Here lies the difference between the code-monkey and IT professional.
The latter delivers solutions, the former just wants a banana for the effort.
What fraction of software that supports businesses never sees the the outside of the firm they are specifically tailored to?
How many businesses won't say: "we don't care if you wrote all of it, or assembled from the blocks you found on the internet"? If it works and is low maintenance IT pro gets paid regardless.
Spending your waking life reinventing the wheel (over and over) is about as fun as evaluating a wheel that is being re-invented. Getting it invented once and for all frees up your time as well as mine for more productive and exciting activities, maybe even some learning and personal growth.
Imagine when the literacy started spreading and all the scribes would scream murder, as less and less people would be willing to exchange silver for their services. Even then, not every word was worth putting on paper...
Let me remind you that calligraphy and literature had some value
retained...
speaking of underground and radiation:
If you put on a plastic construction hard-hat and spend 20minutes in the basement, you're very likely to get a 100mrems reading off your plastic hat after.
The effect is due to interplay of static electricity (plastic hard-hat)
and gaseous radon, which is heavier than air, plentiful in soil and thus often accumulates in basements.
By the way, underground radon is the strongest source of natural radiation, unless you're determined to irradiate yourself by "unnatural" means.
Go on, make an experiment, before they ban the counters... or hardhats...
And btw, in some industries, such readings would be a sufficient reason to dispose of the hard-hat as radioactive waste.. Luckily the high reading dissipates naturally in half-hour or so..
As far as trying before buying is concerned, I'd much rather download full playable demos of ETQW or UT2004, that you can play forever without paying a dime. I still own both games though.
And no, 5 hour trial for the game isn't enough. If you haven't tried, there's no single-player in it, and the only way you can even launch a game is to join online server.
(otherwise you're stuck in tutorial).
I discover a previously-unknown deposit of gold/oil/uranium and start exploiting it?
Unless the corresponding consumption of this stuff goes up accordingly, you simply undercut the existing producers, your wealth goes up, theirs goes down.
I invent a more efficient solar panel that allows me to generate cheap energy from my previously-worthless land?
Ditto, the wealth flows from existing energy producers into your enterprise.
It is hardly plausible everybody will increase their electricity consumption the minute you invent your new panel.
I build a tractor that allows a farmer to increase the yield from his fields without hiring more employees?
The already cheap manual labor gets even cheaper to compete with the new tractor. Your wealth increases at the expense of farm-hands who lose jobs.
I learn something new and gain new skills?
Not sure how this is supposed to affect the economy. Unless you find a way to capitalize on something like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7s4E94-No
I create a piece of software?
Oh, that would certainly change the world, would it not?
and FPGAs remain expensive, because there really isn't a general market for them at this time Agreed. But look at it this way: there was time cell-phones were a rare new cool gadget. How many people actually wanted them before they became somewhat common? The point is -- who said there will never be such a market?
Because every new instance of hardware requires a new FPGA board.
Why is that?
Can't you reprogram the chip as you go? As for the board -- it has to be a general purpose one, you're right, but what's the problem with using it over and over again? What are the typical/best reprogram times?
As for getting FPGA board for myself -- I toy with the idea of stealing it...
well, feel free to call me dumb, but I'm still missing the point here. Are you saying "hardware is expensive that's why opencores.org designs are unseccessful"? wtf? To me there's a reason there're no general purpose FPGA boards for your PC on the consumer market and the reason is quite clear -- what for, if there're no designs that you can use with it? There's a reason FPGA chips are "so expensive" -- anything that's not a consumer-level stuff can afford to be expensive as long as gadget manufacturers are willing to pay.
What I don't understand is:
assuming I have a chance of laying my greedy hands on a couple of FPGA PC boards that [hypothetically] cost somewhere in between the NIC and video-card. In this situation - why sharing HW designs is any different from sharing software?
Oh, and don't be so tense, man! Chill out. I don't read./ for my day job, I read it for recreation.
As for me, I just want to see arena matches between gangs of these suckers. Robot wars indeed!
It's not between "gangs of these suckers" that you will see the "action", but rather gangs of these suckers slaughtering tons of civilians somewhere in the 3rd world that doesn have any. Wars are never about fair competition.
occam's razor is quite naturally integrated with statistics:
Assume you have a family of models with different number of descriptive parameters: n
Now building the posterior p(n| {observation}) and maximizing it with respect to n, you get Occam's Razor in action -- you actually HAVE to pick a model which both describes the available data (scarsity of it is irrelevant) as well as doesn't overfit it by introducing extra (unnecessary) parameters.
This certainly dis-glorifies philosophy of science since it makes a "principle" a mere technicality, but it's your choice to face the facts(using the statistics that you refer to) or continue speculations.
Check this out:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198 518897/
changing your analogy with a kid who sees other ride bicycles:
isn't dating like, being a non-smoker, watching others smoke? From this prospective your advice looks quite different.. "Learn how to waste your time more efficiently on something you don't really care about".
What you get out your dating experience anyway? Instant gratification? What is it?
the funny part is: Russia is one of the last countries that should get worried about global climate change, with their vast territory and general lack of climate-induced disasters...
The country that should get way more worried, whose climate already kinda sucks (with tornado belt and hurricanes from the gulf of Mexico) at the moment doesn't seem to care at all.
Well, I guess the moment of enlightment may come when insurance industry finally realises that in the race for the dirty buck it sometimes make sense to look a little further than one's wallet.
And the scientifically unfounded treaties aimed at protection of this planet's (unfortunately) shared resources may turn out more reasonable that the average SUV suburbanite would've thought.
I only hope that this wouldn't be a sad hindsight, with "I wish I wasn't so conceited, selfish and stupid" written all over the uninhabitable North America...
;)
I happen to have a quite clear view of the practical value of QED, but just cannot remember anybody who would feel completely satisfied with this theoretical contraption. Sure it does work all right on a limited number of exactly solvable cases (something like 4 or 5?), sure it enables us to make several precise predictions (mostly just properties of electron), but what else is it good for? You sound like a person perfectly content with perturbations and summation of divergenet series, not to say anything about loop integrals and cancellation of infinite integrals and the whole regularization mumbo-jumbo. Yes, I know it sortta "works" and we can get our cross-sections and what-not, but then, I think pre-historic astronomers were able to perform quite complex calculations using their tables with the assumption that Universe rotates around THIS planet...
My point is: There's been a lot of work done, time, money and brain-power spend. We have some results. Did it all significantly improve our understanding? I don't think so.
Well, how much of the "recent developments" in this area actually made it into: a) grad physics textbooks b) into the "active practitioners toolset"? Some "think tanks" up to this day spawn not just "possible models" but "families of models" and quite a few are so "open-ended" that there's just no practical way of testing them. They may remain strict and intellectually elegant, like chess, and bear no relation to reality whatsoever.
Not to mention that very few even come close to the beauty of classic (that is non-relativistic) quantum theory. In addition it seems that the approach to math involved is quite liberal, the habit that Dirac started with his delta, but that later was taken to some new heights...
that's a four-momentum, man.
(I did make it small p unlike capital P later on, didn't I?)
Ever heard about Lorentz vectors?
(E, px, py, pz) with "funny" (1, -1, -1, -1) metric (flat space diagonal) meaning when you multiply them, or square in our case, it expands to
E^2 - px^2 - py^2 - pz^2. The magnitude of four-vector is called "interval". Four-momenta of real massive particles have interval > 0 ("time-like"), photons have inteval=0 ("light-like"), events in time-space that cannot possibly be cause-effect related are separated by interval less then 0 ("space-like").
Special Relativity postulated that interval is the same in all possible coordinate systems(4D of course), and everything else is derived from it. That's all there is to Special Relativity.
Re:Another 50 years of HEP...
on
Happy 50th Cern!
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
it will never be over.
the more we learn about nature, the more opportunities for speculation open up. I may be wrong on that but it certainly seems that particle physics didn't really make any progress since quantum theory was accepted in.. what?.. early on in 20th century? If there's any "deeper understanding" gained since it certainly didn't make it into the wild yet...
surprise!
Yes it does: Coincidentally it's exactly ZERO!
=> p^2 = 0 => |P| = E
(HEP notation: c=1)
(in case you had an objection that E=mc^2 which strictly speaking is not applicable to photon as the famous formula denotes the "rest" energy, and the photon is never "at rest", as you might've guessed)
Slashdot Mirror
commercial accounts on a social network was a perfect contender for the Dumbest Idea Ever
Is that a joke?
Here lies the difference between the code-monkey and IT professional.
The latter delivers solutions, the former just wants a banana for the effort.
What fraction of software that supports businesses never sees the the outside of the firm they are specifically tailored to?
How many businesses won't say: "we don't care if you wrote all of it, or assembled from the blocks you found on the internet"? If it works and is low maintenance IT pro gets paid regardless.
Spending your waking life reinventing the wheel (over and over) is about as fun as evaluating a wheel that is being re-invented. Getting it invented once and for all frees up your time as well as mine for more productive and exciting activities, maybe even some learning and personal growth.
Imagine when the literacy started spreading and all the scribes would scream murder, as less and less people would be willing to exchange silver for their services. Even then, not every word was worth putting on paper...
Let me remind you that calligraphy and literature had some value retained...
You forgot the government 5-year plan to create 500,000 Tetris clones.
Which will be achieved and over-achieved in 4 years 8 months with 513,000!!!!
speaking of underground and radiation:
If you put on a plastic construction hard-hat and spend 20minutes in the basement, you're very likely to get a 100mrems reading off your plastic hat after.
The effect is due to interplay of static electricity (plastic hard-hat)
and gaseous radon, which is heavier than air, plentiful in soil and thus often accumulates in basements. By the way, underground radon is the strongest source of natural radiation, unless you're determined to irradiate yourself by "unnatural" means.
Go on, make an experiment, before they ban the counters... or hardhats...
And btw, in some industries, such readings would be a sufficient reason to dispose of the hard-hat as radioactive waste.. Luckily the high reading dissipates naturally in half-hour or so..
s2 model is seriously crippled.
As far as trying before buying is concerned, I'd much rather download full playable demos of ETQW or UT2004, that you can play forever without paying a dime. I still own both games though.
And no, 5 hour trial for the game isn't enough. If you haven't tried, there's no single-player in it, and the only way you can even launch a game is to join online server. (otherwise you're stuck in tutorial).
I discover a previously-unknown deposit of gold/oil/uranium and start exploiting it?
Unless the corresponding consumption of this stuff goes up accordingly, you simply undercut the existing producers, your wealth goes up, theirs goes down.
I invent a more efficient solar panel that allows me to generate cheap energy from my previously-worthless land?
Ditto, the wealth flows from existing energy producers into your enterprise. It is hardly plausible everybody will increase their electricity consumption the minute you invent your new panel.
I build a tractor that allows a farmer to increase the yield from his fields without hiring more employees?
The already cheap manual labor gets even cheaper to compete with the new tractor. Your wealth increases at the expense of farm-hands who lose jobs.
I learn something new and gain new skills?
Not sure how this is supposed to affect the economy. Unless you find a way to capitalize on something like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1q7s4E94-No
I create a piece of software?
Oh, that would certainly change the world, would it not?
Now me with my 9 buddies can totally obliterate IronForge!!!! Get it?
and FPGAs remain expensive, because there really isn't a general market for them at this time
Agreed. But look at it this way: there was time cell-phones were a rare new cool gadget. How many people actually wanted them before they became somewhat common? The point is -- who said there will never be such a market?
Because every new instance of hardware requires a new FPGA board.
Why is that? Can't you reprogram the chip as you go? As for the board -- it has to be a general purpose one, you're right, but what's the problem with using it over and over again? What are the typical/best reprogram times?
As for getting FPGA board for myself -- I toy with the idea of stealing it...
Oh, I agree!
The process of making babies is way more fun than suffering the concequences!
well, feel free to call me dumb, but I'm still missing the point here. Are you saying "hardware is expensive that's why opencores.org designs are unseccessful"? wtf? To me there's a reason there're no general purpose FPGA boards for your PC on the consumer market and the reason is quite clear -- what for, if there're no designs that you can use with it? There's a reason FPGA chips are "so expensive" -- anything that's not a consumer-level stuff can afford to be expensive as long as gadget manufacturers are willing to pay. What I don't understand is: assuming I have a chance of laying my greedy hands on a couple of FPGA PC boards that [hypothetically] cost somewhere in between the NIC and video-card. In this situation - why sharing HW designs is any different from sharing software?
./ for my day job, I read it for recreation.
Oh, and don't be so tense, man! Chill out. I don't read
As for me, I just want to see arena matches between gangs of these suckers. Robot wars indeed!
It's not between "gangs of these suckers" that you will see the "action", but rather gangs of these suckers slaughtering tons of civilians somewhere in the 3rd world that doesn have any. Wars are never about fair competition.
hm..
If this IS THE reason, it's not entirely true (unless you've NO CLUE) what a piece of "programmable logic" is.
As for the superior reading skills you [obviously] praise so high, it doesn't hurt learning to actualy think about the stuff you're reading.
peace
There is a reason why none of the open source hardwares at opencores.org have never been as successful as open-source software
And the reason is...?
how much do you "routinely" spend on gas to drive around those 3-4 stores?
occam's razor is quite naturally integrated with statistics:8 518897/
Assume you have a family of models with different number of descriptive parameters: n
Now building the posterior p(n| {observation}) and maximizing it with respect to n, you get Occam's Razor in action -- you actually HAVE to pick a model which both describes the available data (scarsity of it is irrelevant) as well as doesn't overfit it by introducing extra (unnecessary) parameters.
This certainly dis-glorifies philosophy of science since it makes a "principle" a mere technicality, but it's your choice to face the facts(using the statistics that you refer to) or continue speculations.
Check this out: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/019
Yes, this makes truly proving anything in the physical world basically impossible.
There's a small contraption to help humanity deal with the situation, it's called Occam's Razor
so...
what "shops" are these (so that I can avoid 'em)?
what a waste of time and effort!
changing your analogy with a kid who sees other ride bicycles:
isn't dating like, being a non-smoker, watching others smoke? From this prospective your advice looks quite different.. "Learn how to waste your time more efficiently on something you don't really care about".
What you get out your dating experience anyway? Instant gratification? What is it?
the funny part is: Russia is one of the last countries that should get worried about global climate change, with their vast territory and general lack of climate-induced disasters... The country that should get way more worried, whose climate already kinda sucks (with tornado belt and hurricanes from the gulf of Mexico) at the moment doesn't seem to care at all.
Well, I guess the moment of enlightment may come when insurance industry finally realises that in the race for the dirty buck it sometimes make sense to look a little further than one's wallet. And the scientifically unfounded treaties aimed at protection of this planet's (unfortunately) shared resources may turn out more reasonable that the average SUV suburbanite would've thought.
I only hope that this wouldn't be a sad hindsight, with "I wish I wasn't so conceited, selfish and stupid" written all over the uninhabitable North America...
;)
I happen to have a quite clear view of the practical value of QED, but just cannot remember anybody who would feel completely satisfied with this theoretical contraption. Sure it does work all right on a limited number of exactly solvable cases (something like 4 or 5?), sure it enables us to make several precise predictions (mostly just properties of electron), but what else is it good for? You sound like a person perfectly content with perturbations and summation of divergenet series, not to say anything about loop integrals and cancellation of infinite integrals and the whole regularization mumbo-jumbo. Yes, I know it sortta "works" and we can get our cross-sections and what-not, but then, I think pre-historic astronomers were able to perform quite complex calculations using their tables with the assumption that Universe rotates around THIS planet...
My point is: There's been a lot of work done, time, money and brain-power spend. We have some results. Did it all significantly improve our understanding? I don't think so.
Well, how much of the "recent developments" in this area actually made it into: a) grad physics textbooks b) into the "active practitioners toolset"? Some "think tanks" up to this day spawn not just "possible models" but "families of models" and quite a few are so "open-ended" that there's just no practical way of testing them. They may remain strict and intellectually elegant, like chess, and bear no relation to reality whatsoever. Not to mention that very few even come close to the beauty of classic (that is non-relativistic) quantum theory. In addition it seems that the approach to math involved is quite liberal, the habit that Dirac started with his delta, but that later was taken to some new heights...
that's a four-momentum, man.
(I did make it small p unlike capital P later on, didn't I?)
Ever heard about Lorentz vectors? (E, px, py, pz) with "funny" (1, -1, -1, -1) metric (flat space diagonal) meaning when you multiply them, or square in our case, it expands to E^2 - px^2 - py^2 - pz^2. The magnitude of four-vector is called "interval". Four-momenta of real massive particles have interval > 0 ("time-like"), photons have inteval=0 ("light-like"), events in time-space that cannot possibly be cause-effect related are separated by interval less then 0 ("space-like").
Special Relativity postulated that interval is the same in all possible coordinate systems(4D of course), and everything else is derived from it. That's all there is to Special Relativity.
it will never be over. .. what? .. early on in 20th century? If there's any "deeper understanding" gained since it certainly didn't make it into the wild yet...
the more we learn about nature, the more opportunities for speculation open up. I may be wrong on that but it certainly seems that particle physics didn't really make any progress since quantum theory was accepted in
Yes it does: Coincidentally it's exactly ZERO!
(HEP notation: c=1)
(in case you had an objection that E=mc^2 which strictly speaking is not applicable to photon as the famous formula denotes the "rest" energy, and the photon is never "at rest", as you might've guessed)