Making any comments about the desirability or appropriateness of the percentage of women, blacks, hispanics, etc. in a company implies personal knowledge about the desired or appropriate range of percentages. But, that's where it gets difficult. It's easy to say that the numbers are too low, but it's hard to pin down what the target numbers should be. Should the percentage of women be 50%? But, if there are 10x more men applying for the job, is that appropriate? As others have discussed in this forum, a separate question is whether the 10:1 ratio of men:women applicants is appropriate.
This discussion also presents perhaps a hazy melding of two distinct, important questions: (1) Are there an appropriate percentage of a certain demographic group within a company, and (2) do the members of that demographic group have the same opportunities to get a job in that company? The first question deals with the aggregate end result, while the latter question deals with the probabilities for an individual. In my opinion, the second question is more important but difficult to measure. So, the first question is used as a lazy alternative.
A few years ago, Google published a study of hard disk failures. Failures were not correlated with how much data was written or read. Failures were correlated with the amount of time the disk was spun up, so you should idle a drive not in active use. Failures were negatively correlated with temperature: drives kept cooler were MORE likely to fail.
Actually the paper says that the Google guys approximated power-on hours with a notion of age, which I assume was approximated by a knowledge of either the manufacture date of the delivery date. From the paper, annualized failure rate (AFR) is somewhat correlated with age, but not necessarily strongly enough to predict probability of failure. Even with their large drive population, the paper points out that the drive model mix is not consistent over time and therefore, not much can be made of the apparently weak correlation between AFR and age, which could be perhaps be more greatly influenced by drive model.
The negative correlation with very cold temperatures is interesting but hard to understand without further analysis. Perhaps some drive models didn't handle fly height adjustments well at low temperatures. It's hard to figure out without more data. It should also be pointed out the temperatures were obtained via SMART, and the SMART standard doesn't mandate how temperature is reported. So, different manufacturers could report temperatures in different ways, i.e., different locations (which can easily vary by up to 30 degrees C), different aggregation methods (time windows, sampling frequency), etc. So, the aggregate data is probably not as useful as the data per drive model.
Nobody needs a $4000 in-car navigation when their $400 phone already does the same thing better.
I actually prefer the built-in system. For example, I have a limited data plan because my non-wifi data needs are low, so using an online map like Google Maps or Waze costs extra on a recurring basis. With a phone, I would have to go through the motions of removing it from my pocket, attaching it to the bracket, and plugging it in, as well as the reverse motions when leaving the car. I would also need a special bracket to hold the phone, and even with this bracket, the screen would shake more than an integrated system. The phone screen is significantly smaller. The phone audio is not integrated into the car speakers, so audio levels have to be adjusted, and navigation directions sometimes compete with music. The built-in system also has a physical joystick and dial with voice feedback (not to mention voice recognition) so that I can control it more easily than the using the phone's touchscreen.
I do use my phone for navigation sometimes when I drive my older car. But, given a choice, I always prefer the built-in system.
The goal of the upgrade was an easy performance upgrade, i.e., pop it in and enjoy the speed.
What my experience shows is that DRAM costs less, yields a better performance increase, and most importantly is plug-and-play. Obviously, different machines and operational workloads will affect results, but if SSD performance is not plug-and-play, the value proposition for many users is greatly diminished.
IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.
Hmm, if you assume there is no seek time, then ideally IOPS will be 120 if your request size is exactly a full track, which is almost never the case. IOPS will be 1s / (seek_time + rotational_latency + access_time + overhead). How many IOPS you can get from a 7200rpm drive depends on a lot of factors. Are the requests uniformly randomly distributed? Is NCQ enabled? What is the max track span of the requests? If the max track span is narrow and on the outer part of the disk, then you can get a lot IOPS, quite a bit more than 120.
SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.
Whether or not an SSD is worthwhile depends on the use case. I just put a low-end SSD in an old desktop to replace an HDD. The performance difference was basically negligible. I was quite disappointed. The system bootup was a bit faster, but application startup wasn't any better. And, since I always put my machine to sleep instead of shutting down, bootup times are unimportant. Fortunately, I could live with the dramatically smaller storage capacity because my main storage is on another machine. In contrast, I doubled the DRAM on my other machine, and the performance boost was amazing. The $30 I spent on the DRAM was a much better investment than the $70 for the SSD.
This is an example of correlation not necessarily indicating causation. There's nothing inherently wrong with a temporary structure. Does the fact that some temporary structure have bad ventilation mean that all temporary structures have bad ventilation? If you take the same temporary structure and move it to a rich neighborhood, do the rich kids have similar levels of absenteeism?
Of course, a poorly designed or erected temporary structure is bad, just as a poorly designed or erected permanent structure is bad. However, the underlying problem is funding (and the associated problems arising from neighborhoods with less educated and poorer parents).
Artificial intelligence and neural networks are a hot topic, so this is piggy-backing on that trend. It's not a surprise that Andrew Ng's work is referenced quite a bit.
While the modeling is interesting, it's seems to be just modeling at this point. The main claim of the white paper is high PUE prediction accuracy by the model. While that's academically interesting, the real use is in feedback for optimization. The white paper author realized that and included that optimization problem as one of the examples in the paper. However, the optimization was achieved "through a combination of PUE simulations and local expertise." I'm guessing that the local expertise part was relatively significant because there is basically no discussion of this even though it is the one application that would really make this work practical and really interesting. The paper claimed that this neural network-based optimization reduced PUE "by ~0.02 compared to the previous configuration." But, I have no idea how that would have compared to optimization using just local expertise without the benefit of neural network modeling.
Anyone who has experience outside the public education system figures out real quick that you can't look at the skin color or bank account of a student to see how well they're doing.
While it's true that skin color and wealth cannot be used as independent indicators or predictors of academic performance, the correlation is nonzero. I would even venture to guess that the correlation is more than weak. Yes, correlation is not causation, but correlation is a definite indication of, well, correlation, i.e., there's a relationship.
Racism is the last excuse that our failed public education system still clings to. That and "we don't have enough money."
It's an excuse when we don't like the idea, but a truism when we do. Racism may not be a relevant cause of poor academic performance, but it's statistically clear that racial factors have significant correlation to academic performance. [Please no correlation is not causation garbage -- that type of thinking is just an excuse to avoid further discourse.]
It's funny, but I dislike using my phone for basically all of those things, and so I don't. IMHO, typing on a smart phone is much like trying to assemble Christmas toys while drunk; not pleasurable, and noteworthy mainly for the occasional disaster it causes.
I agree. I only use my phone for situations where a PC is unavailable because the PC user interface is almost always vastly preferable. Yes, Angry Birds is better with a touchscreen, but it's the exception. A physical keyboard is so much better than a virtual keyboard in terms of speed and annoyance. A mouse with buttons has much greater speed and utility than a touchscreen. A 24" screen is much more readable than a 5" or 10" screen, and web page formatting is more usable.
The sole redeeming value of the phone is its mobility.
Absolutely. The original commentary that it's the disc-based DRM that's offensive is illogical. Streaming is the always on, immediately revocable, non-bypassable version of DRM. It's the perfect DRM.
Apple is mucking around with accounting numbers to argue that iPad sales haven't decreased. They may actually be correct. However, that's a moot point. What is inescapable is that iPad sales are not growing. And, this trend is not a single quarter phenomenon. What should be troubling for Apple is that the iPad doesn't appear to be following the iPhone growth in sales and that this growth slowdown has come at a much earlier product age.
"... when "China Qin Shi Huang" gave his name to his country..."
Someone should have suggested to the emperor that he could actually name the whole country after himself. I imagine he would have been very pleased. Of course, he would have had to come up with a name that wasn't based on Indo-European languages. Maybe a cursory look at Wikipedia on the etymology of China is in order.
Instead of restricting edits, why not follow the existing guidelines about open disclosure? There are guidelines about declaring and displaying conflicts of interest. However, there don't seem to be any guidelines that explicitly address the implicit conflict of interest in being both a financial donor and an editor (at least I don't see it). I think donors should be able to edit, but they should not be able to edit without disclosure.
In a way, the donor-editor conflict of interest is nastier than the editor who edits an article about himself because the integrity of Wikipedia is called into doubt. This is easy to address with disclosure. Hopefully Wikipedia sees that.
Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people with religion == Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people without religion.
Religion is almost never the driving factor. In the absence of religion, such people would have found other means and justifications to perpetrate their evil. There are many such examples in history.
Unfortunately, the castigation of religion often reveals a hatred of religion more than a hatred of the evil acts.
Having seen the actual warranty return rates on HDDs when I was working at an HDD company not too long ago, I can tell you that average ARR annual return rates (which are about 2x the actual AFR failure rates) may be somewhere around 5%, but that includes the worst as well as the best models. External drives are often floor-swept models that have higher failure rates, but the best models have ARR rates less than 1%, with actual failure rates less than that.
One other consideration for critical data is the variability in the time-to-failure distribution. With RAID configurations, low variability leads to an increased probability of data loss during rebuild. HDDs tend to have higher variability due to their mechanical nature.
This idea that the family of Chinese languages suffers in adoption due to inherent characteristics is not supported by a reasoned analysis of the current situation. While it may be true that 400 million Chinese don't speak Mandarin, practically 100% of the country speaks some form of the Chinese language. Each of those dialects possess all of the supposed stumbling blocks to learning. If those characteristics (e.g., lack of a phonetic alphabet, lack of word delimiters) were truly hampering learning, how did nearly 100% of the country learn such a difficult language? The answer is that these challenges are only daunting for those unfamiliar with the language.
Other languages possess other characteristics that make learning challenging, but these language are not scrutinized in a similar manner because at least in this forum, the viewpoint is still overwhelmingly American/European. Many European languages include grammatical constructs (e.g., verb conjugation and tenses and case inflection) that are challenging not only for Chinese to learn but even for Americans. Many of these constructs are redundant and could be omitted to simplify the language, but children in these country find ways to learn these languages. Some languages are phonetic, but English is a quasi-phonetic language that is difficult to learn because it is somewhat phonetic but includes many rules and even more exceptions. The difficulty of an English-language spelling bee is testament to the difficulty of the quasi-phonetic nature of English and the accompanying challenges to learning.
I suppose autonomous drones could be viewed as landmines that happen to move and make decisions about their targets. So, if banning landmines makes sense, maybe so would banning autonomous drones.
Another way to look at this is that Apple has always historically pursued maximum profits and market share but adopted different strategies in light of the practicalities of specific markets. As an underdog in the PC market, quality was a differentiator to attract whatever market share was possible, realizing that being a dominant volume seller was not possible. As the dominant vendor in the smartphone space but with eroding market share, Apple is decreasing quality and cost to maintain market share and profit (although not margins). I think this is the more accurate portrayal of Apple, since I doubt they would be willing to blindly sacrifice profit in the name of quality or aesthetics.
"Interestingly, there's a small percentage of people (around 15% or so) for whom talking on a cell phone has no measurable effect on their driving. These are people with the ability to interrupt the conversation flow, saying "just a minute" or simply ignoring the conversation altogether during a crisis."
In other words, the abilities of the driver are significant. Because these types of academic studies ignore the range of driver abilities and the very significant impact of inexperience and stupidity as well as the impact of wisdom, experience, and trained reflexes, these studies do not reflect reality.
Driver experience is important in accident avoidance when talking about cell phones and just about every activity in a car. Changing radio stations or even looking at the speedometer or side mirror at the wrong time could be disastrous, but experienced drivers know when not to do these activities. It is not the activities per se that are dangerous but the coupling with inexperience.
Moreover, these academic studies have not been validated. This is similar to medical studies that show a reduction in blood cholesterol but no impact on longevity. Until the link to accidents and mortality in real-world situations is shown, the results are unconvincing. Yet, the press and the lemmings who believe the press pass around the conclusions as gospel.
The other way to look at this situation is that now Microsoft is the sole cell phone OS vendor who does not compete in the phone manufacturing sector. So, the four big Asian Android phone makers might see Microsoft as the only OS alternative that won't be a direct competitor. This is a huge issue. In the 90's AT&T broke up into a carrier service and an equipment manufacturer for this reason. The Android phone makers should be worried. And, depending on your take on their "united" statements of support this morning, they are either totally not worried or totally worried. IMO, the highly scripted wording and timing reminds me of forced confessions from arrested suspects who have no practical alternative.
I don't doubt the negative effect of keyboards on Chinese character proficiency. The resulting lack of handwriting practice understandably has **some** effect on the ability to reconstruct exact character strokes.
However, this is exactly the same negative effect that causes a drop in English spelling proficiency. It's not that Americans can't read, but spelling without the aid of a spell-check is markedly worse than for previous generations. If you think Chinese children are starting to forget some Chinese characters, consider the state of spelling for American kids! And, this problem with English spelling is an architectural flaw with the language. In contrast to many other European languages, English is only pseudo-phonetic.
The important point is that neither English nor Chinese are broken to the point that they need to be scrapped or re-architected.
"If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it."
It may take a lifetime for non-native Chinese speakers to learn Chinese as a second language, but rest assured that native Chinese children pick up the language fairly quickly. But, of course, the difficulty encountered by non-native speakers in learning a foreign language is a horrible indication of the intrinsic desirability of a particular language. For example, consider the English language. It is an alphabetic language, but pronunciation is only loosely phonetic, or rather, the phonetic system has so many complex rules and exceptions that render it extremely challenging, unless, of course, you happen to be a native speaker and have the complex rules and exceptions pounded into your head through a lifetime of learning. And, that's not even considering the relatively complex grammar rules, much of which is unnecessary, e.g., why is there a need for different cases and conjugations? Shouldn't most Indo-European languages be scrapped in favor of Chinese due to the use inefficient grammars, which make it difficult for non-native adult speakers to learn the language?
For the most part, any language is relatively easy to learn as a first language for a child.
But there is one very important way that power and data networks are similar: the provisioning of equipment must consider the maximum permitted peak load, even if that level is rarely reached. This is why the power company encourages its customers to conserve power during peak hours. It's certainly not because it doesn't want to sell more power but rather that it doesn't want to provision the equipment to support that extra demand.
Similarly, the wireless ISP is worried about having to install extra equipment to handle peak usage. And, by the way, this equipment we're talking about is local cell stations, which means that the overprovisioning problem is greatly enlarged because each station must be provisioned for the anticipated peak usage at that station.
As users, we see the value in high-bandwidth applications, such as video. And, it's certainly true that as these applications improve, more people will be attracted toward their use, and the number of such applications will potentially explode, especially if there is no mechanism for the voluntary restriction of usage by the user.
The real question is whether users are willing to pay the true cost of unlimited data plans, given the realities of overprovisioning requirements. Of course, the alternative question is whether users are willing to accept occasional bandwidth degradation that might occur due to the underprovisioning of local cell stations. Either we need to pay for ubiquitous quality of service or accept the degradation that we now sometimes experience. The real complaint is that we want the QoS without paying its full cost.
Hmm, sort of ironic that a comment about bias that is ostensibly based solely on religious affiliation would actually be a much better example of prejudicial bias. Unfortunately, such hypocritical blindness is all too common.
Slashdot Mirror
Making any comments about the desirability or appropriateness of the percentage of women, blacks, hispanics, etc. in a company implies personal knowledge about the desired or appropriate range of percentages. But, that's where it gets difficult. It's easy to say that the numbers are too low, but it's hard to pin down what the target numbers should be. Should the percentage of women be 50%? But, if there are 10x more men applying for the job, is that appropriate? As others have discussed in this forum, a separate question is whether the 10:1 ratio of men:women applicants is appropriate.
This discussion also presents perhaps a hazy melding of two distinct, important questions: (1) Are there an appropriate percentage of a certain demographic group within a company, and (2) do the members of that demographic group have the same opportunities to get a job in that company? The first question deals with the aggregate end result, while the latter question deals with the probabilities for an individual. In my opinion, the second question is more important but difficult to measure. So, the first question is used as a lazy alternative.
A few years ago, Google published a study of hard disk failures. Failures were not correlated with how much data was written or read. Failures were correlated with the amount of time the disk was spun up, so you should idle a drive not in active use. Failures were negatively correlated with temperature: drives kept cooler were MORE likely to fail.
Actually the paper says that the Google guys approximated power-on hours with a notion of age, which I assume was approximated by a knowledge of either the manufacture date of the delivery date. From the paper, annualized failure rate (AFR) is somewhat correlated with age, but not necessarily strongly enough to predict probability of failure. Even with their large drive population, the paper points out that the drive model mix is not consistent over time and therefore, not much can be made of the apparently weak correlation between AFR and age, which could be perhaps be more greatly influenced by drive model.
The negative correlation with very cold temperatures is interesting but hard to understand without further analysis. Perhaps some drive models didn't handle fly height adjustments well at low temperatures. It's hard to figure out without more data. It should also be pointed out the temperatures were obtained via SMART, and the SMART standard doesn't mandate how temperature is reported. So, different manufacturers could report temperatures in different ways, i.e., different locations (which can easily vary by up to 30 degrees C), different aggregation methods (time windows, sampling frequency), etc. So, the aggregate data is probably not as useful as the data per drive model.
Nobody needs a $4000 in-car navigation when their $400 phone already does the same thing better.
I actually prefer the built-in system. For example, I have a limited data plan because my non-wifi data needs are low, so using an online map like Google Maps or Waze costs extra on a recurring basis. With a phone, I would have to go through the motions of removing it from my pocket, attaching it to the bracket, and plugging it in, as well as the reverse motions when leaving the car. I would also need a special bracket to hold the phone, and even with this bracket, the screen would shake more than an integrated system. The phone screen is significantly smaller. The phone audio is not integrated into the car speakers, so audio levels have to be adjusted, and navigation directions sometimes compete with music. The built-in system also has a physical joystick and dial with voice feedback (not to mention voice recognition) so that I can control it more easily than the using the phone's touchscreen.
I do use my phone for navigation sometimes when I drive my older car. But, given a choice, I always prefer the built-in system.
The goal of the upgrade was an easy performance upgrade, i.e., pop it in and enjoy the speed.
What my experience shows is that DRAM costs less, yields a better performance increase, and most importantly is plug-and-play. Obviously, different machines and operational workloads will affect results, but if SSD performance is not plug-and-play, the value proposition for many users is greatly diminished.
IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.
Hmm, if you assume there is no seek time, then ideally IOPS will be 120 if your request size is exactly a full track, which is almost never the case. IOPS will be 1s / (seek_time + rotational_latency + access_time + overhead). How many IOPS you can get from a 7200rpm drive depends on a lot of factors. Are the requests uniformly randomly distributed? Is NCQ enabled? What is the max track span of the requests? If the max track span is narrow and on the outer part of the disk, then you can get a lot IOPS, quite a bit more than 120.
SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.
Whether or not an SSD is worthwhile depends on the use case. I just put a low-end SSD in an old desktop to replace an HDD. The performance difference was basically negligible. I was quite disappointed. The system bootup was a bit faster, but application startup wasn't any better. And, since I always put my machine to sleep instead of shutting down, bootup times are unimportant. Fortunately, I could live with the dramatically smaller storage capacity because my main storage is on another machine. In contrast, I doubled the DRAM on my other machine, and the performance boost was amazing. The $30 I spent on the DRAM was a much better investment than the $70 for the SSD.
This is an example of correlation not necessarily indicating causation. There's nothing inherently wrong with a temporary structure. Does the fact that some temporary structure have bad ventilation mean that all temporary structures have bad ventilation? If you take the same temporary structure and move it to a rich neighborhood, do the rich kids have similar levels of absenteeism?
Of course, a poorly designed or erected temporary structure is bad, just as a poorly designed or erected permanent structure is bad. However, the underlying problem is funding (and the associated problems arising from neighborhoods with less educated and poorer parents).
Artificial intelligence and neural networks are a hot topic, so this is piggy-backing on that trend. It's not a surprise that Andrew Ng's work is referenced quite a bit.
While the modeling is interesting, it's seems to be just modeling at this point. The main claim of the white paper is high PUE prediction accuracy by the model. While that's academically interesting, the real use is in feedback for optimization. The white paper author realized that and included that optimization problem as one of the examples in the paper. However, the optimization was achieved "through a combination of PUE simulations and local expertise." I'm guessing that the local expertise part was relatively significant because there is basically no discussion of this even though it is the one application that would really make this work practical and really interesting. The paper claimed that this neural network-based optimization reduced PUE "by ~0.02 compared to the previous configuration." But, I have no idea how that would have compared to optimization using just local expertise without the benefit of neural network modeling.
Anyone who has experience outside the public education system figures out real quick that you can't look at the skin color or bank account of a student to see how well they're doing.
While it's true that skin color and wealth cannot be used as independent indicators or predictors of academic performance, the correlation is nonzero. I would even venture to guess that the correlation is more than weak. Yes, correlation is not causation, but correlation is a definite indication of, well, correlation, i.e., there's a relationship.
Racism is the last excuse that our failed public education system still clings to. That and "we don't have enough money."
It's an excuse when we don't like the idea, but a truism when we do. Racism may not be a relevant cause of poor academic performance, but it's statistically clear that racial factors have significant correlation to academic performance. [Please no correlation is not causation garbage -- that type of thinking is just an excuse to avoid further discourse.]
It's funny, but I dislike using my phone for basically all of those things, and so I don't. IMHO, typing on a smart phone is much like trying to assemble Christmas toys while drunk; not pleasurable, and noteworthy mainly for the occasional disaster it causes.
I agree. I only use my phone for situations where a PC is unavailable because the PC user interface is almost always vastly preferable. Yes, Angry Birds is better with a touchscreen, but it's the exception. A physical keyboard is so much better than a virtual keyboard in terms of speed and annoyance. A mouse with buttons has much greater speed and utility than a touchscreen. A 24" screen is much more readable than a 5" or 10" screen, and web page formatting is more usable.
The sole redeeming value of the phone is its mobility.
Absolutely. The original commentary that it's the disc-based DRM that's offensive is illogical. Streaming is the always on, immediately revocable, non-bypassable version of DRM. It's the perfect DRM.
Apple is mucking around with accounting numbers to argue that iPad sales haven't decreased. They may actually be correct. However, that's a moot point. What is inescapable is that iPad sales are not growing. And, this trend is not a single quarter phenomenon. What should be troubling for Apple is that the iPad doesn't appear to be following the iPhone growth in sales and that this growth slowdown has come at a much earlier product age.
"... when "China Qin Shi Huang" gave his name to his country ..."
Someone should have suggested to the emperor that he could actually name the whole country after himself. I imagine he would have been very pleased. Of course, he would have had to come up with a name that wasn't based on Indo-European languages. Maybe a cursory look at Wikipedia on the etymology of China is in order.
Instead of restricting edits, why not follow the existing guidelines about open disclosure? There are guidelines about declaring and displaying conflicts of interest. However, there don't seem to be any guidelines that explicitly address the implicit conflict of interest in being both a financial donor and an editor (at least I don't see it). I think donors should be able to edit, but they should not be able to edit without disclosure.
In a way, the donor-editor conflict of interest is nastier than the editor who edits an article about himself because the integrity of Wikipedia is called into doubt. This is easy to address with disclosure. Hopefully Wikipedia sees that.
Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people with religion == Magnitude of evil perpetrated by "bad" people without religion.
Religion is almost never the driving factor. In the absence of religion, such people would have found other means and justifications to perpetrate their evil. There are many such examples in history.
Unfortunately, the castigation of religion often reveals a hatred of religion more than a hatred of the evil acts.
Having seen the actual warranty return rates on HDDs when I was working at an HDD company not too long ago, I can tell you that average ARR annual return rates (which are about 2x the actual AFR failure rates) may be somewhere around 5%, but that includes the worst as well as the best models. External drives are often floor-swept models that have higher failure rates, but the best models have ARR rates less than 1%, with actual failure rates less than that.
One other consideration for critical data is the variability in the time-to-failure distribution. With RAID configurations, low variability leads to an increased probability of data loss during rebuild. HDDs tend to have higher variability due to their mechanical nature.
This idea that the family of Chinese languages suffers in adoption due to inherent characteristics is not supported by a reasoned analysis of the current situation. While it may be true that 400 million Chinese don't speak Mandarin, practically 100% of the country speaks some form of the Chinese language. Each of those dialects possess all of the supposed stumbling blocks to learning. If those characteristics (e.g., lack of a phonetic alphabet, lack of word delimiters) were truly hampering learning, how did nearly 100% of the country learn such a difficult language? The answer is that these challenges are only daunting for those unfamiliar with the language.
Other languages possess other characteristics that make learning challenging, but these language are not scrutinized in a similar manner because at least in this forum, the viewpoint is still overwhelmingly American/European. Many European languages include grammatical constructs (e.g., verb conjugation and tenses and case inflection) that are challenging not only for Chinese to learn but even for Americans. Many of these constructs are redundant and could be omitted to simplify the language, but children in these country find ways to learn these languages. Some languages are phonetic, but English is a quasi-phonetic language that is difficult to learn because it is somewhat phonetic but includes many rules and even more exceptions. The difficulty of an English-language spelling bee is testament to the difficulty of the quasi-phonetic nature of English and the accompanying challenges to learning.
I suppose autonomous drones could be viewed as landmines that happen to move and make decisions about their targets. So, if banning landmines makes sense, maybe so would banning autonomous drones.
Another way to look at this is that Apple has always historically pursued maximum profits and market share but adopted different strategies in light of the practicalities of specific markets. As an underdog in the PC market, quality was a differentiator to attract whatever market share was possible, realizing that being a dominant volume seller was not possible. As the dominant vendor in the smartphone space but with eroding market share, Apple is decreasing quality and cost to maintain market share and profit (although not margins). I think this is the more accurate portrayal of Apple, since I doubt they would be willing to blindly sacrifice profit in the name of quality or aesthetics.
bytes instead of bits
bytes instead of bits per second
throughput instead of bandwidth
emigration instead of migration
"Interestingly, there's a small percentage of people (around 15% or so) for whom talking on a cell phone has no measurable effect on their driving. These are people with the ability to interrupt the conversation flow, saying "just a minute" or simply ignoring the conversation altogether during a crisis."
In other words, the abilities of the driver are significant. Because these types of academic studies ignore the range of driver abilities and the very significant impact of inexperience and stupidity as well as the impact of wisdom, experience, and trained reflexes, these studies do not reflect reality.
Driver experience is important in accident avoidance when talking about cell phones and just about every activity in a car. Changing radio stations or even looking at the speedometer or side mirror at the wrong time could be disastrous, but experienced drivers know when not to do these activities. It is not the activities per se that are dangerous but the coupling with inexperience.
Moreover, these academic studies have not been validated. This is similar to medical studies that show a reduction in blood cholesterol but no impact on longevity. Until the link to accidents and mortality in real-world situations is shown, the results are unconvincing. Yet, the press and the lemmings who believe the press pass around the conclusions as gospel.
The other way to look at this situation is that now Microsoft is the sole cell phone OS vendor who does not compete in the phone manufacturing sector. So, the four big Asian Android phone makers might see Microsoft as the only OS alternative that won't be a direct competitor. This is a huge issue. In the 90's AT&T broke up into a carrier service and an equipment manufacturer for this reason. The Android phone makers should be worried. And, depending on your take on their "united" statements of support this morning, they are either totally not worried or totally worried. IMO, the highly scripted wording and timing reminds me of forced confessions from arrested suspects who have no practical alternative.
I don't doubt the negative effect of keyboards on Chinese character proficiency. The resulting lack of handwriting practice understandably has **some** effect on the ability to reconstruct exact character strokes.
However, this is exactly the same negative effect that causes a drop in English spelling proficiency. It's not that Americans can't read, but spelling without the aid of a spell-check is markedly worse than for previous generations. If you think Chinese children are starting to forget some Chinese characters, consider the state of spelling for American kids! And, this problem with English spelling is an architectural flaw with the language. In contrast to many other European languages, English is only pseudo-phonetic.
The important point is that neither English nor Chinese are broken to the point that they need to be scrapped or re-architected.
"If your tool is woefully inefficient and takes a lifetime of studying to use it correctly, well, I suspect those are pretty good indications that you should change it."
It may take a lifetime for non-native Chinese speakers to learn Chinese as a second language, but rest assured that native Chinese children pick up the language fairly quickly. But, of course, the difficulty encountered by non-native speakers in learning a foreign language is a horrible indication of the intrinsic desirability of a particular language. For example, consider the English language. It is an alphabetic language, but pronunciation is only loosely phonetic, or rather, the phonetic system has so many complex rules and exceptions that render it extremely challenging, unless, of course, you happen to be a native speaker and have the complex rules and exceptions pounded into your head through a lifetime of learning. And, that's not even considering the relatively complex grammar rules, much of which is unnecessary, e.g., why is there a need for different cases and conjugations? Shouldn't most Indo-European languages be scrapped in favor of Chinese due to the use inefficient grammars, which make it difficult for non-native adult speakers to learn the language?
For the most part, any language is relatively easy to learn as a first language for a child.
But there is one very important way that power and data networks are similar: the provisioning of equipment must consider the maximum permitted peak load, even if that level is rarely reached. This is why the power company encourages its customers to conserve power during peak hours. It's certainly not because it doesn't want to sell more power but rather that it doesn't want to provision the equipment to support that extra demand.
Similarly, the wireless ISP is worried about having to install extra equipment to handle peak usage. And, by the way, this equipment we're talking about is local cell stations, which means that the overprovisioning problem is greatly enlarged because each station must be provisioned for the anticipated peak usage at that station.
As users, we see the value in high-bandwidth applications, such as video. And, it's certainly true that as these applications improve, more people will be attracted toward their use, and the number of such applications will potentially explode, especially if there is no mechanism for the voluntary restriction of usage by the user.
The real question is whether users are willing to pay the true cost of unlimited data plans, given the realities of overprovisioning requirements. Of course, the alternative question is whether users are willing to accept occasional bandwidth degradation that might occur due to the underprovisioning of local cell stations. Either we need to pay for ubiquitous quality of service or accept the degradation that we now sometimes experience. The real complaint is that we want the QoS without paying its full cost.
Hmm, sort of ironic that a comment about bias that is ostensibly based solely on religious affiliation would actually be a much better example of prejudicial bias. Unfortunately, such hypocritical blindness is all too common.