No they're not. Don't be ridiculous. Iran and North Korea understand VERY well the difficult situation the U.S. is in. The U.S. is considered the "big boy" on the block, and as such will never be capable of justifying an offensive nuclear strike on anyone short of China. Why would the U.S. go nuclear against Iran or North Korea when it would be far, far easier in the long run to simply bomb them into oblivion.
The ONLY rational circumstance where a country like Iran or North Korea would fear U.S. nuclear deployment would be if they themselves obtained nuclear weapons and were considered a credible and immediate threat to use them. That's why it has been so lucrative for both countries to pretend to be developing nuclear weapons over the last few decades. The U.S., above all others, wants to keep such weapons out of their hands so as not to initiate a "Nuclear World War" once there is a militant coup. The U.S. would HAVE to strike (especially Iran), which would necessarily demand reciprocation from their allies.
So, basically, no one is out there making decisions based on a fear of U.S. deployment of nukes.
You seem to like aerospace. What about the International Space Station? The Hubble Telescope? And most scientists would probably disagree with you that the recent Mars missions were about doing a "Viking rehash."
Not to mention last year's Deep Impact mission.
I mean, hitting a comet with half a spacecraft while the other half records it?
That's like hitting a bullet with another bullet and having the ejected shell casing take pictures. That is some badass stuff, and required huge advancements in many areas of aerospace technology.
The GP appears to be short-sighted and perhaps full of shit.
Hardware support for decompression: nice
But I'd rather have the CPU dedicated to rendering more complex environments than decompressing textures.
I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, but the phrase "hardware decompression" implies to me that there will be dedicated hardware assigned the task of running the decompression algorithm, as opposed to using a portion of the CPU's cycles to run a software decompression routine.
If that is true, then the CPU is left unburdened by any decompression activities. The only complaint, then, would be the extra cost you, as the consumer, must inevitably pay for the extra hardware.
No?
>>Then learn to be a construction worker, not an architect!
Right, well you can be a construction worker without an architecture degree. Try getting a real software development job in 1994 without a computer science degree.
And the analogy is not... university degree : C.S.:: trade school : monkey coding
The analogy we're discussing is perhaps... mathematics : C.S.:: art : software development:: sociology : human interface design...for example.
The fact that students have these options available today is great, but this is a recent development.
And it speaks to the narrow thinking of some computer scientist types that they can only envision university-level educational programs that scratch the "scientist" itch.
Rimbo, I understand what you're saying, and I agree with your basic premise about a university education being a powerful underpinning of future success. That's why I have a university education, and a university master's degree, and am in school at a university for my Ph.D.
Where we seem to differ is in what we consider "fundamental" to computer technology education. I started C.S. at Texas in 1994. At the time, there was no other option for CS-ish students. You either fit into that educational mold or you didn't.
Well, in 1994 your applied computing/software engineering major wasn't available. If you re-read my comment, you'll notice that I wished for BOTH hardcore computer science for those who want it AND an applied path for people like me. It didn't exist at the time, and that drove me away from CS.
This was EXACTLY my experience at The University of Texas, where CS is really applied mathematics, with a focus on AI. I just wanted to learn to code cool shit. After three years of learning very little I could practically apply, and being bored absolutely stiff (while getting my ass kicked by the maths), I bailed out of CS in favor of an entirely different college (within UT).
I don't begrudge UT for wanted to offer an applied mathematics program in their CS department, but I didn't want that, and was basically told that if I wanted to have a life where I did cool stuff with computers, I had to learn Diff. EQ, calculus-based engineering physics, and a whole lot of theory and proofs of CS (emphasis on the _Science_) concepts that perhaps.01% of real-world programmers actually give a shit about.
Another concern I have with university-level CS programs is that not a whole lot of actual TEACHING goes on. Lower-level courses are "taught" in giant halls where ethereal profs tend to cater to students who already knew the material before they got to high school. It just goes downhill from there. I didn't realize how bad it was until I got to another department where they actually started with the basics, _taught_ the fundamentals, and developed students through to competency.
It's like CS departments got lazy on teaching because they have such a wealth of students who have been dicking around with this stuff since they were 5, just because it was fun.
Except that, in my experience, they don't. The $15 pack of CFL bulbs I bought quit working within a couple of weeks. After that, you'll have trouble convincing me to buy them when the $0.99 bulbs are right next to them, and they work. And if they fail, so what? It was only a buck.
Again, I love the idea of CFLs, but I haven't been impressed with the execution.
I can't speak to your experience in this matter, but I do know that I couldn't justify a DVD player purchase at the time, but if I bought a PS2, I'd have BOTH a game machine AND a DVD player, for one reasonable price.
That was a huge incentive to buy a PS2, and so I did.
In the year 2000 (insert Conan O'Brien falsetto voiceover), LOTS of people watched DVDs on their PS2s, because a PS2 was $250 and a DVD player was 3 or 400, depending. For a great many PS2 owners, that was their first and only DVD player.
I myself didn't upgrade to a "real" DVD player until 2004, when I also bought an HDTV that could take advantage of progressive scanning and several other features that the PS2 didn't offer me at the time.
Obviously, the difference now is that there is no great demand for blu-ray, so whether Sony will be able to inspire such a demand for that capability in their PS3 is questionable. But don't discount the DVD-watching value of the PS2 six years ago. It was huge, and was a total coup for the DVD format.
The thing is, compared to Mars, Venus isn't very interesting. It's not expected to harbor life, or to have ever harbored life, and otherwise it's not a place we expect to send a person. We can learn plenty from Venus by parking a observational satellite in orbit around it.
Mars, however, we might actually want to go there.
Besides, if you want a real technical challenge, lets land a navigable rover on Jupiter. I mean, one that doesn't automatically sink to it's rocky core. Venus is a cakewalk.
1) If a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the benefitial product they hoped to give to the world. So what would you have them do? Commit organizational suicide so they can manufacture medicine to cure a few people, and lose any chance of contributing to the engineering of a better, more accessible solution for the world?
2) Companies are not soul-less collections of worker drones, however much karma it may provide to claim that they are. Most of us work for companies. Most of us are not horrible, soul-less drones. Individuals within companies make decisions, and those individuals usually do the best they can to make the right decisions based on several important angles, like: a) what is best for the people that make up this company (see #1 above) b) what is best for the community we serve c) what is best for the people who invested in our success
At least the popular (even if occasionally horrible, see McDonald's) things from American culture are legitimatly associated with the USA.
Tea has nothing to do with Britain, except that they invaded another territory, liked their foul-tasting drink, and decided to pretend it was utterly British.
No, the tea is good in Britain because the British spent centuries raping east Asia and poisoning its people with a combination of opium, disease, and empire-building.
The Americans just decided Dar Jeeling wasn't worth living under the imperial thumb.
Fair enough. It sounds like we agree far more than disagree on this issue.
There has just been a lot of US = China = Soviet Russia rhetoric around here recently, and it's getting difficult to weed out those trolling from those with a real point about the state of affairs in the U.S.
I believe, though, that governments (be they democratic republics or communist) experience entropy in much the same way as anything else does. That is, without an influx of formative energy, the principles upon which the union was founded erode until they no longer apply.
The ultimate way to infuse this energy is war and/or revolution, but I hope there is a less destructive way to re-invigorate things.
What you're talking about, though, is just the sort of slow erosion of guiding principles that leads to the fall of nations.
It will be interesting to see the transition of power in 2008, and to note whether it infuses energy, or continues the slow increase in political entropy.
There is a WORLD of difference between punishing people for publishing classified information and punishing people for publishing dissenting viewpoints.
I'm shocked that an obviously intelligent poster would fail to acknowledge that distinction.
Of course you're exactly right, but my point is that VS is the standard, and can't be used to learn (at least not easily). I had VS installed on my machine as a student and as an employee of a major tech company, because that's what the developers used. It's already there, it's recognized as the tool of choice. How hard would it be for MS to tack on a little command-line-style coding interface for the "Hello World" crowd?
I realize that's not the intended audience for VS, but hey, with great power comes great responsibility. MS ought to be doing the little things to give back to the CS world.
I can't tell you how many times I've been interested in learning to use a programming environment, only to be thwarted by the proprietary bells, whistles, and hoop-jumping necessary to just play around with a few lines of code. Obviously, there are still compilers out there that offer a straight path to learning, but the real deal these days is Visual Studio. Just TRY to launch VS and get going without a manual, a walkthrough, and some serious persistence.
I'm not saying it isn't/can't be done, but I am saying that it's a nasty barrier for those who are interested enough to play around, but not enough to work at it for 10 hours with no payoff.
I suppose that argument has merit, particularly if you subscribe to a Chomskyan view of power structures such that anything popularly held is, by definition, allowed by the powers that be. And if one ignores the very real and tangible benefits of a "free" society (I'm sure we can agree to a bit of that, at least?).
But even if it is so, what is the alternative you would suggest? Regardless of the action or inaction prescribed by such a conclusion, you still end up equally unsure of your ability to truly affect the existing power structure. Even if one managed the extreme, and organized and led a successful revolution of national or even world government, one is still faced with the same paradoxes of power and control.
So, it seems to make sense to me to not dismiss advantages in our current political system, even if that means we risk missing some larger, but ultimately unalterable, point.
There is a world of difference, evidenced most conveniently by the fact that there is an entire news story and blog thread about the issue, and people are pissed off and saying so openly.
Such things don't happen in China, where the government does repressive things openly because their people lack the freedoms to openly complain about it. That doesn't make what they do honorable. The fact that our freedoms force our bad government officials to be secretive about their evil plots doesn't make our system less honorable.
Quite the opposite. Now use your blood-earned freedoms to make a DIFFERENCE on this issue, rather than spread FUD about how China is somehow better because they can be unabashedly evil.
You may be right, but then it strikes me as curious that so many wireless providers make call clarity, coverage, and reliability THE central focus of their advertisement campaigns.
"Can you hear me now? Good."
If people won't pay based on better service, then why use better as your major selling point? And if people WILL pay for better service, then why wouldn't service providers serve that market?
Is it a technical limitation inherent to wireless networks? Is it that the price-point for better service is higher than people are willing to pay?
It seems to me that a carrier that dramatically improved wireless quality would simply pwn their competitors.
Slashdot Mirror
No they're not. Don't be ridiculous. Iran and North Korea understand VERY well the difficult situation the U.S. is in. The U.S. is considered the "big boy" on the block, and as such will never be capable of justifying an offensive nuclear strike on anyone short of China. Why would the U.S. go nuclear against Iran or North Korea when it would be far, far easier in the long run to simply bomb them into oblivion.
The ONLY rational circumstance where a country like Iran or North Korea would fear U.S. nuclear deployment would be if they themselves obtained nuclear weapons and were considered a credible and immediate threat to use them. That's why it has been so lucrative for both countries to pretend to be developing nuclear weapons over the last few decades. The U.S., above all others, wants to keep such weapons out of their hands so as not to initiate a "Nuclear World War" once there is a militant coup. The U.S. would HAVE to strike (especially Iran), which would necessarily demand reciprocation from their allies.
So, basically, no one is out there making decisions based on a fear of U.S. deployment of nukes.
Not to mention last year's Deep Impact mission.
I mean, hitting a comet with half a spacecraft while the other half records it?
That's like hitting a bullet with another bullet and having the ejected shell casing take pictures. That is some badass stuff, and required huge advancements in many areas of aerospace technology.
The GP appears to be short-sighted and perhaps full of shit.
Could you mean...560?
80 + 560 = 640
>>Then learn to be a construction worker, not an architect!
:: trade school : monkey coding
:: art : software development :: sociology : human interface design ...for example.
Right, well you can be a construction worker without an architecture degree. Try getting a real software development job in 1994 without a computer science degree.
And the analogy is not...
university degree : C.S.
The analogy we're discussing is perhaps...
mathematics : C.S.
The fact that students have these options available today is great, but this is a recent development.
And it speaks to the narrow thinking of some computer scientist types that they can only envision university-level educational programs that scratch the "scientist" itch.
Rimbo, I understand what you're saying, and I agree with your basic premise about a university education being a powerful underpinning of future success. That's why I have a university education, and a university master's degree, and am in school at a university for my Ph.D.
Where we seem to differ is in what we consider "fundamental" to computer technology education. I started C.S. at Texas in 1994. At the time, there was no other option for CS-ish students. You either fit into that educational mold or you didn't.
By the way, Hookem Horns!
Well, in 1994 your applied computing/software engineering major wasn't available. If you re-read my comment, you'll notice that I wished for BOTH hardcore computer science for those who want it AND an applied path for people like me. It didn't exist at the time, and that drove me away from CS.
It could be. I never enrolled in a school that had computer/software engineering programs, as opposed to Computer Science.
This was EXACTLY my experience at The University of Texas, where CS is really applied mathematics, with a focus on AI. I just wanted to learn to code cool shit. After three years of learning very little I could practically apply, and being bored absolutely stiff (while getting my ass kicked by the maths), I bailed out of CS in favor of an entirely different college (within UT).
.01% of real-world programmers actually give a shit about.
I don't begrudge UT for wanted to offer an applied mathematics program in their CS department, but I didn't want that, and was basically told that if I wanted to have a life where I did cool stuff with computers, I had to learn Diff. EQ, calculus-based engineering physics, and a whole lot of theory and proofs of CS (emphasis on the _Science_) concepts that perhaps
Another concern I have with university-level CS programs is that not a whole lot of actual TEACHING goes on. Lower-level courses are "taught" in giant halls where ethereal profs tend to cater to students who already knew the material before they got to high school. It just goes downhill from there. I didn't realize how bad it was until I got to another department where they actually started with the basics, _taught_ the fundamentals, and developed students through to competency.
It's like CS departments got lazy on teaching because they have such a wealth of students who have been dicking around with this stuff since they were 5, just because it was fun.
Except that, in my experience, they don't. The $15 pack of CFL bulbs I bought quit working within a couple of weeks. After that, you'll have trouble convincing me to buy them when the $0.99 bulbs are right next to them, and they work. And if they fail, so what? It was only a buck.
Again, I love the idea of CFLs, but I haven't been impressed with the execution.
I can't speak to your experience in this matter, but I do know that I couldn't justify a DVD player purchase at the time, but if I bought a PS2, I'd have BOTH a game machine AND a DVD player, for one reasonable price.
That was a huge incentive to buy a PS2, and so I did.
In the year 2000 (insert Conan O'Brien falsetto voiceover), LOTS of people watched DVDs on their PS2s, because a PS2 was $250 and a DVD player was 3 or 400, depending. For a great many PS2 owners, that was their first and only DVD player.
I myself didn't upgrade to a "real" DVD player until 2004, when I also bought an HDTV that could take advantage of progressive scanning and several other features that the PS2 didn't offer me at the time.
Obviously, the difference now is that there is no great demand for blu-ray, so whether Sony will be able to inspire such a demand for that capability in their PS3 is questionable. But don't discount the DVD-watching value of the PS2 six years ago. It was huge, and was a total coup for the DVD format.
The thing is, compared to Mars, Venus isn't very interesting. It's not expected to harbor life, or to have ever harbored life, and otherwise it's not a place we expect to send a person. We can learn plenty from Venus by parking a observational satellite in orbit around it.
Mars, however, we might actually want to go there.
Besides, if you want a real technical challenge, lets land a navigable rover on Jupiter. I mean, one that doesn't automatically sink to it's rocky core. Venus is a cakewalk.
That's not a fair criticism, for two reasons:
1) If a company starts manufacturing a product so expensive that they cannot make a profit on it, they will soon cease to exist, as will the benefitial product they hoped to give to the world. So what would you have them do? Commit organizational suicide so they can manufacture medicine to cure a few people, and lose any chance of contributing to the engineering of a better, more accessible solution for the world?
2) Companies are not soul-less collections of worker drones, however much karma it may provide to claim that they are. Most of us work for companies. Most of us are not horrible, soul-less drones. Individuals within companies make decisions, and those individuals usually do the best they can to make the right decisions based on several important angles, like:
a) what is best for the people that make up this company (see #1 above)
b) what is best for the community we serve
c) what is best for the people who invested in our success
At least the popular (even if occasionally horrible, see McDonald's) things from American culture are legitimatly associated with the USA.
Tea has nothing to do with Britain, except that they invaded another territory, liked their foul-tasting drink, and decided to pretend it was utterly British.
No, the tea is good in Britain because the British spent centuries raping east Asia and poisoning its people with a combination of opium, disease, and empire-building.
The Americans just decided Dar Jeeling wasn't worth living under the imperial thumb.
Fair enough. It sounds like we agree far more than disagree on this issue.
There has just been a lot of US = China = Soviet Russia rhetoric around here recently, and it's getting difficult to weed out those trolling from those with a real point about the state of affairs in the U.S.
I believe, though, that governments (be they democratic republics or communist) experience entropy in much the same way as anything else does. That is, without an influx of formative energy, the principles upon which the union was founded erode until they no longer apply.
The ultimate way to infuse this energy is war and/or revolution, but I hope there is a less destructive way to re-invigorate things.
What you're talking about, though, is just the sort of slow erosion of guiding principles that leads to the fall of nations.
It will be interesting to see the transition of power in 2008, and to note whether it infuses energy, or continues the slow increase in political entropy.
There is a WORLD of difference between punishing people for publishing classified information and punishing people for publishing dissenting viewpoints.
I'm shocked that an obviously intelligent poster would fail to acknowledge that distinction.
The F-16 is basically a jet engine with wings. It can perform a vertical climb until it runs out of fuel or atmosphere.
Of course you're exactly right, but my point is that VS is the standard, and can't be used to learn (at least not easily). I had VS installed on my machine as a student and as an employee of a major tech company, because that's what the developers used. It's already there, it's recognized as the tool of choice. How hard would it be for MS to tack on a little command-line-style coding interface for the "Hello World" crowd?
I realize that's not the intended audience for VS, but hey, with great power comes great responsibility. MS ought to be doing the little things to give back to the CS world.
Mod parent UP.
I can't tell you how many times I've been interested in learning to use a programming environment, only to be thwarted by the proprietary bells, whistles, and hoop-jumping necessary to just play around with a few lines of code. Obviously, there are still compilers out there that offer a straight path to learning, but the real deal these days is Visual Studio. Just TRY to launch VS and get going without a manual, a walkthrough, and some serious persistence.
I'm not saying it isn't/can't be done, but I am saying that it's a nasty barrier for those who are interested enough to play around, but not enough to work at it for 10 hours with no payoff.
I suppose that argument has merit, particularly if you subscribe to a Chomskyan view of power structures such that anything popularly held is, by definition, allowed by the powers that be. And if one ignores the very real and tangible benefits of a "free" society (I'm sure we can agree to a bit of that, at least?).
But even if it is so, what is the alternative you would suggest? Regardless of the action or inaction prescribed by such a conclusion, you still end up equally unsure of your ability to truly affect the existing power structure. Even if one managed the extreme, and organized and led a successful revolution of national or even world government, one is still faced with the same paradoxes of power and control.
So, it seems to make sense to me to not dismiss advantages in our current political system, even if that means we risk missing some larger, but ultimately unalterable, point.
There is a world of difference, evidenced most conveniently by the fact that there is an entire news story and blog thread about the issue, and people are pissed off and saying so openly.
Such things don't happen in China, where the government does repressive things openly because their people lack the freedoms to openly complain about it. That doesn't make what they do honorable. The fact that our freedoms force our bad government officials to be secretive about their evil plots doesn't make our system less honorable.
Quite the opposite. Now use your blood-earned freedoms to make a DIFFERENCE on this issue, rather than spread FUD about how China is somehow better because they can be unabashedly evil.
Perhaps you're joking, but just in case you're not...
. aspxs /2216/
That account of events was taken from a parody interview of Hiroshi Yamauchi. It did not actually happen. It was a hoax.
Links:
http://middaysoftware.com/MinhsBlogs/articles/223
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/weblog/comment
You may be right, but then it strikes me as curious that so many wireless providers make call clarity, coverage, and reliability THE central focus of their advertisement campaigns.
"Can you hear me now? Good."
If people won't pay based on better service, then why use better as your major selling point? And if people WILL pay for better service, then why wouldn't service providers serve that market?
Is it a technical limitation inherent to wireless networks? Is it that the price-point for better service is higher than people are willing to pay?
It seems to me that a carrier that dramatically improved wireless quality would simply pwn their competitors.