The helium market is more complicated than people think. MRIs and superconductors need very pure helium, often in liquid form. Party balloons and (I assume) airships don't. So when helium becomes contaminated with air (which it does very easily) what do you do? Answer, you mainly vent it to the atmosphere, because your average research institute or hosptial can't possibly afford to install the equipment to recover pure (and possibly liquid) helium (what they need) from a helium-air gas mix. It makes more sense to sell the helium-air mix to balloon and airship manufacturers.
I've known homeless people, and they were indeed refused support by their family. Family in this case was dad, who was a ornery SOB and disowned his son for going to university instead of working on the farm. Nice.
The son was a slightly geeky maths student. He screwed up some paperwork and didn't get any housing allocated by the university one term. He slept on a mate's floor while trying to sort it out. Then he felt the mate might be getting fed up with him, so he lied and pretended he had somewhere.
Then he started sleeping during the day in the computer lab (how I met him) and just wandering around at night. This didn't do his grades much good, and he dropped off the course.
Once you've been sleeping rough for a very short space of time your mental health nosedives. Asking anyone for help becomes very hard - it's a challenge just keeping basically clean and fed. Note that he had some money (unemployment benefit), just nowhere to live. He could afford to eat, but without access to a kitchen he either ate only cold food, or had to buy (relatively expensive) take-away food. As a single young male you are not on the top of the queue to be housed by the state.
In the end he escaped, and last I met him he had a job, house and girlfriend. But I've seen how someone can become homeless, it doesn't take much, and once it begins it's very hard to stop.
Maybe in the US. In the UK pubs sometimes had a single pay phone but bars in London didn't have anything as uncool as payphones. You either asked to borrow the landline behind the bar, or you went out to the street and used a kiosk. Mostly you managed to just have a night out without going near a telephone.
Interesting. I would like to know more about how modern prostitution works, since you obviously are quite familiar with the process, unlike the author of the article who clearly just made it all up from thin air.
Why do people think their intuition, based on almost nothing more than movies and maybe a documentary from 10 years ago, are absolutely 100% right?
Why wouldn't you? I give personal information to all sorts of people for business reasons. I see no evidence that sex workers are more or less untrustworthy than any other trade. Maybe some are controlled by criminal gangs that would then exploit the details, but that's true of some garages, used car dealerships, nightclubs and restaurants, too.
Good management is a myth, unless your management stack is comprised of individuals smarter than you on the specific field. It can help a lot (and I've worked with wonderful management), but that's it. Its not a silver-bullet.
Awww. I'm glad you found time during all your rockstar full stack development to work out that good management is a myth.
I recommend your next step should be to start a company where you don't bother hiring those non-existent good managers - I'm sure you'll be a millionaire in no time.
The words "deception", "job description", and "gullibile" come to mind.
Not at all. I too know people who work in the intelligence services, and I've known them since long before they took on those jobs! They are intelligent (duh...) and thoughtful. They care about private and privileged communications about as much as someone doing an aerial survey for geological research cares about peeping tom laws and people sunbathing naked in their gardens. They consider the (legal or moral) rules they break as so removed from their purpose and intent as to be quite beside the point.
Whether that attitude needs changing I wouldn't like to say, but it's not an attitude of malice.
"competitors' chips" is a little unfair. It also doesn't brick anything, although a non-technical user won't know the difference. It reversibly disables counterfeit chips.
I'd say it was a grey area, simply because it's so hard to tell if a chip embedded in 3rd party hardware is genuine or not.
For those who knew they were using rip-off chips, screw 'em. It reminds me of the days when I'd get emails from people using pirated copies of my software bitching about bugs. If I could have been bothered, I'd have released a free update that deliberately screwed up those installations.
The idea is to have a timer that would automatically disable the equipment unless it received an enable signal, either from a satellite or removable medium.
Right, but now all the enemy has to do to entirely disable your tank in the field is to disable (or block) the receiver. An enemy with good signals jamming can disable all your armour. Not ideal.
Then dont use it. Pretty simple. There is no law that says you have to use any cloud service, so if you dont trust/like them, dont use them. And dont bitch about it when you choose to do so.
There's no law that says you have to drive a Ford. If you don't trust them, don't drive one. But don't bitch about it when it bursts into flames and kills you, when you choose to drive it.
Dell -- revenues and profits declined so badly they went private? HP - PC division is doing so bad they almost got rid of it. IBM -- completely left the business Compaq - Dead Gateway - Dead
All those companies won. They made great profits from an important product. So what if many are no longer in business. Many steam engine companies are out of business. That doesn't mean that steam engines were bad and we should have invested more in horses or blimps. Life moves on.
'Losers' would be the likes of Commodore, Olivetti, Tandy, Atari, Amstrad
The Apple iPhone may yet end up as the Commodore Amiga of it's era.
Actually, Azure is great, and the addition of high level services like this is the right direction. Just spinning up VMs isn't nearly as useful as a service layer.
The algorithms aren't an especially hard part of machine learning, dealing with the data is. Anything that would save me the hassle of trying to fit things in RAM would be great...
We've given up, and billion means thousand million in British English now.
Even more embarrassing, we now called muffins "English Muffins", because everyone thinks muffins are those fluffy things baked in tins that Starbucks sell.
I won't use a machine which is useless without network
I started out using VT320 terminals, so I'm kind of used to the idea of using lightweight hardware that's useless without a network. Worked pretty well at the time;-)
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
"On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world."
I do have the hardware and software to hand:-). We moved to T2 architecture (T5240s) at the beginning of the year for Oracle and for a bunch of other apps. In the case of Oracle it does what you expect - scales massively well for large numbers of fast queries (i.e. typical webapp situation), but of course if you have a single huge query, it's going to run on a single execution thread, slowly. A simple performance test showed Oracle scaling linearly until our test *client* ran out of steam - by then we were far about any expected load so didn't test further.
The key thing is licensing. We run Oracle 10g standard, and it works out very well. Oracle have insane licensing with fine distinctions about when a core counts as a CPU blah blah blah. Right now, with T2 we get 64 parallel execution threads for 1 Oracle CPU license, which works for me:-)
I'll be interested to see what Rock offers, but with the virtualization capabilities in Solaris, the T2 gives us a lot of room to be flexible and split stuff up. If you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and have designed your software on the principles of atomicity, asynchronicity, and statelessness, it does let you scale very very nicely.
"Language isn't far off at all, we just about have it already"
Actually, we aren't even close. Not only that but we've barely advanced in the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, we're seeing lots more stuff in industry doing 'NLP' - but what its doing was done in labs years ago. It's a case of industry closing the gap on academia. The academics aren't making much progress.
We can use crude dictionary based algorithms to find noun phrases. We can have a fairly good stab at linking adjectives and adverbs to their nouns and verbs. We can get negation right 80% of the time. That's just parsing simple sentences. And sentences are the easy bit of language. Attempts at context sensitivity are dictionary based and poor.
For instance, what does "it" refer to in the following bits of language?
"It is raining" "Eureka! I've got it!"
Think about how on earth you'd get a computer to determine the referent of 'it' in each case. NLP is not the route to AI. If anything, when we get further with AI in a couple of centuries, we may be able to make headway on NLP.
I have never, ever, heard anyone say that you should be better qualified than the people you are managing. That's crazy. Ignoring the poor correlation between qualifications and ability to do a given job, the whole point of a manager is that they aren't *doing* the job - they're allowing the people they manage to do the job better than if they were un-managed. You don't need to be a good programmer to manager programmers. You need to understand what programming is, and what things make it easy or hard. You don't have to be good at doing it.
And believe me, once you move to management, you'll forget how to program pretty fast:)
Let's suppose you and some friends want to hack on something. A bit of private development. So you set up a normal webserver, but stick password control on it, so only 6 of you have access.
Well, the AGPL covers that, because it covers anything that is remotely accessible over a network.
Good point. In many high level languages (esp. PHP) configuration is done though a block of simple code that just sets variables. So, such apps would have to specifically exclude the config file from the remit of the license. Sounds like a minefield to me.
On the plus side, should be fairly easy to comply for Javascript:)
Great! I spend 12 years (count 'em) working to convince first developers, then managers, then commercial directors, and then, finally, lawyers, to see the benefits of open source, and not to fear it. And then this. Great. Thanks.
In an attempt to make life simple for simple folk, I've spent 12 years explaining that there are three kinds of free software:
Public domain software - no copyright, no nothing. Rare and not very useful, but it does exist. Well, it did exist until universities wised up to what some of the faculty were doing.
BSD style software. Free to use, free to make proprietary derivations. GPL style software. Free to use, but distributed derivations must also be GPL
Now this. It's no longer about distribution, it's about use. Not only that, but we aren't talking websites, we're talking any remote network access. 'Remote' is not defined in the license, so it's while localhost is probably excluded, I've no idea what the status of an intranet would be. What about the intranet of a multi-national?
Bah. So, I run a search engine that's AGPL'd. Cool. Folk can search my site. Then I find a bug, and fix it on my copy of the search engine. Now, I'm in breach of license unless I add some stupid 'download my forked version source code here' link to my site. And I have to keep that link there until the main branch accept my bug fix and release a new version, whereupon I must upgrade to the new version (possibly including other stuff I don't want) until I can get rid of the link.
Slashdot Mirror
The helium market is more complicated than people think. MRIs and superconductors need very pure helium, often in liquid form. Party balloons and (I assume) airships don't. So when helium becomes contaminated with air (which it does very easily) what do you do? Answer, you mainly vent it to the atmosphere, because your average research institute or hosptial can't possibly afford to install the equipment to recover pure (and possibly liquid) helium (what they need) from a helium-air gas mix. It makes more sense to sell the helium-air mix to balloon and airship manufacturers.
I've known homeless people, and they were indeed refused support by their family. Family in this case was dad, who was a ornery SOB and disowned his son for going to university instead of working on the farm. Nice.
The son was a slightly geeky maths student. He screwed up some paperwork and didn't get any housing allocated by the university one term. He slept on a mate's floor while trying to sort it out. Then he felt the mate might be getting fed up with him, so he lied and pretended he had somewhere.
Then he started sleeping during the day in the computer lab (how I met him) and just wandering around at night. This didn't do his grades much good, and he dropped off the course.
Once you've been sleeping rough for a very short space of time your mental health nosedives. Asking anyone for help becomes very hard - it's a challenge just keeping basically clean and fed. Note that he had some money (unemployment benefit), just nowhere to live. He could afford to eat, but without access to a kitchen he either ate only cold food, or had to buy (relatively expensive) take-away food. As a single young male you are not on the top of the queue to be housed by the state.
In the end he escaped, and last I met him he had a job, house and girlfriend. But I've seen how someone can become homeless, it doesn't take much, and once it begins it's very hard to stop.
Maybe in the US. In the UK pubs sometimes had a single pay phone but bars in London didn't have anything as uncool as payphones. You either asked to borrow the landline behind the bar, or you went out to the street and used a kiosk. Mostly you managed to just have a night out without going near a telephone.
Interesting. I would like to know more about how modern prostitution works, since you obviously are quite familiar with the process, unlike the author of the article who clearly just made it all up from thin air.
Why do people think their intuition, based on almost nothing more than movies and maybe a documentary from 10 years ago, are absolutely 100% right?
Why wouldn't you? I give personal information to all sorts of people for business reasons. I see no evidence that sex workers are more or less untrustworthy than any other trade. Maybe some are controlled by criminal gangs that would then exploit the details, but that's true of some garages, used car dealerships, nightclubs and restaurants, too.
Good management is a myth, unless your management stack is comprised of individuals smarter than you on the specific field. It can help a lot (and I've worked with wonderful management), but that's it. Its not a silver-bullet.
Awww. I'm glad you found time during all your rockstar full stack development to work out that good management is a myth.
I recommend your next step should be to start a company where you don't bother hiring those non-existent good managers - I'm sure you'll be a millionaire in no time.
Not at all. I too know people who work in the intelligence services, and I've known them since long before they took on those jobs! They are intelligent (duh...) and thoughtful. They care about private and privileged communications about as much as someone doing an aerial survey for geological research cares about peeping tom laws and people sunbathing naked in their gardens. They consider the (legal or moral) rules they break as so removed from their purpose and intent as to be quite beside the point.
Whether that attitude needs changing I wouldn't like to say, but it's not an attitude of malice.
"competitors' chips" is a little unfair. It also doesn't brick anything, although a non-technical user won't know the difference. It reversibly disables counterfeit chips.
I'd say it was a grey area, simply because it's so hard to tell if a chip embedded in 3rd party hardware is genuine or not.
For those who knew they were using rip-off chips, screw 'em. It reminds me of the days when I'd get emails from people using pirated copies of my software bitching about bugs. If I could have been bothered, I'd have released a free update that deliberately screwed up those installations.
There's no law that says you have to drive a Ford. If you don't trust them, don't drive one. But don't bitch about it when it bursts into flames and kills you, when you choose to drive it.
All those companies won. They made great profits from an important product. So what if many are no longer in business. Many steam engine companies are out of business. That doesn't mean that steam engines were bad and we should have invested more in horses or blimps. Life moves on.
'Losers' would be the likes of Commodore, Olivetti, Tandy, Atari, Amstrad
The Apple iPhone may yet end up as the Commodore Amiga of it's era.
You don't trust anything you haven't built???
How do you know your HDD firmware isn't corrupting data? Build it yourself??
Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, etc. etc.
Actually, Azure is great, and the addition of high level services like this is the right direction. Just spinning up VMs isn't nearly as useful as a service layer.
The algorithms aren't an especially hard part of machine learning, dealing with the data is. Anything that would save me the hassle of trying to fit things in RAM would be great...
An inexpensive fire-proof and waterproof safe will survive a gas explosion just fine.
But you are overestimating the importance of identity documents. A few sworn statements will have you up and running again in no time.
They are making it as difficult and possible to get at the content legally.
Indeed. So the less sociopathic and self-entitled among us take the option of 'not getting at it' rather than 'getting it illegally'.
We've given up, and billion means thousand million in British English now.
Even more embarrassing, we now called muffins "English Muffins", because everyone thinks muffins are those fluffy things baked in tins that Starbucks sell.
What's the advantage of a console over a PC for people who develop or play indie games?
Mainly, it's not having your game ripped off by general free-loaders. And of course many games are better suited to controllers than keyboard/mice.
I won't use a machine which is useless without network
I started out using VT320 terminals, so I'm kind of used to the idea of using lightweight hardware that's useless without a network. Worked pretty well at the time ;-)
"On paper, Rock and the T2 look like they'd be a very good match for Oracle's workloads, but since Oracle's license prevents publishing benchmarks and I don't have the hardware and software to hand to test them, I can't tell how they do in the real world."
I do have the hardware and software to hand :-). We moved to T2 architecture (T5240s) at the beginning of the year for Oracle and for a bunch of other apps. In the case of Oracle it does what you expect - scales massively well for large numbers of fast queries (i.e. typical webapp situation), but of course if you have a single huge query, it's going to run on a single execution thread, slowly. A simple performance test showed Oracle scaling linearly until our test *client* ran out of steam - by then we were far about any expected load so didn't test further.
The key thing is licensing. We run Oracle 10g standard, and it works out very well. Oracle have insane licensing with fine distinctions about when a core counts as a CPU blah blah blah. Right now, with T2 we get 64 parallel execution threads for 1 Oracle CPU license, which works for me :-)
I'll be interested to see what Rock offers, but with the virtualization capabilities in Solaris, the T2 gives us a lot of room to be flexible and split stuff up. If you've been paying attention for the last 20 years and have designed your software on the principles of atomicity, asynchronicity, and statelessness, it does let you scale very very nicely.
"Language isn't far off at all, we just about have it already"
Actually, we aren't even close. Not only that but we've barely advanced in the last 20 years. Don't get me wrong, we're seeing lots more stuff in industry doing 'NLP' - but what its doing was done in labs years ago. It's a case of industry closing the gap on academia. The academics aren't making much progress.
We can use crude dictionary based algorithms to find noun phrases. We can have a fairly good stab at linking adjectives and adverbs to their nouns and verbs. We can get negation right 80% of the time. That's just parsing simple sentences. And sentences are the easy bit of language. Attempts at context sensitivity are dictionary based and poor.
For instance, what does "it" refer to in the following bits of language?
"It is raining"
"Eureka! I've got it!"
Think about how on earth you'd get a computer to determine the referent of 'it' in each case. NLP is not the route to AI. If anything, when we get further with AI in a couple of centuries, we may be able to make headway on NLP.
I have never, ever, heard anyone say that you should be better qualified than the people you are managing. That's crazy. Ignoring the poor correlation between qualifications and ability to do a given job, the whole point of a manager is that they aren't *doing* the job - they're allowing the people they manage to do the job better than if they were un-managed. You don't need to be a good programmer to manager programmers. You need to understand what programming is, and what things make it easy or hard. You don't have to be good at doing it.
:)
And believe me, once you move to management, you'll forget how to program pretty fast
If you'd been around here a bit longer, kid, you'd understand ;-)
Err, sure it is.
Let's suppose you and some friends want to hack on something. A bit of private development. So you set up a normal webserver, but stick password control on it, so only 6 of you have access.
Well, the AGPL covers that, because it covers anything that is remotely accessible over a network.
Good point. In many high level languages (esp. PHP) configuration is done though a block of simple code that just sets variables. So, such apps would have to specifically exclude the config file from the remit of the license. Sounds like a minefield to me.
:)
On the plus side, should be fairly easy to comply for Javascript
Great! I spend 12 years (count 'em) working to convince first developers, then managers, then commercial directors, and then, finally, lawyers, to see the benefits of open source, and not to fear it. And then this. Great. Thanks.
In an attempt to make life simple for simple folk, I've spent 12 years explaining that there are three kinds of free software:
Public domain software - no copyright, no nothing. Rare and not very useful, but it does exist. Well, it did exist until universities wised up to what some of the faculty were doing.
BSD style software. Free to use, free to make proprietary derivations.
GPL style software. Free to use, but distributed derivations must also be GPL
Now this. It's no longer about distribution, it's about use. Not only that, but we aren't talking websites, we're talking any remote network access. 'Remote' is not defined in the license, so it's while localhost is probably excluded, I've no idea what the status of an intranet would be. What about the intranet of a multi-national?
Bah. So, I run a search engine that's AGPL'd. Cool. Folk can search my site. Then I find a bug, and fix it on my copy of the search engine. Now, I'm in breach of license unless I add some stupid 'download my forked version source code here' link to my site. And I have to keep that link there until the main branch accept my bug fix and release a new version, whereupon I must upgrade to the new version (possibly including other stuff I don't want) until I can get rid of the link.