Well, the options seem to be (A) some 'social media guru' has moved to sponging directly off the DoD, (B) it's the more-pathetic arm of another delightful propaganda effort, along the lines of whatever they were trying to buy 'persona management' sockpuppetware for, or (C) it's a shamefully feeble attempt to cultivate 'soft power' by emulating kids these days.
I'm not quite sure whether such a manifestly silly document deserves a "Yeah, how about you write something that outperforms an under-motivated toddler and then pledge to protect us from it.." or a "C'mon, 4-eyes, am I really supposed to believe that you'll be in the trenches with an EMP rifle when skynet comes for us?"
Has Twitter not realized that they could, perhaps, develop at least one non-ridiculous alleged source of revenue by charging cost-insensitive, but potentially touchy, users substantial additional fees for more secure access?
Have they done so; but CENTCOM can't afford an auth fob because of cost overruns incurred by the F-35?
Given that size is a fairly useful attribute for an 'anonymous' network(if the system is so small that a little traffic analysis can identify the 10 cypherpunks and couple of dozen kiddie porn enthusiasts that actually use it, it isn't too useful no matter how elegant the design), what does i2P fix about TOR to be worth the greater obscurity?
Given that there is some evidence that this 'grit' can be modified, potentially even at school age and during the course of school, is this really a question worth asking?
Barring advances that team neurology and team psychopharmacology have been rather less than inspiring about, 'intelligence' is what you are stuck with(or without). We know some things about what not to screw up if you want a better shot at it(lead is bad, childhood malnutrition isn't so good, etc.); but by the time kiddo hits school, your options have closed substantially.
So, instead of navel gazing about 'is grit or intelligence more important?', wouldn't it make more sense to suck it up, deal with the intelligences that you have, not those you may want or wish to have at some future time, and ask 'what is this 'grit' and how favorably does attempting to develop it compare to other possible uses of time?'
I'm not terribly impressed (as is typical with this '21st century skills!' Digital! STEM!' flailing); but one thing that's worth pointing out is that, even with boring old traditional education, there is a substantial 'privatized' component. Most notably, textbooks. The fight between Texas and California(the two largest markets, as well as the two most likely to loath whatever the other one likes) hash out the outline; but Pearson and friends end up actually making the sausage and selling it to the schools. Increasingly (for reasons that totally have to do with improved student achievement and the wonderful educational capabilities of computers, and similar bullshit, not for reasons of lock-in, data gathering, or anything similarly slimy, these publishers have increasingly been rolling their own(terrible) online/electronic portions. I've had the most personal experience with 'Pearson SuccessNet'(run screaming, though I doubt that the others are any better).
In this context, If the Mozilla Foundation wants to write some CS curriculum for some part of the K-12 system, I suspect that it'll be a breath of fresh air by comparison, as well as being cheaper than the alternative. The idea of merrily chopping up "High School Diploma-certifies that the bearer is a moderately competent human being with a general grounding in reading, writing, mathematics, history, and not being a total fuckup" into 'digital badges' sounds like something that only hard drugs and an MMORPG addiction would make seem like a good idea; but if we can get people who aren't bloodsucking and largely incompetent textbook-slingers to do some of what they have traditionally done, I'd say that it's a win.
Not necessarily. The motives are more about appearance and cost than any sort of heroic material properties; but using 'wood flour' as a filler to modify the appearance (and cheaply bulk out) polymers is old and common. Given that the stuff is basically just sawdust with quality control it isn't terribly pricey and it has proven adequate to the job over decades of use.
Not very glamorous; and if Makerbot is selling this sort of filament as a 'premium' option compared to ordinary dyed stuff they are probably playing you for a sucker; but a perfectly sensible adoption of an established practice.
There is a second question of interest, if you are willing to sacrifice the sci-fi and do some postprocessing work:
A number of material fabrication techniques involve starting with a shape made of some material that is pretty lousy; but easy to work with, and then either heat treating it to change its properties or using it, like a sponge, to guide the absorption of a more suitable material.
Ceramics are one example: during initial shaping, the material is a slurry or semisolid of mixed mineral particles in water and has fairly pitiful mechanical properties even when dried. Barely better than mud. If fired, though, it hardens up quite nicely.
Sintered metals are another one, where you start with a largely unsuitable powder and heat treat your way to a solid piece(sometimes impregnating it with a molten metal of lower melting point, to control porosity).
There are applications where fillers in plastic are directly useful, and that's certainly something that you could use this for; but there is also a lot of interesting potential in using the 3d printer(capable of complex geometry; but lousy choice of materials, especially nice ones) to produce inputs for traditional processes(firing, lost-wax casting, sintering, etc.) that give you access to nice materials but consume a suitably precisely shaped input.
Out of curiosity, how well do the fibre-filled filaments actually work? Given the way the plastic is deposited(basically a long continuous strand, ideally adhering more or less seamlessly when it touches itself, unlike an injection mould where a more or less homogenous mass of plastic is shot into the mould all at once), I'd be inclined to imagine that the fibre would definitely strengthen the piece along the length of the filament; but that getting the fiber to cross-link and reinforce the contact points between filament edges would be much less likely, leaving the piece stronger in a few details; but no more resistant to delaminating than unfilled plastic.
Is that so, or does the fibre work better than I would expect?
It doesn't help that 'security' is a fairly hairy thing to attempt to judge a product on. Race-to-the-bottom is bad enough for things like build quality(which the layman has some ability to judge sensibly; but which doesn't show up as neat numbers on the spec sheet or the price tag); but boiling down how secure a complex device(much less several working together, probably tied to at least one 'cloud' service) is painfully nontrivial. The only really succinct security advice(conveniently, happens to be widely applicable!) is "Totally fucked, run away screaming."; but somebody looking to actually buy something is going to either disobey that advice or select an unvetted product sooner or later, which doesn't help much.
Wouldn't the gravity well of all but the most pitiful excuses for stars require technology indistinguishable from magic (or at least the ability to make local modifications to gravity on a practical basis, which is pretty close) to exploit anything aside from whatever radiation you can capture, and perhaps the occasional coronal mass ejection or solar prominence?
The sun isn't even a terribly heroic specimen, if conveniently close for our purposes, and it has an escape velocity of what, almost 60 times that of earth? It seems that the hypothetical organism, even if astonishingly heat resistant, is going to have a brutal time dining on a star; while (if it instead 'engulfs' stars, like some giant space amoeba) also not being able to 'eat' too many stars before its own mass would annihilate any sort of 'organism' structure and result in one of the outcomes that befall ordinary stellar cores of considerable mass, whether it be some billions of years of fusing heavier elements, a collapse into some sort of exotic neutron soup, an event horizon, or some other life-incompatible fate.
I don't generally discount the ability of life forms to survive harsh environments and metabolize seemingly inedible things(I am a fungus after all); but eating something with so much mass that your gravitational death-throes will ignite self sustaining fusion in your corpse seems a bit more challenging than the usual lineup of metabolic challenges.
They don't offer any GPUs not packaged with CPUs; but I'm working on the assumption that the same basic GPU block could be turned into a discrete GPU if Intel thought that it was worth doing.
Does anyone know how good, bad, or awful Intel's GPUs are these days? I know that the performance of the GPUs they bother to sell is poor, that much is obvious; but GPU components parallelize nicely: pretty much all market segmentation for AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel (for a given generation of design) is a matter of how many of that manufacturer's GPU-sub-element you get. The most expensive one gets as many as the largest die will hold, the next most expensive gets the same die but with 25% or whatever disabled, and so on.
Are Intel's relatively tepid performance numbers just because their GPUs are relatively small(and have access only to a slice of DDR3 stolen from main memory, not fast dedicated GDDR5), and thus likely solvable in short order if they were to build larger ones; or are their designs themselves relatively tepid, and even allocating similarly generous die space and RAM would still be pretty pitiful?
Is the 'making fire' issue a fairly broad analogy, or a specific concern about contacts arcing as a switch opens or closes(sparks being fairly fire-like in general appearance)?
I certainly wouldn't expect to see it happen(well, maybe with a very low probability); but it wouldn't surprise me if someone at Intel Legal has written up an "AMD/Foundry Contract Opinion.doc" and squirreled it away somewhere.
Given that AMD isn't terribly threatening anymore, we aren't in the Netburst vs. A64 beatdown era now, Intel is probably saved a fair amount of unpleasant antitrust inquiry(US and abroad) by AMD at comparatively limited cost in product margins or lost design wins. If it came to it, selling them foundry services would probably be preferred to letting them die.
How is this not, basically, wiretapping (for which a warrant would ordinarily be necessary)?
I think that it's one part arrogance, as expected from the House of Hoover; pretty much a "John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!"; but way less pithy.
The other half is tortured arguments and logic-chopping legalism that hyperfocuses on means and wholly ignores outcomes. Well, yes, given the way electromagnetic radiation propagates, we can basically intercept all the calls, all the data, and a fuckton of location information; but our actual hardware won't be located on your property, so we don't need a warrant; and anyway, you 'consented' to share all those radio waves with your telco, so you don't have an expectation of privacy anyway!
It's an ugly; but fairly standard, mode of argument for those who wish to chip away at effective constitutional protections without being so...vulgar... as to simply repeal them. Roughly the same logic that has decreed that most email isn't really a 'person, papers, or effects'; because some guys who wrote with quill pens didn't explicitly say that "yes, this means even papers stored on your behalf in Google's datacenter".
More or less any digital audio player is going to be mostly orthogonal to the interests of vinyl enthusiasts. That said, I'll definitely award some extra credit to the first company whose cell phone can use its camera, and an appropriate machine vision algorithm, to 'play' a record rotating underneath it...
I think that the odd wording was the tip-off. MP3 is lossy, sometimes badly so; and even among lossy formats its greatest virtue is ubiquity rather than superiority. However, people who talk about signals having 'purity' tend to be moving in the direction of mysticism at a decent clip.
Memory stick? That's practically a standard these days! If Sony cared about this product they would have rolled a totally new storage format, like they did for the 'Vita'.
It doesn't help that Sony's historical areas of strength have either been commodified pretty heavily(they still do make some pretty nice TVs, on the higher end; but the difference in quality between theirs and similarly priced or cheaper competitors is definitely not what it was back in the CRT days) or are now heavily reliant on software that isn't a crime against humanity.
At least with hardware, Sony can still manage "better than the competition, pity it's not better enough to justify the price" products when they are having a good day. With software, the only impressive thing is that they can even manage to commit acts of malice in the face of their sheer incompetence.
Don't be so mean to the SLS! The Senate Launch System shows every sign of performing exactly as intended and efficiently delivering a stream of respectably-laundered welfare to the appropriate districts. Who says rocket transportation isn't a reality?
I have to wonder if part of the problem is simply not being good enough (or it simply not being possible to be good enough, given the intricacies of finding suitable people and getting them up to speed) at adding new people fast enough to support their various new things.
Time was when Apple pretty much made hardware, MacOS, and one pet project or another over the years(Clarisworks/Appleworks, Hypercard, the occasional foray into some quasi-server thing with IBM, etc.)
Now they make hardware, OSX, iOS(shared in part; but only in part, with OSX), iWork, iLife(with applications from both increasingly showing up on both OSX and iOS), a pretty massive 'cloud' operation to keep delivering all that ITMS, web-app versions of some of its formerly native-only applications, Safari/webkit, Final Cut Pro, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
Even if you have unlimited money, turning a small, focused, group that does a few things into a larger and more heterogenous operation requires significant talent, and probably a certain minimum amount of time that just can't be escaped.
It's a terrible sign of the times that this is so; but it's so goddamn heartwarming to see that we at least have some financial institutions around that aren't too big to fail...
Slashdot Mirror
I think that it's 'merciful' in a slightly more Arabic variation of the "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius." school of mercy.
Well, the options seem to be (A) some 'social media guru' has moved to sponging directly off the DoD, (B) it's the more-pathetic arm of another delightful propaganda effort, along the lines of whatever they were trying to buy 'persona management' sockpuppetware for, or (C) it's a shamefully feeble attempt to cultivate 'soft power' by emulating kids these days.
I'm not quite sure whether such a manifestly silly document deserves a "Yeah, how about you write something that outperforms an under-motivated toddler and then pledge to protect us from it.." or a "C'mon, 4-eyes, am I really supposed to believe that you'll be in the trenches with an EMP rifle when skynet comes for us?"
Has Twitter not realized that they could, perhaps, develop at least one non-ridiculous alleged source of revenue by charging cost-insensitive, but potentially touchy, users substantial additional fees for more secure access?
Have they done so; but CENTCOM can't afford an auth fob because of cost overruns incurred by the F-35?
Somebody here is an idiot; but who?
Given that size is a fairly useful attribute for an 'anonymous' network(if the system is so small that a little traffic analysis can identify the 10 cypherpunks and couple of dozen kiddie porn enthusiasts that actually use it, it isn't too useful no matter how elegant the design), what does i2P fix about TOR to be worth the greater obscurity?
Given that there is some evidence that this 'grit' can be modified, potentially even at school age and during the course of school, is this really a question worth asking?
Barring advances that team neurology and team psychopharmacology have been rather less than inspiring about, 'intelligence' is what you are stuck with(or without). We know some things about what not to screw up if you want a better shot at it(lead is bad, childhood malnutrition isn't so good, etc.); but by the time kiddo hits school, your options have closed substantially.
So, instead of navel gazing about 'is grit or intelligence more important?', wouldn't it make more sense to suck it up, deal with the intelligences that you have, not those you may want or wish to have at some future time, and ask 'what is this 'grit' and how favorably does attempting to develop it compare to other possible uses of time?'
I'm not terribly impressed (as is typical with this '21st century skills!' Digital! STEM!' flailing); but one thing that's worth pointing out is that, even with boring old traditional education, there is a substantial 'privatized' component. Most notably, textbooks. The fight between Texas and California(the two largest markets, as well as the two most likely to loath whatever the other one likes) hash out the outline; but Pearson and friends end up actually making the sausage and selling it to the schools. Increasingly (for reasons that totally have to do with improved student achievement and the wonderful educational capabilities of computers, and similar bullshit, not for reasons of lock-in, data gathering, or anything similarly slimy, these publishers have increasingly been rolling their own(terrible) online/electronic portions. I've had the most personal experience with 'Pearson SuccessNet'(run screaming, though I doubt that the others are any better).
In this context, If the Mozilla Foundation wants to write some CS curriculum for some part of the K-12 system, I suspect that it'll be a breath of fresh air by comparison, as well as being cheaper than the alternative. The idea of merrily chopping up "High School Diploma-certifies that the bearer is a moderately competent human being with a general grounding in reading, writing, mathematics, history, and not being a total fuckup" into 'digital badges' sounds like something that only hard drugs and an MMORPG addiction would make seem like a good idea; but if we can get people who aren't bloodsucking and largely incompetent textbook-slingers to do some of what they have traditionally done, I'd say that it's a win.
Not necessarily. The motives are more about appearance and cost than any sort of heroic material properties; but using 'wood flour' as a filler to modify the appearance (and cheaply bulk out) polymers is old and common. Given that the stuff is basically just sawdust with quality control it isn't terribly pricey and it has proven adequate to the job over decades of use.
Not very glamorous; and if Makerbot is selling this sort of filament as a 'premium' option compared to ordinary dyed stuff they are probably playing you for a sucker; but a perfectly sensible adoption of an established practice.
The fool! Everyone knows that cells undergo fission, not fusion!
There is a second question of interest, if you are willing to sacrifice the sci-fi and do some postprocessing work:
A number of material fabrication techniques involve starting with a shape made of some material that is pretty lousy; but easy to work with, and then either heat treating it to change its properties or using it, like a sponge, to guide the absorption of a more suitable material.
Ceramics are one example: during initial shaping, the material is a slurry or semisolid of mixed mineral particles in water and has fairly pitiful mechanical properties even when dried. Barely better than mud. If fired, though, it hardens up quite nicely.
Sintered metals are another one, where you start with a largely unsuitable powder and heat treat your way to a solid piece(sometimes impregnating it with a molten metal of lower melting point, to control porosity).
There are applications where fillers in plastic are directly useful, and that's certainly something that you could use this for; but there is also a lot of interesting potential in using the 3d printer(capable of complex geometry; but lousy choice of materials, especially nice ones) to produce inputs for traditional processes(firing, lost-wax casting, sintering, etc.) that give you access to nice materials but consume a suitably precisely shaped input.
Out of curiosity, how well do the fibre-filled filaments actually work? Given the way the plastic is deposited(basically a long continuous strand, ideally adhering more or less seamlessly when it touches itself, unlike an injection mould where a more or less homogenous mass of plastic is shot into the mould all at once), I'd be inclined to imagine that the fibre would definitely strengthen the piece along the length of the filament; but that getting the fiber to cross-link and reinforce the contact points between filament edges would be much less likely, leaving the piece stronger in a few details; but no more resistant to delaminating than unfilled plastic.
Is that so, or does the fibre work better than I would expect?
It doesn't help that 'security' is a fairly hairy thing to attempt to judge a product on. Race-to-the-bottom is bad enough for things like build quality(which the layman has some ability to judge sensibly; but which doesn't show up as neat numbers on the spec sheet or the price tag); but boiling down how secure a complex device(much less several working together, probably tied to at least one 'cloud' service) is painfully nontrivial. The only really succinct security advice(conveniently, happens to be widely applicable!) is "Totally fucked, run away screaming."; but somebody looking to actually buy something is going to either disobey that advice or select an unvetted product sooner or later, which doesn't help much.
Wouldn't the gravity well of all but the most pitiful excuses for stars require technology indistinguishable from magic (or at least the ability to make local modifications to gravity on a practical basis, which is pretty close) to exploit anything aside from whatever radiation you can capture, and perhaps the occasional coronal mass ejection or solar prominence?
The sun isn't even a terribly heroic specimen, if conveniently close for our purposes, and it has an escape velocity of what, almost 60 times that of earth? It seems that the hypothetical organism, even if astonishingly heat resistant, is going to have a brutal time dining on a star; while (if it instead 'engulfs' stars, like some giant space amoeba) also not being able to 'eat' too many stars before its own mass would annihilate any sort of 'organism' structure and result in one of the outcomes that befall ordinary stellar cores of considerable mass, whether it be some billions of years of fusing heavier elements, a collapse into some sort of exotic neutron soup, an event horizon, or some other life-incompatible fate.
I don't generally discount the ability of life forms to survive harsh environments and metabolize seemingly inedible things(I am a fungus after all); but eating something with so much mass that your gravitational death-throes will ignite self sustaining fusion in your corpse seems a bit more challenging than the usual lineup of metabolic challenges.
They don't offer any GPUs not packaged with CPUs; but I'm working on the assumption that the same basic GPU block could be turned into a discrete GPU if Intel thought that it was worth doing.
Does anyone know how good, bad, or awful Intel's GPUs are these days? I know that the performance of the GPUs they bother to sell is poor, that much is obvious; but GPU components parallelize nicely: pretty much all market segmentation for AMD, NVIDIA, and Intel (for a given generation of design) is a matter of how many of that manufacturer's GPU-sub-element you get. The most expensive one gets as many as the largest die will hold, the next most expensive gets the same die but with 25% or whatever disabled, and so on.
Are Intel's relatively tepid performance numbers just because their GPUs are relatively small(and have access only to a slice of DDR3 stolen from main memory, not fast dedicated GDDR5), and thus likely solvable in short order if they were to build larger ones; or are their designs themselves relatively tepid, and even allocating similarly generous die space and RAM would still be pretty pitiful?
Is the 'making fire' issue a fairly broad analogy, or a specific concern about contacts arcing as a switch opens or closes(sparks being fairly fire-like in general appearance)?
I certainly wouldn't expect to see it happen(well, maybe with a very low probability); but it wouldn't surprise me if someone at Intel Legal has written up an "AMD/Foundry Contract Opinion.doc" and squirreled it away somewhere.
Given that AMD isn't terribly threatening anymore, we aren't in the Netburst vs. A64 beatdown era now, Intel is probably saved a fair amount of unpleasant antitrust inquiry(US and abroad) by AMD at comparatively limited cost in product margins or lost design wins. If it came to it, selling them foundry services would probably be preferred to letting them die.
How is this not, basically, wiretapping (for which a warrant would ordinarily be necessary)?
I think that it's one part arrogance, as expected from the House of Hoover; pretty much a "John Marshall has made his decision: now let him enforce it!"; but way less pithy.
The other half is tortured arguments and logic-chopping legalism that hyperfocuses on means and wholly ignores outcomes. Well, yes, given the way electromagnetic radiation propagates, we can basically intercept all the calls, all the data, and a fuckton of location information; but our actual hardware won't be located on your property, so we don't need a warrant; and anyway, you 'consented' to share all those radio waves with your telco, so you don't have an expectation of privacy anyway!
It's an ugly; but fairly standard, mode of argument for those who wish to chip away at effective constitutional protections without being so...vulgar... as to simply repeal them. Roughly the same logic that has decreed that most email isn't really a 'person, papers, or effects'; because some guys who wrote with quill pens didn't explicitly say that "yes, this means even papers stored on your behalf in Google's datacenter".
More or less any digital audio player is going to be mostly orthogonal to the interests of vinyl enthusiasts. That said, I'll definitely award some extra credit to the first company whose cell phone can use its camera, and an appropriate machine vision algorithm, to 'play' a record rotating underneath it...
I think that the odd wording was the tip-off. MP3 is lossy, sometimes badly so; and even among lossy formats its greatest virtue is ubiquity rather than superiority. However, people who talk about signals having 'purity' tend to be moving in the direction of mysticism at a decent clip.
Memory stick? That's practically a standard these days! If Sony cared about this product they would have rolled a totally new storage format, like they did for the 'Vita'.
It doesn't help that Sony's historical areas of strength have either been commodified pretty heavily(they still do make some pretty nice TVs, on the higher end; but the difference in quality between theirs and similarly priced or cheaper competitors is definitely not what it was back in the CRT days) or are now heavily reliant on software that isn't a crime against humanity.
At least with hardware, Sony can still manage "better than the competition, pity it's not better enough to justify the price" products when they are having a good day. With software, the only impressive thing is that they can even manage to commit acts of malice in the face of their sheer incompetence.
Don't be so mean to the SLS! The Senate Launch System shows every sign of performing exactly as intended and efficiently delivering a stream of respectably-laundered welfare to the appropriate districts. Who says rocket transportation isn't a reality?
I have to wonder if part of the problem is simply not being good enough (or it simply not being possible to be good enough, given the intricacies of finding suitable people and getting them up to speed) at adding new people fast enough to support their various new things.
Time was when Apple pretty much made hardware, MacOS, and one pet project or another over the years(Clarisworks/Appleworks, Hypercard, the occasional foray into some quasi-server thing with IBM, etc.)
Now they make hardware, OSX, iOS(shared in part; but only in part, with OSX), iWork, iLife(with applications from both increasingly showing up on both OSX and iOS), a pretty massive 'cloud' operation to keep delivering all that ITMS, web-app versions of some of its formerly native-only applications, Safari/webkit, Final Cut Pro, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting.
Even if you have unlimited money, turning a small, focused, group that does a few things into a larger and more heterogenous operation requires significant talent, and probably a certain minimum amount of time that just can't be escaped.
It's a terrible sign of the times that this is so; but it's so goddamn heartwarming to see that we at least have some financial institutions around that aren't too big to fail...