"It's structed in a way that builds upon previous knowledge"
I hated chemistry, precisely because of the way it was structured.
They start by teaching you some model that works nothing like the actual thing works, so you have numerous exceptions to the rules the model provides. Which doesn't make sense...because then they say:
Here you have the next model, which is more accurate than the previous. Remember that previous model? It doesn't really work like that. That is why you had the exceptions, which this new model accounts for. But you were wayyy too stupid three weeks ago to learn all of this.
This goes on for at least one, maybe two more iterations.
History classes should build upon previous knowledge. Chemistry is just hopelessly confusing when taught that way, because your previous knowledge isn't a solid foundation, it's incomplete, and often just wrong.
I wish chemistry were taught in a way that didn't involve the inevitable, "But I thought there were circular energy levels..." question. If it's complicated, so be it.
If you don't think having a fleet of cars with battery powered drive-trains doesn't set Toyota up well for further innovation in electric vehicles, more power to you.
For one thing, it's difficult to do everything right from scratch. You'll see companies make changes to a model's drivetrain one year, chassis the next, etc. It's like programming -- a few small changes are much easier to test and fix than many large ones.
A hybrid is a huge change from a combustion engine, and it's not yet fully developed. Odds are that less expensive mass production of hybrids will allow innovation in other areas.
An electric drivetrain is at least a step forward, and sets Toyota up well to either eliminate the gasoline engine entirely or change it to something more efficient/environmentally friendly/cost effective.
Now, develop your idea by yourself until it's something useful, that other people might be interested in using.
After it's working, meaning that it doesn't crash, has most of the features, and is actually useful, post the code and documentation on Sourceforge (www.sourceforge.net).
From that point, you can use the various tools Sourceforge provides to manage your project and get feedback from users.
Pick one form of communication that developers will use, and stick with it. Provide updates and communicate new ideas before implementing them. Most times, someone else will suggest something else that will lead you in a different direction than originally planned, and often this just makes you more productive.
Count on doing almost all of the work by yourself, because with the thousands of active, interesting projects, you'll be lucky to get a lot of help. Nobody will be as attached or dedicated to your idea as you are.
But most importantly, it has to be useful and/or show a lot of promise before you do your first release, otherwise people will try it and get a bad impression.
>In a perfectly competitive market, the price will move towards the marginal cost of production.
First of all, this is only true if there is a competitive market for a commodity -- any item that can easily be replaced by another.
Music is not a commodity. I don't buy CD's by the pound, I buy the latest Van Morrison album. If I want the latest Van Morrison, but I get Britney Spears instead, I'm going to be pissed off. Each individual company has a monopoly on all music it sells, through copyright.
What the music companies are offering is not only specific, copyrighted music, but all the advertising and media that goes along with it.
There are unknown bands that are giving away their music for free, eating the production and distribution cost. If what people paid was actually dominated by production costs, these bands would go broke in short order because demand for their free music would skyrocket on the basis of it being free. But production cost doesn't set prices, demand does.
If the production cost of CD's went up 2 cents, would CD prices be $19.02 instead of $18.99? No, because demand wouldn't have changed one bit.
What nobody likes to admit is that the music industry, through advertising, production, and distribution, *creates value* for the product they are selling. 13 year old girls want what's on MTV. That's what's valuable to them. And that's the only reason prices haven't dropped...all this media frenzy stuff costs a ton of money, same as it always did.
I could start a company selling tar statues, and charge below what it cost me to make them, and I'd probably go out of business in short order. Why? There's no demand for tar statues, no matter how efficiently I can make them.
Not understanding this is why so many people are confused as to why the prices of some things don't drop, while others do. It's all about what people will willingly pay.
Economic fallacy #1: Prices are driven by cost of production.
There is greater demand for higher quality tracks with no restrictions. Hence, higher prices. Why? Because people will pay for it. Specifically, 13 year old girls will pay for it.
You might think that the price increase isn't worth it, based on previous experience. That's your perogative. But the 13 year old girls that haven't ever purchased a CD, can't tell the difference between the sound quality between an MP3 and a CD, and who are largest target for pop music, see it differently.
Because, when it comes right down to it, being able to see the person you're talking to in real time is just not that necessary, or even desirable, for most people. Definitely not worth the hassle if it takes any extra effort at all.
How much extra information is conveyed by the small picture of a person staring into a web cam? Not a whole lot. What difference would it make if you just saw a small picture of the person you're talking to? Again, not a whole lot.
The only use I've found for a web cam is sending video of my kids to my parents, but even then, a camcorder does a much better job.
I just think that a lot of the problems that Linux has making inroads is because until recently, nobody really had heard of it. It was the new kid on the block, which isn't something you're going to bet your business on, even if it makes financial sense in the short term. Everyone knew what Microsoft was.
Ten years later, most people have at least heard of Linux. In another ten years, people making decisions will have been hearing about it for twenty years. And in that time, Microsoft will have changed their development platform five times and released another two or three OS's that are catastrophes. The big advantage that Microsoft enjoyed -- being seen as the only vendor you can count on forever, won't be there anymore.
Microsoft can't compete technologically with a global distributed network of developers, and they can't compete with the entire web for web-apps. And once they lose that bulletproof image, they're done.
It might not happen soon, but it will happen quickly.
The reason engineers use Matlab is because it has a ton of stuff built in that is extremely useful to engineers.
So it's a very simple way to do quick and dirty simulations. Want an FFT, or a FIR filter? They're built-in.
I have a B.S. in CompSci and I'm doing my masters in EE. Because of my background, I can't stand the awful Matlab programming language that obviously started simple, and was continuously extended based on whatever the popular programming paradigm was at the time. I do all of my simulations in Lisp. But I have to write many things from scratch, like a function which generates average white gaussian noise. Matlab has a randn() function for that. And the Matlab plotting functions are much better than Gnuplot.
Not to mention, Matlab's built-in matrices are a real boon if you need them. Only Python comes close with Numpy and Scipy.
But anyone without a B.S. in comp sci would take ten times as long to do the things I do in Lisp. For them, Matlab is the obvious choice. For me, it's a toss up, but my preference was for a real general purpose programming language.
What would be really cool would be a Lisp->Matlab compiler.
The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. Sure, they've had the developers in the past, but I think it's only a matter of time before they jump ship.
Lots of people aren't too happy with Vista, and OS/X, Linux, and BSD are gaining ground.
The keys to the kingdom are backward compatibility, always an MS strong point. But the open-source community has this nailed -- the POSIX API's are over thirty years old, and won't change. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft changes just enough so that developers can't rely on them to be rock-solid anymore, and there will be a mass exodus.
It will start with specialized apps like video and audio editing software (already happened to some extent) and gradually will work its way through the entire business suite of tools.
Some years ago, I offered to write a Postgresql database app for a small business. They refused, saying they wanted to use SQL Server, even if it was more expensive, since "Microsoft isn't going anywhere anytime soon."
Today, I doubt there would be that same certainty. Ten years from now, I expect the tables will have completely turned, with Linux based apps seen as the "old reliables" that never go away.
Nobody argues the free market is infallible. If they do, don't listen.
What people argue is that the free market is "good enough," and is a system that is so complex and quick to react, that any attempt to regulate it for its own good should be looked at long and hard -- simply because it's so difficult to do better without detrimental ramifications, even with the best of intentions.
Natural monopolies are a problem and environmental costs are a problem, and are good targets for regulation.
"Imperfect information" -- I don't understand where this idea got started, but it's completely wrong when applied to free markets. It has to do with zero-sum games like the bond market where there are definitely winners and losers -- here, the guy with the best information wins.
In a free market, when a transaction takes place, the idea is that both parties are better off than they were before. I make a piece of furniture to sell you, you buy it because you can't make as good a piece of furniture for as low a price. I make a profit, and you profit by using your time more efficiently. We both win, despite the fact that I'm a furniture expert and you don't know every detail about the construction of the chair I sold you.
In fact, it's precisely this reason, that you don't need to have perfect information to participate to your advantage, that the free market works.
No, it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got in a free society.
Think about how much larger and heavier an AK-47 round is compared to an M-16 round.
Now multiply that by the number of soldiers in your army.
Moving ammunition around is a non-trivial consideration, and the smaller and lighter, the better it is logistically.
Of course, you have to consider whether the cartridge you've chosen will get the job done, but in the vast majority of cases, the M-16 will work just fine.
The M-16 is also much easier to shoot, with lower recoil, and greater accuracy at typical combat ranges.
On the other hand, the M-14 is a lot more fun to shoot.
Women don't need to be told this. Some women actually go to places with favorable ratios for this very reason. Men do it too.
It's hilarious when you consider how revolting most comp sci students must be to not attract at least a minimal number of women into the major for this reason alone.
broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders
You can't measure this, which means it's shorthand for "whoever we feel like picking."
Which means they'll take a woman with no programming experience over someone with a history of interest in computers specifically, just because she's a woman.
More power to them. The competition in the field just got that much easier for those of us who had a real education.
As much as I hate political correctness, I sure as hell can't escape the realization that policies like these only benefit me personally. No, I'm not a minority woman.
This is all part of the growing pains of a relatively new, hot field. This too shall pass.
If you can't handle the political correctness, you guys should hop on over to the Electrical Engineering department. There's absolutely no effort to dumb things down to recruit girls here -- the math is about 20 dB more difficult, and there's no way around that.
Besides that, if you do encounter a girl, odds are about 2 to 1 she doesn't even speak English.
So come on over to EE. Nobody cares how socially inept you are here. The nerd factor has been converted to the frequency domain, where it's just lost in the noise.
There will come a time when network access will be as ubiquitous. I'm assuming that people will find this sufficient, much as they take the availability of electricity for granted.
The only problem for web apps is latency. Even with today's bandwidth, the compressed X protocol works just fine for the vast majority of applications, but the latency is the killer.
My prediction is that unless we find a way to communicate at faster than the speed of light, network latency will always drive data storage and applications toward the end points of the network. Maybe not all the way to the end, but you'll never be more than a hop or two away from most of the apps you use and the data you work on.
Really, RAM is a slow cache between your hard drive and your CPU. For web apps, the hard drive is a cache between the network data and RAM.
We'll transition to a web-app only infrastructure when caching no longer makes sense, which I don't think will happen for a long, long time, if ever.
The public (or, at least the members of the public who weren't losing family members) would still think that this clusterfuck was the best thing since sliced bread if it weren't for the New York Times and their ilk pointing out what a dismal failure it has been.
It is possible that reasonable people disagree, but you and I agree on a lot more than you might realize. In fact, the only thing I really disagree with you on is the above point you made.
I think it's reasonable to consider that the constant battery of criticism became a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially considering the nature of the people and ideology that the U.S. is fighting and the tactics that they would have to use to win. This is a media war as much as anything. Terrorism is a psychological tactic that has no effect without the media support -- you really can't separate the two.
I also think that if you really thought the war was a total lost cause from the beginning, that you'd have a much stronger argument against it if you don't do anything to undermine it and it still fails. Then you could say something like, "We did everything we could to support a bad decision, it still failed, lesson learned."
Personally, I think that's the mature and honorable approach in this case. There are very few blunders that are so bad that nothing good can come of them, and I don't believe that OIF was one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
"It's structed in a way that builds upon previous knowledge"
I hated chemistry, precisely because of the way it was structured.
They start by teaching you some model that works nothing like the actual thing works, so you have numerous exceptions to the rules the model provides. Which doesn't make sense...because then they say:
Here you have the next model, which is more accurate than the previous. Remember that previous model? It doesn't really work like that. That is why you had the exceptions, which this new model accounts for. But you were wayyy too stupid three weeks ago to learn all of this.
This goes on for at least one, maybe two more iterations.
History classes should build upon previous knowledge. Chemistry is just hopelessly confusing when taught that way, because your previous knowledge isn't a solid foundation, it's incomplete, and often just wrong.
I wish chemistry were taught in a way that didn't involve the inevitable, "But I thought there were circular energy levels..." question. If it's complicated, so be it.
The Confederacy started the war when they took Fort Sumter. Lincoln was trying to avoid war at all costs. It didn't work.
If you don't think having a fleet of cars with battery powered drive-trains doesn't set Toyota up well for further innovation in electric vehicles, more power to you.
I think the opposite is true.
One of the replies below contains a spoiler for the last episode of Lost.
Don't read further if you don't want to know.
Man, the trolls are everywhere.
The automotive industry evolves slowly.
For one thing, it's difficult to do everything right from scratch. You'll see companies make changes to a model's drivetrain one year, chassis the next, etc. It's like programming -- a few small changes are much easier to test and fix than many large ones.
A hybrid is a huge change from a combustion engine, and it's not yet fully developed. Odds are that less expensive mass production of hybrids will allow innovation in other areas.
An electric drivetrain is at least a step forward, and sets Toyota up well to either eliminate the gasoline engine entirely or change it to something more efficient/environmentally friendly/cost effective.
So you have an idea, that's the first step.
Now, develop your idea by yourself until it's something useful, that other people might be interested in using.
After it's working, meaning that it doesn't crash, has most of the features, and is actually useful, post the code and documentation on Sourceforge (www.sourceforge.net).
From that point, you can use the various tools Sourceforge provides to manage your project and get feedback from users.
Pick one form of communication that developers will use, and stick with it. Provide updates and communicate new ideas before implementing them. Most times, someone else will suggest something else that will lead you in a different direction than originally planned, and often this just makes you more productive.
Count on doing almost all of the work by yourself, because with the thousands of active, interesting projects, you'll be lucky to get a lot of help. Nobody will be as attached or dedicated to your idea as you are.
But most importantly, it has to be useful and/or show a lot of promise before you do your first release, otherwise people will try it and get a bad impression.
>In a perfectly competitive market, the price will move towards the marginal cost of production.
First of all, this is only true if there is a competitive market for a commodity -- any item that can easily be replaced by another.
Music is not a commodity. I don't buy CD's by the pound, I buy the latest Van Morrison album. If I want the latest Van Morrison, but I get Britney Spears instead, I'm going to be pissed off. Each individual company has a monopoly on all music it sells, through copyright.
What the music companies are offering is not only specific, copyrighted music, but all the advertising and media that goes along with it.
There are unknown bands that are giving away their music for free, eating the production and distribution cost. If what people paid was actually dominated by production costs, these bands would go broke in short order because demand for their free music would skyrocket on the basis of it being free. But production cost doesn't set prices, demand does.
If the production cost of CD's went up 2 cents, would CD prices be $19.02 instead of $18.99? No, because demand wouldn't have changed one bit.
What nobody likes to admit is that the music industry, through advertising, production, and distribution, *creates value* for the product they are selling. 13 year old girls want what's on MTV. That's what's valuable to them. And that's the only reason prices haven't dropped...all this media frenzy stuff costs a ton of money, same as it always did.
I could start a company selling tar statues, and charge below what it cost me to make them, and I'd probably go out of business in short order. Why? There's no demand for tar statues, no matter how efficiently I can make them.
Not understanding this is why so many people are confused as to why the prices of some things don't drop, while others do. It's all about what people will willingly pay.
Economic fallacy #1: Prices are driven by cost of production.
There is greater demand for higher quality tracks with no restrictions. Hence, higher prices. Why? Because people will pay for it. Specifically, 13 year old girls will pay for it.
You might think that the price increase isn't worth it, based on previous experience. That's your perogative. But the 13 year old girls that haven't ever purchased a CD, can't tell the difference between the sound quality between an MP3 and a CD, and who are largest target for pop music, see it differently.
"Anyone have any insight as to why that is?"
Because, when it comes right down to it, being able to see the person you're talking to in real time is just not that necessary, or even desirable, for most people. Definitely not worth the hassle if it takes any extra effort at all.
How much extra information is conveyed by the small picture of a person staring into a web cam? Not a whole lot. What difference would it make if you just saw a small picture of the person you're talking to? Again, not a whole lot.
The only use I've found for a web cam is sending video of my kids to my parents, but even then, a camcorder does a much better job.
I just think that a lot of the problems that Linux has making inroads is because until recently, nobody really had heard of it. It was the new kid on the block, which isn't something you're going to bet your business on, even if it makes financial sense in the short term. Everyone knew what Microsoft was.
Ten years later, most people have at least heard of Linux. In another ten years, people making decisions will have been hearing about it for twenty years. And in that time, Microsoft will have changed their development platform five times and released another two or three OS's that are catastrophes. The big advantage that Microsoft enjoyed -- being seen as the only vendor you can count on forever, won't be there anymore.
Microsoft can't compete technologically with a global distributed network of developers, and they can't compete with the entire web for web-apps. And once they lose that bulletproof image, they're done.
It might not happen soon, but it will happen quickly.
The reason engineers use Matlab is because it has a ton of stuff built in that is extremely useful to engineers.
So it's a very simple way to do quick and dirty simulations. Want an FFT, or a FIR filter? They're built-in.
I have a B.S. in CompSci and I'm doing my masters in EE. Because of my background, I can't stand the awful Matlab programming language that obviously started simple, and was continuously extended based on whatever the popular programming paradigm was at the time. I do all of my simulations in Lisp. But I have to write many things from scratch, like a function which generates average white gaussian noise. Matlab has a randn() function for that. And the Matlab plotting functions are much better than Gnuplot.
Not to mention, Matlab's built-in matrices are a real boon if you need them. Only Python comes close with Numpy and Scipy.
But anyone without a B.S. in comp sci would take ten times as long to do the things I do in Lisp. For them, Matlab is the obvious choice. For me, it's a toss up, but my preference was for a real general purpose programming language.
What would be really cool would be a Lisp->Matlab compiler.
The writing is on the wall for Microsoft. Sure, they've had the developers in the past, but I think it's only a matter of time before they jump ship.
Lots of people aren't too happy with Vista, and OS/X, Linux, and BSD are gaining ground.
The keys to the kingdom are backward compatibility, always an MS strong point. But the open-source community has this nailed -- the POSIX API's are over thirty years old, and won't change. It's only a matter of time before Microsoft changes just enough so that developers can't rely on them to be rock-solid anymore, and there will be a mass exodus.
It will start with specialized apps like video and audio editing software (already happened to some extent) and gradually will work its way through the entire business suite of tools.
Some years ago, I offered to write a Postgresql database app for a small business. They refused, saying they wanted to use SQL Server, even if it was more expensive, since "Microsoft isn't going anywhere anytime soon."
Today, I doubt there would be that same certainty. Ten years from now, I expect the tables will have completely turned, with Linux based apps seen as the "old reliables" that never go away.
Do these "signs" translate themselves to many different languages so tourists in the city can figure out where they are?
Those damn Amish, what with their imprisoning animals and eating animal products.
-Vegan environmentalist
Nobody argues the free market is infallible. If they do, don't listen.
What people argue is that the free market is "good enough," and is a system that is so complex and quick to react, that any attempt to regulate it for its own good should be looked at long and hard -- simply because it's so difficult to do better without detrimental ramifications, even with the best of intentions.
Natural monopolies are a problem and environmental costs are a problem, and are good targets for regulation.
"Imperfect information" -- I don't understand where this idea got started, but it's completely wrong when applied to free markets. It has to do with zero-sum games like the bond market where there are definitely winners and losers -- here, the guy with the best information wins.
In a free market, when a transaction takes place, the idea is that both parties are better off than they were before. I make a piece of furniture to sell you, you buy it because you can't make as good a piece of furniture for as low a price. I make a profit, and you profit by using your time more efficiently. We both win, despite the fact that I'm a furniture expert and you don't know every detail about the construction of the chair I sold you.
In fact, it's precisely this reason, that you don't need to have perfect information to participate to your advantage, that the free market works.
No, it's not perfect, but it's the best we've got in a free society.
Not true anymore, we bumped it up to 65mph.
Think about how much larger and heavier an AK-47 round is compared to an M-16 round.
Now multiply that by the number of soldiers in your army.
Moving ammunition around is a non-trivial consideration, and the smaller and lighter, the better it is logistically.
Of course, you have to consider whether the cartridge you've chosen will get the job done, but in the vast majority of cases, the M-16 will work just fine.
The M-16 is also much easier to shoot, with lower recoil, and greater accuracy at typical combat ranges.
On the other hand, the M-14 is a lot more fun to shoot.
Why yes, since it's not the first huge tunnel, we're starting to see the economies of scale kick in.
That's because here in the U.S., people care about sports -- enough not to let some idiotic social theory ruin their teams chances at success.
I'm sitting in a data structures class right now.
Pay attention, stop socializing.
Women don't need to be told this. Some women actually go to places with favorable ratios for this very reason. Men do it too.
It's hilarious when you consider how revolting most comp sci students must be to not attract at least a minimal number of women into the major for this reason alone.
broad interests, diverse perspectives and whether applicants seem to have potential to be future leaders
You can't measure this, which means it's shorthand for "whoever we feel like picking."
Which means they'll take a woman with no programming experience over someone with a history of interest in computers specifically, just because she's a woman.
More power to them. The competition in the field just got that much easier for those of us who had a real education.
As much as I hate political correctness, I sure as hell can't escape the realization that policies like these only benefit me personally. No, I'm not a minority woman.
Thank you, closet bigots!
This is all part of the growing pains of a relatively new, hot field. This too shall pass.
If you can't handle the political correctness, you guys should hop on over to the Electrical Engineering department. There's absolutely no effort to dumb things down to recruit girls here -- the math is about 20 dB more difficult, and there's no way around that.
Besides that, if you do encounter a girl, odds are about 2 to 1 she doesn't even speak English.
So come on over to EE. Nobody cares how socially inept you are here. The nerd factor has been converted to the frequency domain, where it's just lost in the noise.
But only if you have access to electricity!
There will come a time when network access will be as ubiquitous. I'm assuming that people will find this sufficient, much as they take the availability of electricity for granted.
The only problem for web apps is latency. Even with today's bandwidth, the compressed X protocol works just fine for the vast majority of applications, but the latency is the killer.
My prediction is that unless we find a way to communicate at faster than the speed of light, network latency will always drive data storage and applications toward the end points of the network. Maybe not all the way to the end, but you'll never be more than a hop or two away from most of the apps you use and the data you work on.
Really, RAM is a slow cache between your hard drive and your CPU. For web apps, the hard drive is a cache between the network data and RAM.
We'll transition to a web-app only infrastructure when caching no longer makes sense, which I don't think will happen for a long, long time, if ever.
The public (or, at least the members of the public who weren't losing family members) would still think that this clusterfuck was the best thing since sliced bread if it weren't for the New York Times and their ilk pointing out what a dismal failure it has been.
It is possible that reasonable people disagree, but you and I agree on a lot more than you might realize. In fact, the only thing I really disagree with you on is the above point you made.
I think it's reasonable to consider that the constant battery of criticism became a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially considering the nature of the people and ideology that the U.S. is fighting and the tactics that they would have to use to win. This is a media war as much as anything. Terrorism is a psychological tactic that has no effect without the media support -- you really can't separate the two.
I also think that if you really thought the war was a total lost cause from the beginning, that you'd have a much stronger argument against it if you don't do anything to undermine it and it still fails. Then you could say something like, "We did everything we could to support a bad decision, it still failed, lesson learned."
Personally, I think that's the mature and honorable approach in this case. There are very few blunders that are so bad that nothing good can come of them, and I don't believe that OIF was one of them.