Depending on how technical your executive is, a lot of times they understand things better once you've translated all the technical stats into value and cost. For example, if X problem is keeping you occupied for a day a month, you can translate that into costs to the company. If your proposed solutions cost less, then it's easy to justify. If the executive is technical, then give him the technical stats but also do the monetization for convenience sake.
I was a little disappointed that MySQL was the only choice offered. I was hoping for Postgres to be offered along side. It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting companies still don't offer Postgres. MySQL is prevalent but its future is a bit shaky at the moment. Postgres is open source and offers some great features.
Just to be clear, not calling you a jerk. What I said was "knee jerk" reaction, as in just a reaction you get because of some gut feeling. Now that reaction might turn out to be correct but I think we should reserve judgment until we see the price tag. $1 is of course unrealistic but maybe NVidia might surprise us with some genuine innovation that makes that kind of price possible.
That's a bit of a knee jerk reaction. What if the monthly fee was $1 a month? Instead of continuously upgrading every year or so, you pay $12 a year to have the greatest and latest without having to do any of the work yourself. It's also pretty attractive to game developers because they can assume that all their customers are running on the same 3D rendering platform and can be sure that everyone will have the same experience. Until we know the cost of the service, it seems premature to judge its usefulness. I know telcos have left a bad impression on paid services but not all recurring fees are bad. Electricity and water are for most part pretty reliable services that we pay for monthly.
Anyone else ever wonder about how that situation came to be in America? Weren't we the people who cheered for the underdog? The people who would have cheered for David instead of Goliath? Why are we so interested in protecting the pay of top executives and already wealthy, if some of the political debates over the last decade is any indication?
I don't know about that. Geeks care about how other think of them. Geeks often feel the need to be recognized as the smartest guy in the room. Put a bunch of geeks together and see the type of arguments they will get in. They'll split hair until there's nothing left just to proof their "superiority". They might not care how others think of them in other dimensions such as clothing, hygiene, sociability, etc. but "intelligence" in a very narrowly defined way matters a lot to geeks.
If you define superiority as "max bandwidth" then yes wired technologies win. However, if you define it as "most useful" then it isn't always superior. Try serving the number of people who listens to radio with wired connections. Car audio systems would be limited to cassettes and CDs. Imagine trying to fly with a 1,000 km long cable dangling from the plane. Phones are nearly ubiquitous today precisely because they're mobile and wireless. Wires limit your mobility and drives up the cost because you have to laid down a line for each user. Often times those lines aren't even in use. Wireless technology allows you to only occupy the airwaves when it is needed (more or less, discounting the occasional phone home signals). Oh, and you can forget satellite or any form of long distance communications.
As it is often the case in the engineering, the right solution is the one that makes the right trade-offs instead of adhering to some ideology, generalization, or some misguided sense of purity.
Tethering a cable with you device makes the device a non-starter so mentioning wired connection is just pointless.
Once VMware Fusion came out, I switched. I converted my old Windows laptop to a VM that runs on my Mac. Surprisingly enough, I rarely ever boot it up anymore. Now that I've stopped gaming and use my computer only for web and coding, practically anything will work. I love the reliability of my Mac and OSX but I think any decent OS would work, including Windows (especially Windows 2003, which I use on my workstation at work). I'm glad I switched though. My experience with the Powerbook Pro has been very, very positive because it knows how to get out of my way. I haven't used Windows 7 but Windows 2003 is a close second in that category, after some initial tweaks and changes.
Speaking as someone who until after graduating college couldn't run more than three miles, I can tell you that my HRMs have made a huge difference in my fitness and exercise. If nothing else, watching my stats improve over time is a huge motivator for me. Maybe it's the same nerdy instinct that drives some of us to play MMORPGs. Give me stats and tell me how to improve it, and I won't stop until I get there. Then when I do, I set the goal even higher, etc. Since my first HRM I've trained to cycle 100 miles and am a week away from doing my first marathon. I know nerds aren't what people imagine as athletes but endurance sports, especially ones that are measurable and can be done solo, can be really appealing to nerds. Our obsessive nature gives us an advantage in exercises that reward mental discipline (unwilling to give up) and patience.
I'm a pretty avid runner and a cyclist before that and have Polar HRMs. The RS800 syncs using infrared and really doesn't work that well on a Mac. I use a Windows VM to handle that. Getting the data off the HRM, as far as I can tell, is proprietary. I haven't tried to reverse engineer it or anything like that. Once the data is on your computer, you can export it as csv so at least the data is not locked in. The RS800 is pretty crazy in what can record, which includes, heart rate, temperature, altitude, stride length, cadence, and "recovery rate" (haven't really figured out what to make of it yet, looks like time between beats). I think with GPS sensor, it will record the coordinates too.
For those of you wondering why the obsession with HRM, here are two reasons why they can make a huge difference in your work out: 1. If you keep your heart rate below 80% of your max, your ability to keep doing what it is you're doing increases dramatically. This is how I trained to be a long distance cyclist and then a runner. 2. I don't know about you but I thrive on accurate feedback. I want to know how I did during my training, where I'm weak, and where I'm strong. Seeing my stats improve is very encouraging.
"Better than the Linux scheme + proper shared library design? "
But that's the problem here. Microsoft hand holds a lot of developers who might not be experienced or talented enough to do good design. This is an obvious trade-off here but the Microsoft strategy has always been that they're the solver of difficult design problems and everyone else outside of MSFT plug themselves into that framework. This greatly lowers the initial cost of development, which is why there is a ton of Windows software out there. They supposedly do the same internally with an architect and a group of coders to support him for each team. What they're doing now is just a macroscopic version of that. The downside is of course they end up having to support their previous designs and whatever else the legions of Windows developers have done. It's a pretty good strategy/trade-off but there are obvious costs to this. My experience with Linux is definitely nearly as extensive as yours but my experience with.Net is decent and I recall it being relatively easy to get going. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the degree of difficulty involved in doing something comparable in Linux. Other than the Java framework and perhaps Mono, I don't see a comparable environment in Linux.
I've watched that video and I remember they mentioned referencing the original patent for their project. Aren't they pretty much violating a patent by doing this? The idea seems pretty novel and original to me but I'm not a neuroscientist nor a lawyer. Anyone want to clarify?
I think action speaks louder than words works both ways. Iran might have some pretty tough rhetoric but it has yet to take any foreign soil. Israel and the US on the other hand has. Compare the size of Israel at its founding to what it is now. Jordan, an ally of ours, lost the West Bank during the Six Days war and Israel was the one who attacked first. Iran had a democracy until we and the UK overthrow it during Operation Ajax. Then we support the Shah who tortured his own people. Then the Arabs supported Iraq in invading Iran. Iran has talked tough but its actions doesn't match its words. We speak of peace but we're the ones who are all over the world on foreign soil.
So what's the other option? Invade them? We could bomb them but then the whole region might erupt into war and Iran borders Iraq and Afghanistan so they'll probably stir things up there too. Don't see where that manpower is going to come from, unless you want to call up the draft. Which one of us want to die over this, please raise your hands. Better yet, go join the military.
Not only that but now Iran is surrounded by enemies. The Arabs never loved them to start with and financed the Iran-Iraq war. Now Afghanistan and Iraq are in American hands and we know how we think of Iran. Let's not forget how we supported the Shah who is by all accounts much, much worse than the clerics who replaced him. Looking at it from Iran's perspective, I think Iran is pretty damn scared and feels quite threatened.
They've also contributed greatly to the field of psychology and neuroscience by demonstrating what parts of the brain is responsible for what cognitive function.
Wow, I don't recall the WSJ being this biased. Did this all happen after the Mrudoch purchase?
Who cares if Fisker is backed by Gore? Why would that surprise anyone? Gore has money and is an environmentalist. Gore backing an electric car company is almost expected. Both Tesla and Fisker are American companies. Tesla is building a manufacturing plant in CA and it sounds like Fisker is going to be American built, at least for the mass produced version. Yes, Teslas are currently British built but that's for their supercar and first model.
Seeding electric car startups is one way we're going to rebuild the American auto industry. Trying to reboot GM and Chrysler might very well be a lost cause, as some of us had suggested. If these two companies are successful, they will allow America to leapfrog the Japanese and Germans in the making of efficient cars. The Chinese are trying to do the same thing. An electric car is in many ways much simpler than a gasoline driven one. All the accumulated advantages and knowledge of traditional car companies go out the window because the electric motor has a lot less parts than a gasoline engine.
If you disagree with government aid to companies, then it doesn't matter what kind of companies, venture, or backers a companies has. However, if you are OK with some government aid, then Tesla and Fisker are pretty good choices in my opinion. For once, instead of aiding old, antiquated corporations, the government is aiding nimble startups that can potential disrupt and jolt an entire industry.
Not sure if things were any better at one time but the way writing is taught today in public schools generates horrendous results. I remember being taught a very formulaic way of writing essays: six paragraphs, introductory paragraph, concluding paragraph mirrors the introductory paragraph, and all paragraphs start and end with some transition to next paragraph. Then there is the need to satisfy some specific length, although this is quite understandable. It took a college education and many years of reading to undo these "lessons" and really discover the joy of writing essays. Thank you Paul Graham and Nicholas Kristof among many others. I see the same thing happening to high school students I am mentoring. They write very boring essays with a ton of fillers full of sentences structured in a way to use more words than necessarily and make the meaning more ambiguous. Poetry aside, writing is to convey ideas and the value is in the ideas themselves, not really in the words and sentences. The way writing is taught today, the words and sentences get in the way of the ideas. The trend of using computers to grade papers is only adding to this rigid, boring way of writing. One thing I've learned about high school students is that even the low scoring ones are very clever at getting around rigid rules. I had seen a student who knew very little about biology do her homework by scanning in her book for specific phrases mentioned in the questions and looking for some semblance of an answer once she's found the phrases. By the time she was done, she hasn't even read the chapter but her answers would probably get her a "C" -- good enough for her. I'm afraid students will do the same in writing once they realize that computers are grading them.
I would say a good architect is someone who designs something that can actually be built on time and within budget. Architects who don't code much run the risk of being an astronaut.
With that much personal computing power, just put virtualization on there and run as many VMs as you want to your heart's delight! No point in arguing the superiority of various OSes. Just make a VM of one and run it at the same thing as VMs of other OSes. If you want, spin up a few VMs and say you have a Beowulf cluster, which puts the whole idea on its head. Have your own virtual datacenter inside a single computer! If you want to be all MBA about it, create your own "cloud" inside. This is like Legos but for grown nerds (or more like second set of Legos since grown nerds still play with Legos).
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Depending on how technical your executive is, a lot of times they understand things better once you've translated all the technical stats into value and cost. For example, if X problem is keeping you occupied for a day a month, you can translate that into costs to the company. If your proposed solutions cost less, then it's easy to justify. If the executive is technical, then give him the technical stats but also do the monetization for convenience sake.
When was the first IP packet sent? Shouldn't that be the birthday of the Internet?
I was a little disappointed that MySQL was the only choice offered. I was hoping for Postgres to be offered along side. It's strange to me that most ISPs/hosting companies still don't offer Postgres. MySQL is prevalent but its future is a bit shaky at the moment. Postgres is open source and offers some great features.
Had me up until "is a lot like seeing an old girlfriend " and I lost any sense of reference of what you're talking about.
Just to be clear, not calling you a jerk. What I said was "knee jerk" reaction, as in just a reaction you get because of some gut feeling. Now that reaction might turn out to be correct but I think we should reserve judgment until we see the price tag. $1 is of course unrealistic but maybe NVidia might surprise us with some genuine innovation that makes that kind of price possible.
That's a bit of a knee jerk reaction. What if the monthly fee was $1 a month? Instead of continuously upgrading every year or so, you pay $12 a year to have the greatest and latest without having to do any of the work yourself. It's also pretty attractive to game developers because they can assume that all their customers are running on the same 3D rendering platform and can be sure that everyone will have the same experience. Until we know the cost of the service, it seems premature to judge its usefulness. I know telcos have left a bad impression on paid services but not all recurring fees are bad. Electricity and water are for most part pretty reliable services that we pay for monthly.
Anyone else ever wonder about how that situation came to be in America? Weren't we the people who cheered for the underdog? The people who would have cheered for David instead of Goliath? Why are we so interested in protecting the pay of top executives and already wealthy, if some of the political debates over the last decade is any indication?
I don't know about that. Geeks care about how other think of them. Geeks often feel the need to be recognized as the smartest guy in the room. Put a bunch of geeks together and see the type of arguments they will get in. They'll split hair until there's nothing left just to proof their "superiority". They might not care how others think of them in other dimensions such as clothing, hygiene, sociability, etc. but "intelligence" in a very narrowly defined way matters a lot to geeks.
If you define superiority as "max bandwidth" then yes wired technologies win. However, if you define it as "most useful" then it isn't always superior. Try serving the number of people who listens to radio with wired connections. Car audio systems would be limited to cassettes and CDs. Imagine trying to fly with a 1,000 km long cable dangling from the plane. Phones are nearly ubiquitous today precisely because they're mobile and wireless. Wires limit your mobility and drives up the cost because you have to laid down a line for each user. Often times those lines aren't even in use. Wireless technology allows you to only occupy the airwaves when it is needed (more or less, discounting the occasional phone home signals). Oh, and you can forget satellite or any form of long distance communications.
As it is often the case in the engineering, the right solution is the one that makes the right trade-offs instead of adhering to some ideology, generalization, or some misguided sense of purity.
Tethering a cable with you device makes the device a non-starter so mentioning wired connection is just pointless.
Once VMware Fusion came out, I switched. I converted my old Windows laptop to a VM that runs on my Mac. Surprisingly enough, I rarely ever boot it up anymore. Now that I've stopped gaming and use my computer only for web and coding, practically anything will work. I love the reliability of my Mac and OSX but I think any decent OS would work, including Windows (especially Windows 2003, which I use on my workstation at work). I'm glad I switched though. My experience with the Powerbook Pro has been very, very positive because it knows how to get out of my way. I haven't used Windows 7 but Windows 2003 is a close second in that category, after some initial tweaks and changes.
Speaking as someone who until after graduating college couldn't run more than three miles, I can tell you that my HRMs have made a huge difference in my fitness and exercise. If nothing else, watching my stats improve over time is a huge motivator for me. Maybe it's the same nerdy instinct that drives some of us to play MMORPGs. Give me stats and tell me how to improve it, and I won't stop until I get there. Then when I do, I set the goal even higher, etc. Since my first HRM I've trained to cycle 100 miles and am a week away from doing my first marathon. I know nerds aren't what people imagine as athletes but endurance sports, especially ones that are measurable and can be done solo, can be really appealing to nerds. Our obsessive nature gives us an advantage in exercises that reward mental discipline (unwilling to give up) and patience.
I'm a pretty avid runner and a cyclist before that and have Polar HRMs. The RS800 syncs using infrared and really doesn't work that well on a Mac. I use a Windows VM to handle that. Getting the data off the HRM, as far as I can tell, is proprietary. I haven't tried to reverse engineer it or anything like that. Once the data is on your computer, you can export it as csv so at least the data is not locked in. The RS800 is pretty crazy in what can record, which includes, heart rate, temperature, altitude, stride length, cadence, and "recovery rate" (haven't really figured out what to make of it yet, looks like time between beats). I think with GPS sensor, it will record the coordinates too.
For those of you wondering why the obsession with HRM, here are two reasons why they can make a huge difference in your work out:
1. If you keep your heart rate below 80% of your max, your ability to keep doing what it is you're doing increases dramatically. This is how I trained to be a long distance cyclist and then a runner.
2. I don't know about you but I thrive on accurate feedback. I want to know how I did during my training, where I'm weak, and where I'm strong. Seeing my stats improve is very encouraging.
"Better than the Linux scheme + proper shared library design? "
But that's the problem here. Microsoft hand holds a lot of developers who might not be experienced or talented enough to do good design. This is an obvious trade-off here but the Microsoft strategy has always been that they're the solver of difficult design problems and everyone else outside of MSFT plug themselves into that framework. This greatly lowers the initial cost of development, which is why there is a ton of Windows software out there. They supposedly do the same internally with an architect and a group of coders to support him for each team. What they're doing now is just a macroscopic version of that. The downside is of course they end up having to support their previous designs and whatever else the legions of Windows developers have done. It's a pretty good strategy/trade-off but there are obvious costs to this. My experience with Linux is definitely nearly as extensive as yours but my experience with .Net is decent and I recall it being relatively easy to get going. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the degree of difficulty involved in doing something comparable in Linux. Other than the Java framework and perhaps Mono, I don't see a comparable environment in Linux.
Boy, I hope no one brought along a can of air dusters...
j/k
Sorry if offensive, seems like the poster and possibly his brother had a sense of humor.
I've watched that video and I remember they mentioned referencing the original patent for their project. Aren't they pretty much violating a patent by doing this? The idea seems pretty novel and original to me but I'm not a neuroscientist nor a lawyer. Anyone want to clarify?
I think action speaks louder than words works both ways. Iran might have some pretty tough rhetoric but it has yet to take any foreign soil. Israel and the US on the other hand has. Compare the size of Israel at its founding to what it is now. Jordan, an ally of ours, lost the West Bank during the Six Days war and Israel was the one who attacked first. Iran had a democracy until we and the UK overthrow it during Operation Ajax. Then we support the Shah who tortured his own people. Then the Arabs supported Iraq in invading Iran. Iran has talked tough but its actions doesn't match its words. We speak of peace but we're the ones who are all over the world on foreign soil.
So what's the other option? Invade them? We could bomb them but then the whole region might erupt into war and Iran borders Iraq and Afghanistan so they'll probably stir things up there too. Don't see where that manpower is going to come from, unless you want to call up the draft. Which one of us want to die over this, please raise your hands. Better yet, go join the military.
Not only that but now Iran is surrounded by enemies. The Arabs never loved them to start with and financed the Iran-Iraq war. Now Afghanistan and Iraq are in American hands and we know how we think of Iran. Let's not forget how we supported the Shah who is by all accounts much, much worse than the clerics who replaced him. Looking at it from Iran's perspective, I think Iran is pretty damn scared and feels quite threatened.
Wow so if Iran uses a nuke it's their fault. If Israel uses one first it's also Iran's fault. Maybe Iran is justified in its fear of the West.
Ah yes the good old 50's, when men were men and women were property.
They've also contributed greatly to the field of psychology and neuroscience by demonstrating what parts of the brain is responsible for what cognitive function.
Wow, I don't recall the WSJ being this biased. Did this all happen after the Mrudoch purchase?
Who cares if Fisker is backed by Gore? Why would that surprise anyone? Gore has money and is an environmentalist. Gore backing an electric car company is almost expected. Both Tesla and Fisker are American companies. Tesla is building a manufacturing plant in CA and it sounds like Fisker is going to be American built, at least for the mass produced version. Yes, Teslas are currently British built but that's for their supercar and first model.
Seeding electric car startups is one way we're going to rebuild the American auto industry. Trying to reboot GM and Chrysler might very well be a lost cause, as some of us had suggested. If these two companies are successful, they will allow America to leapfrog the Japanese and Germans in the making of efficient cars. The Chinese are trying to do the same thing. An electric car is in many ways much simpler than a gasoline driven one. All the accumulated advantages and knowledge of traditional car companies go out the window because the electric motor has a lot less parts than a gasoline engine.
If you disagree with government aid to companies, then it doesn't matter what kind of companies, venture, or backers a companies has. However, if you are OK with some government aid, then Tesla and Fisker are pretty good choices in my opinion. For once, instead of aiding old, antiquated corporations, the government is aiding nimble startups that can potential disrupt and jolt an entire industry.
Not sure if things were any better at one time but the way writing is taught today in public schools generates horrendous results. I remember being taught a very formulaic way of writing essays: six paragraphs, introductory paragraph, concluding paragraph mirrors the introductory paragraph, and all paragraphs start and end with some transition to next paragraph. Then there is the need to satisfy some specific length, although this is quite understandable. It took a college education and many years of reading to undo these "lessons" and really discover the joy of writing essays. Thank you Paul Graham and Nicholas Kristof among many others. I see the same thing happening to high school students I am mentoring. They write very boring essays with a ton of fillers full of sentences structured in a way to use more words than necessarily and make the meaning more ambiguous. Poetry aside, writing is to convey ideas and the value is in the ideas themselves, not really in the words and sentences. The way writing is taught today, the words and sentences get in the way of the ideas. The trend of using computers to grade papers is only adding to this rigid, boring way of writing. One thing I've learned about high school students is that even the low scoring ones are very clever at getting around rigid rules. I had seen a student who knew very little about biology do her homework by scanning in her book for specific phrases mentioned in the questions and looking for some semblance of an answer once she's found the phrases. By the time she was done, she hasn't even read the chapter but her answers would probably get her a "C" -- good enough for her. I'm afraid students will do the same in writing once they realize that computers are grading them.
I would say a good architect is someone who designs something that can actually be built on time and within budget. Architects who don't code much run the risk of being an astronaut.
With that much personal computing power, just put virtualization on there and run as many VMs as you want to your heart's delight! No point in arguing the superiority of various OSes. Just make a VM of one and run it at the same thing as VMs of other OSes. If you want, spin up a few VMs and say you have a Beowulf cluster, which puts the whole idea on its head. Have your own virtual datacenter inside a single computer! If you want to be all MBA about it, create your own "cloud" inside. This is like Legos but for grown nerds (or more like second set of Legos since grown nerds still play with Legos).