You hit the mark with "children". If you compare childless women to men, the pay gap completely disappears. If sexism were the root cause of the pay gap, it seems like whether or not women had children wouldn't make a difference.
Children are a big distraction from a career if you happen to be the primary care-giver. Of course, women tend to fill that role more often than men. And obviously, childbirth is going to significantly impact a woman's career more than a man.
None of that matters, of course, since logic really has no place in this argument...
Agreed. The authors set up a nearly impossibly complex ethical dilemma that would freeze even a human brain into probable inaction, let alone a computer one, and then claims "See? Because a computer can't guarantee the correct outcome, we can therefore never let a computer make that decision." It seems to be almost the very definition of a straw man to me.
The entire exercise seems to be a deliberate attempt to reach this conclusion, which they helpfully spell out in case anyone missed the not-so-subtle lead: "Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."
I'm in no hurry to turn loose an army of armed robots either, but saying that you can "prove" that an algorithm can't make a fuzzy decision 100% of the time? Well, yeah, no shit. A human sure as hell can't either. But what if the computer can do it far more accurately in 99% of the cases, because it doesn't have all those pesky "I'm fearing for my life and hopped up on adrenaline so I'm going to shoot now and think later" reflexes of a human?
I'm not sure I'd describe a "judgement call" as being non-deterministic. It's really better described as fuzzy logic, and computers do it all the time, such as in spam filters. The difference is that humans have a lifetime of learning and context for them to help make those judgments, where most computer algorithms don't have that extended context to draw from.
I don't see how true randomness has anything to do with these sorts of decision-making processes or with quantum mechanics in general.
I don't think anyone is disputing that hosted online services are both useful and, in some cases, absolutely essential, especially for smaller businesses. Well, maybe some people are, but they're pretty much Luddites, so we can ignore them. It's just that in the rush to push everything to the cloud since that's seen as some sort of panacea, people tend to forget that there are serious consequences to outages, and the more you push services to the cloud, the greater the impact of those outages will be. It's essentially putting all your technological eggs in one basket.
As much as people complain about proprietary file formats, those really don't hold a candle to proprietary services as far as vendor lock-in. If the service you chose, for instance, starts to go south on a regular basis, and you've built your entire ecosystem inside a specific vendor's cloud, you could be in a world of hurt.
That being said, my feeling is that these sorts of system-wide outages are simple part of these services growing pains. Even now, keep in mind that these sorts of large-scale failures are rare enough that they make international headlines. In another five to ten years, it's going to be even rarer still. Otherwise, fewer large players will trust them for critical infrastructure over the long haul. For smallish businesses, even with occasional outages, it's still probably a net win.
I'm afraid I don't have any specific suggestions, but if you want them to get interested in programming, it needs to be an environment that let's them build things that they're already interested in. Generally speaking, that probably means it should be relatively simple to create videogames in the environment you choose. I learned how to program in AppleBASIC on an Apple II+ as a kid, and the very first thing I tried once I reached a basic level of competence was to create a videogame. I've seen this pattern over and over. Even college students seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about final projects if they had the option of creating games - nearly all of them opted to do so.
Modding existing games is a great place to start, because they're already starting out with something they like, and they can see results very quickly. The downside, of course, is that setting up a modding environment is often rather tricky (depends on the game, of course). Other good candidates are things which affect devices in the real world, such as controlling robotics. Lego Mindstorm comes to mind. Seeing real-world reactions from something you programmed is incredibly addictive.
I've long wished there was a quality multi-media / game development engine (2D would be fine) all in one development environment that contained a lot of sample art assets and an integrated language that's simple, robust, and safe. Many modern development environments are often too difficult to set up, unfortunately, and those "all-in-one game development" packages I've seen have been severely lacking in quality. Granted, maybe there are some good ones out there I haven't seen.
The simple answer would be "to learn", of course. Humans are insatiably curious - gathering knowledge even if it's unlikely to benefit us directly.
Besides, I don't mean they wouldn't aim to bring back the species... I meant that I don't believe that scientists would simply dump it back into the wild without fully understanding what the impact would be.
After doing a bit of research, I actually found that they have a home waiting for them, should the species actually be brought back. It's an enclosed nature reserve in Siberia designed as something of a large-scale laboratory, with the intent of recreating the northern subarctic steppe grassland ecosystem during the last ice age. I'd wager that this place or similar parks would be the likely home of any initial populations, and would remain so until their effects on existing ecosystems could be studied in great detail.
Rabbits, weeds, insects, and velociraptors can easily get out of hand. Giant, slow-breeding mammals are easily culled if needed. We've nearly wiped out entire species of large mammals before because of over-hunting. The dangers of them over-populating are probably about the same as the danger of modern elephants over-populating. That is, extremely low.
Besides which, we've learned plenty of painful lessons about the dangers of releasing new animals into new territories. I don't think anyone (well, anyone in a position to actually do so) is foolish to enough suggest we just fling open the Canadian ranges or Siberian wilderness to herds of wooly mammoths.
Was anyone seriously considering releasing them into the wild, though? That's not at all what I had in mind certainly. We well understand the danger of transplanting species at this point - I learned about feral pigs destroying Hawaii's rainforests many years ago. My parents live on a small lake, and the homeowners there have to battle foreign weeds annually that threaten to swallow up everything else. Yeah, many people, especially scientists, now well understand the dangers of throwing new species into a region, because they've seen the damages caused by that first-hand.
So, no, I doubt anyone's foolish enough to do something as reckless as that. If they do start creating these animals, of course, they'd better have a plan for what to do with them. I don't think it would be impossible to create a closed-off reserve for them, in which we can make a long term study about how they might interact with the surrounding environment. I still think that would be fascinating.
The Cryptlocker guys, unfortunately, did a near perfect job implementing their ransom-ware and command/control net. Both the US Justice Dept and Interpol did go after them, and ultimately took down the Zeus botnet controlling the malware, even getting back all the keys for the encrypted files. Don't think for a second that the Justice Dept wouldn't have loved to catch those guys and splash it all over the front page if they could have, though.
I don't buy the conspiracy theories. You can bet the feds are still trying to track Cryptolocker guys with considerable zeal, given how much damage that software caused. I think they just hid their tracks better than the Silk Road operators.
I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical? That nature had her shot and declared these animals unfit for habitation on the earth, perhaps? That this could open the door to more widespread tampering with genetics? We interfere with the "natural order" all the time, most especially when it comes to our own comfort and survival. I'm sort of curious why people would suddenly start worrying about bringing extinct animals back to life. I'll admit I haven't given this a lot of thought yet, but my initial reaction is that it seems like a fascinating opportunity if we can pull it off.
Maybe someone that opposes this on ethical grounds could enlighten me.
The exact boundary line is subjective, but it's not exactly difficult to just play it safe, especially when you're talking to the press or meeting with the public. Professional adults don't intentionally push against those sorts of boundaries unless they're trying to call attention to themselves, because it can do nothing but distract from what they're actually trying to convey. And that's exactly what happened here.
I feel a little bad for this guy, because he probably has never been to a business meeting in his life where such attire would be equally inappropriate, and probably got blindsided by this. Someone should have really given him some advice that what he was wearing wasn't appropriate, and to throw on a jacket or something.
I saw nothing in those links that indicates the military prefers this sort of communication to normal fiber for their US landlocked bases. I'd guess the military probably values that technology for places in which laying down permanent fiber isn't an option. For instance, when a war breaks out, there's a need to set up all sorts of bases and command headquarters in completely unpredictable or currently inaccessible places. Moreover, a laser beam can't as easily be disrupted by enemy ground forces or by bombardment. I'd bet this also has applications for ship-to-ship communications, or maybe ground to air drone as well.
I loved that episode, and I also loved the Enemy Mine movie. It's been a long time since I watched either of those - I have no idea how well they'd stand up today. I think I won't chance it, since my memories are great... probably much better than the reality.
The reboot ended up worse than the original, at least for me. The human characters were so unlikeable I started rooting for the cylons. And the moment the show started getting seriously pseudo-mystical/quasi-religious was the moment I dropped it. The original show would have been fantastic if it had just taken itself just a bit more seriously and dropped most of the cheese. The reboot seemed to take itself too seriously. Or at least, tried to be "deeper" than it really needed to be.
Don't get me wrong, the actors did a fantastic job, the cinematography was brilliant, and some of the early episodes were amazing... I just disliked the overall direction of the series. No skin off my nose if others liked it though.
I broke myself of the habit of running many of my desktop applications fullscreen, especially web viewing, since it's pointless. It's frustrating, but it's really web developers fault for insisting on presenting information in a narrow column format. Fixed or maximum width pages drive me bonkers. To this day, most (all?) standard WordPress layouts, for instance, have a maximum width far short of a standard monitor width Why, for heaven's sake? HTML is infinitely malleable in it's native form.
The move to widescreen is certainly a nod to entertainment software, since it's much more suited to playing movies / TV shows and playing videogames in that wide view. It's also really useful in the rarer types of software that edit data in horizontal tracks, such as music sequencers or video editors.
Unfortunately, it's far less useful to those working primarily with text or other largely vertically oriented documents (like programmers). I suspect that's actually *most* computer users, especially business users. However, I also suspect that since resolutions have largely reached a "good enough" state, not a lot of people complain too much about wasted horizontal space in most of their day-to-day tasks. Instead, like me, they probably just use the space to shuffle other windows around.
If you do nothing but write code or work on other vertical documents, then of course you can always tilt that widescreen 90 degrees and get a massive amount of vertical space. Most people don't do this because they still on occasion make use of that widescreen aspect, playing the occasional video or videogame which sort of demands a horizontal aspect ratio.
Yes, we technically don't need to pay off our debt. That doesn't mean there isn't a practical limit to how much we can actually be indebted without destroying our economy. Nor does it mean it's actually healthy to stay in perpetual debt to the extent we are now. We're currently largely staying afloat only thanks to China buying up massive numbers of US bonds. Consider the ramifications of that very carefully.
We do have to pay off bonds when they come due, and we pay those bonds off with new bonds. Or printing money, which, yes, shrinks the debt, but it also shrinks the purchasing power of every other dollar out in circulation. And when you say "inflation shrinks the debt", what you are actually saying is that inflation reduces the return for people who invested in US Bonds, not to mention every other US-based investment. The reason it helps your mortgage is because you're actually paying the thing off. But the US is financing it's debt with new debt, so it gets hurt by higher inflation since that pushes up interest rates, the same as if you were refinancing your house every five years.
It's not the debt that's the root of the problem, although that's bad enough. It's the near-perpetual deficit spending. To stop doing that, we need to either raise taxes, cut spending, or both. None of our politicians have the political will do it, because everyone understands it's going to cause a lot of short term pain when we do, and no one wants to take the political hit for that.
Speaking of AAA... we lost our AAA credit rating in 2011, and it's been downgraded at least once since then, if I recall. We're still the largest economy (measuring GDP) by a good margin, but we really need to manage our debt better, or it may not stay that way. People seem to think we have some special magic that allows us to ignore the laws of economics that seem to apply to everyone else.
I can probably make some educated guesses about what may have transpired, at least from the performance side, since I've done engine-side programming for AAA games in the past.
Unless you're working with an established and already-polished game engine, all the art content for a game of this size has to be built far in advance of when the engine is fully ready to render it at full efficiency. By it's very nature, optimization is something that has to occur near the end of development for a game, since there's no way to optimize game features until they're largely finished and can approach performance issues holistically. The hardest thing about that is you have to make a very early prediction about how much your game will be able to render. It's extremely time-consuming to fix if it turns out your engine simply can't cope with the amount of artwork or game content it's being asked to process, as that artwork and game content has been in the pipeline for years.
The kicker is that you can't really know for sure what the bottlenecks are exactly and how you can improve on them before you begin the investigation and optimization process, nor can you really predict with 100% certainty how effective your efforts will be, or how long it will take. This is why the recommended specs on boxes are often, at best, simply guesses that are made by the engine developers many months in advance of the title's ship date, and are a reflection of how well they *think* they can get the game engine working. Of course, in other cases, it's managerial wishful thinking, trying to sucker people with lower-end systems into purchasing the game. To me, it seems entirely likely that the programmers either overestimated how much they could optimize the engine / game code or the artists went far beyond their established budgets. Maybe both. Management compounded this issue by not giving the development team time enough to fix the problems.
None of this excuses them in the least, of course, especially on consoles with immutable, fixed hardware to test on. They should have owned up a many months ago and let people know the game wouldn't be ready, because there's zero chance they didn't know about all these problems. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of pressure put on programmers to simply try to patch up the game as best they can given the current time left in the schedule, rather than re-assessing realistically how much time they *actually* need to fix the game, because, you know, money. Instead, I'd imagine that those guys were crunching for many months before the game shipped, and they're still crunching away with insane hours, trying to fix all those bugs. It probably ending up being counter-productive too, because, at least in my case, the quality of my code dropped rather dramatically when I was exhausted.
It's pretty difficult to really know what's going on inside a company. For any game we released, I always saw lots of fan speculation about what was going on, and more often than not, it was well off the mark. So definitely take any speculation, including mine, with a grain of salt. What's absolutely inescapable, though, is that Ubisoft management is ultimately responsible for the go/no-go ship decision, and decided that they didn't care enough about their customers or their reputation to bother getting their game polished to an acceptable standard before launch.
I haven't bought an Ubisoft game since they started on this ridiculous anti-consumer DRM campaign, and this makes me really glad I'm still staying the hell away from them. Yeah, I'd probably have enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series, but there are plenty of game companies that don't piss all over their customers, and they'll be getting my dollars instead.
I think they're doing this precisely because they want to head off government regulation, most likely because they fear government regulation would be much stricter than what they are imposing on themselves via this document. It's probably the same reason why industries like movies and videogames set up their own rating systems. If they waited for the government to do it, it might be worse than than what they came up with themselves - at least from their perspective.
Obviously, those companies are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but likely because they see privacy as a potential hot-button consumer issue in the future, and would like to preempt the discussion if at all possible with this document. If they can self-regulate themselves reasonably well, fine. If not, we can go the legislation and regulation route.
All I'm saying here is that it would be foolish of them to thumb their noses at their customers and piss them off, because they're more likely to either lose sales or get burdened with more regulation via the government that way, as has happened so often before. One would like to think they could eventually learn from decades of mistakes and stay ahead of the curve for once. Maybe some people think of me as naive for thinking a company would use privacy as a selling point, but I'd say there's at least one example to point to recently.
You underestimate management's inability to look critically at itself as the cause of employee unhappiness. The workers damn well know it. This report is simply to clue in management.
From someone who knows little about the Go language (I just read up on Wikipedia a bit just now), could someone fill me in on what particular niche Go fills? Is it essentially a haven for people who dislike C++ (apparently the view of the language authors) but think C is too dangerous / archaic? What does it do that D doesn't, for example. Or maybe it's better to ask what it does better than D?
Also, now that C++ is moving forward much faster with language evolution (C++11/14 have modernized the language significantly with many advanced features), is Go still as relevant as it was five years ago? For instance, you say "no more fumbling around with memory allocation", but that describes my experience with C++ for years now, since smart pointers have been standardized. Then again, in C++, you need to discipline yourself to use the language appropriately, because you can do many awful things that are perfectly legal, language-wise.
Programmers love inventing languages (it's like a rite of passage, I think), but achieving significant and sustained adoption of your new language is always the tricky part. It's not just good enough to be better than language x. You have to provide so much more value that it overcomes existing inertia, which is pretty substantial in the world of C and C++.
It's easy to be cynical and simply dismiss this as rubbish. Sure, most of this may be PR driven, but the fact is that ALL of the major automakers signed off on this document, and if any of them break their promise, it's also going to be a lot of PR damage for them. That equates into actual lost sales, if the damage is bad enough or sustained enough. Consumers are getting more and more privacy conscious, thanks in large part, no doubt, to some of our governments three-letter agencies.
Here's the good news, and why we may be able to give automakers the benefit of the doubt until we spot evidence to the contrary: it's important to look at revenue models for companies when dealing with privacy and data issues. One of the big problems with Google and Facebook is that they have no product to sell other than your data. As such, you're never going to see much in the way of consumer privacy protection from these companies... ever. It's just not really possible. ISPs have plenty of revenue sources, but are generally in a non-competitive environment. As such, they've seen fit to track users for their browsing habits simply for the extra revenue, consumer privacy be damned. They can well afford to screw over their customers with high prices and horrible service, and there's little that people can do about it because there's often no real choice in providers for a given area.
Auto-makers, on the other hand, are in a competitive market. Moreover, they're selling a high-value product for an actual profit. If an automaker decides to play fast and loose with the terms of this promise, people are likely to notice, and simply choose a make of car next time with a company they feel won't renege on their promises. Fortunately, there are plenty of carmakers to choose from. There's also a wide range of price points and features to choose from. You don't sell luxury goods by crapping all over on your customers - at least, not for the long haul.
Most corporations are more than willing to write off a few of it's customers, although thanks to the internet, that's become more and more risky. However, in a competitive market, few corporations will screw over ALL of their customers, or they'll risk damaging their brand and risking market share. That's why they'll almost always back down when confronted with really bad PR.
I never understood how people could be afraid of thunderstorms until I moved to the midwest for a brief time and saw (and heard) a *real* thunderstorm. There's really no comparison between those storms and anything else I've seen. The midwest has some crazy weather, including the occasional green sky during a storm, which I happen to witness once while driving home from work. On that same drive I saw a lighting bolt hit right on the side of the road, practically blinding me, and scaring the bejezus out of me with the noise. Yeesh.
My first and only tornado experience was on a very stormy and rainy night. Sirens started blaring, sounding exactly like air-raid sirens from WWII. It was actually the first time I had heard one in person. Okay, so tornado warning sirens are sounding off, but what the hell am I supposed to do? It was the middle of the night, and I lived by myself in a 2nd floor apartment. Should I climb in my bathtub or something? I settled for watched the live storm coverage on TV for the next few hours to see if a tornado was touching down anywhere near me, and didn't get to sleep until the sirens stopped wailing in the wee hours of the morning.
You guys that live out there on the plains, feel free to chuckle, but yeah, that was a bit unnerving for someone who hadn't grown up with that sort of weather.
Very informative again, thanks. What's really fascinating is that, with the benefit of these high-level explanations (which the researchers take for granted that the other professionals well understand this already - they just hint at it here and there), you can really see that process in action using the various visualization techniques employed, such as the visualization of air flow from specific points in front of the structure, or the visualization of the positively versus negatively buoyant air. I can completely see how some people could essentially dedicate their lives to better understanding these phenomenon.
I'd also be interested to learn more about the hardware they used to model this (apparently using the Blue Waters supercomputer), and the process of programming the simulation itself. Alas, work beckons, so no more distractions for me. I have my own programming tasks to get done.
Thanks, that helped give the terms and overall presentation some context. Of course, most of it still went way above my head as one might expect, since this is for consumption by specialists in the field and not laypersons like us. Fascinating stuff even so.
All programmers and engineers should watch this video, and remember that when they talk to average people about computers in any sort of depth, this is how you sound to them as well.
IMO, over-specialization was the reason the PlayStation 3 and it's Cell processors never really lived up to their potential. While they were amazing at crunching raw numbers in highly-serialized batches (they were originally designed for video processing, remember), they're not really so great at processing the type of wildly diverse data and tasks that videogames typically require. These processors were simply designed for the wrong types of tasks - too specialized, essentially. In this case, the arguably weaker but more general-purpose-task-friendly CPUs of the Xbox 360 could tend to execute equivalent tasks with far less porting or rewriting work on the programmer's part. One of the dangers of creating more narrowly-focused CPUs is that if you miss the mark, you may end up performing no better or even worse than a less focused processor.
In the end, it's a bit of chicken-and-egg, I suppose. C was intentionally designed to be extremely efficient on "general-purpose" processors of the time, and processor developers today create optimizations specifically for large programs written in C/C++ (or more precisely, for the patterns of machine language generated by C/C++ compilers), because that's what the most CPU-intensive large programs are written in today. On the other hand, it's harder to think of practical optimizations other than rather obvious things such as large, on-CPU caches (because physics), which tends to favor programs written with that specific paradigm in mind, especially not without sacrificing current speeds for the existing computing paradigms.
A language that is not largely cache-coherent, for example, is going to be working against most CPU architectures found in widespread deployment, and I don't think that's a coincidence - my guess is that efficiently predicting code and data to reduce memory latency is a really tricky problem to solve in practice, even if theoretical solutions may exist. As such, certain languages may simply have a big leg up here in terms of efficiency. Note, by the way, that cache-coherency isn't an inherent property of C (and many C++ constructs actively discourage good cache coherency) - it's just *possible* to write cache-friendly code, whereas in many languages it's largely impossible, or at least highly impractical.
In the broader sense, you're correct of course that there's really no such thing as a "general-purpose processor", because there will always be design biases. Still, I think you're going to lose the semantic battle there. In my earlier example, I described the Xbox 360's processors as being "general purpose", but what I really meant, of course, was "able to execute arbitrary compiled C++ game code reasonably efficiently". When describing anything as "general purpose", there's always a slight assumption about what the "typical" purpose will be, even if left unstated. In other words, from an academic viewpoint, I think you're mostly correct, but are probably not going to get much traction in your arguments because of sheer inertia in the industry that heavily favors C/C++ as systems languages.
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You hit the mark with "children". If you compare childless women to men, the pay gap completely disappears. If sexism were the root cause of the pay gap, it seems like whether or not women had children wouldn't make a difference.
Children are a big distraction from a career if you happen to be the primary care-giver. Of course, women tend to fill that role more often than men. And obviously, childbirth is going to significantly impact a woman's career more than a man.
None of that matters, of course, since logic really has no place in this argument...
Agreed. The authors set up a nearly impossibly complex ethical dilemma that would freeze even a human brain into probable inaction, let alone a computer one, and then claims "See? Because a computer can't guarantee the correct outcome, we can therefore never let a computer make that decision." It seems to be almost the very definition of a straw man to me.
The entire exercise seems to be a deliberate attempt to reach this conclusion, which they helpfully spell out in case anyone missed the not-so-subtle lead: "Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans."
I'm in no hurry to turn loose an army of armed robots either, but saying that you can "prove" that an algorithm can't make a fuzzy decision 100% of the time? Well, yeah, no shit. A human sure as hell can't either. But what if the computer can do it far more accurately in 99% of the cases, because it doesn't have all those pesky "I'm fearing for my life and hopped up on adrenaline so I'm going to shoot now and think later" reflexes of a human?
I'm not sure I'd describe a "judgement call" as being non-deterministic. It's really better described as fuzzy logic, and computers do it all the time, such as in spam filters. The difference is that humans have a lifetime of learning and context for them to help make those judgments, where most computer algorithms don't have that extended context to draw from.
I don't see how true randomness has anything to do with these sorts of decision-making processes or with quantum mechanics in general.
I don't think anyone is disputing that hosted online services are both useful and, in some cases, absolutely essential, especially for smaller businesses. Well, maybe some people are, but they're pretty much Luddites, so we can ignore them. It's just that in the rush to push everything to the cloud since that's seen as some sort of panacea, people tend to forget that there are serious consequences to outages, and the more you push services to the cloud, the greater the impact of those outages will be. It's essentially putting all your technological eggs in one basket.
As much as people complain about proprietary file formats, those really don't hold a candle to proprietary services as far as vendor lock-in. If the service you chose, for instance, starts to go south on a regular basis, and you've built your entire ecosystem inside a specific vendor's cloud, you could be in a world of hurt.
That being said, my feeling is that these sorts of system-wide outages are simple part of these services growing pains. Even now, keep in mind that these sorts of large-scale failures are rare enough that they make international headlines. In another five to ten years, it's going to be even rarer still. Otherwise, fewer large players will trust them for critical infrastructure over the long haul. For smallish businesses, even with occasional outages, it's still probably a net win.
I'm afraid I don't have any specific suggestions, but if you want them to get interested in programming, it needs to be an environment that let's them build things that they're already interested in. Generally speaking, that probably means it should be relatively simple to create videogames in the environment you choose. I learned how to program in AppleBASIC on an Apple II+ as a kid, and the very first thing I tried once I reached a basic level of competence was to create a videogame. I've seen this pattern over and over. Even college students seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic about final projects if they had the option of creating games - nearly all of them opted to do so.
Modding existing games is a great place to start, because they're already starting out with something they like, and they can see results very quickly. The downside, of course, is that setting up a modding environment is often rather tricky (depends on the game, of course). Other good candidates are things which affect devices in the real world, such as controlling robotics. Lego Mindstorm comes to mind. Seeing real-world reactions from something you programmed is incredibly addictive.
I've long wished there was a quality multi-media / game development engine (2D would be fine) all in one development environment that contained a lot of sample art assets and an integrated language that's simple, robust, and safe. Many modern development environments are often too difficult to set up, unfortunately, and those "all-in-one game development" packages I've seen have been severely lacking in quality. Granted, maybe there are some good ones out there I haven't seen.
The simple answer would be "to learn", of course. Humans are insatiably curious - gathering knowledge even if it's unlikely to benefit us directly.
Besides, I don't mean they wouldn't aim to bring back the species... I meant that I don't believe that scientists would simply dump it back into the wild without fully understanding what the impact would be.
After doing a bit of research, I actually found that they have a home waiting for them, should the species actually be brought back. It's an enclosed nature reserve in Siberia designed as something of a large-scale laboratory, with the intent of recreating the northern subarctic steppe grassland ecosystem during the last ice age. I'd wager that this place or similar parks would be the likely home of any initial populations, and would remain so until their effects on existing ecosystems could be studied in great detail.
Rabbits, weeds, insects, and velociraptors can easily get out of hand. Giant, slow-breeding mammals are easily culled if needed. We've nearly wiped out entire species of large mammals before because of over-hunting. The dangers of them over-populating are probably about the same as the danger of modern elephants over-populating. That is, extremely low.
Besides which, we've learned plenty of painful lessons about the dangers of releasing new animals into new territories. I don't think anyone (well, anyone in a position to actually do so) is foolish to enough suggest we just fling open the Canadian ranges or Siberian wilderness to herds of wooly mammoths.
Was anyone seriously considering releasing them into the wild, though? That's not at all what I had in mind certainly. We well understand the danger of transplanting species at this point - I learned about feral pigs destroying Hawaii's rainforests many years ago. My parents live on a small lake, and the homeowners there have to battle foreign weeds annually that threaten to swallow up everything else. Yeah, many people, especially scientists, now well understand the dangers of throwing new species into a region, because they've seen the damages caused by that first-hand.
So, no, I doubt anyone's foolish enough to do something as reckless as that. If they do start creating these animals, of course, they'd better have a plan for what to do with them. I don't think it would be impossible to create a closed-off reserve for them, in which we can make a long term study about how they might interact with the surrounding environment. I still think that would be fascinating.
The Cryptlocker guys, unfortunately, did a near perfect job implementing their ransom-ware and command/control net. Both the US Justice Dept and Interpol did go after them, and ultimately took down the Zeus botnet controlling the malware, even getting back all the keys for the encrypted files. Don't think for a second that the Justice Dept wouldn't have loved to catch those guys and splash it all over the front page if they could have, though.
I don't buy the conspiracy theories. You can bet the feds are still trying to track Cryptolocker guys with considerable zeal, given how much damage that software caused. I think they just hid their tracks better than the Silk Road operators.
I'm curious about why one would consider this unethical? That nature had her shot and declared these animals unfit for habitation on the earth, perhaps? That this could open the door to more widespread tampering with genetics? We interfere with the "natural order" all the time, most especially when it comes to our own comfort and survival. I'm sort of curious why people would suddenly start worrying about bringing extinct animals back to life. I'll admit I haven't given this a lot of thought yet, but my initial reaction is that it seems like a fascinating opportunity if we can pull it off.
Maybe someone that opposes this on ethical grounds could enlighten me.
The exact boundary line is subjective, but it's not exactly difficult to just play it safe, especially when you're talking to the press or meeting with the public. Professional adults don't intentionally push against those sorts of boundaries unless they're trying to call attention to themselves, because it can do nothing but distract from what they're actually trying to convey. And that's exactly what happened here.
I feel a little bad for this guy, because he probably has never been to a business meeting in his life where such attire would be equally inappropriate, and probably got blindsided by this. Someone should have really given him some advice that what he was wearing wasn't appropriate, and to throw on a jacket or something.
I saw nothing in those links that indicates the military prefers this sort of communication to normal fiber for their US landlocked bases. I'd guess the military probably values that technology for places in which laying down permanent fiber isn't an option. For instance, when a war breaks out, there's a need to set up all sorts of bases and command headquarters in completely unpredictable or currently inaccessible places. Moreover, a laser beam can't as easily be disrupted by enemy ground forces or by bombardment. I'd bet this also has applications for ship-to-ship communications, or maybe ground to air drone as well.
I loved that episode, and I also loved the Enemy Mine movie. It's been a long time since I watched either of those - I have no idea how well they'd stand up today. I think I won't chance it, since my memories are great... probably much better than the reality.
The reboot ended up worse than the original, at least for me. The human characters were so unlikeable I started rooting for the cylons. And the moment the show started getting seriously pseudo-mystical/quasi-religious was the moment I dropped it. The original show would have been fantastic if it had just taken itself just a bit more seriously and dropped most of the cheese. The reboot seemed to take itself too seriously. Or at least, tried to be "deeper" than it really needed to be.
Don't get me wrong, the actors did a fantastic job, the cinematography was brilliant, and some of the early episodes were amazing... I just disliked the overall direction of the series. No skin off my nose if others liked it though.
I broke myself of the habit of running many of my desktop applications fullscreen, especially web viewing, since it's pointless. It's frustrating, but it's really web developers fault for insisting on presenting information in a narrow column format. Fixed or maximum width pages drive me bonkers. To this day, most (all?) standard WordPress layouts, for instance, have a maximum width far short of a standard monitor width Why, for heaven's sake? HTML is infinitely malleable in it's native form.
The move to widescreen is certainly a nod to entertainment software, since it's much more suited to playing movies / TV shows and playing videogames in that wide view. It's also really useful in the rarer types of software that edit data in horizontal tracks, such as music sequencers or video editors.
Unfortunately, it's far less useful to those working primarily with text or other largely vertically oriented documents (like programmers). I suspect that's actually *most* computer users, especially business users. However, I also suspect that since resolutions have largely reached a "good enough" state, not a lot of people complain too much about wasted horizontal space in most of their day-to-day tasks. Instead, like me, they probably just use the space to shuffle other windows around.
If you do nothing but write code or work on other vertical documents, then of course you can always tilt that widescreen 90 degrees and get a massive amount of vertical space. Most people don't do this because they still on occasion make use of that widescreen aspect, playing the occasional video or videogame which sort of demands a horizontal aspect ratio.
Yes, we technically don't need to pay off our debt. That doesn't mean there isn't a practical limit to how much we can actually be indebted without destroying our economy. Nor does it mean it's actually healthy to stay in perpetual debt to the extent we are now. We're currently largely staying afloat only thanks to China buying up massive numbers of US bonds. Consider the ramifications of that very carefully.
We do have to pay off bonds when they come due, and we pay those bonds off with new bonds. Or printing money, which, yes, shrinks the debt, but it also shrinks the purchasing power of every other dollar out in circulation. And when you say "inflation shrinks the debt", what you are actually saying is that inflation reduces the return for people who invested in US Bonds, not to mention every other US-based investment. The reason it helps your mortgage is because you're actually paying the thing off. But the US is financing it's debt with new debt, so it gets hurt by higher inflation since that pushes up interest rates, the same as if you were refinancing your house every five years.
It's not the debt that's the root of the problem, although that's bad enough. It's the near-perpetual deficit spending. To stop doing that, we need to either raise taxes, cut spending, or both. None of our politicians have the political will do it, because everyone understands it's going to cause a lot of short term pain when we do, and no one wants to take the political hit for that.
Speaking of AAA... we lost our AAA credit rating in 2011, and it's been downgraded at least once since then, if I recall. We're still the largest economy (measuring GDP) by a good margin, but we really need to manage our debt better, or it may not stay that way. People seem to think we have some special magic that allows us to ignore the laws of economics that seem to apply to everyone else.
I can probably make some educated guesses about what may have transpired, at least from the performance side, since I've done engine-side programming for AAA games in the past.
Unless you're working with an established and already-polished game engine, all the art content for a game of this size has to be built far in advance of when the engine is fully ready to render it at full efficiency. By it's very nature, optimization is something that has to occur near the end of development for a game, since there's no way to optimize game features until they're largely finished and can approach performance issues holistically. The hardest thing about that is you have to make a very early prediction about how much your game will be able to render. It's extremely time-consuming to fix if it turns out your engine simply can't cope with the amount of artwork or game content it's being asked to process, as that artwork and game content has been in the pipeline for years.
The kicker is that you can't really know for sure what the bottlenecks are exactly and how you can improve on them before you begin the investigation and optimization process, nor can you really predict with 100% certainty how effective your efforts will be, or how long it will take. This is why the recommended specs on boxes are often, at best, simply guesses that are made by the engine developers many months in advance of the title's ship date, and are a reflection of how well they *think* they can get the game engine working. Of course, in other cases, it's managerial wishful thinking, trying to sucker people with lower-end systems into purchasing the game. To me, it seems entirely likely that the programmers either overestimated how much they could optimize the engine / game code or the artists went far beyond their established budgets. Maybe both. Management compounded this issue by not giving the development team time enough to fix the problems.
None of this excuses them in the least, of course, especially on consoles with immutable, fixed hardware to test on. They should have owned up a many months ago and let people know the game wouldn't be ready, because there's zero chance they didn't know about all these problems. Unfortunately, there's a great deal of pressure put on programmers to simply try to patch up the game as best they can given the current time left in the schedule, rather than re-assessing realistically how much time they *actually* need to fix the game, because, you know, money. Instead, I'd imagine that those guys were crunching for many months before the game shipped, and they're still crunching away with insane hours, trying to fix all those bugs. It probably ending up being counter-productive too, because, at least in my case, the quality of my code dropped rather dramatically when I was exhausted.
It's pretty difficult to really know what's going on inside a company. For any game we released, I always saw lots of fan speculation about what was going on, and more often than not, it was well off the mark. So definitely take any speculation, including mine, with a grain of salt. What's absolutely inescapable, though, is that Ubisoft management is ultimately responsible for the go/no-go ship decision, and decided that they didn't care enough about their customers or their reputation to bother getting their game polished to an acceptable standard before launch.
I haven't bought an Ubisoft game since they started on this ridiculous anti-consumer DRM campaign, and this makes me really glad I'm still staying the hell away from them. Yeah, I'd probably have enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series, but there are plenty of game companies that don't piss all over their customers, and they'll be getting my dollars instead.
I think they're doing this precisely because they want to head off government regulation, most likely because they fear government regulation would be much stricter than what they are imposing on themselves via this document. It's probably the same reason why industries like movies and videogames set up their own rating systems. If they waited for the government to do it, it might be worse than than what they came up with themselves - at least from their perspective.
Obviously, those companies are not doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, but likely because they see privacy as a potential hot-button consumer issue in the future, and would like to preempt the discussion if at all possible with this document. If they can self-regulate themselves reasonably well, fine. If not, we can go the legislation and regulation route.
All I'm saying here is that it would be foolish of them to thumb their noses at their customers and piss them off, because they're more likely to either lose sales or get burdened with more regulation via the government that way, as has happened so often before. One would like to think they could eventually learn from decades of mistakes and stay ahead of the curve for once. Maybe some people think of me as naive for thinking a company would use privacy as a selling point, but I'd say there's at least one example to point to recently.
You underestimate management's inability to look critically at itself as the cause of employee unhappiness. The workers damn well know it. This report is simply to clue in management.
From someone who knows little about the Go language (I just read up on Wikipedia a bit just now), could someone fill me in on what particular niche Go fills? Is it essentially a haven for people who dislike C++ (apparently the view of the language authors) but think C is too dangerous / archaic? What does it do that D doesn't, for example. Or maybe it's better to ask what it does better than D?
Also, now that C++ is moving forward much faster with language evolution (C++11/14 have modernized the language significantly with many advanced features), is Go still as relevant as it was five years ago? For instance, you say "no more fumbling around with memory allocation", but that describes my experience with C++ for years now, since smart pointers have been standardized. Then again, in C++, you need to discipline yourself to use the language appropriately, because you can do many awful things that are perfectly legal, language-wise.
Programmers love inventing languages (it's like a rite of passage, I think), but achieving significant and sustained adoption of your new language is always the tricky part. It's not just good enough to be better than language x. You have to provide so much more value that it overcomes existing inertia, which is pretty substantial in the world of C and C++.
It's easy to be cynical and simply dismiss this as rubbish. Sure, most of this may be PR driven, but the fact is that ALL of the major automakers signed off on this document, and if any of them break their promise, it's also going to be a lot of PR damage for them. That equates into actual lost sales, if the damage is bad enough or sustained enough. Consumers are getting more and more privacy conscious, thanks in large part, no doubt, to some of our governments three-letter agencies.
Here's the good news, and why we may be able to give automakers the benefit of the doubt until we spot evidence to the contrary: it's important to look at revenue models for companies when dealing with privacy and data issues. One of the big problems with Google and Facebook is that they have no product to sell other than your data. As such, you're never going to see much in the way of consumer privacy protection from these companies... ever. It's just not really possible. ISPs have plenty of revenue sources, but are generally in a non-competitive environment. As such, they've seen fit to track users for their browsing habits simply for the extra revenue, consumer privacy be damned. They can well afford to screw over their customers with high prices and horrible service, and there's little that people can do about it because there's often no real choice in providers for a given area.
Auto-makers, on the other hand, are in a competitive market. Moreover, they're selling a high-value product for an actual profit. If an automaker decides to play fast and loose with the terms of this promise, people are likely to notice, and simply choose a make of car next time with a company they feel won't renege on their promises. Fortunately, there are plenty of carmakers to choose from. There's also a wide range of price points and features to choose from. You don't sell luxury goods by crapping all over on your customers - at least, not for the long haul.
Most corporations are more than willing to write off a few of it's customers, although thanks to the internet, that's become more and more risky. However, in a competitive market, few corporations will screw over ALL of their customers, or they'll risk damaging their brand and risking market share. That's why they'll almost always back down when confronted with really bad PR.
I never understood how people could be afraid of thunderstorms until I moved to the midwest for a brief time and saw (and heard) a *real* thunderstorm. There's really no comparison between those storms and anything else I've seen. The midwest has some crazy weather, including the occasional green sky during a storm, which I happen to witness once while driving home from work. On that same drive I saw a lighting bolt hit right on the side of the road, practically blinding me, and scaring the bejezus out of me with the noise. Yeesh.
My first and only tornado experience was on a very stormy and rainy night. Sirens started blaring, sounding exactly like air-raid sirens from WWII. It was actually the first time I had heard one in person. Okay, so tornado warning sirens are sounding off, but what the hell am I supposed to do? It was the middle of the night, and I lived by myself in a 2nd floor apartment. Should I climb in my bathtub or something? I settled for watched the live storm coverage on TV for the next few hours to see if a tornado was touching down anywhere near me, and didn't get to sleep until the sirens stopped wailing in the wee hours of the morning.
You guys that live out there on the plains, feel free to chuckle, but yeah, that was a bit unnerving for someone who hadn't grown up with that sort of weather.
Very informative again, thanks. What's really fascinating is that, with the benefit of these high-level explanations (which the researchers take for granted that the other professionals well understand this already - they just hint at it here and there), you can really see that process in action using the various visualization techniques employed, such as the visualization of air flow from specific points in front of the structure, or the visualization of the positively versus negatively buoyant air. I can completely see how some people could essentially dedicate their lives to better understanding these phenomenon.
I'd also be interested to learn more about the hardware they used to model this (apparently using the Blue Waters supercomputer), and the process of programming the simulation itself. Alas, work beckons, so no more distractions for me. I have my own programming tasks to get done.
Thanks, that helped give the terms and overall presentation some context. Of course, most of it still went way above my head as one might expect, since this is for consumption by specialists in the field and not laypersons like us. Fascinating stuff even so.
All programmers and engineers should watch this video, and remember that when they talk to average people about computers in any sort of depth, this is how you sound to them as well.
Interesting article.
IMO, over-specialization was the reason the PlayStation 3 and it's Cell processors never really lived up to their potential. While they were amazing at crunching raw numbers in highly-serialized batches (they were originally designed for video processing, remember), they're not really so great at processing the type of wildly diverse data and tasks that videogames typically require. These processors were simply designed for the wrong types of tasks - too specialized, essentially. In this case, the arguably weaker but more general-purpose-task-friendly CPUs of the Xbox 360 could tend to execute equivalent tasks with far less porting or rewriting work on the programmer's part. One of the dangers of creating more narrowly-focused CPUs is that if you miss the mark, you may end up performing no better or even worse than a less focused processor.
In the end, it's a bit of chicken-and-egg, I suppose. C was intentionally designed to be extremely efficient on "general-purpose" processors of the time, and processor developers today create optimizations specifically for large programs written in C/C++ (or more precisely, for the patterns of machine language generated by C/C++ compilers), because that's what the most CPU-intensive large programs are written in today. On the other hand, it's harder to think of practical optimizations other than rather obvious things such as large, on-CPU caches (because physics), which tends to favor programs written with that specific paradigm in mind, especially not without sacrificing current speeds for the existing computing paradigms.
A language that is not largely cache-coherent, for example, is going to be working against most CPU architectures found in widespread deployment, and I don't think that's a coincidence - my guess is that efficiently predicting code and data to reduce memory latency is a really tricky problem to solve in practice, even if theoretical solutions may exist. As such, certain languages may simply have a big leg up here in terms of efficiency. Note, by the way, that cache-coherency isn't an inherent property of C (and many C++ constructs actively discourage good cache coherency) - it's just *possible* to write cache-friendly code, whereas in many languages it's largely impossible, or at least highly impractical.
In the broader sense, you're correct of course that there's really no such thing as a "general-purpose processor", because there will always be design biases. Still, I think you're going to lose the semantic battle there. In my earlier example, I described the Xbox 360's processors as being "general purpose", but what I really meant, of course, was "able to execute arbitrary compiled C++ game code reasonably efficiently". When describing anything as "general purpose", there's always a slight assumption about what the "typical" purpose will be, even if left unstated. In other words, from an academic viewpoint, I think you're mostly correct, but are probably not going to get much traction in your arguments because of sheer inertia in the industry that heavily favors C/C++ as systems languages.