Exactly. Edison was mostly an invention through brute force guy. He lived in a time when there was very powerfull new developments in technology, (commonly available electricity, the electric motor, etc) and he used his team of people to race through different possibilities.
Well, my guess is that a cheaper furnace is going to be less efficient just because you've got less technology to make sure that you've got complete combustion. When you've got more money, you can spend more to tweak your engine to higher efficiencies. The other gain in efficiency I know about comes from higher temperature differences between the two sides of your engine. I believe this is a basic law of extracting work from a thermodynamic process, higher delta-T = higher efficiency of extracting work. Higher temperatures generally mean higher pressures, which generally means higher cost. Also, if it is carbon neutral, why do we need to worry about CO2 pollution? Isn't the whole "carbon neutral" thing an argument normally used about clean power sources?
There's other things than CO2 to worry about as far as pollution is concerned. Fine particulate matter can cause asthma (and is one of the main problems with diesel fuel). Nitrous oxides are nasty stuff that comes from incomplete combustion. Carbon monoxide is a potent poison, though if dispersed I don't know that it presents a big problem.
If people would treat their programs more like engineered pieces of hardware than written works in progress, things would be better. It just seems to me that people all too often forget that software development requires real planning and that it's not as simple as "I want feature X" in many cases.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Design requirements changing in the middle of development, or being extremely vague is a killer. It's like someone making a building and saying "I want this building to have between 1 and 3000 bathrooms"). Clearly that's insane.
The idea is that the early computer *users* were generally also *programmers*. There were no non-technical computer users in the early days.
Yes I gathered that from the article. I just disagree with this idea. As the original post said, computers were also used for calculating missile trajectories, count census figured, etc. Not everyone using and interacting with the computers was a programmer.
That would fit into the second era of software design, where the guys with money thought that they (or other managers) could understand code, so they naturally wanted a language that was as much like english as possible. Thus COBOL became terribly (in more than one sense) popular.
You're right, for the most part programmers were writing software for other engineers, not other programmers. The author is using a shortcut though to describe "other people like themselves". The software programmers need is tools to create software.
I don't know about anyone else, but I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station.
From what we've done in the past, it doesn't sound like that would be particularly helpful. The things we want to learn are very specialized, and that takes specialized equipment. Just look at the Mars probes we've sent. Two rovers, ground penetrating radar, communications. That doesn't sound very standard to me.
Not to mention the environments are quite different. A Mars probe can use solar cells to power itself. Pluto though is so far away that you need a nuclear power source as the sun is so dim at that distance.
Furthermore, I doubt launching probes from a space station is really going to save much of anything. You need to get the thing to the space station to begin with, so that requires a launch. That's the major expense of deploying the thing, so I don't see how shooting it off from a space station is going to lower any costs. If anything I think it'd raise costs since you have to bring it into the station, then launch it again.
Thus instead of spending 20 years preparing for a single mission, we'll be able to reduce each mission to as little as 5 years (or less!) preparation time.
The 20 year prep years are long gone. I don't know how long it took to plan and launch the current Mars rovers, but I think it was somewhere around 5 years.
Oracle could merely do with that project what MySQL did to the LGPLed JDBC driver: Buy them out and relicense before the project is fully compatible.
Wow, I think I've got a new business model. Create LGPL or BSD licenced drivers for MySQL, wait for Oracle/MySQL to buy you, repeat.
Oracle can't buy everyone. Creating a driver for a well known protocol isn't exactly rocket science, so there's a LOT of groups that could do it. Furthermore if Oracle started trying this, it would only enourage MORE development of more open drivers. Someone handing you big fat checks isn't exactly discouragement for developing drivers;). Right now not many people are interested in doing it because MySQL isn't pressing the issue and trying to enforce their GPL interpretation on anyone. If they did that, there'd suddenly be several groups that'd be interested in doing just that, and at least one of them would succeed before Oracle managed to buy them.
Do you know why they are 20 times more expensive than normal bulbs? Because they take approximately 20 times more resources to make
20 times? Doing a quick look at lightbulbwarehouse.com I see a incandescent for 48 cents. A pin based florescent is $2.98. That's about 6.2 times as expensive, not 20. Secondly, since when were all resources equal in terms of environmental costs? I don't know what extra resources it takes to make a fluorescent, but what if it took more labor? That's not something we're exactly running out of, or something that people are talking about conserving.
You claim you won't save any money over the life of the bulb. Let's do that fairly simple calculation. On a 100 watt incandescent over 10,000 hours (which is the rated life of the fluorescent) you'll use 10,000*100/1000 kilowatt hours of electricity, or 1000 kilowatt hours. A Fluorescent uses about 1/4 of the energy to produce the same amount of light, so that's 10,000*25/1000 = 250 kilowatt hours. Around here electricy is pretty cheap at.07 cents/kilowatt hour, so that's 1000*.07=$70. The fluorescent will use 250*.07=$17.50 in energy. The difference is $52.50.
The lifetime of the incandescent is 4000 hours (and I'm even giving you LONG LIFE incandescents), so you'll need to buy 2.5 bulbs, at a cost of $1.20. So the incandescent bulb saved you $2.98-1.20= $1.78 in bulb costs, but you paid an extra $52.50 in electric costs. That's an extra expense of $50.72 for the incandescent.
Now you claim that the florescents only last about as long as the normal bulbs. Ok, let's do that calculation. That's not true for most people but it's true for you, so let's say the florescent only lasts about as long as normal incandescents, which is about 1000 hours. You'll have to buy 9 more of them to get that same 10,000 hours. That's an extra $26.82 in bulb costs. You're STILL saving $50.72-26.82=$23.90
In case anyone was wondering, this isn't the psychoactive toad that's been a pop culture reference. Various TV shows have had episodes about toad licking (though according to wikipedia licking can be deadly, you're supposed to smoke the venom). That toad is native to the US.
I've read through the article, but I still don't understand how this really qualifies as science. It doesn't sound like he has a well defined question he's trying to answer beyond "the connection between brain and consciousness", which leaves a lot to be desired. How is he going to judge the effects if electrical stimulation? In what part of the brain is he going to implant the electrode? In short, how is going to prevent fooling himself?
The whole thing just sounds a bit obsessesive rather than scientific.
I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually. It feels like all our attempts to understand it (PET, MRI, electrodes, etc), while amazing, as still at the caveman stage of development e.g. hit it with a rock until it does something. I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Well, I don't think you're giving enough credit to what we know, or how complex the brain is. We've identified regions of the brain that're responsible for different things, we've made blind people see through implanted electrodes (albeit a fairly primitive vision). On a smaller scale we know the brain operates on a neural network, works electro-chemically, and we have some understanding of what the neuro-transmitters do. And these are only the things I've read about in the popular press, as I've never taken a neuro-science class. It's not a lot, but I think it's beyond "hit with rock, see what happens".
Memory isn't an unlimited resource you just hoard whenever you think you need it. Right now my instance of firefox is taking up 128 megs! I've seen it up to 256 megs before. This is just simply insane. I've seen people who's computer performance has gone down the tubes because firefox is taking up all the memory (and these are machines with 512 megs of memory, not exactly tiny). What I'd like to convey to the firefox devs is this: Your application isn't the only one running on the system. Play nice and don't be a hog.
With the number of people complaining about this (and the number of people that don't even KNOW to complain) isn't it a safe bet that you've made a mistake in the amount of cached pages?
Is it just me, or are the moderators getting increasingly harsh with this kind of thing?
It's just you. There's been a steady stream of "if it's got an edge, it's flamebait" moderations for years. Really I think it's gotten better, not worse. It used to be if you complained about Slashdot any tiny bit, you'd be moderated as offtopic, troll, etc. Now that more people have started to notice the problems with Slashdot, that doesn't happen very often.
You have to put a lot of effort into online dating sites
I think that's probbably true. But whoever said finding someone was supposed to be easy? I don't have experience with them myself, but I know a few friends it's worked for, so it can't be totally useless. Actually, now that I think about it I can think of 4 couples I know that've found someone online. One couple is married, one couple has been dating for several years, one couple broke up, and the final couple I'm not sure about since they met recently.
I think you should take advantage of your geek skills, which usually involve problem solving and put them to use. First you need to identify the problem. It sounds like you aren't exactly trying to find someone. Finding someone to care about doesn't just happen (at least not most of the time). That's a dumb hollywood idea. People actively seek out mates.
Most people I know have found someone through friends, but a growing number have found people online. If you haven't found someone through your friend circle, I'd suggest one of the many online dating deals. I've never tried it myself, but it's quite mainstream among the under 35 crowd. I know it's not easy, but keep trying and try not to get discouraged. Finding a mate isn't easy for anyone. There's a reason why the vast majority of movies, Tv shows, music, etc have a large finding and losing love component.
I gotta say, I've never understood this... when people eat chocolate they actually FEEL something?
I'm not big on chocolate, but a really nice meal is really quite enjoyable. It's just like any other pleasureable activity. So yes, I'd say I feel something when I eat a very good meal. I'm not sure describing the feeling as love is totally accurate, but it's not completely off the mark. Both things have a large pleasure component.
And the only one that applies to this research is romantic love. Not that the article doesn't explicitly say that, it certainly does. But I think it's worth bringing up though. Some people use the word love as if it's singly defined, but many cultures define love differently.
My thoughts exactly. He seems to think that just because there's a "need to ship" that automatically leads to a quality product. Anyone remember the terrible, long delayed game Daikatana? There's a commercial product that eventually "shipped" but it sucked rocks and lost a lot of money.
This guy obviously hasn't been involved in many commercial software projects. Anytime there's bad leadership, odds are the product is going to fail. It doesn't matter if it's traditional commercial software, commercialy produced open source software, or non-profit produced open source software. Blaming open source for poor management or poor developers is really missing the point.
By their very nature geeks (true geeks) will shovel every bell and whistle into a device they can get away with because that is what they do.
I guess I'm not a "true geek" then. There's definitely a set of people that will do just that. There's also a very large amount of people that follow the mantra "Keep it simple, stupid". You really don't need to look much farther than all the extremely successfull open source software projects to know that what you're saying simply isn't true. Is Linus Torvalds not a "true geek" because he's an extremely practical leader?
I guess I'm not exactly sure why you're even blaming this phenomenon on un-managed geeks, or even open source. Have you opened up Microsoft Word lately? It's full of every bell and whistle you could imagine.
Slashdot Mirror
Edison was more businessman than inventor.....
Exactly. Edison was mostly an invention through brute force guy. He lived in a time when there was very powerfull new developments in technology, (commonly available electricity, the electric motor, etc) and he used his team of people to race through different possibilities.
Well, my guess is that a cheaper furnace is going to be less efficient just because you've got less technology to make sure that you've got complete combustion. When you've got more money, you can spend more to tweak your engine to higher efficiencies. The other gain in efficiency I know about comes from higher temperature differences between the two sides of your engine. I believe this is a basic law of extracting work from a thermodynamic process, higher delta-T = higher efficiency of extracting work. Higher temperatures generally mean higher pressures, which generally means higher cost.
Also, if it is carbon neutral, why do we need to worry about CO2 pollution? Isn't the whole "carbon neutral" thing an argument normally used about clean power sources?
There's other things than CO2 to worry about as far as pollution is concerned. Fine particulate matter can cause asthma (and is one of the main problems with diesel fuel). Nitrous oxides are nasty stuff that comes from incomplete combustion. Carbon monoxide is a potent poison, though if dispersed I don't know that it presents a big problem.
If people would treat their programs more like engineered pieces of hardware than written works in progress, things would be better. It just seems to me that people all too often forget that software development requires real planning and that it's not as simple as "I want feature X" in many cases.
I think there's a lot of truth to this. Design requirements changing in the middle of development, or being extremely vague is a killer. It's like someone making a building and saying "I want this building to have between 1 and 3000 bathrooms"). Clearly that's insane.
The idea is that the early computer *users* were generally also *programmers*. There were no non-technical computer users in the early days.
Yes I gathered that from the article. I just disagree with this idea. As the original post said, computers were also used for calculating missile trajectories, count census figured, etc. Not everyone using and interacting with the computers was a programmer.
That would fit into the second era of software design, where the guys with money thought that they (or other managers) could understand code, so they naturally wanted a language that was as much like english as possible. Thus COBOL became terribly (in more than one sense) popular.
You're right, for the most part programmers were writing software for other engineers, not other programmers. The author is using a shortcut though to describe "other people like themselves". The software programmers need is tools to create software.
I don't know about anyone else, but I pray for the day when science packages based on reconfigurable standard designs can be simply and inexpensively launched from a space station.
From what we've done in the past, it doesn't sound like that would be particularly helpful. The things we want to learn are very specialized, and that takes specialized equipment. Just look at the Mars probes we've sent. Two rovers, ground penetrating radar, communications. That doesn't sound very standard to me.
Not to mention the environments are quite different. A Mars probe can use solar cells to power itself. Pluto though is so far away that you need a nuclear power source as the sun is so dim at that distance.
Furthermore, I doubt launching probes from a space station is really going to save much of anything. You need to get the thing to the space station to begin with, so that requires a launch. That's the major expense of deploying the thing, so I don't see how shooting it off from a space station is going to lower any costs. If anything I think it'd raise costs since you have to bring it into the station, then launch it again.
Thus instead of spending 20 years preparing for a single mission, we'll be able to reduce each mission to as little as 5 years (or less!) preparation time.
The 20 year prep years are long gone. I don't know how long it took to plan and launch the current Mars rovers, but I think it was somewhere around 5 years.
Oracle could merely do with that project what MySQL did to the LGPLed JDBC driver: Buy them out and relicense before the project is fully compatible.
Wow, I think I've got a new business model. Create LGPL or BSD licenced drivers for MySQL, wait for Oracle/MySQL to buy you, repeat.
Oracle can't buy everyone. Creating a driver for a well known protocol isn't exactly rocket science, so there's a LOT of groups that could do it. Furthermore if Oracle started trying this, it would only enourage MORE development of more open drivers. Someone handing you big fat checks isn't exactly discouragement for developing drivers
Do you know why they are 20 times more expensive than normal bulbs? Because they take approximately 20 times more resources to make
20 times? Doing a quick look at lightbulbwarehouse.com I see a incandescent for 48 cents. A pin based florescent is $2.98. That's about 6.2 times as expensive, not 20. Secondly, since when were all resources equal in terms of environmental costs? I don't know what extra resources it takes to make a fluorescent, but what if it took more labor? That's not something we're exactly running out of, or something that people are talking about conserving.
You claim you won't save any money over the life of the bulb. Let's do that fairly simple calculation. On a 100 watt incandescent over 10,000 hours (which is the rated life of the fluorescent) you'll use 10,000*100/1000 kilowatt hours of electricity, or 1000 kilowatt hours. A Fluorescent uses about 1/4 of the energy to produce the same amount of light, so that's 10,000*25/1000 = 250 kilowatt hours. Around here electricy is pretty cheap at
The lifetime of the incandescent is 4000 hours (and I'm even giving you LONG LIFE incandescents), so you'll need to buy 2.5 bulbs, at a cost of $1.20. So the incandescent bulb saved you $2.98-1.20= $1.78 in bulb costs, but you paid an extra $52.50 in electric costs. That's an extra expense of $50.72 for the incandescent.
Now you claim that the florescents only last about as long as the normal bulbs. Ok, let's do that calculation. That's not true for most people but it's true for you, so let's say the florescent only lasts about as long as normal incandescents, which is about 1000 hours. You'll have to buy 9 more of them to get that same 10,000 hours. That's an extra $26.82 in bulb costs. You're STILL saving $50.72-26.82=$23.90
In case anyone was wondering, this isn't the psychoactive toad that's been a pop culture reference. Various TV shows have had episodes about toad licking (though according to wikipedia licking can be deadly, you're supposed to smoke the venom). That toad is native to the US.
I've read through the article, but I still don't understand how this really qualifies as science. It doesn't sound like he has a well defined question he's trying to answer beyond "the connection between brain and consciousness", which leaves a lot to be desired. How is he going to judge the effects if electrical stimulation? In what part of the brain is he going to implant the electrode? In short, how is going to prevent fooling himself?
The whole thing just sounds a bit obsessesive rather than scientific.
I can't believe we still know so little about how the brain works actually. It feels like all our attempts to understand it (PET, MRI, electrodes, etc), while amazing, as still at the caveman stage of development e.g. hit it with a rock until it does something. I would have thought there would have been far more interest into researching how the brain functions.
Well, I don't think you're giving enough credit to what we know, or how complex the brain is. We've identified regions of the brain that're responsible for different things, we've made blind people see through implanted electrodes (albeit a fairly primitive vision). On a smaller scale we know the brain operates on a neural network, works electro-chemically, and we have some understanding of what the neuro-transmitters do. And these are only the things I've read about in the popular press, as I've never taken a neuro-science class. It's not a lot, but I think it's beyond "hit with rock, see what happens".
Memory isn't an unlimited resource you just hoard whenever you think you need it. Right now my instance of firefox is taking up 128 megs! I've seen it up to 256 megs before. This is just simply insane. I've seen people who's computer performance has gone down the tubes because firefox is taking up all the memory (and these are machines with 512 megs of memory, not exactly tiny). What I'd like to convey to the firefox devs is this: Your application isn't the only one running on the system. Play nice and don't be a hog.
With the number of people complaining about this (and the number of people that don't even KNOW to complain) isn't it a safe bet that you've made a mistake in the amount of cached pages?
keep going...
I can do this all day, and you'll eventually run out.
Here's another one to waste your mod points on.
Well, I think the researchers were studying romantic, or that "strong emotion" love. I don't think that varies across culture, as it's just biology.
Is it just me, or are the moderators getting increasingly harsh with this kind of thing?
It's just you. There's been a steady stream of "if it's got an edge, it's flamebait" moderations for years. Really I think it's gotten better, not worse. It used to be if you complained about Slashdot any tiny bit, you'd be moderated as offtopic, troll, etc. Now that more people have started to notice the problems with Slashdot, that doesn't happen very often.
You have to put a lot of effort into online dating sites
I think that's probbably true. But whoever said finding someone was supposed to be easy? I don't have experience with them myself, but I know a few friends it's worked for, so it can't be totally useless. Actually, now that I think about it I can think of 4 couples I know that've found someone online. One couple is married, one couple has been dating for several years, one couple broke up, and the final couple I'm not sure about since they met recently.
Anecdotal yes, but it might be worth a try.
Yah, a naturalist scientist would probbably write something like this:
Love is beautiful
Like birds that sing
Love is not ugly
Like rats
In a puddle of vomit
Love is beautiful
Like the sunshine
And the dancing wind
Love is not ugly
Like pus
And lice
And tobacco snot
Love is beautiful
Love is beautiful
Like all the little animals
In a forest full of green
That smells like pine
And wonder
Love is not invisible brain control
And pain
And malicious intent
And lying all the time
Although it can be all of these things
And more
Love is a many splendoured thing
It is not a shipload of slaughtered pigs
Rotting and festering
In the bleating desert
Love is what love is
And love is not
What love is not
I think you should take advantage of your geek skills, which usually involve problem solving and put them to use. First you need to identify the problem. It sounds like you aren't exactly trying to find someone. Finding someone to care about doesn't just happen (at least not most of the time). That's a dumb hollywood idea. People actively seek out mates.
Most people I know have found someone through friends, but a growing number have found people online. If you haven't found someone through your friend circle, I'd suggest one of the many online dating deals. I've never tried it myself, but it's quite mainstream among the under 35 crowd. I know it's not easy, but keep trying and try not to get discouraged. Finding a mate isn't easy for anyone. There's a reason why the vast majority of movies, Tv shows, music, etc have a large finding and losing love component.
I gotta say, I've never understood this... when people eat chocolate they actually FEEL something?
I'm not big on chocolate, but a really nice meal is really quite enjoyable. It's just like any other pleasureable activity. So yes, I'd say I feel something when I eat a very good meal. I'm not sure describing the feeling as love is totally accurate, but it's not completely off the mark. Both things have a large pleasure component.
And the only one that applies to this research is romantic love. Not that the article doesn't explicitly say that, it certainly does. But I think it's worth bringing up though. Some people use the word love as if it's singly defined, but many cultures define love differently.
My thoughts exactly. He seems to think that just because there's a "need to ship" that automatically leads to a quality product. Anyone remember the terrible, long delayed game Daikatana? There's a commercial product that eventually "shipped" but it sucked rocks and lost a lot of money.
This guy obviously hasn't been involved in many commercial software projects. Anytime there's bad leadership, odds are the product is going to fail. It doesn't matter if it's traditional commercial software, commercialy produced open source software, or non-profit produced open source software. Blaming open source for poor management or poor developers is really missing the point.
By their very nature geeks (true geeks) will shovel every bell and whistle into a device they can get away with because that is what they do.
I guess I'm not a "true geek" then. There's definitely a set of people that will do just that. There's also a very large amount of people that follow the mantra "Keep it simple, stupid". You really don't need to look much farther than all the extremely successfull open source software projects to know that what you're saying simply isn't true. Is Linus Torvalds not a "true geek" because he's an extremely practical leader?
I guess I'm not exactly sure why you're even blaming this phenomenon on un-managed geeks, or even open source. Have you opened up Microsoft Word lately? It's full of every bell and whistle you could imagine.