Always taking away our civil liberties! That stupid monkey! Bush and global warming and the oil corporation, [1] always trying to keep the common man under their thu--
Oh, wait...
[1] Singular; after all, there is only one oil company. It's like a hive-mind of white people trying to own everything.
Your nick (Walt Dismal) is very appropriate given the message: a story of grandiose, long-term proportions that could spring only from somebody with a vivid imagination for the dismal (which I also have...).
Sadly, you might not very far off-the-mark.:-/
Happily though, the bid price on the contract for whether Bush will attack Iran by Dec 2007 on Intrade is only about $15. Assuming the prediction market is accurate, that implies (given Intrade's contract design) a 15% probability that that event will actually occur... But that's the longest-term Iran contract there; it says nothing about what the U.S. might do to Iran prior to Bush leaving office on Jan. 20, 2009 (to be replaced by an as-yet unknown person).
You assert that I made a blanket statement about *all* GPL users. Show me where I said *all* developers choose the GPL just because their neighbor did.
I do not think all developers who choose the GPL are idiots (indeed, I think the GPLv2 is a good license for people who want to keep their source from (legally, at least) being used by businesses to turn a profit. What rational hobbyist coder would give away their code for free, only to help a business make money using their software? That's insane. For hobbyists of this ilk, I think the GPL is a reasonably-good (though still imperfect) license. The BSD license completely fails in this regard.).
I do think many developers are license-agnostic, preferring to deal with technology than the law. I applaud such developers for this preference; really, I wish *all* development could be this way. But making that choice, I think many also choose to just pick up whatever license seems reasonable and slap it on their code upon release, without considering many, or any, of the deeper ramifications...
GPL and BSD licenses each have their place. I just wish developers would choose them more wisely (and the better developers, who care about IP issues (like Linus Torvalds), do)...
First: You want to *gasp!* earn a living? pshaw! Your living should be done in your mother's basement! Code for free, comrade, for the good of the community! (whatever "the community" actually is)
Second: Get a lawyer. Most Slashdotters are not lawyers, and taking intellectual property advice from non-lawyers -- even though they may be reasonably self-educated on the subject -- is probably less-wise for a businessman than coughing-up the $75 for a hour-long meeting with a real practicing attorney.
Finally: Yes, with BSD you can effectively do anything you want. Take the code and close-source your copy and modifications forever if you so choose. You can even sell it as part of the world's most-popular desktop OS, like Microsoft has done...
The downside to BSD, if there is one, is that there are a lot more software ideologues (and license-set-ignorant developers who choose GPL simply because that's what they've heard is "the open source license") than anybody ever imagined, and they work on Linux rather than the BSD OSs.
The fact of the matter is that it costs money to run hardware - money for the electricity, money for the hardware itself, money to connect it all, and money to keep it someplace
Equivlanet costs. These costs exist regardless of the hardware used.
Also, electricity is cheap (at least here in the midwest, at about $0.085/kWh for residential).
So, compare this - if your application cost $3M to develop the "cheap" way, and cost $6M to develop the "expensive" way...but the cheap way requires that you have 20 computers to perform the same task load as 5 computers for the "expensive" way, what did you save? Nothing. In fact, on those numbers your "cheap" application will mean that you will have to have higher costs for the entire life of the application to run those 20 computers - and that will add up to a lot more than the $3M difference.
At $8,000/host (last I checked - about 2 years ago - an IBM X-series 366 (IIRC, it's a quad-Xeon server w/ 4GBytes RAM) cost about this much), and with a difference of 15 hosts, that's a $120,000 difference.
Hence, for purchase price: cheap ("hardware is cheaper") way = $3m + ($8,000 * 20) = $3,160,000, versus expensive ("developers are cheaper") way = $6m + ($8,000 * 5) = $6,048,000
Inflate the hardware costs if you like to narrow the margin; you're looking at adding about $3m/15 marginal hosts = $200,000 per host to make up the difference. If you're buying hardware that expensive, and it's not a mainframe, then I have a bridge in Manhattan to sell you...
Add in electricity (figure each host uses 500watts): marginal cost of 15 hosts for the cheap way = ($0.085/1000Whr) * 500w * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = $372/host/year * 15 hosts = $5,584/year for 15 hosts. Figure on a 5 year support contract with the vendor, extending this cost to $27,922.
Add costs of storage: Figure a sunk cost in an extra rack in the basement where space already exists. The server room guys will have to find a way to fit around the extra rack (where I work, this is a perfectly-reasonable assumption; we have hundreds of racks just in our headquarters)...
Hmm, so far, on the factors you mentioned, the marginal cost of 15 extra computers is $120,000 + $27,922 = about $127,922. Quite a bit less than $3m, I think.
So - no. The "hardware is cheaper" argument is not valid, and never will be.
By your own factors and some real-world price data I've assumed, the "hardware is cheaper" is not only valid, but grossly-so.
Also, you are not guaranteed that computers tomorrow will be faster than computers today, even though that has historically been true. For example, dual core systems are using two slower cores to produce a single processor that performs as fast as a single faster core could to do the same workload. (Moore's Law is still upheld since it really applies to density of the circuitry not the speed. But programmers cannot count on speed increases.) The applications will not run as fast on those slower cores as they would on the faster core, yet the application programmers (especially.Net and Java programmers) are counting on faster processors (and faster cores) to make up for their slower programming environments.
This is true; even Gordon Moore believes his own Moore's Law will fail to hold as we approach the atomic level of PCB lithography. That's part of the drive towards multi-core computing: if increasing the clock cycle is approaching a level of diminishing returns to engineering input/investment, then we start making our apps more distributed and decentralizable; make them run on multiple cores (hence, multi-threaded app dev, whether developers like it or not, is increasingly going to become de rigeur)...
It just does not work.
This assumes over some period of time that the following are true:
The thing of it is though that hardware performance growth is outpacing the rate of growth in optimization discovery. Moore's Law has mostly continued to hold for a few decades now (though that may be changing), and its growth rate is 2n/24 (where n = number of transistors at some point in time).
Meanwhile, nobody (that I know of) has discovered a faster general-purpose sorting algorithm than QuickSort -- and that was published 1961. The low-hanging fruit has been picked in algorithm and compiler optimization (though in the latter, it's up to the compiler authors for whatever happens to be the hot new language of the half-decade to implement them).
The main question programmers should face regarding efficiency these days is not "how can I shave another 10% off this algorithm's run time". Except in real-time and embedded apps, nobody really gives a damn about that; if a user waits 0.22 sec instead of 0.2 sec for their Yahoo mail web page to be generated, management really does not give a flying f**k.
The question is more "which algorithm am I choosing, and why?" For better or worse, the margins of acceptable inefficiency have grown since the days of punchcard-operated mainframes... I mean, just look at Java... *cheap shot* Whether Java is as efficient as C++ (a claim I find unbelievable), it surely isn't as efficient as well-coded ASM. But where is the demand for ASM coders? Even on embedded devices, work is done in C, C++, or sometimes Java (although, not being an embedded dev, I'm sure there are still some forays into ASM too)...
Why do you suppose businesses don't pay very many ASM coders anymore? Whatever your views of business, one thing that's pretty universally-agreed-upon is that businesses are very good at doing things on a tight (often *too* tight) budget. Businesses are cheapskates: if it were cheaper to pay ASM programmers than Java programmers, businesses would do it. But they do not...
You are right though that the quantity of data is growing very rapidly too -- maybe faster than the rate of hardware performance growth, I don't know...
Like all libertarians, he advocates rights for the rich, and slavery for the poor.
Oh really? Show me a quote of Ron Paul wanting to enslave poor people. For that matter, find me a libertarian who says as much.
As a classical liberal whose preferences tend to follow bounded-rationality economic analyses with a political preference for solutions which maximize both efficiency and freedom (and, when the two conflict, find a reasonable middle-grounds), I agree (to a certain extent) with your point that libertarians are often like children telling their parents "you're not the boss of me!"
But the idea that libertarians won't answer any challenges, that they eschew responsibility -- that's beyond ridiculous on your part; it's idiotic and ahistorical. Go read Milton Friedman sometime: he spent the last half of the 20th century answering challenges to libertarianism.
You may have experienced the Randroids, who thump Ayn Rand novels as truth. They are an unfortunately-large section of libertarians who have their heads in the clouds and eschew empiricism. The best libertarians, IMO, are libertarian academic economists, like Arnold Kling or Bryan Caplan, and those writing for The Economist.
libertarianism provides only simple answers to complex questions
Yes, because a system that is, for practical analytical purposes a non-deterministic, non-linear, dynamic system -- like a free market -- is "simple". LOL. That's why PhDs in economics, finance, statistics, physics, math, computer science, etc. understand markets perfectly; that's why the tens of thousands of quantitative trading firms have perfect, infallible stock market analysis algorithms. "Simple"...
I'm a strongly pro-free market guy. But I also favor weakening copyright law back to its original form: 14 years, with an option to renew for another 14 years, after which, the work falls into the public domain.
Actually, I favor categorical copyrights: some types of works should have longer copyrights than others. Software, perhaps only 5-8 years, but books, perhaps 20 years. I don't know what good times for each would be (though I could make some reasonable estimates, given the time), but I can't think of any work which should be copyrighted for longer than a total of 50 years or so though.
You're right in that I should've made an exception for embedded devices.
But the nature of those devices is that they ship *lots* of units; the programmers for those projects have their product output (their code, not the device as a likely consumer-buyable unit) go to many times more people than most programmers do, since the majority of programming is done for in-house, internal purposes. Those tend to involve things like.NET or Java + {insert a half-dozen Java frameworks} web development, maintaining old mainframe software, maintaining MFC apps, writing new desktop apps in a few cases, etc...
And hence, one look at the job market indicates that there are a lot more jobs for non-embedded developers than embedded devs. Or, at least, that's true for Chicago...
Why can't we keep writing efficient code, run it on the faster modern machines, and have things actually GO FASTER?
Simple economics: developer time is expensive, and the cost of it keeps rising with inflation, if not beating it, making the cost of developer time ever more expensive in real terms.
Meanwhile, hardware continues to drop in price in both nominal (not inflation-adjusted) and real (inflation-adjusted) terms.
It's cheaper to implement for a 16 core, 8GByte RAM box than it is to pay a developer to optimize the code so it can run on a single 486DX2/66...
[G]overnment's view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.
I can only imagine how much worse 'texting while driving' is.
How do you know texting is worse than talking on the phone to begin with? Perhaps it is safer, particularly if managed correctly by the driver (which I would not doubt is often a problem).
You are applying an a priori belief without a shred empirical foundation to a policy position...
I have done it, many times. I read blogs, email, etc. on my phone, studied for tests, read magazines, and so forth while driving too. I even change clothes -- everything except my boxers -- while driving. I've done so regularly for years. And how many accidents have I had?
Zero.
It comes down to prioritization and common sense. I didn't say I read *efficiently* while driving -- I certainly don't operate anywhere nearly as quickly on my reading/writing/etc. while driving as I do when I'm not engaged in driving. I check the road ahead of me and to the sides once every second or two, then glance down at my text to be read, get a line or sentence, then look up again at traffic while I process that line/sentence. I don't do these things at all in severely-inclement weather: snow, ice, heavy rain, high winds. Nor do I do them in situations where traffic conditions are changing rapidly: at high speed with lots of merging traffic, in crowded downtown streets with lots of pedestrians, along twisty mountain roads, etc.. I do it primarily in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, sub-10 mi/hour traffic where, if an accident were to occur, it almost certainly would not be serious.
The simple fact is that we are not all created equal and we do not all evolve equally-fast or in the same directions. Some people are competent to perform actions which are dangerous if managed poorly, while others are not. I'm not competent to do something as dangerous as landing an airplane -- but plenty of trained pilots are; the mentally insane (as the VA Tech shootings exemplified) are not competent to use firearms safely, and nor are (IMO) people convicted of any violent crimes - but most other people are, or would be with sufficient training & education.
A better approach, rather than banning an activity outright, would be to test an individual's competence to perform the activity. An outright ban is too broad and inspecific; it has all the surgical precision of the Bush administration's "it's for national security" argument used to justify its actions...
So what if it breeds discontent among a few teachers? That's what they get for being lazy slack-asses getting degrees in bullshit majors like Education (which at my university had a departmental mean GPA of 3.8. Gosh! Education majors are straight-A students on average! Compare with the Physics dept, which had a 1.7 mean GPA - a bunch of pot-smoking dropouts, or the hardest major in college? Given that Physics major consistently perform better on LSATs and other standardized tests than any other major, I choose the latter. I know a girl who only got a 21 on her ACT, and she's doing her master's in Education at that school, BTW).
Teachers' unions are some of the whiniest groups of special interests there are. Even Barack Obama, in "The Audacity of Hope", said (I think around chpt. 5, but I was only skimming certain sections of it) that the status quo is unacceptable, and that teachers' must held more accountable than they presently are or want to be. Using an incentive-based system of pay is exactly the right way to reward teacher performance and competence (but it still doesn't address the accountability problem).
"Work as hard as you want during the day, because you're going to have two hours worth of worksheets to do at home either way."
That, coupled with the ambiguous research on homework's benefit, says -- to me -- that the default of giving hours worth of homework every day, to every student, is out of line with reality.
Not at all. Although my job is officially a 40-hours-per-week salaried job, I'm on call for support if one of our servers has a problem (which, thankfully, almost never happens). Moreover, IT people generally must study on their own time just to stay competitive in the industry: I'm currently reading a book about JSP on my own time, as I work as a Windows developer, so I can maintain a broad (and, in theory, broadly-employable) skill-set. I have other such books awaiting my eyes and time too...
But it's not just IT (which may be among the worst offenders of the studying-during-free-time problem, though I'm probably just ignorant of other fields). People in any professional field must continually keep their skills sharp: research scientists must stay up-to-date on the latest advances in their field, so they are not duplicating others' efforts (in academia) or infringing on patents (in industry), and often must review their day's work at home (my father was such a scientist, and did so every night while watching TV); doctors must stay up-to-date on the latest procedures and medicines (though it seems like few do), lest they prescribe an outdated or inadequate solution to their patient's problem; even people purely in business/sales must remain up-to-date on the competition - the research of which probably occurs outside normal business hours, to some degree (not to mention the work-related socializing outside of work, which borders on corporate lushing - hence why so many people major in business!).
When you start looking at what professional people do just to stay competitive and relevant, and once you realize that such work is often done on the individual's own time, the idea that homework doesn't exist in reality becomes silly.
I do think it's absurd that we must work this much just for the purpose of staying as industrious as we are, however. Work is not, nor should it be, one's life... But like it or not, that is the reality we currently face and children should be prepared for it, right or wrong.
If homework does have benefits, they are being hidden by the current way homework is being utilized.
I do agree w/ this. Homework should *never* be arbitrary; there should always be a serious, worthwhile purpose behind it. To do any less would be to impose an irrational decision upon dozens of students (then again, this can be valuable too - after all, it happens all the time in business and government, and students need to get used to this part of reality as well).
While I see value in teachers giving their students occasional drudge-work for the simple purpose of acclimating their students to the idea that much of life involves seemingly-pointless and/or boring drudge-work, I would still rather the homework be legitimately-instructive and educational in terms of knowledge gained or thinking skills improved - not just as an exercise to "whip them into shape" (to use another figure of speech)...
I'm not sure if this is hyperbole, but if your argument is truly that beating one's head against a wall until they magically understand mathematical concepts is how education happens, you are sadly mistaken.
Of course it was hyperbole. The part about "beating one's head against the wall" was not intended to be taken literally.
It is a figure of speech that means one tries very hard, fails, and continues to try overcoming some obstacle. Such obstacles in academia might include determining how to write an essay of considerable length and research, or solving difficult mathematical problems, or conducting a science experiment with sufficient care and discipline to please a very tough, critical teacher.
There is a difference between homework and what you are describing. Homework is not merely practice. In theory, perhaps, but not in practice. If a students lacks understanding of the concept she is "practicing", they will not magically come to an understanding after many hours, they will be repeating mistakes.
You are quite correct that homework is -- for most students -- unlikely to be sufficient as a sole source of learning. Most people will need things explained to them first, and have assistance available when they get stuck.
But I never said homework is the *sole* form of education. It is a supplementary form; it must be used in tandem with other forms, e.g. lectures, labs, student study groups, independent research, and probably other forms I'm forgetting.
You are incorrect about not understanding a concept after many hours of attempting to understand it through practice, however. I have arrived at several conceptual understandings in CS only after making (but typically not repeating) many mistakes... Same goes for math. They have all been hard-won "aha!" moments of discovery for me that have never been forgotten as a result. It is not magic, it is hard work, persistence, and a desire to succeed.
Does such hard work take time? Damn right it does. But few things worth doing come easily, and if anything *should* be difficult and time consuming, they should occur within the rigors of academia.
Where I do agree with the author (as far as I can tell) is that children need time to grow up as children, not as adults. They do desperately need play time, time on the playground, time to socialize, to develop in adolescence, etc.. Ever-more parents are seeking to destroy this essence of childhood through more-structured programs. Such children often grow up to be successful in academia and industry, but haven't the skills to deal with other people...
I think the better question is not whether children should have homework, but what the proper balance of time spent on homework, time spent in-class, time in extracurriculars (compare physical vs. non-physical extracurriculars), and personal free time should be. We currently have children sit 6 hours/day, 5 days/week, for 9 months/year in the classroom. Homework time depends on the person, ranging from zero to most of a child's out-of-class time, every day. Extracurriculars tend to occupy 1-3 hours/day for the majority of students.
I personally spent much of my time on homework and personal free time, with the occasional extracurricular. I received great grades and for my age (mid 20s) am considered by my peers to be reasonably successful in every conceivable respect. I think most people (at least in the U.S.) place too much emphasis on physical extracurriculars, and not enough on academic performance and time for decompressing and socializing...
In my view, we should: * Send children to school year-round, raise the standards for teacher performance and be more willing to fire the great many incompetent and/or lazy, apathetic teachers that exist, and implement performance-based pay structures to promote competition among teachers (all at the behest of teachers' unions, no doubt). * Students should spend more time in
Because homework is not educational. The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn is a great read on this subject. Be prepared to have your assumptions challenged.
Spoken like a true leftist high-school idiot who has never learned from their homework.
When you go to college, if you study (for example) Computer Science, and if your school is any good at all, you will have assignments requiring you to write programs which use particular data structures and which perform certain algorithms to work with them. You will probably learn the theory in class, but until you actually write the code, you will not truly understand the complexity involved. Therein lies the value of homework in CS.
The same is true of all other subjects: you won't grok history very well without reading quite a few books, which, during such reading, it is a waste of the professor's time to sit in class with you. You are unlikely to understand many mathematical concepts well until you practice them - outside the classroom, having beaten your head against a wall until you either understand them, or have asked the teacher after exhausting all other solutions you've developed. You will not understand music well without practicing it; you will not be an expert martial artist unless you practice your techniques, repeatedly; you cannot be an expert at dating without meeting many, many people who interest you; you are unlikely to be an excellent author without writing many pages of text, probably on several subjects (hence all the essays - more homework - which teachers have us write); and so on.
All things, if one is to be *good* at them, require practice -- and homework is often just that: practice.
A brief perusal of the description of the book and comments about it on Amazon suggests to me that the author has never worked in the real world, for the real world contains much tedious, uninteresting busywork. If children are not taught to accept that hard reality as children, when shall they learn it?
The author no doubt argues that homework hurts childrens' self-esteem. So what? Those who are successful and happy are those who manage to deal with the fact that life often sucks -- they accept this fact, and make the best of it, by getting a job they like, meeting friends and (boy|girl)friends they are interested in, by making enough money to satisfy the bulk of their wants, and by pursuing their dreams within the reality of limited possibilities with which we all must cope. They are the winners in life. Losers go home and whine about how much their life sucks, ask other people to bail them out of their own problems, and in general do nothing to further their own lot in life.
At some age, children must learn that the world is not, in fact, a happy, fun, intelligent, or fulfilling place by default -- *THEY* individually, are responsible for making their lives happy, fun, intelligent, and fulfilling. It can be done, if they are willing to invest the time, intelligence, and discipline into making it so. When shall they learn this lesson: when facing it head-on upon graduating high school? Or prior?
I've had hours per night of homework since I was in third grade. It is partly responsible for making me ultimately a happy (life often sucks, yes, but again, it is possible to ignore the undesirable aspects to a large degree, if one has the discipline, and it is possible to do something about them, given sufficient education, time-management skill, and ability to interact socially), well-educated, disciplined man.
The poverty level for 2006 was around $18,300 (IIRC).
$25k/year isn't bad for somebody who isn't doing a damn thing to earn it. That's more than a relative of mine made in a large midwestern city as a full-time secretary in a doctor's office - and she had to support 2 kids.
Where? I'm in Chicago, and while the data sets I've had to incorporate into my apps (to generate admittedly very simple stats) don't *quite* approach the "very large" size, they're close (they fit in memory, but only barely).
I haven't been seeing anything on Chicago's Craigslist for AI developers though, and I've been checking daily or almost daily for several months. Are the jobs you're referring to out on the west coast (where I have been seeing jobs more-similar to those you describe, e.g. for Amazon in Seattle)?
Slashdot Mirror
Always taking away our civil liberties! That stupid monkey! Bush and global warming and the oil corporation, [1] always trying to keep the common man under their thu--
Oh, wait...
[1] Singular; after all, there is only one oil company. It's like a hive-mind of white people trying to own everything.
Poster is economically-clueless, just as I would expect from a probably left-leaning non-profit.
A non-profit, by definition, does not make a profit.
A business, by contrast, has as its chief (if not sole) responsibility the duty of making a profit.
The two entities could not be more different in this regard.
Your nick (Walt Dismal) is very appropriate given the message: a story of grandiose, long-term proportions that could spring only from somebody with a vivid imagination for the dismal (which I also have...).
:-/
Sadly, you might not very far off-the-mark.
Happily though, the bid price on the contract for whether Bush will attack Iran by Dec 2007 on Intrade is only about $15. Assuming the prediction market is accurate, that implies (given Intrade's contract design) a 15% probability that that event will actually occur... But that's the longest-term Iran contract there; it says nothing about what the U.S. might do to Iran prior to Bush leaving office on Jan. 20, 2009 (to be replaced by an as-yet unknown person).
You assert that I made a blanket statement about *all* GPL users. Show me where I said *all* developers choose the GPL just because their neighbor did.
I do not think all developers who choose the GPL are idiots (indeed, I think the GPLv2 is a good license for people who want to keep their source from (legally, at least) being used by businesses to turn a profit. What rational hobbyist coder would give away their code for free, only to help a business make money using their software? That's insane. For hobbyists of this ilk, I think the GPL is a reasonably-good (though still imperfect) license. The BSD license completely fails in this regard.).
I do think many developers are license-agnostic, preferring to deal with technology than the law. I applaud such developers for this preference; really, I wish *all* development could be this way. But making that choice, I think many also choose to just pick up whatever license seems reasonable and slap it on their code upon release, without considering many, or any, of the deeper ramifications...
GPL and BSD licenses each have their place. I just wish developers would choose them more wisely (and the better developers, who care about IP issues (like Linus Torvalds), do)...
First: You want to *gasp!* earn a living? pshaw! Your living should be done in your mother's basement! Code for free, comrade, for the good of the community! (whatever "the community" actually is)
Second: Get a lawyer. Most Slashdotters are not lawyers, and taking intellectual property advice from non-lawyers -- even though they may be reasonably self-educated on the subject -- is probably less-wise for a businessman than coughing-up the $75 for a hour-long meeting with a real practicing attorney.
Finally: Yes, with BSD you can effectively do anything you want. Take the code and close-source your copy and modifications forever if you so choose. You can even sell it as part of the world's most-popular desktop OS, like Microsoft has done...
The downside to BSD, if there is one, is that there are a lot more software ideologues (and license-set-ignorant developers who choose GPL simply because that's what they've heard is "the open source license") than anybody ever imagined, and they work on Linux rather than the BSD OSs.
Eclipse Eclipse in terms of RAM usage? Is that even possible? Eclipse uses what, like > 100MBytes before even loading a project, doesn't it? LOL...
Equivlanet costs. These costs exist regardless of the hardware used.
Also, electricity is cheap (at least here in the midwest, at about $0.085/kWh for residential).
At $8,000/host (last I checked - about 2 years ago - an IBM X-series 366 (IIRC, it's a quad-Xeon server w/ 4GBytes RAM) cost about this much), and with a difference of 15 hosts, that's a $120,000 difference.
Hence, for purchase price:
cheap ("hardware is cheaper") way = $3m + ($8,000 * 20) = $3,160,000, versus
expensive ("developers are cheaper") way = $6m + ($8,000 * 5) = $6,048,000
Inflate the hardware costs if you like to narrow the margin; you're looking at adding about $3m/15 marginal hosts = $200,000 per host to make up the difference. If you're buying hardware that expensive, and it's not a mainframe, then I have a bridge in Manhattan to sell you...
Add in electricity (figure each host uses 500watts):
marginal cost of 15 hosts for the cheap way = ($0.085/1000Whr) * 500w * 24 hours/day * 365 days/year = $372/host/year * 15 hosts = $5,584/year for 15 hosts. Figure on a 5 year support contract with the vendor, extending this cost to $27,922.
Add costs of storage:
Figure a sunk cost in an extra rack in the basement where space already exists. The server room guys will have to find a way to fit around the extra rack (where I work, this is a perfectly-reasonable assumption; we have hundreds of racks just in our headquarters)...
Hmm, so far, on the factors you mentioned, the marginal cost of 15 extra computers is $120,000 + $27,922 = about $127,922. Quite a bit less than $3m, I think.
By your own factors and some real-world price data I've assumed, the "hardware is cheaper" is not only valid, but grossly-so.
This is true; even Gordon Moore believes his own Moore's Law will fail to hold as we approach the atomic level of PCB lithography. That's part of the drive towards multi-core computing: if increasing the clock cycle is approaching a level of diminishing returns to engineering input/investment, then we start making our apps more distributed and decentralizable; make them run on multiple cores (hence, multi-threaded app dev, whether developers like it or not, is increasingly going to become de rigeur)...
This assumes over some period of time that the following are true:
1) Har
The thing of it is though that hardware performance growth is outpacing the rate of growth in optimization discovery. Moore's Law has mostly continued to hold for a few decades now (though that may be changing), and its growth rate is 2n/24 (where n = number of transistors at some point in time).
Meanwhile, nobody (that I know of) has discovered a faster general-purpose sorting algorithm than QuickSort -- and that was published 1961. The low-hanging fruit has been picked in algorithm and compiler optimization (though in the latter, it's up to the compiler authors for whatever happens to be the hot new language of the half-decade to implement them).
The main question programmers should face regarding efficiency these days is not "how can I shave another 10% off this algorithm's run time". Except in real-time and embedded apps, nobody really gives a damn about that; if a user waits 0.22 sec instead of 0.2 sec for their Yahoo mail web page to be generated, management really does not give a flying f**k.
The question is more "which algorithm am I choosing, and why?" For better or worse, the margins of acceptable inefficiency have grown since the days of punchcard-operated mainframes... I mean, just look at Java... *cheap shot* Whether Java is as efficient as C++ (a claim I find unbelievable), it surely isn't as efficient as well-coded ASM. But where is the demand for ASM coders? Even on embedded devices, work is done in C, C++, or sometimes Java (although, not being an embedded dev, I'm sure there are still some forays into ASM too)...
Why do you suppose businesses don't pay very many ASM coders anymore? Whatever your views of business, one thing that's pretty universally-agreed-upon is that businesses are very good at doing things on a tight (often *too* tight) budget. Businesses are cheapskates: if it were cheaper to pay ASM programmers than Java programmers, businesses would do it. But they do not...
You are right though that the quantity of data is growing very rapidly too -- maybe faster than the rate of hardware performance growth, I don't know...
Oh really? Show me a quote of Ron Paul wanting to enslave poor people. For that matter, find me a libertarian who says as much.
As a classical liberal whose preferences tend to follow bounded-rationality economic analyses with a political preference for solutions which maximize both efficiency and freedom (and, when the two conflict, find a reasonable middle-grounds), I agree (to a certain extent) with your point that libertarians are often like children telling their parents "you're not the boss of me!"
But the idea that libertarians won't answer any challenges, that they eschew responsibility -- that's beyond ridiculous on your part; it's idiotic and ahistorical. Go read Milton Friedman sometime: he spent the last half of the 20th century answering challenges to libertarianism.
You may have experienced the Randroids, who thump Ayn Rand novels as truth. They are an unfortunately-large section of libertarians who have their heads in the clouds and eschew empiricism. The best libertarians, IMO, are libertarian academic economists, like Arnold Kling or Bryan Caplan, and those writing for The Economist.
Yes, because a system that is, for practical analytical purposes a non-deterministic, non-linear, dynamic system -- like a free market -- is "simple". LOL. That's why PhDs in economics, finance, statistics, physics, math, computer science, etc. understand markets perfectly; that's why the tens of thousands of quantitative trading firms have perfect, infallible stock market analysis algorithms. "Simple"...
I'm a strongly pro-free market guy. But I also favor weakening copyright law back to its original form: 14 years, with an option to renew for another 14 years, after which, the work falls into the public domain.
Actually, I favor categorical copyrights: some types of works should have longer copyrights than others. Software, perhaps only 5-8 years, but books, perhaps 20 years. I don't know what good times for each would be (though I could make some reasonable estimates, given the time), but I can't think of any work which should be copyrighted for longer than a total of 50 years or so though.
You're right in that I should've made an exception for embedded devices.
.NET or Java + {insert a half-dozen Java frameworks} web development, maintaining old mainframe software, maintaining MFC apps, writing new desktop apps in a few cases, etc...
But the nature of those devices is that they ship *lots* of units; the programmers for those projects have their product output (their code, not the device as a likely consumer-buyable unit) go to many times more people than most programmers do, since the majority of programming is done for in-house, internal purposes. Those tend to involve things like
And hence, one look at the job market indicates that there are a lot more jobs for non-embedded developers than embedded devs. Or, at least, that's true for Chicago...
Simple economics: developer time is expensive, and the cost of it keeps rising with inflation, if not beating it, making the cost of developer time ever more expensive in real terms.
Meanwhile, hardware continues to drop in price in both nominal (not inflation-adjusted) and real (inflation-adjusted) terms.
It's cheaper to implement for a 16 core, 8GByte RAM box than it is to pay a developer to optimize the code so it can run on a single 486DX2/66...
http://www.presidentreagan.info/speeches/quotes.c
How do you know texting is worse than talking on the phone to begin with? Perhaps it is safer, particularly if managed correctly by the driver (which I would not doubt is often a problem).
You are applying an a priori belief without a shred empirical foundation to a policy position...
I have done it, many times. I read blogs, email, etc. on my phone, studied for tests, read magazines, and so forth while driving too. I even change clothes -- everything except my boxers -- while driving. I've done so regularly for years. And how many accidents have I had?
Zero.
It comes down to prioritization and common sense. I didn't say I read *efficiently* while driving -- I certainly don't operate anywhere nearly as quickly on my reading/writing/etc. while driving as I do when I'm not engaged in driving. I check the road ahead of me and to the sides once every second or two, then glance down at my text to be read, get a line or sentence, then look up again at traffic while I process that line/sentence. I don't do these things at all in severely-inclement weather: snow, ice, heavy rain, high winds. Nor do I do them in situations where traffic conditions are changing rapidly: at high speed with lots of merging traffic, in crowded downtown streets with lots of pedestrians, along twisty mountain roads, etc.. I do it primarily in bumper-to-bumper, stop-and-go, sub-10 mi/hour traffic where, if an accident were to occur, it almost certainly would not be serious.
The simple fact is that we are not all created equal and we do not all evolve equally-fast or in the same directions. Some people are competent to perform actions which are dangerous if managed poorly, while others are not. I'm not competent to do something as dangerous as landing an airplane -- but plenty of trained pilots are; the mentally insane (as the VA Tech shootings exemplified) are not competent to use firearms safely, and nor are (IMO) people convicted of any violent crimes - but most other people are, or would be with sufficient training & education.
A better approach, rather than banning an activity outright, would be to test an individual's competence to perform the activity. An outright ban is too broad and inspecific; it has all the surgical precision of the Bush administration's "it's for national security" argument used to justify its actions...
Sledgehammer, meet housefly.
Actually, you can: on June 8, 2001 a Japanese psycho went on a 15 minute knifing rampage, killing 8 elementary school children and wounding 13 others and 2 teachers.
Depends - how much are they paying the nanny?
So what if it breeds discontent among a few teachers? That's what they get for being lazy slack-asses getting degrees in bullshit majors like Education (which at my university had a departmental mean GPA of 3.8. Gosh! Education majors are straight-A students on average! Compare with the Physics dept, which had a 1.7 mean GPA - a bunch of pot-smoking dropouts, or the hardest major in college? Given that Physics major consistently perform better on LSATs and other standardized tests than any other major, I choose the latter. I know a girl who only got a 21 on her ACT, and she's doing her master's in Education at that school, BTW).
Teachers' unions are some of the whiniest groups of special interests there are. Even Barack Obama, in "The Audacity of Hope", said (I think around chpt. 5, but I was only skimming certain sections of it) that the status quo is unacceptable, and that teachers' must held more accountable than they presently are or want to be. Using an incentive-based system of pay is exactly the right way to reward teacher performance and competence (but it still doesn't address the accountability problem).
"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach."
Not at all. Although my job is officially a 40-hours-per-week salaried job, I'm on call for support if one of our servers has a problem (which, thankfully, almost never happens). Moreover, IT people generally must study on their own time just to stay competitive in the industry: I'm currently reading a book about JSP on my own time, as I work as a Windows developer, so I can maintain a broad (and, in theory, broadly-employable) skill-set. I have other such books awaiting my eyes and time too...
But it's not just IT (which may be among the worst offenders of the studying-during-free-time problem, though I'm probably just ignorant of other fields). People in any professional field must continually keep their skills sharp: research scientists must stay up-to-date on the latest advances in their field, so they are not duplicating others' efforts (in academia) or infringing on patents (in industry), and often must review their day's work at home (my father was such a scientist, and did so every night while watching TV); doctors must stay up-to-date on the latest procedures and medicines (though it seems like few do), lest they prescribe an outdated or inadequate solution to their patient's problem; even people purely in business/sales must remain up-to-date on the competition - the research of which probably occurs outside normal business hours, to some degree (not to mention the work-related socializing outside of work, which borders on corporate lushing - hence why so many people major in business!).
When you start looking at what professional people do just to stay competitive and relevant, and once you realize that such work is often done on the individual's own time, the idea that homework doesn't exist in reality becomes silly.
I do think it's absurd that we must work this much just for the purpose of staying as industrious as we are, however. Work is not, nor should it be, one's life... But like it or not, that is the reality we currently face and children should be prepared for it, right or wrong.
I do agree w/ this. Homework should *never* be arbitrary; there should always be a serious, worthwhile purpose behind it. To do any less would be to impose an irrational decision upon dozens of students (then again, this can be valuable too - after all, it happens all the time in business and government, and students need to get used to this part of reality as well).
While I see value in teachers giving their students occasional drudge-work for the simple purpose of acclimating their students to the idea that much of life involves seemingly-pointless and/or boring drudge-work, I would still rather the homework be legitimately-instructive and educational in terms of knowledge gained or thinking skills improved - not just as an exercise to "whip them into shape" (to use another figure of speech)...
Of course it was hyperbole. The part about "beating one's head against the wall" was not intended to be taken literally.
It is a figure of speech that means one tries very hard, fails, and continues to try overcoming some obstacle. Such obstacles in academia might include determining how to write an essay of considerable length and research, or solving difficult mathematical problems, or conducting a science experiment with sufficient care and discipline to please a very tough, critical teacher.
You are quite correct that homework is -- for most students -- unlikely to be sufficient as a sole source of learning. Most people will need things explained to them first, and have assistance available when they get stuck.
But I never said homework is the *sole* form of education. It is a supplementary form; it must be used in tandem with other forms, e.g. lectures, labs, student study groups, independent research, and probably other forms I'm forgetting.
You are incorrect about not understanding a concept after many hours of attempting to understand it through practice, however. I have arrived at several conceptual understandings in CS only after making (but typically not repeating) many mistakes... Same goes for math. They have all been hard-won "aha!" moments of discovery for me that have never been forgotten as a result. It is not magic, it is hard work, persistence, and a desire to succeed.
Does such hard work take time? Damn right it does. But few things worth doing come easily, and if anything *should* be difficult and time consuming, they should occur within the rigors of academia.
Where I do agree with the author (as far as I can tell) is that children need time to grow up as children, not as adults. They do desperately need play time, time on the playground, time to socialize, to develop in adolescence, etc.. Ever-more parents are seeking to destroy this essence of childhood through more-structured programs. Such children often grow up to be successful in academia and industry, but haven't the skills to deal with other people...
I think the better question is not whether children should have homework, but what the proper balance of time spent on homework, time spent in-class, time in extracurriculars (compare physical vs. non-physical extracurriculars), and personal free time should be. We currently have children sit 6 hours/day, 5 days/week, for 9 months/year in the classroom. Homework time depends on the person, ranging from zero to most of a child's out-of-class time, every day. Extracurriculars tend to occupy 1-3 hours/day for the majority of students.
I personally spent much of my time on homework and personal free time, with the occasional extracurricular. I received great grades and for my age (mid 20s) am considered by my peers to be reasonably successful in every conceivable respect. I think most people (at least in the U.S.) place too much emphasis on physical extracurriculars, and not enough on academic performance and time for decompressing and socializing...
In my view, we should:
* Send children to school year-round, raise the standards for teacher performance and be more willing to fire the great many incompetent and/or lazy, apathetic teachers that exist, and implement performance-based pay structures to promote competition among teachers (all at the behest of teachers' unions, no doubt).
* Students should spend more time in
Spoken like a true leftist high-school idiot who has never learned from their homework.
When you go to college, if you study (for example) Computer Science, and if your school is any good at all, you will have assignments requiring you to write programs which use particular data structures and which perform certain algorithms to work with them. You will probably learn the theory in class, but until you actually write the code, you will not truly understand the complexity involved. Therein lies the value of homework in CS.
The same is true of all other subjects: you won't grok history very well without reading quite a few books, which, during such reading, it is a waste of the professor's time to sit in class with you. You are unlikely to understand many mathematical concepts well until you practice them - outside the classroom, having beaten your head against a wall until you either understand them, or have asked the teacher after exhausting all other solutions you've developed. You will not understand music well without practicing it; you will not be an expert martial artist unless you practice your techniques, repeatedly; you cannot be an expert at dating without meeting many, many people who interest you; you are unlikely to be an excellent author without writing many pages of text, probably on several subjects (hence all the essays - more homework - which teachers have us write); and so on.
All things, if one is to be *good* at them, require practice -- and homework is often just that: practice.
A brief perusal of the description of the book and comments about it on Amazon suggests to me that the author has never worked in the real world, for the real world contains much tedious, uninteresting busywork. If children are not taught to accept that hard reality as children, when shall they learn it?
The author no doubt argues that homework hurts childrens' self-esteem. So what? Those who are successful and happy are those who manage to deal with the fact that life often sucks -- they accept this fact, and make the best of it, by getting a job they like, meeting friends and (boy|girl)friends they are interested in, by making enough money to satisfy the bulk of their wants, and by pursuing their dreams within the reality of limited possibilities with which we all must cope. They are the winners in life. Losers go home and whine about how much their life sucks, ask other people to bail them out of their own problems, and in general do nothing to further their own lot in life.
At some age, children must learn that the world is not, in fact, a happy, fun, intelligent, or fulfilling place by default -- *THEY* individually, are responsible for making their lives happy, fun, intelligent, and fulfilling. It can be done, if they are willing to invest the time, intelligence, and discipline into making it so. When shall they learn this lesson: when facing it head-on upon graduating high school? Or prior?
I've had hours per night of homework since I was in third grade. It is partly responsible for making me ultimately a happy (life often sucks, yes, but again, it is possible to ignore the undesirable aspects to a large degree, if one has the discipline, and it is possible to do something about them, given sufficient education, time-management skill, and ability to interact socially), well-educated, disciplined man.
$2116 = $25,392/year = $12.70/hour (at 2000 hours/year = 40 hours/week * 50 weeks/year).
The poverty level for 2006 was around $18,300 (IIRC).
$25k/year isn't bad for somebody who isn't doing a damn thing to earn it. That's more than a relative of mine made in a large midwestern city as a full-time secretary in a doctor's office - and she had to support 2 kids.
</sarcasm>
Where? I'm in Chicago, and while the data sets I've had to incorporate into my apps (to generate admittedly very simple stats) don't *quite* approach the "very large" size, they're close (they fit in memory, but only barely).
I haven't been seeing anything on Chicago's Craigslist for AI developers though, and I've been checking daily or almost daily for several months. Are the jobs you're referring to out on the west coast (where I have been seeing jobs more-similar to those you describe, e.g. for Amazon in Seattle)?