parent++ (I'm not saying much more than parent post has already said.)
We've more or less hit the limits of useful gains from increasing pipeline depth (and thus increasing clock frequency) or increased Instruction Level Parallelism (which gives you superscalar/multiple dispatch per clock cycle). The silicon required to do the book keeping starts being more of an overhead than you can get by simply rolling back to a simpler core and having more of them- which is precisely what has happened. As of about 2007 clock rates were generally down from their peak with increased throughput coming from the addition of multiple cores.
Multiple cores- full cores with FP and everything!- are useful for Task Level Parallelism, which can be difficult to achieve on a single job but is a very nice fit for many server loads (like web serving) where individual threads have very little interaction. Desktops will no doubt inherit many core (8+) CPUs from the server world, but I'd guess that we'll actually see desktop CPUs shrinking- requiring less power and following the laptop power curves. There may even be a more pronounced separation between the "power desktop user" who uses their CPU for intensive graphic rendering (i.e a graphics workstation or gamer machine) and everyone else (who ends up using a mere 4 or 8 core machine which requires little or no active cooling).
Servers will continue to pack more and more cores with more and more memory. The bandwidth bottleneck is RAM, not Disk as was mentioned in one comment (any serious server setup uses a variety of strategies to serve most content from RAM and only writes to Disk for persistence or tail end performance). This also means they'll have more NICs, and there will be pressure to push the network speed up to keep the CPU and RAM busy.
The reference book on this sort of thing (and apologies for anything I got wrong) is "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson. Very readable and amazingly comprehensive.
Lets be clear here: Google "will be able to moderate the content of its book scans". There is not yet any indication that Google *will* do anything bad or evil with its moderation powers. And you'd have to be mad to think that any non-Government entity could go live with a service that didn't allow them some editorial control.
Lets say you have these rights and publishing everything you can get your hands on- and you don't reserve any editorial rights. Eventually you publish the back editions of playboy- bam! your site load goes up ten fold and your servers start folding at the knees. What do you do? Well, you can't take them down! Isn't that censorship? Or if the US government comes to you and tells you to take something down? Or you publish "The Old Mans Guide to Pedophilia- Now With Street Addresses"- can't take that down! Or the "Bumper List of Presidents of the World and Movie Stars Phone Number". Or "Tax Statements of the U.S.A. 2008". In some kind of ideal world it may be that all these things should remain uncensored but that isn't the current world.
In the real world you have to have control of the service you are running for all sorts of horrible technical and political reasons. You would have to be hopelessly naive to believe otherwise.
By all means complain after it turns out that Google is being evil. Complain about the basic idea (scanning in copyright but out of print books). But complaining about "censorship" without any evidence of poor editorial behaviour? For fucks sake.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell the Mac Air is about 1.35kg and the Macbooks (Pro or Standard) are 2.45kg. I find the difference there quite pronounced.
I've been using Toshiba Porteges for about 4 years now (~1.1kg) and I'd be pretty unhappy with a 2.45 kg laptop. That extra kilogram can't be lightly dismissed. I use my laptop professionally and in most meetings I'm the only person with a laptop. I'm convinced that it is because it is light enough to carry without being a pain in the arse. Everyone else has standard corporate laptops which are 'only' 2-3kg... and they don't use them in meetings. (This doesn't apply to university students who seem to be more prepared to haul around 5kg of computer equipment.) Most corporate laptops are at best carried between home and work.
The Mac Air looks pretty good to me. I do agree with the general line of discussion on the paucity of USB ports. I also regularly use two USB ports. Since one is for a mouse I could work around it but that is a bit of a pain. Wouldn't stop me from getting a Mac Air.
Pricing wise it also seems reasonable to me- comparable to other laptops in this class. Damn expensive for SSD- like other laptops in this class.
Still, I'm not rushing out to buy quite yet. MacAir/Portege style CPU, weight and wireless connectivity with a larger and cheaper SSD and a tablet touch screen would be really nice- and none of that is unlikely in the near future (1-2 years). But the killer would be all that plus high pixel density screens like the Sony eReader/Kindle- all the ePaper based platforms. At this point the trade offs on ePaper are a killer (terrible refresh rate, no colour) but it seems reasonable to think those will be addressed at some point. The timeline for that is a bit longer since there are still real technical hurdles to overcome. But then... well that is a nice device. It is readable like a book, drawable like paper and is a no compromise laptop computer which, because it is all solid state, is robust. Except for the screen we are almost there- and in reasonably short periods of time it should even be affordable.
So I'm waiting a little while longer before buying my next laptop.
I think usefully using computers for teaching is not straightforward. So for example:
How about making the blackboard more interactive by making it a touch screen? and have the students prepare their exercises at their home as presentations, instead of having to write them on paper? and then really exercise the imagination of students by letting them see a visual representation of the topic at hand, since we leave in an age where video dominates? Apparently you haven't been subjected to enough PowerPoint presentations to believe just how pointless presentations are. Everything that makes the student focus on the technology rather than the message is a distraction from the subject on hand. The home work a student does aren't usually for general consumption (e.g. presentation to other students) they are so that the student learns the material by being forced to absorb, understand and then display their understanding. Written language is one of the least obstructive tools we have for getting from understanding in the head to conveying that understanding- and still takes years of formal training to get past the basics. Adding powerpoint or flash is just another tool in the way.
Watching a 10 minute documentary about a historical event is a much more interesting way to teach than have people read a white paper with black letters, for example. Watching a documentary is often good, but visuals can easily distract from the message (as a visual analogy for a concept is presented rather than presenting the concept in straight language). And compared to reading speeds visual presentation can be very slow. Wikipedia would not be improved if it were converted to a narrated visual media. But some historical documentaries maybe good. Some visual stuff may be good in almost any discipline. Although I suspect that given our cultural exposure to visual media it is often easier now to evoke a visual analogy simply by referring to movies or TV (asteroids, tidal waves, space travel, space, the Victorian era, the Korean war, any sport, other cultures... all part of your average 9 year olds visual exposure).
How about watching animated physics presentations on the big screen instead of static presentations on paper?
How about interactive physics and chemistry demos where the children can touch the objects on the screen and experiment with them? Of course actually doing it tends to be better. And static presentations on paper may be a better bridge to the 'power tools' of physics: formula and mathematical manipulation. The ability to deal with the abstract rather than the specific and translate back and forth is the hallmark of many scientific disciplines. Visual presentation probably wouldn't help as much as one would hope.
The possibilities with computers are endless, provided that they are used right. Unfortunately working how to use them right is not straightforward. I don't mean to be dismissive, but I suspect many quite bright people have been working on this one and given the observed results, it probably isn't an easy problem.
Learning, and as a result teaching, is a tricky process. Good teachers help debug the learning process- understanding misconceptions that blindside the learner, pacing material to achieve flow states and helping the learner deal with the extrinsic interfering factors involved in learning (e.g. you are six and have the attention span of gnat).
Without doubt some elements of technology will help in the learning process- flash games for little people to help with rote learning or access to the web for older students who are at a point where they can investigate more on their own. But primary school and high school (not sure what they are called around the world but school from about age 5 through to about age 12 and school from about 12 through to 17) try to teach some pretty challenging stuff. In primary school one of most important objectives is socialisation: don't punch the girls, don't wipe your snot on the desk, don't pee at your chair, say please and thank you- learn to be an acceptable member of your society. After that they also hope to teach some basic tools of society: literacy and numeracy. In high school the objectives expand: learn to teach yourself a bit and learn some wider societal skills. And the socialisation continues: girls and boys are different, you have more freedom, you can do more stuff.
It isn't until University that it is assumed you know how to learn and socialise. That you have the discipline to sit in front of a piece of paper, book, typewriter, computer, script, essay, musical score -or whatever the tool of your profession is- and get on with your work. Your high school homework is trainer wheels for learning to be an independent learner and do things yourself.
Technology may help in the primary and high school education- in fact I'm sure it could- but you need to make sure it doesn't get in the way of the most important things we learn: how to be a social human being and how to gain enough self discipline to independently learn- and maybe some basic literacy and numeracy. Most of that stuff really does need someone standing over you- hopefully being supportive, understanding and encouraging- but not always helping provide some support for your growing self discipline. Computers aren't so good at that.
I don't in any way think that today's schools are ideal but technological 'bling' isn't going to fix the problem.
(Of course I also think we treat our teenagers like children and -worse- force them to hang out with each other rather than adults. Which means they grow up surrounded by other equally confused unchallenged kids. In cultures 200 years ago a teenager would start to take on adult responsibilities- or be a full adult- and I don't think we do our children any favours by removing this responsibility from them. If you want our kids to pay attention then give them real world meaningful challenges. Nothing forces you to learn like doing something that matters. My little one is 1 year old- I've got about a decade to work out how to do this!)
I think the point about IPv4 is that for the people it works for right now there isn't much wrong with it: QoS isn't much of an issue, Security can be dealt with, configuration isn't too hard.
But it isn't necessarily that way for everyone. China and many developing nations don't have enough IP space. IPv4 configuration IS unnecessarily hard- why can't I just physically plug two machines together and have them work? Security is fiddly to configure. NAT adds an additional layer of complexity to everything (e.g. UPnP in home routers, magic VoIP tunneling stuff, peer to peer protocols) and adds a layer of accidental security at best. Of course there are solutions which work around all these problems but if we were starting with a clean slate and a choice between IPv4 and IPv6 the choice would be clear.
So for everyone who has good working IPv4 networks: great. For many others, IPv6 will be (or become) a good alternative. It can come in to play piece by piece- home networks all running IPv6 because noone configured IPv4 services and the ISP supported IPv6 so everything just worked (which could be a reason for ISPs to use IPv6: simpler service configuration). Carriers that use an IPv6 address space on mobile devices because the roaming support makes things easier- leading to large, although disjoint, networks of IPv6 devices. Countries (like China) who use IPv6 internally because, frankly, IPv4 address space issues mean they have to NAT everything out of the country anyway and they get to be on the leading edge of technology development selling back to places like the U.S. rather than buying.
IPv6 doesn't have to happen soon. It just needs to have stable network stacks in lots of places (which is what is happening with Windows, Linux, MacOS as well as Cisco, Nortel and so on) and it can become a natural alternative in a range of situations. The interconnection between IPv4 and IPv6 networks is ugly but is do-able and no worse than the current horror that is NAT.
I don't see the IPv6 transition happening in a wide spread manner any time soon. But I do think it will happen.
And it is worth adding that education, nutrition and all the other factors that go toward a good educational environment vary across the country. So there are going to be areas where the children are adequately fed and literate and others where they simply aren't.
Let me make a few prediction:
* The laptops will come out and there will be a flurry of positive articles.
* A few months down the track there will be a spate of articles arguing it has been a failure because the laptops are breaking, being stolen, not used and the software isn't translated or culturally appropriate. It will conclude with estimates about how many laptops are actually still functional and being used.
* Some years down the track after people have really come to terms with what is useful some hard nosed analysis will demonstrate a worth while positive return for those countries but probably not vastly overwhelming.
I do think the project is worthwhile: but it isn't easy. At least they are realistic:
Big projects like this aren't usually about a single given result: "Look! A million laptops! Our work here is done.". It is about changing how things happen- a change in processes. Ideally this will allow more effective distribution of good educational ideas (write the software and distribute), a tighter feedback loop on what works (because distribution is easier and it is possible to get feedback through software), more sharing between countries (both recipient and wealthy countries) and a huge number of 'niche' education opportunities- beyond a certain point users can go and find resources wherever they happen to be on the Internet. None of this is a panacea but hopefully it will make more effective use of scarce educational resources.
The nice thing about stuff like this is that it allows many different approaches to be taken. Most will fail, some will work. That experimentation will take some time but shows promise compared to the traditional education system which is good- but how much better could it be? That isn't a slam dunk: it is hard to beat face to face education. But if you can't afford the best face to face education this looks like a worthwhile approach to try.
I'd add to the above commentary that our expectations of movies are based not just on the history of movies we have seen but also on comparable experiences, which includes TV and DVD. In the last few decades we have shifted from a few public broadcast channels to many channels of cable television, easy access to videos and DVDs from the local store (or via Netflix et. al.) and private collections of DVDs (which can be be pretty extensive- see your local fanatic). Add to that international fan dubs (I'm thinking particularly anime) and the 2 minute phenomena that is YouTube and Google Videos and there are a lot of things that might be considered competition for your moving picture experience.
And that isn't all- the Internet and video games should also be considered competition, although that is more competition for your time than directly comparable experiences.
The result of this is: if you are going to pony up cash for a movie you want it to be 'worth' those extra dollars in comparison to the 'free' (or other) experiences you might get elsewhere. But TV/Cable/DVDs/Videos are often the same material (on a smaller screen- but with added convenience). And some of the alternative channels actually have 'better' material (for your personal definition of better- which could be 24 hours of Lynch, or 72 hours of Ranma Half). So it is increasingly hard for the cinema films to differentiate from all the other media which is available.
And made for TV stuff is in absolute terms of directly comparable or better quality to older films: Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica 2005 have on screen effects that are much better than even huge feature films like Star Wars Ep 4. And TV series story telling has moved on too- series length plot arcs, even show length plot arcs, character development(!) and sometimes acting too!
All of this raises the benchmark for a movie.
On the flipside, the big budget blockbuster film budgets aren't getting any smaller, but ticket prices are (specially when you allow for inflation). Which means you have to hit a bigger audience, which means- usually- you have to water the material down. Because when you are aiming at a smallish audience it is about conveying a message to those people and you can challenge that audience. But with broad audiences it is about not offending people so where, in a small film, a scene is "challening" and "interesting" in a big film it is "morally offensive" and "unacceptable".
And smaller films are nipping at the heels of the big budget features. The $100K movie can many if not all of the special effects of the $100M film. They can hire the cameras and everyone works for the love of the film. And most of them are crap. But every now and then they aren't and that will tend to suck attention away from the big films.
As other posters have said, and I agree: there are actually still good films out there. There are some really good films being made. There are even some great big budget blockbuster films (the Pirates of the Carribean films would be examples for me). But most big budget films need to pay for itself and there water down their content to get the big audiences. But that lowers the differentiation from competing media...
The answer is probably a combination of:
* Lower distribution costs so cinemas are cheaper to run so ticket prices can go down so movies don't have to be that much better to be worth going to see
* Movies will continue to make a larger proportion of their total earnings outside of cinemas in the so called 'after marker' (c.f. long tail)
* Greater proportion of smaller 'niche' (but still quite large distribution) movies which leads directly to...
* Smaller cinema complexes with fewer seats per cinema
* Improved cinema experience: food and drink, maybe alcohol, lots of things I haven't thought off
* And finally: cinema closures as the competition vets t
In Australia we have a local idiot (Damien Broderick) who enthuses over the singularity and I find it incredibly irritating. I don't have a problem with the concept of a singularity, I DO have a problem with the insistence of some enthusiasts that the singularity is just round the corner. My biggest problem is that most of the pundits don't actually seem to work with technology.
It is really easy as an observer to sit on the outside and say: "Wow, more neato stuff seems to be coming out faster and faster- why, if I extrapolate it will probably keep coming out faster and faster and we'll get this exponential curve." But that ignores the fact that:
* The problems get harder
* Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the technology
* We've never found a silver bullet
By which I mean:
The problems get harder: Einstein may have been a genius- but we have our share of geniuses today. We almost certainly have many more geniuses actively involved in science (and physics research) than ever before- and they are well resourced (not fantastically, but OK). But they aren't producing Einstein like breakthrough physics because it is damn hard to improve on what we have. We know the current models have holes but we haven't worked out how to fix them- and not for want of trying.
The same applies to lots of technical problems- both the technical research and the translation of that research into real world products. Batteries and fusion power both have enormous commerical incentives but somehow we haven't found the answer yet. We HAVE made improvements but the simple truth is: these are hard problems.
See also the cost of electronic foundaries- around a billion $US and climbing by roughly an order of magnitude with each succesive generation. That is where the bleeding edge of real world technology rests and it isn't cheap and it is just unbelievably tricky.
Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the availability of technology: Science can in theory race ahead of everyday use but in practice it usually has to be supported by technology. Leaving aside silver bullet technologues (like AI- see below) scientific research needs to be translated into technologies that everyday people can use. And technology that everyday people use needs to be adopted, which means it needs to be understood and accepted. That isn't a formula for a singularity.
In theory a small population could make a 'huge breakthrough' and race ahead leaving the rest of the world's population bewildered by the change, but every indication is that the be big problems need big resources to address. And even more resources to translate into actual out of the lab usage (see electronics foundries link above).
We do see some impressive stuff (like Google) which catches our attention and is really useful but this is a tool that society adopts at its own rate. And Google is successful because it DOESN'T baffle and bewilder. It empowers the everyday person. That is pretty characteristic of succesful technology.
We've never found a silver bullet: Science fiction stories often have a bit of hidden magic- the AI, fusion power, teleportation (aka worm hole gates, star drives, etc...) that definitively solves some problem (problem solving, energy, transport to the stars) with no big side effects. That is great for science fiction, but in the real world we don't do this (I won't say absolutely, but I can't think of a real life silver bullet). Everything is a careful trade off, the really big problems don't just go away.
The big one is thinking: for all that computers help us do work they don't do what we would consider 'intelligent' things. Or when they do (like pattern recognition in breast cancer X-Rays) they are so limited in their scope that we st
I don't know the actual story but Buffet is well known for 'eating his own dog food'. He only invests in companies he's happy to promote- and then actively promotes them when the opportunity arises. So I wouldn't be at all suprised if the building he works in happened to be owned and/or built by one of the companies he's invested in.
Your statements don't actually say anything other than you don't believe in global warming- you essentially assert that 'there were big changes in the past and I don't believe humans could contribute to them'. The whole- suprising- point of Global Warming is that it looks like there ARE mechanisms whereby humans affect the climate. You can certainly argue that you don't believe conclusions of the research but prefacing a statement of belief with 'I try to approach everything from (a) practical point of view.' is just a little insulting. I guess all those zany scientists were just being impractical huh?
I *do* believe that humans could change the climate since:
* Every time I fly over land I am constantly amazed by how much humans have altered the surface of the earth. In western Europe I'd be suprised if there was a significant percentage of the land cover that wasn't shaped by human hands. And Europe doesn't even have a large percentage of the population of the world- or even the highest densities of people! Does it really suprise you that we might actually change things on an even larger scale than that?
* In the last century and a bit our profile of energy consumption has changed from 'most energy used by humans consumed as food' (either human or livestock) to 'energy consumed by food a small percentage of the energy consumed by a human'. Even our food is more energy intensive (transport, fertilizer, packaging, more meat fewer vegetables). So the environmental footprint of each human (especially in the first world) is simply vast compared to humans only four or five generations ago. And of course our global population is larger than it has ever been (and not likely to start declining for a few more decades).
* The gloabl warming predictions aren't talking about climate changes of 100's or 10's of degrees- they are talking about degrees of change in temperature over the next decades.
Unfortunately that change is different in different places- so sometimes it is up and sometimes it is down! And our infrastructure is often frail in the face of change. A change in the type of snow in the UK affects how trains run (they can't get traction so trains are delayed), small changes in temperature in cold climates make it more likely embankments will collapse leading to road closures, an extra few degrees of temperature can cause dryness which causes dust on power lines that causes arcing and power outages when the first humidity comes along, early frosts affecting crops and general drop in productivity as the regional crop mix changes to adapt to slightly altered local environment.
These aren't thunderous typhoons and dramatic storms. This is the real world of being nibbled to death by ducks. You don't see dramatic changes and societal collapse, you see just... things breaking getting a little worse, bit by bit. Things get a little more expensive overall and oranges are very expensive some times of year. Alright in the first world where we can buy our way out of trouble. Kind of crap in Africa where people die instead.
So I *do* find that believable. And from a practical point of view I'd have thought that caution was the appropriate approach when playing with things like, you know, the global ecology.
I find that the most useful comments clarify the underlying code by adding something that may not be possible to get from the code itself. For example the intention of the code may or may not be clear (the code may be incorrect or it could 'mean' several things given the context) but a comment can be explicit about the intention.
The point is you are not repeating the code statements- you are adding information to the source code. This makes it a lot less likely the comment is going to go out of date. In many cases you can change code and the comment will still remain the same (you are still searching a hash for the RequestItemId- just doing it faster/better/correctly).
Programming is about translating concepts from a problem domain (Billing, Accounting, CRM, Networking, Memory Paging) into code (be it C, C++, Java, Perl, Pascal..). We endeavour to build functions, methods and objects that map to the problem domain (so we can display a picture, act on a button click, add a charge to a customer's bill...). But this translation inevitably has some tricky bits that are not clear from the code (what format is the time in? why do we have to mask of the data retrieved from disk? why aren't we validating the customer's username?). So it can be useful to put the 'original' (our intention) in there and any useful translation notes (the tricky or non-obvious bits) so that we can make it clear where something is done or not done deliberately- and when it is simply an error.
Good comments add information not necessarily obvious from code. That makes it tricky to write good comments since you have to look at the code as if you had never seen it before and ask: what isn't obvious about this? Which is why writing the comments before you write the code can be much more effective. After you've written the code it just feels like you are stating the obvious. Which it is- to you, at that moment in time.
Slashdot Mirror
parent++ (I'm not saying much more than parent post has already said.)
We've more or less hit the limits of useful gains from increasing pipeline depth (and thus increasing clock frequency) or increased Instruction Level Parallelism (which gives you superscalar/multiple dispatch per clock cycle). The silicon required to do the book keeping starts being more of an overhead than you can get by simply rolling back to a simpler core and having more of them- which is precisely what has happened. As of about 2007 clock rates were generally down from their peak with increased throughput coming from the addition of multiple cores.
Multiple cores- full cores with FP and everything!- are useful for Task Level Parallelism, which can be difficult to achieve on a single job but is a very nice fit for many server loads (like web serving) where individual threads have very little interaction. Desktops will no doubt inherit many core (8+) CPUs from the server world, but I'd guess that we'll actually see desktop CPUs shrinking- requiring less power and following the laptop power curves. There may even be a more pronounced separation between the "power desktop user" who uses their CPU for intensive graphic rendering (i.e a graphics workstation or gamer machine) and everyone else (who ends up using a mere 4 or 8 core machine which requires little or no active cooling).
Servers will continue to pack more and more cores with more and more memory. The bandwidth bottleneck is RAM, not Disk as was mentioned in one comment (any serious server setup uses a variety of strategies to serve most content from RAM and only writes to Disk for persistence or tail end performance). This also means they'll have more NICs, and there will be pressure to push the network speed up to keep the CPU and RAM busy.
The reference book on this sort of thing (and apologies for anything I got wrong) is "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" by Hennessy and Patterson. Very readable and amazingly comprehensive.
Lets be clear here: Google "will be able to moderate the content of its book scans". There is not yet any indication that Google *will* do anything bad or evil with its moderation powers. And you'd have to be mad to think that any non-Government entity could go live with a service that didn't allow them some editorial control.
Lets say you have these rights and publishing everything you can get your hands on- and you don't reserve any editorial rights. Eventually you publish the back editions of playboy- bam! your site load goes up ten fold and your servers start folding at the knees. What do you do? Well, you can't take them down! Isn't that censorship? Or if the US government comes to you and tells you to take something down? Or you publish "The Old Mans Guide to Pedophilia- Now With Street Addresses"- can't take that down! Or the "Bumper List of Presidents of the World and Movie Stars Phone Number". Or "Tax Statements of the U.S.A. 2008". In some kind of ideal world it may be that all these things should remain uncensored but that isn't the current world.
In the real world you have to have control of the service you are running for all sorts of horrible technical and political reasons. You would have to be hopelessly naive to believe otherwise.
By all means complain after it turns out that Google is being evil. Complain about the basic idea (scanning in copyright but out of print books). But complaining about "censorship" without any evidence of poor editorial behaviour? For fucks sake.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell the Mac Air is about 1.35kg and the Macbooks (Pro or Standard) are 2.45kg. I find the difference there quite pronounced.
I've been using Toshiba Porteges for about 4 years now (~1.1kg) and I'd be pretty unhappy with a 2.45 kg laptop. That extra kilogram can't be lightly dismissed. I use my laptop professionally and in most meetings I'm the only person with a laptop. I'm convinced that it is because it is light enough to carry without being a pain in the arse. Everyone else has standard corporate laptops which are 'only' 2-3kg... and they don't use them in meetings. (This doesn't apply to university students who seem to be more prepared to haul around 5kg of computer equipment.) Most corporate laptops are at best carried between home and work.
The Mac Air looks pretty good to me. I do agree with the general line of discussion on the paucity of USB ports. I also regularly use two USB ports. Since one is for a mouse I could work around it but that is a bit of a pain. Wouldn't stop me from getting a Mac Air.
Pricing wise it also seems reasonable to me- comparable to other laptops in this class. Damn expensive for SSD- like other laptops in this class.
Still, I'm not rushing out to buy quite yet. MacAir/Portege style CPU, weight and wireless connectivity with a larger and cheaper SSD and a tablet touch screen would be really nice- and none of that is unlikely in the near future (1-2 years). But the killer would be all that plus high pixel density screens like the Sony eReader/Kindle- all the ePaper based platforms. At this point the trade offs on ePaper are a killer (terrible refresh rate, no colour) but it seems reasonable to think those will be addressed at some point. The timeline for that is a bit longer since there are still real technical hurdles to overcome. But then... well that is a nice device. It is readable like a book, drawable like paper and is a no compromise laptop computer which, because it is all solid state, is robust. Except for the screen we are almost there- and in reasonably short periods of time it should even be affordable.
So I'm waiting a little while longer before buying my next laptop.
How about interactive physics and chemistry demos where the children can touch the objects on the screen and experiment with them? Of course actually doing it tends to be better. And static presentations on paper may be a better bridge to the 'power tools' of physics: formula and mathematical manipulation. The ability to deal with the abstract rather than the specific and translate back and forth is the hallmark of many scientific disciplines. Visual presentation probably wouldn't help as much as one would hope. The possibilities with computers are endless, provided that they are used right. Unfortunately working how to use them right is not straightforward. I don't mean to be dismissive, but I suspect many quite bright people have been working on this one and given the observed results, it probably isn't an easy problem.
Learning, and as a result teaching, is a tricky process. Good teachers help debug the learning process- understanding misconceptions that blindside the learner, pacing material to achieve flow states and helping the learner deal with the extrinsic interfering factors involved in learning (e.g. you are six and have the attention span of gnat).
Without doubt some elements of technology will help in the learning process- flash games for little people to help with rote learning or access to the web for older students who are at a point where they can investigate more on their own. But primary school and high school (not sure what they are called around the world but school from about age 5 through to about age 12 and school from about 12 through to 17) try to teach some pretty challenging stuff. In primary school one of most important objectives is socialisation: don't punch the girls, don't wipe your snot on the desk, don't pee at your chair, say please and thank you- learn to be an acceptable member of your society. After that they also hope to teach some basic tools of society: literacy and numeracy. In high school the objectives expand: learn to teach yourself a bit and learn some wider societal skills. And the socialisation continues: girls and boys are different, you have more freedom, you can do more stuff.
It isn't until University that it is assumed you know how to learn and socialise. That you have the discipline to sit in front of a piece of paper, book, typewriter, computer, script, essay, musical score -or whatever the tool of your profession is- and get on with your work. Your high school homework is trainer wheels for learning to be an independent learner and do things yourself.
Technology may help in the primary and high school education- in fact I'm sure it could- but you need to make sure it doesn't get in the way of the most important things we learn: how to be a social human being and how to gain enough self discipline to independently learn- and maybe some basic literacy and numeracy. Most of that stuff really does need someone standing over you- hopefully being supportive, understanding and encouraging- but not always helping provide some support for your growing self discipline. Computers aren't so good at that.
I don't in any way think that today's schools are ideal but technological 'bling' isn't going to fix the problem.
(Of course I also think we treat our teenagers like children and -worse- force them to hang out with each other rather than adults. Which means they grow up surrounded by other equally confused unchallenged kids. In cultures 200 years ago a teenager would start to take on adult responsibilities- or be a full adult- and I don't think we do our children any favours by removing this responsibility from them. If you want our kids to pay attention then give them real world meaningful challenges. Nothing forces you to learn like doing something that matters. My little one is 1 year old- I've got about a decade to work out how to do this!)
I think the point about IPv4 is that for the people it works for right now there isn't much wrong with it: QoS isn't much of an issue, Security can be dealt with, configuration isn't too hard.
But it isn't necessarily that way for everyone. China and many developing nations don't have enough IP space. IPv4 configuration IS unnecessarily hard- why can't I just physically plug two machines together and have them work? Security is fiddly to configure. NAT adds an additional layer of complexity to everything (e.g. UPnP in home routers, magic VoIP tunneling stuff, peer to peer protocols) and adds a layer of accidental security at best. Of course there are solutions which work around all these problems but if we were starting with a clean slate and a choice between IPv4 and IPv6 the choice would be clear.
So for everyone who has good working IPv4 networks: great. For many others, IPv6 will be (or become) a good alternative. It can come in to play piece by piece- home networks all running IPv6 because noone configured IPv4 services and the ISP supported IPv6 so everything just worked (which could be a reason for ISPs to use IPv6: simpler service configuration). Carriers that use an IPv6 address space on mobile devices because the roaming support makes things easier- leading to large, although disjoint, networks of IPv6 devices. Countries (like China) who use IPv6 internally because, frankly, IPv4 address space issues mean they have to NAT everything out of the country anyway and they get to be on the leading edge of technology development selling back to places like the U.S. rather than buying.
IPv6 doesn't have to happen soon. It just needs to have stable network stacks in lots of places (which is what is happening with Windows, Linux, MacOS as well as Cisco, Nortel and so on) and it can become a natural alternative in a range of situations. The interconnection between IPv4 and IPv6 networks is ugly but is do-able and no worse than the current horror that is NAT.
I don't see the IPv6 transition happening in a wide spread manner any time soon. But I do think it will happen.
And it is worth adding that education, nutrition and all the other factors that go toward a good educational environment vary across the country. So there are going to be areas where the children are adequately fed and literate and others where they simply aren't.
Let me make a few prediction:
* The laptops will come out and there will be a flurry of positive articles.
* A few months down the track there will be a spate of articles arguing it has been a failure because the laptops are breaking, being stolen, not used and the software isn't translated or culturally appropriate. It will conclude with estimates about how many laptops are actually still functional and being used.
* Some years down the track after people have really come to terms with what is useful some hard nosed analysis will demonstrate a worth while positive return for those countries but probably not vastly overwhelming.
I do think the project is worthwhile: but it isn't easy. At least they are realistic:
The success of the project in the face of overwhelming global diversity will only be possible by embracing openness and by providing the laptop's users and developers a profound level of freedom.
Big projects like this aren't usually about a single given result: "Look! A million laptops! Our work here is done.". It is about changing how things happen- a change in processes. Ideally this will allow more effective distribution of good educational ideas (write the software and distribute), a tighter feedback loop on what works (because distribution is easier and it is possible to get feedback through software), more sharing between countries (both recipient and wealthy countries) and a huge number of 'niche' education opportunities- beyond a certain point users can go and find resources wherever they happen to be on the Internet. None of this is a panacea but hopefully it will make more effective use of scarce educational resources.
The nice thing about stuff like this is that it allows many different approaches to be taken. Most will fail, some will work. That experimentation will take some time but shows promise compared to the traditional education system which is good- but how much better could it be? That isn't a slam dunk: it is hard to beat face to face education. But if you can't afford the best face to face education this looks like a worthwhile approach to try.
I'd add to the above commentary that our expectations of movies are based not just on the history of movies we have seen but also on comparable experiences, which includes TV and DVD. In the last few decades we have shifted from a few public broadcast channels to many channels of cable television, easy access to videos and DVDs from the local store (or via Netflix et. al.) and private collections of DVDs (which can be be pretty extensive- see your local fanatic). Add to that international fan dubs (I'm thinking particularly anime) and the 2 minute phenomena that is YouTube and Google Videos and there are a lot of things that might be considered competition for your moving picture experience.
And that isn't all- the Internet and video games should also be considered competition, although that is more competition for your time than directly comparable experiences.
The result of this is: if you are going to pony up cash for a movie you want it to be 'worth' those extra dollars in comparison to the 'free' (or other) experiences you might get elsewhere. But TV/Cable/DVDs/Videos are often the same material (on a smaller screen- but with added convenience). And some of the alternative channels actually have 'better' material (for your personal definition of better- which could be 24 hours of Lynch, or 72 hours of Ranma Half). So it is increasingly hard for the cinema films to differentiate from all the other media which is available.
And made for TV stuff is in absolute terms of directly comparable or better quality to older films: Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica 2005 have on screen effects that are much better than even huge feature films like Star Wars Ep 4. And TV series story telling has moved on too- series length plot arcs, even show length plot arcs, character development(!) and sometimes acting too!
All of this raises the benchmark for a movie.
On the flipside, the big budget blockbuster film budgets aren't getting any smaller, but ticket prices are (specially when you allow for inflation). Which means you have to hit a bigger audience, which means- usually- you have to water the material down. Because when you are aiming at a smallish audience it is about conveying a message to those people and you can challenge that audience. But with broad audiences it is about not offending people so where, in a small film, a scene is "challening" and "interesting" in a big film it is "morally offensive" and "unacceptable".
And smaller films are nipping at the heels of the big budget features. The $100K movie can many if not all of the special effects of the $100M film. They can hire the cameras and everyone works for the love of the film. And most of them are crap. But every now and then they aren't and that will tend to suck attention away from the big films.
As other posters have said, and I agree: there are actually still good films out there. There are some really good films being made. There are even some great big budget blockbuster films (the Pirates of the Carribean films would be examples for me). But most big budget films need to pay for itself and there water down their content to get the big audiences. But that lowers the differentiation from competing media...
The answer is probably a combination of:
* Lower distribution costs so cinemas are cheaper to run so ticket prices can go down so movies don't have to be that much better to be worth going to see
* Movies will continue to make a larger proportion of their total earnings outside of cinemas in the so called 'after marker' (c.f. long tail)
* Greater proportion of smaller 'niche' (but still quite large distribution) movies which leads directly to...
* Smaller cinema complexes with fewer seats per cinema
* Improved cinema experience: food and drink, maybe alcohol, lots of things I haven't thought off
* And finally: cinema closures as the competition vets t
In Australia we have a local idiot (Damien Broderick) who enthuses over the singularity and I find it incredibly irritating. I don't have a problem with the concept of a singularity, I DO have a problem with the insistence of some enthusiasts that the singularity is just round the corner. My biggest problem is that most of the pundits don't actually seem to work with technology.
It is really easy as an observer to sit on the outside and say: "Wow, more neato stuff seems to be coming out faster and faster- why, if I extrapolate it will probably keep coming out faster and faster and we'll get this exponential curve." But that ignores the fact that:
* The problems get harder
* Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the technology
* We've never found a silver bullet
By which I mean:
The problems get harder: Einstein may have been a genius- but we have our share of geniuses today. We almost certainly have many more geniuses actively involved in science (and physics research) than ever before- and they are well resourced (not fantastically, but OK). But they aren't producing Einstein like breakthrough physics because it is damn hard to improve on what we have. We know the current models have holes but we haven't worked out how to fix them- and not for want of trying.
The same applies to lots of technical problems- both the technical research and the translation of that research into real world products. Batteries and fusion power both have enormous commerical incentives but somehow we haven't found the answer yet. We HAVE made improvements but the simple truth is: these are hard problems.
See also the cost of electronic foundaries- around a billion $US and climbing by roughly an order of magnitude with each succesive generation. That is where the bleeding edge of real world technology rests and it isn't cheap and it is just unbelievably tricky.
Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the availability of technology: Science can in theory race ahead of everyday use but in practice it usually has to be supported by technology. Leaving aside silver bullet technologues (like AI- see below) scientific research needs to be translated into technologies that everyday people can use. And technology that everyday people use needs to be adopted, which means it needs to be understood and accepted. That isn't a formula for a singularity.
In theory a small population could make a 'huge breakthrough' and race ahead leaving the rest of the world's population bewildered by the change, but every indication is that the be big problems need big resources to address. And even more resources to translate into actual out of the lab usage (see electronics foundries link above).
We do see some impressive stuff (like Google) which catches our attention and is really useful but this is a tool that society adopts at its own rate. And Google is successful because it DOESN'T baffle and bewilder. It empowers the everyday person. That is pretty characteristic of succesful technology.
We've never found a silver bullet: Science fiction stories often have a bit of hidden magic- the AI, fusion power, teleportation (aka worm hole gates, star drives, etc...) that definitively solves some problem (problem solving, energy, transport to the stars) with no big side effects. That is great for science fiction, but in the real world we don't do this (I won't say absolutely, but I can't think of a real life silver bullet). Everything is a careful trade off, the really big problems don't just go away.
The big one is thinking: for all that computers help us do work they don't do what we would consider 'intelligent' things. Or when they do (like pattern recognition in breast cancer X-Rays) they are so limited in their scope that we st
I don't know the actual story but Buffet is well known for 'eating his own dog food'. He only invests in companies he's happy to promote- and then actively promotes them when the opportunity arises. So I wouldn't be at all suprised if the building he works in happened to be owned and/or built by one of the companies he's invested in.
Your statements don't actually say anything other than you don't believe in global warming- you essentially assert that 'there were big changes in the past and I don't believe humans could contribute to them'. The whole- suprising- point of Global Warming is that it looks like there ARE mechanisms whereby humans affect the climate. You can certainly argue that you don't believe conclusions of the research but prefacing a statement of belief with 'I try to approach everything from (a) practical point of view.' is just a little insulting. I guess all those zany scientists were just being impractical huh?
I *do* believe that humans could change the climate since:
* Every time I fly over land I am constantly amazed by how much humans have altered the surface of the earth. In western Europe I'd be suprised if there was a significant percentage of the land cover that wasn't shaped by human hands. And Europe doesn't even have a large percentage of the population of the world- or even the highest densities of people! Does it really suprise you that we might actually change things on an even larger scale than that?
* In the last century and a bit our profile of energy consumption has changed from 'most energy used by humans consumed as food' (either human or livestock) to 'energy consumed by food a small percentage of the energy consumed by a human'. Even our food is more energy intensive (transport, fertilizer, packaging, more meat fewer vegetables). So the environmental footprint of each human (especially in the first world) is simply vast compared to humans only four or five generations ago. And of course our global population is larger than it has ever been (and not likely to start declining for a few more decades).
* The gloabl warming predictions aren't talking about climate changes of 100's or 10's of degrees- they are talking about degrees of change in temperature over the next decades.
Unfortunately that change is different in different places- so sometimes it is up and sometimes it is down! And our infrastructure is often frail in the face of change. A change in the type of snow in the UK affects how trains run (they can't get traction so trains are delayed), small changes in temperature in cold climates make it more likely embankments will collapse leading to road closures, an extra few degrees of temperature can cause dryness which causes dust on power lines that causes arcing and power outages when the first humidity comes along, early frosts affecting crops and general drop in productivity as the regional crop mix changes to adapt to slightly altered local environment.
These aren't thunderous typhoons and dramatic storms. This is the real world of being nibbled to death by ducks. You don't see dramatic changes and societal collapse, you see just... things breaking getting a little worse, bit by bit. Things get a little more expensive overall and oranges are very expensive some times of year. Alright in the first world where we can buy our way out of trouble. Kind of crap in Africa where people die instead.
So I *do* find that believable. And from a practical point of view I'd have thought that caution was the appropriate approach when playing with things like, you know, the global ecology.
I find that the most useful comments clarify the underlying code by adding something that may not be possible to get from the code itself. For example the intention of the code may or may not be clear (the code may be incorrect or it could 'mean' several things given the context) but a comment can be explicit about the intention.
The point is you are not repeating the code statements- you are adding information to the source code. This makes it a lot less likely the comment is going to go out of date. In many cases you can change code and the comment will still remain the same (you are still searching a hash for the RequestItemId- just doing it faster/better/correctly).
Programming is about translating concepts from a problem domain (Billing, Accounting, CRM, Networking, Memory Paging) into code (be it C, C++, Java, Perl, Pascal..). We endeavour to build functions, methods and objects that map to the problem domain (so we can display a picture, act on a button click, add a charge to a customer's bill...). But this translation inevitably has some tricky bits that are not clear from the code (what format is the time in? why do we have to mask of the data retrieved from disk? why aren't we validating the customer's username?). So it can be useful to put the 'original' (our intention) in there and any useful translation notes (the tricky or non-obvious bits) so that we can make it clear where something is done or not done deliberately- and when it is simply an error.
Good comments add information not necessarily obvious from code. That makes it tricky to write good comments since you have to look at the code as if you had never seen it before and ask: what isn't obvious about this? Which is why writing the comments before you write the code can be much more effective. After you've written the code it just feels like you are stating the obvious. Which it is- to you, at that moment in time.