There's a famous quote by Box: "All models are wrong; some models are useful". That's what science is all about -- making models, which are useful until a better model comes along. So by definition, 100% of *all* scientific papers are wrong. But some are wrong in useful ways that inspire new generations of scientists to improve upon them.
Orlowski seems to be thinking of the worth of reusing existing works solely from the perspective of music, and he seems to be asserting that it is old news and only computer nerds don't know about it. Frankly, I couldn't care less about "remixed songs", which I agree is not much more than a dated gimmick; I think it is far more important to allow free access to significant literary works. For example, it might be interesting to write a book set in Middle Earth but presenting it from the Orcs' perspective, much like Gregory Maguire's retelling of the Wizard of Oz from the witch's perspective. In a sane world, there would be no problem with that, but in reality the Tolkien Estate ("protecting the rights" of a man dead 30 years ago) probably would either halt publication or demand a hefty fee.
It is rather frightening that so many people on this forum seem to know very little about measles. Measles 1) can be vaccinated against and many health care systems in the developed world vaccinate all children and 2) is a serious disease. People (particularly children) can die from it. It's not a joke like Chicken Pox (which some readers here seem to think is same disease). The fact that somebody would go somewhere where measles is endemic and not be vaccinated displays a breathtaking lack of responsibility -- and not merely for their own health.
Look it up. Honestly, *none* of the founding fathers were Christians. At best they were "deists", which is really a polite way to say "atheists", because deists believe that while a god exists, it does nothing and everything works by natural law just as if no god existed.
Re:What is this article about ?
on
Sixty Years of Memex
·
· Score: 4, Informative
It's the classic article on the proto-web from the 1940's. Vannevar Bush, the guy who later was responsible for setting up the National Science Foundation (which funds most non-medical, non-defense related scientific research in the US), describes a future in which scholarly research involving many interlinking documents can be done from the desktop. Although he was thinking of an electro-mechanical rather than a digital system. the Web is pretty much what he was predicting.
And there is no reason why a 19th century translation, commentary, or piece of literature should not still be the definitive version
I like Project Gutenberg too, but there is real reason why new translations get made (besides profit) -- 19th century translations into English tend to resemble 19th century English literature -- they just don't seem fresh and use lots of words that have since fallen out of use. Plus, there was the fact that the Victorians were prudes while the Greeks and Romans weren't, so 19th century translations of classical works tend to omit any parts that are a bit racy.
The point isn't that you can get a jpg out of your camera -- I haven't seen a digital camera that can't -- the problem is that the original, uncompressed data generally isn't in an open format.
Before it became an absolute necessity to have a car... Since when is it a necessity to own a car? I'm 34 years old, have a doctorate and am gainfully employed and never owned a car or even had a drivers license. I just choose to live and work in reasonably civilized places like Montreal, NYC, and Washington, DC which have reasonable subway systems. Those who chose to live in god-awful suburbia get what they deserve.
It'll have to be. It's integral to the Evey-in-prison plot.
Oh, I'm sure they'll have to include the idea of the camps, but I wouldn't be surprised if they made Valerie a political dissident or something like that instead.
Snow Crash was written in 1992, past the time when virtual reality environments were already a reality in universities. Now, don't me wrong, I liked "Snow Crash" -- it was a pretty funny semi-parody of 1980's cyberpunk -- but pretty much every idea in it was already mentioned in such books like Gibson's "Neuromancer" (1984) and Sterling's "Islands in the Net" (1988).
I think not -- at least as far as Trek shows. Not that there's anything wrong with secular humanism -- it's more or less my viewpoint -- but consider the Trek evidence (no, I don't know episode names or exact wording -- I'm not *that* much of a Trek fan):
1) The episode where Kirk meets an alien who was the god Apollo in Greek times -- Apollo wants people to worship him but Kirk says "Humanity doesn't need gods -- we find the one sufficient" -- implying that some sort of monotheism is still there in the Trek universe
2) The "20th century Roman Empire" episode the rebels fighting the empire are thought to be "sun worshippers" and the Enterprise crew is surprised to find how noble they are (pagans are evil, ya know) but then Uhurua figures out that they are "son worshippers" -- that is christians, and it all supposedly makes sense.
They still wouldn't have opposable thumbs, so they couldn't use firearms. And their native attacks like kicking and biting are pretty pathetic. They'd be no threat at all.
believe it or not, but there are some people who did not grow up reading books.
As there has always been.
there are a generation or two, or three, of people who do not read books.
No. If anything, books seem to be on a rebound. Twenty years ago outside of big cities the only bookstore one would likely find would be a Waldenbooks mostly selling Garfield comics. Now you can hardly throw a stone and not hit a Borders or a Barnes and Noble. And they really sell some stuff for literati -- stuff like the Loeb and I Tatti Libraries can actually be found in the sticks these days. And of course there's the bookseller Amazon.com. practically the only dot-com that didn't go belly up...
Indeed. As a child I was diagnosed as border-line autistic and now I have a doctorate and lead a reasonably normal life. It's just that people like myself just aren't as "interesting" to the general public or neuroscientists as the "Rainman" types. It isn't that we are less common.
What is it with you Americans and this dogged obsession with "companies only exist to make money"? [..]
Money is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Companies exist to make cars, build furniture, produce electricity, sell food, provide services, and literally 1000s of other purposes. Making money is part of that process, but it is not the actual objective.
When companies are privately owned and are run by some visionary like Henry Ford who wanted to mass produce cars, or Wozniak and Jobs who wanted to mass produce computers, yes, companies are about making products. But publicly owned companies really do have only one purpose: to maximize the return to the stockholders.
Seriously, if the shareholders of Apple decided that the best thing for Apple would be to stop making computers and become an investment bank, that's what would happen. More than a few product making companies have gone that route.
Anonymous opinions are worthless. Anonymous facts are not
Yeah, but think about the typical blog. They aren't giving out information about secret government conspiracies that involve selling Nebraska to the Albanians, but rather that a certain company sucks to work at and has bad management. Unless the reader *knows* which company is being referred to (and then knows to avoid working there), the blog is pretty useless. If I just want funny stories about poorly run companies, I can read "Dilbert" instead.
When I started grad school (in biology, but I did computational work on evolution and gene finding) in 1992 we called it "computational biology" I never heard the term "bioinformatics" until the CS people discovered the field after the dot-com bust.
I used to play with the system, but gave up due to lack of drivers, software etc. The advantages over Windows and MacOS was that BeOS just seemed so much more responsive. But in part that was because the underlying systems were simpler. While I never got around to writing non-trivial programs on the system, I suspect that simplicity meant that the programmer had fewer toys at the API level to play with than with other systems. Whether that would have impeded iTunes is an open question.
The business model of Be was never to be an independent OS. All the main Be people were ex-Apple, and the the idea was to be purchased out by Apple. Be wasn't originally an Intel-based OS -- it was originally a PowerPC OS. Of course, this was before Jobs was brought back. After that happened, Be tried to reinvent itself as an alternative OS for Intel, and failed.
Having programmed in perl, php, python, C, C++ and VB, I find I am just as productive and write code just as fast in pike as I did in perl and python. Do you really think "int i = 0" instead of "i = 0" is what makes C and C++ take longer to code in? No, its the lack of advanced data types, the manual memory allocation/deallocation, and the compile/debug cycle.
Not really. Modern statically typed compiled languages like Java and C# basically solve all those problems, and yet still aren't very convenient for the tasks people (at least me) use scripting languages for. From the descriptions of the language it seems Pike is trying to be a Java/C# competitor rather than a "scripting" language.
I hadn't heard of pike, so I checked it out. It seems to miss the point of scripting languages entirely -- you have to declare the datatypes of variables just like inconvenient compiled languages like Java or C++. The whole point of scripting is to get away from low-level tedium like that. Sure that might make it fast, but if you are going to deal with that stuff, why not just use a compiled language? IMHO, if speed is an issue (and I find it rarely is), use SWIG to write the speed critical parts in a compiled language and write the rest in a scripting language.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a famous quote by Box: "All models are wrong; some models are useful". That's what science is all about -- making models, which are useful until a better model comes along. So by definition, 100% of *all* scientific papers are wrong. But some are wrong in useful ways that inspire new generations of scientists to improve upon them.
Orlowski seems to be thinking of the worth of reusing existing works solely from the perspective of music, and he seems to be asserting that it is old news and only computer nerds don't know about it. Frankly, I couldn't care less about "remixed songs", which I agree is not much more than a dated gimmick; I think it is far more important to allow free access to significant literary works. For example, it might be interesting to write a book set in Middle Earth but presenting it from the Orcs' perspective, much like Gregory Maguire's retelling of the Wizard of Oz from the witch's perspective. In a sane world, there would be no problem with that, but in reality the Tolkien Estate ("protecting the rights" of a man dead 30 years ago) probably would either halt publication or demand a hefty fee.
Anyone care to tell which one is true then?
It is rather frightening that so many people on this forum seem to know very little about measles. Measles 1) can be vaccinated against and many health care systems in the developed world vaccinate all children and 2) is a serious disease. People (particularly children) can die from it. It's not a joke like Chicken Pox (which some readers here seem to think is same disease). The fact that somebody would go somewhere where measles is endemic and not be vaccinated displays a breathtaking lack of responsibility -- and not merely for their own health.
Look it up. Honestly, *none* of the founding fathers were Christians. At best they were "deists", which is really a polite way to say "atheists", because deists believe that while a god exists, it does nothing and everything works by natural law just as if no god existed.
It's the classic article on the proto-web from the 1940's. Vannevar Bush, the guy who later was responsible for setting up the National Science Foundation (which funds most non-medical, non-defense related scientific research in the US), describes a future in which scholarly research involving many interlinking documents can be done from the desktop. Although he was thinking of an electro-mechanical rather than a digital system. the Web is pretty much what he was predicting.
"I've really only scratched the surface of the Knoppix 4.0 DVD"
Ouch -- it hasn't been released yet and he's already ruined his copy? Hopefully he didn't delete the image file or he'll have to download it again.
And there is no reason why a 19th century translation, commentary, or piece of literature should not still be the definitive version
I like Project Gutenberg too, but there is real reason why new translations get made (besides profit) -- 19th century translations into English tend to resemble 19th century English literature -- they just don't seem fresh and use lots of words that have since fallen out of use. Plus, there was the fact that the Victorians were prudes while the Greeks and Romans weren't, so 19th century translations of classical works tend to omit any parts that are a bit racy.
The point isn't that you can get a jpg out of your camera -- I haven't seen a digital camera that can't -- the problem is that the original, uncompressed data generally isn't in an open format.
Before it became an absolute necessity to have a car...
Since when is it a necessity to own a car? I'm 34 years old, have a doctorate and am gainfully employed and never owned a car or even had a drivers license. I just choose to live and work in reasonably civilized places like Montreal, NYC, and Washington, DC which have reasonable subway systems. Those who chose to live in god-awful suburbia get what they deserve.
It'll have to be. It's integral to the Evey-in-prison plot.
Oh, I'm sure they'll have to include the idea of the camps, but I wouldn't be surprised if they made Valerie a political dissident or something like that instead.
Snow Crash was written in 1992, past the time when virtual reality environments were already a reality in universities. Now, don't me wrong, I liked "Snow Crash" -- it was a pretty funny semi-parody of 1980's cyberpunk -- but pretty much every idea in it was already mentioned in such books like Gibson's "Neuromancer" (1984) and Sterling's "Islands in the Net" (1988).
Wow, that wasn't inflammatory.
Yeah! Hunters don't kill the *innocent* animals -- they look for the shifty-eyed ones that are probably the criminal element of their species!
I think not -- at least as far as Trek shows. Not that there's anything wrong with secular humanism -- it's more or less my viewpoint -- but consider the Trek evidence (no, I don't know episode names or exact wording -- I'm not *that* much of a Trek fan):
1) The episode where Kirk meets an alien who was the god Apollo in Greek times -- Apollo wants people to worship him but Kirk says "Humanity doesn't need gods -- we find the one sufficient" -- implying that some sort of monotheism is still there in the Trek universe
2) The "20th century Roman Empire" episode the rebels fighting the empire are thought to be "sun worshippers" and the Enterprise crew is surprised to find how noble they are (pagans are evil, ya know) but then Uhurua figures out that they are "son worshippers" -- that is christians, and it all supposedly makes sense.
They still wouldn't have opposable thumbs, so they couldn't use firearms. And their native attacks like kicking and biting are pretty pathetic. They'd be no threat at all.
"Are we sheep or are we men? Oh, wait, we *are* sheep, but we have human brains. Hey, look a farmer! Let's get him!"
believe it or not, but there are some people who did not grow up reading books.
As there has always been.
there are a generation or two, or three, of people who do not read books.
No. If anything, books seem to be on a rebound. Twenty years ago outside of big cities the only bookstore one would likely find would be a Waldenbooks mostly selling Garfield comics. Now you can hardly throw a stone and not hit a Borders or a Barnes and Noble. And they really sell some stuff for literati -- stuff like the Loeb and I Tatti Libraries can actually be found in the sticks these days. And of course there's the bookseller Amazon.com. practically the only dot-com that didn't go belly up...
No, you're a video game character
Indeed. As a child I was diagnosed as border-line autistic and now I have a doctorate and lead a reasonably normal life. It's just that people like myself just aren't as "interesting" to the general public or neuroscientists as the "Rainman" types. It isn't that we are less common.
What is it with you Americans and this dogged obsession with "companies only exist to make money"? [..]
Money is a means to an end, not the end in and of itself. Companies exist to make cars, build furniture, produce electricity, sell food, provide services, and literally 1000s of other purposes. Making money is part of that process, but it is not the actual objective.
When companies are privately owned and are run by some visionary like Henry Ford who wanted to mass produce cars, or Wozniak and Jobs who wanted to mass produce computers, yes, companies are about making products. But publicly owned companies really do have only one purpose: to maximize the return to the stockholders.
Seriously, if the shareholders of Apple decided that the best thing for Apple would be to stop making computers and become an investment bank, that's what would happen. More than a few product making companies have gone that route.
Anonymous opinions are worthless. Anonymous facts are not
Yeah, but think about the typical blog. They aren't giving out information about secret government conspiracies that involve selling Nebraska to the Albanians, but rather that a certain company sucks to work at and has bad management. Unless the reader *knows* which company is being referred to (and then knows to avoid working there), the blog is pretty useless. If I just want funny stories about poorly run companies, I can read "Dilbert" instead.
When I started grad school (in biology, but I did computational work on evolution and gene finding) in 1992 we called it "computational biology" I never heard the term "bioinformatics" until the CS people discovered the field after the dot-com bust.
I used to play with the system, but gave up due to lack of drivers, software etc. The advantages over Windows and MacOS was that BeOS just seemed so much more responsive. But in part that was because the underlying systems were simpler. While I never got around to writing non-trivial programs on the system, I suspect that simplicity meant that the programmer had fewer toys at the API level to play with than with other systems. Whether that would have impeded iTunes is an open question.
The business model of Be was never to be an independent OS. All the main Be people were ex-Apple, and the the idea was to be purchased out by Apple. Be wasn't originally an Intel-based OS -- it was originally a PowerPC OS. Of course, this was before Jobs was brought back. After that happened, Be tried to reinvent itself as an alternative OS for Intel, and failed.
Having programmed in perl, php, python, C, C++ and VB, I find I am just as productive and write code just as fast in pike as I did in perl and python. Do you really think "int i = 0" instead of "i = 0" is what makes C and C++ take longer to code in? No, its the lack of advanced data types, the manual memory allocation/deallocation, and the compile/debug cycle.
Not really. Modern statically typed compiled languages like Java and C# basically solve all those problems, and yet still aren't very convenient for the tasks people (at least me) use scripting languages for. From the descriptions of the language it seems Pike is trying to be a Java/C# competitor rather than a "scripting" language.
I hadn't heard of pike, so I checked it out. It seems to miss the point of scripting languages entirely -- you have to declare the datatypes of variables just like inconvenient compiled languages like Java or C++. The whole point of scripting is to get away from low-level tedium like that. Sure that might make it fast, but if you are going to deal with that stuff, why not just use a compiled language? IMHO, if speed is an issue (and I find it rarely is), use SWIG to write the speed critical parts in a compiled language and write the rest in a scripting language.