Basically Oracle doesn't allow ANY benchmarks to be released, their spin is that it's fast enough and it's really not about the speed but the scalability and reliability.
The real issue is that one wrong setting in init.ora can make orders of magnitude difference in performance. Set sort_area_size too small, and you'll be hitting the temp tablespace on disk for every sort, set your shared pool to large and latch contention will wipe out performance. Oracle are simply scared that a misconfigured database will benchmark poorly (and to be fair, it will). A database like MySQL is so simple that it's almost impossible to mistune it.
Oracle do release benchmarks when it suits them, tho', but at the moment, they're really obsessing on the performance of 9i Application Server versus WebLogic and WebSphere.
Aren't computer programs as fundamentally mathematical as "classic" mathematics? If the computer program yields a correct result (or conclusion, rather), why should it not be regarded as correct? It'll require human analysis to make sure that the result is correct, so I think his question is redundant; if it is a valid proof then it really shouldn't matter in what flavor it comes.
Computer programs are discrete and finite. You cannot use a computer program to prove a general case, since there are an infinite number of possible inputs to the program, and no-one can run your program for all possible inputs and check the results - you have to write at a higher level, i.e. a traditional mathematical proof.
Do not forget that unlike large scale commercial engineering, such as building a bridge or a skyscraper, NASA pushes the envelope of current science and technology in ways which makes following concrete budgets and timetables at times impossible
Well, so does IBM. They're at the forefront of materials science and solid-state physics, to name just two. A fab is possibly the most complex and expensive artifact on the planet, except maybe for a nuclear aircraft carrier, and IBM is a leader in this field. Yet, every year on the commercial side of their business, IBM announce more (memory, MIPS, reliability, energy efficiency, whatever) per dollar. And this is directly fed from the research side.
If IBM (and their competitors) can do it, why can't NASA? The answer is simple: IBM know that if they don't deliver, they'll go out of business. Maybe not in the short term - they're too big and too well funded - but they plan in terms of decades. Whereas NASA know that there will always be more of the taxpayer's money to spend, and they plan in terms of the next Congress.
I think freedom of speech fares better in EU than in US right now, constitutional rights or not.
Have a read of the EU's charter of fundamental rights. Article 11, paragraph 2 notes that the freedom of expression must be subject to the interest of national security and territorial integrity, or "morals". The US Constitution contains no such provisos.
No more than any other database. Perhapse you missed the part where they said they would serialize the commands that change the objects. In this context they are talking about saving the commands.
Checkpointing once per day? Re-applying 15 MINUTES worth of Oracle transaction logs takes too long for some failover requirements; you force a log switch every 2 minutes if you have to. Or you eat the performance hit of synchronous replication and spec your hardware to compensate.
I'm guessing this DB was written by a bunch of smart CS graduates who overdosed on OO theory and haven't spent much time in the hard core of OLTP: banks, telcos, airlines, retail, etc.
In other words, "it doesn't have queries". What real project doesn't (eventually) need queries? And even if writing your queries "by hand" in Java is good enough for now, what real project doesn't eventually need indices, transactions, or other features of a real database system?
Indeed. It looks like a high-level, language-neutral API for traversing linked lists of structs. Yes, you can rip through such a structure far faster than Oracle can process a relational table, but they are two different solutions to two different problems. I wouldn't use an RDBMS for storing vertex data for a scene rendering application, and I wouldn't use an in-memory linked list for storing bank transactions!
Mark my words, nothing will change until NASA is no longer under the authority of a beancounter
Umm, NASA having vast budgets and no accountability is the problem. How will removing oversight on how the taxpayer's money is spent help? What NASA needs is to be forced to commercially justify every project and every member of staff. Until then, the culture of waste, inefficiency and mismanagement will continue unabated.
Care to compare the performance of these beasts? I would assume the Quad-Xeon would kick SunFire's ass by a significant margin, considering how slow UltraSparc is.
I wouldn't buy one for use on a render farm, if that's what you mean, but what matters in corporate databases is I/O bandwidth and memory bandwidth, and the Sun beats the Dell, which is really a glorified PC, hands down.
...which I think is quite interesting, considering that it's one of the most recent arrivals on the Linux scene (MySQL and PostgreSQL are much more widely used on the Linux platform).
The reason is that MySQL simply couldn't run the TPC benchmarks - its SQL parser isn't sophisticated enough. SAP DB is feature-comparable to Oracle 7 - it's a real, commercial-grade database engine. Of course, I have to wonder why they don't simply use Oracle 9 on Linux to run the benchmark.
Publishers are in it to make money, and they'll do what will make that happen - even if it means throttling back things like creativity and innovation.
You're confusing cause and effect. The way to make money - and the publishers know this - is to sell the market what it wants at a price it is willing to pay. Gamers as a group say they're interested in quality, but their actions tell a different story, as they rush out to buy the latest sequel. Guess which one, speech or action, actually results in dollars changing hands?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any gamer who has ever bought any sequel, or any generic first-person shooter (or any game that fits easily into a "genre") is a part of the problem.
So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Which is why PMs go round and ask programmers, "how long do you think it will take to code this?" (this being described in a functional spec sent round earlier). Then they take the number, fudge it (multiply by 1.5 or 3 or maybe even more, depending on how well you know that developer's history) and enter that into the plan. Then you can reasonably say, programmer X should have feature Y completed by time Z. The project plan might have 1000 person-days on it; a team of 25 should be able to get that done in 40 days.
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics.
Unless you are at the cutting edge of theoretical research in a top-ranked CS faculty, or a Fellow at a major corporation, that simply isn't true. Programming is a skilled craft like carpentry. A few programmers are cabinetmakers, most are in the construction industry. Anyone who likens it to "fine art" is either pretentious or inexperienced.
In fact, they seem to think that if you release a game half-done it'll make more money than a game that's complete.
Despite what you might think, most manager's aren't stupid. Any MBA newbie can look at a spreadsheet and see which games made the most money and which cost the least to develop. You know that MS Project can automatically report on which parts of a project overran, who was managing those tasks, who was assigned to actually code them? Must be nice to have a piece of software that can do your job for you*.
When the market stops rewarding the first and starts rewarding the best, then managers will change their policy, but not before then. All those people who bought Daikatana (or games like it) are guilty.
* I said that to a PM once, she sighed and said yes, I wish I had something like DBA Studio;-)
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
Quad-xeon Dell PowerEdge 6600 8Gb RAM, with RedHat Advanced Server and 4 HDs: $31,168
SunFire V480, quad-UltraSPARC, 8Gb RAM with Solaris and 2 HDs: $43,995.00
In the grand scheme of things, that's not a big difference, especially given the high build quality of Sun hardware. It's too early to say that Dell have a distinct advantage.
None of your freaking business. Mohammed bin Mohammed is an old friend of mine, he wanted to see a picture of my new kitten.
You have a point. On November 12th, 2001, a 58-year old Australian woman resident in Helsinki, placed an obituary notice for Mohammed Atta in Finland's daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. She was questioned by police. If I remember correctly, she had met him many years earlier, had no idea he was a hijacker, but had heard that he had recently died. But, when thousands of lives are at risk, suspicious events have to be followed up, even if it's only to eliminate them from enquiries.
Maybe a professor's testamony of "high probability" is enough to get you in deep shit over there, fortunately we still have something that reminds of citizen rights, this side of the pond.
Since you mention Freedom of Speech, a Constitutional right, I'll assume you're on the West side of "the pond". I suggest you look up Jose Padilla's story.
Hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a way that others can not discern the presence or contents of the hidden message. For example, a message might be hidden within an image by changing the least significant bits to be the message bits
OK, but geeks forget that possible/impossible isn't a binary state, like 1 and 0. It's a about likelihood. Is there a 1% chance that this file contains a hidden message? Or is it more like 90%?
One the police have "reasonable grounds", they can step up to the next level. You can deny it 'til you're blue in the face, but if they get a professor to testify that it's highly probable that there is a message there, and they have evidence that you have corresponded with other suspects ("exactly why did you send Mohammed bin Mohammed a picture of your kitten a day before al-Queda hijacked that airliner?") and suddenly your steganographic sK1Lz aren't worth so much.
Can someone explain to me exactly what this means? Will all i386 executable binaries have unnecessary redundancy? Could the size of the binary be harmlessly reduced by removing it? If so, then why isn't this done?
It means that if you want to add 50 to a number, you can choose to do (+50) or (-(-50)). They both take up the same amount of space and do the same thing. But if you first process a program to ensure that all additions and subtractions are actually additions, then you can encode data into the list of additions by making some of them into subtractions.
most of their business is based on a model of working at a negative margin and making it up in volume.
If you're making a loss on every unit, then the more you sell, the more you lose! "Making it up on volume" just puts you out of business the quicker.
What Amazon are doing is trying to become the "one stop shop". If you want anything, go to Amazon to buy it, and because you trust them (because they've always delivered in the past) it is easier for you to just click "buy now" than go hunting for a better price elsewhere, especially if the choice is dealing with half-a-dozen different suppliers, or just one. When they've got that - and they probably have by now for books, CDs and DVDs - then they can start to make a margin.
Amazon want to be to retailing what Google is to search. If you listen to idiot Slashbots, you would think that all Amazon did was issue patents, but the fact is their execution is superb. Order from them, and it'll show up when they say it will, and if it doesn't, they'll replace it or refund you some money. They're in a completely different league from the typical dotcom.
In that case, it is absolutely essential to detect the intrusion, track the attacker's footprints and minimize the damage as quickly as possible. And I would say linux wins hands down at this, because of its transparency. The main thing is not cost or ease of use or applications or any of the things that are usually considered, but having the innards of the system open for the administrator to see.
Two points. Firstly, if one system is compromised, do you really want all your other systems to be vulnerable to the same technique? No, diversity in operating systems, like diversity in populations or entire ecosystems, is about survival of the system as a whole, rather than an individual unit. And secondly, if you are the government, and you're spending $29B, it's pretty easy to get the source code to anything you want. National security is the root password to everything, remember.
This is great for the army, but as we consolidate overlap between services, I would like to see all branches adopt similar platforms (Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard, Reserve Force, CIA, and Secret Service). It would save moneys for the purpose of cross-training and upgrading in the-long-run.
There's a reason that the Marine Corps operates its own tanks rather than relying on the Army, why the Air Force has ground troops, why the Navy operates aircraft and special forces, and all services have their own logistics. The reason is that if an enemy successfully disrupts one, the others can continue operating. That's why standardizing on one platform would be like putting all your eggs in one basket. Diversity of systems is a tactical advantage that the US would be foolish to give up.
You can bet that most of these people will be there...
Re:Alex should have just waited
on
Half Mast
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· Score: 1
revenge is a dish that is best served cold...
The best revenge is to live well. By now you will be better paid, better dressed and probably better looking than them. Perhaps you're even stronger and faster too. Why waste your time bearing grudges? It's not as if they can hurt you now. Life's too short and there's too much else you could be doing with that energy.
Coordination can be learned. If someone is too clumbsy to catch or throw properly, someone else didn't teach them properly. Some parts of throwing are instinctual, but not all of them.
I dunno, I'm terrible at catching and throwing, always was. Can't play racquet sports worth a damn either, and it's not through lack of trying. But not all sports involve catching... at school I competed at district level in swimming and rifle, and these days my sport of choice is weightlifting.
My problem with most sports is that they're too artificial. There's no inherent reason for most of the "rules", the sizes of the teams, the shape of the ball, the methods of scoring, and so on. With weightlifting, it's just you versus the the fundamental laws of physics. Doesn't get much more interesting than that!
Call me naive, but aren't they supposed to be experts in picking hit songs already, and if a computer program can do the job what the hell are they being paid to do?
One word: volume. Automate the repetitive tasks, let computers do them, and use your people to improve the software, not to do the work themselves. You can see this in any industry. Right now in finance, for example, there are still lots of traders where the client relationship matters, but at the exotic end of the market, the "traders" are physics PhDs who develop and implement the models, then the software takes care of timing and execution.
Most popular music is almost totally based on formulas e
What interests me really is why this is. Are we trained from birth that this is the correct structure for a song? Or does that structure just happen to trigger some emotional response that is common to humans? In architcture and art, there are ratios and patterns that are known to look pleasing to the vast majority of humans, and there is evidence that ancient cultures like the Athenians knew about them too, so perhaps it's not cultural influence. What makes great art and music endure for all time, beyond the end of the culture that produced it, is it that it successfully triggers responses in the brain that we're not consciously aware of? I think I'm getting into Snow Crash territory here...
Slashdot Mirror
Basically Oracle doesn't allow ANY benchmarks to be released, their spin is that it's fast enough and it's really not about the speed but the scalability and reliability.
The real issue is that one wrong setting in init.ora can make orders of magnitude difference in performance. Set sort_area_size too small, and you'll be hitting the temp tablespace on disk for every sort, set your shared pool to large and latch contention will wipe out performance. Oracle are simply scared that a misconfigured database will benchmark poorly (and to be fair, it will). A database like MySQL is so simple that it's almost impossible to mistune it.
Oracle do release benchmarks when it suits them, tho', but at the moment, they're really obsessing on the performance of 9i Application Server versus WebLogic and WebSphere.
That is the WORST pickup line I have ever heard.
I say try it. If she walks away, it was never meant to be. But if it works, she's yours for life!
Aren't computer programs as fundamentally mathematical as "classic" mathematics? If the computer program yields a correct result (or conclusion, rather), why should it not be regarded as correct? It'll require human analysis to make sure that the result is correct, so I think his question is redundant; if it is a valid proof then it really shouldn't matter in what flavor it comes.
Computer programs are discrete and finite. You cannot use a computer program to prove a general case, since there are an infinite number of possible inputs to the program, and no-one can run your program for all possible inputs and check the results - you have to write at a higher level, i.e. a traditional mathematical proof.
Do not forget that unlike large scale commercial engineering, such as building a bridge or a skyscraper, NASA pushes the envelope of current science and technology in ways which makes following concrete budgets and timetables at times impossible
Well, so does IBM. They're at the forefront of materials science and solid-state physics, to name just two. A fab is possibly the most complex and expensive artifact on the planet, except maybe for a nuclear aircraft carrier, and IBM is a leader in this field. Yet, every year on the commercial side of their business, IBM announce more (memory, MIPS, reliability, energy efficiency, whatever) per dollar. And this is directly fed from the research side.
If IBM (and their competitors) can do it, why can't NASA? The answer is simple: IBM know that if they don't deliver, they'll go out of business. Maybe not in the short term - they're too big and too well funded - but they plan in terms of decades. Whereas NASA know that there will always be more of the taxpayer's money to spend, and they plan in terms of the next Congress.
No, I am european. :)
:-)
Actually, me too
I think freedom of speech fares better in EU than in US right now, constitutional rights or not.
Have a read of the EU's charter of fundamental rights. Article 11, paragraph 2 notes that the freedom of expression must be subject to the interest of national security and territorial integrity, or "morals". The US Constitution contains no such provisos.
No more than any other database. Perhapse you missed the part where they said they would serialize the commands that change the objects. In this context they are talking about saving the commands.
Checkpointing once per day? Re-applying 15 MINUTES worth of Oracle transaction logs takes too long for some failover requirements; you force a log switch every 2 minutes if you have to. Or you eat the performance hit of synchronous replication and spec your hardware to compensate.
I'm guessing this DB was written by a bunch of smart CS graduates who overdosed on OO theory and haven't spent much time in the hard core of OLTP: banks, telcos, airlines, retail, etc.
In other words, "it doesn't have queries". What real project doesn't (eventually) need queries? And even if writing your queries "by hand" in Java is good enough for now, what real project doesn't eventually need indices, transactions, or other features of a real database system?
Indeed. It looks like a high-level, language-neutral API for traversing linked lists of structs. Yes, you can rip through such a structure far faster than Oracle can process a relational table, but they are two different solutions to two different problems. I wouldn't use an RDBMS for storing vertex data for a scene rendering application, and I wouldn't use an in-memory linked list for storing bank transactions!
Mark my words, nothing will change until NASA is no longer under the authority of a beancounter
Umm, NASA having vast budgets and no accountability is the problem. How will removing oversight on how the taxpayer's money is spent help? What NASA needs is to be forced to commercially justify every project and every member of staff. Until then, the culture of waste, inefficiency and mismanagement will continue unabated.
Care to compare the performance of these beasts? I would assume the Quad-Xeon would kick SunFire's ass by a significant margin, considering how slow UltraSparc is.
I wouldn't buy one for use on a render farm, if that's what you mean, but what matters in corporate databases is I/O bandwidth and memory bandwidth, and the Sun beats the Dell, which is really a glorified PC, hands down.
...which I think is quite interesting, considering that it's one of the most recent arrivals on the Linux scene (MySQL and PostgreSQL are much more widely used on the Linux platform).
The reason is that MySQL simply couldn't run the TPC benchmarks - its SQL parser isn't sophisticated enough. SAP DB is feature-comparable to Oracle 7 - it's a real, commercial-grade database engine. Of course, I have to wonder why they don't simply use Oracle 9 on Linux to run the benchmark.
Publishers are in it to make money, and they'll do what will make that happen - even if it means throttling back things like creativity and innovation.
You're confusing cause and effect. The way to make money - and the publishers know this - is to sell the market what it wants at a price it is willing to pay. Gamers as a group say they're interested in quality, but their actions tell a different story, as they rush out to buy the latest sequel. Guess which one, speech or action, actually results in dollars changing hands?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that any gamer who has ever bought any sequel, or any generic first-person shooter (or any game that fits easily into a "genre") is a part of the problem.
So, when managers and the other suits try to tell the coders, "OK, well put in a good 8 hrs of coding today, and Mike and Punjab will as well, and we'll have 24 hrs of coding done today on NewGameApp v1.0." Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way.
Which is why PMs go round and ask programmers, "how long do you think it will take to code this?" (this being described in a functional spec sent round earlier). Then they take the number, fudge it (multiply by 1.5 or 3 or maybe even more, depending on how well you know that developer's history) and enter that into the plan. Then you can reasonably say, programmer X should have feature Y completed by time Z. The project plan might have 1000 person-days on it; a team of 25 should be able to get that done in 40 days.
I love programming. It's like a cross between a fine art, such as opera, and a deeply complex science, such as molecular physics.
Unless you are at the cutting edge of theoretical research in a top-ranked CS faculty, or a Fellow at a major corporation, that simply isn't true. Programming is a skilled craft like carpentry. A few programmers are cabinetmakers, most are in the construction industry. Anyone who likens it to "fine art" is either pretentious or inexperienced.
In fact, they seem to think that if you release a game half-done it'll make more money than a game that's complete.
;-)
Despite what you might think, most manager's aren't stupid. Any MBA newbie can look at a spreadsheet and see which games made the most money and which cost the least to develop. You know that MS Project can automatically report on which parts of a project overran, who was managing those tasks, who was assigned to actually code them? Must be nice to have a piece of software that can do your job for you*.
When the market stops rewarding the first and starts rewarding the best, then managers will change their policy, but not before then. All those people who bought Daikatana (or games like it) are guilty.
* I said that to a PM once, she sighed and said yes, I wish I had something like DBA Studio
He's saying the days of solaris/etc (propriatary unix) on "big iron" are gone, and the days of linux on commodity hardware are here.
Quad-xeon Dell PowerEdge 6600 8Gb RAM, with RedHat Advanced Server and 4 HDs: $31,168
SunFire V480, quad-UltraSPARC, 8Gb RAM with Solaris and 2 HDs: $43,995.00
In the grand scheme of things, that's not a big difference, especially given the high build quality of Sun hardware. It's too early to say that Dell have a distinct advantage.
None of your freaking business. Mohammed bin Mohammed is an old friend of mine, he wanted to see a picture of my new kitten.
You have a point. On November 12th, 2001, a 58-year old Australian woman resident in Helsinki, placed an obituary notice for Mohammed Atta in Finland's daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat. She was questioned by police. If I remember correctly, she had met him many years earlier, had no idea he was a hijacker, but had heard that he had recently died. But, when thousands of lives are at risk, suspicious events have to be followed up, even if it's only to eliminate them from enquiries.
Maybe a professor's testamony of "high probability" is enough to get you in deep shit over there, fortunately we still have something that reminds of citizen rights, this side of the pond.
Since you mention Freedom of Speech, a Constitutional right, I'll assume you're on the West side of "the pond". I suggest you look up Jose Padilla's story.
Hiding a secret message within a larger one in such a way that others can not discern the presence or contents of the hidden message. For example, a message might be hidden within an image by changing the least significant bits to be the message bits
OK, but geeks forget that possible/impossible isn't a binary state, like 1 and 0. It's a about likelihood. Is there a 1% chance that this file contains a hidden message? Or is it more like 90%?
One the police have "reasonable grounds", they can step up to the next level. You can deny it 'til you're blue in the face, but if they get a professor to testify that it's highly probable that there is a message there, and they have evidence that you have corresponded with other suspects ("exactly why did you send Mohammed bin Mohammed a picture of your kitten a day before al-Queda hijacked that airliner?") and suddenly your steganographic sK1Lz aren't worth so much.
Can someone explain to me exactly what this means? Will all i386 executable binaries have unnecessary redundancy? Could the size of the binary be harmlessly reduced by removing it? If so, then why isn't this done?
It means that if you want to add 50 to a number, you can choose to do (+50) or (-(-50)). They both take up the same amount of space and do the same thing. But if you first process a program to ensure that all additions and subtractions are actually additions, then you can encode data into the list of additions by making some of them into subtractions.
most of their business is based on a model of working at a negative margin and making it up in volume.
If you're making a loss on every unit, then the more you sell, the more you lose! "Making it up on volume" just puts you out of business the quicker.
What Amazon are doing is trying to become the "one stop shop". If you want anything, go to Amazon to buy it, and because you trust them (because they've always delivered in the past) it is easier for you to just click "buy now" than go hunting for a better price elsewhere, especially if the choice is dealing with half-a-dozen different suppliers, or just one. When they've got that - and they probably have by now for books, CDs and DVDs - then they can start to make a margin.
Amazon want to be to retailing what Google is to search. If you listen to idiot Slashbots, you would think that all Amazon did was issue patents, but the fact is their execution is superb. Order from them, and it'll show up when they say it will, and if it doesn't, they'll replace it or refund you some money. They're in a completely different league from the typical dotcom.
In that case, it is absolutely essential to detect the intrusion, track the attacker's footprints and minimize the damage as quickly as possible. And I would say linux wins hands down at this, because of its transparency. The main thing is not cost or ease of use or applications or any of the things that are usually considered, but having the innards of the system open for the administrator to see.
Two points. Firstly, if one system is compromised, do you really want all your other systems to be vulnerable to the same technique? No, diversity in operating systems, like diversity in populations or entire ecosystems, is about survival of the system as a whole, rather than an individual unit. And secondly, if you are the government, and you're spending $29B, it's pretty easy to get the source code to anything you want. National security is the root password to everything, remember.
This is great for the army, but as we consolidate overlap between services, I would like to see all branches adopt similar platforms (Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard, Reserve Force, CIA, and Secret Service). It would save moneys for the purpose of cross-training and upgrading in the-long-run.
There's a reason that the Marine Corps operates its own tanks rather than relying on the Army, why the Air Force has ground troops, why the Navy operates aircraft and special forces, and all services have their own logistics. The reason is that if an enemy successfully disrupts one, the others can continue operating. That's why standardizing on one platform would be like putting all your eggs in one basket. Diversity of systems is a tactical advantage that the US would be foolish to give up.
You can bet that most of these people will be there...
revenge is a dish that is best served cold...
The best revenge is to live well. By now you will be better paid, better dressed and probably better looking than them. Perhaps you're even stronger and faster too. Why waste your time bearing grudges? It's not as if they can hurt you now. Life's too short and there's too much else you could be doing with that energy.
Coordination can be learned. If someone is too clumbsy to catch or throw properly, someone else didn't teach them properly. Some parts of throwing are instinctual, but not all of them.
I dunno, I'm terrible at catching and throwing, always was. Can't play racquet sports worth a damn either, and it's not through lack of trying. But not all sports involve catching... at school I competed at district level in swimming and rifle, and these days my sport of choice is weightlifting.
My problem with most sports is that they're too artificial. There's no inherent reason for most of the "rules", the sizes of the teams, the shape of the ball, the methods of scoring, and so on. With weightlifting, it's just you versus the the fundamental laws of physics. Doesn't get much more interesting than that!
Call me naive, but aren't they supposed to be experts in picking hit songs already, and if a computer program can do the job what the hell are they being paid to do?
One word: volume. Automate the repetitive tasks, let computers do them, and use your people to improve the software, not to do the work themselves. You can see this in any industry. Right now in finance, for example, there are still lots of traders where the client relationship matters, but at the exotic end of the market, the "traders" are physics PhDs who develop and implement the models, then the software takes care of timing and execution.
Most popular music is almost totally based on formulas e
What interests me really is why this is. Are we trained from birth that this is the correct structure for a song? Or does that structure just happen to trigger some emotional response that is common to humans? In architcture and art, there are ratios and patterns that are known to look pleasing to the vast majority of humans, and there is evidence that ancient cultures like the Athenians knew about them too, so perhaps it's not cultural influence. What makes great art and music endure for all time, beyond the end of the culture that produced it, is it that it successfully triggers responses in the brain that we're not consciously aware of? I think I'm getting into Snow Crash territory here...