It's not just a matter of privacy. Repeating false information about a person runs foul of libel and slander.
The credit rating agencies have some kind of weird exemption under law from being sued under libel or slander. So if a creditor gives a credit agency false information about your payment history, it's a huge ordeal to get this expunged, and meanwhile you can't sue the credit rating agency for broadcasting what would be a libellous falsehood in any other context.
These people, not so lucky.
I don't think the credit rating agencies want to see big issues surrounding libel and slander challenged in court. They have it good. Hardly anyone ever points out their cozy loophole. Either they'll choose to prop up the legitimacy of these fringe collators, or they'll be distributing severed horse heads to make them go away.
The late '90s were a zenith of Western society, a fair balance of regulation and freedom; technology and tradition.
You've got to be kidding. This ranks right up there with Jody Foster defending Mel Gibson as "not such a bad guy to work with" while the Russell Williams story was breaking in Canada. He was a great guy in the office, too, but had defects in other life aspects.
You cleverly post this right after I finish reading a long treatise on the nutter-of-the-moment and his trigger words.
One sentence (nice touch with the semicolon) before you spout on the G-word. Plus you're potty mouth to no useful effect.
But let's argue the point. If the late 90s was a zenith, it was the kind of zenith that ought to include a parachute, but doesn't, or the parachutes are fabricated in metal: gold for the precious few, lead for everyone else. Nortel stock needed a parachute *and* a heat shield *and* a giant sofa cushion.
I just finished watching the movie Moon. There's a character who throws up in his space suit. His slashdot nick was Ralph Nadir, cause throwing up in a space suit is a *bad* day at the office. How did you pick your nick?
Or am I not giving you enough credit all around, and you're actually talking about the late 1890s?
The only way you're going to get screwed is that if Amazon decides having your application priced in an uncompetitive way is going to maximize their return on another app.
Conflict of interest here, any way you slice it. But not so different than mall contracts, which cleverly prevent internal competition.
Even malls don't have the balls to directly dictate retail price levels.
The Evergreen 5xxx cards were well ahead of Nvidia in performance and power consumption. Over the longer term, AMDs openness about hardware specs. will play out to their advantage. A policy direction like this one takes years to play out. They decided to invest development effort into cleaning up their code base so they could open source the majority of the specifications. This is a slow process and likely diverted talent from bug fixing their proprietary drivers. Meanwhile Linux is trending to a saner architecture for support of modern video cards. I can see Linux driver support (for AMD at least) becoming a strength two or three years from now.
From another perspective AMD simultaneously bet the farm and bit off more than they could chew with their fusion ambitions. Maybe they could chew it, but the kind of slow chewing you do when your cheeks are too full. The Global Foundries transition also added to the chipmunk cheeks.
It would have been a killer initiative had it been released on the original time frame, and still looks pretty good if their releases this year are quality out of the gate. They aren't in a good position to stumble again.
Slowly the driver support and the product releases are coming closer together. Hate to see them becoming the Postgres of the graphics industry. So much better it's not even funny, but at the bottom of most people's lists for reasons forgotten to time.
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Isn't that written somewhere in the Linux license agreement?
That's like saying mass murder is good because it makes people interested in police work. Talk about zero merit.
Wow, there was an opportunity there to fire up the brain before twitching the fingers. W. was amazingly fluid and eloquent when discussing the ultimate form of punishment. In some people absolutist sentiments (mass murderer, sex criminal, foreigners who dress funny) have an express train to vocalization, and sober reflection never leaves the station.
I think of astrologers as map makers who got a bit carried away drawing sea monsters. The reason we agreed upon constellations in the first place is so that people could have efficient conversations about not blundering into peril on moonless nights.
It's unfortunately that astrology evolved into the society for the preservation of sea monsters. Did the Catholic church ever take a stand against rococo illustrations of the terrifyingly unknown? I think not. Even so, astrology was the inception of astronomical literacy, larded with silly superstition, in much the same way that the modern medical student memorizes many ridiculous sentences.
When Middle Earth finally deleted Saron, the world of hobbits and men was definitely a better place, though much of value diminished as a result. That was a primary theme. Brave New World explores where we end up if we succeed in discarding everything that troubles us (in addition to mass murder, society discards natural childbirth and heartbreak). Not just a theme, it was the actual title.
What a good psychiatrist understands is that drive-through exorcism leaves people in a vulnerable state. Your inner life was organized in relation to the missing horror, tectonic plates shift to fill the gap, and there's always the risk that the dwarves of Moria will dig too deep in another mine shaft. Do you end up better off? Does your white wizard have nine lives?
I think a conservative doctor would inspect the hairy mole of astrology and say "do nothing, it's causing no real harm, and it's removal runs close to delicate nerves".
I think your typing speed and your reading speed are linked together.
The article does a great job of laying out means and motive and avenues of military conspiracy, and furthermore, documents that the means are exceptionally esoteric and that the motives precisely align with recent policy statements on the parts of the alleged conspirators, who I might add have a brazen rap sheet, but who now seem to increasingly fear "three strikes and you're a lout".
Where the article fails hopelessly is explaining what a three year delay actually buys us. What's the leverage point? Is this just a bunch of politicians playing "not on my watch" or will the Risk board change in some interesting way over the short hiatus?
Will the Ahmadinejad faction wane as a result? Will it cause the Iranians a crisis of confidence in foreign technology procurement? This bit the Russians hard after the Siberian pipeline thing. Will the Americans sew things up in Iraq over that time period to enable them to better address the Iran situation when the pot finally boils?
These are the real questions the article fails to address.
Concerning the slow news day knee jerk, I don't understand why the jury convicted Hans Reiser. It was nothing but informed conjecture about an arrogant prick until he cracked post sentencing.
If 'Machiavellien' is intended as a faux German plural, it's almost funny.
The whole thing is entirely Machiavellien, including the MPAA's worst fear that if we ignore the boobirds among our ranks long enough to discover we *can* win this battle, they're completely screwed. Power is brittle in that way. From what I've read of Machiavelli, that was his thesis statement, and one of driving factors in why alliances are so fluid: everyone has their finger in the wind, all the time.
I don't understand why this battle is ultimately hard to win. It's an established fact that H.264 has dubious intimate hygiene (concerning licensing terms). Yeah, but she's a looker, and went to a slightly better dentist than her twin sister, who is captain of her field hockey team and a lemon twist decisively less attractive on her Facebook page.
What DiBona had to say about the visual difference is that there isn't much for mass streaming, except that VP8 streams better from the infrastructure perspective. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that interview except that Chris is definitely a sharp guy. I think he's 80% a straight shooter and 20% shrewd reality distortion field.
The next time some wanker within earshot complains that their favorite H.264 feed isn't accessible I'll loudly explain that the president of the MPAA is currently fighting extradition to Sweden and we don't yet know how it will pan out, whereas VP8 has none of the same legal encumbrances.
Machiavellian? Yes.
And if anyone with a clue complains, I'll admit that, yes, it's technically a difference rape and legal encumbrance, and the problems with Paypal on one side are mirrored by the frequent glitches in the Vigpull account on the other.
And after several generations, you'd have a new species,' he said."
We sure don't need that, we already have sensational slashdot editors completely lacking in the office of gravity. Fortunately it's 04:00 and I don't have the physical energy to hammer my brains out, though this troll caption gave me good incentive.
Krugman's economic views are coherent, not terribly deep, and potentially wrong, yet he does a more credible job of putting his ideas forward than the people who hate his ideas most (of putting their own ideas forward).
In this context, "potentially wrong" is a merit point, as distinct from ideological views, which are never wrong.
I see no reason to lump Krugman in with a flagrant quack. One of his least deep observations is that "fiscal restraint" in government does a lot more to serve the mid to long term interests of the financial elite than it does to help out a family having trouble paying their mortgage during a recession caused by excesses of the aforementioned elite. Or maybe this is so obvious it can only be seen with bifocals.
Unfortunately, the rhetorical temperature in Washington permits a dancing gorilla to wander around the basketball court without the general public cluing in. Krugman speaks against this, which makes him dumb by association.
This is an addition to my previous post because the barest notion of Galileo in sway to his contemporaries makes me gag. I'm not buying Feyeraband's dipshit tractor beam, as explained by a well conceived post that actually shed more light than most others.
Technically, by Newtonian standards, even the moon orbits the sun more so than the Earth.
First of all, the moon's attraction to the sun is double the moon's attraction to the earth. Then check out the last comment that the moon's orbit is nowhere convex inward (to the sun). He's putting forward the claim that in geometric terms, the moon's path would be right at home on the Indy left-turn 500. Even if a car pulls to the outside to pass, the left turn still dominates. They could do this without ever turning the steering wheel in the rightward direction. More left, or less left. Drift a bit to the inside, then a bit back to the outside. That's how the moon orbits the sun.
If a pair of cars take turns passing each other on the outside, are they orbiting each other, or are they still going around the track? From the car cam perspective, your main adversary looks a lot like a satellite.
In the king's ballroom, your GF thinks you're spinning around her, but your host thinks you're spinning around the dance hall. How Galileo ever sorted this out in his mind is beyond me.
If that's his conclusion, I don't trust his analysis of Galileo one bit. If the sun and the earth were the only bodies in the universe, it would be darn difficult to tell which one goes around the other. Most of contemporary thinking was rushing to conclusions on propositions with multiple valid interpretations against known observation.
Jupiter goes around both the sun and the earth, though the sun stays closer to the center if you're into averaging out. It's the mysterious case of Venus never appearing in the midnight sky that sets one to thinking. Galileo was Italian. He was plenty familiar with Venus.
I'm sure Galileo, like Feyerabend, thought most of his contemporaries were dipshits. Heliocentrism refuted by contemporary evidence? What contemporary evidence? The dipshit consensus? I'd like to hear more about that claim. A Venusian eclipse would have nicely settled matters in favour of the dipshits. I don't think the dipshits were playing with a full deck.
So, regulation would be OK if there were no such thing as bad regulation, but private enterprise is OK no matter how many Enrons and BPs and Bhopals and LTCMs and Bailout R Uses blight society?
Good regulation is regulation which keeps the private sector blighters playing between the lines where they assume their own risks. Profit is good if you don't socialize loss. The private sector *loves* socialized loss. Who's to stop them? Surely not government?
Bad regulation is what transpires when the private sector incentivises government through expensive DC lobby campaigns. Note how in the case of bad regulation, private sector and government have joined in unholy wedlock. Why does government get all the blame? Double standard? I guess there's always been a double standard under the bedsheets. We'd have half as much bad regulation if the private sector purchased less.
I don't personally believe the internet was built to deliver movies on demand at negligible cost, or more accurately, at a cost subsidized by those of us who don't gorge at the video on demand buffet.
I do believe that bandwidth costs should decline (exponentially) over time at a steady rate. Eventually even video on demand will be a small fraction of built capacity, and it can be charged at pennies on the GB. For now, that remains a fiction. Capital costs were immense and someone has to foot the bill.
What peeves me most is that after the capital cost is recouped, the rates never descend anywhere close to the rate of decline in cost structure. Util recently, Telus was expunging my voice mail messages if I had more than thirty or so that I was slow deleting. Judging from the Telus policy in 2005, ten minutes of accumulated voice mail at an 8kbit sampling rate (not counting pauses) was bringing their servers down.
Can't imagine how those same Telus execs are coping a mere five years later with 2 hours/day of HDTV on demand for every customer who can't recall the Reagan assassination attempt.
Okay, then I'll RTFA. Oh wait, two screens worth of text later and it still hasn't [defined his terms].
The man knows how to bury his lead like no other. About twenty-five screens down (I follow the rule of setting the font size so I can lean back and page down with my toes) he finally spits it out the thesis sentence:
By inserting such egregiously large buffers into the network, we have destroyed TCP's congestion avoidance algorithms.
So you don't measure power or power consumption in Volts, but you can compare power consumption in Volts if resistances remain similar.
Cool, there aren't so many of us left who still use ECL. A recent project had a single flip-flop consuming a constant 1/8 watt IIRC. A nice little one bit memory, with jitter so low you can hardly measure it. I'm pretty sure I read a data sheet on a SiGe LVPECL part with cycle to cycle switching jitter specified in femtoseconds. The beauty of constant power draw.
Aside from that, I'm not sure why we're talking about resistive-load DRAM.
The fact that RAM is faster and offers lower latency than just about anything else in the system has been true more or less forever.
This is the problem when the article is so poor to begin with, if you're not careful, you're pulled down to the same inane level. Since my brain isn't working well after reading that tripe, let me add that GaAs has been faster than silicon more or less forever. OK, I'm better now.
Let's not go too far down that road, or we'll run into the truism that the quickest man for the job is the man with the smallest dataset (and the fattest wallet).
The more I think about that article, the further I drift away from the cognitive on switch.
Integrity rarely walks on the same side of the street with popularity. I admire Debian as an anchor tenant in the free software ecosystem, but I actually run the derivative with loose morals. I do make most of my choices with a bias toward freedom. Almost always choose ATI over NVidia due to driver licensing differences, even though ATI's drivers have a long standing reputation for being more difficult or less capable. Eventually AMD will turn the ship around. For an enlightened attitude toward freedom, I'm willing to persevere.
Well, being unable to upgrade to a newer version may be bad, but it's not as bad as the device not working with any version.
The FSF people would tell you that if the device doesn't work in the first place, it can't regress. Apparently this is a bonus in the hyperbolic geometry where freedom is proscriptive.
Sometimes, actually, the relationship with balky hardware is best ended before the OS installer has consummated a working reboot.
Other times impinging constraints dictate sucking it up and pressing forward. If it takes a binary blob to cross the river alive, I'm all for a binary blob, which I reward with all the mercy of a sled team feeding deceased Huskies to other Huskies.
The whole model is still too distribution centric, and not making enough allowance for the difference between one user and another. We all have our own set of mission critical applications. Sometimes a critical application needs to be stable above all else, even if it's long out of date. Sometimes it must be the last major release, even if the release has many problems. Sometimes you need both, and a way to control which is the default and which is the sandbox.
If I'm working with a bleeding edge C++ compiler release and it messes up my code generation, I'm prepared to hunt that down and deal with it. I'll probably A/B against another compiler that recently worked.
There are features on my desktop that are huge benefits for my productivity. At the same time, if my X desktop goes flaky, I don't have the tip of my fingers skillset (or the interest) to bug hunt. It's not my bag. Other people can do dogfood duty before I sign up.
On another front, if my IM client baked out, I might not miss it for a month or more. I know people who wouldn't last five minutes without their buddy list.
The conflict arises when a tool you've marked for aggressive update needs to drag in something unproven you've marked for maximal stability. This needs to be resolved by the user. Tentative updates with rollback points would be nice.
In my view, this entire debate is worthless until it's centered more around the requirements of the user, and less around distribution politics.
People will say "it's too big of a nightmare to have everyone upgrading on selective fronts". The same argument was put forward about template header libraries in C++. Everyone will combine the components differently! It will be a debugging nightmare!
Actually, no. The extra design rigour involved in making the components fit together in the first place more than compensates for combinatorial deployment. There is pain, but it's not that pain.
It's ugly in practice because it takes C++ into territory where the tools struggle to produce meaningful diagnostics. Concepts would have mitigated this in part, but it was ambitious, and it risked imposing bureaucracy, so Stroustrup wisely raised a red flag late in the day. Meanwhile, new compilers such as clang are coming down the pike that flounder less badly on obvious typos.
I don't think migration to heterogeneous updates will be painless. But I think the pain involved pertains to a real problem, one well worth solving. In the long run, debugging likely gets easier, because there is more variance from one user to another in installed components to correlate against. When two people report the same weird ass bug, they won't have a Zesty Zaphod identical to ten million other users.
It just takes a different mindset to treat combinatorics as an asset rather than a liability. The ground changes under our feet in more ways than we appreciate. The recent adoption of PEG parsers is a good example. No ambiguity, linear time. Why not twenty years ago? For the packrat parser, memory consumption is a constant multiple of the input stream. Has anyone looked at the backflips in TeX to avoid memory consumption linear to input size? In the 1980s, this was a no fly zone.
Will we ever trust the dependency graph enough to give the user his due? It can't be harder than unwinding the C preprocessor in C++ refactoring tools.
I may have little faith in our government, but I have a lot of faith in the average American.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. Do you?
Does your definition of "average American citizen" include people who can find Afghanistan on a world map, or not? Does it include Vitaly Borker? Men with long black cars in Jersey? The swelling ranks of the unemployed?
I watched several documentaries on the Iraq war recently with many interviews of American government officials at various levels. Amazing the number of competent people right below the top level. At the very top, are pompous bastards posing as pompous idiots making out like bandits in servitude to the kingpins of the private sector. I guess those people who control government, but aren't in government aren't "average Americans" either.
This asinine rhetoric about government is like blaming one side or the other in the battle of the sexes.
Or is the government to blame because government inherently attracts the grasping tentacles of financial power? And without government to manipulate, these tentacles would be somehow rendered harmless?
And another thing, I thought when reading scripture from the troll gospels, it was customary to cite chapter and verse.
I hadn't come across the term confusopoly. The other day I commented that lately rather than reading Dilbert, I check up on the developer blog at Open Pandora.
Market discipline (and invisible hand enlightenment) depend crucially on transactions between rational, well informed parties.
The prime order of business in a mature firm is to escape market discipline. Market discipline entails the risk of failure if you decide poorly. Who wants that, if you can avoid it?
I've spent far too much time in the past delving into the confusopoly of video cards. By the time a card gets a solid reputation for price/performance, out with the old, in with the new. Amazing what two determined firms can spin from essentially eight core chipsets (old|new lithography * bargain|enthusiast * AMD|NVidia).
In the Quandroid article the other day, it was observed that with so many players, the difference between good and great is a warehouse of unsold inventory, so companies are going to face a lot of pressure establishing zero-to-sixty supply chains to minimize inventory at risk. Confusolopies help to blunt this risk, by enabling sell-though before the market achieves product consensus. The movie studios do this all the time. They were none to0 happy about people in the early seating on opening night tweeting suck factor to their friends standing in line for the late seating. The objective is that the opening weekend depends entirely on hype rather that quality.
It's hard to equalize market share on the price signal when the price signal announces "you'll regret living the next two hours of your life" if you buy this discount ticket.
I first became aware of the complexity on both sides when a feminist GF back in the 1980s complained that women's shirts cost more to dry clean than men's shirts, ever if the garments were extremely similar.
I thought about that for a moment. My garments would have to be dry cleaned by gremlins for me to bother going back to complain that it was worse for wear. I suspect that young women are more demanding customers.
The same holds true for cell phones. Not all phone users are created equal. If this bugs you, I'm sure the feminists will be happy to strike up a deal on hair stylist and undergarment price equity.
I don't have a problem with corporations using price as a tool to minimize risk in their supply chain. I do have a problem when the contracts are so complex, the customer doesn't fully understand what that price is.
The purpose of fine print rarely promotes free market virtue, but instead functions to escape market discipline.
I wish we had different terms for different types of government regulation. Oppressive regulation is telling firms what price they can charge or what they can sell. Virtuous regulation is saying "we don't care what you sell, or how you price it, but the person you sell it to must understand what they've bought". You can't just sweep this under caveat emptor. In a mass market, you immediately end up with rational ignorance which benefits the larger party in the exchange and sabotagues informed commerce.
Shafting the customer with a crappy product sold at a premium price, that's OK, if the customer was dumb enough to bite. Bamboozling the customer to misunderstand the price actually paid or the product actually received, not OK.
For the shafted, once bitten, twice shy. This is good. For the bamboozled, never start an argument with someone who buys their ink by the barrel, prints walls of Latin in six point font that mutates monthly, and outsources telephone support to India. Instead of crap inventory rotting unsold in a Chinese warehouse, your society's human capital rots on the vine to India, or gives up and Fedex's the worthless junk to landfill.
The entire premise of free markets is to reward virtue. The entire premise of bamboozlement is for entrenched mediocrity to escape market discipline. Enron and the derivatives market as a whole were primarily exercises in bamboozlement, not just to escape market discipline, but to escape market discipline on the road to windfall profits.
Yes, I have to agree that occasionally Google sucks the hind banana. Electronic data sheets is one area. There are a bunch of squatter sites trying to sell you what a better search result set would have provided for free at the top of the list. For a while I had a feature on Google where I could zap these nasties, but the nasty zapper went away. Without notification. Poof.
There are a few search areas where I'm going to give Blekko a spin. Google is not good at accommodating certain personal preferences, such as my severe distaste for data sheet squatter archives.
And don't get me started on the disaster of searching for health information on the supplement SAMe or the programming language R. Yeah, one can use r-seek. It's a bit of a pain.
If blekko lets me type/R and gives me good results, Google will lose a slice of my action.
Google is cheating on this one. What they need is a way to signal that a search result is highly controversial, rather than arbitrarily deciding whether to bury it or not. I guess attributes are problematic for Google, because they are too easily traced back to the algorithm behind them.
There's a niche here for an alternative search engine whose business model is not so intensely linked to the secrecy of their algorithms. Maybe that's what Blekko is trying to do.
Some niche computer languages are excellent precisely because the ugly mega-industrial languages such as C, C++, PERL, and FORTRAN handle the worst of the toxic waste. It's less difficult to be wonderful when a language is not under the gun to be all things to all nightmares.
I'm looking forward to small spin-offs content to function under the giant shadow. Alpha and Blekko are the first two I've seen with any personal appeal.
Flippant comments about assassination should be dealt with as harshly as discussions of bombs in an airport. It's a very thin line between jocularity and nervous jocularity, the kind where you really mean it.
When Reagan was shot I recall thinking "I sure wouldn't miss that old phony" in the emphatic terms of youth. As I got older, I realized that no matter how many people think these things (I'm sure I was far from alone), they're not for sharing out loud, in seriousness, in jest, or mock jest, nudge nudge.
We've seen where that leads on the issue of Obama's racial heritage.
If I see one more "Skip this Welcome Page" I'm going to scream. I close them arbitrarily. If they have sound I never go back to that site.
Cover shock is nothing new. I used to feel the same way about nightclubs guarded by self-important muffin men. On the other side of the door, a wall of noise and twenty varieties of macro brew.
Google is weak in setting up a personal filter for places you never wish to visit. They are migrating traditional saturation-bomb advertisers to targeted marketing very slowly, one sip at a time.
The other factor to bear in mind is that people are unreliable in assessing their immunity to the slime factor (ads you didn't wish to suffer through, that affect your future purchasing regardless).
I'd like to be able to point my phone at any product in a supermarket and have the phone play the most obnoxious advertisement run on TV for the product instantly, so I can boycott on gag factor. There's hardly any direct punishment for advertisers who wag their junk in your face.
Google is trying to balance here on the cusp of interruption marketing and permission marketing, in the terminology of Seth Godin. The first five seconds of these ad clips will end up being a lot like movie trailers. For your standard action movie, a trailer often contains 100% of the content worth viewing reduced to half second snippets. Why anyone shows up at these movies after seeing the trailer is beyond me.
Godin somehow believes that products can be so exceptional, that permission isn't an automatic precursor to disappointment. Definitely, these products exist. And mostly they sell themselves. He calls them purple cows.
Maybe the one area where advertising makes sense is hawking overpriced accessories for a killer product to tap impulse buying during the love affair. What we all need to fill our hollow days is the toy that keeps on spending. I've had a few. Good times, kinda.
Wake me up when advertising figures out how to tap into a value system of self restraint. I mean the actual value system, and not just the T shirt.
Speaking of purple cows, one has to love Open Pandora.
GPUs are indeed an inexpensive way to boost speed in some cases. But they have been rather oversold; while some specific types of problems benefit a lot from them, many problems do not.
Where do you get the idea that GPUs have been oversold? Is the loudest mouth breather in the room representative of the general consensus? One vain, overreaching guy from 1960 who had spent too many hours hunched over a keyboard predicts human level AI within the decade, and the entire endeavour is tainted forever? All to alleviate one slow news day?
2000 BC called, and wants their sampling procedure back.
Sixteen lanes of PCI-e V 3.0 has a architectural bandwidth of 16 GB/s and we're looking at about 4GB of local memory with very high bandwidth. The computational problems you can parcel up within these constraints is not small. This is before integrated GPUs becomes commonplace fabricated on the same die, with or without the IBM pixie dust.
For thirty years we enjoyed the regime that a rising tide lifts all boats. Everyone worked within a single dominant programming paradigm and (nearly) every program benefited from clock speed. Memory latency was drifting to the event horizon, but we mostly dealt with that. Until we hit the thermal bend.
If that is the standard of reference, *everything* from the last ten years was oversold.
There's a similar problem measuring the inflation rate. If you keep a fixed basket of goods, you get a consistent measure of inflation that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Back in 1970, they gave you an organic apple for the price of a regular apple. But aside from that, who wants the 1970 basket of goods, even at half it's original price? In that basket, an iPhone would cost you a trillion dollars, and take thirty years to deliver.
If you update the basket to account for the change in the kinds of goods available, you end up with a lower measure of inflation. When a Cray is small enough to fall into the toilet, and you don't even hear the splash, that's serious deflation. And what value do you assign to gene sequencing bird flu over the weekend? In your standard basket?
Exploiting the GPU is not a quick fix. There are immense transition costs, and it only applies to suitable computations. Tragic.
But think about the evolving basket of goods. Here's a good way to do it. Take every package in the R programming language and ask what level of acceleration is available from GPU computing, once the transition costs are paid in full, and then decide if the GPU was oversold or not. R covers econometrics, data mining, and computational biology to name just a few.
That basket works for me. Or do you think that statistical inference over massive data sets has no relevance to the next twenty years? Are you saying that massive stockpiles of data are oversold? Really? That's a brave position.
I recall serious observations circa 1990 from prominent economists that the PC showed up everywhere in the economic data except for productivity. Relative to the 1980 basket of productivity, there was merit in the argument. In 1980, you changed your font once every two years. To successfully fritter, you had to play Pac-Man on CGA.
I get miffed when the standard of "oversold" is denominated in News at Eleven squeaky-wheel gratification reflex, while reeducating the entire white collar work force to a whole new way of doing things is taken for granted.
One man's oversold is another man's relentless progress.
To all those proposing that Palin is too stupid to be electable, what about the obligatory joke that Assange will be as hard to root out as Osama? Does that pass Palin muster?
Where does he go to blend into thousands of like-minded jihadists in the crags of the Misty Mountains? How does Assange appeal to the duplicity of Pakistan to mire the Americans in a memo generator of vanishing horizons? I'm guessing Assange has already pissed off the Royal Scimitar in half a dozen swarthy havens. Oh well, he wouldn't have blended without spending far too much dangerous time on a beach.
But have no fear, Julian, Ecuador wants you. No wait, offer rescinded. Too bad. Quito is rife with easy Swedes, and the CIA is afraid of heights. It would have been paradise.
Palin is doing a fair job of flicking the yo-yo of evil at any convenient thorn while dressed to sell with a rusty plug of tobacco in the cheek pouch of grammar. What other qualification does a republican candidate need? It's not like you have to debate Ralph Nader to become elected. He's not even allowed to enter the room.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just a matter of privacy. Repeating false information about a person runs foul of libel and slander.
The credit rating agencies have some kind of weird exemption under law from being sued under libel or slander. So if a creditor gives a credit agency false information about your payment history, it's a huge ordeal to get this expunged, and meanwhile you can't sue the credit rating agency for broadcasting what would be a libellous falsehood in any other context.
These people, not so lucky.
I don't think the credit rating agencies want to see big issues surrounding libel and slander challenged in court. They have it good. Hardly anyone ever points out their cozy loophole. Either they'll choose to prop up the legitimacy of these fringe collators, or they'll be distributing severed horse heads to make them go away.
You've got to be kidding. This ranks right up there with Jody Foster defending Mel Gibson as "not such a bad guy to work with" while the Russell Williams story was breaking in Canada. He was a great guy in the office, too, but had defects in other life aspects.
You cleverly post this right after I finish reading a long treatise on the nutter-of-the-moment and his trigger words.
Looking Behind the Mug-Shot Grin of an Accused Killer
One sentence (nice touch with the semicolon) before you spout on the G-word. Plus you're potty mouth to no useful effect.
But let's argue the point. If the late 90s was a zenith, it was the kind of zenith that ought to include a parachute, but doesn't, or the parachutes are fabricated in metal: gold for the precious few, lead for everyone else. Nortel stock needed a parachute *and* a heat shield *and* a giant sofa cushion.
I just finished watching the movie Moon. There's a character who throws up in his space suit. His slashdot nick was Ralph Nadir, cause throwing up in a space suit is a *bad* day at the office. How did you pick your nick?
Or am I not giving you enough credit all around, and you're actually talking about the late 1890s?
Conflict of interest here, any way you slice it. But not so different than mall contracts, which cleverly prevent internal competition.
Even malls don't have the balls to directly dictate retail price levels.
The Evergreen 5xxx cards were well ahead of Nvidia in performance and power consumption. Over the longer term, AMDs openness about hardware specs. will play out to their advantage. A policy direction like this one takes years to play out. They decided to invest development effort into cleaning up their code base so they could open source the majority of the specifications. This is a slow process and likely diverted talent from bug fixing their proprietary drivers. Meanwhile Linux is trending to a saner architecture for support of modern video cards. I can see Linux driver support (for AMD at least) becoming a strength two or three years from now.
From another perspective AMD simultaneously bet the farm and bit off more than they could chew with their fusion ambitions. Maybe they could chew it, but the kind of slow chewing you do when your cheeks are too full. The Global Foundries transition also added to the chipmunk cheeks.
It would have been a killer initiative had it been released on the original time frame, and still looks pretty good if their releases this year are quality out of the gate. They aren't in a good position to stumble again.
Slowly the driver support and the product releases are coming closer together. Hate to see them becoming the Postgres of the graphics industry. So much better it's not even funny, but at the bottom of most people's lists for reasons forgotten to time.
"The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." Isn't that written somewhere in the Linux license agreement?
Wow, there was an opportunity there to fire up the brain before twitching the fingers. W. was amazingly fluid and eloquent when discussing the ultimate form of punishment. In some people absolutist sentiments (mass murderer, sex criminal, foreigners who dress funny) have an express train to vocalization, and sober reflection never leaves the station.
I think of astrologers as map makers who got a bit carried away drawing sea monsters. The reason we agreed upon constellations in the first place is so that people could have efficient conversations about not blundering into peril on moonless nights.
It's unfortunately that astrology evolved into the society for the preservation of sea monsters. Did the Catholic church ever take a stand against rococo illustrations of the terrifyingly unknown? I think not. Even so, astrology was the inception of astronomical literacy, larded with silly superstition, in much the same way that the modern medical student memorizes many ridiculous sentences.
When Middle Earth finally deleted Saron, the world of hobbits and men was definitely a better place, though much of value diminished as a result. That was a primary theme. Brave New World explores where we end up if we succeed in discarding everything that troubles us (in addition to mass murder, society discards natural childbirth and heartbreak). Not just a theme, it was the actual title.
What a good psychiatrist understands is that drive-through exorcism leaves people in a vulnerable state. Your inner life was organized in relation to the missing horror, tectonic plates shift to fill the gap, and there's always the risk that the dwarves of Moria will dig too deep in another mine shaft. Do you end up better off? Does your white wizard have nine lives?
I think a conservative doctor would inspect the hairy mole of astrology and say "do nothing, it's causing no real harm, and it's removal runs close to delicate nerves".
I think your typing speed and your reading speed are linked together.
The article does a great job of laying out means and motive and avenues of military conspiracy, and furthermore, documents that the means are exceptionally esoteric and that the motives precisely align with recent policy statements on the parts of the alleged conspirators, who I might add have a brazen rap sheet, but who now seem to increasingly fear "three strikes and you're a lout".
Where the article fails hopelessly is explaining what a three year delay actually buys us. What's the leverage point? Is this just a bunch of politicians playing "not on my watch" or will the Risk board change in some interesting way over the short hiatus?
Will the Ahmadinejad faction wane as a result? Will it cause the Iranians a crisis of confidence in foreign technology procurement? This bit the Russians hard after the Siberian pipeline thing. Will the Americans sew things up in Iraq over that time period to enable them to better address the Iran situation when the pot finally boils?
These are the real questions the article fails to address.
Concerning the slow news day knee jerk, I don't understand why the jury convicted Hans Reiser. It was nothing but informed conjecture about an arrogant prick until he cracked post sentencing.
Mozilla's VP of Engineering On H.264
If 'Machiavellien' is intended as a faux German plural, it's almost funny.
The whole thing is entirely Machiavellien, including the MPAA's worst fear that if we ignore the boobirds among our ranks long enough to discover we *can* win this battle, they're completely screwed. Power is brittle in that way. From what I've read of Machiavelli, that was his thesis statement, and one of driving factors in why alliances are so fluid: everyone has their finger in the wind, all the time.
I don't understand why this battle is ultimately hard to win. It's an established fact that H.264 has dubious intimate hygiene (concerning licensing terms). Yeah, but she's a looker, and went to a slightly better dentist than her twin sister, who is captain of her field hockey team and a lemon twist decisively less attractive on her Facebook page.
Geek Time with Chris DiBona
What DiBona had to say about the visual difference is that there isn't much for mass streaming, except that VP8 streams better from the infrastructure perspective. I wasn't entirely sure what to make of that interview except that Chris is definitely a sharp guy. I think he's 80% a straight shooter and 20% shrewd reality distortion field.
The next time some wanker within earshot complains that their favorite H.264 feed isn't accessible I'll loudly explain that the president of the MPAA is currently fighting extradition to Sweden and we don't yet know how it will pan out, whereas VP8 has none of the same legal encumbrances.
Machiavellian? Yes.
And if anyone with a clue complains, I'll admit that, yes, it's technically a difference rape and legal encumbrance, and the problems with Paypal on one side are mirrored by the frequent glitches in the Vigpull account on the other.
Judge Deals Another Setback to Mass BitTorrent Lawsuits
Jebeeeesus etch crisis, I have to kick this cat again.
What's the difference between a nerd and a retard? One of them can tie a Windsor knot, but I forget which.
We sure don't need that, we already have sensational slashdot editors completely lacking in the office of gravity. Fortunately it's 04:00 and I don't have the physical energy to hammer my brains out, though this troll caption gave me good incentive.
Krugman's economic views are coherent, not terribly deep, and potentially wrong, yet he does a more credible job of putting his ideas forward than the people who hate his ideas most (of putting their own ideas forward).
In this context, "potentially wrong" is a merit point, as distinct from ideological views, which are never wrong.
I see no reason to lump Krugman in with a flagrant quack. One of his least deep observations is that "fiscal restraint" in government does a lot more to serve the mid to long term interests of the financial elite than it does to help out a family having trouble paying their mortgage during a recession caused by excesses of the aforementioned elite. Or maybe this is so obvious it can only be seen with bifocals.
Unfortunately, the rhetorical temperature in Washington permits a dancing gorilla to wander around the basketball court without the general public cluing in. Krugman speaks against this, which makes him dumb by association.
This is an addition to my previous post because the barest notion of Galileo in sway to his contemporaries makes me gag. I'm not buying Feyeraband's dipshit tractor beam, as explained by a well conceived post that actually shed more light than most others.
Technically, by Newtonian standards, even the moon orbits the sun more so than the Earth.
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/98953.html
First of all, the moon's attraction to the sun is double the moon's attraction to the earth. Then check out the last comment that the moon's orbit is nowhere convex inward (to the sun). He's putting forward the claim that in geometric terms, the moon's path would be right at home on the Indy left-turn 500. Even if a car pulls to the outside to pass, the left turn still dominates. They could do this without ever turning the steering wheel in the rightward direction. More left, or less left. Drift a bit to the inside, then a bit back to the outside. That's how the moon orbits the sun.
If a pair of cars take turns passing each other on the outside, are they orbiting each other, or are they still going around the track? From the car cam perspective, your main adversary looks a lot like a satellite.
In the king's ballroom, your GF thinks you're spinning around her, but your host thinks you're spinning around the dance hall. How Galileo ever sorted this out in his mind is beyond me.
If that's his conclusion, I don't trust his analysis of Galileo one bit. If the sun and the earth were the only bodies in the universe, it would be darn difficult to tell which one goes around the other. Most of contemporary thinking was rushing to conclusions on propositions with multiple valid interpretations against known observation.
Jupiter goes around both the sun and the earth, though the sun stays closer to the center if you're into averaging out. It's the mysterious case of Venus never appearing in the midnight sky that sets one to thinking. Galileo was Italian. He was plenty familiar with Venus.
I'm sure Galileo, like Feyerabend, thought most of his contemporaries were dipshits. Heliocentrism refuted by contemporary evidence? What contemporary evidence? The dipshit consensus? I'd like to hear more about that claim. A Venusian eclipse would have nicely settled matters in favour of the dipshits. I don't think the dipshits were playing with a full deck.
So, regulation would be OK if there were no such thing as bad regulation, but private enterprise is OK no matter how many Enrons and BPs and Bhopals and LTCMs and Bailout R Uses blight society?
Good regulation is regulation which keeps the private sector blighters playing between the lines where they assume their own risks. Profit is good if you don't socialize loss. The private sector *loves* socialized loss. Who's to stop them? Surely not government?
Bad regulation is what transpires when the private sector incentivises government through expensive DC lobby campaigns. Note how in the case of bad regulation, private sector and government have joined in unholy wedlock. Why does government get all the blame? Double standard? I guess there's always been a double standard under the bedsheets. We'd have half as much bad regulation if the private sector purchased less.
I don't personally believe the internet was built to deliver movies on demand at negligible cost, or more accurately, at a cost subsidized by those of us who don't gorge at the video on demand buffet.
I do believe that bandwidth costs should decline (exponentially) over time at a steady rate. Eventually even video on demand will be a small fraction of built capacity, and it can be charged at pennies on the GB. For now, that remains a fiction. Capital costs were immense and someone has to foot the bill.
What peeves me most is that after the capital cost is recouped, the rates never descend anywhere close to the rate of decline in cost structure. Util recently, Telus was expunging my voice mail messages if I had more than thirty or so that I was slow deleting. Judging from the Telus policy in 2005, ten minutes of accumulated voice mail at an 8kbit sampling rate (not counting pauses) was bringing their servers down.
Can't imagine how those same Telus execs are coping a mere five years later with 2 hours/day of HDTV on demand for every customer who can't recall the Reagan assassination attempt.
Okay, then I'll RTFA. Oh wait, two screens worth of text later and it still hasn't [defined his terms].
The man knows how to bury his lead like no other. About twenty-five screens down (I follow the rule of setting the font size so I can lean back and page down with my toes) he finally spits it out the thesis sentence:
So you don't measure power or power consumption in Volts, but you can compare power consumption in Volts if resistances remain similar.
Cool, there aren't so many of us left who still use ECL. A recent project had a single flip-flop consuming a constant 1/8 watt IIRC. A nice little one bit memory, with jitter so low you can hardly measure it. I'm pretty sure I read a data sheet on a SiGe LVPECL part with cycle to cycle switching jitter specified in femtoseconds. The beauty of constant power draw.
Aside from that, I'm not sure why we're talking about resistive-load DRAM.
The fact that RAM is faster and offers lower latency than just about anything else in the system has been true more or less forever.
This is the problem when the article is so poor to begin with, if you're not careful, you're pulled down to the same inane level. Since my brain isn't working well after reading that tripe, let me add that GaAs has been faster than silicon more or less forever. OK, I'm better now.
Let's not go too far down that road, or we'll run into the truism that the quickest man for the job is the man with the smallest dataset (and the fattest wallet).
The more I think about that article, the further I drift away from the cognitive on switch.
Integrity rarely walks on the same side of the street with popularity. I admire Debian as an anchor tenant in the free software ecosystem, but I actually run the derivative with loose morals. I do make most of my choices with a bias toward freedom. Almost always choose ATI over NVidia due to driver licensing differences, even though ATI's drivers have a long standing reputation for being more difficult or less capable. Eventually AMD will turn the ship around. For an enlightened attitude toward freedom, I'm willing to persevere.
Well, being unable to upgrade to a newer version may be bad, but it's not as bad as the device not working with any version.
The FSF people would tell you that if the device doesn't work in the first place, it can't regress. Apparently this is a bonus in the hyperbolic geometry where freedom is proscriptive.
Sometimes, actually, the relationship with balky hardware is best ended before the OS installer has consummated a working reboot.
Other times impinging constraints dictate sucking it up and pressing forward. If it takes a binary blob to cross the river alive, I'm all for a binary blob, which I reward with all the mercy of a sled team feeding deceased Huskies to other Huskies.
The whole model is still too distribution centric, and not making enough allowance for the difference between one user and another. We all have our own set of mission critical applications. Sometimes a critical application needs to be stable above all else, even if it's long out of date. Sometimes it must be the last major release, even if the release has many problems. Sometimes you need both, and a way to control which is the default and which is the sandbox.
If I'm working with a bleeding edge C++ compiler release and it messes up my code generation, I'm prepared to hunt that down and deal with it. I'll probably A/B against another compiler that recently worked.
There are features on my desktop that are huge benefits for my productivity. At the same time, if my X desktop goes flaky, I don't have the tip of my fingers skillset (or the interest) to bug hunt. It's not my bag. Other people can do dogfood duty before I sign up.
On another front, if my IM client baked out, I might not miss it for a month or more. I know people who wouldn't last five minutes without their buddy list.
The conflict arises when a tool you've marked for aggressive update needs to drag in something unproven you've marked for maximal stability. This needs to be resolved by the user. Tentative updates with rollback points would be nice.
In my view, this entire debate is worthless until it's centered more around the requirements of the user, and less around distribution politics.
People will say "it's too big of a nightmare to have everyone upgrading on selective fronts". The same argument was put forward about template header libraries in C++. Everyone will combine the components differently! It will be a debugging nightmare!
Actually, no. The extra design rigour involved in making the components fit together in the first place more than compensates for combinatorial deployment. There is pain, but it's not that pain.
It's ugly in practice because it takes C++ into territory where the tools struggle to produce meaningful diagnostics. Concepts would have mitigated this in part, but it was ambitious, and it risked imposing bureaucracy, so Stroustrup wisely raised a red flag late in the day. Meanwhile, new compilers such as clang are coming down the pike that flounder less badly on obvious typos.
I don't think migration to heterogeneous updates will be painless. But I think the pain involved pertains to a real problem, one well worth solving. In the long run, debugging likely gets easier, because there is more variance from one user to another in installed components to correlate against. When two people report the same weird ass bug, they won't have a Zesty Zaphod identical to ten million other users.
It just takes a different mindset to treat combinatorics as an asset rather than a liability. The ground changes under our feet in more ways than we appreciate. The recent adoption of PEG parsers is a good example. No ambiguity, linear time. Why not twenty years ago? For the packrat parser, memory consumption is a constant multiple of the input stream. Has anyone looked at the backflips in TeX to avoid memory consumption linear to input size? In the 1980s, this was a no fly zone.
Will we ever trust the dependency graph enough to give the user his due? It can't be harder than unwinding the C preprocessor in C++ refactoring tools.
I may have little faith in our government, but I have a lot of faith in the average American.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. Do you?
Does your definition of "average American citizen" include people who can find Afghanistan on a world map, or not? Does it include Vitaly Borker? Men with long black cars in Jersey? The swelling ranks of the unemployed?
I watched several documentaries on the Iraq war recently with many interviews of American government officials at various levels. Amazing the number of competent people right below the top level. At the very top, are pompous bastards posing as pompous idiots making out like bandits in servitude to the kingpins of the private sector. I guess those people who control government, but aren't in government aren't "average Americans" either.
This asinine rhetoric about government is like blaming one side or the other in the battle of the sexes.
Or is the government to blame because government inherently attracts the grasping tentacles of financial power? And without government to manipulate, these tentacles would be somehow rendered harmless?
And another thing, I thought when reading scripture from the troll gospels, it was customary to cite chapter and verse.
I hadn't come across the term confusopoly. The other day I commented that lately rather than reading Dilbert, I check up on the developer blog at Open Pandora.
Market discipline (and invisible hand enlightenment) depend crucially on transactions between rational, well informed parties.
The prime order of business in a mature firm is to escape market discipline. Market discipline entails the risk of failure if you decide poorly. Who wants that, if you can avoid it?
I've spent far too much time in the past delving into the confusopoly of video cards. By the time a card gets a solid reputation for price/performance, out with the old, in with the new. Amazing what two determined firms can spin from essentially eight core chipsets (old|new lithography * bargain|enthusiast * AMD|NVidia).
In the Quandroid article the other day, it was observed that with so many players, the difference between good and great is a warehouse of unsold inventory, so companies are going to face a lot of pressure establishing zero-to-sixty supply chains to minimize inventory at risk. Confusolopies help to blunt this risk, by enabling sell-though before the market achieves product consensus. The movie studios do this all the time. They were none to0 happy about people in the early seating on opening night tweeting suck factor to their friends standing in line for the late seating. The objective is that the opening weekend depends entirely on hype rather that quality.
It's hard to equalize market share on the price signal when the price signal announces "you'll regret living the next two hours of your life" if you buy this discount ticket.
I first became aware of the complexity on both sides when a feminist GF back in the 1980s complained that women's shirts cost more to dry clean than men's shirts, ever if the garments were extremely similar.
I thought about that for a moment. My garments would have to be dry cleaned by gremlins for me to bother going back to complain that it was worse for wear. I suspect that young women are more demanding customers.
The same holds true for cell phones. Not all phone users are created equal. If this bugs you, I'm sure the feminists will be happy to strike up a deal on hair stylist and undergarment price equity.
I don't have a problem with corporations using price as a tool to minimize risk in their supply chain. I do have a problem when the contracts are so complex, the customer doesn't fully understand what that price is.
The purpose of fine print rarely promotes free market virtue, but instead functions to escape market discipline.
I wish we had different terms for different types of government regulation. Oppressive regulation is telling firms what price they can charge or what they can sell. Virtuous regulation is saying "we don't care what you sell, or how you price it, but the person you sell it to must understand what they've bought". You can't just sweep this under caveat emptor. In a mass market, you immediately end up with rational ignorance which benefits the larger party in the exchange and sabotagues informed commerce.
Shafting the customer with a crappy product sold at a premium price, that's OK, if the customer was dumb enough to bite. Bamboozling the customer to misunderstand the price actually paid or the product actually received, not OK.
For the shafted, once bitten, twice shy. This is good. For the bamboozled, never start an argument with someone who buys their ink by the barrel, prints walls of Latin in six point font that mutates monthly, and outsources telephone support to India. Instead of crap inventory rotting unsold in a Chinese warehouse, your society's human capital rots on the vine to India, or gives up and Fedex's the worthless junk to landfill.
The entire premise of free markets is to reward virtue. The entire premise of bamboozlement is for entrenched mediocrity to escape market discipline. Enron and the derivatives market as a whole were primarily exercises in bamboozlement, not just to escape market discipline, but to escape market discipline on the road to windfall profits.
Yes, I have to agree that occasionally Google sucks the hind banana. Electronic data sheets is one area. There are a bunch of squatter sites trying to sell you what a better search result set would have provided for free at the top of the list. For a while I had a feature on Google where I could zap these nasties, but the nasty zapper went away. Without notification. Poof.
There are a few search areas where I'm going to give Blekko a spin. Google is not good at accommodating certain personal preferences, such as my severe distaste for data sheet squatter archives.
And don't get me started on the disaster of searching for health information on the supplement SAMe or the programming language R. Yeah, one can use r-seek. It's a bit of a pain.
If blekko lets me type /R and gives me good results, Google will lose a slice of my action.
Google is cheating on this one. What they need is a way to signal that a search result is highly controversial, rather than arbitrarily deciding whether to bury it or not. I guess attributes are problematic for Google, because they are too easily traced back to the algorithm behind them.
There's a niche here for an alternative search engine whose business model is not so intensely linked to the secrecy of their algorithms. Maybe that's what Blekko is trying to do.
Some niche computer languages are excellent precisely because the ugly mega-industrial languages such as C, C++, PERL, and FORTRAN handle the worst of the toxic waste. It's less difficult to be wonderful when a language is not under the gun to be all things to all nightmares.
I'm looking forward to small spin-offs content to function under the giant shadow. Alpha and Blekko are the first two I've seen with any personal appeal.
Flippant comments about assassination should be dealt with as harshly as discussions of bombs in an airport. It's a very thin line between jocularity and nervous jocularity, the kind where you really mean it.
When Reagan was shot I recall thinking "I sure wouldn't miss that old phony" in the emphatic terms of youth. As I got older, I realized that no matter how many people think these things (I'm sure I was far from alone), they're not for sharing out loud, in seriousness, in jest, or mock jest, nudge nudge.
We've seen where that leads on the issue of Obama's racial heritage.
If I see one more "Skip this Welcome Page" I'm going to scream. I close them arbitrarily. If they have sound I never go back to that site.
Cover shock is nothing new. I used to feel the same way about nightclubs guarded by self-important muffin men. On the other side of the door, a wall of noise and twenty varieties of macro brew.
Google is weak in setting up a personal filter for places you never wish to visit. They are migrating traditional saturation-bomb advertisers to targeted marketing very slowly, one sip at a time.
The other factor to bear in mind is that people are unreliable in assessing their immunity to the slime factor (ads you didn't wish to suffer through, that affect your future purchasing regardless).
I'd like to be able to point my phone at any product in a supermarket and have the phone play the most obnoxious advertisement run on TV for the product instantly, so I can boycott on gag factor. There's hardly any direct punishment for advertisers who wag their junk in your face.
Google is trying to balance here on the cusp of interruption marketing and permission marketing, in the terminology of Seth Godin. The first five seconds of these ad clips will end up being a lot like movie trailers. For your standard action movie, a trailer often contains 100% of the content worth viewing reduced to half second snippets. Why anyone shows up at these movies after seeing the trailer is beyond me.
Godin somehow believes that products can be so exceptional, that permission isn't an automatic precursor to disappointment. Definitely, these products exist. And mostly they sell themselves. He calls them purple cows.
Maybe the one area where advertising makes sense is hawking overpriced accessories for a killer product to tap impulse buying during the love affair. What we all need to fill our hollow days is the toy that keeps on spending. I've had a few. Good times, kinda.
Wake me up when advertising figures out how to tap into a value system of self restraint. I mean the actual value system, and not just the T shirt.
Speaking of purple cows, one has to love Open Pandora.
Open Pandora - Hands on.
Tucker had nothing on those guys. But have no fear, as of two days ago, the nubs are golden!
GPUs are indeed an inexpensive way to boost speed in some cases. But they have been rather oversold; while some specific types of problems benefit a lot from them, many problems do not.
Where do you get the idea that GPUs have been oversold? Is the loudest mouth breather in the room representative of the general consensus? One vain, overreaching guy from 1960 who had spent too many hours hunched over a keyboard predicts human level AI within the decade, and the entire endeavour is tainted forever? All to alleviate one slow news day?
2000 BC called, and wants their sampling procedure back.
Sixteen lanes of PCI-e V 3.0 has a architectural bandwidth of 16 GB/s and we're looking at about 4GB of local memory with very high bandwidth. The computational problems you can parcel up within these constraints is not small. This is before integrated GPUs becomes commonplace fabricated on the same die, with or without the IBM pixie dust.
For thirty years we enjoyed the regime that a rising tide lifts all boats. Everyone worked within a single dominant programming paradigm and (nearly) every program benefited from clock speed. Memory latency was drifting to the event horizon, but we mostly dealt with that. Until we hit the thermal bend.
If that is the standard of reference, *everything* from the last ten years was oversold.
There's a similar problem measuring the inflation rate. If you keep a fixed basket of goods, you get a consistent measure of inflation that becomes increasingly irrelevant. Back in 1970, they gave you an organic apple for the price of a regular apple. But aside from that, who wants the 1970 basket of goods, even at half it's original price? In that basket, an iPhone would cost you a trillion dollars, and take thirty years to deliver.
If you update the basket to account for the change in the kinds of goods available, you end up with a lower measure of inflation. When a Cray is small enough to fall into the toilet, and you don't even hear the splash, that's serious deflation. And what value do you assign to gene sequencing bird flu over the weekend? In your standard basket?
Exploiting the GPU is not a quick fix. There are immense transition costs, and it only applies to suitable computations. Tragic.
But think about the evolving basket of goods. Here's a good way to do it. Take every package in the R programming language and ask what level of acceleration is available from GPU computing, once the transition costs are paid in full, and then decide if the GPU was oversold or not. R covers econometrics, data mining, and computational biology to name just a few.
That basket works for me. Or do you think that statistical inference over massive data sets has no relevance to the next twenty years? Are you saying that massive stockpiles of data are oversold? Really? That's a brave position.
I recall serious observations circa 1990 from prominent economists that the PC showed up everywhere in the economic data except for productivity. Relative to the 1980 basket of productivity, there was merit in the argument. In 1980, you changed your font once every two years. To successfully fritter, you had to play Pac-Man on CGA.
I get miffed when the standard of "oversold" is denominated in News at Eleven squeaky-wheel gratification reflex, while reeducating the entire white collar work force to a whole new way of doing things is taken for granted.
One man's oversold is another man's relentless progress.
To all those proposing that Palin is too stupid to be electable, what about the obligatory joke that Assange will be as hard to root out as Osama? Does that pass Palin muster?
Where does he go to blend into thousands of like-minded jihadists in the crags of the Misty Mountains? How does Assange appeal to the duplicity of Pakistan to mire the Americans in a memo generator of vanishing horizons? I'm guessing Assange has already pissed off the Royal Scimitar in half a dozen swarthy havens. Oh well, he wouldn't have blended without spending far too much dangerous time on a beach.
But have no fear, Julian, Ecuador wants you. No wait, offer rescinded. Too bad. Quito is rife with easy Swedes, and the CIA is afraid of heights. It would have been paradise.
Palin is doing a fair job of flicking the yo-yo of evil at any convenient thorn while dressed to sell with a rusty plug of tobacco in the cheek pouch of grammar. What other qualification does a republican candidate need? It's not like you have to debate Ralph Nader to become elected. He's not even allowed to enter the room.