If you are responsible for the GUI on a large project, then no. Calculus isn't gonna do you a bit of good. If you're optimizing DB calls for a project with thousands of concurrent connections, then yes, you do need that. Advanced math is needed for *some* types of development, not all.
Same goes for algorithms. Yes, you'll learn about all kinds of special algorithms in a formal class. But then you get to the real world, and 99% of the time you're gonna use quicksort, heapsort or merge sort depending on your needs (average vs worst-case sort time, stability, etc). The dozen special sorts you memorized are so rarely required that it is almost a waste of time to spend 16 weeks learning them. Yes, there are fields where those sorts are helpful, but for *most* development projects it is unlikely you would ever use them.
When I lived in Orlando, one of the roads into my subdiv was 30mph. Lots of college kids in the area, so cops hung out on that road very often. My neighbor was ticketed there for driving 31. Swear to god, I saw the ticket for myself. He fought it, and as you would expect, he won.
At UCF, the cops were famous for handing out tickets for 1 and 2 mph infractions. They'd even pull over shuttle buses (that ran out to the common student housing areas).
That's news to me. We have a lot of lights down here that are red for longer than two minutes by design. Mostly side roads leading to major roads.
It varies by time as well. During rush hour, some side road lights on major roads will be red for 5+ minutes. One of the two lights leading out of my current subdivision onto a big road will have cars stacked up 30 deep during rush hour because the light is red for so long.
I've never been in a state (to my knowledge) that allows you to run a red light, except in cases where the light is clearly defective, in which case you treat it like a flashing red.
When I lived in Orlando, I had a really funky light nearby.
The light was for a side-road onto a major road (6 lanes). The process to get a green after 10pm went like this: --Arrive at light --Wait for pedestrian light to go from white to red (white time plus 45 seconds of flashing red) --Pedestrian light is now red, but traffic light on major road stays green --Wait for a car on the major road to get in the turn lane --The new car causes one direction on the major road to go red, he gets a green turn --Once his turn light goes red, the main road goes back to green and the pedestrian light resets to white --Wait for the pedestrian light to turn red (minimum two minutes more) --Main road finally goes red, you get a green light that lasts exactly 5 seconds (I timed it)
If you get there at the wrong time, you could easily be waiting 10 minutes (you are basically dependent on someone on the major road turning off). After discovering this, I just turn right, go up a couple blocks and make an illegal U-turn.
The idea isn't bad, it just took me by surprise because no one told me. I didn't get a call saying "hey, your plan is about to drop", nothing on my bill, no mention of it from the person who signed me up. It just happened by surprise one month.
I didn't know what had happened until I started trying to diagnose why my connection was shit all of a sudden. Eventually, I called and got a support tech to look up my account status.
But it doesn't work that way. Comcast has exclusive coverage in some areas. There is no one to lose customers to in many cases, so there are no negotiations. It is either get it the way Comcast says, or don't get it at all.
I mean, a definition of server like that is so broad my firewall could be called a server because it allows VPN. Or my SVN repo.
Bright House doesn't seem to care. I've run mail servers, web servers, gaming servers. Granted, they have plenty of other sins to account for, but on the server front, they seem to turn a blind eye until you start consuming huge amounts of bandwidth (IE, if my web server were ever/.'ed)
I had an odd one happen with TWC once. I had the same introductory offer for 6 months for their Super-Mega-Ultra-Sparkly-Rainbows plan. After 6 months, I expected my bill to double. Instead, after 6 months, my bill remained the same, but my account was downgraded to the "Basic User" plan because no one bothered to tell me I'd have to call them up and say "hey guys, I want to keep my current plan".
With only 100 residents left, you could probably do it for $3m. The remaining abandoned property will be snatched up, through eminent domain or something similar (there's bound to be a statute for this sort of thing...
Hedley Lamarr: Wait a minute... there might be legal precedent. Of course! Land-snatching! [grabs a law book] Hedley Lamarr: Land, land... "Land: see Snatch." [flips back several pages] Hedley Lamarr: Ah, Haley vs. United States. Haley: 7, United States: nothing. You see, it can be done!
A shame, I was looking forward to the commercials...
Tom Hanks: [voiceover in TV ad] Are you tired of the same old Grand Canyon? TV Dad: [bored] Here we are kids. The Grand Canyon. TV Daughter: Oh, it's so old and boring! I want a new one, *now!* Tom Hanks: [appears from behind bush] Hello. I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine. TV Son: Tussle my hair, Mr. Hanks! Tom Hanks: Sure thing, son. [laughs as he does so. Stars come out of the boy's hair. He then smiles in wonder] Tom Hanks: Now, I'm pleased to tell you about the new Grand Canyon. [shot changes to that of a smouldering crater] Tom Hanks: Coming this weekend! It's east of Shelbyville and south of Capital City. Marge Simpson: [watching ad] That's where Springfield is! Tom Hanks: It's nowhere near where anything is or ever was. This is Tom Hanks saying, if you're gonna pick a government to trust, why not this one?
--If you are a lefty like me, you end up rubbing off half the page while writing. Quick-drying pens work best here. --If you're an engineering student, pencil is damn near impossible to see on your typical green engineering paper. --Some courses explicitly require pens. You are never allowed to use pencils in surveying courses, all notebook entries must be in pen (think "chain of custody", you have to be able to prove nothing has been altered). --Fast talking professors are usually easier to keep up with when using pens. The smoothness of the stroke allows you to write rapidly.
Personally, I stopped using pencils in middle school for everything but scantrons.
Who cares about entrance requirements? I care about what they can do *after* graduating. And for that we have PE and FE exams. You can't call yourself an engineer until after passing the PE, involving a country-wide standardized exam plus X years of work experience. It doesn't matter which accredited school you went to, or what their entrance reqs were. If you can pass the PE, you have been trained to the minimum acceptable level in the US.
I remember a second-year course that involved a few small design projects. Yeah, we had a few teams designing pasta bridges that couldn't even support their own weight, or mousetrap race cars that needed a nudge to get going off the starting line. Guess what? None of those people were still in the program when graduation time rolled around.
Make the entrance reqs as low as possible. The difficulty of the material will weed out those who can't perform.
I seem to remember a NatGeo show about prison in Australia. The majority of inmates were back in prison for another crime after being released. Rehab doesn't seem to be any more effective there.
As far as actual crime goes, Australia has a very low rate for gun crimes. Having said that, they apparently are near the top of the list (Top 5) for Assault, Burglary, Rape and overall percentage of citizens victimized. http://www.nationmaster.com/country/as-australia/cri-crime&all=1
This assumes the mentioned site is on the up-and-up. I'm not aware of any bias from that site, but I'm sure someone will happily point it out if there is.
My pay isn't stellar, but for my situation it is good enough. I prefer a simply life, and have low expenses (no kids, my only expensive hobby is golfing, I enjoying cooking so I don't eat out much, etc), so even though I'm possibly the lowest paid person here besides the part-time custodial staff, I still make enough to be comfortably in the black every month.
What really makes it worth it is the job itself. I work for a small IT contracting company that does the IT work for the company I'm physically at. Even though I'm salary exempt like most IT workers, the company bills the client hourly for however many hours I do. As a result, I'm under strict orders *not* to work overtime (they don't want to pay for it, of course). If I do a 10 hour day, I leave two hours early on Friday. I work a staggered shift, coming in around 9:30 and leaving around 6. Works better for me that way.
Officially, I'm a support tech, but as a one-man IT department, I do everything. Networking, server admin, Sharepoint admin, backups, etc. Most of this stuff is a steal for this company for what I'm being paid (ever seen the hourly rate for Sharepoint admins?), but I'm early on in my career, so I get to play with stuff and pad my resume in the process. This month, I'm recoding the company websites with one of the marketing people as well as selecting and deploying a new asset management system for tracking IT assets. My company is paying for my MCSE certifications as well (i'm a Linux guy in an MS shop).
Sure, there are downsides. My budget is precisely $0, I'd have to go through the full purchase order process to get more paperclips right now.
More pay would be nice, but from my perspective, this job provides other benefits that will pay off in the long-term.
Yup. I haven't been to the theaters in about 6 months (when I used to go once a week), and I can say I don't miss it a bit. And other than buying the infrequent DVD (Season releases of old TV shows I enjoy that aren't currently syndicated), I do all my movie watching through Netflix. Even then, I think I only have 3 or 4 movies in my queue from this decade. I've found the appeal of Netflix to be all the old movies that I never see on TV (I'm really enjoying a lot of the old flicks from the 50's and 60's). They can postpone releases for a year for all I care. I've got enough movies queued to last me a *long* time.
Not necessarily. It is possible for two distinct species to interbreed and produce fertile offspring. It is *rare*, but it has been documented in several hybrid species (ligers, mules, etc). Generally speaking, male hybrids are sterile, while females have the rare chance of being fertile. The ability to produce fertile offspring is an indicator of two species being part of the same genus, not species.
As far as interbreeding goes, the genetic structure between the two is quite similar. Assuming the current accepted theory that the common ancestor is Homo heidelbergensis, our DNA would be about 98-99% identical with Homo neanderthalensis. Additionally, current theory based on genetic analysis suggests that the hominoid X chromosome diverged much later than the initial divergence, suggesting that interbreeding may have happened for in excess of 1 million years afterward.
Having said that, hybrids are generally sterile, and are generally more prone to disease, genetic disorders, etc. Even if we did mix, the offspring would almost certainly have died off by natural selection (hybrids are almost always inferior to their parents in terms of fitness for survival).
For example: spending $500 billion dollars to find a cure for cancer will be very important.
Will it be, really? People will continue to die by the thousands every year. And then we will have the same cry: We must stop (whatever becomes the new cause of death) before we can think about space. People are supposed to die, and a lot younger than we currently do. Eliminate the big causes of death and you *increase* the load on the planet's resources. And why cancer? Only *one* cancer (lungs) is in the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
And what happens when 20 years from now we now we realize that the climate change won't stop. Climates *always* change, and not always into a form that is comfortable for us. The idea that we can freeze the climate in a configuration that we like is the ultimate in hubris. You can slow it, you can try to minimize the change, but you can't stop it "in its tracks". So what happens when we realize the planet will continue to change and we have nowhere else to turn because we've been ignoring space all this time?
Any economist will tell you: running four programs concurrently at 25% of max capacity is more efficient than running one at 100% and retooling between each. Money is always tight, but if you *stop* a program, more times than not it never gets restarted.
NASA's budgets is approx. 0.5% of GDP. If you want to find money, look at the big money sinks. Which is more feasible: killing NASA or finding a way to reduce defense spending by 2.75%? They both free up the same amount of money.
Precisely. Hell, the *Mayans* didn't envision any doomsday scenarios. We don't even know for certain if the long count calendar cycles at 13 or 20 k'atuns (Mayan counting was base-20, though many scholars believe the calendar cycles after 13). Assuming 13, in Mayan culture the end of a cycle would be a major event, a time of celebration. Nothing in the archaeological record suggests they thought this world would end precisely 1 cycle after it began.
All this nonsense is just another way to scam the gullible. These doomsday criers are worse than the Y2K nuts. At least Y2K had a grain of truth to it (the rollover *could* have caused problems if it hadn't been patched in time).
That many of a species that without modern technology and medicine should by rights number in the tens or hundreds of thousands just isn't going to be sustainable.
Okay, I'll preface this by saying that I agree the current rate of growth is not sustainable.
However, the idea that our population should number in the thousands is way off. Pre-Columbian populations in the US were >1 million (estimates range quite a bit, but the *low* end of the scale is still above 1 million). The city of Alexandria at its peak in ancient times had over 300K citizens. Neither example had anything close to "modern" technology and medicine.
The real problem is not so much the numbers, it is age. We weren't meant to naturally live into our 80's. With a faster turnover from the "natural" life expectancy of 35-45 years, you could probably support more people (fewer "drains" on resources from the old/infirm/etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on what kind of developing you do.
If you are responsible for the GUI on a large project, then no. Calculus isn't gonna do you a bit of good. If you're optimizing DB calls for a project with thousands of concurrent connections, then yes, you do need that. Advanced math is needed for *some* types of development, not all.
Same goes for algorithms. Yes, you'll learn about all kinds of special algorithms in a formal class. But then you get to the real world, and 99% of the time you're gonna use quicksort, heapsort or merge sort depending on your needs (average vs worst-case sort time, stability, etc). The dozen special sorts you memorized are so rarely required that it is almost a waste of time to spend 16 weeks learning them. Yes, there are fields where those sorts are helpful, but for *most* development projects it is unlikely you would ever use them.
When I lived in Orlando, one of the roads into my subdiv was 30mph. Lots of college kids in the area, so cops hung out on that road very often. My neighbor was ticketed there for driving 31. Swear to god, I saw the ticket for myself. He fought it, and as you would expect, he won.
At UCF, the cops were famous for handing out tickets for 1 and 2 mph infractions. They'd even pull over shuttle buses (that ran out to the common student housing areas).
That's news to me. We have a lot of lights down here that are red for longer than two minutes by design. Mostly side roads leading to major roads.
It varies by time as well. During rush hour, some side road lights on major roads will be red for 5+ minutes. One of the two lights leading out of my current subdivision onto a big road will have cars stacked up 30 deep during rush hour because the light is red for so long.
I've never been in a state (to my knowledge) that allows you to run a red light, except in cases where the light is clearly defective, in which case you treat it like a flashing red.
A few times. Always got the same generic "we'll look into it" response.
Yup, and even at the peak of funding, it only comes about to about 2x the current budget, adjusted for inflation.
NASA never had a *monster* budget, they found ways to do a lot with a little, and cut a lot of corners in the process.
A machine that old? The password is bound to be: sex, love, secret or god =)
When I lived in Orlando, I had a really funky light nearby.
The light was for a side-road onto a major road (6 lanes). The process to get a green after 10pm went like this:
--Arrive at light
--Wait for pedestrian light to go from white to red (white time plus 45 seconds of flashing red)
--Pedestrian light is now red, but traffic light on major road stays green
--Wait for a car on the major road to get in the turn lane
--The new car causes one direction on the major road to go red, he gets a green turn
--Once his turn light goes red, the main road goes back to green and the pedestrian light resets to white
--Wait for the pedestrian light to turn red (minimum two minutes more)
--Main road finally goes red, you get a green light that lasts exactly 5 seconds (I timed it)
If you get there at the wrong time, you could easily be waiting 10 minutes (you are basically dependent on someone on the major road turning off). After discovering this, I just turn right, go up a couple blocks and make an illegal U-turn.
The idea isn't bad, it just took me by surprise because no one told me. I didn't get a call saying "hey, your plan is about to drop", nothing on my bill, no mention of it from the person who signed me up. It just happened by surprise one month.
I didn't know what had happened until I started trying to diagnose why my connection was shit all of a sudden. Eventually, I called and got a support tech to look up my account status.
But it doesn't work that way. Comcast has exclusive coverage in some areas. There is no one to lose customers to in many cases, so there are no negotiations. It is either get it the way Comcast says, or don't get it at all.
I don't think they do.
I mean, a definition of server like that is so broad my firewall could be called a server because it allows VPN. Or my SVN repo.
Bright House doesn't seem to care. I've run mail servers, web servers, gaming servers. Granted, they have plenty of other sins to account for, but on the server front, they seem to turn a blind eye until you start consuming huge amounts of bandwidth (IE, if my web server were ever /.'ed)
I had an odd one happen with TWC once. I had the same introductory offer for 6 months for their Super-Mega-Ultra-Sparkly-Rainbows plan. After 6 months, I expected my bill to double. Instead, after 6 months, my bill remained the same, but my account was downgraded to the "Basic User" plan because no one bothered to tell me I'd have to call them up and say "hey guys, I want to keep my current plan".
By negotiating, you mean users agreeing not to cry if Comcast promises to use lube next time, right?
With only 100 residents left, you could probably do it for $3m. The remaining abandoned property will be snatched up, through eminent domain or something similar (there's bound to be a statute for this sort of thing...
Hedley Lamarr: Wait a minute... there might be legal precedent. Of course! Land-snatching!
[grabs a law book]
Hedley Lamarr: Land, land... "Land: see Snatch."
[flips back several pages]
Hedley Lamarr: Ah, Haley vs. United States. Haley: 7, United States: nothing. You see, it can be done!
A shame, I was looking forward to the commercials...
Tom Hanks: [voiceover in TV ad] Are you tired of the same old Grand Canyon?
TV Dad: [bored] Here we are kids. The Grand Canyon.
TV Daughter: Oh, it's so old and boring! I want a new one, *now!*
Tom Hanks: [appears from behind bush] Hello. I'm Tom Hanks. The US Government has lost its credibility, so it's borrowing some of mine.
TV Son: Tussle my hair, Mr. Hanks!
Tom Hanks: Sure thing, son.
[laughs as he does so. Stars come out of the boy's hair. He then smiles in wonder]
Tom Hanks: Now, I'm pleased to tell you about the new Grand Canyon.
[shot changes to that of a smouldering crater]
Tom Hanks: Coming this weekend! It's east of Shelbyville and south of Capital City.
Marge Simpson: [watching ad] That's where Springfield is!
Tom Hanks: It's nowhere near where anything is or ever was. This is Tom Hanks saying, if you're gonna pick a government to trust, why not this one?
Not always. Pencils have a number of downsides:
--If you are a lefty like me, you end up rubbing off half the page while writing. Quick-drying pens work best here.
--If you're an engineering student, pencil is damn near impossible to see on your typical green engineering paper.
--Some courses explicitly require pens. You are never allowed to use pencils in surveying courses, all notebook entries must be in pen (think "chain of custody", you have to be able to prove nothing has been altered).
--Fast talking professors are usually easier to keep up with when using pens. The smoothness of the stroke allows you to write rapidly.
Personally, I stopped using pencils in middle school for everything but scantrons.
Who cares about entrance requirements? I care about what they can do *after* graduating. And for that we have PE and FE exams. You can't call yourself an engineer until after passing the PE, involving a country-wide standardized exam plus X years of work experience. It doesn't matter which accredited school you went to, or what their entrance reqs were. If you can pass the PE, you have been trained to the minimum acceptable level in the US.
I remember a second-year course that involved a few small design projects. Yeah, we had a few teams designing pasta bridges that couldn't even support their own weight, or mousetrap race cars that needed a nudge to get going off the starting line. Guess what? None of those people were still in the program when graduation time rolled around.
Make the entrance reqs as low as possible. The difficulty of the material will weed out those who can't perform.
I'm not too sure about that.
I seem to remember a NatGeo show about prison in Australia. The majority of inmates were back in prison for another crime after being released. Rehab doesn't seem to be any more effective there.
As far as actual crime goes, Australia has a very low rate for gun crimes. Having said that, they apparently are near the top of the list (Top 5) for Assault, Burglary, Rape and overall percentage of citizens victimized.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/as-australia/cri-crime&all=1
This assumes the mentioned site is on the up-and-up. I'm not aware of any bias from that site, but I'm sure someone will happily point it out if there is.
You're not the only one.
My pay isn't stellar, but for my situation it is good enough. I prefer a simply life, and have low expenses (no kids, my only expensive hobby is golfing, I enjoying cooking so I don't eat out much, etc), so even though I'm possibly the lowest paid person here besides the part-time custodial staff, I still make enough to be comfortably in the black every month.
What really makes it worth it is the job itself. I work for a small IT contracting company that does the IT work for the company I'm physically at. Even though I'm salary exempt like most IT workers, the company bills the client hourly for however many hours I do. As a result, I'm under strict orders *not* to work overtime (they don't want to pay for it, of course). If I do a 10 hour day, I leave two hours early on Friday. I work a staggered shift, coming in around 9:30 and leaving around 6. Works better for me that way.
Officially, I'm a support tech, but as a one-man IT department, I do everything. Networking, server admin, Sharepoint admin, backups, etc. Most of this stuff is a steal for this company for what I'm being paid (ever seen the hourly rate for Sharepoint admins?), but I'm early on in my career, so I get to play with stuff and pad my resume in the process. This month, I'm recoding the company websites with one of the marketing people as well as selecting and deploying a new asset management system for tracking IT assets. My company is paying for my MCSE certifications as well (i'm a Linux guy in an MS shop).
Sure, there are downsides. My budget is precisely $0, I'd have to go through the full purchase order process to get more paperclips right now.
More pay would be nice, but from my perspective, this job provides other benefits that will pay off in the long-term.
Yup. I haven't been to the theaters in about 6 months (when I used to go once a week), and I can say I don't miss it a bit. And other than buying the infrequent DVD (Season releases of old TV shows I enjoy that aren't currently syndicated), I do all my movie watching through Netflix. Even then, I think I only have 3 or 4 movies in my queue from this decade. I've found the appeal of Netflix to be all the old movies that I never see on TV (I'm really enjoying a lot of the old flicks from the 50's and 60's). They can postpone releases for a year for all I care. I've got enough movies queued to last me a *long* time.
Not necessarily. It is possible for two distinct species to interbreed and produce fertile offspring. It is *rare*, but it has been documented in several hybrid species (ligers, mules, etc). Generally speaking, male hybrids are sterile, while females have the rare chance of being fertile. The ability to produce fertile offspring is an indicator of two species being part of the same genus, not species.
As far as interbreeding goes, the genetic structure between the two is quite similar. Assuming the current accepted theory that the common ancestor is Homo heidelbergensis, our DNA would be about 98-99% identical with Homo neanderthalensis. Additionally, current theory based on genetic analysis suggests that the hominoid X chromosome diverged much later than the initial divergence, suggesting that interbreeding may have happened for in excess of 1 million years afterward.
Having said that, hybrids are generally sterile, and are generally more prone to disease, genetic disorders, etc. Even if we did mix, the offspring would almost certainly have died off by natural selection (hybrids are almost always inferior to their parents in terms of fitness for survival).
For example: spending $500 billion dollars to find a cure for cancer will be very important.
Will it be, really? People will continue to die by the thousands every year. And then we will have the same cry: We must stop (whatever becomes the new cause of death) before we can think about space. People are supposed to die, and a lot younger than we currently do. Eliminate the big causes of death and you *increase* the load on the planet's resources. And why cancer? Only *one* cancer (lungs) is in the top 10 causes of death worldwide.
And what happens when 20 years from now we now we realize that the climate change won't stop. Climates *always* change, and not always into a form that is comfortable for us. The idea that we can freeze the climate in a configuration that we like is the ultimate in hubris. You can slow it, you can try to minimize the change, but you can't stop it "in its tracks". So what happens when we realize the planet will continue to change and we have nowhere else to turn because we've been ignoring space all this time?
Any economist will tell you: running four programs concurrently at 25% of max capacity is more efficient than running one at 100% and retooling between each. Money is always tight, but if you *stop* a program, more times than not it never gets restarted.
NASA's budgets is approx. 0.5% of GDP. If you want to find money, look at the big money sinks. Which is more feasible: killing NASA or finding a way to reduce defense spending by 2.75%? They both free up the same amount of money.
Precisely. Hell, the *Mayans* didn't envision any doomsday scenarios. We don't even know for certain if the long count calendar cycles at 13 or 20 k'atuns (Mayan counting was base-20, though many scholars believe the calendar cycles after 13). Assuming 13, in Mayan culture the end of a cycle would be a major event, a time of celebration. Nothing in the archaeological record suggests they thought this world would end precisely 1 cycle after it began.
All this nonsense is just another way to scam the gullible. These doomsday criers are worse than the Y2K nuts. At least Y2K had a grain of truth to it (the rollover *could* have caused problems if it hadn't been patched in time).
You see the same in some stores in the US now. Mostly discount stores, but also in stores like Aldi (a German-based corp, IIRC).
That many of a species that without modern technology and medicine should by rights number in the tens or hundreds of thousands just isn't going to be sustainable.
Okay, I'll preface this by saying that I agree the current rate of growth is not sustainable.
However, the idea that our population should number in the thousands is way off. Pre-Columbian populations in the US were >1 million (estimates range quite a bit, but the *low* end of the scale is still above 1 million). The city of Alexandria at its peak in ancient times had over 300K citizens. Neither example had anything close to "modern" technology and medicine.
The real problem is not so much the numbers, it is age. We weren't meant to naturally live into our 80's. With a faster turnover from the "natural" life expectancy of 35-45 years, you could probably support more people (fewer "drains" on resources from the old/infirm/etc).
Damn, I feel sorry for whoever gets stuck analyzing the YouTube data. One massive 40-hour-a-week rickroll.