I don't think I could honestly trust in the abilities of any programmer who hasn't had a serious discrete math class, without that being matched by years of actively failing at good design and learning the more fundamental pitfalls and ways around them the hard way.
Settle down, they're talking about creating "Web Developers" not programmers.
You won't be able to generate or store hydrogen at your house.
Says who? I've got a couple of test tubes, water and electricity...
The important question is does it scale?
No. The important question is does it run Linux? It's a given that it runs NetBSD - sure, my toaster does.
I just don't think you'll find many in the younger crowd of coders to be humble enough to think that 1) their code could be buggy, or 2) that something/someone else could fix it. The only people I run into that talk about hard and true reliable coding as a standard are over 45 years old. All the young bucks think its impossible.
I think it's a matter of experience and maturity. I'm 51 and have been a (mostly) Unix system programmer and admin since while in college. I've worked on all sorts of systems from Linux/Windows PCs to a Cray 2 and YMP and I'm used to having to account for the unexpected. I try to teach the young padawans on my team to think about what could possibly go wrong, and discuss this more with others as the importance of something rises, and to expect the unexpected. An example I offer is an error message I once got from Tcsh way back - "Assertion botch: This can't happen!" Obviously this is balanced against how critical the code/usage is and the famous "cheap, fast, good - pick two" triangle along with the practical aspects of customer/contract needs and requirements. I also stress trying to understand *why* something works, or needs to work, the way it does, not just *how*.
The most important thing seems to be curiosity and a desire to (really) learn and understand how to solve problems, not just solving them. Find the right youngster, give them support and the right environment and some time to learn. Of course, the really hard part is finding the right person.
Give a man a compiler and he'll generate code; teach him to write a compiler and he'll get hooked on caffeine, go crazy, quit and spend his remaining days curled up in a ball sobbing and muttering about Yacc and Lex - or something like that...
...also there is the inertia of so many scientists and engineers...
Sounds like words of a youngster who doesn't know that newer isn't always better.
The number of floating point operations (FLOPS) performed by a next-generation game console outranks early days supercomputers like the Cray.
Sure, but do they have the system capability / bandwidth to actually do anything with those numbers and is their raw speed offset by not being vector processors like the Cray 2 (process an entire array of data in 1 instruction)? I'm not a hardware geek, but was an administrator for the Cray 2 at the NASA Langley Research Center back in the mid 1980s and, among other things, wrote a proof-of-concept program in C to perform Fast Fourier transforms on wind tunnel data in near real time - probably would have been faster had I been a FORTRAN geek - and the system could pump through quite a bit of data - at least for the 80s.
And the Cray 2 was way prettier than a PS3/4 or Xbox, though the Fluorinert immersion used for cooling is a bit cumbersome and expensive
Kamikazes Per Hour?
Kardashians Per Hour - (the official business model units of E! Entertainment Television)
with anyone using Netflix's traditional cheap-ass bandwidth provider, Cogent. You can make a reasonable argument that Netflix is unique and should be given a pass on paying for transit because of customers of the ISP wanting that data But from the ISP's perspective
So, apparently, your complaint is that because NetFlix doesn't pay enough initially, by using Cogent, they should have to pay more to someone else? How much should NetFlix pay to Cogent to avoid having to pay a toll to Comcast/Verizon/etc... for fair access to those networks over and above the peering agreement and fees Cogent has with those other networks? How much money / profit *should* the last-mile ISPs be guaranteed, over and above the fees it collects from those last-mile users?
When President Lawnchair
You do know that President Deer in the Headlights wasn't any better.
Rather than using the existing WebRTC standard, though..., Microsoft has
So they're simply skipping their traditional embrace, extend, extinguish process. Efficient.
Japan has now put 100 passengers on a Maglev train doing over 500kph.
Were they volunteers?
I know you are joking, but the line was plagiarized/borrowed. The original line was "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property". But It wasn't simply about the right to accumulate a bunch of luxuries; in context, it was referring to the pursuit of things that are somehow relevant to a satisfying and productive life. So it would be the right to pursue home ownership for your family, maybe fields for farming, and for many
Take it from someone who, at 51, is debt-free, has a net-worth of almost $2M, but lost his wife in 2006 after 20 years together, "property" does not make "happiness". Though having "things" might make your pursuit of satisfaction and/or productivity (whatever that means to you) easier, property is a means to an end. Happiness is something you realize from within and, possibly, experience with someone else.
Even after 20 years together, Sue and I held hands where ever we went - I miss that and nothing else I have can, or could ever, compensate for losing her. Remember Sue...
The line is better written as, "the pursuit of happiness."
The question is: does the Wheeler-DeWitt equation allow this? "We prove that once a small true vacuum bubble is created, it has the chance to expand exponentially," say the researchers.
And then there's this from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory, which states that this has already happened.[
When and why did being an idiot become a right?
It's right there in the Declaration of Independence (for people in the US anyway) -- "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" -- and ignorance is bliss (or so I've heard...)
There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
