If you throw it backwards, you don't make it go at the same speed but in the negative direction. It just goes at a slower speed in the positive direction so it follows you around.
Do you have the right to output the same communications as someone else, i.e., copy, under free speech rights? I don't know - does anyone have an expert opinion?
In the long run, information wants to be free as in beer because publishers will be decimated by the low cost of digital media. The law and public policy will change to encourage good authors while making books free as in beer. It's a simple matter of extrapolation.
So if you may have heard "a worm that turned", it is a saying that means a worm is defending itself. Who ever thought words taken out of context have simple meanings?
Somehow after a long history of progress interlaced to be sure with problems, we've come to a real show stopper.
What does this mean? Have people become spoiled?
Shall we compare Americans to spoiled children, like the kind who get too much for Christmas, and don't really care for much except their happiness? People can blame government or business. People can ask who is the best to elect, but what is that going to change?
Many people go to work to save for retirement and maintain a so-called standard of living. People are surrounded with technological marvels, but all so many of us want to do, day after day, is push a few buttons, pull a few levers, and then live comfortably for a few hours.
There may be responsibility, but is there achievement? The economic fabric doesn't really support achievement. The riskiest thing an average consumer can do buy for at the retail level is a little do-it-yourself project or gambling. Retailers know their customers. Customers want their happiness packaged neatly and easy to use.
Knowledge, which is a major factor in achievement, is really hard to buy. I went to a major bookstore the other day, and I noticed a new computer system to let customers search. There were many books that exist in the world to deal with the idea that I wanted, and many of them were listed on the computer, but none of them were available even for special order. Customer desires don't fall far from this tree.
If we want government to change things, we should want government to make expert knowledge widely distributed, not just reachable on two government subsidized buses followed by a government subsidized train.
And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
Shut down is actually pretty quick. There are two buttons that make shut down extremely fast even on the most complex machines. First press Reset. Then Power. Many machines make it even easier: press Power.
Now, if only they could make Windows come up as fast. Every time the computer finishes booting, it comes to the same state more or less. The only thing visibly different is the clock. So if security isn't really a big problem, why not just save this state and restart to it every time? I can save a virtual machine to a boot up state and then save multiple copies of this virtual machine. Any time I want a fast virtual machine boot, run one of these copies. I don't because I don't mind waiting for 2 minutes while the virtual machine boots, but I could, you know.
Yes, I'm a modeller. To the extent that our opinions guide decisions (what is a model if not a collection of opinions?) we need a professional code of ethics, just like engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc
You are? You sound so intelligent, the code of ethics better start with not letting you walk down a runway.
jail and fine the people who orchestrated this. And every other exploit
I find the people who allowed themselves to be exploited as much to blame. People were buying houses at the ultrainflated prices, which they now acknowledge they can't pay for, because they wanted to later exploit the next sucker who will do what? buy the same dump for a million dollars? Once the price gets to the point where two conditions hold #1 it's obvious that the next working class person moving out of an apartment can't afford the place, and #2 the house doesn't have enough class to attract a wealthy person, the market is going to recoil. About 6 years ago, I started looking into the real estate market, and the agent dragged me around to 20 ugly stink holes, and everyone was asking about 50,000 more than last quarter. So obviously I would have to move in and then move out after 6 months, go through the wrangling of paying for fees and whatever, just to hope to rip off the next buyer for 50,000+, and if I couldn't, I would be stuck in a place that sucks so much I wouldn't even be motivated to work to pay for it. The real estate agent knew what the hell he was doing. Any buyer walking into an "investment" costing enough money to retire on also perks up damn fast and knows what s/he's doing too. So I have no sympathy on anyone who lost their savings in this crazy market.
Anyone who lost big money in the stock market also had to be stupid. After the dot com bust, Enron, and all that crap, anyone who plays with big money had better not miss it.
The problem with most people is that they don't realize how much they don't know.
And suppose some people did realize how much they didn't know... then what? Are these people going to be able to get what didn't know? Get it where? How?
That leads to computer information, or rather how computers are used to manipulate people (be it with funky risk scoring or whatever concoction that can make a fool of people willing to part with risk capital) because of the lack of computer information. We want computers to tell us things that help our decision making, be it on Wall Street, or anywhere, but in comparison to the amount of information that can potentially be stored electronically and used for decision making (a number of bytes that would easily have Google living up to its name, 10^100 bytes) computers only have what some people have bothered to feed the machines with. Combine the thinness of information with incompatibility with different query tools, and it's easy for people in authority to make crazy-ass decisions based on information from "trusted sources" called computers. You can bet that contributed to the economic tailspin.
The reliability of data comes from having it in quantity, relevance, and accessibility. Computers are not yet powerful enough to store so much information and offer enough viewpoints to enable people to verify decisions. Thus, we rely on people to get into authority, and these people try to make decisions in real time. But what are they deciding? They are trying to decide how to maneuver their own wealth so as to look good for a few years and get a few fat bonuses, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.
Bankers were trapped into not being able to provide a more stable service. Bankers couldn't very well tell people to stop borrowing when other banks were lending like crazy, so they imploded. The bosses concentrated on their own pay (building their own parachutes) and very likely trotted out "computer data" to sucker investors. Investors and bankers alike lack enough computing power to gather the right data. The people with the bigger computers knew there was a real problem coming and they scrambled to get what they could for themselves. The biggest sucker investors were the working class. The working class is a people with PCs that show popup ads and banner ads telling them the wonders of the real estate market. That isn't even data! These suckers ignored the real world that is visible to everyone - anyone could see without massive databases that as an algorithm (a virus!?) has somehow started:
do-in-each-year {
RaisePrice((clsHouse) thatHouseDownTheBlock, new FactorOf(1.1));
RaisePrice((clsHouse) thatHouseDownTheBlock, new FactorOf(1.1));
RaisePrice((clsHouse) thatHouseDownTheBlock, new FactorOf(1.1)); } until (Price((clsHouse) thatHouseDownTheBlock) > 500,000)
while the prices of other things hardly move in comparison, there will be big trouble.
The stock markets are dropping like rocks (in spite of bailouts and other patches) because investors are trying to clean house and look for reality instead of speculation. The reality though is our need for more powerful computers so that we can get what is real.
The population is more educated and individuals are more capable of making their own decisions, but they have no information. They have no real basis for major decisions. Computers present blobs of crafted text on the Internet but this text is based on what? How do people get to know the thoughts that led to the articles? And how do people go forward to decide based on what they see? Can people pull their own data together? Well, no! If we want a solution that lasts, we have to put together a large public database that anyone can consult because know we can't trust people in authority.
Let's just say it's about 2.7 degrees K colder than intergalactic space. It's less dramatic, but more to the point.
No - because most of us don't know how cold intergalactic space is to start with, and then the 2.7 is still somewhat arbitrary sounding even if intergalactic space was stated to be 3 K. Why not 2.8 or 2.9 or 2.999? Saying 100 times colder indicates a particular order of magnitude was selected for the work, and who knows where we'll be at even greater orders of magnitude?
I have read and written about 50 Tb with my single, non-redundant 160 Gb hard drive and I have never lost so much as one bit. This is just a store-bought hard disk without even a hint of longevity. It was the cheapest drive in terms of bytes for the buck - even cheaper than used drives, which tend to be slightly overpriced for people who want to spend next to nothing. I verify all my reads and writes because I handle some large files - no data loss has ever occurred, even though I do not treat my drive lightly. I transport my drive from place to place, run it from various power sources, and use it fearlessly during thunderstorms. Zero information has gone missing.
Therefore, with a RAID system of redundant 50 Tb disks, I could fear nothing.
While I agree with most of your post, I think there are real constraints on paper length. Mostly, these are researcher time - longer papers take longer to write, and to edit - and signal-to-noise - I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.
This is part of the problem. Here is an example of language that is hard to understand. It sounds smart, and people let that pass because they want a system that allows their own sloppy work to get in.
Can people use plain language when everyone in the audience doesn't have the same background?
"researcher signal to noise" - what is that? Does everyone have some kind of electronic communications related degree or training? Besides if people wrote more, they would have more to stand on, and would be forced to make sure they are doing good work since they put all that effort into the writing, they don't want it to be all wasted on a bad review.
"sign error" - what? Did I forget the minus sign on a number or did I use a minus sign when it's supposed to be plus? Was a bit flipped? Trying to say something in very few words is what we're told to do, but it's also a mechanism for obfuscation. It also tells students that the system is all about obfuscating any kind of work, so if they just know how to obfuscate, that's the ticket to the big time.
This attitude is partially contributing to the economic meltdown we're having. So many people want to take the easy way to make money instead of doing hard work. They bought into the economic strategy of buy and later sell to some poor guy for an inflated price - free money! The reality cheque is in the mail now.
I really hate reading research papers. Many of them are cookie cutter papers to make it look like work was done - a bunch of text with a few graphs and lists thrown in, all followed by a massive list of references. The descriptions defy anyone to actually replicate the work. Theorems are proved on the basis of some other theorems in difficult-to-find references, but the logical steps (as you would see in a math textbook where theorems are proven in detail) are at best a few scattered mentions of the format "if x and y then z (and you better believe it because that's what happens when you do all the substitutions)."
In the past, people didn't have such a huge reference base so they could follow the logic, but now with computers, the Internet, and massive hard drives, papers ought to be much longer and more detailed. This would force researchers to not have the attitude of "because you are either studying for a Ph.D. or you have one, you should have the IQ to reverse engineer my logic".
When people start their education, they are told "show your work". Full credit is not given for just the final answer. Because there are more and more universities, institutes, students, problems, etc., people have less time to read about each project and follow every step of reasoning. It was necessary to keep papers short, and that wasn't such a bad thing when people took care to present well, but the system of trust can only persist as long as the trust is not broken. There are too many research areas now with their own little symbolisms and patterns of communications, as well as too many researchers who invent their own symbolisms and styles when they are unsure whether any standard exists. It's a Tower of Babel.
A solution in the computer age is quite simple. Computer storage is cheap enough to permit massive appendixes that give the details of derivations. The Internet can be used to distribute standard ways of expressing ideas and themes that are commonly found. The entire system needs to be more self enforcing by having papers widely available so that people can see what is the right way versus the wrong way. Then, the statistic of which papers have the most references can give a meaningful idea of which papers are the best.
When I see movies depicting life decades ago, I see that people presented themselves with greater complexity and attention to detail. Communications seem to be more bursty now, perhaps because everyone is trying to finish quicker with every objective. Often this leads to shallower thought though because there isn't time taken or given to ponder. So we may well be seeing "research" that just marginally advances a randomly selected result from someone else's papers, and that is the easy path to getting credit and "getting on with life". It's the whole attitude of "no one is going to care because there is so much going on and I'm just insignificant".
Computers can help here. If people want to achieve more signficance, they can produce more full-bodied writeups - this process itself forces them to think deeper and better, and if they have something worth telling, the world will find out.
I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition
Back in the good old days when you had 2, 4, or 8 Mb of RAM and had an operating system that even let you think you had more memory with virtual memory, swapping a few Mb didn't cost too much time compared to how fast the processor ran. Nowadays, swapping even 500 Mb on a low-RAM computer makes you think your computer has gone off the deep end. 500 Mb of disk I/O can take a lot of time. Never mind asking why simple things like IE sometimes requires 200 Mb or 300 Mb for IE6 with no tabbing and how computers booting into Windows XP used to run ok with less than 256 Mb, now may consume more than 1 Gb and never give any of that memory back after just booting. Even swapping to get an extra 256 Mb costs an enormous amount of time, so the question should be why software requires so much memory to do so little.
One time, I installed Oracle on virtual machine, but I wanted to save RAM so I set the virtual machine's memory to 400 Mb. It swapped like crazy and every time I clicked on something it took 20 minutes. Having a big swap doesn't let you do anything better.
Strangely, I have 2 Gb of RAM, and I try to keep more than 600 Mb unused, but a lot of programs still swap. But I'm using Vista, which may like to send idle software into virtul memory to keep the RAM open because some people with 512 Mb would find Vista too hard to use.
These folks have done in 10 years what has taken over 100 in the US in terms of industrialization and economics
Easily said with the help of reverse engineering rather than invention. China has an old history going back hundreds and thousands of years, but now the government is looking around and letting people catch up. Once the people catch up, the government's power is far reduced so it takes a braver government to trust the people to take the country into the future.
The software was a big mess: A hospital management system (basically an accounting package) written in FORTRAN!.
It had evolved over decades. It was pretty much unsupportable, but we had the old developers in-house, so they were able to solve the weird bugs usually.
To our surprise, they did not want the regular compiled version with customer support. They just wanted the source code.
We told them that the source code was not for sale. It was also too embarrassing to release.
They then put an enormous amount of money on the table, and promised to keep it in house.
Stranger than fiction. With that much will to spend and that much tolerance for crap, especially when it would have probably been cheaper to just hire a couple of people and let them start from scratch, it seems they could have shopped around, probably did, and no one else was biting, for even more money. They scraped the bottom of the barrel. Is it naivite or laziness in shopping? I suppose no one else would trust them with the source code (but maybe they just liked a certain feature set in the program).
I suspect a LOT more computing power is thrown at more mundane things like predicting where the financial markets are going to be based on a gazillion data inputs.
I wouldn't say mundane.
For one thing, any intelligent deep thought requires the gazillion inputs because of the sheer number of factors and an error or bad approximation in just a few inputs could throw off the decision or computation. Granted, the financial markets are typically so frenzied that hardly anyone knows whether to buy or sell, but we would do well to build computers that are capable of market analysis.
Data input is one of the biggest hindrances to computing. Take a typical office, and there are people laboriously entering information because that is the only way to get it right. It shouldn't take petaflops to scan a wrinkled page with scribbles or listen to voice in a noisy room.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
I still use a buggy whip in my car you insensitive clod!
I'm only an IT project manager until my bosses find someone better.
Ergo, you must be always trying to beat your "competition".
There are a few factors that give you a bit more job security though. You are always getting better with experience, so you might be just the person another company is looking for. In a world of change, who is good today is bad tomorrow, so the "overs" go by the rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
At the end of the day, saying peeps demonstrates a character flaw that will get your sorry ass fired.
Do not neglect to think that your unders want to topple you, and you getting stuff out of their way is viewable as secrecy in upper management designed to hold them back. Your situation is delicate, and you are probably trying to secure it somehow, while your overs are building boxes so that you are as replaceable as possible.
BTW Slashdot is approaching the 25th million post!
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
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· Score: 1
Not the CEO who can't, or can't hire the right people, or can't make get the right contracts, or can't sway the public to buy more Ford products?
Large companies have a certain momentum that is hard to change instantly. In order to just operate, they plan ahead for a few years at least and they line up budgets, plans, policies, etc. and hope that it all works. On top of it all, there are people in management with their own little agendas and problems.
So the result can be success or failure, but there are tweaks happening all along the way.
The good boss should be able to look at the decisions and make more decisions. Decisions are based on data, knowledge, principles, etc. Some of this comes from people. Some come from getting people to give you what you need. Some comes from getting hands on. Some comes from experience, education, character, etc. The situation may make it easy or hard to look good, but decision and execution can make major differences.
Space being huge and all, and the probability of getting hit by something solid is very small, I can understand that a spacecraft can go far. But I didn't learn much about the effects of radiation on hardware. An organism may suffer in space travel, but how well does hardware bear up after a few years, even with shielding?
Our earthly magnetic field is quite useful for deflecting some radiation, so would putting an artificial magnetic field around a spacecraft be enough to protect people? It would take a lot of energy to juice up an electrical coil, but what the heck.
Slashdot Mirror
If you throw it backwards, you don't make it go at the same speed but in the negative direction. It just goes at a slower speed in the positive direction so it follows you around.
Do you have the right to output the same communications as someone else, i.e., copy, under free speech rights? I don't know - does anyone have an expert opinion?
In the long run, information wants to be free as in beer because publishers will be decimated by the low cost of digital media. The law and public policy will change to encourage good authors while making books free as in beer. It's a simple matter of extrapolation.
So if you may have heard "a worm that turned", it is a saying that means a worm is defending itself. Who ever thought words taken out of context have simple meanings?
Yes.
Of course, by legalizing it.
What about the "American Dream"?
Somehow after a long history of progress interlaced to be sure with problems, we've come to a real show stopper.
What does this mean? Have people become spoiled?
Shall we compare Americans to spoiled children, like the kind who get too much for Christmas, and don't really care for much except their happiness? People can blame government or business. People can ask who is the best to elect, but what is that going to change?
Many people go to work to save for retirement and maintain a so-called standard of living. People are surrounded with technological marvels, but all so many of us want to do, day after day, is push a few buttons, pull a few levers, and then live comfortably for a few hours.
There may be responsibility, but is there achievement? The economic fabric doesn't really support achievement. The riskiest thing an average consumer can do buy for at the retail level is a little do-it-yourself project or gambling. Retailers know their customers. Customers want their happiness packaged neatly and easy to use.
Knowledge, which is a major factor in achievement, is really hard to buy. I went to a major bookstore the other day, and I noticed a new computer system to let customers search. There were many books that exist in the world to deal with the idea that I wanted, and many of them were listed on the computer, but none of them were available even for special order. Customer desires don't fall far from this tree.
If we want government to change things, we should want government to make expert knowledge widely distributed, not just reachable on two government subsidized buses followed by a government subsidized train.
In the modern era we will have a paperless tiger!!
And it's not only boot time but also shut down time that can be painful.
Shut down is actually pretty quick. There are two buttons that make shut down extremely fast even on the most complex machines. First press Reset. Then Power. Many machines make it even easier: press Power.
Now, if only they could make Windows come up as fast. Every time the computer finishes booting, it comes to the same state more or less. The only thing visibly different is the clock. So if security isn't really a big problem, why not just save this state and restart to it every time? I can save a virtual machine to a boot up state and then save multiple copies of this virtual machine. Any time I want a fast virtual machine boot, run one of these copies. I don't because I don't mind waiting for 2 minutes while the virtual machine boots, but I could, you know.
Yes, I'm a modeller. To the extent that our opinions guide decisions (what is a model if not a collection of opinions?) we need a professional code of ethics, just like engineers, lawyers, doctors, etc
You are? You sound so intelligent, the code of ethics better start with not letting you walk down a runway.
jail and fine the people who orchestrated this. And every other exploit
I find the people who allowed themselves to be exploited as much to blame. People were buying houses at the ultrainflated prices, which they now acknowledge they can't pay for, because they wanted to later exploit the next sucker who will do what? buy the same dump for a million dollars? Once the price gets to the point where two conditions hold #1 it's obvious that the next working class person moving out of an apartment can't afford the place, and #2 the house doesn't have enough class to attract a wealthy person, the market is going to recoil. About 6 years ago, I started looking into the real estate market, and the agent dragged me around to 20 ugly stink holes, and everyone was asking about 50,000 more than last quarter. So obviously I would have to move in and then move out after 6 months, go through the wrangling of paying for fees and whatever, just to hope to rip off the next buyer for 50,000+, and if I couldn't, I would be stuck in a place that sucks so much I wouldn't even be motivated to work to pay for it. The real estate agent knew what the hell he was doing. Any buyer walking into an "investment" costing enough money to retire on also perks up damn fast and knows what s/he's doing too. So I have no sympathy on anyone who lost their savings in this crazy market.
Anyone who lost big money in the stock market also had to be stupid. After the dot com bust, Enron, and all that crap, anyone who plays with big money had better not miss it.
The problem with most people is that they don't realize how much they don't know.
And suppose some people did realize how much they didn't know ... then what? Are these people going to be able to get what didn't know? Get it where? How?
That leads to computer information, or rather how computers are used to manipulate people (be it with funky risk scoring or whatever concoction that can make a fool of people willing to part with risk capital) because of the lack of computer information. We want computers to tell us things that help our decision making, be it on Wall Street, or anywhere, but in comparison to the amount of information that can potentially be stored electronically and used for decision making (a number of bytes that would easily have Google living up to its name, 10^100 bytes) computers only have what some people have bothered to feed the machines with. Combine the thinness of information with incompatibility with different query tools, and it's easy for people in authority to make crazy-ass decisions based on information from "trusted sources" called computers. You can bet that contributed to the economic tailspin.
The reliability of data comes from having it in quantity, relevance, and accessibility. Computers are not yet powerful enough to store so much information and offer enough viewpoints to enable people to verify decisions . Thus, we rely on people to get into authority, and these people try to make decisions in real time. But what are they deciding? They are trying to decide how to maneuver their own wealth so as to look good for a few years and get a few fat bonuses, regardless of the consequences for everyone else.
Bankers were trapped into not being able to provide a more stable service. Bankers couldn't very well tell people to stop borrowing when other banks were lending like crazy, so they imploded. The bosses concentrated on their own pay (building their own parachutes) and very likely trotted out "computer data" to sucker investors. Investors and bankers alike lack enough computing power to gather the right data. The people with the bigger computers knew there was a real problem coming and they scrambled to get what they could for themselves. The biggest sucker investors were the working class. The working class is a people with PCs that show popup ads and banner ads telling them the wonders of the real estate market. That isn't even data! These suckers ignored the real world that is visible to everyone - anyone could see without massive databases that as an algorithm (a virus!?) has somehow started:
while the prices of other things hardly move in comparison, there will be big trouble.
The stock markets are dropping like rocks (in spite of bailouts and other patches) because investors are trying to clean house and look for reality instead of speculation. The reality though is our need for more powerful computers so that we can get what is real.
The population is more educated and individuals are more capable of making their own decisions, but they have no information. They have no real basis for major decisions. Computers present blobs of crafted text on the Internet but this text is based on what? How do people get to know the thoughts that led to the articles? And how do people go forward to decide based on what they see? Can people pull their own data together? Well, no! If we want a solution that lasts, we have to put together a large public database that anyone can consult because know we can't trust people in authority.
No - because most of us don't know how cold intergalactic space is to start with, and then the 2.7 is still somewhat arbitrary sounding even if intergalactic space was stated to be 3 K. Why not 2.8 or 2.9 or 2.999? Saying 100 times colder indicates a particular order of magnitude was selected for the work, and who knows where we'll be at even greater orders of magnitude?
Another No - it's actually 2.97 K colder.
I have read and written about 50 Tb with my single, non-redundant 160 Gb hard drive and I have never lost so much as one bit. This is just a store-bought hard disk without even a hint of longevity. It was the cheapest drive in terms of bytes for the buck - even cheaper than used drives, which tend to be slightly overpriced for people who want to spend next to nothing. I verify all my reads and writes because I handle some large files - no data loss has ever occurred, even though I do not treat my drive lightly. I transport my drive from place to place, run it from various power sources, and use it fearlessly during thunderstorms. Zero information has gone missing.
Therefore, with a RAID system of redundant 50 Tb disks, I could fear nothing.
While I agree with most of your post, I think there are real constraints on paper length. Mostly, these are researcher time - longer papers take longer to write, and to edit - and signal-to-noise - I need to know the basic idea of your paper *before* I decide to check your sign errors.
This is part of the problem. Here is an example of language that is hard to understand. It sounds smart, and people let that pass because they want a system that allows their own sloppy work to get in.
Can people use plain language when everyone in the audience doesn't have the same background?
"researcher signal to noise" - what is that? Does everyone have some kind of electronic communications related degree or training? Besides if people wrote more, they would have more to stand on, and would be forced to make sure they are doing good work since they put all that effort into the writing, they don't want it to be all wasted on a bad review.
"sign error" - what? Did I forget the minus sign on a number or did I use a minus sign when it's supposed to be plus? Was a bit flipped? Trying to say something in very few words is what we're told to do, but it's also a mechanism for obfuscation. It also tells students that the system is all about obfuscating any kind of work, so if they just know how to obfuscate, that's the ticket to the big time.
This attitude is partially contributing to the economic meltdown we're having. So many people want to take the easy way to make money instead of doing hard work. They bought into the economic strategy of buy and later sell to some poor guy for an inflated price - free money! The reality cheque is in the mail now.
I really hate reading research papers. Many of them are cookie cutter papers to make it look like work was done - a bunch of text with a few graphs and lists thrown in, all followed by a massive list of references. The descriptions defy anyone to actually replicate the work. Theorems are proved on the basis of some other theorems in difficult-to-find references, but the logical steps (as you would see in a math textbook where theorems are proven in detail) are at best a few scattered mentions of the format "if x and y then z (and you better believe it because that's what happens when you do all the substitutions)."
In the past, people didn't have such a huge reference base so they could follow the logic, but now with computers, the Internet, and massive hard drives, papers ought to be much longer and more detailed. This would force researchers to not have the attitude of "because you are either studying for a Ph.D. or you have one, you should have the IQ to reverse engineer my logic".
When people start their education, they are told "show your work". Full credit is not given for just the final answer. Because there are more and more universities, institutes, students, problems, etc., people have less time to read about each project and follow every step of reasoning. It was necessary to keep papers short, and that wasn't such a bad thing when people took care to present well, but the system of trust can only persist as long as the trust is not broken. There are too many research areas now with their own little symbolisms and patterns of communications, as well as too many researchers who invent their own symbolisms and styles when they are unsure whether any standard exists. It's a Tower of Babel.
A solution in the computer age is quite simple. Computer storage is cheap enough to permit massive appendixes that give the details of derivations. The Internet can be used to distribute standard ways of expressing ideas and themes that are commonly found. The entire system needs to be more self enforcing by having papers widely available so that people can see what is the right way versus the wrong way. Then, the statistic of which papers have the most references can give a meaningful idea of which papers are the best.
When I see movies depicting life decades ago, I see that people presented themselves with greater complexity and attention to detail. Communications seem to be more bursty now, perhaps because everyone is trying to finish quicker with every objective. Often this leads to shallower thought though because there isn't time taken or given to ponder. So we may well be seeing "research" that just marginally advances a randomly selected result from someone else's papers, and that is the easy path to getting credit and "getting on with life". It's the whole attitude of "no one is going to care because there is so much going on and I'm just insignificant".
Computers can help here. If people want to achieve more signficance, they can produce more full-bodied writeups - this process itself forces them to think deeper and better, and if they have something worth telling, the world will find out.
What is exactly "inappropriate material for children"? Will the FCC make a list of websites?
Whatever happens, this site ought to be in the top 500. The filth and smut would corrupt beyond redemption.
So, M is for Microsoft.
But what can they possibly do after M? The language I, and then back to C, followed by R?
I decided to be bold and installed Hardy with no swap partition
Back in the good old days when you had 2, 4, or 8 Mb of RAM and had an operating system that even let you think you had more memory with virtual memory, swapping a few Mb didn't cost too much time compared to how fast the processor ran. Nowadays, swapping even 500 Mb on a low-RAM computer makes you think your computer has gone off the deep end. 500 Mb of disk I/O can take a lot of time. Never mind asking why simple things like IE sometimes requires 200 Mb or 300 Mb for IE6 with no tabbing and how computers booting into Windows XP used to run ok with less than 256 Mb, now may consume more than 1 Gb and never give any of that memory back after just booting. Even swapping to get an extra 256 Mb costs an enormous amount of time, so the question should be why software requires so much memory to do so little.
One time, I installed Oracle on virtual machine, but I wanted to save RAM so I set the virtual machine's memory to 400 Mb. It swapped like crazy and every time I clicked on something it took 20 minutes. Having a big swap doesn't let you do anything better.
Strangely, I have 2 Gb of RAM, and I try to keep more than 600 Mb unused, but a lot of programs still swap. But I'm using Vista, which may like to send idle software into virtul memory to keep the RAM open because some people with 512 Mb would find Vista too hard to use.
These folks have done in 10 years what has taken over 100 in the US in terms of industrialization and economics
Easily said with the help of reverse engineering rather than invention. China has an old history going back hundreds and thousands of years, but now the government is looking around and letting people catch up. Once the people catch up, the government's power is far reduced so it takes a braver government to trust the people to take the country into the future.
The software was a big mess: A hospital management system (basically an accounting package) written in FORTRAN!.
It had evolved over decades. It was pretty much unsupportable, but we had the old developers in-house, so they were able to solve the weird bugs usually.
To our surprise, they did not want the regular compiled version with customer support. They just wanted the source code.
We told them that the source code was not for sale. It was also too embarrassing to release.
They then put an enormous amount of money on the table, and promised to keep it in house.
Stranger than fiction. With that much will to spend and that much tolerance for crap, especially when it would have probably been cheaper to just hire a couple of people and let them start from scratch, it seems they could have shopped around, probably did, and no one else was biting, for even more money. They scraped the bottom of the barrel. Is it naivite or laziness in shopping? I suppose no one else would trust them with the source code (but maybe they just liked a certain feature set in the program).
I suspect a LOT more computing power is thrown at more mundane things like predicting where the financial markets are going to be based on a gazillion data inputs.
I wouldn't say mundane.
For one thing, any intelligent deep thought requires the gazillion inputs because of the sheer number of factors and an error or bad approximation in just a few inputs could throw off the decision or computation. Granted, the financial markets are typically so frenzied that hardly anyone knows whether to buy or sell, but we would do well to build computers that are capable of market analysis.
Data input is one of the biggest hindrances to computing. Take a typical office, and there are people laboriously entering information because that is the only way to get it right. It shouldn't take petaflops to scan a wrinkled page with scribbles or listen to voice in a noisy room.
I still use a buggy whip in my car you insensitive clod!
I'm only an IT project manager until my bosses find someone better.
Ergo, you must be always trying to beat your "competition".
There are a few factors that give you a bit more job security though. You are always getting better with experience, so you might be just the person another company is looking for. In a world of change, who is good today is bad tomorrow, so the "overs" go by the rule of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
At the end of the day, saying peeps demonstrates a character flaw that will get your sorry ass fired.
Do not neglect to think that your unders want to topple you, and you getting stuff out of their way is viewable as secrecy in upper management designed to hold them back. Your situation is delicate, and you are probably trying to secure it somehow, while your overs are building boxes so that you are as replaceable as possible.
BTW Slashdot is approaching the 25th million post!
Not the CEO who can't, or can't hire the right people, or can't make get the right contracts, or can't sway the public to buy more Ford products?
Large companies have a certain momentum that is hard to change instantly. In order to just operate, they plan ahead for a few years at least and they line up budgets, plans, policies, etc. and hope that it all works. On top of it all, there are people in management with their own little agendas and problems.
So the result can be success or failure, but there are tweaks happening all along the way.
The good boss should be able to look at the decisions and make more decisions. Decisions are based on data, knowledge, principles, etc. Some of this comes from people. Some come from getting people to give you what you need. Some comes from getting hands on. Some comes from experience, education, character, etc. The situation may make it easy or hard to look good, but decision and execution can make major differences.
Space being huge and all, and the probability of getting hit by something solid is very small, I can understand that a spacecraft can go far. But I didn't learn much about the effects of radiation on hardware. An organism may suffer in space travel, but how well does hardware bear up after a few years, even with shielding?
Our earthly magnetic field is quite useful for deflecting some radiation, so would putting an artificial magnetic field around a spacecraft be enough to protect people? It would take a lot of energy to juice up an electrical coil, but what the heck.
Hooray for Sol. Just in time for the latest hike in the price of gas. Solar keeps looking better, and more of our gas taxes better be going to this.