Close, Hawaii isn't quite a chain of volcanoes. It's a series of islands that happen to catalog movement over a hotspot in the middle of the Pacific ocean. You can read more about it here. It's actually quite interesting how an island forms as the plate moves, then after moving it's no longer on the hot spot and erodes away. There's many more 'islands' underneath the ocean surface in the Hawaii chain.
It is funny how with Jobs at the helm Apple was the visionary. Windows '95 was basically MacOS '85. Then the iPod hit, with Creative's Nomad and MS's Zune being also-ran's some months/years later. Today we have iPod features years behind competitors.
Apple went from 10 years ahead to 4-5 years behind. First screen sizes, then the "thin wars", now removing physical buttons in favor of tactile screens. What's next? Slightly larger screen with a Wacom digitizer a-la Samsung Note series?
If he really wanted the wall to be indestructible, he'd commission a few hundred billion of the 3310's and gorilla-glue them together for the wall. Nobody would get through.
Maybe over or under, but that's a different problem.
Most of the comments so far have been personal attacks on Musk. I guess this is par for the low level of discourse here.
However, I'd like to see some discussion of his statement.
Would a better connection between humans and machines be beneficial?
I'd lean toward "no", with the thinking that a majority of what people end up using technology for today is posting pictures of themselves or their cats on Facebook.
It's true our brains are able to process an incredible amount of information very quickly to make sense of things. Best I can tell that's limited to sensory input, not direction.
What would be the benefits/ problems?
Benefits? We *may* get some robotics technicians able to quickly tell that arm on the assembly line to stop before it hits Dave again. Then again, that operator may not like Dave, and could tell the arm to hit harder.
When it comes to our brains processing, I see something moving and I can recognize that as my dog chasing a ball. When it comes to directing? I'm having a hard time just coming up with what words I can type here to keep my message clear and concise. I'd wager people are incredibly limited when it comes to proper expression with other people, much less with machines with a limited vocabulary.
I just don't think that humans have the output bandwidth to keep up with the necessary input bandwidth for machines. The only exception I can think of would be motor control applications, but anyone that has seen any sci-fi movies in the past 20 years can tell you what happens when you put a crazy person in control of fast-moving metal.
How could this be achieved?
Just like today, we will have technophiles and technophobes. We *could* get to a point where games like Sword Art Online are a reality, then its a simple step to get those same signals going to hardware. Where would we draw that line on safety/security/health?
Humans are indecisive, impulsive, emotional creatures. There would need to be some serious thought about how this sort of technology should be used. SAO is a good example, "win or die".
Come on, folks, I have seen much better from you in the past.
Oracle as a database is still floating on that mindshare of "it's expensive... and therefore worth it" but other databases have since done things in a much smarter, cleaner, more user-friendly way. Two examples:
There are no "users" in Oracle, it's a sign-in to a schema. That's right, every 'user' is their own database. To connect to something else requires explicit permissions from the owner. Multiple users working on a project will probably just use a shared username/password instead of the headache to open things up (at least, that's what we end up doing).
The SQL optimizer, which normally does a good job, has it's own stupid quirk. It ingests the "WHERE" clause first, potentially breaking stuff in the "SELECT" statement. Example:
SELECT ORACLE_FUNCTION(par1, par2) as funcResult, col2, col3
FROM table
WHERE funcResult = 'TRUE'
will fail miserably with an "undefined identifier" error. There are two options to fix, call the function twice, or wrap it in a "SELECT *". What kind of hair-brained idea is that?
My coworker and I were just talking about this yesterday as our group is doing their annual reviews. We came up with the following:
DON'T try to find some one-size-fits-all measurement to judge folks by. It's impossible to find a way to compare back-end and front-end developers that is fair to everyone. If the problem space is different, recognize that.
DON'T attempt to find some numeric rating scale. Yes, there are a lot of companies out there that do it, but the numbers are completely arbitrary and mostly meaningless
DO talk to your employees about what their aspirations are, help them get there, and evaluate their progress. As a manager your job is to enable them to succeed. You should know what they want out of next year, next 2 years, and so on. This gives you a gauge for that person, even if they don't want to climb to the top.
DO evaluate them against their nearest peers. It's unfair to compare the college grad to the graybeard, through with the right graybeard you may get a feel for how well the college grad is doing. Use metrics lazarus suggested. Are they fitting in with the team? Are they pushing themselves to get better? Are they fixing their code and making it easy for others to read?
DO talk to those that work closely with them. Project Leads, co-workers, managers. These are the folks that know first-hand how involved and productive your guys are
Of course, all of this is just input to some grander scheme. Many places I've worked have some allocated bonus/leave/raise pool, so the manager creates an average. With all this feedback, you should be able to tell who's above average from who's below.
Unions certainly had their time and place in history, but these days it seems to be less about standing up for the little guy and more about how much money can we bring in via Union Dues. ( My opinion of course, I work within a Union Company )
I agree with this sentiment. One of my mom's friends is a unionized electrician that, last I heard, hadn't actually worked in near 3 years and is still having to pay union dues to be "in the club" and he signed a contract that he can't back out of. I also have a buddy, in the same city, that is a non-unionized electrician and he works 4-10's every week. Granted this isn't the story with all unions, but a good example nonetheless.
Given the choice between earning a living and slowly bleeding out, I'd pick the former any day.
That's ~5GB a day over one year. So he managed to dig up and exfiltrate a DVD's worth of information, on top of his normal duties, every day?
Nope... he was doing it for 20 years, which brings that average down to 250 MB/day. That's still A LOT of information for 20 years ago, when hard drives were still measured in MB. The fact that he was able to keep going for so long is dumbfounding to me. Most places have random inspections, you'd think over the course of 20 years, he'd have been busted a few times.
Company A joins a standards body to try to unify the solution to some problem. That solution gets near, and Company A leaves, then proposes a new standard for everybody, further fragmenting the solution.
I'm all for innovation and standardization, though I much prefer the approach like X windows. "Hey, this is getting old and crusty, we need some answers folks" then a few groups come up with ideas, and gradually we get to a consensus (looking like Wayland). This "I don't wanna play with you guys, I'm gonna go buy my own ball and start my own team" playground BS is retarded and counterproductive.
A good start would be for them to name the API after something other than an every-day noun commonly used to describe servers. Unless their whole drive is to define a term with itself and further confuse people.
"Our Metal(*patent pending) API brings you closer to metal. Our API is better in every way. The whole industry is using Metal to drive metal!"
If you're looking to build a game, try out Processing. It's based on Java, heavily documented and supported. With it's graphics libraries you can see what you're doing almost immediately. You can whip up a small game in a few hours (with experience, of course), and they have plenty of examples.
Make it meaningful to you. Find yourself a project, start planning, and follow it through. The most important part is to not get discouraged, learn from every failure. Keep in mind even those programmers (software engineers) that have been in the weeds for 20 years feel like throwing that keyboard against the wall every now and then.
There's lots of little things you can do to get started in programming, though I encourage you to find that comfort zone and slowly push your way out of it. Start small and build on to something bigger. If the project seems much to big, break it down to manageable chunks. You won't build Amazon in a day, but you can certainly set up a small web server, then start customizing, add a database, add data, do other neat stuff over time.
Or how about all of these additives being applied to the paper? Is the paper less disposable now that it is 100% coated in stuff (instead of, say, 5-10% of ink)? What are the manufacturing costs? How are these costs compared to the 80x reusable?
Oh, and who really wants paper that erases itself? I still have some notes from college 10+ years ago that, while hastily/sloppily written, are still readable and sometimes useful.
"Excuse me, I'm from the computer services group, and your A/C appears to be acting up... It's reporting . Please go to this website and click 'Accept' to all the prompts and we can diagnose it remotely".
Jessica Alba also runs her own business(es), which, as far as I care to research, is the biggest portion of her income these days. Many celebs are just a face from a screen with loads of money that they throw around. Others have actually made something of themselves and are quite successful in other ways.
Hell, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) has an advanced degree in Physics, as does Dolph Lundgren. Don't judge a book by its cover.
Yea, but 1 Dodge Hellcat is a helluva lot of fun to drive. That Hellcat is going to be worth a lot more to any car guy than 10,000 laptops.
It's better for the environment or more efficient to *not* have a private jet, a private yacht, or a 300+ car collection. By your argument, those people should sit in coach on Southwest, below-deck on some other boat, or sit in mass transit to get from point A to point B. They don't because of any number of reasons. Comfort, money, or maybe they find enjoyment out of it... maybe, just maybe, having a fast car is their "zen", their opportunity to break away from the daily grind and have some fun.
Just because it isn't useful/efficient in your eyes doesn't mean there's no purpose in it for someone else.
I just think it's interesting that Apple was distant from the Intel ecosystem up to ~15 years ago or so... back when they made the move from PowerPC to x86. With that change came a (relatively) large influx of development because now it was easier to write the low-level code (drivers, compilers, etc...). Now Apple wants to go back to the old ways?
Is there any benefit other than avoiding some bulk-buy Intel tax?
Slashdot Mirror
Close, Hawaii isn't quite a chain of volcanoes. It's a series of islands that happen to catalog movement over a hotspot in the middle of the Pacific ocean. You can read more about it here. It's actually quite interesting how an island forms as the plate moves, then after moving it's no longer on the hot spot and erodes away. There's many more 'islands' underneath the ocean surface in the Hawaii chain.
It is funny how with Jobs at the helm Apple was the visionary. Windows '95 was basically MacOS '85. Then the iPod hit, with Creative's Nomad and MS's Zune being also-ran's some months/years later. Today we have iPod features years behind competitors.
Apple went from 10 years ahead to 4-5 years behind. First screen sizes, then the "thin wars", now removing physical buttons in favor of tactile screens. What's next? Slightly larger screen with a Wacom digitizer a-la Samsung Note series?
How many millions did it take to replace the headphone jack with a useless piece of plastic?
/snark
It does kinda sound like a 1960's supervillian scheme. "First I'll freeze the Arctic! then I'll freeze the world!"
I suppose you gotta spend $500 billion to make a trillion...
If he really wanted the wall to be indestructible, he'd commission a few hundred billion of the 3310's and gorilla-glue them together for the wall. Nobody would get through.
Maybe over or under, but that's a different problem.
Most of the comments so far have been personal attacks on Musk. I guess this is par for the low level of discourse here. However, I'd like to see some discussion of his statement. Would a better connection between humans and machines be beneficial?
I'd lean toward "no", with the thinking that a majority of what people end up using technology for today is posting pictures of themselves or their cats on Facebook.
It's true our brains are able to process an incredible amount of information very quickly to make sense of things. Best I can tell that's limited to sensory input, not direction.
What would be the benefits/ problems?
Benefits? We *may* get some robotics technicians able to quickly tell that arm on the assembly line to stop before it hits Dave again. Then again, that operator may not like Dave, and could tell the arm to hit harder.
When it comes to our brains processing, I see something moving and I can recognize that as my dog chasing a ball. When it comes to directing? I'm having a hard time just coming up with what words I can type here to keep my message clear and concise. I'd wager people are incredibly limited when it comes to proper expression with other people, much less with machines with a limited vocabulary.
I just don't think that humans have the output bandwidth to keep up with the necessary input bandwidth for machines. The only exception I can think of would be motor control applications, but anyone that has seen any sci-fi movies in the past 20 years can tell you what happens when you put a crazy person in control of fast-moving metal.
How could this be achieved?
Just like today, we will have technophiles and technophobes. We *could* get to a point where games like Sword Art Online are a reality, then its a simple step to get those same signals going to hardware. Where would we draw that line on safety/security/health?
Humans are indecisive, impulsive, emotional creatures. There would need to be some serious thought about how this sort of technology should be used. SAO is a good example, "win or die".
Come on, folks, I have seen much better from you in the past.
There are no "users" in Oracle, it's a sign-in to a schema. That's right, every 'user' is their own database. To connect to something else requires explicit permissions from the owner. Multiple users working on a project will probably just use a shared username/password instead of the headache to open things up (at least, that's what we end up doing).
The SQL optimizer, which normally does a good job, has it's own stupid quirk. It ingests the "WHERE" clause first, potentially breaking stuff in the "SELECT" statement. Example:
will fail miserably with an "undefined identifier" error. There are two options to fix, call the function twice, or wrap it in a "SELECT *". What kind of hair-brained idea is that?
That's why! Google took their business model and perfected it!
No wonder Ellison is all butt-hurt (pun intended)
I suppose in 5000 years people thinking we drank nothing but PBR is better than Bud Light, Keystoneor Olde English 800.
Of course, all of this is just input to some grander scheme. Many places I've worked have some allocated bonus/leave/raise pool, so the manager creates an average. With all this feedback, you should be able to tell who's above average from who's below.
Unions certainly had their time and place in history, but these days it seems to be less about standing up for the little guy and more about how much money can we bring in via Union Dues. ( My opinion of course, I work within a Union Company )
I agree with this sentiment. One of my mom's friends is a unionized electrician that, last I heard, hadn't actually worked in near 3 years and is still having to pay union dues to be "in the club" and he signed a contract that he can't back out of. I also have a buddy, in the same city, that is a non-unionized electrician and he works 4-10's every week. Granted this isn't the story with all unions, but a good example nonetheless.
Given the choice between earning a living and slowly bleeding out, I'd pick the former any day.
That's ~5GB a day over one year. So he managed to dig up and exfiltrate a DVD's worth of information, on top of his normal duties, every day?
Nope... he was doing it for 20 years, which brings that average down to 250 MB/day. That's still A LOT of information for 20 years ago, when hard drives were still measured in MB. The fact that he was able to keep going for so long is dumbfounding to me. Most places have random inspections, you'd think over the course of 20 years, he'd have been busted a few times.
Is anybody else getting sick of this crap?
Company A joins a standards body to try to unify the solution to some problem. That solution gets near, and Company A leaves, then proposes a new standard for everybody, further fragmenting the solution.
I'm all for innovation and standardization, though I much prefer the approach like X windows. "Hey, this is getting old and crusty, we need some answers folks" then a few groups come up with ideas, and gradually we get to a consensus (looking like Wayland). This "I don't wanna play with you guys, I'm gonna go buy my own ball and start my own team" playground BS is retarded and counterproductive.
A good start would be for them to name the API after something other than an every-day noun commonly used to describe servers. Unless their whole drive is to define a term with itself and further confuse people.
"Our Metal(*patent pending) API brings you closer to metal. Our API is better in every way. The whole industry is using Metal to drive metal!"
30+ replies and no "Yo Mamma" jokes?
It's almost like we're maturing. Almost.
Unless it lets me configure it to talk to me like Joe Pesci or Gordon Ramsey, I'm not interested.
I want a GPS that tells me "You missed the turn, you F**king disgrace", but will settle for sending similar messages to friends.
If you're looking to build a game, try out Processing. It's based on Java, heavily documented and supported. With it's graphics libraries you can see what you're doing almost immediately. You can whip up a small game in a few hours (with experience, of course), and they have plenty of examples.
I second this sentiment.
Make it meaningful to you. Find yourself a project, start planning, and follow it through. The most important part is to not get discouraged, learn from every failure. Keep in mind even those programmers (software engineers) that have been in the weeds for 20 years feel like throwing that keyboard against the wall every now and then.
There's lots of little things you can do to get started in programming, though I encourage you to find that comfort zone and slowly push your way out of it. Start small and build on to something bigger. If the project seems much to big, break it down to manageable chunks. You won't build Amazon in a day, but you can certainly set up a small web server, then start customizing, add a database, add data, do other neat stuff over time.
Or how about all of these additives being applied to the paper? Is the paper less disposable now that it is 100% coated in stuff (instead of, say, 5-10% of ink)? What are the manufacturing costs? How are these costs compared to the 80x reusable?
Oh, and who really wants paper that erases itself? I still have some notes from college 10+ years ago that, while hastily/sloppily written, are still readable and sometimes useful.
"Excuse me, I'm from the computer services group, and your A/C appears to be acting up... It's reporting . Please go to this website and click 'Accept' to all the prompts and we can diagnose it remotely".
Yea, no problem catching idiots with that...
There are projects out there that allow a PC to use the Wiimote (and you can emulate the Wii/GC in Dolphin, anyway)
Jessica Alba also runs her own business(es), which, as far as I care to research, is the biggest portion of her income these days. Many celebs are just a face from a screen with loads of money that they throw around. Others have actually made something of themselves and are quite successful in other ways.
Hell, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean) has an advanced degree in Physics, as does Dolph Lundgren. Don't judge a book by its cover.
Yea, but 1 Dodge Hellcat is a helluva lot of fun to drive. That Hellcat is going to be worth a lot more to any car guy than 10,000 laptops.
It's better for the environment or more efficient to *not* have a private jet, a private yacht, or a 300+ car collection. By your argument, those people should sit in coach on Southwest, below-deck on some other boat, or sit in mass transit to get from point A to point B. They don't because of any number of reasons. Comfort, money, or maybe they find enjoyment out of it... maybe, just maybe, having a fast car is their "zen", their opportunity to break away from the daily grind and have some fun.
Just because it isn't useful/efficient in your eyes doesn't mean there's no purpose in it for someone else.
I just think it's interesting that Apple was distant from the Intel ecosystem up to ~15 years ago or so... back when they made the move from PowerPC to x86. With that change came a (relatively) large influx of development because now it was easier to write the low-level code (drivers, compilers, etc...). Now Apple wants to go back to the old ways?
Is there any benefit other than avoiding some bulk-buy Intel tax?
... and my ass catching fire from a bad heating element in the seat. That's no way to take a shit.
Now there's a workmans comp claim if I've ever seen one. "Your honor, creimer's ass-hair caught on fire due to a poorly maintained bidet"