The S3 doesn't even have a quad core in most markets. But a fast dual core processor is going to give you better performance hands down in a phone while also giving you better power performance. That's why the new iPhone beats it in the benchmarks. Even in a desktop, it's questionable whether there's sufficient parallel workload for a quad core to used efficiently. The clock speed is also irrelevant here: Apple has doubled the performance of the chip by using their own custom ARM core without substantially increasing the clock speed. At this point, ARM chips have a long way to go in terms of IPC performance, and higher clock speeds (and the exponentially higher power they use) are not where it's at.
So I'm sorry, but overclocked quad core processors are not the next (or current) big thing in phones.
That's nonsense. There is exactly zero risk of Apple pushing every other company out of the cell phone market or even of gaining majority market share. It's just not something you need to worry about.
If "ahead" is bigger, heavier and more power hungry then you might be right. If ahead is smaller, lighter, faster and with more available content and software then you're dead wrong.
First, it's not the case that most democratic systems share power among multiple parties. They are a wide variety of democracies in the world. Some systems are more favorable to coalitions than others and therefore are able to accommodate multiple parties. Germany, for example. Systems like Canada's might seem on the outside to be multi-party systems but in nearly every case you have two parties splitting the majority of the vote while any other party is lucky to even get a seat in the government. Coalitions are almost unheard of. Without coalitions, the system inherently favors the area of the political spectrum represented by the fewest parties. (The part of the spectrum where the vote is least divided.)
The Median Voter Theorem also tells us that in a two party system with uni-dimensional issues that the parties gravitate towards one another. For the most part, that's what we're seeing here. Obama has been forced to move quite far to the right of his liberal democratic position in order to compete with Romney who has positioned himself quite far to the left of some of the more radical elements in the republican party on a great number of issues.
As a note of personal opinion, I've viewed many of Knan's videos, and I them to be horrendous. I shutter to think of anyone at the university level trying to learn from them.
On a more serious note, the point might have been missed, both of my comment and of the theory of evolution. The key idea isn't how the genetic variation is introduced; the point is that there is a source of inheritance (concepts, available technologies, previously successful products), a source of variation (human creativity and innovation) and that there is a selection process at work (market forces, consumer and executive decisions). It doesn't so much matter how those things arise.
What people mockingly call "devolution" is evolution. You can even cite examples of traits which wither away because they are no longer advantageous for genetic selection. There's no need to cover it as a separate topic. The loss of a trait or ability can be and often is advantageous as most require energy to maintain. (Our large brain is a huge disadvantage when food is scarce.)
There's also the myth that evolution has an overall direction, for example from single celled life to humans. While humans might take longer to evolve and might seem more advanced to us, we share the world and even our bodies with billions of single celled organisms which are doing just fine. They have been evolving for just as long as we have, and in that sense are just as evolved.
The Catholics sided against the static or steady state universe because it supported an infinitely old universe which contradicted the existence of a moment of creation. This wasn't done for scientific reasons since at the time there was insufficient evidence to resolve the static vs. expanding/contracting universe problem. Some scientists (which you refer to as atheists) preferred one model over the other for various reasons. The big bang theory complicates things in many ways and scientists favored a simpler model pending any definitive evidence for the big bang or stead state theories. Some people also felt that the need for a moment of creation was an inelegant solution, but without the data this is hardly a scientific position.
Regardless of how much we know, there will always be mysteries. Those who wish to do so will always be free to attribute those to God while otherwise accepting evidence when available. Whether or not this stance makes sense is an interesting philosophical question, but ultimately I think it's a very human position to take. People love to imagine that there are Gods or other powerful beings behind the great mysteries of the universe. As we pull back the curtain on each mystery and see that there are no Gods there, some will begin to doubt. But I think there will always be more hiding places for our imagination to fill than there will be answers to expose them. Religion will survive or die off quite independently of any science. Sure, it will often be forced to change. But in one form or another there will always be mysteries and overactive imaginations.
You know what's funny, is that human design does bear a stronger resemblance to evolution than to the top to bottom all at once intelligent design proposed by ID. Especially when that design is the result of years of experimental products involving the market as a selection force. Ideas of course would be the genetic material.
Like it or not, there is not a single high tech product on the market that could be designed from top to bottom by a single man in effective isolation. Most (and usually almost all) of the functionality and design in even the most (apparently) original products is simply inherited from earlier generations of products, even if it's combined in an somewhat novel way on occasion.
That's a bit ingenuous. Evolution is ongoing. Not only that, but a correct theoretical understanding of how things came to be is essential for making and testing predictions of what we are likely to find. The rhetoric that we only need to know how things work "now" assumes that we have he luxury of discarding the best framework we have for formulating hypotheses for future investigation regarding biology or making sense of current data. We do not have that luxury.
Maybe it's a reference to fountain pens? Now that I think of it, I remember writing nibs on fountain pens working better for right handed people. I always had to hold them at a different angle to use them, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
Funny you mention that. I use the number row a lot, but I still find the number pad with my right hand to be faster for dedicated numeric entry. I just don't use it much because as a programmer I don't do a lot of manual numeric data entry.
I've gotten really used to scissors. Good scissors don't require any modification to use left handed; they just work. For cheap ones, all you have to do is apply a little transverse force and they work just as well left handed.
As a life long lefty, I can honestly say I've never felt the need to complain because a piece of technology isn't designed for me. I don't find any technology gadget I own to be designed in such a way so as to impede my usage of it.
I do know lefties who complain constantly about the injustice afforded them, but to be honest I've never been able to empathize with them.
I remember for most of my childhood hearing my grandfather complain about the cost of greater integration in virtually every area. From cars to the kitchen stove, integrated circuits were popping up all over the place, hindering repairability and it really pissed a lot of people off.
Every time we move towards greater integration, you always hear the conservative crowd crawling out of the woodwork. Lately it's just comical when you put it in the context of the last fifty years of electronics development. I mean you've already got 99% of your key components and circuits sealed inside a small number of integrated circuit housings, and have been for the last 30 years or more. To an extent it's ridiculous that anybody would be surprised that electronics are moving in this direction.
By the way, has anybody bothered to check the claimed lifespan on the new MacBook Pro retina's battery? If it lasts even 3/4 of the time they claim it will, you'll never need to worry about replacing it anyway. With new advancements in batteries, I fully expect the replaceable battery to go the way of the replaceable vacuum tube where computers are concerned. The only likely casualty will be the sense of accomplishment some folks get from resurrecting their old notebook. For the rest of us, we'll just be satisfied that the three year battery replacement cycle is now a thing of the past with batteries that outlive the device.
You make some good points. Although I don't think it applies in my case. I often have the lab to myself, and during grad school most of the other students do as you suggest, coming in around noon and working late into the night, if they showed up at all. My experience is that most people (given the freedom) are binge workers, working only when there is a deadline looming over them. Forcing them onto a regular schedule at all seems to adversely affect their job satisfaction, while increasing their availability so that they actually get supervised and complete work faster.
Whereas I tend to naturally work on a regular schedule, I don't often find myself up against deadlines. I come into work early because there's nobody else there and when there is, they're half asleep and don't tend to bother me. For me a ten hour day means I go home at 6 rather than at 4. Since it takes me a few hours to plan hour a solution to a problem, by mid afternoon I'm often in the middle of an implementation (or in the case of my thesis I often had my research organized and was just getting into writing by that time.) So for me, productivity tends to increase as I get more and more organized and focused on a given task up to the point where I'm too tired to stay that way.
I realize that most people don't work this way, but I almost never leave work without completing whatever it is I'm working on unless it's clearly too much for one day. That's why my thesis was completed in two weeks rather than a month or more. It got broken down into ten one day jobs, and I took the weekend off. For me, that style of working feels more relaxed, because I never take work home with me. When I leave work I feel a sense of accomplishment and I don't feel the need to work from home in the evenings. I always get my weekends off. And best of all, my boss is always impressed with my productivity and has a hard enough time keeping up with me that he's unlikely to be pushy. In fact he'll generally not even notice if I slack off a bit for a week or two and let the rest of the team catch up.
I'd argue that the opposite is true, being a musician, and an FPGA CAD specialist with a wife and son at home. Leaving work when I'm most creative is a bloody waste of that time. At the same time, before forced to work 12 hours every day would also wind up being a waste of time, because there's no point in staying longer when you're not productive.
I find the same true is of music. Back when I played/wrote/recorded full time, the most productive and creative times would often extend well beyond an eight hour day. So I think it's foolishness to think that creativeness is somehow correlated to a short relaxed day.
I actually do find them productive, or at least 10 hours give or take one or two. With 8 hour workdays it seems I'm always getting ready to leave just when I'm most productive.
I doubt I'd find the extra time productive if it were mandatory because longer hours necessitate the freedom to leave and rest when you're no longer productive. But when I wrote my thesis for example, two weeks of 10-12 hour days got the job done. If I'd worked longer days I wouldn't have been able to resume easily the next morning because of fatigue. Shorter 8 hour days would have eliminated my most productive writing time.
The key is that you're not actually changing the resolution. You're changing the "effective" resolution, which simply changes how large things are on the screen.
Slashdot Mirror
The S3 doesn't even have a quad core in most markets. But a fast dual core processor is going to give you better performance hands down in a phone while also giving you better power performance. That's why the new iPhone beats it in the benchmarks. Even in a desktop, it's questionable whether there's sufficient parallel workload for a quad core to used efficiently. The clock speed is also irrelevant here: Apple has doubled the performance of the chip by using their own custom ARM core without substantially increasing the clock speed. At this point, ARM chips have a long way to go in terms of IPC performance, and higher clock speeds (and the exponentially higher power they use) are not where it's at.
So I'm sorry, but overclocked quad core processors are not the next (or current) big thing in phones.
That's nonsense. There is exactly zero risk of Apple pushing every other company out of the cell phone market or even of gaining majority market share. It's just not something you need to worry about.
If "ahead" is bigger, heavier and more power hungry then you might be right. If ahead is smaller, lighter, faster and with more available content and software then you're dead wrong.
I don't really care what a company does. If I like their products, I buy them. :) Anything else is silly.
Is anyone else sick of hearing about Apple vs. Samsung?
First, it's not the case that most democratic systems share power among multiple parties. They are a wide variety of democracies in the world. Some systems are more favorable to coalitions than others and therefore are able to accommodate multiple parties. Germany, for example. Systems like Canada's might seem on the outside to be multi-party systems but in nearly every case you have two parties splitting the majority of the vote while any other party is lucky to even get a seat in the government. Coalitions are almost unheard of. Without coalitions, the system inherently favors the area of the political spectrum represented by the fewest parties. (The part of the spectrum where the vote is least divided.)
The Median Voter Theorem also tells us that in a two party system with uni-dimensional issues that the parties gravitate towards one another. For the most part, that's what we're seeing here. Obama has been forced to move quite far to the right of his liberal democratic position in order to compete with Romney who has positioned himself quite far to the left of some of the more radical elements in the republican party on a great number of issues.
Thanks.
As a note of personal opinion, I've viewed many of Knan's videos, and I them to be horrendous. I shutter to think of anyone at the university level trying to learn from them.
You appear to be a silly hamster. Oh, wait... ;)
On a more serious note, the point might have been missed, both of my comment and of the theory of evolution. The key idea isn't how the genetic variation is introduced; the point is that there is a source of inheritance (concepts, available technologies, previously successful products), a source of variation (human creativity and innovation) and that there is a selection process at work (market forces, consumer and executive decisions). It doesn't so much matter how those things arise.
What people mockingly call "devolution" is evolution. You can even cite examples of traits which wither away because they are no longer advantageous for genetic selection. There's no need to cover it as a separate topic. The loss of a trait or ability can be and often is advantageous as most require energy to maintain. (Our large brain is a huge disadvantage when food is scarce.)
There's also the myth that evolution has an overall direction, for example from single celled life to humans. While humans might take longer to evolve and might seem more advanced to us, we share the world and even our bodies with billions of single celled organisms which are doing just fine. They have been evolving for just as long as we have, and in that sense are just as evolved.
The Catholics sided against the static or steady state universe because it supported an infinitely old universe which contradicted the existence of a moment of creation. This wasn't done for scientific reasons since at the time there was insufficient evidence to resolve the static vs. expanding/contracting universe problem. Some scientists (which you refer to as atheists) preferred one model over the other for various reasons. The big bang theory complicates things in many ways and scientists favored a simpler model pending any definitive evidence for the big bang or stead state theories. Some people also felt that the need for a moment of creation was an inelegant solution, but without the data this is hardly a scientific position.
Regardless of how much we know, there will always be mysteries. Those who wish to do so will always be free to attribute those to God while otherwise accepting evidence when available. Whether or not this stance makes sense is an interesting philosophical question, but ultimately I think it's a very human position to take. People love to imagine that there are Gods or other powerful beings behind the great mysteries of the universe. As we pull back the curtain on each mystery and see that there are no Gods there, some will begin to doubt. But I think there will always be more hiding places for our imagination to fill than there will be answers to expose them. Religion will survive or die off quite independently of any science. Sure, it will often be forced to change. But in one form or another there will always be mysteries and overactive imaginations.
You know what's funny, is that human design does bear a stronger resemblance to evolution than to the top to bottom all at once intelligent design proposed by ID. Especially when that design is the result of years of experimental products involving the market as a selection force. Ideas of course would be the genetic material.
Like it or not, there is not a single high tech product on the market that could be designed from top to bottom by a single man in effective isolation. Most (and usually almost all) of the functionality and design in even the most (apparently) original products is simply inherited from earlier generations of products, even if it's combined in an somewhat novel way on occasion.
Is IQ that important if you don't have money but have obligations (family, children, debt)?
Yes, unless you ignore the total cost to society.
Disingenuous, rather.
That's a bit ingenuous. Evolution is ongoing. Not only that, but a correct theoretical understanding of how things came to be is essential for making and testing predictions of what we are likely to find. The rhetoric that we only need to know how things work "now" assumes that we have he luxury of discarding the best framework we have for formulating hypotheses for future investigation regarding biology or making sense of current data. We do not have that luxury.
Maybe it's a reference to fountain pens? Now that I think of it, I remember writing nibs on fountain pens working better for right handed people. I always had to hold them at a different angle to use them, but you get used to it pretty quickly.
Funny you mention that. I use the number row a lot, but I still find the number pad with my right hand to be faster for dedicated numeric entry. I just don't use it much because as a programmer I don't do a lot of manual numeric data entry.
I've gotten really used to scissors. Good scissors don't require any modification to use left handed; they just work. For cheap ones, all you have to do is apply a little transverse force and they work just as well left handed.
I'm not sure how a pen could be left handed.
As a life long lefty, I can honestly say I've never felt the need to complain because a piece of technology isn't designed for me. I don't find any technology gadget I own to be designed in such a way so as to impede my usage of it.
I do know lefties who complain constantly about the injustice afforded them, but to be honest I've never been able to empathize with them.
Football certainly doesn't matter.
I remember for most of my childhood hearing my grandfather complain about the cost of greater integration in virtually every area. From cars to the kitchen stove, integrated circuits were popping up all over the place, hindering repairability and it really pissed a lot of people off.
Every time we move towards greater integration, you always hear the conservative crowd crawling out of the woodwork. Lately it's just comical when you put it in the context of the last fifty years of electronics development. I mean you've already got 99% of your key components and circuits sealed inside a small number of integrated circuit housings, and have been for the last 30 years or more. To an extent it's ridiculous that anybody would be surprised that electronics are moving in this direction.
By the way, has anybody bothered to check the claimed lifespan on the new MacBook Pro retina's battery? If it lasts even 3/4 of the time they claim it will, you'll never need to worry about replacing it anyway. With new advancements in batteries, I fully expect the replaceable battery to go the way of the replaceable vacuum tube where computers are concerned. The only likely casualty will be the sense of accomplishment some folks get from resurrecting their old notebook. For the rest of us, we'll just be satisfied that the three year battery replacement cycle is now a thing of the past with batteries that outlive the device.
You make some good points. Although I don't think it applies in my case. I often have the lab to myself, and during grad school most of the other students do as you suggest, coming in around noon and working late into the night, if they showed up at all. My experience is that most people (given the freedom) are binge workers, working only when there is a deadline looming over them. Forcing them onto a regular schedule at all seems to adversely affect their job satisfaction, while increasing their availability so that they actually get supervised and complete work faster.
Whereas I tend to naturally work on a regular schedule, I don't often find myself up against deadlines. I come into work early because there's nobody else there and when there is, they're half asleep and don't tend to bother me. For me a ten hour day means I go home at 6 rather than at 4. Since it takes me a few hours to plan hour a solution to a problem, by mid afternoon I'm often in the middle of an implementation (or in the case of my thesis I often had my research organized and was just getting into writing by that time.) So for me, productivity tends to increase as I get more and more organized and focused on a given task up to the point where I'm too tired to stay that way.
I realize that most people don't work this way, but I almost never leave work without completing whatever it is I'm working on unless it's clearly too much for one day. That's why my thesis was completed in two weeks rather than a month or more. It got broken down into ten one day jobs, and I took the weekend off. For me, that style of working feels more relaxed, because I never take work home with me. When I leave work I feel a sense of accomplishment and I don't feel the need to work from home in the evenings. I always get my weekends off. And best of all, my boss is always impressed with my productivity and has a hard enough time keeping up with me that he's unlikely to be pushy. In fact he'll generally not even notice if I slack off a bit for a week or two and let the rest of the team catch up.
I'd argue that the opposite is true, being a musician, and an FPGA CAD specialist with a wife and son at home. Leaving work when I'm most creative is a bloody waste of that time. At the same time, before forced to work 12 hours every day would also wind up being a waste of time, because there's no point in staying longer when you're not productive.
I find the same true is of music. Back when I played/wrote/recorded full time, the most productive and creative times would often extend well beyond an eight hour day. So I think it's foolishness to think that creativeness is somehow correlated to a short relaxed day.
I actually do find them productive, or at least 10 hours give or take one or two. With 8 hour workdays it seems I'm always getting ready to leave just when I'm most productive.
I doubt I'd find the extra time productive if it were mandatory because longer hours necessitate the freedom to leave and rest when you're no longer productive. But when I wrote my thesis for example, two weeks of 10-12 hour days got the job done. If I'd worked longer days I wouldn't have been able to resume easily the next morning because of fatigue. Shorter 8 hour days would have eliminated my most productive writing time.
The key is that you're not actually changing the resolution. You're changing the "effective" resolution, which simply changes how large things are on the screen.