Ugh, why is it that developers think they're so superior when they utter such nonsense as "If a programmer is so incompetent he can't get leap seconds right, I shudder to think what else he did wrong." It makes me more likely to think the person who writes this has never written actual code in a real, production system when you have things like actual deadlines to worry about.
It's not that a good programmer couldn't get leap seconds "right", it's that it's very easy to imagine a case where the non-congruity of timing calls introduced by leap seconds could be overlooked. In a complicated program where there are literally millions of things that can go wrong, not thinking foremost about leap seconds should be expected.
I totally disagree. While of course this happens to some extent, and while in general Slashdot has some pretty common points-of-view (FOSS supporters, generally libertarian leaning, etc.), the level of groupthink and mob rule is many orders of magnitude less on slashdot than on digg. While part of this may be due to the audience, I think the biggest factor is the moderation system. There is no "agree" or "disagree" moderation on slashdot. There are certainly many times I've moderated stuff as interesting or insightful even if I didn't necessarily agree with the sentiment of the poster.
On digg, it's all up or down. You'll frequently see comments like "**** Republicans!" rated very highly. Whether or not you agree with Republican political views, putting four asterisks before their party name adds nothing to the discussion. You rarely, if ever, see a comment like that rated highly on slashdot, unless there's something sarcastic behind it. Of course, now you'll probably see lots of comments like that as responses rated highly:-P
My guess is that there's not much that can be done to combat this given that game development is such a highly competitive industry. I bet you'd find a similar atmosphere in Hollywood - the millions of wannabee actors and actresses that move to LA all dream of being the next Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn.
Similarly, all those game developers dream of building the next Warcraft, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn sites.
The fact that this was modded insightful is even more proof of why most tech people should never run a business. "Oh, the majority of users on the internet can't use your site? Tell 'em it's their problem."
Be careful what you do with statistics. My guess is that New York City's rate is only slightly lower because, in addition to having a lot of walkers, it has a lot of poor people. For example, Manhattan has a much lower obesity rate, and while I could state that this is because Manhattan is the most easily walkable of all the boroughs, it's much more likely that it's because Manhattan has the most rich people.
Summary is wrong - btrees != binary trees
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 3, Informative
The summary is wrong when it talks about "an off by ten error in btrees". In fact, the article talks about how normal binary heap implementations are slow when virtual memory is taken into account.
In fact, b-trees ARE cache aware and ARE optimized to limit paging on disk. PHK's algorithm is essentially a cache-aware version of a binary heap.
That is, binary tree is to b-tree as binary heap is to PHK's b-heap.
Mod parent up. There was a comment on the article that referenced cache oblivious algorithms, which was a new concept to me and very interesting. Basically, this set of algorithms assumes a memory hierarchy (e.g. fast ram vs slow disk) that is optimized to limit the number of times the slower memory is accessed. Importantly, cache oblivious algorithms are optimal REGARDLESS of the size of the cache. That's opposed to a cache aware algorithm, like a normal b-tree, where the size of each node is set according to the page size of the machine.
In truth, identifying bubbles is actually remarkably easy. Famed investor Jeremy Grantham defines a bubble as a "3-sigma" event - that is, times when some fundamental ratio of value (such as P/E ratios, price-to-income ratios for housing affordability, price-to-rent ratios, etc.) - is more that 3 standard deviations above the mean for that ratio. Importantly, he showed that of 30-some odd historical bubbles, they ALWAYS popped, ALWAYS giving up more than 100% of the gains during the bubble period.
What is difficult, though, is trying to figure out WHEN a bubble will pop. The Nasdaq was far overvalued in mid 99 - that still didn't prevent it from DOUBLING in early 2000 before it burst.
Grantham also makes a good case as to why bubbles form. Tons of people in the financial world saw that risk was being underpriced in 2006/07. However, what would have happened if a CEO of a major bank would have said back in late 2005 / early 2006 "This is crazy, we're not going be backing these loans given to anyone who can fog a mirror"? That bank would have seriously underperformed its peers for the next two years, and that CEO would have been ousted long before his prudence would have been proven correct.
Interoperability Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
Basiacally, google is essentially building on what has become an industry standard for cloud storage.
This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.
Mod parent up. When I originally read the article about Diaspora in the NYT, all I could think was "hey, cool idea, but this is BEYOND vaporware." I worry that with all the press it's getting, if it comes out and totally sucks (which is more likely than not), it will just strengthen Facebook's position.
I'm sure UVA will resist the subpoena, but as a UVA grad, shit like this is going to KILL the university. Please tell me what self-respecting scientist would want to work there now?
Politics in Virginia is always a battle between liberal northern VA, which has had huge growth in recent years and is very socially tolerant due to large numbers of highly educated immigrants, and the more rural rest of the state. The one thing I'm hopeful about is that this will royally piss off tons of northern VA voters because they will see it as lowering the quality of UVA, which is seen as a great value as one of the best public universities in the US.
No, that's not what either timholman or my post said. As a personal example, my partner is an interventional radiologist and the chief of radiology at one of the major hospitals in Austin TX. My sister is an OB/GYN. Both of them are very smart and do things every day that are leaps and bounds beyond what I am, or could be, capable of.
That said, a general purpose computer is NOT the right tool for either of them. It's not that they are too stupid. Quite the opposite, it's that they have better things to do than worry about malware and driver incompatibilities, etc. etc. While I don't necessarily think an IPad would be good for them now, once Apple figures out a better keyboard setup to work with the IPad, it probably would be.
Kudos to timholman and the mods. This post is a great (though perhaps rare) example of what I love about slashdot - a post that actually got me to change my opinion.
While I've been bemoaning the locked down nature of where Apple is going, I think for the majority of internet users this is exactly what they need.
The other issue would simply be starting a "employee grab" war. You think Google couldn't try the same thing with Microsoft's employees? The only end result would be both companies would be paying more for employees, with a stalemate as far as talent goes.
Well, that's the whole point on why the agreement to not poach employees is illegal. This is price fixing, plain and simple, except that instead of colluding to raise the price of a product they sell, the companies are colluding to artificially keep the cost of employee salaries lower than they should be.
I'm confused - regardless of its merits, how is this an argument AGAINST the iPad?
I see the iPad as a divergence from a laptop - you can do all the things and more that you can do on an iPad on a laptop. In fact, that's why I think it will fail. Coming from someone who loves Apple products, I don't see any reason to get an iPad if I've got a MacBookPro. People say it's a great eReader, but without eInk (or any other kind of reflective as opposed to emissive display), I think most hardcore book readers will disagree.
Besides all the other obvious problems with this idea, the author seems to assume that DNA profiles are unique. While duplicates ARE exceedingly rare, the birthday paradox ensures that you DO get lots of false positive matches if everyone in the US is indexed. Juries already assume DNA matches are 100%, and since there is no chance they understand statistics, they are going to put a lot of innocent people in jail if a scheme like this goes through.
Seriously, the PC market seemed to do just fine for decades without an official "app store". Why can't I just download an app from any vendor's site without having to go through some gatekeeper (who keeps 30% of the revenue). I'm a huge IPhone fan, but has Apple brainwashed us so much that we need an official app store that we forgot that it's not really necessary in the first place?
If you read the settlement carefully, it says that 1/3 of the settlement goes to the lawyers. Our legal system is such a fucking scam.
Over the past decade I've been a member of the class in about 10 class action lawsuits. The majority of the time I don't even bother to collect - filling out the paperwork isn't worth it to get a 5 dollar coupon. I guess I've sure made a lot of lawyers rich, though.
Except often times in technology and business, timing is everything. Back in 1995 there was no way the "browser is the OS" model could work, for lots of reasons, the most obvious being that almost all consumers were on dialup. Now it's the norm to have always-on broadband.
Paypal has owned the x.com domain since before they were paypal (check wikipedia), so while x.com probably wasn't super cheap back in 1999, it's not like they just purchased it.
This weekend I moved, and I always have a hard time throwing out old stuff. You know, an old palm pilot I haven't used in years, CRT monitors, close I don't wear anymore (or never really wore much in the first place), etc. I just feel guilty dumping stuff when there's nothing really wrong with it.
Then I though about how we spent tens of billions on the space station, only to throw it away a couple of years after it was finished, so subsequently I felt fine about throwing 3/4 of my closet in the dumpster.
If you look at a lot of the astroturfing comments on the openinternet site, you'll see how ridiculously ignorant most of them are. A huge percentage of them are of the form "keep the government from taking over the internet!", which makes about as much sense as "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
The Internet was FOUNDED by the US government, with most of the vital underlying technologies coming from ARPANET and NSFNET (though I should give credit to those European governments responsible for funding CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and the web). This nonsense about how the wonders of the free market and private enterprise created the Internet is a willful and gross rewriting of history.
Slashdot Mirror
Ugh, why is it that developers think they're so superior when they utter such nonsense as "If a programmer is so incompetent he can't get leap seconds right, I shudder to think what else he did wrong." It makes me more likely to think the person who writes this has never written actual code in a real, production system when you have things like actual deadlines to worry about.
It's not that a good programmer couldn't get leap seconds "right", it's that it's very easy to imagine a case where the non-congruity of timing calls introduced by leap seconds could be overlooked. In a complicated program where there are literally millions of things that can go wrong, not thinking foremost about leap seconds should be expected.
I totally disagree. While of course this happens to some extent, and while in general Slashdot has some pretty common points-of-view (FOSS supporters, generally libertarian leaning, etc.), the level of groupthink and mob rule is many orders of magnitude less on slashdot than on digg. While part of this may be due to the audience, I think the biggest factor is the moderation system. There is no "agree" or "disagree" moderation on slashdot. There are certainly many times I've moderated stuff as interesting or insightful even if I didn't necessarily agree with the sentiment of the poster.
On digg, it's all up or down. You'll frequently see comments like "**** Republicans!" rated very highly. Whether or not you agree with Republican political views, putting four asterisks before their party name adds nothing to the discussion. You rarely, if ever, see a comment like that rated highly on slashdot, unless there's something sarcastic behind it. Of course, now you'll probably see lots of comments like that as responses rated highly :-P
My guess is that there's not much that can be done to combat this given that game development is such a highly competitive industry. I bet you'd find a similar atmosphere in Hollywood - the millions of wannabee actors and actresses that move to LA all dream of being the next Julia Roberts or Tom Cruise, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn.
Similarly, all those game developers dream of building the next Warcraft, but the vast majority will end up bitter, dejected, and many will be making porn sites.
The fact that this was modded insightful is even more proof of why most tech people should never run a business. "Oh, the majority of users on the internet can't use your site? Tell 'em it's their problem."
Be careful what you do with statistics. My guess is that New York City's rate is only slightly lower because, in addition to having a lot of walkers, it has a lot of poor people. For example, Manhattan has a much lower obesity rate, and while I could state that this is because Manhattan is the most easily walkable of all the boroughs, it's much more likely that it's because Manhattan has the most rich people.
See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/nyregion/22fat.html for some good information
The summary is wrong when it talks about "an off by ten error in btrees". In fact, the article talks about how normal binary heap implementations are slow when virtual memory is taken into account.
In fact, b-trees ARE cache aware and ARE optimized to limit paging on disk. PHK's algorithm is essentially a cache-aware version of a binary heap.
That is, binary tree is to b-tree as binary heap is to PHK's b-heap.
Mod parent up. There was a comment on the article that referenced cache oblivious algorithms, which was a new concept to me and very interesting. Basically, this set of algorithms assumes a memory hierarchy (e.g. fast ram vs slow disk) that is optimized to limit the number of times the slower memory is accessed. Importantly, cache oblivious algorithms are optimal REGARDLESS of the size of the cache. That's opposed to a cache aware algorithm, like a normal b-tree, where the size of each node is set according to the page size of the machine.
A very helpful overview here from MIT Opencourseware: http://www.catonmat.net/blog/mit-introduction-to-algorithms-part-fourteen/
In truth, identifying bubbles is actually remarkably easy. Famed investor Jeremy Grantham defines a bubble as a "3-sigma" event - that is, times when some fundamental ratio of value (such as P/E ratios, price-to-income ratios for housing affordability, price-to-rent ratios, etc.) - is more that 3 standard deviations above the mean for that ratio. Importantly, he showed that of 30-some odd historical bubbles, they ALWAYS popped, ALWAYS giving up more than 100% of the gains during the bubble period.
What is difficult, though, is trying to figure out WHEN a bubble will pop. The Nasdaq was far overvalued in mid 99 - that still didn't prevent it from DOUBLING in early 2000 before it burst.
Grantham also makes a good case as to why bubbles form. Tons of people in the financial world saw that risk was being underpriced in 2006/07. However, what would have happened if a CEO of a major bank would have said back in late 2005 / early 2006 "This is crazy, we're not going be backing these loans given to anyone who can fog a mirror"? That bank would have seriously underperformed its peers for the next two years, and that CEO would have been ousted long before his prudence would have been proven correct.
Mod parent up. This is from the docs:
Interoperability
Google Storage is interoperable with a large number of cloud storage tools and libraries that work with services such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Eucalyptus Systems, Inc.
Basiacally, google is essentially building on what has become an industry standard for cloud storage.
This article submission is either from an idiot or a troll.
Mod parent up. When I originally read the article about Diaspora in the NYT, all I could think was "hey, cool idea, but this is BEYOND vaporware." I worry that with all the press it's getting, if it comes out and totally sucks (which is more likely than not), it will just strengthen Facebook's position.
I'm sure UVA will resist the subpoena, but as a UVA grad, shit like this is going to KILL the university. Please tell me what self-respecting scientist would want to work there now?
Politics in Virginia is always a battle between liberal northern VA, which has had huge growth in recent years and is very socially tolerant due to large numbers of highly educated immigrants, and the more rural rest of the state. The one thing I'm hopeful about is that this will royally piss off tons of northern VA voters because they will see it as lowering the quality of UVA, which is seen as a great value as one of the best public universities in the US.
No, that's not what either timholman or my post said. As a personal example, my partner is an interventional radiologist and the chief of radiology at one of the major hospitals in Austin TX. My sister is an OB/GYN. Both of them are very smart and do things every day that are leaps and bounds beyond what I am, or could be, capable of.
That said, a general purpose computer is NOT the right tool for either of them. It's not that they are too stupid. Quite the opposite, it's that they have better things to do than worry about malware and driver incompatibilities, etc. etc. While I don't necessarily think an IPad would be good for them now, once Apple figures out a better keyboard setup to work with the IPad, it probably would be.
Kudos to timholman and the mods. This post is a great (though perhaps rare) example of what I love about slashdot - a post that actually got me to change my opinion.
While I've been bemoaning the locked down nature of where Apple is going, I think for the majority of internet users this is exactly what they need.
What do you mean by "your browsers HTML editing feature"? It's not like browsers have a native "edit HTML" widget, AFAIK.
The other issue would simply be starting a "employee grab" war. You think Google couldn't try the same thing with Microsoft's employees? The only end result would be both companies would be paying more for employees, with a stalemate as far as talent goes.
Well, that's the whole point on why the agreement to not poach employees is illegal. This is price fixing, plain and simple, except that instead of colluding to raise the price of a product they sell, the companies are colluding to artificially keep the cost of employee salaries lower than they should be.
I'm confused - regardless of its merits, how is this an argument AGAINST the iPad?
I see the iPad as a divergence from a laptop - you can do all the things and more that you can do on an iPad on a laptop. In fact, that's why I think it will fail. Coming from someone who loves Apple products, I don't see any reason to get an iPad if I've got a MacBookPro. People say it's a great eReader, but without eInk (or any other kind of reflective as opposed to emissive display), I think most hardcore book readers will disagree.
Besides all the other obvious problems with this idea, the author seems to assume that DNA profiles are unique. While duplicates ARE exceedingly rare, the birthday paradox ensures that you DO get lots of false positive matches if everyone in the US is indexed. Juries already assume DNA matches are 100%, and since there is no chance they understand statistics, they are going to put a lot of innocent people in jail if a scheme like this goes through.
You pulled it out of your ass so you'd sound officious and get a post on /.
Officious - I do not think it means what you think it means.
Seriously, the PC market seemed to do just fine for decades without an official "app store". Why can't I just download an app from any vendor's site without having to go through some gatekeeper (who keeps 30% of the revenue). I'm a huge IPhone fan, but has Apple brainwashed us so much that we need an official app store that we forgot that it's not really necessary in the first place?
If you read the settlement carefully, it says that 1/3 of the settlement goes to the lawyers. Our legal system is such a fucking scam.
Over the past decade I've been a member of the class in about 10 class action lawsuits. The majority of the time I don't even bother to collect - filling out the paperwork isn't worth it to get a 5 dollar coupon. I guess I've sure made a lot of lawyers rich, though.
My smartphone already does this - it's called google translate, and was a huge boon while I was overseas last month.
Except often times in technology and business, timing is everything. Back in 1995 there was no way the "browser is the OS" model could work, for lots of reasons, the most obvious being that almost all consumers were on dialup. Now it's the norm to have always-on broadband.
Paypal has owned the x.com domain since before they were paypal (check wikipedia), so while x.com probably wasn't super cheap back in 1999, it's not like they just purchased it.
This weekend I moved, and I always have a hard time throwing out old stuff. You know, an old palm pilot I haven't used in years, CRT monitors, close I don't wear anymore (or never really wore much in the first place), etc. I just feel guilty dumping stuff when there's nothing really wrong with it.
Then I though about how we spent tens of billions on the space station, only to throw it away a couple of years after it was finished, so subsequently I felt fine about throwing 3/4 of my closet in the dumpster.
If you look at a lot of the astroturfing comments on the openinternet site, you'll see how ridiculously ignorant most of them are. A huge percentage of them are of the form "keep the government from taking over the internet!", which makes about as much sense as "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"
The Internet was FOUNDED by the US government, with most of the vital underlying technologies coming from ARPANET and NSFNET (though I should give credit to those European governments responsible for funding CERN, where Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP and the web). This nonsense about how the wonders of the free market and private enterprise created the Internet is a willful and gross rewriting of history.