There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient. In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.
In what way ? Is there an example of something that people have been able to do with software that they could not have done otherwise (possibly with less economy and a lot more tedious work) ? We do not have artificial intelligence or anything. It seems to me that all of the revolutionary changes brought about by software are economic, in the sense that expensive, tedious things can now be done cheaply, by an ever larger number of people.
The whole point of software is to automate tedious things, so if choice becomes tedious we should really try to automate that as well. Joel's approach is entirely correct: figure out what your users are trying to do, and try to offer options which relate to them. Exporting all functionality and leaving the user to figure out what all the options mean exemplifies design failure. It is essentially "no design". Slightly better is to provide sensible defaults, but the best designs focus on things the user thinks a computer ought to do and things the user wants to do (disregarding, sometimes, what the computer really does do).
The whole situation reminds me of command line interfaces, where the user had to memorize a bunch of commands and options and put them all together in order to accomplish a goal. We have somehow recreated that mess in graphical form, with the added inefficiencies of navigating menus using a mouse. It's almost like a cruel joke has been played on the public. Just when computers look like they might become simple enough for anyone to use and are widely adopted - BAM! Take that suckers!
Whenever this topic comes up I think of my Grandma. She is a smart lady and she uses computers, but she is also old. She has been around for a while, and she's not about to tolerate any more nonsense. Contrary to the stereotype she is not intimidated by technology, but she avoids a lot of it because her impression is that most of this stuff is designed by idiots who don't have a clue what they are doing. I hate to say it, but she's right. I think that when we talk about software that grandmas can use, it should be in this sense. Old people are not going to put up with this crazy crap the way younger people seem to do. It has to make sense, and it has to work.
That's really not true. If you're smart and save your money (which no one does, because they don't want to live like a student) you could be substantially better off by not going to college or university right away. You are correct that eventually it is an impediment to most careers, but you could still do it on the side and have a degree by the time you need it, without the financial hit of being a full time student for more than a year or two (tops).
+5 insightful. Educational policy seems to always be derived from the following three things (in order):
1) commercial interests
2) fads and incestuous thinking
3) hyperbole and irrational thinking
You could say it is a serious problem, but it's hard to say anything without being lumped into 3).
"a mouse with a big head, ears, eyes and teeth" - I blame the influence of Japanese animation. It's only a matter of time before we have mecha-mice and a shy male mouse in a house full of female mice.
It wasn't that way initially. Lots of people started using iTunes just to play their music collections, and burning to CD was an important feature. Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn" ? The iPod's came to dominate the portable mp3 market because of iTunes. They supplanted recordable cds. If Apple doesn't allow people to burn movies, the movie store is either dead in the water or will face very slow adoption. Nobody is going to shell out $300 for some box just to download movies and watch them on their TV when they can buy DVDs for the same price. If you want to hook people you have to get them on your platform, then show them what is possible with new hardware. I.e: get them ripping and burning cds in iTunes, then show them the iPod. Get them downloading movies and watching them, then show them the movie player.
The reality is, burning movies has not yet reached the pervasiveness that burning music did when iTunes became popular, and I would bet that the movie studios are putting up a stink. Give them a year. The common man has almost figured out bittorrent:)
Here's some of his shitty poetry, care of the wayback machine:
ocean's cold
rfjason
Closing up shop in a world of endless wonder
All those rides sent your mind asunder
I always thought you'd win the days last light
I'm sorry that I was right
Never fear the machine's darkness
Even the roaring would leave you helpless
I always knew you'd bring back someone
To remind me of all that I had done
Oh, ocean's cold
They never told you to watch out ever
Thrilled with the ride that they had never
Ridden through all it's twists and turns
The ticket dries and burns
Oh, ocean's cold
Do you feel it now, the ocean's cold
You'd never know it sneaking up on you
The permanance of what you go through
I always thought you'd win the burning rays
I'm sorry that you saw these days
Oh no, ocean's cold
Oh I feel it now, the ocean's cold
As someone with a graduate degree in math, I hope my advice is worthwhile. First, a Bachelor's degree doesn't give you anything beyond basic skills. You can not take a degree (any degree) and walk right into a job, unless that job is mundane (and everybody starts there). What you are getting is a general education with possibly some exposure to specialized concepts or techniques. That's not a criticism, it's reality. Whatever career path you take will build on those skills, and you are just starting out. So I hope I have disillusioned you from depressingly common notion that university degree = job. There is no job waiting for you. If you wanted training for a job, you should have gone to a technical school.
Thankfully, what you did get (or are getting) is in many ways better than a job. An education in any subject is worthwhile, but this is especially true for hard subjects, like math and science. They teach you to think, and people who think are valuable in any field. You need to find a field that you're interested in, or look for a place that needs someone like you. You need to be ambitious, you need to be flexible, and you need to work hard. Then you will be successful.
My advice is to look for companies which do interesting things and apply. They will look at you and decide if you could be useful. You will have to do this a lot. Don't be afraid to jump at something you are unfamiliar with. For the most part you don't know anything (and when you're young EVERYBODY knows this), so you need to try a lot of things. Don't be afraid of trying anything. If you have some good ideas and a bit of cash, you might try starting a business. In that case, read all of Paul Graham's essays (I don't know much).
As for your education, the honest truth is it doesn't matter. Even if you go to graduate school it doesn't matter. So do whatever is easiest to fulfill the requirements, and take every course that you think could be interesting. Your goal is to learn something. In the real world, that counts, but not in the way that school has lead you to believe.
Sorry, I forgot to mention how to get contours from your plot. Basically, you intersect planes (z=1, z=2, etc) with each polygon and draw all the resulting lines. To determine if a polygon intersects z=t, subtract t from all the z-values and see if you have both positive and negative signs. If not, then the polygon is entirely on one side of z=t and you don't get a line from it. You can speed this up by sorting the polygons by minimal z-value (among all the vertices), then breaking ties by maximal z-value. To draw the part of a contour resulting from a polygon, it helps a lot of have triangles. Then two points will be on one side of z=t and one point will be on the other (or touching) z=t. Draw a picture of this on paper, and compute the approriate (x,y) values on the sides of the triangle that cross z=t. Then project the line segment connecting them to the view screen to get a piece of the contour.
The idea behind plotting z = f(x,y) is to sample the function on a grid of points (x,y). You then interpolate linearly between adjacent points to get a polygon. For example, if my grid contains (x,y) = {(0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1)} then my polygon in 3-space has corners (0,0,f(0,0)), (0,1,f(0,1)), etc. Project this polygon onto the screen using the standard 3d transformations.
There are a couple of things to watch out for. First, all polygons should be convex. This is usually not a problem, but you can guarantee it by making sure that the 2D grid is composed of convex polygons - typically rectangles or triangles are used. It might be best to use a grid of rectangles first because that is easier to understand and debug, but when that is working move to a grid of triangles because everything will be much faster.
Second, if the function changes rapidly between the grid points then your plot will probably be wrong. One solution which works in most cases is to use an adaptive grid. For each polygon in 3D, average all the corner points to obtain the center. Compute the actual function value using the x and y coordinates of the center, and compare with the center's z-value. If they differ significantly then you split the polygon up, using the center point (with the real function value) as a new vertex, and repeat. A rectangle will split into 4 smaller rectangles, a triangle into 3 smaller triangles, etc. To determine if the values differ significantly, project them onto the view screen and see if they map to the same pixel. There are ways to optimize all of this significantly.
For plotting a cloud of points you are really screwed unless you know the function is of the form z = f(x,y). In that case, each (x,y) point has two closest neighbours which should give you a triangle. Sort the values by x and then by y, and as you construct each triangle remove the initial point (but not the neighbours) from the list. This will give you a triangular mesh. There are a few weird things which can happen, but you can mostly solve these problems by throwing away bad points.
My point is that the school's actions are not justified. What right does a publically funded school have to dictate what websites it's students go to ? Elementary schools can filter websites, but a university is for adults. They (of all places) should respect the rights and freedoms of citizens. There is hardly a difference between this and threatening students who read certain books or associate with certain people. They can wrap it all under their "codes-of-conduct" all they want, it is still a violation of fundamental rights, namely the rights to freedom of expression and to freedom of association.
My larger point is that while seemingly every institution has taken it upon themselves to encroach on individual liberties, a growing economic disparity leaves more and more people vulnerable. It's not an issue of rich versus poor. A solidly middle class family can muster resources to fight injustice, or at the very least, they can present a credible challenge so that a compromise is persued. Poor people have fewer recourses available, and economically unstable families (which is what much of the middle class has become) can not afford the additional risk. You tell me, is this a recipe for subjugation ? I think it is a serious problem for a free society, and while this might seem like a trivial issue, it perfectly illustrates the overall dynamic of what is happening.
Is your free speech for sale ? It is if you want to keep that scholarship. This is a great example of how growing economic inequality spills over into other aspects of life. A well off student can afford to take a stand on principle here.
It would be good for lan parties, but I suspect it's really a way to get people to take their work PC home.
That being said, I'm sure that since the margins for these things are higher it will soon become unfashionable to carry around a lightweight computer and have an absence of lower back problems. Long live marketing!
Tell that to Richard Dinon, the Florida man charged with a felony after using an open wireless access point. Or how about the Register.com versus Verio case ? The court ruled that Verio scraping a publically available whois database was illegal, because Register.com put a notice in there that repeated automated access was not permitted. That precendent almost contradicts this one (there's the distinction of how versus who).
For what it's worth, I agree with the court's ruling. What I don't agree with is the tendency for people, companies, government agencies, police, and yes, occasionally the courts, to presume that citizens need permission for everything that they do. If it doesn't violate a law, we don't need permission.
Buying a product is not the same as buying a service. The question is whether the ISP is capable of giving the customer their full bandwidth, not just at the particular time when grandma wants it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing that this chip could do that could not be done by simply making current designs more efficient. In fact, the use of such a chip necessarily wastes energy.
Software is much more then that.
In what way ? Is there an example of something that people have been able to do with software that they could not have done otherwise (possibly with less economy and a lot more tedious work) ? We do not have artificial intelligence or anything. It seems to me that all of the revolutionary changes brought about by software are economic, in the sense that expensive, tedious things can now be done cheaply, by an ever larger number of people.
The whole point of software is to automate tedious things, so if choice becomes tedious we should really try to automate that as well. Joel's approach is entirely correct: figure out what your users are trying to do, and try to offer options which relate to them. Exporting all functionality and leaving the user to figure out what all the options mean exemplifies design failure. It is essentially "no design". Slightly better is to provide sensible defaults, but the best designs focus on things the user thinks a computer ought to do and things the user wants to do (disregarding, sometimes, what the computer really does do). The whole situation reminds me of command line interfaces, where the user had to memorize a bunch of commands and options and put them all together in order to accomplish a goal. We have somehow recreated that mess in graphical form, with the added inefficiencies of navigating menus using a mouse. It's almost like a cruel joke has been played on the public. Just when computers look like they might become simple enough for anyone to use and are widely adopted - BAM! Take that suckers! Whenever this topic comes up I think of my Grandma. She is a smart lady and she uses computers, but she is also old. She has been around for a while, and she's not about to tolerate any more nonsense. Contrary to the stereotype she is not intimidated by technology, but she avoids a lot of it because her impression is that most of this stuff is designed by idiots who don't have a clue what they are doing. I hate to say it, but she's right. I think that when we talk about software that grandmas can use, it should be in this sense. Old people are not going to put up with this crazy crap the way younger people seem to do. It has to make sense, and it has to work.
That's really not true. If you're smart and save your money (which no one does, because they don't want to live like a student) you could be substantially better off by not going to college or university right away. You are correct that eventually it is an impediment to most careers, but you could still do it on the side and have a degree by the time you need it, without the financial hit of being a full time student for more than a year or two (tops).
+5 insightful. Educational policy seems to always be derived from the following three things (in order):
1) commercial interests
2) fads and incestuous thinking
3) hyperbole and irrational thinking
You could say it is a serious problem, but it's hard to say anything without being lumped into 3).
Two male CEO's "marry" and one leaves their company to their "spouse" avoiding billions of dollars of tax consequences.
Do you honestly think these people don't have ways of avoiding taxes now ?
Thinner platters can save energy because they don't have to be as wide - you can stack more of them vertically and get the same storage space.
"a mouse with a big head, ears, eyes and teeth" - I blame the influence of Japanese animation. It's only a matter of time before we have mecha-mice and a shy male mouse in a house full of female mice.
It wasn't that way initially. Lots of people started using iTunes just to play their music collections, and burning to CD was an important feature. Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn" ? The iPod's came to dominate the portable mp3 market because of iTunes. They supplanted recordable cds. If Apple doesn't allow people to burn movies, the movie store is either dead in the water or will face very slow adoption. Nobody is going to shell out $300 for some box just to download movies and watch them on their TV when they can buy DVDs for the same price. If you want to hook people you have to get them on your platform, then show them what is possible with new hardware. I.e: get them ripping and burning cds in iTunes, then show them the iPod. Get them downloading movies and watching them, then show them the movie player.
:)
The reality is, burning movies has not yet reached the pervasiveness that burning music did when iTunes became popular, and I would bet that the movie studios are putting up a stink. Give them a year. The common man has almost figured out bittorrent
Here's some of his shitty poetry, care of the wayback machine:
ocean's cold
rfjason
Closing up shop in a world of endless wonder
All those rides sent your mind asunder
I always thought you'd win the days last light
I'm sorry that I was right
Never fear the machine's darkness
Even the roaring would leave you helpless
I always knew you'd bring back someone
To remind me of all that I had done
Oh, ocean's cold
They never told you to watch out ever
Thrilled with the ride that they had never
Ridden through all it's twists and turns
The ticket dries and burns
Oh, ocean's cold
Do you feel it now, the ocean's cold
You'd never know it sneaking up on you
The permanance of what you go through
I always thought you'd win the burning rays
I'm sorry that you saw these days
Oh no, ocean's cold
Oh I feel it now, the ocean's cold
You need to adjust the tracking on your VCRs. This problem should not appear on DVDs.
You souless bastards! Rich, rich, souless bastards :) Just kidding - please don't wreck the economy.
As someone with a graduate degree in math, I hope my advice is worthwhile. First, a Bachelor's degree doesn't give you anything beyond basic skills. You can not take a degree (any degree) and walk right into a job, unless that job is mundane (and everybody starts there). What you are getting is a general education with possibly some exposure to specialized concepts or techniques. That's not a criticism, it's reality. Whatever career path you take will build on those skills, and you are just starting out. So I hope I have disillusioned you from depressingly common notion that university degree = job. There is no job waiting for you. If you wanted training for a job, you should have gone to a technical school.
Thankfully, what you did get (or are getting) is in many ways better than a job. An education in any subject is worthwhile, but this is especially true for hard subjects, like math and science. They teach you to think, and people who think are valuable in any field. You need to find a field that you're interested in, or look for a place that needs someone like you. You need to be ambitious, you need to be flexible, and you need to work hard. Then you will be successful.
My advice is to look for companies which do interesting things and apply. They will look at you and decide if you could be useful. You will have to do this a lot. Don't be afraid to jump at something you are unfamiliar with. For the most part you don't know anything (and when you're young EVERYBODY knows this), so you need to try a lot of things. Don't be afraid of trying anything. If you have some good ideas and a bit of cash, you might try starting a business. In that case, read all of Paul Graham's essays (I don't know much).
As for your education, the honest truth is it doesn't matter. Even if you go to graduate school it doesn't matter. So do whatever is easiest to fulfill the requirements, and take every course that you think could be interesting. Your goal is to learn something. In the real world, that counts, but not in the way that school has lead you to believe.
Sorry, I forgot to mention how to get contours from your plot. Basically, you intersect planes (z=1, z=2, etc) with each polygon and draw all the resulting lines. To determine if a polygon intersects z=t, subtract t from all the z-values and see if you have both positive and negative signs. If not, then the polygon is entirely on one side of z=t and you don't get a line from it. You can speed this up by sorting the polygons by minimal z-value (among all the vertices), then breaking ties by maximal z-value. To draw the part of a contour resulting from a polygon, it helps a lot of have triangles. Then two points will be on one side of z=t and one point will be on the other (or touching) z=t. Draw a picture of this on paper, and compute the approriate (x,y) values on the sides of the triangle that cross z=t. Then project the line segment connecting them to the view screen to get a piece of the contour.
The idea behind plotting z = f(x,y) is to sample the function on a grid of points (x,y). You then interpolate linearly between adjacent points to get a polygon. For example, if my grid contains (x,y) = {(0,0), (0,1), (1,0), (1,1)} then my polygon in 3-space has corners (0,0,f(0,0)), (0,1,f(0,1)), etc. Project this polygon onto the screen using the standard 3d transformations.
There are a couple of things to watch out for. First, all polygons should be convex. This is usually not a problem, but you can guarantee it by making sure that the 2D grid is composed of convex polygons - typically rectangles or triangles are used. It might be best to use a grid of rectangles first because that is easier to understand and debug, but when that is working move to a grid of triangles because everything will be much faster.
Second, if the function changes rapidly between the grid points then your plot will probably be wrong. One solution which works in most cases is to use an adaptive grid. For each polygon in 3D, average all the corner points to obtain the center. Compute the actual function value using the x and y coordinates of the center, and compare with the center's z-value. If they differ significantly then you split the polygon up, using the center point (with the real function value) as a new vertex, and repeat. A rectangle will split into 4 smaller rectangles, a triangle into 3 smaller triangles, etc. To determine if the values differ significantly, project them onto the view screen and see if they map to the same pixel. There are ways to optimize all of this significantly.
For plotting a cloud of points you are really screwed unless you know the function is of the form z = f(x,y). In that case, each (x,y) point has two closest neighbours which should give you a triangle. Sort the values by x and then by y, and as you construct each triangle remove the initial point (but not the neighbours) from the list. This will give you a triangular mesh. There are a few weird things which can happen, but you can mostly solve these problems by throwing away bad points.
How is it that the most useful comment in the whole thread is not modded informative ? This could easily be the problem! Mod up!
My point is that the school's actions are not justified. What right does a publically funded school have to dictate what websites it's students go to ? Elementary schools can filter websites, but a university is for adults. They (of all places) should respect the rights and freedoms of citizens. There is hardly a difference between this and threatening students who read certain books or associate with certain people. They can wrap it all under their "codes-of-conduct" all they want, it is still a violation of fundamental rights, namely the rights to freedom of expression and to freedom of association.
My larger point is that while seemingly every institution has taken it upon themselves to encroach on individual liberties, a growing economic disparity leaves more and more people vulnerable. It's not an issue of rich versus poor. A solidly middle class family can muster resources to fight injustice, or at the very least, they can present a credible challenge so that a compromise is persued. Poor people have fewer recourses available, and economically unstable families (which is what much of the middle class has become) can not afford the additional risk. You tell me, is this a recipe for subjugation ? I think it is a serious problem for a free society, and while this might seem like a trivial issue, it perfectly illustrates the overall dynamic of what is happening.
Is your free speech for sale ? It is if you want to keep that scholarship. This is a great example of how growing economic inequality spills over into other aspects of life. A well off student can afford to take a stand on principle here.
We'll I'm sure they'll post a dupe to make up for it.
Wow, case closed. I would have questioned the librarian's judgement, but if this is the case then there is no decision to make.
It would be good for lan parties, but I suspect it's really a way to get people to take their work PC home.
That being said, I'm sure that since the margins for these things are higher it will soon become unfashionable to carry around a lightweight computer and have an absence of lower back problems. Long live marketing!
I believe they mean "portable relative to other desktop computers".
Don't bring your "facts" into this :)
Tell that to Richard Dinon, the Florida man charged with a felony after using an open wireless access point. Or how about the Register.com versus Verio case ? The court ruled that Verio scraping a publically available whois database was illegal, because Register.com put a notice in there that repeated automated access was not permitted. That precendent almost contradicts this one (there's the distinction of how versus who).
For what it's worth, I agree with the court's ruling. What I don't agree with is the tendency for people, companies, government agencies, police, and yes, occasionally the courts, to presume that citizens need permission for everything that they do. If it doesn't violate a law, we don't need permission.
Buying a product is not the same as buying a service. The question is whether the ISP is capable of giving the customer their full bandwidth, not just at the particular time when grandma wants it.