TelstraClear's cable network offers a superior alternative to Telecom's ADSL, but it's only available in some main centres. Data caps are bad but have improved, I'm currently on 40GB/month for around NZ$80. That's around US$500 and counting by the time you read this (sorry, joke).
The best advantage of the cable is that you don't have to pay hefty landline fixed charges to qualify for internet service - you can go mobile-only or get your POTS fix over IP. I get mine from 2talk - NZ$15/month including 300 minutes of calls to pretty much anywhere and I still have my old phone number.
Clearly language learning should be emphasized in primary school; by high school you've already lost your peak learning capacity for language.
I can see that the high-school language thing would've made sense once, since it was an academic subject with greater emphasis on written translation and defunct languages (Latin and Ancient Greek), and well beyond the average primary school teacher or student.
But now, we care more about fluent communication in living languages, and there's generally no shortage of native and multilingual teachers. So if there hasn't been a big shake up since I left school, it's long overdue already.
Speaking for my own experience though, I had little exposure to anything other than my native English prior to high school. My high school French was a write-off; I barely passed. But well into my twenties I made good inroads into learning both German and Chinese. You can learn as an adult, but it takes a big time commitment. If you're unable to commit to an hour a day over several years, try something else instead, because it's race between learning and forgetting.
Agree. My take on this is that the current generation of 'Desktop Search' tools fail to deliver in that you can't use them to actually 'Search Your Desktop'.
By 'Search Your Desktop' I mean find matches for search terms in text and metadata anywhere on your desktop, including documents and applications you currently have open.
So for example you could type a search term into the search tool, and get results including such things as open Firefox tabs, terminal sessions, and unsaved word processor documents. Selecting one of these results would switch you to the relevant window and navigate to the first result.
The search paradigm introduced by internet search engines is a winner; the more we can leverage it the better.
That's immortality for the machines, not for the people.
I'd agree that the biggest problem with human-level AI is that the economics of it are terrible. For your gazillions of research dollars and hours you get something that's already on tap and cheap as dirt, especially in the third world.
Even once you get your amazing smart supercomputer, you still have to train it (human employees are mostly good to go), house it (it'll be bigger than your average high-rise apartment), and feed it/cool it with enough electricity to power a neighborhood. Sure, with a lot more research it'll come down in size and power requirements, just maybe comparable to a real human brain, at which point it'll be all the more obvious how pointless the endeavor really was.
But wait, if you can equal a human brain, you can scale it up and transcend our intellectual limitations! That may be so, but we already routinely do that through collaboration, and with improvements in communication tech we're getting a lot better at it.
Or, if 'bigger brain' really beats the sum of lesser minds, we've barely even started on the possibilities for augmenting our biological ones, like with cybernetics, genetic engineering, smart drugs, maybe even stem cell therapies and brain grafts. There's got to be something there that beats building a whole new brain from scratch.
I'd lump the race for AI in with the space race as noble aspirations whose stated goal is to deliver solutions looking for problems. How bad are things going to have to get on Earth before your average Joseph would rather go live on Mars or Venus instead? For any solution that permits us to colonize space, there's a simpler, cheaper solution for letting us stay put.
It matters little if you sell stock before or after a dividend payment is booked - any systematic advantage to either option is arbitraged out of the market. Also market rules may help by automatically adjusting orders according to the amount of the dividend.
(The investor's particular tax situation may mean that there is a difference though.)
Avatar, NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap, NOT to be confused with the seriously good 'The Last Airbender' cartoon, NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap.
Just chiming in on the state of roundabouts in New Zealand...
The main problem here is that *most* people do not indicate correctly. Generally this means people don't indicate at all, which won't directly cause a crash but can impede flow. What is dangerous is the second-guessing this encourages, that is, assuming someone is going to take an exit even though they aren't indicating.
This is pure driver error, but the road code contributes a bit to the problem by requiring drivers to indicate their intended exit as they approach the roundabout - left for the first, straight for the second, and right for the third (note we drive on the left). IMO this rule is mostly cruft, and distracts people from the most important rule which is of course to indicate left before exiting.
We have a lot of really good roundabouts, mostly larger two-lane affairs. We have some bad roundabouts on intersections with a dominant traffic flow (doing a U-turn at these is dangerous because other drivers second-guess you). We have some bad roundabouts that are too small - for these the 'give way to cars already on the roundabout' rule fails and 'give way deadlock' ensues.
There's more to 'divide and conquer' as using democracy as a means of social control than splitting society into two factions. When it comes down to the polling booth, each individual is acting independently, which is about as divided as you can get.
We buy into this hook, line and sinker since it appeals to our lofty ideals of 'equal rights for every person' and voter anonymity'. But the price is a big one - we lose the power of collective bargaining.
I like to think of this in terms of bandwidth. With your vote you get the right to influence public policy at a rate of around one bit per election. Now compare that to your internet connection bandwidth and try not to feel shafted by democracy.
Even one bit per election is being generous, since for a lot of issues your choice isn't being 0 and 1, it's between 0 and 0.
Fair comment, but I still consider scrambling helicopters for this is the kind of thing you do in a panic in lieu of real disaster response.
Civil defense sirens and mobile phones get the message out much faster, and helicopters have other uses in disaster scenarios.
If the the earthquake triggering the tsunami is nearby, maybe people in the water wouldn't feel it so still need to be warned to get away from the coast.
It's a major botch if there aren't already ample features in the mobile phone infrastructure to meet the same requirements.
I kinda assumed emergency broadcasts were already possible, but collective incompetence of government and telcos meant that they weren't used in practice.
I mean, here in NZ we've had authorities flying over the beaches in helicopters with bullhorns issuing tsunami warnings. Helicopters I tell you!
One of the many daft aspects of this law, but one not well covered already, is that it's based on the faulty assumption that the piracy is occurring over the internet.
Speaking as a New Zealander myself, there's an economic barrier to piracy in that internet access here is slow and expensive. I have a pretty good plan at 40GB/month at $80 plus $3/GB for excess usage. Aside from recent and obscure stuff, it's generally cheaper and more convenient (not to mention legal) to hire from the local video library.
I'll hazard a guess that a large proportion of file sharing in NZ happens off-the-radar with people passing portable HDDs around. No less so with this new law in place. But that's already covered by existing laws, and that's as much as the government can do since it's impractical to enforce.
And another thing - this law apparently deals with downloaders as copyright infringers, rather than the party they're downloading from. Without being clued up on copyright law, this strikes me as utterly nonsensical. Downloading is *not* an act of copying. How exactly do you copy something you don't already have possession of? If I buy a pirated book (knowingly or otherwise), have I infringed copyright?
I recently had data transferred off a stack of DS/DD 5.25" floppy disks from the 80's. Not many read errors at all, and no evidence of degradation while in (not at all careful) storage.
Some nice points there, but I don't get what you mean about doing away with parking lots, and parking lots being bad for the environment.
I guess you get more freedom about where the parking lots are located (don't need to be walking distance from destination), but surely they'd still be necessary. And if the parking lots are moved to anywhere less convenient than they are now, then that'll increase the total distance travelled by the car and traffic density - which isn't too good for the environment either.
I'd call GP's post hyperbole rather than BS, but it's not impossible either. If the workload is sufficiently seek-heavy, like on a system thrashing its page file with a working set much larger than physical RAM, then several orders of magnitude sounds about right.
The take-away here is that SSDs are a non-revolving storage revolution.
And IMHO making a cost comparison against traditional HDDs is misleading since those are already ridiculously cheap. That happens when mass-produced goods become obsolete 8-)
What you're missing is that Superfetch doesn't just 'hand memory over to programs', it has to actually load data from disk. That ties up your disk, which slows down the entire machine for anything else you might happen to be using for at the time, provided that involves at least some disk access (i.e., pretty much anything).
I don't mind having to wait a short time for an application to launch when I (first) ask for it to launch. I definitely do mind having to wait for the application to load while I'm in the middle of doing something else, especially when I wasn't going to use it anyway.
When Superfetch is combined with various other processes that also use disk at random times, in particular search indexing and virus checking, the net result is a frustratingly sluggish machine that sits there with its disk buzzing constantly.
To be clear, I think the boot-time enhancing functionality of Superfetch is great, but the application pre-loading is a disaster.
Maybe Dell stops selling AMD components to third parties. This hands Intel a monopoly in the (non-low-power) x86 market, allowing Intel to increase their margins, which Dell's competitors have to pay. That could spell a big competitive advantage for Dell.
Plus there's no lost sales for AMD if Dell can swallow AMD's entire production capacity.
Thanks for that tip, I'd been using unique '+'-addresses when dishing out email addresses, but bad email address validation comes up all too frequently.
A couple of things to add here:
Gmail can filter based on where all the periods are (I checked)
Leading, trailing and consecutive periods may be problematic, best to avoid (gmail accepts these fine, but Exchange for one may refuse to send)
'+'-addresses work fine in conjunction with periods (not that you'd need to use them together)
Best to have at least one period in your 'real' email address, so that spammers can't guess it by simply stripping periods
I doubt that, but feel free to back up that claim. Custom chip graphics capabilities on the Amiga were basically limited to tweaking display parameters per-scanline (resolution, palette), block copies, and line drawing (maybe fills too, I'd have to look it up).
Slashdot Mirror
TelstraClear's cable network offers a superior alternative to Telecom's ADSL, but it's only available in some main centres. Data caps are bad but have improved, I'm currently on 40GB/month for around NZ$80. That's around US$500 and counting by the time you read this (sorry, joke).
The best advantage of the cable is that you don't have to pay hefty landline fixed charges to qualify for internet service - you can go mobile-only or get your POTS fix over IP. I get mine from 2talk - NZ$15/month including 300 minutes of calls to pretty much anywhere and I still have my old phone number.
Clearly language learning should be emphasized in primary school; by high school you've already lost your peak learning capacity for language.
I can see that the high-school language thing would've made sense once, since it was an academic subject with greater emphasis on written translation and defunct languages (Latin and Ancient Greek), and well beyond the average primary school teacher or student.
But now, we care more about fluent communication in living languages, and there's generally no shortage of native and multilingual teachers. So if there hasn't been a big shake up since I left school, it's long overdue already.
Speaking for my own experience though, I had little exposure to anything other than my native English prior to high school. My high school French was a write-off; I barely passed. But well into my twenties I made good inroads into learning both German and Chinese. You can learn as an adult, but it takes a big time commitment. If you're unable to commit to an hour a day over several years, try something else instead, because it's race between learning and forgetting.
Agree. My take on this is that the current generation of 'Desktop Search' tools fail to deliver in that you can't use them to actually 'Search Your Desktop'.
By 'Search Your Desktop' I mean find matches for search terms in text and metadata anywhere on your desktop, including documents and applications you currently have open.
So for example you could type a search term into the search tool, and get results including such things as open Firefox tabs, terminal sessions, and unsaved word processor documents. Selecting one of these results would switch you to the relevant window and navigate to the first result.
The search paradigm introduced by internet search engines is a winner; the more we can leverage it the better.
Now it makes sense... I figured the looters were all workaholic corporate types.
That's immortality for the machines, not for the people.
I'd agree that the biggest problem with human-level AI is that the economics of it are terrible. For your gazillions of research dollars and hours you get something that's already on tap and cheap as dirt, especially in the third world.
Even once you get your amazing smart supercomputer, you still have to train it (human employees are mostly good to go), house it (it'll be bigger than your average high-rise apartment), and feed it/cool it with enough electricity to power a neighborhood. Sure, with a lot more research it'll come down in size and power requirements, just maybe comparable to a real human brain, at which point it'll be all the more obvious how pointless the endeavor really was.
But wait, if you can equal a human brain, you can scale it up and transcend our intellectual limitations! That may be so, but we already routinely do that through collaboration, and with improvements in communication tech we're getting a lot better at it.
Or, if 'bigger brain' really beats the sum of lesser minds, we've barely even started on the possibilities for augmenting our biological ones, like with cybernetics, genetic engineering, smart drugs, maybe even stem cell therapies and brain grafts. There's got to be something there that beats building a whole new brain from scratch.
I'd lump the race for AI in with the space race as noble aspirations whose stated goal is to deliver solutions looking for problems. How bad are things going to have to get on Earth before your average Joseph would rather go live on Mars or Venus instead? For any solution that permits us to colonize space, there's a simpler, cheaper solution for letting us stay put.
It matters little if you sell stock before or after a dividend payment is booked - any systematic advantage to either option is arbitraged out of the market. Also market rules may help by automatically adjusting orders according to the amount of the dividend.
(The investor's particular tax situation may mean that there is a difference though.)
So if not free, it's still a relatively cheap TST (or whatever) instruction after reading the data into a register. GP's point stands.
So is a big stomach, guess that's why birds don't lounge around eating leaves all day.
Avatar, NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap, NOT to be confused with the seriously good 'The Last Airbender' cartoon, NOT to be confused with the current movie-based crap.
Not at all confused.
Just chiming in on the state of roundabouts in New Zealand...
The main problem here is that *most* people do not indicate correctly. Generally this means people don't indicate at all, which won't directly cause a crash but can impede flow. What is dangerous is the second-guessing this encourages, that is, assuming someone is going to take an exit even though they aren't indicating.
This is pure driver error, but the road code contributes a bit to the problem by requiring drivers to indicate their intended exit as they approach the roundabout - left for the first, straight for the second, and right for the third (note we drive on the left). IMO this rule is mostly cruft, and distracts people from the most important rule which is of course to indicate left before exiting.
We have a lot of really good roundabouts, mostly larger two-lane affairs. We have some bad roundabouts on intersections with a dominant traffic flow (doing a U-turn at these is dangerous because other drivers second-guess you). We have some bad roundabouts that are too small - for these the 'give way to cars already on the roundabout' rule fails and 'give way deadlock' ensues.
Large dataset already in L1 CPU cache what?
There's more to 'divide and conquer' as using democracy as a means of social control than splitting society into two factions. When it comes down to the polling booth, each individual is acting independently, which is about as divided as you can get.
We buy into this hook, line and sinker since it appeals to our lofty ideals of 'equal rights for every person' and voter anonymity'. But the price is a big one - we lose the power of collective bargaining.
I like to think of this in terms of bandwidth. With your vote you get the right to influence public policy at a rate of around one bit per election. Now compare that to your internet connection bandwidth and try not to feel shafted by democracy.
Even one bit per election is being generous, since for a lot of issues your choice isn't being 0 and 1, it's between 0 and 0.
Fair comment, but I still consider scrambling helicopters for this is the kind of thing you do in a panic in lieu of real disaster response.
Civil defense sirens and mobile phones get the message out much faster, and helicopters have other uses in disaster scenarios.
If the the earthquake triggering the tsunami is nearby, maybe people in the water wouldn't feel it so still need to be warned to get away from the coast.
It's a major botch if there aren't already ample features in the mobile phone infrastructure to meet the same requirements.
I kinda assumed emergency broadcasts were already possible, but collective incompetence of government and telcos meant that they weren't used in practice.
I mean, here in NZ we've had authorities flying over the beaches in helicopters with bullhorns issuing tsunami warnings. Helicopters I tell you!
/bin/laden
One of the many daft aspects of this law, but one not well covered already, is that it's based on the faulty assumption that the piracy is occurring over the internet.
Speaking as a New Zealander myself, there's an economic barrier to piracy in that internet access here is slow and expensive. I have a pretty good plan at 40GB/month at $80 plus $3/GB for excess usage. Aside from recent and obscure stuff, it's generally cheaper and more convenient (not to mention legal) to hire from the local video library.
I'll hazard a guess that a large proportion of file sharing in NZ happens off-the-radar with people passing portable HDDs around. No less so with this new law in place. But that's already covered by existing laws, and that's as much as the government can do since it's impractical to enforce.
And another thing - this law apparently deals with downloaders as copyright infringers, rather than the party they're downloading from. Without being clued up on copyright law, this strikes me as utterly nonsensical. Downloading is *not* an act of copying. How exactly do you copy something you don't already have possession of? If I buy a pirated book (knowingly or otherwise), have I infringed copyright?
I recently had data transferred off a stack of DS/DD 5.25" floppy disks from the 80's. Not many read errors at all, and no evidence of degradation while in (not at all careful) storage.
Think you mean Dimoxinil.
http://www.hairlosstalk.com/interact/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=42579&view=next
Some nice points there, but I don't get what you mean about doing away with parking lots, and parking lots being bad for the environment.
I guess you get more freedom about where the parking lots are located (don't need to be walking distance from destination), but surely they'd still be necessary. And if the parking lots are moved to anywhere less convenient than they are now, then that'll increase the total distance travelled by the car and traffic density - which isn't too good for the environment either.
SATA drive what? I assume you mean an SSD 8-)
I'd call GP's post hyperbole rather than BS, but it's not impossible either. If the workload is sufficiently seek-heavy, like on a system thrashing its page file with a working set much larger than physical RAM, then several orders of magnitude sounds about right.
The take-away here is that SSDs are a non-revolving storage revolution.
And IMHO making a cost comparison against traditional HDDs is misleading since those are already ridiculously cheap. That happens when mass-produced goods become obsolete 8-)
What you're missing is that Superfetch doesn't just 'hand memory over to programs', it has to actually load data from disk. That ties up your disk, which slows down the entire machine for anything else you might happen to be using for at the time, provided that involves at least some disk access (i.e., pretty much anything).
I don't mind having to wait a short time for an application to launch when I (first) ask for it to launch. I definitely do mind having to wait for the application to load while I'm in the middle of doing something else, especially when I wasn't going to use it anyway.
When Superfetch is combined with various other processes that also use disk at random times, in particular search indexing and virus checking, the net result is a frustratingly sluggish machine that sits there with its disk buzzing constantly.
To be clear, I think the boot-time enhancing functionality of Superfetch is great, but the application pre-loading is a disaster.
Maybe Dell stops selling AMD components to third parties. This hands Intel a monopoly in the (non-low-power) x86 market, allowing Intel to increase their margins, which Dell's competitors have to pay. That could spell a big competitive advantage for Dell.
Plus there's no lost sales for AMD if Dell can swallow AMD's entire production capacity.
Thanks for that tip, I'd been using unique '+'-addresses when dishing out email addresses, but bad email address validation comes up all too frequently.
A couple of things to add here:
I doubt that, but feel free to back up that claim. Custom chip graphics capabilities on the Amiga were basically limited to tweaking display parameters per-scanline (resolution, palette), block copies, and line drawing (maybe fills too, I'd have to look it up).
I haven't read it, but the mere premise of the book 'The Dice Man' is proof that we have free will.