More seriously, if you really, really wanted to get somebody to the ISS on the cheap, could you not just stuff a guy in a space suit with a jumbo oxygen tank into the cargo bay of the Dragon capsule?
IMHO what's difficult is giving constructive feedback to somebody who doesn't interview well or doesn't perform well on the job simply because they aren't very intelligent. I don't know what to tell them. It's not helpful to say "don't get confused so often" or "have better ideas."
(And I say this freely admitting there are people smart enough to justifiably feel the same way about me.)
I think independent testing of this sort is tremendously valuable.
What I don't understand is why the summary is focused on ARM beating Atom when the overall winner - in performance, in performance per watt, and in cost - was the Intel Ivy Bridge... by a huge margin.
I have sufficient faith in Canada to pop pills regulated by them. But the summary says: "The U.S. Food and Drug Administration claimed many of the drugs promoted as Canadian actually came from other countries."
If true, this is effectively sandwich-baggie stuff, plus false advertising.
In the summary Intel's "mobile chief" says: 'I see no data that supports the claims that ARM is more efficient,' so where's the evidence either way? Has somebody counted the watt-hours to compress an mp3 on various chips (with bit-identical results), or something like that? A quick googling did not find it for me.
it is always possible, with four wolves and a sheep, to know the outcome of a vote on what's for dinner.
What evidence is there that democracies oppress minorities more than authoritarian governments do? Hopefully at least 3 of the 5 wolves in your story are bright enough to realize that they are all the same species and out-vote the bigots who want to see one of themselves as something else (a sheep).
Would OpenELEC enable hardware video decoding? The summary says it's not supported, and without that it'll be pretty useless for video replay. Software decoding is too jittery.
Your post explains a lot about how we got where we are - because people "reason" using the most impressive anecdotes that come to mind, rather than rationally, using statistics. (Go ahead and follow the link to see whether Norway or the US has a higher rate of gun deaths - except I'm sure you already know if you stopped to think about it from that angle instead). Intellectually we all know that anecdotes and isolated incidents have very little predictive value. But they're so fascinating!
But if it weren't a "managed" platform, the app probably wouldn't exist (except perhaps in some embryonic form, e.g. gcash vs. quickbooks or octave vs. matlab) because the developer couldn't make any money on it. Ugh, I hate saying that. But enthusiasm around free software as a movement seems to have faded, and almost all the great open-source applications are old and mainly on servers.
When you bring a product to market, your users just don't expect it to suddenly go away and be replaced by something else a year down the road.
Just keep in mind how many defunct companies are, in retrospect, faulted for refusing to sacrifice their sacred cow / cannibalize their existing business / streamline their offerings. Keep in mind how many slashdotters revile Intel for maintaining x86, and Microsoft for not being innovative enough, and for feature creep. I realize you did address that a little bit in your post, but still I don't think people realize what "being willing to fail" actually means in practice. It means you often incur losses associated with failure, including a hit to your credibility.
The lack of a ethernet port on the original MacBook air was bad because there was no suitable alternative - USB doesn't cut it. But Thunderbolt, on the other hand, has plenty of bandwidth to hang the ethernet interface (plus everything else) on it. I just hope there are more thunderbolt peripherals soon, because for now I still start each day by plugging in my ethernet, firewire external drive, displayport, usb hub, and headphones to my MacBook.
LCD/LED/OLED displays only look good at native resolution 2n multiples of native resolution. That is a simple fact.
Not any more. With a retinal display, by definition, arbitrary scalings will look just fine. Just as nobody worried about setting their CRT to a multiple of the dot pitch.
Huh? The 17" 2880 x 1800 display is breakthrough. I don't remember another time, ever, when one manufacturer had such a clearly superior laptop to everything else on the market.
I am curious what specific techniques they have refined - how is navigation towards the surface of Mars performed? Is there optical tracking of visual features on the surface (ala Buzz Aldrin or a robotic pilot?) Do they navigate with respect to satellites in known locations around Mars (ala GPS), or celestial navigation? Or is it largely ballistic (based on conditions well ahead of time and predictions based on orbital mechanics, leaving little to final steering corrections?)
There was a well-reviewed movie about the Atacama Desert last year called Nostalgia for the Light, which touches on both the science and local politics of the area.
TOPSCENE technology rapidly processes and converts terrain elevation information, two-dimensional imagery, and sensor information from multiple sources into an interactive, 3D visualization of the warfighter's mission operating environment. This makes it possible to train on actual terrain and in near-real time.
The thing is, it's realllly expensive to have something like this for a relatively small number of people to use. And I'm pretty sure it's more dependent on direct elevation sensing (e.g. SAR) compared to the image-based techniques google is using. I'm sure whatever google puts out will luck much slicker, because defense software has so many other requirements besides looking good (e.g. accurately stimulating night vision goggles, realistic visual ranges due to atmospheric effects, integrating with other simulation components, etc).
And, frankly, the defense industry cannot compete with silicon valley in paying top dollar to acquire companies with necessary technologies and salaries that draw top talent. In hot areas like computer security it's basically a training ground where people start off for a few years before being snatched away by higher-paying employers.
MS peaked in 2003 (XP+Office 2003). And to be fair they pretty much nailed it by then. Off the top of my head the only thing I'd really miss by going back to that setup was indexed searching for emails in Outlook. It'll be interesting to see if Apple finds anywhere to go after smartphones settle down.
It was unable to answer questions that required any thought or insight. It was just looking up the answers in a database based on patterns in the questions.
That's because it's a trivia game show, and that's what trivia is.
That said, you are wrong in thinking that answering trivia questions is trivial. Encoding the patterns in the questions sufficient to get the right answer as much as they did was a step forward. Nobody else has ever created a system that could compete with Watson in what it does, and that is a fact. Moreover, the ability to beat the world champions in whatever task is seldom necessary to justify automating that task if there is a cost savings. When you dial up a call center, whoever picks up the phone is not Ken Jennings.
P.S., here's a Time story from 2008 called "Why Circuit City Busted, While Best Buy Boomed." It claims Circuit City failed because it was poorly managed and complacent, while Best Buy flourished because it was the opposite. In other words, we always write the same post-mortem for dying or dead companies.
People now think they have a right to have children and also that making somebody else pay for children they failed to properly plan on is some kind of fundamental human right. It isn't.
Human beings are living organisms and so have strong survival instincts. Biological imperatives (e.g. reproduce) typically trump social conventions (e.g. property rights). That's not a value judgment on my part; it's a fact. So, if you're waiting for the poor to peaceably fade into oblivion out of respect for the sanctity of the legal rights of those around them, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.
Slashdot Mirror
More seriously, if you really, really wanted to get somebody to the ISS on the cheap, could you not just stuff a guy in a space suit with a jumbo oxygen tank into the cargo bay of the Dragon capsule?
(And I say this freely admitting there are people smart enough to justifiably feel the same way about me.)
What I don't understand is why the summary is focused on ARM beating Atom when the overall winner - in performance, in performance per watt, and in cost - was the Intel Ivy Bridge... by a huge margin.
What alternative is there? Go straight into the servant sector? (Oops I meant service sector.)
If true, this is effectively sandwich-baggie stuff, plus false advertising.
In the summary Intel's "mobile chief" says: 'I see no data that supports the claims that ARM is more efficient,' so where's the evidence either way? Has somebody counted the watt-hours to compress an mp3 on various chips (with bit-identical results), or something like that? A quick googling did not find it for me.
If it's so great, sign yourself up; what's stopping you?
What evidence is there that democracies oppress minorities more than authoritarian governments do? Hopefully at least 3 of the 5 wolves in your story are bright enough to realize that they are all the same species and out-vote the bigots who want to see one of themselves as something else (a sheep).
This guy seems very sane. I hope Vermonters give this a shot!
Would OpenELEC enable hardware video decoding? The summary says it's not supported, and without that it'll be pretty useless for video replay. Software decoding is too jittery.
Your post explains a lot about how we got where we are - because people "reason" using the most impressive anecdotes that come to mind, rather than rationally, using statistics. (Go ahead and follow the link to see whether Norway or the US has a higher rate of gun deaths - except I'm sure you already know if you stopped to think about it from that angle instead). Intellectually we all know that anecdotes and isolated incidents have very little predictive value. But they're so fascinating!
But if it weren't a "managed" platform, the app probably wouldn't exist (except perhaps in some embryonic form, e.g. gcash vs. quickbooks or octave vs. matlab) because the developer couldn't make any money on it. Ugh, I hate saying that. But enthusiasm around free software as a movement seems to have faded, and almost all the great open-source applications are old and mainly on servers.
Just keep in mind how many defunct companies are, in retrospect, faulted for refusing to sacrifice their sacred cow / cannibalize their existing business / streamline their offerings. Keep in mind how many slashdotters revile Intel for maintaining x86, and Microsoft for not being innovative enough, and for feature creep. I realize you did address that a little bit in your post, but still I don't think people realize what "being willing to fail" actually means in practice. It means you often incur losses associated with failure, including a hit to your credibility.
Which, case in point, Apple stopped selling a few years ago in favor of the smaller, lower-res 2560x1440 27" model.
Either way, neither seems so hot compared to a 2880 x 1800 display... on a laptop!
The lack of a ethernet port on the original MacBook air was bad because there was no suitable alternative - USB doesn't cut it. But Thunderbolt, on the other hand, has plenty of bandwidth to hang the ethernet interface (plus everything else) on it. I just hope there are more thunderbolt peripherals soon, because for now I still start each day by plugging in my ethernet, firewire external drive, displayport, usb hub, and headphones to my MacBook.
Not any more. With a retinal display, by definition, arbitrary scalings will look just fine. Just as nobody worried about setting their CRT to a multiple of the dot pitch.
Huh? The 17" 2880 x 1800 display is breakthrough. I don't remember another time, ever, when one manufacturer had such a clearly superior laptop to everything else on the market.
I am curious what specific techniques they have refined - how is navigation towards the surface of Mars performed? Is there optical tracking of visual features on the surface (ala Buzz Aldrin or a robotic pilot?) Do they navigate with respect to satellites in known locations around Mars (ala GPS), or celestial navigation? Or is it largely ballistic (based on conditions well ahead of time and predictions based on orbital mechanics, leaving little to final steering corrections?)
There was a well-reviewed movie about the Atacama Desert last year called Nostalgia for the Light, which touches on both the science and local politics of the area.
The thing is, it's realllly expensive to have something like this for a relatively small number of people to use. And I'm pretty sure it's more dependent on direct elevation sensing (e.g. SAR) compared to the image-based techniques google is using. I'm sure whatever google puts out will luck much slicker, because defense software has so many other requirements besides looking good (e.g. accurately stimulating night vision goggles, realistic visual ranges due to atmospheric effects, integrating with other simulation components, etc).
And, frankly, the defense industry cannot compete with silicon valley in paying top dollar to acquire companies with necessary technologies and salaries that draw top talent. In hot areas like computer security it's basically a training ground where people start off for a few years before being snatched away by higher-paying employers.
MS peaked in 2003 (XP+Office 2003). And to be fair they pretty much nailed it by then. Off the top of my head the only thing I'd really miss by going back to that setup was indexed searching for emails in Outlook. It'll be interesting to see if Apple finds anywhere to go after smartphones settle down.
That's because it's a trivia game show, and that's what trivia is.
That said, you are wrong in thinking that answering trivia questions is trivial. Encoding the patterns in the questions sufficient to get the right answer as much as they did was a step forward. Nobody else has ever created a system that could compete with Watson in what it does, and that is a fact. Moreover, the ability to beat the world champions in whatever task is seldom necessary to justify automating that task if there is a cost savings. When you dial up a call center, whoever picks up the phone is not Ken Jennings.
P.S., here's a Time story from 2008 called "Why Circuit City Busted, While Best Buy Boomed." It claims Circuit City failed because it was poorly managed and complacent, while Best Buy flourished because it was the opposite. In other words, we always write the same post-mortem for dying or dead companies.
If an article begins: "In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing..." don't bother reading any further. It's just a screed.
Human beings are living organisms and so have strong survival instincts. Biological imperatives (e.g. reproduce) typically trump social conventions (e.g. property rights). That's not a value judgment on my part; it's a fact. So, if you're waiting for the poor to peaceably fade into oblivion out of respect for the sanctity of the legal rights of those around them, you are setting yourself up for disappointment.