As a senior computer science major, I've seen a lot of freshmen at my school come in as Computer Science majors and change to Information Systems Management (which teaches programming without as much math, software engineering, etc.) because they couldn't handle the math. Although you don't have to be great at math to be a good programmer, thinking like a mathematician helps prepare one for writing efficient data structures and algorithms.
I took a programming contest class as one of my electives. Writing a program to solve a particular problem is usually pretty easy. Making that solution run in the time allotted was incredibly difficult.
Writing efficient code takes time. But it's time well spent.
I wonder why mirror business seems to be such a big problem. All the university mirrors and they seem to competiting about having mirros.
I think the sheer amount of projects and their sizes presents a lot of the problem. At my university I've been given a lot of old hardware to create our internal mirror. 500GB goes fast when you get all of Debian or Fedora. I have to constantly evaluate what is important, since I don't have the funds to throw more storage at the box.
Slashdot Mirror
As a senior computer science major, I've seen a lot of freshmen at my school come in as Computer Science majors and change to Information Systems Management (which teaches programming without as much math, software engineering, etc.) because they couldn't handle the math. Although you don't have to be great at math to be a good programmer, thinking like a mathematician helps prepare one for writing efficient data structures and algorithms. I took a programming contest class as one of my electives. Writing a program to solve a particular problem is usually pretty easy. Making that solution run in the time allotted was incredibly difficult. Writing efficient code takes time. But it's time well spent.
I think the sheer amount of projects and their sizes presents a lot of the problem. At my university I've been given a lot of old hardware to create our internal mirror. 500GB goes fast when you get all of Debian or Fedora. I have to constantly evaluate what is important, since I don't have the funds to throw more storage at the box.
If I could just get my hands on our new NetApp...