Kids do stupid things. That's aout as newsworthy as the sun rising I the East. Within a few years, stupid comments you made way back when will be recognized as such.
But while there is real slander going on, that's the extreme edge of a real sea-change going on. Sites like RateYourProfessor.com have fundamentally changed how studets and learning institutions interract! My wife, daughter, and two oldest sons are all attending CSUs and they all rely on RateYourProfessor HEAVILY to decide what classes to take. They find that it's quite accurate, too!
This is something that strikes at the very heart of (IMHO) antiquated conncepts like tenure, which often works to cement boring, mediocre teachers into irrevokable positions in schools, draining the will of otherwise good students, and making education more expensive and less valuable to all others involved.
Like most technology, they assume it's never going to be used to its potential. Take my laptop -- only when I actively cool it or balance it precariously several inches off the desk can I max out both cores. Try that with it sitting on its little rubber feet, and it overheats and throttles itself to 800 mhz. Try that when using the video card for anything stressful at all, and it shuts off.
Tell me about it! A few years back, I bought "Max Payne II", and it played mighty fine on my laptop - for about 15 minutes. Then it would suddenly stop rendering smoothly in 3-D, and the framerate would drop to maybe 1-2 frames per second, and rebooting (usually) took care of it.
After updating EVERYING and checking for new drivers, I finally discovered that if I let the computter "sit" for a while, it would start working again. That's when I began to suspect heating problems, and found that when I played the game with the computer suspended 1/2 inch off the table with a couple of books, and pointed a small 10" bookshelf fan at the back so there was lots of air flow underneath, that I could play all afternoon like that.
The truth is that all that power really is commonly used, but not continuously. A second or 5 here and there don't represent a major cooling problem.
The same is true for cars! I found this out when I became a pilot. Aircraft engines are usually under-rated, air-cooled engines. In short, the carburetor is too small to allow the engine to perform at full capacity. And it's necessary! Take a look at the usage pattern of a plane, in terms of a car doing the same thing.
1) Start the car. Ambient temperature is about 80 degrees. Nice day!
2) Warm it up for perhaps 3-5 minutes to "taxi to the freeway".
3) Goose it at 100% full power, pedal to the medal.
4) Leave the car floored for another 20 minutes.
5) Climb a giant, 12,000 foot tall mountain in a long straightaway at around 100 miles per hour, with the pedal to the medal the whole way.
6) Once at the top of the mountain, drive in a straight line at well over 150 MPH, while the outside temperature is well below freezing.
Stopping here - that behavior would be just nuts in a car! Probably 9 of 10 cars would self-destruct in conditions anywhere close. That single-engine aircraft manage it with an accident rate that's comparable to cars is quite a feat!
But, it's being slow is an implementation detail, not a language detail. The fact is, you were able to write some code that the machine "understood" well enough to perform. The rest is just implementation detail. There are many C/C++ compilers, all of which have various performance/price/compatibility trade-offs. Surprisingly, the most popular compiler is also one of the slowest: gcc generally prefers cross-platform capability over performance, and neither compiles the quickest nor produces the quickest executing code.
But, NONE of this deals with the real reason why not everybody can be a good programmer. A good programmer must be able to precisely articulate exactly what he/she wants to have the machine do. And, it's quite surprising how few people can really do that. Most people think that much of what programmers and computers do really is just so much hand-waving, and while they crave the power of a programmer, they don't crave the attention to detail that something so simple as transposing two numbers can destroy.
Yet, to get something done, you MUST know that you can't mix up a divisor and a dividend. This is a detail, and one of countless details that a programmer is paid to articulate. The REAL skill in being a good programmer isn't in the details of XYZ language, but in the details of the problem being solved!
Languages are progressing to be easier to code, and this is a good thing. Programmers are paid to solve real problems, and in the process, have to solve implementation problems. Languages that minimize implementation overhead give programmers more skill to solve more complex and more challenging real-world problems.
Don't worry - the world won't have any real shortages of problem-solving, logical people any time soon. Today's problems are getting harder, not easier!
Many times, developers will have a list of features that they figure are "1.0". They may not have reached all the features yet, but the features developed thusfar may be very stable.
A case in point is my own set of backup scripts (this is not) Backup Buddy. I've been using them for years, they work very well, stable even with very large sets of data. (Well into the TBs currently, managing over 100 backup sources in 24 hour rotation)
But I don't consider them "1.0" yet because I always envisioned a handy-dandy web interface for managing backup rotations, verifying backups (currently working) and recovering files 1-by-1 securely. So, I edit config files. (aw shucks)
Sure, dedicated hardware will work faster than emulation in software. But what about the "middle of the road" EG: FPGA? How well could an FPGA allow for actual neuronic simulation with quasi-dedicated hardware, and at what cost?
Sure, directly fabricated silicon will outperform software emulation on GP hardware. But it's not just a question of silicon vs software...
A more appropriate name for it is "Chrome Fullscreen".
An even more appropriate name for it is "Chrome's Google-Confusion-Fest". Because Google is starting to bewilder me with parallel, seemingly conflicting options!
1) There's Chromium O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser.
2) There's Android O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser, that's incompatible with Chromium.
3) There's Google Gears, which is pretty cool, but doesn't work with Chromium O/S, or Chrome the browser.
4) There's Chrome itself, whicch is just a browser, without a distro of any kind, and paradoxically, doesn't work on Linux.
In short, while Google has been lobbing all this juicy-looking stuff out onto the marketplace, it's been set up in such a way as the boxes are likely to fall on anxious developers.
This looks to me more like a minefield than a fruited plain!
Come on, Google! If you want me, a developer, to "jump on board" with your stuff, you'd better get it all talking to each other, because your deeply fragmented product lines are causing me to shun your products.
and.... you could have figured out what I was talking about by looking up "Cessna 182" on Google...
Also, "1 moving part" could easily be defined as an electric motor with a prop bolted on. Not that the "1 moving part" couldn't be dissected, but that, when they are bolted together, they move together without friction between the parts. They function as "1 moving part" and this increases reliability.
But since you're commenting, what do you mean by "uses direct fuel"? Jets are fast because they aren't limited by the spead of propeller blade tips, which become very inefficient as they exceed the speed of sound. It's difficult to get propeller-driven aircraft to exceed about 350 MPH or so, and near impossible to even make this with a larger plane, since larger planes have larger props and that results in faster movement on the correspondingly larger propellers.
But propeller-driven craft are considerably more fuel-efficient than jets at lower speeds. That's were aircraft such as the single-engine turboprop TBM 850, which provides near-jet performance at a fraction of the cost of a jet for smaller aircraft, with fewer moving parts than a piston-single.
If my company ever gets big enough to justify a "corporate plane", it would probably be a turboprop, since they're much cheaper than jets (by near HALF) and very similar in actual performance.
That would mean an efficiency of greater than 100%. Which is obviously nonsense. ICEs are generally 35-45% efficient in peak operation.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind, too. But "efficiency" can mean different things depending on context. You could mean "time efficiency" - how much time gets wasted getting a job done, which would be irregardless of other resource usage. You are talking about "efficiency" in terms of ability to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, and you are right, there.
But read the article. By context, I think they are actually talking about strength-to-weight ratio - how much useful power you get per pound of fuel/battery/engine. Combine that with the informal nature of the article, and it kinda makes sense that way.
Me? I'm curious about a system with obvious advantages for private aviation:
1) Better power/weight ratio, which is big. Even in a fairly substantial Cessna 182, when you take off with full fuel, you have to be honest in considering the actual weight of your passengers.
2) Fewer moving parts: Few pieces of equipment rival the reliability of an electric motor. If fuel cells are a simple chemical process without moving parts, the chances of failure could potentially drop through the floor. And that makes flying safer for everyone - most importantly, me.
Everything about a plane is about reducing failure rates. They are expressly designed to reduce mechanical complexity to reduce the chances of failure. The fuel mixture on a private plane is adjusted manually. The throttle is very simple. There are actually two ignition systems on each plane, and rather than use an electrical coil like a car, they each use an independent magneto system, like a lawn mower, so that an electrical failure (like a blown fuse) won't stop the engine from working.
If you could reduce the number of moving parts to ONE.... wow. That would be... AWESOME.
I've been waiting for the next platform shift. It's been moving towards cloud computing for about a decade, now, but aside from killing the client-server application, the Internet really hasn't caused any major change in platform.
We all still boot an O/S and run applications on the O/S, some of which are Internet-access applications. But it's struck me for some time that the browser really *should* be the next generation O/S. With plugins and all, Firefox is showing lots of signs, but it's just not stepping up to the plate - I guess the vision isn't quite there - the guys at Firefox still see the browser as a browser.
A decade ago, the idea of moving any kind of application "into the cloud" was a laughable concept that most people wouldn't dare touch. Nowadays, it's so common that perhaps 50% of all software development is now oriented around "cloud computing". I wouldn't be surprised if the number was even higher.
So Google's taking this trend to its logical conclusion: why bother with "local" at all?
It's an interesting take, and one that's sure to really upset the Winopoly if it's got any success at all. The flaws of the Winopoly are obvious and horrible - security woes too many to number, spam spewing from the many leaks, disks that crash, and an Operating System so big, complex, and cumbersome to work on that not even one of the wealthiest companies in the world can do much about it.
After investing untold billions into the Windows codebase, the result was Windows Vista/Windows 7, which is a bit prettier but certainly won't be introducing meaningful change. It might even be more secure, as much as something larger and more complicated is ever more secure than simpler, ancestral systems.
But Chromium takes us a whole new direction. My guess is that it *belongs* in a VM/application style software stack, where you can either run it alone on a netbook or something, or run it as a Win/Lin/OSX application. VMWare makes this a reality, even if it's never set up as an "application".
My guess? It's going to succeed, but in about 5 years' time. Google really needs to unify Chromium and Android. They should be virtually identical platforms. Microsoft is going the other way with IE - trying to pound the web, kicking and screaming, back into Windows proprietary extensions.
Yeah, that's why I'd never trust anything that could potentially write directly to my brain. Some sort of helmet thing might be uncomfortable, but at least you can rip it off if they (trojans / hackers / foreign agents) start getting frisky with your mind. Presuming that you have enough motor control left to do the ripping. Perhaps a panic button; hooked up to bladder control or something. (only partly joking)
Explain to me how potentially "writing directly to your brain" is functionally any different than manipulation through the control of information? Advertising works because when you advertise, people buy your shit. You might find this fact annoying, but it's true, and it's one of a million examples of human manipulation therefrom.
For another example, see "Ditto-Head" Rush Limbaugh supporter/worshippers. They are convinced that gubbmint can't do anything but tax and waste money. Listen to them! Never mind the "free society" protected by that very gubbmint...
You are already manipulated and controlled for fun and profit, and it's part of the social animals that is who we actually are.
he easy "out" would be that you weren't dead, and you owe them for unpaid premiums.
Sadly, there's even precedence for this interpretation. People "die" all the time in hospitals, and are revived. Heart stops beating, no breathing, etc. Bring out the ekg and the shock plates...
If you can remember your life before your "death" then you are the same person.
However, this interpretation would become very interesting if Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity actually happens - if you "upload" a copy of your self-pattern to the cloud, which one is you? And if you make a backup copy of your cloud self, then execute it, do you split your inheritance? Does inheritance even mean anything if you are effectively a sim in a video game? And if, as a sim, in a video game, you are able to interact (perhaps by wireless?) to a robot, is the robot alive?
The only meaningful way to do this is to make an HTTP call to self, which is expensive, or write it in C or something and shell out, which makes doing it cross-cluster painful without adding lots of overhead and complexity.
PHP just isn't the "right" tool for this type of job. Projects like PHP/Erlang might mitigate this, somewhat. Thus my probing in re: HPC and Erlang, since massively multicore is obviously the future.
In other news: it's surprisingly difficult to perform useful neurosurgery with a hammer.
You're bringing PHP and "rendering PDF reports" into a discussion about HPC?
Yes. Because in a few years, hardware comparable to what is now "HPC" will be routine. We've already jumped from unicore, uniprocessor servers to almost a hundred cores. Just a decade or so, a 100-core computing cluster was HPC, even if not near the "top 500".
And you propose Erlang as some kind of solution? Nobody doing HPC is using Erlang.
But... Erlang was designed for scalability! It was DESIGNED to smoothly scale from a unicore to multicore to LOBOS style computing. If Erlang isn't a "player" in the HPC space, why the !@# not? And if it's not a player, what is, and what do I need to do to transition to it over the next decade or so?
As usual for Slashdot, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Since you posted this on Slashdot... (I'll put the mirror away)
We're still at the point where unthreaded languages (like PHP) are still viable. For example, we use PHP in a complex, multi-server, multi-core cluster, and it's "share nothing" approach scales quite nicely, in that having more and more users hitting the systemm on separate servers doesn't really cause a problem, since there's virtually no cross-communication going on.
But there's a scalability limit in what you can do "PER PROCESS". There are some very processor intensive functions that simply take a while to do (such as rendering a 100 page report, then converting to PDF) and there's currently no way to spread the load in PHP beyond a single core.
At the other extreme, we have almost the same problem - having such a large number of cores that resources commonly shared among threads and processes is really no longer feasible.
Languages like Erlang have a "shared nothing" approach, but not at the process/thread level, but at the function level. Individual functions within a process are themselves "share nothing" and thus can easily scale across multiple cores, processors, and servers in a networked cluster. (at least, this is the theory)
So how 'bout it, folks? Where are the benchmarks showing how languages DESIGNED to take advantage of parallel processors and clusters actually scale up in the real world? Is Erlang the cat's meow when discussing systems of this scale?
I'm not expecting to see my example process (100 page PDF reports) scale up smoothly to 250,000 cores, but I sure would like to see it scale up smoothly to a dozen or two!
Yeah, I don't understand the attitude that things are always a click away.
OK. For me, they are.
It takes a long time to download, and the internet is not always stable or available.
It takes me something less than 1 hour to download a 1 hour show. This is called "streaming"....
If you're streaming you'll still want to back up or skip forward.
And I commonly do. It takes about 10 seconds for the stream to resume when I do.
If you've paid for something, even a measly $1, you'd like the ability to watch it twice.
So... I push play again? (I don't pay per show, I pay Netflix a flat price, and Hulu has ads, but they aren't nearly as bad as standard TV)
Backing up to DVD is a good option. Maybe not for Cheers reruns of course, but if you're watching next year's equivalent of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, it could be worth keeping.
I could see myself buying season DVDs. I'm more likely to rent then as needed from Netflix, because after 2 viewings, I won't care for at least 5-10 years.
I'm still wrapping my head around the idea that some people have internet good enough to stream this high definition video in real time, fast enough to treat the whole thing like it was on Tivo. They've probably got cable modems, which they'd have to give up if they got rid of cable...
I have a 3 Mbit DSL connection. Most shows are honestly not true "HD" quality, but they do come in much higher resolutions than old school TV. I rarely notice bad image quality ruining the experience. I have a "buffering..." incident perhaps 1x every hour or so, and it usually lasts much less than an average commercial break on old school TV.
And no one is going to let you skip commercials forever without having a subscription fee.
With Hulu/Netflix, I can't skip the ads. Since there aren't 6 of them every 12 1/2 minutes, I don't mind. Netflix has no ads. Hulu has ONE ad where you'd normally see a commercial break. Both are acceptable to me.
The whole "everything should be free, and high quality entertainment will spontaneously produce itself" idea seems very suspect. Too much like the whole dot-com bubble where visions of the future didn't synch up with reality.
I agree! I pay Netflix about $15/month. I pay for my DSL service. Sites that I don't pay into have ads. This seems reasonable to me.
Imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to watch is available from the internet instantly for a flat rate all you can eat cheap price. That's where we are headed. In that world, why bother maintaining enough expensive disk space (with backups) for a video format that will be obsolete 6 months after you download it?
I don't have to imagine - it's my life right now! I write this on my Linux laptop, while my bedroom Mac Mini (with a 23" wide-screen monitor) is playing a show, streamed off the Internet. (in this case, it's a Law and Order episode being used as "background noise" to drown out my daughter and friends who are having a slumber party) I watch what I want, when I want, without any kind of scheduling. Although there are occasional "buffering... buffering..." glitches, they amount to perhaps a minute or two every other hour - far less time than an old-school commercial break. Since the switch to digital TV, every TV in my house has disappeared except for one old 19" set used for console video games.
While I tend towards "old school", and watch standard American/British TV on sites like Hulu/Netflix, my kids are far more likely (than I) to also watch foreign shows on Hulu or other flash sites. In particular, they like Anime and obscure Martial Arts shows that are often hosted on oversees websites.
In my household, we watch all our TV off the Internet, on demand. It's not only lots cheaper than Cable/Dish, it's actually a far better viewing experience. And I can take the $1000/year that we USED to spend on our primo Dish service (with all the channels and a 2-head DVR) and buy a rather nice computer.
I hate the ridiculous anti-free nature of the app store, but it's not hard to see why Apple would be concerned. The fear is that if a program gets into the App Store that allows any sort of user-provided data to be executed, then evil unlicensed apps could be delivered to the platform through that interpreter.
This problem is easily solved: Just require the code to be signed!
Although there are many upsides to interpreted languages, perhaps top of the heap is a short application development cycle. But I would happily throw a couple hundred bux for an interpretive SDK that let's me run unsigned code, so that I could develop my appz. Then, when I'm ready to sell, I get the code signed by Apple.
My company vends a product written in an common, interpreted language. It's closed-source, so we use a software obfuscation tool. It's largely the same idea...
Have you ever actually HAD a job? Because, in case you haven't noticed, jobs aren't all that easy to come by. Perhaps telling the CEO of YOUR company off like this won't get you escorted out immediately by security, but it probably would in his case. I can't think of a scenario won't get the poor guy's arse immediately fired, but I can think of plenty of scenarios where he ends up being sued. And even if (LONG odds here) the boss decides to fix things, you will never, ever, ever be promoted or see a raise. More likely you'll get lots of 'incidents' filed in your personnel file and you'll get fired in a few months. You'll have no memory of these 'incidents' of being late, rude, and sexist, and they will be filed anonymously by people 'afraid of repercussions'.
OP, here's my advice.
1) Keep a log of the times you've been asked to violate copyright law. Keep it at home, and enter in stuff after hours. Object gently when you are asked to borken the lawz, just so that you can honestly say that you did object.
2) Look for another job.
3) When you find one, call BSA and offer them your logbook. Take a vacation on the money you get.
OR...
1) STFU! Keep your nose to the wheel and enjoy the piratezes softwarez. Save a bit of money so that if (when?) the software company gets audited, and you're out of a job, you have something to fall back on.
First rule of Verizon: the people in the stores know nothing and are not backed up by the home office.
Second rule of Verizon: neither do the people on the phone. In fact, the only thing that people who work at Verizon are particularly good at is coming up with reasons why you need to pay, even when the contract is cancelled.
Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.
That's about right for anything having to do with Verizon Wireless.
Please, for the love of God and all that is decent in this world, steer clear of Verizon Wireless!!!
I am a Verizon Wireless customer. They make "horrible customer service" sound like something to aspire to.
They haven't been able to get my bill "right" for months. Every single month there are random charges tacked on, that they cannot explain when I call. Until recently, they've cancelled these charges with good apology. But now?
I have two phones suspended because they are lost. Originally, I was told I could suspend them indefinitely. Then I was told that I could only suspend them month-by-month. Then I was was told I could suspend them three months at a time. Now, they're telling me that I can only suspend 6 months per year. None of which was mentioned when I asked up front, and none of which is ever consistently said after the fact.
So I decided to buy out the contract. Get this: Not only are they're charging me for two months' service for two phones I don't even have, they're charging me for an entire two months of service for both of those two phones AFTER the contract has been cancelled by being bought out!
If you are ever, EVER tempted to go Verizon, RUN LIKE HELL OUT OF THERE. They make a pack of lying vultures being eaten by a horde of hungry lawyers seem friendly!
I'm in a window. I want to switch to a different window that might be in the same app and might be in a different app, without leaving the K/B. How?
Typical scenario: I have two or three terminal windows open, debugging a webserver that's misconfigured. I have this terminal window somewhere in docroot, editing a temporary HTML file that I'm using to diagnose the problem. I have another terminal window editing httpd.conf, and being used to restart Apache. I have a browser window or two to see if I got it right, yet.
I can switch from the terminal window to the browser window without much trouble, but I can't easily switch to the other terminal window!
There's the Alt-Tab combination, but that switches between different *applications*. I can jigger the mouse into a corner, and see all windows on all workspaces, but that requires using the mouse - easier to click on the window with the mouse directly.
There's no way to do this that I've been able to find, but if you know it, I'd sure like to know... As a LONG time KDE user, I LOVE Compiz effect's alt-tab combination that not only lets me scroll thru the windows, but provides a nice "stacked" interface for letting me see what I'm switching to!
Slashdot Mirror
Kids do stupid things. That's aout as newsworthy as the sun rising I the East. Within a few years, stupid comments you made way back when will be recognized as such.
But while there is real slander going on, that's the extreme edge of a real sea-change going on. Sites like RateYourProfessor.com have fundamentally changed how studets and learning institutions interract! My wife, daughter, and two oldest sons are all attending CSUs and they all rely on RateYourProfessor HEAVILY to decide what classes to take. They find that it's quite accurate, too!
This is something that strikes at the very heart of (IMHO) antiquated conncepts like tenure, which often works to cement boring, mediocre teachers into irrevokable positions in schools, draining the will of otherwise good students, and making education more expensive and less valuable to all others involved.
This is a very good thing!
Like most technology, they assume it's never going to be used to its potential. Take my laptop -- only when I actively cool it or balance it precariously several inches off the desk can I max out both cores. Try that with it sitting on its little rubber feet, and it overheats and throttles itself to 800 mhz. Try that when using the video card for anything stressful at all, and it shuts off.
Tell me about it! A few years back, I bought "Max Payne II", and it played mighty fine on my laptop - for about 15 minutes. Then it would suddenly stop rendering smoothly in 3-D, and the framerate would drop to maybe 1-2 frames per second, and rebooting (usually) took care of it.
After updating EVERYING and checking for new drivers, I finally discovered that if I let the computter "sit" for a while, it would start working again. That's when I began to suspect heating problems, and found that when I played the game with the computer suspended 1/2 inch off the table with a couple of books, and pointed a small 10" bookshelf fan at the back so there was lots of air flow underneath, that I could play all afternoon like that.
The truth is that all that power really is commonly used, but not continuously. A second or 5 here and there don't represent a major cooling problem.
The same is true for cars! I found this out when I became a pilot. Aircraft engines are usually under-rated, air-cooled engines. In short, the carburetor is too small to allow the engine to perform at full capacity. And it's necessary! Take a look at the usage pattern of a plane, in terms of a car doing the same thing.
1) Start the car. Ambient temperature is about 80 degrees. Nice day!
2) Warm it up for perhaps 3-5 minutes to "taxi to the freeway".
3) Goose it at 100% full power, pedal to the medal.
4) Leave the car floored for another 20 minutes.
5) Climb a giant, 12,000 foot tall mountain in a long straightaway at around 100 miles per hour, with the pedal to the medal the whole way.
6) Once at the top of the mountain, drive in a straight line at well over 150 MPH, while the outside temperature is well below freezing.
Stopping here - that behavior would be just nuts in a car! Probably 9 of 10 cars would self-destruct in conditions anywhere close. That single-engine aircraft manage it with an accident rate that's comparable to cars is quite a feat!
It is a joke...its code runs so slow.
But, it's being slow is an implementation detail, not a language detail. The fact is, you were able to write some code that the machine "understood" well enough to perform. The rest is just implementation detail. There are many C/C++ compilers, all of which have various performance/price/compatibility trade-offs. Surprisingly, the most popular compiler is also one of the slowest: gcc generally prefers cross-platform capability over performance, and neither compiles the quickest nor produces the quickest executing code.
But, NONE of this deals with the real reason why not everybody can be a good programmer. A good programmer must be able to precisely articulate exactly what he/she wants to have the machine do. And, it's quite surprising how few people can really do that. Most people think that much of what programmers and computers do really is just so much hand-waving, and while they crave the power of a programmer, they don't crave the attention to detail that something so simple as transposing two numbers can destroy.
Yet, to get something done, you MUST know that you can't mix up a divisor and a dividend. This is a detail, and one of countless details that a programmer is paid to articulate. The REAL skill in being a good programmer isn't in the details of XYZ language, but in the details of the problem being solved!
Languages are progressing to be easier to code, and this is a good thing. Programmers are paid to solve real problems, and in the process, have to solve implementation problems. Languages that minimize implementation overhead give programmers more skill to solve more complex and more challenging real-world problems.
Don't worry - the world won't have any real shortages of problem-solving, logical people any time soon. Today's problems are getting harder, not easier!
But you forgot to say why!
Many times, developers will have a list of features that they figure are "1.0". They may not have reached all the features yet, but the features developed thusfar may be very stable.
A case in point is my own set of backup scripts (this is not) Backup Buddy. I've been using them for years, they work very well, stable even with very large sets of data. (Well into the TBs currently, managing over 100 backup sources in 24 hour rotation)
But I don't consider them "1.0" yet because I always envisioned a handy-dandy web interface for managing backup rotations, verifying backups (currently working) and recovering files 1-by-1 securely. So, I edit config files. (aw shucks)
Sure, dedicated hardware will work faster than emulation in software. But what about the "middle of the road" EG: FPGA? How well could an FPGA allow for actual neuronic simulation with quasi-dedicated hardware, and at what cost?
Sure, directly fabricated silicon will outperform software emulation on GP hardware. But it's not just a question of silicon vs software...
A more appropriate name for it is "Chrome Fullscreen".
An even more appropriate name for it is "Chrome's Google-Confusion-Fest". Because Google is starting to bewilder me with parallel, seemingly conflicting options!
1) There's Chromium O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser.
2) There's Android O/S, which is pretty much just a Linux distro with a browser, that's incompatible with Chromium.
3) There's Google Gears, which is pretty cool, but doesn't work with Chromium O/S, or Chrome the browser.
4) There's Chrome itself, whicch is just a browser, without a distro of any kind, and paradoxically, doesn't work on Linux.
In short, while Google has been lobbing all this juicy-looking stuff out onto the marketplace, it's been set up in such a way as the boxes are likely to fall on anxious developers.
This looks to me more like a minefield than a fruited plain!
Come on, Google! If you want me, a developer, to "jump on board" with your stuff, you'd better get it all talking to each other, because your deeply fragmented product lines are causing me to shun your products.
I see plenty of other posts about LogMeIn, and it's decent, but in my opinion, Co-Pilot takes the cake for commercial users. (such as myself)
1) 1/4 the price of LogMeIn.
2) Windows/Mac compatible, not only as a client, but as support.
3) No-setup for either end. Nothing fancy. Any bonehead can make it work.
4) You can buy a day for a few bux.
I wish they supported Linux as support, but I'll accept Win/Mac.
and.... you could have figured out what I was talking about by looking up "Cessna 182" on Google...
Also, "1 moving part" could easily be defined as an electric motor with a prop bolted on. Not that the "1 moving part" couldn't be dissected, but that, when they are bolted together, they move together without friction between the parts. They function as "1 moving part" and this increases reliability.
But since you're commenting, what do you mean by "uses direct fuel"? Jets are fast because they aren't limited by the spead of propeller blade tips, which become very inefficient as they exceed the speed of sound. It's difficult to get propeller-driven aircraft to exceed about 350 MPH or so, and near impossible to even make this with a larger plane, since larger planes have larger props and that results in faster movement on the correspondingly larger propellers.
But propeller-driven craft are considerably more fuel-efficient than jets at lower speeds. That's were aircraft such as the single-engine turboprop TBM 850, which provides near-jet performance at a fraction of the cost of a jet for smaller aircraft, with fewer moving parts than a piston-single.
If my company ever gets big enough to justify a "corporate plane", it would probably be a turboprop, since they're much cheaper than jets (by near HALF) and very similar in actual performance.
< pedantic>
It's not a "hacker", it's a "cracker"....
It's not "Red Hat Linux", it's "GNU/Linux"....
It's not "M$ Windoze", it's "MS Windows".... /pedantic>
<
PS: Knowing how to make a less-than symbol on SlashDork: PRICELESS!
That would mean an efficiency of greater than 100%. Which is obviously nonsense. ICEs are generally 35-45% efficient in peak operation.
Yeah, that thought crossed my mind, too. But "efficiency" can mean different things depending on context. You could mean "time efficiency" - how much time gets wasted getting a job done, which would be irregardless of other resource usage. You are talking about "efficiency" in terms of ability to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy, and you are right, there.
But read the article. By context, I think they are actually talking about strength-to-weight ratio - how much useful power you get per pound of fuel/battery/engine. Combine that with the informal nature of the article, and it kinda makes sense that way.
Me? I'm curious about a system with obvious advantages for private aviation:
1) Better power/weight ratio, which is big. Even in a fairly substantial Cessna 182, when you take off with full fuel, you have to be honest in considering the actual weight of your passengers.
2) Fewer moving parts: Few pieces of equipment rival the reliability of an electric motor. If fuel cells are a simple chemical process without moving parts, the chances of failure could potentially drop through the floor. And that makes flying safer for everyone - most importantly, me.
Everything about a plane is about reducing failure rates. They are expressly designed to reduce mechanical complexity to reduce the chances of failure. The fuel mixture on a private plane is adjusted manually. The throttle is very simple. There are actually two ignition systems on each plane, and rather than use an electrical coil like a car, they each use an independent magneto system, like a lawn mower, so that an electrical failure (like a blown fuse) won't stop the engine from working.
If you could reduce the number of moving parts to ONE.... wow. That would be... AWESOME.
I've been waiting for the next platform shift. It's been moving towards cloud computing for about a decade, now, but aside from killing the client-server application, the Internet really hasn't caused any major change in platform.
We all still boot an O/S and run applications on the O/S, some of which are Internet-access applications. But it's struck me for some time that the browser really *should* be the next generation O/S. With plugins and all, Firefox is showing lots of signs, but it's just not stepping up to the plate - I guess the vision isn't quite there - the guys at Firefox still see the browser as a browser.
A decade ago, the idea of moving any kind of application "into the cloud" was a laughable concept that most people wouldn't dare touch. Nowadays, it's so common that perhaps 50% of all software development is now oriented around "cloud computing". I wouldn't be surprised if the number was even higher.
So Google's taking this trend to its logical conclusion: why bother with "local" at all?
It's an interesting take, and one that's sure to really upset the Winopoly if it's got any success at all. The flaws of the Winopoly are obvious and horrible - security woes too many to number, spam spewing from the many leaks, disks that crash, and an Operating System so big, complex, and cumbersome to work on that not even one of the wealthiest companies in the world can do much about it.
After investing untold billions into the Windows codebase, the result was Windows Vista/Windows 7, which is a bit prettier but certainly won't be introducing meaningful change. It might even be more secure, as much as something larger and more complicated is ever more secure than simpler, ancestral systems.
But Chromium takes us a whole new direction. My guess is that it *belongs* in a VM/application style software stack, where you can either run it alone on a netbook or something, or run it as a Win/Lin/OSX application. VMWare makes this a reality, even if it's never set up as an "application".
My guess? It's going to succeed, but in about 5 years' time. Google really needs to unify Chromium and Android. They should be virtually identical platforms. Microsoft is going the other way with IE - trying to pound the web, kicking and screaming, back into Windows proprietary extensions.
They *still* haven't figured it out...
Yeah, that's why I'd never trust anything that could potentially write directly to my brain. Some sort of helmet thing might be uncomfortable, but at least you can rip it off if they (trojans / hackers / foreign agents) start getting frisky with your mind. Presuming that you have enough motor control left to do the ripping. Perhaps a panic button; hooked up to bladder control or something. (only partly joking)
Explain to me how potentially "writing directly to your brain" is functionally any different than manipulation through the control of information? Advertising works because when you advertise, people buy your shit. You might find this fact annoying, but it's true, and it's one of a million examples of human manipulation therefrom.
For another example, see "Ditto-Head" Rush Limbaugh supporter/worshippers. They are convinced that gubbmint can't do anything but tax and waste money. Listen to them! Never mind the "free society" protected by that very gubbmint...
You are already manipulated and controlled for fun and profit, and it's part of the social animals that is who we actually are.
Dang. I was going to pipe in with some popcorn related joke or something, but it's no fun when you aren't first to the punch-line...
he easy "out" would be that you weren't dead, and you owe them for unpaid premiums.
Sadly, there's even precedence for this interpretation. People "die" all the time in hospitals, and are revived. Heart stops beating, no breathing, etc. Bring out the ekg and the shock plates...
If you can remember your life before your "death" then you are the same person.
However, this interpretation would become very interesting if Kurzweil's vision of the Singularity actually happens - if you "upload" a copy of your self-pattern to the cloud, which one is you? And if you make a backup copy of your cloud self, then execute it, do you split your inheritance? Does inheritance even mean anything if you are effectively a sim in a video game? And if, as a sim, in a video game, you are able to interact (perhaps by wireless?) to a robot, is the robot alive?
Are you alive, as a sim?
Interesting times ahead...
Have you *tried* to do this with PHP?
The only meaningful way to do this is to make an HTTP call to self, which is expensive, or write it in C or something and shell out, which makes doing it cross-cluster painful without adding lots of overhead and complexity.
PHP just isn't the "right" tool for this type of job. Projects like PHP/Erlang might mitigate this, somewhat. Thus my probing in re: HPC and Erlang, since massively multicore is obviously the future.
In other news: it's surprisingly difficult to perform useful neurosurgery with a hammer.
You're bringing PHP and "rendering PDF reports" into a discussion about HPC?
Yes. Because in a few years, hardware comparable to what is now "HPC" will be routine. We've already jumped from unicore, uniprocessor servers to almost a hundred cores. Just a decade or so, a 100-core computing cluster was HPC, even if not near the "top 500".
And you propose Erlang as some kind of solution? Nobody doing HPC is using Erlang.
But... Erlang was designed for scalability! It was DESIGNED to smoothly scale from a unicore to multicore to LOBOS style computing. If Erlang isn't a "player" in the HPC space, why the !@# not? And if it's not a player, what is, and what do I need to do to transition to it over the next decade or so?
As usual for Slashdot, you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Since you posted this on Slashdot... (I'll put the mirror away)
We're still at the point where unthreaded languages (like PHP) are still viable. For example, we use PHP in a complex, multi-server, multi-core cluster, and it's "share nothing" approach scales quite nicely, in that having more and more users hitting the systemm on separate servers doesn't really cause a problem, since there's virtually no cross-communication going on.
But there's a scalability limit in what you can do "PER PROCESS". There are some very processor intensive functions that simply take a while to do (such as rendering a 100 page report, then converting to PDF) and there's currently no way to spread the load in PHP beyond a single core.
At the other extreme, we have almost the same problem - having such a large number of cores that resources commonly shared among threads and processes is really no longer feasible.
Languages like Erlang have a "shared nothing" approach, but not at the process/thread level, but at the function level. Individual functions within a process are themselves "share nothing" and thus can easily scale across multiple cores, processors, and servers in a networked cluster. (at least, this is the theory)
So how 'bout it, folks? Where are the benchmarks showing how languages DESIGNED to take advantage of parallel processors and clusters actually scale up in the real world? Is Erlang the cat's meow when discussing systems of this scale?
I'm not expecting to see my example process (100 page PDF reports) scale up smoothly to 250,000 cores, but I sure would like to see it scale up smoothly to a dozen or two!
Yeah, I don't understand the attitude that things are always a click away.
OK. For me, they are.
It takes a long time to download, and the internet is not always stable or available.
It takes me something less than 1 hour to download a 1 hour show. This is called "streaming"....
If you're streaming you'll still want to back up or skip forward.
And I commonly do. It takes about 10 seconds for the stream to resume when I do.
If you've paid for something, even a measly $1, you'd like the ability to watch it twice.
So... I push play again? (I don't pay per show, I pay Netflix a flat price, and Hulu has ads, but they aren't nearly as bad as standard TV)
Backing up to DVD is a good option. Maybe not for Cheers reruns of course, but if you're watching next year's equivalent of Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, it could be worth keeping.
I could see myself buying season DVDs. I'm more likely to rent then as needed from Netflix, because after 2 viewings, I won't care for at least 5-10 years.
I'm still wrapping my head around the idea that some people have internet good enough to stream this high definition video in real time, fast enough to treat the whole thing like it was on Tivo. They've probably got cable modems, which they'd have to give up if they got rid of cable...
I have a 3 Mbit DSL connection. Most shows are honestly not true "HD" quality, but they do come in much higher resolutions than old school TV. I rarely notice bad image quality ruining the experience. I have a "buffering..." incident perhaps 1x every hour or so, and it usually lasts much less than an average commercial break on old school TV.
And no one is going to let you skip commercials forever without having a subscription fee.
With Hulu/Netflix, I can't skip the ads. Since there aren't 6 of them every 12 1/2 minutes, I don't mind. Netflix has no ads. Hulu has ONE ad where you'd normally see a commercial break. Both are acceptable to me.
The whole "everything should be free, and high quality entertainment will spontaneously produce itself" idea seems very suspect. Too much like the whole dot-com bubble where visions of the future didn't synch up with reality.
I agree! I pay Netflix about $15/month. I pay for my DSL service. Sites that I don't pay into have ads. This seems reasonable to me.
Imagine a world where anything you could possibly want to watch is available from the internet instantly for a flat rate all you can eat cheap price. That's where we are headed. In that world, why bother maintaining enough expensive disk space (with backups) for a video format that will be obsolete 6 months after you download it?
I don't have to imagine - it's my life right now! I write this on my Linux laptop, while my bedroom Mac Mini (with a 23" wide-screen monitor) is playing a show, streamed off the Internet. (in this case, it's a Law and Order episode being used as "background noise" to drown out my daughter and friends who are having a slumber party) I watch what I want, when I want, without any kind of scheduling. Although there are occasional "buffering... buffering..." glitches, they amount to perhaps a minute or two every other hour - far less time than an old-school commercial break. Since the switch to digital TV, every TV in my house has disappeared except for one old 19" set used for console video games.
While I tend towards "old school", and watch standard American/British TV on sites like Hulu/Netflix, my kids are far more likely (than I) to also watch foreign shows on Hulu or other flash sites. In particular, they like Anime and obscure Martial Arts shows that are often hosted on oversees websites.
In my household, we watch all our TV off the Internet, on demand. It's not only lots cheaper than Cable/Dish, it's actually a far better viewing experience. And I can take the $1000/year that we USED to spend on our primo Dish service (with all the channels and a 2-head DVR) and buy a rather nice computer.
I hate the ridiculous anti-free nature of the app store, but it's not hard to see why Apple would be concerned. The fear is that if a program gets into the App Store that allows any sort of user-provided data to be executed, then evil unlicensed apps could be delivered to the platform through that interpreter.
This problem is easily solved: Just require the code to be signed!
Although there are many upsides to interpreted languages, perhaps top of the heap is a short application development cycle. But I would happily throw a couple hundred bux for an interpretive SDK that let's me run unsigned code, so that I could develop my appz. Then, when I'm ready to sell, I get the code signed by Apple.
My company vends a product written in an common, interpreted language. It's closed-source, so we use a software obfuscation tool. It's largely the same idea...
Have you ever actually HAD a job? Because, in case you haven't noticed, jobs aren't all that easy to come by. Perhaps telling the CEO of YOUR company off like this won't get you escorted out immediately by security, but it probably would in his case. I can't think of a scenario won't get the poor guy's arse immediately fired, but I can think of plenty of scenarios where he ends up being sued. And even if (LONG odds here) the boss decides to fix things, you will never, ever, ever be promoted or see a raise. More likely you'll get lots of 'incidents' filed in your personnel file and you'll get fired in a few months. You'll have no memory of these 'incidents' of being late, rude, and sexist, and they will be filed anonymously by people 'afraid of repercussions'.
OP, here's my advice.
1) Keep a log of the times you've been asked to violate copyright law. Keep it at home, and enter in stuff after hours. Object gently when you are asked to borken the lawz, just so that you can honestly say that you did object.
2) Look for another job.
3) When you find one, call BSA and offer them your logbook. Take a vacation on the money you get.
OR...
1) STFU! Keep your nose to the wheel and enjoy the piratezes softwarez. Save a bit of money so that if (when?) the software company gets audited, and you're out of a job, you have something to fall back on.
First rule of Verizon: the people in the stores know nothing and are not backed up by the home office.
Second rule of Verizon: neither do the people on the phone. In fact, the only thing that people who work at Verizon are particularly good at is coming up with reasons why you need to pay, even when the contract is cancelled.
Expect nothing and you will not be disappointed.
That's about right for anything having to do with Verizon Wireless.
There was one more detail: security authentication was being handled by Javascript, which the Googlebot doesn't bother with...
Please, for the love of God and all that is decent in this world, steer clear of Verizon Wireless!!!
I am a Verizon Wireless customer. They make "horrible customer service" sound like something to aspire to.
They haven't been able to get my bill "right" for months. Every single month there are random charges tacked on, that they cannot explain when I call. Until recently, they've cancelled these charges with good apology. But now?
I have two phones suspended because they are lost. Originally, I was told I could suspend them indefinitely. Then I was told that I could only suspend them month-by-month. Then I was was told I could suspend them three months at a time. Now, they're telling me that I can only suspend 6 months per year. None of which was mentioned when I asked up front, and none of which is ever consistently said after the fact.
So I decided to buy out the contract. Get this: Not only are they're charging me for two months' service for two phones I don't even have, they're charging me for an entire two months of service for both of those two phones AFTER the contract has been cancelled by being bought out!
If you are ever, EVER tempted to go Verizon, RUN LIKE HELL OUT OF THERE. They make a pack of lying vultures being eaten by a horde of hungry lawyers seem friendly!
I'm in a window. I want to switch to a different window that might be in the same app and might be in a different app, without leaving the K/B. How?
Typical scenario: I have two or three terminal windows open, debugging a webserver that's misconfigured. I have this terminal window somewhere in docroot, editing a temporary HTML file that I'm using to diagnose the problem. I have another terminal window editing httpd.conf, and being used to restart Apache. I have a browser window or two to see if I got it right, yet.
I can switch from the terminal window to the browser window without much trouble, but I can't easily switch to the other terminal window!
There's the Alt-Tab combination, but that switches between different *applications*. I can jigger the mouse into a corner, and see all windows on all workspaces, but that requires using the mouse - easier to click on the window with the mouse directly.
There's no way to do this that I've been able to find, but if you know it, I'd sure like to know... As a LONG time KDE user, I LOVE Compiz effect's alt-tab combination that not only lets me scroll thru the windows, but provides a nice "stacked" interface for letting me see what I'm switching to!