I took OS comparison course in MIT's business school some years back, and must say of all the courses I took in computer science, that one became the least useful the quickest. OS's seem to be changing faster than computer languages, and much faster than good SE techniques like design patterns.
I'm guessing that it is because the underlying hardware is changing rapidly- many hardware sectors increase in size and performance a magnitude every five years, making some resource algorithms less meaningful. Plus novelties like flash, MRAM, cores, cells, and GPUs, etc. all have to be integrated in.
Although the global, instananeous, interactive electronic network has morphed considerably since its inception in 1844, I believe the InterNet is this singularity. Its hard to say whats its mature form will be, but it has changed human commerce, communication, and knowledge storage irreversibly.
About 55% of the US electricity grid comes from burning coal.
Coal releases twice as much CO2 per unit of energy generated
as octain burning. Nuclear, wind, and hydro are much clean,
but aren't increasing their share of the US electric grid.
When I visited the Computer History Museum from out of town a few weeks ago it had occupied half of building on the main SGI campus. Google HQ was up the street and just occupied anther four SGI buildings. There was an article of./ or digg about Sergey's goofy interior design in these building attempting to implement grad school-like common offices and private spaces engineers need to think.
Also, all that SGI purple must be repainted with Google blue-red-green-yellow.
(I strongly recommend visiting both the museum [free] and the Googleplex.)
One of my company's best selling products exploits graph computing simulating single core memory images at terabyte sizes. The few SGI competitors that do this dont
do it as large or as well at the moment. Its always been conundrum whether to rewrite for partitioned memory in clusters.
Brick DVD stores may only carry 5-10% the inventory of Netflix because the less popular items may only rent a few times a year. But when you connect millions of customers to these, you can make a profit, according the authors of the "Long Tail", first a Wired article, now a pop-economics hardback book.
All these "twenty years ago" debates are to valid to some degree. However, during that time performance and storage has increase an order of magnitude every five years.
But there are still some apps where you hit the wall, e.g. gaming graphics. Coding efficiency still matters in some cases.
The original Netflix plan was downloading. But that depended sufficient broadband. Colleges with InterNet2 can download two hours of quality video in minutes, but it is still on the order of an hour for your average home broadband.
I am trying to remember the exact title (googling doent help because Isaac wrote hundreds of stories). But the story was about planet of people who lived mostly alone on plantations run by robots. They would communicate with each other constantly by immersive television, but almost never met in person. (I wondered what they did for physical romance?). I recall the plot conflict was about solving a murder of one of these recluses.
I recall near the begining of the dot.com a guy who was going to spend
a whole year in a house living off of stuff ordered from the net.
He legally changed his name to DotComGuy. He was going to make living
via selling advertising and webcam feeds.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotcomguy
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40940,00. html
In my experience algorithms are rarely monopolized by any single field very long and fairly quickly find themselves distributed across all sciences and engineering.
For example the algorithm of tomographic inversion was picked up by seismologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, material scientists, etc. for similar situtations in their fields.
Likewise radiology engineers monitor devlopments in image processing and 3D graphics to construct even move vivid and useful body images.
Its seems like every portal is continously increase the number and bandwidth of its ads. Its not uncommon to have a half-dozen animations crowding the screen. Even Slashrot is plagued with these!
bacteria responsible for majority of deposits?
on
Gold Mining Bacteria
·
· Score: 1
Mineral deposits are basically geochemical anomalies where some substances is concentrated millions or billions of times normal background level.
Bacteria have been implicated in uranium, lead, zince, copper, petroleum and perhaps others.
A surprise has been the every deep drilling into the earth, up to eight miles deep,
has found teeming bacteria. These may have been when these rocks were at the surface, and/or bateria have gone deeper into the earth over billions of years.
Theres a boom and bust in the game industry every decade.
Old timers remember this, especially with Atari.
New hardware and software create booms, over-production of similar games and creative ruts lead to busts.
Its hard to say what part of the cycle we are on now.
I remember reading about the debate in Disney's engineered town of Celebration, Forida.
(Celebration was a partial implementation of Walt's Futureland: "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow".) Initially the schools made heavy use of electronic technology, experitmental teaching and grading. But the parents, who paid a premium to live in Celebration, screamed bloody murder, that non-traditional education would keep their kids out of Harvard, and changed the school system into a more traditional format.
DRAM prices used be as predictible as MicroSoft stock: the price halved (doubled)
every two years. Even faster during a price war. But its been stuck at $100 (+/- $50) a gigabyte for about five years. This compared to flash which has fallen to $20 / GB from $300 in the same time period.
Mainland China adopted both a phonetic alphabet and a simplified ideograph system
and pretty much enforced their use. However, they were a totalitarian society
at that time and could do so.
Even so, the phonetic alphabet is flawed. It uses 24 letters of the roman alphabet
to represent 37 sounds, so there is some doubling up of sounds per letter,
and doubling of letters for sounds. For example there are four variations of
the "ch" sound in Chinese represented by "ch", "q", "zh" and "j". There are enough
exceptions that effectively you learn how to pronounce the 400 legatiment syllables
as a whole rather than sounding out their letters. Chinese has only about about a
quarter of the syllables of a European language. A pre-communist spelling reform made their own 37 symbol alphabet, but this is not used on the mainland.
The other flaw is phonetic drift in the last 80 years making a tiny percentage of phonetic spelling
already wrong. Many "n" finals in the Beijing dialect have changed to an "r".
Phonetic drift doesnt matter so much with ideographs. Though you can see poems
that used to rhyme, or had repetive tonal patterns in the Han to Tang dynasties
no longer rhyme. Much is attributed to the crude Mongols whose manglings eventually became the norm, much like French pronunciation basterized Old English.
The ideographs are slightly phonetic. About 70 are used to transliterate gringo names. An example is Coca-cola. It immediately signals transliteration to any native Chinese speaker. But the a couple of the transliteration characters can be literally translated as "mount happiness". Western news sources sometimes mistakenly take phonetics literally.
Many modern techical words combine a meaning character with a pronunciation character to make a new ideograph. Chemistry and anatomy terms are clear examples.
I can guess the pronunciation fairly easily. Words centuries old are harder
to guess, but there are often patterns.
I've seen several proposals for home computing or media centers
that would only show a browser. They touted cost savings by
eliminating some software or hardware costs. But in practice
a commodity general purpose PC, perhaps at the lower end of power,
was more cost effective than a custom computer.
I access the internet at public libraries in the US or at cafes abroad.
Many only enable access to IE and no other Windows applications or utilities.
So they are effectively browser-only computers.
Many on these humerous incidents are due to terrible user interface design
in both hardware and software. Compuers should be as easy to use as a car.
Car designers have been around about a century longer than computer designers
and had their share of bad features. When I rent a car I expect it to be driveable
immediately. When I rent a computer at an Internet cafe I expect to be able to
use it immediately.
This recent book claims about 4% of the population has absolutely no concern or empathy for anyone else and comprises a large fraction of criminals. Even if just some of them are smart enough to scam people, thats enough to cause significant crime.
Slashdot Mirror
I took OS comparison course in MIT's business school some years back, and must say of all the courses I took in computer science, that one became the least useful the quickest. OS's seem to be changing faster than computer languages, and much faster than good SE techniques like design patterns.
I'm guessing that it is because the underlying hardware is changing rapidly- many hardware sectors increase in size and performance a magnitude every five years, making some resource algorithms less meaningful. Plus novelties like flash, MRAM, cores, cells, and GPUs, etc. all have to be integrated in.
Although the global, instananeous, interactive electronic network has morphed considerably since its inception in 1844, I believe the InterNet is this singularity. Its hard to say whats its mature form will be, but it has changed human commerce, communication, and knowledge storage irreversibly.
About 55% of the US electricity grid comes from burning coal. Coal releases twice as much CO2 per unit of energy generated as octain burning. Nuclear, wind, and hydro are much clean, but aren't increasing their share of the US electric grid.
When I visited the Computer History Museum from out of town a few weeks ago it had occupied half of building on the main SGI campus. Google HQ was up the street and just occupied anther four SGI buildings. There was an article of ./ or digg about Sergey's goofy interior design in these building attempting to implement grad school-like common offices and private spaces engineers need to think.
Also, all that SGI purple must be repainted with Google blue-red-green-yellow.
(I strongly recommend visiting both the museum [free] and the Googleplex.)
One of my company's best selling products exploits graph computing simulating single core memory images at terabyte sizes. The few SGI competitors that do this dont do it as large or as well at the moment. Its always been conundrum whether to rewrite for partitioned memory in clusters.
Brick DVD stores may only carry 5-10% the inventory of Netflix
because the less popular items may only rent a few times a year.
But when you connect millions of customers to these,
you can make a profit, according the authors of the "Long Tail",
first a Wired article, now a pop-economics hardback book.
Or becomes obsolete quicker. Then people have to purchase the next level.
All these "twenty years ago" debates are to valid to some degree. However, during that time performance and storage has increase an order of magnitude every five years.
But there are still some apps where you hit the wall, e.g. gaming graphics. Coding efficiency still matters in some cases.
The original Netflix plan was downloading. But that depended sufficient broadband. Colleges with InterNet2 can download two hours of quality video in minutes, but it is still on the order of an hour for your average home broadband.
http://www.umich.edu/~engb415/literature/cyberzach /Asimov/naksun.html
I am trying to remember the exact title (googling doent help because Isaac wrote hundreds of stories). But the story was about planet of people who lived mostly alone on plantations run by robots. They would communicate with each other constantly by immersive television, but almost never met in person. (I wondered what they did for physical romance?). I recall the plot conflict was about solving a murder of one of these recluses.
I recall near the begining of the dot.com a guy who was going to spend a whole year in a house living off of stuff ordered from the net. He legally changed his name to DotComGuy. He was going to make living via selling advertising and webcam feeds. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dotcomguy http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,40940,00. html
In my experience algorithms are rarely monopolized by any single field very long and fairly quickly find themselves distributed across all sciences and engineering. For example the algorithm of tomographic inversion was picked up by seismologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, material scientists, etc. for similar situtations in their fields. Likewise radiology engineers monitor devlopments in image processing and 3D graphics to construct even move vivid and useful body images.
Its seems like every portal is continously increase the number and bandwidth of its ads. Its not uncommon to have a half-dozen animations crowding the screen. Even Slashrot is plagued with these!
Mineral deposits are basically geochemical anomalies where some substances is concentrated millions or billions of times normal background level. Bacteria have been implicated in uranium, lead, zince, copper, petroleum and perhaps others.
A surprise has been the every deep drilling into the earth, up to eight miles deep, has found teeming bacteria. These may have been when these rocks were at the surface, and/or bateria have gone deeper into the earth over billions of years.
Theres a boom and bust in the game industry every decade. Old timers remember this, especially with Atari. New hardware and software create booms, over-production of similar games and creative ruts lead to busts. Its hard to say what part of the cycle we are on now.
This was one of the fears of a too-long gap between shuttle visits. ISS needs a shuttle-assisted orbit boost at least every other year.
I remember reading about the debate in Disney's engineered town of Celebration, Forida. (Celebration was a partial implementation of Walt's Futureland: "Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow".) Initially the schools made heavy use of electronic technology, experitmental teaching and grading. But the parents, who paid a premium to live in Celebration, screamed bloody murder, that non-traditional education would keep their kids out of Harvard, and changed the school system into a more traditional format.
DRAM prices used be as predictible as MicroSoft stock: the price halved (doubled) every two years. Even faster during a price war. But its been stuck at $100 (+/- $50) a gigabyte for about five years. This compared to flash which has fallen to $20 / GB from $300 in the same time period.
Then top swimmers may become enuchs to minimize drag.
Plus there is already a high tech hommonym for that term!
And Paul Erlich 35 years ago? Humans invent new solutions and cope. They've even become fabulously wealthy compared to the 18th century.
Mainland China adopted both a phonetic alphabet and a simplified ideograph system and pretty much enforced their use. However, they were a totalitarian society at that time and could do so.
Even so, the phonetic alphabet is flawed. It uses 24 letters of the roman alphabet to represent 37 sounds, so there is some doubling up of sounds per letter, and doubling of letters for sounds. For example there are four variations of the "ch" sound in Chinese represented by "ch", "q", "zh" and "j". There are enough exceptions that effectively you learn how to pronounce the 400 legatiment syllables as a whole rather than sounding out their letters. Chinese has only about about a quarter of the syllables of a European language. A pre-communist spelling reform made their own 37 symbol alphabet, but this is not used on the mainland.
The other flaw is phonetic drift in the last 80 years making a tiny percentage of phonetic spelling already wrong. Many "n" finals in the Beijing dialect have changed to an "r". Phonetic drift doesnt matter so much with ideographs. Though you can see poems that used to rhyme, or had repetive tonal patterns in the Han to Tang dynasties no longer rhyme. Much is attributed to the crude Mongols whose manglings eventually became the norm, much like French pronunciation basterized Old English.
The ideographs are slightly phonetic. About 70 are used to transliterate gringo names. An example is Coca-cola. It immediately signals transliteration to any native Chinese speaker. But the a couple of the transliteration characters can be literally translated as "mount happiness". Western news sources sometimes mistakenly take phonetics literally.
Many modern techical words combine a meaning character with a pronunciation character to make a new ideograph. Chemistry and anatomy terms are clear examples. I can guess the pronunciation fairly easily. Words centuries old are harder to guess, but there are often patterns.
I've seen several proposals for home computing or media centers that would only show a browser. They touted cost savings by eliminating some software or hardware costs. But in practice a commodity general purpose PC, perhaps at the lower end of power, was more cost effective than a custom computer.
I access the internet at public libraries in the US or at cafes abroad. Many only enable access to IE and no other Windows applications or utilities. So they are effectively browser-only computers.
Many on these humerous incidents are due to terrible user interface design in both hardware and software. Compuers should be as easy to use as a car. Car designers have been around about a century longer than computer designers and had their share of bad features. When I rent a car I expect it to be driveable immediately. When I rent a computer at an Internet cafe I expect to be able to use it immediately.
This recent book claims about 4% of the population has absolutely no concern or empathy for anyone else and comprises a large fraction of criminals.
Even if just some of them are smart enough to scam people, thats enough to cause
significant crime.