Directors and officers of a corporation have a fiduciary duty to the stockholders to run the company in their interest.
When you study real people in controlled settings, their actual interests turn out to be far murkier and less consistent than we like to imagine.
There's no perfect way for management to pin-point the precise interests of their collective (and fluctuating) stockholders.
Rather than becoming slaves to opinion-poll rounding errors, perhaps management is wise to buffer this obligation by living like decent human beings, following thousands of years of human precedent before we got all hot and bothered and legalled-up over brittle inducements.
For example, Boost is really sweet when you need to slam together a pile of code and have it working out of the gate with minimal fuss, but if performance is an issue, you cant use it.
Wow, that's just bizarre. I don't know where you get your misinformation, but it's an elite grade of batshit.
The whole point of Boost is that it maintains a certain amount of abstraction without boxing you into a performance corner. Were it not for those conflicting goals, the devilishness of its internal machinery could not be justified.
Template metaprogramming essentially involves expressions converting themselves to a symbolic representation that doesn't resolve itself into a concrete expression—by means of purely functional transformation at a quasi-syntactic level;—until some final result is demanded, at which point the highest performance code path can be selected based on the actual parameters (more specifically, often exploiting which parameters vary and which parameters are constant or nearly constant).
The problem with Boost is similar to what Knuth said about the problem with literate programming.
Literate programming demands a high proficiency with two different skills: formal reasoning and verbal expression. This shrinks the available pool of adherents and adopters. And worse, there's a terrible opportunity cost, because the people out there who have extremely high proficiency in both of these skills are in extremely high demand to take on central roles in large projects where they don't spend their hours bent over literate code.
The kind of environment where Boost can be best exploited for both its abstraction and its performance is going to be wonk-filled boiler-rooms at high frequency trading companies where the cash, the talent, the commitment, and the project duration mesh together. Importantly, the project specification in these environments is often in continuous, long-term evolution as your firm chases whatever edge it thinks it might have in a chaotic, rapidly-shifting market environment. The month you spend pouring over low-level optimization gets deployed for a whole week. The month you spend automated your Boost framework to achieve nearly the same performance becomes a permanent code asset (and a competitive asset whenever you find yourself needing once again to run that old play).
Boost is in that category where if you have to ask, you can't cut the mustard. The natural Boost programmers already know who they are. Few of these people toil in the public eye. That's not where this elite, double-barrel skillset tends to land.
The Wolfram language is impossible to assess based on this video. If your application depends on Wolfram "knowledge" how do you know it will continue to meet rigorous specifications the day after tomorrow?
Is there a public regression suite on the contained knowledge against which to assess whether your program is erected on firm or porous soil?
What guarantee does one have that it's cleverness or performance characteristics will stay consistent when it matters most?
I suspect the killer application for WooL is prototyping the semantic web. The semantic web has been dragging its feet. Google and Facebook don't wish to become disintermediated. They have one foot on both sides of this fence and their hands cupped over their testicles. Doesn't make for rapid progress.
The Achilles heel of search is that search returns results rather than models. Google is trying to split the difference by having search return interactions. It's an excellent paving stone on the road to a lucrative future purveying OOXML.
If ten minutes of coding within the Wolfram Language embarrasses Google search, we have a winner here of WuLing mammoth proportions.
If you're still running 10.6 for some reason, your computer is either a low-end one from at least 7 years ago, or you've made an intentional choice to remain on 10.6 for some reason
It used to be that low IQ was failing to identify the continuation of some trivial numerical sequence on some trivial test. The new low IQ is use-case blindness, the inability to even hazard a guess at the myriads of reasons other people live differently than you do. The ravening mob of blindness promulgators are ever with us. Pity.
Here's my story.
I bought my wife a second generation Core Duo iMacs, which I believe has never been upgraded from the original Leopard. I use this computer so rarely (about ten hours per years) that I can barely keep track of which leopard presently holds court.
The computer works—until some piece of software offers to "upgrade" itself, then restarts with a whole new user interface (I'm looking at you, iTunes). Then I'm constantly told the computer doesn't work any more, but the real problem is that she hasn't figured out where all the familiar functions were forcibly relocated.
I'm not willing to sit down at her desk and chase GUI tidbits from point A to point B, so I just told her "don't click upgrade". When something visibly breaks, then I'm willing to sit down and deal with it. Meanwhile I have enough sysadmin on my plate with my own Linux desktop, where I'm heavily invested in ZSH, and my FreeBSD server, where I'm making very heavy use of ZFS. This is where my neural matter wants to go.
I have a very low tolerance for having something trivial I've mastered at the autonomic level yanked back to the center of my attention. It took me close to a decade to cease seething about the relocation of the CTRL key in favour of a CAPS LOCK key that should have been ALT-NUMLOCK or, even better, CTRL-ALT-INSERT. FFS I can type ~50 wpm in ALL CAPS using the right shift key for six of my fingers, alternating to the right shift key for the other two. But guess what? The CAPS LOCK key is more prominent to my left pinkie than ENTER is to my right pinkie. If we normalize the utility of the ENTER key to 100, the utility of the CAPS LOCK key comes out around -1000.
The problem with most upgrades is that it's always more of this father-knows-best groupthink bullshit.
It's a huge project just to figure out what's going to change. The only recourse one has to all these unnecessary relearning cycles is to skip as many releases as humanly possible. I'd be thrilled if XP is the last Microsoft OS I learn how to use in this lifetime. I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 and I stayed there until 2000 went out of support. Later I ended up using XP in a different work environment and I can't name a single thing that improved, except that I had to disable a lot more bling for half a day. Long ago I held out on MSDOS until I could jump straight to Windows NT which I adopted within weeks of the Intel P6 becoming available. That was a real upgrade, one well worth reprogramming a decade of autonomic habits. I never used any of the shitshow 3.1/95/98 for more than the very occasional hour.
These upgrades change a lot of stuff for extremely dubious benefits. An upgrade is going from UFS to ZFS. That I can buy into. An upgrade is going from System 7 to OS X. On that one I can sell my wife.
What I really want concerning these fairly useless system frobs is the semantic web: searchable metadata describing every user interface action that formerly existed and whether it still exists in the new version, plus a mapping to a more-or-less equivalent version, if such a thing has even been retained. Oh yes, Apple is good at silent castration. Ideally the OS would track which user interface functions have been regularly used, and list out all the things the upgraded user will be instantly forced to relearn. But no. It's sexy. No assistance offered retraining for sexy. That what sexy means, lo
I simply don't install applications on Android that ask for abusive permissions, which pretty much puts my phone back into the stone age. I don't need the project right now of installing a root kit, tweaking non-standard security settings, then wondering whether the next glitch is something I have to fix myself.
Net effect, so far as I'm concerned, is that the smart phone has not been invented yet.
I've always considered the Brights movement to be tragically misnamed (almost cringe-worthy) but at this point I'd have no problem carrying around a Bright phone where the device's intelligence was on my side for once.
Kurzweil is probably a good deal less bright than Sir Isaac Newton, but also a good deal less crazy, his barmy extrapolation of the singularity notwithstanding. Clearly Google hired the man based on the smartest thing he's accomplished rather than the dumbest thing he espouses.
I've thought about this for a long time, and I'm only 99% convinced Kurzweil is wrong. He holds the record for the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard for which I maintain a non-zero sliver of belief. That said, extropian immortality sure as heck isn't life as we presently know it. Even if he's right, I'm not sure I give a damn about my xeno-species future extropian self.
What's left of me as I presently know myself would be just a little sliver of MSDOS buried somewhere deep inside Windows 8, though that might be just enough to properly enjoy hearing Raymond-prime mutter, "Oh, indeed, my original Raymond self, he was such a twit, wasn't he? Every so often I simulate his ego as a kind of Positronic CPU burn to keep my immortality in good working order, but only when the liquid helium is in copious supply."
He's weirdest belief of all is that you can multiply something by a million and it gets a million times better and not more aptly just a million times different.
The difference in standards compliance in modern browsers is a supermodel vs an air-brushed supermodel.
The difference between IE5/IE6 and other browsers of the era was a supermodel vs watching your own parents having sex.
One could say the same thing about Visual C++ as well.
The thing about Goldman Sachs is that you never get to ruin the economy twice in exactly the same way. There's relentless pressure to innovate concerning your grand malfeasance. It's so comforting to know that Goldman now goes to church on Sunday mornings and sings the sub-prime anthem.
Only a failed criminal tries the same scheme twice. The key is to make such obscene profits the first time that you can sit tight long enough for the apologists to paper over your track record before hatching your next plan.
The title character is a poor and fatherless teenager growing up in The Bronx. Billy and his friends are in awe of the flashy mobsters in the neighborhood. Dutch Schultz and Otto Berman, based on the real-life mobsters, hire Billy as a gofer and become mentors to him. The gangsters take Billy up to their upstate hideaway, where they are awaiting a trial. Schultz becomes a community leader and converts to Catholicism.
100% perfection in any non-trivial thing (whether hard or soft) is impossible.
This is 100% semantic wankery, because triviality is circularly defined as the magic threshold beyond which bugs become inevitable.
Of course there's an implicit ego frame of reference, because we're all looking for an edge on the margin where the big money lives. They didn't call it a "space race" for nothing. It would be far more pertinent to observe about the human species that bragging rights come from body bags. That's just how we run our affairs on the larger political scales.
I can't stand the intellectual posing that ensues whenever someone espouses the culture of bug mitigation with extreme prejudice. Oh, nothing can ever be perfect—as if that's ever the human standard in anything. Part of this is IQ wanking: the notion that writing bug-free code requires superhuman feats of logical perfection. Successfully reasoning your way out of a wet paper bag has something to do with writing bug-free software, but it's a secondary term at most.
The real key to writing defect-minimized systems is a good understanding of human psychology and mental frailty, keeping notes, and constantly upping your game.
It's a rare piece of software that is more robust than the worst API it programs against. Even if the code behind that API is 100% bug free, you're far from out of the woods, because the API can be designed in such as way as to delegate complexity up hill.
No doubt Opportunity was far from perfect, but it sure as hell sets a god-like bar compared to what passes for quality work in 98% of the make-a-buck sphere.
There are even patents filed which allow identification of individual only by this fingerprint.
The government is doing things for which there are even patents? Wow. I had no idea.
Geez, with IPv6 giving every single web client a distinct address, you'd think the NSA would be campaigning behind the scenes to have their carefully curated fat-pipe monopolists ramming IPv6 down our collective throats.
And damn, what a surprising patent, with only about a thousand years of prior art.
On 29 January 1697 Newton returned at 4pm from working at the Royal Mint and found in his post the problems that Bernoulli had sent to him directly; two copies of the printed paper containing the problems. Newton stayed up to 4am before arriving at the solutions; on the following day he sent a solution of them to Montague, then president of the Royal Society for anonymous publication.
He announced that the curve required in the first problem must be a cycloid, and he gave a method of determining it. He also solved the second problem, and in so doing showed that by the same method other curves might be found which cut off three or more segments having similar properties.
Solutions were also obtained from Leibniz and the Marquis de l'HÃpital; and, although Newton's solution was anonymous, he was recognized by Bernoulli as its author; "tanquam ex ungue leonem" (we recognize the lion by his claw).
I guess that cuts both ways.
PS: Notice our fine Slashdot Classic buggering poor Mr l'HÃpital.
If you need evidence of how valuable it is, merely look at our recent financial crisis when the flow of money froze up.
That's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
I guess you don't recall the August 1981 strike air-traffic controllers strike. Most of those wealthy bankers could be replaced by people being paid 10% as much, and after a few years we'd hardly notice the difference, except perhaps that the new lot wouldn't be nearly so adept at screwing the system over.
I guess if you were running NASA you'd pay a billion dollars per o-ring, because--gosh--look at what happens if it won't deform, and the size of the bill if we need to replace the dumb thing. Ten thousand parts at a billion dollars each sure adds up. When you think about it, with each o-ring protecting the safety of a ten-trillion dollar shuttle, a mere billion dollars per ring is a screaming deal, wouldn't you say?
Finance wasn't rocket science until the inmates figured out that astrobucks are a good living. It doesn't need to be rocket science any more than an o-ring needs to cost a billion dollars.
The controllers had Washington by the balls. Big mistake. The bankers have Washington by the carotid artery. We can therefore infer from this that bankers do more important, more productive, more difficult work. Or we can infer that bankers are better at pouring over Grey's Anatomy if it serves their personal interests.
However, in order to get this to work well, you need the transmitted signal to be phased-aligned to within an appreciable fraction of a wavelength.... Since we are around a gigahertz, that means that the phase of the carrier should be accurate to within a couple hundred picoseconds, max.
Micrel SY89295U Programmable delay range: 3.2 ns to 14.8 ns in 10 ps increments in 2^10 discrete steps. 160 ps rise/fall, less than 2 ps RMS cycle-to-cycle jitter.
That gives you a spatial resolution of about 3 mm within a 3 m pixel on the fine delay; more if you also introduce a coarse delay line (in 10 ns increments). I think the Xilinx DCM gives a step delay on the order of 10 ps in 1024 discrete steps. You've now got 3 mm steps out to 3 km. Note that the linearity of these delay lines is not perfect, so there's some art to it (it's not a simple two-digit number in base 1000), but the worst case step remains small. You might use two DCMs in series plus the CML Micrel to ensure uniform coverage (one Spartan 3E has four DCMs IIRC). Actually, for a multi-channel base station, you'd need to fabricate an ASIC with a very large number of programmable delay lines, as I imagined it before RingTFA.
If the phone is 150 m away from a cell transmitter, you can set up a ping pong ping loop with a round-trip frequency of 1 MHz, where each end bats the pulse back as fast as possible.
Imagine the phone sends out a coloured packet and two or more base station pong it back. The phone can ping back on the first received response, or the last, or the n'th response in between. The fastest paths need to be artificially delayed until all paths are equal time. (With multi-pathing, the radio might be able to detect and measure more than one path length per base station.)
It would take long to achieve the coarse lock-on. Then it needs to maintained during motion of the mobile end, plus changes in atmospheric conditions, or sway in the buildings you're bouncing off of, if you've used the loudest path instead of the quickest path. The timing fabric is quite doable. The delay line can be anywhere in the ping pong circuit. The non-radio portions would ideally use fibre as copper has a temperature-variable c that adds up quick in the ps regime where lengths of 100 m are involved.
I can totally see this working, though radio systems at this level are astrobuck black magic.
The software-defined LTE phased array waveform simulation would be an interesting computational problem. They probably do the time extraction with DSP rather than actual delay lines. I'm wondering how much the upstream channel borks total throughput.
Maybe this is the Netflix special. Agility is always the last crow.
The "jump the shark" moment for "WMD" was when the surviving Boston bomber was charged with using a WMD.
His improvised kitchen device should have been termed a weapon of mass carnage. Note how the official term focuses more on loss of structure than on human life.
Why the present example jumps the shark is that while global warming might be a supreme menace, it has not yet to my knowledge been successfully weaponized.
In this case, we're really dealing with an Apocalyptic Horseman of Mass Resettlement, if there's a need to be operatic.
Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable.
Slashdot worth saving:
Overall, the authors found that the relationship between sadism and avowed trolling was the strongest, and that indeed, sadists appear to troll because they find it pleasurable.
The former is news for gorms; the later is news for nerds. We can't fix this protesting CSS.
If you post about your political beliefs (honestly held)
In a forum where you're reluctant to post your favourite sexual position (honesty held) why would you regard it as open season to post your political position (honesty held)?
There's a way to engage with most issues without dragging in this or that ideological apparatus. The same applies to the political sub-genre known as organized religion. Evangelism is the most political act known to man. Religion itself is not necessarily political, but it quickly becomes political where people feel the need to make others aware that these convictions exist.
Part of the problem is that people fall into the habit of using their worldview as the starting point for every engagement. The same old argument gets a new suit of clothes to suit the occasion. This doesn't take a great deal of cognitive effort.
It's a lot more cognitive work to write bottom up, starting with the issue first of all, then pointing out, perhaps, where it fits into various frames of reference.
This is the cognitive effort of actually engagement.
One of the appeals of grabbing two cans of coloured paint and a flap of cloth and declaring in a loud voice "I am a Springbok" is to put the effort of espousing your worldview on cruise control, while those around you who don't run up equal and opposite colours are left to cook every meal from scratch.
As Mark Twain once said, never contest your identity in a shouting match with people who source their sesame-seed identity buns from McDonald's: everywhere you go, five minutes later, there's more of the same.
No, the opposite of trolling is not merely conviction, it's honest conviction plus cooking from scratch.
Should Target have protected themselves better? Probably. But hindsight is 20/20.
I strongly suspect this is not a hindsight problem whatsoever. The problem is that long term risks are usually weighted against short term gains: personal bonus clauses/promotions triggered by a run of street-beating financial quarters.
There's also the problem of risk hacking, where management willing trades the possibility of a huge setback against the likelihood of a good run of beating par.
With a long enough track record of success, even the big boom which erases more than your accrued margin over par is all too easily swept away under the hindsight carpet.
The only way to get correct risk trade-offs is where the people making these decisions are stuck on "long term hold" in their reward structure. This usually ends up being the founding entrepreneurs and first round employees who are quietly vesting. While these groups have influence, it's not usually enough to deflect the Venture Capitalist's hand-selected upper management team, hugely incentivised around servicing the VC's priority access to the sell-high exit ramp.
Unless you think Target was an inside job, your appeal to the NSA's woes (self-inflicted for entirely different reasons) falls a little short here.
There is very nearly no defense possible against the insider perfect crime. Of course you can always find some neighbour who describes the fellow as a bit suspicious. These are the same people who believe in the nun bun.
Perhaps the brain scan will be soon invented where this worrisome component of free human will can be exorcised from the system with 20/20 foresight. This won't be a good development for human society, in my humble opinion. 20/20 foresight is the planet of the damned.
The entire ecosystem of credentials is a catastrophe. The correct system is NTSC: never twice the same credential. Then when Target leaks the unique credential upon which your transaction stream is based, it would be conceptually possible to permit class action lawsuits against damages incurred, both direct (cash out of pocket) and indirect (hassle and time).
There would still need to be centralized certificate authorities, but these organizations would have no other business model than getting security right. Suffering a Target breach would amount to an existential threat. Then the NSA becomes the correct standard of comparison.
Given a choice, I would far rather people be scientifically literate than English-literate.
This isn't about English literacy, either, unless you think that most people regard "debt" and "deficit" as abstract coinages passed down from Cleopatra's personal mentat.
Here's how the lizard brain encodes language in people with an aspy deficit:
jackpot = pussy debt/deficit = no pussy astronomy/astrology = preoccupations of pointy hats who get no pussy
There's simply no need in this model to discriminate words from the second cluster. Here's a truly horrible capsule summary of what we're up against:
This is designed to influence exactly the kind of person who fails to conceptually discriminate astronomy from astrology. Advertising is not a universal technique. It's merely a universal technique for the shaking the trees most easily shaken: small cognition, big lizard.
The core element is the appeal which answers "What's in it for me?" and the answer either needs to be "more pussy" or something from the first list of things regarded as being directly associated with more pussy, or the proximity of more pussy, or the vain fantasy of the proximity of more pussy.
The bottom brain works on a system of warm, warmer, warmest. I know of a person who has made at least three trips to China thinking he's going to score himself a docile second wife; he has no clue whatsoever that these Chinese women he meets can decode his demeanour as an OCD control freak by the second interaction—if, in fact, there was any legitimacy to their desire to score a comfortable N.A. lifestyle in the first place. In his own culture, most women decode his personality style in a single glace. In his mind all these women have be ruined by a culture which turns them into snooty princesses. Who knows how much money this guy has poured in this project, where 60 seconds of input from a properly functioning top brain could have informed him that "warmer" amounts to a snowball's chance in hell on day where hell's barometer is falling.
Judging from how long he's had his top brain stored in the garage under a dusty tarpaulin, he long ago gave up on welcoming any input from this part of his brain. Either the input is faulty (unlikely), or it conflicts with his cherished lizard-brain fantasy self-image (likely). He's plenty functional in an ordered environment where he has far fewer options to make his own choices.
The problem with this study is that a large slice of the population—in one or more major spheres of living—fails to curate their "beliefs" into consistent/inconsistent, but merely partitions into warmer and colder, using an internal vocabulary where there's only a single word for snow.
These scientists who conducted this study without comprehension of this are living in a similarly tiny mental closet. s/pussy/p-value This is the lizard brain of successful careers built upon bad science.
I guess it accords with a cherished lizard-brain fantasy of someday scoring tenure. For three decades, at least, tenure has become practically synonymous with barometer rising. Engaging in this kind of research project is an awfully indirect way to confront their own delusions.
IUT's called not being lazy and getting a second job.
I'm thinking you're descended from Pilgrims wearing extremely black clothes.
Plus I was very unamerican and drove a 15 year old car refusing to buy a new one, and lived in a 800 sq foot home
No, perhaps you're Puerto Rican.
People can afford what is important to them.
Ah, you're Jewish Asian American.
There's research that shows the highest willingness to make this kind of sacrifice for gains far into the future are people who combine elements of status insecurity and class superiority.
I've listened to several highly informed commentators lately who agreed that what it would take to get American schools to the level of the Asian tigers is to put children through hell on earth of cramming 12 hours per day for years on end to pass some standard exam that admits only a privileged few.
Good thing we no longer dangle children down chimneys or mine shafts.
No one thinks the American educational system is perfect at the K12 level (the cream of the American university system is presently unrivalled), but people who dig deep largely report that the problems are economic and social where the gated communities are doing very well, thank you, at what they value most: drama, sports, and cheerleading. This is a different path to success.
I could dig up a dozen such authoritative voices from my notes, but instead I'll simply echo the most recent exchange I've reviewed which discusses this problem:
This is not a possible headline on a site that boasts of "news for nerds". The subject of that sentence is "study" and the verb cluster (elided in terse journalistic bravado) is "is now in" and the copular completion is "peril".
A failed study is a study that fails to replicate. A failed meme is a meme that fails to replicate. Perhaps we should also protest ALPHA, our seemingly self-inflicted wound.
Most Christians believe in evolution. Even the fundamentalist ones. But only the loud and idiotic get on TV so now we have a christian stereotype.
Where are all the loud Christians— the ones who aren't insane—when it comes time to shout down the anti-scientific bias being introduced into school systems in certain American states?
I'll take what you're saying far more seriously when I see the sober-minded Christians busy shouting down their own who cross the line. I sure as hell shout down scientists who begin to claim more than science can reasonably pretend to know. This particularly stereotype was well and duly earned through meek opposition. The meek shall inherit the worst.
Slashdot Mirror
MediaWiki. Before I created my note-taking wiki, my ideas went off in all directions.
I'm also pretty heavy into R/C/C++/zsh/ZFS/git right now.
When you study real people in controlled settings, their actual interests turn out to be far murkier and less consistent than we like to imagine.
There's no perfect way for management to pin-point the precise interests of their collective (and fluctuating) stockholders.
Rather than becoming slaves to opinion-poll rounding errors, perhaps management is wise to buffer this obligation by living like decent human beings, following thousands of years of human precedent before we got all hot and bothered and legalled-up over brittle inducements.
Wow, that's just bizarre. I don't know where you get your misinformation, but it's an elite grade of batshit.
The whole point of Boost is that it maintains a certain amount of abstraction without boxing you into a performance corner. Were it not for those conflicting goals, the devilishness of its internal machinery could not be justified.
Template metaprogramming essentially involves expressions converting themselves to a symbolic representation that doesn't resolve itself into a concrete expression—by means of purely functional transformation at a quasi-syntactic level;—until some final result is demanded, at which point the highest performance code path can be selected based on the actual parameters (more specifically, often exploiting which parameters vary and which parameters are constant or nearly constant).
The problem with Boost is similar to what Knuth said about the problem with literate programming.
Literate programming demands a high proficiency with two different skills: formal reasoning and verbal expression. This shrinks the available pool of adherents and adopters. And worse, there's a terrible opportunity cost, because the people out there who have extremely high proficiency in both of these skills are in extremely high demand to take on central roles in large projects where they don't spend their hours bent over literate code.
The kind of environment where Boost can be best exploited for both its abstraction and its performance is going to be wonk-filled boiler-rooms at high frequency trading companies where the cash, the talent, the commitment, and the project duration mesh together. Importantly, the project specification in these environments is often in continuous, long-term evolution as your firm chases whatever edge it thinks it might have in a chaotic, rapidly-shifting market environment. The month you spend pouring over low-level optimization gets deployed for a whole week. The month you spend automated your Boost framework to achieve nearly the same performance becomes a permanent code asset (and a competitive asset whenever you find yourself needing once again to run that old play).
Boost is in that category where if you have to ask, you can't cut the mustard. The natural Boost programmers already know who they are. Few of these people toil in the public eye. That's not where this elite, double-barrel skillset tends to land.
The Wolfram language is impossible to assess based on this video. If your application depends on Wolfram "knowledge" how do you know it will continue to meet rigorous specifications the day after tomorrow?
Is there a public regression suite on the contained knowledge against which to assess whether your program is erected on firm or porous soil?
What guarantee does one have that it's cleverness or performance characteristics will stay consistent when it matters most?
I suspect the killer application for WooL is prototyping the semantic web. The semantic web has been dragging its feet. Google and Facebook don't wish to become disintermediated. They have one foot on both sides of this fence and their hands cupped over their testicles. Doesn't make for rapid progress.
The Achilles heel of search is that search returns results rather than models. Google is trying to split the difference by having search return interactions. It's an excellent paving stone on the road to a lucrative future purveying OOXML.
If ten minutes of coding within the Wolfram Language embarrasses Google search, we have a winner here of WuLing mammoth proportions.
No, you're thinking of "a picture is worth ten million bits".
Self reply: the other right.
Waiting waiting waiting for Slashdot alpha to allow my cowboy.
It used to be that low IQ was failing to identify the continuation of some trivial numerical sequence on some trivial test. The new low IQ is use-case blindness, the inability to even hazard a guess at the myriads of reasons other people live differently than you do. The ravening mob of blindness promulgators are ever with us. Pity.
Here's my story.
I bought my wife a second generation Core Duo iMacs, which I believe has never been upgraded from the original Leopard. I use this computer so rarely (about ten hours per years) that I can barely keep track of which leopard presently holds court.
The computer works—until some piece of software offers to "upgrade" itself, then restarts with a whole new user interface (I'm looking at you, iTunes). Then I'm constantly told the computer doesn't work any more, but the real problem is that she hasn't figured out where all the familiar functions were forcibly relocated.
I'm not willing to sit down at her desk and chase GUI tidbits from point A to point B, so I just told her "don't click upgrade". When something visibly breaks, then I'm willing to sit down and deal with it. Meanwhile I have enough sysadmin on my plate with my own Linux desktop, where I'm heavily invested in ZSH, and my FreeBSD server, where I'm making very heavy use of ZFS. This is where my neural matter wants to go.
I have a very low tolerance for having something trivial I've mastered at the autonomic level yanked back to the center of my attention. It took me close to a decade to cease seething about the relocation of the CTRL key in favour of a CAPS LOCK key that should have been ALT-NUMLOCK or, even better, CTRL-ALT-INSERT. FFS I can type ~50 wpm in ALL CAPS using the right shift key for six of my fingers, alternating to the right shift key for the other two. But guess what? The CAPS LOCK key is more prominent to my left pinkie than ENTER is to my right pinkie. If we normalize the utility of the ENTER key to 100, the utility of the CAPS LOCK key comes out around -1000.
The problem with most upgrades is that it's always more of this father-knows-best groupthink bullshit.
It's a huge project just to figure out what's going to change. The only recourse one has to all these unnecessary relearning cycles is to skip as many releases as humanly possible. I'd be thrilled if XP is the last Microsoft OS I learn how to use in this lifetime. I was an early adopter of Windows 2000 and I stayed there until 2000 went out of support. Later I ended up using XP in a different work environment and I can't name a single thing that improved, except that I had to disable a lot more bling for half a day. Long ago I held out on MSDOS until I could jump straight to Windows NT which I adopted within weeks of the Intel P6 becoming available. That was a real upgrade, one well worth reprogramming a decade of autonomic habits. I never used any of the shitshow 3.1/95/98 for more than the very occasional hour.
These upgrades change a lot of stuff for extremely dubious benefits. An upgrade is going from UFS to ZFS. That I can buy into. An upgrade is going from System 7 to OS X. On that one I can sell my wife.
What I really want concerning these fairly useless system frobs is the semantic web: searchable metadata describing every user interface action that formerly existed and whether it still exists in the new version, plus a mapping to a more-or-less equivalent version, if such a thing has even been retained. Oh yes, Apple is good at silent castration. Ideally the OS would track which user interface functions have been regularly used, and list out all the things the upgraded user will be instantly forced to relearn. But no. It's sexy. No assistance offered retraining for sexy. That what sexy means, lo
I simply don't install applications on Android that ask for abusive permissions, which pretty much puts my phone back into the stone age. I don't need the project right now of installing a root kit, tweaking non-standard security settings, then wondering whether the next glitch is something I have to fix myself.
Net effect, so far as I'm concerned, is that the smart phone has not been invented yet.
I've always considered the Brights movement to be tragically misnamed (almost cringe-worthy) but at this point I'd have no problem carrying around a Bright phone where the device's intelligence was on my side for once.
Kurzweil is probably a good deal less bright than Sir Isaac Newton, but also a good deal less crazy, his barmy extrapolation of the singularity notwithstanding. Clearly Google hired the man based on the smartest thing he's accomplished rather than the dumbest thing he espouses.
I've thought about this for a long time, and I'm only 99% convinced Kurzweil is wrong. He holds the record for the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard for which I maintain a non-zero sliver of belief. That said, extropian immortality sure as heck isn't life as we presently know it. Even if he's right, I'm not sure I give a damn about my xeno-species future extropian self.
What's left of me as I presently know myself would be just a little sliver of MSDOS buried somewhere deep inside Windows 8, though that might be just enough to properly enjoy hearing Raymond-prime mutter, "Oh, indeed, my original Raymond self, he was such a twit, wasn't he? Every so often I simulate his ego as a kind of Positronic CPU burn to keep my immortality in good working order, but only when the liquid helium is in copious supply."
He's weirdest belief of all is that you can multiply something by a million and it gets a million times better and not more aptly just a million times different.
The difference in standards compliance in modern browsers is a supermodel vs an air-brushed supermodel.
The difference between IE5/IE6 and other browsers of the era was a supermodel vs watching your own parents having sex.
One could say the same thing about Visual C++ as well.
The thing about Goldman Sachs is that you never get to ruin the economy twice in exactly the same way. There's relentless pressure to innovate concerning your grand malfeasance. It's so comforting to know that Goldman now goes to church on Sunday mornings and sings the sub-prime anthem.
Only a failed criminal tries the same scheme twice. The key is to make such obscene profits the first time that you can sit tight long enough for the apologists to paper over your track record before hatching your next plan.
Mission accomplished. I have no idea what you're talking about, and I couldn't give a rat's ass.
This is 100% semantic wankery, because triviality is circularly defined as the magic threshold beyond which bugs become inevitable.
Of course there's an implicit ego frame of reference, because we're all looking for an edge on the margin where the big money lives. They didn't call it a "space race" for nothing. It would be far more pertinent to observe about the human species that bragging rights come from body bags. That's just how we run our affairs on the larger political scales.
I can't stand the intellectual posing that ensues whenever someone espouses the culture of bug mitigation with extreme prejudice. Oh, nothing can ever be perfect—as if that's ever the human standard in anything. Part of this is IQ wanking: the notion that writing bug-free code requires superhuman feats of logical perfection. Successfully reasoning your way out of a wet paper bag has something to do with writing bug-free software, but it's a secondary term at most.
The real key to writing defect-minimized systems is a good understanding of human psychology and mental frailty, keeping notes, and constantly upping your game.
It's a rare piece of software that is more robust than the worst API it programs against. Even if the code behind that API is 100% bug free, you're far from out of the woods, because the API can be designed in such as way as to delegate complexity up hill.
No doubt Opportunity was far from perfect, but it sure as hell sets a god-like bar compared to what passes for quality work in 98% of the make-a-buck sphere.
The government is doing things for which there are even patents? Wow. I had no idea.
Geez, with IPv6 giving every single web client a distinct address, you'd think the NSA would be campaigning behind the scenes to have their carefully curated fat-pipe monopolists ramming IPv6 down our collective throats.
And damn, what a surprising patent, with only about a thousand years of prior art.
I guess that cuts both ways.
PS: Notice our fine Slashdot Classic buggering poor Mr l'HÃpital.
That's just about the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
I guess you don't recall the August 1981 strike air-traffic controllers strike. Most of those wealthy bankers could be replaced by people being paid 10% as much, and after a few years we'd hardly notice the difference, except perhaps that the new lot wouldn't be nearly so adept at screwing the system over.
I guess if you were running NASA you'd pay a billion dollars per o-ring, because--gosh--look at what happens if it won't deform, and the size of the bill if we need to replace the dumb thing. Ten thousand parts at a billion dollars each sure adds up. When you think about it, with each o-ring protecting the safety of a ten-trillion dollar shuttle, a mere billion dollars per ring is a screaming deal, wouldn't you say?
Finance wasn't rocket science until the inmates figured out that astrobucks are a good living. It doesn't need to be rocket science any more than an o-ring needs to cost a billion dollars.
The controllers had Washington by the balls. Big mistake. The bankers have Washington by the carotid artery. We can therefore infer from this that bankers do more important, more productive, more difficult work. Or we can infer that bankers are better at pouring over Grey's Anatomy if it serves their personal interests.
In my post above: ... wouldn't take long ...
Fingers too fast, or delay line from the Chomskian trace badly programmed.
Speech Errors as Linguistic Evidence
Micrel SY89295U
Programmable delay range: 3.2 ns to 14.8 ns in 10 ps increments in 2^10 discrete steps.
160 ps rise/fall, less than 2 ps RMS cycle-to-cycle jitter.
That gives you a spatial resolution of about 3 mm within a 3 m pixel on the fine delay; more if you also introduce a coarse delay line (in 10 ns increments). I think the Xilinx DCM gives a step delay on the order of 10 ps in 1024 discrete steps. You've now got 3 mm steps out to 3 km. Note that the linearity of these delay lines is not perfect, so there's some art to it (it's not a simple two-digit number in base 1000), but the worst case step remains small. You might use two DCMs in series plus the CML Micrel to ensure uniform coverage (one Spartan 3E has four DCMs IIRC). Actually, for a multi-channel base station, you'd need to fabricate an ASIC with a very large number of programmable delay lines, as I imagined it before RingTFA.
If the phone is 150 m away from a cell transmitter, you can set up a ping pong ping loop with a round-trip frequency of 1 MHz, where each end bats the pulse back as fast as possible.
Imagine the phone sends out a coloured packet and two or more base station pong it back. The phone can ping back on the first received response, or the last, or the n'th response in between. The fastest paths need to be artificially delayed until all paths are equal time. (With multi-pathing, the radio might be able to detect and measure more than one path length per base station.)
It would take long to achieve the coarse lock-on. Then it needs to maintained during motion of the mobile end, plus changes in atmospheric conditions, or sway in the buildings you're bouncing off of, if you've used the loudest path instead of the quickest path. The timing fabric is quite doable. The delay line can be anywhere in the ping pong circuit. The non-radio portions would ideally use fibre as copper has a temperature-variable c that adds up quick in the ps regime where lengths of 100 m are involved.
I can totally see this working, though radio systems at this level are astrobuck black magic.
The software-defined LTE phased array waveform simulation would be an interesting computational problem. They probably do the time extraction with DSP rather than actual delay lines. I'm wondering how much the upstream channel borks total throughput.
Maybe this is the Netflix special. Agility is always the last crow.
His improvised kitchen device should have been termed a weapon of mass carnage. Note how the official term focuses more on loss of structure than on human life.
Why the present example jumps the shark is that while global warming might be a supreme menace, it has not yet to my knowledge been successfully weaponized.
In this case, we're really dealing with an Apocalyptic Horseman of Mass Resettlement, if there's a need to be operatic.
I've been complaining about this regularly in recent months. Far bigger issue than beta that so much content isn't nerdworthy.
Slashdot NOT worth saving:
Slashdot worth saving:
The former is news for gorms; the later is news for nerds. We can't fix this protesting CSS.
In the above post: s/y/ly + s/ly/y.
Man, what did I eat for lunch? Apparently, some kind of distal neurotoxin. This is a strange betrayal of the old fingers I've rarely experienced.
In a forum where you're reluctant to post your favourite sexual position (honesty held) why would you regard it as open season to post your political position (honesty held)?
There's a way to engage with most issues without dragging in this or that ideological apparatus. The same applies to the political sub-genre known as organized religion. Evangelism is the most political act known to man. Religion itself is not necessarily political, but it quickly becomes political where people feel the need to make others aware that these convictions exist.
Part of the problem is that people fall into the habit of using their worldview as the starting point for every engagement. The same old argument gets a new suit of clothes to suit the occasion. This doesn't take a great deal of cognitive effort.
It's a lot more cognitive work to write bottom up, starting with the issue first of all, then pointing out, perhaps, where it fits into various frames of reference.
This is the cognitive effort of actually engagement.
One of the appeals of grabbing two cans of coloured paint and a flap of cloth and declaring in a loud voice "I am a Springbok" is to put the effort of espousing your worldview on cruise control, while those around you who don't run up equal and opposite colours are left to cook every meal from scratch.
As Mark Twain once said, never contest your identity in a shouting match with people who source their sesame-seed identity buns from McDonald's: everywhere you go, five minutes later, there's more of the same.
No, the opposite of trolling is not merely conviction, it's honest conviction plus cooking from scratch.
I strongly suspect this is not a hindsight problem whatsoever. The problem is that long term risks are usually weighted against short term gains: personal bonus clauses/promotions triggered by a run of street-beating financial quarters.
There's also the problem of risk hacking, where management willing trades the possibility of a huge setback against the likelihood of a good run of beating par.
With a long enough track record of success, even the big boom which erases more than your accrued margin over par is all too easily swept away under the hindsight carpet.
The only way to get correct risk trade-offs is where the people making these decisions are stuck on "long term hold" in their reward structure. This usually ends up being the founding entrepreneurs and first round employees who are quietly vesting. While these groups have influence, it's not usually enough to deflect the Venture Capitalist's hand-selected upper management team, hugely incentivised around servicing the VC's priority access to the sell-high exit ramp.
Unless you think Target was an inside job, your appeal to the NSA's woes (self-inflicted for entirely different reasons) falls a little short here.
There is very nearly no defense possible against the insider perfect crime. Of course you can always find some neighbour who describes the fellow as a bit suspicious. These are the same people who believe in the nun bun.
Perhaps the brain scan will be soon invented where this worrisome component of free human will can be exorcised from the system with 20/20 foresight. This won't be a good development for human society, in my humble opinion. 20/20 foresight is the planet of the damned.
The entire ecosystem of credentials is a catastrophe. The correct system is NTSC: never twice the same credential. Then when Target leaks the unique credential upon which your transaction stream is based, it would be conceptually possible to permit class action lawsuits against damages incurred, both direct (cash out of pocket) and indirect (hassle and time).
There would still need to be centralized certificate authorities, but these organizations would have no other business model than getting security right. Suffering a Target breach would amount to an existential threat. Then the NSA becomes the correct standard of comparison.
This isn't about English literacy, either, unless you think that most people regard "debt" and "deficit" as abstract coinages passed down from Cleopatra's personal mentat.
Here's how the lizard brain encodes language in people with an aspy deficit:
jackpot = pussy
debt/deficit = no pussy
astronomy/astrology = preoccupations of pointy hats who get no pussy
There's simply no need in this model to discriminate words from the second cluster. Here's a truly horrible capsule summary of what we're up against:
Secret Formula For Persuasive Writing Techniques
This is designed to influence exactly the kind of person who fails to conceptually discriminate astronomy from astrology. Advertising is not a universal technique. It's merely a universal technique for the shaking the trees most easily shaken: small cognition, big lizard.
The core element is the appeal which answers "What's in it for me?" and the answer either needs to be "more pussy" or something from the first list of things regarded as being directly associated with more pussy, or the proximity of more pussy, or the vain fantasy of the proximity of more pussy.
The bottom brain works on a system of warm, warmer, warmest. I know of a person who has made at least three trips to China thinking he's going to score himself a docile second wife; he has no clue whatsoever that these Chinese women he meets can decode his demeanour as an OCD control freak by the second interaction—if, in fact, there was any legitimacy to their desire to score a comfortable N.A. lifestyle in the first place. In his own culture, most women decode his personality style in a single glace. In his mind all these women have be ruined by a culture which turns them into snooty princesses. Who knows how much money this guy has poured in this project, where 60 seconds of input from a properly functioning top brain could have informed him that "warmer" amounts to a snowball's chance in hell on day where hell's barometer is falling.
Judging from how long he's had his top brain stored in the garage under a dusty tarpaulin, he long ago gave up on welcoming any input from this part of his brain. Either the input is faulty (unlikely), or it conflicts with his cherished lizard-brain fantasy self-image (likely). He's plenty functional in an ordered environment where he has far fewer options to make his own choices.
The problem with this study is that a large slice of the population—in one or more major spheres of living—fails to curate their "beliefs" into consistent/inconsistent, but merely partitions into warmer and colder, using an internal vocabulary where there's only a single word for snow.
These scientists who conducted this study without comprehension of this are living in a similarly tiny mental closet. s/pussy/p-value This is the lizard brain of successful careers built upon bad science.
Scientific method: Statistical errors
I guess it accords with a cherished lizard-brain fantasy of someday scoring tenure. For three decades, at least, tenure has become practically synonymous with barometer rising. Engaging in this kind of research project is an awfully indirect way to confront their own delusions.
I'm thinking you're descended from Pilgrims wearing extremely black clothes.
No, perhaps you're Puerto Rican.
Ah, you're Jewish Asian American.
There's research that shows the highest willingness to make this kind of sacrifice for gains far into the future are people who combine elements of status insecurity and class superiority.
I've listened to several highly informed commentators lately who agreed that what it would take to get American schools to the level of the Asian tigers is to put children through hell on earth of cramming 12 hours per day for years on end to pass some standard exam that admits only a privileged few.
Good thing we no longer dangle children down chimneys or mine shafts.
No one thinks the American educational system is perfect at the K12 level (the cream of the American university system is presently unrivalled), but people who dig deep largely report that the problems are economic and social where the gated communities are doing very well, thank you, at what they value most: drama, sports, and cheerleading. This is a different path to success.
I could dig up a dozen such authoritative voices from my notes, but instead I'll simply echo the most recent exchange I've reviewed which discusses this problem:
Ira Glass | Talks at Google
This is not a possible headline on a site that boasts of "news for nerds". The subject of that sentence is "study" and the verb cluster (elided in terse journalistic bravado) is "is now in" and the copular completion is "peril".
A failed study is a study that fails to replicate. A failed meme is a meme that fails to replicate. Perhaps we should also protest ALPHA, our seemingly self-inflicted wound.
Where are all the loud Christians— the ones who aren't insane—when it comes time to shout down the anti-scientific bias being introduced into school systems in certain American states?
I'll take what you're saying far more seriously when I see the sober-minded Christians busy shouting down their own who cross the line. I sure as hell shout down scientists who begin to claim more than science can reasonably pretend to know. This particularly stereotype was well and duly earned through meek opposition. The meek shall inherit the worst.