Why do you think people will still use Javascript once they have other options?
(1) Inertia, and (2) code base. COBOL, and to some extent Fortran, are still around because of the huge amount of code nearly everywhere that would be way too expensive (and in some cases impossible) to recode. You also have to retool people and dev environments if you're going to jump to the latest/greatest way to slice bread. Not a fan of JS, but I don't see it disappearing any time soon.
And anything that does anything using arrays of any kind is "technically" using tensors. However, I suspect that Google is just using it for the psuedo-geek-sexy sound of it. Or maybe they're using an array of old Tensor high-intensity lights?? If so, my humble apologies.
I strongly suspect that Google's "Tensor" is not the same as a mathematical tensor, which is what the SGI chips were working with. This use of the work smells more of marketing than mathematics. As in "OMG, Google is using TENSORS!!! to do their AI language processing. TENSORS dammit!!!"
I've seen this problem in many organizations run by people who consider themselves to be in a "profession" like doctors, lawyers, and to a varied extent anyone with a non-computer PhD. The attitude seems to be that "I am smart, so I can figure this out without paying someone who knows what they're doing, and I'll do a better and less expensive job." This applies to many aspects of running an organization, with IT and finance/budget being two very egregious areas. I've seen many a small R&D company fail because its principle owners/operators try to do the finance/budget side after the company has become larger than a couple of people, and lots of computer security issues in companies where this "we can do it all" attitude holds sway. They can't quite see that people pay them for their expertise, so why should they balk at paying other people for expertise they don't themselves have. I've been expecting a security meltdown at hospitals and medical facilities ever since the big money pushed in a few years ago by the Government to drag medical IT into at least the last decade of the 20th century. This will be quite the roller-coaster ride.
Mod+2 if I had mod points. This summary is statistical cherry-picking at its worst. Gives those who want to rant about misleading gender-bias studies something to rant about rather than helping sort out a fix for the remaining 5% or so pay offset.
Exactly. The only solid bottom line is that there haven't been enough well-design studies to know anything other than the efforts looked at by these faulty studies didn't appear to reduce sitting time. Sounds like a paper that's setting up for a proposal to do a good study (I've been in that business, and that's how it works).
I do a sit/stand regimen and it has helped with back and should pain. Gains made take time, which makes it hard to study without a long-term effort, which requires funding to support. To do it right takes an control-group study where some people just sit hunched over their screens all day and others follow (and stick with) a mixed sit/stand schedule. This paper says that study has not been done, we can't say anything qualitative about standing at your desk until that study is done, and unstated is "we're proposing to do this study given sufficient funds."
Them's the facts. Or do you want to go back to the time of home-brew computers, and a slew of different architectures and operating systems with software only available on any one particular system in a hit or miss fashion? It was fun, but it was also a bit of a PITA.
So, has Senator Cruz not heard of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA)? Still alive and kicking, although they do have their own problems. However, one very big reason for MDA and its presence in Alaska is our good buddies in North Korea.
Granted, but I would have expected that this flood of hacked information would be showing up in the black markets somewhere. As I recall, the way we first learned of the Target hack job was because the stolen information was showing up in these markets and was being used. Is there any evidence that this is the case for this treasure trove of information?
OK, so if the site is so damned vulnerable why hasn't it been cracked by a Black Hat yet? Access to this sort of information is the wet dream of most hackers-for-hire. TFA quotes a Government person saying that the site is secure. The White Hat hackers say it isn't. Unless someone is lying about there having been no break-ins yet, then I have a hard time accepting that the site is a plum waiting to be picked by the next script kiddie that comes along. I could see that there would be a desire to cover up any hack job, but I don't know that a cover-up of something that juicy could hold up for long. Some missing pieces to this story.
... to bank from your cellphone. Call me paranoid and old-fashioned (I admit to being both), but if I do on-line banking at all I do it from my own home computer on a wired LAN. OK, so I can't do all the wild-and-crazy things these mobile banking apps allow, but I also am likely to have my money in my bank in my account at the end of the day and not in a bank account in Siberia somewhere.
The summary (at least) is a bit off on the description. dtmos is close, but still no cigar. The large flare produced three outputs of concern: high levels of x-ray radiation (photons), high levels of high-energy protons, and the CME which is a blast of low-energy (for the sun, anyway) plasma into the solar wind. The x-rays arrive first (at the speed of light, natch) with the high-energy protons not far behind. The shock wave produced by the CME arrives several days later. All of these can cause problems with spacecraft in near-earth orbit, but I suspect that the concern here was those high-energy protons which can damage electronics (and people - this is radiation in the bad old sense). The flux level of those beasts is dropping, but I'm sure NASA is concerned about this sunspot region producing another large flare with another hit from high-energy protons.
The CME, if the shock it produced in the solar wind indeed reaches the earth (this one likely will), can alter the fluxes of high-energy electrons in the earth's radiation belts and will generate active auroral conditions. The ISS is well below the radiation belts, so the CME-produced effects near the earth probably aren't as much of a concern here.
I work with GPS a lot, and there are many MANY people around the world who spend their entire lives making sure that there are very precise measurements of where those satellites are and how good predictions of where they'll be going are. These orbit calculations take into account the pressure of light from the sun on the satellites along with several other very small effects, so if there was some large extra mass in a ring around the earth it would have been noticed many years ago. I think this guy needs to recheck his calculations.
I don't see this coming out of the contractor's fee. From local news reporting (I live in Seattle) this looks to me like the state is the up-gefucking party here, and if I were the state I'd be looking to avoid being sued by the contractor for providing misleading/incomplete information during the bid process. I expect that total cost of this little mishap will be well into the $1M+ range, and it'll come out of contingency money. Since we're still early in the dig process and haven't even gotten to the hard parts (digging under large buildings, for example) it's not good to be eating big chunks out of the contingency money at this point.
Just as there are nightmare PHB managers, there are useless waste-of-space techies. Assuming that we're talking here about apples and apples (competent managers and competent techies) they bring different, and damn-near equally important, skills and assets to the table. I have spent several decades in the science-for-hire business (research in a private company, not university related), and you see the other side of this problem quite often. Highly competent science types who take on management roles rather than hire someone with the right skills because "I am a PhD and can do this silly management stuff with one hand behind my back." Those are the companies that run into problems big-time. Any good science/tech business of any size needs to have good managers who have been trained for what they do and are competent at it. If both sides recognize the inherent worth of the other (again, assuming competence all around), and if they stay off each others turf and call on the other when their expertise is what's needed, this is what makes a company run.
There's an old story (and a song, as I recall) about an old woman who finds a sick snake and takes it home to nurse it to health. After the snake is healthy, it bites her and when she complains tells her to stop complaining because she knew what it was when she took it in. Same goes for Apple devs in the current situation. This is SOP for Apple and has been for years. If you're going to develop apps for Apple machines you gotta be ready with your snake-bit kit at all times.
Seattle has a similar situation and has a bike-friendly mayor who's pushed the issue and is likely to lose his upcoming bid for re-election (not solely because of bike issues, but he's known as Mayor McSchwinn and it's one of several things that voters are unhappy about). I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and bicycled from near Culver City to the UCLA campus in Westwood the entire time. I feel very fortunate to have avoided an accident during that time and had many near-misses. US cities are not set up for bicycles, and making them so is an expensive proposition. (OK, so Boulder is an exception, but they've a lot of money to spend in stuff like this). Yes, bicycling is better for you than sitting on your ass in a car, but spending a lot of scarce tax dollars catering to the biking minority is a very inefficient use of transportation money.
Assuming TFA's numbers are correct, I'd bet that much of the problem is that no agency, be it government or commercial (and particularly commercial) wants to spend it's money seeing if published results are reproducible. Additionally, no one ever won a Noble Prize for excellence in reproducing others' results. Verification of results is key to science, but this is one of several aspects of doing science right that the funding agencies either don't want to, or can't (as in Congress looking over the shoulders of managers at the NSF), pay for. Everyone wants "everything, all the time" without paying for it, and this is the sort of thing that happens when decisions are driven by the money people (who may be scientists, to be fair) and not the people who know what the hell is going on.
Yeah, yeah - code clean, test-test-test, document-document-document, have separate test/run machines that are configured the same, yada yada. This is all well and good, and any halfway-decent developer knows all this. However, software development is not done in a vacuum and each and damn near everything mentioned is involved in cost/time benefit analyses when crunch-time comes (which it always does). With some exceptions, when I see a company that's saddled with horrible old legacy codes that nobody can understand, often a large measure of this is paybacks (for not adequate funding and poor schedule planning) being the bitch that they are. How to do things the best way are well known, it's just that the best way is more expensive (in the short term, which is the only term business understands these days) and takes more time than the average business will wait. If the bottom line is get something done that sorta-kinda works as fast/cheap as possible, you get spaghetti code that even the guy/gal who developed it can't follow.
The Washington State's exchange website, for which the state paid $54 million to Delloite LLC, hasn't been a rollicking success either. I'm trying to wrap my head around why it costs $54 million to set up a pretty straight-forward website (costs evidently do not include hardware, just people/time/software). I believe that cost was over half what the state received from the feds to set up the exchange. Details here (such as they are).
(Sound of pooch being screwed.) This is how real science works, particularly with highly complex issues like the earth's climate. We learn new things as we go along, and when new knowledge means we need to adjust our undestanding, that's what is done. The next update by the IPCC (if it gets funded, that is) may well show that what we learn in the interim indicates that the current estimates of climate change were too small. Unfortunately, the polarization of politics will take this latest IPCC report (if it indeed says what the article states) as an indication that these science types have been lying to us all along and they should now be ignored and driven from the temple. Efforts to deal with the effects of the upcoming changes will be killed off and nothing will be done until it's too late to do much of anything other than hope to cope.
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Why do you think people will still use Javascript once they have other options?
(1) Inertia, and (2) code base. COBOL, and to some extent Fortran, are still around because of the huge amount of code nearly everywhere that would be way too expensive (and in some cases impossible) to recode. You also have to retool people and dev environments if you're going to jump to the latest/greatest way to slice bread. Not a fan of JS, but I don't see it disappearing any time soon.
And anything that does anything using arrays of any kind is "technically" using tensors. However, I suspect that Google is just using it for the psuedo-geek-sexy sound of it. Or maybe they're using an array of old Tensor high-intensity lights?? If so, my humble apologies.
I strongly suspect that Google's "Tensor" is not the same as a mathematical tensor, which is what the SGI chips were working with. This use of the work smells more of marketing than mathematics. As in "OMG, Google is using TENSORS!!! to do their AI language processing. TENSORS dammit!!!"
... is the patient whose body produced this antibody going to get a cut, or is it just the researchers and their organizations who will gain?
I've seen this problem in many organizations run by people who consider themselves to be in a "profession" like doctors, lawyers, and to a varied extent anyone with a non-computer PhD. The attitude seems to be that "I am smart, so I can figure this out without paying someone who knows what they're doing, and I'll do a better and less expensive job." This applies to many aspects of running an organization, with IT and finance/budget being two very egregious areas. I've seen many a small R&D company fail because its principle owners/operators try to do the finance/budget side after the company has become larger than a couple of people, and lots of computer security issues in companies where this "we can do it all" attitude holds sway. They can't quite see that people pay them for their expertise, so why should they balk at paying other people for expertise they don't themselves have. I've been expecting a security meltdown at hospitals and medical facilities ever since the big money pushed in a few years ago by the Government to drag medical IT into at least the last decade of the 20th century. This will be quite the roller-coaster ride.
Mod+2 if I had mod points. This summary is statistical cherry-picking at its worst. Gives those who want to rant about misleading gender-bias studies something to rant about rather than helping sort out a fix for the remaining 5% or so pay offset.
... pachinko! That'll put off the singularity for at least a century or more.
Exactly. The only solid bottom line is that there haven't been enough well-design studies to know anything other than the efforts looked at by these faulty studies didn't appear to reduce sitting time. Sounds like a paper that's setting up for a proposal to do a good study (I've been in that business, and that's how it works).
I do a sit/stand regimen and it has helped with back and should pain. Gains made take time, which makes it hard to study without a long-term effort, which requires funding to support. To do it right takes an control-group study where some people just sit hunched over their screens all day and others follow (and stick with) a mixed sit/stand schedule. This paper says that study has not been done, we can't say anything qualitative about standing at your desk until that study is done, and unstated is "we're proposing to do this study given sufficient funds."
Them's the facts. Or do you want to go back to the time of home-brew computers, and a slew of different architectures and operating systems with software only available on any one particular system in a hit or miss fashion? It was fun, but it was also a bit of a PITA.
In a word, yes.
So, has Senator Cruz not heard of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA)? Still alive and kicking, although they do have their own problems. However, one very big reason for MDA and its presence in Alaska is our good buddies in North Korea.
The new beta looks like a bad case of ReCode (recode.net) envy to me.
Granted, but I would have expected that this flood of hacked information would be showing up in the black markets somewhere. As I recall, the way we first learned of the Target hack job was because the stolen information was showing up in these markets and was being used. Is there any evidence that this is the case for this treasure trove of information?
OK, so if the site is so damned vulnerable why hasn't it been cracked by a Black Hat yet? Access to this sort of information is the wet dream of most hackers-for-hire. TFA quotes a Government person saying that the site is secure. The White Hat hackers say it isn't. Unless someone is lying about there having been no break-ins yet, then I have a hard time accepting that the site is a plum waiting to be picked by the next script kiddie that comes along. I could see that there would be a desire to cover up any hack job, but I don't know that a cover-up of something that juicy could hold up for long. Some missing pieces to this story.
... to bank from your cellphone. Call me paranoid and old-fashioned (I admit to being both), but if I do on-line banking at all I do it from my own home computer on a wired LAN. OK, so I can't do all the wild-and-crazy things these mobile banking apps allow, but I also am likely to have my money in my bank in my account at the end of the day and not in a bank account in Siberia somewhere.
The summary (at least) is a bit off on the description. dtmos is close, but still no cigar. The large flare produced three outputs of concern: high levels of x-ray radiation (photons), high levels of high-energy protons, and the CME which is a blast of low-energy (for the sun, anyway) plasma into the solar wind. The x-rays arrive first (at the speed of light, natch) with the high-energy protons not far behind. The shock wave produced by the CME arrives several days later. All of these can cause problems with spacecraft in near-earth orbit, but I suspect that the concern here was those high-energy protons which can damage electronics (and people - this is radiation in the bad old sense). The flux level of those beasts is dropping, but I'm sure NASA is concerned about this sunspot region producing another large flare with another hit from high-energy protons.
The CME, if the shock it produced in the solar wind indeed reaches the earth (this one likely will), can alter the fluxes of high-energy electrons in the earth's radiation belts and will generate active auroral conditions. The ISS is well below the radiation belts, so the CME-produced effects near the earth probably aren't as much of a concern here.
I work with GPS a lot, and there are many MANY people around the world who spend their entire lives making sure that there are very precise measurements of where those satellites are and how good predictions of where they'll be going are. These orbit calculations take into account the pressure of light from the sun on the satellites along with several other very small effects, so if there was some large extra mass in a ring around the earth it would have been noticed many years ago. I think this guy needs to recheck his calculations.
I don't see this coming out of the contractor's fee. From local news reporting (I live in Seattle) this looks to me like the state is the up-gefucking party here, and if I were the state I'd be looking to avoid being sued by the contractor for providing misleading/incomplete information during the bid process. I expect that total cost of this little mishap will be well into the $1M+ range, and it'll come out of contingency money. Since we're still early in the dig process and haven't even gotten to the hard parts (digging under large buildings, for example) it's not good to be eating big chunks out of the contingency money at this point.
Just as there are nightmare PHB managers, there are useless waste-of-space techies. Assuming that we're talking here about apples and apples (competent managers and competent techies) they bring different, and damn-near equally important, skills and assets to the table. I have spent several decades in the science-for-hire business (research in a private company, not university related), and you see the other side of this problem quite often. Highly competent science types who take on management roles rather than hire someone with the right skills because "I am a PhD and can do this silly management stuff with one hand behind my back." Those are the companies that run into problems big-time. Any good science/tech business of any size needs to have good managers who have been trained for what they do and are competent at it. If both sides recognize the inherent worth of the other (again, assuming competence all around), and if they stay off each others turf and call on the other when their expertise is what's needed, this is what makes a company run.
There's an old story (and a song, as I recall) about an old woman who finds a sick snake and takes it home to nurse it to health. After the snake is healthy, it bites her and when she complains tells her to stop complaining because she knew what it was when she took it in. Same goes for Apple devs in the current situation. This is SOP for Apple and has been for years. If you're going to develop apps for Apple machines you gotta be ready with your snake-bit kit at all times.
He is the spouse (husband, I assume) of Congressperson Karen DelBene (D-WA), also an ex-MS person.
Seattle has a similar situation and has a bike-friendly mayor who's pushed the issue and is likely to lose his upcoming bid for re-election (not solely because of bike issues, but he's known as Mayor McSchwinn and it's one of several things that voters are unhappy about). I lived in Los Angeles in the mid-1970s and bicycled from near Culver City to the UCLA campus in Westwood the entire time. I feel very fortunate to have avoided an accident during that time and had many near-misses. US cities are not set up for bicycles, and making them so is an expensive proposition. (OK, so Boulder is an exception, but they've a lot of money to spend in stuff like this). Yes, bicycling is better for you than sitting on your ass in a car, but spending a lot of scarce tax dollars catering to the biking minority is a very inefficient use of transportation money.
Assuming TFA's numbers are correct, I'd bet that much of the problem is that no agency, be it government or commercial (and particularly commercial) wants to spend it's money seeing if published results are reproducible. Additionally, no one ever won a Noble Prize for excellence in reproducing others' results. Verification of results is key to science, but this is one of several aspects of doing science right that the funding agencies either don't want to, or can't (as in Congress looking over the shoulders of managers at the NSF), pay for. Everyone wants "everything, all the time" without paying for it, and this is the sort of thing that happens when decisions are driven by the money people (who may be scientists, to be fair) and not the people who know what the hell is going on.
Yeah, yeah - code clean, test-test-test, document-document-document, have separate test/run machines that are configured the same, yada yada. This is all well and good, and any halfway-decent developer knows all this. However, software development is not done in a vacuum and each and damn near everything mentioned is involved in cost/time benefit analyses when crunch-time comes (which it always does). With some exceptions, when I see a company that's saddled with horrible old legacy codes that nobody can understand, often a large measure of this is paybacks (for not adequate funding and poor schedule planning) being the bitch that they are. How to do things the best way are well known, it's just that the best way is more expensive (in the short term, which is the only term business understands these days) and takes more time than the average business will wait. If the bottom line is get something done that sorta-kinda works as fast/cheap as possible, you get spaghetti code that even the guy/gal who developed it can't follow.
The Washington State's exchange website, for which the state paid $54 million to Delloite LLC, hasn't been a rollicking success either. I'm trying to wrap my head around why it costs $54 million to set up a pretty straight-forward website (costs evidently do not include hardware, just people/time/software). I believe that cost was over half what the state received from the feds to set up the exchange. Details here (such as they are).
(Sound of pooch being screwed.) This is how real science works, particularly with highly complex issues like the earth's climate. We learn new things as we go along, and when new knowledge means we need to adjust our undestanding, that's what is done. The next update by the IPCC (if it gets funded, that is) may well show that what we learn in the interim indicates that the current estimates of climate change were too small. Unfortunately, the polarization of politics will take this latest IPCC report (if it indeed says what the article states) as an indication that these science types have been lying to us all along and they should now be ignored and driven from the temple. Efforts to deal with the effects of the upcoming changes will be killed off and nothing will be done until it's too late to do much of anything other than hope to cope.