who knows, I think the only way you could say GR has a hole in it is because it doesn't seem to mesh well with quantum mech. Though I'm not sure if it would actually take hundreds of pages to write out the GR equations, I'm sure that back when it was first done, there were great ways to make it shorter(I've seen a few and I hate them, damnable tensors and other things that find their way into EM books).
The simplest way to write out the GR equations takes only a line. It's incredibly beautiful but useless if you actually want to solve them. By writing out the equations in full, I mean in terms of terms, added and subtracted, consising of scalars connected by multiplication, division, and exponentiation. This is what takes several hundred pages.
oh well, its tough to say it, but I don't think you need to say GR has a hole in it, rather it is still a theory and therefore is relegated to not having been shown that there are no holes in it. I don't think its all that bad, I'm sure at some point relativity will need to be slightly changed and modified, just like special relativity modified alot of Newton's stuff by looking at the world differently(if you just do some expansions on the special relativity equations, the first term usually nicely works it way out to the newton equations).
Interesting point here. The Newtonian laws of physics, as Newton stated them, work just peachy with SR and don't have to be modified at all. What goes out the window is the Galilean transformations.
oh well, be exciting to see what happens and I hope that this problem either leads to a new understanding of general relativity or a new addition to it, both are very exciting.
Indeed. I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, there's a third possibility: that this might just turn out to be nonsense. That would be a lot more boring, but it's still a possibility.
I remember, working in a mostly-physics research community, how wonderfully exciting it was when the first results from cold fusion came out. Everybody, and I mean everybody, wanted it to be valid. When it deflated like a lead balloon, there was a massive sense of disappointment.
My point is that claiming that there is a hole in GR is not obvious, as GR is not completely understood analytically.
I'm sure that a lot of people will try to find a numerical solution to GR that accounts for the effect, and for all we know right now, they just might find it.
The General Theory of Relativity consists of sixteen coupled differential equations that can be reduced to ten, which when just written out would take hundreds of pages. It is so complex that there are research programs just categorizing possible solutions.
Analytical solutions only exist for two cases: the overall case that describes a homogeneous universe, and the Schwartzschild case that describes a spherical body. There is also a linear approximation that gets gravity waves.
It's a bit premature to say that GR has a hole in it, because nobody has ever explored it fully. Perhaps this will lead to a solution of GR for this case, or perhaps not.
It sucks because they are so paranoid about having their precious user interface hidden (which user interface pretty much sucks) that it's against the license to integrate it in a seamless fashion into anything else.
Yes, I know they're pissed about that magazine in the UK including some of it on a CD, but still.
Although the MS Research work is interesting and pretty good, it was only one of several papers this year that described techniques that could produce similar effects. Good quality work in this area has been going on since the 1997 paper by Litwinowicz, and the techniques have been used in industry.
I hate Microsoft products as much as the next guy, but MS research does do a lot of good work. However, it's usually in collaboration with research universities, as in this year's papers by Agarwala et. al. and Wang et. al. So it's not as if these papers just magically emerged from the bowels of MS.
Also, the two biggest names in CG, Blinn and Kajiya, have published jack by comparison since they went to MS. Blinn isn't even followed by an entorage of groupies any more.
They're pretty cool but not there yet. You can walk in any direction, but the tiles are small and take some time to get into place. Effectively, they only work with baby steps and if you aren't weraring a facesucker. Even so limited, they take quite a lot of floor space.
If you're just concentrating on the exhibition, which is what usually gets reported, then no; there isn't much that's great.
However, that's because we've had a lackluster couple of years for research, for fairly obvious reasons.
But the research is picking up. I've seen a couple of wow things in software, but it takes a few years for these to make it to market. For instance, there are the high-contrast displays and techniques, which were in prototype phase last year and are almost to market now. They'll be toys for a while, but they have the ability completely to revolutionize movie and television. This is much, much bigger than HDTV. Apart from consumer yummies, though, quite a lot of decent advances, so far especially in modeling, and the technical sessions are only half over.
The major problem is legal. Standard arrangements for papers don't provide the rights for rebroadcast. When they want to release videos of the papers on a DVD, which they did last year, they have to renegotiate rights.
Now, ideally, they'd get the rights first. That hasn't happened yet, but I just got back from the Pioneers' party, and from what the organizers said, it sounds like they're working on it.
So far, that's been the best. A video game where you have to pop balloons by throwing balls at them. Only the balls are real, about 1.5 m, and you bounce them at other people in the audience.
PC-DOS was the Microsoft operating system for the IBM PC. MS-DOS was essentially the same thing, but with a different ROM and a different name for legal reasons licensed to companies like Zenith. (Who indeed had a better product than IBM, which a color pixel screen that could easily have supported a Macintosh-like OS. I know coz' I implemented a QuickDraw clone for the Z-100). All this at about the time the Mac came out.
Many people at Microsoft, especially the top officers, genuinely believe that they're idealistic, and that they're changing the world for the better, doing revolutionary things.
Two of the biggest names in computer graphics, Blinn and Kajiya, are working for Microsoft Research. Microsoft, like IBM in the day, does a boatload of great research, even if like IBM they don't use any of it. Where else is a researcher to go? The national research labs are dead and dying, and even when they were vibrant, they paid about 40% of what industry pays people to do less work.
And Penrose it not only an asshole, but a stupid one.
At least Hawking isn't stupid. However, by all accounts, Hawking was an asshole long before he got sick. If anything, being disabled has mellowed him out. I'll see your "My Left Foot" and raise you the episode with the blind woman on Night Court.
Just two days ago I saw an error message like this on my XP box whilst running a wizard for a Microsoft development system. I can't remember exactly what it said, but this is what it was like.
Error 23753. Many programs require Hoojimongle services. If you disable Hoojimongle services, many programs may fail. Furthermore, you may be unable to reboot if...
The buttons were labeled "Yes" and "No"; there was no way to scroll or resize the dialog box to see what it said, and there was no other way of getting rid of the dialog box short of stopping the process.
Shrek challenges the human/machine relationship by presenting emotional characters that are to a large extent solutions to a set of equations.
This is not more stupid than the bulk of the artists' statements I see these days. Punch it up with some words like hermeneutics and "the other," and you get instant art.
It depends on what you mean by "useful." If you're working in a shop that requires UML, and you need to communicate with people, then it's useful. The big problem with UML is that a truly bad design looks just the same as a good design. A much better test of the quality of design is to describe it in English. If it can't be done easily, then it's probably a bad design.
How about books on secure programming?
I haven't met any of these that I like. There are lots that tell how to secure against various exploits, but few that explain the basics.
Are design patterns a good tool?
They aren't a tool. They are an attempt at establishing a common vocabulary. The worst thing you can do with a design pattern is think, "That's cool! I'll implement it."
Will learning things like assembly or Lisp teach me anything useful?
Yes, definitely. Both will make you a better programmer no matter what language you use. Assembly because it gives you a feel for what a compiler can do directly and what takes work, and LISP because it encourages a way of looking at tasks that you probably haven't thought of.
Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming should be in your library, even if you don't read it cover-to-cover. Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things should also be there. And, of course, the revised edition of The Mythical Man-Month
The thing is that most of the ideas in programming are quite old, but they get repackaged as new things. Once you understand the old stuff, the new stuff all falls into place.
There are a few invaluable things that CS can give you. Algorithms, for instance. There exist plenty of classical solutions to everyday problems that most modern programmers just don't know about. Proving the complexity of algorithms is also incredibly useful. You won't prove every algorithm you produce in your life, but it will give you a feel for it. Graph theory is also quite useful.
OK, glance at the website. What is it about? Big type: it's Jakob Nielsen's Website. What's a Jakob Nielsen and what does he do? Oh, wait. Up near the top in 12 point trendy all lower-case type, it's usable information technology. Whatever the hell that means. I'm not going to see it at all unless I'm sitting at a computer and using it. So what is it? Is is Jakob Nielsen's personal website, or is is usable infromation technology? Again, whatever the hell.
Look down a bit more, and what do we see. Again, bit type but not so big. Permanent Content. Well, I'm glad that's settled! I hate those damn Ephemeral Content websites. Looking down, what's this? Alertbox. Jakob's column on Web Usability. Do I click on that? No, nothing happens. They're below. Not even indented, so I can tell at a glance that they're supposed to be under the header. The first one looks like a paragraph with a link. Then there are some links without paragraphs. There's a space between the paragraph with the link and the others, which have no space between them. Ah, so the first one must be special in some way. No it's not.
What's that over to the right? It says it's News, but the first thing is an ad for a conference. I click on it, and, ah! So somebody knows how to write a website.
Of course, it isn't quite, but close enough, and given that the Avoirdupois and Imperial systems were established when scales weren't so accurate, pretty good.
Furthermore, the Avaoirdupois system is based on binary, not decimal.
Microsoft has Kajiya and Blinn, two of the biggest names in computer graphics. At times I've seen some good stuff at SIGGRAPH from them. However, that's been dropping off over the past few years. The only marginally significant contribution from Microsoft last year was a fairly obvious way of laying out Wang tiles for large textures.
Also, I've noticed that Blinn and Kajiya lack an entourage at SIGGRAPH. There was a time when if they projected an image of Blinn at SIGGRAPH, everybody cheered. Not any more.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the problems with the clocks on the GPS satellites.
Anyway, it's fun stuff.
who knows, I think the only way you could say GR has a hole in it is because it doesn't seem to mesh well with quantum mech. Though I'm not sure if it would actually take hundreds of pages to write out the GR equations, I'm sure that back when it was first done, there were great ways to make it shorter(I've seen a few and I hate them, damnable tensors and other things that find their way into EM books).
The simplest way to write out the GR equations takes only a line. It's incredibly beautiful but useless if you actually want to solve them. By writing out the equations in full, I mean in terms of terms, added and subtracted, consising of scalars connected by multiplication, division, and exponentiation. This is what takes several hundred pages.
oh well, its tough to say it, but I don't think you need to say GR has a hole in it, rather it is still a theory and therefore is relegated to not having been shown that there are no holes in it. I don't think its all that bad, I'm sure at some point relativity will need to be slightly changed and modified, just like special relativity modified alot of Newton's stuff by looking at the world differently(if you just do some expansions on the special relativity equations, the first term usually nicely works it way out to the newton equations).
Interesting point here. The Newtonian laws of physics, as Newton stated them, work just peachy with SR and don't have to be modified at all. What goes out the window is the Galilean transformations.
oh well, be exciting to see what happens and I hope that this problem either leads to a new understanding of general relativity or a new addition to it, both are very exciting.
Indeed. I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, there's a third possibility: that this might just turn out to be nonsense. That would be a lot more boring, but it's still a possibility.
I remember, working in a mostly-physics research community, how wonderfully exciting it was when the first results from cold fusion came out. Everybody, and I mean everybody, wanted it to be valid. When it deflated like a lead balloon, there was a massive sense of disappointment.
Yes, these are really good and quite useful.
My point is that claiming that there is a hole in GR is not obvious, as GR is not completely understood analytically.
I'm sure that a lot of people will try to find a numerical solution to GR that accounts for the effect, and for all we know right now, they just might find it.
The General Theory of Relativity consists of sixteen coupled differential equations that can be reduced to ten, which when just written out would take hundreds of pages. It is so complex that there are research programs just categorizing possible solutions.
Analytical solutions only exist for two cases: the overall case that describes a homogeneous universe, and the Schwartzschild case that describes a spherical body. There is also a linear approximation that gets gravity waves.
It's a bit premature to say that GR has a hole in it, because nobody has ever explored it fully. Perhaps this will lead to a solution of GR for this case, or perhaps not.
It's great because it's a nice renderer.
It sucks because they are so paranoid about having their precious user interface hidden (which user interface pretty much sucks) that it's against the license to integrate it in a seamless fashion into anything else.
Yes, I know they're pissed about that magazine in the UK including some of it on a CD, but still.
Although the MS Research work is interesting and pretty good, it was only one of several papers this year that described techniques that could produce similar effects. Good quality work in this area has been going on since the 1997 paper by Litwinowicz, and the techniques have been used in industry.
I hate Microsoft products as much as the next guy, but MS research does do a lot of good work. However, it's usually in collaboration with research universities, as in this year's papers by Agarwala et. al. and Wang et. al. So it's not as if these papers just magically emerged from the bowels of MS.
Also, the two biggest names in CG, Blinn and Kajiya, have published jack by comparison since they went to MS. Blinn isn't even followed by an entorage of groupies any more.
They're pretty cool but not there yet. You can walk in any direction, but the tiles are small and take some time to get into place. Effectively, they only work with baby steps and if you aren't weraring a facesucker. Even so limited, they take quite a lot of floor space.
If you're just concentrating on the exhibition, which is what usually gets reported, then no; there isn't much that's great.
However, that's because we've had a lackluster couple of years for research, for fairly obvious reasons.
But the research is picking up. I've seen a couple of wow things in software, but it takes a few years for these to make it to market. For instance, there are the high-contrast displays and techniques, which were in prototype phase last year and are almost to market now. They'll be toys for a while, but they have the ability completely to revolutionize movie and television. This is much, much bigger than HDTV. Apart from consumer yummies, though, quite a lot of decent advances, so far especially in modeling, and the technical sessions are only half over.
The major problem is legal. Standard arrangements for papers don't provide the rights for rebroadcast. When they want to release videos of the papers on a DVD, which they did last year, they have to renegotiate rights.
Now, ideally, they'd get the rights first. That hasn't happened yet, but I just got back from the Pioneers' party, and from what the organizers said, it sounds like they're working on it.
So far, that's been the best. A video game where you have to pop balloons by throwing balls at them. Only the balls are real, about 1.5 m, and you bounce them at other people in the audience.
PC-DOS was the Microsoft operating system for the IBM PC. MS-DOS was essentially the same thing, but with a different ROM and a different name for legal reasons licensed to companies like Zenith. (Who indeed had a better product than IBM, which a color pixel screen that could easily have supported a Macintosh-like OS. I know coz' I implemented a QuickDraw clone for the Z-100). All this at about the time the Mac came out.
Many people at Microsoft, especially the top officers, genuinely believe that they're idealistic, and that they're changing the world for the better, doing revolutionary things.
Two of the biggest names in computer graphics, Blinn and Kajiya, are working for Microsoft Research. Microsoft, like IBM in the day, does a boatload of great research, even if like IBM they don't use any of it. Where else is a researcher to go? The national research labs are dead and dying, and even when they were vibrant, they paid about 40% of what industry pays people to do less work.
And Penrose it not only an asshole, but a stupid one.
At least Hawking isn't stupid. However, by all accounts, Hawking was an asshole long before he got sick. If anything, being disabled has mellowed him out. I'll see your "My Left Foot" and raise you the episode with the blind woman on Night Court.
n/t
Just two days ago I saw an error message like this on my XP box whilst running a wizard for a Microsoft development system. I can't remember exactly what it said, but this is what it was like.
Error 23753. Many programs require Hoojimongle services. If you disable Hoojimongle services, many programs may fail. Furthermore, you may be unable to reboot if...
The buttons were labeled "Yes" and "No"; there was no way to scroll or resize the dialog box to see what it said, and there was no other way of getting rid of the dialog box short of stopping the process.
Shrek challenges the human/machine relationship by presenting emotional characters that are to a large extent solutions to a set of equations.
This is not more stupid than the bulk of the artists' statements I see these days. Punch it up with some words like hermeneutics and "the other," and you get instant art.
Is UML useful?
It depends on what you mean by "useful." If you're working in a shop that requires UML, and you need to communicate with people, then it's useful. The big problem with UML is that a truly bad design looks just the same as a good design. A much better test of the quality of design is to describe it in English. If it can't be done easily, then it's probably a bad design.
How about books on secure programming?
I haven't met any of these that I like. There are lots that tell how to secure against various exploits, but few that explain the basics.
Are design patterns a good tool?
They aren't a tool. They are an attempt at establishing a common vocabulary. The worst thing you can do with a design pattern is think, "That's cool! I'll implement it."
Will learning things like assembly or Lisp teach me anything useful?
Yes, definitely. Both will make you a better programmer no matter what language you use. Assembly because it gives you a feel for what a compiler can do directly and what takes work, and LISP because it encourages a way of looking at tasks that you probably haven't thought of.
Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming should be in your library, even if you don't read it cover-to-cover. Donald Norman's The Design of Everyday Things should also be there. And, of course, the revised edition of The Mythical Man-Month
The thing is that most of the ideas in programming are quite old, but they get repackaged as new things. Once you understand the old stuff, the new stuff all falls into place.
There are a few invaluable things that CS can give you. Algorithms, for instance. There exist plenty of classical solutions to everyday problems that most modern programmers just don't know about. Proving the complexity of algorithms is also incredibly useful. You won't prove every algorithm you produce in your life, but it will give you a feel for it. Graph theory is also quite useful.
OK, glance at the website. What is it about? Big type: it's Jakob Nielsen's Website. What's a Jakob Nielsen and what does he do? Oh, wait. Up near the top in 12 point trendy all lower-case type, it's usable information technology. Whatever the hell that means. I'm not going to see it at all unless I'm sitting at a computer and using it. So what is it? Is is Jakob Nielsen's personal website, or is is usable infromation technology? Again, whatever the hell.
Look down a bit more, and what do we see. Again, bit type but not so big. Permanent Content. Well, I'm glad that's settled! I hate those damn Ephemeral Content websites. Looking down, what's this? Alertbox. Jakob's column on Web Usability. Do I click on that? No, nothing happens. They're below. Not even indented, so I can tell at a glance that they're supposed to be under the header. The first one looks like a paragraph with a link. Then there are some links without paragraphs. There's a space between the paragraph with the link and the others, which have no space between them. Ah, so the first one must be special in some way. No it's not.
What's that over to the right? It says it's News, but the first thing is an ad for a conference. I click on it, and, ah! So somebody knows how to write a website.
Our televisions had knobs, so we used to have to file a groove in one end of a broomstick.
(No shit--I actually did this.)
Of course, it isn't quite, but close enough, and given that the Avoirdupois and Imperial systems were established when scales weren't so accurate, pretty good.
Furthermore, the Avaoirdupois system is based on binary, not decimal.
I can write that one:
"I would have this job done if I were allowed to and not subject to discrimination on the basis of my gender. Besides, why haven't the men done it?
You can't get a baby in one month by making nine women pregnant.
And when was the last time you flew to a convention on a helicopter?
Microsoft has Kajiya and Blinn, two of the biggest names in computer graphics. At times I've seen some good stuff at SIGGRAPH from them. However, that's been dropping off over the past few years. The only marginally significant contribution from Microsoft last year was a fairly obvious way of laying out Wang tiles for large textures.
Also, I've noticed that Blinn and Kajiya lack an entourage at SIGGRAPH. There was a time when if they projected an image of Blinn at SIGGRAPH, everybody cheered. Not any more.
Apple's APIs are such that, if you do things the right way, new supported languages will just work.
I know this may come as a shock to some of you, but it's true.