This was a pretty awesome book showing some of the cool things that you can do with set-based programming and SQL databases: medians, efficient tree-storage, and even string parsing!
The edition I read had a lot of typos, but they are generally pretty obvious. The author is also rather active in newsgroups, so there is a lot of supplemental information and the ability to ask questions.
It's been eight years since the Clinton administration. This is 4x the doubling period based on Moore's Law. While Moore's Law relates to transistor density, Wikipedia says that it's roughly similar to gains in disk storage.
So in the last eight years, we could estimate disk storage gains of 2^4 = 16x. This doesn't get you all the way to 50x, but it cuts out a big chunk of the gains.
Neal Stephenson has a great discussion of this topic in "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." He writes about how Free/Open Source developers cause certain technologies to become inexpensive commodities once their techniques become commonplace.
The combined pressures of non-advanced software not being profitable and beyond-bleeding edge technology not being feasible puts a window on software vendors. This is a sort of metaphorical biosphere, not unlike the real one on Earth. The difference is that this biosphere is a moving treadmill and that vendors have to keep up to stay alive.
Some software manufacturers (e.g. Microsoft) try to change the rules of the game by locking customers in with proprietary standards and trying to dictate the pace of the treadmill. I would suggest that this will be a losing battle as users will eventually jump entire platforms to a competitor.
Some new vendors like Google, VMware (n.b. I am a former VMware employee) have embraced interoperability. Those vendors will need to keep pace or die.
On the whole, I think that this is a very good state for the software industry. In the long term, it will award profits to companies that are innovative and kill off companies that are not.
All they have left is ten thoudand bucks? Dammit Jim, I'm a nerd, not a banker!
According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-K):
A Form 10-K is an annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), that gives a comprehensive summary of a public company's performance.
This may be the least effective method of debugging in existence. Actually, code reviews are a best practice in software development because they can have very good defect discovery rates in the late stages of development compared to other defect discovery strategies.
Disclaimer: I went to high school at Phillips Exeter Academy on a scholarship, and did my undergrad studies at Stanford.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the story poster on their acceptance to Carnegie Mellon. I hear great things about the school, and I know at least one person who I respect greatly in both a personal and an academic sense who has gone on to seek a Ph.D. there. Google has a location in Pittsburgh, and it isn't because they love the tour at the Heinz factory.
I also tend to agree with bflora in that it may be too late at this point to tweak your odds. Please take that for the liberating fact that it is. You are already in to Carnegie Mellon; anything else right now is just hot fudge on the sundae. You are going to have the opportunities meet tons of interesting people, learn tons of interesting things, and have wonderful adventures. As other people have mentioned in the thread, what you receive from college is very much about what you choose to put into it.
The major point I would like to make is for future applicants. The best undergrad application advice I ever received was from an admission person at Stanford himself. He said, "Make sure that we can take your application and our mind-reading ray gun, and pick you out of the crowd during lunch time at your school cafeteria." He wanted an applicant who could describe him or herself honestly and give the admissions team insight into what makes them special. I won't discuss the actual content of my application essay here, for fear of outright copying, but I will say that the essay was about a true example of my intellectual curiosity and passion in action.
Again, for the original poster, congratulations, and enjoy your journey. You have a great one ahead, regardless of what other committees decide.
I disagree that they chose the less moral option. I don't think people appreciate how Google's current strategy is positively subversive. They know that they can't get away with providing access to certain information, and so Google's presence or absence from the Chinese market denies access to subversive information regardless. The brilliant thing they are doing is making known to the search user that information is being denied to them by the government on a particular topic. Even though Google doesn't return certain results, they are sneaking through the meta-information that there is something here the government doesn't want users to see. When people know they are being denied information, they are much more suspicious than when they don't realize the information exists to begin with.
I'm not understanding something:
Google released a new AJAX framework based on Java.
Doesn't AJAX mean 'Async. Java And XML'? So can you have AJAX based on something else?
No. AJAX stands for Asynchonous Javascriptand XML. This library seems to be Java that builds the javascript and HTML for you.
Because that's a great idea. Move the work of the congested patent office to the congested courts. I would think it would be more beneficial for patents to take a little longer, rather than more unnecessary lawsuits in the courts.
I certainly agree with the sarcasm of your post. The patent office is neglecting its duties by passing the buck to the courts. There are a variety of reasons for this, but in the end, it is the PTO's responsibility to perform its own functions.
My response was simply to point out that the fact that a patent was issued does not make this as much of a slam dunk case as one would expect, due to the general context of the current patent process.
The problem is that the patent office has pretty much stated that they don't really spend much time these days researching whether a given idea is patentable, and instead let the courts sort it all out. In that context, this is really about challenging the validity of the patent.
What we need is a really low electrical power CPU - optimized to take as little electricity as possible, but which is capable of running these kinds of applications acceptably quickly.
Yeah. All the people I used to work with at Transmeta and I could have told you that about 4 years ago. Unfortunately, no one really listened and they mostly just complained about the processor speed being too slow to play FPSes.
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This was a pretty awesome book showing some of the cool things that you can do with set-based programming and SQL databases: medians, efficient tree-storage, and even string parsing!
The edition I read had a lot of typos, but they are generally pretty obvious. The author is also rather active in newsgroups, so there is a lot of supplemental information and the ability to ask questions.
It's been eight years since the Clinton administration. This is 4x the doubling period based on Moore's Law. While Moore's Law relates to transistor density, Wikipedia says that it's roughly similar to gains in disk storage. So in the last eight years, we could estimate disk storage gains of 2^4 = 16x. This doesn't get you all the way to 50x, but it cuts out a big chunk of the gains.
Neal Stephenson has a great discussion of this topic in "In the Beginning... was the Command Line." He writes about how Free/Open Source developers cause certain technologies to become inexpensive commodities once their techniques become commonplace.
The combined pressures of non-advanced software not being profitable and beyond-bleeding edge technology not being feasible puts a window on software vendors. This is a sort of metaphorical biosphere, not unlike the real one on Earth. The difference is that this biosphere is a moving treadmill and that vendors have to keep up to stay alive.
Some software manufacturers (e.g. Microsoft) try to change the rules of the game by locking customers in with proprietary standards and trying to dictate the pace of the treadmill. I would suggest that this will be a losing battle as users will eventually jump entire platforms to a competitor.
Some new vendors like Google, VMware (n.b. I am a former VMware employee) have embraced interoperability. Those vendors will need to keep pace or die.
On the whole, I think that this is a very good state for the software industry. In the long term, it will award profits to companies that are innovative and kill off companies that are not.
Disclaimer: I went to high school at Phillips Exeter Academy on a scholarship, and did my undergrad studies at Stanford.
First of all, I would like to congratulate the story poster on their acceptance to Carnegie Mellon. I hear great things about the school, and I know at least one person who I respect greatly in both a personal and an academic sense who has gone on to seek a Ph.D. there. Google has a location in Pittsburgh, and it isn't because they love the tour at the Heinz factory.
I also tend to agree with bflora in that it may be too late at this point to tweak your odds. Please take that for the liberating fact that it is. You are already in to Carnegie Mellon; anything else right now is just hot fudge on the sundae. You are going to have the opportunities meet tons of interesting people, learn tons of interesting things, and have wonderful adventures. As other people have mentioned in the thread, what you receive from college is very much about what you choose to put into it.
The major point I would like to make is for future applicants. The best undergrad application advice I ever received was from an admission person at Stanford himself. He said, "Make sure that we can take your application and our mind-reading ray gun, and pick you out of the crowd during lunch time at your school cafeteria." He wanted an applicant who could describe him or herself honestly and give the admissions team insight into what makes them special. I won't discuss the actual content of my application essay here, for fear of outright copying, but I will say that the essay was about a true example of my intellectual curiosity and passion in action.
Again, for the original poster, congratulations, and enjoy your journey. You have a great one ahead, regardless of what other committees decide.
I disagree that they chose the less moral option. I don't think people appreciate how Google's current strategy is positively subversive. They know that they can't get away with providing access to certain information, and so Google's presence or absence from the Chinese market denies access to subversive information regardless. The brilliant thing they are doing is making known to the search user that information is being denied to them by the government on a particular topic. Even though Google doesn't return certain results, they are sneaking through the meta-information that there is something here the government doesn't want users to see. When people know they are being denied information, they are much more suspicious than when they don't realize the information exists to begin with.
I certainly agree with the sarcasm of your post. The patent office is neglecting its duties by passing the buck to the courts. There are a variety of reasons for this, but in the end, it is the PTO's responsibility to perform its own functions.
My response was simply to point out that the fact that a patent was issued does not make this as much of a slam dunk case as one would expect, due to the general context of the current patent process.
That is certainly a reasonable expectation.
The problem is that the patent office has pretty much stated that they don't really spend much time these days researching whether a given idea is patentable, and instead let the courts sort it all out. In that context, this is really about challenging the validity of the patent.
"Drivers unnecessary"