Scientists are the worst examples of group-think. They are taught something and repeat it and hold it to be fact even when confronted with good alternative explanations.
As child, I could see that the continents of North and South America could plausibly fit up to Africa, yet my science teacher dismissed the idea that they were once joined. As we all now know, they were, in fact, once joined.
There's nothing wrong with dismissing an idea when there's not enough evidence to support it.
A child saying "those look like they could fit together" is something any scientist would, and should, dismiss as an actual argument for the existence of tectonic plates.
When it turned out there was a massive volcanic conveyor belt discovered at the bottom of the ocean in between the two continents, with magnetic stripes from different periods of north/south flips, and an ever growing record of similar fossils on different parts of the world with more accurate dating techniques, etc, etc, and now there's something worth considering.
A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now. The idea that people who change their mind should be shamed goes against the whole idea of science..
Also I don't know how a "science teacher", who has to teach you a fixed curriculum which you get tested on, counts as a scientist. Is this childhood experience what you're judging all scientists by?
What centrism taught us is that just because you want the universe to be one way doesn't mean it is.
You may prefer the idea that the universe is endless and it contracts and expands, it would certainly make things simpler, but it doesn't fit with observation.
Fusion a good enough reason for ya? Depends on the expense, fusion research is certainly worthwhile but we still need to ask how much we're prepared to invest in it. I haven't even heard a figure for the expected cost per kWh of power from a commercial fusion reactor.
If it turns out to cost considerably more than current power it won't be widely used, no matter how eco-friendly or technologically advanced.
Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year.
To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years. Well the problem is tritium is created in fusion reactors; as more reactors are built more tritium is produced so even more reactors could be built, and it can be considered as more of a "catalyst" than a fuel in that it's not used up.
The demand for tritium would certainly decrease hugely as more fusion reactors came online.
I think he meant the processor isn't designed for general purpose computing like a 18-wheeler isn't designed for grocery shopping; you could do it but that's not what it's designed for so it's not the best idea
(And yes I know there's a chicken and egg problem there, but Microsoft is ready to take the first step when Intel thinks it's justified, as with Itanium)
Actually Intel keeps trying(Itanium?) and AMD uses a compatibility mode.
The problem is as usual MSFT. which only runs on windows. yes I know a decade ago NT 4.0 did run on PowerPC, and even a couple of alpha chips. You realize Windows runs on Itanium, right? The reason no-one is moving across is because x86 is fine; it was 30 years ago and is now (which Intel deserve a lot of kudos for). It's just not worth the application incompatibility, this has nothing to do with Microsoft who will happily go to whatever hardware the consumers and developers are using.
The demise of the x86 general architecture will not begin until Windows goes out of fashion. It's the only major platform strongly tied to that CPU architecture. Windows isn't as tied to x86 as you might think, when Intel was getting behind it's Itanium processors they managed to get Microsoft to port Windows and most of their server software (ie SQL Server) across. Either they really thought Itanium would be huge, or it wasn't that much effort to port.
The main thing tying Windows to x86 are the applications for it, and games etc wouldn't do so well with a Rosetta-like layer to convert instruction set.
.NET's processor independent code may (and was probably intended to) decrease the reliance on x86 and allow future instruction set changes, but I don't think there's any rush to move from x86. It gets a lot of slack on/. but phenomenal success and unprecedented backwards compatibility trump arguments over elegance any day.
We've noticed this 'dumbing down' (thanks Idiocracy) for a while now at Uni. Right, evolutionary pressures have become so relaxed that students can become noticeably less capable within a single generation..
Some people take Idiocracy way, way, too seriously.
When civilization has to concern itself with what might happen in the next few hundred thousand years, when it has been shown that stupidity is actually favored (despite modern hazards like cars and common day-to-day requirements for math, etc), and that it will be favored for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, only then can we think of this as a potential future problem.
Until that time it's just a nice way to feel smug and superior, and I think that may be all this article is.
Everyone likes to hear that standards have dropped and that much more was expected of themselves, but the report compares different syllabuses and exams that are taken at different ages.
This report is comparing individual exam questions even when the syllabus has been changed. As it says in the article "The content became broader and shallower"; a wider range of maths is probably a good thing.
Also aside from all the politically motivated bashing and calls for a "cultural revolution" they sneak this past people:
Ucas figures show the number of people who took up places on full time maths degrees has gone up by 9.3% on last year. So more people are taking up maths than ever, a wider range of maths are being covered, and more emphasis is placed on calculator use and having a wide variety of skills than prioritizing for fast mental arithmetic and specialization in a few areas.
What a disgrace! Down with Brown!
I'm wondering if the traditional lock approach used in MySQL (and most SQL databases as far as I know) somewhat kills parallel operations I'm not sure what you mean, fine-grained locking is up to the engine, and MySQL can't really do it.
InnoDB is the classic example; you can get MySQL to lock entire InnoDB (or MyISAM) tables, but if you want to lock a certain row in an InnoDB table MySQL can't help, because it doesn't know about InnoDB.
If you're saying "the MyISAM/MySQL table-based locking won't work in a parallel environment", then you're right, but that's nothing new that relates SSDs and micro-cores.
Fully transactional engines have to be very good at being parallelizable. In databases things had to be "parallel" even before multi-core was around, because being able to interact in more ways with the database at a time means better performance.
You don't need two CPUs to have multiple clients trying to write to the same data without treading on each others' toes.
Databases are inherently scalable and parallelizable, so I think more low-latency memory and more CPUs will have a big effect.
But I could be wrong, I only deal with databases on the other side of the SQL parser.
I'm not impressed by the snobby "I like what tourists don't like" argument. How you can describe an ancient monument a tourist trap is beyond me.
It's just stonehenge and a barrier to try and stop people ruining it by touching the stones, how is that stage managed?
You're free to your own opinion, just don't act like it's anything other than opinion. (Same goes for your obnoxious sig)
It doesn't look as impressive, and is almost completely ruined, whereas stonehenge has always survived to some degree.
I'm not sure why you consider Avebury more impressive. I've been to both as a child and I was more impressed by stonehenge.
That having been said there are more impressive burial sites, which are earth mounds which have caves that go underground, and are lit up by natural light only on certain days of the year.
They were certainly more impressive to visit, if not visually impressive.
With modern wear leveling algorithms, you can write to an SSD continuously at its maximum write rate for about fifty years before you wear it out. They are, if anything, much more suitable for rapidly changing data than a regular hard drive. Is that the whole SSD drive being written to, or just one commonly used piece? How long would it take to constantly write to a single byte before you ran out?
At the uni I attend Computer Science and Physics can be bundled into a single 4 year course (CS or Phys individually would be 3 years), and I find the two complement each other very nicely. They almost feel like two sides of the same coin, somehow.
The FCC are talking about providing free, nationwide wireless internet.. Damn them to hell!
Slashdot users in general, it seems, cannot distinguish between creator and creation. Bad things are created by bad producers, who will only ever produce bad things. Good things are created by good producers, who will only ever produce good things.
Slashdot Mirror
A little late for doing quantum physics experiments don't you think Sam?
A child saying "those look like they could fit together" is something any scientist would, and should, dismiss as an actual argument for the existence of tectonic plates.
When it turned out there was a massive volcanic conveyor belt discovered at the bottom of the ocean in between the two continents, with magnetic stripes from different periods of north/south flips, and an ever growing record of similar fossils on different parts of the world with more accurate dating techniques, etc, etc, and now there's something worth considering.
A scientist was right to doubt the existence of tectonic plates before based on your observation, and is right to believe in them now. The idea that people who change their mind should be shamed goes against the whole idea of science..
Also I don't know how a "science teacher", who has to teach you a fixed curriculum which you get tested on, counts as a scientist. Is this childhood experience what you're judging all scientists by?
(Pssst, mods, I'm pretty sure it's a joke)
What centrism taught us is that just because you want the universe to be one way doesn't mean it is.
You may prefer the idea that the universe is endless and it contracts and expands, it would certainly make things simpler, but it doesn't fit with observation.
According to quantum physics there exists a universe where you whole-heartedly agreed with GP
If it turns out to cost considerably more than current power it won't be widely used, no matter how eco-friendly or technologically advanced. Let's suppose that by the time we're slinging tanks of He3 off the moon, the world-wide demand is 100 tonnes of the stuff a year, and people are happy to pay $3 billion per tonne. That gives us gross revenues of $300 billion a year. To put that number in perspective: Ignoring the cost of money and taxes and whatnot, that rate of income would launch a moon shot like our reference mission every day for the next 10,000 years. Well the problem is tritium is created in fusion reactors; as more reactors are built more tritium is produced so even more reactors could be built, and it can be considered as more of a "catalyst" than a fuel in that it's not used up.
The demand for tritium would certainly decrease hugely as more fusion reactors came online.
Mod parent up, Apple shouldn't be immune to criticism
Oh! Nice counter-attack
I think he meant the processor isn't designed for general purpose computing like a 18-wheeler isn't designed for grocery shopping; you could do it but that's not what it's designed for so it's not the best idea
And who said abstract math isn't useful?
(And yes I know there's a chicken and egg problem there, but Microsoft is ready to take the first step when Intel thinks it's justified, as with Itanium)
The problem is as usual MSFT. which only runs on windows. yes I know a decade ago NT 4.0 did run on PowerPC, and even a couple of alpha chips. You realize Windows runs on Itanium, right? The reason no-one is moving across is because x86 is fine; it was 30 years ago and is now (which Intel deserve a lot of kudos for). It's just not worth the application incompatibility, this has nothing to do with Microsoft who will happily go to whatever hardware the consumers and developers are using.
The main thing tying Windows to x86 are the applications for it, and games etc wouldn't do so well with a Rosetta-like layer to convert instruction set.
Some people take Idiocracy way, way, too seriously.
When civilization has to concern itself with what might happen in the next few hundred thousand years, when it has been shown that stupidity is actually favored (despite modern hazards like cars and common day-to-day requirements for math, etc), and that it will be favored for hundreds of thousands of years into the future, only then can we think of this as a potential future problem.
Until that time it's just a nice way to feel smug and superior, and I think that may be all this article is.
Everyone likes to hear that standards have dropped and that much more was expected of themselves, but the report compares different syllabuses and exams that are taken at different ages.
This report is comparing individual exam questions even when the syllabus has been changed. As it says in the article "The content became broader and shallower"; a wider range of maths is probably a good thing.
Also aside from all the politically motivated bashing and calls for a "cultural revolution" they sneak this past people: Ucas figures show the number of people who took up places on full time maths degrees has gone up by 9.3% on last year. So more people are taking up maths than ever, a wider range of maths are being covered, and more emphasis is placed on calculator use and having a wide variety of skills than prioritizing for fast mental arithmetic and specialization in a few areas.
What a disgrace! Down with Brown!
"He's only 37, is Indian but converted from [...]"
Sounds like "There's a new employee in IT, he's black but he's okay"
I'm not offended (not Indian), just found it surprising
InnoDB is the classic example; you can get MySQL to lock entire InnoDB (or MyISAM) tables, but if you want to lock a certain row in an InnoDB table MySQL can't help, because it doesn't know about InnoDB.
If you're saying "the MyISAM/MySQL table-based locking won't work in a parallel environment", then you're right, but that's nothing new that relates SSDs and micro-cores.
Fully transactional engines have to be very good at being parallelizable. In databases things had to be "parallel" even before multi-core was around, because being able to interact in more ways with the database at a time means better performance.
You don't need two CPUs to have multiple clients trying to write to the same data without treading on each others' toes.
Databases are inherently scalable and parallelizable, so I think more low-latency memory and more CPUs will have a big effect.
But I could be wrong, I only deal with databases on the other side of the SQL parser.
Forget about that. We are the same, you and I. Hope.
Yes but think about the volume of the pack related to the product within. What about the environmental costs about shipping that extra volume around?
I just want to kill myself every time I eat a bag of potato chips that wasn't prepared with the environment in mind.
How is that more environmentally friendly? Please tell me this isn't about CO2 reduction.
The most environmentally friendly corpse removal thing I've heard of is mulching. Soil is nature's pringles can.
I'm not impressed by the snobby "I like what tourists don't like" argument. How you can describe an ancient monument a tourist trap is beyond me.
It's just stonehenge and a barrier to try and stop people ruining it by touching the stones, how is that stage managed?
You're free to your own opinion, just don't act like it's anything other than opinion. (Same goes for your obnoxious sig)
It doesn't look as impressive, and is almost completely ruined, whereas stonehenge has always survived to some degree.
I'm not sure why you consider Avebury more impressive. I've been to both as a child and I was more impressed by stonehenge.
That having been said there are more impressive burial sites, which are earth mounds which have caves that go underground, and are lit up by natural light only on certain days of the year.
They were certainly more impressive to visit, if not visually impressive.
At the uni I attend Computer Science and Physics can be bundled into a single 4 year course (CS or Phys individually would be 3 years), and I find the two complement each other very nicely. They almost feel like two sides of the same coin, somehow.
The FCC are talking about providing free, nationwide wireless internet.. Damn them to hell!
Slashdot users in general, it seems, cannot distinguish between creator and creation. Bad things are created by bad producers, who will only ever produce bad things. Good things are created by good producers, who will only ever produce good things.