One of the major employers of coders in the US is the US government via NASA and the military (think jobs that can't be outsourced because of security restrictions). Where I work I use algebra and linear algebra on a pretty regular basis and I have used calc, stat, and diff eq on more than one occassion. If you want to guide a missle,simulate a satellite,do advanced data mining,figure out the worst case run time of the algorithm you just implemented on a real-time system, etc, etc, etc math is a must. In addition think of sociology, engineering, physics, etc. All require a good grasp of math.
Who says I'm going to call my friends using VOIP in the future anyway? What stops me from writing an unregulated program that does the same thing and does it over an encrypted channel using openssl ? As mobile phones become more powerful and connected directly to high-speed internet what stops me from doing the same thing there? Furthermore is I'm serious about doing something illegal why am I not using pgp to talk about it?
First, since when does the presence of life on other planets contradict the existence of a god? The earth isn't flat and the sun doesn't orbit us either, yet somehow world religions go on. Second, how is it so hard to see the innate value and magnitude if we were to discover life on mars? Finally, why is the discovery of life only interesting if it involves little green men. Microbial life on mars would be a watershed event in it's own right. I can't even begin to list all the medical, philisophical, biological, etc implications that would immediately result.
Assumptions are irritating
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The article falls flat on two fronts for me. The article assume that 1) religion means christianity 2)ethics are the sole domain of religion.
Outside of that particular pet peeve I would also argue that the article does not address the issue on its true scale: religion in mass media. Nor does it address the reason for the typically marginal role of religion in the mass media: there are a lot of people who either don't want to see it in that context(Christians included) or who do want to see it but can't agree on what it should look like.
Just looking at the miriad of splinter groups within the judeo-christian pantheon of religions and the innumerable hotly contested details that caused them to split in the first place should make it clear why a strongly religious game with mass appeal would be difficult to create. Now think in terms of the gaming demographic. That doesn't mean impossible, but outside of the occassional high production value rarity al-la Passion of Christ I wouldn't hold my breath.
And to get to the heart of the issue, is that really such a bad thing? Doesn't relying on video games to provide religion, education, ethical guidance, etc. simply mirror the TV as a baby sitter/parent problem?
I would argue that though GAs are better than simple hill climbing they are far from being "Great" at getting out of local optima. In fact, a lot of the theory surrounding GAs has to do with how to avoid exactly that since the basic GA of some mutation combined with splicing for reproduction tends to get stuck extremely easily being limited almost entirely to the values represented in the original population. Evolutionary algorithms might be a better choice to pair with hill climbers. Evolutionary algorithms use vector cross products and gausian probabalistic mutation as the main operations for reproduction and my uderstanding is that they tend to get much better coverage of the search space than GAs. For instance a big problem in standargd GAs is that you get stuck with various combinations of whatever values were in the original population (only mutation can put in new values and mutated "genes" tend not to stick around for very long in the later stages of the evolution) . In EAs where most of the reproduction is based on probabalistic calculations however, you get a whole gradiant of values that change all the time.
I think the point is not that it isn't useful but that it was already being used. My relatives in South Africa know about this trick. The boy scouts use it there for goodness sake. I've been looking around and apparently the "inventor" never even checked the interior temperature of his device. Also the same article seems to indicate the social impacts reported were not indipendantly verified, but reported by Abba himself....
Relying on secret design to ensure security is what is known as seucrity through obscurity and is generally frowned upon by the security community the first thing you do when designing a secure system is assume that the attacker knows exactly how it is set up. In the case of ATMs if one designs the security around the attacker not knowing the design what happens when an ex-employee decides to make a quick buck?
Does anyone understand the manufacturer's argument about the calibration codes being like the difference between two processor designs? I can't imagine how that would be, but then I don't know anything about the calibration codes.....
Manually recompiling half of your shared libraries to get a program to run : HARD
Breaking half the other programs on your disk doing it: EASY
Manually configuring your firewall config file for additional security : HARD
Forgetting 2 lines that leave you wide open: EASY
Getting X-windows to run on unkown hardware : HARD
getting X-windows to ***K itself on same unknown hardware accidentally 2 days later: EASY
Manually setting up an install package: HARD
typing tar -cvf reallybigimportantfile......:EASY
How a monthly subscribtion eventually filters down to the artists? It seems such a system would make it hard to do the "for each time a user listens to X's song they get hit with a bat by the RIAA" analysis.
This was on NPR the other day. There are a number of issues one of which is that when we flip a coin it actually has a fairly high probability of never actually "flipping" end-over-end. You can test this by attaching a ribbon to the coin and to, say, the table, flipping the coin and then counting the number of twists in the ribbon. It isn't a question of trying to flip it more or less times so much as the physics of the flip. As mentioned in other posts, letting the coin bounce on the ground does make things better since in that case the coin's motion is less predictable.
When I worked at Fujitsu we had some of the crusoe powered notebooks. The size was nice, but the performance on winXP was disappointingly weak. Any time I opened anything under winXP it took longer to come up than it did on my ancient 400MHz desktop from home.
I think that the author makes some very good points about the high-level problems of OOP and I think the same also applies to AOP (aspect oriented programming). Both approaches force you to take a design that consists of many different, well understood paradigms and then force it into a language that supports only one or two of them. AOP gets people excited because it means you have two paradigms to work with instead of one. This is great, but it misses the point. We should be putting a whole set of different design paradigms into the next generation of languages not just (last language)+1 of them.
I think part of the reason that this broader problem is not fully realized is that you don't run into it until you have to update existing code with essentially new features and even then hindsight is 20/20. It shows up there because you have to now take the constrained language, look at it in terms of the many design paradigms you started with, add a new one, and then squish it all back in again. The result of this process may be very close to what you had before (this is when it's easy) or may be very different(this is often when we see a group scrap it all). Unfortunately it's all to easy to just say "well if I'd implemented it THIS way then the change would have been small" which ends up being almost as helpful as realizing you should have played the OTHER lottery number.
The other reason I think we don't see any movement in this direction is that, much as with functional programming before it, once you have spent the last 5,10,50 years thinking of everything in terms of OOP it is very hard to see where it's letting you down.
did you read the review? I'm thinking maybe the part that goes:
Most adults and even teenagers don't want to 'learn how to program' as much as they want to learn how to use a tool to perform a task.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the major employers of coders in the US is the US government via NASA and the military (think jobs that can't be outsourced because of security restrictions). Where I work I use algebra and linear algebra on a pretty regular basis and I have used calc, stat, and diff eq on more than one occassion. If you want to guide a missle,simulate a satellite,do advanced data mining,figure out the worst case run time of the algorithm you just implemented on a real-time system, etc, etc, etc math is a must.
In addition think of sociology, engineering, physics, etc. All require a good grasp of math.
Who says I'm going to call my friends using VOIP in the future anyway? What stops me from writing an unregulated program that does the same thing and does it over an encrypted channel using openssl ? As mobile phones become more powerful and connected directly to high-speed internet what stops me from doing the same thing there? Furthermore is I'm serious about doing something illegal why am I not using pgp to talk about it?
First, since when does the presence of life on other planets contradict the existence of a god? The earth isn't flat and the sun doesn't orbit us either, yet somehow world religions go on. Second, how is it so hard to see the innate value and magnitude if we were to discover life on mars? Finally, why is the discovery of life only interesting if it involves little green men. Microbial life on mars would be a watershed event in it's own right. I can't even begin to list all the medical, philisophical, biological, etc implications that would immediately result.
The article falls flat on two fronts for me. The article assume that 1) religion means christianity 2)ethics are the sole domain of religion.
Outside of that particular pet peeve I would also argue that the article does not address the issue on its true scale: religion in mass media. Nor does it address the reason for the typically marginal role of religion in the mass media: there are a lot of people who either don't want to see it in that context(Christians included) or who do want to see it but can't agree on what it should look like.
Just looking at the miriad of splinter groups within the judeo-christian pantheon of religions and the innumerable hotly contested details that caused them to split in the first place should make it clear why a strongly religious game with mass appeal would be difficult to create. Now think in terms of the gaming demographic. That doesn't mean impossible, but outside of the occassional high production value rarity al-la Passion of Christ I wouldn't hold my breath.
And to get to the heart of the issue, is that really such a bad thing? Doesn't relying on video games to provide religion, education, ethical guidance, etc. simply mirror the TV as a baby sitter/parent problem?
I would argue that though GAs are better than simple hill climbing they are far from being "Great" at getting out of local optima. In fact, a lot of the theory surrounding GAs has to do with how to avoid exactly that since the basic GA of some mutation combined with splicing for reproduction tends to get stuck extremely easily being limited almost entirely to the values represented in the original population. Evolutionary algorithms might be a better choice to pair with hill climbers. Evolutionary algorithms use vector cross products and gausian probabalistic mutation as the main operations for reproduction and my uderstanding is that they tend to get much better coverage of the search space than GAs. For instance a big problem in standargd GAs is that you get stuck with various combinations of whatever values were in the original population (only mutation can put in new values and mutated "genes" tend not to stick around for very long in the later stages of the evolution) . In EAs where most of the reproduction is based on probabalistic calculations however, you get a whole gradiant of values that change all the time.
I think the point is not that it isn't useful but that it was already being used. My relatives in South Africa know about this trick. The boy scouts use it there for goodness sake. I've been looking around and apparently the "inventor" never even checked the interior temperature of his device. Also the same article seems to indicate the social impacts reported were not indipendantly verified, but reported by Abba himself....
Relying on secret design to ensure security is what is known as seucrity through obscurity and is generally frowned upon by the security community the first thing you do when designing a secure system is assume that the attacker knows exactly how it is set up. In the case of ATMs if one designs the security around the attacker not knowing the design what happens when an ex-employee decides to make a quick buck?
Does anyone understand the manufacturer's argument about the calibration codes being like the difference between two processor designs? I can't imagine how that would be, but then I don't know anything about the calibration codes.....
The potential is to make them all completely different though. Just feed the robot a different model and you get a different house.
Manually recompiling half of your shared libraries to get a program to run : HARD Breaking half the other programs on your disk doing it: EASY Manually configuring your firewall config file for additional security : HARD Forgetting 2 lines that leave you wide open: EASY Getting X-windows to run on unkown hardware : HARD getting X-windows to ***K itself on same unknown hardware accidentally 2 days later: EASY Manually setting up an install package: HARD typing tar -cvf reallybigimportantfile ...... :EASY
How a monthly subscribtion eventually filters down to the artists? It seems such a system would make it hard to do the "for each time a user listens to X's song they get hit with a bat by the RIAA" analysis.
This was on NPR the other day. There are a number of issues one of which is that when we flip a coin it actually has a fairly high probability of never actually "flipping" end-over-end. You can test this by attaching a ribbon to the coin and to, say, the table, flipping the coin and then counting the number of twists in the ribbon. It isn't a question of trying to flip it more or less times so much as the physics of the flip. As mentioned in other posts, letting the coin bounce on the ground does make things better since in that case the coin's motion is less predictable.
When I worked at Fujitsu we had some of the crusoe powered notebooks. The size was nice, but the performance on winXP was disappointingly weak. Any time I opened anything under winXP it took longer to come up than it did on my ancient 400MHz desktop from home.
There was a slashdot interview that raised a few eyebrows on that front
And I thought having a cdrom open randomly was bad.... Just wait for the smell extension
self tuning singers......
I think that the author makes some very good points about the high-level problems of OOP and I think the same also applies to AOP (aspect oriented programming). Both approaches force you to take a design that consists of many different, well understood paradigms and then force it into a language that supports only one or two of them. AOP gets people excited because it means you have two paradigms to work with instead of one. This is great, but it misses the point. We should be putting a whole set of different design paradigms into the next generation of languages not just (last language)+1 of them.
I think part of the reason that this broader problem is not fully realized is that you don't run into it until you have to update existing code with essentially new features and even then hindsight is 20/20. It shows up there because you have to now take the constrained language, look at it in terms of the many design paradigms you started with, add a new one, and then squish it all back in again. The result of this process may be very close to what you had before (this is when it's easy) or may be very different(this is often when we see a group scrap it all). Unfortunately it's all to easy to just say "well if I'd implemented it THIS way then the change would have been small" which ends up being almost as helpful as realizing you should have played the OTHER lottery number.
The other reason I think we don't see any movement in this direction is that, much as with functional programming before it, once you have spent the last 5,10,50 years thinking of everything in terms of OOP it is very hard to see where it's letting you down.
did you read the review? I'm thinking maybe the part that goes:
Most adults and even teenagers don't want to 'learn how to program' as much as they want to learn how to use a tool to perform a task.