Yes, I did exactly the same thing from the late 70s to early 90s when I did my A-levels in maths, and came to same conclusion. Now I have to hire technical people and, if I'm to use A levels to discriminate, I have to somehow find out what year they took their A-levels (even though in the UK this may be construed as illegally discriminatory because that might involve discovery of a candidate's age). The simplest system would work the best - order everyone and award marks by percentile rank. This avoids grade inflation by design.
I think the real problem is that as a society we've become so politically correct we go to great lengths to avoid telling people they are below average - when in reality half of all people are precisely that (by any uniformly distributed, reasonable, metric).
I have a ray tracer spreadsheet, doing the classic bouncing sphere animation, written in simple Excel formulas only (no VBA). It was written over two years ago by a guy I still work with (he has a very low Slashdot ID, a geek PhD., and a lovely girlfriend - though not sure how he accomplished the last one). I believe he was meant to be writing some documentation at the time.
He also owes me a TPS report, with a new coversheet.
The "New Heap" has been around since Windows 2000 SP5 - the Low Fragmentation Heap - which provides about 10% performance improvement in common business apps - just wasn't enabled by default. In Vista, it's become the default - nothing new there.
RE: Microsoft Research: I've used the Detours research project in many applications - most users (even tech savvy IT support) think I've accomplished something magical using it - it's extremely powerful software. I am firmly in the "outside world", and these are real products (even if they are internal to my employer, a Fortune 500 corp) - just because you are unaware of the innovation that is happening there (and just because it is funded by Microsoft) doesn't mean you should automatically discount this research. I fully endorse the grandparent post: there is cutting edge work going on there.
V3 - great phone, absolutely DIRE interface. Really, Microsoft would have done a better job on their UI (and they would have done, their phones are at least more usable). Crap predictive text (uses a last used algorithm, not most commonly used, so "IF" and "HE" get swapped round at random. Totally dire address book (won't display number when you're entering a text, so you don't know if a name refers to a landline, mobile, or work line), can only search address book based on first character (nice one motorola). And to top it all off, completely mis-leading dialogs - for example, if someone calls whilst you're in the middle of retreiving a message, you can't terminate the call to the answering service by hitting end call - because that terminates the call you haven't answered! Seriously, if you think the V3 is a good phone, you need to try more phones!
So many (frankly) BS comments about Excel's relevance to development....
Where I work we have a team of ten people working with Excel directly supporting about double that number of traders (more than that if you look at our strategic projects). Every other software development group in our firm has more developers than traders paying for developers. We use Excel because it provides a UI that is unrivaled (and because of its rather good - but still not quite good enough for us - recalc engine). We're not idiots, we are the type of people who run multiple boxes and OSes at home, and our Excel development projects are almost psychotic in the way they push the boundaries of what is possible. We started with Life, then Tetris, then someone had to go and write an non-VBA Excel raytracer(!); more seriously we have written a macro meta-language for Excel and sophisticated profiling tools - as a firm we run distributed computing out of Excel, and I've worked with a single spreadsheet (dev time about 4 man months) that did everything (and then some) that an entire system (dev time 6 man years) did at a fund management firm I had worked at previously. That's what is possible with Excel and why it remains a popular choice in business.
It's easy to be really very bad in Excel whilst thinking you're an expert. I've lost count of the number of people I've interviewed who call themselves experts but have no idea about what a volatile function is, or how to use maps/dictionaries in Excel VBA (if you don't know these, and think you're good - you're not!). You need to be a good coder, good designer, and have an appreciation for user interface design in order to be of any real use - just like when using a "real" language, except possibly more so, because it's so easy to do things really wrong in Excel. In short, don't underestimate the value of books like these.
The real problem is that Excel (and other such spreadsheets - but mostly Excel) leaves the average person feeling like they're a wiz-kid programmer after they've been using it in their job for only a few months. I've lost track of the number of self-professed "experts" I've interviewed who didn't know the first thing about sheet design and how it affects operational risk. Worse, are consultants and auditors who have no idea about things like calculational complexity and change management. I've worked with spreadsheets for many years, and I've often seen people use volatile functions incorrectly (*please* look them up and understand why they can make a spreadsheet slow if you use Excel) or code a bubble sort in VBA and then wonder why recalculation takes so long.
Just to answer some of your points however:
References: There are a couple of (unfortunately) volatile functions you can use to compute refernces dynamically: INDIRECT() and OFFSET(). Alternatively in a large production environment (like a big bank...) you'd do better to resolve refernces once using some form of macro pre-processing (which you'd have to write yourself, but hey).
Code duplication: This is not as big an issue as you make it out to be, as copydowns are quite efficient (all functions and names are just symbols internally, and in R1C1 reference form the copydowns are identical strings). Moreover, you are using the wrong function: You should MATCH() once on (A4-FedStdDeduction), then INDEX() the items required in the FedTaxRates table.
Unreadable code: Use cell comments on the header row (or column) of the table.
Poor layout: Use conditional formatting (with the condition being something like MOD(ROW(),2)=1 to do automatic grey-barring. Use "center across selection" or cell merging for different size table columns.
Charting: Agreed. Don't go there. In fact, for any meaningful statistics anaylsis, use a real system. Besides, the stats functions in Excel have known weaknesses.
Database access / external data: Use RTD() and/or write a COM / VBA addin (even better, use the C API / EXCEL4 interface, which allows for high bandwidth communications).
Overall Excel is a very powerful tool, but most people wildly overestimate their knowledge and abilities in it, leading to the kind of errors hinted at in the liked article. The *real* problems with Excel are:
Unsupported interfaces: MS likes to "innovate" by always adding their latest wizz-bang coding interface to office and leaving previous generations stagnant (EG: strings are limited in length to 255 chars in the C API), then quietly dropping support. This is very bad. I think they will probably not get away with dropping VBA support however.
Calculation complexity limits haven't changed for ten years: Still stuck with the same limits in Excel - 7 nesting levels, 1024 char max formula length etc.
Best regards,
Daniel
PS: I have a comprehensive suite of tools for profiling Excel (internal and external functions, VBA, XLL) that I've been working on for some time, if anybody is interested in such a thing or knows of anything similar (I haven't seen the like yet) please email: desva at btinternet dot com.
You are absolutely kidding right? I've studied at Durham, UK (Carlos Frenk was my Astro lecturer), QM, London, and Stanford, US, and they all have their fair share of smart people. Calling Frenk, or indeed any of these guys "kids" is way out of line. Than again, I could just chalk it up as yet another example of American insularity. (Go ahead, mod me flamebait, I just don't take kindly to the "kids" vs. "pro" and "university of whatever" thing - it's rude and naive).
Ed, You're talking complete horse-poo - as pointed out to me by a collegue who just read your comment, little knowing that I knew the author! I finished the last parts of my PhD. analysis in Excel - nothing wrong with it if you're trying to understand systematics quickly. In fact, I felt very productive using it; typically one is going to write some bespoke software to process the bulk of the stats, then having reduced the dataset to a managable size, finalising results using a speadsheet is very good idea. BTW: where I work now there are - literally -billions of dollars worth of transactions recorded in Excel spreadsheets, and we run monte carlo simulations directly from spreadsheets. Nothing wrong with it if you know the limitations of Excel (one of which is the stats and random number functions - they used to be awful!) Hope CERN is going well, excuse the message on your answer-phone!;-)
I agree. I've been a lurker since the earliest days of Slashdot. The increasing frequency of duplicated stories, and shoddy (possibly non-existant) fact checking mark a team resting on their past fame. This "story" really does take the award for blatant stupidity however; CowboyNeal, can you please do some basic fact checking? You work with technology and the claim that a sticker can increase battery life doesn't set alarm bells ringing? Are you insane?
Yes; at work I do financial computation (monte carlo simulation, distributed processing, that kind of thing). On many occasions I've written and tested code (on a dual 2.8GHz P4) that runs only slightly slower on 1GHz P3 laptop, and runs much much faster on my other 1.6GHz Pentium M laptop - this things still smokes, and I've had it for over a year.
The P4 is a dead end. Hyperthreading is of no use in most mainstream apps (and Intel knows this); and Intel's own mobile processor is far superior in terms of computation per watt / per MHz (take your pick).
Dan
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
Whilst I agree with your post I have to post my two cents: "England" (by which you presumably mean the UK) has managed just fine for several hundred years - even against superior German forces during WWII - spends a larger proportion of its GDP on defense then any other western country - excluding the US of course - and like France, has a nuclear deterent. I don't think anyone is going to be attempting to invade England in a hurry.
Personally, I think the US could do with spending more on social programs and less on "defence" - the likelihood of using the military for the actual _defence_ of the US mainland in the near future is vanishingly small. Furthermore, having a huge military only encourages its use - after all, what's the point of spending all that money on weapons and personnel just for them to sit there unused?
How about Britain's stand against Germany? And the "alternative" history where the UK and Soviet Russia held back Nazi German whilst the US did nothing for three years, instead of "crying to the US" for help? And Lend-Lease was of course a very fair way to wrestle global economic leadership from England. Let us say nothing about Napoleon (the other superpower was France, if you can count to 250 and have history books going back that far, not Germany again) because the US was obviously there to save free Europe from that little bit of autocracy too. Never mind, I'm sure your version of history is at least more entertaining.
I define globalisation to be the integration of national economies; I believe this is not "arbitrary nonsense", but a commonly accepted definition. Integration of national economies can be measured by FDI (as a percentage of GDP in order to track this through time). If you disagree (as you seem to be doing by suggesting that I'm engaging in sophistry), then please provide a meaningful alternative measure.
I claim that sustained FDI as a percentage of GDP was much higher in the past for the dominant national economies.
I conclude that by this measure, national economies were more interconnected 100 years ago then they are now.
As a corrollary I make the (weaker) claim that the hype surrounding globalisation is what leads people to believe that the conclusion above must be false. By not addressing my premise directly (other than saying, "sorry, aint buying it"!) you have re-enforced my belief in the validity of this claim.
If you are going to reply, please point out the fallacy in my argument, or refute my premise, rather than blindly directing a charge of BS against me. Ad hominem attacks on my supposed educational immaturity and/or academic background credit no-one, and I assure you that your assertions are quite wrong.
Of course scale matters for comparison in absolute terms, but if one wishes to compare "globalisation" between eras then one MUST pick a relative measure. In fact, anything ELSE is completely indefensible - it is plain nonsense to suggest that we look at the sum of economic activities at two different times. If we were to do this and look at the US we would immediately come to the conclusion that the US domestic economy circa 2000 is more "globalised" than the global economy circa 1900 because it meets all of your criteria: whilst its absolute (inflation adjusted) GDP is much larger, it is internally much more interconnected and its output is also far more diversified THAN THAT OF THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY of around 1900.
In actual fact, the US (UK, Australian, etc.)economy of 1900 was more open to FDI, less protectionist, and much less regulated than it is now. Thus, a century ago, economies had already achieved the goals of the champions of globalisation today: free, unregulated movement of capital, goods, and services. I'm not suggesting that the average worker had a PC at home, was connected to a global network, and lived in an information nirvana, as you seem to be implying I'm doing. I *am* suggesting that you have fallen for a common fallacy, that you are refusing to accept a globalisation metric that is used by the IMF, and that your anecdotal arguments, such as the origins of your breakfast and the comparison of coca-cola (10% of UK GDP at the time, so in economic terms your point was incorrect anyway) are completely irrelevant.
I think that most liberal economists would agree with the statements I've made. You, however, seem to be inflicted with a myopia of the accident of your year of birth, and are content to believe the common viewpoint that everything is more globalised now.
And where did you get the idea that I'm doing a Masters from (FYI, I'm not), and what's that got to do with the discussion?
Thanks for the SHOUTING, but it is you who doesn't get it: What was true for the British Empire was also true for at least Western Europe, the United States, Australia, and certain parts of South America. Much the same as now, except with higher levels of direct investment, and without China's integration into the world economy.
Let me reiterate my claim simply, as it is clear you don't get it at all: Direct investment as a percentage of GDP is about the only statistic that is relevant when one talks about Globalization. It was higher pre-WWI than it is now, and this was also true for ALL developed nation states. Looking at capital flows globally (as a percentage of global GDP) it was higher then as well. Hence, more globalised then than now.
The British Empire before WWI was absolutely huge, and consisted of many countries which today receive far less foreign direct investment. There is nothing dishonest or wrong in taking it as a proxy. You seem to make the arrogant assumption that things today are somehow radically different from in the past. Putting things in CAPS doens't make them right.
Note to insulting clown(you): Sorry, but I never equated the modern global economy to the British economy; a statistic was requested, I provided one. By any meaningful _relative_ measure, todays "global economy" is more protectionist, more regionised (EU vs. US vs. Asia) and less interconnected, then the global economy of 1914. What do you mean when you assert than England is more globalised now? It is probably more cosmopolitan, certainly more connected, but its economy is measurably less dependant on the fortunes of non-EU states. Hence, it is fair to claim that the pre-WWI world (were incidently, the British empire was the largest economic entity, and thus a fair proxy for the global economy THEN) was more globalised than todays world.
Sorry, had to jump in here, even though I'm not the original poster. I'm struggling to not comment on the fact that this was modded "insightful" when it is completely wrong. In actual fact, the global economy was indeed more globalized during the latter days of the British empire than it is now; capital outflow from the UK has never recovered to the same level (as a percentage of GDP) as it was in 1914. In addition, no country (yes, including the US) has ever had as high a rate of capital outflow as was achieved by the UK before the First world war. Also, you really need to check your history books - during the "days of the British empire" I think you'll find that most people in the UK were living in cities. (certainly far more, as a percentage of population, than in the US). Whilst you're there, read a history of the East India company, or any book about corporatism, to see what globalisation really was about back then.
Well done on your breakfast, but it's nothing new; certainly a member of the Eurpoean middle classes at the beginning of the 20th century could have done the same.
Yes, the whole world is affected by the low-turnout and general apathy of the average US citizen, but I fail to see the irony of my two statements - American policy makers are there to represent Americans in a democracy; how they treat non-voters / non-Americans has nothing to do with the fact that they were elected in a (pseudo?)-democratic fashion. No, the representative nature you allude to is not a "smoothing function" of public opinion; the wealthy have far more say with those who are meant to represent all fairly and equally, so there is neither balance nor enlightened "elitism" (in the sense you mean it of some wise council looking after the plebians). As for "real democracy", well you could try the Californian variety, where they have exactly the problems you mention, or the Swiss model, where (though the citizens have exactly the same ability to propose new laws as in Cali) they don't seem to screw it up. Really, it's about voter education: the OP was basically saying "if you're not researched enough, don't vote, because you're devaluing my vote". That's wrong on so many levels, yet you (and perhaps a significant minority of slashdotters?) seem to agree that's an OK attitude to adopt! If that is the case then an understanding of the problems of disenfranchisement really is lacking here, which is quite sad; being a relatively well paid geek shouldn't excuse you from concern for the "average US citizen".
Errrr..... Why is this modded "insightful"?!? Sorry chum, the whole point of democracy is that everybody is equal and all get the opportunity to vote; just because you think your "well researched" vote is somehow better than the next guy's doesn't make it so. Quite frankly, your attitude smacks of arrogance - try and understand the intent of a democratic system and that the elitism you're displaying is almost the exact opposite of what democracy is about.
To everyone who reads this - PLEASE get out there and vote tomorrow, so that whatever the outcome, it is at least **REPRESENTATIVE*** of the people's wishes. The whole world is watching....
Actually, that's a bad analogy, since modern assembly possesses a significantly richer grammar than C. However, it is correct to say that the interactions between language elements (instructions) in ASM are very much simpler than in C. More on topic: Why are people surprised that millions of years of evolution has resulted in a high entropy encoding "format" (the genome) whose consituent elements are multipurpose and have complex interactions with each other? An animal is more evolved (has a history of more complex environmental interactions) than a plant, so why shouldn't its genome be less redundant / contain more entropy? Comparisons of number of genes are (to return to the computing analogy) like comparing two processors based on their physical size. D.
I've got to second this; every (physics) PhD I know from my time in Silicon Valley (at SLAC) is gainfully employed. Interestingly, my collegue thinks this isn't the case for CompSci PhDs, so there you go. Get a PhD in Physics!!!
I've lived in London nearly all my life, work in IT, and carry lots of geek toys (iPod, notebook, Archos mp3 player which now serves as file sharer, PDA, digital camera and mobile phone!). I've never had any trouble I couldn't handle. Here's my advice (it works, I've tested it on many occasions!):
1) Most importantly - Never *ever* carry round something you couldn't afford to lose - that means, if you're carrying round data that is important to you - MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A COPY OF IT SOMEWHERE. If it is important to others ENCRYPT IT. I can't stress this enough - in IT, data is nearly always the most valuable asset you can carry with you.
2) Always ALWAYS look confident, focused, and aware of your surroundings. Notice people round you, make sure they know you've noticed them, but don't be aggresive. Your stance should say "there are easier targets than me. Move along".
3) If you do happen to find yourself in the middle of a potential conflict situation (group of youths approach and agressively ask for the time for example) react politely but firmly - don't lose your confidence or look like you can't handle yourself.
If you find it difficult maintaining confidence walking round London, you should join a gym and/or take up a martial art - it can make a very big difference to how people percieve you. Finally, if you're new to London, give it time. My partner felt very threatened in San Francisco, but has no problems wondering round the worst parts of south east London on her own - it's just a question of being comfortable with your surroundings. Best regards, Dan
Particle physics experiments routinely collect far more data than this. The Babar experiment that I participated in stores enough data that its database is an order of magnitude greater in size than anything in this article (Current size: 895.0 TB).
See:
BaBar Database for details, it uses an OO database (which in my experience was very painful for users)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I did exactly the same thing from the late 70s to early 90s when I did my A-levels in maths, and came to same conclusion. Now I have to hire technical people and, if I'm to use A levels to discriminate, I have to somehow find out what year they took their A-levels (even though in the UK this may be construed as illegally discriminatory because that might involve discovery of a candidate's age).
The simplest system would work the best - order everyone and award marks by percentile rank. This avoids grade inflation by design.
I think the real problem is that as a society we've become so politically correct we go to great lengths to avoid telling people they are below average - when in reality half of all people are precisely that (by any uniformly distributed, reasonable, metric).
Obviously, no one is going to read this, so /. his server (he still hasn't given me that TPS report). Ray tracing in Excel:
http://arbitrary.name/RayTracer.zip
Dan
I have a ray tracer spreadsheet, doing the classic bouncing sphere animation, written in simple Excel formulas only (no VBA). It was written over two years ago by a guy I still work with (he has a very low Slashdot ID, a geek PhD., and a lovely girlfriend - though not sure how he accomplished the last one). I believe he was meant to be writing some documentation at the time.
He also owes me a TPS report, with a new coversheet.
Dan
The "New Heap" has been around since Windows 2000 SP5 - the Low Fragmentation Heap - which provides about 10% performance improvement in common business apps - just wasn't enabled by default. In Vista, it's become the default - nothing new there.
Dan
RE: Microsoft Research: I've used the Detours research project in many applications - most users (even tech savvy IT support) think I've accomplished something magical using it - it's extremely powerful software.
I am firmly in the "outside world", and these are real products (even if they are internal to my employer, a Fortune 500 corp) - just because you are unaware of the innovation that is happening there (and just because it is funded by Microsoft) doesn't mean you should automatically discount this research. I fully endorse the grandparent post: there is cutting edge work going on there.
- Dan
V3 - great phone, absolutely DIRE interface. Really, Microsoft would have done a better job on their UI (and they would have done, their phones are at least more usable). Crap predictive text (uses a last used algorithm, not most commonly used, so "IF" and "HE" get swapped round at random. Totally dire address book (won't display number when you're entering a text, so you don't know if a name refers to a landline, mobile, or work line), can only search address book based on first character (nice one motorola). And to top it all off, completely mis-leading dialogs - for example, if someone calls whilst you're in the middle of retreiving a message, you can't terminate the call to the answering service by hitting end call - because that terminates the call you haven't answered! Seriously, if you think the V3 is a good phone, you need to try more phones!
So many (frankly) BS comments about Excel's relevance to development....
Where I work we have a team of ten people working with Excel directly supporting about double that number of traders (more than that if you look at our strategic projects). Every other software development group in our firm has more developers than traders paying for developers. We use Excel because it provides a UI that is unrivaled (and because of its rather good - but still not quite good enough for us - recalc engine). We're not idiots, we are the type of people who run multiple boxes and OSes at home, and our Excel development projects are almost psychotic in the way they push the boundaries of what is possible. We started with Life, then Tetris, then someone had to go and write an non-VBA Excel raytracer(!); more seriously we have written a macro meta-language for Excel and sophisticated profiling tools - as a firm we run distributed computing out of Excel, and I've worked with a single spreadsheet (dev time about 4 man months) that did everything (and then some) that an entire system (dev time 6 man years) did at a fund management firm I had worked at previously. That's what is possible with Excel and why it remains a popular choice in business.
It's easy to be really very bad in Excel whilst thinking you're an expert. I've lost count of the number of people I've interviewed who call themselves experts but have no idea about what a volatile function is, or how to use maps/dictionaries in Excel VBA (if you don't know these, and think you're good - you're not!). You need to be a good coder, good designer, and have an appreciation for user interface design in order to be of any real use - just like when using a "real" language, except possibly more so, because it's so easy to do things really wrong in Excel. In short, don't underestimate the value of books like these.
Best regards,
Daniel
The real problem is that Excel (and other such spreadsheets - but mostly Excel) leaves the average person feeling like they're a wiz-kid programmer after they've been using it in their job for only a few months. I've lost track of the number of self-professed "experts" I've interviewed who didn't know the first thing about sheet design and how it affects operational risk. Worse, are consultants and auditors who have no idea about things like calculational complexity and change management. I've worked with spreadsheets for many years, and I've often seen people use volatile functions incorrectly (*please* look them up and understand why they can make a spreadsheet slow if you use Excel) or code a bubble sort in VBA and then wonder why recalculation takes so long. Just to answer some of your points however:
References: There are a couple of (unfortunately) volatile functions you can use to compute refernces dynamically: INDIRECT() and OFFSET(). Alternatively in a large production environment (like a big bank...) you'd do better to resolve refernces once using some form of macro pre-processing (which you'd have to write yourself, but hey).
Code duplication: This is not as big an issue as you make it out to be, as copydowns are quite efficient (all functions and names are just symbols internally, and in R1C1 reference form the copydowns are identical strings). Moreover, you are using the wrong function: You should MATCH() once on (A4-FedStdDeduction), then INDEX() the items required in the FedTaxRates table.
Unreadable code: Use cell comments on the header row (or column) of the table.
Poor layout: Use conditional formatting (with the condition being something like MOD(ROW(),2)=1 to do automatic grey-barring. Use "center across selection" or cell merging for different size table columns.
Charting: Agreed. Don't go there. In fact, for any meaningful statistics anaylsis, use a real system. Besides, the stats functions in Excel have known weaknesses.
Database access / external data: Use RTD() and/or write a COM / VBA addin (even better, use the C API / EXCEL4 interface, which allows for high bandwidth communications).
Overall Excel is a very powerful tool, but most people wildly overestimate their knowledge and abilities in it, leading to the kind of errors hinted at in the liked article. The *real* problems with Excel are:
Unsupported interfaces: MS likes to "innovate" by always adding their latest wizz-bang coding interface to office and leaving previous generations stagnant (EG: strings are limited in length to 255 chars in the C API), then quietly dropping support. This is very bad. I think they will probably not get away with dropping VBA support however.
Calculation complexity limits haven't changed for ten years: Still stuck with the same limits in Excel - 7 nesting levels, 1024 char max formula length etc.
Best regards,
Daniel
PS: I have a comprehensive suite of tools for profiling Excel (internal and external functions, VBA, XLL) that I've been working on for some time, if anybody is interested in such a thing or knows of anything similar (I haven't seen the like yet) please email: desva at btinternet dot com.
You are absolutely kidding right? I've studied at Durham, UK (Carlos Frenk was my Astro lecturer), QM, London, and Stanford, US, and they all have their fair share of smart people. Calling Frenk, or indeed any of these guys "kids" is way out of line. Than again, I could just chalk it up as yet another example of American insularity. (Go ahead, mod me flamebait, I just don't take kindly to the "kids" vs. "pro" and "university of whatever" thing - it's rude and naive).
Dan
Ed, ;-)
You're talking complete horse-poo - as pointed out to me by a collegue who just read your comment, little knowing that I knew the author! I finished the last parts of my PhD. analysis in Excel - nothing wrong with it if you're trying to understand systematics quickly. In fact, I felt very productive using it; typically one is going to write some bespoke software to process the bulk of the stats, then having reduced the dataset to a managable size, finalising results using a speadsheet is very good idea.
BTW: where I work now there are - literally -billions of dollars worth of transactions recorded in Excel spreadsheets, and we run monte carlo simulations directly from spreadsheets. Nothing wrong with it if you know the limitations of Excel (one of which is the stats and random number functions - they used to be awful!)
Hope CERN is going well, excuse the message on your answer-phone!
Dan
PS: I like the way "OSX is good" == Mod points!!
I agree. I've been a lurker since the earliest days of Slashdot. The increasing frequency of duplicated stories, and shoddy (possibly non-existant) fact checking mark a team resting on their past fame. This "story" really does take the award for blatant stupidity however; CowboyNeal, can you please do some basic fact checking? You work with technology and the claim that a sticker can increase battery life doesn't set alarm bells ringing? Are you insane?
D.
Yes; at work I do financial computation (monte carlo simulation, distributed processing, that kind of thing). On many occasions I've written and tested code (on a dual 2.8GHz P4) that runs only slightly slower on 1GHz P3 laptop, and runs much much faster on my other 1.6GHz Pentium M laptop - this things still smokes, and I've had it for over a year.
The P4 is a dead end. Hyperthreading is of no use in most mainstream apps (and Intel knows this); and Intel's own mobile processor is far superior in terms of computation per watt / per MHz (take your pick).
Dan
Whilst I agree with your post I have to post my two cents: "England" (by which you presumably mean the UK) has managed just fine for several hundred years - even against superior German forces during WWII - spends a larger proportion of its GDP on defense then any other western country - excluding the US of course - and like France, has a nuclear deterent. I don't think anyone is going to be attempting to invade England in a hurry.
Personally, I think the US could do with spending more on social programs and less on "defence" - the likelihood of using the military for the actual _defence_ of the US mainland in the near future is vanishingly small. Furthermore, having a huge military only encourages its use - after all, what's the point of spending all that money on weapons and personnel just for them to sit there unused?
Dan
How about Britain's stand against Germany? And the "alternative" history where the UK and Soviet Russia held back Nazi German whilst the US did nothing for three years, instead of "crying to the US" for help? And Lend-Lease was of course a very fair way to wrestle global economic leadership from England.
Let us say nothing about Napoleon (the other superpower was France, if you can count to 250 and have history books going back that far, not Germany again) because the US was obviously there to save free Europe from that little bit of autocracy too.
Never mind, I'm sure your version of history is at least more entertaining.
Dan
I define globalisation to be the integration of national economies; I believe this is not "arbitrary nonsense", but a commonly accepted definition. Integration of national economies can be measured by FDI (as a percentage of GDP in order to track this through time). If you disagree (as you seem to be doing by suggesting that I'm engaging in sophistry), then please provide a meaningful alternative measure.
I claim that sustained FDI as a percentage of GDP was much higher in the past for the dominant national economies.
I conclude that by this measure, national economies were more interconnected 100 years ago then they are now.
As a corrollary I make the (weaker) claim that the hype surrounding globalisation is what leads people to believe that the conclusion above must be false. By not addressing my premise directly (other than saying, "sorry, aint buying it"!) you have re-enforced my belief in the validity of this claim.
If you are going to reply, please point out the fallacy in my argument, or refute my premise, rather than blindly directing a charge of BS against me. Ad hominem attacks on my supposed educational immaturity and/or academic background credit no-one, and I assure you that your assertions are quite wrong.
Dan
Of course scale matters for comparison in absolute terms, but if one wishes to compare "globalisation" between eras then one MUST pick a relative measure. In fact, anything ELSE is completely indefensible - it is plain nonsense to suggest that we look at the sum of economic activities at two different times. If we were to do this and look at the US we would immediately come to the conclusion that the US domestic economy circa 2000 is more "globalised" than the global economy circa 1900 because it meets all of your criteria: whilst its absolute (inflation adjusted) GDP is much larger, it is internally much more interconnected and its output is also far more diversified THAN THAT OF THE ENTIRE WORLD ECONOMY of around 1900.
In actual fact, the US (UK, Australian, etc.)economy of 1900 was more open to FDI, less protectionist, and much less regulated than it is now. Thus, a century ago, economies had already achieved the goals of the champions of globalisation today: free, unregulated movement of capital, goods, and services. I'm not suggesting that the average worker had a PC at home, was connected to a global network, and lived in an information nirvana, as you seem to be implying I'm doing. I *am* suggesting that you have fallen for a common fallacy, that you are refusing to accept a globalisation metric that is used by the IMF, and that your anecdotal arguments, such as the origins of your breakfast and the comparison of coca-cola (10% of UK GDP at the time, so in economic terms your point was incorrect anyway) are completely irrelevant.
I think that most liberal economists would agree with the statements I've made. You, however, seem to be inflicted with a myopia of the accident of your year of birth, and are content to believe the common viewpoint that everything is more globalised now.
And where did you get the idea that I'm doing a Masters from (FYI, I'm not), and what's that got to do with the discussion?
Dan
Thanks for the SHOUTING, but it is you who doesn't get it: What was true for the British Empire was also true for at least Western Europe, the United States, Australia, and certain parts of South America. Much the same as now, except with higher levels of direct investment, and without China's integration into the world economy.
Let me reiterate my claim simply, as it is clear you don't get it at all: Direct investment as a percentage of GDP is about the only statistic that is relevant when one talks about Globalization. It was higher pre-WWI than it is now, and this was also true for ALL developed nation states. Looking at capital flows globally (as a percentage of global GDP) it was higher then as well. Hence, more globalised then than now.
The British Empire before WWI was absolutely huge, and consisted of many countries which today receive far less foreign direct investment. There is nothing dishonest or wrong in taking it as a proxy.
You seem to make the arrogant assumption that things today are somehow radically different from in the past. Putting things in CAPS doens't make them right.
Dan
Note to insulting clown(you): Sorry, but I never equated the modern global economy to the British economy; a statistic was requested, I provided one. By any meaningful _relative_ measure, todays "global economy" is more protectionist, more regionised (EU vs. US vs. Asia) and less interconnected, then the global economy of 1914. What do you mean when you assert than England is more globalised now? It is probably more cosmopolitan, certainly more connected, but its economy is measurably less dependant on the fortunes of non-EU states. Hence, it is fair to claim that the pre-WWI world (were incidently, the British empire was the largest economic entity, and thus a fair proxy for the global economy THEN) was more globalised than todays world.
Dan
Sorry, had to jump in here, even though I'm not the original poster. I'm struggling to not comment on the fact that this was modded "insightful" when it is completely wrong. In actual fact, the global economy was indeed more globalized during the latter days of the British empire than it is now; capital outflow from the UK has never recovered to the same level (as a percentage of GDP) as it was in 1914. In addition, no country (yes, including the US) has ever had as high a rate of capital outflow as was achieved by the UK before the First world war. Also, you really need to check your history books - during the "days of the British empire" I think you'll find that most people in the UK were living in cities. (certainly far more, as a percentage of population, than in the US). Whilst you're there, read a history of the East India company, or any book about corporatism, to see what globalisation really was about back then.
Well done on your breakfast, but it's nothing new; certainly a member of the Eurpoean middle classes at the beginning of the 20th century could have done the same.
Dan.
Yes, the whole world is affected by the low-turnout and general apathy of the average US citizen, but I fail to see the irony of my two statements - American policy makers are there to represent Americans in a democracy; how they treat non-voters / non-Americans has nothing to do with the fact that they were elected in a (pseudo?)-democratic fashion.
No, the representative nature you allude to is not a "smoothing function" of public opinion; the wealthy have far more say with those who are meant to represent all fairly and equally, so there is neither balance nor enlightened "elitism" (in the sense you mean it of some wise council looking after the plebians).
As for "real democracy", well you could try the Californian variety, where they have exactly the problems you mention, or the Swiss model, where (though the citizens have exactly the same ability to propose new laws as in Cali) they don't seem to screw it up. Really, it's about voter education: the OP was basically saying "if you're not researched enough, don't vote, because you're devaluing my vote". That's wrong on so many levels, yet you (and perhaps a significant minority of slashdotters?) seem to agree that's an OK attitude to adopt! If that is the case then an understanding of the problems of disenfranchisement really is lacking here, which is quite sad; being a relatively well paid geek shouldn't excuse you from concern for the "average US citizen".
Dan.
Errrr..... Why is this modded "insightful"?!? Sorry chum, the whole point of democracy is that everybody is equal and all get the opportunity to vote; just because you think your "well researched" vote is somehow better than the next guy's doesn't make it so. Quite frankly, your attitude smacks of arrogance - try and understand the intent of a democratic system and that the elitism you're displaying is almost the exact opposite of what democracy is about.
To everyone who reads this - PLEASE get out there and vote tomorrow, so that whatever the outcome, it is at least **REPRESENTATIVE*** of the people's wishes.
The whole world is watching....
- Dan
Actually, that's a bad analogy, since modern assembly possesses a significantly richer grammar than C. However, it is correct to say that the interactions between language elements (instructions) in ASM are very much simpler than in C.
More on topic: Why are people surprised that millions of years of evolution has resulted in a high entropy encoding "format" (the genome) whose consituent elements are multipurpose and have complex interactions with each other? An animal is more evolved (has a history of more complex environmental interactions) than a plant, so why shouldn't its genome be less redundant / contain more entropy? Comparisons of number of genes are (to return to the computing analogy) like comparing two processors based on their physical size.
D.
I've got to second this; every (physics) PhD I know from my time in Silicon Valley (at SLAC) is gainfully employed. Interestingly, my collegue thinks this isn't the case for CompSci PhDs, so there you go. Get a PhD in Physics!!!
Dan
I've lived in London nearly all my life, work in IT, and carry lots of geek toys (iPod, notebook, Archos mp3 player which now serves as file sharer, PDA, digital camera and mobile phone!). I've never had any trouble I couldn't handle. Here's my advice (it works, I've tested it on many occasions!):
1) Most importantly - Never *ever* carry round something you couldn't afford to lose - that means, if you're carrying round data that is important to you - MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A COPY OF IT SOMEWHERE. If it is important to others ENCRYPT IT. I can't stress this enough - in IT, data is nearly always the most valuable asset you can carry with you.
2) Always ALWAYS look confident, focused, and aware of your surroundings. Notice people round you, make sure they know you've noticed them, but don't be aggresive. Your stance should say "there are easier targets than me. Move along".
3) If you do happen to find yourself in the middle of a potential conflict situation (group of youths approach and agressively ask for the time for example) react politely but firmly - don't lose your confidence or look like you can't handle yourself.
If you find it difficult maintaining confidence walking round London, you should join a gym and/or take up a martial art - it can make a very big difference to how people percieve you.
Finally, if you're new to London, give it time. My partner felt very threatened in San Francisco, but has no problems wondering round the worst parts of south east London on her own - it's just a question of being comfortable with your surroundings.
Best regards,
Dan
Particle physics experiments routinely collect far more data than this. The Babar experiment that I participated in stores enough data that its database is an order of magnitude greater in size than anything in this article (Current size: 895.0 TB).
See: BaBar Database for details, it uses an OO database (which in my experience was very painful for users)
Dan