I care, even if the rant is hardly original. My preferred version is Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It". I refuse to distinguish content from its conveyance. Nor do I abstract a loaf of bread from Monsanto's seed policy.
Interesting how Apple is redefining the user. The user as originally conceived has been replaced by the content consumer. The content consumer is used by Apple to make money. Apple is the new user. I suspect this is why Apple values ease of use so highly. The user is dead. Long live the user.
A large proportion of Ubuntu's usability problems stem from being a mouse in a minefield of corporate cross-fire. A ban on software patents would cut the usability problems by 80% Too often Apple gets credited for design what they achieve through control.
The cool thing in Wikipedia is that you can check out what really happened when people link to "stuff like this".
The repressed editor at the heart of "stuff like this" is harping on the gayness of a judge as grounds for immediate recusal on the legal matter in question. Without getting into specifics, I can see reasons why the issue might not be so clear cut. Do judges with children recuse themselves in cases of child abuse? It might be different in the judge had a child of their own who had been abused. I'm sure it's been discussed. There would be dictates on the matter that could be cited, as this response spells out in reasonable and participatory terms:
Walker's member of a protected minority class affected by the case was not an issue in the case, and is not related to the question of the constitutionality of the ballot measure. If that can be sourced as a major political argument, it might be appropriate in a "public reaction" section of [[Perry v. Schwarzenegger]], the article about the case, but it would have to be put in context with a sourced statement that judges who are members of a protected class (blacks, gays, straights, Christians, whatever) are not required to recuse themselves from rulings on the basis of affecting the civil rights of the class. - [[User:Wikidemon|Wikidemon]] ([[User talk:Wikidemon|talk]]) 14:39, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
Ten posts later the repressed editor (with no edit history of note) is referring to longtime contributors as asstards and flinging other profanities in all directions.
What is his response to the thoughtful interaction above? To go grammar nazi on a well intentioned person who misuses "overlook" to mean "look over".
I'm guessing you are not a native English speaker, "Native94080", unless you are actually asking us to ignore the case in question? Perhaps you wish us to "look over", "look into", or "look at" the case, meaning to observe and inspect for relevant information to the topic at hand?
I spent the day yesterday reading The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman (2009). Good, but you have to work for your rewards. Many of the classification examples use spam data. There's not a hope in hell this particular repressed editor would escape the classification bucket "asking for trouble" by any of the statistical methods I read about.
Folks, this isn't a [[WP:FORUM]]. What's to be discussed here is the editing of this article -- and since the matter at question is a single aspect of the public response to the ruling in a case related to this Prop which has its own web page, the correct place for possible inclusion of a mention of this response is on the case's web page... as Wikidemon noted. --[[User:NatGertler|Nat Gertler]] ([[User talk:NatGertler|talk]]) 20:21, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
Ho, he's not even ranting on the right talk page.
I've had hard work on Wikipedia undone by the next random moron who came along. It's not a place to indulge a perfectionist streak. I moved on. Mostly make small one paragraph edits to articles that clearly omit a point of merit, usually providing sources. 75% of my pebbles survive unscathed.
I'm a bit disillusioned about the quality ceiling. Careful writing tends to suffer instant bitrot. OTOH, competent nuggets fare better.
I think the quality problem is hard. People tend not to agree. It's hard to achieve high quality without basing the process on credentialism and prerogative of the elite. That works too, but there's already plenty of stuff out there on that basis, it's a much slower process, and Wikipedia benefits from being immediate, if not always great.
I'm sure there are plenty of cases where admins overstep the bounds. It's also true that the pungent miasma of disenchantment tends to have an inverse relationship in loudness of complain vs how well it holds up when you go back and turn the edit history stones.
War between America and China? It must be cool to grow up in an isolated wood cabin reading dusty tomes about world history from the 1950s then suddenly the satellite dish arrives and you can post on the internet.
Sorry, I missed which country is invading the other.
China could stamp out a billion machetes in just a few weeks. Rwanda was barely an hours worth of China's productive capacity. 18,000 Japanese soldiers cut off from their supply chain defended Iwo Jima for 35 days. You'd face 18 million Chinese just landing on the beach. Some would have weapons.
Or how about the Chinese invading Los Angeles. I don't think they'd survive the first commute. By the first number that came up, there are 65 million handguns in America. Imagine that these were not all pointed at fellow Americans for a few hours. It would make Mogadishu look like a mild celebration of Chinese new year. The bullets would be flying thicker than rice at a Mafia wedding.
Or maybe the Americans could hatch a plot to pump sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere and reverse global warming while secretly stock-piling a million M1A1 tanks to cross the newly exposed land bridge to China. Hey, it almost worked for the Germans.
A final possibility is that both sides would follow "A Taste of Armageddon" and China agrees to manufacture a few million suicide booths at an unbeatable low, low price with Walmart branding. This would be good for Texas, but might strain the agreement as the Chinese complain "do we really have to make them so large?" Meanwhile the Japanese embargo the entire deal in an effort to collect royalties on the bundled BluRay player and the Cell chips sourced from IBM overheat running the provably-fair thermonuclear simulation. It would be a fiasco all around.
Hrm. Previous post composed on an iMac will tiny little indistinct i and l characters and god awful chicklet keyboard with a dirty mind of its own. The joys of proofing in an eye-pleasing design font. My fingers are rarely wrong, but the i deceives.
It's a tool folks NOT a ball club, there is no needs for fans here.
Huh. I would have sworn it was a professional sports league with a binding fifteen year ELC, trade deadline two weeks into the season, head office review of all injury claims, binding arbitration with a league appointed arbitrator, exclusive ownership of stadiums built with pubic money, $10 hormone-filled mystery-meat hotdogs, and restricted free agency that doesn't kick in until age 35.
Yes, yeast piss is dangerous to consume. It's full of very tiny disease-causing yeast and bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right. It's actually sterile when excreted from the yeast cell, but if the (male) yeast cell gets a forked eye and squirts all over the toilet seat, the sticky residue breeds disease-causing bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right either. Yeast don't argue about the toilet seat. The whole analogy seems broken beyond repair. If I had fallen for the Gerry Germ propaganda back in grade three, maybe I'd now fall for the ruse that disgust is scale invariant. Have I told you the one about the soiled electron?
There was a lot of similar crap back in the days of Gerry Germ. The next school year, I was struggling with the idea of "cold blooded" dinosaurs. I got the idea that dinosaurs might be like lizards and not croak immediately if their body temperature fell to ambient, but I never cottoned to the idea that dinosaurs didn't quaff Gatorade to cool down after an intense one-on-one. I think my science teacher at the time was a bit tenuous on the distinction between homeostatic and exothermic.
My next science teacher was adamant that fossil fuels were non-replenishable, which struck me as a chemical impossibility unless petroleum was a byproduct of supernovas as governed by their rigid cosmological schedules. Later I figured out that "non-replenishable petroleum" was a statement of science by someone with bills to pay. From the point of view of paying your bills, petroleum is non-replenishable. I don't recall my science teacher once mentioning that uranium is non-replenishable, and this was well before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, so it wasn't yet clear this wouldn't soon become your typical tax-payer's favorite whinge.
We're pretty stupid for the most part about plants, too.
In addition to (bacteria==pathogens==germs) and (dinosaurs==lizards with giant bodies and small brains) and (petroleum==Genesis project) and (plants==passive and simple minded) there was the depiction of the electron as a tiny point mass, or sometimes an advanced mention of an atom's "cloud of electrons", but never any mention of hydrogen's "cloud of electron". Until you get the idea that one is a crowd, you don't get anything. You have to go one step beyond the misanthrope's creed (one's company, two's a crowd) to really _get_ quantum physics.
These days the biologists are tapping into the poets ("I contain multitudes") and it turns out that "one" is an entire ecosystem, even if it still takes two to tango. I might have cracked the sanitization of this in elementary school, but my books and teachers were strangely silent about the urogenital baton-pass routing around the bath soap. At least in this case they had a coherent motive for keeping the lights dim.
I was just getting used to stupidity as an additive to the water supply, and now it's available as a rock salt. FYI, from what I've seen on bad TV shows, the pursuit of stolen vehicles does nothing for public safety, either. Perhaps apprehending pedophiles at gun point also carries unacceptable risk.
Where exactly does "unintended" fit into this? Where is the data that any kind of impingement on the addictive behaviours of narcissistic scoff-laws doesn't end badly?
My attitude is that people determined to behave like children need to be treated like children. Less autonomy. This could take many forms, such as a vigilance camera pointed at the driver's eyes. Of course, this would not be abused by law enforcement. No one sees that coming.
but distinguishing it from real random data is just a matter of having sophisticated enough statistical tests
It's not just the test that matters, but also the sample size. Can't squeeze blood out of a stone. If the minimum sequence length that distinguishes random from pseudo-random is 2^256 elements, you're also going to need a sophisticated cryopreservation system and a wine cellar of the Long Now.
If your method doesn't involve sampling, it's not actually statistics, and what you're hiding under the word "just" might be a kissing cousin of Chaitin's omega. Good luck with that.
The nested container idea has been around for a long time. It occurred to me a long time ago. Somehow in the meantime the once-famous cryptanalysis rubber-hose has been replaced by a hefty phone book. I guess the phone book seems more medieval than it once did. Most people still have flexible hose in the back yard.
There is indeed a non-zero cost to interrogation. What goes on under the naked bulb is only a small portion of the total cost. Sending out the giant neuralizer vans to cover your agency's traces is a more significant part of the cost. A competent, stress-free Brazilian stenographer and receptionist will also set you back. Even the naked bulb will soon cost more than it used to. There's a fair amount of risk involved in playing this game that you'll have to learn how to type with elephant hands and soft fingertips, but then again, you might get lucky.
The level of risk depends on whether you model this on the asymptotic cost of commodity confession, or whether you model this as an intimidation game.
In the Western intimidation game, whoever moves first winds up with the biggest knuckles on the most thoroughly articulated limbs, before being returned to society as a poster-child for clever smiles.
In the Eastern European intimidation game, the role of the poster-child is socialized into a giant Siberian theme park. Thirty million people can't be wrong, but they can be mighty dead or unhappy.
Let me suggest that apt-get plausible-deniability does not improve your border-crossing credit rating. I doubt it improves your success rate with Swedish twins, either, but that has yet to settle out.
Personally, I think that shows that the 'invisible hand' doesn't deliver more and more prosperity to the human race, something that the more enlightened economists such as Stiglitz are beginning to say aloud.
Of all the economists I've read recently, my own views are closest to Stiglitz. But I don't think he's saying what you seem to imply.
One problem with the invisible hand metaphor is that an invisible hand never takes a sick day. Everyone just assumes it shows up for work. It works under certain conditions, but those conditions are not guaranteed to exist without a steady hand at the switch. One of the services that government can provide to the economy is arranging for those conditions to exist more often than not. Sure, this is expensive, but the last time the invisible hand spread a fever and then took sick leave, the invisible hand collected a trillion dollar bonus payment. That doesn't seem right to me.
It also continues a worrisome trend in America of widening income disparity. The entire economy is shifting to drug lord structure: only the guy at the top has money to burn and chicks for free, everyone else functions with an aspirational motivation, to have a life that sucks less by moving another rung up the ladder.
It works the same in professional sports. The vast majority of athletes who try to break into the pro leagues are lucky to break minimum wage for the time and energy invested, if they don't actually lose money. You might say that the weak aspirants should know better. Try that argument on a pro scout. There's no obvious formula for picking the gems. There's a few dead ringers in every draft year, which is exactly my point. The vast majority have uncertain prospects, even athletes drafted after the top ten from the first round.
In MLB I once watched a show on the draft process which stated that 50% of the prospects with enough talent and drive to make it fall by the wayside on injuries, esp. rotator cuff. Six months off at a key point in your development is a terrible set back, even with full recovery. Athletes, especially young men, have a lot of ego. Few believe in statistics. The setback will happen to the other guy. I'm better than him. But in reality, it's mostly a coin flip.
There's a scene in Days of Thunder which I recall because Tom Cruise, posing as a racer in real life on the publicity tour, stated that he really believed his dialog when his character said that avoiding an accident in front of you is more skill than luck. And why wouldn't he? In his own profession, he's one of the chosen few. No matter what he believes in his spare time. IIRC, Tom actually said that the opposing dialog made him furious when filming the scene.
One of the problems with systems more like Somali and less like Sweden is promoting ruthlessness and cruelty and placing a low value on life at the bottom. This translates into less education for young girls (which drives global population growth), and more boys willing their way to glory with high explosives (which shrouds freedom with the Patriot Act).
So what kind of society does the invisible hand prefer? More like Sweden or more like Somalia? Or is it somehow value neutral by the virgin birth and the miracle of small government?
A better question is this: What roles must government play to ensure that privatizing profit comes along with privatizing loss (no more "too big to fail")? And what is the least expensive way for government to provide this function? And what is our rational at the end of the day that Gorden Gecko won't find yet another way to steer us over a cliff? Greed is good, but so is ensuring that the greedy are playing with their own bankrolls, and not cleverly mortgaging the system around them.
It surprises me that this thing with Intel inflames passions. The practice has been around for a long time. Circa 1980 there were expensive washing-machine disk drives where the vendor would enable half the platters at the time
Some ignoramus actually removed all chemical equations from the Smelting article.
Some ignoramus put forward a regressive edit on an article lacking citations as evidence of process problems at Wikipedia. Yes, the edit was poorly judged, but an article lacking citations is a cork in a windstorm.
I tend to defend Wikipedia since the interesting question is "Why does it work at all?" One lesson we've learned is that metrics of irreproachability constitute a poor utility function with respect to what most people need most of the time. It falls short when the aim is to slap your name on a document purporting to contain original work adding value to the community.
So yes, Wikipedia falls vastly short of providing a credible foundation for promulgating reputation. The niche it properly occupies is halfway between the card catalog and the dusty tomes of eminence. It's a secondary transfer station in the subway system of knowledge.
When I was eight years old my father showed me how to wind a wire around a large nail and make an electromagnet. It wasn't long before I looked up electromagnetism in an edition of the Encyclopedia Britanica from the 1960s. This was heavy going for a nine year old. I learned practically nothing, the eminence and authority of the text flying completely over my head.
And I set myself and impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12 year-old children in a south Indian village teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?
How did it go? SPOILER ALERT
"Well, how long did you practice on it before you decided you understood nothing?" They said, "We look at it every day." So I said, "For two months, you were looking at stuff you didn't understand?" So a 12 year-old girl raises her hand and says, literally, "Apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease, we've understood nothing else."
Going back to my early experience with Britannica, "apart from understanding that the ratio of windings in a transformer established the ratio of voltage and the inverse ratio for current, I've understood hardly anything else." That's not high praise. I'd have made more progress with an internet full of unreliable napkin diagrams explicated in a foreign language.
The problem is that all too often irreproachable equates to inaccessible. You can even find this relationship within the cloisters of the peer review process.
From the font of no knowledge:
When later challenges to the legitimacy of the papers submitted by the Bogdanov brothers arose, the debate spread to the question of whether the substitution of a "publication requirement" by university professors when they do not understand students' work is a valid means of determining the veracity of a paper.
My recent insight into peer review is that it operates at two distinct time scales. The short time scale is career advancement with tau = 5 years. The longer time scale is reliable scientific consensus which a time scale of tau = 30 years. (It sometimes takes seven tau periods before the last ripple is smoothed out.) There is no question that peer review is a excellent mechanism to achieve scientific consensus over century time scales.
The scientists themselves are caught up in the dual function of peer view to gate career advancement and to establish the accurate, long term consensus, and thereby sometimes fall into the trap of conflating power with authority.
Within the context of scientific peer review, over the generational time frame, the cliques and rivalries fall by the wayside, the old arguments lose their sex appeal, and the bad actors move onto more topical debates.
Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.
I swear I've worked for that company more than once. In economic theory, failure is considered a virtue. Lack of failure is considered the hallmark of central planning.
It makes no sense to count moribund projects at SF. Many of those projects were started as larks or trial balloons or elliptical treadmills to develop a lusty cranial sixpack.
The serious failures tend to go hand in hand with significant success: Perl, GCC, and PHP have all managed to steer their code bases into heavy water.
In the case Perl and GCC, it's doubtful whether more foresight at the outset would have changed anything. People simply didn't know what would become important that far down the road, or it wasn't feasible to tackle with resources available at the time.
PHP strikes me as a foresight-not-appreciated zone, at least initially. Who knew that security would someday matter? On the internet? I will give PHP some credit for innovating around culture rather than elegance, but sheesh, did they have to dial it up to eleven to prove their point?
On the other side of the ledger we have the legacy of IE6 which matured into an emphysemaic wearing a black cape after running amok in a kindergarten. Some kinds of damage are worse than others.
Stupid or bad people sometimes get into positions of responsibility.
Speaking of which, Newt recently cleared the bar at 18 feet, elevating "Luo tribesman" into the neo-conservative N-word lexicon in a single bound.
These people hate Michael Moore with a passion, so why do they expend so much energy making him sound like an intelligent man? As Mr Moore pointed out, it is obvious to anyone who has ever cracked open an American history book, American was founded on the sentiment of anti-colonialism (only when done by the British--it's increasingly OK when we do it).
The other thread of American history which comes to mind is the Salem witch hunts. One forgets how deep certain threads in American history run.
There's plenty of abuse of children far more severe than reported in this story. He's a man among millions if you include drunken frat boys, men of the cloth, and morally destitute fathers. There seems to be this weird pseudo-Christian ideology in America that one witch in a fire purifies society of a million nervous glances of suspicious-looking old hags.
It's the adult version of "who farted?" Reminds me of the book Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. (Obviously written by a guy without much ambition in the knowing dept.)
Here's how I first learned that I'm a geek at heart. In my introduction to how the fart game was played it turned that *I* farted without having realized it prior to lightening-fire social deliberations. I sensed immediately that there was another kind of logic to the lifeforms around me. Stupid me, I decided that adulthood was the process of growing out of this behaviour, not growing into it.
But Ubuntu itself? Brown? With crappy wanna-be mac buttons on the wrong side? With some heinous orange and piss colored icons scattered to and fro?
Many men choose their GFs on visual aesthetics rather than life skills, even counting "looking sexy" as a life skill (the aspects of sexy that can't be defined by a tape measure).
I've heard all the complaints about the Ubuntu colour scheme before.
Tell me, when you look at the Italian flag, do you see snot, blood, and semen?
Now that you point it out, I think I'll move to Estonia. They seem to have gone to extra trouble to avoid colours based on bodily fluids. Gotta like that. Unlike the Italian white, the Estonian white is very pure.
Scientists very rarely drive out dissenting views.
The Andrew Weaver complaining about the Harper government is the same guy who sued the National Post for not covering his science the way he wished them to.
Any scientist who disregards Stephen McIntyre because he's unqualified to offer an opinion is a douche bag. Not sure if Weaver himself crossed this line, but he seems sorely tempted.
Stephen's criticism of the statistics behind the original hockey stick graph have been upheld by eminent statisticians. The original peer review of the hockey stick study failed to encompass statistical competence, so it was a failed process. The adhesive on the gold star dried up, the sticker fell off. If you ask guys with only average competence in statistics to performed the peer review, they fail to spot subtle errors. An error is an error is an error. No amount of groupthink will spare your conclusion.
Yes, scientists can be plenty good at driving out dissenting views.
1) You have no scientific training. 2) Why don't you publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal if you think you have something to say? (Our anonymous review process will soon send you straight to hell and you'll have hardly any recourse.)
Much less often: 3) That's an excellence point. I'll fix my paper immediately. I disappointed this error made it through peer review. We should fix that, too.
No, the usual argument is that peer review is good because it's the best we have. Sadly, the conclusion does not follow the argument. Peer review has an acceptable track record in coming to long term consensus. For climate change, another century of study would restore my faith in the consensus of peer review. Peer review is a low pass filter. Science is deeply, deeply, deeply wrong for decades at a time. Many of our greatest theories had to first outgrow the pimply teenage years (where peer review is at its most intense).
Back to Harper, I'm beginning to get the feeling that liberalism is the politics of oil surplus. When it's all about grabbing a giant share of a shrinking pie and holding on for dear life, fear and conservatism seems to rule the day.
Scientists resent having their work misconstrued as the ignorant (but powerful) race to the bottom. Sometimes they get a little too worked up and put the boots to Stephen McIntyre in defense of science, when in fact their doing the exact opposite: immunizing science against criticism that points out loose ends in a cherished conviction.
The whole enterprise of science is based on the premise that the smallest valid criticism is worth more than the largest flawed conviction. But I don't have to earn my living as a scientist, so it's cheap for me to espouse lofty views, and I'm able to actually express my views because I'm not a minion of the Harper government.
Harper really needs to brush up on his Mandarin. Tanks are better for suppressing dissent, and cheaper, too. I wonder, however, if his ideological nose bone will make it hard for him to master tonal pronunciation.
I'd like to put the whole lot of them into a space ark, activate the stasis field, and ship them off to a star system 500,000 light years away.
On arrival, in the cargo hold, they will find a MagmaTite thermos flask containing a kilogram blob of molten nickel-iron, along with instructions to place this blob at the center of whatever planetary mass they select to become the new center of the universe. They can then confirm the success of the molten blob transplantation by observing that the universe looks pretty much exactly the same as it did from its former center point.
Don't forget to send a telegram! We're all waiting with bated breath to see how it works out.
In 2006, government spending for defense was only $622.2 billion, in comparison, spending for Pensions alone was $747.1 billion.
If this is representative of the quality of your argument, big government is here to stay.
The government paying out pensions owed isn't "spending" any more than a bank allowing you to withdraw funds from your bank account. Just like governments, banks sometimes put figures on your bank statement that don't hold up on judgement day.
Yes, in serious discussion, the stupid misuse of a single word renders your argument embarrassing and impotent. These little pinholes are how Elvis leaves the building. Ideology hardly ever passes the hydrogen test.
The main difference between a government pension and a bank pension is how the administrative overhead (huge in both cases) is distributed.
In the government, there are masses of people earning government wages (and returning a big chunk of that right back to the government in taxes). In a bank, the administrative overhead is paid out to 150 partners while the other 5000 or 50,000 employees earn chicken scratch. The 150 partners lobby government for tax shelters available only to the filthy rich and few taxes are paid. Much of the wealth ends up in Switzerland or Bermuda.
I don't get the joy of small government if all we end up with is a different set of crooks.
Economists and psychologists tend to model the utility function on motivation as logarithmic. If we do this in base ten, 10 billion dollars in compensation buys you a 10 in initiative and motivation. A couple of infamous connivers have done better than this. We can ignore these outlying data points, along with Madoff, the inverse replica.
Working in base ten normalized to the almighty dollar, for 1 buck you get 0 units of motivation, for 10 bucks you get 1 unit of motivation, for 100 bucks you get 2 units of motivation, etc. For ten cents you get a kick in the pants. That's about right.
Does one guy working at motivation 10 produce more economic value than 100 guys working at motivation level 8? How much concentration of corporate wealth is needed to justify your argument? Is the concentration of corporate wealth a circular term in the argument? Is exponential incentive only justifiable in a system that begins with the premise of an exponential concentration of wealth in the first place?
If so, how exactly are robber barons an improvement over big government?
You mean the next judge isn't as free to ignore this ruling as this judge was to ignore the previous context?
The funny thing is how many people "own" their homes, but rent their culture and personal identity. The marketing term for this is "consumer convenience". Gains now, losses later.
Some people even think about their credit score as "my credit score" and not libellous slander by agencies of incompetence who force you to beg on your knees to fix obvious mistakes, if you succeed at all.
Imagine if it were possible to get a woman half pregnant. In the first fertilization, the sex chromosome is discarded and the ovum divides to a blastocyst and implants, awaiting further instructions. Imagine that the women immediately senses the half-pregnant condition, an interval of a few days in which final fertilization takes place, or the sexless 22 chromosome blastocyst aborts.
Many more decisions in life would be less abrupt, and we might have a better developed sense of reading the fine print before acting on impulse.
Rape as a reproductive strategy would be harder to pull off (conquering armies would learn to take longer rest breaks).
Homicides immediately following the phrase "why didn't you tell me you were already half pregnant?" would become persistently depressing.
Windows running on Alpha was a limited production run of aluminum framed cars. It was mostly a gesture, with the possibility of appealing to a niche enthusiast segment, with no guarantee the niche survived. Every sentient person involved knew the Alpha chips achieved it's outstanding performance by indulging in expensive fabrication steps that don't scale to the mass consumer market (without exceedingly large budgets).
What protected the Wintel alliance as much as anything was the alternatives rallying around the false prophet of reduced complexity. Reduced complexity (along the axis presumed to correlate most strongly with penis length) automatically sounds good, but doesn't always survive close analysis.
At least half the complexity in 21st century processor design involves the memory bus: address translation, cache hierarchy, TLB, coherence, snoop interface, the transaction model, and pin interface. RISC offers no advantage here. In fact, at a certain point of sophistication, the RMW instruction format from x86 reduces work in memory ordering, since you have fewer addresses delivered to the memory order logic to check for referencing identical (or overlapping) regions.
Based on the cost of the integration logic (peripherals and memory hierarchy) even if you come up with a zero-cost RISC core design, you still have to do at least as much work as your well-funded CISC competitor to finish the greater half of the chip. This is just the design aspect and ignores fabrication expertise and economy of scale.
The known problems with x86 were the variable length instruction formatting, the floating point model, and to many distinct partial updates to the flag register.
The extra registers in AMD64 don't get you nearly as much in the general case as the original RISC rhetoric conditioned people to expect without thinking. High-performance loops that are modestly register starved see a 10% gain for having twice the register set. Specific register-hungry loops see a much bigger gain. But a lot of that code now runs on the much larger SIMD register set, if it hasn't been booted to the GPU where it sees a x10 performance increase (rather than 10% to 30%).
The problem with x86 was never performance as much as power consumption to achieve that performance. x86 could trim a large amount of power with a different instruction encoding with far more predictable instruction boundaries (to enhance parallel dispatch). Whether it increases overall performance is another question. Probably not much.
Power economy for achieved performance is what ARM got right from the outset, and the reason that ARM is finally achieving dominance in a market niche that RISC as a performance gambit never achieved. In the mobile market, power efficiency matters enough to drive consumer preference.
It's the same deal with alternate energy technologies. Not until the price of gas is high enough at the pumps with the failings of the current model lead to an alternative technology gaining a permanent foothold.
Intel had a twenty five year run before hitting the wall where power efficiency mattered as much as price/performance/compatibility. Normally any technology that scales by a factor of one million before faltering to the competition is hailed as a resounding success. The original designers of such a technology don't normally hang their heads in a hall of shame.
RISC bugged me from the beginning, because it turned smart people into idiots. People smart enough to surprise the socks off me on other subjects would turn into soccer hooligans on the RISC subject and run around the room half-naked draped in the flag of orthogonality.
With a large enough register set, orthogonality damages power efficiency. You can't have a bazillion ways to encode exactly the same program in exactly the same space and not have to pay the price for that in wasted silicon. What you want is enough orthogonality that choosing an optimal code sequence is less complicated than solving a four-dime
Once you start getting consumers used to no-buttons-no-wires no-batteries-no-keystroke-logging sort of a thing, there's no stopping.
I can see it now. Milkman replaced by the Copper Top delivery van. Egg racks in the refrigerator (which are deprecated for health reasons) replaced by battery racks with fresh cells of every description so you always have a no-stopping experience.
And from the produce department, Apple products available on one hour home delivery exchange for when the non-replaceable battery conks out.
Finally, Julian Assange and his harem of hot Swedish babes raise money for Wikileaks by endorsing the unbeatable personal security available from the Wi-Fi Alliance.
What women want degenerates into a common knowledge problem. Just read this thread, it illustrates what any sensible woman already knows: the incredible male fascination with easy ways to get laid without doing any real emotional work.
Even if the ruse works, you'll likely end up with the kind of chick who is easily duped by a shallow ruse. The pussy might be good in the short term, but soon you'll have to gnaw your arm off.
To really understand what women want involves tensor calculus: it's a varying function of what the women currently has. The tensor system has fairly strong immunity to fixed points. It tends to loop through sex, babies, parenthood, graduation, sex, babies, parenthood, etc.
As soon as you achieve one of these, your emotions migrate to the next stage. There's no gloriously horny fixed point.
Sometimes you find a woman who is so disillusioned with life, she gets off the bus. She's often found in the company of a man who is sexually exhausted (beyond caring), and disillusioned with disillusioned. Who knew that caring about life makes a woman more attractive?
The other term that confuses matters is that a women evaluates what she knows about you differently than what you've stated about yourself explicitly, even if these are the same thing. This tends to happen when a woman consciously knows better, but subconsciously continues to hope.
That's where real emotional work enters the picture. To have any real success with women, you have to be able to navigate the simultaneous equations. Sometimes you wander into a cul de sac, where there's no solution at all. Then you have to jump bravely from one ledge to another. This involves the use of that other male bone, the backbone. Anakin Skywalker is not your role model.
If the relationship has any emotional equity, the backbone move is termed "conflict resolution". Many relationships suck at this. A quick test for sucking at conflict resolution is when your typical relationship goes directly from great sex to Armageddon.
These days, for people who live in urban areas, there are a lot of fish in the sea. Nevertheless, the Armageddon cycles eventually build up, until you find yourself sitting around in your underwear watching Seinfeld reruns.
Perhaps this is saving time, but it sure as hell won't save any energy, as they'll be starting search queries over multiple servers for things you weren't even looking for, and presumably leaving them to timeout the millisecond you type the next letter.
My technical insight is that you won't ever work for Google. You just failed the admission quiz.
Let's suppose Google has 500,000 servers with 1GB SRAM each. That's 0.5 petabytes of online SRAM. A single search result can be coded as a 64-bit integer or less (if such a big index scales, but they're clever, and I bet they figured it out). Maybe 100 bytes for the top ten results for a given search prefix. The top million search terms that represent 90-99% of delivered results can be cached in SRAM entirely prebuilt.
Beyond these, the top 100 million individual search results can be cached in SRAM in pre-rendered fragments (but the page as a whole must combine several of these, likely involving several machines).
We're now at 99.9% of delivered results and have yet to request a disk seek. 0.1% of Google search traffic is a non-trivial deluge. I'm sure Google works the problem all the way down. They're working within a tight budget of 4 trillion disk seeks per day to handle the last 0.1% (500,000 servers with 10ms average seek time--unless they're fond of SSD).
I could continue, but we're already past the point of marginal return on spelling out the obvious.
Yes, as I'm sure someone will point out, even radix-sort by network router across a clever cache hierarchy doesn't come for free.
On the flip side, the "instant" result set will tend to direct people into the cheap prebuilt portion of the mass-appeal search query tree. Plus there is the number of times they manage to distract the user who was about to type a highly focused search query (hence unique and expensive to construct) in favour of meandering around in a superficial result set because it seems easier to click through the wrong pile of laundry than continue typing three words. People are like that.
My analysis is that any technology which encourages the user population to be creatures of habit (and popularity) will tend to decrease energy cost to Google by enhancing cache effectiveness, if they properly design their back-end to anticipate this.
I could be wrong, but the argument can't be dismissed without spoiling some beer coasters.
packet switching is always going to have higher latency than circuit switching... pretty much inevitable. so no, it's not just you.
I have a telecoms book which explains that at a certain point in the past, calls early in the morning EST in the oversubscribed east coast corridor (which I recall as Boston to Washington) were sometimes circuit switched via California, since the east-west links had a lot of excess capacity at 05:00 PST. This strategy sucked for the phone company if the call lasted more than three hours.
It's quite simple - his new job at Oracle puts him in a position where he will be violating HP trade secrets. He simply cannot work as the CEO of any large US IT company without attracting such a lawsuit.
The second statement is largely true. He's an attractive target, and there seems to be bad blood.
The first statement seems to tread on the Islamic definition of "violation". If he doesn't directly disclose any facts about HP's plans or internals, his violations will be relatively mild. If he confines his participation to business activities involving HP as a competitor to broad approval of plans assembled by junior executives, his violation won't be much greater than routine incestuousness in the high tech sector.
I don't see it in Oracle's interest to involve Hurd in detailed decisions that might look bad for obvious reasons. If anything, Hurd takes over some responsibilities of another executive who is then free to worry about HP full time. You end up with more competence in every chair, even without violating any Chinese walls.
In the meantime, HP will extract a few concessions on the presumption that Hurd might violate trade secrets as viewed through the narrow filter of California law.
If HP is steaming mad, perhaps they'll petition Carly to have to have some teeth added to the law regarding executive non-compete. That'll work great. Or maybe they'll change their Napoleonic business culture before burning all of their personnel bridges.
Wikipedia is a sausage factory in a glass house. Far too much information about the information to escape that queasy feeling. I think this is a good thing. Too much of our appeal to authority is not having to know which ingredients came from China, and the level of lead paint in the soil there.
Here's a lede sentence on Godel from SEP:
His work touched every field of mathematical logic, if it was not in most cases their original stimulus.
What a thicket of weasel words only an academic could love. There's not a primitive element of this statement that any pair of logicians would reliably agree upon. It's a statement of rough consensus right out of statistical mechanics. List every field of mathematical logic? Different lists. Which of his works touched these fields? Different lists. "I never touched upon that woman." List of cases (is that a euphemism for "publications"?) over which to evaluate the majority predicate most? Different lists.
It's one part sentiment and three parts genuflect. The writer is declaring by means of this stylistic dodge "I'm trying not to bore you so close to the beginning, so I'm saving up the deep breathing for later".
I'm personally not that keen on sole authorship moderated by graphite rods. If Feynman wrote it, F the committee review. If Gell-Mann wrote it, F the committee review. If Feynman and Gell-Mann wrote it together, and a committee polished it up until I can't tell the difference, F the end result.
The only reason the writer here is at risk of boring anyone so early in the article is this vague navigating around petty rivalries.
Why not a simple declarative sentence? "In addition to originating the research program in metamathetics, Godel made seminal contributions to x, y, and z; primary contributions to u, v, and w; and touched on almost everything in between." God forbid, that would never pass academic review. People might disagree on the boundary between w and x. International bun fights might result.
Wikipedia navigates around this in an interesting way. It's permissible to cite authoritative voices making concrete lists (i.e. not excessively under the thumb of onerous vetting) on a one-shot basis. Entire paragraphs are pastiched with concrete facts supplied by a different authority in every phrase or sentence. Reminds me of resampling statistics. For all its faults, it's less dry than one voice trying to please everyone until long after most readers have ceased reading.
I'm all for less veneration of sausage and more realism about sausage factories.
Another feature of Wikipedia that I like is that the citations are biased toward accessibility. Not having free electronic access to a state-of-the-art research library, it matters when it comes to verifying a fact whether I have convenient access to the source in question. Sometimes on Wikipedia I trust the lofty sources behind the mighty paywalls less than the merely competent source that's freely accessible. Which of those citations was more thoroughly reviewed by the unwashed freetards? Many fields could be quoting Shockley on eugenics and I wouldn't (initially) know the difference. Nor am I going to pop $35 every time I harbour a dark suspicion, so paywall authorities are largely useless.
OTOH, when it comes time to achieve a firm foundation for rigorous hair-splitting, I'm sure SEP shines supernova bright compared to communal candle wax. For the most part, one needs profound expertise in a field to fully appreciate rigorous hair-splitting. First you have to know exactly how the hair was mounted in the diamond anvil. That's one percent of us, one percent of the time.
It's amazing how many people laud mother nature as a design consultancy who think that ten years for Perl 6 was too long.
Personally, I regard pretty much everything after the ribosome as derivative and second rate. Like most other great scientists, after a major breakthrough early in her career, it's been nothing but permutations ever since.
Look at her recent work. Her answer to large cranium/small orifice was more powerful contractions. The snake was the original rubber mallet. Instead of finessing the problem, mother nature reverts to brute force. If you ask me, she lost the thread a long time ago. Speaking of which, the umbilicus strangles more infants than plastic bags. I can't believe the umbilicus is still legal in Sweden. They tend to have strict laws against this kind of design malpractice.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody gives a shit.
I care, even if the rant is hardly original. My preferred version is Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It". I refuse to distinguish content from its conveyance. Nor do I abstract a loaf of bread from Monsanto's seed policy.
Interesting how Apple is redefining the user. The user as originally conceived has been replaced by the content consumer. The content consumer is used by Apple to make money. Apple is the new user. I suspect this is why Apple values ease of use so highly. The user is dead. Long live the user.
A large proportion of Ubuntu's usability problems stem from being a mouse in a minefield of corporate cross-fire. A ban on software patents would cut the usability problems by 80% Too often Apple gets credited for design what they achieve through control.
The cool thing in Wikipedia is that you can check out what really happened when people link to "stuff like this".
The repressed editor at the heart of "stuff like this" is harping on the gayness of a judge as grounds for immediate recusal on the legal matter in question. Without getting into specifics, I can see reasons why the issue might not be so clear cut. Do judges with children recuse themselves in cases of child abuse? It might be different in the judge had a child of their own who had been abused. I'm sure it's been discussed. There would be dictates on the matter that could be cited, as this response spells out in reasonable and participatory terms:
Walker's member of a protected minority class affected by the case was not an issue in the case, and is not related to the question of the constitutionality of the ballot measure. If that can be sourced as a major political argument, it might be appropriate in a "public reaction" section of [[Perry v. Schwarzenegger]], the article about the case, but it would have to be put in context with a sourced statement that judges who are members of a protected class (blacks, gays, straights, Christians, whatever) are not required to recuse themselves from rulings on the basis of affecting the civil rights of the class. - [[User:Wikidemon|Wikidemon]] ([[User talk:Wikidemon|talk]]) 14:39, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
Ten posts later the repressed editor (with no edit history of note) is referring to longtime contributors as asstards and flinging other profanities in all directions.
What is his response to the thoughtful interaction above? To go grammar nazi on a well intentioned person who misuses "overlook" to mean "look over".
I'm guessing you are not a native English speaker, "Native94080", unless you are actually asking us to ignore the case in question? Perhaps you wish us to "look over", "look into", or "look at" the case, meaning to observe and inspect for relevant information to the topic at hand?
I spent the day yesterday reading The Elements of Statistical Learning: Data Mining, Inference, and Prediction by Hastie, Tibshirani, and Friedman (2009). Good, but you have to work for your rewards. Many of the classification examples use spam data. There's not a hope in hell this particular repressed editor would escape the classification bucket "asking for trouble" by any of the statistical methods I read about.
Folks, this isn't a [[WP:FORUM]]. What's to be discussed here is the editing of this article -- and since the matter at question is a single aspect of the public response to the ruling in a case related to this Prop which has its own web page, the correct place for possible inclusion of a mention of this response is on the case's web page... as Wikidemon noted. --[[User:NatGertler|Nat Gertler]] ([[User talk:NatGertler|talk]]) 20:21, 11 August 2010 (UTC)
Ho, he's not even ranting on the right talk page.
I've had hard work on Wikipedia undone by the next random moron who came along. It's not a place to indulge a perfectionist streak. I moved on. Mostly make small one paragraph edits to articles that clearly omit a point of merit, usually providing sources. 75% of my pebbles survive unscathed.
I'm a bit disillusioned about the quality ceiling. Careful writing tends to suffer instant bitrot. OTOH, competent nuggets fare better.
I think the quality problem is hard. People tend not to agree. It's hard to achieve high quality without basing the process on credentialism and prerogative of the elite. That works too, but there's already plenty of stuff out there on that basis, it's a much slower process, and Wikipedia benefits from being immediate, if not always great.
I'm sure there are plenty of cases where admins overstep the bounds. It's also true that the pungent miasma of disenchantment tends to have an inverse relationship in loudness of complain vs how well it holds up when you go back and turn the edit history stones.
War between America and China? It must be cool to grow up in an isolated wood cabin reading dusty tomes about world history from the 1950s then suddenly the satellite dish arrives and you can post on the internet.
Sorry, I missed which country is invading the other.
China could stamp out a billion machetes in just a few weeks. Rwanda was barely an hours worth of China's productive capacity. 18,000 Japanese soldiers cut off from their supply chain defended Iwo Jima for 35 days. You'd face 18 million Chinese just landing on the beach. Some would have weapons.
Or how about the Chinese invading Los Angeles. I don't think they'd survive the first commute. By the first number that came up, there are 65 million handguns in America. Imagine that these were not all pointed at fellow Americans for a few hours. It would make Mogadishu look like a mild celebration of Chinese new year. The bullets would be flying thicker than rice at a Mafia wedding.
Or maybe the Americans could hatch a plot to pump sulphur dioxides into the atmosphere and reverse global warming while secretly stock-piling a million M1A1 tanks to cross the newly exposed land bridge to China. Hey, it almost worked for the Germans.
A final possibility is that both sides would follow "A Taste of Armageddon" and China agrees to manufacture a few million suicide booths at an unbeatable low, low price with Walmart branding. This would be good for Texas, but might strain the agreement as the Chinese complain "do we really have to make them so large?" Meanwhile the Japanese embargo the entire deal in an effort to collect royalties on the bundled BluRay player and the Cell chips sourced from IBM overheat running the provably-fair thermonuclear simulation. It would be a fiasco all around.
Hrm. Previous post composed on an iMac will tiny little indistinct i and l characters and god awful chicklet keyboard with a dirty mind of its own. The joys of proofing in an eye-pleasing design font. My fingers are rarely wrong, but the i deceives.
Huh. I would have sworn it was a professional sports league with a binding fifteen year ELC, trade deadline two weeks into the season, head office review of all injury claims, binding arbitration with a league appointed arbitrator, exclusive ownership of stadiums built with pubic money, $10 hormone-filled mystery-meat hotdogs, and restricted free agency that doesn't kick in until age 35.
Amazing how perceptions vary.
Yes, yeast piss is dangerous to consume. It's full of very tiny disease-causing yeast and bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right. It's actually sterile when excreted from the yeast cell, but if the (male) yeast cell gets a forked eye and squirts all over the toilet seat, the sticky residue breeds disease-causing bacterial homunculi. No, that's not right either. Yeast don't argue about the toilet seat. The whole analogy seems broken beyond repair. If I had fallen for the Gerry Germ propaganda back in grade three, maybe I'd now fall for the ruse that disgust is scale invariant. Have I told you the one about the soiled electron?
There was a lot of similar crap back in the days of Gerry Germ. The next school year, I was struggling with the idea of "cold blooded" dinosaurs. I got the idea that dinosaurs might be like lizards and not croak immediately if their body temperature fell to ambient, but I never cottoned to the idea that dinosaurs didn't quaff Gatorade to cool down after an intense one-on-one. I think my science teacher at the time was a bit tenuous on the distinction between homeostatic and exothermic.
My next science teacher was adamant that fossil fuels were non-replenishable, which struck me as a chemical impossibility unless petroleum was a byproduct of supernovas as governed by their rigid cosmological schedules. Later I figured out that "non-replenishable petroleum" was a statement of science by someone with bills to pay. From the point of view of paying your bills, petroleum is non-replenishable. I don't recall my science teacher once mentioning that uranium is non-replenishable, and this was well before Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, so it wasn't yet clear this wouldn't soon become your typical tax-payer's favorite whinge.
We're pretty stupid for the most part about plants, too.
Stefano Mancuso: The roots of plant intelligence
In addition to (bacteria==pathogens==germs) and (dinosaurs==lizards with giant bodies and small brains) and (petroleum==Genesis project) and (plants==passive and simple minded) there was the depiction of the electron as a tiny point mass, or sometimes an advanced mention of an atom's "cloud of electrons", but never any mention of hydrogen's "cloud of electron". Until you get the idea that one is a crowd, you don't get anything. You have to go one step beyond the misanthrope's creed (one's company, two's a crowd) to really _get_ quantum physics.
These days the biologists are tapping into the poets ("I contain multitudes") and it turns out that "one" is an entire ecosystem, even if it still takes two to tango. I might have cracked the sanitization of this in elementary school, but my books and teachers were strangely silent about the urogenital baton-pass routing around the bath soap. At least in this case they had a coherent motive for keeping the lights dim.
I was just getting used to stupidity as an additive to the water supply, and now it's available as a rock salt. FYI, from what I've seen on bad TV shows, the pursuit of stolen vehicles does nothing for public safety, either. Perhaps apprehending pedophiles at gun point also carries unacceptable risk.
Where exactly does "unintended" fit into this? Where is the data that any kind of impingement on the addictive behaviours of narcissistic scoff-laws doesn't end badly?
My attitude is that people determined to behave like children need to be treated like children. Less autonomy. This could take many forms, such as a vigilance camera pointed at the driver's eyes. Of course, this would not be abused by law enforcement. No one sees that coming.
It's not just the test that matters, but also the sample size. Can't squeeze blood out of a stone. If the minimum sequence length that distinguishes random from pseudo-random is 2^256 elements, you're also going to need a sophisticated cryopreservation system and a wine cellar of the Long Now.
If your method doesn't involve sampling, it's not actually statistics, and what you're hiding under the word "just" might be a kissing cousin of Chaitin's omega. Good luck with that.
The nested container idea has been around for a long time. It occurred to me a long time ago. Somehow in the meantime the once-famous cryptanalysis rubber-hose has been replaced by a hefty phone book. I guess the phone book seems more medieval than it once did. Most people still have flexible hose in the back yard.
There is indeed a non-zero cost to interrogation. What goes on under the naked bulb is only a small portion of the total cost. Sending out the giant neuralizer vans to cover your agency's traces is a more significant part of the cost. A competent, stress-free Brazilian stenographer and receptionist will also set you back. Even the naked bulb will soon cost more than it used to. There's a fair amount of risk involved in playing this game that you'll have to learn how to type with elephant hands and soft fingertips, but then again, you might get lucky.
The level of risk depends on whether you model this on the asymptotic cost of commodity confession, or whether you model this as an intimidation game.
In the Western intimidation game, whoever moves first winds up with the biggest knuckles on the most thoroughly articulated limbs, before being returned to society as a poster-child for clever smiles.
In the Eastern European intimidation game, the role of the poster-child is socialized into a giant Siberian theme park. Thirty million people can't be wrong, but they can be mighty dead or unhappy.
Let me suggest that apt-get plausible-deniability does not improve your border-crossing credit rating. I doubt it improves your success rate with Swedish twins, either, but that has yet to settle out.
Of all the economists I've read recently, my own views are closest to Stiglitz. But I don't think he's saying what you seem to imply.
One problem with the invisible hand metaphor is that an invisible hand never takes a sick day. Everyone just assumes it shows up for work. It works under certain conditions, but those conditions are not guaranteed to exist without a steady hand at the switch. One of the services that government can provide to the economy is arranging for those conditions to exist more often than not. Sure, this is expensive, but the last time the invisible hand spread a fever and then took sick leave, the invisible hand collected a trillion dollar bonus payment. That doesn't seem right to me.
It also continues a worrisome trend in America of widening income disparity. The entire economy is shifting to drug lord structure: only the guy at the top has money to burn and chicks for free, everyone else functions with an aspirational motivation, to have a life that sucks less by moving another rung up the ladder.
It works the same in professional sports. The vast majority of athletes who try to break into the pro leagues are lucky to break minimum wage for the time and energy invested, if they don't actually lose money. You might say that the weak aspirants should know better. Try that argument on a pro scout. There's no obvious formula for picking the gems. There's a few dead ringers in every draft year, which is exactly my point. The vast majority have uncertain prospects, even athletes drafted after the top ten from the first round.
In MLB I once watched a show on the draft process which stated that 50% of the prospects with enough talent and drive to make it fall by the wayside on injuries, esp. rotator cuff. Six months off at a key point in your development is a terrible set back, even with full recovery. Athletes, especially young men, have a lot of ego. Few believe in statistics. The setback will happen to the other guy. I'm better than him. But in reality, it's mostly a coin flip.
There's a scene in Days of Thunder which I recall because Tom Cruise, posing as a racer in real life on the publicity tour, stated that he really believed his dialog when his character said that avoiding an accident in front of you is more skill than luck. And why wouldn't he? In his own profession, he's one of the chosen few. No matter what he believes in his spare time. IIRC, Tom actually said that the opposing dialog made him furious when filming the scene.
One of the problems with systems more like Somali and less like Sweden is promoting ruthlessness and cruelty and placing a low value on life at the bottom. This translates into less education for young girls (which drives global population growth), and more boys willing their way to glory with high explosives (which shrouds freedom with the Patriot Act).
So what kind of society does the invisible hand prefer? More like Sweden or more like Somalia? Or is it somehow value neutral by the virgin birth and the miracle of small government?
A better question is this: What roles must government play to ensure that privatizing profit comes along with privatizing loss (no more "too big to fail")? And what is the least expensive way for government to provide this function? And what is our rational at the end of the day that Gorden Gecko won't find yet another way to steer us over a cliff? Greed is good, but so is ensuring that the greedy are playing with their own bankrolls, and not cleverly mortgaging the system around them.
It surprises me that this thing with Intel inflames passions. The practice has been around for a long time. Circa 1980 there were expensive washing-machine disk drives where the vendor would enable half the platters at the time
Some ignoramus put forward a regressive edit on an article lacking citations as evidence of process problems at Wikipedia. Yes, the edit was poorly judged, but an article lacking citations is a cork in a windstorm.
I tend to defend Wikipedia since the interesting question is "Why does it work at all?" One lesson we've learned is that metrics of irreproachability constitute a poor utility function with respect to what most people need most of the time. It falls short when the aim is to slap your name on a document purporting to contain original work adding value to the community.
So yes, Wikipedia falls vastly short of providing a credible foundation for promulgating reputation. The niche it properly occupies is halfway between the card catalog and the dusty tomes of eminence. It's a secondary transfer station in the subway system of knowledge.
When I was eight years old my father showed me how to wind a wire around a large nail and make an electromagnet. It wasn't long before I looked up electromagnetism in an edition of the Encyclopedia Britanica from the 1960s. This was heavy going for a nine year old. I learned practically nothing, the eminence and authority of the text flying completely over my head.
Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education
How did it go? SPOILER ALERT
Going back to my early experience with Britannica, "apart from understanding that the ratio of windings in a transformer established the ratio of voltage and the inverse ratio for current, I've understood hardly anything else." That's not high praise. I'd have made more progress with an internet full of unreliable napkin diagrams explicated in a foreign language.
The problem is that all too often irreproachable equates to inaccessible. You can even find this relationship within the cloisters of the peer review process.
From the font of no knowledge:
My recent insight into peer review is that it operates at two distinct time scales. The short time scale is career advancement with tau = 5 years. The longer time scale is reliable scientific consensus which a time scale of tau = 30 years. (It sometimes takes seven tau periods before the last ripple is smoothed out.) There is no question that peer review is a excellent mechanism to achieve scientific consensus over century time scales.
The scientists themselves are caught up in the dual function of peer view to gate career advancement and to establish the accurate, long term consensus, and thereby sometimes fall into the trap of conflating power with authority.
Within the context of scientific peer review, over the generational time frame, the cliques and rivalries fall by the wayside, the old arguments lose their sex appeal, and the bad actors move onto more topical debates.
Peer review fails to transcend human politi
I swear I've worked for that company more than once. In economic theory, failure is considered a virtue. Lack of failure is considered the hallmark of central planning.
It makes no sense to count moribund projects at SF. Many of those projects were started as larks or trial balloons or elliptical treadmills to develop a lusty cranial sixpack.
The serious failures tend to go hand in hand with significant success: Perl, GCC, and PHP have all managed to steer their code bases into heavy water.
In the case Perl and GCC, it's doubtful whether more foresight at the outset would have changed anything. People simply didn't know what would become important that far down the road, or it wasn't feasible to tackle with resources available at the time.
PHP strikes me as a foresight-not-appreciated zone, at least initially. Who knew that security would someday matter? On the internet? I will give PHP some credit for innovating around culture rather than elegance, but sheesh, did they have to dial it up to eleven to prove their point?
On the other side of the ledger we have the legacy of IE6 which matured into an emphysemaic wearing a black cape after running amok in a kindergarten. Some kinds of damage are worse than others.
Speaking of which, Newt recently cleared the bar at 18 feet, elevating "Luo tribesman" into the neo-conservative N-word lexicon in a single bound.
These people hate Michael Moore with a passion, so why do they expend so much energy making him sound like an intelligent man? As Mr Moore pointed out, it is obvious to anyone who has ever cracked open an American history book, American was founded on the sentiment of anti-colonialism (only when done by the British--it's increasingly OK when we do it).
The other thread of American history which comes to mind is the Salem witch hunts. One forgets how deep certain threads in American history run.
There's plenty of abuse of children far more severe than reported in this story. He's a man among millions if you include drunken frat boys, men of the cloth, and morally destitute fathers. There seems to be this weird pseudo-Christian ideology in America that one witch in a fire purifies society of a million nervous glances of suspicious-looking old hags.
It's the adult version of "who farted?" Reminds me of the book Everything I need to know I learned in kindergarten. (Obviously written by a guy without much ambition in the knowing dept.)
Here's how I first learned that I'm a geek at heart. In my introduction to how the fart game was played it turned that *I* farted without having realized it prior to lightening-fire social deliberations. I sensed immediately that there was another kind of logic to the lifeforms around me. Stupid me, I decided that adulthood was the process of growing out of this behaviour, not growing into it.
Many men choose their GFs on visual aesthetics rather than life skills, even counting "looking sexy" as a life skill (the aspects of sexy that can't be defined by a tape measure).
I've heard all the complaints about the Ubuntu colour scheme before.
Tell me, when you look at the Italian flag, do you see snot, blood, and semen?
Now that you point it out, I think I'll move to Estonia. They seem to have gone to extra trouble to avoid colours based on bodily fluids. Gotta like that. Unlike the Italian white, the Estonian white is very pure.
The Andrew Weaver complaining about the Harper government is the same guy who sued the National Post for not covering his science the way he wished them to.
UVic's Andrew Weaver sues National Post
Any scientist who disregards Stephen McIntyre because he's unqualified to offer an opinion is a douche bag. Not sure if Weaver himself crossed this line, but he seems sorely tempted.
Portrait of a local climate skeptic
Stephen's criticism of the statistics behind the original hockey stick graph have been upheld by eminent statisticians. The original peer review of the hockey stick study failed to encompass statistical competence, so it was a failed process. The adhesive on the gold star dried up, the sticker fell off. If you ask guys with only average competence in statistics to performed the peer review, they fail to spot subtle errors. An error is an error is an error. No amount of groupthink will spare your conclusion.
Yes, scientists can be plenty good at driving out dissenting views.
1) You have no scientific training.
2) Why don't you publish a paper in a peer reviewed journal if you think you have something to say? (Our anonymous review process will soon send you straight to hell and you'll have hardly any recourse.)
Much less often:
3) That's an excellence point. I'll fix my paper immediately. I disappointed this error made it through peer review. We should fix that, too.
No, the usual argument is that peer review is good because it's the best we have. Sadly, the conclusion does not follow the argument. Peer review has an acceptable track record in coming to long term consensus. For climate change, another century of study would restore my faith in the consensus of peer review. Peer review is a low pass filter. Science is deeply, deeply, deeply wrong for decades at a time. Many of our greatest theories had to first outgrow the pimply teenage years (where peer review is at its most intense).
Back to Harper, I'm beginning to get the feeling that liberalism is the politics of oil surplus. When it's all about grabbing a giant share of a shrinking pie and holding on for dear life, fear and conservatism seems to rule the day.
Scientists resent having their work misconstrued as the ignorant (but powerful) race to the bottom. Sometimes they get a little too worked up and put the boots to Stephen McIntyre in defense of science, when in fact their doing the exact opposite: immunizing science against criticism that points out loose ends in a cherished conviction.
The whole enterprise of science is based on the premise that the smallest valid criticism is worth more than the largest flawed conviction. But I don't have to earn my living as a scientist, so it's cheap for me to espouse lofty views, and I'm able to actually express my views because I'm not a minion of the Harper government.
Wikipedia JSF edits traced to Defence computers in Alberta
Harper really needs to brush up on his Mandarin. Tanks are better for suppressing dissent, and cheaper, too. I wonder, however, if his ideological nose bone will make it hard for him to master tonal pronunciation.
I'd like to put the whole lot of them into a space ark, activate the stasis field, and ship them off to a star system 500,000 light years away.
On arrival, in the cargo hold, they will find a MagmaTite thermos flask containing a kilogram blob of molten nickel-iron, along with instructions to place this blob at the center of whatever planetary mass they select to become the new center of the universe. They can then confirm the success of the molten blob transplantation by observing that the universe looks pretty much exactly the same as it did from its former center point.
Don't forget to send a telegram! We're all waiting with bated breath to see how it works out.
If this is representative of the quality of your argument, big government is here to stay.
The government paying out pensions owed isn't "spending" any more than a bank allowing you to withdraw funds from your bank account. Just like governments, banks sometimes put figures on your bank statement that don't hold up on judgement day.
Yes, in serious discussion, the stupid misuse of a single word renders your argument embarrassing and impotent. These little pinholes are how Elvis leaves the building. Ideology hardly ever passes the hydrogen test.
The main difference between a government pension and a bank pension is how the administrative overhead (huge in both cases) is distributed.
In the government, there are masses of people earning government wages (and returning a big chunk of that right back to the government in taxes). In a bank, the administrative overhead is paid out to 150 partners while the other 5000 or 50,000 employees earn chicken scratch. The 150 partners lobby government for tax shelters available only to the filthy rich and few taxes are paid. Much of the wealth ends up in Switzerland or Bermuda.
I don't get the joy of small government if all we end up with is a different set of crooks.
Economists and psychologists tend to model the utility function on motivation as logarithmic. If we do this in base ten, 10 billion dollars in compensation buys you a 10 in initiative and motivation. A couple of infamous connivers have done better than this. We can ignore these outlying data points, along with Madoff, the inverse replica.
Working in base ten normalized to the almighty dollar, for 1 buck you get 0 units of motivation, for 10 bucks you get 1 unit of motivation, for 100 bucks you get 2 units of motivation, etc. For ten cents you get a kick in the pants. That's about right.
Does one guy working at motivation 10 produce more economic value than 100 guys working at motivation level 8? How much concentration of corporate wealth is needed to justify your argument? Is the concentration of corporate wealth a circular term in the argument? Is exponential incentive only justifiable in a system that begins with the premise of an exponential concentration of wealth in the first place?
If so, how exactly are robber barons an improvement over big government?
You mean the next judge isn't as free to ignore this ruling as this judge was to ignore the previous context?
The funny thing is how many people "own" their homes, but rent their culture and personal identity. The marketing term for this is "consumer convenience". Gains now, losses later.
Some people even think about their credit score as "my credit score" and not libellous slander by agencies of incompetence who force you to beg on your knees to fix obvious mistakes, if you succeed at all.
Imagine if it were possible to get a woman half pregnant. In the first fertilization, the sex chromosome is discarded and the ovum divides to a blastocyst and implants, awaiting further instructions. Imagine that the women immediately senses the half-pregnant condition, an interval of a few days in which final fertilization takes place, or the sexless 22 chromosome blastocyst aborts.
Many more decisions in life would be less abrupt, and we might have a better developed sense of reading the fine print before acting on impulse.
Rape as a reproductive strategy would be harder to pull off (conquering armies would learn to take longer rest breaks).
Homicides immediately following the phrase "why didn't you tell me you were already half pregnant?" would become persistently depressing.
Windows running on Alpha was a limited production run of aluminum framed cars. It was mostly a gesture, with the possibility of appealing to a niche enthusiast segment, with no guarantee the niche survived. Every sentient person involved knew the Alpha chips achieved it's outstanding performance by indulging in expensive fabrication steps that don't scale to the mass consumer market (without exceedingly large budgets).
What protected the Wintel alliance as much as anything was the alternatives rallying around the false prophet of reduced complexity. Reduced complexity (along the axis presumed to correlate most strongly with penis length) automatically sounds good, but doesn't always survive close analysis.
At least half the complexity in 21st century processor design involves the memory bus: address translation, cache hierarchy, TLB, coherence, snoop interface, the transaction model, and pin interface. RISC offers no advantage here. In fact, at a certain point of sophistication, the RMW instruction format from x86 reduces work in memory ordering, since you have fewer addresses delivered to the memory order logic to check for referencing identical (or overlapping) regions.
Based on the cost of the integration logic (peripherals and memory hierarchy) even if you come up with a zero-cost RISC core design, you still have to do at least as much work as your well-funded CISC competitor to finish the greater half of the chip. This is just the design aspect and ignores fabrication expertise and economy of scale.
The known problems with x86 were the variable length instruction formatting, the floating point model, and to many distinct partial updates to the flag register.
The extra registers in AMD64 don't get you nearly as much in the general case as the original RISC rhetoric conditioned people to expect without thinking. High-performance loops that are modestly register starved see a 10% gain for having twice the register set. Specific register-hungry loops see a much bigger gain. But a lot of that code now runs on the much larger SIMD register set, if it hasn't been booted to the GPU where it sees a x10 performance increase (rather than 10% to 30%).
The problem with x86 was never performance as much as power consumption to achieve that performance. x86 could trim a large amount of power with a different instruction encoding with far more predictable instruction boundaries (to enhance parallel dispatch). Whether it increases overall performance is another question. Probably not much.
Power economy for achieved performance is what ARM got right from the outset, and the reason that ARM is finally achieving dominance in a market niche that RISC as a performance gambit never achieved. In the mobile market, power efficiency matters enough to drive consumer preference.
It's the same deal with alternate energy technologies. Not until the price of gas is high enough at the pumps with the failings of the current model lead to an alternative technology gaining a permanent foothold.
Intel had a twenty five year run before hitting the wall where power efficiency mattered as much as price/performance/compatibility. Normally any technology that scales by a factor of one million before faltering to the competition is hailed as a resounding success. The original designers of such a technology don't normally hang their heads in a hall of shame.
RISC bugged me from the beginning, because it turned smart people into idiots. People smart enough to surprise the socks off me on other subjects would turn into soccer hooligans on the RISC subject and run around the room half-naked draped in the flag of orthogonality.
With a large enough register set, orthogonality damages power efficiency. You can't have a bazillion ways to encode exactly the same program in exactly the same space and not have to pay the price for that in wasted silicon. What you want is enough orthogonality that choosing an optimal code sequence is less complicated than solving a four-dime
I can see it now. Milkman replaced by the Copper Top delivery van. Egg racks in the refrigerator (which are deprecated for health reasons) replaced by battery racks with fresh cells of every description so you always have a no-stopping experience.
And from the produce department, Apple products available on one hour home delivery exchange for when the non-replaceable battery conks out.
Finally, Julian Assange and his harem of hot Swedish babes raise money for Wikileaks by endorsing the unbeatable personal security available from the Wi-Fi Alliance.
What women want degenerates into a common knowledge problem. Just read this thread, it illustrates what any sensible woman already knows: the incredible male fascination with easy ways to get laid without doing any real emotional work.
Even if the ruse works, you'll likely end up with the kind of chick who is easily duped by a shallow ruse. The pussy might be good in the short term, but soon you'll have to gnaw your arm off.
To really understand what women want involves tensor calculus: it's a varying function of what the women currently has. The tensor system has fairly strong immunity to fixed points. It tends to loop through sex, babies, parenthood, graduation, sex, babies, parenthood, etc.
As soon as you achieve one of these, your emotions migrate to the next stage. There's no gloriously horny fixed point.
Sometimes you find a woman who is so disillusioned with life, she gets off the bus. She's often found in the company of a man who is sexually exhausted (beyond caring), and disillusioned with disillusioned. Who knew that caring about life makes a woman more attractive?
The other term that confuses matters is that a women evaluates what she knows about you differently than what you've stated about yourself explicitly, even if these are the same thing. This tends to happen when a woman consciously knows better, but subconsciously continues to hope.
That's where real emotional work enters the picture. To have any real success with women, you have to be able to navigate the simultaneous equations. Sometimes you wander into a cul de sac, where there's no solution at all. Then you have to jump bravely from one ledge to another. This involves the use of that other male bone, the backbone. Anakin Skywalker is not your role model.
If the relationship has any emotional equity, the backbone move is termed "conflict resolution". Many relationships suck at this. A quick test for sucking at conflict resolution is when your typical relationship goes directly from great sex to Armageddon.
These days, for people who live in urban areas, there are a lot of fish in the sea. Nevertheless, the Armageddon cycles eventually build up, until you find yourself sitting around in your underwear watching Seinfeld reruns.
And you still don't know what women want.
My technical insight is that you won't ever work for Google. You just failed the admission quiz.
Let's suppose Google has 500,000 servers with 1GB SRAM each. That's 0.5 petabytes of online SRAM. A single search result can be coded as a 64-bit integer or less (if such a big index scales, but they're clever, and I bet they figured it out). Maybe 100 bytes for the top ten results for a given search prefix. The top million search terms that represent 90-99% of delivered results can be cached in SRAM entirely prebuilt.
Beyond these, the top 100 million individual search results can be cached in SRAM in pre-rendered fragments (but the page as a whole must combine several of these, likely involving several machines).
We're now at 99.9% of delivered results and have yet to request a disk seek. 0.1% of Google search traffic is a non-trivial deluge. I'm sure Google works the problem all the way down. They're working within a tight budget of 4 trillion disk seeks per day to handle the last 0.1% (500,000 servers with 10ms average seek time--unless they're fond of SSD).
I could continue, but we're already past the point of marginal return on spelling out the obvious.
Yes, as I'm sure someone will point out, even radix-sort by network router across a clever cache hierarchy doesn't come for free.
On the flip side, the "instant" result set will tend to direct people into the cheap prebuilt portion of the mass-appeal search query tree. Plus there is the number of times they manage to distract the user who was about to type a highly focused search query (hence unique and expensive to construct) in favour of meandering around in a superficial result set because it seems easier to click through the wrong pile of laundry than continue typing three words. People are like that.
My analysis is that any technology which encourages the user population to be creatures of habit (and popularity) will tend to decrease energy cost to Google by enhancing cache effectiveness, if they properly design their back-end to anticipate this.
I could be wrong, but the argument can't be dismissed without spoiling some beer coasters.
I have a telecoms book which explains that at a certain point in the past, calls early in the morning EST in the oversubscribed east coast corridor (which I recall as Boston to Washington) were sometimes circuit switched via California, since the east-west links had a lot of excess capacity at 05:00 PST. This strategy sucked for the phone company if the call lasted more than three hours.
The second statement is largely true. He's an attractive target, and there seems to be bad blood.
The first statement seems to tread on the Islamic definition of "violation". If he doesn't directly disclose any facts about HP's plans or internals, his violations will be relatively mild. If he confines his participation to business activities involving HP as a competitor to broad approval of plans assembled by junior executives, his violation won't be much greater than routine incestuousness in the high tech sector.
I don't see it in Oracle's interest to involve Hurd in detailed decisions that might look bad for obvious reasons. If anything, Hurd takes over some responsibilities of another executive who is then free to worry about HP full time. You end up with more competence in every chair, even without violating any Chinese walls.
In the meantime, HP will extract a few concessions on the presumption that Hurd might violate trade secrets as viewed through the narrow filter of California law.
If HP is steaming mad, perhaps they'll petition Carly to have to have some teeth added to the law regarding executive non-compete. That'll work great. Or maybe they'll change their Napoleonic business culture before burning all of their personnel bridges.
Wikipedia is a sausage factory in a glass house. Far too much information about the information to escape that queasy feeling. I think this is a good thing. Too much of our appeal to authority is not having to know which ingredients came from China, and the level of lead paint in the soil there.
Here's a lede sentence on Godel from SEP:
What a thicket of weasel words only an academic could love. There's not a primitive element of this statement that any pair of logicians would reliably agree upon. It's a statement of rough consensus right out of statistical mechanics. List every field of mathematical logic? Different lists. Which of his works touched these fields? Different lists. "I never touched upon that woman." List of cases (is that a euphemism for "publications"?) over which to evaluate the majority predicate most? Different lists.
It's one part sentiment and three parts genuflect. The writer is declaring by means of this stylistic dodge "I'm trying not to bore you so close to the beginning, so I'm saving up the deep breathing for later".
I'm personally not that keen on sole authorship moderated by graphite rods. If Feynman wrote it, F the committee review. If Gell-Mann wrote it, F the committee review. If Feynman and Gell-Mann wrote it together, and a committee polished it up until I can't tell the difference, F the end result.
The only reason the writer here is at risk of boring anyone so early in the article is this vague navigating around petty rivalries.
Why not a simple declarative sentence? "In addition to originating the research program in metamathetics, Godel made seminal contributions to x, y, and z; primary contributions to u, v, and w; and touched on almost everything in between." God forbid, that would never pass academic review. People might disagree on the boundary between w and x. International bun fights might result.
Wikipedia navigates around this in an interesting way. It's permissible to cite authoritative voices making concrete lists (i.e. not excessively under the thumb of onerous vetting) on a one-shot basis. Entire paragraphs are pastiched with concrete facts supplied by a different authority in every phrase or sentence. Reminds me of resampling statistics. For all its faults, it's less dry than one voice trying to please everyone until long after most readers have ceased reading.
I'm all for less veneration of sausage and more realism about sausage factories.
Another feature of Wikipedia that I like is that the citations are biased toward accessibility. Not having free electronic access to a state-of-the-art research library, it matters when it comes to verifying a fact whether I have convenient access to the source in question. Sometimes on Wikipedia I trust the lofty sources behind the mighty paywalls less than the merely competent source that's freely accessible. Which of those citations was more thoroughly reviewed by the unwashed freetards? Many fields could be quoting Shockley on eugenics and I wouldn't (initially) know the difference. Nor am I going to pop $35 every time I harbour a dark suspicion, so paywall authorities are largely useless.
OTOH, when it comes time to achieve a firm foundation for rigorous hair-splitting, I'm sure SEP shines supernova bright compared to communal candle wax. For the most part, one needs profound expertise in a field to fully appreciate rigorous hair-splitting. First you have to know exactly how the hair was mounted in the diamond anvil. That's one percent of us, one percent of the time.
It's amazing how many people laud mother nature as a design consultancy who think that ten years for Perl 6 was too long.
Personally, I regard pretty much everything after the ribosome as derivative and second rate. Like most other great scientists, after a major breakthrough early in her career, it's been nothing but permutations ever since.
Look at her recent work. Her answer to large cranium/small orifice was more powerful contractions. The snake was the original rubber mallet. Instead of finessing the problem, mother nature reverts to brute force. If you ask me, she lost the thread a long time ago. Speaking of which, the umbilicus strangles more infants than plastic bags. I can't believe the umbilicus is still legal in Sweden. They tend to have strict laws against this kind of design malpractice.