It's a search engine. A googol, on the other hand, is 10^100.
Google, Inc. changed the spelling intentionally for the same reason that Apple doesn't use the slogan "Think Differently" -- because they think peoples is stupid.
The vast majority of jobs in our economy cannot be offshored, and therefore are in no danger of going away. Focus on one of these if you are really worried about your future:
1) Any kind of job requiring a physical presence: Burger flipper, security guard, apple picker, forest ranger, architect, construction worker, consultant, executive manager,... In the IT realm, consider becoming an IT help desk staffer, business analyst, architect, or product manager.
2) Any kind of job requiring certification in the US. Become a doctor or a lawyer. They have unions, er I mean associations, to police the streets and keep the jobs onshore.
The scary thing about software is that modern telecom has made it so easily offshore-able. Within 10 years I doubt that any sizeable commercial software packages will be developed primarily in the US.
> So why do people persist in thinking that rockets should be reusable?
Maybe because jet airliners are reusable? Maybe because an entire world-wide industry has evolved to build and fly them? Maybe because someone thinks that building a reusable space vehicle is not impossibly more difficult than building a 747?
Reaching mach 30 and tolerating the 1000s of degrees of reentry heat puts enormous stress on the shuttle. It really is nothing like flying a 747. Because of this stress, most of the critical systems need to be inspected after each flight and often replaced. Performing these inspections requires large portions of the orbiter to be dismantled and reassembled between flights. These are all per-launch costs that don't get cheaper as you fly more often.
The key point is that all of this inspection/rebuilding costs more than a simple expendable rocket would. At some point, engineering may advance to the point that a vehicle could sustain dozens of launches with no need for manual inspection. Then I would concede that reusables make sense economically. Until then, they don't.
On an economic basis there is no justification for reusable vehicles. Launch costs today are dominated by the cost of the ground crew (thousands of people are needed to maintain and launch the shuttle). The best way to reduce costs is to simplify ground operations as much as possible. Reusable vehicles don't do this, in fact they do the opposite.
If the world were run by rational people, there would be two primary vehicles: (1) A heavy-lifting, single-use, less reliable unmanned system for cargo, and (2) a small, but highly safe/redundant system for people. Combining these in the manner of the shuttle forces human reliability standards throughout, which is a bad way to get stuff into space cheaply.
So why do people persist in thinking that rockets should be reusable? It's just one of those persistent cultural myths, probably borne out of the American fascination with the automobile. Blame the Jetsons. Or maybe Star Wars. Who knows.
(I walked out of the last movie when this bit went wrong.)
Too bad. If you had stayed, you would have found out that entering Gondor was an extended dream sequence when the hobbits are asleep in Faramir's cave. You really shouldn't give up on things so easily.
While we techies know our shit, too frequently we don't know how to explain it to the people who we're helping out, and seldom can do so to those who are going to give us the money to by the equipment we need. A manager who can keep us working happily by filtering innane problems to us rather than having us spend 100% of the time helping people move their mouse is the only way to keep us from jumping ship. And having the manager communicate our needs in the marketing speak that we don't have is the only way to get us our toys so we are happy in our jobs.
Some tough love here. This kind of "separate worlds" view of IT/business is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in the USA. Today neither of the following is acceptable, at good companies:
A business executive who disavows responsibility for the success of IT initiatives
An IT person who disavows responsibility for understanding the business: how it makes money, who the customers are, and the frustrations of the front-line workers
Today, if you persist in this mode of thought as an IT professional, you will find that increasingly your "code monkey" job will be getting outsourced or offshored. And your IT coworker who took a less myopic view of IT and the business will have gotten promoted, and now manages the outsourcer/offshorer with a business mindset. In the future expect to see a lot more horizontal movement of workers between IT and the business, in the best companies.
If transparency is good, then lots of transparency is even better! Many states now require teachers to take tests of basic competence in core subjects. Why not make these scores available to parents as well?
And while we're at it, I want webcams of the classrooms and playground, so I can keep an eye on Junior throughout the day. The teacher's lounge would be nice too -- I always did wonder what happened in there.
If you want more than the Space.com article, read the PDF preprint entitled "Lack of observational evidence for quantum structure of space-time at Planck scales".
Just so people understand what's going on here, this work affects the many (untested) theories that posit some kind of "quantum of distance". There are two basic reasons that people are considering these types of theories:
At very short distance scales, the two great physical theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics (the Standard Model) are incompatible. Something interesting must occur on the scale of the Planck length = 10^-35 meters.
Many physicists have an intuitive distaste for the infinite amount of information required to specify the location of a single particle, in a truly continuous universe. Some view the universe as some kind of cellular automaton, again giving rise to a discrete grid and "quantum of distance". Proponents here would be (maybe) Feynman, Fredkin, and (most recently) Wolfram.
Anyway, what the current work does is put a bound on the "graininess" of space. Pretty clever, if correct.
Well, what to say? Have not seen such meaningless statement over the years....
It is in fact true that "runtime-compiled" languages like Java, etc. could in principle be faster than "pre-compiled" languages like C. The reason is that a compiler can do a better job optimizing the code as it gets more information, and there are some pieces of information that just aren't available prior to runtime.
The classic example is branch prediction: You can optimize the code better if you have some idea of the likelihood of each branch. In a "pre-compiled" language like C, this assessment is difficult because you don't know in advance the values of the variables in your branch test. In a "runtime-compiled" system (e.g., Hotspot), the compiler can observe the actual branching behavior during execution, and then optimize based on this much-improved information.
And we can't just blame the people who write C compilers for this situation: One of the more fundamental theorems of computer science is that no algorithm, no matter how complex, can examine a generic piece of code and accurately "guess" the values of runtime variables, without just simulating the code's execution.
What I don't know is how large this potential advantage could be, for "typical" algorithms. One interesting avenue that I haven't seen explored would be to develop a C compiler that is informed by the output of some kind of profiling tool; the profiler would glean runtime information by observing the code's execution under typical use for some period of time, and would then dump this info to the compiler for an additional round of optimization.
I challenge you to name a single book written by >3 people that doesn't suck, or to name a book written by >1 person that is a genuine classic.
The Bible. The Kalevala.
The Bible. But they always told me the Bible was written by God? Mommy, did they lead me wrong??
The Bible is more properly viewed as the Church's amalgamation of multiple source texts, rather than a single unified work. It's as though you've taken the 30 greatest books on a given topic and taped them together. Just because the Church taped them together hundreds of years ago doesn't make it a single creative work. Ditto with things like the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which another poster mentioned.
My bet is that the Bible's individual books were largely the works of single authors, with little or no collaboration between authors across different books. Is there a scholar of Bible history who would disagree?
The Kalevala. I haven't read this, so have only a Google-level understanding and will assume the classic status you imply (it does sound very interesting). The Kalevala was apparently compiled from multiple source texts by a fellow named Lönnrot. It appears that he also assumed significant creative control over the undertaking:
With regard to his method, Lönnrot explained: "I felt myself to have the same right which, according to their conviction, most singers bestow on themselves, namely, to be able to order the runes as they are best suited to be joined together, or, in the words of a rune: "I conjured myself into a conjurer, a singer came of me. That is, I considered myself as good a singer as they."
I would bet that either: (1) The separate portions of the Kalevala are as disconnected as the books of the Bible (i.e., not a single narrative), or (2) Lönnrot changed the source texts significantly during his re-telling. In the first case you've again cheated by taping books together, while in the second case case the Kalevala is effectively the work of a single author.
...is all k-12 text books and supporting materials (worksheets, lesson plans, etc.) produced under an open source licence... This work could be all be done collectively by the nations teachers themselves, just like this good woman has done. This idea just needs a Corporate Sponsor or two to host the server space and bandwidth.
No, your idea needs content. The server space and bandwidth are trivial. Are you lining up to write a few chapters for free, or is this one of those things where you're volunteering other people's time?
And while we're at it, haven't you ever noticed that the aesthetic quality of a product is inversely related to the number of people with creative control? K-12 textbooks read like DMV manuals precisely because there are too many people involved; "open-sourcing" their creation would only exacerbate the problem. I challenge you to name a single book written by >3 people that doesn't suck, or to name a book written by >1 person that is a genuine classic.
Re:Most companies aren't asking the right question
on
CIOs Looking At OSS
·
· Score: 1
What you really need to be asking is, how can participating in Open Source help my business? As an example, it's been said many times, but bear repeating: most of the lines of code written in the world are written for internal projects within a company and never see the light of day. Many companies don't release such code because it's a one-way operation. You release it, your competition uses it and you get nothing in return.
There are really two questions embedded in your comment:
How do open source projects get started?
Why would a company using an open source product participate in its development?
My take on the first question is that, so far, viable open source projects have come from three sources:
Grassroots efforts among developers to "scratch an itch". Examples: Linux, the GNU utilities, Apache
Software companies trying to boost market share for products with significant external competition. Examples: Mozilla, Darwin
Software companies trying to create a platform for selling services/support (the loss leader approach). Examples: Compiere
Other avenues might be possible. For example, a company might open internally-developed code if it felt that the benefit of externally-developed improvements would outweigh the harm of giving the code to its competitors.
The second question is more straightforward. As a company, I want to participate in OSS projects so that I can steer them. And if I don't release my developments back into the main development tree, my cost of maintaining a proprietary version will grow over time. Cost control in SW development is all about achieving and maintaining scale; splintering off is counter-productive unless there's a very good reason.
Hydrogen power and fuel cells for automotive power have always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
Biodiesel is a much better solution to the automotive power issue. Biodiesel:
Requires very little modification to existing diesel vehicles -- typically only a few hundred dollars worth
Comes from plant matter and is therefore renewable
Does not produce any net CO2 into the atmosphere (no more CO2 is emitted than was consumed by the vegetation used in production)
Has a much higher energy density than a hydrogen fuel cell ever will
I just don't see any dimension along which hydrogen is better than biodiesel. The only real app for fuel cells that I can think of is as a replacement for batteries, e.g., in laptops.
When I was an undergrad at Caltech, the scifi author David Brin (an alumnus) used to come to campus every year and give very interesting talks on all kinds of random topics.
Anyway, he has an interesting argument against government subsidy of the arts. He puts people into a pyramid formation based on ability, and observes that the market in effect draws a line through the pyramid based on minimal income needed to sustain the artist's way of life. The people well above this line make a lot of income, and the people just above the line struggle to barely get by. (The people below the line presumably find other work.)
Now government subsidy moves the line downward, allowing more people in the pyramid to be artists. Brin's key observation is that it also increases the number of people barely getting by, and therefore the total "pain" in the workforce. Geometrically, the area of the pyramid's base gets larger as the cut-line moves lower.
Molyneux's suggestion only really helps out the "little guy" if you believe that no additional developers would be attracted into the industry as a result of government subsidy, which I doubt. Hell, even I might move to the UK and be a game developer if I thought there was a dole check waiting for me.
That's a good thing. For large software development projects with many engineers involved. I can pick up other people's code and not worry about whether X really means X or whether it's a macro that's been defined elsewhere to mean Y.
Casual observation: Most of the advances in programming over the past 50 years have enhanced coder productivity by limiting what programmers can do.
Examples:
1950's -- High-level languages eliminate many degrees of freedom present in assembly, e.g., most kinds of self-modifying code
1960/70's -- Procedural programming encapsulates data within functions, limiting the scope of variables. Execution flow also more rigidly constructed; use of goto is allowed but discouraged
1980's -- OOP enforces additional encapsulation; encourages "black box" coding in which programmers have no ability to look inside large chunks of code/data
1990's -- Java eliminates pointer manipulation and implicit type-casting (e.g., all those "if (x=1) {}" bugs in C)
My explanation of this trend is that coding productivity is enhanced if we minimize the number of dimensions along which coders can screw up (or at least do something nonstandard).
AOP doesn't seem to fit this trend (or does it?). What would be the next programming degree of freedom that could be eliminated? To me one answer would be in the direction of functional programming, which severely restricts programmers' ability to specify execution order.
Somewhat offtopic, in a parallel vein many of the advances in science/math over the past 100 years have also been "limiting" advances: Special relativity eliminated faster-than-light signalling and absolute reference frames, quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle limiting what kinds of information we can have about particles, Godel's theorem proved the fundamental limitations of mathematics, etc.
Since I haven't seen a cogent explanation posted yet, I'll take a swing.
Fact 1. 60 Hz transformer hum is unrelated to what you're hearing. (That would be at 120 Hz and relatively independent of screen refresh, which doesn't match your symptoms.) As a sidebar, 60 Hz hum is caused by the Lorentz force between the electric current in a transformer coil and the magnetic field that the current induces, which produces an radial outward force on the coil. (This effect is what limits the size of magnetic fields we can create in the laboratory -- no one wants an exploding electromagnet.) As the 60 Hz alternating current runs back and forth through the transformer, a 120 Hz mechanical vibration is induced.
Fact 2. It's also not directly related to "CRT whine". We can tell this because: (a) CRT whine is independent of whether screen contents are changing, and (b) CRT whine is a directly audible mechanical vibration, not a crosstalk into your audio out line. CRT whine is caused by the electronics that drive the electron gun's horizontal deflector. For example, if you scan 500 lines 60 times a second, the signal on the horizontal deflection plates is at 30 kHz, which some people can hear. Most modern computers have enough scan lines and a high enough refresh rate that the signal frequency is too high for anyone to hear, making this not a common problem with newer computers.
Fact 3. What you're hearing is caused by capacitive coupling between signal lines (wires) inside your computer. Because of the electric repulsion between electrons, high-frequency signals can "conduct" across the air between separate wires, especially if the wires are close together. In your case, it's crosstalk between the display and audio circuitry. This crosstalk interference can be reduced with grounded metal RF shielding, but it adds cost/bulk/weight and so manufacturers try to minimize the amount they use. An audio company would shield the DAC and preamp components carefully to bring the noise below a perceptible level; a typical computer manufacturer will just make it sound ok for ordinary use.
My guess......is that you have an active-matrix LCD screen, not a passive LCD or CRT. The reason is that you only hear the noise when the screen content changes. Unlike the other two, an active-matrix screen has transistors at each pixel that remember their state. Thus there is a drive signal to the screen only when pixels are changing. Only if relatively large portions of the LCD are being continually rewritten will the duty cycle of this drive signal be substantial, and therefore the crosstalk be audible.
Conclusion: It's annoying, but there's not much you can do about it without buying a higher-quality (i.e., better-shielded) audio card.
Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
So intelligence is to computation what religion is to the physical world: a tag we use to label the things we don't understand.
Just as our dependence on religion as a means of explanation/prediction has lessened over time as science has improved, so too must the amount of "intelligence" decline as computation science advances. Maybe this is why primetime TV has gotten so bad?
Or, to put it another way, Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
This is an interesting view, and there are a couple of corollaries if you take it seriously:
Corollary 1: Intelligence depends on how a calculation is done, not merely on its results. In other words, the Turing test is fundamentally flawed. A chess-playing Deep Junior is unintelligent because we know that in principle we could look at its code and understand the rules behind its behavior (in this case, alpha/beta search plus a position evaluator). By contrast, Kasparov is intelligent because he evaluates the gestalt of a position in a way that we cannot analytically understand. Even if we could closely monitor his neural activity and follow the computation in his brain, it is a collective activity of so many constituent neurons that it is not "conceptually reducible" to us as Deep Junior's algorithm is. One would conclude that even if Kasparov were to lose to a computer, he would still be playing the game intelligently whereas the computer would not.
Corollary 2: True intelligence can only be achieved by systems that are opaque to "why did you conclude that?" kinds of analyses. Collective/swarm intelligence would be opaque in this way, but rules/knowledge-based systems would not. This would imply that the "traditional" AI approach is doomed to failure.
I've been an amateur astronomer for quite a while, and have unfortunately seen many people purchase telescopes and then quickly lose interest. Many times this is because they either buy something of very low quality and get frustrated, or because they buy a scope that is good but doesn't really fit their needs.
Advice #1: Get a good quality telescope. Stay away from the plastic-lensed Tasco 2" refractors at your neighborhood department/hobby store. Take a look at Orion Telescopes -- everything there is good quality.
Advice #2: Base the rest of the decision on how you'll use the scope. At your price limit, you'll find that you can get one but not all of the following in a good-quality scope:
Large aperture -- lets you see fainter objects. An 8" scope allows you to see roughly 8 times as many objects in the sky as a 4" scope. If you're one of those freaks (like me) that want the most photons per dollar, you can't beat a Dobsonian telescope.
Compactness -- most of us have to live near street lights, which means that if you want to see faint objects, your scope needs to be transportable. Different people have different thresholds for what is "transportable"...some of my friends are very happy with their 36" Dobsonians that require massive trailers to haul. If you really want portability, get one of the Schmidt-Cassegrains from Meade or Celestron -- their 8" scopes fit in a medium suitcase.
Tracking/computer control -- the mechanisms used to track the scope to the earth's rotation and to provide a computer interface are not cheap. To those of us raised on binoculars and star-hopping, the "goto" computer-controlled scopes are like shooting fish in a barrel. But if you want to see a lot of stuff very quickly, they are nice. They also require the least stamina and dexterity to operate, something that may be a consideration for your dad. Some part of me wants to make fun of these guys who sit in their chairs sipping cocoa while the computer does all the work, just as I do at the folks who go to the Grand Canyon and ride the poor mules down to the bottom rather than hike. Still, if it opens the experience to people who couldn't otherwise do it, so much the better. Most of the Schmidt-Cassegrains have options for computer control.
The ideal thing is if people can learn about the sky first before jumping into an expensive telescope purchase. A star chart and an inexpensive pair of 7x50 binoculars will let you see a surprising amount: Binary stars, some galaxies, lots of star clusters, all of the planets except Neptune and Pluto, the Galilean moons of Jupiter, amazing detail on the Earth's Moon, etc.
Terraforming could also use CO2 in soil...
on
More on the Mars Ice Cap
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Mars also contains CO2 in its soil. This is in two forms: (1) CO2 directly adsorbed onto the (porous) rocks and dirt, and (2) CO2 in ice form mixed into the soil, possibly mixed with water ice as well.
The extent of these soil deposits is almost completely unknown and difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, if the surface temperature were raised then some portion of this trapped CO2 would outgas. (This would be akin to obtaining liquid/vapor water by heating a section of Siberian permafrost.) Because CO2 is such a good greenhouse gas, there might therefore exist a temperature threshold beyond which the outgassing of CO2 and subsequent greenhouse heating would push the planet into a self-sustaining "hot" mode.
Or it may be the case that too much of the CO2 on Mars has either been lost to space, or is chemically locked up in carbonate rocks. This is a numerical question that won't get answered until we have the ability to bore into the surface and measure the free CO2 content.
I'm personally doubtful of these "heat it up and it will automatically fix itself" scenarios. If Mars did sustain a liquid water ocean at some point (an amazingly we still don't know the answer to that for sure), then something dramatic must have happened to make it shift into the cold, dry climate that exists today. My likeliest candidate would be the cooling and freezing of the planet's core, and the subsequent cessation of volcanic activity. Without volcanos, CO2 gets locked up in carbonate rocks and it never cycles back into gaseous CO2. The same thing could happen to the Earth someday, but fortunately the Sun will have long since gone supergiant and vaporized us in our tracks.
I agree very much with this approach with some modifications, and here's why.
If one were to define a long-term goal for manned spaceflight, the only reasonable answer would be "to establish a long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space". Any other goal would not make sense in light of the overwhelming cost/risk advantages of unmanned flight.
The angst that a lot of people have over the Shuttle/ISS programs is that they don't seem to connect where we are today with this end-state goal. Costs per pound are not falling, and the ISS isn't really going to tell us anything we didn't already know from Spacelab and Mir.
So what should be next? I think the really tough nut is the "self-sustaining" part. I can see two broad scenarios:
We develop self-sustainable environments in space first, and launch costs remain high. The tough challenge is to create a self-sustaining environment with little weight/volume. There are a number of possible routes to this. One could be a Biosphere2-like program (but managed differently) to explicitly figure it out. If that doesn't work, we could wait until technology allows humans to create more space-friendly bodies for ourselves, e.g., through genetic engineering or downloading a person's neural net into a silicon-based machine.
We get lower launch costs first, and self-sustainability develops over time. If launch costs are low we could, in addition to sending supplies, export manufacturing technology to reduce the need for supplies. Over time, self-sufficiency could be achieved.
Now I don't think any of us knows which of these is the path of least resistance, so the logical course is to bet on both.
So what would I do?
Explicitly separate NASA's budget into three pieces: Manned exploration, unmanned exploration, and launch systems. Do not allow money to cross these boundaries to cover cost overruns.
Close down the Shuttle/ISS programs, as they are not compatible with the manned exploration goal. The budget for "manned exploration" would be much lower.
Invest heavily in two areas: (1) New technologies to dramatically lower the cost of launch, and (2) development of maximally self-sustaining living environments appropriate for space. These are not easy problems -- the timescale on solving these is 10-20 years.
Give the unmanned program more money, but otherwise leave it alone. The goals of the unmanned program have always been clear, being driven by the goals of the commercial and scientific establishments in a very direct way. I trust the profit motive to determine what kinds of weather and communications satellites we need, and I will trust the scientific (and ultimately peer review) process to determine what kinds of knowledge are most important to obtain and which missions/facilities best deliver it.
My belief is that every job that a particular person could be successful at basically has the same total compensation.
This sounds ludicrous, until you look at all of the components of "compensation": Money, free time, desirable working life (travel, working conditions), social prestige, relative lack of stress in making ends meet, inherent intellectual interest, amount of freedom, etc.
The problem most people have is that they forget about how important all of these pieces are. A job as a struggling artist starts to sound nice to an investment banker, precisely because he's forgotten what it's like to have no money and lots of stress about making ends meet. Now if that investment banker has enough money saved up that these elements of his compensation are no longer personally valuable to him, then that's something else.
The other corollary to this view is that your total comp will be greatest if you are in a field for which you are distinctively qualified. I would love to be Michael Jordan, but I'm just not qualified. Michael Jordan would love to be in baseball, but he's not as distinctively qualified and his total comp will be lower there.
I'm an IT-focused management consultant who has worked with many different CIOs and other executive leaders, at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 10 giants. I'd address the career question by standing in the shoes of the CIO for a moment.
My bet is that most CIOs would agree to the following statements about their situation:
"IT has the ability to create significant bottom-line value for my company, but I have real trouble delivering it and demonstrating that I've done so."
"The other executives lean on me to lower IT costs and demonstrate the bottom-line value of what I'm doing. The guys with P&Ls don't have to deal with a fraction of the crap I get, so long as they hit their numbers or weave a good story why they didn't."
"A big reason that IT isn't delivering bottom-line value is that the business and IT worlds are too separated. The business people can't explain to IT what they need, and my IT people are smart but want to be spoon-fed business requirements."
"I need to free up dollars and my best people to focus on activities that will create business value. Routine operations (e.g., running the data center) and development (e.g., standalone, easily-encapsulated projects) can be outsourced to others who do it more cheaply and at acceptable quality."
I would also bet that this picture is almost completely insensitive to short-term market conditions (in other words, expect the situation to be the same in 10 years). My corollary is that you could build a career in IT if you:
Stay away from the scut work that can be outsourced. Ask yourself: in what way could an outsourcer (or on-site contractor) not do the work I'm doing?
Have an interest in understanding the bottom-line benefit that IT can create. This means getting out of your cubicle and getting smart about the business, and how people are using IT.
Harbor no illusions that spending 10 hours a day looking at your IDE will make you indespensible.
I find it curious that most Slashdotters interpret the question "Is America innovative?" to mean "Does America make nifty gadgets?". We're talking about a more general concept here, or at least we should be. Here are some other components of innovation:
Financial innovation. Does money get to the people who can best use it, so that individuals and businesses can maximize their return? Here America has been extremely innovative: mutual funds, REITs, individual stock investing, "junk" bonds, and so forth. America's innovative capital markets are often cited as an important contributor to America's long-term productivity growth.
Organizational/business process innovation. Can businesses and governments reinvent themselves to face new competitive challenges? When they fall behind, do they innovate out of problems or look for a handout? America has traditionally been very open to new business models and processes, however sometimes nostalgia wins out (e.g., farm subsidies).
Cultural innovation. At a commercial level one could look at worldwide sales of "cultural products" including TV, movies, and books. At a deeper level, does a culture have the ability to learn from others and make new immigrants feel included? America's report card here is quite complex; there is sometimes a disparity between what Americans aspire to and what they achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
What is a google?
It's a search engine. A googol, on the other hand, is 10^100.
Google, Inc. changed the spelling intentionally for the same reason that Apple doesn't use the slogan "Think Differently" -- because they think peoples is stupid.
The vast majority of jobs in our economy cannot be offshored, and therefore are in no danger of going away. Focus on one of these if you are really worried about your future: 1) Any kind of job requiring a physical presence: Burger flipper, security guard, apple picker, forest ranger, architect, construction worker, consultant, executive manager, ... In the IT realm, consider becoming an IT help desk staffer, business analyst, architect, or product manager.
2) Any kind of job requiring certification in the US. Become a doctor or a lawyer. They have unions, er I mean associations, to police the streets and keep the jobs onshore.
The scary thing about software is that modern telecom has made it so easily offshore-able. Within 10 years I doubt that any sizeable commercial software packages will be developed primarily in the US.
> So why do people persist in thinking that rockets should be reusable?
Maybe because jet airliners are reusable? Maybe because an entire world-wide industry has evolved to build and fly them? Maybe because someone thinks that building a reusable space vehicle is not impossibly more difficult than building a 747?
Reaching mach 30 and tolerating the 1000s of degrees of reentry heat puts enormous stress on the shuttle. It really is nothing like flying a 747. Because of this stress, most of the critical systems need to be inspected after each flight and often replaced. Performing these inspections requires large portions of the orbiter to be dismantled and reassembled between flights. These are all per-launch costs that don't get cheaper as you fly more often.
The key point is that all of this inspection/rebuilding costs more than a simple expendable rocket would. At some point, engineering may advance to the point that a vehicle could sustain dozens of launches with no need for manual inspection. Then I would concede that reusables make sense economically. Until then, they don't.
On an economic basis there is no justification for reusable vehicles. Launch costs today are dominated by the cost of the ground crew (thousands of people are needed to maintain and launch the shuttle). The best way to reduce costs is to simplify ground operations as much as possible. Reusable vehicles don't do this, in fact they do the opposite.
If the world were run by rational people, there would be two primary vehicles: (1) A heavy-lifting, single-use, less reliable unmanned system for cargo, and (2) a small, but highly safe/redundant system for people. Combining these in the manner of the shuttle forces human reliability standards throughout, which is a bad way to get stuff into space cheaply.
So why do people persist in thinking that rockets should be reusable? It's just one of those persistent cultural myths, probably borne out of the American fascination with the automobile. Blame the Jetsons. Or maybe Star Wars. Who knows.
Too bad. If you had stayed, you would have found out that entering Gondor was an extended dream sequence when the hobbits are asleep in Faramir's cave. You really shouldn't give up on things so easily.
While we techies know our shit, too frequently we don't know how to explain it to the people who we're helping out, and seldom can do so to those who are going to give us the money to by the equipment we need. A manager who can keep us working happily by filtering innane problems to us rather than having us spend 100% of the time helping people move their mouse is the only way to keep us from jumping ship. And having the manager communicate our needs in the marketing speak that we don't have is the only way to get us our toys so we are happy in our jobs.
Some tough love here. This kind of "separate worlds" view of IT/business is going the way of the dinosaur, at least in the USA. Today neither of the following is acceptable, at good companies:
Today, if you persist in this mode of thought as an IT professional, you will find that increasingly your "code monkey" job will be getting outsourced or offshored. And your IT coworker who took a less myopic view of IT and the business will have gotten promoted, and now manages the outsourcer/offshorer with a business mindset. In the future expect to see a lot more horizontal movement of workers between IT and the business, in the best companies.
If transparency is good, then lots of transparency is even better! Many states now require teachers to take tests of basic competence in core subjects. Why not make these scores available to parents as well?
And while we're at it, I want webcams of the classrooms and playground, so I can keep an eye on Junior throughout the day. The teacher's lounge would be nice too -- I always did wonder what happened in there.
If you want more than the Space.com article, read the PDF preprint entitled "Lack of observational evidence for quantum structure of space-time at Planck scales".
Just so people understand what's going on here, this work affects the many (untested) theories that posit some kind of "quantum of distance". There are two basic reasons that people are considering these types of theories:
Anyway, what the current work does is put a bound on the "graininess" of space. Pretty clever, if correct.
Well, what to say? Have not seen such meaningless statement over the years....
It is in fact true that "runtime-compiled" languages like Java, etc. could in principle be faster than "pre-compiled" languages like C. The reason is that a compiler can do a better job optimizing the code as it gets more information, and there are some pieces of information that just aren't available prior to runtime.
The classic example is branch prediction: You can optimize the code better if you have some idea of the likelihood of each branch. In a "pre-compiled" language like C, this assessment is difficult because you don't know in advance the values of the variables in your branch test. In a "runtime-compiled" system (e.g., Hotspot), the compiler can observe the actual branching behavior during execution, and then optimize based on this much-improved information.
And we can't just blame the people who write C compilers for this situation: One of the more fundamental theorems of computer science is that no algorithm, no matter how complex, can examine a generic piece of code and accurately "guess" the values of runtime variables, without just simulating the code's execution.
What I don't know is how large this potential advantage could be, for "typical" algorithms. One interesting avenue that I haven't seen explored would be to develop a C compiler that is informed by the output of some kind of profiling tool; the profiler would glean runtime information by observing the code's execution under typical use for some period of time, and would then dump this info to the compiler for an additional round of optimization.
The Bible. But they always told me the Bible was written by God? Mommy, did they lead me wrong??
The Bible is more properly viewed as the Church's amalgamation of multiple source texts, rather than a single unified work. It's as though you've taken the 30 greatest books on a given topic and taped them together. Just because the Church taped them together hundreds of years ago doesn't make it a single creative work. Ditto with things like the Encyclopedia Brittanica, which another poster mentioned.
My bet is that the Bible's individual books were largely the works of single authors, with little or no collaboration between authors across different books. Is there a scholar of Bible history who would disagree?
The Kalevala. I haven't read this, so have only a Google-level understanding and will assume the classic status you imply (it does sound very interesting). The Kalevala was apparently compiled from multiple source texts by a fellow named Lönnrot. It appears that he also assumed significant creative control over the undertaking:
I would bet that either: (1) The separate portions of the Kalevala are as disconnected as the books of the Bible (i.e., not a single narrative), or (2) Lönnrot changed the source texts significantly during his re-telling. In the first case you've again cheated by taping books together, while in the second case case the Kalevala is effectively the work of a single author.
No, your idea needs content. The server space and bandwidth are trivial. Are you lining up to write a few chapters for free, or is this one of those things where you're volunteering other people's time?
And while we're at it, haven't you ever noticed that the aesthetic quality of a product is inversely related to the number of people with creative control? K-12 textbooks read like DMV manuals precisely because there are too many people involved; "open-sourcing" their creation would only exacerbate the problem. I challenge you to name a single book written by >3 people that doesn't suck, or to name a book written by >1 person that is a genuine classic.
So who won?
What you really need to be asking is, how can participating in Open Source help my business? As an example, it's been said many times, but bear repeating: most of the lines of code written in the world are written for internal projects within a company and never see the light of day. Many companies don't release such code because it's a one-way operation. You release it, your competition uses it and you get nothing in return.
There are really two questions embedded in your comment:
My take on the first question is that, so far, viable open source projects have come from three sources:
Other avenues might be possible. For example, a company might open internally-developed code if it felt that the benefit of externally-developed improvements would outweigh the harm of giving the code to its competitors.
The second question is more straightforward. As a company, I want to participate in OSS projects so that I can steer them. And if I don't release my developments back into the main development tree, my cost of maintaining a proprietary version will grow over time. Cost control in SW development is all about achieving and maintaining scale; splintering off is counter-productive unless there's a very good reason.
Hydrogen power and fuel cells for automotive power have always seemed like a solution in search of a problem.
Biodiesel is a much better solution to the automotive power issue. Biodiesel:
I just don't see any dimension along which hydrogen is better than biodiesel. The only real app for fuel cells that I can think of is as a replacement for batteries, e.g., in laptops.
When I was an undergrad at Caltech, the scifi author David Brin (an alumnus) used to come to campus every year and give very interesting talks on all kinds of random topics.
Anyway, he has an interesting argument against government subsidy of the arts. He puts people into a pyramid formation based on ability, and observes that the market in effect draws a line through the pyramid based on minimal income needed to sustain the artist's way of life. The people well above this line make a lot of income, and the people just above the line struggle to barely get by. (The people below the line presumably find other work.)
Now government subsidy moves the line downward, allowing more people in the pyramid to be artists. Brin's key observation is that it also increases the number of people barely getting by, and therefore the total "pain" in the workforce. Geometrically, the area of the pyramid's base gets larger as the cut-line moves lower.
Molyneux's suggestion only really helps out the "little guy" if you believe that no additional developers would be attracted into the industry as a result of government subsidy, which I doubt. Hell, even I might move to the UK and be a game developer if I thought there was a dole check waiting for me.
That's a good thing. For large software development projects with many engineers involved. I can pick up other people's code and not worry about whether X really means X or whether it's a macro that's been defined elsewhere to mean Y.
Casual observation: Most of the advances in programming over the past 50 years have enhanced coder productivity by limiting what programmers can do.
Examples:
My explanation of this trend is that coding productivity is enhanced if we minimize the number of dimensions along which coders can screw up (or at least do something nonstandard).
AOP doesn't seem to fit this trend (or does it?). What would be the next programming degree of freedom that could be eliminated? To me one answer would be in the direction of functional programming, which severely restricts programmers' ability to specify execution order.
Somewhat offtopic, in a parallel vein many of the advances in science/math over the past 100 years have also been "limiting" advances: Special relativity eliminated faster-than-light signalling and absolute reference frames, quantum mechanics introduced the uncertainty principle limiting what kinds of information we can have about particles, Godel's theorem proved the fundamental limitations of mathematics, etc.
Since I haven't seen a cogent explanation posted yet, I'll take a swing.
Fact 1. 60 Hz transformer hum is unrelated to what you're hearing. (That would be at 120 Hz and relatively independent of screen refresh, which doesn't match your symptoms.) As a sidebar, 60 Hz hum is caused by the Lorentz force between the electric current in a transformer coil and the magnetic field that the current induces, which produces an radial outward force on the coil. (This effect is what limits the size of magnetic fields we can create in the laboratory -- no one wants an exploding electromagnet.) As the 60 Hz alternating current runs back and forth through the transformer, a 120 Hz mechanical vibration is induced.
Fact 2. It's also not directly related to "CRT whine". We can tell this because: (a) CRT whine is independent of whether screen contents are changing, and (b) CRT whine is a directly audible mechanical vibration, not a crosstalk into your audio out line. CRT whine is caused by the electronics that drive the electron gun's horizontal deflector. For example, if you scan 500 lines 60 times a second, the signal on the horizontal deflection plates is at 30 kHz, which some people can hear. Most modern computers have enough scan lines and a high enough refresh rate that the signal frequency is too high for anyone to hear, making this not a common problem with newer computers.
Fact 3. What you're hearing is caused by capacitive coupling between signal lines (wires) inside your computer. Because of the electric repulsion between electrons, high-frequency signals can "conduct" across the air between separate wires, especially if the wires are close together. In your case, it's crosstalk between the display and audio circuitry. This crosstalk interference can be reduced with grounded metal RF shielding, but it adds cost/bulk/weight and so manufacturers try to minimize the amount they use. An audio company would shield the DAC and preamp components carefully to bring the noise below a perceptible level; a typical computer manufacturer will just make it sound ok for ordinary use.
My guess... ...is that you have an active-matrix LCD screen, not a passive LCD or CRT. The reason is that you only hear the noise when the screen content changes. Unlike the other two, an active-matrix screen has transistors at each pixel that remember their state. Thus there is a drive signal to the screen only when pixels are changing. Only if relatively large portions of the LCD are being continually rewritten will the duty cycle of this drive signal be substantial, and therefore the crosstalk be audible.
Conclusion: It's annoying, but there's not much you can do about it without buying a higher-quality (i.e., better-shielded) audio card.
Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
So intelligence is to computation what religion is to the physical world: a tag we use to label the things we don't understand.
Just as our dependence on religion as a means of explanation/prediction has lessened over time as science has improved, so too must the amount of "intelligence" decline as computation science advances. Maybe this is why primetime TV has gotten so bad?
Or, to put it another way, Intelligence means "I don't understand how you thought that".
This is an interesting view, and there are a couple of corollaries if you take it seriously:
I've been an amateur astronomer for quite a while, and have unfortunately seen many people purchase telescopes and then quickly lose interest. Many times this is because they either buy something of very low quality and get frustrated, or because they buy a scope that is good but doesn't really fit their needs.
Advice #1: Get a good quality telescope. Stay away from the plastic-lensed Tasco 2" refractors at your neighborhood department/hobby store. Take a look at Orion Telescopes -- everything there is good quality.
Advice #2: Base the rest of the decision on how you'll use the scope. At your price limit, you'll find that you can get one but not all of the following in a good-quality scope:
The ideal thing is if people can learn about the sky first before jumping into an expensive telescope purchase. A star chart and an inexpensive pair of 7x50 binoculars will let you see a surprising amount: Binary stars, some galaxies, lots of star clusters, all of the planets except Neptune and Pluto, the Galilean moons of Jupiter, amazing detail on the Earth's Moon, etc.
Mars also contains CO2 in its soil. This is in two forms: (1) CO2 directly adsorbed onto the (porous) rocks and dirt, and (2) CO2 in ice form mixed into the soil, possibly mixed with water ice as well.
Read here to learn more.
The extent of these soil deposits is almost completely unknown and difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, if the surface temperature were raised then some portion of this trapped CO2 would outgas. (This would be akin to obtaining liquid/vapor water by heating a section of Siberian permafrost.) Because CO2 is such a good greenhouse gas, there might therefore exist a temperature threshold beyond which the outgassing of CO2 and subsequent greenhouse heating would push the planet into a self-sustaining "hot" mode.
Or it may be the case that too much of the CO2 on Mars has either been lost to space, or is chemically locked up in carbonate rocks. This is a numerical question that won't get answered until we have the ability to bore into the surface and measure the free CO2 content.
I'm personally doubtful of these "heat it up and it will automatically fix itself" scenarios. If Mars did sustain a liquid water ocean at some point (an amazingly we still don't know the answer to that for sure), then something dramatic must have happened to make it shift into the cold, dry climate that exists today. My likeliest candidate would be the cooling and freezing of the planet's core, and the subsequent cessation of volcanic activity. Without volcanos, CO2 gets locked up in carbonate rocks and it never cycles back into gaseous CO2. The same thing could happen to the Earth someday, but fortunately the Sun will have long since gone supergiant and vaporized us in our tracks.
I agree very much with this approach with some modifications, and here's why.
If one were to define a long-term goal for manned spaceflight, the only reasonable answer would be "to establish a long-term, self-sustaining human presence in space". Any other goal would not make sense in light of the overwhelming cost/risk advantages of unmanned flight.
The angst that a lot of people have over the Shuttle/ISS programs is that they don't seem to connect where we are today with this end-state goal. Costs per pound are not falling, and the ISS isn't really going to tell us anything we didn't already know from Spacelab and Mir.
So what should be next? I think the really tough nut is the "self-sustaining" part. I can see two broad scenarios:
- We develop self-sustainable environments in space first, and launch costs remain high. The tough challenge is to create a self-sustaining environment with little weight/volume. There are a number of possible routes to this. One could be a Biosphere2-like program (but managed differently) to explicitly figure it out. If that doesn't work, we could wait until technology allows humans to create more space-friendly bodies for ourselves, e.g., through genetic engineering or downloading a person's neural net into a silicon-based machine.
- We get lower launch costs first, and self-sustainability develops over time. If launch costs are low we could, in addition to sending supplies, export manufacturing technology to reduce the need for supplies. Over time, self-sufficiency could be achieved.
Now I don't think any of us knows which of these is the path of least resistance, so the logical course is to bet on both.So what would I do?
My belief is that every job that a particular person could be successful at basically has the same total compensation.
This sounds ludicrous, until you look at all of the components of "compensation": Money, free time, desirable working life (travel, working conditions), social prestige, relative lack of stress in making ends meet, inherent intellectual interest, amount of freedom, etc.
The problem most people have is that they forget about how important all of these pieces are. A job as a struggling artist starts to sound nice to an investment banker, precisely because he's forgotten what it's like to have no money and lots of stress about making ends meet. Now if that investment banker has enough money saved up that these elements of his compensation are no longer personally valuable to him, then that's something else.
The other corollary to this view is that your total comp will be greatest if you are in a field for which you are distinctively qualified. I would love to be Michael Jordan, but I'm just not qualified. Michael Jordan would love to be in baseball, but he's not as distinctively qualified and his total comp will be lower there.
I'm an IT-focused management consultant who has worked with many different CIOs and other executive leaders, at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 10 giants. I'd address the career question by standing in the shoes of the CIO for a moment.
My bet is that most CIOs would agree to the following statements about their situation:
I would also bet that this picture is almost completely insensitive to short-term market conditions (in other words, expect the situation to be the same in 10 years). My corollary is that you could build a career in IT if you:
I find it curious that most Slashdotters interpret the question "Is America innovative?" to mean "Does America make nifty gadgets?". We're talking about a more general concept here, or at least we should be. Here are some other components of innovation:
Financial innovation. Does money get to the people who can best use it, so that individuals and businesses can maximize their return? Here America has been extremely innovative: mutual funds, REITs, individual stock investing, "junk" bonds, and so forth. America's innovative capital markets are often cited as an important contributor to America's long-term productivity growth.
Organizational/business process innovation. Can businesses and governments reinvent themselves to face new competitive challenges? When they fall behind, do they innovate out of problems or look for a handout? America has traditionally been very open to new business models and processes, however sometimes nostalgia wins out (e.g., farm subsidies).
Cultural innovation. At a commercial level one could look at worldwide sales of "cultural products" including TV, movies, and books. At a deeper level, does a culture have the ability to learn from others and make new immigrants feel included? America's report card here is quite complex; there is sometimes a disparity between what Americans aspire to and what they achieve.