That may be true for the architectural design side of things, but isn't really true for floorplans and is certainly far from true for the SolidWorks part of the story. SolidWorks is still the platform of choice in almost every Mechanical Engineering project I've gotten a glimpse of.
The thing however, and this applies to AutoCAD too in this case, these products are 3D CAD, not graphics software. The mindset to work in one is different to working in the other
I wasn't around when they landed someone on the moon so I can't quite comment on that bit, but I can tell you what I (and the rest of my kind) use the extra processing power for:
Finite Element Analysis (simulating car crashes to make them safer before we crash the dummies in them).
Multibody Dynamics (Simulation of robot behavior saves a ton of money, we can simulate the different options before we build 10 different robots or spend a year figuring out something by trial and error)
Computational Fluid Dynamics (designing cars, jets and pretty much anything in between like windmills and how they affect their surroundings and how efficient they are)
Simulating Complex Systems (designing control schemes for anything from chemical plants, to cruise control to autopilots)
Computational Thermodynamics (Working on that tricky global warming thing, or just trying to figure out how to best model and work with various chemicals or proteins)
This is just the uses (that I know of) that more raw power can help out in Mechanical Engineering. I still have to wait about an hour for certain simulations or computations to run and they're not even all that complex yet. The faster these things run (even a few percent increases) can save us tons of time in the long run. And time is money...
Allow me to add a few, since I might know a thing or two about this subject. Some of you might remember Flame, a robot designed at the TU Delft, and being used to further understand human walking (he walks like we do, as opposed to for example Asimo...)
While that may be the case, it's usually the parents that are footing the bill for the university education. So while they may legally have little input, when daddy gets upset over something and stops sending checks, junior quickly picks up on that
I think a CNC machine could actually... the main problem would be making sure the pumpkin doesn't move while you're working on it. The teeth would be hard to do, but a 3D CNC machine like certain specialized businesses and technical universities have should be able to make a decent attempt, but since the material is fairly fragile it'll take a while.
whether a material is soft and flexible doesn't mean it can't be CNC'ed, it just means that the bit will have to rotate a lot faster and the movement speed will have to take into account the shape it's making... It's a challenge, but certainly not too difficult. It'll leave a mess that needs to be cleaned though...
I'm not saying there's a monopoly, but in a lot of fields the other alternatives (Japan, Korea, China just to name a few) are not as easy to get into. There's also a major social hurdle that needs to be overcome there, that isn't the case in the US.
Talent does attract more talent, and talent needs room to grow. Especially in technical circles the US is fairly attractive. But again, I'm only speaking from my own field and experience.
I agree it might have some effect, especially since people who live in academia tend to be rather idealistic.
But, only speaking from personal experience, I've never had any problems.
Sure if you can get over the increased presence and slightly longer wait at the airport due to checks nothing has even really changed.
You are right that the climate might scare away a lot of your 'elite', but when you think about it, the US is still home to many of those 'elite' and the institutions that those of us wishing to become said 'elite' wish to visit. And THAT is the real reason people congregate in the US.
I plan on doing my PhD in the US, these issues while granted are not the prefered status-quo are not enough to risk these kind of opportunities for my career. If I have to have my laptop searched, then so be it.
Recap: I agree the situation as it stands is not going in the right direction, but the world's 'elite' still live and learn in the US, and that's unlikely to change. These 'elite' often BECOME US citizens, and although sad for the average joe or jose, these things are mad a simple as possible, because of the rare talents they have.
The sheer imbalance in favor of the US can only be offset by a huge amount of talent and opportunity in another nation to rival it.
It might also be related to the amount of PR per team and their results. If a team crashes and burns (not literally I hope) then they might seem less inclined to flout their performance. However, the Dutch team from the TU Delft (the Nuna, that won the last 4 WSC in Australia) have had such success and press coverage here in Holland that that too is declining because now it's almost become expected for them to win. I'm sorry if that sounds arrogant, but that is how our uni sees the matter.
Upon finishing the race, the Belgian Umicore team and the Australian Aurora team were trailing the Nuna by 120 and 170 km respectively.
Two solar cars from the United States crashed, including the University of Michigan's much-hyped and extremely well-funded Continuum. After what the Stanford solar team described on its blog as a "hectic" race start, with solar cars launched into the race with only a minute between each start, and caravans scrambling to catch up (each car has to be accompanied by a lead vehicle and chase vehicle), U-M's car collided with its own lead vehicle. U-M blames an abrupt stop by the Stanford team for the accident, but whatever the cause, Continuum suffered significant damage to its canopy and front solar modules.
I know this doesn't apply for all labs, but where I work it's not finances that are the main shortcoming. Sure, an increase in finance could help us, but even doubling our budget would leave us with more money than we can spend. It's the interference with scientific research that really gets in the way.
My fear is also that if science gets a huge boost in spending, the money would not all go to equally well thought out and worthy causes. Mismanagement is a big problem when the budget goes up.
Also, it might be worth noting that a small, but not unnoticeable percentage of the DoD budget goes to scientific research. I don't mean to troll, but a lot of military research also has civilian uses, just take a look at the list of DARPA research grants and imagine how valuable some of those things could be for civilian life.
http://www.darpa.mil/body/off_programs.html
But all in all I do agree with you, a switch of focus from military to science would be nice, but the switch should not be financial, people need to realize that science holds such great promise that it's worth investing in.
IANAL, but can he not counter sue them if they take him to court under the law you're describing, not to mention the whole postage issue?
Can you even prove someone downloaded something by torrenting that will stand up in a court of law?
Plus, from TFA it reads a lot like this law firm acts like those spam emails you get from the Nigerian business man who needs help getting his money out of the country.
Oh and is there any kind of presidence like this in the UK or anywhere else?
I think most engineers would be more Constructive than Destructive by nature.. That depends, what's the difference between a mechanical and a civil engineer?
mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets:-p
sorry, couldn't resist.
Actually, an organization can have the same legal standing as a person. They have to apply for these and be granted them. This enables them to have bank accounts, be party to a contract etc.
I CAN speak Dutch and the article says this:
"Demonoid is offline again. After subpoenas by the CRIA." Those are the claims made by the author of the article. The so-called journalist that wrote the article is Wieland van Dijk, his blog is found at http://log.alamagordo.org/ for those interested.
However, from a site I found by googling his name, http://www.amsterdamcentraal.nl/correspondenten/wieland/, is shows a few things, and this is my personal interpretation of this.
1, he writes articles that are both poorly written and not exactly high-level journalism (reports on how Amsterdam's metro is doing for example)
2, He claims to enjoy living in neighborhoods that are known as 'probleem wijken' which means problem neighborhoods, make your own opinions on that, but bundled with,
3, he writes very one-sided articles, mainly about Amsterdam's soccer team, and has yet to (while browsing some of the articles) name a source.
From this I personally conclude that he isn't exactly a 'professional journalist' of the caliber most people would rely on for news.
oh and btw, I found his email for anyone wanting to ask him about his source of information, maybe he's got Deimos' phone number; wieland[at]amsterdamcentraal.nl
I can understand how you might be able to be productive on your PC, but some people (quit playing games a few years ago) still need the high end stuff. I am an engineering student and do a lot of work with CAD software and heavy duty processing of data, so the lower-end my CPU and VGAs, the more time I have to wait on them to catch up with what I want to do. As Time is money, you can see how in some cases a high end PC can be necessary to do one's job.
On a sorta similar story,
I was working as an intern in an engineering bureau, and we were working on a machine that was a tad slow and when big assemblies came up it would really start to stutter. I mentioned (don't remember the exact systems involved) that a certain set up would increase the speed and responsiveness of the computers and let everyone work a bit faster and the supervisor contacted the guy in charge of acquisitions right away. I was surprised at his reaction and one of the older guys explained to me that if we can spend a minute a day a piece less on waiting, (with almost a hundred engineers working in the company) that's an hour and a half man hours more each day, multiply that by the amount of days they work in a year and that's a pretty penny. Apparently some situations it is beneficial to get high-end hardware.
Sadly of course the new machines arrived 2 days before I was done there, but hey, I learned something new!
I read tfa, and aside from the bad math in the last paragraph I also have a problem with the logic of his example. He assumes that since one person who knows twice as much as me should get twice as high as me. But it isn't at all taking into account that twice of VERY LITTLE knowledge is still not a lot. I can understand that multiple choice will not be a perfect way of judging someone's knowledge, but thinking about how many people need to take the exam, and how few people there are to grade them. Not to mention it is impossible to ask long answer questions on every aspect of a course. Multiple choice questions are still not too bad a way of quizzing a large group of people on subject matter that has a large range of subtopics. Assuming of course the questions aren't uber-hard.
Damn this wasn't exactly something I wanted to read 2 days before my exams (which happen to be largely mc-questions)
Genius is also spelling 'genius' right...
Don't worry about it though, I once signed my name in 9th grade as Phil the genious and didn't hear the end of it for weeks.
IIT-Kanpur(For those who dont know, its Indian equivalent for MIT) Aside from the grammatical error, you don't think that's a bit of a stretch?
MIT:
staff: 998,
students: approx. 10000
Nobel Laureates: 63 working there (27 alumni have one).
Not to mention all the alumni (Buzz Aldrin, Kofi Annan and many more) and their various inventions and discoveries.
IIT
staff: approx. 500,
students: approx. 4000
Nobel Laureates: 0
A few notable alumni, granted and it has often been named the best engineering college in India.
Not to slam IIT too much, I'm sure it's a fine college, but claiming it as India's MIT is not the same as saying it's India's MIT, which I assume the submitter meant.
sheesh, it's not even in the summary, it's in TFA title,
I also hate to point out the obvious, but I don't need to be a researcher at CMU to realize that if all those split files were put together it would be easier and faster to download the file... talk about pointing out the obvious
I typed some random simple things for Google Scholar to find results for;
"the"; 1,23 billion
"a"; 623 million
"biology"; 4,23 million
"evolution"; 5,18 million (sorry, had to check)
So there are a fair bit of papers out there, billions to be exact. Draw your own conclusions from that, I think the word evolution in scientific papers isn't such a big deal, I think we get a problem when it comes to publishing in non-scientific media (ie newspapers or magazines).
On a side note, I live in Europe, and we don't even THINK about whether evolution is true or not. It's a bit of an area we don't particularly care about, but when it comes to schools, it is taught as the only theory we have. It's actually pretty amusing (and alarming) to see how many Americans have such an issue with this, as well as the whole scientology thing. These are things most people here at my Uni think a human being with half a brain would dismiss because it doesn't stand up to 5 seconds of scrutiny. But then again, what do you expect at a technical university? I don't think anyone believes in astrology, witches, magic or any other of those things mentioned in a post above.
I'm sure we've all heard of the studies that show how overwhelmingly atheist the scientific community is, I stick to my personal belief; the gene pool needs a little Chlorine...
PS sorry I kinda trailed off at the end, but I can get very worked up over the state of affairs in modern society, as is evident I think.
I was told in physics class that 'we' (humans) have had to adjust our satellites' orbits and all because a perfect orbit is hard to obtain and relativity gets in the way at those speeds up there. So why don't most of those pieces just burn up in the atmosphere while they're slowly pulled into Earth? Is it because their mass is so little that the pull by the Earth is so small that it's just taking forever for the acceleration to be noticeable or what?
Thanks for the links, so I take it that a main reason is that a lot of people can't afford it or people are too poor and aren't offered any coverage. But if the government were to make it mandatory for companies to offer people from all income ranges insurance, wouldn't that remedy it? or is it not economically viable to do that for the companies?
What I don't understand is what that lobbying has to do with it? If everyone was insured then the doctors wouldn't have to worry about getting paid because it's all taken care of by the insurance companies, or am I being unusually naive? Sorry about all the questions.
Slashdot Mirror
As Hugh Daniels put it:
“The problem with trying to child-proof the world, is that it makes people neglect the far more important task of world-proofing the child.
That may be true for the architectural design side of things, but isn't really true for floorplans and is certainly far from true for the SolidWorks part of the story. SolidWorks is still the platform of choice in almost every Mechanical Engineering project I've gotten a glimpse of.
The thing however, and this applies to AutoCAD too in this case, these products are 3D CAD, not graphics software. The mindset to work in one is different to working in the other
I wasn't around when they landed someone on the moon so I can't quite comment on that bit, but I can tell you what I (and the rest of my kind) use the extra processing power for:
Finite Element Analysis (simulating car crashes to make them safer before we crash the dummies in them).
Multibody Dynamics (Simulation of robot behavior saves a ton of money, we can simulate the different options before we build 10 different robots or spend a year figuring out something by trial and error)
Computational Fluid Dynamics (designing cars, jets and pretty much anything in between like windmills and how they affect their surroundings and how efficient they are)
Simulating Complex Systems (designing control schemes for anything from chemical plants, to cruise control to autopilots) Computational Thermodynamics (Working on that tricky global warming thing, or just trying to figure out how to best model and work with various chemicals or proteins)
This is just the uses (that I know of) that more raw power can help out in Mechanical Engineering. I still have to wait about an hour for certain simulations or computations to run and they're not even all that complex yet. The faster these things run (even a few percent increases) can save us tons of time in the long run. And time is money...
Allow me to add a few, since I might know a thing or two about this subject. Some of you might remember Flame, a robot designed at the TU Delft, and being used to further understand human walking (he walks like we do, as opposed to for example Asimo...)
:-)
http://www.3me.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=c4fa06f1-b767-4a67-a19e-ea3356400f06&lang=en
The nice people at DBL (Delft Biorobotics Laboratory) have built a next generation robot called TUlip
http://www.dutchrobotics.net
for those interested. That's one I worked on a little, so I might be a little biased in terms of how cool it is
Some more cool robots we saw in China and elsewhere are:
The Cornell Ranger's record for longest distance walked
http://ruina.tam.cornell.edu/research/topics/locomotion_and_robotics/papers/CornellRanger/index.html
or maybe nexi?
http://robotic.media.mit.edu/projects/robots/mds/overview/overview.html
Or take your pick from a variety in this list:
http://www.ri.cmu.edu/research_project_view.html?menu_id=261
or this one
http://www.rec.ri.cmu.edu/project/index.htm
Don't wanna piss away my karma, but don't forget the canceled Falcon 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_5
just thought I'd add that fyi, in case you didn't count it
While that may be the case, it's usually the parents that are footing the bill for the university education. So while they may legally have little input, when daddy gets upset over something and stops sending checks, junior quickly picks up on that
I think a CNC machine could actually... the main problem would be making sure the pumpkin doesn't move while you're working on it. The teeth would be hard to do, but a 3D CNC machine like certain specialized businesses and technical universities have should be able to make a decent attempt, but since the material is fairly fragile it'll take a while.
whether a material is soft and flexible doesn't mean it can't be CNC'ed, it just means that the bit will have to rotate a lot faster and the movement speed will have to take into account the shape it's making... It's a challenge, but certainly not too difficult. It'll leave a mess that needs to be cleaned though...
I'm not saying there's a monopoly, but in a lot of fields the other alternatives (Japan, Korea, China just to name a few) are not as easy to get into. There's also a major social hurdle that needs to be overcome there, that isn't the case in the US.
Talent does attract more talent, and talent needs room to grow. Especially in technical circles the US is fairly attractive. But again, I'm only speaking from my own field and experience.
I agree it might have some effect, especially since people who live in academia tend to be rather idealistic.
But, only speaking from personal experience, I've never had any problems.
Sure if you can get over the increased presence and slightly longer wait at the airport due to checks nothing has even really changed.
You are right that the climate might scare away a lot of your 'elite', but when you think about it, the US is still home to many of those 'elite' and the institutions that those of us wishing to become said 'elite' wish to visit. And THAT is the real reason people congregate in the US.
I plan on doing my PhD in the US, these issues while granted are not the prefered status-quo are not enough to risk these kind of opportunities for my career. If I have to have my laptop searched, then so be it.
Recap: I agree the situation as it stands is not going in the right direction, but the world's 'elite' still live and learn in the US, and that's unlikely to change. These 'elite' often BECOME US citizens, and although sad for the average joe or jose, these things are mad a simple as possible, because of the rare talents they have. The sheer imbalance in favor of the US can only be offset by a huge amount of talent and opportunity in another nation to rival it.
It might also be related to the amount of PR per team and their results. If a team crashes and burns (not literally I hope) then they might seem less inclined to flout their performance. However, the Dutch team from the TU Delft (the Nuna, that won the last 4 WSC in Australia) have had such success and press coverage here in Holland that that too is declining because now it's almost become expected for them to win. I'm sorry if that sounds arrogant, but that is how our uni sees the matter.
Some more fun info for those interested:
The peak speed for the Nuna in 2007 was 142 km/h.
Upon finishing the race, the Belgian Umicore team and the Australian Aurora team were trailing the Nuna by 120 and 170 km respectively.
Two solar cars from the United States crashed, including the University of Michigan's much-hyped and extremely well-funded Continuum. After what the Stanford solar team described on its blog as a "hectic" race start, with solar cars launched into the race with only a minute between each start, and caravans scrambling to catch up (each car has to be accompanied by a lead vehicle and chase vehicle), U-M's car collided with its own lead vehicle. U-M blames an abrupt stop by the Stanford team for the accident, but whatever the cause, Continuum suffered significant damage to its canopy and front solar modules.
I know this doesn't apply for all labs, but where I work it's not finances that are the main shortcoming. Sure, an increase in finance could help us, but even doubling our budget would leave us with more money than we can spend. It's the interference with scientific research that really gets in the way.
My fear is also that if science gets a huge boost in spending, the money would not all go to equally well thought out and worthy causes. Mismanagement is a big problem when the budget goes up.
Also, it might be worth noting that a small, but not unnoticeable percentage of the DoD budget goes to scientific research. I don't mean to troll, but a lot of military research also has civilian uses, just take a look at the list of DARPA research grants and imagine how valuable some of those things could be for civilian life. http://www.darpa.mil/body/off_programs.html
But all in all I do agree with you, a switch of focus from military to science would be nice, but the switch should not be financial, people need to realize that science holds such great promise that it's worth investing in.
IANAL, but can he not counter sue them if they take him to court under the law you're describing, not to mention the whole postage issue?
Can you even prove someone downloaded something by torrenting that will stand up in a court of law?
Plus, from TFA it reads a lot like this law firm acts like those spam emails you get from the Nigerian business man who needs help getting his money out of the country.
Oh and is there any kind of presidence like this in the UK or anywhere else?
mechanical engineers build weapons, civil engineers build targets
sorry, couldn't resist.
Actually, an organization can have the same legal standing as a person. They have to apply for these and be granted them. This enables them to have bank accounts, be party to a contract etc.
I CAN speak Dutch and the article says this:
"Demonoid is offline again. After subpoenas by the CRIA." Those are the claims made by the author of the article. The so-called journalist that wrote the article is Wieland van Dijk, his blog is found at http://log.alamagordo.org/ for those interested.
However, from a site I found by googling his name, http://www.amsterdamcentraal.nl/correspondenten/wieland/, is shows a few things, and this is my personal interpretation of this.
1, he writes articles that are both poorly written and not exactly high-level journalism (reports on how Amsterdam's metro is doing for example)
2, He claims to enjoy living in neighborhoods that are known as 'probleem wijken' which means problem neighborhoods, make your own opinions on that, but bundled with,
3, he writes very one-sided articles, mainly about Amsterdam's soccer team, and has yet to (while browsing some of the articles) name a source.
From this I personally conclude that he isn't exactly a 'professional journalist' of the caliber most people would rely on for news.
oh and btw, I found his email for anyone wanting to ask him about his source of information, maybe he's got Deimos' phone number; wieland[at]amsterdamcentraal.nl
They're being French wasn't reason enough?
*ducks and runs*
I can understand how you might be able to be productive on your PC, but some people (quit playing games a few years ago) still need the high end stuff. I am an engineering student and do a lot of work with CAD software and heavy duty processing of data, so the lower-end my CPU and VGAs, the more time I have to wait on them to catch up with what I want to do. As Time is money, you can see how in some cases a high end PC can be necessary to do one's job.
On a sorta similar story, I was working as an intern in an engineering bureau, and we were working on a machine that was a tad slow and when big assemblies came up it would really start to stutter. I mentioned (don't remember the exact systems involved) that a certain set up would increase the speed and responsiveness of the computers and let everyone work a bit faster and the supervisor contacted the guy in charge of acquisitions right away. I was surprised at his reaction and one of the older guys explained to me that if we can spend a minute a day a piece less on waiting, (with almost a hundred engineers working in the company) that's an hour and a half man hours more each day, multiply that by the amount of days they work in a year and that's a pretty penny. Apparently some situations it is beneficial to get high-end hardware.
Sadly of course the new machines arrived 2 days before I was done there, but hey, I learned something new!
I read tfa, and aside from the bad math in the last paragraph I also have a problem with the logic of his example. He assumes that since one person who knows twice as much as me should get twice as high as me. But it isn't at all taking into account that twice of VERY LITTLE knowledge is still not a lot. I can understand that multiple choice will not be a perfect way of judging someone's knowledge, but thinking about how many people need to take the exam, and how few people there are to grade them. Not to mention it is impossible to ask long answer questions on every aspect of a course. Multiple choice questions are still not too bad a way of quizzing a large group of people on subject matter that has a large range of subtopics. Assuming of course the questions aren't uber-hard. Damn this wasn't exactly something I wanted to read 2 days before my exams (which happen to be largely mc-questions)
Genius is also spelling 'genius' right... Don't worry about it though, I once signed my name in 9th grade as Phil the genious and didn't hear the end of it for weeks.
sheesh, it's not even in the summary, it's in TFA title, I also hate to point out the obvious, but I don't need to be a researcher at CMU to realize that if all those split files were put together it would be easier and faster to download the file... talk about pointing out the obvious
I typed some random simple things for Google Scholar to find results for;
"the"; 1,23 billion
"a"; 623 million
"biology"; 4,23 million
"evolution"; 5,18 million (sorry, had to check)
So there are a fair bit of papers out there, billions to be exact. Draw your own conclusions from that, I think the word evolution in scientific papers isn't such a big deal, I think we get a problem when it comes to publishing in non-scientific media (ie newspapers or magazines).
On a side note, I live in Europe, and we don't even THINK about whether evolution is true or not. It's a bit of an area we don't particularly care about, but when it comes to schools, it is taught as the only theory we have. It's actually pretty amusing (and alarming) to see how many Americans have such an issue with this, as well as the whole scientology thing. These are things most people here at my Uni think a human being with half a brain would dismiss because it doesn't stand up to 5 seconds of scrutiny. But then again, what do you expect at a technical university? I don't think anyone believes in astrology, witches, magic or any other of those things mentioned in a post above.
I'm sure we've all heard of the studies that show how overwhelmingly atheist the scientific community is, I stick to my personal belief; the gene pool needs a little Chlorine...
PS sorry I kinda trailed off at the end, but I can get very worked up over the state of affairs in modern society, as is evident I think.
I was told in physics class that 'we' (humans) have had to adjust our satellites' orbits and all because a perfect orbit is hard to obtain and relativity gets in the way at those speeds up there. So why don't most of those pieces just burn up in the atmosphere while they're slowly pulled into Earth? Is it because their mass is so little that the pull by the Earth is so small that it's just taking forever for the acceleration to be noticeable or what?
Thanks for the links, so I take it that a main reason is that a lot of people can't afford it or people are too poor and aren't offered any coverage. But if the government were to make it mandatory for companies to offer people from all income ranges insurance, wouldn't that remedy it? or is it not economically viable to do that for the companies? What I don't understand is what that lobbying has to do with it? If everyone was insured then the doctors wouldn't have to worry about getting paid because it's all taken care of by the insurance companies, or am I being unusually naive? Sorry about all the questions.