I don't believe that's true. There's widespread evidence that beyond a certain basis covering the necessities, that additional consumer indulgence actually generates a net negative experience. There's lots of psychological literature on this phenomenon.
Meh, I reread my post and I think it was clear enough that my quibble with altruism was not with the definition but rather with its nature.
If you choose to do something altruistically, why do you do so? Is there nothing to your choice, are you a simple automaton? Is it an act of pure randomness? Or is it because it makes you sad to do so? Because it's the 'right' thing to do? (reinforcing yourself for right action).
The remaining choice would be that it makes you feel good to do so, in which case the altruism is gone.
My point is that altruism doesn't exist in reality, not that the definition is incorrect. All actual instances of something labeled 'altruism' are in fact examples of the positive feedback mechanism of fundamental psychology. There are only two things that shape all behavior: genes and environment. All behavior comes from those two sources. 'Altruism' exists because it gets reinforced, either in genetics or by the environment.
I don't care at all for what Rand felt or thought, she had crazy ideas. But the notion that altruism is just a form of selfishness is straight out of fundamental psychology. Why does any organism engage in any behavior: either shaping by genetics or shaping by environment. Either way, it's the reward based feedback system that creates altruism.
In most cases, homeless people are not rational thinkers at all. Most homeless people have serious mental illness problems. It's just not hard to acquire housing (at least in this country) if you're mentally whole.
And if they were at all rational, they'd probably realize that the rape and slaughter strategy is not their best option. Grand theft will get them food and shelter for life without the risk of lethal injection or the moral quandaries of rape and murder.
I don't know what office you're looking at... back in 94 we had low resolution, non wysiwyg, simple documents. Today it's multimedia presentations, web browsing, streaming media, etc.
Even if all you do is write word documents, the tools available to do that have gotten much better, and really, if that is all you do, I think the experience is actually significantly faster today than it was then. I can remember doing spell checks back then that took wall clock time to complete. Today you can spell check a 3k page document in an instant, or you don't even have to because that's all done in the background, and auto correct took care of your errors or highlighted them for you to fix in the first place so that you don't have them to fix. Heck, back then you probably didn't have a storage media capable of storing a formatted 3k page document.
In short... I attribute your experience to a lack of awareness of just how much things have improved... perhaps the changes have been too gradual over the years for you to notice, but they are quite radically different today than they were back then.
Algorithms won over brute force a long time ago. We're using brute force on the good algorithms!
Seriously, there are very few big CPU tasks that have not had a LOT of smart people look at the algorithms. The idea that we'll suddenly take a big leap in algorithmic efficiency when Moore's law ends is laughable.
Parallel is a decently magic bullet. The number of interesting computing tasks I've seen that cannot be partitioned into parallel tasks has been quite small. That's why 100% of the top 500 supercomputers are parallel devices.
#1 is just plain wrong, and misses my point entirely to boot.
#2 is true. There are certainly things you can do that the compiler can not beat into submission. But the examples given so far do not reflect anything close to what I would have described as 'bloat', and in any case rarely go unaddressed in most end-user software from any medium sized & up company.
#3 is not true. It's a false trade-off. Those features are not dependent in performance.
I meant memory is cheaper than CPU in the algorithmic sense. E.g. trade a GB of memory to convert an O(n^2) algorithm to O(n ln n). A make your computation take seconds instead of days type of trade-off.
For #1, the opportunities for large gains are almost always at the algorithmic and not the design level. Credit card fraud detection is so far up the coding food chain that you're almost certainly barking up the wrong tree if what you want is performance / memory compactness improvement. If your concern is that fraud detection is too much feature creep, well, that's what I'd say is using up our resources, so we're in agreement there, but my point is that users like features.
For #2, you're incorrect about what compilers are doing these days, at least given your specific example. They specifically are, in fact, looking for opportunities to run code in parallel that is currently written in a sequential fashion.
For #3, the advantage to be gained from doubling the frame rate is relatively small. Most games can run at 60+ fps at good resolutions these days, with things like 8xAA etc all turned on. The marginal improvements in user experience from doubling the frame rate are worthless compared with the development effort required to actually achieve that without sacrificing quality. Again, users like features, and in most cases developers are going to be much better off adding more features before pursuing a comparatively useless bump in the frame rate.
You can't do that on today's hardware because of a couple of reasons:
1) the algorithms that are efficient are now well known, and taught at the university level. This means there is less room for improvement.
2) compilers are really good now. So you can't squeeze much out of careful assembly. In fact, there are only a handful of people in the world who can output better machine code than a modern compiler, and only with many hours of investment. So again, there is a lot less room for improvement.
3) the hardware capabilities are too good. With the 2600, you could have only 4 colors on screen. But then people found tricks to get 6 colors, and that was a 50% improvement. Today you can have more colors than the human eye can discern. No trick you can come up with can make any improvement.
That's really an urban legend. Most software today is well optimized. It just does much, much more than software did in the past. It uses more memory because many algorithms are trading memory for cpu because memory is cheaper, or memory for disk access because disk accesses didn't keep up with the pace of advancement in cpu and memory (by a couple of orders of magnitude over the last couple of decades).
That is a lot of kw/h. Over a million kwh in the winter months? You run a million dollars worth of power through an apartment per year? I'm impressed the lines hold up.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm doing the opposite of semantics ... the problem is actually with the semantic definition in my opinion.
I don't believe that's true. There's widespread evidence that beyond a certain basis covering the necessities, that additional consumer indulgence actually generates a net negative experience.
There's lots of psychological literature on this phenomenon.
Meh, I reread my post and I think it was clear enough that my quibble with altruism was not with the definition but rather with its nature.
If you choose to do something altruistically, why do you do so? Is there nothing to your choice, are you a simple automaton? Is it an act of pure randomness? Or is it because it makes you sad to do so? Because it's the 'right' thing to do? (reinforcing yourself for right action).
The remaining choice would be that it makes you feel good to do so, in which case the altruism is gone.
My point is that altruism doesn't exist in reality, not that the definition is incorrect. All actual instances of something labeled 'altruism' are in fact examples of the positive feedback mechanism of fundamental psychology. There are only two things that shape all behavior: genes and environment. All behavior comes from those two sources. 'Altruism' exists because it gets reinforced, either in genetics or by the environment.
I don't care at all for what Rand felt or thought, she had crazy ideas. But the notion that altruism is just a form of selfishness is straight out of fundamental psychology. Why does any organism engage in any behavior: either shaping by genetics or shaping by environment. Either way, it's the reward based feedback system that creates altruism.
In most cases, homeless people are not rational thinkers at all. Most homeless people have serious mental illness problems. It's just not hard to acquire housing (at least in this country) if you're mentally whole.
And if they were at all rational, they'd probably realize that the rape and slaughter strategy is not their best option. Grand theft will get them food and shelter for life without the risk of lethal injection or the moral quandaries of rape and murder.
You don't want to fail to pay taxes when self employed. The IRS scrutinizes you much more closely.
Altruism is always a disguised form of selfishness. Even anonymous donors donate because it makes them feel good.
Maybe. Does the free release of my work gain me notoriety that helps me to make future sales? We're not all short term minimalist thinkers.
And besides, both food and housing are guaranteed to all US citizens.*
* Some restrictions may apply, see county jail for details.
I don't know what office you're looking at ... back in 94 we had low resolution, non wysiwyg, simple documents. Today it's multimedia presentations, web browsing, streaming media, etc.
Even if all you do is write word documents, the tools available to do that have gotten much better, and really, if that is all you do, I think the experience is actually significantly faster today than it was then. I can remember doing spell checks back then that took wall clock time to complete. Today you can spell check a 3k page document in an instant, or you don't even have to because that's all done in the background, and auto correct took care of your errors or highlighted them for you to fix in the first place so that you don't have them to fix. Heck, back then you probably didn't have a storage media capable of storing a formatted 3k page document.
In short ... I attribute your experience to a lack of awareness of just how much things have improved ... perhaps the changes have been too gradual over the years for you to notice, but they are quite radically different today than they were back then.
I don't understand ... user interaction on the desktop uses typically 1% of a modern cpu.
Virus scans are getting to be more cpu bound if you have an SSD.
Well, without the slowness of windows, we wouldn't need faster computers, so there'd be nothing driving innovation.
By interesting I simply meant cpu intensive. Nearly everything on the desktop can parallelize too:
Speech recognition ...
Virus scans
Anything graphics/video
Builds
What do you do on the desktop that uses a lot of cpu that you think can't parallelize well?
Funniest post in the topic. (But i already posted so I can't moderate you).
Algorithms won over brute force a long time ago. We're using brute force on the good algorithms!
Seriously, there are very few big CPU tasks that have not had a LOT of smart people look at the algorithms. The idea that we'll suddenly take a big leap in algorithmic efficiency when Moore's law ends is laughable.
Parallel is a decently magic bullet. The number of interesting computing tasks I've seen that cannot be partitioned into parallel tasks has been quite small. That's why 100% of the top 500 supercomputers are parallel devices.
Nope, it's a law:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/law (definition #1 even!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law
Please people, stop making yourselves look foolish claiming Moore's Law isn't a law. This comes up every time!
#1 is just plain wrong, and misses my point entirely to boot.
#2 is true. There are certainly things you can do that the compiler can not beat into submission. But the examples given so far do not reflect anything close to what I would have described as 'bloat', and in any case rarely go unaddressed in most end-user software from any medium sized & up company.
#3 is not true. It's a false trade-off. Those features are not dependent in performance.
I meant memory is cheaper than CPU in the algorithmic sense. E.g. trade a GB of memory to convert an O(n^2) algorithm to O(n ln n). A make your computation take seconds instead of days type of trade-off.
For #1, the opportunities for large gains are almost always at the algorithmic and not the design level. Credit card fraud detection is so far up the coding food chain that you're almost certainly barking up the wrong tree if what you want is performance / memory compactness improvement. If your concern is that fraud detection is too much feature creep, well, that's what I'd say is using up our resources, so we're in agreement there, but my point is that users like features.
For #2, you're incorrect about what compilers are doing these days, at least given your specific example. They specifically are, in fact, looking for opportunities to run code in parallel that is currently written in a sequential fashion.
For #3, the advantage to be gained from doubling the frame rate is relatively small. Most games can run at 60+ fps at good resolutions these days, with things like 8xAA etc all turned on. The marginal improvements in user experience from doubling the frame rate are worthless compared with the development effort required to actually achieve that without sacrificing quality. Again, users like features, and in most cases developers are going to be much better off adding more features before pursuing a comparatively useless bump in the frame rate.
You can't do that on today's hardware because of a couple of reasons:
1) the algorithms that are efficient are now well known, and taught at the university level. This means there is less room for improvement.
2) compilers are really good now. So you can't squeeze much out of careful assembly. In fact, there are only a handful of people in the world who can output better machine code than a modern compiler, and only with many hours of investment. So again, there is a lot less room for improvement.
3) the hardware capabilities are too good. With the 2600, you could have only 4 colors on screen. But then people found tricks to get 6 colors, and that was a 50% improvement. Today you can have more colors than the human eye can discern. No trick you can come up with can make any improvement.
That's really an urban legend. Most software today is well optimized. It just does much, much more than software did in the past. It uses more memory because many algorithms are trading memory for cpu because memory is cheaper, or memory for disk access because disk accesses didn't keep up with the pace of advancement in cpu and memory (by a couple of orders of magnitude over the last couple of decades).
I'm pretty sure my bill comes in kwh, not kw/h. And that was the point of my joke.
You're right ... I should have said about 720 million dollars. I made a joke about units and got the units wrong. :-(
That is a lot of kw/h. Over a million kwh in the winter months? You run a million dollars worth of power through an apartment per year? I'm impressed the lines hold up.