Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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Ok, I see how this is a real issue now. If it costs $50 to store a gnome ($100 for a 1T drive, and 500 gigabytes per genome of machine data), and the lab wants a copy as well as the user, and a backup somewhere, that's $150, which is significant when we imagine the entire process dropping to $1,000. The guys drawing blood and extracting DNA need their money, too, which frankly should be $100 to $200. Even shipping isn't cheap. Dry ice all the way to Korea has to cost a ton. My package was 17 lbs! When trying to get the overall cost below $1,000, every dollar counts.
On the positive side, Moore's Law still applies to data storage, which will get cheaper every year. On the other hand, our genome is not likely to require more storage over time. This might be a short-term problem.
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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· Score: 1
Yeah... I know you're right. I'm a fast learner, and I jump into all sorts of fields and make waves. One thing I've learned is that being smart gets you only so far. There's no substituted for real-world experience.
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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· Score: 1
Well... I hope I can get all the read data. Since I'm doing exome sequencing, rather than genome sequencing, shouldn't the raw data be something like 100X less, or around 5Gb per exome?
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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· Score: 1
Will do! I wasn't expecting so much generosity in reply to my post, but thanks! I'm no dummy, but all I have is a Wikipedia level of knowledge of genetics, so any help I can get will be very much appreciated.
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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Thanks, guys, for the CNV info. I'm doing only 30-deep sequencing, but I will get 3 exome sequences all probably having the same defect on the X chromosome. Combining the data should give me some reasonable CNV detection ability.
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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Thanks! I will check out snpEff. I certainly will need some help, so if you don't mind, I will contact you when I get the data. Same thing for the guy above who offered to help.
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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· Score: 1
Thanks! I certainly will need some guidance, so if you don't mind, I'll ping you when I get the data. Same thing for the guy below who also offered to help.
Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
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The DNA Data Deluge
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Please... entire DNA genomes are tiny... on the order of 1Gb, with no compression. Taking into account the huge similarities to published genomes, we can compress that by at least 1000X. What they are talking about is the huge amount of data spit out by the sequencing machines in order to determine your genome. Once determined, it's tiny.
That said, what I need is raw machine data. I'm having to do my own little exome research project. My family has a very rare form of X-linked color blindness that is most likely caused by a single gene defect on our X chromosome. It's no big deal, but now I'm losing central vision, with symptoms most similar to late-onset Starardt's Disease. My UNC ophthalmologist beat the experts at John Hopkins and Jacksonville's hospital, and made the correct call, directly refuting the other doctor's diagnosis of Stargartd's. She though I had something else and that my DNA would prove it. She gave me the opportunity to have my exome sequenced, and she was right.
So, I've got something pretty horrible, and my ophthalmologist thinks it's most likely related to my unusual form of color blindness. My daughter carries this gene, as does my cousin and one of her sons. Gene research to the rescue?!? Unfortunately... no. There are simply too few people like us. So... being a slashdot sort of geek who refuses to give up, I'm running my own study. Actually, the UNC researchers wanted to work with me... all I'd have to do is bring my extended family from California to Chapel Hill a couple of times over a couple of years and have them see doctors at UNC. There's simply no way I could make that happen.
Innovative companies to the rescue... This morning, Axeq, a company headquartered in MD, received my families DNA for exome sequencing at their Korean lab. They ran an exome sequencing special in April: $600 per exome, with an order size minimum of six. They have been great to work with, and accepted my order for only four. Bioserve, also in MD, did the DNA extraction from whole blood, and they have been even more helpful. The blood extraction labs were also incredibly helpful, once we found the right places (very emphatically not Labcorp or Quest Diagnostics). The Stanford clinic lab manager was unbelievably helpful, and in LA, the lab director at the San Antonio Hospital Lab went way overboard, So far, I have to give Axeq and Bioserve five stars out of five, and the blood draw labs deserve a six.
Assuming I get what I'm expecting, I'll get a library of matched genes, and also all the raw machine output data, for four relatives. The output data is what I really need, since our particular mutation is not currently in the gene database. Once I get all the data, I'll need to do a bit of coding to see if I can identify the mutation. Unfortunately, there are several ways that this could be impossible. For example, "copy number variations", or CNVs, if they go on for over a few hundred base pairs, are unable to be detected with current technology. Ah... the life of a geek. This is yet another field I have to get familiar with...
I've got to call you on the CISC statement, though the RISC/CISC debate has been dead for many years now. As you pointed out, modern CISC processors translate CISC instructions into micro-ops that look a lot like a RISC instruction set, and every modern RISC processor has added so much hardware that it's a joke to call them "reduced" anything. At this point, the density of the instruction set is important in that it reduces cache misses, and some CISC processors beat some RISC processors in this space, but the ARM Thumb architecture blows x86 out of the water, IIRC, in code side. However, data cache misses far out weigh instruction cache misses now days, so even instruction density isn't very useful anymore for speed. I think now days the only real difference has been the applications driving CPU design. ARM is low power and small first, and powerful second. x86 is the other way around. It's cool to see these variations of these architectures invading each other's turf.
Back in 1986 (when I took Dave Patterson's computer architecture course), CISC processors used microcode. That was practically their definition. RISC processors were more pipelined, and did more per clock. They often had Harvard architectures with separate instruction and data busses, while CISC processors clung onto a single bus. The microcode architecture was inherently slow (a whole clock was used just to read the microcode ROM), and was only commonly used because of the great flexibility it provided, in addition to the simplified design effort. For example, it helped propel IBM to greatness by having machines with compatible instruction sets decade after decade, even though the hardware changed radically, and it helped Intel win the CPU wars because of compatibility rather than CPU performance. While Intel worried about compatibility and keeping costs down, Sun Microsystems built fantastic RISC based workstations that put Intel CPUs to shame. However, Moore's Law was on Intel's side. When transistors were cheap enough, Intel switched from microcode to effectively a CISC-to-RISC translator (micro-ops). That ended the RISC/CISC debate, AFAIK, and enabled Intel to compete with CPUs from Sun. The complexity of that translator is just too small to worry about compared to all the stuff both CISC and RISC architectures have bolted on since then. High end RISC and CISC processors have very little difference of any significant meaning now days. At first, RISC won, by being faster. Then CISC won by becoming RISC and remaining compatible with Windows, and then RISC lost by becoming complex. Then RISC won by being smaller and lower power (ARM). Now CISC is being shrunk and made low power again. I think this all has a ton more to do with ARM vs Intel then the encoding of their instruction sets.
It is the nature of large bureaucracies to behave as an evil Frankenstein monster made up of the weakest attributes of many fine people. This is true also of large corporations. The only solution I've seen is strong leadership from the top. I know a number of lawyers, and I would say they are all fine people. However, as a group, the justice system they are part of take people for all they are worth. It's not any one lawyers fault... it's just the system that's in place. However, it's the system built by the monster made up of lawyers.
Take my mother's case. Her husband died leaving a long complicated trust written with many mistakes. His lawyer made two amendments over two decades, but never read the trust before writing the amendments. Naturally, there are huge errors and contradictions. Now, the lawyer screwed up, plain and simple. He even admits the trust has drafting mistakes, and has offered testimony clarifying what happened, and what my mother's husband's intent was. His firm and a lawyer they work with have made $200K so far defending my mother, and depositions for the trial haven't even started. No one in the legal profession expects my mother to loose the case, but they do expect her to loose $400K in the process, almost all of her savings. Everyone thinks it's terrible, even the lawyers charging all the money. My money-crazy step-sister managed to find a lawyer that respectable lawyers hate. He's not one of the upstanding ones. However, the dozen or so people being paid so far are good people, and they all hate to see my mother fleeced like this.
Nice link! That's one thing I love about Slashdot... if you can put up with all the noise and offensive posts, there's often a nugget worth waiting for. I hope they mod your link +5 informative.
The tools for private communication are there, and geeks like me contribute what we can (not that much in my case). Instead of saying "it's not rocket science", we should say, "it's not crypto." This stuff is hard, which is why it's fun.
His statement that there is no practical way to safeguard privacy is true to a point. No one in the world is going to decrypt my one-time-pad encrypted email that I encrypt on a machine not connected to the Internet, transfer by USB stick, and email as an attachment. Instead, if anyone really cares, they'll just get my data the old fashioned way. It's really a matter of how much money the eavesdropper is willing to spend. Anything over I'm guessing maybe $100,000, and they just hire an expert to bug my house, car, cell phone, clothing, have an affair with my wife and run dog. If we care to, and have at least a small clue, we can encrypt whatever we want securely. At least if no one really cares to know what we're encrypting.
I agree with Google, Microsoft, and friends. We should let our service providers be honest with us, and have a public debate about privacy vs. security. I don't have any secrets. Not one. Now that doesn't mean I post all my passwords on my blog,
I wish the story of what my money-crazy evil step-sister is doing to my mother would go viral... $200K in pointless legal expenses and counting. I hope Barr get's through this without much damage, but unfortunately that is the exception to the rule. All the social media attention in the world wont save Barr a dime. The law's not about justice. It's about lawyers legally stealing money from people.
Absolutely right! If you're lucky, you'll never have rights worth enough to pay a lawyer to sue you. My 70+ year old widowed mother is being sued by my money-crazy step-sister. There is zero merit to the case, but my poor mother has already had incurred over $200K in expenses, and they haven't even started the effort to go to trial. The judge couldn't throw out the case because the law says disputes of this type can only be decided at trial. The system is set up to take away your money and give it to lawyers, plain and simple. Anyone without enough money to play this game can be taken advantage of by any company that cares to, and the law is set up to benefit lawyers here as well.
There is a defense. If you're bright, and a fast learner, you can represent yourself, and hopefully not cock it up. It will take even more of your time than hiring lawyers, but the expenses will be tiny. Naturally, judges, who all happen to be lawyers, take a dim view of this approach. It's a good thing the people passing the laws that lawyers live by aren't lawyers themselves!... Oh, wait!
Seriously, is anyone out there in geek land even considering MySQL for a brand spanking new project with no history attached to MySQL? I don't know of any. It's just a matter of time now for things to swing from MySQL to MariaDB, though I think a lot of geeks will take a good look at other options like PostgreSQL before switching. Unless Oracle does something really interesting with MySQL, it's dead... seriously... no one in the year 2120 will even remember MySQL except for unfortunate geeks working for the government and large banks who will continue doing new projects with MySQL until the end of time.
I'm hoping this is an issue everyone can finally agree on, but you're probably right. Besides, Fox News is only making an issue of this to bash Obama a bit. As soon as it looks like public support starts swinging towards actually ending this invasion of privacy, they'll go on the warpath to defend America against terrorists, and all my conservative friends will forget why they were upset about the program. They'll also deny Google, Microsoft, and friends the right to tell us what unspeakable acts the government forces them to do, and after a while, average Joe will even forget that there is massive government spying on Americans. It is the nature of most of us to want to believe in a higher authority without question, whether God or Country.
Anyone remember Bush selling us torcher? I remember at least 2/3rds of the morons near where I live were convinced. Secret CIA prisons? Yeah, they're all for it. Guantanamo? They made sure to let their congressmen they want to keep our gulag open with the Red White and Blue over it. Remember how a majority of Democrats were against gay marriage 6 months before Obama went on a warpath for gay rights? I happen to be pretty happy about that one, but the insanely rapid shift in public opinion was due to PR. How about the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq? Even I was too dumb to see that mess coming.
I'm thrilled Google, Microsoft, and friends have asked for some sunlight on the way our fundamental right privacy to privacy has been run over rough-shod. At least if we stupid morons are told the whole story, I can blame ourselves for being morons rather than ignorant. I prefer to be a moron. Our tech giants at least have enough spine to ask for a tiny bit of sanity... except of course for Cisco, who is making a killing world wide on government spying and censorship.
So you consider the secret password to my hard drive as a secret the government can torcher out of me legally, but my secret off shore account information in my head is protected by the 5th amendment? Somehow, the physical location of the locked away data is what is important to you, rather than the reasons for having the 5th amendment in the first place. I have a secret, and I'm allowed to keep it. That's what they 5th says.
Now, to compare against forced blood draw, the court has to have a court order like they do to search your house. This was determined to be a right to privacy thing, rather than a right to keep a secret. They decided that a 5th amendment protected secret has to be some idea in your brain, and that it doesn't cover taking samples from your body. That's a pretty scary line they crossed, but at least it helps us put away rapists with more confidence that we got the right guy. Now, the fact that our communication, location, phone calls, emails, and internet browsing is mostly available to be data-mined by the NSA without any process at all is new since 9/11. The NSA knows your brand of toilet paper and the last time you slept at your girl friend's apartment, as well as who you had lunch with, and the contents of that last non-encrypted e-mail you sent. They've correlated that with the likelihood that dorks like you and me who post openly on Slashdot are going to do something violent. The right to privacy has been bent over a chair and anal-raped. Hopefully, we're at least a little safer for it. Are we?
Wow... you have a warped sense of self-incrimination. I have a secret in my head and you're asking me to tell you. If I do, I spend years in jail. If I don't tell you, I go free. The 5th amendments stops you from torturing the secret out of me. It really is that simple. They can't ask me for the combination to my safe, either, but they can bust the door off. The only reason the feds are trying to pretend this isn't a 5th amendment violation is they don't currently have a powerful enough blow torch to get through your electronic safe's door. There is simply no difference in asking for my hard-drive password and asking for all of my secret off shore account information. If you allow one, you have to allow the other.
Audible is great for a lot of people, just not people like me. I agree the reading is generally high quality. On Android, the speed-up feature used to totally suck, but lately, they've copied my pitch-synchronous algorithms from libsonic, which I can tell from the new and improved sound quality. It's perfectly legal for them to do that: I give the software away as public domain software.
For around half of blind people, Audible is wonderful. For people like me, Audible is almost useless. First of all, their software only lets me go up to 3X speed up. I listen at about 550 words per minute when listening to fiction (3.5X), and 600 wpm (4X) on my computer. To learn to listen that fast, you have to train your ear to the voice. If the reader on Audible were the same for every book, that would be possible, but unfortunately, it's a different reader more often than not. With a text to speech engine, it's the same voice all the time, making it far easier to train for speed listening. The most popular voice with blind speed listeners is Eloquence on Windows, which is the same as Voxin on Linux. I prefer the Mary TTS artic "rms" voice because it's free software (no connection to RMS... probably). I also read far too many books to afford Audible, and Audible's selection is too weak for me.
However, Audible does rock... except that they are owned by evil Amazon! I've never seen the blind picket any company other than Amazon. It's pretty funny. They can't read the signs they carry! If you remember back when Amazon turned off their crappy built-in text-to-speech feature in Kindle for most e-books, you may recall Amazon claiming that the Author's Guild made them do it. That's total BS. No other e-reader company caved in this way, including Apple and Google. Amazon just used the Author's Guild as an excuse to stop their kindles from competing with their highly profitable audio book products at Audible. Amazon's company motto: Be Evil.
I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.
So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!
Code architecture is key, as is a common coding methodology among the team. Brilliant coders often are loners, and if you put them on a team, each may do what they normally do and do their own thing. You'll have a program written in several different languages, and an integration nightmare.
Here's an integration nightmare that continues to this day, thanks to lame computer language design. To reduce integration problems, a common architecture in EDA is to read a design into a common set of in-memory data structures, and to split up the extensive process of automating design implementation into several "tools". Each tool runs in sequence, moving the process forward, for example we run digital high level synthesis, then lower level technology mapping, placement, and then routing. They read from those common data structures, and write back to them. I have never seen a group succeed who did not use this architecture. The problem is how do you extend the objects in the common data structures so your tool can manipulate them? In C++, we use inheritance to extend the functionality of a class, but these shared common objects have already been instantiated by the time your tool runs, and they don't have your extensions. You can still inherit from there classes, but you'll have to copy all the objects to new objects of your subclasses to be able to use them, doubling the memory required. Alternatively, you could have a void pointer on each object in memory and use run-time hacks to cross-link them to your new extension objects, and throughout your code you wind up going back and forth through the void pointer. Various better systems are often employed, but they're all hacks to work around limitations in languages like C++, Java, D, and C#. If a team doesn't agree beforehand just how they are going to share objects and extend them, the effort is doomed before it begins.
I completely agree. I should have left off the gratuitous bashing of the GOP, but I was responding to some gratuitous bashing of DEMs. If either had a clue in this area, we'd be all over it. The one thing I think everyone agrees on is the government is massively inept at investing in pretty much everything. You get guys with a track record and a plan, although risky, like Tesla, and we decide to fund them. Good deal. Then we get Solyndra and Fisker and God knows who else and every stupid representative of any town that will benefit crying that their favorite doomed company needs an equal share of the government's money. The "every opportunity needs equal funding" crowed shows up and it's the end of intelligent investment.
I don't mean to say that all government investment is bad. I don't know how we'd make progress in most science without it, but even there, there's a 10-to-1 stupidity factor. Do we really want to spend another 10 billion on donut-shaped magnet fusion when we all know it wont work? Why not throw a tiny bit at molten salt reactors, which we proved work well in the 60's? We're in this weird place where we require government involvement to advance many critical fields of basic science, yet we know the money will be spent stupidly. At the same time, a half billion loan to a company like Tesla made all the difference. Where do you go from here?
Speaking as a blatant democrat and businessman, I agree with your first paragraph. Tesla had a good chance. I cheered the decision to extend the government backed loan. They'd already produced the most successful electric car in my lifetime, losing not too much money in the process, while developing core competencies - the drive train and battery packs. The basic principle that government should invest where there is a track record of success falls on deaf ears in Washington. Companies like Fisker did not meet this threshold, and Solyndra was essentially an idea on paper, worth more research, but not a half billion dollars. I think a 1 in 3 success rate is about the best we could expect from government investments, regardless of the party in charge. No VCs I know of have a 1 in 3 success rate. Still... Fisker was a doomed investment. I was pissed when I heard of it. I'm just glad we never gave them the second half of the money.
As for the second part, yes democrats pushed for bad loans, but unregulated banks got unregulated insurance on unregulated derivatives, while everyone knew that they were all too big to fail. That lack of regulation on businesses that the government will give a trillion dollars to before allowing to fail is the GOP's fault. There's blame to go around, and that's not rewriting history. Still, good post overall.
Just to back up my point, in 1998, or 1999, I had my wife sell all her Apple stock and buy Red Hat. I could describe why I felt that was wise, but reality clearly proved me wrong. Can Yahoo turn around? I have to say I'd love to see it.
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Ok, I see how this is a real issue now. If it costs $50 to store a gnome ($100 for a 1T drive, and 500 gigabytes per genome of machine data), and the lab wants a copy as well as the user, and a backup somewhere, that's $150, which is significant when we imagine the entire process dropping to $1,000. The guys drawing blood and extracting DNA need their money, too, which frankly should be $100 to $200. Even shipping isn't cheap. Dry ice all the way to Korea has to cost a ton. My package was 17 lbs! When trying to get the overall cost below $1,000, every dollar counts.
On the positive side, Moore's Law still applies to data storage, which will get cheaper every year. On the other hand, our genome is not likely to require more storage over time. This might be a short-term problem.
Yeah... I know you're right. I'm a fast learner, and I jump into all sorts of fields and make waves. One thing I've learned is that being smart gets you only so far. There's no substituted for real-world experience.
Well... I hope I can get all the read data. Since I'm doing exome sequencing, rather than genome sequencing, shouldn't the raw data be something like 100X less, or around 5Gb per exome?
Will do! I wasn't expecting so much generosity in reply to my post, but thanks! I'm no dummy, but all I have is a Wikipedia level of knowledge of genetics, so any help I can get will be very much appreciated.
Thanks, guys, for the CNV info. I'm doing only 30-deep sequencing, but I will get 3 exome sequences all probably having the same defect on the X chromosome. Combining the data should give me some reasonable CNV detection ability.
Thanks! I will check out snpEff. I certainly will need some help, so if you don't mind, I will contact you when I get the data. Same thing for the guy above who offered to help.
Thanks! I certainly will need some guidance, so if you don't mind, I'll ping you when I get the data. Same thing for the guy below who also offered to help.
Please... entire DNA genomes are tiny... on the order of 1Gb, with no compression. Taking into account the huge similarities to published genomes, we can compress that by at least 1000X. What they are talking about is the huge amount of data spit out by the sequencing machines in order to determine your genome. Once determined, it's tiny.
That said, what I need is raw machine data. I'm having to do my own little exome research project. My family has a very rare form of X-linked color blindness that is most likely caused by a single gene defect on our X chromosome. It's no big deal, but now I'm losing central vision, with symptoms most similar to late-onset Starardt's Disease. My UNC ophthalmologist beat the experts at John Hopkins and Jacksonville's hospital, and made the correct call, directly refuting the other doctor's diagnosis of Stargartd's. She though I had something else and that my DNA would prove it. She gave me the opportunity to have my exome sequenced, and she was right.
So, I've got something pretty horrible, and my ophthalmologist thinks it's most likely related to my unusual form of color blindness. My daughter carries this gene, as does my cousin and one of her sons. Gene research to the rescue?!? Unfortunately... no. There are simply too few people like us. So... being a slashdot sort of geek who refuses to give up, I'm running my own study. Actually, the UNC researchers wanted to work with me... all I'd have to do is bring my extended family from California to Chapel Hill a couple of times over a couple of years and have them see doctors at UNC. There's simply no way I could make that happen.
Innovative companies to the rescue... This morning, Axeq, a company headquartered in MD, received my families DNA for exome sequencing at their Korean lab. They ran an exome sequencing special in April: $600 per exome, with an order size minimum of six. They have been great to work with, and accepted my order for only four. Bioserve, also in MD, did the DNA extraction from whole blood, and they have been even more helpful. The blood extraction labs were also incredibly helpful, once we found the right places (very emphatically not Labcorp or Quest Diagnostics). The Stanford clinic lab manager was unbelievably helpful, and in LA, the lab director at the San Antonio Hospital Lab went way overboard, So far, I have to give Axeq and Bioserve five stars out of five, and the blood draw labs deserve a six.
Assuming I get what I'm expecting, I'll get a library of matched genes, and also all the raw machine output data, for four relatives. The output data is what I really need, since our particular mutation is not currently in the gene database. Once I get all the data, I'll need to do a bit of coding to see if I can identify the mutation. Unfortunately, there are several ways that this could be impossible. For example, "copy number variations", or CNVs, if they go on for over a few hundred base pairs, are unable to be detected with current technology. Ah... the life of a geek. This is yet another field I have to get familiar with...
I've got to call you on the CISC statement, though the RISC/CISC debate has been dead for many years now. As you pointed out, modern CISC processors translate CISC instructions into micro-ops that look a lot like a RISC instruction set, and every modern RISC processor has added so much hardware that it's a joke to call them "reduced" anything. At this point, the density of the instruction set is important in that it reduces cache misses, and some CISC processors beat some RISC processors in this space, but the ARM Thumb architecture blows x86 out of the water, IIRC, in code side. However, data cache misses far out weigh instruction cache misses now days, so even instruction density isn't very useful anymore for speed. I think now days the only real difference has been the applications driving CPU design. ARM is low power and small first, and powerful second. x86 is the other way around. It's cool to see these variations of these architectures invading each other's turf.
Back in 1986 (when I took Dave Patterson's computer architecture course), CISC processors used microcode. That was practically their definition. RISC processors were more pipelined, and did more per clock. They often had Harvard architectures with separate instruction and data busses, while CISC processors clung onto a single bus. The microcode architecture was inherently slow (a whole clock was used just to read the microcode ROM), and was only commonly used because of the great flexibility it provided, in addition to the simplified design effort. For example, it helped propel IBM to greatness by having machines with compatible instruction sets decade after decade, even though the hardware changed radically, and it helped Intel win the CPU wars because of compatibility rather than CPU performance. While Intel worried about compatibility and keeping costs down, Sun Microsystems built fantastic RISC based workstations that put Intel CPUs to shame. However, Moore's Law was on Intel's side. When transistors were cheap enough, Intel switched from microcode to effectively a CISC-to-RISC translator (micro-ops). That ended the RISC/CISC debate, AFAIK, and enabled Intel to compete with CPUs from Sun. The complexity of that translator is just too small to worry about compared to all the stuff both CISC and RISC architectures have bolted on since then. High end RISC and CISC processors have very little difference of any significant meaning now days. At first, RISC won, by being faster. Then CISC won by becoming RISC and remaining compatible with Windows, and then RISC lost by becoming complex. Then RISC won by being smaller and lower power (ARM). Now CISC is being shrunk and made low power again. I think this all has a ton more to do with ARM vs Intel then the encoding of their instruction sets.
It is the nature of large bureaucracies to behave as an evil Frankenstein monster made up of the weakest attributes of many fine people. This is true also of large corporations. The only solution I've seen is strong leadership from the top. I know a number of lawyers, and I would say they are all fine people. However, as a group, the justice system they are part of take people for all they are worth. It's not any one lawyers fault... it's just the system that's in place. However, it's the system built by the monster made up of lawyers.
Take my mother's case. Her husband died leaving a long complicated trust written with many mistakes. His lawyer made two amendments over two decades, but never read the trust before writing the amendments. Naturally, there are huge errors and contradictions. Now, the lawyer screwed up, plain and simple. He even admits the trust has drafting mistakes, and has offered testimony clarifying what happened, and what my mother's husband's intent was. His firm and a lawyer they work with have made $200K so far defending my mother, and depositions for the trial haven't even started. No one in the legal profession expects my mother to loose the case, but they do expect her to loose $400K in the process, almost all of her savings. Everyone thinks it's terrible, even the lawyers charging all the money. My money-crazy step-sister managed to find a lawyer that respectable lawyers hate. He's not one of the upstanding ones. However, the dozen or so people being paid so far are good people, and they all hate to see my mother fleeced like this.
Are you really going to defend this system?
Nice link! That's one thing I love about Slashdot... if you can put up with all the noise and offensive posts, there's often a nugget worth waiting for. I hope they mod your link +5 informative.
The tools for private communication are there, and geeks like me contribute what we can (not that much in my case). Instead of saying "it's not rocket science", we should say, "it's not crypto." This stuff is hard, which is why it's fun.
His statement that there is no practical way to safeguard privacy is true to a point. No one in the world is going to decrypt my one-time-pad encrypted email that I encrypt on a machine not connected to the Internet, transfer by USB stick, and email as an attachment. Instead, if anyone really cares, they'll just get my data the old fashioned way. It's really a matter of how much money the eavesdropper is willing to spend. Anything over I'm guessing maybe $100,000, and they just hire an expert to bug my house, car, cell phone, clothing, have an affair with my wife and run dog. If we care to, and have at least a small clue, we can encrypt whatever we want securely. At least if no one really cares to know what we're encrypting.
I agree with Google, Microsoft, and friends. We should let our service providers be honest with us, and have a public debate about privacy vs. security.
I don't have any secrets. Not one. Now that doesn't mean I post all my passwords on my blog,
I wish the story of what my money-crazy evil step-sister is doing to my mother would go viral... $200K in pointless legal expenses and counting. I hope Barr get's through this without much damage, but unfortunately that is the exception to the rule. All the social media attention in the world wont save Barr a dime. The law's not about justice. It's about lawyers legally stealing money from people.
Absolutely right! If you're lucky, you'll never have rights worth enough to pay a lawyer to sue you. My 70+ year old widowed mother is being sued by my money-crazy step-sister. There is zero merit to the case, but my poor mother has already had incurred over $200K in expenses, and they haven't even started the effort to go to trial. The judge couldn't throw out the case because the law says disputes of this type can only be decided at trial. The system is set up to take away your money and give it to lawyers, plain and simple. Anyone without enough money to play this game can be taken advantage of by any company that cares to, and the law is set up to benefit lawyers here as well.
There is a defense. If you're bright, and a fast learner, you can represent yourself, and hopefully not cock it up. It will take even more of your time than hiring lawyers, but the expenses will be tiny. Naturally, judges, who all happen to be lawyers, take a dim view of this approach. It's a good thing the people passing the laws that lawyers live by aren't lawyers themselves! ... Oh, wait!
Seriously, is anyone out there in geek land even considering MySQL for a brand spanking new project with no history attached to MySQL? I don't know of any. It's just a matter of time now for things to swing from MySQL to MariaDB, though I think a lot of geeks will take a good look at other options like PostgreSQL before switching. Unless Oracle does something really interesting with MySQL, it's dead... seriously... no one in the year 2120 will even remember MySQL except for unfortunate geeks working for the government and large banks who will continue doing new projects with MySQL until the end of time.
I'm hoping this is an issue everyone can finally agree on, but you're probably right. Besides, Fox News is only making an issue of this to bash Obama a bit. As soon as it looks like public support starts swinging towards actually ending this invasion of privacy, they'll go on the warpath to defend America against terrorists, and all my conservative friends will forget why they were upset about the program. They'll also deny Google, Microsoft, and friends the right to tell us what unspeakable acts the government forces them to do, and after a while, average Joe will even forget that there is massive government spying on Americans. It is the nature of most of us to want to believe in a higher authority without question, whether God or Country.
Anyone remember Bush selling us torcher? I remember at least 2/3rds of the morons near where I live were convinced. Secret CIA prisons? Yeah, they're all for it. Guantanamo? They made sure to let their congressmen they want to keep our gulag open with the Red White and Blue over it. Remember how a majority of Democrats were against gay marriage 6 months before Obama went on a warpath for gay rights? I happen to be pretty happy about that one, but the insanely rapid shift in public opinion was due to PR. How about the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq? Even I was too dumb to see that mess coming.
I'm thrilled Google, Microsoft, and friends have asked for some sunlight on the way our fundamental right privacy to privacy has been run over rough-shod. At least if we stupid morons are told the whole story, I can blame ourselves for being morons rather than ignorant. I prefer to be a moron. Our tech giants at least have enough spine to ask for a tiny bit of sanity... except of course for Cisco, who is making a killing world wide on government spying and censorship.
So you consider the secret password to my hard drive as a secret the government can torcher out of me legally, but my secret off shore account information in my head is protected by the 5th amendment? Somehow, the physical location of the locked away data is what is important to you, rather than the reasons for having the 5th amendment in the first place. I have a secret, and I'm allowed to keep it. That's what they 5th says.
Now, to compare against forced blood draw, the court has to have a court order like they do to search your house. This was determined to be a right to privacy thing, rather than a right to keep a secret. They decided that a 5th amendment protected secret has to be some idea in your brain, and that it doesn't cover taking samples from your body. That's a pretty scary line they crossed, but at least it helps us put away rapists with more confidence that we got the right guy. Now, the fact that our communication, location, phone calls, emails, and internet browsing is mostly available to be data-mined by the NSA without any process at all is new since 9/11. The NSA knows your brand of toilet paper and the last time you slept at your girl friend's apartment, as well as who you had lunch with, and the contents of that last non-encrypted e-mail you sent. They've correlated that with the likelihood that dorks like you and me who post openly on Slashdot are going to do something violent. The right to privacy has been bent over a chair and anal-raped. Hopefully, we're at least a little safer for it. Are we?
Wow... you have a warped sense of self-incrimination. I have a secret in my head and you're asking me to tell you. If I do, I spend years in jail. If I don't tell you, I go free. The 5th amendments stops you from torturing the secret out of me. It really is that simple. They can't ask me for the combination to my safe, either, but they can bust the door off. The only reason the feds are trying to pretend this isn't a 5th amendment violation is they don't currently have a powerful enough blow torch to get through your electronic safe's door. There is simply no difference in asking for my hard-drive password and asking for all of my secret off shore account information. If you allow one, you have to allow the other.
Audible is great for a lot of people, just not people like me. I agree the reading is generally high quality. On Android, the speed-up feature used to totally suck, but lately, they've copied my pitch-synchronous algorithms from libsonic, which I can tell from the new and improved sound quality. It's perfectly legal for them to do that: I give the software away as public domain software.
For around half of blind people, Audible is wonderful. For people like me, Audible is almost useless. First of all, their software only lets me go up to 3X speed up. I listen at about 550 words per minute when listening to fiction (3.5X), and 600 wpm (4X) on my computer. To learn to listen that fast, you have to train your ear to the voice. If the reader on Audible were the same for every book, that would be possible, but unfortunately, it's a different reader more often than not. With a text to speech engine, it's the same voice all the time, making it far easier to train for speed listening. The most popular voice with blind speed listeners is Eloquence on Windows, which is the same as Voxin on Linux. I prefer the Mary TTS artic "rms" voice because it's free software (no connection to RMS... probably). I also read far too many books to afford Audible, and Audible's selection is too weak for me.
However, Audible does rock... except that they are owned by evil Amazon! I've never seen the blind picket any company other than Amazon. It's pretty funny. They can't read the signs they carry! If you remember back when Amazon turned off their crappy built-in text-to-speech feature in Kindle for most e-books, you may recall Amazon claiming that the Author's Guild made them do it. That's total BS. No other e-reader company caved in this way, including Apple and Google. Amazon just used the Author's Guild as an excuse to stop their kindles from competing with their highly profitable audio book products at Audible. Amazon's company motto: Be Evil.
I read an insane number of ebooks each year, just not with my eyes, because my central vision is shot. Instead I pay Bookshare.org $50/year, and read as many ebooks as I like. The funny thing is when I could see properly, I never spent that much money on books. Now that I have to listen to wav files I create using the Mary TTS text to speech system, I listen to books all the time! It's awesome.
So, DRM-ed ebooks are especially evil for people like me. I'll often read the first two books in a trilogy on Bookshare, and the third will only be available on Amazon. Fortunately, you can crack Amazon DRM in Windows, which means I wind up paying them over $50/year for that last freaking volume. It's a huge PITA. not because I have to pay, but it's actually very time consuming to convert DRMed books to plain text for my text-to-speech engine. I'd much prefer to buy from any company other than Amazon, but because they're the biggest, they have the most cracked software. There's actually a law that makes it legal for me to crack it, because I can't read the God Damed Fucking DRM-ed Amazon Kindles!
Code architecture is key, as is a common coding methodology among the team. Brilliant coders often are loners, and if you put them on a team, each may do what they normally do and do their own thing. You'll have a program written in several different languages, and an integration nightmare.
Here's an integration nightmare that continues to this day, thanks to lame computer language design. To reduce integration problems, a common architecture in EDA is to read a design into a common set of in-memory data structures, and to split up the extensive process of automating design implementation into several "tools". Each tool runs in sequence, moving the process forward, for example we run digital high level synthesis, then lower level technology mapping, placement, and then routing. They read from those common data structures, and write back to them. I have never seen a group succeed who did not use this architecture. The problem is how do you extend the objects in the common data structures so your tool can manipulate them? In C++, we use inheritance to extend the functionality of a class, but these shared common objects have already been instantiated by the time your tool runs, and they don't have your extensions. You can still inherit from there classes, but you'll have to copy all the objects to new objects of your subclasses to be able to use them, doubling the memory required. Alternatively, you could have a void pointer on each object in memory and use run-time hacks to cross-link them to your new extension objects, and throughout your code you wind up going back and forth through the void pointer. Various better systems are often employed, but they're all hacks to work around limitations in languages like C++, Java, D, and C#. If a team doesn't agree beforehand just how they are going to share objects and extend them, the effort is doomed before it begins.
I completely agree. I should have left off the gratuitous bashing of the GOP, but I was responding to some gratuitous bashing of DEMs. If either had a clue in this area, we'd be all over it. The one thing I think everyone agrees on is the government is massively inept at investing in pretty much everything. You get guys with a track record and a plan, although risky, like Tesla, and we decide to fund them. Good deal. Then we get Solyndra and Fisker and God knows who else and every stupid representative of any town that will benefit crying that their favorite doomed company needs an equal share of the government's money. The "every opportunity needs equal funding" crowed shows up and it's the end of intelligent investment.
I don't mean to say that all government investment is bad. I don't know how we'd make progress in most science without it, but even there, there's a 10-to-1 stupidity factor. Do we really want to spend another 10 billion on donut-shaped magnet fusion when we all know it wont work? Why not throw a tiny bit at molten salt reactors, which we proved work well in the 60's? We're in this weird place where we require government involvement to advance many critical fields of basic science, yet we know the money will be spent stupidly. At the same time, a half billion loan to a company like Tesla made all the difference. Where do you go from here?
Speaking as a blatant democrat and businessman, I agree with your first paragraph. Tesla had a good chance. I cheered the decision to extend the government backed loan. They'd already produced the most successful electric car in my lifetime, losing not too much money in the process, while developing core competencies - the drive train and battery packs. The basic principle that government should invest where there is a track record of success falls on deaf ears in Washington. Companies like Fisker did not meet this threshold, and Solyndra was essentially an idea on paper, worth more research, but not a half billion dollars. I think a 1 in 3 success rate is about the best we could expect from government investments, regardless of the party in charge. No VCs I know of have a 1 in 3 success rate. Still... Fisker was a doomed investment. I was pissed when I heard of it. I'm just glad we never gave them the second half of the money.
As for the second part, yes democrats pushed for bad loans, but unregulated banks got unregulated insurance on unregulated derivatives, while everyone knew that they were all too big to fail. That lack of regulation on businesses that the government will give a trillion dollars to before allowing to fail is the GOP's fault. There's blame to go around, and that's not rewriting history. Still, good post overall.
Just to back up my point, in 1998, or 1999, I had my wife sell all her Apple stock and buy Red Hat. I could describe why I felt that was wise, but reality clearly proved me wrong. Can Yahoo turn around? I have to say I'd love to see it.