If theres one thing that makes sense to be in the "cloud" thats mail.
Well, mostly. It still occasionally fails for the same reason most cloud-only services still fail: you can't access it when you aren't online. When is that? Travel:
* Going from Osaka to Tokyo I would have Wifi access if I was prepared to pay for a separate account - and if the Wifi is up, and if the train has a good connection, and the connection-gnomes are in a good mood. Mostly I'm off-line during those hours.
* Long flights. No wifi, no mobile reception. No access to anything online, for twelve hours at a time.
* International travel. Often no Wifi - especially during transit - and roaming is far too expensive for mere mortals to pay. We only have one home, and I'm not sure mortgaging it would cover a week of mobile charges abroad.
Why is travel important? Because I (and I guess many other people) get and keep their travel-related information in the form of emails and calendar items - itineraries, booking confirmations, contact information, access maps and so on. It doesn't do me much good floating in the cloud if I can't access it when I need it.
Perhaps some years from now we'll have ubiquitous online access, access that is reliable, affordable and without the risk of sticker shock and hidden charges no matter where you come from and where you go. Perhaps. Until then, I'll just make sure all my information is accessible and editable locally.
If you're going to have a function like "dist-upgrade" at all, it should work correctly.
The operative word is "should". It will only work reliably if you basically stick with your default system, and don't do any configuration or installs outside of that framework. This is not always feasible.
In practice I've found that I can upgrade once with few side effects. The second time around is pretty much guaranteed to subtly break in various ways, so I need to do a clean install instead.
I have yet to upgrade to 11.4; I have used Unity quite a bit on another machine, and honestly, I really, really like it. It's great at just getting out of my way. I was going to wait for 11.10, but now I consider upgrading as soon as I can. Though, I will do a reinstall, not an upgrade.
Well, do you understand German or Japanese? Do you have a special interest (manga or anime for instance) that makes you seek out these foreign-language sites? In either case it makes you rather unusual.
Few people ever feel the need to talk to those other clusters. Few people have the ability, even if they wanted to. Most people do not speak any of the world languages as a second language after all. The few that can and want to connect with other webs - and they really are quite few - tend to act as bridges, filtering through the information that most people in their home cluster could find useful. When a weird video clip from Japan spreads through the US intartubes it arrives through a small number of people that do keep up with the Japanese web.
This lack of curiosity is natural. Much of the web really is local. It's about information that's really only useful for people from a specific region, country or even city. Even generic information has a surprising amount of locally specific components.
Japanese sites, Swedish sites and US sites about scuba diving, for instance, has a lot of information in common (I've been looking them up lately). But then, two talk in metric, the other in imperial units; recommended equipment may not have the same name or even be available in the other areas; local certification rules and regulations may differ; equipment for one area may be completely unsuitable for another; and any talk about specific diving schools, diving spots or interesting wildlife is of course completely local. As a result, I tend to mostly read Japanese sites as here's where I'll do most of my diving, even though I'm really more comfortable with both Swedish and English than with Japanese.
How many Chinese-language searches do you think you have in the US each day? Would be interesting, too, to see the number of English-language searches in Japan, say, or in Germany.
Most people, the world over, only ever see the part of the net that's in their own language. The idea of the net as a world-wide melting pot is pretty overstated. It's like a large cocktail party where everyone is in the same room, but clustered into separate groups that talk only to each other, mostly ignoring everyone else.
The problem with GPU's for large-scale simulations is in the communications latency, and to some extent the numerical accuracy. As long as your problem needs only single-precision floats and can fit in a single GPU (or two connected with a dedicated bus) it can be insanely fast. Go to doubles and the speed drops quite a bit but is still very fast. Future hardware will likely be much better at high-precision as well.
But when your problem is too large to fit in a single system, the communications will eat up most of the gain. Remember, you have a hop out to the host system, then from the destination host to the GPU over there; two extra steps over and above the normal node communications. It's still faster, but for things like large-scale neural simulations the speedup may be ~2x or so, no more.
Now, doubling the speed may sound like a good deal. But remember that it takes time to write, debug and verify that extra code, working off the communications bottlenecks, load distribution and so on. For a given project you really need to decide if:
* will you save more simulation time over the course of your project than you spend on the extra development time? If you need five extra weeks to use GPUs, you need to have some very long-running simulations in order to save five weeks of calculation time.
* When you consider hardware and development time and cost, is it more or less efficient for your project to use GPUs or to just add more computing nodes instead?
For some projects it will turn out to be worth it. For many others it will not. But it's not a slam dunk by any means.
"I work at a sort of small ISP and we've done testing, implementation, published our website with an AAAA record and put some information on the site for everyone to see."
Not to disparage you or anything, but does _anybody_ ever go look at their ISPs website? I have never seen the site for our current ISP, nor did I ever visit the site for my previous one; that's a span of about ten years in total. In fact, it didn't even occur to me that they might have some information for me there until just now when I saw your post.
This is all to say that while I agree the end-user interest is (and should be) low, basing it on the reaction to info on your site might not gauge the interest that exists very well.
I travel quite a lot. Books - paper or on-screen - are fine during travel. TV shows, made as they are for small screens, work fine too. But not movies. I save those for when I can go see them on a big screen together with other people.
I don't have a rooted device, but I'm not going to access the Movie Market anyway (let me guess it's not available where I live; I haven't bothered to find out).
I see a movie about two or three times a year. When I do, we go to a movie house - big screen, plush seats, expectant crowd - and make an evening of it. Movie, then dinner somewhere, perhaps a beer or two someplace. Part of a full nights entertainment.
Watching a movie - made for big-screen immersion - by myself on a small screen, with distractions all around - no thanks, I'll rather do without.
Why did they detour for gravel? All you need to do is dig out the bottom block, then quickly place a torch on the floor. All the gravel above will be disintegrated as it falls onto the torch. They're professionals; aren't they supposed to know this sort of thing?
Chromium works well enough, I agree. But I use Chromium and Firefox in parallel (long story) and I just don't notice any speed difference at all. As far as using them, they seem all but identical to me.
different divisions are effectively operated as wholly separate companies
And in this case, of course, it really is a wholly separate company, owned 50-50 by Sony and Ericsson, and based out of Sweden, one continent away from Sony headquarters.
They didn't buy Ericsson. Sony Ericsson is a separate company, jointly owned by Sony and by Ericsson. And fortunately apparently not much infused with the Sony corporate misculture.
Keeping the computer for as long as it works is a good idea, absolutely. In my limited experience, though, a laptop really isn't made to last much longer then the typical 3-4 years they get used.
I've always "used up" my laptops the past decade or so. I have big machines at work for the heavy lifting, and any decent laptop made the last ten years is enough for my surfing, writing and so on. I'm a heavy user, admittedly, but so far my track record is 3-4 years.
The screen dims and grows red as the (non-replaceable) backlight starts to go. The keyboard becomes mushy, keycaps fade and keys and trackpads start failing from accumulated damage from spilled liquids, dust and debris. The disk starts to fail, connectors may wear out and the battery max charge creeps toward zero. Any one of those may be fixed individually, but you don't pay for a new disk, keyboard or battery for a computer that's already slowly failing in other ways.
Most of those eyes - flies included - are not used for stereoscopic perception. They have two eyes because one eye typically covers less than half the visual field. Most animals' eyes are pointed away from each other, with very little or no visual overlap anywhere.
Depth perception mostly does not need stereoscopy. If it did, one-eyed people would hardly be able to walk or feed themselves, never mind drive a car or other things.
Stereovision is good mainly for precise location within, oh, a few meters, in the case of primates. The kind of distance and precision you'd need to move between tree branches. For longer distances, or for less accuracy, other cues are sufficient.
there isn't an innate sense that 10 is smaller than 12
I have a hard time believing this. Got any references (except mentally retarded and seriously underage ones)?
I think the OP may refer to the fact that above some small number (5-6 or thereabouts) we no longer have a preconscious sense or relative magnitude. If you put one set of five objects and one set with six objects, you can immediately, unthinkingly point out which set is the larger one. And so can anybody, including children with not a day of education, and even some other animals (their limit may differ of course).
With 10 and 12 objects, you need to count. More to the point, you need to learn how to do so. You can longer rely on any kind of automatic perceptual or cognitive ability to do so.
It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.
Could move it to the day before, but then you'd collide with Panama Independence day, Ataturk Rememberance day and the Heroe's day in Indonesia. And the day after is the death day of Cornelis Wreeswijk and Percival Lowell, and the Comoro islands joining the United Nations.
Point being, you can't really pick any day without it being significant in some way - in many ways, good and bad.
"I doubt requiring employees to work au naturel would stand up to a legal challenge,"
Well... You can require a particular uniform for a job. And I doubt somebody hired as a stripper would have much luck suing for the right to do their job fully clothed.
Put it this way: have prospective employees at nudist resorts gained the right to get hired while refusing to undress? Have non-believers the right to get hired by churches or similar despite rejecting the beliefs?
I think you may be right, but I don't think it's really clear-cut either, especially as this is an upfront requirement from the beginning, not a change of policy towards existing employees.
Accommodation and vergence is handled by separate subcortical subsystems. If the mismatch causes eye strain - and I've only seen anecdotal speculation - then the brain will most likely readily adapt over time. It'll simply learn that the inputs can vary independently from each other at times.
After all, you have a similar kind of mismatch when you use stereoscopic close-up lenses (for fine mechanical work, say) and people adapt to them as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, mostly. It still occasionally fails for the same reason most cloud-only services still fail: you can't access it when you aren't online. When is that? Travel:
* Going from Osaka to Tokyo I would have Wifi access if I was prepared to pay for a separate account - and if the Wifi is up, and if the train has a good connection, and the connection-gnomes are in a good mood. Mostly I'm off-line during those hours.
* Long flights. No wifi, no mobile reception. No access to anything online, for twelve hours at a time.
* International travel. Often no Wifi - especially during transit - and roaming is far too expensive for mere mortals to pay. We only have one home, and I'm not sure mortgaging it would cover a week of mobile charges abroad.
Why is travel important? Because I (and I guess many other people) get and keep their travel-related information in the form of emails and calendar items - itineraries, booking confirmations, contact information, access maps and so on. It doesn't do me much good floating in the cloud if I can't access it when I need it.
Perhaps some years from now we'll have ubiquitous online access, access that is reliable, affordable and without the risk of sticker shock and hidden charges no matter where you come from and where you go. Perhaps. Until then, I'll just make sure all my information is accessible and editable locally.
The operative word is "should". It will only work reliably if you basically stick with your default system, and don't do any configuration or installs outside of that framework. This is not always feasible.
In practice I've found that I can upgrade once with few side effects. The second time around is pretty much guaranteed to subtly break in various ways, so I need to do a clean install instead.
I have yet to upgrade to 11.4; I have used Unity quite a bit on another machine, and honestly, I really, really like it. It's great at just getting out of my way. I was going to wait for 11.10, but now I consider upgrading as soon as I can. Though, I will do a reinstall, not an upgrade.
You just gave me another reason to go with Google+ and ignoring you.
Well, do you understand German or Japanese? Do you have a special interest (manga or anime for instance) that makes you seek out these foreign-language sites? In either case it makes you rather unusual.
Few people ever feel the need to talk to those other clusters. Few people have the ability, even if they wanted to. Most people do not speak any of the world languages as a second language after all. The few that can and want to connect with other webs - and they really are quite few - tend to act as bridges, filtering through the information that most people in their home cluster could find useful. When a weird video clip from Japan spreads through the US intartubes it arrives through a small number of people that do keep up with the Japanese web.
This lack of curiosity is natural. Much of the web really is local. It's about information that's really only useful for people from a specific region, country or even city. Even generic information has a surprising amount of locally specific components.
Japanese sites, Swedish sites and US sites about scuba diving, for instance, has a lot of information in common (I've been looking them up lately). But then, two talk in metric, the other in imperial units; recommended equipment may not have the same name or even be available in the other areas; local certification rules and regulations may differ; equipment for one area may be completely unsuitable for another; and any talk about specific diving schools, diving spots or interesting wildlife is of course completely local. As a result, I tend to mostly read Japanese sites as here's where I'll do most of my diving, even though I'm really more comfortable with both Swedish and English than with Japanese.
How many Chinese-language searches do you think you have in the US each day? Would be interesting, too, to see the number of English-language searches in Japan, say, or in Germany.
Most people, the world over, only ever see the part of the net that's in their own language. The idea of the net as a world-wide melting pot is pretty overstated. It's like a large cocktail party where everyone is in the same room, but clustered into separate groups that talk only to each other, mostly ignoring everyone else.
The problem with GPU's for large-scale simulations is in the communications latency, and to some extent the numerical accuracy. As long as your problem needs only single-precision floats and can fit in a single GPU (or two connected with a dedicated bus) it can be insanely fast. Go to doubles and the speed drops quite a bit but is still very fast. Future hardware will likely be much better at high-precision as well.
But when your problem is too large to fit in a single system, the communications will eat up most of the gain. Remember, you have a hop out to the host system, then from the destination host to the GPU over there; two extra steps over and above the normal node communications. It's still faster, but for things like large-scale neural simulations the speedup may be ~2x or so, no more.
Now, doubling the speed may sound like a good deal. But remember that it takes time to write, debug and verify that extra code, working off the communications bottlenecks, load distribution and so on. For a given project you really need to decide if:
* will you save more simulation time over the course of your project than you spend on the extra development time? If you need five extra weeks to use GPUs, you need to have some very long-running simulations in order to save five weeks of calculation time.
* When you consider hardware and development time and cost, is it more or less efficient for your project to use GPUs or to just add more computing nodes instead?
For some projects it will turn out to be worth it. For many others it will not. But it's not a slam dunk by any means.
Well, Google already alters the sort order depending on where you are. No principal difference to sorting it according to accessibility on your part.
"I work at a sort of small ISP and we've done testing, implementation, published our website with an AAAA record and put some information on the site for everyone to see."
Not to disparage you or anything, but does _anybody_ ever go look at their ISPs website? I have never seen the site for our current ISP, nor did I ever visit the site for my previous one; that's a span of about ten years in total. In fact, it didn't even occur to me that they might have some information for me there until just now when I saw your post.
This is all to say that while I agree the end-user interest is (and should be) low, basing it on the reaction to info on your site might not gauge the interest that exists very well.
I travel quite a lot. Books - paper or on-screen - are fine during travel. TV shows, made as they are for small screens, work fine too. But not movies. I save those for when I can go see them on a big screen together with other people.
I don't have a rooted device, but I'm not going to access the Movie Market anyway (let me guess it's not available where I live; I haven't bothered to find out).
I see a movie about two or three times a year. When I do, we go to a movie house - big screen, plush seats, expectant crowd - and make an evening of it. Movie, then dinner somewhere, perhaps a beer or two someplace. Part of a full nights entertainment.
Watching a movie - made for big-screen immersion - by myself on a small screen, with distractions all around - no thanks, I'll rather do without.
"Pews in the local church would be better."
Or the local strip joint. Add clerical collars to some of the outfits for extra effect.
Why did they detour for gravel? All you need to do is dig out the bottom block, then quickly place a torch on the floor. All the gravel above will be disintegrated as it falls onto the torch. They're professionals; aren't they supposed to know this sort of thing?
"...while Netflix runs on all iPhones and iPads."
That would be two devices. Three less than on Android.
Chromium works well enough, I agree. But I use Chromium and Firefox in parallel (long story) and I just don't notice any speed difference at all. As far as using them, they seem all but identical to me.
Do you watch TV? Idly click around on Slashdot/Facebook/Reddit/Whatever? There's your time right there.
different divisions are effectively operated as wholly separate companies
And in this case, of course, it really is a wholly separate company, owned 50-50 by Sony and Ericsson, and based out of Sweden, one continent away from Sony headquarters.
They didn't buy Ericsson. Sony Ericsson is a separate company, jointly owned by Sony and by Ericsson. And fortunately apparently not much infused with the Sony corporate misculture.
"Single window mode is all you need to know about why you should upgrade."
As long as I can not use single-window mode I'm happy to upgrade. If it becomes the only way to use gimp, it's time to fork the code.
Keeping the computer for as long as it works is a good idea, absolutely. In my limited experience, though, a laptop really isn't made to last much longer then the typical 3-4 years they get used.
I've always "used up" my laptops the past decade or so. I have big machines at work for the heavy lifting, and any decent laptop made the last ten years is enough for my surfing, writing and so on. I'm a heavy user, admittedly, but so far my track record is 3-4 years.
The screen dims and grows red as the (non-replaceable) backlight starts to go. The keyboard becomes mushy, keycaps fade and keys and trackpads start failing from accumulated damage from spilled liquids, dust and debris. The disk starts to fail, connectors may wear out and the battery max charge creeps toward zero. Any one of those may be fixed individually, but you don't pay for a new disk, keyboard or battery for a computer that's already slowly failing in other ways.
"99% of living creatures have a pair of eyes."
Most of those eyes - flies included - are not used for stereoscopic perception. They have two eyes because one eye typically covers less than half the visual field. Most animals' eyes are pointed away from each other, with very little or no visual overlap anywhere.
Depth perception mostly does not need stereoscopy. If it did, one-eyed people would hardly be able to walk or feed themselves, never mind drive a car or other things.
Stereovision is good mainly for precise location within, oh, a few meters, in the case of primates. The kind of distance and precision you'd need to move between tree branches. For longer distances, or for less accuracy, other cues are sufficient.
I think the OP may refer to the fact that above some small number (5-6 or thereabouts) we no longer have a preconscious sense or relative magnitude. If you put one set of five objects and one set with six objects, you can immediately, unthinkingly point out which set is the larger one. And so can anybody, including children with not a day of education, and even some other animals (their limit may differ of course).
With 10 and 12 objects, you need to count. More to the point, you need to learn how to do so. You can longer rely on any kind of automatic perceptual or cognitive ability to do so.
It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.
Could move it to the day before, but then you'd collide with Panama Independence day, Ataturk Rememberance day and the Heroe's day in Indonesia. And the day after is the death day of Cornelis Wreeswijk and Percival Lowell, and the Comoro islands joining the United Nations.
Point being, you can't really pick any day without it being significant in some way - in many ways, good and bad.
"I doubt requiring employees to work au naturel would stand up to a legal challenge,"
Well... You can require a particular uniform for a job. And I doubt somebody hired as a stripper would have much luck suing for the right to do their job fully clothed.
Put it this way: have prospective employees at nudist resorts gained the right to get hired while refusing to undress? Have non-believers the right to get hired by churches or similar despite rejecting the beliefs?
I think you may be right, but I don't think it's really clear-cut either, especially as this is an upfront requirement from the beginning, not a change of policy towards existing employees.
Balding is only a problem if you make it one.
And yes, before you ask, I am also rapidly developing dandruff immunity; it doesn't bother me.
Accommodation and vergence is handled by separate subcortical subsystems. If the mismatch causes eye strain - and I've only seen anecdotal speculation - then the brain will most likely readily adapt over time. It'll simply learn that the inputs can vary independently from each other at times.
After all, you have a similar kind of mismatch when you use stereoscopic close-up lenses (for fine mechanical work, say) and people adapt to them as well.