Man, you must have skipped your sociobiology classes, whatever they call it lately. Women bear the brunt of reproductive cost. And due to male insecurity over paternal certainty, even if the rape doesn't lead to an unwanted pregnancy, the woman feels (legitimately) devalued as a mating prospect. Males justify this attitude of blaming the victim with an internal Mel Gibson voice-over (she was asking for it).
On the male side of the reproductive coin, the worst case scenario is paying support for a child that isn't even yours, and that you can't actually visit, and won't love you enough to check you into rehab if you falter in middle age. See How DNA Testing Is Changing Fatherhood. The courts presently have little problem with this, despite its historical demographic slant, and I've yet to read a feminist complaint on this front.
India has also caught the bug. See Don't do paternity test routinely. The previous article argues in favour of precisely this measure.
I don't get the Hurd controversy. America basically impeached the smartest man in American politics since Robert McNamara and there was never a hint of harassment. Over what? Bad judgement concerning small sums of money that wouldn't even top up a petty change jar in the sexually enlightened nation of France.
Mark's obligation to the HP shareholder was to single-source his lechery, or nix his duplicity. Fail to pass elementary skill testing question, do not pass GO multiple times, nor collect over $50m in bonuses.
Right. Let me guess - you don't know many professors, do you?
As an undergraduate with a six course load, I didn't get 3 hours per term of face time with any professor attending a major Canadian math and computer science degree mill. Let's round it up to 20 hours. If I had paid $50,000 per year, which thankfully I didn't, it amounts to about $1000/hour of professorial face time, assuming the rest of my education was worthless (I have a COBOL credit to prove it).
How many professors would hang on IRC for a small percentage of that? For $200/hour, the entire humanities faculty would stampede to their terminals, and only the most confident and ambitious assistant professors of any stripe would turn away from their keyboards.
Let me guess. You haven't seen many professorial pay grades, have you?
The real reason people pay $50,000 per year is to gain membership in a gated social community. Only a small portion of that contributes to your education, even if you rave about the cherry on top, a professor who actually knows your name. I wouldn't mind seeing the expensive ivy covered walls taken down a peg or two by an effective information program.
Perhaps the people who fear Linus is going to burn out again spent too many years watching Seinfeld and deeply internalized "no hugging, no learning". Linus != George. OTOH, given his acidic tongue, he's probably not well suited to a career in stand up comedy. Anyone else think that Larry McVoy would make a good Kramer? </rimshot>
I wouldn't know where to start learning C++, PHP, Java, HTML5, or PERL, much less how to choose one over the other for a particular application.
There's something a little odd about this question. Mentions the volume of code output from his past life, but not the application domain. Seems to have weak Google skills. Not sure how he managed to post this query to an electronic discussion board. Did he dictate to his grand-nephew?
Having expertise in an application domain would be a good place to start. Then figure out what languages have remained relevant. But I get the feeling his former application domain is in the same state of decline as his programming skills.
With that list of former languages, the guy *ought* to have a fairly strong skillset for maintaining write-only Perl scripts (write-only code was a major industry back in the day), and I figure there's some demand for that. It would be a good transition language: old school mindset, old school syntax (uglier than most), but with a post-Algol dynamic execution environment.
If he can get over the hurdle of the moderately complex program that use to run in 50k now requiring 50M, he'll do OK. If not, he should try his hand at embedded. I've never written a line of code for an AVR that I couldn't have written (conceptually) with a C compiler from 1983. Those early microcomputer C compilers were riddled with trivial bugs. I recall a fairly simple C static variable initialization (more than one nesting level) the compile mis-generated. That wasn't uncommon. It's been a long time since I've had to report a major code generation error in a C compiler. It's the same skill, minus much of the grief.
The other thing that changed is that I no longer schedule lunch around a global recompile. Certain of the old-school time management skills have gone by the wayside. These days, it's your computer that goes to lunch. Between keystrokes.
Hey there old guy, while you were cranking out 100,000 lines of code, did you acquire any documentation skills? Those older code bases he's equipped to maintain often go along with old school formal management processes.
The biggest change from then to now is that you simply don't know what you're doing in most modern development environments, not the way one used to. Competence is a bubble of lantern light you carry on your person as you trudge into dark places, with one screen tethered to the internet. It's humanly impossible to learn PHP without constant recourse to a memory aid, if your memory is filtered on sanity. New kids won't even know what "filtered on sanity" means. It's been way out of style since Microsoft introduced us to the glories of central planning. In the 1980s, I knew *every function* of my favorite program editor. Often I knew every command line switch on the compiler I was using. And every function in the API I was programming against. These days, I don't even know every line in the context menu that comes up on a simple right click in Eclipse.
The other sea change one has to master is letting your tools do more of the work, whether it's unit testing, make scripts, or an IDE.
A fairly debilitating liability at the outset is not having a good sense of what is supposed to be painful, and what isn't. The rules on how productivity is gated have changed substantially. Long ago it was possible to put in a super productive week banging out a top notch utility library suited to the compiler and application domain. You'd be hung in the modern workplace for losing a week on an HIH detour.
If he's a bit more adventuresome, despite not mentioning Forth on his list of skills, he could do a lot worse than buying himself a Lego Mindstorms NXT and a copy of WoW and investing some quality time into Lua. The C side of Lua is anchored in the old-school skills he seems to have in abundance. He won't have a job at the end of play time, but he'd manage to bridge about half his generation gap in the process, and he mig
In watercraft, there are two sides to the tree: watercraft where buoyancy is independent of orientation (e.g. Zodiac) and watercraft where orientation is everything. In the second group, you have canoes/kayaks with great initial stability and terrible final stability, and you also have the converse. For propulsion, you have gas eating outboards, propulsion by environmental agents, and self propulsion. And you have a choice between artificial materials and natural materials.
C is instructive if you stay close to the shoreline. LISP is a kayak. You can roll over and come up the other side. Some people like that. Python is a reasonably nimble rowboat with room for a picnic cooler. PHP is a powerboat with an onboard mini-bar in a deadhead lagoon. Java is a twin Zodiac catamaran. Never sinks in the water, but watch out for the trees. C++ is a canoe with two gun decks and side mounted chainsaws (sorry, Bjarne). Name your pleasure.
I'm partial to the wood-canvas Chestnut Prospector, paddling solo in a sheltered bay. The one thing an amateur absolutely needs to avoid is going bow up against a cross-wind.
I was only on the periphery during the Woody era, but I definitely recall the libertarian slippery slopers whom I read with terrible dismay and a sense of impending doom.
I was using Debian to get stuff done in a startup company setting. There's an equation in book publishing: your readership drops by half with every equation included. Well, the value of the distribution dropped by half for every backport I found myself forced to install. Since I was using the LAMP stack among other things, and the 2002 LAMP stack wasn't working great for me in 2005, I jumped ship, not even knowing Ubuntu existed (first it was Fedora).
But here I am, running Ubuntu today, since I ultimately preferred the Debian infrastructure. Not proud of it on some level, but at least I escaped the orbit of yammering libertarians driving three year release cycles. At the time I felt like I was being negotiated over like a hostage in a hostage drama.
I've always regarded developing for the desktop to be a bit of an Alice in Wonderland proposition. User adoption seems to be inversely correlated with good engineering practice. Maybe you should be grateful that Canonical snarfed the EAT ME biscuit.
In the case of Perl, as least I get what Perl 6 was trying to accomplish. The Woody experience left me shaking my head.
Your Econ-101 course would have been improved by including a copy of Animal Farm. In the lost epilogue, the pigs mint coinage to invest German efficiency into everything they were doing already.
The principle you seem to be ranting on here is that voluntary transactions create wealth, no matter how the transaction is instrumented (coins, jars of pebbles, jiggling twins).
Monopoly is the word we use to describe the situation where voluntary rubs noses with indentured servitude. If there's only one place to purchase food, well, no-one is forcing you to chose survival.
In high speed computing one tends to compute bisection bandwidth: given any way of partitioning the system, what is the maximum bandwidth across the partition boundaries.
The concept of monopoly is similarly fungible. The banking industry has sliced up the economic system so that one partition (the high velocity insiders) have access to first-mover advantage, and everyone else doesn't. One term in what constitutes voluntary trade has been supremely tilted in favour of a group that isn't working nearly as hard as they ought to relative to the resources they command, even if it does, as you point out, greatly enrich Columbian farmers who would otherwise have to grow vegetables.
If the glorious concentration of wealth directed equated to aggregate productivity, Russia would be a model economy.
I will say your recitation of why money in and of itself can't be blamed was superbly rendered.
On the other hand, somehow you didn't manage to notice that typing the query "apple suicide" into Google no longer brings up a fairy tale: it brings up Foxccon in the "I feel lucky" position.
Here's the main point. Unless you're a climate scientist, you're not qualified in any way to engage in a "fact based debate." There's too much data here and it requires specialists to see all of it as a homogeneous whole and draw conclusions.
Unless you're a climate scientist who confers with hard core statisticians and even then the climate record suffers an appalling lack of homogeneous data. It's not been until the satellite era that anything resembling a homogeneous record has come into existence. Different times, different instruments, different measurement densities. Go a little further back, it's tree rings in a teacup.
I think the global warming hypothesis is somewhere around "preponderance of evidence" (civil standard) and nowhere close to "beyond a reasonable doubt" (criminal standard). It's almost certainly probably true.
I'm not a climate denier. I just think it's a darn hard to build a definitive case on a data set that's thin on the back end. If we had satellite climate data dating back to 1900, it'd be a slam dunk. Within another two or three decades, it'll be a slam dunk. Urgency != certainty.
It'll be interesting to look back in 2050, if civilization still exists, to see which point in history is regarded as having successfully proven the global warming thesis. Will half the data from 2010 have been shot full of holes in retrospect? Or not? As compared against the standards of scientific proof in other branches of science not bearing the weight of the survival of planet earth and life as we know it.
Here's a question. Let's imagine a world where AGW is taking place, but the paucity of data makes this fact scientifically unprovable, until underlying agents of AGW are far advanced (far more so than earth presently). Would the scientific consensus in this world be that the AGW thesis is unprovable as the data stands, or would they busy themselves with squeezing blood from a rock?
Is an ambitious scientist convinced of the future outcome not vulnerable to the thought process "it doesn't matter if I stretch the data a little bit, I'll soon be vindicated anyway"?
Economics as a discipline usually tells you what you needed to know long after you needed to know it. Why is it not possible that climate science also dabbles in dismal? And on what planet is the dismal realist rewarded with the largest study grant?
Neither am I sure I buy the strategy "safety in numbers". Isn't that just a good way to dissipate the painful fact that nobody understands the elephant as a whole?
On the other side of the fence, proof that the planet is *not* warming consists of lies, fabrications, distortions, and bupkus. In a prudent world, one would want to see that proof before conducting a grand experiment on the whole ball of water.
Perl 6 is a stillborn fetus, left lying on the ground for a decade, getting all smelly and rotten.
That's an appropriate sentiment for a guy who choses his programming language the same way he chooses his girlfriend.
The true test of Perl 6 is how many of the new genes baked into Perl 6 show up in Python/PHP/Ruby ten years from now. That would make Perl 6 an important language, even if it never gets laid.
At some point I'm going to give Perl 6 a shot with an open mind, and see whether all those years paid off with a mature reflection on the nature of womanhood. Even if it's not girlfriend material.
If you are having to speculate based on what is likely and common, then it fits the very definition of "vague".
Another great way to muddy the waters is to misconstrue the question. You don't have to speculate. There's a difference between a vague question and casting a wide net. The transaction value of a single post is maximized in providing a specific answer to a specific question, whereas the transactional value of a discussion forum is maximized by having many situations and specifics put forward, including scenarios not originally envisioned.
There's at least as many undeclared assumptions in your narrow pedanticism as in the original question.
The question could be more evocative of his actual circumstance, but perhaps the poster was afraid of blowing his cover. Is the net cast on this question so broad that this can't be a useful exchange? Probably, if the question generates more complaints than contributions.
Bikes do have to obey the same traffic laws as cars.
Brought to you by the same people who managed to shut down a perfectly good public transportation system in LA long ago so that cars would rule the universe.
Like many other things, biking has different proficiency brackets. A novice or careless recreational rider should stop at stop signs, no questions asked.
An experienced rider with cleats who commutes daily might choose to practice safety differently. The disadvantage of coming to a complete stop is that you when you do enter the intersection, you enter at a slower speed, and expose yourself while crossing for longer (often longer than you can predict the future). I also cross the intersection on a much straighter path without stopping. It's hard to cleat in under power without at least one brief front wheel wobble. When you ride under control in perfectly straight lines, cars anticipate your trajectory better. If you don't cleat in under power, you end up crossing the intersection beside the cars instead of in front of the cars. You might collect some paint, but you won't get a ticket.
Advantages of a standing semi-stop for an experienced rider: less time spent in the intersection, better control over bike path, less window of risk where you can't predict what other idiots will do, and less hindrance of traffic around you, who are prone to do stupider things when feeling delayed, even if the delay is trivial *or doesn't even exist*. It only takes a minuscule perceived delay to bring out the worst of driver with cell phone, who certainly won't spare the bandwidth to check whether superficial perception reflects reality.
The speed of the semi-stop doesn't interest me much. What matters is that I get four clear checks for oncoming vehicles and pedestrians: look left, look right, listen left, listen right. If traffic is heavy enough that the auditory check is worthless, I usually accept my fate and come to a full stop. Fortunately in my town, that's only major corridors and certain times of day or poorly planned routes.
If stopping at the stop sign raised a protective fence against all contending lanes, I would concede the merit of unthinking adherence.
Stopping is not some magic force field that makes an intersection safer. There's a right time and a wrong time to enter an intersection, regardless of your minimum speed of approach. The amount of time required to evaluate this is to some degree proportional to your time of exposure in crossing the intersection. There's a nice little equation to solve. With one small caveat: NEVER make any decision that depends for safety on a vehicle driver having a correct interpretation of what you're going to do next.
Another defensive tactic is isolation: only having to pay attention to one threat in one direction, with a plausible path of escape. Is it safer to cross an intersection after stopping with vehicles chomping to cross against you on both your left and right (it's hard to look both ways), or safer to scoot at the first opportunity when there's only one car in contention on one side, and further away? Sometimes if there are too many cars lined up against me and not looking predictable I pretend I've dropped something until the idiots clear.
One time in the past five years of aggressive traffic management I made a risky decision and had three cars do something unpredictable in short succession. I was trying to get into a grocery store parking lot, and there were service vehicles in the street, plus a mass of oncoming vehicles halfway down the street. Poof! Plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D evaporated in a two second interval. Had to go to plan E. Pinned the brakes on both wheels without time to unclip and toppled over in the middle of the street (far enough away from any moving cars). To the people on the sidewalk who didn't understand the chess game that had suddenly hemmed me into a bad situation, I looked like a guy who just randomly grabbed both brakes and
Hell, just about anything is better than Bubble Sort. I'm not sure why it's even taught.
I once read that bubble sort is the optimal sort on a Turing machine. Too bad it wasn't named tapeworm sort, then every student would understand immediately. It would be analyzed alongside dining-philosopher chopstick sort, where the dining philosopher won't each (finicky like Tesla) unless holding a matched pair, with the option of swapping hands if holding a pair of sticks before release.
If the purpose is to teach analysis of algorithms under different computational assumptions, there's nothing wrong with teaching bubble sort. When it gains rank in the panoply of commercially viable sorts, that's where the problems begin. But since when did academia much care about A) carefully informing you about the importance of the material they were teaching you, or B) the grim realities of commercial applicability.
Extreme adherence to practicality made C++ what it is today. All software for the F22 and F35 are written in C++. Not Haskell or LISP. The beautiful languages are the languages best suited to reject design iteration on practicality. If it's not very practical to begin with, why mess up a good thing? C++ never had that problem.
What my university failed to teach properly was radix-sort, which is both practical and of theoretical interest. If the time devoted to bubble sort had instead been devoted to radix sort, the astute reader would know that record length is a critical parameter in this benchmark protocol.
Hell, give me a one-bit record length and some fast disk drives, I could sort a terabyte at the same speed as UCal using a single loop of RS485 multidrop instead of that overpriced Cisco kit.
Don't bother reading TFA. It does not report the sort protocol record length.
The word (and concept) of "unobtainium" goes back to the 50s at least, actually.
If the term "unobtainium" wasn't invented by the early heyday of jet fighter engineering (circa the Korean war), I'll eat my carbon-graphite bike frame.
My understanding is that superconductors have current limits independent of resistive effects (possibly due to magnetic field intensity). How much material you need depends on those exact limits. Even silver could be cheap as dirt if the current density is high enough.
The other thing I've heard is that superconductors are generally discovered by observing related effects, not by measuring conductivity itself.
There also seems to be many people here who have never heard of the black swan effect. You can't prove a black swan doesn't exist by observing a sequence of white swans. There's always a first time. This also applies to the possibility that something important is someday discovered or first published independent of peer review.
That said, there's no point in wearing out your salivary glands unnecessarily, although I've heard it's a common ailment to overdose on visual innuendo of the possibility of doing something you're not actually doing (with dim prospects).
For me qualified engineering porn is when the material is officially characterized in important criteria such as current density limits.
I feel the same way about quantum computing. Still haven't seen a formula which describes the ultimate constraint (or cost) on how many qubits can be stacked together (usually the universe puts limits on salivary endeavours). It would be kind of weird if qubits prove to be as stackable as frictionless pulleys.
The most interesting man I never met lived in a small house near the beach, had newspapers and old chairs and magazines piled to the ceiling in every room. Must have had a thousand cubic feet of Life Magazine. A most exciting fellow. What the man could have done with a proper warehouse, who knows?
What will finally put Seagate out of business is the universal porn compressor: an algorithm to produce almost any image with a pornographic payload (validated through fMRI studies). Finally we can eliminate women from sex. It'll be great.
If you don't like that don't buy one. None of your rights are being infringed. You got what you paid for and you are free to do with it as you will.
Nicely done. You got a passing grade in the free market school cheer ("Viva caveat emptor!") and DNF in every aspect of the situation worth discussing. You've clearly set yourself ahead well ahead of the obese peloton walking their bikes up the intellectual incline with loud proclamations that TI has no moral right to make a stupid decision (which as you rightly point out is their eternal privilege).
With any nose at all for controversy, you might have wondered out loud who TI regards as their real customers for this product. In a shocking development, it might not be the high school students (or parents thereof) who actually shell out their hard won cash. There's a challenging concept to swallow for a transactional reductionist.
TI might regard their customers for this product to be school board administrators who hold the power to set curriculum standards which induces teachers to set exams that are biased toward the success of students buying a particular TI product, abused of most of its generative learning potential by the grasping grubbiness of TI corporate headquarters.
In an educational system that prizes testability over learning, perhaps this is exactly what the true customer demands.
But as you point out, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one. It's not like the customers of the school board (ostensibly the students) have any say in the educational product they consume, supposing they actually got together and groused publicly. It is their disempowered cash after all, that turns the main propeller.
But then, as your stellar argument has it, if the school system is corrupt you don't have to attend. There's the beauty of libertarianism. You've got a perfect retort for everything, in the world as it ought to exist.
Of the ten or more creative ways to look at this situation, caveat emptor drives the hearse.
You can sure tell the difference on this thread between the bargain-rack brigade and those familiar with economic thinking (recommended for the former category: "The Naked Economist").
Objectively, on historical price/performance trends, what you're getting from this card for $200 is eye popping. So eye popping it's almost hard to find a game that benefits without slathering on the bling. Oh dear, it's so good it has practically eclipsed the utility envelope.
I'm not sure I prefer the world where "bargain" has become wholly subordinate to the phrase "attention bargain shoppers". It's really quite a stupid stance to blame the economy, because immersive gaming is pretty much purely a luxury item to begin with.
ATI has an easy answer to this video card: a 5840 with a 1120:56:32 configuration. The 5830 is hammered in most benchmarks by only having half the ROPs enable. Aside from that, it kicks ass.
This is purely a manufacturing yield consideration. ATI has been in production for longer than Nvidia on this generation, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some additions to the product line based on yield refinements, now that they have a viable competitor in this niche. When yields were lower, it was insane for ATI to direct their massive 334mm^2 Cyprus chips into discount configurations. Talk about not getting economic thinking. It only made sense to discount the chips they couldn't sell otherwise, and mostly those were the ones with a failed ROP unit.
On paper, people who want high frame rates on a single mid-sized monitor (1680x1050 or less) are fairly well served by a 5830 (at some price point). But the benchies have trouble drawing distinctions at this screen size (the cards are too freaking fast), so all the attention is drawn to frame rate on 30" monster displays.
Relative to the economic situation of someone gaming for hours a day on a 30" display (and only the latest and greatest titles), I'd say $200 is bargain basement.
I spent $150 on my last video card, but I won't rent a movie less than a year old, because I'm only willing to pay the back-catalog price. Anyone who pulls a movie off the "new releases" rack is an economic bracket where a $200 video card is fungible entertainment.
I agree with many of the bargain-rack shoppers here. I'm appalled to pay $10 to watch a movie in the theatre on opening weekend, when I can rent the same movie six months later for $2 and share it with my snuggle bunny while gorging on home-popped popcorn dressed with reggiano parmigiano.
invisible bureaucracy of posers
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The End of Free
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Normally I skim other comments before posting, but today I'm too busy.
This whole piece is ruined by the tactic of taking people's rhetoric too literally when mounting an attack on the underlying sentiment. In the heat of the battle, people say strange things. Ten years later, the discussion needs to rise above the original Battling Tops.
What was really at stake was the transaction floor. How valuable does information need to be *before* the constrictive apparatus of scarcity and profit kicks in? Given an exponentially falling cost of production and distribution for *most* information, the transaction floor ought to be pretty darn high.
The same thing applies to the patent system. The novelty floor is presently set an order of magnitude (or three) below where it needs to be. It's not hard to find examples of defensible patents, such as the original public key patent. Your average hacker wasn't going to invent public key exchange by accident. It took a fairly large conceptual leap to realize that this might be a possible goal. The blue LED is another one that took real dedication and effort where many had failed. If you take the current patent system and shrink it to 10% or 1% of the current patent issue rate (suitable for information that wants to be expensive) the system becomes such a small shadow of its present self, that maybe it's just easier to shut it down completely.
The problem is that a patent system dialed up to a respectable level of novelty will experience a dilution pressure. There will be a constant stream of people who would like to become millionaires by gaining possession of a simple idea such as one-click shopping. The anti-patent ideologues look at this and decide that cited the "slippery slope" argument is a way to force the system into a favorable polar outcome (no patents at all).
The problem there is that if you look at every social system in the world as a slippery slope and force every aspect of every system into a polar outcome to defeat the slippery slope, you end up with a crap system. Societies do not function integrating over a trust level of zero. The right solution is to design laws that bend but don't break. It's an engineering challenge. You can't build a democratic system without managing to solve this problem at least some of the time. If you believe it's completely unsolvable, then you don't functionally believe in democracy.
Where the transaction floor on "information wants to be expensive" needs to wind up is *above* what society can achieve for free by exploiting what Clay Shirkey calls the trillion hours per year cognitive surplus. People like to create, people like to collaborate, people like to share. If that's all it takes to create information of value, we don't need some corporation erecting a toll booth to dampen value creation.
There are lots of places where corporations have something unique to *add* to the picture. Open source hasn't come anywhere close to the refinement of OS X. You get that refinement with some DRM bitters on the side, but there it is. You have a choice. Apple gave my father the run around for the last several months on the iPhone reception issue. How do you hold a tiny phone in a giant mitt without touching the corners? Just because information wants to be expensive, doesn't mean you're always getting what you paid for.
The vigorous immune rejection at the Well was probably the same thing I feel. We need less companies out there looking around for something of value where they can plant a flag post and claim to be somehow essential to something that was already proceeding just fine. Corporate hustle can often bring an algorithm to market six months ahead of when the hackers would have got there anyway. How essential is that, in the long run? The accelerated solutions often prove to be annoyingly flimsy and riddled with security flaws, so it's arguable that the corporations win this race mostly by throwing more babie
I find it tedious this need to equate happeningness with innovation.
Cell phones would look pretty pathetic if not embedded in an ecosystem which made it possible to efficiently produce the software and content and phone designs you implicitly rave about. Just about every great innovation that makes the modern cell phone possible was developed primarily on giant PC workstations.
Just like it's easier to have a lot of spare cash in early adulthood (and the coolness associated with that) if you still live in your parent's basement and leach off the free utilities.
It was the same thing with the success of scripting languages on the back of the nasty compiled languages such as C/C++. When Python runs fast, which language to you think is doing the real heavy lifting?
Standing on the shoulders of giants and poaching the low hanging fruit is a time honoured tradition, but why is the hulking giant always portrayed as a dim gallumph? It's like saying peaches are cool, but peach tree step ladders aren't.
Coolness ends up being how much newness one can take credit for, while disregarding long years of hard work by the better established that made the niche possible in the first place. OpenCL based media encoders running on massive GPUs is only going to make your cell phone decoder even more cool and bit efficient.
So I get your message. There's nothing happening on the PC platform because the cell platform has figured out how to take all the credit on the unassailable logic that the most important component in any technology ecosystem is the pocket-sized gratification device.
Oh for fucks sake, chill. It was some low paid drone in a call center who made the original decision. Not exactly an executive decision.
You can bet your life it was an executive decision to staff the call center with low-paid droids incapable of acting on moral discretion. This is the business model they choose to create, where 99% of their interaction with the public is through low-paid droids incapable of moral discretion.
On this model, getting publicly burned in effigy once every six months is a normal cost of business. The phone companies have taken it upon themselves to function as the bulwark of enculturated infantilism (few cost-up-front purchase options). They deserve what they get.
On the other side of the fence, America's enlisted men have roughly the same level of moral discretion when it comes to participating in the wrong war as Verizon's call center droids have in accepting a justifiable termination request.
The fact that the NSA is still serving a purpose in spite of 'completely secure' key sizes should suggest a fairly obvious conclusion.
Sweet. Stupidity by obscurity. Shall we integrate the area under the curve of obviousness * tinfoil_coefficient?
There is an obvious conclusion, but apparently it's not obvious. It's one of those cases where whichever answer you presently hold seems obvious, until one discovers an even more obvious answer. The parent post has been careful to distance itself from any clue as to which rung on the ladder of obviousness it presently occupies, a strategy which suggests an entry level rungs. Think of the cost. I certainly wouldn't want to be a large enough blip on the threat radar to find myself at the center of an exaflop computation. I value my keratin.
Feynman in Joking has a chapter on safe cracking. He ultimately concludes that "cold cracking" is largely a myth. Almost every safe cracker starts with an in: tampered mechanism, partially guessed combination, faulty mechanicals.
The bulk of what your average cyber TLA computes would be simple traffic analysis, which at that scale, is probably not so simple, and involves correlating across networks (cell, internet, house of poozle). One wonders how many initial demerits one earns by connecting through a known onion router.
Next you have attacks against keys with weak initial entropy, key leakage, or sloppy key management (betcha that's a growth industry). Any cipher which purports to send random bits can be hacked to leak key bits (secretly) in the apparently random nonce values. It's nearly impossible to prove your cipher isn't doing this without access to the source code all the way down to the CPU microcode, and beyond. Huh, a funny thing happened to our masks on the way to the foundry, but the chips seem to run great. From a TLA perspective, this is a useful advantage, because what you end up with is not a level playing field. What you can crack by brute force, someday soon your adversary can also crack by brute force. It's a lot more fun when you have to peel off the anonymous brown wrapper.
What seems obvious to me is that your average TLA enjoys hiding behind this obviousness meme, and might even participate in its dissemination as a part of a highly successful initiative in distracting paranoids and shallow thinkers from useful analysis. You just have to find a forum where seeming clever is more important than being clever, add water, and stir.
My favorite local coffee shop is right beside the schizophrenia resource center. If I had the right social hacking skills, I could accomplish this mission by buying the right person who drifts into the coffee shop with a wifi netbook a free coffee a day. "Just keep posting buddy, the Joe's on me."
If the placebo effect works, it has no link with superstition. Superstition is the belief in things that don't exist or don't work.
To really test the placebo effect, you'd have to test people who don't even know they are being tested (sneak the placebo into their diet). Or perhaps they need to perform the placebo study on total amnesiacs. Unfortunately, if the subjects suddenly began to recall everything, that would mess the protocol up.
I grew up near Calgary. Tyrrell rocks. It's also neat how you swoop into the crag after fifty miles of prairie. I just wish they had done a bit more with the Burgess exhibit.
A thousand skeletons doesn't impress me half as much as one pair of bronze stirrups. Or even a splintered chuckwagon. Surely, over the 7000 years of human history, someone would have managed the feat.
Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the write limit is a limit of the underlying flash, not the controller...
Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the magnetic media density limit is a limit of the underlying magnetic domains, not the controller...
No wait! Then they invented PRML. Turns out the underlying limit was actually due to engineers lacking vision. All they needed was a new analytic frame of reference. The same deal has happened over and over again with RF spectrum. One man's noise is another man's signal. I just don't know the RF world well enough to cite examples off the top of my head.
That said, there's a long of history of quacks who would like you to believe they invented PRML when they actually haven't.
On gut instinct I'd give this about 3:1 against this having a solid grain of truth, and slightly longer odds against commercialization at significantly better than cost parity compared to other methods of achieving the same end. Even where you find a grain of truth, the product often falls into a niche for one reason or another. Sometimes it's nothing serious, just small things that get refined in the due course of time, which would be great if your massively larger competitors were transfixed with awe.
So many business plans are missing the critical line item:
Transfix deep-pocket competitors with awe while we burnish our new technology to ultimate perfection.
There's really no technical excuse for not catching a deviation between a release point in a VCS system and the associated tarball, assuming the VCS hasn't also been compromised.
Given this statement, the sensible eyeballs are validating the source as it exists in the VCS, and the sensible admins are checking the correspondence of the tarballs downloaded against the associated VCS checkout checksum. I'm not saying this is the procedure most sites us, just that there's no conceptual obstacle to making this happen. The locus of trust is the VCS system, not the derivative tarballs.
It's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time to think that open source has such a surfeit of competent eyeballs that they can afford to scatter their resources and catch deviations everywhere, including purportedly identical copies.
That's putting a value of zero on a competent eyeball. Competent eyeballs are contributing to the project, and noticing defects on an incidental basis. This incidental attention catches a lot where activity is heavy.
Vandalism on obscure Wikipedia pages often survives for months, if more subtle than replacing the entire page with
$favorite_underutilized_part_of_my_anatomy!
The concept of scattering this kind of precious scrutiny over derivative works because software installers are too damn lazy to check the shasum boggles my mind.
I end up installing quite a lot of software in the middle of trying to complete a complex task under deadline. Many times I've closed my eyes and typed "sudo make install". When I'm less under the gun I'm more deliberate in my approach. Apparently my faith in distributed paranoia is largely unfounded.
Or maybe the people setting up IRC servers have some dim thought in the back of their minds "maybe I'll meet a chick and get laid someday". There's nothing like the mating reflex to dampen the precautionary spirit.
Proposed warning for the download page:
The bad news is that this software won't help you get laid. The good news is that if you neglect to check the shasum, you might catch a vicarious STD anyway.
It's funny how little I care what goes on behind closed binaries. OTOH, having GPL poison pills floating around in what started out as a BSD project is a form of spam that really irritates me, because their existence is hard to ignore. The guts of binary blobs don't pollute your result sets on Google code search. If Google had the perfect algorithm to guarantee that when I search for information about a BSD project, the existence of GPL poison pills forked off that code base *never comes to my attention* (this includes filtering discussion threads debating the matter) then I would have no objection to the GPL punk behaving like a jack-off. It's his life.
Sometimes the GPL people sound like they've spent far too long listening to Tom Wait's "What's he building in there?" Some of my systems are binary-blob free, others aren't. I know my options and I'm happy with my choices. Mother nature didn't publish her source code for the first three billion years. Suddenly the word "freedom" is polymorphic in a strange new way. Hijacking what came before has *always* been a part of the GPL Kool-Aid. Now that we've forcefully opened up mother nature's source code, we discover that hijacking has been part of the Kook-Aid since forever. It's a strange world.
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Man, you must have skipped your sociobiology classes, whatever they call it lately. Women bear the brunt of reproductive cost. And due to male insecurity over paternal certainty, even if the rape doesn't lead to an unwanted pregnancy, the woman feels (legitimately) devalued as a mating prospect. Males justify this attitude of blaming the victim with an internal Mel Gibson voice-over (she was asking for it).
On the male side of the reproductive coin, the worst case scenario is paying support for a child that isn't even yours, and that you can't actually visit, and won't love you enough to check you into rehab if you falter in middle age. See How DNA Testing Is Changing Fatherhood. The courts presently have little problem with this, despite its historical demographic slant, and I've yet to read a feminist complaint on this front.
India has also caught the bug. See Don't do paternity test routinely. The previous article argues in favour of precisely this measure.
I don't get the Hurd controversy. America basically impeached the smartest man in American politics since Robert McNamara and there was never a hint of harassment. Over what? Bad judgement concerning small sums of money that wouldn't even top up a petty change jar in the sexually enlightened nation of France.
Mark's obligation to the HP shareholder was to single-source his lechery, or nix his duplicity. Fail to pass elementary skill testing question, do not pass GO multiple times, nor collect over $50m in bonuses.
As an undergraduate with a six course load, I didn't get 3 hours per term of face time with any professor attending a major Canadian math and computer science degree mill. Let's round it up to 20 hours. If I had paid $50,000 per year, which thankfully I didn't, it amounts to about $1000/hour of professorial face time, assuming the rest of my education was worthless (I have a COBOL credit to prove it).
How many professors would hang on IRC for a small percentage of that? For $200/hour, the entire humanities faculty would stampede to their terminals, and only the most confident and ambitious assistant professors of any stripe would turn away from their keyboards.
Let me guess. You haven't seen many professorial pay grades, have you?
The real reason people pay $50,000 per year is to gain membership in a gated social community. Only a small portion of that contributes to your education, even if you rave about the cherry on top, a professor who actually knows your name. I wouldn't mind seeing the expensive ivy covered walls taken down a peg or two by an effective information program.
Perhaps the people who fear Linus is going to burn out again spent too many years watching Seinfeld and deeply internalized "no hugging, no learning". Linus != George. OTOH, given his acidic tongue, he's probably not well suited to a career in stand up comedy. Anyone else think that Larry McVoy would make a good Kramer? </rimshot>
There's something a little odd about this question. Mentions the volume of code output from his past life, but not the application domain. Seems to have weak Google skills. Not sure how he managed to post this query to an electronic discussion board. Did he dictate to his grand-nephew?
Having expertise in an application domain would be a good place to start. Then figure out what languages have remained relevant. But I get the feeling his former application domain is in the same state of decline as his programming skills.
With that list of former languages, the guy *ought* to have a fairly strong skillset for maintaining write-only Perl scripts (write-only code was a major industry back in the day), and I figure there's some demand for that. It would be a good transition language: old school mindset, old school syntax (uglier than most), but with a post-Algol dynamic execution environment.
If he can get over the hurdle of the moderately complex program that use to run in 50k now requiring 50M, he'll do OK. If not, he should try his hand at embedded. I've never written a line of code for an AVR that I couldn't have written (conceptually) with a C compiler from 1983. Those early microcomputer C compilers were riddled with trivial bugs. I recall a fairly simple C static variable initialization (more than one nesting level) the compile mis-generated. That wasn't uncommon. It's been a long time since I've had to report a major code generation error in a C compiler. It's the same skill, minus much of the grief.
The other thing that changed is that I no longer schedule lunch around a global recompile. Certain of the old-school time management skills have gone by the wayside. These days, it's your computer that goes to lunch. Between keystrokes.
Hey there old guy, while you were cranking out 100,000 lines of code, did you acquire any documentation skills? Those older code bases he's equipped to maintain often go along with old school formal management processes.
The biggest change from then to now is that you simply don't know what you're doing in most modern development environments, not the way one used to. Competence is a bubble of lantern light you carry on your person as you trudge into dark places, with one screen tethered to the internet. It's humanly impossible to learn PHP without constant recourse to a memory aid, if your memory is filtered on sanity. New kids won't even know what "filtered on sanity" means. It's been way out of style since Microsoft introduced us to the glories of central planning. In the 1980s, I knew *every function* of my favorite program editor. Often I knew every command line switch on the compiler I was using. And every function in the API I was programming against. These days, I don't even know every line in the context menu that comes up on a simple right click in Eclipse.
The other sea change one has to master is letting your tools do more of the work, whether it's unit testing, make scripts, or an IDE.
A fairly debilitating liability at the outset is not having a good sense of what is supposed to be painful, and what isn't. The rules on how productivity is gated have changed substantially. Long ago it was possible to put in a super productive week banging out a top notch utility library suited to the compiler and application domain. You'd be hung in the modern workplace for losing a week on an HIH detour.
If he's a bit more adventuresome, despite not mentioning Forth on his list of skills, he could do a lot worse than buying himself a Lego Mindstorms NXT and a copy of WoW and investing some quality time into Lua. The C side of Lua is anchored in the old-school skills he seems to have in abundance. He won't have a job at the end of play time, but he'd manage to bridge about half his generation gap in the process, and he mig
In watercraft, there are two sides to the tree: watercraft where buoyancy is independent of orientation (e.g. Zodiac) and watercraft where orientation is everything. In the second group, you have canoes/kayaks with great initial stability and terrible final stability, and you also have the converse. For propulsion, you have gas eating outboards, propulsion by environmental agents, and self propulsion. And you have a choice between artificial materials and natural materials.
C is instructive if you stay close to the shoreline. LISP is a kayak. You can roll over and come up the other side. Some people like that. Python is a reasonably nimble rowboat with room for a picnic cooler. PHP is a powerboat with an onboard mini-bar in a deadhead lagoon. Java is a twin Zodiac catamaran. Never sinks in the water, but watch out for the trees. C++ is a canoe with two gun decks and side mounted chainsaws (sorry, Bjarne). Name your pleasure.
I'm partial to the wood-canvas Chestnut Prospector, paddling solo in a sheltered bay. The one thing an amateur absolutely needs to avoid is going bow up against a cross-wind.
I was only on the periphery during the Woody era, but I definitely recall the libertarian slippery slopers whom I read with terrible dismay and a sense of impending doom.
I was using Debian to get stuff done in a startup company setting. There's an equation in book publishing: your readership drops by half with every equation included. Well, the value of the distribution dropped by half for every backport I found myself forced to install. Since I was using the LAMP stack among other things, and the 2002 LAMP stack wasn't working great for me in 2005, I jumped ship, not even knowing Ubuntu existed (first it was Fedora).
But here I am, running Ubuntu today, since I ultimately preferred the Debian infrastructure. Not proud of it on some level, but at least I escaped the orbit of yammering libertarians driving three year release cycles. At the time I felt like I was being negotiated over like a hostage in a hostage drama.
I've always regarded developing for the desktop to be a bit of an Alice in Wonderland proposition. User adoption seems to be inversely correlated with good engineering practice. Maybe you should be grateful that Canonical snarfed the EAT ME biscuit.
In the case of Perl, as least I get what Perl 6 was trying to accomplish. The Woody experience left me shaking my head.
Your Econ-101 course would have been improved by including a copy of Animal Farm. In the lost epilogue, the pigs mint coinage to invest German efficiency into everything they were doing already.
The principle you seem to be ranting on here is that voluntary transactions create wealth, no matter how the transaction is instrumented (coins, jars of pebbles, jiggling twins).
Monopoly is the word we use to describe the situation where voluntary rubs noses with indentured servitude. If there's only one place to purchase food, well, no-one is forcing you to chose survival.
In high speed computing one tends to compute bisection bandwidth: given any way of partitioning the system, what is the maximum bandwidth across the partition boundaries.
The concept of monopoly is similarly fungible. The banking industry has sliced up the economic system so that one partition (the high velocity insiders) have access to first-mover advantage, and everyone else doesn't. One term in what constitutes voluntary trade has been supremely tilted in favour of a group that isn't working nearly as hard as they ought to relative to the resources they command, even if it does, as you point out, greatly enrich Columbian farmers who would otherwise have to grow vegetables.
If the glorious concentration of wealth directed equated to aggregate productivity, Russia would be a model economy.
I will say your recitation of why money in and of itself can't be blamed was superbly rendered.
On the other hand, somehow you didn't manage to notice that typing the query "apple suicide" into Google no longer brings up a fairy tale: it brings up Foxccon in the "I feel lucky" position.
Unless you're a climate scientist who confers with hard core statisticians and even then the climate record suffers an appalling lack of homogeneous data. It's not been until the satellite era that anything resembling a homogeneous record has come into existence. Different times, different instruments, different measurement densities. Go a little further back, it's tree rings in a teacup.
I think the global warming hypothesis is somewhere around "preponderance of evidence" (civil standard) and nowhere close to "beyond a reasonable doubt" (criminal standard). It's almost certainly probably true.
I'm not a climate denier. I just think it's a darn hard to build a definitive case on a data set that's thin on the back end. If we had satellite climate data dating back to 1900, it'd be a slam dunk. Within another two or three decades, it'll be a slam dunk. Urgency != certainty.
It'll be interesting to look back in 2050, if civilization still exists, to see which point in history is regarded as having successfully proven the global warming thesis. Will half the data from 2010 have been shot full of holes in retrospect? Or not? As compared against the standards of scientific proof in other branches of science not bearing the weight of the survival of planet earth and life as we know it.
Here's a question. Let's imagine a world where AGW is taking place, but the paucity of data makes this fact scientifically unprovable, until underlying agents of AGW are far advanced (far more so than earth presently). Would the scientific consensus in this world be that the AGW thesis is unprovable as the data stands, or would they busy themselves with squeezing blood from a rock?
Is an ambitious scientist convinced of the future outcome not vulnerable to the thought process "it doesn't matter if I stretch the data a little bit, I'll soon be vindicated anyway"?
Economics as a discipline usually tells you what you needed to know long after you needed to know it. Why is it not possible that climate science also dabbles in dismal? And on what planet is the dismal realist rewarded with the largest study grant?
Neither am I sure I buy the strategy "safety in numbers". Isn't that just a good way to dissipate the painful fact that nobody understands the elephant as a whole?
On the other side of the fence, proof that the planet is *not* warming consists of lies, fabrications, distortions, and bupkus. In a prudent world, one would want to see that proof before conducting a grand experiment on the whole ball of water.
That's an appropriate sentiment for a guy who choses his programming language the same way he chooses his girlfriend.
The true test of Perl 6 is how many of the new genes baked into Perl 6 show up in Python/PHP/Ruby ten years from now. That would make Perl 6 an important language, even if it never gets laid.
At some point I'm going to give Perl 6 a shot with an open mind, and see whether all those years paid off with a mature reflection on the nature of womanhood. Even if it's not girlfriend material.
Another great way to muddy the waters is to misconstrue the question. You don't have to speculate. There's a difference between a vague question and casting a wide net. The transaction value of a single post is maximized in providing a specific answer to a specific question, whereas the transactional value of a discussion forum is maximized by having many situations and specifics put forward, including scenarios not originally envisioned.
There's at least as many undeclared assumptions in your narrow pedanticism as in the original question.
The question could be more evocative of his actual circumstance, but perhaps the poster was afraid of blowing his cover. Is the net cast on this question so broad that this can't be a useful exchange? Probably, if the question generates more complaints than contributions.
Brought to you by the same people who managed to shut down a perfectly good public transportation system in LA long ago so that cars would rule the universe.
Like many other things, biking has different proficiency brackets. A novice or careless recreational rider should stop at stop signs, no questions asked.
An experienced rider with cleats who commutes daily might choose to practice safety differently. The disadvantage of coming to a complete stop is that you when you do enter the intersection, you enter at a slower speed, and expose yourself while crossing for longer (often longer than you can predict the future). I also cross the intersection on a much straighter path without stopping. It's hard to cleat in under power without at least one brief front wheel wobble. When you ride under control in perfectly straight lines, cars anticipate your trajectory better. If you don't cleat in under power, you end up crossing the intersection beside the cars instead of in front of the cars. You might collect some paint, but you won't get a ticket.
Advantages of a standing semi-stop for an experienced rider: less time spent in the intersection, better control over bike path, less window of risk where you can't predict what other idiots will do, and less hindrance of traffic around you, who are prone to do stupider things when feeling delayed, even if the delay is trivial *or doesn't even exist*. It only takes a minuscule perceived delay to bring out the worst of driver with cell phone, who certainly won't spare the bandwidth to check whether superficial perception reflects reality.
The speed of the semi-stop doesn't interest me much. What matters is that I get four clear checks for oncoming vehicles and pedestrians: look left, look right, listen left, listen right. If traffic is heavy enough that the auditory check is worthless, I usually accept my fate and come to a full stop. Fortunately in my town, that's only major corridors and certain times of day or poorly planned routes.
If stopping at the stop sign raised a protective fence against all contending lanes, I would concede the merit of unthinking adherence.
Stopping is not some magic force field that makes an intersection safer. There's a right time and a wrong time to enter an intersection, regardless of your minimum speed of approach. The amount of time required to evaluate this is to some degree proportional to your time of exposure in crossing the intersection. There's a nice little equation to solve. With one small caveat: NEVER make any decision that depends for safety on a vehicle driver having a correct interpretation of what you're going to do next.
Another defensive tactic is isolation: only having to pay attention to one threat in one direction, with a plausible path of escape. Is it safer to cross an intersection after stopping with vehicles chomping to cross against you on both your left and right (it's hard to look both ways), or safer to scoot at the first opportunity when there's only one car in contention on one side, and further away? Sometimes if there are too many cars lined up against me and not looking predictable I pretend I've dropped something until the idiots clear.
One time in the past five years of aggressive traffic management I made a risky decision and had three cars do something unpredictable in short succession. I was trying to get into a grocery store parking lot, and there were service vehicles in the street, plus a mass of oncoming vehicles halfway down the street. Poof! Plan A, plan B, plan C, plan D evaporated in a two second interval. Had to go to plan E. Pinned the brakes on both wheels without time to unclip and toppled over in the middle of the street (far enough away from any moving cars). To the people on the sidewalk who didn't understand the chess game that had suddenly hemmed me into a bad situation, I looked like a guy who just randomly grabbed both brakes and
I once read that bubble sort is the optimal sort on a Turing machine. Too bad it wasn't named tapeworm sort, then every student would understand immediately. It would be analyzed alongside dining-philosopher chopstick sort, where the dining philosopher won't each (finicky like Tesla) unless holding a matched pair, with the option of swapping hands if holding a pair of sticks before release.
If the purpose is to teach analysis of algorithms under different computational assumptions, there's nothing wrong with teaching bubble sort. When it gains rank in the panoply of commercially viable sorts, that's where the problems begin. But since when did academia much care about A) carefully informing you about the importance of the material they were teaching you, or B) the grim realities of commercial applicability.
Extreme adherence to practicality made C++ what it is today. All software for the F22 and F35 are written in C++. Not Haskell or LISP. The beautiful languages are the languages best suited to reject design iteration on practicality. If it's not very practical to begin with, why mess up a good thing? C++ never had that problem.
What my university failed to teach properly was radix-sort, which is both practical and of theoretical interest. If the time devoted to bubble sort had instead been devoted to radix sort, the astute reader would know that record length is a critical parameter in this benchmark protocol.
Hell, give me a one-bit record length and some fast disk drives, I could sort a terabyte at the same speed as UCal using a single loop of RS485 multidrop instead of that overpriced Cisco kit.
Don't bother reading TFA. It does not report the sort protocol record length.
If the term "unobtainium" wasn't invented by the early heyday of jet fighter engineering (circa the Korean war), I'll eat my carbon-graphite bike frame.
My understanding is that superconductors have current limits independent of resistive effects (possibly due to magnetic field intensity). How much material you need depends on those exact limits. Even silver could be cheap as dirt if the current density is high enough.
The other thing I've heard is that superconductors are generally discovered by observing related effects, not by measuring conductivity itself.
There also seems to be many people here who have never heard of the black swan effect. You can't prove a black swan doesn't exist by observing a sequence of white swans. There's always a first time. This also applies to the possibility that something important is someday discovered or first published independent of peer review.
That said, there's no point in wearing out your salivary glands unnecessarily, although I've heard it's a common ailment to overdose on visual innuendo of the possibility of doing something you're not actually doing (with dim prospects).
For me qualified engineering porn is when the material is officially characterized in important criteria such as current density limits.
I feel the same way about quantum computing. Still haven't seen a formula which describes the ultimate constraint (or cost) on how many qubits can be stacked together (usually the universe puts limits on salivary endeavours). It would be kind of weird if qubits prove to be as stackable as frictionless pulleys.
The most interesting man I never met lived in a small house near the beach, had newspapers and old chairs and magazines piled to the ceiling in every room. Must have had a thousand cubic feet of Life Magazine. A most exciting fellow. What the man could have done with a proper warehouse, who knows?
What will finally put Seagate out of business is the universal porn compressor: an algorithm to produce almost any image with a pornographic payload (validated through fMRI studies). Finally we can eliminate women from sex. It'll be great.
If you don't like that don't buy one. None of your rights are being infringed. You got what you paid for and you are free to do with it as you will.
Nicely done. You got a passing grade in the free market school cheer ("Viva caveat emptor!") and DNF in every aspect of the situation worth discussing. You've clearly set yourself ahead well ahead of the obese peloton walking their bikes up the intellectual incline with loud proclamations that TI has no moral right to make a stupid decision (which as you rightly point out is their eternal privilege).
With any nose at all for controversy, you might have wondered out loud who TI regards as their real customers for this product. In a shocking development, it might not be the high school students (or parents thereof) who actually shell out their hard won cash. There's a challenging concept to swallow for a transactional reductionist.
TI might regard their customers for this product to be school board administrators who hold the power to set curriculum standards which induces teachers to set exams that are biased toward the success of students buying a particular TI product, abused of most of its generative learning potential by the grasping grubbiness of TI corporate headquarters.
In an educational system that prizes testability over learning, perhaps this is exactly what the true customer demands.
But as you point out, if you don't like it, you don't have to buy one. It's not like the customers of the school board (ostensibly the students) have any say in the educational product they consume, supposing they actually got together and groused publicly. It is their disempowered cash after all, that turns the main propeller.
But then, as your stellar argument has it, if the school system is corrupt you don't have to attend. There's the beauty of libertarianism. You've got a perfect retort for everything, in the world as it ought to exist.
Of the ten or more creative ways to look at this situation, caveat emptor drives the hearse.
You can sure tell the difference on this thread between the bargain-rack brigade and those familiar with economic thinking (recommended for the former category: "The Naked Economist").
Objectively, on historical price/performance trends, what you're getting from this card for $200 is eye popping. So eye popping it's almost hard to find a game that benefits without slathering on the bling. Oh dear, it's so good it has practically eclipsed the utility envelope.
I'm not sure I prefer the world where "bargain" has become wholly subordinate to the phrase "attention bargain shoppers". It's really quite a stupid stance to blame the economy, because immersive gaming is pretty much purely a luxury item to begin with.
ATI has an easy answer to this video card: a 5840 with a 1120:56:32 configuration. The 5830 is hammered in most benchmarks by only having half the ROPs enable. Aside from that, it kicks ass.
This is purely a manufacturing yield consideration. ATI has been in production for longer than Nvidia on this generation, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some additions to the product line based on yield refinements, now that they have a viable competitor in this niche. When yields were lower, it was insane for ATI to direct their massive 334mm^2 Cyprus chips into discount configurations. Talk about not getting economic thinking. It only made sense to discount the chips they couldn't sell otherwise, and mostly those were the ones with a failed ROP unit.
On paper, people who want high frame rates on a single mid-sized monitor (1680x1050 or less) are fairly well served by a 5830 (at some price point). But the benchies have trouble drawing distinctions at this screen size (the cards are too freaking fast), so all the attention is drawn to frame rate on 30" monster displays.
Relative to the economic situation of someone gaming for hours a day on a 30" display (and only the latest and greatest titles), I'd say $200 is bargain basement.
I spent $150 on my last video card, but I won't rent a movie less than a year old, because I'm only willing to pay the back-catalog price. Anyone who pulls a movie off the "new releases" rack is an economic bracket where a $200 video card is fungible entertainment.
I agree with many of the bargain-rack shoppers here. I'm appalled to pay $10 to watch a movie in the theatre on opening weekend, when I can rent the same movie six months later for $2 and share it with my snuggle bunny while gorging on home-popped popcorn dressed with reggiano parmigiano.
Normally I skim other comments before posting, but today I'm too busy.
This whole piece is ruined by the tactic of taking people's rhetoric too literally when mounting an attack on the underlying sentiment. In the heat of the battle, people say strange things. Ten years later, the discussion needs to rise above the original Battling Tops.
What was really at stake was the transaction floor. How valuable does information need to be *before* the constrictive apparatus of scarcity and profit kicks in? Given an exponentially falling cost of production and distribution for *most* information, the transaction floor ought to be pretty darn high.
The same thing applies to the patent system. The novelty floor is presently set an order of magnitude (or three) below where it needs to be. It's not hard to find examples of defensible patents, such as the original public key patent. Your average hacker wasn't going to invent public key exchange by accident. It took a fairly large conceptual leap to realize that this might be a possible goal. The blue LED is another one that took real dedication and effort where many had failed. If you take the current patent system and shrink it to 10% or 1% of the current patent issue rate (suitable for information that wants to be expensive) the system becomes such a small shadow of its present self, that maybe it's just easier to shut it down completely.
The problem is that a patent system dialed up to a respectable level of novelty will experience a dilution pressure. There will be a constant stream of people who would like to become millionaires by gaining possession of a simple idea such as one-click shopping. The anti-patent ideologues look at this and decide that cited the "slippery slope" argument is a way to force the system into a favorable polar outcome (no patents at all).
The problem there is that if you look at every social system in the world as a slippery slope and force every aspect of every system into a polar outcome to defeat the slippery slope, you end up with a crap system. Societies do not function integrating over a trust level of zero. The right solution is to design laws that bend but don't break. It's an engineering challenge. You can't build a democratic system without managing to solve this problem at least some of the time. If you believe it's completely unsolvable, then you don't functionally believe in democracy.
Where the transaction floor on "information wants to be expensive" needs to wind up is *above* what society can achieve for free by exploiting what Clay Shirkey calls the trillion hours per year cognitive surplus. People like to create, people like to collaborate, people like to share. If that's all it takes to create information of value, we don't need some corporation erecting a toll booth to dampen value creation.
There are lots of places where corporations have something unique to *add* to the picture. Open source hasn't come anywhere close to the refinement of OS X. You get that refinement with some DRM bitters on the side, but there it is. You have a choice. Apple gave my father the run around for the last several months on the iPhone reception issue. How do you hold a tiny phone in a giant mitt without touching the corners? Just because information wants to be expensive, doesn't mean you're always getting what you paid for.
The vigorous immune rejection at the Well was probably the same thing I feel. We need less companies out there looking around for something of value where they can plant a flag post and claim to be somehow essential to something that was already proceeding just fine. Corporate hustle can often bring an algorithm to market six months ahead of when the hackers would have got there anyway. How essential is that, in the long run? The accelerated solutions often prove to be annoyingly flimsy and riddled with security flaws, so it's arguable that the corporations win this race mostly by throwing more babie
I find it tedious this need to equate happeningness with innovation.
Cell phones would look pretty pathetic if not embedded in an ecosystem which made it possible to efficiently produce the software and content and phone designs you implicitly rave about. Just about every great innovation that makes the modern cell phone possible was developed primarily on giant PC workstations.
Just like it's easier to have a lot of spare cash in early adulthood (and the coolness associated with that) if you still live in your parent's basement and leach off the free utilities.
It was the same thing with the success of scripting languages on the back of the nasty compiled languages such as C/C++. When Python runs fast, which language to you think is doing the real heavy lifting?
Standing on the shoulders of giants and poaching the low hanging fruit is a time honoured tradition, but why is the hulking giant always portrayed as a dim gallumph? It's like saying peaches are cool, but peach tree step ladders aren't.
Coolness ends up being how much newness one can take credit for, while disregarding long years of hard work by the better established that made the niche possible in the first place. OpenCL based media encoders running on massive GPUs is only going to make your cell phone decoder even more cool and bit efficient.
So I get your message. There's nothing happening on the PC platform because the cell platform has figured out how to take all the credit on the unassailable logic that the most important component in any technology ecosystem is the pocket-sized gratification device.
Oh for fucks sake, chill. It was some low paid drone in a call center who made the original decision. Not exactly an executive decision.
You can bet your life it was an executive decision to staff the call center with low-paid droids incapable of acting on moral discretion. This is the business model they choose to create, where 99% of their interaction with the public is through low-paid droids incapable of moral discretion.
On this model, getting publicly burned in effigy once every six months is a normal cost of business. The phone companies have taken it upon themselves to function as the bulwark of enculturated infantilism (few cost-up-front purchase options). They deserve what they get.
On the other side of the fence, America's enlisted men have roughly the same level of moral discretion when it comes to participating in the wrong war as Verizon's call center droids have in accepting a justifiable termination request.
The fact that the NSA is still serving a purpose in spite of 'completely secure' key sizes should suggest a fairly obvious conclusion.
Sweet. Stupidity by obscurity. Shall we integrate the area under the curve of obviousness * tinfoil_coefficient?
There is an obvious conclusion, but apparently it's not obvious. It's one of those cases where whichever answer you presently hold seems obvious, until one discovers an even more obvious answer. The parent post has been careful to distance itself from any clue as to which rung on the ladder of obviousness it presently occupies, a strategy which suggests an entry level rungs. Think of the cost. I certainly wouldn't want to be a large enough blip on the threat radar to find myself at the center of an exaflop computation. I value my keratin.
Feynman in Joking has a chapter on safe cracking. He ultimately concludes that "cold cracking" is largely a myth. Almost every safe cracker starts with an in: tampered mechanism, partially guessed combination, faulty mechanicals.
The bulk of what your average cyber TLA computes would be simple traffic analysis, which at that scale, is probably not so simple, and involves correlating across networks (cell, internet, house of poozle). One wonders how many initial demerits one earns by connecting through a known onion router.
Next you have attacks against keys with weak initial entropy, key leakage, or sloppy key management (betcha that's a growth industry). Any cipher which purports to send random bits can be hacked to leak key bits (secretly) in the apparently random nonce values. It's nearly impossible to prove your cipher isn't doing this without access to the source code all the way down to the CPU microcode, and beyond. Huh, a funny thing happened to our masks on the way to the foundry, but the chips seem to run great. From a TLA perspective, this is a useful advantage, because what you end up with is not a level playing field. What you can crack by brute force, someday soon your adversary can also crack by brute force. It's a lot more fun when you have to peel off the anonymous brown wrapper.
What seems obvious to me is that your average TLA enjoys hiding behind this obviousness meme, and might even participate in its dissemination as a part of a highly successful initiative in distracting paranoids and shallow thinkers from useful analysis. You just have to find a forum where seeming clever is more important than being clever, add water, and stir.
My favorite local coffee shop is right beside the schizophrenia resource center. If I had the right social hacking skills, I could accomplish this mission by buying the right person who drifts into the coffee shop with a wifi netbook a free coffee a day. "Just keep posting buddy, the Joe's on me."
If the placebo effect works, it has no link with superstition. Superstition is the belief in things that don't exist or don't work.
To really test the placebo effect, you'd have to test people who don't even know they are being tested (sneak the placebo into their diet). Or perhaps they need to perform the placebo study on total amnesiacs. Unfortunately, if the subjects suddenly began to recall everything, that would mess the protocol up.
I grew up near Calgary. Tyrrell rocks. It's also neat how you swoop into the crag after fifty miles of prairie. I just wish they had done a bit more with the Burgess exhibit.
A thousand skeletons doesn't impress me half as much as one pair of bronze stirrups. Or even a splintered chuckwagon. Surely, over the 7000 years of human history, someone would have managed the feat.
Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the write limit is a limit of the underlying flash, not the controller...
Extra ECC data and fancy controller trickery can't get around the fact that the magnetic media density limit is a limit of the underlying magnetic domains, not the controller...
No wait! Then they invented PRML. Turns out the underlying limit was actually due to engineers lacking vision. All they needed was a new analytic frame of reference. The same deal has happened over and over again with RF spectrum. One man's noise is another man's signal. I just don't know the RF world well enough to cite examples off the top of my head.
That said, there's a long of history of quacks who would like you to believe they invented PRML when they actually haven't.
On gut instinct I'd give this about 3:1 against this having a solid grain of truth, and slightly longer odds against commercialization at significantly better than cost parity compared to other methods of achieving the same end. Even where you find a grain of truth, the product often falls into a niche for one reason or another. Sometimes it's nothing serious, just small things that get refined in the due course of time, which would be great if your massively larger competitors were transfixed with awe.
So many business plans are missing the critical line item:
Transfix deep-pocket competitors with awe while we burnish our new technology to ultimate perfection.
Pity.
There's really no technical excuse for not catching a deviation between a release point in a VCS system and the associated tarball, assuming the VCS hasn't also been compromised.
Given this statement, the sensible eyeballs are validating the source as it exists in the VCS, and the sensible admins are checking the correspondence of the tarballs downloaded against the associated VCS checkout checksum. I'm not saying this is the procedure most sites us, just that there's no conceptual obstacle to making this happen. The locus of trust is the VCS system, not the derivative tarballs.
It's the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time to think that open source has such a surfeit of competent eyeballs that they can afford to scatter their resources and catch deviations everywhere, including purportedly identical copies.
That's putting a value of zero on a competent eyeball. Competent eyeballs are contributing to the project, and noticing defects on an incidental basis. This incidental attention catches a lot where activity is heavy.
Vandalism on obscure Wikipedia pages often survives for months, if more subtle than replacing the entire page with
$favorite_underutilized_part_of_my_anatomy!
The concept of scattering this kind of precious scrutiny over derivative works because software installers are too damn lazy to check the shasum boggles my mind.
I end up installing quite a lot of software in the middle of trying to complete a complex task under deadline. Many times I've closed my eyes and typed "sudo make install". When I'm less under the gun I'm more deliberate in my approach. Apparently my faith in distributed paranoia is largely unfounded.
Or maybe the people setting up IRC servers have some dim thought in the back of their minds "maybe I'll meet a chick and get laid someday". There's nothing like the mating reflex to dampen the precautionary spirit.
Proposed warning for the download page:
The bad news is that this software won't help you get laid. The good news is that if you neglect to check the shasum, you might catch a vicarious STD anyway.
For me, it's the immaturity of Clang/LLVM that makes the project so damn impressive, like a three year old playing Bach's cello suites.
LLVM Project Blog: Clang++ Builds Boost!
That was a nice summary of the situation.
It's funny how little I care what goes on behind closed binaries. OTOH, having GPL poison pills floating around in what started out as a BSD project is a form of spam that really irritates me, because their existence is hard to ignore. The guts of binary blobs don't pollute your result sets on Google code search. If Google had the perfect algorithm to guarantee that when I search for information about a BSD project, the existence of GPL poison pills forked off that code base *never comes to my attention* (this includes filtering discussion threads debating the matter) then I would have no objection to the GPL punk behaving like a jack-off. It's his life.
Sometimes the GPL people sound like they've spent far too long listening to Tom Wait's "What's he building in there?" Some of my systems are binary-blob free, others aren't. I know my options and I'm happy with my choices. Mother nature didn't publish her source code for the first three billion years. Suddenly the word "freedom" is polymorphic in a strange new way. Hijacking what came before has *always* been a part of the GPL Kool-Aid. Now that we've forcefully opened up mother nature's source code, we discover that hijacking has been part of the Kook-Aid since forever. It's a strange world.