Andouillette - sausages made from the colonic intestinal linings - are a fine example. I ordered them unknowingly in a French bistro on holiday. I figured out what they were made from about halfway through the plate. While the remainder of the plate required me to engage in a kind of self-administered Jedi mind trick, they were still mighty tasty.
Actually much more boring - pork meat, suet, and oats. It's basically a cheap porridge sausage, which is about what you'd expect from the Scots. It's popular in Ireland too. I rather like it.
A friend used to speculate that if black pudding was the red blood cells, then white pudding was the white ones (ie - pus). But it would be prohibitively expensive to separate them out, and it really would be a luxury foodstuff as the white cells are only a tiny fraction of the total cells in the bloody.
Auto == self. You eat bits of yourself. The linings of your mouth, accidentally biting your cheeks and tongue, etc. Many people also nibble their nails, their skin, etc.
Cannibalism is daft though. You're far more likely to catch a disease that thrives in humans that way.
Maybe not collaboration between Google and Microsoft, but maybe collaboration between Microsoft and the content cartels.
"Hey, people are downloading stuff from YouTube and saving it. We wondered if y'all at Microsoft could fix that."
"If we give Google a reason to require obnoxious DRM on all YouTube content, it will serve both your needs, and also ours, because Google will have to spend a lot more on CPU time encrypting all that stuff."
Shoes, tyres, etc already have them. Walmart love them for stock control - which means one in each carton at least, and then one each on high ticket items. They've experimented with pickup loops on the shelf, tracking stock in real-time. They've run commercials showing a man billed for all the items in his pockets via RFID - not showing their hand much...
Yeah ; it's even worse. Regulated means that people with power / lobbying cash can use them, and the general public cannot.
Technology like this is fundamentally democratising - the sad side to that is that it democratises snooping, drone attacks, etc. The glad side is that intelligence gathering is no longer the sole province of those able to afford a vast intelligence apparatus.
Those with power love to support their own privacy because they are more likely to have something to hide. Citizens with drones scare them, because they create remote sensing platforms that have a low entry cost and scale with the number of participants ; whereas current remote sensing platforms require very high buy-in (because you need to buy a CCTV network, plane, helicopter, or satellite launch) and are thus the sole province of large organizations, and large organizations are more likely to be sociopathic in nature.
* Find environmental violations (drone with pollution sensors) * Detect abnormal nocturnal activity (drone with IR camera and some software that learns where IR hotspots usually are - and aren't) * Work out footfall density in urban areas (useful to know where to site stalls / shops)
Think up your own. Corporations love intelligence, and hate the idea of other people having better intelligence. Especially about them.
Imagine, if you will, a cloud of drones. You can't control the drones, but there are a lot of them, and they contain a bunch of algorithms that cause them to congregate in areas you tend to find interesting anyway. All the drones upload their data to you, and you have a giant server farm dedicated to extracting useful intelligence from the data. That's Glass. It's ironic but unsurprising that Schmidt will promote this squadron of drones, and try hard to stop people owning and operating their own.
One of my eyes has a lazier focus than the other. Being a nerd and reading books and screens all day, I noticed from the age of about 17 that my distance vision starts to get a bit fuzzy unless I get outside and look at distant objects, and that this is more pronounced in one eye than the other.
3D films help with the difference between the eyes, because you have to focus both eyes correctly for the effect to work ; it's not like the real world where a slightly fuzzy object seems to be acceptable to your brain, in a 3D film, the fuzziness is really noticeable and your eyes work harder (in my experience).
I also wear reading glasses (+1D) when my distance vision gets fuzzy, not because I need them to read, but because they move the focal point at my monitor distance to what is effectively infinity ; thus solving the problem of having to look at distant objects without cutting into my hacking time.
CPUs move memory around in register-sized chunks ("words"). Therefore a CPU operating in 64-bit mode moves memory around in 64-bit sized words.
You can gain some ground by packing smaller variables together, but there will be some slack for things that don't fit into the chunk size. And it's more efficient to access memory aligned to word boundaries.
You may as well say "why use 8 bits when you only need one" - most databases store boolean values as a whole byte, because it's a total pain in the arse to write a single bit then offset the rest of the row by one bit to save 7 bits of space. If you have multiple boolean fields (up to 8 per byte), they get packed together, because it's much cheaper to shift a single byte to the left than it is to shift the rest of the row.
So the answer is, everyone does that, because their compiler takes care of it for them.
It might also be because of L2 cache sizes, or bus speeds.
P4 Northwood had an L2 cache of 512Kb
Athlon 64 had an L2 cache of 1MB
Most of the text-processing jobs I run (XML, XSLT, HTML Tidy, Regex) get a really big boost out of having a larger cache. The jump in performance from a Core 2 Duo to a 2 core i5 is very noticeable, for parts that run at similar clock speeds.
He's de-duping files with SHA512, from the listing.
That will get a major boost on 64-bit machines just because of the increased word width. I imagine the hashing step is what is consuming most of the CPU time, and making the code CPU bound instead of I/O bound.
I agree that 64-bit machines are somewhat niche, but I work in that niche.
If you do anything serious with Java, on Windows, because of the memory layout and the insistence of the HotSpot VM on being allocated contiguous stretches of address space, you're limited to about 1.2GB of heap space. When you have a domain that has object counts in the 3 - 5 million region, that fills up rapidly. This is for a big graph of objects and the queries for them involve lots of graph traversal. The code in question can do set queries in about 0.5s that an RDBMS takes over 5 mins to do, so there's a real value to caching all the objects on the heap.
Yes, I could use another language that doesn't have a stupid VM and have ample overhead in 4GB, although this data set will grow (even if it's not "social network" level of growth). But with working code in Java, it's much cheaper and easier to throw a 64-bit OS and another stick of RAM at it.
A shame that my employer is still tragically stuck in the 90s and thinks 32 bits should be enough for anyone..
GPL is probably a better license for a compiler, if only because it prevents the stupid proliferation of proprietary extensions that have plagued the compiler market.
A public health care system operates on the incentive that they will try and do the most good for their budget. This means that they will attempt to pay for as much health care as possible, within their fixed budget.
The insurance system operates on the incentive that they want to make a profit. Therefore they will try and avoid paying for as much healthcare as possible. In addition, the vast bureaucracy they create to prop up their efforts to avoid payment has a vast cost.
Why the FUCK would you want to enter into a system that by design, will try it's level best to leave you sick, maimed or dead?
You're not discounting sleep. Lets assume you spend 8 hours unconscious a night. That may be generous, but you're also wasting time commuting, etc.
Assuming neither prison, or your current job, count as "quality time", and you spend 8 hours a day working. (8 * 5 = 40). And assume that if you commit a white-collar crime with an 8 year sentence, you'll have sufficient capital to retire on, in a style that you'd enjoy.
That leaves you with 8 hours quality time per day, which is really what you're giving up when you go to prison. Trade that for being able to have 16 hours quality time a day when you get out.
Assume you do the crime at 30, and you would have worked to age 65, so 35 year span.
16 * (35 - 8) = 432 (27 years of 16 hours a day quality time) vs 8 * 35 = 280 (35 years of 8 hours a day quality time and 8 hours work)
So you get MUCH more quality time until retirement age via the white-collar-crime method. The only possible downer is that you may value the time you spend between 30 and 38 more than the time you have later. The other factor would be that if you enjoy your job, you're giving up a lot of quality time.
I keep backups, but if my PC was wiped, there's a certain minimum amount of time before I'm back up and running again.
If you kept doing it, my job would turn into restoring backups instead of programming.
Even if you only get hit once, and then armour your systems against it, your economic activity is diverted away from something that was (presumably..) productive. That might be the difference between being able to compete with your foreign competitors and going under - unscrupulous states would be happy to sponsor such cyber-attacks if they thought their consulting business would benefit.
I think Steve's method wasn't to tell people how to do stuff, but tell people it wasn't good enough until he thought it was.
There's a story (which I can't find) which exemplifies this : back in the mists of time, Steve sent back the design for a particular piece of UI so often that the programmer wrote an application style toolkit, and the next meeting he had, when Steve didn't like something, he just reconfigured it until he did.
Asking creative people to excel doesn't put them off - forcing them to do things a particular way and complaining when it doesn't produce results does.
Yup, they've made it very clear - as do many other successful tech companies - that they consider the hiring process to be the most important thing they do.
You hire a certain type of people and it's virtually certain that some innovation will occur under your roof, because that kind of person will be bored senseless if they don't. Combine that with a company mandate to spend 20% of your time doing whatever the hell you want to and that's Google's recipe for success - like good bread - fine ingredients, given space to grow, not forced like the Chorleywood white bread process that most companies want.
Meyer's problem is she doesn't understand this. Rather than doing what Google do - make the office so damn nice that people WANT to go there - she's just mandating that people HAVE to go there. Whether she argued for the carrot and the board told her that they couldn't afford it, so she had to use the stick, or whether she just thought that Google was too soft while she was there, doesn't make a difference.
Google understands - creative people dislike being told what to do, but more importantly LOATHE being told how to do it.
So your argument is, that before they privatised our national assets, we weren't free to avoid being enriched by them, but when they were sold off, we got the opportunity to pay to keep a share of what we already owned? With the end result being that the rich got the lion's share as usual, and the poor lost their share of valuable national assets?
I remember the milk. It wasn't just for poor children - it was for all children. They used to make special half-pint milk bottles to hand it out in. The economic stimulus must have been enormous - not only were you nurturing the workers of tomorrow, you were encouraging dairies and glass blowers. And probably forestalling many cases of rickets, a disease that has been on the upswing in the UK recently, so saving the NHS much trouble and money in the way of orthotic braces and surgery.
And it was proper full-cream milk, not the semi-skimmed piss-water that passes for milk today. One of the more pleasant events of the school day.
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Andouillette - sausages made from the colonic intestinal linings - are a fine example. I ordered them unknowingly in a French bistro on holiday. I figured out what they were made from about halfway through the plate. While the remainder of the plate required me to engage in a kind of self-administered Jedi mind trick, they were still mighty tasty.
Actually much more boring - pork meat, suet, and oats. It's basically a cheap porridge sausage, which is about what you'd expect from the Scots. It's popular in Ireland too. I rather like it.
A friend used to speculate that if black pudding was the red blood cells, then white pudding was the white ones (ie - pus). But it would be prohibitively expensive to separate them out, and it really would be a luxury foodstuff as the white cells are only a tiny fraction of the total cells in the bloody.
Auto == self. You eat bits of yourself. The linings of your mouth, accidentally biting your cheeks and tongue, etc. Many people also nibble their nails, their skin, etc.
Cannibalism is daft though. You're far more likely to catch a disease that thrives in humans that way.
Puerto Rico, 2 people killed, 25 injured, annually, from New Years Eve celebration gunfire.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebratory_gunfire
http://web.archive.org/web/20070208230620/http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=381365
Maybe not collaboration between Google and Microsoft, but maybe collaboration between Microsoft and the content cartels.
"Hey, people are downloading stuff from YouTube and saving it. We wondered if y'all at Microsoft could fix that."
"If we give Google a reason to require obnoxious DRM on all YouTube content, it will serve both your needs, and also ours, because Google will have to spend a lot more on CPU time encrypting all that stuff."
Shoes, tyres, etc already have them. Walmart love them for stock control - which means one in each carton at least, and then one each on high ticket items. They've experimented with pickup loops on the shelf, tracking stock in real-time. They've run commercials showing a man billed for all the items in his pockets via RFID - not showing their hand much...
It would amusing to pick it apart and see how much prior art and how many ridiculous claims it contained.
Futurama requires that you feed and clothe a shitload of honest hardworking Koreans. This just requires a few asshats.
Yeah ; it's even worse. Regulated means that people with power / lobbying cash can use them, and the general public cannot.
Technology like this is fundamentally democratising - the sad side to that is that it democratises snooping, drone attacks, etc. The glad side is that intelligence gathering is no longer the sole province of those able to afford a vast intelligence apparatus.
Those with power love to support their own privacy because they are more likely to have something to hide. Citizens with drones scare them, because they create remote sensing platforms that have a low entry cost and scale with the number of participants ; whereas current remote sensing platforms require very high buy-in (because you need to buy a CCTV network, plane, helicopter, or satellite launch) and are thus the sole province of large organizations, and large organizations are more likely to be sociopathic in nature.
* Find environmental violations (drone with pollution sensors)
* Detect abnormal nocturnal activity (drone with IR camera and some software that learns where IR hotspots usually are - and aren't)
* Work out footfall density in urban areas (useful to know where to site stalls / shops)
Think up your own. Corporations love intelligence, and hate the idea of other people having better intelligence. Especially about them.
Imagine, if you will, a cloud of drones. You can't control the drones, but there are a lot of them, and they contain a bunch of algorithms that cause them to congregate in areas you tend to find interesting anyway. All the drones upload their data to you, and you have a giant server farm dedicated to extracting useful intelligence from the data. That's Glass. It's ironic but unsurprising that Schmidt will promote this squadron of drones, and try hard to stop people owning and operating their own.
One of my eyes has a lazier focus than the other. Being a nerd and reading books and screens all day, I noticed from the age of about 17 that my distance vision starts to get a bit fuzzy unless I get outside and look at distant objects, and that this is more pronounced in one eye than the other.
3D films help with the difference between the eyes, because you have to focus both eyes correctly for the effect to work ; it's not like the real world where a slightly fuzzy object seems to be acceptable to your brain, in a 3D film, the fuzziness is really noticeable and your eyes work harder (in my experience).
I also wear reading glasses (+1D) when my distance vision gets fuzzy, not because I need them to read, but because they move the focal point at my monitor distance to what is effectively infinity ; thus solving the problem of having to look at distant objects without cutting into my hacking time.
who exactly does that? using 8 bytes when you only need 4 is just stupid.
It's more complicated that than.
CPUs move memory around in register-sized chunks ("words"). Therefore a CPU operating in 64-bit mode moves memory around in 64-bit sized words.
You can gain some ground by packing smaller variables together, but there will be some slack for things that don't fit into the chunk size. And it's more efficient to access memory aligned to word boundaries.
You may as well say "why use 8 bits when you only need one" - most databases store boolean values as a whole byte, because it's a total pain in the arse to write a single bit then offset the rest of the row by one bit to save 7 bits of space. If you have multiple boolean fields (up to 8 per byte), they get packed together, because it's much cheaper to shift a single byte to the left than it is to shift the rest of the row.
So the answer is, everyone does that, because their compiler takes care of it for them.
It might also be because of L2 cache sizes, or bus speeds.
P4 Northwood had an L2 cache of 512Kb
Athlon 64 had an L2 cache of 1MB
Most of the text-processing jobs I run (XML, XSLT, HTML Tidy, Regex) get a really big boost out of having a larger cache. The jump in performance from a Core 2 Duo to a 2 core i5 is very noticeable, for parts that run at similar clock speeds.
He's de-duping files with SHA512, from the listing.
That will get a major boost on 64-bit machines just because of the increased word width. I imagine the hashing step is what is consuming most of the CPU time, and making the code CPU bound instead of I/O bound.
I agree that 64-bit machines are somewhat niche, but I work in that niche.
If you do anything serious with Java, on Windows, because of the memory layout and the insistence of the HotSpot VM on being allocated contiguous stretches of address space, you're limited to about 1.2GB of heap space. When you have a domain that has object counts in the 3 - 5 million region, that fills up rapidly. This is for a big graph of objects and the queries for them involve lots of graph traversal. The code in question can do set queries in about 0.5s that an RDBMS takes over 5 mins to do, so there's a real value to caching all the objects on the heap.
Yes, I could use another language that doesn't have a stupid VM and have ample overhead in 4GB, although this data set will grow (even if it's not "social network" level of growth). But with working code in Java, it's much cheaper and easier to throw a 64-bit OS and another stick of RAM at it.
A shame that my employer is still tragically stuck in the 90s and thinks 32 bits should be enough for anyone..
GPL is probably a better license for a compiler, if only because it prevents the stupid proliferation of proprietary extensions that have plagued the compiler market.
On one side, you have single payer.
On the other side, you have health insurance.
A public health care system operates on the incentive that they will try and do the most good for their budget. This means that they will attempt to pay for as much health care as possible, within their fixed budget.
The insurance system operates on the incentive that they want to make a profit. Therefore they will try and avoid paying for as much healthcare as possible. In addition, the vast bureaucracy they create to prop up their efforts to avoid payment has a vast cost.
Why the FUCK would you want to enter into a system that by design, will try it's level best to leave you sick, maimed or dead?
You're not discounting sleep. Lets assume you spend 8 hours unconscious a night. That may be generous, but you're also wasting time commuting, etc.
Assuming neither prison, or your current job, count as "quality time", and you spend 8 hours a day working. (8 * 5 = 40). And assume that if you commit a white-collar crime with an 8 year sentence, you'll have sufficient capital to retire on, in a style that you'd enjoy.
That leaves you with 8 hours quality time per day, which is really what you're giving up when you go to prison. Trade that for being able to have 16 hours quality time a day when you get out.
Assume you do the crime at 30, and you would have worked to age 65, so 35 year span.
16 * (35 - 8) = 432 (27 years of 16 hours a day quality time)
vs
8 * 35 = 280 (35 years of 8 hours a day quality time and 8 hours work)
So you get MUCH more quality time until retirement age via the white-collar-crime method. The only possible downer is that you may value the time you spend between 30 and 38 more than the time you have later. The other factor would be that if you enjoy your job, you're giving up a lot of quality time.
"MMmmn, giant mutant mudcrab cakes!"
I will never think of the word "norks" quite the same again.
Yup, this is why you should only accept standard user logins, let them use sudo if they need to administer the box.
I keep backups, but if my PC was wiped, there's a certain minimum amount of time before I'm back up and running again.
If you kept doing it, my job would turn into restoring backups instead of programming.
Even if you only get hit once, and then armour your systems against it, your economic activity is diverted away from something that was (presumably..) productive. That might be the difference between being able to compete with your foreign competitors and going under - unscrupulous states would be happy to sponsor such cyber-attacks if they thought their consulting business would benefit.
I think Steve's method wasn't to tell people how to do stuff, but tell people it wasn't good enough until he thought it was.
There's a story (which I can't find) which exemplifies this : back in the mists of time, Steve sent back the design for a particular piece of UI so often that the programmer wrote an application style toolkit, and the next meeting he had, when Steve didn't like something, he just reconfigured it until he did.
Asking creative people to excel doesn't put them off - forcing them to do things a particular way and complaining when it doesn't produce results does.
Yup, they've made it very clear - as do many other successful tech companies - that they consider the hiring process to be the most important thing they do.
You hire a certain type of people and it's virtually certain that some innovation will occur under your roof, because that kind of person will be bored senseless if they don't. Combine that with a company mandate to spend 20% of your time doing whatever the hell you want to and that's Google's recipe for success - like good bread - fine ingredients, given space to grow, not forced like the Chorleywood white bread process that most companies want.
Valve also grok this. Their employee manual basically says "organize yourself into groups and do whatever the hell you want" (yes, really).
Meyer's problem is she doesn't understand this. Rather than doing what Google do - make the office so damn nice that people WANT to go there - she's just mandating that people HAVE to go there. Whether she argued for the carrot and the board told her that they couldn't afford it, so she had to use the stick, or whether she just thought that Google was too soft while she was there, doesn't make a difference.
Google understands - creative people dislike being told what to do, but more importantly LOATHE being told how to do it.
So your argument is, that before they privatised our national assets, we weren't free to avoid being enriched by them, but when they were sold off, we got the opportunity to pay to keep a share of what we already owned? With the end result being that the rich got the lion's share as usual, and the poor lost their share of valuable national assets?
I remember the milk. It wasn't just for poor children - it was for all children. They used to make special half-pint milk bottles to hand it out in. The economic stimulus must have been enormous - not only were you nurturing the workers of tomorrow, you were encouraging dairies and glass blowers. And probably forestalling many cases of rickets, a disease that has been on the upswing in the UK recently, so saving the NHS much trouble and money in the way of orthotic braces and surgery.
And it was proper full-cream milk, not the semi-skimmed piss-water that passes for milk today. One of the more pleasant events of the school day.