Re:Imperial System does have an advantage
on
Biking @ 80 MPH
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· Score: 1
Sorry - but I have to react to this:
As a South African having been in the US now for 3 yrs I can say that from my perspective the argument of "it's hard for people to relate the metric system to their daily lives" is completely flawed. You are used to whatever you grow up in. It's as simple as that. Having said that, and having been here for 3 yrs, I *am* used to the Imperial system; and IMHO it is a more difficult system to use in daily life. Thank God for the fact that food products here do give metric units next to the Imperial ones.
The Imperial system is fundamentally flawed for reasons that I won't bother going into here. There is no reason to persist in using it. For Pete's sake, it's not even an American system to begin with! I don't understand this emotional attachment to a system of measurements that was an "import" in the first place, and moreover, isn't even used anymore in the country that "invented" it.
I've followed the development of AtheOS with occassional interest over the last year or so. Congratulations on what seems to be a very interesting project.
As is often heard (but perhaps seldom understood), an OS in and of itself has only academic interest without meaningful applications. Some might argue "it's the applications, stupid", but I find this thinking somewhat one dimensional. A computing experience is made up of that delicate balance between functionality of available applications, and the ability of the underlying OS to "run" those applications, and run them well. This duality is something I think very few people truly understand (I'm not one of them, I'll quickly add). Word with its rich but admittedly overbloated feature set loses most of its appeal given that most flavours of Windows are unreliable, slow, and crippled by a "single-user-at-the-console" mentality as well as the horror that is the Windows registry.
Although I have a keen interest in the OS that I happen to use, this is not at the expense of any and all applications. Granted, I'd search long and hard for alternatives before I abandon a particular platform, but I'm not (I hope) blindly loyal to any one system.
I can understand that native AtheOS apps might be few and far between. For my purposes, I can probably get by with just gcc and xemacs (although I'd sorely miss kdevelop). Consider me thus a programmer (and not some sad MS Office junkie - bless their blissfully ignorant little souls) and tell me why should I use AtheOS? What can it offer that my current Linux and IRIX boxen don't? Or perhaps, if someone with time on their hands hacks an AtheOS-GUI theme for KDE/Gnome (perhaps this exists already?) why bother with the real thing?
Some quick background - my Bachelors and Master's are in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, and I'm currently studying towards a PhD in Biomedical Engineering.
Perhaps the most sound (and the most difficult) strategy is to know yourself. Understand what set of criteria is important to you in a career (job type, job satisfaction, renumeration, status, security) and match this against what your perceptions of Computer Engineering / Computer Science are.
In some important respects, the two disciplines share (obviously) a similar backdrop (think of surgeons vs internists in medicine perhaps - with engineers mapping to the surgeons, and scientists mapping to the internists). Some basic training will overlap, but the specialised learning, and more importantly the the mind-set, you'll leave each with can differ tremendously.
I think it's simplistic and limiting to class computer science as "software" and computer engineering as "hardware". Indeed, you can study computer "science" and finish up hardly being able to string two statements together in C. Likewise, you can study computer "engineering" and hardly be able to solder a resistor to a "breadboard" (sort of descriptive of me:-)). Ironically, you'll probably be able to string together C code, though.
You should perhaps consider that computer engineering is traditionally a specialisation of electronic engineering (and here I use electrical/electronic engineering interchageably).
Electronic Engineering is concerned with the processing of energy/information. Whether this energy is electron based, optic-based, is largely irrelevant. What is important is how can you use/manipulate this to solve problems.
Electronic Engineering, historically, grew primarily from physics and applied mathematics - and you don't often need to scratch the discipline too deeply to find that lineage still flows strong. Indeed, at least where I studied, EE at times seemed more mathematics than anything else. Practically every course had a mathematical undertone: signal processing was all about probablity and information theory, control systems was about linear differential mathematics, electronics lost itself in the physics of transistors, optics was mostly algebra, and then of course there were the more "pure" maths courses. Hell, now that I think about it electromagnetism and its love of Maxwell's equations matched anything that I've seen physicists grapple with when talking about relativity.
In terms of "practical" hands-on mucking about with circuits and the such, we had very little. One formal course of electronic design in my third year - and otherwise mostly in the assorted lab courses here and there. I should add that where I studied, the course offered a wide range of electives - had I the inclination I certainly could have jumped into hardware with both feet (and elbows, and the odd eyeball). Even courses on high speed circuitry and microwave antennas were all done on computer in simulations and the like.
Note, that I consider this a Good Thing. University study is not about trade certification. The moment you wed a degree to a particular technology you suddenly assign your knowledge a life-span that extends only as long as the technology is in vogue.
I cannot speak much about Computer Science. Its lineage stems strongly from studies of logic and philosophy. Despite what other slashdotters have posted, in my experience and the CS students I knew, it didn't hold a candle to the mathematics we as EE students had to suffer. And of course CS considers itself a *pure* science as opposed to engineering (which simply stated considers itself an *applied* science).
Scientists are more concerned with *why* things work, engineers with *how* things work - this makes scientists good at analysis and processing, and engineers good at synthesis and creativity.
Note that being highly creative is not necessarily a good trait in a scientist, while you can hardly be a good engineer without being creative. Remember, creativity is *not* the same thing as intelligence - a creative individual often implies intelligence as well. The converse does not always hold.
I remember that the EE students would often (perhaps unfairly) scorn the CS students. We (as EEs) would often be given problems that had to obviously be solved on computer, yet had no formal computer programming courses (this I considered a Bad Thing). We simply were expected to be able to program, or teach ourselves enough to get the task done. The CS students often had several formal classes in programming, yet little concern or understanding of practical considerations. A running joke was that an EE's program would be a jumbled mess of garbage that worked like lightning, a CS's source code would be 2/3 comments and the rest wouldn't work anyway. Several EEs that I knew programmed circles around anything that moved. Several also shouldn't have been allowed near a keyboard if the fate of the planet depended on it.
To this day, a lot of "pure" CS people that I know have little understanding about the actual implications of their coding styles. Elegance for the sake of elegance is a hindrance when down at the machine level you end up clogging the system down because you have no concept of how your code actually ends up shunting electrons around.
I don't know if this answers your question. EE/CE is IMHO more difficult than CS. Of course, you also have a much broader base of study doing EE/CE, and will deal with more than "just software". More than anything, I'd say that EE/CE taught me "how to think". How to approach and solve problems in a practical real world manner. I wasn't (and still am not) the kind of guy who'd be happy with a soldering iron, breadboad, and nest of components scattered about, up to my eyeballs in "hardware". If this is what you think Engineering entails, you have a misconception.
If you're up to the challenge, take the engineering track!
This kind of action from Microsoft, while understandable and even expected, completely puzzles me. And yet, when I look at the company's defense in its anti-trust trial, the one common thread is an arrogance bordering on a complete disconnect from reality.
I keep asking myself, what do they want to accomplish by this, and can they really be so stupid?
I'm sure that slashdot, while actively read in Redmond, has few friends there. Still, the somewhat volatile and reactive/. community should be well known, if only be reputation. Who knows, perhaps The Company has been looking for a reason to slash out at/. for quite some time. They certainly seem to have been doing a lot of clutching at straws lately.
One can probably safely assume that Microsoft's goal is to limit the spread of its "Specification". This is understandable, and certainly their right. But I can't help but think that if limiting its spread is what The Company wanted, the best strategy would have been to simply do nothing. Remain quiet. Pick battles wisely, if at all.
I remember reading the/. article, shaking my head at Microsoft's "perversion" of a perfectly good open standard, and moving on. Reading J. K. Weston's email, and already feeling affronted at his referring to/. as "Internet Service Provider" (what's wrong with Dear Andover.net or Dear slashdot?), I can't help but feel that the whole issue is speading a la deCSS. Something that I had read, and forgotten about, is now foremost in my mind again.
Threatening in a oh-so subtle manner with the DMCA act is right up their with other MS legalese brilliance (the forged court-presented video footage of a "crippled" non-IE demonstration comes to mind).
I won't make comments on the legality of MS's attempts here. I keep telling myself that surely The Company can't be so utterly clueless... there *has* to be some ulterior motive behind "stirring up a hornet's nest". The bubble of invincibility that The Company thought it held about itself has burst in such a dramatic manner that surely even J. K Weston's office must have at least felt some of its spray.
Anyone interested in getting the "Specification" (sadly flawed and stereotypical as it is) can easily get it from The Company's site (at least that's my understanding). Does it really matter at all whether the "Specification" is now "out there"? What possible good (for MS) can come from making it an issue now, in this manner, and with this community? More importantly, what impact at all does having the "Specification" out there have on The Company anyway?
I'm sitting here typing and shaking my head. I almost pity them their sad posturing... MS reminds me increasingly more of a panicked, albeit still powerful, child that simply can't understand the world would be a much better place without another brat.
Bravo/. for your stand. Don't pull the postings. I for one am enjoying watching the wounded giant fall over, kicking and thrashing as it goes down. Actions like this only accelerate its utter fall.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry - but I have to react to this:
As a South African having been in the US now for 3 yrs I can say that from my perspective the argument of "it's hard for people to relate the metric system to their daily lives" is completely flawed. You are used to whatever you grow up in. It's as simple as that. Having said that, and having been here for 3 yrs, I *am* used to the Imperial system; and IMHO it is a more difficult system to use in daily life. Thank God for the fact that food products here do give metric units next to the Imperial ones.
The Imperial system is fundamentally flawed for reasons that I won't bother going into here. There is no reason to persist in using it. For Pete's sake, it's not even an American system to begin with! I don't understand this emotional attachment to a system of measurements that was an "import" in the first place, and moreover, isn't even used anymore in the country that "invented" it.
Hi Kurt -
I've followed the development of AtheOS with occassional interest over the last year or so. Congratulations on what seems to be a very interesting project.
As is often heard (but perhaps seldom understood), an OS in and of itself has only academic interest without meaningful applications. Some might argue "it's the applications, stupid", but I find this thinking somewhat one dimensional. A computing experience is made up of that delicate balance between functionality of available applications, and the ability of the underlying OS to "run" those applications, and run them well. This duality is something I think very few people truly understand (I'm not one of them, I'll quickly add). Word with its rich but admittedly overbloated feature set loses most of its appeal given that most flavours of Windows are unreliable, slow, and crippled by a "single-user-at-the-console" mentality as well as the horror that is the Windows registry.
Although I have a keen interest in the OS that I happen to use, this is not at the expense of any and all applications. Granted, I'd search long and hard for alternatives before I abandon a particular platform, but I'm not (I hope) blindly loyal to any one system.
I can understand that native AtheOS apps might be few and far between. For my purposes, I can probably get by with just gcc and xemacs (although I'd sorely miss kdevelop). Consider me thus a programmer (and not some sad MS Office junkie - bless their blissfully ignorant little souls) and tell me why should I use AtheOS? What can it offer that my current Linux and IRIX boxen don't? Or perhaps, if someone with time on their hands hacks an AtheOS-GUI theme for KDE/Gnome (perhaps this exists already?) why bother with the real thing?
Some quick background - my Bachelors and Master's are in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, and I'm currently studying towards a PhD in Biomedical Engineering.
Perhaps the most sound (and the most difficult) strategy is to know yourself. Understand what set of criteria is important to you in a career (job type, job satisfaction, renumeration, status, security) and match this against what your perceptions of Computer Engineering / Computer Science are.
In some important respects, the two disciplines share (obviously) a similar backdrop (think of surgeons vs internists in medicine perhaps - with engineers mapping to the surgeons, and scientists mapping to the internists). Some basic training will overlap, but the specialised learning, and more importantly the the mind-set, you'll leave each with can differ tremendously.
I think it's simplistic and limiting to class computer science as "software" and computer engineering as "hardware". Indeed, you can study computer "science" and finish up hardly being able to string two statements together in C. Likewise, you can study computer "engineering" and hardly be able to solder a resistor to a "breadboard" (sort of descriptive of me :-)). Ironically, you'll probably be able to string together C code, though.
You should perhaps consider that computer engineering is traditionally a specialisation of electronic engineering (and here I use electrical/electronic engineering interchageably).
Electronic Engineering is concerned with the processing of energy/information. Whether this energy is electron based, optic-based, is largely irrelevant. What is important is how can you use/manipulate this to solve problems.
Electronic Engineering, historically, grew primarily from physics and applied mathematics - and you don't often need to scratch the discipline too deeply to find that lineage still flows strong. Indeed, at least where I studied, EE at times seemed more mathematics than anything else. Practically every course had a mathematical undertone: signal processing was all about probablity and information theory, control systems was about linear differential mathematics, electronics lost itself in the physics of transistors, optics was mostly algebra, and then of course there were the more "pure" maths courses. Hell, now that I think about it electromagnetism and its love of Maxwell's equations matched anything that I've seen physicists grapple with when talking about relativity.
In terms of "practical" hands-on mucking about with circuits and the such, we had very little. One formal course of electronic design in my third year - and otherwise mostly in the assorted lab courses here and there. I should add that where I studied, the course offered a wide range of electives - had I the inclination I certainly could have jumped into hardware with both feet (and elbows, and the odd eyeball). Even courses on high speed circuitry and microwave antennas were all done on computer in simulations and the like.
Note, that I consider this a Good Thing. University study is not about trade certification. The moment you wed a degree to a particular technology you suddenly assign your knowledge a life-span that extends only as long as the technology is in vogue.
I cannot speak much about Computer Science. Its lineage stems strongly from studies of logic and philosophy. Despite what other slashdotters have posted, in my experience and the CS students I knew, it didn't hold a candle to the mathematics we as EE students had to suffer. And of course CS considers itself a *pure* science as opposed to engineering (which simply stated considers itself an *applied* science).
Scientists are more concerned with *why* things work, engineers with *how* things work - this makes scientists good at analysis and processing, and engineers good at synthesis and creativity.
Note that being highly creative is not necessarily a good trait in a scientist, while you can hardly be a good engineer without being creative. Remember, creativity is *not* the same thing as intelligence - a creative individual often implies intelligence as well. The converse does not always hold.
I remember that the EE students would often (perhaps unfairly) scorn the CS students. We (as EEs) would often be given problems that had to obviously be solved on computer, yet had no formal computer programming courses (this I considered a Bad Thing). We simply were expected to be able to program, or teach ourselves enough to get the task done. The CS students often had several formal classes in programming, yet little concern or understanding of practical considerations. A running joke was that an EE's program would be a jumbled mess of garbage that worked like lightning, a CS's source code would be 2/3 comments and the rest wouldn't work anyway. Several EEs that I knew programmed circles around anything that moved. Several also shouldn't have been allowed near a keyboard if the fate of the planet depended on it.
To this day, a lot of "pure" CS people that I know have little understanding about the actual implications of their coding styles. Elegance for the sake of elegance is a hindrance when down at the machine level you end up clogging the system down because you have no concept of how your code actually ends up shunting electrons around.
I don't know if this answers your question. EE/CE is IMHO more difficult than CS. Of course, you also have a much broader base of study doing EE/CE, and will deal with more than "just software". More than anything, I'd say that EE/CE taught me "how to think". How to approach and solve problems in a practical real world manner. I wasn't (and still am not) the kind of guy who'd be happy with a soldering iron, breadboad, and nest of components scattered about, up to my eyeballs in "hardware". If this is what you think Engineering entails, you have a misconception.
If you're up to the challenge, take the engineering track!
This kind of action from Microsoft, while understandable and even expected, completely puzzles me. And yet, when I look at the company's defense in its anti-trust trial, the one common thread is an arrogance bordering on a complete disconnect from reality.
/. community should be well known, if only be reputation. Who knows, perhaps The Company has been looking for a reason to slash out at /. for quite some time. They certainly seem to have been doing a lot of clutching at straws lately.
/. article, shaking my head at Microsoft's "perversion" of a perfectly good open standard, and moving on. Reading J. K. Weston's email, and already feeling affronted at his referring to /. as "Internet Service Provider" (what's wrong with Dear Andover.net or Dear slashdot?), I can't help but feel that the whole issue is speading a la deCSS. Something that I had read, and forgotten about, is now foremost in my mind again.
/. for your stand. Don't pull the postings. I for one am enjoying watching the wounded giant fall over, kicking and thrashing as it goes down. Actions like this only accelerate its utter fall.
I keep asking myself, what do they want to accomplish by this, and can they really be so stupid?
I'm sure that slashdot, while actively read in Redmond, has few friends there. Still, the somewhat volatile and reactive
One can probably safely assume that Microsoft's goal is to limit the spread of its "Specification". This is understandable, and certainly their right. But I can't help but think that if limiting its spread is what The Company wanted, the best strategy would have been to simply do nothing. Remain quiet. Pick battles wisely, if at all.
I remember reading the
Threatening in a oh-so subtle manner with the DMCA act is right up their with other MS legalese brilliance (the forged court-presented video footage of a "crippled" non-IE demonstration comes to mind).
I won't make comments on the legality of MS's attempts here. I keep telling myself that surely The Company can't be so utterly clueless... there *has* to be some ulterior motive behind "stirring up a hornet's nest". The bubble of invincibility that The Company thought it held about itself has burst in such a dramatic manner that surely even J. K Weston's office must have at least felt some of its spray.
Anyone interested in getting the "Specification" (sadly flawed and stereotypical as it is) can easily get it from The Company's site (at least that's my understanding). Does it really matter at all whether the "Specification" is now "out there"? What possible good (for MS) can come from making it an issue now, in this manner, and with this community? More importantly, what impact at all does having the "Specification" out there have on The Company anyway?
I'm sitting here typing and shaking my head. I almost pity them their sad posturing... MS reminds me increasingly more of a panicked, albeit still powerful, child that simply can't understand the world would be a much better place without another brat.
Bravo