The importance of math is because you may be in a situation where you will have to figure something out for yourself and by that I don't necessarily mean that you need to build a house in the middle of the wilderness. So the importance of knowing math is...and I can't stress this enough...being able to do it. So in the case of just knowing the 'principles' of calculus nothing could be further from the truth. The importance of Calc is being able to integrate and differentiate and recognize problems where they apply. Seriously just knowing lim h->0 for f(x+h) - f(x)/h isn't going to help you actually perform much calculus. Unless you relish deriving the chain rule from scratch...which is IMHO one of the prime reasons for memorizing things in math - when the derivation is rather difficult. As for saying things like "I don't need X" well that from where I stand is the fault of the educational system insofar as it has taught you that life's problems come in convenient little packages. Difficult functions exist because the world is messy.
One of my relatives went to a technical school and never took any math beyond addition/subtraction multiplication and division and I remember trying to explain algebra to them. In doing so I realized that much of what they did in life with math was rote memorization. From doing their taxes to converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. They didn't realize that if you know some things about the system you are trying to model you can "create your own formulas". He couldn't recognize a problem as algebraic and didn't have the tools to solve it.
People I've worked with have shown the same issue with probability. The understood that the odds of the lottery were bad and flipping a coin was good but when faced with a moderately complex problem (i.e. like how to replace a usage based model with a fixed rate model in a way that we don't lose money) it was difficult to communicate to them. They didn't recognize to problem as probabilistic and didn't have the tools to solve it.
I've seen people who had some algebra calculate it over and over again to see how it changes over time. They didn't recognize a calculus problem and they didn't have the tools to solve it.
From where I stand not learning to DO math means putting yourself in the position of having to know by rote every math solution which is beyond your ability. Even then, you probably don't know enough to make any changes to that solution...I can't count the number of times I've read product literature where someone has compared some performance metric for a specific item against the average for some grouping of items.
Well first I'm not sure why you're highlighting that quote. The position in the Top500 does correlate more strongly with cores than any other factor - including bandwidth. However this isn't surprising considering as it's just a measure of how well they run linpack. So the statement I made is correct - I don't need to know that IB's RDMA provides better latency than substituting that with 10Ge to get on the Top500.
I have no problem with the idea that there are applications where the interconnect speed is significant (there are definitely cases where it is not and in those cases where it is my gut reaction would be that the performance increase is likely to be less than two-fold) and that drives the number and degree that you can utilize cores. However it seems reasonable to be that these cases pair down the problem space yet again. The problem is that, unless you're misreading me it's not clear that we are still talking about the general case.
This is the inherent risk in generalizing just about anything. If I say "X" strongly correlates with "Y" then I'll have somebody invoke case "Z" and now we have to discuss how much "Z" contributes to the general case...and I start thinking about a parable involving blind men and an elephant. For example I've talked to HPC people who, from our conversation I would assume would counter you with "You think it's about bandwidth, It's not. It's about latency"...and so on.
Weird. The article was about building supercomputers - so was my comment. And the EC2 thing - man where did that come from? I'm one of the biggest critics of that technology. It is definitely NOT a replacement for large cluster environments even small highly parallel tasks the MD5 cracking - It's like 3x slower and 2x as expensive than using a high-end GPU.
"It's OK to be ignorant about something outside of your field."
How about being ignorant about a post you allegedly read?
Agreed. I did think the context was clear both from my writing and the fact that the article we are discussing is about building a machine. Anywho it's interesting that you emphasize efficiency in parallelism. I always find it curious that parallelism is assumed to always provide equal or improved performance even if the improvement is slight. However take something like estimating Pi. It can be reduced to an embarrassingly parallel algorithm however in doing so it is guaranteed slower than a serial algorithm (ceterus paribus). In other worlds any finite number of compute nodes are going to estimate digits more slowly than a single machine.
Supercomputing is largely a solved problem...do a regression analysis on the variables on the Top 500 sometime. Primarily it's a function of the number of cores. I've told people in my own workplace - you want a machine on the Top 500 then write me a cheque - making a supercomputer isn't the feat of skill or engineering that it was in the days of Cray. This doesn't even touch on what the hell you use these things for the problem space for parallel processing is clearly smaller than that of serial processing. Add to that the assertion that the number of useful applications drops off steeply as you add more cores (at some point you are left with only the "embarrassingly parallel" ones) and creating the largest supercomputer in the world is akin to saying you are creating the least useful computer in the world. Not to mention probably one of the least power efficient, highest maintenance costs, etc..
Conducted by LexisNexis, the survey of 1,700 people identified dejection and frustration as prominent emotions among 49 per cent of respondents, who admitted they're unable to manage all the information coming their way. Of those, 51 per cent said they're close to giving up.
Ok let me get this straight you asked a bunch of people if they were unable to handle the all the information coming their way and most said "yes". First of all, what does that even mean? Is it email? Really? We've had email as a part of business for over a decade and most people can't quickly determine if they need to read a message or not? Are these the people who keep spammers in business? Don't get me wrong, I've been overworked but that was about having too much to actually produce or to be interrupted too frequently but I don't see what that has to do with the informational content. Nor does it answer how the alleged deluge of information creates poor quality work. Wouldn't having more information than you need (assuming this information is work related if it isn't apply a similar -mental- filter to the one you use for spam). On the other hand having more work to do in a day at a particular level of quality than is reasonable to expect - i.e. Being Overworked would logically have a reduction of quality as a potential outcome.
I mean how do we know that most people aren't simply overworked (which seems a reasonable assumption to me anyway) and all this survey did was determine who considers their workload to be "information" and who doesn't.
So "insightful" to you means Eliza style (perhaps with better grammar) reflection? From the short description you posted it seems like MOST of the conversation and analysis was on your end. Perhaps you're easily impressed or just surrounded by people who are so much less so.
There is no part of a cops job-description which states "must act as play-thing for every twit he meets",
Retarded argument. There is no need for someone to act as a play-thing in order for bubble blowing (even *gasp* to the face!) to be something less than right and sufficient cause for arrest. The officer, by the way called the act of bubbles touching him "assault" not harassment.
Reading over his claim it seems he believes that this was an effort to "mock police and diminish their authority". I'd argue that this is at best a tenuous interpretation of the events which in any case does not necessitate harassment and makes idea that the police officer was assaulted ludicrous. However it is interesting to see this window into his mind (through the lens of his lawyers anyway) were I to guess it was the second clause in that statement that made him act. Simply put: He didn't like people *thinking* less of police authority and *that* is something that is not in the job description of police, does not warrant arrest and is something that people should stand up to.
Agreed people seem poorly suited to do analysis...and unwilling to believe that they are precisely that.
The dancing pigeons seem analogous to a lot of decisions made around here.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes scientists are always right and are always better able to conduct public policy than politicians.
Lame. The OP's implied statement appears to be that policy can't dictate reality (or at least generally so). Science is actually better suited to inform public policy than politicians appear to be. However that doesn't mean that scientists have to be always right or that they need to be involved at something other than the informational level.
Your point also completely disregards the growing philosophy of post-normal science
Just as an aside "growing philosophy" are weasel words where I come from. Who cares that some idea is growing? Vaccine as a cause of ASD is a growing philosophy too.
where scientists can "produce" evidence to support a viewpoint they consider to be politically expedient,
Well having read the Wiki article it doesn't really seem to say that to me (also some of the examples seem poorly researched). It seems closer to what Steven J. Gould covered in the "mis-measure of man" that social norms guide avenues of investigation and this focus can produce poor quality evidence which can be used by people looking to justify their cause and/or convince people who are not wary.
However what can be said that is that without cheating you actually CAN'T "produce" the evidence for any claim when they are judged by the same standard Your mistake here, and perhaps in life is assuming that all evidence is equal.
even if the evidence does not necessarily incontrovertibly entail the conclusions. *rolls eyes* More weasel words...there is very little that wouldn't qualify there.
I love how people take a group of symptoms which could be explained at least a dozen different ways, observed in a terribly uncontrolled way but still yield an unwavering belief in the cause.
I like this quote: "Parents voted to protect their children's health and plug the computers back in with hardwires" however the picture from ctv.ca shows a bunch of students with iPads.
I don't think so. Price-fixing IMHO is when there is collusion between market participants. i.e. all sellers sell at a fixed rate or possibly when buyers and sellers have an undisclosed agreement to purchase at some rate.
Oh and "ask any..." is an argument by anonymous authority.
Generally I would agree that building isn't - these days - more cost effective than buying. However support is kind of an interesting facet and not nearly as straightforward as one thinks. I have a Sony laptop with a hugely expensive warranty. Sony's on-site support requires diagnosis over-the-phone, (about an hour all-told) a technician is shipped the part and dispatched (1-4 weeks from the date of the call and at least an hour of downtime for the actual repair). The technician has no authorization to request parts. So if they bring the wrong part then you have to call again. As it stands my laptop currently has serious problems - only two-thirds of the screen is visible - but this support system is so costly to my work day that it's easier to simply use an external monitor and wait until the unit gets replaced by IT at which point it can be sent to a Sony depot. While this is an extreme case, I would contend that most support contracts inflict a huge cost on my workday. Dell, for example would ship me a part which I could install myself however when something serious went wrong (motherboard, screen) I found myself borrowing laptops from the loaner pool. The only thing that made this low-cost was that they had some units which were almost the same model. Effectively I could pull my drive, insert it into the loaner, reboot twice (first time Windows would install drivers) and I'd be working again.
The point? The thing that made support low-cost to the worker was having similar spare machines commensurate with the number of machines likely to be failing at one time. Having an on-site, expedited warranty system was clearly and always secondary to having a cold spare So outside of having someone to blame (which sadly is more important than it should be) it's conceivable that, if you plan correctly you could end up with significantly better support than your average vendor could supply.
Interesting fact, as you move away from the desktop and into the server room - I'd argue that commodity hardware is even more cost effective. Having a cold spare on a 1U machine is at least conceivable and assuming you plan well would allow you faster replacements than even the most expensive warranty service. Not to mention that the number of hours a server is down is far more likely to inconvenience or enrage more people than a single desktop/laptop. As you move away from commodity hardware and into proprietary systems like blades - it becomes difficult to cost prohibitive to have a cold spare for everything. This also goes for hardware that is longer term. One time I noticed that I could purchase four of the controllers for our wireless networks on Ebay for the price of continuing one years support on the two we had in production. Last time one failed it took two days for the manufacturer to get one to us.
It's a crime because you're exploiting a weakness in a computer system, and cheating people out of cash
There's nothing sacred about something being on a computer. There was a computer system competing for money, someone beat it and as a result got the money the computer's owners would have got. Considering that you have assumed that this constitutes cheating is essentially begging the question (unless you were elected as president of 'Those who get to say what is and is not cheating' and nobody told me - and even if you did I don't recognize your authority:-) )
So taking this situation at face value without your prejudices. This seems much more similar to someone offering a cash prize for defeating a computer in a Go tournament. The person who beat the computer would also be exploiting a weakness in a computer system and receiving money as a result.
This seems significantly different than stealing money from people for a number of reasons an easy one that you somehow didn't notice was "ownership". It's unreasonable to assume that the potential to make money in the market with a computer program constitutes ownership of said funds.
None of those are what Windows Mobile 7 is trying to compete with They're going after somewhere between iPhone and Android, which is a sweet spot
Doesn't "competition" require two parties? Leaving aside for the moment the ludicrous idea that MS doesn't want the money from current iPhone or Android users but rather on the seeming logical impossibility of the statement. Either MS is entering a market where there is no competition - in which case they are not "competing" with anyone. Or they are trying for the dollars currently going to either the iPhone or the Android - in which case it's more correct to say they are competing with *both*.
Even while Microsoft is now targeting more mainstream users it doesn't mean its not a good platform for business users. Integration with Office and other tools is great and WM7 doesn't have the childly feel that i associated with iPhone
I can't say anything about Mobile 7 but historically MS's integration with office has actually sucked pretty badly. Both in email synchronization which was so bad in the last generation of devices. Not only did we in IT drop them and move to iPhones but urged many of our existing Blackberry users to do the same..Viewing MS documents has been only passable at best and illustrated by the number of better document readers/editors which exist on the WM platform itself.
The only good thing I have to say about the WM platform (or WinCE as it was called) over the past fifteen years was that there was a fair amount of developer tools available for free (even MS's eVC and eVB). However these days that's hardly a selling point.
XNA might be a selling point in the sense that it might be easier to port games over. Although XNA works well in moving a game using a gamepad from a windows PC to a XBOX360 - it's not clear that the same transition is reasonable between an XBOX and a phone. However as far as I can see the game market for the iPhone and other devices is rather different (puzzle games, novelty games that leverage some part of the UI ie. motion) that it probably doesn't matter.
Your thesis may be correct but your example seems moronic. Google realtime search actually doesn't appear to "predict" what I'm looking for but rather just updates my search page while it's idle. Google does provide auto-completion which is essentially an index of your prior searches and some list of prior search others have done. I don't see how an index into a list (or an updating screen) would have been so incomprehensible to you (or anyone) five years ago (especially considering that fifteen years ago the internet was all about 'push technologies').
Mood sensing stuff is a stupid idea because generally it's trying to model a behavior that is likely far more complicated than it's inputs. Which isn't a problem in and of itself - it's what computers do but what I think is key to making this kind of technology successful is that it is acting on voluntary input from the user from there the user can modulate their actions to get the desired response. i.e. Handwriting recognition became useful when people could change their writing to something the computer could predict reliably (i.e. graffiti).
Take your own examples...sensing you are overwhelmed with information isn't a "mood" it's a state based on a myriad of inputs, so is being "lost". The computer can look at your heart rate and perspiration but that doesn't tell it you are overwhelmed or lost. Attempting to do so will however cause the computer to change something that you likely didn't want changed and you have to deal with.
Possibly (depending on what is meant by 'all else'), but outside of labour I doubt that distinction would shows up very often. I suspect that we are talking about something like 20% per-cpu.
Ok all puns on "acid" aside (especially when you add adjectives like "big-iron"). The point of the article seems to be about scaling out - specifically with cheaper hardware. I agree that one's choice of tools is a business decision (so is everything in business) but it's not like using MySQL or postgres is somehow cost prohibitive.
Isn't that a very specific context though? The underlying assumption seems to be that there is one dataset per application. Which may well be the general case - in other words what is the "same way your application does but without mapping" when your applications are written in different frameworks, languages or when the data is accessed via say an reporting environment?
It's not that they didn't have "modern science" - whatever that means. It's that there is no evidence of well controlled experimentation and statistical methods. Without those much of western medicine would be stuck in the stone age too. The only two compounds that I know of that showed empirical use in the history of Western medicine are Quinona bark as an anti-malarial and Salix for pain releif. However if you look at even the early accounts of Salix use you'll see that people like Rev. Stone who kept careful (but methodological retarded) records came to the conclusion that Salix could be used for Ague (fever) but if you do the math it's reasonable to believe that he never gave them a therapeutic dose for fever and his records don't really record much about pain (which is often tricky to measure anyway). That leaves us with Quinona which was fatal in about 20% of serious cases. That is - IMHO pretty close to the threshold that humans can detect without actually doing math.
Take a look at using ASA as intervention for preventing cardiac events - that had three or four small studies which all came up pretty inconclusive IIRC. It was only when *combining* the studies did we get a result that showed some effect.
This isn't cultural elitism just the acknowledgment that in order to use something intentionally you need large samples, good record keeping and at least some knowledge of probability.
Half the herbs on the shelf in GNC have peer reviewed double blind studies backing them which is really all the prescription drugs show.
Shananagans on two counts:
i) I think there is significant reason to doubt that you checked for studies with very much rigor.
ii) Even it you did check for some. It's not necessarily the same as what prescription drugs are required to show. I've read a number of journal articles on herbal remedies and what I tend to see are small-n, poorly controlled, terrible endpoint design...I could go on. Now sure this may be my sampling but the point here is that while there may be "evidence" for some effects of some herbal compounds. That's not the same as saying most herbal compounds have equivalent evidence to the vast majority of FDA passed drugs.
Slashdot Mirror
The importance of math is because you may be in a situation where you will have to figure something out for yourself and by that I don't necessarily mean that you need to build a house in the middle of the wilderness. So the importance of knowing math is...and I can't stress this enough...being able to do it. So in the case of just knowing the 'principles' of calculus nothing could be further from the truth. The importance of Calc is being able to integrate and differentiate and recognize problems where they apply. Seriously just knowing lim h->0 for f(x+h) - f(x)/h isn't going to help you actually perform much calculus. Unless you relish deriving the chain rule from scratch...which is IMHO one of the prime reasons for memorizing things in math - when the derivation is rather difficult. As for saying things like "I don't need X" well that from where I stand is the fault of the educational system insofar as it has taught you that life's problems come in convenient little packages. Difficult functions exist because the world is messy.
One of my relatives went to a technical school and never took any math beyond addition/subtraction multiplication and division and I remember trying to explain algebra to them. In doing so I realized that much of what they did in life with math was rote memorization. From doing their taxes to converting from Fahrenheit to Celsius. They didn't realize that if you know some things about the system you are trying to model you can "create your own formulas". He couldn't recognize a problem as algebraic and didn't have the tools to solve it.
People I've worked with have shown the same issue with probability. The understood that the odds of the lottery were bad and flipping a coin was good but when faced with a moderately complex problem (i.e. like how to replace a usage based model with a fixed rate model in a way that we don't lose money) it was difficult to communicate to them. They didn't recognize to problem as probabilistic and didn't have the tools to solve it.
I've seen people who had some algebra calculate it over and over again to see how it changes over time. They didn't recognize a calculus problem and they didn't have the tools to solve it.
From where I stand not learning to DO math means putting yourself in the position of having to know by rote every math solution which is beyond your ability. Even then, you probably don't know enough to make any changes to that solution...I can't count the number of times I've read product literature where someone has compared some performance metric for a specific item against the average for some grouping of items.
Well first I'm not sure why you're highlighting that quote. The position in the Top500 does correlate more strongly with cores than any other factor - including bandwidth. However this isn't surprising considering as it's just a measure of how well they run linpack. So the statement I made is correct - I don't need to know that IB's RDMA provides better latency than substituting that with 10Ge to get on the Top500.
I have no problem with the idea that there are applications where the interconnect speed is significant (there are definitely cases where it is not and in those cases where it is my gut reaction would be that the performance increase is likely to be less than two-fold) and that drives the number and degree that you can utilize cores. However it seems reasonable to be that these cases pair down the problem space yet again. The problem is that, unless you're misreading me it's not clear that we are still talking about the general case.
This is the inherent risk in generalizing just about anything. If I say "X" strongly correlates with "Y" then I'll have somebody invoke case "Z" and now we have to discuss how much "Z" contributes to the general case...and I start thinking about a parable involving blind men and an elephant. For example I've talked to HPC people who, from our conversation I would assume would counter you with "You think it's about bandwidth, It's not. It's about latency"...and so on.
Weird. The article was about building supercomputers - so was my comment. And the EC2 thing - man where did that come from? I'm one of the biggest critics of that technology. It is definitely NOT a replacement for large cluster environments even small highly parallel tasks the MD5 cracking - It's like 3x slower and 2x as expensive than using a high-end GPU.
"It's OK to be ignorant about something outside of your field."
How about being ignorant about a post you allegedly read?
Read more than six words. Moron. (Glad I got that in under six words)
Agreed. I did think the context was clear both from my writing and the fact that the article we are discussing is about building a machine. Anywho it's interesting that you emphasize efficiency in parallelism. I always find it curious that parallelism is assumed to always provide equal or improved performance even if the improvement is slight. However take something like estimating Pi. It can be reduced to an embarrassingly parallel algorithm however in doing so it is guaranteed slower than a serial algorithm (ceterus paribus). In other worlds any finite number of compute nodes are going to estimate digits more slowly than a single machine.
Supercomputing is largely a solved problem...do a regression analysis on the variables on the Top 500 sometime. Primarily it's a function of the number of cores. I've told people in my own workplace - you want a machine on the Top 500 then write me a cheque - making a supercomputer isn't the feat of skill or engineering that it was in the days of Cray. This doesn't even touch on what the hell you use these things for the problem space for parallel processing is clearly smaller than that of serial processing. Add to that the assertion that the number of useful applications drops off steeply as you add more cores (at some point you are left with only the "embarrassingly parallel" ones) and creating the largest supercomputer in the world is akin to saying you are creating the least useful computer in the world. Not to mention probably one of the least power efficient, highest maintenance costs, etc..
Conducted by LexisNexis, the survey of 1,700 people identified dejection and frustration as prominent emotions among 49 per cent of respondents, who admitted they're unable to manage all the information coming their way. Of those, 51 per cent said they're close to giving up.
Ok let me get this straight you asked a bunch of people if they were unable to handle the all the information coming their way and most said "yes". First of all, what does that even mean? Is it email? Really? We've had email as a part of business for over a decade and most people can't quickly determine if they need to read a message or not? Are these the people who keep spammers in business? Don't get me wrong, I've been overworked but that was about having too much to actually produce or to be interrupted too frequently but I don't see what that has to do with the informational content. Nor does it answer how the alleged deluge of information creates poor quality work. Wouldn't having more information than you need (assuming this information is work related if it isn't apply a similar -mental- filter to the one you use for spam). On the other hand having more work to do in a day at a particular level of quality than is reasonable to expect - i.e. Being Overworked would logically have a reduction of quality as a potential outcome.
I mean how do we know that most people aren't simply overworked (which seems a reasonable assumption to me anyway) and all this survey did was determine who considers their workload to be "information" and who doesn't.
So "insightful" to you means Eliza style (perhaps with better grammar) reflection? From the short description you posted it seems like MOST of the conversation and analysis was on your end. Perhaps you're easily impressed or just surrounded by people who are so much less so.
There is no part of a cops job-description which states "must act as play-thing for every twit he meets", Retarded argument. There is no need for someone to act as a play-thing in order for bubble blowing (even *gasp* to the face!) to be something less than right and sufficient cause for arrest. The officer, by the way called the act of bubbles touching him "assault" not harassment.
Reading over his claim it seems he believes that this was an effort to "mock police and diminish their authority". I'd argue that this is at best a tenuous interpretation of the events which in any case does not necessitate harassment and makes idea that the police officer was assaulted ludicrous. However it is interesting to see this window into his mind (through the lens of his lawyers anyway) were I to guess it was the second clause in that statement that made him act. Simply put: He didn't like people *thinking* less of police authority and *that* is something that is not in the job description of police, does not warrant arrest and is something that people should stand up to.
Agreed people seem poorly suited to do analysis...and unwilling to believe that they are precisely that.
The dancing pigeons seem analogous to a lot of decisions made around here.
The problem with your argument is that it assumes scientists are always right and are always better able to conduct public policy than politicians.
Lame. The OP's implied statement appears to be that policy can't dictate reality (or at least generally so). Science is actually better suited to inform public policy than politicians appear to be. However that doesn't mean that scientists have to be always right or that they need to be involved at something other than the informational level.
Your point also completely disregards the growing philosophy of post-normal science
Just as an aside "growing philosophy" are weasel words where I come from. Who cares that some idea is growing? Vaccine as a cause of ASD is a growing philosophy too.
where scientists can "produce" evidence to support a viewpoint they consider to be politically expedient,
Well having read the Wiki article it doesn't really seem to say that to me (also some of the examples seem poorly researched). It seems closer to what Steven J. Gould covered in the "mis-measure of man" that social norms guide avenues of investigation and this focus can produce poor quality evidence which can be used by people looking to justify their cause and/or convince people who are not wary.
However what can be said that is that without cheating you actually CAN'T "produce" the evidence for any claim when they are judged by the same standard Your mistake here, and perhaps in life is assuming that all evidence is equal.
even if the evidence does not necessarily incontrovertibly entail the conclusions.
*rolls eyes* More weasel words...there is very little that wouldn't qualify there.
I love how people take a group of symptoms which could be explained at least a dozen different ways, observed in a terribly uncontrolled way but still yield an unwavering belief in the cause.
I like this quote: "Parents voted to protect their children's health and plug the computers back in with hardwires" however the picture from ctv.ca shows a bunch of students with iPads.
I don't think so. Price-fixing IMHO is when there is collusion between market participants. i.e. all sellers sell at a fixed rate or possibly when buyers and sellers have an undisclosed agreement to purchase at some rate.
Oh and "ask any..." is an argument by anonymous authority.
Generally I would agree that building isn't - these days - more cost effective than buying. However support is kind of an interesting facet and not nearly as straightforward as one thinks. I have a Sony laptop with a hugely expensive warranty. Sony's on-site support requires diagnosis over-the-phone, (about an hour all-told) a technician is shipped the part and dispatched (1-4 weeks from the date of the call and at least an hour of downtime for the actual repair). The technician has no authorization to request parts. So if they bring the wrong part then you have to call again. As it stands my laptop currently has serious problems - only two-thirds of the screen is visible - but this support system is so costly to my work day that it's easier to simply use an external monitor and wait until the unit gets replaced by IT at which point it can be sent to a Sony depot. While this is an extreme case, I would contend that most support contracts inflict a huge cost on my workday. Dell, for example would ship me a part which I could install myself however when something serious went wrong (motherboard, screen) I found myself borrowing laptops from the loaner pool. The only thing that made this low-cost was that they had some units which were almost the same model. Effectively I could pull my drive, insert it into the loaner, reboot twice (first time Windows would install drivers) and I'd be working again.
The point? The thing that made support low-cost to the worker was having similar spare machines commensurate with the number of machines likely to be failing at one time. Having an on-site, expedited warranty system was clearly and always secondary to having a cold spare So outside of having someone to blame (which sadly is more important than it should be) it's conceivable that, if you plan correctly you could end up with significantly better support than your average vendor could supply.
Interesting fact, as you move away from the desktop and into the server room - I'd argue that commodity hardware is even more cost effective. Having a cold spare on a 1U machine is at least conceivable and assuming you plan well would allow you faster replacements than even the most expensive warranty service. Not to mention that the number of hours a server is down is far more likely to inconvenience or enrage more people than a single desktop/laptop. As you move away from commodity hardware and into proprietary systems like blades - it becomes difficult to cost prohibitive to have a cold spare for everything. This also goes for hardware that is longer term. One time I noticed that I could purchase four of the controllers for our wireless networks on Ebay for the price of continuing one years support on the two we had in production. Last time one failed it took two days for the manufacturer to get one to us.
It's a crime because you're exploiting a weakness in a computer system, and cheating people out of cash
:-) )
There's nothing sacred about something being on a computer. There was a computer system competing for money, someone beat it and as a result got the money the computer's owners would have got. Considering that you have assumed that this constitutes cheating is essentially begging the question (unless you were elected as president of 'Those who get to say what is and is not cheating' and nobody told me - and even if you did I don't recognize your authority
So taking this situation at face value without your prejudices. This seems much more similar to someone offering a cash prize for defeating a computer in a Go tournament. The person who beat the computer would also be exploiting a weakness in a computer system and receiving money as a result.
This seems significantly different than stealing money from people for a number of reasons an easy one that you somehow didn't notice was "ownership". It's unreasonable to assume that the potential to make money in the market with a computer program constitutes ownership of said funds.
None of those are what Windows Mobile 7 is trying to compete with They're going after somewhere between iPhone and Android, which is a sweet spot .Viewing MS documents has been only passable at best and illustrated by the number of better document readers/editors which exist on the WM platform itself.
Doesn't "competition" require two parties? Leaving aside for the moment the ludicrous idea that MS doesn't want the money from current iPhone or Android users but rather on the seeming logical impossibility of the statement. Either MS is entering a market where there is no competition - in which case they are not "competing" with anyone. Or they are trying for the dollars currently going to either the iPhone or the Android - in which case it's more correct to say they are competing with *both*.
Even while Microsoft is now targeting more mainstream users it doesn't mean its not a good platform for business users. Integration with Office and other tools is great and WM7 doesn't have the childly feel that i associated with iPhone
I can't say anything about Mobile 7 but historically MS's integration with office has actually sucked pretty badly. Both in email synchronization which was so bad in the last generation of devices. Not only did we in IT drop them and move to iPhones but urged many of our existing Blackberry users to do the same.
The only good thing I have to say about the WM platform (or WinCE as it was called) over the past fifteen years was that there was a fair amount of developer tools available for free (even MS's eVC and eVB). However these days that's hardly a selling point.
XNA might be a selling point in the sense that it might be easier to port games over. Although XNA works well in moving a game using a gamepad from a windows PC to a XBOX360 - it's not clear that the same transition is reasonable between an XBOX and a phone. However as far as I can see the game market for the iPhone and other devices is rather different (puzzle games, novelty games that leverage some part of the UI ie. motion) that it probably doesn't matter.
Your thesis may be correct but your example seems moronic. Google realtime search actually doesn't appear to "predict" what I'm looking for but rather just updates my search page while it's idle. Google does provide auto-completion which is essentially an index of your prior searches and some list of prior search others have done. I don't see how an index into a list (or an updating screen) would have been so incomprehensible to you (or anyone) five years ago (especially considering that fifteen years ago the internet was all about 'push technologies').
Mood sensing stuff is a stupid idea because generally it's trying to model a behavior that is likely far more complicated than it's inputs. Which isn't a problem in and of itself - it's what computers do but what I think is key to making this kind of technology successful is that it is acting on voluntary input from the user from there the user can modulate their actions to get the desired response. i.e. Handwriting recognition became useful when people could change their writing to something the computer could predict reliably (i.e. graffiti).
Take your own examples...sensing you are overwhelmed with information isn't a "mood" it's a state based on a myriad of inputs, so is being "lost". The computer can look at your heart rate and perspiration but that doesn't tell it you are overwhelmed or lost. Attempting to do so will however cause the computer to change something that you likely didn't want changed and you have to deal with.
IMHO you haven't read enough negative stuff.
Possibly (depending on what is meant by 'all else'), but outside of labour I doubt that distinction would shows up very often. I suspect that we are talking about something like 20% per-cpu.
Ok all puns on "acid" aside (especially when you add adjectives like "big-iron"). The point of the article seems to be about scaling out - specifically with cheaper hardware. I agree that one's choice of tools is a business decision (so is everything in business) but it's not like using MySQL or postgres is somehow cost prohibitive.
Isn't that a very specific context though? The underlying assumption seems to be that there is one dataset per application. Which may well be the general case - in other words what is the "same way your application does but without mapping" when your applications are written in different frameworks, languages or when the data is accessed via say an reporting environment?
Probably not...and here's why.
It's not that they didn't have "modern science" - whatever that means. It's that there is no evidence of well controlled experimentation and statistical methods. Without those much of western medicine would be stuck in the stone age too. The only two compounds that I know of that showed empirical use in the history of Western medicine are Quinona bark as an anti-malarial and Salix for pain releif. However if you look at even the early accounts of Salix use you'll see that people like Rev. Stone who kept careful (but methodological retarded) records came to the conclusion that Salix could be used for Ague (fever) but if you do the math it's reasonable to believe that he never gave them a therapeutic dose for fever and his records don't really record much about pain (which is often tricky to measure anyway). That leaves us with Quinona which was fatal in about 20% of serious cases. That is - IMHO pretty close to the threshold that humans can detect without actually doing math.
Take a look at using ASA as intervention for preventing cardiac events - that had three or four small studies which all came up pretty inconclusive IIRC. It was only when *combining* the studies did we get a result that showed some effect.
This isn't cultural elitism just the acknowledgment that in order to use something intentionally you need large samples, good record keeping and at least some knowledge of probability.
Half the herbs on the shelf in GNC have peer reviewed double blind studies backing them which is really all the prescription drugs show.
Shananagans on two counts:
i) I think there is significant reason to doubt that you checked for studies with very much rigor.
ii) Even it you did check for some. It's not necessarily the same as what prescription drugs are required to show. I've read a number of journal articles on herbal remedies and what I tend to see are small-n, poorly controlled, terrible endpoint design...I could go on. Now sure this may be my sampling but the point here is that while there may be "evidence" for some effects of some herbal compounds. That's not the same as saying most herbal compounds have equivalent evidence to the vast majority of FDA passed drugs.
...the google motto. I mean like in the early days when Google was following it.
If you have a loud girl/boyfriend