Jesus fucking christ, is this the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA or SOVIET RUSSIA?
That's a good question. In this case (ostensibly the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), RIM would not be giving you a job. It follows then that in SOVIET RUSSIA, RIM job gives you! Does that clear things up?
Then there is hypocritical kind of racism, which implies that there is something shameful about making a game where all the characters are mainly one race while making a game where all the characters are mainly another is to be praised to the heavens.
I suggest doing everything possible to make reiser4 really really fast and have lots of bells and whistles. Then we should rename it to RicerFS.
That's not quite correct. To make RicerFS, you need to start with something Japanese. In this case, you might fork "Gfarm", at least that is Japanese. Then you don't change anything except for sticking a massive ascii art "Type R" somewhere in the comments, which you would also code to appear when you mount the file system.
It examines reasons for their successes and strongly suggests a link between practice (10,000 hours by age 20 being the magic milestone) and luck.
Luck certainly is a factor. But 10,000 hours of practice isn't going to do jack shit without talent. All it will do is take you to the limits of your talent. Again, that partly assumes you had some good guidance during that training. Which will be partly luck - you happen to be born in proximity to a good coach, or not - if that coach is scouring the area for talent and picks the best talent out of a group of children. An Euler may have had a Bernoulli for a tutor, but would Bernoulli have persisted if Euler had not demonstrated talent? Surely Euler was not the only student Bernoulli tutored.
Talent, practice and luck are all necessary conditions. None of them are by themselves sufficient. Although if you are naturally talented, it's easy and fun to practice. And with some brain, you can do some thinking to help put yourself in the right place so that you can be there at the right time. Google has also lowered the bar for successful autodidactism, making getting good tutoring less a matter of luck.
If this is book is anything like Gladwell's other PC apologetics, it will go to great lengths to avoid the links between outliers and talent, the notion that the will/love of practice can be considered a talent, and of course, the genetic basis for such.
Let's assume that everything that's been worked on for 50 years and still doesn't work isn't going to work. This includes fusion and space travel.
You could be right with fusion. Space travel - I don't think so. Project Orion has a good chance of moving large masses to wherever they are needed. We just have to be desperate enough.
It's quite possible that industrial civilization will just run down.
Temporarily, yes. I think what will happen is that humanity will run down for a time, but then adapt to longer time horizons and low but positive growth rates, until instantaneously solar derived energy (wind, solar as opposed to petroleum) use saturates in terms of area used and efficiency at harvesting. With a lot of focus on solar, the EROEI will improve, cost will go down, and the growth will again resume at a somewhat higher rate.
Long term, human populations will eventually saturate and learn to do more with less, barring catastrophes or a superior competitor. A lot will look like things before oil hit the scene in a major way. For one, things will again be made to last and be repairable, as the energy costs in manufacture start to dominate, and the cost to buy cheap junk approaches that of superior products.
But yeah, long term, you are right. Poor is another word for subsistence, or input = output with very little left over. By current standards, the pre-industrial world was "poor".
It's like AMD took the lead while Intel hobbled into the pits to fix a flat, which took 12.8 seconds, and then Intel came right up and passed them in the next lap. AMD's a lap down now, and is realizing it just didn't bring enough horsepower to the race. This thing is all over except the turning of the donuts, the spraying of the milk, and the back-flip onto the tarmac.
I think I've just witnessed the Ford Edsel of car analogies. Thank you.
What are you going to back them up to, and if it's another Terabyte drive then you are right back to the reliability problem that prompted the backup policy in the first place?
If you are using another drive as a backup and not a RAID, I would think that the chances of it failing at the same time as your original drive would be minimal - the backup would hardly see any use. If you are that worried, get a third, from another vendor. Still cheaper and easier than any alternative. By the time you have to start worrying about drive lifetimes (e.g. 5 years), it will be a small subset of a new drive and you will have more data.
I would say that their failure to recognize that their days of being a growth stock are over is just one of many examples of management incompetence./blockquote
I think Bill realized this. I remember reading an article in the late 1990s about him hiring someone to invest on his behalf as he began to sell his MS shares.
How's 1995 treating you? Animated GIF's still everywhere?
Do you understand what Noscript actually does? It allows you to very easily whitelist which sites you trust to run javascript/flash. After about a week of enabling sites you frequent (e.g. banking, google maps etc), there is very little upkeep involved, while preventing sundry sites you google from executing code. The effort compared to a full reinstall every 6 months is minuscule, which is why Noscript is so popular.
As the practice of disabling javascript by default becomes more popular, companies should ask themselves whether they really need javascript or flash for what they do. If they are in the position of an 800lbs gorilla (e.g. bank, ebay, amazon, google etc), then they can use javascript for whatever they want. But a lot of smaller companies probably lose some sales because they use javascript where it is not necessary, e.g. in conveying basic product information and price.
I read the article in Wired someone linked to. It's good and worth reading. Not unlike the article by Martin Hellman on the Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence featured here a week ago or so. I used to enjoy ragging on the wet blanket Jeff Goldblum types. As I get older, I realize that optimism is no substitute for a good hard look at reality. If there is one thing in life you can count on, it's Murphy's Law. Actions have consequences, often unintended.
As to what to do about it... I'm not sure. Which is why I have the same sense of melancholy as Bill Joy. There are so many genies out of the bottle or about to be unleashed it's hard to count them these days. Just because the world seemingly works fine now and has for the last few decades doesn't mean that it is robust in the long term, nor does it mean someone is crazy for pointing out ways in which the system may not be robust.
That or buy some SSD's. Really this noise issue is beginning to lose importance these days and that's the point I'm trying to make here.
That's an interesting idea you bring up... it's not so much that noise is losing importance, it's just that manufacturers have realized that noise (or power usage) factors into the decision making of a large chunk of their market, the market has means to compare manufacturers (e.g. silentpcreview.com) and the manufactures have engineered accordingly. But from the consumer's point you are right - noise is becoming a solved problem and hence eventually won't factor into a buying decision because no one will be manufacturing noisy parts.
Aside from primary storage (which should go to SSD en masse within a year or two) it's just CPU and GPU producing too much in the way of heat that causes the remaining noise issue. Depending on how much a person wants to have their cake (high performance) and eat it too (silence) will determine whether noise needs to be taken into account when purchasing. Noise is certainly getting to be less and less of a factor. If all you are going to do is basic internet and office stuff, an Asus Eee Box B202 will work. GPUs are to the point where you can do basic gaming and HD video passively, with something like a 780G based motherboard.
I suspect that within 1-5 years we will see most of the other noise issues ironed out. That's pretty amazing to me - it means that most of the issues with computers as a household appliance have been solved. If anything is going to cause noise to be an issue in future years it will be the GPUs required to get games to run with an acceptable fps at whatever resolution a 30 inch monitor (or whatever is the largest monitor size that can eventually be manufactured at a mass market price point) runs.
Said with a straight face by a community that doesn't know when to quit.
I've long thought that the strength of FOSS is that it succeeds by a sort of intelligent design and natural selection of those designs, the lack of a unified focus that your comment is ridiculing. Perhaps what MS is doing is not classic marget segmentation at all, but more of an aping of the open source world. Maybe their hope was that by releasing a bunch of tiers, at least one of them would be successful.
This is purely and Econ 101 issue, not a technical one. It's called Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good".
That's not Gresham's Law. If PCs were money, which they aren't, and if people were fanatically buying the 1 minute boot time PCs and hoarding them while using the 2 minute boot time PCs to pay for things (because they are both legal tender), then we would have a great example of Gresham's Law in action.
People do in fact care about boot times, which is one of the reasons SSD is taking off. It's also part of the reason people have been buying faster CPUs since the days of the C64. However, people also care about having functionality and eye candy. So they make a choice, weighing up boot time and general speed versus functionality/ eye candy. In the end boot time is where it is in the scheme of things for a reason. Even in the Linux world where people have a real choice over some sort of functional obsolescent choice, Ubuntu dominates over the likes of Puppy or DSL.
Now we are reaching the point of diminishing marginal returns in computing for all sorts of things, e.g. eye candy (compiz and aero, how much better can it really get?), functionality (excel has been largely right for 11 years), speed, ability to multi-task (dual core). Some remaining areas of concern are power, boot-up times, gaming for 1920x1200 resolutions, that sort of thing, which is why we are reading about them here.
All corporations tend to authoritarianism, and these are the people who actually own the world, while blathering about freedom and democracy. The truth is that anyone employed by a large corporation spends most of their waking hours living in a totalitarian dictatorship - could this be what is wrong with Western Civilisation?
What would you propose as an alternative? If the alternative to totalitarianism is freedom, the alternative to dictatorship is democracy and living under these conditions is what is wrong with Western Civilization, I'm not convinced that the alternatives are anything more than blathering.
I was about to rush to the defense of spreadsheets until I re-read the title. It's not Scientific Modeling, Engineering Simulation, Financial Modeling, Quick and Dirty Engineering Calculation. It's Scientific DATA Analysis. Which would imply making sense of data, probably a whole lot of it. And probably more than just looking at a correlation by eye in a chart.
I'd say that Excel is not a great tool for that job, any more than it is a great tool for complex and recurring financial information. With apologies to Henry Spencer, those who do not understand relational databases are condemned to reinvent them poorly, usually in Excel.
Well, we turn to cartoonists for actual unbiased information when the press falls down on its job to do the same.
Yes. Although I am not sure that the "job" of the press was ever to provide unbiased information. Providing biased information is orders of magnitude more profitable and always has been.
Why are they to blame? There is no feedback mechanism to reward consumers for this behavior. Why should one consumer spend more on a locally produced product for a higher price, when the local person he enriches is likely just going to spend money on the foreign goods? The only way I know of to solve this is force, through protectionist policies.
If that qualifies as a religion, then so should the irrational belief that software is inferior if it is given away. Which is really just an order of the larger, consumerist religion that holds that if it's not advertised and requires money or theft to acquire, it's not worth having.
And yes, it's got all the rituals too. -Guilt at finding serials and cracks for all of your software. -Penance paid with a full reinstall every year to cleanse yourself of malware! -Buying the holy Norton Relics to ward off evil. and my favorite, instead of Confession we have Windows Genuine Advantage (TM)!
There are some religions that were created to benefit their followers. I would class FOSS software religion in that category. Others, like Scientology, were created only to benefit their founder. I liken each new Microsoft OS or Office suite to a step up the OT levels. Some people view them as a waste of money. Others are amazed at the dramatic difference in productivity they bring.
The proles will look to the MS shill for an answer. The question should be, what will we give him to take back, beads and trinkets?
I think he would be offended if we returned his valuable glass beads and trinkets. A gift in kind would be more appropriate, but not the same gift. Perhaps lifetime access to sourceforge would be appropriate.
Shhh! Some game developers will figure out the obvious corollary - that if they only increase the size of the possible solution space until it is becomes impractical to try a breadth-first search, they will have created the next Day Of The Tentacle.
I used to worry a lot about this, although I am not worrying as much these days. Scarcity of all things - energy, minerals, food, water... is going to give rise to lots of competition. I doubt that competition is going to favor the stupid nearly as much as the last 60 years has. Somehow I don't think the selection pressure will be great for those who are naturally inclined towards sitting on a couch, watching TV and collecting welfare payments.
If anything, it will look more like the previous millions of years where life was nasty, brutish and short. All you have to do to see the selective pressure for intelligence in humans over time in our typical environment is look at a timeline to see how ape brains have evolved into human brains - to the point where brains are using 20% of a person's energy. 17,000 years have elapsed since the lascaux cave paintings, and that's only 680 generations, or iterations in which the natural environment has selected for intelligence. That's pretty impressive to think that the sum total of human civilization has been pretty much created within that time.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good question. In this case (ostensibly the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA), RIM would not be giving you a job. It follows then that in SOVIET RUSSIA, RIM job gives you! Does that clear things up?
Squeaky wheel gets the kick!
Snopes is more credible than any other internet resource?
Then there is hypocritical kind of racism, which implies that there is something shameful about making a game where all the characters are mainly one race while making a game where all the characters are mainly another is to be praised to the heavens.
That's not quite correct. To make RicerFS, you need to start with something Japanese. In this case, you might fork "Gfarm", at least that is Japanese. Then you don't change anything except for sticking a massive ascii art "Type R" somewhere in the comments, which you would also code to appear when you mount the file system.
Luck certainly is a factor. But 10,000 hours of practice isn't going to do jack shit without talent. All it will do is take you to the limits of your talent. Again, that partly assumes you had some good guidance during that training. Which will be partly luck - you happen to be born in proximity to a good coach, or not - if that coach is scouring the area for talent and picks the best talent out of a group of children. An Euler may have had a Bernoulli for a tutor, but would Bernoulli have persisted if Euler had not demonstrated talent? Surely Euler was not the only student Bernoulli tutored.
Talent, practice and luck are all necessary conditions. None of them are by themselves sufficient. Although if you are naturally talented, it's easy and fun to practice. And with some brain, you can do some thinking to help put yourself in the right place so that you can be there at the right time. Google has also lowered the bar for successful autodidactism, making getting good tutoring less a matter of luck.
If this is book is anything like Gladwell's other PC apologetics, it will go to great lengths to avoid the links between outliers and talent, the notion that the will/love of practice can be considered a talent, and of course, the genetic basis for such.
You could be right with fusion. Space travel - I don't think so. Project Orion has a good chance of moving large masses to wherever they are needed. We just have to be desperate enough.
Temporarily, yes. I think what will happen is that humanity will run down for a time, but then adapt to longer time horizons and low but positive growth rates, until instantaneously solar derived energy (wind, solar as opposed to petroleum) use saturates in terms of area used and efficiency at harvesting. With a lot of focus on solar, the EROEI will improve, cost will go down, and the growth will again resume at a somewhat higher rate.
Long term, human populations will eventually saturate and learn to do more with less, barring catastrophes or a superior competitor. A lot will look like things before oil hit the scene in a major way. For one, things will again be made to last and be repairable, as the energy costs in manufacture start to dominate, and the cost to buy cheap junk approaches that of superior products.
But yeah, long term, you are right. Poor is another word for subsistence, or input = output with very little left over. By current standards, the pre-industrial world was "poor".
I think I've just witnessed the Ford Edsel of car analogies. Thank you.
If you are using another drive as a backup and not a RAID, I would think that the chances of it failing at the same time as your original drive would be minimal - the backup would hardly see any use. If you are that worried, get a third, from another vendor. Still cheaper and easier than any alternative. By the time you have to start worrying about drive lifetimes (e.g. 5 years), it will be a small subset of a new drive and you will have more data.
Those are "Nigeria's rules"? That's a bit like asking how much someone like Gary Kasparov should play by the rules of FIDE.
Do you understand what Noscript actually does? It allows you to very easily whitelist which sites you trust to run javascript/flash. After about a week of enabling sites you frequent (e.g. banking, google maps etc), there is very little upkeep involved, while preventing sundry sites you google from executing code. The effort compared to a full reinstall every 6 months is minuscule, which is why Noscript is so popular.
As the practice of disabling javascript by default becomes more popular, companies should ask themselves whether they really need javascript or flash for what they do. If they are in the position of an 800lbs gorilla (e.g. bank, ebay, amazon, google etc), then they can use javascript for whatever they want. But a lot of smaller companies probably lose some sales because they use javascript where it is not necessary, e.g. in conveying basic product information and price.
That doesn't mean he's wrong.
I read the article in Wired someone linked to. It's good and worth reading. Not unlike the article by Martin Hellman on the Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence featured here a week ago or so. I used to enjoy ragging on the wet blanket Jeff Goldblum types. As I get older, I realize that optimism is no substitute for a good hard look at reality. If there is one thing in life you can count on, it's Murphy's Law. Actions have consequences, often unintended.
As to what to do about it... I'm not sure. Which is why I have the same sense of melancholy as Bill Joy. There are so many genies out of the bottle or about to be unleashed it's hard to count them these days. Just because the world seemingly works fine now and has for the last few decades doesn't mean that it is robust in the long term, nor does it mean someone is crazy for pointing out ways in which the system may not be robust.
That's an interesting idea you bring up... it's not so much that noise is losing importance, it's just that manufacturers have realized that noise (or power usage) factors into the decision making of a large chunk of their market, the market has means to compare manufacturers (e.g. silentpcreview.com) and the manufactures have engineered accordingly. But from the consumer's point you are right - noise is becoming a solved problem and hence eventually won't factor into a buying decision because no one will be manufacturing noisy parts.
Aside from primary storage (which should go to SSD en masse within a year or two) it's just CPU and GPU producing too much in the way of heat that causes the remaining noise issue. Depending on how much a person wants to have their cake (high performance) and eat it too (silence) will determine whether noise needs to be taken into account when purchasing. Noise is certainly getting to be less and less of a factor. If all you are going to do is basic internet and office stuff, an Asus Eee Box B202 will work. GPUs are to the point where you can do basic gaming and HD video passively, with something like a 780G based motherboard.
I suspect that within 1-5 years we will see most of the other noise issues ironed out. That's pretty amazing to me - it means that most of the issues with computers as a household appliance have been solved. If anything is going to cause noise to be an issue in future years it will be the GPUs required to get games to run with an acceptable fps at whatever resolution a 30 inch monitor (or whatever is the largest monitor size that can eventually be manufactured at a mass market price point) runs.
I've long thought that the strength of FOSS is that it succeeds by a sort of intelligent design and natural selection of those designs, the lack of a unified focus that your comment is ridiculing. Perhaps what MS is doing is not classic marget segmentation at all, but more of an aping of the open source world. Maybe their hope was that by releasing a bunch of tiers, at least one of them would be successful.
That's not Gresham's Law. If PCs were money, which they aren't, and if people were fanatically buying the 1 minute boot time PCs and hoarding them while using the 2 minute boot time PCs to pay for things (because they are both legal tender), then we would have a great example of Gresham's Law in action.
People do in fact care about boot times, which is one of the reasons SSD is taking off. It's also part of the reason people have been buying faster CPUs since the days of the C64. However, people also care about having functionality and eye candy. So they make a choice, weighing up boot time and general speed versus functionality/ eye candy. In the end boot time is where it is in the scheme of things for a reason. Even in the Linux world where people have a real choice over some sort of functional obsolescent choice, Ubuntu dominates over the likes of Puppy or DSL.
Now we are reaching the point of diminishing marginal returns in computing for all sorts of things, e.g. eye candy (compiz and aero, how much better can it really get?), functionality (excel has been largely right for 11 years), speed, ability to multi-task (dual core). Some remaining areas of concern are power, boot-up times, gaming for 1920x1200 resolutions, that sort of thing, which is why we are reading about them here.
What would you propose as an alternative? If the alternative to totalitarianism is freedom, the alternative to dictatorship is democracy and living under these conditions is what is wrong with Western Civilization, I'm not convinced that the alternatives are anything more than blathering.
I was about to rush to the defense of spreadsheets until I re-read the title. It's not Scientific Modeling, Engineering Simulation, Financial Modeling, Quick and Dirty Engineering Calculation. It's Scientific DATA Analysis. Which would imply making sense of data, probably a whole lot of it. And probably more than just looking at a correlation by eye in a chart.
I'd say that Excel is not a great tool for that job, any more than it is a great tool for complex and recurring financial information. With apologies to Henry Spencer, those who do not understand relational databases are condemned to reinvent them poorly, usually in Excel.
Yes. Although I am not sure that the "job" of the press was ever to provide unbiased information. Providing biased information is orders of magnitude more profitable and always has been.
Why are they to blame? There is no feedback mechanism to reward consumers for this behavior. Why should one consumer spend more on a locally produced product for a higher price, when the local person he enriches is likely just going to spend money on the foreign goods? The only way I know of to solve this is force, through protectionist policies.
If that qualifies as a religion, then so should the irrational belief that software is inferior if it is given away. Which is really just an order of the larger, consumerist religion that holds that if it's not advertised and requires money or theft to acquire, it's not worth having.
And yes, it's got all the rituals too.
-Guilt at finding serials and cracks for all of your software.
-Penance paid with a full reinstall every year to cleanse yourself of malware!
-Buying the holy Norton Relics to ward off evil.
and my favorite, instead of Confession we have Windows Genuine Advantage (TM)!
There are some religions that were created to benefit their followers. I would class FOSS software religion in that category. Others, like Scientology, were created only to benefit their founder. I liken each new Microsoft OS or Office suite to a step up the OT levels. Some people view them as a waste of money. Others are amazed at the dramatic difference in productivity they bring.
If it's so easy, why doesn't everyone own ILM?
I think he would be offended if we returned his valuable glass beads and trinkets. A gift in kind would be more appropriate, but not the same gift. Perhaps lifetime access to sourceforge would be appropriate.
Shhh! Some game developers will figure out the obvious corollary - that if they only increase the size of the possible solution space until it is becomes impractical to try a breadth-first search, they will have created the next Day Of The Tentacle.
I used to worry a lot about this, although I am not worrying as much these days. Scarcity of all things - energy, minerals, food, water... is going to give rise to lots of competition. I doubt that competition is going to favor the stupid nearly as much as the last 60 years has. Somehow I don't think the selection pressure will be great for those who are naturally inclined towards sitting on a couch, watching TV and collecting welfare payments.
If anything, it will look more like the previous millions of years where life was nasty, brutish and short. All you have to do to see the selective pressure for intelligence in humans over time in our typical environment is look at a timeline to see how ape brains have evolved into human brains - to the point where brains are using 20% of a person's energy. 17,000 years have elapsed since the lascaux cave paintings, and that's only 680 generations, or iterations in which the natural environment has selected for intelligence. That's pretty impressive to think that the sum total of human civilization has been pretty much created within that time.