, Math is important. We use it everywhere, and its one of the last areas that you can major in that you can take your learned skills and apply them in nearly every industry.
If I wasn't such a great developer and so in love with the field, I'd have no problem applying for almost any entry level position because of my Math background. Math has given me such a broad subject base and good problem solving skills that I'm pretty sure I could be good at just about anything given about 6 months to learn the job.
This is the case for most Math majors I know. Many were supplementing their degree with a Math degree as I had, and they all could probably have gone into any field and been successful.
But Sun's license allows you to redistribute source, as long as you keep things compliant with their open standard. Java is basically Free software now. They just don't want any forking going on. I can't say that I blame them. A lot of Java's value would be lost with a major split. That's what the whole M$ suit was all about.
Yeah, the Sims sure did introduce some innovation. So did the Sims Livin' large, the Sims Hot Date, and the Sims' Funeral parlor. While the Sims was pretty groundbreaking, what did that broken ground yield? A bunch of annoying add-ons. That's all the gaming industry has been reduced to. You do bring up a few good orignal games. But here's the problem. You've listed 4 original games out of like 4000000 that have been released this year. And how many of those original games did people buy? Sure, Animal Crossing is a million seller, but GTA Vice City is a 9 million seller. The idiot masses prefer killing whores to killing monotony.
There are so few original games out there. The movie industry is going through the same problem. Think of the most successful movies made recently. Most of them are remakes of extremely successful comics/books/older movies/older tv shows. There's not a lot of innovation going on. You know why? Cost. How much does it cost to develop a really graphically satisfying game? Millions of dollars. I'm not even talking about a game that is fun to play. I'm just talking about satisfying the minimum graphical requirements that gamers today require. In the glory days of the Genesis/SNES, two geeks could mortgage their house, buy a development kit from Sega for 20K, spend 6 months developing an awesome title, and be succeessful. You're not going to see many small groups of developers attempting that on these new consoles. The other problem is consolidation. EA, Activision, and the like have sucked all the innovation out of the industry by buying up all of the competition. Basically the problem with videogames are that they've gone mainstream. Don't you remember when being into videogames had you pegged as a nerd? You never heard of games being mentioned on TV, in movies, or in commercials, unless the people playing them are caricatures of what we used to be as preteens/teenagers. Now that publishers have to play to the large audience of slackjawed morons, they have to dumb down game difficulty, turn up the eye-candy, and of course sprinkle in plenty of T&A. Videogames peaked with the SNES. I still own the newest consoles (GCN, GBA, etc), but I'll never have the same love for gaming that I did then. I realize that a good portion of this is nestalgia, but its also quality.