What a crock comparing Flash to Watcom. Watcom was all about giving users precise control over compilation and linkage. The theme song for Flash was That's the way we like it, Uh-Huh Uh-Huh. (I never knew sexual grunts were proper nouns.)
The number one appeal of Flash to content developers was how little control Flash offered the user, if you foolishly crossed the installation chasm--the only user statistic you ever hear from the Flash camp.
What does Flash mean? Does not fade gracefully into your peripheral vision.
Watcom was brilliantly portable. Microsoft feasted on the dotcom bubble, during which time brilliantly portable was suspended as a development tool virtue long enough to extinguish a relatively tiny rival who was causing great technical embarrassment.
Around the same point in time, Flash energized on the brilliant business model that what the internet desperately needs to become is a 24/7 neon strip mall. Thanks for redecorating my lawn in the worst possible taste.
There were plenty type A software people out there who were determined to steal Flash's lunch money at the first opportunity, push it violently into a hallway locker, and leave it there until it starved to death.
Yes, you do need to be a statistics major to make any sense of "intersect soon". All users are created equal? All page views are created equal? It boggles the mind.
I sometimes wonder if 25% of all FF traffic is reloading my 200 active tabs every time FF or Ubuntu request a security reboot.
For every user like me who reads everything on my screen--if it warrants a flick of the eyeballs--there's probably 100 Joe pornloaders out there lapping up floppy crumbs.
Seriously, the first lesson in statistics is "wash before you divide". You don't know where those numbers have been. Ewww, if only you knew.
If PHK gets his way with software liability, either slashdot will have to start including definitions of "user share" in its never-fails-to-amaze TFA preamble, or we'll have to host a giant ten minute memorial service for the good old days when any random claim was newsworthy.
Coitus rarely leads to conception. Asteroids rarely strike planets. I don't think that word means what you think it does. A mortal blow matters every time. For a long time machines only had brawn, speed, or stamina. Things are changing at tremendous speed.
We're already seeing a sharp rise in income disparity in America and similar economies. The displacement is incremental, but potent nevertheless, and recent trends suggest this process is accelerating. No one has a convincing model for what the labour force will look like 50 years from now.
As it stands right now, Gary Kasparov would have trouble defeating a high-end cell phone over the chess board. This is an artificial task. Watson is less so. And so it will go. The word "rarely" answers no pressing question.
Because there is no GAAP way to express the value of customer loyalty,
Dude, I wish you the best of luck. Loyalty is the hot ass you crave after wedding the invisible hand.
Corporations bent on cultivating the next quarterly earnings report don't hold much enduring appeal to informed consumers wishing to build relationship equity with non-human entities. Where does the loyalty come to rest in this system? With suckers, if you can find them?
A reputation for morality and high ethical standards is normally built up over the course of a lifetime. But some big companies have found a quicker route--just buy it.
Are you planning to GAAP codify loyalty the commodity, or loyalty the sentiment? Watch your step, Groupon, there's a small crevice near you.
Severance is what permits you to grow yet another head after you misplace those who have gone before. You could always try picking up a discount head off the bargain rack, but the flighty shareholders will vote thumbs down. Or you could rent out the "captain of industry" chair for good coin to thrill seekers with Sim-City cred--except that the lawyers would spoil it. There goes your profit center. By the time your shareholders, the lawyers, and your directors+candidate/sucker all nod in agreement, it's another predictable episode.
There actually is something interesting going on here in the rumpled manifold of greed and commerce.
I think part of it is a selection bias toward winners. It's our heroism reflex run wild. If ten talented people vie for king of the hill (any career juncture from high school to grad school to middling rungs on the corporate ladder) and only one person prevails (probably as much through luck as good management), the winner walks off with the prize and a survivor halo. What price the survivor halo?
Then, like poker, you stake your halo at the next table (in the antechamber of Cloud Nine), in another round of lucky bastard takes all. What price your survivor halo now? Think of the halos as lottery tickets, where you have few ultimate winners at the end of the day. Making the first cut doesn't make your ticket worth anything at all except for prospects in the final draw. Only one person can cash out, so the halos are transacted in multiple rounds of winner-take-all.
Guys like Apotheker, who come into the job wearing the halo of halos (as expected by the flighty shareholders), aren't going to risk all that went before on a sour moment from a sour board (see Dunn, Patricia).
These people aren't necessarily more competent than their rivals, but there are only so many heroism slots available to the human psyche. They got one, their adversary didn't. We believe in success. We believe that success fuels success. Every year we award trophies in all the major sports leagues, whether the champion deserves it or not. It's the slot we hold fixed, while the champion varies. Then along come the carpers of competence, wondering why not all champions are created equal, as if competence prevails on any given Monday. Have you ever opened your eyes in a board meeting?
Shareholders want the halo of "born winner". You see this on sports forums even more clearly. Chris Drury: born winner. Look at his contract lately. Savvy halo owners don't transact on their trophy without a substantial safety net.
The only way the halo represents what it claims to represent is when having the halo grants you super powers because people believe in your halo. When exercising the power of that belief, your decisions might not resemble ordinary competence, and then the resentful competence carpers will fill you with darts. Your halo tarnishes, and you recede, diminished, into The West. You know this going in. Your severance prospects are configured accordingly.
Competence might be a better corporate performance model in long-term aggregate, but with money, the non-linearity of the cash-in/cash-out cycle drives people to manipulate time frames.
Imagine you hold HP stock and the company is positioned to earn 15% in each of the next two years. But that's not good enough. So you convince the exec. (though lush compensation) to represent earnings the first year as 20% and then you cash-out on a 20% annual return in one year, and free up your money to LRR somewhere else. Nice. Next year the company will announce 10% return and the CEO will probably get fired. So unless the midterm compensation was extremely lush, the CEO would prefer to announce 10% return the first year and 20% the second year.
This is why we get halo dramas rather than sustained competence. The aggregate return on the company often matters less to sharp interests than how it's spun. It's the same non-linearity which propels the finance community to b
Here is what I want now: "New AAA batteries lasting twice as long as those currently sold reach the market [...] as measured by independent testing...
You should rethink your crush on the cute red-haired girl, and maybe settle for deoxygenated speaker cable instead--where basic research to applications cycles at the speed of CTRL-S in PowerPoint. I guess I'm jaded, too, about erection returns.
Serious question: How many headlines does it take to change a battery? Plenty, if you get sucked into the cul de sac of small iterative improvements in the suburb of basic physical limits.
Why do we settle for chump change? I suspect that somewhere among the 10^500 Calabi-Yau manifolds there's a periodic table where every headline is grand. How life organizes in this universe is another question, best explored by those demanding results yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Do take a map and a compass. The parameter space resembles Tokyo pancaked into a Mandelbrot. Just one small wrong turn, no headlines for you.
It only takes a few centimeters of wire to make a 60ns delay
There are people in the battery industry who will knocking on your door shortly to seize your dielectric material in the interest of national welfare. You need a dielectric constant on the order of 1,000,000 to achieve this (in the context of telegrapher's equations, speed of light varies as sqrt(e_r)). By comparison, relative permittivity of barium titanate ranges up to about 10,000.
You might want to check your math. It takes only a few keystrokes to google "2cm/c in ns".
It would be nice someday if Google would give "2cm/c in ps" the same stature. What a world. Even the metric system can't get a fair shake.
To me a nanosecond seems pretty big. I've spent a chunk of my time over the last couple of years designing consumer circuits sensitive to changes of 10ps in signal arrival time due to changes in the surrounding bulk dielectric.
You haven't lived until you've read a datasheet with the performance spec:
Deterministic jitter: 300 fs.
Probably a PECL part, but still.
And no, they're not using an instantaneous tau to approximate a decay distribution. Anyone who has ever cooked popcorn knows better than that.
The whole point of Netburst was to achieve premature ejaculation in the frequency domain. This is what happens when people evaluate performance on a proxy indicator (given a choice between simple and correct, what does your average careerist commuter choose?)
Apparently it was a pretty good ruse, because ten years later, people are busy citing the frequency plateau as if it means a great deal more than it does. It didn't hurt Enron's raping of California that Intel took out a few hundred megawatts of generating capacity so that they could play top dog in marketing souffle GHz. Law of unintended consequence or not? Netburst was chosen over an alternate proposal (from their Israeli team IIRC) that later became CoreDuo. As much as Netburst marketing hurt AMD, it was maybe the last good thing to happen to them.
We could easily have 5GHz single-core processors now if Intel wished to shift 10% of their revenues into after-market cooler upgrades. They hummed and hawed and finally decided against this.
There's a lot we can do to more fully exploit the chips we already have, now that the ground is not moving so fast under our feet. It won't have the glamour of more with more. It will be mostly in the unglamorous vein of more with less.
The same thing is happening in agriculture according to the Econmist's last "feed the world" quarterly report, written amid a growing chorus of worry "it's not like the seventies, how will we ever manage!"
According to Jared Diamond, more with more often achieves a pawn promotion to the hallowed realm of archaeology. It's no panacea in the long run.
Troll much? But let's take a refresher course, ten years later.
Should be a rule that you don't create a model that depends on Microsoft.
1-800-what-model-is-that? I worked in the 1980s on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean input methods. CJK input was a time-limited product, completely dependent on Microsoft, so of course we got eaten when they folded CJK fonts and IME into the operating system.
Your sentiment really pissed me off, because a lot of people gave blood to bring Microsoft down a peg or two in the 1990s so that in this day and age young people might suppose you actually know what you're talking about (other models existing, as they do now) when you spout nonsense like that.
Watcom C/C++ was a superior compiler, but it got eaten alive by Visual C++, a product which set the C++ language back by almost five years by pretending to support standard features, but then only implemented namespaces one level deep, and cutting ever other corner in the template system a harried reviewer would miss on the first day (that was policy in all of their development plans).
It was as if Visual C++ promised support for K&R C 100% except that nesting of curly braces was only permitted in main(). Nesting braces aren't very important, there are work-arounds. We'll get to it in a future release. Meanwhile: 1) Put your entire program in main(); Cry baby. 2) the comma operator is your friend; 3) assign variables within the expression of first use; 4) write your program in FORTH and cross-compile; achieve code re-use through the use of the #define facility; use VBASIC instead, it has no pretense to scale, and can't hurt you.
Until Microsoft, nobody dreamed what you could do with the CPP in a pinch. If Google Code had existed in the late nineties, #ifdef _MSC_VER would have made the Google Zeitgeist.
There's no denying the colossal stupidity of many of Microsoft's main competitors. I've even read comments by Microsoft execs who basically said "we were amazed to watch our competitors blow themselves up". So true.
They never said that about Netscape. But what's one set of Nixon tapes among friends, anyhow, or forged video tapes submitted to the U.S. Justice Department?
Microsoft submitted a second inaccurate videotape into evidence later the same month as the first. The issue in question was how easy or hard it was for America Online users to download and install Netscape Navigator onto a Windows PC. Microsoft's videotape showed the process as being quick and easy, resulting in the Netscape icon appearing on the user's desktop. The government produced its own videotape of the same process, revealing that Microsoft's videotape had conveniently removed a long and complex part of the procedure and that the Netscape icon was not placed on the desktop, requiring a user to search for it. Brad Chase, a Microsoft vice president, verified the government's tape and conceded that Microsoft's own tape was falsified.
You need to bone up on game theory. After destroying a well-managed competitor funded on a world record IPO through a multitude of dirty tricks, a lot of smart people wandered around in a daze dialing 1-800-what-model-is-that?
Top three fatal flaws in a 1990s era business model if your potential competitor was Microsoft: 1. Revenue 2. Market share 3. Profit
I recall it was the shops who were most dependent on Microsoft who made out best. Visio was an extremely well behaved ISV and they were ultimately rewarded for their OLE monstrosity. Is that what you had in mind? The independence of toady-hood?
Food is essentially a chemical. DNA is a chemical. Should we be surprised that one chemical would have an effect on other chemicals?
Not in dead tissue. In living organisms, enzymatic Q is a big deal. Achieving a high Q is pretty much the mandate of evolution toward complexity. See Freeman Dyson's little monograph "Origins of Life" from 1985. Interfering effects would tend to lower system Q, but now that we can examine the Swiss cheese in nanoscopic detail, I'm not surprising to find a few little green men hammocking in the bubbles.
Broadly, however, there would be considerable surprise if this was pervasive on the same scale as innate genetic expression mechanisms. If not, the co-evolutionary factor is far greater than anyone has yet surmised (zen spewing potheads excluded).
I don't hate Phoronix either, but he's in a bad place trying to monetize eyeballs connected to brains capable of tracking more moving objects than the Chicago-Washington corridor after a threat level upgrade from orange to burnt lavender. The mental airspace is crowded enough without adding biplanes with banners.
Why do the people crowing "use NVidia" put me in mind of Jack Nicholson shouting "You can't handle the documentation!" Damn straight, ya bunch of cowards.
Apparently, with enough documentation, no programming task is shallow after all. Didn't prominent memes in the open source camp put forward the notion that the only thing holding us back was lack of technical disclosure? Where are those voices now?
When the going gets tough, the tough get Binary Blobs. Not the banner I originally unfurled.
"RISC" and "freedom" are two of the most bent out of shape words in the computer science lexicon. When RMS designed "freedom" a new API, he fired off a scripting command to his global botnet s/freedom/free_as_in_beer/gggggggggggg/! but he missed the last "g" and it's been confusion ever since.
RISC actually meant Reduced Implementation Team Computing. In practice it meant "this is very cool, but we are way behind the big boys, but maybe we can catch up through a policy of extreme simplification clothed in FUD". Hardly anyone names a sexy new technology after a budgetary constraint, so it became known as RISC instead.
There was about a ten year period where you could do a CPU design on RISC principles for much less than a CISC design, while bragging about superior performance. This was always a bit disingenuous, since CISC chips were designed for the largest (and cheapest) mass production processes, while RISC chips were produced in much smaller lots with entirely different binning triage. Was it really ever the architecture?
The dirty secret here is that by 1996 the complexity of the execution core was only a small driver in project design cost. Cache architecture, cache coherency, bus protocol were equally or more important, and everyone had an equally complex design: there's no such thing as a RITC cache hierarchy in the performance space. The Pentium Pro was the first Intel chip which really nailed the caching subsystem. You see this when benchmarks hold up really well under load. On a lightly loaded system the Pentium Pro and the Pentium Pah weren't that different. Many were disappointed. But when you started to run a heavily loaded Windows NT, you really noticed a difference.
Some of the RISC people said about the Pentium Pro split-transaction bus "that's not a real man's bus!" What they meant was "if Intel makes that bus any better, we're doomed!" They all knew their real edge had been won by hard work rather than dumb lingo, despite the mass indirection in the marketing space.
Much of the performance of Alpha had less to do with architecture and more to do with some very expensive metalization layers which made the architecture possible. Bike frames filled with pressurized helium have not yet made it to Walmart (I'm brave enough to conjecture without clicking through).
This article is doing its level best to resurrect RISC as a badge of distinction purely as a market agenda. What a crock. I'd rather click through 38 pages of Phoronix.
Someone could do one of those sarcastic motivation posters titled "RISC" over a picture of a man with elephant balls on a trolly, and the caption underneath: "This is your compiler on Itanium".
Intel released the XScale to Marvell back in 2006. Is that what you mean? Besides, Itanium has better predication.
I recall maybe ten years ago people talking about how everything was going from C to just about anything else. But the reality is that C/C++ is still on the ground floor doing the heavy lifting.
I suppose if you're stranded on a ship in the doldrums, you shake your fist at the sky above rather than the ocean beneath, which makes perfect sense until someone follows up with the attention grabbing headline "Ocean Spurned".
I've used the SAM7XC512 before which was a pretty fat SOC with 128KB SRAM. This chip stacks up nicely (twice the speed, half the SRAM) and it really does have 5 SPI ports on the data sheet.
I'm meant that rhetorically, but money really is a bike shed of the human mind.
The global economy is the most complex system around (or second only to the female mind), yet confident opinions abound on less rationale that people put forward to choose their nail colour.
Differential equation with no stated boundary condition? Fine, it integrates to the same a priori answer either way.
Game theory 401. Prerequisite: Matrix math: Exception: People who opine about government (but please bring a complete set of oil paints to illuminate your workings).
As soon as the world "government" enters the debate, people treat it like the Explorers Club, and check their brains on the coat rack while handing their keys to valet parking.
So all they did was give even larger incentive for rich people to start playing games with taxes.
Oh god, welcome to the bike shed of small minds. Does that sentiment pass for intelligence when you are debating software designs? I didn't think so. Not if you're gainfully employed. While you're at it, why don't you observe that packets don't collide if you don't send any. Perfect network protocol achieved, without halfway trying.
Let's play follow the derivative. Wheeeeee! Welcome to tax rate zero, where honesty is a way of life. There's no other possible interpretation of your sentiment after supplying only the induction step. A base premise might be that we're already on the high side of too much evasion incentive. If you said that out loud, someone might ask you to prove it, but that would resemble real work, the kind you get paid for, where there's a difference between right and wrong, and it's better to advocate one than the other.
The miracle of zero taxation would be wonderful but for the annoying correlation between societies which manage to collect taxes and much higher standards of living, even with the monumental tax bite considered. Honestly, it boggles the mind how this could be. Africa: the 50,000 year anomaly.
Secondly, the incentive you are speaking to is a subordinate incentive. The primary incentive is to actually make a big heap of money in the first place. The secondary incentive is too keep as much as you can. If you put 100% of your efforts into the subordinate incentive, welcome to zero tax rate! You might miss the income you're no longer earning when you wake up in the gutter a year later.
Oh, but the primary incentive remains constant, and effort expended on the subordinate incentive comes from the printing press of human cupidity. The miraculous thing about a cupidity incentive is that it never subtracts from anything else you're already doing, so it's not subject to an equilibrium equation such as any division of effort in how you make your money in the first place.
Money can't buy you love, and apparently it can't buy you brains either. Try harder. Please. What you said shouldn't pass for intelligent thought anywhere geeks congregate. I'm not saying your statement is false, I'm saying that it's erected on unspoken Wile E. Coyote contingencies. Would you accept the same if someone out there was poised to pull the lever to unleash a trillion tons of SO2 into the atmosphere? FFS I hope not.
The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
However, congratulating AMD and holding them up as superior to everyone else when they are not is not the right way to accomplish this goal.
Everyone else? There are three horses in this race, and a few ticks hitched to the feathers surrounding the coffin bone. 90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial. Sometimes you have to integrate over quorum.
Intel isn't especially huffed about offloading high-demand computing to a GPU chip manufactured by somebody else. Without somebody else poised to siphon an artery, Intel would do everything in their power to level the field. We would have one coefficient of Moore's law governing performance, rather than two. Generally when you lash two horses together, the slower horse governs the pace.
Fortunately, the GPU swallowed the blue pill before Intel could do much about it. On the side of the fence with the big Cheshire grin, we have precisely two spectral lines of any significance: red and green. But you have to remember that both of these companies exist in an ecosystem where the bully in the china shop hoovers up the vast majority of the resources like the human race arrived on a shiny new continent.
It ain't easy feeding the sourdough culture known as Fab. It's the pudding mix in Sleeper, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
If your Fab blows a bubble, you're in a world of hurt. Around this nightmare, you have to knock off some of the most technically demanding design projects known to man, year in and year out. After you build a Saturn V, everyone wants a Saturn VI. The Saturn VI blows everyone away--for a year or two--then everyone starts to itch and scratch for a Saturn VII.
Back when the original Saturn V was crawling toward heaven at a top speed of 1mph, who exactly was "everyone else"? But let's not give the Americans any credit for trumping anyone else.
The painful truth here is that if you love open source, sometimes you have to settle for second best. AMD is slowly making good on the promise of taking this track, although it's truly frightened to think of how much oxygen has boiled off in their seemingly perpetual state of launch readiness. It ain't called Fusion for nothing.
At the bottom of the process this is an IP issue. Some people seem to think that open source happens in Wikileak time frames. It could work that way, but billion transistor designs would really stress out your onion router, and customs might seize your next mask set.
I played a chess game not long ago where I settled into the Siberian Winter defense. In other words, my opponent was better than me, but he fired his powder a moment too soon.
I was boxed in by the mate threat, and his mate threat was boxed in by my passed wing pawn on the other side of the board. If his quill armada didn't crush me first, my winter pawn would crush him later.
If you're asking "what has AMD's wing pawn done for you lately" I suppose the answer is that it sits there doing not very much.
In my case, not very much won me the game after 10 rounds of desperately accurate counter-parries.
In my coda, the question is whether this parable applies to the lone guy at the trading desk, or to the evolution of computerized trading safety nets which ensure that no one fails until we all fail, Dr Strangelove style.
There's a mathematical definition of hedge, and there's the social theory of hedge. The later means "but I think I can get away with it, so it's OK". The mathematical version depends on having correct variance models. If you don't, no hedge exists. Taleb 101.
Society would benefit from hedging itself against the tendency of bankers to hedge themselves deep into the grey zone.
Seriously, bankers talking about risk is a lot like Tom Cruise interviewed after filming Days of Thunder appearing to say--very fervently--that the idea from the movie that you can't control circumstance at 200 mph is full of baloney and that he really got mad filming those scenes where other characters throw this in his face. He races his own cars and believes in control over destiny, which is common among people who take insane risks.
Even if you have LTCM wonks dictating algorithms to be coded by nuclear power engineers and run in NSA bunkers, you can't escape precipice risk. But you can shepherd all the risk with your border collie safeguard systems into the universal millisecond of doom.
So in the lingo, an unhedged risk is the one where only one bank has egg on its face, and a hedged risk is where every fucking bank has egg on its face, and greater society picks up the tab.
Here's a question about ISP bungling. I signed up with Shaw in British Columbia pretty much the week they began service. I've used them for a long time, and have mostly been pleased with the service.
A couple of years ago, I started to have some severe performance problems. On my OpenBSD firewall, I would start a ping process and watch the ping arrival times. About once a minute, the ping responses disappear for 30s. Then all thirty ping packets showed up simultaneously with measured delays more or less forming the integers 30..1. And for a while subsequently, packets would flow normally again.
If the ping is the only process running, it would ping one per second for hours. As soon as I ran any other packet stream through the firewall concurrently, I would see this problem again. At the time I had a GB network switch which worked well, but tended to run awfully hot, and some suspect cable runs. I messed around with gear substitutions quite a bit thinking it was OpenBSD going strange with ethernet corruption. It's hard to imagine what corner of the room OpenBSD has available to send all those packets to cool their jets for up to 30s. For a long while the machine was a Pentium Pro that just wouldn't die, with Intel nics (usually fxp0). I also had many old Via Rhine cards around, and those were in there from time to time. My packet filter was bog standard with some of the scrubbing options enabled.
Finally I've convinced myself the problem is not at my end, and I call up Shaw. I get this chipper 20-something who thinks he has the world by the tail. My experience with Shaw is that 1/3 of the agents are useful, 1/3 don't get in the way, and 1/3 detect competence as an obstacle to concluding the service call. This guy was 99th percentile in the last 1/3. Smart enough to think he could define his way to a conclusion, but not smart enough to pick up the exponential decline in my tolerance for his behaviour.
The usual ensued. He basically insisted that we connect a "regular" PC directly to the connection. I used my partner's OS X machine, since "regular" for me lives at the bottom of a dark closet never to be exhumed. We went to a speed measurement site, and the connection performed flawlessly. Cognito sum ergo, Horatio, there has never been an issue with Shaw network configuration since the caveman woke up with a headache after sleeping on top of the monolith. In bakeoff-free inference logic: A => B and B => C, then A => C, where => stands for "doesn't fuck up" when used together.
I convinced him that this was not sufficient (to get me off the phone) so we continued to assess and we ventured into some simple A/B comparisons, I forget the details. He sent me off to the back room to reset the connection yet again (god knows why). I came back 15s longer than some of the previous times. He asked me why. I said, "first, before I mucked with new test, I checked that our baseline case had remained unchanged".
He was instructing the tests to run A - B - C - E - W - Vishnu - Xenu and beyond. I was going A - B - A - C - A - D - A - E. Only I was fast enough it took five iterations for him to notice. He chewed me out for not following his instructions to the letter. HARSH words were exchanged at this precise juncture. Shaw's telephone support recording device passed through the glass transition phase before hardening onto the capstan. We terminated the call and for a week I had no more time available to waste on the problem. Then one day the problem just went away. Magic. By this point I had permanently replaced the Gbit switch, and I thought, weirder things have happened, but is it really possible that OpenBSD has a 30-second holding tank for outbound ping packets only when other packet streams are running concurrently? There are things in life that are implausible, yet true, but these usually have some shred of potential mechanism before you discover how three balls all fall into the same pocket on a sin
You're both right and you're wrong. Nice stomp job on people trying to argue the case from inappropriate details. Now we can start an actual discussion.
In the bigger scheme of things, the adrenaline nature of the finance sector does lead to safeguards being trimmed in the interests of race to the buck.
There was an EconTalk podcast in the last year or two where the guest spoke about a proposed reform where a certain percentage of credit (I recall 5%) must be obtained from an especially sophisticated tranche of institutional investors. As I recall the thrust, it was spoken about with bankers at the highest levels and had support from many wonks within Washington. The bankers demured for what the subtext depicted as total B.S. reasons. The quip I remember was a moment out in the hall where the guest asks, "what's really going on here?" and the banker replies, "look, we don't want this".
There's the problem: neither of those phrases is likely to be recalled with 100% accuracy, or even transcribed accurately as I recall hearing them. I'm suffering a bad case of Google spam and I haven't been able to dig it up.
"Look, we don't want this" fell on my ears as meaning, "we know this would lead to adult supervision and spoil the party".
I'll have more time another day to wade through the EconTalk podcast transcripts. I was extremely disappointed in the direction of the discussion at this point. Russ Roberts went down a peg or three in my mind. He didn't seem to want it, either.
Don't tell me the bankers stalking the corridors of power aren't clever about slapping away the hand of adult supervision whenever they think it has actual teeth, the kind that leave tooth marks on giant bonus payments spewing out of a centripetal leverage pump.
Very nice post from the primordial mists of the AC. As the data points accumulate, it's becoming more evident that the AC did not branch from the human race as long ago as it often seems, but still walk among us, capable of intelligent digital locomotion, possessing the full modern complement of shift keys and angle brackets.
I've said it before: Tyrrell rocks. I grew up in the area, but only visited later in life as a tourist. When I trim my chin feathers and expose my Grenadier Guard chin wattle, I can do a bang-on impression of an Albertosaurus, or so I'm told. Like New Orleans jazz, it's bred in the bone. Either you have it, or you don't.
The thing that burns my biscuits about these press reports is failing to mental that Alberta had an equatorial climate in the era concerned. Along with fixation on the gaps (ever smaller and smaller), a certain sect would probably argue that equatorial drift does not require hundreds of millions of years.
If god grabbed the planet by the axle threads, how long would it take to shift the equator circa 50 degrees, and would we all feel green for decades or centuries?
Not that Turing tests are a mature industry, we need to start treating this with the full panoply of dismal respect.
First on my list, Turing deflation, as illustrated by the fellow who intoned at the OFA over bots reading from scripts "I call BS" with not a single high bit of ASCII sarcasm.
Seriously, Alan, you needed to set the bar a lot higher.
What's left of the man's legacy? On the Turing test, the computers mostly just sat there while humans limbo danced the bar down to ankle height. On chess, as soon as we made significant progress, the AI community added to their LISP programs:
#undefine chess_AI
All he's got left is the really long paper tape immune to the knottings of entropy--so long as it's massless and frictionless and you only make one--and that's really hard to manufacture and ship, even supposing your customer already has the Heisenberg sprocket feeder.
We could send the USS Capstan to a planetary system near you, but the tape would be a party line, and most of his theorems would fail.
Which brings up the touchy issue of one tape per universe, or else. What if another galaxy out there fabricates a forbidden second tape without obeying the rules of the infinite-tape galactic token ring? What kind of short-snouted creature arrives to adjudicate that? For example, what if a Microsoft comes along and decides, horror of horrors, on a different Sierpinski subspace embedding not yet registered at the Trans Galactic patent office for their illicit competitive tape? Two doubly-infinite tapes on different Sierpinski subspace embeddings would not get along.
I suspect we would soon find ourselves on the top of a single-ended list for the next hyperspace bypass, just as soon as the stubby Vogon fingers fix the mess caused by rewinding right through the massless feedstop. "What kind of moron put ends on a tape in the first place?" is the first message we'll read when we finally crack the cosmic groan.
Slashdot Mirror
What a crock comparing Flash to Watcom. Watcom was all about giving users precise control over compilation and linkage. The theme song for Flash was That's the way we like it, Uh-Huh Uh-Huh. (I never knew sexual grunts were proper nouns.)
The number one appeal of Flash to content developers was how little control Flash offered the user, if you foolishly crossed the installation chasm--the only user statistic you ever hear from the Flash camp.
What does Flash mean? Does not fade gracefully into your peripheral vision.
Watcom was brilliantly portable. Microsoft feasted on the dotcom bubble, during which time brilliantly portable was suspended as a development tool virtue long enough to extinguish a relatively tiny rival who was causing great technical embarrassment.
Around the same point in time, Flash energized on the brilliant business model that what the internet desperately needs to become is a 24/7 neon strip mall. Thanks for redecorating my lawn in the worst possible taste.
There were plenty type A software people out there who were determined to steal Flash's lunch money at the first opportunity, push it violently into a hallway locker, and leave it there until it starved to death.
Tell me that's a good long term business model.
Yes, you do need to be a statistics major to make any sense of "intersect soon". All users are created equal? All page views are created equal? It boggles the mind.
I sometimes wonder if 25% of all FF traffic is reloading my 200 active tabs every time FF or Ubuntu request a security reboot.
For every user like me who reads everything on my screen--if it warrants a flick of the eyeballs--there's probably 100 Joe pornloaders out there lapping up floppy crumbs.
Seriously, the first lesson in statistics is "wash before you divide". You don't know where those numbers have been. Ewww, if only you knew.
If PHK gets his way with software liability, either slashdot will have to start including definitions of "user share" in its never-fails-to-amaze TFA preamble, or we'll have to host a giant ten minute memorial service for the good old days when any random claim was newsworthy.
Coitus rarely leads to conception. Asteroids rarely strike planets. I don't think that word means what you think it does. A mortal blow matters every time. For a long time machines only had brawn, speed, or stamina. Things are changing at tremendous speed.
We're already seeing a sharp rise in income disparity in America and similar economies. The displacement is incremental, but potent nevertheless, and recent trends suggest this process is accelerating. No one has a convincing model for what the labour force will look like 50 years from now.
As it stands right now, Gary Kasparov would have trouble defeating a high-end cell phone over the chess board. This is an artificial task. Watson is less so. And so it will go. The word "rarely" answers no pressing question.
Dude, I wish you the best of luck. Loyalty is the hot ass you crave after wedding the invisible hand.
Corporations bent on cultivating the next quarterly earnings report don't hold much enduring appeal to informed consumers wishing to build relationship equity with non-human entities. Where does the loyalty come to rest in this system? With suckers, if you can find them?
The body beautiful
Are you planning to GAAP codify loyalty the commodity, or loyalty the sentiment? Watch your step, Groupon, there's a small crevice near you.
Severance is what permits you to grow yet another head after you misplace those who have gone before. You could always try picking up a discount head off the bargain rack, but the flighty shareholders will vote thumbs down. Or you could rent out the "captain of industry" chair for good coin to thrill seekers with Sim-City cred--except that the lawyers would spoil it. There goes your profit center. By the time your shareholders, the lawyers, and your directors+candidate/sucker all nod in agreement, it's another predictable episode.
There actually is something interesting going on here in the rumpled manifold of greed and commerce.
I think part of it is a selection bias toward winners. It's our heroism reflex run wild. If ten talented people vie for king of the hill (any career juncture from high school to grad school to middling rungs on the corporate ladder) and only one person prevails (probably as much through luck as good management), the winner walks off with the prize and a survivor halo. What price the survivor halo?
Then, like poker, you stake your halo at the next table (in the antechamber of Cloud Nine), in another round of lucky bastard takes all. What price your survivor halo now? Think of the halos as lottery tickets, where you have few ultimate winners at the end of the day. Making the first cut doesn't make your ticket worth anything at all except for prospects in the final draw. Only one person can cash out, so the halos are transacted in multiple rounds of winner-take-all.
Guys like Apotheker, who come into the job wearing the halo of halos (as expected by the flighty shareholders), aren't going to risk all that went before on a sour moment from a sour board (see Dunn, Patricia).
These people aren't necessarily more competent than their rivals, but there are only so many heroism slots available to the human psyche. They got one, their adversary didn't. We believe in success. We believe that success fuels success. Every year we award trophies in all the major sports leagues, whether the champion deserves it or not. It's the slot we hold fixed, while the champion varies. Then along come the carpers of competence, wondering why not all champions are created equal, as if competence prevails on any given Monday. Have you ever opened your eyes in a board meeting?
Shareholders want the halo of "born winner". You see this on sports forums even more clearly. Chris Drury: born winner. Look at his contract lately. Savvy halo owners don't transact on their trophy without a substantial safety net.
The only way the halo represents what it claims to represent is when having the halo grants you super powers because people believe in your halo. When exercising the power of that belief, your decisions might not resemble ordinary competence, and then the resentful competence carpers will fill you with darts. Your halo tarnishes, and you recede, diminished, into The West. You know this going in. Your severance prospects are configured accordingly.
Competence might be a better corporate performance model in long-term aggregate, but with money, the non-linearity of the cash-in/cash-out cycle drives people to manipulate time frames.
Imagine you hold HP stock and the company is positioned to earn 15% in each of the next two years. But that's not good enough. So you convince the exec. (though lush compensation) to represent earnings the first year as 20% and then you cash-out on a 20% annual return in one year, and free up your money to LRR somewhere else. Nice. Next year the company will announce 10% return and the CEO will probably get fired. So unless the midterm compensation was extremely lush, the CEO would prefer to announce 10% return the first year and 20% the second year.
This is why we get halo dramas rather than sustained competence. The aggregate return on the company often matters less to sharp interests than how it's spun. It's the same non-linearity which propels the finance community to b
I sequester up to 50 litres of carbon in my gas tank, until it's all gone, then I pay a lot of money to sequester some more.
All the gasoline I've thus sequestered septuagenarified in the paint (now in the process of peeling off). Speechless.
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with sky
carbon
beside the organic
chicken.
You should rethink your crush on the cute red-haired girl, and maybe settle for deoxygenated speaker cable instead--where basic research to applications cycles at the speed of CTRL-S in PowerPoint. I guess I'm jaded, too, about erection returns.
Serious question: How many headlines does it take to change a battery? Plenty, if you get sucked into the cul de sac of small iterative improvements in the suburb of basic physical limits.
Why do we settle for chump change? I suspect that somewhere among the 10^500 Calabi-Yau manifolds there's a periodic table where every headline is grand. How life organizes in this universe is another question, best explored by those demanding results yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Do take a map and a compass. The parameter space resembles Tokyo pancaked into a Mandelbrot. Just one small wrong turn, no headlines for you.
There are people in the battery industry who will knocking on your door shortly to seize your dielectric material in the interest of national welfare. You need a dielectric constant on the order of 1,000,000 to achieve this (in the context of telegrapher's equations, speed of light varies as sqrt(e_r)). By comparison, relative permittivity of barium titanate ranges up to about 10,000.
You might want to check your math. It takes only a few keystrokes to google "2cm/c in ns".
It would be nice someday if Google would give "2cm/c in ps" the same stature. What a world. Even the metric system can't get a fair shake.
To me a nanosecond seems pretty big. I've spent a chunk of my time over the last couple of years designing consumer circuits sensitive to changes of 10ps in signal arrival time due to changes in the surrounding bulk dielectric.
You haven't lived until you've read a datasheet with the performance spec:
Deterministic jitter: 300 fs.
Probably a PECL part, but still.
And no, they're not using an instantaneous tau to approximate a decay distribution. Anyone who has ever cooked popcorn knows better than that.
The whole point of Netburst was to achieve premature ejaculation in the frequency domain. This is what happens when people evaluate performance on a proxy indicator (given a choice between simple and correct, what does your average careerist commuter choose?)
Apparently it was a pretty good ruse, because ten years later, people are busy citing the frequency plateau as if it means a great deal more than it does. It didn't hurt Enron's raping of California that Intel took out a few hundred megawatts of generating capacity so that they could play top dog in marketing souffle GHz. Law of unintended consequence or not? Netburst was chosen over an alternate proposal (from their Israeli team IIRC) that later became CoreDuo. As much as Netburst marketing hurt AMD, it was maybe the last good thing to happen to them.
We could easily have 5GHz single-core processors now if Intel wished to shift 10% of their revenues into after-market cooler upgrades. They hummed and hawed and finally decided against this.
There's a lot we can do to more fully exploit the chips we already have, now that the ground is not moving so fast under our feet. It won't have the glamour of more with more. It will be mostly in the unglamorous vein of more with less.
The same thing is happening in agriculture according to the Econmist's last "feed the world" quarterly report, written amid a growing chorus of worry "it's not like the seventies, how will we ever manage!"
According to Jared Diamond, more with more often achieves a pawn promotion to the hallowed realm of archaeology. It's no panacea in the long run.
Troll much? But let's take a refresher course, ten years later.
1-800-what-model-is-that? I worked in the 1980s on Chinese, Japanese, and Korean input methods. CJK input was a time-limited product, completely dependent on Microsoft, so of course we got eaten when they folded CJK fonts and IME into the operating system.
Your sentiment really pissed me off, because a lot of people gave blood to bring Microsoft down a peg or two in the 1990s so that in this day and age young people might suppose you actually know what you're talking about (other models existing, as they do now) when you spout nonsense like that.
Watcom C/C++ was a superior compiler, but it got eaten alive by Visual C++, a product which set the C++ language back by almost five years by pretending to support standard features, but then only implemented namespaces one level deep, and cutting ever other corner in the template system a harried reviewer would miss on the first day (that was policy in all of their development plans).
It was as if Visual C++ promised support for K&R C 100% except that nesting of curly braces was only permitted in main(). Nesting braces aren't very important, there are work-arounds. We'll get to it in a future release. Meanwhile: 1) Put your entire program in main(); Cry baby. 2) the comma operator is your friend; 3) assign variables within the expression of first use; 4) write your program in FORTH and cross-compile; achieve code re-use through the use of the #define facility; use VBASIC instead, it has no pretense to scale, and can't hurt you.
Until Microsoft, nobody dreamed what you could do with the CPP in a pinch. If Google Code had existed in the late nineties, #ifdef _MSC_VER would have made the Google Zeitgeist.
There's no denying the colossal stupidity of many of Microsoft's main competitors. I've even read comments by Microsoft execs who basically said "we were amazed to watch our competitors blow themselves up". So true.
They never said that about Netscape. But what's one set of Nixon tapes among friends, anyhow, or forged video tapes submitted to the U.S. Justice Department?
You need to bone up on game theory. After destroying a well-managed competitor funded on a world record IPO through a multitude of dirty tricks, a lot of smart people wandered around in a daze dialing 1-800-what-model-is-that?
Top three fatal flaws in a 1990s era business model if your potential competitor was Microsoft:
1. Revenue
2. Market share
3. Profit
I recall it was the shops who were most dependent on Microsoft who made out best. Visio was an extremely well behaved ISV and they were ultimately rewarded for their OLE monstrosity. Is that what you had in mind? The independence of toady-hood?
Not in dead tissue. In living organisms, enzymatic Q is a big deal. Achieving a high Q is pretty much the mandate of evolution toward complexity. See Freeman Dyson's little monograph "Origins of Life" from 1985. Interfering effects would tend to lower system Q, but now that we can examine the Swiss cheese in nanoscopic detail, I'm not surprising to find a few little green men hammocking in the bubbles.
Broadly, however, there would be considerable surprise if this was pervasive on the same scale as innate genetic expression mechanisms. If not, the co-evolutionary factor is far greater than anyone has yet surmised (zen spewing potheads excluded).
I don't hate Phoronix either, but he's in a bad place trying to monetize eyeballs connected to brains capable of tracking more moving objects than the Chicago-Washington corridor after a threat level upgrade from orange to burnt lavender. The mental airspace is crowded enough without adding biplanes with banners.
Why do the people crowing "use NVidia" put me in mind of Jack Nicholson shouting "You can't handle the documentation!" Damn straight, ya bunch of cowards.
Apparently, with enough documentation, no programming task is shallow after all. Didn't prominent memes in the open source camp put forward the notion that the only thing holding us back was lack of technical disclosure? Where are those voices now?
When the going gets tough, the tough get Binary Blobs. Not the banner I originally unfurled.
"RISC" and "freedom" are two of the most bent out of shape words in the computer science lexicon. When RMS designed "freedom" a new API, he fired off a scripting command to his global botnet s/freedom/free_as_in_beer/gggggggggggg/! but he missed the last "g" and it's been confusion ever since.
RISC actually meant Reduced Implementation Team Computing. In practice it meant "this is very cool, but we are way behind the big boys, but maybe we can catch up through a policy of extreme simplification clothed in FUD". Hardly anyone names a sexy new technology after a budgetary constraint, so it became known as RISC instead.
There was about a ten year period where you could do a CPU design on RISC principles for much less than a CISC design, while bragging about superior performance. This was always a bit disingenuous, since CISC chips were designed for the largest (and cheapest) mass production processes, while RISC chips were produced in much smaller lots with entirely different binning triage. Was it really ever the architecture?
The dirty secret here is that by 1996 the complexity of the execution core was only a small driver in project design cost. Cache architecture, cache coherency, bus protocol were equally or more important, and everyone had an equally complex design: there's no such thing as a RITC cache hierarchy in the performance space. The Pentium Pro was the first Intel chip which really nailed the caching subsystem. You see this when benchmarks hold up really well under load. On a lightly loaded system the Pentium Pro and the Pentium Pah weren't that different. Many were disappointed. But when you started to run a heavily loaded Windows NT, you really noticed a difference.
Some of the RISC people said about the Pentium Pro split-transaction bus "that's not a real man's bus!" What they meant was "if Intel makes that bus any better, we're doomed!" They all knew their real edge had been won by hard work rather than dumb lingo, despite the mass indirection in the marketing space.
Much of the performance of Alpha had less to do with architecture and more to do with some very expensive metalization layers which made the architecture possible. Bike frames filled with pressurized helium have not yet made it to Walmart (I'm brave enough to conjecture without clicking through).
This article is doing its level best to resurrect RISC as a badge of distinction purely as a market agenda. What a crock. I'd rather click through 38 pages of Phoronix.
Someone could do one of those sarcastic motivation posters titled "RISC" over a picture of a man with elephant balls on a trolly, and the caption underneath: "This is your compiler on Itanium".
Intel released the XScale to Marvell back in 2006. Is that what you mean? Besides, Itanium has better predication.
I recall maybe ten years ago people talking about how everything was going from C to just about anything else. But the reality is that C/C++ is still on the ground floor doing the heavy lifting.
I suppose if you're stranded on a ship in the doldrums, you shake your fist at the sky above rather than the ocean beneath, which makes perfect sense until someone follows up with the attention grabbing headline "Ocean Spurned".
I've used the SAM7XC512 before which was a pretty fat SOC with 128KB SRAM. This chip stacks up nicely (twice the speed, half the SRAM) and it really does have 5 SPI ports on the data sheet.
I'm meant that rhetorically, but money really is a bike shed of the human mind.
The global economy is the most complex system around (or second only to the female mind), yet confident opinions abound on less rationale that people put forward to choose their nail colour.
Differential equation with no stated boundary condition? Fine, it integrates to the same a priori answer either way.
Game theory 401. Prerequisite: Matrix math: Exception: People who opine about government (but please bring a complete set of oil paints to illuminate your workings).
As soon as the world "government" enters the debate, people treat it like the Explorers Club, and check their brains on the coat rack while handing their keys to valet parking.
Oh god, welcome to the bike shed of small minds. Does that sentiment pass for intelligence when you are debating software designs? I didn't think so. Not if you're gainfully employed. While you're at it, why don't you observe that packets don't collide if you don't send any. Perfect network protocol achieved, without halfway trying.
Let's play follow the derivative. Wheeeeee! Welcome to tax rate zero, where honesty is a way of life. There's no other possible interpretation of your sentiment after supplying only the induction step. A base premise might be that we're already on the high side of too much evasion incentive. If you said that out loud, someone might ask you to prove it, but that would resemble real work, the kind you get paid for, where there's a difference between right and wrong, and it's better to advocate one than the other.
The miracle of zero taxation would be wonderful but for the annoying correlation between societies which manage to collect taxes and much higher standards of living, even with the monumental tax bite considered. Honestly, it boggles the mind how this could be. Africa: the 50,000 year anomaly.
Secondly, the incentive you are speaking to is a subordinate incentive. The primary incentive is to actually make a big heap of money in the first place. The secondary incentive is too keep as much as you can. If you put 100% of your efforts into the subordinate incentive, welcome to zero tax rate! You might miss the income you're no longer earning when you wake up in the gutter a year later.
Oh, but the primary incentive remains constant, and effort expended on the subordinate incentive comes from the printing press of human cupidity. The miraculous thing about a cupidity incentive is that it never subtracts from anything else you're already doing, so it's not subject to an equilibrium equation such as any division of effort in how you make your money in the first place.
Money can't buy you love, and apparently it can't buy you brains either. Try harder. Please. What you said shouldn't pass for intelligent thought anywhere geeks congregate. I'm not saying your statement is false, I'm saying that it's erected on unspoken Wile E. Coyote contingencies. Would you accept the same if someone out there was poised to pull the lever to unleash a trillion tons of SO2 into the atmosphere? FFS I hope not.
The "what have you done for me lately" crowd has an interesting way with words that never fails to amuse me.
Everyone else? There are three horses in this race, and a few ticks hitched to the feathers surrounding the coffin bone. 90% of the cells in the human body are bacterial. Sometimes you have to integrate over quorum.
Intel isn't especially huffed about offloading high-demand computing to a GPU chip manufactured by somebody else. Without somebody else poised to siphon an artery, Intel would do everything in their power to level the field. We would have one coefficient of Moore's law governing performance, rather than two. Generally when you lash two horses together, the slower horse governs the pace.
Fortunately, the GPU swallowed the blue pill before Intel could do much about it. On the side of the fence with the big Cheshire grin, we have precisely two spectral lines of any significance: red and green. But you have to remember that both of these companies exist in an ecosystem where the bully in the china shop hoovers up the vast majority of the resources like the human race arrived on a shiny new continent.
It ain't easy feeding the sourdough culture known as Fab. It's the pudding mix in Sleeper, the plant in Little Shop of Horrors.
If your Fab blows a bubble, you're in a world of hurt. Around this nightmare, you have to knock off some of the most technically demanding design projects known to man, year in and year out. After you build a Saturn V, everyone wants a Saturn VI. The Saturn VI blows everyone away--for a year or two--then everyone starts to itch and scratch for a Saturn VII.
Back when the original Saturn V was crawling toward heaven at a top speed of 1mph, who exactly was "everyone else"? But let's not give the Americans any credit for trumping anyone else.
The painful truth here is that if you love open source, sometimes you have to settle for second best. AMD is slowly making good on the promise of taking this track, although it's truly frightened to think of how much oxygen has boiled off in their seemingly perpetual state of launch readiness. It ain't called Fusion for nothing.
At the bottom of the process this is an IP issue. Some people seem to think that open source happens in Wikileak time frames. It could work that way, but billion transistor designs would really stress out your onion router, and customs might seize your next mask set.
I played a chess game not long ago where I settled into the Siberian Winter defense. In other words, my opponent was better than me, but he fired his powder a moment too soon.
I was boxed in by the mate threat, and his mate threat was boxed in by my passed wing pawn on the other side of the board. If his quill armada didn't crush me first, my winter pawn would crush him later.
If you're asking "what has AMD's wing pawn done for you lately" I suppose the answer is that it sits there doing not very much.
In my case, not very much won me the game after 10 rounds of desperately accurate counter-parries.
Three cheers for the winter pawn.
In my coda, the question is whether this parable applies to the lone guy at the trading desk, or to the evolution of computerized trading safety nets which ensure that no one fails until we all fail, Dr Strangelove style.
You be the judge. No hedge achieves measure zero.
You need to imbibe some Argumentative Theory, followed by a Black Swan shooter.
There's a mathematical definition of hedge, and there's the social theory of hedge. The later means "but I think I can get away with it, so it's OK". The mathematical version depends on having correct variance models. If you don't, no hedge exists. Taleb 101.
Society would benefit from hedging itself against the tendency of bankers to hedge themselves deep into the grey zone.
Seriously, bankers talking about risk is a lot like Tom Cruise interviewed after filming Days of Thunder appearing to say--very fervently--that the idea from the movie that you can't control circumstance at 200 mph is full of baloney and that he really got mad filming those scenes where other characters throw this in his face. He races his own cars and believes in control over destiny, which is common among people who take insane risks.
Even if you have LTCM wonks dictating algorithms to be coded by nuclear power engineers and run in NSA bunkers, you can't escape precipice risk. But you can shepherd all the risk with your border collie safeguard systems into the universal millisecond of doom.
So in the lingo, an unhedged risk is the one where only one bank has egg on its face, and a hedged risk is where every fucking bank has egg on its face, and greater society picks up the tab.
Here's a question about ISP bungling. I signed up with Shaw in British Columbia pretty much the week they began service. I've used them for a long time, and have mostly been pleased with the service.
A couple of years ago, I started to have some severe performance problems. On my OpenBSD firewall, I would start a ping process and watch the ping arrival times. About once a minute, the ping responses disappear for 30s. Then all thirty ping packets showed up simultaneously with measured delays more or less forming the integers 30..1. And for a while subsequently, packets would flow normally again.
If the ping is the only process running, it would ping one per second for hours. As soon as I ran any other packet stream through the firewall concurrently, I would see this problem again. At the time I had a GB network switch which worked well, but tended to run awfully hot, and some suspect cable runs. I messed around with gear substitutions quite a bit thinking it was OpenBSD going strange with ethernet corruption. It's hard to imagine what corner of the room OpenBSD has available to send all those packets to cool their jets for up to 30s. For a long while the machine was a Pentium Pro that just wouldn't die, with Intel nics (usually fxp0). I also had many old Via Rhine cards around, and those were in there from time to time. My packet filter was bog standard with some of the scrubbing options enabled.
Finally I've convinced myself the problem is not at my end, and I call up Shaw. I get this chipper 20-something who thinks he has the world by the tail. My experience with Shaw is that 1/3 of the agents are useful, 1/3 don't get in the way, and 1/3 detect competence as an obstacle to concluding the service call. This guy was 99th percentile in the last 1/3. Smart enough to think he could define his way to a conclusion, but not smart enough to pick up the exponential decline in my tolerance for his behaviour.
The usual ensued. He basically insisted that we connect a "regular" PC directly to the connection. I used my partner's OS X machine, since "regular" for me lives at the bottom of a dark closet never to be exhumed. We went to a speed measurement site, and the connection performed flawlessly. Cognito sum ergo, Horatio, there has never been an issue with Shaw network configuration since the caveman woke up with a headache after sleeping on top of the monolith. In bakeoff-free inference logic: A => B and B => C, then A => C, where => stands for "doesn't fuck up" when used together.
I convinced him that this was not sufficient (to get me off the phone) so we continued to assess and we ventured into some simple A/B comparisons, I forget the details. He sent me off to the back room to reset the connection yet again (god knows why). I came back 15s longer than some of the previous times. He asked me why. I said, "first, before I mucked with new test, I checked that our baseline case had remained unchanged".
He was instructing the tests to run A - B - C - E - W - Vishnu - Xenu and beyond. I was going A - B - A - C - A - D - A - E. Only I was fast enough it took five iterations for him to notice. He chewed me out for not following his instructions to the letter. HARSH words were exchanged at this precise juncture. Shaw's telephone support recording device passed through the glass transition phase before hardening onto the capstan. We terminated the call and for a week I had no more time available to waste on the problem. Then one day the problem just went away. Magic. By this point I had permanently replaced the Gbit switch, and I thought, weirder things have happened, but is it really possible that OpenBSD has a 30-second holding tank for outbound ping packets only when other packet streams are running concurrently? There are things in life that are implausible, yet true, but these usually have some shred of potential mechanism before you discover how three balls all fall into the same pocket on a sin
You're both right and you're wrong. Nice stomp job on people trying to argue the case from inappropriate details. Now we can start an actual discussion.
In the bigger scheme of things, the adrenaline nature of the finance sector does lead to safeguards being trimmed in the interests of race to the buck.
There was an EconTalk podcast in the last year or two where the guest spoke about a proposed reform where a certain percentage of credit (I recall 5%) must be obtained from an especially sophisticated tranche of institutional investors. As I recall the thrust, it was spoken about with bankers at the highest levels and had support from many wonks within Washington. The bankers demured for what the subtext depicted as total B.S. reasons. The quip I remember was a moment out in the hall where the guest asks, "what's really going on here?" and the banker replies, "look, we don't want this".
There's the problem: neither of those phrases is likely to be recalled with 100% accuracy, or even transcribed accurately as I recall hearing them. I'm suffering a bad case of Google spam and I haven't been able to dig it up.
"Look, we don't want this" fell on my ears as meaning, "we know this would lead to adult supervision and spoil the party".
I'll have more time another day to wade through the EconTalk podcast transcripts. I was extremely disappointed in the direction of the discussion at this point. Russ Roberts went down a peg or three in my mind. He didn't seem to want it, either.
Don't tell me the bankers stalking the corridors of power aren't clever about slapping away the hand of adult supervision whenever they think it has actual teeth, the kind that leave tooth marks on giant bonus payments spewing out of a centripetal leverage pump.
s/mental/mention
The vast majority of my typos are full word substitutions. No idea at all how that word leaked into the sentiment.
Very nice post from the primordial mists of the AC. As the data points accumulate, it's becoming more evident that the AC did not branch from the human race as long ago as it often seems, but still walk among us, capable of intelligent digital locomotion, possessing the full modern complement of shift keys and angle brackets.
I've said it before: Tyrrell rocks. I grew up in the area, but only visited later in life as a tourist. When I trim my chin feathers and expose my Grenadier Guard chin wattle, I can do a bang-on impression of an Albertosaurus, or so I'm told. Like New Orleans jazz, it's bred in the bone. Either you have it, or you don't.
The thing that burns my biscuits about these press reports is failing to mental that Alberta had an equatorial climate in the era concerned. Along with fixation on the gaps (ever smaller and smaller), a certain sect would probably argue that equatorial drift does not require hundreds of millions of years.
If god grabbed the planet by the axle threads, how long would it take to shift the equator circa 50 degrees, and would we all feel green for decades or centuries?
Not that Turing tests are a mature industry, we need to start treating this with the full panoply of dismal respect.
First on my list, Turing deflation, as illustrated by the fellow who intoned at the OFA over bots reading from scripts "I call BS" with not a single high bit of ASCII sarcasm.
Seriously, Alan, you needed to set the bar a lot higher.
What's left of the man's legacy? On the Turing test, the computers mostly just sat there while humans limbo danced the bar down to ankle height. On chess, as soon as we made significant progress, the AI community added to their LISP programs:
#undefine chess_AI
All he's got left is the really long paper tape immune to the knottings of entropy--so long as it's massless and frictionless and you only make one--and that's really hard to manufacture and ship, even supposing your customer already has the Heisenberg sprocket feeder.
We could send the USS Capstan to a planetary system near you, but the tape would be a party line, and most of his theorems would fail.
Which brings up the touchy issue of one tape per universe, or else . What if another galaxy out there fabricates a forbidden second tape without obeying the rules of the infinite-tape galactic token ring? What kind of short-snouted creature arrives to adjudicate that? For example, what if a Microsoft comes along and decides, horror of horrors, on a different Sierpinski subspace embedding not yet registered at the Trans Galactic patent office for their illicit competitive tape? Two doubly-infinite tapes on different Sierpinski subspace embeddings would not get along.
I suspect we would soon find ourselves on the top of a single-ended list for the next hyperspace bypass, just as soon as the stubby Vogon fingers fix the mess caused by rewinding right through the massless feedstop. "What kind of moron put ends on a tape in the first place?" is the first message we'll read when we finally crack the cosmic groan.