If you are an avid/. reader, you might rememberthat some scientists tried shooting a laser at a cloud attempting to induce a lightning strike on Sept 24, 2004.
Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
Companies do this all the time. When the expected revenue doesn't meet the support costs plus the opportunity cost, it's better to eliminate the product than continue to support it. Just getting something functional is a business 101's definition of a "sunk-cost".
I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp
Interesting you picked those two. I was working at Inmos when CMU came up with the iWarp If the transputer were to be redone from scratch, it probably would have looked very similar to iWarp, but then I thought to myself, aren't people supposed to avoid these mistakes;^)
But I digress. Today Intel is betting on MIC instead of Itanium.
I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping.
AMD's Bulldozer is an example of partially virtualizing the cores (basically two threads share 2 cores) and it doesn't seem to be that great. I'm not so sure that it necessarily suggests that this strategy has much legs for problems that are solved in "big-iron" computers anymore than low latency access to high-latency serial async messaging in the TP or iW case. For some small class of problems it's a slam dunk, for the general case, not so much...
I agree with this sentiment. Legal wranglings seem to be mostly attempts to put potholes into the path of the competition to slow them down.
Unfortunatly, it's a bit like game theory going out of control. You have all these patents and a multi-party prisoner's dillema. If everyone agreed to not to assert patent infringment suits, everyone could do better, but why not be the one that defects and gains a temporary upper hand. If you study a multi-party iterated prisoner's dillemma, the perennial question is how to get optimal result when everyone's best strategy always seems to be to defect?
Why do we need 100% leaders? I've been in groups where everyone wanted to be the leader (and had some vague qualification claim for leadership). Let me tell you, that mix is a ticket for 100% politics and 0% action.
In reality, leadership is an emergent property of a group. Just because you can lean one group doesn't mean you should be the leader of another group. Many of the qualities of a leader are born, and others are a function of experience. The only preparation that we probably need to give our kids on leadership is the opportunity so if they are successful, they can build confidence on that. Many school teachers give these experiences to kids in small group to see how they do (e.g, let the group of students decide who is allowed to use saws, or if the hotdog is worth eating after it falls on the ground).
On the other hand, giving them the opportunity to saw off their hand will only give them experience leading the saw and having the teacher wiping off dirt from a hotdog will only give them the experience that that eating dirt won't kill them... Neither is a reasonable proxy for leadership...
I guess that type of woman would find happiness as an outsider in another country... This apparent person (you can never be too sure on the internet), is apparently an HR person, who in an other article entitled, "Were you a bully in high school? No job for you!" that led with the lines...
Allow me to be a bit personal here. In 8th grade I became the victim of choice for the popular kids at my school.
Now she writes an article about being gleeful that she's doing the "right" thing to raise her kid to be the "boss". I think she needs to look in the mirror and question her motives, her perspective, and her real goal... Maybe she should let her kid find his own path in life....
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
The video makes a oblique reference to the Canadian Alextel which was technically like its French minitel counterpart, but never really got off the ground and deemed destroyed by the internet by the '90's.
However, for a while Canadian RIM was quite a competitor with US companies with their proprietary email network. Now, not so much... Ironically, this company was probably also destroyed by the internet...
This whole thread is a sad reflection on Americans inability to see the bleeding obvious. Your post particularly has no grounding in reality at all, I must have missed where the occupiers caused fires that endanger life.
Not that my post suggested that occupiers caused fires that endangered lives, but only property damage (please re-read, if you care).
But since you brought that up, in fact many occupiers have started fires (seattle, denver, oakland, calgary, etc). A few of them did get procecuted (e.g., Michael Clapper in denver), but many of them have been given a "pass" by the police because of local political pressure (e.g, in oakland)...
I'm not sure which of us isn't grounded in reality here. I found those occupy fire starting instances in less than 10 seconds in google...
Ironically, I've found many computer science majors are not very versed in the ramification of statistics either. I think it has something to do with the binary world that they envisage or something like that.
The most common example is the "1-in-a-million" mentatlity many computer science majors have when talking about bugs or special-case code paths. You'd think they'd know better as they can often quote all sorts of statistical sort or database traversal, O(log n), big-o little-o, etc, but when you get them with a common sense thing about code performance issue, they appear to get some sort of temporary lobotomy.
But will a bunch of redneck yahoos ever be able to cover the amount of property damage typical wildfires cause?
It should be criminal charges, in any sane system. People's lives were put at risk by negligent practices.
But will a bunch of granola crunching anarchists ever be able to cover the amount of property damage a typical occupy protest causes? It should be criminal charges in any sane system. People's lives were put at risk by negligent practices.
However, since both practices are vaguely covered by some legal umbrella (first/second amendement issues), and the local politico-police complex doesn't want to prosecute (for fear of voter backlash), there won't be any criminal charges in either case. In the USA, until there is sufficient local outrage, generally nothing gets charged.
Do these sorts of "adults are computer illiterate" stories bother anyone else?
No, these stories don't bother me as I know many adults that although use computers daily, are practically illiterate about computers.
Still, I was a dot com millionaire, and that's got to count for something.
No, it doesn't have to count for anything. It is these types of stories about winning the lottery must mean I'm somehow superior than the average joe that bother me;^) I'm sure there are plenty of dot-com millionaires that didn't know much about the computers that ran the websites which made them accidentally rich.
I'm old enough to remember when "tech savy" was someone that could set the clock on a VCR. It's always been this way.
What's a VCR? (just kidding)... Every generation has their "tech savy" litmus test, it's always been this way, but today it's not setting a VCR clock. Maybe today it's setting a non-default password for your wireless router or something like that...
Russia is into building these things for billions of dollars. They have a heavily vested interest here.
You are making the tacit assumption of course that the russians aren't doing hacking themselves... Oh you said that big bad wolf ruined your last centrifuge, tell you what, I'll give you a 20% discount on new replacement centrifuges... Don't worry, I'll take care of you...
If billions of dollars are at stake, what's another billion in spare parts...;^)
As for why you have a suit - the challenger disaster revealed that the astronauts actually survived the explosions, only to die of hypoxia in the thin air. If you look at shuttle photos before and after, you'll see they used light jumpsuits prior to the disaster, and then wore the orange pressure suits (launch/reentry suits) afterwards.
Okay, so they somehow survive the explosion and are now up 65,000 feet with an orange pressure suit. Is that gonna change anything? There's wasn't survivable "ejection" system on the shuttle (they studied adding one, but concluded there was no feasible way to deploy it).
Wouldn't have helped Columbia (which broke up during reentry when the frictional heating was highest), as they're not made to handle extreme atsmosphere re-entry temperatures - just for cases of decompression.
There was no way that this scheme would have saved any of the Challenger folks either as there was no way for them to get to the hatch and jump out in free fall conditions. The PR solution was to put them in these pressure suits and if in the rare instance there was some small problem (e.g., early main engine cutoff) where the shuttle might be stabilized into a glide pattern after a launch abort, but didn't have enough glide distance to reach an emergency landing site, they could open the hatch and attempt to parachute to the ground rather than do nothing than watch the shuttle crash into the ground. Basically a TSA/govt approach to fixing a problem. Just do something to get the people off your back.
Of course going into space is a dangerous exercise as you are straping yourself to equipment just a hair above the experimental level. Looking good in cheap mass produced designer space suits isn't high on the list of priorities for anyone.
Although Yamamoto did spend some time at Harvard, he actually graduated from the Japanese naval academy. Ironically, having spent much time in the United States (he was later the Japanese naval attaché), he was firmly against attacking the US as he thought that Japan had no hope of winning a protracted war.
As to how the pearl harbor attack was so successful? Many attribute it be a copy of the battle of taranto (the first all-airplane attack launched from an air-craft carrier) where the UK destroyed some docked Italian battleships. My take is that Yamamoto copied the US war exercise where US Admiral Yarnell performed pretty much the exact same attack on Hawaii with pretty much the same result...
He didn't learn our weakesses in school, but by studying history. Based on Yamamoto's prewar pro-US stance as a function of his time here, I'd say let more folks like him in.
Educate their women, which can only happen when they have enough to eat..
If it were only so simple. This has less to do with food and more to do with culture. For example, in Afganistan today, people have enough to eat, yet girls are being poisoned in the schools to prevent them from being educated.
In several places in africa today (darfur, kifu, central africa, niger, chad, sudan, yemen, etc) political power struggles are basically forcing massive numbers of people to migrate like refugees. In this situation, there's no farming, no education, no stability at all. Sometimes it's just about survival.
Of course this is all based on the naive notion that the main purpose of food aid is to benefit those receiving the aid. That is merely a side effect, its real purpose is to consume market surpluses and enrich the producers of these commodities...
Emergency food aid is not about being cynical about consuming market surpluses. Local farmers aren't in competition to produce this. If you want to slam someone about who benefits from emergency food aid, slam nutriset (the french company that holds the patent on Plumpy, one of the leading emergency food items). You can also note that there is a big problem with some african nations accepting non emergency food aid from the US (european countries threatening to boycott agriculural exports if they accept any potentially GM seeds from the US on the chance that they won't eat the grain, but plant it and cross contaminate).
Disposal of market surplus is really a minor issue with food aid these days. In a era where we have countries importing large quantities of maize, wheat, rice and soya, and the increasing price of oil to create fertilizer and move the grain, giving such a small amount away to africa isn't on anyone's minds these days.
Hmm, I thought the rules of introducing star trek to people who have never seen it were
1. You do not talk about star trek 2. You do not talk about star trek 3. If someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the watching of star trek is over. 4. Only 2 star trek episodes at a viewing 5. One one viewing per day 6. Shirts and shoes REQUIRED! 7. The kvetching will go on as long as required. 8. If this is your first viewing of a star trek episode, you have to actually watch
In a gold rush, it's often better to be the one selling the shovels instead of the one buying shovels and digging for the gold...
So instead of a market of 100 space suits a year, there's maybe a total market of 5,000 (best case for the forseeable future, at that rate you'd be launching 100 people into space every week). If you expect at least a couple manufacturers competing, that's 2,500. I can tell you that probably doesn't even count as mass manufacturing for something like a space suit...
Compare this to a bullet proof vest. There are about 20,000 law-enforcement agencies in the US. Assuming only 1/10th of them would buy 1 bullet proof vest (a ridiculously small number). If this were the case, who would make a "cheap" bullet proof vest...
If the idea doesn't work and someone gets a patent on it, no-harm, no-foul, right? Nobody is going to infringe... If the idea does work and it has yet to be shown to work in a product, a large company might have an advantage, right?
Sometimes smart folks think alike. This is why companies usually want to start patent filings as early as possible, usually well before the idea can demonstrate actual advantages (e.g., usually as soon as partially functioning prototype or even half baked pseudo-code/flowchart suggests it can be refined into potential advantage). Then they stretch out the filing by adding refinements to their patent claims as the implementation gets fleshed out and patent goes through the review process.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are an avid /. reader, you might rememberthat some scientists tried shooting a laser at a cloud attempting to induce a lightning strike on Sept 24, 2004.
Apparently they all survived the experience... ;^)
Intel would be stupid to eliminate a product they've actually got functional.
Companies do this all the time. When the expected revenue doesn't meet the support costs plus the opportunity cost, it's better to eliminate the product than continue to support it. Just getting something functional is a business 101's definition of a "sunk-cost".
I far prefer many of the design decisions made in the Inmos Transputer and the Intel iWarp
Interesting you picked those two. I was working at Inmos when CMU came up with the iWarp If the transputer were to be redone from scratch, it probably would have looked very similar to iWarp, but then I thought to myself, aren't people supposed to avoid these mistakes ;^)
But I digress. Today Intel is betting on MIC instead of Itanium.
I'd also have threaded compute elements and produced virtual cores, rather than threaded instructions on physical cores, since threading the compute elements would allow you to distribute the heat better, wouldn't prevent you accessing elements that are wholly independent of those in use and would reduce unnecessary swapping.
AMD's Bulldozer is an example of partially virtualizing the cores (basically two threads share 2 cores) and it doesn't seem to be that great. I'm not so sure that it necessarily suggests that this strategy has much legs for problems that are solved in "big-iron" computers anymore than low latency access to high-latency serial async messaging in the TP or iW case. For some small class of problems it's a slam dunk, for the general case, not so much...
whoosh....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron
I agree with this sentiment. Legal wranglings seem to be mostly attempts to put potholes into the path of the competition to slow them down.
Unfortunatly, it's a bit like game theory going out of control. You have all these patents and a multi-party prisoner's dillema. If everyone agreed to not to assert patent infringment suits, everyone could do better, but why not be the one that defects and gains a temporary upper hand. If you study a multi-party iterated prisoner's dillemma, the perennial question is how to get optimal result when everyone's best strategy always seems to be to defect?
Why do we need 100% leaders? I've been in groups where everyone wanted to be the leader (and had some vague qualification claim for leadership). Let me tell you, that mix is a ticket for 100% politics and 0% action.
In reality, leadership is an emergent property of a group. Just because you can lean one group doesn't mean you should be the leader of another group. Many of the qualities of a leader are born, and others are a function of experience. The only preparation that we probably need to give our kids on leadership is the opportunity so if they are successful, they can build confidence on that. Many school teachers give these experiences to kids in small group to see how they do (e.g, let the group of students decide who is allowed to use saws, or if the hotdog is worth eating after it falls on the ground).
On the other hand, giving them the opportunity to saw off their hand will only give them experience leading the saw and having the teacher wiping off dirt from a hotdog will only give them the experience that that eating dirt won't kill them... Neither is a reasonable proxy for leadership...
self-flaggellating American woman...
I guess that type of woman would find happiness as an outsider in another country...
This apparent person (you can never be too sure on the internet), is apparently an HR person, who in an other article entitled, "Were you a bully in high school? No job for you!" that led with the lines...
Allow me to be a bit personal here. In 8th grade I became the victim of choice for the popular kids at my school.
Now she writes an article about being gleeful that she's doing the "right" thing to raise her kid to be the "boss". I think she needs to look in the mirror and question her motives, her perspective, and her real goal... Maybe she should let her kid find his own path in life....
Still, it's cute to think of the US and Canada as competing...
The video makes a oblique reference to the Canadian Alextel which was technically like its French minitel counterpart, but never really got off the ground and deemed destroyed by the internet by the '90's.
However, for a while Canadian RIM was quite a competitor with US companies with their proprietary email network. Now, not so much... Ironically, this company was probably also destroyed by the internet...
This whole thread is a sad reflection on Americans inability to see the bleeding obvious. Your post particularly has no grounding in reality at all, I must have missed where the occupiers caused fires that endanger life.
Not that my post suggested that occupiers caused fires that endangered lives, but only property damage (please re-read, if you care).
But since you brought that up, in fact many occupiers have started fires (seattle, denver, oakland, calgary, etc). A few of them did get procecuted (e.g., Michael Clapper in denver), but many of them have been given a "pass" by the police because of local political pressure (e.g, in oakland)...
I'm not sure which of us isn't grounded in reality here. I found those occupy fire starting instances in less than 10 seconds in google...
Ironically, I've found many computer science majors are not very versed in the ramification of statistics either. I think it has something to do with the binary world that they envisage or something like that.
The most common example is the "1-in-a-million" mentatlity many computer science majors have when talking about bugs or special-case code paths. You'd think they'd know better as they can often quote all sorts of statistical sort or database traversal, O(log n), big-o little-o, etc, but when you get them with a common sense thing about code performance issue, they appear to get some sort of temporary lobotomy.
But will a bunch of redneck yahoos ever be able to cover the amount of property damage typical wildfires cause?
It should be criminal charges, in any sane system. People's lives were put at risk by negligent practices.
But will a bunch of granola crunching anarchists ever be able to cover the amount of property damage a typical occupy protest causes? It should be criminal charges in any sane system. People's lives were put at risk by negligent practices.
However, since both practices are vaguely covered by some legal umbrella (first/second amendement issues), and the local politico-police complex doesn't want to prosecute (for fear of voter backlash), there won't be any criminal charges in either case. In the USA, until there is sufficient local outrage, generally nothing gets charged.
I need a giant electric pad in the garage so I can just drive over it and have the car charge itself...
You'll have to wait a couple years for it, but it's on it's way...
If you have Nissan Leaf or Chevy Volt this might happen a bit sooner...
Do these sorts of "adults are computer illiterate" stories bother anyone else?
No, these stories don't bother me as I know many adults that although use computers daily, are practically illiterate about computers.
Still, I was a dot com millionaire, and that's got to count for something.
No, it doesn't have to count for anything. It is these types of stories about winning the lottery must mean I'm somehow superior than the average joe that bother me ;^) I'm sure there are plenty of dot-com millionaires that didn't know much about the computers that ran the websites which made them accidentally rich.
I'm old enough to remember when "tech savy" was someone that could set the clock on a VCR. It's always been this way.
What's a VCR? (just kidding)... Every generation has their "tech savy" litmus test, it's always been this way, but today it's not setting a VCR clock. Maybe today it's setting a non-default password for your wireless router or something like that...
I knew I saw this stuff before... Siggraph 2005 http://people.csail.mit.edu/celiu/motionmag/motionmag.html
Russia is into building these things for billions of dollars. They have a heavily vested interest here.
You are making the tacit assumption of course that the russians aren't doing hacking themselves...
Oh you said that big bad wolf ruined your last centrifuge, tell you what, I'll give you a 20% discount on new replacement centrifuges... Don't worry, I'll take care of you...
If billions of dollars are at stake, what's another billion in spare parts... ;^)
As for why you have a suit - the challenger disaster revealed that the astronauts actually survived the explosions, only to die of hypoxia in the thin air. If you look at shuttle photos before and after, you'll see they used light jumpsuits prior to the disaster, and then wore the orange pressure suits (launch/reentry suits) afterwards.
Okay, so they somehow survive the explosion and are now up 65,000 feet with an orange pressure suit. Is that gonna change anything? There's wasn't survivable "ejection" system on the shuttle (they studied adding one, but concluded there was no feasible way to deploy it).
Wouldn't have helped Columbia (which broke up during reentry when the frictional heating was highest), as they're not made to handle extreme atsmosphere re-entry temperatures - just for cases of decompression.
There was no way that this scheme would have saved any of the Challenger folks either as there was no way for them to get to the hatch and jump out in free fall conditions. The PR solution was to put them in these pressure suits and if in the rare instance there was some small problem (e.g., early main engine cutoff) where the shuttle might be stabilized into a glide pattern after a launch abort, but didn't have enough glide distance to reach an emergency landing site, they could open the hatch and attempt to parachute to the ground rather than do nothing than watch the shuttle crash into the ground. Basically a TSA/govt approach to fixing a problem. Just do something to get the people off your back.
Of course going into space is a dangerous exercise as you are straping yourself to equipment just a hair above the experimental level. Looking good in cheap mass produced designer space suits isn't high on the list of priorities for anyone.
Although Yamamoto did spend some time at Harvard, he actually graduated from the Japanese naval academy. Ironically, having spent much time in the United States (he was later the Japanese naval attaché), he was firmly against attacking the US as he thought that Japan had no hope of winning a protracted war.
As to how the pearl harbor attack was so successful? Many attribute it be a copy of the battle of taranto (the first all-airplane attack launched from an air-craft carrier) where the UK destroyed some docked Italian battleships. My take is that Yamamoto copied the US war exercise where US Admiral Yarnell performed pretty much the exact same attack on Hawaii with pretty much the same result...
He didn't learn our weakesses in school, but by studying history. Based on Yamamoto's prewar pro-US stance as a function of his time here, I'd say let more folks like him in.
Educate their women, which can only happen when they have enough to eat..
If it were only so simple. This has less to do with food and more to do with culture. For example, in Afganistan today, people have enough to eat, yet girls are being poisoned in the schools to prevent them from being educated.
In several places in africa today (darfur, kifu, central africa, niger, chad, sudan, yemen, etc) political power struggles are basically forcing massive numbers of people to migrate like refugees. In this situation, there's no farming, no education, no stability at all. Sometimes it's just about survival.
Of course this is all based on the naive notion that the main purpose of food aid is to benefit those receiving the aid. That is merely a side effect, its real purpose is to consume market surpluses and enrich the producers of these commodities ...
Emergency food aid is not about being cynical about consuming market surpluses. Local farmers aren't in competition to produce this. If you want to slam someone about who benefits from emergency food aid, slam nutriset (the french company that holds the patent on Plumpy, one of the leading emergency food items). You can also note that there is a big problem with some african nations accepting non emergency food aid from the US (european countries threatening to boycott agriculural exports if they accept any potentially GM seeds from the US on the chance that they won't eat the grain, but plant it and cross contaminate).
Disposal of market surplus is really a minor issue with food aid these days. In a era where we have countries importing large quantities of maize, wheat, rice and soya, and the increasing price of oil to create fertilizer and move the grain, giving such a small amount away to africa isn't on anyone's minds these days.
So do you mean the TOS episode "Whom God's Destroy" ...
Or do you mean the TNG episode "The Game"...
I think most people would need the tie-ups, beer and eye-lid clips for either of these episodes ;^)
Hmm, I thought the rules of introducing star trek to people who have never seen it were
1. You do not talk about star trek
2. You do not talk about star trek
3. If someone yells stop, goes limp, taps out, the watching of star trek is over.
4. Only 2 star trek episodes at a viewing
5. One one viewing per day
6. Shirts and shoes REQUIRED!
7. The kvetching will go on as long as required.
8. If this is your first viewing of a star trek episode, you have to actually watch
Q is a fallen angel. A plot device as old as the bible.
In a gold rush, it's often better to be the one selling the shovels instead of the one buying shovels and digging for the gold...
So instead of a market of 100 space suits a year, there's maybe a total market of 5,000 (best case for the forseeable future, at that rate you'd be launching 100 people into space every week). If you expect at least a couple manufacturers competing, that's 2,500. I can tell you that probably doesn't even count as mass manufacturing for something like a space suit...
Compare this to a bullet proof vest. There are about 20,000 law-enforcement agencies in the US. Assuming only 1/10th of them would buy 1 bullet proof vest (a ridiculously small number). If this were the case, who would make a "cheap" bullet proof vest...
I say we nuke the site from orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Oh, wait, didn't we try something like that already... http://lcross.arc.nasa.gov/observation.htm
(yes, I know no nuclear weapons were involved)
The kids who are into comic books are most likely already interested in science.
My experience is that the converse might be (mostly) true, but this direction isn't true...
If the idea doesn't work and someone gets a patent on it, no-harm, no-foul, right? Nobody is going to infringe...
If the idea does work and it has yet to be shown to work in a product, a large company might have an advantage, right?
Sometimes smart folks think alike. This is why companies usually want to start patent filings as early as possible, usually well before the idea can demonstrate actual advantages (e.g., usually as soon as partially functioning prototype or even half baked pseudo-code/flowchart suggests it can be refined into potential advantage). Then they stretch out the filing by adding refinements to their patent claims as the implementation gets fleshed out and patent goes through the review process.