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PostPosted: Sun Sep 11, 2005 7:50 am 
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The Señor wrote:
nick012000 wrote:
krylex wrote:
However, what is pretty much the largest company on the face of the planet? It makes more money in a quarter than a great deal of nations of the world do in a year.

I'll give you a hint, Billy Gates is the principal shareholder.


Actually, Wal-Mart is the biggest company in the world, according to this.

Microsoft is #41.

that particular list is not well-liked because it bases company size on total revenues, not profits, which means it is totally biased towards retailers.


He's right. Total revenue != profit. Every single dell computer sold, Microsoft makes profit. Every single non-apple machine sold at a retailer like Wal-Mart - MS makes profit.

Profitwise, I believe its them at the top, or at least right there near it.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 10:03 pm 
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Tamayo wrote:
Thinman wrote:
If you're new to programming, I strongly suggest Python instead of C or assembly.


Yes, it is, indeed. Python really is pretty good. If I may be so bold, however, let me also recommend you learn Lisp, and you learn it from the masters by reading Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman.


If I might be a little less bold, I'd suggest learning Scheme with DrScheme. I'm not advocating one language over another, but DrScheme has a lot of tools built in to help novice programmers that I haven't seen in any LISP environments.


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PostPosted: Sat Oct 08, 2005 10:26 pm 
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Tamayo wrote:
Use the tool appropriate to the job. C++ is a tool, and for certain tasks, it is appropriate. It could be a better tool, yes; but it works. For tasks outside its purview, though, other tools are far better.


I think the biggest issue we face is when OOP concepts popularized by C++ are being used in enterprise systems.

The issue is that enterprise systems need to define their business logic, that is, define the structure of information and the dynamics of information and the ways in which huamsn are to interact with the system.

But object-oriented ideas are a bit loopy. Take inheritance as an example. Or look at the way C++ and languages that borrow from C++ readily convolve physical representation with logical meaning, largely due to the fact that C++ inherited C's style of programming just above assembler.

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For example, the processing cycles one can save by writing a database manager in C++ rather than Perl are completely irrelevant because database programs are always waiting for disk accesses, so the (relative) safety and convenience of using Perl rather than C++ is emphasised. By contrast, the very most time-critical parts of a video game are often written in assembly language.


A piece of advice to anyone considering a career in programming:

Optimization works like this. First, you get your software working correctly. Second, you profile. Third, you correct your biggest bottlenecks. Rinse, lather, repeat.

At no point do you make design decisions based on broad generalizations like "database programs are always waiting for disk accesses." Everyone means well when they write it, hell, I've written stuff like that. But don't believe it *until* you've profiled.

(Example of where a DBMS isn't limited by disk: when tables are in heap. If you were cogniscent of the logical/physical separation you wouldn't assume that the only way to implement a table is as a file on disk.)


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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 8:01 am 
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sco08y wrote:
If I might be a little less bold, I'd suggest learning Scheme with DrScheme. I'm not advocating one language over another, but DrScheme has a lot of tools built in to help novice programmers that I haven't seen in any LISP environments.


Dr. Scheme is what I learned Lisp with, and it ruined me for Lisp for 3 years. Avoid Dr. Scheme like the plauge upon mankind it is.

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PostPosted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 10:45 am 
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sco08y wrote:
But object-oriented ideas are a bit loopy. Take inheritance as an example. Or look at the way C++ and languages that borrow from C++ readily convolve physical representation with logical meaning, largely due to the fact that C++ inherited C's style of programming just above assembler.

I don't see this a a problem with OOP per se, as much as a problem with the way most programming languages have implemented Inheritance as inheritance by extension.

Under Java (for example) if you define class Circle as inheriting from class Ellipse, you are effectively stating, "<i>A Circle has all the attributes of an Ellipse, plus zero or more new new attributes</i>". On the other hand, it is also possible to define Inheritance as inheritance by restriction, which allows you to say "<i>A Circle has all the attributes of an Ellipse, subject to these constraints</i>". XML Schema is a good example of restriction-type inheritance.

Mapping between the two systems can be difficult and is certainly not one-to-one. This is one reason why SOAP is moving from a RPC model to a Document exchange model. It's rather easier to develop a loosely coupled document processing service than it is to try an map your entire public API to XML in a platform-independent fashion.

Quote:
Tamayo wrote:
Use the tool appropriate to the job. C++ is a tool, and for certain tasks, it is appropriate. It could be a better tool, yes; but it works. For tasks outside its purview, though, other tools are far better.


I think the biggest issue we face is when OOP concepts popularized by C++ are being used in enterprise systems.

The issue is that enterprise systems need to define their business logic, that is, define the structure of information and the dynamics of information and the ways in which huamsn are to interact with the system.

Again, how is this an OOP problem? If programmers habitually ignore Model-View-Controller separation, is that really a fault of the language?

As far as enterprise systems go, I'm currently working on a J2EE* framework. Everything falls out into separate pieces rather nicely. Business logic and transaction entry points in one place (Session beans), Event handler in another, Persistent Data in a third (Entity Beans) and an ephemeral data model shared with the client for easy communication.

I don't see how this is a problem unless you want to try and tie everything into one giant object model or something.


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*I do, in fact, like the majority of the J2EE architecture. The implementation of certain pieces is kind of crappy (HAY GUYS LETS USE XML DESCRIPTORS TO AVOID STATIC CODE CHECKING) and some pieces probably should not be built using Java/XML, but the majority of the framework is insanely useful for building server-type systems.

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PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:20 am 
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Sco08y wrote:
A piece of advice to anyone considering a career in programming:

Optimization works like this. First, you get your software working correctly. Second, you profile. Third, you correct your biggest bottlenecks. Rinse, lather, repeat.

At no point do you make design decisions based on broad generalizations like "database programs are always waiting for disk accesses." Everyone means well when they write it, hell, I've written stuff like that. But don't believe it *until* you've profiled.


(Emphasis mine.)

I will most humbly agree with everything you say here, with the exception of the phrase "at no point". Certainly, as you note, one must first get a working program. Actually coding any program should take far less time than designing it, because it is in the quality of a program's design that its maintainability and even usefulness becomes evident. Before one has a working program, though, one must rely on intuition and experience (and gosh! maybe even mathematical proof) that any given facet of the system will work correctly and satisfactorily. It is by such generalisations that you note there that original designs are chosen.

As for example, functional programmers have historically tended to use simple but very clear algorithms in their programs, and as a result, people have come to believe that functional programs are necessarily slow. While yes, it is simpler to use and comprehend an association list than a red-black tree, enshrining the frequent use of a large association list in your program in the design phase of the program will ensure that your program runs slowly. That's a mathematical statement, by the way, not a mere generalisation. Ideally, one would design for the requirement of a dictionary rather than an alist or a rbtree in particular; thus, when the alist showed itself insufficient, it would not be difficult to change the program to accommodate the rbtree.

You mention database views as an example of where memory access is more important that disk access. Yes, indeed, of course you're right, and naturally when manipulating such objects, it might become necessary to optimise -- for example, perhaps by means of rewriting a Perl module in C. (Though Perl, of course, is already superb at that kind of stuff.) A good design, though, should predict and accommodate such changes. It is in the prediction of and accommodation to the process of incremental refinement that a designer uses his or her intuition and experience.


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PostPosted: Wed Oct 26, 2005 11:50 pm 
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The Señor wrote:
(and yes, the first thing I did during a CS exam where I was forced to use a goddamn iMac (it's Carnegie Mellon. you'd think they'd use something better than iMacs for the CS machines... Linux desktops or SOMETHING. OSX is decent, but the mouse and keyboards are so bad. worse than laptop keyboards, for chrissakes.) was figure out how to set the meta key in a terminal so I could use Emacs instead of goddamn CodeWarrior. pfffft.)


OK, I just joined this forum to ask what happened to the Sun and Linux clusters in Wean?


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 27, 2005 6:49 am 
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bitwise wrote:
The Señor wrote:
(and yes, the first thing I did during a CS exam where I was forced to use a goddamn iMac (it's Carnegie Mellon. you'd think they'd use something better than iMacs for the CS machines... Linux desktops or SOMETHING. OSX is decent, but the mouse and keyboards are so bad. worse than laptop keyboards, for chrissakes.) was figure out how to set the meta key in a terminal so I could use Emacs instead of goddamn CodeWarrior. pfffft.)


OK, I just joined this forum to ask what happened to the Sun and Linux clusters in Wean?

Haha. Well, the Computing Services page claims to have clusters of Linux machines in the 5200 corridor... except they also claim to have only XP and Linux machines in Wean 5200? Huh. Maybe they moved all the iMacs to Hunt or something. Not like I care anymore--Linux laptop, yay. (And I don't think 211 is going to have a computer-based final, so it's moot. Hell, I don't think anything I'll take the rest of the time I'm here will have a computer-based final.)

Or are the big rows of classrooms the 5100 corridor and not officially clusters? I'm never on Wean 5 anymore, so I don't remember. But anyway, I assume those Linux boxes are what you're talking about. I guess they're still using iMacs for instruction, which strikes me as pretty weird. At least they're telling everyone in every class to use Eclipse now. Hell, my roommate is in programming 100, and they even use Eclipse.

Oh, Eclipse. I <3 you. Now, Thinny, write that genius kill ring and Emacs-shortcut module for it you were talking about that one night.

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PostPosted: Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:25 pm 
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The Señor wrote:
Haha. Well, the Computing Services page claims to have clusters of Linux machines in the 5200 corridor... except they also claim to have only XP and Linux machines in Wean 5200? Huh. Maybe they moved all the iMacs to Hunt or something. Not like I care anymore--Linux laptop, yay. (And I don't think 211 is going to have a computer-based final, so it's moot. Hell, I don't think anything I'll take the rest of the time I'm here will have a computer-based final.)

Or are the big rows of classrooms the 5100 corridor and not officially clusters? I'm never on Wean 5 anymore, so I don't remember. But anyway, I assume those Linux boxes are what you're talking about. I guess they're still using iMacs for instruction, which strikes me as pretty weird. At least they're telling everyone in every class to use Eclipse now. Hell, my roommate is in programming 100, and they even use Eclipse.

Oh, Eclipse. I <3 you. Now, Thinny, write that genius kill ring and Emacs-shortcut module for it you were talking about that one night.


My knowledge of Wean is more than 3 years old, so I don't remember which cooridor is which. There used to be a Linux and a Sun cluster, as well as a Windows cluster, in the cooridor behind the one where Mark Stehlik's office is located. But those are general-use clusters, so they probably would not be allocated for testing. You might have been allocated a room with iMacs, because they were short on rooms. Come to think of it, I can't remember taking an exam on computer for any CS class. The programming was done in projects; the tests were paper and pencil.


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PostPosted: Thu Oct 27, 2005 8:34 pm 
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bitwise wrote:
My knowledge of Wean is more than 3 years old, so I don't remember which cooridor is which. There used to be a Linux and a Sun cluster, as well as a Windows cluster, in the cooridor behind the one where Mark Stehlik's office is located. But those are general-use clusters, so they probably would not be allocated for testing. You might have been allocated a room with iMacs, because they were short on rooms. Come to think of it, I can't remember taking an exam on computer for any CS class. The programming was done in projects; the tests were paper and pencil.

100, 111, 113, and 200 CS classes have their finals on computers. I actually have never met Mark Stehlik, mainly because I'm not actually a CS major (yet! working on it. next semester, hopefully). 5100 is where the classroom clusters are (right hallway), and 5200 is where the clusters are. I know there are XP and Andrew Linux machines back there. However, I'm pretty sure that all of the Sun machines have been retired (or at least, I haven't seen any this year).

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 3:38 pm 
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If anyone still cares: Yes, the Sun machines are gone. The Linux machines remain. They were never all that different anyway, except the Suns were slower.

There's a pretty good balance of Windows, Mac and Linux clusters around campus. Of course, the Graphics cluster is pure linux.

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PostPosted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 3:55 pm 
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PS--I met Mark Stehlik. :P Gogo double major!

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