Building a house isn't a one-time endeavor. Much like code, houses are never 100% finished. They're frequently repaired and less frequently remodeled, renovated, or expanded. If you look at photographs of the same house over the span of a century or more, it's sometimes hard to believe that the final version is the same building as the original. And when people work on their houses, they usually go for the most cost effective approach, even if that means leaving no longer used stuff in place because it would be more expensive to rip it out. Look inside the wall of an old house, and you'll be amazed at the stuff you find.
I'm pretty sure that they don't want to automate it. One of the first things Libre Office did after they forked from OO.o was to come up with a list of "easy hacks" for people who wanted to get involved but didn't know where to start. That includes stuff like dead code removal and translating comments from German to English. By leaving that stuff marked out but undone, they hope to ease new people into the project. That may not be the most efficient way of doing this kind of thing, but if it helps to recruit new developers it will do a lot more for the project in the long run than just getting rid of the cruft. It's a big difference between a project run by paid coders on a tight budget and one that depends on a variable number of volunteers.
According to the article, this is about employees with unvested shares. That means they don't actually own the shares yet; they're only promised the shares if they meet certain conditions, usually continued employment. If they're at will employees, Zynga has the right to fire them at any time for any reason, including firing them to keep their options from vesting. That may be sleazy and underhanded, and it's likely to cause them serious loss of reputation (more of a problem for the VCs, who will have to deal with other startups, than Zynga), but it's technically legal. Demanding the return of the options is just giving the employees a choice: get fired and lose your options because they haven't vested or keep your job and give up your options as the price of continued employment. Again, it's sleazy enough to make pond scum resent your comparison to Zynga management, but it's probably legal.
That may be Microsoft's plan, but it's a real loser for expensive specialty software. At my work, we have plenty of technical apps that cost more than the Windows machine they're running on, even though they require fairly hefty hardware. There's no way a company writing a $10K app is going to be willing to hand over $3K to Microsoft to get it on their appstore. They'd rather port to another, more open platform. Stealing those kinds of apps away from Unix workstations was a big win for Microsoft 10-20 years ago. It will be an equally big loss if they drive them back to Unix/Linux in an attempt to cash in as a gatekeeper.
And that's not the only big loss. Many larger businesses have their own custom apps and packages that they've written in-house and depend on to keep their companies running. Making Windows depend exclusively on something like the appstore to install software will kill that market and push Windows out of big business. Unless there's some kind of Windows for Business solution that lets you set up your own software sources, Microsoft will be killing the golden goose.
The Turing test, as originally proposed, wasn't just a test of casual conversation. It was supposed to involve skeptical questioners doing their very best to separate human from AI, with no limit on conversational topic. The hypothetical questions in Turing's original paper included ones about math, chess problems, and poetry. If you held a Turing test under the original rules, with a reward for testers who successfully told human from AI (and for humans who successfully proved their humanity) you would find that no AI would get anywhere close to success. Because everybody knows that, public tests like this one have repeatedly watered down the original concept to make things more interesting. But that just proves how far AI has to come, not that it's getting close to succeeding.
It isn't just the OS that makes the system open or closed; how easily you can do other things is very important. Apple has a much more tightly locked down application environment. Getting an app into the iOS Appstore is much tougher than getting it into the Android Marketplace, and installing unapproved apps is much easier under Android. From a user standpoint, having access to outside apps by setting a single checkbox contributes more to real openness than being able to replace the OS.
Note that this kind of material only works to increase the heat capacity of the building, so it will only work when the temperature fluctuates across the phase change temperature over the course of the day. You'll still need a heater if it gets cold and stays cold and an air conditioner if it gets hot and stays hot. The big benefit is that the heat capacity only applies across a narrow temperature range, so it's relatively easy to maintain that temperature passively.
No, he's not an academic purist; he's a businessman who's selling a product that competes with MySQL. So he's trying to convince web startups to pay a bunch of money for his product rather than rely on free MySQL because he claims it will help them scale better than Facebook. IOW, businessman trashes competitor's product, claims you should buy from him instead. Nothing to see here.
But we're talking about a state sales tax, and you're talking about a list of services that Amazon doesn't get from the state of California:
Except that they do receive some services from California; that's the point. Amazon has "associates" that are based in California, which is the legal basis for California demanding that Amazon charge sales taxes.
To give a concrete example, I live in California and bought my TV from a California company that most certainly does use state and local services paid for from those sales taxes. But because I bought it through Amazon as an intermediary, there was no sales tax charged at the time of purchase. If I had bought from the same company by going down to their store, I would have had to pay sales tax. That's a pure sales tax avoidance scheme, and it's crazy to let it continue.
FWIW, I am a good citizen who tracks my on-line purchases and pays the use tax for goods when I didn't pay the sales tax at the time I purchased them. I would personally rather have those taxes deducted at the time of purchase rather than wait and pay them later.
Yes, Amazon provides some of that lifestyle. Of course Amazon sells it using the DARPA developed internet and ships it on public roads, often using the US Postal Service. They hire programmers who were educated in public schools and at public universities. When they're worried about competition, they sue their competitors in Federal Court, often over patents issued by the USPTO. Their facilities are protected from crime by publicly funded police and from foreign invaders by the US military. If one of their buildings catches fire, it will be put out by publicly funded fire fighters. That's a developed world lifestyle, and it's made possible by the continuous effort of a capable government.
And there are many old games that are still very playable because they did a great job of basic design and were able to crank up to a high enough difficulty to give anyone a real challenge. I think this is true of a lot of the classic arcade games. They're built more around reflexes and hand-eye coordination than thinking and planning. As long as they can't be beaten by memorizing and following a predictable series of moves, they can be just as challenging as they were when they first came out.
I wouldn't say that common sense is wrong more often than not. I would say that it's wrong often enough that you should do your best to test any common sense idea before building an elaborate theory that depends on it being correct. Common sense can often be a useful guide, but it can lead you into some really unpleasant blind alleys when it's wrong.
The biggest reason to run "duh" studies is because you really do have to test the obvious. If you assume something is true without testing it, any theory you build on that assumption is on shaky ground. Showing that your basic assumptions is correct is a vital step before you can do anything more complicate.
It's called advertising. Even supposedly independent minded engineers will start to believe that Cisco gear is better than the other guy's if he hears it often enough.
I think you'll find that even 239Pu has too high a neutron emission rate (about 20 neutrons/kg sec) to make a reliable gun-type bomb. That gives you hundreds of neutrons per second in the separate subcritical assemblies. Given a critical assembly time on the order of a millisecond, that gives much too high a probability of a fizzle to make a practical design.
Also, given that the half-life of 240Pu is about 1/4 that of 239Pu, just aging your Plutonium is not going to be enough to reduce 240Pu levels to a reasonable level. By the time the 240Pu has decayed to the point it has a lower neutron emission rate than the 239Pu, most of your 239Pu will also have decayed and you'll need to reprocess it to recover enough for a bomb. Not really a practical solution.
It's a little bit more complicated than that. The average time between neutron emissions in the fissile material for a gun-type bomb has to be substantially longer than the assembly time. Otherwise you'll get predetonation and the device will fizzle. If the design doesn't incorporate a neutron source, the parts will just sit there until there's finally a spontaneous emission that can start a chain reaction.
To avoid that unpredictable delay, during which the pieces might move back out of perfect alignment, real-world gun-type designs have incorporated neutron sources that release extra neutrons at just the right moment. The most common design uses an explosion to mix polonium and beryllium, which then release enough neutrons to trigger the reaction. That kind of neutron generator was used in the Little Boy device.
I used to bake breads using conventional (for America) volume measurement. When I started to do sourdough baking, I started using a scale because the recipes used weights. Now I do all my breads by weight even though I'm not following formal recipes anymore, in part because it gives me better control. I have a very good idea of how my dough will change if I use one ounce of water more or less, which lets me get exactly the style of dough I want right now.
It's certainly possible to bake bread by feel, adjusting the amount of flour to get a dough that's just the consistency you want. That method starts to have serious problems when you're making breads with dough that's too sticky to knead easily by hand, or when you're trying to minimize kneading to achieve a deliberately coarse texture. In those cases, it's much easier to weigh out just the right amount of everything at the beginning. Once you have a good scale for recipes that really require it, it turns out to be just as easy to do all your bread recipes by weight as by volume. I don't use the scale much for other cooking, but that's because I do those recipes without much in the way of measuring of any kind.
I can't speak for the parent, but when I'm baking I certainly do. Home volume measures just aren't precise enough to get really controllable, reproducible results. Besides, if you're already weighing out your flour, it's easier to hit the tare button and weigh in some water than it is to get a measuring cup.
The question is not with (rare Earth) element vs. rare (Earth element); it's with referring to 3He as an element at all. It isn't an element at all. He is an element, 3He is an isotope. This is an important distinction, and one that any competent science writer should get right every time.
You don't have to use a "random number generator". You can capture truly random values, since you only have to do it once.
Great, except that it's going to take ages to collect enough random data for a whole disk. I've tried pre-filling my disks with pseudo random data before doing full disk encryption- the recommended approach, since it makes it hard to figure out where the files are- and it's very slow. On my Core i7,/dev/urandom generates pseudo-random numbers at maybe 500 GB/day. A true RNG will be much, much slower. It might possibly work if you're only trying to encrypt a thumb drive, but it would be hopeless for a full size SSD.
A 50 fold improvement in efficiency is less extraordinary than you think; bioethanol, which I assume is what they're comparing to, is very inefficient. Crop plants typically store on the order of 1% of the sunlight they absorb as chemical energy, with the rest being wasted or used to maintain the plant. Most of that stored energy is in stems, roots, leaves, and other parts of the plant that aren't used for ethanol production, with only a small fraction winding up in the seeds that are used. (This is why celulosic ethanol has been such a big target; it would massively increase the fraction of the plant that's usable for fuel production.) Finally, the conversion from starch to fuel isn't very efficient, either. There's enough room for efficiency gains that a 50 fold improvement seems perfectly possible.
This is mentioned in the article; it happens with Pinky because of his chase algorithm. He's designed to ambush the player by targeting the space 4 tiles ahead of Pac Man*. If Pinky and Pac Man are on a head-on collision course, that point will eventually be behind him, which will force him to turn to the side if that's an available course.
*There's actually a bug in the routine that makes him target the space 4 above and 4 to the left when Pac Man is moving up.
Did anybody, for even a second think it's kinda weird for a program to splatter its parts all over the disk and into every directory it can find?
Yeah, that would be weird. It would be much more sensible for programs to behave the way they do under sane Linux package management, and put their parts into places defined by the filesystem hierarchy standard. That way it's possible to have just one copy of important files and libraries, so each program package can be much smaller.
Not necessarily. You can define the pressure in terms of the triple point, which is an absolute pressure that depends only on the physical properties of water. The definition of temperature already uses the triple point of water as its fixed point, so you could define mass in terms of a fixed volume of liquid water at its triple point.
A more insidious problem is that the isotopic composition of water isn't fixed and has an impact on its physical properties, including both the density and triple point. This is a potential problem with defining mass in terms of silicon, too; it has three stable isotopes. You can theoretically define it in terms of only one isotope or a fixed ratio of isotopes, but then you have the practical problem of isotopic purity.
I'd think it would be better to define things in terms of an element that has only one stable isotope. Gold would be the obvious choice, since it's also incredibly inert and would avoid problems with the mass changing because of chemical reactions.
No, silicon is not a metal, unless you're using the astronomers' definition of metal (i.e. anything heavier than helium). Chemists generally categorize silicon as a semi-metal or metaloid.
Slashdot Mirror
Building a house isn't a one-time endeavor. Much like code, houses are never 100% finished. They're frequently repaired and less frequently remodeled, renovated, or expanded. If you look at photographs of the same house over the span of a century or more, it's sometimes hard to believe that the final version is the same building as the original. And when people work on their houses, they usually go for the most cost effective approach, even if that means leaving no longer used stuff in place because it would be more expensive to rip it out. Look inside the wall of an old house, and you'll be amazed at the stuff you find.
I'm pretty sure that they don't want to automate it. One of the first things Libre Office did after they forked from OO.o was to come up with a list of "easy hacks" for people who wanted to get involved but didn't know where to start. That includes stuff like dead code removal and translating comments from German to English. By leaving that stuff marked out but undone, they hope to ease new people into the project. That may not be the most efficient way of doing this kind of thing, but if it helps to recruit new developers it will do a lot more for the project in the long run than just getting rid of the cruft. It's a big difference between a project run by paid coders on a tight budget and one that depends on a variable number of volunteers.
According to the article, this is about employees with unvested shares. That means they don't actually own the shares yet; they're only promised the shares if they meet certain conditions, usually continued employment. If they're at will employees, Zynga has the right to fire them at any time for any reason, including firing them to keep their options from vesting. That may be sleazy and underhanded, and it's likely to cause them serious loss of reputation (more of a problem for the VCs, who will have to deal with other startups, than Zynga), but it's technically legal. Demanding the return of the options is just giving the employees a choice: get fired and lose your options because they haven't vested or keep your job and give up your options as the price of continued employment. Again, it's sleazy enough to make pond scum resent your comparison to Zynga management, but it's probably legal.
That may be Microsoft's plan, but it's a real loser for expensive specialty software. At my work, we have plenty of technical apps that cost more than the Windows machine they're running on, even though they require fairly hefty hardware. There's no way a company writing a $10K app is going to be willing to hand over $3K to Microsoft to get it on their appstore. They'd rather port to another, more open platform. Stealing those kinds of apps away from Unix workstations was a big win for Microsoft 10-20 years ago. It will be an equally big loss if they drive them back to Unix/Linux in an attempt to cash in as a gatekeeper.
And that's not the only big loss. Many larger businesses have their own custom apps and packages that they've written in-house and depend on to keep their companies running. Making Windows depend exclusively on something like the appstore to install software will kill that market and push Windows out of big business. Unless there's some kind of Windows for Business solution that lets you set up your own software sources, Microsoft will be killing the golden goose.
The Turing test, as originally proposed, wasn't just a test of casual conversation. It was supposed to involve skeptical questioners doing their very best to separate human from AI, with no limit on conversational topic. The hypothetical questions in Turing's original paper included ones about math, chess problems, and poetry. If you held a Turing test under the original rules, with a reward for testers who successfully told human from AI (and for humans who successfully proved their humanity) you would find that no AI would get anywhere close to success. Because everybody knows that, public tests like this one have repeatedly watered down the original concept to make things more interesting. But that just proves how far AI has to come, not that it's getting close to succeeding.
It isn't just the OS that makes the system open or closed; how easily you can do other things is very important. Apple has a much more tightly locked down application environment. Getting an app into the iOS Appstore is much tougher than getting it into the Android Marketplace, and installing unapproved apps is much easier under Android. From a user standpoint, having access to outside apps by setting a single checkbox contributes more to real openness than being able to replace the OS.
Note that this kind of material only works to increase the heat capacity of the building, so it will only work when the temperature fluctuates across the phase change temperature over the course of the day. You'll still need a heater if it gets cold and stays cold and an air conditioner if it gets hot and stays hot. The big benefit is that the heat capacity only applies across a narrow temperature range, so it's relatively easy to maintain that temperature passively.
No, he's not an academic purist; he's a businessman who's selling a product that competes with MySQL. So he's trying to convince web startups to pay a bunch of money for his product rather than rely on free MySQL because he claims it will help them scale better than Facebook. IOW, businessman trashes competitor's product, claims you should buy from him instead. Nothing to see here.
Except that they do receive some services from California; that's the point. Amazon has "associates" that are based in California, which is the legal basis for California demanding that Amazon charge sales taxes.
To give a concrete example, I live in California and bought my TV from a California company that most certainly does use state and local services paid for from those sales taxes. But because I bought it through Amazon as an intermediary, there was no sales tax charged at the time of purchase. If I had bought from the same company by going down to their store, I would have had to pay sales tax. That's a pure sales tax avoidance scheme, and it's crazy to let it continue.
FWIW, I am a good citizen who tracks my on-line purchases and pays the use tax for goods when I didn't pay the sales tax at the time I purchased them. I would personally rather have those taxes deducted at the time of purchase rather than wait and pay them later.
Yes, Amazon provides some of that lifestyle. Of course Amazon sells it using the DARPA developed internet and ships it on public roads, often using the US Postal Service. They hire programmers who were educated in public schools and at public universities. When they're worried about competition, they sue their competitors in Federal Court, often over patents issued by the USPTO. Their facilities are protected from crime by publicly funded police and from foreign invaders by the US military. If one of their buildings catches fire, it will be put out by publicly funded fire fighters. That's a developed world lifestyle, and it's made possible by the continuous effort of a capable government.
And there are many old games that are still very playable because they did a great job of basic design and were able to crank up to a high enough difficulty to give anyone a real challenge. I think this is true of a lot of the classic arcade games. They're built more around reflexes and hand-eye coordination than thinking and planning. As long as they can't be beaten by memorizing and following a predictable series of moves, they can be just as challenging as they were when they first came out.
I wouldn't say that common sense is wrong more often than not. I would say that it's wrong often enough that you should do your best to test any common sense idea before building an elaborate theory that depends on it being correct. Common sense can often be a useful guide, but it can lead you into some really unpleasant blind alleys when it's wrong.
The biggest reason to run "duh" studies is because you really do have to test the obvious. If you assume something is true without testing it, any theory you build on that assumption is on shaky ground. Showing that your basic assumptions is correct is a vital step before you can do anything more complicate.
It's called advertising. Even supposedly independent minded engineers will start to believe that Cisco gear is better than the other guy's if he hears it often enough.
I think you'll find that even 239Pu has too high a neutron emission rate (about 20 neutrons/kg sec) to make a reliable gun-type bomb. That gives you hundreds of neutrons per second in the separate subcritical assemblies. Given a critical assembly time on the order of a millisecond, that gives much too high a probability of a fizzle to make a practical design.
Also, given that the half-life of 240Pu is about 1/4 that of 239Pu, just aging your Plutonium is not going to be enough to reduce 240Pu levels to a reasonable level. By the time the 240Pu has decayed to the point it has a lower neutron emission rate than the 239Pu, most of your 239Pu will also have decayed and you'll need to reprocess it to recover enough for a bomb. Not really a practical solution.
It's a little bit more complicated than that. The average time between neutron emissions in the fissile material for a gun-type bomb has to be substantially longer than the assembly time. Otherwise you'll get predetonation and the device will fizzle. If the design doesn't incorporate a neutron source, the parts will just sit there until there's finally a spontaneous emission that can start a chain reaction.
To avoid that unpredictable delay, during which the pieces might move back out of perfect alignment, real-world gun-type designs have incorporated neutron sources that release extra neutrons at just the right moment. The most common design uses an explosion to mix polonium and beryllium, which then release enough neutrons to trigger the reaction. That kind of neutron generator was used in the Little Boy device.
I used to bake breads using conventional (for America) volume measurement. When I started to do sourdough baking, I started using a scale because the recipes used weights. Now I do all my breads by weight even though I'm not following formal recipes anymore, in part because it gives me better control. I have a very good idea of how my dough will change if I use one ounce of water more or less, which lets me get exactly the style of dough I want right now.
It's certainly possible to bake bread by feel, adjusting the amount of flour to get a dough that's just the consistency you want. That method starts to have serious problems when you're making breads with dough that's too sticky to knead easily by hand, or when you're trying to minimize kneading to achieve a deliberately coarse texture. In those cases, it's much easier to weigh out just the right amount of everything at the beginning. Once you have a good scale for recipes that really require it, it turns out to be just as easy to do all your bread recipes by weight as by volume. I don't use the scale much for other cooking, but that's because I do those recipes without much in the way of measuring of any kind.
I can't speak for the parent, but when I'm baking I certainly do. Home volume measures just aren't precise enough to get really controllable, reproducible results. Besides, if you're already weighing out your flour, it's easier to hit the tare button and weigh in some water than it is to get a measuring cup.
The question is not with (rare Earth) element vs. rare (Earth element); it's with referring to 3He as an element at all. It isn't an element at all. He is an element, 3He is an isotope. This is an important distinction, and one that any competent science writer should get right every time.
Great, except that it's going to take ages to collect enough random data for a whole disk. I've tried pre-filling my disks with pseudo random data before doing full disk encryption- the recommended approach, since it makes it hard to figure out where the files are- and it's very slow. On my Core i7, /dev/urandom generates pseudo-random numbers at maybe 500 GB/day. A true RNG will be much, much slower. It might possibly work if you're only trying to encrypt a thumb drive, but it would be hopeless for a full size SSD.
A 50 fold improvement in efficiency is less extraordinary than you think; bioethanol, which I assume is what they're comparing to, is very inefficient. Crop plants typically store on the order of 1% of the sunlight they absorb as chemical energy, with the rest being wasted or used to maintain the plant. Most of that stored energy is in stems, roots, leaves, and other parts of the plant that aren't used for ethanol production, with only a small fraction winding up in the seeds that are used. (This is why celulosic ethanol has been such a big target; it would massively increase the fraction of the plant that's usable for fuel production.) Finally, the conversion from starch to fuel isn't very efficient, either. There's enough room for efficiency gains that a 50 fold improvement seems perfectly possible.
This is mentioned in the article; it happens with Pinky because of his chase algorithm. He's designed to ambush the player by targeting the space 4 tiles ahead of Pac Man*. If Pinky and Pac Man are on a head-on collision course, that point will eventually be behind him, which will force him to turn to the side if that's an available course.
*There's actually a bug in the routine that makes him target the space 4 above and 4 to the left when Pac Man is moving up.
Yeah, that would be weird. It would be much more sensible for programs to behave the way they do under sane Linux package management, and put their parts into places defined by the filesystem hierarchy standard. That way it's possible to have just one copy of important files and libraries, so each program package can be much smaller.
Not necessarily. You can define the pressure in terms of the triple point, which is an absolute pressure that depends only on the physical properties of water. The definition of temperature already uses the triple point of water as its fixed point, so you could define mass in terms of a fixed volume of liquid water at its triple point.
A more insidious problem is that the isotopic composition of water isn't fixed and has an impact on its physical properties, including both the density and triple point. This is a potential problem with defining mass in terms of silicon, too; it has three stable isotopes. You can theoretically define it in terms of only one isotope or a fixed ratio of isotopes, but then you have the practical problem of isotopic purity.
I'd think it would be better to define things in terms of an element that has only one stable isotope. Gold would be the obvious choice, since it's also incredibly inert and would avoid problems with the mass changing because of chemical reactions.
No, silicon is not a metal, unless you're using the astronomers' definition of metal (i.e. anything heavier than helium). Chemists generally categorize silicon as a semi-metal or metaloid.