There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.
This is my biggest gripe with MythTV, and I disagree that it's reasonably minor: UI inconsistency is really bad. Having up-arrow mean something on one page and a different thing on another, for example, is a huge liability in terms of ease of use, and such idiosyncracies contribute greatly to percieved complexity and lack of professional polish. Before nearly anything else, keybindings need to be consistent. Second to that, key action needs to be consistent (eg, on some pages, repeatedly hitting down-arrow cycles through UI elements, on some it does not and causes form transitions instead). MythTV is a good project, but regrettably not yet a great one, and while the commercially available alternatives might not be quite as featureful, they blow it away in terms of ease-of-use.
The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this, except for the choices made by the project leader. There's a lot to be read into the fact that users will now be able to vote on which features should be prioritized for development.
From my reading of TFA, Wired has retracted stories where sources could not be verified, not where they were shown to be fabricated. No source was shown to be fabricated. There's a big difference: the first is readily attributable to sloppy journalism; the second is certainly fraud. Or perhaps we've forgotten about the the legal theories of reasonable doubt and innocent until proven guilty?
The Slashdot editors should be castigated for using such inflammatory headlines as doing so is in itself is evidence of sloppy journalism on their part.
Not a single sysadmin who actually deserves the title is going to run a db out of system memory.
Why?
Because if the system crashes, the db is lost.
Ergo, the system will either dribble output to magnetic media, or the db will be run off disk directly. Since people who design databases for a living understand caching issues, they'll probably do a much better job at managing 4+GB of main memory than someone asking for motherboard advice on Slashdot.
Sure, big memory will help this a lot, but the fact that the original poster is suggesting using a RAM disk means his position is suspicious.
anti-terrorism legislation requires hotels retain a photocopy of your driver's license
Can you cite this legislation?
My experience staying in hotels in the US 2-3 times per year post September 11 is that not one has asked to see my identification. Granted, I tend to stay in a more expensive class of hotels than Red Lion, but beyond a valid credit card, they do not verify identity.
This is absolutely true. Even if you are the only programmer who will ever look at the code. 10 years from now, when you're called on to fix a bug in something you wrote, you'll be extra glad that you took the time to write clearly, and comment liberally. Anyone else who comes across your code will thank you as well. And I'm speaking with nearly 30 years' experience as a programmer (and two CS degrees from MIT).
In particular, unless you have very specific efficiency needs, modern CPUs are more than up to the task for nearly anything we can think of these days, further ameliorating the need for trading optimization against clarity. That said, there still remain applications which are CPU-bound. In such cases where hand optimization makes a difference, I usually first write a clear, general-purpose version of the code to make sure it works correctly. Then, I'll special case highly optimized versions where all bets are off for readability and maintainability, but will retain the clear version for the general purpose case. This does two things: first, it provides a soft intro to the algorithm in unoptimized fasion, aiding future maintenance; second, it provides a benchmark against which performance and correctness of the optimized code can be tested. If code size becomes a serious issue (for example in embedded applications), the clearly written reference code gets put in a comment above the highly optimized code. But in any case, the clear, correct version is retained.
The importance of clearly written code (and the process of writing code clearly) is difficult to overstate.
Absolutely. And the inclusion of H4, which was most definitely NOT a gadget, but one of the most advanced scientific instruments of it's time, makes the list suspect.
While there is obviously revenue to be had in reimplementing standard distribution models under the rubric of blogging, as is mentioned in the parent post, but there's plenty of fertile ground in the lower end of the scale, where individuals get to enjoy material produced by their associates, relatives, and friends. I'm thinking in particular about social communication sites like Multiply.com which effectively integrate RSS-style mechanisms (new stuff appears at the top of a message list) with blogging.
But there is a _massive_ and _fundamental_ difference between a 100 line program and a 100,000 line program.
Agreed -- although I think the transition more accurately happens somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 lines. At 1,000 lines a single developer can easily keep the entirety of the project in his head. At 10,000 this is no longer possible.
I'd be curious if the sensitivity of the surrounding neurons would increase to better sense the impulses generated by the implant. It seems that this would just be a small modification of the neural net...
Unlikely. The first two synapses in the visual system (in the retina) are already working near the quantum limit for efficiency (under the appropriate conditions, humans can detect a single photon). Although I have not seen anyone actually addressing this issue, the results suggest that the signal from passive photodiodes just won't be strong enough under normal light levels to overcome system noise and the fundamental biochemical thresholds.
The problem with using a small amplifier is that you need to get power to it. All of the other retinal efforts are designing systems with external power sources (and power transmitted inductively to a coil that also gets implanted in the eye): Dr. Chow's is the only one which isn't. While this makes for an elegantly simple design, it severly limits it's capabilities.
IAAVN (I Am A Visual Neuroscientist) working on artificial vision. I have seen presentations on this approach, and unlike many of the other efforts in this field, Dr. Chow's claims appear astonishingly good.
The basic idea is beautiful and elegant: you put an array of tiny photodiodes behind the retina, exactly where the photoreceptor cells (rods and cones) are. Shining light on each of these nearly-cell-sized photodiodes creates a localized voltage which should stimulate a small handful of cells, generating a signal that will mimic the original biologically transduced input to the retina. The photodiodes nicely supplant the dying photosensitive cells. It sounds perfect.
I was very impressed with their presentation at a one-day symposium on artificial vision I attended at USC a few years ago, until one of the audience members pointed out that they had done some calculations, and it seemed that one would need incredibly high light levels to generate enough current to stimulate the local cells. Dr. Chow admitted that, even being optimistic about the conversion efficiency of photodiodes (which here need to be optimized for biocompatibility more than efficiency), the physics involved dictates that you would need light bright enough to cause damage to even the non-photosensitive tissue to get the device to work. Dr. Chow then backpedaled to say that even if the device cannot restore lost vision, it can perhaps supplant any remaining healty cells to improve vision in low-sighted patients. That question-anwer cycle was the first point in his presentation where he backed off from the claim of restoring full vision to blind patients.
Dr. Chow's results were done in a private laboratory, part of a company set up to profit from his advances. He must answer to his shareholders, and his results are not open to the level of scruitiny that standard scientific claims are. He was reluctant to answer questions at this session. Therefore, as a scientist I am bound by the lack of openness to view his claims with a grain of salt.
Other efforts to create artificial vision are still having trouble with just a handful of points of light. While I believe that the subretinal approach has a good chance of eventually proving fruitful, using a silicon-based device that lacks an external power source just cannot produce normal vision. This is why the article concentrates on the improvements in existing low vision, rather than discussing restoration of lost vision.
It'd be better if there was an impossibly out of range value like -274C reported when the sensor failed so that the problem would be more clear and could be sorted as a marker value rather than one that requires a response.
How about if the sensor just accurately reported it was broken? Or delivered a better out-of-band signal to indicate an invalid value on the output? Impossibly large or small values can still be used; you want an indication that prevents them from being included in any further computation, or invalidates such computations if they are allowed to proceede. Like NaN.
Would you have students learn to read German as part of a philosophy class so that they can study the Germanic greats in their native language? Probably not, because the particular laguage used to express deep concepts is more-or-less irrelevant. Instead, you would use the one easiest for the task. In the US, it would probably be English. In France, French. In Japan, Japanese.
So when you're trying to teach programming -- not just training someone how to use a particular software house's tool -- why not use a language that best exposes the most important issues without obfuscating them with the arcana of syntax?
Here's another analogy, if you want to teach someone to drive, do you teach them using a tractor? It would work, right? The same basic principles and laws apply to driving tractors, busses, cars, and trucks. But you probably wouldn't want to use a tractor (bus or truck) because they're particularly difficult and quirky to control. You'd probably use a car, and, at least in the US, probably one with an automatic transmission. You would do this because cars the easiest vehicular form to control, allowing the student to quickly master the concepts around controlling their vehicle and concentrate on the more important aspects of driving such as the conventions and laws surrounding interacting with other drivers. In a similar way, Lisp (or Scheme, my personal variant) allows the student to quickly get to deeper issues in programming because the syntax is so simple.
I'll bite on this troll because it plays on so many misconceptions.
[Lisp] has never produced anything of use (actually maybe, but I'm keen to hear of some *large* *all-lisp* program that does something truly useful
How about an entire operating system? Or have you never heard of Lisp Machines? A full-blown editor, or have you never heard of Emacs? How about a state-of-the-art compiler with incremental compilation, on-demand linking, better-than-human-hands optimization, or have you never heard of Common Lisp?
[L]isp is the *worst* language to start out with. For exactly the reason you point out. utterly horrible syntax. And that's all you worry about as a beginner learning lisp.
Have you spent time teaching programming courses? I have. Have you studied the pedagogy of programming? I have. When you teach programming based on C, and similar syntax-laden languages, you spend 1/2 to 2/3 of the course detailing syntax. When you teach Lisp or its derivatives, you spend one week on syntax, and the rest of the term on concepts. Why? Because the syntax of Lisp is incredibly simple and this frees the course to concentrate on more important issues in programming.
((((((((((neq lisp simple)))))))))))))) oh crap! to many close paransss...
You probably never used an editor that had proper indenting and parenthesis matching. In Emacs (and related editors like Epsilon, Jove, microemacs, mg, etc.) you never wonder how many parentheses you need because it's obvious. Parentheses are not a burden.
BZZZZZZT. Wrong. C is an awful language for beginners, just as BASIC, FORTRAN, APL, ALGOL60, and so forth were, and Java, Pascal, and so forth continue to be because it is mired in syntax.
Software Engineering has absolutely nothing to do with syntax. Nothing. Would you ever consider that philosophy is the study of spelling? No, so why would you think that forcing a naive user to stumble hither and yon against arcane syntax is a good way of teaching programming concepts? You want to start --START-- with a language that has incredibly simple syntax. Like Lisp, Scheme, and the like. Then you can spend time worrying about things like data structures, lexical and dynamic scoping, control structures, etc. Once these fundamental notions are understood, then you can spend time with syntax.
Well, studies have shown differences between men and women. This is no surprise. Studies have not on the other hand been particularly revealing as to whether it's down to nature or nurture.
IATACOAGDS (I am the adult child of a gender-difference scientist) and my mother's research tries to address exactly this issue. While it is an accepted fact that women, on average, do less well than men, on average, on tasks of spatial reasoning (which have been shown to correlate well with performance on mathematics tasks), there is a very interesting subpopulation of women who do as well as men. This subpopulation has two components to it, one nature and one nurture, and both are necessary: the first is that the woman must be right-handed and have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who is left-handed or ambidexeterous; the second is that she must have had a chance to persue higher education in mathematics, engineering, or science (a bachelor's degree is sufficient).
Much of the research done to date on this subpopulation has been done in adult women. My mother's research attempts to see if the same population can be identified before-the-fact in elementary school where the nurture effects will not be as strong (so goes the hypothesis). She has had some luck in picking out these girls, but since the real study is longitudinal, it will be a few years yet before the conclusions are in.
At some point, we'll get over ourselves, and be able to study such questions openly and without fear of recrimination, as long as the studies are done without the influence of political agendae. Personally, I think my mother's research is a step in the right direction.
Even though I am not a T-Mobile subcriber, it's distrubing to me that my personal information is protected by the whim of a corporation...
The issue here is not the whim of said corporation, but the disconnect between the appearance of security provided by their corporate communications (advertising, contract boilerplate, etc.) and the reality of their networks. T-Mobile in the US is so inept that they can't set their network time correctly (in certain parts of the Boston area it reads as GMT -8, in others as GMT -5 as it should be). They have you verify your identity by keying in the last four digits of your social security number over the line. Why should you expect any such corporation to actually protect your personal information?
1) It Weighs More - and that weight has a huge impact because rolling mass is much more difficult to move
The materials they used are proof-of-concept, rather than advanced. With the tweel design, automotive engineers will be liberated from the traditional axle-into-hub design, and the tweel can mount directly on the axle, eliminating the heavy metallic wheel.
2) More Friction - Again, a drop in efficency due to difficult in rolling the wheel
Materials. I'm impressed that they got to within 5% at the first go-around!
3) More Expensive - No longer a need for "expensive" tire pressure monitoring systems (which probably aren't all that expensive, although they are sometimes troublesome) and you don't have to replace your tires as often, but if the tweels cost 3x as much, there is no saving here
Scale of manufacturing will solve that.
4) Noise - No one likes loud tires
Again, materials. Recall that traditional tires have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of man-years of development!
I was a young teenager when Star Wars was first in theatrical release. I loved it... absolutely adored the film... and saw it 17 times. My father, in contrast, couldn't get past the concept of "The Force" finding it childish, unnecessary, and an irrational appeal to the mindless masses. It (obviously) didn't bother me. Although I certainly didn't take any ken to the idea, the fact that people in the story had some hokey ideology and mythologically-based religion wasn't a sticking point.
Now that I'm older, and more cynical about what is done to make movies appealing to the broadest possible audience, I find watching Star Wars to be bearable only because of the nostalgia: like my father, I find The Force to be as distasteful as any other form of magic, paranormal activity, or fantasy used to currently sell books and movies. Star Wars (both the original movie, and the entire story arc) could have easily been written using the idea, "trust your finely honed skill and ability," rather than, "trust The Force," sending a much better message to the public, while being just as enjoyable as entertainment.
So, yes, take these movies at face value, and remember that your fond memories of them were formed at a different point in your psychological development: they aren't written for adults.
While you're mostly right, there are a couple significant things different between silicon (especially pure silicon) and diamond. Silicon is an element, diamond is a form of an element.
Well, if you're going to be pedantic, you're mostly right. When you say "silicon" and "silicon ingot" in the context of the semiconductor industry, you mean "single crystal silicon" which is a form of silicon (and, in fact, you mean a certain crystallographic form of silicon, the exact name of which I forget, but may be face-centered cubic); silicon can easily be manufactured in large quantities in polycrystaline form (and is, indeed, used to make conductive traces on ICs, but is more commonly called "poly"), and glassy form (note, I'm not talking about silicon dioxide, but glassy pure silicon). When you say "diamond" in the context of the semiconductor industry, you mean "single crystal carbon in diamond form" (in, not unusually once you study it, the same crystallographic form as silicon crystal used for semiconductors).
That said, the secondary element from my argument above is that the silicon ingots produced by wafer foundries are huge -- many feet long, and up to 400mm in diameter -- single crystals. Make single crystal carbon (to be pedantic) that big, in 7 nines purity, with the same crystal structure as natural diamond, dopable to arbitrary coloration, and DeBeers, as I was saying, it out of business. Think it's not cost effective? The semiconductor industry has billions of dollars to throw at it for R&D to make it so.
I've been saying for about 10 years that the jewlery diamond industry is doomed. Here's the reasoning.
1. Silicon ingots used by chip foundries are the purest substance available to man in production quantities, at 7 nines (99.99999% pure).
2. The semiconductor industry doesn't think twice about investing billions -- BILLIONS -- of dollars in manufacturing and R&D.
3. Diamond is a very interesting base out of which to build semiconductors: it has (from memory) a large band-gap, excellent thermal characteristics, and some blindingly fast transistors have been made in the lab out of it.
Once the semiconductor folks decide that they want to do large-scale diamond manufacturing, there's a huge impetus to generate higher quality diamond than has ever been mined, in quantities that will make the collection of mined dimonds seem a drop in the bucket. The only hope DeBeers has at that point is to market based on the imperfections of natural stones, since perfection, their current stock-in-trade, will no longer be a selling point.
While making an impression is important, having a "big name" degree is not as cracked up as it is made to be.
In the limited amount of hiring I've done (2 sysadmin positions, 1 programmer), I find the degree and institution are good general indicators of talent, but not absolute ones. It's a form of verification, often: when a candidate interviews really well, and I see he's from (say) MIT, it makes sense. It's comforting. It fits. When a candidate interviews really well and he's from (say) ITT Tech, it doesn't fit. Something's wrong, why didn't he attend a better institution?
Also, when hiring, you want to know about the person's professional culture to be able to predict how he will fit in. I know what the cultures are at MIT, Caltech, CMU, Stanford, UCB are like. I know that if I hire someone from Caltech, he'll be pretty honest about things left lying around because they have an honor code there. I know that if I hire someone from MIT, he'll be apt to use unattended things around the lab to measure the mass of some esoteric subatomic particle in his spare time. Do I know the same thing about, say, U Michigan? UT Austin? NMSU? UC Irvine? UMass Boston? Nope. Will that prevent me from hiring them? No, but I'm more likely to hire someone I know more about, even if it's only by reputation.
Agreed. IAAN (I am a neuroscientist) and at the Society for Neuroscience meeting a few weeks ago, there was a substantial amount of work being presented on spinal chord repair using stem cells. One researcher's results were scary: while the subject (rats if I recall correctly) were able to recover from SRI (Spinal Chord Injury) with the injection of stem cells, they developed allodynia, the condition where normal touch sensation of the skin is painful. This was because stem cells were not selective enough when making connections to existing fibers, and many of the new connections were incorrect. While this research does not mean the Korean team hasn't managed a substantial advance, it does mean that things aren't as simple as we might hope, and one should definitely view the Korean results carefully.
Slashdot Mirror
There is also some inconsistency with key bindings too - most of the UI looks in the key bindings database to find out which key is "select", whcih is "play", etc. However, some parts of the UI make assumptions instead - i.e. expecting Enter to be "select". But that's reasonably minor and probably doesn't affect most people.
This is my biggest gripe with MythTV, and I disagree that it's reasonably minor: UI inconsistency is really bad. Having up-arrow mean something on one page and a different thing on another, for example, is a huge liability in terms of ease of use, and such idiosyncracies contribute greatly to percieved complexity and lack of professional polish. Before nearly anything else, keybindings need to be consistent. Second to that, key action needs to be consistent (eg, on some pages, repeatedly hitting down-arrow cycles through UI elements, on some it does not and causes form transitions instead). MythTV is a good project, but regrettably not yet a great one, and while the commercially available alternatives might not be quite as featureful, they blow it away in terms of ease-of-use.
The thing that frustrates me more than anything else is that there's no excuse for this, except for the choices made by the project leader. There's a lot to be read into the fact that users will now be able to vote on which features should be prioritized for development.
From my reading of TFA, Wired has retracted stories where sources could not be verified, not where they were shown to be fabricated. No source was shown to be fabricated. There's a big difference: the first is readily attributable to sloppy journalism; the second is certainly fraud. Or perhaps we've forgotten about the the legal theories of reasonable doubt and innocent until proven guilty?
The Slashdot editors should be castigated for using such inflammatory headlines as doing so is in itself is evidence of sloppy journalism on their part.
My point exactly: this isn't being run on a RAM disk.
Not a single sysadmin who actually deserves the title is going to run a db out of system memory.
Why?
Because if the system crashes, the db is lost.
Ergo, the system will either dribble output to magnetic media, or the db will be run off disk directly. Since people who design databases for a living understand caching issues, they'll probably do a much better job at managing 4+GB of main memory than someone asking for motherboard advice on Slashdot.
Sure, big memory will help this a lot, but the fact that the original poster is suggesting using a RAM disk means his position is suspicious.
anti-terrorism legislation requires hotels retain a photocopy of your driver's license
Can you cite this legislation?
My experience staying in hotels in the US 2-3 times per year post September 11 is that not one has asked to see my identification. Granted, I tend to stay in a more expensive class of hotels than Red Lion, but beyond a valid credit card, they do not verify identity.
This is absolutely true. Even if you are the only programmer who will ever look at the code. 10 years from now, when you're called on to fix a bug in something you wrote, you'll be extra glad that you took the time to write clearly, and comment liberally. Anyone else who comes across your code will thank you as well. And I'm speaking with nearly 30 years' experience as a programmer (and two CS degrees from MIT).
In particular, unless you have very specific efficiency needs, modern CPUs are more than up to the task for nearly anything we can think of these days, further ameliorating the need for trading optimization against clarity. That said, there still remain applications which are CPU-bound. In such cases where hand optimization makes a difference, I usually first write a clear, general-purpose version of the code to make sure it works correctly. Then, I'll special case highly optimized versions where all bets are off for readability and maintainability, but will retain the clear version for the general purpose case. This does two things: first, it provides a soft intro to the algorithm in unoptimized fasion, aiding future maintenance; second, it provides a benchmark against which performance and correctness of the optimized code can be tested. If code size becomes a serious issue (for example in embedded applications), the clearly written reference code gets put in a comment above the highly optimized code. But in any case, the clear, correct version is retained.
The importance of clearly written code (and the process of writing code clearly) is difficult to overstate.
Absolutely. And the inclusion of H4, which was most definitely NOT a gadget, but one of the most advanced scientific instruments of it's time, makes the list suspect.
Nothing to see here, move along.
While there is obviously revenue to be had in reimplementing standard distribution models under the rubric of blogging, as is mentioned in the parent post, but there's plenty of fertile ground in the lower end of the scale, where individuals get to enjoy material produced by their associates, relatives, and friends. I'm thinking in particular about social communication sites like Multiply.com which effectively integrate RSS-style mechanisms (new stuff appears at the top of a message list) with blogging.
But there is a _massive_ and _fundamental_ difference between a 100 line program and a 100,000 line program.
Agreed -- although I think the transition more accurately happens somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 lines. At 1,000 lines a single developer can easily keep the entirety of the project in his head. At 10,000 this is no longer possible.
I'd be curious if the sensitivity of the surrounding neurons would increase to better sense the impulses generated by the implant. It seems that this would just be a small modification of the neural net...
Unlikely. The first two synapses in the visual system (in the retina) are already working near the quantum limit for efficiency (under the appropriate conditions, humans can detect a single photon). Although I have not seen anyone actually addressing this issue, the results suggest that the signal from passive photodiodes just won't be strong enough under normal light levels to overcome system noise and the fundamental biochemical thresholds.
The problem with using a small amplifier is that you need to get power to it. All of the other retinal efforts are designing systems with external power sources (and power transmitted inductively to a coil that also gets implanted in the eye): Dr. Chow's is the only one which isn't. While this makes for an elegantly simple design, it severly limits it's capabilities.
IAAVN (I Am A Visual Neuroscientist) working on artificial vision. I have seen presentations on this approach, and unlike many of the other efforts in this field, Dr. Chow's claims appear astonishingly good.
The basic idea is beautiful and elegant: you put an array of tiny photodiodes behind the retina, exactly where the photoreceptor cells (rods and cones) are. Shining light on each of these nearly-cell-sized photodiodes creates a localized voltage which should stimulate a small handful of cells, generating a signal that will mimic the original biologically transduced input to the retina. The photodiodes nicely supplant the dying photosensitive cells. It sounds perfect.
I was very impressed with their presentation at a one-day symposium on artificial vision I attended at USC a few years ago, until one of the audience members pointed out that they had done some calculations, and it seemed that one would need incredibly high light levels to generate enough current to stimulate the local cells. Dr. Chow admitted that, even being optimistic about the conversion efficiency of photodiodes (which here need to be optimized for biocompatibility more than efficiency), the physics involved dictates that you would need light bright enough to cause damage to even the non-photosensitive tissue to get the device to work. Dr. Chow then backpedaled to say that even if the device cannot restore lost vision, it can perhaps supplant any remaining healty cells to improve vision in low-sighted patients. That question-anwer cycle was the first point in his presentation where he backed off from the claim of restoring full vision to blind patients.
Dr. Chow's results were done in a private laboratory, part of a company set up to profit from his advances. He must answer to his shareholders, and his results are not open to the level of scruitiny that standard scientific claims are. He was reluctant to answer questions at this session. Therefore, as a scientist I am bound by the lack of openness to view his claims with a grain of salt.
Other efforts to create artificial vision are still having trouble with just a handful of points of light. While I believe that the subretinal approach has a good chance of eventually proving fruitful, using a silicon-based device that lacks an external power source just cannot produce normal vision. This is why the article concentrates on the improvements in existing low vision, rather than discussing restoration of lost vision.
It'd be better if there was an impossibly out of range value like -274C reported when the sensor failed so that the problem would be more clear and could be sorted as a marker value rather than one that requires a response.
How about if the sensor just accurately reported it was broken? Or delivered a better out-of-band signal to indicate an invalid value on the output? Impossibly large or small values can still be used; you want an indication that prevents them from being included in any further computation, or invalidates such computations if they are allowed to proceede. Like NaN.
Not every programmer is a Software Engineer.
And I'm doing everything I can to correct that.
Would you have students learn to read German as part of a philosophy class so that they can study the Germanic greats in their native language? Probably not, because the particular laguage used to express deep concepts is more-or-less irrelevant. Instead, you would use the one easiest for the task. In the US, it would probably be English. In France, French. In Japan, Japanese.
So when you're trying to teach programming -- not just training someone how to use a particular software house's tool -- why not use a language that best exposes the most important issues without obfuscating them with the arcana of syntax?
Here's another analogy, if you want to teach someone to drive, do you teach them using a tractor? It would work, right? The same basic principles and laws apply to driving tractors, busses, cars, and trucks. But you probably wouldn't want to use a tractor (bus or truck) because they're particularly difficult and quirky to control. You'd probably use a car, and, at least in the US, probably one with an automatic transmission. You would do this because cars the easiest vehicular form to control, allowing the student to quickly master the concepts around controlling their vehicle and concentrate on the more important aspects of driving such as the conventions and laws surrounding interacting with other drivers. In a similar way, Lisp (or Scheme, my personal variant) allows the student to quickly get to deeper issues in programming because the syntax is so simple.
I'll bite on this troll because it plays on so many misconceptions.
[Lisp] has never produced anything of use (actually maybe, but I'm keen to hear of some *large* *all-lisp* program that does something truly useful
How about an entire operating system? Or have you never heard of Lisp Machines? A full-blown editor, or have you never heard of Emacs? How about a state-of-the-art compiler with incremental compilation, on-demand linking, better-than-human-hands optimization, or have you never heard of Common Lisp?
[L]isp is the *worst* language to start out with. For exactly the reason you point out. utterly horrible syntax. And that's all you worry about as a beginner learning lisp.
Have you spent time teaching programming courses? I have. Have you studied the pedagogy of programming? I have. When you teach programming based on C, and similar syntax-laden languages, you spend 1/2 to 2/3 of the course detailing syntax. When you teach Lisp or its derivatives, you spend one week on syntax, and the rest of the term on concepts. Why? Because the syntax of Lisp is incredibly simple and this frees the course to concentrate on more important issues in programming.
((((((((((neq lisp simple))))))))))))))
oh crap! to many close paransss...
You probably never used an editor that had proper indenting and parenthesis matching. In Emacs (and related editors like Epsilon, Jove, microemacs, mg, etc.) you never wonder how many parentheses you need because it's obvious. Parentheses are not a burden.
BZZZZZZT. Wrong. C is an awful language for beginners, just as BASIC, FORTRAN, APL, ALGOL60, and so forth were, and Java, Pascal, and so forth continue to be because it is mired in syntax.
Software Engineering has absolutely nothing to do with syntax. Nothing. Would you ever consider that philosophy is the study of spelling? No, so why would you think that forcing a naive user to stumble hither and yon against arcane syntax is a good way of teaching programming concepts? You want to start --START-- with a language that has incredibly simple syntax. Like Lisp, Scheme, and the like. Then you can spend time worrying about things like data structures, lexical and dynamic scoping, control structures, etc. Once these fundamental notions are understood, then you can spend time with syntax.
Well, studies have shown differences between men and women. This is no surprise. Studies have not on the other hand been particularly revealing as to whether it's down to nature or nurture.
IATACOAGDS (I am the adult child of a gender-difference scientist) and my mother's research tries to address exactly this issue. While it is an accepted fact that women, on average, do less well than men, on average, on tasks of spatial reasoning (which have been shown to correlate well with performance on mathematics tasks), there is a very interesting subpopulation of women who do as well as men. This subpopulation has two components to it, one nature and one nurture, and both are necessary: the first is that the woman must be right-handed and have an immediate family member (parent or sibling) who is left-handed or ambidexeterous; the second is that she must have had a chance to persue higher education in mathematics, engineering, or science (a bachelor's degree is sufficient).
Much of the research done to date on this subpopulation has been done in adult women. My mother's research attempts to see if the same population can be identified before-the-fact in elementary school where the nurture effects will not be as strong (so goes the hypothesis). She has had some luck in picking out these girls, but since the real study is longitudinal, it will be a few years yet before the conclusions are in.
At some point, we'll get over ourselves, and be able to study such questions openly and without fear of recrimination, as long as the studies are done without the influence of political agendae. Personally, I think my mother's research is a step in the right direction.
Even though I am not a T-Mobile subcriber, it's distrubing to me that my personal information is protected by the whim of a corporation ...
The issue here is not the whim of said corporation, but the disconnect between the appearance of security provided by their corporate communications (advertising, contract boilerplate, etc.) and the reality of their networks. T-Mobile in the US is so inept that they can't set their network time correctly (in certain parts of the Boston area it reads as GMT -8, in others as GMT -5 as it should be). They have you verify your identity by keying in the last four digits of your social security number over the line. Why should you expect any such corporation to actually protect your personal information?
1) It Weighs More - and that weight has a huge impact because rolling mass is much more difficult to move
The materials they used are proof-of-concept, rather than advanced. With the tweel design, automotive engineers will be liberated from the traditional axle-into-hub design, and the tweel can mount directly on the axle, eliminating the heavy metallic wheel.
2) More Friction - Again, a drop in efficency due to difficult in rolling the wheel
Materials. I'm impressed that they got to within 5% at the first go-around!
3) More Expensive - No longer a need for "expensive" tire pressure monitoring systems (which probably aren't all that expensive, although they are sometimes troublesome) and you don't have to replace your tires as often, but if the tweels cost 3x as much, there is no saving here
Scale of manufacturing will solve that.
4) Noise - No one likes loud tires
Again, materials. Recall that traditional tires have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of man-years of development!
Agreed.
... absolutely adored the film ... and saw it 17 times. My father, in contrast, couldn't get past the concept of "The Force" finding it childish, unnecessary, and an irrational appeal to the mindless masses. It (obviously) didn't bother me. Although I certainly didn't take any ken to the idea, the fact that people in the story had some hokey ideology and mythologically-based religion wasn't a sticking point.
I was a young teenager when Star Wars was first in theatrical release. I loved it
Now that I'm older, and more cynical about what is done to make movies appealing to the broadest possible audience, I find watching Star Wars to be bearable only because of the nostalgia: like my father, I find The Force to be as distasteful as any other form of magic, paranormal activity, or fantasy used to currently sell books and movies. Star Wars (both the original movie, and the entire story arc) could have easily been written using the idea, "trust your finely honed skill and ability," rather than, "trust The Force," sending a much better message to the public, while being just as enjoyable as entertainment.
So, yes, take these movies at face value, and remember that your fond memories of them were formed at a different point in your psychological development: they aren't written for adults.
While you're mostly right, there are a couple significant things different between silicon (especially pure silicon) and diamond. Silicon is an element, diamond is a form of an element.
Well, if you're going to be pedantic, you're mostly right. When you say "silicon" and "silicon ingot" in the context of the semiconductor industry, you mean "single crystal silicon" which is a form of silicon (and, in fact, you mean a certain crystallographic form of silicon, the exact name of which I forget, but may be face-centered cubic); silicon can easily be manufactured in large quantities in polycrystaline form (and is, indeed, used to make conductive traces on ICs, but is more commonly called "poly"), and glassy form (note, I'm not talking about silicon dioxide, but glassy pure silicon). When you say "diamond" in the context of the semiconductor industry, you mean "single crystal carbon in diamond form" (in, not unusually once you study it, the same crystallographic form as silicon crystal used for semiconductors).
That said, the secondary element from my argument above is that the silicon ingots produced by wafer foundries are huge -- many feet long, and up to 400mm in diameter -- single crystals. Make single crystal carbon (to be pedantic) that big, in 7 nines purity, with the same crystal structure as natural diamond, dopable to arbitrary coloration, and DeBeers, as I was saying, it out of business. Think it's not cost effective? The semiconductor industry has billions of dollars to throw at it for R&D to make it so.
I've been saying for about 10 years that the jewlery diamond industry is doomed. Here's the reasoning.
1. Silicon ingots used by chip foundries are the purest substance available to man in production quantities, at 7 nines (99.99999% pure).
2. The semiconductor industry doesn't think twice about investing billions -- BILLIONS -- of dollars in manufacturing and R&D.
3. Diamond is a very interesting base out of which to build semiconductors: it has (from memory) a large band-gap, excellent thermal characteristics, and some blindingly fast transistors have been made in the lab out of it.
Once the semiconductor folks decide that they want to do large-scale diamond manufacturing, there's a huge impetus to generate higher quality diamond than has ever been mined, in quantities that will make the collection of mined dimonds seem a drop in the bucket. The only hope DeBeers has at that point is to market based on the imperfections of natural stones, since perfection, their current stock-in-trade, will no longer be a selling point.
While making an impression is important, having a "big name" degree is not as cracked up as it is made to be.
In the limited amount of hiring I've done (2 sysadmin positions, 1 programmer), I find the degree and institution are good general indicators of talent, but not absolute ones. It's a form of verification, often: when a candidate interviews really well, and I see he's from (say) MIT, it makes sense. It's comforting. It fits. When a candidate interviews really well and he's from (say) ITT Tech, it doesn't fit. Something's wrong, why didn't he attend a better institution?
Also, when hiring, you want to know about the person's professional culture to be able to predict how he will fit in. I know what the cultures are at MIT, Caltech, CMU, Stanford, UCB are like. I know that if I hire someone from Caltech, he'll be pretty honest about things left lying around because they have an honor code there. I know that if I hire someone from MIT, he'll be apt to use unattended things around the lab to measure the mass of some esoteric subatomic particle in his spare time. Do I know the same thing about, say, U Michigan? UT Austin? NMSU? UC Irvine? UMass Boston? Nope. Will that prevent me from hiring them? No, but I'm more likely to hire someone I know more about, even if it's only by reputation.
Agreed. IAAN (I am a neuroscientist) and at the Society for Neuroscience meeting a few weeks ago, there was a substantial amount of work being presented on spinal chord repair using stem cells. One researcher's results were scary: while the subject (rats if I recall correctly) were able to recover from SRI (Spinal Chord Injury) with the injection of stem cells, they developed allodynia, the condition where normal touch sensation of the skin is painful. This was because stem cells were not selective enough when making connections to existing fibers, and many of the new connections were incorrect. While this research does not mean the Korean team hasn't managed a substantial advance, it does mean that things aren't as simple as we might hope, and one should definitely view the Korean results carefully.