Bloomberg is trying to find an excuse for running for a third term. Any excuse no matter how silly or absurd is better than having people focused on the fact that under his leadership as Mayor the city doesn't actually have a program to train students to become programmers or find work in other professions that can then be guaranteed to given them a good shot at a decent job and thereby boost the city's economy.
Any thinking person might wonder, however, how Bloomberg has the time to learn enough coding skills to help him appreciate what its going to take to actually develop city-wide plans to actually make it easier for coders to find jobs? If this can help in that, its surely worth his time. If nothing materializes in terms of a real jobs program, then this is little more than a publicity stunt. He got himself into this. It will be interesting to see him get himself out.
I invested thousands of hours of time and thousands of dollars in books on Java when Sun ran the show and Java held promise as an open platform that a user could use to do an incredible number of novel things.
However, Oracle proves only that whatever anyone does with Java they Oracle will parasitize it and take control of it, if they think it is their advantage. In the short run this is a great strategy for Oracle, but in the long run it is a disaster for anyone thinking of doing any development in Java, since nothing you create is your own.
I have moved on, I don't know about other Java coders but it no longer makes much sense as a platform for any kind of open work that the developer can retain control of.
Like much of science, we often only see the small pieces that we are most familiar with. Biology is not rocket science, the underlying mathematics is much more difficult than rocket science. A small combinatoric problem in a biological context can contain a larger solution space than all the electrons in the known universe.
I'm at the other end of Biology myself, Systematics (at the intersection of Taxonomy, Morphology and Machine Vision). The bridge between the two is where the action is in terms of functional genomics, its just that it is very hard to frame, much less compute, the equations needed to solve problems that unify both ends of the spectrum at once. Most biological problems don't lend themselves to ready statistical analysis because evolution is largely a long sequence of many nearly random events involving incredible complex interactions of encompassing extraordinary diversity and because statistical techniques have great difficulty factoring out the effects of phylogeny.
I just wish I only paid more attention to mathematics at a much earlier age. Without it, making the connections is hopeless. I guess that's why I see the potential for parallelism in GPU computing revolutionizing most biological disciplines. What worry about is that given the difficulty of these problems and the time it will take to get solutions carbon dioxide pollution and human population growth will largely have exterminated much of the biodiversity we will need to obtain answers. Maybe with luck our Chinese colleagues will push the frontiers faster than we are. I guess they better hope so as their environmental problems are often much larger than our own on a local and regional level, although all this talk of eliminating the EPA may get us quickly there as well.
That seems to be the general attitude across the board in the US, but it seems unlikely to be warranted any more. They keep growing their economy at between 8-10% per year. Estimates are their GDP will overtake that of the US in about 2025, if not sooner. The days of resting on laurels will have been gone by then. In any event if we are that far ahead, it seems hard to get a sense of that on slashdot judging from the sophistication of most comments.
Besides, I be curious to know what specific research has been falsified? Its not as if the US fossil fuels industry hasn't been doing the same here with respect to climate science.
Sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me. I agree that virtually all technology is global these days. Its just the rate of uptake that is astounding. About 35% of all US PhD students are Chinese an other 35% are Indian, while US grads are diminishing as a percentage. Major cutbacks in the UK now as well, but China is growing in double digits in most technology areas. I don't read Chinese myself, but the number of journals in the genomics area for Chinese readers is growing fast.
Beg, borrow, steal, collaborate it all comes down to the same effect. The momentum is shifting and shifting quickly, while our politicians sleep and throw cocktail parties to raise campaign dollars. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially given what sad shape planet earth is in, but when the reality does start to set in a lot of people are going to have nervous breakdowns and lots of unrealistic expectations. Keep in mind much of that importing is done on our dime given our otherwise large trade imbalance on most other commodity goods.
In any event, the throughput for NVIDIA's Tesla product lines are quite impressive. They really are revolutionizing computational biology, where there are many NP complete and NP Hard problems that can only be tackled with very past processors (in parallel) and with heuristic rather than exact algorithms. Do you know if these are manufactured here or in Asia?
Genomic analysis involves extensive use of recursive techniques, which are well suited to parallel processing and combinatoric problems. GPU's are small independent components originally designed to handle large matrices of pixel elements for video programming very quickly for video display and refresh. Thus, they can when suitably programmed, for example using CUDA, in parallel to compute solutions required to map problems of high combinatoric dimensionality onto a one dimensional space (sequence) very quickly compared to a CPU that would require serial computation on an extremely large combinatoric space. Effectively, it puts massive supercomputers in the petabyte and exabye processing speeds to be built with standard components at modest prices.
The amazing thing about this technology and the responses of the supposedly technologically sophisticated responses on a site such as slashdot, is that the Chinese are picking up on the technology and on genomic data mining far faster and with more intensity than is the broader US tech community. Given the size of their brainpower base and the rate at which they are adapting the technology the Chinese are well on their way to dominating the drug development and physiological/functional genomic sciences in the next 10 years. The race will largely be over before most American tech types even know it happened.
The even more amazing thing is the potential of unlocking the genetics which control human intelligence, memory and learning capacity. Once these are patented and developed for a host of applications all other forms technology will become increasingly inconsequential. While the US is putting its most powerful computers to use cracking into and reading people's email, the Chinese have a more ambitious agenda.
Actually, this is a good thing, since the Chinese are far more cognizant of the dangers posed by imminent global warming due to carbon dioxide pollution to their economy and the the stability of their political system. If you have any doubts about the Chinese propensity to use their wits, I suggest you see the movie Red Cliff, which very dramatically displays the remarkable triumph of wits over shear military superiority. Its based on a true story.
"IMHO, hybrid cars suffer from complexity right now, and battery weight / performance metrics still are a bit too crappy to make any longer term sense. If we improve batteries, we can reduce complexity, significantly improving the hybrid value proposition. Still a ways off."
Do you actually own a hybrid? I have less problems with my hybrid than I do with my conventional car.
So does every other gasoline powered vehicle. In any event, my experience with my Prius is that even in extreme cold 0-32 F it does its thing in a way not that much different on average than it does at 80-100 F. Sure its less efficient, as the batteries perform more poorly, but with global warming, I just don't see that much cold weather here any more (south MS, where its about 20-30 F above normal this winter).
"Without gas, the Prius Gen III can go only about 1-2 miles on the battery."
Much further than my non-hybrid vehicle when relying entirely on its battery!
" it's fairly obvious that fuel use in the US keeps increasing while car mileage standards are ever higher."
So does the population, which is one of the reason's improved mpg efficiency is extremely important if you want to hope that the cost of gas won't be $200-300 a gallon in the near future.
Generally speaking he is right. Most who post and those who code can distinguish a valid argument from an invalid one, whether everyone can or not. In fact, although I have a lot of technical knowledge, there's seldom a time, when seeing points arguing based on reasoning rather than sophism, that I can't learn even more from my fellow slash-doters. A larger share of BS gets challenged here than on most sites. One just has to be astute enough to recognize it.
I really haven't seen any specific peer reviewed articles on this point since I haven't bothered to look. Perhaps you could point these out.
However, there is no doubt that manufacturers of non-hybrid vehicles and oil companies hate these things and spend a lot of effort at trying to discredit hybrid technology at every opportunity. Its not too hard to understand why.
I don't know what prices are like in your area, but the greater fuel efficiency of diesel is more than made up for around here by its much higher price (about a dollar a gallon more).
I haven't had to replace my tires yet. They look new even though I've now got about 70,000 miles on them. You probably are not checking your tire pressure and rotating often enough and are thus getting uneven wear. In contrast for some reason I have to replace my tires on my Chevy Uplander about every 35,000 miles no matter what I do. Perhaps, its just a result of the weight difference between the cars.
I totally agree. The motives of folks attempting to spread fear when there's no reason for it has to be questioned. The cost of replacing batteries every 10 years pales in comparison with the difference in the price of gasoline saved during that same period.
The shame of it is that if more switched to hybrids, fuel prices for everyone would go down as simply less would be used for a given number of miles driven. Some economists have argued that hybrids are the only thing keeping gas prices as low as they are in the US. No wonder the oil companies spend so much to market against their use.
The emissions are not significantly more than they are for producing batteries on non-hybrid cars. That's one of the reasons the Russians and the Chinese are teaming up to produce batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles en mass.
Having owned quite a few cars and now owning a Prius for quite a few years, I simply can't agree with you. Given the reality of speed limits, traffic, and parking issues, overall I can't think of a single of the many cars that I have owned that has provided me anything more special on average than I get with my Prius. It has far more acceleration when I want or need it (largely because it is so light and gets tremendous torque from the motor), far more fuel economy, the same or more comfort, smoothness of ride and handling ability, and ease of parking than any other car or truck I've owned. Admittedly, its poor when hauling things, but no one would by a Prius as a moving van.
If I have one major complaint, it would be that my older Prius has a rather poor interface on the GIS system, say compared to a Garmin unit, except for being better in being entirely built in. I don't know if this has changed in newer models, but I would suspect that it has given advances in GIS technology over the past 5 years.
Just my opinion, but I am definitely buying another when one of my other cars needs replacing.
Yes and larger vehicles are more likely to either strike something or be struck by something by virtue of their larger size. The media and the SUV manufactures like to over-accentuate dramatic crashes to hype the safety statistics, which look only at instances where there was a crash and not the far more frequent episodes when a crash due to being in a smaller car was avoided.
"I have had to change the small 12 volt battery a couple of times, ~5 year intervals, and tires about every 60K is not a problem."
I went to a computer controlled battery charger that can keep it trickle charged when its not fully charged and off when it is. Consequently, I've totally eliminated the two or three episodes where I didn't drive the car frequently enough to keep the battery charged (I travel for months at a time abroad or cross country). The charger I picked up from my Toyota dealer has been well worth its modest price.
Slashdot Mirror
Bloomberg is trying to find an excuse for running for a third term. Any excuse no matter how silly or absurd is better than having people focused on the fact that under his leadership as Mayor the city doesn't actually have a program to train students to become programmers or find work in other professions that can then be guaranteed to given them a good shot at a decent job and thereby boost the city's economy.
Any thinking person might wonder, however, how Bloomberg has the time to learn enough coding skills to help him appreciate what its going to take to actually develop city-wide plans to actually make it easier for coders to find jobs? If this can help in that, its surely worth his time. If nothing materializes in terms of a real jobs program, then this is little more than a publicity stunt. He got himself into this. It will be interesting to see him get himself out.
I invested thousands of hours of time and thousands of dollars in books on Java when Sun ran the show and Java held promise as an open platform that a user could use to do an incredible number of novel things.
However, Oracle proves only that whatever anyone does with Java they Oracle will parasitize it and take control of it, if they think it is their advantage. In the short run this is a great strategy for Oracle, but in the long run it is a disaster for anyone thinking of doing any development in Java, since nothing you create is your own.
I have moved on, I don't know about other Java coders but it no longer makes much sense as a platform for any kind of open work that the developer can retain control of.
Like much of science, we often only see the small pieces that we are most familiar with. Biology is not rocket science, the underlying mathematics is much more difficult than rocket science. A small combinatoric problem in a biological context can contain a larger solution space than all the electrons in the known universe.
I'm at the other end of Biology myself, Systematics (at the intersection of Taxonomy, Morphology and Machine Vision). The bridge between the two is where the action is in terms of functional genomics, its just that it is very hard to frame, much less compute, the equations needed to solve problems that unify both ends of the spectrum at once. Most biological problems don't lend themselves to ready statistical analysis because evolution is largely a long sequence of many nearly random events involving incredible complex interactions of encompassing extraordinary diversity and because statistical techniques have great difficulty factoring out the effects of phylogeny.
I just wish I only paid more attention to mathematics at a much earlier age. Without it, making the connections is hopeless. I guess that's why I see the potential for parallelism in GPU computing revolutionizing most biological disciplines. What worry about is that given the difficulty of these problems and the time it will take to get solutions carbon dioxide pollution and human population growth will largely have exterminated much of the biodiversity we will need to obtain answers. Maybe with luck our Chinese colleagues will push the frontiers faster than we are. I guess they better hope so as their environmental problems are often much larger than our own on a local and regional level, although all this talk of eliminating the EPA may get us quickly there as well.
That seems to be the general attitude across the board in the US, but it seems unlikely to be warranted any more. They keep growing their economy at between 8-10% per year. Estimates are their GDP will overtake that of the US in about 2025, if not sooner. The days of resting on laurels will have been gone by then. In any event if we are that far ahead, it seems hard to get a sense of that on slashdot judging from the sophistication of most comments.
Besides, I be curious to know what specific research has been falsified? Its not as if the US fossil fuels industry hasn't been doing the same here with respect to climate science.
Sounds a lot like wishful thinking to me. I agree that virtually all technology is global these days. Its just the rate of uptake that is astounding. About 35% of all US PhD students are Chinese an other 35% are Indian, while US grads are diminishing as a percentage. Major cutbacks in the UK now as well, but China is growing in double digits in most technology areas. I don't read Chinese myself, but the number of journals in the genomics area for Chinese readers is growing fast.
Beg, borrow, steal, collaborate it all comes down to the same effect. The momentum is shifting and shifting quickly, while our politicians sleep and throw cocktail parties to raise campaign dollars. Not necessarily a bad thing, especially given what sad shape planet earth is in, but when the reality does start to set in a lot of people are going to have nervous breakdowns and lots of unrealistic expectations. Keep in mind much of that importing is done on our dime given our otherwise large trade imbalance on most other commodity goods.
In any event, the throughput for NVIDIA's Tesla product lines are quite impressive. They really are revolutionizing computational biology, where there are many NP complete and NP Hard problems that can only be tackled with very past processors (in parallel) and with heuristic rather than exact algorithms. Do you know if these are manufactured here or in Asia?
Genomic analysis involves extensive use of recursive techniques, which are well suited to parallel processing and combinatoric problems. GPU's are small independent components originally designed to handle large matrices of pixel elements for video programming very quickly for video display and refresh. Thus, they can when suitably programmed, for example using CUDA, in parallel to compute solutions required to map problems of high combinatoric dimensionality onto a one dimensional space (sequence) very quickly compared to a CPU that would require serial computation on an extremely large combinatoric space. Effectively, it puts massive supercomputers in the petabyte and exabye processing speeds to be built with standard components at modest prices.
The amazing thing about this technology and the responses of the supposedly technologically sophisticated responses on a site such as slashdot, is that the Chinese are picking up on the technology and on genomic data mining far faster and with more intensity than is the broader US tech community. Given the size of their brainpower base and the rate at which they are adapting the technology the Chinese are well on their way to dominating the drug development and physiological/functional genomic sciences in the next 10 years. The race will largely be over before most American tech types even know it happened.
The even more amazing thing is the potential of unlocking the genetics which control human intelligence, memory and learning capacity. Once these are patented and developed for a host of applications all other forms technology will become increasingly inconsequential. While the US is putting its most powerful computers to use cracking into and reading people's email, the Chinese have a more ambitious agenda.
Actually, this is a good thing, since the Chinese are far more cognizant of the dangers posed by imminent global warming due to carbon dioxide pollution to their economy and the the stability of their political system. If you have any doubts about the Chinese propensity to use their wits, I suggest you see the movie Red Cliff, which very dramatically displays the remarkable triumph of wits over shear military superiority. Its based on a true story.
Yes, but you have better pensions and health care, and a much cleaner, less stressful environment, not to mention vacations.
What on earth are you talking about. Lithium batteries are far more environmentally friendly than lead-acid batteries.
Looks as if the oil-company set is doing some serious astro-turfing here on /.
"IMHO, hybrid cars suffer from complexity right now, and battery weight / performance metrics still are a bit too crappy to make any longer term sense. If we improve batteries, we can reduce complexity, significantly improving the hybrid value proposition. Still a ways off."
Do you actually own a hybrid? I have less problems with my hybrid than I do with my conventional car.
You sound like you work for an oil company.
"sensitive to outside temperature"
So does every other gasoline powered vehicle. In any event, my experience with my Prius is that even in extreme cold 0-32 F it does its thing in a way not that much different on average than it does at 80-100 F. Sure its less efficient, as the batteries perform more poorly, but with global warming, I just don't see that much cold weather here any more (south MS, where its about 20-30 F above normal this winter).
"Without gas, the Prius Gen III can go only about 1-2 miles on the battery."
Much further than my non-hybrid vehicle when relying entirely on its battery!
Funny that you have a sig that disagrees with you.
" it's fairly obvious that fuel use in the US keeps increasing while car mileage standards are ever higher."
So does the population, which is one of the reason's improved mpg efficiency is extremely important if you want to hope that the cost of gas won't be $200-300 a gallon in the near future.
Generally speaking he is right. Most who post and those who code can distinguish a valid argument from an invalid one, whether everyone can or not. In fact, although I have a lot of technical knowledge, there's seldom a time, when seeing points arguing based on reasoning rather than sophism, that I can't learn even more from my fellow slash-doters. A larger share of BS gets challenged here than on most sites. One just has to be astute enough to recognize it.
I guess I better start checking for conspirators under my dashboard before I turn on the ignition.
Mine is about 1-2%, which is much less than I see on my Chevy which is at 4-5%.
I really haven't seen any specific peer reviewed articles on this point since I haven't bothered to look. Perhaps you could point these out.
However, there is no doubt that manufacturers of non-hybrid vehicles and oil companies hate these things and spend a lot of effort at trying to discredit hybrid technology at every opportunity. Its not too hard to understand why.
This sounds like excuses to me too.
I don't know what prices are like in your area, but the greater fuel efficiency of diesel is more than made up for around here by its much higher price (about a dollar a gallon more).
I haven't had to replace my tires yet. They look new even though I've now got about 70,000 miles on them. You probably are not checking your tire pressure and rotating often enough and are thus getting uneven wear. In contrast for some reason I have to replace my tires on my Chevy Uplander about every 35,000 miles no matter what I do. Perhaps, its just a result of the weight difference between the cars.
I totally agree. The motives of folks attempting to spread fear when there's no reason for it has to be questioned. The cost of replacing batteries every 10 years pales in comparison with the difference in the price of gasoline saved during that same period.
The shame of it is that if more switched to hybrids, fuel prices for everyone would go down as simply less would be used for a given number of miles driven. Some economists have argued that hybrids are the only thing keeping gas prices as low as they are in the US. No wonder the oil companies spend so much to market against their use.
The emissions are not significantly more than they are for producing batteries on non-hybrid cars. That's one of the reasons the Russians and the Chinese are teaming up to produce batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles en mass.
Having owned quite a few cars and now owning a Prius for quite a few years, I simply can't agree with you. Given the reality of speed limits, traffic, and parking issues, overall I can't think of a single of the many cars that I have owned that has provided me anything more special on average than I get with my Prius. It has far more acceleration when I want or need it (largely because it is so light and gets tremendous torque from the motor), far more fuel economy, the same or more comfort, smoothness of ride and handling ability, and ease of parking than any other car or truck I've owned. Admittedly, its poor when hauling things, but no one would by a Prius as a moving van.
If I have one major complaint, it would be that my older Prius has a rather poor interface on the GIS system, say compared to a Garmin unit, except for being better in being entirely built in. I don't know if this has changed in newer models, but I would suspect that it has given advances in GIS technology over the past 5 years.
Just my opinion, but I am definitely buying another when one of my other cars needs replacing.
Yes and larger vehicles are more likely to either strike something or be struck by something by virtue of their larger size. The media and the SUV manufactures like to over-accentuate dramatic crashes to hype the safety statistics, which look only at instances where there was a crash and not the far more frequent episodes when a crash due to being in a smaller car was avoided.
"I have had to change the small 12 volt battery a couple of times, ~5 year intervals, and tires about every 60K is not a problem."
I went to a computer controlled battery charger that can keep it trickle charged when its not fully charged and off when it is. Consequently, I've totally eliminated the two or three episodes where I didn't drive the car frequently enough to keep the battery charged (I travel for months at a time abroad or cross country). The charger I picked up from my Toyota dealer has been well worth its modest price.