So how would this work in a world of per-user licenses of Microsoft software? I buy a car running embedded NT in the on-board computer systems, and if I let someone else drive it I have to pay Microsoft an additional license??
Depends what it was running. If it was Appleshare, and only Appleshare it would be pretty stable. I ran an MacOS/Appleshare box without rebooting from Oct 1986 to Jan 1991. Five year uptime.
SOAP and XML-RPC are the distributed-object scheme
I don't see how XML-RPC or SOAP are a distributed object scheme. Sure, it's a communications protocol. It allows you to send data structures down a wire, or do remote procedure calls.
But where is the encapsulation? Where are the methods? How is this equal to serialized component architectures?
One of Slash's weak points is its two-tier architecture.
I am sure. But what you are describing is not depedendent on having a distributed object architecture.
What the hell happened to science education?
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 2
Ah - cold fusion as a great coverup/conspiracy to surpress.
What a crock. Cold fusion has the same status as alien abduction, Loch Ness and the Yeti in scientific circles. Or maybe the Piltdown man and von Danaken's theories.
Well, the fact is that nobody has ever shown that cold fusion exists. All we have is an experiment with anamolous results that have been reproduced. A thorough investigation of the anamoly turns out to have identified the source of heat as being a thermocouple power supply. Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite.
The interesting question is do memes like this persist, especially in places like this.
My guess is that is a failure of a general education to instill a capacity of rational thought and scientific skepticism in vast majority of the populace. We still have the need to debunk urban legends about organ harvesting, so why not similar legends about cold fusion?
Fleischmann and Pons blew it. Get over it.
Re:A lesson in collaborative science
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 2
Actually, the most significant evidence was that the orbit of the planet Mercury fails to follow Newtonian mechanics. There are alternative explanations to the Michelson-Morley experiment results, however none of them explain the orbital mechanics of Mercury.
Well thanks to Google, most evey publicly accessable page is accessable forever (for now, barring bankruptcy) thanks to their cashing ablity.
Google and all other search engines are FAR from complete listings of the Internet. The best estimates are that Google has maybe a 20% indexed coverage of the internet. In addition Google does not cache pages that are excluded by request, or are generated from database searches.
It seems to me that the big issues that electronic journals face is archival storage and peer review.
Advancing technologies make storage media obsolete. When the demand for a format drops below a certain level, it is no longer profitable to manufacture the equipment needed to read it. Storage media have finite lifetimes. Much of the data collected on early tapes is not readable any more. Dead tree format is the only practical time tested format for archival storage in existence. Scientific journals MUST be archivable. The means to archive the web are not available to librarians.
Peer review of scientific journals is necessary for a variety of reasons. It prevents fraudulent data from being published. It catches many mistakes by authors. It is a necessary step in quality control - true scientific publication must include the information needed to duplicate an experiment. Without peer review the quality of the scientific record is suspect. Peer review is slow and costs money.
Electronic publication does not provide the revenue required to fund real peer review or publication in archivable format. MOVE 'ZIG'.
The main pox infecting the pustules of the web is client side scripting. Every browser invented by the mind of man treats every client side language differently, making the authorship of working code a Death March.
Browsers as they exist can barely (and sometimes not) handle the much easier task of rendering a page, and until one put a standards compliant page on the web AND HAVE IT APPEAR SIMILARLY on 99.5% of the browsers in use WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING CLIENT SIDE SCRIPTING!!!
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Re:Does it have emacs, TeX, and sendmail? Others?
on
OS X
·
· Score: 2
Sendmail as default mail deamon - yes
emacs - yes
csh, tcsh, zsh - yes - bash you can compile & install
TeX - not in default, but I know people who have it running.
Other things that I know that work on OS X are Samba, mysql, ssh, cvs. Apache is the personal web server, and comes with PHP.
perl -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::LWP" works.
What is really amazing is that the terminal supports drag and drop; ie drag a folder to it and you get the path on the command line.
The level of compatability of Darwin with the standard UNIX tools is astonishing to me.
It seems to me that this sort of thing has a great potential to backfire.
Many, many people start off with pirated warez, and later buy into stuff as their means increase. But with copy protection making pirating impossible, the warez will dry up.
This will cause people to look a lot more seriously at the free beer alternatives, and very likely grow the market segment of user of these programs. Later on these same people will be far less likely to buy into the non-free software world.
I am a Sr. programmer working for an internet consultancy, and came to this job after working as a scientist for 20 years. I have a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. I spent a good part of my career working in the lab doing some of the tasks that you describe, however I was a scientist first, and then a programmer.
Speaking now as a programmer, I find the type of job you are describing to be totally uninteresting and perhaps actually dangerous from a career point of view. Programmers live and die by developing skill sets that are in demand in their marketplace. The type of work that is described in this article would result in my skill set (carefully built from years of hard work) failing to be interesting to the vast majority of employers.
The reason that you are having a hard time attracting programmers is that the job market is oriented towards people with certain job histories, and what you are offering is not likely to give a programmer the backgound he needs for that next job.
Try instead recruiting scientists or math majors with an interest in programming, and get them some training.
They would be wrong. The study of physics implies the study of some natural phenomena. The study of mathematics does not. Physics does use mathematics intensively in such study, so much so that advances in math are often required to solve physics problems. But it is not true that advances in math always lead to advances in Physics, or that advances in Phyics are always built on advances in math.
Science is not the explanation of natural phonomenae. It is the pursuit of knowledge.
Far too encompassing. Memorizing a poem is not science but is a pursuit of knowledge.
What's over the horizon, why is the sky blue.
the question 'why is the sky blue' is the study of natural phenomena. What is over the horizon may involve sailing around in a boat. Nobody ever called Magellan a scientist.
You are confusing science with philosophy. They are NOT the same thing.
According to this definition, physics, biology, math, and computer science are all sciences.
1. Please explain to me what "observation, identification, description and experimental investigation" has to do with computer science?
2. Natural phenomena. 'Nuff said.
3. Such activities applied to an object of study.
Bzzzt. None of these apply to the activities described as computer science.
Mathematics is an extremely important part of the application of the scientific method, however that does NOT make it a science per se. It is merely one of the tools (the most important) used in the pursuit of science.
On a deeper philisophical level there have been attempts to classify mathematics as a science by asserting by induction that the structures of mathematics (sets, numbers etc.) are real objects through holistic continuity with the real objects of science. However this approach fails when you investigate it further, for the application of maathematics to science is always in an idealized sense, for example in the study of the fluid mechanics of waves you do not treat the individual atoms of water in a mathematical fashion, you make an assumption that you have a continuum of fluid, and you do not take into account the depth of the liquid, you merely assume it is infinitely deep. Therefore there is no essential holistic continuity between the objects of the study and mathematical structures used to build models of their behaviour. These objects are fundamental abstractions.
"Computer Science* is the study of data structures and algorithims, which is *DEFINATLEY* a science
No, it is not. Science is the study of natural phenomena, and the use of the scientific method to develop predictive models that describe the behaviour of that phenomena. The study of algorithms is a branch of mathematics.
And as far as being having to understand programming before understanding algorithms, well I feel sorry for your professors. Algorithms were invented 1000 years before computers. The word algorithm is a corruption of the name of the author of the first book on modern algebra, written in the year 830 by Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi.
Slashdot Mirror
Buffalo NY would have to be the ideal location for this. Cold as hell, and right next to the Niagra Hydro plant for cheap power.
Businesses typically are running IIS and they have a need for dynamic content and use ASP.
SERIOUS web businesses run Java.
Why would you use php or perl on win2k when ASP
Because someday I might need to run my code on a non-Microsot platform. ASP is a dead end.
It would seem to me that a "monolithic conglomerate" is an oxymoron.
So how would this work in a world of per-user licenses of Microsoft software? I buy a car running embedded NT in the on-board computer systems, and if I let someone else drive it I have to pay Microsoft an additional license??
Hardware : Mac Plus
OS : 6.8.3 or so
MacOS, I would give it 10 days.
Depends what it was running. If it was Appleshare, and only Appleshare it would be pretty stable. I ran an MacOS/Appleshare box without rebooting from Oct 1986 to Jan 1991. Five year uptime.
SOAP and XML-RPC are the distributed-object scheme
I don't see how XML-RPC or SOAP are a distributed object scheme. Sure, it's a communications protocol. It allows you to send data structures down a wire, or do remote procedure calls.
But where is the encapsulation? Where are the methods? How is this equal to serialized component architectures?
One of Slash's weak points is its two-tier architecture.
I am sure. But what you are describing is not depedendent on having a distributed object architecture.
Ah - cold fusion as a great coverup/conspiracy to surpress.
What a crock. Cold fusion has the same status as alien abduction, Loch Ness and the Yeti in scientific circles. Or maybe the Piltdown man and von Danaken's theories.
Well, the fact is that nobody has ever shown that cold fusion exists. All we have is an experiment with anamolous results that have been reproduced. A thorough investigation of the anamoly turns out to have identified the source of heat as being a thermocouple power supply. Yet even today we find this crap on systems like slashodot. Systmes that purport to cater to some sort of intellectual elite.
The interesting question is do memes like this persist, especially in places like this.
My guess is that is a failure of a general education to instill a capacity of rational thought and scientific skepticism in vast majority of the populace. We still have the need to debunk urban legends about organ harvesting, so why not similar legends about cold fusion?
Fleischmann and Pons blew it. Get over it.
Actually, the most significant evidence was that the orbit of the planet Mercury fails to follow Newtonian mechanics. There are alternative explanations to the Michelson-Morley experiment results, however none of them explain the orbital mechanics of Mercury.
Well thanks to Google, most evey publicly accessable page is accessable forever (for now, barring bankruptcy) thanks to their cashing ablity.
Google and all other search engines are FAR from complete listings of the Internet. The best estimates are that Google has maybe a 20% indexed coverage of the internet. In addition Google does not cache pages that are excluded by request, or are generated from database searches.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
It seems to me that the big issues that electronic journals face is archival storage and peer review.
Advancing technologies make storage media obsolete. When the demand for a format drops below a certain level, it is no longer profitable to manufacture the equipment needed to read it. Storage media have finite lifetimes. Much of the data collected on early tapes is not readable any more. Dead tree format is the only practical time tested format for archival storage in existence. Scientific journals MUST be archivable. The means to archive the web are not available to librarians.
Peer review of scientific journals is necessary for a variety of reasons. It prevents fraudulent data from being published. It catches many mistakes by authors. It is a necessary step in quality control - true scientific publication must include the information needed to duplicate an experiment. Without peer review the quality of the scientific record is suspect. Peer review is slow and costs money.
Electronic publication does not provide the revenue required to fund real peer review or publication in archivable format.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
The main pox infecting the pustules of the web is client side scripting. Every browser invented by the mind of man treats every client side language differently, making the authorship of working code a Death March.
Browsers as they exist can barely (and sometimes not) handle the much easier task of rendering a page, and until one put a standards compliant page on the web AND HAVE IT APPEAR SIMILARLY on 99.5% of the browsers in use WE DON'T NEED NO STINKING CLIENT SIDE SCRIPTING!!!
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Sendmail as default mail deamon - yes
emacs - yes
csh, tcsh, zsh - yes - bash you can compile & install
TeX - not in default, but I know people who have it running.
Other things that I know that work on OS X are Samba, mysql, ssh, cvs. Apache is the personal web server, and comes with PHP.
perl -MCPAN -e "install Bundle::LWP" works.
What is really amazing is that the terminal supports drag and drop; ie drag a folder to it and you get the path on the command line.
The level of compatability of Darwin with the standard UNIX tools is astonishing to me.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Copyright covers only the embodiment of an idea, not the idea itself,
Copyright covers the EXPRESSION of the idea.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Here in NJ, on Cablevision I get 5 MB/s down and 1 MB/s up, if I can find a server that will provide the service. I pay $29.95/mo for this.
The real limits I see are due to the fact that there are really not very many places on the internet that will dish out the bits at these rates.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
It seems to me that this sort of thing has a great potential to backfire.
Many, many people start off with pirated warez, and later buy into stuff as their means increase. But with copy protection making pirating impossible, the warez will dry up.
This will cause people to look a lot more seriously at the free beer alternatives, and very likely grow the market segment of user of these programs. Later on these same people will be far less likely to buy into the non-free software world.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
No, this statement is true. Windows XP is not a released product, and Videolan does not allow you to play DVD's.
The fact of the matter is that there is no other released product that will do what you are criticising Mac OS X about.
Ridiculous.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
I am a Sr. programmer working for an internet consultancy, and came to this job after working as a scientist for 20 years. I have a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. I spent a good part of my career working in the lab doing some of the tasks that you describe, however I was a scientist first, and then a programmer.
Speaking now as a programmer, I find the type of job you are describing to be totally uninteresting and perhaps actually dangerous from a career point of view. Programmers live and die by developing skill sets that are in demand in their marketplace. The type of work that is described in this article would result in my skill set (carefully built from years of hard work) failing to be interesting to the vast majority of employers.
The reason that you are having a hard time attracting programmers is that the job market is oriented towards people with certain job histories, and what you are offering is not likely to give a programmer the backgound he needs for that next job.
Try instead recruiting scientists or math majors with an interest in programming, and get them some training.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
What the heck kind of modern "multimedia" system doesn't have DVD and CD-RW support???
Neither Windows or Linux have otu of the box support for both.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Churchill called this battle "the hinge of fate". It is the largest land battle ever fought.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
historically, no one had ever successfully invaded Russia.
The Vikings did.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
Mathematics is not a branch of science
My premise.
Some would say that math IS physics.
They would be wrong. The study of physics implies the study of some natural phenomena. The study of mathematics does not. Physics does use mathematics intensively in such study, so much so that advances in math are often required to solve physics problems. But it is not true that advances in math always lead to advances in Physics, or that advances in Phyics are always built on advances in math.
Science is not the explanation of natural phonomenae. It is the pursuit of knowledge.
Far too encompassing. Memorizing a poem is not science but is a pursuit of knowledge.
What's over the horizon, why is the sky blue.
the question 'why is the sky blue' is the study of natural phenomena. What is over the horizon may involve sailing around in a boat. Nobody ever called Magellan a scientist.
You are confusing science with philosophy. They are NOT the same thing.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
According to this definition, physics, biology, math, and computer science are all sciences.
1. Please explain to me what "observation, identification, description and experimental investigation" has to do with computer science?
2. Natural phenomena. 'Nuff said.
3. Such activities applied to an object of study.
Bzzzt. None of these apply to the activities described as computer science.
Mathematics is an extremely important part of the application of the scientific method, however that does NOT make it a science per se. It is merely one of the tools (the most important) used in the pursuit of science.
On a deeper philisophical level there have been attempts to classify mathematics as a science by asserting by induction that the structures of mathematics (sets, numbers etc.) are real objects through holistic continuity with the real objects of science. However this approach fails when you investigate it further, for the application of maathematics to science is always in an idealized sense, for example in the study of the fluid mechanics of waves you do not treat the individual atoms of water in a mathematical fashion, you make an assumption that you have a continuum of fluid, and you do not take into account the depth of the liquid, you merely assume it is infinitely deep. Therefore there is no essential holistic continuity between the objects of the study and mathematical structures used to build models of their behaviour. These objects are fundamental abstractions.
Q.E.D.
MOVE 'ZIG'.
"Computer Science* is the study of data structures and algorithims, which is *DEFINATLEY* a science
No, it is not. Science is the study of natural phenomena, and the use of the scientific method to develop predictive models that describe the behaviour of that phenomena. The study of algorithms is a branch of mathematics.
And as far as being having to understand programming before understanding algorithms, well I feel sorry for your professors. Algorithms were invented 1000 years before computers. The word algorithm is a corruption of the name of the author of the first book on modern algebra, written in the year 830 by Mohammed ibn-Musa al-Khowarizmi.
MOVE 'ZIG'.