Really, listen to Tim Minchin. The quote above is a reply to: Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy They promote drug dependency At the cost of the natural remedies That are all our bodies need They are immoral and driven by greed. Why take drugs When herbs can solve it? Why use chemicals When homeopathic solvents Can resolve it? It's time we all return-to-live With natural medical alternatives."
I assure you, if 'natural medicine' things would _really_ work miracles, people would realize it. There is nothing drug companies can do to stop some independent researcher in other country finding out that eating unladen swallow droppings will cure all types of cancer.
Pharmacy companies are bit 'evil', because they try to earn serious money to recoup their investments by limiting supply to life-saving treatments. I could even believe that they have found a synthetic cure for something and they are holding it under the wraps to earn more money from treatment drugs rather than one-shot cure drug. But claiming that they are suppressing alternative medicine research to protect their earnings...
This is a valid answer. And then suggestions will be in what areas you can earn enough cash to fulfill that dream. Might be very different from 'how do I enjoy my work' or 'how do I develop myself as a person'.
Had a friend who was working 12+hours days (plus being on-call during a night) as highly paid contractor in the bank. He was doing that for over 10 years already. He was 40, but looked more like 55. And he had a clear deadline - by 45, he would save enough money to never have to work again, buy big house, yaht etc etc. (yes, it was well paid work). Problem is that by then, he might not be able to really enjoy it...
But yes, if having a LOT of money in 20 years is your only criteria, there are legal ways to do that, if you are willing to flush 20-years of life quality down the drain.
I think that Tim Minchin has summed up alternative medicine in best way in his Storm poem
By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work. You know what they call "alternative medicine" That's been proved to work? Medicine."
Quotation needed. BTW, most people are on GPRS/3G/whatever - but you probably meant 'landline' type of connectivity. I really doubt that there are more people using dialup compared to low-speed DSL (1-2Mb range).
And thing is that this D-wave gizmo seems to be useless for these important problems.
I assure you that if they would show factorization of very big numbers in instant time, nobody would doubt them, but instead line up with checkbooks.
So far, as far as I'm aware, they have failed to show ANY kind of important problem which can be solved by their machine in time orders of magnitude faster than comparable size hardware (not to mention, comparable _cost_ hardware).
No, NSPR is really low level. You can think about it as less readable libc+libsocket+libthread, which gives you platform-independent API. So, it is PRUint32 PL_strlen(const char *str); instead of size_t strlen ( const char * str ); (saves you from worry about what size_t is on given platform). And every other function you know from above libraries will be converted into some with strange prefixes, but well defined data types. Well, there are few other goodies like hashtables, but generally it is about being really portable.
Yes, it is plain horrible for coding or text editing, but idea behind it is to support some more niche programs for video/photo editing, 3d modelling etc, with keyboard changing icons on keys depending in which mode are.
I have a strong feeling of deja vu - I have heard same pitch about Mozilla NSPR (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSPR). Same thing - base library for many platforms, which is very well tested, developed for the needs of browser coding, but not really tied to hmtl rendering in any way.
So, assuming I want to be hipster should I: - use NSPR, because it was available before reusing browser base libraries went mainstream or - use Chrome library, because really cool guys use Chrome rather than Firefox ?
Have you even tried to read it? http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-438-public-comment-on-inflation-measurement Rules for measuring inflation have changed. They have changed in the way inflation is a lot lower than it would be according to pre-1980 rules. There is no doubt about it. You can argue that new rules are 'better' - in the way of better representing effects of inflation of average citizen. Thats possible, I just don't trust honesty of government as much as you do.
However, the advanced western democracies have done a good job managing the fake statistics. In the USA, the CPI published by biased government stayed under 4% a year most of the time since the 70s.
"Scammer intercepts and slightly alters the email" It is not clear for me that it has happend on the wire, as opposed to compromising mail server or customer machine. Has the scammer really captured the email while it was transmitted over http/smtp connection, performed 'surgery' in realtime and sent it further with modified content?
From the comments section, somebody describes similar situation, but first step was to install keylogger on customer PC. Which means we are in point 3, not point 2 from my list.
I wonder, in real world, how big percentage of the attacks are performed by man-in-the-middle (where strength of cypher matters). Between
1) 3 letter agencies just accessing content directly on Yahoo servers 2) Somebody hacking router between you and Yahoo (or evesdropping on physical line) and performing very costly cypher break 3) Having trojan/keylogger/whatever on your machine giving access to everything
How much point 2 is a problem compared to 1 and 3? People can write a lot about how usage of bad cipher will allow your mails to be cracked in 1 day instead of 5 billion years... but probably 99% of compromised emails are accessed through 1 or 3.
It is like with optimizing code. You could optimize hotspot where 99% of cpu time is spent, but it is hard. So instead you optimize all things around, making other 1% order of magnitudes faster and then forget than you cannot do anything about remaining 99%...
Are we talking about same Microvision which has 720p resolution and needs a 'screen' at least 6 inches from the projector and cost over $300 per piece? Imagine oculus rift with that front part 20cm long...
If the display refresh and the tracking-camera frame rate are both 60 Hz, there's no way to get less than 33ms of lag as the display tracks your movement
Not sure how important tracking camera is versus rotation detectors (ones which were in previous dev kit). Orientation is sampled 1000Hz. Camera is probably less, but they have prediction for movement (you cannot change position velocity as fast as rotation speed), so it might be non-issue.
Regarding display refresh - there is 60Hz and there is 60Hz. With new display, they are not taking 33ms to refresh the display - they are 'blinking' it very fast and then it is black for most of the time. This means that 'blink' can be very much up to date and next one will be also up to date. There will be no 'smearing' of pixels while they are changing. At same time, there is something in our brains, which composes multiple single frames into continous motion (has something to do with the way eyes are naturally moving).
Movement prediction, 'blinking' display and bit of wetware in your brain can possibly create a very good effect. No guarantee that they will achieve it, but I would not make statements about minimal latency purely based on time between display refreshes with the new OLED screens.
Yes, it would be impressive, but that's not a case. "While the theme of the game (You Only Get One) was a pre-coded template, Angelina chose the color of the walls, the textures, the ambient sound track. "
If you add 'randomly' before 'chose', you will get a feeling how big breakthrough in AI development it is...
And no, it is not a good first step towards something. Being able to google texture based on some keywords has nothing to do with being able to create game code. Or with being 'creative' in any sense of the word.
Back in old times, when we were behind Iron Curtain and in few years afterwards, Pen&Paper RPG books were precious commodity. Imagine having to spend half a month salary for a single book. So 'secondary' market was thriving, with somebody buying a book and then everybody else photocopying it over and over. Unfortunately, photocopiers were A4, while most RPG books were in letter format, which was causing ugly black borders on top and bottom and angry stares from the shop owner, who was using a lot more toner than he has expected...
It is like with playing a guitar. You can show somebody two or three chords, ask him to hit the strings and sing along - and in half an hour, you have some kind of achievement. Yes, he will have to unlearn this half an hour if he is supposed to become next Paco de Lucia. Or you can do it other way around and start with exercising fingers for finger-style play and then, maybe, in 100 hours, you will have they guys playing something remotely enjoyable. Which way do you think is better to capture the interest of current, instant-gratification generation? To be honest, any generation... Actually, it is even worse. With guitar, you can at least point to great guitarists and say - listen to them, if you want to play like that, you need to exercise your fingers for hours. With computers... you point to any AAA games kid really enjoyed and you will say "Look at these games, I will NOT teach you how to make them, because I feel superior in my ivory tower and don't think these guys know anything about programming. Behold my 7-line solution for newest Project Euler task!"
Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'. Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a lot more'?
We don't really need more Great Filter theories. This one is not a theory, it's measured, and it's quite enough all by itself.
I think that sufficiently evolved civilisation CAN argue with biodiversity curve. Jurrassic park style. Clone extinct organisms and breed them. Use DNA manipulation to create superior species to fill out niches left by extinction. I'm not saying that we will manage to do that - but I really doubt that if you take million our-level civilisations each of the would fail. I think that filter is somewhere earlier - in my opinion it is self-replicating DNA-like molecules. Jump between bit of chemistry and the replicating-programs-encoded-as-molecules.
I thought that voting in US is choice between "let's have a lot of wars for fake reasons" and "let's have a lot of wars while waving my Peace Nobel Award"? Are they really giving you an option to vote for 'no wars' out there? And on side note, would you accept having to pay, let's say, $20 per gallon of petrol in return of having no wars with US presence in them? Same people would get killed for same reasons, just not by your country - and you will have to pay 5 times as much for gas. Or is it "I don't want to have wars, but only as long as same quality of life/cheap gas/electronics/whatever are available"?
In other news: Musicians can recognize pitch of the sound better than deaf people. Special force soldiers fare better in the fight ring than housewifes. Women are better at bearing babies than men. Slashdot readers are better at detecting duplicate stories than slashdot editors. Urban Planners are better at stating the obvious than me...
If it can be fitted upside down, let's make it square, so there will be now 4 ways of plugging it in, only 2 of which will work. After few iterations of that, maybe we will finally end up with round connector...
I would be very careful with claims about poor design of JNI. There are multiple aspects which are non-obvious to person who 'just want to call that single native call without hassle'. Example - think about implementing GC which is concurrent and copying. You want to perform it while some piece of code is inside JNI call (it might stay there forever, for example waiting for I/O). That bit of JNI was passed references to few of your java objects. Suddenly, a lot of magic around JNI local and global references and extra level of indirection start making sense... JNI is sometimes hard/verbose not because they want to make C interfacing hard, but because they want to make Java JVM evolution possible. And yes, high-performance concurrent copying gc is a bigger priority for java usage than saving few minutes of one-time work when writing a JNI wrapper. Especially given Swig which automates almost everything.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, listen to Tim Minchin. The quote above is a reply to:
Pharmaceutical companies are the enemy
They promote drug dependency
At the cost of the natural remedies
That are all our bodies need
They are immoral and driven by greed.
Why take drugs
When herbs can solve it?
Why use chemicals
When homeopathic solvents
Can resolve it?
It's time we all return-to-live
With natural medical alternatives."
I assure you, if 'natural medicine' things would _really_ work miracles, people would realize it. There is nothing drug companies can do to stop some independent researcher in other country finding out that eating unladen swallow droppings will cure all types of cancer.
Pharmacy companies are bit 'evil', because they try to earn serious money to recoup their investments by limiting supply to life-saving treatments. I could even believe that they have found a synthetic cure for something and they are holding it under the wraps to earn more money from treatment drugs rather than one-shot cure drug. But claiming that they are suppressing alternative medicine research to protect their earnings...
This is a valid answer. And then suggestions will be in what areas you can earn enough cash to fulfill that dream. Might be very different from 'how do I enjoy my work' or 'how do I develop myself as a person'.
Had a friend who was working 12+hours days (plus being on-call during a night) as highly paid contractor in the bank. He was doing that for over 10 years already. He was 40, but looked more like 55. And he had a clear deadline - by 45, he would save enough money to never have to work again, buy big house, yaht etc etc. (yes, it was well paid work). Problem is that by then, he might not be able to really enjoy it...
But yes, if having a LOT of money in 20 years is your only criteria, there are legal ways to do that, if you are willing to flush 20-years of life quality down the drain.
I think that Tim Minchin has summed up alternative medicine in best way in his Storm poem
By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call "alternative medicine"
That's been proved to work?
Medicine."
Watch it if you have not already
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Quotation needed.
BTW, most people are on GPRS/3G/whatever - but you probably meant 'landline' type of connectivity. I really doubt that there are more people using dialup compared to low-speed DSL (1-2Mb range).
And thing is that this D-wave gizmo seems to be useless for these important problems.
I assure you that if they would show factorization of very big numbers in instant time, nobody would doubt them, but instead line up with checkbooks.
So far, as far as I'm aware, they have failed to show ANY kind of important problem which can be solved by their machine in time orders of magnitude faster than comparable size hardware (not to mention, comparable _cost_ hardware).
No, NSPR is really low level. You can think about it as less readable libc+libsocket+libthread, which gives you platform-independent API.
So, it is
PRUint32 PL_strlen(const char *str);
instead of
size_t strlen ( const char * str );
(saves you from worry about what size_t is on given platform). And every other function you know from above libraries will be converted into some with strange prefixes, but well defined data types.
Well, there are few other goodies like hashtables, but generally it is about being really portable.
Take a look at
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/concept/
http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/tactus/
and other things from this family.
This is an _adaptive keyboard_.
Yes, it is plain horrible for coding or text editing, but idea behind it is to support some more niche programs for video/photo editing, 3d modelling etc, with keyboard changing icons on keys depending in which mode are.
I have a strong feeling of deja vu - I have heard same pitch about Mozilla NSPR (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Projects/NSPR). Same thing - base library for many platforms, which is very well tested, developed for the needs of browser coding, but not really tied to hmtl rendering in any way.
So, assuming I want to be hipster should I:
- use NSPR, because it was available before reusing browser base libraries went mainstream
or
- use Chrome library, because really cool guys use Chrome rather than Firefox
?
Have you even tried to read it?
http://www.shadowstats.com/article/no-438-public-comment-on-inflation-measurement
Rules for measuring inflation have changed. They have changed in the way inflation is a lot lower than it would be according to pre-1980 rules. There is no doubt about it. You can argue that new rules are 'better' - in the way of better representing effects of inflation of average citizen. Thats possible, I just don't trust honesty of government as much as you do.
However, the advanced western democracies have done a good job managing the fake statistics. In the USA, the CPI published by biased government stayed under 4% a year most of the time since the 70s.
Fixed it for you. Take a look at
http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts
"Scammer intercepts and slightly alters the email"
It is not clear for me that it has happend on the wire, as opposed to compromising mail server or customer machine. Has the scammer really captured the email while it was transmitted over http/smtp connection, performed 'surgery' in realtime and sent it further with modified content?
From the comments section, somebody describes similar situation, but first step was to install keylogger on customer PC. Which means we are in point 3, not point 2 from my list.
Well, this sounds a lot more like Offshore Division rather than Algorithms Division...
I wonder, in real world, how big percentage of the attacks are performed by man-in-the-middle (where strength of cypher matters). Between
1) 3 letter agencies just accessing content directly on Yahoo servers
2) Somebody hacking router between you and Yahoo (or evesdropping on physical line) and performing very costly cypher break
3) Having trojan/keylogger/whatever on your machine giving access to everything
How much point 2 is a problem compared to 1 and 3? People can write a lot about how usage of bad cipher will allow your mails to be cracked in 1 day instead of 5 billion years... but probably 99% of compromised emails are accessed through 1 or 3.
It is like with optimizing code. You could optimize hotspot where 99% of cpu time is spent, but it is hard. So instead you optimize all things around, making other 1% order of magnitudes faster and then forget than you cannot do anything about remaining 99%...
Are we talking about same Microvision which has 720p resolution and needs a 'screen' at least 6 inches from the projector and cost over $300 per piece? Imagine oculus rift with that front part 20cm long...
If the display refresh and the tracking-camera frame rate are both 60 Hz, there's no way to get less than 33ms of lag as the display tracks your movement
Not sure how important tracking camera is versus rotation detectors (ones which were in previous dev kit). Orientation is sampled 1000Hz. Camera is probably less, but they have prediction for movement (you cannot change position velocity as fast as rotation speed), so it might be non-issue.
Regarding display refresh - there is 60Hz and there is 60Hz. With new display, they are not taking 33ms to refresh the display - they are 'blinking' it very fast and then it is black for most of the time. This means that 'blink' can be very much up to date and next one will be also up to date. There will be no 'smearing' of pixels while they are changing. At same time, there is something in our brains, which composes multiple single frames into continous motion (has something to do with the way eyes are naturally moving).
Movement prediction, 'blinking' display and bit of wetware in your brain can possibly create a very good effect. No guarantee that they will achieve it, but I would not make statements about minimal latency purely based on time between display refreshes with the new OLED screens.
Yes, it would be impressive, but that's not a case.
"While the theme of the game (You Only Get One) was a pre-coded template, Angelina chose the color of the walls, the textures, the ambient sound track. "
If you add 'randomly' before 'chose', you will get a feeling how big breakthrough in AI development it is...
And no, it is not a good first step towards something. Being able to google texture based on some keywords has nothing to do with being able to create game code. Or with being 'creative' in any sense of the word.
Back in old times, when we were behind Iron Curtain and in few years afterwards, Pen&Paper RPG books were precious commodity. Imagine having to spend half a month salary for a single book. So 'secondary' market was thriving, with somebody buying a book and then everybody else photocopying it over and over. Unfortunately, photocopiers were A4, while most RPG books were in letter format, which was causing ugly black borders on top and bottom and angry stares from the shop owner, who was using a lot more toner than he has expected...
It is like with playing a guitar. You can show somebody two or three chords, ask him to hit the strings and sing along - and in half an hour, you have some kind of achievement. Yes, he will have to unlearn this half an hour if he is supposed to become next Paco de Lucia. Or you can do it other way around and start with exercising fingers for finger-style play and then, maybe, in 100 hours, you will have they guys playing something remotely enjoyable. Which way do you think is better to capture the interest of current, instant-gratification generation? To be honest, any generation...
Actually, it is even worse. With guitar, you can at least point to great guitarists and say - listen to them, if you want to play like that, you need to exercise your fingers for hours. With computers... you point to any AAA games kid really enjoyed and you will say "Look at these games, I will NOT teach you how to make them, because I feel superior in my ivory tower and don't think these guys know anything about programming. Behold my 7-line solution for newest Project Euler task!"
Let's imagine some mad dictator in Northen Cubic Iran starts producing it in huuuge quantities, put into weak containers all accross the country and around his presidential palaces and says 'try to bomb me now'.
Is it feasible for such person to produce enough of this stuff that when released into atmosphere, it would make a significant effect? Not extinction in 1 year effect, but something like 'speed up global warming by 10 years and put it behind the line where Syberia undeground methane starts bubbling a lot more'?
You can't argue with the biodiversity curve.
We don't really need more Great Filter theories. This one is not a theory, it's measured, and it's quite enough all by itself.
I think that sufficiently evolved civilisation CAN argue with biodiversity curve. Jurrassic park style. Clone extinct organisms and breed them. Use DNA manipulation to create superior species to fill out niches left by extinction.
I'm not saying that we will manage to do that - but I really doubt that if you take million our-level civilisations each of the would fail. I think that filter is somewhere earlier - in my opinion it is self-replicating DNA-like molecules. Jump between bit of chemistry and the replicating-programs-encoded-as-molecules.
I thought that voting in US is choice between "let's have a lot of wars for fake reasons" and "let's have a lot of wars while waving my Peace Nobel Award"?
Are they really giving you an option to vote for 'no wars' out there?
And on side note, would you accept having to pay, let's say, $20 per gallon of petrol in return of having no wars with US presence in them? Same people would get killed for same reasons, just not by your country - and you will have to pay 5 times as much for gas. Or is it "I don't want to have wars, but only as long as same quality of life/cheap gas/electronics/whatever are available"?
In other news:
Musicians can recognize pitch of the sound better than deaf people.
Special force soldiers fare better in the fight ring than housewifes.
Women are better at bearing babies than men.
Slashdot readers are better at detecting duplicate stories than slashdot editors.
Urban Planners are better at stating the obvious than me...
If it can be fitted upside down, let's make it square, so there will be now 4 ways of plugging it in, only 2 of which will work. After few iterations of that, maybe we will finally end up with round connector...
I would be very careful with claims about poor design of JNI. There are multiple aspects which are non-obvious to person who 'just want to call that single native call without hassle'.
Example - think about implementing GC which is concurrent and copying. You want to perform it while some piece of code is inside JNI call (it might stay there forever, for example waiting for I/O). That bit of JNI was passed references to few of your java objects. Suddenly, a lot of magic around JNI local and global references and extra level of indirection start making sense...
JNI is sometimes hard/verbose not because they want to make C interfacing hard, but because they want to make Java JVM evolution possible. And yes, high-performance concurrent copying gc is a bigger priority for java usage than saving few minutes of one-time work when writing a JNI wrapper. Especially given Swig which automates almost everything.
I thought that we already had GPUs embedded in CPUs. How embedding CPU inside GPU makes it so much different and breakthrough?