The CUDA cuBLAS library the above poster refers to DOES allow CPU to GPU data transfer independently from the computation, allowing data re-use. The behavior the poster described is a compatibility layer for programmers who either don't know what they're doing, or don't need it done fast. CUDA's architecture has its shortcomings (NO on-chip facility for synchronization of data across cores, forcing you to go all the way to global memory), but that is not one of them.
Both Dvorak and qwerty were hand-designed layouts for typewriters. Since computers are much better at optimizing over permutations of a large number of objects than humans, anyone considering learning a non-standard layout should strongly consider one of the modern computer-optimized layouts.
If you have a qwerty background and care at least a little about standardization, colemak is a modern layout that includes ease of transition from qwerty in its design. I've been using colemak for about a year, and can touch type in both qwerty and colemak. The transition was very fast and painless for me, especially for conversational English. If you go in with reasonable expectations, you'll probably be surprised how quickly your mind can adapt. http://colemak.com/
If you don't care about standardization at all, you can download software to tune a layout for the sort of typing you do here: http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
I have read Elbow Room, and about half of Consciousness explained. Dennett lays out the most common definitions of free will, discusses which ones are useful/meaningful from a philosophical/ethical standpoint, and debunks claims that the useful definitions are incompatible with determinism.
Daniel Dennett also argues that free will is not to be taken for granted, and is something that can be undermined or bolstered in meaningful ways, and must be exercised and defended. His overall message is rather optimistic and inspiring: There is nothing at all depressing about philosophical determinism, and if you really value your freedom, get off your butt and take steps to defend it.
I think you're over-estimating how rational people are. Most people in this world have not even made a conscious decision to base their world-view on things that are observable. You can't expect people with faith based world-views to be ready to think rationally about free will and determinism.
I do believe that determinism is compatible with the varieties of free will worth having. Dan Dennett, whom I've had the pleasure of hearing speak on the topic, makes a very convincing argument. I highly recommend his work on the subject, especially the more accessible incarnations of it. (Consciousness Explained is overkill for most people; I recommend Elbow Room)
The free market sometimes results in non-zero sum games for consumers. The instability (positive feedback) in the market caused by economy of scale can ruin small businesses EVEN IF they provide better (overall, not just price) value for consumers. When stuck in such a prisoner's dilemma, it is rational to resist the temptation to defect (if you can afford to, to avoid long-term damage), and in any case to vigorously pursue an end to the situation through some enforceable trust mechanism. That's the beauty of a democracy.
Great, now they will burn less gas as they arrest cyclists engaged in LEGAL peaceful protest. I think a sentence mentioning the NYPD's violent attacks on critical mass every month since the RNC would add a bit of perspective. I wonder if the tasers they use run on rechargeable batteries too.
I bought this product a couple weeks ago since I was starting to experience pain from mousing. The mouse cost a bundle and it doesn't even come with a Mac driver, but it has cleared up my discomfort.
I find that since my hand is significantly larger than the body of the mouse, it keeps me from being tempted to rest my hand/arm on the desk while mousing. This is also the case with my kinesis keyboard (the real one, not their new cheapo rubber membrane keyboards). A hand-floating postition is supposedly better ergonomically since the freedom of wrist motion means you can offload some of the movement to larger tougher joints, preventing the smaller joints from having to reach as far as often.
Buying quality input devices, using a break timer, and fixing your posture can save you a bunch of money and pain if you are a professional computer user.
For a philosopher that tries very hard to keep his beliefs in harmony with our growing body of scientific knowledge, you might like to read the philosopher Daniel Dennett. While his earlier works focused more on metaphysical stuff like consciousness and free will, his later works are turning to religion and morality.
Wikipedia has a nice article on this. There are details, but basically, you have two bands of wind that travel around the world from west to easy, on in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream
If i'm reading you correctly, you're incrorrect about the direction of flow of the jet stream. You may have been misled by a similar comment regarding how the jet stream re-distributes energy from the equator to the poles. In the northern hemisphere, the jetstream flows roughly from west to east in a ring that circles the globe. I think it is in the same direction in the southern hemisphere, but I'm not certain.
Solar and wind are complementary power sources. Kites can produce energy at night, while solar has a peak output when demand is highest, i.e. on hot sunny days when people are running their air conditioners at full capacity(consequences for the environment be damned). Hopefully hydrogen energy storage will help smooth out peaks and troughs in energy production, but there is a cost to that as well.
The idea is that you pump power back into the system when wind is too low to maintain altitude. Ideally, you do this using hydrogen you produced when the winds were stronger.
Electricity users greatly outnumber air travelers. Air traffic can be routed around aerial power plants. If disneyland can lobby the government hard enough to get no fly zones put up over their theme parks, you can bet that the power companies can too.
So, there are few inter-related mac vs. wintel differences in paradigm at play here...
Most mac users never want to tear apart their machines. They see hardware repair as someone else's problem. Along these lines, mac laptops are not designed to be easily servicable by the user, but more optimized for size, weight and durability.
It will take you something like ten screws, popping open of a thick lexan case and careful handling of shielding to get to an ibook's hard drive, but when you get there you will find that it is shock mounted in a clever way, and that it is probably the most reliable make/model of its day (for a while this was IBM/Hitachi travelstar).
Most mac users (and probably most PC users for that matter) do not want to know anything about ATAPI, IDE, serial vs. parallel, master/slave drive jumper settings, etc...
I had a dell laptop display die on me twice, and I just had a logic board replacement on my ibook because of a bad video chip. (for free, outside of warranty, yay apple!)
I agree that this feature will find more use on computers with built-in displays (ibooks, imacs, powerbooks)
Remembering the keys for 't'(target disk mode) and 'option'(boot option menu) and 'c'(boot from cd) are partly easier to remember since they are simple and have not changed in a long time (ever?)
Having your debugging be dependent on having a working display (so you can see said menu) is emphatically ~NOT an advantage.
If the screen dies on your mac laptop, you can boot while holding 't' (stands for "target disk mode") to turn it into a firewire drive.
Plug it into another mac, power up holding the 'option' key (stands for "option") and you can select to boot from the broken machine's drive. Copy your files over to the second machine or even just keep working like nothing happened until you can get your broken machine repaired.
What will you do when the graphics break on your wintel laptop? Will retrieving your files be as easy as holding down a key and plugging it into another machine?
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The CUDA cuBLAS library the above poster refers to DOES allow CPU to GPU data transfer independently from the computation, allowing data re-use. The behavior the poster described is a compatibility layer for programmers who either don't know what they're doing, or don't need it done fast. CUDA's architecture has its shortcomings (NO on-chip facility for synchronization of data across cores, forcing you to go all the way to global memory), but that is not one of them.
Both Dvorak and qwerty were hand-designed layouts for typewriters. Since computers are much better at optimizing over permutations of a large number of objects than humans, anyone considering learning a non-standard layout should strongly consider one of the modern computer-optimized layouts.
If you have a qwerty background and care at least a little about standardization, colemak is a modern layout that includes ease of transition from qwerty in its design. I've been using colemak for about a year, and can touch type in both qwerty and colemak. The transition was very fast and painless for me, especially for conversational English. If you go in with reasonable expectations, you'll probably be surprised how quickly your mind can adapt.
http://colemak.com/
If you don't care about standardization at all, you can download software to tune a layout for the sort of typing you do here:
http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/
A healthy mother and fetus do ~not share blood.
I have read Elbow Room, and about half of Consciousness explained. Dennett lays out the most common definitions of free will, discusses which ones are useful/meaningful from a philosophical/ethical standpoint, and debunks claims that the useful definitions are incompatible with determinism.
Daniel Dennett also argues that free will is not to be taken for granted, and is something that can be undermined or bolstered in meaningful ways, and must be exercised and defended. His overall message is rather optimistic and inspiring: There is nothing at all depressing about philosophical determinism, and if you really value your freedom, get off your butt and take steps to defend it.
I think you're over-estimating how rational people are. Most people in this world have not even made a conscious decision to base their world-view on things that are observable. You can't expect people with faith based world-views to be ready to think rationally about free will and determinism.
I do believe that determinism is compatible with the varieties of free will worth having. Dan Dennett, whom I've had the pleasure of hearing speak on the topic, makes a very convincing argument. I highly recommend his work on the subject, especially the more accessible incarnations of it. (Consciousness Explained is overkill for most people; I recommend Elbow Room)
The free market sometimes results in non-zero sum games for consumers. The instability (positive feedback) in the market caused by economy of scale can ruin small businesses EVEN IF they provide better (overall, not just price) value for consumers. When stuck in such a prisoner's dilemma, it is rational to resist the temptation to defect (if you can afford to, to avoid long-term damage), and in any case to vigorously pursue an end to the situation through some enforceable trust mechanism. That's the beauty of a democracy.
Great, now they will burn less gas as they arrest cyclists engaged in LEGAL peaceful protest. I think a sentence mentioning the NYPD's violent attacks on critical mass every month since the RNC would add a bit of perspective. I wonder if the tasers they use run on rechargeable batteries too.
I bought this product a couple weeks ago since I was starting to experience pain from mousing. The mouse cost a bundle and it doesn't even come with a Mac driver, but it has cleared up my discomfort. I find that since my hand is significantly larger than the body of the mouse, it keeps me from being tempted to rest my hand/arm on the desk while mousing. This is also the case with my kinesis keyboard (the real one, not their new cheapo rubber membrane keyboards). A hand-floating postition is supposedly better ergonomically since the freedom of wrist motion means you can offload some of the movement to larger tougher joints, preventing the smaller joints from having to reach as far as often. Buying quality input devices, using a break timer, and fixing your posture can save you a bunch of money and pain if you are a professional computer user.
For a philosopher that tries very hard to keep his beliefs in harmony with our growing body of scientific knowledge, you might like to read the philosopher Daniel Dennett. While his earlier works focused more on metaphysical stuff like consciousness and free will, his later works are turning to religion and morality.
Wikipedia has a nice article on this. There are details, but basically, you have two bands of wind that travel around the world from west to easy, on in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream
If i'm reading you correctly, you're incrorrect about the direction of flow of the jet stream. You may have been misled by a similar comment regarding how the jet stream re-distributes energy from the equator to the poles. In the northern hemisphere, the jetstream flows roughly from west to east in a ring that circles the globe. I think it is in the same direction in the southern hemisphere, but I'm not certain.
If you put a huge greenhouse at the bottom of the tube, the story is completely different. It is called a solar updraft tower. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
Solar and wind are complementary power sources. Kites can produce energy at night, while solar has a peak output when demand is highest, i.e. on hot sunny days when people are running their air conditioners at full capacity(consequences for the environment be damned). Hopefully hydrogen energy storage will help smooth out peaks and troughs in energy production, but there is a cost to that as well.
The idea is that you pump power back into the system when wind is too low to maintain altitude. Ideally, you do this using hydrogen you produced when the winds were stronger.
Electricity users greatly outnumber air travelers. Air traffic can be routed around aerial power plants. If disneyland can lobby the government hard enough to get no fly zones put up over their theme parks, you can bet that the power companies can too.
So, there are few inter-related mac vs. wintel differences in paradigm at play here...
Most mac users never want to tear apart their machines. They see hardware repair as someone else's problem. Along these lines, mac laptops are not designed to be easily servicable by the user, but more optimized for size, weight and durability.
It will take you something like ten screws, popping open of a thick lexan case and careful handling of shielding to get to an ibook's hard drive, but when you get there you will find that it is shock mounted in a clever way, and that it is probably the most reliable make/model of its day (for a while this was IBM/Hitachi travelstar).
Most mac users (and probably most PC users for that matter) do not want to know anything about ATAPI, IDE, serial vs. parallel, master/slave drive jumper settings, etc...
I had a dell laptop display die on me twice, and I just had a logic board replacement on my ibook because of a bad video chip. (for free, outside of warranty, yay apple!)
I agree that this feature will find more use on computers with built-in displays (ibooks, imacs, powerbooks)
Remembering the keys for 't'(target disk mode) and 'option'(boot option menu) and 'c'(boot from cd) are partly easier to remember since they are simple and have not changed in a long time (ever?)
Having your debugging be dependent on having a working display (so you can see said menu) is emphatically ~NOT an advantage. If the screen dies on your mac laptop, you can boot while holding 't' (stands for "target disk mode") to turn it into a firewire drive. Plug it into another mac, power up holding the 'option' key (stands for "option") and you can select to boot from the broken machine's drive. Copy your files over to the second machine or even just keep working like nothing happened until you can get your broken machine repaired. What will you do when the graphics break on your wintel laptop? Will retrieving your files be as easy as holding down a key and plugging it into another machine?