[rescue] FrameMaker FYI

[Dave McGuire]

On Mar 25, 2004, at 8:08 PM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
>>   I had the exact same problem, at about the same level.  I've been
>> living & breathing computers since I was 7.  The morons in my high
>> school handed the then-brand-new computer courses to...THE MATH
>> TEACHERS.  Because computers are all math, right?  Fucking morons.
>
> In a way, aren't they all math and physics?  The study of algorithms 
> has
> long been an area mathematicians, long before computers came out, and 
> it
> is only fairly recently to my understanding that people distinguished
> between math and physics.
>
> For some reason, understanding math and algorithms seems to have little
> effect on how one understands a computer though, for some reason.  At
> least, thus has been my experience.

   No, it's pretty simple...think of it this way.  It's possible to 
reduce pretty much anything to mathematics.  Physics, electronics, 
computer science, chemistry, biology...anything.  Just because one 
*can* reduce something to mathematics, however, doesn't mean one 
*should*.

   I am reminded of the famous story of Edison working on his light 
bulbs.  He walked up to his young college-boy assistant, handed him a 
freshly-blown glass bulb, and asked him to get the volume of the bulb.  
The kid sat there ALL AFTERNOON executing complex calculations of the 
sphere, the taper toward the stem, the stem itself...generating pages 
of calculations.  At the end of the day, Edison grabbed the bulb from 
him in frustration, filled it with water, dumped the water into a 
graduated cylinder, and voila...there's the volume, in ten seconds 
flat.

   Mathematics isn't always king.

          -Dave

--
Dave McGuire          "PC users only know two 'solutions'...
Cape Coral, FL          reboot and upgrade."    -Jonathan Patschke