The fact that a university is behind this patent lawsuit is the most disturbing part to me. I probably have no real basis for this opinion, since I only spent three semesters at the school (I transferred to another school), but I had the overwhelming feeling that Northeastern U's primary concern was: bring in the money. That's why I transferred to UMass Amherst. In my experience, Northeastern was overpriced, and filled with students and teachers who just couldn't give a damn about academics. UM Amherst's admission standards were certainly lower than NEU's, but I found that the students who wanted to be there were really motivated, and that the teaching, in general, was outstanding.
That's not to say that NEU didn't/doesn't have some strong departments, nor do I mean to disparage anyone who is presently working their ass off there. I just didn't see it. This article strengthens my opinion of NEU as essentially "for profit" and not "for education".
This is one of my favorite switches. Of course, we bought it, and then realized that we don't have much use for it. But it's a neat idea! Someday we'll hook it up to something.
Yes, I remember that. The worst part is that some researchers had already set up a load-balancer for people to use, to ease the load on the stratum 1 machines: pool.ntp.org. If the people writing the D-Link software had spent a few minutes thinking about the impact of what they were doing, using this address would have been obvious. My personal opinion is that D-Link should have set up their own timeserver, and shared that out, since they should have had a reasonable expectation that any address they put in there would be hammered.
I've always wondered if these factors are the same that make learning a new language difficult for an adult. People always talk about how children's brains are more receptive to new language-- and perhaps they are-- but it seems to me that one cannot discount the factors you mention. I don't know what adult groups researchers studied when they came to that conclusion. Working adults in a stable environment? Immigrant workers? Children are unique in that they are free from many pressures that adults are not. Of course, I can also see the argument that children's brains have fewer established brain structures to begin with, so that learning a new language is simply the same as learning anything else.
Wow. That's sick. I, too, was raised with the "waste not, want not" ethic, although, I have to admit, I am not as frugal as my father. And my grandfather, who had just struck out on his own during the time of the Depression, saved literally everything, and after he died, we spent a year throwing away completely useless things (old foam cushions from the 1960's that had turned rock hard? weird) that had been piled up to the point that it was an extreme fire hazard. So I guess this can cut the other way as well.
Anyhow, I've found, when in your situation, that a nice coat of paint (or wax) can do wonders for people's perception. But the phenomena that you talk about is one of the things that made me finally give in and accept that most people really are primarily motivated by emotion. My girlfriend's sister drove her car, unmaintained, until the engine seized. Change the oil? No thanks, too icky. The car was only four years old. That kind of throwaway culture just sickens me.
I have to disagree with many of your comments. While I think that general purpose computers will decline in popularity, and I also think this is a good thing, I highly doubt that they will be "killed off". LOTS of people need general-purpose computers for data-processing, and that need will not be filled by shiny single-purpose gizmos.
What first-party proprietary product has stability problems? Well, for starters, Windows itself does. To be quite honest, once you've worked closely with and studied another operating system that has any thought put into its design, you will realize what a total POS Windows and its toolchain is. It is not built with you in mind. It is built for the purpose of maintaining Microsoft's hegemony.
You obviously do not have any exposure to high-availability systems. Windows is amazingly difficult to run in this kind of environment-- that's why virtualization is becoming so popular. It's working around the software's shortcomings.
As for Open Source being shoddy. I could give you counterexamples all day. MTAs like Postfix are vastly more flexible, reliable, and safe to run than Exchange. Berkeley Packet Filter beats the pants off of Microsoft's "firewall" software, particularly if you want system policies that integrate with DHCP (like, revoking leases from network abusers), VPN, and failover, or do anything not explicitly intended by the GUI designer (pf on OpenBSD has no GUI). Microsoft's system inspection tools are a JOKE-- the ones that they provide are so ambigious that Microsoft even now offers third-party tools on their own website to supplement their own (like ProcessExplorer). The shell is barely functional, which means that you cannot easily chain tools together, and the likelihood that the new Windows shell can run industry-standard sh scripts is probably nil. I work with both of these platforms in server environments, and the difference is night and day. I prefer the Open Source stuff almost any day.
A final note-- your "weak" third-party applications should not be crashing your system. Modern operating systems properly contain their applications. The fact that Windows users are still dealing with issues that were identified in the 1980's shows that most of the world still exists in a sad state of affairs.
UMass Amherst? Funny, that's actually the very library I was talking about when I said that there are lots of good libraries out there. That library in particular is exceptional. I used to live down the street from the Smith library, and have used it many times, although not for research purposes-- but it seemed well-equipped. The OP is just full of shit. Aggregate databases have been around for a long time, and if he had bothered to talk to a librarian, who knows exactly where to look, he probably would have found what he was looking for. I should also mention collaborative networks between libraries, but since you are familiar with the Five College area, you're probably also aware that many libraries share materials. This is hardly a new thing.
With all due respect, I don't think we can trust anything that Adobe says about their own product. I've gotten the feeling lately that they have been pushing more updates out, faster, because they want to milk their dominant position (now that Quark is crumbling fast and Macromedia is gone). What do you think the chances are that the new Photoshop UI comes with a new file format to support it's "innovating new UI"? Likely, I think.
Just yesterday, we attempted to transfer some Dreamweaver (which Adobe now owns) licenses to some other machines. The original users were upgraded to the latest CS3 suite, and no longer needed them. Of course, we had forgotten about the activation scheme that comes with this software, and had since erased the original computers, which meant we needed to call Adobe. We called, and halfway through the re-activation scheme found that this could not be done. Why? Because the new machines were Windows machines. Even though we PAID for licenses for dual-platform media, the customer service rep told us that, upon the first activation, the product was now BOUND to the Macintosh platform. Bullshit! There's a database somewhere at Adobe where they store this information, and all they need to do is flip some bits. The fact that they prevent you from doing this at all means that they thought of this scenario, and are actively blocking it.
There are other examples: after Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, their Captivate product went from under $100 in price to nearly $500. There were three generations of product, all with different file formats, and all with incremental price increases, in under 2 years. Add to that the Adobe CEO's recent comments that Adobe's customers are "not typically price sensitive", and you can see their strategy here: push out changes as fast as possible, because people will buy them.
So, I'm sorry, Adobe, I don't trust anything you say. I have never personally had a problem with Adobe's UI-- and I've found it better than every other image-editing UI out there. That's not to say there's no room for improvement, but in my opinion, if GIMP were to model itself on Photoshop's current UI, that would be a good thing.
Are you f'ing serious? Isn't this exactly the kind of abuse that privacy advocates have been screaming about since the start? What does this kind of shopping preference tell you, seriously? For starters, it does not actually tell you if the person is Middle Eastern! There is simply a greater likelihood that the person is. But do we really care if the person is Middle Eastern? No! We're looking for terrorists! Once again, there's simply another, slightly higher (because, honestly, what proportion of Middle Easterners are terrorists? Very small) probability that the person is a terrorist. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I suspect that eventually, the noise drowns out the signal. The end result is intelligence agents wasting their time. I think it is pretty clear to everyone by now, that, if you want to find the terrorists, you need to follow the money. These people do not operate in a vaccuum. Traditional intelligence (remember when 'intelligence' had something to do with being smart?) is very good at this kind of thing. Note to United States: use your fucking brains.
There are very few publishers out there who solely publish textbooks. Of the ones you mentioned above, IIRC, McGraw and Houghton are the only ones left that are not a part of a larger publisher, in textbooks, most notably Thomson, Pearson, and Macmillan. Holt and Harcourt are a part of Macmillan US and Prentice is a part of Pearson. Those three publishers (Thomson, Pearson, and Macmillan) have extremely diverse catalogs, and many of the big publishers are deep into trade publishing as well as journals, newspapers, and college textbooks. Nature, e.g, is owned by Macmillan UK, and Thomson publishes a HUGE number of scientific journals, both in print and in database form.
One of GHB's earliest and still very common uses is by bodybuilders to elevate human growth hormone levels. Don't remember where I learned this although I do recall an acquaintance of mine in college who recreationally used GHB and ketamine, among other things. Wonder if he's still alive...
What kind of library are you talking about? Your hometown public library? Virtually every college or university with a halfway respectable science program will have access to a huge number of scientific publications, either online or in print (and in many cases, both). Card catalogs? IIRC, my alma mater had them, but it was mostly because they either hadn't finished indexing their collection electronically, or because they hadn't bothered to throw them out yet. Real libraries, and especially real librarians, do NOT suck. They are essential.
I work for a publishing company that shall remain unnamed, but has a rather large stake in scientific publishing. Several years ago, our company president commented, in reference to state legislation that was being pushed to control the cost of college textbooks, that "campaign contributions just don't have the effect they used to anymore" and that the state PIRGs were just a bunch of fearmongers. While it it true that the cost of textbooks has gone up, because our customers are demanding more and more elaborate kinds of books, it is also true that our profit margins have remained the same: very large. His comment simply disgusted me. You can't go from talking about how "sudoku books are pure profit" to bemoaning the fact that people don't want to pay $200 for their intro psych book. Obviously, I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I think this is a bad company to work for (quite the contrary), however this kind of shortsightedness is exactly what is wrong with the world. I expect them to fight this legislation with equal vigor.
I think it's just a matter of time. The pure economics of it will eventually win out, like the Cold War. Microsoft will "stay ahead" as long as they can throw money at their problems, but eventually this will catch up with them. It's very hard to compete with free, especially against an operating system that has more freedom to do things "right" than to do them "glitzy". Linux doesn't need to appeal to fickle buyers or hungry stockholders. Developers can focus on stability. Microsoft's culture of reinventing the wheel, even among their own product lines (why write from scratch when you can rewrite your own stable product?), is also working against them in a big way.
I seem to recall something my father said once about the difficulty of trying to bounce a laser beam off a mirror on the moon (my father built laser-guidance systems), and that was that attenuating a laser beam enough to do that test is extraordinarily difficult. The state of the art may have indeed improved since the 1980's (when he was doing this kind of work), so I'd like to see how they think they have solved that problem.
It's interesting that you should mention Apple's design choices wrt screws, etc, as I was thinking about this recently as well. The original G4/B&W G3 case was a really nice bit of design. In keeping with Apple, there were very few screws, BUT, not only was opening the case easy, it was elegant as well. A latch on the side of the case, and the whole hinged door opened. For the first time, too, you could drop standard PC components into the machine. The processor did not need a cooling fan, it had this really big heatsink. Cables were routed along the inner wall of the case to maximize airflow. And so on. They took their much-heralded design knowledge and applied it to the inside of the machine as well.
Unfortunately, they seem to have done a 180 since then, back to the days of black-box machines. It's a shame. At the same time, I can't really blame them-- that G4 was such a great machine, it's still my main machine today, and I have no intentions of trading it in, either. Too much of a good thing, I guess.
The Earth is only a very big rock with a layer of pond scum on it. True enough. I remember having a conversation with a hippie-acquaintance of mine (this isn't my label; she was a self-proclaimed hippie, since the 1960's) about our impact on the Earth. I am most definitely at the "preservationist" end of the scale of environmentalism, so maybe she thought I also shared her sense of mysticism about the planet. Anyhow, I remember the shock on her face when I said, "Nature will do just fine without us. I'm not worried about nature." Funny. The universe seems ironic enough that as soon as we get our own priorites straight, we'll probably smash into some very large celestial object. Problem solved.
Of course, in the scale of my own life, and with the events that we can reasonably expect to happen from our own actions, I think we should make a big effort to set things right. We don't have to revert the planet to a pre-human state, but we should at least attempt to preserve it for our own well-being, and for the aesthetic beauty and knowledge it offers us.
That's a real shame. After two semesters of CS and mathematics, I picked a copy of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics and I just said, "Wow!". I'd flipped through them before, but now, I understand them-- thanks to the hard work I put in. But honestly-- I love the simplicity of C. That means that you need to do more yourself, but, unlike with C++, you're also not forced into the thinking about the problem the way that the language designer envisioned. Sure, you need to know more about the machine to get some basic functionality, but anyone who seriously means to use a modern language should know these things as well.
That's idiotic. No one can be right all the time, and this is a subject where no one truly does know what they're talking about. If you want the opportunity to expand your mind, you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that your own value system is the obstacle. Spend some time studying metaphysics and you'll see what I mean.
After some thinking about the subject this morning, too, I'm ready to concede my original point and say that mathematics, like other languages, cannot be non-sensical. I suspect that if you remove the geometric component of mathematics, you don't have much left.
Interesting. Apparently I picked the just the right person to start this particular discussion with! I find this stuff to be fascinating. Of course, I am not a professional mathematician (nor am I a professional philosopher), so I'm sure that my knowledge is incomplete.
I wasn't implying that it was undesirable to visualize certain mathematical models, and I'm sure that you understand that-- just that sometimes it may actually be impossible. That's perhaps an unproveable statement. Anyhow, thanks for the pointers. When I have some time to get away from the homework, I will certainly look into your suggested readings, and I will look for that Java applet.
Actually, I think you're not taking the parent's post literally enough. Mathematics *does* model things that "don't make sense". Think about that word, "sense", for a moment-- it has a clear etymological connection to "sensation", the "perception or awareness of stimuli through the senses". I believe that language actually shapes our understanding of the things that we try to describe (this is a typical characteristic of analytic philosophy). Since we perceive the world through our senses, I find it unsurprising that language is filled with otherwise strange constructions like "it makes sense", "that feels right", "I see what you are talking about".
Now the interesting thing about mathematics is that it allows us to describe things which simply don't make sense. Tell me, when you try to visualize hyperbolic geometry, what does it look like? We have no real-world analogue for this, and we can't actually visualize this in anything but a non-trivial way. Do you think that fundamental particles, in all their weirdness, make sense? I would argue that there are actually logically-consistent things that we cannot visualize or otherwise sense. Thus, I don't think that our understanding of the universe should have any dependence on whether or not it "makes sense" to us. As long as we can describe the universe in a logically-consistent way, we can-- algorithmically- use the rules we have worked out to explain how it functions. Whether we can hold these mathematical creations in our minds is unimportant.
Of course, that assumes that logical consistency indeed accurately represents the universe. But that's a whole new can of worms. That's a prison that we are perhaps locked into by our own nature, and it reminds me of the whole "humans have puny brains" meme that sci-fi authors love to throw at us.
And despite its light appearance, the aircraft will be able to carry a 2,000-pound multi-sensor payload, plus a custom fender, flame stickers for an extra speed punch and/or synthetic leather finish. ... and say, a bomb.
Hate to be the downer of the party, but that's the way our leaders think. Gain the "high ground."
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that a university is behind this patent lawsuit is the most disturbing part to me. I probably have no real basis for this opinion, since I only spent three semesters at the school (I transferred to another school), but I had the overwhelming feeling that Northeastern U's primary concern was: bring in the money. That's why I transferred to UMass Amherst. In my experience, Northeastern was overpriced, and filled with students and teachers who just couldn't give a damn about academics. UM Amherst's admission standards were certainly lower than NEU's, but I found that the students who wanted to be there were really motivated, and that the teaching, in general, was outstanding.
That's not to say that NEU didn't/doesn't have some strong departments, nor do I mean to disparage anyone who is presently working their ass off there. I just didn't see it. This article strengthens my opinion of NEU as essentially "for profit" and not "for education".
This is one of my favorite switches. Of course, we bought it, and then realized that we don't have much use for it. But it's a neat idea! Someday we'll hook it up to something.
Yes, I remember that. The worst part is that some researchers had already set up a load-balancer for people to use, to ease the load on the stratum 1 machines: pool.ntp.org. If the people writing the D-Link software had spent a few minutes thinking about the impact of what they were doing, using this address would have been obvious. My personal opinion is that D-Link should have set up their own timeserver, and shared that out, since they should have had a reasonable expectation that any address they put in there would be hammered.
I've always wondered if these factors are the same that make learning a new language difficult for an adult. People always talk about how children's brains are more receptive to new language-- and perhaps they are-- but it seems to me that one cannot discount the factors you mention. I don't know what adult groups researchers studied when they came to that conclusion. Working adults in a stable environment? Immigrant workers? Children are unique in that they are free from many pressures that adults are not. Of course, I can also see the argument that children's brains have fewer established brain structures to begin with, so that learning a new language is simply the same as learning anything else.
Wait. Are you saying that the federal government are a bunch of PIRATES? Time to fight fire with fire.
Wow. That's sick. I, too, was raised with the "waste not, want not" ethic, although, I have to admit, I am not as frugal as my father. And my grandfather, who had just struck out on his own during the time of the Depression, saved literally everything, and after he died, we spent a year throwing away completely useless things (old foam cushions from the 1960's that had turned rock hard? weird) that had been piled up to the point that it was an extreme fire hazard. So I guess this can cut the other way as well.
Anyhow, I've found, when in your situation, that a nice coat of paint (or wax) can do wonders for people's perception. But the phenomena that you talk about is one of the things that made me finally give in and accept that most people really are primarily motivated by emotion. My girlfriend's sister drove her car, unmaintained, until the engine seized. Change the oil? No thanks, too icky. The car was only four years old. That kind of throwaway culture just sickens me.
I have to disagree with many of your comments. While I think that general purpose computers will decline in popularity, and I also think this is a good thing, I highly doubt that they will be "killed off". LOTS of people need general-purpose computers for data-processing, and that need will not be filled by shiny single-purpose gizmos.
What first-party proprietary product has stability problems? Well, for starters, Windows itself does. To be quite honest, once you've worked closely with and studied another operating system that has any thought put into its design, you will realize what a total POS Windows and its toolchain is. It is not built with you in mind. It is built for the purpose of maintaining Microsoft's hegemony.
You obviously do not have any exposure to high-availability systems. Windows is amazingly difficult to run in this kind of environment-- that's why virtualization is becoming so popular. It's working around the software's shortcomings.
As for Open Source being shoddy. I could give you counterexamples all day. MTAs like Postfix are vastly more flexible, reliable, and safe to run than Exchange. Berkeley Packet Filter beats the pants off of Microsoft's "firewall" software, particularly if you want system policies that integrate with DHCP (like, revoking leases from network abusers), VPN, and failover, or do anything not explicitly intended by the GUI designer (pf on OpenBSD has no GUI). Microsoft's system inspection tools are a JOKE-- the ones that they provide are so ambigious that Microsoft even now offers third-party tools on their own website to supplement their own (like ProcessExplorer). The shell is barely functional, which means that you cannot easily chain tools together, and the likelihood that the new Windows shell can run industry-standard sh scripts is probably nil. I work with both of these platforms in server environments, and the difference is night and day. I prefer the Open Source stuff almost any day.
A final note-- your "weak" third-party applications should not be crashing your system. Modern operating systems properly contain their applications. The fact that Windows users are still dealing with issues that were identified in the 1980's shows that most of the world still exists in a sad state of affairs.
UMass Amherst? Funny, that's actually the very library I was talking about when I said that there are lots of good libraries out there. That library in particular is exceptional. I used to live down the street from the Smith library, and have used it many times, although not for research purposes-- but it seemed well-equipped. The OP is just full of shit. Aggregate databases have been around for a long time, and if he had bothered to talk to a librarian, who knows exactly where to look, he probably would have found what he was looking for. I should also mention collaborative networks between libraries, but since you are familiar with the Five College area, you're probably also aware that many libraries share materials. This is hardly a new thing.
With all due respect, I don't think we can trust anything that Adobe says about their own product. I've gotten the feeling lately that they have been pushing more updates out, faster, because they want to milk their dominant position (now that Quark is crumbling fast and Macromedia is gone). What do you think the chances are that the new Photoshop UI comes with a new file format to support it's "innovating new UI"? Likely, I think.
Just yesterday, we attempted to transfer some Dreamweaver (which Adobe now owns) licenses to some other machines. The original users were upgraded to the latest CS3 suite, and no longer needed them. Of course, we had forgotten about the activation scheme that comes with this software, and had since erased the original computers, which meant we needed to call Adobe. We called, and halfway through the re-activation scheme found that this could not be done. Why? Because the new machines were Windows machines. Even though we PAID for licenses for dual-platform media, the customer service rep told us that, upon the first activation, the product was now BOUND to the Macintosh platform. Bullshit! There's a database somewhere at Adobe where they store this information, and all they need to do is flip some bits. The fact that they prevent you from doing this at all means that they thought of this scenario, and are actively blocking it.
There are other examples: after Adobe's purchase of Macromedia, their Captivate product went from under $100 in price to nearly $500. There were three generations of product, all with different file formats, and all with incremental price increases, in under 2 years. Add to that the Adobe CEO's recent comments that Adobe's customers are "not typically price sensitive", and you can see their strategy here: push out changes as fast as possible, because people will buy them.
So, I'm sorry, Adobe, I don't trust anything you say. I have never personally had a problem with Adobe's UI-- and I've found it better than every other image-editing UI out there. That's not to say there's no room for improvement, but in my opinion, if GIMP were to model itself on Photoshop's current UI, that would be a good thing.
Are you f'ing serious? Isn't this exactly the kind of abuse that privacy advocates have been screaming about since the start? What does this kind of shopping preference tell you, seriously? For starters, it does not actually tell you if the person is Middle Eastern! There is simply a greater likelihood that the person is. But do we really care if the person is Middle Eastern? No! We're looking for terrorists! Once again, there's simply another, slightly higher (because, honestly, what proportion of Middle Easterners are terrorists? Very small) probability that the person is a terrorist. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I suspect that eventually, the noise drowns out the signal. The end result is intelligence agents wasting their time. I think it is pretty clear to everyone by now, that, if you want to find the terrorists, you need to follow the money. These people do not operate in a vaccuum. Traditional intelligence (remember when 'intelligence' had something to do with being smart?) is very good at this kind of thing. Note to United States: use your fucking brains.
There are very few publishers out there who solely publish textbooks. Of the ones you mentioned above, IIRC, McGraw and Houghton are the only ones left that are not a part of a larger publisher, in textbooks, most notably Thomson, Pearson, and Macmillan. Holt and Harcourt are a part of Macmillan US and Prentice is a part of Pearson. Those three publishers (Thomson, Pearson, and Macmillan) have extremely diverse catalogs, and many of the big publishers are deep into trade publishing as well as journals, newspapers, and college textbooks. Nature, e.g, is owned by Macmillan UK, and Thomson publishes a HUGE number of scientific journals, both in print and in database form.
One of GHB's earliest and still very common uses is by bodybuilders to elevate human growth hormone levels. Don't remember where I learned this although I do recall an acquaintance of mine in college who recreationally used GHB and ketamine, among other things. Wonder if he's still alive...
What kind of library are you talking about? Your hometown public library? Virtually every college or university with a halfway respectable science program will have access to a huge number of scientific publications, either online or in print (and in many cases, both). Card catalogs? IIRC, my alma mater had them, but it was mostly because they either hadn't finished indexing their collection electronically, or because they hadn't bothered to throw them out yet. Real libraries, and especially real librarians, do NOT suck. They are essential.
I work for a publishing company that shall remain unnamed, but has a rather large stake in scientific publishing. Several years ago, our company president commented, in reference to state legislation that was being pushed to control the cost of college textbooks, that "campaign contributions just don't have the effect they used to anymore" and that the state PIRGs were just a bunch of fearmongers. While it it true that the cost of textbooks has gone up, because our customers are demanding more and more elaborate kinds of books, it is also true that our profit margins have remained the same: very large. His comment simply disgusted me. You can't go from talking about how "sudoku books are pure profit" to bemoaning the fact that people don't want to pay $200 for their intro psych book. Obviously, I don't want to bite the hand that feeds me, nor do I think this is a bad company to work for (quite the contrary), however this kind of shortsightedness is exactly what is wrong with the world. I expect them to fight this legislation with equal vigor.
I think it's just a matter of time. The pure economics of it will eventually win out, like the Cold War. Microsoft will "stay ahead" as long as they can throw money at their problems, but eventually this will catch up with them. It's very hard to compete with free, especially against an operating system that has more freedom to do things "right" than to do them "glitzy". Linux doesn't need to appeal to fickle buyers or hungry stockholders. Developers can focus on stability. Microsoft's culture of reinventing the wheel, even among their own product lines (why write from scratch when you can rewrite your own stable product?), is also working against them in a big way.
I seem to recall something my father said once about the difficulty of trying to bounce a laser beam off a mirror on the moon (my father built laser-guidance systems), and that was that attenuating a laser beam enough to do that test is extraordinarily difficult. The state of the art may have indeed improved since the 1980's (when he was doing this kind of work), so I'd like to see how they think they have solved that problem.
It's interesting that you should mention Apple's design choices wrt screws, etc, as I was thinking about this recently as well. The original G4/B&W G3 case was a really nice bit of design. In keeping with Apple, there were very few screws, BUT, not only was opening the case easy, it was elegant as well. A latch on the side of the case, and the whole hinged door opened. For the first time, too, you could drop standard PC components into the machine. The processor did not need a cooling fan, it had this really big heatsink. Cables were routed along the inner wall of the case to maximize airflow. And so on. They took their much-heralded design knowledge and applied it to the inside of the machine as well.
Unfortunately, they seem to have done a 180 since then, back to the days of black-box machines. It's a shame. At the same time, I can't really blame them-- that G4 was such a great machine, it's still my main machine today, and I have no intentions of trading it in, either. Too much of a good thing, I guess.
As long as you have an ample supply of liquid nitrogen.
Of course, in the scale of my own life, and with the events that we can reasonably expect to happen from our own actions, I think we should make a big effort to set things right. We don't have to revert the planet to a pre-human state, but we should at least attempt to preserve it for our own well-being, and for the aesthetic beauty and knowledge it offers us.
That's a real shame. After two semesters of CS and mathematics, I picked a copy of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming and Horowitz and Hill's The Art of Electronics and I just said, "Wow!". I'd flipped through them before, but now, I understand them-- thanks to the hard work I put in. But honestly-- I love the simplicity of C. That means that you need to do more yourself, but, unlike with C++, you're also not forced into the thinking about the problem the way that the language designer envisioned. Sure, you need to know more about the machine to get some basic functionality, but anyone who seriously means to use a modern language should know these things as well.
That's idiotic. No one can be right all the time, and this is a subject where no one truly does know what they're talking about. If you want the opportunity to expand your mind, you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that your own value system is the obstacle. Spend some time studying metaphysics and you'll see what I mean.
After some thinking about the subject this morning, too, I'm ready to concede my original point and say that mathematics, like other languages, cannot be non-sensical. I suspect that if you remove the geometric component of mathematics, you don't have much left.
Interesting. Apparently I picked the just the right person to start this particular discussion with! I find this stuff to be fascinating. Of course, I am not a professional mathematician (nor am I a professional philosopher), so I'm sure that my knowledge is incomplete.
I wasn't implying that it was undesirable to visualize certain mathematical models, and I'm sure that you understand that-- just that sometimes it may actually be impossible. That's perhaps an unproveable statement. Anyhow, thanks for the pointers. When I have some time to get away from the homework, I will certainly look into your suggested readings, and I will look for that Java applet.
Actually, I think you're not taking the parent's post literally enough. Mathematics *does* model things that "don't make sense". Think about that word, "sense", for a moment-- it has a clear etymological connection to "sensation", the "perception or awareness of stimuli through the senses". I believe that language actually shapes our understanding of the things that we try to describe (this is a typical characteristic of analytic philosophy). Since we perceive the world through our senses, I find it unsurprising that language is filled with otherwise strange constructions like "it makes sense", "that feels right", "I see what you are talking about".
Now the interesting thing about mathematics is that it allows us to describe things which simply don't make sense. Tell me, when you try to visualize hyperbolic geometry, what does it look like? We have no real-world analogue for this, and we can't actually visualize this in anything but a non-trivial way. Do you think that fundamental particles, in all their weirdness, make sense? I would argue that there are actually logically-consistent things that we cannot visualize or otherwise sense. Thus, I don't think that our understanding of the universe should have any dependence on whether or not it "makes sense" to us. As long as we can describe the universe in a logically-consistent way, we can-- algorithmically- use the rules we have worked out to explain how it functions. Whether we can hold these mathematical creations in our minds is unimportant.
Of course, that assumes that logical consistency indeed accurately represents the universe. But that's a whole new can of worms. That's a prison that we are perhaps locked into by our own nature, and it reminds me of the whole "humans have puny brains" meme that sci-fi authors love to throw at us.
Hate to be the downer of the party, but that's the way our leaders think. Gain the "high ground."