Leaving aside the whole actual argument of the article, I find the journalism troubling.
There's a few lede paragraphs. And then, it's all about "a growing number of economists, policy analysts and academics". It turns out "they say" things that back the arguments point -- anonymously and collectively. "Experts cite" statistics.
But then, whose names do we actually get? Well, there's the president/CEO of a test-taking company, who only says "The reality is, they may not be ready for college." (Take my test and find out, I guess.)
Then we get some paragraphs about how much school costs. Fine. Then we're told that college grads have a much, much lower unemployment rate than those with just a high school degree, which doesn't seem to support the point at all, but the statement is given as if it does.
That's followed by a quote from some career-center councilor -- hardly a national expert -- who complains that a four-year degree doesn't get you much (again without actually speaking to the thesis of the article).
Then we have some quotes from a high-school senior, the one from the introductory paragraphs. And her mom.
Okay, _finally_: Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, who gives the pull-quote above. Apparently some more on him here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Vedder . Anti-immigration, pro-tobacco, shockingly opposed to public funding for higher education. But okay, at least he qualifies as an "economist, policy analyst and academic".
Next up: Margaret Spellings, former federal education secretary under George W. Bush. Wait, she's a counter-point. She supports more college grads. Okay.
Next: John Reynolds, but all he is quoted talking about is whether dropping out makes you depressed. (It doesn't, overall.)
And then we close with a quote from the test company guy, who says, shockingly, that we need a new way of measuring skills rather than just trusting college degrees. Perhaps if there were *some sort of test*. Right, I see where you're coming from.
So, in summary, this WHOLE ARTICLE, which purports to show some sort of trend, is really just a framework around the argument of this Richard Vedder guy. His research may be sound, or it may not be -- but it sure isn't enough to support what the article claims.
If the employee has any sense of responsibility, he immediately reported the loss to his boss, and the situation was already being dealt with. Hopefully sympathetically.
If he didn't do that, well, he does deserve to be called out as untrustworthy. Maybe that's not Gizmodo's job, but I wouldn't feel too sorry for him in that case.
I don't get why they care if THEY themselves offer so many ways to avoid all that crap.
I think your upper-case letters there pretty much answer the question. It's all about control. Facebook has become in fact what AOL and Prodigy and Delphi all imagined they'd be: the walled garden where their users stayed most of the time, only venturing from the home base out into the wide Internet to bring stuff back "home".
The "lite" offering is good from Facebook's point of view because it keeps in users who might stray otherwise. But a third-party script which messes around inside the garden without their consent or control -- that's a problem.
You don't even need one which can run in different threads. You just need one which can flag various tasks as "uh, come back to that in a bit", and then very quickly go to the next thing on the list.
Uncertainty quantification in risk analysis has become a key application. In this context, computing the diagonal of in- verse covariance matrices is of paramount importance. Stan- dard techniques, that employ matrix factorizations, incur a cubic cost which quickly becomes intractable with the cur- rent explosion of data sizes. In this work we reduce this complexity to quadratic with the synergy of two algorithms that gracefully complement each other and lead to a radi- cally different approach. First, we turned to stochastic esti- mation of the diagonal. This allowed us to cast the problem as a linear system with a relatively small number of multiple right hand sides. Second, for this linear system we developed a novel, mixed precision, iterative refinement scheme, which uses iterative solvers instead of matrix factorizations. We demonstrate that the new framework not only achieves the much needed quadratic cost but in addition offers excellent opportunities for scaling at massively parallel environments. We based our implementation on BLAS 3 kernels that en- sure very high processor performance. We achieved a peak performance of 730 TFlops on 72 BG/P racks, with a sus- tained performance 73% of theoretical peak. We stress that the techniques presented in this work are quite general and applicable to several other important applications.
Um, I didn't actually give a percentage figure for what amount of the debt should be considered related, just noted that all debt that _is_ military in nature is normally reported as just general debt and outside of the $600B budget figure mentioned above. _That's_ the cooking of the books.
There's another $150 billion in military spending outside of the Department of Defense. And paying off debt accrued through previous military spending is also lumped in outside of that $600B.
When you consider social security separately (and arguably you should, since it's a self-contained program), total military spending easily approaches half.
However, it does not have the user friendless of windows or mac.
On the contrary, Linux is far, far more user-friendly than MS Windows or Mac OS. You're mistaking having a short, low learning curve for being user-friendly.
Linux does what I tell it to do, and if it doesn't know how to do something, it's much easier for me -- the user -- to teach it what I want. I definitely agree that it takes more investment to get to that point. If you're interested in learning, it's worth it -- not because it's free or virus-safe or whatever, but precisely because it's more user-friendly.
Don't get me wrong... I like linux too... but what you did was obliterate a perfectly good installation for no good reason just because you weren't accustomed to it.
Sure. But, s/weren't accustomed to it/had no need for it/.
Yeah, I went through that. You're missing the steps about digging out your install CDs and finding the Xcode Developer Tools, and X11. I can do all that, but like I said, it's extra steps First I installed Fink, because I'd heard good things, and then realized that they only had an old version of Inkscape. Then I installed MacPorts, and ran into some other frustration. Then I thought, why am I jumping through all these hoops anyway? I could just have the real thing.
Or run Linux natively. I have a slightly dated 24" iMac with an ATI Radeon GPU. I ran OS X for a few days and then got frustrated with the limited and over-intrusive UI, and with the tediousness of dealing with the various software ports projects. (The latter aren't awful, and I don't mean to disparage the people working on this, but it's nothing like just having yum or apt-get already there and just waiting to install thousands of excellent free packages.)
So I installed rEFIt, and shrunk OS X down to a tiny partition I never boot into. Instead, I run Fedora 12 with all open source / free software drivers, including sound and 3D-accelerated video. (I think maybe the webcam doesn't work, but I don't really care.) Definitely the nicest Linux workstation I've ever had.
Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
Additionally, which monospaced font you use matters. You need one that's designed to be readable and to make clear distinctions between 0 and O, l and 1, and so on. I use Raph Levien's Inconsolata for coding, and it's excellent (and available under the Open Font License).
The app store is getting full of this junk: fifty dollar "apps" that give you credit in some ridiculous game. And worse. The "social" aspect is focused on trying to hook your friends and acquaintances in; it's not MMO, it's Amway.
How well have "intelligent and autonomous" software agents worked in other areas of computing? Pretty well on the autonomous -- but still terrible on "intelligent".
The article is, of course, ridiculously vague on what that really means (says "self-sufficient coding in order to coordinate and extend its own survival"), but I expect all that really means is that they'll act like the polymorphic computer viruses we've already got. Ho-hum.
It's not like we're going to get The Adolescence of P1 or anything, here.
We have one of those already; I imagine a lot of schools do. Ours is only an 18-node cluster so the numbers are much smaller, but the story here is that this is relatively big, not that it's some new thing.
This is, of course, wrong. Such local installations are normally done with "sudo", which does not require root passwords.
No. PackageKit will still use PolicyKit. The change is that it will now require "auth_admin", which does indeed require the input of the root password. (This is like sudo configured with the rootpw flag in sudoers.)
It would also be possible to configure PolicyKit to require "auth_self" (or auth_self_keep, which remembers that you authenticated for a few minutes), which would provide sudo-like behavior. But that wasn't done.
So the announcement is right.
Arguably, the current (i.e., old again) behavior isn't right and a sudo-like setup should be the default -- but that's a FutureFeature.
Slashdot Mirror
Leaving aside the whole actual argument of the article, I find the journalism troubling.
There's a few lede paragraphs. And then, it's all about "a growing number of economists, policy analysts and academics". It turns out "they say" things that back the arguments point -- anonymously and collectively. "Experts cite" statistics.
But then, whose names do we actually get? Well, there's the president/CEO of a test-taking company, who only says "The reality is, they may not be ready for college." (Take my test and find out, I guess.)
Then we get some paragraphs about how much school costs. Fine. Then we're told that college grads have a much, much lower unemployment rate than those with just a high school degree, which doesn't seem to support the point at all, but the statement is given as if it does.
That's followed by a quote from some career-center councilor -- hardly a national expert -- who complains that a four-year degree doesn't get you much (again without actually speaking to the thesis of the article).
Then we have some quotes from a high-school senior, the one from the introductory paragraphs.
And her mom.
Okay, _finally_: Ohio University economics professor Richard Vedder, who gives the pull-quote above. Apparently some more on him here: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Richard_Vedder . Anti-immigration, pro-tobacco, shockingly opposed to public funding for higher education. But okay, at least he qualifies as an "economist, policy analyst and academic".
Next up: Margaret Spellings, former federal education secretary under George W. Bush. Wait, she's a counter-point. She supports more college grads. Okay.
Next: John Reynolds, but all he is quoted talking about is whether dropping out makes you depressed. (It doesn't, overall.)
And then we close with a quote from the test company guy, who says, shockingly, that we need a new way of measuring skills rather than just trusting college degrees. Perhaps if there were *some sort of test*. Right, I see where you're coming from.
So, in summary, this WHOLE ARTICLE, which purports to show some sort of trend, is really just a framework around the argument of this Richard Vedder guy. His research may be sound, or it may not be -- but it sure isn't enough to support what the article claims.
Seriously.
Awesome, moderators. In what way is this flamebait? It's the commonly accepted definition of a cult. Go look it up; I'll wait.
Sounds a lot like a cult, doesn't it?
No, it sounds like a religion.
The key difference is simply the scale (in time and numbers) at which the organization is generally accepted as "normal".
Yeahhhhh.... but that's not the patent.
If the employee has any sense of responsibility, he immediately reported the loss to his boss, and the situation was already being dealt with. Hopefully sympathetically.
If he didn't do that, well, he does deserve to be called out as untrustworthy. Maybe that's not Gizmodo's job, but I wouldn't feel too sorry for him in that case.
I don't get why they care if THEY themselves offer so many ways to avoid all that crap.
I think your upper-case letters there pretty much answer the question. It's all about control. Facebook has become in fact what AOL and Prodigy and Delphi all imagined they'd be: the walled garden where their users stayed most of the time, only venturing from the home base out into the wide Internet to bring stuff back "home".
The "lite" offering is good from Facebook's point of view because it keeps in users who might stray otherwise. But a third-party script which messes around inside the garden without their consent or control -- that's a problem.
What makes you think that spinning drives don't have a limit on total number of writes?
You don't even need one which can run in different threads. You just need one which can flag various tasks as "uh, come back to that in a bit", and then very quickly go to the next thing on the list.
"Low cost high performance uncertainty quantification", full text available in PDF.
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1645421&coll=GUIDE&dl=GUIDE&CFID=77531079&CFTOKEN=42017699&ret=1#Fulltext
And, here's the abstract:
Uncertainty quantification in risk analysis has become a key
application. In this context, computing the diagonal of in-
verse covariance matrices is of paramount importance. Stan-
dard techniques, that employ matrix factorizations, incur a
cubic cost which quickly becomes intractable with the cur-
rent explosion of data sizes. In this work we reduce this
complexity to quadratic with the synergy of two algorithms
that gracefully complement each other and lead to a radi-
cally different approach. First, we turned to stochastic esti-
mation of the diagonal. This allowed us to cast the problem
as a linear system with a relatively small number of multiple
right hand sides. Second, for this linear system we developed
a novel, mixed precision, iterative refinement scheme, which
uses iterative solvers instead of matrix factorizations. We
demonstrate that the new framework not only achieves the
much needed quadratic cost but in addition offers excellent
opportunities for scaling at massively parallel environments.
We based our implementation on BLAS 3 kernels that en-
sure very high processor performance. We achieved a peak
performance of 730 TFlops on 72 BG/P racks, with a sus-
tained performance 73% of theoretical peak. We stress that
the techniques presented in this work are quite general and
applicable to several other important applications.
"Work on 3 different projects at once. If you are cutting and pasting and reusing code a lot between them, you're coding things the right way."
Ow! NO YOU'RE NOT!
With PDF version! http://arbesman.net/milkyway/
Um, I didn't actually give a percentage figure for what amount of the debt should be considered related, just noted that all debt that _is_ military in nature is normally reported as just general debt and outside of the $600B budget figure mentioned above. _That's_ the cooking of the books.
Really? Did you go to college?
There's another $150 billion in military spending outside of the Department of Defense. And paying off debt accrued through previous military spending is also lumped in outside of that $600B. When you consider social security separately (and arguably you should, since it's a self-contained program), total military spending easily approaches half.
However, it does not have the user friendless of windows or mac.
On the contrary, Linux is far, far more user-friendly than MS Windows or Mac OS. You're mistaking having a short, low learning curve for being user-friendly.
Linux does what I tell it to do, and if it doesn't know how to do something, it's much easier for me -- the user -- to teach it what I want. I definitely agree that it takes more investment to get to that point. If you're interested in learning, it's worth it -- not because it's free or virus-safe or whatever, but precisely because it's more user-friendly.
Don't get me wrong... I like linux too... but what you did was obliterate a perfectly good installation for no good reason just because you weren't accustomed to it.
Sure. But, s/weren't accustomed to it/had no need for it/.
Yeah, I went through that. You're missing the steps about digging out your install CDs and finding the Xcode Developer Tools, and X11. I can do all that, but like I said, it's extra steps First I installed Fink, because I'd heard good things, and then realized that they only had an old version of Inkscape. Then I installed MacPorts, and ran into some other frustration. Then I thought, why am I jumping through all these hoops anyway? I could just have the real thing.
Sure it is. There's even projects to do it. For example, OpenBIOS.
Or run Linux natively. I have a slightly dated 24" iMac with an ATI Radeon GPU. I ran OS X for a few days and then got frustrated with the limited and over-intrusive UI, and with the tediousness of dealing with the various software ports projects. (The latter aren't awful, and I don't mean to disparage the people working on this, but it's nothing like just having yum or apt-get already there and just waiting to install thousands of excellent free packages.)
So I installed rEFIt, and shrunk OS X down to a tiny partition I never boot into. Instead, I run Fedora 12 with all open source / free software drivers, including sound and 3D-accelerated video. (I think maybe the webcam doesn't work, but I don't really care.) Definitely the nicest Linux workstation I've ever had.
Reading prose is different from reading code. I'd think that whatever you gain wouldn't be enough to make up for the loss from lack of vertical alignment.
Additionally, which monospaced font you use matters. You need one that's designed to be readable and to make clear distinctions between 0 and O, l and 1, and so on. I use Raph Levien's Inconsolata for coding, and it's excellent (and available under the Open Font License).
On Fedora, yum install levien-inconsolata-fonts.
The app store is getting full of this junk: fifty dollar "apps" that give you credit in some ridiculous game. And worse. The "social" aspect is focused on trying to hook your friends and acquaintances in; it's not MMO, it's Amway.
Mafia Wars CEO Brags About Scamming Users From Day One and Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell are good starting points, if you haven't seen this before (or realized it as obvious).
This deserves a gigantic "O RLY?"
How well have "intelligent and autonomous" software agents worked in other areas of computing? Pretty well on the autonomous -- but still terrible on "intelligent".
The article is, of course, ridiculously vague on what that really means (says "self-sufficient coding in order to coordinate and extend its own survival"), but I expect all that really means is that they'll act like the polymorphic computer viruses we've already got. Ho-hum.
It's not like we're going to get The Adolescence of P1 or anything, here.
We have one of those already; I imagine a lot of schools do. Ours is only an 18-node cluster so the numbers are much smaller, but the story here is that this is relatively big, not that it's some new thing.
This is, of course, wrong. Such local installations are normally done with "sudo", which does not require root passwords.
No. PackageKit will still use PolicyKit. The change is that it will now require "auth_admin", which does indeed require the input of the root password. (This is like sudo configured with the rootpw flag in sudoers.)
It would also be possible to configure PolicyKit to require "auth_self" (or auth_self_keep, which remembers that you authenticated for a few minutes), which would provide sudo-like behavior. But that wasn't done.
So the announcement is right.
Arguably, the current (i.e., old again) behavior isn't right and a sudo-like setup should be the default -- but that's a FutureFeature.