I see the parent modded "funny", but in reality this doesn't sound so implausible.
Average user: so, what's this whole "dual-core" mumbo jumbo? You: well, think of each core like a separate computer. One core for the all-in-one anti-virus, firewall, automated secure dohicky, bloated security suite; and the other core for the rest of your stuff! It will feel as if you aren't running it at all! Average user: that's awesome, thanks!
Ok...to be perfectly honest, I have no idea who Buckey Fuller is. I thought it was a sort of reference to "average Joe"...my mistake.
ok, now about your reply:
in an environment couched in overly polite language, mannerisms rather than manners Slashdot is overly polite????:)
As a result there is starting to be quite little of value to be found in either place as academia regresss to the industrial mean and thus academia has less and less of value to give to industry other than labor.
When you say academia is regressing to the industrial mean, you're making a little bit of a blanket generalization. There are areas of academia that are inherently "marketable" and those that are not. The former might be regressing to the whims of industry, but then that is where their value lies. To be clear, I'm talking about fields like Industrial Engineering, and within Comp.Sci, areas like databases, web search and mining, software engineering. However, there are significant portions of academia that have very little to do with industry, but which produce innovations that are eventually used by the industry. I was referring to these areas when I said "bridge the gap between academia and industry". A lot of innovation at Google and elsewhere comes from area like A.I., which are certainly not funded by industry, at least in a majority. Most companies couldn't give a damn if I came up with a tractable POMDP and such, but if tomorrow I invented a kickass new search algorithm, sure they'd be lining up for patent rights. My point was that it takes either Ph.D.s, or very, very, very committed "Average Joe"s to keep abreast of multiple, possibly obscure fields, and have the foresight and technical ability to adapt those obscure results that you consider useless to the product at hand. The only reason I say this is because Mr.Ph.D. has a 5-7 year head start in full-time research than Average Joe, who likely has been working his ass off on 18 hour workdays trying to meet production deadlines. In that situation (and I think we've all been there), I find it highly unlikely that Mr. Joe is going use his weekends to learn advanced statistics and browse through the latest CS journals.
Have you actually read a doctoral thesis lately? Originality does not imply value
True, but it doesn't exclude it either. I'd say there's a pretty good chance of originality having value somewhere. Doctoral theses aren't supposed to change the world. And as a matter of fact, yes I have read a few theses lately. It's what I DO for a living (a meagre living it is though). If you're interested, I'll send you links to some theses that are a) recent b) quite brilliant and c) have some value in SOME industry somewhere. But again, remember that industrial value is not usually an objective for the average Ph.D. thesis.
And while you're right -- there are a lot of "fluff" theses out there, I'd say you're speaking in gross generalization about academia. From your point of view, it almost seems like getting a Ph.D. is the most worthless waste of time in the world. Google might indeed have been the work of two smart kids, but there ARE a lot of people in academia who are very smart, but might not have money or starting a company as their primary life objective. Don't be so quick to judge them, or academia.
While I partially understand where you're coming from, it just seems that you're taking an overly harsh 'git the college boy' attitude.
You sound a trifle bitter, and your argument is the same one used for the college degree vs. hard working high school dropout issue. But perhaps my biggest problem with your comment is that you seem to associate Ph.D.s with inherently smarter people. As you've rightfully pointed out, that claim is likely to be pure B.S. However, what the *average* Ph.D. CAN do that the *average* Bucky Fuller CANNOT do is bridge the gap between academia and industry. Note that we're talking averages here -- you're likely to find some Bucky's who can do what Ph.D. can do and some Ph.D.s who cannot do what Bucky can do. However, any Ph.D. (at least those employed by Google) has spent several years wrangling with the state of the art in the field and furthermore, has contributed originality to the FIELD. They are in a much better position to analyze academic developments in the field, EXTEND those developments to the project at hand and figure out how to integrate them into product in a commercial sense. Now if Bucky had chosen to get his Ph.D. (or at least masters) and survived the rigors of graduate school, he would be able to do the same. But Ph.D.s have put in the time, the pain and like it or not -- are more intellectually rigorous than your *AVERAGE* (keyword) Bucky with a bachelors.
So no, 5000 Ph.D.s employed by Google -- and these are likely to be leading figures in their respective fields -- is NOT a bad investment. At the very, very least, they know more and can think more critically than their bachelor counterparts. To use a terrible military analogy, anyone can be a marine, but only if they put in the time, the training, survive the rigors and finish the program. But not everyone can perform like a marine, although *SOME* intuitively gifted individuals might.
I live in a democracy
I don't like Bush or what his administration is doing.
I want to change it.
Clearly, a majority disagrees with me.
---------------
Therefore, I don't like what I see. I don't have the power to change it.
I understand that on paper, in a democracy you can change what you don't like, but that just isn't the case on an individual level. You can change what you don't like only if a majority agrees with you, or if the counting system is flawed.
this is what you have to accept with a democratic ideal like Wikipedia. Much like a real democracy, you might not like what you see, but you have to live with it. Wikipedia is a similar process, except that individuals get a WHOLE LOT more say in the process. And if you bring in guards, who will guard the guards? (and don't say meta-guards, PLEASE!) If this bothers you, do some research, edit the article yourself and play the editing war with that politician's staff.
you just bashed the whole field of natural language processing! while its true that computers probably won't be "understanding" words for quite a while (cue the AI discussion), it's quite within the realm of NLP to reasonably accurately tag the parts of speech in your sentence, and then possibly use some heuristic to reason about what was implied. of course, we're talking a very restricted subset of english as usable. you won't be able to say "hey ol' computer boy, howz about.....". simple imperative sentences ("do this...") shouldn't be too hard to tackle.
personally, i can't wait till they take speech recognition and couple it with natural language processing as a standard part of the desktop interface. it should be quite feasible now that we're seeing affordable 64-bit computing with fast memory and bus speeds. imagine excel with a speech-recognition interface, so instead of typing and filling formulae you would just tell it to "sum the row labeled timing, but only include values greater than 10".
ok, back to work...
Seriously, I think people really don't realize that Google's motto is not a formal contract - it's marketing, but somewhat targeted at smarter people by using the image of a benevolent, world-changing ethical company. And do people seriously expect China to be intimidated by Google's withdrawal from China? Do you have any idea how quickly the mass of engineers in China could whip up a Google alternative (Baidu, anyone)? Without Google in China, Chinese users would be on MSN search the very next minute or back on Google through proxies. I JUST don't see how withdrawing from China would be an 'unethical' thing to do. "Don't be evil" is a cute saying, not US trade law that binds (or doesn't) Microsoft.
Shame on you, throwing Kuhn references around like that! Kuhn's paradigm shifts, perhaps one of the worst uses of technical terms that penetrated '80s business ideology, are more in line with the biological idea of punctuated equilibria applied to intellectualism. Things cruise along for a little while, ho-hum, until the intellectual climate changes and then science truly progresses. There are similar analogies in a myriad other fields.
However, I think all the article was talking about was really clever people who are secure and confident about their knowledge. People tend to equate "genius" with "will discover something to change the world any day now", but geniuses might simply offer a fresh view or point out something that no one has noticed before on a day to day basis. In other words, think smaller than Kuhn!
And I completely agree with you, science definitely doesn't have a monopoly on geniuses. But from a very early age, no matter where we grow up, we tend to be exposed to the stereotype of the mad scientist and the odd poster of Einstein. How many 8th graders know what relativity is in really simple terms, rather than Einstein "was a really smart scientist".
Since there is no word on a fix yet, it would be interesting if Microsoft rolls out a 3rd party patch which warns Gmail users when the recipient email address has periods in it.
I've said this before on/., but perhaps you should really put down the bong. Nobody really needs periods in their email address if they can fill out an SMTP "From" line properly. Your period-less email address can be the hash key and the plaintext value you put in quotes before the address would be the value. So nobody who didn't want to send you email would care (because they could see your real name), and those who did could just hit reply.
Perhaps you're hoping for a level of corporate ethic that just does not exist. Who's going to tell average beer-drinkin' Joe (or cheerful Jonathan in the UK) that the cheap "inturrnet" phone doesn't support emergency calling or calling during power cuts. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be plastered over the VOIP phone boxes, and I'm also reasonably sure that average Joe/Jonathan does not read Slashdot (or a newspaper for that matter). And at last count, there are more Joes in the world than Slashdotters = $$.
From the summary, it sounds like these guys are a step removed from Jackass.
But seriously, when are they going to deal with the myth that Java "is just as efficient as C++ these days"
The developed world seems to have a notion that every last penny of the budgets of developing countries should be spent on eradicating poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, it takes more than throwing at money at the problem to make those things go away (why hasn't the US eradicated hunger and poverty in that case?). I think India realizes that one way to a better economy is by utilizing that massive amount of engineering/IT/science brainpower that all its universities are spewing out every year. Better economy leads to better infrastructure, which is the first step thats needed on the road to curing the other problems. So no -- their priorities are not messed up, and it's not like they're snatching money from the poor to send rockets up in space. Your view of economies and development is overly simplistic.
I beg to differ. While camera manufacturers may stop selling their film SLRs, a lot of pros/semi-pros will stick to film. Here are some reasons, in brief:
1) Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
2) Some photographers just love the grain of B&W developed on Tri-X or T-Max film, which doesn't use the C-41 process used for Walmart shit.
There are more, but it's been a long day...
Anyway, I've been using my Canon EOS 10s film camera for years and will continue doing so, mainly because it inculcates a whole new ethic -- you can just snap away and hit the delete button when you find something ugly. Film forces you to think in artistic terms BEFORE you click, and there's a definite cost associated with clicking the shutter release. I believe it makes better photographers.
Why do people still use vinyl? Don't kid yourself -- 35mm film is not the floppy disk. It's not going to die anytime soon.
It's all very fine to point the finger at immigrant workers and blame them for vanishing jobs, but the question to be asked is why are they needed? Is it because immigrant workers are instantly, instinctively appealing to employers that they just feel a desperate urge to dump on their countrymen? If that were the case, then this would be a valid argument. But the IT immigration bias exists because the demand for IT labor exists. True, if there were no immigrant workers, then there'd be no shortage of X country IT jobs for people from X country, but there also would be a gaping personnel demand that X country's IT workers could not fill. The question should be why are immigrant IT workers getting jobs over the natives (and I use that term as respectfully as "immigrant")? And please don't come back with the "lower wage" stuff -- all the (few) job offers I got (being an "immigrant") were very competitive with those of local workers.
i don't know about you, but i hate that they re-branded Konfabulator as the Yahoo Widget Enginer. Another case of innovation-by-purchase. Now I wonder if the dashboard will give you a free stress test...
I agree...it's not a complete 'fake' yet. If you read the article at Time about this, it mentions that the US collaborator who was so quick to distance himself had made a claim to be chairman of the stem cell research trust that was being set up (he was rejected) and had claimed 50% of the patent.
Above all, the collaborators are at fault too for not reviewing the paper that was being submitted (they all had the opportunity to, but were perhaps blinded by the dazzling results). IMO, the US collaborator who wants his name removed as co-author should get a big f**king NO. If you're not 100% careful about what you put your name on, you should accept the consequences.
It could still be a fake yet, but Hwang isn't the only one to blame. As the parent poster said, hold on...
Such spider robots could one day be used to fit pieces of a large solar array or reflector on top of the netting.
in R&D, when they say "one day..." it's either a bone for the funding agency or the media, or some interesting application on paper that has a slim chance of making it to production. I just thought it was more concrete based on the title of the story. Oh well...no asimov stories about crazy robots in space yet.
Wow...Microsoft cleaning up after Sony? It's like oil companies issuing nicotine patches to clean up after tobacco companies. The big fight this winter is evil vs. evil. Wooo!
Slashdot Mirror
Average user: so, what's this whole "dual-core" mumbo jumbo?
You: well, think of each core like a separate computer. One core for the all-in-one anti-virus, firewall, automated secure dohicky, bloated security suite; and the other core for the rest of your stuff! It will feel as if you aren't running it at all!
Average user: that's awesome, thanks!
Not so funny now, eh?
ok, now about your reply:
in an environment couched in overly polite language, mannerisms rather than manners :)
Slashdot is overly polite????
As a result there is starting to be quite little of value to be found in either place as academia regresss to the industrial mean and thus academia has less and less of value to give to industry other than labor.
When you say academia is regressing to the industrial mean, you're making a little bit of a blanket generalization. There are areas of academia that are inherently "marketable" and those that are not. The former might be regressing to the whims of industry, but then that is where their value lies. To be clear, I'm talking about fields like Industrial Engineering, and within Comp.Sci, areas like databases, web search and mining, software engineering. However, there are significant portions of academia that have very little to do with industry, but which produce innovations that are eventually used by the industry. I was referring to these areas when I said "bridge the gap between academia and industry". A lot of innovation at Google and elsewhere comes from area like A.I., which are certainly not funded by industry, at least in a majority. Most companies couldn't give a damn if I came up with a tractable POMDP and such, but if tomorrow I invented a kickass new search algorithm, sure they'd be lining up for patent rights. My point was that it takes either Ph.D.s, or very, very, very committed "Average Joe"s to keep abreast of multiple, possibly obscure fields, and have the foresight and technical ability to adapt those obscure results that you consider useless to the product at hand. The only reason I say this is because Mr.Ph.D. has a 5-7 year head start in full-time research than Average Joe, who likely has been working his ass off on 18 hour workdays trying to meet production deadlines. In that situation (and I think we've all been there), I find it highly unlikely that Mr. Joe is going use his weekends to learn advanced statistics and browse through the latest CS journals.
Have you actually read a doctoral thesis lately? Originality does not imply value
True, but it doesn't exclude it either. I'd say there's a pretty good chance of originality having value somewhere. Doctoral theses aren't supposed to change the world. And as a matter of fact, yes I have read a few theses lately. It's what I DO for a living (a meagre living it is though). If you're interested, I'll send you links to some theses that are a) recent b) quite brilliant and c) have some value in SOME industry somewhere. But again, remember that industrial value is not usually an objective for the average Ph.D. thesis.
And while you're right -- there are a lot of "fluff" theses out there, I'd say you're speaking in gross generalization about academia. From your point of view, it almost seems like getting a Ph.D. is the most worthless waste of time in the world. Google might indeed have been the work of two smart kids, but there ARE a lot of people in academia who are very smart, but might not have money or starting a company as their primary life objective. Don't be so quick to judge them, or academia.
While I partially understand where you're coming from, it just seems that you're taking an overly harsh 'git the college boy' attitude.
You sound a trifle bitter, and your argument is the same one used for the college degree vs. hard working high school dropout issue. But perhaps my biggest problem with your comment is that you seem to associate Ph.D.s with inherently smarter people. As you've rightfully pointed out, that claim is likely to be pure B.S. However, what the *average* Ph.D. CAN do that the *average* Bucky Fuller CANNOT do is bridge the gap between academia and industry. Note that we're talking averages here -- you're likely to find some Bucky's who can do what Ph.D. can do and some Ph.D.s who cannot do what Bucky can do. However, any Ph.D. (at least those employed by Google) has spent several years wrangling with the state of the art in the field and furthermore, has contributed originality to the FIELD. They are in a much better position to analyze academic developments in the field, EXTEND those developments to the project at hand and figure out how to integrate them into product in a commercial sense. Now if Bucky had chosen to get his Ph.D. (or at least masters) and survived the rigors of graduate school, he would be able to do the same. But Ph.D.s have put in the time, the pain and like it or not -- are more intellectually rigorous than your *AVERAGE* (keyword) Bucky with a bachelors. So no, 5000 Ph.D.s employed by Google -- and these are likely to be leading figures in their respective fields -- is NOT a bad investment. At the very, very least, they know more and can think more critically than their bachelor counterparts. To use a terrible military analogy, anyone can be a marine, but only if they put in the time, the training, survive the rigors and finish the program. But not everyone can perform like a marine, although *SOME* intuitively gifted individuals might.
anyone care to post the bottom line, i.e. for someone building an SLI system, ATI or nVidia? Isn't that what it's all about in the end? Bottom line?
I live in a democracy I don't like Bush or what his administration is doing. I want to change it. Clearly, a majority disagrees with me. --------------- Therefore, I don't like what I see. I don't have the power to change it. I understand that on paper, in a democracy you can change what you don't like, but that just isn't the case on an individual level. You can change what you don't like only if a majority agrees with you, or if the counting system is flawed.
this is what you have to accept with a democratic ideal like Wikipedia. Much like a real democracy, you might not like what you see, but you have to live with it. Wikipedia is a similar process, except that individuals get a WHOLE LOT more say in the process. And if you bring in guards, who will guard the guards? (and don't say meta-guards, PLEASE!) If this bothers you, do some research, edit the article yourself and play the editing war with that politician's staff.
you just bashed the whole field of natural language processing! while its true that computers probably won't be "understanding" words for quite a while (cue the AI discussion), it's quite within the realm of NLP to reasonably accurately tag the parts of speech in your sentence, and then possibly use some heuristic to reason about what was implied. of course, we're talking a very restricted subset of english as usable. you won't be able to say "hey ol' computer boy, howz about.....". simple imperative sentences ("do this...") shouldn't be too hard to tackle.
personally, i can't wait till they take speech recognition and couple it with natural language processing as a standard part of the desktop interface. it should be quite feasible now that we're seeing affordable 64-bit computing with fast memory and bus speeds. imagine excel with a speech-recognition interface, so instead of typing and filling formulae you would just tell it to "sum the row labeled timing, but only include values greater than 10". ok, back to work...
just more proof that we're related to our simian cousins -- even in our society, certain monkeys decide to become cops.
now every grad student taking a bioinformatics class gets a pop quiz tomorrow!
Seriously, I think people really don't realize that Google's motto is not a formal contract - it's marketing, but somewhat targeted at smarter people by using the image of a benevolent, world-changing ethical company. And do people seriously expect China to be intimidated by Google's withdrawal from China? Do you have any idea how quickly the mass of engineers in China could whip up a Google alternative (Baidu, anyone)? Without Google in China, Chinese users would be on MSN search the very next minute or back on Google through proxies. I JUST don't see how withdrawing from China would be an 'unethical' thing to do. "Don't be evil" is a cute saying, not US trade law that binds (or doesn't) Microsoft.
However, I think all the article was talking about was really clever people who are secure and confident about their knowledge. People tend to equate "genius" with "will discover something to change the world any day now", but geniuses might simply offer a fresh view or point out something that no one has noticed before on a day to day basis. In other words, think smaller than Kuhn!
And I completely agree with you, science definitely doesn't have a monopoly on geniuses. But from a very early age, no matter where we grow up, we tend to be exposed to the stereotype of the mad scientist and the odd poster of Einstein. How many 8th graders know what relativity is in really simple terms, rather than Einstein "was a really smart scientist".
I've said this before on /., but perhaps you should really put down the bong. Nobody really needs periods in their email address if they can fill out an SMTP "From" line properly. Your period-less email address can be the hash key and the plaintext value you put in quotes before the address would be the value. So nobody who didn't want to send you email would care (because they could see your real name), and those who did could just hit reply.
...far cry from the network-aware worms of today... And so the worms of yesteryear were NOT network-aware, and still 'worms' huh?
Numbers will never go away, simply because it just won't be the same, as many Slashdotter known, to ask a cute girl for her e-mail address in a bar.
Perhaps you're hoping for a level of corporate ethic that just does not exist. Who's going to tell average beer-drinkin' Joe (or cheerful Jonathan in the UK) that the cheap "inturrnet" phone doesn't support emergency calling or calling during power cuts. I'm pretty sure it's not going to be plastered over the VOIP phone boxes, and I'm also reasonably sure that average Joe/Jonathan does not read Slashdot (or a newspaper for that matter). And at last count, there are more Joes in the world than Slashdotters = $$.
From the summary, it sounds like these guys are a step removed from Jackass. But seriously, when are they going to deal with the myth that Java "is just as efficient as C++ these days"
You can never be told what Perl is.
You just have to see it for yourself.
sorry, i just had to.
The developed world seems to have a notion that every last penny of the budgets of developing countries should be spent on eradicating poverty and hunger. Unfortunately, it takes more than throwing at money at the problem to make those things go away (why hasn't the US eradicated hunger and poverty in that case?). I think India realizes that one way to a better economy is by utilizing that massive amount of engineering/IT/science brainpower that all its universities are spewing out every year. Better economy leads to better infrastructure, which is the first step thats needed on the road to curing the other problems. So no -- their priorities are not messed up, and it's not like they're snatching money from the poor to send rockets up in space. Your view of economies and development is overly simplistic.
1) Film STILL offers better resolution, although this won't last for long. I believe its close to 22 megapixels, although this is not for sure.
2) Some photographers just love the grain of B&W developed on Tri-X or T-Max film, which doesn't use the C-41 process used for Walmart shit.
There are more, but it's been a long day...
Anyway, I've been using my Canon EOS 10s film camera for years and will continue doing so, mainly because it inculcates a whole new ethic -- you can just snap away and hit the delete button when you find something ugly. Film forces you to think in artistic terms BEFORE you click, and there's a definite cost associated with clicking the shutter release. I believe it makes better photographers.
Why do people still use vinyl? Don't kid yourself -- 35mm film is not the floppy disk. It's not going to die anytime soon.
It's all very fine to point the finger at immigrant workers and blame them for vanishing jobs, but the question to be asked is why are they needed? Is it because immigrant workers are instantly, instinctively appealing to employers that they just feel a desperate urge to dump on their countrymen? If that were the case, then this would be a valid argument. But the IT immigration bias exists because the demand for IT labor exists. True, if there were no immigrant workers, then there'd be no shortage of X country IT jobs for people from X country, but there also would be a gaping personnel demand that X country's IT workers could not fill. The question should be why are immigrant IT workers getting jobs over the natives (and I use that term as respectfully as "immigrant")? And please don't come back with the "lower wage" stuff -- all the (few) job offers I got (being an "immigrant") were very competitive with those of local workers.
i don't know about you, but i hate that they re-branded Konfabulator as the Yahoo Widget Enginer. Another case of innovation-by-purchase. Now I wonder if the dashboard will give you a free stress test...
Above all, the collaborators are at fault too for not reviewing the paper that was being submitted (they all had the opportunity to, but were perhaps blinded by the dazzling results). IMO, the US collaborator who wants his name removed as co-author should get a big f**king NO. If you're not 100% careful about what you put your name on, you should accept the consequences.
It could still be a fake yet, but Hwang isn't the only one to blame. As the parent poster said, hold on...
Such spider robots could one day be used to fit pieces of a large solar array or reflector on top of the netting. in R&D, when they say "one day..." it's either a bone for the funding agency or the media, or some interesting application on paper that has a slim chance of making it to production. I just thought it was more concrete based on the title of the story. Oh well...no asimov stories about crazy robots in space yet.
Wow...Microsoft cleaning up after Sony? It's like oil companies issuing nicotine patches to clean up after tobacco companies. The big fight this winter is evil vs. evil. Wooo!