From my earlier years: Fast and cheap file transfer? A grad student with a mag tape.

This demonstrates the difference between commercial/professionally run products and what can be a very ad hoc management style for open products.

A commercial organization receives a DR and reviews it. The DR is assigned a priority and a severity. Being obscure and performance related, I'd guess that it scored low on both. It doesn't impact security, it doesn't rear its ugly head often. So it won't impact many users, and presumably, the impact won't be that great. As such, and assuming that you have limited resources devoted to a product, it doesn't exactly float to the top of the heap.

But from the standpoint of code, the defect *might* be interesting! And in a looser environment, interesting trumps utility. Also, the impacted source might be more isolated... meaning to the volunteer "dive right in" developer, it is a more attractive problem to handle.

I'm not trying to defend Oracle or condemn the MariaDB team. I'm using this as an example of how different development processes and practices (highly managed/cathedral vs. open-uncommitted/bazaar) might yield different results. And how different group goals (further integration of MySQL into the Oracle family vs. ??? for MariaDB) might impact where efforts are place.

Yet a smart calculator can get past the "here's the formula for this" phase to "here's a way to think about and experiment with data" phase. After all, do you know how to compute square roots by hand? I learned it in fifth grade (some long time ago), and haven't used it since, well, fifth grade.

Consider my daughter (now in college) studying biology. I'd help/watch her with homework over time while she was in high school. TI-84, using statistical software. Having the tool, and quickly being able to go from raw data to processed data? Priceless, in that she could experiment. She could try different sets and learn the impact of source changes on the resultant. I wouldn't have wanted her to have had to calculate that by hand. She'd have learned technique, but not comprehension.

And I'm happy with her there. I'd rather she know how to work with data and build from there. That's the future.

TLDs are a thing of the past, or will be. The TLD explosion will hasten that.

Remember the early days of ebay? How you could peruse ALL of the new postings for a day in "computer hardware" (one single category) in ten minutes? Yes, you would go to computer>hardware to get to the category, and that's what you did.

Now ebay has been overrun by online stores and bulk postings, a single ID posting hundreds or more items per day. A virtual online catalog for thousands of sale-by-the-shovel retailers. And everything is found via search. (Hey, try posting computer hardware in "dolls". People will find it and it'll sell for the same price you'd get elsewhere.)

This is the future of domain names. You search by company name in the address field, it goes where you want to, your browser/search engine learn your preferences. In five years, no one will care if you are prostitutes-international.xxx or im.a.who.re !

Today is National Sysadmin Day. It is also National Coffee Milkshake Day.

Coincidence? I think not.

Nope, too slow. Two-term Taylor series.

Yeah, I anayzed the CORDICS. And the source implementation of atan2, etc. And optimized for cos = 1-sqrt(sin). (By the way, sqrt is expensive, too). And looked at integer approximations.

The key was I ONLY NEEDED ACCURACY WITHIN 5%!!!!! As others have pointed out, understanding the problem speeds things along nicely. Reviewing the source code showed that the lib calls used hardware doubles. Cycle-expensive. Modern processors, FP and INT are pretty close when compared to trig functions. And only needing very low precision meant the taylor expansions were around two mults and an add. Three and two for some of the more expensive ops, but the trig ran more expensive there as well.

Side note: Going to int was considered as well, but adding in the renormalizations added time, too. And I usually avoid div when I can.

Side note: The power of 1.5 can be done as a cube and a square root (sqrt(x*x*x)). It is cheaper to do x^1.5 as x*sqrt(x), saving a couple of mults...

Did the math... around 100K trig calls per frame. Maybe a few thousand points, but each calculated the intersection of multiple phased waves. And my code was faster than a table lookup!

Look it up, program it, forget it, and leave it for someone else to fix the bugs because you didn't understand it...

Bullshit. You want to develop game engines, you have to know how to move things around. You have to know how to create a world. You have to understand what your team is doing, and understand it at a gut level. This isn't rendering, this is creating a world.

So learn your math well. It will give you an additional layer of depth that will differentiate you from those who don't.

Disclaimer: I just coded up some low-precision trig operations. I'm generating some simulated waves in the world I'm creating. Costing hundreds of trig calls per frame, and figure 50 frames per second... My routines are around 3 to 5 times faster than system calls, you want to look up that hundreds per frame at 50 fps again? It means I have a lot more CPU available for other tasks. Math. Taylor series. Error analysis. Makes me the person that gets hired instead of the one that gets passed over.

11 environments (ObjC, Mac, C#/WPF... .NET) over five years, so I think he means around 5 months apiece! In other words, a beginner/dabbler who hasn't been involved in a project of any depth...

The news purveyors are complaiining that a summary of the article is being presented. People only read the summary and don't click to see the whole article. Ad revenue due to the news purveyor is lost.

This seems similar to the original arguments against selling music by the track instead of the entire CD. The "old model" was that the purchase package was a full CD (with a few good songs and a lot of dogs). This parallels showing a whole page (with a few interesting paragraphs and a lot of filler. The content owners wanted to sell the whole package, not just the highlights.

The new model is letting the listener hear a short clip (the paragraph on the aggregator's page), and then buying an entire song (viewing the whole article on the host page) if interested. Selling a whole CD (buying the magazine/newspaper or hopping to linked articles at the host's site) may be done if there's sufficient "good" content. And once on the host site, the viewer may well view more than the one article.

This seems to work well for the music industry. Yes, the model has changed. Yes, they have adapted. The print world needs to examine this model, use it, adapt.

Turn Left! Or so the Nav system of my unlocked phone said, even though I was in the middle of the bridge...

Understanding why the math works makes the programs work. Understanding probability and statistics make my inline sampling calculations correct. Understaning how spline calculations work make my curve approximation code (or even the use of curve approximation libraries) correct.

Yes, there are a lot of good libraries out there. They are optimized. They are error-correcting. They are correct. And knowing what they do and how they work enables you to use them effectively.

When you talk to your clients (or your bosses) and they ask you about how you did something, the ability to pull the core math and explain it will go very far.

It is kind of like lifting weights. The lifting isn't its own end. It makes the daily (carrying 40 pound boxes of cat litter into the house) mundane. So it is with math. Understanding simple things as polynomial interpolations for higher-order polynomials can make or break your ability to project storage estimates. Understanding O() notation will help you program well.

Don't scrimp on the math. There are enough bad systems out there for other reasons already.

Okay, you want to know how many ways the world can end? Pick up a collection of Ballard. Drowning. Drought. Giant crystals. On and on. Each the despair and hopeless of mankind at its final moments.

Funny, this thread reads like "the great writers of the previous generations..."