An open source matlab contest is the same animal as if Microsoft held an open source Excel or Visual Basic contest... except that Matlab costs a lot more, and Mathworks tend to be a lot more evil in its licensing terms.
Matlab costs about $3500... but at my work, somehow it costs $70,000 a year because of some weird ass licensing scheme matlworks sticks large government labs with. I've tired to convince my project that for that money it makes more sense just to hire programmers to add whatever features we need to octave and go tell mathworks to fuck themselves.
Oh, and by the way... all of that money is still not enough to get you bug reports noticed. For that you need to pay for some sort of premiere program.
This is the first instance of one extraterrestrial satellite photographing another
ok, Cassini took a picture of huygens back in December when both were satellites of Saturn. And before that Mars Express took a picture of Beagle 2 when both were satellites of the Sun.
It makes the arguement less valid. Abstract notions like relativity evolve over time. In Galileo's era people just didn't think that way... so to the minds of the Renaissance it was an either or sort of thing... not a depends how you look at it sort of thing.
BTW, once you realize that abstract notions like responsibility, revenge, etc took time to develop, it makes reading ancient myths much more interesting to read, especially the Sumarian ones. These myths were a way to communicate such abstract notions before words were coined for them.
Plants have no problems with a cloudy sky where you never see the sun or stars.
I don't know what the Hebrew version of this is: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also." But in English it seems to pretty clearly say God made the Sun an the stars, not that it suddenly stopped being cloudy. And in Genesis, this happens after plants are made. So the plants need divine intervention to stay alive before the sun is around.
The hebrew word used for the term 'day' here is 'jom' which is used not only for days of 24 hours but for eras too. So it is not hard to reconcile Genesis with the fact, that stars existed millions of years before. Genesis doesn't deny that.
Ok fine... but the eras are still presented in Genesis in a different order than they occurred. Stars formed before the Earth, creatures that move arose before grass, seeds, and plants that bear fruit. And insects arose before birds and whales.
Genesis clearly states the orders of the days (or eras) and the order given doesn't match what really happened. This much is clear from nuclear chemistry (the stars) and from the fossil record. And much harder to dispute than evolution.
but even in your reading of this... plants were created before the sun was seen on the Earth.
I think the way to reconcile this may be to require the existence of some sort of eye to see the sun and stars. that way the light can shine on the plants before it is seen. But this interpretation runs into problems in that the creatures that move are created on the day after the Sun and the stars.
It's hard to reconcile Genesis with the fact that Stars had to exist for many, many millennia before the Earth formed. (in order to produce the heavier elements you need a star and a supernova).
hmmm... perhaps Genesis could be read as describing the beginning of consciousness. The things existed only after they were named in a conscious mind....this is a kind of buddhist take on it.
001:014 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 001:015 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 001:016 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 001:017 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 001:018 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 001:019 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
By this time there already were continents and oceans and plants (day 3).
Do they really want a literal interpretation of the King James version of Genesis to be opened up for Scientific debate? Let's just keep Genesis out of Science classes and put it in Religion and Philosophy classes. That's the best thing for everyone.
Exactly. Although the argument against Galileo was based on scripture, the real reason he was brought down was political.
The same thing is happening in Kansas. It is a very weak argument to say Evolution contradicts Genesis. It definitely isn't a strong enough contradiction to warrant the moral outrage of the creationists... It's a political response because they think they're being called idiots.
But still the oceans, the dry land, and plants all appear before the Sun and the Stars....not to say that there isn't a way to reconcile it... I just don't know how.
Also of interest is that Genesis says this:
1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Evolution provides an way of explaining how moving creatures began in the waters and eventually lead to birds.
Of course, Genesis also implies that birds arose before insects which is in contradiction with the fossil record.
But hey, it's a start... a way to find a truce in this stupid battle.
wtf, can anybody explain. Is this considered 'normal' in the US?
In the US, a company that takes a political position risks a boycott that will continue on for years and years.
Such a decision would use a company to further the political ends of the corporate leadership at the expense of squandering the investment of the shareholders.
Therefore it is considered unethical for a publicly traded company to make political statements unless there is a clear benefit to the company.
In this case, Microsoft has a clear need for talented programmers. By advocating a law like this in Washington state as opposed to in the federal government they make Washington state a more desirable place to live to the demographics from which they recruit. Therefore they gain a competitive advantage in recruiting over tech companies located in states without such laws.
Clearly, the advantage to them in terms of recruiting outweighs their risks from a product boycott by the far right.
Yeah, but that sort of notion of relativity is a modern notion that comes largely from Galileo's work on mechanics. And it wasn't fully hashed out until Einstein.
10:12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
Clearly it states that the Sun stood still, not that the Earth stopped rotating. Therefore clearly the Sun revolves around the Earth, and the Earth does not go around the Sun. To say otherwise is blasphemy.
Who cares what the intent is of the group proposing the change. If the reality is a wording that is clearer and more complete, is that not better?
The new definition is more wordy, but it keys off of a word without a precise definition: "adequate".
The whole definition would make what is and is not science much more murky. The key to the original definition is that science limits itself to things with natural causes... this is because natural causes can be tested. Supernatural causes cannot be tested. The new definition turns itself around to limit science to natural phenomenon, but leaves open the door to supernatural causes.
seriously though, I think a lot of these people just don't understand what evolution really is. They instantly think "men came from monkeys" and thus see it as a threat to their faith, put their fingers in their ears, and start singing their hymn of choice.
What really gets my goat is when creationists go after the Big Bang theory... The big bang theory was proposed by a Belgian Priest, George Lemaitre. He was an early expert on General Relativity who saw in the equations a way to find the moment of creation as described in Genesis.
Before the Big Bang theory, most astrophysicists thought the universe had no beginning... it just always was. But Lemaitre was able to prove there was a beginning to all of existence. Which was a profound result that should have been embraced by the so-called creationists.
AND, if you sit down and read Genesis it pretty closely matches the big bang theory... the universe starts out as pure light. What doesn't match Genesis is the current ideas on how planets form... Genesis says that the Earth formed first, and then the Sun, moon, and stars formed....So why don't the creationists go after all of the textbooks that say the opposite?? This is a much stronger contradiction with scripture than Evolution.
Supernatural means beyond the scope of the natural world and not bound by natural laws. Therefore, any theory with a supernatural explanation cannot be tested. Science cannot disprove a hypothesis based on the supernatural. (Did you take a picture of the vampire?... I couldn't they can't be photographed)
So to included hypotheses based on supernatural explanations into science is a waste of your time... science cannot test such hypotheses, and cannot do anything with them. You gain nothing by including the supernatural in Science, and you lose all of science's utility in eliminating hypotheses.
That does not mean that supernatural explanations should necessarily be discounted... it just means that it is beyond the scope of science. Science is limited to the natural world and natural phenomenon. To deal with questions of the supernatural you need to employ philosophy and religion.
It is pure idiocy to try to redefine science to include the supernatural. If they succeed, we'll just have to go and invent another word to mean what 'science' used to mean... because it's meaning is a very useful and profound idea that will persist no matter what P.C. word is chosen to go with its meaning.
But couldn't code be treated more as mathematical notation?
I don't write notes describing what I'm doing before I work something out... I work it our first and then figure out how to describe it.
Perhaps with design by contract like in Eiffel, the code itself could make the intent more clear than comments could. Sort of like stating the theorum you're gonna prove beofre you prove it. The code would describe the expected result before it calculates it.
Comments are a good idea, but maybe not the best idea. Other posters have pointed out that it is hard to keep comments synced with code that's evolving... and I'm bitten by this all of the time. The more detailed my comments are, the _harder_ it is for me to maintain my code. The compiler and unit tests will tell me if my code is correct, but it is very time consuming to make sure the comments are correct.
My dream is for a language that doesn't need comments... maybe even one that could be explained by an automated tool (like the way Apple's Shark explains the dissasssembly of your code)
Mathematica's notebooks also has a neat solution to this. Where you imbed the code into a Latex like document. The twist mathematica gives is that you can hide all or some of the code from the document and only show the results. You then click little arrows to expand the detail to show you the code that generated the results. This gives a nice way to slowly descend into deeper and deeper depths of detail.
I highly recommend it to anyone coming from a C++ or Java background who is wondering what the big deal about Cocoa is.
And if this little PDF catches your Fancy, Aaron Hillegass has an excellant book: "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Another good book is "Building Cocoa Applications" by Garfinkel and Mahoney.
In 19 years they'll patent a "nospecific technology improvement to target ultrasonic pulses inside the human skull", then 19 years after that it will be to target inside of the human brain, then 19 years after that it will be to target inside the skull of any animal....
anyway, you get the point. You can extend patents indefinitely by playing stupid games like this... Big Pharma does it all the time. Patent a drug, then patent how you make the drug, then patent how you make the machines that make the drug...
All NASA centers lease from LMIT (was OAO)... and get charged quite a bit more than retail in the leases.
My PC is $151/mo for three years ($5436 over the lease), but was ~$3000 from the manufacturer (the government price would have been even less). This is on top of monthly charges for support ($135/mo), email ($19/mo), network access ($34/mo), calendaring ($7.50/mo), manditory external file storage ($40/mo). All of these charges are out in the open and anyone who can multiply can see how bad the government is getting ripped off.... but no one in power at NASA seems to care.
We recently tried to order a Mac mini from LMIT for outright purchase (the lease contract requires us to buy all systems from LMIT) and they tried to charge us $1600!!
And the support is so abysmal that most of us find coworkers to fix our systems rather than call the help desk (and risk having the problem made worse).
All of this was once in-house, but congress pushed for privatization.... and this mess is what happened.
They've changed the requirement for registration... it's free now
but the article is pretty bad... the lead makes it seem like they have inside information about the meeting, but they don't. They just take quotes from other people's articles and make it appear as if they got all of these great interviews with Wozniak and others....but all of the quotes are familiar to me as from older articles (and none of the other articles they use for their information are cited)
and they have this gem:
"But above all, some argue, Jobs must avoid repeating the mistake that cost Apple its massive early lead in the computer market. That happened largely because Jobs would not open up the Mac. He kept its operating system proprietary, and Microsoft and its ally Intel(INTC) clobbered him"
This isn't even remotely true... Steve Jobs was no longer at Apple during this period. He was forced out shortly after the introduction of the Mac. I think they meant "Apple" rather than Jobs.
If steve could create a sphere with one single button on the outside, that glowed, and had any realistic expectation that it might sell, he would.
Ya know, that would be a pretty cool wireless mouse for presentations... just put an accelerometer inside to detect tilt like in that powerbook hack.:)
Slashdot Mirror
An open source matlab contest is the same animal as if Microsoft held an open source Excel or Visual Basic contest... except that Matlab costs a lot more, and Mathworks tend to be a lot more evil in its licensing terms.
Matlab costs about $3500... but at my work, somehow it costs $70,000 a year because of some weird ass licensing scheme matlworks sticks large government labs with. I've tired to convince my project that for that money it makes more sense just to hire programmers to add whatever features we need to octave and go tell mathworks to fuck themselves.
Oh, and by the way... all of that money is still not enough to get you bug reports noticed. For that you need to pay for some sort of premiere program.
This is the first instance of one extraterrestrial satellite photographing another
ok, Cassini took a picture of huygens back in December when both were satellites of Saturn. And before that Mars Express took a picture of Beagle 2 when both were satellites of the Sun.
I propose that we coin a new term for obsessive investigative reporting that heavily uses the internet: "to go DrunkenBatman on someone" :)
Doesn't make it any less true...
It makes the arguement less valid. Abstract notions like relativity evolve over time. In Galileo's era people just didn't think that way... so to the minds of the Renaissance it was an either or sort of thing... not a depends how you look at it sort of thing.
BTW, once you realize that abstract notions like responsibility, revenge, etc took time to develop, it makes reading ancient myths much more interesting to read, especially the Sumarian ones. These myths were a way to communicate such abstract notions before words were coined for them.
Plants have no problems with a cloudy sky where you never see the sun or stars.
I don't know what the Hebrew version of this is: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also." But in English it seems to pretty clearly say God made the Sun an the stars, not that it suddenly stopped being cloudy. And in Genesis, this happens after plants are made. So the plants need divine intervention to stay alive before the sun is around.
The hebrew word used for the term 'day' here is 'jom' which is used not only for days of 24 hours but for eras too. So it is not hard to reconcile Genesis with the fact, that stars existed millions of years before. Genesis doesn't deny that.
Ok fine... but the eras are still presented in Genesis in a different order than they occurred. Stars formed before the Earth, creatures that move arose before grass, seeds, and plants that bear fruit. And insects arose before birds and whales.
Genesis clearly states the orders of the days (or eras) and the order given doesn't match what really happened. This much is clear from nuclear chemistry (the stars) and from the fossil record. And much harder to dispute than evolution.
but even in your reading of this... plants were created before the sun was seen on the Earth.
...this is a kind of buddhist take on it.
I think the way to reconcile this may be to require the existence of some sort of eye to see the sun and stars. that way the light can shine on the plants before it is seen. But this interpretation runs into problems in that the creatures that move are created on the day after the Sun and the stars.
It's hard to reconcile Genesis with the fact that Stars had to exist for many, many millennia before the Earth formed. (in order to produce the heavier elements you need a star and a supernova).
hmmm... perhaps Genesis could be read as describing the beginning of consciousness. The things existed only after they were named in a conscious mind.
From a google search: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genesis.html
001:014 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: 001:015 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. 001:016 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. 001:017 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, 001:018 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. 001:019 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
By this time there already were continents and oceans and plants (day 3).
Do they really want a literal interpretation of the King James version of Genesis to be opened up for Scientific debate? Let's just keep Genesis out of Science classes and put it in Religion and Philosophy classes. That's the best thing for everyone.
Exactly. Although the argument against Galileo was based on scripture, the real reason he was brought down was political.
The same thing is happening in Kansas. It is a very weak argument to say Evolution contradicts Genesis. It definitely isn't a strong enough contradiction to warrant the moral outrage of the creationists... It's a political response because they think they're being called idiots.
Thanks. This is a good interpretation.
...not to say that there isn't a way to reconcile it... I just don't know how.
But still the oceans, the dry land, and plants all appear before the Sun and the Stars.
Also of interest is that Genesis says this:
1:20 And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.
Evolution provides an way of explaining how moving creatures began in the waters and eventually lead to birds.
Of course, Genesis also implies that birds arose before insects which is in contradiction with the fossil record.
But hey, it's a start... a way to find a truce in this stupid battle.
wtf, can anybody explain. Is this considered 'normal' in the US?
In the US, a company that takes a political position risks a boycott that will continue on for years and years.
Such a decision would use a company to further the political ends of the corporate leadership at the expense of squandering the investment of the shareholders.
Therefore it is considered unethical for a publicly traded company to make political statements unless there is a clear benefit to the company.
In this case, Microsoft has a clear need for talented programmers. By advocating a law like this in Washington state as opposed to in the federal government they make Washington state a more desirable place to live to the demographics from which they recruit. Therefore they gain a competitive advantage in recruiting over tech companies located in states without such laws.
Clearly, the advantage to them in terms of recruiting outweighs their risks from a product boycott by the far right.
Yeah, but that sort of notion of relativity is a modern notion that comes largely from Galileo's work on mechanics. And it wasn't fully hashed out until Einstein.
Just to expand on what I said above....
Here's what was used against Galileo:
From the book of Joshua
10:12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon. 10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
Clearly it states that the Sun stood still, not that the Earth stopped rotating. Therefore clearly the Sun revolves around the Earth, and the Earth does not go around the Sun. To say otherwise is blasphemy.
Who cares what the intent is of the group proposing the change. If the reality is a wording that is clearer and more complete, is that not better?
The new definition is more wordy, but it keys off of a word without a precise definition: "adequate".
The whole definition would make what is and is not science much more murky. The key to the original definition is that science limits itself to things with natural causes... this is because natural causes can be tested. Supernatural causes cannot be tested. The new definition turns itself around to limit science to natural phenomenon, but leaves open the door to supernatural causes.
seriously though, I think a lot of these people just don't understand what evolution really is. They instantly think "men came from monkeys" and thus see it as a threat to their faith, put their fingers in their ears, and start singing their hymn of choice.
...So why don't the creationists go after all of the textbooks that say the opposite?? This is a much stronger contradiction with scripture than Evolution.
What really gets my goat is when creationists go after the Big Bang theory... The big bang theory was proposed by a Belgian Priest, George Lemaitre. He was an early expert on General Relativity who saw in the equations a way to find the moment of creation as described in Genesis.
Before the Big Bang theory, most astrophysicists thought the universe had no beginning... it just always was. But Lemaitre was able to prove there was a beginning to all of existence. Which was a profound result that should have been embraced by the so-called creationists.
AND, if you sit down and read Genesis it pretty closely matches the big bang theory... the universe starts out as pure light. What doesn't match Genesis is the current ideas on how planets form... Genesis says that the Earth formed first, and then the Sun, moon, and stars formed.
Supernatural means beyond the scope of the natural world and not bound by natural laws. Therefore, any theory with a supernatural explanation cannot be tested. Science cannot disprove a hypothesis based on the supernatural. (Did you take a picture of the vampire?... I couldn't they can't be photographed)
So to included hypotheses based on supernatural explanations into science is a waste of your time... science cannot test such hypotheses, and cannot do anything with them. You gain nothing by including the supernatural in Science, and you lose all of science's utility in eliminating hypotheses.
That does not mean that supernatural explanations should necessarily be discounted... it just means that it is beyond the scope of science. Science is limited to the natural world and natural phenomenon. To deal with questions of the supernatural you need to employ philosophy and religion.
It is pure idiocy to try to redefine science to include the supernatural. If they succeed, we'll just have to go and invent another word to mean what 'science' used to mean... because it's meaning is a very useful and profound idea that will persist no matter what P.C. word is chosen to go with its meaning.
But couldn't code be treated more as mathematical notation?
I don't write notes describing what I'm doing before I work something out... I work it our first and then figure out how to describe it.
Perhaps with design by contract like in Eiffel, the code itself could make the intent more clear than comments could. Sort of like stating the theorum you're gonna prove beofre you prove it. The code would describe the expected result before it calculates it.
Comments are a good idea, but maybe not the best idea. Other posters have pointed out that it is hard to keep comments synced with code that's evolving... and I'm bitten by this all of the time. The more detailed my comments are, the _harder_ it is for me to maintain my code. The compiler and unit tests will tell me if my code is correct, but it is very time consuming to make sure the comments are correct.
My dream is for a language that doesn't need comments... maybe even one that could be explained by an automated tool (like the way Apple's Shark explains the dissasssembly of your code)
Mathematica's notebooks also has a neat solution to this. Where you imbed the code into a Latex like document. The twist mathematica gives is that you can hide all or some of the code from the document and only show the results. You then click little arrows to expand the detail to show you the code that generated the results. This gives a nice way to slowly descend into deeper and deeper depths of detail.
Apple has a free mini-book that intros Objective-C and gives a good feel for its capabilities:
ObjC.pdf
I highly recommend it to anyone coming from a C++ or Java background who is wondering what the big deal about Cocoa is.
And if this little PDF catches your Fancy, Aaron Hillegass has an excellant book: "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X". Another good book is "Building Cocoa Applications" by Garfinkel and Mahoney.
In 19 years they'll patent a "nospecific technology improvement to target ultrasonic pulses inside the human skull", then 19 years after that it will be to target inside of the human brain, then 19 years after that it will be to target inside the skull of any animal....
anyway, you get the point. You can extend patents indefinitely by playing stupid games like this... Big Pharma does it all the time. Patent a drug, then patent how you make the drug, then patent how you make the machines that make the drug...
All NASA centers lease from LMIT (was OAO)... and get charged quite a bit more than retail in the leases.
My PC is $151/mo for three years ($5436 over the lease), but was ~$3000 from the manufacturer (the government price would have been even less). This is on top of monthly charges for support ($135/mo), email ($19/mo), network access ($34/mo), calendaring ($7.50/mo), manditory external file storage ($40/mo). All of these charges are out in the open and anyone who can multiply can see how bad the government is getting ripped off.... but no one in power at NASA seems to care.
We recently tried to order a Mac mini from LMIT for outright purchase (the lease contract requires us to buy all systems from LMIT) and they tried to charge us $1600!!
And the support is so abysmal that most of us find coworkers to fix our systems rather than call the help desk (and risk having the problem made worse).
All of this was once in-house, but congress pushed for privatization.... and this mess is what happened.
NASA leases, and the budgets are for the lifetime of the project, not by the year... so this doesn't explain it
that makes sense... but why do government agencies lease then? They don't care about tax breaks...
They've changed the requirement for registration... it's free now
...but all of the quotes are familiar to me as from older articles (and none of the other articles they use for their information are cited)
but the article is pretty bad... the lead makes it seem like they have inside information about the meeting, but they don't. They just take quotes from other people's articles and make it appear as if they got all of these great interviews with Wozniak and others.
and they have this gem:
"But above all, some argue, Jobs must avoid repeating the mistake that cost Apple its massive early lead in the computer market. That happened largely because Jobs would not open up the Mac. He kept its operating system proprietary, and Microsoft and its ally Intel(INTC) clobbered him"
This isn't even remotely true... Steve Jobs was no longer at Apple during this period. He was forced out shortly after the introduction of the Mac. I think they meant "Apple" rather than Jobs.
If steve could create a sphere with one single button on the outside, that glowed, and had any realistic expectation that it might sell, he would.
:)
Ya know, that would be a pretty cool wireless mouse for presentations... just put an accelerometer inside to detect tilt like in that powerbook hack.
Triton also has an atmosphere... very thin... but probably as
dense as Enceladus and denser than Pluto.