It's not really 3D. It's just a visual illusion. It's just like those images that, when you look at them, appear to be moving though they're not -- that isn't a motion picture, though the picture appears to be undergoing motion.
You do realize that the same is true of movie frames, right?
I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
We are, as far as we know, the only species on the planet capable of doing the physics and chemistry to understand how CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere. That's a place to start.
Fear of hubris is for barbarians. We're better than that now.
There isn't an intelligent person the planet who denies that global warming is real. The debate is all about causation.
The deniers set up multiple goalposts. There are the ones who deny it's happening at all (a favorite tactic of this group is to start their time series with 1998, which was an unusally warm year, to insist that there's been no warming trend in the last 10^H^H11^H^H12 years) and then the "reasonable" ones who say it's happening but that human activity plays no part. This mirrors the pseudo-split between young earth creationists and "intelligent design" proponents almost exactly, and it's no surprise that there's a lot of crossover between the groups.
Don't confuse the "joint press conference structured for soundbites" that constitutes a modern political "debate" with actual structured debate. The former is useless, except as a venue for excesses of rhetoric. The latter can actually force people on both sides to come up with meaningful evidence and coherent arguments for their positions, and give the audience a solid basis for forming their own opinions.
I agree with your last paragraph, but the one before it represents absurd wishful thinking on the part of corporate IT management, not reality. The fact is that there is no off-the-shelf solution -- not from Oracle, nor from some project on Sourceforge -- that will not require "management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling" for any company of reasonable size.
Well, I like to develop locally using small data sets, then put the code on the server and let it crunch on the big data sets once it's done. And even "toy" data sets need to be pretty big if they're going to be useful for development. As a rule, if you can make code work well on your desktop, then you've done your job right; if you absolutely positively need thousands of cores to get through a reasonable amount of data in a reasonable time, then odds are you need to improve your algorithms. Local development is not only more convenient, it also forces a certain amount of discipline on the developer.
It depends on how you define "power." If it's in terms of the number of calculations per second the computer is capable of doing, then of course more cores equals more power. The question is whether you're going to be running software that uses that power. The sterotypical "I just want to surf the web and read e-mail" low-end user isn't going to, but then, that guy isn't in the target market for this machine.
In bioinformatics, many of the problem we work on are "embarrassingly parallel," and I can guarantee you that I'd have no problem keeping all 12 cores on this machine busy. But scientists are a tiny niche market, of course. Presumably the new Mac Pro is mainly being pitched, as previous machines in the lines have been, to graphics and video pros. Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.
You're right, of course, but remember that CEO hiring and firing decisions at huge companies are made by people who believe, or claim to believe, that top-level executives actually do meaningful work.
I know this is going to come off a bit trollish, but... do you have any knowledge of what the net neutrality debate is about? At all? Because what you wrote is absolutely irrelevant in this context.
No, if you or I stole that kind of money, we'd get a cell. (And yes, he stole it; Dell is a public corporation, ergo its cash reserves belong to the shareholders, not the CEO.) Michael Dell gets a "fine" which will hurt him about as much as losing a $5 bill would hurt the average Joe. "It's good to be the king!"
Re:IBM PCs compared extremely poorly with Amigas
on
The Amiga Turns 25
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
in the end, open architecture and expandability won
No, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" won, just as "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" tends to win today. It's really amazing to me how people continue to try to come up with technical justifications for behavior that's clearly driven by non-technical concerns.
Seriously, it's bad enough that we have a patent system that allows these patent trolls to exist at all, but it really looks to me like one judge is creating a favorable environment most of the patent troll lawsuits in the entire US (and, given that the US seems to be far and away the number one country for patent trolling, maybe most such lawsuits in the entire world.) Isn't there any way to fire this clown?
In US law, the justification for IP law comes from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, where its purpose and limitations are clearly spelled out.
In your world view, a business owner who hires a graphic design company to develop a logo and graphic identity for their company wouldn't be able to acquire the rights to the design and use them as they please. Likewise, a musician who hires a video production company and producer to make a music video for their song wouldn't be able to acquire the rights to the video.
Irrelevant. IP trolls are nothing like either of these examples.
I suspect you're perfectly well aware of both the Constitutional justification for copyrights and patents, and the extent of the abuse to which that innocuous little line has been subjected, but choose to pretend otherwise because you're hoping to join the trolls' ranks yourself one of these days. You might want to consider a more ethical line of work like, oh, say, bank robbery, but it's up to you.
That's completely irrelevant. If they own the rights to the content then they own the rights.
It's quite relevant if you consider the actual purpose of IP law as spelled out in the Constitution. We, the people, have an interest in protecting the rights of those of who actually produce useful content. We have no interest whatsoever in protecting the "rights" of those who buy old content and use it for trolling.
The smaller the gauge, the larger the bore diameter, and (generally speaking) the more powerful the shotgun. Period.
You screwed up. I did too, when talking about caliber, but I'm man enough to admit it. You're not. Instead you claim to be "technically accurate" while making multiple contradictory claims in the same post. Whatever. I'm done arguing with you, troll.
The caliber bit, I'll cop to -- as I said in reply to another post in the thread, by the convention I'm familiar with, "x caliber" = "x/100 inches," but that's apparently an informal usage and what it comes down to is that "22 caliber" and ".22 caliber" are both correct and mean the same thing.
But as for gauge, you have it exactly backwards. "The smaller the gauge of a shotgun the LESS powerful it is" is absolutely not true. Since you oh-so-helpfully linked to the Wiki article, you might want to actually go back and read it. Or try firing a 20-gauge shotgun, then a 12-gauge, and see for yourself.
By the convention I'm familiar with, "x caliber" = "x/100 inches"; thus a 22 caliber rifle fires a buller.22 inches in diameter, while a.22 caliber rifle would fire a bullet.0022 inches in diameter, i.e. a speck of dust. Looking around the web, though, I see that this may be incorrect; "22 caliber" (or 38 caliber, 45 caliber, etc.) is an informal usage and the complete caliber description includes the decimal point. My bad. Firearms and ammunition manufacturers seem to use the two interchangeably, based on a look around the web.
I am somewhat conflicted on the whole issue, but to me giving a government agency ANY authority over the content on the internet is a huge flashing red light and and potential slippery slope
And I agree with you. Fortunately, net neutrality has NOTHING AT ALL to do with content.
Net neutrality means this, and only this: all packets are created equal. Comcast has to treat packets originating from Google the same as those originating from Bing, and treat packets sent in response to http requests the same as packets sent in response to ftp requests. That's all it is. The whole thing, right there. Content has absolutely nothing to do with it. And the ONLY role the FCC has in this is enforcement of this simple rule.
How can you describe this as anything other than the government deciding what's allowed and what's not allowed on the Internet?
Well, you can start by realizing that net neutrality has nothing at all to do with "the government deciding what's allowed and what's not allowed on the Internet," and go from there.
Honestly, do these people believe that anyone will swallow lies like that?
Given the hysteria that greets any attempt at ensuring net neutrality, the answer to your question appears to be "yes." And I'm not just talking about telecom industry shills and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, either. Read any story that mentions net neutrality on Slashdot -- where people really ought to know better -- and you'll see that many people have swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. There are a lot of people, including many technically literate people, who actually believe that (a) net neutrality decreases broadband users' freedom of choice, (b) telling telcos that they can't discriminate based on packet origin will somehow morph into forcing discrimination based on content, or (c) some combination of the above. And it seems that there is simply no amount of explanation of what net neutrality actually is, and how it works, which will get through to people who think like this.
The counter-argument to that is that the intense, long-term training needed to produce longbowmen could only happen on a large scale when the nobility tolerated it, and IIRC there were several points in English history when the practice was suppressed -- a decision that was inevitably reversed when the monarchy realized that having a plentiful supply of trained archers was the only way England could hope to balance out the manpower advantage of its Continental, especially French, likely opponents in the next war. IOW, the longbow didn't exactly turn peasants into soldiers, it just made it possible to have peasants who were also soldiers, provided they trained nearly from birth in the same way the nobility trained to be knights.
I'm not sure what a guage is, but a.20 gauge shotgun, if such a thing existed, would probably tear your shoulder off with recoil. A 20 gauge shotgun is quite controllable and suitable for rabbit-hunting.
and squirrels with my.22 caliber rifle
On the other hand, a.22 caliber rifle (again, if such a thing existed) would pose little threat to even the smallest squirrel -- the critter might feel a bit of a sting when you hit it, but that's about all. A 22 caliber rifle, of course, will do for a squirrel quite nicely.
Maybe if Crytek hired people with three digit IQs they could make some fun games; this guy's obviously one of the 50% of humanity with a two digit quotient.
Heh. On the couple of pages, at least, all of them are for the degree, not the disease. Long-term grad students might argue that there's not really much difference...
If you want to get away from the micro-scale side of biology but still use some of your skills and experience, you might consider getting into medical informatics. There's an enormous amount of R&D to be done in the areas of electronic medical records, automated order entry, clinical surveillance, drug interaction databases, etc. If you're interested in sociology and economics, data mining to determine the costs and benefits of health care is a big deal right now, for obvious reasons. If you want to go the AI route, then semi-automated diagnosis and "personalized medicine" are also very promising fields. And there's no shortage of degree programs if you want to get a Master's; a quick Google search on "medical informatics MS" turns up tons of results.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really 3D. It's just a visual illusion. It's just like those images that, when you look at them, appear to be moving though they're not -- that isn't a motion picture, though the picture appears to be undergoing motion.
You do realize that the same is true of movie frames, right?
I mean who are we to think we have that much power over the entire planet?
We are, as far as we know, the only species on the planet capable of doing the physics and chemistry to understand how CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere. That's a place to start.
Fear of hubris is for barbarians. We're better than that now.
There isn't an intelligent person the planet who denies that global warming is real. The debate is all about causation.
The deniers set up multiple goalposts. There are the ones who deny it's happening at all (a favorite tactic of this group is to start their time series with 1998, which was an unusally warm year, to insist that there's been no warming trend in the last 10^H^H11^H^H12 years) and then the "reasonable" ones who say it's happening but that human activity plays no part. This mirrors the pseudo-split between young earth creationists and "intelligent design" proponents almost exactly, and it's no surprise that there's a lot of crossover between the groups.
Don't confuse the "joint press conference structured for soundbites" that constitutes a modern political "debate" with actual structured debate. The former is useless, except as a venue for excesses of rhetoric. The latter can actually force people on both sides to come up with meaningful evidence and coherent arguments for their positions, and give the audience a solid basis for forming their own opinions.
I agree with your last paragraph, but the one before it represents absurd wishful thinking on the part of corporate IT management, not reality. The fact is that there is no off-the-shelf solution -- not from Oracle, nor from some project on Sourceforge -- that will not require "management, staff, and gurus to roll their own and keep them rolling" for any company of reasonable size.
Well, I like to develop locally using small data sets, then put the code on the server and let it crunch on the big data sets once it's done. And even "toy" data sets need to be pretty big if they're going to be useful for development. As a rule, if you can make code work well on your desktop, then you've done your job right; if you absolutely positively need thousands of cores to get through a reasonable amount of data in a reasonable time, then odds are you need to improve your algorithms. Local development is not only more convenient, it also forces a certain amount of discipline on the developer.
It depends on how you define "power." If it's in terms of the number of calculations per second the computer is capable of doing, then of course more cores equals more power. The question is whether you're going to be running software that uses that power. The sterotypical "I just want to surf the web and read e-mail" low-end user isn't going to, but then, that guy isn't in the target market for this machine.
In bioinformatics, many of the problem we work on are "embarrassingly parallel," and I can guarantee you that I'd have no problem keeping all 12 cores on this machine busy. But scientists are a tiny niche market, of course. Presumably the new Mac Pro is mainly being pitched, as previous machines in the lines have been, to graphics and video pros. Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
A new CEO might excite the board and top investors a little, perhaps shuffle some HR/management policies around a little. But in the end, the same issues that are inherent in being a company of that size are still going to be there.
You're right, of course, but remember that CEO hiring and firing decisions at huge companies are made by people who believe, or claim to believe, that top-level executives actually do meaningful work.
I know this is going to come off a bit trollish, but ... do you have any knowledge of what the net neutrality debate is about? At all? Because what you wrote is absolutely irrelevant in this context.
No, if you or I stole that kind of money, we'd get a cell. (And yes, he stole it; Dell is a public corporation, ergo its cash reserves belong to the shareholders, not the CEO.) Michael Dell gets a "fine" which will hurt him about as much as losing a $5 bill would hurt the average Joe. "It's good to be the king!"
in the end, open architecture and expandability won
No, "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" won, just as "nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" tends to win today. It's really amazing to me how people continue to try to come up with technical justifications for behavior that's clearly driven by non-technical concerns.
... it's the only way to be sure.
Seriously, it's bad enough that we have a patent system that allows these patent trolls to exist at all, but it really looks to me like one judge is creating a favorable environment most of the patent troll lawsuits in the entire US (and, given that the US seems to be far and away the number one country for patent trolling, maybe most such lawsuits in the entire world.) Isn't there any way to fire this clown?
There is no "IP law" in the Constitution.
In US law, the justification for IP law comes from Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution, where its purpose and limitations are clearly spelled out.
In your world view, a business owner who hires a graphic design company to develop a logo and graphic identity for their company wouldn't be able to acquire the rights to the design and use them as they please. Likewise, a musician who hires a video production company and producer to make a music video for their song wouldn't be able to acquire the rights to the video.
Irrelevant. IP trolls are nothing like either of these examples.
I suspect you're perfectly well aware of both the Constitutional justification for copyrights and patents, and the extent of the abuse to which that innocuous little line has been subjected, but choose to pretend otherwise because you're hoping to join the trolls' ranks yourself one of these days. You might want to consider a more ethical line of work like, oh, say, bank robbery, but it's up to you.
That's completely irrelevant. If they own the rights to the content then they own the rights.
It's quite relevant if you consider the actual purpose of IP law as spelled out in the Constitution. We, the people, have an interest in protecting the rights of those of who actually produce useful content. We have no interest whatsoever in protecting the "rights" of those who buy old content and use it for trolling.
The smaller the gauge, the larger the bore diameter, and (generally speaking) the more powerful the shotgun. Period.
You screwed up. I did too, when talking about caliber, but I'm man enough to admit it. You're not. Instead you claim to be "technically accurate" while making multiple contradictory claims in the same post. Whatever. I'm done arguing with you, troll.
The caliber bit, I'll cop to -- as I said in reply to another post in the thread, by the convention I'm familiar with, "x caliber" = "x/100 inches," but that's apparently an informal usage and what it comes down to is that "22 caliber" and ".22 caliber" are both correct and mean the same thing.
But as for gauge, you have it exactly backwards. "The smaller the gauge of a shotgun the LESS powerful it is" is absolutely not true. Since you oh-so-helpfully linked to the Wiki article, you might want to actually go back and read it. Or try firing a 20-gauge shotgun, then a 12-gauge, and see for yourself.
By the convention I'm familiar with, "x caliber" = "x/100 inches"; thus a 22 caliber rifle fires a buller .22 inches in diameter, while a .22 caliber rifle would fire a bullet .0022 inches in diameter, i.e. a speck of dust. Looking around the web, though, I see that this may be incorrect; "22 caliber" (or 38 caliber, 45 caliber, etc.) is an informal usage and the complete caliber description includes the decimal point. My bad. Firearms and ammunition manufacturers seem to use the two interchangeably, based on a look around the web.
I am somewhat conflicted on the whole issue, but to me giving a government agency ANY authority over the content on the internet is a huge flashing red light and and potential slippery slope
And I agree with you. Fortunately, net neutrality has NOTHING AT ALL to do with content.
Net neutrality means this, and only this: all packets are created equal. Comcast has to treat packets originating from Google the same as those originating from Bing, and treat packets sent in response to http requests the same as packets sent in response to ftp requests. That's all it is. The whole thing, right there. Content has absolutely nothing to do with it. And the ONLY role the FCC has in this is enforcement of this simple rule.
How can you describe this as anything other than the government deciding what's allowed and what's not allowed on the Internet?
Well, you can start by realizing that net neutrality has nothing at all to do with "the government deciding what's allowed and what's not allowed on the Internet," and go from there.
Honestly, do these people believe that anyone will swallow lies like that?
Given the hysteria that greets any attempt at ensuring net neutrality, the answer to your question appears to be "yes." And I'm not just talking about telecom industry shills and their bought-and-paid-for politicians, either. Read any story that mentions net neutrality on Slashdot -- where people really ought to know better -- and you'll see that many people have swallowed the propaganda hook, line, and sinker. There are a lot of people, including many technically literate people, who actually believe that (a) net neutrality decreases broadband users' freedom of choice, (b) telling telcos that they can't discriminate based on packet origin will somehow morph into forcing discrimination based on content, or (c) some combination of the above. And it seems that there is simply no amount of explanation of what net neutrality actually is, and how it works, which will get through to people who think like this.
The counter-argument to that is that the intense, long-term training needed to produce longbowmen could only happen on a large scale when the nobility tolerated it, and IIRC there were several points in English history when the practice was suppressed -- a decision that was inevitably reversed when the monarchy realized that having a plentiful supply of trained archers was the only way England could hope to balance out the manpower advantage of its Continental, especially French, likely opponents in the next war. IOW, the longbow didn't exactly turn peasants into soldiers, it just made it possible to have peasants who were also soldiers, provided they trained nearly from birth in the same way the nobility trained to be knights.
hunting rabbits with my .20 guage shotgun
I'm not sure what a guage is, but a .20 gauge shotgun, if such a thing existed, would probably tear your shoulder off with recoil. A 20 gauge shotgun is quite controllable and suitable for rabbit-hunting.
and squirrels with my .22 caliber rifle
On the other hand, a .22 caliber rifle (again, if such a thing existed) would pose little threat to even the smallest squirrel -- the critter might feel a bit of a sting when you hit it, but that's about all. A 22 caliber rifle, of course, will do for a squirrel quite nicely.
Maybe if Crytek hired people with three digit IQs they could make some fun games; this guy's obviously one of the 50% of humanity with a two digit quotient.
Beam. Eye. Pot. Kettle.
Argh. "On the first couple of pages ..." etc.
Heh. On the couple of pages, at least, all of them are for the degree, not the disease. Long-term grad students might argue that there's not really much difference ...
If you want to get away from the micro-scale side of biology but still use some of your skills and experience, you might consider getting into medical informatics. There's an enormous amount of R&D to be done in the areas of electronic medical records, automated order entry, clinical surveillance, drug interaction databases, etc. If you're interested in sociology and economics, data mining to determine the costs and benefits of health care is a big deal right now, for obvious reasons. If you want to go the AI route, then semi-automated diagnosis and "personalized medicine" are also very promising fields. And there's no shortage of degree programs if you want to get a Master's; a quick Google search on "medical informatics MS" turns up tons of results.