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Comment It depends (Score 1) 656

Maths is always good, no matter what situation. It goes side by side with logic, and calculus is a way of thinking about the world and its processes.

For some areas, there's a lot of math involved. Consider data analysis. At first, it may seem like you will never need data analysis, but many people end up working for companies where they have to track performance and efficiency issues (if you can save those 5 bits for each of those 10M clients, you'll get a nice raise). Another example: picture a situation where you are developing a phone application to determine if the user is riding a bus or not. In these kinds of situations (not that rare), you'll need to know data analysis, frequency analysis, time-frequency analysis....and for that you'll always eventually wind up having to understand some concepts of 'Advanced Math' (though do note that this isn't 'advanced math' at all)

I often hear that there are engineers and programmers. If you just want to be a programmer, maybe you won't need maths, but if you want to be an engineer, it will not only boost your way of thinking, but also simplify a lot of problems. (I'm not saying you'll ever have to know how JPEG or GIF works -- this involves maths --, but I'm saying that if you do, then you can do great things with that information).
Technology

Gartner Says 3D Printers Will Cost Less Than $2,000 By 2016 170

colinneagle writes "Widespread adoption of 3D printing technology may not be that far away, according to a Gartner report predicting that enterprise-class 3D printers will be available for less than $2,000 by 2016. 3D printers are already in use among many businesses, from manufacturing to pharmaceuticals to consumers goods, and have generated a diverse set of use cases. As a result, the capabilities of the technology have evolved to meet customer needs, and will continue to develop to target those in additional markets, Gartner says."

Comment Re:Not for users (Score 1) 107

"Wine SDK" = Winelib. Just plug in the fact that Android has no X11, fix a couple of dependencies, and there you go. BTW, you still need Wine to run Winelib applications (those are compiled with the Win32 API implementation given by wine, that is, they are native, but still require, for instance, a wineserver). It's all native, though.

Comment Re:TL;DR (Score 1) 107

You were modded informative, IMO, for part of your post. Wine is not stuck in the Windows 2000 era for sure, as I have run many applications specifically designed for XP (and some made for Vista and Seven). You are right when you say that it "is relatively slow compared to Win32 on actual Windows", but you should add that this actually isn't for the majority of cases, or at least not in my experience. Anything DirectX related is bound to be slower in Wine, yes, but I've had better performance in Wine on multiple occasions.

And yes, you are again right when you say it has numerous bugs ;]

Comment Re:printf (Score 2) 425

You're right, the performance difference is negligible. I guess it's just a habit I've developed, though when I come to think of it, it really makes some sense to leave that in release code. OTOH, it might reveal what you expect a function to do more easily, thus facilitating reverse-engineering if one is afraid of that.

Comment Re:printf (Score 4, Insightful) 425

This is not input checking. Input checking is checking the input for validity and acting accordingly. This is an assert, which is usually used as a way for programmers to make sure they didn't fuck up. If it is triggered, then the programmer fucked up. That's how it's supposed to be used.

Hence, the programmer fucked up, and this isn't input checking. It is nevertheless, IMO; a good practice to assert things (in debug code), but it also isn't checking for valid inputs, it's checking for programmer stupidity.

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