While I agree you can get carried away, ala the "a man with a hammer sees a world of nails" syndrome, and that one should use simple string processing code in hard-baked production code, I don't think anyone will ever regret knowing how to use regexps better. They are marvelous for scripting, log parsing, and the less-baked-in type of thing.
While I found Jobs' stlye too caustic, I have to agree with most of his insights. Yes, maybe it took Kamen 9 years to find his components. However, it would have taken a whole lot less tome to find/create them if he had a complete, working design from which to reverse engineer, which all his competitors now have.
How many products today can you think of that have some marvel of engineering as a barrier to competition? It's execution quality, features and marketing that makes people like Sony, Mercedes, Microsoft etc. the product leaders that they are.
The real danger to the Segway, is if they got everything right except the usage model. That is, someone copies the basic technology but refines it to suit the way people really want to use it: e.g., what the Palm did to the Newton.
...would be if a controllable electromagnet was attached to the scan head. Then, the scanner could actually move the pieces around too. You'd have to do some 'move blocking pieces into a holding area temporarily' stuff, but that would make the project even more fun, no?
TV is evil anyway. It really adds no value to one's life. It is a disease in that it gives your brain just enough stimulation to prevent it from getting bored and doing something worthwhile. Stop watching it. Doing so will change your life. I'm not joking. Watching TV conditions you for the worse, and the only way you'll know I'm not making this up is to go without for 2 months.
I enjoyed your thermo thoughts and am with you; my point is, the rest of the universe is passive. Things float around and hit each other. Suns burn until their energy runs out. Compared to earth - heck compared to a housefly - the universe make me yawn.
The rest of your argument strikes me the same as if you criticized an Indy 500 car for having no radio [or having a blindspot;^) ], or wished airplanes had no redundant systems, or disdained a plastic pen because it wasn't made from optimally strong carbon fiber. Minimalism means boiling a problem to its essentials and devising the simplest solution. Well, creating self-metabolizing self-replicating living creatures with sensory perception is going to require some complexity, including redundancy and design tradeoffs.
The human body is an amazing, wonderful thing. We are getting no closer to creating thinking computers. Find me a robot with the mobility, strength and weight that even comes close. All this, and we can render energy from an immense variety of foods and reproduce. How many machines run for 100 years, much less those that see the abuse and variance in environment and use model as we do?
How much more wonder does one need to see to believe we are designed? Is God in your blindspot?
ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur?
I am with you. It is indeed impossible to compare how lucky I am with some hapless being on a planet that wasn't perfect like ours because he does not exist. But this goes back to my original point. If one adopts the belief mechanism that since the universe is huge, and since anything can happen given enough time, well then I can draw a line from oblivion to myself and feel confident about it.
On the other hand, if you take the belief mechanism that our wonderful world was designed, I too can work backwards and draw my line from oblivion.
And just as you choose a car, and buy accessories for it, you can get accessories for the belief system - there are any number of books or people that would talk all day about either one.
i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction
You are absolutely correct. An AC makes my room colder, but not only does the heat from the room go outside, but so does extra heat created in the process of pumping the heat out. If I pour a bag of red and blue marbles into one bowl, I can sort them, but at the expense of the disorder created in breaking down energy to do so. Still, everything in the universe besides earth is entirely passive. Suns burn until they run out of energy, rocks float around and break things.
Don't get me wrong, I love astronomy...but to think that somehow, having certain chemicals combined with genetic mutations could bring order from disorder - and eventually the supreme masterpiece of the earth, where a fly's design is a miracle of nature? I just can't make myself believe this any more than I could believe that shaking a bag full of watch parts for a million years could ever result in a whole watch. Even with lightning!
== what if that God that told you so is part of your imagination.
== If you want to believe in something your imagination can create and ask your imagination for answers surely your imagination will answer things for you. But you are not living in truth.
I don't want you to think that I get private, literal messages in my head from God. My messages from God come from the Bible, and they're confirmed with how following it changes my life and the lives of others. I have never seen anything else *permanently* fix people of their problems and vices. That to me is proof enough.
But there is more proof; consider that the Bible's cohesive message (the pathetic fall of man, the love of God, and redemption of mankind through Jesus == God Himself) was written over thousands of years, by dozens of different authors living around the globe (Egypt, Rome, Greece, Iraq, Iran, etc), of different cultures, and that most of the authors *humiliate*, not glorify themselves (e.g. Peter's 3 denials). Who else other than God could have guided all these authors to talk about the same principles, with the same underlying messages and prophecies fulfilled by Christ?
And at least in the New Testament, most of the authors were executed for their beliefs - and yet psychologists say it is impossible for someone to willingly die for a fraud.
I'll close with one last thought. To find the way to the next 'world' you will need someone from there to help you. You cannot escape eventual death on this world, nor find a way off of it using only the things that come from this world. The good news is that Someone wants nothing more than to help you.
Re:Is anybody using the Xbox as a low-cost server?
on
Hacking the XBox
·
· Score: 1
Is it a bad idea to build a hoard of XBoxen as a Beowulf cluster? Well, some clusters are processor bound, and won't scale with more nodes. The XBox is fast, but not that fast compared to a dual processor Xeon. OTOH, communications-bound clusters need fast interconnect; like 1000mbit or proprietary systems like Myrinet. Here, you'd be stuck with the built in 100mbit (at least I think it's 100mibt...)
But for a certain class of clustering needs it would work. I think doing povray renderings would work wonderfully.
Also, big iron pro clusters rely on server management, monitoring and such; features built into only high-end server equipment. Pros would shy away from using this for a major cluster project for that reason alone.
All you need is a positive non-zero probablity for something to eventually happen. We have no idea how amny times life almost formed and then died before it finally succeeded.
Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.
The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.
For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B. With all the dice rolling and obvious failures along the way, one would expect to find a whole lot of these, no?
And, the earth has not had an infinite amount of time to roll the dice. It is of finite age. Recent work shows the earth as 5 billion years old, not counting for the time it required to cool. Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago. This is not enough time to go from scratch to our planet's situation today. Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.
...from what you believe.
If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being.
On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so.
I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in. Curious? Ask God for help, he won't turn you down.
I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the <gasp> Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.
...from what you believe.
If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being.
On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so.
I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in.
I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the (gasp) Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.
One thing CA can't do is raise our property taxes. We revolted a while back with proposition 13. There's a law preventing them from raising them more than 1% a year. I think we may need another revolt.
This was the modus operandi for a long time for brick & mortar companies with.com operations. The problem was, if the companies are truly separate (as required to escape taxes) then they can't work together - e.g. buy a book online, pick it up at the store. Or return something at the store you bought online, etc. Plus, even without these headaches, the great state of California would find a way to rain on such obvious acts of 'inequality'
Rendering works great for Grid, because rendering requires very little communication to occur per processing cycle. Other apps, like fluid flow analysis and such require computing nodes to do a lot of talking per computational cycle, making them unsuitable for grid.
The money would get burnt and they'd end up with one cool new feature. Think about it: do you think it'd take > $1 Bil to come up with a new OS that would eclipse Linux? They're simply unable to leverage their money. Big huge companies like Microsoft only innovate in response to threatening developments from other companies *when the direction is clear*.
Same phenomena as the new Star Wars movies: when you're lean and hungry, you take risks and the drive for acceptance leads to excellence (orig SW films). But when the pressure is off, and you can do whatever you want without risk of making or breaking yourself, you end up with Episodes I and II, whose only redeeming feature was the desire of the special effects team to achieve.
The one tricky thing about HUD is that it requires special glass to make it work. I have a Corvette with a HUD, and sure 'nuff, it says HUD on the windsheild label. Hope it doesn't break!
Had to laugh at your 'clock puzzle' answer as it's exactly what I'd do - the pragmatic approach. Maybe they were concerned that if you ignored the missing screws you were just delaying a problem down the road. On the other hand, this _is_ Microsoft, no?
When I read about these attempts to come up with the perfect language to handle variations of pentagons, it reminds me of the classic 'Bert and Ernie' skit where Bert assigns Ernie the task of cleaning a pile of toys in their apartment.
After Bert's departure, Ernie decides he must first come up with a taxonomy system - first, he'll pick up the red things. Hmmm, the only red toy is a fire truck. So he puts it down. Ok, pick up the toys with wheels. Same result - only a fire truck. What about the toys with ladders? Still one toy, a fire truck.
By this time Bert, enraged, returns to find that Ernie has accomplished nothing. We can learn many things from this, but mainly...
Getting the job done is what counts, not how cleanly you do it. Devise mechanisms when it really helps get the job done, else risk making the mechanism a job in and of itself.
The states are doing this because they need money, not because it's right or wrong.
Whenever you hear the word 'fairness' or 'level playing field', immediately shoot the person who said it. 'Fairness' is a word used by people that use sympathy to get what they want from someone else who has it.
...makes you stronger. Our country typically makes its mark with innovation. Then the Japanese perfect what we do, the Europeans do it with style for a premium price, then the rest of Asia makes it out of plastic for $0.10.
We therefore cannot stop. I see this trend of outsourcing as a cattle prod to create something which indeed only my talents can accomplish (for now) or which at least gives me a few years of lead time.
Corporate America reacts to what tries to kill it. Part of the reason they scramble to outsource everything *is to keep alive* in the face of hostile unions, oppressive taxes, lawsuits and health care costs. Thus they hire people that adapt to our current climate, who in turn lead their companies to Enron-dom. Thomas Edison is the *last* person you'd see running GE today...
Also, what can kill others makes you stronger. Our country's military and ability to bail people out gives us political and therefore economic advantages. People lucky enough to live in America enjoy this advantage.
I think the point was, by hiring enough 'local face people' customers will *interact* with local nationals, but that doesn't mean that the hoards of programmers actually doing the work will be locals.
Slashdot Mirror
The Portland compiler traditionally underperforms the Intel compiler, and often gcc as well.
While I agree you can get carried away, ala the "a man with a hammer sees a world of nails" syndrome, and that one should use simple string processing code in hard-baked production code, I don't think anyone will ever regret knowing how to use regexps better. They are marvelous for scripting, log parsing, and the less-baked-in type of thing.
While I found Jobs' stlye too caustic, I have to agree with most of his insights. Yes, maybe it took Kamen 9 years to find his components. However, it would have taken a whole lot less tome to find/create them if he had a complete, working design from which to reverse engineer, which all his competitors now have.
How many products today can you think of that have some marvel of engineering as a barrier to competition? It's execution quality, features and marketing that makes people like Sony, Mercedes, Microsoft etc. the product leaders that they are.
The real danger to the Segway, is if they got everything right except the usage model. That is, someone copies the basic technology but refines it to suit the way people really want to use it: e.g., what the Palm did to the Newton.
I think for you, the key word was 'imagine'.
...would be if a controllable electromagnet was attached to the scan head. Then, the scanner could actually move the pieces around too. You'd have to do some 'move blocking pieces into a holding area temporarily' stuff, but that would make the project even more fun, no?
TV is evil anyway. It really adds no value to one's life. It is a disease in that it gives your brain just enough stimulation to prevent it from getting bored and doing something worthwhile. Stop watching it. Doing so will change your life. I'm not joking. Watching TV conditions you for the worse, and the only way you'll know I'm not making this up is to go without for 2 months.
I enjoyed your thermo thoughts and am with you; my point is, the rest of the universe is passive. Things float around and hit each other. Suns burn until their energy runs out. Compared to earth - heck compared to a housefly - the universe make me yawn.
;^) ], or wished airplanes had no redundant systems, or disdained a plastic pen because it wasn't made from optimally strong carbon fiber. Minimalism means boiling a problem to its essentials and devising the simplest solution. Well, creating self-metabolizing self-replicating living creatures with sensory perception is going to require some complexity, including redundancy and design tradeoffs.
The rest of your argument strikes me the same as if you criticized an Indy 500 car for having no radio [or having a blindspot
The human body is an amazing, wonderful thing. We are getting no closer to creating thinking computers. Find me a robot with the mobility, strength and weight that even comes close. All this, and we can render energy from an immense variety of foods and reproduce. How many machines run for 100 years, much less those that see the abuse and variance in environment and use model as we do?
How much more wonder does one need to see to believe we are designed? Is God in your blindspot?
ok first of all, by your arguement by probability, someone who won the lottery shouldn't believe it because its so improbable. Second of all, if we give a low probability to all the conditions necessary for life to occur, why shouldn't life occur it the conditions necessary for it do occur?
I am with you. It is indeed impossible to compare how lucky I am with some hapless being on a planet that wasn't perfect like ours because he does not exist. But this goes back to my original point. If one adopts the belief mechanism that since the universe is huge, and since anything can happen given enough time, well then I can draw a line from oblivion to myself and feel confident about it.
On the other hand, if you take the belief mechanism that our wonderful world was designed, I too can work backwards and draw my line from oblivion.
And just as you choose a car, and buy accessories for it, you can get accessories for the belief system - there are any number of books or people that would talk all day about either one.
i think that you need to review thermodynamic theory. The theory states that the total energy and order of the system will move to disorder, but not that local events cannot move in the opposite direction
You are absolutely correct. An AC makes my room colder, but not only does the heat from the room go outside, but so does extra heat created in the process of pumping the heat out. If I pour a bag of red and blue marbles into one bowl, I can sort them, but at the expense of the disorder created in breaking down energy to do so. Still, everything in the universe besides earth is entirely passive. Suns burn until they run out of energy, rocks float around and break things.
Don't get me wrong, I love astronomy...but to think that somehow, having certain chemicals combined with genetic mutations could bring order from disorder - and eventually the supreme masterpiece of the earth, where a fly's design is a miracle of nature? I just can't make myself believe this any more than I could believe that shaking a bag full of watch parts for a million years could ever result in a whole watch. Even with lightning!
== what if that God that told you so is part of your imagination.
== If you want to believe in something your imagination can create and ask your imagination for answers surely your imagination will answer things for you. But you are not living in truth.
I don't want you to think that I get private, literal messages in my head from God. My messages from God come from the Bible, and they're confirmed with how following it changes my life and the lives of others. I have never seen anything else *permanently* fix people of their problems and vices. That to me is proof enough.
But there is more proof; consider that the Bible's cohesive message (the pathetic fall of man, the love of God, and redemption of mankind through Jesus == God Himself) was written over thousands of years, by dozens of different authors living around the globe (Egypt, Rome, Greece, Iraq, Iran, etc), of different cultures, and that most of the authors *humiliate*, not glorify themselves (e.g. Peter's 3 denials). Who else other than God could have guided all these authors to talk about the same principles, with the same underlying messages and prophecies fulfilled by Christ?
And at least in the New Testament, most of the authors were executed for their beliefs - and yet psychologists say it is impossible for someone to willingly die for a fraud.
I'll close with one last thought. To find the way to the next 'world' you will need someone from there to help you. You cannot escape eventual death on this world, nor find a way off of it using only the things that come from this world. The good news is that Someone wants nothing more than to help you.
Is it a bad idea to build a hoard of XBoxen as a Beowulf cluster? Well, some clusters are processor bound, and won't scale with more nodes. The XBox is fast, but not that fast compared to a dual processor Xeon. OTOH, communications-bound clusters need fast interconnect; like 1000mbit or proprietary systems like Myrinet. Here, you'd be stuck with the built in 100mbit (at least I think it's 100mibt...)
But for a certain class of clustering needs it would work. I think doing povray renderings would work wonderfully.
Also, big iron pro clusters rely on server management, monitoring and such; features built into only high-end server equipment. Pros would shy away from using this for a major cluster project for that reason alone.
All you need is a positive non-zero probablity for something to eventually happen. We have no idea how amny times life almost formed and then died before it finally succeeded.
Not quite. There are limits to chance. There is a number which represents the number of electrons in the universe. If something has odds of 1 in that number, it is considered impossible.
The 'monkeys on typewriters ending up with war and peace' flies in the face of reason, IMHO, and yet it is a crutch and fundamental pillar of evolutionary theory, attractive because one can always simply require the disbeliever to roll the dice a trillion more times or so.
For those who think I'm rationalizing equally with my limited 100 year lifespan perspective, consider this: they have never discovered fossilized remains of an inter-species mutation; e.g., a creature evolutionarily between A and B. With all the dice rolling and obvious failures along the way, one would expect to find a whole lot of these, no?
And, the earth has not had an infinite amount of time to roll the dice. It is of finite age. Recent work shows the earth as 5 billion years old, not counting for the time it required to cool. Fossil evidence shows life emerging 400 million years ago. This is not enough time to go from scratch to our planet's situation today. Even if you took all the carbon in the universe, put it on the earth, allowed it to react at the most rapid rate possible AND left it for a billion years, the odds of ending up with one functional protein are 1 in 10exp60.
...from what you believe.
If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being.
On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so.
I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in. Curious? Ask God for help, he won't turn you down.
I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the <gasp> Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.
...from what you believe. If one wants to believe that chance and pure science resulted in what we are today, one can find a way to do so, by believing that the universe's matter spontaneously appeared as proposed by Hawking, and that somehow our earth was precisely as close to the sun as it has to be (slightly either way and we wouldn't be here), and that lightning struck the right soup (despite that these experiments no longer stand up to scrutiny), somehow bringing order from disorder (flying in the face of everything else in our entropically increasing universe) in the perfect, chemically left-handed way, and that given enough time (and people have shown that indeed, we have not had enough time!) mutations combined with competition led to not only improvements but revolutions in life forms leading up to a singular, particularly unique human being. On the other hand, if you believe in a loving universal creator, you will see the hand of a brilliant designer at work in our world. It will make sense to you how animals somehow know what food not to eat, why 'Occam's Razor' doesn't apply leading us to an entirely plant and insect based world, and you won't be suprised that constellations have ancient names whose origin is unknown yet points to Biblical prophecy. As you can probably guess, I fall in this latter category. It's not because the church told me so, and it's certainly not because I don't like science, it's because God told me so. I have also learned that evidence nor arguments will not sway people from one way to the other. As an engineer, this is sad, since I naturally gravitate towards this approach. Though yes, I enjoy reading about how more and more even secular scientists are 'out of ideas' on explaining away God, and reading honest looks by Christians and the same (e.g. The Case for Faith), I don't expect many people to change their beliefs because of it. People will not (and cannot, really) release their core denial of a creator, that is, unless the creator helps them and they let the help in. I know how difficult this is to accept for most people, but all I can say is to give it a shot, stripping away everything non-God apart from it (which leaves you really with the (gasp) Bible...). And then, you may finally see how silly it is to think that electrified chemicals and enough time led to the creation of the singular ball of pure creational brilliance in our universe.
One thing CA can't do is raise our property taxes. We revolted a while back with proposition 13. There's a law preventing them from raising them more than 1% a year. I think we may need another revolt.
This was the modus operandi for a long time for brick & mortar companies with .com operations. The problem was, if the companies are truly separate (as required to escape taxes) then they can't work together - e.g. buy a book online, pick it up at the store. Or return something at the store you bought online, etc. Plus, even without these headaches, the great state of California would find a way to rain on such obvious acts of 'inequality'
Rendering works great for Grid, because rendering requires very little communication to occur per processing cycle. Other apps, like fluid flow analysis and such require computing nodes to do a lot of talking per computational cycle, making them unsuitable for grid.
The money would get burnt and they'd end up with one cool new feature. Think about it: do you think it'd take > $1 Bil to come up with a new OS that would eclipse Linux? They're simply unable to leverage their money. Big huge companies like Microsoft only innovate in response to threatening developments from other companies *when the direction is clear*.
Same phenomena as the new Star Wars movies: when you're lean and hungry, you take risks and the drive for acceptance leads to excellence (orig SW films). But when the pressure is off, and you can do whatever you want without risk of making or breaking yourself, you end up with Episodes I and II, whose only redeeming feature was the desire of the special effects team to achieve.
The one tricky thing about HUD is that it requires special glass to make it work. I have a Corvette with a HUD, and sure 'nuff, it says HUD on the windsheild label. Hope it doesn't break!
Had to laugh at your 'clock puzzle' answer as it's exactly what I'd do - the pragmatic approach. Maybe they were concerned that if you ignored the missing screws you were just delaying a problem down the road. On the other hand, this _is_ Microsoft, no?
Bravo on your accomplishments, BTW.
When I read about these attempts to come up with the perfect language to handle variations of pentagons, it reminds me of the classic 'Bert and Ernie' skit where Bert assigns Ernie the task of cleaning a pile of toys in their apartment.
After Bert's departure, Ernie decides he must first come up with a taxonomy system - first, he'll pick up the red things. Hmmm, the only red toy is a fire truck. So he puts it down. Ok, pick up the toys with wheels. Same result - only a fire truck. What about the toys with ladders? Still one toy, a fire truck.
By this time Bert, enraged, returns to find that Ernie has accomplished nothing. We can learn many things from this, but mainly...
Getting the job done is what counts, not how cleanly you do it. Devise mechanisms when it really helps get the job done, else risk making the mechanism a job in and of itself.
--matt
The states are doing this because they need money, not because it's right or wrong.
Whenever you hear the word 'fairness' or 'level playing field', immediately shoot the person who said it. 'Fairness' is a word used by people that use sympathy to get what they want from someone else who has it.
Well, the good news is you may see a whole lot of people moving their e-commerce sites to Oregon...
...makes you stronger. Our country typically makes its mark with innovation. Then the Japanese perfect what we do, the Europeans do it with style for a premium price, then the rest of Asia makes it out of plastic for $0.10.
We therefore cannot stop. I see this trend of outsourcing as a cattle prod to create something which indeed only my talents can accomplish (for now) or which at least gives me a few years of lead time.
Corporate America reacts to what tries to kill it. Part of the reason they scramble to outsource everything *is to keep alive* in the face of hostile unions, oppressive taxes, lawsuits and health care costs. Thus they hire people that adapt to our current climate, who in turn lead their companies to Enron-dom. Thomas Edison is the *last* person you'd see running GE today...
Also, what can kill others makes you stronger. Our country's military and ability to bail people out gives us political and therefore economic advantages. People lucky enough to live in America enjoy this advantage.
I think the point was, by hiring enough 'local face people' customers will *interact* with local nationals, but that doesn't mean that the hoards of programmers actually doing the work will be locals.
I want to agree with you, but over there there's a big vacuum of poverty that will absorb decent pay for a long time before major wealth envy sets in.