Sounds like your dad might benefit from some time sitting in front of HD.
In what way will realizing he "needs" a much more expensive TV benefit him?
I agree, once you've seen sports in HD, you don't want to go back. But once you've adjusted to HD, you don't really enjoy them more. You just enjoy them less if you don't have HD.
Save the money, and treat yourself and dad to game tickets.
Although I agree with you, no one is forced into using these technologies
That's only true if you are talking about web site operators. If you are a user, you are forced to to use whatever the web sites you use demands, or go without. No flash? No Youtube.
The cost of a lack of standardization falls on the user. It's not the web sites that have a mish mash of proprietary technologies installed, its the user. Any stability or security costs from this situation are borne by the user.
Really,there isn't much justification for Flash any longer. Really,the biggest value it has is that it's a legal way to obtain patented video codecs.
Well, I don't think a public servant ought to be pilloried for thinking, even about a bad idea. It's not thinking that is the problem, it's acting without thinking.
"Conceiving" that somebody might "envision" using this for general use is hardly a ringing endorsement. It seems to me to be a self-evident truth. If this thing is in specialized use, then in some future scenario there will be a suggestion to put it into general use. Probably that future scenario will be like 9/11 -- an environment where people are demanding action, not reflection.
So, if the technology exists, then I think we ought to consider using for everybody. I expect we'll discover all kinds of reasons to reject the idea, which will be good to know when the demand is to do something, anything.
If an administration is foolish enough to put this into effect except in the aftermath of a 9/11 type event, then it'll deserve what it gets.
I don't think it is so far fetched for the FAA to want to know about this technology. Wanting to know about it doesn't necessarily mean they intend to mandate it for general use. In fact the letter mentions what occurred to me to be some obvious legitimate applications of the technology, such as prisoner transport.
In all seriousness, this does seem like more government waste...unless Apple is donating them or giving them an obscene discount, there are far cheaper laptops that will achieve the same goal.
Research and development does things that would be wasteful on the production line.
The question isn't whether laptops are "the answer", although ironically the need of reporters to cater to short attention spans often twist stories in that direction. The question is whether achievement can be boosted or other costs cut by using laptops.
If you could achieve a measurable boost in achievement by giving every student a laptop, and the grand scheme of things this would be money well spent. Math skills in particular build upon prior years' skills learned, and the reason many reasonably intelligent people are "no good at math" is because they fell behind at some point and never caught up because their problems were not diagnosed precisely.
Of course, nearly everything can work in education, given favorable circumstances. But it doesn't hurt to try new things, as long as you don't expect a magically cure all.
This is one of those ideas that has a very reasonable justification, but can go badly wrong if the policy becomes more takes precedence over the goals it is supporting.
This decision is very simple in principle: you choose the tool for a project that benefits the organization the most. In practice, it is often more difficult than making the decision by top-down fiat.
When I was a team leader, I always looked at projects for the "take away". The "take away" is the thing you got from the project that made you better on the next one, that allowed you to quote lower or to make your proposal stand out. The key idea is this: you should learn from every project and improve.
You don't learn anything if every project is done exactly the same way, with exactly the same tools and methods, and with code cut and pasted from the last project. But you don't learn much if you do every project in a different language and platform using different methodologies each month. This is so blindingly obvious that it hardly needs discussion, except that this is the kind of obvious thing everyone dismisses as obvious, then goes on to blatantly ignore.
Organizations go dysfunctional when people get stuck in black and white, narrowly paradigmatic thinking. Each end of the spectrum has a perfectly valid paradigm that shows its position is the correct one. The problem of real world management is striking an effective balance, a policy that is disciplined, but flexible.
Yes, you want to steer developers into using the same techniques and tools, so that you maximize your depth of knowledge in those things. But from time to time you should try things differently. If you are a Java shop, you might try a C# project, so you understand what the competitors are using. It may also encourage you to look at new ways of packaging your Java code, say as web services, which brings new knowledge to the organization that will be valuable even on other java projects. No competent Java programmer is going to be flummoxed if he is called upon to contribute to a C# project, especially if that project uses the same design philosophy (probably more important than platform) as the projects he has been working on.
It's also the case that inflexible standardization can sometimes make the learning curve worse and the expenses higher.
Suppose you are standardized on SQL Server 2005 as your database, and you have a project that requires storing and manipulating map data. SQL Server 2005 doesn't have primitive types or operators for geographic data. You can create your own idiosyncratic ways of doing things (expensive and nonstandard). You buy an entirely new platform from ESRI that stores geographic objects in standard RDBMS tables, which means (a) buying more products (b) learning to administer another platform and (c) using whole new set of APIs. Or you can do the project in Postgres or Oracle or even SQL Server 2008, in which case you are just using the same old standard SQL with a few simple extensions.
The brainless form of standardization in this case is to use the same product, then have to create or buy new products and platforms as a consequence. The more intelligent form of standardization is to stick to the techniques that you have been using, and know to work, which sometime requires a product that isn't your standard one. It might be reasonable to choose the former, but only if you understand this is actually a more experimental approach.
The platform choice should be guided by a number of principles, which should be able to overrule the policy:
(1) The project must succeed. (2) The company must profit. (3) Future support for the platform must be assured. (4) The project should have "take away" potential. (5) The company should continually learn and grow its capabilities, so it can respond to technological and competitive change.
This last principle is important, and the degree to which it applies de
at least 20 years ago, I thought, hey, with the density and speed of transistors these days, and with RISC being popular, why not go all the way and make chip with literally hundreds of (wait for it..) Z80 cpu's?
Well, you were late if it were twenty years ago. Thinking Machine's CM-1 had 64K processors by the mid 80s. They weren't Z80s, they were actually even simpler processors that worked on one bit of the problem at a time.
Are you really saying there's no risk to Google's innovation?
I'm not sure how you get there from what I said. The driving strategic factor behind acquiring Yahoo is constraining Google.
MS looks at Google, and sees its younger self. MS was built around the desktop OS cash cow. Having a cash cow means having room to fail. MS often failed, but used its money to keep strategic projects alive until they could kill the competition. Google might not have the swaggering, mercilessly brutal image that MS in the bad old days did, but make no mistake, they're an aggressive competitor. Worse yet from MS's standpoint, Google has its own cash cow, and MS knows exactly how a cash cow can be used to enter new markets.
Why oh why is Google mucking around with office suites? Because with a cash cow, it's play money to them. As long as the money rolls in, nobody is going to complain. If online office suites turns into a big business well, jolly good, but they can afford to chalk it up as brainstorming. On the darker side, Office suites are a very serious business to Microsoft; it's one of Microsoft's cash cows and one of the pillars of its strategic power. It must be maddening to have a dominant player in the search market mess around in their core business.
Over the years, many MS competitors lost their ability to innovate because they were obsessed with MS, and now Google is doing the same to them. Is it intentional? You decide.
I think there's a similar effect that explains the "whooshing" sound you hear when you watch shooting stars.
For years, scientists have believed that the sound was a figment of human imagination, even though many people would swear to hearing it. The problem is that the meteors are miles and miles overhead, but the sound is heard simultaneously. Now I've personally heard the whoosh of a bolide during a the massive meteor shower, and I'd be prepared to swear it was simultaneous with the flash of the meteor trail, even though I know that sound could not travel that fast, even if it were a mere few thousand feet.
It's even more psychologically convincing because the sound isn't really a "whoosh"; it's not what you'd expect. It's more like the sound of slurping the last bit of milkshake with a straw, listened to through a long PVC pipe.
I read a few years ago that physicists found an accoustic effect created by the low frequency electrmagnetic energy working on water droplets of a certain size. This would make sense because when I did hear the "whoosh", I was lying on my back on the dewy grass. I've also read that wireframe glasses can account for the simultaneous sound.
I've been saying this all along. Tinfoil hats,and Faraday cage like devices in general, can't be relied upon unless they're grounded.
In many cases, you'll get significant attenuation without grounding, as in the case of foil shields for protecting passport RFIDs, but grounding, even imperfect grounding, would improve shielding tremendously.
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe. Then you replace your floors with carbon impregnated panels, and for the final touch connect them to a six foot copper rod driven into the earth.
A company with Microsoft's resources should be able to come up with a better business plan than a buy-in. I think they're impatient, for some reason not yet disclosed.
It's all about Google.
If I were an MS strategist, Google's search business wouldn't scare me. If you lost sleep every time somebody made money doing something technological you'd go mad.
I'd be a little more concerned with Google's foray into online office suites, but I'd be fairly confident that wasn't a serious problem in the short to mid term.
The thing I'd be freaked about is Google's casual way of generating APIs for its popular services. That hits Microsoft where it lives.
This is a relatively low cost, low risk game for Google. Nobody expects them to provide soup-to-nuts service for all your IT needs; they're just throwing API shit against the wall. If it sticks, good for Google, bad for MS; if t doesn't, MS feels no pain, but neither does Google. It's just another interesting idea from Google.
This is like assymetrical warfare: MS is the conventional force, and Google is the guerilla force. Google chooses when and where to stike, and if it fails it doesn't cost them much. Tactical failures can even be strategic victories if they provoke a costly response. From MS's standpoint, it is necessary to limit Google's ability to strike when and where it will, and get away without much loss no matter the outcome. One thing you can do is start to poach on Google's engineering talent; taking people out of a team is disruptive. Another thing you can do is try to hurt them in places where they live, so you want them so focused at keeping their ad revenue flowing that they can't do anything else.
Google's strategic weakness is that it doesn't provide full solutions. It is an interesting technology company, not a product company. That's good for MS because once Google (or anybody else) provides a complete replacement for Office, Exchange and Sharepoint, bad things are going to happen to MS.
Gaining control of Yahoo makes sense for several reasons. First, it keeps them from cooperating with Google, which is the opposite of what MS wants. MS wants Google to have to work harder to get ad revenue, not less. Second, Yahoo is a product company, like MS; it could be the first to offer the complete, MS free product stack. Equally bad, Yahoo could goad Google into upgrading its products so they look more like a viable replacement for MS to enterprise customers.
The picture MS would prefer is Google struggling to maintain ad revenues, and facing a steep uphill battle in product adoption and API mindshare when it looks at MS dominated product areas.
Throwing everything out and starting from scratch is the favorite gambit of armchair strategists everywhere, but it doesn't gain you any customer loyalty.
Microsoft's biggest virtue as a company -- speaking from the customer's standpoint -- has always been predictability. It doesn't mean they make the best of anything. Only people who have drunk the kook-aid think that. It doesn't mean that they do what the customers would wish them to do. It means that they consistently did things in a way that the people who have the most invested in products could live with. They didn't leave enterprise customers high and dry, or fill them with uncertainty about the future of technologies they'd put a lot of money and time into.
Microsoft taking a clean sheet approach to its core business negates precisely its one advantage to customers.
The real problem is that Microsoft is addicted to growth, and since it's core businesses can't produce any more growth, it has lost focus by pursuing synergy. At some point, this lack of focus is going to kill the cash cows.
Avoiding that means confronting the truth that the ride shareholders got in the 80s and 90s is over. They need to become a mature company, like Coca Cola, with popular, reliable selling products, that rewards shareholders with regular and generous dividends rather than explosive stock growth, and which tinkers with new products that fall mostly within its area of expertise. What Microsoft is doing in, say the entertainment world is like Coke trying to use its soft drink power to become a dominant player in the fast food restaurant field and sports arenas.
You can easily imagine a company that delivers reliable, regular profits, focused on the things that make Microsoft valuable, sustainably milking the value of a dominant market position by delivering products people can live with at a price that discourages new competitors. The problem is imagining a transition to that future that isn't horribly traumatic. Microsoft would have been better off, in the long term, if it had been broken up.
One of the things it takes to be good at anything non-trivial is attention to detail -- lots of it, over a long time.
You don't find nerds becoming bar fighters because that's a pasttime for the mentally impulsive and physically gifted. Studying footwork, tactics, achieving physical conditioning you need to box or grapple takes dedication.
I don't think it's ridiculous at all. Anyone trained in any martial art (not just eastern, count boxing, fencing, etc. as well) will probably agree.
Keeping your senses and your ability to think during a fight is anything but trivial, and requires a lot of training.
Most regular people would probably have trouble just remembering how the pieces move after a few minutes of fighting, with all the adrenaline pumping and your whole body in "I have no time for thinking" mode.
Perhaps ironically for a geek, I don't know what it's like to be good at chess, but I do know what it's like to be good at fighting.
A lot of intelligent people aren't good at fighting because they overanalyze a fight. It's helpful to watch other people fight and analyze, but in a fight you have to be in the moment. I knew an architect who was very physically powerful, but never able to fight well because he tried to think strategically during a fight. He was always thinking, if I do this, then he'll do that, then I'll do this etc. A cunning fighter is one who reacts in the moment, in a way that is both appropriate and unpredictable.
"Thinking" in a fight -- if it can be called that -- is not sequential, nor is it analytical. It's more wholistic and intuitive. Even a swift reasoner cannot project future scenarios fast enough to keep up with the present, and being in the moment is critical. The reason the average person can't remember the details of a fight is that he isn't paying attention. He's thinking about the past ("that punch hurt") or the future ("I'm going to get murdered.") An experienced fighter is aware of every detail without being stuck on any one.
Although I can't say from experience, I wonder if this means being good at chess isn't a little like being good at sparring. My faults as a chess player are like the faults of my architect friend as a fighter; although I have formidable analytical skills, they aren't a match for somebody who moves with the swift assurance of being familiar with the scenario. I spend too much time dealing with the shambles of my "strategy" to take advantage of the opportunities my opponent's moves create.
As far as silliness is concerned, all sports are silly if you look at them the right way. Chess and barehand fighting are individual sports pared down to the minimally interesting essentials: two individuals striving to gain advantage over each other. Perhaps arm wresting is more basic, but not sufficiently complex to invite tactical analysis.
In any case, Chess Boxing is clearly a sport tailor made for Russia.
Well, maybe the boss likes things to look tidier than they really need to be so he can do a VIP tour at the drop of a hat. This looks more like the workshops of a few genius inventors I've known. They simply scale things differently; they don't have different teams of engineers and fabricators working on different pieces, they do everything in one place and move back and forth between different aspects of the project.
Granted, the modular approach to scaling a project (split off a team for every major problem) is more reliable, but it's not the way you do things if you want to do something two or three orders of magnitude cheaper than anybody's done in before. Now if I were going to be on the maiden flight of a suborbital space plane, and had a choice, I'd far prefer to do it on a twenty or thirty billion dollar aircraft from Lockheed Martin. But if I had to do it on plane with a total project cost well under 100 million, I'd say Scaled probably knows how to do that kind of project better.
The thing about CLIs is that they do anything you want them to instantly, if you know what you're doing.
What you are saying amounts to this: speaking a language is more flexible than communicating by drawing pictures. That much should be obvious. What isn't so obvious is this is what makes being able to communicate in pictures so useful in many situations. The flexibility that gives language is power is sometimes a burden, particularly when communicating about simple concrete things (or in the case of computers things that can be represented by metaphors embodied in representations of such).
If you were dropped in a country where you didn't speak the language, you'd find the ability to draw or to mime concrete things or simple metaphors extremely valuable. One of the consequences of the power of language is that it takes a long time to figure out which of the infinite variety of equally good, arbitrarily chosen constructs do what. At the other extreme, when speaking with other fluent speakers of a language, pictures are still sometimes very helpful in clearing things up, although given a choice you'd give up drawing before you gave up speaking.
Years ago, when people were seriously debating which were better, GUIs or CLIs, I used to give this counterexample to the idea that this a reasonable dichotomy to even consider. Suppose you have a folder full of files, and you want to make a copy all the ones starting with "85TAX", because that's how you named your 1985 tax documents. This is very simple to do with a CLI, but quite tedious with a GUI if there are more than a handful of them. On the other hand, suppose you didn't have the good fortune to have such a linguistic handle on the files you wanted. You just wanted to grab a dozen or so files that in your mind you knew were relevant to some task. In that case dealing with the expressive power of language is a hindrance. The simplicity of the atomic operation of shift clicking each file beats the power of language to express infinite kinds of relationships, because there is nothing manifest to exercise that power upon.
I hope you realize that you are reasoning emotionally, not analytically.
The target of your polemic are (a) hippies with (b) money who (c) care about rare birds and (d) don't care about poor people. Just because somebody demonstrating caring about rare birds doesn't mean he doesn't demonstrate caring about people in other circumstances. That's an assumption you are making for polemical purposes, so that you can brand anybody who disagrees with you on an issue as a hypocrite.
Also, the implication is that anybody who has anything to say should just STFU if you think there's an issue that's more important. It's a BS position, because there's always a more important issue you can scrounge up. If you want to have any credibility arguing this position, you'd better show that you've dedicated your life to assisting the poor.
You can't be a serious thinker about issues and be a single issue person. The world doesn't work that way. Sometimes it's time to stand up for the environment, and sometimes it's time to stand up for the downtrodden. And quite often doing one is doing the other.
If you knew anything about environmentalism other than what you've learned from right wing bullshitters, you'd know that environmental problems fall disproportionately on the poor. Who breaths the most pollution? The poor. Who suffers the most from climate change or short sighted, locally focused water management? The poor.
The middle class don't do so great either, under the rape the environment philosophy.
But if you're wealthy, you get the lion's share of the economic benefits of that philosophy. Using that money, can simply move away from problems. Move to the outer suburbs, and buy a vacation home in Vail. If you despoil your native country, you can always go to Costa Rica to stay at a marvelous eco-friendly resort.
It's not that I have anything against the wealthy in general. I've known quite a few of them, and a lot of them are forward looking, socially responsible problem solvers. But this argument that environmentalists ignore the poor is just ignorant. It's worse than ignorant. It's willfully ignorant.
You don't give a shit about the poor, you're just exploiting them to make a rhetorical point. No person sincerely interested in the poor takes the attitude that nobody can have any other priorities but the poor.
Well, I used to run into huge arguments with my old boss over this kind of reasoning. When you are doing product positioning, you can't use your own experience and preference as a guide, unless you plan to sell to exclusively to people who have exactly your own background and personality.
You don't print very much -- nor do I. But if you were a sales guy, you'd be doing lots of quotes; granted many come by email but you often need it "in writing". If you were a lawyer, you'd need to print contracts. While we need print a lot less than we did ten years ago, people still print things like newsletters, menus, or lost cat notices.
If you've trodden on the Office upgrade treadmill, and so far as you know you will probably continue to tread on it, then this doesn't really all that different; either way you shell out to MS over time, just in smaller, more frequent increments. Since there probably isn't much incremental value MS can add to Office, they're probably going to have to charge less for upgrades, so over time things even out. But cash today is worth more than cash tommorow -- sometimes a lot more.
Imagine you are a startup, and the difference between rental and buying is such that you break even on buying in three years and lose money in four. That's hardly worth worrying about in a stable business, but it's a huge plus when you are watching your burn rate.
Well, because people would rather have their house walls aligned with the street than with the sun, and streets are not always aligned with the sun. Putting a building obliquely on a lot to take advantage of natural light is a very architecty kind of thing to do. Most people's houses are boxes for holding their stuff, as George Carlin once observed.
Somebody else mentioned light pipes, which are not particularly hard to install since most of the domes are designed to fit between the roof rafters. In fact, cutting out a section of roof rafter and putting in a jack rafter isn't really that hard, although sticking your head through a hole you've just cut in your roof can be a bit sobering when you realize that whatever else happens you've got to get whatever you're installing framed up and flashed before the next rain. So personally, I wouldn't hesitate to go to a larger size because you don't want to do any framing. The fiddly part is the flashing.
Of course it's sensible to design your house to use natural light, and light pipes are the natural next step. However, you end up with a house that is not lined up with the houses on either side, and appears to be hosting a miniature UFO invasion. But, as I reminded my wife when we were house hunting, you spend more of your time in your house potentially looking out than outside looking at it. If you're a geek, you're not supposed to be aware of what the neighbors think, much less care.
Well the thing about "peak oil" is that nobody can say for sure. The "peak" is not wholly a physical constraint. Suppose we've hit "peak" in 2008. This means in 2009 we pump a bit less than in 2008, and probably in 2010 we pump a bit less than in 2009. Well, can't some of that 2010 oil be pumped in 2009? Sure. We are not physically constrained from pumping more than we did in 2008, we're economically constrained.
And reserves never run out, although our extraction from them may drop to near zero. They'll just become economically impractical to use for energy. Imagine a point in the future where the only oil reserves left yield 0 net energy: it costs as much in energy to get a barrel of oil out of the ground as is contained in a barrel of oil. Will anybody bother? Possibly, but the oil will be extracted for uses other than energy.
There are four variables we have to consider: (1)the physical reserves of oil, (2)the economic value of a unit of oil, (3)the world economy, (4) changes in business practices/technology. They're all bound up together in complex ways, but most people only take into account the first two.
People who think this way, think that the high prices signal peak oil. I don't think this is right. As long as oil prices continue to rise, I don't think it is likely that production will decline very much. As long as prices are rising, it seems more likely that production will be sustained, or even inch up a bit. The real nightmare scenario isn't rising prices, its when prices are unable to rise any more. Unless something has happened to make oil reserves more abundant at a given price, or unless some substitute for oil has been found, oil prices failing to rise as supplies dwindle would indicate the world economy is reacting to oil scarcity by contracting.
"Peak Oil" makes things sound simpler than they are. In point of fact, peak oil isn't a calamity in itself. The question is why. If oil is declining because the world is turning to cheap nuclear/solar/conservation/whatever, peak oil is a good thing. The problem is that we're in a very complex time; the global credit crisis is creating economic uncertainty, but prices for oil remain high. That's worrying. I expect we'll get some short to mid term price relief for a number of reasons, but the current situation suggests a lack of resiliency with respect to future fluctuations in the petroleum market.
It's all about time to adapt. Detroit new higher gas prices were going to make people shift to smaller cars. They just didn't expe ct it to be this year. Americans for years have been whining that we can't adapt because our economy and geography mean we use more energy, but in fact that's precisely why we need to be more forward looking than less energy dependent economies.
With respect to the rare earth problem, the same thing applies. We'll never run out of them, they'll just become too costly to extract for the things we currently use them for. In fact, given time, business practices can adapt to the increased scarcity. Right now, we dig materials out of the ground and throw them into landfills. Recycling of course is an obvious answer. If neodynium or gadolinium become fabulously expensive, then it makes sense to step up recycling of those materials.
One idea that makes a great deal of sense is to accelerate recycling of valuable materials by leasing them. Using leasing to encourage recycling has been an idea promoted by environmental thinkers for some years now. Imagine a TV has $500 of gallium in it. First off, that means it becomes very expensive to buy that TV. Furthermore, it might well cost more than $500 to recover the gallium from the TV, so that valuable material goes into the landfill.
Now imagine that the factory leases the TV to the user. At the end of the lease, the factory is going to get the TV back. They could throw out $500 of gallium, but it would make more sense
Civil Engineers choose their major with the idea that they are going to build bridges when they graduate, but its a decade or more before anybody entrusts them with that. What they do when they get out is more like figuring out how many gallons of paint it will take to paint the traffic lines on the bridge.
People coming out of a CS program aren't good for much right away. There are exceptions of course. Developing software is like music; anybody can do it if they apply themselves, and after a while with the right coaching and effort they can become passable. But then you've got Mozart, who was composing at age 5. If you were Mozart, you'd probably know it. The fact that you say you aren't good at programming only means you're more self-aware than others. Very few people coming out of school are good, although very few people know how not-good they are. It takes a year or two of seasoning to get up to speed.
I'd suggest you don't worry about what you are good and not good at yet. You don't really know at this point. You should look into things you think you aren't good at -- you might surprise yourself.
I'd look for a good employer. One doing interesting things, with happy employees. Then learn the kinds of things on the job your employer needs. You didn't think you were done learning did you?
Well, I think the GP means "thing" in the sense of "concrete artifact" rather than "things that can be aggregated into an artifact with a certain hypothetical precision."
"Calibration" of course isn't exactly the perfect term when applied to the standard itself. The current mass standard isn't really "calibrated"; sub-standards are calibrated against it. It may have been tweaked to produce the minimum error in the standards previously in use, but it's not quite the same thing.
In this case, since the standard is really a theoretical model, the issue is practical. There's no practical way to count the atoms. In order to calibrate your sub-standards, you need an artifact to calibrate them against. The artifact would be used just like the old standard was used. Almost nothing would change on a day to day basis.
I'm guessing there are two practical advantages. The first is that you have a recipe by which you can create a second kg artifact. While this is a bit like having two watches, still being able to recreate the second artifact would be helpful if the original one became unavailable. I also imagine that having a second artifact could serve as a kind of control; you'd compare the two artifacts to each other -- naturally they won't be perfectly matched. Then you store the control artifact safely. If later on you suspect something is wrong with your first artifact, you take the second one out for testing. In the worst case, you build a new set of spheres using the same or an improved recipe. You can't do that if the standard is defined in terms of an individual artifact.
On the other hand, a standard which is defined in a theoretically reproducible way would be practically useless if there was no way to generate an artifact of sufficient precision to serve as if it were the new reference object. You'd know what a kg is, but you wouldn't have a practical way of checking the mass of affordably machined weights against it.
So being able to produce a stable reference artifact of a certain precision is an important test of the practicality of the standard. If you can't do it with silicon, you've got to use some other material. Presumably, either a platinum object of the required precision cannot be made yet, or the stability of a platinum artifact is suspect, or silicon is just as good as platinum, but a lot cheaper.
In any case, you can't "eat it too" until you "have your cake".
Slashdot Mirror
In what way will realizing he "needs" a much more expensive TV benefit him?
I agree, once you've seen sports in HD, you don't want to go back. But once you've adjusted to HD, you don't really enjoy them more. You just enjoy them less if you don't have HD.
Save the money, and treat yourself and dad to game tickets.
That's only true if you are talking about web site operators. If you are a user, you are forced to to use whatever the web sites you use demands, or go without. No flash? No Youtube.
The cost of a lack of standardization falls on the user. It's not the web sites that have a mish mash of proprietary technologies installed, its the user. Any stability or security costs from this situation are borne by the user.
Really,there isn't much justification for Flash any longer. Really,the biggest value it has is that it's a legal way to obtain patented video codecs.
Well, I don't think a public servant ought to be pilloried for thinking, even about a bad idea. It's not thinking that is the problem, it's acting without thinking.
"Conceiving" that somebody might "envision" using this for general use is hardly a ringing endorsement. It seems to me to be a self-evident truth. If this thing is in specialized use, then in some future scenario there will be a suggestion to put it into general use. Probably that future scenario will be like 9/11 -- an environment where people are demanding action, not reflection.
So, if the technology exists, then I think we ought to consider using for everybody. I expect we'll discover all kinds of reasons to reject the idea, which will be good to know when the demand is to do something, anything.
If an administration is foolish enough to put this into effect except in the aftermath of a 9/11 type event, then it'll deserve what it gets.
TFS liks to a blog post which itself links to part of a letter (page two, so we don't even get to see the whole letter).
Well, WRT page 1, I used my superior hacking skills to alter the URL http://www.lamperdlesslethal.com/news/upload/pg2HomelandSecurity7_06.pdf to http://www.lamperdlesslethal.com/news/upload/pg1HomelandSecurity7_06.pdf.
I don't think it is so far fetched for the FAA to want to know about this technology. Wanting to know about it doesn't necessarily mean they intend to mandate it for general use. In fact the letter mentions what occurred to me to be some obvious legitimate applications of the technology, such as prisoner transport.
In all seriousness, this does seem like more government waste...unless Apple is donating them or giving them an obscene discount, there are far cheaper laptops that will achieve the same goal.
Research and development does things that would be wasteful on the production line.
The question isn't whether laptops are "the answer", although ironically the need of reporters to cater to short attention spans often twist stories in that direction. The question is whether achievement can be boosted or other costs cut by using laptops.
If you could achieve a measurable boost in achievement by giving every student a laptop, and the grand scheme of things this would be money well spent. Math skills in particular build upon prior years' skills learned, and the reason many reasonably intelligent people are "no good at math" is because they fell behind at some point and never caught up because their problems were not diagnosed precisely.
Of course, nearly everything can work in education, given favorable circumstances. But it doesn't hurt to try new things, as long as you don't expect a magically cure all.
This is one of those ideas that has a very reasonable justification, but can go badly wrong if the policy becomes more takes precedence over the goals it is supporting.
This decision is very simple in principle: you choose the tool for a project that benefits the organization the most. In practice, it is often more difficult than making the decision by top-down fiat.
When I was a team leader, I always looked at projects for the "take away". The "take away" is the thing you got from the project that made you better on the next one, that allowed you to quote lower or to make your proposal stand out. The key idea is this: you should learn from every project and improve.
You don't learn anything if every project is done exactly the same way, with exactly the same tools and methods, and with code cut and pasted from the last project. But you don't learn much if you do every project in a different language and platform using different methodologies each month. This is so blindingly obvious that it hardly needs discussion, except that this is the kind of obvious thing everyone dismisses as obvious, then goes on to blatantly ignore.
Organizations go dysfunctional when people get stuck in black and white, narrowly paradigmatic thinking. Each end of the spectrum has a perfectly valid paradigm that shows its position is the correct one. The problem of real world management is striking an effective balance, a policy that is disciplined, but flexible.
Yes, you want to steer developers into using the same techniques and tools, so that you maximize your depth of knowledge in those things. But from time to time you should try things differently. If you are a Java shop, you might try a C# project, so you understand what the competitors are using. It may also encourage you to look at new ways of packaging your Java code, say as web services, which brings new knowledge to the organization that will be valuable even on other java projects. No competent Java programmer is going to be flummoxed if he is called upon to contribute to a C# project, especially if that project uses the same design philosophy (probably more important than platform) as the projects he has been working on.
It's also the case that inflexible standardization can sometimes make the learning curve worse and the expenses higher.
Suppose you are standardized on SQL Server 2005 as your database, and you have a project that requires storing and manipulating map data. SQL Server 2005 doesn't have primitive types or operators for geographic data. You can create your own idiosyncratic ways of doing things (expensive and nonstandard). You buy an entirely new platform from ESRI that stores geographic objects in standard RDBMS tables, which means (a) buying more products (b) learning to administer another platform and (c) using whole new set of APIs. Or you can do the project in Postgres or Oracle or even SQL Server 2008, in which case you are just using the same old standard SQL with a few simple extensions.
The brainless form of standardization in this case is to use the same product, then have to create or buy new products and platforms as a consequence. The more intelligent form of standardization is to stick to the techniques that you have been using, and know to work, which sometime requires a product that isn't your standard one. It might be reasonable to choose the former, but only if you understand this is actually a more experimental approach.
The platform choice should be guided by a number of principles, which should be able to overrule the policy:
(1) The project must succeed.
(2) The company must profit.
(3) Future support for the platform must be assured.
(4) The project should have "take away" potential.
(5) The company should continually learn and grow its capabilities, so it can respond to technological and competitive change.
This last principle is important, and the degree to which it applies de
at least 20 years ago, I thought, hey, with the density and speed of transistors these days, and with RISC being popular, why not go all the way and make chip with literally hundreds of (wait for it..) Z80 cpu's?
Well, you were late if it were twenty years ago. Thinking Machine's CM-1 had 64K processors by the mid 80s. They weren't Z80s, they were actually even simpler processors that worked on one bit of the problem at a time.
Are you really saying there's no risk to Google's innovation?
I'm not sure how you get there from what I said. The driving strategic factor behind acquiring Yahoo is constraining Google.
MS looks at Google, and sees its younger self. MS was built around the desktop OS cash cow. Having a cash cow means having room to fail. MS often failed, but used its money to keep strategic projects alive until they could kill the competition. Google might not have the swaggering, mercilessly brutal image that MS in the bad old days did, but make no mistake, they're an aggressive competitor. Worse yet from MS's standpoint, Google has its own cash cow, and MS knows exactly how a cash cow can be used to enter new markets.
Why oh why is Google mucking around with office suites? Because with a cash cow, it's play money to them. As long as the money rolls in, nobody is going to complain. If online office suites turns into a big business well, jolly good, but they can afford to chalk it up as brainstorming. On the darker side, Office suites are a very serious business to Microsoft; it's one of Microsoft's cash cows and one of the pillars of its strategic power. It must be maddening to have a dominant player in the search market mess around in their core business.
Over the years, many MS competitors lost their ability to innovate because they were obsessed with MS, and now Google is doing the same to them. Is it intentional? You decide.
I think there's a similar effect that explains the "whooshing" sound you hear when you watch shooting stars.
For years, scientists have believed that the sound was a figment of human imagination, even though many people would swear to hearing it. The problem is that the meteors are miles and miles overhead, but the sound is heard simultaneously. Now I've personally heard the whoosh of a bolide during a the massive meteor shower, and I'd be prepared to swear it was simultaneous with the flash of the meteor trail, even though I know that sound could not travel that fast, even if it were a mere few thousand feet.
It's even more psychologically convincing because the sound isn't really a "whoosh"; it's not what you'd expect. It's more like the sound of slurping the last bit of milkshake with a straw, listened to through a long PVC pipe.
I read a few years ago that physicists found an accoustic effect created by the low frequency electrmagnetic energy working on water droplets of a certain size. This would make sense because when I did hear the "whoosh", I was lying on my back on the dewy grass. I've also read that wireframe glasses can account for the simultaneous sound.
I've been saying this all along. Tinfoil hats,and Faraday cage like devices in general, can't be relied upon unless they're grounded.
In many cases, you'll get significant attenuation without grounding, as in the case of foil shields for protecting passport RFIDs, but grounding, even imperfect grounding, would improve shielding tremendously.
Obviously, you should run a wire from your tinfoil hat to a conductive grounding strip attached to the heel of your shoe. Then you replace your floors with carbon impregnated panels, and for the final touch connect them to a six foot copper rod driven into the earth.
A company with Microsoft's resources should be able to come up with a better business plan than a buy-in. I think they're impatient, for some reason not yet disclosed.
It's all about Google.
If I were an MS strategist, Google's search business wouldn't scare me. If you lost sleep every time somebody made money doing something technological you'd go mad.
I'd be a little more concerned with Google's foray into online office suites, but I'd be fairly confident that wasn't a serious problem in the short to mid term.
The thing I'd be freaked about is Google's casual way of generating APIs for its popular services. That hits Microsoft where it lives.
This is a relatively low cost, low risk game for Google. Nobody expects them to provide soup-to-nuts service for all your IT needs; they're just throwing API shit against the wall. If it sticks, good for Google, bad for MS; if t doesn't, MS feels no pain, but neither does Google. It's just another interesting idea from Google.
This is like assymetrical warfare: MS is the conventional force, and Google is the guerilla force. Google chooses when and where to stike, and if it fails it doesn't cost them much. Tactical failures can even be strategic victories if they provoke a costly response. From MS's standpoint, it is necessary to limit Google's ability to strike when and where it will, and get away without much loss no matter the outcome. One thing you can do is start to poach on Google's engineering talent; taking people out of a team is disruptive. Another thing you can do is try to hurt them in places where they live, so you want them so focused at keeping their ad revenue flowing that they can't do anything else.
Google's strategic weakness is that it doesn't provide full solutions. It is an interesting technology company, not a product company. That's good for MS because once Google (or anybody else) provides a complete replacement for Office, Exchange and Sharepoint, bad things are going to happen to MS.
Gaining control of Yahoo makes sense for several reasons. First, it keeps them from cooperating with Google, which is the opposite of what MS wants. MS wants Google to have to work harder to get ad revenue, not less. Second, Yahoo is a product company, like MS; it could be the first to offer the complete, MS free product stack. Equally bad, Yahoo could goad Google into upgrading its products so they look more like a viable replacement for MS to enterprise customers.
The picture MS would prefer is Google struggling to maintain ad revenues, and facing a steep uphill battle in product adoption and API mindshare when it looks at MS dominated product areas.
Throwing everything out and starting from scratch is the favorite gambit of armchair strategists everywhere, but it doesn't gain you any customer loyalty.
Microsoft's biggest virtue as a company -- speaking from the customer's standpoint -- has always been predictability. It doesn't mean they make the best of anything. Only people who have drunk the kook-aid think that. It doesn't mean that they do what the customers would wish them to do. It means that they consistently did things in a way that the people who have the most invested in products could live with. They didn't leave enterprise customers high and dry, or fill them with uncertainty about the future of technologies they'd put a lot of money and time into.
Microsoft taking a clean sheet approach to its core business negates precisely its one advantage to customers.
The real problem is that Microsoft is addicted to growth, and since it's core businesses can't produce any more growth, it has lost focus by pursuing synergy. At some point, this lack of focus is going to kill the cash cows.
Avoiding that means confronting the truth that the ride shareholders got in the 80s and 90s is over. They need to become a mature company, like Coca Cola, with popular, reliable selling products, that rewards shareholders with regular and generous dividends rather than explosive stock growth, and which tinkers with new products that fall mostly within its area of expertise. What Microsoft is doing in, say the entertainment world is like Coke trying to use its soft drink power to become a dominant player in the fast food restaurant field and sports arenas.
You can easily imagine a company that delivers reliable, regular profits, focused on the things that make Microsoft valuable, sustainably milking the value of a dominant market position by delivering products people can live with at a price that discourages new competitors. The problem is imagining a transition to that future that isn't horribly traumatic. Microsoft would have been better off, in the long term, if it had been broken up.
One of the things it takes to be good at anything non-trivial is attention to detail -- lots of it, over a long time.
You don't find nerds becoming bar fighters because that's a pasttime for the mentally impulsive and physically gifted. Studying footwork, tactics, achieving physical conditioning you need to box or grapple takes dedication.
I don't think it's ridiculous at all. Anyone trained in any martial art (not just eastern, count boxing, fencing, etc. as well) will probably agree.
Keeping your senses and your ability to think during a fight is anything but trivial, and requires a lot of training.
Most regular people would probably have trouble just remembering how the pieces move after a few minutes of fighting, with all the adrenaline pumping and your whole body in "I have no time for thinking" mode.
Perhaps ironically for a geek, I don't know what it's like to be good at chess, but I do know what it's like to be good at fighting.
A lot of intelligent people aren't good at fighting because they overanalyze a fight. It's helpful to watch other people fight and analyze, but in a fight you have to be in the moment. I knew an architect who was very physically powerful, but never able to fight well because he tried to think strategically during a fight. He was always thinking, if I do this, then he'll do that, then I'll do this etc. A cunning fighter is one who reacts in the moment, in a way that is both appropriate and unpredictable.
"Thinking" in a fight -- if it can be called that -- is not sequential, nor is it analytical. It's more wholistic and intuitive. Even a swift reasoner cannot project future scenarios fast enough to keep up with the present, and being in the moment is critical. The reason the average person can't remember the details of a fight is that he isn't paying attention. He's thinking about the past ("that punch hurt") or the future ("I'm going to get murdered.") An experienced fighter is aware of every detail without being stuck on any one.
Although I can't say from experience, I wonder if this means being good at chess isn't a little like being good at sparring. My faults as a chess player are like the faults of my architect friend as a fighter; although I have formidable analytical skills, they aren't a match for somebody who moves with the swift assurance of being familiar with the scenario. I spend too much time dealing with the shambles of my "strategy" to take advantage of the opportunities my opponent's moves create.
As far as silliness is concerned, all sports are silly if you look at them the right way. Chess and barehand fighting are individual sports pared down to the minimally interesting essentials: two individuals striving to gain advantage over each other. Perhaps arm wresting is more basic, but not sufficiently complex to invite tactical analysis.
In any case, Chess Boxing is clearly a sport tailor made for Russia.
Well, maybe the boss likes things to look tidier than they really need to be so he can do a VIP tour at the drop of a hat. This looks more like the workshops of a few genius inventors I've known. They simply scale things differently; they don't have different teams of engineers and fabricators working on different pieces, they do everything in one place and move back and forth between different aspects of the project.
Granted, the modular approach to scaling a project (split off a team for every major problem) is more reliable, but it's not the way you do things if you want to do something two or three orders of magnitude cheaper than anybody's done in before. Now if I were going to be on the maiden flight of a suborbital space plane, and had a choice, I'd far prefer to do it on a twenty or thirty billion dollar aircraft from Lockheed Martin. But if I had to do it on plane with a total project cost well under 100 million, I'd say Scaled probably knows how to do that kind of project better.
What you are saying amounts to this: speaking a language is more flexible than communicating by drawing pictures. That much should be obvious. What isn't so obvious is this is what makes being able to communicate in pictures so useful in many situations. The flexibility that gives language is power is sometimes a burden, particularly when communicating about simple concrete things (or in the case of computers things that can be represented by metaphors embodied in representations of such).
If you were dropped in a country where you didn't speak the language, you'd find the ability to draw or to mime concrete things or simple metaphors extremely valuable. One of the consequences of the power of language is that it takes a long time to figure out which of the infinite variety of equally good, arbitrarily chosen constructs do what. At the other extreme, when speaking with other fluent speakers of a language, pictures are still sometimes very helpful in clearing things up, although given a choice you'd give up drawing before you gave up speaking.
Years ago, when people were seriously debating which were better, GUIs or CLIs, I used to give this counterexample to the idea that this a reasonable dichotomy to even consider. Suppose you have a folder full of files, and you want to make a copy all the ones starting with "85TAX", because that's how you named your 1985 tax documents. This is very simple to do with a CLI, but quite tedious with a GUI if there are more than a handful of them. On the other hand, suppose you didn't have the good fortune to have such a linguistic handle on the files you wanted. You just wanted to grab a dozen or so files that in your mind you knew were relevant to some task. In that case dealing with the expressive power of language is a hindrance. The simplicity of the atomic operation of shift clicking each file beats the power of language to express infinite kinds of relationships, because there is nothing manifest to exercise that power upon.
Junis will be able to download that porn.
I hope you realize that you are reasoning emotionally, not analytically.
The target of your polemic are (a) hippies with (b) money who (c) care about rare birds and (d) don't care about poor people. Just because somebody demonstrating caring about rare birds doesn't mean he doesn't demonstrate caring about people in other circumstances. That's an assumption you are making for polemical purposes, so that you can brand anybody who disagrees with you on an issue as a hypocrite.
Also, the implication is that anybody who has anything to say should just STFU if you think there's an issue that's more important. It's a BS position, because there's always a more important issue you can scrounge up. If you want to have any credibility arguing this position, you'd better show that you've dedicated your life to assisting the poor.
You can't be a serious thinker about issues and be a single issue person. The world doesn't work that way. Sometimes it's time to stand up for the environment, and sometimes it's time to stand up for the downtrodden. And quite often doing one is doing the other.
If you knew anything about environmentalism other than what you've learned from right wing bullshitters, you'd know that environmental problems fall disproportionately on the poor. Who breaths the most pollution? The poor. Who suffers the most from climate change or short sighted, locally focused water management? The poor.
The middle class don't do so great either, under the rape the environment philosophy.
But if you're wealthy, you get the lion's share of the economic benefits of that philosophy. Using that money, can simply move away from problems. Move to the outer suburbs, and buy a vacation home in Vail. If you despoil your native country, you can always go to Costa Rica to stay at a marvelous eco-friendly resort.
It's not that I have anything against the wealthy in general. I've known quite a few of them, and a lot of them are forward looking, socially responsible problem solvers. But this argument that environmentalists ignore the poor is just ignorant. It's worse than ignorant. It's willfully ignorant.
You don't give a shit about the poor, you're just exploiting them to make a rhetorical point. No person sincerely interested in the poor takes the attitude that nobody can have any other priorities but the poor.
Well, I used to run into huge arguments with my old boss over this kind of reasoning. When you are doing product positioning, you can't use your own experience and preference as a guide, unless you plan to sell to exclusively to people who have exactly your own background and personality.
You don't print very much -- nor do I. But if you were a sales guy, you'd be doing lots of quotes; granted many come by email but you often need it "in writing". If you were a lawyer, you'd need to print contracts. While we need print a lot less than we did ten years ago, people still print things like newsletters, menus, or lost cat notices.
If you've trodden on the Office upgrade treadmill, and so far as you know you will probably continue to tread on it, then this doesn't really all that different; either way you shell out to MS over time, just in smaller, more frequent increments. Since there probably isn't much incremental value MS can add to Office, they're probably going to have to charge less for upgrades, so over time things even out. But cash today is worth more than cash tommorow -- sometimes a lot more.
Imagine you are a startup, and the difference between rental and buying is such that you break even on buying in three years and lose money in four. That's hardly worth worrying about in a stable business, but it's a huge plus when you are watching your burn rate.
Well, because people would rather have their house walls aligned with the street than with the sun, and streets are not always aligned with the sun. Putting a building obliquely on a lot to take advantage of natural light is a very architecty kind of thing to do. Most people's houses are boxes for holding their stuff, as George Carlin once observed.
Somebody else mentioned light pipes, which are not particularly hard to install since most of the domes are designed to fit between the roof rafters. In fact, cutting out a section of roof rafter and putting in a jack rafter isn't really that hard, although sticking your head through a hole you've just cut in your roof can be a bit sobering when you realize that whatever else happens you've got to get whatever you're installing framed up and flashed before the next rain. So personally, I wouldn't hesitate to go to a larger size because you don't want to do any framing. The fiddly part is the flashing.
Of course it's sensible to design your house to use natural light, and light pipes are the natural next step. However, you end up with a house that is not lined up with the houses on either side, and appears to be hosting a miniature UFO invasion. But, as I reminded my wife when we were house hunting, you spend more of your time in your house potentially looking out than outside looking at it. If you're a geek, you're not supposed to be aware of what the neighbors think, much less care.
Are you crazy? Context switches are the slowdown in multitasking OSes.
Unfortunately, multitasking OSes are not the slowdown in most tasks, exceptions noted of course.
Well the thing about "peak oil" is that nobody can say for sure. The "peak" is not wholly a physical constraint. Suppose we've hit "peak" in 2008. This means in 2009 we pump a bit less than in 2008, and probably in 2010 we pump a bit less than in 2009. Well, can't some of that 2010 oil be pumped in 2009? Sure. We are not physically constrained from pumping more than we did in 2008, we're economically constrained.
And reserves never run out, although our extraction from them may drop to near zero. They'll just become economically impractical to use for energy. Imagine a point in the future where the only oil reserves left yield 0 net energy: it costs as much in energy to get a barrel of oil out of the ground as is contained in a barrel of oil. Will anybody bother? Possibly, but the oil will be extracted for uses other than energy.
There are four variables we have to consider: (1)the physical reserves of oil, (2)the economic value of a unit of oil, (3)the world economy, (4) changes in business practices/technology. They're all bound up together in complex ways, but most people only take into account the first two.
People who think this way, think that the high prices signal peak oil. I don't think this is right. As long as oil prices continue to rise, I don't think it is likely that production will decline very much. As long as prices are rising, it seems more likely that production will be sustained, or even inch up a bit. The real nightmare scenario isn't rising prices, its when prices are unable to rise any more. Unless something has happened to make oil reserves more abundant at a given price, or unless some substitute for oil has been found, oil prices failing to rise as supplies dwindle would indicate the world economy is reacting to oil scarcity by contracting.
"Peak Oil" makes things sound simpler than they are. In point of fact, peak oil isn't a calamity in itself. The question is why. If oil is declining because the world is turning to cheap nuclear/solar/conservation/whatever, peak oil is a good thing. The problem is that we're in a very complex time; the global credit crisis is creating economic uncertainty, but prices for oil remain high. That's worrying. I expect we'll get some short to mid term price relief for a number of reasons, but the current situation suggests a lack of resiliency with respect to future fluctuations in the petroleum market.
It's all about time to adapt. Detroit new higher gas prices were going to make people shift to smaller cars. They just didn't expe ct it to be this year. Americans for years have been whining that we can't adapt because our economy and geography mean we use more energy, but in fact that's precisely why we need to be more forward looking than less energy dependent economies.
With respect to the rare earth problem, the same thing applies. We'll never run out of them, they'll just become too costly to extract for the things we currently use them for. In fact, given time, business practices can adapt to the increased scarcity. Right now, we dig materials out of the ground and throw them into landfills. Recycling of course is an obvious answer. If neodynium or gadolinium become fabulously expensive, then it makes sense to step up recycling of those materials.
One idea that makes a great deal of sense is to accelerate recycling of valuable materials by leasing them. Using leasing to encourage recycling has been an idea promoted by environmental thinkers for some years now. Imagine a TV has $500 of gallium in it. First off, that means it becomes very expensive to buy that TV. Furthermore, it might well cost more than $500 to recover the gallium from the TV, so that valuable material goes into the landfill.
Now imagine that the factory leases the TV to the user. At the end of the lease, the factory is going to get the TV back. They could throw out $500 of gallium, but it would make more sense
Civil Engineers choose their major with the idea that they are going to build bridges when they graduate, but its a decade or more before anybody entrusts them with that. What they do when they get out is more like figuring out how many gallons of paint it will take to paint the traffic lines on the bridge.
People coming out of a CS program aren't good for much right away. There are exceptions of course. Developing software is like music; anybody can do it if they apply themselves, and after a while with the right coaching and effort they can become passable. But then you've got Mozart, who was composing at age 5. If you were Mozart, you'd probably know it. The fact that you say you aren't good at programming only means you're more self-aware than others. Very few people coming out of school are good, although very few people know how not-good they are. It takes a year or two of seasoning to get up to speed.
I'd suggest you don't worry about what you are good and not good at yet. You don't really know at this point. You should look into things you think you aren't good at -- you might surprise yourself.
I'd look for a good employer. One doing interesting things, with happy employees. Then learn the kinds of things on the job your employer needs. You didn't think you were done learning did you?
Well, I think the GP means "thing" in the sense of "concrete artifact" rather than "things that can be aggregated into an artifact with a certain hypothetical precision."
"Calibration" of course isn't exactly the perfect term when applied to the standard itself. The current mass standard isn't really "calibrated"; sub-standards are calibrated against it. It may have been tweaked to produce the minimum error in the standards previously in use, but it's not quite the same thing.
In this case, since the standard is really a theoretical model, the issue is practical. There's no practical way to count the atoms. In order to calibrate your sub-standards, you need an artifact to calibrate them against. The artifact would be used just like the old standard was used. Almost nothing would change on a day to day basis.
I'm guessing there are two practical advantages. The first is that you have a recipe by which you can create a second kg artifact. While this is a bit like having two watches, still being able to recreate the second artifact would be helpful if the original one became unavailable. I also imagine that having a second artifact could serve as a kind of control; you'd compare the two artifacts to each other -- naturally they won't be perfectly matched. Then you store the control artifact safely. If later on you suspect something is wrong with your first artifact, you take the second one out for testing. In the worst case, you build a new set of spheres using the same or an improved recipe. You can't do that if the standard is defined in terms of an individual artifact.
On the other hand, a standard which is defined in a theoretically reproducible way would be practically useless if there was no way to generate an artifact of sufficient precision to serve as if it were the new reference object. You'd know what a kg is, but you wouldn't have a practical way of checking the mass of affordably machined weights against it.
So being able to produce a stable reference artifact of a certain precision is an important test of the practicality of the standard. If you can't do it with silicon, you've got to use some other material. Presumably, either a platinum object of the required precision cannot be made yet, or the stability of a platinum artifact is suspect, or silicon is just as good as platinum, but a lot cheaper.
In any case, you can't "eat it too" until you "have your cake".
This thread is like a couple of janitors on break discussing the merits of the 2008 models according Yachting magazine.
They might have the dinghies, but they'll never use them with the objects of discussion.