I never bought into Applethink, and after every product annoucement I falsely predict they've finally blown it and nobody will "fall for it" this time. Meanwhile they're approaching $100e9 and probably wouldn't give my resume a second look. You win.
No, no. Suggesting those is just sending the poster in the wrong direction. GLUT and GLUI aren't substitutes for real UI interface libraries at all. GLUT certainly provides some useful functions for basic things like setting up the rendering surface and putting a text string onto the screen, but it's not a UI library. GLUI is, but it's a simple, crude little thing for people who need their graphics demos to be a little bit interactive. You couldn't remotely approximate something like an office suite with it.
The problem they're talking about is energy distribution, not generation.
So? Distribution is part of capacity. And the answer remains the same: build more.
We need to switch to new energy sources of energy. Who are the crybabies who assume that's impossible if it requires any actual investment and/or decision-making?
When I was a kid it scared me to watch my dad watch the news, because I didn't like the news, and didn't want to grow up and have to watch it. Now I like watching the news, and I realize things change, the "me" of today won't be around tomorrow because I'll be slightly different, but it's OK.
Why worry about games? Any of a thousand other hobbies has just as much "merit" (if any). I liked video games in my teens and early twenties, faded out in my mid-20s and early 30s, but now play more again - with my kids. But it doesn't matter, when it comes to hobbies, just follow your bliss.
an 18% return - not bad, but not as crazy huge as it might look on first glance.
Well, an 18% return sustained for 36 years is crazy huge, precisely because it turns $666 into $210k. An 18% return on a single stock for year is very good. An 18% return on a portfolio for a whole year is really good. But a sustained 18% return for 36 years in a row? I doubt Bill G.'s own stock in Microsoft achieved that.
The vast majority of the social security trust fund was spent NOT on social security benefits but on other non social security projects, anything, you name it, roads, defense, welfare, but not social security. Not because of "changing demographics" or anything else, but becuase of fraud.
The reason I don't agree it's fraud is because it was done in the open. We elected and re-elected the people who did it, and knew it was happening. In other words, the US public simply decided they would rather have an unsustainable ratio of services to taxes at that time. The money was not secretly spent on the first-lady's collection of shoes, or on million dollar salaries for SS administrators. The problem isn't fraud or inefficiency, but short-sightedness.
Still, SS is not "failing," in the sense of disappearing. The SS trust fund was never intended to become the primary funding for SS, rather it was some extra money that should have been set aside to address a transitory problem - the population bubble of the baby boomers. In the long run there is no need for such a fund, but the the taxes collected from workers must match the benefits distributed to pensioners over the long run. The SS benefit will not go to zero unless there is no next generation of workers. If that ever happened, a 401k balance wouldn't help you either. In response to aging demographics, money stored in financial instruments would be devalued by deflation, as more "rich" old people out-bid each other for the services of relatively scarce laborers.
The corrections required to SS to make it solvent are really not all that severe. They seem overwhelming simply because no politician promising to push back the SS age by a few years and reduce the benefit by several percentage points can be elected, or re-elected. So maybe we will end up letting inflation do the job for us, due to lack of political will. That end result is worse, but still not cataclysmic.
As for the postal service, I don't see anybody else coming to my house to pick up a letter and deliver it anywhere in the nation for 44 cents. Historically the postal service has filled a role that no private company would, and has been solvent, until the double whammy of the Internet and the recession. Lots of companies are struggling with that, even efficient ones.
Social Security and Medicare Projections: 2009. $107 TRILLION in UNFUNDED liabilities!
I'm puzzled why you think that illustrates inefficiency? What it illustrates is 1) changing demographics, and 2) refusal of voters to elect representatives who will put taxes and benefits in line with each other. It would be "inefficiency" if the government had collected enough taxes to pay the benefits, but wasted it on sales commissions or management overhead or something, but that's not the case.
Aging demographics create difficulty because the ratio of producers to consumers decreases. Social security is one way that manifests. But even if there were no government program at all, the same problem would still manifest, though in a different way - children of the elderly would bear more burden directly, poverty among the elderly would increase, etc. It's not as if the problem would magically go away.
An actual example of inefficiency in Social Security is fraud, such as collecting somebody's benefits after they die. That must certainly be combatted, but unfortunately it's just a drop in the bucket.
Social Security, Medicare, and the US Post Office are all quite efficient.
That is, if you compare them to real-world standards (private industry and other governments), instead of an idealized standard of perfection. (E.g. people who carp about medicare fraud without ever considering that insurance fraud affects all insurers).
But there are physical constraints on antennae and telescopes, relating to the wavelength of the signal and the directional accuracy required, that DO dictate specific size constraints.
Ever wonder why cellphone cameras haven't displaced SLRs yet? It really does come down to the size of the sensor, and the size of the lens needed to gather energy for that sensor.
What do we get? A typical journalist "the narrative" story, where humanity is in a race against robots which will surely supplant us.
It's especially bad because the robot didn't even come close to breaking the record! Let's celebrate this technical triumph for what it is, but save the robot overlords concession speech for when it actually applies.
Maybe you already answered this somewhere in there and I just didn't get it - but is the process in this story (creating liquid fuel) better than just incinerating the waste to make electricity onsite? That seems more direct. All the stuff that would have to be caught by smoke scrubbers, where does it go in this liquid fuel plant?
I'd say it's the Progressive Era (1890s-1920s in the US) they're approaching - reducing government corruption, food and medical safety standards, better worker conditions...
Last year the Air Quality Index in Atlanta reached the level of "Unhealthy For Sensitive Groups" (100-150) on 16 days, and never reached the next level, "Unhealthy" (150-200). Beijing's score - over 500 - sounds very bad indeed.
Well, yeah. I think this headline is silly. There is very little invention here to argue about. And maybe Facebook Messages isn't supposed to be an "invention." Maybe it's just supposed to be a feature on the Facebook site that Facebook users will want to use. Ebay didn't invent online auctions either. None of the magazines I read invented the idea of magazines, and the grocery store where I shop didn't invent groceries. Who cares?
Really, who cares what they intended in the first place?
I read this statement as: "we are NOT going to sue or try sue unauthorized Kinect developers. we are not going to upload new firmware to close the barn door every time it connects to the Internet. We are not going to try to figure out who is doing this and ban them from XBox Live."
Hawks don't think that way though; the basic premise is the enemy is so intrinsically evil that your only option is to be evil first, beating him to the punch. Thus (by definition) a provocation or bad precedent by the good guys is just a head start on what would have happened anyways, since (unfortunately) the bad guys are so evil.
Wow, what a nice summary of contemporary America. "I want everything set up perfectly to maximize my rights and my productivity, and I shouldn't have to pay or sacrifice anything for it because it's all thanks to me and nobody else!"
OK, so you think only algorithms requiring uniform memory access are valid benchmarks. How uniform does it have to be? Real world problems do have structure, they do have locality, and an architecture that fails to exploit that is going to lose out to those that do.
Sure, your point is taken, otherwise you could say "my benchmarks is IOPS" and "my computer is every computer in the world" and win. But Linpack is not that; you can't score well without a fast interconnect, because what it measures is a set of computations that are actually useful. (Which is why the quip about a beowulf cluster of Android smartphones is stupid... because it couldn't actually be done. Go ahead and try to get on Top500 with a seti@home-type setup.)
The real innovatiors should be recognized for their efforts to reduce space, power and cost, or finding new algorithms to crunch the numbers in more efficient or useful ways.
And NHRA should start awarding drag-racing championships on fuel efficiency rather than quarter-mile times.
Look, the Top500 is about performance, as in speed. There are other metrics for flops/watt or flops/dollar, or whatever. If those were the lists that managed to draw competitors and eyeballs, then nobody would care about Top500 and we wouldn't have to quibble about whether Linpack is a representative benchmark of what it claims to measure: speed.
"Your will to trade half the vertical scan lines for fake 3d?" Obviously I'd rather not lose resolution. Your solution sounds fine, or how about shutter glasses for a double-bright 120 hz screen that interleaves two full-resolution 60p channels? I am not really current on what techniques all the new 3d displays are using.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be different if Apple's app store were just one app provider, but it's the only way to get apps onto the phone!
* Disclaimer, I don't actually own an iPhone.
I never bought into Applethink, and after every product annoucement I falsely predict they've finally blown it and nobody will "fall for it" this time. Meanwhile they're approaching $100e9 and probably wouldn't give my resume a second look. You win.
No, no. Suggesting those is just sending the poster in the wrong direction. GLUT and GLUI aren't substitutes for real UI interface libraries at all. GLUT certainly provides some useful functions for basic things like setting up the rendering surface and putting a text string onto the screen, but it's not a UI library. GLUI is, but it's a simple, crude little thing for people who need their graphics demos to be a little bit interactive. You couldn't remotely approximate something like an office suite with it.
So? Distribution is part of capacity. And the answer remains the same: build more.
We need to switch to new energy sources of energy. Who are the crybabies who assume that's impossible if it requires any actual investment and/or decision-making?
When I was a kid it scared me to watch my dad watch the news, because I didn't like the news, and didn't want to grow up and have to watch it. Now I like watching the news, and I realize things change, the "me" of today won't be around tomorrow because I'll be slightly different, but it's OK.
Why worry about games? Any of a thousand other hobbies has just as much "merit" (if any). I liked video games in my teens and early twenties, faded out in my mid-20s and early 30s, but now play more again - with my kids. But it doesn't matter, when it comes to hobbies, just follow your bliss.
25/0.08 = 312.50
210000/666 = 315.32
Well, an 18% return sustained for 36 years is crazy huge, precisely because it turns $666 into $210k. An 18% return on a single stock for year is very good. An 18% return on a portfolio for a whole year is really good. But a sustained 18% return for 36 years in a row? I doubt Bill G.'s own stock in Microsoft achieved that.
The reason I don't agree it's fraud is because it was done in the open. We elected and re-elected the people who did it, and knew it was happening. In other words, the US public simply decided they would rather have an unsustainable ratio of services to taxes at that time. The money was not secretly spent on the first-lady's collection of shoes, or on million dollar salaries for SS administrators. The problem isn't fraud or inefficiency, but short-sightedness.
Still, SS is not "failing," in the sense of disappearing. The SS trust fund was never intended to become the primary funding for SS, rather it was some extra money that should have been set aside to address a transitory problem - the population bubble of the baby boomers. In the long run there is no need for such a fund, but the the taxes collected from workers must match the benefits distributed to pensioners over the long run. The SS benefit will not go to zero unless there is no next generation of workers. If that ever happened, a 401k balance wouldn't help you either. In response to aging demographics, money stored in financial instruments would be devalued by deflation, as more "rich" old people out-bid each other for the services of relatively scarce laborers.
The corrections required to SS to make it solvent are really not all that severe. They seem overwhelming simply because no politician promising to push back the SS age by a few years and reduce the benefit by several percentage points can be elected, or re-elected. So maybe we will end up letting inflation do the job for us, due to lack of political will. That end result is worse, but still not cataclysmic.
As for the postal service, I don't see anybody else coming to my house to pick up a letter and deliver it anywhere in the nation for 44 cents. Historically the postal service has filled a role that no private company would, and has been solvent, until the double whammy of the Internet and the recession. Lots of companies are struggling with that, even efficient ones.
I'm puzzled why you think that illustrates inefficiency? What it illustrates is 1) changing demographics, and 2) refusal of voters to elect representatives who will put taxes and benefits in line with each other. It would be "inefficiency" if the government had collected enough taxes to pay the benefits, but wasted it on sales commissions or management overhead or something, but that's not the case.
Aging demographics create difficulty because the ratio of producers to consumers decreases. Social security is one way that manifests. But even if there were no government program at all, the same problem would still manifest, though in a different way - children of the elderly would bear more burden directly, poverty among the elderly would increase, etc. It's not as if the problem would magically go away.
An actual example of inefficiency in Social Security is fraud, such as collecting somebody's benefits after they die. That must certainly be combatted, but unfortunately it's just a drop in the bucket.
That is, if you compare them to real-world standards (private industry and other governments), instead of an idealized standard of perfection. (E.g. people who carp about medicare fraud without ever considering that insurance fraud affects all insurers).
I think it would help Wikipedia's image if it didn't - they're getting typecast.
Ever wonder why cellphone cameras haven't displaced SLRs yet? It really does come down to the size of the sensor, and the size of the lens needed to gather energy for that sensor.
It's especially bad because the robot didn't even come close to breaking the record! Let's celebrate this technical triumph for what it is, but save the robot overlords concession speech for when it actually applies.
What are you complaining about? I always thought it was "bitter farts."
Maybe you already answered this somewhere in there and I just didn't get it - but is the process in this story (creating liquid fuel) better than just incinerating the waste to make electricity onsite? That seems more direct. All the stuff that would have to be caught by smoke scrubbers, where does it go in this liquid fuel plant?
The 60s was after it all went rancid.
Last year the Air Quality Index in Atlanta reached the level of "Unhealthy For Sensitive Groups" (100-150) on 16 days, and never reached the next level, "Unhealthy" (150-200). Beijing's score - over 500 - sounds very bad indeed.
Well, yeah. I think this headline is silly. There is very little invention here to argue about. And maybe Facebook Messages isn't supposed to be an "invention." Maybe it's just supposed to be a feature on the Facebook site that Facebook users will want to use. Ebay didn't invent online auctions either. None of the magazines I read invented the idea of magazines, and the grocery store where I shop didn't invent groceries. Who cares?
I read this statement as: "we are NOT going to sue or try sue unauthorized Kinect developers. we are not going to upload new firmware to close the barn door every time it connects to the Internet. We are not going to try to figure out who is doing this and ban them from XBox Live."
All this is great news.
This is slashdot, need I remind you that "information wants to be free?" Inventions don't have loyalty.
Hawks don't think that way though; the basic premise is the enemy is so intrinsically evil that your only option is to be evil first, beating him to the punch. Thus (by definition) a provocation or bad precedent by the good guys is just a head start on what would have happened anyways, since (unfortunately) the bad guys are so evil.
Wow, what a nice summary of contemporary America. "I want everything set up perfectly to maximize my rights and my productivity, and I shouldn't have to pay or sacrifice anything for it because it's all thanks to me and nobody else!"
Sure, your point is taken, otherwise you could say "my benchmarks is IOPS" and "my computer is every computer in the world" and win. But Linpack is not that; you can't score well without a fast interconnect, because what it measures is a set of computations that are actually useful. (Which is why the quip about a beowulf cluster of Android smartphones is stupid... because it couldn't actually be done. Go ahead and try to get on Top500 with a seti@home-type setup.)
And NHRA should start awarding drag-racing championships on fuel efficiency rather than quarter-mile times.
Look, the Top500 is about performance, as in speed. There are other metrics for flops/watt or flops/dollar, or whatever. If those were the lists that managed to draw competitors and eyeballs, then nobody would care about Top500 and we wouldn't have to quibble about whether Linpack is a representative benchmark of what it claims to measure: speed.
"Your will to trade half the vertical scan lines for fake 3d?" Obviously I'd rather not lose resolution. Your solution sounds fine, or how about shutter glasses for a double-bright 120 hz screen that interleaves two full-resolution 60p channels? I am not really current on what techniques all the new 3d displays are using.