So Mr. Jagger is now the CEO and a major investor in an SME with a turnover of around $120M per annum. He has well chosen business associates and, presumably, a considerable degree of autonomy. And because the business is built so closely around him and his close associates, his position is rather secure. Unusually, too, he is a celebrity who is actually famous for doing something, rather than just famous for being plucked from obscurity and made famous. Pretty good
Moral: Kids, stop trying to get on reality TV and go to economics classes.
(This is just a plug for my new single, Smack up ma CEO of a Fortune 500 company)
Let me confess an interest. I have been trying to design a workable electric bike for some time, and concluded that the current battery technology just isn't anywhere near adequate. And my requirement is a measly 2000W/30mph.
So: 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. Well, yes, my little Italian 125cc racer could manage that years ago. It weighed about the same. It also put out about 25hp., was a pig to keep on the boil, and used quite a lot of gas. A quick back of envelope calculation suggests that the electric hybrid would need a combined output (elec + diesel) of around 20 hp to get the same result. There doesn't seem to be enough power there.
Nor, in fact, does there seem to be enough power to maintain a sustained 80mph. That little 200cc Diesel can't do it, and the batteries run down when using the electric motor as well.
Ah well, let's just wait for the fuel cell to fulfil the promise it's been showing for the last 50 years or so...
Total entropy of system increases. In this case the system is the entire universe. But localised entropy may go down, either by statistical fluctuation or as a result of some other process. Example: if I build a wall from bricks (small reduction in entropy) I give off heat (increase in entropy). There is nothing to stop star condensation if the net total entropy of the universe is increasing as a result of the expansion of the universe, randomisation of dust cloud particle position etc. This business about laws of thermodynamics comes from the same lamebrains that persecuted Galileo.
Of course, the question about why there is a universe at all has to be answered. But according to Bill Ockham's Remington, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity, therefore, as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.
I think we are now seeing the end result of the business slogan of the early nineties that everything is subjective. This belief, that there are no real objective standards, is popular with the business community because it provides the ultimate get-out. But then, I fscked up my career with one company by pointing out to the President that badly built bridges really do fall down and defective aeroplanes really do crash. You perceive the results, true, but the effects are objective
The interesting thing is that this belief is actually a hangover from the Soviet era when the Communist government believed that it could reconstruct reality to suit dogma.
Of course, this belief fouled up Soviet science. Now it looks like Bush and co. are going to repeat the process. Instead of communist apparatchiks deciding what is science and what isn't, capitalist apparatchiks do the job.
Forget the separation of Church and State for a moment, anyone sufficiently badly educated or stupid to believe Creationism for a microsecond shouldn't be left in charge of a potato chip, let alone a school board or a government.
Ah well, I don't expect European bioresearch and pharmaceuticals companies are too worried. The day Bush needs a stem cell based treatment for Alzheimer's, or whatever, he'll have a sudden conversion to science.
If you look at the Mercedes (Daimler-Benz) A-Class, you will see it was designed for batteries/fuel cells. The floor is a double layer with space between the layers for the cells and the drive gear. That way the passengers are reaonably high, like a small SUV, but the weight is low down. The concept was launched as a passenger vehicle in the small car market, but in order to make it work with an ic engine the engine/transmission has to be a weird shape and, because there's no room for a normal steering system, the linkages go everywhere and the steering sucks. (Plus the lack of low down weight in the centre of the vehicle meant the handling was terrible). But by the time fuel cells are available Mercedes will have huge passenger mileages of experience with the platform. Daimler also own the Smart city car design which again makes a lot more sense when the transmission subunit is replaced with electrical drive.
We took on a new graduate who was given one to connect to a test rig. A straightforward application, controlling a few solenoids and little AC motors.
Eventually he showed up with the most fried piece of hardware we had ever seen. Mobo blackened and burnt, case full of evil smelling smoke. And a strange home made cable soldered to the twisted remains of the IO port adaptor...
He hadn't understood what the solid state relay block was for, and had soldered the mains connections (240VAC) direct to the TTL outputs (5V DC).
Amazingly, a new mobo, good cleanup and a new PSU and it worked reliably for years afterwards, even when it got dropped 2 ft. onto the breech of a tank gun.
I can't resist this. A guy I know works for a development charity, and was in Sierra Leone when they had the first democratic elections since, I guess, the last ice age. There's a lot of blind people there, partly owing to disease and partly owing to military activity. They wanted them to be able to use the secret ballot. So what high tech fix did they use?
They made little cardboard folders that the ballot papers fitted into. There were holes over where you made a cross on the ballot paper, and next to them were symbols for the candidates in a kind of simplified Braille. So the blind voters could make a mark in the right place without being helped to make the right decision by the local Bush-equivalent clan representative. But hey, what do you expect from Third World people? And a lot of them were black, probably unemployed, and so wouldn't have had the vote in a civilised state anyway.
I got this, with the Postscript ROM, for $500. It prints from anything on my mixed network (Mac, Win, Linux) via 10/100 Ethernet, and unlike most cheap printers takes a whole ream at a time. When I was doing my shopping I found out that HP charges way too much for Ethernet and most low-end lasers have paper trays that are far too small. It actually runs about 11-12 ppm on our typical workload. HP used to be the world leaders in low and mid range printers, but it looks like companies like Samsung are preparing to eat their lunch. Too much time spent calculating executive benefits after mergers?
I have to admit that when I was in my last school year I had access to the chemicals, equipment and workshop facilities to build a fairly serious "dirty bomb". (I didn't, by the way.)But those were the days when schools had kilogram jars of thorium oxide and uranyl nitrate, and the uranyl nitrate wasn't made from the residues AFTER the U235 had been removed).
Even though things are better regulated now, possessing too much chemical knowledge in certain areas could make you a target.
Understanding chemistry is mostly about recognising patterns, and relating them to experience. There are so many patterns and so many interrelations that no textbook can really get far enough into the subject at a general level.
What part of chemistry is it you want to understand?
Organic or inorganic?
Synthesis or analysis?
Industrial or theoretical?
Once you learn a set of patterns, and get a feel for them (like the relations in the periodic table, or the way the properties of organics change as the carbon backbone changes length) it becomes easier to learn new ones. But if you haven't got an objective in mind, it's difficult to understand why it is worth the effort.
Anyone who has come up against this kind of thing before knows the problem is the job-preserving idiots of the heritage industry. They take an absolutist view that no changes can ever be made to listed buildings - which considered that many of them evolved over many years with constant change, is a bad joke. If they had been around in the 1600s or the 1800s, most of London's historic buildings would not exist (No, Sir Christopher, it has to be rebuilt exactly the way it was before the fire). Meanwhile, many Grade 1 listed buildings are rendered useless.
The answer is to start serious lobbying against the present system of Grade 1 listing, to ensure that structural changes to allow modern communications etc. are permitted so long as they are easily reversible.
I agree, except that I would add "or a new consulting startup with someone in charge who provides the marketing muscle."
Having been employed for over 20 years ending as cfo/cio, I walked out to go independent, met up with some guys with an interesting consulting plan and a need for content delivery software - and haven't looked back. The experience gained in the last two years has been priceless, especially in how you survive on your own without corporate backup.
But this is my word of caution: in this environment, programming skills aren't enough. The key skills are the ability to analyse, prototype creative solutions, and to see clearly the end goal and plot a path to it. These result in deliverables. As another poster says, forget about programming labels and concentrate on the bigger picture.
Much of the world still uses print media and the use of color is constantly growing. Laser color printers and inkjets are effectively CMYK - they use 3 ink colors and black to reproduce a range of the spectrum (gamut). RGB is based around additive colors - adding light - while CMYK is based around absorbtion by pigment - subtracting light. So their characteristics are different. The answer to visualisation is the expensive process of proofing.
Even more important, mixing colors cannot create exactly certain shades which can be produced by specialty inks. These colors are represented by "Pantone" colors, and any decent prepress system must allow spot Pantones to be added to an image.
Photoshop is the killer color application, and running it successfully on Linux would be a step towards giving Linux a slice of Apple's pie. But it is a relatively small pie, and I can't see the prepress guys happily surrendering their much-loved Macs any time soon. The fact is that "office" printers are stepping on the low-end territory of commercial print - and for these, the key issue is good Linux drivers with an ability to provide quality output from RGB.
My conclusion: Photoshop on Linux - OK but probably not a killer app
Excellent Linux drivers for things like the HP 4600, that work well with GIMP - better use of resources.
I may be as stupid as you think, but I've actually been a cfo, actually been involved in lobbying politicans, actually learnt some economics. Believing that the Government should not be too close to the current agenda of business is based on experience, not theory. I agree the trend has been going on for years but it seems to have accelerated recently. And please note that I am able to reply without making cheap cracks about - well, crack - or calling you stupid.
What I find utterly amazing about all of this is that under a Republican president US industry seems to have forgotten all about its ability to move with the times and is engaged in a desperate war to maintain restrictive business practices. After all, it was completely restrictive business practices, aka Command Economy, that so comprehensively screwed Communism. If the world's most successful Intel PC maker has to do stuff like this, how can Microsoft argue it is not a monopolist?
The pattern, from Microsoft to the RIAA, seems more and more protectionist. Which is all very well, but protectionism stifles innovation and new business models. It's a tragedy that at a time when things are changing so fast, when a grasp of what is happening in the rest of the world is increasingly important, that instead of having a government that can hold monopolists and protectionists in check and encourage innovation, we sem to have a US government that is run by them and thinks that foreigners are funny people who don't matter unless they might be able to stop oil from flowing.
Dell has always been a company that challenged the conventions, and its low-cost manufacturing has been an example of how to respond to globalisation. It's ridiculous that they are being hampered by the sort of 19th century practices that Marx banged on about.
For the inflated price of a high street jeweller, you can afford to go to an artisan jeweller and have something completely custom. Do research on the net, find someone you both like the look of. If you live on the East Coast, you might even want to make the trip to Europe - Italy, Netherlands, parts of Germany and even Birmingham, UK are good places. And you're making a stand for individuality as well as getting something that might actually appreciate in value
What on Earth have the native Australians, who have already been largely exterminated by the descendants of Brits, done to deserve RIAA execs? I thought Australia had signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which forbids that kind of thing.
For one of these. Slot it into the bay of a notebook case with screen and keyboard, slot it into a docking station to run a big monitor and heavy duty keyboard, slot it into a chord keyboard, mini HUD and mouse for use on airplanes or between meetings. And perhaps a PDA type screen to clip on one face. Ideally, have the docking station take two so you can sync them overnight and have a live recovery system. I could lock one in the safe when I go on vacation and take the other with me. And, let's face it, 100/gigabit Ethernet and Firewire mean that the I/O of these things isn't going to be ridiculously limited. Though it will really come into its own when flash memory over 1Gbyte gets cheap.
I'm prepared self-sacrificingly to be a beta tester, IBM please note.
That's how you recognise a hostile nuclear sub: read the barcode. Presumably IFF doesn't work under water so our hunter-killers have to rely on correct labeling. And now we know why so many spies were needed in the Cold War: they were trying to get the codes for the entire Nato and Soviet fleets.
Scan the bar code, launch the torpedo: the message comes back over the VLF "You have destroyed a Russian cruiser. That is a total of 550 points on your reward card. Do you want to choose a gift now?"
Extreme cynicism aside, however, this kind of competition is surely a Good Thing, and I wiash it had been around when I was a student.
No, fluorinert does not have the same effect as mustard gas. I know this because of a software error in a PID controller we once built. By the time I noticed the bug there were 2 litres of fluorinert in the atmosphere of the office and I hadn't noticed. (it was a bit difficult hiding the loss of $3000 worth of heat exchange fluid, though)
Re:Computer 'Science'?
on
Think Python
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Many years ago I went for interview to the CS department of the University of Leeds, England. Things were going well until I asked the full professor interviewing me if we were going to learn anything about the hardware side of computing. He looked down his nose at me, drew in his breath and said "My boy, we don't concern ourselves with the doings of technicians". (Leeds is not precisely in the forefront of advances in modern computing.) However, for the last hundred years or so it has really been increasingly difficult to separate science and engineering. More and more, scientific hypotheses can only be tested when sufficiently advanced engineering comes along. There have always been "whiteboard scientists" (i.e. theoreticians) who resent this. But most great scientists were skilled engineers as well. Galileo, Newton, Bunsen, Babbage, Turing...
I think the terminology is the problem. We don't talk about "Physics science" or "Biology science", so why "computer science" or "rocket science"? Why not just computing and rocketry?
While I'm having a rant, there's also a problem with degrading the word "engineer". MCSEs and such are basically technicians, not engineers. Perhaps if we admitted that the people who implement systems using standard components that just have to be set up correctly (although this may be a challenging role) are technicians, then we could accept that most "computer scientists" are actually trained as engineers, that this is a highly skilled and challenging professional role, and the number of real scientific researchers is not that great. Just like physics and chemistry nowadays, in fact.
I would suggest that the test of a pseudoscience is that it doesn't create a heirarchy of engineers and technicians because, basically, it doesn't work and there would be nothing for them to do. You don't get sociological engineers designing ever better societies, and socio-technicians building them just as fast as people can throw money at them. (At least, the attempts, such as Marxist-Leninism, have been abject failures). But you get plenty of sociologists. On this basis, computing, with its deep organisational structures, is an extremely successful science-based system. Arguments about testing hypotheses are irrelevant: real scientists tend not to work like that anyway. Scientific proof has been conventionally about other people reproducing your results. But if the nature of your science/engineering is that you can rapidly produce millions of copies of your concept or invention, this becomes trivial. If I claim to have invented (say) a graphics chip architecture that can draw polygons twice as fast as the previous best for a given clock speed and die size, I prove this by marketing the product, not by publishing and waiting for other labs to build a copy and duplicate my result.
The people who use the data - the corporations - are using it based on the belief that they are paying for some acceptable level of accuracy. They have to believe or be made to believe the market research companies are somehow extracting good information from that band of congenital liars, we the people.
So perhaps the real objective of this "research" is actually to persuade the guys who pay for the surveys that IBM consulting has better ways of doing them - trust us, we
know
, and that's an extra 20% on the bill for all that research we did into how to do market research.
No, it doesn't scale. Oslo is not London. And who is going to knock down extremely expensive real estate to put up tollbooths? In a country with such restricted space, we already have the absurd situation that it is free to drive out of Wales over the bridges, but not in - so truck routes are arranged to enter from the North and exit from the South, paying nothing.
The answer is to dismantle London. Why do we need it? Technology means there is no longer a need to gather huge numbers of people together in big buildings for them to cooperate. And there is nothing useful or productive in Central London that requires large manufacturing sites. The reason for the dominance of London is all those civil servants living in houses with vastly inflated prices and hoping to retire, sell them and get rich. Making travel INTO London more expensive will benefit those house prices still further. It's classical monopoly economics, as explained by Karl Marx.
Even the planning system colludes, preventing the building of houses in surrounding areas to drive prices up still further.
But of course, the Mayor's position depends on all this continuing to work. If prices fall or London starts to be sidelined, he'll be out. So: devise a scheme to make living in Central London even more attractive. And don't worry about the folks having enough money to live there. It's your and my pension schemes they're raping to pay their bonuses.
I think this should be modded up. I was struck by this idea, too. It would make sense if they were talking about an improved PCB filler that contained microscopic bubbles of air, and this is exactly what feathers are like.
I'm reminded of when we had round a reporter from a {nameless} electronics magazine. The marketing guy took him out to "lunch", close to publication deadline. The resulting article was indeed extremely out to lunch and did much to confirm the reputation of journalists around the lab. Perhaps those guys are making some interesting inhalable chemicals from their organic materials.
A big area of technological growth is digital printing. Currently A3 color digital page printers run up to about 2000 sheets per hour. A full 2-page image for one of these babies is potentially over 300Mbit, which means gigabit/s networking is already needed between the data source and the rip to get full performance. Before digital presses can reach the sizes reached by plate technology presses, 10Gb/s will surely be needed.
And, if that's boring, think about the military applications. In order to try and cut costs and save on code duplication, the labs are building systems in which part of the application (the secret part) runs on secure systems, whereas non-secret parts run on machines using commercial code. Having a single physical pipe between the areas rather than, as at present, multiple pipes could make the security setup a lot easier, and make the design of the machine considerably cheaper. We will all sleep a lot more securely knowing that LL is able to design lots of new exciting kinds of nuclear weapon at minimal cost.
By the way, if they use any GPLed software, does that mean they have to release the entire source code for the application? Just a question.
Slashdot Mirror
Moral: Kids, stop trying to get on reality TV and go to economics classes.
(This is just a plug for my new single, Smack up ma CEO of a Fortune 500 company)
So: 0 to 60 in 6 seconds. Well, yes, my little Italian 125cc racer could manage that years ago. It weighed about the same. It also put out about 25hp., was a pig to keep on the boil, and used quite a lot of gas. A quick back of envelope calculation suggests that the electric hybrid would need a combined output (elec + diesel) of around 20 hp to get the same result. There doesn't seem to be enough power there.
Nor, in fact, does there seem to be enough power to maintain a sustained 80mph. That little 200cc Diesel can't do it, and the batteries run down when using the electric motor as well.
Ah well, let's just wait for the fuel cell to fulfil the promise it's been showing for the last 50 years or so...
Of course, the question about why there is a universe at all has to be answered. But according to Bill Ockham's Remington, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. God + universe = two entities, universe = 1 entity, therefore, as Laplace put it, je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.
The interesting thing is that this belief is actually a hangover from the Soviet era when the Communist government believed that it could reconstruct reality to suit dogma.
Of course, this belief fouled up Soviet science. Now it looks like Bush and co. are going to repeat the process. Instead of communist apparatchiks deciding what is science and what isn't, capitalist apparatchiks do the job.
Forget the separation of Church and State for a moment, anyone sufficiently badly educated or stupid to believe Creationism for a microsecond shouldn't be left in charge of a potato chip, let alone a school board or a government.
Ah well, I don't expect European bioresearch and pharmaceuticals companies are too worried. The day Bush needs a stem cell based treatment for Alzheimer's, or whatever, he'll have a sudden conversion to science.
If you look at the Mercedes (Daimler-Benz) A-Class, you will see it was designed for batteries/fuel cells. The floor is a double layer with space between the layers for the cells and the drive gear. That way the passengers are reaonably high, like a small SUV, but the weight is low down. The concept was launched as a passenger vehicle in the small car market, but in order to make it work with an ic engine the engine/transmission has to be a weird shape and, because there's no room for a normal steering system, the linkages go everywhere and the steering sucks. (Plus the lack of low down weight in the centre of the vehicle meant the handling was terrible). But by the time fuel cells are available Mercedes will have huge passenger mileages of experience with the platform. Daimler also own the Smart city car design which again makes a lot more sense when the transmission subunit is replaced with electrical drive.
We took on a new graduate who was given one to connect to a test rig. A straightforward application, controlling a few solenoids and little AC motors.
Eventually he showed up with the most fried piece of hardware we had ever seen. Mobo blackened and burnt, case full of evil smelling smoke. And a strange home made cable soldered to the twisted remains of the IO port adaptor...
He hadn't understood what the solid state relay block was for, and had soldered the mains connections (240VAC) direct to the TTL outputs (5V DC).
Amazingly, a new mobo, good cleanup and a new PSU and it worked reliably for years afterwards, even when it got dropped 2 ft. onto the breech of a tank gun.
They made little cardboard folders that the ballot papers fitted into. There were holes over where you made a cross on the ballot paper, and next to them were symbols for the candidates in a kind of simplified Braille. So the blind voters could make a mark in the right place without being helped to make the right decision by the local Bush-equivalent clan representative.
But hey, what do you expect from Third World people? And a lot of them were black, probably unemployed, and so wouldn't have had the vote in a civilised state anyway.
I got this, with the Postscript ROM, for $500. It prints from anything on my mixed network (Mac, Win, Linux) via 10/100 Ethernet, and unlike most cheap printers takes a whole ream at a time. When I was doing my shopping I found out that HP charges way too much for Ethernet and most low-end lasers have paper trays that are far too small. It actually runs about 11-12 ppm on our typical workload. HP used to be the world leaders in low and mid range printers, but it looks like companies like Samsung are preparing to eat their lunch. Too much time spent calculating executive benefits after mergers?
I have to admit that when I was in my last school year I had access to the chemicals, equipment and workshop facilities to build a fairly serious "dirty bomb". (I didn't, by the way.)But those were the days when schools had kilogram jars of thorium oxide and uranyl nitrate, and the uranyl nitrate wasn't made from the residues AFTER the U235 had been removed).
Even though things are better regulated now, possessing too much chemical knowledge in certain areas could make you a target.
What part of chemistry is it you want to understand?
Once you learn a set of patterns, and get a feel for them (like the relations in the periodic table, or the way the properties of organics change as the carbon backbone changes length) it becomes easier to learn new ones. But if you haven't got an objective in mind, it's difficult to understand why it is worth the effort.
The answer is to start serious lobbying against the present system of Grade 1 listing, to ensure that structural changes to allow modern communications etc. are permitted so long as they are easily reversible.
Having been employed for over 20 years ending as cfo/cio, I walked out to go independent, met up with some guys with an interesting consulting plan and a need for content delivery software - and haven't looked back. The experience gained in the last two years has been priceless, especially in how you survive on your own without corporate backup.
But this is my word of caution: in this environment, programming skills aren't enough. The key skills are the ability to analyse, prototype creative solutions, and to see clearly the end goal and plot a path to it. These result in deliverables. As another poster says, forget about programming labels and concentrate on the bigger picture.
Even more important, mixing colors cannot create exactly certain shades which can be produced by specialty inks. These colors are represented by "Pantone" colors, and any decent prepress system must allow spot Pantones to be added to an image.
Photoshop is the killer color application, and running it successfully on Linux would be a step towards giving Linux a slice of Apple's pie. But it is a relatively small pie, and I can't see the prepress guys happily surrendering their much-loved Macs any time soon. The fact is that "office" printers are stepping on the low-end territory of commercial print - and for these, the key issue is good Linux drivers with an ability to provide quality output from RGB.
My conclusion: Photoshop on Linux - OK but probably not a killer app
Excellent Linux drivers for things like the HP 4600, that work well with GIMP - better use of resources.
I may be as stupid as you think, but I've actually been a cfo, actually been involved in lobbying politicans, actually learnt some economics. Believing that the Government should not be too close to the current agenda of business is based on experience, not theory. I agree the trend has been going on for years but it seems to have accelerated recently. And please note that I am able to reply without making cheap cracks about - well, crack - or calling you stupid.
If the world's most successful Intel PC maker has to do stuff like this, how can Microsoft argue it is not a monopolist?
The pattern, from Microsoft to the RIAA, seems more and more protectionist. Which is all very well, but protectionism stifles innovation and new business models. It's a tragedy that at a time when things are changing so fast, when a grasp of what is happening in the rest of the world is increasingly important, that instead of having a government that can hold monopolists and protectionists in check and encourage innovation, we sem to have a US government that is run by them and thinks that foreigners are funny people who don't matter unless they might be able to stop oil from flowing.
Dell has always been a company that challenged the conventions, and its low-cost manufacturing has been an example of how to respond to globalisation. It's ridiculous that they are being hampered by the sort of 19th century practices that Marx banged on about.
For the inflated price of a high street jeweller, you can afford to go to an artisan jeweller and have something completely custom. Do research on the net, find someone you both like the look of. If you live on the East Coast, you might even want to make the trip to Europe - Italy, Netherlands, parts of Germany and even Birmingham, UK are good places. And you're making a stand for individuality as well as getting something that might actually appreciate in value
What on Earth have the native Australians, who have already been largely exterminated by the descendants of Brits, done to deserve RIAA execs? I thought Australia had signed the UN Declaration on Human Rights, which forbids that kind of thing.
I'm prepared self-sacrificingly to be a beta tester, IBM please note.
Scan the bar code, launch the torpedo: the message comes back over the VLF "You have destroyed a Russian cruiser. That is a total of 550 points on your reward card. Do you want to choose a gift now?"
Extreme cynicism aside, however, this kind of competition is surely a Good Thing, and I wiash it had been around when I was a student.
No, fluorinert does not have the same effect as mustard gas. I know this because of a software error in a PID controller we once built. By the time I noticed the bug there were 2 litres of fluorinert in the atmosphere of the office and I hadn't noticed. (it was a bit difficult hiding the loss of $3000 worth of heat exchange fluid, though)
However, for the last hundred years or so it has really been increasingly difficult to separate science and engineering. More and more, scientific hypotheses can only be tested when sufficiently advanced engineering comes along. There have always been "whiteboard scientists" (i.e. theoreticians) who resent this.
But most great scientists were skilled engineers as well. Galileo, Newton, Bunsen, Babbage, Turing...
I think the terminology is the problem. We don't talk about "Physics science" or "Biology science", so why "computer science" or "rocket science"?
Why not just computing and rocketry?
While I'm having a rant, there's also a problem with degrading the word "engineer". MCSEs and such are basically technicians, not engineers. Perhaps if we admitted that the people who implement systems using standard components that just have to be set up correctly (although this may be a challenging role) are technicians, then we could accept that most "computer scientists" are actually trained as engineers, that this is a highly skilled and challenging professional role, and the number of real scientific researchers is not that great. Just like physics and chemistry nowadays, in fact.
I would suggest that the test of a pseudoscience is that it doesn't create a heirarchy of engineers and technicians because, basically, it doesn't work and there would be nothing for them to do. You don't get sociological engineers designing ever better societies, and socio-technicians building them just as fast as people can throw money at them. (At least, the attempts, such as Marxist-Leninism, have been abject failures). But you get plenty of sociologists. On this basis, computing, with its deep organisational structures, is an extremely successful science-based system. Arguments about testing hypotheses are irrelevant: real scientists tend not to work like that anyway.
Scientific proof has been conventionally about other people reproducing your results. But if the nature of your science/engineering is that you can rapidly produce millions of copies of your concept or invention, this becomes trivial. If I claim to have invented (say) a graphics chip architecture that can draw polygons twice as fast as the previous best for a given clock speed and die size, I prove this by marketing the product, not by publishing and waiting for other labs to build a copy and duplicate my result.
So perhaps the real objective of this "research" is actually to persuade the guys who pay for the surveys that IBM consulting has better ways of doing them - trust us, we
- know
, and that's an extra 20% on the bill for all that research we did into how to do market research.The answer is to dismantle London. Why do we need it? Technology means there is no longer a need to gather huge numbers of people together in big buildings for them to cooperate. And there is nothing useful or productive in Central London that requires large manufacturing sites. The reason for the dominance of London is all those civil servants living in houses with vastly inflated prices and hoping to retire, sell them and get rich. Making travel INTO London more expensive will benefit those house prices still further. It's classical monopoly economics, as explained by Karl Marx.
Even the planning system colludes, preventing the building of houses in surrounding areas to drive prices up still further.
But of course, the Mayor's position depends on all this continuing to work. If prices fall or London starts to be sidelined, he'll be out. So: devise a scheme to make living in Central London even more attractive. And don't worry about the folks having enough money to live there. It's your and my pension schemes they're raping to pay their bonuses.
I'm reminded of when we had round a reporter from a {nameless} electronics magazine. The marketing guy took him out to "lunch", close to publication deadline. The resulting article was indeed extremely out to lunch and did much to confirm the reputation of journalists around the lab. Perhaps those guys are making some interesting inhalable chemicals from their organic materials.
And, if that's boring, think about the military applications. In order to try and cut costs and save on code duplication, the labs are building systems in which part of the application (the secret part) runs on secure systems, whereas non-secret parts run on machines using commercial code. Having a single physical pipe between the areas rather than, as at present, multiple pipes could make the security setup a lot easier, and make the design of the machine considerably cheaper. We will all sleep a lot more securely knowing that LL is able to design lots of new exciting kinds of nuclear weapon at minimal cost.
By the way, if they use any GPLed software, does that mean they have to release the entire source code for the application? Just a question.