...nobody has yet found a PC capable of running Windows 7 today.
(I upgraded from XP last month. I upgraded the PC at the same time, to what sounded like quite a fast machine. But Win7 destroyed that advantage. How I wish I didn't need proprietary packages - then I'd switch everything to Linux and shout less at my computer)
So in some 18,000 years there will be a bunch of techs wondering why their galaxy-spanning computers are running a bit slow? Man, who expected hackers from the past?
What's the relationship between FITS, HDF and NetCDF? I've looked into the last two, but eventually decided they were far more complicated than I needed them to be - and did the evil thing that so many of us do - invented my own simple format that is 'just enough' for my own needs:-).But FITS is new to me.
First, as an academic group, it is important to make your software usable for other groups. It brings collaborators to you - researchers who want to do something new, that your software almost supports. It's faster for them to work with you than start from scratch - more for your expertise in the field than for your coding abilities.
Second, industrial software isn't open source, and for niche markets is often of terrible quality at a very high price. Open-source is slowly pushing industrial software out of science - biomedical imaging being a very good example. With OS, if the package doesn't do what you need, you can at least extend it yourself. Often more importantly, you can also check it for bugs. Less out-and-out coding bugs, more subtle bias in the way the data is processed. Super-secret-magic-algorithms do not make for reliable science.
My main screen is 1920x1080, so I don't think that's my problem. My problem is that I can't find anything - I spend far too long searching for options - and I've been using it since not long after it was introduced. Everything is two clicks away - apart from the stuff I use (e.g. sub/superscript in Powerpoint).
Seriously, I have not spoken to a single real-person-standing-in-front-of-me who likes the ribbon. I am genuinely surprised by reports from people who like it. As a GUI element I don't see how it's different to tabs and buttons. As a GUI design, I think it's poorly laid-out.
With menus it is easy to present a lot of options in a tree structure, several layers deep if needed. The ribbon is effectively two layers deep. Maybe it would be useful for often-used options, alongside a menu bar, but not instead of it. I'm used to complicated packages (I also use stuff like Solidworks) - I just like to be able to see what's available.
How about nobody is allowed to post on/. without first building their own computer? I'll be generous, you're allowed to simply strap a uC to a board, but you do have to write your own bootstrap routine. Bonus points for doing it properly and using discretes. Now, back to physics, it's about measuring it yourself, and understanding every step. Video camera + crazy software is going to take a long time to understand (care to explain motion artefacts captured by a video camera?). Start from Galileo, work up.
1) This. Video is no substitute for real life.
2) Nobody remembers how to measure anything these days. I spend a large part of my time explaining to PhD students (and the not so occasional postdoc) how to measure stuff, and why their measurements might not quite match their equations, and why they shouldn't always believe their (or my) results. And why some measurements are pointless, because the error is larger than the number they're looking for. We've gotta start teaching this stuff early.
I have to script in VBA for a large commercial package I use. It's like a bad trip back to the 80s. I knew things were going to be fun when I discovered that the square root function is called sqr().
My favourite part is the 'object oriented' bit. It's like a bad parody of OO misunderstood. There is no object orientation - as far as I can tell, a VBA object would barely pass for a C struct.
Add to that a rather 'special' vendor interpretation of OO (no doubt guided by the VBA way), and I find myself building CAD models where the transform (rotation, translation, etc) is the object, to which I pass the...um... shape (even in plain English I struggle not to call it an object!) by its name as a string. The code is virtually unreadable, even by me, and I wrote it.
The faster VBA dies, the better. I'm not sure it really counts as BASIC. Go and try Python - it's actually fun to write.
I find an automobile analogy is called for:
If someone wants to learn to drive, do you start by explaining the operation of internal combustion engine? Compression ratios maybe?
Many of the problems programmers of a 'certain age' have come from trying to outguess the compiler/interpreter. A programming language should be designed to express the problem you want to solve, not how the particular processor will actually do it. Logo, for example, is a very long way from assembly code, but a useful teaching language.
Sure, you can go through all those second-hand bookstores and strip them of anything will make a profit. It makes the store less interesting for the rest of us, who actually want to read the books we find. I like the search, which may turn up a treasure I recognise, or may turn up something obscure that I, but virtually nobody else, want to read.
To put it another way, it's why Firefly was canned. Lots of us thought it was good, but not enough to turn a quick profit. There's a lot of instant-hit cheap crap on TV. Please don't do this to bookstores as well.
Firefox is a browser platform which is extremely extensible across a broad range of interfaces, you can touch a lot of things inside the browser.
Extremely extensible - but do we need it? I'm not sure XUL buys us all that much, in common usage, but it certainly slows things down. It would be nice to go back to a small, lightweght, fast browser. I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere...
Um, predictable, no. That's the down side. I have very, very little job security. But so long as I stay one of the best at my tiny little niche in science, I can work all over the world. A fairly limited number of labs, but they do nicely span the planet. I'm not unusual - plenty of people are quietly following this career path. Sure, it's possible to go through university, get your piece of paper, and settle into some dumb job for the rest of your life. If you want that fine, but there were a whole load of folks trying to show you bigger horizons as you went through. It took me a long time to realise, but they were always there. Once I started to see, the opportunities just opened up, and I find myself living in a foreign country playing with big toys.
Lectures don't teach you very much, you can get it all from a book. But finding someone to tell you which books to read...that's a real gift. The certificate says you had the chances - the CV says whether you took them.
I guess you missed the 'retired early' part. Sometimes folks do things for fun rather than profit. Especially when they've fixed the profit part elsewhere.
You don't even need weapons any more. If the point of terrorism is to create fear and panic, this makes it easy. Train a bunch of people. Don't tell them there are no explosives - even better, train them badly. Send them out to look suspicious. 'Leak' information about an impending attack. Watch your operatives get caught and spill the beans, and sit back and enjoy the chaos. Which city shall we close this week?
Congratulations! That's the most informative most I've ever seen on/. A very nice summary of a new field of research, and without jargon. What are you doing here?
Which is why NMR and MRI are both moving to weaker magnets...oh, no, they're not. They're moving to bigger magnets requiring more helium. We're struggling to find low-temperature superconductors that will maintain a high enough current density, let alone high Tc. Maybe you want to give away sensitivity, but I think you'll find your colleagues don't. Guess who'll be getting published?
This is so true, even in the early 90's. I remember a summer job, doing fairly braindead work for a government research agency. I discovered a computer in the library, loaded with more datasheets than I had ever seen. I spent the rest of the week quietly printing out the datasheet (well, book) for a 68hc11 - it gave me enough information to build a board, write an assembler, and boot the chip! Oh, happy days. There really is no feeling quite like starting a microcontroller/microprocessor on your own board, bootstrapping your own code, and getting the first response from it.
Today, datasheets are easy to get - but you're right, the writing quality is excellent. It's amazing how often the manual for a chip is some much better than the manual for the gadget built around it.
Some old instruments still use them - the same ones that don't have USB ports. What I'd really like is a device that fits in a floppy bay, looks like a floppy to the hardware, but has a USB port on the front. Has anyone ever sen one?
Slashdot Mirror
...nobody has yet found a PC capable of running Windows 7 today.
(I upgraded from XP last month. I upgraded the PC at the same time, to what sounded like quite a fast machine. But Win7 destroyed that advantage. How I wish I didn't need proprietary packages - then I'd switch everything to Linux and shout less at my computer)
So in some 18,000 years there will be a bunch of techs wondering why their galaxy-spanning computers are running a bit slow? Man, who expected hackers from the past?
What's the relationship between FITS, HDF and NetCDF? I've looked into the last two, but eventually decided they were far more complicated than I needed them to be - and did the evil thing that so many of us do - invented my own simple format that is 'just enough' for my own needs :-).But FITS is new to me.
I think you're missing two points:
First, as an academic group, it is important to make your software usable for other groups. It brings collaborators to you - researchers who want to do something new, that your software almost supports. It's faster for them to work with you than start from scratch - more for your expertise in the field than for your coding abilities.
Second, industrial software isn't open source, and for niche markets is often of terrible quality at a very high price. Open-source is slowly pushing industrial software out of science - biomedical imaging being a very good example. With OS, if the package doesn't do what you need, you can at least extend it yourself. Often more importantly, you can also check it for bugs. Less out-and-out coding bugs, more subtle bias in the way the data is processed. Super-secret-magic-algorithms do not make for reliable science.
My main screen is 1920x1080, so I don't think that's my problem. My problem is that I can't find anything - I spend far too long searching for options - and I've been using it since not long after it was introduced. Everything is two clicks away - apart from the stuff I use (e.g. sub/superscript in Powerpoint).
Seriously, I have not spoken to a single real-person-standing-in-front-of-me who likes the ribbon. I am genuinely surprised by reports from people who like it. As a GUI element I don't see how it's different to tabs and buttons. As a GUI design, I think it's poorly laid-out.
With menus it is easy to present a lot of options in a tree structure, several layers deep if needed. The ribbon is effectively two layers deep. Maybe it would be useful for often-used options, alongside a menu bar, but not instead of it. I'm used to complicated packages (I also use stuff like Solidworks) - I just like to be able to see what's available.
Does anybody apart from Microsoft, actually think the ribbon is a good thing? I would consider removing it to be a feature.
How about nobody is allowed to post on /. without first building their own computer? I'll be generous, you're allowed to simply strap a uC to a board, but you do have to write your own bootstrap routine. Bonus points for doing it properly and using discretes. Now, back to physics, it's about measuring it yourself, and understanding every step. Video camera + crazy software is going to take a long time to understand (care to explain motion artefacts captured by a video camera?). Start from Galileo, work up.
1) This. Video is no substitute for real life.
2) Nobody remembers how to measure anything these days. I spend a large part of my time explaining to PhD students (and the not so occasional postdoc) how to measure stuff, and why their measurements might not quite match their equations, and why they shouldn't always believe their (or my) results. And why some measurements are pointless, because the error is larger than the number they're looking for. We've gotta start teaching this stuff early.
I agree with all your points, but who writes those applications? It's certainly not moto.
Because it would be really difficult to write a 'make a bigger space, I'd like to leave the train' function?
I have to script in VBA for a large commercial package I use. It's like a bad trip back to the 80s. I knew things were going to be fun when I discovered that the square root function is called sqr().
...um... shape (even in plain English I struggle not to call it an object!) by its name as a string. The code is virtually unreadable, even by me, and I wrote it.
My favourite part is the 'object oriented' bit. It's like a bad parody of OO misunderstood. There is no object orientation - as far as I can tell, a VBA object would barely pass for a C struct.
Add to that a rather 'special' vendor interpretation of OO (no doubt guided by the VBA way), and I find myself building CAD models where the transform (rotation, translation, etc) is the object, to which I pass the
The faster VBA dies, the better. I'm not sure it really counts as BASIC. Go and try Python - it's actually fun to write.
I find an automobile analogy is called for: If someone wants to learn to drive, do you start by explaining the operation of internal combustion engine? Compression ratios maybe? Many of the problems programmers of a 'certain age' have come from trying to outguess the compiler/interpreter. A programming language should be designed to express the problem you want to solve, not how the particular processor will actually do it. Logo, for example, is a very long way from assembly code, but a useful teaching language.
Or maybe it's easier/quicker/cheaper to test if someone owns a piece of paper, rather that whether they learned anything?
Sure, you can go through all those second-hand bookstores and strip them of anything will make a profit. It makes the store less interesting for the rest of us, who actually want to read the books we find. I like the search, which may turn up a treasure I recognise, or may turn up something obscure that I, but virtually nobody else, want to read. To put it another way, it's why Firefly was canned. Lots of us thought it was good, but not enough to turn a quick profit. There's a lot of instant-hit cheap crap on TV. Please don't do this to bookstores as well.
Agreed. Also, as the man says,
Firefox is a browser platform which is extremely extensible across a broad range of interfaces, you can touch a lot of things inside the browser.
Extremely extensible - but do we need it? I'm not sure XUL buys us all that much, in common usage, but it certainly slows things down. It would be nice to go back to a small, lightweght, fast browser. I'm sure I've heard that before somewhere...
Um, predictable, no. That's the down side. I have very, very little job security. But so long as I stay one of the best at my tiny little niche in science, I can work all over the world. A fairly limited number of labs, but they do nicely span the planet. I'm not unusual - plenty of people are quietly following this career path. Sure, it's possible to go through university, get your piece of paper, and settle into some dumb job for the rest of your life. If you want that fine, but there were a whole load of folks trying to show you bigger horizons as you went through. It took me a long time to realise, but they were always there. Once I started to see, the opportunities just opened up, and I find myself living in a foreign country playing with big toys. Lectures don't teach you very much, you can get it all from a book. But finding someone to tell you which books to read...that's a real gift. The certificate says you had the chances - the CV says whether you took them.
I guess you missed the 'retired early' part. Sometimes folks do things for fun rather than profit. Especially when they've fixed the profit part elsewhere.
You don't even need weapons any more. If the point of terrorism is to create fear and panic, this makes it easy. Train a bunch of people. Don't tell them there are no explosives - even better, train them badly. Send them out to look suspicious. 'Leak' information about an impending attack. Watch your operatives get caught and spill the beans, and sit back and enjoy the chaos. Which city shall we close this week?
Congratulations! That's the most informative most I've ever seen on /. A very nice summary of a new field of research, and without jargon. What are you doing here?
Which is why NMR and MRI are both moving to weaker magnets...oh, no, they're not. They're moving to bigger magnets requiring more helium. We're struggling to find low-temperature superconductors that will maintain a high enough current density, let alone high Tc. Maybe you want to give away sensitivity, but I think you'll find your colleagues don't. Guess who'll be getting published?
This is so true, even in the early 90's. I remember a summer job, doing fairly braindead work for a government research agency. I discovered a computer in the library, loaded with more datasheets than I had ever seen. I spent the rest of the week quietly printing out the datasheet (well, book) for a 68hc11 - it gave me enough information to build a board, write an assembler, and boot the chip! Oh, happy days. There really is no feeling quite like starting a microcontroller/microprocessor on your own board, bootstrapping your own code, and getting the first response from it. Today, datasheets are easy to get - but you're right, the writing quality is excellent. It's amazing how often the manual for a chip is some much better than the manual for the gadget built around it.
It's already happening - have a look at frontiersin.org. You pay to publish, access is free to anyone.
Some old instruments still use them - the same ones that don't have USB ports. What I'd really like is a device that fits in a floppy bay, looks like a floppy to the hardware, but has a USB port on the front. Has anyone ever sen one?
Funny how so many people complain about "made in China" while no-one is turning down cheap gadgets.
I'll subscribe to keep the Daily Mail off the web - where do I sign?