Beer helped civilization in the sense that its fermentation made water drinkable, as opposed to a microbe culture broth that would almost certainly kill you if you drank it. Other than that this summary sounds like nonsense.
Personally I don't like Apple's tactics or philosophy very much, but you would have to be fairly dishonest to say that the original iPhone was a step backwards. Sure it didn't have 3G, but it had the only reasonably usable browser of any smartphone at the time. Also 3G wasn't as widely available as it is now, so it was a reasonable compromise at the time. It changed the smartphone industry in a meaningful way.
Somehow that sounds unlikely. Why was the samba server useful? Why was the researcher's desktop shared? Over the internet to boot? Why was a cert useful to log onto the RedHat box? What was the motivation for taking over the box in this fashion?
RAID is best used as a complement to backup. These days many people backup up on disk systems for speed and access, so having RAID on your backup system is useful.
One very important sentence in the groklaw article:
The reason she found Samsung was not willful is because of all the prior art that their experts testified showed that the Apple patents were invalid.
Am I reading this correctly? Apple has invalid patents but still got damages out of them? Does this mean they are a one-shot deal and that other manufacturers can infringe now? In this case 1 billion dollars to render Apple's portfolio irrelevant was effectively very cheap, given the size of the relevant market.
the project, described here is not to build a simulation of a human brain capable of reasoning and thought, certainly not at first.
It is aimed at better understanding the way the real human brain works, from the neurological and physiological point of view. It is anticipated that to understand this some level of simulation will be needed, indeed. However current computers are incapable of dealing with the complexity of the complete human brain, even if we knew its structure.
In other words it sounds like a perfectly sensible basic science project. It starts relatively small, with about 115 million Euros between the European Research Council and matching member countries funds. It may build up to about 1.5 billions if specific milestones are met on the way. It will be subjected to reviews and evaluations and audits on the way.
It doesn't sound at all like an airy fairy project with no hope of succeeding, quite the contrary.
Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you. They are more likely to buy your products because they know them. International students are often more motivated to study, lifting the general class level.
Whereas wave equation problems are propagation problems, the theory to solve the corresponding PDEs is well understood and can rely on explicit finite differences or finite element schemes which are known to be stable, for instance under the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition (look this up if you want). The corresponding code "only" requires matrix additions and multiplications, this is why for this problems the Linpack benchmark is relevant.
On the other hand the parabolic Laplace and Poisson equations can only be solved by matrix inversion. Most often they are well conditioned and sparse problems, nonetheless matrix inversion is a harder problem which is not so simple to parallelize. It is still a very active field of research. Look up fast Poisson solvers or adaptive multigrid solvers for instance.
A simple example of a Poisson-like problem is heat transfer or image denoising.
I think the way the sentence is constructed is slightly confusing. They are not talking about the simulated sound waves but about the computation waves. This type of code is not monolithic, but runs through various phases during computation (as in map-reduce for instance). To remain efficient, you have to orchestrate the nodes to remain in sync to avoid costly idling locks.
Typically, some parts of CFD or other scientific simulations may include non-deterministic steps, e.g. mathematical optimization often benefits from some randomization for speeding up convergence. Overall this does not change the outcome of the computation because the convergence results is what matters.
Constant retraining in one's field is relatively easy. It would take most developers only a little effort to learn a new programming language, or the latest trend in web-oriented methodologies. Now you may agree that if one moved developers into management, going them to do an MBA is going to require massive efforts and not inconsequential investment from their company. Yet moving a developer into management without this massive retraining is not unlikely to result in a disaster.
Now the teachers in elementary and high schools' expertise is in education, not computer science. This is a massively different field for most people. For a start, even elementary logic does not apply very well to most students. Try to organize a class according to some mathematical principle and watch what happens. We are not talking about a little retraining here.
Given that time is running out on worldwide access to current forms of cheap and relatively safe energy, how can we ensure we have a future as thinking beings, not to mention access to sufficient resources to make the singularity happen? This seems like a hard problem.
...and what a nightmare they unleashed upon the world. As an ignorant undergrad student I wrote once an important letter with it, using at least 3 different fonts in a single page. I thought it look good but it didn't have the intended effect. It lacked class and was not professional looking.
Wysiwyg editors let you focus on the appearance instead of the content, and what's more they do not necessarily let you adjust the appearance in a consistent manner. MacWrite certainly didn't have styles. I only learned about various professional compositing software in grad school, including TeX.
Steve Jobs famously took typography courses at college. He should also have taken compositing classes as well, and perhaps we would now have Word with better styles control.
Frankly the O'Reilly books are a bit passé these days. Look at the state of their C++ or Python books, either totally out of date or a joke. Exhibit A: the 60-page book on Scipy and Numpy, arguably the most important recent topic on Python, the one that makes it a real, pedal-to-the-metal competitor to Matlab.
In this country, many people go without health insurance, because premiums are too high. As a result, people get sick every day but don't go and see their doctor because they can't afford it. The US has the best quality health care in the world! why can't sick people get affordable treatment?
This should really be an easy, high impact problem to solve, right?
1- Quality selection is 100% in the hands of the editors, who are all academic volunteers. The math journal may sometime provide a web site for entering and managing the reviews (and the reviewers;-)
2- Math papers are rarely, if ever edited. The reviewers might ask for changes, clarifications, etc, which the authors implement. Eventually they vet or reject the paper, and if accepted, the last version is the one that gets published verbatim.
3- 100% of figures are made by authors.
4- Pleasing layouts are provided by LaTeX. Typesetting is done by the authors. There are now well-accepted LaTeX templates for all math journals. This effort was performed decades ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Beer helped civilization in the sense that its fermentation made water drinkable, as opposed to a microbe culture broth that would almost certainly kill you if you drank it. Other than that this summary sounds like nonsense.
Personally I don't like Apple's tactics or philosophy very much, but you would have to be fairly dishonest to say that the original iPhone was a step backwards. Sure it didn't have 3G, but it had the only reasonably usable browser of any smartphone at the time. Also 3G wasn't as widely available as it is now, so it was a reasonable compromise at the time. It changed the smartphone industry in a meaningful way.
Somehow that sounds unlikely. Why was the samba server useful? Why was the researcher's desktop shared? Over the internet to boot? Why was a cert useful to log onto the RedHat box? What was the motivation for taking over the box in this fashion?
Do you have a link to the bugtraq discussion?
The provisions regarding presumption of innocence in the old Napoleonic penal code are no longer valid in France. See this article instead.
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr
Danish physicist (1885 - 1962)
Depends on your software RAID solution. Even Linux can use ZFS now.
RAID is best used as a complement to backup. These days many people backup up on disk systems for speed and access, so having RAID on your backup system is useful.
For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, plausible, elegant, and wrong.
(Attributed to many people).
One very important sentence in the groklaw article:
Am I reading this correctly? Apple has invalid patents but still got damages out of them? Does this mean they are a one-shot deal and that other manufacturers can infringe now? In this case 1 billion dollars to render Apple's portfolio irrelevant was effectively very cheap, given the size of the relevant market.
In Europe (similar market to the US) the market share of the iPhone is 25% compared to 44% to Samsung. Same article you quote.
Hello,
the project, described here is not to build a simulation of a human brain capable of reasoning and thought, certainly not at first.
It is aimed at better understanding the way the real human brain works, from the neurological and physiological point of view. It is anticipated that to understand this some level of simulation will be needed, indeed. However current computers are incapable of dealing with the complexity of the complete human brain, even if we knew its structure.
In other words it sounds like a perfectly sensible basic science project. It starts relatively small, with about 115 million Euros between the European Research Council and matching member countries funds. It may build up to about 1.5 billions if specific milestones are met on the way. It will be subjected to reviews and evaluations and audits on the way.
It doesn't sound at all like an airy fairy project with no hope of succeeding, quite the contrary.
Meanwhile, they learn the local language and culture. They are more likely to do business with you. They are more likely to buy your products because they know them. International students are often more motivated to study, lifting the general class level.
Whereas wave equation problems are propagation problems, the theory to solve the corresponding PDEs is well understood and can rely on explicit finite differences or finite element schemes which are known to be stable, for instance under the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition (look this up if you want). The corresponding code "only" requires matrix additions and multiplications, this is why for this problems the Linpack benchmark is relevant.
On the other hand the parabolic Laplace and Poisson equations can only be solved by matrix inversion. Most often they are well conditioned and sparse problems, nonetheless matrix inversion is a harder problem which is not so simple to parallelize. It is still a very active field of research. Look up fast Poisson solvers or adaptive multigrid solvers for instance.
A simple example of a Poisson-like problem is heat transfer or image denoising.
I think the way the sentence is constructed is slightly confusing. They are not talking about the simulated sound waves but about the computation waves. This type of code is not monolithic, but runs through various phases during computation (as in map-reduce for instance). To remain efficient, you have to orchestrate the nodes to remain in sync to avoid costly idling locks.
Typically, some parts of CFD or other scientific simulations may include non-deterministic steps, e.g. mathematical optimization often benefits from some randomization for speeding up convergence. Overall this does not change the outcome of the computation because the convergence results is what matters.
It's cooler. Look up "compute server".
Well, do they count CUDA cores as fully-fledged CPU cores ?
Constant retraining in one's field is relatively easy. It would take most developers only a little effort to learn a new programming language, or the latest trend in web-oriented methodologies. Now you may agree that if one moved developers into management, going them to do an MBA is going to require massive efforts and not inconsequential investment from their company. Yet moving a developer into management without this massive retraining is not unlikely to result in a disaster.
Now the teachers in elementary and high schools' expertise is in education, not computer science. This is a massively different field for most people. For a start, even elementary logic does not apply very well to most students. Try to organize a class according to some mathematical principle and watch what happens. We are not talking about a little retraining here.
Given that time is running out on worldwide access to current forms of cheap and relatively safe energy, how can we ensure we have a future as thinking beings, not to mention access to sufficient resources to make the singularity happen? This seems like a hard problem.
One main driver for progress has been access to energy in various forms. It is likely that this trend will continue.
Have you thought of plotting a list of life an human landmark achievement not just vs. time but vs. energy required ?
...and what a nightmare they unleashed upon the world. As an ignorant undergrad student I wrote once an important letter with it, using at least 3 different fonts in a single page. I thought it look good but it didn't have the intended effect. It lacked class and was not professional looking.
Wysiwyg editors let you focus on the appearance instead of the content, and what's more they do not necessarily let you adjust the appearance in a consistent manner. MacWrite certainly didn't have styles. I only learned about various professional compositing software in grad school, including TeX.
Steve Jobs famously took typography courses at college. He should also have taken compositing classes as well, and perhaps we would now have Word with better styles control.
Seriously, what's the worst that can happen? Skynet? Wait...
Frankly the O'Reilly books are a bit passé these days. Look at the state of their C++ or Python books, either totally out of date or a joke. Exhibit A: the 60-page book on Scipy and Numpy, arguably the most important recent topic on Python, the one that makes it a real, pedal-to-the-metal competitor to Matlab.
In this country, many people go without health insurance, because premiums are too high. As a result, people get sick every day but don't go and see their doctor because they can't afford it. The US has the best quality health care in the world! why can't sick people get affordable treatment?
This should really be an easy, high impact problem to solve, right?
Not complete nonsense. Read the controversial story of the article "Manifold Destiny" published on the NYT.
1- Quality selection is 100% in the hands of the editors, who are all academic volunteers. The math journal may sometime provide a web site for entering and managing the reviews (and the reviewers ;-)
2- Math papers are rarely, if ever edited. The reviewers might ask for changes, clarifications, etc, which the authors implement. Eventually they vet or reject the paper, and if accepted, the last version is the one that gets published verbatim.
3- 100% of figures are made by authors.
4- Pleasing layouts are provided by LaTeX. Typesetting is done by the authors. There are now well-accepted LaTeX templates for all math journals. This effort was performed decades ago.