No no. Thinking is part of it, but just like Newton, Bohr, and all the rest of them, experimenting and observing is an integral part of science. See my reply to the post below to kinda see more of my distinction between scientists (Bell, Hawking) and engineers/inventors (Edison, Babbage).
Philosophers do often speak out against science, and for good reason. Their basic assumptions are generally without any basis whatsoever. I classify a scientist as someone who does basic research for its own sake, not to make money off of it by creating some machine. An engineer may do good science, but he is not a scientist. An experiment designed to reveal something the world to the experimenter is a trait of a good scientist. An experiment designed to find out whether something will work or is feasible practically is a trait of a good engineer.
That's my point. Edison was not a scientist. He did no fundamental research on ANYTHING. He took modern scientific theories and ideas and applied them, _making things_ with them. The same goes for Westinghouse and Babbage.
You included Tesla. Tesla was in it for the money, but he didn't have his mind much on science. He, too, did little more than tinker with gadgets and come up with theories on why his things worked.
It's funny that you say 3-legged chair. A three legged chair would be perfectly stable, even if all the legs are of different lengths. Now, where the center of gravity is when you sit on this chair may make the difference between falling and sitting, but a 3 legged chair can be absolutely stable. It's gauranteed not to wobble. Ever.
Anyway, science is a philosophy as much as, say, Plato's world of form. He had no real reasoning method..he started with his own, personal, basic assumptions and carried them out to their logical conclusions, just like pure science. Think of all the famous ancient Greek philosophers. Chances are, a good many of them are scientists - Aristotle? Socrates? Xeno? They all did quite a bit of basic scientific work.
You are missing the distinction between science and engineering. All the people you named were essentially engineers. The fact that they were in it for the money both has nothing to do with this and proves that they weren't scientists.
Scientists aren't out to make money on something. Show me an astronomer or theroetical physicist who's in it for the money. Hawking? Penrose? I don't think so. But....some guys running a biotech firm? Nuclear physicists? These guys build nanobots and reactors that are used in submarines. They're in it for the money, even if they are "doing good science."
That does NOT make the scientsits.
scientist \Sci"en*tist\, n. One learned in science; a scientific investigator; one devoted to scientific study
engineer n 1: a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems
That's right from dictionary.com. A scientist seeks truth and knowledge by experimentation. An engineer seeks money, fame, or something else by creating things to perform certain tasks.
Einstein never made a damn thing worth noting. Neither did Bell, or Faraday, or Hawking, or anyone else (yes, I am biased toward physics). Scientists are few and far between, just as are philosophers. Engineers are quite common - we even have schools devoted to nothing but training them, a la my very own RPI. They're very well paid, too.
Science != engineering. Show me someone who has come up with a new way of looking at the world, oran important basic theory just for the hell of it, and I will show you someone who _thinks_ and doesn't make pretty little gadgets trying to get rich, like Edison.
The greatest scientists in history - Newton, Galileo, Bohr, Einstein, etc. - have _all_ been scientist philosophers, not engineers. It is the engineers' job to try and adapt what we know about the world through pure scientific research to practical applications.
It is the job of the true scientist to constantly evaluate how we think about the world and what we know about it. Pure science is nothing more than another school of philosophy - the sophists believe what they did, Kant believed in the impracticality of pure reason, and Bohr believed that it was impossible to fully understand the world through any amount of research. It is a system of beliefs based on reason, just like any other modern philosophy.
The above poster is absolutely right - people expect scientists to make their world better by doing practical research. The people who give us new advances in technology are called engineers - lasers, microwaves, washing machines, and transistors were created by engineers. However, every one of these engineers turned some seemingly useless, impractical research done by some scientist somewhere into something practical and useful.
Bottom line, science != engineering.
Science and philosophy are in the same realm - engineering does not belong there.
Nope, he was right. A Pentium 60 does a work unit in less than half the time of a 486DX4/100. I have one right behind doing nothing but crunching SETI (and occasionally acting as a storage system), and it definitely takes 100-150 hours per unit.
Windows is a massive operating system, and it is indeed a large hack - a miracle that it works as well as it does. I'm personally running a copy of Windows ME and 2000 on various computers I own, and I'm impressed that they have managed to keep so much code through so many incarnations of this OS and STILL maintain almost 100% compatibility among their entire product line.
About this project. They're not using any legacy Windows code. They're not trying to hack together a lot of crap and bloat and just keep all the old code while shoving new stuff in. This entire project is, hopefully, going to be about completely reprogramming Windows in the best way possible. That means keeping it efficient, not having to deal with old code that you'd rather keep, etc. In this process, the coders WILL be learning from the "glaring failures" in windows and hopefully show MS a thing or two about how to do it right given some dedication.
I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that these people will learn massive amounts of information, and have to think of no small number of clever hacks and tricks as they go along. We should be saluting these guys - if they succeed, and their OS is open source in the end, it could be forged into something that is the best of both Windows and Linux - an OS that is truly accessible to the masses, very easy to use, very powerful, and very stable. Is this not, essentially, the reason we hoped that the MS antitrust trial would result in the gov't forcing MS to open-source windows? So that we could take it and turn it into something _better_ than linux or Win 98?
Don't beat on these guys, they're not taking programming tips from MS design teams - they're trying to acheive the same result in a totally different way. Once that happens, the possibilities may very well open up right in front of us.
Keep your fingers crossed...I will for a few years.
I'm sick of seeing this "$200 for a doorknob, $435 for a hammer" crap people spout about the government.
This is where those numbers really come from: The government often pays for things to be beuilt by contract. Instead of listing every item and price on invoices or work orders or whatever the hell they are, they take the price of the entire contract and divide it by however many items there are. Thus, though a computer system on an F-16 may cost $10,000 and the special gold tempered cockpit glass may cost $50,000 per bubble, a hammer used by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics (aren't they the same company now or something?) still only costs $15 or $20.
So, in other words, while we're paying $435 for a hammer, we're also paying $435 for the highly special radar scanning tip in the nose of the aircraft.
News flash: DeCSS was written as a windows program to crack CSS on dvd's, and it was done _because they could_. These guys didn't have dreams of a DVD player for linux in their heads or anything.
As a New Orleanian, I'd just like to point out the Louisiana's police and government are among the most pompous, racist, corrupt, and just plain evil governemtn officials in the country.
Well, actually, the police department has undergone major changes in the last 3 years since Pennington became cheif...this man is a badass. Anyway, I can definitely tell you the police are getting their act together and turning into one of the better forces around.
Anyway..I do have to say that I agree with your statements though:)
For all you people who apparently didn't get the sarcasm, that "make spam illegal!!" was a joke directed at the people who have these strange knee-jerk reactions to things they want to get rid of.
No, disinformation is a destabilizing technique, not a stabilizing one (terms borrowed from what I know about Cold War nuclear war planning - things like missle buildup and Star Wars were destabilizing, because they just encouraged the USSR to stock _more_ weapons rather out of pure necessity).
Anyway, if huge lists of non-existant addresses are created, then yes, the actual proportion of spam that gets delievered will go down. However, that just means the spammers will have to amass EVEN BIGGER lists just to get the same number of arriving messages. This will encourage spammers to try even harder than they are now to get mail into our boxes.
We're never going to get rid of it, and disinformation will not make it go away.
We have to come up with something better - make spam illegal!
CNet is at least 5 years old (they recently had an anniversary, but I can't find their link to the story), and they are one of, if not the, the largest online tech sources around. They als have significant resources and revenue streams. Don't believe me? They own news.com, computers.com, shareware.com, downloads.com, and builder.com. You don't just happen on these domain names. And you know what? Each of those domains is among the largest in its respective field.
CNet used to run these ads. the left hand side had a huge bodybuilder and it said "ZDNet in print." The right side had a skinny weakling and said "ZDNet online." They were right. The CNet site is larger, ahs more original content, and I believe has an order of magnitude greater page hits/day (I'm not so sure about that one, but I heard it somewhere). They just do it better online than ZDNet.
Their TV shows are better than ZDNet's too. I've actually talked to people who have seen CNet's, but I have yet to meet one who has seen ZDTV. This is far from scientific, but it has been my experience.
Anyway, I've been reading CNet for major tech news and to keep in touch with the "newbie"-er side of computers since it all started, about 4-5 years ago. They've come a long way, and have grown a tremendous amount.
Haven't you ever noticed that half the stories end with "[some major company such as intel] is an investor in CNet"? Seems lots of large companies have poured some cash into this "startup." Well, this startup has been doing it well since about '95 and has lots and lots of revenue and resources.
This is offtopic, but it's something I want to say.
That t-shirt is pretty cool, but I've got to say something, in complete honesty.
In my 6 years of using all flavors of windws - 3.1, 95, 98, nt, 2k - I have never seen a screen like that.
I dual boot into debian on my main box, an athlon I built from scratch, and i do a little programming in C++, so I'm not a computer novice or anything. I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of the computers I've had..from crappy Compaqs' filled with nasty proprietary hardware, a couple Thinkpads, and my current PIII --> Athlon box.
Do these things actually happen?/.'ers make it sound like their computers BSOD every 20 minutes when they're in windows. What's up?
Well what happens when i download three new songs and want to listen to them in my car on the way to work? TOO BAD with these players. With my nomad or little MD player, I can just throw those new songs on in no time and not have to compile and burn an entirely new disc.
Slashdot Mirror
No no. Thinking is part of it, but just like Newton, Bohr, and all the rest of them, experimenting and observing is an integral part of science. See my reply to the post below to kinda see more of my distinction between scientists (Bell, Hawking) and engineers/inventors (Edison, Babbage).
Philosophers do often speak out against science, and for good reason. Their basic assumptions are generally without any basis whatsoever. I classify a scientist as someone who does basic research for its own sake, not to make money off of it by creating some machine. An engineer may do good science, but he is not a scientist. An experiment designed to reveal something the world to the experimenter is a trait of a good scientist. An experiment designed to find out whether something will work or is feasible practically is a trait of a good engineer.
That's my point. Edison was not a scientist. He did no fundamental research on ANYTHING. He took modern scientific theories and ideas and applied them, _making things_ with them. The same goes for Westinghouse and Babbage.
You included Tesla. Tesla was in it for the money, but he didn't have his mind much on science. He, too, did little more than tinker with gadgets and come up with theories on why his things worked.
It's funny that you say 3-legged chair. A three legged chair would be perfectly stable, even if all the legs are of different lengths. Now, where the center of gravity is when you sit on this chair may make the difference between falling and sitting, but a 3 legged chair can be absolutely stable. It's gauranteed not to wobble. Ever.
Anyway, science is a philosophy as much as, say, Plato's world of form. He had no real reasoning method..he started with his own, personal, basic assumptions and carried them out to their logical conclusions, just like pure science. Think of all the famous ancient Greek philosophers. Chances are, a good many of them are scientists - Aristotle? Socrates? Xeno? They all did quite a bit of basic scientific work.
You are missing the distinction between science and engineering. All the people you named were essentially engineers. The fact that they were in it for the money both has nothing to do with this and proves that they weren't scientists.
Scientists aren't out to make money on something. Show me an astronomer or theroetical physicist who's in it for the money. Hawking? Penrose? I don't think so. But....some guys running a biotech firm? Nuclear physicists? These guys build nanobots and reactors that are used in submarines. They're in it for the money, even if they are "doing good science."
That does NOT make the scientsits.
scientist \Sci"en*tist\, n. One learned in science; a scientific investigator; one devoted to scientific study
engineer n 1: a person who uses scientific knowledge to solve practical problems
That's right from dictionary.com. A scientist seeks truth and knowledge by experimentation. An engineer seeks money, fame, or something else by creating things to perform certain tasks.
Einstein never made a damn thing worth noting. Neither did Bell, or Faraday, or Hawking, or anyone else (yes, I am biased toward physics). Scientists are few and far between, just as are philosophers. Engineers are quite common - we even have schools devoted to nothing but training them, a la my very own RPI. They're very well paid, too.
Science != engineering. Show me someone who has come up with a new way of looking at the world, oran important basic theory just for the hell of it, and I will show you someone who _thinks_ and doesn't make pretty little gadgets trying to get rich, like Edison.
The greatest scientists in history - Newton, Galileo, Bohr, Einstein, etc. - have _all_ been scientist philosophers, not engineers. It is the engineers' job to try and adapt what we know about the world through pure scientific research to practical applications.
It is the job of the true scientist to constantly evaluate how we think about the world and what we know about it. Pure science is nothing more than another school of philosophy - the sophists believe what they did, Kant believed in the impracticality of pure reason, and Bohr believed that it was impossible to fully understand the world through any amount of research. It is a system of beliefs based on reason, just like any other modern philosophy.
The above poster is absolutely right - people expect scientists to make their world better by doing practical research. The people who give us new advances in technology are called engineers - lasers, microwaves, washing machines, and transistors were created by engineers. However, every one of these engineers turned some seemingly useless, impractical research done by some scientist somewhere into something practical and useful.
Bottom line, science != engineering.
Science and philosophy are in the same realm - engineering does not belong there.
Nope, he was right. A Pentium 60 does a work unit in less than half the time of a 486DX4/100. I have one right behind doing nothing but crunching SETI (and occasionally acting as a storage system), and it definitely takes 100-150 hours per unit.
Um....it is named for Gutenberg the man, who invented (sort of) the printing press.
What are you smoking? The GPL specifically states that someone may charge however much they wish for a GPL'd proggie. Go learn to fucking read
You're wrong.
The Thunderbirds have been out more than long enough to get them into stores and their L2 cache is at full clock
http://artists.mp3s.com/artists/17/da_rude_vs_mind machine.html
Go there. The "Artist" has a record label.
Isn't that the point of this entire project?
Windows is a massive operating system, and it is indeed a large hack - a miracle that it works as well as it does. I'm personally running a copy of Windows ME and 2000 on various computers I own, and I'm impressed that they have managed to keep so much code through so many incarnations of this OS and STILL maintain almost 100% compatibility among their entire product line.
About this project. They're not using any legacy Windows code. They're not trying to hack together a lot of crap and bloat and just keep all the old code while shoving new stuff in. This entire project is, hopefully, going to be about completely reprogramming Windows in the best way possible. That means keeping it efficient, not having to deal with old code that you'd rather keep, etc. In this process, the coders WILL be learning from the "glaring failures" in windows and hopefully show MS a thing or two about how to do it right given some dedication.
I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that these people will learn massive amounts of information, and have to think of no small number of clever hacks and tricks as they go along. We should be saluting these guys - if they succeed, and their OS is open source in the end, it could be forged into something that is the best of both Windows and Linux - an OS that is truly accessible to the masses, very easy to use, very powerful, and very stable. Is this not, essentially, the reason we hoped that the MS antitrust trial would result in the gov't forcing MS to open-source windows? So that we could take it and turn it into something _better_ than linux or Win 98?
Don't beat on these guys, they're not taking programming tips from MS design teams - they're trying to acheive the same result in a totally different way. Once that happens, the possibilities may very well open up right in front of us.
Keep your fingers crossed...I will for a few years.
I'm sick of seeing this "$200 for a doorknob, $435 for a hammer" crap people spout about the government.
This is where those numbers really come from:
The government often pays for things to be beuilt by contract. Instead of listing every item and price on invoices or work orders or whatever the hell they are, they take the price of the entire contract and divide it by however many items there are. Thus, though a computer system on an F-16 may cost $10,000 and the special gold tempered cockpit glass may cost $50,000 per bubble, a hammer used by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics (aren't they the same company now or something?) still only costs $15 or $20.
So, in other words, while we're paying $435 for a hammer, we're also paying $435 for the highly special radar scanning tip in the nose of the aircraft.
Urine is actually very sterile. Cheeck out this site. Do a google search for even more.
:)
Yes I know you weren't serious, but..urine is very drinkable, and many people do.
Lay off the bad crack, my friend.
News flash: DeCSS was written as a windows program to crack CSS on dvd's, and it was done _because they could_. These guys didn't have dreams of a DVD player for linux in their heads or anything.
Welcome to the REAL world
As a New Orleanian, I'd just like to point out the Louisiana's police and government are among the most pompous, racist, corrupt, and just plain evil governemtn officials in the country.
:)
Well, actually, the police department has undergone major changes in the last 3 years since Pennington became cheif...this man is a badass. Anyway, I can definitely tell you the police are getting their act together and turning into one of the better forces around.
Anyway..I do have to say that I agree with your statements though
For all you people who apparently didn't get the sarcasm, that "make spam illegal!!" was a joke directed at the people who have these strange knee-jerk reactions to things they want to get rid of.
No, disinformation is a destabilizing technique, not a stabilizing one (terms borrowed from what I know about Cold War nuclear war planning - things like missle buildup and Star Wars were destabilizing, because they just encouraged the USSR to stock _more_ weapons rather out of pure necessity).
Anyway, if huge lists of non-existant addresses are created, then yes, the actual proportion of spam that gets delievered will go down. However, that just means the spammers will have to amass EVEN BIGGER lists just to get the same number of arriving messages. This will encourage spammers to try even harder than they are now to get mail into our boxes.
We're never going to get rid of it, and disinformation will not make it go away.
We have to come up with something better - make spam illegal!
I got a 36 on mine :)
30FPS is already a rate.
A rate per unit time is a change in rate over timem or acceleration, by definition.
Every != per.
CNet is far from a "2 year old startup.."
CNet is at least 5 years old (they recently had an anniversary, but I can't find their link to the story), and they are one of, if not the, the largest online tech sources around. They als have significant resources and revenue streams. Don't believe me? They own news.com, computers.com, shareware.com, downloads.com, and builder.com. You don't just happen on these domain names. And you know what? Each of those domains is among the largest in its respective field.
CNet used to run these ads. the left hand side had a huge bodybuilder and it said "ZDNet in print." The right side had a skinny weakling and said "ZDNet online." They were right. The CNet site is larger, ahs more original content, and I believe has an order of magnitude greater page hits/day (I'm not so sure about that one, but I heard it somewhere). They just do it better online than ZDNet.
Their TV shows are better than ZDNet's too. I've actually talked to people who have seen CNet's, but I have yet to meet one who has seen ZDTV. This is far from scientific, but it has been my experience.
Anyway, I've been reading CNet for major tech news and to keep in touch with the "newbie"-er side of computers since it all started, about 4-5 years ago. They've come a long way, and have grown a tremendous amount.
Haven't you ever noticed that half the stories end with "[some major company such as intel] is an investor in CNet"? Seems lots of large companies have poured some cash into this "startup." Well, this startup has been doing it well since about '95 and has lots and lots of revenue and resources.
Oh my, you're dense :)
[soe linear measurement such as frames] per second per second is a unit of acceleration.
That would mean each second, your coputer is processing at a rate 30 frames/second more than the last second.
IE, within a few seconds it will be pushing 120 frames/second, the next second it will be doing 150 frames/second, etc
Shouldn't your sig say "life is a waste of time"?
This is offtopic, but it's something I want to say.
/.'ers make it sound like their computers BSOD every 20 minutes when they're in windows. What's up?
That t-shirt is pretty cool, but I've got to say something, in complete honesty.
In my 6 years of using all flavors of windws - 3.1, 95, 98, nt, 2k - I have never seen a screen like that.
I dual boot into debian on my main box, an athlon I built from scratch, and i do a little programming in C++, so I'm not a computer novice or anything. I have NEVER seen a BSOD on any of the computers I've had..from crappy Compaqs' filled with nasty proprietary hardware, a couple Thinkpads, and my current PIII --> Athlon box.
Do these things actually happen?
X is not an OS. Windows and MacOS are.
X starts faster on my box, too, but Windows starts up faster than linux --> KDE.
You know you've been on /. too long when you "moderate" things down in your mind as you read them elsewhere.
....."
Kinda like spending so much time on IRC you begin to think of all your actions as "/me
It may surprise you how few Congressmen actually know/have read the Constitution, my friend.
Well what happens when i download three new songs and want to listen to them in my car on the way to work? TOO BAD with these players. With my nomad or little MD player, I can just throw those new songs on in no time and not have to compile and burn an entirely new disc.