Yes, but they also had to know the EXACT moment of "Saturn entering Venus" (obviously, to advice the King to do the same to the Queen;-) ), so they DID know their math and their charts...
Paul B.
P.S. Why am I actually answering an AC, anyway?...;-)
... instead of replying to me (whom you obviously will find in perfect agreement with you! I mentioned my political inclinations quite obviously...;-) ) try engaging one of those leftist/statist kids/pops -- maybe we even have a chance to put an idea or two in their heads.;-)
But yes, I do appreciate you making this point -- just a pity that noone will probably see it except for someone who agrees with it anyway.
... unless you also put the total number of cows in both US and canada into you equation.
Say, there are no cows in Canada and they;ve just imported 800, learned that their precious purchase is at danger of that mad cow desease and screened all of them, finding 3 mad. Depending on the accuracy of their test, they might've missed another 3 or 4 or 400...
Say, there is a million cows in the US and 1600 were added. Learning of the desease, they tested all of them and found just one mad.
.. just not with your subject line (unless you forgot to put quotes around "capitalism" to mean "statist economy").;-) Obviously you are coming from the Left, and I am coming from the Top (libertarian, you know...) but yes, Science is becoming another consumable, to be bought and sold like oil and food. -- see my previous comments in this thread.
the only way to give it some dignity back is to detach it from the government oversight (whoever runs the govt. at the moment), and the only way to achieve THAT is to have enough of independent private wealth in society to fund interesting scientific projects. And no, I do not mean "it is cheaper for me to give $1M grant to this professor who will prove that I do not harm anything than $5M fine to the EPA who thinks that I am harming everything around my plant".
Anyther perspective for you -- I grew up in Soviet Union (decidedly non-capitalist country) and the environment there was, to put it mildly, REALLY bad. Free society (which some of us equate with capitalism, obviously in the different sense of the word that you used in your subj) seems to be doing much better.
If kepler modified his measurements to fit into the then current view of things, astronomy would have been set back 100 years.
Do not you think that there were plenty of astroLOGISTS at the time who might have noticed that things do not exactly add up up there, but just were not interested in following THAT route? Kepler might as well decide to be one of them (and forever forgotten), in which case another bright guy with access to the same technology (best at that time) would publish the same observations.
The problem is that now almost all science is funded from "public funds", so there is really no incentive to go against what the public believes (and public ius represented by the bureocrats in Washington, you know...;-) ).
Hey, those guys and girl are public sector employees (Dept. of Fish and Game, I think it was called, though now it is apparently Fish and Wildlife Service). Think of the last time you visited your loval DMV office -- maybe most of them have THAT particular type of personalty, you know what I am talking about. In any case, not too many are going to bite the hand which gives them nice govt. job (with GREAT benefits) when there is some "pressure" to look another way. On the other hand, they feel quite free to bitch in an (anonymous?) survey, no, it is almost impossible to fire them!
I guess the term "scientist" lost it luster when it stopped being applied to indepedently wealthy gentlemen with curiosity about how the World works (or ones so smart that wealthy private persons just feel like funding their work) and started being applied to everyone with some education and certain level in the society. I wish we would go back to 18th century in the way we do science. Otherwise it is all fake, serving this or that special groop (whoever pays).
And yes, technically my job title is "Scientist", working for one of the big defence contractors. No, I do not do "science" in the original sense of this word. But looking back at the University life -- it was prostitution as well...;-)
Yes, I myself agree that L hand on the keyboard, R hand on the mouse IS the right way of doing things (coming from electronics CAD background, not graphical arts background), but I was wondering recently: Why do not we provide UI emulation layers???
Remember in 80s/90s you could not get a decent DOS text editor which would not have switchable "Wordstar mode" or "Norton mode", and so on, making customers who come from your competitor make right at home. Yes, Emacs CAN emulate VI (see M-x viper-mode)!
It looks like now commercial SW vendors stopped that practice (I'm moving our CAD group from Mentor to Cadence and I'd REALLY like for Cadence to provide Mentor-like keybindings), but why can not GIMP can not give people a way to load "Photoshop Emulation" is beyond my understanding...
That's a rather bad analogy unless you're implying that Microsoft are somehow responsible for writing and distributing viruses.
Of course they are!;-) Long gone are the days of a lone virus writer coding in assembler for bare hardware, occasionally assisted by INT 13. Now, having access to gigabytes of supporting DLLs and applications provided by Microsoft (s)he can achive so much more!
Or do you think modern virus/worm/spyware writers re-implement TCP/IP stack (hmm, bad example, would put some blaim on U. of Berkeley;-) ), then SMTP on top of that JUST to sent a spam message or two??? Or do they re-implement the whole word processor complete with built-in BASIC?;-)
Of course everything you see on the screen is eventually rasterized before being displayed - but that's a requirement for any display thats out puting to a CRT, LCD, etc.
I guess you were not around when top-of-the-line CG was represented as "display lists", basically list of vectors for DAC to convert to voltages steering CRT e-beam across the screen. THAT was true vector graphics! Of course it was so much better suited for engineering blueprints rather than porn collections, so it was quickly replaced by modern bitmapped displays. I think that bitmapped displays became pupular only in late 70s-early 80s, while "vector" dispplays have been around since 60s...
In most cases you will end up reading up information on the reactor, maybe if your lucky you can actually design one and work on it.
Extremely bad example!;-)
Yes, you can read, but almost by definition (of a nuclear reactor), I can imagine, the "secret sauce" recipe is NOT published in the open literature (maybe for better). So, if you REALLY want to learn about building 'em, you'd have to participate in a team who is actually building one, and, by keeping your eyes sufficintly open, can learn much more that from the "open" books. Or at least be able to learn the details faster...
The term "communication" shall mean any transmittal of information, whether oral or written, including correspondence, electronic mail and other internet transmissions, web pages, Internet Relay Chat logs, instant messages [...]
I can just imagine Intel's Craig Barrett and our beloved Darl frigging chatting on IRC (!) how to shut the whole Leenux thngy down...;-)
Or is it IBM just playing cute for the Groklaw //. crowd?
So far the consensus here was that it is Microsoft behind the whole SCO debacle -- but what if IBM knows better (and I guess I'd bet my $10 on THEM knowing better;-) ).
Is it a purely defensive move? Or is the the "beginning of the end" of the PC industry as we knew it?
Linux + PPC (+ IBM) might beat BSD + PPC (+ Apple) -- espcially since IBM makes the PPC part! -- and definitely beats Windows + i86, but why the hell NOW??? What do they know that I do not?
Maybe I should actually go RTFA, but I doubt it will clear things for me.
It came with Mathematica bundled! Now a single license for that costs way more that a top-of-the-line PC. And a single UNIX license for that costs more than almost the best Mac available!;-)
And, as far as I remeber, Next pioneered CD-roms, or was it CD-Recordables? I remember the cool story that you were supposed to carry your whole system (set up especially for you) on a single disk and boot from that. Knoppix, anyone?;-)
I wish I'd have Next Cube somewhere in the corner, maybe I'll buy one on e-bay, just for the coolnest of it...;-)
Q. How do you make sure you're solving the right problem?
A. If GM builds a the wrong car for the wrong market are you going to blame it on anyone but GM leadership? If not, then why are you going to give them a pass on implimenting a network infrastructure that fails so meet their needs?
Excellent point! Somehow when things fail in a private company, it is always the fault of the "suits", while when things fail in the Gov't -- well, it was just too tough, and not enough funded (please increase my tax rate!;-) ), and this and that.
Comparing the waste of the modern Big Gov't to the reasonably (if only sometime inefficiently) run corporation can be eye-opening, but most of the people here would prefer to close their eyes shut for whatever political reasons.
at which time company Chairman Bill Gates called the update "a significant step in delivering on our goal to help customers make their PCs better isolated and more resilient in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks."
The increasingly sophisticated attacks just threw me over the edge! It sounds so much like a Big Brother representative would sound when informing the world of a successful (real) attack, and even in the last time it happened (9/11;-( ) it was referred too as "unpredicted", not actually "sophisticated"!
Do not you think it is appropriate for Bill a) not to use anti-terrorism language and b) remember that buffer-overflow attacks were in the books, when, like 1969? (AFAIR, Morrisson's warm used that).
I've been thinking about the shortcomings of HTML (and everything else that followed it!) from the position of a computer scientist for YEARS... Those standards ARE shitty, big time.
Conmtrast this to IEEE standards -- they get developed when a bunch of companies are ready to invest several mega$$ for a chip spin -- and they just want to choose the best course, arguing with each other about technical merit of this or that approach. And in the whole HT|X/ML world there can be (almost) no competition on technical merits, just a bunch of guys arguing if it should be or BAR.
I wish I'd have the time on my hands and their budgets to actually try something revolutionary. Leke the original WWW, which was NOT designed by a committee...
(And yes, I did check my Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest algorithm book AFTER the fact!), but I was going more for Funny than Insightful in my post, you know...;-)
Hmm, putting my tin-foil hat on, maybe the Mentor guys DID solve it, but it invited too much heat from one or two of TLAs...;-)
Paul B.
P.S. Good luck in your search though!
Re:Ironically, that story isn't true
on
New Standard Keyboard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
There are many studies comparing wpm speeds of people proficient in both Qwerty and Dvorak that show the clear advantage of the latter.
Sorry, did not have time to read through all three linked articles, but did read the Reason one (due to the fact that I do trust the sourse) and one of its main punches was the UN-SCIENTIFIC ways those studies were conducted. And, unfortunately, in your comment you do show the same attitude of referencing "numerous studies" without considering what could go wrong with them.
Think about it in programmer's terms: ok, there is this language called, say, "BigBigSea" which noone spends proper time to learn, but most everyone knows a bit and can handle (some can get really good at it). And then there is this new language called "Tea", and you did learn it, one of the early adopters... Would not you swear that since you've learned it your productivity increased 10-fold? Even when people would try to put a bit of a study together, you would sub-consciously give your old skill a disadvantage to provide advantage to your new skill, which can move you up in the food chain?
With bad stomach from all the Mt. Dew and junk food, diabetes from too much sweets and increased weight from, you know, sitting at our computers all day -- BUT WE STILL VALUE OUR BRAIN!;-)
Reminder -- you are not on the "Health Channel" (or whatever)...
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but they also had to know the EXACT moment of "Saturn entering Venus" (obviously, to advice the King to do the same to the Queen ;-) ), so they DID know their math and their charts...
;-)
Paul B.
P.S. Why am I actually answering an AC, anyway?...
... instead of replying to me (whom you obviously will find in perfect agreement with you! I mentioned my political inclinations quite obviously... ;-) ) try engaging one of those leftist/statist kids/pops -- maybe we even have a chance to put an idea or two in their heads. ;-)
But yes, I do appreciate you making this point -- just a pity that noone will probably see it except for someone who agrees with it anyway.
Paul B.
... unless you also put the total number of cows in both US and canada into you equation.
Say, there are no cows in Canada and they;ve just imported 800, learned that their precious purchase is at danger of that mad cow desease and screened all of them, finding 3 mad. Depending on the accuracy of their test, they might've missed another 3 or 4 or 400...
Say, there is a million cows in the US and 1600 were added. Learning of the desease, they tested all of them and found just one mad.
Who did better? Again, no one knows...
Paaul B.
.. just not with your subject line (unless you forgot to put quotes around "capitalism" to mean "statist economy"). ;-) Obviously you are coming from the Left, and I am coming from the Top (libertarian, you know...) but yes, Science is becoming another consumable, to be bought and sold like oil and food. -- see my previous comments in this thread.
the only way to give it some dignity back is to detach it from the government oversight (whoever runs the govt. at the moment), and the only way to achieve THAT is to have enough of independent private wealth in society to fund interesting scientific projects. And no, I do not mean "it is cheaper for me to give $1M grant to this professor who will prove that I do not harm anything than $5M fine to the EPA who thinks that I am harming everything around my plant".
Anyther perspective for you -- I grew up in Soviet Union (decidedly non-capitalist country) and the environment there was, to put it mildly, REALLY bad. Free society (which some of us equate with capitalism, obviously in the different sense of the word that you used in your subj) seems to be doing much better.
Paul B.
If kepler modified his measurements to fit into the then current view of things, astronomy would have been set back 100 years.
;-) ).
Do not you think that there were plenty of astroLOGISTS at the time who might have noticed that things do not exactly add up up there, but just were not interested in following THAT route? Kepler might as well decide to be one of them (and forever forgotten), in which case another bright guy with access to the same technology (best at that time) would publish the same observations.
The problem is that now almost all science is funded from "public funds", so there is really no incentive to go against what the public believes (and public ius represented by the bureocrats in Washington, you know...
Paul B.
Hey, those guys and girl are public sector employees (Dept. of Fish and Game, I think it was called, though now it is apparently Fish and Wildlife Service). Think of the last time you visited your loval DMV office -- maybe most of them have THAT particular type of personalty, you know what I am talking about. In any case, not too many are going to bite the hand which gives them nice govt. job (with GREAT benefits) when there is some "pressure" to look another way. On the other hand, they feel quite free to bitch in an (anonymous?) survey, no, it is almost impossible to fire them!
;-)
I guess the term "scientist" lost it luster when it stopped being applied to indepedently wealthy gentlemen with curiosity about how the World works (or ones so smart that wealthy private persons just feel like funding their work) and started being applied to everyone with some education and certain level in the society. I wish we would go back to 18th century in the way we do science. Otherwise it is all fake, serving this or that special groop (whoever pays).
And yes, technically my job title is "Scientist", working for one of the big defence contractors. No, I do not do "science" in the original sense of this word. But looking back at the University life -- it was prostitution as well...
Paul B.
Yes, I myself agree that L hand on the keyboard, R hand on the mouse IS the right way of doing things (coming from electronics CAD background, not graphical arts background), but I was wondering recently: Why do not we provide UI emulation layers???
Remember in 80s/90s you could not get a decent DOS text editor which would not have switchable "Wordstar mode" or "Norton mode", and so on, making customers who come from your competitor make right at home. Yes, Emacs CAN emulate VI (see M-x viper-mode)!
It looks like now commercial SW vendors stopped that practice (I'm moving our CAD group from Mentor to Cadence and I'd REALLY like for Cadence to provide Mentor-like keybindings), but why can not GIMP can not give people a way to load "Photoshop Emulation" is beyond my understanding...
Paul B.
That's a rather bad analogy unless you're implying that Microsoft are somehow responsible for writing and distributing viruses.
;-) Long gone are the days of a lone virus writer coding in assembler for bare hardware, occasionally assisted by INT 13. Now, having access to gigabytes of supporting DLLs and applications provided by Microsoft (s)he can achive so much more!
;-) ), then SMTP on top of that JUST to sent a spam message or two??? Or do they re-implement the whole word processor complete with built-in BASIC? ;-)
Of course they are!
Or do you think modern virus/worm/spyware writers re-implement TCP/IP stack (hmm, bad example, would put some blaim on U. of Berkeley
Paul B.
And do not forget that HP started when Hewlett and Packard built an electronic sound generator for Disney in '39
Paul B.
Of course everything you see on the screen is eventually rasterized before being displayed - but that's a requirement for any display thats out puting to a CRT, LCD, etc.
I guess you were not around when top-of-the-line CG was represented as "display lists", basically list of vectors for DAC to convert to voltages steering CRT e-beam across the screen. THAT was true vector graphics! Of course it was so much better suited for engineering blueprints rather than porn collections, so it was quickly replaced by modern bitmapped displays. I think that bitmapped displays became pupular only in late 70s-early 80s, while "vector" dispplays have been around since 60s...
Paul B.
Knuth isn't God.
Correct, so far...
His books aren't the Bible.
Wrong!
Actually I think that I heard that his motivation for MetaFont (not TeX) was proper typesetting of the Bible, the link above might put you on a trail.
Paul B.
In most cases you will end up reading up information on the reactor, maybe if your lucky you can actually design one and work on it.
;-)
;-)
Extremely bad example!
Yes, you can read, but almost by definition (of a nuclear reactor), I can imagine, the "secret sauce" recipe is NOT published in the open literature (maybe for better). So, if you REALLY want to learn about building 'em, you'd have to participate in a team who is actually building one, and, by keeping your eyes sufficintly open, can learn much more that from the "open" books. Or at least be able to learn the details faster...
This does not invalidate your point though!
Paul B.
The term "communication" shall mean any transmittal of information, whether oral or written, including correspondence, electronic mail and other internet transmissions, web pages, Internet Relay Chat logs, instant messages [...]
;-)
/. crowd?
I can just imagine Intel's Craig Barrett and our beloved Darl frigging chatting on IRC (!) how to shut the whole Leenux thngy down...
Or is it IBM just playing cute for the Groklaw /
Paul B.
So far the consensus here was that it is Microsoft behind the whole SCO debacle -- but what if IBM knows better (and I guess I'd bet my $10 on THEM knowing better ;-) ).
Is it a purely defensive move? Or is the the "beginning of the end" of the PC industry as we knew it?
Linux + PPC (+ IBM) might beat BSD + PPC (+ Apple) -- espcially since IBM makes the PPC part! -- and definitely beats Windows + i86, but why the hell NOW??? What do they know that I do not?
Maybe I should actually go RTFA, but I doubt it will clear things for me.
Paul B.
It came with Mathematica bundled! Now a single license for that costs way more that a top-of-the-line PC. And a single UNIX license for that costs more than almost the best Mac available! ;-)
;-)
;-)
And, as far as I remeber, Next pioneered CD-roms, or was it CD-Recordables? I remember the cool story that you were supposed to carry your whole system (set up especially for you) on a single disk and boot from that. Knoppix, anyone?
I wish I'd have Next Cube somewhere in the corner, maybe I'll buy one on e-bay, just for the coolnest of it...
Paul B
The same atoms which make up my existance also make up the existance of a rock. How come We aren't all rocks?
Bad luck, man, REALLY bad luck...
Paul
Q. How do you make sure you're solving the right problem?
;-) ), and this and that.
A. If GM builds a the wrong car for the wrong market are you going to blame it on anyone but GM leadership? If not, then why are you going to give them a pass on implimenting a network infrastructure that fails so meet their needs?
Excellent point! Somehow when things fail in a private company, it is always the fault of the "suits", while when things fail in the Gov't -- well, it was just too tough, and not enough funded (please increase my tax rate!
Comparing the waste of the modern Big Gov't to the reasonably (if only sometime inefficiently) run corporation can be eye-opening, but most of the people here would prefer to close their eyes shut for whatever political reasons.
Paul B.
at which time company Chairman Bill Gates called the update "a significant step in delivering on our goal to help customers make their PCs better isolated and more resilient in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks."
;-( ) it was referred too as "unpredicted", not actually "sophisticated"!
The increasingly sophisticated attacks just threw me over the edge! It sounds so much like a Big Brother representative would sound when informing the world of a successful (real) attack, and even in the last time it happened (9/11
Do not you think it is appropriate for Bill a) not to use anti-terrorism language and b) remember that buffer-overflow attacks were in the books, when, like 1969? (AFAIR, Morrisson's warm used that).
Paul B.
Of course, the filter filtered mine < and > and totally screwed up the meaning of "if it should be or BAR" ;-)
Paul B.
I've been thinking about the shortcomings of HTML (and everything else that followed it!) from the position of a computer scientist for YEARS... Those standards ARE shitty, big time.
.
Conmtrast this to IEEE standards -- they get developed when a bunch of companies are ready to invest several mega$$ for a chip spin -- and they just want to choose the best course, arguing with each other about technical merit of this or that approach. And in the whole HT|X/ML world there can be (almost) no competition on technical merits, just a bunch of guys arguing if it should be or BAR
I wish I'd have the time on my hands and their budgets to actually try something revolutionary. Leke the original WWW, which was NOT designed by a committee...
Paul B.
(And yes, I did check my Cormen/Leiserson/Rivest algorithm book AFTER the fact!), but I was going more for Funny than Insightful in my post, you know... ;-)
Paul B.
Hmm, putting my tin-foil hat on, maybe the Mentor guys DID solve it, but it invited too much heat from one or two of TLAs... ;-)
Paul B.
P.S. Good luck in your search though!
There are many studies comparing wpm speeds of people proficient in both Qwerty and Dvorak that show the clear advantage of the latter.
Sorry, did not have time to read through all three linked articles, but did read the Reason one (due to the fact that I do trust the sourse) and one of its main punches was the UN-SCIENTIFIC ways those studies were conducted. And, unfortunately, in your comment you do show the same attitude of referencing "numerous studies" without considering what could go wrong with them.
Think about it in programmer's terms: ok, there is
this language called, say, "BigBigSea" which noone spends proper time to learn, but most everyone knows a bit and can handle (some can get really good at it). And then there is this new language called "Tea", and you did learn it, one of the early adopters... Would not you swear that since you've learned it your productivity increased 10-fold? Even when people would try to put a bit of a study together, you would sub-consciously give your old skill a disadvantage to provide advantage to your new skill, which can move you up in the food chain?
Paul B.
Who reads (on ./!) "Sun releases..." and thinks about new, hopefully open-sourced, version of Solaris, not radiation? ;-)
Paul B.
With bad stomach from all the Mt. Dew and junk food, diabetes from too much sweets and increased weight from, you know, sitting at our computers all day -- BUT WE STILL VALUE OUR BRAIN! ;-)
Reminder -- you are not on the "Health Channel" (or whatever)...
Paul B.