Since Google search started to handle mixed-unit calculations flawlessly, I just input any unit at hand, and spare my worry for whether I trust the numbers in the numbers in the first place.
The original reason for avoiding mixed unit calculations was that it was so easy to screw something up handling the conversions manually.
Now I just cut and paste whatever formula I entered into Google search, so if necessary I can repeat or otherwise verify the calculation later.
There were actually a couple of weird edge-cases in Google calculator ten years ago (forget what they were, but it was based on a surprising resolution of something that didn't on the surface appear ambiguous). I can't now recall the last time Google's mixed-unit calculator steered me wrong since then.
Since the calculation carries units all the way through, missing or misplaced parentheses are usually busted in the first instance. (Wait a minute, I wasn't expecting this to come out in kg m / s^3.)
In fact, for that reason alone, it's so much better than a regular calculator used with entirely consistent mks units.
Facebook will cure 2018 hate speech in 2023 or 2028. If the planet still exists in 2028.
Somehow, I don't think Zuck factored into his estimate that arms races are two-way streets.
And another factor: in Arab cultures, young men sexualize extremely minor details of women's behaviours and dress. As the loudness declines, the gain increases.
Nevertheless, Facebook will declare this an objective victory. Meanwhile, hate will persist on a cholesterol-reduced diet with fewer words identified by a single letter, and lesser thickets of exclamation marks.
So at least we can expect hate to become less ugly, undigested.
Small victory, I suppose, had he promised it next year.
If you've ever had to take your car into the dealer for a new gear box, you're unlikely to be surprised by this: Using data from the publicly traded dealership groups, Forbes' Jim Henry has discovered that the most profitable part of a dealer's business is its service and parts department.
For the Penske Automotive Group... the gross margin for service and parts was 57 percent, vs. just 8 percent for new-vehicle sales.
Of course, Apple's profit margins for new phone sales is closer to 57 percent than 8 percent.
We could hypothesize that Apple skews to laudanum on both sides, or we could hypothesize that Apple takes more on one side, and hence less at the other (really?), or we could form a trust relationship with a third party mechanic, and not think about this at all.
During LIGO's fifth Science Run in November 2005, sensitivity reached the primary design specification of a detectable strain of one part in 1021 over a 100 Hz bandwidth.
Sleepy engineer: "Hmm, that sure looks like a typo. Any normal 10-bit ADC would have a natural range of 1024 distinct values. Weird, the engineering magic of LIGO must be somewhere else."
My joke actually praises the sleepy engineer: if reading that text correctly required consciously overriding deeply engrained subconscious intuitions about achievable scale, you possibly have a hope of comprehending 10^139.
You're right. It's not. That, sir, is an x86 instruction, which the x86 translation layer takes as input and passes to a RISC core. Intel, at least, has been doing this since the Core series was released.
No, since the Pentium Pro in 1995, which already employed microcode translation; not with the Pentium IV, which was deliberately brain damaged to win the MHz war (I don't even know how to classify the trace cache, except ungodly hot); again with the Core Duo, after that (god bless Israel).
What you are calling a RISC core has more proprietary CISC-world abstraction violations than you could shake a stick at (these are primarily performance hacks, but nonetheless).
Explain to me why micro-op fission gets more air time in your lexicon than macro-op fusion? Because modern x86 processors use both tricks to obtain a working representation which minimizes in-flight resource consumption (which is similar to RISC, but is not directly motivated by either "simple" or "reduced"—hasty is a better proxy—and none of this is reflected in the instruction set, as is patently obvious). And even then, the micro-op fission remains semantically distinct from an actual RISC instruction stream deep into the pipeline in small yet critical details (internal modern x86 micro-ops are fuzzy creatures, but these implementation tricks aren't publicly documented).
There's actually a more basic level underneath RISC: readers and writers attached to separate busses. But this is so low level is tends to make your ISA non-portable to the next iteration, so no-one sane goes here (I'm looking at you, Itanium, even though after you started here, you went another 100 miles downstream).
write_assert rA to register_bus_1 read rB from register bus_1 read rC from register bus_1 write_deassert rA to register_bus_1
Register files tend to be multiple ported, so there would be other register busses available concurrently. That's all one clock cycle if your macro-op fusion puts Humpty back together again (and not analogous to any RISC instruction).
mov ebx, eax mov ecx, eax
In a transport triggered architecture-like world, these two instructions could be fused into a single assertion of eax, and a simultaneous read by register file ebx and register file ecx off the same bus.
But you'd still call it a RISC core, wouldn't you, so long as the internal representation was granulated into some kind of small, vaguely uniform ops? (Macro or micro, who cares?)
Between 1985 and 1995, I must have read many dozen articles in computer magazines about how x86 CISC could never grow up to compete against the Big Boys (where RISC was the prototypical Big Boy). This was a potent brew of aesthetic disgust (with which I largely concurred), competitive ambition, and mentally defective bullshit—as history now records. In order to advance this kind of claim in a falsifiable way, RISC has to actually mean something.
Back when I wrote a fair amount of 486 code, I mainly worked in a RISC subset (most of which dated back to the 8086 or were simple extensions), heavily augmented with non-RISC ModR/M sib addressing modes. There was no OOO, so there was no need for an intermediate micro-op representation: the complex read/modify/write instruction were decomposed into RISC primitives (load,operation,store) by an execution-engine state machine (which I suppose you could call a micro-op sequencer on the understanding that the machine supported exactly one in-flight macro-op. A non-distinction without a difference?) Compared to 386, 486 felt a bit RISCy because many of your core operations had a single-cycle execution time (and you tended to ignore program fetch delays, because of the concurrent internal i-cache).
That's no-one's idea of a classic RISC instruction.
And even though this gets decoded into micro-ops, the complex address generation is computed only once, and the memory order checks take advantage of this having been a single, fused instruction, so the semantic nuances are carried deep through the OOO pipeline.
There's so much crap on the Internet about RISC, it blows my mind.
50% of the RISC hype was about being able to compete against the legacy vendors with smaller, cheaper design teams.
You can call x86 RISC, but it never got cheaper to design. The cost of the design is almost a superset of its CISC and RISC elements (I'm pretty sure its hybrid nature creates headaches above and beyond the sum of its parts).
The RISC hype bubble had some validity for roughly a five-year period before Intel launched the Pentium Pro in 1995 (RISC hype persisted outside the clue nucleus for another five years after that for largely political reasons). The Pentium Pro is where the complexity of the CPU core and the complexity of the memory subsystem (and latency hiding) began to cross over. There is no possible way to design a processor with a deep, concurrent queue of in-flight cache and memory transactions (with SMP coherence), and extensive latency hiding in the execution engine using a small design team.
Wikipedia's article on the Pentium Pro makes it sounds like its performance sucked, but it held up amazingly well on mixed Windows NT server workloads compared to any RISC architecture at anywhere near the price (it's deep OOO latency-hiding was a huge boon to memory thrashing compared to in-order RISC with wider dispatch.)
Of course, most benchmarks are biased to the salt-flat quarter mile.
Another thing, the majority of CISC junk-in-the-trunk (e.g. 286 call gates) is subject to exponential shrinkage; barely a third decimal point by the time you reach a billion transistors.
On the matter of superscalar execution, this naturally prioritizes the quick and the fleeting (only these instructions could pair up in the P5). Superscalar under OOO is a different beast: now the killer dimension becomes instruction flight time. This for the macro-ops at the level of the retirement order buffer, the micro-ops at the level of the dispatch buffer, and the outstanding memory operations at the level of the memory order buffer.
Intel's x86 architecture is more HISC than RISC: Hasty Instruction Set Computing. The faster you retire the operations (at any level), the sooner you free up precious reservation buffers. (x86 never inched one step closer to a conventional load/store architecture, the cardinal 'R' in RISC; most especially, transient addresses off the stack frame do not retire to the register model in x86—what a waste of reservation stations—because they are never register-assigned in the first place.)
Execution optimization has gone even further; processors not only translate many machine instructions into a series of uops, but also do the opposite when appropriate; they combine certain machine instruction sequences (such as a compare followed by a conditional jump) into a more complex uop. This is also known as macro-op fusion.
If some traditional RISC architecture adds macro-op fusion to its internal implementation, do I get to declare that "modern MIPS is nothing more than a MIPS translation layer around a CISC chip, anyway"?
Since the early 1990s, this debate has been my #1 personal case study in technological propaganda, herd following, and revisionist misinformation.
I originally got onto this file asking myself a hard question: just who is this messianic charlatan named Steve Jobs?
It doesn't actually contradict last month's study.
This study demonstrates a lingering neuro-generative capacity (at the tissue level). The previous study demonstrates a paucity of neuro-generative reality (with a bias toward the functional view).
Most old dogs are set in their ways, but some old dogs do indeed learn new tricks.
Oh noes, CONTRADICTION, time to ostrich my head into the nearest dune.
Watching kids play dodgeball requires an order of magnitude more mental exertion than the amount of cognitive empathy you invested in that donut-shop knee slapper.
But we'll work you up to it gradually. For starters, try walking two dogs at the same time, then gradually work your way up to three dogs on each arm.
Then we'll take your treats and your leash and your muzzle and your shock collar away and stick you into a room with 30 middle schoolers, with only your bare hands for self-defense—but these are both tattooed on both sides with "jail bait" because both the friendly front of your hand and the stinging back of your hand can land you into a heap of trouble.
You can bring your gavel, but that will probably only work on pure surprise effect for a couple of days, and thereafter will only be good for earning yourself weird nicknames.
Not that you don't have any already, if that's your standard donut banter.
Intel only provides 3 year warranties on Xeon processors. If they were feeling generous, they might provide updates for chips 5 years out...
What does warranty have to do with this?
If a baby seat kills babies because it's defective by design, this is not a warranty issue. Not even if the baby seat only kills babies when combined with other safety systems that weren't invented yet at the time the baby seat was originally sold.
Both of these ends of the telescope are too extreme for the matter at hand, but at least mine is wide awake, whereas as yours is snoozing behind the wheel.
So we tailor their class times to their biological rhythms and they turn into adults with juvenile biological rhythms. Will they ever really grow up?
I've had N24 for the last thirty years, so I can officially blow this smoke back into your face.
Juvenile:
* A prepubescent child. * A person younger than the age of majority. * A person younger than the age of criminal responsibility. * An animal that is not sexually mature. * A mindless insult that all-too-often passes itself off as intelligent discourse.
Last I checked, college students fuck like rabbits, so we'll dispatch item #1 with extreme prejudice.
If someone goes straight to college campus from high school, the typical age of the incoming freshman in a U.S. college is 18 or 19.
So, by sophomore year, juveniles (as defined by a minority criteria) are already a distinct minority.
So what we have here is a juvenile-onset biological rhythm shift which persist well into young adulthood.
Young adulthood having recently become the age during which a majority of the population struggles to acquire a remunerative skillset among the top-three quartiles of career prospects and life outcomes.
Last October, just 65.9 percent of people who had graduated from high school the previous spring had enrolled in college, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said this week.
(The large chunk of the college admission population enrolled in the humanities starts the race a full quartile back, many drop-outs return to the fray later, and some high school dropouts have intrinsic skills, so even the dismal quartile from 25–50th percentile is by no means guaranteed merely by showing up.)
A really good example of the indirect path was in the news cycle this week:
Wylie was born to parents who were both physicians. At age 6 he was abused by a mentally unstable person, and the school tried to cover it up. In 2000 his father and he won a settlement of CA$290,000 against the school district. As a child he was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD.
He left school at 16 without a qualification, but by 17 was working for the Canadian opposition leader Michael Ignatieff. He taught himself to code at age 19. At 20, he began studying law at the London School of Economics.
In 2013 he was introduced to SCL Elections which would later create Cambridge Analytica.
Ignatieff was a catastrophic political leader, but the rest of his bio reads like a Who's Who entry (recent Order of Canada, and back to full professorship at Harvard).
Speaking of physicians, that's surely one profession that's never strayed into sparing the whip.
The whole point of a free market is that the best decision point for risks vs. benefits is the individual, with specific knowledge of his or her own situation.
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there where the benefits look dubious, not having any of the risk factors in the first place that those "benefits" are mooted to reduce, while having a family history of cancer in precisely those organs most closely associated with acrylamide animal models.
The only free market I believe in is the one where decision makers—including the ever-more beleaguered individual—are empowered with specific information and associated choice gradients they can realistically exploit. A free market for me is a giant network of autonomous choice gradients populated by informed, self-interested choosers. Half of capitalism talks a big story about free markets, while doing everything in the power of their Dr Strangelovesque second arm to squelch choice gradients, to dominate choice gradients with macroscopic binary decision points, to suppress the flow of pertinent information, or to cloud the flow of pertinent information if it can't killed at source.
I watched The Kite Runner last night. Great in the small stuff, weak in the large stuff (central-casting bullet spray that gets sleepy-footed and near-sighted in the third act, helping the audience ignore the small detail that the protagonist has gone batshit INSANE in his peril management skills), but a worthy film for all that.
MINOR spoiler alert. At a key point, there's a line "Where's your shame?"
Okay, free-market fat cats, my turn: Where's your shame?
The benefits (in the large) outweigh the risks (in the large).
"In the large" is hammer and sickle territory. WTF has that got to do with decentralized, individual, free-market choice?
Nice. No expedient socialism here. Just business as usual, with the crisp, wind-blown flag of capitalist ideology self-interest concealing your missing pants.
I've usually had pretty good accuracy, going all the way back to Dragon Dictate circa 2000 (condenser microphone, silent room).
When I've bothered to use it, Google voice recognition on my phone has been just fine in ambient conditions.
Many my enunciation hits the sweet spot for these models. Large swaths of Canada required a trained ear (or at least an attentive ear) to distinguish from Received SoCal Hollywood. (So much so that it's some strange accent from the Ottawa valley that became the national stereotype, which I don't even hear used much when I'm actually in Ottawa.) Of course, we also have a large East Indian population in Canada, and their accents don't tend to recede so quickly (probably because they think they already know how to speak English just fine).
I also tend to speak very fast when dictating, which forces a somewhat staccato speech pattern. The hard of hearing aren't that keen on being spoken to slowly like idiots, and I usually don't try it on my machines, either.
What I've read lately is that the best models are now surpassing human accuracy in some tests (but I didn't check out the noise model or any of the other possible confounds).
There's really no way around it, unless you're a total social recluse they probably have some info on you.
Yeah, and they also have metadata indicating that 100% of what they've collected on me came from tertiary sources (after they've ignored me not having an account, hardly anyone in my family having an account, and my browser having every privacy extension known to man).
Doesn't smell a whole lot like consent, does it? Not even by the imagined 18-year-old male "no means maybe, and maybe means yes" standard of consent.
I don't block all this shit to prevent tracking. Good grief, I read The Puzzle Palace back in 1982 while you could still smell the ink drying and like they say in cryptography (attacks only get better), in practical terms, surveillance only ever collects more. This was obvious in the eighties already.
I block primary and secondary collection strategies so that the commercial parties collecting this information about me can't for a moment pretend I was nodding my head while they did it.
Yeah, I know you're doing it, by increasingly more strenuous methods, and I'm not on board.
Blocking primary and secondary collection is fundamentally a speech act.
Zuckerberg apologist: "Blah, blah, blah none of the users seem to mind."
Me: "Oh, yeah? 70% of everything you collected about me is based on user-agent fingerprinting my web activities based on a browser extension list top-heavy in surveillance blockers. I mind a lot, and your collected dossier on me basically screams that message."
The exception would be that Facebook has painstakingly whitewashed their own metadata, in a bizarrely ironic act of plausible-denial QED.
"Of course we don't have your middle finger on file, and we know that for certain because we've got this sophisticated, hand-crafted algorithm to precisely erase any trace of a collection-M.O. middle finger."
I waited a long time to get my first mobile phone. The first thing I looked for was a security click-box on my address book "just tell every app. that tries to access this to fuck off" unless I tell Android at the system level otherwise (there would be no possible way for the application to prompt for or request this change).
404.
My relationship with Android started off sketchy, and only went downhill from there.
I did eventually find a way: install no apps at all.
So now it's just a shiny phone with a Google keyboard and a Chrome browser and that suffices. When Chrome is not open, the WiFi and data modem are always disabled.
Almost a security model that makes sense.
Also, I enjoy saving the $5/month for not having even a pittance of a data connection, because it drives my telco's billing department absolutely mad. Some machine learning algorithm is busy tying its nickers into a knot trying to invite into a higher revenue-bracket future. Somewhere out there, there's a Telus middle manager crying giant tears onto his monthly "conversion" report because of me.
With a security model I could tolerate, I'd probably have dozens of apps and full-time data service.
Or even 30 years ago... well ray tracing was anyway.
Back in 1980, the University of Waterloo mathematics and computer science building had a locked public display case featuring artifacts from the senior-level computer graphics course, most of which involved ray tracing (standard chessboard-reflected-in-shiny-sphere kinds of things, but with the scenes aggressively simplified—like only three chess pieces of a dozen polygons each and the board reduced to sixteen squares).
What separated the great from the good was treatment of subtleties such as getting the specular highlighting right. I was young and naive and didn't have Wikipedia at my fingertips, so I don't recall much more.
They also had a public information kiosk back in 1980 which used some kind of polygon-fill graphics language to render an interactive dial-up information browser in all the best oversaturated colours. Just like the Internet, if the Internet consisted of exactly one host, and it was dead slow. But shiny! Everyone tried it out—for exactly three minutes (that would be about your third screen rendered).
They also had rooms full of card readers, which they couldn't bother themselves to eliminate until some fancy anniversary shindig a few years later.
In one terminal room you'd have IBM 3270 block-oriented displays, in the next you'd have the god-awful WIDJET terminals, in the next you'd have IBM PCs running APL (for statistics students), in the next you had Commodore SuperPETs, custom tweaked by the Computer Systems Group or related ecosystem (these people were later responsible for the Watcom C++ compiler).
WIDJET (Waterloo interactive direct job-entry terminals) was basically a JCL front-end with the ability to store about six whole files on non-card storage, where mostly you sat twiddling your thumbs waiting for your runs to pass through the job submission queue.
One such room was more advanced and you could *edit* your next assignment with your previous run still in the queue, but you had to sign up way ahead of time to actually get a seat in this room.
In the other room, you might submit a compile, sit there for ten minutes watching it bounce up and down the queue (upper-year jobs had priority) and then decide "oh, I did something wrong in the previous assignment" and you'd click "edit" on some previous source file, only to discover the message "job submission cancelled" popping up on the status line of your display and since you'd already spent years with the immense power of the TRS-80 or Apple II at your fingertips, you'd bash your head into the desk and wonder how you'd become mired in this technological institution of hazing, abuse, and mediocrity.
The SuperPETs were okay, but the custom Pascal did some kind of partial compile to catch syntax errors before running the interpreter. The error reporting was beyond horrible. 50% of all syntax errors were the same message: "syntax error near or before end of file." It was much like Donald Trump tweaking "WRONG!" at you if you got a single brace out of alignment.
"Sorry! I'll hunt through my entire program looking for the one I messed up." This worked for localized changes. But generally what you actually did after a big edit was added or removed braces at random until you found the problem through a tedious process of bisection (which, however, was an order of magnitude less tedious than dealing with WIDJET, even in the good room).
My first year at Waterloo was the biggest computer science mindfuck of my entire life.
Eventually I discovered you could kind of get into a groove with the IBM 3270 terminals—as archaic as they seemed—if you blinked longer than normal after each press of the ENTER key. Plus, these had chat, so you could send "nice sunrise" messages to all your friends at 05:00.
The space shuttle was going to drastically reduce the cost of space flight, too, until it actually flew.
Oh, come on. Nobody serious ever believed that. I was there where the sparkly unicorn farts were still fresh on the air.
Generation IV nuclear cycles would certainly have extremely costly teething problems, but little I've seen there makes me roll my eyes like the space shuttle propaganda once did.
Nothing defies economic common sense quite like sending human beings into outer space (times ten if you expect to retrieve them again, in working condition).
What actually happens is that we use the romance factor of the space program to organize damn hard things to do, simply because they are damn hard—and deeply embedded in the mil-space sector (which always adds a few more psi to national penis size, no matter what about the economic fallout).
Long ago the nuclear romance turned into an acrimonious divorce. Nothing nuclear will ever get financed on a giant romantic bag of unicorn farts.
Yes, it's the stockholders who have lost. From a high near $200 in early Feb to $160 today, they've lost 20%... but only if they bought at the high and sold today. For most people, it's just paper losses (or smaller gains).
The stockholders would include almost all of the management, most of the employees, some of the contractors, many key venture capital relationships, and god-knows how many potential activist shareholders, plus speculative financial shops that might be substantially leveraged; 10% is then easily 100%, and 20% could amount to -100% (subject to a hedge floor) should Facebook's price remain depressed.
Ferengi Rule of Disposition #7: Nothing elicits a bigger yawn that someone else's margin call.
Hmm, much depends on whether the severed arm leaps back up and reunites itself with the brave knight, or remains there decomposing among the dead leaves.
Who wouldn't want to know about The Tingler with Vincent Price? (3m15) or The Love Statue (5m20).
Then he gets in the first serious contender, Chappaqua.
Chappaqua is a 1967 American drama film, written and directed by Conrad Rooks.
The film is based on Rooks' experiences with drug addiction and includes cameo appearances by William S. Burroughs, Swami Satchidananda, Allen Ginsberg, Moondog, Ornette Coleman, The Fugs, and Ravi Shankar.
But no legitimate critic will touch it. The Tomatometer is mute with indifference.
This is one of those Wikipedia articles which colour between the lines, yet miss the target entirely. Not a lick of biochemistry in the entire treatment.
As an alien, you wouldn't even begin to suspect that body image or eating disorders was a human thing. The funny thing is, we only ever warn our children about the Wikipedia articles that hit the topic dead square, without colouring between the lines whatsoever.
Of course, by the bitter-endive corollary of Godwin's law, no good deed sufficiently bitched about escapes descent into a myopic compliance culture.
Regulating Facebook and other social media sites will provide feel-good band-aids that address immediate -- and by the time regulations are enforceable, outdated -- concerns, but those regulations certainly will not curtail Facebook's collection and sale of user-supplied data, as long as that practice remains profitable. Facebook is powerful enough, now, to ensure that any proposed regulations will be flexible enough, or toothless enough, to allow for a continuation, in some form, of its business model.
While regulation is an ugly dance, rumours of its impotence are overstated.
Sane companies don't go "oh, whatever", they go "oh, shit!" and their first line of defense is to discourage regulation in the first place (by fixing the behaviour, if possible). Only when that fails do corporations spend large amounts of money figuring out how to sidestep the kudzu regime.
You almost make it sound like corporations enjoy lining the pockets of corrupt politicians with huge bundles of cash. I assure you, they don't.
I quickly figured out that the hassle of finding an Android app without obnoxious permission structures (and which remained stable over time) generally exceeded the value of the resulting app.
I only ever installed two or three apps with access to my contacts (this eliminated most applications). One of those was Google, another was the Pebble watch application. Google probably didn't leak the whole caboodle to a third party (they are too greedy to share). I don't know about Pebble, but I do know that the companion Runkeeper app was no saint.
There's no way for Pebble to send call notifications to the watch without gaining access to call metadata, so the whole idea of a smartwatch makes that particular privacy battle unwinnable.
That's part of the reason I'm in no rush to buy a replacement smartwatch now: Android is not on my side of this.
Slashdot Mirror
Since Google search started to handle mixed-unit calculations flawlessly, I just input any unit at hand, and spare my worry for whether I trust the numbers in the numbers in the first place.
The original reason for avoiding mixed unit calculations was that it was so easy to screw something up handling the conversions manually.
Now I just cut and paste whatever formula I entered into Google search, so if necessary I can repeat or otherwise verify the calculation later.
There were actually a couple of weird edge-cases in Google calculator ten years ago (forget what they were, but it was based on a surprising resolution of something that didn't on the surface appear ambiguous). I can't now recall the last time Google's mixed-unit calculator steered me wrong since then.
Since the calculation carries units all the way through, missing or misplaced parentheses are usually busted in the first instance. (Wait a minute, I wasn't expecting this to come out in kg m / s^3.)
In fact, for that reason alone, it's so much better than a regular calculator used with entirely consistent mks units.
Facebook will cure 2018 hate speech in 2023 or 2028. If the planet still exists in 2028.
Somehow, I don't think Zuck factored into his estimate that arms races are two-way streets.
And another factor: in Arab cultures, young men sexualize extremely minor details of women's behaviours and dress. As the loudness declines, the gain increases.
Nevertheless, Facebook will declare this an objective victory. Meanwhile, hate will persist on a cholesterol-reduced diet with fewer words identified by a single letter, and lesser thickets of exclamation marks.
So at least we can expect hate to become less ugly, undigested.
Small victory, I suppose, had he promised it next year.
A captive repair model is a moral hazard and always has been. The king is dead. Welcome to your new Detroit.
The Surprising Source Of Car Dealers' Profits
Of course, Apple's profit margins for new phone sales is closer to 57 percent than 8 percent.
We could hypothesize that Apple skews to laudanum on both sides, or we could hypothesize that Apple takes more on one side, and hence less at the other (really?), or we could form a trust relationship with a third party mechanic, and not think about this at all.
If only.
Sleepy engineer: "Hmm, that sure looks like a typo. Any normal 10-bit ADC would have a natural range of 1024 distinct values. Weird, the engineering magic of LIGO must be somewhere else."
My joke actually praises the sleepy engineer: if reading that text correctly required consciously overriding deeply engrained subconscious intuitions about achievable scale, you possibly have a hope of comprehending 10^139.
No, since the Pentium Pro in 1995, which already employed microcode translation; not with the Pentium IV, which was deliberately brain damaged to win the MHz war (I don't even know how to classify the trace cache, except ungodly hot); again with the Core Duo, after that (god bless Israel).
How Israel saved Intel
What you are calling a RISC core has more proprietary CISC-world abstraction violations than you could shake a stick at (these are primarily performance hacks, but nonetheless).
Explain to me why micro-op fission gets more air time in your lexicon than macro-op fusion? Because modern x86 processors use both tricks to obtain a working representation which minimizes in-flight resource consumption (which is similar to RISC, but is not directly motivated by either "simple" or "reduced"—hasty is a better proxy—and none of this is reflected in the instruction set, as is patently obvious). And even then, the micro-op fission remains semantically distinct from an actual RISC instruction stream deep into the pipeline in small yet critical details (internal modern x86 micro-ops are fuzzy creatures, but these implementation tricks aren't publicly documented).
There's actually a more basic level underneath RISC: readers and writers attached to separate busses. But this is so low level is tends to make your ISA non-portable to the next iteration, so no-one sane goes here (I'm looking at you, Itanium, even though after you started here, you went another 100 miles downstream).
write_assert rA to register_bus_1
read rB from register bus_1
read rC from register bus_1
write_deassert rA to register_bus_1
Register files tend to be multiple ported, so there would be other register busses available concurrently. That's all one clock cycle if your macro-op fusion puts Humpty back together again (and not analogous to any RISC instruction).
mov ebx, eax
mov ecx, eax
In a transport triggered architecture-like world, these two instructions could be fused into a single assertion of eax, and a simultaneous read by register file ebx and register file ecx off the same bus.
But you'd still call it a RISC core, wouldn't you, so long as the internal representation was granulated into some kind of small, vaguely uniform ops? (Macro or micro, who cares?)
Between 1985 and 1995, I must have read many dozen articles in computer magazines about how x86 CISC could never grow up to compete against the Big Boys (where RISC was the prototypical Big Boy). This was a potent brew of aesthetic disgust (with which I largely concurred), competitive ambition, and mentally defective bullshit—as history now records. In order to advance this kind of claim in a falsifiable way, RISC has to actually mean something.
Back when I wrote a fair amount of 486 code, I mainly worked in a RISC subset (most of which dated back to the 8086 or were simple extensions), heavily augmented with non-RISC ModR/M sib addressing modes. There was no OOO, so there was no need for an intermediate micro-op representation: the complex read/modify/write instruction were decomposed into RISC primitives (load,operation,store) by an execution-engine state machine (which I suppose you could call a micro-op sequencer on the understanding that the machine supported exactly one in-flight macro-op. A non-distinction without a difference?) Compared to 386, 486 felt a bit RISCy because many of your core operations had a single-cycle execution time (and you tended to ignore program fetch delays, because of the concurrent internal i-cache).
Once you get into OOO, you need track multiple i
add segment_register:[disp + r32_A + r32_B*n], r32_C
That's no-one's idea of a classic RISC instruction.
And even though this gets decoded into micro-ops, the complex address generation is computed only once, and the memory order checks take advantage of this having been a single, fused instruction, so the semantic nuances are carried deep through the OOO pipeline.
There's so much crap on the Internet about RISC, it blows my mind.
50% of the RISC hype was about being able to compete against the legacy vendors with smaller, cheaper design teams.
You can call x86 RISC, but it never got cheaper to design. The cost of the design is almost a superset of its CISC and RISC elements (I'm pretty sure its hybrid nature creates headaches above and beyond the sum of its parts).
The RISC hype bubble had some validity for roughly a five-year period before Intel launched the Pentium Pro in 1995 (RISC hype persisted outside the clue nucleus for another five years after that for largely political reasons). The Pentium Pro is where the complexity of the CPU core and the complexity of the memory subsystem (and latency hiding) began to cross over. There is no possible way to design a processor with a deep, concurrent queue of in-flight cache and memory transactions (with SMP coherence), and extensive latency hiding in the execution engine using a small design team.
Wikipedia's article on the Pentium Pro makes it sounds like its performance sucked, but it held up amazingly well on mixed Windows NT server workloads compared to any RISC architecture at anywhere near the price (it's deep OOO latency-hiding was a huge boon to memory thrashing compared to in-order RISC with wider dispatch.)
Wide dispatch = straight line speed (American car).
OOO latency absorbers = cornering speed (German car).
Of course, most benchmarks are biased to the salt-flat quarter mile.
Another thing, the majority of CISC junk-in-the-trunk (e.g. 286 call gates) is subject to exponential shrinkage; barely a third decimal point by the time you reach a billion transistors.
On the matter of superscalar execution, this naturally prioritizes the quick and the fleeting (only these instructions could pair up in the P5). Superscalar under OOO is a different beast: now the killer dimension becomes instruction flight time. This for the macro-ops at the level of the retirement order buffer, the micro-ops at the level of the dispatch buffer, and the outstanding memory operations at the level of the memory order buffer.
Intel's x86 architecture is more HISC than RISC: Hasty Instruction Set Computing. The faster you retire the operations (at any level), the sooner you free up precious reservation buffers. (x86 never inched one step closer to a conventional load/store architecture, the cardinal 'R' in RISC; most especially, transient addresses off the stack frame do not retire to the register model in x86—what a waste of reservation stations—because they are never register-assigned in the first place.)
Micro-operation
If some traditional RISC architecture adds macro-op fusion to its internal implementation, do I get to declare that "modern MIPS is nothing more than a MIPS translation layer around a CISC chip, anyway"?
Since the early 1990s, this debate has been my #1 personal case study in technological propaganda, herd following, and revisionist misinformation.
I originally got onto this file asking myself a hard question: just who is this messianic charlatan named Steve Jobs?
It doesn't actually contradict last month's study.
This study demonstrates a lingering neuro-generative capacity (at the tissue level). The previous study demonstrates a paucity of neuro-generative reality (with a bias toward the functional view).
Most old dogs are set in their ways, but some old dogs do indeed learn new tricks.
Oh noes, CONTRADICTION, time to ostrich my head into the nearest dune.
Watching kids play dodgeball requires an order of magnitude more mental exertion than the amount of cognitive empathy you invested in that donut-shop knee slapper.
But we'll work you up to it gradually. For starters, try walking two dogs at the same time, then gradually work your way up to three dogs on each arm.
Then we'll take your treats and your leash and your muzzle and your shock collar away and stick you into a room with 30 middle schoolers, with only your bare hands for self-defense—but these are both tattooed on both sides with "jail bait" because both the friendly front of your hand and the stinging back of your hand can land you into a heap of trouble.
You can bring your gavel, but that will probably only work on pure surprise effect for a couple of days, and thereafter will only be good for earning yourself weird nicknames.
Not that you don't have any already, if that's your standard donut banter.
What does warranty have to do with this?
If a baby seat kills babies because it's defective by design, this is not a warranty issue. Not even if the baby seat only kills babies when combined with other safety systems that weren't invented yet at the time the baby seat was originally sold.
Both of these ends of the telescope are too extreme for the matter at hand, but at least mine is wide awake, whereas as yours is snoozing behind the wheel.
I've had N24 for the last thirty years, so I can officially blow this smoke back into your face.
Juvenile:
* A prepubescent child.
* A person younger than the age of majority.
* A person younger than the age of criminal responsibility.
* An animal that is not sexually mature.
* A mindless insult that all-too-often passes itself off as intelligent discourse.
Last I checked, college students fuck like rabbits, so we'll dispatch item #1 with extreme prejudice.
Age of majority
What is the normal age for college freshmen in the U. S.?
So, by sophomore year, juveniles (as defined by a minority criteria) are already a distinct minority.
So what we have here is a juvenile-onset biological rhythm shift which persist well into young adulthood.
Young adulthood having recently become the age during which a majority of the population struggles to acquire a remunerative skillset among the top-three quartiles of career prospects and life outcomes.
Fewer U.S. Graduates Opt for College After High School — April 2014
(The large chunk of the college admission population enrolled in the humanities starts the race a full quartile back, many drop-outs return to the fray later, and some high school dropouts have intrinsic skills, so even the dismal quartile from 25–50th percentile is by no means guaranteed merely by showing up.)
A really good example of the indirect path was in the news cycle this week:
Ignatieff was a catastrophic political leader, but the rest of his bio reads like a Who's Who entry (recent Order of Canada, and back to full professorship at Harvard).
Speaking of physicians, that's surely one profession that's never strayed into sparing the whip.
* How Much Do 30-Hour Shifts Suck for Medical Residents? — 8 March 2017
* No Doctor Should Work 30 Straight Hours Without Sleep — 15 December 2016
* Marathon 24- to 26-hour doctor shifts may be unsafe for patients: experts — 19 February 2016
* A Dangerous Study of Medical Resident
The whole point of a free market is that the best decision point for risks vs. benefits is the individual, with specific knowledge of his or her own situation.
I'm sure there are plenty of people out there where the benefits look dubious, not having any of the risk factors in the first place that those "benefits" are mooted to reduce, while having a family history of cancer in precisely those organs most closely associated with acrylamide animal models.
The only free market I believe in is the one where decision makers—including the ever-more beleaguered individual—are empowered with specific information and associated choice gradients they can realistically exploit. A free market for me is a giant network of autonomous choice gradients populated by informed, self-interested choosers. Half of capitalism talks a big story about free markets, while doing everything in the power of their Dr Strangelovesque second arm to squelch choice gradients, to dominate choice gradients with macroscopic binary decision points, to suppress the flow of pertinent information, or to cloud the flow of pertinent information if it can't killed at source.
I watched The Kite Runner last night. Great in the small stuff, weak in the large stuff (central-casting bullet spray that gets sleepy-footed and near-sighted in the third act, helping the audience ignore the small detail that the protagonist has gone batshit INSANE in his peril management skills), but a worthy film for all that.
MINOR spoiler alert. At a key point, there's a line "Where's your shame?"
Okay, free-market fat cats, my turn: Where's your shame?
The benefits (in the large) outweigh the risks (in the large).
"In the large" is hammer and sickle territory. WTF has that got to do with decentralized, individual, free-market choice?
Nice. No expedient socialism here. Just business as usual, with the crisp, wind-blown flag of capitalist ideology self-interest concealing your missing pants.
Headline almost imported some humour there from the lemons department.
I've usually had pretty good accuracy, going all the way back to Dragon Dictate circa 2000 (condenser microphone, silent room).
When I've bothered to use it, Google voice recognition on my phone has been just fine in ambient conditions.
Many my enunciation hits the sweet spot for these models. Large swaths of Canada required a trained ear (or at least an attentive ear) to distinguish from Received SoCal Hollywood. (So much so that it's some strange accent from the Ottawa valley that became the national stereotype, which I don't even hear used much when I'm actually in Ottawa.) Of course, we also have a large East Indian population in Canada, and their accents don't tend to recede so quickly (probably because they think they already know how to speak English just fine).
I also tend to speak very fast when dictating, which forces a somewhat staccato speech pattern. The hard of hearing aren't that keen on being spoken to slowly like idiots, and I usually don't try it on my machines, either.
What I've read lately is that the best models are now surpassing human accuracy in some tests (but I didn't check out the noise model or any of the other possible confounds).
Yeah, and they also have metadata indicating that 100% of what they've collected on me came from tertiary sources (after they've ignored me not having an account, hardly anyone in my family having an account, and my browser having every privacy extension known to man).
Doesn't smell a whole lot like consent, does it? Not even by the imagined 18-year-old male "no means maybe, and maybe means yes" standard of consent.
I don't block all this shit to prevent tracking. Good grief, I read The Puzzle Palace back in 1982 while you could still smell the ink drying and like they say in cryptography (attacks only get better), in practical terms, surveillance only ever collects more. This was obvious in the eighties already.
I block primary and secondary collection strategies so that the commercial parties collecting this information about me can't for a moment pretend I was nodding my head while they did it.
Yeah, I know you're doing it, by increasingly more strenuous methods, and I'm not on board.
Blocking primary and secondary collection is fundamentally a speech act.
Zuckerberg apologist: "Blah, blah, blah none of the users seem to mind."
Me: "Oh, yeah? 70% of everything you collected about me is based on user-agent fingerprinting my web activities based on a browser extension list top-heavy in surveillance blockers. I mind a lot, and your collected dossier on me basically screams that message."
The exception would be that Facebook has painstakingly whitewashed their own metadata, in a bizarrely ironic act of plausible-denial QED.
"Of course we don't have your middle finger on file, and we know that for certain because we've got this sophisticated, hand-crafted algorithm to precisely erase any trace of a collection-M.O. middle finger."
So now look at which side has No Way Out .
I waited a long time to get my first mobile phone. The first thing I looked for was a security click-box on my address book "just tell every app. that tries to access this to fuck off" unless I tell Android at the system level otherwise (there would be no possible way for the application to prompt for or request this change).
404.
My relationship with Android started off sketchy, and only went downhill from there.
I did eventually find a way: install no apps at all.
So now it's just a shiny phone with a Google keyboard and a Chrome browser and that suffices. When Chrome is not open, the WiFi and data modem are always disabled.
Almost a security model that makes sense.
Also, I enjoy saving the $5/month for not having even a pittance of a data connection, because it drives my telco's billing department absolutely mad. Some machine learning algorithm is busy tying its nickers into a knot trying to invite into a higher revenue-bracket future. Somewhere out there, there's a Telus middle manager crying giant tears onto his monthly "conversion" report because of me.
With a security model I could tolerate, I'd probably have dozens of apps and full-time data service.
Android fail.
Back in 1980, the University of Waterloo mathematics and computer science building had a locked public display case featuring artifacts from the senior-level computer graphics course, most of which involved ray tracing (standard chessboard-reflected-in-shiny-sphere kinds of things, but with the scenes aggressively simplified—like only three chess pieces of a dozen polygons each and the board reduced to sixteen squares).
What separated the great from the good was treatment of subtleties such as getting the specular highlighting right. I was young and naive and didn't have Wikipedia at my fingertips, so I don't recall much more.
They also had a public information kiosk back in 1980 which used some kind of polygon-fill graphics language to render an interactive dial-up information browser in all the best oversaturated colours. Just like the Internet, if the Internet consisted of exactly one host, and it was dead slow. But shiny! Everyone tried it out—for exactly three minutes (that would be about your third screen rendered).
They also had rooms full of card readers, which they couldn't bother themselves to eliminate until some fancy anniversary shindig a few years later.
In one terminal room you'd have IBM 3270 block-oriented displays, in the next you'd have the god-awful WIDJET terminals, in the next you'd have IBM PCs running APL (for statistics students), in the next you had Commodore SuperPETs, custom tweaked by the Computer Systems Group or related ecosystem (these people were later responsible for the Watcom C++ compiler).
WIDJET (Waterloo interactive direct job-entry terminals) was basically a JCL front-end with the ability to store about six whole files on non-card storage, where mostly you sat twiddling your thumbs waiting for your runs to pass through the job submission queue.
One such room was more advanced and you could *edit* your next assignment with your previous run still in the queue, but you had to sign up way ahead of time to actually get a seat in this room.
In the other room, you might submit a compile, sit there for ten minutes watching it bounce up and down the queue (upper-year jobs had priority) and then decide "oh, I did something wrong in the previous assignment" and you'd click "edit" on some previous source file, only to discover the message "job submission cancelled" popping up on the status line of your display and since you'd already spent years with the immense power of the TRS-80 or Apple II at your fingertips, you'd bash your head into the desk and wonder how you'd become mired in this technological institution of hazing, abuse, and mediocrity.
The SuperPETs were okay, but the custom Pascal did some kind of partial compile to catch syntax errors before running the interpreter. The error reporting was beyond horrible. 50% of all syntax errors were the same message: "syntax error near or before end of file." It was much like Donald Trump tweaking "WRONG!" at you if you got a single brace out of alignment.
"Sorry! I'll hunt through my entire program looking for the one I messed up." This worked for localized changes. But generally what you actually did after a big edit was added or removed braces at random until you found the problem through a tedious process of bisection (which, however, was an order of magnitude less tedious than dealing with WIDJET, even in the good room).
My first year at Waterloo was the biggest computer science mindfuck of my entire life.
Eventually I discovered you could kind of get into a groove with the IBM 3270 terminals—as archaic as they seemed—if you blinked longer than normal after each press of the ENTER key. Plus, these had chat, so you could send "nice sunrise" messages to all your friends at 05:00.
Fro
Oh, come on. Nobody serious ever believed that. I was there where the sparkly unicorn farts were still fresh on the air.
Generation IV nuclear cycles would certainly have extremely costly teething problems, but little I've seen there makes me roll my eyes like the space shuttle propaganda once did.
Nothing defies economic common sense quite like sending human beings into outer space (times ten if you expect to retrieve them again, in working condition).
What actually happens is that we use the romance factor of the space program to organize damn hard things to do, simply because they are damn hard—and deeply embedded in the mil-space sector (which always adds a few more psi to national penis size, no matter what about the economic fallout).
Long ago the nuclear romance turned into an acrimonious divorce. Nothing nuclear will ever get financed on a giant romantic bag of unicorn farts.
The risk profiles have nothing in common.
The stockholders would include almost all of the management, most of the employees, some of the contractors, many key venture capital relationships, and god-knows how many potential activist shareholders, plus speculative financial shops that might be substantially leveraged; 10% is then easily 100%, and 20% could amount to -100% (subject to a hedge floor) should Facebook's price remain depressed.
Ferengi Rule of Disposition #7: Nothing elicits a bigger yawn that someone else's margin call.
Monty Python-The Black Knight
Hmm, much depends on whether the severed arm leaps back up and reunites itself with the brave knight, or remains there decomposing among the dead leaves.
Rich Haridy - Psychedelics On Film: An Illustrated Journey — 9 March 2016
I'm guessing this is the same Haridy.
Who wouldn't want to know about The Tingler with Vincent Price? (3m15) or The Love Statue (5m20).
Then he gets in the first serious contender, Chappaqua.
But no legitimate critic will touch it. The Tomatometer is mute with indifference.
Neural basis of self
This is one of those Wikipedia articles which colour between the lines, yet miss the target entirely. Not a lick of biochemistry in the entire treatment.
As an alien, you wouldn't even begin to suspect that body image or eating disorders was a human thing. The funny thing is, we only ever warn our children about the Wikipedia articles that hit the topic dead square, without colouring between the lines whatsoever.
Of course, by the bitter-endive corollary of Godwin's law, no good deed sufficiently bitched about escapes descent into a myopic compliance culture.
Thanks for digging up the real thing.
Dan Jurafsky, the 4th author, is a big deal in NLP circles. MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.
Lecture Slides from the Stanford Coursera course by Dan Jurafsky and Christopher Manning
Just might have got some of the subtle stuff right, here.
While regulation is an ugly dance, rumours of its impotence are overstated.
Sane companies don't go "oh, whatever", they go "oh, shit!" and their first line of defense is to discourage regulation in the first place (by fixing the behaviour, if possible). Only when that fails do corporations spend large amounts of money figuring out how to sidestep the kudzu regime.
You almost make it sound like corporations enjoy lining the pockets of corrupt politicians with huge bundles of cash. I assure you, they don't.
The very word "outsmarted" has a cliche factor of 98.9%
Pretty much the whole shit-show is better covered by the old, not-the-least-bit-tired adage "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong".
The other 1.1% of "outsmarted" is brilliantly covered by Foghorn Leghorn Teaching the Art of Baseball.
The very word "outsmarted" has a cliche factor of 98.9%
Pretty much the whole shit-show is better covered by the old, not-the-least-bit-tired adage "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong".
The other 1.1% of "outsmarted" is brilliantly covered by Foghorn Leghorn Teaching the Art of Baseball.
I quickly figured out that the hassle of finding an Android app without obnoxious permission structures (and which remained stable over time) generally exceeded the value of the resulting app.
I only ever installed two or three apps with access to my contacts (this eliminated most applications). One of those was Google, another was the Pebble watch application. Google probably didn't leak the whole caboodle to a third party (they are too greedy to share). I don't know about Pebble, but I do know that the companion Runkeeper app was no saint.
Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers
There's no way for Pebble to send call notifications to the watch without gaining access to call metadata, so the whole idea of a smartwatch makes that particular privacy battle unwinnable.
That's part of the reason I'm in no rush to buy a replacement smartwatch now: Android is not on my side of this.