The idea of the "Negroponte Inversion" was that in the majority of the 20th century, broadcast entertainment traveled over the air and personal communication was transmitted through wires. The Inversion happens when broadcast entertainment travels over wires and personal communication is transmitted through the air.
The internet started off for the majority as over-the-wire communication, but the article's premise is that there is a coming inversion where it will be transmitted in the majority through the air.
Of course, the article is bogus because it states a specific technology (802.11N). There may be a "Negroponte Inversion" coming for computer networking, but my opinion is that it will be driven by sociological and business factors, not by an obselete-as-shipped wireless networking standard.
What is a supercomputer?
The fastest, most powerful machine to solve a problem today. This
is generally credited to Dr. Sid Fernbach, George Michael and Jack
Worlton, and others.
What if I qualify that with "cost?" ["for the cheapest"]
Then, it's not a supercomputer. Period. It might be a minisupercomputer, though. Don't let George know that I said that (he's much more hard-line).
Eugene N. Miya, Comp.Sys.Arch.Super FAQ
Sounds dandy at first, but the details raise a lot of questions:
1. Are your projects all less than a month long? How do these people, who get paid minimum wage until a project is finished, pay their bills, car payments, home payments, childcare, etc? Do they receive the bonuses prior to the work being finished? Do you just stop bonus payments when your money runs out (for example, if your employees underperform, etc?)
2. What happens when one guy works 40 hours a week adding additional value to the software, hardware, or product baseline (assuming one only _has_ to work 16-24 hours a week, if at all.) Does that guy earn more bonus money than the guy who gets his shit done in 2 days, then goes into "personal time" the rest of the week?
3. This sort of relationship in general implies a great deal of trust in a very shady world. If my boss told me that the company is starting to look for ways to pay everyone as contractors and file 1099's for our income instead of W2's then I would look for a new place to work. This is because I would have to provide myself with defense in Law of Agency. There would be no recourse in termination of my employment, because as a contractor, I could be let go at any time. Since I get paid minimum wage until my bonuses come in, I would probably be defenseless in trying to recover any future bonus income in the case that I was terminated, because it's all variable upon performance. For example, If I get fired, I don't get paid my bonus money, because when I don't work for the company, I don't perform. So basically, I would be earning $5.85 an hour, or $234.00 before taxes a week ($46.80 if I worked two 8 hour days) doing work that, supposedly, I could have gotten paid $780 a week (assuming a 40k/year salary) doing at another company, in the promise of earning a big bonus that may never come because I got fired a week before the project finished?
I'm sure that you're a very honest person, running a legal business, who treats his/her employees well. But as a general rule, I would caution anyone against this kind of business arrangement, no matter how attractive it sounds. There are two issues here: 1) giving more freedom and flexibility to employees and 2) fundamentally reducing their legal rights as employees. I'm all for 1 as much as possible but completely against 2.
One thing that the article leaves out, unfortunately, is another unique property of Fermilab - that it owns a herd of American Bison. Having "signature" animals at National Labs isn't unique to Fermi - for example, Argonne National Labs, also in Illinois, has a large population of the cream-colored Dama Dama "White Deer." However, while Argonne merely allows the deer to roam freely on its land, Fermilab Bison are actively cultivated by the lab, creating some really fine breeding studs, and acting as a sustainable way of preserving one aspect of the natural "Prairie" that is part of North American history.
This is understandable, considering that the person who wrote the article is/was a programmer him/herself. This is my non-technical, management-level summary of his points:
1. "Expert" programmers want managers to recognize them as good, and all other programmers that do not generate as much code as them as bad programmers. 2. "Expert" programmers want managers to recognize that they deserve more money than all the programmers that do not generate as much code as they do. 3. "Expert" programmers do not like to communicate. They view communication as a waste of time and think of less communication as a pro. 4. "Expert" programmers do not want to acknowledge the existence of anyone who is better than they are. Because if there was someone better than them, then they wouldn't be "Experts" anymore. 5. Despite viewing communication as inefficiency, actively wanting isolation from each other, "Expert" programmers promise that "things will just flow." 6. People should be judged on the quality of their work.
Am I wrong in thinking that maybe the article is...a bit obvious? He ends with the following aphorism:
"As with many things in life, sometimes you get what you pay for."
I don't mean to be rude, but can I please put a "duh" tag on this?
Unfortunately, this technique only works if the "original" image edited was formed using a lossy image compression algorithm. Although it works for most casual cases of manipulation, people who are really quite clever can circumvent the analysis.
It becomes a little easier if the people who are editing the photographs are the ones that are taking them also - shooting base material in a lossless compression algorithm like RAW or TIF.
My personal opinion is that this is a good "quick and dirty" test for image manipulation, but should not be used as a certification for un-retouched images.
Don't pay your taxes, do you, Sycraft? It's ok. I've sent the feds over to your house. You won't have to worry about the next dot com bust while you're earning nickels in jail.
FTW
As a simple example say I have $5 and I pay it to you to fix my dryer. You then pay that $5 to bob to make you a nice dinner, he pays it to me to fix his computer, I pay it to you to fix my washer and so on. The same $5 keeps getting spent and re-spent. However the net effect is we all are richer.
Actually, the Federal Government took $1.00 away from Bob after he slaved over a stove to serve me my meal, the State Government took a quarter before he even turned on the stove, FICA, SUTA, and FUTA took another nickel. Group health insurance took a dime, and Bob already elected to save 60 cents in his pre-tax 401k. This left Bob with $3.00, certainly not enough to pay you to fix his computer, and definitely not enough to secure my repair services!
This is one of those cases where allegory is truly misleading. The article makes the comparison to shopping bags and tupperware in order to emphasize the "everyday" nature of the material. The truth is that they have similar basic components, but the exact composition and processing differences cause one material to be good at resisting bullets and another at storing food (or selling at parties.) Unlike Tupperware, Dyneema vests are composed of woven and laminated fabric.
Dyneema is actually a trade name for a thread derived from Ultra High Molecular Weight polyethylene. The intrinsic strength of the material comes from the ability to increase the length of the polyethylene chain to extreme lengths. Since the structure of UHMW derives its strength mostly from the intermolecular Van-der Waals forces, the longer the polythethylene chains get, the stronger the forces holding the material together become. When the processing of the polythylene allows the length of the chains to become uniform, then you can engineer it into useful forms, such as a fiber which eventually be formed into fabric, then laminated and put on your chest.
Of course, being UHMW, Dyneema has a weakness: Its melting point is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or about the temperature of a hot light bulb. Which means that while your body heat might not harm the vest, carelessness in storage might.
Can you first give a single concrete example of the following subjective terms:
1. Excessive Weaponry 2. High End Weapon 3. Massacre vs. Rampage Shooting 4. Basic Level of Arsenal 5. Sophisticated Weapon
Second, stripped of what I perceive to be a disturbingly pseudo-academic tone, my interpretation of what you are saying is this: "Gun Laws prevent massacres by preventing an arms race."
I disagree, mostly because of Factual History:
1. September 16, 1920 - 23 Wall Street Bombing - 38 killed, 400 injured. 2. April 19, 1995 - Oklahoma City Bombing - 168 killed, 800+ injured. 3. September 11, 2001 - WTC Attacks - 2973+ killed
In short, unless you intend to put fertilizer, nitromethane, diesel fuel, jet planes, and Ryder Trucks on your short list of excessive, sophisticated, or high-end weaponry, I would say that your argument is utterly wrong.
"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."
The Jim Miller quote above confuses me, as Maxwell Technologies advertises a 125V output power module which is spec'd to only lose 70% of its charge after 30 days. So why is he contradicting his own company's products?
For those who are unfamiliar, while ultracaps sound fantastic, they are ultimately bound by the physical laws of capacitors, one law being that their output voltage drops (linearly) as they discharge. Maxwell Technologies knows about this, so they develop ultracapacitor arrays with extremely high internal voltages (4000+ V) and regulate the power output using efficient step-down converters. Battery cells, of course, do this naturally, because the electrochemical reactions generating the current do so at a voltage determined by the electric potential of the galvanic reaction inside the cell.
This is one reason why you don't hear much about using ultracaps in portable electronic equipment. While ultracaps may be relatively compact, they are still bulky, and though they may be able to provide the necessary voltage, you have to factor in doubling or even tripling the required voltage to use efficient step-down converters. The story gets even worse for charging. Let's say you want to charge using 12 volts DC. Do you run through dedicated charging circuitry which takes in "safe" voltage, but can only charge the ultracap at battery-style rates (low current), or do you try and charge the ultracap in its theoretical minimum charge time (high current), which means that the wall-warts you are used to seeing will look more like big, boxy IGBT/Invert-based welders (and you thought your xbox 360 power supply was big...)
In short, while it sounds good in theory, the practical challenges of discharging and charging ultracaps are fairly sizable.
It took Andrew Wiles seven years to write a rigorous proof for Fermat's Last 'Theorem'. If he had started when he was 23 instead of 34, he would have proved it while he was 30, instead of 41.
The real problem, of course, is that it wasn't until Andrew learned about the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that he figured out the method for proving Fermat's Last Theorem. He then waited for 2 years before starting.
Who I think is a better example of mathematician burnout is Yutaka Taniyama himself. He started his career at 28 - way old for a mathematician - and killed himself at age 31. A year after his mathematical prime. Coincidence? Maybe. But you never know...
Hypercomputing. Gilson is a salesman. What I want to know is who is the technical designer on his team?
Note that Gilson's machine is based on a paper published by Mark Oskin, Fred Chong, and Tim Sherwood. (This paper was about something called "Active Pages" and has a lot to do with Processing-In-Memory, research that we are also working on). I would think of Chong as being the lead investigator. Here's his homepage:
Active Pages
This article is chock full of no-namers, but one name does have weight. That's Allan Snavely, who published a very informative piece on benchmarking the Tera MTA. It doesn't surprise me that he was trying expose Gilson's machine as a hoax - Snavely has a big interest in multithreaded parallel machines, and so PIM-like Distributed Memory Architecture like this one is rather suspect. He's also a performance nut (what self-respecting computer engineer isn't?)
Take Snavely's comments with a grain of salt. Snavely has most likely read Chong's Active Pages ISCA paper, made back in 1998. He's known about the possibilities of reconfigurable FPGA computing for 5 years, and this is probably his first experience interacting with an actual compiler for it.
In our business, whenever anyone sees a compiler for a machine - even if it is theoretical, it's automatically known to have "have promise". Just don't hold the future of computing to that.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of the "Negroponte Inversion" was that in the majority of the 20th century, broadcast entertainment traveled over the air and personal communication was transmitted through wires. The Inversion happens when broadcast entertainment travels over wires and personal communication is transmitted through the air.
The internet started off for the majority as over-the-wire communication, but the article's premise is that there is a coming inversion where it will be transmitted in the majority through the air.
Of course, the article is bogus because it states a specific technology (802.11N). There may be a "Negroponte Inversion" coming for computer networking, but my opinion is that it will be driven by sociological and business factors, not by an obselete-as-shipped wireless networking standard.
What is a supercomputer?
The fastest, most powerful machine to solve a problem today. This is generally credited to Dr. Sid Fernbach, George Michael and Jack Worlton, and others.
What if I qualify that with "cost?" ["for the cheapest"]
Then, it's not a supercomputer. Period. It might be a minisupercomputer, though. Don't let George know that I said that (he's much more hard-line).
Eugene N. Miya, Comp.Sys.Arch.Super FAQ
Sounds dandy at first, but the details raise a lot of questions:
1. Are your projects all less than a month long? How do these people, who get paid minimum wage until a project is finished, pay their bills, car payments, home payments, childcare, etc? Do they receive the bonuses prior to the work being finished? Do you just stop bonus payments when your money runs out (for example, if your employees underperform, etc?)
2. What happens when one guy works 40 hours a week adding additional value to the software, hardware, or product baseline (assuming one only _has_ to work 16-24 hours a week, if at all.) Does that guy earn more bonus money than the guy who gets his shit done in 2 days, then goes into "personal time" the rest of the week?
3. This sort of relationship in general implies a great deal of trust in a very shady world. If my boss told me that the company is starting to look for ways to pay everyone as contractors and file 1099's for our income instead of W2's then I would look for a new place to work. This is because I would have to provide myself with defense in Law of Agency. There would be no recourse in termination of my employment, because as a contractor, I could be let go at any time. Since I get paid minimum wage until my bonuses come in, I would probably be defenseless in trying to recover any future bonus income in the case that I was terminated, because it's all variable upon performance. For example, If I get fired, I don't get paid my bonus money, because when I don't work for the company, I don't perform. So basically, I would be earning $5.85 an hour, or $234.00 before taxes a week ($46.80 if I worked two 8 hour days) doing work that, supposedly, I could have gotten paid $780 a week (assuming a 40k/year salary) doing at another company, in the promise of earning a big bonus that may never come because I got fired a week before the project finished?
I'm sure that you're a very honest person, running a legal business, who treats his/her employees well. But as a general rule, I would caution anyone against this kind of business arrangement, no matter how attractive it sounds. There are two issues here: 1) giving more freedom and flexibility to employees and 2) fundamentally reducing their legal rights as employees. I'm all for 1 as much as possible but completely against 2.
One thing that the article leaves out, unfortunately, is another unique property of Fermilab - that it owns a herd of American Bison. Having "signature" animals at National Labs isn't unique to Fermi - for example, Argonne National Labs, also in Illinois, has a large population of the cream-colored Dama Dama "White Deer." However, while Argonne merely allows the deer to roam freely on its land, Fermilab Bison are actively cultivated by the lab, creating some really fine breeding studs, and acting as a sustainable way of preserving one aspect of the natural "Prairie" that is part of North American history.
This is understandable, considering that the person who wrote the article is/was a programmer him/herself. This is my non-technical, management-level summary of his points:
1. "Expert" programmers want managers to recognize them as good, and all other programmers that do not generate as much code as them as bad programmers.
2. "Expert" programmers want managers to recognize that they deserve more money than all the programmers that do not generate as much code as they do.
3. "Expert" programmers do not like to communicate. They view communication as a waste of time and think of less communication as a pro.
4. "Expert" programmers do not want to acknowledge the existence of anyone who is better than they are. Because if there was someone better than them, then they wouldn't be "Experts" anymore.
5. Despite viewing communication as inefficiency, actively wanting isolation from each other, "Expert" programmers promise that "things will just flow."
6. People should be judged on the quality of their work.
Am I wrong in thinking that maybe the article is...a bit obvious? He ends with the following aphorism:
"As with many things in life, sometimes you get what you pay for."
I don't mean to be rude, but can I please put a "duh" tag on this?
Unfortunately, this technique only works if the "original" image edited was formed using a lossy image compression algorithm. Although it works for most casual cases of manipulation, people who are really quite clever can circumvent the analysis.
It becomes a little easier if the people who are editing the photographs are the ones that are taking them also - shooting base material in a lossless compression algorithm like RAW or TIF.
My personal opinion is that this is a good "quick and dirty" test for image manipulation, but should not be used as a certification for un-retouched images.
Don't pay your taxes, do you, Sycraft? It's ok. I've sent the feds over to your house. You won't have to worry about the next dot com bust while you're earning nickels in jail. FTW
Yes, why the hell are there so many nuts like yourself on Slashdot that have to turn everything in to an anti-government rant?
What's my cause exactly, you nutjob?
As a simple example say I have $5 and I pay it to you to fix my dryer. You then pay that $5 to bob to make you a nice dinner, he pays it to me to fix his computer, I pay it to you to fix my washer and so on. The same $5 keeps getting spent and re-spent. However the net effect is we all are richer.
Actually, the Federal Government took $1.00 away from Bob after he slaved over a stove to serve me my meal, the State Government took a quarter before he even turned on the stove, FICA, SUTA, and FUTA took another nickel. Group health insurance took a dime, and Bob already elected to save 60 cents in his pre-tax 401k. This left Bob with $3.00, certainly not enough to pay you to fix his computer, and definitely not enough to secure my repair services!
Any questions?
Have you ever wondered if there was more to life, other than being really, really, ridiculously high-performance?
This is one of those cases where allegory is truly misleading. The article makes the comparison to shopping bags and tupperware in order to emphasize the "everyday" nature of the material. The truth is that they have similar basic components, but the exact composition and processing differences cause one material to be good at resisting bullets and another at storing food (or selling at parties.) Unlike Tupperware, Dyneema vests are composed of woven and laminated fabric.
Dyneema is actually a trade name for a thread derived from Ultra High Molecular Weight polyethylene. The intrinsic strength of the material comes from the ability to increase the length of the polyethylene chain to extreme lengths. Since the structure of UHMW derives its strength mostly from the intermolecular Van-der Waals forces, the longer the polythethylene chains get, the stronger the forces holding the material together become. When the processing of the polythylene allows the length of the chains to become uniform, then you can engineer it into useful forms, such as a fiber which eventually be formed into fabric, then laminated and put on your chest.
Of course, being UHMW, Dyneema has a weakness: Its melting point is about 300 degrees Fahrenheit, or about the temperature of a hot light bulb. Which means that while your body heat might not harm the vest, carelessness in storage might.
Can you first give a single concrete example of the following subjective terms:
1. Excessive Weaponry
2. High End Weapon
3. Massacre vs. Rampage Shooting
4. Basic Level of Arsenal
5. Sophisticated Weapon
Second, stripped of what I perceive to be a disturbingly pseudo-academic tone, my interpretation of what you are saying is this: "Gun Laws prevent massacres by preventing an arms race."
I disagree, mostly because of Factual History:
1. September 16, 1920 - 23 Wall Street Bombing - 38 killed, 400 injured.
2. April 19, 1995 - Oklahoma City Bombing - 168 killed, 800+ injured.
3. September 11, 2001 - WTC Attacks - 2973+ killed
In short, unless you intend to put fertilizer, nitromethane, diesel fuel, jet planes, and Ryder Trucks on your short list of excessive, sophisticated, or high-end weaponry, I would say that your argument is utterly wrong.
Taken from the Technology Review article:
"We're skeptical, number one, because of leakage," says Miller, explaining that high-voltage ultracaps have a tendency to self-discharge quickly. "Meaning, if you leave it parked overnight it will discharge, and you'll have to charge it back up in the morning."
The Jim Miller quote above confuses me, as Maxwell Technologies advertises a 125V output power module which is spec'd to only lose 70% of its charge after 30 days. So why is he contradicting his own company's products?
For those who are unfamiliar, while ultracaps sound fantastic, they are ultimately bound by the physical laws of capacitors, one law being that their output voltage drops (linearly) as they discharge. Maxwell Technologies knows about this, so they develop ultracapacitor arrays with extremely high internal voltages (4000+ V) and regulate the power output using efficient step-down converters. Battery cells, of course, do this naturally, because the electrochemical reactions generating the current do so at a voltage determined by the electric potential of the galvanic reaction inside the cell.
This is one reason why you don't hear much about using ultracaps in portable electronic equipment. While ultracaps may be relatively compact, they are still bulky, and though they may be able to provide the necessary voltage, you have to factor in doubling or even tripling the required voltage to use efficient step-down converters. The story gets even worse for charging. Let's say you want to charge using 12 volts DC. Do you run through dedicated charging circuitry which takes in "safe" voltage, but can only charge the ultracap at battery-style rates (low current), or do you try and charge the ultracap in its theoretical minimum charge time (high current), which means that the wall-warts you are used to seeing will look more like big, boxy IGBT/Invert-based welders (and you thought your xbox 360 power supply was big...)
In short, while it sounds good in theory, the practical challenges of discharging and charging ultracaps are fairly sizable.
Grabboids! (with regards to Walter Chang...)
I don't know about you, but my sex drive hasn't peaked yet. Then again, I'm an engineer...
It took Andrew Wiles seven years to write a rigorous proof for Fermat's Last 'Theorem'. If he had started when he was 23 instead of 34, he would have proved it while he was 30, instead of 41.
The real problem, of course, is that it wasn't until Andrew learned about the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture that he figured out the method for proving Fermat's Last Theorem. He then waited for 2 years before starting.
Who I think is a better example of mathematician burnout is Yutaka Taniyama himself. He started his career at 28 - way old for a mathematician - and killed himself at age 31. A year after his mathematical prime. Coincidence? Maybe. But you never know...
Hypercomputing. Gilson is a salesman. What I want to know is who is the technical designer on his team? Note that Gilson's machine is based on a paper published by Mark Oskin, Fred Chong, and Tim Sherwood. (This paper was about something called "Active Pages" and has a lot to do with Processing-In-Memory, research that we are also working on). I would think of Chong as being the lead investigator. Here's his homepage: Active Pages This article is chock full of no-namers, but one name does have weight. That's Allan Snavely, who published a very informative piece on benchmarking the Tera MTA. It doesn't surprise me that he was trying expose Gilson's machine as a hoax - Snavely has a big interest in multithreaded parallel machines, and so PIM-like Distributed Memory Architecture like this one is rather suspect. He's also a performance nut (what self-respecting computer engineer isn't?) Take Snavely's comments with a grain of salt. Snavely has most likely read Chong's Active Pages ISCA paper, made back in 1998. He's known about the possibilities of reconfigurable FPGA computing for 5 years, and this is probably his first experience interacting with an actual compiler for it. In our business, whenever anyone sees a compiler for a machine - even if it is theoretical, it's automatically known to have "have promise". Just don't hold the future of computing to that.