I'm not sure if I'm in the minority or not but all I did (well ~98%) with it was mix a bunch of random stuff together to see what happened (surprise surprise - not much).
I also had a program called ChemLab (I think) that had ~50 experiments and I worked through each one of them / got a result and gained better understanding than I ever had through a real chemistry lab or set.
Anyway, it seems to me that it'd almost be nicer to have a reasonably flexible software simulator that kids could use (assuming that one doesn't yet exist) than a real chemistry set.
I don't think that shiny is such a bad thing or that free is such a good one.
OS X gives you consumer apps and polish plus you get BSD under the hood if you want it.
Sure, you can download *BSD (or any Linux distro) for free, install it on a commodity box and get some work done. You just have to deal with a lot of unnecessary hassle.
If you want Office / other consumer apps, you can tinker with klunky / inconsistent free software, you can dual boot into Windows or you can just buy a Mac.
Seems like such a good deal to me that I switched as soon as OS X came out.
I was just giving you a hard time - I'm actually very impressed by how much you do. Doubly so since you were around when Sputnik was launched:D
Money's not everything and while I'm still relatively young, I'm old enough to understand how important it is to stay in shape and not to get caught up in the treadmill.
Then fix it, dear Henry, Dear Henry... (had to look that up:-)
I recommend trying to anyone reading. My wife and I started going a bit over a year ago and it's great for building strength, flexibility and endurance.
Depending on the instructor, there can be a lot of mumbo-jumbo but, if you look past all that, it's a great workout and I feel much better, overall, when I'm doing it regularly.
You're not alone - I really like the way they look as well (both inside and out). The push button start and in the dash shifter are pretty cool as well.
Oddly, I really don't like the way the Matrix looks even though, objectively, I think it shares a lot of external geometry with the Prius.
The syntax really is a bit of a stumbling block for people coming from a Java / C++ / C# background, though. Unfortunately, most developers experience with object-oriented programming comes from a C++ lineage language and that makes Objective C seem unnatural.
It took awhile for me to get used to the SmallTalk like message calls [object message] and dashes. After getting used to them, I realized how nice they are and really think it's a shame that C++ was the model for newer languages rather than Objective C / SmallTalk.
Since there's a GCC front-end for Objective C, I would encourage any developers reading this to try it out sometime, if they haven't already.
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, there are a few things Visual Studio does better than any other IDE I've used.
The best example I can think of is auto-completion.
Some sort of auto-completion is present in most IDEs, including XCode (Code Sense) and Eclipse (Code Assist).
Microsoft's implementation (IntelliSense) just works better.
You'd think that code completion would be easy to get right but it's almost painful how poorly most other versions work.
IntelliSense does a better job of showing polymorphisms and makes it easier to fill in parameters. It also seems dramatically faster than most other auto-completion systems. True, this may just be my perception but I don't think that's the case. Even with the delay set to 0(ms), XCode's completion seems to lag. Visual Studio's completion is so fast that I don't even notice a delay.
Visual Studio's debugger also seems pretty nice to me.
Both Visual Studio and XCode are weak when it comes to re-factoring.
XCode doesn't seem to have any facilities even for the simplest re-factoring operations.
Visual C# 2005 at least has 'rename' and 'extract method'. I have seen a few third party plugins to do a bit more for Visual C++ but the one I tried was a bit flakey.
Eclipse has a lot of re-factoring operations for Java that 'just work'.
Eclipse also has a nice incremental compiling feature (again for Java) that shows compilation errors and warnings and offers 'quick fixes' for many of the simpler ones (missing imports; try/catch pairs; unimplemented methods; etc).
The above are the main things that keep me away from XCode. I do like a lot of its features but don't see myself using it regularly without a few of the above.
I guess I wandered a bit away from my point (and this post is getting a bit long / moving off-topic).
What I wanted to say was simply that Visual Studio has a few features that make coding a lot easier. Making things easier for everyone means making things easier if you don't understand the fundamentals.
At the same time, if you understand software engineering, at least some of the automation is actually useful and time-saving.
Having gone through 4 years of undergrad and 7 of graduate work at a brick and mortar university, I can say with confidence that there's a lot more to school than the content of the classes.
There are a lot of things you can learn from being physically present at a school.
I'd strongly recommend going away to college and staying in a dorm for a few years, at least. I'm not a terribly gregarious or socially adept person but being in a dorm environment forced me to make social ties.
You'll meet and interact with a variety of people who you'd not otherwise and everyone's in the same boat. The friendships you make in college can last a lifetime. You may also be surprised by how often those connections will pay off in your professional career.
It's important to remember that you'll only get out of it what you put into it. It's easy to just keep your head down and stay out of the social loop. I've done far too much of that and I'm that much poorer for it.
It may not be easy but forcing yourself to interact and to participate socially while you're in school will pay off enormously.
Participate in study groups - even if you don't need to. Even if you know everything, you'll benefit from the social interaction. You may even be surprised to find that you didn't know quite as much as you thought (and it's far better to learn that from a study group than from an exam). Finally, you'll never understand something as well as you do when you can explain it to someone else.
I'd even recommend getting a taste of school spirit. I know it may seem stupid but it bonds you into a community and gives you a bit to talk about. Once you get past the idea that it's silly, you might even find it interesting and fun.
Considering all of that, I do urge you to avoid the online degree. On the other hand, if you're already socially adept and have more friends and connections than you can possibly want, or you're just going to waste the opportunity, you might as well go the online route.
Reporting negative results may not make a good paper but it's vitally important to the progress of science.
If you do something that doesn't work and don't say so in press, I could spend years replicating the same work and finding out for myself that I've just 'wasted' that time working on something that doesn't work.
An interesting side-note is that pharmaceutical companies often force researchers to sign a "Materials Transfer Agreement" (MTA) if they want to work with the company's experimental drugs.
It is very common for MTAs to include a clause that stipulates that all results must be cleared through the pharmaceutical company before being published. Just by chance, it happens that negative results are typically not approved for publication while positive results are.
Perhaps I'm crazy but saying 'everyone else does it' or that it's in the gray area doesn't justify it or make it right, in my mind.
At best, it just means that there's a pervasive culture of
'justifiable dishonesty' in academia.
It'd be bad enough to falsify results in a case where it really didn't matter (if there ever were such a thing). In the case of health sciences, though, we're talking about falsifying results that may make something that's utterly ineffective appear to be an effective treatment for a terminal illness or that may sweep significant potential side-effects under the rug.
In the case of drugs, the cost of falsified claims can easily amount to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of wasted research money for pharmaceutical companies, exposure to costly lawsuits - not to mention human lives.
The most disturbing thing about that quote is that most people I've recited it to think I made it up and don't see how it's relevant.
More amazing to me is that the response has been so irrational and disproportionate.
As bad as terrorism may be, the number of deaths due to it are dwarfed when compared to those due to poverty (or even just those due to preventable traffic accidents).
I feel for those who've died and lost loved ones due to terrorism but it is absurd to spend so much money, so severely erode civil rights and to live in fear because of a relatively small amount of terrorism.
I'd much rather keep my rights and have all of the 'homeland security' money spent to combat foreign and domestic poverty (or, perhaps, just a working emergency response system that could deal with natural disasters, industrial accidents and terrorist acts).
What environmental action caused this shift in pollution? What environmental policy was responsible? It seems to me that most of the changes to the way factories operate have been due to economic boom and bust, specific government/societal response to specific harmful actions (such as the dumping of toxic waste), and the like. No media myth like 'global warming' was responsible.
There was actually a clean air movement that played no small part in the reversal
And the fact of the matter is that cities like LA still exist, covered in a layer of soot and smog.
True, LA is bad but it is actually dramatically better than places like Gary, Indiana and London, England, were early in the last century. I think that the only places that come close today are a few cities in China but, even there, some technologies developed to improve air quality are in use.
There is certainly logical justification for reducing the output of pollutants which harm us. But every attempt we have made to meddle with the environment has resulted in catastrophe, precisely because we act without proper information. Take as an example the efforts to 'preserve' old-growth forest, the flash fires and death of species that has resulted, because humans for some reason anthropomorphize big trees and parks.
This is a red herring. I'm not suggesting 'meddling', merely decreasing the substantial impact we're currently having.
It is true that some industries and people would suffer some economic hardship during the transition but many others would boon due to the engineering and production that would be required to move toward cleaner technologies.
This is such a sweeping statement. You sum up massive job loss, complete shift of economy, possible loss of top-spot status for the US, tremendous impact to the third-world, and many more factors as 'people would suffer'.
I do not deny that there would be a substantial number of jobs lost, a shift in the economy and hardship for the third-world. Those things will happen regardless of whether we take proactive action or not. It is impossible to prevent the future and there will be changes in technology and economics. Worrying about this is like worrying about the buggy-whip manufacturers and laborers at the introduction of the automobile. If you are in a doomed industry and you do not adapt, you will be marginalized and your employees will loose their jobs. Proper planing and preparation can significantly decrease the impact of those changes.
Hardship to the third world can be minimized if there is a viable global market for CO2. More advanced nations will not need all of their allocated CO2 production and they can sell or give it to the third world. Further, the entire world, including developing nations, benefits from development of cleaner technologies. If the transition is completed properly, developing nations, can minimize the impact of their development on the environment or they could even leapfrog into a more modern economy, learning from and largely skipping the transition through the industrial revolution.
I believe that the US is currently well on its way to loosing its hegomony and 'top-spot' status. If we are not prepared for the eventual extinction of fossil fuel supplies, the US will not be able to sustain itself. It is not something that will happen overnight. Further, if the technologies required to move past dependence on fossil fuels are developed in other countries, the US will have lost a tremendous opportunity to be at the forefront of the future global economy. Since we can anticipate this, I would argue that the only way you can hope to ensure that the US retains its status is to prepare for and invent the future rather than suffering from it.
Even if global warming were false... On the other hand, if there is tru
You're probably not old enough to remember or were fortunate enough not to live in a heavily industrialized area but there was a time, not so very long ago, when it wad commonplace for there to be a layer of soot from coal covering everything outside for tens to hundreds miles from factories and steel mills. More amazing is that, for a long time, most people actually considered it perfectly normal.
I'd say that the fact that such pollution no longer exists within the US or the EU is considerable evidence that at least one environmental action has succeeded in its goals.
It also highlights something that is often lost in this debate - even if you believe firmly that the environment can take care of itself, there is more than ample justification based solely on self-interest to take action to decrease human impact on the environment.
Even if the it were true that human activities don't have a significant impact on global climate, there are many tangible benefits to moving toward cleaner technologies.
Most of us don't realize how difficult it is just to go outside in many cities. If you happen to live near a big city, I'd recommend biking a few miles during rush hour. You may find your lungs and eyes a bit irritated from the car exhaust. It wasn't always that way and some day people will look back on that with astonishment and disbelief, much as people now are amazed by the amount of coal soot that used to be omnipresent in industrialized areas.
There are also significant economic and strategic benefits of promoting development of new technology and significantly decreasing our dependence on a finite resource like oil and the nations that produce it.
It is true that some industries and people would suffer some economic hardship during the transition but many others would boon due to the engineering and production that would be required to move toward cleaner technologies.
Such transitions are not uncommon through history and are inevitable. If everyone has to take the losses, then solely out of self-interest, why not reap the economic benefits as well? Why not be at the forefront of development of technologies that the entire world will want to use? Why not build things that work as well or better than the alternatives but use less fuel and produce less waste? If you don't, I assure you that someone else will.
The opportunity cost of not taking action is enormous. Even if global warming were false, oil won't last forever and when it starts getting more and more difficult to extract less and less oil, there will be a crash. It may not be for some time but it will happen and when it does, those who have prepared for it and anticipated it will reap enormous benefits and those who haven't will suffer great economic hardships and loss of standard of living.
On the other hand, if there is truth to global warming and something can be done about it, then we will all benefit from such action or we will all suffer the consequences of our inaction.
Other replies have mentioned that performance and size are considerations.
Another significant issue that's easy to overlook is that the Prius puts out significantly lower emissions than your econo box.
True, being better for the environment is a harder selling point for someone who only cares about fuel economy but it's also a far better justification for using hybrid technology.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry - you're not.
When I was a kid, I had a chemistry set.
I'm not sure if I'm in the minority or not but all I did (well ~98%) with it was mix a bunch of random stuff together to see what happened (surprise surprise - not much).
I also had a program called ChemLab (I think) that had ~50 experiments and I worked through each one of them / got a result and gained better understanding than I ever had through a real chemistry lab or set.
Anyway, it seems to me that it'd almost be nicer to have a reasonably flexible software simulator that kids could use (assuming that one doesn't yet exist) than a real chemistry set.
I don't think that shiny is such a bad thing or that free is such a good one.
OS X gives you consumer apps and polish plus you get BSD under the hood if you want it.
Sure, you can download *BSD (or any Linux distro) for free, install it on a commodity box and get some work done. You just have to deal with a lot of unnecessary hassle.
If you want Office / other consumer apps, you can tinker with klunky / inconsistent free software, you can dual boot into Windows or you can just buy a Mac.
Seems like such a good deal to me that I switched as soon as OS X came out.
Unfortunately, people like that tend not to let the facts get in the way of their arguments.
See what I'm saying - "Yeah..... but still...."
BTW - I enjoyed your stuff @ electricstate (Losing Weight has Turned Me Gay :-)
I was just giving you a hard time - I'm actually very impressed by how much you do. Doubly so since you were around when Sputnik was launched :D
Money's not everything and while I'm still relatively young, I'm old enough to understand how important it is to stay in shape and not to get caught up in the treadmill.
Then fix it, dear Henry, Dear Henry... (had to look that up :-)
I'd like to second that
I recommend trying to anyone reading. My wife and I started going a bit over a year ago and it's great for building strength, flexibility and endurance.
Depending on the instructor, there can be a lot of mumbo-jumbo but, if you look past all that, it's a great workout and I feel much better, overall, when I'm doing it regularly.
dude - knock it off... you're making me look bad
That's great news! - thanks a lot getting my update now :-)
My principal complaint with the iPod's volume control is that it isn't fine-grained enough.
When there's a lot of ambient noise, the granularity isn't a big deal.
It really bugs me if I'm in a quiet environment, though. There's a sharp jump from 0 volume to a level that's already uncomfortably loud for me.
You're not alone - I really like the way they look as well (both inside and out). The push button start and in the dash shifter are pretty cool as well.
Oddly, I really don't like the way the Matrix looks even though, objectively, I think it shares a lot of external geometry with the Prius.
I agree and like Objective C.
The syntax really is a bit of a stumbling block for people coming from a Java / C++ / C# background, though. Unfortunately, most developers experience with object-oriented programming comes from a C++ lineage language and that makes Objective C seem unnatural.
It took awhile for me to get used to the SmallTalk like message calls [object message] and dashes. After getting used to them, I realized how nice they are and really think it's a shame that C++ was the model for newer languages rather than Objective C / SmallTalk.
Since there's a GCC front-end for Objective C, I would encourage any developers reading this to try it out sometime, if they haven't already.
I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, there are a few things Visual Studio does better than any other IDE I've used.
The best example I can think of is auto-completion.
Some sort of auto-completion is present in most IDEs, including XCode (Code Sense) and Eclipse (Code Assist).
Microsoft's implementation (IntelliSense) just works better.
You'd think that code completion would be easy to get right but it's almost painful how poorly most other versions work.
IntelliSense does a better job of showing polymorphisms and makes it easier to fill in parameters. It also seems dramatically faster than most other auto-completion systems. True, this may just be my perception but I don't think that's the case. Even with the delay set to 0(ms), XCode's completion seems to lag. Visual Studio's completion is so fast that I don't even notice a delay.
Visual Studio's debugger also seems pretty nice to me.
Both Visual Studio and XCode are weak when it comes to re-factoring.
XCode doesn't seem to have any facilities even for the simplest re-factoring operations.
Visual C# 2005 at least has 'rename' and 'extract method'. I have seen a few third party plugins to do a bit more for Visual C++ but the one I tried was a bit flakey.
Eclipse has a lot of re-factoring operations for Java that 'just work'.
Eclipse also has a nice incremental compiling feature (again for Java) that shows compilation errors and warnings and offers 'quick fixes' for many of the simpler ones (missing imports; try/catch pairs; unimplemented methods; etc).
The above are the main things that keep me away from XCode. I do like a lot of its features but don't see myself using it regularly without a few of the above.
I guess I wandered a bit away from my point (and this post is getting a bit long / moving off-topic).
What I wanted to say was simply that Visual Studio has a few features that make coding a lot easier. Making things easier for everyone means making things easier if you don't understand the fundamentals.
At the same time, if you understand software engineering, at least some of the automation is actually useful and time-saving.
Having gone through 4 years of undergrad and 7 of graduate work at a brick and mortar university, I can say with confidence that there's a lot more to school than the content of the classes.
There are a lot of things you can learn from being physically present at a school.
I'd strongly recommend going away to college and staying in a dorm for a few years, at least. I'm not a terribly gregarious or socially adept person but being in a dorm environment forced me to make social ties.
You'll meet and interact with a variety of people who you'd not otherwise and everyone's in the same boat. The friendships you make in college can last a lifetime. You may also be surprised by how often those connections will pay off in your professional career.
It's important to remember that you'll only get out of it what you put into it. It's easy to just keep your head down and stay out of the social loop. I've done far too much of that and I'm that much poorer for it.
It may not be easy but forcing yourself to interact and to participate socially while you're in school will pay off enormously.
Participate in study groups - even if you don't need to. Even if you know everything, you'll benefit from the social interaction. You may even be surprised to find that you didn't know quite as much as you thought (and it's far better to learn that from a study group than from an exam). Finally, you'll never understand something as well as you do when you can explain it to someone else.
I'd even recommend getting a taste of school spirit. I know it may seem stupid but it bonds you into a community and gives you a bit to talk about. Once you get past the idea that it's silly, you might even find it interesting and fun.
Considering all of that, I do urge you to avoid the online degree. On the other hand, if you're already socially adept and have more friends and connections than you can possibly want, or you're just going to waste the opportunity, you might as well go the online route.
Reporting negative results may not make a good paper but it's vitally important to the progress of science.
If you do something that doesn't work and don't say so in press, I could spend years replicating the same work and finding out for myself that I've just 'wasted' that time working on something that doesn't work.
An interesting side-note is that pharmaceutical companies often force researchers to sign a "Materials Transfer Agreement" (MTA) if they want to work with the company's experimental drugs.
It is very common for MTAs to include a clause that stipulates that all results must be cleared through the pharmaceutical company before being published. Just by chance, it happens that negative results are typically not approved for publication while positive results are.
Perhaps I'm crazy but saying 'everyone else does it' or that it's in the gray area doesn't justify it or make it right, in my mind.
At best, it just means that there's a pervasive culture of 'justifiable dishonesty' in academia.
It'd be bad enough to falsify results in a case where it really didn't matter (if there ever were such a thing). In the case of health sciences, though, we're talking about falsifying results that may make something that's utterly ineffective appear to be an effective treatment for a terminal illness or that may sweep significant potential side-effects under the rug.
In the case of drugs, the cost of falsified claims can easily amount to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of wasted research money for pharmaceutical companies, exposure to costly lawsuits - not to mention human lives.
The most disturbing thing about that quote is that most people I've recited it to think I made it up and don't see how it's relevant.
More amazing to me is that the response has been so irrational and disproportionate.
As bad as terrorism may be, the number of deaths due to it are dwarfed when compared to those due to poverty (or even just those due to preventable traffic accidents).
I feel for those who've died and lost loved ones due to terrorism but it is absurd to spend so much money, so severely erode civil rights and to live in fear because of a relatively small amount of terrorism.
I'd much rather keep my rights and have all of the 'homeland security' money spent to combat foreign and domestic poverty (or, perhaps, just a working emergency response system that could deal with natural disasters, industrial accidents and terrorist acts).
There was actually a clean air movement that played no small part in the reversal
True, LA is bad but it is actually dramatically better than places like Gary, Indiana and London, England, were early in the last century. I think that the only places that come close today are a few cities in China but, even there, some technologies developed to improve air quality are in use.
This is a red herring. I'm not suggesting 'meddling', merely decreasing the substantial impact we're currently having.
I do not deny that there would be a substantial number of jobs lost, a shift in the economy and hardship for the third-world. Those things will happen regardless of whether we take proactive action or not. It is impossible to prevent the future and there will be changes in technology and economics. Worrying about this is like worrying about the buggy-whip manufacturers and laborers at the introduction of the automobile. If you are in a doomed industry and you do not adapt, you will be marginalized and your employees will loose their jobs. Proper planing and preparation can significantly decrease the impact of those changes.
Hardship to the third world can be minimized if there is a viable global market for CO2. More advanced nations will not need all of their allocated CO2 production and they can sell or give it to the third world. Further, the entire world, including developing nations, benefits from development of cleaner technologies. If the transition is completed properly, developing nations, can minimize the impact of their development on the environment or they could even leapfrog into a more modern economy, learning from and largely skipping the transition through the industrial revolution.
I believe that the US is currently well on its way to loosing its hegomony and 'top-spot' status. If we are not prepared for the eventual extinction of fossil fuel supplies, the US will not be able to sustain itself. It is not something that will happen overnight. Further, if the technologies required to move past dependence on fossil fuels are developed in other countries, the US will have lost a tremendous opportunity to be at the forefront of the future global economy. Since we can anticipate this, I would argue that the only way you can hope to ensure that the US retains its status is to prepare for and invent the future rather than suffering from it.
You're probably not old enough to remember or were fortunate enough not to live in a heavily industrialized area but there was a time, not so very long ago, when it wad commonplace for there to be a layer of soot from coal covering everything outside for tens to hundreds miles from factories and steel mills. More amazing is that, for a long time, most people actually considered it perfectly normal.
I'd say that the fact that such pollution no longer exists within the US or the EU is considerable evidence that at least one environmental action has succeeded in its goals.
It also highlights something that is often lost in this debate - even if you believe firmly that the environment can take care of itself, there is more than ample justification based solely on self-interest to take action to decrease human impact on the environment.
Even if the it were true that human activities don't have a significant impact on global climate, there are many tangible benefits to moving toward cleaner technologies.
Most of us don't realize how difficult it is just to go outside in many cities. If you happen to live near a big city, I'd recommend biking a few miles during rush hour. You may find your lungs and eyes a bit irritated from the car exhaust. It wasn't always that way and some day people will look back on that with astonishment and disbelief, much as people now are amazed by the amount of coal soot that used to be omnipresent in industrialized areas.
There are also significant economic and strategic benefits of promoting development of new technology and significantly decreasing our dependence on a finite resource like oil and the nations that produce it.
It is true that some industries and people would suffer some economic hardship during the transition but many others would boon due to the engineering and production that would be required to move toward cleaner technologies.
Such transitions are not uncommon through history and are inevitable. If everyone has to take the losses, then solely out of self-interest, why not reap the economic benefits as well? Why not be at the forefront of development of technologies that the entire world will want to use? Why not build things that work as well or better than the alternatives but use less fuel and produce less waste? If you don't, I assure you that someone else will.
The opportunity cost of not taking action is enormous. Even if global warming were false, oil won't last forever and when it starts getting more and more difficult to extract less and less oil, there will be a crash. It may not be for some time but it will happen and when it does, those who have prepared for it and anticipated it will reap enormous benefits and those who haven't will suffer great economic hardships and loss of standard of living.
On the other hand, if there is truth to global warming and something can be done about it, then we will all benefit from such action or we will all suffer the consequences of our inaction.
Other replies have mentioned that performance and size are considerations. Another significant issue that's easy to overlook is that the Prius puts out significantly lower emissions than your econo box. True, being better for the environment is a harder selling point for someone who only cares about fuel economy but it's also a far better justification for using hybrid technology.