Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
At least in the United States, attending an anti-government demonstration is not a crime, not even a minor one like the others you list. It is constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly.
Given that the particular hardware setup is detailed here (a GTX 480 achieves the 1 billion keys/sec figure), and the algorithm used (radix sort) has known asymptotic behavior (O(nk) for n keys of length k), 10^9 keys/sec is quite meaningful, particularly since it's a significant implementation challenge (possibly even an algorithmic challenge) to port this algorithm to a GPU.
Furthermore, I think sorting speed is appropriately measured in keys/sec. Big-O does not in fact describe the speed, but rather the upper bound of the growth of an algorithm's asymptotic running time, which needs to be paired with the implementation, architecture, and data set to determine a speed. It turns out the constant factors can actually be quite important in practice.
Out of curiosity, did your dad try installing Ubuntu on that rig? If so, what problems did he encounter?
I ask because I put together a computer for my mother a few months back, with relatively similar specs, and was pretty impressed with both the Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10 install processes. They were both painless experiences; I can't remember either one being technical at all. I certainly didn't have to muck around with the CLI at all (well, that's not quite true - I did have to do some CLI magic to get a USB wireless stick to work, but in W7 it didn't work because there was simply no driver at all available, so I'd call that one a tie, or in Ubuntu's favor).
Point is, you've clearly had some bad experiences with Ubuntu, and you're entitled to your opinion, but I really think the whole user experience for Ubuntu is vastly, vastly better for the majority of users than your experience indicates.
When you're doing test-driven development, how do you avoid coding too narrowly to the tests? At some point you surely must think about general principles; how does that fit into the framework?
I am sort of a nut about error messages, partly because I once read the Apple Human Interface guidelines and thought they were a good thing. In particular, does the error message provide the user with information that will help him make the error message go away?
I'm OT, but I wish latex had been developed with this philosophy in mind. I really dread seeing latex spit out screenfuls of unintelligible gobbledygook, followed by a single "?". Oh great, what did I do wrong this time? Latex sure isn't telling me.
I always imaginged that "Luke's dad Annakin" was going to be, you know, "dad age".
This is an interesting comment, because what is "dad age," anyways? To children, parents seem incalculably old, wise, and experienced. Parents, on the other hand, remember well being angst-ridden teenagers themselves, and that it wasn't so long ago.
Then you don't make the change. But then the rationale is: "management didn't approve it," instead of "It was this way when I came on board." There are other valid reasons, too; maybe it would be too expensive, maybe the downtime (or risk of downtime) would be too great. But the reason given was "I inherited it," which isn't a good one, in my opinion.
I couldn't tell you. Even looking at a transcript (which I posted below), I didn't have the patience to cut through all the BS. He says "freedom" or "free" or some permutation thereof pretty much every 15 seconds, which I just couldn't take for more than a few minutes.
he lesson to be learned isn't that "human errors account for more problems than technical errors" -- it's that your network design is fundamentally flawed.
No kidding. The sysadmin who uttered that quote comes across poorly as well. He makes the excuse: "It was like that when I got here, so I inherited the bad design." Seriously?! Your job title is Network Administrator! Administer the damn network! It's what you were hired to do!
In my case, yes, the system was exceedingly well documented, and also made use of standard tools (Makefiles, perl and bash scripts, etc.).
But I don't think documentation is a panacea if the tool used is particularly rarified. Perhaps the DBA in question (this is purely hypothetical now) set something up using Oracle, and then left. Now, maybe it's easy enough to use as the interface for SQL queries and the like, but what happens if there are major reorganizations that really do require specialized knowledge? Can you document all possible contingencies? Without simply giving enough learning materials for the user to become a DBA? (I have no idea, honestly, since I don't have any experience with high-end DBs, I can't say anything about how hard it is to maintain one, so I'm more making a general point rather than a specific one.)
they trust someone with MD after their name (as if it's not a diploma mill degree anyway) more than an engineer or physicist.
Er, doesn't that behavior make sense? I wouldn't let a medical doctor to write a compiler for me, and I wouldn't let an engineering Ph.D. remove my appendix. The fact that alternative medicine is bullshit doesn't seem like a reason to disparage M.D.s.
Depending on the size and stability of the GPs research budget, that may not be practical. I worked on a fairly large academic research team (by EE/CS standards) that had the budget to hire a few full-time staff members for certain things. After the main implementation push the project wound down a bit, and those staff moved on to other jobs, leaving the grad students to maintain the infrastructure. That was fine as it was, but could have been massively not-fine if the staff had used complex tools that required specialized knowledge that the students didn't have, and would have to divert their energies from research to tool-learning.
Basically, if you're hiring a DBA, make sure that you can keep them on staff indefinitely.
I was thinking about that, but I think I'm not enough of a multi-tasker for that to work well for me. I'd probably either (a) pay too much attention to the radio, and be less effective/efficient with my engineering, or (b) tune out the radio entirely and not absorb anything.
Although, maybe I could listen while cooking. Haven't done too much cooking lately though, unfortunately:-/
They don't want to read their news. They'd rather hear it (radio) or see it (TV, streaming videos).
I'd be really curious to see statistics on this. I'm probably on the upper end of the youth demographic, and the only way I get news is by reading it. I think TV news is mostly a waste of time, radio is too inefficient compared to quickly scanning an article, and streaming video is the worst of the two -- most of the "stories" delivered by video are just fluffy human interest pieces, or clips that have some spectacle to them. (Of course, this is all my personal experience, and I don't believe I'm necessarily typical. Hence, I'd like statistics.)
Naturally, I don't read printed newspapers, I read their websites. At least, the ones not behind a paywall.
I will rarely criticize anything as harshly as this, but, it has to be said: some of the analysis in this article could be used as a chapter in How to Lie with Statistics.
For example, the article cites Tim Kane's "analysis" that shows that startups were responsible for all US job creation since 1977. His proof of this is to take all the net jobs created by firms existing for one year or less and compare that to the net job creation of companies existing for more than one year.
Seriously, what kind of a piss-poor business can't manage to last a year? The least successful businesses I've ever seen, those one-off restaurants that crop up and then die, manage to last a year before their owners realize they're throwing away money. So, basically that data set lumps together a whole bunch of positive numbers in one category, and dumps all the negatives in the other.
Now, the analysis in the cited article does get more nuanced than that, and it does, eventually, explain what I just said. But, it's very, very easy to get a misleading opinion from that presentation, and the linked article seems to perpetuate that misperception.
And furthermore, what makes this different from reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal on an iPad? I don't think "young people" are that easily duped. If you want news, you go read news, and if you don't, you don't.
I do think there has been some legitimate innovation in recent years, but nothing that belongs on your list - it's pretty hard to beat the printing press!
I think some of the most interesting recent creations have not really been technical, but social. For example, YouTube is not really groundbreaking from a technological standpoint. It is video, over the internet. Sure, there's a lot of technological infrastructure that must exist for YouTube to exist, but that's not really the main contribution of the service. It's a (mildly) novel method of communication, that's achieved enough popular momentum that you have the President of the United States releasing speeches via that channel. I think that counts for *something.*
What annoys me is how everything that Silicon Valley produces is hyped to the N-th degree. Every technology gets lauded as "revolutionary", and God forbid you release something merely "evolutionary." I'd love to see both of those words stricken from tech journalists vocabulary. Let's save "revolutionary" for things like the wheel. That even satisfies the other meaning <grin>.
Completely agreed. I really like Apple's products, but to say they're the lone innovators is complete crap. Their industrial and human/computer interface design is certainly innovative, and that's what makes their products so nice to use, but just because it's the most visible form of innovation doesn't make it the only.
I'm also incredulous at the statement that Google Maps was an incremental innovation. Surely people remember mapping websites pre-Google Maps, where you got served a basically static image, you couldn't drag around the map, zooming in and out was a high latency operation, the level of detail was always wrong, the maps were always too tiny, etc. etc. Before Google Maps I hated online maps, and Google Maps changed that instantly.
Sure, you could call it incremental, because, hey, it's pretty easy to imagine a piece of mapping software, but Google actually made it work, and that was worthwhile. Apple's innovation is really in a fairly similar vein: designing an excellent user interface for a fairly easy-to-imagine functionality.
It's entirely believable, because it happens all the time. Not in every public school, and not with every teacher, but it certainly happens. Some teachers feel threatened by intelligent pupils, and feel the need to cut them down to size. Of course it's entirely possible that the kid may have acted like a jerk in some situation, but it's funny how kids tend to act like jerks most often to adults that act the same way... sort of like, you know, adults.
And if you REALLY REALLY REALLY cared about the environment you would kill yourself so as to contribute no further fossil fuel emissions!:-)
But seriously, let's not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Buying a used car is probably more optimal environmentally speaking, but new cars will be bought, and they may as well be environmentally friendly. Furthermore, if enough people purchase hybrid cars (or pure electric cars, etc.), it will become obvious that a market exists for them, which will encourage auto manufacturers to produce them. It's a virtuous cycle.
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Or have you never smoked a joint, pirated a song, attended an anti-government demonstration, or drove over the speed limit?
At least in the United States, attending an anti-government demonstration is not a crime, not even a minor one like the others you list. It is constitutionally protected freedom of speech and assembly.
Given that the particular hardware setup is detailed here (a GTX 480 achieves the 1 billion keys/sec figure), and the algorithm used (radix sort) has known asymptotic behavior (O(nk) for n keys of length k), 10^9 keys/sec is quite meaningful, particularly since it's a significant implementation challenge (possibly even an algorithmic challenge) to port this algorithm to a GPU.
Furthermore, I think sorting speed is appropriately measured in keys/sec. Big-O does not in fact describe the speed, but rather the upper bound of the growth of an algorithm's asymptotic running time, which needs to be paired with the implementation, architecture, and data set to determine a speed. It turns out the constant factors can actually be quite important in practice.
I only know two iPhone users (both smug bastards) and three Blackberry users (all stuck up bastards).
Channeling Doctor Cox from Scrubs: "People are bastards. Bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling."
Out of curiosity, did your dad try installing Ubuntu on that rig? If so, what problems did he encounter?
I ask because I put together a computer for my mother a few months back, with relatively similar specs, and was pretty impressed with both the Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10 install processes. They were both painless experiences; I can't remember either one being technical at all. I certainly didn't have to muck around with the CLI at all (well, that's not quite true - I did have to do some CLI magic to get a USB wireless stick to work, but in W7 it didn't work because there was simply no driver at all available, so I'd call that one a tie, or in Ubuntu's favor).
Point is, you've clearly had some bad experiences with Ubuntu, and you're entitled to your opinion, but I really think the whole user experience for Ubuntu is vastly, vastly better for the majority of users than your experience indicates.
When you're doing test-driven development, how do you avoid coding too narrowly to the tests? At some point you surely must think about general principles; how does that fit into the framework?
I am sort of a nut about error messages, partly because I once read the Apple Human Interface guidelines and thought they were a good thing. In particular, does the error message provide the user with information that will help him make the error message go away?
I'm OT, but I wish latex had been developed with this philosophy in mind. I really dread seeing latex spit out screenfuls of unintelligible gobbledygook, followed by a single "?". Oh great, what did I do wrong this time? Latex sure isn't telling me.
C++ is up there (down there?) as well.
I always imaginged that "Luke's dad Annakin" was going to be, you know, "dad age".
This is an interesting comment, because what is "dad age," anyways? To children, parents seem incalculably old, wise, and experienced. Parents, on the other hand, remember well being angst-ridden teenagers themselves, and that it wasn't so long ago.
Then you don't make the change. But then the rationale is: "management didn't approve it," instead of "It was this way when I came on board." There are other valid reasons, too; maybe it would be too expensive, maybe the downtime (or risk of downtime) would be too great. But the reason given was "I inherited it," which isn't a good one, in my opinion.
I couldn't tell you. Even looking at a transcript (which I posted below), I didn't have the patience to cut through all the BS. He says "freedom" or "free" or some permutation thereof pretty much every 15 seconds, which I just couldn't take for more than a few minutes.
For people who hate watching video as much as I do, here's a transcript: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html
he lesson to be learned isn't that "human errors account for more problems than technical errors" -- it's that your network design is fundamentally flawed.
No kidding. The sysadmin who uttered that quote comes across poorly as well. He makes the excuse: "It was like that when I got here, so I inherited the bad design." Seriously?! Your job title is Network Administrator! Administer the damn network! It's what you were hired to do!
In my case, yes, the system was exceedingly well documented, and also made use of standard tools (Makefiles, perl and bash scripts, etc.).
But I don't think documentation is a panacea if the tool used is particularly rarified. Perhaps the DBA in question (this is purely hypothetical now) set something up using Oracle, and then left. Now, maybe it's easy enough to use as the interface for SQL queries and the like, but what happens if there are major reorganizations that really do require specialized knowledge? Can you document all possible contingencies? Without simply giving enough learning materials for the user to become a DBA? (I have no idea, honestly, since I don't have any experience with high-end DBs, I can't say anything about how hard it is to maintain one, so I'm more making a general point rather than a specific one.)
In 5th grade, I always felt sick during math class, which was taught by a teacher that I really didn't like.
In my defense, their understanding of mathematics would have made any thinking person ill :-D.
they trust someone with MD after their name (as if it's not a diploma mill degree anyway) more than an engineer or physicist.
Er, doesn't that behavior make sense? I wouldn't let a medical doctor to write a compiler for me, and I wouldn't let an engineering Ph.D. remove my appendix. The fact that alternative medicine is bullshit doesn't seem like a reason to disparage M.D.s.
WHERE IS MY TIN FOIL HAT?!?!
See, if your pictures of your tinfoil hat had geolocation data attached on them, you'd be able to find it!
Depending on the size and stability of the GPs research budget, that may not be practical. I worked on a fairly large academic research team (by EE/CS standards) that had the budget to hire a few full-time staff members for certain things. After the main implementation push the project wound down a bit, and those staff moved on to other jobs, leaving the grad students to maintain the infrastructure. That was fine as it was, but could have been massively not-fine if the staff had used complex tools that required specialized knowledge that the students didn't have, and would have to divert their energies from research to tool-learning.
Basically, if you're hiring a DBA, make sure that you can keep them on staff indefinitely.
I was thinking about that, but I think I'm not enough of a multi-tasker for that to work well for me. I'd probably either (a) pay too much attention to the radio, and be less effective/efficient with my engineering, or (b) tune out the radio entirely and not absorb anything.
Although, maybe I could listen while cooking. Haven't done too much cooking lately though, unfortunately :-/
To quote the Simpsons' comic book guy: "A sarcasm detector, that's a real useful invention." *device explodes* :-D
They don't want to read their news. They'd rather hear it (radio) or see it (TV, streaming videos).
I'd be really curious to see statistics on this. I'm probably on the upper end of the youth demographic, and the only way I get news is by reading it. I think TV news is mostly a waste of time, radio is too inefficient compared to quickly scanning an article, and streaming video is the worst of the two -- most of the "stories" delivered by video are just fluffy human interest pieces, or clips that have some spectacle to them. (Of course, this is all my personal experience, and I don't believe I'm necessarily typical. Hence, I'd like statistics.)
Naturally, I don't read printed newspapers, I read their websites. At least, the ones not behind a paywall.
I will rarely criticize anything as harshly as this, but, it has to be said: some of the analysis in this article could be used as a chapter in How to Lie with Statistics.
For example, the article cites Tim Kane's "analysis" that shows that startups were responsible for all US job creation since 1977. His proof of this is to take all the net jobs created by firms existing for one year or less and compare that to the net job creation of companies existing for more than one year.
Seriously, what kind of a piss-poor business can't manage to last a year? The least successful businesses I've ever seen, those one-off restaurants that crop up and then die, manage to last a year before their owners realize they're throwing away money. So, basically that data set lumps together a whole bunch of positive numbers in one category, and dumps all the negatives in the other.
Now, the analysis in the cited article does get more nuanced than that, and it does, eventually, explain what I just said. But, it's very, very easy to get a misleading opinion from that presentation, and the linked article seems to perpetuate that misperception.
And furthermore, what makes this different from reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal on an iPad? I don't think "young people" are that easily duped. If you want news, you go read news, and if you don't, you don't.
I do think there has been some legitimate innovation in recent years, but nothing that belongs on your list - it's pretty hard to beat the printing press!
I think some of the most interesting recent creations have not really been technical, but social. For example, YouTube is not really groundbreaking from a technological standpoint. It is video, over the internet. Sure, there's a lot of technological infrastructure that must exist for YouTube to exist, but that's not really the main contribution of the service. It's a (mildly) novel method of communication, that's achieved enough popular momentum that you have the President of the United States releasing speeches via that channel. I think that counts for *something.*
What annoys me is how everything that Silicon Valley produces is hyped to the N-th degree. Every technology gets lauded as "revolutionary", and God forbid you release something merely "evolutionary." I'd love to see both of those words stricken from tech journalists vocabulary. Let's save "revolutionary" for things like the wheel. That even satisfies the other meaning <grin>.
Completely agreed. I really like Apple's products, but to say they're the lone innovators is complete crap. Their industrial and human/computer interface design is certainly innovative, and that's what makes their products so nice to use, but just because it's the most visible form of innovation doesn't make it the only.
I'm also incredulous at the statement that Google Maps was an incremental innovation. Surely people remember mapping websites pre-Google Maps, where you got served a basically static image, you couldn't drag around the map, zooming in and out was a high latency operation, the level of detail was always wrong, the maps were always too tiny, etc. etc. Before Google Maps I hated online maps, and Google Maps changed that instantly.
Sure, you could call it incremental, because, hey, it's pretty easy to imagine a piece of mapping software, but Google actually made it work, and that was worthwhile. Apple's innovation is really in a fairly similar vein: designing an excellent user interface for a fairly easy-to-imagine functionality.
It's entirely believable, because it happens all the time. Not in every public school, and not with every teacher, but it certainly happens. Some teachers feel threatened by intelligent pupils, and feel the need to cut them down to size. Of course it's entirely possible that the kid may have acted like a jerk in some situation, but it's funny how kids tend to act like jerks most often to adults that act the same way... sort of like, you know, adults.
And if you REALLY REALLY REALLY cared about the environment you would kill yourself so as to contribute no further fossil fuel emissions! :-)
But seriously, let's not allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good. Buying a used car is probably more optimal environmentally speaking, but new cars will be bought, and they may as well be environmentally friendly. Furthermore, if enough people purchase hybrid cars (or pure electric cars, etc.), it will become obvious that a market exists for them, which will encourage auto manufacturers to produce them. It's a virtuous cycle.