I'm more worried about a proliforation of Donglegates. Everyone constantly being videoed in case they say somthing racist, sexist, anti-semitic, or transphobic. Everyone watching what they say all the time in case they get recorded and then fired from their job, or arrested if they live in the UK or Australia
My original point was that supercomputers do things that MapReduce architectures are not designed to do. I'm not sure how half of what you just wrote relates to that point. You seem to be saying that computers are so fast now that we only need one machine. In that case, MapReduce vs supercomputers is irrelevant anyway. Instead of putting what I'm saying in some "context" that is completely irrelevant, why don't you try to understand the original point: MapReduce is not designed for tight coupling. You use MPI or related technologies for that.
You say that finite element has MapReduce implementations. I googled finite element hadoop and the first result was "What is Hadoop not good for". Why don't you link to the map reduce implementation of finite element instead of being so insufferably smug.
You might also try googling linpack hadoop. The first result explains why there is no Hadoop implementation of linpack.
No need to be so rude. I happen to have worked with Hadoop like architectures so I know what I'm talking about. The site says
This algorithm was developed as an exercise while the author was learning MapReduce.
It doesn't give any big O running time bounds. Even if the algorithm could achieve the standard big O bounds for matrix multiplication, the overhead for Hadoop is still much higher than the overhead for cpu's in a supercomputer to talk to each other.
The MapReduce framework cannot do every possible algorithm efficiently. It can only do a certain subset of problems. Supercomputers are deigned for problems that require "tightly coupling" between processors. A typical problem is multiplying two large matrices together. MapReduce cannot do this kind of problem efficiently.
I don't know if this is AC's point, but the fact that we need more efficience across the board, does not imply that everything needs to be done more efficiently.
E.g. the money that an NGO or a company looking to become "green" spends on making its data centres more efficient, might be better spent making its transportation more efficient, etc.
Until we have a global carbon tax, advocacy should focus on finding the "easy" efficiency gains, or conversely, companies or sectors performing less efficiently than is known to be technically possible.
Simply saying "everything must be made more efficient" is wrong, and inefficient.
Yes there will have to be sacrifices, but it's for the greater good. We can get back to principles like proportionate punishment once the evil of spam is thoroughly purged.
It is relevant because Google is doing this for a reason, and there are really only two possible ones. First, it is a free gift to the Open Source community. That would be very nice but that's not how this decision would be interpreted by most people. Second, it is Google's attempt to ameliorate the impact of some of the unfair aspects of patents system, on open source developers. In that case, my claim that this measure is irrelevant to the real issues, because it doesn't address the root cause, is correct. Perhaps "insufficient" would have been a better term than "irrelevant". Now you might still object that it's not on topic to post that a measure that is proposed is not a sufficient solution to the greater problem that it aims to solve, but I think that that is a rather petty objection.
As to eliminating obvious patents, the question is how specifically to do this. The law does indeed disallow obvious patents. However, obvious is an ambiguous term, and wherever there is any room for interpretation, there is room for gross error as is happening now. So until you or anyone else can get a sensible plan to get the patent office to "do their job", my proposal to eliminate software patents still stands as a reasonable alternative.
Or let me put it this way: what software patents can you name that really did deserve to be granted and were not obvious, and how valuable have they been (relative to the previous existing technologies). Now compare that with the damage done by the threat of being sued over obvious patents.
It's great for open source people to be free from the threat of being sued over patents, but the real problem is obvious patents.
If Google owns any patents that are obvious, (and if they don't, other companies certainly do) then giving a free pass to open source doesn't do much to ameliorate the problem. Many people like to earn money. Even people who contribute to open source are often partly motivated by getting paid jobs as a result of their efforts. Given this, it is still a problem that smaller companies who sell closed source software or hardware based on closed source software, are still under threat from obvious patents.
The only sensible solution is to get rid of obvious patents. One way to do this is to eliminate software patents (i.e. the de facto software patents that exist today). Sure it would mean that some truly original work was no longer protected, but I think on balance it's the right way to go.
In comparison, how fair would it be if a law let some lucky restaurants close down all nearby competition, but then those few remaining restaurants showed their magnanimity by permitting people to give away free food to the homeless if the felt like it.
Green solutions. Advanced power management features, and automatic tracking of each thread's carbon footprint. An console allows users to see the carbon footprint of each thread in real time.
Social networking. Users can share jar files on social networks, and like their friends jar files.
Cloud computing. Java 8 will be the first VM built for the cloud.
The comments section is not meant to advertise your blog. And every time you say "go read my blog" I will say "go take a graduate macro course" like I've taken. Once you've taken a graduate level macro class, then I'll read your blog.
Either the acquisition is something that could easily be replicated in 3 weeks by their engineers, or it is a breakthrough that will revolutionize the way AI has been done for the last 40 years. Nothing in between.
Of course you do, everyone prefers to get paid more rather than less, and the less people trained to do your job, the more you will get paid. This is not the government's problem, however. The government should neither try to artificially increase supply, nor decrease supply, of people trained for any kind of job. In practice this would involve making people aware of the opportunities available in all lines of work, in an even handed manner, and providing whatever courses the students wanted.
Where the money comes from and what you spend it on are orthogonal decisions, and each should be made on its own merits. They are logically orthogonal decisions because once you have 2 billion dollars, you can decide to spend it on whatever makes the most sense.
Generally speaking, funding alternative energy is absolutely necessary, but the devil is in the details. Government money spent right could achieve much more benefit than private sector spending, or it might be wasted, depending on exactly how it is allocated.
As to taking revenue from oil or gas, it's not even clear from the article whether the revenue will represent a new kind of tax, or existing revenue will be used. In a new tax, it's not clear what the benefits of this would be.
Kill people just because you can is not a healthy attitude. Neither is making it easy for others to do it on a whim.
Having weapons is not the same as killing people just because you can. People can own weapons but only intend to kill when it is lawful to do so. The reasons why individuals should be allowed to have weapons have been discussed in detail in the context of the second amendment.
We should not have to make everything you should not do illegal.
On the other hand, laws should generally reflect what is right and wrong. The second amendment exists because people believed that an individual has a right to own a firearm, and therefore what Cody Wilson is doing is also not immoral. If you think that what he is doing is immoral, can you explain why the second amendment should exist?
So the question is how, short of making it illegal, do we stop cretins like this who think they have the right to do this sort of unhealthy social engineering?
Well you can try to argue to him your reasons why individuals shouldn't have weapons. Short of this, it seems strange to me that you think its possible to stop people doing what is their legal right, aside from giving them arguments as to why it's not their moral right to do so.
If you don't like the "state" you live under then move or change it. It's okay to think subversive thoughts but there are lines.
But there is nothing subversive about encouraging people to do something perfectly legal. If you think this is the case, perhaps you are the one living in the wrong country.
Each time you use the word G**k, you validate the society prejudices that lead to violence against certain groups, especially minors, including violent sexual assault such as wedgies.
People who have experienced this violent sexual assault often re-experience their trauma when they are exposed to this kind of language, and the stereotypes you have used that promote anti G**k prejudice.
Your prejudice is so extreme that instead of objecting to the content of the talk itself, you are just as concerned with "discussing sex with a room full of geeks".
Attributing sexism in a community to the presence of G**k's is no more acceptable that attributing sexism in rap music to the presence of Black people.
I would guess that it relates to a certain way of thinking about the world, where everything an individual does on their own is a criminal matter, and everything a person does for a company is a civil matter.
It probably also relates to the "just doing my job" mentality where something becomes less morally objectionable merely because you're doing it as part of a job.
It's normal for many people to write on the same topic. Carmack's article is very well written and discusses very different technical approaches to latency than the article you linked. Of the two, I found Carmack's article more useful because it covered a lot more ground, and focussed more on the high level issues than on the implementation details.
Oracle's stock price has dropped $.49 for the week or.018 percent. Google stock price has dropped $10.45 for the week or.017 percent. So the court decision’s have not a major impact of their stock values.
Did Oracle also have a copyright on the ConvertToPercent function?
I don't understand the question's you are asking me, or how they are relevant to the matter at hand. I'm not arguing about who is right or wrong, or who is doing real science and who is doing fake science. I am arguing that the implication of the article, namely that a huge amount of money, and hence political power, is being used, is wrong, because the money being spent arguing against climate change is a drop in the ocean compared with the other side.
I agree that it's not ideal to compare money spent on lobbying with money spent on research, but most of your complaints are along the lines of "money spent on bad stuff can't be compared with money spent on good stuff", which is not the issue at hand.
No I didn't say that. But since the think tanks that are being funded by the $120 million, are arguing against a lot of mainstream research, it makes sense to compare the two. I don't have any figure for how much funding pro-global warming think tanks and lobbies recieve.
As to the incentives, if 1% of scientists are denialists and they are getting 1/130'th of the money, then no, there is not proportionally more money going to them.
The article claims 120 million between 2002 and 2010 was funneled toward climate denial. During that time the US Federal Government spent around 2 billion a year on climate science.
That is, the Federal Governemnt was spending about 130 times as much money on research alone, than these groups.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm more worried about a proliforation of Donglegates. Everyone constantly being videoed in case they say somthing racist, sexist, anti-semitic, or transphobic. Everyone watching what they say all the time in case they get recorded and then fired from their job, or arrested if they live in the UK or Australia
My original point was that supercomputers do things that MapReduce architectures are not designed to do. I'm not sure how half of what you just wrote relates to that point. You seem to be saying that computers are so fast now that we only need one machine. In that case, MapReduce vs supercomputers is irrelevant anyway. Instead of putting what I'm saying in some "context" that is completely irrelevant, why don't you try to understand the original point: MapReduce is not designed for tight coupling. You use MPI or related technologies for that.
You say that finite element has MapReduce implementations. I googled finite element hadoop and the first result was "What is Hadoop not good for". Why don't you link to the map reduce implementation of finite element instead of being so insufferably smug.
You might also try googling linpack hadoop. The first result explains why there is no Hadoop implementation of linpack.
No need to be so rude. I happen to have worked with Hadoop like architectures so I know what I'm talking about. The site says
It doesn't give any big O running time bounds. Even if the algorithm could achieve the standard big O bounds for matrix multiplication, the overhead for Hadoop is still much higher than the overhead for cpu's in a supercomputer to talk to each other.
These systems do different things.
The MapReduce framework cannot do every possible algorithm efficiently. It can only do a certain subset of problems. Supercomputers are deigned for problems that require "tightly coupling" between processors. A typical problem is multiplying two large matrices together. MapReduce cannot do this kind of problem efficiently.
I don't know if this is AC's point, but the fact that we need more efficience across the board, does not imply that everything needs to be done more efficiently.
E.g. the money that an NGO or a company looking to become "green" spends on making its data centres more efficient, might be better spent making its transportation more efficient, etc.
Until we have a global carbon tax, advocacy should focus on finding the "easy" efficiency gains, or conversely, companies or sectors performing less efficiently than is known to be technically possible.
Simply saying "everything must be made more efficient" is wrong, and inefficient.
Yes there will have to be sacrifices, but it's for the greater good. We can get back to principles like proportionate punishment once the evil of spam is thoroughly purged.
It is relevant because Google is doing this for a reason, and there are really only two possible ones. First, it is a free gift to the Open Source community. That would be very nice but that's not how this decision would be interpreted by most people. Second, it is Google's attempt to ameliorate the impact of some of the unfair aspects of patents system, on open source developers. In that case, my claim that this measure is irrelevant to the real issues, because it doesn't address the root cause, is correct. Perhaps "insufficient" would have been a better term than "irrelevant". Now you might still object that it's not on topic to post that a measure that is proposed is not a sufficient solution to the greater problem that it aims to solve, but I think that that is a rather petty objection.
As to eliminating obvious patents, the question is how specifically to do this. The law does indeed disallow obvious patents. However, obvious is an ambiguous term, and wherever there is any room for interpretation, there is room for gross error as is happening now. So until you or anyone else can get a sensible plan to get the patent office to "do their job", my proposal to eliminate software patents still stands as a reasonable alternative.
Or let me put it this way: what software patents can you name that really did deserve to be granted and were not obvious, and how valuable have they been (relative to the previous existing technologies). Now compare that with the damage done by the threat of being sued over obvious patents.
If Google owns any patents that are obvious, (and if they don't, other companies certainly do) then giving a free pass to open source doesn't do much to ameliorate the problem. Many people like to earn money. Even people who contribute to open source are often partly motivated by getting paid jobs as a result of their efforts. Given this, it is still a problem that smaller companies who sell closed source software or hardware based on closed source software, are still under threat from obvious patents.
The only sensible solution is to get rid of obvious patents. One way to do this is to eliminate software patents (i.e. the de facto software patents that exist today). Sure it would mean that some truly original work was no longer protected, but I think on balance it's the right way to go.
In comparison, how fair would it be if a law let some lucky restaurants close down all nearby competition, but then those few remaining restaurants showed their magnanimity by permitting people to give away free food to the homeless if the felt like it.
It's ok, he's working for a company so it's a civil matter at worst.
Highlights of Java 8 include
Green solutions. Advanced power management features, and automatic tracking of each thread's carbon footprint. An console allows users to see the carbon footprint of each thread in real time.
Social networking. Users can share jar files on social networks, and like their friends jar files.
Cloud computing. Java 8 will be the first VM built for the cloud.
The comments section is not meant to advertise your blog. And every time you say "go read my blog" I will say "go take a graduate macro course" like I've taken. Once you've taken a graduate level macro class, then I'll read your blog.
Beautiful false dichotomy there.
Either the acquisition is something that could easily be replicated in 3 weeks by their engineers, or it is a breakthrough that will revolutionize the way AI has been done for the last 40 years. Nothing in between.
Of course you do, everyone prefers to get paid more rather than less, and the less people trained to do your job, the more you will get paid. This is not the government's problem, however. The government should neither try to artificially increase supply, nor decrease supply, of people trained for any kind of job. In practice this would involve making people aware of the opportunities available in all lines of work, in an even handed manner, and providing whatever courses the students wanted.
http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3thnsv/
Where the money comes from and what you spend it on are orthogonal decisions, and each should be made on its own merits. They are logically orthogonal decisions because once you have 2 billion dollars, you can decide to spend it on whatever makes the most sense.
Generally speaking, funding alternative energy is absolutely necessary, but the devil is in the details. Government money spent right could achieve much more benefit than private sector spending, or it might be wasted, depending on exactly how it is allocated.
As to taking revenue from oil or gas, it's not even clear from the article whether the revenue will represent a new kind of tax, or existing revenue will be used. In a new tax, it's not clear what the benefits of this would be.
Kill people just because you can is not a healthy attitude. Neither is making it easy for others to do it on a whim.
Having weapons is not the same as killing people just because you can. People can own weapons but only intend to kill when it is lawful to do so. The reasons why individuals should be allowed to have weapons have been discussed in detail in the context of the second amendment.
We should not have to make everything you should not do illegal.
On the other hand, laws should generally reflect what is right and wrong. The second amendment exists because people believed that an individual has a right to own a firearm, and therefore what Cody Wilson is doing is also not immoral. If you think that what he is doing is immoral, can you explain why the second amendment should exist?
So the question is how, short of making it illegal, do we stop cretins like this who think they have the right to do this sort of unhealthy social engineering?
Well you can try to argue to him your reasons why individuals shouldn't have weapons. Short of this, it seems strange to me that you think its possible to stop people doing what is their legal right, aside from giving them arguments as to why it's not their moral right to do so.
If you don't like the "state" you live under then move or change it. It's okay to think subversive thoughts but there are lines.
But there is nothing subversive about encouraging people to do something perfectly legal. If you think this is the case, perhaps you are the one living in the wrong country.
It's like those poor fools attribute the rise of the company from nothing to him, and not just it's recent decline.
Each time you use the word G**k, you validate the society prejudices that lead to violence against certain groups, especially minors, including violent sexual assault such as wedgies.
People who have experienced this violent sexual assault often re-experience their trauma when they are exposed to this kind of language, and the stereotypes you have used that promote anti G**k prejudice.
Your prejudice is so extreme that instead of objecting to the content of the talk itself, you are just as concerned with "discussing sex with a room full of geeks".
Attributing sexism in a community to the presence of G**k's is no more acceptable that attributing sexism in rap music to the presence of Black people.
I would guess that it relates to a certain way of thinking about the world, where everything an individual does on their own is a criminal matter, and everything a person does for a company is a civil matter.
It probably also relates to the "just doing my job" mentality where something becomes less morally objectionable merely because you're doing it as part of a job.
Funnily enough, that's exactly one of the methods the article discusses, except there are some details you hav glossed over that he fills in.
It's normal for many people to write on the same topic. Carmack's article is very well written and discusses very different technical approaches to latency than the article you linked. Of the two, I found Carmack's article more useful because it covered a lot more ground, and focussed more on the high level issues than on the implementation details.
Did Oracle also have a copyright on the ConvertToPercent function?
I don't understand the question's you are asking me, or how they are relevant to the matter at hand. I'm not arguing about who is right or wrong, or who is doing real science and who is doing fake science. I am arguing that the implication of the article, namely that a huge amount of money, and hence political power, is being used, is wrong, because the money being spent arguing against climate change is a drop in the ocean compared with the other side.
I agree that it's not ideal to compare money spent on lobbying with money spent on research, but most of your complaints are along the lines of "money spent on bad stuff can't be compared with money spent on good stuff", which is not the issue at hand.
No I didn't say that. But since the think tanks that are being funded by the $120 million, are arguing against a lot of mainstream research, it makes sense to compare the two. I don't have any figure for how much funding pro-global warming think tanks and lobbies recieve.
As to the incentives, if 1% of scientists are denialists and they are getting 1/130'th of the money, then no, there is not proportionally more money going to them.
To follow up with some facts:
The article claims 120 million between 2002 and 2010 was funneled toward climate denial. During that time the US Federal Government spent around 2 billion a year on climate science.
That is, the Federal Governemnt was spending about 130 times as much money on research alone, than these groups.