I know assembly. It's fun in a geeky way, and it may be useful for embedded systems. I don't do embedded systems and will defer to those with more expertise in that area.
But for modern PC hardware, for significantly sized code that needs to run as fast as possible, hand-tweaked assembly isn't the way to go. I've seen very smart people brag about the handful of clock cycles they saved by hand tweaking the assembly. And I've seen (apparently) smarter people save thousands of cycles by ripping out the hard-coded assembly so that a good compiler can do its job. Some knowledge of assembly may be useful in understanding what the compiler does, and how to take advantage of that, but don't write it yourself!
This hasn't exactly been a good thing for Obama. He's trying to portray himself (fairly or unfairly) as the guy who isn't going to get involved in mudslinging. This story has hurt him as much, if not more than, it has hurt Hillary. So who does it help? That's right, the rest of the Democratic primary candidates. At least two of whom are also clients of Blue State digital. Shouldn't we be pointing fingers at Bill Richardson?
Or we could drop worrying about who said what, or who did or didn'thave aproved their saying it, and concentrate on something else. Like, I don't know, what the candidates positions on issues are? Is the only thing we're ever going to ask Barak Obama about is whether he aproves of what nasty thing someone else said about Hilary? Who cares?
I'm just saying there is a difference between saying "If we exploited this known physical effect, and were able to greatly improve existing technologies, what could we do?" (as is the case with Magnetic Field Propulsion) and speculating about, for example, Gravity Drives. Yeah, we've got a couple programs trying, so far unsuccessfully, to detect gravity waves, because various theories say they should exist. But we cannot spend useful time perparing to capitalize on future discoveries, because we don't know anything except that our current theories aren't quite right; or maybe our instuments aren't sensitive enough; basically we don't know squat. The only reason to talk about gravity waves having propulsion aplications is because a charachter on Star Trek did; and he did only because it's an area of physics we don't know enough about to make him look obviously silly.
Speculation begining from stuff we know and speculation begining from stuff we don't know are fumndamentally different. SciFi authors do both; engineers should be paid only for the former.
The "research and engineering" going into how to build a space elevator, with the exception of the materials science, is a silly waste of time. Every problem beides "what to make it our of" is essentially within the reach of current capabilities; the solutions to all of them depend on what you make it out of and on the tech level of whatever future society figures out what to make it out of, and/or why it would be worth it. We are nowhere close to answering either of those questions.
It's not a matter of setting up your company for mandatory yearly turnover - most of your employees are not going to be on this plan in any case. But in a large org like Google or the big university where I had such a job, you will periodically have projects you want to hire someone to do, but that you don't want to add a permanent position for.
In the job I had, I was called a "casual employee" - the sub-sub-department that hired me didn't have to go through getting aproval to expand their headount; they could just pay me out of their genreal operating budget and I could start the day after they decided they needed me. But to keep such expedited procedures from getting out of hand, the total number of hours I could work under this system was limited to a bit less than a years worth of full time. It seemed like a pretty good deal for all sides at the time.
"Building a rocket to go to the space station is not an advanced concept."
Entirely agree. The space station as a whole is a huge expenditure of resources to learn pretty much nothing. We've been to low earth orbit a few times already.
"Building a space elevator using carbon nanotubes...that's advanced. Magnetic field drives...that's advanced. Solar sails, antimatter engines, gravitational drives...all advanced."
All *fictional*. With the possible exception of solar sails, based on my understanding of those "technologies", they are not at a point where time might be usefully spent on them by engineers as opposed to SciFi writers.
I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm refering to this statement in the first article linked to:
"...The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles."
Those "expected lifetimes" are not supported by anyting; they are just (stupid, obviously bad) assumptions. Earlier in the article he seems to give the Prius exclusive blame for all environmental damage due to nickel mining. And he goes on about how it's too bad for Toyota the government caught on to their scam and changed the test for fuel efficiency to one that doesn't over inflate the Prius numbers. He fails to note that Toyota was a chief lobbying force supporting the change in regulations.
What does being a V8 have to do with anything? My flat 4 has over 500K on it.
In any case, the article assumes the Hummer will go 300K and the Prius 100K. Assuming the drivers have similar maintenance habits, etc. one of these assumptions is stupid. Given this basic level of rigging in their comparison, am I expected to beleive the many other numbers they throw about?
If you can catch up to it, why climb on board? You're going to have the same issues decelerating at the other end too. Even as an unmanned cargo drone, sent ahead with supplies it doesn't work. The reason it's slow is itdoesn't push very hard; give it lots of mass to push and it's not slow but glacial.
This sounds great for a lightweight unmanned probe that just keeps steadily accelerating forever. Other than that I can't see it.
I'll readily agree with you that Windows kind of sucks technically, and MS kind of sucks ethically.
But this article is comparing Windows and OSX. Is it your contention that MS is solely (or even chiefly) to blame for the fact that OSX is not available on comodity hardware?
Looking at the handful of highly skilled coders I know:
- Before age 25, all of them regularly stayed up all night coding, primarily of their own free will.
- A few of them still do, still mostly because they want to, and get little respect/pay for it. These are in the game industry.
- The rest, outside the game industry, get good pay and respect. They go home at 5 and stop thinking about work. Some code on their own projects, and might occasionally stay up late doing so.
Frankly, if you're a smart, capable person of college age, I would not reccomend selecting any career path if you're not already occasionally staying up all night doing whatever it is. If you're going to like doing something enough to do it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for much of your life; then with the added enthusiasm of youth, you really ought to like doing it for about as long as you can stay awake.
Well, that makes more sense; I was indeed misunderstanding somewhat. But given that I've done all manner of date handling code without even knowing this and had no problem, the option to set set my system clock to GMT or local sounds like the option to spend my time caring about something I don't have to for no discernable reason. There may be some reason to want this option, but it is not apparent to me, and the lack of it doesn't seem to have crippled Windows adoption.
As a side note, I don't think anyone claimed UTC == GMT, but as long as you're going to note that they are not the same, I'll need to be pedantic and point out that while they refer to conceptually different entities, and while the use of either term implies different things about the precision and technical derivation of the time reference in question, for any such reference fairly close to the present, either refers, in the end, to the same bloody time.:)
My system is displaying local time, and every way I know of to get a timestamp in several coding environments will give me UTC, though some will ask the operating system to convert to local if I want them to. Which it handles just great. Windows is stupid in a whole lot of ways. But it is not utterly lacking in basic requirements like time handling.
"They tax the hell out of cigarettes, but that doesn't cause many people to quit using them."
Why do you say that? Cigarette smoking is way way down. It's hard to prove causation on a widespread scale, but anecdotally, the steadily increasing expense was certainly a factor when I quit.
Odd; Some sort of device for locating cell phones in an emergency made the news around here recently when it was used to rescue people buried in an avalanche. That would involve finding a phone over a fairly short distance, when you already had a pretty good idea what general area it was in, so it must be a range issue.
I specifically referenced violent crime in a desperate attempt to focus the discussion. I do not beleive I am the victim of any violent crime of which I am unaware.
I pay a variety of taxes which our society originaly instituted for a variety of purposes. Some are stupid. Describing them as "crimes" pointlessly confuses the issue.
All levels of our society are, by historical standards, very "personal" crime free. When I said before I would prefer our current society to any other that had really existed, I did mean for someone in roughly my social position. But if I were going to be in the lower strata of a society, would I prefer it be ours than any other? Definitely; many times more so.
"The US is chock full of injustice."
Compared to what? Your imagined libertarian paradise, or some society that has actually existed in the real world? I'm not disputing that modern US society could use improvement. Certainly there is work to do.
But you are advocating junking what I percieve to be the best system achieved so far, in favor of something entirely untested with what look to me like obvious problems. Based on emotional appeals to individual tragic cases in opposition to clear and massive statistical trends. Thanks, I'll pass.
I do not imagine, but observe, that while there are many things about our current society that I do not like (some of which you touch upon), it is, on the whole, working better than any other society ever has. Of all real societies that do exist or have existed on earth, I would like to live in the one I do (or at least, in some modern, industrialized, western democracy; which one makes little difference)
You it seems, would desperately prefer to live in the world as you imagine it would be after your radical reforms. As I do not think it would work out so well, I'll take the real, pretty good world I've got.
You seem particularly incensed about the horrors of crime. Statistically, I can expect to live my entire life without ever being the victim (or perpetrator) of a violent crime. Historically, that is unheard of. Any thoughts why the society you see as so disfuctional is so fabulously successful on this front?
"If you'll think about it for a minute... Police haven't done squat to stop crime... The system is broken."
If I think about it for a moment, I note that I live in a society where my chances of being the victim of violent crime are radically lower than any other place or time known to man. You'll forgive my limited enthusiuasm for completely junking our current law enforcement system.
"a private sector force who I knew was actually on my side"
Why would they be on your side, if I hire them and say (falsely) that you stole from me?
Bingo. Given a pile of blocks, my daughter will put on a little play with the blocks as actors. My son will try to build a tower. My daughter (being older) can build a better tower, but is only interested in doing so for the social aspect: the admiration she'll then get from her brother. And it's not differential encouragement; god knows I want her to build towers with me; I like towers, she's older, and I'm impatient. I've learened to enjoy the plays. Particularly the one where the little-girl block reluctantly agrees to play with the daddy block...
So your argument is "Clinton did it, so it must be okay"?
Ignoring for the moment that this particular program was not in fact operating under Clinton, I certainly wouldn't assume anything Clinton did was OK in any case. Given that you automatically brand those who disagree with you "ignorant left-wingers", I'm a bit surprised you consider Clinton the gold-standard of morality and/or legality.
Anyway, the Bush Administration has been in control for a little bit now, I'd think were past any transitional stage, yes? Can we start holding them responsible for the governments actions sometime soon?
"everything prior we'd ever dealt with in science was deterministic"
Or so we assumed, though the extreme statistical probabilities chance at quantum scales would give to effects at larger scales would look just like determinism in all those prior contexts. The assumption that the world is deteriminsic has served science well, and indeed should not be undermined without very convincing evidence. But the evidence is there: The double-slit experiment; Einstiens own work on the photo-electic effect; etc. provide that evidence.
My intuition agrees with yours and Einstiens. But when it comes to quantum mechanics, my intution disagrees with clear experimental results, and thus I must reject it.
I understand that. I mentioned "Fate, God and Free-will", because those are what the poster I was replying to mentioned, claiming Einstien wasn't expressing anything about them. Rather, I beleive, Einstien was assuming it was understood that these were just labels for the way the universe ticks, and expressing his opinion that it ticks deterministically.
I actually was about to drop "God" out of the list, on the grounds of being meaningless in this context, but left it in because it's the label Einstien used, and because I decided the same was true of Fate and Free Will for that matter.
Whatever. Einstien was saying the world is deterministic; though, as far as I can tell, for aesthetic rather than scientific reasons.
As for Dawkins, he seems to belabor his points rather tediously. Particularly since I can't imagine anyone paying any attention to him who didn't already agree with him entirely. (Like I do.)
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says it's impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle; and particularly that increasing the precision whith which you know one will decrease the precision with which you know the other. It is related to, but not quite the same as, the assertion of quantum mechanics that at the smallest scales, reality is not deterministic.
Einstein thought this risiculous, as expressed in the famous quote, but most physicists now beleive he was wrong.
Either position is clearly saying quite a lot about Fate, God and Free-will!
"I don't like the fact that my car has a chip governing it to 125MpH."
So disable it. You've every right to, and if it's any of the ones I'm familiar with, the dealer will be happy to help you with it too. They'll also sell you tires that won't disintegrate at 130; Which is what the stock ones will do, which is of course the whole point of that chip.
Not sure what the relevance to DRM is, except to show you're an idiot that doesn't know what he's talking about, but the rest of your post makes that pretty clear anyway.
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I know assembly. It's fun in a geeky way, and it may be useful for embedded systems. I don't do embedded systems and will defer to those with more expertise in that area.
But for modern PC hardware, for significantly sized code that needs to run as fast as possible, hand-tweaked assembly isn't the way to go. I've seen very smart people brag about the handful of clock cycles they saved by hand tweaking the assembly. And I've seen (apparently) smarter people save thousands of cycles by ripping out the hard-coded assembly so that a good compiler can do its job. Some knowledge of assembly may be useful in understanding what the compiler does, and how to take advantage of that, but don't write it yourself!
This hasn't exactly been a good thing for Obama. He's trying to portray himself (fairly or unfairly) as the guy who isn't going to get involved in mudslinging. This story has hurt him as much, if not more than, it has hurt Hillary. So who does it help? That's right, the rest of the Democratic primary candidates. At least two of whom are also clients of Blue State digital. Shouldn't we be pointing fingers at Bill Richardson?
Or we could drop worrying about who said what, or who did or didn'thave aproved their saying it, and concentrate on something else. Like, I don't know, what the candidates positions on issues are? Is the only thing we're ever going to ask Barak Obama about is whether he aproves of what nasty thing someone else said about Hilary? Who cares?
I'm just saying there is a difference between saying "If we exploited this known physical effect, and were able to greatly improve existing technologies, what could we do?" (as is the case with Magnetic Field Propulsion) and speculating about, for example, Gravity Drives. Yeah, we've got a couple programs trying, so far unsuccessfully, to detect gravity waves, because various theories say they should exist. But we cannot spend useful time perparing to capitalize on future discoveries, because we don't know anything except that our current theories aren't quite right; or maybe our instuments aren't sensitive enough; basically we don't know squat. The only reason to talk about gravity waves having propulsion aplications is because a charachter on Star Trek did; and he did only because it's an area of physics we don't know enough about to make him look obviously silly.
Speculation begining from stuff we know and speculation begining from stuff we don't know are fumndamentally different. SciFi authors do both; engineers should be paid only for the former.
The "research and engineering" going into how to build a space elevator, with the exception of the materials science, is a silly waste of time. Every problem beides "what to make it our of" is essentially within the reach of current capabilities; the solutions to all of them depend on what you make it out of and on the tech level of whatever future society figures out what to make it out of, and/or why it would be worth it. We are nowhere close to answering either of those questions.
It's not a matter of setting up your company for mandatory yearly turnover - most of your employees are not going to be on this plan in any case. But in a large org like Google or the big university where I had such a job, you will periodically have projects you want to hire someone to do, but that you don't want to add a permanent position for.
In the job I had, I was called a "casual employee" - the sub-sub-department that hired me didn't have to go through getting aproval to expand their headount; they could just pay me out of their genreal operating budget and I could start the day after they decided they needed me. But to keep such expedited procedures from getting out of hand, the total number of hours I could work under this system was limited to a bit less than a years worth of full time. It seemed like a pretty good deal for all sides at the time.
"Building a rocket to go to the space station is not an advanced concept."
Entirely agree. The space station as a whole is a huge expenditure of resources to learn pretty much nothing. We've been to low earth orbit a few times already.
"Building a space elevator using carbon nanotubes...that's advanced. Magnetic field drives...that's advanced. Solar sails, antimatter engines, gravitational drives...all advanced."
All *fictional*. With the possible exception of solar sails, based on my understanding of those "technologies", they are not at a point where time might be usefully spent on them by engineers as opposed to SciFi writers.
I know the previous poster said being cynical was cute, but you're not going to get chicks that way. Not when you're obviously just working it.
I don't know what you are talking about, but I'm refering to this statement in the first article linked to:
"...The Prius costs an average of $3.25 per mile driven over a lifetime of 100,000 miles - the expected lifespan of the Hybrid.
The Hummer, on the other hand, costs a more fiscal $1.95 per mile to put on the road over an expected lifetime of 300,000 miles."
Those "expected lifetimes" are not supported by anyting; they are just (stupid, obviously bad) assumptions. Earlier in the article he seems to give the Prius exclusive blame for all environmental damage due to nickel mining. And he goes on about how it's too bad for Toyota the government caught on to their scam and changed the test for fuel efficiency to one that doesn't over inflate the Prius numbers. He fails to note that Toyota was a chief lobbying force supporting the change in regulations.
What does being a V8 have to do with anything? My flat 4 has over 500K on it.
In any case, the article assumes the Hummer will go 300K and the Prius 100K. Assuming the drivers have similar maintenance habits, etc. one of these assumptions is stupid. Given this basic level of rigging in their comparison, am I expected to beleive the many other numbers they throw about?
If you can catch up to it, why climb on board? You're going to have the same issues decelerating at the other end too. Even as an unmanned cargo drone, sent ahead with supplies it doesn't work. The reason it's slow is itdoesn't push very hard; give it lots of mass to push and it's not slow but glacial.
This sounds great for a lightweight unmanned probe that just keeps steadily accelerating forever. Other than that I can't see it.
I'll readily agree with you that Windows kind of sucks technically, and MS kind of sucks ethically.
But this article is comparing Windows and OSX. Is it your contention that MS is solely (or even chiefly) to blame for the fact that OSX is not available on comodity hardware?
Looking at the handful of highly skilled coders I know:
- Before age 25, all of them regularly stayed up all night coding, primarily of their own free will.
- A few of them still do, still mostly because they want to, and get little respect/pay for it. These are in the game industry.
- The rest, outside the game industry, get good pay and respect. They go home at 5 and stop thinking about work. Some code on their own projects, and might occasionally stay up late doing so.
Frankly, if you're a smart, capable person of college age, I would not reccomend selecting any career path if you're not already occasionally staying up all night doing whatever it is. If you're going to like doing something enough to do it 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for much of your life; then with the added enthusiasm of youth, you really ought to like doing it for about as long as you can stay awake.
Quite the ringing endorsement in these parts.
Well, that makes more sense; I was indeed misunderstanding somewhat. But given that I've done all manner of date handling code without even knowing this and had no problem, the option to set set my system clock to GMT or local sounds like the option to spend my time caring about something I don't have to for no discernable reason. There may be some reason to want this option, but it is not apparent to me, and the lack of it doesn't seem to have crippled Windows adoption.
:)
As a side note, I don't think anyone claimed UTC == GMT, but as long as you're going to note that they are not the same, I'll need to be pedantic and point out that while they refer to conceptually different entities, and while the use of either term implies different things about the precision and technical derivation of the time reference in question, for any such reference fairly close to the present, either refers, in the end, to the same bloody time.
My system is displaying local time, and every way I know of to get a timestamp in several coding environments will give me UTC, though some will ask the operating system to convert to local if I want them to. Which it handles just great.
Windows is stupid in a whole lot of ways. But it is not utterly lacking in basic requirements like time handling.
"They tax the hell out of cigarettes, but that doesn't cause many people to quit using them."
Why do you say that? Cigarette smoking is way way down. It's hard to prove causation on a widespread scale, but anecdotally, the steadily increasing expense was certainly a factor when I quit.
Odd; Some sort of device for locating cell phones in an emergency made the news around here recently when it was used to rescue people buried in an avalanche. That would involve finding a phone over a fairly short distance, when you already had a pretty good idea what general area it was in, so it must be a range issue.
I specifically referenced violent crime in a desperate attempt to focus the discussion. I do not beleive I am the victim of any violent crime of which I am unaware.
I pay a variety of taxes which our society originaly instituted for a variety of purposes. Some are stupid. Describing them as "crimes" pointlessly confuses the issue.
All levels of our society are, by historical standards, very "personal" crime free. When I said before I would prefer our current society to any other that had really existed, I did mean for someone in roughly my social position. But if I were going to be in the lower strata of a society, would I prefer it be ours than any other? Definitely; many times more so.
"The US is chock full of injustice."
Compared to what? Your imagined libertarian paradise, or some society that has actually existed in the real world? I'm not disputing that modern US society could use improvement. Certainly there is work to do.
But you are advocating junking what I percieve to be the best system achieved so far, in favor of something entirely untested with what look to me like obvious problems. Based on emotional appeals to individual tragic cases in opposition to clear and massive statistical trends. Thanks, I'll pass.
You imagine a lot of things...
I do not imagine, but observe, that while there are many things about our current society that I do not like (some of which you touch upon), it is, on the whole, working better than any other society ever has. Of all real societies that do exist or have existed on earth, I would like to live in the one I do (or at least, in some modern, industrialized, western democracy; which one makes little difference)
You it seems, would desperately prefer to live in the world as you imagine it would be after your radical reforms. As I do not think it would work out so well, I'll take the real, pretty good world I've got.
You seem particularly incensed about the horrors of crime. Statistically, I can expect to live my entire life without ever being the victim (or perpetrator) of a violent crime. Historically, that is unheard of. Any thoughts why the society you see as so disfuctional is so fabulously successful on this front?
"If you'll think about it for a minute ... Police haven't done squat to stop crime ... The system is broken."
If I think about it for a moment, I note that I live in a society where my chances of being the victim of violent crime are radically lower than any other place or time known to man. You'll forgive my limited enthusiuasm for completely junking our current law enforcement system.
"a private sector force who I knew was actually on my side"
Why would they be on your side, if I hire them and say (falsely) that you stole from me?
Bingo. Given a pile of blocks, my daughter will put on a little play with the blocks as actors. My son will try to build a tower. My daughter (being older) can build a better tower, but is only interested in doing so for the social aspect: the admiration she'll then get from her brother. And it's not differential encouragement; god knows I want her to build towers with me; I like towers, she's older, and I'm impatient. I've learened to enjoy the plays. Particularly the one where the little-girl block reluctantly agrees to play with the daddy block...
So your argument is "Clinton did it, so it must be okay"?
Ignoring for the moment that this particular program was not in fact operating under Clinton, I certainly wouldn't assume anything Clinton did was OK in any case. Given that you automatically brand those who disagree with you "ignorant left-wingers", I'm a bit surprised you consider Clinton the gold-standard of morality and/or legality.
Anyway, the Bush Administration has been in control for a little bit now, I'd think were past any transitional stage, yes? Can we start holding them responsible for the governments actions sometime soon?
"everything prior we'd ever dealt with in science was deterministic"
Or so we assumed, though the extreme statistical probabilities chance at quantum scales would give to effects at larger scales would look just like determinism in all those prior contexts. The assumption that the world is deteriminsic has served science well, and indeed should not be undermined without very convincing evidence. But the evidence is there: The double-slit experiment; Einstiens own work on the photo-electic effect; etc. provide that evidence.
My intuition agrees with yours and Einstiens. But when it comes to quantum mechanics, my intution disagrees with clear experimental results, and thus I must reject it.
I understand that. I mentioned "Fate, God and Free-will", because those are what the poster I was replying to mentioned, claiming Einstien wasn't expressing anything about them. Rather, I beleive, Einstien was assuming it was understood that these were just labels for the way the universe ticks, and expressing his opinion that it ticks deterministically.
I actually was about to drop "God" out of the list, on the grounds of being meaningless in this context, but left it in because it's the label Einstien used, and because I decided the same was true of Fate and Free Will for that matter.
Whatever. Einstien was saying the world is deterministic; though, as far as I can tell, for aesthetic rather than scientific reasons.
As for Dawkins, he seems to belabor his points rather tediously. Particularly since I can't imagine anyone paying any attention to him who didn't already agree with him entirely. (Like I do.)
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle says it's impossible to know both the position and velocity of a particle; and particularly that increasing the precision whith which you know one will decrease the precision with which you know the other. It is related to, but not quite the same as, the assertion of quantum mechanics that at the smallest scales, reality is not deterministic.
Einstein thought this risiculous, as expressed in the famous quote, but most physicists now beleive he was wrong.
Either position is clearly saying quite a lot about Fate, God and Free-will!
"I don't like the fact that my car has a chip governing it to 125MpH."
So disable it. You've every right to, and if it's any of the ones I'm familiar with, the dealer will be happy to help you with it too. They'll also sell you tires that won't disintegrate at 130; Which is what the stock ones will do, which is of course the whole point of that chip.
Not sure what the relevance to DRM is, except to show you're an idiot that doesn't know what he's talking about, but the rest of your post makes that pretty clear anyway.