I guess an important thing to add here is that each of those computer systems can do exactly one of those tasks well. A single human could do all of them to a respectable degree. And then drive home then make a sandwich ready for tomorrow because she doesn't think she'll have time in the morning.
My day job is writing trading software, specifically for exchange traded instruments (shares, futures, options, some spreads, and a couple of other things). We (and a few of our competitors) DO use (k, m, b) for (1000, 1x10^6, 1x10^9). Our system has configurable per user and per group limits on the number of units or the value of the trade - specifically to stop this kind of thing from happening. I find it unusual that a trader would only deal in amounts of $100m for shares though, this tends to be more for FX (foreign exchange) deals doesn't it?
But I pretty much agree with you here though, there's a whole load of controls to stop this from happening. The are a few other possibilities other than a fat finger (or cat) but the one that jumps to my mind straight away is an algo gone wrong.
The long answer is that traders start at 7am by reading reports and recomendations.
They traders make decisions about what they will trade and what position they will take early on based on this information. They will pay a LOT of money to money to get this information as early as possible. The information providers want to be able to sell this valuable data and analysis.
This won't affect day traders so much, who try to squeeze trades in between the various peaks and troughs in prices during the day (playing with graphs basically).
What this means is that the people that are releasing this information will only have to wait until 10am and the information will still be released into the public domain that morning anyway. It is is very important to trades who are trying to take long term positions and want to get a price that makes it worth while to trade the stock. (if you have to pick a trader take side with this is the one you want.)
You point out that there needs to be an investment to write drivers whenever you write an application. I imagine that this would be one of the first things that a library would be created for. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there that would like to get their teeth stuck into something like that!
I know someone who teaches in a primary school (7-10) in inner city Leeds. The kids are REALLY low ability! When she talks about them, she describes their behaviour as appalling because they can't keep up with the most basic of tasks. They come from 1 of the poorest areas of the country, their parents are long term unemployed from a long line of long term unemployed. These kids get no support because the parents can't read or write either, the ones that aren't in prison. More than once she's had to send her assistant round to their houses to remind parents of parents evening. The only time she's found she can get the kids to do anything is rewarding them with time in the computer lab, where things often go missing. Given the current funding levels, it's not so easy to justify the expense of giving high acheivers ALL the help when there's others struggling with the basics.
BUT with schools being funded the way they are, there's not really much option. The system is currently trying to lift the disadvantaged out of a hole too. It's a really delicate balancing act, trying to get those at the bottom of the ladder on to the first rung and those at the top to go higher. There's only so much money to fund education so you're pretty limited.
Obligatory/. suggested solution: What about an EdQ? Like EQ but for education. Work out a statistic based not only on how your current peers are doing but what the previous ones are too. Everyone could take the same test and different levels of acheivement could be seperated into different 'grades' starting with A at the top down F at the bottom.
It's worth pointing out that another conclusion of this paper is that not only does avatar behaviour match that of people in the real world, but the correlation is strong enough that further study should be carried out as to whether using online world should be used to study a wider range of human behaviour. For example, they suggest that it might be possible to study the affects of having a male become pregnant or study economics using online monetary systems.
I've been to good ol' Lossie. I think it's perfect! Takeoffs would occur over the bay which opens up to the North Sea. Lossiemouth itself isn't hugely populated but it does lie next door to the base. There is a housing estate right up to the fence on one side (with the local pub about 1 mile from the main entrance), all other sides are clear and the nearest large town is Elgin about 10 miles away.
As long as they are careful to take off and land over the water I can't see many problems at all.
He did invest his talent, but he never invested in any of the risk. It's easy to put effort into an enterprise, doing the work etc. but until you decide to share in the risk then you don't have very much to negotiate with.
Look at it this way. If the company had gone under, all he would have lost was his job. And he would have still gained something from it, and whatever he'd saved over that period and experience. That's always valuable when going to your next employer. If he'd have become a fully fledged investor, invested in the risk of a startup and taken some of the heat of the others then he would have been rewarded appropriately.
I'm not sure if he seriously believes what he's saying. While there is an outside possibility that he's telling the absolute truth (ie. mathematically non-zero), it's possible that he's just a loon.
Ah, those were the days. Installation was a matter of dragging the application directory to the necessary location and making sure !System had been updated.
I cried the day I realised I had to move to the PC platform. (All to do with cost and community issues, nothing to do with technical ones!)
You could expand on this and say that each RAW format specification should be left in escrow. One of the conditions for public release could be that the format is no longer supported by any devices currently in mass production. Obviously this would work best for formats that are used in mass produced devices in the first place. Other conditions could be:
The company that owns the IP goes out of business.
The company decides to donate it to the community.
The format is succesfully reverse engineered.
You could argue about this list until the cows come home but the point is to take some of the responsability away from those that have no interest in preserving the information.
While I applaud any attempt by a private individual to write their own GSM stack, I would like to point out a few things (based on personal experience of writing software for GSM devices):
There are a LOT of documents to download! Several hundred!
Some of these documents are BIG! The spec covering the communication between the different layers of the protocol stack on a device alone comes to well over 1000 pages. There are several more specs like that lying around.
These specs are written in a language that is only loosely based on English. By this I mean that many hundreds of people have been involved writing these specs (some of whom do not speak English as their first language), there has been a lot of 'fudging' to cover up where some specs have been written at the same time but vitally depend on information contained in each other, and most of the authors a engineers - not writers.
If you were thinking of implementing only a small subset of the features, you've still got to trawl through the relevant specs finding even the most basic information.
Just remember this; I saw a project that took 30 people almost 2 years to design and implement a GSM stack (based on some previous work). This was considered amazingly fast at the time!
I see a lot of people here have been having a go at off-shoring work, especially Indian companies. As a software engineer for a company that does contracting almost exclusively, here are some things that I've seen/noticed:
The location of the workers has less baring on the success of a project than the strength of the project management. Yes you need able programmers but it's up to the PM to communicate with the team in a language they understand and allocate the resourses properly.
Don't be surprised at who's a pleasure to work with and who isn't - even within the same company. I've worked on projects for HUGE blue chip companies (who shall remain nameless). With some of the code I saw from them, I am actually surprised that business unit is still in business. I've seen large multi-million euro projects die a nasty death because of a couple of bad managers from the clients. On the other hand I've also seen some nice pretty code that's a pleasure to work with from the same company, from an equally large business unit who understood that writing software takes time.
If you don't have a contract in place before you start the work, the longer you go on without a contract, the more risk to the project. More specifically, the more risk of getting burned. A little work before hand is alright if it helps bring the sale in but you have to know where the line is.
I have to say that the the guy was a little naive in paying while the work was on and not on condition of meeting certain milestones (I'm guessing here - he didn't say specifically but it sounds like he just gave them a sum of money every month for x months). He was more naive by making the final payment before full acceptance tests (the format of which agreed in the contract and the tests agreed to during the project by a process agreed to in the contract). All I have to say is - lesson learned, he probably won't do it again. I hope he won't use the same company again and make sure that in future that if he doesn't have direct control over he is able to get regular interim deliveries (of code, executables, design and test docs), status reports and milestone revies. If things are going bad, there should be a provision to take the entire project off them including both and code documents and giving it to someone else. As someone who does the contracting, a client that has all this in place is less of a risk to your reputation and bank balance (it works both ways you know), we've had companies not pay for work we've done in good faith).
As for the guy's current situation, I wouldn't recommend 'IcePick' Vinnie, try the law first, if that doesn't work just pass the word around and hope for the best.
More than likely these microgenerators will be powered by methanol. It's easy to produce, well understood, and easy to handle. All this makes it CHEAP! Since methanol will come from specially grown crops, so in some respects it can be regarded as CARBON NEUTRAL. In other words, it won't contribute any more CO2 to the atmosphere than was taken out to produce it.
Factoring in the other energy used to produce the crop (such as powering tractors, transporting it etc) can be quite complicated and will no doubt slightly offset the advantages but overall I seem to recall that it isn't a bad trade off.
I hate to say it but this only works if EVERYONE does this at the same time. If only 1 person stands up then if they aren't immediately gotten rid of, you can almost guarantee that the next round of redundancies or shitty jobs that come around will put that person on the shortlist.
The most effective way to deal with it would probably involve lawyers and/or a new job!
Since the X-Prize has been won now, they technically don't have any focus any more. But I do agree that they shouldn't let their new challenges get too confused. It could easily go 1 of 2 ways now, losing focus, letting the differences between challenges blur and being ignored as they wrestle with internal management and resource issues OR effectively splitting the new challenges up and providing clear and acheivable goals that will inspire people to going out there and win.
In my ill considered and completely unprofessional opinion, they should have different fields such as green automotive, green air transport, automated land transport etc. and each field have no more that 1 or 2 challenges such as "first to do X" and "the highest/biggest/best Y by date Z".
as the President, your actions will decide the price of the food I buy at the store, what treatments I might be able to recieve in hospital, our relationship with neighbouring countries and ultimately whether I (or my children) will need to be drafted.
By the way, I'm British. I can't vote for you and have never even been to the US, so my question is this: why should I try to persuade my American friends to vote for you.
Sun's description of Throughput Computing and their approach of putting multiple processor cores reminds me of what Inmos tried to do with the Transputer before they became STMicroelectronics. The idea was to have many small processors positioned close to each other, communicating between each other closely. I seem to recall seeing transputers on eBay a while back for huge amounts of money. By all accounts, a transputer board was a very useful piece of kit for the right appplications!
New Year 2003/4 in the UK, 111 MILLION SMSs were sent between midnight 31 December and midnight 1 January, an average of 4.625 million/hour. In reality the first couple of minutes around 37.2 million were sent.
I'm guessing that the events are aimed at promoting safe transportation of people and cargo but there is not specific mention of the amount of time that a craft will be 'airborn' for. Even mach 3 on a sub-orbital flight will take a few hours to make it coast to coast. During this time the craft might launch to the proper altitude and then glide the rest of the way. The amount of time spent in powered flight affects height and speed and therefore the distance travelled.
What if the organisers had an event where competitors have to lift a pre-determined mass to a minimum altitude and keep above there for as long as possible?
I hate to admit it, but for single developer projects Source Safe is actually really handy! It's absolutely pants at handling merging but this shouldn't be much of a problem if there's just one of you or even in a small team of 3 or 4 should you choose to expand the operation. It keeps track of eveything and allows for easy versioning and comparison between versions. I found it's great if you find new problems cropping up after a certain date and you want to compare what changes you made.
Beware though, it's not much good at anything else so if you want to use multiple branches or get frequent source updates from the client or anywhere else I'd consider something else.
Hi, great to hear that there are people actually studying this area academically.
My question is this: would you rate current cutting edge AI to be at the level of clever cockroaches or stupid rats? And related to that, if you gave a psycologist (an animal specialist perhaps??) a case study detailing the behaviour of an AI controlled bot (without telling them what it was) that roves around scavenging and interacting with things, what do you think the they would say? (And would they guess it was a robot?)
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there - US beef is banned in the EU because US beef growers use steroids to boost muscle mass in their stock. This (allegedly) remains in meat consumed by humans and has been deemed unsafe on this side of the pond. There is the whole thing about market protectionism, but that's a whole other story.
PS. it's "genetically modified" not "gene modificated".
There is a school of thought that takes into account the development status of a nation when applying protectionist policies. In general, the less developed an economy is, the more protectionism required. For example, a 3rd world African nation generally spends a lot of money on arming itself and less on basic infrastucture. This has 2 effects, 1. money is going out of that country to buy arms because these nations rarely have a local industry capable of supplying these needs. 2. lack of spending on infrastructure (including roads, hospitals and schools) means that there is no investment that will give that nation the ability to supply its own needs. All this occurs before considerations for monetary issues. Internal investment also distributes internally, which is required to list people out of poverty.
As a nation becomes more developed less protectionism is required but it shouldn't be removed altogether. It should be treated as a sliding scale. Protectionism isn't just stopping moeny going out of a nation, it's about persuading people in that nation to invest it in other people in that nation. It's about human factors too.
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I guess an important thing to add here is that each of those computer systems can do exactly one of those tasks well. A single human could do all of them to a respectable degree. And then drive home then make a sandwich ready for tomorrow because she doesn't think she'll have time in the morning.
My day job is writing trading software, specifically for exchange traded instruments (shares, futures, options, some spreads, and a couple of other things). We (and a few of our competitors) DO use (k, m, b) for (1000, 1x10^6, 1x10^9). Our system has configurable per user and per group limits on the number of units or the value of the trade - specifically to stop this kind of thing from happening. I find it unusual that a trader would only deal in amounts of $100m for shares though, this tends to be more for FX (foreign exchange) deals doesn't it?
But I pretty much agree with you here though, there's a whole load of controls to stop this from happening. The are a few other possibilities other than a fat finger (or cat) but the one that jumps to my mind straight away is an algo gone wrong.
The short answer is money.
The long answer is that traders start at 7am by reading reports and recomendations.
They traders make decisions about what they will trade and what position they will take early on based on this information.
They will pay a LOT of money to money to get this information as early as possible.
The information providers want to be able to sell this valuable data and analysis.
This won't affect day traders so much, who try to squeeze trades in between the various peaks and troughs in prices during the day (playing with graphs basically).
What this means is that the people that are releasing this information will only have to wait until 10am and the information will still be released into the public domain that morning anyway.
It is is very important to trades who are trying to take long term positions and want to get a price that makes it worth while to trade the stock. (if you have to pick a trader take side with this is the one you want.)
You point out that there needs to be an investment to write drivers whenever you write an application. I imagine that this would be one of the first things that a library would be created for. I'm sure that there are plenty of people out there that would like to get their teeth stuck into something like that!
I know someone who teaches in a primary school (7-10) in inner city Leeds. The kids are REALLY low ability! When she talks about them, she describes their behaviour as appalling because they can't keep up with the most basic of tasks. They come from 1 of the poorest areas of the country, their parents are long term unemployed from a long line of long term unemployed. These kids get no support because the parents can't read or write either, the ones that aren't in prison. More than once she's had to send her assistant round to their houses to remind parents of parents evening. The only time she's found she can get the kids to do anything is rewarding them with time in the computer lab, where things often go missing. Given the current funding levels, it's not so easy to justify the expense of giving high acheivers ALL the help when there's others struggling with the basics.
/. suggested solution:
BUT with schools being funded the way they are, there's not really much option. The system is currently trying to lift the disadvantaged out of a hole too. It's a really delicate balancing act, trying to get those at the bottom of the ladder on to the first rung and those at the top to go higher. There's only so much money to fund education so you're pretty limited.
Obligatory
What about an EdQ? Like EQ but for education. Work out a statistic based not only on how your current peers are doing but what the previous ones are too. Everyone could take the same test and different levels of acheivement could be seperated into different 'grades' starting with A at the top down F at the bottom.
It's worth pointing out that another conclusion of this paper is that not only does avatar behaviour match that of people in the real world, but the correlation is strong enough that further study should be carried out as to whether using online world should be used to study a wider range of human behaviour. For example, they suggest that it might be possible to study the affects of having a male become pregnant or study economics using online monetary systems.
I've been to good ol' Lossie. I think it's perfect! Takeoffs would occur over the bay which opens up to the North Sea. Lossiemouth itself isn't hugely populated but it does lie next door to the base. There is a housing estate right up to the fence on one side (with the local pub about 1 mile from the main entrance), all other sides are clear and the nearest large town is Elgin about 10 miles away.
As long as they are careful to take off and land over the water I can't see many problems at all.
He did invest his talent, but he never invested in any of the risk. It's easy to put effort into an enterprise, doing the work etc. but until you decide to share in the risk then you don't have very much to negotiate with.
Look at it this way. If the company had gone under, all he would have lost was his job. And he would have still gained something from it, and whatever he'd saved over that period and experience. That's always valuable when going to your next employer. If he'd have become a fully fledged investor, invested in the risk of a startup and taken some of the heat of the others then he would have been rewarded appropriately.
OK, let me rephrase that.
I'm not sure if he seriously believes what he's saying. While there is an outside possibility that he's telling the absolute truth (ie. mathematically non-zero), it's possible that he's just a loon.
I had to double check the date on the article to make sure it wasn't 1st April!
While this guy seems genuine, the whole conspiracy theory thing still rings alarm bells in my head. Not sure whether to believe him.
Ah, those were the days. Installation was a matter of dragging the application directory to the necessary location and making sure !System had been updated.
I cried the day I realised I had to move to the PC platform. (All to do with cost and community issues, nothing to do with technical ones!)
Other conditions could be:
You could argue about this list until the cows come home but the point is to take some of the responsability away from those that have no interest in preserving the information.
Just remember this; I saw a project that took 30 people almost 2 years to design and implement a GSM stack (based on some previous work). This was considered amazingly fast at the time!
I have to say that the the guy was a little naive in paying while the work was on and not on condition of meeting certain milestones (I'm guessing here - he didn't say specifically but it sounds like he just gave them a sum of money every month for x months). He was more naive by making the final payment before full acceptance tests (the format of which agreed in the contract and the tests agreed to during the project by a process agreed to in the contract). All I have to say is - lesson learned, he probably won't do it again. I hope he won't use the same company again and make sure that in future that if he doesn't have direct control over he is able to get regular interim deliveries (of code, executables, design and test docs), status reports and milestone revies. If things are going bad, there should be a provision to take the entire project off them including both and code documents and giving it to someone else. As someone who does the contracting, a client that has all this in place is less of a risk to your reputation and bank balance (it works both ways you know), we've had companies not pay for work we've done in good faith).
As for the guy's current situation, I wouldn't recommend 'IcePick' Vinnie, try the law first, if that doesn't work just pass the word around and hope for the best.
More than likely these microgenerators will be powered by methanol. It's easy to produce, well understood, and easy to handle. All this makes it CHEAP! Since methanol will come from specially grown crops, so in some respects it can be regarded as CARBON NEUTRAL. In other words, it won't contribute any more CO2 to the atmosphere than was taken out to produce it.
Factoring in the other energy used to produce the crop (such as powering tractors, transporting it etc) can be quite complicated and will no doubt slightly offset the advantages but overall I seem to recall that it isn't a bad trade off.
I hate to say it but this only works if EVERYONE does this at the same time. If only 1 person stands up then if they aren't immediately gotten rid of, you can almost guarantee that the next round of redundancies or shitty jobs that come around will put that person on the shortlist.
The most effective way to deal with it would probably involve lawyers and/or a new job!
Since the X-Prize has been won now, they technically don't have any focus any more. But I do agree that they shouldn't let their new challenges get too confused. It could easily go 1 of 2 ways now, losing focus, letting the differences between challenges blur and being ignored as they wrestle with internal management and resource issues OR effectively splitting the new challenges up and providing clear and acheivable goals that will inspire people to going out there and win.
In my ill considered and completely unprofessional opinion, they should have different fields such as green automotive, green air transport, automated land transport etc. and each field have no more that 1 or 2 challenges such as "first to do X" and "the highest/biggest/best Y by date Z".
as the President, your actions will decide the price of the food I buy at the store, what treatments I might be able to recieve in hospital, our relationship with neighbouring countries and ultimately whether I (or my children) will need to be drafted.
By the way, I'm British. I can't vote for you and have never even been to the US, so my question is this: why should I try to persuade my American friends to vote for you.
Sun's description of Throughput Computing and their approach of putting multiple processor cores reminds me of what Inmos tried to do with the Transputer before they became STMicroelectronics. The idea was to have many small processors positioned close to each other, communicating between each other closely. I seem to recall seeing transputers on eBay a while back for huge amounts of money. By all accounts, a transputer board was a very useful piece of kit for the right appplications!
New Year 2003/4 in the UK, 111 MILLION SMSs were sent between midnight 31 December and midnight 1 January, an average of 4.625 million/hour. In reality the first couple of minutes around 37.2 million were sent.
See here for details.
What about the longest sustained flight?
I'm guessing that the events are aimed at promoting safe transportation of people and cargo but there is not specific mention of the amount of time that a craft will be 'airborn' for. Even mach 3 on a sub-orbital flight will take a few hours to make it coast to coast. During this time the craft might launch to the proper altitude and then glide the rest of the way. The amount of time spent in powered flight affects height and speed and therefore the distance travelled.
What if the organisers had an event where competitors have to lift a pre-determined mass to a minimum altitude and keep above there for as long as possible?
I hate to admit it, but for single developer projects Source Safe is actually really handy! It's absolutely pants at handling merging but this shouldn't be much of a problem if there's just one of you or even in a small team of 3 or 4 should you choose to expand the operation.
It keeps track of eveything and allows for easy versioning and comparison between versions. I found it's great if you find new problems cropping up after a certain date and you want to compare what changes you made.
Beware though, it's not much good at anything else so if you want to use multiple branches or get frequent source updates from the client or anywhere else I'd consider something else.
Hi, great to hear that there are people actually studying this area academically.
My question is this: would you rate current cutting edge AI to be at the level of clever cockroaches or stupid rats?
And related to that, if you gave a psycologist (an animal specialist perhaps??) a case study detailing the behaviour of an AI controlled bot (without telling them what it was) that roves around scavenging and interacting with things, what do you think the they would say? (And would they guess it was a robot?)
I'm afraid I have to disagree with you there - US beef is banned in the EU because US beef growers use steroids to boost muscle mass in their stock. This (allegedly) remains in meat consumed by humans and has been deemed unsafe on this side of the pond. There is the whole thing about market protectionism, but that's a whole other story.
PS. it's "genetically modified" not "gene modificated".
There is a school of thought that takes into account the development status of a nation when applying protectionist policies. In general, the less developed an economy is, the more protectionism required.
For example, a 3rd world African nation generally spends a lot of money on arming itself and less on basic infrastucture. This has 2 effects, 1. money is going out of that country to buy arms because these nations rarely have a local industry capable of supplying these needs. 2. lack of spending on infrastructure (including roads, hospitals and schools) means that there is no investment that will give that nation the ability to supply its own needs. All this occurs before considerations for monetary issues. Internal investment also distributes internally, which is required to list people out of poverty.
As a nation becomes more developed less protectionism is required but it shouldn't be removed altogether. It should be treated as a sliding scale. Protectionism isn't just stopping moeny going out of a nation, it's about persuading people in that nation to invest it in other people in that nation. It's about human factors too.