By lengthening the round trip time from coding to compiling you're decreasing the rate of repetition (and success). It would be better to get the fundamentals of the language down first and then work on scenarios where you might want to make patches on a remote console-based system. Then go through some exercises where the students patch bugs using a console-based editor and compile/build commands.
AS/400 (or iSeries or whatever IBM's name of the year is) can have null pointers that are a negative offset (but so far as I ever saw, only for programs running in batch and never interactively). So, if you try some trick comparing current pointer location as beyond a prior pointer location to track a locations in a data area to save an explicit check for 0 it will work every time interactively and randomly cause a null pointer exception in batch (something I had never noticed in K&R until someone pointed it out to me).
I might have the details slightly wrong. That was over a decade ago and I've only written a few simple C utilities since then.
I was puzzled by their reference to a study placing the cost of K - 12 education at the second highest at $91,700 per student (that is a cumulative cost, not annual). The study coves ages 6 - 15, but states K - 12, which would typically be 5 - 18. A look at the PDF, suggests that the headline is just the 6 - 15 age group as it reports, "A high school graduate in 2009 had $149,000 spent on his 13 year public school education." It also states that the US pays more for only middle of the road results that have not improved over the years. I'm assuming on a relative basis with the other countries, since there is an overall inflation of test scores over time, As I read it, the study the article cites actually contradicts the conclusions in the article.
As an interesting aside, that cost of public school education is a lower annual rate than we pay for daycare (and our daycare costs are lower than average in our area). Considering that other studies have shown that earlier education opportunies (like good daycare) and supplemental learning over the summer months improve scores, I would suggest that NCLB is a failure precisely because it puts the emphasis on the wrong things. Why not focus on year-round learning (not necessarly more school days, but shorter breaks 3 or 4 times per year? And maybe work on getting more kids in a learning environment before Kindergarten (especially those at risk for underperformance).
According to Punished by Rewards, which cites many studies, it can also be counterproductive, especially in work that requires creativity or teamwork. The only creativity it appears to encourage long term is cheating. It's short term productive at best and long term counterproductive at worst (here's looking at you Wall Street).
There's not a single programmer in our department under 40 and most are over 50. Most who left retired. It helps to work for a company that uses retention as a performance benchmark.
The only wired connection to our house is the electricity. We pay under $300 per year for municipal wireless and watch TV through OTA HD or our internet connected devices (Mac Mini on the main set and Apple TV in the basement). Several years ago we were paying Comcast over $1400 per year for less throughput (purely internet, no other services). Unfortunately, the cable companies have been very successful at quashing municipal internet in most municipalities.
Of course it's streamlined assuming that the switch includes moving to taxes on sales (the only rational approach). The average number of employees I've seen stats on show around 15 to 20 employees per business, so the mega corporations are already a minor factor. Moreover, most of those businesses are already paying sales taxes and are definitely tracking sales, so it would add little overhead to the business. In fact, it would probably reduce the burden to both the business and the government when you consider the tracking and filing of at least three different payroll components (withholding, social security, medicare and many other potential modifiers such as FSAs, 401ks, SIMPLE plans). Managing changing withholding allowances would also go away. As for your Amazon example, that will not be a "typical" case and if the regulations were sensible (I realize that's a stretch) taxes would come into play for the tangible product or reasonable proxy thereof (printing and distribution of the product) where such a thing exists (consultants might need to be handled differently). Even at the individual level (for the self employed) computing and filing sales much simpler than payroll taxes (I've spent over half my career self employed and would much prefer the change to sales tax).
Perhaps Apple is overstreching a bit too far here; I for one think the backlash isn't worth that 30% cut.
Some of the biggest expenses in publishing are PPP: paper, printing, and postage. For publications sold at newsstands there is also waste (unsold copies). Apple's 30% cut could easily be less than postage/delivery alone depending on the revenue model. Typically most of the revenue comes from advertising, so 30% (assuming subscription alone) could be seen as a huge bargain.
but as a whole, [Microsoft's] P/E is better than Apple's (even if they do have a lower market cap).
Better is in the eye of the beholder. Apple's earnings growth rate is much higher than Microsoft's. Since Q1 2006, Apple has averaged a nearly 62% earnings growth rate (and last year was almost 155%). Over the same period, Microsoft had an average earnings growth rate a of 23% (55% last year).
Investors give a higher P/E to companies with higher sustained growth (so long as nothing brings doubt about the future prospects of growth). Those earnings could be paid out as dividends, and thus the investor "owns" a stake in those earnings (plus any cash, property, etc less debt) proportional to their stock holdings and thus will pay more in order to make more. If Apple can sustain that average growth rate for another 5+ years, the current P/E will look like a bargain. In a better economy (less perceived uncertainty about future earnings), Microsoft's P/E might look more like Apple's (but then Apple's would be higher than it is now, too).
That's why they use BCD or some other type of decimal encoding. Spreadsheets can be a problem, though. I remember (back in the early days of PCs) trying to explain to a financial analyst that there wasn't a bug in his spreadsheet when the cross checks on his calculations where coming up with a (very small) inequality.
Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?
I would argue that most of those companies blew their opportunities by failing to adapt to rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, almost all of them failed at the transition from text-based to graphics-based interfaces. Netscape, however, had an issue with a competitor that could throw enormous money developing a browser that it could then give away.
One could say that Microsoft learned that style matters (as punctuated by Apple's reemergence). What it also shows is that disruptive technologies can dethrone the king if the king isn't paying attention.
If history is any guide, Comcast certainly will. I had business class service which through a succession of mergers and reallocation was provided by Time Warner, AT&T and finally Comcast. Download throughput was great. I could download Linux CDs in 8 minutes or so -- at least until Comcast came along and throughput dropped dramatically (none of this via torrents) and I just assumed the remote sites were overburdened. But, I could never find alternates that gave better performance. I tried a few performance testing sites and the benchmarks were showing everything was up to spec. I eventually decided to try the municipal wireless service (at a paltry 1-2M cap) because it would save me about $80 per month for throughput that would hopefully match what Comcast actually provided. I ran simultaneous tcpdump logs of downloads from the same remote servers and found that the wireless real-world throughput was almost double Comcast's. But, when I went to the testing sites Comcast was something like 8x faster than wireless. Needless to say, I canceled Comcast service. This was a few years ago, so things may have changed (but I'm not going to switch back to find out).
I liked the part in TFA about parallel universes leaking gravity. I'm not worried about MBHs sucking up the mass of the earth. I'm afraid they will be zombie black holes that eat branes.
The delayed arrival time from bounces off even very close objects can have interesting effects. For some real fun, find a reasonably long path (a half mile or so) below grade with concrete and or stone walls and lots of buildings. Now, loop back and forth several dozen times and download the track to your computer. It'll make you look like Superman jumping across (and into) the trench and in and out of buildings.
I hate patents as much as anyone else, but:
1) This isn't so obvious, and requires some fairly complex math
2) It is pretty complex (in the way it functions), enough that i would actually consider this patent-worthy.
I would add that at least this patent is not solely a software patent; it has a hardware component.
I thought maybe something had corrupted my Firefox session at the time... I suspected Google was having problems, so I went to E*Trade which was failing to load just about anything except text. I don't see any references to Google or ga.js on E*Trade's pages. But, E*Trade does rely heavily on Akamai servers. If it was a DOS attack, it may have affected Akamai, too (either as the subject of a separate direct attack or an indirect victim of traffic generated by Google's problems).
Both Google and E*Trade recovered at the same time.
Really? In how many companies does HR choose the IT staff? In our company, the IT department managers review the resumes and (in addition to management) at least one person actively coding projects interviews the candidates. I'd bet nearly 75% don't have a CS degree, let alone a master's (and those that do are usually managers with an MBA, and an undergraduate degree in math or science). Business experience is way more important than the degree. So much so, that I really need to make a strong case to recommend anyone just out of school (even after one person we interviewed [a month before graduation] became one of our best team leads).
If you really want to understand how division works, iterative subtraction would be better -- literally count the number of times the divisor gets used. Then, to optimize (vs iterative subtraction) and improve accuracy (over long division) learn double division. Long division belongs in the same category as these old school coding techniques -- I'm tempted to hedge a bit on that point since long division is faster, but I can't even remember the last time I used it (probably best measured in decades).
As someone who works with both Java and RPG ILE (and sometimes C) on an i5 (or whatever IBM's nom du jour for the system is -- I've lost track), you just end up replacing one problem with another. I've seen plenty of RPG programs run away evaluating expressions against an uninitialized value until it's hard to discover the initial source of the problem. There are times where having a program blow up with a null value makes it a lot easier to find the problem at or close to the source. The whole topic of nulls seems to lead to omphaloskepsis and I can't help but think of the example from Godel, Escher, Bach where a series of unbreakable phonographs continue to be destroyed by a matching series of records that break them. This seems to apply most readily to some other posts in this topic which refer to clearly defining the meaning of null within a particular context (or replacing it with a special Object).
I particulary like the example of "date of death" in a database: it is always unknown until it's known. I think null is the ideal (practical) way of representing it until the date is known. What would make a better substitution? A date before the day of birth? Or would that have to be more than 9 months before the date of birth? And what if the date of birth is not known. Should you enter the last known date alive? What if the person died shortly after the date was entered and you don't find out until later (this one, at least, could be useful in some applications)?
Now, if a programmer calculates the age at death and doesn't check for null, I'd rather see the program blow up right then and there rather than pass something like negative ages through the system. When I first started writing OO programs, I got so frustrated with nulls that I made sure I initialized everything to something that represented the state in a meaningful way. As a result, the programs got overly complex and difficult to debug when checks got missed (that would have caused an error with nulls). When I learned to make judicious use of final fields amd variables where appropriate many of my longstanding issues with nulls went away. I tell the programmers I work with that null is your friend if you use it appropriately.
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By lengthening the round trip time from coding to compiling you're decreasing the rate of repetition (and success). It would be better to get the fundamentals of the language down first and then work on scenarios where you might want to make patches on a remote console-based system. Then go through some exercises where the students patch bugs using a console-based editor and compile/build commands.
Apple also has banned Pulitzer-prize winning artists from their store as well.
A decision that was reversed on its merits as noted here... and now you know the rest of the story.
AS/400 (or iSeries or whatever IBM's name of the year is) can have null pointers that are a negative offset (but so far as I ever saw, only for programs running in batch and never interactively). So, if you try some trick comparing current pointer location as beyond a prior pointer location to track a locations in a data area to save an explicit check for 0 it will work every time interactively and randomly cause a null pointer exception in batch (something I had never noticed in K&R until someone pointed it out to me). I might have the details slightly wrong. That was over a decade ago and I've only written a few simple C utilities since then.
I was puzzled by their reference to a study placing the cost of K - 12 education at the second highest at $91,700 per student (that is a cumulative cost, not annual). The study coves ages 6 - 15, but states K - 12, which would typically be 5 - 18. A look at the PDF, suggests that the headline is just the 6 - 15 age group as it reports, "A high school graduate in 2009 had $149,000 spent on his 13 year public school education." It also states that the US pays more for only middle of the road results that have not improved over the years. I'm assuming on a relative basis with the other countries, since there is an overall inflation of test scores over time, As I read it, the study the article cites actually contradicts the conclusions in the article.
As an interesting aside, that cost of public school education is a lower annual rate than we pay for daycare (and our daycare costs are lower than average in our area). Considering that other studies have shown that earlier education opportunies (like good daycare) and supplemental learning over the summer months improve scores, I would suggest that NCLB is a failure precisely because it puts the emphasis on the wrong things. Why not focus on year-round learning (not necessarly more school days, but shorter breaks 3 or 4 times per year? And maybe work on getting more kids in a learning environment before Kindergarten (especially those at risk for underperformance).
According to Punished by Rewards , which cites many studies, it can also be counterproductive, especially in work that requires creativity or teamwork. The only creativity it appears to encourage long term is cheating. It's short term productive at best and long term counterproductive at worst (here's looking at you Wall Street).
There's not a single programmer in our department under 40 and most are over 50. Most who left retired. It helps to work for a company that uses retention as a performance benchmark.
The only wired connection to our house is the electricity. We pay under $300 per year for municipal wireless and watch TV through OTA HD or our internet connected devices (Mac Mini on the main set and Apple TV in the basement). Several years ago we were paying Comcast over $1400 per year for less throughput (purely internet, no other services). Unfortunately, the cable companies have been very successful at quashing municipal internet in most municipalities.
Too late. She already reported me to the Union of Intelligent Agents after I asked her (for the third time) to open the pod bay doors.
Of course it's streamlined assuming that the switch includes moving to taxes on sales (the only rational approach). The average number of employees I've seen stats on show around 15 to 20 employees per business, so the mega corporations are already a minor factor. Moreover, most of those businesses are already paying sales taxes and are definitely tracking sales, so it would add little overhead to the business. In fact, it would probably reduce the burden to both the business and the government when you consider the tracking and filing of at least three different payroll components (withholding, social security, medicare and many other potential modifiers such as FSAs, 401ks, SIMPLE plans). Managing changing withholding allowances would also go away. As for your Amazon example, that will not be a "typical" case and if the regulations were sensible (I realize that's a stretch) taxes would come into play for the tangible product or reasonable proxy thereof (printing and distribution of the product) where such a thing exists (consultants might need to be handled differently). Even at the individual level (for the self employed) computing and filing sales much simpler than payroll taxes (I've spent over half my career self employed and would much prefer the change to sales tax).
Perhaps Apple is overstreching a bit too far here; I for one think the backlash isn't worth that 30% cut.
Some of the biggest expenses in publishing are PPP: paper, printing, and postage. For publications sold at newsstands there is also waste (unsold copies). Apple's 30% cut could easily be less than postage/delivery alone depending on the revenue model. Typically most of the revenue comes from advertising, so 30% (assuming subscription alone) could be seen as a huge bargain.
but as a whole, [Microsoft's] P/E is better than Apple's (even if they do have a lower market cap).
Better is in the eye of the beholder. Apple's earnings growth rate is much higher than Microsoft's. Since Q1 2006, Apple has averaged a nearly 62% earnings growth rate (and last year was almost 155%). Over the same period, Microsoft had an average earnings growth rate a of 23% (55% last year).
Investors give a higher P/E to companies with higher sustained growth (so long as nothing brings doubt about the future prospects of growth). Those earnings could be paid out as dividends, and thus the investor "owns" a stake in those earnings (plus any cash, property, etc less debt) proportional to their stock holdings and thus will pay more in order to make more. If Apple can sustain that average growth rate for another 5+ years, the current P/E will look like a bargain. In a better economy (less perceived uncertainty about future earnings), Microsoft's P/E might look more like Apple's (but then Apple's would be higher than it is now, too).
That's why they use BCD or some other type of decimal encoding. Spreadsheets can be a problem, though. I remember (back in the early days of PCs) trying to explain to a financial analyst that there wasn't a bug in his spreadsheet when the cross checks on his calculations where coming up with a (very small) inequality.
I'm disappointed they didn't go back to the true roots of PC gaming: Donkey. You didn't even need to add a game controller.
Really? Ask Wordstar, Wordperfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBaseIII, Netscape, and countless other companies what fat lot of good the early lead did for them?
I would argue that most of those companies blew their opportunities by failing to adapt to rapidly changing technologies. Indeed, almost all of them failed at the transition from text-based to graphics-based interfaces. Netscape, however, had an issue with a competitor that could throw enormous money developing a browser that it could then give away. One could say that Microsoft learned that style matters (as punctuated by Apple's reemergence). What it also shows is that disruptive technologies can dethrone the king if the king isn't paying attention.
No, he used the plural form of the noun "Japanese" which is the same as the singular form -- look it up.
If history is any guide, Comcast certainly will. I had business class service which through a succession of mergers and reallocation was provided by Time Warner, AT&T and finally Comcast. Download throughput was great. I could download Linux CDs in 8 minutes or so -- at least until Comcast came along and throughput dropped dramatically (none of this via torrents) and I just assumed the remote sites were overburdened. But, I could never find alternates that gave better performance. I tried a few performance testing sites and the benchmarks were showing everything was up to spec. I eventually decided to try the municipal wireless service (at a paltry 1-2M cap) because it would save me about $80 per month for throughput that would hopefully match what Comcast actually provided. I ran simultaneous tcpdump logs of downloads from the same remote servers and found that the wireless real-world throughput was almost double Comcast's. But, when I went to the testing sites Comcast was something like 8x faster than wireless. Needless to say, I canceled Comcast service. This was a few years ago, so things may have changed (but I'm not going to switch back to find out).
I liked the part in TFA about parallel universes leaking gravity. I'm not worried about MBHs sucking up the mass of the earth. I'm afraid they will be zombie black holes that eat branes.
But, if you follow the footnotes (e.g., http://web.archive.org/web/20080213072335/http://www.losethetrainingwheels.org/default.aspx?Lev=2&ID=34 ) you will see that experiments have shown how insignificant those forces are.
0.99999[repeating] don't have a last digit by virtue of being infinitely long
It's last digit is 1 (as is it's first and only digit).
The delayed arrival time from bounces off even very close objects can have interesting effects. For some real fun, find a reasonably long path (a half mile or so) below grade with concrete and or stone walls and lots of buildings. Now, loop back and forth several dozen times and download the track to your computer. It'll make you look like Superman jumping across (and into) the trench and in and out of buildings.
I hate patents as much as anyone else, but: 1) This isn't so obvious, and requires some fairly complex math 2) It is pretty complex (in the way it functions), enough that i would actually consider this patent-worthy.
I would add that at least this patent is not solely a software patent; it has a hardware component.
I thought maybe something had corrupted my Firefox session at the time... I suspected Google was having problems, so I went to E*Trade which was failing to load just about anything except text. I don't see any references to Google or ga.js on E*Trade's pages. But, E*Trade does rely heavily on Akamai servers. If it was a DOS attack, it may have affected Akamai, too (either as the subject of a separate direct attack or an indirect victim of traffic generated by Google's problems).
Both Google and E*Trade recovered at the same time.
Really? In how many companies does HR choose the IT staff? In our company, the IT department managers review the resumes and (in addition to management) at least one person actively coding projects interviews the candidates. I'd bet nearly 75% don't have a CS degree, let alone a master's (and those that do are usually managers with an MBA, and an undergraduate degree in math or science). Business experience is way more important than the degree. So much so, that I really need to make a strong case to recommend anyone just out of school (even after one person we interviewed [a month before graduation] became one of our best team leads).
If you really want to understand how division works, iterative subtraction would be better -- literally count the number of times the divisor gets used. Then, to optimize (vs iterative subtraction) and improve accuracy (over long division) learn double division. Long division belongs in the same category as these old school coding techniques -- I'm tempted to hedge a bit on that point since long division is faster, but I can't even remember the last time I used it (probably best measured in decades).
As someone who works with both Java and RPG ILE (and sometimes C) on an i5 (or whatever IBM's nom du jour for the system is -- I've lost track), you just end up replacing one problem with another. I've seen plenty of RPG programs run away evaluating expressions against an uninitialized value until it's hard to discover the initial source of the problem. There are times where having a program blow up with a null value makes it a lot easier to find the problem at or close to the source. The whole topic of nulls seems to lead to omphaloskepsis and I can't help but think of the example from Godel, Escher, Bach where a series of unbreakable phonographs continue to be destroyed by a matching series of records that break them. This seems to apply most readily to some other posts in this topic which refer to clearly defining the meaning of null within a particular context (or replacing it with a special Object).
I particulary like the example of "date of death" in a database: it is always unknown until it's known. I think null is the ideal (practical) way of representing it until the date is known. What would make a better substitution? A date before the day of birth? Or would that have to be more than 9 months before the date of birth? And what if the date of birth is not known. Should you enter the last known date alive? What if the person died shortly after the date was entered and you don't find out until later (this one, at least, could be useful in some applications)?
Now, if a programmer calculates the age at death and doesn't check for null, I'd rather see the program blow up right then and there rather than pass something like negative ages through the system. When I first started writing OO programs, I got so frustrated with nulls that I made sure I initialized everything to something that represented the state in a meaningful way. As a result, the programs got overly complex and difficult to debug when checks got missed (that would have caused an error with nulls). When I learned to make judicious use of final fields amd variables where appropriate many of my longstanding issues with nulls went away. I tell the programmers I work with that null is your friend if you use it appropriately.