That is like saying that you're not going to drive anymore just because there are traffic jams. All tools have their pros and cons, but the good ones (which I believe email is) have pros that far outweigh the cons. A famous guy like Knuth just needs to have separate "personal" and "public" emails. The personal one gets a small amount of mail from friends, family, etc, and then the public one gets flooded with email that he can sort with filters and such (or even have someone else read). But dropping email all together is a "throwing the baby out with the bath water" solution.
On the most basic level data storage is just a tool, and like any other tool it's true worth/morale value is determined by how you use it. Do you hear people crying out that we should do away with hammers or create a bunch of laws limiting their use just because you can break someone's bones with it? No, it has a myriad of other important and good uses and we leave it up to individuals to use the tool correctly. If you're afraid of what a hammer might do to you, then just don't use one. The same applies to data storage. If you don't like storing all of that data, then don't store it. Nobody is forcing you to take pictures with a digital camera, have a blog, search on Google, or any of the other things that create the mentioned "digital footprint". It's called agency (the ability to choose for yourself), and I recommend that people start using it instead of demanding a bunch of laws to make all of the decisions for us.
You also have to consider the "EA effect". If one company does dominate an industry, then you lose competition and innovation. Nintendo is very innovative right now because getting their butt kicked last generation forced them to be, but if they're all alone at the top then don't expect the innovation that you're seeing right now.
Yes, now someone went and edited the wiki to state that it was an addon, but you can't blame me for reading the wiki and posting before that edit was made.
I agree with the "do what you love" statement, but I can't say that I really agree with any of his "technical" points. Sticking to non-proprietary standards works really well in some cases (like web-based development), but in some cases non-proprietary standards just don't exist or really suck. Plus, the "network is the computer" thing works well for Google, but if you're writing a client only app or embedded code on a small device (which is still a huge part of the software industry, despite what many believe) then that just doesn't make sense. I agree with the general message of the article, but some of the points are too focused on the view from his limited perspective.
Firefox is starting to lose what made it great (small, streamlined design that anyone could add to with extensions) and becoming far more bloated than the original IE that it so gratefully replaced. I'm fine with them adding these features, but they should be extensions, not part of the browser itself. Sure, they could make "standard extensions" that come with the default installation of Firefox, but you should be able to remove them and keep the small, streamlined Firefox that we all love so much in the beginning.
Your argument could be claimed about any sport/game. It's all about strategy and effective use of what's available. Professional level of any sport/game is completely different than the casual level that's just played for enjoyment. And yes, sponsorship is meant to free up time and resources of the "athlete" so they can focus on the "sport", as well as, for advertising revenue. I personally think that "professional gaming" is fairly ridiculous, but what form of observation based entertainment doesn't appear ridiculous to those that don't enjoy watching it?
Ya, it's been done by TONS of people. Pretty much any small UAV has exactly what he's talking about. You'd think that a guy that was so involved with the technology would already know what's out there.
Amen, 40 people is no where near a decent study and how good of drivers were the 3 that got in a wreck? Would they have gotten in the same wreck without a cell phone?
The one thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the benchmarks only show "compute timings" and not actual setup and retreval times. If the benchmarks showed the amount of time to get the data to the GPU and especially the time to get the result back to a place where a program could actually use it then it would be blown out of the water by the CPU. Future cards/drivers could speed up the process of retrieving the data, but for now there will always be lame benchmarks like this that are unfairly biased toward the GPU and only tell half the story. I mean what's the point of doing an FFT so quickly if it takes forever to actually be able to get to the data.
I definitely agree that Computer Science is not a dying field like so many claim it to be, but six figures for post doc work? I'm currently in search of employment and the highest post-doc I've found is $50k (with the average being in the low $40s), compared to most industry that's paying around $70k. Let me know where you work cause I'd love to sign up.
Slashdot Mirror
That is like saying that you're not going to drive anymore just because there are traffic jams. All tools have their pros and cons, but the good ones (which I believe email is) have pros that far outweigh the cons. A famous guy like Knuth just needs to have separate "personal" and "public" emails. The personal one gets a small amount of mail from friends, family, etc, and then the public one gets flooded with email that he can sort with filters and such (or even have someone else read). But dropping email all together is a "throwing the baby out with the bath water" solution.
On the most basic level data storage is just a tool, and like any other tool it's true worth/morale value is determined by how you use it. Do you hear people crying out that we should do away with hammers or create a bunch of laws limiting their use just because you can break someone's bones with it? No, it has a myriad of other important and good uses and we leave it up to individuals to use the tool correctly. If you're afraid of what a hammer might do to you, then just don't use one. The same applies to data storage. If you don't like storing all of that data, then don't store it. Nobody is forcing you to take pictures with a digital camera, have a blog, search on Google, or any of the other things that create the mentioned "digital footprint". It's called agency (the ability to choose for yourself), and I recommend that people start using it instead of demanding a bunch of laws to make all of the decisions for us.
You also have to consider the "EA effect". If one company does dominate an industry, then you lose competition and innovation. Nintendo is very innovative right now because getting their butt kicked last generation forced them to be, but if they're all alone at the top then don't expect the innovation that you're seeing right now.
Yes, now someone went and edited the wiki to state that it was an addon, but you can't blame me for reading the wiki and posting before that edit was made.
I agree with the "do what you love" statement, but I can't say that I really agree with any of his "technical" points. Sticking to non-proprietary standards works really well in some cases (like web-based development), but in some cases non-proprietary standards just don't exist or really suck. Plus, the "network is the computer" thing works well for Google, but if you're writing a client only app or embedded code on a small device (which is still a huge part of the software industry, despite what many believe) then that just doesn't make sense.
I agree with the general message of the article, but some of the points are too focused on the view from his limited perspective.
Firefox is starting to lose what made it great (small, streamlined design that anyone could add to with extensions) and becoming far more bloated than the original IE that it so gratefully replaced. I'm fine with them adding these features, but they should be extensions, not part of the browser itself. Sure, they could make "standard extensions" that come with the default installation of Firefox, but you should be able to remove them and keep the small, streamlined Firefox that we all love so much in the beginning.
Your argument could be claimed about any sport/game. It's all about strategy and effective use of what's available. Professional level of any sport/game is completely different than the casual level that's just played for enjoyment. And yes, sponsorship is meant to free up time and resources of the "athlete" so they can focus on the "sport", as well as, for advertising revenue. I personally think that "professional gaming" is fairly ridiculous, but what form of observation based entertainment doesn't appear ridiculous to those that don't enjoy watching it?
Ya, it's been done by TONS of people. Pretty much any small UAV has exactly what he's talking about. You'd think that a guy that was so involved with the technology would already know what's out there.
I couldn't have said it any better.
Well, maybe I would have left out the "raping babies" comment, and that would have probably been at least slightly better.
How and why did something this lame make it onto slashdot?
Amen, 40 people is no where near a decent study and how good of drivers were the 3 that got in a wreck? Would they have gotten in the same wreck without a cell phone?
The one thing that I haven't seen mentioned is that the benchmarks only show "compute timings" and not actual setup and retreval times. If the benchmarks showed the amount of time to get the data to the GPU and especially the time to get the result back to a place where a program could actually use it then it would be blown out of the water by the CPU. Future cards/drivers could speed up the process of retrieving the data, but for now there will always be lame benchmarks like this that are unfairly biased toward the GPU and only tell half the story. I mean what's the point of doing an FFT so quickly if it takes forever to actually be able to get to the data.
Cause shelling out $400-500 just for a video card obviously makes a lot more sense.
I definitely agree that Computer Science is not a dying field like so many claim it to be, but six figures for post doc work? I'm currently in search of employment and the highest post-doc I've found is $50k (with the average being in the low $40s), compared to most industry that's paying around $70k. Let me know where you work cause I'd love to sign up.