You've confused a number of variables in these cases (it's probably because you seem to merge "research" and "marketing" -- the two use entirely different vocabularies.)
You seem a little skeptical of scientists in general. That's a good thing until you toss out all claims only because something is claimed at all.;)
There is an inconsistency at the heart of your post that I'd like to weed out.
(and it's funny how quickly you'll discount an oberservation: Don't you simply believe? Should I make some tables and package it in a whitepaper? Does that make it more credible?)
I never said anything about being published... only about providing sufficient evidence. If you'll go back and read my post you'll notice that I said that you've got to actually debunk a claim if you're going to dismiss it. None of this has anything to do with publication. You did not make a detailed observation. This is the matter in dispute. Even if you'd at least said specifically what changes are visible between an animation at 30fps and 60fps you'd have been contributing something.
Any Quake 3 player with a good system would have ZERO difficulty discerning between 60fps, 100fps, and possibly 200fps
You'll also note that this isn't necessarily proof that the eye is picking up each frame. If you've ever programmed a time-relative game (that is... a game that doesn't use the lock-step method for applying world physics,) you'll see that the finer grained the latency times are between frames, the closer the objects get to optimum movement. It's possible to base a character's movement off of a step function... and in that case you'll see jumps through time/space regardless of the frame rate.
The point is that you've got to be precise about what you're "seeing."
In the case of pixel accuracy simply measuring the number of rods and cones in the eye would be insufficient and a half-measure: The "picture" that we see is the end result of a very intelligent system which may, for instance, do sub-pixel integration via "jitter"
You mean interpolation... and this is the brain's way of accounting for "jumps" between "frames"... that much is true. However, this is just a smarter way of catching up to live data. It's not adding any extra processed frames. It's like the difference between the state of the video buffer and the state of the monitor's surface. The "tearing" that you see in animated graphics is the digital version of our brain's motion blur. Of course, even if you do assume that interpolated frames count... there's a limit in the brain's processing capabilities. Your original post decried the whole notion of finding limits and that was the original issue in dispute.
I hope you're not going to suggest that we can process photons faster than photons can move.;)
The notion that there are no limits to our capacity for visual interpretation is silly.
P.S. The post is interesting because most people in computers have seen this shit a million times before
Yes, many people on Slashdot talk out of their ass but that doesn't mean that it's interesting.
CD is apparently beyond the absolute limit of human hearing, yet strangely they're coming out with DVD audio at 24-bits per sample/96Khz
I suppose that you're going to say that we can hear sound at any frequency for any amplitude.;)
This is entirely off of the original topic anyway. It's fine to take issue with a statement like, "humans can only process 30 frames per second," but unless you prove otherwise (note: you don't even have to prove the actual limit) then your statement amounts to, "I don't think so" (which is also fine, though much less interesting than proof.) What you did was even worse than that though. You essentially said, "ignore all measurements of human capabilities -- they're inherently flawed because people have made mistakes in the past." That's the issue. That's bad reasoning.
Another is to append the JAR to the end of a BMP, since windows can use a BMP as an icon, and ZIP (and thus JAR) files are end-based.
Why do that? First of all, "bitmaps" (they should be called PIXMAPS damnit) aren't going to look so great scaled down and up in all kinds of ways (or moved between color depths.) Icons are distinct for just this reason (they're really just files that can contain several bitmaps of predetermined resolutions/color-depths.)
So anyway... I doubt that you need the imaging lesson from me. You've got the wrong approach to this problem though (and there's no need to pull out the "Evil Microsoft" buttons or anything.)
For a given file extension, an "icon handler" can be installed. This is a COM object that must implement the IUnknown (of course,) IPersistFile, and IExtractIcon interfaces (they're all very very easy to implement.)
This way, you can actually store the icon resource in the java file and the JRE can just install a handler for the Windows-specific implementation of the icon viewer (or you can add your own extension and push it into the Java community -- the java file format isn't too complicated.)
Are you actually employed as a programmer? I'm practically homeless and out of work... I could really use a job.;) ____________________
How exactly is this moderated as interesting? The only interesting thing about this post is how a person can be so deliberately obtuse.
There are actual quantitative experiments that have demonstrated the limits of photon reception in the human eye. To just dismiss all of this work with, "there is no doubt that Quake 3 FEELS smoother..." is ridiculous! Go ahead then, prove that there's no physical limit.
The next thing you know, he'll be saying that there's no limit to how much energy we consume in a given instant (after all, if the capabilities of the eye aren't fine-grained, then neither is the structure of the body -- surely!)
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade... has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
The next time that someone purports to defy many many years of research, make sure that you have more than "his word" to go on... especially if he says that it's been "proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable."
If you think that there are no limits to our capabilities for processing colors, sounds, and variations through time, you'll have to ignore an awful lot of biology. ____________________
World Wide Web, a now popular bastardization of a once U.S. DoD network.
What do you mean? The WWW is made possible by an application protocol, a certain document specification, and a media descriptor database. ARPANET consisted of physical connections between computers and a transport protocol to shift bytes around. The only way that you can argue that the two are connected is by saying that the application protocol of the WWW is usually implemented over a transport protocol like the one used by ARPANET.
Is this what you meant to say?
For the record, I'm an American citizen and think that this whole thread has become pretty silly. ____________________
Being 'famous' is equivelent to being respected by ones peers*, a much more honourable goal than simply stuffing your driveway full of SUVs and gold faucets for your sinks.
People stuff their driveways with SUV's and assorted trinkets because overall it earns them a higher measure of respect from their peers. No offense, and I honestly wish that conditions weren't like this, but the only people living in "la la land" are the ones who don't yet recognize that the majority of people award values of respect according to the summation of some (superficially arbitrary and generally shared) series. Each person is assigned a value according to the sum of weights assigned by the perceiver to the "desirable" characteristics that the subject possesses. Each perceiver has an "n-dimensional criterion vector" in his/her head that he/she fills with measurements of your capacity in each category. That perceiver's own bias is applied by taking the dot product of your measurements with a vector of matching size (each component of this latter vector indicates the perceiver's preference for that particular trait: apathy at 0, severe dislike at very low numbers and severe like at very high numbers.) Once these two vectors are combined, the resultant vector is summed. The perceiver will then categorize you according to whatever threshold your summation has passed. This can be anything from disdain (those of you with high "nerd" marks among the perceivers with particularly large negative numbers in the corresponding component of the bias vector) to complete lust (those of you with the "beautiful" marks among the perceivers with particularly large positive numbers in the components that match your physical features.)
People don't necessarily think of it like that but it works for defining things like neural networks.
I know that this is off of the main subject, but it seems to be a very important topic. If you want to be appreciated for criteria more complex and varied than your visible physical structure, find people who are patient and at least mildly analytical (these will be the ones most likely to acknowledge the traits that you value.)
The worst thing that you can do is display impatience and overgeneral thinking. That's exactly the behavior that you despise.
PS: I think that Maslow was an ass.;) ____________________
I don't know how terribly common the GDI is in *real* games.
The GDI would be used in circumstances where it couldn't be avoided. The case of Unreal that you mentioned (which probably makes heavier use of user) is the type of situation that I was describing. Of course most big games won't use drawing surfaces as GDI targets. The point was that most Windows programs will exploit the features of Windows in one way or another. Just look at a program's import table.
I know how DirectX works, its my favorite API to work with. However, my point was that DirectX changes very significantly (particularly between 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0) and it might be too hard for a company to keep up with the changing interfaces.
The differences between DirectX 6.0 and DirectX 8.0 are fewer than the differences between DirectX 0.0 and DirectX 8.0. Regardless, the most commonly updated part of DirectX is Direct3D (and even then it's been D3DIM that's changed most notably.) Microsoft's seperating D3D from DDraw and then nixing DDraw is probably the biggest modification.
So, Direct3D should be the toughest thing to keep up with (the other subsets are pretty much unchanging and very basic -- except for DirectMusic.) It's not as if the basic mathematics are going to be changed anytime soon, and all extentions to the design of D3D are built on top of that math.
Except that Win32 is entirely irrelevent for this discussion.
Win32 isn't entirely irrelevant in this discussion. Firstly, DirectX objects are just a subset of the set of all possible COM objects. If you're going to reproduce DirectX on a system, you'll have to reproduce OLE (at least to some degree.) Secondly, several games programmers use the ->GetDC() member of the IDirectDrawSurface interface at some spot in their games. When the surface is locked and a device context handle is returned, the program is obviously going to use it in classic GDI calls. Thirdly, the DirectDraw library can automatically perform clipping for you when you provide it with a window handle (so some system for managing window information is important too.) In short, any game that was intended to be run under Windows will probably require parts of the Windows API far removed from those exposed by the DirectX interfaces.
We're talking DirectX, and that changes significantly every year.
Right, and in fact this newest release makes the whole DirectDraw discussion pretty much dead. In any case, the way that COM objects are meant to be designed is that updated interfaces must be queried. Right now, a game might attempt to create the first version of the DirectDraw object: CoCreateInstance(CLSID_DirectDraw, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IDirectDraw, (void**)*pdd) and if it fails then the game can abort with a message that the required version of DirectX isn't installed. So long as OLE/COM is supported properly, there won't be any problem with the changes made to DirectX from year to year that Windows machines without the latest libraries won't have too.
Any function that approaches infinity can represent all of the stars in the universe (at least as far as counting them.)
to wit:
f(x)=1/x
x->1/n f(x)=n
Where "n" is the number of stars in the universe.
As for going from a fractal graph to a formula... that's a little backwards. You go from a formula to a graph, just like every other graph. ____________________
But does anyone seriously want to end up like Tesla?
Yes! You've focused on one small aspect of his life and blown it up into monumental proportions. Grant died penniless too, but I doubt that any of his descendents are ashamed of his work in winning the American Civil War. Mother Teresa died penniless too, who'd want to end up like her?
Maybe the most important question of all is, "Was Tesla content when he died?" It's so incredibly shallow to say, "Well Tesla gave us AC, and all sorts of other innovations related in some way to electronics/electromagnetism... but he died without much money so don't model yourself after him kids." Yeah, I know, we've all got to eat. I don't have any problem with that. What I do have a problem with is this silly attitude that a person's worth is somehow directly proportional to the size of his/her wallet. I'm not preaching childish idealism here.
Questions of intellectual property aside, this I assert to be true: Tesla was a prouder and happier man in his dying days than was Rockefeller.
We are all eventually measured by our actions. The ways in which we affect our fellow human beings run much deeper and last much longer in the scope of human existance than a temporary accumulation of monetary wealth ever will.
I'm sorry that I've made this post so long, but I have such a hard time understanding why very few people seem to be able to see this. Have you seen Soylent Green? Do you remember when Charlton's friend is being put to death in that happy room with happy music? That time could have been better spent fighting against what he thought was wrong. Coveting money and pursuing instant gratification are the pastimes of idle people.
Please excuse me, I'm a little pissed off. I know far too many desperate people who'd sell their own mothers for a few bucks and patent the idea if they thought it'd make them more money. I've begun to think that I'm one of the only people left who still believes in patience, dignity, and social responsibility.
I knew that Medical School produced a lot of harried people, but I thought that it was just because there was so much work to do. I didn't think that it had anything to do with their risking their lives to save some poor rocket.
The spooks now gets a very cheap audit from the Worlds top security experts.
They own the world's top security experts.
(That's not to say that everyone in the NSA is a brilliant mathematician but neither is everyone at NASA a brilliant astrophysicist -- the important distinction is that both organizations are the only ones in their class.)
The brackets mean I'm inserting my own comments into a quote (e.g.: "To be or not to be, that is the [yeah right] question.") The abbreviation "sic" means "spelling in context. That is to say that, in the previous post, the word "your" was used when it should have been "you're."
Is Lucent's "Mathematical Sciences Research Center" (where, to tie in another thread, Claude Shannon did his thing) a misnomer?
Well yes. Because it's part of Lucent, should that make it any more accurate? Pop culture (at one point) bred phrases like "library science." As for motion picture sciences, "chemistry" and "physics" aren't exactly motion picture sciences but if they mean "those studies that show why cameras and other related contraptions work" then it's accurate enough.
Like it or not - and I can tell that you don't - any body of systemized knowledge can be called a "science."
Anything can be called a science, that doesn't mean that we're talking about the same thing. Physics is not akin to "library science."
Yes, today that usage usually refers to a specific method of inquiry - the "scientific method - but not always.
When it does not it is of questionable integrity at best. In any case, it's called the "scientific method" because it is the method of science. It's not called the "Mr.Slippery method" or the "Kalani method" for just that reason. If you want to start your own discipline founded on some kind of meta-physical beliefs then have at it. Just don't call it science.
I would say that the 'vacuum' wasn't really a vacuum. (currently) Unobservable objects carried away the energy of the two rocks when they met.
Then you've come up with a hypothesis that can be disproven. That's a scientific response anyway.
The problem is there is no algorithm to determine what the right interpretation of an experiment is. You can clearly draw the line between the scientific and the unscientific at the individual level
What I said was that you reproduce the experiments and observe the results. Observations constitute objective measurement and rules of mathematics determine whether or not the experiments were conducted correctly. I did *not* say that "scientific" and "unscientific" at the individual level are airy things that can be redefined and tossed around like a bedsheet.
Two rocks collide in the cold vacuum of space and instantly freeze (no rebound, no transfer of kinetic energy, etc...)
One example refutes an inductive principle.
I can easily say that the results that refute this statement are due to experimental error
Of course you can say that but it doesn't make it true. Neither you nor any other human being constitutes the sole deciding factor in the measurement of objective reality. You'll have to show the error in a deductively valid argument (unless it's not deductively valid, in which case it is not admissible immediately.) If all parts of the argument can be proven to be true, it is valid whether or not you protest.
and if I don't want to do that then I can always say that the problem was in the definition of the terms equal and oposite.
That would be fine if your new definitions made the theory work. It's not about who wins, it's about what's right.
and terms usually aren't wll [sic] defined until they are tested by apparently contradicting evidence.
Do you mean that the terms are too vague? This statement doesn't really make much sense.
Where to draw the line between a good scientific reluctance to give up useful theories, and a nonscientific faith in past results is not apparent
Yes it is but it's at the individual level. If you claim that you have found a refutation for one of Newton's laws, and you outline the experiment, I can attempt to reproduce the experiment. If I reproduce it correctly and observe something different than what you claimed, I would discard your claim. If I reproduce it correctly and observe the same thing, I move toward revising current theory. The *act* of Science can be considered the largest distributed computation of all time.
You mean Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687)? That sure makes a clear distinction between Science and philosophy.;)
Yes, and his work in optics, and innumerable other writings. He is the poster child for objective measurement. Have you read his Principia? Newton disliked philosophy, but he lived in a time when it was necessary to publish work as philosophy. You'll glean as much out of some of the things written by him and those who knew him in James R. Neuman's "The World of Mathematics" (put out in the 50's -- it's a REALLY great collection of essays showing the human thought behind mathematicians and scientists.) Still, and I'm going to assume that you have read his Principia, Newton's own work shows cogent deductive reasoning. That's at the heart of the scientific method.
While I do agree, that the philosophy they write in philosophy departments around the world is mostly useless
I didn't say that. I only said that it's not scientific.
As philosophy means "the love of wisdom" it should be the cornerstone of all science
There's an assertion that begs for a proof. Like a lot of things in life, this is generally used as so much doublespeak.
or I haven't been clear enough, I'll rectify this now in any case.
I wasn't talking about the difference between science and philosophy, but on how to recognize what is science and what isn't
I know, I brought the difference up because it was implied in your post that you didn't recognize the difference.
(which is, as far as I know, the main issue in the philosophy of science).
Further evidence...
In your original post, you stated that people generally regard science as a source of infalliable information, however Newton's own theories have been proven to be not correct.
I didn't say that all scientists spew out infallible information. The important point here is that scientific "theories" (or even scientific "facts") can be disproven.
For example:
"The universe is governed by 'God,' who lives in a place called heaven (which we won't find until we die) and cannot be contacted by mortal man." -- this is an empty assertion (it can't be disproven.)
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." -- this assertion can be disproven.
In one of your other posts, you mentioned something about truth not being important, but rather the pursuit of truth (is important).
You took that out of context. The quote was from a play called "Arcadia." The message was that we're defined by our actions, not our discoveries. You've completely misinterpreted what I said.
in the real world, you simply cannot rely on people's unbiased pursuit of the truth.
Oh geez... well at least we finally agree. The scientific method is the standard by which findings are made. If a scientific experiment is done incorrectly, the results are misinterpreted, or the results cannot be duplicated... the data is discarded. It's almost like error correction in a modem, it filters out the noise.
In todays economy, where science is for the most part big business, research grants and empolyment opportunities are just two factors that have the potential to skewer the pursuit of truth.
Your mistake here is that you redefine science. If a "scientific experiment" is put forward that makes the case that "cigarette smoking is harmless" then, if it can be disproven, that assertion is thrown out. If a claim is made that cigarette smoking is harmless because God told me but he'll never tell anyone else then obviously the claim can't be proven and it gets thrown out. If the claim uses manufactored data and can't be duplicated by another research team, it gets thrown out.
So would you consider things like Creation Science science? If not, then I don't see how you can stand by this statement.
If you're actually serious when you say this, you must not have read anything I wrote. Just because it has "Science" in its name does NOT make it a science. "Creation Science" makes assertions that are not provable. Therefore it is not a scientific endeavor (just like a lot of things in the world that have "science" appended or prepended to their names.)
I can't really think of too many scenarios where what a computer scientist does is scientific at all.
I agree, that's why I brought this up. I really would like an example of a scientific experiment performed by a "Computer Scientist." I also agree with your statement about "CS" being a branch of mathematics. It would certainly be more accurate to call a CS-major a computician (kind of funny, but more accurate.)
3: ability to produce solutions in some problem domain; "the skill of a well-trained boxer"; "the science of pugilism" [syn: skill]
In the term "computer science" it's got mostly defintion 3 above.
The "ability to produce solutions in some problem domain" is horribly vague. This is an example of popular culture affecting language. Babe Ruth wasn't a "brilliant scientist," regardless of the fact that he was great at solving the problems of baseball, because his "experiments" were not reproducable and he didn't set down any theory that could be disproven. The first definition nails it... the body of knowledge acquired through systematic (reproducible) study.
The third definition describes "skill." This is generally relegated to the airy notion of "indescribable aptitude."
In short, to be skilled is not necessarily to be scientific.
PS: You wind up saying that CS should be classified as a branch of mathematics but, as can be seen by reading the first definition of "science" in your post, this means that CS isn't a science.
Except for certain branches of physics that is: Particle physics where they need $ billions to do the next experiment and even that is not enough
Well if it's testable then it's science.
There's a line from a play called "Arcadia" that's really great. It's something like, "... it doesn't matter whether the universe is spherical, or shaped like a table, or jumping up and down on one leg. It's not the truth that makes us human, it's the pursuit of the truth."
I think I've probably botched it seriously, but I think that's close. In any case, I can see where theoretical physics is reaching out into fantasy (at least with some of the string theory stuff.) Testable hypotheses are the bedrock of science. The rest is just mental masturbation.
Except that's not how it's always been seen. In fact, the popular notion going back centuries is to place a clear divide between science and mathematics. This is why you'll find debates about whether "math lends more to science" or "science lends more to math." Science is the pursuit of objective reality and mathematics is a collection of lenses through which we may view objective reality.
In any case, there's a book coming out by Stephen Wolfram that intends to (I think) link his work in automa/complexity with the real world. If this is valid, it would be a new science but the division between the mathematical origin would remain.
Slashdot Mirror
You've confused a number of variables in these cases (it's probably because you seem to merge "research" and "marketing" -- the two use entirely different vocabularies.)
;)
... only about providing sufficient evidence. If you'll go back and read my post you'll notice that I said that you've got to actually debunk a claim if you're going to dismiss it. None of this has anything to do with publication. You did not make a detailed observation. This is the matter in dispute. Even if you'd at least said specifically what changes are visible between an animation at 30fps and 60fps you'd have been contributing something.
... a game that doesn't use the lock-step method for applying world physics,) you'll see that the finer grained the latency times are between frames, the closer the objects get to optimum movement. It's possible to base a character's movement off of a step function ... and in that case you'll see jumps through time/space regardless of the frame rate.
... and this is the brain's way of accounting for "jumps" between "frames" ... that much is true. However, this is just a smarter way of catching up to live data. It's not adding any extra processed frames. It's like the difference between the state of the video buffer and the state of the monitor's surface. The "tearing" that you see in animated graphics is the digital version of our brain's motion blur. Of course, even if you do assume that interpolated frames count ... there's a limit in the brain's processing capabilities. Your original post decried the whole notion of finding limits and that was the original issue in dispute.
;)
;)
You seem a little skeptical of scientists in general. That's a good thing until you toss out all claims only because something is claimed at all.
There is an inconsistency at the heart of your post that I'd like to weed out.
(and it's funny how quickly you'll discount an oberservation: Don't you simply believe? Should I make some tables and package it in a whitepaper? Does that make it more credible?)
I never said anything about being published
Any Quake 3 player with a good system would have ZERO difficulty discerning between 60fps, 100fps, and possibly 200fps
You'll also note that this isn't necessarily proof that the eye is picking up each frame. If you've ever programmed a time-relative game (that is
The point is that you've got to be precise about what you're "seeing."
In the case of pixel accuracy simply measuring the number of rods and cones in the eye would be insufficient and a half-measure: The "picture" that we see is the end result of a very intelligent system which may, for instance, do sub-pixel integration via "jitter"
You mean interpolation
I hope you're not going to suggest that we can process photons faster than photons can move.
The notion that there are no limits to our capacity for visual interpretation is silly.
P.S. The post is interesting because most people in computers have seen this shit a million times before
Yes, many people on Slashdot talk out of their ass but that doesn't mean that it's interesting.
CD is apparently beyond the absolute limit of human hearing, yet strangely they're coming out with DVD audio at 24-bits per sample/96Khz
I suppose that you're going to say that we can hear sound at any frequency for any amplitude.
This is entirely off of the original topic anyway. It's fine to take issue with a statement like, "humans can only process 30 frames per second," but unless you prove otherwise (note: you don't even have to prove the actual limit) then your statement amounts to, "I don't think so" (which is also fine, though much less interesting than proof.) What you did was even worse than that though. You essentially said, "ignore all measurements of human capabilities -- they're inherently flawed because people have made mistakes in the past." That's the issue. That's bad reasoning.
Thank you.
____________________
The Lisp joke in your signature is funny.
____________________
Another is to append the JAR to the end of a BMP, since windows can use a BMP as an icon, and ZIP (and thus JAR) files are end-based.
... I doubt that you need the imaging lesson from me. You've got the wrong approach to this problem though (and there's no need to pull out the "Evil Microsoft" buttons or anything.)
... I could really use a job. ;)
Why do that? First of all, "bitmaps" (they should be called PIXMAPS damnit) aren't going to look so great scaled down and up in all kinds of ways (or moved between color depths.) Icons are distinct for just this reason (they're really just files that can contain several bitmaps of predetermined resolutions/color-depths.)
So anyway
For a given file extension, an "icon handler" can be installed. This is a COM object that must implement the IUnknown (of course,) IPersistFile, and IExtractIcon interfaces (they're all very very easy to implement.)
This way, you can actually store the icon resource in the java file and the JRE can just install a handler for the Windows-specific implementation of the icon viewer (or you can add your own extension and push it into the Java community -- the java file format isn't too complicated.)
Are you actually employed as a programmer? I'm practically homeless and out of work
____________________
How exactly is this moderated as interesting? The only interesting thing about this post is how a person can be so deliberately obtuse.
..." is ridiculous! Go ahead then, prove that there's no physical limit.
... has just been proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable.
... especially if he says that it's been "proven wrong so many times it is now completely laughable."
There are actual quantitative experiments that have demonstrated the limits of photon reception in the human eye. To just dismiss all of this work with, "there is no doubt that Quake 3 FEELS smoother
The next thing you know, he'll be saying that there's no limit to how much energy we consume in a given instant (after all, if the capabilities of the eye aren't fine-grained, then neither is the structure of the body -- surely!)
The next time someone wants to sell their bosses on the idea that this is the last upgrade
The next time that someone purports to defy many many years of research, make sure that you have more than "his word" to go on
If you think that there are no limits to our capabilities for processing colors, sounds, and variations through time, you'll have to ignore an awful lot of biology.
____________________
World Wide Web, a now popular bastardization of a once U.S. DoD network.
What do you mean? The WWW is made possible by an application protocol, a certain document specification, and a media descriptor database. ARPANET consisted of physical connections between computers and a transport protocol to shift bytes around. The only way that you can argue that the two are connected is by saying that the application protocol of the WWW is usually implemented over a transport protocol like the one used by ARPANET.
Is this what you meant to say?
For the record, I'm an American citizen and think that this whole thread has become pretty silly.
____________________
OK so, maybe you're hopped up on smack and can't function normally, but if you'd read the linked article you'd see that this is very much related.
... guy.
There's a new wave of parameterless image filters rising up into a whole new field of study and you're sitting here bitching about Van Gogh's intent.
Van Gogh and his whore's stupid gift of a severed ear are not relevant
____________________
Being 'famous' is equivelent to being respected by ones peers*, a much more honourable goal than simply stuffing your driveway full of SUVs and gold faucets for your sinks.
;)
People stuff their driveways with SUV's and assorted trinkets because overall it earns them a higher measure of respect from their peers. No offense, and I honestly wish that conditions weren't like this, but the only people living in "la la land" are the ones who don't yet recognize that the majority of people award values of respect according to the summation of some (superficially arbitrary and generally shared) series. Each person is assigned a value according to the sum of weights assigned by the perceiver to the "desirable" characteristics that the subject possesses. Each perceiver has an "n-dimensional criterion vector" in his/her head that he/she fills with measurements of your capacity in each category. That perceiver's own bias is applied by taking the dot product of your measurements with a vector of matching size (each component of this latter vector indicates the perceiver's preference for that particular trait: apathy at 0, severe dislike at very low numbers and severe like at very high numbers.) Once these two vectors are combined, the resultant vector is summed. The perceiver will then categorize you according to whatever threshold your summation has passed. This can be anything from disdain (those of you with high "nerd" marks among the perceivers with particularly large negative numbers in the corresponding component of the bias vector) to complete lust (those of you with the "beautiful" marks among the perceivers with particularly large positive numbers in the components that match your physical features.)
People don't necessarily think of it like that but it works for defining things like neural networks.
I know that this is off of the main subject, but it seems to be a very important topic. If you want to be appreciated for criteria more complex and varied than your visible physical structure, find people who are patient and at least mildly analytical (these will be the ones most likely to acknowledge the traits that you value.)
The worst thing that you can do is display impatience and overgeneral thinking. That's exactly the behavior that you despise.
PS: I think that Maslow was an ass.
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I don't know how terribly common the GDI is in *real* games.
The GDI would be used in circumstances where it couldn't be avoided. The case of Unreal that you mentioned (which probably makes heavier use of user) is the type of situation that I was describing. Of course most big games won't use drawing surfaces as GDI targets. The point was that most Windows programs will exploit the features of Windows in one way or another. Just look at a program's import table.
I know how DirectX works, its my favorite API to work with. However, my point was that DirectX changes very significantly (particularly between 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0) and it might be too hard for a company to keep up with the changing interfaces.
The differences between DirectX 6.0 and DirectX 8.0 are fewer than the differences between DirectX 0.0 and DirectX 8.0. Regardless, the most commonly updated part of DirectX is Direct3D (and even then it's been D3DIM that's changed most notably.) Microsoft's seperating D3D from DDraw and then nixing DDraw is probably the biggest modification.
So, Direct3D should be the toughest thing to keep up with (the other subsets are pretty much unchanging and very basic -- except for DirectMusic.) It's not as if the basic mathematics are going to be changed anytime soon, and all extentions to the design of D3D are built on top of that math.
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Except that Win32 is entirely irrelevent for this discussion.
Win32 isn't entirely irrelevant in this discussion. Firstly, DirectX objects are just a subset of the set of all possible COM objects. If you're going to reproduce DirectX on a system, you'll have to reproduce OLE (at least to some degree.) Secondly, several games programmers use the ->GetDC() member of the IDirectDrawSurface interface at some spot in their games. When the surface is locked and a device context handle is returned, the program is obviously going to use it in classic GDI calls. Thirdly, the DirectDraw library can automatically perform clipping for you when you provide it with a window handle (so some system for managing window information is important too.) In short, any game that was intended to be run under Windows will probably require parts of the Windows API far removed from those exposed by the DirectX interfaces.
We're talking DirectX, and that changes significantly every year.
Right, and in fact this newest release makes the whole DirectDraw discussion pretty much dead. In any case, the way that COM objects are meant to be designed is that updated interfaces must be queried. Right now, a game might attempt to create the first version of the DirectDraw object: CoCreateInstance(CLSID_DirectDraw, NULL, CLSCTX_INPROC_SERVER, IID_IDirectDraw, (void**)*pdd) and if it fails then the game can abort with a message that the required version of DirectX isn't installed. So long as OLE/COM is supported properly, there won't be any problem with the changes made to DirectX from year to year that Windows machines without the latest libraries won't have too.
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Any function that approaches infinity can represent all of the stars in the universe (at least as far as counting them.)
... that's a little backwards. You go from a formula to a graph, just like every other graph.
to wit:
f(x)=1/x
x->1/n f(x)=n
Where "n" is the number of stars in the universe.
As for going from a fractal graph to a formula
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But does anyone seriously want to end up like Tesla?
... but he died without much money so don't model yourself after him kids." Yeah, I know, we've all got to eat. I don't have any problem with that. What I do have a problem with is this silly attitude that a person's worth is somehow directly proportional to the size of his/her wallet. I'm not preaching childish idealism here.
Yes! You've focused on one small aspect of his life and blown it up into monumental proportions. Grant died penniless too, but I doubt that any of his descendents are ashamed of his work in winning the American Civil War. Mother Teresa died penniless too, who'd want to end up like her?
Maybe the most important question of all is, "Was Tesla content when he died?" It's so incredibly shallow to say, "Well Tesla gave us AC, and all sorts of other innovations related in some way to electronics/electromagnetism
Questions of intellectual property aside, this I assert to be true: Tesla was a prouder and happier man in his dying days than was Rockefeller.
We are all eventually measured by our actions. The ways in which we affect our fellow human beings run much deeper and last much longer in the scope of human existance than a temporary accumulation of monetary wealth ever will.
I'm sorry that I've made this post so long, but I have such a hard time understanding why very few people seem to be able to see this. Have you seen Soylent Green? Do you remember when Charlton's friend is being put to death in that happy room with happy music? That time could have been better spent fighting against what he thought was wrong. Coveting money and pursuing instant gratification are the pastimes of idle people.
Please excuse me, I'm a little pissed off. I know far too many desperate people who'd sell their own mothers for a few bucks and patent the idea if they thought it'd make them more money. I've begun to think that I'm one of the only people left who still believes in patience, dignity, and social responsibility.
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if(to_b || !to_b) //That is the question
When I heard that joke it was:
#define QUESTION(b) (2*b) | ~(2*b)
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MeowMeow Jones is retarded
Then Eric Blair (George Orwell for the unwashed proles) is retarded as well. Mr. Jones was making an allusion to his 1948 work, 1984.
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... since when do rockets require surgeons?
I knew that Medical School produced a lot of harried people, but I thought that it was just because there was so much work to do. I didn't think that it had anything to do with their risking their lives to save some poor rocket.
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The spooks now gets a very cheap audit from the Worlds top security experts.
They own the world's top security experts.
(That's not to say that everyone in the NSA is a brilliant mathematician but neither is everyone at NASA a brilliant astrophysicist -- the important distinction is that both organizations are the only ones in their class.)
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The brackets mean I'm inserting my own comments into a quote (e.g.: "To be or not to be, that is the [yeah right] question.") The abbreviation "sic" means "spelling in context. That is to say that, in the previous post, the word "your" was used when it should have been "you're."
Thank you.
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Is Lucent's "Mathematical Sciences Research Center" (where, to tie in another thread, Claude Shannon did his thing) a misnomer?
Well yes. Because it's part of Lucent, should that make it any more accurate? Pop culture (at one point) bred phrases like "library science." As for motion picture sciences, "chemistry" and "physics" aren't exactly motion picture sciences but if they mean "those studies that show why cameras and other related contraptions work" then it's accurate enough.
Like it or not - and I can tell that you don't - any body of systemized knowledge can be called a "science."
Anything can be called a science, that doesn't mean that we're talking about the same thing. Physics is not akin to "library science."
Yes, today that usage usually refers to a specific method of inquiry - the "scientific method - but not always.
When it does not it is of questionable integrity at best. In any case, it's called the "scientific method" because it is the method of science. It's not called the "Mr.Slippery method" or the "Kalani method" for just that reason. If you want to start your own discipline founded on some kind of meta-physical beliefs then have at it. Just don't call it science.
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Thank you for your post. I think that I've addressed these issues in this thread.
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I would say that the 'vacuum' wasn't really a vacuum. (currently) Unobservable objects carried away the energy of the two rocks when they met.
Then you've come up with a hypothesis that can be disproven. That's a scientific response anyway.
The problem is there is no algorithm to determine what the right interpretation of an experiment is. You can clearly draw the line between the scientific and the unscientific at the individual level
What I said was that you reproduce the experiments and observe the results. Observations constitute objective measurement and rules of mathematics determine whether or not the experiments were conducted correctly. I did *not* say that "scientific" and "unscientific" at the individual level are airy things that can be redefined and tossed around like a bedsheet.
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What exactly counts as disproving this statement?
Two rocks collide in the cold vacuum of space and instantly freeze (no rebound, no transfer of kinetic energy, etc...)
One example refutes an inductive principle.
I can easily say that the results that refute this statement are due to experimental error
Of course you can say that but it doesn't make it true. Neither you nor any other human being constitutes the sole deciding factor in the measurement of objective reality. You'll have to show the error in a deductively valid argument (unless it's not deductively valid, in which case it is not admissible immediately.) If all parts of the argument can be proven to be true, it is valid whether or not you protest.
and if I don't want to do that then I can always say that the problem was in the definition of the terms equal and oposite.
That would be fine if your new definitions made the theory work. It's not about who wins, it's about what's right.
and terms usually aren't wll [sic] defined until they are tested by apparently contradicting evidence.
Do you mean that the terms are too vague? This statement doesn't really make much sense.
Where to draw the line between a good scientific reluctance to give up useful theories, and a nonscientific faith in past results is not apparent
Yes it is but it's at the individual level. If you claim that you have found a refutation for one of Newton's laws, and you outline the experiment, I can attempt to reproduce the experiment. If I reproduce it correctly and observe something different than what you claimed, I would discard your claim. If I reproduce it correctly and observe the same thing, I move toward revising current theory. The *act* of Science can be considered the largest distributed computation of all time.
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You mean Newton's Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687)? That sure makes a clear distinction between Science and philosophy. ;)
Yes, and his work in optics, and innumerable other writings. He is the poster child for objective measurement. Have you read his Principia? Newton disliked philosophy, but he lived in a time when it was necessary to publish work as philosophy. You'll glean as much out of some of the things written by him and those who knew him in James R. Neuman's "The World of Mathematics" (put out in the 50's -- it's a REALLY great collection of essays showing the human thought behind mathematicians and scientists.) Still, and I'm going to assume that you have read his Principia, Newton's own work shows cogent deductive reasoning. That's at the heart of the scientific method.
While I do agree, that the philosophy they write in philosophy departments around the world is mostly useless
I didn't say that. I only said that it's not scientific.
As philosophy means "the love of wisdom" it should be the cornerstone of all science
There's an assertion that begs for a proof. Like a lot of things in life, this is generally used as so much doublespeak.
Thanks though.
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or I haven't been clear enough, I'll rectify this now in any case.
...
... well at least we finally agree. The scientific method is the standard by which findings are made. If a scientific experiment is done incorrectly, the results are misinterpreted, or the results cannot be duplicated ... the data is discarded. It's almost like error correction in a modem, it filters out the noise.
I wasn't talking about the difference between science and philosophy, but on how to recognize what is science and what isn't
I know, I brought the difference up because it was implied in your post that you didn't recognize the difference.
(which is, as far as I know, the main issue in the philosophy of science).
Further evidence
In your original post, you stated that people generally regard science as a source of infalliable information, however Newton's own theories have been proven to be not correct.
I didn't say that all scientists spew out infallible information. The important point here is that scientific "theories" (or even scientific "facts") can be disproven.
For example:
"The universe is governed by 'God,' who lives in a place called heaven (which we won't find until we die) and cannot be contacted by mortal man." -- this is an empty assertion (it can't be disproven.)
"For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction." -- this assertion can be disproven.
In one of your other posts, you mentioned something about truth not being important, but rather the pursuit of truth (is important).
You took that out of context. The quote was from a play called "Arcadia." The message was that we're defined by our actions, not our discoveries. You've completely misinterpreted what I said.
in the real world, you simply cannot rely on people's unbiased pursuit of the truth.
Oh geez
In todays economy, where science is for the most part big business, research grants and empolyment opportunities are just two factors that have the potential to skewer the pursuit of truth.
Your mistake here is that you redefine science. If a "scientific experiment" is put forward that makes the case that "cigarette smoking is harmless" then, if it can be disproven, that assertion is thrown out. If a claim is made that cigarette smoking is harmless because God told me but he'll never tell anyone else then obviously the claim can't be proven and it gets thrown out. If the claim uses manufactored data and can't be duplicated by another research team, it gets thrown out.
So would you consider things like Creation Science science? If not, then I don't see how you can stand by this statement.
If you're actually serious when you say this, you must not have read anything I wrote. Just because it has "Science" in its name does NOT make it a science. "Creation Science" makes assertions that are not provable. Therefore it is not a scientific endeavor (just like a lot of things in the world that have "science" appended or prepended to their names.)
I can't really think of too many scenarios where what a computer scientist does is scientific at all.
I agree, that's why I brought this up. I really would like an example of a scientific experiment performed by a "Computer Scientist." I also agree with your statement about "CS" being a branch of mathematics. It would certainly be more accurate to call a CS-major a computician (kind of funny, but more accurate.)
Thank you.
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3: ability to produce solutions in some problem domain; "the skill of a well-trained boxer"; "the science of pugilism" [syn: skill]
... the body of knowledge acquired through systematic (reproducible) study.
In the term "computer science" it's got mostly defintion 3 above.
The "ability to produce solutions in some problem domain" is horribly vague. This is an example of popular culture affecting language. Babe Ruth wasn't a "brilliant scientist," regardless of the fact that he was great at solving the problems of baseball, because his "experiments" were not reproducable and he didn't set down any theory that could be disproven. The first definition nails it
The third definition describes "skill." This is generally relegated to the airy notion of "indescribable aptitude."
In short, to be skilled is not necessarily to be scientific.
PS: You wind up saying that CS should be classified as a branch of mathematics but, as can be seen by reading the first definition of "science" in your post, this means that CS isn't a science.
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Except for certain branches of physics that is: Particle physics where they need $ billions to do the next experiment and even that is not enough
Well if it's testable then it's science.
There's a line from a play called "Arcadia" that's really great. It's something like, "... it doesn't matter whether the universe is spherical, or shaped like a table, or jumping up and down on one leg. It's not the truth that makes us human, it's the pursuit of the truth."
I think I've probably botched it seriously, but I think that's close. In any case, I can see where theoretical physics is reaching out into fantasy (at least with some of the string theory stuff.) Testable hypotheses are the bedrock of science. The rest is just mental masturbation.
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At least that's how I've always seen it.
Except that's not how it's always been seen. In fact, the popular notion going back centuries is to place a clear divide between science and mathematics. This is why you'll find debates about whether "math lends more to science" or "science lends more to math." Science is the pursuit of objective reality and mathematics is a collection of lenses through which we may view objective reality.
In any case, there's a book coming out by Stephen Wolfram that intends to (I think) link his work in automa/complexity with the real world. If this is valid, it would be a new science but the division between the mathematical origin would remain.
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