Anyone remember the disposable Paper phones currently in design? We never thought those would replace cell phones (or heaven forbid, one of those option loaded corporate receptionist phones). But it's still a good idea because you can spend a few bucks on a paper phone if you need to make a call, and just throw it away when the time runs out.
Same thing here with paper speakers. This isn't designed for watching The Matrix or Gladiator in all its glory. These speakers are better suited for cheap things when you just want any sound production whatsoever... Like talking advertisements in magazines...
Sure, $1m is for slackware development is peanuts. But then some guy wants $1m to develop a new technology to reduce industrial waste for the logging industry, and someone else wants $1m to study the effects of drugs on New York Pidgeons. And there are tens of thousands of people asking for "Just a measly 1 million dollars". There are only so many kickbacks to go around, and politicians can have trouble telling the real stuff (slackware) from the scams (effects of marijauna on college students).
Yes, there's a lot of inefficiency in the beaurocracy. But it's become a difficult task to even determine which money is wasted money, and without cutting meaningless projects, well meaning studies can't get their funded.
That said, I still believe that the government funding for slackware development idea is a troll.
I think this is a troll but I'm not sure... The call to action seems to be "Lets spend half a billion federal dollars developing slackware because it worked for FDR."
This isn't a completely obvious troll because many people still believe that FDR saved America from the great depression through The New Deal (though it's now generally agreed that only World War II really turned things around-- look it up if you don't believe me).
That said, the overall feels seems to appeal to emotions (Do the right thing, Be American, etc.) so I'll label it a troll. Respond accordingly...
I hate to sound ungrateful, but who is actually using Slackware these says? Yes, Slackware was (IIRC) the first *big* distro, but the techy users have mostly switched to SUSE or Debian, and the corporations seem to like RedHat, Mandrake, and the like. It seems like most Slackware fans are loyal for "old times sake", rather than for reasons like Debian's apt-get. Just like old-time businesses losing ground to others that evolved to the market needs, this happens to Linux Distros as well. Part of life in the free market of open source, I guess.
Perhaps its time for another "What's your favorite Linux Distro?" poll. Will CowboyNeal have his own distro as well?:)
Gee, a homemade air cooling device is pretty cool, but if you're going to do it yourself, why not spend your time making the most kick-ass cooling system you can? There are severalplaces
that sellkits, and lots of goodinformation. If you're going to make your own cooler, at least do it in style!
It's all well and good that the Pentium IV has some design "issues", and I think many of us here at/. expected this. Unfortunately, much of the purchasing decisions in the real world are based on sheer numbers: Dollars, Gigahertz, or both.
Look at the success of Microsoft Dos and Windows. There were certainly better alternatives out at the time for everything DOS and Windows did (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, even Macs). Microsoft primarily won the OS and Apps market because of its hugely successful marketting push. The only thing the average person heard in conjunction with "Computers" became "Microsoft".
Or consider America Online. There were many ISPs before them (remember netcom?), but the veritable hailstorm of "Free" floppies and CDs bought AOL the lion's share of Internet Service Provision.
The fact is that unless the Pentium has a serious flaw in it (fdiv, F00F), it will do reasonably well just because it has "1.5ghz". And as we all know, that more gigahertz must mean better technology!
In future news... Watch as Intel attaches a Ring Oscillator to their P5 chip running at 10ghz, unused by the rest of the chip.
You can apply what you know about the console market to other embedded systems. In some sense, the desktop is an anomoly among computers because it's so easy to get at its internals and muck around with it. It's the perfect playground for Open Source programs. But when you deploy ten thousand cell phone base stations, the last thing you want is a choice of linux distributions. You would much rather have exactly the same setup that people have tested and used day-in and day-out.
It's great that it's somewhat easy to maintain a Linux web server, but embedded systems are different. If my grandmother's cell phone has a bug in it, she can't just call tech support and have them fix it. If your Xbox has some internal glitches in the hardware, you can't just swap out the defective piece and replace it with something that works.
Embedded systems need to be supported by a corporation that is dedicated to system stability. Open Source may make a lot of cool software, but 90% of the stability comes from beta testers in the field. In the embedded systems, you need to find 99% of your bugs before it leaves the door. I'm not saying that Open Source projects couldn't handle this... Just that they've been found wanting in the past.
Whoa, the US Government creates a program and funds it with U.S. taxes paid for by U.S. Taxpayers! What did you think they were going to do, magically create more money and spend that instead? 99% of the United States government is paid for by U.S. citizens. The Taxpayer has already been separated from his dollar-- it's just up to the government to decide *how* to waste it.
Has anyone noticed this problem with EA Games? A small, successful company comes up with a really well designed game (Ultima IV, Ultima Underworld, Thief, etc). EA buys the company and starts wrenching the life (money) from the franchise. A few years later the company gets funding cut by EA.
To me this is yet more evidence that makes me believe EA knows very little about how to run businesses. They exude the mentality that "Lots of Hype for a well known Franchise makes oodles of money." Witness Daikatana... The fact is that only fun games can make serious money.
Would you kill a cow for $100 in meat today, or milk it for $1000 in the coming year? EA's Business practices are not geared towards the long term health *or* profitability of the Computer Game market!
One more reason to buy id software games. They're not owned by EA-- it's just a bunch of guys who like making extremely vicersal games.
I know it's hard to read the article, when it's slightly more than one page, but it mentions that a negative index of refraction could give you a tighter focus than positive IoR values could give.
First, let me preface this by saying I haven't actually written code that used SDL before, although I have spent time writing Quake Mods-- I'm mostly distanced from the graphics APIs.
One of the best judges of an API's efficiency is the success of programs using it. Looking over the list is somewhat impressive. But most of the popular games are Loki Ports, and they've had a lot of experience with SDL already. I see very few popular non-Loki games on the list.
I think you can conlude two things from this. First, it's possible to get reasonable performance from SDL, and it's definitly a reasonable API. Second, SDL just doesn't have the same support community size as OpenGL or DirectX. I suspect that the biggest barrier to graphics programming is *not* how often you run into trouble with the API, but how many other people can help you out when trouble occurs. No matter what API you use, you *will* have issues to deal with. So the smaller community size is probably the biggest obstical that SDL has to overcome.
Wow, mp3 voice recordings of artists encouraged by the RIAA to say Napster is evil-- sign me up! I can hardly wait to be a corporate activist for the RIAA.
It's so hard managing my spare time now. Should I work for money so I can buy CDs for $16.99? Or I could generously donate my free time telling *others* how they should give $16.99 to the RIAA for a $1 piece of plastic! I don't think I can lose either way. Maybe I'll do both!
It's dangerous for a politician to make a firm stand on particular details of any issue, even though that's what people want. That's because people rarely agree on all the little details. What if someone said, "I support KDE over Gnome as a Linux desktop environment" instead of just "I support a linux desktop environment"? You've just aliented half of your potential support!
Its clear from the interview that he really is thinking about his answers (some of them). He just knows when to keep his mouth shut about the details.
As a DCI certified Judge, I can attest that they've made huge advances against the rules lawyering and cheating. Judges are allowed to given penalties against players who are trying to rules lawyer their opponents. If the offense isn't serious, then it's probably rules lawyering. The penalty for rules lawyering (minor unsportsmanlike conduct) is generally worse than the opponent's infraction-- so the person who tries to get a cheap game win generally ends worse off.
Anyway, the point is that tournament magic isn't for everyone. I enjoy the competition, but some people just like to play with their friends. Don't let someone else tell you how you can or can't have fun with the game.
The simple fact is that America rules the world's culture, economics, politics, communications, and education. There are many countries out there that hate this, with good reason. It's the reason America is seen as a great evil among most of the Middle East, instead of "just another powerful country" like England or Germany. America acts like it owns the world, and to a large extent, it does. America might not have complete dictatorial control over each and every country in the world, but even the President doesn't control the American State governments, and so on. So despite the civil unrest all around the world, it is undoubtably America who's calling the shots. When a ruler starts abusing the country's subjects, who settles the dispute? Witness American troops in Bosnia.
Again... I didn't create the world. This is just the way things are. I wonder how long the American empire will last? No Dynasty has lasted longer than 500 years, to my knowledge. America seems to be in its prime.
Much of rural America is inward looking, much like rural China/Russia/France/Britain/Wherever. Bangor has perhaps 35,000 people living in it. Sizable for a local culture, but certainly not the million people needed for a true global culture.
Culture is a reflection of the population. It's only natural that a smaller population is more inward looking-- there are fewer people from other cultures to provide new views on life. If you'd enjoy a more cosmopolitan life, visit Boston or New York.
That said, I agree that most Americans are "Americentric", even those in larger cities. But that doesn't mean they eschew other cultures. Americans merely claim other cultural phenomenons and absorb them into American Culture.
I believe the reason is that Americans have no reason to depend on other countries in the world (unlike even the first world countries, much less the third world). American politics does not depend as much on, say, the Middle East as the Middle East does on America.
But the cynic says that patents were much more difficult to enforce in those days. Witness the number of patent infringements on the Cotton Gin-- its owner died penniless, despite inventing a machine that made cotton harvesting far, far more efficient. Perhaps Franklin, ever charismatic, realized he would look nobler without a patent, and realized that a patent wouldn't be worth much to him anyway.
Having spent 10 years developing software, let me assure you that your greatest speed gains come from the algorithm design, not the language used.
The best example I have is from 2 years ago when I worked for Motorola. I wrote a simulator that performed a large file with a real device on the other side. The simulator was also responisible for multithreading other tasks from the real device at the same time (although the program only used one unix thread to do this). We wrote our simulator in Perl and the actual device ran compiled C code.
It turned out that our interpretted Perl code sent packets to the C program so fast that the hardware running the C code crashed. We literally had to cripple our Perl code so it sent the data at a slower rate.
That said, I firmly believe that it's far more important to choose a language that best suits your development abilities and choose language speed second. C++ and Java are great languages if you want to be forced into object oriented development, and sometimes that's what you need. Personally I love perl, but learning how to write clean perl code is extremely difficult (though rewarding).
So if everyone really knows what they're doing (cross fingers), go with Perl, because you cannot get that much expressiveness in any other language. If you think your development skills would benefit from additional structure, go with C++.
That's true also. I'm just saying that Emily should spend more time determining if there are benefits or not, and less time determining if therapists can sense energy fields or not. The study is valid-- it's just that other studies would have been more appropriate.
Personally I believe that any medical benefits from theraputic touch can be credited to psychological and emotional reasons, not to bio-electricity. That said, I believe there are many medical discoveries waiting to be made in the area of human bio-electricity, and I wish researchers would stop bashing the crazy people (even though they deserve it) and start searching for real results. There are many studies saying, "The bio-electrical field doesn't affect health in way X." It's only fair to ask the question, "Well, in what ways _does_ the bio-electrical field affect health?"
I've had enough of this petty fued between traditional medical researchers and alternative practioners. If you want to be a real service to humanity, stop trying to discredit each other and go make a discovery that actually impacts my life. Tell me how bio-electricity CAN help me, not how it CAN'T.
I guess I'm saying that rather than bitch about how someone doesn't really understand medical science, why not make a difference instead? So yeah, therapeutic touch folks definitly can't isolate a problematic area of the electrical field. The whole point of the study was to say, "Nyah, nyah, you're just a bunch of crazy flakey people!"
I just think it's pathetic when the whole point of your study is showing someone else is wrong, rather that searching out new truth. You can tell that the study is biased because it focuses on the psychological practice, not the science that is or isn't backing up the practice.
It's possible that humans are physically healthier when their bio-electrical fields are near other humans, regardless of "hitting the right places" or not. Or maybe people just feel better psychologically when they think someone else is nearby. So it's still possible that therapeutic touch therapists are helping patients, even if the therapists don't understand the real reason for this.
This is similar to understanding that the earth is round, but thinking it's round because "God likes round things," not because "sufficiently large masses assume the compact shape of a sphere under gravitational pressure."
I honestly believe that most of these therapeutic touch therapists are interested in helping people, even if their science is a bit wacky. If that's true, they're far better human beings than Emily and her parents, who are more interested in wholesale discreditation of theories than separating the truth from the lies.
Whatever... I hope you excuse me while I spend time learning how to treat people with Love and Respect, not hatred and disdain.:/
A slight correction. Emily Rosa did not prove that "theraputic touch" doesn't provide medical benefits. She proved that practitioners of it could not detect the proximity of another human due to the presence of their bio-electrical field (which definitly does exist, by the way). All her study showed was that the conscious human brain cannot reliable sense nearby electrical fields. It didn't prove or disprove that altering things in and near a human's electrical field have any other impacts on the human.
Think about this analogy. Even though I can't consciously tell how much Vitamin C is in the food I eat, the Vitamin C still affects my physical health. A study that shows people can't detect how many vitamins are in their food does not prove that vitamins are (or aren't) nutritionally helpful.
If people want to further study the bio-electrical field using scientific methods, great. Maybe we'll find better health that way and maybe we won't. This study just deals a blow to the nut-cases who don't use scientific backing for their therapy, but would they care about that study in the first place?
My friend and I spent time programming games on the TI-85. The coolest game my friend wrote (who now works on Madden 2001) was Arkanoid. But this wasn't just any arkanoid game... It had 3 different kinds of blocks, a level editor, and it even stored the levels in a compressed vector so you didn't run out of memory. I spent much time on that... Very cool. There was also a pretty solid poker program that either he or I wrote (I can't remember who). We never uploaded them to the net, but we gave them to everyone at our Highschool, so who knows where the games have ended up.:)
Sure, the future holds lots of computing-specific appliances. Put a chip in your TV, your Calculator, and your Toaster for doing all sorts of computation. But how are you going to write software for each of these "appliance-computers"? You need some sort of system that can act like a TV, a calculator, and at least have network access to the toaster. You need a text editor and the option of simulating or stepping through code. The very act of software development cannot be done on your Mr. Coffee.
Consider this... I've spent several months programming a Quake 3 Mod using TextPad and the base Q3 code from Id Software. I can't imagine doing the development on a specialized computer appliance. Even if I had a machine that only played games (eg. a PS2), I'd still need access to the general purpose computer to develop the mod. And making your PS2 or Dreamcast boot linux doesn't count-- that's making the specific system more general. The fact is that we'll always need a more general computer for the purpose of developing specific computers.
Of course, the average person will use far more specialized computer. But I'm happy as long as I have my PC.
Speaking as a software engineer, I personally know a whole lot of Computer Engineers and Computer Programmers. Most of the hardware folks know how to program and most of the software folks know how to design circuits. But let me tell you... The code from most hardware designers is utter trash compared to the stuff that the real software teams puts out. To be fair, I wouldn't dare design a real circuit.
If a computer engineer could easily go into programming, that's only because a programmer could easily go into computer engineering. Because there's such a dire need for programmers right now, even bad programmers look good. Maybe that's why it seems like computer engineers have no trouble programming. They don't look that bad by comparison to all the unqualified DotCom code monkeys. But real programming, just like real hardware design, is not something you just "pick up" but instead learn through years of experience.
On the bright side, that does mean it doesn't matter which major you pick as long as you get lots of exposure to different fields.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember the disposable Paper phones currently in design? We never thought those would replace cell phones (or heaven forbid, one of those option loaded corporate receptionist phones). But it's still a good idea because you can spend a few bucks on a paper phone if you need to make a call, and just throw it away when the time runs out.
:)
Same thing here with paper speakers. This isn't designed for watching The Matrix or Gladiator in all its glory. These speakers are better suited for cheap things when you just want any sound production whatsoever... Like talking advertisements in magazines...
On second thought maybe this isn't a good idea.
-Ted
It seems slightly inflamatory, but he's got a real point. Or maybe I've just been suckered in. :)
Sure, $1m is for slackware development is peanuts. But then some guy wants $1m to develop a new technology to reduce industrial waste for the logging industry, and someone else wants $1m to study the effects of drugs on New York Pidgeons. And there are tens of thousands of people asking for "Just a measly 1 million dollars". There are only so many kickbacks to go around, and politicians can have trouble telling the real stuff (slackware) from the scams (effects of marijauna on college students).
Yes, there's a lot of inefficiency in the beaurocracy. But it's become a difficult task to even determine which money is wasted money, and without cutting meaningless projects, well meaning studies can't get their funded.
That said, I still believe that the government funding for slackware development idea is a troll.
-Ted
I think this is a troll but I'm not sure... The call to action seems to be "Lets spend half a billion federal dollars developing slackware because it worked for FDR."
This isn't a completely obvious troll because many people still believe that FDR saved America from the great depression through The New Deal (though it's now generally agreed that only World War II really turned things around-- look it up if you don't believe me).
That said, the overall feels seems to appeal to emotions (Do the right thing, Be American, etc.) so I'll label it a troll. Respond accordingly...
-Ted
I hate to sound ungrateful, but who is actually using Slackware these says? Yes, Slackware was (IIRC) the first *big* distro, but the techy users have mostly switched to SUSE or Debian, and the corporations seem to like RedHat, Mandrake, and the like. It seems like most Slackware fans are loyal for "old times sake", rather than for reasons like Debian's apt-get. Just like old-time businesses losing ground to others that evolved to the market needs, this happens to Linux Distros as well. Part of life in the free market of open source, I guess.
:)
Perhaps its time for another "What's your favorite Linux Distro?" poll. Will CowboyNeal have his own distro as well?
-Ted
Gee, a homemade air cooling device is pretty cool, but if you're going to do it yourself, why not spend your time making the most kick-ass cooling system you can? There are several places that sell kits, and lots of good information. If you're going to make your own cooler, at least do it in style!
-Ted
It's all well and good that the Pentium IV has some design "issues", and I think many of us here at /. expected this. Unfortunately, much of the purchasing decisions in the real world are based on sheer numbers: Dollars, Gigahertz, or both.
Look at the success of Microsoft Dos and Windows. There were certainly better alternatives out at the time for everything DOS and Windows did (PC-DOS, DR-DOS, even Macs). Microsoft primarily won the OS and Apps market because of its hugely successful marketting push. The only thing the average person heard in conjunction with "Computers" became "Microsoft".
Or consider America Online. There were many ISPs before them (remember netcom?), but the veritable hailstorm of "Free" floppies and CDs bought AOL the lion's share of Internet Service Provision.
The fact is that unless the Pentium has a serious flaw in it (fdiv, F00F), it will do reasonably well just because it has "1.5ghz". And as we all know, that more gigahertz must mean better technology!
In future news... Watch as Intel attaches a Ring Oscillator to their P5 chip running at 10ghz, unused by the rest of the chip.
-Ted
You can apply what you know about the console market to other embedded systems. In some sense, the desktop is an anomoly among computers because it's so easy to get at its internals and muck around with it. It's the perfect playground for Open Source programs. But when you deploy ten thousand cell phone base stations, the last thing you want is a choice of linux distributions. You would much rather have exactly the same setup that people have tested and used day-in and day-out.
It's great that it's somewhat easy to maintain a Linux web server, but embedded systems are different. If my grandmother's cell phone has a bug in it, she can't just call tech support and have them fix it. If your Xbox has some internal glitches in the hardware, you can't just swap out the defective piece and replace it with something that works.
Embedded systems need to be supported by a corporation that is dedicated to system stability. Open Source may make a lot of cool software, but 90% of the stability comes from beta testers in the field. In the embedded systems, you need to find 99% of your bugs before it leaves the door. I'm not saying that Open Source projects couldn't handle this... Just that they've been found wanting in the past.
-Ted
Whoa, the US Government creates a program and funds it with U.S. taxes paid for by U.S. Taxpayers! What did you think they were going to do, magically create more money and spend that instead? 99% of the United States government is paid for by U.S. citizens. The Taxpayer has already been separated from his dollar-- it's just up to the government to decide *how* to waste it.
-Ted
Has anyone noticed this problem with EA Games? A small, successful company comes up with a really well designed game (Ultima IV, Ultima Underworld, Thief, etc). EA buys the company and starts wrenching the life (money) from the franchise. A few years later the company gets funding cut by EA.
To me this is yet more evidence that makes me believe EA knows very little about how to run businesses. They exude the mentality that "Lots of Hype for a well known Franchise makes oodles of money." Witness Daikatana... The fact is that only fun games can make serious money.
Would you kill a cow for $100 in meat today, or milk it for $1000 in the coming year? EA's Business practices are not geared towards the long term health *or* profitability of the Computer Game market!
One more reason to buy id software games. They're not owned by EA-- it's just a bunch of guys who like making extremely vicersal games.
-Ted
I know it's hard to read the article, when it's slightly more than one page, but it mentions that a negative index of refraction could give you a tighter focus than positive IoR values could give.
-Ted
First, let me preface this by saying I haven't actually written code that used SDL before, although I have spent time writing Quake Mods-- I'm mostly distanced from the graphics APIs.
One of the best judges of an API's efficiency is the success of programs using it. Looking over the list is somewhat impressive. But most of the popular games are Loki Ports, and they've had a lot of experience with SDL already. I see very few popular non-Loki games on the list.
I think you can conlude two things from this. First, it's possible to get reasonable performance from SDL, and it's definitly a reasonable API. Second, SDL just doesn't have the same support community size as OpenGL or DirectX. I suspect that the biggest barrier to graphics programming is *not* how often you run into trouble with the API, but how many other people can help you out when trouble occurs. No matter what API you use, you *will* have issues to deal with. So the smaller community size is probably the biggest obstical that SDL has to overcome.
-Ted
Wow, mp3 voice recordings of artists encouraged by the RIAA to say Napster is evil-- sign me up! I can hardly wait to be a corporate activist for the RIAA.
It's so hard managing my spare time now. Should I work for money so I can buy CDs for $16.99? Or I could generously donate my free time telling *others* how they should give $16.99 to the RIAA for a $1 piece of plastic! I don't think I can lose either way. Maybe I'll do both!
It's dangerous for a politician to make a firm stand on particular details of any issue, even though that's what people want. That's because people rarely agree on all the little details. What if someone said, "I support KDE over Gnome as a Linux desktop environment" instead of just "I support a linux desktop environment"? You've just aliented half of your potential support!
Its clear from the interview that he really is thinking about his answers (some of them). He just knows when to keep his mouth shut about the details.
-Ted
As a DCI certified Judge, I can attest that they've made huge advances against the rules lawyering and cheating. Judges are allowed to given penalties against players who are trying to rules lawyer their opponents. If the offense isn't serious, then it's probably rules lawyering. The penalty for rules lawyering (minor unsportsmanlike conduct) is generally worse than the opponent's infraction-- so the person who tries to get a cheap game win generally ends worse off.
Anyway, the point is that tournament magic isn't for everyone. I enjoy the competition, but some people just like to play with their friends. Don't let someone else tell you how you can or can't have fun with the game.
-Ted
The simple fact is that America rules the world's culture, economics, politics, communications, and education. There are many countries out there that hate this, with good reason. It's the reason America is seen as a great evil among most of the Middle East, instead of "just another powerful country" like England or Germany. America acts like it owns the world, and to a large extent, it does. America might not have complete dictatorial control over each and every country in the world, but even the President doesn't control the American State governments, and so on. So despite the civil unrest all around the world, it is undoubtably America who's calling the shots. When a ruler starts abusing the country's subjects, who settles the dispute? Witness American troops in Bosnia.
Again... I didn't create the world. This is just the way things are. I wonder how long the American empire will last? No Dynasty has lasted longer than 500 years, to my knowledge. America seems to be in its prime.
-Ted
Much of rural America is inward looking, much like rural China/Russia/France/Britain/Wherever. Bangor has perhaps 35,000 people living in it. Sizable for a local culture, but certainly not the million people needed for a true global culture.
Culture is a reflection of the population. It's only natural that a smaller population is more inward looking-- there are fewer people from other cultures to provide new views on life. If you'd enjoy a more cosmopolitan life, visit Boston or New York.
That said, I agree that most Americans are "Americentric", even those in larger cities. But that doesn't mean they eschew other cultures. Americans merely claim other cultural phenomenons and absorb them into American Culture.
I believe the reason is that Americans have no reason to depend on other countries in the world (unlike even the first world countries, much less the third world). American politics does not depend as much on, say, the Middle East as the Middle East does on America.
Um, welcome to the world we live in, I guess...
-Ted
But the cynic says that patents were much more difficult to enforce in those days. Witness the number of patent infringements on the Cotton Gin-- its owner died penniless, despite inventing a machine that made cotton harvesting far, far more efficient. Perhaps Franklin, ever charismatic, realized he would look nobler without a patent, and realized that a patent wouldn't be worth much to him anyway.
-Ted
Having spent 10 years developing software, let me assure you that your greatest speed gains come from the algorithm design, not the language used.
The best example I have is from 2 years ago when I worked for Motorola. I wrote a simulator that performed a large file with a real device on the other side. The simulator was also responisible for multithreading other tasks from the real device at the same time (although the program only used one unix thread to do this). We wrote our simulator in Perl and the actual device ran compiled C code.
It turned out that our interpretted Perl code sent packets to the C program so fast that the hardware running the C code crashed. We literally had to cripple our Perl code so it sent the data at a slower rate.
That said, I firmly believe that it's far more important to choose a language that best suits your development abilities and choose language speed second. C++ and Java are great languages if you want to be forced into object oriented development, and sometimes that's what you need. Personally I love perl, but learning how to write clean perl code is extremely difficult (though rewarding).
So if everyone really knows what they're doing (cross fingers), go with Perl, because you cannot get that much expressiveness in any other language. If you think your development skills would benefit from additional structure, go with C++.
-Ted
That's true also. I'm just saying that Emily should spend more time determining if there are benefits or not, and less time determining if therapists can sense energy fields or not. The study is valid-- it's just that other studies would have been more appropriate.
Personally I believe that any medical benefits from theraputic touch can be credited to psychological and emotional reasons, not to bio-electricity. That said, I believe there are many medical discoveries waiting to be made in the area of human bio-electricity, and I wish researchers would stop bashing the crazy people (even though they deserve it) and start searching for real results. There are many studies saying, "The bio-electrical field doesn't affect health in way X." It's only fair to ask the question, "Well, in what ways _does_ the bio-electrical field affect health?"
I've had enough of this petty fued between traditional medical researchers and alternative practioners. If you want to be a real service to humanity, stop trying to discredit each other and go make a discovery that actually impacts my life. Tell me how bio-electricity CAN help me, not how it CAN'T.
-Ted
I guess I'm saying that rather than bitch about how someone doesn't really understand medical science, why not make a difference instead? So yeah, therapeutic touch folks definitly can't isolate a problematic area of the electrical field. The whole point of the study was to say, "Nyah, nyah, you're just a bunch of crazy flakey people!"
:/
I just think it's pathetic when the whole point of your study is showing someone else is wrong, rather that searching out new truth. You can tell that the study is biased because it focuses on the psychological practice, not the science that is or isn't backing up the practice.
It's possible that humans are physically healthier when their bio-electrical fields are near other humans, regardless of "hitting the right places" or not. Or maybe people just feel better psychologically when they think someone else is nearby. So it's still possible that therapeutic touch therapists are helping patients, even if the therapists don't understand the real reason for this.
This is similar to understanding that the earth is round, but thinking it's round because "God likes round things," not because "sufficiently large masses assume the compact shape of a sphere under gravitational pressure."
I honestly believe that most of these therapeutic touch therapists are interested in helping people, even if their science is a bit wacky. If that's true, they're far better human beings than Emily and her parents, who are more interested in wholesale discreditation of theories than separating the truth from the lies.
Whatever... I hope you excuse me while I spend time learning how to treat people with Love and Respect, not hatred and disdain.
-Ted
A slight correction. Emily Rosa did not prove that "theraputic touch" doesn't provide medical benefits. She proved that practitioners of it could not detect the proximity of another human due to the presence of their bio-electrical field (which definitly does exist, by the way). All her study showed was that the conscious human brain cannot reliable sense nearby electrical fields. It didn't prove or disprove that altering things in and near a human's electrical field have any other impacts on the human.
Think about this analogy. Even though I can't consciously tell how much Vitamin C is in the food I eat, the Vitamin C still affects my physical health. A study that shows people can't detect how many vitamins are in their food does not prove that vitamins are (or aren't) nutritionally helpful.
If people want to further study the bio-electrical field using scientific methods, great. Maybe we'll find better health that way and maybe we won't. This study just deals a blow to the nut-cases who don't use scientific backing for their therapy, but would they care about that study in the first place?
-Ted
My friend and I spent time programming games on the TI-85. The coolest game my friend wrote (who now works on Madden 2001) was Arkanoid. But this wasn't just any arkanoid game... It had 3 different kinds of blocks, a level editor, and it even stored the levels in a compressed vector so you didn't run out of memory. I spent much time on that... Very cool. There was also a pretty solid poker program that either he or I wrote (I can't remember who). We never uploaded them to the net, but we gave them to everyone at our Highschool, so who knows where the games have ended up. :)
-Ted
Sure, the future holds lots of computing-specific appliances. Put a chip in your TV, your Calculator, and your Toaster for doing all sorts of computation. But how are you going to write software for each of these "appliance-computers"? You need some sort of system that can act like a TV, a calculator, and at least have network access to the toaster. You need a text editor and the option of simulating or stepping through code. The very act of software development cannot be done on your Mr. Coffee.
Consider this... I've spent several months programming a Quake 3 Mod using TextPad and the base Q3 code from Id Software. I can't imagine doing the development on a specialized computer appliance. Even if I had a machine that only played games (eg. a PS2), I'd still need access to the general purpose computer to develop the mod. And making your PS2 or Dreamcast boot linux doesn't count-- that's making the specific system more general. The fact is that we'll always need a more general computer for the purpose of developing specific computers.
Of course, the average person will use far more specialized computer. But I'm happy as long as I have my PC.
-Ted
Speaking as a software engineer, I personally know a whole lot of Computer Engineers and Computer Programmers. Most of the hardware folks know how to program and most of the software folks know how to design circuits. But let me tell you... The code from most hardware designers is utter trash compared to the stuff that the real software teams puts out. To be fair, I wouldn't dare design a real circuit.
If a computer engineer could easily go into programming, that's only because a programmer could easily go into computer engineering. Because there's such a dire need for programmers right now, even bad programmers look good. Maybe that's why it seems like computer engineers have no trouble programming. They don't look that bad by comparison to all the unqualified DotCom code monkeys. But real programming, just like real hardware design, is not something you just "pick up" but instead learn through years of experience.
On the bright side, that does mean it doesn't matter which major you pick as long as you get lots of exposure to different fields.
-Ted