Don't worry about your gray matter. I just turned 50. I'm lucky enough that my current gig is really enjoyable, and as a result I am programming better now than I ever have. As others have said, follow your passion. I've drifted back and forth between tech and management several times in my 30 year career, and its clear to me that I am happier, and therefore more productive, when I am purely tech. But to each his own, you might be happiest in management. And finally, don't think your decision now is permanent. You can probably change roles two or three times in your 40s -- I did.
The butterfly effect, as an illustration of chaos, will protect us from the singularity.
No doubt you are right that chaos, noise, quantized time, etc. will protect us from a true singularity, i.e. a divide by zero. However, that might be moot. It won't matter very much if the pace of paradigm-shifting events is not infinite if it is still so fast that several paradim shifts happen each night while you sleep. If this really does happen, most people are going to feel damn insignificant.
No, you've missed the point entirely. This is not a case where you can treat "revolution" as a synonym of "singularity". They really are talking about something that is more equivalent to a divide by zero.
Consider the major "paradigm shifts" in the history of life on this planet, where I use that phrase rather broadly. The first self-replicating molecule was the first paradigm shift. A long time later we get primitive cells. A shorter time interval later (but still a long time) we get multicellular creatures. And so on until we have paradigm shift events that are things like mammals, primates, humanoids, homo sapiens, stone tools, iron tools, printing press, telephones, computers, internet. If you look at the amount of time that elapses between each successive paradim shift, you see that each time the interval is shorter. We live in an era where the intervals are now measured in a few years, and very soon now the intervals will be measured months, as we start making leaps in the ability to create true machine intelligence. When we then reach the point where the machine intelligence is smarter than the humans that designed it, and has access to all of the worlds knowledge, look out! The intervals between paradigm shifts might become measured in days, and then in seconds. That is what is meant by "singularity".
All of this is spelled out in much detail (and I might add some very wild speculation) by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near. There are some plots on pages 17-20 of that book that are my source for the above description. I did a google search today and found a powerpoint deck that has a slide with a similar plot. I'm obfuscating the link so that govis.org.nz isn't slashdotted: www.govis.org.nz/conference2002/presentations/mark -fowler.ppt
I've had back pain off and on for the last several years. Chiropractic definitely helps, but is only a band-aid. I've come to believe that Yoga is a definite solution, if you can discipline yourself to practice regularly. I get too busy at times to fit the 90 minute sessions at the local yoga studio into my schedule, so I've needed an alternate solution. After some discussion with my chiropractor, I've started just doing some standing backbends a couple times a day. Think of it has unhunching. If you're hunched too much of the time, you need to unhunch.
I recommend that you take some yoga classes so that you understand the right way to do backbends, but short of that, try this: stand up. Put your hands on your hips, thumbs in back pointing toward your spine. Contract your abdomimal and lower back muscles to give yourself a firm foundation. Tilt your pelvis forward a little (increase your lumbar curve). Look up. Bend backwards, curving your spine starting at the top and moving downward. Go slowly and carefully, and don't ignore pain. If it starts to hurt, back off immediately and only bend as much as you can comfortably. Try to breath as normally as you can (don't hold your breath!). Hold for a few breaths, then straighten up, and repeat. Do this for a minute or two a couple times everyday, and you should find that after a while you can bend more deeply. When you become confident with your ability, try doing the back bends with your arms raised overhead.
Most of my back pain has been in my upper back, but my chiropractor frequently commented that my lower back needed adjustment as much or more as my upper back. I find that when doing back bends for the first time in a day that there is often a little "pop" in my lower back, much like a chiropractic adjustment. Afterwards, my lower back feels better than normal for a while. But the really great thing is that I'm pain-free again in my upper back, and no longer need to see the chiropractor.
By the way, I've been getting a reasonable amount of exercise lately, and I'm totally convinced that is part of the solution. Someone else commented on the importance of toning your abdominal muscles. I agree, but instead of thinking abdominals only, think all of the core muscles, front and back, around your mid section. Strengthing your abdominals without strengthening your lower back muscles will lead to other undersirable imbalances.
No, the statement was correct. Today, Linux is still too hard to install and use for a significant percentage of consumers to use. It doesn't matter if it's free (as in free beer) if it isn't easily accessible to the masses. When you exclude us geeks, the learning curve becomes a very real "substantial cost".
Re:Another reason why Americans are fat
on
Hacker's Diet
·
· Score: 1
I remember going for lunch to a "Fresh Choice" (a salad bar chain in California) and standing behind two grossly fat woman in line. They each nearly filled their plates with iceberg lettuce (least nutricious of the lettuce choices) and then drenched the lettuce with about a cup of bleu cheese dressing and topped that with croutons. This was their entire meal. No broccoli, no corn, no peas, no beets, no sprouts, nothing with any nutritive value.
I think they were proud of themselves for eating a healthy salad, and were probably looking forward to a "reward" at dinner time for being so good at lunch.
I've been a professional software engineer now for over 20 years, and for much of that time, I've worked in companies where I was expected to give up much of my life in exchange for stock options and free drinks and snacks. I just turned 40, and rather than being eased (or pushed) out, I'm still in demand. But I don't plan to ever take a permanent job again, since it seems that all of the greater silicon valley area (i.e. including san francisco) is full of companies that are all trying to convince their employees to make their work their life. I've had enough of that.
Now I work as a contractor. Many companies here are so desperate for warm bodies that there are lots of contract positions available. The nice thing about many of these positions is that the hourly pay is so good that the companies don't want you to work much more than 40 hours a week (and if they do, you get paid for those extra hours). So now I make more money than I ever did as a permanent employee while working less hours.
By the way, I see no evidence to believe that companies looking for contractors have any bias against people who are past their 20s and early 30s. My current contract requires that I program in two languages (perl and verilog) that I've never programmed in before. Nobody assumed that just because I was 40 that I'd have a hard time picking up new skills.
I'm by no means an expert, but I question some of your implicit assumptions. First, it's been said here that individual rods and cones can fire at a maximum frequency of about 12fps. I'll accept this as given. But do they all fire in synchronization? If they don't, then the true affect is that the eye/brain is sampling at a much higher frequency, but just not the entire visual field at once.
Second, you say "At about 12fps (the eye's sampling rate), you can't tell the difference between multiple frames and true motion". I'd state this differently: At about 12fps, the eye/brain tends to interpolate and infer motion. At less than 12fps, the eye/brain does is not likely to iterpolate. This is a much different assumption than claiming the eye's framerate is 12fps.
Finally, you said that the strobe effect is due to phase differences between the eye and the animation rate. I disagree. As I said before, I don't think the eye takes an entire synchronous snapshot of all rods and cones, processes the information, and then some fraction of time later repeats. In any given microsecond, there are probably some rods and cones firing. These will be able to provide the brain with cues about events that are happening at rates higher than 12fps. In the case of my juggling animator, the strobe effect was entirely due to the fact that even at 75fps, balls that have just been released from the hand (or are just about to be caught) are moving quickly enough that there is no overlap of their position between two frames. The eye is a very good edge detector and is able to see that ball appear in several distinct locations with empty space in between. Adding motion blur eliminates any sense of a strobroscopic affect, probably even at frame rates of 12fps. I never did this experiment, because my motion blur algorithm assumed linear motion from one frame to the next. This assumption worked well at 37.5 and 75 fps, but did not work well at lower frame rates.
10-12 Frames per second seems _unbelievably_ slow to me. I (and most anyone else) can easily see a difference between an image moving at 12FPS or one at 24FPS. Even the difference between 30 and 60FPS is pretty obvious.
I fooled around for six months writing a juggling animator. At the end, I had it so that it could animate at the refresh rate of my monitor (75fps). If I animated the pattern "in real time" (i.e. a cycle takes as long as it would take if it was juggled by a six foot human on earth), the balls moved quickly enough on the screen that without motion blur there was a stroboscopic effect. So, I added motion blur, and was able to retain the 75fps. With other refinements such as subpixel positioning, the animation looked perfectly smooth. Out of curiousity, I reduced the frame rate to 37.5 fps, leaving all of the refinements in place. The difference was subtle, but I and several of my friends that I showed it to could all see the difference.
I don't think this proves that the eye is sampling at a rate higher than 37.5 fps, since the eye/brain could be doing a lot of amazing image processing to achieve an effective frame rate higher than the raw frame rate.
The law is out of step with the physical and economic realities of digital media. Right now, this incongruity is beneficial to society as a whole, but it won't be long before this is no longer true, and the law will need to change. Read my essay on the subject.
Interesting essay. Use fantasy to construct a future, and then assume that today's real economy should be based upon the characteristics of that fantasy future. But I can see how you genuinely want that future world to exist today, and are striving to achieve it. If so, there's one major problem with your essay, and I quote:
What if it wasn't like this and that the costs for reproduction were as easy as it is for software now?
So you're saying that there would be absolutely no cost to duplicate anything? All of the energy and matter is free? In that case, no one would need to work at all, and the need for a currency disappears entirely. So yes, everything would be free.
But if you think that's an excuse for saying that all software should be free now, you're crazy.
Almost everyone arguing that software piracy is bad uses the argument that since it's illegal, it must be bad, but they never argue why it should be illegal in the first place. If you use this kind of argument to defend your laws, you will create a very ugly feedback-loop. You will never be able to remove bad laws since they represent the moral standards of the society.
It goes both ways here, but I think you thieves are more guilty of circular logic. You say "I would never have paid for it anyway, so I didn't steal it." Never have paid anything? Then you valued it as worthless. So why do you use it at all? Clearly you aren't valuing it as worthless.
Look at it another way. You say "Hypothetically, I would never in the future value this software enough to pay to use it, so therefore it must not be worth anything. Since it isn't worth anything, then it's not stealing if I copy it. Therefore, I'm going to copy it in case I want to use it in the future. Oh look, I have this software, I think I'll use it."
Clearly you see the circular argument there.
If you want to be able to claim some moral ground, you can't use commerically licensed software without obeying the license, including paying the price specified by the author. Anything short of that is an infringement on the author's rights. If you think the author is evil for wanting that kind of arrangement, then take a legal action and boycott him by not using his software, and maybe he will learn that he's better off charging less or using a different license. If you steal from him, then you've made it harder for him to lower the price on his software, and you've lost your moral ground by breaking the law.
This post is already too long, but I have one more point. Why is it that everyone here rushes to defend the GPL, but so many here don't respect non-Free licenses? If you think it is valid to steal from a developer who sells software under a commercial license, then you've given up your right to claim hurt when a commercial developer uses GPL code in a commerical product. Both acts are theft, and neither is morally superior to the other.
You have no moral right to expect the courts to uphold the validity of the GPL if you don't also expect them to uphold commercial licenses as well.
most likely not. i was merely stating that although i have lots of software, hardly any purchased, the companies havnt lost that $10,000. I would not have purchased those programs
You wouldn't purchase them, but you did use them, eh? Let's rewrite your statement a little:
most likely not. i was merely stating that although i use lots of software, hardly any purchased, the companies havnt lost that $10,000. I would not have used those programs.
Now there's an obvious contradiction, which reveals the fallacy of the argument. If you don't pay for software, and don't use it, then you haven't stolen property. But if you don't pay for software, and then you go ahead and use it anyway, then you have stolen property. No amount of weasling around by saying "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway!" matters here. If you use it, and you didn't pay for it, you're a thief.
The formation of a black hole (i.e. the radiation from its cataclysmic collapse) could have an effect on us, but the resulting black hole would have no more effect on us than the current star does. At this distance, mass is just mass. After the collapse, space time will be warped in its vicinity, but we won't be able to tell except through indirect measurements.
Though it seems to me that we'd have as good a chance as any for detecting gravity waves from the collapse. Anyone know more about this?
Slashdot Mirror
Don't worry about your gray matter. I just turned 50. I'm lucky enough that my current gig is really enjoyable, and as a result I am programming better now than I ever have. As others have said, follow your passion. I've drifted back and forth between tech and management several times in my 30 year career, and its clear to me that I am happier, and therefore more productive, when I am purely tech. But to each his own, you might be happiest in management. And finally, don't think your decision now is permanent. You can probably change roles two or three times in your 40s -- I did.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon
No doubt you are right that chaos, noise, quantized time, etc. will protect us from a true singularity, i.e. a divide by zero. However, that might be moot. It won't matter very much if the pace of paradigm-shifting events is not infinite if it is still so fast that several paradim shifts happen each night while you sleep. If this really does happen, most people are going to feel damn insignificant.
No, you've missed the point entirely. This is not a case where you can treat "revolution" as a synonym of "singularity". They really are talking about something that is more equivalent to a divide by zero.
k -fowler.ppt
.pdf and made it available. I think homepage.mac.com can probably handle the slashdotting. :)u larity.pdf
Consider the major "paradigm shifts" in the history of life on this planet, where I use that phrase rather broadly. The first self-replicating molecule was the first paradigm shift. A long time later we get primitive cells. A shorter time interval later (but still a long time) we get multicellular creatures. And so on until we have paradigm shift events that are things like mammals, primates, humanoids, homo sapiens, stone tools, iron tools, printing press, telephones, computers, internet. If you look at the amount of time that elapses between each successive paradim shift, you see that each time the interval is shorter. We live in an era where the intervals are now measured in a few years, and very soon now the intervals will be measured months, as we start making leaps in the ability to create true machine intelligence. When we then reach the point where the machine intelligence is smarter than the humans that designed it, and has access to all of the worlds knowledge, look out! The intervals between paradigm shifts might become measured in days, and then in seconds. That is what is meant by "singularity".
All of this is spelled out in much detail (and I might add some very wild speculation) by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near. There are some plots on pages 17-20 of that book that are my source for the above description. I did a google search today and found a powerpoint deck that has a slide with a similar plot. I'm obfuscating the link so that govis.org.nz isn't slashdotted:
www.govis.org.nz/conference2002/presentations/mar
I've pulled that one slide as a
http://homepage.mac.com/jim.lloyd/CountdownToSing
I've had back pain off and on for the last several years. Chiropractic definitely helps, but is only a band-aid. I've come to believe that Yoga is a definite solution, if you can discipline yourself to practice regularly. I get too busy at times to fit the 90 minute sessions at the local yoga studio into my schedule, so I've needed an alternate solution. After some discussion with my chiropractor, I've started just doing some standing backbends a couple times a day. Think of it has unhunching. If you're hunched too much of the time, you need to unhunch.
I recommend that you take some yoga classes so that you understand the right way to do backbends, but short of that, try this: stand up. Put your hands on your hips, thumbs in back pointing toward your spine. Contract your abdomimal and lower back muscles to give yourself a firm foundation. Tilt your pelvis forward a little (increase your lumbar curve). Look up. Bend backwards, curving your spine starting at the top and moving downward. Go slowly and carefully, and don't ignore pain. If it starts to hurt, back off immediately and only bend as much as you can comfortably. Try to breath as normally as you can (don't hold your breath!). Hold for a few breaths, then straighten up, and repeat. Do this for a minute or two a couple times everyday, and you should find that after a while you can bend more deeply. When you become confident with your ability, try doing the back bends with your arms raised overhead.
Most of my back pain has been in my upper back, but my chiropractor frequently commented that my lower back needed adjustment as much or more as my upper back. I find that when doing back bends for the first time in a day that there is often a little "pop" in my lower back, much like a chiropractic adjustment. Afterwards, my lower back feels better than normal for a while. But the really great thing is that I'm pain-free again in my upper back, and no longer need to see the chiropractor.
By the way, I've been getting a reasonable amount of exercise lately, and I'm totally convinced that is part of the solution. Someone else commented on the importance of toning your abdominal muscles. I agree, but instead of thinking abdominals only, think all of the core muscles, front and back, around your mid section. Strengthing your abdominals without strengthening your lower back muscles will lead to other undersirable imbalances.
Maybe we should lay low for a while....
No, the statement was correct. Today, Linux is still too hard to install and use for a significant percentage of consumers to use. It doesn't matter if it's free (as in free beer) if it isn't easily accessible to the masses. When you exclude us geeks, the learning curve becomes a very real "substantial cost".
I remember going for lunch to a "Fresh Choice" (a salad bar chain in California) and standing behind two grossly fat woman in line. They each nearly filled their plates with iceberg lettuce (least nutricious of the lettuce choices) and then drenched the lettuce with about a cup of bleu cheese dressing and topped that with croutons. This was their entire meal. No broccoli, no corn, no peas, no beets, no sprouts, nothing with any nutritive value.
I think they were proud of themselves for eating a healthy salad, and were probably looking forward to a "reward" at dinner time for being so good at lunch.
I've been a professional software engineer now for over 20 years, and for much of that time, I've worked in companies where I was expected to give up much of my life in exchange for stock options and free drinks and snacks. I just turned 40, and rather than being eased (or pushed) out, I'm still in demand. But I don't plan to ever take a permanent job again, since it seems that all of the greater silicon valley area (i.e. including san francisco) is full of companies that are all trying to convince their employees to make their work their life. I've had enough of that.
Now I work as a contractor. Many companies here are so desperate for warm bodies that there are lots of contract positions available. The nice thing about many of these positions is that the hourly pay is so good that the companies don't want you to work much more than 40 hours a week (and if they do, you get paid for those extra hours). So now I make more money than I ever did as a permanent employee while working less hours.
By the way, I see no evidence to believe that companies looking for contractors have any bias against people who are past their 20s and early 30s. My current contract requires that I program in two languages (perl and verilog) that I've never programmed in before. Nobody assumed that just because I was 40 that I'd have a hard time picking up new skills.
I'm by no means an expert, but I question some of your implicit assumptions. First, it's been said here that individual rods and cones can fire at a maximum frequency of about 12fps. I'll accept this as given. But do they all fire in synchronization? If they don't, then the true affect is that the eye/brain is sampling at a much higher frequency, but just not the entire visual field at once.
Second, you say "At about 12fps (the eye's sampling rate), you can't tell the difference between multiple frames and true motion". I'd state this differently: At about 12fps, the eye/brain tends to interpolate and infer motion. At less than 12fps, the eye/brain does is not likely to iterpolate. This is a much different assumption than claiming the eye's framerate is 12fps.
Finally, you said that the strobe effect is due to phase differences between the eye and the animation rate. I disagree. As I said before, I don't think the eye takes an entire synchronous snapshot of all rods and cones, processes the information, and then some fraction of time later repeats. In any given microsecond, there are probably some rods and cones firing. These will be able to provide the brain with cues about events that are happening at rates higher than 12fps. In the case of my juggling animator, the strobe effect was entirely due to the fact that even at 75fps, balls that have just been released from the hand (or are just about to be caught) are moving quickly enough that there is no overlap of their position between two frames. The eye is a very good edge detector and is able to see that ball appear in several distinct locations with empty space in between. Adding motion blur eliminates any sense of a strobroscopic affect, probably even at frame rates of 12fps. I never did this experiment, because my motion blur algorithm assumed linear motion from one frame to the next. This assumption worked well at 37.5 and 75 fps, but did not work well at lower frame rates.
10-12 Frames per second seems _unbelievably_ slow to me. I (and most anyone else) can easily see a difference between an image moving at 12FPS or one at 24FPS. Even the difference between 30 and 60FPS is pretty obvious.
I fooled around for six months writing a juggling animator. At the end, I had it so that it could animate at the refresh rate of my monitor (75fps). If I animated the pattern "in real time" (i.e. a cycle takes as long as it would take if it was juggled by a six foot human on earth), the balls moved quickly enough on the screen that without motion blur there was a stroboscopic effect. So, I added motion blur, and was able to retain the 75fps. With other refinements such as subpixel positioning, the animation looked perfectly smooth. Out of curiousity, I reduced the frame rate to 37.5 fps, leaving all of the refinements in place. The difference was subtle, but I and several of my friends that I showed it to could all see the difference.
I don't think this proves that the eye is sampling at a rate higher than 37.5 fps, since the eye/brain could be doing a lot of amazing image processing to achieve an effective frame rate higher than the raw frame rate.
The law is out of step with the physical and economic realities of digital media. Right now, this incongruity is beneficial to society as a whole, but it won't be long before this is no longer true, and the law will need to change. Read my essay on the subject.
Interesting essay. Use fantasy to construct a future, and then assume that today's real economy should be based upon the characteristics of that fantasy future. But I can see how you genuinely want that future world to exist today, and are striving to achieve it. If so, there's one major problem with your essay, and I quote:
"Copyright © 1995 Leo L. Schwab. All Rights Reserved."
What if it wasn't like this and that the costs for reproduction were as easy as it is for software now?
So you're saying that there would be absolutely no cost to duplicate anything? All of the energy and matter is free? In that case, no one would need to work at all, and the need for a currency disappears entirely. So yes, everything would be free.
But if you think that's an excuse for saying that all software should be free now, you're crazy.
Almost everyone arguing that software piracy is bad uses the argument that since it's illegal, it must be bad, but they never argue why it should be illegal in the first place. If you use this kind of argument to defend your laws, you will create a very ugly feedback-loop. You will never be able to remove bad laws since they represent the moral standards of the society.
It goes both ways here, but I think you thieves are more guilty of circular logic. You say "I would never have paid for it anyway, so I didn't steal it." Never have paid anything? Then you valued it as worthless. So why do you use it at all? Clearly you aren't valuing it as worthless.
Look at it another way. You say "Hypothetically, I would never in the future value this software enough to pay to use it, so therefore it must not be worth anything. Since it isn't worth anything, then it's not stealing if I copy it. Therefore, I'm going to copy it in case I want to use it in the future. Oh look, I have this software, I think I'll use it."
Clearly you see the circular argument there.
If you want to be able to claim some moral ground, you can't use commerically licensed software without obeying the license, including paying the price specified by the author. Anything short of that is an infringement on the author's rights. If you think the author is evil for wanting that kind of arrangement, then take a legal action and boycott him by not using his software, and maybe he will learn that he's better off charging less or using a different license. If you steal from him, then you've made it harder for him to lower the price on his software, and you've lost your moral ground by breaking the law.
This post is already too long, but I have one more point. Why is it that everyone here rushes to defend the GPL, but so many here don't respect non-Free licenses? If you think it is valid to steal from a developer who sells software under a commercial license, then you've given up your right to claim hurt when a commercial developer uses GPL code in a commerical product. Both acts are theft, and neither is morally superior to the other.
You have no moral right to expect the courts to uphold the validity of the GPL if you don't also expect them to uphold commercial licenses as well.
most likely not. i was merely stating that although i have lots of software, hardly any purchased, the companies havnt lost that $10,000. I would not have purchased those programs
You wouldn't purchase them, but you did use them, eh? Let's rewrite your statement a little:
most likely not. i was merely stating that although i use lots of software, hardly any purchased, the companies havnt lost that $10,000. I would not have used those programs.
Now there's an obvious contradiction, which reveals the fallacy of the argument. If you don't pay for software, and don't use it, then you haven't stolen property. But if you don't pay for software, and then you go ahead and use it anyway, then you have stolen property. No amount of weasling around by saying "I wouldn't have paid for it anyway!" matters here. If you use it, and you didn't pay for it, you're a thief.
would a black hole that close have effects on us?
The formation of a black hole (i.e. the radiation from its cataclysmic collapse) could have an effect on us, but the resulting black hole would have no more effect on us than the current star does. At this distance, mass is just mass. After the collapse, space time will be warped in its vicinity, but we won't be able to tell except through indirect measurements.
Though it seems to me that we'd have as good a chance as any for detecting gravity waves from the collapse. Anyone know more about this?