They just need to adapt. The world will change whether or not they agree; the only difference is whether they are dragged kicking and screaming into a new era, as the RIAA was, or whether they embrace change and try to find a new niche.
The grandparent is explaining his or her own philosophy. You are free to adopt it or not as you see fit, but you have no right to mock the poster's belief, as you have no more evidence to prove it false than the grandparent does to prove it true. That's what makes it belief rather than knowledge.
Until it is replaced by an asymptotically faster one.
Re:Becuase People don't know what they want!
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Why Software is Hard
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Or the ones who say "hey, that gives me an idea... it'd be really neat if that could do X, too!" throughout the project. Feature creep is probably the single largest reason why programs don't meet deadlines.
Some of them teach that as a business or process-centric major, rather than one centered around technical skill. For example, SE majors at my old college only took three courses that required significant amounts of programming: Intro to CS I, Intro to CS II, and Operating Systems. The result was that they could write superb requirements documents and make very nice looking UML diagrams (things that many of us learned on our own anyway), but couldn't write programs of any useful complexity.
I felt bad for them in OS. Those who didn't learn to program well on their own generally did quite poorly.
At that school, CS was mostly programming, with some theory thrown in as an afterthought. If you're interested in theoretical CS at all, it pays to declare a math minor, as it complements applied study nicely and theoretical study even better. As someone mentioned, many new graduate students are surprised at how much math is used, and having a strong mathematical background actually confers quite an edge - in my experience, more than a solid theory background, particularly at the Ph. D. level.
Math also gives you a different perspective. People look at me funny when I say that the most important areas of mathematics aren't used enough in CS, but there is plenty of room to make better use of number theory, abstract algebra, and continuous mathematics in the field, among other areas of math. I actually consider finding new ways to apply math to CS a research interest, though one that I must pursue on my own.
This somehow ended up turning into an advertisement for mathematics, but the basic point is to know what you want to do, know the fields surrounding that discipline, and choose the field(s) among them that will best help you attain your goals.
Let's consider this from some other perspectives. Other aesthetics change throughout time in a kind of punctuated equilibrium - art, music, and architecture all have "periods". Typically, these periods have a few exponents who are themselves involved in catalyzing change by introducing something:
Appealing to the new aesthetic, but usually not the old one (what the author is bemoaning, I suppose).
So revolutionary that it no longer fits into the same style of the old period.
Ultimately, this is going to happen; it has happened many times in the past in every artistic field, including gaming itself. The only question is who will be the radical game designers that manage to change the dominant aesthetic? Obviously people who continue to develop their own style of games despite the current demands of the mainstream.
In other words, if you're interested in creating innovative games, keep at it. At some point, people will want something else (whether this happens anytime soon is still up for debate, and if you want to make some money now, you might be better off conforming).
Economic incentives would probably work far better while still keeping incandescent bulbs legal. I have doubts as to whether an info. campaign (especially for reasons like "help save the environment", which many people don't take seriously for one reason or another) would work.
If you replace the word "scientists" with "publishers", your whole post itself becomes much more reasonable. We are not paid for publishing, and many of us (myself included) find it wrong that our freely-given research is held ransom by people who had nothing to do with its creation, yet we would still like it, and by extension ourselves, to become well-known. I personally upload copies of my research to my website to circumvent this, even if this is technically a violation of a contract with many journals. Restricting access to scientific information slows the entire field down, thus any scientist who has taken up the cause of advancing his field has a duty to fight this.
To me, publishers are little better than the music industry (which does the same thing to classical sheet music that should be public domain by now). Please don't blame the scientists; there is little we can do about this unless our research becomes so well-known that people actively seek it out. Well, perhaps we could start our own "opensource" journals, but journals themselves have prestige that must be built up, and this can take a lot of time.
Additionally, current dogma states that extensive peer-review is required to maintain high quality research and thus a journal's prestige. I believe that peer review stifles innovation and would like it abolished (if this means lots of crackpot research, so be it: I believe that the worth of an idea is a platonic ideal, which we must all judge according to our imperfect "sense" of its worth. No one person or entity has the right to withhold ideas from the entire population without that population's consent). However, doing so would probably cause many to shy away from the journal.
Here's that longer response/apology I promised below:
The argument I hear implicit in your words, that professors should be compensated for their research activities, is one I support. However, as I mentioned below, this is often not feasible because the "worth" of one's research is not always immediately apparent. Additionally, you are referring to tenured academics as lazy, which I simply cannot countenance. You glorify something that you do not understand. Therefore, though I am only a Ph. D. student at the moment, I wish to share my view (doubtless with its misconceptions) of the career as an aspiring academic:
Becoming a professor is not a career decision to be taken lightly and it is not for the lazy; it truly is something that must be born of a devotion to the pursuit of knowledge to the exclusion of almost everything else. The training process required to get a Ph. D. is lengthy, difficult, and generally unrewarding. True, we are generally funded while graduate students, but the funding is paltry, requires a TA or RA position at the institution unless you are fortunate enough to obtain a fellowship, and carries an expectation to devote every moment of our time to our studies and research. Even fellowships contain clauses prohibiting us from working without permission of the dean. Following a successful defense, most professors must undergo a more difficult and only slightly more rewarding postdoctoral position. These do not necessarily lead to tenure-track positions; approximately 10% will be offered assistant professorships, which carry an average salary of $44,939. In other words, after I complete my Ph. D. and a postdoc, I can look forward to starting at about $10,000 less per year than I would with most jobs I could attain right now with only a bachelor's degree in CS if I happen to be in this fortunate 10%. This is despite all of the work I have published without demanding anything in return (indeed, such work is expected). If I please my superiors and bring lots of grant money in for my institution (which involves writing a lot of proposals I'd rather not be bothered with, as they interfere with my research and other duties), I may eventually be granted tenure and perhaps rise in academic rank.
We are not compensated for publishing our research, so unless we choose to patent our innovations, our salary is our sole source of income.
A lazy person would not get this far. Anyone capable of enduring that much to reach this point is dedicated enough to the pursuit of knowledge to continue of his own accord because it is truly what he wishes to do.
You're making some assumptions: first, that teaching is not worth compensation and job security; second, that the value of research will be immediately recognized by the scientific community; and third, that the research process is instantaneous and requires little effort.
In actuality, great ideas sometimes fail to gain recognition by the community for years and the research itself can take months to years to perform before any worthwhile results are available. I am of the opinion that it is impossible to objectively evaluate the worth of an idea in the first place, but this philosophy notwithstanding, the "worth" of an idea, which I will define for simplicity's sake as its usability, seldom remains constant over time. How would you propose to compensate someone for doing research of still-indeterminate impact?
You also fail to consider the career from a professor's perspective or you would dare not call academics lazy, but I address that in the longer response to your parent post, as it is not an effective rebuttal to your argument so much as an apology for the academic profession and way of life.
Rooibos (or "red tea") is technically a tisane, since it doesn't come from camellia sinensis. I'm somewhat "into" tea and I didn't hear about it until last year, so I imagine it was pretty obscure until then, but now it's all over the place, at least in the USA. (Yes, we call proper tea "English breakfast tea" here)
The "zing" of rooibos complements white tea fairly well. I usually make a 1.5:1 blend of white to red, since the white tea's flavor is weaker.
It depends on how probable you believe life existing elsewhere is. I believe that extraterrestrial life existing is quite probable given the size of the universe (though perhaps it is less probable in a single galaxy) and, given enough chances, civilizations should almost certainly exist that are more advanced than ours, even if the majority of civilizations are not. The challenge, then, is finding the civilizations in this vast universe. As the article points out, this is a formidable challenge. However, civilizations near our level should be easier to find because they manipulate large amounts of energy in ways that we may be able to detect (radio emissions, spacecraft, etc). Less advanced civilizations may not be there yet and more advanced civilizations may have moved on to entirely new technologies.
To put it in probabilistic terms, the probability of finding a civilization may be very small, but the conditional probability of finding one near our level given that we find one at all is probably much higher.
A truly free election allows any issues such as foreign policy to be corrected. That is why countries such as Venezuela and Iran are not a real issue for America (as long as free elections are allowed).
You assume that the people in such countries don't already view their foreign policy as "correct".
I may have been answering a slightly different question than the article asks.
I am also of the opinion that any work receiving public funding should be made public. It isn't that common for research to be kept private, though; scientists generally want to publish. A more common scenario may be patenting publicly-funded research, which still necessitates disclosure (but prevents anyone else from acting upon that disclosure).
I've often wondered why, if the scientists themselves are willing to publish results for free, the journals don't follow suit? When I began doing research, I was a student in a university that did not have access to all of the journals I needed. This was incredibly frustrating and may have negatively impacted my research, as I was unable to do an extensive literature review (there are only so many times one is willing to pay for articles before the bill gets quite large). Perhaps most universities have access to the journals, but the journals don't have any right to restrict access to others' research in the first place, IMO.
This happens in music as well. Trying to find free sheet music of classical public domain works can be quite challenging, though projects like Mutopia are beginning to change this.
My argument isn't about the base. It's about the use and granularity of the scale: the entire range of temperatures from 0F - 100F is habitable (though the extremes may be unpleasant). That is not the case with Celsius, and, regardless of the resolution of our temperature sensors, the range between 0C and 100C is thus not optimally employed in day to day use. (And since people have attacked aspects of this argument that I never explicitly stated, a disclaimer: I make no claims as to the habitability of temperatures outside of 0-100F. Furthermore, by "habitable", I mean a temperature that can be endured by an average healthy person taking appropriate precautions against the heat or cold for a reasonable length of time. I also explicitly excluded science and cooking, the latter in which temperatures routinely exceed 100 in either scale).
As the Wikipedia article states, there are several stories regarding the bases of the scale, a common one stating that Fahrenheit used the coldest temperature he experienced in a year as 0 and what he measured his body temperature to be as 100. When considering common use (which is the scope of my argument), choosing the coldest temperature one experiences in an average year in a temperate climate for a base is not a bad idea, though doing so based on one location and one year is somewhat foolish. That 100F is generally near the warmest temperature of a year in such a climate is an added bonus.
My point wasn't that the scale wasn't understandable (changing systems is going to play havoc with anyone regardless, because temperature as we sense it is not easily quantified), but rather that the scale isn't efficient for day-to-day use. Again, outside of cooking and science, I suspect that temperatures over 50C are rarely used, just as temperatures of over 122F don't come up in routine conversation. For discussion of comfortable temperature ranges, this makes the F scale more precise and more efficient. (The argument that temperature sensors are not able to operate with a margin of error less than 1C notwithstanding; presumably, future sensors will).
Knowledge of the freezing point is the primary advantage of the Celsius scale in such use, but just as you know that the human body temperature is 36.6C, we know that the freezing point is 32F.
Regarding other units, the primary advantage of the metric system is that subdivisions of units work well with our base 10 number system. The disadvantage is that 10 can only be factored into 5 and 2 (and raising 10 to any power isn't giving you any new prime factors to work with). The subdivision of the foot into inches is actually kind of nice because 12 is a highly composite number. In the case of most metric units, I think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages... just not so with the Celsius scale (outside of SI, where it's already used anyway).
Anyway, I don't care strongly enough one way or the other to argue much about the merits of two temperature scales, both of which are fairly easy to use, so I'll leave it at that:)
An easy strategy to avoid that is to devote some time to design using an application, like Photoshop, which requires no coding. Once the design is finished, put it away for a little while, return when feeling more productive, and code it up.
Some of my best creative work took place after coding, though, so I'm not quite sure this is true.
The Celsius scale is calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of water. This is great for scientific use, but comes at the expense of sensitivity for day-to-day use. It is seldom that anyone wants to know the temperature outside as a fraction of the temperature required to make water boil (though the freezing point is of more use), and temperatures in habitable areas of the earth seldom exceed 50C. That means the upper half of the scale is not being used. Since a Fahrenheit degree is finer-grained than a Celsius degree and the endpoints of the scale more closely match the range of habitable temperatures, it makes more sense to use F outside of science and cooking, IMO.
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They just need to adapt. The world will change whether or not they agree; the only difference is whether they are dragged kicking and screaming into a new era, as the RIAA was, or whether they embrace change and try to find a new niche.
The grandparent is explaining his or her own philosophy. You are free to adopt it or not as you see fit, but you have no right to mock the poster's belief, as you have no more evidence to prove it false than the grandparent does to prove it true. That's what makes it belief rather than knowledge.
INTP is supposed to be the more "open" type in the sense I think you're using the word, but it is an interesting conjecture.
(I'm an INTJ and also have a very wide range of musical tastes, though I suppose my "primary" genre is classical these days).
Or the ones who say "hey, that gives me an idea... it'd be really neat if that could do X, too!" throughout the project. Feature creep is probably the single largest reason why programs don't meet deadlines.
Some of them teach that as a business or process-centric major, rather than one centered around technical skill. For example, SE majors at my old college only took three courses that required significant amounts of programming: Intro to CS I, Intro to CS II, and Operating Systems. The result was that they could write superb requirements documents and make very nice looking UML diagrams (things that many of us learned on our own anyway), but couldn't write programs of any useful complexity.
I felt bad for them in OS. Those who didn't learn to program well on their own generally did quite poorly.
At that school, CS was mostly programming, with some theory thrown in as an afterthought. If you're interested in theoretical CS at all, it pays to declare a math minor, as it complements applied study nicely and theoretical study even better. As someone mentioned, many new graduate students are surprised at how much math is used, and having a strong mathematical background actually confers quite an edge - in my experience, more than a solid theory background, particularly at the Ph. D. level.
Math also gives you a different perspective. People look at me funny when I say that the most important areas of mathematics aren't used enough in CS, but there is plenty of room to make better use of number theory, abstract algebra, and continuous mathematics in the field, among other areas of math. I actually consider finding new ways to apply math to CS a research interest, though one that I must pursue on my own.
This somehow ended up turning into an advertisement for mathematics, but the basic point is to know what you want to do, know the fields surrounding that discipline, and choose the field(s) among them that will best help you attain your goals.
Let's consider this from some other perspectives. Other aesthetics change throughout time in a kind of punctuated equilibrium - art, music, and architecture all have "periods". Typically, these periods have a few exponents who are themselves involved in catalyzing change by introducing something:
Ultimately, this is going to happen; it has happened many times in the past in every artistic field, including gaming itself. The only question is who will be the radical game designers that manage to change the dominant aesthetic? Obviously people who continue to develop their own style of games despite the current demands of the mainstream.
In other words, if you're interested in creating innovative games, keep at it. At some point, people will want something else (whether this happens anytime soon is still up for debate, and if you want to make some money now, you might be better off conforming).
Economic incentives would probably work far better while still keeping incandescent bulbs legal. I have doubts as to whether an info. campaign (especially for reasons like "help save the environment", which many people don't take seriously for one reason or another) would work.
If you replace the word "scientists" with "publishers", your whole post itself becomes much more reasonable. We are not paid for publishing, and many of us (myself included) find it wrong that our freely-given research is held ransom by people who had nothing to do with its creation, yet we would still like it, and by extension ourselves, to become well-known. I personally upload copies of my research to my website to circumvent this, even if this is technically a violation of a contract with many journals. Restricting access to scientific information slows the entire field down, thus any scientist who has taken up the cause of advancing his field has a duty to fight this.
To me, publishers are little better than the music industry (which does the same thing to classical sheet music that should be public domain by now). Please don't blame the scientists; there is little we can do about this unless our research becomes so well-known that people actively seek it out. Well, perhaps we could start our own "opensource" journals, but journals themselves have prestige that must be built up, and this can take a lot of time.
Additionally, current dogma states that extensive peer-review is required to maintain high quality research and thus a journal's prestige. I believe that peer review stifles innovation and would like it abolished (if this means lots of crackpot research, so be it: I believe that the worth of an idea is a platonic ideal, which we must all judge according to our imperfect "sense" of its worth. No one person or entity has the right to withhold ideas from the entire population without that population's consent). However, doing so would probably cause many to shy away from the journal.
Perhaps to its own detriment.
Here's that longer response/apology I promised below:
The argument I hear implicit in your words, that professors should be compensated for their research activities, is one I support. However, as I mentioned below, this is often not feasible because the "worth" of one's research is not always immediately apparent. Additionally, you are referring to tenured academics as lazy, which I simply cannot countenance. You glorify something that you do not understand. Therefore, though I am only a Ph. D. student at the moment, I wish to share my view (doubtless with its misconceptions) of the career as an aspiring academic:
Becoming a professor is not a career decision to be taken lightly and it is not for the lazy; it truly is something that must be born of a devotion to the pursuit of knowledge to the exclusion of almost everything else. The training process required to get a Ph. D. is lengthy, difficult, and generally unrewarding. True, we are generally funded while graduate students, but the funding is paltry, requires a TA or RA position at the institution unless you are fortunate enough to obtain a fellowship, and carries an expectation to devote every moment of our time to our studies and research. Even fellowships contain clauses prohibiting us from working without permission of the dean. Following a successful defense, most professors must undergo a more difficult and only slightly more rewarding postdoctoral position. These do not necessarily lead to tenure-track positions; approximately 10% will be offered assistant professorships, which carry an average salary of $44,939. In other words, after I complete my Ph. D. and a postdoc, I can look forward to starting at about $10,000 less per year than I would with most jobs I could attain right now with only a bachelor's degree in CS if I happen to be in this fortunate 10%. This is despite all of the work I have published without demanding anything in return (indeed, such work is expected). If I please my superiors and bring lots of grant money in for my institution (which involves writing a lot of proposals I'd rather not be bothered with, as they interfere with my research and other duties), I may eventually be granted tenure and perhaps rise in academic rank.
We are not compensated for publishing our research, so unless we choose to patent our innovations, our salary is our sole source of income.
A lazy person would not get this far. Anyone capable of enduring that much to reach this point is dedicated enough to the pursuit of knowledge to continue of his own accord because it is truly what he wishes to do.
You're making some assumptions: first, that teaching is not worth compensation and job security; second, that the value of research will be immediately recognized by the scientific community; and third, that the research process is instantaneous and requires little effort.
In actuality, great ideas sometimes fail to gain recognition by the community for years and the research itself can take months to years to perform before any worthwhile results are available. I am of the opinion that it is impossible to objectively evaluate the worth of an idea in the first place, but this philosophy notwithstanding, the "worth" of an idea, which I will define for simplicity's sake as its usability, seldom remains constant over time. How would you propose to compensate someone for doing research of still-indeterminate impact?
You also fail to consider the career from a professor's perspective or you would dare not call academics lazy, but I address that in the longer response to your parent post, as it is not an effective rebuttal to your argument so much as an apology for the academic profession and way of life.
Rooibos (or "red tea") is technically a tisane, since it doesn't come from camellia sinensis. I'm somewhat "into" tea and I didn't hear about it until last year, so I imagine it was pretty obscure until then, but now it's all over the place, at least in the USA. (Yes, we call proper tea "English breakfast tea" here)
The "zing" of rooibos complements white tea fairly well. I usually make a 1.5:1 blend of white to red, since the white tea's flavor is weaker.
It depends on how probable you believe life existing elsewhere is. I believe that extraterrestrial life existing is quite probable given the size of the universe (though perhaps it is less probable in a single galaxy) and, given enough chances, civilizations should almost certainly exist that are more advanced than ours, even if the majority of civilizations are not. The challenge, then, is finding the civilizations in this vast universe. As the article points out, this is a formidable challenge. However, civilizations near our level should be easier to find because they manipulate large amounts of energy in ways that we may be able to detect (radio emissions, spacecraft, etc). Less advanced civilizations may not be there yet and more advanced civilizations may have moved on to entirely new technologies.
To put it in probabilistic terms, the probability of finding a civilization may be very small, but the conditional probability of finding one near our level given that we find one at all is probably much higher.
I may have been answering a slightly different question than the article asks.
I am also of the opinion that any work receiving public funding should be made public. It isn't that common for research to be kept private, though; scientists generally want to publish. A more common scenario may be patenting publicly-funded research, which still necessitates disclosure (but prevents anyone else from acting upon that disclosure).
I've often wondered why, if the scientists themselves are willing to publish results for free, the journals don't follow suit? When I began doing research, I was a student in a university that did not have access to all of the journals I needed. This was incredibly frustrating and may have negatively impacted my research, as I was unable to do an extensive literature review (there are only so many times one is willing to pay for articles before the bill gets quite large). Perhaps most universities have access to the journals, but the journals don't have any right to restrict access to others' research in the first place, IMO.
This happens in music as well. Trying to find free sheet music of classical public domain works can be quite challenging, though projects like Mutopia are beginning to change this.
I get the feeling that these games will be titled along the lines of "chocobo teaches typing", "chocobo math", etc.
My argument isn't about the base. It's about the use and granularity of the scale: the entire range of temperatures from 0F - 100F is habitable (though the extremes may be unpleasant). That is not the case with Celsius, and, regardless of the resolution of our temperature sensors, the range between 0C and 100C is thus not optimally employed in day to day use. (And since people have attacked aspects of this argument that I never explicitly stated, a disclaimer: I make no claims as to the habitability of temperatures outside of 0-100F. Furthermore, by "habitable", I mean a temperature that can be endured by an average healthy person taking appropriate precautions against the heat or cold for a reasonable length of time. I also explicitly excluded science and cooking, the latter in which temperatures routinely exceed 100 in either scale).
As the Wikipedia article states, there are several stories regarding the bases of the scale, a common one stating that Fahrenheit used the coldest temperature he experienced in a year as 0 and what he measured his body temperature to be as 100. When considering common use (which is the scope of my argument), choosing the coldest temperature one experiences in an average year in a temperate climate for a base is not a bad idea, though doing so based on one location and one year is somewhat foolish. That 100F is generally near the warmest temperature of a year in such a climate is an added bonus.
Competence and compassion are not mutually exclusive.
My point wasn't that the scale wasn't understandable (changing systems is going to play havoc with anyone regardless, because temperature as we sense it is not easily quantified), but rather that the scale isn't efficient for day-to-day use. Again, outside of cooking and science, I suspect that temperatures over 50C are rarely used, just as temperatures of over 122F don't come up in routine conversation. For discussion of comfortable temperature ranges, this makes the F scale more precise and more efficient. (The argument that temperature sensors are not able to operate with a margin of error less than 1C notwithstanding; presumably, future sensors will).
Knowledge of the freezing point is the primary advantage of the Celsius scale in such use, but just as you know that the human body temperature is 36.6C, we know that the freezing point is 32F.
Regarding other units, the primary advantage of the metric system is that subdivisions of units work well with our base 10 number system. The disadvantage is that 10 can only be factored into 5 and 2 (and raising 10 to any power isn't giving you any new prime factors to work with). The subdivision of the foot into inches is actually kind of nice because 12 is a highly composite number. In the case of most metric units, I think that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages... just not so with the Celsius scale (outside of SI, where it's already used anyway).
Anyway, I don't care strongly enough one way or the other to argue much about the merits of two temperature scales, both of which are fairly easy to use, so I'll leave it at that :)
I think you can probably tell the users to ignore the IE alert and a good deal of them will do just that without question.
Weather forecast temperatures are seldom given with decimal points, even in countries that already use the Celsius scale.
An easy strategy to avoid that is to devote some time to design using an application, like Photoshop, which requires no coding. Once the design is finished, put it away for a little while, return when feeling more productive, and code it up.
Some of my best creative work took place after coding, though, so I'm not quite sure this is true.
The Celsius scale is calibrated to the freezing and boiling points of water. This is great for scientific use, but comes at the expense of sensitivity for day-to-day use. It is seldom that anyone wants to know the temperature outside as a fraction of the temperature required to make water boil (though the freezing point is of more use), and temperatures in habitable areas of the earth seldom exceed 50C. That means the upper half of the scale is not being used. Since a Fahrenheit degree is finer-grained than a Celsius degree and the endpoints of the scale more closely match the range of habitable temperatures, it makes more sense to use F outside of science and cooking, IMO.
I'm in agreement on use of all other metrics.