Interesting point. Perhaps the 'direction' comes from the sociological benefits and/or penalties for a given physical or mental trait, which could be driven internally by the system in a feedback loop.
Lets take the most basic and easily understood example today - having a child.
Does society fiscally reward or fiscally punish having a child? Both, actually, depending on where you are on the socioeconomic scale. If you are a young and extremely poor single woman, society fiscally rewards having a child. A woman with making minimum wage at a part time job can increase her cashflow by 50% and reduce her expenses by another 50% simply by having a baby (Section 8 housing assistance, WIC, food stamps, etc.) If you are an established and extremely wealthy single man, society fiscally punishes having a child. A successful paternity suit against a man grossing $120,000 a year in CA or MA ($120k isn't extremely wealthy there, but it's a start) can reduce his monthly available cash after taxes and fixed expenses (rent, car payment, insurance, etc) from $2000 / month to $0, possibly leaving him at a fiscal deficit each month until he downsizes his lifestyle, simply because the state will take $2000 per month from his paycheck and give it to the mother of the child.
These are pretty radical examples, but I can see where about three generations of such disparate measures on both ends of the spectrum will have a pretty serious impact on the genetic and educational makeup of the following generations of that civilization. People today point to how the group living in poverty is growing rapidly and how the upper class is being narrowed into the hands of fewer and fewer, and never stop to wonder what we are doing to cause it to happen.
Directed evolution doesn't always mean beneficial or better. And it definitely doesn't have to mean outside or divine influence.
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God:)
Actually if you ask the top scientists, most of them will say they believe in God. It's the most politically correct answer, but in their minds they are thinking 'no, dumbass, and quit asking'.
When I was young I went to Sunday School religiously. I wanted to believe, and I wanted to see the path. After years of that, one day in Sunday School I picked up the one book it all centered around (the Bible) and asked the teacher if it was true. He said 'yes'.
I asked if it was completely true and that all the answers were in there. He said 'yes'.
Being fairly familiar with the book of Genesis (it was quite interesting, quite detailed, and the first chapter so I read it a few times more often than any others) and the story of the creation of the Earth, I asked if that part was true. He said 'yes'.
So I said 'Where's the dinosaurs?' Blank stares all around.
I gave him my home phone number and said that when he had an answer for that one, call me and I'll be back. He never called. Now I'm a top scientist.
A square less than 200' on each side. I can only imagine that this is something like the little array of mirrors inside a DLP television, except the mirrors are 1 square foot to 1 square meter each, they move following the sun to keep it focused on the boiler, and it covers half an acre of land. Nifty idea.
Oh yea, I remember this one... The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
Computer Science - designing, writing, and integrating new software packages to meet business requirements. IT - purchasing, configuring, installing, maintaining the servers, network, infrastructure, operating systems, and integration points with other systems at the hardware and network levels.
One involves doing work that has been off-shored. The other involves personally touching the hardware from time to time. Guess which group is still hiring people to work on-site?
But I completely agree with you - years of massive influx of cheap labor (H1-B and offshoring) has decimated the professional prospects for entry level programmers, and the ripple effect is that nobody thinks the (non-existent entry level) jobs are cool anymore, so nobody is idolizing the programmers, so the next generation isn't enthusiastic.
Watch him leave the parking lot each morning for a month. I bet at least once he stops mid-walk, turns around and walks back to his car to check the door to make sure he locked it. Being OCD is a bitch in real life, but it makes for some damn fine software engineers.
Well that, and I'm guessing he spent some time coding in C/C++. Real C coders don't write exception handling - they write good code that doesn't need exception handling.
Yes. Do all that and require four semesters of grammar so developers can express themselves in coherent English.
That said - I'd imagine that Zoho isn't doing rocket science - I would bet a dollar that they make 'web applications', which is a nice way of saying they move buttons around on a web page. It doesn't take four years of theory and design training to move buttons around on a web page. Maybe recent high school grads will work out nice for him, and if so - good for everybody involved.
I'm guessing you indirectly hit the nail on the head.
It's not that women are quitting in droves. It's that the H1-B's that are being imported in quantities that are overwhelming the system (and have been for a decade) are primarily men.
How many female Indians have you seen in your office?
The statistic being reported by the OP is telling, but it is telling the wrong story. It's not that women are leaving the system in statistically significant numbers - it's that Indian men are overwhelming the system.
Time-in starts when they walk in the building, and time-out is when they exit the building? They only have to clear 40 hours per week to be in the good graces of management? And they aren't measured by the quality of their output?
Perhaps the parents are using the computer as a cheap babysitter, the way our parents used the television. I guess the difference is that television in our day was somewhat educational.
I can see where 8+ hours a day of the kind of interaction common to WoW or IM would be a mind-numbing experience, eventually dumbing down a person.
Test Driven Development in its truest form. Actually you write the test first and make sure it fails. Then you write the code (or build the rocket) and re-run the test. It will probably fail the first attempt, but you watch it in the debugger and figure out what you did wrong, then do it again.
According to TDD after two or three more attempts they should be all set.
Gallons per thousand miles. Basically, most people (in their mind) drive 1,000 miles per month (everybody that drives a lease is very familiar with the number) so gallons per thousand miles is a pretty accurate estimate for gallons per month. Multiple that by the cost of gas and voila! cost of gas per month.
If you say the vehicle uses 100 gallons per thousand miles (10mpg) - that's one thing (like a Hummer). If you say the vehicle uses 20 gallons per thousand miles (50mpg) - that's something else (like a Prius).
It will pretty quickly bring to light the impact of better gas mileage on the low end (10mpg vs 20mpg = 100 gallons vs 50 gallons), and how little impact better gas mileage is on the high end (50mpg vs 60mpg = 20 gallons vs 16.7 gallons).
I'm curious - what sort of algorithm would you use that can effectively store the data needed for a cache search that can represent 4096 byte sectors in 16 bytes.
As for the 'only time the system will slow down is when you have out-read the cache' - that's exactly the scenario that the OP is describing - massive serial reads on files that are larger than the cache. IIRC the cache was sized on the order of a few Megabytes, and every multimedia file I read all day / all night (music files, video files, gave vobs, etc) is at least that large, most are much larger.
PS - A CS101 undergrad could implement a reasonable implementation in a hour. Now that's funny. Most first semester CS 101 undergrad students I've met couldn't pour rocks out of a box if the instructions were printed on the underside of the box.
The guy has been the Director of the NSA for half a decade and now he is running this new program - and you are asking how this is not the NSA? It's too early for me to be snarky, but... ummm... yea.
At that level you are assigned high level goals (like making sure Google doesn' t get hacked by the Chinese.) Your job is to put good level middle level managers in place to hit a chunk of those individual goals. The job of those managers is to put good low level managers in place to manage the implementation of the details of one of those goals singly. The job of the low level managers is to hire you and I to actually do the work, to keep us motivated to deliver that single goal. The job of you and I : actually care about the details and get it done.
Actual domain knowledge about the minutiae doesn't hurt, but it doesn't really help either. That said, I think they'd be a lot better off with Thresh - he has a proven record of just pwning on the cyberwarrior field.
high performance fighters with afterburners designed for low-altitude performance have trouble hitting mach 1 near the ground. [Citation needed.]
The air is more dense near the ground so it provides a LOT more O2 for the fuel to oxidize with while on full AB near the ground - high performance fighters with afterburners accelerate faster and hit mach 1 sooner when they are closer to the ground than at any other altitude. Granted most of them they can go faster when they are higher, but not ~that much faster~ (as the O2 thins out they have to use less gas to maintain the proper ratio, giving less actual thrust, but giving awesome gains to mileage. If you've got some examples of modern day afterburning jet fighters that can hit mach 1+ at altitude but can't muster enough juice to exceed 760mph at sea level - I'd love to check it out.
But yea, as I understand it scramjets aren't particularly effective below certain altitudes, and they also have minimum operational speeds just to run (400mph, per wiki), hence the need to drop them from B-52's just to get the motors started.
Windows 7 and your average suite of corporate crapware (anti-virus, monitoring tools, Outlook and Word, etc) will burn through 1G of memory just getting started. If you are paying the piper to upgrade desktops and roll out a new OS, might as well kick in the extra $75 and get 3Gig of RAM.
That said, if OP is intent on comparing the performance of desktops I say forget comparing across vendors (HP, Dell, IBM) and compare configurations instead (same box with 1G vs 3G of RAM, 5400rpm drives vs 7200rpm drives vs SSDs, video cards, etc.) Then forget the benchmarks and just compare long term support contracts with the vendors, and load them up with 3Gigs of memory.
Personally I'm a fan of Dell, but that's only because I know how to navigate their support site to get the drivers I need.
All mileage is from fueleconomy.gov, highway mpg. City is lower, of course, but these all looked like they could average 30mpg across the board if a good chunk of your driving was highway.
Toyota Camry (four door family sedan) - 33mpg Saturn Aura (four door family sedan) - 33mpg Chevy Malibu (four door family sedan) - 33mpg Nissan Altima (four door family sedan) - 32mpg VW Jetta (smaller four door sedan) - 42mpg VW Golf (smaller three door hatchback) - 42mpg Audi A3 (five door hatchback) - 42mpg
I actually drove an Altima for a year and a half in 2005, it was nice enough for a professional and big enough to fit four adults in relative comfort and carry luggage in the trunk. It averaged about 27-28mpg across the board. Any 4 cylinder petrol ICE with 2.0L or less displacement can get close to 30mpg, if the car manufacturer is trying. Anything bigger than that (engine size) - you have to resort to fancy tricks like hybrid or what have you.
You touched on where it doesn't make sense - and I'm right there with you : my SUV averages about 16mpg and when my daily drive was less than 10 miles per day it didn't matter. When I got a temporary reassignment and was driving 60 miles per day, and gas was $4 a gallon, on paper it looked like I'd save more each month in gas than the payment on a new hybrid. I considered it, but ultimately kept my SUV (makes more sense during the winter - clearance and 4wd are more important to me during the snow season.)
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting point. Perhaps the 'direction' comes from the sociological benefits and/or penalties for a given physical or mental trait, which could be driven internally by the system in a feedback loop.
Lets take the most basic and easily understood example today - having a child.
Does society fiscally reward or fiscally punish having a child? Both, actually, depending on where you are on the socioeconomic scale.
If you are a young and extremely poor single woman, society fiscally rewards having a child. A woman with making minimum wage at a part time job can increase her cashflow by 50% and reduce her expenses by another 50% simply by having a baby (Section 8 housing assistance, WIC, food stamps, etc.)
If you are an established and extremely wealthy single man, society fiscally punishes having a child. A successful paternity suit against a man grossing $120,000 a year in CA or MA ($120k isn't extremely wealthy there, but it's a start) can reduce his monthly available cash after taxes and fixed expenses (rent, car payment, insurance, etc) from $2000 / month to $0, possibly leaving him at a fiscal deficit each month until he downsizes his lifestyle, simply because the state will take $2000 per month from his paycheck and give it to the mother of the child.
These are pretty radical examples, but I can see where about three generations of such disparate measures on both ends of the spectrum will have a pretty serious impact on the genetic and educational makeup of the following generations of that civilization. People today point to how the group living in poverty is growing rapidly and how the upper class is being narrowed into the hands of fewer and fewer, and never stop to wonder what we are doing to cause it to happen.
Directed evolution doesn't always mean beneficial or better. And it definitely doesn't have to mean outside or divine influence.
I bet it plays a mean game of chess.
If you look at the top scientists, most of them believe in God :)
Actually if you ask the top scientists, most of them will say they believe in God.
It's the most politically correct answer, but in their minds they are thinking 'no, dumbass, and quit asking'.
When I was young I went to Sunday School religiously. I wanted to believe, and I wanted to see the path.
After years of that, one day in Sunday School I picked up the one book it all centered around (the Bible) and asked the teacher if it was true.
He said 'yes'.
I asked if it was completely true and that all the answers were in there.
He said 'yes'.
Being fairly familiar with the book of Genesis (it was quite interesting, quite detailed, and the first chapter so I read it a few times more often than any others) and the story of the creation of the Earth, I asked if that part was true.
He said 'yes'.
So I said 'Where's the dinosaurs?' Blank stares all around.
I gave him my home phone number and said that when he had an answer for that one, call me and I'll be back. He never called. Now I'm a top scientist.
Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say "YES"!
A square less than 200' on each side.
I can only imagine that this is something like the little array of mirrors inside a DLP television, except the mirrors are 1 square foot to 1 square meter each, they move following the sun to keep it focused on the boiler, and it covers half an acre of land. Nifty idea.
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington DC, DC 20500
If you decide you have the balls to break in and steal stuff, post pix. This I have GOT to see ...
Oh yea, I remember this one ...
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs, trying to turn itself over but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping.
What a coincidence. According to the article, most recent CS grads are hungry.
Computer Science - designing, writing, and integrating new software packages to meet business requirements.
IT - purchasing, configuring, installing, maintaining the servers, network, infrastructure, operating systems, and integration points with other systems at the hardware and network levels.
One involves doing work that has been off-shored. The other involves personally touching the hardware from time to time. Guess which group is still hiring people to work on-site?
But I completely agree with you - years of massive influx of cheap labor (H1-B and offshoring) has decimated the professional prospects for entry level programmers, and the ripple effect is that nobody thinks the (non-existent entry level) jobs are cool anymore, so nobody is idolizing the programmers, so the next generation isn't enthusiastic.
Watch him leave the parking lot each morning for a month. I bet at least once he stops mid-walk, turns around and walks back to his car to check the door to make sure he locked it. Being OCD is a bitch in real life, but it makes for some damn fine software engineers.
Well that, and I'm guessing he spent some time coding in C/C++. Real C coders don't write exception handling - they write good code that doesn't need exception handling.
Yes.
Do all that and require four semesters of grammar so developers can express themselves in coherent English.
That said - I'd imagine that Zoho isn't doing rocket science - I would bet a dollar that they make 'web applications', which is a nice way of saying they move buttons around on a web page. It doesn't take four years of theory and design training to move buttons around on a web page. Maybe recent high school grads will work out nice for him, and if so - good for everybody involved.
Which are the good ones, the X-topped or the K-topped?
I ask because I have a few Dell 400sc machines sitting around looking busy and trying not to get replaced.
I'm guessing you indirectly hit the nail on the head.
It's not that women are quitting in droves.
It's that the H1-B's that are being imported in quantities that are overwhelming the system (and have been for a decade) are primarily men.
How many female Indians have you seen in your office?
The statistic being reported by the OP is telling, but it is telling the wrong story. It's not that women are leaving the system in statistically significant numbers - it's that Indian men are overwhelming the system.
Time-in starts when they walk in the building, and time-out is when they exit the building?
They only have to clear 40 hours per week to be in the good graces of management?
And they aren't measured by the quality of their output?
Sounds like they got it pretty easy to me.
Perhaps the parents are using the computer as a cheap babysitter, the way our parents used the television.
I guess the difference is that television in our day was somewhat educational.
I can see where 8+ hours a day of the kind of interaction common to WoW or IM would be a mind-numbing experience, eventually dumbing down a person.
ever since I took my first programming class 31 years ago
Pascal or Basic? I ask because my first official programming class was 27 years ago (and it was taught using UCSD Pascal.)
Test Driven Development in its truest form.
Actually you write the test first and make sure it fails.
Then you write the code (or build the rocket) and re-run the test. It will probably fail the first attempt, but you watch it in the debugger and figure out what you did wrong, then do it again.
According to TDD after two or three more attempts they should be all set.
Gallons per thousand miles.
Basically, most people (in their mind) drive 1,000 miles per month (everybody that drives a lease is very familiar with the number) so gallons per thousand miles is a pretty accurate estimate for gallons per month. Multiple that by the cost of gas and voila! cost of gas per month.
If you say the vehicle uses 100 gallons per thousand miles (10mpg) - that's one thing (like a Hummer).
If you say the vehicle uses 20 gallons per thousand miles (50mpg) - that's something else (like a Prius).
It will pretty quickly bring to light the impact of better gas mileage on the low end (10mpg vs 20mpg = 100 gallons vs 50 gallons), and how little impact better gas mileage is on the high end (50mpg vs 60mpg = 20 gallons vs 16.7 gallons).
I'm curious - what sort of algorithm would you use that can effectively store the data needed for a cache search that can represent 4096 byte sectors in 16 bytes.
As for the 'only time the system will slow down is when you have out-read the cache' - that's exactly the scenario that the OP is describing - massive serial reads on files that are larger than the cache. IIRC the cache was sized on the order of a few Megabytes, and every multimedia file I read all day / all night (music files, video files, gave vobs, etc) is at least that large, most are much larger.
PS - A CS101 undergrad could implement a reasonable implementation in a hour.
Now that's funny. Most first semester CS 101 undergrad students I've met couldn't pour rocks out of a box if the instructions were printed on the underside of the box.
The guy has been the Director of the NSA for half a decade and now he is running this new program - and you are asking how this is not the NSA? ... ummm ... yea.
It's too early for me to be snarky, but
At that level you are assigned high level goals (like making sure Google doesn' t get hacked by the Chinese.)
Your job is to put good level middle level managers in place to hit a chunk of those individual goals.
The job of those managers is to put good low level managers in place to manage the implementation of the details of one of those goals singly.
The job of the low level managers is to hire you and I to actually do the work, to keep us motivated to deliver that single goal.
The job of you and I : actually care about the details and get it done.
Actual domain knowledge about the minutiae doesn't hurt, but it doesn't really help either.
That said, I think they'd be a lot better off with Thresh - he has a proven record of just pwning on the cyberwarrior field.
high performance fighters with afterburners designed for low-altitude performance have trouble hitting mach 1 near the ground.
[Citation needed.]
The air is more dense near the ground so it provides a LOT more O2 for the fuel to oxidize with while on full AB near the ground - high performance fighters with afterburners accelerate faster and hit mach 1 sooner when they are closer to the ground than at any other altitude. Granted most of them they can go faster when they are higher, but not ~that much faster~ (as the O2 thins out they have to use less gas to maintain the proper ratio, giving less actual thrust, but giving awesome gains to mileage. If you've got some examples of modern day afterburning jet fighters that can hit mach 1+ at altitude but can't muster enough juice to exceed 760mph at sea level - I'd love to check it out.
But yea, as I understand it scramjets aren't particularly effective below certain altitudes, and they also have minimum operational speeds just to run (400mph, per wiki), hence the need to drop them from B-52's just to get the motors started.
Windows 7 and your average suite of corporate crapware (anti-virus, monitoring tools, Outlook and Word, etc) will burn through 1G of memory just getting started.
If you are paying the piper to upgrade desktops and roll out a new OS, might as well kick in the extra $75 and get 3Gig of RAM.
That said, if OP is intent on comparing the performance of desktops I say forget comparing across vendors (HP, Dell, IBM) and compare configurations instead (same box with 1G vs 3G of RAM, 5400rpm drives vs 7200rpm drives vs SSDs, video cards, etc.) Then forget the benchmarks and just compare long term support contracts with the vendors, and load them up with 3Gigs of memory.
Personally I'm a fan of Dell, but that's only because I know how to navigate their support site to get the drivers I need.
Volkswagen Diesel, I presume?
All mileage is from fueleconomy.gov, highway mpg. City is lower, of course, but these all looked like they could average 30mpg across the board if a good chunk of your driving was highway.
Toyota Camry (four door family sedan) - 33mpg
Saturn Aura (four door family sedan) - 33mpg
Chevy Malibu (four door family sedan) - 33mpg
Nissan Altima (four door family sedan) - 32mpg
VW Jetta (smaller four door sedan) - 42mpg
VW Golf (smaller three door hatchback) - 42mpg
Audi A3 (five door hatchback) - 42mpg
I actually drove an Altima for a year and a half in 2005, it was nice enough for a professional and big enough to fit four adults in relative comfort and carry luggage in the trunk. It averaged about 27-28mpg across the board. Any 4 cylinder petrol ICE with 2.0L or less displacement can get close to 30mpg, if the car manufacturer is trying. Anything bigger than that (engine size) - you have to resort to fancy tricks like hybrid or what have you.
You touched on where it doesn't make sense - and I'm right there with you : my SUV averages about 16mpg and when my daily drive was less than 10 miles per day it didn't matter. When I got a temporary reassignment and was driving 60 miles per day, and gas was $4 a gallon, on paper it looked like I'd save more each month in gas than the payment on a new hybrid. I considered it, but ultimately kept my SUV (makes more sense during the winter - clearance and 4wd are more important to me during the snow season.)