The learning curve nowadays is definitely steeper than it used to be. Compare grandma's old tube radio and your DAB receiver. While I agree that studying electrical engineering in the 40's must have helped just as much as nowadays to understand your contemporary radio, the obstacles to understanding the newer version are more plenty fold. Miniaturization is certainly a big issue here and complicated standards the other.
It appears to me that nowadays you have neither the inclination to do so just for the hell of it, because a herd of engineers can do it much better than you nor the means to do it because you don't have the resources.
Given that you are traveling along some sort of trajectory through the space of stuff you can learn, the inability to do certain simple things may block further more advanced things you can learn later on, once you have mastered the simpler stuff.
I do applaud initiatives to enable interested individuals to modify whatever complex parts of the environment there are (there are hobby geneticists (I'll let you fill in the concerns)). Even if it is just a subsystem (i.e. Java programming for Android phones) it opens people a door to catch on and to take part.
Art is a similar can of worms but compared to engineering there is still only one artist but there is also a gallerist now and a whole machinery that explains art to you.
Overall I don't think that there should be a way back to the old days, but there should be an awareness of the widening intellectual gap between the individual and whatever system the individual interacts with. I really don't believe in jeopardizing our society by leaving large numbers of people out of the loop on what is going on around them.
That those totalitarian regimes don't all behave like North Korea in terms of enabling internet access amazes me. I guess there is a trade off involved here. If you want to compete with western economies you need something like the internet if you don't want to look like North Korea. Obviously they think they can keep the net under control. Would be kinda nice if you could have it your way even if it was just to prove them wrong.
Assuming the card provides 4.64 TFLOPS and PCIe offers 8GB/s I would assume one can perform 2320 single floating point operations per single float send. Is this what GPU programmers want, or do you feel that the card is twiddling its thumbs?
I could imagine that the io-flops rate is just like it should be but I'm curious what people think about it.
"Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly." -Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind, 1948.
What is wrong with that? Sure it might leave some geniuses out there disgruntled but you would stress society far too much if you would only cater to the genius.
Just today I talked to some old fellow (~80 years old) about his navigation system and he was totally amazed about the shortest path algorithm it uses. I told him about Dijkstra's algorithm and that it was discovered in the 50s (gasp). We had a look at the wiki article but I didn't get around to really understanding it.
Normally we go with our mental faculties we have in finding an acceptable path and then leave it at that. Our problems never require to get an optimal solution or to understand how we solve them exactly and what other options we have. Also frequently everyday problems are small enough that O(.) notation never comes in handy in comparing your algorithm performance.
Of course you can give your kid a computer and all of a sudden a memory space of 2^32 bytes and a throughput of 10^9 instructions per second change the whole thing.
I'm just wondering how you could challenge your kid to solve some problem with a computer. Way back when I got my C64 my father always nagged me about a database program he would like to have, I did give it a try with Basic. I also played around with raster interrupts to draw bars on the background because it seemed to be a cool thing to do.
I'm kind of curious whether you actually need a computer to get your kid interested in computer science. I could imagine playing with model trains could help. I think there is an article by Dijkstra about a real world algorithm regarding the assembly of trains. I always thought about controlling my setup with a computer anyway, so there is a start. I'm also wondering whether you could devise any cunning computing machine that doesn't need much silicon (SiOx is allowed) your kid might have fun fooling around with (tough call, it reminds me of an abacus or a certain Wolfram related xkcd strip).
Unfortunately it is easy nowadays to scratch an itch by just buying/downloading a program or you can just evade the itch by escaping into a virtual world. Maybe there is a multiplayer game where building robots is encouraged?
Ultimately your problem seems to be how to get your kid connected with the real world or at least into creative problem solving. It doesn't take a computer to do that. (It doesn't take a computer to become a nerd;). Then again you could also live in the real world getting by without much creativity in problem solving (I still use maps). Your kid could be that dull. Maybe there is an evolutionary advantage in being good at real world problem solving. I would propose you come up with some incentives for your kid to get good at it, just in case, nagging also helps (studies have shown that), and just to be safe you can make another kid. Maybe the one you have really doesn't have what it takes to be exactly like you, also you never know what a sibling can be good for.
Personally I think there is no such thing as being overeducated. Your future boss might feel inconvenienced by your knowing too much, but who wants to work in a stagnant company like that anyway.
>As a branch manager in an IT company this is bad news to me, it tells me employee in question is not a team player shown by their inability to communicate well with others.
Why would you expect anyone to communicate with people HR or you selected, in their spare time.
> IT is about the flow of information and team work not about building walls
Sanity is about keeping your private and work life separate, much like your IT department does with firewalls and security software.
> Also do not try and show off as this may mark you as being insecure.
Or as not set in your ways like all the older guys - hey what happened to your agenda?
> So on your first day take a note book and use it as this will tell your employer that you are serious about your job.
Use a note book indeed. My parents used to do this too when our society was infiltrated with 20% in-official secret police members (much like Bush suggested America should be after 9/11). This is important when you have to be sure on what you or others said. Especially in nowadays climate this will help you find out that no matter how right your are employers can still be tyrants. Do it anyway, its still intimidating to some people.
> Last but not least "be yourself"
I'm mildly amused by your sense of humour, I prefer watching House though.
Agreed! The MIT some time ago started offering lectures in robotics. I didn't view this as a particularly CSy thing and didn't see the importance of giving all that AI stuff a body. I was wrong! You would expect this kind of mistake from cerebral types (I think, therefore I am.) somehow, wouldn't you?
It is reasonable to expect that they too will be unable to move at the speed of light. They will probably face similar problems as we do, so I would expect them to be going at around 0.1c. Lets assume that they live at most 100 ly away. Then if they were really scared and already capable enough they could be here by now if we were really lucky and they lived that close nearby (10ly) or they will arrive in the next thousand years. (Here is a bit of a distribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_distance_from_earth.jpg)
I would expect most activity to come from planetary system based civilizations as opposed to planet bound civilizations like ours, i.e. their industrial base depends on planetary system resources. We should be able to detect those in the next 50 years because they would have a bit of a foot print in terms of energy emissions and we will finally have the ability to do imaging of planetary systems. (I'm already wondering when the first scientist starts thinking in earnest about whether she/he could detect mining/industrial operations from changes in planetary orbits.)
This still gives us a bit of a chance I guess. In the next hundred years we might develop some ability to set up industrial operations on other planets and moons and have people live there so we could be on par even if we wouldn't do much out of the ordinary.
This line of thinking somehow hinges on some magical synchronization of our neighbourhood as far as development is concerned. I don't have to prove or explain this though. I can just say that much more capable civilizations don't exist since we would have noticed (Really?) easily enough, and they don't need a trigger event to come and say hi, and if no civilizations exist nearby we wouldn't have to worry anyway. I'm also wondering whether larger civilizations would feel any urge to send ships right away - what is one planetary system more in the collection. That is why I would expect that similarly/slightly larger sized civilizations make worrisome surprise visits because of our transmissions.
I would expect that moving into space will give civilizations a whole new level of insight into the universe. The resources in the planetary system can fuel much larger societies. Because of that there will be far more talented people to solve hard problems. More energy will be available for larger/expensive physics experiments. The new environment will generate a whole new range of questions, like who is supervising living conditions of miners on Mercury, how to deal with all that pesky dust on whatever celestial body without an atmosphere, and so on.
The report states that MIR-2 had some symbolic computation capabilities the US seemed to have caught up with only slowly. Read the report, it's on page three.
This report shows that the US was driven by the competition with the USSR. Who knows, it probably helped push MACSYMA along and people had some incentive to make some impractical sounding products out of this, like the little known Mathematica or also Maple.
I'm beginning to think that the computing world became so boring lately mainly because the cold war is over. Just look at the table listing all those technologies on page 5. It doesn't mention Quantum computing alright, but things like the hypercolumn cortex model might finally materialize in form of the Blue Brain project. It could very well be, that this initiative was a driver for some computing projects that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Environmentalism was a secret movement there and people were harassed by the secret police for doing something for the environment. This is exactly what this fool wants with his dreamed up theories. Now you just have to explain to me, i.e. how mining in Russia and Eastern Germany were environmentaly friendly. Not to speak of all the other desasters. He probably also thinks Chernobyl was a good idea.
However, people fuck up all the time. So when you came out of your mom, were you told "Don't worry, nothing will go wrong." when you started screaming:)?
On a more serious note, there are workplaces where you have to hit buttons to prevent accidents like having your hands chopped off. Any more refined and also intrusive means to prevent more complex fuck-ups will enable higher risk technologies. This could be installed on a voluntary basis (people go to war voluntarily) and a government under competitive pressure might just permit this and then some.
You see, we won't go from free will today to scull cap tomorrow. Today we may have some sort of automated observation techniques:
In between there will be more incremental improvements. Nobody will worry too much from step to step apart from some notorious naysayers, you know how these things work. I mean people accept torture nowadays, the scull cap has way more benefits than torture if used on a large number of people.
Actually we should rather go the A. C. Clarke direction and get the scull cap. That relieves us of doing all the complex paperwork and provides whatever inhibition is required to not kill the neurotic dog of the neurotic neighbor.
One could also throw a piece of Asimov in and let MULTIVAC perform a consistency check of human generated laws - a sanity check before the control information is handed down to each human being.
I would take great comfort in the idea that a computer controls me where computer-like accuracy is requested from me. Just imagine, you could finally have flying cars, nuclear heated homes, and breeder reactors (no more plutonium proliferation issues).
On the other hand we could follow "Alien" and just breed non-pathetic animals and we will soon have other problems to worry about than pet registries and licenses. After all superhumanity will not arrise with the help of cows, carp, cats and other milquetoast animals.
I just thought about this "advantage" some short while ago and came to the conclusion that if you need a totalitarian regime to let you come to senses, you may get another one as soon as society has forgotten how that felt like.
We (the Germans) frequently talk about never forgetting the third reich, but that alone is already worrisome. We almost implicitly admit that we have no better idea than to not forget (I like to exaggerate). It would be a good idea if it worked, but for instance that latest financial crisis shows that people all too easily forget things like Glass-Steagall to give an example. This financial stuff is really a side issue but it shows how people can forget things that were deemed necessary to prevent disaster once, on a smaller scale and in shorter time frames.
Fortunately politicians and others (and I guess the student movement of 1968 had a hand in it) figured out what had to change in Germany to make it a decent place. I hope it stays like that, it would be a shame if people decided they were over-correcting or something.
Funny now that I think about it, the Gestapo didn't prevent the Stasi and all it took was a bit of spin.
I do think that GUI calculators needn't look like the ones you can hold in your hands. The numbers are already on the keyboard why use a mouse to access them. So a simple command line tool is fine with me. PARI (or gp) seemed to do well for me. I like the fact that it supports arbitrary precision arithmetic and uses rational numbers as long as possible. The part that irks me is that it doesn't deal well with other number systems like hexadecimal or binary especially as far as output is concerned.
If you know something better, I'm open for suggestions. I didn't try the ones suggested in the article though.
Unicode support would do maybe? Multilingual Slashdot even? That would fit in nicely with that other dimension of diversity idle was supposed to add;).
No - don't poke fun of this, this is important. They are still fucking up open standards (svg) and have an even less likable guy in power now. What else would you want? Monsanto or AIG have nothing to do with computers so I guess we are stuck with MS.
Slashdot Mirror
That was quick:
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1722149/google-releases-programmers-app-building-tool
I guess I was stating the obvious.
The learning curve nowadays is definitely steeper than it used to be. Compare grandma's old tube radio and your DAB receiver. While I agree that studying electrical engineering in the 40's must have helped just as much as nowadays to understand your contemporary radio, the obstacles to understanding the newer version are more plenty fold. Miniaturization is certainly a big issue here and complicated standards the other.
It appears to me that nowadays you have neither the inclination to do so just for the hell of it, because a herd of engineers can do it much better than you nor the means to do it because you don't have the resources.
Given that you are traveling along some sort of trajectory through the space of stuff you can learn, the inability to do certain simple things may block further more advanced things you can learn later on, once you have mastered the simpler stuff.
I do applaud initiatives to enable interested individuals to modify whatever complex parts of the environment there are (there are hobby geneticists (I'll let you fill in the concerns)). Even if it is just a subsystem (i.e. Java programming for Android phones) it opens people a door to catch on and to take part.
Art is a similar can of worms but compared to engineering there is still only one artist but there is also a gallerist now and a whole machinery that explains art to you.
Overall I don't think that there should be a way back to the old days, but there should be an awareness of the widening intellectual gap between the individual and whatever system the individual interacts with. I really don't believe in jeopardizing our society by leaving large numbers of people out of the loop on what is going on around them.
That those totalitarian regimes don't all behave like North Korea in terms of enabling internet access amazes me. I guess there is a trade off involved here. If you want to compete with western economies you need something like the internet if you don't want to look like North Korea.
Obviously they think they can keep the net under control. Would be kinda nice if you could have it your way even if it was just to prove them wrong.
Assuming the card provides 4.64 TFLOPS and PCIe offers 8GB/s I would assume one can perform 2320 single floating point operations per single float send. Is this what GPU programmers want, or do you feel that the card is twiddling its thumbs?
I could imagine that the io-flops rate is just like it should be but I'm curious what people think about it.
"Individual talent is too sporadic and unpredictable to be allowed any important part in the organization society. Social systems which endure are built on the average person who can be trained to occupy any position adequately if not brilliantly."
-Stuart Chase, The Proper Study of Mankind, 1948.
What is wrong with that?
Sure it might leave some geniuses out there disgruntled but you would stress society far too much if you would only cater to the genius.
Just today I talked to some old fellow (~80 years old) about his navigation system and he was totally amazed about the shortest path algorithm it uses. I told him about Dijkstra's algorithm and that it was discovered in the 50s (gasp). We had a look at the wiki article but I didn't get around to really understanding it.
Normally we go with our mental faculties we have in finding an acceptable path and then leave it at that. Our problems never require to get an optimal solution or to understand how we solve them exactly and what other options we have. Also frequently everyday problems are small enough that O(.) notation never comes in handy in comparing your algorithm performance.
Of course you can give your kid a computer and all of a sudden a memory space of 2^32 bytes and a throughput of 10^9 instructions per second change the whole thing.
I'm just wondering how you could challenge your kid to solve some problem with a computer. Way back when I got my C64 my father always nagged me about a database program he would like to have, I did give it a try with Basic. I also played around with raster interrupts to draw bars on the background because it seemed to be a cool thing to do.
I'm kind of curious whether you actually need a computer to get your kid interested in computer science. I could imagine playing with model trains could help. I think there is an article by Dijkstra about a real world algorithm regarding the assembly of trains. I always thought about controlling my setup with a computer anyway, so there is a start. I'm also wondering whether you could devise any cunning computing machine that doesn't need much silicon (SiOx is allowed) your kid might have fun fooling around with (tough call, it reminds me of an abacus or a certain Wolfram related xkcd strip).
Unfortunately it is easy nowadays to scratch an itch by just buying/downloading a program or you can just evade the itch by escaping into a virtual world. Maybe there is a multiplayer game where building robots is encouraged?
Ultimately your problem seems to be how to get your kid connected with the real world or at least into creative problem solving. It doesn't take a computer to do that. (It doesn't take a computer to become a nerd ;). Then again you could also live in the real world getting by without much creativity in problem solving (I still use maps). Your kid could be that dull. Maybe there is an evolutionary advantage in being good at real world problem solving. I would propose you come up with some incentives for your kid to get good at it, just in case, nagging also helps (studies have shown that), and just to be safe you can make another kid. Maybe the one you have really doesn't have what it takes to be exactly like you, also you never know what a sibling can be good for.
I never called it magical, more like old fashioned.
If you would like to know what some of us are doing differently you could have a look at this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_education_system
Personally I think there is no such thing as being overeducated. Your future boss might feel inconvenienced by your knowing too much, but who wants to work in a stagnant company like that anyway.
>As a branch manager in an IT company this is bad news to me, it tells me employee in question is not a team player shown by their inability to communicate well with others.
Why would you expect anyone to communicate with people HR or you selected, in their spare time.
> IT is about the flow of information and team work not about building walls
Sanity is about keeping your private and work life separate, much like your IT department does with firewalls and security software.
> Also do not try and show off as this may mark you as being insecure.
Or as not set in your ways like all the older guys - hey what happened to your agenda?
> So on your first day take a note book and use it as this will tell your employer that you are serious about your job.
Use a note book indeed. My parents used to do this too when our society was infiltrated with 20% in-official secret police members (much like Bush suggested America should be after 9/11). This is important when you have to be sure on what you or others said. Especially in nowadays climate this will help you find out that no matter how right your are employers can still be tyrants. Do it anyway, its still intimidating to some people.
> Last but not least "be yourself"
I'm mildly amused by your sense of humour, I prefer watching House though.
Agreed! The MIT some time ago started offering lectures in robotics. I didn't view this as a particularly CSy thing and didn't see the importance of giving all that AI stuff a body. I was wrong! You would expect this kind of mistake from cerebral types (I think, therefore I am.) somehow, wouldn't you?
It is reasonable to expect that they too will be unable to move at the speed of light. They will probably face similar problems as we do, so I would expect them to be going at around 0.1c. Lets assume that they live at most 100 ly away. Then if they were really scared and already capable enough they could be here by now if we were really lucky and they lived that close nearby (10ly) or they will arrive in the next thousand years. (Here is a bit of a distribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_distance_from_earth.jpg)
I would expect most activity to come from planetary system based civilizations as opposed to planet bound civilizations like ours, i.e. their industrial base depends on planetary system resources. We should be able to detect those in the next 50 years because they would have a bit of a foot print in terms of energy emissions and we will finally have the ability to do imaging of planetary systems. (I'm already wondering when the first scientist starts thinking in earnest about whether she/he could detect mining/industrial operations from changes in planetary orbits.)
This still gives us a bit of a chance I guess. In the next hundred years we might develop some ability to set up industrial operations on other planets and moons and have people live there so we could be on par even if we wouldn't do much out of the ordinary.
This line of thinking somehow hinges on some magical synchronization of our neighbourhood as far as development is concerned. I don't have to prove or explain this though. I can just say that much more capable civilizations don't exist since we would have noticed (Really?) easily enough, and they don't need a trigger event to come and say hi, and if no civilizations exist nearby we wouldn't have to worry anyway. I'm also wondering whether larger civilizations would feel any urge to send ships right away - what is one planetary system more in the collection. That is why I would expect that similarly/slightly larger sized civilizations make worrisome surprise visits because of our transmissions.
I would expect that moving into space will give civilizations a whole new level of insight into the universe. The resources in the planetary system can fuel much larger societies. Because of that there will be far more talented people to solve hard problems. More energy will be available for larger/expensive physics experiments. The new environment will generate a whole new range of questions, like who is supervising living conditions of miners on Mercury, how to deal with all that pesky dust on whatever celestial body without an atmosphere, and so on.
>... and symbolic computing.
The report states that MIR-2 had some symbolic computation capabilities the US seemed to have caught up with only slowly. Read the report, it's on page three.
This report shows that the US was driven by the competition with the USSR. Who knows, it probably helped push MACSYMA along and people had some incentive to make some impractical sounding products out of this, like the little known Mathematica or also Maple.
I'm beginning to think that the computing world became so boring lately mainly because the cold war is over. Just look at the table listing all those technologies on page 5. It doesn't mention Quantum computing alright, but things like the hypercolumn cortex model might finally materialize in form of the Blue Brain project. It could very well be, that this initiative was a driver for some computing projects that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Environmentalism was a secret movement there and people were harassed by the secret police for doing something for the environment. This is exactly what this fool wants with his dreamed up theories. Now you just have to explain to me, i.e. how mining in Russia and Eastern Germany were environmentaly friendly. Not to speak of all the other desasters. He probably also thinks Chernobyl was a good idea.
>I very much doubt it was actually vinegar that they drank, since it's not exactly something you can drink in the first place.
Maybe not in Russia but in Rome: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posca .
Also I know that people in Germany drank it towards the beginning of the last century instead of lemonade, heavily diluted obviously.
Cute!
However, people fuck up all the time. So when you came out of your mom, were you told "Don't worry, nothing will go wrong." when you started screaming :)?
On a more serious note, there are workplaces where you have to hit buttons to prevent accidents like having your hands chopped off. Any more refined and also intrusive means to prevent more complex fuck-ups will enable higher risk technologies. This could be installed on a voluntary basis (people go to war voluntarily) and a government under competitive pressure might just permit this and then some.
You see, we won't go from free will today to scull cap tomorrow. Today we may have some sort of automated observation techniques:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.99.8216&rep=rep1&type=pdf
In between there will be more incremental improvements. Nobody will worry too much from step to step apart from some notorious naysayers, you know how these things work. I mean people accept torture nowadays, the scull cap has way more benefits than torture if used on a large number of people.
Actually we should rather go the A. C. Clarke direction and get the scull cap. That relieves us of doing all the complex paperwork and provides whatever inhibition is required to not kill the neurotic dog of the neurotic neighbor.
One could also throw a piece of Asimov in and let MULTIVAC perform a consistency check of human generated laws - a sanity check before the control information is handed down to each human being.
I would take great comfort in the idea that a computer controls me where computer-like accuracy is requested from me. Just imagine, you could finally have flying cars, nuclear heated homes, and breeder reactors (no more plutonium proliferation issues).
On the other hand we could follow "Alien" and just breed non-pathetic animals and we will soon have other problems to worry about than pet registries and licenses. After all superhumanity will not arrise with the help of cows, carp, cats and other milquetoast animals.
I just thought about this "advantage" some short while ago and came to the conclusion that if you need a totalitarian regime to let you come to senses, you may get another one as soon as society has forgotten how that felt like.
We (the Germans) frequently talk about never forgetting the third reich, but that alone is already worrisome. We almost implicitly admit that we have no better idea than to not forget (I like to exaggerate). It would be a good idea if it worked, but for instance that latest financial crisis shows that people all too easily forget things like Glass-Steagall to give an example. This financial stuff is really a side issue but it shows how people can forget things that were deemed necessary to prevent disaster once, on a smaller scale and in shorter time frames.
Fortunately politicians and others (and I guess the student movement of 1968 had a hand in it) figured out what had to change in Germany to make it a decent place. I hope it stays like that, it would be a shame if people decided they were over-correcting or something.
Funny now that I think about it, the Gestapo didn't prevent the Stasi and all it took was a bit of spin.
So this is the anatomical theatre of sorts:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Computer-Science/6-661Spring2003/CourseHome/index.htm
>But then again, you have a gun and you're willing to use it... I'm sure your strategy is the best strategy ever. No really.
Everything else is just self deterrence. Even politicians think so.
I do think that GUI calculators needn't look like the ones you can hold in your hands. The numbers are already on the keyboard why use a mouse to access them. So a simple command line tool is fine with me.
PARI (or gp) seemed to do well for me. I like the fact that it supports arbitrary precision arithmetic and uses rational numbers as long as possible. The part that irks me is that it doesn't deal well with other number systems like hexadecimal or binary especially as far as output is concerned.
If you know something better, I'm open for suggestions. I didn't try the ones suggested in the article though.
Oops, they don't even need winter to freeze to death in Russia.
Invade Russia during winter at your own peril.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard
Well Russians are actually nicer people than Americans if you go by prisoners per capita. Here have a look at the map:
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita&b_map=1
Russia has a higher murder rate though:
http://www.nationmaster.com/red/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita&b_map=1
Now I'm conflicted. How do you define nice again?
But think of the possibilities!
That's just like an oscillator from hell.
At least they seem to be very stable.
>The cast of Slashdot had too little diversity
Unicode support would do maybe? Multilingual Slashdot even? That would fit in nicely with that other dimension of diversity idle was supposed to add ;).
>The whole "Evil Bill" thing got old too.
No - don't poke fun of this, this is important. They are still fucking up open standards (svg) and have an even less likable guy in power now. What else would you want? Monsanto or AIG have nothing to do with computers so I guess we are stuck with MS.