I haven't heard anyone mention laptops. Well-built laptops such as ThinkPads are probably top-to-bottom the most reliable hardware out there, especially if you get a low-power, preferably fanless model. Plug in a USB keyboard & mouse and probably an external monitor and go.
I'll defer to others on software and hard drive suggestions, but will add the anecdote that the only laptop hard drive i have had fail was a low-end SSD, which had complete data loss after only a few months. When i dropped my open, running ThinkPad T61 about 5 feet onto a wooden floor, the mechanical drive only lost about a 5GB region, which i have allocated around and had no problems since. Barely even cosmetic damage to the laptop.
in my format, 0 decompresses to Metallica "Unforgiven" and 1 decompresses to Metallica "Nothing Else Matters". so if you distribute the bit 0 or 1, you're distributing copyrighted material. and yer goin to jail and stuff. welcome to America.
And learning the difference between kilometers and miles wouldn't hurt... Earth to Mars... oops, missed the damn planet!
Get your facts straight. Aside from what the article mentions, the error would not have caused mission failure if either (a) they had not decided to go from 2 solar panels to 1 (which resulted in more AMDs because of unbalanced radiation pressure) or (b) they had been tracking the trajectory of the spacecraft with ground instruments rather than dedicating them to other science. (I learned about these while interning at JPL.)
That's true, psychaiatrists do every day. But MDs don't really believe in this...
Psychiatrists are MDs. That's what allows them to use modern pharmaceuticals as part of treatments.
Sure, doctors tend to be skeptical of disease characterizations that aren't (yet) backed up by hard science. I'm fine with this. Many doctors would not ordinarily attribute pain or dysfunction to neurology (unless it has a clear, conscious basis). But i believe there are a good number who are mindful of the connection. For example, I know a gastrointerologist who said it's "not uncommon" for him to see patients with digestive/gastronomical symptoms that come entirely from depression (or other neurological/psychological problems).
But it seems to me that emotional issues causing physical problems are an unexplored and undertreated area of modern American medicine.
How naive! Psychiatrists explore and treat this in their practice every day. It is well known that the mind can seriously fuck with the body subconsciously. The digestive tract is an especially popular victim (e.g. with bulimia, IBS, GERD).
You're right that you can't have a tool that detects all bugs.
But you guys would be surprised at how accurately tools like Coverity can predict the overall bug density of a large project. Just as some example numbers, if the Coverity folks find their tool finds 30% of bugs and their tool finds 30 bugs in 50,000 lines of code, the actual number of bugs is going to be near 100. It's called statistical inference.;)
I know people who started doing better in Calc when they threw away their silly picture filled BA Calculus book and used the "harder" one from the Math/Eng courses.
This reminds me of an interesting notion i don't think anyone here has really pointed out. One can think of there being two sides to math: there is the syntax and the semantics. Either can be (in some sense) a basis of reasoning. Some seem to agree with one more than the other: for example, the calc book with pictures attempts to explain calculus by its semantics on a plane or in a space. The "harder" one was probably more syntactic, describing and proving important theorems based on simpler ones. Some probably find it easier to focus on the rules for manipulating the symbols rather than trying to get an intuitive notion of the rules by relating it to their world.
Anyway, great mathematicians are able to leverage both syntax and semantics, using one when the other lets you down and not being distracted by the other when one is sufficient. What's my point? I guess my point is that it's helpful to recognize the two approaches, be mindful of any favor you have of one over the other, try to be comfortable with each, recognizing that you don't have to always be in tune with both to get stuff done!
Think about doing long division back in the day... That was a very syntactic method of reducing a division problem to many smaller division, multiplication, and subtraction problems. You didn't need an intuitive understanding of how a division problem can be broken up like it does to apply long division, and you weren't doing any *less* math because of it. On the other hand, because i have an intuitive understanding of how i can break up a division problem, i don't have to remember the syntactic rules for long division. i can make something up that works and probably looks a lot like long division.
A final comment about conceptualizing something--anything: USE IT! THINK ABOUT IT! As a graduate student, i spend days, weeks, months thinking about problems and you know you're really getting into something when you remember moments between being asleep and being totally awake in which you're framing all sorts of unrelated stuff in terms of this new way of thinking.
Alice: "Try to get this concept through your thick skull: the software can do whatever I design it to do"
(pause)
user: "Can you design it to tell you my requirements?"
boy, that's easy:
print "This software is required to print this statement.";
>Communications satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 30,000 miles above the earth. Even if you have satellite both ways (vs. the more common satellite for download, modem for upload) the speed of light limits your absolute theoretical minimum ping time to about 1/3 of a second (333ms).
A ping is a round-trip and the internet is not in geosynchronous orbit, so it's roughly a 120,000 mi trip or minimum of 2/3 of a second.
one of the benefits of Java: security! not only could they not do malicious things, we had defenses against DOS: time limit and non-instant execution. Instead, submissions were queued up and executed one at a time. also, if you refreshed the status web page faster than was automatic, you got demoted in the queue.:) typical wait time: 10 minutes or something. people submit way too often if there's no wait time. you need to get them to do a little thinking before they just tweak stuff aimlessly and submit again.
also, we found out that running the same set of test cases each time was a bad idea and folks could circumvent writing a full implementation. our solution: randomly choosing test cases.
7 TAs == huge class? ha! our CS2 class sometimes had 800 students (across all sections) with about 40 TAs. We also did all the stuff people are discussing: automatic instant feedback, security manager, trapping I/O and stuff like System.exit(). for non-instant feedback assignments, we had a graphical UI for assigning grades and adding comments for parts of the assignment based on test results run in the same VM. it would then email grade reports to the students and output codes to be copied and pasted into the Web interface, which was fancy itself: MOTD, scheduling office hours, limiting TA permissions to their section, deadline enforcement, per-student granting of extensions, etc.
by the way, this was CS1322 at Georgia Tech ca. 2001. i don't even know how much of the stuff is left. hmm... WebWork still seems to be up.
It has always amazed me that people programmaticly build SQL queries using strings of concrete syntax! What the hell? Leverage your type system! It's there for a reason! Build an abstract syntax tree, and then let some library take care of communicating it to the database. Look, Mommy! No injections! (And it's not by "being careful".)
will it finally be correct to call x86[_64] the "Intel architecture" (as a bunch of knumb-nuts called it back at the Apple switch) or is IA64 still hangin on for dear life?
Wasn't one of the theories about Apple switching to Intel that they'd have a vendor able to provide both their PC and Ipod CPUs?... Guess it shoots down that theory.
... unless the next ipod is going to draw 200 watts and be powered by an RTG.;)
i'm pretty sure Pulse-n-Glide is only optimal given your engine is more powerful than what you need from it. if you didn't need the ability to climb hills or go faster than 30 mph, you could get away with a tiny engine--using it constantly at its powerband.
Rarely is such a testing tool going to cover all the possibilities without a gargantuan effort to model the software -- which effort will most likely not be able to keep up with the actual development anyway. These tools won't be widely accepted until they can automatically read source code and create a software's model without programmer input.
did you RTFA? design first, code later.
there are other tools for analyzing code after it's written. this article is not about those, but there's lots of work out there on automatic reverse engineering and model extraction.
Slashdot Mirror
oops
30x in three years? That's 1000% every 2.031 years.
There are 2.71828 kinds of people in the world. The kind that understand exponential growth, and 1.71828 kinds that don't.
I haven't heard anyone mention laptops. Well-built laptops such as ThinkPads are probably top-to-bottom the most reliable hardware out there, especially if you get a low-power, preferably fanless model. Plug in a USB keyboard & mouse and probably an external monitor and go. I'll defer to others on software and hard drive suggestions, but will add the anecdote that the only laptop hard drive i have had fail was a low-end SSD, which had complete data loss after only a few months. When i dropped my open, running ThinkPad T61 about 5 feet onto a wooden floor, the mechanical drive only lost about a 5GB region, which i have allocated around and had no problems since. Barely even cosmetic damage to the laptop.
Second semester freshman course is mostly about constructing machine-checkable proofs about programs. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/course/csu290/syllabus.html
in my format, 0 decompresses to Metallica "Unforgiven" and 1 decompresses to Metallica "Nothing Else Matters". so if you distribute the bit 0 or 1, you're distributing copyrighted material. and yer goin to jail and stuff. welcome to America.
Can you become a minority in short order?
Sure, doctors tend to be skeptical of disease characterizations that aren't (yet) backed up by hard science. I'm fine with this. Many doctors would not ordinarily attribute pain or dysfunction to neurology (unless it has a clear, conscious basis). But i believe there are a good number who are mindful of the connection. For example, I know a gastrointerologist who said it's "not uncommon" for him to see patients with digestive/gastronomical symptoms that come entirely from depression (or other neurological/psychological problems).
i followed the link and all i've been able to surmise is that they're not talking about Google Image Search.
I know people who started doing better in Calc when they threw away their silly picture filled BA Calculus book and used the "harder" one from the Math/Eng courses.
This reminds me of an interesting notion i don't think anyone here has really pointed out. One can think of there being two sides to math: there is the syntax and the semantics. Either can be (in some sense) a basis of reasoning. Some seem to agree with one more than the other: for example, the calc book with pictures attempts to explain calculus by its semantics on a plane or in a space. The "harder" one was probably more syntactic, describing and proving important theorems based on simpler ones. Some probably find it easier to focus on the rules for manipulating the symbols rather than trying to get an intuitive notion of the rules by relating it to their world.
Anyway, great mathematicians are able to leverage both syntax and semantics, using one when the other lets you down and not being distracted by the other when one is sufficient. What's my point? I guess my point is that it's helpful to recognize the two approaches, be mindful of any favor you have of one over the other, try to be comfortable with each, recognizing that you don't have to always be in tune with both to get stuff done!
Think about doing long division back in the day... That was a very syntactic method of reducing a division problem to many smaller division, multiplication, and subtraction problems. You didn't need an intuitive understanding of how a division problem can be broken up like it does to apply long division, and you weren't doing any *less* math because of it. On the other hand, because i have an intuitive understanding of how i can break up a division problem, i don't have to remember the syntactic rules for long division. i can make something up that works and probably looks a lot like long division.
A final comment about conceptualizing something--anything: USE IT! THINK ABOUT IT! As a graduate student, i spend days, weeks, months thinking about problems and you know you're really getting into something when you remember moments between being asleep and being totally awake in which you're framing all sorts of unrelated stuff in terms of this new way of thinking.
>Communications satellites are in geosynchronous orbit, roughly 30,000 miles above the earth. Even if you have satellite both ways (vs. the more common satellite for download, modem for upload) the speed of light limits your absolute theoretical minimum ping time to about 1/3 of a second (333ms).
A ping is a round-trip and the internet is not in geosynchronous orbit, so it's roughly a 120,000 mi trip or minimum of 2/3 of a second.
fools!
:) typical wait time: 10 minutes or something. people submit way too often if there's no wait time. you need to get them to do a little thinking before they just tweak stuff aimlessly and submit again.
one of the benefits of Java: security! not only could they not do malicious things, we had defenses against DOS: time limit and non-instant execution. Instead, submissions were queued up and executed one at a time. also, if you refreshed the status web page faster than was automatic, you got demoted in the queue.
also, we found out that running the same set of test cases each time was a bad idea and folks could circumvent writing a full implementation. our solution: randomly choosing test cases.
7 TAs == huge class? ha! our CS2 class sometimes had 800 students (across all sections) with about 40 TAs. We also did all the stuff people are discussing: automatic instant feedback, security manager, trapping I/O and stuff like System.exit(). for non-instant feedback assignments, we had a graphical UI for assigning grades and adding comments for parts of the assignment based on test results run in the same VM. it would then email grade reports to the students and output codes to be copied and pasted into the Web interface, which was fancy itself: MOTD, scheduling office hours, limiting TA permissions to their section, deadline enforcement, per-student granting of extensions, etc.
by the way, this was CS1322 at Georgia Tech ca. 2001. i don't even know how much of the stuff is left. hmm... WebWork still seems to be up.
Of course, that wasn't multiple rovers, and a short 83 days hardly compares to the longevity of the more recent rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.
... not to mention the enormous difference in size/scale. [1] [2]
:)
I got to see these in person, which is why the difference is so ingrained in my mind.
It has always amazed me that people programmaticly build SQL queries using strings of concrete syntax! What the hell? Leverage your type system! It's there for a reason! Build an abstract syntax tree, and then let some library take care of communicating it to the database. Look, Mommy! No injections! (And it's not by "being careful".)
... was unavailable for comment.
/so going to hell
will it finally be correct to call x86[_64] the "Intel architecture" (as a bunch of knumb-nuts called it back at the Apple switch) or is IA64 still hangin on for dear life?
Wasn't one of the theories about Apple switching to Intel that they'd have a vendor able to provide both their PC and Ipod CPUs? ... Guess it shoots down that theory.
... unless the next ipod is going to draw 200 watts and be powered by an RTG. ;)
i'm pretty sure Pulse-n-Glide is only optimal given your engine is more powerful than what you need from it. if you didn't need the ability to climb hills or go faster than 30 mph, you could get away with a tiny engine--using it constantly at its powerband.
no. RTFA.
if you already did, then you're just dumb.
did you RTFA? design first, code later.
there are other tools for analyzing code after it's written. this article is not about those, but there's lots of work out there on automatic reverse engineering and model extraction.
i bet you were the kid who would keep asking "... and why is that true?", never taking anything on faith/obviousness.