I don't like the word Grid being applied in this way
Me neither, but for slightly different reasons.
The main definition of a grid is a pattern of intersecting lines. While sun or ibm may arrange their computers neatly in rows of vertical racks and build it in a grid pattern physically, nothing of this remains for the actual use or architecture of so-called grid computing. This leaves large swaths of parallel algorithms by the wayside. The only things you can efficiently compute on a grid are the "embarassingly parallel" codes that don't interact much with neighboring CPUs nor require large data sets. Sure, you can do SETI work units and compute large primes, but for chess, weather, and crash sims you'd be better off with a traditional supercomputer or local cluster.
I would appreciate more insight into why In essence, everything I said is wrong.
Here are some of your misconceptions, in no particular order:
1. The onus is on you to prove that it's right. That's how science works. You have a new theory, you have to offer evidence, proof, falsifiability, and explain how it encompasses all the correctly handled cases from existing theories while expanding in a simple and elegant way into new areas. The more grandiose and far-reaching the theory is, the more proof you must have.
2. You got the name wrong, calling it "Frame Grabbing" instead of "Frame Dragging". In fact you referred to the individual "frames" themselves, as if physical reality were a video. It's not. Just because two phrases sounds the same doesn't mean the underlying concepts are the same.
3. Frame dragging takes place in context of a large rotating body. What's special about rotation? To keep from flying apart, the body must be subject to a large centripetal acceleration from gravity. That's missing in the case of a linearly moving body. In physics, that's a huge difference.
4. You used an incorrect metaphor (spacetime as a gas). Going supersonic in a gas doesn't lead to square roots of negative numbers or division by zero. The boundary conditions are completely different and drawing conclusions about one based on the other is just wrong.
5. You jumbled up a bunch of words like cavitation, invisibility, clock skew, time travel, time dilation, observer, and there was not one formula relating anything to anything else.
6. The words you wrote sound like they came from someone under the influence of marijuana. At worst, you're just another physics crackpot that thinks they understand relativity when they only understand the WORD relativity.
7. Stop watching dumbed-down-for-TV science programs. Go to college, take courses, read the textbook over and over, understand units of measure, differential equations, fields, particles vs. waves, many-worlds, the standard model, string theory, and (now listen carefully) the overall process of making observations about the universe, formulating a theory, testing the theory, and making your test results available in peer-reviewed publications. It's hard work, it's done by people who love physics, and mixing-n-matching various physics concepts as if they were garanimals does a disservice to people who work really hard on understanding complex and universe-altering concepts.
8. Just because I don't have a better theory doesn't make you right and me wrong. Having NO theory is more accurate than having an incorrect theory. At least I know what I don't know.
It wasn't just that it was a script as opposed to C++ or something, but that he referred to it as a single script not plural. Even modest software projects benefit from modularization--the contractor's failure to do even that was yet another red flag. However, your point is well taken.
"Recently we have been referred to an outsourcing company to finish customization on a script that the author had no time to complete..."
(a) the person(s) who did the referring should be notified, so that they don't try referring other projects into the same fate.
(b) if you paid the original author the money that you spent on outsourcing, he probably would have *found* the time to complete it. One likely scenario is that the original author got annoyed with you or your company management and just plain left.
(c) why on earth would you have allowed it to be shrouded/obfuscated? work for hire should be delivered in source form.
(d) you specifically called it a script not a program. this gives (me at least) the feeling that it wasn't a very ambitious or important project, more like a proof-of-concept that got blown out of proportion. if it was intended to serve a real business need, it should have been taken more seriously.
(e) it's sounds like you're less interested in getting the script to work than you are in getting your company's money back. the thing is, the lawyers will charge $250/hour, so it's probably best to just chalk it up to experience, let your manager chew you out for screwing it up, and accept the lessons life has taught you.
However, he does not rule out fractional numbers of dead people.
When I'm in the mood to tweak, I'll bring up the idea that deaths should be scaled by life expectancy. An extreme example would be that maybe the death of a 90 year-old guy with cancer should only count about 1% as much as the death of a healthy college kid.
This is at first a bit horrifying, but it changes the perception of health risk a bit. A car accident can strike at any time no matter your health or life-expectancy, but the flu is far harsher on the very young and the very old. Heart attacks quite rare for the under-30 crowd, become very common in the 50's and 60's and start tapering off since people who are susceptible have already had them. Various other ailments have other relationships to life-expectancy, both for susceptibility and for impact.
The logical conclusion I always get to is that we should focus a lot more health resources on the very young, i.e. pre-natal and neo-natal care, free vaccinations, healthy childhood diets and exercise, lifelong sunscreen habits, semi-intentional exposure to a variety of colds and flus in the teens and 20's, and moderation of alcohol and fatty foods after that.
It's all common sense stuff and would pay off 100:1 compared to after-the-event treatments for things like heart attacks and cancer.
Wrong. From the article it sounds like they placed the device, let it record for several weeks, then removed it and retrieved the record of his travels. Makes the device much simpler and easier to self power.
Wow, that's even less useful than I thought. All it does is gather circumstantial evidence that your car was at certain places at certain dates and times. It gathers no evidence of actual crimes, except maybe for parking tickets.
PROSECUTOR: We have evidence that you parked near a crack dealer on 3rd street twice a week for the last several months. How much crack did you buy each time? DEFENDANT: 3rd street? That's where blockbuster is. I was returning videos!!! PROSECUTOR: <craps pants>
1. There is an antenna placement conflict between GPS being line-of-sight and the covert need for police to keep the unit hidden. It is likely that there is a small, thin antenna that can be run up a seam betweeen body panels, or a thin black tape that can be run along glass next to a rubber window gasket. Point is, these things will be visible.
2. It has to transmit to the police or it's useless. No way you're going to get a satellite uplink from under a car so it probably just broadcasts locally on a "tweener" frequency somewhere in the police or public bands. Drive your car over to a ham radio guy's house and within 20 seconds he'll have equipment out to scan for the frequency.
3. The size will probably be big enough to be visible with a quick inspection by flashlight and mirror-on-a-stick. It's probably about the size of the smallest commercially available GPS units. Probably not magnetic like in the bond movies, more likely some loops for quick-ties. Whole thing is flat black plastic maybe with some intentional mud-spot camo. Wire leads away from it to the antenna.
4. If they really want to install it in a hidden place they'll have to use a jack to raise your car. Stick something crushable and hard to replace at each possible jacking point (including ones not in the owners manual) and just check these before you do your dastardly deeds.
5. The tech is neat, but once they roll it out and every officer has one it'll be like lo-jack. The criminals know it might be there and they change their tactics to compensate. Small time cheaters will be easier to follow, but the best bet for catching mobsters is probably still the tax code.
"Shadow Watermelon Carrier" In fact it was so disturbing that one must assume it was done by an outside agency: nobody at G4 would have been capable of anything so creatively weird.
Aside from the union issue, conference people really don't like tripped breakers during the show. That is very, very bad.
The rules about plugging in unauthorized stuff probably originated before laptops when a lot of things people would plug in were extra lighting for their booth or a microwave under a table for booth workers' convenience. The electricity budget is carefully planned out ahead of time and stuff like that could easily trip a breaker if the kilowatts were not counted up. So, there was an alignment between the conference organizer's needs (no tripped breakers) and the unions needs (more work for their electricians) so the rules got made. [I am not suggesting electricians actually looked up documents to evaluate power usage before plugging stuff in. It's more that they want an electrican around so that when someone does plug something new in and the breaker trips, at least he's right there and available and knows where the breaker is and can reset it in a couple of minutes without bothering convention management about it.]
But even know, I don't have much confidence that security guards would be knowledgable about power consumption for various typical appliances. Things like a CRT, a plasma display, and an LCD monitor may all be lumped into the same mental category by the security guard (looks like a TV) even though the power consumption varies 20:1 among them.
Things don't have to be animate to be capable of reacting. If you pay attention to something, you'll probably understand it better and make better decisions about how to use/maintain it. If you just "use" a thing and ignore the sounds it makes, the fluids leaking, the maintenance schedule in the owner's manual, etc then your car/appliance/whatever will "hate" you in the sense of not giving the best service to you.
Also, a lot of items in your world are made by people and so have some embodiment of expecting to interact with humans designed into them.
Retreads are economical, but they are also somewhat of a hazard.
It is very common for retreads to separate from the underlying tire and leave a 6 foot long piece of vulcanized rubber somewhere in the roadway. Worse, since it was molded into a circlar shape at some point, the retread doesn't want to lie flat on the road so pretty much the next car that comes along is going to get damaged.
and yet there is no sphere for "ignoring what your three best developers all said to you in that meeting yesterday and instead doing some CYA or politics-based thing even if it causes the project to fail"
1. open source projects don't really have deadlines, so they cannot fail. There is no manager to say "stop working on this" so there always exists the possibility that someone will take up the torch and finish the project or add the finishing touches that make it interesting to users.
2. The cost of an open-source failure is nearly zero. Sure, somebody sunk some time into it, but disappointed customers aren't going to sue, management isn't going to axe anyone, nobody spent money on ads or PR campaigns. So what if the product doesn't ship, or it's 12 months late, big deal.
3. Since there is no political or management pressure to succeed, open source projects have the luxury of failing early and allowing people to work on more interesting or worthwhile projects right away, rather than dragging on months or years waiting for management to realize how messed up something is.
I'm kind of wondering if there are a few million people out there with borderline (or not so borderline) cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder who type britney or mp3 into google over and over again hoping for something new to show up.
It's kind of like the 1-900 phone polls that allow you to vote over and over again for your favorite <whatever> but get corrupted by a few people using their parents' phone line and the redial button.
If google took more of a one-man one-vote philosophy and only counted a search term once per persistent cookie, they might get a more varied list.
Kind of, but then you wouldn't have an interactive user interface (the topic at hand), just a static display that a viewer has to mentally remap into a timeline.
Slashdot Mirror
Me neither, but for slightly different reasons.
The main definition of a grid is a pattern of intersecting lines. While sun or ibm may arrange their computers neatly in rows of vertical racks and build it in a grid pattern physically, nothing of this remains for the actual use or architecture of so-called grid computing. This leaves large swaths of parallel algorithms by the wayside. The only things you can efficiently compute on a grid are the "embarassingly parallel" codes that don't interact much with neighboring CPUs nor require large data sets. Sure, you can do SETI work units and compute large primes, but for chess, weather, and crash sims you'd be better off with a traditional supercomputer or local cluster.
Wiki reference here
Moof!
Humans have self-awareness with only 25 watts.
How does it feel to know that your computer may have a consciousness 14 times more powerful than your own?
For a start, read here and here here.
Was it just me? The ads that were served up beside TFA were all for vacuum tube suppliers...
People sure go to a lot of work just avoid creating a robots.txt file!
Here are some of your misconceptions, in no particular order:
1. The onus is on you to prove that it's right. That's how science works. You have a new theory, you have to offer evidence, proof, falsifiability, and explain how it encompasses all the correctly handled cases from existing theories while expanding in a simple and elegant way into new areas. The more grandiose and far-reaching the theory is, the more proof you must have.
2. You got the name wrong, calling it "Frame Grabbing" instead of "Frame Dragging". In fact you referred to the individual "frames" themselves, as if physical reality were a video. It's not. Just because two phrases sounds the same doesn't mean the underlying concepts are the same.
3. Frame dragging takes place in context of a large rotating body. What's special about rotation? To keep from flying apart, the body must be subject to a large centripetal acceleration from gravity. That's missing in the case of a linearly moving body. In physics, that's a huge difference.
4. You used an incorrect metaphor (spacetime as a gas). Going supersonic in a gas doesn't lead to square roots of negative numbers or division by zero. The boundary conditions are completely different and drawing conclusions about one based on the other is just wrong.
5. You jumbled up a bunch of words like cavitation, invisibility, clock skew, time travel, time dilation, observer, and there was not one formula relating anything to anything else.
6. The words you wrote sound like they came from someone under the influence of marijuana. At worst, you're just another physics crackpot that thinks they understand relativity when they only understand the WORD relativity.
7. Stop watching dumbed-down-for-TV science programs. Go to college, take courses, read the textbook over and over, understand units of measure, differential equations, fields, particles vs. waves, many-worlds, the standard model, string theory, and (now listen carefully) the overall process of making observations about the universe, formulating a theory, testing the theory, and making your test results available in peer-reviewed publications. It's hard work, it's done by people who love physics, and mixing-n-matching various physics concepts as if they were garanimals does a disservice to people who work really hard on understanding complex and universe-altering concepts.
8. Just because I don't have a better theory doesn't make you right and me wrong. Having NO theory is more accurate than having an incorrect theory. At least I know what I don't know.
In essense, everything you said was wrong, but hey relativity is like that sometimes.
It wasn't just that it was a script as opposed to C++ or something, but that he referred to it as a single script not plural. Even modest software projects benefit from modularization--the contractor's failure to do even that was yet another red flag. However, your point is well taken.
"Recently we have been referred to an outsourcing company to finish customization on a script that the author had no time to complete..."
(a) the person(s) who did the referring should be notified, so that they don't try referring other projects into the same fate.
(b) if you paid the original author the money that you spent on outsourcing, he probably would have *found* the time to complete it. One likely scenario is that the original author got annoyed with you or your company management and just plain left.
(c) why on earth would you have allowed it to be shrouded/obfuscated? work for hire should be delivered in source form.
(d) you specifically called it a script not a program. this gives (me at least) the feeling that it wasn't a very ambitious or important project, more like a proof-of-concept that got blown out of proportion. if it was intended to serve a real business need, it should have been taken more seriously.
(e) it's sounds like you're less interested in getting the script to work than you are in getting your company's money back. the thing is, the lawyers will charge $250/hour, so it's probably best to just chalk it up to experience, let your manager chew you out for screwing it up, and accept the lessons life has taught you.
However, he does not rule out fractional numbers of dead people.
When I'm in the mood to tweak, I'll bring up the idea that deaths should be scaled by life expectancy. An extreme example would be that maybe the death of a 90 year-old guy with cancer should only count about 1% as much as the death of a healthy college kid.
This is at first a bit horrifying, but it changes the perception of health risk a bit. A car accident can strike at any time no matter your health or life-expectancy, but the flu is far harsher on the very young and the very old. Heart attacks quite rare for the under-30 crowd, become very common in the 50's and 60's and start tapering off since people who are susceptible have already had them. Various other ailments have other relationships to life-expectancy, both for susceptibility and for impact.
The logical conclusion I always get to is that we should focus a lot more health resources on the very young, i.e. pre-natal and neo-natal care, free vaccinations, healthy childhood diets and exercise, lifelong sunscreen habits, semi-intentional exposure to a variety of colds and flus in the teens and 20's, and moderation of alcohol and fatty foods after that.
It's all common sense stuff and would pay off 100:1 compared to after-the-event treatments for things like heart attacks and cancer.
Wrong. From the article it sounds like they placed the device, let it record for several weeks, then removed it and retrieved the record of his travels. Makes the device much simpler and easier to self power.
Wow, that's even less useful than I thought. All it does is gather circumstantial evidence that your car was at certain places at certain dates and times. It gathers no evidence of actual crimes, except maybe for parking tickets.
PROSECUTOR: We have evidence that you parked near a crack dealer on 3rd street twice a week for the last several months. How much crack did you buy each time?
DEFENDANT: 3rd street? That's where blockbuster is. I was returning videos!!!
PROSECUTOR: <craps pants>
Do not point laser at remaining pilot!
If you're going to go looking for it...
1. There is an antenna placement conflict between GPS being line-of-sight and the covert need for police to keep the unit hidden. It is likely that there is a small, thin antenna that can be run up a seam betweeen body panels, or a thin black tape that can be run along glass next to a rubber window gasket. Point is, these things will be visible.
2. It has to transmit to the police or it's useless. No way you're going to get a satellite uplink from under a car so it probably just broadcasts locally on a "tweener" frequency somewhere in the police or public bands. Drive your car over to a ham radio guy's house and within 20 seconds he'll have equipment out to scan for the frequency.
3. The size will probably be big enough to be visible with a quick inspection by flashlight and mirror-on-a-stick. It's probably about the size of the smallest commercially available GPS units. Probably not magnetic like in the bond movies, more likely some loops for quick-ties. Whole thing is flat black plastic maybe with some intentional mud-spot camo. Wire leads away from it to the antenna.
4. If they really want to install it in a hidden place they'll have to use a jack to raise your car. Stick something crushable and hard to replace at each possible jacking point (including ones not in the owners manual) and just check these before you do your dastardly deeds.
5. The tech is neat, but once they roll it out and every officer has one it'll be like lo-jack. The criminals know it might be there and they change their tactics to compensate. Small time cheaters will be easier to follow, but the best bet for catching mobsters is probably still the tax code.
"Shadow Watermelon Carrier"
In fact it was so disturbing that one must assume it was done by an outside agency: nobody at G4 would have been capable of anything so creatively weird.
Aside from the union issue, conference people really don't like tripped breakers during the show. That is very, very bad.
The rules about plugging in unauthorized stuff probably originated before laptops when a lot of things people would plug in were extra lighting for their booth or a microwave under a table for booth workers' convenience. The electricity budget is carefully planned out ahead of time and stuff like that could easily trip a breaker if the kilowatts were not counted up. So, there was an alignment between the conference organizer's needs (no tripped breakers) and the unions needs (more work for their electricians) so the rules got made. [I am not suggesting electricians actually looked up documents to evaluate power usage before plugging stuff in. It's more that they want an electrican around so that when someone does plug something new in and the breaker trips, at least he's right there and available and knows where the breaker is and can reset it in a couple of minutes without bothering convention management about it.]
But even know, I don't have much confidence that security guards would be knowledgable about power consumption for various typical appliances. Things like a CRT, a plasma display, and an LCD monitor may all be lumped into the same mental category by the security guard (looks like a TV) even though the power consumption varies 20:1 among them.
Things don't have to be animate to be capable of reacting. If you pay attention to something, you'll probably understand it better and make better decisions about how to use/maintain it. If you just "use" a thing and ignore the sounds it makes, the fluids leaking, the maintenance schedule in the owner's manual, etc then your car/appliance/whatever will "hate" you in the sense of not giving the best service to you.
Also, a lot of items in your world are made by people and so have some embodiment of expecting to interact with humans designed into them.
Retreads are economical, but they are also somewhat of a hazard.
It is very common for retreads to separate from the underlying tire and leave a 6 foot long piece of vulcanized rubber somewhere in the roadway. Worse, since it was molded into a circlar shape at some point, the retread doesn't want to lie flat on the road so pretty much the next car that comes along is going to get damaged.
HFMWIC = "Head Military Figure What's In Charge"
(often the MF part of the acronym is interpreted differently).
So start an open source success/failure analysis project!
and yet there is no sphere for "ignoring what your three best developers all said to you in that meeting yesterday and instead doing some CYA or politics-based thing even if it causes the project to fail"
1. open source projects don't really have deadlines, so they cannot fail. There is no manager to say "stop working on this" so there always exists the possibility that someone will take up the torch and finish the project or add the finishing touches that make it interesting to users.
2. The cost of an open-source failure is nearly zero. Sure, somebody sunk some time into it, but disappointed customers aren't going to sue, management isn't going to axe anyone, nobody spent money on ads or PR campaigns. So what if the product doesn't ship, or it's 12 months late, big deal.
3. Since there is no political or management pressure to succeed, open source projects have the luxury of failing early and allowing people to work on more interesting or worthwhile projects right away, rather than dragging on months or years waiting for management to realize how messed up something is.
I'm kind of wondering if there are a few million people out there with borderline (or not so borderline) cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder who type britney or mp3 into google over and over again hoping for something new to show up.
It's kind of like the 1-900 phone polls that allow you to vote over and over again for your favorite <whatever> but get corrupted by a few people using their parents' phone line and the redial button.
If google took more of a one-man one-vote philosophy and only counted a search term once per persistent cookie, they might get a more varied list.
It probably isn't a good long-term strategy to respond to microsoft this way. Open source software needs to find an open-source signing mechanism.
A good starting point might be for www.mozilla.org to host unmirrored checksums for itself and its plug-ins.
That sort of logic doesn't scale very well...if having sex with a 30 year old person is legal, why isn't having sex with a 30 month old person legal?
Kind of, but then you wouldn't have an interactive user interface (the topic at hand), just a static display that a viewer has to mentally remap into a timeline.