"Actually, watching someone with advancing (but not yet devestating) Alzheimers can also show you how little memory is needed for intelligence."
I think you're missing the point, if you an function, that means the most important memory is intact, consider it the brain having multiple hard disks, with data stored on each one (different parts of the brain, different networks), if one hard disk dies, or gets disconnected (cable cut), the brain cannot access that information in that storage area that is now disabled.
Memory is absolutely crucial to intelligence, there is no intelligence without a place to store and analyze feedback, even briefly.
", but EVERY one of us is going to wind up with carpal tunnel."
From wikipedia:
"The term 'carpal tunnel' is also used quite commonly to refer to 'carpal tunnel syndrome' which is a condition where the median nerve is compressed within the tunnel and causes pain and/or numbness of the wrist/hand, never proven to be the result of repetitive motion such as painting or typing. It has been shown to be associated with obesity, hypothyroidism, diabetes, pregnancy, family history, rheumatoid arthritis and wrist shape."
"Of course Google is profiling what people do as they search, indexing everything is what they are about. The question is where this impacts on privacy and what limits we want to put on it."
*don's a decent sized tin foil hat*
There are no limits we can really put on it, the NSA is already sucking up the whole damn internet, ISP's are monitorign and recording you traffic and many I'm sure sell this data illegally to advertisers. There's taps on all the packets that go through the internet in different countries and different places, so trying to keep privacy on data without moving to something like Tor, etc, is not going to happen on how most of use the net today. The intelligence agencies of the world must be having a ball mining and capturing our packet data and reconstructing them into files on us using mathematical techniques to reconstruct what goes where, I'm sure this will get very good over time. Not to mention with the help of google, etc,
Indoor bike/w resistance + walking (cardio), also some weight training at home. You should brun at least 800 calories a day worth of workout, and keep yourself eating just under 1800 cals for the first week to see results on the scale. Cut out ALL sugary drinks, move to water, and just eat what you do normally. You don't have to radically change your diet, but you DO have to burn off more then you take in. Cardio (biking, walking, running) combined with free weight strength training are the best ways to lose weight.
If you're going to walk: At least 2 hours a day 7/days a week + freeweights + indoor bike (note that distnace is more important then time, you can walk faster, do more distance, etc)
If you're going to run, google articles on running, you have to build yourself up slowly to learn how to sustain yourself running over time, it's basically similar to the above, except you do less time running once you've gotten up to a full hour at least without stopping too much, add in some freeweight training, etc.
... more distraction while they are driving! I really hope they find the wisdom to only have something like a computer or internet in the backseats, and leave the front panel for navigation, controls for the phone, music, etc.
I have to wonder if we aren't making driving much more risky basically putting all this stuff in the car. I know when I'm driving, even when I'm not listening to music or anything, I'm glad my attention was not so absorbed by something else that I would not have been able to react to idiots many times.
We can leave the idea of having a 'home and office in the car' until we have technology that drives our cars for us. Sometimes I hope they do some serious research on distractibility because the road already has enough idiots on it.
"It seems that responsibility isn't required for anything anymore."
The real problem is multi-faceted, lets face this fact please. Lets not also forget it's the result of western culture and our materialsitic, excessively individualistic culture. 100 years ago advertising and TV were not very uniqitously prevalent, cell phones, video games, computers, the internet and all sorts of modern distractions did NOT exist. Since the advent of mass communication technology (Radio, TV, media, etc), this has allowed us to tune out and 'check out' into our little entertainment/fantasy lives without actually engaging people, pretending we're "doing something". When in reality all we are doing is mindlessly consuming what amounts to mind candy and drivel. This is not to say that all movies are bad or can't have an impact, nor should all movies 'have a point'.
But all these changes, has also allowed us to be consumed by our personal interests, hobboes. wealth chasing and work, cutting into the finite amount of time that exists in a day. Time is at a premium.
Over the past century commercialization has taken over damn near everything within our lives, with ads in our faces 24/7 and our love of money is what does us in, we want to offload our risks onto others, we want passive incomes, we want to make it rich, etc. To make as much money as possible and then point at someone else when things go wrong when it is really our own hyper individualistic bent, narcissm, lack of altruism and greed that causes social decay. Society is structured and fosters impossible and crazy ideas and expectations that simply cannot be met or implemented realistically, but many of us buy at least some of the pablum society pushes because it's congruent with our identity or economci interest, even if it is over the long term detriment to the whole of who we are.
Many aspects of society foster mediocre character, and mediocre thinking. Many on slashdot should know this already. We have kids raising kids, with one teacher to 25-30+ students usually, who are severely disengaged.
I will post this link again because it illustrates what is so wrong with western society and western culture:
Next up is Ivorytower blues: A good book to read for anyone thinking about going to university anywhere, and the increasing commercialization and 'mass marketing' of education as a cure all, when it isn't.
"It is neither right, nor privilege. It is a network of computers."
Actually the internet is more like a utility, and I think it would be wise if governments viewed it as such. The real problem is corruption, bad people who don't give a fuck about us and incompetnece.
The truth is the money men, and men of power fear the internet, because it allows for radical transformation of society especially more towards the left i.e. a kind of consumer socialism is possible with digital goods for instance, we call it piracy, but it cuts both ways, IP is abused willy nilly and public domain is always being extended.
IMHO, companies need to forced to release stuff into the public domain after a fixed amount of time, and it's non negotiable. Right now many companies are simply milking old properties who've longe since paid for themselves, adding no new value to society at all.
"To become a professional you do a theoretical degree to give you a toolkit and learn how to find stuff out, then you do your professional training. Works for physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants. You end up with two or more sets of postnominal letters, one of which is vocational. Why not software designers?"
Computer science is really an information science, or what I like to call a "Hub science". It ranks up their with physics IMHO as one of foundational disciplines. Since one will need some education in it as a pre-requisite to actually function in the future in many jobs just because information technology will be everywhere.
The problem is the industry moves very fast and the need to solve problems (which is creating new discplines on the fly faster then academica can catch up) is far out-stripping academia's ability to keep their curriculum updated from 'research in the field' (i.e. in the workplace), since computer science is becoming very broad very fast and there is no way for academics by themselves keep on top of the explosion of information.
In fact, I'm surprised academics have not moved (even tentatively) to what I call the "wiki-pedia, professional / expert model" of education. It's an idea I've had brewing in my mind for some time now, where industry, academia, and professionals in the field have a wiki-like forum. Specifically where workers and industry share feedback about better engineering practices. And they come up with this wiki-like software, in which they can edit courses and curriculum, textbooks, and whatnot in real time with a feedback / comments section for every page in these (online) wiki-able electronic notes / lectures, and textbooks, and then one can use this kind of software as a base and have them go to print textbooks, etc, when necessary.
The idea that a group of experts in academia can possibly do a better job then everyone else who's working in industry I think is an idea past it's time. Wikipedia has shown that many experts, academics (and non-experts) alike all hammering away at a problem will catch things that one organization or institution can't by itself simply out of mere time constraints. No one has enough time in the day, that can compensate for others who do have the time (retired professionals, scientists, professors, bright students, etc).
"Computer science", today, is really vast subject and if we really get down to it. It's a huge field that is really in it's infancy still. In the games industry, just doing graphical special effects, particles, water simulation, and shaders, etc, is becoming a discipline unto itself. New disciplines are being created via cross polination of many other disciplines constantly that haven't totally shaken out yet.
Another real problem is that programming is really a subet of mathematics and physics to some extent, and our teaching of math and physics is really not that great in many schools at the public/highschool level. As a personal note: I've found myself borrowing a lot of concepts and methodologies from physics and whatnot when working on things. There is an enormous amount of cross polination, because in comp sci, many of the things you can do are effectivelly only limited by your imagination.
Damn near anything and everything can be converted to abstract representations, reconceptualizaed, etc, to be better understood. I think the real problem though is that programming right now lacks visualization tools, and that much 'code' and compiler tools are not really that developed yet, I've been thinking about what I call 'virtual engineering', where mathematical statements are converted to visual representation geometry (i.e. visual signs, etc, to stand in for how something the programmer doesn't see actually behaves as if it were a visualizable mechanical system in the real world). Although this is really basic, it does give you some idea of what I'm talking about.
I think that programming was really born out by mathematicians, especially, the type I like to call s
"I think this part of the computing timeline is going to be one that is well remembered. I know I find it fascinating."
Well remembered? Perhaps... but I wouldn't sing their praises just yet. Advances in memory are critically necessary to keep the pace of computational speed up. The big elephants in the room are: Heat, memory bandwidth and latency. Part of the reason the GPU's this time round were not as impressive is because of increasing memory bandwidth linearly will start not have the same effects sooner or later, there is a point at which the geometry of information will come into play and the law of diminishing returns on a kind of architecture or memory will take place for a price that people can afford to pay.
Next up, 32-bit addressing is starting to be a real pain in the ass. The move to 64-bit operating systems is critical if we are to expect GPU's to keep increasing their memory (1GB+ of local memory on a card now).
Supreme commander was one of the few games to hit the 4GB addressing limit and more and more games will definitely do so in the future. I know you were talking about other areas of computing, but without the games market, I don't see any serious reason for any regular person to upgrade their computers video at all. The many who donate to distributed computing did so as an afterhtought, not as the main reason they bought the card... As for the wider non-gaming market we'll have to see whether not GPU computing is going to be moer widely adopted.
Lastly, let us not forget that one of the primary reasons GPU computing is so fast is memory bandwidth, delay's in better memory technology will have big impacts on GPU performacne. As we've seen with this generation of GPU's, Nvidia's lack of DDR5 and a smaller process for the GT280 hurt them a lot.
"I'm more interested in when Google starts returning relevant results to my queries.
I can't believe that I'm the only one that finds Google's quality of service somewhat below par."
You're not the only one, but for the most part it is better then most other search engines out there. The real problem is spammers and paid advertising, I think spammers have really made search frustrating for a lot of companies. And ad companies pay other people to promote their sites for them (digg, slashdot, etc). I've noticed the increase in spam-vertised websites in search results for a lot of things.
Personally I think the idea of sharding and search being more specific for what you're looking for is needed. I'd like to see a google with 'tags' and a delicious interface, things like educational institutions and universities get lumped into their own search engine space for instance, this would help narrow down what one is looking for, although it would take time and feedback to design something well for other areas. The fact is that search results get diluted as you put more and more stuff online (numbers and geometric scale).
For fun, I've noticed stumble upon and del.ico.us are not bad alternatives when looking for new and interesting sites without having to use search
"Says who? Hey, we're already arguing on conspiracy grounds, why not argue for fake moon landings while we're at it?
I'm a programmer, but that doesn't make me more credible than someone who has no clue about programming when I claim that Cthuluh is controlling the internet."
While I agree with you somewhat, I've it's a hobby of mine to scour the "crazy's", because frequently because of their over-active paranoia they'll pick up things that most people normally wouldn't that are in fact TRUE, the problem with these people is that - they mix truth with imagined relationships or patterns that aren't there, thereby most people disqualify all of what they say by association, instead of just 'ignoring' what is false, and finding what is true.
The truth of a statement is not determined by:
-The status of the person -Their education -Whether or not that society considers them crazy/kooky, etc -and on and on.
A statement is true whether or not someone is crazy, educated or not, has a job or not, or is rich or not. This 'false by association' stuff is programmed into us from birth, and while it can be a nice heuristic. I'd really like a study done on the amount of true statements vs false statements, done scientifically and with an eye towards taking what is said statement by statement to analyze the truth value's. I imagine the kind of patterns that you'd find would be interesting to say the least.
I imagine paranoid/crazy people would pick up a lot of true stuff that we deem false because we've been programmed by education/the media/entertainment, etc, and vice versa.
"When Expert X and Expert Y are putting out mutually contradictory versions of events, then the reader must critically evaluate them both"
*Dons tin foil hat for a moment*
Unfortunately this can be abused willy nilly for information the government or other rich people/businesses don't want you to know, or to use experts to omit, skew or smear information since the people with money control what is "credible" and what is "not", experts in my opinion are over-rated, history has shown many experts to be competent enough to do their jobs, but not that competent after the have died and a generation or two down the line gets to look back at their incompetence that wasn't recognized, because many experts can hide their ignorance behind other peoples ignorance, "credibility" or status.
Eisenhower's Farewell address, 1961:
"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mould, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
... while I didn't mind playing the first fable, it felt a lot like a platformer like Maximo vs. Army of Zin, with RPG elements. It was basically an action game with some RPG-lite elements, also the character aged way too fast. I remember getting to the end of the game and looking insanely old.
Though I enjoyed the first one a bit, I hope this one will be better.
"I agree with both of these points. C++ is not that great as a teaching language, but I've found C Primer Plus and C++ Primer Plus to be excellently written, beautifully expositional books."
But if you combine the books with C++ then you can get a teaching language, check out the reviews of the primer on amazon.com, I wish people would actually read the book, and the reviews before they post. I speak from experience myself, the biggest point in Mr Prata's favor is he knows how to conceptualize his thoughts clearly and express them in words that are clear, simple and precise. He goes into the detail necessary for an absolute no nothing about programming. Despite what professional programmers might have against such a book, they never had to or tried to teach themselves from ground zero.
There's a reason why Prata's book is in a 5th edition, is because it's a darn good place for auto-didacts, anyone interested in a gateway to understanding programming could easily start there as anywhere else.
I think Mr Prat's book would be even better if he put the whole thing up on a website for free, and into a wiki and let people edit it. Mr Prata has a gift for communicating, and I wish most other book writers had his gift for clarity.
"I don't usually write flaming posts, but C++ as a teaching language ?!? You are smoking crack."
Look I'm speaking from absolute experience here, I knew how to make basic batch files back in the day (DOS), but I could never wrap my mind around programming languages very well until I found Stephen prata's C++ primer, his primer does not only teach you about C++ and much of it applies to every other language, once you read and do try the stuff in that book it makes C++ easy. I know because I tried a lot of c++ books before that didn't do anything for me, and I ended up giving to the library or selling them.
The right books can take something that seems like it is hard and TELL YOU EXACTLY what you need to do and what is going on, go read c++ primer plus, then come back and criticize me, because until you've done so it's a criticism that is completely uninformed.
I'm speaking as a person that began having absolutely zero knowledge, and that book is a extremely good place to start for anyone. Everyone thinks they "know" how to teach, but we all teach ourselves -- "The only man who can convince himself of anything is himself" (mine). But the same applies to teaching, teaching can only take you so far because learning is done through repeated exposure, practice, and is over 90% of all learning is done unconsciously for you.
"I'll agree on that one. A kid taking twelve years of science classes, and yet not being able to read or critique an experiment in science journals is terrible. But when they graduate not even knowing what a journal is, or how to create an experiment, that's just broken beyond imagining."
It won't matter how good the teachers are or the system is if the kids are disengaged.
It is one of the best ways to learn programming from absolutely knowing nothing! Because it explains in very accurate, precise and simple language that is very well expressed. This is where I learned to program years ago, and I'd challenge anyone to find a better place to bring an absolute know nothing about programming into the fold.
It explains all the simple functions and whatnot for console programming, etc, if he can't dig that then he's not fit to program, the book makes C++ as easy as something as python, or the old visual basic.
The old visual basic 6 is not a BAD place to start if you can find some good programming books, because the old VB gave "immediate" results that kids often look for.
"And you're going to have to do it anyway. If you send people to Venus/Mars - it will take months for them to get there, where will they live during those months? My answer is a space station. Not a NASA Suicide Vessel."
Which brings up a thought, what exactly would people do when they had kids, how would they deal with human turnover (from age) of skills, and politics? I'd see it as a nightmare unless we somehow give them high intelligence + and superior ability to reign in their animal instincts.
... I don't see the mouse going away at all, especially for artists and gaming. Even though artists use many tools like Wacom tablets, etc. Every tool has it's own niche and the reason the mouse works so well is because it's easy to use, forgiving in terms of energy expenditure. I think the real issue is with USER interfaces, the next great quantum leap will be in the actual design of the UI. Like how John carmack was talking about how artists could paint a landscape inside a game engine and see the results immediately. Creative programming IMHO will take us a lot further then a new interface method, after all, the physical interface is designed for and around the programs you want to use. For instance the Wii's remote for some games is not all it's crackedup to be and I went and purchased the traditional "Wii classic" (really updated SNES) controller, and I like using it a lot better in many games.
Eye tracking might take off, but like a joystick with sensitivity issues the software will need some tweaking, since your eyes are never perfectly still and I'm not sure if it be as great as they expect, or if will be just another interface tool to add to our toolbox
it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves."
The problem is, someone needs to come up with something similar to C but much easier to use, which comes with very good tutorials and is worked on by many like say python.
The biggest barrier to assembly to my mind, is lack of compelling demonstrations on why to use it, I think what needs to be done is, remember the "scene" where people did demos like 2nd reality?
Stuff like the above, except more advanced needs more exposure, there has to be some kind of bait-and-hook to for the person on the end. People want to do make and do great things, they don't say "I want to learn assembly" they see something like say a game and say "I want to make something like that!" then the go about learning the tools, because it is the end goal they want to realize that will make them sludge through it all.
As it stands not many people really want to write in assembly what they can do in C or a higher level language with less lines because of demands on their time and mental resources.
Assembly is time consuming and verbose, but it is accurate because of its specific verbosity. I agree that in the ideal world we would code more towards the metal but what happens is: Our minds are too slow and our memories are small. Then there is the fact that our lives are short and market demands are too demanding to go for excellent quality over return on investment except in the most extremely mission critical industries (military, etc).
So we create "general shells" around lower level of abstraction, that abstracts the inner workings from us so we can get useful things done in the time the market demands.
If we lived in the future and in some post-scarcity economy, I could see many "old" things become new again, as we'd have the time to read, learn and analyze things to a much deeper extent then we do over the short lives and small brains we are given. the truth is most people want to get a bit of life in before they are dead between work/education, bills, relationships and fun.
"I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy."
IT's actually the same reason why OPT OUT is used instead of OPT IN, simple inertia.
"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."--by Bertrand Russell
They have talent and making video games, but this does not mean they have talent in knowing what elements of their past games made it a success. This was obvious by the theme they chose and the format (3d, 3rdperson fps view type action).
I played hellgate and I wanted to like it but I couldn't get into it because the art direction and the viewing angles were not right for that kind of game. Diablo worked because of it's isometric style, hence blizzards sane choice of using it again in Diablo 3, the hellgate london guys while they have great skills at making game elements, doesn't mean they know how to put those elements together into something their customers will like, and it was obviou with the closure they didn't really grasp what they were doing.
... conclusion for one reason only because the word a (in the english language), such as "a house", points out the fact that language and numbers intersect. That is, language and numbers derive themselves from the same fundamental source, that is our ability to draw distinctions. Even if they use one word to refer a few objects (1 to 4) and another one to refer to more then that, this still shows that they have the ability to know more then, less then (bigger vs smaller), and that is intimately tied to geometry and hence numbers, I see numeracy is a organic/fractal outgrowth of our ability to draw distinctions (this from that), othewise we could not function as a species.
Slashdot Mirror
"Actually, watching someone with advancing (but not yet devestating) Alzheimers can also show you how little memory is needed for intelligence."
I think you're missing the point, if you an function, that means the most important memory is intact, consider it the brain having multiple hard disks, with data stored on each one (different parts of the brain, different networks), if one hard disk dies, or gets disconnected (cable cut), the brain cannot access that information in that storage area that is now disabled.
Memory is absolutely crucial to intelligence, there is no intelligence without a place to store and analyze feedback, even briefly.
", but EVERY one of us is going to wind up with carpal tunnel."
From wikipedia:
"The term 'carpal tunnel' is also used quite commonly to refer to 'carpal tunnel syndrome' which is a condition where the median nerve is compressed within the tunnel and causes pain and/or numbness of the wrist/hand, never proven to be the result of repetitive motion such as painting or typing. It has been shown to be associated with obesity, hypothyroidism, diabetes, pregnancy, family history, rheumatoid arthritis and wrist shape."
"He does not recognize me, or my brothers, or my parents (inc. his own son!)."
This just goes to show us how important our memory systems are in our intelligence and what an important role it plays in our lives.
"Of course Google is profiling what people do as they search, indexing everything is what they are about. The question is where this impacts on privacy and what limits we want to put on it."
*don's a decent sized tin foil hat*
There are no limits we can really put on it, the NSA is already sucking up the whole damn internet, ISP's are monitorign and recording you traffic and many I'm sure sell this data illegally to advertisers. There's taps on all the packets that go through the internet in different countries and different places, so trying to keep privacy on data without moving to something like Tor, etc, is not going to happen on how most of use the net today. The intelligence agencies of the world must be having a ball mining and capturing our packet data and reconstructing them into files on us using mathematical techniques to reconstruct what goes where, I'm sure this will get very good over time. Not to mention with the help of google, etc,
Copy that was temporarily put online:
http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/94A1F45E-A830-49DB-B319-DF68C28D561D/0/strat_trends_17mar07.pdf
http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=2930944
Indoor bike /w resistance + walking (cardio), also some weight training at home. You should brun at least 800 calories a day worth of workout, and keep yourself eating just under 1800 cals for the first week to see results on the scale. Cut out ALL sugary drinks, move to water, and just eat what you do normally. You don't have to radically change your diet, but you DO have to burn off more then you take in. Cardio (biking, walking, running) combined with free weight strength training are the best ways to lose weight.
If you're going to walk: At least 2 hours a day 7/days a week + freeweights + indoor bike (note that distnace is more important then time, you can walk faster, do more distance, etc)
If you're going to run, google articles on running, you have to build yourself up slowly to learn how to sustain yourself running over time, it's basically similar to the above, except you do less time running once you've gotten up to a full hour at least without stopping too much, add in some freeweight training, etc.
Great sites to get you started:
http://www.fitday.com/ (tracking what you eat)
http://www.johnstonefitness.com/
That is pretty much the way to go!
... more distraction while they are driving! I really hope they find the wisdom to only have something like a computer or internet in the backseats, and leave the front panel for navigation, controls for the phone, music, etc.
I have to wonder if we aren't making driving much more risky basically putting all this stuff in the car. I know when I'm driving, even when I'm not listening to music or anything, I'm glad my attention was not so absorbed by something else that I would not have been able to react to idiots many times.
We can leave the idea of having a 'home and office in the car' until we have technology that drives our cars for us. Sometimes I hope they do some serious research on distractibility because the road already has enough idiots on it.
"It seems that responsibility isn't required for anything anymore."
The real problem is multi-faceted, lets face this fact please. Lets not also forget it's the result of western culture and our materialsitic, excessively individualistic culture. 100 years ago advertising and TV were not very uniqitously prevalent, cell phones, video games, computers, the internet and all sorts of modern distractions did NOT exist. Since the advent of mass communication technology (Radio, TV, media, etc), this has allowed us to tune out and 'check out' into our little entertainment/fantasy lives without actually engaging people, pretending we're "doing something". When in reality all we are doing is mindlessly consuming what amounts to mind candy and drivel. This is not to say that all movies are bad or can't have an impact, nor should all movies 'have a point'.
But all these changes, has also allowed us to be consumed by our personal interests, hobboes. wealth chasing and work, cutting into the finite amount of time that exists in a day. Time is at a premium.
Over the past century commercialization has taken over damn near everything within our lives, with ads in our faces 24/7 and our love of money is what does us in, we want to offload our risks onto others, we want passive incomes, we want to make it rich, etc. To make as much money as possible and then point at someone else when things go wrong when it is really our own hyper individualistic bent, narcissm, lack of altruism and greed that causes social decay. Society is structured and fosters impossible and crazy ideas and expectations that simply cannot be met or implemented realistically, but many of us buy at least some of the pablum society pushes because it's congruent with our identity or economci interest, even if it is over the long term detriment to the whole of who we are.
Many aspects of society foster mediocre character, and mediocre thinking. Many on slashdot should know this already. We have kids raising kids, with one teacher to 25-30+ students usually, who are severely disengaged.
I will post this link again because it illustrates what is so wrong with western society and western culture:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU
Next up is Ivorytower blues: A good book to read for anyone thinking about going to university anywhere, and the increasing commercialization and 'mass marketing' of education as a cure all, when it isn't.
http://www.ivorytowerblues.com/
"It is neither right, nor privilege. It is a network of computers."
Actually the internet is more like a utility, and I think it would be wise if governments viewed it as such. The real problem is corruption, bad people who don't give a fuck about us and incompetnece.
The truth is the money men, and men of power fear the internet, because it allows for radical transformation of society especially more towards the left i.e. a kind of consumer socialism is possible with digital goods for instance, we call it piracy, but it cuts both ways, IP is abused willy nilly and public domain is always being extended.
IMHO, companies need to forced to release stuff into the public domain after a fixed amount of time, and it's non negotiable. Right now many companies are simply milking old properties who've longe since paid for themselves, adding no new value to society at all.
"To become a professional you do a theoretical degree to give you a toolkit and learn how to find stuff out, then you do your professional training. Works for physicians, lawyers, engineers, accountants. You end up with two or more sets of postnominal letters, one of which is vocational. Why not software designers?"
Computer science is really an information science, or what I like to call a "Hub science". It ranks up their with physics IMHO as one of foundational disciplines. Since one will need some education in it as a pre-requisite to actually function in the future in many jobs just because information technology will be everywhere.
The problem is the industry moves very fast and the need to solve problems (which is creating new discplines on the fly faster then academica can catch up) is far out-stripping academia's ability to keep their curriculum updated from 'research in the field' (i.e. in the workplace), since computer science is becoming very broad very fast and there is no way for academics by themselves keep on top of the explosion of information.
In fact, I'm surprised academics have not moved (even tentatively) to what I call the "wiki-pedia, professional / expert model" of education. It's an idea I've had brewing in my mind for some time now, where industry, academia, and professionals in the field have a wiki-like forum. Specifically where workers and industry share feedback about better engineering practices. And they come up with this wiki-like software, in which they can edit courses and curriculum, textbooks, and whatnot in real time with a feedback / comments section for every page in these (online) wiki-able electronic notes / lectures, and textbooks, and then one can use this kind of software as a base and have them go to print textbooks, etc, when necessary.
The idea that a group of experts in academia can possibly do a better job then everyone else who's working in industry I think is an idea past it's time. Wikipedia has shown that many experts, academics (and non-experts) alike all hammering away at a problem will catch things that one organization or institution can't by itself simply out of mere time constraints. No one has enough time in the day, that can compensate for others who do have the time (retired professionals, scientists, professors, bright students, etc).
"Computer science", today, is really vast subject and if we really get down to it. It's a huge field that is really in it's infancy still. In the games industry, just doing graphical special effects, particles, water simulation, and shaders, etc, is becoming a discipline unto itself. New disciplines are being created via cross polination of many other disciplines constantly that haven't totally shaken out yet.
Another real problem is that programming is really a subet of mathematics and physics to some extent, and our teaching of math and physics is really not that great in many schools at the public/highschool level. As a personal note: I've found myself borrowing a lot of concepts and methodologies from physics and whatnot when working on things. There is an enormous amount of cross polination, because in comp sci, many of the things you can do are effectivelly only limited by your imagination.
Damn near anything and everything can be converted to abstract representations, reconceptualizaed, etc, to be better understood. I think the real problem though is that programming right now lacks visualization tools, and that much 'code' and compiler tools are not really that developed yet, I've been thinking about what I call 'virtual engineering', where mathematical statements are converted to visual representation geometry (i.e. visual signs, etc, to stand in for how something the programmer doesn't see actually behaves as if it were a visualizable mechanical system in the real world). Although this is really basic, it does give you some idea of what I'm talking about.
I think that programming was really born out by mathematicians, especially, the type I like to call s
"I think this part of the computing timeline is going to be one that is well remembered. I know I find it fascinating."
Well remembered? Perhaps... but I wouldn't sing their praises just yet. Advances in memory are critically necessary to keep the pace of computational speed up. The big elephants in the room are: Heat, memory bandwidth and latency. Part of the reason the GPU's this time round were not as impressive is because of increasing memory bandwidth linearly will start not have the same effects sooner or later, there is a point at which the geometry of information will come into play and the law of diminishing returns on a kind of architecture or memory will take place for a price that people can afford to pay.
Next up, 32-bit addressing is starting to be a real pain in the ass. The move to 64-bit operating systems is critical if we are to expect GPU's to keep increasing their memory (1GB+ of local memory on a card now).
Supreme commander was one of the few games to hit the 4GB addressing limit and more and more games will definitely do so in the future. I know you were talking about other areas of computing, but without the games market, I don't see any serious reason for any regular person to upgrade their computers video at all. The many who donate to distributed computing did so as an afterhtought, not as the main reason they bought the card... As for the wider non-gaming market we'll have to see whether not GPU computing is going to be moer widely adopted.
Lastly, let us not forget that one of the primary reasons GPU computing is so fast is memory bandwidth, delay's in better memory technology will have big impacts on GPU performacne. As we've seen with this generation of GPU's, Nvidia's lack of DDR5 and a smaller process for the GT280 hurt them a lot.
"I'm more interested in when Google starts returning relevant results to my queries.
I can't believe that I'm the only one that finds Google's quality of service somewhat below par."
You're not the only one, but for the most part it is better then most other search engines out there. The real problem is spammers and paid advertising, I think spammers have really made search frustrating for a lot of companies. And ad companies pay other people to promote their sites for them (digg, slashdot, etc). I've noticed the increase in spam-vertised websites in search results for a lot of things.
Personally I think the idea of sharding and search being more specific for what you're looking for is needed. I'd like to see a google with 'tags' and a delicious interface, things like educational institutions and universities get lumped into their own search engine space for instance, this would help narrow down what one is looking for, although it would take time and feedback to design something well for other areas. The fact is that search results get diluted as you put more and more stuff online (numbers and geometric scale).
For fun, I've noticed stumble upon and del.ico.us are not bad alternatives when looking for new and interesting sites without having to use search
"Says who? Hey, we're already arguing on conspiracy grounds, why not argue for fake moon landings while we're at it?
I'm a programmer, but that doesn't make me more credible than someone who has no clue about programming when I claim that Cthuluh is controlling the internet."
While I agree with you somewhat, I've it's a hobby of mine to scour the "crazy's", because frequently because of their over-active paranoia they'll pick up things that most people normally wouldn't that are in fact TRUE, the problem with these people is that - they mix truth with imagined relationships or patterns that aren't there, thereby most people disqualify all of what they say by association, instead of just 'ignoring' what is false, and finding what is true.
The truth of a statement is not determined by:
-The status of the person
-Their education
-Whether or not that society considers them crazy/kooky, etc
-and on and on.
A statement is true whether or not someone is crazy, educated or not, has a job or not, or is rich or not. This 'false by association' stuff is programmed into us from birth, and while it can be a nice heuristic. I'd really like a study done on the amount of true statements vs false statements, done scientifically and with an eye towards taking what is said statement by statement to analyze the truth value's. I imagine the kind of patterns that you'd find would be interesting to say the least.
I imagine paranoid/crazy people would pick up a lot of true stuff that we deem false because we've been programmed by education/the media/entertainment, etc, and vice versa.
"When Expert X and Expert Y are putting out mutually contradictory versions of events, then the reader must critically evaluate them both"
*Dons tin foil hat for a moment*
Unfortunately this can be abused willy nilly for information the government or other rich people/businesses don't want you to know, or to use experts to omit, skew or smear information since the people with money control what is "credible" and what is "not", experts in my opinion are over-rated, history has shown many experts to be competent enough to do their jobs, but not that competent after the have died and a generation or two down the line gets to look back at their incompetence that wasn't recognized, because many experts can hide their ignorance behind other peoples ignorance, "credibility" or status.
Eisenhower's Farewell address, 1961:
"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present--and is gravely to be regarded.
Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.
It is the task of statesmanship to mould, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society."
... while I didn't mind playing the first fable, it felt a lot like a platformer like Maximo vs. Army of Zin, with RPG elements. It was basically an action game with some RPG-lite elements, also the character aged way too fast. I remember getting to the end of the game and looking insanely old.
Though I enjoyed the first one a bit, I hope this one will be better.
"I agree with both of these points. C++ is not that great as a teaching language, but I've found C Primer Plus and C++ Primer Plus to be excellently written, beautifully expositional books."
But if you combine the books with C++ then you can get a teaching language, check out the reviews of the primer on amazon.com, I wish people would actually read the book, and the reviews before they post. I speak from experience myself, the biggest point in Mr Prata's favor is he knows how to conceptualize his thoughts clearly and express them in words that are clear, simple and precise. He goes into the detail necessary for an absolute no nothing about programming. Despite what professional programmers might have against such a book, they never had to or tried to teach themselves from ground zero.
There's a reason why Prata's book is in a 5th edition, is because it's a darn good place for auto-didacts, anyone interested in a gateway to understanding programming could easily start there as anywhere else.
I think Mr Prat's book would be even better if he put the whole thing up on a website for free, and into a wiki and let people edit it. Mr Prata has a gift for communicating, and I wish most other book writers had his gift for clarity.
"I don't usually write flaming posts, but C++ as a teaching language ?!? You are smoking crack."
Look I'm speaking from absolute experience here, I knew how to make basic batch files back in the day (DOS), but I could never wrap my mind around programming languages very well until I found Stephen prata's C++ primer, his primer does not only teach you about C++ and much of it applies to every other language, once you read and do try the stuff in that book it makes C++ easy. I know because I tried a lot of c++ books before that didn't do anything for me, and I ended up giving to the library or selling them.
The right books can take something that seems like it is hard and TELL YOU EXACTLY what you need to do and what is going on, go read c++ primer plus, then come back and criticize me, because until you've done so it's a criticism that is completely uninformed.
I'm speaking as a person that began having absolutely zero knowledge, and that book is a extremely good place to start for anyone. Everyone thinks they "know" how to teach, but we all teach ourselves -- "The only man who can convince himself of anything is himself" (mine). But the same applies to teaching, teaching can only take you so far because learning is done through repeated exposure, practice, and is over 90% of all learning is done unconsciously for you.
"I'll agree on that one. A kid taking twelve years of science classes, and yet not being able to read or critique an experiment in science journals is terrible. But when they graduate not even knowing what a journal is, or how to create an experiment, that's just broken beyond imagining."
It won't matter how good the teachers are or the system is if the kids are disengaged.
See below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG3HPX0D2mU
C++ primer plus by stephen prata.
http://www.amazon.com/Primer-Plus-5th-Stephen-Prata/dp/0672326973/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1216718603&sr=8-1
It is one of the best ways to learn programming from absolutely knowing nothing! Because it explains in very accurate, precise and simple language that is very well expressed.
This is where I learned to program years ago, and I'd challenge anyone to find a better place to bring an absolute know nothing about programming into the fold.
It explains all the simple functions and whatnot for console programming, etc, if he can't dig that then he's not fit to program, the book makes C++ as easy as something as python, or the old visual basic.
The old visual basic 6 is not a BAD place to start if you can find some good programming books, because the old VB gave "immediate" results that kids often look for.
"And you're going to have to do it anyway. If you send people to Venus/Mars - it will take months for them to get there, where will they live during those months? My answer is a space station. Not a NASA Suicide Vessel."
Which brings up a thought, what exactly would people do when they had kids, how would they deal with human turnover (from age) of skills, and politics? I'd see it as a nightmare unless we somehow give them high intelligence + and superior ability to reign in their animal instincts.
... I don't see the mouse going away at all, especially for artists and gaming. Even though artists use many tools like Wacom tablets, etc. Every tool has it's own niche and the reason the mouse works so well is because it's easy to use, forgiving in terms of energy expenditure. I think the real issue is with USER interfaces, the next great quantum leap will be in the actual design of the UI. Like how John carmack was talking about how artists could paint a landscape inside a game engine and see the results immediately. Creative programming IMHO will take us a lot further then a new interface method, after all, the physical interface is designed for and around the programs you want to use. For instance the Wii's remote for some games is not all it's crackedup to be and I went and purchased the traditional "Wii classic" (really updated SNES) controller, and I like using it a lot better in many games.
Eye tracking might take off, but like a joystick with sensitivity issues the software will need some tweaking, since your eyes are never perfectly still and I'm not sure if it be as great as they expect, or if will be just another interface tool to add to our toolbox
"i didn't just miss assembly. i still do.
it's a shame no one gives assembly the respect it deserves."
The problem is, someone needs to come up with something similar to C but much easier to use, which comes with very good tutorials and is worked on by many like say python.
The biggest barrier to assembly to my mind, is lack of compelling demonstrations on why to use it, I think what needs to be done is, remember the "scene" where people did demos like 2nd reality?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtCW-axRJV8
Stuff like the above, except more advanced needs more exposure, there has to be some kind of bait-and-hook to for the person on the end. People want to do make and do great things, they don't say "I want to learn assembly" they see something like say a game and say "I want to make something like that!" then the go about learning the tools, because it is the end goal they want to realize that will make them sludge through it all.
As it stands not many people really want to write in assembly what they can do in C or a higher level language with less lines because of demands on their time and mental resources.
Assembly is time consuming and verbose, but it is accurate because of its specific verbosity. I agree that in the ideal world we would code more towards the metal but what happens is: Our minds are too slow and our memories are small. Then there is the fact that our lives are short and market demands are too demanding to go for excellent quality over return on investment except in the most extremely mission critical industries (military, etc).
So we create "general shells" around lower level of abstraction, that abstracts the inner workings from us so we can get useful things done in the time the market demands.
If we lived in the future and in some post-scarcity economy, I could see many "old" things become new again, as we'd have the time to read, learn and analyze things to a much deeper extent then we do over the short lives and small brains we are given. the truth is most people want to get a bit of life in before they are dead between work/education, bills, relationships and fun.
"I'm constantly amazed about how people will post private information in a public place (thus making it public information), and then complain about how they are being robbed of their privacy."
IT's actually the same reason why OPT OUT is used instead of OPT IN, simple inertia.
"Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do."--by Bertrand Russell
"Thats the way Diablo2 always felt to me too LOL."
Except diablo 2 did not play like an MMO at all, it was a real time action game. Enormous difference.
They have talent and making video games, but this does not mean they have talent in knowing what elements of their past games made it a success. This was obvious by the theme they chose and the format (3d, 3rdperson fps view type action).
I played hellgate and I wanted to like it but I couldn't get into it because the art direction and the viewing angles were not right for that kind of game. Diablo worked because of it's isometric style, hence blizzards sane choice of using it again in Diablo 3, the hellgate london guys while they have great skills at making game elements, doesn't mean they know how to put those elements together into something their customers will like, and it was obviou with the closure they didn't really grasp what they were doing.
... conclusion for one reason only because the word a (in the english language), such as "a house", points out the fact that language and numbers intersect. That is, language and numbers derive themselves from the same fundamental source, that is our ability to draw distinctions. Even if they use one word to refer a few objects (1 to 4) and another one to refer to more then that, this still shows that they have the ability to know more then, less then (bigger vs smaller), and that is intimately tied to geometry and hence numbers, I see numeracy is a organic/fractal outgrowth of our ability to draw distinctions (this from that), othewise we could not function as a species.