If you want productivity, with exposed tools and command-line speed, Linux is the way to go. Windows is the convergent gaming/media platform, but it isn't for serious work. But its well locked down and great for games like FPS and click-the-dialog-boxes, slowly becoming one with the console.
Lessig in congress could do wonders for slashdot-type causes. This is a key way to stop bad laws being made and for us to have an influence. Though I don't agree with everything he says, he is closer on the issues I care about than any other viable candidate. I am making a donation.
I guarantee the number one application in cities will be telling your car to circle so you don't have to find parking. Traffic will get way worse, then this will be outlawed.
What happened in the past has no influence over what will happen in the future. You may have flipped seventy-five heads, but the odds of the next penny landing head or tails is still 50/50.
I'd argue this is a mistaken conclusion. The chances are overwhelmingly that the person who told you it was a fair coin is lying.
Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments. I had passed over Erlang at first because 1) the syntax is a bit less clear to me than *ml/haskell and 2) the disclaimers on the website as to what Erlang is good for.
Productivity is very important to me as one of my major purposes is research code: mathematics, statistics, and machine learning. I am excited by the promise of parallel fp and am struggling with the somewhat ironic fact that fp it is not that popular in the math/scientific community (modulo a few very successful projects like Macaulay 2, which is very functional). I'm also convinced that over the course of my career, effective use of parallelism will be critical, while it is not used at all in many of the problems I encounter. Can anyone speak to the quality of math libraries (e.g. linear algebra) for Erlang or other functional languages? I've even considered F# to get good library support.
demi, I'm encouraged to hear that erlang has treated you well for web applications. What kinds of limitations did you run into that prevented more components from being written in Erlang?
I have heard this a few times about fp being better suited to multiproccessor systems. I have put some time into trying to learn an fp language, monads, etc.
But are there any fp languages that actually offer parallel/distributed/concurrent facilities NOW? Besides Erlang? It looks to me like the answer is no: the jocaml project is dead, Haskell stuff is deep research, etc. Is fp-for-parallel-computation just vaporware? I hope not. I would love to use this paradigm to get ready for 80-core processors, etc., but I can't find any implementation. MPI with C++ seems by far the most developed.
For me it is the Wii that is killing it, together with consistent bad behavior on Sony's part (rootkit most prominently). I bought a playstation 2 at the moment of launch and it was fine. But I just bought a Wii because my wife, who has never before shown interest in video games, wanted one and is now very excited about it. Plus the fact that Sony is on its side in a format war almost guarantees that Blue-ray will lose.
I'm sure the PS3 will do fine, but with an order of magnitude smaller market than the Wii.
I switched to Linux on the desktop about two or three years ago. I got an iBook maybe 8 months ago. For me the UI was not particularly intuitive, and after about six months I went back to using primarily Linux and windows.
I think I am similar in a few ways: I am a power Excel user, and I found that Mac Excel was no easier to use than Open Office, primarily because all the keystrokes are different, and I use Excel by muscle memory. So I don't think Mac Excel is really a solution; I expect you'll have plugin problems too. One other thing to watch out for: there are sometimes big performance hits on OSX for number crunching versus either windows or linux. E.g: for a computation in R (statistics program) I run, some timings were: 4yr old P4 with 256 ram running Fedora: 145s, iBook G4 with 1gig ram: 455s, core 2 duo 7200 windows laptop: 63s, xeon 5130 workstation: 75sec (FB-DIMM cost I'd guess). So watch out on that (there are some references about why this happens with Macs with R, too lazy to google).
My solution (a bit expensive): I have a windows laptop (dual boot to ubuntu) primarily to run excel with plugins (vnc or synergy to use the keyboard/mouse from big rig). The big rig is a dual xeon 5130 running Ubuntu for serious research computations and programming (even the big banks run a lot of quant stuff on linux), and general desktop work not requiring excel. The mac has the advantage of waking instantly from sleep: it is the internet terminal and plays iTunes (too slow for crunching, too weird, for me, for office apps).
Good luck!
What is it with people reinventing the wheel when it comes to entering mathematical notation? Every serious mathematician, and many in CS, Physics, etc. (can't say for sure because they aren't my fields) uses Latex to write papers and communicate math in ascii. As far as I know, exactly noone uses unicode. If they are interested in adoption, why on earth not use Latex notation instead of untypeable unicode or their ascii version of it?
Latex is the standard. Unicode will never be flexible enough to be as dominant. Use a subset of Latex, or any goal of making it easier for math folk to write these programs is lost.
Gold has no tangible value. It is shiny, thus people want it, but it has no 'inherent' value. Sure, it can be used in a few manufacturing processes, but if that was all it was good for (i.e, not shiny), it wouldn't be worth much.
They are complex entities with many activities, good and bad. The effects of their actions are also very complicated. Any company can be cast as doing good or doing evil depending on which chain of consequences you follow. Efforts on corporate reform should focus on incentives to align externalities with public aims, not judge each company thumbs up or thumbs down, which is ultimately futile.
I use excel without touching the mouse--all keystrokes that go through the menus (alt-em, alt-es alt-v, etc). This would be a disaster for me. Familiar keystrokes is also the reason I use excel. If I can get the same menus/keybindings in open office, I would switch as soon as I would have to go to 2007.
In the April 1999 JACI (Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology) estimated that 1% of the population, or close to 3 million Americans, is allergic to peanuts or tree nuts.
So it is pretty common. And this allergy can be very serious. Google for "anaphylactic shock." It is a get-to-the-hospital-in-30-minutes or die situation. Those warnings save lives.
I would advise you to try to start out as a 'quant' or a developer of 'algorithmic' trading solutions. Quants use programs and math to kick ass on the trading floor. Some quant houses don't care at all about wall st experience because they view things in a statistical/algorithmic way. They always always need good IT people. Think DE Shaw, Barclays, etc. Read Willmott forums and such places for info and job leads. Almost all of these jobs will be in New York/Connecticut and London. Another keyword is 'financial engineering;' there are masters programs that can certify you in this and your background is probably appropriate. Check out 'Financial engineering news.'
Algorithmic trading is another route. Big brokerages all have algorithmic trading platforms, which automatically split up an order into tiny pieces to sell throughout the day, on different exchanges. You could get into working on these systems, which are in a continual arms race, and see where that leads.
The bottom line is to use your IT background. Like most fields, trading is getting more computational/mathematical, not less, so you need to leverage your abilities. Start with solid books like Bodie, Kane and Marcus: Investments and Hull: Options, futures, and derivatives to get some foundational knowledge. Ignore the retail-oriented 'technical' trading/day trading stuff. Read the WSJ and Institutional Investor and things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want productivity, with exposed tools and command-line speed, Linux is the way to go. Windows is the convergent gaming/media platform, but it isn't for serious work. But its well locked down and great for games like FPS and click-the-dialog-boxes, slowly becoming one with the console.
Lessig in congress could do wonders for slashdot-type causes. This is a key way to stop bad laws being made and for us to have an influence. Though I don't agree with everything he says, he is closer on the issues I care about than any other viable candidate. I am making a donation.
Moreover, just add a few more top universities, and any journal that doesn't allow open access will quickly stop being a top journal.
20% hikes for math and physical sciences, engineering and computer science.
Sounds good to me.
I guarantee the number one application in cities will be telling your car to circle so you don't have to find parking. Traffic will get way worse, then this will be outlawed.
What happened in the past has no influence over what will happen in the future. You may have flipped seventy-five heads, but the odds of the next penny landing head or tails is still 50/50.
I'd argue this is a mistaken conclusion. The chances are overwhelmingly that the person who told you it was a fair coin is lying.
or purpoting to be from paypal? Problem solved.
Thanks to everyone for your thoughtful comments. I had passed over Erlang at first because 1) the syntax is a bit less clear to me than *ml/haskell and 2) the disclaimers on the website as to what Erlang is good for.
Productivity is very important to me as one of my major purposes is research code: mathematics, statistics, and machine learning. I am excited by the promise of parallel fp and am struggling with the somewhat ironic fact that fp it is not that popular in the math/scientific community (modulo a few very successful projects like Macaulay 2, which is very functional). I'm also convinced that over the course of my career, effective use of parallelism will be critical, while it is not used at all in many of the problems I encounter. Can anyone speak to the quality of math libraries (e.g. linear algebra) for Erlang or other functional languages? I've even considered F# to get good library support.
demi, I'm encouraged to hear that erlang has treated you well for web applications. What kinds of limitations did you run into that prevented more components from being written in Erlang?
I have heard this a few times about fp being better suited to multiproccessor systems. I have put some time into trying to learn an fp language, monads, etc.
But are there any fp languages that actually offer parallel/distributed/concurrent facilities NOW? Besides Erlang? It looks to me like the answer is no: the jocaml project is dead, Haskell stuff is deep research, etc. Is fp-for-parallel-computation just vaporware? I hope not. I would love to use this paradigm to get ready for 80-core processors, etc., but I can't find any implementation. MPI with C++ seems by far the most developed.
For me it is the Wii that is killing it, together with consistent bad behavior on Sony's part (rootkit most prominently). I bought a playstation 2 at the moment of launch and it was fine. But I just bought a Wii because my wife, who has never before shown interest in video games, wanted one and is now very excited about it. Plus the fact that Sony is on its side in a format war almost guarantees that Blue-ray will lose.
I'm sure the PS3 will do fine, but with an order of magnitude smaller market than the Wii.
Correlation does not imply causation. Learned that one in college...
There is also an online form for comment here.
Just called my CA Assembly rep to ask them to support the bill. Look yours up here.
It may not be perfect, but is a move in the right direction.
I don't usually make posts like this, but he does have sources. Argue with those, AC.
I switched to Linux on the desktop about two or three years ago. I got an iBook maybe 8 months ago. For me the UI was not particularly intuitive, and after about six months I went back to using primarily Linux and windows.
I think I am similar in a few ways: I am a power Excel user, and I found that Mac Excel was no easier to use than Open Office, primarily because all the keystrokes are different, and I use Excel by muscle memory. So I don't think Mac Excel is really a solution; I expect you'll have plugin problems too. One other thing to watch out for: there are sometimes big performance hits on OSX for number crunching versus either windows or linux. E.g: for a computation in R (statistics program) I run, some timings were: 4yr old P4 with 256 ram running Fedora: 145s, iBook G4 with 1gig ram: 455s, core 2 duo 7200 windows laptop: 63s, xeon 5130 workstation: 75sec (FB-DIMM cost I'd guess). So watch out on that (there are some references about why this happens with Macs with R, too lazy to google).
My solution (a bit expensive): I have a windows laptop (dual boot to ubuntu) primarily to run excel with plugins (vnc or synergy to use the keyboard/mouse from big rig). The big rig is a dual xeon 5130 running Ubuntu for serious research computations and programming (even the big banks run a lot of quant stuff on linux), and general desktop work not requiring excel. The mac has the advantage of waking instantly from sleep: it is the internet terminal and plays iTunes (too slow for crunching, too weird, for me, for office apps).
Good luck!
Another is krugle which I've used occasionally.
What is it with people reinventing the wheel when it comes to entering mathematical notation? Every serious mathematician, and many in CS, Physics, etc. (can't say for sure because they aren't my fields) uses Latex to write papers and communicate math in ascii. As far as I know, exactly noone uses unicode. If they are interested in adoption, why on earth not use Latex notation instead of untypeable unicode or their ascii version of it? Latex is the standard. Unicode will never be flexible enough to be as dominant. Use a subset of Latex, or any goal of making it easier for math folk to write these programs is lost.
Gold has no tangible value. It is shiny, thus people want it, but it has no 'inherent' value. Sure, it can be used in a few manufacturing processes, but if that was all it was good for (i.e, not shiny), it wouldn't be worth much.
They are complex entities with many activities, good and bad. The effects of their actions are also very complicated. Any company can be cast as doing good or doing evil depending on which chain of consequences you follow. Efforts on corporate reform should focus on incentives to align externalities with public aims, not judge each company thumbs up or thumbs down, which is ultimately futile.
Sweet. Thanks for the info, I won't fear Excel 2007.
I use excel without touching the mouse--all keystrokes that go through the menus (alt-em, alt-es alt-v, etc). This would be a disaster for me. Familiar keystrokes is also the reason I use excel. If I can get the same menus/keybindings in open office, I would switch as soon as I would have to go to 2007.
at the Miami herald, without two layers of spam: http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/editoria l/15889697.htm
-takeshi
In the April 1999 JACI (Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology) estimated that 1% of the population, or close to 3 million Americans, is allergic to peanuts or tree nuts.
So it is pretty common. And this allergy can be very serious. Google for "anaphylactic shock." It is a get-to-the-hospital-in-30-minutes or die situation. Those warnings save lives.
I would advise you to try to start out as a 'quant' or a developer of 'algorithmic' trading solutions. Quants use programs and math to kick ass on the trading floor. Some quant houses don't care at all about wall st experience because they view things in a statistical/algorithmic way. They always always need good IT people. Think DE Shaw, Barclays, etc. Read Willmott forums and such places for info and job leads. Almost all of these jobs will be in New York/Connecticut and London. Another keyword is 'financial engineering;' there are masters programs that can certify you in this and your background is probably appropriate. Check out 'Financial engineering news.'
Algorithmic trading is another route. Big brokerages all have algorithmic trading platforms, which automatically split up an order into tiny pieces to sell throughout the day, on different exchanges. You could get into working on these systems, which are in a continual arms race, and see where that leads.
The bottom line is to use your IT background. Like most fields, trading is getting more computational/mathematical, not less, so you need to leverage your abilities. Start with solid books like Bodie, Kane and Marcus: Investments and Hull: Options, futures, and derivatives to get some foundational knowledge. Ignore the retail-oriented 'technical' trading/day trading stuff. Read the WSJ and Institutional Investor and things like that.
Good luck.