To answer these concerns, I think one has to broaden the historical context. When universities were first conceived of in the 14th century, most fields which we are familiar with today did not even exist in the imagination. You couldn't study information technology, any of the sciences or fields of engineering (as we know them today), or even art practice. One basically studied to become a clergyman, a lawyer, or a teacher. It wasn't until the 19th century that academia even began to consider training engineers and other practical folk within their halls using modern curricular methods, which as the poster points out, do sometimes have their drawbacks.
The point is that all of the institutional traditions of academia are set in place to create future generations of academics and professionals. We have similar discussion continuously in academia -- it has been pointed out than in steady state, a professor will train one graduate student to succeed him. Yet the average number of graduate students trained by a professor over his lifetime will often go into the dozens. Where do most of those students end up? Not in academia usually, but in industry.
My own personal opinion is that academia is not constructed for the practical "real life" experiences the poster is concerned about, nor is there any reason to expect that it would do a good job at it. That is primarily what internships and summer research experiences are intended for. Ideally, in good internship and co-op programs, not only will students bring their classwork education into industry and academic research, but students will bring back their practical knowledge into the classroom.
It would be neat to have a commercial craft on the moon, but let's keep things in perspective.
Why does one want to go to the moon?
Why aren't we there today?
The primary reason why the Apollo missions failed to spawn a continuous succession of future missions was the complete lack of infrastructure left behind for future scientific projects (including unprecedented experiments due to low lunar seismic noise, critical for gravity wave detection; and optical and radio astronomy), which is why we should be there in the first place.
Repeat this mantra : "It's the science, stupid." We're not going to the moon to put business cards on it.
The cost of any lunar mission is extraordinary, and moreover, the cost of providing good infrastructure for important missions is even larger. Ultimately, and certainly until we have some sort of permanent base there, I think there is no good business plan which can justify that infrastructre. Even the relatively few space applications which one can possible imagine (semiconductors, pharmaceuticals) could be achieved in Earth orbit for much, much less money.
The revenues gained by any lunar project simply pale in comparison to what is needed to achieve the important goals discussed above.
So what are these folks doing? Little more than medieval item worship. Putting messages, items, and business cards on the moon? Sure, it's a start, but a LONG, LONG ways from achieving the goal of why we should be there.
And I, for one, question whether any short-term business strategy can supply the needed infrastructure to provide those goals. It will ultimately require at least partial government support.
Let's not forget Apple is a monopoly -- basic economics suggests that above and beyond the market share issue discussed above, Apple would charge more for a PPC running MacOS than would a licensed third party manufacturer.
Incidentally, third party manufacturing has long been an issue in Apple's history, as Carelton's "Apple" describes in some detail. Under the Scully administration, Apple repeatedly opted for the "high-right" strategy of targetting the high-profit, small-market share, since they believed they could charge a premium for their systems. After a brief foray into third-party manufacturing under Amelio, Apple has returned to being the sole manufacturer with Jobs. Apple would like to be the BMW of the computing industry. Just as BMW has carved out a very successful business from the "high-right" portion of the automobile market, so Apple hopes to do so with computers.
Incidentally, Apple also began a project (dubbed "Star Trek" -- to boldly go where no Apple had gone before) in the early 1990s which sought to port the MacOS to Intel hardware, which would also have cut down the cost of using the MacOS. Star Trek was killed internally before being brought to market, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that Apple would risk losing sales on their own hardware.
I was in the same situation as the poster, having purchased from onsale.com almost five years ago. Since I didn't want my data from a five-year old purchase cycling on to Fry's, I tried to use their opt-out script this morning, but it wasn't even working properly.
If you actually read this article, the study only confirms that for a few hours after consuming a cup of coffee, your heart is placed under more stress. In and of itself, this does not appear to be very significant. Any vigorous physical activity will also raise your heartrate, constrict your arteries, and put your heart under more stress. It says NOTHING about long-term health consequences, which is really the main issue here.
I recall reading several years ago that at that time, the long-term health consequences of coffee were unclear. Some adverse affects were sometimes suggested in studies, but it turns out there are tremendous confounding factors -- coffee drinkers often tend to eat lots of donuts, be less active, and so on. When the initial population of patient participants was selected as healthy health care professionals, little or no adverse affects were observed for moderate (up to a couple of cups a day) intakes of coffee.
... I don't think that Hawking has any particular expertise which makes him an authority on this topic.
Often people look to individuals who have accomplished a great deal in one narrow endeavor (running a company, discovering fundamental particles, writing the Linux kernel) or insight and wisdom into topics in completely different fields, or the "big questions" of the human condition. In a few cases (such as that of Manhattan Project nuclear physicists in the postwar generation being tapped for their insights into government policy), the individuals have thought a great deal about certain questions, and their expertise does lend a certain air of authority. However, in many, many cases, as in this story with Hawking, their expertise does not lend any particular weight to their opinions. Indeed, their success in a totally unrelated endeavor often boosts their own self-importance above their personal knowledge, and their opinions often have a somewhat sophomoric, naive glow about them.
We should remain open to good ideas from anywhere, regardless of their source. However, the converse also applies -- we should ignore bad ideas, regardless of the source.
The link posted above contained a really good general QC background, written up as part of this fellow's Master's thesis, intended for CS people, starting with basic quantum physics and going on to qubits and basic quantum computing. I think it is worthwhile pointing out the link :
The description that the researchers at AI are slowly entering in thousands of facts such as "a table has four legs" sounds extremely similar to Lenat's Cyc project. Even the timescales (10 years in both cases) for both projects sounds quite similar.
Given that Cyc's project has apparently failed to live up to its original claims of producing genuine childlike intelligence by slowly building up all of the information a child has, and has since spawned into a commercial product, why should one believe AI will fare any better? How do their approaches differ? It seems particularly problematic for AI, as a company, that Cyc has released their OpenCyc project to the community.
These machines are ranked by PEAK theoretical speed. The top machines each have thousands of processors, so even if the processors which make them up are much slower, they make up for the difference in sheer numbers.
Vinge is not the only one to notice that the rate of growth in computer devices, if extrapolated for a few decades, will eventually exceed the capacity of the human brain, both in terms of strorage capability and in terms of processing speed. Indeed, this very notion forms the basis of many of Joy's and Kurzweil's recent discussions.
However, in doing this extrapolation, one is making a few assumptions. Most notably is that one can teach a computer how to:"think" using some (probably very complex) set of algorithms with comparable computational efficiency as the human brain, if one indeed had a computer with similar processing and storage ability as the human brain. That logic is quite flawed, due to the assumption of computational efficiency.
What do I mean by computational efficiency? Roughly speaking, the relative performance of one algorithm to another. For instance, in talking about the singularity (as Vinge puts it), one often neglects to notice the fact that human beings, with their neurons clicking away at petacycles per second, can only do arithmetic extremely poorly, at less than a flop! Logical puzzles often similarly vex humans (witness the analytic portions of the GRE!), where they also perform incredibly poorly. Significantly, human beings are very computationally inefficient at most tasks involving higher brain functions. We might process sound and visual input very well and very quickly, but most higher brain functions are very poor performers indeed.
One application of a similar train of logic is that human beings are the only animals known to be capable of performing arithmetic. Therefore, if one had a computer comparable to the human brain, one could do arithmetic. Heck, by this logic, we're only 50 years away from using computers to do integer addition!
The main point here is that, with regards to developing a "thinking" machine, WE MIGHT VERY WELL have the brute force computational resources available to us today. The hardware is not the limitation, so much as our ability to design the software with the complex adaptive ability of the human brain.
Just WHEN we will be able to develop that software, no one can really say, since it is really a fundamental flaw in our approaches, rather than in our devices. (It is similar to asking when physicists will be able to write down a self-consistent theory of everything. No one can say.) It could happen in a decade or two, or it could take significantly longer then 50 years. It all depends on how clever we are in attacking the problem.
This is an excellent question, and one I have wondered about myself.
There are two sides to this coin.
1) How many next-generation (PS2, Gamecube, XBox) consoles (NGCs) do we expect to be sold?
2) How many NGCs (obviously, only PS2 right now) have been sold already?
To answer these questions :
1) Roughly, this number should be at least the number of existing PS1 + DC consoles. This is not incorproating the significant increase in the overall market that we expect from first-time console owners who might be inclined to buy a console for its DVD playback ability (for instance).
I seem to find that roughly 15 - 20 million PS1 consoles were sold worldwide since its debut in 1995. And about 5 million DC consoles. This makes the total market size at least 20 - 25 million strong.
2) How many PS2 units have sold so far? I seem to find about 5 million have been shipped. It's more difficult to find out how many have been sold, but to be conservative, we can assume that all of the units shipped will sell by the Nintendo launch.
So... it seems that at most, 25% of the NGC market will have saturated by the time Nintendo enters the scene this fall. A million or two units is not going to change that number dramatically. It would appear there is a great deal more room left for growth.
HOWEVER, since one cannot overestimate the influence which a dominant technology has in the marketplace (think VHS vs. Betamax), Microsoft is going to have a very hard time taking the reins away from Sony and Nintendo this fall. I would certainly say that if they cannot make the crucial Christmas ship date, they are likely to find themselves killed before leaving the starting gate.
It's a pretty sad day for/. moderation when a clueless post such as this gets moderated up to "4, insightful".
It is actually very remarkable that molecules exist in space at all. Why? There are two sides to the process -- creation and destruction.
(*) Creation : Interstellar space is in general very tenuous , and so the likelihood that any two atoms combine in the gaseous phase to form a molecule is very improbable.
(*) Destruction - Once a molecule is created, it doesn't live forever. Space is a very harsh environment, and any molecules created are subjected to harsh cosmic radiation, the stellar radiation field (resulting from all stars surrounding it), as well as stellar winds and shocks. Any of these processes is cabable of disrupting molecules.
When you go ahead and do the naive estimate for the abundance of a molecule balancing creation and destruction rates, assuming only gaseous phase processes, you find that it is highly unlikely to find any substantial amounts of molecules in interstellar space. Indeed, when astronomers first invented instruments capable of detecting rotational mode transitions of molecules like CO and H_2O in interstellar space, their theoretician colleagues told them to forget the plan.
The reason why we have clouds of molecular gas in our galaxy today is a rather amazing one which no one originally anticipated. Besides gas, there are also small, solid dust grains belched out from winds from cool red giant stars in their final phases of evolution. Atoms collide and freeze out onto the surfaces of these grains, where they can remain for a very long time, migrating very slowly along the surface via Brownian processes. Every once in a while, it will bump into another or molecule frozen out in a similar fashion, thereby creating a more complex molecule. The dust grains catalyze the generation of molecules -- without them, we wouldn't have such an abundance of molecular gas in the galaxy today. Indeed, astronomers believe star formation in the early universe was substantially different from that which occurs today because such dust grains would have been completely absent.
I think this result is particularly surprising since one might expect that any winds or shocks thrown off by a star capable of boiling away a comet might also tend to powerful enough to destroy the molecules generated. If that really is the mechanism involved, it is a remarkable coincidence that the winds are just powerful enough to ablate the comets, but not so powerful as to destroy the molecules present.
Galactic collisions are actually relatively common in Nature; typical galactic separations are of order hundreds to thousands of kiloparsecs (kpc), whereas a typical galaxy is of order a few kpc in radius. Moreover, galaxies form along a highly filamentary spiderwork of structure in the early universe, and tend to flow inwards to more massive galaxies.
This situation is to be contrasted with the fate of stars during a galactic collision. Stellar radii are about 10^8 times smaller than the typical interstellar separation, so the vast majority of stars will simply fly right by another. A few stars will probably encounter a direct encounter (particularly if the initial pass is close enough to raise subtantial tides on the stars, which would act to drain energy and angular momentum from the system), but the vast majority fly by unscathed.
It is true, however, that gaseous clouds in the interstellar medium are much more extended that stars, and collision between clouds (particularly giant molecular clouds) will be quite spectacular. It is hypothesized that cloud collisions as well as gaseous flows (bringing tremendous influxes of mass to the galactic nuclar region) resulting from galactic collisions can account for the tremendous bursts of star formation seen in "starburst" galaxies such as NGC 1808.
In any case, the future collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda will be quite fascinating for far future Milky Way astronomers (if any are still around). Or perhaps for astronomers in other galaxies, far, far away...
The key point in this analysis is that they get 32 TFlops in doing the gravity summation for a discrete particle simulation.
If you have additional physics (hydrodynamics, etc), that processing must happen on the workstation which is running the simulation. So the performance is ultimately bottlenecked by the workstation. In practice, Grape practioners typically do not see anything close to the theoretical peak of their boards.
(First, a preface. I'm a member of a computational astrophysics research group. We have ported our codes to the kinds of hybir d architectures of the machines discussed here, and have benchmarked their performances. Moreover, we have previously run on vector machines, so we have a fair idea of the pros and cons of the two approaches.)
While zavyman points out the basic problems inherent in parallelizing any discretized numerical model, the problem in obtaining good performance on hybrid architectures like the IBM SP-2s and SGI Origins which currently top out the top 500 list goes much deeper.
First, these machines are built around a hybrid architecture. Each node has a few processors (typically between 4 and 16, depending on the model), which utilize shared memory. These nodes connect to one another via an internode interconnect, with relatively modest bandwidth.
While this hybrid architecture allows supercomputer manufacturers like IBM and SGI to scale into the thousands of processors, it also introduces a substantial complexity into building of high-performance codes. Ideally, one would like to run threads-based parallelization on each node, and MPI between nodes, though the reality is that most codes in use use only MPI.
One can get decent scalability (into the hundreds of processors) when one runs physical models with limited communication -- ie, which simulate hyperbolic PDES like those of hydrodynamics (as zavyman describes above). However, things become more interesting when one considers more varied physics, such as that involved in solving elliptic PDEs (such as Poisson's equation for self-gravity or electrostatics). Because elliptic equations connect everything with everything else on the spatial domain, the communication costs ARE MUCH HIGHER. It is extremely challenging to build a multiphysics code with such varied parallelization demands. Indeed, it is a fair statement that no one has yet achieved excellent performance on anything close fo the thousands of processors available on these hybrid machines. For instance, another poster describes a climate model available from another research group. However, if you dig deeper, you find that they state,
"ForesightWX uses an IBM 12-node system with 52 processors working 24 hours a day. The cluster fits snuggly in a small room. A decade ago the same power would have filled the building."
52 processors is a far cry from the thousands of processors available to the users of these machines. Since each processor is slower than a vector processor like the Cray (by about a factor of 3 - 5), and assuming ideal speedup, such modest levels of parallelization lead to speedups of about 10-15 relative to a single Cray T90 processor. It is quite evident that there is little net gain over running the same simulation on 8-16 T90 nodes.
Moreover, due to the hardware constraints described above, IT MAY VERY WELL BE THE CASE WE NEVER SEE EXCELLENT MULTIPHYSICS PERFORMANCE ON THEM.
(One can get better parallel performance by increasing the problem size, but as the article points out, doubling the resolution of a simulation increases the cost by a factor of 16; hence, simply increasing the problem size may lead to unacceptably long computation times.)
I think massively parallel architectures will ultmately be the wave of the future, but there is little getting around the fact that the current generation of IBM-SP2s are dogs in the performance category.
As pointed out by a previous poster, this author is a beginner in most of these languages. I had an interesting experience in a graduate level CS class here in Berkeley on optimizing a matrix-matrix multiply routine. (Interestingly enough, the class was on parallel computing -- the point of the exercise was to learn just HOW INCREDIBLY important the serial part of one's algorithm is, even when one has oodles of processors available).
The results are interesting for a number of reasons.
(1) The "naive" algorithm, even with optimization, performed at about 50 MFlops (the Suns we used had a theoretical peak of 333 MFlops).
(2) With excellent optimization, pulling out all the stops, and using all the tricks available (unrolling loops, deallocating pointers to local variables, etc.), teams of just two students working for a week could get EXCELLENT performances (ie, within 10-20% of theoretical peak), approaching those of Sun's built-in library, and exceeding those of some existing libraries (like PHiPAC).
(3) Different groups with different approaches got very widely disparate results -- some barely exceeding those of the naive algorithm.
In sum, how ones goes about coding an algorithm can make ENORMOUS differences in the performance of a code. This is particularly true with numerical algorithms in C and other languages with pointers, where some compilers have great trouble optimizing routines using pointers, since the values are not known at compilation time. Taking this into account, I wouldn't give this guy's results much credence at all.
However, with the help of a lot of experts in the various languages, it will be possible to get a much better appraisal of the relative performances of different languages. A close analogy exists with these benchmarks and the SPEC open standards evaluations for CPUs. The only fair way they found, to compare across all CPUs and compilers, was to allow a very strict non-optimal compilation, and no-holds barred compilation. The same is true here -- we need to get teams to go no-holds barred in the creation of the best possible codes for each language.
The/. blurb seems to have ommitted one key point with respect to the Economist article. The KEY POINT of the article is that the "big three" Japenese hardware manufacturers (NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi) dominated the business computing industry for years in Japan. Since these hardware companies use an older 1970s business model derived from US mainframe and supercomputer companies like IBM and Cray, software has been tied to the platform. It is not at all surprising, in this context, that PC software companies (Microsoft included) experienced sluggish sales.
Just take a look at the time history of PC sales and Microsoft sales shown in the article. They're both tightly correlated, and both skyrocketing. The main point is that MICROSOFT IS RAPIDLY BECOMING AN INCREASING PRESENCE IN JAPANESE COMPUTING. The plot shows Microsoft sales increasing six-fold in the last six years. I would hardly call that a negligable presence.
I would suggest that many of the previous posters try something new, and check out the original article, before ranting on their own little soapboxes.
This posting achieved a shockingly high moderation, given its relative lack of (dare I say?) intelligent arguments.
Part of the poster's dubious reasoning criticizes the notion that human beings are sentient --
"... it doesn't mean anything, because I feel that I can make up any arbritrary decision I like so I can declare that a being that is indistinguishable from a sentient entity is still not sentient.:) "
Yet he fails to provide an objective criterion by which we can test whether any being (biological or otherwise) is sentient. One can (as some psychologists have done) construct a very simple, objective test of sentience. There were a series of excellent experiments done by Gallup (1970) on various animals in front of mirrors, using a protocol with two sets of primates, including a control group and a group with their foreheads marked. His findings suggest that only marked chimpanzees and orangutangs consistently point to their own foreheads when viewing themselves in the mirror; indeed, some animals will attack the image of themselves, apparently thinking it is another animal. "Sentience" or "consciousness" is indeed a bag of loose terminology; but if we restrict our attention to a kind of minimalist self-awareness without reference to "feelings" and "decisions", I believe the Gallup experiments provide a strong indication that certain test animals possessed some level of self-awareness. Naturally, as with any experiment on animals, considerable caveats are necessary -- we need to be certain the animals were not somehow conditioned to produce the desired response. In addition, other animals may have some less advanced notions of self-awareness and not pass the test. Yet given the reproducibility of the experiment, I believe one can make a very strong case that AT LEAST those subjects passing the test demonstrate SOME LEVEL of self-awareness not present in lower animals.
Of course, human beings would also pass such a test.
The other main point the author attempts to make is that because a human being uses biological mechanisms, which are at some level, simplistic firings of neurons and what not, a human being is not intelligent --
"Seriously though, the so called 'intelligent' h. sapiens owes its 'intelligence' to a group of electrical impulses and a few simple chemical reactions among the many millions of cells that makes up the creatures 'brain'."
Let's consider this point for a moment. Fundamentally, EVERY process in the universe relies on quite simple physical principles -- including both biological and computational systems (classical or quantum -- it doesn't matter). The firings or the human neurons are little dissimilar, from this perspective, from the currents flowing along the computer you are now using.
Taken to its logical extreme, this argument would state that NO entity or collection of entities could ever be deemed intelligent, because ultimately, everything is a result of simple fundamental physics.
Clearly, this argument is also completely without merit. As with many complex systems, intelligence in human beings exhibits far more complexity than one could imagine by isolating a single part. Those few firing neurons are capable of producing everything from a Theory oF General Relativity to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
In general, WHAT a computational device uses to realize a system is irrelevant -- you can build a Turing computer from semiconductors or from a magnetic tape, or whatever. WHAT CERTAINLY DOES matter is HOW COMPLEX the system is -- whether it has a few fundamental elements (like a single processor computer, or a single-celled organism) or trillions (like neurons of the human mind).
Re:The only good post on this topic!!!
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Star In A Jar
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Mr. Roboto :
I wanted to drop you an e-mail to thank you for the kind comment on the post. Your e-mail isn't publicly posted, so I am posting here hoping you will get a chance to read this post.
One crucial aspect of any moderation system is to obtain a reasonably well-informed and intelligent group of moderators. This is the basis of all peer-reviewed systems; while still far from perfect, one would prefer to have, say, a knowledgeable group of medical doctors review the results of clinical tests of new drugs, rather than the population as a whole.
In the early days of/., users brought to this common tech watering pool were self-selected geeks/technophiles/scientsts. Granted, there is always a fair portion of bad apples in the mix, but it was quite reasonable to base a moderation system on that group. I can't imagine, for instance, Yahoo (whose user population today largely reflects the computer-using society as a whole) ever managing to successfully accomplish anything similar.
As/. grows, I believe the inevitable outcome is that the moderation system will falter and perhaps eventually fail as well, unless further safeguards are put into place.
Bob
But we can't do experiments with self-gravity.
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This is very cool stuff -- people often believe astrophysics is either observational or theoretical. The ability to do experiments is important in verifying the validity of theoretical models and computer simulations.
HOWEVER, note that these experiments are largely concerned with a limited set of physics -- basically radiation hydrodynamics (under the conditions tested, the plasmas are so hot that the radiation pressure is comparable to the gas pressure). Supernovae are essentially hydrodynamical phenomena because the time it takes for a highly supersonic shock to pass through the supernova progenitor is much less than the time it would take for gravity to collapse the progenitor. In astrophysics, many processes (such as star and galaxy formation) are crucially linked not only to radiation hydrodynamics but also to other physics including, critically, self-gravity. It is MUCH more difficult to include self-gravity, because the real self-gravity of the system is totally negligable, and the plasma is charge neutral on a whole (charge densities obey Poisson's equation, just like self-graviting mass densities do).
So this is a very cool start, but it will remain to see if we can ever construct experiments for other kinds of astrophysical systems in the lab.
Violence has existed in human culture since its very beginnings. Man evolved, through a combination of wit and violence, above the animal kingdom, but has never lost that violent edge at any point in his history, as any casual inspection of the history of wars and crime will tell you. At the same time, art and literature throughout human
history have depicted violence; it is a facet of human life, and no artist can simply wish it away if he wishes to remain true to life. (Anyone who believes that violence in art is a new phenomenon should enhance their knowledge of human culture by reading The Illiad. Acbilles is as cold-blooded a killer as has ever appeared on a computer monitor, and the body count far exceeds any Hollywood film I have seen recently.)
Previous posters have created a tremendously simplified view of the world in which the media and electronic games condition and incite us (particularly children) to violence. In reality, even in the complete abseence of external media, man is an often-violent creature. One cannot eliminate violence from man; it is inherent to his nature.
The reasons for every mass-killing in the last few years are complex, but largely have nothing to do with art, music, the media, or computer games. Millions of pscyhologically balanced people enjoy these with no problems. Instead, we should be asking outselves why some members of our society are so incredibly estranged and angry that they are driven to commit such acts, and what we can do to help them. We should also be asking ourselves why it is that guns are so easy to come by in our society that even an average teenager has no problem getting his hands on a few. Going after the computer gaming industry is a sad attempt to focus attention, but it misses the point entirely, and in the end will bring us no closet to solving the myriad of problems which are responsible.
I have to agree with this poster. What matters in a scientific theory is not the formulation used, but what _predictions_ are made. Heaviside's equations are completely, absolutely identical in content to Maxwell's original formulation, and are MUCH more physically intuitive.
A sad day for/. moderation.
Bob
Sony hasn't (yet) sold 10 million PS2 units!
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No X Box for Xmas?
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This article has one factoid wrong. Sony had promised promised to have shipped 10 million PS2 units by the end of March, and subsequently met that goal. However, in many places, many of those units are simply stacked up in the backroom and haven't been sold yet -- the Electronics Boutique store I visited just this past weekend had more units than they could sell right away.
I do agree that the size of the entertainment console market is large, but finite, and that the sooner one of Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo comes in and claims their stake, the sooner the next-generation console will be over. However, given that there are over 30 million PS1 units out there (not counting N64 and DC owners not owning a PS1, and not counting the substantial growth in the industry as a whole), it is evident that most customers are still sitting on the sideline, and not rushing out to purchase the PS2. With two more consoles coming out in the short-term, and very few great games available for the PS2 just yet, I think most consumers are taking a "wait-and-see" attitude.
I thought I would respond to a few of the excellent points other readers are making.
I think the FIRST program is an excellent one; it is a great idea to have students work together with mentors from industry and academia. It's a great experience for them, and it helps put the focus on science and engineering education, which is often quite lacking in pre-university levels.
That said, however, I think realistically speaking, it is incredibly hard to pull together the support to do this project at smaller and more rural schools which don't have major industries and universities nearby. In addition, many smaller schools may not be able to pull together a large enough team to compete. If we step aside and think "outside the box" for a moment, I think we can all agree that there are many ways to promote science and engineering. For instance, when I was in HS, I participated in the Physics Olympiad and a local bridge-breaking contest. Yet both of those leaved much to be desired (ie, very few students competed on the US Physics Olympiad Team). We can encourage math and science in alternate ways which do not rely on expensive equipment or corporate sponsorships, and can reach many more students in the process.
To respond to another reader, I agree we shouldn't be "pushing" kids into science and engineering. Nothing could be worse. However, I think we should be making an effort to reach ALL kids out there who do have a genuine interest in science and engineering. We all know of examples of just how a few brilliant individuals can make major contributions to a field, and it is shameful to think that in all likelihood, we may not even be aware of such individuals, who may chose to go into alternate career paths. It is our loss.
Slashdot Mirror
To answer these concerns, I think one has to broaden the historical context. When universities were first conceived of in the 14th century, most fields which we are familiar with today did not even exist in the imagination. You couldn't study information technology, any of the sciences or fields of engineering (as we know them today), or even art practice. One basically studied to become a clergyman, a lawyer, or a teacher. It wasn't until the 19th century that academia even began to consider training engineers and other practical folk within their halls using modern curricular methods, which as the poster points out, do sometimes have their drawbacks.
The point is that all of the institutional traditions of academia are set in place to create future generations of academics and professionals. We have similar discussion continuously in academia -- it has been pointed out than in steady state, a professor will train one graduate student to succeed him. Yet the average number of graduate students trained by a professor over his lifetime will often go into the dozens. Where do most of those students end up? Not in academia usually, but in industry.
My own personal opinion is that academia is not constructed for the practical "real life" experiences the poster is concerned about, nor is there any reason to expect that it would do a good job at it. That is primarily what internships and summer research experiences are intended for. Ideally, in good internship and co-op programs, not only will students bring their classwork education into industry and academic research, but students will bring back their practical knowledge into the classroom.
Bob
It would be neat to have a commercial craft on the moon, but let's keep things in perspective.
Why does one want to go to the moon?
Why aren't we there today?
The primary reason why the Apollo missions failed to spawn a continuous succession of future missions was the complete lack of infrastructure left behind for future scientific projects (including unprecedented experiments due to low lunar seismic noise, critical for gravity wave detection; and optical and radio astronomy), which is why we should be there in the first place.
Repeat this mantra : "It's the science, stupid." We're not going to the moon to put business cards on it.
The cost of any lunar mission is extraordinary, and moreover, the cost of providing good infrastructure for important missions is even larger. Ultimately, and certainly until we have some sort of permanent base there, I think there is no good business plan which can justify that infrastructre. Even the relatively few space applications which one can possible imagine (semiconductors, pharmaceuticals) could be achieved in Earth orbit for much, much less money.
The revenues gained by any lunar project simply pale in comparison to what is needed to achieve the important goals discussed above.
So what are these folks doing? Little more than medieval item worship. Putting messages, items, and business cards on the moon? Sure, it's a start, but a LONG, LONG ways from achieving the goal of why we should be there.
And I, for one, question whether any short-term business strategy can supply the needed infrastructure to provide those goals. It will ultimately require at least partial government support.
Bob
Let's not forget Apple is a monopoly -- basic economics suggests that above and beyond the market share issue discussed above, Apple would charge more for a PPC running MacOS than would a licensed third party manufacturer.
Incidentally, third party manufacturing has long been an issue in Apple's history, as Carelton's "Apple" describes in some detail. Under the Scully administration, Apple repeatedly opted for the "high-right" strategy of targetting the high-profit, small-market share, since they believed they could charge a premium for their systems. After a brief foray into third-party manufacturing under Amelio, Apple has returned to being the sole manufacturer with Jobs. Apple would like to be the BMW of the computing industry. Just as BMW has carved out a very successful business from the "high-right" portion of the automobile market, so Apple hopes to do so with computers.
Incidentally, Apple also began a project (dubbed "Star Trek" -- to boldly go where no Apple had gone before) in the early 1990s which sought to port the MacOS to Intel hardware, which would also have cut down the cost of using the MacOS. Star Trek was killed internally before being brought to market, for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was that Apple would risk losing sales on their own hardware.
Bob
I was in the same situation as the poster, having purchased from onsale.com almost five years ago. Since I didn't want my data from a five-year old purchase cycling on to Fry's, I tried to use their opt-out script this morning, but it wasn't even working properly.
How convenient.
Bob
If you actually read this article, the study only confirms that for a few hours after consuming a cup of coffee, your heart is placed under more stress. In and of itself, this does not appear to be very significant. Any vigorous physical activity will also raise your heartrate, constrict your arteries, and put your heart under more stress. It says NOTHING about long-term health consequences, which is really the main issue here.
I recall reading several years ago that at that time, the long-term health consequences of coffee were unclear. Some adverse affects were sometimes suggested in studies, but it turns out there are tremendous confounding factors -- coffee drinkers often tend to eat lots of donuts, be less active, and so on. When the initial population of patient participants was selected as healthy health care professionals, little or no adverse affects were observed for moderate (up to a couple of cups a day) intakes of coffee.
Bob
... I don't think that Hawking has any particular expertise which makes him an authority on this topic.
Often people look to individuals who have accomplished a great deal in one narrow endeavor (running a company, discovering fundamental particles, writing the Linux kernel) or insight and wisdom into topics in completely different fields, or the "big questions" of the human condition. In a few cases (such as that of Manhattan Project nuclear physicists in the postwar generation being tapped for their insights into government policy), the individuals have thought a great deal about certain questions, and their expertise does lend a certain air of authority. However, in many, many cases, as in this story with Hawking, their expertise does not lend any particular weight to their opinions. Indeed, their success in a totally unrelated endeavor often boosts their own self-importance above their personal knowledge, and their opinions often have a somewhat sophomoric, naive glow about them.
We should remain open to good ideas from anywhere, regardless of their source. However, the converse also applies -- we should ignore bad ideas, regardless of the source.
http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/index.ht ml
Bob
Given that Cyc's project has apparently failed to live up to its original claims of producing genuine childlike intelligence by slowly building up all of the information a child has, and has since spawned into a commercial product, why should one believe AI will fare any better? How do their approaches differ? It seems particularly problematic for AI, as a company, that Cyc has released their OpenCyc project to the community.
Bob
These machines are ranked by PEAK theoretical speed. The top machines each have thousands of processors, so even if the processors which make them up are much slower, they make up for the difference in sheer numbers.
Vinge is not the only one to notice that the rate of growth in computer devices, if extrapolated for a few decades, will eventually exceed the capacity of the human brain, both in terms of strorage capability and in terms of processing speed. Indeed, this very notion forms the basis of many of Joy's and Kurzweil's recent discussions.
:"think" using some (probably very complex) set of algorithms with comparable computational efficiency as the human brain, if one indeed had a computer with similar processing and storage ability as the human brain. That logic is quite flawed, due to the assumption of computational efficiency.
However, in doing this extrapolation, one is making a few assumptions. Most notably is that one can teach a computer how to
What do I mean by computational efficiency? Roughly speaking, the relative performance of one algorithm to another. For instance, in talking about the singularity (as Vinge puts it), one often neglects to notice the fact that human beings, with their neurons clicking away at petacycles per second, can only do arithmetic extremely poorly, at less than a flop! Logical puzzles often similarly vex humans (witness the analytic portions of the GRE!), where they also perform incredibly poorly. Significantly, human beings are very computationally inefficient at most tasks involving higher brain functions. We might process sound and visual input very well and very quickly, but most higher brain functions are very poor performers indeed.
One application of a similar train of logic is that human beings are the only animals known to be capable of performing arithmetic. Therefore, if one had a computer comparable to the human brain, one could do arithmetic. Heck, by this logic, we're only 50 years away from using computers to do integer addition!
The main point here is that, with regards to developing a "thinking" machine, WE MIGHT VERY WELL have the brute force computational resources available to us today. The hardware is not the limitation, so much as our ability to design the software with the complex adaptive ability of the human brain.
Just WHEN we will be able to develop that software, no one can really say, since it is really a fundamental flaw in our approaches, rather than in our devices. (It is similar to asking when physicists will be able to write down a self-consistent theory of everything. No one can say.) It could happen in a decade or two, or it could take significantly longer then 50 years. It all depends on how clever we are in attacking the problem.
Thanks. Do you have a source? Most of the sources I found cited substantially lower numbers.
In any case, it would appear that the market is far from saturation.
Bob
This is an excellent question, and one I have wondered about myself.
There are two sides to this coin.
1) How many next-generation (PS2, Gamecube, XBox) consoles (NGCs) do we expect to be sold?
2) How many NGCs (obviously, only PS2 right now) have been sold already?
To answer these questions :
1) Roughly, this number should be at least the number of existing PS1 + DC consoles. This is not incorproating the significant increase in the overall market that we expect from first-time console owners who might be inclined to buy a console for its DVD playback ability (for instance).
I seem to find that roughly 15 - 20 million PS1 consoles were sold worldwide since its debut in 1995. And about 5 million DC consoles. This makes the total market size at least 20 - 25 million strong.
2) How many PS2 units have sold so far? I seem to find about 5 million have been shipped. It's more difficult to find out how many have been sold, but to be conservative, we can assume that all of the units shipped will sell by the Nintendo launch.
So... it seems that at most, 25% of the NGC market will have saturated by the time Nintendo enters the scene this fall. A million or two units is not going to change that number dramatically. It would appear there is a great deal more room left for growth.
HOWEVER, since one cannot overestimate the influence which a dominant technology has in the marketplace (think VHS vs. Betamax), Microsoft is going to have a very hard time taking the reins away from Sony and Nintendo this fall. I would certainly say that if they cannot make the crucial Christmas ship date, they are likely to find themselves killed before leaving the starting gate.
Bob
It's a pretty sad day for /. moderation when a clueless post such as this gets moderated up to "4, insightful".
It is actually very remarkable that molecules exist in space at all. Why? There are two sides to the process -- creation and destruction.
(*) Creation : Interstellar space is in general very tenuous , and so the likelihood that any two atoms combine in the gaseous phase to form a molecule is very improbable.
(*) Destruction - Once a molecule is created, it doesn't live forever. Space is a very harsh environment, and any molecules created are subjected to harsh cosmic radiation, the stellar radiation field (resulting from all stars surrounding it), as well as stellar winds and shocks. Any of these processes is cabable of disrupting molecules.
When you go ahead and do the naive estimate for the abundance of a molecule balancing creation and destruction rates, assuming only gaseous phase processes, you find that it is highly unlikely to find any substantial amounts of molecules in interstellar space. Indeed, when astronomers first invented instruments capable of detecting rotational mode transitions of molecules like CO and H_2O in interstellar space, their theoretician colleagues told them to forget the plan.
The reason why we have clouds of molecular gas in our galaxy today is a rather amazing one which no one originally anticipated. Besides gas, there are also small, solid dust grains belched out from winds from cool red giant stars in their final phases of evolution. Atoms collide and freeze out onto the surfaces of these grains, where they can remain for a very long time, migrating very slowly along the surface via Brownian processes. Every once in a while, it will bump into another or molecule frozen out in a similar fashion, thereby creating a more complex molecule. The dust grains catalyze the generation of molecules -- without them, we wouldn't have such an abundance of molecular gas in the galaxy today. Indeed, astronomers believe star formation in the early universe was substantially different from that which occurs today because such dust grains would have been completely absent.
I think this result is particularly surprising since one might expect that any winds or shocks thrown off by a star capable of boiling away a comet might also tend to powerful enough to destroy the molecules generated. If that really is the mechanism involved, it is a remarkable coincidence that the winds are just powerful enough to ablate the comets, but not so powerful as to destroy the molecules present.
Bob
Galactic collisions are actually relatively common in Nature; typical galactic separations are of order hundreds to thousands of kiloparsecs (kpc), whereas a typical galaxy is of order a few kpc in radius. Moreover, galaxies form along a highly filamentary spiderwork of structure in the early universe, and tend to flow inwards to more massive galaxies.
This situation is to be contrasted with the fate of stars during a galactic collision. Stellar radii are about 10^8 times smaller than the typical interstellar separation, so the vast majority of stars will simply fly right by another. A few stars will probably encounter a direct encounter (particularly if the initial pass is close enough to raise subtantial tides on the stars, which would act to drain energy and angular momentum from the system), but the vast majority fly by unscathed.
It is true, however, that gaseous clouds in the interstellar medium are much more extended that stars, and collision between clouds (particularly giant molecular clouds) will be quite spectacular. It is hypothesized that cloud collisions as well as gaseous flows (bringing tremendous influxes of mass to the galactic nuclar region) resulting from galactic collisions can account for the tremendous bursts of star formation seen in "starburst" galaxies such as NGC 1808.
In any case, the future collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda will be quite fascinating for far future Milky Way astronomers (if any are still around). Or perhaps for astronomers in other galaxies, far, far away...
Bob
The key point in this analysis is that they get 32 TFlops in doing the gravity summation for a discrete particle simulation.
If you have additional physics (hydrodynamics, etc), that processing must happen on the workstation which is running the simulation. So the performance is ultimately bottlenecked by the workstation. In practice, Grape practioners typically do not see anything close to the theoretical peak of their boards.
Bob
(First, a preface. I'm a member of a computational astrophysics research group. We have ported our codes to the kinds of hybir d architectures of the machines discussed here, and have benchmarked their performances. Moreover, we have previously run on vector machines, so we have a fair idea of the pros and cons of the two approaches.)
While zavyman points out the basic problems inherent in parallelizing any discretized numerical model, the problem in obtaining good performance on hybrid architectures like the IBM SP-2s and SGI Origins which currently top out the top 500 list goes much deeper.
First, these machines are built around a hybrid architecture. Each node has a few processors (typically between 4 and 16, depending on the model), which utilize shared memory. These nodes connect to one another via an internode interconnect, with relatively modest bandwidth.
While this hybrid architecture allows supercomputer manufacturers like IBM and SGI to scale into the thousands of processors, it also introduces a substantial complexity into building of high-performance codes. Ideally, one would like to run threads-based parallelization on each node, and MPI between nodes, though the reality is that most codes in use use only MPI.
One can get decent scalability (into the hundreds of processors) when one runs physical models with limited communication -- ie, which simulate hyperbolic PDES like those of hydrodynamics (as zavyman describes above). However, things become more interesting when one considers more varied physics, such as that involved in solving elliptic PDEs (such as Poisson's equation for self-gravity or electrostatics). Because elliptic equations connect everything with everything else on the spatial domain, the communication costs ARE MUCH HIGHER. It is extremely challenging to build a multiphysics code with such varied parallelization demands. Indeed, it is a fair statement that no one has yet achieved excellent performance on anything close fo the thousands of processors available on these hybrid machines. For instance, another poster describes a climate model available from another research group. However, if you dig deeper, you find that they state,
"ForesightWX uses an IBM 12-node system with 52 processors working 24 hours a day. The cluster fits snuggly in a small room. A decade ago the same power would have filled the building."
52 processors is a far cry from the thousands of processors available to the users of these machines. Since each processor is slower than a vector processor like the Cray (by about a factor of 3 - 5), and assuming ideal speedup, such modest levels of parallelization lead to speedups of about 10-15 relative to a single Cray T90 processor. It is quite evident that there is little net gain over running the same simulation on 8-16 T90 nodes.
Moreover, due to the hardware constraints described above, IT MAY VERY WELL BE THE CASE WE NEVER SEE EXCELLENT MULTIPHYSICS PERFORMANCE ON THEM.
(One can get better parallel performance by increasing the problem size, but as the article points out, doubling the resolution of a simulation increases the cost by a factor of 16; hence, simply increasing the problem size may lead to unacceptably long computation times.)
I think massively parallel architectures will ultmately be the wave of the future, but there is little getting around the fact that the current generation of IBM-SP2s are dogs in the performance category.
Bob
As pointed out by a previous poster, this author is a beginner in most of these languages. I had an interesting experience in a graduate level CS class here in Berkeley on optimizing a matrix-matrix multiply routine. (Interestingly enough, the class was on parallel computing -- the point of the exercise was to learn just HOW INCREDIBLY important the serial part of one's algorithm is, even when one has oodles of processors available).
The results are interesting for a number of reasons.
(1) The "naive" algorithm, even with optimization, performed at about 50 MFlops (the Suns we used had a theoretical peak of 333 MFlops).
(2) With excellent optimization, pulling out all the stops, and using all the tricks available (unrolling loops, deallocating pointers to local variables, etc.), teams of just two students working for a week could get EXCELLENT performances (ie, within 10-20% of theoretical peak), approaching those of Sun's built-in library, and exceeding those of some existing libraries (like PHiPAC).
(3) Different groups with different approaches got very widely disparate results -- some barely exceeding those of the naive algorithm.
In sum, how ones goes about coding an algorithm can make ENORMOUS differences in the performance of a code. This is particularly true with numerical algorithms in C and other languages with pointers, where some compilers have great trouble optimizing routines using pointers, since the values are not known at compilation time. Taking this into account, I wouldn't give this guy's results much credence at all.
However, with the help of a lot of experts in the various languages, it will be possible to get a much better appraisal of the relative performances of different languages. A close analogy exists with these benchmarks and the SPEC open standards evaluations for CPUs. The only fair way they found, to compare across all CPUs and compilers, was to allow a very strict non-optimal compilation, and no-holds barred compilation. The same is true here -- we need to get teams to go no-holds barred in the creation of the best possible codes for each language.
Bob
The /. blurb seems to have ommitted one key point with respect to the Economist article. The KEY POINT of the article is that the "big three" Japenese hardware manufacturers (NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi) dominated the business computing industry for years in Japan. Since these hardware companies use an older 1970s business model derived from US mainframe and supercomputer companies like IBM and Cray, software has been tied to the platform. It is not at all surprising, in this context, that PC software companies (Microsoft included) experienced sluggish sales.
Just take a look at the time history of PC sales and Microsoft sales shown in the article. They're both tightly correlated, and both skyrocketing. The main point is that MICROSOFT IS RAPIDLY BECOMING AN INCREASING PRESENCE IN JAPANESE COMPUTING. The plot shows Microsoft sales increasing six-fold in the last six years. I would hardly call that a negligable presence.
I would suggest that many of the previous posters try something new, and check out the original article, before ranting on their own little soapboxes.
Bob
This posting achieved a shockingly high moderation, given its relative lack of (dare I say?) intelligent arguments.
:) "
Part of the poster's dubious reasoning criticizes the notion that human beings are sentient --
"... it doesn't mean anything, because I feel that I can make up any arbritrary decision I like so I can declare that a being that is indistinguishable from a sentient entity is still not sentient.
Yet he fails to provide an objective criterion by which we can test whether any being (biological or otherwise) is sentient. One can (as some psychologists have done) construct a very simple, objective test of sentience. There were a series of excellent experiments done by Gallup (1970) on various animals in front of mirrors, using a protocol with two sets of primates, including a control group and a group with their foreheads marked. His findings suggest that only marked chimpanzees and orangutangs consistently point to their own foreheads when viewing themselves in the mirror; indeed, some animals will attack the image of themselves, apparently thinking it is another animal. "Sentience" or "consciousness" is indeed a bag of loose terminology; but if we restrict our attention to a kind of minimalist self-awareness without reference to "feelings" and "decisions", I believe the Gallup experiments provide a strong indication that certain test animals possessed some level of self-awareness. Naturally, as with any experiment on animals, considerable caveats are necessary -- we need to be certain the animals were not somehow conditioned to produce the desired response. In addition, other animals may have some less advanced notions of self-awareness and not pass the test. Yet given the reproducibility of the experiment, I believe one can make a very strong case that AT LEAST those subjects passing the test demonstrate SOME LEVEL of self-awareness not present in lower animals.
Of course, human beings would also pass such a test.
The other main point the author attempts to make is that because a human being uses biological mechanisms, which are at some level, simplistic firings of neurons and what not, a human being is not intelligent --
"Seriously though, the so called 'intelligent' h. sapiens owes its 'intelligence' to a group of electrical impulses and a few simple chemical reactions among the many millions of cells that makes up the creatures 'brain'."
Let's consider this point for a moment. Fundamentally, EVERY process in the universe relies on quite simple physical principles -- including both biological and computational systems (classical or quantum -- it doesn't matter). The firings or the human neurons are little dissimilar, from this perspective, from the currents flowing along the computer you are now using.
Taken to its logical extreme, this argument would state that NO entity or collection of entities could ever be deemed intelligent, because ultimately, everything is a result of simple fundamental physics.
Clearly, this argument is also completely without merit. As with many complex systems, intelligence in human beings exhibits far more complexity than one could imagine by isolating a single part. Those few firing neurons are capable of producing everything from a Theory oF General Relativity to Mahler's Ninth Symphony.
In general, WHAT a computational device uses to realize a system is irrelevant -- you can build a Turing computer from semiconductors or from a magnetic tape, or whatever. WHAT CERTAINLY DOES matter is HOW COMPLEX the system is -- whether it has a few fundamental elements (like a single processor computer, or a single-celled organism) or trillions (like neurons of the human mind).
Mr. Roboto :
/., users brought to this common tech watering pool were self-selected geeks/technophiles/scientsts. Granted, there is always a fair portion of bad apples in the mix, but it was quite reasonable to base a moderation system on that group. I can't imagine, for instance, Yahoo (whose user population today largely reflects the computer-using society as a whole) ever managing to successfully accomplish anything similar.
/. grows, I believe the inevitable outcome is that the moderation system will falter and perhaps eventually fail as well, unless further safeguards are put into place.
I wanted to drop you an e-mail to thank you for the kind comment on the post. Your e-mail isn't publicly posted, so I am posting here hoping you will get a chance to read this post.
One crucial aspect of any moderation system is to obtain a reasonably well-informed and intelligent group of moderators. This is the basis of all peer-reviewed systems; while still far from perfect, one would prefer to have, say, a knowledgeable group of medical doctors review the results of clinical tests of new drugs, rather than the population as a whole.
In the early days of
As
Bob
This is very cool stuff -- people often believe astrophysics is either observational or theoretical. The ability to do experiments is important in verifying the validity of theoretical models and computer simulations.
HOWEVER, note that these experiments are largely concerned with a limited set of physics -- basically radiation hydrodynamics (under the conditions tested, the plasmas are so hot that the radiation pressure is comparable to the gas pressure). Supernovae are essentially hydrodynamical phenomena because the time it takes for a highly supersonic shock to pass through the supernova progenitor is much less than the time it would take for gravity to collapse the progenitor. In astrophysics, many processes (such as star and galaxy formation) are crucially linked not only to radiation hydrodynamics but also to other physics including, critically, self-gravity. It is MUCH more difficult to include self-gravity, because the real self-gravity of the system is totally negligable, and the plasma is charge neutral on a whole (charge densities obey Poisson's equation, just like self-graviting mass densities do).
So this is a very cool start, but it will remain to see if we can ever construct experiments for other kinds of astrophysical systems in the lab.
Bob
Violence has existed in human culture since its very beginnings. Man evolved, through a combination of wit and violence, above the animal kingdom, but has never lost that violent edge at any point in his history, as any casual inspection of the history of wars and crime will tell you. At the same time, art and literature throughout human
history have depicted violence; it is a facet of human life, and no artist can simply wish it away if he wishes to remain true to life. (Anyone who believes that violence in art is a new phenomenon should enhance their knowledge of human culture by reading The Illiad. Acbilles is as cold-blooded a killer as has ever appeared on a computer monitor, and the body count far exceeds any Hollywood film I have seen recently.)
Previous posters have created a tremendously simplified view of the world in which the media and electronic games condition and incite us (particularly children) to violence. In reality, even in the complete abseence of external media, man is an often-violent creature. One cannot eliminate violence from man; it is inherent to his nature.
The reasons for every mass-killing in the last few years are complex, but largely have nothing to do with art, music, the media, or computer games. Millions of pscyhologically balanced people enjoy these with no problems. Instead, we should be asking outselves why some members of our society are so incredibly estranged and angry that they are driven to commit such acts, and what we can do to help them. We should also be asking ourselves why it is that guns are so easy to come by in our society that even an average teenager has no problem getting his hands on a few. Going after the computer gaming industry is a sad attempt to focus attention, but it misses the point entirely, and in the end will bring us no closet to solving the myriad of problems which are responsible.
I have to agree with this poster. What matters in a scientific theory is not the formulation used, but what _predictions_ are made. Heaviside's equations are completely, absolutely identical in content to Maxwell's original formulation, and are MUCH more physically intuitive.
/. moderation.
A sad day for
Bob
I do agree that the size of the entertainment console market is large, but finite, and that the sooner one of Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo comes in and claims their stake, the sooner the next-generation console will be over. However, given that there are over 30 million PS1 units out there (not counting N64 and DC owners not owning a PS1, and not counting the substantial growth in the industry as a whole), it is evident that most customers are still sitting on the sideline, and not rushing out to purchase the PS2. With two more consoles coming out in the short-term, and very few great games available for the PS2 just yet, I think most consumers are taking a "wait-and-see" attitude.
I thought I would respond to a few of the excellent points other readers are making.
I think the FIRST program is an excellent one; it is a great idea to have students work together with mentors from industry and academia. It's a great experience for them, and it helps put the focus on science and engineering education, which is often quite lacking in pre-university levels.
That said, however, I think realistically speaking, it is incredibly hard to pull together the support to do this project at smaller and more rural schools which don't have major industries and universities nearby. In addition, many smaller schools may not be able to pull together a large enough team to compete. If we step aside and think "outside the box" for a moment, I think we can all agree that there are many ways to promote science and engineering. For instance, when I was in HS, I participated in the Physics Olympiad and a local bridge-breaking contest. Yet both of those leaved much to be desired (ie, very few students competed on the US Physics Olympiad Team). We can encourage math and science in alternate ways which do not rely on expensive equipment or corporate sponsorships, and can reach many more students in the process.
To respond to another reader, I agree we shouldn't be "pushing" kids into science and engineering. Nothing could be worse. However, I think we should be making an effort to reach ALL kids out there who do have a genuine interest in science and engineering. We all know of examples of just how a few brilliant individuals can make major contributions to a field, and it is shameful to think that in all likelihood, we may not even be aware of such individuals, who may chose to go into alternate career paths. It is our loss.