The trick will be that those who do not accept the skullcaps will be at a tremendous competitive disadvantage in most economic measures. There may even need to be physical segregation of the populations.
The bandwidth may be huge, but to what advantage? I find that in the vast majority of cases when using a computer, the bottleneck isn't my fingers and hands, or the nerves feeding or controlling them. The bottleneck is the time taken to figure out exactly what it is I want to do. For example, in the time it has taken me to type and edit what I have written so far I could have typed 9 times as many words if the words had been supplied to me pre-edited. Only if I were a 10wpm hunt and pecker would I really notice a difference. Having a direct neural-machine interface is going to help about as much as hooking up an NSLU2 to gigabit ethernet.
A lot has transpired since the Serengeti. Hands (and associated neural wiring) have been with us since we were apes. Tool usage (including musical instruments) and construction since then has exploded, as has the selection pressure for dexterity. Same with writing, especially among certain subsets of humanity. I wouldn't underestimate the force of selective pressure for manual dexterity in the thousands of years of using our hands for all manner of things.
I also find that I can think better when I am using my hands for output as opposed to speaking. There is no thinking overhead that I can detect when I type - I think things, they appear on the screen. Somewhat like firewire vs USB, my best guess is that our brain has dedicated circuits for translating thoughts to output through our hands/fingers. Since in my experience it is the thinking that limits the rate of output, any additional overhead (as I can remember reading about with Dragon products) is going to slow me down. Chances are good that with a direct neural-machine interface you would have to think certain thoughts to get the computer to do what you want, and there would be overhead associated with that.
The NSA did SELinux (for Linux...) so I don't think it's unreasonable to think they might have helped MS on security issues without doing anything nasty.
Like they are going to take a chance on getting caught doing something untoward in an open source application, where all eyes in the world are watching what they do. A closed source operating system is a completely different matter.
You will find that the Bernoulli effect (the lift generated by a pressure difference above and below the wing) is not the main reason why planes fly (although the effect does exist, it is just not a large enough force to keep a plane up).
Did you really mean to say the bit in parenthesis? The net force on the wing is certainly the reason the airplane stays in the air, which is in turn the result of integrating the vertical pressure component over the surface of the wing. It can't be otherwise.
I couldn't agree more that Bernoulli (and especially, the equal transit time fallacy) is a terrible explanation that condemns most people to having a poor intuition about aerodynamics. Any kid sticking his hand (or better yet, a flat blade) out the window of a moving car and noting how the force varies with angle of attack will have a better understanding and much cognitive dissonance when exposed to the equal transit time fallacy.
(Seriously, how much heat is that thing going to put out?)
Your joke was funny. To answer your serious question, probably less heat than you might think. For example, the i5-750 with the so-called "turbo boost" uses one or two cores running fast and taking up all the power when that is called for, or potentially all 4 cores running within the same power envelope if there is something that can use 4 cores. That's 4 cores doing much more work than 1, and using the same amount of power. More cores running slower must continue scaling, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
American Generals refused to believe the early reports of the speed and agility of the Zero. British Generals refused to fund the development of the jet engine until the Germans fielded theirs.
For much of the working world, Dilbert is documentary rather than comic strip. I wouldn't be surprised that in the absence of war, the upper echelons of the military will also become filled with PHBs - those whose primary skills are getting what they want politically (a straight ascent to the top of the hierarchy), rather than what is best for the organization. Those who have the skills and the desire to make the organization more effective will inherently rub the leadership up the wrong way (different goals). As a result, they often get marginalized, and only during times of intense need (e.g. a war) do their ideas get implemented.
It seems pretty clear that if there is a creator, the creator was either very stupid or simply hasn't involved itself in the design of life. Which of those do you prefer?
The former doesn't really make sense, especially when it is evident that there are a bunch of immutable laws (physics) that govern the behavior of things and he is both too stupid to design things properly and at the same time too clever to allow his immutable laws, er, not to be. If the latter, perhaps those laws were designed along with the rest of the universe, as an experiment. Evolution would be an emergent property of the initial distribution of matter, the physics of the system, and possibly a random function. Kind of like Blizzard not intentionally designing the evolution of battle tactics in Starcraft, but creating a system where it will happen. (If this sort of creator is in existence, we might expect periodic nerfing of exceptionally successful forms of life, and buffs applied to the losers of life.)
Looking at astronomy porn like those NASA milky way galaxy pics earlier, my mind boggles at the sheer vastness of the scale involved. To think that anything could compute such a thing in simulation would be very difficult to believe. It might be easier if outside the solar system was a light show, somewhat like the Truman Show on a larger scale. But still, the patience of the creator involved would be amazing, as supernovas have been occurring throughout history, and each would have to have been planned. So I suspect that, while technically it could be possible that the universe is a simulation or experiment of a "god", I think it is unlikely. A micromanaging god much moreso.
When I receive these complaints, I explain as patiently as I can that these are precisely the reasons I eschew slides, and why I value the attention and dialogue that writing and extemporaneous speaking facilitate. I think students get the point, but they didn't come to college to think, try, and learn. They came to college so they could get a degree so they can get a job, and anything that stands in their way must be stopped.
I just hope you put the required amount of effort into teaching your class (not saying you are or aren't, though if you don't care that the majority of your students HATE one of your practices, this may be an indication). I would usually show professors the same degree of respect they showed me in the effort that went into presenting the material (e.g. did they even face the class? Did they attempt to gauge understanding and explain concepts that the class was having difficulty grasping? Did they encourage questions? Did they attempt to make the lecture interesting, showing the applications of the material (there always are in an engineering class, otherwise why teach it?), interesting anecdotes etc. Was it evident that they took the craft of public speaking seriously?). If it was obvious that student understanding was a very distant last compared with their own priorities (most probably research), I would skip the class. And when I came to class (to hand in my homework, usually), I would make my entrance and exit without particular attention to the assigned starting or finishing time. I would show them the same respect they showed me and my tuition.
I would be very respectful towards those professors who made an effort. I would participate in their class, and really attempt to internalize the curriculum, to learn the lessons they thought especially relevant, interesting, whatever, to show them that respect. (This was independent of whether there was exam material only covered in their lecture that they would insert as a pedagogical "dongle" to give incentive to the class attenders.) I am still in contact with some of them.
You can take my SQL when you pry it from my...
on
The NoSQL Ecosystem
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· Score: 1
This isn't "it ain't broke, don't fix it"
Instead we're dealing with "I have a hammer, so every problem looks like a nail"
SQL is hardly a hammer - a hammer only has one general use. It's not a Swiss army knife either - a lot of fairly low-grade tools that are convenient in a pinch. If anything, a Swiss army knife is a spreadsheet.
An RDBMS is more like a well equipped workshop that you build and equip at the site of likely problems. It will take far more work to set up than buying a leatherman tool. However, it will solve almost any unanticipated problem you throw at it, once it is built. That is the beauty of an RDBMS, and why businesses and governments like to build both workshops and relational databases.
Of course, there are circumstances where a RDBMS is not called for. If you are doing anything that needs to be highly optimized for just one thing, and will only ever be used for just that one thing, then you do not use an RDBMS. (e.g. an FPS). Much like you wouldn't use a workshop if all you are going to be doing is manufacturing widgets - then you need a factory.
I guess the analogy kind of breaks down there, because a workshop isn't efficient enough to run as a business compared to a factory - it is support infrastructure. For many, many things though, an RDBMS can be the core of a business information system and can also quickly and conveniently answer questions that weren't thought of at design time. Their RDBMS problem domain will only increase as computing power grows, unlike more specialized systems. I would not be surprised at all if SQL is still dominant in a hundred years time.
If you have commercial information that you absolutely cannot allow to fall into the wrong hands (or accidentally deleted, corrupted, not backed up, whatever), is storing that data in a data center ever really acceptable? I would think not, but I'd like to hear someone else's opinion. Has anyone here done things DIY for this very reason?
He's not that stupid a person.. and there's no way that someone hasn't explained to him what a robots.txt file is by now..
Rupert is 78 years old. The onset of dementia is a real risk at his age, and would explain how he has been acting of late. Poor judgment shows up in the mild Alzheimer's stage, or before, in the "mild cognitive impairment" stage. (Alzheimer's accounts for 50% or more of dementia cases - so if he has dementia, it's probably that). A demented person in the early stages of the disease can converse perfectly normally, and still make gross errors of judgment.
Successful business leaders are generally used to being right most of the time (because they have been in the past). Indeed for most, if they operated on consensus views, they would never have taken the risks they have taken and succeeded. When bits of their brain start dying on them, causing them to operate on incomplete or out of date information because they can't form memories or analyze things properly, they will start to run into problems. They can then do one of two things. They can either try and see if there is a problem, or they can believe that this is yet another instance where the world is wrong and they are right, which is an ingrained thought pattern. Denial is generally easier.
Successful business owners have also often put themselves in a position where no one can tell them what to do, and if they don't want to listen to other people, they won't. Many are narcissistic, and have surrounded themselves with yes men who will tell the boss yes even when the answer is obviously no. Those few minions with the guts to explain a robots.txt file (or worse, that the boss is losing his mind) may well have been sent to whatever News Corp's version of Siberia is.
Of course, it may not be dementia. He may be 13 years past retirement age and functioning well. But several things he has said, like his expectation that his business's profit margins should somehow deserve to be preserved (unlike any other business), the fact that he seems to think he can go up against google (which has twice the market cap and surely as many friends in high places) and win, his age, and his Sun King reputation lead me to suspect dementia.
Even if it is not dementia, age takes its toll on the brain. If Rupert is right and everyone else is wrong, then he is clearly operating at genius level. How many geniuses were still functioning at genius level at age 78? Most every genius (including in the field of business) I can think of throughout history did their best work well before age 65.
As you say, light is cheap. You can light a room for 1% of the cost of running a small heater (e.g. 15W vs 1500W or more).
The other two are the main problems - comfortable environment and transport. Historically, the solution to the former has been personal insulation (i.e. wearing lots of clothes). While constrictive, expense-wise it has a lot going for it. The low energy alternative is to properly insulate your house, or at least, parts of it. This can certainly be done as is illustrated in the Passivhaus concept, as another commenter alluded to.
Transport wise you can either do mass public transport (e.g. trains), and move to human powered transport for local use. A good velomobile can go surprisingly fast (45km/h), but it will never spend any significant time there if the vast majority of the power that goes into it is wasted by forced stopping all the time.
For the infrastructure to support velomobiles properly we'd need to come up with a solution to the frequent stopping that is mandated on our roads by the design. Either grade separation (like a freeway), or timing the traffic so that someone on a priority road does not have to stop. The latter would mean an end to those triggered traffic lights that allow one lone vehicle to force a hundred vehicles to stop, just because it approached the lights.
Yup. In the red corner: a tasty snickers bar, weighing in at 275 calories. Can be eaten in less than a minute, tastes great, really satisfies. Can be bought for pocket change.
In the blue corner: a twenty minute jog, weighing in at approximately -275 calories. Sucks ass to do, though you feel a bit better afterward. Takes more than an hour once you include building up motivation, getting ready, getting to the jogging location, showering, and getting back into your routine. Any more than 20 minutes, 3 times a week and it feels excessive.
Even if the 20 minute jog somehow wins a round, all it takes is 1 extra snickers bar to even things out again, and 3 per week to eliminate any hope of that jogging shifting any weight. But with a disciplined diet, you will also lose more than the paltry 1000 calories per week eaten away by the jogging. And your knees will thank you for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The bandwidth may be huge, but to what advantage? I find that in the vast majority of cases when using a computer, the bottleneck isn't my fingers and hands, or the nerves feeding or controlling them. The bottleneck is the time taken to figure out exactly what it is I want to do. For example, in the time it has taken me to type and edit what I have written so far I could have typed 9 times as many words if the words had been supplied to me pre-edited. Only if I were a 10wpm hunt and pecker would I really notice a difference. Having a direct neural-machine interface is going to help about as much as hooking up an NSLU2 to gigabit ethernet.
A lot has transpired since the Serengeti. Hands (and associated neural wiring) have been with us since we were apes. Tool usage (including musical instruments) and construction since then has exploded, as has the selection pressure for dexterity. Same with writing, especially among certain subsets of humanity. I wouldn't underestimate the force of selective pressure for manual dexterity in the thousands of years of using our hands for all manner of things.
I also find that I can think better when I am using my hands for output as opposed to speaking. There is no thinking overhead that I can detect when I type - I think things, they appear on the screen. Somewhat like firewire vs USB, my best guess is that our brain has dedicated circuits for translating thoughts to output through our hands/fingers. Since in my experience it is the thinking that limits the rate of output, any additional overhead (as I can remember reading about with Dragon products) is going to slow me down. Chances are good that with a direct neural-machine interface you would have to think certain thoughts to get the computer to do what you want, and there would be overhead associated with that.
Best comment ever.
Like they are going to take a chance on getting caught doing something untoward in an open source application, where all eyes in the world are watching what they do. A closed source operating system is a completely different matter.
Did you really mean to say the bit in parenthesis? The net force on the wing is certainly the reason the airplane stays in the air, which is in turn the result of integrating the vertical pressure component over the surface of the wing. It can't be otherwise.
I couldn't agree more that Bernoulli (and especially, the equal transit time fallacy) is a terrible explanation that condemns most people to having a poor intuition about aerodynamics. Any kid sticking his hand (or better yet, a flat blade) out the window of a moving car and noting how the force varies with angle of attack will have a better understanding and much cognitive dissonance when exposed to the equal transit time fallacy.
Hyper-competitive former fighter jocks + confined space + roids. Whatcouldpossiblygowrong?
Well?
While they are doing that, they ought to rename the parent company: Microsoft Is Not Google Either, or MINGE.
Look... are you insinuating something?
Invisible to writers of malware?
...velcro gloves.
Your joke was funny. To answer your serious question, probably less heat than you might think. For example, the i5-750 with the so-called "turbo boost" uses one or two cores running fast and taking up all the power when that is called for, or potentially all 4 cores running within the same power envelope if there is something that can use 4 cores. That's 4 cores doing much more work than 1, and using the same amount of power. More cores running slower must continue scaling, otherwise they wouldn't be doing it.
That was perfect. Thank you.
T, FTFY
And Captain Kirk would still find a way to pork it without spontaneously combusting.
For much of the working world, Dilbert is documentary rather than comic strip. I wouldn't be surprised that in the absence of war, the upper echelons of the military will also become filled with PHBs - those whose primary skills are getting what they want politically (a straight ascent to the top of the hierarchy), rather than what is best for the organization. Those who have the skills and the desire to make the organization more effective will inherently rub the leadership up the wrong way (different goals). As a result, they often get marginalized, and only during times of intense need (e.g. a war) do their ideas get implemented.
... seems to have been designed to linger.
The former doesn't really make sense, especially when it is evident that there are a bunch of immutable laws (physics) that govern the behavior of things and he is both too stupid to design things properly and at the same time too clever to allow his immutable laws, er, not to be. If the latter, perhaps those laws were designed along with the rest of the universe, as an experiment. Evolution would be an emergent property of the initial distribution of matter, the physics of the system, and possibly a random function. Kind of like Blizzard not intentionally designing the evolution of battle tactics in Starcraft, but creating a system where it will happen. (If this sort of creator is in existence, we might expect periodic nerfing of exceptionally successful forms of life, and buffs applied to the losers of life.)
Looking at astronomy porn like those NASA milky way galaxy pics earlier, my mind boggles at the sheer vastness of the scale involved. To think that anything could compute such a thing in simulation would be very difficult to believe. It might be easier if outside the solar system was a light show, somewhat like the Truman Show on a larger scale. But still, the patience of the creator involved would be amazing, as supernovas have been occurring throughout history, and each would have to have been planned. So I suspect that, while technically it could be possible that the universe is a simulation or experiment of a "god", I think it is unlikely. A micromanaging god much moreso.
At company picnics, employees are encouraged to take part in "Whack-a-mole" competitions during summertime, and ice sculpting during the winter.
I just hope you put the required amount of effort into teaching your class (not saying you are or aren't, though if you don't care that the majority of your students HATE one of your practices, this may be an indication). I would usually show professors the same degree of respect they showed me in the effort that went into presenting the material (e.g. did they even face the class? Did they attempt to gauge understanding and explain concepts that the class was having difficulty grasping? Did they encourage questions? Did they attempt to make the lecture interesting, showing the applications of the material (there always are in an engineering class, otherwise why teach it?), interesting anecdotes etc. Was it evident that they took the craft of public speaking seriously?). If it was obvious that student understanding was a very distant last compared with their own priorities (most probably research), I would skip the class. And when I came to class (to hand in my homework, usually), I would make my entrance and exit without particular attention to the assigned starting or finishing time. I would show them the same respect they showed me and my tuition.
I would be very respectful towards those professors who made an effort. I would participate in their class, and really attempt to internalize the curriculum, to learn the lessons they thought especially relevant, interesting, whatever, to show them that respect. (This was independent of whether there was exam material only covered in their lecture that they would insert as a pedagogical "dongle" to give incentive to the class attenders.) I am still in contact with some of them.
SQL is hardly a hammer - a hammer only has one general use. It's not a Swiss army knife either - a lot of fairly low-grade tools that are convenient in a pinch. If anything, a Swiss army knife is a spreadsheet.
An RDBMS is more like a well equipped workshop that you build and equip at the site of likely problems. It will take far more work to set up than buying a leatherman tool. However, it will solve almost any unanticipated problem you throw at it, once it is built. That is the beauty of an RDBMS, and why businesses and governments like to build both workshops and relational databases.
Of course, there are circumstances where a RDBMS is not called for. If you are doing anything that needs to be highly optimized for just one thing, and will only ever be used for just that one thing, then you do not use an RDBMS. (e.g. an FPS). Much like you wouldn't use a workshop if all you are going to be doing is manufacturing widgets - then you need a factory.
I guess the analogy kind of breaks down there, because a workshop isn't efficient enough to run as a business compared to a factory - it is support infrastructure. For many, many things though, an RDBMS can be the core of a business information system and can also quickly and conveniently answer questions that weren't thought of at design time. Their RDBMS problem domain will only increase as computing power grows, unlike more specialized systems. I would not be surprised at all if SQL is still dominant in a hundred years time.
If you have commercial information that you absolutely cannot allow to fall into the wrong hands (or accidentally deleted, corrupted, not backed up, whatever), is storing that data in a data center ever really acceptable? I would think not, but I'd like to hear someone else's opinion. Has anyone here done things DIY for this very reason?
Rupert is 78 years old. The onset of dementia is a real risk at his age, and would explain how he has been acting of late. Poor judgment shows up in the mild Alzheimer's stage, or before, in the "mild cognitive impairment" stage. (Alzheimer's accounts for 50% or more of dementia cases - so if he has dementia, it's probably that). A demented person in the early stages of the disease can converse perfectly normally, and still make gross errors of judgment.
Successful business leaders are generally used to being right most of the time (because they have been in the past). Indeed for most, if they operated on consensus views, they would never have taken the risks they have taken and succeeded. When bits of their brain start dying on them, causing them to operate on incomplete or out of date information because they can't form memories or analyze things properly, they will start to run into problems. They can then do one of two things. They can either try and see if there is a problem, or they can believe that this is yet another instance where the world is wrong and they are right, which is an ingrained thought pattern. Denial is generally easier.
Successful business owners have also often put themselves in a position where no one can tell them what to do, and if they don't want to listen to other people, they won't. Many are narcissistic, and have surrounded themselves with yes men who will tell the boss yes even when the answer is obviously no. Those few minions with the guts to explain a robots.txt file (or worse, that the boss is losing his mind) may well have been sent to whatever News Corp's version of Siberia is.
Of course, it may not be dementia. He may be 13 years past retirement age and functioning well. But several things he has said, like his expectation that his business's profit margins should somehow deserve to be preserved (unlike any other business), the fact that he seems to think he can go up against google (which has twice the market cap and surely as many friends in high places) and win, his age, and his Sun King reputation lead me to suspect dementia.
Even if it is not dementia, age takes its toll on the brain. If Rupert is right and everyone else is wrong, then he is clearly operating at genius level. How many geniuses were still functioning at genius level at age 78? Most every genius (including in the field of business) I can think of throughout history did their best work well before age 65.
As you say, light is cheap. You can light a room for 1% of the cost of running a small heater (e.g. 15W vs 1500W or more).
The other two are the main problems - comfortable environment and transport. Historically, the solution to the former has been personal insulation (i.e. wearing lots of clothes). While constrictive, expense-wise it has a lot going for it. The low energy alternative is to properly insulate your house, or at least, parts of it. This can certainly be done as is illustrated in the Passivhaus concept, as another commenter alluded to.
Transport wise you can either do mass public transport (e.g. trains), and move to human powered transport for local use. A good velomobile can go surprisingly fast (45km/h), but it will never spend any significant time there if the vast majority of the power that goes into it is wasted by forced stopping all the time.
For the infrastructure to support velomobiles properly we'd need to come up with a solution to the frequent stopping that is mandated on our roads by the design. Either grade separation (like a freeway), or timing the traffic so that someone on a priority road does not have to stop. The latter would mean an end to those triggered traffic lights that allow one lone vehicle to force a hundred vehicles to stop, just because it approached the lights.
Yup. In the red corner: a tasty snickers bar, weighing in at 275 calories. Can be eaten in less than a minute, tastes great, really satisfies. Can be bought for pocket change.
In the blue corner: a twenty minute jog, weighing in at approximately -275 calories. Sucks ass to do, though you feel a bit better afterward. Takes more than an hour once you include building up motivation, getting ready, getting to the jogging location, showering, and getting back into your routine. Any more than 20 minutes, 3 times a week and it feels excessive.
Even if the 20 minute jog somehow wins a round, all it takes is 1 extra snickers bar to even things out again, and 3 per week to eliminate any hope of that jogging shifting any weight. But with a disciplined diet, you will also lose more than the paltry 1000 calories per week eaten away by the jogging. And your knees will thank you for it.