SanDisk has announced a 1GB Secure Digital card that can store data for 100 years, but can be written on only once....
Great - Now to find a foolproof way to...
Ensure that when you are burning an ISO, it really does write the disk image. Coz trust me if I find another disk with only a single ISO file, its going to be a sorry 100 years.
I would say we should bring out a petition to outlaw divorce. Since, it is obvious who the group of people would be to sign it. I would say that make that petition visible to everyone too. I don't think gays/marriage preservers would mind that. After all we are standing up for marriage!
And of course, we should have the thunderous support of all these marriage preserving groups like NOM -- how could you not support something that promotes family wholeness?? < Cue in Ad of a lonely bedraggled child, saying how he would be perfect if his parents hadn't divorced >
The bible does not espouse divorce [2], so it must be a sin, of course!
Hey, you started the wholesomeness of marriage thing. Now it would be hypocritical for you to oppose this, wouldn't it?
However, you lose credibility in only highlighting what the gay community did in California.
If you were truly espousing your idea - you also need to highlight all the gay bashing that has occurred and continues to occur to this day, rather than paying a cursory homage to the other side.
Specious writings like these, passing off as balanced but subtly edging towards an agenda are devious, to say the least.
You are right, that the point here should not be the fear of one group over the other. The issue at its very core is that a group of people took a debilitating decision on another group.
If the laws only applied to the group that oppressed gay marriage -- that may even be right -- they have every right to decide what is right for them.
However, in this case, since the law is applied to gays and specifically aims to cripple them -- it is plain wrong.
Let us not forget the fact that gays do not actively tell you that you will be going to hell because of a certain book.
What I find hilariously funny is that these gay-bashers are hypocrites in every sense of the word.
You stand with a picket line judging homosexuals and casting curses on them and at the same time, completely forget "Thou Shalt not judge" -- Welcome to Hell with the gays.
I can't wait for the afterlife to find all these bible-toting people in hell with gays. Boy, Satan will not be the only one doing the roasting!:-)
To be Christian is to be kind, benevolent, accepting yourself for who you are, and accepting others for who they are.
This shit purported by these so-called "conservatives" ain't Christianity. In fact, it is even farther from Christianity than the sins they oppose.
What part of the health care reform bill will save thousands of lives? Do you even know what the bill does? Have you read any of it? Even a summary? All the bill does is give more money to insurance corporations, force people to buy health insurance who didn't before, and tax the middle class. That's it. There's no magic spells in it to save lives. You've swallowed the partisan bullcrap hook, line, and sinker.
Ok, I think you are going a little overboard in trying to prove your point. The health care bill though may be not as dramatic, is a significant step.
Here are some of the things it does, that did not happen before:
Cover pre-existing medical condition.
Cover a child with pre-existing condition.
The insurance companies are not allowed to rescind their coverage if you develop a serious illness
Customers of all insurance plans will ow have a right to appeal any denial of coverage - not possible before for everyone.
No lifetime cap on coverage by the insurance companies.
Health insurance shopping exchange.
Look, I get your argument for not buying into partisan arguments, but do not deny things that were actually achieved. It is true that Republicans did not want all those changes above and are actively working to weaken them.
Democratic processes work via consensus and it is true that to a certain extent they are all tainted. However, passage of this health care bill would not have happened without this president.
Somehow I feel that it is people who have gotten so sick of all this partisan muck that allow the party of bigotry (GOP) to actually advance ahead with senseless arguments - because this party targets people's emotions in a misleading way to garner its support.
This does not mean that democrats are in the white -- but currently what we really need in this country is a little more logic, and a lot less rhetoric. And much of this implies that people who have gotten sick must make their voice heard.
Titan is a young celestial body - with its own dense atmosphere and the only body until now in the solar system that has surface liquids apart from us.
Sure it can be hypothesized that since Titan is young - it probably is taking a course that Earth took millions of years ago. With the distance from Sun rendering it cold and the fact that it orbits Saturn being the primary differences.
Of course finding Life would be an enormous discovery. But if we start with what we already know - that Organic reactions are taking place on Titan's surface, and that it is a giant Organic Soup -- It gives us a huge interesting laboratory to study and experiment!
We can even direct Titan's course of life by controlled introduction of earth's anaerobic life on its surface -- since we already know a hypothesis on how our own Earth's atmosphere has evolved into the current air composition -- we can *test* and use those theories to change Titan's atmosphere, in turn not only validating our theories, but may be making Titan inhabitable like Earth!
Exciting to say the least! If only we humans can, just for a second -- stop bickering amongst ourselves and look outwards to this possibility!!
A point many people probably didn't notice is that India is not really pissed off at the whole ACTA treaty.
The major reason for India's tirade seems to be the fact that (in addition to Pharmaceutical situation, of course) it was left out of negotiations. In a multi-polarized world, India increasingly sees itself as an important node in the global market. Had the negotiations proceeded in an all-inclusive manner, I am pretty sure most countries' governments would have happily and silently signed oppressive laws into place.
In a way, this "unfair" tactic by western countries, I believe did push India over the edge, but surely the humanitarian, people-friendly position is not why India and other countries are opposing this law. It benefits the Indian Pharmaceutical companies and it is in India's benefit to fight this both for trying to keep its industry alive and asserting its influence.
For the record - I am Indian. And yes, I am opposed to many tough measures in the ACTA -- but I have this sneaky suspicion that just to appease India and other countries, the other countries will throw a ball in their direction -- give them some special concession in a very limited area -- and then all these countries will happily climb on to the ACTA bandwagon!
For all those expecting a showdown between India/China vs. the rest of the world -- chances are that it will never actually develop into something more than a few provocative statements here and there -- fervent negotiations will go on to give them some choicest concessions, so they can all start oppressing people everywhere asap... of course, this will be marketed heavily as something "amazingly good" for the people of the world!
As opposed to an obscure programmer who has no interest in fixing a problem because it's boring ?
Nope not really. With open source - you will usually have someone out there who needs to plug that hole because they have a genuine need for it for some reason. They migrate their solution upstream, where it ends up benefiting all.
True, open source also results in abandoned works. But the very fact that you have the code available means that if you take interest, you can do anything with it (or even own and direct its development) as opposed to a black-box that is closed-source. You just have a binary and you are stuck with it, if your programmer abandons it.
Open source is not always a polished alternative - something that closed source can always do better. But Open Source is always a fundamentally superior alternative -- because knowledge only grows when shared and incorporated with other's opinions.
This is one of the reasons why academia seems to embrace Open Source widely - because no where else is the value of collaboration more recognized.
I actually think this is Google and Facebook's own doing rather than a sneaky third party.
Both Messrs Page/Brin and Zuckerberg have made statements in recent memory that can only be called tactless. Statements like "the age of privacy is over" or "people should not expect privacy" etc...etc...
When you run one of the world's largest social network and search engine, I am surprised that these gentlemen bandy about making such statements in such a callous manner. They certainly may be geniuses in their respective fields, but making such statements was a public relations disaster. It may be so that what they said was completely true, but when speaking to a group you always need to adhere to diplomacy.
It is like the oil companies saying - "Yeah, we are in this for oil/money/our investors interest only. People/Environment be damned." -- That is usually the unspoken part and it is hara-kiri to be an executive of the company and actually put this so candidly. In fact you are acting against your company's interest.
So, I think both Google and Facebook executives alarmed people greatly. Because they are in the business of our privacy. This combined with their latest faux-pas, Google's WiFi data collection, and Facebook's privacy control. Both of these situations could have been mitigated if their Public Relations had acted quickly, reassured people. However, in both cases, the companies inordinately delayed their response, in fact at first not even owning up to their mistake but blaming it on inadvertent situations and naysayers.
The only way out of this is for them to quickly own up their mistakes (even if they think none was made). Sincerely apologize (or at least make such public gestures, regardless of their personal feelings) and calm some frayed nerves. Trust me -- if tomorrow both Facebook and Google - ran ad campaigns saying "We're sorry. There is nothing more important to us than our user's privacy and we will defend it to death" -- They will be America's sweethearts back again.
Face it, thanks to Open Sores we all get to suffer more malware and more powerful malware. If even Microsoft with all their programmers has a hell of a time keeping up with patches and all of that, how are average users going to stand a chance? Tell me again why closed source is such a horrible thing??
Because closed source is equivalent to security through obscurity paradigm -- which never works and worse still - is illusory. You are only asking to live in your la-la land when the reality is different.
Malicious people are going to develop such sophisticated attacks regardless of whether software is closed-source or open-source.
Making such exploits open-source lets us know what sort of channels are exploited. This leads to a better understanding of the weaknesses in the underlying protocol. This is where you have improved software that won't fall down like a house of cards when kicked at the shins.
With closed source -- you are trusting what? An obscure programmer who is under a deadline to push something out the door??
You probably are not even aware of how many times Open Sourcing has saved your a$$. Just because you pretend the problem doesn't exist, does not mean that your ignorance is the truth.
I totally agree with you. (Can someone mod the parent of this reply up, please?)
We do need a linguistically fine-tuned populace who are able to interpret, and analyse the state of the world around them. This is why the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) has an entire section on seemingly esoteric words differentiated by subtle connotations. (This is something that many Engineering and Math students wonder when taking GRE - Why an overly contrived English section?)
Unfortunately - I see that almost everywhere, people are looking for sound-bytes and simplified information.
The trouble with simplification is that you either, end up with an extremely wordy conjecture, for eg: [[Scientists find that humans and Chimpanzees at a long point of time in the past had a common relative. In effect, making humans and Chimpanzees distant cousins.]]
or
to satisfy conciseness, you lose precision. for eg: [[Scientists find that humans and Chimpanzees are related.]]
Language is the *tool* we have to satisfy both our needs for conciseness and accuracy, but of course, then you lose the universal appeal.
I will only partly agree with Mr. McAllister's assertion about the potential for catastrophic loss via an inadvertent leak. However, I do feel that much of this stuff go packaged as half-truths and half-fear mongering.
There are a few facets to the issue - let me try to dissect them:
Immense amount of data being collected: Very true. Everyday people are generating information that when cleverly pieced together can unravel every minute of their life. However, the caveat is that there is such a huge amount of information. Today we are at a position where the inflow of data far exceeds our capacity to process it. Most regular people aren't interesting enough for someone to worth wading through the muck to piece together coherency. Yet, there are people who will be subjected to such attacks and hopefully they are already taking precautions.
For the rest of us mere mortals, no matter how significant we think our precious little existence is, the fact remains that largely we are all mostly just statistical data points -- white noise.
Just like in statistics -- corporations are not looking for a particular person, but they are trying to aggregate it all and derive a trend or more accurately a statistical model. And just like in statistics -- the outliers will stand out.
The Valuable data is the Aggregate, not the actual data point: This is where the line becomes gray. Is it alright to zealously collect every dimension of data available to derive a meaningful aggregate? We are all understandably uncomfortable having our menial contributions, measured and carefully cataloged. However, if there is a way where important data about you is handled for only a brief while -- converted into something that retains the meaning of that data point but loses the association with you, I have a feeling then that would be classified as legal. Of course, active research is being done today in this area.
Data is unduly important today because we have (stupidly) delegated our identity amongst few numbers: I heard on NPR yesterday about how people's health insurance is being stolen. And do you know why such a fraud occurs? Because, no one conclusively establishes the patient's identity. They just ask for the card and done. They don't ask the driver's license nor put a simple photograph of the patient on the file to check.
We have done the same thing with other such numbers -- Social Security, Date of Birth have all been used conclusively to establish a person's identity. True - it may have been a simplifying solution when Computers were not advanced. But the real travesty is not the availability of our data out there - which in this modern age is inevitable -- but that we are not switching to more robust methods of establishing people's identity. One of the ways could be to check finger prints (finger print readers are mighty cheap) or other such biometric data that cannot be easily faked.
A lot of you are complaining about the lack of coding skills, as well as lack of theoretical knowledge.
The sad part is that more often than not excellent coders are not the best theorists -- some top coders get so involved with a particular language or technology, that they are effectively locked into it and vice-versa.
As mentioned earlier in one of the replies to this post -- IT and CS seem to be two siblings with diverging goals.
There are very few people who are both excellent coders as well as well-versed with theory and reality behind.
The truth of the matter is that these people have either worked very hard or have accumulated this expertise over long years of experience. So, to be honest -- you cannot really expect an AVERAGE fresh BS graduate to be highly honed in both.
I don't think many recruiters come with reasonable expectations themselves. (In interest of fairness - I am a masters student in CS, and I am from India)
Many come in ready to find someone who is tailor-made all-in-one panacea for their jobs.
Sure there are some students out there who feel entitled, but there are definitely people out there who genuinely intend to learn, fit in, and improve themselves.
May be the change needs to be mutual, not just on the colleges' end, but Recruiters and Companies also need to realize that there are distinct categories of CS graduates out there. If the job requires someone with both skills and you are having a hard time finding one person for it - then may be you need to split the job into theory-centric and code-centric part. Hire the best theorist out there and couple him/her with the best coder. Recruit them in such a way that they work together well -- and pair them for the tasks.
I am aware that many recruiters become jaded and form prejudices against classes of candidates (you can see many examples of that above) -- and may be there is some truth to that, but has it really been looked upon objectively?
Yeah but that probably applies to people who do not read/.
Frankly speaking - I will gladly welcome a social network where I don't have to deal with the same annoying bunch that go as my friends.
If I have to look at another lol cat, weird bollywood dances, or request for some vegetable/animal/food/fodder/poke over an online connection.... it is all getting old.
Facebook used to be fun. Now its just tiring.
I agree with your main assertion. The problem is indeed "bad/malicious" patents. And even though I do see the spirit behind your ideas and may even support it if proposed, I think the whole patent structure needs to be properly reformed. It is all too common to see a patent and then find that it is just a minor variation of something done earlier and the patent should not have been awarded. Happens very often in software world and then it is subject to lengthy litigation.
I think we need a detailed categorization of art forms - a genealogy of human technology and art. Patents should then be assigned to this genealogical trees' nodes. Have a committee specializing in a branch subset to actually look at patents in that field. Utilize the technology so the committee collaborates online and processes patents in its sub-field. Of course, all the committee members should be established field experts in their sub-branches and the voting system should be designed to eliminate biases.
This will immediately allow comparison of patents in a branch - as the subset will be closely related and if the genealogy is extremely thorough - the number of patents would be small enough for the committee to be aware of most of it. Of course the genealogy should be dynamic to allow further sub-branching.
No, it's not perfect, as in T(N) = T(1)/N, but it's certainly much stronger a correlation than "only a fraction." May be true. But do not forget "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation .
<quote><p>... but it's just a little bit scary, since I have seen it fail (as in the build driver crashing) about 1 in a 100 times. But for daily dev work, it's awesome.</p></quote>
And why does it fail about 1 in 100 times? It is mysteries like these that are the real cause of worry. For mission critical applications, not knowing the cause of failure is a deal breaker. See my comment below about understanding parallelization.
Again, I suspect the improvements noticed are not just due to the cores, but also improvements in RAM, memory bus, processor-memory interface, and speedy hard drive.
Look I am not against multiple cores - dual or even quad cores are actually beneficial since both the hardware and software can effectively utilize them without a lot of complications. But beyond quad core, I am not convinced.
The only one way I can argue for the need of more than quad cores is to allow for a future unknown resource-intensive application. But for most present day applications, even for Graphics rendering (which by the way - has its own dedicated processor!), spending money on more cores is purely money down the drain.
Parallelization of algorithms is actually not a trivial task at all. Many programmers discover this fact after innocuously assuming that they can just do it by reading a book or utilizing a library in their otherwise procedural programming paradigm. It is only after they have banged their heads, that many realize that parallelization actually entails a completely different thinking about programming. And these are the lucky programmers.
The worst are the ones who naiively implement utilizing a library and happily go about blissfully ignorant about the issues involved.
Compound this with the fact that most common languages used today (C, C++ etc.) really didn't think of parallelization as an integrated aspect. It is mostly tacked on as an after thought. There is work being done in developing effective strategies for parallel algorithms -- but this work is still very pedantic in nature and you will need a whole new generation of software developers to catch up to that.
What bothers me is not that Intel or AMD are coming out with ever more cores... that is simply an artifact of technological progress. You cannot expect that to stop just because the rest of the world has to catch up. But the fact that bugs me is that nagging suspicion that we are not really using all the computing power already at our disposal and we are being deluged with more. Simplistic metrics like my program runs faster, ergo more cores = faster is fallacious. It will only be valid as a metric if you change nothing on the computer except the number of cores.
But since processors are packaged with memory controllers, conducting such an experiment is only difficult for regular people. You never know whether it was the improvement in underlying memory interface that got you that extra speed or the tacking of actual cores.
But see that is the issue here -- every one is throwing around numbers convinced that it is solely the number of cores that is causing the improvement.
What part of that 14 minutes improvement -- is actually the result of a speedy RAM, improvements to the processor-memory bus interface? If we strip it down to its bare, I have a high confidence that the cores added only a fraction of improvement. Also factor in
Data flowing through your processor is not a water stream -- you provide 6 pumps and viola! You pump out more water.
Data has to be managed and marshalled through the cores - that takes what? You guessed it - more processing power. One of your cores will be exclusively dealing in managing data flow through other cores -- so even though you are under the illusion that you are putting a healthy load -- the fact of the matter is that in absolute terms, you did not gain any great leap in your computing power.
I have been wondering for quite some time - do regular joe consumers really need all those cores? OR is everyone buying into the marketing hype of processor manufacturers without thinking whether we would actually need that many cores??
First of all, any computer organization text will inform you that as the number of cores increase - scheduling amongst those cores becomes an exponentially costly issue in itself. This scheduling/load balancing of course has to be ultra low latency to maintain a reasonable throughput. Not to mention the fact, that on software side managing threading and choosing instructions to parallelize is a big headache. Many decent programmers cannot get it right so that in itself defeats the presence of different cores.
Secondly - unless you are continuously doing protein folding, calculating eigen values of huge matrices, or are acting as a node for traffic in your part of the world -- most people's processor cores will spend a majority of their time idling or spin-lock. Is it any surprise then that both Intel and AMD are advertising technologies to power down three cores, boosting the power for the other three?? Simply because most end-users will rarely utilize all six of their cores simultaneously. Yes, that is even true no matter if you are doing heavy video transcoding or running multiple servers, and playing games simultaneously - you will still leave your cores without any task simply because unless the bandwidth of the memory bus catches up, your cores will be waiting for data to process. This is why Intel's i-series architecture is superior to AMDs and likely the fact their processors cost more, because they have addressed the memory bus issue.
You have to realize your computer acts like a chain and it is only as fast as its weakest link.
I have been advising people that any new dual or quad processor will suffice - they should instead spend that extra money on buying a better motherboard, speedier RAM, and of course high-speed HDD.
Trust me when I say that just that approach above will yield systems that are actually much faster than coupling an i7/Mega-core behemoth with an old hard-disk and crappy RAM.
It is an altogether different matter that computers are already so speedy that most users cannot for the love of God discern between the speeds of any recent dual-core and a top-of-the-line processor - and it is not their fault -- the advantages now we are talking about are incremental. The power is present but cannot be harnessed. So any gloating is moot.
Most colleges (including mine) implement a similar solution - asking a user to download a program to give network access for Windows especially. And don't even get me started on that bloatware McAfee.
Don't simply discard your college because of the network policy - choose it/discard it based on the quality of programs it offers.:-)
You have many excellent options to choose from above. Personally with powerful computers and oodles of RAM, I choose to run a thin layer of Linux and Virtualize Windows within it. However it may not be the most desirable situation on a laptop if Windows IS your primary OS.
However, in my opinion, whatever you decide to implement - it is important that you bring up the privacy issue with the IT department of your school. Someone needs to raise that issue emphatically. If they give you a written assurance of your privacy and later you discover that in fact it is not true, you can always sue them!;-)
So.... What is the optimum configuration that yields the high-enough FPS/high-enough resolution/lowest latencies with the minimum of price?
In other words - Build a system configuration at the minimum price after which any incremental gain in performance is disproportionate to further input in price?
Hmmm.. makes me wonder if this move by MS is merely a face-saving measure? It just might be embarrassing to admit that only 1 or 2 users of Windows Live Messenger exist in Iran and other such countries!:-)
Agreed about the BIOS+Browser = future -- personally I thought the original idea was anyways too glib and I have serious misgivings about it.
Loading X with a kernel with barebones drivers for the system is even in the present scenario is very fast.
My misgiving about the original idea is that when you say BIOS + Browser -- analogically its like saying in a car that since you can see the scenery (Browser), and the wheels are capable inherently capable of traveling on a road (BIOS), you can dispose of the car engine (OS) completely since its beneath the hood!
B***S**t.
There's just so many things wrong with this article.
Firstly - the very basic function of the OS is to manage the hardware, so to "demote the OS to just another function of HW" doesn't make sense at all!
And just to run a decent browser a lot of underlying systems need to be there just to make it all work - a windowing system, a file management system to store your downloadable stuff (if you want that.. which I think YOU DO want!), printing subsystem.
Remote Procedure Calls need to exist for the browser to open up your favorite document, writable store for cookies, message passing such as signals and semaphores if you want the tab functionality of browsers need to be present.
Just because you have your browser full-screen doesn't make your OS dispensable!
To achieve the same level of functionality as today's browsers, a lot of subsystems underneath should work properly.
In most respects your browser is JUST ANOTHER function on top of your OS.
Analogically, this article is akin to saying that hey you can see scenery passing by in your car (browser) and you have wheels (BIOS) so the engine (OS) can be completely discarded. The wheels (BIOS) by themselves innately have the capability of traveling on roads!
Err... massive oversimplification there buddy.....
3.start networking
4.put a webbrowser in fullscreen..
To put a browser on the screen - you will need to have a windowing system. To have a windowing system, mechanisms such as callbacks, RPC, signals, and events have to be setup.
Not to mention - which user owns the browser?
So to make it look like the present, either all this code has to go into your favorite browser (re-inventing the wheel!) or it has to load separately...
and what do you end up having? Very close to what's already there!
Slashdot Mirror
SanDisk has announced a 1GB Secure Digital card that can store data for 100 years, but can be written on only once. ...
Great - Now to find a foolproof way to...
Ensure that when you are burning an ISO, it really does write the disk image. Coz trust me if I find another disk with only a single ISO file, its going to be a sorry 100 years.
The real threat to marriage is actually divorce.
41% of first marriages end in divorce. [1]
I would say we should bring out a petition to outlaw divorce. Since, it is obvious who the group of people would be to sign it. I would say that make that petition visible to everyone too. I don't think gays/marriage preservers would mind that. After all we are standing up for marriage!
And of course, we should have the thunderous support of all these marriage preserving groups like NOM -- how could you not support something that promotes family wholeness?? < Cue in Ad of a lonely bedraggled child, saying how he would be perfect if his parents hadn't divorced >
The bible does not espouse divorce [2], so it must be a sin, of course! Hey, you started the wholesomeness of marriage thing. Now it would be hypocritical for you to oppose this, wouldn't it?
Sources:
[1] www.divorcerate.org
[2] Catholic Church and Divorce
Your logic is true.
:-)
However, you lose credibility in only highlighting what the gay community did in California.
If you were truly espousing your idea - you also need to highlight all the gay bashing that has occurred and continues to occur to this day, rather than paying a cursory homage to the other side.
Specious writings like these, passing off as balanced but subtly edging towards an agenda are devious, to say the least.
You are right, that the point here should not be the fear of one group over the other. The issue at its very core is that a group of people took a debilitating decision on another group.
If the laws only applied to the group that oppressed gay marriage -- that may even be right -- they have every right to decide what is right for them.
However, in this case, since the law is applied to gays and specifically aims to cripple them -- it is plain wrong.
Let us not forget the fact that gays do not actively tell you that you will be going to hell because of a certain book.
What I find hilariously funny is that these gay-bashers are hypocrites in every sense of the word. You stand with a picket line judging homosexuals and casting curses on them and at the same time, completely forget "Thou Shalt not judge" -- Welcome to Hell with the gays.
I can't wait for the afterlife to find all these bible-toting people in hell with gays. Boy, Satan will not be the only one doing the roasting!
To be Christian is to be kind, benevolent, accepting yourself for who you are, and accepting others for who they are.
This shit purported by these so-called "conservatives" ain't Christianity. In fact, it is even farther from Christianity than the sins they oppose.
What part of the health care reform bill will save thousands of lives? Do you even know what the bill does? Have you read any of it? Even a summary? All the bill does is give more money to insurance corporations, force people to buy health insurance who didn't before, and tax the middle class. That's it. There's no magic spells in it to save lives. You've swallowed the partisan bullcrap hook, line, and sinker.
Ok, I think you are going a little overboard in trying to prove your point. The health care bill though may be not as dramatic, is a significant step.
Here are some of the things it does, that did not happen before:
Look, I get your argument for not buying into partisan arguments, but do not deny things that were actually achieved. It is true that Republicans did not want all those changes above and are actively working to weaken them.
Democratic processes work via consensus and it is true that to a certain extent they are all tainted. However, passage of this health care bill would not have happened without this president.
Somehow I feel that it is people who have gotten so sick of all this partisan muck that allow the party of bigotry (GOP) to actually advance ahead with senseless arguments - because this party targets people's emotions in a misleading way to garner its support.
This does not mean that democrats are in the white -- but currently what we really need in this country is a little more logic, and a lot less rhetoric. And much of this implies that people who have gotten sick must make their voice heard.
Titan is a young celestial body - with its own dense atmosphere and the only body until now in the solar system that has surface liquids apart from us.
Sure it can be hypothesized that since Titan is young - it probably is taking a course that Earth took millions of years ago. With the distance from Sun rendering it cold and the fact that it orbits Saturn being the primary differences.
Of course finding Life would be an enormous discovery. But if we start with what we already know - that Organic reactions are taking place on Titan's surface, and that it is a giant Organic Soup -- It gives us a huge interesting laboratory to study and experiment!
We can even direct Titan's course of life by controlled introduction of earth's anaerobic life on its surface -- since we already know a hypothesis on how our own Earth's atmosphere has evolved into the current air composition -- we can *test* and use those theories to change Titan's atmosphere, in turn not only validating our theories, but may be making Titan inhabitable like Earth!
Exciting to say the least! If only we humans can, just for a second -- stop bickering amongst ourselves and look outwards to this possibility!!
A point many people probably didn't notice is that India is not really pissed off at the whole ACTA treaty.
The major reason for India's tirade seems to be the fact that (in addition to Pharmaceutical situation, of course) it was left out of negotiations. In a multi-polarized world, India increasingly sees itself as an important node in the global market. Had the negotiations proceeded in an all-inclusive manner, I am pretty sure most countries' governments would have happily and silently signed oppressive laws into place.
In a way, this "unfair" tactic by western countries, I believe did push India over the edge, but surely the humanitarian, people-friendly position is not why India and other countries are opposing this law. It benefits the Indian Pharmaceutical companies and it is in India's benefit to fight this both for trying to keep its industry alive and asserting its influence.
For the record - I am Indian. And yes, I am opposed to many tough measures in the ACTA -- but I have this sneaky suspicion that just to appease India and other countries, the other countries will throw a ball in their direction -- give them some special concession in a very limited area -- and then all these countries will happily climb on to the ACTA bandwagon!
For all those expecting a showdown between India/China vs. the rest of the world -- chances are that it will never actually develop into something more than a few provocative statements here and there -- fervent negotiations will go on to give them some choicest concessions, so they can all start oppressing people everywhere asap... of course, this will be marketed heavily as something "amazingly good" for the people of the world!
As opposed to an obscure programmer who has no interest in fixing a problem because it's boring ?
Nope not really. With open source - you will usually have someone out there who needs to plug that hole because they have a genuine need for it for some reason. They migrate their solution upstream, where it ends up benefiting all.
True, open source also results in abandoned works. But the very fact that you have the code available means that if you take interest, you can do anything with it (or even own and direct its development) as opposed to a black-box that is closed-source. You just have a binary and you are stuck with it, if your programmer abandons it.
Open source is not always a polished alternative - something that closed source can always do better. But Open Source is always a fundamentally superior alternative -- because knowledge only grows when shared and incorporated with other's opinions.
This is one of the reasons why academia seems to embrace Open Source widely - because no where else is the value of collaboration more recognized.
I actually think this is Google and Facebook's own doing rather than a sneaky third party.
Both Messrs Page/Brin and Zuckerberg have made statements in recent memory that can only be called tactless. Statements like "the age of privacy is over" or "people should not expect privacy" etc...etc...
When you run one of the world's largest social network and search engine, I am surprised that these gentlemen bandy about making such statements in such a callous manner. They certainly may be geniuses in their respective fields, but making such statements was a public relations disaster. It may be so that what they said was completely true, but when speaking to a group you always need to adhere to diplomacy.
It is like the oil companies saying - "Yeah, we are in this for oil/money/our investors interest only. People/Environment be damned." -- That is usually the unspoken part and it is hara-kiri to be an executive of the company and actually put this so candidly. In fact you are acting against your company's interest.
So, I think both Google and Facebook executives alarmed people greatly. Because they are in the business of our privacy. This combined with their latest faux-pas, Google's WiFi data collection, and Facebook's privacy control. Both of these situations could have been mitigated if their Public Relations had acted quickly, reassured people. However, in both cases, the companies inordinately delayed their response, in fact at first not even owning up to their mistake but blaming it on inadvertent situations and naysayers.
The only way out of this is for them to quickly own up their mistakes (even if they think none was made). Sincerely apologize (or at least make such public gestures, regardless of their personal feelings) and calm some frayed nerves. Trust me -- if tomorrow both Facebook and Google - ran ad campaigns saying "We're sorry. There is nothing more important to us than our user's privacy and we will defend it to death" -- They will be America's sweethearts back again.
Personally, both their PR firms need to be fired.
Face it, thanks to Open Sores we all get to suffer more malware and more powerful malware. If even Microsoft with all their programmers has a hell of a time keeping up with patches and all of that, how are average users going to stand a chance? Tell me again why closed source is such a horrible thing??
Because closed source is equivalent to security through obscurity paradigm -- which never works and worse still - is illusory. You are only asking to live in your la-la land when the reality is different.
Malicious people are going to develop such sophisticated attacks regardless of whether software is closed-source or open-source.
Making such exploits open-source lets us know what sort of channels are exploited. This leads to a better understanding of the weaknesses in the underlying protocol. This is where you have improved software that won't fall down like a house of cards when kicked at the shins.
With closed source -- you are trusting what? An obscure programmer who is under a deadline to push something out the door??
You probably are not even aware of how many times Open Sourcing has saved your a$$. Just because you pretend the problem doesn't exist, does not mean that your ignorance is the truth.
I totally agree with you. (Can someone mod the parent of this reply up, please?)
We do need a linguistically fine-tuned populace who are able to interpret, and analyse the state of the world around them. This is why the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) has an entire section on seemingly esoteric words differentiated by subtle connotations. (This is something that many Engineering and Math students wonder when taking GRE - Why an overly contrived English section?)
Unfortunately - I see that almost everywhere, people are looking for sound-bytes and simplified information.
The trouble with simplification is that you either,
end up with an extremely wordy conjecture, for eg: [[Scientists find that humans and Chimpanzees at a long point of time in the past had a common relative. In effect, making humans and Chimpanzees distant cousins.]]
or to satisfy conciseness, you lose precision. for eg: [[Scientists find that humans and Chimpanzees are related.]]
Language is the *tool* we have to satisfy both our needs for conciseness and accuracy, but of course, then you lose the universal appeal.
There are a few facets to the issue - let me try to dissect them:
Just like in statistics -- corporations are not looking for a particular person, but they are trying to aggregate it all and derive a trend or more accurately a statistical model. And just like in statistics -- the outliers will stand out.
A lot of you are complaining about the lack of coding skills, as well as lack of theoretical knowledge.
The sad part is that more often than not excellent coders are not the best theorists -- some top coders get so involved with a particular language or technology, that they are effectively locked into it and vice-versa.
As mentioned earlier in one of the replies to this post -- IT and CS seem to be two siblings with diverging goals.
There are very few people who are both excellent coders as well as well-versed with theory and reality behind.
The truth of the matter is that these people have either worked very hard or have accumulated this expertise over long years of experience. So, to be honest -- you cannot really expect an AVERAGE fresh BS graduate to be highly honed in both.
I don't think many recruiters come with reasonable expectations themselves. (In interest of fairness - I am a masters student in CS, and I am from India)
Many come in ready to find someone who is tailor-made all-in-one panacea for their jobs.
Sure there are some students out there who feel entitled, but there are definitely people out there who genuinely intend to learn, fit in, and improve themselves.
May be the change needs to be mutual, not just on the colleges' end, but Recruiters and Companies also need to realize that there are distinct categories of CS graduates out there. If the job requires someone with both skills and you are having a hard time finding one person for it - then may be you need to split the job into theory-centric and code-centric part. Hire the best theorist out there and couple him/her with the best coder. Recruit them in such a way that they work together well -- and pair them for the tasks.
I am aware that many recruiters become jaded and form prejudices against classes of candidates (you can see many examples of that above) -- and may be there is some truth to that, but has it really been looked upon objectively?
Yeah but that probably applies to people who do not read /.
Frankly speaking - I will gladly welcome a social network where I don't have to deal with the same annoying bunch that go as my friends.
If I have to look at another lol cat, weird bollywood dances, or request for some vegetable/animal/food/fodder/poke over an online connection.... it is all getting old.
Facebook used to be fun. Now its just tiring.
I agree with your main assertion. The problem is indeed "bad/malicious" patents.
And even though I do see the spirit behind your ideas and may even support it if proposed, I think the whole patent structure needs to be properly reformed. It is all too common to see a patent and then find that it is just a minor variation of something done earlier and the patent should not have been awarded. Happens very often in software world and then it is subject to lengthy litigation.
I think we need a detailed categorization of art forms - a genealogy of human technology and art.
Patents should then be assigned to this genealogical trees' nodes. Have a committee specializing in a branch subset to actually look at patents in that field. Utilize the technology so the committee collaborates online and processes patents in its sub-field. Of course, all the committee members should be established field experts in their sub-branches and the voting system should be designed to eliminate biases.
This will immediately allow comparison of patents in a branch - as the subset will be closely related and if the genealogy is extremely thorough - the number of patents would be small enough for the committee to be aware of most of it. Of course the genealogy should be dynamic to allow further sub-branching.
Is such a system already in place?
I agree.
Intel has also been doing its part. The Thread building blocks library is being increasingly used. http://www.threadingbuildingblocks.org/
No, it's not perfect, as in T(N) = T(1)/N, but it's certainly much stronger a correlation than "only a fraction."
May be true. But do not forget "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation .
<quote><p>... but it's just a little bit scary, since I have seen it fail (as in the build driver crashing) about 1 in a 100 times. But for daily dev work, it's awesome.</p></quote>
And why does it fail about 1 in 100 times? It is mysteries like these that are the real cause of worry. For mission critical applications, not knowing the cause of failure is a deal breaker.
See my comment below about understanding parallelization.
Again, I suspect the improvements noticed are not just due to the cores, but also improvements in RAM, memory bus, processor-memory interface, and speedy hard drive.
Look I am not against multiple cores - dual or even quad cores are actually beneficial since both the hardware and software can effectively utilize them without a lot of complications. But beyond quad core, I am not convinced.
The only one way I can argue for the need of more than quad cores is to allow for a future unknown resource-intensive application. But for most present day applications, even for Graphics rendering (which by the way - has its own dedicated processor!), spending money on more cores is purely money down the drain.
Parallelization of algorithms is actually not a trivial task at all.
Many programmers discover this fact after innocuously assuming that they can just do it by reading a book or utilizing a library in their otherwise procedural programming paradigm. It is only after they have banged their heads, that many realize that parallelization actually entails a completely different thinking about programming. And these are the lucky programmers.
The worst are the ones who naiively implement utilizing a library and happily go about blissfully ignorant about the issues involved.
Compound this with the fact that most common languages used today (C, C++ etc.) really didn't think of parallelization as an integrated aspect. It is mostly tacked on as an after thought. There is work being done in developing effective strategies for parallel algorithms -- but this work is still very pedantic in nature and you will need a whole new generation of software developers to catch up to that.
What bothers me is not that Intel or AMD are coming out with ever more cores... that is simply an artifact of technological progress. You cannot expect that to stop just because the rest of the world has to catch up.
But the fact that bugs me is that nagging suspicion that we are not really using all the computing power already at our disposal and we are being deluged with more. Simplistic metrics like my program runs faster, ergo more cores = faster is fallacious. It will only be valid as a metric if you change nothing on the computer except the number of cores.
But since processors are packaged with memory controllers, conducting such an experiment is only difficult for regular people. You never know whether it was the improvement in underlying memory interface that got you that extra speed or the tacking of actual cores.
But see that is the issue here -- every one is throwing around numbers convinced that it is solely the number of cores that is causing the improvement.
What part of that 14 minutes improvement -- is actually the result of a speedy RAM, improvements to the processor-memory bus interface? If we strip it down to its bare, I have a high confidence that the cores added only a fraction of improvement.
Also factor in
Data flowing through your processor is not a water stream -- you provide 6 pumps and viola! You pump out more water.
Data has to be managed and marshalled through the cores - that takes what? You guessed it - more processing power. One of your cores will be exclusively dealing in managing data flow through other cores -- so even though you are under the illusion that you are putting a healthy load -- the fact of the matter is that in absolute terms, you did not gain any great leap in your computing power.
I have been wondering for quite some time - do regular joe consumers really need all those cores? OR is everyone buying into the marketing hype of processor manufacturers without thinking whether we would actually need that many cores??
First of all, any computer organization text will inform you that as the number of cores increase - scheduling amongst those cores becomes an exponentially costly issue in itself. This scheduling/load balancing of course has to be ultra low latency to maintain a reasonable throughput.
Not to mention the fact, that on software side managing threading and choosing instructions to parallelize is a big headache. Many decent programmers cannot get it right so that in itself defeats the presence of different cores.
Secondly - unless you are continuously doing protein folding, calculating eigen values of huge matrices, or are acting as a node for traffic in your part of the world -- most people's processor cores will spend a majority of their time idling or spin-lock. Is it any surprise then that both Intel and AMD are advertising technologies to power down three cores, boosting the power for the other three?? Simply because most end-users will rarely utilize all six of their cores simultaneously. Yes, that is even true no matter if you are doing heavy video transcoding or running multiple servers, and playing games simultaneously - you will still leave your cores without any task simply because unless the bandwidth of the memory bus catches up, your cores will be waiting for data to process.
This is why Intel's i-series architecture is superior to AMDs and likely the fact their processors cost more, because they have addressed the memory bus issue.
You have to realize your computer acts like a chain and it is only as fast as its weakest link.
I have been advising people that any new dual or quad processor will suffice - they should instead spend that extra money on buying a better motherboard, speedier RAM, and of course high-speed HDD.
Trust me when I say that just that approach above will yield systems that are actually much faster than coupling an i7/Mega-core behemoth with an old hard-disk and crappy RAM.
It is an altogether different matter that computers are already so speedy that most users cannot for the love of God discern between the speeds of any recent dual-core and a top-of-the-line processor - and it is not their fault -- the advantages now we are talking about are incremental. The power is present but cannot be harnessed. So any gloating is moot.
Most colleges (including mine) implement a similar solution - asking a user to download a program to give network access for Windows especially. And don't even get me started on that bloatware McAfee.
:-)
;-)
Don't simply discard your college because of the network policy - choose it/discard it based on the quality of programs it offers.
You have many excellent options to choose from above. Personally with powerful computers and oodles of RAM, I choose to run a thin layer of Linux and Virtualize Windows within it. However it may not be the most desirable situation on a laptop if Windows IS your primary OS.
However, in my opinion, whatever you decide to implement - it is important that you bring up the privacy issue with the IT department of your school. Someone needs to raise that issue emphatically. If they give you a written assurance of your privacy and later you discover that in fact it is not true, you can always sue them!
So....
What is the optimum configuration that yields the high-enough FPS/high-enough resolution/lowest latencies with the minimum of price?
In other words - Build a system configuration at the minimum price after which any incremental gain in performance is disproportionate to further input in price?
An optimization problem there.
Hmmm.. makes me wonder if this move by MS is merely a face-saving measure? It just might be embarrassing to admit that only 1 or 2 users of Windows Live Messenger exist in Iran and other such countries! :-)
Agreed about the BIOS+Browser = future -- personally I thought the original idea was anyways too glib and I have serious misgivings about it.
Loading X with a kernel with barebones drivers for the system is even in the present scenario is very fast.
My misgiving about the original idea is that when you say BIOS + Browser -- analogically its like saying in a car that since you can see the scenery (Browser), and the wheels are capable inherently capable of traveling on a road (BIOS), you can dispose of the car engine (OS) completely since its beneath the hood!
B***S**t. There's just so many things wrong with this article. Firstly - the very basic function of the OS is to manage the hardware, so to "demote the OS to just another function of HW" doesn't make sense at all! And just to run a decent browser a lot of underlying systems need to be there just to make it all work - a windowing system, a file management system to store your downloadable stuff (if you want that.. which I think YOU DO want!), printing subsystem. Remote Procedure Calls need to exist for the browser to open up your favorite document, writable store for cookies, message passing such as signals and semaphores if you want the tab functionality of browsers need to be present. Just because you have your browser full-screen doesn't make your OS dispensable! To achieve the same level of functionality as today's browsers, a lot of subsystems underneath should work properly. In most respects your browser is JUST ANOTHER function on top of your OS. Analogically, this article is akin to saying that hey you can see scenery passing by in your car (browser) and you have wheels (BIOS) so the engine (OS) can be completely discarded. The wheels (BIOS) by themselves innately have the capability of traveling on roads!
Err... massive oversimplification there buddy. .. ..
3.start networking
4.put a webbrowser in fullscreen ..
To put a browser on the screen - you will need to have a windowing system. To have a windowing system, mechanisms such as callbacks, RPC, signals, and events have to be setup.
Not to mention - which user owns the browser?
So to make it look like the present, either all this code has to go into your favorite browser (re-inventing the wheel!) or it has to load separately...
and what do you end up having? Very close to what's already there!