India will catch up in this area too...they're already the diabetic capital of the world, importing American style lifestyle diseases at a good clip. All they're really missing now is a good corn industry subsidy so that they can make everything with high-fructose corn syrup in it!
Can I get a guitar that shoots fire for burning their houses down when I play "Smoke on the Water" instead? Bad guitarists who only know a few chords need to be protected too.
I'd suggest Importing, Exporting or Travelling with Musical Instruments for more more information about the restrictions that impact traveling musicians. While it's a bit UK centric, the CITES rules apply here too. As for the idea that the concerns here are just fear-mongering, try taking an older instrument made with ivory somewhere and watch how that turns out, as the most extreme example. Ebony isn't on the CITES list, but there's plenty of other materials appearing in many vintage guitars that are.
Putting everything into your browser should work about as well as the first big Great Leap Forward: "enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster."
The SEC doesn't enforce anything at the big banks, because those companies are where ex-SEC lawyers go if they want a big paycheck later. You don't prosecute your future employer. They only go after little fish just so they can appear as if they are doing their job. Small hedge fund who did something wrong? Expect the SEC to kick your ass if you cross them. Firm like Goldman? The SEC management will stop any attempt to investigate them, because the top people have their eye on retiring from there to a cushy Goldman job.
And if the computer in charge decides you can't run a program, you can't override that and run it yourself anyway. "2001" is also prior art for Apple's walled garden approach to iPad security.
You weren't paying very much attention then to what was being done with your data. Facebook Beacon was one of the worst privacy violations I've ever run into, bad enough for them to lose a class action lawsuit over it. The Face Recognition feature was also enabled by default, letting data collected from your pictures be used to tag your face in other people's pictures you appeared. If that doesn't seriously concern you, you should reconsider just what else could happen with that data.
I was pointing out that the predictive power of a circa 1933 IQ score and that of a more recently designed one are not necessarily the same. You can't prove they aren't useful nowadays with data about how well they tracked ability from eighty years ago.
Given when he was born and normal school progression, Feynman's IQ test would have happened around somewhere around 1933. At that point in time, it was likely an early Stanford-Binet test, which was only slightly older than Feynman himself then. I seriously doubt the 124 score had any accuracy, given it's believed Feynman was already wandering around doing Calculus around the same age he took the test.
I thought the US was being run by liars and thieves, which you can find in any profession. The system is impossible to break as it's constructed right now for reasons more fundamental than the sleaze and past jobs of its current practitioners. To get into office, you need an expensive marketing campaign to gather votes. To get enough money for an expensive campaign, you need donations. And to get donations, you have to make promises and look out for the people who sponsored you after you're elected. That's the loop that needs to be broken before non-career politicians can hold office.
If I were to pick a single criteria for who I'd like to vote for, it wouldn't be "scientists and engineers"--it would be "didn't accept any campaign bribes". But without those, you can't afford the marketing needed to win an election.
Well, the fact that Pfizer spends a lot of money advertising Celebrex shouldn't need any citation. They have ads on TV, in magazines, I see them all the time. And the sales reps they send to doctor's offices to convince them to prescribe the medicine aren't cheap staff either.
All that overhead is paid for out of the profits made from selling it at a high price. Pharma companies complain that drugs are expensive because they have high R&D costs. The way they turn around and spend giant amounts of money on advertising/marketing for them each year--all of which must drive up the cost too--should make you wonder just how much of that is true. The wild claim that the margins are "thousands of percents", that sounds a bit hysterical, but I wouldn't rule it out for some cheap to manufacture medicines protected by patents. I've seen an order of magnitude price drop going from a single source, patented medicine here, after the patent ran out and the generics hit the market.
And fact that people see those advertisements, ask their doctor to try the medicine, and sometimes then end up with an expensive prescription for it has to drive up average insurance costs for everyone to cover that prescription. That follows just from assuming the marketing they're doing works to any degree. If it didn't, surely they'd stop doing it. So Pfizer here is a) driving up the price of the drug through increasing overhead they presumably pass along via the sales price, and b) forcing everyone to pay for some of that by virtue of making people who may or may not really need the drug to "ask for it by name", as the old ad slogan goes.
Here's a true story about this particular medicine, which I can only offer as a unverifiable personal anecdote. I had a temporary injury once, at the age of 30, that it turned out Celebrex was just the thing for. My doctor ended up giving me a giant stack of the free samples his sales rep gave him on the last trip, long enough to last me until I was completely recovered a little over a month later. You see, he knew there was no way my insurance company was going to authorize a prescription for the medicine. He told me that they know once patients are prescribed Celebrex, they're often taking it for the rest of their lives. So he doesn't even bother trying to fight through all the necessary insurance paperwork unless someone really does need it indefinitely like that. He just takes some from the samples pile happily provided by Pfizer. First hit is free etc. (All of that paperwork I just alluded to is also an indirect cost of health coverage that only exists because the medicine is so expensive here.)
Yes; I haven't heard a song on the American pop charts for over a decade now that I really enjoyed hearing. And a significant portion of current pop music, easily >1%, uses processing such as autotune-as-effect that drives me batty if I notice it. I used to review audio equipment, I notice fake sound processing, and that particular case I can't stand it. I'll happily listen to older voice processing as effect equipment such as a vocoder, something about this latest variation puts me on edge.
And the answer to the next question, "well what do you listen to then?", is "mainly European progressive metal". That stuff is incredibly interesting to analyze at whatever depth you'd like. It's far less than 1% of the music made though.
The fallacy at work here is what trading system developers call "curve fitting". If you're given a set of data and claim there's a correlation between two things in it, you can always fit a curve to predict one from the other with good accuracy if you work on it a while. Clear signs of curve fitting in play are "magic numbers"--constants like the "2 to 6 days" alluded to here, where the model doesn't work unless you get them right.
The fun thing about curve fitting is that you never know when it's going to work or not. This curve was built against data from 2008. The market went in one direction for much of 2008--down, hard. This last month? Market went down, hard. I suspect what they've built is a system that errs often on the side of downward moves, and that's completely compatible with today's market too. Put that same system in the middle of a giddy bull market...and it can lose all of the profits it made in the other section at a shocking rate.
Trading systems work out issues like this by collecting a lot of data to train against, only using a portion of it to train the model, and then testing the results against what's left. There wasn't nearly enough data available here for this one to have gone through that. Eventually, the market will no longer look like the one they drew a curve against, and then they're done.
I always liked the related scam for selling stock selection services. You e-mail a group of marks "stock XYZ will go higher in the next month!", breaking them into (say) 4 groups. The next month, you contact everyone who got a good recommendation the last time with "stock ABC will go higher in the next month!". Repeat a few layers deep. After 3 or 4 such calls, a fraction of the people you contacted have now gotten nothing but winning picks from you; them you try to sell your picking service to.
For the launching from the keyboard problem, I solved all those issues for myself by installing Synapse; I believe I used install instructions here. Once installed and setup to run at startup, I have mine configured to work by hitting Ctl-Space. Bring the UI up, it quickly learns about any application you use regularly and makes launching faster than any of the approaches you mentioned.
A similar app you might consider instead is called Gnome DO.
I'd like to know where this world you live in, where 99% of music is more interesting if you analyze it more deeply, is at. Here where I live, listening carefully to all of the pop music released for quite some time now just makes me start screaming for the head of the guy who invented Autotune. The background music at some places nowadays makes me wish for death if I accidentally slip into careful listening.
At what point did you read the article suggesting that these skills were useful or implied "smart"? Saying that players are better at word recognition than researchers thought was possible is not implying word recognition has any particular value.
The fact that the top thing mentioned as still needing improvement for 3.2 is "touch" reinforces the idea that this whole insanity was aimed at being more touchpad friendly all along. Why all these desktop GUIs feel they should work toward that unproductive metaphor lately boggles my mind; it's like the hipsters have taken over open-source development. When I can get a cheap touchpad 30" monitor to replace the one I use on my desktop, maybe I'll be willing to consider a move in that direction. Seems a long way off.
Re:We have ideas, we just can't exploit them
on
The Post-Idea World
·
· Score: 1
Apple was sued by Creative for $100M, Personal Audio LLC for $8M, and probably more I'm forgetting about. They actually tried to deflect one of the lawsuits by admitting the basic idea was invented in 1979. Apple's situation exactly demonstrates both major problems here. No real innovation, just refinement of existing ideas with a better look/feel. And they were only able to survive because they could shrug off a ridiculous $100M lawsuit from Creative and keep going.
Do you like our kernel?
It's unstable? Of course it is.
Must crash a lot. Often. It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.
Kernels are like any other software - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.
Any sort of useful benchmarking here would take an article a hundred times more difficult to write than the work that went into this one. Performance for this class of applications is so dependent on workload that the idea of evaluating their speed can't happen usefully without a large amount of testing. There are possibilities for almost every layer that multiply together for the number of configurations to consider. For each framework, you'd need to evaluate each of the web server possibilities, each of the database backends, tune all of them and the framework usefully, pick a couple of different use cases (varying the read vs. write ratio in particular), try a number of concurrency levels, and then track both page throughput and latency. By the time you finished, new versions would be out and you'd have to throw out the results and start over.
TurboGears never managed to get enough momentum in terms of code contributors to really prosper. You can get a feel for some of the saga just by reading the project's Wikipedia page. It lives or dies based on the contributions of a few key people, and that group had the misfortune of stalling right as Django in particular was really picking up a lot of steam around two years ago.
Re:Eclipse has adopted Git [for] for Eclipse proje
on
The Rise of Git
·
· Score: 2
Meh, call me when there's tortoisegit, and by then it will be too late.
You missed the call, it was a while ago. I considered TortoiseGit mature enough to use around V1.3, which was January of 2010. The upward spike in downloads shown on their page, which really took off around V1.2, shows quite a few people agree.
Slashdot Mirror
India will catch up in this area too...they're already the diabetic capital of the world, importing American style lifestyle diseases at a good clip. All they're really missing now is a good corn industry subsidy so that they can make everything with high-fructose corn syrup in it!
Can I get a guitar that shoots fire for burning their houses down when I play "Smoke on the Water" instead? Bad guitarists who only know a few chords need to be protected too.
I'd suggest Importing, Exporting or Travelling with Musical Instruments for more more information about the restrictions that impact traveling musicians. While it's a bit UK centric, the CITES rules apply here too. As for the idea that the concerns here are just fear-mongering, try taking an older instrument made with ivory somewhere and watch how that turns out, as the most extreme example. Ebony isn't on the CITES list, but there's plenty of other materials appearing in many vintage guitars that are.
Your application sounds interesting. You left out the important detail though: how is your golf game?
No no no...it's Apple's competitors who have been eaten by Lions. On Wall Street, people are eaten by bears.
Putting everything into your browser should work about as well as the first big Great Leap Forward: "enormous amounts of investment produced only modest increases in production or none at all. In short, the Great Leap was a very expensive disaster."
The SEC doesn't enforce anything at the big banks, because those companies are where ex-SEC lawyers go if they want a big paycheck later. You don't prosecute your future employer. They only go after little fish just so they can appear as if they are doing their job. Small hedge fund who did something wrong? Expect the SEC to kick your ass if you cross them. Firm like Goldman? The SEC management will stop any attempt to investigate them, because the top people have their eye on retiring from there to a cushy Goldman job.
There's a good chat with Matt Taibii, author of the fun Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?, discussing how SEC Document Shredding Covers Up Wall Street Crimes. This has been going on for a long time now, and the shredding is central to why the Bernie Madoff scheme wasn't caught earlier too.
And if the computer in charge decides you can't run a program, you can't override that and run it yourself anyway. "2001" is also prior art for Apple's walled garden approach to iPad security.
You weren't paying very much attention then to what was being done with your data. Facebook Beacon was one of the worst privacy violations I've ever run into, bad enough for them to lose a class action lawsuit over it. The Face Recognition feature was also enabled by default, letting data collected from your pictures be used to tag your face in other people's pictures you appeared. If that doesn't seriously concern you, you should reconsider just what else could happen with that data.
I was pointing out that the predictive power of a circa 1933 IQ score and that of a more recently designed one are not necessarily the same. You can't prove they aren't useful nowadays with data about how well they tracked ability from eighty years ago.
Given when he was born and normal school progression, Feynman's IQ test would have happened around somewhere around 1933. At that point in time, it was likely an early Stanford-Binet test, which was only slightly older than Feynman himself then. I seriously doubt the 124 score had any accuracy, given it's believed Feynman was already wandering around doing Calculus around the same age he took the test.
I thought the US was being run by liars and thieves, which you can find in any profession. The system is impossible to break as it's constructed right now for reasons more fundamental than the sleaze and past jobs of its current practitioners. To get into office, you need an expensive marketing campaign to gather votes. To get enough money for an expensive campaign, you need donations. And to get donations, you have to make promises and look out for the people who sponsored you after you're elected. That's the loop that needs to be broken before non-career politicians can hold office.
If I were to pick a single criteria for who I'd like to vote for, it wouldn't be "scientists and engineers"--it would be "didn't accept any campaign bribes". But without those, you can't afford the marketing needed to win an election.
Well, the fact that Pfizer spends a lot of money advertising Celebrex shouldn't need any citation. They have ads on TV, in magazines, I see them all the time. And the sales reps they send to doctor's offices to convince them to prescribe the medicine aren't cheap staff either.
All that overhead is paid for out of the profits made from selling it at a high price. Pharma companies complain that drugs are expensive because they have high R&D costs. The way they turn around and spend giant amounts of money on advertising/marketing for them each year--all of which must drive up the cost too--should make you wonder just how much of that is true. The wild claim that the margins are "thousands of percents", that sounds a bit hysterical, but I wouldn't rule it out for some cheap to manufacture medicines protected by patents. I've seen an order of magnitude price drop going from a single source, patented medicine here, after the patent ran out and the generics hit the market.
And fact that people see those advertisements, ask their doctor to try the medicine, and sometimes then end up with an expensive prescription for it has to drive up average insurance costs for everyone to cover that prescription. That follows just from assuming the marketing they're doing works to any degree. If it didn't, surely they'd stop doing it. So Pfizer here is a) driving up the price of the drug through increasing overhead they presumably pass along via the sales price, and b) forcing everyone to pay for some of that by virtue of making people who may or may not really need the drug to "ask for it by name", as the old ad slogan goes.
Here's a true story about this particular medicine, which I can only offer as a unverifiable personal anecdote. I had a temporary injury once, at the age of 30, that it turned out Celebrex was just the thing for. My doctor ended up giving me a giant stack of the free samples his sales rep gave him on the last trip, long enough to last me until I was completely recovered a little over a month later. You see, he knew there was no way my insurance company was going to authorize a prescription for the medicine. He told me that they know once patients are prescribed Celebrex, they're often taking it for the rest of their lives. So he doesn't even bother trying to fight through all the necessary insurance paperwork unless someone really does need it indefinitely like that. He just takes some from the samples pile happily provided by Pfizer. First hit is free etc. (All of that paperwork I just alluded to is also an indirect cost of health coverage that only exists because the medicine is so expensive here.)
Yes; I haven't heard a song on the American pop charts for over a decade now that I really enjoyed hearing. And a significant portion of current pop music, easily >1%, uses processing such as autotune-as-effect that drives me batty if I notice it. I used to review audio equipment, I notice fake sound processing, and that particular case I can't stand it. I'll happily listen to older voice processing as effect equipment such as a vocoder, something about this latest variation puts me on edge.
And the answer to the next question, "well what do you listen to then?", is "mainly European progressive metal". That stuff is incredibly interesting to analyze at whatever depth you'd like. It's far less than 1% of the music made though.
The fallacy at work here is what trading system developers call "curve fitting". If you're given a set of data and claim there's a correlation between two things in it, you can always fit a curve to predict one from the other with good accuracy if you work on it a while. Clear signs of curve fitting in play are "magic numbers"--constants like the "2 to 6 days" alluded to here, where the model doesn't work unless you get them right.
The fun thing about curve fitting is that you never know when it's going to work or not. This curve was built against data from 2008. The market went in one direction for much of 2008--down, hard. This last month? Market went down, hard. I suspect what they've built is a system that errs often on the side of downward moves, and that's completely compatible with today's market too. Put that same system in the middle of a giddy bull market...and it can lose all of the profits it made in the other section at a shocking rate.
Trading systems work out issues like this by collecting a lot of data to train against, only using a portion of it to train the model, and then testing the results against what's left. There wasn't nearly enough data available here for this one to have gone through that. Eventually, the market will no longer look like the one they drew a curve against, and then they're done.
I always liked the related scam for selling stock selection services. You e-mail a group of marks "stock XYZ will go higher in the next month!", breaking them into (say) 4 groups. The next month, you contact everyone who got a good recommendation the last time with "stock ABC will go higher in the next month!". Repeat a few layers deep. After 3 or 4 such calls, a fraction of the people you contacted have now gotten nothing but winning picks from you; them you try to sell your picking service to.
For the launching from the keyboard problem, I solved all those issues for myself by installing Synapse; I believe I used install instructions here. Once installed and setup to run at startup, I have mine configured to work by hitting Ctl-Space. Bring the UI up, it quickly learns about any application you use regularly and makes launching faster than any of the approaches you mentioned.
A similar app you might consider instead is called Gnome DO.
I'd like to know where this world you live in, where 99% of music is more interesting if you analyze it more deeply, is at. Here where I live, listening carefully to all of the pop music released for quite some time now just makes me start screaming for the head of the guy who invented Autotune. The background music at some places nowadays makes me wish for death if I accidentally slip into careful listening.
At what point did you read the article suggesting that these skills were useful or implied "smart"? Saying that players are better at word recognition than researchers thought was possible is not implying word recognition has any particular value.
The fact that the top thing mentioned as still needing improvement for 3.2 is "touch" reinforces the idea that this whole insanity was aimed at being more touchpad friendly all along. Why all these desktop GUIs feel they should work toward that unproductive metaphor lately boggles my mind; it's like the hipsters have taken over open-source development. When I can get a cheap touchpad 30" monitor to replace the one I use on my desktop, maybe I'll be willing to consider a move in that direction. Seems a long way off.
Apple was sued by Creative for $100M, Personal Audio LLC for $8M, and probably more I'm forgetting about. They actually tried to deflect one of the lawsuits by admitting the basic idea was invented in 1979. Apple's situation exactly demonstrates both major problems here. No real innovation, just refinement of existing ideas with a better look/feel. And they were only able to survive because they could shrug off a ridiculous $100M lawsuit from Creative and keep going.
Do you like our kernel?
It's unstable?
Of course it is.
Must crash a lot.
Often. It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.
Kernels are like any other software - they're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.
Any sort of useful benchmarking here would take an article a hundred times more difficult to write than the work that went into this one. Performance for this class of applications is so dependent on workload that the idea of evaluating their speed can't happen usefully without a large amount of testing. There are possibilities for almost every layer that multiply together for the number of configurations to consider. For each framework, you'd need to evaluate each of the web server possibilities, each of the database backends, tune all of them and the framework usefully, pick a couple of different use cases (varying the read vs. write ratio in particular), try a number of concurrency levels, and then track both page throughput and latency. By the time you finished, new versions would be out and you'd have to throw out the results and start over.
TurboGears never managed to get enough momentum in terms of code contributors to really prosper. You can get a feel for some of the saga just by reading the project's Wikipedia page. It lives or dies based on the contributions of a few key people, and that group had the misfortune of stalling right as Django in particular was really picking up a lot of steam around two years ago.
Meh, call me when there's tortoisegit, and by then it will be too late.
You missed the call, it was a while ago. I considered TortoiseGit mature enough to use around V1.3, which was January of 2010. The upward spike in downloads shown on their page, which really took off around V1.2, shows quite a few people agree.