What I mean is that Google always has to do things the Google way whether that's an improvement or not. Whether this turns out to be a valuable contribution to the field will play out over the next few years. We'll see. But a company that makes their own DB, their own phone, their own programming languages, etc. is pretty much a prototypical "not invented here" company.
It does certainly smack of "Not-Invented-Here Syndrome," but compared to the Dilbert like project management culture of my job I rather admire it.
I've just been getting in to generic programming with C++ (Stepanov's new book, awesome). So the fact that they don't have templates or operator overloading (the two critical pieces to STL style) was a bit of a downer. That being said the interfaces concept reminded me of generic functions (in CLOS). Sounds pathetic but I probably will give it a try just because it's from Google -- but I'm quite skeptical. With the really interesting work going on with Haskell, Clojure, Fortress, etc. it seems a shame to stay so close to C.
Sorry for the generalization shimi. I thought for awhile about how to express that idea and couldn't think of a good way. But you're right, education and/or intelligence are not the predictors. I guess it just seems to me that it SHOULD be.
Also, though my statement is essentially indefensible, I did want to point out that I was not saying that all postal workers are uneducated, but rather was referring to the postal workers that had opened fire years ago as being the intersection of the set "uneducated" and the set "postal workers." I apologize.
I always thought this kind of thing was always done by uneducated postal workers and the like. Pretty disheartening to see a fellow engineer act so stupidly.
Time to reconsider getting a concealed weapons permit I guess. Condolences to Agarwal and Pugh's (and anon woman's) families.
If you're stuck in windows like I am at work you really need to try MS Powershell. It works great. I'm just as comfortable with it as I am with bash at home. It's object based scripting is quite cool also; you can do COM automation in a very simple manner. I do traditionally file maintenance stuff and more slick MS Office automation with Powershell. Totally recommend it if you have to use Windows.
Strang is the man. I actually bought this textbook to supplement my Calc III textbook because I was having a hard time (prof being crap didn't help). So I bought this text (which has multivariable at the end + a nice section on LinALg of course) and I dominated the last portion of the course. Great book.
I think he's saying that he IS an Apple employee (that eats at BJ's) not that he overheard it. The the patent link below seems to indicate that he's dead on.
Based on what you wrote you would hate Courant and Robbins What is Mathematics?, too rigorous. I think you would enjoy Mathematics from the Birth of Numbers by Jan Gullberg and Calculus Made Easy by Sylvanus Thompson.
You might also find Unknown Quantity interesting. I think Gullberg would be my #1 req for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RA-dMSDPFhA