Part of me thinks that had the technology been around in the mid 1700's the rights of something like Wikileaks would have been enshrined in the constitution by the founding fathers as the ultimate check and balance.
I turn to games to escape from thinking. The puzzles in Max Payne (more skill tests, than puzzles) were annoying.
Perhaps if I wanted games to make me think it would be different. I used to like that, but its been a while since then. When I do want to play and think, I turn to Civ, or Sim City or some similar clone.
Medium sized companies $100 Million a year in revenue some times allocate $10 Million a year (or 10% of revenue) to legal expenses.
To change the mind of a company it takes a lot. Losing $10 Million a day does not seem to have convinced the American Auto companies to make cars we want to buy. One could argue that they just don't know what American's want to buy, but really how hard is it to walk to a Honda or Toyota dealership and look around?
Its really a question of economics, they can buy the 2 million players and come out ahead. They should have worked a deal along time ago. A very long time ago. See music industry for examples.
Maybe Craigslist was too busy in other courts fighting for the rights of drug dealers and prostitutes who regularly use CL to sell their wares. My favorite ads are the prostitutes who take drugs for payment. How do they even get on craigslist?
Cheap energy is the answer to most problems, be it solar, wind (indirect solar), geo-thermal, tidal, or biofuel (indirect solar). Also anything dealing with water purification on both the small and large scale.
Those are the two issues to deal with if we are to keep life as we know it moving forward; with relative peace. (Today is a world of peace compared to wars over things like energy, food, or water.)
If you like in the world of Spys and Spooks, then you are used to being worried/paranoid. Its just like breathing.
I do think these people should be concerned about their laptops, ipods, and anything else made in China. This is almost like us buying our equipment from Russia during the cold war.
China is a "communist" country with a capitalist economy, a different and scary beast. One that makes the toys we and our government loves to buy. And the question is what have we forgotten how to make because we would prefer for the Chinese to make more cheaply?
Gaming companies have been claiming they are having trouble with the 8-cores in the PS3. I think that comes from lack of experience and that the gaming engines haven't been designed to take advantage of multiprocessor systems before.
Unless we are going to multi-cores because increasing clock rate is getting hard to do.
I don't think "supercomputer" approaches (which I admit I think of as the same as "massively parallel scientific computing") are applicable to most applications today. Exceptions might be video, picture, and audio editing; and maybe certain types of database operations. If you have other examples I'd be most interested in hearing about them.
Parallelism has been done where it is easy (web server and similar) and where there was no other choice (scientific computing, etc.) but it has not been done well in "main stream" software.
Historically software development has been lazy (with a few notable exceptions) and sat back relying on new silicon (EE's, Moore's Law, higher clock rates) to improve performance. But in the future that may change. Breaking your software up into parallel tasks maybe required to get performance benefits from new silicon.
As a computer scientist I am ashamed of the lack of progress of my discipline. But I also harbor hope that this will put computer science back into the software development process. Right now development is mostly about visual editors and high level scripting languages.
You are making that assumption by only considering "small window" compile time parallelism. But if we train the developers correctly (I know, I know, why start doing that again, we haven't for decades) then looking at software design at a high level and designing parallelism into the software architecture from the beginning; it should be possible to reach better performance on many different types of applications.
M$ made it easy to use low skilled developers to write (barely) passable software. But I think if parallelism takes off, it will separate the "men from the boys" in the software development space. Given the 4, 6, and 8 core processors around today I see no reason that parallelism will not become important, at least in areas where speed matters.
When I was in graduate school in the mid '90's I thought Parallelism would be the next big thing. Needless to say I was a bit early on that prediction. Finally maybe those graduate classes and grant work will pay off.:-)
What I would like to see explained is why for the same music a cassette tape would cost $9.99 and a CD would cost $15.99. Royalties, marketing, etc. should be the same for both. A CD costs LESS than a tape to produce.
For that reason, unless their break down has "$6 of inflated profit" for record label, I don't believe their break down at all.
Sadly in Corporate America (TM) multitasking is a demand of the job. I blame my job and the web for shaving 40 points off my effective IQ inside the cube walls.
These days if I am sitting in front of a computer and not multitasking it feels funny, like driving a car without a seat belts, or leaving home without my keys.
Of course it is entirely possible that learning to multi-task and shave 40 IQ points makes the average Tech'y ready for a job in upper management.
In theory anything developed with public funds is supposed to go into the public domain. But that seems to have died even faster than the Bill of Rights.
Somethings I'd rather just believe. Sure they show it could have been caused by a small asteroid. But isn't it much more fun to think it could have been a UFO with engine trouble? Perhaps the shadows, Romulans, part of an exploded DeathStar, Heart of Gold, etc.
If they were, their lobbists would be be crawling all over this. The cost of capturing and storing all of the digital communications made by employees is non trivial. I know of one company just trying to give their lawyers access to query and retain e-mails. That project is a mess. I can't imagine trying to keep instant messaging along with, etc., etc......
Well several magazines have said the iPhone is the best product of the year. And PC Mag names Vista as the worse product of the year. Perhaps the Universe is not as baddly out of wack as we thought.
But isn't this yesterday's news? Or did I read it on yahoo over breakfast.
I long for the days when slashdot was for news I didn't see on Yahoo first.
But this is still cool technology. And means I should keep putting off buying a new iPod.
Slashdot Mirror
Subject says it all... Not sure about tomorrow.
I think he is saying these perks are a symptom of a bubble. Kinda like a fever is a symptom of an illness, not a cause of the illness.
In general I'd say companies offering these perks shows either a real shortage of talent or really bad management!
Part of me thinks that had the technology been around in the mid 1700's the rights of something like Wikileaks would have been enshrined in the constitution by the founding fathers as the ultimate check and balance.
I turn to games to escape from thinking. The puzzles in Max Payne (more skill tests, than puzzles) were annoying.
Perhaps if I wanted games to make me think it would be different. I used to like that, but its been a while since then. When I do want to play and think, I turn to Civ, or Sim City or some similar clone.
Medium sized companies $100 Million a year in revenue some times allocate $10 Million a year (or 10% of revenue) to legal expenses.
To change the mind of a company it takes a lot. Losing $10 Million a day does not seem to have convinced the American Auto companies to make cars we want to buy. One could argue that they just don't know what American's want to buy, but really how hard is it to walk to a Honda or Toyota dealership and look around?
Its really a question of economics, they can buy the 2 million players and come out ahead. They should have worked a deal along time ago. A very long time ago. See music industry for examples.
Maybe Craigslist was too busy in other courts fighting for the rights of drug dealers and prostitutes who regularly use CL to sell their wares. My favorite ads are the prostitutes who take drugs for payment. How do they even get on craigslist?
Cheap energy is the answer to most problems, be it solar, wind (indirect solar), geo-thermal, tidal, or biofuel (indirect solar). Also anything dealing with water purification on both the small and large scale.
Those are the two issues to deal with if we are to keep life as we know it moving forward; with relative peace. (Today is a world of peace compared to wars over things like energy, food, or water.)
If you like in the world of Spys and Spooks, then you are used to being worried/paranoid. Its just like breathing.
I do think these people should be concerned about their laptops, ipods, and anything else made in China. This is almost like us buying our equipment from Russia during the cold war.
China is a "communist" country with a capitalist economy, a different and scary beast. One that makes the toys we and our government loves to buy. And the question is what have we forgotten how to make because we would prefer for the Chinese to make more cheaply?
Gaming companies have been claiming they are having trouble with the 8-cores in the PS3. I think that comes from lack of experience and that the gaming engines haven't been designed to take advantage of multiprocessor systems before.
Unless we are going to multi-cores because increasing clock rate is getting hard to do.
I don't think "supercomputer" approaches (which I admit I think of as the same as "massively parallel scientific computing") are applicable to most applications today. Exceptions might be video, picture, and audio editing; and maybe certain types of database operations. If you have other examples I'd be most interested in hearing about them.
Yea. Group think is going to be a huge problem. As if it weren't already a big enough problem as it is.
Parallelism has been done where it is easy (web server and similar) and where there was no other choice (scientific computing, etc.) but it has not been done well in "main stream" software.
Historically software development has been lazy (with a few notable exceptions) and sat back relying on new silicon (EE's, Moore's Law, higher clock rates) to improve performance. But in the future that may change. Breaking your software up into parallel tasks maybe required to get performance benefits from new silicon.
As a computer scientist I am ashamed of the lack of progress of my discipline. But I also harbor hope that this will put computer science back into the software development process. Right now development is mostly about visual editors and high level scripting languages.
You are making that assumption by only considering "small window" compile time parallelism. But if we train the developers correctly (I know, I know, why start doing that again, we haven't for decades) then looking at software design at a high level and designing parallelism into the software architecture from the beginning; it should be possible to reach better performance on many different types of applications.
M$ made it easy to use low skilled developers to write (barely) passable software. But I think if parallelism takes off, it will separate the "men from the boys" in the software development space. Given the 4, 6, and 8 core processors around today I see no reason that parallelism will not become important, at least in areas where speed matters.
When I was in graduate school in the mid '90's I thought Parallelism would be the next big thing. Needless to say I was a bit early on that prediction. Finally maybe those graduate classes and grant work will pay off. :-)
What I would like to see explained is why for the same music a cassette tape would cost $9.99 and a CD would cost $15.99. Royalties, marketing, etc. should be the same for both. A CD costs LESS than a tape to produce.
For that reason, unless their break down has "$6 of inflated profit" for record label, I don't believe their break down at all.
Get to understand Chinese culture. Then ask yourself what the world will be like when THEY are the defacto military and economic power.
If they ship it with windows its really not a competitor to the Apple. Without a good OS, it is just a container for crappy content.
Sadly in Corporate America (TM) multitasking is a demand of the job. I blame my job and the web for shaving 40 points off my effective IQ inside the cube walls.
These days if I am sitting in front of a computer and not multitasking it feels funny, like driving a car without a seat belts, or leaving home without my keys.
Of course it is entirely possible that learning to multi-task and shave 40 IQ points makes the average Tech'y ready for a job in upper management.
In theory anything developed with public funds is supposed to go into the public domain. But that seems to have died even faster than the Bill of Rights.
Somethings I'd rather just believe. Sure they show it could have been caused by a small asteroid. But isn't it much more fun to think it could have been a UFO with engine trouble? Perhaps the shadows, Romulans, part of an exploded DeathStar, Heart of Gold, etc.
If they were, their lobbists would be be crawling all over this. The cost of capturing and storing all of the digital communications made by employees is non trivial. I know of one company just trying to give their lawyers access to query and retain e-mails. That project is a mess. I can't imagine trying to keep instant messaging along with, etc., etc. .....
Well several magazines have said the iPhone is the best product of the year. And PC Mag names Vista as the worse product of the year. Perhaps the Universe is not as baddly out of wack as we thought.
But isn't this yesterday's news? Or did I read it on yahoo over breakfast. I long for the days when slashdot was for news I didn't see on Yahoo first. But this is still cool technology. And means I should keep putting off buying a new iPod.
So how many calls do you think they got?