I've been tempted to snag a small 40 gig model and use that as my OS drive, and use my existing internal 1TB HDD for the actual data.
I've been doing exactly that for about a year now and highly recommend it. Use 3 (or 4) 1TB HDDs in a RAID for your non-OS storage and you'll add some failsafe capacity as well as speed.
I fail to understand the entire roll-up computation field. What's the appeal? Why would I want to carry around a cylinder of material that is easy to crush (and therefore crease, likely destroying in the process) when the same item can be made flat, rigid, and slide easily into my briefcase along with other flat things that I need to carry around? Floppy items are no fun to type on. Curly things are no fun to read.
Even a *used* business-class laptop is a good idea, because they typically are much beefier than their consumer grade equivalents. You can often find them that are still within their warranty. And warranties are often 3 years long, instead of 1 year or even 90 days for the consumer-grade crap.
A close friend always buys consumer grade. I always buy business grade. We both travel internationally quite a bit and depend on our hardware for our businesses. He's had a never-ending litany of issues. When I have the occasional issue, it's fixed, FAST.
With a business laptop, you can also buy extra levels of service that will do things like protect you against accidental damage (essentially an insurance policy) or get replacement hardware / technician at your door the next day.
The ISP I'm with seems to meter very accurately: their figures never vary more than ~0.5% from what my router reports (i.e. maximum of a couple of MB discrepancy every 1 GB, and it's not always in their favour). They provide usage statistics via their website and a number of other tools: downloadable desktop widgets, Android and iOS apps, and of course, email/SMS warnings when you hit 70%, 90% and 100% of your monthly allowance. Additionally, they publish the API for their stats server so anyone can write their own tools to monitor usage if they want. The stats are also fairly timely, generally lagging 30-90 minutes behind the actual usage.
While that would be seemingly the Right Thing to do, I find it amazing that an ISP is that enlightened. Given that credit card bills in the US are at best a week or so behind, a delay measured in minutes is incredible. An API? No frelling way. Accurate to better than one percent? Amazing. Really. Ab-so-lute-ly amazing. SMS alerts when you cross thresholds? It's like they think their customers are valuable or something.
Why do we need GPS-based electronic tracking to know how many miles our vehicles have travelled when the odometer already does that? In states with yearly safety inspections, those numbers are already recorded. Why is that not sufficient? It suggests that knowing not just how far each individual has travelled, but exactly where and when is what the government wants.
Plos One, the New Internet Age's online quicker-to-publish-than-verify journal.
Its record: 10% genuine breakthroughs, 50% hype, and 40% bad data. (Caveat: the previous sentence may be bad data.)
Your call on this one.
You are basing these assertions on what data? And PLoS ONE differs from other publications by how much in these figures?
If 10% of a journal's papers were actual breakthroughs, that would be exceptionally high. If true, we wouldn't be debating the added value that journals provide, for all we would need to do is to point to that example.
In the US, where governmental records are required by law to be kept, using a non-governmental privately-owned system for email that is (a) insecure, and (b) likely not compliant with the necessary auditing and archiving requirements, (c) likely not subject to FOIA, when the email is for official business is against the law in many states in addition to being just outright stupid. As in ex-Gov. Palin stupid, remember?
There is no reason for the government employees to be using GMail or Hotmail for their jobs.
You've touched upon one of the big issues facing companies: uncertainty. Companies (and, by extension, shareholders) hate uncertainty. Given the choice between using newfangled GPL code where there's s a chance you might get sued at some unknown time in the future by an unknown party for some unrealized violation based on a large, detailed licensing document that you need lawyers to figure out, versus using a package that requires buying a license to do exactly what you want from an established company for a fixed cost, guess which choice the pointy-haired boss is going to take? Certainty wins over free as in beer, and the PHB does not care about free as in speech.
Initial tests show that the system in Bath emits approximately half as much energy as heat than the previous AC powered system while running much faster.
If you mean "much cooler", you already said that. If you mean "much faster", you should probably sign up for that physics (or electronics) course.
I'm betting the new systems were much faster because they were, well, newer than the old ones, and the fact that they ran faster is completely unrelated to the fact that the cable running into the box that provides power carries DC rather than AC. But what do you expect from a propaganda-laden puff piece released by a university PR department, scientific accuracy and truth?
We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.
80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.
Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).
Rescaling, the figures become 0.5 to 1.0 MW. That's a highly non-trivial amount of power to transfer electrically (ignoring the massive electromagnetic fields that level of power transfer creates). Not something that's going to be done in the home.
Recall, a consumer-grade hair drier is in the 1.0 to 1.5 kW range. We're talking about operating about a thousand of those at the same time for 5-10 minutes. Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near that. Moreover, even if it's wildly efficient at 99% transfer to the batteries, that's 0.01 x 1 MW = 10 KW of loss that needs to be dissipated. I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot.
And Qaddafi is among the worst, or perhaps you haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years or so. The biggest difference between Qaddafi and the bulk of the other despots is that he actively wages war against his perceived enemies in the rest of world, rather than just talking about it.
2. If it doesn't have to be so fancy, what's wrong with just having them raise their hands and counting them?
Or, if you want a permanent identifiable record, take a photograph as people have their hands raised during each phase (yes, no, abstain). Use more than one camera from different angles to make sure you don't have occlusion problems. Have volunteers count hands live (each volunteer covering one Nth of the committee) to get real-time values that are approximate and sufficient for votes with more than, say 10 points difference; for close votes, use the photographic record.
While the cell phone idea sounds good, and likely everyone will own one, the likelihood that (a) everyone will have brought theirs, (b) they won't be busy doing something else with it, (c) they remembered to charge it so the battery doesn't die before the vote, (d) they send their SMS to the correct number, (e) they don't blow the encoding, no matter how simple, (f) their provider accounts are in good standing / topped up, (g) the local cell tower can handle the traffic from so many devices simultaneously, and (h) the SMS actually get delivered in a timely fashion, etc., is not 100%.
Here's another idea: You want something dead simple and fast. Print lists of the delegates with three checkboxes (yes, no, abstain) and have 10 volunteers go and poll each delegate in person, ticking the appropriate box. Each volunteer tallies his section and the chairman adds up the reports for the final vote. Each vote will take perhaps 5 minutes or so. The key with this approach is that you need LOTS of vote recording volunteers.
I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it.
The summary is not absolutely clear on who makes this statement, but the article attributes it to "a professor". I don't know where this professor works, but the outstanding programmers I know can all do calculus in their sleep. Not all programmers, or even all good programmers, but the outstanding ones. It isn't about continuous versus discrete, which is a complete and utter red herring, but the ability to think abstractly. Hell the best programmer I know is a pure theoretical mathematician: his code is always beautiful, clear, easy to maintain, and, imporantantly, correct; he's prolific to boot. But he's an outstanding programmer. I know plenty of work-a-day programmers who are not outstanding, and whom I would suspect would have problems with integration by parts.
Based in part on my differing experience, I posit that the quoted professor does not work at a high-end institution where really outstanding programmers are likely to be found. This opinion is bolstered by the observation that discrete mathematics (the Z transform, difference equations, discrete Fourier transforms, and the like) and continuous mathematics really are not that different if taught properly. If an individual can't master continuous and discrete mathematics, then they are not going to be an outstanding programmer, because they can't think sufficiently abstractly.
Outstanding programmers can do system architecture, data structure design, algorithmic development. No one who can design and understand a Fibonacci heap is going to have problems with dx/dt.
The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve...
Bearing in mind that, although not often mentioned, the curve is dynamic. My less-than-stellar experience with marketing folks would suggest that they generally don't understand this idea, instead throwing their arms up in the air when their assumptions are no longer valid and declaring, "OMFG THE MARKET HAS CHANGED!!" But the dynamic nature of the curve means that today's advantageous price point of USD 0.99 may not be valid in two years, or even two months. Pricing is not absolute (although there are absolute psychological factors, like 0.99 is perceived as disproportionately less than 1.00), but relative to the current market.
Prof. Brian Derby of the University of Manchester was printing bone scaffolding in 2005. He was a finalist for the Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas Award in 2008 for that work (full disclosure: I was a finalist as well, but for something else).
If both teams relied solely on computer models to make the decision, both teams would likely know whether an attempt on 4th down would be attempted. There would almost never be an unexpected attempt, and the only unaccounted variable would be the actual play to be run on the attempt, which could also be predicted relatively accurately by considering coach play calling tendencies.
I suppose you're claiming that a model could never be built that had the value of surprise or unusual choices as one of the variables. And a random element is right out.
More seriously, if you can think of general characteristics of anything, it's usually pretty easy to come up with a model to cover it. Especially when big money is involved. The same reasoning posited above would argue that Watson was impossible to build. I'm glad the very talented folks at IBM did not succumb to such shortsightedness.
Answer: "attempt field goal with 10 seconds remaining in the 4th quarter on the 25 yard line with 4th down and 3 to go when down by 2 points"
Question: "what is a winning strategy?"
Seems like that fits the description of only one correct answer to select. It all depends on how you phrase the inputs and how efficient your search is.
The point is that the success of the Watson team is twofold, first, as you rightly point out, to understand complex human language. The second is to efficiently organize and search vast amounts of human knowledge. Both tasks are related, in that they are attempting to identify and classify structure in information, and, I imagine, the same team would be hugely successful at football strategy using the same underlying analytical tools.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been tempted to snag a small 40 gig model and use that as my OS drive, and use my existing internal 1TB HDD for the actual data.
I've been doing exactly that for about a year now and highly recommend it. Use 3 (or 4) 1TB HDDs in a RAID for your non-OS storage and you'll add some failsafe capacity as well as speed.
I fail to understand the entire roll-up computation field. What's the appeal? Why would I want to carry around a cylinder of material that is easy to crush (and therefore crease, likely destroying in the process) when the same item can be made flat, rigid, and slide easily into my briefcase along with other flat things that I need to carry around? Floppy items are no fun to type on. Curly things are no fun to read.
Can someone explain, please?
Egad, I wish I had mod points right now. +1 insightful on the parent.
The OP doesn't know how to deal with choice and is looking for someone to make the decision for him.
Even a *used* business-class laptop is a good idea, because they typically are much beefier than their consumer grade equivalents. You can often find them that are still within their warranty. And warranties are often 3 years long, instead of 1 year or even 90 days for the consumer-grade crap.
A close friend always buys consumer grade. I always buy business grade. We both travel internationally quite a bit and depend on our hardware for our businesses. He's had a never-ending litany of issues. When I have the occasional issue, it's fixed, FAST.
With a business laptop, you can also buy extra levels of service that will do things like protect you against accidental damage (essentially an insurance policy) or get replacement hardware / technician at your door the next day.
The ISP I'm with seems to meter very accurately: their figures never vary more than ~0.5% from what my router reports (i.e. maximum of a couple of MB discrepancy every 1 GB, and it's not always in their favour). They provide usage statistics via their website and a number of other tools: downloadable desktop widgets, Android and iOS apps, and of course, email/SMS warnings when you hit 70%, 90% and 100% of your monthly allowance. Additionally, they publish the API for their stats server so anyone can write their own tools to monitor usage if they want. The stats are also fairly timely, generally lagging 30-90 minutes behind the actual usage.
While that would be seemingly the Right Thing to do, I find it amazing that an ISP is that enlightened. Given that credit card bills in the US are at best a week or so behind, a delay measured in minutes is incredible. An API? No frelling way. Accurate to better than one percent? Amazing. Really. Ab-so-lute-ly amazing. SMS alerts when you cross thresholds? It's like they think their customers are valuable or something.
Won't happen in the US.
The primary concern should be to make the search better or faster than what can be done by humans without the gadgets.
What can machines do better than humans? Sense magnetic fields. Process signals faster. Move faster. Perform repetitive tasks in an automated fashion.
Whatever you do, be sure to test before you do any serious field work and take plenty of spare parts.
Why do we need GPS-based electronic tracking to know how many miles our vehicles have travelled when the odometer already does that? In states with yearly safety inspections, those numbers are already recorded. Why is that not sufficient? It suggests that knowing not just how far each individual has travelled, but exactly where and when is what the government wants.
Plos One, the New Internet Age's online quicker-to-publish-than-verify journal.
Its record: 10% genuine breakthroughs, 50% hype, and 40% bad data. (Caveat: the previous sentence may be bad data.)
Your call on this one.
You are basing these assertions on what data? And PLoS ONE differs from other publications by how much in these figures?
If 10% of a journal's papers were actual breakthroughs, that would be exceptionally high. If true, we wouldn't be debating the added value that journals provide, for all we would need to do is to point to that example.
Agreed.
In the US, where governmental records are required by law to be kept, using a non-governmental privately-owned system for email that is (a) insecure, and (b) likely not compliant with the necessary auditing and archiving requirements, (c) likely not subject to FOIA, when the email is for official business is against the law in many states in addition to being just outright stupid. As in ex-Gov. Palin stupid, remember?
There is no reason for the government employees to be using GMail or Hotmail for their jobs.
You've touched upon one of the big issues facing companies: uncertainty. Companies (and, by extension, shareholders) hate uncertainty. Given the choice between using newfangled GPL code where there's s a chance you might get sued at some unknown time in the future by an unknown party for some unrealized violation based on a large, detailed licensing document that you need lawyers to figure out, versus using a package that requires buying a license to do exactly what you want from an established company for a fixed cost, guess which choice the pointy-haired boss is going to take? Certainty wins over free as in beer, and the PHB does not care about free as in speech.
Why are they banning under-13's from using the site? Is 13 the age of consent in the United States? what an arb number...
Any number is going to be an arbitrary threshold; perhaps you didn't give the idea the few more seconds of thought it deserved before typing?
If you mean "much cooler", you already said that. If you mean "much faster", you should probably sign up for that physics (or electronics) course.
I'm betting the new systems were much faster because they were, well, newer than the old ones, and the fact that they ran faster is completely unrelated to the fact that the cable running into the box that provides power carries DC rather than AC. But what do you expect from a propaganda-laden puff piece released by a university PR department, scientific accuracy and truth?
We estimated that a car driven 100 km uses about 80 kWh of energy.
80kWh / 5-10 minutes ~= 1000-500kW.
Hmm. That's roughly the power draw of a small electric passenger train (e.g. an old subway train).
Rescaling, the figures become 0.5 to 1.0 MW. That's a highly non-trivial amount of power to transfer electrically (ignoring the massive electromagnetic fields that level of power transfer creates). Not something that's going to be done in the home.
Recall, a consumer-grade hair drier is in the 1.0 to 1.5 kW range. We're talking about operating about a thousand of those at the same time for 5-10 minutes. Personally, I don't want to be anywhere near that. Moreover, even if it's wildly efficient at 99% transfer to the batteries, that's 0.01 x 1 MW = 10 KW of loss that needs to be dissipated. I am not familiar with materials found in the home that can provide safe, reliable, tamper-proof thermal isolation from grasping a cable / connector package that is glowing hot.
We got a plate full of ruthless dictators.
And Qaddafi is among the worst, or perhaps you haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years or so. The biggest difference between Qaddafi and the bulk of the other despots is that he actively wages war against his perceived enemies in the rest of world, rather than just talking about it.
2. If it doesn't have to be so fancy, what's wrong with just having them raise their hands and counting them?
Or, if you want a permanent identifiable record, take a photograph as people have their hands raised during each phase (yes, no, abstain). Use more than one camera from different angles to make sure you don't have occlusion problems. Have volunteers count hands live (each volunteer covering one Nth of the committee) to get real-time values that are approximate and sufficient for votes with more than, say 10 points difference; for close votes, use the photographic record.
While the cell phone idea sounds good, and likely everyone will own one, the likelihood that (a) everyone will have brought theirs, (b) they won't be busy doing something else with it, (c) they remembered to charge it so the battery doesn't die before the vote, (d) they send their SMS to the correct number, (e) they don't blow the encoding, no matter how simple, (f) their provider accounts are in good standing / topped up, (g) the local cell tower can handle the traffic from so many devices simultaneously, and (h) the SMS actually get delivered in a timely fashion, etc., is not 100%.
Here's another idea: You want something dead simple and fast. Print lists of the delegates with three checkboxes (yes, no, abstain) and have 10 volunteers go and poll each delegate in person, ticking the appropriate box. Each volunteer tallies his section and the chairman adds up the reports for the final vote. Each vote will take perhaps 5 minutes or so. The key with this approach is that you need LOTS of vote recording volunteers.
I get to carry card that says "Back off, man. I'm a scientist."
One of the greatest joys in life is to be able to write, in one block letter per little square, "S C I E N T I S T" on visa and immigration forms.
There's no content... Hello, Taco? You there?
Hello?
Anyone?
Ulp.
A 5KW laser is surely going to cause surface vaporization and thus create potentially far more thrust that the light pressure alone.
Their security policies prevent me from saying anything about the super sweet things I saw inside the building...
Their security policies sound more like industrial trade secret policies, unless the cool things they have inside are anti-terrorism devices.
Seagate started tanking in quality just after they bought Maxtor.
I have seen many outstanding programmers who struggled with calculus and never really got it.
The summary is not absolutely clear on who makes this statement, but the article attributes it to "a professor". I don't know where this professor works, but the outstanding programmers I know can all do calculus in their sleep. Not all programmers, or even all good programmers, but the outstanding ones. It isn't about continuous versus discrete, which is a complete and utter red herring, but the ability to think abstractly. Hell the best programmer I know is a pure theoretical mathematician: his code is always beautiful, clear, easy to maintain, and, imporantantly, correct; he's prolific to boot. But he's an outstanding programmer. I know plenty of work-a-day programmers who are not outstanding, and whom I would suspect would have problems with integration by parts.
Based in part on my differing experience, I posit that the quoted professor does not work at a high-end institution where really outstanding programmers are likely to be found. This opinion is bolstered by the observation that discrete mathematics (the Z transform, difference equations, discrete Fourier transforms, and the like) and continuous mathematics really are not that different if taught properly. If an individual can't master continuous and discrete mathematics, then they are not going to be an outstanding programmer, because they can't think sufficiently abstractly.
Outstanding programmers can do system architecture, data structure design, algorithmic development. No one who can design and understand a Fibonacci heap is going to have problems with dx/dt.
The trick, of course, is locating the price that puts you on that part of the demand curve...
Bearing in mind that, although not often mentioned, the curve is dynamic. My less-than-stellar experience with marketing folks would suggest that they generally don't understand this idea, instead throwing their arms up in the air when their assumptions are no longer valid and declaring, "OMFG THE MARKET HAS CHANGED!!" But the dynamic nature of the curve means that today's advantageous price point of USD 0.99 may not be valid in two years, or even two months. Pricing is not absolute (although there are absolute psychological factors, like 0.99 is perceived as disproportionately less than 1.00), but relative to the current market.
Prof. Brian Derby of the University of Manchester was printing bone scaffolding in 2005. He was a finalist for the Saatchi and Saatchi World Changing Ideas Award in 2008 for that work (full disclosure: I was a finalist as well, but for something else).
Here's but one link to the press coverage of that particular idea from 2005.
http://news.cnet.com/Paging%20Dr.%20Inkjet/2100-1041_3-5656823.html
If both teams relied solely on computer models to make the decision, both teams would likely know whether an attempt on 4th down would be attempted. There would almost never be an unexpected attempt, and the only unaccounted variable would be the actual play to be run on the attempt, which could also be predicted relatively accurately by considering coach play calling tendencies.
I suppose you're claiming that a model could never be built that had the value of surprise or unusual choices as one of the variables. And a random element is right out.
More seriously, if you can think of general characteristics of anything, it's usually pretty easy to come up with a model to cover it. Especially when big money is involved. The same reasoning posited above would argue that Watson was impossible to build. I'm glad the very talented folks at IBM did not succumb to such shortsightedness.
Answer: "attempt field goal with 10 seconds remaining in the 4th quarter on the 25 yard line with 4th down and 3 to go when down by 2 points"
Question: "what is a winning strategy?"
Seems like that fits the description of only one correct answer to select. It all depends on how you phrase the inputs and how efficient your search is.
The point is that the success of the Watson team is twofold, first, as you rightly point out, to understand complex human language. The second is to efficiently organize and search vast amounts of human knowledge. Both tasks are related, in that they are attempting to identify and classify structure in information, and, I imagine, the same team would be hugely successful at football strategy using the same underlying analytical tools.