I should try being more eloquent. I was obviously in a bad mood when I wrote that comment.
To an extent, it is like being a cabinet maker. There are different kinds of people who make cabinets. Some are in love with wood and form. Some build cabinets to make money. Some people are actually more interested in the tools than the piece they are building.
It is an axiom of the artistic cabinetry world that the best work is done with the fewest and simplest tools. A band saw, a couple hand saws, some chisels, a couple of hand planes, a bit and brace. That's pretty much it. The tools force you to work directly with the thing that matters -- the wood and the construction. With these tools you have complete expressiveness in the material and complete control. You keep track of exactly what the grain of the wood is doing, and how the joints are holding up.
Many of the people who work as custom cabinet makers make a lot of money. Their pieces are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other people work as laborers in furniture making factories. Of course here the managers apply the "different tools for different jobs" notion, though the employees probably don't care that much -- they get paid by the hour. It is the carefully choosen "different tool" that is most likely to take their fingers off anyway.
One of the programmers I have the most respect for, the one who wrote my favorite programming books, is Donald Knuth. His books contain some of the most advanced consructs I have seen in book form, including a lengthy discussion on garbage collection. But he choose to present his ideas using an assembly language -- MIX. Garbage collection is not the tool, it is a product of the tool. I think the reason I responded so strongly to the assertions of the parent article is because it is like (for instance Java is like) Large Woodworking Corp telling me I cannot use hand saws and chisels anymore. LWC says I have to buy their premolded modular furniture components and join them together with LWC fasteners. Which was not really the intent of the article. The article was just talking about improvements in GC techniques. But the statement about GC being a panacea was absurd -- unless you are working on a nearly trivial problem.
There is a disease amongst Computer Scientists that makes us get lost in the "tools". It is as if our job is to tell other people how to solve problems, instead of pursuing the solution of real problems ourselves. What is the "wood" of computer science? I think the substance is the problem, especially the hard problem. How are we doing with computer vision, with natural language, with common sense and reasoning? Not too good. A couple of decades ago it got hard, despite our initial optimisim. So everyone gave up and started selling "tools" instead of promising solutions. I'm sure that, if anything, all these tools just get in the way.
I guess that is a good example of what I am taking about. Gcc does not make anyone any money, directly. And it is not an especially great compiler either. Gcc is a wonderful commodity. Try benchmarking low level code with the (also recently free beer) MS compiler (under W2000) against gcc (under W2000 or Linux) and you will find out what I am talking about.
I did not intend the comment as a troll, though I suppose it was overly terse. People are constantly worried about outsourcing and the devaluation of engineering jobs. I'm not saying easier jobs have no value or are not worth doing, just that harder problems have higher relative value.
Basically, I think everything will become a commodity except what is still hard. And the only way to attack what is still hard is at the lower levels, because the main problem with hard problems is consistently time. The "extreme situations" are the ones we should be attacking; in the beginning all we worked on were extreme situations, and I and other software engineers were far more professional and respected than we are today. By trying to abstact and simplify so much we have denigrated the value of the computer profession as a whole, usually for the benefit of the proponents of the specific "solution" or abstraction. It's great that it is so easy to put together an online transaction system these days, but whatever happened to natural language recognition?
Also, there is a big difference between using task specific garbage collection in the context of a proprietary data structure and trying to develop a general abstract collector. It is even worse to disallow programmatic memory mangement like Java does.
The extreme situations are the only ones that are valuable.
If you are not coding an "extreme situation," your job is outsourced. Any application that can tolerate garbage collection is trivial.
Thanks anyway -- I'll stick to C and assembly. At least I will have a job tommorrow.
This public emphasis on IT oriented solutions and security must be a smoke screen by MS. What makes an OS usable is excellent support for very fast basic services so that new and powerful applications can be developed. The applications that really matter are not the browser connecting you to your bank -- that will easily become a commodity. The applications that matter are the hard ones, like Avid Media Composer, or Photoshop, or Autocad, or Maya.
Any products based on.NET or mono are very low value -- they can be easily outsourced or duplicated as commodities. What the OS community is neglecting is support for very high value low level applications; applications that need fast direct IO and proprietary data structures -- applications that will not tolerate managed environments. Pointers and low level access exist for a very strategic reason.
The idea (in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's) was that as hardware gets faster, the environment will improve for the user, NOT for the programmer. Programs are supposed to get smarter as hardware increases in power. But we are using the increase in power to make the programmers job easier. This is so misguided.
The first successful "personal" platform for difficult applications was the Macintosh. In 1985 the Mac had quickdraw and a useable direct display graphics interface. X11 was saddled with the prohibitively slow client/server interface and proprietary direct graphics APIs. Consequently the Macintosh became the platform of choice for hard media applications, and it is still the only computer in most post production houses in Hollywood (I've worked in post production in LA for the last couple of years), despite the ballyhoo about linux in the renderfarm.
The Mac has practically owned the difficult media market since 1984 because it provided powerful and simple direct I/O support, so that rich high-value applications could be more easily created.
MS, DOS, and windows recieved their power from IBM. IBM choose MS DOS for their first PC, which became influential in 1985 thru 1987 -- pushing out CPM/Motorola 68000 based systems. The PC/MS DOS was selected because it was IBM, not because it was MS. At this time Apple was for the hobby desktop, IBM was for serious IT, and CPM was the serious IT oriented PC. IBM/MS DOS replaced CPM, but it did not replace the Mac. MS/PC did not become viable as a serious GUI application platform until windows 95. But from the beginning Windows had a direct useable display model and was practically superior to X11 for high performance apps. It was the LACK of security and abstraction that made Windows better.
Over the past eight years many apps have transitioned from the Mac and from proprietary Unix based display API onto Windows. Autocad moved from Unix onto windows. Avid DV works well under windows. Photoshop is excellent under windows (and [sorry] is much faster than the gimp.)
I believe that we in the OS community are loosing track of what matters. If I want to write a serious application -- a very smart application with heavy GUI interactivity -- what do I use? Should I use SDL? Why do I have to tunnel through the C/S metaphor? Why *is* there a C/S metaphor for an OS that wants to become a choice for the "desktop"? Should not something other that X be the standard GUI for a desktop system?
Where are the serious applications for Linux? Instead of Avid media composer there is Cinelerra. Instead of Photoshop there is GIMP, which is the best thing OS has produced, but (be honest) -- it does not compare in terms of feel with Photoshop. GIMP does not snap. Where is Autocad for Linux?
Why all this emphasis on low value applications? Dot NET based development might as well be outsourced. If you don't need to code an efficient pointer based data structure maybe you should look for a new job. What OS/Linux needs to do is become the platform of choice for the SMARTEST and most cutting edge of applications.
As it stands right now I cannot even simply change my
Right after I got my degree in 1984 I got a job with a computer vision company writing image processing microcode. My degree was in Physics. The company I worked for gave me the title of "Systems Engineer", mainly because the Chief Engineer denegrated the position of "Programmer". That company had no programmers working for it -- only "Systems" and "Electronic" Engineers. But I still spent most of my time writing code. Code was my principle deliverable.
After that I worked for SAIC for a few years. They were the same way -- they denegrated the position of "Programmer" and I became a "Senior Systems Engineer". But I still spent all of my time either writing code or writing documents about algorithms and the design of software systems. But no way was I a "Programmer".
Then I went to a more IT oriented industrial company and I found out what the problem was. I worked with several people who had the title of "Software Engineer", but who were actually "Programmers", in the denegrated sense. They were not productive. They were slow and difficult. I could produce (by their esimate) at a rate of 10 times what they could, and (by my estimate) at a rate of 100 times what most of them could do. I was a manager, but it made more sense for me to write what I needed myself, rather than to delegate. Of the 30 engineers at the company, perhaps 6 were good enough to use as developers.
The reason the other 24 people became "Software Engineers" is because they thought they could make some money. They did not have strong math and science interest, but they were working on their degrees in the early 90s when Time magazine or whoever said the world needed computer programmers.
This is our current problem. The US has millions of people who are supposedly "Software Engineers" or "Programmers" for strategic or commercial reasons. Engineering is not in their heart -- it is a manifestation of greed and desire. This is due to the pudit assessment in the 80s and 90s that "High Tech" would be the place to be -- the rewarding career of the future -- and the hyperbola of the "Dotcom" boom. Such a weight of disingenuous involvement necessarily has a deep and devastating flip side, and that flip side is now, and reflected by your question. The question is not asked with quite enough blood and pain, I think.
The present is painful because the past was foolish. There is actually no room for programmers in this world, but only for engineers. Engineers can design their own programmers -- hence C++, hence Java, hence Visual C++, hence dotnet, mono, whatever you like -- Programmers can be outsourced mindless anonymous denizens piecing simple concepts together. For a penny an hour. Because the Engineers have made it easy to mindlessly wire simple concepts together anywhere, even as far away as India -- if the problem being addressed is a "Programming" problem.
***
FYI -- I have been there, in Bangalore. They are beautiful, motivated, and brilliant, totally enamoured by knowledge. You must know who Ganesh is and the relation of Ganesh to Bangalore to understand why Bangalore is such a good place to outsource. But you must know that they want to be *here*, in the US. Bangalore is a pit, full of the oil scum of two-stroke lawnmower engines. No one wants to live there for long. And the more success, the more expectation, the more money -- the higher the standard of living they will demand.
Is programming a commodity??
NO, because an activity cannot be a commodity. Programming is a process of iteration, and value comes froms proximity. When all the wannabes pass away here, those who cannot compete because they simply do not have the aptitude or interest, the value of proximity will begin to re-emerge. I am no better than my brother who is as good as me in Bangalore, but I *am* closer.
Any Doctor who applies the laws of thermodynamics as in the context of the article clearly has their doctorate in something other than physics. The analogy is more hyperbolic than amusing. I guess this is a hallmark of influence and seniority: concepts such as "energy" and "virus" are used in a cavalier fashion instead of with accuracy.
From:
What is Science?
Richard P. Feynman
the Physics Teacher, September, 1969, pp. 313-320
There is a first-grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate. manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog, a windable toy dog, and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says "What makes it move?" Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question "What makes it move?" Then there is a picture of a motor bike and the question "What makes it move?" and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about: physics, biology, chemistry. But that wasn't it. The answer was in the teachers edition of the book; the answer I was trying, to learn is that "energy makes it move." Now energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I mean by that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly, using the energy idea. It is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that "God makes it move," or "spirit makes it move," or "movability makes it move." (In fact one could equally well say "energy makes it stop.")
Look at it this way: That's only the definition of energy. It should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not "what makes it move is energy." This is a very subtle difference. It's the same with this inertia proposition. Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: if you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around. What a good way to begin a science course. Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That's good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, 'I don't think energy makes it move." Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, "Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language." Without using the word "energy," tell me what you know now about the dog's motion." You cannot. So you learned nothing except the definition. You learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson is that not possibly destructive?
I think, for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others-"gravity makes it fall;" "the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction." Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction,
is sad, because it's not science.
To properly deconstruct the technologist perspective you must be more accurate. Kids who listen to the radio are not "recieving and demodulating musical signals without paying for it", they're just listening to some music. Practically speaking, Kazaa is treated in the same way. Kazzaa is a way to listen to music like the radio is, except you can often select what you want to listen to. And you get a local copy, though not an especially good one at a 128k bit rate. But in general kids don't care much. They used to be just as happy recording the radio on cassette tapes.
Digital systems and the internet have made it easier to record the radio on cassette tapes. Big deal. No one yet has shown, in any study with any credibility, a change in behavior over the past 30 years. All the words are simply postering attempts to take advantage of the current situation in some way.
I haven't used these, but your comment about the modified monopod suggests that Chung Lee's design could be modified to make it lighter. If a weight at the end of (an aluminum) monopod works well, then the steel pipes in Lee's solution may not be the best solution.
What is the Physics? Is it the overall weight of the assembly with its CG (center of gravity) at your hand that helps? Or is it the counter balancing effect of the pedulum? Can you get a better smoothness to weight ratio by moving the weight out onto the pendulum head?
I don't have a great feel for this without trying it, but I suspect you would get better performance by increasing the lever arm. In the same way that a tight rope walker uses a longer pole, or a weight lifter uses a longer bar, moving the weight out on the lever arm helps maintain balance.
You can probably use this design with aluminum struts instead of steel pipe struts and get similar performance, though you will probably have to increase the pendulum weight a little. The total weight may be less. I wonder how much raw carbon-fiber tube costs? Maybe it is affordable if you buy it as a material.
The real issue here, what makes this solution viable, is low head weight. The expensive solutions are targeted towards professional cameras that easily weigh 15 lbs: Sony Betacams, the DSR 300 - 500s and such, and the the top of the line steadycams are for 35mm film cameras. Smoothing a consumer handycam is a much easier problem. As the image quality on tiny cameras goes up homemade solutions will become much more significant.
How are you *ever* going to determine the effect of P2P on record industry revenues, using an unassailable and repeatable methodology? No one has even tried to demonstate the marketing difference between on demand download of 128k mp3 content and analog recording of radio broadcasts. How would you construct such a study? In the end it is all hand waving and opinion, and the only thing that matters is record industry profits.
Chances are industry profits will follow the economy. The more disposible income there is, the more people will "vote" for their favorite bands. All I have to work with is anecdotal evidence: my sister bought 15 copies of the Elvis Costello CD for her friends for Christmans because she "wanted to support him." But my sister has money.
My own anecdotal experience is that the only time I bought any CDs at all was during the heyday of Napster. I bought all kinds of stuff because I was reminded of and found what was good. (Also I had money during the heyday.) I also had money before Napster, but I did not buy CDs because I got burned too often.
What if it turns out that P2P actually stokes interest in music and ultimately increases record sales more than radio broadcast does? It is ENTIRELY possible that this is the case. All of a sudden the industries are going to do this huge spin....
Slashdot Mirror
I should try being more eloquent. I was obviously in a bad mood when I wrote that comment.
To an extent, it is like being a cabinet maker. There are different kinds of people who make cabinets. Some are in love with wood and form. Some build cabinets to make money. Some people are actually more interested in the tools than the piece they are building.
It is an axiom of the artistic cabinetry world that the best work is done with the fewest and simplest tools. A band saw, a couple hand saws, some chisels, a couple of hand planes, a bit and brace. That's pretty much it. The tools force you to work directly with the thing that matters -- the wood and the construction. With these tools you have complete expressiveness in the material and complete control. You keep track of exactly what the grain of the wood is doing, and how the joints are holding up.
Many of the people who work as custom cabinet makers make a lot of money. Their pieces are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Other people work as laborers in furniture making factories. Of course here the managers apply the "different tools for different jobs" notion, though the employees probably don't care that much -- they get paid by the hour. It is the carefully choosen "different tool" that is most likely to take their fingers off anyway.
One of the programmers I have the most respect for, the one who wrote my favorite programming books, is Donald Knuth. His books contain some of the most advanced consructs I have seen in book form, including a lengthy discussion on garbage collection. But he choose to present his ideas using an assembly language -- MIX. Garbage collection is not the tool, it is a product of the tool. I think the reason I responded so strongly to the assertions of the parent article is because it is like (for instance Java is like) Large Woodworking Corp telling me I cannot use hand saws and chisels anymore. LWC says I have to buy their premolded modular furniture components and join them together with LWC fasteners. Which was not really the intent of the article. The article was just talking about improvements in GC techniques. But the statement about GC being a panacea was absurd -- unless you are working on a nearly trivial problem.
There is a disease amongst Computer Scientists that makes us get lost in the "tools". It is as if our job is to tell other people how to solve problems, instead of pursuing the solution of real problems ourselves. What is the "wood" of computer science? I think the substance is the problem, especially the hard problem. How are we doing with computer vision, with natural language, with common sense and reasoning? Not too good. A couple of decades ago it got hard, despite our initial optimisim. So everyone gave up and started selling "tools" instead of promising solutions. I'm sure that, if anything, all these tools just get in the way.
I guess that is a good example of what I am taking about. Gcc does not make anyone any money, directly. And it is not an especially great compiler either. Gcc is a wonderful commodity. Try benchmarking low level code with the (also recently free beer) MS compiler (under W2000) against gcc (under W2000 or Linux) and you will find out what I am talking about.
I did not intend the comment as a troll, though I suppose it was overly terse. People are constantly worried about outsourcing and the devaluation of engineering jobs. I'm not saying easier jobs have no value or are not worth doing, just that harder problems have higher relative value.
Basically, I think everything will become a commodity except what is still hard. And the only way to attack what is still hard is at the lower levels, because the main problem with hard problems is consistently time. The "extreme situations" are the ones we should be attacking; in the beginning all we worked on were extreme situations, and I and other software engineers were far more professional and respected than we are today. By trying to abstact and simplify so much we have denigrated the value of the computer profession as a whole, usually for the benefit of the proponents of the specific "solution" or abstraction. It's great that it is so easy to put together an online transaction system these days, but whatever happened to natural language recognition?
Also, there is a big difference between using task specific garbage collection in the context of a proprietary data structure and trying to develop a general abstract collector. It is even worse to disallow programmatic memory mangement like Java does.
The extreme situations are the only ones that are valuable. If you are not coding an "extreme situation," your job is outsourced. Any application that can tolerate garbage collection is trivial. Thanks anyway -- I'll stick to C and assembly. At least I will have a job tommorrow.
This public emphasis on IT oriented solutions and security must be a smoke screen by MS. What makes an OS usable is excellent support for very fast basic services so that new and powerful applications can be developed. The applications that really matter are not the browser connecting you to your bank -- that will easily become a commodity. The applications that matter are the hard ones, like Avid Media Composer, or Photoshop, or Autocad, or Maya.
.NET or mono are very low value -- they can be easily outsourced or duplicated as commodities. What the OS community is neglecting is support for very high value low level applications; applications that need fast direct IO and proprietary data structures -- applications that will not tolerate managed environments. Pointers and low level access exist for a very strategic reason.
Any products based on
The idea (in the 50's, 60's, 70's, and 80's) was that as hardware gets faster, the environment will improve for the user, NOT for the programmer. Programs are supposed to get smarter as hardware increases in power. But we are using the increase in power to make the programmers job easier. This is so misguided.
The first successful "personal" platform for difficult applications was the Macintosh. In 1985 the Mac had quickdraw and a useable direct display graphics interface. X11 was saddled with the prohibitively slow client/server interface and proprietary direct graphics APIs. Consequently the Macintosh became the platform of choice for hard media applications, and it is still the only computer in most post production houses in Hollywood (I've worked in post production in LA for the last couple of years), despite the ballyhoo about linux in the renderfarm.
The Mac has practically owned the difficult media market since 1984 because it provided powerful and simple direct I/O support, so that rich high-value applications could be more easily created.
MS, DOS, and windows recieved their power from IBM. IBM choose MS DOS for their first PC, which became influential in 1985 thru 1987 -- pushing out CPM/Motorola 68000 based systems. The PC/MS DOS was selected because it was IBM, not because it was MS. At this time Apple was for the hobby desktop, IBM was for serious IT, and CPM was the serious IT oriented PC. IBM/MS DOS replaced CPM, but it did not replace the Mac. MS/PC did not become viable as a serious GUI application platform until windows 95. But from the beginning Windows had a direct useable display model and was practically superior to X11 for high performance apps. It was the LACK of security and abstraction that made Windows better.
Over the past eight years many apps have transitioned from the Mac and from proprietary Unix based display API onto Windows. Autocad moved from Unix onto windows. Avid DV works well under windows. Photoshop is excellent under windows (and [sorry] is much faster than the gimp.)
I believe that we in the OS community are loosing track of what matters. If I want to write a serious application -- a very smart application with heavy GUI interactivity -- what do I use? Should I use SDL? Why do I have to tunnel through the C/S metaphor? Why *is* there a C/S metaphor for an OS that wants to become a choice for the "desktop"? Should not something other that X be the standard GUI for a desktop system?
Where are the serious applications for Linux? Instead of Avid media composer there is Cinelerra. Instead of Photoshop there is GIMP, which is the best thing OS has produced, but (be honest) -- it does not compare in terms of feel with Photoshop. GIMP does not snap. Where is Autocad for Linux?
Why all this emphasis on low value applications? Dot NET based development might as well be outsourced. If you don't need to code an efficient pointer based data structure maybe you should look for a new job. What OS/Linux needs to do is become the platform of choice for the SMARTEST and most cutting edge of applications.
As it stands right now I cannot even simply change my
Right after I got my degree in 1984 I got a job with a computer vision company writing image processing microcode. My degree was in Physics. The company I worked for gave me the title of "Systems Engineer", mainly because the Chief Engineer denegrated the position of "Programmer". That company had no programmers working for it -- only "Systems" and "Electronic" Engineers. But I still spent most of my time writing code. Code was my principle deliverable.
After that I worked for SAIC for a few years. They were the same way -- they denegrated the position of "Programmer" and I became a "Senior Systems Engineer". But I still spent all of my time either writing code or writing documents about algorithms and the design of software systems. But no way was I a "Programmer".
Then I went to a more IT oriented industrial company and I found out what the problem was. I worked with several people who had the title of "Software Engineer", but who were actually "Programmers", in the denegrated sense. They were not productive. They were slow and difficult. I could produce (by their esimate) at a rate of 10 times what they could, and (by my estimate) at a rate of 100 times what most of them could do. I was a manager, but it made more sense for me to write what I needed myself, rather than to delegate. Of the 30 engineers at the company, perhaps 6 were good enough to use as developers.
The reason the other 24 people became "Software Engineers" is because they thought they could make some money. They did not have strong math and science interest, but they were working on their degrees in the early 90s when Time magazine or whoever said the world needed computer programmers.
This is our current problem. The US has millions of people who are supposedly "Software Engineers" or "Programmers" for strategic or commercial reasons. Engineering is not in their heart -- it is a manifestation of greed and desire. This is due to the pudit assessment in the 80s and 90s that "High Tech" would be the place to be -- the rewarding career of the future -- and the hyperbola of the "Dotcom" boom. Such a weight of disingenuous involvement necessarily has a deep and devastating flip side, and that flip side is now, and reflected by your question. The question is not asked with quite enough blood and pain, I think.
The present is painful because the past was foolish. There is actually no room for programmers in this world, but only for engineers. Engineers can design their own programmers -- hence C++, hence Java, hence Visual C++, hence dotnet, mono, whatever you like -- Programmers can be outsourced mindless anonymous denizens piecing
simple concepts together. For a penny an hour. Because the Engineers have made it easy to mindlessly wire simple concepts together anywhere, even as far away as India -- if the problem being addressed is a "Programming" problem.
***
FYI -- I have been there, in Bangalore. They are beautiful, motivated, and brilliant, totally enamoured by knowledge. You must know who Ganesh is and the relation of Ganesh to Bangalore to understand why Bangalore is such a good place to outsource. But you must know that they want to be *here*, in the US. Bangalore is a pit, full of the oil scum of two-stroke lawnmower engines. No one wants to live there for long. And the more success, the more expectation, the more money -- the higher the standard of living they will demand.
Is programming a commodity??
NO, because an activity cannot be a commodity. Programming is a process of iteration, and value comes froms proximity. When all the wannabes pass away here, those who cannot compete because they simply do not have the aptitude or interest, the value of proximity will begin to re-emerge. I am no better than my brother who is as good as me in Bangalore, but I *am* closer.
Any Doctor who applies the laws of thermodynamics as in the context of the article clearly has their doctorate in something other than physics. The analogy is more hyperbolic than amusing. I guess this is a hallmark of influence and seniority: concepts such as "energy" and "virus" are used in a cavalier fashion instead of with accuracy.
From:
What is Science?
Richard P. Feynman
the Physics Teacher, September, 1969, pp. 313-320
There is a first-grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate. manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog, a windable toy dog, and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says "What makes it move?" Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question "What makes it move?" Then there is a picture of a motor bike and the question "What makes it move?" and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about: physics, biology, chemistry. But that wasn't it. The answer was in the teachers edition of the book; the answer I was trying, to learn is that "energy makes it move." Now energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I mean by that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly, using the energy idea. It is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that "God makes it move," or "spirit makes it move," or "movability makes it move." (In fact one could equally well say "energy makes it stop.")
Look at it this way: That's only the definition of energy. It should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not "what makes it move is energy." This is a very subtle difference. It's the same with this inertia proposition. Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: if you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around. What a good way to begin a science course. Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That's good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, 'I don't think energy makes it move." Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, "Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language." Without using the word "energy," tell me what you know now about the dog's motion." You cannot. So you learned nothing except the definition. You learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson is that not possibly destructive?
I think, for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others-"gravity makes it fall;" "the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction." Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it's not science.
To properly deconstruct the technologist perspective you must be more accurate. Kids who listen to the radio are not "recieving and demodulating musical signals without paying for it", they're just listening to some music. Practically speaking, Kazaa is treated in the same way. Kazzaa is a way to listen to music like the radio is, except you can often select what you want to listen to. And you get a local copy, though not an especially good one at a 128k bit rate. But in general kids don't care much. They used to be just as happy recording the radio on cassette tapes.
Digital systems and the internet have made it easier to record the radio on cassette tapes. Big deal. No one yet has shown, in any study with any credibility, a change in behavior over the past 30 years. All the words are simply postering attempts to take advantage of the current situation in some way.
I haven't used these, but your comment about the modified monopod suggests that Chung Lee's design could be modified to make it lighter. If a weight at the end of (an aluminum) monopod works well, then the steel pipes in Lee's solution may not be the best solution.
What is the Physics? Is it the overall weight of the assembly with its CG (center of gravity) at your hand that helps? Or is it the counter balancing effect of the pedulum? Can you get a better smoothness to weight ratio by moving the weight out onto the pendulum head?
I don't have a great feel for this without trying it, but I suspect you would get better performance by increasing the lever arm. In the same way that a tight rope walker uses a longer pole, or a weight lifter uses a longer bar, moving the weight out on the lever arm helps maintain balance.
You can probably use this design with aluminum struts instead of steel pipe struts and get similar performance, though you will probably have to increase the pendulum weight a little. The total weight may be less. I wonder how much raw carbon-fiber tube costs? Maybe it is affordable if you buy it as a material.
The real issue here, what makes this solution viable, is low head weight. The expensive solutions are targeted towards professional cameras that easily weigh 15 lbs: Sony Betacams, the DSR 300 - 500s and such, and the the top of the line steadycams are for 35mm film cameras. Smoothing a consumer handycam is a much easier problem. As the image quality on tiny cameras goes up homemade solutions will become much more significant.
Jesus says "God is good."
Meaning exclusively.
I think humans are doing well if they can just be humane.
How are you *ever* going to determine the effect of P2P on record industry revenues, using an unassailable and repeatable methodology? No one has even tried to demonstate the marketing difference between on demand download of 128k mp3 content and analog recording of radio broadcasts. How would you construct such a study? In the end it is all hand waving and opinion, and the only thing that matters is record industry profits.
Chances are industry profits will follow the economy. The more disposible income there is, the more people will "vote" for their favorite bands. All I have to work with is anecdotal evidence: my sister bought 15 copies of the Elvis Costello CD for her friends for Christmans because she "wanted to support him." But my sister has money.
My own anecdotal experience is that the only time I bought any CDs at all was during the heyday of Napster. I bought all kinds of stuff because I was reminded of and found what was good. (Also I had money during the heyday.) I also had money before Napster, but I did not buy CDs because I got burned too often.
What if it turns out that P2P actually stokes interest in music and ultimately increases record sales more than radio broadcast does? It is ENTIRELY possible that this is the case. All of a sudden the industries are going to do this huge spin....