200mph is about 320kph. The car in the video took quite a while to even hit 300kph.
But I suppose it's not that silly to have a car with a 245mph top speed, if you just want to get to 160 or 200mph faster than the other cars on the road.
> In a free market none of these companies would have been bailed out. Instead they would have been forced to declare bankruptcy
But which country has this mythical free market? The one that has a thriving market in flying unicorns? Or is it the one where legislators and regulators can be bought and sold?;)
Reminds me a bit of those "True Believer arguments". e.g. "A True Believer would never do X" where X is something bad. Looking through that "lens" you'll find that the real world has rather few "True Believers", and you don't really learn much about what the True Believers actually believe in.
Anyway, to me what is important is not whether a market is free or non-free, but whether the market is well-regulated or not. And we should focus on how to have a well-regulated market, not on how free it is. Quality not quantity[1].
There have been arguments that the regulators should be people from the industry, since they know the industry well etc, and that's why it's ok and inevitable to have the "ex-CEO of Company X" end up regulating "Company X" and stuff like that. Somehow I'm still not convinced by those arguments (especially given the observed results;) ).
[1] Similarly there's always this popular debate about big vs small government, I find that rather stupid since what seems far more important is the quality of the government, not the quantity of it. But in a democracy I guess that's ultimately determined by the general quality of the voters.
There's no proof of the mathematical ability either.
People who think they are good at math aren't necessarily actually good.
And people who know they aren't good at math, and thus say they aren't good might still see the world rather differently from the people who score 500 in the SAT Math.
I believe 500 is considered an average score despite SAT not involving calculus, statistics, probability etc. So someone who scores 800 in SAT might be well aware that he's crap at calculus and the other areas of mathematics.
When the average is abysmal, "way above average" might not be "good", but still see the world rather differently.
There's even more confusion than that. You can't assume all those people are actually good at math.
After all, people who think they are good at math are not necessarily actually good at math.
Then there are also people who are way above average in math but they know they are crap compared to the "real mathematicians".
You could fly a plane far better than 99% of the people out there, but that does not automatically make you good at flying, or suitable for piloting a commercial airliner with hundreds of people on board. Despite that, you might still know more about flying, aerodynamics and physics than the average person and you might be above average in stuff involving coordination, etc.
Thus someone way above average in math but who doesn't selfrate as "good" might still see the world a bit differently from most other people.
OK, to show you my POV - here's what I consider a big change- when humans get virtual telepathy, telekinesis and augmented brains.
This is already being crudely done with mobile phones (communications and buying of stuff via vending machines).
And the tech is already there for: 1) humans (and other creatures) to control stuff just by thinking. 2) adding extra senses (google for "seeing tongue") 3) Small cams, microphones etc
Once you can do it safely and reliably, add some clever software and you can use "thought macros"[1] to control stuff and communicate.
You could then take a picture/video of something, tell your e-brain to save it and associate it with a particular thought pattern so that when you rethink that particular pattern the object is retrieved, and you can also send it to someone else[2].
Then humans, computing and culture would enter a new stage of evolution...
As it is, you can show me all that fancy AJAX and I'll just go "meh". Yes all that is very nice and useful, but looking at what's possible with the current state of the art I'd call that "underperforming";). In contrast Douglas Engelbart and gang really stretched the limits of technology in the 1960s.
Then again maybe it was a waste of resources and we would still have what we have today even if he and his bunch didn't do all that? Oh well, I'm just getting rather impatient though:).
[1] I bet nobody's thought patterns are the same - so you'd have to "train" the program to recognize thought macros. [2] Trouble of course is the **AA might have something to say about that and want to collect toll on each retrieval and share. I wouldn't like that particular evolutionary path.
I agree, it did not begin with literacy, there was Culture and Religion way before literacy.
Your consciousness depends on your collection of cells to work together as a _group_ (with the individual cells regularly making sacrifices for the benefit of the whole).
But independent cells have done pretty fine for billions of years, without this newfangled "working together for the better of the whole" idea:). Are your poor little white blood cells and neurons doing that much better than protozoa? Do they even know "You" exist? Red blood cells don't even have a nucleus.
Can Culture and Religion benefit the hosts? Or only some cultures and religions?
But computer programs aren't that different compared to 30 years ago.
Just look at the operating systems:
Unix is pretty old. When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
And look up the "Mother of all Demos" - they had real time video conferencing, working together with a remote user over a WAN on the same document. So many innovative concepts, 40+ years ago.
The hardware available then naturally limited these pioneers, I'm sure they had plenty more they could think of but could not implement.
Linux - just Unix revisited. Mac - The WIMP from PARC finally makes its way to the public (note the scrollbar was invented in 1977). Windows 95/2K- ok the taskbar was nice (I think the Acorn had it first). Windows XP - whoopee a new colour scheme, and some rearrangements, no big improvements Windows Vista - I can't say this is a big improvement, in many ways the user experience is worse. KDE/GNOME - basically the same old thing as "X" years ago, now with Wobbly Windows and stuff copied from Windows 95.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive;).
But they do store protein sequences in the pseq table in their RDBMS[1]. While protein sequences are not the same thing as DNA sequences, I believe they're not very different from a database storage and retrieval perspective - just store them as a string.
And you don't need to use exact string matching on RDBMSes, many are fine with other types of matches. While that's slower than an exact match, it's still doable (and in some cases still indexable).
[1] One of the pdfs I linked to also gives the address of their DB and website.
> it's about turning people on who get turned on by rape fantasies (essentially *promoting* their desire for rape), that's another however.
And those people don't happen to have a rewind button?
You don't really have to show a rape scene to tell the audience that someone gets horrifically raped.
After all, there are many famous murder scenes where the actual murder isn't shown in graphic detail, and apparently they can be even more impactful that way.
So maybe we should ban rape/torture scenes in "Hollywood movies" too? That might not be such a bad thing - maybe film makers will stop relying on "right in your face stuff"[1] and start trying other tricks.
[1] There are too many movies where the filmmakers try to scare you just by having a loud sound and a sudden movement. Whoopee I'm scared for about half a second. Let's leave the "jump out of corner and yell Boo!" to the 5 year old toddlers ok? In contrast there are movies where you end up not even wanting to look at your mirror while brushing your teeth, heck maybe you might not risk brushing your teeth that night either...
SQL is going to be around for a long time, because it's useful as an "API" - as a protocol or layer of abstraction.
Programmers can write all sorts of programs in all sorts of programming languages and then use SQL to talk to the DB. If the DB changes a bit, they can often use the same SQL or modify it slightly.
You often see lots of grumbling and cursing in various companies because people actually end up doing that and companies end up with lots of stuff hooked to the DB - MS Access, perl, python, ruby, java, radius servers, openvpn, accounting and finance stuff...
They grumble, but the fact is the database is being used. The data has become more useful.
If you have your database locked up behind some new fangled protocol that only 20 people in the world know, it's not going to be as easy to do that - and often each bunch will start creating their own databases and you end up with a different mess, and a mess that's not as useful.
Having everyone use SQL to talk to the DB is not actually a bug it's a feature.
One man's impedance mismatch is another man's layer of abstraction.
Personally I haven't seen any human without huge lapses in logic. Even atheists.
FWIW most people in general are detached from reality[1].
For example watch the following video and count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black:
Well some say the issue was nothing to do with the flight computers and a lot to do with:
1) the concorde being way overweight 2) taking off in a tail wind while overweight 3) taking off with landing gear that's not aligned 4) pilot and copilot not being careful enough
Quote: Prior to MySQL 5.1.12, when a stored routine or trigger caused an INSERT into an AUTO_INCREMENT column, the generated AUTO_INCREMENT value was not written into the binary log, so a different value could in some cases be inserted on the slave.
Using replication written by people who regularly release stuff of such "quality", is being inefficient - you'll eventually be wasting a lot of time.
A prev company I worked for stupidly used MySQL for a lot of stuff and I'd say it has cost them quite a fair bit. They've had lost data, corrupted data and server crashes (not hardware related).
Slashdot Mirror
Well I hope my cells keep working for the "greater good", don't start believing the "working for yourself=good" stuff.
And also kill all the cells that decide to strike it out on their own.
Yeah I'm evil like that.
But he said there was a duel key/feature and with it the duelers couldn't be hurt by the rest of the people.
200mph is about 320kph. The car in the video took quite a while to even hit 300kph.
But I suppose it's not that silly to have a car with a 245mph top speed, if you just want to get to 160 or 200mph faster than the other cars on the road.
> If acceleration is what you're after, at a fraction of the price, what you want is a motorbike.
That's true, but if you factor in long term costs, a motorbike is more likely to cost you an arm or a leg.
> In a free market none of these companies would have been bailed out. Instead they would have been forced to declare bankruptcy
;)
;) ).
But which country has this mythical free market? The one that has a thriving market in flying unicorns? Or is it the one where legislators and regulators can be bought and sold?
Reminds me a bit of those "True Believer arguments". e.g. "A True Believer would never do X" where X is something bad. Looking through that "lens" you'll find that the real world has rather few "True Believers", and you don't really learn much about what the True Believers actually believe in.
Anyway, to me what is important is not whether a market is free or non-free, but whether the market is well-regulated or not. And we should focus on how to have a well-regulated market, not on how free it is. Quality not quantity[1].
There have been arguments that the regulators should be people from the industry, since they know the industry well etc, and that's why it's ok and inevitable to have the "ex-CEO of Company X" end up regulating "Company X" and stuff like that. Somehow I'm still not convinced by those arguments (especially given the observed results
[1] Similarly there's always this popular debate about big vs small government, I find that rather stupid since what seems far more important is the quality of the government, not the quantity of it. But in a democracy I guess that's ultimately determined by the general quality of the voters.
> He's making assumptions he can't support
There's no proof of the mathematical ability either.
People who think they are good at math aren't necessarily actually good.
And people who know they aren't good at math, and thus say they aren't good might still see the world rather differently from the people who score 500 in the SAT Math.
I believe 500 is considered an average score despite SAT not involving calculus, statistics, probability etc. So someone who scores 800 in SAT might be well aware that he's crap at calculus and the other areas of mathematics.
When the average is abysmal, "way above average" might not be "good", but still see the world rather differently.
There's even more confusion than that. You can't assume all those people are actually good at math.
After all, people who think they are good at math are not necessarily actually good at math.
Then there are also people who are way above average in math but they know they are crap compared to the "real mathematicians".
You could fly a plane far better than 99% of the people out there, but that does not automatically make you good at flying, or suitable for piloting a commercial airliner with hundreds of people on board. Despite that, you might still know more about flying, aerodynamics and physics than the average person and you might be above average in stuff involving coordination, etc.
Thus someone way above average in math but who doesn't selfrate as "good" might still see the world a bit differently from most other people.
How many kWh do you need to use to hit the top tier rate of $0.33/kWh?
$0.33/kWh is almost like running your own generator.
See: http://www.generatorjoe.net/page.asp?id=61
Power companies should be using stuff that's far more efficient.
What in the world are they burning to produce your electricity? Extra virgin olive oil?
> in much the same way that it has been doing it for _thousands_ of years?
Easy for you to say Mr Vampire Man.
It's been getting harder and harder for me to distinguish Symantec and McAfee software from malware.
OK, to show you my POV - here's what I consider a big change- when humans get virtual telepathy, telekinesis and augmented brains.
;). In contrast Douglas Engelbart and gang really stretched the limits of technology in the 1960s.
:).
This is already being crudely done with mobile phones (communications and buying of stuff via vending machines).
And the tech is already there for:
1) humans (and other creatures) to control stuff just by thinking.
2) adding extra senses (google for "seeing tongue")
3) Small cams, microphones etc
Once you can do it safely and reliably, add some clever software and you can use "thought macros"[1] to control stuff and communicate.
You could then take a picture/video of something, tell your e-brain to save it and associate it with a particular thought pattern so that when you rethink that particular pattern the object is retrieved, and you can also send it to someone else[2].
Then humans, computing and culture would enter a new stage of evolution...
As it is, you can show me all that fancy AJAX and I'll just go "meh". Yes all that is very nice and useful, but looking at what's possible with the current state of the art I'd call that "underperforming"
Then again maybe it was a waste of resources and we would still have what we have today even if he and his bunch didn't do all that? Oh well, I'm just getting rather impatient though
[1] I bet nobody's thought patterns are the same - so you'd have to "train" the program to recognize thought macros.
[2] Trouble of course is the **AA might have something to say about that and want to collect toll on each retrieval and share. I wouldn't like that particular evolutionary path.
I agree, it did not begin with literacy, there was Culture and Religion way before literacy.
:). Are your poor little white blood cells and neurons doing that much better than protozoa? Do they even know "You" exist? Red blood cells don't even have a nucleus.
Your consciousness depends on your collection of cells to work together as a _group_ (with the individual cells regularly making sacrifices for the benefit of the whole).
But independent cells have done pretty fine for billions of years, without this newfangled "working together for the better of the whole" idea
Can Culture and Religion benefit the hosts? Or only some cultures and religions?
But computer programs aren't that different compared to 30 years ago.
;).
Just look at the operating systems:
Unix is pretty old. When you strip away the "transparent windows" and flashy glitz, the popular desktop computer O/Ses (Linux/OSX/Windows) are just as primitive as stuff 30 years ago.
And look up the "Mother of all Demos" - they had real time video conferencing, working together with a remote user over a WAN on the same document. So many innovative concepts, 40+ years ago.
The hardware available then naturally limited these pioneers, I'm sure they had plenty more they could think of but could not implement.
Linux - just Unix revisited.
Mac - The WIMP from PARC finally makes its way to the public (note the scrollbar was invented in 1977).
Windows 95/2K- ok the taskbar was nice (I think the Acorn had it first).
Windows XP - whoopee a new colour scheme, and some rearrangements, no big improvements
Windows Vista - I can't say this is a big improvement, in many ways the user experience is worse.
KDE/GNOME - basically the same old thing as "X" years ago, now with Wobbly Windows and stuff copied from Windows 95.
As for apps, the spreadsheet was a decent leap 30+ years ago. The browser? Go look at the Demo again and look up the history of hypertext. DTP? I dunno...
The Lisp fanatics will say stuff is just as primitive as it was 50 years ago, if not more primitive
But they do store protein sequences in the pseq table in their RDBMS[1]. While protein sequences are not the same thing as DNA sequences, I believe they're not very different from a database storage and retrieval perspective - just store them as a string.
And you don't need to use exact string matching on RDBMSes, many are fine with other types of matches. While that's slower than an exact match, it's still doable (and in some cases still indexable).
[1] One of the pdfs I linked to also gives the address of their DB and website.
> it's about turning people on who get turned on by rape fantasies (essentially *promoting* their desire for rape), that's another however.
And those people don't happen to have a rewind button?
You don't really have to show a rape scene to tell the audience that someone gets horrifically raped.
After all, there are many famous murder scenes where the actual murder isn't shown in graphic detail, and apparently they can be even more impactful that way.
So maybe we should ban rape/torture scenes in "Hollywood movies" too? That might not be such a bad thing - maybe film makers will stop relying on "right in your face stuff"[1] and start trying other tricks.
[1] There are too many movies where the filmmakers try to scare you just by having a loud sound and a sudden movement. Whoopee I'm scared for about half a second. Let's leave the "jump out of corner and yell Boo!" to the 5 year old toddlers ok? In contrast there are movies where you end up not even wanting to look at your mirror while brushing your teeth, heck maybe you might not risk brushing your teeth that night either...
> In Italian, but the pictures speak for themselves.
Yeah the pictures are probably doing a lot of hand waving and gesticulating.
And right now they're apparently screaming about "slashdot" while doing so.
What do you think about Unison and Postgresql?
http://harts.net/reece/pubs/2009/unison-UCSF-sfpug.pdf
Video of above presentation:
http://blog.thebuild.com/sfpug/sfpug-unison-20090311.mov
http://www.vimeo.com/3732938
See also: http://psb.stanford.edu/psb-online/proceedings/psb09/hart.pdf
Presenter is not very good though in my opinion :).
You can use SQL with flat files.
SQL is going to be around for a long time, because it's useful as an "API" - as a protocol or layer of abstraction.
Programmers can write all sorts of programs in all sorts of programming languages and then use SQL to talk to the DB. If the DB changes a bit, they can often use the same SQL or modify it slightly.
You often see lots of grumbling and cursing in various companies because people actually end up doing that and companies end up with lots of stuff hooked to the DB - MS Access, perl, python, ruby, java, radius servers, openvpn, accounting and finance stuff...
They grumble, but the fact is the database is being used. The data has become more useful.
If you have your database locked up behind some new fangled protocol that only 20 people in the world know, it's not going to be as easy to do that - and often each bunch will start creating their own databases and you end up with a different mess, and a mess that's not as useful.
Having everyone use SQL to talk to the DB is not actually a bug it's a feature.
One man's impedance mismatch is another man's layer of abstraction.
> I has born in the early 60s
:)
O RLY?
I can has you born in the early 80s or 90s.
> They are failing to outgrow these normal childhood behaviours, which don't work so well once you leave the nest.
Leave the nest?
What's this crazy talk? We're fine here in our mom's basement.
Personally I haven't seen any human without huge lapses in logic. Even atheists.
FWIW most people in general are detached from reality[1].
For example watch the following video and count the total number of times that the people wearing white pass the basketball. Do not count the passes made by the people wearing black:
http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/flashmovie/15.php
[1] Many wouldn't even see a gorilla in a video waving at them, because they are so busy with more important matters. Go figure.
12 hours? That's a bit long for someone who supposedly knew everything when it came to pills.
Or did he intentionally want to suffer and linger for 12 hours?
Well some say the issue was nothing to do with the flight computers and a lot to do with:
1) the concorde being way overweight
2) taking off in a tail wind while overweight
3) taking off with landing gear that's not aligned
4) pilot and copilot not being careful enough
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4185791,00.html
There are plenty of lectures available online. The OP underestimates the potential of Youtube and similar stuff.
See: http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
Don't like MIT? Try Stanford then.
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity
Plenty more. e.g.
http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley
How about seeing what people can learn in IIT, India?
http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd
Or UNSW in Australia?
http://www.youtube.com/user/unswelearning
Or "attend" a lecture given by the Noble Prize winner Richard Feynman?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M0e1lzB1lY
Youtube is a good way to waste time for people who like to waste time.
But it is also a good way to learn stuff for people who want to learn stuff.
And it's far more efficient if students can figure out they hate a course way before they even sign up for it and thus don't waste time and money.
Inefficient?
See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/replication-features-auto-increment.html
Quote: Prior to MySQL 5.1.12, when a stored routine or trigger caused an INSERT into an AUTO_INCREMENT column, the generated AUTO_INCREMENT value was not written into the binary log, so a different value could in some cases be inserted on the slave.
Using replication written by people who regularly release stuff of such "quality", is being inefficient - you'll eventually be wasting a lot of time.
A prev company I worked for stupidly used MySQL for a lot of stuff and I'd say it has cost them quite a fair bit. They've had lost data, corrupted data and server crashes (not hardware related).