A) It's not that big of an assumption. The exponential curve in computing power doesn't just go back to the advent of computers, it goes back as far as we could perform simple arithmetic. It's an assumption based on our long history of improving methods and fabricating machines to compute. Unless we have capped our ability to invent new methods of computing, it's a fairly safe assumption to make. Our ability to compute is probably not limited by the number of transistors we can pack on a silicon disk.
B) given a large enough knowledge base and a set of really good AI algorithms, one should be able to create intelligent machines. There's nothing to prevent them from replicating, either. However, I don't think that they will ever be truly sentient. Even so, careful design will be necessary to ensure Asimov's laws of robotics are strictly enforced.
C) I don't believe Kurzweil has ever claimed NP-Hard problems would be solved by the exponential increase in computing power.
Why the above tripe was modded insightful is beyond me. Certificates are the oldest and most reliable way of anonymously verifying identity between sites or otherwise anonymous users.
Nobody expects certificates to perform on the fly authentication. Authentication is performed before the certificate is issued, and thereafter one has the assurance that the certificate is being held by a previously authenticated authority. You might as well complain that authentication itself is a scam because it is not 100% reliable.
Where the F have you been for the last 15 years, anyway? Essentially, you're making the ridiculous claim that assymetric public/private key based encryption is worthless, when it has been proven to be anything but.
Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business
on
Desktop Linux Is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Open Office Base does have a form builder. It's not as slick as MS Access, but it does work. The main issue I had with Base the last time I used it was that the query designer only supported select queries - no inserts, updates, or deletes. So you could use the form builder, but you'd still have to hand code the SQL for most of the work you'd be using forms for. Not particularly a big deal to me, but if you're used to the Microsoft drag and drop sort of programming, I guess it could be an issue.
A computer with an offsite backup still preserves data when the building is bombed, burned down, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. A map in such a building will be gone forever. Sayonara, data. Your Vet teacher and apparently the entire Marine Corps have it wrong.
He describes them as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." That quote really stuck with me since then, and I've often thought about these huge trading businesses on Wall Street that somehow are so valuable they provide their workers with luxury working conditions in highrises in downtown Manhattan and millions of dollars a year in salary and bonuses. But I can't quite figure out what value they actually provide anyone. Last quarter they reported they made money every single trading day. Uncanny that they can ri^H^Hpredict the market so accurately. Is there a purpose for letting people suck money out of the stock market the way they do? Or are they really a giant vampire squid as Taiibi describes them to be? Seems like all this could be doing is hurting the people who actually do provide goods and services and actual value to the economy, but what do I know, I'm certainly no Wall Street master of the universe.
But its the distributing part that is special, not the map/reduce part.
You're basically just dividing up a huge list and sending each part to a different machine. Tacked on to each list are the map and reduce functions themselves so each machine knows what to do with the list.
Its the parallelization of the problem that is the hard part. Map does not mean the mapping of the problem to thousands of machines - it means the mapping of a function to a list, and that is not a terribly difficult problem.
Parallel/distributed sorting doesn't eliminate the need for map/reduce, it just helps spread the problem set across machines.
Here's the thing though...its the distributing of the problem set and the combining of the results that is the hard part - not map/reduce.
Map and reduce are simple functional programming paradigms. With map, you apply a function to a list - which could be either atomic values or other functions. With reduce, you take a single function(like add or multiply, for instance) and use that to condense the list into a single value or object.
That's my understanding of map/reduce from my functional language classes in school and that's exactly how Google describes it. I don't really see what the big deal is with map/reduce in itself.
Like I said, its the distributing the problem among thousands of machines that is the hard part.
And I'd have to say, that if you're OK with Obama getting the most Texas delegates while losing the popular vote, you shouldn't have any problem when the reverse is true and the supers pick her to be the nominee.
You're going to have to wait for the publishers to change the pricing.
Even at $9.99, amazon is selling these books at a loss. They can't sustain this price forever, and this little fact is something they seem to be hiding from the current crop of kindle customers.
Too rich for their own good, money to burn, since to own this device, you would already have a laptop, an ipod, a cell phone, digital camera, etc. etc. If you have the money to fork over $400 for a device less useful than just about everything else on the market, you probably own a Segway.
Not to say that its not nice being rich, but you're also an idiot since this overpriced, semi-useful device is full of DRM and all your books will likely be gone as soon as amazon decides to discontinue it or not to support the old form of DRM with their new model.
But hey, if you're both rich and dumb, its perfect for you. Maybe someone will invent a clip to attach it to your Segway so you can read while you ride.
This has been about the worst April Fools Day ever. Partly because its Sunday, but the jokes on Slashdot and Google this year are about the most unfunny, unprankable ones ever.
It is not common knowledge, and stats mean more than quoting a wikipedia article(which doesn't state postgres performs better, it states performance is "comparable"). My understanding of the "common knowledge" is that mysql offers better performance, postgres has better sql standard compliance and more features. Common knowledge would dictate that more features would slow down performance. For instance, extra data integrity checks every time inserts, updates or deletes are performed would be an extra feature, but it would come at the expense of speed.
You are just propagating myths - how about real comparisons of performance, like these?
Where are the statistics to back up your assertion - that Postgres performs better with a high volume of inserts/updates/deletes than MySQL with InnoDB?
Or are you just repeating something you've heard?
Postgres may have more features and better support of SQL standards like transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc, but these are things that improve data integrity, not performance.
MySQL has always been oriented to performance rather than features and its use as a backend for web sites has always been a primary goal for its developers.
It may be easier to maintain a network of homogenous PC's, but once I've broken into one of your computers, I've broken into them all. That's something that management should consider as well as the supposed "ease of maintenance" a homogenous network would bring. What's easier - fixing one compromised machine, or an entire network of them?
Slashdot Mirror
A) It's not that big of an assumption. The exponential curve in computing power doesn't just go back to the advent of computers, it goes back as far as we could perform simple arithmetic. It's an assumption based on our long history of improving methods and fabricating machines to compute. Unless we have capped our ability to invent new methods of computing, it's a fairly safe assumption to make. Our ability to compute is probably not limited by the number of transistors we can pack on a silicon disk.
B) given a large enough knowledge base and a set of really good AI algorithms, one should be able to create intelligent machines. There's nothing to prevent them from replicating, either. However, I don't think that they will ever be truly sentient. Even so, careful design will be necessary to ensure Asimov's laws of robotics are strictly enforced.
C) I don't believe Kurzweil has ever claimed NP-Hard problems would be solved by the exponential increase in computing power.
Why the above tripe was modded insightful is beyond me. Certificates are the oldest and most reliable way of anonymously verifying identity between sites or otherwise anonymous users.
Nobody expects certificates to perform on the fly authentication. Authentication is performed before the certificate is issued, and thereafter one has the assurance that the certificate is being held by a previously authenticated authority. You might as well complain that authentication itself is a scam because it is not 100% reliable.
Where the F have you been for the last 15 years, anyway? Essentially, you're making the ridiculous claim that assymetric public/private key based encryption is worthless, when it has been proven to be anything but.
Open Office Base does have a form builder. It's not as slick as MS Access, but it does work. The main issue I had with Base the last time I used it was that the query designer only supported select queries - no inserts, updates, or deletes. So you could use the form builder, but you'd still have to hand code the SQL for most of the work you'd be using forms for. Not particularly a big deal to me, but if you're used to the Microsoft drag and drop sort of programming, I guess it could be an issue.
FTW?
Maybe, if you're in a contest to find the slowest sorting algorithm. :)
Well, the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow is 11 meters per second. African or European.
http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/
However, as soon as you strap a memory card to the swallow, it is no longer unladen. By definition.
Therefore, the bandwidth capacity of an unladen swallow is zero.
Oh yeah?
What about wormholes? Duh.
mainly from the kind of sites people from Slashdot would link to like rotten.com or that goat site.
That was like 10 years ago and I still havent recovered!
A computer with an offsite backup still preserves data when the building is bombed, burned down, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. A map in such a building will be gone forever. Sayonara, data. Your Vet teacher and apparently the entire Marine Corps have it wrong.
I remember reading an article about Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone last year by Matt Taiibi. Ah yes, this is the one:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/12697/64796
He describes them as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." That quote really stuck with me since then, and I've often thought about these huge trading businesses on Wall Street that somehow are so valuable they provide their workers with luxury working conditions in highrises in downtown Manhattan and millions of dollars a year in salary and bonuses. But I can't quite figure out what value they actually provide anyone. Last quarter they reported they made money every single trading day. Uncanny that they can ri^H^Hpredict the market so accurately. Is there a purpose for letting people suck money out of the stock market the way they do? Or are they really a giant vampire squid as Taiibi describes them to be? Seems like all this could be doing is hurting the people who actually do provide goods and services and actual value to the economy, but what do I know, I'm certainly no Wall Street master of the universe.
I don't even think CmdrTaco has one of these:
Score 5, Troll, bitches.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=27217&cid=2932562
But its the distributing part that is special, not the map/reduce part.
You're basically just dividing up a huge list and sending each part to a different machine. Tacked on to each list are the map and reduce functions themselves so each machine knows what to do with the list.
Its the parallelization of the problem that is the hard part. Map does not mean the mapping of the problem to thousands of machines - it means the mapping of a function to a list, and that is not a terribly difficult problem.
Exactly. There is nothing special to map and reduce.
Here's an example. Map and reduce are functional programming tools that work with lists. So we'll start with a simple list.
1 2 3 4 5
Now we'll take a function - x^2, and map it to the list. The list now becomes:
1 4 9 16 25.
Now, we'll apply a reduce function to our list to combine it to a single value. I'll use "+" to keep it simple. We end up with:
55
And that is pretty much all there is to map and reduce.
Parallel/distributed sorting doesn't eliminate the need for map/reduce, it just helps spread the problem set across machines.
Here's the thing though...its the distributing of the problem set and the combining of the results that is the hard part - not map/reduce.
Map and reduce are simple functional programming paradigms. With map, you apply a function to a list - which could be either atomic values or other functions. With reduce, you take a single function(like add or multiply, for instance) and use that to condense the list into a single value or object.
That's my understanding of map/reduce from my functional language classes in school and that's exactly how Google describes it. I don't really see what the big deal is with map/reduce in itself.
Like I said, its the distributing the problem among thousands of machines that is the hard part.
And I'd have to say, that if you're OK with Obama getting the most Texas delegates while losing the popular vote, you shouldn't have any problem when the reverse is true and the supers pick her to be the nominee.
In other words, you were looking to get something on the cheap by hiring foreign programmers, and it bit you in the ass.
Oh, well, from what I understand thats a common occurrence, so don't feel bad.
You're going to have to wait for the publishers to change the pricing.
Even at $9.99, amazon is selling these books at a loss. They can't sustain this price forever, and this little fact is something they seem to be hiding from the current crop of kindle customers.
Too rich for their own good, money to burn, since to own this device, you would already have a laptop, an ipod, a cell phone, digital camera, etc. etc. If you have the money to fork over $400 for a device less useful than just about everything else on the market, you probably own a Segway.
Not to say that its not nice being rich, but you're also an idiot since this overpriced, semi-useful device is full of DRM and all your books will likely be gone as soon as amazon decides to discontinue it or not to support the old form of DRM with their new model.
But hey, if you're both rich and dumb, its perfect for you. Maybe someone will invent a clip to attach it to your Segway so you can read while you ride.
I haven't posted in a long while, so forgive me if I am explaining the obvious.
Open Audacity, set your sound card as the input, hit the record button and then play your song. Save the recording. Instant DRM removal.
This has been about the worst April Fools Day ever. Partly because its Sunday, but the jokes on Slashdot and Google this year are about the most unfunny, unprankable ones ever.
Yawn...ZZzzzzz
>> How about a test that actually stresses the databases and uses most of their features?
Well, you've just restated my point. I'm not the one making the unverified claims about performance, I'm just asking for actual verification.
It is not common knowledge, and stats mean more than quoting a wikipedia article(which doesn't state postgres performs better, it states performance is "comparable"). My understanding of the "common knowledge" is that mysql offers better performance, postgres has better sql standard compliance and more features. Common knowledge would dictate that more features would slow down performance. For instance, extra data integrity checks every time inserts, updates or deletes are performed would be an extra feature, but it would come at the expense of speed.
l _vs_postgres (mysql tested faster)
q l-vs-mysql.html (mysql tested faster)
You are just propagating myths - how about real comparisons of performance, like these?
http://monstera.man.poznan.pl/wiki/index.php/Mysq
http://www-css.fnal.gov/dsg/external/freeware/pgs
Where are the statistics to back up your assertion - that Postgres performs better with a high volume of inserts/updates/deletes than MySQL with InnoDB?
Or are you just repeating something you've heard?
Postgres may have more features and better support of SQL standards like transactions, triggers, stored procedures, etc, but these are things that improve data integrity, not performance.
MySQL has always been oriented to performance rather than features and its use as a backend for web sites has always been a primary goal for its developers.
It may be easier to maintain a network of homogenous PC's, but once I've broken into one of your computers, I've broken into them all. That's something that management should consider as well as the supposed "ease of maintenance" a homogenous network would bring. What's easier - fixing one compromised machine, or an entire network of them?
that global warming would lead to new oil discoveries.
There's another language that combines functional and iterative programming - it's called Perl.
This book is a good reference on Perl's functional capabilities.