I'm curious as to whether you were studying CS in a large, public engineering university, or a small liberal arts-type school (or somewhere in between). No doubt, there are lots of programs which cater solely to the theoretical side of work. I attended an engineering school where the math was certainly theoretical, but you could still see the potential for applications of the calculus program in fields like fluid dynamics, or thermodynamics, and the like.

But CS 101 was the reason I strayed far clear of computer science. I would have never appreciated what it means to be a good computer engineer with the way sorting algorithms and data structures were introduced. Concepts were never really taught from a 'how is this useful to me?' perspective. I can't really describe it better than that. I became a programmer/computer engineer later when my interest in the field developed as a result of real world applications and uses (like understanding how Python or the internet works). I figured that this might happen, hence why I felt comfortable forgoing the study in school ;-)

That said, there are still great computer engineering programs at large universities where the focus is on engineering and software development as opposed to the pure, theoretical science of software engineering (think Master's of Engineering programs, as opposed to Master's of Science). They dip into some concepts as well such as agile development and systems engineering (which are silly in my opinion) but nevertheless good to know, and helpful in the world of industrial software engineering.

Being able to do calculus helps you think critically and serves as a basis for study in many other important fields. There's a pattern of reasoning skills that you develop when you read a book, learn a method, apply it to solve a problem, verify your answer, and return to the problem to identify and correct errors.

Being able to solve the problem without having to look it up gives you an intuition for solving complex problems without having to resort to such means. If I tell you the derivative of a value is x^{-1}, you shouldn't need to look up that it varies logarithmically. And being able to solve the problem yourself is what gives you the faith in the solution being correct. You could always look up the wrong value from the table, or provide the wrong input to a compute engine (side rant: Mathematica syntax drives me bonkers). You should always have multiple ways of understanding and verifying your solutions because relying solely on existing tools to perform the work for you without understanding where they come from turns this process into a black box which you have to rely on purely out of faith; I would argue that this can be dangerous, especially for mission critical applications. For basic calculus, linear algebra and differential equations, which every college engineer is expected to understand, I don't think this is an unreasonable requirement.

Even while you yourself may have not been in a situation where you needed to understand these concepts, there are many fields in which being able to manipulate these equations is important: particle advection, comupter graphics and animation engines (manipulating ODEs and PDEs, linear algebra), or scientific and numerical computing and modeling (pretty much anything field of math). So I would say, if I were developing a comprehensive computer science program, I absolutely would have to include this in my curriculum, otherwise I would be shutting our students out of these fields. And if you're a mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc. engineer (or you're any other kind of engineer having to work with them), you need to understand these concepts to have faith in your results.

The purpose of your college program was not to cater its curriculum directly to you, but to give all the students enrolled a broad set of skills that they could apply in situations that might arise. And understand that your program can only expose you to the skills that you should learn, but it's up to you to find a practical use for them.

we need to triple funding for creating GUI interfaces in Visual Basic! Hurry!!!

The first two-thirds of the summary lauds Bill Gates like a propaganda piece about the dictator of North Korea. This whole place has become sickeningly MS-friendly ever since Dice took over.

Great one guys.

And I'll celebrate the 50th when it's over.

I don't browse around with an active email login session anyways due to that LinkedIn fiasco from a little while ago and just use thunderbird now, but while I still used Gmail's web interface, the first thing I had to do on my browser was block cookies from youtube. As a result, I no longer saw my gmail login when I was browsing youtube. You might want to try that....

Of course not - a well-engineered product could never be profitable. They were being taught how to code, not how to be a lawyer, MBA, marketer...

Agree with this. I use Firefox simply because I don't trust for-profit groups and avoid them as much as I can. It's a shame, because Chrome is a pretty slick browser and would be fun to try, but even when I do, I'd have this horrible nagging feeling that Google is spying on me in whatever way it has been engineered to do (even if I'm using Chromium instead).

Though I still think Firefox is better from a technical standpoint anyways. The speed and memory footprint have improved drastically for quite a while, and I can't live without the extensions. It's what makes my browser MINE, and not Google's, Apple's, Opera's... and I don't think I'm missing any other important ones ;-)

There's an Omnibar extension for Firefox which you could install if you would like that.

I seem to remember reading a post by Mozilla (though I can't find it now) that stated privacy reasons for not doing the same thing in Firefox. In Chrome, everything you type (including pages from history or URLs) are sent to Google's servers, even if you didn't intend for that. I far prefer Firefox's awareness of user security, and I rather like that it allows you to scroll up and down to choose different search engines. I figure there are probably ways that Chrome implements this as well, but I like how Firefox does it.

It's sad because if you're a user with those needs, then that's your only choice in town. Imagine how you would feel if you had special needs which meant you could only use a single platform. Given the fact that Apple often positions themselves as if their customers have hordes of cash and nothing better to do with them than burn the entirety on Apple's vertically integrated platform, you can see how that would be upsetting to those who don't appreciate that.

Maybe you haven't been listening to the reaction Joel, but NOBODY APPROVES of your stupid fucking agency and the stupid fucking things they do. Except perhaps your authoritarian, imperialist, warmonger friends in Congress (Feinstein and the like).

You probably won't realize why this is happening until you figure out how to admit how utterly fucking wrong you are. It's YOUR FAULT that your agency (and all other intelligence agencies) are hated because you decided to run out of control without a single shred of oversight. Don't blame this embarrassing atrocity on any one else.

Jeez, of all people, you'd think the ones working at the NSA realize that this can't be!

The problem is very simply that Americans aren't as involved in the democratic process as they should be (or they are and that they're simply too ignorant to understand how it's supposed to work). This is certainly not true of all Americans, but it is true of the vast majority, and what more is Democracy? Nothing more than the only thing the /. moderation system can beat....

Anyone looking at this case can see that each side can be classified into one of two groups.

On Google's side, we have companies that are providing new products and innovating in the realm of engineering. Google alone has produced (sometimes through acquisition, but has continued to nurture and develop) Android, Docs, Search (PageRank), Hangouts, Adwords, News, and tons more. People get angry at Google for killing products that they actually use (nobody complained when the Kin or WinRT went away). Likewise, on their side they have companies like Rackspace, Red Hat, Stack Exchange, and a host of others who are still real engineering companies, who develop and promote the adoption of real engineering products which people actually use.

On the other hand, you have dinosaurs like Oracle, Microsoft, EMC, and so on who have more interest in killing competing products via acquisition, lititgation, EEE, and so on. Oracle alone has probably killed more products than it has successfully brought to the market (think OpenOffice and OpenSolaris, there are probably many more). And when they do try to innovate (think of all of Microsoft's failures for example), they fall flat on their face because they don't understand progress or real, sound engineering. But they're the first ones to jump into patent and copyright suits. Microsoft makes more money off Android than they do off their failed mobile efforts. They're not in the business to profit off progress - they're in it to profit off killing others. Google is by no means a saint in this respect, but they're certainly not pathological killers. Companies in this group are just parasites, sucking money out of the industry through shitty developers (shitty because they build upon these companies' shitty products), or through legal or business means including litigation, extortion, bribery, and conflict of interest.

Nothing will stop the companies on Google's side from continuing to innovate and do good in the world with the services they provide. But the courts will decide here whether they're strong enough to support them, or if they want to chum up with the dinosaurs and fight the good fight against continued progress and innovation.

Use an aluminum foil antenna to direct microwaves to any given pole and that should cause sufficient interference to break this little scheme.

I wonder how long before those animals resort to oding something like this... in the name of profit...