Actually, all that math is an abstraction of electronics, and electronics is just an abstraction of physics.
And physics is but the application of math to real world phenomena.
Secondly, who said that computer science is "an abstraction of electronics?" Computer science, properly, is a subbranch of boolean logic, hybridized with some number theory. Would it be as significant if the relevant electronics never existed? Certainly not. Would people still explore this area of mathematics? I'd argue yes.
There is no significant difference in skill levels of programmers and researchers.
Who said we're debating skill levels? Hell, I'd argue that there is no single measure of programming skill, as different skills are required for different tasks. A good numerical model programmer would likely make a poor application developer, and vice versa.
Again, as the grandparent has stated, computer science != programming. Programming is an application of computer science, in the same way electrical and mechanical engineering are applications of physics.
Well, the main performance benefit is from the fact that you're not sending single SQL statements over, but you're storing the statements on the server and calling them when you need them to run.
Knowing how something works is not part of the process of experimentation.
Nonsense. You need to know what you're trying to replicate, otherwise you don't know whether you've replicated it or not. Without at least a basic understanding of the phenomenon you're looking for, you won't know if you've found it.
If I provide an experiment to prove something and it works, it will work regardless of the understanding of the executor.
At the very least, the executor has to know how to build and evaluate your experimental apparatus. This requires domain specific knowledge.
What you said might have been true in the 17th and 18th centuries, when scientific knowledge was simple enough for an interested layperson to work out the expected results from first principles. Today, that's not even close to being true.
I think the one tie is that before Web 2.0 a lot of people would hear about these approaches and say "unpossible!" Now that you can point to plenty of successes that work like this, people can't be as casually dismissive.
Perhaps. But, another equally likely scenario is that this sort of fast development cycle was impossible back then. Many of the tools and languages advocated by Agile proponents and Web 2.0 startups have only come into prominence over the last few years. One of the most important things for Agile development is thorough, robust tool support. Its much more difficult to do Agile/Web 2.0 development without IDEs, unit testing frameworks, and version control/configuration management. As these tools have caught on in the corporate world, using the Agile process has become much easier.
At the same time, some of the lessons of Agile development may still be of use to. For example, the Agile method advocates heavy use of unit and integration tests to establish a baseline for current behavior and to catch regressions. This attitude towards automated testing is useful no matter which industry one is in.
You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.
Too true. However, I'd argue that a well-managed agile process can give you more initiative. There's nothing quite like coding up a feature, putting it before the product development people, and getting feedback, all within a workday.
As you say, though, it has to be well managed, with a strong project manager who can step on behalf of the developers when the product development folks ask for features that would be prohibitively costly or time consuming to implement.
Many recent console games (like Devil May Cry 4) do support preloading content onto the hard drive of the console. In fact, one of the main complaints against the latest patch for the Sony Playstation 3 was that it led to erasure of such preloaded content, leading to people having to go through the pre-loading process all over again.
Well, that comes right back to my original point, though. Even taking into account night, weather, and degradation from environmental conditions, there's still enough sunlight hitting the earth to provide for humanity's energy needs. Putting the capture mechanism in space adds a whole lot of unnecessary complication.
In other words, lets finish building solar panels on Earth before starting to build solar panels in space.
The driver behind the successive decentralization/centralization waves in computing is economics, to some extent, but I'd argue that bandwidth is also just as important. In other words, when bandwidth (as compared to CPU time) is cheap, people choose to centralize. When bandwidth is expensive, people choose to decentralize.
Examples: When widespread use of computing started, bandwidth (phone lines) were relatively cheap compared to the costs of getting time on a mainframe. Therefore, centralization was the order of the day, with one large system being shared amongst a large number of remote users.
As the costs of computers declined, the cost of bandwidth became more and more expensive as compared to the cost of CPU time. We see this in the long decentralization of computing resources, first to minicomputers, then to individual workstations.
Now, as new networking technologies have made bandwidth cheap again, we're seeing increased centralization. With the increasing spread of broadband speeds (even over wireless networks), basic productivity tasks can be handled by centralized servers without too much noticeable latency. However, as soon as someone makes a widely popular application that requires significant amount of bandwidth (as compared to CPU), we'll see a return to individual workstations.
I prefer my doctors to get their medical articles from periodicals like JAMA.
Really? So, if your doctor saw a medical article published in some other journal, like Nature, you'd have her ignore the publication because it wasn't in the "right" journal? I think that's a pretty narrow minded attitude. Granted, doctors shouldn't be acting based on journal articles alone, but that applies to all journal articles, including the ones published in JAMA.
i define it as a bunch of assholes who think they are better than other people out of weakness of character and insecurity
I call it a bunch of people who actually know what's going on and how a discovery works. People that aren't afraid to show the actual complexity of a piece of technology, rather than glossing over the fine details like Popular Science so often does.
If you have to care about it being centralized somewhere, then it is not black box, because you DO care about what is on the inside.
Well, not necessarily. For example, if I outsource my web hosting to Amazon's EC2, do I care what OS their servers are running? Do I care what kind of hardware or load balancing they're employing? Of course not. Indeed, if I had to care about such things, it'd defeat the purpose of the service. Note that Amazon is still free to distribute its services across multiple locations - as long as its all transparent to the user, its still cloud computing, according to most definitions I've read.
The reason many are so cynical about cloud computing is that your "inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization." is no different from the old model of businesses renting time on IBM mainframes to do their data processing. The computing industry has seen several cycles of "inevitable" centralization, followed by the equally inevitable decentralization. This is just latest instance of that repetition.
I bet businesses will learn that having control of one's own data can be an advantage the moment one of these clouds either dries up or rains their public data all over the internet [okay, no more punnery].
Has anyone ever thought about what life would be like if we DIDN'T have the space program?!
Pretty much the same as it is now, I'd imagine.
Slashdot would be out of business...
Last I saw, DARPA, not NASA funded the initial development of IP. In fact, the development of computers and networking had more to do with sharing data about simulations than going into space.
we'd still be in the dark ages of tech if we didnt have a space program. No high availiability servers, no hybrid cars, no amazingy resilient memory metals, no high heat plastics or ceramics... ALL these things have peices that came from the space program research or otherwise.
That may be true (I'm going to ask you to prove it anyway), but can you honestly say that, without NASA, these things wouldn't have been invented? Hint: lots of these things are essential for military purposes too. If NASA hadn't invented these things, the DoD would have.
Kids nowdays learn basic science in schools...taught to a test, taught to look into the box of ideas and take from it, imitate, never innovate. Rarely will you ever see a child look up and wonder about what makes the world tick, what makes the sun shine, why is the sky blue...etc.
When was it ever "cool" for kids above a certain age to state those questions?
Nowadays, Brittany Spears getting in a car wreck is more in tune with their attention spans.
And, back in the days of Apollo, it was the drug habits of the Beatles. Celebrity antics always make news.
We DO need a space program, it needs more money, and the Patriots in congress don't seem to understand that.
Why and why? I mean, I'll be the first to agree that having a space program is cool and all, but its a hard case to argue that a space program was ever vital for national security, much less now.
Its time we had an administration that hearkened back to the days of Reganomics, where failure was NOT an option.
For someone who ostensibly supports the space program, you sure have a weird choice of political hero. You do realize it was Reagan that crippled NASA with massive budget cuts, right? Cuts that indirectly led to the Challenger disaster, as Reagan conveniently "forgot" to cut NASA's responsibilities and schedule while he carved its budget down to the bone.
And please, for the love of god, learn to use white space. <p> is your friend.
All facetiousness aside, the issue with solar power isn't that the Earth doesn't get enough sunlight, its just that we don't have any efficient ways of capturing the sunlight that does hit Earth. I'm not sure how putting capture mechanisms in space would help.
Countries/Governments/Regimes/Individuals that threaten the well being of the US are all valid targets for the use of military power.
I agree there. Now, tell me, even if Iraq had nukes, how would they pose a threat to our well being? The Soviet Union had lots of nukes too, but I don't see American troops garrisoning Moscow.
Establishing a society more friendly to US interests in the middle of the Mideast, while expensive in every measure, provides a needed (and potentially infectious) stress relief in the region.
Yeah, but how does that "stress relief" guarantee US political security?
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason those people are interested in "Computer Science" is because "Software Engineering" hasn't reached the same level of prestige.
Actually, all that math is an abstraction of electronics, and electronics is just an abstraction of physics.
And physics is but the application of math to real world phenomena.
Secondly, who said that computer science is "an abstraction of electronics?" Computer science, properly, is a subbranch of boolean logic, hybridized with some number theory. Would it be as significant if the relevant electronics never existed? Certainly not. Would people still explore this area of mathematics? I'd argue yes.
There is no significant difference in skill levels of programmers and researchers.
Who said we're debating skill levels? Hell, I'd argue that there is no single measure of programming skill, as different skills are required for different tasks. A good numerical model programmer would likely make a poor application developer, and vice versa.
Again, as the grandparent has stated, computer science != programming. Programming is an application of computer science, in the same way electrical and mechanical engineering are applications of physics.
Everything is rooted in mathematics, but that's a far cry from saying that everything is mathematics.
On the other hand, software is as much a mathematical formula as x + 2 = 4.
Indeed - you even have such highly protected rights like "free speech zones".
If they weren't free speech zones, those fences hemming in the protesters at the G8 summit in Genoa were what, exactly?
A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. A free-speech zone by any other name smells just as shitty.
Well, the main performance benefit is from the fact that you're not sending single SQL statements over, but you're storing the statements on the server and calling them when you need them to run.
Knowing how something works is not part of the process of experimentation.
Nonsense. You need to know what you're trying to replicate, otherwise you don't know whether you've replicated it or not. Without at least a basic understanding of the phenomenon you're looking for, you won't know if you've found it.
If I provide an experiment to prove something and it works, it will work regardless of the understanding of the executor.
At the very least, the executor has to know how to build and evaluate your experimental apparatus. This requires domain specific knowledge.
What you said might have been true in the 17th and 18th centuries, when scientific knowledge was simple enough for an interested layperson to work out the expected results from first principles. Today, that's not even close to being true.
I think the one tie is that before Web 2.0 a lot of people would hear about these approaches and say "unpossible!" Now that you can point to plenty of successes that work like this, people can't be as casually dismissive.
Perhaps. But, another equally likely scenario is that this sort of fast development cycle was impossible back then. Many of the tools and languages advocated by Agile proponents and Web 2.0 startups have only come into prominence over the last few years. One of the most important things for Agile development is thorough, robust tool support. Its much more difficult to do Agile/Web 2.0 development without IDEs, unit testing frameworks, and version control/configuration management. As these tools have caught on in the corporate world, using the Agile process has become much easier.
At the same time, some of the lessons of Agile development may still be of use to. For example, the Agile method advocates heavy use of unit and integration tests to establish a baseline for current behavior and to catch regressions. This attitude towards automated testing is useful no matter which industry one is in.
You can really easily end up chasing your own tail or always being behind the ball because you're always reacting instead of acting.
Too true. However, I'd argue that a well-managed agile process can give you more initiative. There's nothing quite like coding up a feature, putting it before the product development people, and getting feedback, all within a workday.
As you say, though, it has to be well managed, with a strong project manager who can step on behalf of the developers when the product development folks ask for features that would be prohibitively costly or time consuming to implement.
As others have pointed out, there are a variety of fusible alloys that are no more toxic than the other components in the computer.
Many recent console games (like Devil May Cry 4) do support preloading content onto the hard drive of the console. In fact, one of the main complaints against the latest patch for the Sony Playstation 3 was that it led to erasure of such preloaded content, leading to people having to go through the pre-loading process all over again.
Well, that comes right back to my original point, though. Even taking into account night, weather, and degradation from environmental conditions, there's still enough sunlight hitting the earth to provide for humanity's energy needs. Putting the capture mechanism in space adds a whole lot of unnecessary complication.
In other words, lets finish building solar panels on Earth before starting to build solar panels in space.
The driver behind the successive decentralization/centralization waves in computing is economics, to some extent, but I'd argue that bandwidth is also just as important. In other words, when bandwidth (as compared to CPU time) is cheap, people choose to centralize. When bandwidth is expensive, people choose to decentralize.
Examples: When widespread use of computing started, bandwidth (phone lines) were relatively cheap compared to the costs of getting time on a mainframe. Therefore, centralization was the order of the day, with one large system being shared amongst a large number of remote users.
As the costs of computers declined, the cost of bandwidth became more and more expensive as compared to the cost of CPU time. We see this in the long decentralization of computing resources, first to minicomputers, then to individual workstations.
Now, as new networking technologies have made bandwidth cheap again, we're seeing increased centralization. With the increasing spread of broadband speeds (even over wireless networks), basic productivity tasks can be handled by centralized servers without too much noticeable latency. However, as soon as someone makes a widely popular application that requires significant amount of bandwidth (as compared to CPU), we'll see a return to individual workstations.
I prefer my doctors to get their medical articles from periodicals like JAMA.
Really? So, if your doctor saw a medical article published in some other journal, like Nature, you'd have her ignore the publication because it wasn't in the "right" journal? I think that's a pretty narrow minded attitude. Granted, doctors shouldn't be acting based on journal articles alone, but that applies to all journal articles, including the ones published in JAMA.
i define it as a bunch of assholes who think they are better than other people out of weakness of character and insecurity
I call it a bunch of people who actually know what's going on and how a discovery works. People that aren't afraid to show the actual complexity of a piece of technology, rather than glossing over the fine details like Popular Science so often does.
I wonder if Randall Munroe has met this dude.
If you have to care about it being centralized somewhere, then it is not black box, because you DO care about what is on the inside.
Well, not necessarily. For example, if I outsource my web hosting to Amazon's EC2, do I care what OS their servers are running? Do I care what kind of hardware or load balancing they're employing? Of course not. Indeed, if I had to care about such things, it'd defeat the purpose of the service. Note that Amazon is still free to distribute its services across multiple locations - as long as its all transparent to the user, its still cloud computing, according to most definitions I've read.
The reason many are so cynical about cloud computing is that your "inevitable combination of large scale web hosting with virtualization." is no different from the old model of businesses renting time on IBM mainframes to do their data processing. The computing industry has seen several cycles of "inevitable" centralization, followed by the equally inevitable decentralization. This is just latest instance of that repetition.
I bet businesses will learn that having control of one's own data can be an advantage the moment one of these clouds either dries up or rains their public data all over the internet [okay, no more punnery].
So, in other words, its like the shared mainframe/minicomputer model that we got rid of in favor of desktop PCs then?
Clippy: It looks like your trying to design a lunar lander. Would you like to:
But the Vikings could breathe the air in N. America. Its not like the atmosphere suddenly ended once they sailed past Iceland.
Has anyone ever thought about what life would be like if we DIDN'T have the space program?!
Pretty much the same as it is now, I'd imagine.
Slashdot would be out of business...
Last I saw, DARPA, not NASA funded the initial development of IP. In fact, the development of computers and networking had more to do with sharing data about simulations than going into space.
we'd still be in the dark ages of tech if we didnt have a space program. No high availiability servers, no hybrid cars, no amazingy resilient memory metals, no high heat plastics or ceramics... ALL these things have peices that came from the space program research or otherwise.
That may be true (I'm going to ask you to prove it anyway), but can you honestly say that, without NASA, these things wouldn't have been invented? Hint: lots of these things are essential for military purposes too. If NASA hadn't invented these things, the DoD would have.
Kids nowdays learn basic science in schools...taught to a test, taught to look into the box of ideas and take from it, imitate, never innovate. Rarely will you ever see a child look up and wonder about what makes the world tick, what makes the sun shine, why is the sky blue...etc.
When was it ever "cool" for kids above a certain age to state those questions?
Nowadays, Brittany Spears getting in a car wreck is more in tune with their attention spans.
And, back in the days of Apollo, it was the drug habits of the Beatles. Celebrity antics always make news.
We DO need a space program, it needs more money, and the Patriots in congress don't seem to understand that.
Why and why? I mean, I'll be the first to agree that having a space program is cool and all, but its a hard case to argue that a space program was ever vital for national security, much less now.
Its time we had an administration that hearkened back to the days of Reganomics, where failure was NOT an option.
For someone who ostensibly supports the space program, you sure have a weird choice of political hero. You do realize it was Reagan that crippled NASA with massive budget cuts, right? Cuts that indirectly led to the Challenger disaster, as Reagan conveniently "forgot" to cut NASA's responsibilities and schedule while he carved its budget down to the bone.
And please, for the love of god, learn to use white space. <p> is your friend.
If there's some way of capturing raw solar [energy] and getting it down to earth in a usable form, I'm all for it.
There is. Its called Electromagnetic Radiation. You might have heard of it as "light".
All facetiousness aside, the issue with solar power isn't that the Earth doesn't get enough sunlight, its just that we don't have any efficient ways of capturing the sunlight that does hit Earth. I'm not sure how putting capture mechanisms in space would help.
Countries/Governments/Regimes/Individuals that threaten the well being of the US are all valid targets for the use of military power.
I agree there. Now, tell me, even if Iraq had nukes, how would they pose a threat to our well being? The Soviet Union had lots of nukes too, but I don't see American troops garrisoning Moscow.
Establishing a society more friendly to US interests in the middle of the Mideast, while expensive in every measure, provides a needed (and potentially infectious) stress relief in the region.
Yeah, but how does that "stress relief" guarantee US political security?
EM does not "interfere" with itself, it adds just as light does.
Except that, y'know, light interferes with itself too.