Nice links. Interesting how bonch presumes Google had to look around for something to measure themselves against of type "gadget". In truth, they were striving to be the opposite of Facebook and Microsoft, on the presumption that might work out OK in the long run:
A key goal of Android was to provide an open application platform, using application sandboxes to create a much more secure environment that doesn(slashcode fuckup)t rely on a central authority to verify that applications do what they claim.
Here's the deep analysis of the Blackberry internals, reading between the lines with psychic divination:
To achieve this, it uses Linux process isolation and user IDs to prevent each application from being able to access the system or other application in ways that are not controlled and secure. This is very different from iOS(slashcode fuckup)s original design constraints, which remember didn(slashcode fuckup)t allow any third party applications at all.
How to spot a Blackberry competitor? It's designed around having multiple windows on the screen at the same time:
Because Android is designed around having multiple windows on the screen, to have the drawing inside each window be hardware accelerated means requiring that the GPU and driver support multiple active GL contexts in different processes running at the same time. The hardware at that time just didn(slashcode fuckup)t support this, even ignoring the additional memory needed for it that was not available. Even today we are in the early stages of this -- most mobile GPUs still have fairly expensive GL context switching.
It's probably true that Apple has a near monopoly on the early adopter spendoids. I don't think there are a lot more people out there lining up to be so loose with their cash. They are already at the apogee of milking their traditional 10% and these people will soon take their short attention spans to whatever Apple invents next. With Apple, value is rarely time invariant: one part useful, two parts sooner and sexier. Mature market segments tend to deflate the later terms.
Six months is too soon, but I'll be interested to check back on how this pans out a year from now.
Too many people fear a ticket for talking, and they compensate by texting from their lap (or below the level of window).
Arab culture has a solution for that. A few severed hands hanging from streetlights in the mode of the Appian autobahn and plenty of attentive drivers with the left-handed 12 o'clock grip would reset priorities pronto. For example: compensating to the considered realization that this type of multitasking exposes others to grievous bodily harm by being less of a shithead instead of doubling down.
The argument from shithead never impresses me. "Oh, but the shitheads!" Checkmate.
After we mandate turning cars into wireless network nodes for all drivers (because there are too many shitheads out there to ask politely) it will become possible for the car to detect human real-time response violations, pull you over to the side of the road using the Google boot (which automatically adds a minus to your plus page), while issuing the cell-phone self-destruct code.
Shitheads retaliate by stuffing rags into their gasoline filler tubes and clicking their Zippos.
Fine, we've been looking for a good reason to ban gasoline.
Regarding TMI, there's a huge difference from what the official report concluded in the immediate aftermath to what they actually found when they finally cut the reactor core into pieces for shipment to Idaho--at a cost of $300 million of which I imagine a fair chunk was spent on rad-hard remote-controlled cutting robots with state-of-the-art dust suppression systems carving slow precise grooves at the bottom of the reaction vessel just a few inches away from the outside diameter. I vaguely recall it was less than a day away from dripping molten steel off the snub end of its radioactive nut sack had they not finally turned the right valve. The official story, at first, was that none of the internal fuel assemblies had melted and sagged to the bottom.
Is the island big enough to build a supercolider with meter thick walls that run 100m deep? Make lemonade from lemons. We could be crowing about the Higgs instead of those snotty Europeans.
Also, the monumental confusion in the control room about the correct mitigation measure matches anything that went on in Japan. The situation was not helped by politicians showing up to look important and tying up all the phone lines. Our phone systems are better now.
We also matched the Russians in the high-stakes game of "rules are for sissies".
The closure of these valves was a violation of a key NRC rule, according to which the reactor must be shut down if all auxiliary feed pumps are closed for maintenance.
Rather than trying to meet a five year plan, the TMI site in America was rushed to completion to satisfy executive bonuses concerning the delivery of operating revenue to impatient banks and investors, following capitalist dictates that have since matured into a healthy, insolent puberty that's too big to spank:
In a democracy, the public good is a hefty, highly-visible surface containment structure. Inside that giant structure, the profit motive wanders around with no pants on and you only find out when they really fuck up. Bankers and physicists, you'd think they were related somehow.
The less highly visible sub-soil containment structure was not so impressive. It largely amounted to "publish the report damn quick before we learn anything we'd rather publish under dimmer lights when the mayfly media are feeding on a different frenzy". It worked a charm. The post-autopsy report was largely ignored.
In a subsequent incident high over head, the White Physicist cracked the quench code in the sodium hypocritite blame suppression system, but our avarice to Feynman ratio has since gone from poor to divide by zero.
Nah. It's only better because they get lots more practice.
About the only time your average geek is not processing language at one level or another is when fingering the skin flute of visual recall, which opens the Temple Grandin floodgates to every shapely derriere and saucy come-hither freshly impressed upon the orbs of desire (or permanently engraved in the limbic arousal hall-of-fame since the eruption of first pubertal mole hair). Perhaps there are a few virtuosos of visual recall out there whose language system has languished and atrophied. For most of us, however, I suspect our downtime doesn't much impact our verbal SLA. Any day I sit in front the computer, I probably process a quarter million words, but then I put more comments in my code than most people, even if I have to read the comments 100 times each in passing before my code actually works.
There's two halves to male performance: aptitude and attitude. Since men don't have much of a chip in the reproductive game until we accomplish something, we tend to stick with the dull stuff through thick and thin.
Sure, attitude is more amenable to social modification, but I don't think this comes for free. I think society would have to consistently incent women to behave more like men, not just jigger some baseline attitudes about what men and women are good for. Now it's starting to look like an active intervention rather than a sober rebalancing, and the fairness police have a lot more explaining to do. I'm a fan of fairness in the abstract, not so much of outcome based fairness, which smacks of utopian socialism, with possibly an extremely bitter aftertaste after the sugar wears off.
If I make a considered personal opinion that I'm crossing high-fructose corn sugar and most soy derivatives off my menu for now and forever, because the superficial culinary joy is outweighed by the metabolic tax, and because I dislike mega-corporation agriculture, and because I *really* dislike mega-corporation agriculture as pwned by Monsanto under their regulatory capture of having the FDA "generally recognize as safe" a shot-gun genetic modification technology (which scatters the injected gene throughout the chromosomes) then to enter my house, as a principle of courtesy and respect, the visitor should scrape this particular dog shit off their shoes before stepping onto my porch.
Until advertising incorporates the "I have decided" list of things I personally never wish to hear from again, I'm not unlocking the front gate, if only to protect my porch, even if I don't open the door after they ring the bell.
As a consumer, I'm never allowed to set a fixed policy. In their mind I'm permanently up for suasion and drift. They understand decision fatigue and wield it against me.
Another decision I've made is to never purchase a condiment which contains 40% of my sodium RDA in a single tablespoon. Does the cash register access my file to help me enforce this firm personal decision when I pass the till. Not bloodly likely. I'm surrounding by B2B technology of the highest order, yet I have to personally flip over every stupid bottle and read it myself.
At this point I'm guessing that the license plate still garbed in the pristine shrink-wrap Steve Jobs couldn't bear to tear into has come up for sale on eBay.
of a week-old announcement
So it was boring then and it's still boring now, but finally we have geek quorum.
from Wladimir Palant
Oh oh, even worse, its about some Twitter celebrity I've never heard of.
Three strikes, you're out.
Since I missed it myself the first time, I'll add my two percents.
I grew up in the era of Coke vs Pepsi. The debate should have been about high fructose corn syrup vs metabolic syndrome. You hear from the man standing under the elephant, but it's never about the diabetic ankles.
One of missing gems from Five Equations That Changed the World:
information + greed + sex appeal = toxic sludge
The dynamic here is that whatever standard one sets for acceptable advertising conduct, the advertisers are incented to differentiate themselves by crowding the perimeter of bad taste. The bad behaviour doesn't end until the acceptance criteria is reduced to the null set of "don't call us, we'll call you". There's plenty of people out there who enjoy the mind rot, the same way many people are into body rot. Advertising is best applied to these people.
The spectacular increase in metabolic syndrome in the western world over the last thirty years can't possibly be genetics. It could perhaps be caused by people parking the salty and sugary chip truck on their front lawn thinking they'll not really notice its presence there.
If you can't do, report: you're smart enough to s/loses/dives but not smart enough to s/dives/forestalls.
Now the reader who ordinarily fails to distinguish "dives" from "loses" as processed through the filter of law-of-the-jungle public-company quarterly reporting intervals will fail to notice the giant Bill Gates reality-distortion-apparatus strapped to face.
As for FB, my bet is still that it goes the way of MySpace before too long.
Has that school board guy who got 10 out of 60 on his grade ten level math test become a Slashdot moderator? That statement might amount to insightful from the perspective of its author, but not so much from its readership.
MySpace when T.U. when FB became the world's largest refugee camp. When FB goes T.U. what replaces FB as the bright and shiny refugee camp of monumental social girth?
Let's play "one of these things is not the same":
A) winner take all market dynamics B) the pet rock market crash of January 1976
A quick peak at the American age pyramid suggests that each teenage year represents about 2% of the American population, or about 6 million students at each teenage grade level.
If 1% play the game of zero-knowledge monkeys, you'll average about one student every 500 years achieving an unmotivated zero.
Far easier to achieve a zero if you have some knowledge, but installed the battery in reverse, or if you have a lot of knowledge and installed the battery in perverse.
The example grade 10 test I viewed was not exclusively multiple choice.
It's not that what he points out is not a factor, so much that he ignores the rest of the story, which is that the "generative spirit" continually finds ways to break down the walls, create alternatives, and generally keep innovating despite [] the controls the gardeners put in place.
Sure, take all that talent and energy for granted, it's not like us geeks know the difference. We're just a bunch of shit-bags glad to lap up dandruff flakes of appreciation from 6.9 billion free-riders.
He equally ignores the fact that the vast majority of users of open technologies never did, or ever would have, engaged in any truly generative behavior. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Did you notice how the Catholic church squeaked in just under 400 years in fessing up a mea culpa in the Galileo affair? Another view of the story is that technologies are quickly subsumed into existing social institutions of subjugation, except for the free-rider escape hatch (see above).
Zittrain's giant heap of manure is that generativity is an essential sphincter relaxant in the natural course of human social institutions: the bigger the hat, the tighter the sphincter. Generativity is to human freedom as vitamins are to Krebs cycle. But this vitamin theory makes your head hurt, and you have better things to do. Angry Birds wait for no man.
For no other purpose than to add to the obnoxious rumble of discontent: Me too!
And I'll add, Ubuntu did a terrible job of communication around this change of direction. I couldn't have cared less which side of the window the close box is located on, but the way they handled the change should have set my teeth on edge much sooner than it did.
Yeah, back when Slashdot ran at 2400 bps, the comment limit was shorter than Twitter. But not to worry, like the Witnesses, the "great crowd" with seven-digit UIDs are relegated to a paradise on earth.
I have to say in 1981 making those decisions I felt like I was providing enough freedom for ten years, that is the move from 64K to 640K felt like something that would last a great deal of time.
The complaints as Gates recalls began in five years. He was off by a factor of two. I remember 1981 clear as day. There was hardly a baseline by which to judge the trajectory of the home computer. A monochrome 80 column display with mixed case was state of the art. By the end of 1982, the PC was selling a decimal order of magnitude faster than IBM projected, which put a whole different spin on enough. Volume drove down cost, and lower cost made eyes bigger sooner than almost anyone guessed.
I've read a lot from Gates over the years. Arrogant in most regards, but rarely stupid. Gates might have had the sentiment that a 0.33 MIPS processor didn't need 16MB of system memory, and figured that the memory limit would be addressed in a less anemic platform in the fullness of time. No-one in 1981 thought that 8088 byte code would still reign supreme thirty years later, any more than COBOL programmers in the 1960s worried about Y2K.
I don't really see a problem here. We have more than enough storage for the amount of analysis we're able to do. It's a short term nuisance that we have to invest some resources in being a little more selective in what we save, until storage or analysis catches up again.
There are some applications of genetics where the error component is the signal you're looking for. These methods are less forgiving of lossy synopsis. There might be room for some improvements to storage and compression algorithms in this space.
Stores have figured out how to dump the unprofitable customers (long live data mining). Now they've figured out how to dump the skittish investors. You weren't wanted in the first place. Actually, the game was played this way all along.
Reason is a short leash. The receiving side will take blind faith any time they can get it.
I've done all of the above popular/unpopular, except for lauding Visual Studio. I lived through the Commander Sonak incident in its early support for C++ templates. I'm not stepping into that beam ever goddamn ever again. It might at this point be positively stupendous, but I couldn't give an elephant's asshole. Don't mistake eternal bitterness for groupthink.
From time to time I try to burn off some karma with little success. I guess I try too hard. It's simple: if you're going to post against the grain, you have to do some work. You can't just post "Well I think Microsoft rocks!" and not get voted off the island. Try handing out "God sucks!" pamphlets in front of a peace-loving Baptist church on any given Sunday. Any worthwhile community nurses its fragile bonds, even if some tolerate exceptionally harsh internal criticism if voiced in the proper manner.
Moderation systems tend to be imperfect because humans are imperfect. If there's no objective standard to optimize towards, all that's left is popularity, no matter how cleverly you echo diffract.
On the other point--which made LOL--it is pretty stupid how quickly the early posts attract karma points. It would be a good idea if moderation points awarded in the first few hours on a fresh topic wore off and expired. If the comment was that great, it will be repeat moderated against the full complement of early opinion. You can't suppress moderation at the outset or it would turn into an instant free for all, but the early mods could be made provisional, and that would certainly help.
Actually, we do know it's not random, within a very small margin of dithering. Given any chosen universal computer (one with an extremely small definition is best), if a sequence can be printed by a program whose length is less than the sequence, the sequence is not random.
There is a small dependence on which universal machine you pick at the outset, but any two universal machines will never disagree on the length of the shortest program required by more than the shortest program by which one machine simulates the other.
print nine nine times print nine ninety times
If the first case is dubious, the second isn't.
Sussman's comment about perfect encryption cracks me up: as if what the world needs most is a really high quality one time pad.
Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.
As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seeing 35MB/s copying over the LAN with rsync/ssh. A test involving recursive scp starting following symlinks recursively on a 20GB file set, which put the gears to deduplication. It ran great. I finally killed it at a duplication level of 7.8. Doubt dedup will do much for me in production on my little LAN.
My biggest worry is that you really need ECC to protect the long-duration content in the ARC cache, not to mention critical ZFS memory structures themselves. On the Intel side, for ECC you're looking at an X3400 chipset, or an expensive Xeon chip. Apparently there are somewhat cheaper solutions on the AMD side. For the ZIL cache, people recommend mirrored SLC.
For a while we enjoyed 60% annual drive capacity growth rate, but this is projected to fall to 20% annual growth as we head toward bit patterned media. I wouldn't assume vastly greater capacities in the near term.
It's a little unclear how to translate this for a home-use ZFS box. Error rate is usage dependent and seems to depend on the quality of the mainboard memory access path.
A feature that might help ZFS outside of the enterprise is an ARC cache scrubber using the ZFS checksum data.
I'm still figuring this stuff out, but my impression so far is that ZFS makes the most sense where data preservation must coexist with high availability and there are fall-back measures in place on the preservation front.
Well, the desktop in general, Windows included, is rapidly becoming inconsequential other than for business use.
Having a job is rapidly becoming inconsequential other than providing food and shelter. Some of us have not yet moved into the palace of Versailles, where the only consequence was looking good or hosting an A-list soiree.
And even when I'm not working, my life is a hell of a lot less compartmentalized that this sentiment presumes.
As a result of all this user interface churn, I now have two more or less identical systems behind my desk so I can use whichever screws over my use-case-of-the-day less than the other, which will be some pair selected from among LMDE, Fedora, and Ubuntu before/after ascendance of the Sun King. One is presently Ubuntu LTS, but I've moved its server functions elsewhere to accommodate the tablet UI avoidance slalom. My regular desktop is 10.10 for as along as that remains viable.
I'm too lazy to look it up but the figure I remember seeing is that 25% of the world's hard drive manufacturing capacity has been impacted by the floods so the markup shouldn't be anything like 150%.
You do know that supply and demand is diagrammed with curves don't you? And since we live in a complex world where anything you make has a thousand inputs, the concept of leverage applies here: the other million dollars you spend on your server farm isn't worth much minus all the hard drives. Some people are willing to pay a big premium not to be left out in the cold when so much depends upon a red slider. And retail on the whole is in dire thrall to willingness-to-pay, which by most accounts of capitalism is how it should be.
Fungibility comes into play, but billion dollar facilities don't ramp up and down in the span of a retail hissy fit.
It would have taken you twice as long to figure this out as to spew your complaint, so I understand the latency of comprehension.
I like this first of these (it's low key but interesting about when we shouldn't put a price on things), can't vouch for the second one:
Dell's defence is that at some point in time less expensive video cards with crappy RAMDACs blighted consumers and they will find plenty of unemployed former Matrox executives to testify on their behalf.
Seriously, I think this is a no-brainer for a truth in advertising slap on the wrist, but if we go down this path, where do we find enough cells to house the audiophile industry? We'll be building tent farms after rounding up just the low-oxygen HDMI crowd plying low-oxygen consumers.
Sure, any mature person basic literacy skills and an orderly life not overly afflicted with unique circumstance (the strange prevalence of rare illness in the long tail of evolutionary ferment). Other small advantages: ability to cope with independence, knowing what you want, a realistic model of your strengths/weaknesses, social hostility running from inetd rather than a daemon service, financial means to choose the right institution and setting, a learning style that suits teaching to test, and stalwart cynicism towards institutional bullshit.
How the piece of paper gets used in greater society is a whole 'nother sphere of dysfunction.
As you say, the top quintile can just show up with a tidy CV and good self-presentation and talk themselves into a job. A quarter of what remains can navigate success on a track record of work ethic and contribution. A remaining third lands employment on the basis of insecurity: willingness to be underpaid and overworked and never call in sick. Half of what remains are willing to battle with physical hardship: hard construction, working up in Fort McMurry. The remaining quintile is the feeder tranche for the growth industry of the for-profit American prison system. Society has no idea how to productively use these people, so we decided to monetize (tough on crime sells to all levels: the bottom of the totem pole is always keen on a new subbasement of even greater pillory).
I've listened to OCW lectures across a number of fields, most recently Paul Bloom's introductory psychology class at Princeton (he's great, but I knew 90% of his material already--the world of TED talkable ideas is highly incestuous). A fairly decent lecture on game theory spent half an hour working some basic algebra after laying out the payoff matrix topology. When you are younger, rolling up your sleeves to work some examples in gory detail is a great learning experience, it anchors all the blather to the real world. Insight is hollow if you don't know how to do the work. As you get older, you're far happier to declare "and the rest is algebra" and move on to the next subject; you've gotten over the notion that you can be good at everything in detail simultaneously (for CS people "and the rest is syntax" so long as you don't have to write Python, and R, and C++ and VHDL all in the same week).
That youthful feeling of life as an all-you-can-eat intellectual buffet of mastery over detail is quickly cured by one course in organic chemistry, or less swiftly by a four year program in economics.
Risk management classes are what those hypothetical 20,000 people require.
In a world with no first movers, we would still be banging rocks together. As for personal data preservation (one of the least fun activities ever invented) how many people living in the Cascadia subduction zone have gallons of fresh water per person stored in a secure cabinet, replenished annually? People forget to secure their own data after upload to the cloud because they are too busy following guidelines such as this: Be prepared, not scared.
Check for home hazards: Is the house bolted to its foundations? Are the walls braced? Chimneys weak? Are roof tiles loose? Make necessary repairs now!
It kills me this meme that blame-free living is a trivial thing that comfortably fits between the cracks of everyday life.
The way I would like the world to work is that everyone subscribes to a personal data cloud provider (the billing could be rolled into your internet bill, the same way in some places you can choose your long distance provider, yet have your line provider intermediate the billing). All of your posts and activities on any online service would be consolidated here, regardless of whichever media company serves up the access layer to the maddening crowd.
The possibility of this happening given the norms of human behaviour is so remote I'm embarrassed to even mention it.
The point is that AMD went to great lengths in designing a new architecture and in advertising it as the Next Big Thing yet there is no benefit anywhere to be seen
And never before has the Next Big Thing entered the world with a whimper rather than a bang?
What was your opinion on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X back in the day? Did you bitch slap Motorola for wasting your time? Not the Next Big Thing after all?
My perspective is that this architecture is exposing weakness in AMD's process technology, and that it was designed on the premise that their process technology would be much further ahead. One of AMD's goals behind the scenes is to come up with a process technology equally well suited for the CPU and the GPU. The main problem here is that AMD is not a strong enough company to survive continued weakness. Obviously they had different ideas about where this would be at this point in time or it would not have been designed this way in the first place (or survived the massive pre-silicon performance simulation).
Here's why I sometimes what to punch the "What have you done for me lately?" crowd flat on the nose:
Performance improvements aimed at improving scalability started heavily with [Postgres] version 8.1, and running simple benchmarks version 8.4 has been shown to be more than 10 times faster on read only workloads and at least 7.5 times faster on both read and write workloads compared with version 8.0.
ACID first, performance second. Unless an early version is soundly trounced by MySQL in a page view benchmark, resulting in a giant lemming exodus.
The fixation on surface metrics also worked wonders in the race to the bottom at your local grocery store. "Organic" is actually just a synonym for "what used to be the default back in 1970 until we optimized out all the nutrition, nickle by nickle".
Slashdot Mirror
Nice links. Interesting how bonch presumes Google had to look around for something to measure themselves against of type "gadget". In truth, they were striving to be the opposite of Facebook and Microsoft, on the presumption that might work out OK in the long run:
Here's the deep analysis of the Blackberry internals, reading between the lines with psychic divination:
How to spot a Blackberry competitor? It's designed around having multiple windows on the screen at the same time:
It's probably true that Apple has a near monopoly on the early adopter spendoids. I don't think there are a lot more people out there lining up to be so loose with their cash. They are already at the apogee of milking their traditional 10% and these people will soon take their short attention spans to whatever Apple invents next. With Apple, value is rarely time invariant: one part useful, two parts sooner and sexier. Mature market segments tend to deflate the later terms.
Six months is too soon, but I'll be interested to check back on how this pans out a year from now.
Arab culture has a solution for that. A few severed hands hanging from streetlights in the mode of the Appian autobahn and plenty of attentive drivers with the left-handed 12 o'clock grip would reset priorities pronto. For example: compensating to the considered realization that this type of multitasking exposes others to grievous bodily harm by being less of a shithead instead of doubling down.
The argument from shithead never impresses me. "Oh, but the shitheads!" Checkmate.
After we mandate turning cars into wireless network nodes for all drivers (because there are too many shitheads out there to ask politely) it will become possible for the car to detect human real-time response violations, pull you over to the side of the road using the Google boot (which automatically adds a minus to your plus page), while issuing the cell-phone self-destruct code.
Shitheads retaliate by stuffing rags into their gasoline filler tubes and clicking their Zippos.
Fine, we've been looking for a good reason to ban gasoline.
Regarding TMI, there's a huge difference from what the official report concluded in the immediate aftermath to what they actually found when they finally cut the reactor core into pieces for shipment to Idaho--at a cost of $300 million of which I imagine a fair chunk was spent on rad-hard remote-controlled cutting robots with state-of-the-art dust suppression systems carving slow precise grooves at the bottom of the reaction vessel just a few inches away from the outside diameter. I vaguely recall it was less than a day away from dripping molten steel off the snub end of its radioactive nut sack had they not finally turned the right valve. The official story, at first, was that none of the internal fuel assemblies had melted and sagged to the bottom.
Is the island big enough to build a supercolider with meter thick walls that run 100m deep? Make lemonade from lemons. We could be crowing about the Higgs instead of those snotty Europeans.
Also, the monumental confusion in the control room about the correct mitigation measure matches anything that went on in Japan. The situation was not helped by politicians showing up to look important and tying up all the phone lines. Our phone systems are better now.
We also matched the Russians in the high-stakes game of "rules are for sissies".
Rather than trying to meet a five year plan, the TMI site in America was rushed to completion to satisfy executive bonuses concerning the delivery of operating revenue to impatient banks and investors, following capitalist dictates that have since matured into a healthy, insolent puberty that's too big to spank:
Trillion-Dollar Jet Has Thirteen Expensive New Flaws
In a democracy, the public good is a hefty, highly-visible surface containment structure. Inside that giant structure, the profit motive wanders around with no pants on and you only find out when they really fuck up. Bankers and physicists, you'd think they were related somehow.
The less highly visible sub-soil containment structure was not so impressive. It largely amounted to "publish the report damn quick before we learn anything we'd rather publish under dimmer lights when the mayfly media are feeding on a different frenzy". It worked a charm. The post-autopsy report was largely ignored.
In a subsequent incident high over head, the White Physicist cracked the quench code in the sodium hypocritite blame suppression system, but our avarice to Feynman ratio has since gone from poor to divide by zero.
About the only time your average geek is not processing language at one level or another is when fingering the skin flute of visual recall, which opens the Temple Grandin floodgates to every shapely derriere and saucy come-hither freshly impressed upon the orbs of desire (or permanently engraved in the limbic arousal hall-of-fame since the eruption of first pubertal mole hair). Perhaps there are a few virtuosos of visual recall out there whose language system has languished and atrophied. For most of us, however, I suspect our downtime doesn't much impact our verbal SLA. Any day I sit in front the computer, I probably process a quarter million words, but then I put more comments in my code than most people, even if I have to read the comments 100 times each in passing before my code actually works.
There's two halves to male performance: aptitude and attitude. Since men don't have much of a chip in the reproductive game until we accomplish something, we tend to stick with the dull stuff through thick and thin.
Sure, attitude is more amenable to social modification, but I don't think this comes for free. I think society would have to consistently incent women to behave more like men, not just jigger some baseline attitudes about what men and women are good for. Now it's starting to look like an active intervention rather than a sober rebalancing, and the fairness police have a lot more explaining to do. I'm a fan of fairness in the abstract, not so much of outcome based fairness, which smacks of utopian socialism, with possibly an extremely bitter aftertaste after the sugar wears off.
I quite liked this recent episode:
Baumeister on Gender Differences and Culture
There's more.
If I make a considered personal opinion that I'm crossing high-fructose corn sugar and most soy derivatives off my menu for now and forever, because the superficial culinary joy is outweighed by the metabolic tax, and because I dislike mega-corporation agriculture, and because I *really* dislike mega-corporation agriculture as pwned by Monsanto under their regulatory capture of having the FDA "generally recognize as safe" a shot-gun genetic modification technology (which scatters the injected gene throughout the chromosomes) then to enter my house, as a principle of courtesy and respect, the visitor should scrape this particular dog shit off their shoes before stepping onto my porch.
Until advertising incorporates the "I have decided" list of things I personally never wish to hear from again, I'm not unlocking the front gate, if only to protect my porch, even if I don't open the door after they ring the bell.
As a consumer, I'm never allowed to set a fixed policy. In their mind I'm permanently up for suasion and drift. They understand decision fatigue and wield it against me.
Another decision I've made is to never purchase a condiment which contains 40% of my sodium RDA in a single tablespoon. Does the cash register access my file to help me enforce this firm personal decision when I pass the till. Not bloodly likely. I'm surrounding by B2B technology of the highest order, yet I have to personally flip over every stupid bottle and read it myself.
Capitalism where art thou?
At this point I'm guessing that the license plate still garbed in the pristine shrink-wrap Steve Jobs couldn't bear to tear into has come up for sale on eBay.
So it was boring then and it's still boring now, but finally we have geek quorum.
Oh oh, even worse, its about some Twitter celebrity I've never heard of.
Three strikes, you're out.
Since I missed it myself the first time, I'll add my two percents.
I grew up in the era of Coke vs Pepsi. The debate should have been about high fructose corn syrup vs metabolic syndrome. You hear from the man standing under the elephant, but it's never about the diabetic ankles.
One of missing gems from Five Equations That Changed the World:
information + greed + sex appeal = toxic sludge
The dynamic here is that whatever standard one sets for acceptable advertising conduct, the advertisers are incented to differentiate themselves by crowding the perimeter of bad taste. The bad behaviour doesn't end until the acceptance criteria is reduced to the null set of "don't call us, we'll call you". There's plenty of people out there who enjoy the mind rot, the same way many people are into body rot. Advertising is best applied to these people.
The spectacular increase in metabolic syndrome in the western world over the last thirty years can't possibly be genetics. It could perhaps be caused by people parking the salty and sugary chip truck on their front lawn thinking they'll not really notice its presence there.
If you can't do, report: you're smart enough to s/loses/dives but not smart enough to s/dives/forestalls.
Now the reader who ordinarily fails to distinguish "dives" from "loses" as processed through the filter of law-of-the-jungle public-company quarterly reporting intervals will fail to notice the giant Bill Gates reality-distortion-apparatus strapped to face.
Has that school board guy who got 10 out of 60 on his grade ten level math test become a Slashdot moderator? That statement might amount to insightful from the perspective of its author, but not so much from its readership.
MySpace when T.U. when FB became the world's largest refugee camp. When FB goes T.U. what replaces FB as the bright and shiny refugee camp of monumental social girth?
Let's play "one of these things is not the same":
A) winner take all market dynamics
B) the pet rock market crash of January 1976
That said, "trickle down" is for bozos.
1 / .75 ^ 60 = 30 million to 1 against
A quick peak at the American age pyramid suggests that each teenage year represents about 2% of the American population, or about 6 million students at each teenage grade level.
If 1% play the game of zero-knowledge monkeys, you'll average about one student every 500 years achieving an unmotivated zero.
Far easier to achieve a zero if you have some knowledge, but installed the battery in reverse, or if you have a lot of knowledge and installed the battery in perverse.
The example grade 10 test I viewed was not exclusively multiple choice.
Does it harm the consumer if the majority of authors give up in disgust?
Does it absolve Apple and Amazon that the consumers wallow in boneheaded thrall to convenience?
Sure, take all that talent and energy for granted, it's not like us geeks know the difference. We're just a bunch of shit-bags glad to lap up dandruff flakes of appreciation from 6.9 billion free-riders.
Did you notice how the Catholic church squeaked in just under 400 years in fessing up a mea culpa in the Galileo affair? Another view of the story is that technologies are quickly subsumed into existing social institutions of subjugation, except for the free-rider escape hatch (see above).
Zittrain's giant heap of manure is that generativity is an essential sphincter relaxant in the natural course of human social institutions: the bigger the hat, the tighter the sphincter. Generativity is to human freedom as vitamins are to Krebs cycle. But this vitamin theory makes your head hurt, and you have better things to do. Angry Birds wait for no man.
For no other purpose than to add to the obnoxious rumble of discontent: Me too!
And I'll add, Ubuntu did a terrible job of communication around this change of direction. I couldn't have cared less which side of the window the close box is located on, but the way they handled the change should have set my teeth on edge much sooner than it did.
Yeah, back when Slashdot ran at 2400 bps, the comment limit was shorter than Twitter. But not to worry, like the Witnesses, the "great crowd" with seven-digit UIDs are relegated to a paradise on earth.
I have to say in 1981 making those decisions I felt like I was providing enough freedom for ten years, that is the move from 64K to 640K felt like something that would last a great deal of time.
The complaints as Gates recalls began in five years. He was off by a factor of two. I remember 1981 clear as day. There was hardly a baseline by which to judge the trajectory of the home computer. A monochrome 80 column display with mixed case was state of the art. By the end of 1982, the PC was selling a decimal order of magnitude faster than IBM projected, which put a whole different spin on enough. Volume drove down cost, and lower cost made eyes bigger sooner than almost anyone guessed.
I've read a lot from Gates over the years. Arrogant in most regards, but rarely stupid. Gates might have had the sentiment that a 0.33 MIPS processor didn't need 16MB of system memory, and figured that the memory limit would be addressed in a less anemic platform in the fullness of time. No-one in 1981 thought that 8088 byte code would still reign supreme thirty years later, any more than COBOL programmers in the 1960s worried about Y2K.
There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom as capiced already in 1959.
I don't really see a problem here. We have more than enough storage for the amount of analysis we're able to do. It's a short term nuisance that we have to invest some resources in being a little more selective in what we save, until storage or analysis catches up again.
There are some applications of genetics where the error component is the signal you're looking for. These methods are less forgiving of lossy synopsis. There might be room for some improvements to storage and compression algorithms in this space.
Stores have figured out how to dump the unprofitable customers (long live data mining). Now they've figured out how to dump the skittish investors. You weren't wanted in the first place. Actually, the game was played this way all along.
Reason is a short leash. The receiving side will take blind faith any time they can get it.
I've done all of the above popular/unpopular, except for lauding Visual Studio. I lived through the Commander Sonak incident in its early support for C++ templates. I'm not stepping into that beam ever goddamn ever again. It might at this point be positively stupendous, but I couldn't give an elephant's asshole. Don't mistake eternal bitterness for groupthink.
From time to time I try to burn off some karma with little success. I guess I try too hard. It's simple: if you're going to post against the grain, you have to do some work. You can't just post "Well I think Microsoft rocks!" and not get voted off the island. Try handing out "God sucks!" pamphlets in front of a peace-loving Baptist church on any given Sunday. Any worthwhile community nurses its fragile bonds, even if some tolerate exceptionally harsh internal criticism if voiced in the proper manner.
Moderation systems tend to be imperfect because humans are imperfect. If there's no objective standard to optimize towards, all that's left is popularity, no matter how cleverly you echo diffract.
On the other point--which made LOL--it is pretty stupid how quickly the early posts attract karma points. It would be a good idea if moderation points awarded in the first few hours on a fresh topic wore off and expired. If the comment was that great, it will be repeat moderated against the full complement of early opinion. You can't suppress moderation at the outset or it would turn into an instant free for all, but the early mods could be made provisional, and that would certainly help.
Actually, we do know it's not random, within a very small margin of dithering. Given any chosen universal computer (one with an extremely small definition is best), if a sequence can be printed by a program whose length is less than the sequence, the sequence is not random.
There is a small dependence on which universal machine you pick at the outset, but any two universal machines will never disagree on the length of the shortest program required by more than the shortest program by which one machine simulates the other.
print nine nine times
print nine ninety times
If the first case is dubious, the second isn't.
Sussman's comment about perfect encryption cracks me up: as if what the world needs most is a really high quality one time pad.
Chums, chumettes, and granfallooners.
Yeah, I upgraded my FreeBSD 8.1 box to 9.0-RC2 so I could start playing with ZFS v28. Madly sacrificing chickens in triplicate, after a Gentoo-like recompile of 400 ports, freebsd-upgrade left me a somewhat hosed system where basic services (startx, portupgrade) won't run complaining that libz.so.5 is missing. I guess I'm looking at a fresh install.
As far as I got with ZFS, it totally rocked. In my test I set up a three drive mirror (which I think of as a plain mirror with a presilvered hot spare). Seeing 35MB/s copying over the LAN with rsync/ssh. A test involving recursive scp starting following symlinks recursively on a 20GB file set, which put the gears to deduplication. It ran great. I finally killed it at a duplication level of 7.8. Doubt dedup will do much for me in production on my little LAN.
My biggest worry is that you really need ECC to protect the long-duration content in the ARC cache, not to mention critical ZFS memory structures themselves. On the Intel side, for ECC you're looking at an X3400 chipset, or an expensive Xeon chip. Apparently there are somewhat cheaper solutions on the AMD side. For the ZIL cache, people recommend mirrored SLC.
For a while we enjoyed 60% annual drive capacity growth rate, but this is projected to fall to 20% annual growth as we head toward bit patterned media. I wouldn't assume vastly greater capacities in the near term.
Here is a nice paper, sans authorship date (which the author will regret when his time comes in the Beetlejuice afterlife lobby) :
End-to-end Data Integrity for File Systems: A ZFS Case Study
He cites a recent analysis of Google server farm metrics:
DRAM Errors in the Wild: A Large-Scale Field Study
It's a little unclear how to translate this for a home-use ZFS box. Error rate is usage dependent and seems to depend on the quality of the mainboard memory access path.
A feature that might help ZFS outside of the enterprise is an ARC cache scrubber using the ZFS checksum data.
I'm still figuring this stuff out, but my impression so far is that ZFS makes the most sense where data preservation must coexist with high availability and there are fall-back measures in place on the preservation front.
Having a job is rapidly becoming inconsequential other than providing food and shelter. Some of us have not yet moved into the palace of Versailles, where the only consequence was looking good or hosting an A-list soiree.
And even when I'm not working, my life is a hell of a lot less compartmentalized that this sentiment presumes.
As a result of all this user interface churn, I now have two more or less identical systems behind my desk so I can use whichever screws over my use-case-of-the-day less than the other, which will be some pair selected from among LMDE, Fedora, and Ubuntu before/after ascendance of the Sun King. One is presently Ubuntu LTS, but I've moved its server functions elsewhere to accommodate the tablet UI avoidance slalom. My regular desktop is 10.10 for as along as that remains viable.
Fuck I'm beginning to hate the tablet generation.
You do know that supply and demand is diagrammed with curves don't you? And since we live in a complex world where anything you make has a thousand inputs, the concept of leverage applies here: the other million dollars you spend on your server farm isn't worth much minus all the hard drives. Some people are willing to pay a big premium not to be left out in the cold when so much depends upon a red slider. And retail on the whole is in dire thrall to willingness-to-pay, which by most accounts of capitalism is how it should be.
Fungibility comes into play, but billion dollar facilities don't ramp up and down in the span of a retail hissy fit.
It would have taken you twice as long to figure this out as to spew your complaint, so I understand the latency of comprehension.
I like this first of these (it's low key but interesting about when we shouldn't put a price on things), can't vouch for the second one:
Satz on Markets
Munger on Price Gouging
A few hours of your time, and the world will become oh so much less mysterious.
Dell's defence is that at some point in time less expensive video cards with crappy RAMDACs blighted consumers and they will find plenty of unemployed former Matrox executives to testify on their behalf.
Seriously, I think this is a no-brainer for a truth in advertising slap on the wrist, but if we go down this path, where do we find enough cells to house the audiophile industry? We'll be building tent farms after rounding up just the low-oxygen HDMI crowd plying low-oxygen consumers.
Clarification: Bloom does not teach game theory; I skipped to a different experience.
Sure, any mature person basic literacy skills and an orderly life not overly afflicted with unique circumstance (the strange prevalence of rare illness in the long tail of evolutionary ferment). Other small advantages: ability to cope with independence, knowing what you want, a realistic model of your strengths/weaknesses, social hostility running from inetd rather than a daemon service, financial means to choose the right institution and setting, a learning style that suits teaching to test, and stalwart cynicism towards institutional bullshit.
How the piece of paper gets used in greater society is a whole 'nother sphere of dysfunction.
As you say, the top quintile can just show up with a tidy CV and good self-presentation and talk themselves into a job. A quarter of what remains can navigate success on a track record of work ethic and contribution. A remaining third lands employment on the basis of insecurity: willingness to be underpaid and overworked and never call in sick. Half of what remains are willing to battle with physical hardship: hard construction, working up in Fort McMurry. The remaining quintile is the feeder tranche for the growth industry of the for-profit American prison system. Society has no idea how to productively use these people, so we decided to monetize (tough on crime sells to all levels: the bottom of the totem pole is always keen on a new subbasement of even greater pillory).
I've listened to OCW lectures across a number of fields, most recently Paul Bloom's introductory psychology class at Princeton (he's great, but I knew 90% of his material already--the world of TED talkable ideas is highly incestuous). A fairly decent lecture on game theory spent half an hour working some basic algebra after laying out the payoff matrix topology. When you are younger, rolling up your sleeves to work some examples in gory detail is a great learning experience, it anchors all the blather to the real world. Insight is hollow if you don't know how to do the work. As you get older, you're far happier to declare "and the rest is algebra" and move on to the next subject; you've gotten over the notion that you can be good at everything in detail simultaneously (for CS people "and the rest is syntax" so long as you don't have to write Python, and R, and C++ and VHDL all in the same week).
That youthful feeling of life as an all-you-can-eat intellectual buffet of mastery over detail is quickly cured by one course in organic chemistry, or less swiftly by a four year program in economics.
In a world with no first movers, we would still be banging rocks together. As for personal data preservation (one of the least fun activities ever invented) how many people living in the Cascadia subduction zone have gallons of fresh water per person stored in a secure cabinet, replenished annually? People forget to secure their own data after upload to the cloud because they are too busy following guidelines such as this:
Be prepared, not scared.
It kills me this meme that blame-free living is a trivial thing that comfortably fits between the cracks of everyday life.
The way I would like the world to work is that everyone subscribes to a personal data cloud provider (the billing could be rolled into your internet bill, the same way in some places you can choose your long distance provider, yet have your line provider intermediate the billing). All of your posts and activities on any online service would be consolidated here, regardless of whichever media company serves up the access layer to the maddening crowd.
The possibility of this happening given the norms of human behaviour is so remote I'm embarrassed to even mention it.
And never before has the Next Big Thing entered the world with a whimper rather than a bang?
9 Gadgets That Prove You(slashcode fuckup)re a Hard-Core Early Adopter
What was your opinion on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X back in the day? Did you bitch slap Motorola for wasting your time? Not the Next Big Thing after all?
My perspective is that this architecture is exposing weakness in AMD's process technology, and that it was designed on the premise that their process technology would be much further ahead. One of AMD's goals behind the scenes is to come up with a process technology equally well suited for the CPU and the GPU. The main problem here is that AMD is not a strong enough company to survive continued weakness. Obviously they had different ideas about where this would be at this point in time or it would not have been designed this way in the first place (or survived the massive pre-silicon performance simulation).
Here's why I sometimes what to punch the "What have you done for me lately?" crowd flat on the nose:
ACID first, performance second. Unless an early version is soundly trounced by MySQL in a page view benchmark, resulting in a giant lemming exodus.
The fixation on surface metrics also worked wonders in the race to the bottom at your local grocery store. "Organic" is actually just a synonym for "what used to be the default back in 1970 until we optimized out all the nutrition, nickle by nickle".