Please at least try to get informed about who you are insulting.
Please try to understand who he was trying to insult.
Not everyone who believes in a higher power [...] believes the universe is 6k years old
The special thing about Kansas is not that there are people who believe in a higher power there, it is that school boards tried to mandate teaching intelligent design as science. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the insult was directed at those '6k old earth' people.
believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
This is just plain non-sequitur.
First of all: There is no such thing as intrinsic value. The very concept of something having value requires that there is someone who values it. I know, there are philosophers who disagree with me, but the only consequence of that mindset is that there exists intrinsic value that is valued by noone, which is about as inconsequential as you can get. Theists are typically not, BTW, among those. See explention below.
So: All question of value is meaningless unless one adresses the question of "worth something to whom?".
Obviously, we humans value things, in ways that are significant to us, but also vary a lot between individuals.
If one believes in gods, one may also believe that they value things, and that their valuation matters if you want their favor. But the values held by any a particular god is not necessarily any guide to our own valuation of those things. They may for example be in internal conflict, or in conflict with the interest of humans.
If you believe in a monotheistic god who demands to be followed and will punish whoever does not, and only then, then that does provide a certain global standard, but still only because (and if) one cares about that deity's valuation.
Without such a being, there is still us humans to value life, and if ther is no god, then nothing matters more than that.
In fact, one could argue that it is mostly religious people who value anything higher than life.
Then there is of course a wide variety of opinions on whose life one cares about, and what one believes to be good for them, but that is moving into ideology, beyond the basic metaphysics of value.
When Russia has been great and proud, it has been under totalitarian rule (both under czars and portions of the soviet era), and to many Putin seems to be restoring it.
Experience with democracy has been fleeting and disappointing, There is no centuries old tradition of civil liberties and people's power, only varying standards of living and international influence, so they still look to a string leader like all countries used to up until a couple of centuries ago. Add to that americas soaring debt and fascist china being the fastest growing economy anyone has ever seen, and it's easy to get the masses behind a "powerful russia" campaign.
Of course the reasons for this experience are far more complex and not actually particularly tied to the specific systems used in the 'great and powerful' periods, and I certainly do believe a mature democracy would serve them a lot better in the long run. But try to explain that to the man and woman on the street who has experienced some trials and broken promises since the breakdown of communism that equal nothing America has seen since the civil war.
And as for hard work: the soviet system didn't exactly nurture private enterprise, true. But acedemic tradition in in Russia has been top notch and extremely disciplined not just before but during the entire soviet era. The common worker too simply _had_ to work hard, even if there wasn't so much worldy reward to be gained from working _efficiently_. But if you already know how to work hard, that can be fixed, especially with the generation change they've since received.
Correlation implies either a causal relationship or a causal relationship with a third factor.
Only if the correlation is consistent and repeatable, and none of the two events occur with similar frequency without the other. Even then it's just a finite probability of causal relationships being involved.
GAAAAAAAAH! Can you knee-jerk idiots just shut the hell up? Learning to parrot a phrase does not make you smart.
1) A report of correlation is not a claim of proven causation
2) Observed correlation is the primary means of discovering causation.
People like you should be forced to write those two nuggets a thousand times across your fucking foreheads.
The saying you're regurgitating is meant to protect against overconfidence and rash conclusions. Using it to dismiss any and all observed correlations as irrelevant would lay science to waste. Correlation does imply that there might be something worth investigating unlesss there are strong arguments it can't be so. Unproven but fairly consistent correlations constitutes a lot of our understanding of the world, even within science. Of course you don't take it as gospel, science is all about never doing that. But you do have to be able to work with an build on information with less than 100% certainty in order to get anywhere. You just have to keep track of the uncertainty.
"If you can't fit it in 4 gigs, tough. Just wait until memory is free. [...] We could save so much overhead
Think that one over again. What about the overhead every application would need to implement in order to operate well under circumstances where this is a common occurrence?
Development time is hideously expensive, as are errors in production environments.
Your RAM doesn't require any swap space at all. If you have enough RAM to run all your apps with no swap space and space to spare, go for it. It's the best. Chances are you will one day hit out of memory errors, though, but then you can just add some swap space again.
The 2x rule of thumb is meant as a recommended upper limit. The whole idea of swap space is based on the assumption that you can never get too much RAM. Since RAM is expensive while disk space is cheap, and not all of the RAM in use is actually being addressed at all times, it makes sense to use some disk space to emulate more RAM than you really have.
But if you actually use enough memory to fill up more than 3x physical, chances are performance will really start to suffer because most of the time will be spent waiting for disk IO instead of doing jobs designed to work against low-latency RAM. It can still be the right thing to do sometimes, if you really need all that space for one app to work, and can live with the sluggishness, but for most users it would just encourage needlessly bogging down the machine.
Indeed, with the exception of AIDS babies (Infants born with AIDS because their mothers had it, or caught it during pregnancy) and those very rare cases of transfusion-borne AIDS (almost impossible these days), AIDS is a disease that is ENTIRELY related to your behavior.
False. It is also related to the generally unverifiable behavior of your partner.
They consciously engaged in behavior they knew was dangerous, why should the public pay for it?
Because most of the public engages in some of those those practices, and empirically it is impossible to stop them doing so.
I doubt anyone here would raise an eyebrow if the suggestion were make to never use public funds for their treatment.
And what is the weather like on your planet? Which, by the way, is where I think my eyebrow might be right now.
I'll go for an accepting and functioning society over your self-righteous hatred any day. We all know where that kind of thinking leads.
Gathering support from the american public was easy. I'm talking about everyone who knows shit about international policy and terrorism, how the whole rest of the world except britain and some insignificant 'bought' countries saw right through the fabricated tripe all along and said so in no uncertain terms. Sure, the american people hardly know they exist and certainly don't care what they think, bu the US government do know they exist, knew exactly what the pravailing view was, and why, and knew full well that their 'info' was bulshit. There is no way they could not, because they made it up (or ordered someone to). Even the US intelligence community insiders have confirmed this.
Now, I'm not one of those conspiracy nuts that believe they staged 9/11, but I am completely convinced they used it as a convenient excuse to do completely unrealted stuuff that they would otherwise never get aaway with.
He suggested it, and he worked specifically to gather support for it. Of course he's to blame. Just because many others also have blood on their hands does not reduce his responsability for what he initiated.
Vietnam was a big mistake, but it might not have been obvious from the start.
This time it was obvious, and it had happened before. It is completely and utterly inexcusable.
And before you cry 'we weren't to know': Just about everyone was saying loud and clear that the US administration's case was pure bull and the evidence didn't hold up. If they had 'intelligence' saying otherwise it is because they ordered it, and that explains why they refused to show it.
I do hold Vietnam against JFK. That does not mean every democrat would have done the same then, and certainly not that every democrat (or republican for that matter) would do the same today.
Afghanistan OTOH is tricky, and I'm not really blaming them for the lack of success there. Well, except for the part about diverting all your resources and attention to a doomed Iraq campaign in stead.
Well, you see, there's this thing about military action: it's not all the same. It tends to actually matter who you attack, at what scale, with what goal, and with what strategy.
It is very possible that another leader would fuck up spectacularly too, but I have to believe that _most_ leaders would at least go after someone who actually had something to do with the attack.
Exactly! Having a population that's actively misinformed is one thing, having a population that actively despises proper information and reasoning is... well, I'm not sure exactly what it is but it sure as hell isn't good.
Ask any social psychology professor out there. They all know this.
More interestingly, judging by their widely-employed strategy of inciting as much fear as possible in everyone they can, even the leading conservatives know this.
assuming that the current Democrat and Republican political platforms are 1) the only two possible viewpoints people could have, and 2) basically unchanging ideals.
Very important point. For example the so-called neo-conservatives are neither new nor conservative.
The result: a slightly higher failure rate -- around around 0.6 percent more -- among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company's main datacenter -- and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year
The savings should be more than enough to pay for replacement hardware, and even for upgrades. And stepping back and looking at the big picture
If you really looked at the big picture you would see that both the original summary and your comment are comparing apples and oranges. It could very well be that the savings are real, but the summary contains insufficient information to conclude so without external data:
It should be comparing the savings with total business cost of the higher fail rate. I amazes me how often even the people supposed to represent the economic expertise in a company forget to consider this sort of thing. Even if estimation is hard, anything estimate is better than just ignoring costs.
So what is the cost?
The cost replacement hardware is one part.
There is also increased manpower to do the maintenance.
With a higher fail rate you need a larger datacenter to provide the same capacity of online units at any given time. That means more space, more servers, more infrastructure, more power.
There may be indirect costs relating to higher risk and more frequent problems providing full service.
Probabaly a couple of things I forgot.
You may have noticed that none of these are quantified in the summary. We don't know if they mean that the failure rate has gone plus 0.06 or times 0.006, we dont know what the old one was, and we don't know how much the old one cost.
If they mean the fail rate went up 0.6% from 0.6% to 1.2% you have more than doubled your maintenance costs. Probably they don't mean that, but you just can't tell.
Maybe I could have found out all these things by reading the article (though I doubt it), but that's beside the point I'm trying to make: don't make rash conclusions from a summary with numbers that look impressive but can't in fact be evaluated.
Doesn't matter. There are basically 2 big point here:
1) The special-puropose GPU will morph into a more generalized co-processor for handling all sorts of massively parallel stuff. This is just bleeding obvious, and I can prove that, because it is already happening. As more and more of it becomes programmable, it only makes sense that the built-in rendering microcode is replaced with libraries that ou may or may not chose to hack yourself.
2) Once the generalization is done, it will make sense to merge the two processors. Might sound weird, but we are already doing multicore designs in stead of separate CPUs, which would be the logical choice if density were such an issue. Turns out the benefits outweigh the cost of advanced cooling.
You are right, though, that it will not be a small "nice extra" tacked onto the CPU. It will be a very large part of thte CPU, and of its total working capacity.
Re:I don't know if I fully agree with that
on
Fire Your IT Boss
·
· Score: 1
Agree. Technical can make things easier, but in general the big risk that will really fuck up your company is getting managers that can't manage. And believe me: most people have no clue in that department, technical wizard or not (and especially not the people who think they automatically can manage well just because they're brilliant in some other field). Getting a suit to manage the techs well is a much smaller hurdle, as long as he suit in question undrestands his role and respects the technical advice from the staff.
Slashdot Mirror
Please at least try to get informed about who you are insulting.
Please try to understand who he was trying to insult.
Not everyone who believes in a higher power [...] believes the universe is 6k years old
The special thing about Kansas is not that there are people who believe in a higher power there, it is that school boards tried to mandate teaching intelligent design as science. It is therefore reasonable to assume that the insult was directed at those '6k old earth' people.
believes in a higher power (and by extension, that life has value)
This is just plain non-sequitur.
First of all:
There is no such thing as intrinsic value. The very concept of something having value requires that there is someone who values it. I know, there are philosophers who disagree with me, but the only consequence of that mindset is that there exists intrinsic value that is valued by noone, which is about as inconsequential as you can get. Theists are typically not, BTW, among those. See explention below.
So:
All question of value is meaningless unless one adresses the question of "worth something to whom?".
Obviously, we humans value things, in ways that are significant to us, but also vary a lot between individuals.
If one believes in gods, one may also believe that they value things, and that their valuation matters if you want their favor. But the values held by any a particular god is not necessarily any guide to our own valuation of those things. They may for example be in internal conflict, or in conflict with the interest of humans.
If you believe in a monotheistic god who demands to be followed and will punish whoever does not, and only then, then that does provide a certain global standard, but still only because (and if) one cares about that deity's valuation.
Without such a being, there is still us humans to value life, and if ther is no god, then nothing matters more than that.
In fact, one could argue that it is mostly religious people who value anything higher than life.
Then there is of course a wide variety of opinions on whose life one cares about, and what one believes to be good for them, but that is moving into ideology, beyond the basic metaphysics of value.
More like a different experience than the west.
When Russia has been great and proud, it has been under
totalitarian rule (both under czars and portions of the
soviet era), and to many Putin seems to be restoring it.
Experience with democracy has been fleeting and disappointing,
There is no centuries old tradition of civil liberties and
people's power, only varying standards of living and international
influence, so they still look to a string leader like all
countries used to up until a couple of centuries ago.
Add to that americas soaring debt and fascist china being
the fastest growing economy anyone has ever seen, and it's
easy to get the masses behind a "powerful russia" campaign.
Of course the reasons for this experience are far more complex
and not actually particularly tied to the specific systems
used in the 'great and powerful' periods, and I certainly do
believe a mature democracy would serve them a lot better
in the long run. But try to explain that to the man and woman
on the street who has experienced some trials and broken promises
since the breakdown of communism that equal nothing America
has seen since the civil war.
And as for hard work: the soviet system didn't exactly
nurture private enterprise, true. But acedemic tradition in in
Russia has been top notch and extremely disciplined not just
before but during the entire soviet era. The common worker
too simply _had_ to work hard, even if there wasn't so much
worldy reward to be gained from working _efficiently_.
But if you already know how to work hard, that can be fixed,
especially with the generation change they've since received.
I think you're on to something, but it's a bit too long and fiddly.
What we need to balance tings up is simply:
Global Piracy Day
What should it be on? I know:
Let's just pirate theirs!
Correlation implies either a causal relationship or a causal relationship with a third factor.
Only if the correlation is consistent and repeatable, and none of the two events occur with similar frequency without the other. Even then it's just a finite probability of causal relationships being involved.
"Correlation does not imply causation"
GAAAAAAAAH! Can you knee-jerk idiots just shut the hell up?
Learning to parrot a phrase does not make you smart.
1) A report of correlation is not a claim of proven causation
2) Observed correlation is the primary means of discovering causation.
People like you should be forced to write those two nuggets a thousand times across your fucking foreheads.
The saying you're regurgitating is meant to protect against overconfidence and rash conclusions. Using it to dismiss any and all observed correlations as irrelevant would lay science to waste. Correlation does imply that there might be something worth investigating unlesss there are strong arguments it can't be so. Unproven but fairly consistent correlations constitutes a lot of our understanding of the world, even within science. Of course you don't take it as gospel, science is all about never doing that. But you do have to be able to work with an build on information with less than 100% certainty in order to get anywhere. You just have to keep track of the uncertainty.
Those would have to be weightless breasts. Great Scott, I think we're on to something!
"Brownian Ratchet" incessantly, and I know what those are: a theoretical molecular machine
I thought they were widely observed in microbial locomotion systems?
"If you can't fit it in 4 gigs, tough. Just wait until memory is free.
[...]
We could save so much overhead
Think that one over again. What about the overhead every application would need to implement in order to operate well under circumstances where this is a common occurrence?
Development time is hideously expensive, as are errors in production environments.
Your RAM doesn't require any swap space at all.
If you have enough RAM to run all your apps with no swap space and space to spare, go for it. It's the best. Chances are you will one day hit out of memory errors, though, but then you can just add some swap space again.
The 2x rule of thumb is meant as a recommended upper limit.
The whole idea of swap space is based on the assumption that you can never get too much RAM. Since RAM is expensive while disk space is cheap, and not all of the RAM in use is actually being addressed at all times, it makes sense to use some disk space to emulate more RAM than you really have.
But if you actually use enough memory to fill up more than 3x physical, chances are performance will really start to suffer because most of the time will be spent waiting for disk IO instead of doing jobs designed to work against low-latency RAM. It can still be the right thing to do sometimes, if you really need all that space for one app to work, and can live with the sluggishness, but for most users it would just encourage needlessly bogging down the machine.
Indeed, with the exception of AIDS babies (Infants born with AIDS because their mothers had it, or caught it during pregnancy) and those very rare cases of transfusion-borne AIDS (almost impossible these days), AIDS is a disease that is ENTIRELY related to your behavior.
False. It is also related to the generally unverifiable behavior of your partner.
They consciously engaged in behavior they knew was dangerous, why should the public pay for it?
Because most of the public engages in some of those those practices, and empirically it is impossible to stop them doing so.
I doubt anyone here would raise an eyebrow if the suggestion were make to never use public funds for their treatment.
And what is the weather like on your planet? Which, by the way, is where I think my eyebrow might be right now.
I'll go for an accepting and functioning society over your self-righteous hatred any day. We all know where that kind of thinking leads.
If you could just go and change people's behavior at will we could have world peace tomorrow as well.
The fact is that abstinence campaigns have generally had zero or negative effect.
Gathering support from the american public was easy. I'm talking about everyone who knows shit about international policy and terrorism, how the whole rest of the world except britain and some insignificant 'bought' countries saw right through the fabricated tripe all along and said so in no uncertain terms. Sure, the american people hardly know they exist and certainly don't care what they think, bu the US government do know they exist, knew exactly what the pravailing view was, and why, and knew full well that their 'info' was bulshit. There is no way they could not, because they made it up (or ordered someone to). Even the US intelligence community insiders have confirmed this.
Now, I'm not one of those conspiracy nuts that believe they staged 9/11, but I am completely convinced they used it as a convenient excuse to do completely unrealted stuuff that they would otherwise never get aaway with.
He suggested it, and he worked specifically to gather support for it. Of course he's to blame. Just because many others also have blood on their hands does not reduce his responsability for what he initiated.
Vietnam was a big mistake, but it might not have been obvious from the start.
This time it was obvious, and it had happened before. It is completely and utterly inexcusable.
And before you cry 'we weren't to know': Just about everyone was saying loud and clear that the US administration's case was pure bull and the evidence didn't hold up. If they had 'intelligence' saying otherwise it is because they ordered it, and that explains why they refused to show it.
I do hold Vietnam against JFK. That does not mean every democrat would have done the same then, and certainly not that every democrat (or republican for that matter) would do the same today.
Afghanistan OTOH is tricky, and I'm not really blaming them for the lack of success there. Well, except for the part about diverting all your resources and attention to a doomed Iraq campaign in stead.
Well, you see, there's this thing about military action: it's not all the same. It tends to actually matter who you attack, at what scale, with what goal, and with what strategy.
It is very possible that another leader would fuck up spectacularly too, but I have to believe that _most_ leaders would at least go after someone who actually had something to do with the attack.
Exactly!
Having a population that's actively misinformed is one thing, having a population that actively despises proper information and reasoning is... well, I'm not sure exactly what it is but it sure as hell isn't good.
I for one welcome the new Japanese Being who is building... oh, wait. Sorry.
Ask any social psychology professor out there. They all know this.
More interestingly, judging by their widely-employed strategy of inciting as much fear as possible in everyone they can, even the leading conservatives know this.
assuming that the current Democrat and Republican political platforms are 1) the only two possible viewpoints people could have, and 2) basically unchanging ideals.
Very important point.
For example the so-called neo-conservatives are neither new nor conservative.
The result: a slightly higher failure rate -- around around 0.6 percent more -- among the air-cooled servers compared to those in the company's main datacenter -- and a potential savings of $2.87 million per year
The savings should be more than enough to pay for replacement hardware, and even for upgrades. And stepping back and looking at the big picture
If you really looked at the big picture you would see that both the original summary and your comment are comparing apples and oranges. It could very well be that the savings are real, but the summary contains insufficient information to conclude so without external data:
It should be comparing the savings with total business cost of the higher fail rate. I amazes me how often even the people supposed to represent the economic expertise in a company forget to consider this sort of thing. Even if estimation is hard, anything estimate is better than just ignoring costs.
So what is the cost?
You may have noticed that none of these are quantified in the summary. We don't know if they mean that the failure rate has gone plus 0.06 or times 0.006, we dont know what the old one was, and we don't know how much the old one cost.
If they mean the fail rate went up 0.6% from 0.6% to 1.2% you have more than doubled your maintenance costs. Probably they don't mean that, but you just can't tell.
Maybe I could have found out all these things by reading the article (though I doubt it), but that's beside the point I'm trying to make: don't make rash conclusions from a summary with numbers that look impressive but can't in fact be evaluated.
I wonder if they will compare the instances of disease to those from food poisoning from earlier methods of food storage?
OK, I'm sold. There is absolutely no point in learning more about the health effects of newer containers, as long as we can think of something worse.
I do hate America, you insensitive clod.
"Linked". Does. Not. Imply. Causation. You. Annoying. Git.
Doesn't matter. There are basically 2 big point here:
1) The special-puropose GPU will morph into a more generalized co-processor for handling all sorts of massively parallel stuff.
This is just bleeding obvious, and I can prove that, because it is already happening. As more and more of it becomes programmable, it only makes sense that the built-in rendering microcode is replaced with libraries that ou may or may not chose to hack yourself.
2) Once the generalization is done, it will make sense to merge the two processors. Might sound weird, but we are already doing multicore designs in stead of separate CPUs, which would be the logical choice if density were such an issue. Turns out the benefits outweigh the cost of advanced cooling.
You are right, though, that it will not be a small "nice extra" tacked onto the CPU. It will be a very large part of thte CPU, and of its total working capacity.
Agree. Technical can make things easier, but in general the big risk that will really fuck up your company is getting managers that can't manage. And believe me: most people have no clue in that department, technical wizard or not (and especially not the people who think they automatically can manage well just because they're brilliant in some other field). Getting a suit to manage the techs well is a much smaller hurdle, as long as he suit in question undrestands his role and respects the technical advice from the staff.