On the cruelty of really teaching computing science
The second part of this talk pursues some of the scientific and educational consequences of the assumption that computers represent a radical novelty. In order to give this assumption clear contents, we have to be much more precise as to what we mean in this context by the adjective "radical". We shall do so in the first part of this talk, in which we shall furthermore supply evidence in support of our assumption.
The usual way in which we plan today for tomorrow is in yesterday's vocabulary. We do so, because we try to get away with the concepts we are familiar with and that have acquired their meanings in our past experience. Of course, the words and the concepts don't quite fit because our future differs from our past, but then we stretch them a little bit. Linguists are quite familiar with the phenomenon that the meanings of words evolve over time, but also know that this is a slow and gradual process.
It is the most common way of trying to cope with novelty: by means of metaphors and analogies we try to link the new to the old, the novel to the familiar. Under sufficiently slow and gradual change, it works reasonably well; in the case of a sharp discontinuity, however, the method breaks down: though we may glorify it with the name "common sense", our past experience is no longer relevant, the analogies become too shallow, and the metaphors become more misleading than illuminating. This is the situation that is characteristic for the "radical" novelty.
Coping with radical novelty requires an orthogonal method. One must consider one's own past, the experiences collected, and the habits formed in it as an unfortunate accident of history, and one has to approach the radical novelty with a blank mind, consciously refusing to try to link it with what is already familiar, because the familiar is hopelessly inadequate. One has, with initially a kind of split personality, to come to grips with a radical novelty as a dissociated topic in its own right. Coming to grips with a radical novelty amounts to creating and learning a new foreign language that can not be translated into one's mother tongue. (Any one who has learned quantum mechanics knows what I am talking about.) Needless to say, adjusting to radical novelties is not a very popular activity, for it requires hard work. For the same reason, the radical novelties themselves are unwelcome.
By now, you may well ask why I have paid so much attention to and have spent so much eloquence on such a simple and obvious notion as the radical novelty. My reason is very simple: radical novelties are so disturbing that they tend to be suppressed or ignored, to the extent that even the possibility of their existence in general is more often denied than admitted.
On the historical evidence I shall be short. Carl Friedrich Gauss, the Prince of Mathematicians but also somewhat of a coward, was certainly aware of the fate of Galileo and could probably have predicted the calumniation of Einstein when he decided to suppress his discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, thus leaving it to Bolyai and Lobatchewsky to receive the flak. It is probably more illuminating to go a little bit further back, to the Middle Ages. One of its characteristics was that "reasoning by analogy" was rampant; another characteristic was almost total intellectual stagnation, and we now see why the two go together. A reason for mentioning this is to point out that, by developing a keen ear for unwarranted analogies, one can detect a lot of medieval thinking today.
The other thing I can not stress enough is that the fraction of the population for which gradual change seems to be all but the only paradigm of history is very large, probably much larger than you would expect. Certainly when I started to observe it, their number turned out to be much larger than I had expected.
For instance, the vast majority of the mathematical community has never challenged
Thats not correct. Intelligent science fiction movies (like Inception) do fine. But that just demonstrates why SyFy is failing.
Some of the most popular movies in recent times are science fiction. Inception, Avatar, District 9, Watchmen, Star Trek, Wall-E, Cloverfield, Serenity, and many more hugely popular films have been inarguably science fiction. Indeed its easier now to find popular science fiction in films than ever before. But notice that all of these films where not just simply science fiction. They where movies with engaging plots, characters, and worlds. They where movies which where more than monsters shooting aliens.
SyFy channel fundamentally does not understand this. SyFy doesn't get that its not about the spaceships, boobs, and guns. Audiences are increasingly sophisticated, and they expect there movies and TV shows to keep pace. Stupid writing, cheesy plots, and one dimensional characters simply no longer attract audiences.
Is no one here capable of considering the benefits of vertical integration. I bet a significant portion of the people posting here are posting from Macs. Macs that are controlled from head to tail by Apple. Most of these posters would break about how stable, quick, and integrated the use experience is. When asked if they would install windows, they would say no. All of them are too stupid to realize that there are benefits to the average consumer for vertical integration.
The FCC and the FTC have no grounds to stop this merger. You can not act against a company like a person simply because of what they might do, only what they do. If Comcast starts utilizing the position in a monopolistic manner than they can (and should) step in. Also, the FCC and FTC can certainly allow the merger with provisos on certain behavior to prevent abuse if it so please.
The lack of understanding about complex deals such as this that spend months getting approved is astounding. Its not like they just see the application and stamp it. This deal literally spent months waiting on the FCC to come to a decision. People need to give a little more thought than simply spouting off about how big corporation == evil.
feed an analog source directly off of a PC. Not a true audiophile anyways. The reality is any integrated PC sound card with integrated optical out (S/PDIF Over TOSLINK) is fine for the job. Why? Because a true audiophile is going to keep digital digital until it hits the pre-amp. While it is true that one card may out perform the other in the D to A conversion most people are going to notice more out of a decent pair of speakers than any money spent on a new card. On the other hand the audiophiles are going to be running a TOSLINK to the back of the pre-amp and than out from there on XLR cables to the amps. Generally amps that are kept as close as possible to the speakers as well.
A PC sound card outputting to a pair of headphones is a crap thing to test. The common 3.5mm headphone cables are utterly terrible at noise rejection (don't you love when you can hear your cellphone receiving a text?). They also run across a lost of noisy crap to get your ears (power-supply, monitor, and numerous other devices).
The key to true audio quality is to keep it digital as long as possible, and make as much of the analog runs as possible balanced.
The sad thing is that this kind of crap is endemic to the audio market as a whole. Audio is for the most part simple physics.
Yes... and no.
We WILL run out of IPV4 adresses but you are very likely to see large scale NAT (Network Adress Translation) for awhile before an eventual transition to IPV6.
For example most of the people I know (I fit in the younger generation category) have four to five passwords. They have a common trash password for sites they don't really care about being compromised (say slashdot). Than a different one for ones with personal data, but nothing critical. And than separate ones for email and financial stuff.
Yes they share passwords between sites, yes they share passwords with loved ones (duh). But this is all done in a "smart" manner, not a dumb one.
... and most companies use dedicated hardware encoders like those produced by envivo and others.
Besides that they still have to rigorously defend such a patent since this sounds like one of those that might get thrown out in court.
Stuff like BLAST is enormously complicated even for a Graduate level mathematician. If you actually want to contribute to these you should have taken several very in depth courses in numerical analysis.
Ironically one of the things Pew failed to account for is that Google's is one of the largest forms of media consumption on its own. Unlike Apple, where they MUST drive a new feature or product with advertising for it to be seen Google's new features appear on the Google frontpage. Probably the most visited site in the world (facebook has higher residence time though). No one reports the new Google doodle or search extensively because whats there to report? Everyone has already seen it. More importantly though Google has never really advertised extensively, not like Apple. And if you don't think advertisement dollars drive media focus in a huge way you are out of touch.
Ironically Google's success in some ways precludes it form media reporting. They don't really need to advertise, they are the word for internet search. They don't need to drive the hype that Apple spends billions of dollars on. When Google turned on instant search I never saw a single report on it. But everyone I knew, everyone, had an opinion immediately. Apples WISHES they could drive that kind of advertising with their heart and soul.
So your entire post contradicts itself in short. Being a warrior, being conditioned to follow orders has nothing to do with whether or not you are good at math and enjoy hard science. There are many, many people who are both. Trying to "sub-divide" it so that you are either a geek or a warrior is really, really stupid.
The real reason probably has a lot more to do with the fact that we're even sitting around here on a Saturday afternoon questioning the decision. Geeks tend to think they're smarter than everyone else (just because its usually true, doesn't mean it always is), tend to question authority, and hate to be told what to do. If you give a geek a little bit of authority, they tend to get extremely dictatorial over their small little domain.
The entire point is that this kind of stero-typing is both counterproductive and flat out stupid. The ability to make decisions under pressure has nothing to do with stuff like that. Many famous generals are noted for there intellectual pursuits. Does that make them "not suited to a chain of authority"? Infact spec-ops guys (say like McChrystal) are notorious for the disrespect for chains of command. Yet they are highly successful warriors.
Many of the problems people in this thread sound increasing like they are working for the IT department of a company whose primary business is elsewhere (like most IT people do). That there is aegism here isn't really surprising, executives who can not understand the value of technical experience are going to be endemic, because they themselves are not technical. However, my experience is that true IT companies (those whose primary business is IT), understand and value such experience. I work at a Fortune 100 IT technology company, and most of the office is over 40. That is most of the CODERS are over 40. That is because management is thoroughly technical and values a technical experience. However of the literally 100s of candidates we interview, of huge groups the ones that fail, fail because of two reasons regardless of age, lack of technical depth or lack of enthusiasm.
As others have mentioned though many older programmers work themselves into a corner, by refusing to keep up with modern technology.
If you are ones of those like the linked blog who think modern computing is no different from what you where doing twenty years ago your sorely mistaken. Yes there is a basis, but huge innovations have been made in the last twenty years. Just because you wrote assembler (I an undergrad have done so as well) doesn't mean you know jack about design patterns, or about languages based on CSP, or about minimizing context switching in a modern Linux kernel, or why a b-tree is faster on modern computers than a binary tree (hint the last two are related). It doesn’t matter how much experience you have, if you don’t keep up with this kind of stuff your not as good as that young gun “who hasn’t been there” but does know this kind of stuff.
The second factors as others have mentioned is simple enthusiasm. Anyone can be enthusiastic, yet many (old) programmers no longer seem to love the technology they are working with. True IT managers look for people who when presented with a hard problem jump up to the whiteboard and start drawing, eager to rip it apart. Age has nothing to do with this. Yet for some reason many old developers let this passion slip by them. The irony is this point leads to the first. Those who are truly enjoy what they work with don’t have any trouble keeping up, because well they enjoy working with it.
If you wish to hit iOS H.264 is your only option. Apple has very strict requirements on applications that stream over 3g, including a 60k/s variant. (If you don't mean actual streaming but just progressive download thats different). You can look those up on the Apple developer forums.
Slashdot Mirror
Thats not correct. Intelligent science fiction movies (like Inception) do fine. But that just demonstrates why SyFy is failing.
Some of the most popular movies in recent times are science fiction. Inception, Avatar, District 9, Watchmen, Star Trek, Wall-E, Cloverfield, Serenity, and many more hugely popular films have been inarguably science fiction. Indeed its easier now to find popular science fiction in films than ever before. But notice that all of these films where not just simply science fiction. They where movies with engaging plots, characters, and worlds. They where movies which where more than monsters shooting aliens.
SyFy channel fundamentally does not understand this. SyFy doesn't get that its not about the spaceships, boobs, and guns. Audiences are increasingly sophisticated, and they expect there movies and TV shows to keep pace. Stupid writing, cheesy plots, and one dimensional characters simply no longer attract audiences.
Sovereignty of a nation in revolution is questionable. Much of the (democratic) world subscribes to theories of "popular sovereignty."
Is no one here capable of considering the benefits of vertical integration. I bet a significant portion of the people posting here are posting from Macs. Macs that are controlled from head to tail by Apple. Most of these posters would break about how stable, quick, and integrated the use experience is. When asked if they would install windows, they would say no. All of them are too stupid to realize that there are benefits to the average consumer for vertical integration. The FCC and the FTC have no grounds to stop this merger. You can not act against a company like a person simply because of what they might do, only what they do. If Comcast starts utilizing the position in a monopolistic manner than they can (and should) step in. Also, the FCC and FTC can certainly allow the merger with provisos on certain behavior to prevent abuse if it so please. The lack of understanding about complex deals such as this that spend months getting approved is astounding. Its not like they just see the application and stamp it. This deal literally spent months waiting on the FCC to come to a decision. People need to give a little more thought than simply spouting off about how big corporation == evil.
feed an analog source directly off of a PC. Not a true audiophile anyways. The reality is any integrated PC sound card with integrated optical out (S/PDIF Over TOSLINK) is fine for the job. Why? Because a true audiophile is going to keep digital digital until it hits the pre-amp. While it is true that one card may out perform the other in the D to A conversion most people are going to notice more out of a decent pair of speakers than any money spent on a new card. On the other hand the audiophiles are going to be running a TOSLINK to the back of the pre-amp and than out from there on XLR cables to the amps. Generally amps that are kept as close as possible to the speakers as well.
A PC sound card outputting to a pair of headphones is a crap thing to test. The common 3.5mm headphone cables are utterly terrible at noise rejection (don't you love when you can hear your cellphone receiving a text?). They also run across a lost of noisy crap to get your ears (power-supply, monitor, and numerous other devices).
The key to true audio quality is to keep it digital as long as possible, and make as much of the analog runs as possible balanced.
The sad thing is that this kind of crap is endemic to the audio market as a whole. Audio is for the most part simple physics.
Yes ... and no.
We WILL run out of IPV4 adresses but you are very likely to see large scale NAT (Network Adress Translation) for awhile before an eventual transition to IPV6.
For example most of the people I know (I fit in the younger generation category) have four to five passwords. They have a common trash password for sites they don't really care about being compromised (say slashdot). Than a different one for ones with personal data, but nothing critical. And than separate ones for email and financial stuff. Yes they share passwords between sites, yes they share passwords with loved ones (duh). But this is all done in a "smart" manner, not a dumb one.
... and most companies use dedicated hardware encoders like those produced by envivo and others. Besides that they still have to rigorously defend such a patent since this sounds like one of those that might get thrown out in court.
Stuff like BLAST is enormously complicated even for a Graduate level mathematician. If you actually want to contribute to these you should have taken several very in depth courses in numerical analysis.
Ironically one of the things Pew failed to account for is that Google's is one of the largest forms of media consumption on its own. Unlike Apple, where they MUST drive a new feature or product with advertising for it to be seen Google's new features appear on the Google frontpage. Probably the most visited site in the world (facebook has higher residence time though). No one reports the new Google doodle or search extensively because whats there to report? Everyone has already seen it. More importantly though Google has never really advertised extensively, not like Apple. And if you don't think advertisement dollars drive media focus in a huge way you are out of touch.
Ironically Google's success in some ways precludes it form media reporting. They don't really need to advertise, they are the word for internet search. They don't need to drive the hype that Apple spends billions of dollars on. When Google turned on instant search I never saw a single report on it. But everyone I knew, everyone, had an opinion immediately. Apples WISHES they could drive that kind of advertising with their heart and soul.
Some of them are brilliant
So your entire post contradicts itself in short. Being a warrior, being conditioned to follow orders has nothing to do with whether or not you are good at math and enjoy hard science. There are many, many people who are both. Trying to "sub-divide" it so that you are either a geek or a warrior is really, really stupid.
The real reason probably has a lot more to do with the fact that we're even sitting around here on a Saturday afternoon questioning the decision. Geeks tend to think they're smarter than everyone else (just because its usually true, doesn't mean it always is), tend to question authority, and hate to be told what to do. If you give a geek a little bit of authority, they tend to get extremely dictatorial over their small little domain.
The entire point is that this kind of stero-typing is both counterproductive and flat out stupid. The ability to make decisions under pressure has nothing to do with stuff like that. Many famous generals are noted for there intellectual pursuits. Does that make them "not suited to a chain of authority"? Infact spec-ops guys (say like McChrystal) are notorious for the disrespect for chains of command. Yet they are highly successful warriors.
Because "warriors" have to be different from geeks? A good portion of the CS guys I know are ex-army. Several of them ex Delta.
Many of the problems people in this thread sound increasing like they are working for the IT department of a company whose primary business is elsewhere (like most IT people do). That there is aegism here isn't really surprising, executives who can not understand the value of technical experience are going to be endemic, because they themselves are not technical. However, my experience is that true IT companies (those whose primary business is IT), understand and value such experience. I work at a Fortune 100 IT technology company, and most of the office is over 40. That is most of the CODERS are over 40. That is because management is thoroughly technical and values a technical experience. However of the literally 100s of candidates we interview, of huge groups the ones that fail, fail because of two reasons regardless of age, lack of technical depth or lack of enthusiasm.
As others have mentioned though many older programmers work themselves into a corner, by refusing to keep up with modern technology. If you are ones of those like the linked blog who think modern computing is no different from what you where doing twenty years ago your sorely mistaken. Yes there is a basis, but huge innovations have been made in the last twenty years. Just because you wrote assembler (I an undergrad have done so as well) doesn't mean you know jack about design patterns, or about languages based on CSP, or about minimizing context switching in a modern Linux kernel, or why a b-tree is faster on modern computers than a binary tree (hint the last two are related). It doesn’t matter how much experience you have, if you don’t keep up with this kind of stuff your not as good as that young gun “who hasn’t been there” but does know this kind of stuff.
The second factors as others have mentioned is simple enthusiasm. Anyone can be enthusiastic, yet many (old) programmers no longer seem to love the technology they are working with. True IT managers look for people who when presented with a hard problem jump up to the whiteboard and start drawing, eager to rip it apart. Age has nothing to do with this. Yet for some reason many old developers let this passion slip by them. The irony is this point leads to the first. Those who are truly enjoy what they work with don’t have any trouble keeping up, because well they enjoy working with it.
If you wish to hit iOS H.264 is your only option. Apple has very strict requirements on applications that stream over 3g, including a 60k/s variant. (If you don't mean actual streaming but just progressive download thats different). You can look those up on the Apple developer forums.