The Robert Epstein segment still has me shaking my head a month later. It seems like for some men large breasts are the only reliable signal. Wake up guys. A B-cup is the French curve of aesthetic pleasure. With small adjustments of the gravity vector, it can become anything from a teardrop to a Tsarist onion, to say nothing of dynamic effects.
But then, if you're a speech scientist and you can't tell the difference after a month of correspondence, I can see the merit in opting for overflow.
I've worked hard to master a writing style able to bump marbles out of their customary grooves. It's a lot more work that flipping open an ideological switchblade.
I'm shocked at the number of responses here by middle manager types whose life motto is to fly comfortably under the radar. The culture of considerate memos with broad input from every desk in the company is what Bill hung upside down by its ankles in the early 1980s.
When you start reading the literature on leadership and change, the lesson is that you have to shake some trees, and communicate communicate communicate and communicate some more.
If you tone it down to the level of Indiana Jones in the classroom at the beginning of Raiders, does anyone actually listen?
Without these concubines, my food and drink will not taste good. It is the King's wish that they not be beheaded.
Sun Tzu's response: Sorry boss, conflicting orders, does not compute, off with their heads.
It's a fact: beheading favorite concubines gets results. I think Steve would like to see Google achieve the same results using more modern methods.
Wave and Google+ are worrying setbacks should their ad revenue business model falter. His message might be wrong, but it needs to be vigorously debated ASAP. If Google is the company I think it is, there will be a lot more heated discussion about the import of this menu than the context of its divulgence.
Leadership is dangerous business. The image seared in my mind is Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead leading the charge of the Battle of Gettysburg hat upon sword.
That's a pretty constructive dialog. Is that the norm on LKML these days? Linus, I feel your pain.
Argh. This is a small disaster, you know that, right? Suddenly we have user-visible allocation changes depending on which CPU you are running on. I just hope that the address-space randomization has caught all the code that depended on specific layouts.
But honestly, it's not like the transition to AMD64 was all that smooth, either. We're all members of the breakage-of-the-month club. Others should be careful what they drool over.
If Intel had come out with Bulldozer instead of AMD, we'd be calling this Prescott version 2.0.
That's an awfully rash statement. Fanboi, meet anti-Fanboi. You'll get along famously.
Prescott was designed as it was for bad engineering reasons. They were trying to glue an extra pair of legs onto the frequency horse, with no concern for hay consumption; it didn't end well. We don't yet know that AMD made bad engineering decisions. So far it's not a giant killer. They're a much smaller company than Intel, and it's a tremendous challenge to synchronize their processor design with their fabrication technology without getting a bad case of roadmap rash.
On paper, the rationale looks fine: treat the thermal envelope as your rate limiting resource. Duplicate as much as possible within that constraint, share resources that burn too hot. Prescott is not a generic synonym for disappointment and slander. It was a very specific recipe for humble pie.
Intel's P6 was a killer foundation for many years, yet its initial reception was cold by the lovers of Windows 95 (how do you spell loser, let me count the ways). Intel's Pentium was greeted with ridicule in the smoking hot 60Mhz incarnation (15 watts, can you believe that?) It went on to great success after a die shrink.
There's still hope for Bulldozer yet. Prescott is far from the leading analogy of suck. I suppose you picked it as the only one that's prominent in fanboi lingo.
You have to hope that whatever sacrifice AMD made in this design was made to better enable the CPU and GPU to be fabricated on the same process in Trinity and beyond.
In politics, people have memory. Deals are made. Losers sit tight. Times change. Deals forgotten. Sharp headlines ensue.
The SFS page is completely useless in not provided the least explanation about why we need all this launch tonnage.
I read this change in budget priority as being driven by technical continuity. With the Shuttle shut down, you have find some way to keep this kind of expertise assembled and moving forward, or you lose a lot. Must be galling for the planetary explorers to be stuck carrying The Load of covert tonnage requirements. Still, times are tough and planets can wait.
I'm in the process of tapering my slashdot contributions to a dull whimper. I used my time posting on slashdot to evolve my thinking. That project has reached a satisfactory plateau and my energies are drifting toward other outlets.
Without that process in background, it has become increasingly hard to wade into a discussion like this where so many posts are throwing terms around indicative of brains stuck in some gear entirely unlike hard thinking.
"Bloat" is a parking orbit of intellectual laziness. Have you seen what passes for discourse anywhere electrons gather? Checked out any dusty law library lately? Yet in our sphere we can invoke a purity aesthetic and not even have to think it through, because, uh, what exactly? Because the solution to life, the universe and everything is to clone Steve Gibson?
he apparently doesn't realize how completely pointless this is
No, he has the psychological structure where he enjoys pretending he doesn't get it, then he slurps up the ensuing attention because it gives him a troll woody.
I'd like to take all his 9-tuples and pave the Bulwer-Lytton or the collected utterances of Wesley Crusher or the cc: transcripts from Howard Stern. It would cover them all.
TFA displays some page contents on my FF, then immediately refreshes to http://m.xconomy.com/ which formats a bunch of category links on IBM green and white printer paper, but contains no useful text.
I'm able to read a copy obtained by wget with no problems.
No need for memory mapped disk I/O if you have no disk, either.
I don't think you thought that comment through. Which is funny, because you were busy unbundling what VM brings to the table.
Here's a case study. Two processes open the same file for writing, one of them is actively writing, while the other appears to be lurking with nothing to say. Copy-on-write is a fundamental technique for detecting write contention; best of all, detecting when write contention never actually happens. You need the ability to establish many-to-one mappings, to mark the mappings with permitted access modes (read, read/write), and the ability to trap on an access fault. COW permits a lazy fork, which is why Unix was the right answer (management at the process level), and NT wasn't (management at the thread level), to overstate by a factor of about a million, but true nevertheless.
It's possible that the OS might choose to mark some pages inaccessible in order to use access faults as a signal to help it manage physical memory locality. In fact, I'd be shocked if the technique is not already widely used, if not so much in J Random Desktop. Or did you also assume that gobs of MRAM would be on a single IO interface of a single core, forever and ever?
It seems most people encode in their mental maps that VM is the technology which fails to completely hide the fact that disk heads are the continental drift of electronic data access. When my leg heals, we throw the crutch away. VM == crutch.
You do pay a price in power consumption for the TLB lookup mechanism on every memory access. Probably get a lot of that back in the memory activity averted by COW semantics. Unless MRAM supports local page duplication, which isn't a crazy idea, given the likely width of the row access bus. But this idea never seems to survive DRAM commodity economics.
You get even more back by the billion emails your system doesn't end up sending because the TLB lookup was busy checking page execute privs, but 99.99% of people won't correctly attribute the systems theory effect to the musty deterrent so it will be another psychological no-op. What do we need Shelob for? No-one has gone through that tunnel in 1000 years.
Your call. It's funny how people so quickly presume that a technique associated with managing a point of pain exists only for that one reason. Many biologists proclaim (for dramatic effect or otherwise) that sex is an aberration that should never have occurred, since it's so much more convenient to go it alone. But the average person concludes that sex != crutch (with little true analysis), so I guess we're keeping that one, even if MRAM prevails.
The irony of course is that people will be saying that global warming was manufactured by Exxon and other big corporations to distract us from the far more severe problem of the contraction of meaningful wages.
The world is potentially heading to a place where an awful lot of people have nothing much to contribute. The stark analysis of such a society is that wages collapse, and anyone who doesn't own property (e.g. real estate, or shares in Google) is pauperized.
Another analysis is that a lot of people might end up growing heirloom tomatoes with nothing much else to do with their time. If they can afford the seed.
If I had an economic crystal ball, my first junket into the future would be the structure of the labour force in 2060. If such a concept still exists.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the global warming scare has blown over--the consequences were severe, but we bunkered down and made the best of things with far more resourcefulness than we gave ourselves credit for--and that structural problems with how people contribute to society are a mainstay of the daily tweetdeck.
Any regulatory system with sharp edges is subject to being gamed. Sharp edges are a leverage point. In the worst example, it boils down to a hanging chad, and a back room phone conversation with a Florida judge concerning the terminal velocity of falling chads versus the coefficient of upward mobility.
Even worse if the edges are sharp in the time domain: that one last negative moderation immediately consigns you to the garbage heap, which arriving in a sudden bang feels rude and vindictive.
If karma is a moving average like uptime (I could care less but for the sake of argument), it would make sense for the karma bonus computed on posts for display to readers with available moderation points were computed with a longer time lag than the karma used to rate articles for the general riff-raff.
If would also make sense if it was a stochastic blend (a real number, with a weighted coin flip when it drifts between integers). A bonus of 0.3 would be treating as +1 for 30% of the moderators, and 0 for the other 70% (the coin flip needs to be consistent as viewed by any individual user revisiting the same thread).
There could even be a visual indicator to (meta) moderators that the long lag karma bonus is in discrepancy with the short lag bonus. These mechanisms would abate punitive dismissal by three college kids in a dorm room synchronizing their brick bats.
Meta moderation is corrective, but I wouldn't have a clue how well this works in practice. I see the odd wail. What I'm proposing subtracts incentive around the leverage points.
The link I posted the first time lists the limbic hot buttons: security, certainty, autonomy , relatedness, fairness. Our instincts about fairness and certainty (which treads also on consistency) tends to lead us away from stochastic blending even while we sit their wailing the abuses around the leverage points. Stupid humans.
I would say the coin flip increases certainty, viewing the system from a larger perspective. Unfortunately it throws in your face uncertainty over small fish, and small fish have strong smells.
The point of course is to mitigate the sharp spikes of limbic anxiety which all too easily gain ascendance and turn a reasoned post into a lime green one-piece with thumb holsters. My suggestions might be the worst way to do it, or they might not.
Postscript on moderation dynamics: it might alleviate some moderation problems if the moderators had a lateral moderation option: applying -1 Borat simultaneously with +1 well played. This should cost the moderator a fractional moderation point.
My account it set up with a bonus for long posts. I detest most one liners unless significantly up-moderated. I'm going to turn on my brain to assess where you're coming from over one crappy sentence? But yes yes yes for barbs of evil perfection.
If it would be nice if the discrimination of where the post is coming from was a stronger effect. You shouldn't have to punish someone for -1 Borat / +1 well played. Some people love that shit, but for god's sake spare me.
First the moderator works hard enough to decide that the post is worthy of both moderations, then he (or she--but this is about as common as men with a supernumerary nipple) mentally discards both moderations because the post isn't deserving either a boost or bash in level.
It would be nice if the moderation system generated a stronger discrimination signal unmasked by moderators feeling they have to vote people on or off the island.
(I haven't moderated for eight years, so forgive me if my grasp of the mechanics predates my land line.)
I've posted a lot here over the last decade, sometimes bordering on excessively. I'm the kind of person who thinks by writing. I generally know what I think when I begin writing a post, and it doesn't change much by the end, but something changes very profoundly in how deeply the idea integrates against other ideas sloshing around in my liquid bit bucket. This is a deep way of thinking, but it burns a lot of time, even composing at 90wpm in perfectly formed paragraphs.
I always read the main link (if there is a main link, and it isn't the forth one; god that sucks). I usually skim about thirty comments from the top of the cream pool. Then I response to my general impression of sentiment of the discussion. I pretty much let my mood dictate the tone of my post. The range of my writing style is what makes it a useful thinking process. If I always posted from the same mood, I'd soon become just another fly-weight ideologue. I try not to embarrass myself outrageously more than one post out of three.
I don't really know how my posts are digested after the fact. My karma has never fluctuated so far as I've noticed, but I never return to engage in dialog. As if I hadn't burned enough energy posting on the topic the first time.
manning up and telling the world what they really think with no apologies
That would be me.
when the person suddenly shuts up and has nothing further to say despite your (non-inflammatory) obvious challenge to them
You crack me up. That would also be me; I'm not in it for the last word, though I suppose it appears cowardly to people who aren't aware of my pattern and agenda for being here in the first place.
One of the most destructive forces around here are the stories posted where an extra sentence is tacked on at the end full of weasel words of misleading sentiment. Sure it stimulates discussion. It also encourages the trolls to invite Borat for a bikini modeling party. Think of the children! Seriously.
I feel my time here is winding down. I've gained a far stronger grip over my opinion--and the modes available to express it--than I had ten years ago. Like Wikipedia, this place sometimes gives you the feeling that it gets to a certain level and then you hit the glass ceiling of circular regurgitation. Before slashdot came onto the scene, there was just as much circular regurgitation, but only half as much awareness on behalf of the recidivist pukers. Worse than having the memes is having the memes and not knowing it.
Yesterday I watched Your Brain at Work. I think a lot about cognitive styles. You can witness plenty of the less flattering eddies in any Slashdot thread. What we like to think of as intelligence is rooted in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is an extraordinarily small box compared to the rest of cognition, as the video points out.
The LPC is easily down regulated by any small annoyance. A person with strong internal mindfulness can moderate the interplay between intuition/limbic sentiment and the thin threads of LPC rationality. Probably the posts most worth reading are the ones that integrate both, perhaps in a back and forth cycle. That's ultimately the high level cognitive skill here. Whizzing through the little Sudoku puzzle of linguistic inference and put-down rejoinders, not so much.
As much as I've said a harsh word from time to time, I try not to write my posts as if making other people feel bad is the only thing that motivates me to move my fingers. Provocation is not a bad thing if you anchor it back to meaningful discussion. I'm sure it is taken badly some of the time, but my karma survives.
My personal sentiment is that this site really needs to kill those trailing sentences on story submissions that incite vague limbic arousal if it wishes to maintain any vestige of cognitive separation from other discussion forums where the Borats roam
The Apple II had a forty column display of upper case only, which made it well suited neither for programming nor word processing. The TRS-80 had 64 columns, but no lower case, either; despite the font ROM having these characters, the video memory was organized as 1Kx7 bits, to save a single 1024x1 memory chip. Early versions of the Commodore Pet were also limited to 40 columns.
The Apple III has a proper 80 column display, but it also had bank switched memory, and did not become successful.
The early success of the IBM PC was in large measure driven by providing a decent keyboard and monitor, which I regard as ergonomic virtues. It certainly wasn't sold on performance.
I purchased a fat Mac with dual floppies which I soon regretted. Trying to run a compiler, it would constantly request a floppy by ejecting the floppy it would immediately need next. I'd have to push that one back in and paperclip the other one (or was there a keystroke if I was feeling less bitter?) The hard drive upgrade was prohibitively expensive, so I purchased a beige crap-box with a 20MB hard drive, and finally managed to write some code without being in a constant state of exasperation.
Jobs was brilliant at marketing, but I never felt Apple lead the market in technical innovation. Mac OS had tragic memory management for years and years. For everything they got right, they got another thing wrong.
What Jobs had was the vision to define the customer's aspirations. All these aspirated customers go around redefining history, but what can you do?
Moore's law more or less dictates that innovation follows a straight line (e.g. the slow adoption of adequate displays). The person who gets to claim the innovation is whichever sales guy is good at getting the customer to buy a more expensive machine before others can afford it. The real innovation took place--in almost every case--in the context of designs that hardly anyone could yet afford.
His real genius for innovation didn't emerge until devices became a lot less expensive.
I don't think $55 million passes the smell test, either. Why would it not work for a public company to do (revenues-profits)/FDA_approvals over a two decade time span? Even then, it doesn't prove that Pharma couldn't have brought good two drugs to market for the cost of one home run. It suggests that Pharma believes one home run is worth a pair of extra base hits.
Then usual PR ruse then kicks in. After you pack your squad with nine 50 home-run hitters, divide your Yankee payroll by total number of hits to paint a sorry picture of escalating costs totally out of control. Do not divide by runs scored. And further, slather on the Hollywood accounting, where cost is equated to short term cash obligation ignoring future tax rebates. The version of "cost" says something about the need for deep pockets, while hatching a sleepy lie about just how quickly those pockets are full again.
I'm not with Neal whatsoever in this piece. I sat on the same rug, watching the same TV, showing the same moon mission, at very nearly the same age. I was sneaking out of bed to do so, having only barely learned how to tell time.
Freeman Dyson has long maintained that the least realistic payload in space is a human being. It's a lousy frontier for flag planting. Since the 1960s, were about half-way to having a non-human payload that can do nearly as much--possibly more. And at a tiny fraction of the launch cost, independent of launch vehicle. While Neal was hunkered down for seven years spewing out the Baroque Cycle (a mammoth achievement) he seemed to miss the entire story of Spirit and Opportunity.
Around the same age as my late night visits to Apollo mission countdowns, I used to sit in the bathtub and use my legs as pistons and my shiny backside as a battering ram to propel water out of the local gravity well. In a tame mood, this started with several iterations of harmonic amplification. Subsequent to gaining the ability to reason past glory (some heartless trudge would always point out the wet floor), I've never had any desire to continue with the wet space dream.
If the advantage of space is vacuum micro-gravity, we could accomplish the same by building an evacuated tube around the equator, with hardly any launch costs at all. Plenty of engineering challenge there.
If the mission is viewing, that's being handled fairly well by a combination of ground stations and spectacular satellites.
If the mission is seeking life in the cosmos, we need to bulk up our skinny little legs until we can generate a plume from the tub in the basement up through the skylight in the loft on the third floor. Or we can wait for 50 years and let dry flakes of dust float up on a thermal waft instead.
Dark energy is the name of a problem, not a solution. It's embarrassing that 75% of the universe is made up of we-have-no-idea-what.
Dark energy is the anonymous coward of particle physics. If it would sign up for a proper account, it would be far easier to study. It's possible that we already understand dark energy completely: a term that shows up in a few things we already measure, with no additional personality to be further described.
Is it not possible there could be such a physics: lurker particles that show up in only one force with hardly any intricate structure to alleviate our embarrassment?
I think you need to realize that out in space, the stars don't twinkle. Space is a big and lonely place. Without some chemistry in your small cast, you end up with 2001 or Moon or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. 2001 works as a movie, but would you try that in a TV series based on a concept with no established track record? Try to tell anyone who has been in solitary confinement for a year that Star Trek is campy. Someone who has been in solitary in a cell ten parsecs to a side.
I'm interested in how that chemistry originally involved. One review I read said that the original series works because the main cast members enter into their roles (however campy) with 100% commitment.
I've never been much of a fan of TNG. Whenever anyone addresses "Number One" I think of the Woodie Allen joke in Sleeper where he refers to his brain as his "second favorite organ". Number One is my third favorite bodily function.
The tension in Wrath of Khan is that Kirk himself is a borderline pathological sore loser, but he's also loyal and resourceful, while this seethes underneath.
I find Scotty and Chekov to be the most campy, by far--often filmed in solo shots, like Gimli with set remarks in LOTR. One could argue, in a way, that we're seeing the human crew exaggerated as Spock would see them. Human emotion against the vastness of space needs to burn pretty bright, or like a floating ember expires.
I'm curious about the original thinking on that. It seems in the show to arise out of chemistry between the three principle characters, rather than a directorial decision. Shatner comes across as a saner version of George C. Scott from Dr Strangelove. When you watch McNamara in Fog of War, you get the feeling about that era that some of the heated discussions behind closed doors at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, reality imitates art.
In the original Star Wars, they were quite explicitly looking for chemistry during the original casting. That worked. Later you get Anakin, who is everything Shatner wasn't, and it's almost unwatchable.
Another possible influence on Shatner might have been the Julia Child cooking shows, which were contemporaneous. She didn't hail from the Anakin/Picard school of acting, either.
Thinking back, a long long time, some of the close ups on Shatner perhaps overstayed their welcome. I found that maudlin more than campy. Doesn't Holly bring back Rimmer to keep Lister sane? The original model for that was the show ending spats between Spock and McCoy. Otherwise Kirk would have woken up some morning and discover he'd become a giant Helicobactor Pylori.
Chrome 14 improves the score of Chrome 13, although strangely, the Google-modified test gives Chrome a worse score than the original Mozilla version.
Strangely? A confident authorial tone accompanied by a chicken-shit aversion to spraining any trusted cliches. Who ordered that?
A confident archer might very well substitute a different target discipline in advance of perfecting his new bow, knowing that he'll soon knock it out of the park. Indeed, starting out with the right target discipline might very well accelerate future results, adding effective use of time to his profile of dominance.
Chrome is not the freckled kid in this story desperate to gain his or her first friend. Isn't there another player in this story that was once desperate to gain its first friend, and then after amassing 100 million friends on its tithing roster, still continued to behave like the unloved child?
If we were reviewing zit creams instead of browsers, I would concur with the author's careless sentiment.
CTIA officials disputed the Citigroup report's numbers, saying Bazinet and Rollins appear to be using information from 2010.
Whoa, it's still 2011, and I was so 2012 already.
Our crisis outruns competent criticism, so give us more money / leeway, no strings attached.
If the report used data from August, I'd trust it far less. I guess the Goldilocks report has a 30 day shelf life: not too fresh, not too stale. Just what you love to see when you work hard to prepare such a document in a thorough and even-handed way: pitched into the rubbish bin before the ink has barely dried.
Which means that the real security is the lock on the door. All you've done is allow another avenue of attacking it.
What's the driving need to oversimplify this? The meme exists to put a damper on tree-fort chortle from idiots who've never performed a base 2 logarithm.
If I'm just one guy, and I grab the source code for OpenSSL and hack myself a unique protocol by adding some kind of fairly simple input permutation to AES, I certainly haven't made AES stronger, but I have most certainly inconvenienced any agency that thinks it knows what an orthodox AES bit stream looks like. There are stupid ways to do this (re-using key bits from the AES pass could blow AES open). And there are less stupid ways to do this.
One problem with obscurity is that it's a bad idea to go around asking for advice concerning whether you landed on "less stupid". And no, it's not as hard as crypto experts pretend. It's not like it's the virgin birth to mangle some bits. Experts always exaggerate their fiefdoms. What is tremendously difficult is to achieve sufficient mixing of the right potency with the minimal number of rounds--and to have any kind of formal justification for the cake-batter which ensues.
There's simply not enough expertise out there to go around cracking all the different cipher variations if every geek rolled up their obscurity sleeves (and added to strong primitives already in place), even supposing most of them make a botch of it.
The big problem with obscurity there is that you never really know if you're on the botch list. Doesn't come with a satisfaction guarantee you can take to the bank.
Finally, obscurity sucks if there's anyone on the inside you distrust by the least amount. Your fly could be undone in the worst possible way and you would have no clue.
Even in professional systems, the password is protected through obscurity, but it's been boiled down to absolutely the least amount of obscurity necessary to get on with business, so internal vigilance can be extremely intense.
How many firms hire consultants to set the master password? Maybe we should call this "security by short and curlies". They can hand over your weakness any day of the week to any black hat anywhere on the globe, but if you catch them at it, you can sue them to dirt.
By hiring a security consultant, all you've done is open up another avenue for your credentials to leak.
Come on, there are limits to this kind of cognitive reduction.
I buy a different grade of "fell swoop". Every year on this planet there is some place where the physical environment changes in a way it hasn't change for 1000 years, probably going back a billion years.
A watched pot never boils. An unwatched pot glows molten. Ever experienced that? I have. Hard on the pathetic human brain to track between two lines of paint unless one of those is just the other one displaced by 12 precise feet on the asphalt ribbon of foregone conclusions.
It's a fucking conflated system where you might never find a smoking gun of irrefutable causality in any single detail.
Out of a large cloud of suspicious linkages, consensus will ultimately emerge. Consensus is a very slow human process. In science, it can be a brief half century. More like 400 years if the science steps on any purple robes.
If the genetic deluge has yet to persuade even a small minority of creationists, I wouldn't be watching the ice shelf with prompt expectation.
Slashdot Mirror
Talking to Machines
The Robert Epstein segment still has me shaking my head a month later. It seems like for some men large breasts are the only reliable signal. Wake up guys. A B-cup is the French curve of aesthetic pleasure. With small adjustments of the gravity vector, it can become anything from a teardrop to a Tsarist onion, to say nothing of dynamic effects.
But then, if you're a speech scientist and you can't tell the difference after a month of correspondence, I can see the merit in opting for overflow.
I've worked hard to master a writing style able to bump marbles out of their customary grooves. It's a lot more work that flipping open an ideological switchblade.
I'm shocked at the number of responses here by middle manager types whose life motto is to fly comfortably under the radar. The culture of considerate memos with broad input from every desk in the company is what Bill hung upside down by its ankles in the early 1980s.
When you start reading the literature on leadership and change, the lesson is that you have to shake some trees, and communicate communicate communicate and communicate some more.
If you tone it down to the level of Indiana Jones in the classroom at the beginning of Raiders, does anyone actually listen?
What he's saying about Bezos rung a bell from a distance era:
Story about Sun Tzu and the kings' concubines:
Sun Tzu's response: Sorry boss, conflicting orders, does not compute, off with their heads.
It's a fact: beheading favorite concubines gets results. I think Steve would like to see Google achieve the same results using more modern methods.
Wave and Google+ are worrying setbacks should their ad revenue business model falter. His message might be wrong, but it needs to be vigorously debated ASAP. If Google is the company I think it is, there will be a lot more heated discussion about the import of this menu than the context of its divulgence.
Leadership is dangerous business. The image seared in my mind is Confederate General Lewis A. Armistead leading the charge of the Battle of Gettysburg hat upon sword.
The most brilliant thing Steve Jobs ever said, "It's not the stockholders job to know what they want."
That's a pretty constructive dialog. Is that the norm on LKML these days? Linus, I feel your pain.
But honestly, it's not like the transition to AMD64 was all that smooth, either. We're all members of the breakage-of-the-month club. Others should be careful what they drool over.
That's an awfully rash statement. Fanboi, meet anti-Fanboi. You'll get along famously.
Prescott was designed as it was for bad engineering reasons. They were trying to glue an extra pair of legs onto the frequency horse, with no concern for hay consumption; it didn't end well. We don't yet know that AMD made bad engineering decisions. So far it's not a giant killer. They're a much smaller company than Intel, and it's a tremendous challenge to synchronize their processor design with their fabrication technology without getting a bad case of roadmap rash.
On paper, the rationale looks fine: treat the thermal envelope as your rate limiting resource. Duplicate as much as possible within that constraint, share resources that burn too hot. Prescott is not a generic synonym for disappointment and slander. It was a very specific recipe for humble pie.
Intel's P6 was a killer foundation for many years, yet its initial reception was cold by the lovers of Windows 95 (how do you spell loser, let me count the ways). Intel's Pentium was greeted with ridicule in the smoking hot 60Mhz incarnation (15 watts, can you believe that?) It went on to great success after a die shrink.
There's still hope for Bulldozer yet. Prescott is far from the leading analogy of suck. I suppose you picked it as the only one that's prominent in fanboi lingo.
You have to hope that whatever sacrifice AMD made in this design was made to better enable the CPU and GPU to be fabricated on the same process in Trinity and beyond.
In politics, people have memory. Deals are made. Losers sit tight. Times change. Deals forgotten. Sharp headlines ensue.
The SFS page is completely useless in not provided the least explanation about why we need all this launch tonnage.
I read this change in budget priority as being driven by technical continuity. With the Shuttle shut down, you have find some way to keep this kind of expertise assembled and moving forward, or you lose a lot. Must be galling for the planetary explorers to be stuck carrying The Load of covert tonnage requirements. Still, times are tough and planets can wait.
That takes a lot of IBM printer paper. And the SaturnV supplied its own lift. Nice architectural separation.
I'm in the process of tapering my slashdot contributions to a dull whimper. I used my time posting on slashdot to evolve my thinking. That project has reached a satisfactory plateau and my energies are drifting toward other outlets.
Without that process in background, it has become increasingly hard to wade into a discussion like this where so many posts are throwing terms around indicative of brains stuck in some gear entirely unlike hard thinking.
"Bloat" is a parking orbit of intellectual laziness. Have you seen what passes for discourse anywhere electrons gather? Checked out any dusty law library lately? Yet in our sphere we can invoke a purity aesthetic and not even have to think it through, because, uh, what exactly? Because the solution to life, the universe and everything is to clone Steve Gibson?
Sorry, I've lost the thread completely.
No, he has the psychological structure where he enjoys pretending he doesn't get it, then he slurps up the ensuing attention because it gives him a troll woody.
I'd like to take all his 9-tuples and pave the Bulwer-Lytton or the collected utterances of Wesley Crusher or the cc: transcripts from Howard Stern. It would cover them all.
TFA displays some page contents on my FF, then immediately refreshes to http://m.xconomy.com/ which formats a bunch of category links on IBM green and white printer paper, but contains no useful text.
I'm able to read a copy obtained by wget with no problems.
I don't think you thought that comment through. Which is funny, because you were busy unbundling what VM brings to the table.
Here's a case study. Two processes open the same file for writing, one of them is actively writing, while the other appears to be lurking with nothing to say. Copy-on-write is a fundamental technique for detecting write contention; best of all, detecting when write contention never actually happens. You need the ability to establish many-to-one mappings, to mark the mappings with permitted access modes (read, read/write), and the ability to trap on an access fault. COW permits a lazy fork, which is why Unix was the right answer (management at the process level), and NT wasn't (management at the thread level), to overstate by a factor of about a million, but true nevertheless.
It's possible that the OS might choose to mark some pages inaccessible in order to use access faults as a signal to help it manage physical memory locality. In fact, I'd be shocked if the technique is not already widely used, if not so much in J Random Desktop. Or did you also assume that gobs of MRAM would be on a single IO interface of a single core, forever and ever?
It seems most people encode in their mental maps that VM is the technology which fails to completely hide the fact that disk heads are the continental drift of electronic data access. When my leg heals, we throw the crutch away. VM == crutch.
You do pay a price in power consumption for the TLB lookup mechanism on every memory access. Probably get a lot of that back in the memory activity averted by COW semantics. Unless MRAM supports local page duplication, which isn't a crazy idea, given the likely width of the row access bus. But this idea never seems to survive DRAM commodity economics.
You get even more back by the billion emails your system doesn't end up sending because the TLB lookup was busy checking page execute privs, but 99.99% of people won't correctly attribute the systems theory effect to the musty deterrent so it will be another psychological no-op. What do we need Shelob for? No-one has gone through that tunnel in 1000 years.
Your call. It's funny how people so quickly presume that a technique associated with managing a point of pain exists only for that one reason. Many biologists proclaim (for dramatic effect or otherwise) that sex is an aberration that should never have occurred, since it's so much more convenient to go it alone. But the average person concludes that sex != crutch (with little true analysis), so I guess we're keeping that one, even if MRAM prevails.
The irony of course is that people will be saying that global warming was manufactured by Exxon and other big corporations to distract us from the far more severe problem of the contraction of meaningful wages.
The world is potentially heading to a place where an awful lot of people have nothing much to contribute. The stark analysis of such a society is that wages collapse, and anyone who doesn't own property (e.g. real estate, or shares in Google) is pauperized.
Another analysis is that a lot of people might end up growing heirloom tomatoes with nothing much else to do with their time. If they can afford the seed.
If I had an economic crystal ball, my first junket into the future would be the structure of the labour force in 2060. If such a concept still exists.
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if the global warming scare has blown over--the consequences were severe, but we bunkered down and made the best of things with far more resourcefulness than we gave ourselves credit for--and that structural problems with how people contribute to society are a mainstay of the daily tweetdeck.
2nd postscript: a mechanical observation.
Any regulatory system with sharp edges is subject to being gamed. Sharp edges are a leverage point. In the worst example, it boils down to a hanging chad, and a back room phone conversation with a Florida judge concerning the terminal velocity of falling chads versus the coefficient of upward mobility.
Even worse if the edges are sharp in the time domain: that one last negative moderation immediately consigns you to the garbage heap, which arriving in a sudden bang feels rude and vindictive.
If karma is a moving average like uptime (I could care less but for the sake of argument), it would make sense for the karma bonus computed on posts for display to readers with available moderation points were computed with a longer time lag than the karma used to rate articles for the general riff-raff.
If would also make sense if it was a stochastic blend (a real number, with a weighted coin flip when it drifts between integers). A bonus of 0.3 would be treating as +1 for 30% of the moderators, and 0 for the other 70% (the coin flip needs to be consistent as viewed by any individual user revisiting the same thread).
There could even be a visual indicator to (meta) moderators that the long lag karma bonus is in discrepancy with the short lag bonus. These mechanisms would abate punitive dismissal by three college kids in a dorm room synchronizing their brick bats.
Meta moderation is corrective, but I wouldn't have a clue how well this works in practice. I see the odd wail. What I'm proposing subtracts incentive around the leverage points.
The link I posted the first time lists the limbic hot buttons: security, certainty, autonomy , relatedness, fairness. Our instincts about fairness and certainty (which treads also on consistency) tends to lead us away from stochastic blending even while we sit their wailing the abuses around the leverage points. Stupid humans.
I would say the coin flip increases certainty, viewing the system from a larger perspective. Unfortunately it throws in your face uncertainty over small fish, and small fish have strong smells.
The point of course is to mitigate the sharp spikes of limbic anxiety which all too easily gain ascendance and turn a reasoned post into a lime green one-piece with thumb holsters. My suggestions might be the worst way to do it, or they might not.
Postscript on moderation dynamics: it might alleviate some moderation problems if the moderators had a lateral moderation option: applying -1 Borat simultaneously with +1 well played. This should cost the moderator a fractional moderation point.
My account it set up with a bonus for long posts. I detest most one liners unless significantly up-moderated. I'm going to turn on my brain to assess where you're coming from over one crappy sentence? But yes yes yes for barbs of evil perfection.
If it would be nice if the discrimination of where the post is coming from was a stronger effect. You shouldn't have to punish someone for -1 Borat / +1 well played. Some people love that shit, but for god's sake spare me.
First the moderator works hard enough to decide that the post is worthy of both moderations, then he (or she--but this is about as common as men with a supernumerary nipple) mentally discards both moderations because the post isn't deserving either a boost or bash in level.
It would be nice if the moderation system generated a stronger discrimination signal unmasked by moderators feeling they have to vote people on or off the island.
(I haven't moderated for eight years, so forgive me if my grasp of the mechanics predates my land line.)
I've posted a lot here over the last decade, sometimes bordering on excessively. I'm the kind of person who thinks by writing. I generally know what I think when I begin writing a post, and it doesn't change much by the end, but something changes very profoundly in how deeply the idea integrates against other ideas sloshing around in my liquid bit bucket. This is a deep way of thinking, but it burns a lot of time, even composing at 90wpm in perfectly formed paragraphs.
I always read the main link (if there is a main link, and it isn't the forth one; god that sucks). I usually skim about thirty comments from the top of the cream pool. Then I response to my general impression of sentiment of the discussion. I pretty much let my mood dictate the tone of my post. The range of my writing style is what makes it a useful thinking process. If I always posted from the same mood, I'd soon become just another fly-weight ideologue. I try not to embarrass myself outrageously more than one post out of three.
I don't really know how my posts are digested after the fact. My karma has never fluctuated so far as I've noticed, but I never return to engage in dialog. As if I hadn't burned enough energy posting on the topic the first time.
That would be me.
You crack me up. That would also be me; I'm not in it for the last word, though I suppose it appears cowardly to people who aren't aware of my pattern and agenda for being here in the first place.
One of the most destructive forces around here are the stories posted where an extra sentence is tacked on at the end full of weasel words of misleading sentiment. Sure it stimulates discussion. It also encourages the trolls to invite Borat for a bikini modeling party. Think of the children! Seriously.
I feel my time here is winding down. I've gained a far stronger grip over my opinion--and the modes available to express it--than I had ten years ago. Like Wikipedia, this place sometimes gives you the feeling that it gets to a certain level and then you hit the glass ceiling of circular regurgitation. Before slashdot came onto the scene, there was just as much circular regurgitation, but only half as much awareness on behalf of the recidivist pukers. Worse than having the memes is having the memes and not knowing it.
Yesterday I watched Your Brain at Work. I think a lot about cognitive styles. You can witness plenty of the less flattering eddies in any Slashdot thread. What we like to think of as intelligence is rooted in the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is an extraordinarily small box compared to the rest of cognition, as the video points out.
The LPC is easily down regulated by any small annoyance. A person with strong internal mindfulness can moderate the interplay between intuition/limbic sentiment and the thin threads of LPC rationality. Probably the posts most worth reading are the ones that integrate both, perhaps in a back and forth cycle. That's ultimately the high level cognitive skill here. Whizzing through the little Sudoku puzzle of linguistic inference and put-down rejoinders, not so much.
As much as I've said a harsh word from time to time, I try not to write my posts as if making other people feel bad is the only thing that motivates me to move my fingers. Provocation is not a bad thing if you anchor it back to meaningful discussion. I'm sure it is taken badly some of the time, but my karma survives.
My personal sentiment is that this site really needs to kill those trailing sentences on story submissions that incite vague limbic arousal if it wishes to maintain any vestige of cognitive separation from other discussion forums where the Borats roam
The Apple II had a forty column display of upper case only, which made it well suited neither for programming nor word processing. The TRS-80 had 64 columns, but no lower case, either; despite the font ROM having these characters, the video memory was organized as 1Kx7 bits, to save a single 1024x1 memory chip. Early versions of the Commodore Pet were also limited to 40 columns.
The Apple III has a proper 80 column display, but it also had bank switched memory, and did not become successful.
The early success of the IBM PC was in large measure driven by providing a decent keyboard and monitor, which I regard as ergonomic virtues. It certainly wasn't sold on performance.
I purchased a fat Mac with dual floppies which I soon regretted. Trying to run a compiler, it would constantly request a floppy by ejecting the floppy it would immediately need next. I'd have to push that one back in and paperclip the other one (or was there a keystroke if I was feeling less bitter?) The hard drive upgrade was prohibitively expensive, so I purchased a beige crap-box with a 20MB hard drive, and finally managed to write some code without being in a constant state of exasperation.
Jobs was brilliant at marketing, but I never felt Apple lead the market in technical innovation. Mac OS had tragic memory management for years and years. For everything they got right, they got another thing wrong.
What Jobs had was the vision to define the customer's aspirations. All these aspirated customers go around redefining history, but what can you do?
Moore's law more or less dictates that innovation follows a straight line (e.g. the slow adoption of adequate displays). The person who gets to claim the innovation is whichever sales guy is good at getting the customer to buy a more expensive machine before others can afford it. The real innovation took place--in almost every case--in the context of designs that hardly anyone could yet afford.
His real genius for innovation didn't emerge until devices became a lot less expensive.
I don't think $55 million passes the smell test, either. Why would it not work for a public company to do (revenues-profits)/FDA_approvals over a two decade time span? Even then, it doesn't prove that Pharma couldn't have brought good two drugs to market for the cost of one home run. It suggests that Pharma believes one home run is worth a pair of extra base hits.
Then usual PR ruse then kicks in. After you pack your squad with nine 50 home-run hitters, divide your Yankee payroll by total number of hits to paint a sorry picture of escalating costs totally out of control. Do not divide by runs scored. And further, slather on the Hollywood accounting, where cost is equated to short term cash obligation ignoring future tax rebates. The version of "cost" says something about the need for deep pockets, while hatching a sleepy lie about just how quickly those pockets are full again.
I'm not with Neal whatsoever in this piece. I sat on the same rug, watching the same TV, showing the same moon mission, at very nearly the same age. I was sneaking out of bed to do so, having only barely learned how to tell time.
Freeman Dyson has long maintained that the least realistic payload in space is a human being. It's a lousy frontier for flag planting. Since the 1960s, were about half-way to having a non-human payload that can do nearly as much--possibly more. And at a tiny fraction of the launch cost, independent of launch vehicle. While Neal was hunkered down for seven years spewing out the Baroque Cycle (a mammoth achievement) he seemed to miss the entire story of Spirit and Opportunity.
Around the same age as my late night visits to Apollo mission countdowns, I used to sit in the bathtub and use my legs as pistons and my shiny backside as a battering ram to propel water out of the local gravity well. In a tame mood, this started with several iterations of harmonic amplification. Subsequent to gaining the ability to reason past glory (some heartless trudge would always point out the wet floor), I've never had any desire to continue with the wet space dream.
If the advantage of space is vacuum micro-gravity, we could accomplish the same by building an evacuated tube around the equator, with hardly any launch costs at all. Plenty of engineering challenge there.
If the mission is viewing, that's being handled fairly well by a combination of ground stations and spectacular satellites.
If the mission is seeking life in the cosmos, we need to bulk up our skinny little legs until we can generate a plume from the tub in the basement up through the skylight in the loft on the third floor. Or we can wait for 50 years and let dry flakes of dust float up on a thermal waft instead.
Perhaps dark energy is mediated by embrasons. If there was a god, and he was anything like me, the universe would surely have such a particle.
Dark energy is the anonymous coward of particle physics. If it would sign up for a proper account, it would be far easier to study. It's possible that we already understand dark energy completely: a term that shows up in a few things we already measure, with no additional personality to be further described.
Is it not possible there could be such a physics: lurker particles that show up in only one force with hardly any intricate structure to alleviate our embarrassment?
I think you need to realize that out in space, the stars don't twinkle. Space is a big and lonely place. Without some chemistry in your small cast, you end up with 2001 or Moon or The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. 2001 works as a movie, but would you try that in a TV series based on a concept with no established track record? Try to tell anyone who has been in solitary confinement for a year that Star Trek is campy. Someone who has been in solitary in a cell ten parsecs to a side.
I'm interested in how that chemistry originally involved. One review I read said that the original series works because the main cast members enter into their roles (however campy) with 100% commitment.
I've never been much of a fan of TNG. Whenever anyone addresses "Number One" I think of the Woodie Allen joke in Sleeper where he refers to his brain as his "second favorite organ". Number One is my third favorite bodily function.
The tension in Wrath of Khan is that Kirk himself is a borderline pathological sore loser, but he's also loyal and resourceful, while this seethes underneath.
I find Scotty and Chekov to be the most campy, by far--often filmed in solo shots, like Gimli with set remarks in LOTR. One could argue, in a way, that we're seeing the human crew exaggerated as Spock would see them. Human emotion against the vastness of space needs to burn pretty bright, or like a floating ember expires.
I'm curious about the original thinking on that. It seems in the show to arise out of chemistry between the three principle characters, rather than a directorial decision. Shatner comes across as a saner version of George C. Scott from Dr Strangelove. When you watch McNamara in Fog of War, you get the feeling about that era that some of the heated discussions behind closed doors at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, reality imitates art.
In the original Star Wars, they were quite explicitly looking for chemistry during the original casting. That worked. Later you get Anakin, who is everything Shatner wasn't, and it's almost unwatchable.
Another possible influence on Shatner might have been the Julia Child cooking shows, which were contemporaneous. She didn't hail from the Anakin/Picard school of acting, either.
Thinking back, a long long time, some of the close ups on Shatner perhaps overstayed their welcome. I found that maudlin more than campy. Doesn't Holly bring back Rimmer to keep Lister sane? The original model for that was the show ending spats between Spock and McCoy. Otherwise Kirk would have woken up some morning and discover he'd become a giant Helicobactor Pylori.
So how did that original chemistry evolve?
Strangely? A confident authorial tone accompanied by a chicken-shit aversion to spraining any trusted cliches. Who ordered that?
A confident archer might very well substitute a different target discipline in advance of perfecting his new bow, knowing that he'll soon knock it out of the park. Indeed, starting out with the right target discipline might very well accelerate future results, adding effective use of time to his profile of dominance.
Chrome is not the freckled kid in this story desperate to gain his or her first friend. Isn't there another player in this story that was once desperate to gain its first friend, and then after amassing 100 million friends on its tithing roster, still continued to behave like the unloved child?
If we were reviewing zit creams instead of browsers, I would concur with the author's careless sentiment.
Whoa, it's still 2011, and I was so 2012 already.
Our crisis outruns competent criticism, so give us more money / leeway, no strings attached.
If the report used data from August, I'd trust it far less. I guess the Goldilocks report has a 30 day shelf life: not too fresh, not too stale. Just what you love to see when you work hard to prepare such a document in a thorough and even-handed way: pitched into the rubbish bin before the ink has barely dried.
What's the driving need to oversimplify this? The meme exists to put a damper on tree-fort chortle from idiots who've never performed a base 2 logarithm.
If I'm just one guy, and I grab the source code for OpenSSL and hack myself a unique protocol by adding some kind of fairly simple input permutation to AES, I certainly haven't made AES stronger, but I have most certainly inconvenienced any agency that thinks it knows what an orthodox AES bit stream looks like. There are stupid ways to do this (re-using key bits from the AES pass could blow AES open). And there are less stupid ways to do this.
One problem with obscurity is that it's a bad idea to go around asking for advice concerning whether you landed on "less stupid". And no, it's not as hard as crypto experts pretend. It's not like it's the virgin birth to mangle some bits. Experts always exaggerate their fiefdoms. What is tremendously difficult is to achieve sufficient mixing of the right potency with the minimal number of rounds--and to have any kind of formal justification for the cake-batter which ensues.
There's simply not enough expertise out there to go around cracking all the different cipher variations if every geek rolled up their obscurity sleeves (and added to strong primitives already in place), even supposing most of them make a botch of it.
The big problem with obscurity there is that you never really know if you're on the botch list. Doesn't come with a satisfaction guarantee you can take to the bank.
Finally, obscurity sucks if there's anyone on the inside you distrust by the least amount. Your fly could be undone in the worst possible way and you would have no clue.
Even in professional systems, the password is protected through obscurity, but it's been boiled down to absolutely the least amount of obscurity necessary to get on with business, so internal vigilance can be extremely intense.
How many firms hire consultants to set the master password? Maybe we should call this "security by short and curlies". They can hand over your weakness any day of the week to any black hat anywhere on the globe, but if you catch them at it, you can sue them to dirt.
By hiring a security consultant, all you've done is open up another avenue for your credentials to leak.
Come on, there are limits to this kind of cognitive reduction.
I buy a different grade of "fell swoop". Every year on this planet there is some place where the physical environment changes in a way it hasn't change for 1000 years, probably going back a billion years.
A watched pot never boils. An unwatched pot glows molten. Ever experienced that? I have. Hard on the pathetic human brain to track between two lines of paint unless one of those is just the other one displaced by 12 precise feet on the asphalt ribbon of foregone conclusions.
It's a fucking conflated system where you might never find a smoking gun of irrefutable causality in any single detail.
Out of a large cloud of suspicious linkages, consensus will ultimately emerge. Consensus is a very slow human process. In science, it can be a brief half century. More like 400 years if the science steps on any purple robes.
If the genetic deluge has yet to persuade even a small minority of creationists, I wouldn't be watching the ice shelf with prompt expectation.