mark-t

I had a perfectly good algorithm. It was a memoized recursion. The problem was that my program printed something like blah*10^27 and they were asking for an exact answer.

  1. Not real.
  2. Mac4Lin.
  3. Not absolutely clear, but note that thunar's internal menus are displayed in the toolbar instead of the window, like a mac. It could be Mac4Lin again, but I'm guessing it's not real, unless there's something about thunar I don't know.
  4. Enlightenment.
  5. Pekwm.
  6. Enlightenment.
  7. Could be anything. It does have a Gnome footprint on the bottom right, though, so I'd guess metacity.
  8. Fluxbox. (yay!)
  9. I'm not sure. Probably compiz-fusion.
  10. Could be anything.

How I got started is another story. I switched to linux because windows drove me crazy. Then Gnome and KDE drove me crazy. Then xfce drove me crazy. It became apparent that I had very specific needs, and nothing available was going to fill them. So, I chose something close to what I wanted (fluxbox) and started fixing things. Thus, I guess you could say I started because I'm picky.

Personally, I like to do contest problems. You can find tons and tons of them on John Scholes's website: http://www.kalva.demon.co.uk/ but they tend to be on the hard side. The AIME is possibly the easiest on there, and those are the sort of problems where the average high school only has one student every decade or so that can solve any.

There are contests for junior high students and less advanced high school students, too, but I can't find the problems online. There are books, though. You might want to look at the AMC 8, 10, and 12.

Or, you know, make some up. Think of a problem you've always been curious about, and try to solve it. There are forums online that can offer guidance. For example, I work on http://math2.org/mmb/ .

Personally, I find Lisp easier to write but much harder to read. The syntax certainly plays some role in that, but I don't think it's the key. The problem, I think, is that it's just too dense. When you use a lot of intermediate variables, you get to name them something relevant. But Lisp code (or at least my Lisp code) usually doesn't have all of this context floating around, so it's harder to figure out what's going on.

Maybe people have an easier time understanding other languages because they work in the same way the computer does.

Didn't take me long to find one in my scripts directory. Just imagine you're doing something similar by hand:

  #!/bin/bash

  # This script strips debugging symbols from programs and stores them separately.
  # They will be loaded by gdb when needed but will not take up memory when
  # running the program normally.

  # determine where to save debugging symbols
  DEBUG_PATH="/usr/lib/debug"
  if [[ ${EUID} != 0 ]]; then
    DEBUG_PATH="${HOME}/lib/debug";
  fi

  # go through list of command line arguments and split each one
  for x in "$@"
  do
    echo "Splitting ${x}"
    y="${DEBUG_PATH}${x}.debug"
    mkdir -p "$(dirname $y)"
    objcopy --only-keep-debug "${x}" "${y}" || continue
    objcopy --add-gnu-debuglink="${y}" "${x}" || continue
    chmod a-x,o-w "${y}"
    strip "${x}"
  done

As for down votes, they're only available to members who have enough karma. (Paul claimed 20 a while ago, though my experience didn't confirm that -- maybe you need 21)

I can assure you that any negative effects of skipping grades are far outweighed by the effects of holding students back. The latter fosters resentment and frustration, which doesn't help social aspects much. For the former, as long as you're sharing classes with advanced students in higher grades (and why wouldn't you be?), the older students are very welcoming.

Also, arrogance isn't a negative quality in talented math/science students -- it's essential. You just can't get really good at math unless you believe you can figure out difficult problems yourself. Maybe you don't have to admit it, but there's a point where denying your abilities looks foolish. The "I've played a lot of Number Munchers" line only works for so long.

Frankly, a belief that natural disasters only strike highly religious areas is quite strange, and I see no evidence for it. As Goladus pointed out, San Francisco gets earthquakes; that was also the first thing I thought of. But is there any part of the planet that doesn't suffer from natural disasters? I don't think anybody could make the original assertion without realizing these problems, and my explanation shouldn't be needed. If I could, I would have downmodded it.

Edit: Oh, they've managed to make it into a completely different URL. I guess that's slightly more usable than the previous system, if I open that URL before I start reading, but it would really be nice if there were links from the content. We'll see what GreaseMonkey has to say about it.