We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android -- now, that will no longer be the case, and I guarantee you there will be instances where Google uses the inevitable differences between "Blink" and WebKit (which is also the core rendering engine for Mac OS X and Safari) for competitive advantage with Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, al la Microsoft and IE...:-/
This is true already: there are visual and performance differences between different webkit browsers. WebKit is just a layout engine, whereas a full browser requires dozens of other components. WebKit for Developers provides a nice overview on this: http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/
Uh huh.. Yeah.. Except do you really think this is about the children?
When you walked into a gas chamber they used to tell you that it's just a shower for hygiene reasons also...
I agree with tom. My case is a little different in that I made/installed my own carputter (Mazda 6) and I'll be honest... I didn't bother wiring any relays that would disallow me from fiddling with the keyboard while on the move. I can change routes, add new stopover points and let the passenger take control this way. Usually I input all of my addresses while sitting at an intersection and I dont find it to be a big problem.
Compared to driving with a map, I'd say it's MUCH MUCH easier because I dont have to try to scan/pin-point where I am and where my next intersection/exit is everytime I look down at the damn thing. Instead I just glance at my monitor which tells me how many km/miles I have to the next turn and how long it will approx. take at my current speed. Voice navi gives me three warnings 500m, 300m & 100m so I rarely miss a turn.
It's the best thing I've put into my car. Period.
Because they can't 'do no evil'
on
Can We Trust Google?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As succinctly pointed out by another fellow./ in another thread on google, the media hype may not be 'fair' when it focuses on google but no other company today is waiving a "Do no evil" banner. In the words of one of Yahoo's CEO's: "Well, of course you shouldn't be evil. But you also shouldn't have to brag about it either."
In fact, the very strategy that gained so much trust and support for google may now be backfiring as they try to mediate these conflicts. They need to expand into China, but do you censor? Is that evil? Who assigned Sergey and Page as the moral police? How come they can call the shots on what gets filtered? Couple this with the Patriot Act where google can make all the fuss they want but in the end they'll have to concede and keep mute about it and you get articles like the one we are discussing here.
So personally... No I don't trust google. It's not because of any industry attachments or a failed stock acquisition, its common sense. I'll keep my data on my own hard-drive, I won't index it with a third party tool and I will encrypt my email. Call me paranoid but at least I sleep well.
May I point out that not all reasonable people believe that math is our own creation per se. (No, I don't support Intelligent Design). You will find textbooks filled with discussions on the nature of mathematics, varying from pure Platonistic arguments down to Positivism and a plethora of other ideas. Godel himself was more of a Platonist than most of us would anticipate. In fact, most of us carry an implicit Platonistic attitude. As a great example, almost every science headline resorts to "X discovers Y!". Now, in order to be discovered it had to be there in the first place! There they are, the per Our scientific community has an implicit Platonistic view and I think most people don't realize that until you expose it. (Well now you should know!)
As for Godel's Incompleteness, it is an amazing result but it's not a silver bullet for math. It killed Hilbert's program, that's for sure, but it's hardly the end of math. Technically speaking, we can disallow Godel's result by fiat through some clever limitations, but the problem with that of course is the very fact that we're disallowing by fiat. And not to mention, not all of mathematics is affected either (ex. third order logic seems to be doing fine).
I've listened to dozens of arguments trying to outright discredit math based on Godel's results, and I must say, 99% of the time the speakers only have superfluous knowledge of the result and yet they extrapolate to derive amazing results. It reminds me of AI (Artificial Intelligence) where every other psychologist talks about the 'limitations of machines' blatantly unaware that what they are really referring to is the 'limitations of algorithms'. It's a succinct point, but before you build your mansion, might as well check the foundations first, right?
It may not be 'real news' but I don't think it should be dismissed as completely irrelevant. (Like 95% of current commentators have done).
First, on relevance of wishlists: Granted that wishlists are not the most accurate estimates of your preferences, what is? My list contains over 50 books, and for the most part they are all related to each other. In fact, I would say that by looking at my list you would have a pretty accurate gauge to measure my interests. Am I an anomaly? Possibly. (Though I doubt it)
But it still makes you wonder how then does Amazon produce dozens and dozens of relevant suggestions to each of your books. For example, I often add a book to my shopping cart just to see the "what other people have bought when they bought this book x". Click, Wishlist, click, Wishlist. I think it's naive to dismiss wishlists completely. In fact, I'm sure that you will be able to successfully data mine data obtained from the wishlists and extract interesting and useful information.
Now, the actual experiment: An interesting observation that I've recently read about developments in AI: "It stops being AI once it hits the mainstream". It's true, and it's happening here. The idea does not capture anything new, but the application is interesting. You can find out what people are reading and where. (And that's a powerful tool!) It open a big can of worms: advertising, targeting social groups, other 'moral' and 'immoral' uses. To those who know how to utilize it, this might prove to be a goldmine.
I agree with you but I also think that the whole pursuit for the 'best' compressor is misguided, even a set of ROC curves won't tell us much. From a practical standpoint a single compressor as 'jack of all trades' is obviously the best solution but due to the differences in the compression algorithms every data-set that you're going to push through the compressor will yield different results. If you even take the most basic/well studied Lempel-Ziv and Huffman algorithms you'll quickly find cases where each would be preferred over another.
From a programmers point of view:
- Sometimes I don't want to send my dictionary with my encoded file, sometimes I can even assume that we have the dictionaries on both end points of communication.
- Sometimes I can wait 5 minutes to zip a file and 20 minutes to unzip it. When I'm trying to stream a file, I probably don't.
- Sometimes I want everyone to be able to read my file (zip it!). Sometimes I don't.
And since different algm's identify different patterns in the file their compressing, certain files will be compressed better by different algorithms and do much worse on the next file. Besides, we're not even getting into any discussion of lossy/lossless algm's here. (Think jpeg vs bmp).
Why does everyone use it? In many cases -it is- because of the 'default' install on your aforementioned web-hosts. I've built a number of applications (95% web related) and I've always exclusively used MySQL for them because I had access to it, and I did not need to go the extra mile to download/install and configure another DBMS. (And this assumes you have root privileges also).
"Why do most web hosting companies use it?"
- For above reasons. Most/every distro aimed at a stable server environment will come with an automated MySQL installer (for free), as an admin, what else would you want?
"Why do most web hosting companies use Linux?"
- I don't see how this in any way relates to the discussion of databases and MySQL in general.
Matter of fact is, MySQL got a lot of bad rep simply because it lagged (still does, but hey, if you want a full fledged DB2 platform be ready to spend big bucks) in its feature set. Even simple concept such as transactions and inability to guarantee basic ACID properties of a database put it behind MySQL/DB2/Oracle. Now as mentioned in the parent post, 'the hobbiest toy' is partially true. All things considered, if MySQL couldn't guarantee safety of my transaction where my web-counter could miss a click is not such a big deal (or a blog-post). But once you start talking about debit/credit transactions now you're going to have doubts won't you?
I've been a long time MySQL fan, but then I got a chance to play with DB2 and half a year later after I got back to MySQL I was genuinely surprised that some of my queries which executed perfectly fine on DB2 would not run on MySQL. Soon enough I found out that the features that I got so used to in DB2 were not yet supported by MySQL.
MySQL is getting better with every release, but 'every host' uses it so it must be good argument is not true.
When I was backpacking through Italy this summer I was suprised to find the aformentioned policies (or parts of them) in place and in use in every internet cafe I stopped in. They always checked my ID and some even asked me to see my passport. Now, it wasnt the most pleasant feeling when somebody asked you to get your passport out to check your email.. but I always got the same reply: "I know, sorry... New regulations.."
I guess the data retention aspect of this law would be new, but otherwise much of it is already in place!
First of, I dont think that it is fair to compare a product like gas-ionisation lamps to LEDs. Both products occupy very different consumer niches and it is unlikely that LEDs will be able to challenge gas-ionisation lamps anytime soon in terms of output.
As for half life, the 50,000 mark mentioned by the author IS the half-life. Most diodes are listed under 100,000 hour life mark, with 50,000 hours without any failures. Lumileds guarantees 70% lumen output by the 50,000 mark, but that is definetely not an industry standard. While Lumileds certainly managed to grab a nice portion of the market, their 'design' is questionable. The y keep pushing the lumens (most recently 190 lumen) by cranking the power to the diode (190 lumen at 1.4amps).
Recently, Nichia and other big LED manufacturers put out some very nice 0.5Watt diodes that take a fraction of Lumileds power and eliminate one of the biggest problems associated with Lumileds LED's.. HEAT! From a point of thermal design, Lumileds LED's is a pain to say the least. But at least others are moving in the right direction, instead of producing single LED light source, arrays of LED's seem to be the way for the future.
Yes (virtually) is the correct word. Most LED manufactures that you will find will list 100,000 hours as the lifetime of an LED. However, and this is the important part, they guarantee 50,000 hours without failure. So if you have a cluster of LED's you are 'guaranteed' that all of them will work until the 50,000 hour mark.
Also, as someone has already mentioned earlier. LED's do reduce their light output with time. The usual mark (if my memory doesnt decieve me) is about 75% output by 100,000 mark. Now, also recognize that the 100,000 number is a theoretical bound, it's hard to test something like an LED which is suppose to die after 12 years.
But getting back to the 'virtual' part. If you think about it, even if you take the worst case, let's say a store, in which the light is on for 12 hours a day.. 50,000 Hours is 12 years, show me an incandescent bulb that could stand up to that.
Only problem with this kind of setup is in fact it's limited ability to accomplish anything usefull to a consumer or a medium company. While, of course it is an interesting field, and one that needs to be researched, technology like proximity computing (SUN) is what will dictate the technology in the future. It's hard as it is to even get decent multiprocessor scheduling without too much overhead on a single pc, overhead incurred with grids would be enormous (I guess that's why the primary applications would be file storage etc.)
Proximity computing on the other hand, is an innovative approach that doesnt try to solve a problem in place, but avoids it all together.
I think that in reality, we dont have as many choices as you may think. What are you going to turn to? Yahoo (yeah right), MSN Search? The remaining ad filled, over-verbose, inaccurate engines?
But that's not the point. The 'pretty' image of Google will inevitably change as they grow. What evolved as a free service, became a growing corporation (and it will continue to expand). The more power they yeild over the market, the more radical the opposition will become, simply because of their share. To me, the parallel between Microsoft and Google is simple, both employ the best guys they can find (lets not get into rhetoric discussions of how Microsoft 'sux' and Google 'wins') and are dominant forces in their regions. Furthermore, Google is evolving along the exact same lines as Microsoft, it's becoming a hegemon that trumps all competition in comparison.
Microsoft has it's own record of 'abusing' this power. BUT, both sides have a good argument in this case. You could easily make the case for the fact that since Google is a dominant engine, the more services they put out, the more they integrate an average user into their model. Eventually this process will lead to same endpoint as Microsoft, they will impede development of smaller companies (dont they already?).
Expect more discussions like this one in the future, mark my words.
Combine the unsurpassed parallel processing capability of our brain with speed of sequential execution of an even average home pc, and who knows what can happen. This is what you read about in sci-fi, yet it's already on our door steps. (Mind you it's in infant stage, but nonetheless.)
Next thing you know faculties of Math/Science/etc. will cease to exist and instead the parents will pick if they want the latest copy of Mathematica or Maple installed in their childs brain;)
Slashdot Mirror
We could always count on WebKit being the universal web rendering engine across iOS and Android -- now, that will no longer be the case, and I guarantee you there will be instances where Google uses the inevitable differences between "Blink" and WebKit (which is also the core rendering engine for Mac OS X and Safari) for competitive advantage with Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, al la Microsoft and IE... :-/
This is true already: there are visual and performance differences between different webkit browsers. WebKit is just a layout engine, whereas a full browser requires dozens of other components. WebKit for Developers provides a nice overview on this: http://paulirish.com/2013/webkit-for-developers/
Hmm, you don't need even ReverseHTTP for this. You can get this functionality with JavaScript and existing browsers: http://www.igvita.com/2009/03/03/collaborative-map-reduce-in-the-browser/
Uh huh.. Yeah.. Except do you really think this is about the children? When you walked into a gas chamber they used to tell you that it's just a shower for hygiene reasons also...
I agree with tom. My case is a little different in that I made/installed my own carputter (Mazda 6) and I'll be honest... I didn't bother wiring any relays that would disallow me from fiddling with the keyboard while on the move. I can change routes, add new stopover points and let the passenger take control this way. Usually I input all of my addresses while sitting at an intersection and I dont find it to be a big problem.
Compared to driving with a map, I'd say it's MUCH MUCH easier because I dont have to try to scan/pin-point where I am and where my next intersection/exit is everytime I look down at the damn thing. Instead I just glance at my monitor which tells me how many km/miles I have to the next turn and how long it will approx. take at my current speed. Voice navi gives me three warnings 500m, 300m & 100m so I rarely miss a turn.
It's the best thing I've put into my car. Period.
As succinctly pointed out by another fellow ./ in another thread on google, the media hype may not be 'fair' when it focuses on google but no other company today is waiving a "Do no evil" banner. In the words of one of Yahoo's CEO's: "Well, of course you shouldn't be evil. But you also shouldn't have to brag about it either."
In fact, the very strategy that gained so much trust and support for google may now be backfiring as they try to mediate these conflicts. They need to expand into China, but do you censor? Is that evil? Who assigned Sergey and Page as the moral police? How come they can call the shots on what gets filtered? Couple this with the Patriot Act where google can make all the fuss they want but in the end they'll have to concede and keep mute about it and you get articles like the one we are discussing here.
So personally... No I don't trust google. It's not because of any industry attachments or a failed stock acquisition, its common sense. I'll keep my data on my own hard-drive, I won't index it with a third party tool and I will encrypt my email. Call me paranoid but at least I sleep well.
I must be on crack OR ./ is playing mindgames on me.
Not "performs", but "forms".
*Puts down the coffee mug*
Hmm, ./ garbled one of my sentences. Should say:
"There they are, the perfect performs!. Ah, Noesis!"
May I point out that not all reasonable people believe that math is our own creation per se. (No, I don't support Intelligent Design). You will find textbooks filled with discussions on the nature of mathematics, varying from pure Platonistic arguments down to Positivism and a plethora of other ideas. Godel himself was more of a Platonist than most of us would anticipate. In fact, most of us carry an implicit Platonistic attitude. As a great example, almost every science headline resorts to "X discovers Y!". Now, in order to be discovered it had to be there in the first place! There they are, the per Our scientific community has an implicit Platonistic view and I think most people don't realize that until you expose it. (Well now you should know!)
As for Godel's Incompleteness, it is an amazing result but it's not a silver bullet for math. It killed Hilbert's program, that's for sure, but it's hardly the end of math. Technically speaking, we can disallow Godel's result by fiat through some clever limitations, but the problem with that of course is the very fact that we're disallowing by fiat. And not to mention, not all of mathematics is affected either (ex. third order logic seems to be doing fine).
I've listened to dozens of arguments trying to outright discredit math based on Godel's results, and I must say, 99% of the time the speakers only have superfluous knowledge of the result and yet they extrapolate to derive amazing results. It reminds me of AI (Artificial Intelligence) where every other psychologist talks about the 'limitations of machines' blatantly unaware that what they are really referring to is the 'limitations of algorithms'. It's a succinct point, but before you build your mansion, might as well check the foundations first, right?
It may not be 'real news' but I don't think it should be dismissed as completely irrelevant. (Like 95% of current commentators have done).
First, on relevance of wishlists:
Granted that wishlists are not the most accurate estimates of your preferences, what is? My list contains over 50 books, and for the most part they are all related to each other. In fact, I would say that by looking at my list you would have a pretty accurate gauge to measure my interests. Am I an anomaly? Possibly. (Though I doubt it)
But it still makes you wonder how then does Amazon produce dozens and dozens of relevant suggestions to each of your books. For example, I often add a book to my shopping cart just to see the "what other people have bought when they bought this book x". Click, Wishlist, click, Wishlist. I think it's naive to dismiss wishlists completely. In fact, I'm sure that you will be able to successfully data mine data obtained from the wishlists and extract interesting and useful information.
Now, the actual experiment:
An interesting observation that I've recently read about developments in AI: "It stops being AI once it hits the mainstream". It's true, and it's happening here. The idea does not capture anything new, but the application is interesting. You can find out what people are reading and where. (And that's a powerful tool!) It open a big can of worms: advertising, targeting social groups, other 'moral' and 'immoral' uses. To those who know how to utilize it, this might prove to be a goldmine.
I agree with you but I also think that the whole pursuit for the 'best' compressor is misguided, even a set of ROC curves won't tell us much. From a practical standpoint a single compressor as 'jack of all trades' is obviously the best solution but due to the differences in the compression algorithms every data-set that you're going to push through the compressor will yield different results. If you even take the most basic/well studied Lempel-Ziv and Huffman algorithms you'll quickly find cases where each would be preferred over another.
From a programmers point of view: - Sometimes I don't want to send my dictionary with my encoded file, sometimes I can even assume that we have the dictionaries on both end points of communication. - Sometimes I can wait 5 minutes to zip a file and 20 minutes to unzip it. When I'm trying to stream a file, I probably don't. - Sometimes I want everyone to be able to read my file (zip it!). Sometimes I don't.
And since different algm's identify different patterns in the file their compressing, certain files will be compressed better by different algorithms and do much worse on the next file. Besides, we're not even getting into any discussion of lossy/lossless algm's here. (Think jpeg vs bmp).
This is a very shortsighted argument for MySQL.
Why does everyone use it? In many cases -it is- because of the 'default' install on your aforementioned web-hosts. I've built a number of applications (95% web related) and I've always exclusively used MySQL for them because I had access to it, and I did not need to go the extra mile to download/install and configure another DBMS. (And this assumes you have root privileges also).
"Why do most web hosting companies use it?" - For above reasons. Most/every distro aimed at a stable server environment will come with an automated MySQL installer (for free), as an admin, what else would you want?
"Why do most web hosting companies use Linux?" - I don't see how this in any way relates to the discussion of databases and MySQL in general.
Matter of fact is, MySQL got a lot of bad rep simply because it lagged (still does, but hey, if you want a full fledged DB2 platform be ready to spend big bucks) in its feature set. Even simple concept such as transactions and inability to guarantee basic ACID properties of a database put it behind MySQL/DB2/Oracle. Now as mentioned in the parent post, 'the hobbiest toy' is partially true. All things considered, if MySQL couldn't guarantee safety of my transaction where my web-counter could miss a click is not such a big deal (or a blog-post). But once you start talking about debit/credit transactions now you're going to have doubts won't you?
I've been a long time MySQL fan, but then I got a chance to play with DB2 and half a year later after I got back to MySQL I was genuinely surprised that some of my queries which executed perfectly fine on DB2 would not run on MySQL. Soon enough I found out that the features that I got so used to in DB2 were not yet supported by MySQL.
MySQL is getting better with every release, but 'every host' uses it so it must be good argument is not true.
When I was backpacking through Italy this summer I was suprised to find the aformentioned policies (or parts of them) in place and in use in every internet cafe I stopped in. They always checked my ID and some even asked me to see my passport. Now, it wasnt the most pleasant feeling when somebody asked you to get your passport out to check your email.. but I always got the same reply: "I know, sorry... New regulations.."
I guess the data retention aspect of this law would be new, but otherwise much of it is already in place!
Correct, white LED is just a phosphor covered blue led. The patent is owned by Nichia and you can view the specifications here:
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,998,925.WKU.&OS=PN/5,998,925&RS =PN/5,998,925
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
First of, I dont think that it is fair to compare a product like gas-ionisation lamps to LEDs. Both products occupy very different consumer niches and it is unlikely that LEDs will be able to challenge gas-ionisation lamps anytime soon in terms of output.
As for half life, the 50,000 mark mentioned by the author IS the half-life. Most diodes are listed under 100,000 hour life mark, with 50,000 hours without any failures. Lumileds guarantees 70% lumen output by the 50,000 mark, but that is definetely not an industry standard. While Lumileds certainly managed to grab a nice portion of the market, their 'design' is questionable. The y keep pushing the lumens (most recently 190 lumen) by cranking the power to the diode (190 lumen at 1.4amps).
Recently, Nichia and other big LED manufacturers put out some very nice 0.5Watt diodes that take a fraction of Lumileds power and eliminate one of the biggest problems associated with Lumileds LED's.. HEAT! From a point of thermal design, Lumileds LED's is a pain to say the least. But at least others are moving in the right direction, instead of producing single LED light source, arrays of LED's seem to be the way for the future.
Yes (virtually) is the correct word. Most LED manufactures that you will find will list 100,000 hours as the lifetime of an LED. However, and this is the important part, they guarantee 50,000 hours without failure. So if you have a cluster of LED's you are 'guaranteed' that all of them will work until the 50,000 hour mark.
Also, as someone has already mentioned earlier. LED's do reduce their light output with time. The usual mark (if my memory doesnt decieve me) is about 75% output by 100,000 mark. Now, also recognize that the 100,000 number is a theoretical bound, it's hard to test something like an LED which is suppose to die after 12 years.
But getting back to the 'virtual' part. If you think about it, even if you take the worst case, let's say a store, in which the light is on for 12 hours a day.. 50,000 Hours is 12 years, show me an incandescent bulb that could stand up to that.
Only problem with this kind of setup is in fact it's limited ability to accomplish anything usefull to a consumer or a medium company. While, of course it is an interesting field, and one that needs to be researched, technology like proximity computing (SUN) is what will dictate the technology in the future. It's hard as it is to even get decent multiprocessor scheduling without too much overhead on a single pc, overhead incurred with grids would be enormous (I guess that's why the primary applications would be file storage etc.) Proximity computing on the other hand, is an innovative approach that doesnt try to solve a problem in place, but avoids it all together.
I think that in reality, we dont have as many choices as you may think. What are you going to turn to? Yahoo (yeah right), MSN Search? The remaining ad filled, over-verbose, inaccurate engines? But that's not the point. The 'pretty' image of Google will inevitably change as they grow. What evolved as a free service, became a growing corporation (and it will continue to expand). The more power they yeild over the market, the more radical the opposition will become, simply because of their share. To me, the parallel between Microsoft and Google is simple, both employ the best guys they can find (lets not get into rhetoric discussions of how Microsoft 'sux' and Google 'wins') and are dominant forces in their regions. Furthermore, Google is evolving along the exact same lines as Microsoft, it's becoming a hegemon that trumps all competition in comparison. Microsoft has it's own record of 'abusing' this power. BUT, both sides have a good argument in this case. You could easily make the case for the fact that since Google is a dominant engine, the more services they put out, the more they integrate an average user into their model. Eventually this process will lead to same endpoint as Microsoft, they will impede development of smaller companies (dont they already?). Expect more discussions like this one in the future, mark my words.
Combine the unsurpassed parallel processing capability of our brain with speed of sequential execution of an even average home pc, and who knows what can happen. This is what you read about in sci-fi, yet it's already on our door steps. (Mind you it's in infant stage, but nonetheless.) Next thing you know faculties of Math/Science/etc. will cease to exist and instead the parents will pick if they want the latest copy of Mathematica or Maple installed in their childs brain ;)