Bollocks on their predication rate. Real forecasters report skill. By contrast, actual progress on predicting the North Atlantic Oscillation, perhaps an achievable goal, would be huge.
Both of these issues are covered in Judith Curry on Climate Change, a podcast from 2013 which, as it happens, I consumed yesterday.
Concerning the rush to embarrass themselves by reporting their weather prediction rate, it's because of the taxonomic land grab.
Host: I wonder how you feel about how your particular field has changed as you've grown up in it and been out for 25 years.... Do you feel that we are making progress in the scientific world on this particular topic? Or are we in trouble?
Guest: I think we're in big trouble. When I left graduate school, nobody called themselves a climate scientist. They were an atmospheric dynamicist or a geochemist or a physical oceanographer or things like that. And we were all focused on increasing fundamental understanding. And that was the focus. It was the breakthrough in understanding, changing the way people think, was what mattered. And somebody who published too many papers was probably looked at with suspicion--they are doing the quick and easy stuff; they are not really digging in. It was potentially superficial.
The other thing that was looked down upon, say in the 1980s, was doing something that was too applied, working to deal with regional problems or something like that. That was viewed as soft core; it was what the people did who couldn't really make fundamental contributions to understanding, so they moved on to some of these applied topics, which were useful in some way to regional decision-makers.
I would say in 2000--it was a gradual transition, but I think circa 2000 there was a switch to people finding it beneficial to self-label them as a climate scientist. There was a lot of money, research dollars in this area; there was a lot of influence to be had, in terms of sitting on panels and boards and committees and being interviewed by journalists and being invited to testify in front of Congress. And so the value and the influence of the scientist sort of switched into that dimension where your measure of influence was not so much how you increased our fundamental understanding of how the oceans worked, but it was really to what boards and committees you sat on, your press, and your influence in policy, being invited to testify in front of Congress, and whatever. So I've seen that switch.
The problem is, the concern that I have for the health of our field, is that there's still a lot of fundamental things that we don't understand. The climate models aren't good enough. We need to go back to basics, increase our understanding about the non-linear dynamics of all these ocean oscillations and complexity of the system and things like that.
There are a lot of fundamental things that are getting short shrift, that the sex appeal in our field right now and a lot of funding is to do what I call mock 'climate model taxonomy', where people are analyzing the output of climate models and finding something interesting, alarming, or using them to infer that we won't be able to grow grapes in California in 2100 or something like this. This is the stuff that gets published in Nature and Science and PNAS. People get a press release.
Note that the word "useful" as I chose to hear it, is entirely confined to the domain of career advancement and the writing of committee-room position papers.
Two things about Russ.
One is that he doesn't connect as much as he should. He's (since) done other podcasts which talk about how the regional nature of congressional representation makes politics in America intensely regional. This is
I won't dream of a single (or multiple) damn quantum thing until I see an equation that describes a real-world superposition scaling limit, species type "immovable object".
I believed in Moore's law because it was on a collision course with the atom, right from day one. Even as a child, I didn't believe in a Laplacian universe, in the sense that the accumulated knowledge required to compute the deterministic outcome could exist in one place—a place smaller than the universe itself—for any value of "smaller" my small mind was capable of entertaining.
I've been reading articles about quantum computing seemingly for decades now, and not a single article has pointed out any practical scaling limit. For all these dunderheads seem to know, we could cajole the entire universe into a state of Laplacian superposition, if only we didn't suck at stacking these tiny little Lego blocks.
No scaling boundary equation widely promulgated = no credibility widely disseminated = very little fantasy action for people who don't believe in giant green men with anger management issues.
Or do you seriously think an Apple Intel CPU is more reliable than a Dell Intel CPU?
Never heard of Xeon? At least half of a high-end chip's reliability comes from the post-manufacture test procedure and binning standard.
At Apple's scale, they can negotiate any production standard with Intel that they wish to have. This isn't even uncommon, as companies like Google and Facebook are already negotiating custom Xeons for the datacenter, which certainly involves tweaking some internal chip firmware (e.g. changing cache allocation policies or thermal envelopes), all the way up to possibly adding specialized instructions and/or execution units.
Finally, far more problems arise from the mainboard and assembly quality than the underlying chip quality, but at the end of the day it all adds up.
Welcome to Supply Chain 501. It's not your father's Supply Chain 101.
That said, Apple (the company) is a cult-like Black Box of the highest order. When it serves their agenda, they make good products. When their agenda shifts with the winds of fashion—so long, sweet Mini—caveat emptor.
Yes it is but people have been trying to do that for 40 years and have not gotten it right yet so...
Wrong. Plenty of code correctness has been deployed in service of this goal.
Unfortunately, there are endemic economic and political reasons why we constantly choose the protocols and implementations that are bigger, hairier, and less continent.
All you need is a culture of kicking non-conforming implementations to the curb, and then the rigorous implementations have a chance to emerge from the weeds. Do we have such a culture? No—most of the time—no, we do not. Such a culture would cramp Megacorp style, and interfere with timeless value-adds, such as embrace and extend, closed ecosystem, DRM jungle, NIST-sanctioned algorithmic weevils, definition by implementation, documentation by implementation, etc. etc.
Far, far away in dull and dusty places like the Erlang OTP or Bernstein's qmail or Knuth's TeX—or perhaps even the Google protocol buffers for at least one lucky and unusually blessed language binding from the somewhat recent past—you just might find a rigorously coded parser or two.
For the most part, however, I agree. We'll probably never have rigorous parsers in a dominant culture of "screw everyone else", Wild West dysenteroperability.
Of course NASA passed on decades of hard-won experience. They're not psychopaths.
It went something like this:
Dear ESA:
Hire only the best and the brightest, keep the group challenged and engaged for decade upon decade, with frequent launch opportunities pushing the boundary of the possible at each and every iteration.
My favourite touch is the two giant call-outs in the linked article.
Few of the sites I read regularly have these any more (meaning since I got good at "inspect element" and custom User CSS overrides; appears I've accumulated 150 of these over the past three years, also used to defeat anything that hovers or slides annoyingly).
Basketball is inherently racist, as genetic traits are heritable and are correlated with your ethnic/genetic background.
FTFY.
What's racist about race is presupposing outcomes that were highly predictable on first impression, because it's lamentably a very short step for an advantaged social group—often one of relatively homogeneous racial composition, suffused with elaborate rituals of social etiquette—to conclude that a disadvantaged racial subgroup never given an opportunity to do xcan't do x.
Race isn't just some magic third rail used to divide humans into two distinct groups, in much the same way that humans divide house pets into two distinct groups: potty trained and not potty trained. There are days, though, where that can be a good working assumption.
Somehow this story showed up in my Slashdot feed, when it's really just supposed to trigger a mass outpouring of the reflex derision arc among those so inclined (said barf cookies falsely paraded by its practitioners as chuckle fodder).
"There, don't you feel better now? Now come sit with us at the adult table." Amazing what a quickie bile purge can accomplish in raising the level of discussion elsewhere.
This is all good. Yet somehow my dank, reeking bile seems to have been misclassified as grasshopper lipstick and I seem to be trapped in completely the wrong purgative honeypot. Where do I unclick "chuckle fodder"? Where do I unclick "news-item-of-the-week free-association paralympics"? Which direction do I kneel to moon Marvin, patron saint of universal laugh-at-anything good will?
No, I'm not new here. It must be shocking to some that I haven't figured out my account configuration yet. You'd think I'd know by now that no unexplored configuration sub-menu goes ultimately unpunished.
Well, now I know. True hell is becoming stuck in the wrong hellban honeypot.
The side effect of your Mercedes choosing to impact the young mother with her baby stroller instead of the nearby telephone pole (ouch! that could hurt!) is that the customer's testicles fall off, and his dick never rises for the rest of his miserable, injury-free life (female customers sensibly snipped the wires on this pathetic contraction long ago).
The Mercedes survivor can always tell his disappointed women, "not MY fault, the Mercedes made me do it". Mercedes! Modestly dressed women cross themselves. Everyone spits.
All this spit makes the sidewalks dangerous to navigate for the common folk, but we can all rest safe knowing that the privileged remain comfy and cozy inside their steel cocoons.
12 year old girl and accusing her of "wanting" an older man to rape her into a coma seems sketchy to me
Hillary: Your honour, I submit that the innocent-looking 12-year-old girl you see before you was slavering and panting to have my defendant, an older man, to rape her into a coma.
Yes, that's exactly how it plays out on Matlock.
Opposing council: [passing in the hallway, afterwards]: Good lord, Hillary, how did you become so damn good at this lawyering business? Your argument for the defense was a fucking masterstroke! Clearly you're headed for bigger and better things.
This might actually be more about the crawl than the index. The mobile index could be set to crawl content in mobile format only, and more often.
What makes freshness important, in the first place? Mostly celebrity gossip, and the retail deal of the hour. Neither of those are functions people do much on PCs anyway.
Still, if Google decides not to keep long-form content reasonably fresh (if not fresher) in their desktop index, it foreshadows a Yahooesque self-inflicted extinction event of their traditional core brand.
Now Yahoo just needs to explain what system or software or mental competence they're in the middle of upgrading that causes them not to tell people what's about to happen before it happens.
Sure hope Competence 11.0 is finally the one that ignites self-perception.
The last of the Morrises to be active in the pitching business is Arnold "the Knife" Morris, so named because of his extraordinary skill with the Sharpcut, the forerunner of the Ginsu. He is in his early seventies, a cheerful, impish man with a round face and a few wisps of white hair, and a trademark move whereby, after cutting a tomato into neat, regular slices, he deftly lines the pieces up in an even row against the flat edge of the blade.
Sure, sharpened steel is a great technology, but will people actually use it unless first impressed by a delightfully manicured tomato?... But wait, there's more!
The turn requires the management of expectation. That's why Arnold always kept a pineapple tantalizingly perched on his stand. "For forty years, I've been promising to show people how to cut the pineapple, and I've never cut it once," he says.
Steve's legendary pineapple was his insistence that RISC would blow CISC out of the water. That pineapple never danced (excluding, for a while, one or two hand-picked Photoshop effects). Miraculously, it still hasn't danced.
In 1982, after racking up nine felonies, he was sent to Graterford Prison for 18 years.
That sure sounds like the 8088 I knew and loved.
Over the next two years he scored 21 victories in 21 fights, 16 by KO and 12 of those in the first round.
Ditto.
"Younger guys would think that an old boxer must be an easy target," Sugar said, "Only to find out when they stood in front of him they couldn't hit him with a handful of stones."
To it's credit, The DEC Alpha actually landed a punch. Others, not so much.
At 41, Hopkins finally seemed washed up. But he adapted, deciding to put on a few pounds and move up in weight class. "It was a new life for me," he said. "I could finally eat pasta and not worry about going over the weight limit."
It was AMD that finally provided the magic milkshake.
At 46 years, four months and 10 days he broke George Foreman's record to become the oldest fighter ever to win a world championship.
Ye olde 8088 has sure come a long way.
Where x86 went up in weight class, Jobs ultimately—not with the once-franchise iMac, but the iPhone—successfully went down in weight class. That much-vaunted 10" chef knife went nowhere fast after decades of trying, but he stuck with it—full marks—and finally made a freaking fortune on pastel-coloured paring knives.
I'm late to this party, but just so anyone who stumbles upon this thread by some quirk of Google future, the views expressed above are not reliable. It's not apparent that the author knows much of anything about the ZIL or the SLOG. There are trade-offs involved with ZFS, no question. But none of these are anywhere as inane as this post would seem to have it.
If the vast majority of your work load is synchronous write, you do have to provide a SLOG with as much write bandwidth as the rest of your pool. Except during recovery, the SLOG is pretty much sequential write-only (not a demanding case for any enterprise-grade write-optimized storage device). These writes take place concurrently to the synchronous writes (latency matters). Under ZFS, the primary pool still batches writes into transaction groups every few seconds. The comment about the inability of ZFS to use RAM for write caching is simply incoherent.
What ZFS can't do, for synchronous writes, is use RAM for write coalescing, eliminating writes to stable storage (the SLOG, in this scenario) if one write immediately replaces another (a fairly common traffic pattern). Well duh you can only do this if your RAM counts as stable storage for any file system, and if you even have this, it's usually a device requiring I/O traffic to access, the same as any other persistent storage device.
What hardware RAID does potentially buy you is combining both the persistent RAM and the persistent storage onto a single device channel, allowing the OS to kill two birds with a single I/O write operation. And for this, you buy yourself a really really complex layer of extra device firmware, which historically has been far from entirely bug free. Your surface area of failure increases enormously (though you do have fingers to point at the extremely well healed—all that internal firmware testing is baked into the price with a healthy insurance multiple—should the worst come to pass).
Do you really need synchronous write coalescing? A basic Xeon these days has 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0. Does that look like a rate-limiting resource on sustained synchronous write traffic to your storage pool? I wish. And if it does, I'm pretty sure your first response is this: more sockets, please.
As it happens, there are giant industry plans afoot to add a non-volatile memory type into the system memory hierarchy. ZFS will like this—a lot—should any of this chortling evil land-grab vapour come to pass.
They do these sorts of deals to get potential customers to their site.
And here I thought they just had an excess of pink and purple, and needed to run those ink reservoirs dry so they could replace the entire rainbow cartridge all at once, without losing their green cred.
Satire—once the cynicism becomes too thick—is nothing more than a devious way of getting the reader to work four times as hard as normal, to ultimately decode the underlying message "look at meeeeee!"
Read Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds. He variously suffers from elitism, spurned-author petulance, and a predilection for Hegelian phraseology, but he offers up real ideas where few ideas roam.
Here's a bit from his essay Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — With Exceptions:
Probably the pressure of trivial literature has crushed many highly talented writers with the result that today they deliver the products that keep highbrow readers away from science fiction. This process brings about a negative selection of authors and readers: for even those writers who can write good things produce banalities wholesale: the banality repels intelligent readers away from science fiction; as they form a small majority in fandom the "silent majority" dominates the market, and the evolution into higher spheres cannot occur.
Therefore, in science fiction, a vicious circle of cause and effect coupled together keeps the existing state of science fiction intact and going.
Here is a fragment from my own notes, concerning an essay I wasn't able to later pin point:
[Lem] makes some rather complex arguments that separating the good from the bad is a lot harder than it looks, but the critic must first identify the correct mode of parsing a work, should it deserve one.
He also points out that the working critic with the skills to properly perform this work are ever in short supply.
With some of Dick, Le Guin, or Vonnegut I do feel like challenged to identify the correct mode of parsing the work. Vonnegut never settles for just a single dark layer.
I feel the extra depth sometimes with Gibson, Clarke, Niven, to name a few that I've liked, but I also perceive the banality, too. Gibson makes it up with tone, Clarke with his natural ability as a raconteur, and Niven with his larger-than-life extrapolations. Talent 3, genre 0.
A major problem with SF is often that our little pinprick of a blue marble is so often beaten to a bloody pulp by the Total Plot Device Holodeck, which constitutes 90% of SF's dark energy.
BBB is a rating agency. I don't think they have any actual teeth.
You do know that most social media sites since the paleolithic era manage reputation differently than displaying your elite 5-digit UID on every post?
Bear in mind that almost all blackmail is reputational blackmail (as someone running exclusively on ZFS with automatic snapshots, I can still claim this to be true).
General wisdom is that you DON'T go for any counteroffer
General wisdom among people who have never heard of auction theory is that you DON'T go for any counteroffer...
People who have heard of auction theory know that general wisdom in this area is overrated. It's a very thorny sub-discipline of game theory. Just for example, the stable marriage problem is widely studied because the best form of loyalty is when no defection transaction has a mutually positive incentive.
Ideologically, the invisible hand supposedly functions as the great purveyor of stable marriage: to the highest bidder thou shalt go. All this stuff about employees hiding their market preferences and market value from their current employer is the opposite of what a free market economy supposedly delivers (or, to put it another way, all of this exists under the "sand in the Vaseline" column of the invisible hand).
At least this discussion recognizes that in the big picture, the present labour-market etiquette of skulking around is a big steaming pile of crap, and there ought to be a better way. Loyalty in the workforce is the modern equivalent of mind games in the bedroom. You don't hear nearly so much about mind games in the bedroom since divorce became far less stigmatized.
For the record, I would tell firm B, "look, make me an offer, if I like your offer I'll ask my present employer if they wish to beat it by some significant amount (a figure that shall not be less than $5000 annually) and only if they beat you by that margin, will I accept the counteroffer. (I'm assuming trust can be established, and we aren't analyzing my capacity to lie like a bastard.) By doing this you've heavily loaded the dice toward the benefit of firm B is resolving near-ties in best-offer-received. This should offer them sufficient protection that you're not just playing them to win some other chess game on a different chess board.
Obviously, it's a lot more complex, because there's an entire Dilbert Space of opportunities to lie and defect.
Theorem: in any society, a maximum of one individual can operate effectively without extending any trust at all.
Corollary: under the rubric of professionalism, the vast majority of participants in meaningful economy extend trust in more directions that you can count on any given work day.
Definition: EQ = the ability to navigate life's challenges with a less oppressive coefficient of paranoia.
Exponential growth sustained for a sufficient length of time—never more than a blink of the eye on an evolutionary time scale—is indistinguishable from the hyperbole event horizon.
Step right up.
Anyone can play.
Just strap on your Extrapolator 2000, and posit anything.
At 5,900 kilograms (13,000 lb), it is more than ten times the size of Anik A2 and yet still one of the smallest, least powerful communications satellites ever built, serving barely two dozen users in the remote community of Toque2Mukluk.
Anik F2 is a Boeing 702-series satellite, designed to support and enhance current North American voice, data, and broadcast services with its C- and Ku-band technologies. It is the fifteenth satellite to be launched by Telesat, and the first to achieve dual-band operation.
JPEG and PNG images stored on a USB thumb drive in a FAT data partition aren't going away anytime soon, short of the mother of all EMP events. And even then, there will be thumb drives someone tossed into a large jar of loose change that miraculously survived the pulse.
USB flash drives market to reach annual volume sales of 561 million units by 2018 — article text completely worthless (bold word my addition; you know you've worked in marketing too long if you've never actually seen a denominator written down). Average drive capacity is presently heading into the 32 GB range. Can you quickly multiply 32 GB by 500 million? It's not hard. Go!
I grew up with Carl Sagan. "Billions and billions" used to be shorthand for mind-blowing ubiquity. Yet somehow we're suffering from a preservation crisis. I'm having a little trouble squaring the Drake equation on this particular tempest in a teapot.
Even if we only had the thumb drives rescued from giant jars of loose change after the mother of all EMPs, we'd still retain more knowledge about the present day than what we presently know about the life and times of Joseph Smith, much less any of his deep-antiquity antecedents.
In other news, the pox just adopted mark-to-market accounting practices.
I figure this is how it works with The Donald, too. He wakes up in the morning with a novel idea for how to litigate one of his business partners—also known as contractual co-signatories—and mentally adds $300 million tax free to his personal net worth as he flosses his astonishingly sharp teeth.
Pity this won't show up on his tax returns for years and years. This, however, is also good—it will probably take five to ten years to amass the necessary 200 pages of tax offsets against correspondingly novel loopholes in the federal tax code.
Trump: "Good morning, Bernie, looks like we have a new long-term project."
Senior minion [whose name isn't actually 'Bernie']: Excellent! Whose blood are we drinking, this time?
Trump: Ah, that building in, ah, the Trump crap whatsitsname, you know, the building from that deal, summer of 2013, where we saw the chick with the really great rack as we walked through the lobby on the way to get the Mexican food that was okay, but not-at-all what we expected, so we left no tip.
Senior minion: Yes, of course, the really great rack—who could forget—before the awesomely authentic burritos which were not-at-all satisfactory. I'll get right on it.
Phone call ends.
Senior minion [addressing staff]: About face! Leaches, march!
Back at the Mar-a-Lago Faraday cage, Trump does a little mental arithmetic. "Let's see, ten point one plus zero point three equals ten point four. Nice." Here he pauses for a moment to let his newfound wealth fully sink in.
"What's next? Let's see, here. Focus group con-call at 11:00 with three adoring, educated black women, located—with some difficulty, to hear my staff bitch about it—in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. That Kellyanne, mostly I just want to strangle her, but my word I've never known a woman who can turn rocks the way she does.
Hmm, not until 11:00, there's the silver lining—still two hours away. Not much else on the schedule, looks like it's Twitter time—best part of my day, not counting lawsuits and loopholes. Ten-point-four. What will ten-point-four say today? Something pithy, or something punchy? Decisions, decisions."
Despite the brass ring TOS of whatever version you were previously running, an infection is as an infection does.
Also, read your antibiotic prescription carefully. * may include systemd[**]
[**] First we keep Berlin, then we take Warsaw, someday soon we annex Prague, and eventually perhaps we'll incite the Arabs to cut Manhattan down to size.
All hail PC-BSD: the systemd-free libertarian antibiotic of last resort.
Slashdot Mirror
Bollocks on their predication rate. Real forecasters report skill. By contrast, actual progress on predicting the North Atlantic Oscillation, perhaps an achievable goal, would be huge.
Both of these issues are covered in Judith Curry on Climate Change, a podcast from 2013 which, as it happens, I consumed yesterday.
Concerning the rush to embarrass themselves by reporting their weather prediction rate, it's because of the taxonomic land grab.
Note that the word "useful" as I chose to hear it, is entirely confined to the domain of career advancement and the writing of committee-room position papers.
Two things about Russ.
One is that he doesn't connect as much as he should. He's (since) done other podcasts which talk about how the regional nature of congressional representation makes politics in America intensely regional. This is
I won't dream of a single (or multiple) damn quantum thing until I see an equation that describes a real-world superposition scaling limit, species type "immovable object".
I believed in Moore's law because it was on a collision course with the atom, right from day one. Even as a child, I didn't believe in a Laplacian universe, in the sense that the accumulated knowledge required to compute the deterministic outcome could exist in one place—a place smaller than the universe itself—for any value of "smaller" my small mind was capable of entertaining.
I've been reading articles about quantum computing seemingly for decades now, and not a single article has pointed out any practical scaling limit. For all these dunderheads seem to know, we could cajole the entire universe into a state of Laplacian superposition, if only we didn't suck at stacking these tiny little Lego blocks.
No scaling boundary equation widely promulgated = no credibility widely disseminated = very little fantasy action for people who don't believe in giant green men with anger management issues.
Never heard of Xeon? At least half of a high-end chip's reliability comes from the post-manufacture test procedure and binning standard.
At Apple's scale, they can negotiate any production standard with Intel that they wish to have. This isn't even uncommon, as companies like Google and Facebook are already negotiating custom Xeons for the datacenter, which certainly involves tweaking some internal chip firmware (e.g. changing cache allocation policies or thermal envelopes), all the way up to possibly adding specialized instructions and/or execution units.
Finally, far more problems arise from the mainboard and assembly quality than the underlying chip quality, but at the end of the day it all adds up.
Welcome to Supply Chain 501. It's not your father's Supply Chain 101.
That said, Apple (the company) is a cult-like Black Box of the highest order. When it serves their agenda, they make good products. When their agenda shifts with the winds of fashion—so long, sweet Mini—caveat emptor.
The New Mac mini is Quickly Turning into a Disaster
Mac Mini 2014 Review: A Terrible Shame
Once upon a time, a very nice product, too bad about the "greatness" removal tool presiding from the glass office.
Wrong. Plenty of code correctness has been deployed in service of this goal.
Unfortunately, there are endemic economic and political reasons why we constantly choose the protocols and implementations that are bigger, hairier, and less continent.
All you need is a culture of kicking non-conforming implementations to the curb, and then the rigorous implementations have a chance to emerge from the weeds. Do we have such a culture? No—most of the time—no, we do not. Such a culture would cramp Megacorp style, and interfere with timeless value-adds, such as embrace and extend, closed ecosystem, DRM jungle, NIST-sanctioned algorithmic weevils, definition by implementation, documentation by implementation, etc. etc.
Far, far away in dull and dusty places like the Erlang OTP or Bernstein's qmail or Knuth's TeX—or perhaps even the Google protocol buffers for at least one lucky and unusually blessed language binding from the somewhat recent past—you just might find a rigorously coded parser or two.
For the most part, however, I agree. We'll probably never have rigorous parsers in a dominant culture of "screw everyone else", Wild West dysenteroperability.
Of course NASA passed on decades of hard-won experience. They're not psychopaths.
It went something like this:
Dear ESA:
Hire only the best and the brightest, keep the group challenged and engaged for decade upon decade, with frequent launch opportunities pushing the boundary of the possible at each and every iteration.
N.B.: Sorry, there's no silver bullet.
My favourite touch is the two giant call-outs in the linked article.
Few of the sites I read regularly have these any more (meaning since I got good at "inspect element" and custom User CSS overrides; appears I've accumulated 150 of these over the past three years, also used to defeat anything that hovers or slides annoyingly).
FTFY.
What's racist about race is presupposing outcomes that were highly predictable on first impression, because it's lamentably a very short step for an advantaged social group—often one of relatively homogeneous racial composition, suffused with elaborate rituals of social etiquette—to conclude that a disadvantaged racial subgroup never given an opportunity to do x can't do x.
Race isn't just some magic third rail used to divide humans into two distinct groups, in much the same way that humans divide house pets into two distinct groups: potty trained and not potty trained. There are days, though, where that can be a good working assumption.
Somehow this story showed up in my Slashdot feed, when it's really just supposed to trigger a mass outpouring of the reflex derision arc among those so inclined (said barf cookies falsely paraded by its practitioners as chuckle fodder).
"There, don't you feel better now? Now come sit with us at the adult table." Amazing what a quickie bile purge can accomplish in raising the level of discussion elsewhere.
This is all good. Yet somehow my dank, reeking bile seems to have been misclassified as grasshopper lipstick and I seem to be trapped in completely the wrong purgative honeypot. Where do I unclick "chuckle fodder"? Where do I unclick "news-item-of-the-week free-association paralympics"? Which direction do I kneel to moon Marvin, patron saint of universal laugh-at-anything good will?
No, I'm not new here. It must be shocking to some that I haven't figured out my account configuration yet. You'd think I'd know by now that no unexplored configuration sub-menu goes ultimately unpunished.
Well, now I know. True hell is becoming stuck in the wrong hellban honeypot.
The side effect of your Mercedes choosing to impact the young mother with her baby stroller instead of the nearby telephone pole (ouch! that could hurt!) is that the customer's testicles fall off, and his dick never rises for the rest of his miserable, injury-free life (female customers sensibly snipped the wires on this pathetic contraction long ago).
The Mercedes survivor can always tell his disappointed women, "not MY fault, the Mercedes made me do it". Mercedes! Modestly dressed women cross themselves. Everyone spits.
All this spit makes the sidewalks dangerous to navigate for the common folk, but we can all rest safe knowing that the privileged remain comfy and cozy inside their steel cocoons.
Hillary: Your honour, I submit that the innocent-looking 12-year-old girl you see before you was slavering and panting to have my defendant, an older man, to rape her into a coma.
Yes, that's exactly how it plays out on Matlock.
Opposing council: [passing in the hallway, afterwards]: Good lord, Hillary, how did you become so damn good at this lawyering business? Your argument for the defense was a fucking masterstroke! Clearly you're headed for bigger and better things.
This might actually be more about the crawl than the index. The mobile index could be set to crawl content in mobile format only, and more often.
What makes freshness important, in the first place? Mostly celebrity gossip, and the retail deal of the hour. Neither of those are functions people do much on PCs anyway.
Still, if Google decides not to keep long-form content reasonably fresh (if not fresher) in their desktop index, it foreshadows a Yahooesque self-inflicted extinction event of their traditional core brand.
Now Yahoo just needs to explain what system or software or mental competence they're in the middle of upgrading that causes them not to tell people what's about to happen before it happens.
Sure hope Competence 11.0 is finally the one that ignites self-perception.
Nicely done. You just lumped Steve Jobs in with Arnold "the Knife" Morris.
The Pitchman
Sure, sharpened steel is a great technology, but will people actually use it unless first impressed by a delightfully manicured tomato? ... But wait, there's more!
Steve's legendary pineapple was his insistence that RISC would blow CISC out of the water. That pineapple never danced (excluding, for a while, one or two hand-picked Photoshop effects). Miraculously, it still hasn't danced.
Why Linus Torvalds Prefers x86 Over ARM
How could this be? Let's dissect.
The Underappreciated True Story of 48-Year-Old Boxer Bernard Hopkins
That sure sounds like the 8088 I knew and loved.
Ditto.
To it's credit, The DEC Alpha actually landed a punch. Others, not so much.
It was AMD that finally provided the magic milkshake.
Ye olde 8088 has sure come a long way.
Where x86 went up in weight class, Jobs ultimately—not with the once-franchise iMac, but the iPhone—successfully went down in weight class. That much-vaunted 10" chef knife went nowhere fast after decades of trying, but he stuck with it—full marks—and finally made a freaking fortune on pastel-coloured paring knives.
Meanwhile, Ritchie improved steel. Advantage: Ritchie.
I'm late to this party, but just so anyone who stumbles upon this thread by some quirk of Google future, the views expressed above are not reliable. It's not apparent that the author knows much of anything about the ZIL or the SLOG. There are trade-offs involved with ZFS, no question. But none of these are anywhere as inane as this post would seem to have it.
If the vast majority of your work load is synchronous write, you do have to provide a SLOG with as much write bandwidth as the rest of your pool. Except during recovery, the SLOG is pretty much sequential write-only (not a demanding case for any enterprise-grade write-optimized storage device). These writes take place concurrently to the synchronous writes (latency matters). Under ZFS, the primary pool still batches writes into transaction groups every few seconds. The comment about the inability of ZFS to use RAM for write caching is simply incoherent.
What ZFS can't do, for synchronous writes, is use RAM for write coalescing, eliminating writes to stable storage (the SLOG, in this scenario) if one write immediately replaces another (a fairly common traffic pattern). Well duh you can only do this if your RAM counts as stable storage for any file system, and if you even have this, it's usually a device requiring I/O traffic to access, the same as any other persistent storage device.
What hardware RAID does potentially buy you is combining both the persistent RAM and the persistent storage onto a single device channel, allowing the OS to kill two birds with a single I/O write operation. And for this, you buy yourself a really really complex layer of extra device firmware, which historically has been far from entirely bug free. Your surface area of failure increases enormously (though you do have fingers to point at the extremely well healed—all that internal firmware testing is baked into the price with a healthy insurance multiple—should the worst come to pass).
Do you really need synchronous write coalescing? A basic Xeon these days has 40 lanes of PCIe 3.0. Does that look like a rate-limiting resource on sustained synchronous write traffic to your storage pool? I wish. And if it does, I'm pretty sure your first response is this: more sockets, please.
As it happens, there are giant industry plans afoot to add a non-volatile memory type into the system memory hierarchy. ZFS will like this—a lot—should any of this chortling evil land-grab vapour come to pass.
And here I thought they just had an excess of pink and purple, and needed to run those ink reservoirs dry so they could replace the entire rainbow cartridge all at once, without losing their green cred.
Satire—once the cynicism becomes too thick—is nothing more than a devious way of getting the reader to work four times as hard as normal, to ultimately decode the underlying message "look at meeeeee!"
Read Stanislaw Lem's Microworlds. He variously suffers from elitism, spurned-author petulance, and a predilection for Hegelian phraseology, but he offers up real ideas where few ideas roam.
Here's a bit from his essay Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case — With Exceptions:
Another essay which I thought had some real substance: Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans
Here is a fragment from my own notes, concerning an essay I wasn't able to later pin point:
With some of Dick, Le Guin, or Vonnegut I do feel like challenged to identify the correct mode of parsing the work. Vonnegut never settles for just a single dark layer.
I feel the extra depth sometimes with Gibson, Clarke, Niven, to name a few that I've liked, but I also perceive the banality, too. Gibson makes it up with tone, Clarke with his natural ability as a raconteur, and Niven with his larger-than-life extrapolations. Talent 3, genre 0.
A major problem with SF is often that our little pinprick of a blue marble is so often beaten to a bloody pulp by the Total Plot Device Holodeck, which constitutes 90% of SF's dark energy.
You do know that most social media sites since the paleolithic era manage reputation differently than displaying your elite 5-digit UID on every post?
Bear in mind that almost all blackmail is reputational blackmail (as someone running exclusively on ZFS with automatic snapshots, I can still claim this to be true).
General wisdom among people who have never heard of auction theory is that you DON'T go for any counteroffer ...
People who have heard of auction theory know that general wisdom in this area is overrated. It's a very thorny sub-discipline of game theory. Just for example, the stable marriage problem is widely studied because the best form of loyalty is when no defection transaction has a mutually positive incentive.
Ideologically, the invisible hand supposedly functions as the great purveyor of stable marriage: to the highest bidder thou shalt go. All this stuff about employees hiding their market preferences and market value from their current employer is the opposite of what a free market economy supposedly delivers (or, to put it another way, all of this exists under the "sand in the Vaseline" column of the invisible hand).
Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha on LinkedIn and The Alliance
At least this discussion recognizes that in the big picture, the present labour-market etiquette of skulking around is a big steaming pile of crap, and there ought to be a better way. Loyalty in the workforce is the modern equivalent of mind games in the bedroom. You don't hear nearly so much about mind games in the bedroom since divorce became far less stigmatized.
For the record, I would tell firm B, "look, make me an offer, if I like your offer I'll ask my present employer if they wish to beat it by some significant amount (a figure that shall not be less than $5000 annually) and only if they beat you by that margin, will I accept the counteroffer. (I'm assuming trust can be established, and we aren't analyzing my capacity to lie like a bastard.) By doing this you've heavily loaded the dice toward the benefit of firm B is resolving near-ties in best-offer-received. This should offer them sufficient protection that you're not just playing them to win some other chess game on a different chess board.
Obviously, it's a lot more complex, because there's an entire Dilbert Space of opportunities to lie and defect.
Theorem: in any society, a maximum of one individual can operate effectively without extending any trust at all.
Corollary: under the rubric of professionalism, the vast majority of participants in meaningful economy extend trust in more directions that you can count on any given work day.
Definition: EQ = the ability to navigate life's challenges with a less oppressive coefficient of paranoia.
That about sums it up.
Exponential growth sustained for a sufficient length of time—never more than a blink of the eye on an evolutionary time scale—is indistinguishable from the hyperbole event horizon.
Step right up.
Anyone can play.
Just strap on your Extrapolator 2000, and posit anything.
You can't be wrong.
Everyone's a winner, every time.[*]
[*] someconditionsmayapplymillennialsnotincludedgetyourstoday
At 5,900 kilograms (13,000 lb), it is more than ten times the size of Anik A2 and yet still one of the smallest, least powerful communications satellites ever built, serving barely two dozen users in the remote community of Toque2Mukluk.
Anik F2 is a Boeing 702-series satellite, designed to support and enhance current North American voice, data, and broadcast services with its C- and Ku-band technologies. It is the fifteenth satellite to be launched by Telesat, and the first to achieve dual-band operation.
JPEG and PNG images stored on a USB thumb drive in a FAT data partition aren't going away anytime soon, short of the mother of all EMP events. And even then, there will be thumb drives someone tossed into a large jar of loose change that miraculously survived the pulse.
USB flash drives market to reach annual volume sales of 561 million units by 2018 — article text completely worthless (bold word my addition; you know you've worked in marketing too long if you've never actually seen a denominator written down). Average drive capacity is presently heading into the 32 GB range. Can you quickly multiply 32 GB by 500 million? It's not hard. Go!
I grew up with Carl Sagan. "Billions and billions" used to be shorthand for mind-blowing ubiquity. Yet somehow we're suffering from a preservation crisis. I'm having a little trouble squaring the Drake equation on this particular tempest in a teapot.
Even if we only had the thumb drives rescued from giant jars of loose change after the mother of all EMPs, we'd still retain more knowledge about the present day than what we presently know about the life and times of Joseph Smith, much less any of his deep-antiquity antecedents.
The Americas Are Now Officially 'Measles-Free'
In other news, the pox just adopted mark-to-market accounting practices.
I figure this is how it works with The Donald, too. He wakes up in the morning with a novel idea for how to litigate one of his business partners—also known as contractual co-signatories—and mentally adds $300 million tax free to his personal net worth as he flosses his astonishingly sharp teeth.
Pity this won't show up on his tax returns for years and years. This, however, is also good—it will probably take five to ten years to amass the necessary 200 pages of tax offsets against correspondingly novel loopholes in the federal tax code.
Trump: "Good morning, Bernie, looks like we have a new long-term project."
Senior minion [whose name isn't actually 'Bernie']: Excellent! Whose blood are we drinking, this time?
Trump: Ah, that building in, ah, the Trump crap whatsitsname, you know, the building from that deal, summer of 2013, where we saw the chick with the really great rack as we walked through the lobby on the way to get the Mexican food that was okay, but not-at-all what we expected, so we left no tip.
Senior minion: Yes, of course, the really great rack—who could forget—before the awesomely authentic burritos which were not-at-all satisfactory. I'll get right on it.
Phone call ends.
Senior minion [addressing staff]: About face! Leaches, march!
Back at the Mar-a-Lago Faraday cage, Trump does a little mental arithmetic. "Let's see, ten point one plus zero point three equals ten point four. Nice." Here he pauses for a moment to let his newfound wealth fully sink in.
"What's next? Let's see, here. Focus group con-call at 11:00 with three adoring, educated black women, located—with some difficulty, to hear my staff bitch about it—in Alabama, Kentucky, and Tennessee. That Kellyanne, mostly I just want to strangle her, but my word I've never known a woman who can turn rocks the way she does.
Hmm, not until 11:00, there's the silver lining—still two hours away. Not much else on the schedule, looks like it's Twitter time—best part of my day, not counting lawsuits and loopholes. Ten-point-four. What will ten-point-four say today? Something pithy, or something punchy? Decisions, decisions."
Despite the brass ring TOS of whatever version you were previously running, an infection is as an infection does.
Also, read your antibiotic prescription carefully.
* may include systemd[**]
[**] First we keep Berlin, then we take Warsaw, someday soon we annex Prague, and eventually perhaps we'll incite the Arabs to cut Manhattan down to size.
All hail PC-BSD: the systemd-free libertarian antibiotic of last resort.
s/warn/brag/
s/Hackers/contributing members of society/
s/lowlife/1%/
s/iocane/iocane/