Very true. This is also important for the instructors (at least in CS) - how can you mark programming assignments if the environments used for development are that diverse.
It'll be interesting to see how VMs change that game: assignment handout is a Linux VM that runs on any host OS, an has all the necessary apps and libraries installed. Students hand in a modified VM for the instructor and TAs to run on whatever host platform they use. Not quite feasible yet, I think, but maybe in a few years?
Education is not a substitute for experience. Remember ISA cards, IRQ settings and COM 1,3 vs 2,4 problems, and how to work around it? Kids today don't. They depend on PnP to magically make it work. A lot of hiring monkeys don't get this but it is true. Show me any snort-nosed kid that can build a network using printer cables or old-school DOS hacks to get something to work in WindowsXP.
These are quite possibly the worst examples of experience you could have listed. Those skills are about as obsolete as making fire with a flint stone, starting a car engine with a hand crank, or feeding your program to a mainframe on punch cards. Which is to say: sure, there are specialty applications where this technology still might find some use. But overall, the reason why nobody cares is simply that the world has moved on.
True experience is not about mastery of some obsolete-but-cool-in-its-day technology, but the improved judgment that stems from being able to analyze situations and relate them to similar problems you have encountered in the past, which in turn helps you find a better solution.
Child pornography is also a 15 year old girl recording herself nude on her mobile phone and then sending the video to her boyfriend in his 18th birthday.
In the US, maybe. There are countries with saner laws in that respect.
However, there are professional cameras far in excess of 50MP.
Have you ever used one of these? Have you ever seen somebody use one outside a studio? I bet you haven't, and there is a reason: getting full resolution out of these cameras is a fucking pain in the ass, and is pretty much impossible without a well-equipped studio.
Let's ignore cost here - others have commented on quality of lenses etc. I'll just focus on hard physical limits instead.
First off, with this resolution, even a moderately fast lens (say f/5.6) will have a really shallow depth of field. So if you want to have 50MP that are actually in focus, you need to stop your lens WAY down (I used to shoot at f/22). Of course, now you don't exactly have a lot of light left, so you need to use a tripod and as-bright-as-you-can-get studio lighting.
Current consumer camera image sensors are already pretty close to ideal sensitivity: they have a quantum efficiency of 40-50%, meaning that every other photon is actually recorded. Or put differently, with the same sensor/pixel size, at most you can hope to boost light sensitivity by a factor of 2. That is not an awful lot. If you want more sensitive cameras that you can operate without a tripod, you have to increase the pixel size by either making the whole sensor larger (thus making the depth of field that much shallower), or you have to keep the resolution small.
Well, they would in all likelihood be extremely tough for their size and weight. If they figure out how these can be produced in large quantities, maybe we can interleave the loops, and create nanotube "chainmall". That would be an awesome material.
The food critic and newspaper are not anonymous, so this ruling doesn't even apply there. Of course they can get sued - everybody can get sued for anything, but that doesn't mean they would loose!
All that is done here is that for certain types of posts which a court finds libelous, the authors of the post have to be disclosed (if they are known by the host of the online service). This does NOT mean they will get convicted of libel, but it does mean that they have to defend themselves in court, and possibly back up any claims they made. Sounds fair to me.
True. And some of those have become cool products (photosynth comes to mind, as well as some game-related technologies). Still, it is reasonable for shareholders to ask if the return on investment is reasonable in the long run. Otherwise, MSR just becomes a public relations exercise. Which is also fine I suppose, as long as they are frank about it with their shareholders.
I would like to see more corporate research, but I think it is also clear that companies need to ensure they have the procedures in place for tech transfer from R to D.
I just want to add that overdrive was originally developed for TVs, where the lag doesn't matter (as long as you also delay the sound by the same duration). This technology was never intended to be used in computer monitors, where latency is just as bad as motion blur.
Sorry, but you are letting yourself be blinded by ideology. Copyright law very clearly states that "derivative work" is only work that directly uses a certain percentage of the original work. Like a mashup in music, or taking a couple hundred lines from gcc and using them elsewhere.
Ask yourself this: assume somebody writes a compiler with the same plugin infrastructure as gcc. Now I am distributing a closed source plugin for that compiler, which also happens to work with gcc. Note that I am not distributing either gcc or the other compiler.
Is my plugin derivative work? Of what? gcc? The other compiler? Of course the answer is "no" in both cases! And since the legal status of my plugin does not depend on the existence of a third party software (the mythical second compiler), it should be very clear that distributing binary plugins is perfectly fine, even if they work just with gcc.
A plugin interface is an API, and API compatibility does not mean derivative work.
Ah, but this is a plugin. At the moment of distribution, it isn't linked to anything. The end-user "links" it to a separately distributed gcc by placing the plugin in a specific directory (or whatever else the mechanism will be).
It is patently obvious that this doesn't fall under the "derivative work" clause of copyright law (and therefore cannot be prevented by the GPL).
Nor is reading books, or watching movies. YouTube is, however, part of our culture. Not "essential", but certainly not as useless as you're suggesting.
So what is your point? I bet you can find lots of people who don't want to read books, and lots of people who don't want to go to movies. Is that OK with you, or do you want to shove these things down their throat as well? And if you are OK with not consuming movies and books, then why is the internet any different?
Right. And speeding up horse carriages is just a matter of how many horses you use. Not.
The fundamental power source here is gravity, by using the difference in elevation of the water surface with low surface tension at the back of the boat and normal surface tension in front. That elevation difference is tiny, and the power it can provide is therefore fundamentally limited.
Well, allow me to play devils advocate here for a second.
Anybody who has ever hired anybody for anything knows that this is an imperfect process. You don't know the person, you just know a bunch of stats about them, and try to infer how they would perform in your environment. This is always a guess.
So what do you do? Maybe you have experience with working with people of different personality types, professional backgrounds etc. Maybe you even even have a formal statistical model that predicts how well somebody will perform given these factors. Even if you don't, you will somehow correlate your experience with the person in front of you, and make a decision.
Correlation isn't causation, but if you are forced into a decision without knowing causality, then correlation is the best thing you have.
It sucks if you get eliminated from the candidate list based on this, but I understand why it happens. What can you do? A few things:
- practice interviews, possibly with a professional coach
- play your strengths - one or two perceived weaknesses can be outweighed by significant strengths
- apply for jobs where being extroverted is not the highest priority or even potentially problematic (anything that requires secrecy, for example).
I am all for privacy and limiting government snooping. That said, anybody who finds my passport ALREADY has 10 years worth of immigration stamps and visas at his finger tips. And yet, should I loose my passport, privacy will probably be the last thing on my mind...
The whole argument as well as the article are completely ass-backwards. The real news should be
Universities Generate >45B in Economic Value
The key here is that the reason they made 45B is that it was worth at least that to somebody else who paid for it and now produces goods or services that are directly contributing to the economy.
The alternative is that most research just gets published as a research article, and then vanishes in some drawer and a handful of university libraries. That is why Bah-Doyle and similar acts in other countries were introduced, so that there is an experienced party that can screen research output for valuable inventions and make sure those feed back into the economy. The problem is often not a lack of good ideas, but the willingness and aptitude of the researchers to take them commercial.
Also, you and the article make it sound as if the university just takes the money and runs. That is not the case. First, the universities share the revenues with the inventors. Second, they do something for their share. The extent of support varies from institution to institution, but at a minimum they provide valuable seed funding for patents etc., without which you can't realistically even get private funding in many areas.
Many universities (such as the one I am at), do a lot more: they provide infrastructure to startups, or help find experienced people for posts such as CFO. And having an experienced CFO does wonders for the startup's ability to raise funding, so the university share tends to easily pay for itself.
A hit on a large metropolis, say New York City, by an object the size of a large family car would likely obliterate the Big Apple...
Yeah, but the likelihood of that happening is so tiny, you might as well start worrying about spontaneous human combustion.
It only takes one big one, and 10,000 years, or near enough, of recorded history is nothing compared to geological timescales.
Precisely. Therefore, it is a waste of resources to plan against events that are infrequent even on a geological timescale. Let's focus on the threats that have more than a snowballs chance in hell to affect us or our children, shall we?
Even if it really was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (we don't know for sure as others have pointed out), the real reason dinosaurs died was that they had insufficient ability to adapt to a changing environment.
Although a hit on a large metropolis would obviously be a major disaster for the people in the region, the existence of a sentient race like ours is not seriously threatened by asteroids.
I might add that the number of people killed by asteroids over all of human history is dwarfed by the number of people killed in wars, or the number of people killed in famines or epidemics, or car crashes, for that matter. I see no reason to believe this will change in the next few centuries.
The whole asteroid thing doesn't even make the top 100 of threads to humankind. Stop believing everything Hollywood throws at you.
I agree with the general sentiment, but you are being a tad unfair to the memristor. It is true that its existence was argued on a theoretical basis 37 years ago, but until this year, nobody had a clue how to build one. Finally figuring that one out is a genuine tech breakthrough (much more so than the flexible displays, which are the result of incremental improvements).
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. This is also important for the instructors (at least in CS) - how can you mark programming assignments if the environments used for development are that diverse.
It'll be interesting to see how VMs change that game: assignment handout is a Linux VM that runs on any host OS, an has all the necessary apps and libraries installed. Students hand in a modified VM for the instructor and TAs to run on whatever host platform they use. Not quite feasible yet, I think, but maybe in a few years?
I am a middle-aged guy myself, but that said:
Education is not a substitute for experience. Remember ISA cards, IRQ settings and COM 1,3 vs 2,4 problems, and how to work around it? Kids today don't. They depend on PnP to magically make it work. A lot of hiring monkeys don't get this but it is true. Show me any snort-nosed kid that can build a network using printer cables or old-school DOS hacks to get something to work in WindowsXP.
These are quite possibly the worst examples of experience you could have listed. Those skills are about as obsolete as making fire with a flint stone, starting a car engine with a hand crank, or feeding your program to a mainframe on punch cards. Which is to say: sure, there are specialty applications where this technology still might find some use. But overall, the reason why nobody cares is simply that the world has moved on.
True experience is not about mastery of some obsolete-but-cool-in-its-day technology, but the improved judgment that stems from being able to analyze situations and relate them to similar problems you have encountered in the past, which in turn helps you find a better solution.
Child pornography is also a 15 year old girl recording herself nude on her mobile phone and then sending the video to her boyfriend in his 18th birthday.
In the US, maybe. There are countries with saner laws in that respect.
However, there are professional cameras far in excess of 50MP.
Have you ever used one of these? Have you ever seen somebody use one outside a studio? I bet you haven't, and there is a reason: getting full resolution out of these cameras is a fucking pain in the ass, and is pretty much impossible without a well-equipped studio.
Let's ignore cost here - others have commented on quality of lenses etc. I'll just focus on hard physical limits instead.
First off, with this resolution, even a moderately fast lens (say f/5.6) will have a really shallow depth of field. So if you want to have 50MP that are actually in focus, you need to stop your lens WAY down (I used to shoot at f/22). Of course, now you don't exactly have a lot of light left, so you need to use a tripod and as-bright-as-you-can-get studio lighting.
Current consumer camera image sensors are already pretty close to ideal sensitivity: they have a quantum efficiency of 40-50%, meaning that every other photon is actually recorded. Or put differently, with the same sensor/pixel size, at most you can hope to boost light sensitivity by a factor of 2. That is not an awful lot. If you want more sensitive cameras that you can operate without a tripod, you have to increase the pixel size by either making the whole sensor larger (thus making the depth of field that much shallower), or you have to keep the resolution small.
Well, they would in all likelihood be extremely tough for their size and weight. If they figure out how these can be produced in large quantities, maybe we can interleave the loops, and create nanotube "chainmall". That would be an awesome material.
How is that for "wild and unfounded speculation"?
In both ATMs and gambling machines, the operator is a trusted entity. In voting he is not. Big difference.
The food critic and newspaper are not anonymous, so this ruling doesn't even apply there. Of course they can get sued - everybody can get sued for anything, but that doesn't mean they would loose!
All that is done here is that for certain types of posts which a court finds libelous, the authors of the post have to be disclosed (if they are known by the host of the online service). This does NOT mean they will get convicted of libel, but it does mean that they have to defend themselves in court, and possibly back up any claims they made. Sounds fair to me.
Except if x in NaN ("not a number") in IEEE floating point format. Then, x== x is false. ;-)
True. And some of those have become cool products (photosynth comes to mind, as well as some game-related technologies). Still, it is reasonable for shareholders to ask if the return on investment is reasonable in the long run. Otherwise, MSR just becomes a public relations exercise. Which is also fine I suppose, as long as they are frank about it with their shareholders.
I would like to see more corporate research, but I think it is also clear that companies need to ensure they have the procedures in place for tech transfer from R to D.
Sad that this is rated funny rather than insightful...
Precisely.
I just want to add that overdrive was originally developed for TVs, where the lag doesn't matter (as long as you also delay the sound by the same duration). This technology was never intended to be used in computer monitors, where latency is just as bad as motion blur.
Sorry, but you are letting yourself be blinded by ideology. Copyright law very clearly states that "derivative work" is only work that directly uses a certain percentage of the original work. Like a mashup in music, or taking a couple hundred lines from gcc and using them elsewhere.
Ask yourself this: assume somebody writes a compiler with the same plugin infrastructure as gcc. Now I am distributing a closed source plugin for that compiler, which also happens to work with gcc. Note that I am not distributing either gcc or the other compiler.
Is my plugin derivative work? Of what? gcc? The other compiler? Of course the answer is "no" in both cases! And since the legal status of my plugin does not depend on the existence of a third party software (the mythical second compiler), it should be very clear that distributing binary plugins is perfectly fine, even if they work just with gcc.
A plugin interface is an API, and API compatibility does not mean derivative work.
Ah, but this is a plugin. At the moment of distribution, it isn't linked to anything. The end-user "links" it to a separately distributed gcc by placing the plugin in a specific directory (or whatever else the mechanism will be).
It is patently obvious that this doesn't fall under the "derivative work" clause of copyright law (and therefore cannot be prevented by the GPL).
alias mc mv
'nuff said.
I hate to bring it to you, but if you live in the neck of the woods, you also have less access to libraries and movie theaters.
The choice you make about where you live does affect the infrastructure you have available to you. Is this really surprising?
Nor is reading books, or watching movies. YouTube is, however, part of our culture. Not "essential", but certainly not as useless as you're suggesting.
So what is your point? I bet you can find lots of people who don't want to read books, and lots of people who don't want to go to movies. Is that OK with you, or do you want to shove these things down their throat as well? And if you are OK with not consuming movies and books, then why is the internet any different?
Right. And speeding up horse carriages is just a matter of how many horses you use. Not.
The fundamental power source here is gravity, by using the difference in elevation of the water surface with low surface tension at the back of the boat and normal surface tension in front. That elevation difference is tiny, and the power it can provide is therefore fundamentally limited.
Yeah. It would be more credible if it was published in an ERGONOMICS journal, not an economics journal. Just saying...
Well, allow me to play devils advocate here for a second.
Anybody who has ever hired anybody for anything knows that this is an imperfect process. You don't know the person, you just know a bunch of stats about them, and try to infer how they would perform in your environment. This is always a guess.
So what do you do? Maybe you have experience with working with people of different personality types, professional backgrounds etc. Maybe you even even have a formal statistical model that predicts how well somebody will perform given these factors. Even if you don't, you will somehow correlate your experience with the person in front of you, and make a decision.
Correlation isn't causation, but if you are forced into a decision without knowing causality, then correlation is the best thing you have.
It sucks if you get eliminated from the candidate list based on this, but I understand why it happens. What can you do? A few things:
- practice interviews, possibly with a professional coach
- play your strengths - one or two perceived weaknesses can be outweighed by significant strengths
- apply for jobs where being extroverted is not the highest priority or even potentially problematic (anything that requires secrecy, for example).
I am all for privacy and limiting government snooping. That said, anybody who finds my passport ALREADY has 10 years worth of immigration stamps and visas at his finger tips. And yet, should I loose my passport, privacy will probably be the last thing on my mind...
The whole argument as well as the article are completely ass-backwards. The real news should be
Universities Generate >45B in Economic Value
The key here is that the reason they made 45B is that it was worth at least that to somebody else who paid for it and now produces goods or services that are directly contributing to the economy.
The alternative is that most research just gets published as a research article, and then vanishes in some drawer and a handful of university libraries. That is why Bah-Doyle and similar acts in other countries were introduced, so that there is an experienced party that can screen research output for valuable inventions and make sure those feed back into the economy. The problem is often not a lack of good ideas, but the willingness and aptitude of the researchers to take them commercial.
Also, you and the article make it sound as if the university just takes the money and runs. That is not the case. First, the universities share the revenues with the inventors. Second, they do something for their share. The extent of support varies from institution to institution, but at a minimum they provide valuable seed funding for patents etc., without which you can't realistically even get private funding in many areas.
Many universities (such as the one I am at), do a lot more: they provide infrastructure to startups, or help find experienced people for posts such as CFO. And having an experienced CFO does wonders for the startup's ability to raise funding, so the university share tends to easily pay for itself.
Well, it is the "2009 FIRST Robotics Competition", and it may well be the first one this year ;-)
A hit on a large metropolis, say New York City, by an object the size of a large family car would likely obliterate the Big Apple...
Yeah, but the likelihood of that happening is so tiny, you might as well start worrying about spontaneous human combustion.
It only takes one big one, and 10,000 years, or near enough, of recorded history is nothing compared to geological timescales.
Precisely. Therefore, it is a waste of resources to plan against events that are infrequent even on a geological timescale. Let's focus on the threats that have more than a snowballs chance in hell to affect us or our children, shall we?
Oh please.
Even if it really was an asteroid that killed the dinosaurs (we don't know for sure as others have pointed out), the real reason dinosaurs died was that they had insufficient ability to adapt to a changing environment.
Although a hit on a large metropolis would obviously be a major disaster for the people in the region, the existence of a sentient race like ours is not seriously threatened by asteroids.
I might add that the number of people killed by asteroids over all of human history is dwarfed by the number of people killed in wars, or the number of people killed in famines or epidemics, or car crashes, for that matter. I see no reason to believe this will change in the next few centuries.
The whole asteroid thing doesn't even make the top 100 of threads to humankind. Stop believing everything Hollywood throws at you.
I agree with the general sentiment, but you are being a tad unfair to the memristor. It is true that its existence was argued on a theoretical basis 37 years ago, but until this year, nobody had a clue how to build one. Finally figuring that one out is a genuine tech breakthrough (much more so than the flexible displays, which are the result of incremental improvements).