IE8 came out in 2009, and from my understanding it massively improved JavaScript performance. Still not on par with the competition, but within an order of magnitude. FF 3.5 (with TraceMonkey) was released in 2009 as well, and had a similarly impressive boost to JS performance. Just because neither is quite at a Chrome level doesn't mean they aren't *much* faster than they used to be.
I worked for Microsoft out of college (though I had some co-ops under my belt beforehand). I can't speak for Apple or Google, but Microsoft doesn't expect an 80 hour work week. My average work week there was 40-45 hours; it could drop as low as 35 or go as high as 50, but that was the exception, not the rule. I don't know of anyone in either group that I worked for that regularly exceeded 50 hours, and it was never my impression that managers expected that sort of time from anyone.
Fission and so-called "fusion" weapons differ primarily in scale, they aren't qualitatively different. You drop enough of them, you've still got a problem. In reality, virtually all nuclear weapons employ fusion as part of their design, but the fusion isn't what causes the damage, it just improves the yield in the main fission process. The more advanced nuclear weapons are more powerful largely because they operate as two stage devices, with the first stage existing solely to enhance the power of the second stage's explosion. Pakistan probably doesn't have two stage weapons, but that's not exactly comforting when you consider that Little Boy and Fat Man were primitive compared to modern single stage weapons which are several times more powerful even without a second stage.
I also see comments below about the bombs dropped on Japan - people need to keep in mind that was 65 years ago AND the bomb types were nuclear FISSION, not nuclear fusion. There's a distinct difference.
Actually, the only real difference between fission bombs and so-called "fusion" bombs is the blast radius; fusion occurs in the latter, but its sole purpose is to increase the amount of fission in the fissile material. In both cases, the primary explosive force is provided by splitting uranium or plutonium atoms en masse. While the details are fairly complicated, the main difference between a fission and a "fusion" bomb is that a pure fission device uses a high explosive to compress the fissile core, while a fusion device uses fusion to do the same thing. A fusion device creates a small amount of fission to trigger fusion in surrounding hydrogen (technically, deuterium and tritium). The fusion of that hydrogen then compresses the main fissile core the way the high explosives do in a pure fission bomb. The reason a "fusion" bomb is more powerful is that the fusion of the hydrogen doesn't just create explosive force, it also releases neutrons which trigger fission in the U-238 shell around the fissile core. U-238 is not very fissionable; you can split it, but it won't go into a chain reaction. But the neutrons released by the fusion process trigger fission in the U-238, amplifying the amount of force compressing the core (made of plutonium or U-235, both of which do have chain reactions from fission).
The whole reason for doing this is that a fission reaction is so powerful that it would, left to its own devices, blow apart the chunk of fissile material so fast that most of it wouldn't actually fission. By increasing the power of the force that compresses the fissile core, and making the core stay together fractions of a second longer, the fission process is much more complete, leading to greater explosive power when the core eventually explodes. The radioactivity produced can actually be less; it's spread over a larger area by the bigger blast, and the original fissile material is broken down more completely (granted, more radioactive materials are produced, but the effects roughly even out, with the greater dispersal reducing the radioactivity per unit area).
Not to mention this has been the case for years. Unless transitioning from IE6 to IE7/8 has also accelerated drastically, the GPP's explanation makes no sense.
Since 3.5 released, I've had a grand total of maybe two crashes (at least one of which was clearly caused by Flash). It does use a decent amount of memory (100-400 MB depending on how I'm using it), but nowhere near what IE8 is using (often 50 MB or more per tab), and on my machine, I've got more than enough memory to handle it. Maybe you really are using unstable plugins and add-ons?
If they're on the Chrome team, sure. But if it's anything like Microsoft, everyone chooses their own. While I was working at Microsoft, I browsed the company intranet with IE, but external browsing was entirely Firefox. A lot of people on my team did that. I left around when Chrome released, but I assume a few people use it too.
Google isn't all tech heads you know. They have an HR department, a marketing department, a legal department, etc. And besides that, being a programmer doesn't mean you're necessarily familiar with good security practices. A sizable minority, if not a majority of programmers know how to code but aren't much better at general computer use than your average present day internet using teenager. Some people view it as a job, not a lifestyle, and those people tend not to actively seek out knowledge beyond the scope of their immediate responsibilities, and good security practices aren't needed to code.
For a lot of modern corporate data storage situations, deletion isn't really important. My company uses an in-house write-once file system (no idea what it's based on), because by and large, the cost of storing old data is negligible next to the advantages of being able to view an older version of the dataset, completely remove fragmentation from the picture, etc. I suspect deletion operations are fairly uncommon at Google; in the rare cases it is necessary it is quite possible they just copy the data they want to keep to a new location, then flash the drive completely.
Even if not codified, there are de facto standards. If the hardware and media are made by multiple manufacturers, there have to be. Even if it's just licensing a spec from the IP owner.
Well, not if it's the "self-styled" types he refers to. I was diagnosed (legitimately) twenty years ago before it became the fashion to diagnose every social phobia as some form of autism. It's a little pathetic how many people latch on to it nowadays to justify being socially awkward. At this point, I've managed to work around all but three symptoms:
Tendency to monologue (though I'm much better about this than I used to be)
Problems dealing with larger groups (above six or so, where sub-groups start forming and my ability to track it all goes to hell)
Hating specific foods due to their mealy/grainy texture
I am relatively intelligent, but that's probably aided by coming from a family of librarians and professors; the Asperger's just helps me focus on the things that interest me, but even the non-Aspie members of my family are similarly intelligent.
None of those make me unable to function socially, and just because it's a bit more work for me doesn't mean I try and excuse any of it or stay home and mope. Hell, aside from these semi-anonymous internet posting I rarely mention it. I don't consider it a disability, and anyone who leans on it to justify their own social ineptitude makes everyone view legit Aspies through a warped prism.
What food allergies? I'm aware of (and have personal experience of) a difference in personal tastes (usually related to food texture), but I've never heard of any link to actual food allergies. The closest I've seen is speculation that autoimmune diseases (including celiac disease) in the mother are linked to autism in children, but that's hardly saying that it is linked to food allergies. Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the diagnoses were somewhat more likely to occur in tandem, if only because the type of parent likely to get their kid inaccurately diagnosed with mild autism is likely to see food allergies where there aren't any, but I've seen no legitimate clinical comparison that would establish such a link.
Keep in mind, the cases of autism theoretically linked to vaccines include a lot of relatively mild cases (high functioning, Asperger's, etc.) While I know I was more trouble as a child due to my Asperger's, it didn't hurt me or my family in the long run; by the time I was fifteen I had adapted enough that I functioned close enough to normal as to go unrecognized (aside from occasional lapses into monologue mode; luckily, my girlfriend is actually entertained listening to me, or so she claims).
Deaths from preventable diseases are higher than you think. Even at a generous reading of the autism statistics (a full 1% of the U.S. population), it's not much higher than the death rate of diseases that we now prevent. A measles infection in a healthy person in a developed country still runs a 0.3% risk of death (roughly a third of the autism rate), jumping to 30% if they are immunocompromised (due to AIDS, certain cancers, old age). Poor health care can raise that as high as 28% in undeveloped countries.
In addition, you talk only of the deaths caused by preventable illnesses. But those illnesses often caused all sorts of long term damage themselves to people who survived them. Rubella rarely kills a healthy person. But a rubella epidemic in the U.S. a few years before the vaccine was introduced triggered 30,000 still births, and 20,000 thousand more children were born impaired or disabled; not minor issues, but permanently deaf, blind, or mentally retarded.
So don't compare the autism rate as a whole to the preventable deaths triggered by illnesses we now vaccinate against. Compare significant impairment from autism to significant impairment or death from vaccines. And then keep in mind that no legitimate study has actually established a link between vaccines and autism, so even if there was a link, it's probably a hell of a lot weaker than a million other environmental and genetic factors.
For the interested: Figures for both diseases were sourced from their respective Wikipedia articles, feel free to investigate their references yourself.
And that would be a good thing? Best case scenario, we end up working forever, hogging the planet to ourselves. Worst case, we end up with massive overpopulation in the space of a few decades. Yes, the accompanying technological advances would stave off a Malthusian catastrophe for a while, but when people have children without dying, there is an upper limit to the life sustaining potential of our solar system. Unless we turn our current understanding of physics on its head and find a way to travel at or above light speed, we'd exhaust the resources of the solar system in a matter of a few centuries.
No, they don't. U.S. Constitution, Article 3, Section 3:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
And aid and comfort is construed extremely narrowly. Treason was intentionally restricted by the founders because it was so flagrantly misused by the British at the time.
If you can pull that off reliably, you'll have made a huge stride forward in the field of AI. Automated recognition of an individual in multiple contexts with a high degree of reliability is a non-trivial problem.
Those revolving doors don't prevent reentry though. And if you make one that does prevent reentry, it can't be automatic. Otherwise a slow moving passenger either gets squished, or more realistically, gums up the works as the safety mechanism stops the door and someone has to manually reverse it a few feet to let them out.
I have a small-to-middling duffel, as well as a small rolling case. Both fit in the overhead trivially (and I don't even have to stick them in sideways to do so, I'm not a total dick). In order to fit one through an NYC turnstile, I have to hug them to my chest and push forward at half speed or less, both because I want to avoid catching on anything (it's a real pain if the strap catches on the prongs) and because it's hard to push when your hands are holding the luggage. It's usually not a huge deal, because not too many people are carrying luggage like that. In an airport, at least half your passengers are carrying stuff like that. If you don't increase the size of the turnstile, you'll get serious clusterfucks leaving the terminal.
You'd need to make it *much* larger to accommodate carry-on luggage. And you'd need to put in a lot of them to make sure that people aren't standing in line for minutes to get *out* of the terminal just because a few planes disembarked at the same time. And that means making an enormously wide hallway to accommodate several over-sized turnstile gates. And because the grandma in the wheelchair still can't push through one on her own, and to allow rapid evacuation in case of an emergency, you *still* need a security guard to make sure that when grandma goes through, terrorists, or more likely, clueless travelers, don't wander through before it shuts.
Your post isn't informative, it's a poorly thought out "I could do it better" that fails to factor in real world concerns.
If you just use a door that only opens from one side, an intruder (accidental or otherwise) can easily go through after someone else opens the door, but before the door closes. You need a rotating full height gate that only turns one direction to fully prevent problems. Those sorts of gates are common in places where they're practical (NYC subway system for instance). But in an airport, everyone is toting around luggage of non-trivial size. You'd need to increase the size of the turnstile dramatically to allow a person and luggage to fit into one of the "slots", and that's expensive and more importantly, slow (one person takes a second or two to go through, so it would take minutes to handle even one plane full of passengers, unless you build a dozen or more of these, consuming inordinate amounts of space). Alternatively, you hire a guard on the cheap and have them make sure everyone goes the correct direction. Slightly more error prone, but faster and less space wasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
IE8 came out in 2009, and from my understanding it massively improved JavaScript performance. Still not on par with the competition, but within an order of magnitude. FF 3.5 (with TraceMonkey) was released in 2009 as well, and had a similarly impressive boost to JS performance. Just because neither is quite at a Chrome level doesn't mean they aren't *much* faster than they used to be.
I worked for Microsoft out of college (though I had some co-ops under my belt beforehand). I can't speak for Apple or Google, but Microsoft doesn't expect an 80 hour work week. My average work week there was 40-45 hours; it could drop as low as 35 or go as high as 50, but that was the exception, not the rule. I don't know of anyone in either group that I worked for that regularly exceeded 50 hours, and it was never my impression that managers expected that sort of time from anyone.
To the unaware: That was a joke about Shadowrun, a cyberpunk/fantasy roleplaying game.
Fission and so-called "fusion" weapons differ primarily in scale, they aren't qualitatively different. You drop enough of them, you've still got a problem. In reality, virtually all nuclear weapons employ fusion as part of their design, but the fusion isn't what causes the damage, it just improves the yield in the main fission process. The more advanced nuclear weapons are more powerful largely because they operate as two stage devices, with the first stage existing solely to enhance the power of the second stage's explosion. Pakistan probably doesn't have two stage weapons, but that's not exactly comforting when you consider that Little Boy and Fat Man were primitive compared to modern single stage weapons which are several times more powerful even without a second stage.
I also see comments below about the bombs dropped on Japan - people need to keep in mind that was 65 years ago AND the bomb types were nuclear FISSION, not nuclear fusion. There's a distinct difference.
Actually, the only real difference between fission bombs and so-called "fusion" bombs is the blast radius; fusion occurs in the latter, but its sole purpose is to increase the amount of fission in the fissile material. In both cases, the primary explosive force is provided by splitting uranium or plutonium atoms en masse. While the details are fairly complicated, the main difference between a fission and a "fusion" bomb is that a pure fission device uses a high explosive to compress the fissile core, while a fusion device uses fusion to do the same thing. A fusion device creates a small amount of fission to trigger fusion in surrounding hydrogen (technically, deuterium and tritium). The fusion of that hydrogen then compresses the main fissile core the way the high explosives do in a pure fission bomb. The reason a "fusion" bomb is more powerful is that the fusion of the hydrogen doesn't just create explosive force, it also releases neutrons which trigger fission in the U-238 shell around the fissile core. U-238 is not very fissionable; you can split it, but it won't go into a chain reaction. But the neutrons released by the fusion process trigger fission in the U-238, amplifying the amount of force compressing the core (made of plutonium or U-235, both of which do have chain reactions from fission).
The whole reason for doing this is that a fission reaction is so powerful that it would, left to its own devices, blow apart the chunk of fissile material so fast that most of it wouldn't actually fission. By increasing the power of the force that compresses the fissile core, and making the core stay together fractions of a second longer, the fission process is much more complete, leading to greater explosive power when the core eventually explodes. The radioactivity produced can actually be less; it's spread over a larger area by the bigger blast, and the original fissile material is broken down more completely (granted, more radioactive materials are produced, but the effects roughly even out, with the greater dispersal reducing the radioactivity per unit area).
Not to mention this has been the case for years. Unless transitioning from IE6 to IE7/8 has also accelerated drastically, the GPP's explanation makes no sense.
Since 3.5 released, I've had a grand total of maybe two crashes (at least one of which was clearly caused by Flash). It does use a decent amount of memory (100-400 MB depending on how I'm using it), but nowhere near what IE8 is using (often 50 MB or more per tab), and on my machine, I've got more than enough memory to handle it. Maybe you really are using unstable plugins and add-ons?
If they're on the Chrome team, sure. But if it's anything like Microsoft, everyone chooses their own. While I was working at Microsoft, I browsed the company intranet with IE, but external browsing was entirely Firefox. A lot of people on my team did that. I left around when Chrome released, but I assume a few people use it too.
Google isn't all tech heads you know. They have an HR department, a marketing department, a legal department, etc. And besides that, being a programmer doesn't mean you're necessarily familiar with good security practices. A sizable minority, if not a majority of programmers know how to code but aren't much better at general computer use than your average present day internet using teenager. Some people view it as a job, not a lifestyle, and those people tend not to actively seek out knowledge beyond the scope of their immediate responsibilities, and good security practices aren't needed to code.
And that approach is often handy; you can piggyback on the proxy settings already configured in IE.
For a lot of modern corporate data storage situations, deletion isn't really important. My company uses an in-house write-once file system (no idea what it's based on), because by and large, the cost of storing old data is negligible next to the advantages of being able to view an older version of the dataset, completely remove fragmentation from the picture, etc. I suspect deletion operations are fairly uncommon at Google; in the rare cases it is necessary it is quite possible they just copy the data they want to keep to a new location, then flash the drive completely.
Mod parent Informative please. It's a good link, particularly with the /.ing of the original article link.
Even if not codified, there are de facto standards. If the hardware and media are made by multiple manufacturers, there have to be. Even if it's just licensing a spec from the IP owner.
Well, not if it's the "self-styled" types he refers to. I was diagnosed (legitimately) twenty years ago before it became the fashion to diagnose every social phobia as some form of autism. It's a little pathetic how many people latch on to it nowadays to justify being socially awkward. At this point, I've managed to work around all but three symptoms:
I am relatively intelligent, but that's probably aided by coming from a family of librarians and professors; the Asperger's just helps me focus on the things that interest me, but even the non-Aspie members of my family are similarly intelligent.
None of those make me unable to function socially, and just because it's a bit more work for me doesn't mean I try and excuse any of it or stay home and mope. Hell, aside from these semi-anonymous internet posting I rarely mention it. I don't consider it a disability, and anyone who leans on it to justify their own social ineptitude makes everyone view legit Aspies through a warped prism.
What food allergies? I'm aware of (and have personal experience of) a difference in personal tastes (usually related to food texture), but I've never heard of any link to actual food allergies. The closest I've seen is speculation that autoimmune diseases (including celiac disease) in the mother are linked to autism in children, but that's hardly saying that it is linked to food allergies. Now, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the diagnoses were somewhat more likely to occur in tandem, if only because the type of parent likely to get their kid inaccurately diagnosed with mild autism is likely to see food allergies where there aren't any, but I've seen no legitimate clinical comparison that would establish such a link.
Amusingly, cats may be responsible for increased culture-wide neuroticism in humans. I don't think it's been linked to autism though. :-)
Keep in mind, the cases of autism theoretically linked to vaccines include a lot of relatively mild cases (high functioning, Asperger's, etc.) While I know I was more trouble as a child due to my Asperger's, it didn't hurt me or my family in the long run; by the time I was fifteen I had adapted enough that I functioned close enough to normal as to go unrecognized (aside from occasional lapses into monologue mode; luckily, my girlfriend is actually entertained listening to me, or so she claims).
Deaths from preventable diseases are higher than you think. Even at a generous reading of the autism statistics (a full 1% of the U.S. population), it's not much higher than the death rate of diseases that we now prevent. A measles infection in a healthy person in a developed country still runs a 0.3% risk of death (roughly a third of the autism rate), jumping to 30% if they are immunocompromised (due to AIDS, certain cancers, old age). Poor health care can raise that as high as 28% in undeveloped countries.
In addition, you talk only of the deaths caused by preventable illnesses. But those illnesses often caused all sorts of long term damage themselves to people who survived them. Rubella rarely kills a healthy person. But a rubella epidemic in the U.S. a few years before the vaccine was introduced triggered 30,000 still births, and 20,000 thousand more children were born impaired or disabled; not minor issues, but permanently deaf, blind, or mentally retarded.
So don't compare the autism rate as a whole to the preventable deaths triggered by illnesses we now vaccinate against. Compare significant impairment from autism to significant impairment or death from vaccines. And then keep in mind that no legitimate study has actually established a link between vaccines and autism, so even if there was a link, it's probably a hell of a lot weaker than a million other environmental and genetic factors.
For the interested: Figures for both diseases were sourced from their respective Wikipedia articles, feel free to investigate their references yourself.
And that would be a good thing? Best case scenario, we end up working forever, hogging the planet to ourselves. Worst case, we end up with massive overpopulation in the space of a few decades. Yes, the accompanying technological advances would stave off a Malthusian catastrophe for a while, but when people have children without dying, there is an upper limit to the life sustaining potential of our solar system. Unless we turn our current understanding of physics on its head and find a way to travel at or above light speed, we'd exhaust the resources of the solar system in a matter of a few centuries.
As is, there still will be, but they'll call it the "Neck Suss Won" just to cover their asses legally. Or because of extremely bad translation...
And aid and comfort is construed extremely narrowly. Treason was intentionally restricted by the founders because it was so flagrantly misused by the British at the time.
If you can pull that off reliably, you'll have made a huge stride forward in the field of AI. Automated recognition of an individual in multiple contexts with a high degree of reliability is a non-trivial problem.
Those revolving doors don't prevent reentry though. And if you make one that does prevent reentry, it can't be automatic. Otherwise a slow moving passenger either gets squished, or more realistically, gums up the works as the safety mechanism stops the door and someone has to manually reverse it a few feet to let them out.
I have a small-to-middling duffel, as well as a small rolling case. Both fit in the overhead trivially (and I don't even have to stick them in sideways to do so, I'm not a total dick). In order to fit one through an NYC turnstile, I have to hug them to my chest and push forward at half speed or less, both because I want to avoid catching on anything (it's a real pain if the strap catches on the prongs) and because it's hard to push when your hands are holding the luggage. It's usually not a huge deal, because not too many people are carrying luggage like that. In an airport, at least half your passengers are carrying stuff like that. If you don't increase the size of the turnstile, you'll get serious clusterfucks leaving the terminal.
You'd need to make it *much* larger to accommodate carry-on luggage. And you'd need to put in a lot of them to make sure that people aren't standing in line for minutes to get *out* of the terminal just because a few planes disembarked at the same time. And that means making an enormously wide hallway to accommodate several over-sized turnstile gates. And because the grandma in the wheelchair still can't push through one on her own, and to allow rapid evacuation in case of an emergency, you *still* need a security guard to make sure that when grandma goes through, terrorists, or more likely, clueless travelers, don't wander through before it shuts.
Your post isn't informative, it's a poorly thought out "I could do it better" that fails to factor in real world concerns.
If you just use a door that only opens from one side, an intruder (accidental or otherwise) can easily go through after someone else opens the door, but before the door closes. You need a rotating full height gate that only turns one direction to fully prevent problems. Those sorts of gates are common in places where they're practical (NYC subway system for instance). But in an airport, everyone is toting around luggage of non-trivial size. You'd need to increase the size of the turnstile dramatically to allow a person and luggage to fit into one of the "slots", and that's expensive and more importantly, slow (one person takes a second or two to go through, so it would take minutes to handle even one plane full of passengers, unless you build a dozen or more of these, consuming inordinate amounts of space). Alternatively, you hire a guard on the cheap and have them make sure everyone goes the correct direction. Slightly more error prone, but faster and less space wasteful.