Yes, Amdahl's Law says that if 50% of a procedure's steps must be run in sequence and 50% can be dispatched among a pool of workers, then the speedup from having an infinitely large pool of workers is the reciprocal of 50% . . . or two times. Two time improvement for an infinite number of CPU cores.
After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
. . . or until recently it was. For one, Moore's law is starting to take effect so its no longer feasible to expect an increase in throughput every 3 years. At the same time programming paradigms, such as better task abstraction, closures and functional-reactive programming make modeling and communicating concurrency an easier task.
I'm with your on speculating other reasons - I was thinking exactly the same thing myself. But I think its unfair to then go ahead and draw a conclusion - the person should have a chance at a fair hearing.
Just breaking: Australian Prime minister Tony About-face reports that, in the interests of national security, the weather will no longer be reported, and the machinery will be turned over to the George Brandis / Australian Federal Police, where it will be used to monitor the internet (just meta-data) for unauthorized wind-mills.
Wasn't this already covered in the INXS song from the 80s? Don't ask me, what you know is true. When two worlds collide, 8 bit synthesizers start playing.
I imagine that part of your desire to work from home is self-actualization and better use of time? I think a good way to achieve this is to try to build a strong foundation and cut your living expenses. This way you can be selective about the types of employers and jobs that you work on. You might need to offer a very competitive rate initially, or just start working from home (open-source) and let people know you're for hire, but once you've got your foot in (your own front) door, opportunities should steadily improve. Get set up to make that first move. I think this advice applies to other pursuits too, not just working from home.
The system will check for blinking to avoid criminals simply holding a photograph up to the lens.
So a video will work just fine then? This is a STUPID idea.
Sounds pretty solid to me. What could go wrong? Industry giants like Google are involved. Except maybe. . .
Just recently, Google released an image detection / sorting feature that tagged people as the incorrect species. Jacky Alciné tweeted "Google, y'all fucked up. My friend's not a gorilla'.
In 2010, Nikon were accused of releasing a racist camera, as the blink detection feature, upon photographing Asians, would ask: "Did someone just blnk!?"
Every second NGO is a front. While they're non-government their humanitarian causes provide legitimate reasons to go about town, get involved with policy makers and do whatever is needed - issue bribes to influence decisions, gather information, collect dirt, etc. Both the USA and Britain use this tactic all the time, so its not surprising they're also spying on other government organizations, which could be up to the same thing. I'm not saying that Amnesty International is, but it would be worth it for them to check.
Now every government says that every other government conducts in spying and that its a necessary evil. The real problem is that its not just spying. Because under the radar operations are not answerable to the people, this makes the already blurry line that separates defense from offense a whole lot fuzzier. The cogs of war are always turning.
Take the example of Afghanistan. The CIA used NGOs extensively there as a base to start funding 'moderate rebels' (terrorists) in order to drive out Soviet Influence. When extra funds were needed, everyone's favorite kingdom Saudi Arabia were happy to help finance operations as well. Speaking of which, Wikileaks just released a report on how Saudi Arabia have extensive operations in every country, to promote their interests.
We're screwed. While covert surveillance is necessary for defense, there's nothing to stop it being corrupted and used for offense, and the policy decisions that lead to war are all conducted in secret. Things are already well underway by the time the media propaganda machine fires up and puts it to the people for 'popular vote'.
Doesn't Automatic Reference Counting at the compiler level give most of the benefits of Garbage Collection (except for manually breaking retain cycles with a 'weak' modifier) at the same time as offering benefits on resource-constrained devices? A garbage collector takes CPU clicks, and therefore reduces performance and battery life.
Languages like Swift and Vala use reference counting and have a very modern, clean feel. Objective-C also does, if you don't mind an antiquated syntax.
Indeed when I said (jokingly) organic, I meant primarily people - testimonies, alibis, witnesses, etc. Today pretty much everything is recorded on social networks like this one, by governments, by wikileaks, so its is a different situation. Good (and still relevant) point about rotting in jail and/or having movements restricted though.
It might seem absurd (or antiquated) today, but in the past evidence was primarily organic, and so evidence would decompose at a high rate, particularly if the weather was hot or humid. This would effect the ability to conduct a fair trial, and so there was a duty to bring the matter speedily before the courts.
Aren't most things currently running in "managed" (with a Virtual Machine, and garbage collection) environment these days? Swift is interesting, in that, like Objective-C it uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for memory management, along with a syntax that is appealing to younger developers. ARC gives almost all of the benefits of garbage collection, at the same time as being compiled in, so it doesn't require CPU clicks at run-time. For mobile this (which is where everything is going) this gives superior performance and battery life. I'd say we're moving in this direction, not away.
You can currently write Android apps in Swift with Apportable. Although Apple doesn't blow a whistle about this, most of the low-down parts of the stack are open-source. Moving up, Apportable have implemented in-house versions of Foundation, UIKit and so forth.
In the coming months, Apple will be releasing Swift for Linux, though its not clear whether that will include Foundation and UIKit. If not I can see the Apportable ones possibly being open-sourced in the future.
The statistic that I quoted was just for wind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power) so I'm not sure how much influence sun would have. And watts per capita might still place Germany in front.
Certainly USA has more space for both wind and solar.
And one of those countries, believe it or not, and despite all kinds of competing interests, is the USA. In 1997 installed capacity in Germany surpassed the U.S. and led until once again overtaken by the U.S. in 2008.
Reminds me of the time years ago, I wound up in a bank. We got this company-wide email from someone in senior management, I don't remember who. Maybe the CEO or CTO. I read something like: "We've had a management consultancy in this week, and and their advice was that productivity could improve if staff were recognized and shown gratitude for their contributions. So thankyou!". . . . And that was the end of that.
Remember MacGyver? Huge in the late 80s and early 90s, and then silence. What happened is, in 1993 he went for a holiday in Egypt and liked the place so much he just stayed. He's been quietly making a name for himself as a repairman ever since.
Around about 2011 I was using the Oxygen XML Editor, and noticed that every time I performed a certain function (I don't recall which, schema validation or something) that Skype would crash. This was on OSX, prior to the current version with the dressed up UI.
"Electricity companies decommission their peak power generators, and just run at near 100% utilization all day. Because of this they can temporarily increase profit taking."
The savings will go away because rates become flat and providers increase profit taking. Eventually (hopefully) competitive pressures bring overall (ie averaged over a year) prices down again, because the cost of production is cheaper.
* Prices of peak and off-peak become flat rate throughout the day.
* Electricity companies decommission their peak power generators, and just run at near 100% utilization all day. Because of this they can temporarily increase profit taking.
* Competition will mean eventually passing on savings to consumers.
Ah, every Murdoch owned newspaper has these fabricated Mr and Mrs (usually Mr, funnily enough) Normals dominating the comments section. One of the main ones in Australian is even called 'Hacka' - as in Social Engineering Hacker.
I bet a computer could do a much more objective interpretation of the Rorschach Ink Blot, draw a person and all of the other silly cognitive tests that are used in psychiatric care. That or just come up with a truly random interpretation. It would be about as effective.
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Yes, Amdahl's Law says that if 50% of a procedure's steps must be run in sequence and 50% can be dispatched among a pool of workers, then the speedup from having an infinitely large pool of workers is the reciprocal of 50% . . . or two times. Two time improvement for an infinite number of CPU cores.
After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
. . . or until recently it was. For one, Moore's law is starting to take effect so its no longer feasible to expect an increase in throughput every 3 years. At the same time programming paradigms, such as better task abstraction, closures and functional-reactive programming make modeling and communicating concurrency an easier task.
I'm with your on speculating other reasons - I was thinking exactly the same thing myself. But I think its unfair to then go ahead and draw a conclusion - the person should have a chance at a fair hearing.
Just breaking: Australian Prime minister Tony About-face reports that, in the interests of national security, the weather will no longer be reported, and the machinery will be turned over to the George Brandis / Australian Federal Police, where it will be used to monitor the internet (just meta-data) for unauthorized wind-mills.
Wasn't this already covered in the INXS song from the 80s? Don't ask me, what you know is true. When two worlds collide, 8 bit synthesizers start playing.
I imagine that part of your desire to work from home is self-actualization and better use of time? I think a good way to achieve this is to try to build a strong foundation and cut your living expenses. This way you can be selective about the types of employers and jobs that you work on. You might need to offer a very competitive rate initially, or just start working from home (open-source) and let people know you're for hire, but once you've got your foot in (your own front) door, opportunities should steadily improve. Get set up to make that first move. I think this advice applies to other pursuits too, not just working from home.
The system will check for blinking to avoid criminals simply holding a photograph up to the lens.
So a video will work just fine then? This is a STUPID idea.
Sounds pretty solid to me. What could go wrong? Industry giants like Google are involved. Except maybe. . .
Every second NGO is a front. While they're non-government their humanitarian causes provide legitimate reasons to go about town, get involved with policy makers and do whatever is needed - issue bribes to influence decisions, gather information, collect dirt, etc. Both the USA and Britain use this tactic all the time, so its not surprising they're also spying on other government organizations, which could be up to the same thing. I'm not saying that Amnesty International is, but it would be worth it for them to check.
Now every government says that every other government conducts in spying and that its a necessary evil. The real problem is that its not just spying. Because under the radar operations are not answerable to the people, this makes the already blurry line that separates defense from offense a whole lot fuzzier. The cogs of war are always turning.
Take the example of Afghanistan. The CIA used NGOs extensively there as a base to start funding 'moderate rebels' (terrorists) in order to drive out Soviet Influence. When extra funds were needed, everyone's favorite kingdom Saudi Arabia were happy to help finance operations as well. Speaking of which, Wikileaks just released a report on how Saudi Arabia have extensive operations in every country, to promote their interests.
We're screwed. While covert surveillance is necessary for defense, there's nothing to stop it being corrupted and used for offense, and the policy decisions that lead to war are all conducted in secret. Things are already well underway by the time the media propaganda machine fires up and puts it to the people for 'popular vote'.
Doesn't Automatic Reference Counting at the compiler level give most of the benefits of Garbage Collection (except for manually breaking retain cycles with a 'weak' modifier) at the same time as offering benefits on resource-constrained devices? A garbage collector takes CPU clicks, and therefore reduces performance and battery life.
Languages like Swift and Vala use reference counting and have a very modern, clean feel. Objective-C also does, if you don't mind an antiquated syntax.
Indeed when I said (jokingly) organic, I meant primarily people - testimonies, alibis, witnesses, etc. Today pretty much everything is recorded on social networks like this one, by governments, by wikileaks, so its is a different situation. Good (and still relevant) point about rotting in jail and/or having movements restricted though.
It might seem absurd (or antiquated) today, but in the past evidence was primarily organic, and so evidence would decompose at a high rate, particularly if the weather was hot or humid. This would effect the ability to conduct a fair trial, and so there was a duty to bring the matter speedily before the courts.
I'm new to this thread, but I must admit I'm also having a difficult time following your point. Could you try rephrasing it?
Nearly everything?
Aren't most things currently running in "managed" (with a Virtual Machine, and garbage collection) environment these days? Swift is interesting, in that, like Objective-C it uses Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for memory management, along with a syntax that is appealing to younger developers. ARC gives almost all of the benefits of garbage collection, at the same time as being compiled in, so it doesn't require CPU clicks at run-time. For mobile this (which is where everything is going) this gives superior performance and battery life. I'd say we're moving in this direction, not away.
You can currently write Android apps in Swift with Apportable. Although Apple doesn't blow a whistle about this, most of the low-down parts of the stack are open-source. Moving up, Apportable have implemented in-house versions of Foundation, UIKit and so forth.
In the coming months, Apple will be releasing Swift for Linux, though its not clear whether that will include Foundation and UIKit. If not I can see the Apportable ones possibly being open-sourced in the future.
History proves you wrong.
Back then people would argue about whether PC meant IBM derivative or personal computer, in general. And they still do today.
The statistic that I quoted was just for wind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power) so I'm not sure how much influence sun would have. And watts per capita might still place Germany in front.
Certainly USA has more space for both wind and solar.
And one of those countries, believe it or not, and despite all kinds of competing interests, is the USA. In 1997 installed capacity in Germany surpassed the U.S. and led until once again overtaken by the U.S. in 2008.
Reminds me of the time years ago, I wound up in a bank. We got this company-wide email from someone in senior management, I don't remember who. Maybe the CEO or CTO. I read something like: "We've had a management consultancy in this week, and and their advice was that productivity could improve if staff were recognized and shown gratitude for their contributions. So thankyou!". . . . And that was the end of that.
Remember MacGyver? Huge in the late 80s and early 90s, and then silence. What happened is, in 1993 he went for a holiday in Egypt and liked the place so much he just stayed. He's been quietly making a name for himself as a repairman ever since.
Ah, I see what you mean. I suspect at that point they can sell you a solar cell and/or turbine to go with your battery?
Around about 2011 I was using the Oxygen XML Editor, and noticed that every time I performed a certain function (I don't recall which, schema validation or something) that Skype would crash. This was on OSX, prior to the current version with the dressed up UI.
Really? I thought I was agreeing with you.
"Electricity companies decommission their peak power generators, and just run at near 100% utilization all day. Because of this they can temporarily increase profit taking."
The savings will go away because rates become flat and providers increase profit taking. Eventually (hopefully) competitive pressures bring overall (ie averaged over a year) prices down again, because the cost of production is cheaper.
I would imagine the following effects over time:
Ah, every Murdoch owned newspaper has these fabricated Mr and Mrs (usually Mr, funnily enough) Normals dominating the comments section. One of the main ones in Australian is even called 'Hacka' - as in Social Engineering Hacker.
Heh. But is it reality? [Queue 13th Floor opening sequence].
I bet a computer could do a much more objective interpretation of the Rorschach Ink Blot, draw a person and all of the other silly cognitive tests that are used in psychiatric care. That or just come up with a truly random interpretation. It would be about as effective.