I like your comment about Ruby. I'm an "older programmer", and yes, I can make a C or C++ version that's 50 times faster. But oh my god is Ruby so much easier to program in. People like to use Perl for parsing stuff; I learned Ruby instead, but the principle is the same. The amount of coding (and thinking) requires is a tiny fraction of what's necessary to do this stuff using STL. So, when I'm doing scientific computing, and something's going to run for days, yeah, use C... or even Fortran. But when it's time to parse some results, I hack together a Ruby program. That program is going to be mostly I/O bound anyhow, so C won't be much faster, and even if it were, I'm just going to go on to some other aspect of the problem while waiting on the parsed results. Or have a break. Or think about the problem I'm trying to solve, rather than wasting brain energy on how to code something ancillary. This is particularly applicable to one-off programs, where the development time is a substantial portion of the time required to get to an answer.
I actually have chronic fatigue syndrome (with gradual improvement over the last 15 years), so I really have to actively budget my energy. Part of my success as an engneer (and now as an academic) has come from finding least-effort solutions. When solving a new problem, my first goal is to find a minimal solution that meets the requirements well and correctly. There's always time later to make a faster revision, where optimizations are made based on actual user feedback, rather than just guessing.
So, it comes to pass that it is "about" 6PM in the timezone where Harold Camping is, and nothing happens to him. What will Harold Camping do?
Things he's likely to do: (a) Figure he got his calculations wrong and start over on his math. (b) Worry a little that perhaps he wasn't as Christian as he thought he was supposed to be, but then dismiss the idea immediately. (c) More steadfastly ignore all naysayers, insisting that his beliefs are sound and that there WILL be a rapture. (d) Shove his head further into the sand.
Rational things he ought to do but won't: (a) Take seriously the idea that he wasn't as Christian as he was supposed to be. (b) Take seriously the idea that the Rapture was a mythological idea to begin with and isn't going to happen.
Things he's probably not smart enough to do, right or wrong: (a) Reinterpret the Rapture in a more philosophical light, suggesting that the rapture did indeed happen; it just doesn't LOOK like it did to the untrained eye. In fact, all raptured people have been transformed in some way and are now "in heaven", which happens to be a parallel dimension to Earth, and raptured people are straddling that dimensional boundary. (b) Reinterpret his entire belief system and consider that perhaps he was taking certain Christian scriptures or traditions too seriously. (c) Take seriously the works of scholars that have suggested that Revelations describes events that already happened before the book was written.
The thing you need to realize is that it's not about needing anything. This is no different from taking an Emacs user and forcing them to use vim or pico. They're used to working in a certain way, and changing that on them is a huge distraction, because now they have to think about the environment instead of the engineering problem. Maybe after a while, they'd get used to a change, but they came to rely on something (a particular editor, OS, office chair, or monitor arrangement) probably because it helped them function more effectively. Thus, if you change it, it's not just a distraction, but it's also an impedement to their workflow.
Some people write huge amounts of code and then only compile occasionally. They'll do well with a slower computer. Then there are developers that recompile every five seconds, because they like to tweak and compile and tweak and compile. They actually NEED a much faster computer, because their productivity is siginificantly affected by compile time. (Amdahl's law for coders!) Rather than force everyone into a cookie-cutter way of doing things, employers should adapt to what makes their employees most efficient.
Why so stingy that you can't give this guy a second monitor? Is it that or lay people off? Why are you fucking around in his office in the first place? Yes, the company owns the office, but people need a place to get comfortable, where things are familiar. IMHO, entering into someone else's workspace without permission is incredibly rude. If you're in there, you better be dropping off a package and don't even think about moving anything around.
It's like when you have 100 tabs open in your web browser, and, besides slashdot, they're all relevant to your work, and they took a lot of googling to find. However, they're relevance is transient, so you didn't bother to bookmark them. Then while you're out at lunch, the sysadmin decides to update some software on your computer, and when you come back, your windows are closed and your history is cleared, and you have to waste hours finding all this crap again.
I guess it should come as no surprise to me that managers fail to empathize with their employees or recognize that everyone prefers to operate in different ways.
"Do developers really need a second monitor?" is SOOOO totally the wrong question.
It's Microsoft's fault for being anticompetitive. True. It's also the people's fault for being uneducated about computers But that's not a reasonable statement to make, because not everyone can specialize in computers. So, this is, in a way, a consequence of the free market, and we can blame some of this on the conservatives who refused to apply antitrust law when appropriate. The 1980's and 1990's were a time when the personal computer was just becoming commonplace, and we had to go through that growing pain to learn some lessons about things we could not have anticipated. Many lessons have been learned, and things are improving. Even Microsoft is getting on board with ODF (halfheartedly, but still...), and the've managed to make WIndows 7 kinda usable. In 100 years, the problems that occurred with the rise of the personal computer will be something to laugh at.
As for Miguel de Icaza, I think people are being too unfair to him. While it's true that C# and.Net are copycats of Java, there's been time to learn some lessons and improve the technology..Net is better technology than JVM. All Miguel did was make a Free Software clone of.Net. Microsoft's embrace and extend was turned around on them, and they had some of THEIR technology cloned. And it was done because they CLAIMED that this could be done royalty-free. Without Mono,.Net would be an even more closed platform, so I think it's a good thing that an alternative VM was developed. In a way, it works to keep Microsoft honest. And indeed, their claim of it being royalty-free has held up so far. Because Microsoft have 'promised' not to sue anyone, it's unlikely they could win in a court case. It's called estoppel. If you act on good faith based on what they've said (even if it's not on a contract), then they can't change their minds.
Yeah, but it's easy to make such assumptions about people who are too afraid to reveal their identity when flaming. They're called Anonymous Cowards for a reason. I've actually accomplished things in my life, so what I say has some weight. If I stick my foot in my mouth, I'm no worse than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and countless other famous people who regularly say foolish-sounding things. Foolish words or not, they go back to work the next day and continue being successful. And then there are those who have no accomplishments to fall on. If they have a reputation at all, it's purely from words they've written. It's much easier to topple that house of cards and lose face. There are two reasons why someone would post as an AC on slashdot: (1) too lazy to create an account, or (2) aware that their paper-thin reputation is at risk when they take the risk of posting a comment that may reflect negatively upon them. Most likely, it's (2). Potentially, there's (3) someone who might get into trouble with their employer for making harsh comments on the internet, but those people are usually smart enough to temper their words and be polite.
So, going back to this comment about getting out of the lab... yes, GUI and system software development IS HARD. That's why the good engineers get paid $75/hour (when we're really desperate for work) to do it. Stop complaining about how hard it is and start using your brain to come up with clever solutions to hard problems.
Unlike basement-dwelling ACs like yourself, I've held a job. I own a house and two cars. Indeed, I'm often bombarded to do consulting work, which I had to turn down far too often in order to work on my doctoral degree. You, sir, make too many assumptions. I've been in the real world. Unlike many software engineers, I understand the value of marketing and sales departments and understand how engineering work must have business value. I've taken my industry experience into academia, and I've used it to my advantage.
Interestingly, the OGD1 board produced by the Open Graphics Project is a significantly more powerful device. The problem is that very few OGD1 boards were produces, due to lack of funding.
I'm a chip designer. While I've always been very good at software, I prefer hardware, and as I have moved more and more in that direction, I have come to feel that software stuff is mostly bullshit. Software is the stuff you write to give high level direction to the hardware. So why is everyone doing such a crap job of it? Ok, I've written GUI-based apps, plenty, and it's not easy to make a really intuitive interface. But I still can't see how CEOs of software companies like Microsoft can look at themselves in the mirror. They spend billions of dollars developing software that is absolutely horrid at automating the most basic of tasks. Computers are fantastic at fast, repetitive tasks. Making your PC connect to wireless reliably is one such task. So why can't they make it work right 100% of the time? I should never ever have to type in something that the computer can look up for itself. I should never have to do maintenance that's obvious. There are many unexpected things that happen as a result of bugs (these are unintentional) and hardware failure (shit happens). These are the times when someone has to look under the hood, because the result is largely unanticipated. This is reasonable. However, if there is something in a textbook that you can teach to someone, then it's KNOWN, and it should damn well be automated. If you can make a human procedure for it, you can make a software procedure for it. (And I'm talking about simple stuff, not computer vision or SPAM detection, although SPAM detection is automated and quite good. Irony?)
Not EVERY action can be anticipated, otherwise there would be no need for user interfaces at all. It's the things that have to be done the same way every time for everyone that should be automated. Interestingly, some software is trying to be smart and anticipate. Like automatic text substitution and spellchecking. Those don't always work right, but at least they're trying, and they're getting better at it. Similiarly, there's the way browser URL bars and search bars try to anticipate what you're trying to type and give you suggestions based on what others have done. Those are awesome (pun intended).
I actually use the command line a lot. For instance, I compile stuff using gcc. That's me doing development, not admining the machine. I also sometimes do stuff using bash that could be done using Finder (yes, I use a Mac, but I have Windows in a VM, and I have a Linux server at home). Again, that's me doing something I want to do with my files. But for the most part, you should just be able to turn your computer on, and have it get the hell out of the way of what you want to do. Want to type email? You select the Mail app, click the Compose button, and off you go. Aside from perhaps a few security measures (some of which are also lazy bullshit in the way they're designed), nothing should get in the way of that action.
Now, some of you out there like mucking about with the innards of their operating system. And that's cool for you. I know about this stuff do, and I do it better than most software engineers or CS grads. (Indeed, someone must know this, so that someone can write the OS and program the automated procedures.) But for MOST people, including those of us who have Ph.D.s in Computer Science, we have OTHER WORK TO DO. And this software bullshit (or bullshit software) is just SLOWING US DOWN.
Not so much. I remember the days when WordPerfect dominated over Word, both the DOS and Windows versions. WordPerfect COULD be faster, but tended to bog down as documents filled with gobs and gobs of superfluous inline formatting codes. I've seen documents that had runs of bold-on/bold-off/bold-on/bold-off, etc. (Actually, I've seen the same thing in Dreamweaver, with loads of superfluous markup.) Word, on the other hand, stored its formatting in a tree of data structure, which made it relatively immune to this kind of accumulating kruft. As a result of having inline codes, WordPerfect often had to do a great deal more computation to figure out how to dynamically format text on the screen, so text could fall behind typing. This was a big deal in the era of 33MHz 386's and 40MHz 286's.
These days, it's not such a big deal. Even if one word processor used 5 times as much CPU time as another per keypress, it would still be idle 99.9999% of the time. Then we get junk like Dreamweaver, bogging down web browsers and networks with HTML files twice as large as they need to be.
The same could be said for people who major in Math, English, Philosophy, and Religion (not the same as Ministry). People choose to go into fields they enjoy or feel compelled by. Not all of them are huge money-makers.
Of course, you're an Anonymous Coward who is just jeallous that this other person even HAS a job, unlike your basement-dwelling self. This person chose a career path that makes little money. You're unemployed and living with your mom due to sheer irremedial incompetence.
This is definitely an interesting approach they're taking.
In my research group, we're looking at a different tactic called near-threshold computing. Say you have a 32nm device that uses 100W at 1V. If you were to run it at 400mV, it would use about 1W, but logic slows by a factor of 10. So that 100X reduction in power translates into a 10X reduction in energy.
Fast-forward to 11nm, where the transistor density is 10X what it is at 32nm. Nominal voltage won't go down much, so without doing something drastic, your chip would use a kilowatt. To run the whole device, you have to lower the voltage a lot.
Unfortunately, that's not the whole story, which is where we're focused. Process variation is transistor parameter variations that are the result of manufacturing difficulties. For instance, we're doing sub-wavelength lithography, which makes all edges really fuzzy. And transistors are now small enough that dopant atoms range in the tens. So if one transistor has 20 boron atoms, and one nearby has 25, then that's a 25% variation in threshold voltage. These problems are getting progressively worse as transistors scale down. And the effect is amplified when you lower voltage. Die-to-die and within-die variation are massive at that scale and voltage. Generally, your whole processor's frequency is limited by the slowest circuit path on the chip. At smaller geometry and lower voltage, the speed difference between the slowest and fastest paths grows. The faster paths use more power, which is also a problem.
We tend to focus on architectural solutions to this. Let the circuits fail... then catch and correct the errors. I published a paper in MICRO 2010, where we lower voltage to a SRAM caches. (Google for >.) At some point, the bit cell failures become catastrophic, so we applied forward error correction. The result is that at a voltage where an unprotected cache is completely useless (so many errors that nearly every cache line has more bad cells than standard ECC can handle), our approach salvages 50% of the nominal voltage cache capacity.
Leaving your wifi open is a security nightmare and an invitation for abuse. Someone hogging your bandwidth is the least of your worries. Before long someone is going to hack your own computers and download kiddy porn on your connection. Law enforcement won't accept "intentionally left it open for the good of mankind" as a legitimate excuse. Rather, they'll tell you that you should have known better and you asked for the trouble you got into. Why do you want to make life difficult for yourself?
If you have a few neighbors that you trust and want to share your connection with, then give them your access key. This way, you can know exactly who is doing what because you have their hostnames and MAC addresses.
I recall when iOS4 came out, there were people still in contract with 3G iPhones. I'm not sure if there still are at this point, bit it's kindof a lousy thing to do, to take a phone that was slow to begin with and make it even slower.
And they're funding the development from all the phishing scams. http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/RTjp4tv83B4/fbi-businesses-lost-11m-over-12-months-to-china-based-phishers.ars
Re:RTFA? Oh right you didn't.
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Is Sugar Toxic?
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Something similar has been done. I don't recall exactly where. Perhaps North Carolina. Anyhow, I saw it on the Discovery Channel, and they had interviews with kids and stuff. There was a highschool where the lunch menu was replaced with healthy stuff like a salad bar, etc. Behavioral problems declined, absenteeism declined, grades improved, etc. Instead of pizza and McDonalds, the kids ate healthier, and lo and behold, they felt better.
I've encountered a few news articles about young mothers diluting their babys' formula because they thought it would make it last longer. That's obviously absurd. At the very least, the baby would just urinate more and want to drink more frequently. But it's worse than that. Apparently, a newborn's kidneys cannot filter out water quickly enough. IIRC, one article was about a baby who died, and another was about one who nearly died. Diluting formula is child endangerment!
I haven't heard of this either. I have heard of genetic modifications making corn more allergenic. But that's mostly because both my wife and daughter have bad reactions to corn. So my research is therefore biased. But it isn't that hard to google and find people complaining of corn giving them reflux or reflux-like symptoms. (In this case, we think it's causing tissue inflammation of the stomach, forcing acid into the esophagus.)
I founded the Open Graphics Project. Our objective was to develop an open source graphics card. At the time, no GPU maker was releasing specs that would allow FOSS developers to write good drivers. This started in 2004, with a lot of attention and excitement. Being the sort to DO, rather than just complain, and also being a graphics chip designer, I decided that the open approach might be the solution. There were multiple slashdot articles, interviews, and a good deal of hardware design and software was developed.
It's now 2011, and you most likely have never heard of the Open Graphics Project. Also, it's 2011, and most other open hardware projects have come and gone or are just limping along.
Why is this? Because nobody wants to provide the one thing that makes or breaks an open hardware project: Money.
Building hardware costs money. Designing it is hard enough, but we got that accomplished. It took until 2009 before the OGP managed to actually build our prototype hardware in quantities that we could lend and sell, and this was because we got donations from the Linux Fund.
Why does no one put up money? Because it's (rightfully so) too much of a risk. If you could predict that one project or another would succeed, you might invest, especially if you knew that you'd get some kind of return on your investment (besides "sponsor"). But you can't make that prediction, and it's foolish for you to throw money at every fly-by-night project that comes along. And thus, open hardware projects die, except those that are backed by someone who already has money. The problem is that most of THOSE people aren't willing to "give away" their designs. Conundrum.
Some friends and I have some solutions we're working on. Watch this space for late Summer 2011.:)
Seriously. I'm a demanding user, so I got a maxed-out 2011 MacBook Pro. Now, with a blazingly fast CPU and 8GB of RAM, it's evident that the main thing limiting the speed of this computer is the mechanical hard drive. I just didn't want to spend an extra $1000 on an SSD. In 10 years, a 1/2 TB SSD will be affordable.
Whenever it comes to light that some new drug has caused harm to a lot of people, the response is that they are evil and should have known better. Blah. Blah. I'm not saying I disagree, but it's important to put things into perspective.
Pharmaceutical companies are businesses dedicated to making a profit. That is all. It just happens to be that the products they are pedaling are chemicals that affect the body. While it may be that some individuals working there care about the potential negative effects of a drug, there is a disconnect between those people who understand the drug and those who market it. Those selling it assume that the scientists understand all the effects and have done adequate testing. But this is impossible, because you can't get large enough sample sizes, and the scientists are sometimes forced to falsify their results, or have it falsified for them before publication. Drug trials are not conducted as a means to ensure safety of the drug -- that obscures the motivation. Drug companies are strictly liable for the effects of their drugs (except for vaccines, where there's a centralized fund), so drug trials are conducted purely as a means to ensure profitability by lowering the probability of being sued, so that the damages paid out are less than the profit margin. It's purely a statistics game.
This kind of numbers game happens in other industries. For instance, there was the Fort Pinto. It was found during initial testing that in a collision above 25mph, the gas tank would rupture, increasing the chances of a fire. Ford business gurus decided that the cost of the lawsuits would be less than the cost of fixing the problem. The rest is history. And Ford to this day continues to make similar compromises, resulting in unnecessary death and injury.
But as a result of these business tactics, auto makers and pharm companies are more profitable than they would be if they were more careful. And this is what makes shareholders happy.
People like to point out excessively philosophical tripe like that gravity is a matter of faith. You have to have faith that gravity that works now will work tomorrow. That's bullshit. Gravity is a demonstrable fact. What you might have faith in is that the MATH we use to MODEL gravity. You would have faith that if you used that mathematical model, that it is adequate for what you're applying to. In other words, what you have faith in is the scientists who created the model and your ability to apply it properly.
You might also talk about the scientific method. It's not something we can prove. It's an axiom. Some of us have faith that the scientific method is a good way to discover things. Others of us have seen it work well so many times that it's no longer a matter of faith. Then all we're left with is having faith that other scientists are doing it properly.
I do not have or even need faith in "Science." I have faith in Scientists and their results. And sometimes my faith is tested, due to occasional incompetence.
It's too bad they didn't or else they wouldn't have a mixed-up impression of what Satanism is. It's basically hedonistic humanism with a license to destroy those who get in the way of your fun. This is doesn't necessarily make it BETTER, but it's important to realize that most (many? some?) Satanists don't really believe in Satan as a real being, although they may believe in Satan as an archetype or metaphor. (BTW, Shatan was a god in the ancient Hebrew pantheon (perhaps equivalent to Loki). You knew that ancient Hebrew religion was really polytheistic and it was later pasted over and reinterpreted as montheistic, didn't you?)
My point is that it pays to understand what you're up against, and I often think that Christians use "Satanism" incorrectly. They're battling a strawman.
Back when I first started using a Mac, the only nEdit I could get required X11 (so copy/paste doesn't integrate well), and the hotkeys were not very Mac-like. Are you saying that there is now a Cocoa port of Lesstif and this has changed?
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I like your comment about Ruby. I'm an "older programmer", and yes, I can make a C or C++ version that's 50 times faster. But oh my god is Ruby so much easier to program in. People like to use Perl for parsing stuff; I learned Ruby instead, but the principle is the same. The amount of coding (and thinking) requires is a tiny fraction of what's necessary to do this stuff using STL. So, when I'm doing scientific computing, and something's going to run for days, yeah, use C... or even Fortran. But when it's time to parse some results, I hack together a Ruby program. That program is going to be mostly I/O bound anyhow, so C won't be much faster, and even if it were, I'm just going to go on to some other aspect of the problem while waiting on the parsed results. Or have a break. Or think about the problem I'm trying to solve, rather than wasting brain energy on how to code something ancillary. This is particularly applicable to one-off programs, where the development time is a substantial portion of the time required to get to an answer.
I actually have chronic fatigue syndrome (with gradual improvement over the last 15 years), so I really have to actively budget my energy. Part of my success as an engneer (and now as an academic) has come from finding least-effort solutions. When solving a new problem, my first goal is to find a minimal solution that meets the requirements well and correctly. There's always time later to make a faster revision, where optimizations are made based on actual user feedback, rather than just guessing.
So, it comes to pass that it is "about" 6PM in the timezone where Harold Camping is, and nothing happens to him. What will Harold Camping do?
Things he's likely to do:
(a) Figure he got his calculations wrong and start over on his math.
(b) Worry a little that perhaps he wasn't as Christian as he thought he was supposed to be, but then dismiss the idea immediately.
(c) More steadfastly ignore all naysayers, insisting that his beliefs are sound and that there WILL be a rapture.
(d) Shove his head further into the sand.
Rational things he ought to do but won't:
(a) Take seriously the idea that he wasn't as Christian as he was supposed to be.
(b) Take seriously the idea that the Rapture was a mythological idea to begin with and isn't going to happen.
Things he's probably not smart enough to do, right or wrong:
(a) Reinterpret the Rapture in a more philosophical light, suggesting that the rapture did indeed happen; it just doesn't LOOK like it did to the untrained eye. In fact, all raptured people have been transformed in some way and are now "in heaven", which happens to be a parallel dimension to Earth, and raptured people are straddling that dimensional boundary.
(b) Reinterpret his entire belief system and consider that perhaps he was taking certain Christian scriptures or traditions too seriously.
(c) Take seriously the works of scholars that have suggested that Revelations describes events that already happened before the book was written.
What else will Harold Camping do?
But where do they make balloons?
The thing you need to realize is that it's not about needing anything. This is no different from taking an Emacs user and forcing them to use vim or pico. They're used to working in a certain way, and changing that on them is a huge distraction, because now they have to think about the environment instead of the engineering problem. Maybe after a while, they'd get used to a change, but they came to rely on something (a particular editor, OS, office chair, or monitor arrangement) probably because it helped them function more effectively. Thus, if you change it, it's not just a distraction, but it's also an impedement to their workflow.
Some people write huge amounts of code and then only compile occasionally. They'll do well with a slower computer. Then there are developers that recompile every five seconds, because they like to tweak and compile and tweak and compile. They actually NEED a much faster computer, because their productivity is siginificantly affected by compile time. (Amdahl's law for coders!) Rather than force everyone into a cookie-cutter way of doing things, employers should adapt to what makes their employees most efficient.
Why so stingy that you can't give this guy a second monitor? Is it that or lay people off? Why are you fucking around in his office in the first place? Yes, the company owns the office, but people need a place to get comfortable, where things are familiar. IMHO, entering into someone else's workspace without permission is incredibly rude. If you're in there, you better be dropping off a package and don't even think about moving anything around.
It's like when you have 100 tabs open in your web browser, and, besides slashdot, they're all relevant to your work, and they took a lot of googling to find. However, they're relevance is transient, so you didn't bother to bookmark them. Then while you're out at lunch, the sysadmin decides to update some software on your computer, and when you come back, your windows are closed and your history is cleared, and you have to waste hours finding all this crap again.
I guess it should come as no surprise to me that managers fail to empathize with their employees or recognize that everyone prefers to operate in different ways.
"Do developers really need a second monitor?" is SOOOO totally the wrong question.
It's Microsoft's fault for being anticompetitive. True. It's also the people's fault for being uneducated about computers But that's not a reasonable statement to make, because not everyone can specialize in computers. So, this is, in a way, a consequence of the free market, and we can blame some of this on the conservatives who refused to apply antitrust law when appropriate. The 1980's and 1990's were a time when the personal computer was just becoming commonplace, and we had to go through that growing pain to learn some lessons about things we could not have anticipated. Many lessons have been learned, and things are improving. Even Microsoft is getting on board with ODF (halfheartedly, but still...), and the've managed to make WIndows 7 kinda usable. In 100 years, the problems that occurred with the rise of the personal computer will be something to laugh at.
As for Miguel de Icaza, I think people are being too unfair to him. While it's true that C# and .Net are copycats of Java, there's been time to learn some lessons and improve the technology. .Net is better technology than JVM. All Miguel did was make a Free Software clone of .Net. Microsoft's embrace and extend was turned around on them, and they had some of THEIR technology cloned. And it was done because they CLAIMED that this could be done royalty-free. Without Mono, .Net would be an even more closed platform, so I think it's a good thing that an alternative VM was developed. In a way, it works to keep Microsoft honest. And indeed, their claim of it being royalty-free has held up so far. Because Microsoft have 'promised' not to sue anyone, it's unlikely they could win in a court case. It's called estoppel. If you act on good faith based on what they've said (even if it's not on a contract), then they can't change their minds.
Yeah, but it's easy to make such assumptions about people who are too afraid to reveal their identity when flaming. They're called Anonymous Cowards for a reason. I've actually accomplished things in my life, so what I say has some weight. If I stick my foot in my mouth, I'm no worse than Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and countless other famous people who regularly say foolish-sounding things. Foolish words or not, they go back to work the next day and continue being successful. And then there are those who have no accomplishments to fall on. If they have a reputation at all, it's purely from words they've written. It's much easier to topple that house of cards and lose face. There are two reasons why someone would post as an AC on slashdot: (1) too lazy to create an account, or (2) aware that their paper-thin reputation is at risk when they take the risk of posting a comment that may reflect negatively upon them. Most likely, it's (2). Potentially, there's (3) someone who might get into trouble with their employer for making harsh comments on the internet, but those people are usually smart enough to temper their words and be polite.
So, going back to this comment about getting out of the lab... yes, GUI and system software development IS HARD. That's why the good engineers get paid $75/hour (when we're really desperate for work) to do it. Stop complaining about how hard it is and start using your brain to come up with clever solutions to hard problems.
Unlike basement-dwelling ACs like yourself, I've held a job. I own a house and two cars. Indeed, I'm often bombarded to do consulting work, which I had to turn down far too often in order to work on my doctoral degree. You, sir, make too many assumptions. I've been in the real world. Unlike many software engineers, I understand the value of marketing and sales departments and understand how engineering work must have business value. I've taken my industry experience into academia, and I've used it to my advantage.
Interestingly, the OGD1 board produced by the Open Graphics Project is a significantly more powerful device. The problem is that very few OGD1 boards were produces, due to lack of funding.
I'm a chip designer. While I've always been very good at software, I prefer hardware, and as I have moved more and more in that direction, I have come to feel that software stuff is mostly bullshit. Software is the stuff you write to give high level direction to the hardware. So why is everyone doing such a crap job of it? Ok, I've written GUI-based apps, plenty, and it's not easy to make a really intuitive interface. But I still can't see how CEOs of software companies like Microsoft can look at themselves in the mirror. They spend billions of dollars developing software that is absolutely horrid at automating the most basic of tasks. Computers are fantastic at fast, repetitive tasks. Making your PC connect to wireless reliably is one such task. So why can't they make it work right 100% of the time? I should never ever have to type in something that the computer can look up for itself. I should never have to do maintenance that's obvious. There are many unexpected things that happen as a result of bugs (these are unintentional) and hardware failure (shit happens). These are the times when someone has to look under the hood, because the result is largely unanticipated. This is reasonable. However, if there is something in a textbook that you can teach to someone, then it's KNOWN, and it should damn well be automated. If you can make a human procedure for it, you can make a software procedure for it. (And I'm talking about simple stuff, not computer vision or SPAM detection, although SPAM detection is automated and quite good. Irony?)
Not EVERY action can be anticipated, otherwise there would be no need for user interfaces at all. It's the things that have to be done the same way every time for everyone that should be automated. Interestingly, some software is trying to be smart and anticipate. Like automatic text substitution and spellchecking. Those don't always work right, but at least they're trying, and they're getting better at it. Similiarly, there's the way browser URL bars and search bars try to anticipate what you're trying to type and give you suggestions based on what others have done. Those are awesome (pun intended).
I actually use the command line a lot. For instance, I compile stuff using gcc. That's me doing development, not admining the machine. I also sometimes do stuff using bash that could be done using Finder (yes, I use a Mac, but I have Windows in a VM, and I have a Linux server at home). Again, that's me doing something I want to do with my files. But for the most part, you should just be able to turn your computer on, and have it get the hell out of the way of what you want to do. Want to type email? You select the Mail app, click the Compose button, and off you go. Aside from perhaps a few security measures (some of which are also lazy bullshit in the way they're designed), nothing should get in the way of that action.
Now, some of you out there like mucking about with the innards of their operating system. And that's cool for you. I know about this stuff do, and I do it better than most software engineers or CS grads. (Indeed, someone must know this, so that someone can write the OS and program the automated procedures.) But for MOST people, including those of us who have Ph.D.s in Computer Science, we have OTHER WORK TO DO. And this software bullshit (or bullshit software) is just SLOWING US DOWN.
Not so much. I remember the days when WordPerfect dominated over Word, both the DOS and Windows versions. WordPerfect COULD be faster, but tended to bog down as documents filled with gobs and gobs of superfluous inline formatting codes. I've seen documents that had runs of bold-on/bold-off/bold-on/bold-off, etc. (Actually, I've seen the same thing in Dreamweaver, with loads of superfluous markup.) Word, on the other hand, stored its formatting in a tree of data structure, which made it relatively immune to this kind of accumulating kruft. As a result of having inline codes, WordPerfect often had to do a great deal more computation to figure out how to dynamically format text on the screen, so text could fall behind typing. This was a big deal in the era of 33MHz 386's and 40MHz 286's.
These days, it's not such a big deal. Even if one word processor used 5 times as much CPU time as another per keypress, it would still be idle 99.9999% of the time. Then we get junk like Dreamweaver, bogging down web browsers and networks with HTML files twice as large as they need to be.
The same could be said for people who major in Math, English, Philosophy, and Religion (not the same as Ministry). People choose to go into fields they enjoy or feel compelled by. Not all of them are huge money-makers.
Of course, you're an Anonymous Coward who is just jeallous that this other person even HAS a job, unlike your basement-dwelling self. This person chose a career path that makes little money. You're unemployed and living with your mom due to sheer irremedial incompetence.
This is definitely an interesting approach they're taking.
In my research group, we're looking at a different tactic called near-threshold computing. Say you have a 32nm device that uses 100W at 1V. If you were to run it at 400mV, it would use about 1W, but logic slows by a factor of 10. So that 100X reduction in power translates into a 10X reduction in energy.
Fast-forward to 11nm, where the transistor density is 10X what it is at 32nm. Nominal voltage won't go down much, so without doing something drastic, your chip would use a kilowatt. To run the whole device, you have to lower the voltage a lot.
Unfortunately, that's not the whole story, which is where we're focused. Process variation is transistor parameter variations that are the result of manufacturing difficulties. For instance, we're doing sub-wavelength lithography, which makes all edges really fuzzy. And transistors are now small enough that dopant atoms range in the tens. So if one transistor has 20 boron atoms, and one nearby has 25, then that's a 25% variation in threshold voltage. These problems are getting progressively worse as transistors scale down. And the effect is amplified when you lower voltage. Die-to-die and within-die variation are massive at that scale and voltage. Generally, your whole processor's frequency is limited by the slowest circuit path on the chip. At smaller geometry and lower voltage, the speed difference between the slowest and fastest paths grows. The faster paths use more power, which is also a problem.
We tend to focus on architectural solutions to this. Let the circuits fail... then catch and correct the errors. I published a paper in MICRO 2010, where we lower voltage to a SRAM caches. (Google for >.) At some point, the bit cell failures become catastrophic, so we applied forward error correction. The result is that at a voltage where an unprotected cache is completely useless (so many errors that nearly every cache line has more bad cells than standard ECC can handle), our approach salvages 50% of the nominal voltage cache capacity.
The 3G had tethering support? Or did you jailbreak it?
Leaving your wifi open is a security nightmare and an invitation for abuse. Someone hogging your bandwidth is the least of your worries. Before long someone is going to hack your own computers and download kiddy porn on your connection. Law enforcement won't accept "intentionally left it open for the good of mankind" as a legitimate excuse. Rather, they'll tell you that you should have known better and you asked for the trouble you got into. Why do you want to make life difficult for yourself?
If you have a few neighbors that you trust and want to share your connection with, then give them your access key. This way, you can know exactly who is doing what because you have their hostnames and MAC addresses.
I recall when iOS4 came out, there were people still in contract with 3G iPhones. I'm not sure if there still are at this point, bit it's kindof a lousy thing to do, to take a phone that was slow to begin with and make it even slower.
And they're funding the development from all the phishing scams.
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/RTjp4tv83B4/fbi-businesses-lost-11m-over-12-months-to-china-based-phishers.ars
Something similar has been done. I don't recall exactly where. Perhaps North Carolina. Anyhow, I saw it on the Discovery Channel, and they had interviews with kids and stuff. There was a highschool where the lunch menu was replaced with healthy stuff like a salad bar, etc. Behavioral problems declined, absenteeism declined, grades improved, etc. Instead of pizza and McDonalds, the kids ate healthier, and lo and behold, they felt better.
I've encountered a few news articles about young mothers diluting their babys' formula because they thought it would make it last longer. That's obviously absurd. At the very least, the baby would just urinate more and want to drink more frequently. But it's worse than that. Apparently, a newborn's kidneys cannot filter out water quickly enough. IIRC, one article was about a baby who died, and another was about one who nearly died. Diluting formula is child endangerment!
I haven't heard of this either. I have heard of genetic modifications making corn more allergenic. But that's mostly because both my wife and daughter have bad reactions to corn. So my research is therefore biased. But it isn't that hard to google and find people complaining of corn giving them reflux or reflux-like symptoms. (In this case, we think it's causing tissue inflammation of the stomach, forcing acid into the esophagus.)
I founded the Open Graphics Project. Our objective was to develop an open source graphics card. At the time, no GPU maker was releasing specs that would allow FOSS developers to write good drivers. This started in 2004, with a lot of attention and excitement. Being the sort to DO, rather than just complain, and also being a graphics chip designer, I decided that the open approach might be the solution. There were multiple slashdot articles, interviews, and a good deal of hardware design and software was developed.
It's now 2011, and you most likely have never heard of the Open Graphics Project. Also, it's 2011, and most other open hardware projects have come and gone or are just limping along.
Why is this? Because nobody wants to provide the one thing that makes or breaks an open hardware project: Money.
Building hardware costs money. Designing it is hard enough, but we got that accomplished. It took until 2009 before the OGP managed to actually build our prototype hardware in quantities that we could lend and sell, and this was because we got donations from the Linux Fund.
Why does no one put up money? Because it's (rightfully so) too much of a risk. If you could predict that one project or another would succeed, you might invest, especially if you knew that you'd get some kind of return on your investment (besides "sponsor"). But you can't make that prediction, and it's foolish for you to throw money at every fly-by-night project that comes along. And thus, open hardware projects die, except those that are backed by someone who already has money. The problem is that most of THOSE people aren't willing to "give away" their designs. Conundrum.
Some friends and I have some solutions we're working on. Watch this space for late Summer 2011. :)
Seriously. I'm a demanding user, so I got a maxed-out 2011 MacBook Pro. Now, with a blazingly fast CPU and 8GB of RAM, it's evident that the main thing limiting the speed of this computer is the mechanical hard drive. I just didn't want to spend an extra $1000 on an SSD. In 10 years, a 1/2 TB SSD will be affordable.
Whenever it comes to light that some new drug has caused harm to a lot of people, the response is that they are evil and should have known better. Blah. Blah. I'm not saying I disagree, but it's important to put things into perspective.
Pharmaceutical companies are businesses dedicated to making a profit. That is all. It just happens to be that the products they are pedaling are chemicals that affect the body. While it may be that some individuals working there care about the potential negative effects of a drug, there is a disconnect between those people who understand the drug and those who market it. Those selling it assume that the scientists understand all the effects and have done adequate testing. But this is impossible, because you can't get large enough sample sizes, and the scientists are sometimes forced to falsify their results, or have it falsified for them before publication. Drug trials are not conducted as a means to ensure safety of the drug -- that obscures the motivation. Drug companies are strictly liable for the effects of their drugs (except for vaccines, where there's a centralized fund), so drug trials are conducted purely as a means to ensure profitability by lowering the probability of being sued, so that the damages paid out are less than the profit margin. It's purely a statistics game.
This kind of numbers game happens in other industries. For instance, there was the Fort Pinto. It was found during initial testing that in a collision above 25mph, the gas tank would rupture, increasing the chances of a fire. Ford business gurus decided that the cost of the lawsuits would be less than the cost of fixing the problem. The rest is history. And Ford to this day continues to make similar compromises, resulting in unnecessary death and injury.
But as a result of these business tactics, auto makers and pharm companies are more profitable than they would be if they were more careful. And this is what makes shareholders happy.
People like to point out excessively philosophical tripe like that gravity is a matter of faith. You have to have faith that gravity that works now will work tomorrow. That's bullshit. Gravity is a demonstrable fact. What you might have faith in is that the MATH we use to MODEL gravity. You would have faith that if you used that mathematical model, that it is adequate for what you're applying to. In other words, what you have faith in is the scientists who created the model and your ability to apply it properly.
You might also talk about the scientific method. It's not something we can prove. It's an axiom. Some of us have faith that the scientific method is a good way to discover things. Others of us have seen it work well so many times that it's no longer a matter of faith. Then all we're left with is having faith that other scientists are doing it properly.
I do not have or even need faith in "Science." I have faith in Scientists and their results. And sometimes my faith is tested, due to occasional incompetence.
It's too bad they didn't or else they wouldn't have a mixed-up impression of what Satanism is. It's basically hedonistic humanism with a license to destroy those who get in the way of your fun. This is doesn't necessarily make it BETTER, but it's important to realize that most (many? some?) Satanists don't really believe in Satan as a real being, although they may believe in Satan as an archetype or metaphor. (BTW, Shatan was a god in the ancient Hebrew pantheon (perhaps equivalent to Loki). You knew that ancient Hebrew religion was really polytheistic and it was later pasted over and reinterpreted as montheistic, didn't you?)
My point is that it pays to understand what you're up against, and I often think that Christians use "Satanism" incorrectly. They're battling a strawman.
Back when I first started using a Mac, the only nEdit I could get required X11 (so copy/paste doesn't integrate well), and the hotkeys were not very Mac-like. Are you saying that there is now a Cocoa port of Lesstif and this has changed?