I really, really like computers. Played on 'em as a kid endlessly, and learned a lot that way. And I really think schools should not be buying lots of computers.
It's not that computers are bad, or good; it's a question of what they're bad or good compared to. Every dollar that goes to buying a computer and then maintaining that computer is a dollar that could have gone towards more textbooks or paying/training teachers better (hopefully attracting/producing better teachers). And if you're going to justify a large budget item
for a school or for teaching a child at home, you'd better make sure your scarce dollars are going where they can do the most good.
Computers and the internet can be great tools. There are really good pieces of educational
software out there. Most are garbage, of course,
but there are some good ones. And the internet
can be a great reference, if you sit down and
teach the kids actual research skills. (Yes, there are research skills beyond
``go to http://www.google.com, type in what you want, and print out what you get.'') And besides
using them as tools, you might reasonably want to teach a `computer skills' or even programming sort of class where the computers are an end in themselves.
But to do this properly requires thinking the use of the computers through carefully; training the teachers both how to use them and how to teach the children to use them; and spending the money it takes to buy the computers and keep them maintained and useful. And this generally isn't done. Classrooms worth of computers are bought, used for a bit in not-horribly-useful ways, and frequently it never goes beyond that.
Sure, even then, there will be kids who find the
computers and start playing with them on their own and learn a lot; but those aren't the kids you have to worry about, they'll learn on their own pretty much no matter what you do. Buying labs of computers for a few kids isn't the way to go; set up a few in the library and in one or two classrooms.
Certainly schools should have a few computers available. But the biggest problems in todays
schools, and with the education of todays kids, are not that the kids
don't have expensive computers on their desks.
Hire a Seasoned Programming Manager It's one thing to hack together a couple of small little programs to do some ad hoc tasks. It's quite another thing to develop code
I can't even begin to agree with this poster enough.
In science, there is a (usually quite healthy)
avoidence of ``management'' in any sense. And for small enough projects, that's ok.
But if you are going to be doing any serious amount of computational work and you don't have
any in-house computational experience, you will
be setting yourself up for disaster. (Can you imagine trying to start a large experimental project without any in-house experimental experience?) There will be a guaranteed disconnect between you and your
programming staff (who will almost certainly
be inexperienced if they are to be affordable).
And there's no good outcome possible here. Even
if they are the most talented coders in the world,
if you two can't speak a common language, you can't possibly expect things to work well.
Hire someone experienced in scientific computing -- it could be a graduate of the field who does computational work now, or it could be someone from the more CS side of things -- to be in charge of computational work. If it's a small enough project, they can spend some time doing coding, too; but likely you'll have a young coder or two, too.
Please trust me on this; I've seen projects
fail or do very poorly because of exactly this
problem.
This article is typical of an overload of the
term "computer science" by people who don't draw
distinctions finely enough.
There are (at least) three distinct areas where you need a term using words like computer and
science. They are:
Computing Science (or Computer Science) -- typical CS stuff; algorithms research, working on good models of computation.
Kind of a cross between pure mathematics and
Operations Research; lots of good stuff here,
but not really science in the hypothesis/test/conclusions sense.
Scientific Computing The part of CS particularly focused on scientific applications. Numerical methods, especially for PDE solving or
simulation; efficient parallel (or serial) algorithms for typical science applications; maybe even including things like parallel IO .
Computational Science Like theoretical science or experiemental science or observational science, this is science-of-choice
done using a particular tool; here, computer simulations or calculations. The first two were focused on computation, possibly with science as
an application; this one is focused on science,
with computing as a tool.
The distinctions are important, because otherwise
its hard to talk intelligently about science
and computing, as we see in the NYT article.
If the article read ``All Science is Computational
Science'', it'd be an overstatement but at least
make some sense. As it is, the article is clearly
nonsense.
Perhaps some day, people will realize that constitutionally guaranteeing freedom of speech does not make speech free. Freedom of speech is not something which can be forced, for if it is forced, it is not freedom.
Perhaps some day, people will understand that
enforcing freedom of assembly does not make people free to assemble. Freedom is not something which can be enforced, for if it is enforced, it is not freedom.
Perhaps some day, people will realize that trying to protect human rights does not make people free. Freedom is not something which can be forced, for if it is forced, it is not freedom.
Perhaps some day, people will realize that posting inanities in cool-sounding but meaningless slogans do not make those slogans true. Truth is not something which is meaningless, for if it is meaningless, it is not true.
I'm going to add, as someone who spends their days working on massively parallel (>1000 procs) programs, yet another endorsement for TotalView. It is the only usable, robust, multi-platform parallel debugger that I'm aware of, and this is something I try to keep an eye on.
Techno solution to not-techno problem
on
Golden Rice
·
· Score: 1
So leaving aside entirely the issue of bioengineered crops, this is a good example of using a cool, sexy technology to solve a problem that isn't technical in nature, and requires a more subtle understanding of the problem than simply genetics to solve.
One issue is that peasants eeking out a living from the land are notoriously risk-averse, to the point that early observers often felt they were making `irrational' decisions economically. For instance, subsistance farmers in south-east asia often will refuse to grow varieties of rice which on average produce almost a factor of two more per year. Why? Well, the yield was more variable from year-to-year; so while on average it will produce twice as much, in any given year there might be a shortfall. When you're just barely surviving, you can't afford that sort of risk; so you don't take it.
So I can't wait to see these researchers,
proud of their new spiffy rice, hurt and confused when people from a culture they don't understand refuse to grow it -- particularly when it's a disturbing orange color, very very different from what their fathers and fathers fathers grew.
The worst part is, however, that leafy greens -- rich in Vitamin A, the main benifit of this golden rice -- grow plentifully near rice paddies, but historically aren't an important part of the peasant diet. Education programs here and there have been fairly successful in getting those incorporated into the diet; this is clearly an
easier, more sustainable, less costly approach to the problem then genetically modified foods; and yet, it's not as sexy, so getting funding for the programs is difficult. Oh, well.
People have talked about how communism failed utterly, why do I see democracy doing the exact same?
Democracy is doing just fine, thank you. American democracy, however, suffers from the two-party system, which is only slightly better than a one party system.
A democracy is not a system that has elections; hell, the USSR had elections. A democracy is a system where a party can be voted out of power. The Reps or Dems can't be voted completely out of power; all that can happen under the current system is that one has slightly more power than the other in one branch or another. They both always have a lot of power.
A vibrant, healthy democracy requires more than this.
Because accuracy or quality in reporting is no longer what's most important. What is most important is being the first to report it.
I.e., CNN and other modern (especially internet) media outlets are tripping over themselves to be able to say `First Post'. Realizing this makes understanding the media a lot easier.
Could someone who has post (here, or as a link) a description, in English, of the algorithm works?
Such a description is definately speech; is no longer a trade secret; and is certainly not a mechanism for circumventing access control.
From that description, I think I'd like to code
up `fair-use-dvd.c' Others might like to do the same sort of thing.
Just for the reasons described in the article. To rehash them briefly:
Most projects requiring lots of CPU time involve lots of data.
Even those that don't usually require more than the paltry amount of data you can put in memory or stick on disk without anyone noticing.
Almost all of the rest of them require heavy interrelations between processes.
I think that a lot of posters are missing the point.
This is not going to be useful for `traditional' supercomputing stuff -- no one is going to be doing a lot of cosmological simulations, climate modelling, or aerodynamics simulations on a system like this.
But there are applications that are `embarassingly parallel' that this will work for. Ray tracing. Image rendering. Certain classes of optimization problems. And these are applications with a lot of industrial use -- so they are quite likely to have people willing to pay money to have done.
Companies who do a lot of those sorts of computations would be better off getting their own cluster, maybe even by setting something like this up on their own machines. But if they're only going to be running a few runs, it would be silly for them to do so. This is another option for them.
Whether it is a useful option or not is going to depend on what sort of turn around they're going to get on jobs, and what they'll charge to run the jobs. These aren't unrelated. The pay structure will be tricky. Too much, and this option isn't really very attractive (the only concievable advantage of this set-up would be that it would be cheap.) Too little, and people won't volunteer their computer time.
So the idea that if the USA hadn't entered the war, the UK would have been invaded is crap. Sure, the US and Canada helped economically - but many Americans seem to think that Hitler was still trying to invade in July 1941
Canada and Australia, who hardly count as major players in WWII, had more troops combined in WWII than the US ever did, and for much longer (being good members of the Commonwealth, both were in the war more or less once Britain was in.)
The US contribution, besides money, was a big infusion of fresh troops and equipment when the militaries of the countries who had been in since the beginning were depleted.
Being broken up would probably be one of the better things to happen to Microsoft: the individual companies could work more independently, their "top management" could focus on just one market, their stock prices would soar, and they would still end up dominating each market and cooperating.
FWIW, The Economist, which is about as pro-market as one can easily imagine, has been arguing this point in the last couple of issues; they favour splitting MS into a couple of Windows companies and one or maybe more applications companies (by product line.) They further argue that this would be in the company's long-term best interest anyway, as it would `unleash a lot of pent-up innovation' as competition increased, and that after the short-term, it would be best for the industry.
And the buisnesses co-operating isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. Colluding to the exclusion of other buisnesses would be disasterous, but hopefully market forces and the threat of further regulatory action would prevent that.
I use Citibank - there are a tonne of things I hate about Citibank, but their online banking is enormously convenient and I've had nothing but good experiences with it thus far. Their online-pay seems to work quite well, though I've only been using that particular feature for the past ~3 months. One utility wasn't expecting an online payment and didn't notice that I had paid, but a good loud phone conversation cleared that up. That was obviously the utility's fault, not the online payment service.
It is exactly a judge's job to figure out, for each case, which laws apply and how to apply them. Sometimes - and this is inevitable with any complex system, legal or otherwise - some of the rules will conflict. In some of these cases, a law is completely incompatible with another law. In other cases, it's just in odd circumstances where one law will conflict with another law.
It is precisely the judge's job in cases like that to decide how to apply the conflicting laws. Usually, one will win over the other. In the U.S., the Constitution always wins.
What do you suggest as an alternative? That the judge simultaneously apply both, inconsistent, laws? I'd be interested in your description of how that would happen.
Not using it for VMWare, but I'll chime in that the 7500 is a lovely little machine, and I've actually grown quite fond of the pointing device (though I hated it passionately for the first week or so.)
The philosophers I've studied under would be a little disturbed to find out that you've decided that developmental psychology is an appropriate subject for them to study.
Another nit to pick: the issue of whether or not one's native language restricts what one can think is a philosophical question,
Um, no. Questions about the interaction between language and cognitive processes are quite squarely linguistic and/or psychological questions. Philosophy typically considers questions of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
This is just an instance of rules created for print/television advertising being applied blindly to internet `advertising'. It's stupid and annoying, but it's happening a lot with law and other groups regulations, and it has to happen, because the interenet is a different sort of media, and it takes rules a while to adapt.
If enough people scream about it, it will be changed, new regulations for internet advertising will be written, and we'll be able to move on to the next set of rules that have to be rewritten.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that computers are bad, or good; it's a question of what they're bad or good compared to. Every dollar that goes to buying a computer and then maintaining that computer is a dollar that could have gone towards more textbooks or paying/training teachers better (hopefully attracting/producing better teachers). And if you're going to justify a large budget item for a school or for teaching a child at home, you'd better make sure your scarce dollars are going where they can do the most good.
Computers and the internet can be great tools. There are really good pieces of educational software out there. Most are garbage, of course, but there are some good ones. And the internet can be a great reference, if you sit down and teach the kids actual research skills. (Yes, there are research skills beyond ``go to http://www.google.com, type in what you want, and print out what you get.'') And besides using them as tools, you might reasonably want to teach a `computer skills' or even programming sort of class where the computers are an end in themselves.
But to do this properly requires thinking the use of the computers through carefully; training the teachers both how to use them and how to teach the children to use them; and spending the money it takes to buy the computers and keep them maintained and useful. And this generally isn't done. Classrooms worth of computers are bought, used for a bit in not-horribly-useful ways, and frequently it never goes beyond that.
Sure, even then, there will be kids who find the computers and start playing with them on their own and learn a lot; but those aren't the kids you have to worry about, they'll learn on their own pretty much no matter what you do. Buying labs of computers for a few kids isn't the way to go; set up a few in the library and in one or two classrooms.
Certainly schools should have a few computers available. But the biggest problems in todays schools, and with the education of todays kids, are not that the kids don't have expensive computers on their desks.
I can't even begin to agree with this poster enough.
In science, there is a (usually quite healthy) avoidence of ``management'' in any sense. And for small enough projects, that's ok.
But if you are going to be doing any serious amount of computational work and you don't have any in-house computational experience, you will be setting yourself up for disaster. (Can you imagine trying to start a large experimental project without any in-house experimental experience?) There will be a guaranteed disconnect between you and your programming staff (who will almost certainly be inexperienced if they are to be affordable). And there's no good outcome possible here. Even if they are the most talented coders in the world, if you two can't speak a common language, you can't possibly expect things to work well.
Hire someone experienced in scientific computing -- it could be a graduate of the field who does computational work now, or it could be someone from the more CS side of things -- to be in charge of computational work. If it's a small enough project, they can spend some time doing coding, too; but likely you'll have a young coder or two, too.
Please trust me on this; I've seen projects fail or do very poorly because of exactly this problem.
There are (at least) three distinct areas where you need a term using words like computer and science. They are:
- Computing Science (or Computer Science) -- typical CS stuff; algorithms research, working on good models of computation.
Kind of a cross between pure mathematics and
Operations Research; lots of good stuff here,
but not really science in the hypothesis/test/conclusions sense.
- Scientific Computing The part of CS particularly focused on scientific applications. Numerical methods, especially for PDE solving or
simulation; efficient parallel (or serial) algorithms for typical science applications; maybe even including things like parallel IO .
- Computational Science Like theoretical science or experiemental science or observational science, this is science-of-choice
done using a particular tool; here, computer simulations or calculations. The first two were focused on computation, possibly with science as
an application; this one is focused on science,
with computing as a tool.
The distinctions are important, because otherwise its hard to talk intelligently about science and computing, as we see in the NYT article. If the article read ``All Science is Computational Science'', it'd be an overstatement but at least make some sense. As it is, the article is clearly nonsense.Perhaps some day, people will understand that enforcing freedom of assembly does not make people free to assemble. Freedom is not something which can be enforced, for if it is enforced, it is not freedom.
Perhaps some day, people will realize that trying to protect human rights does not make people free. Freedom is not something which can be forced, for if it is forced, it is not freedom.
Perhaps some day, people will realize that posting inanities in cool-sounding but meaningless slogans do not make those slogans true. Truth is not something which is meaningless, for if it is meaningless, it is not true.
I'm going to add, as someone who spends their days working on massively parallel (>1000 procs) programs, yet another endorsement for TotalView. It is the only usable, robust, multi-platform parallel debugger that I'm aware of, and this is something I try to keep an eye on.
One issue is that peasants eeking out a living from the land are notoriously risk-averse, to the point that early observers often felt they were making `irrational' decisions economically. For instance, subsistance farmers in south-east asia often will refuse to grow varieties of rice which on average produce almost a factor of two more per year. Why? Well, the yield was more variable from year-to-year; so while on average it will produce twice as much, in any given year there might be a shortfall. When you're just barely surviving, you can't afford that sort of risk; so you don't take it.
So I can't wait to see these researchers, proud of their new spiffy rice, hurt and confused when people from a culture they don't understand refuse to grow it -- particularly when it's a disturbing orange color, very very different from what their fathers and fathers fathers grew.
The worst part is, however, that leafy greens -- rich in Vitamin A, the main benifit of this golden rice -- grow plentifully near rice paddies, but historically aren't an important part of the peasant diet. Education programs here and there have been fairly successful in getting those incorporated into the diet; this is clearly an easier, more sustainable, less costly approach to the problem then genetically modified foods; and yet, it's not as sexy, so getting funding for the programs is difficult. Oh, well.
Democracy is doing just fine, thank you. American democracy, however, suffers from the two-party system, which is only slightly better than a one party system.
A democracy is not a system that has elections; hell, the USSR had elections. A democracy is a system where a party can be voted out of power. The Reps or Dems can't be voted completely out of power; all that can happen under the current system is that one has slightly more power than the other in one branch or another. They both always have a lot of power.
A vibrant, healthy democracy requires more than this.
Oh, wait; oops, I was wrong.
Read VI.2. again. ``This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States [...] and all Treaties made [...] shall be the supreme Law of the Land.''
Could someone who has post (here, or as a link) a description, in English, of the algorithm works? Such a description is definately speech; is no longer a trade secret; and is certainly not a mechanism for circumventing access control.
From that description, I think I'd like to code up `fair-use-dvd.c' Others might like to do the same sort of thing.
I think that a lot of posters are missing the point.
This is not going to be useful for `traditional' supercomputing stuff -- no one is going to be doing a lot of cosmological simulations, climate modelling, or aerodynamics simulations on a system like this.
But there are applications that are `embarassingly parallel' that this will work for. Ray tracing. Image rendering. Certain classes of optimization problems. And these are applications with a lot of industrial use -- so they are quite likely to have people willing to pay money to have done.
Companies who do a lot of those sorts of computations would be better off getting their own cluster, maybe even by setting something like this up on their own machines. But if they're only going to be running a few runs, it would be silly for them to do so. This is another option for them.
Whether it is a useful option or not is going to depend on what sort of turn around they're going to get on jobs, and what they'll charge to run the jobs. These aren't unrelated. The pay structure will be tricky. Too much, and this option isn't really very attractive (the only concievable advantage of this set-up would be that it would be cheap.) Too little, and people won't volunteer their computer time.
<sarc>Wow! Talk about innovation! Maybe they can have an innovative way of turning it off, too.. something like IMPLICIT NONE </sarc>
Great. A ripped-off Java with features that they even knew were bad ideas in FORTRAN 77. Truly, MicroSoft, you are a forward-thinking innovator.
Canada and Australia, who hardly count as major players in WWII, had more troops combined in WWII than the US ever did, and for much longer (being good members of the Commonwealth, both were in the war more or less once Britain was in.)
The US contribution, besides money, was a big infusion of fresh troops and equipment when the militaries of the countries who had been in since the beginning were depleted.
They'd have a hell of a hard time trying to convince anyone to buy shares in `legal'.
And the buisnesses co-operating isn't necessarily a bad thing at all. Colluding to the exclusion of other buisnesses would be disasterous, but hopefully market forces and the threat of further regulatory action would prevent that.
I use Citibank - there are a tonne of things I hate about Citibank, but their online banking is enormously convenient and I've had nothing but good experiences with it thus far. Their online-pay seems to work quite well, though I've only been using that particular feature for the past ~3 months. One utility wasn't expecting an online payment and didn't notice that I had paid, but a good loud phone conversation cleared that up. That was obviously the utility's fault, not the online payment service.
It is exactly a judge's job to figure out, for each case, which laws apply and how to apply them. Sometimes - and this is inevitable with any complex system, legal or otherwise - some of the rules will conflict. In some of these cases, a law is completely incompatible with another law. In other cases, it's just in odd circumstances where one law will conflict with another law.
It is precisely the judge's job in cases like that to decide how to apply the conflicting laws. Usually, one will win over the other. In the U.S., the Constitution always wins.
What do you suggest as an alternative? That the judge simultaneously apply both, inconsistent, laws? I'd be interested in your description of how that would happen.
Not using it for VMWare, but I'll chime in that the 7500 is a lovely little machine, and I've actually grown quite fond of the pointing device (though I hated it passionately for the first week or so.)
The philosophers I've studied under would be a little disturbed to find out that you've decided that developmental psychology is an appropriate subject for them to study.
Um, no. Questions about the interaction between language and cognitive processes are quite squarely linguistic and/or psychological questions. Philosophy typically considers questions of ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.
http://dailynews .yahoo.com/h/nm/19991105/ts/microsoft_leadall_3.ht ml
The district court confirmed it'll be tonight.
If enough people scream about it, it will be changed, new regulations for internet advertising will be written, and we'll be able to move on to the next set of rules that have to be rewritten.