How do I know that this whole Siddhartha Finch retrospective article in the New York Times isn't actually the April Fool's Day joke that's being pull on all of us?
I've never heard these guys before. They're amusing and all, but they're kind of like the Bevis and Butthead of the Linux commentary world, aren't they?
If the computer ran for 6 months straight using 1.8GHz processors, couldn't they have waited several months and utilized newer CPUs running at double the speed, halving the computation time?
This 'research' regarding optimizing for this effect has already been done...
What about the Voyager spacecraft? Signals from those are still being received, they're about 90 AU from Earth right now, and though (after around 3 minutes of looking) I couldn't find the watts they're putting into radio transmission, I did find that the whole spacecraft operates on 315 watts. (Or at least it did when it was at its full power -- which it isn't now.)
For maximum pessimism, say that it's currently putting its maximum 315 watts into "phoning home" -- I work this out to 26.1 million miles per watt. (My guess is that realistically it's more like 1e3 times that.)
I think this is an interesting take on things, but I have to ask, does this mean that pigs and fowl -- as is -- are "too human"? Diseases from these jump over to the human populations in SE Asia, and then to the rest of the world, all the time. They're called this year's new strain of flu.
There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM).
Whenever someone says this about a distro, it is apparent to me that they have nice shiney happy friendly hardware. So many times I have taken a friend at face value when they've told me about the sweet time they're having with some new random distro (Ubuntu, most recently) and so I go off and spend an hour installing it... and then a weekend fucking around with rescue disks trying to recover some semblance of functionality out of my Laptop From Hell.
Try saying this instead: It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.
Since I could install from 1.2 and after my emerge sync emerge world at the end would be as up to date as someone who used 2004.3.
For me, the helpfulness of a new release is that the installer aspect of it is updated with new information, new hardware configs, etc. (No, I don't install from Stage 1, even if that would make a difference. That's just stupid.)
I happen to work on a laptop that is the Linux Machine from Hell. I'm not sure if it's just that the Dell Inspiron 600M as a line is Linux-unfriendly or if I just happened to luck out and get the cursed one, but basically nothing on this computer works right. (Built-in wireless, sound, PCMCIA, on-board ethernet... it's all shite.) Any given distro that I've installed -- and I've installed a score at least -- manages to get most things working, but not everything. I've tried out 3 different Gentoo releases, and each one got more things right than the last, but it didn't work all the way even with 2004.2. Maybe I'll have better luck with this one once I get around to trying to install to it.
I really like the Gentoo installation procedure. Very Slackware circa 1994.:-) [Yes, I have been doing the Linux thing since then.]
Here's the joke that completely killed me and my friends doing physics
& astronomy degress back just a tad more than a decade ago...
There once was a very wealthy man who enjoyed greatly betting on
horse races. As he was motivated to win in all his endeavours, he
desired to find a perfect method for placing his bets at the track.
To this end, he hired three experts whom he set upon the task of
finding a perfect betting system. They were a biologist, a
statistician, and a physicist. He gave them a year to investigate and
told them to present their results after the year was up.
When it was time to present the results, he gathered them together.
"Did you find a perfect system?" he asked the biologist. "I studied
everything I could about the muscular power, reflex reaction time,
diet, training, and many other things. Unfortunately the variables
were just too complicated and there were too many of them, so I
couldn't find a perfect system."
Not a problem, thought the man, I have two other experts. So he asked
the statistician if he had found a perfect system.
"I analyzed every piece of data that I could: track condition, weather
conditions, time of day, jockey, competitors, age of the horse... just
everything. I ran every regression I could. But there were just too
many variables and I couldn't develop a predicable model from them."
Now the man was concerned, so with hestitation he asked the physicist
if he had discovered a perfect system for betting on horses at the
race.
"Yes!" exclaimed the physicist, "I have!"
"Terrific!" said the man.
"Well," started the physicist slowly, "there is one problem. It only
works for spherical horses moving through a vacuum."
I've got a story like that, though perhaps a bit more grim than funny. (Though maybe funny too.)
The hackers in my company were not given any test data to work with (of course) in a particular web app we were building, which had (among other features) an online events calendar.
So, the hackers would make up data themselves. Which led to some fairly off-colour events being entered into the events calendar database.
At a client acceptance meeting, the project manager demonstrated a "show all events through the web" feature and was presented with (among other things) a "baby raping festival".
We were given a policy on test data creation after that.
That's a good kit, but what, no Tom's Root/Boot disk? It's the most GNU/Linux you can put on 1 floppy disk! I swear, this little sucker has saved my bacon so many times, and I learned a lot about Linux by using it. You wanna talk about good foo? It's got a freaking 67k version of emacs on it! This disk is stripped down to the wires and yet still kick-ass functional.
Go, Tom!
Cheers,
Richard
P.S. I love the Leatherman tool, too, but ever since 9/11 I have lost more of them than I would like to count to the *&%^# nice security people at airports. Sometimes it has been just stupidity on my part, other times I put it in my checked luggage, only to have the minimum wage baggage handling fuckos steal it from me. I'm finally going to give up on taking it with me travelling. If my laptop craps out while on business, I'll just go and buy anther one locally I guess.
While I have to admit this master/slave approach sounds neat the first time you hear about it, I have to break it to the./ers: it's been done before. Many times.
I remember The Perl Journal sponsoring a PD competition a few years ago, and I think there was an entry (well, a set of entries) like this. [ And that certainly wasn't new even back then. ]
Interesting, in the post-mortem for that competition, the judge was disappointed that no-one had tried winning the competition by rewriting the Perl symbol table and substituting in an "always defect" subroutine for your opponent. (The PD version of Orbital Mind Control Lasers, I suppose.)
So, while this is an interesting and fun little news story, I wish it weren't presented as though "'Tit for Tat' has been defeated! This is a first, a breakthrough!!!!!" It's not.
... and Taipei 101 is truly amazing, but look at that picture and you see just how out of place it is in the context of the whole city. Translation: there is no economic force in play here, only ego.
Skyscrapers are tall because the land they sit on is valuable and the owners want to get the best possible financial return on the land... or because someone has a yen to own the biggest cement, steel and glass phallus.
I don't know where you got this from, but even taking it at face value, remember that this is "average" by quintile. In other words, when you look at the 80-100% quintile, this is skewed upwards dramatically by the 98-100% slice that makes something like 500k/900k/6000k. And when you look at that last percentile in its components, it's probably something like 1000k/2000k/3000k/50000k.
I didn't think I said anything about the end of Cryptonomicon. What I was trying to say was that the story-arc started by Cryptonomicon didn't to me seem to be finished, and I think it has great, great potential. I'm just frustrated that he went off in another direction for his next few books. I see Cryptonomicon as being the first book of a triology. But of course that's just my opinion, and I could be completely wrong.
I actually quite liked the ending to Cryptonomicon -- I thought it was the best of all of his books (in terms of both books and endings) that I've read, which is most of them. [ I did quite like the end of "In the Beginning was the command line", too.:-) ]
Cheers,
Richard
Re:I might one day read the Baroque cycle...
on
The System of the World
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I find your reply not to be very helpful. Allow me to push the envelope in the same vein...
"The Universe?"
Tipler's Omega Point proves infeasible and/or it is found to follow a hyperbolic expansion. So, between Heat Death and Proton Decay, it eventually becomes very boring.
Well... umm... yes, I suppose. But I figure there's some good (and not entirely obvious) stories that could be told about what happens along the way.
Cheers,
Richard
I might one day read the Baroque cycle...
on
The System of the World
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
... but I'm still waiting for the real follow-up to Cryptonomicon.
I admit that I haven't been following what's going on with Stephenson's writing plans, but it just seems to me that there were so many loose ends at the end of Cryptonomicon, all of them fertile ground for more work...
What's to become of the Epiphyte corporation and its data crypt plan?
The relationship between modern-day Waterhouse and Ms. Shaftoe?
The impending creation of the NSA under (recently-post) WWII-era Waterhouse and the evil, scheming ex-IBM-er military intelligence officer?
What's up with Grandma Waterhouse, who is spoken of reverentially by modern-day Waterhouse?
Gotta be more good stuff with (WWII) Waterhouse and Turing...
The rebuilding of Japan under McArthur and Goto Dengo?
I don't even feel like I scratched the surface with this list.
The Economist has a regular science and technology section. It's a very well-rounded magazine. That it is entitled "The Economist" doesn't mean that it is solely devoted to economics, any more than "Time" is devoted solely to watches and clocks.
Slashdot Mirror
Cheers,
Richard
Cheers,
Richard
Reading that was more reminiscent of MozillaQuest in its heyday.
Cheers,
Richard
You forgot: good beer.
You have no idea what the original poster is talking about, do you?
Original poster -- sounds like you've got some work to do on the home front!
Cheers,
Richard
I've never heard these guys before. They're amusing and all, but they're kind of like the Bevis and Butthead of the Linux commentary world, aren't they?
Cheers,
Richard
Here's a google cache of it...
(I searched on the name of a buddy of mine who worked on this paper to find this, which is why the search terms were like that.)
Cheers,
Richard
For maximum pessimism, say that it's currently putting its maximum 315 watts into "phoning home" -- I work this out to 26.1 million miles per watt. (My guess is that realistically it's more like 1e3 times that.)
Sorry HAM-guy, but Voyager still kicks yer butt.
Cheers,
Richard
You sure about this? Fire and Ice: The Myth of Converging Values
Cheers,
Richard
"Daimler/Chrysler wins SCO Case Hands Down"
:-)
Maybe we'll be so lucky.
Cheers,
Richard
Cheers,
Richard
They do. It's called "product placement." E.g. ever notice how (almost) every computer ever shown in movie or TV show is a Mac?
Cheers,
Richard
Whenever someone says this about a distro, it is apparent to me that they have nice shiney happy friendly hardware. So many times I have taken a friend at face value when they've told me about the sweet time they're having with some new random distro (Ubuntu, most recently) and so I go off and spend an hour installing it... and then a weekend fucking around with rescue disks trying to recover some semblance of functionality out of my Laptop From Hell.
Try saying this instead: It worked for me, but your mileage may vary.
Cheers,
Richard
For me, the helpfulness of a new release is that the installer aspect of it is updated with new information, new hardware configs, etc. (No, I don't install from Stage 1, even if that would make a difference. That's just stupid.)
I happen to work on a laptop that is the Linux Machine from Hell. I'm not sure if it's just that the Dell Inspiron 600M as a line is Linux-unfriendly or if I just happened to luck out and get the cursed one, but basically nothing on this computer works right. (Built-in wireless, sound, PCMCIA, on-board ethernet... it's all shite.) Any given distro that I've installed -- and I've installed a score at least -- manages to get most things working, but not everything. I've tried out 3 different Gentoo releases, and each one got more things right than the last, but it didn't work all the way even with 2004.2. Maybe I'll have better luck with this one once I get around to trying to install to it.
I really like the Gentoo installation procedure. Very Slackware circa 1994. :-) [Yes, I have been doing the Linux thing since then.]
Cheers,
Richard
Cheers,
Richard
The hackers in my company were not given any test data to work with (of course) in a particular web app we were building, which had (among other features) an online events calendar.
So, the hackers would make up data themselves. Which led to some fairly off-colour events being entered into the events calendar database.
At a client acceptance meeting, the project manager demonstrated a "show all events through the web" feature and was presented with (among other things) a "baby raping festival".
We were given a policy on test data creation after that.
Cheers,
Richard
That's a good kit, but what, no Tom's Root/Boot disk? It's the most GNU/Linux you can put on 1 floppy disk! I swear, this little sucker has saved my bacon so many times, and I learned a lot about Linux by using it. You wanna talk about good foo? It's got a freaking 67k version of emacs on it! This disk is stripped down to the wires and yet still kick-ass functional.
Go, Tom!
Cheers,
Richard
P.S. I love the Leatherman tool, too, but ever since 9/11 I have lost more of them than I would like to count to the *&%^# nice security people at airports. Sometimes it has been just stupidity on my part, other times I put it in my checked luggage, only to have the minimum wage baggage handling fuckos steal it from me. I'm finally going to give up on taking it with me travelling. If my laptop craps out while on business, I'll just go and buy anther one locally I guess.
While I have to admit this master/slave approach sounds neat the first time you hear about it, I have to break it to the ./ers: it's been done before. Many times.
I remember The Perl Journal sponsoring a PD competition a few years ago, and I think there was an entry (well, a set of entries) like this. [ And that certainly wasn't new even back then. ] Interesting, in the post-mortem for that competition, the judge was disappointed that no-one had tried winning the competition by rewriting the Perl symbol table and substituting in an "always defect" subroutine for your opponent. (The PD version of Orbital Mind Control Lasers, I suppose.)
So, while this is an interesting and fun little news story, I wish it weren't presented as though "'Tit for Tat' has been defeated! This is a first, a breakthrough!!!!!" It's not.
Cheers,
Richard
Skyscrapers are tall because the land they sit on is valuable and the owners want to get the best possible financial return on the land... or because someone has a yen to own the biggest cement, steel and glass phallus.
(Answer: it's in Toronto)
Cheers,
Richard
Cheers,
Richard
I don't know where you got this from, but even taking it at face value, remember that this is "average" by quintile. In other words, when you look at the 80-100% quintile, this is skewed upwards dramatically by the 98-100% slice that makes something like 500k/900k/6000k. And when you look at that last percentile in its components, it's probably something like 1000k/2000k/3000k/50000k.
Cheers,
Richard
I actually quite liked the ending to Cryptonomicon -- I thought it was the best of all of his books (in terms of both books and endings) that I've read, which is most of them. [ I did quite like the end of "In the Beginning was the command line", too. :-) ]
Cheers,
Richard
I find your reply not to be very helpful. Allow me to push the envelope in the same vein...
Well... umm... yes, I suppose. But I figure there's some good (and not entirely obvious) stories that could be told about what happens along the way.
Cheers,
Richard
I admit that I haven't been following what's going on with Stephenson's writing plans, but it just seems to me that there were so many loose ends at the end of Cryptonomicon, all of them fertile ground for more work...
I don't even feel like I scratched the surface with this list.
Cheers,
Richard
Cheers,
Richard