In that event, the amount of money you'll be paying the insurance company will be exactly the amount of money you'd be paying if you didn't have insurance at all, plus the profit the insurance company is taking.
Quite correct, but of course it doesn't matter. In the UK at least, you must have insurance to drive legally. Even if the insurance company themselves are confident that you won't need it, you still have to pay them!
Insurance companies know this... they are looking for people who are guaranteed cash cows, people who'll never claim but who have no choice but to get covered anyway. Another example of government meddling distorting markets against the interest of the consumer.
it relies on a government granted monopoly called copyrights. There is a difference.
You are talking absolute nonsense. A government granted monopoly would imply that it was illegal to sell, say, a competing wordprocessor, just like Ma Bell used to have a government granted monopoly on telephones - it was illegal to compete with them. Even these days in the UK, it is illegal for a courier to charge less than GBP1 for delivering a letter - that market is the exclusive preserve of Royal Mail.
All the government says is "if you want to use Microsoft's software, you must abide by their license". It's exactly the same right it grants to every software company including Corel, et al, who did compete against MS with word processors. And, incidentally, it's the exact same right that the GPL relies on.
We've talked a decent amount about doing crypto on GPU's
You can already get hardware accelerated crypto, Sun even bundles it with some servers. I remember back in '96 accidentally melting an nCipher unit that fitted into a drive bay...
wait, if there is a technology that allows construction of GPU that is 3 times faster than the fastest CPUs, why Intel and AMD do not use this technology to build those 3times faster CPUs?
MIPS did this in the R8000 chipset used in some of SGI's Impact systems, back in the early 90s. The result was a machine that was deadly for floating point, but the trade-off was merely average general-purpose (i.e. integer) performance and it was very difficult to optimize code for.
It depends. If you have a gaming card, it will sacrifice precision for speed to hit its price. If you're rendering 100 fps in a game and in a couple of noncontiguous frames the walls don't quite line up, no big deal. But a professional CAD card, speed is sacrificed for precision - the risk of an engineer making a mistake or failing to spot one in an assembly alignment because of rendering artefact is too high.
In practice, a CAD card is just as fast as a gaming card, it just costs 5x as much (or more). Still, if your computation was well suited to matrix multiply and add (even a modest GPU will spank a good CPU at this) it might still be worth it.
The last I heard, product design included selecting COTS parts from catalogues... if Apple's engineers chose components that couldn't be consistently sourced, then that is a design-time failure. Hell, I can design a great MP3 player if I can assume a power supply made of pure Unobtainium, but no-one's going to be able to mass-manufacture it!
NOTE: iPod equipment that is sent in for battery service or service requiring other repairs will be replaced with functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment. You will not receive the same iPod that was sent in for service.
I'll just do my own thing' stance is usually just rationalization. It's an easy way to make your own laziness or hatred of fashion into a righteous crusade. That may not be the case for you, but it is for many (most commonly seen in the goth/punk communities today). It's no surprise that there are far fewer punks/goths/etc over the age of 25 than under.
This is a common issue, I wrote about it in a journal entry a while back. Basically, people who claim not to care about appearances actually care very much indeed about being seen not to care. Their whole ego is so tied up in the "I'm an individual" schtick (yeah, just like everyone else) that they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces!
Unfortunately the only problem with this so far appears to be the current crop. I have thus far met 9 developers who went and got themselves MBA's.
Realistically speaking, an MBA from any but the top 25 b-schools in the US or the top 100 in the world overall isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's just like computer science: a CS degree from CMU is worth a lot more than one from DeVry!
A lot of programming employment opportunities are just soul draining code lackey positions. A lot of the really interesting, creative work comes from peoples' hobby projects.
Yes, but the vast majority of the stuff developers actually need - apartments, groceries, utilities, etc etc - aren't paid for by hobbies.
Of the last 500 years, about 450 was spent in inviting the British to leave (aka. kicking them out).
Oh please. Every bit of infrastructure India has - roads, railways, a phone system, etc etc - was built by the British. Being colonized was the best thing that ever happened to India.
Reality: if you had been born in Rwanda instead of somewhere "Western", you would never have had the opportunity to get that degree on your wall and that comfy chair on your ass.
On a micro (i.e. individual) level that is true, but we are talking on a macro (i.e. entire country) level. Over the course of a few hundred years, Britain transformed itself from an impoverished and frequently conquered backwater to the most powerful and wealthiest empire in history. Why? Because a culture of innovation took hold. There needs to be a sea-change in the attitude not of any given individual in Rwanda but in the population. For example, they need to come to the collective realization that tribal genocide is generally a bad idea.
But it's going to be very hard to turn down a system that has 25% more memory bandwidth, 60% higher clock, and costs half as much. There's always a chance the Sun will still come out a little ahead of the Opteron, but it's not going to come out THAT much ahead.
Think about TCO tho'. In 10 years time, the Sun will most likely still be working perfectly and will still be supported by the manufacturer, parts available if it does break, OS certified on it, etc etc. In 5 years time if that PC breaks you might as well scrap it, because parts will be hard to come by. The whole Linux-on-x86 thing isn't as cheap as it appears up front.
I doubt you mean to say that computers are obsolete, too? And what is the modern version of the airplane from your analogy?
Think of steam as legacy applications, the maintenance of which is being outsourced, and aeroplanes as the new areas of IT that are opening up, like bioinformatics.
Graduate scientific and engineering education in this country has been dominated by foreign students and professors for decades. Undergraduate scientific and engineering education would not exist without foreign professors and TA's. Indians and Chinese probably account for the two largest groups of foreign graduate students and professors.
You are missing the point - which is that Indians and Chinese have to leave India and China in order to get useful work done. If they could stay at home and do what they do, don't you think that they would?
And you really think once tech jobs start disappearing, and more and more people are out of work over here, we'll really be so innovative?
Look at what's being outsourced - data entry, call centres, maintenance of legacy applications, development of systems that require a lot of grunt-work (like an ERP app with thousands of screens) but not a lot of novel thought. All the intellectual property that makes all that possible comes from the West. Think about this: India didn't invent any of the computer or comms tech it uses to be an outsourcing-to location*.
* Indians working in the US aren't the same thing; it's not the individuals in this case but the culture that fosters innovation.
Third-world countries don't innovate because they are hungry and poor not because they don't have the ability to.
You have it backwards. They are hungry and poor because they don't innovate and create value. Even the ones that aren't hungry and poor don't do much by way of actual innovation.
Several of their innovations are things like writing, the number 0, arabic (!!) number system, gun powder and I'm sure countless other inventions.
Indeed - I mention the last 500 years as my timeframe in a footnote. If you ask, what have those cultures done recently their list of accomplishments is far, far less impressive.
Slashdot Mirror
"if P=NP is proven, then all the others are going to fall in short time, making that solution worth $8M" (or $1M * the number of problems).
:-P
P=NP where N=1. Now, where's that cheque?
In that event, the amount of money you'll be paying the insurance company will be exactly the amount of money you'd be paying if you didn't have insurance at all, plus the profit the insurance company is taking.
Quite correct, but of course it doesn't matter. In the UK at least, you must have insurance to drive legally. Even if the insurance company themselves are confident that you won't need it, you still have to pay them!
Insurance companies know this... they are looking for people who are guaranteed cash cows, people who'll never claim but who have no choice but to get covered anyway. Another example of government meddling distorting markets against the interest of the consumer.
it relies on a government granted monopoly called copyrights. There is a difference.
You are talking absolute nonsense. A government granted monopoly would imply that it was illegal to sell, say, a competing wordprocessor, just like Ma Bell used to have a government granted monopoly on telephones - it was illegal to compete with them. Even these days in the UK, it is illegal for a courier to charge less than GBP1 for delivering a letter - that market is the exclusive preserve of Royal Mail.
All the government says is "if you want to use Microsoft's software, you must abide by their license". It's exactly the same right it grants to every software company including Corel, et al, who did compete against MS with word processors. And, incidentally, it's the exact same right that the GPL relies on.
I thought the real reason to get a *professional level* card is to get a guarantee of reliability
Well, ISV certification - a CAD vendor will assert "with this card, our software produces no rendering artifacts".
We've talked a decent amount about doing crypto on GPU's
You can already get hardware accelerated crypto, Sun even bundles it with some servers. I remember back in '96 accidentally melting an nCipher unit that fitted into a drive bay...
wait, if there is a technology that allows construction of GPU that is 3 times faster than the fastest CPUs, why Intel and AMD do not use this technology to build those 3times faster CPUs?
MIPS did this in the R8000 chipset used in some of SGI's Impact systems, back in the early 90s. The result was a machine that was deadly for floating point, but the trade-off was merely average general-purpose (i.e. integer) performance and it was very difficult to optimize code for.
The problem with your statement is that both ATI and Nvidia use the same GPU on their CAD cards as used on their Gaming cards.
That's probably just to save on die/fab costs - there's no reason why different circuitry couldn't be activated by "gaming" mode than by "CAD" mode.
as far as i know, GPU's do a lot of rounding off
It depends. If you have a gaming card, it will sacrifice precision for speed to hit its price. If you're rendering 100 fps in a game and in a couple of noncontiguous frames the walls don't quite line up, no big deal. But a professional CAD card, speed is sacrificed for precision - the risk of an engineer making a mistake or failing to spot one in an assembly alignment because of rendering artefact is too high.
In practice, a CAD card is just as fast as a gaming card, it just costs 5x as much (or more). Still, if your computation was well suited to matrix multiply and add (even a modest GPU will spank a good CPU at this) it might still be worth it.
product engineering no.
The last I heard, product design included selecting COTS parts from catalogues... if Apple's engineers chose components that couldn't be consistently sourced, then that is a design-time failure. Hell, I can design a great MP3 player if I can assume a power supply made of pure Unobtainium, but no-one's going to be able to mass-manufacture it!
NOTE: iPod equipment that is sent in for battery service or service requiring other repairs will be replaced with functionally equivalent new, used, or refurbished iPod equipment. You will not receive the same iPod that was sent in for service.
How does that work for engraved backs?
If SciFi channel would do as good a job as they did with Dune it could be classic.
As opposed to how good a job they did of Battlestar Galactica, you mean?
I'll just do my own thing' stance is usually just rationalization. It's an easy way to make your own laziness or hatred of fashion into a righteous crusade. That may not be the case for you, but it is for many (most commonly seen in the goth/punk communities today). It's no surprise that there are far fewer punks/goths/etc over the age of 25 than under.
This is a common issue, I wrote about it in a journal entry a while back. Basically, people who claim not to care about appearances actually care very much indeed about being seen not to care. Their whole ego is so tied up in the "I'm an individual" schtick (yeah, just like everyone else) that they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces!
Unfortunately the only problem with this so far appears to be the current crop. I have thus far met 9 developers who went and got themselves MBA's.
Realistically speaking, an MBA from any but the top 25 b-schools in the US or the top 100 in the world overall isn't worth the paper it's printed on. It's just like computer science: a CS degree from CMU is worth a lot more than one from DeVry!
A lot of programming employment opportunities are just soul draining code lackey positions. A lot of the really interesting, creative work comes from peoples' hobby projects.
Yes, but the vast majority of the stuff developers actually need - apartments, groceries, utilities, etc etc - aren't paid for by hobbies.
Last I checked, "Steampunk" was a form of science fiction, not an actual historical era.
Yeah, I would have said "Victorian" but I had to use a scifi genre in order to have Slashdot and steam-engines co-exist.
Incredibly arrogant attitude you have there, to discount all reasons for innovation
Incredibly strong beliefs you have for someone who won't even reveal the made-up name you use on Slashdot.
only the West can be innovative, not those browns
I said "West" not "Whites" - you mentioned race, not me.
Of the last 500 years, about 450 was spent in inviting the British to leave (aka. kicking them out).
Oh please. Every bit of infrastructure India has - roads, railways, a phone system, etc etc - was built by the British. Being colonized was the best thing that ever happened to India.
Reality: if you had been born in Rwanda instead of somewhere "Western", you would never have had the opportunity to get that degree on your wall and that comfy chair on your ass.
On a micro (i.e. individual) level that is true, but we are talking on a macro (i.e. entire country) level. Over the course of a few hundred years, Britain transformed itself from an impoverished and frequently conquered backwater to the most powerful and wealthiest empire in history. Why? Because a culture of innovation took hold. There needs to be a sea-change in the attitude not of any given individual in Rwanda but in the population. For example, they need to come to the collective realization that tribal genocide is generally a bad idea.
But it's going to be very hard to turn down a system that has 25% more memory bandwidth, 60% higher clock, and costs half as much. There's always a chance the Sun will still come out a little ahead of the Opteron, but it's not going to come out THAT much ahead.
Think about TCO tho'. In 10 years time, the Sun will most likely still be working perfectly and will still be supported by the manufacturer, parts available if it does break, OS certified on it, etc etc. In 5 years time if that PC breaks you might as well scrap it, because parts will be hard to come by. The whole Linux-on-x86 thing isn't as cheap as it appears up front.
I doubt you mean to say that computers are obsolete, too? And what is the modern version of the airplane from your analogy?
Think of steam as legacy applications, the maintenance of which is being outsourced, and aeroplanes as the new areas of IT that are opening up, like bioinformatics.
Don't forget that linux was created not in the West but in Europe (Finland) ;)
Aye - says a great deal when a bunch of European students working in their spare time can accomplish more than some entire countries...
Graduate scientific and engineering education in this country has been dominated by foreign students and professors for decades. Undergraduate scientific and engineering education would not exist without foreign professors and TA's. Indians and Chinese probably account for the two largest groups of foreign graduate students and professors.
You are missing the point - which is that Indians and Chinese have to leave India and China in order to get useful work done. If they could stay at home and do what they do, don't you think that they would?
And you really think once tech jobs start disappearing, and more and more people are out of work over here, we'll really be so innovative?
Look at what's being outsourced - data entry, call centres, maintenance of legacy applications, development of systems that require a lot of grunt-work (like an ERP app with thousands of screens) but not a lot of novel thought. All the intellectual property that makes all that possible comes from the West. Think about this: India didn't invent any of the computer or comms tech it uses to be an outsourcing-to location*.
* Indians working in the US aren't the same thing; it's not the individuals in this case but the culture that fosters innovation.
Third-world countries don't innovate because they are hungry and poor not because they don't have the ability to.
You have it backwards. They are hungry and poor because they don't innovate and create value. Even the ones that aren't hungry and poor don't do much by way of actual innovation.
Several of their innovations are things like writing, the number 0, arabic (!!) number system, gun powder and I'm sure countless other inventions.
Indeed - I mention the last 500 years as my timeframe in a footnote. If you ask, what have those cultures done recently their list of accomplishments is far, far less impressive.