I studied “computation” at Oxford 92-95 while CAR Hoare was still there and basically all they taught us about computers were these formal methods. They actually thought it would revolutionise programming and looked down at anything else as “hand-waving”. Think the syllabus was abandoned only a few years later thank goodness.
Interesting to hear your experience. I was there 94–97, when the curriculum was still pretty heavy on formal methods (and functional programming).
For me it was wonderful. I already knew how to write computer programs, as that's what I had spent most of my waking hours doing before that point, but learning how to think rigorously about the correctness of programs was a revelation to me.
I studied "Mathematics and Computation" there in 89-92 because they seemed to think that "computation" was a fad that was probably going away, so you couldn't let people study just "Computation".
There was a certain amount of formal methods, but only in a perfunctory manner, as if to satisfy an inconvenient requirement. Some functional programming, but in an extremely shallow way. Overall, I did not learn a single useful thing in 3 years.
I followed this up with Ph.D. in Computer Science somewhere else, which was also a complete waste of time.
Not a single useful thing? A complete waste of time? Really not anything that you found intriguing or thought-provoking for its own sake? I did the same course nine years later and found it very stimulating, even if it wasn't always directly "applicable" so to speak. But perhaps the syllabus had changed a bit by then.
What I learned from these comments sharing their experiences from one time to another is that the curriculum evolved and no one had the same experience.
Not to mention how individuals perceive things - two students with similar aptitude in the same class can still have their own very different experiences.
Still a strong presence in 98-01 but also lots of functional programming, algorithms and complexity and the tail end of the parallel research boom. I loved it.
Actually it goes straight back to the Apple TV remote without having to unlock. Not sure what the time limit is but it works after the device has gone to sleep and otherwise locked itself.
Am I unusual in being constantly surprised when people assume time's arrow in everyday conversation? I can never quite accept the sheer oddness and asymmetry of it.
Does that mean you are uncomfortable - or whatever I should call it - with the implied time ordering of events like an egg sitting on the table and then falling down and smashing on the floor?
I was just thinking about this the other day. Yes, a memory-mapped-file is different, because the API is still that of a file. The memory mapping is just a behind-the-scenes optimisation.
Only if you want posix compliance across threads and such. If you just want the contents of the file memory mapped nothing stops you from setting up a shared memory segment and mapping it without that filesystem overhead.
Does that work for writes as well? I am not sure if it would work without the OS setting up traps for writes to the pages or explicit flush calls from the app. In the former case, it would be very inefficient, and in the latter, it wouldn't be a clean write-and-forget system.
What a pros-and-cons evaluation of a culture misses is that cultures are "self-modifying code", with the weakest attributes constantly being revised. Few cultures are modernising as quickly as Korean. After all, Korean Air decided that Korean Air had a problem.
Where this process of introspection and change falls down is with expats and their children, who have detailed knowledge of and an exaggerated respect for the culture they left behind but are unable to play a role in changing it. Culture becomes a museum exhibit to these people. (I would be surprised if 'The Korean' lives in Korea.) As someone who knows lots of Koreans but few Korean Americans, I can say that after a few bottles of soju and speaking their native language, nobody is more aware of and passionate about resolving the problems in their own culture than a Korean.
When I sold my company, our own advisers (not Goldman but a famous name) did something which in my opinion is much worse -- I'm 99% sure they told the winning bidder that we'd been prepared to accept a 20% lower bid from their competitor. The winning bidder, of course, then suddenly reduced their bid by 20% on the planned day of completion. The reason our advisers did this is that it was much more important to them to get future business from the buyer, a large multinational, than future business from me and my colleagues.
I feel sorry for the vendors in this case, but you don't do an all-share deal without being extremely cautious about the shares you're taking as payment. Even a pair of PhDs should have known that.
What interests me here is that we have a lot of news stories floating around at the moment lambasting financial companies for relatively minor misdeeds, because that's all journalists can pin on them without getting sued. If the real truth about what goes on begins to leak out the public reaction could be very interesting.
> don't do an all-share deal without being extremely cautious about the shares you're taking as payment.
This.
Cash is king. Unless your acquirer is Intel, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon or anyone of the other big boys.
One must remember: If someone is swapping their stock for yours - then they, by definition, value their stock less than they do yours. That's a losing deal in anyone's books. If they say they need the cash for growth - call BS - since if they grow that fast they should hold onto every last bit of their stock.
On the other hand that's a standard negotiating ploy.
How many times, when buying a car, are you minutes from closing the deal when suddenly a new fee appears. Or suddenly an issue with your trade-in and it's not worth what they "thought" it was. It only changes your monthly payment by $10... do you really want to walk away after the effort you've put in to this point?
So not necessarily anything nefarious going on (though not discounting the possibility entirely).
> do you really want to walk away after the effort you've put in to this point?
Can you afford not to? The company you're dealing with has now proven to be unwilling to stick to the points you spent all that time negotiating. They're counting on you conceding the $10 because it's easy.
Unless you show that you're willing to walk away and start all over from scratch (preferably with someone else), they'll push as hard as they think they can get away with.
