Slashdot now looks like an old Blogger page. I hate blogger pages, they're last decade thing. If Beta becomes all I can have, I'm leaving slashdot. They weren't getting anything from me anyway, so I guess it's one less connection to their crappy servers anyway.

A POSIX mutex can be initialized via a call to a library function or, alternatively, it can be "statically initialized" with the constant value of PTHREAD_MUTEX_INITIALIZER, which initializes it and sets default attributes. It's not exactly "clearing the memory to 0", but it's along the lines of that train of thought

Could you elaborate on that kind of knowledge? I'm genuinely interested.

To me, it isn't about writing that weird code. It's about knowing what happens, so that I DO know when I really need to optimize and so that I DO know what's going on under the hood. I find it very important to understand the CPU and memory, how it all works. Many programmers still think of this as magic, and that's why they're programmers, not engineers. But this post mentions software engineering, not mere programming.

I've tried all versions of that picture that I could find and I've analysed the GIF. what you see is a tampered picture (first GIF frame) which has seen red pixels (red "noise") added in the shape of a possible HL3 logo. It's fake.

My "woosh!" was in agreement with the AC's response! I totally agree with it, and find it somewhat ironical that parent, the one with the mistake, stated that gp should "brush up on problem analysis 101".

woosh!

In fact, if you RTFA, you see that's what Dropbox does.

Patents are meaningless and hurt the overall market. There, I said it.

I present to you, uzbl

And don't forget statistics and data analysis!

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).

Then go RTFA!.

Oh, right, this is /. ...

AH! Brilliant, sir! Have all my internetz!