You were probably going for funny, but if I had mod points I'd call this insightful. It really is shoulders all the way down; no one accomplishes anything of significance without relying on many, many others.
building a supercomputer means getting thousands of CPUs to cooperate which is a much harder challenge.
Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.
Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.
He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.
These are makeshift solutions. With an ever growing population all solution we come up with, besides of reducing population and consumption, is rather temporary.
We don't have an ever-growing population. Worldwide, we're already basically at replacement level reproduction, and the industrialized world is at less than replacement level when you remove immigration. Europe's population is declining, period. In Hans Rosling's terms, we have reached and passed "peak child"; there are just shy of 2B children in the world and that number is not increasing and -- based on current trends -- not going to increase.
Assuming we maintain a constant level of 2B children, that means that there will be 2B people in each living generation, putting us at a steady-state population of about 10B. Actually, barring significant changes in current trends, that won't be a steady state, it will be a high water mark. As wealth and -- more importantly -- female education levels continue to rise around the world, the birthrate in what we now call the developing world will also drop below replacement and the population will gradually decline.
Maybe someday they will actually get a marketing department that understands that the latest thing from "Fart Around Fridays" shouldn't always be "released" unless they have good reason to believe that it's sustainably profitable by some metric and they are willing to sustain it even if they are wrong in their projections. Should they choose to do so someday, it will be hard for them to become "adults" given their reputation over many years.
Actually, I think that's what has happened, and it's what's caused Google to acquire the bad reputation you speak of. When Larry Page took over a couple of years back, he immediately started demanding more focus on "world-changing" projects (at Google success is measured more by impact than by dollars; the assumption is that if you have a big enough impact there will be a way to make it profitable), and cutting the long tail of projects that weren't getting enough usage.
In your terms, Google is becoming an "adult" company, which is why they've been gradually canceling all of the non-hits which were introduced during the "throw anything and see what sticks" era -- like SMS search, assuming it's actually been cancelled. Google still does (and I hope will continue to do) more ambitious, speculative stuff than any other company out there, but there is definitely much more focus on demonstrating first that a project is going to be successful (i.e. hundreds of millions of users) than there used to be.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but these are my own opinions, not official company positions.)
This always happens. Lowest cost + government insurance = safety failure.
It's a government project, entirely overseen and operated by the Department of Energy. There's no private corporation to blame here, sorry. Insurance isn't even relevant since the government itself would hold the liability -- if it weren't exempt from civil liability anyway.
Print it out and put it in your wallet? No, no.. bad idea.
No, that's a good idea, and exactly what you should do. Yes, it means that an attacker who manages to get your password and your wallet can get into your account, but that's still far more secure than a password alone. If your alternative is not using a second factor because you're afraid you won't have it when you need it, you're far better off using two factor and keeping the list of backup code list in your wallet.
Google offers SMS messaging as one of the methods for second-factor auth.
"you'll be asked for a code that will be sent to you via text, voice call, or our mobile app." (http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=180744)
There are actually a couple of other options as well, including a code via e-mail and a hardcopy list of pre-assigned one-time-use code, though they're mostly intended for recovery, in case you lose access to your phone. And you can also provide a backup phone number.
The funny part is that if the Onion had just remained silent on this subject people would still be wondering whether they had actually been hacked or whether this is simply gigantic practical joke.
They still have eleven more chances at the circuit court level, if you include the DC and federal circuit courts.
This is the federal 9th circuit court of appeals, so its decisions are binding on all district courts in the 9th circuit. Yes, there are 11 more appellate courts (10 circuits, plus DC), on whose courts this decision is not binding... but it still establishes a persuasive precedent that other circuits are going to be reluctant to ignore. If they got another appellate court to disagree with the 9th, it would go to the Supreme Court for a decision. If, on the other hand, they the other court sided with the 9th, the non-binding precedent would become almost impossible to override.
So, no, they don't have eleven more chances, nor even 10. At best they have one remaining chance, and it's a very, very long shot: go to trial in a district court in a different circuit, win that, win the appeal and then win in DC. Given that AFAIK they haven't found a single judge who didn't slap them down, I think that's vanishingly unlikely.
Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.
If they're so easy to find, why did you post only one, from 2008, who was locked out for only 15 hours? Your second just said that Google might temporarily disable your account if they suspect it's being attacked (hint: you probably want them to disable it in that case) and that Google will offer you some account recovery options.
Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.
Not true. You can still log on to your Chromebook and use it as a web browser, including whatever you need to straighten out your account problem. You just won't be able to access your Google account stuff. If you haven't set it to disallow other users, in the worst case (somehow you simply cannot recover your Google account), you can always use it to create a new Google account. If you have set it to disallow other users, you can always reset it to factory configuration and log in with a new account.
In short: In the unlikely event you truly lose access to your Google account you will have lost access to everything in your account... but your Chromebook is still yours, is not locked to that account, and can be used just as before with a new account.
There's no battle going on. Google Docs is nowhere near Microsoft Office. If there is a battle, it's only on the Google side.
Depends on what you're doing. If you collaborate with others Office is nowhere near Google Docs. Office has far more features, but Docs has the stuff most people need most of the time and the access-anywhere and slick real-time collaboration features are very powerful.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but Google doesn't tell me what to say.)
Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.
X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.
Submitter here. The 5000 figure is from the first 6 months of sales from June/July 2011.The Amazon sales charts numbers are from January of this year. Also, not many folks buy laptops from Amazon, so topping the sales there is nothing big.
OTOH, total sales so through Q1 of 2013 are purportedly in the 500K range. Certainly not a Windows killer yet, nor even an OS X competitor, but 100X more than 5K.
The way this is promoted in the news you'd think that zip guns never existed, and until "just hours ago" there was no way to come up with an improvised weapon.
This first iteration is roughly equivalent to (perhaps arguably inferior to) a zip gun... but there are some limitations on the capability of zip guns which 3D-printed guns don't have. Specifically, zip guns are simple because they must be simple. A gun with complex, detailed parts cannot be easily crafted by an unskilled person. That same limitation does not apply to 3D printed guns. Indeed, even this first iteration has inner workings which are far more sophisticated than the zip gun (in fact, it's overly complicated).
What does that mean? It means that we're only a bit (okay, a lot) of design work away from a printable automatic, or even select-fire, magazine-fed gun. Durability may always be a problem, especially for the parts that have to handle high pressures, but what if we combine the simple, strong parts of a zip gun with a sophisticated 3D-printed frame and action?
The point is that what's been made so far isn't really all that useful or interesting... but it's only the beginning. It will get better, much better, as both 3D printers and the designs improve. It will also get cheaper.
Not even printing and assemblng the weapon breaks gun control law. You need no license or certification to produce a firearm, unless that weapon is a class3 (fully auto, cannons, sawed off shotguns, mortars, etc.), or you intend to sell it.
Almost. There is federal law banning the production of "undetectable" guns, so you have to be sure you add a significant chunk of metal to make it legal. Assuming you do that, then, yes, it's legal.
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
Define "works". If your definition includes "reduces intentional homicides", you're provably wrong. Plot a graph of private gun ownership rates against intentional homicide rates around the world and what you'll find is that there is no correlation. In fact based on the most recent numbers from UNODC and the 2007 small arms report, there's a slight negative correlation, which means that countries with more guns tend to have fewer homicides.
There are lots of programmers working and making very good livings well after age 35. I'm 43 and just two years ago was hired by Google, with a significant pay increase. I work with lots of other guys who are in their 40s, 50s and even 60s and they're bright, very capable and -- obviously -- highly experienced.
Of course I'm talking about people who started when they were younger, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to pick it up later in life.
If you enjoy it, and are successfully making a living at it, go for it. Ignore the naysayers.
yea because the 1% of the market that belongs to linux users will definitely hurt WD's bottom line.
<shrug/>
Whatever. It's worth pointing out, though, that Linux is not the only non-Windows OS. In fact, Windows' total desktop market share is 92%. And falling.
Slashdot Mirror
It's shoulders all the way down.
You were probably going for funny, but if I had mod points I'd call this insightful. It really is shoulders all the way down; no one accomplishes anything of significance without relying on many, many others.
For something like an i5, the ALUs consume about 10% of the CPU power. The rest is prediction/data movement/caching/etc.
That's fascinating. Thanks.
building a supercomputer means getting thousands of CPUs to cooperate which is a much harder challenge.
Looking at his presentation, that seems to be his point. He concludes that power efficiency is going to become the limiting factor driving design decisions, and that since the power cost of increasing FLOPS has been so much lower than the power cost of moving larger quantities of data we're heading into an era where connectivity costs will so dominate the cost of cycles that cycles will be essentially free.
Hes's then basically arguing that it won't be cost-effective to build data transmission architectures that can effectively utilize exaflops, so no one will bother to build an exaflop machine.
He didn't state it, but if the rest of his arguments are correct, perhaps we're going to see the definition of a new metric for HPC, one that somehow captures the ability of a machine to distribute data to its computation nodes.
Everybody concerned will already have this news from other sources.
I'm interested, and I learned of it here.
These are makeshift solutions. With an ever growing population all solution we come up with, besides of reducing population and consumption, is rather temporary.
We don't have an ever-growing population. Worldwide, we're already basically at replacement level reproduction, and the industrialized world is at less than replacement level when you remove immigration. Europe's population is declining, period. In Hans Rosling's terms, we have reached and passed "peak child"; there are just shy of 2B children in the world and that number is not increasing and -- based on current trends -- not going to increase.
Assuming we maintain a constant level of 2B children, that means that there will be 2B people in each living generation, putting us at a steady-state population of about 10B. Actually, barring significant changes in current trends, that won't be a steady state, it will be a high water mark. As wealth and -- more importantly -- female education levels continue to rise around the world, the birthrate in what we now call the developing world will also drop below replacement and the population will gradually decline.
Rosling explains it well: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html
You're assuming that Google did just pull the plug without notice. That's so unlike Google that I'm skeptical that it's what happened.
Maybe someday they will actually get a marketing department that understands that the latest thing from "Fart Around Fridays" shouldn't always be "released" unless they have good reason to believe that it's sustainably profitable by some metric and they are willing to sustain it even if they are wrong in their projections. Should they choose to do so someday, it will be hard for them to become "adults" given their reputation over many years.
Actually, I think that's what has happened, and it's what's caused Google to acquire the bad reputation you speak of. When Larry Page took over a couple of years back, he immediately started demanding more focus on "world-changing" projects (at Google success is measured more by impact than by dollars; the assumption is that if you have a big enough impact there will be a way to make it profitable), and cutting the long tail of projects that weren't getting enough usage.
In your terms, Google is becoming an "adult" company, which is why they've been gradually canceling all of the non-hits which were introduced during the "throw anything and see what sticks" era -- like SMS search, assuming it's actually been cancelled. Google still does (and I hope will continue to do) more ambitious, speculative stuff than any other company out there, but there is definitely much more focus on demonstrating first that a project is going to be successful (i.e. hundreds of millions of users) than there used to be.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but these are my own opinions, not official company positions.)
Still, the encryption approach is the right one. It's fast, easy and much harder to circumvent.
With respect, are you really trying to say there are no reactors remaining of the same design as that one in Chernobyl?
Take note of the italicized portions of the GP's post and yours.
This always happens. Lowest cost + government insurance = safety failure.
It's a government project, entirely overseen and operated by the Department of Energy. There's no private corporation to blame here, sorry. Insurance isn't even relevant since the government itself would hold the liability -- if it weren't exempt from civil liability anyway.
Print it out and put it in your wallet? No, no.. bad idea.
No, that's a good idea, and exactly what you should do. Yes, it means that an attacker who manages to get your password and your wallet can get into your account, but that's still far more secure than a password alone. If your alternative is not using a second factor because you're afraid you won't have it when you need it, you're far better off using two factor and keeping the list of backup code list in your wallet.
Google offers SMS messaging as one of the methods for second-factor auth.
"you'll be asked for a code that will be sent to you via text, voice call, or our mobile app." (http://support.google.com/accounts/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=180744)
There are actually a couple of other options as well, including a code via e-mail and a hardcopy list of pre-assigned one-time-use code, though they're mostly intended for recovery, in case you lose access to your phone. And you can also provide a backup phone number.
Personally I just dont' want google to have my mobile phone number. They know too much already.
Use the authenticator app, then, if you have a smartphone.
The funny part is that if the Onion had just remained silent on this subject people would still be wondering whether they had actually been hacked or whether this is simply gigantic practical joke.
Are you really sure it isn't?
They still have eleven more chances at the circuit court level, if you include the DC and federal circuit courts.
This is the federal 9th circuit court of appeals, so its decisions are binding on all district courts in the 9th circuit. Yes, there are 11 more appellate courts (10 circuits, plus DC), on whose courts this decision is not binding... but it still establishes a persuasive precedent that other circuits are going to be reluctant to ignore. If they got another appellate court to disagree with the 9th, it would go to the Supreme Court for a decision. If, on the other hand, they the other court sided with the 9th, the non-binding precedent would become almost impossible to override.
So, no, they don't have eleven more chances, nor even 10. At best they have one remaining chance, and it's a very, very long shot: go to trial in a district court in a different circuit, win that, win the appeal and then win in DC. Given that AFAIK they haven't found a single judge who didn't slap them down, I think that's vanishingly unlikely.
100% of those I've polled agree.
You can't divide by zero. x / 0 != 0.
He asked his cat.
What a load of FUD.
Google is a wonderful company, and their products are useful and seductive and beautifully interlinked. But they're free to use and you're not the customer. And every day a certain number of people have their Google account blocked, for one reason or another, and find that there's no recourse to Google to fix that. In fact, there's no customer service department at all.
Examples on the internet of this are easy to find: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/open-letter-to-google-why-have-you-taken-away-my-google-gmail-accounts/7873/ http://classicsynth.hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Get-Disabled-Google-Account-Back
If they're so easy to find, why did you post only one, from 2008, who was locked out for only 15 hours? Your second just said that Google might temporarily disable your account if they suspect it's being attacked (hint: you probably want them to disable it in that case) and that Google will offer you some account recovery options.
Now imagine that this happens to you, and your laptop has just become a paperweight. And this time, you've paid for it. Hmmm.
Not true. You can still log on to your Chromebook and use it as a web browser, including whatever you need to straighten out your account problem. You just won't be able to access your Google account stuff. If you haven't set it to disallow other users, in the worst case (somehow you simply cannot recover your Google account), you can always use it to create a new Google account. If you have set it to disallow other users, you can always reset it to factory configuration and log in with a new account.
In short: In the unlikely event you truly lose access to your Google account you will have lost access to everything in your account... but your Chromebook is still yours, is not locked to that account, and can be used just as before with a new account.
Also, since you buy a Chromebook, there are customer support centers to help you: http://support.google.com/chromeos/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1280301. I'm pretty sure Google provides customer support for all of its paid services.
There's no battle going on. Google Docs is nowhere near Microsoft Office. If there is a battle, it's only on the Google side.
Depends on what you're doing. If you collaborate with others Office is nowhere near Google Docs. Office has far more features, but Docs has the stuff most people need most of the time and the access-anywhere and slick real-time collaboration features are very powerful.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but Google doesn't tell me what to say.)
Chromebooks have been topping the Amazon sales charts. Clearly TFA's numbers are bullshit because you don't top Amazon by selling less than 5,000 units.
X is dying. Slashdot confirms it. One of the oldest trolls that still works.
Submitter here. The 5000 figure is from the first 6 months of sales from June/July 2011.The Amazon sales charts numbers are from January of this year. Also, not many folks buy laptops from Amazon, so topping the sales there is nothing big.
OTOH, total sales so through Q1 of 2013 are purportedly in the 500K range. Certainly not a Windows killer yet, nor even an OS X competitor, but 100X more than 5K.
The way this is promoted in the news you'd think that zip guns never existed, and until "just hours ago" there was no way to come up with an improvised weapon.
This first iteration is roughly equivalent to (perhaps arguably inferior to) a zip gun... but there are some limitations on the capability of zip guns which 3D-printed guns don't have. Specifically, zip guns are simple because they must be simple. A gun with complex, detailed parts cannot be easily crafted by an unskilled person. That same limitation does not apply to 3D printed guns. Indeed, even this first iteration has inner workings which are far more sophisticated than the zip gun (in fact, it's overly complicated).
What does that mean? It means that we're only a bit (okay, a lot) of design work away from a printable automatic, or even select-fire, magazine-fed gun. Durability may always be a problem, especially for the parts that have to handle high pressures, but what if we combine the simple, strong parts of a zip gun with a sophisticated 3D-printed frame and action?
The point is that what's been made so far isn't really all that useful or interesting... but it's only the beginning. It will get better, much better, as both 3D printers and the designs improve. It will also get cheaper.
Not even printing and assemblng the weapon breaks gun control law. You need no license or certification to produce a firearm, unless that weapon is a class3 (fully auto, cannons, sawed off shotguns, mortars, etc.), or you intend to sell it.
Almost. There is federal law banning the production of "undetectable" guns, so you have to be sure you add a significant chunk of metal to make it legal. Assuming you do that, then, yes, it's legal.
Gun control works quite well in countries that have decided to implement it nationwide.
Define "works". If your definition includes "reduces intentional homicides", you're provably wrong. Plot a graph of private gun ownership rates against intentional homicide rates around the world and what you'll find is that there is no correlation. In fact based on the most recent numbers from UNODC and the 2007 small arms report, there's a slight negative correlation, which means that countries with more guns tend to have fewer homicides.
There are lots of programmers working and making very good livings well after age 35. I'm 43 and just two years ago was hired by Google, with a significant pay increase. I work with lots of other guys who are in their 40s, 50s and even 60s and they're bright, very capable and -- obviously -- highly experienced.
Of course I'm talking about people who started when they were younger, but I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to pick it up later in life.
If you enjoy it, and are successfully making a living at it, go for it. Ignore the naysayers.
yea because the 1% of the market that belongs to linux users will definitely hurt WD's bottom line.
<shrug/>
Whatever. It's worth pointing out, though, that Linux is not the only non-Windows OS. In fact, Windows' total desktop market share is 92%. And falling.
Then what's the opposite of Hate?
Also indifference. Love and hate are very closely related.