"Manage your own onsite cloud!"
You mean.. a server?
"It's the clouuuuuuud"

Clearly it depends on what your specific development interest are, and the way that your professor presents the material.

In my course, solving linear systems was maybe the first week, and then on to bigger and better things.

The lecture I heard on eigenvectors was so ludicrously inspiring that I almost couldn't sit through the whole thing without running back to my dorm to write python. To think, that it allows you to define an "anchor" in an arbitrary transformation. You can interpolate at any point along the eigenvector and create an animation! Also, regarding computer vision / OCR? LA is HUGE.

Thinking in terms of matrices also enables making parallel code where another developer would miss it. If your code isn't performance intensive then this doesn't really matter, but it's the foundation of why there's a huge population of interest behind CUDA/GPGPU's. If you hear all the hype about functional programming / map -> reduce etc, the whole point with it is allowing you to process enormous baskets of vectors (ie: matrices).

The fringes of what I know about computer science always seems to sit adjacent to a linear algebra problem. I'm sorry you had a poor experience with it.

Linear Algebra > all other math classes. I feel like it should have been the grade school progression immediately after basic algebra, learn matrices. Then use matrices for everything after that. Teach the linear algebra method of a thing before you teach any other method.

But then again I'm a zealot.

I agree that what I learned in calculus has been meh. I wouldn't have lost anything if instead of taking the course, someone had sat me down and said "a derivative is a function that represents the rate of change (slope) of a function. An integral is effectively the reverse operation."

Maybe it would be different if I was a quant or something?

I never understood the massive emphasis placed on recursion in college. Was it because it's somewhat unintuitive? That must be it, since it couldn't be taught because it's useful.

Using it immediately opens you up to stack overflows. Unless your language decides your method is eligible for tail call optimization. Even then, that hampers the code's maintainability immensely, because if one guy makes a change to your data processing recursor that precludes it from tail call optimization, you suddenly get stack overflows when you didn't before. I have solved thousands of problems that I could have used recursion for. Iteration is always better, except if you're going for a solution that allows you to stand up in your cubicle and go "SHAZAM!" after you build and it works.

Once you fully understand recursion, you also understand why you should hardly ever (epsilon% of the time) use it. It's just a parlor trick colleges use as a tool of discrimination. It works well enough at that I suppose, but I would consider using it often to be a bad habit, like shooting pennies and confetti out of your sleeves during dinner.

Executive Enterprise Super Government contracting. It's the same up here.

Switch to a different provider? Not where I live.

Also, the established players have been colluding in the environment you're describing for over a decade now. If comcast can't survive "the onslaught that is high speed internet at affordable prices" then they're terrible at business.

Yep, I have a surface pro 2. I love it for zbrush. It's a one of a kind device for that kind of work. Literally nothing else exists. For the price of a cintiq you get the computer too. I wish they advertised it heavily to artists, instead of ipad users. An ipad user is going to be like "this thing weighs like 5 pounds and is a half an inch thick, I want my dollar/mass ratio to be close to infinity!". An artist will be like "You mean I can do my zbrush sculpting at a coffee shop with the same workflow that I use on a cintiq, AND it can handle 15m tris like a champion? Yes please."

That's fair, and i'll probably do that when my warranty gets a little closer to expiration. I bought a 2007 Jeep and got __burned__ by its shitty problems, so I'm skittish now. :(

At the expense of feeding an AC troll, what makes you dub it a "shitty purchase"? I happen to be satisfied with it. It gets reasonably good gas mileage and looks like a fighter jet. Probably not for the kind of person that thinks a hatchback is aesthetically pleasing, but it works for me. It's also not for the kind of person that needs back seats..

It can still get you killed!

I'm just of the mind that if it had somewhere between 230-260 hoursepower it would be perfect. It's fun to drive, sometimes I just want to get up to highway speed faster than I am :D

As an FRS owner, this gives me some hope that toyota hasn't completely abandoned the platform. I like my car enough to want to spend more money on it, but the only factory upgrades they've offered so far have been ludicrously overpriced (1000$ headunit? Why is a radio priced like it has an i7 in it..) and cosmetic rather than performance. (No thanks to your 80$ oil cap). There have been rumors of a factory installed turbocharger since their original run, but so far nothing. It's a toyota vehicle, but many of the components (mainly the 4 cylinder engine) were manufactured by subaru. I read somewhere that relations between subaru and toyota chilled for some reason, and that's the major reason why it's been so orphaned. This gives me hope that's not entirely the case.

_all_ fossil fuel based energy companies? Surely someone wouldn't be engaging in hyperbole on the internet.

Oh, excellent, I was in HTML mode and it stripped out all my line breaks. :|