True for whatever your company competes on, but not for everything else (the so called "hygiene" factors, that don't need to be great, just basically work. e.g. Apple doesn't compete on their internal payroll software).
Your point on complexity is spot on. The abstractions and symbolic references that make programming so difficult handle complexity far better than the blocks and connectors of FBP and visual programming.
OTOH the two roles of component-maker and assembler is realized in the massive standard libraries and open source libraries of all mainstream languages.
This is a sensible business move for Microsoft - like Google's massive server farms, it's a capital investment that is a barriers for newcomers to breach. For MS/Google, it's a reasonably small percentage of xbox/LIVE revenue; but for a newcomer with small sales, it's prohibitively expensive.
But this only works if the server farm actually helps users... For google, the instant google-suggest is a pretty impressive and convenient feature - good enough for the barrier to be reasonably effective (though not absolutely compelling, IMHO). For Microsoft, the benefit is yet to be seen. Streaming video games would be helped but it, but that has had only modest success. That would help massive multiplayer games - but that's not MS's present market.
In other words: huge server farms for a game console is a great technology platform... all it needs is its "killer app".
Apparently in Japan, legislation requires that camera-like devices make a camera-like noise when used. So smartphones in Japan sound like a camera when you take a pic.
In soviet russia, home entertainment system watches YOU!
> 1080p camera... 60 FPS. Field of view increased by 60%....
> motion tracking... detect skin pigmentation changes related to heart rate
Seriously, imagine being able to measure consumers' emotional reaction to advertisements... if you were worried about information being gathered about you, with google adwords targeting you by search, or facebook data-mining your social network, you ain't seen nothing yet.
You must write a thesis that will draw in 20 more students, or you are worthless. Their fees pay your salary. They in turn must write a thesis to draw in 20 more etc.
1. white noise - download a program onto your PC, or there's some websites. To be really effective, wear headphones.
2. keep a fan running (it also produces white noise).
3. earplugs (the foam kind that you roll up).
4. don't think they "should" be quieter and more considerate - this dramatically increases your sense of annoyance. Don't do the "right" thing and carefully "be quiet" yourself. Instead, be relaxed about making ordinary noise yourself. It will make others noise seem less annoying.
They know the benefits of piracy, that's why they allow windows and office to work even when not validated. Same reason adobe doesn't crack down on photoshop piracy.
But the reason this is especially dangerous for them at the moment is that mobile devices are fast approaching console quality, and so gamers will switch to it (the PowerVR series6 rogue is apparently on par with xbox360's xeno GPU, around 210GPixel/s - if it ever actually arrives). There's also Ouya and steam's console. Additionally, casual games have increasing importance (which suits mobile better). Finally, it does seem that graphics have overshot what the market demand - this is what has enabled the current console generation to last so long, and why gaming PCs are increasingly niche (and thus not targeted by studios).
So, even though these next-gen consoles are much more powerful than next-gen mobile devices, if consumers don't want it, it doesn't matter.
Maybe not in the incumbents' interest to upgrade, but GPUs and multi-core CPUs have definitely advanced, creating a situation ripe for disruption.
And meanwhile a new gaming platform has actually already gained great traction and momentum: iPhone, app store, and arguably the iPad. Disruptions usually start small...
said in a talk that it was DEC's demise that inspired his PhD research that he wrote up as "The Innovator's Dilemma".
It wasn't management - it's that minicomputers were replaced by workstations (Sun and the like). They went from top to bottom in a couple of years, with the same management team.
Unobtainium floats. The mountains float. The mountains are on Pandora, which is being mined for... unobtainium. The mountains are located in a region of especially strong interference.
I'm thinking there could be a connection...
However, the plot called for the largest deposit of unobtainable to be under the local's giant tree. The non-floating tree. So, I'm not sure what to think here, except that perhaps it was a distortion to serve the plot, or (a nicer justification) that the mountains have much larger deposit, but they are too remote/difficult to mine. That is, the local's giant tree has the largest *accessible* deposit.
A quick search reveals that unobtainium is a room-temperature super-conductor, hence the magnetic levitation trick that we've all seen before; the floating mountains, and the interference. At this point, James Cameron has more credibility than our astrophysicist reviewer. Also, I'm expecting that Orson Scott Card helped out with the script/screenplay/world, because (1) he did so with Cameron's *The Abyss*; and (2) many of the ideas in the film have appeared in Card's work; and (3) Card is a notably mythic-oriented story-teller, as is Cameron. I may be wrong, but You heard it here first!
It's part of a conspiracy of a world-wide cartel of efficiency-oriented programmer that control computing, to ensure their skills remain in demand. Whenever computers start getting too fast, they contrive another layer. The iPhone is another of their strategies.
So, if linux has already been very popular on netbooks, since Ubuntu is one of (if not) the friendliest linuxes, then the OS will be no more a barrier to adoption than it was for netbooks.
Can they take a tiny part of the deep field image, that is (apparently) black, and do the same thing again?
Re:This is what linguists have been waiting for
on
Monkeys With Syntax
·
· Score: 1
I've been reading "The Language Instinct" (Pinker), and his thorough development of his theme is really striking: that language in humans is a biological feature similar, in that sense, to how we walk or digest food. We don't have to try or think about it; it's a free gift. I agree it would be cool to see a syntax, or proto-syntax, or just *some* step along the way. It would really emphasize that language is, partially, just a biological instinct.
I find it odd to think of monkeys having a "word" for different predators, because a predator-specific call isn't necessarily part of a language, which the term "word" implies.
BTW: I find the linguist claim of "infinite" range of expression to be disingenuous, because, while it's technically true, the *vast* majority of them are uninteresting, not useful, and not used. e.g. "I (really)* like ice-cream"; or "(I wonder why)* I wonder." (using regular expression syntax, where "*" means 0 to an infinite number of repetitions). In contrast, simply composing different words is extremely expressive: combining just two words squares the number of expressions; three words cubes it, and so on (v^n, where v is vocabulary size; ^ is "to the power of"; and n is the number of words in the expression). As an example, it's easy to find a phrase that is unique to a document (for a google search). It's not *infinite*, but it's huge, and the results are interesting, useful, and used.
Slashdot Mirror
the transformations you want don't exist.
True for whatever your company competes on, but not for everything else (the so called "hygiene" factors, that don't need to be great, just basically work. e.g. Apple doesn't compete on their internal payroll software).
Your point on complexity is spot on. The abstractions and symbolic references that make programming so difficult handle complexity far better than the blocks and connectors of FBP and visual programming.
OTOH the two roles of component-maker and assembler is realized in the massive standard libraries and open source libraries of all mainstream languages.
cloudy
This is a sensible business move for Microsoft - like Google's massive server farms, it's a capital investment that is a barriers for newcomers to breach. For MS/Google, it's a reasonably small percentage of xbox/LIVE revenue; but for a newcomer with small sales, it's prohibitively expensive.
But this only works if the server farm actually helps users... For google, the instant google-suggest is a pretty impressive and convenient feature - good enough for the barrier to be reasonably effective (though not absolutely compelling, IMHO). For Microsoft, the benefit is yet to be seen. Streaming video games would be helped but it, but that has had only modest success. That would help massive multiplayer games - but that's not MS's present market.
In other words: huge server farms for a game console is a great technology platform... all it needs is its "killer app".
Apparently in Japan, legislation requires that camera-like devices make a camera-like noise when used. So smartphones in Japan sound like a camera when you take a pic.
Office is 30 years old? Or the improving and worsening overlapped...
EDIT 22 years old http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office
In soviet russia, home entertainment system watches YOU!
> 1080p camera... 60 FPS. Field of view increased by 60%....
> motion tracking... detect skin pigmentation changes related to heart rate
Seriously, imagine being able to measure consumers' emotional reaction to advertisements... if you were worried about information being gathered about you, with google adwords targeting you by search, or facebook data-mining your social network, you ain't seen nothing yet.
Oh, OK. I got the x1,000 approximation from the top of page 59.
BTW: Moore's Law approximates to x10 in 5 years, as 2**(5/1.5)=10.0793683992 A nice rule of thumb, so x100 in 10 years, x1,000 in 15 years etc.
He sells the exaFLOP dream; but it's x1,000 faster than today. At Moore's faux Law, that takes 15 years - so, due in 2028, not 2020.
Writing correct concurrent code is like understand quantum mechanics, if you think you do you don't.
Maybe he just won't write concurrent code, and therefore his junior thought his skills weren't con-current.
You must write a thesis that will draw in 20 more students, or you are worthless. Their fees pay your salary. They in turn must write a thesis to draw in 20 more etc.
ogooglebar: thought or concept forbidden by google
1. white noise - download a program onto your PC, or there's some websites. To be really effective, wear headphones.
2. keep a fan running (it also produces white noise).
3. earplugs (the foam kind that you roll up).
4. don't think they "should" be quieter and more considerate - this dramatically increases your sense of annoyance. Don't do the "right" thing and carefully "be quiet" yourself. Instead, be relaxed about making ordinary noise yourself. It will make others noise seem less annoying.
They know the benefits of piracy, that's why they allow windows and office to work even when not validated. Same reason adobe doesn't crack down on photoshop piracy.
But the reason this is especially dangerous for them at the moment is that mobile devices are fast approaching console quality, and so gamers will switch to it (the PowerVR series6 rogue is apparently on par with xbox360's xeno GPU, around 210GPixel/s - if it ever actually arrives). There's also Ouya and steam's console. Additionally, casual games have increasing importance (which suits mobile better). Finally, it does seem that graphics have overshot what the market demand - this is what has enabled the current console generation to last so long, and why gaming PCs are increasingly niche (and thus not targeted by studios).
So, even though these next-gen consoles are much more powerful than next-gen mobile devices, if consumers don't want it, it doesn't matter.
Economists don't answer questions because they know what the answer is. They answer because they are asked.
What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe not in the incumbents' interest to upgrade, but GPUs and multi-core CPUs have definitely advanced, creating a situation ripe for disruption.
And meanwhile a new gaming platform has actually already gained great traction and momentum: iPhone, app store, and arguably the iPad. Disruptions usually start small...
He has a point about open-source UI interfaces. Not sure it's due to "design by committee", probably more that most programmers aren't UI designers.
This will reduce star-power to that of voice actors... and copyright of an actor's image will become even more valuable. Studios will like this.
said in a talk that it was DEC's demise that inspired his PhD research that he wrote up as "The Innovator's Dilemma".
It wasn't management - it's that minicomputers were replaced by workstations (Sun and the like). They went from top to bottom in a couple of years, with the same management team.
Unobtainium floats. The mountains float. The mountains are on Pandora, which is being mined for... unobtainium. The mountains are located in a region of especially strong interference.
I'm thinking there could be a connection...
However, the plot called for the largest deposit of unobtainable to be under the local's giant tree. The non-floating tree. So, I'm not sure what to think here, except that perhaps it was a distortion to serve the plot, or (a nicer justification) that the mountains have much larger deposit, but they are too remote/difficult to mine. That is, the local's giant tree has the largest *accessible* deposit.
A quick search reveals that unobtainium is a room-temperature super-conductor, hence the magnetic levitation trick that we've all seen before; the floating mountains, and the interference. At this point, James Cameron has more credibility than our astrophysicist reviewer. Also, I'm expecting that Orson Scott Card helped out with the script/screenplay/world, because (1) he did so with Cameron's *The Abyss*; and (2) many of the ideas in the film have appeared in Card's work; and (3) Card is a notably mythic-oriented story-teller, as is Cameron. I may be wrong, but You heard it here first!
It's part of a conspiracy of a world-wide cartel of efficiency-oriented programmer that control computing, to ensure their skills remain in demand. Whenever computers start getting too fast, they contrive another layer. The iPhone is another of their strategies.
Ubuntu is already available for ARM processors.
So, if linux has already been very popular on netbooks, since Ubuntu is one of (if not) the friendliest linuxes, then the OS will be no more a barrier to adoption than it was for netbooks.
Can they take a tiny part of the deep field image, that is (apparently) black, and do the same thing again?
I've been reading "The Language Instinct" (Pinker), and his thorough development of his theme is really striking: that language in humans is a biological feature similar, in that sense, to how we walk or digest food. We don't have to try or think about it; it's a free gift. I agree it would be cool to see a syntax, or proto-syntax, or just *some* step along the way. It would really emphasize that language is, partially, just a biological instinct.
I find it odd to think of monkeys having a "word" for different predators, because a predator-specific call isn't necessarily part of a language, which the term "word" implies.
BTW: I find the linguist claim of "infinite" range of expression to be disingenuous, because, while it's technically true, the *vast* majority of them are uninteresting, not useful, and not used. e.g. "I (really)* like ice-cream"; or "(I wonder why)* I wonder." (using regular expression syntax, where "*" means 0 to an infinite number of repetitions). In contrast, simply composing different words is extremely expressive: combining just two words squares the number of expressions; three words cubes it, and so on (v^n, where v is vocabulary size; ^ is "to the power of"; and n is the number of words in the expression). As an example, it's easy to find a phrase that is unique to a document (for a google search). It's not *infinite*, but it's huge, and the results are interesting, useful, and used.