Google used to. And they've finally realized that it was an ineffective way to identify talent that works for them in the long term. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/20/google_hiring_procedures/. I just interviewed with them, and they have dumped the brain teasers and puzzles completely. They are actually much more interested in what you like to do and the kind of person you are. Way overdue. Google did itself a huge disservice in letting people think you needed a PhD or to be "super smart" to work there.
And there's a huge confounder here. I'd argue that making a direct causal link between success of the competitors and the competition and problems itself is really difficult. People that are motivated and bright can do well, and some of them will like these contests. But you can be motivated by all sorts of programming, and you can't treat the fact that the US is not doing as well in the one area as a condemnation of our education system. In fact, it might be a sign that schools are starting to focus on a more diverse set of students and skillsets.
I will go one further. Some have noted that teams train for a long time for these competitions. I see no value in that beyond the commitment (which is significant) and I see a real risk in become over-specialized in a kind of programming and problem solving that has very little general application.
Put it this way, if you gave me a choice between a top contender in this contest who trained for six months to do well, and a student who spent six months in between classes trying to make and sell an Xbox Live simple 2D game, I'd pick the latter every time.
As for my comment, it was more to the point that it is not large enough to require parallel programming between machines and this is by design. If I remember correctly, these contests are limited to a single computer and a small team. Parallel algorithm development is a whole different animal. In that world, 10Mb is nothing, a graph with millions of nodes is not big.
Mainly, expectations management. They really liked the challenge of short term projects and solving these kinds of problems, but the day to day of long term development just burnt them out. Sometimes, raw skill isn't enough, and I have to say, they got some really bad advice on what programming careers for somebody with a Bachelor's degree looks like from professors that were out of touch. That was the real problem.
Yes, ironically, one of those "real world" skills that this may not test is writing and communication. Proofreading being paramount to the first, of course. So, your humor is on point.
Be nice if Slashdot had a "WTF!?" edit button. You get two minutes to fix your fails. After that, to the wolves with ye.
I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
It's easy to dump on "professional" programmers, and yes, there's a lack of talent, but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career. Programming as a career has nothing to do with getting the computer to do what you want; it has everything to do with getting it to do what your customer wants. Your boss wants, what IT wants, and frankly, it really is about not doing what you can't maintain or do well enough and having the courage to say no. And, yes, it does mean being able to work in a team with people that have different skills or are less talented than you.
I've seen too many students who thrived on this kind of work, were encouraged by professors and others for their talents, only to watch them crash and burn in the realities of programming outside of school. And academics is no recourse for some either, as that is not quickly solving problems with known answers, that's asking questions, forming a new problem (harder than it sounds) and then hopefully answering it well.
I thinking of the world in which you don't want those problems to crop up in the first place, and when they do (and yes, they will), you want the fixes to work and work correctly, not just trade one bug for two down the road, then four.
Making those systems has nothing to do with quick or dirty. The reason they happen is too many programmers have to compromise in the face of unrealistic deadlines for fear of being replaced by new talent who writes code (too) fast, and makes headaches down the road even faster.
The people that really hold these contests and the kind of programming done for them as the peak of software development really cause many more problems than they solve in most organizations. Those that just seem them as special kind of programming skill (fun, challenging, but unique) do much better. And any school that overemphasizes this skillset versus a more diverse one is not the best school.
Sure, if you can be quick and clean, that's valuable. But it's throwaway code by nature. You get no points for making the code readable, well structured, interoperable, etc. And, sadly, new complex algorithm development is the kind of development very few people actually get to do.
There are all kinds of programmers and skillsets The problem with these contests is they give the impression that this the "highest form" of programming skill. In fact, there are many important skills these contests don't address at all, and there are many good programs at schools those that would have a hard time fielding a competitive team.
This programming contests have nothing to do with real world programming or the skills need for most CS fields. Certainly, these are fun algorithmic challenges, but the timed nature of these contests encourage quick and dirty solutions that have no place in the real world. Creating new algorithms and other kinds of CS research requires a lot of attention to performance, scalability and correctness that aren't tested by these contests.
Okay, maybe those High Performance Trading guys want crazy quick complex code that nobody can understand, but that's kind of the problem, is it not?
What I want is to be able to stick a box in my house and have access to that simple interface that DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. provide. But, we don't have the infrastructure that makes it affordable or practical. Sure, I could get a business account and set up a server, but everybody in my neighborhood did it, no more bandwidth.
I find it funny that projects like Google Fiber will make most of what Google and their cloud services provides vulnerable to host it your own software. Everything that is old will be new again.
I was hoping to provide some insights, but the article is just riddled with misunderstandings. I stopped reading after this line:
"Generally speaking, the API makes use of properties in the case where you supply a class or object; but the classes in the API typically donâ(TM)t make use of properties."
No, not at all. Properties are used pretty much everywhere in the API. Examples abound with get only properties (ahem Length?).
Methinks Mr. Cogswell is in way over his head. Language design is not an easy subject, and it requires more than a cursory glance for the perspective of everyday programming.
As others have noted here, C# does seem to be adopting more language features. And, having used the new async programming model, I have to say C# has taken a noticeable lead in useful features.
Nothing prevents Java from doing the same, but given the slow progress of implementing and adopting things like lambdas, I can't say the future of Java will look all that different than today. Which is too bad; there are new ideas that are worth the effort.
No prosecutor is going to give a witness immunity from any crime. Of course many are given immunity from prosecution or a deal for their role in the matter, but that doesn't cover crimes that aren't part of that matter.
Also, the defense has no such power, and would have an equally time convincing any one to testify if it meant that the prosecution could go fishing for any infraction to discredit a witness as well.
It's simple. The fifth aids in the prosecution of crimes by ensuring witnesses will never be endangered by prosecution for their testimony.
A killer who is accused of murdering multiple people including prostitutes is caught and put on trial. Key witnesses have also engaged in prostitution, but the prosecution (rightly so), is not interested in pursuing those crimes compared to these heinous murders.
No fifth amendment, the defense can try to get the witness to admit to committing a crime to discredit the witness. Convince a witness to testify in that environment. Difficult, no? So, without it, key evidence and facts are missing, and a guilty party may go free.
With the fifth amendment, any attempt by the defense can be immediately objected to. It removes whole avenues of irrelevant questioning by the defense. And it goes the other way. Defense witnesses are also free from the risk of prosecution based on their testimony.
This isn't TV, where somebody is being sweated by a lawyer and finally has to invoke their rights in a dramatic fashion. The reality is that those questions would be objected to and dismissed, and many a smart lawyer would not even try such lines of questioning, lest they raise the ire of the judge.
TL; DR? It's a key part of the judicial process, which is obvious with just a bit of thought.
I'd bet this was the standard cube farm, or worse, the open space "collaborative" environment where every conversation carries, making it impossible to focus without some headphones and some music. And nothing says "Hey, I'm approachable" like being hunched over a computer, heads bobbing to the beat.
You want to improve software productivity, start with the environment. Offices. With doors. That you can knock on, close and have a real conversation without distracting others.
Remember Pair Programming? For a while there, there were methodologies that demanded it for all code. Now, it's an afterthought or relic. Sure, most developers don't like it. I surely don't.
But, to be fair, the best development I ever did was working with someone else. It makes sense, being able to bounce ideas around, play off somebody else's strengths. I remember in college, me and a professor knocked out a workable xUnit-like test runner for C++ in a day. This was before cpptest, or course. That code was used for years in his class.
You want good code? Forget that open layout startup space. Get some offices, get some doors, and then get people off their chairs and knocking on them. Build trust by showing people that you value them.
That's a great plan for society. Leave knowledge to the elite; they are they only ones that can afford it. You don't learn anything useful in college, so why bother. Heck, high school is kind of pointless. Why not start a trade at sixteen, that's more money is your pocket. Why not fourteen? That's the ticket. Leave that higher education to those elite know-it-alls.
We don't need to value teachers, educators at all; the internet will fix that with some YouTube videos. After all, you don't understand that stuff, so how can it possibly be worth anything? Let's be honest, not everyone can be educated. You know deep down that you aren't smart Best not to try.
That's a world worth living in. Call it the New Dark Ages. College prices are a concern because they are pricing out people from becoming educated, from having choices. College is not the problem; the cost is. Cheaper loans, more grants and scholarships, more public support all need to be considered alongside cost controls. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it should be a choice for everyone. Everyone can benefit from a higher education, from learning. Smart has nothing to do with it.
An uneducated populous is ripe for exploitation. History (one of those "useless" subjects) teaches us this. Look to the source of this advice, the value of controlling knowledge and the media in this age. Why bother thinking for yourself when you can have somebody do it for you?
There is value in culture, in art, in science that goes beyond money. It is crazy that we are so focused on what it takes to survive these days, not thrive and grow. We don't have to embrace a gold-paved road to a new Dark Age. We can do better.
It's discrimination, plain and simple. I've a victim of it, many others have. The notion that what one shares with a doctor is private is enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, no less.
"All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal."
The point of electronic health records is to actually improve the privacy of health information by enforcing auditing of all actions. Patients like being able to look at their record, and have their doctors share information with each other for their treatment with permission. Other than that, it's private and the idea that is protected by law, technology and culture is a good thing.
I'm glad Google Health died, given this. And I worry about the company as a whole when the founder makes statements like this, and their breakthrough hardware is a perfect tool for spying on people in public. It was bad enough that ad-supported technology is everywhere thanks to their success. Heck, remember when people just took your money and left you alone? I miss that.
And it's not a given that we will have the breakthroughs we need to create a supercomputer that can handle the simulations on a scale needed anytime soon. Basically, GPU acceleration gave a nice bump in super computing power, but the fundamentals of power consumption, memory hierarchy and interconnection still remain. See the link at the bottom for a compelling presentation of the challenges.
Building machine of this size is a worthwhile as it can address lots of interesting scientific problems. And, trying to simulate a brain can lead to more research on how our brains actually work and lead to new understanding of brain disorder.
As for sticking a "human" in a computer, well, I doubt that's the goal of the author. I know it is for some, but what's the point. As the slides above show, the human brain is at least a million times more power efficient that the best case for a supercomputer on the scale needed. No shortage of human brains (quite the opposite). Such a machine would help understand the brain in ways that we can't do now, not a way to live forever.
I look at the sea of comments here and I note how many of you buy into the notion that only that which makes us money is worthwhile, that higher education is just a path to a job. Yes, how unless things like literature, art, philosophy are. How foolish for somebody to think they can make a good living teaching others. College should be for something useful, and teacher deserve less, for that can't do, teach, no?
Thankfully, a few have noted what the point of an education is to be able to think. Critically. You rally against the H1B and the race to the bottom, and then turn around and laugh at someone silly enough to pursue their passions. So what, those classes were useless anyway.
Yes, a population devoid of knowledge of great books, great art, great ideas is a useful one. It's easy to exploit and control. Perhaps you are happy to be a tiny gear in a massive machine. Go on and judge people that think our society has room for more than "practical" economic workhorses that are only temporary distracted by the latest gadget or self-help psychology as foolish.
If you do, realize that they are better off that you, in a way that you will never understand, because you have dismissed the knowledge that made us truly great. You may think you know it all, but you really don't know what you are missing.
Yep, I have a PhD. And it's not in literature. And do regret it at times, but what I truly regret is how devalued intellectual pursuits have become in this century.
I have been using Windows 8. Yes, as a power user I do miss the start menu and how it enabled discovery of programs and multitasking. But, the kernel is responsive and I like the simpler, less chrome look. Even Windows 7 feels less responsive and snappy to me now. And the ideas in Windows RT (the new runtime) make a lot of sense (highly asynchronous, access from managed and native environments). But, they wrapped it up in the weirdest way.
Why Microsoft just doesn't embrace a "desktop mode" and "metro mode" on a per user basis just baffles me. If you select desktop mode, you get the start menu, and to get to the metro screen, you have that option on that menu (or shift+win). Win key takes you back to desktop from any metro app. Metro mode, works like Windows 8 now. Shift+Win is desktop shortcut.
Ta-da, best of both worlds. And you buy some time to get the Windows RT runtime for desktop apps, or integrating metro into desktop mode.
Sigh. Scheme is the perfect platform for learning. You can start from the simplest of concepts to the most advanced in just one language. From simple math to reduction semantics.
Frankly, I learned Scheme as a undergrad and I was saddened when they moved to Java. I don't worry about learning a new language, because I was taught what the essence of programming is. Scheme exposes these core concepts better than any language I know.
Windows Phone 8 is actually a pretty compelling product. Not the best match for desktop or laptops, but it really is effective in the mobile environment. It does just what I need it to do, quickly. It doesn't want to make you fiddle with it, or use it over and over.
I do hope that Microsoft can establish a profitable sector in the market, because I really do appreciate the platform.
But, there is a flip side to this coin. Too many teachers' unions are focused on protecting those with seniority who have been burned out and have no business being in a classroom, much less drawing a salary to do so. Thanks to union protections, teachers that have ceased to function can draw a salary for months and months while an insane process moves slowly forward. Also, too many unions create and promote barriers to entry into the profession for those without education degrees, even though there is some evidence that a short period of training combined with on the job evaluation may be just as effective in creating good teachers.
Teachers with advanced degrees in education recieve additional salary, but there is no evidence that degrees make teachers more effective in the classroom. However, there is evidence that advanced degree in a specific field (especially in STEM fields) does positively impact classroom performance.
I agree that there is no evidence that the current test-based metrics are actually effective. But, there has to be some way to evaluate teachers that doesn't boil down to taking their word for it. 360 evaluations involving students, peers and parents seems like a good start.
Too many teachers' unions were interested in protecting the status quo and ensuring lifetime employement of their members and reinforcing the absolute value of an education degree, even as it diminished in real value and usefulness and became entangled in abstract theories unrelated to the core goal of any teacher which is to transmit knowledge to others.
It is truly laughable to me that a teacher certification is needed for a MS or PhD to teach a subject in high school. At some point, we need teachers that actually know the subjects they are teaching. For all the criticism of testing, it shocks me that to become a teacher, one has to pass a test that may have nothing to do with actually being able to teach and certianly nothing to do with the subject they are teaching.
Having dedicated decoders for the IPU is definitely on the right rrack, but a shared fetch is still means there is a bottleneck in getting those cores fed.Also, apparently, the changes hit the L1 performance, so they had to add some cache to make up for it. So, there is some room for improvement, and this does help, However, I just don't see it as the big step that AMD needs against Intel. Intel's dies are smaller, they are making better use of space, and this is a huge advantage. Intel has 10 core dies, and has room to go to 12. In the server space, this is a big gain in density.
Also, they have a lead in hyperthreading, which does seem to boost multithreaded performance enough in highly parallel server scenarios to hold up against the chip multithreading concept that Bulldozer supports.
What is strange is that AMD need to really get a vision of a unified platform. AMD could really have a great ultrabook and media PC platform, but against, they let Intel take a lead in this area.
Probably going to burn some karma here, but here goes. I'm fairly sure that the DEA has plenty of storage. I'd bet it's plenty more than 40TB too. Did anybody think that when the case review came up, they looked at and somebody said: "Yea, it's 5% of what we have stored electronically in terms of evidence." And then the lawyer tried to point out that it was taking a lot of resources for very little gain in the motion, but paraphrased incorrectly.
Why not read it is as: "We currently have about 40TB in electronic evidence for our active caseload, five precent is dedicated to this one case." Sure, it doesn't allow for bashing big government or current drug policy, but seems to make common sense, does it not?
Slashdot Mirror
Google used to. And they've finally realized that it was an ineffective way to identify talent that works for them in the long term. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/20/google_hiring_procedures/. I just interviewed with them, and they have dumped the brain teasers and puzzles completely. They are actually much more interested in what you like to do and the kind of person you are. Way overdue. Google did itself a huge disservice in letting people think you needed a PhD or to be "super smart" to work there.
And there's a huge confounder here. I'd argue that making a direct causal link between success of the competitors and the competition and problems itself is really difficult. People that are motivated and bright can do well, and some of them will like these contests. But you can be motivated by all sorts of programming, and you can't treat the fact that the US is not doing as well in the one area as a condemnation of our education system. In fact, it might be a sign that schools are starting to focus on a more diverse set of students and skillsets.
I will go one further. Some have noted that teams train for a long time for these competitions. I see no value in that beyond the commitment (which is significant) and I see a real risk in become over-specialized in a kind of programming and problem solving that has very little general application.
Put it this way, if you gave me a choice between a top contender in this contest who trained for six months to do well, and a student who spent six months in between classes trying to make and sell an Xbox Live simple 2D game, I'd pick the latter every time.
As for my comment, it was more to the point that it is not large enough to require parallel programming between machines and this is by design. If I remember correctly, these contests are limited to a single computer and a small team. Parallel algorithm development is a whole different animal. In that world, 10Mb is nothing, a graph with millions of nodes is not big.
Mainly, expectations management. They really liked the challenge of short term projects and solving these kinds of problems, but the day to day of long term development just burnt them out. Sometimes, raw skill isn't enough, and I have to say, they got some really bad advice on what programming careers for somebody with a Bachelor's degree looks like from professors that were out of touch. That was the real problem.
Yes, ironically, one of those "real world" skills that this may not test is writing and communication. Proofreading being paramount to the first, of course. So, your humor is on point.
Be nice if Slashdot had a "WTF!?" edit button. You get two minutes to fix your fails. After that, to the wolves with ye.
I looked at the input/output files for the 2011 and 2012 contests. The biggest files I found were on the order of 10Mb. That's not a huge dataset in my mind, not by a long shot. I'd bet that most, if not all of the submitted solutions would fail if given datasets on the order of gigabytes, or not run in any reasonable amount of time. Makes sense, they don't have to. But that's real world scale.
It's easy to dump on "professional" programmers, and yes, there's a lack of talent, but being good in these contests is no predictor of success in a programming career. Programming as a career has nothing to do with getting the computer to do what you want; it has everything to do with getting it to do what your customer wants. Your boss wants, what IT wants, and frankly, it really is about not doing what you can't maintain or do well enough and having the courage to say no. And, yes, it does mean being able to work in a team with people that have different skills or are less talented than you.
I've seen too many students who thrived on this kind of work, were encouraged by professors and others for their talents, only to watch them crash and burn in the realities of programming outside of school. And academics is no recourse for some either, as that is not quickly solving problems with known answers, that's asking questions, forming a new problem (harder than it sounds) and then hopefully answering it well.
I thinking of the world in which you don't want those problems to crop up in the first place, and when they do (and yes, they will), you want the fixes to work and work correctly, not just trade one bug for two down the road, then four.
Making those systems has nothing to do with quick or dirty. The reason they happen is too many programmers have to compromise in the face of unrealistic deadlines for fear of being replaced by new talent who writes code (too) fast, and makes headaches down the road even faster.
The people that really hold these contests and the kind of programming done for them as the peak of software development really cause many more problems than they solve in most organizations. Those that just seem them as special kind of programming skill (fun, challenging, but unique) do much better. And any school that overemphasizes this skillset versus a more diverse one is not the best school.
But, hey, I'm old and grumpy, so what do I know.
Sure, if you can be quick and clean, that's valuable. But it's throwaway code by nature. You get no points for making the code readable, well structured, interoperable, etc. And, sadly, new complex algorithm development is the kind of development very few people actually get to do.
There are all kinds of programmers and skillsets The problem with these contests is they give the impression that this the "highest form" of programming skill. In fact, there are many important skills these contests don't address at all, and there are many good programs at schools those that would have a hard time fielding a competitive team.
s/This/These/g. I is smart!
This programming contests have nothing to do with real world programming or the skills need for most CS fields. Certainly, these are fun algorithmic challenges, but the timed nature of these contests encourage quick and dirty solutions that have no place in the real world. Creating new algorithms and other kinds of CS research requires a lot of attention to performance, scalability and correctness that aren't tested by these contests.
Okay, maybe those High Performance Trading guys want crazy quick complex code that nobody can understand, but that's kind of the problem, is it not?
What I want is to be able to stick a box in my house and have access to that simple interface that DropBox, SkyDrive, etc. provide. But, we don't have the infrastructure that makes it affordable or practical. Sure, I could get a business account and set up a server, but everybody in my neighborhood did it, no more bandwidth.
I find it funny that projects like Google Fiber will make most of what Google and their cloud services provides vulnerable to host it your own software. Everything that is old will be new again.
I was hoping to provide some insights, but the article is just riddled with misunderstandings. I stopped reading after this line:
"Generally speaking, the API makes use of properties in the case where you supply a class or object; but the classes in the API typically donâ(TM)t make use of properties."
No, not at all. Properties are used pretty much everywhere in the API. Examples abound with get only properties (ahem Length?).
Methinks Mr. Cogswell is in way over his head. Language design is not an easy subject, and it requires more than a cursory glance for the perspective of everyday programming.
As others have noted here, C# does seem to be adopting more language features. And, having used the new async programming model, I have to say C# has taken a noticeable lead in useful features.
Nothing prevents Java from doing the same, but given the slow progress of implementing and adopting things like lambdas, I can't say the future of Java will look all that different than today. Which is too bad; there are new ideas that are worth the effort.
No prosecutor is going to give a witness immunity from any crime. Of course many are given immunity from prosecution or a deal for their role in the matter, but that doesn't cover crimes that aren't part of that matter.
Also, the defense has no such power, and would have an equally time convincing any one to testify if it meant that the prosecution could go fishing for any infraction to discredit a witness as well.
It's simple. The fifth aids in the prosecution of crimes by ensuring witnesses will never be endangered by prosecution for their testimony.
A killer who is accused of murdering multiple people including prostitutes is caught and put on trial. Key witnesses have also engaged in prostitution, but the prosecution (rightly so), is not interested in pursuing those crimes compared to these heinous murders.
No fifth amendment, the defense can try to get the witness to admit to committing a crime to discredit the witness. Convince a witness to testify in that environment. Difficult, no? So, without it, key evidence and facts are missing, and a guilty party may go free.
With the fifth amendment, any attempt by the defense can be immediately objected to. It removes whole avenues of irrelevant questioning by the defense. And it goes the other way. Defense witnesses are also free from the risk of prosecution based on their testimony.
This isn't TV, where somebody is being sweated by a lawyer and finally has to invoke their rights in a dramatic fashion. The reality is that those questions would be objected to and dismissed, and many a smart lawyer would not even try such lines of questioning, lest they raise the ire of the judge.
TL; DR? It's a key part of the judicial process, which is obvious with just a bit of thought.
I'd bet this was the standard cube farm, or worse, the open space "collaborative" environment where every conversation carries, making it impossible to focus without some headphones and some music. And nothing says "Hey, I'm approachable" like being hunched over a computer, heads bobbing to the beat.
You want to improve software productivity, start with the environment. Offices. With doors. That you can knock on, close and have a real conversation without distracting others.
Remember Pair Programming? For a while there, there were methodologies that demanded it for all code. Now, it's an afterthought or relic. Sure, most developers don't like it. I surely don't.
But, to be fair, the best development I ever did was working with someone else. It makes sense, being able to bounce ideas around, play off somebody else's strengths. I remember in college, me and a professor knocked out a workable xUnit-like test runner for C++ in a day. This was before cpptest, or course. That code was used for years in his class.
You want good code? Forget that open layout startup space. Get some offices, get some doors, and then get people off their chairs and knocking on them. Build trust by showing people that you value them.
That's a great plan for society. Leave knowledge to the elite; they are they only ones that can afford it. You don't learn anything useful in college, so why bother. Heck, high school is kind of pointless. Why not start a trade at sixteen, that's more money is your pocket. Why not fourteen? That's the ticket. Leave that higher education to those elite know-it-alls.
We don't need to value teachers, educators at all; the internet will fix that with some YouTube videos. After all, you don't understand that stuff, so how can it possibly be worth anything? Let's be honest, not everyone can be educated. You know deep down that you aren't smart Best not to try.
That's a world worth living in. Call it the New Dark Ages. College prices are a concern because they are pricing out people from becoming educated, from having choices. College is not the problem; the cost is. Cheaper loans, more grants and scholarships, more public support all need to be considered alongside cost controls. Sure, it's not for everyone, but it should be a choice for everyone. Everyone can benefit from a higher education, from learning. Smart has nothing to do with it.
An uneducated populous is ripe for exploitation. History (one of those "useless" subjects) teaches us this. Look to the source of this advice, the value of controlling knowledge and the media in this age. Why bother thinking for yourself when you can have somebody do it for you?
There is value in culture, in art, in science that goes beyond money. It is crazy that we are so focused on what it takes to survive these days, not thrive and grow. We don't have to embrace a gold-paved road to a new Dark Age. We can do better.
It's discrimination, plain and simple. I've a victim of it, many others have. The notion that what one shares with a doctor is private is enshrined in the Hippocratic Oath, no less.
"All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal."
The point of electronic health records is to actually improve the privacy of health information by enforcing auditing of all actions. Patients like being able to look at their record, and have their doctors share information with each other for their treatment with permission. Other than that, it's private and the idea that is protected by law, technology and culture is a good thing.
I'm glad Google Health died, given this. And I worry about the company as a whole when the founder makes statements like this, and their breakthrough hardware is a perfect tool for spying on people in public. It was bad enough that ad-supported technology is everywhere thanks to their success. Heck, remember when people just took your money and left you alone? I miss that.
And it's not a given that we will have the breakthroughs we need to create a supercomputer that can handle the simulations on a scale needed anytime soon. Basically, GPU acceleration gave a nice bump in super computing power, but the fundamentals of power consumption, memory hierarchy and interconnection still remain. See the link at the bottom for a compelling presentation of the challenges.
Building machine of this size is a worthwhile as it can address lots of interesting scientific problems. And, trying to simulate a brain can lead to more research on how our brains actually work and lead to new understanding of brain disorder.
As for sticking a "human" in a computer, well, I doubt that's the goal of the author. I know it is for some, but what's the point. As the slides above show, the human brain is at least a million times more power efficient that the best case for a supercomputer on the scale needed. No shortage of human brains (quite the opposite). Such a machine would help understand the brain in ways that we can't do now, not a way to live forever.
(https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B83UyWf1s-CdZnFoS2RiU2lJbEU/edit)
No. That's my lawn. Mine, I say.
I look at the sea of comments here and I note how many of you buy into the notion that only that which makes us money is worthwhile, that higher education is just a path to a job. Yes, how unless things like literature, art, philosophy are. How foolish for somebody to think they can make a good living teaching others. College should be for something useful, and teacher deserve less, for that can't do, teach, no?
Thankfully, a few have noted what the point of an education is to be able to think. Critically. You rally against the H1B and the race to the bottom, and then turn around and laugh at someone silly enough to pursue their passions. So what, those classes were useless anyway.
Yes, a population devoid of knowledge of great books, great art, great ideas is a useful one. It's easy to exploit and control. Perhaps you are happy to be a tiny gear in a massive machine. Go on and judge people that think our society has room for more than "practical" economic workhorses that are only temporary distracted by the latest gadget or self-help psychology as foolish.
If you do, realize that they are better off that you, in a way that you will never understand, because you have dismissed the knowledge that made us truly great. You may think you know it all, but you really don't know what you are missing.
Yep, I have a PhD. And it's not in literature. And do regret it at times, but what I truly regret is how devalued intellectual pursuits have become in this century.
I have been using Windows 8. Yes, as a power user I do miss the start menu and how it enabled discovery of programs and multitasking. But, the kernel is responsive and I like the simpler, less chrome look. Even Windows 7 feels less responsive and snappy to me now. And the ideas in Windows RT (the new runtime) make a lot of sense (highly asynchronous, access from managed and native environments). But, they wrapped it up in the weirdest way.
Why Microsoft just doesn't embrace a "desktop mode" and "metro mode" on a per user basis just baffles me. If you select desktop mode, you get the start menu, and to get to the metro screen, you have that option on that menu (or shift+win). Win key takes you back to desktop from any metro app. Metro mode, works like Windows 8 now. Shift+Win is desktop shortcut.
Ta-da, best of both worlds. And you buy some time to get the Windows RT runtime for desktop apps, or integrating metro into desktop mode.
Microsoft, this isn't hard at all. What's up?
Sigh. Scheme is the perfect platform for learning. You can start from the simplest of concepts to the most advanced in just one language. From simple math to reduction semantics.
Frankly, I learned Scheme as a undergrad and I was saddened when they moved to Java. I don't worry about learning a new language, because I was taught what the essence of programming is. Scheme exposes these core concepts better than any language I know.
Windows Phone 8 is actually a pretty compelling product. Not the best match for desktop or laptops, but it really is effective in the mobile environment. It does just what I need it to do, quickly. It doesn't want to make you fiddle with it, or use it over and over.
I do hope that Microsoft can establish a profitable sector in the market, because I really do appreciate the platform.
Basically, I was lucky. Introduction to programming and AP computing science on IBM PCjrs with Turbo Pascal. It was great start.
But, there is a flip side to this coin. Too many teachers' unions are focused on protecting those with seniority who have been burned out and have no business being in a classroom, much less drawing a salary to do so. Thanks to union protections, teachers that have ceased to function can draw a salary for months and months while an insane process moves slowly forward. Also, too many unions create and promote barriers to entry into the profession for those without education degrees, even though there is some evidence that a short period of training combined with on the job evaluation may be just as effective in creating good teachers.
Teachers with advanced degrees in education recieve additional salary, but there is no evidence that degrees make teachers more effective in the classroom. However, there is evidence that advanced degree in a specific field (especially in STEM fields) does positively impact classroom performance.
I agree that there is no evidence that the current test-based metrics are actually effective. But, there has to be some way to evaluate teachers that doesn't boil down to taking their word for it. 360 evaluations involving students, peers and parents seems like a good start.
Too many teachers' unions were interested in protecting the status quo and ensuring lifetime employement of their members and reinforcing the absolute value of an education degree, even as it diminished in real value and usefulness and became entangled in abstract theories unrelated to the core goal of any teacher which is to transmit knowledge to others.
It is truly laughable to me that a teacher certification is needed for a MS or PhD to teach a subject in high school. At some point, we need teachers that actually know the subjects they are teaching. For all the criticism of testing, it shocks me that to become a teacher, one has to pass a test that may have nothing to do with actually being able to teach and certianly nothing to do with the subject they are teaching.
Having dedicated decoders for the IPU is definitely on the right rrack, but a shared fetch is still means there is a bottleneck in getting those cores fed.Also, apparently, the changes hit the L1 performance, so they had to add some cache to make up for it. So, there is some room for improvement, and this does help, However, I just don't see it as the big step that AMD needs against Intel. Intel's dies are smaller, they are making better use of space, and this is a huge advantage. Intel has 10 core dies, and has room to go to 12. In the server space, this is a big gain in density.
Also, they have a lead in hyperthreading, which does seem to boost multithreaded performance enough in highly parallel server scenarios to hold up against the chip multithreading concept that Bulldozer supports.
What is strange is that AMD need to really get a vision of a unified platform. AMD could really have a great ultrabook and media PC platform, but against, they let Intel take a lead in this area.
Probably going to burn some karma here, but here goes. I'm fairly sure that the DEA has plenty of storage. I'd bet it's plenty more than 40TB too. Did anybody think that when the case review came up, they looked at and somebody said: "Yea, it's 5% of what we have stored electronically in terms of evidence." And then the lawyer tried to point out that it was taking a lot of resources for very little gain in the motion, but paraphrased incorrectly.
Why not read it is as: "We currently have about 40TB in electronic evidence for our active caseload, five precent is dedicated to this one case." Sure, it doesn't allow for bashing big government or current drug policy, but seems to make common sense, does it not?