Similarly I used to look down upon "inventions" like google and facebook. I know that I misused the term inventions. Google search - Common! what is so impressive about the idea of google? Nothing! Similar is facebook. The ideas themselves are not impressive as such. It is something which any idiot can come up with. The reason these companies became popular is because these companies are useful to us! It is not because they are great "inventions". I heard these are called innovations.
To get a dose of the point of view I have. Contrast the above said examples with an invention like bicycle. I have no clue how Macmillan got convinced that one could balance and ride a two wheeled machine! It takes quite an amount of time for someone to learn riding bicycle. Imagine what it is to believe that it can be done at that time. Inventions like this were far more impressive when I was littler :P. Of course even now..
An unrelated but similar conversation happened when I came to Vizag a couple of days ago. I met Harsha who worked for three years in a civil engineering firm in USA and came here (ya to vizag) to start a civil engineering design consultancy firm. Guess what he says? He says it is way easier for someone to start a IT firm here compared to an engineering firm. Politicians don't bother because they don't understand IT business. Since 'civil= real estate', the person who knows more about who has to be bribed to what extent seems to have an upper hand over the person who actually can do civil engineering. There is a fact which goes around like a joke.Indian government did not involve itself in two things IT sector and IITs. If you notice they did pretty darn well.
Here is a random photograph I shot at when I went to Bheemli
If you have a facebook account you can check more of them at
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=49165&id=100000480453082
Looks like u have enjoined the trip to bheemli...nice pics....nice time when u visit a place shoot a small video-fun video.
ReplyDeleteI have no idea of what to shoot when it comes to videos :( any pointers on that?
ReplyDeleteIts like a documentary but funny one,mentioning the purpose of visiting a place..your commentary running in the background...showing the visuals of that place,describing the journey.A short video not a long one 8 to 10 minutes would be good.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of things in this post that I as a CSE student take offense to - (note that I use *CSE* - Science and Engineering, and I do believe nobody combines the aspects of pure science research with systems engineering as well as my discipline does, so CSE is justified)
ReplyDelete0. Extremely wrong to put "(computer science)" as an alias for programming. Go through the CS section in the BTech Curriculum book and you will see how little of naive programming is mentioned in there. Most of CSE deals with pure research like theoretical CS or systems like network and programming is just a means a to an ends, though it is a very important means.
1. Programming is _not_ engineering. Just like other branches, CSE also lays importance on programming as a _tool_, not as engineering in itself. A typical CSE course does include _software_ engineering, but thats only from the point of view of how to design, maintain and work with such a large scale system (the system in this case being millions of lines of code and complex modules interacting with each other).
2. Google (representative of search engines) is not an invention ? I really suggest you read up more about the history and complexity of search engines before coming up with a line like that. Think of the sheer complexity of dealing with data of the order thats much larger than 10^18 and finding the exact match for 1-2 search terms in the order of microseconds time. If you look at it closely, there are an insane number of systems design issues that come into picture. If you were to look at it as a large-scale engineering system, my guess is that complexity wise Google should rate on par with (or higher than) the largest factories/refineries/plants ever.
3. About Facebook again,one indicator I would suggest you to look at is the amount of research funding across the world that is going into social networks - you will be amazed. From among the millions of user accounts that Facebook stores on its servers, how is it able to fetch updates of your friends in no time at all and display when your page loads ?
4. Finally, just dont under-estimate something because its *not physical* (as is the case with most comp sci stuff) or the concept appears simple on the face of it. Your post is a classic example to explain why CSE rocks - it deals bests with abstractions, providing solutions to the most complicated problems of the world yet abstracting the gory details out in such a way that the layman never realizes the extent of whats happening and feels there is nothing in there at all. The very reason to why its such a celebrated field is that underneath those layers of abstraction lie complex systems and solid theoretical research.
PS: I would be glad to provide more examples (ever wondered about how banks manage to combine ATM+mobile banking+internet transactions into a single interface dealing with millions of people and yet never messing up your account balances?) - not sure if you are interested though.
Yes, I am a CSE fanatic.
Wikipedia describes -"Innovation is a change in the thought process for doing something, or the useful application of new inventions or discoveries" and Invention as the process of coming up with something new. If you look at it, the PageRank algorithm Google uses was a big *invention* by the founders, who were then CSE PhDs students. The Google search engine itself is the pot-pourri of not one, but hundreds of such inventions.
ReplyDeleteBasic idea behind any engineering is measurement. anything that helps in measurement, requires measurement or has anything to do with measurement. Anything that has to do with quantification of any kind. I think programming is a big part of it these days..
ReplyDeleteAs for facebook and google: It is worth noting that not all good or not so good ideas become a big success. There is more to the success of a project than the idea, which is ofcourse important but only 50%. Any idiot can come up with an idea, but not every idiot can make it work
@Kritika: I haven't met you, but I love your comments :)
Fantastic! I was waiting for this. I wanted some CS guy to get angry with what I posted which is why I made sure my post is ambiguous compared to my usual posts. If you notice the title is not apt.
ReplyDeleteThere are lots of things in this post that I as a CSE student take offense to - (note that I use *CSE* - Science and Engineering, and I do believe nobody combines the aspects of pure science research with systems engineering as well as my discipline does, so CSE is justified)
I did not want to hurt CS guys but I wanted them to take offense to get hot replies like this. Actually this is the perfect setting for my next blog post(probably posts from the comments I see here).I am sorry it was that nasty.
0. Extremely wrong to put "(computer science)" as an alias for programming. Go through the CS section in the BTech Curriculum book and you will see how little of naive programming is mentioned in there. Most of CSE deals with pure research like theoretical CS or systems like network and programming is just a means a to an ends, though it is a very important means.
What you said is damn right! - I have been through the curriculum. I am one of the very few guys who took courses from all branches. I did 6 out of my 7 mtech electives outside my branch-had to almost con my fac ad for that. He was ranting"Ravikanth, you cant get mtech in Aerosopace Engineering by doing courses from other branches which are not even related to this!":P In the first paragraph I was not talking anything about invention or innovation or programming or CSE! I was really talking about my screwed up experience with programming because of my wrong opinion about it. This paragraph had two purposes one is to get your attention and the other is to entice/provoke you(CS guys to be frank) to comment on the rest of my post.
1. Programming is _not_ engineering. Just like other branches, CSE also lays importance on programming as a _tool_, not as engineering in itself. A typical CSE course does include _software_ engineering, but thats only from the point of view of how to design, maintain and work with such a large scale system (the system in this case being millions of lines of code and complex modules interacting with each other).
Agreed. its a tool. I told you I was enticing you. You fell for my classic prank Ravinga. Ok that did not work. Please dont give that stern look-it scares me out. smile please :)
Bleh. Lame come-back/cover-up. :P
ReplyDeletesure. If that makes you feel better think of it that way. It did serve its purpose. By the way I am going to post my replies to your comments at at http://g-ravi-ty.blogspot.com/2010/10/replies-to-kirthikas-comments.html
ReplyDeleteby the way - even if it is a cover-up i think it is fantastic. I dont know if others agree that but it is definitely not lame.
ReplyDelete@others - what do other say.
if u have a Facebook Account....?
ReplyDeleteWhats dat line ra..?
U r kidding right..?
Even a Retard has one....
lol! I am sure there are a few smart people who dont use facebook though :)
ReplyDelete