It is possible to use the GPU effectively to speed up some scientific simulations. Usually in fluid mechanics problems that could be solved by time marching (or physics that obey hyperbolic governing differential equations). But working with the GPU is a real PITA. There is no standardization. There is no real support for any high level languages. Of course they have bullet points saying "C++ is Supported". But you dig in and find, you have to link with their library, there is no standardization, you need to manage the memory, you need to manage the data pipe line and fetch and cache, the actual amount of code you could fit in their "processing" unit is trivially small. All it could store turns out to be about 10 or so double precision solution variables and about flux vector splitting for Navier Stokes for just one triangle. About 40 lines of C code.
On top of everything, the binary is a mismash of compiled executable chunks sitting in the interpreted code. Essentially the if a competitor or hacker gets the "executable" they can reverse engineer every bit of innovation you had done to cram your code into these tiny processors and reverse engineer your scientific algorithm at a very fine grain.
Then their sales critter create "buzz". Make misleading, almost lying, presentations about GPU programming and how it is going to achieve world domination.
She was painting zebras you insensitive clod. Just zebras which are mathematically mapped to the unit square. But that was her early black and white period. Now a days she is into painting invisible pink zebra striped unicorns.
It was about that time photography made big inroads and thousands of artists who made a decent living painting landscapes, river views, seascapes, and portraits of snooty rich people lost their means of earning a pay check. So they had to be "different" from photographs. "Realistic painting? Why would I pay you so much money for something a photogapher can do in a few minutes?". So art became "non-photograph".
All those guys who laughed at Geocities with over use of blinking letters and the icon for "Under construction" are already suffering enough by having to look at the hideous things on the facebook walls. But this is going to prove beyond doubt geocities was a just a decade before its time.
Come on guys, more opportunities for Faster Than Light travel. May be not yet for mortals but for the particles shot through a tunnel in alps, all it takes is a few bad connections and some inaccurate clocks, and superluminal speed becomes a reality.
I view a desire to do evil as being evil where you define an evil action as being evil. In that sense, we're both correct in the context of our own philosophy and incorrect in the context of each other's philosophy.
Fair enough.
One funny thing is, we both are convinced we arrived at our current belief system by logic. May be desire to see oneself as logical is also innate;-)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39248607
Since the late 1980s, the game theory, strategies to play iterated prisoner's dilemma etc have led to a fundamental understanding of how altruism and cooperation could evolve. Chapter 13, "Nice guys finish first" in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a good starting point. But it is slightly dated, circa 1992. There are more recent materials too.
Almost all the savvy kids have been creating *two* on line avatars, one personal and one SFM. Safe for Mom. Now may be they will use SFM as SFE (Safe for Employers) or they will create yet another separate avatar for SFE. Looks like the only thing easier than creating on line avatars is creating corporations. "Corporations are people my friend". Now "Avatars are your friend my corporations".
You are very honest to admit that deep in your heart, lurks lust, greed, treachery and dishonesty. And you are correct in assuming same dark feeling are in the depths of most other human beings. But how often do you act out on those feelings? Your conscience, no doubt shaped by religious upbringing and teachings instilled in you by your parents, elders in the community and leaders you trust, keeps it under reasonable check. Is that not correct?
To summarize: We both agree darkness lies in the heart of most people. We both agree that most people do not act out on those dark feelings. We both agree people develop some kind of checks and balances, a moral compass.
Where we differ is: You believe that this moral compass is acquired by faith in God, religious upbringing and a dash of fear of God, and lot trust in God for salvation. I believe this moral compass was developed by an evolutionary process.
The foundation for our respective beliefs: Your belief comes from reading about the discourses by learned people, in philosophy and you find their arguments cogent and convincing. My belief comes from the observations of altruistic behavior on animals and scientific theories that explain under what circumstances such altruism can arise. I find the evidence cogent and convincing.
I will never be able to convince you that our inner moral compass arose from a natural mechanistic process. But I will be very happy to be your neighbor, colleague and a fellow citizen.
No the evidence for altruism and cooperation is very strong and scientific. It is not based on folk psychology and reading between the lines to get the "true" moral lessons of some stone age mythology. Do yourself a favor. Find the Parade magazine article about "the golden rule" written by Carl Sagan circa 1992 to get a quick summary of how the evolution of cooperation. At around the same time Richard Dawkins added a new chapter to his ground breaking book, "The Selfish Gene". The Chapter 13, "Why nice guys finish first". You will understand that majority of the people are honest majority of the time. A small minority of people are dishonest most of the time. Majority of the people are dishonest occasionally. The system is rigged against the people who are dishonest majority of their time. They follow a high risk high reward strategy. A microscopic minority of these habitual offenders hit it spectacularly big, garner headlines and attention. But most of them lose, they remain at the bottom of the society. Even drug dealers several layers above street level thugs barely make ends meet. But our mind is evolved to think, what you see often is more likely to happen. Our mind is not evolved to get past seeing the taped broadcast and hearing about cruise ships hitting corals reefs in the Mediterranean seas 20 times over two days. That is what distorting your perception.
Mix crowd sourcing, cheap data connection, low labor cost of India together and what do you get? You can hire people in India to sit in front of their computers on 8 hour shifts breaking any captcha you throw at them.
True, we have honesty and dishonesty ingrained in our DNA. To understand it, we need to classify the interactions of humans with other humans into "in-group" interactions and "out-group" interactions. You will find all the "in-group" interactions are based on honesty and mutual cooperation and altruism. This is in our blood and is constantly encouraged by all the religious texts talking about charity, kindness, honesty and cooperation. The in-groups were originally extended families and clans. They are technically generic altruism bonded by shared DNA.
When it comes to out-group interactions majority of it is based on hostility, and some level of dishonesty. Almost all religious texts talk about the "others" and how to defend against them. So with this broad frame work we could understand the building blocks of the society. We may actually understand "What's the matter with Kansas?".
The game theory predicts that we will never be able to drive the cheater population to zero. In both in-group and out-group interactions there will be cheaters who are more selfish. They hone their selfish skills practicing it against the "out-group" with social permission, but use it against the in-group for self promotion too. But cheaters can form only a small fraction of the society, again predicted by game theory. Thus my broad claim "in general human beings are honest and cooperating" has some basis.
What theory of evolution teaches us is that one does not have to be individually smart to create extremely smart systems.
The pendulum swings always to the extremes. If you look at it as it is going up, no it is coming down, aw shucks it is going up again, it looks like a stupid system. If you draw the free body diagram of the pendulum bob and calculate the restoring force you find that there is a restoring force, that is constantly trying to bring the bob to the equilibrium, and it is proportional to how far from the "norm" the bob has deviated, and actually you will see it as a smart system, but with a little too less damping.
At any given moment Democracy will be making decisions, will be pushing the extremes, and over shoot sane limits and seem to be very chaotic and dumb. But it has correction system built in, when one party over reaches, it will lose power and the pendulum will swing the other way.
So, yeah, people are not very smart when they elect the politicians, but the beauty of Democracy is that they don't have to be.
It is NOT in our nature to be dishonest. Human beings are quite honest, and they cooperate well and they sacrifice a lot for their self identified group. When the extended families and clans were the only available group identity the cooperating families thrived. The fundamental honesty, reciprocal altruism and altruism for blood relatives is so ingrained in our DNA by we were able cobble together clans into tribes (11000 BCE), tribes into nations (8000 BCE) and nations into empires 5000 BCE.
There is strong evidence to the contrary, that governments work, even dictatorships work, even authoritarian monarchies work, even in the "lawless" areas in the Hindukush mountains between Afganistan and Kazhakstan, there is order, there is a local law, a custom, a way of life where large number of people have large number of peaceful daily transactions. Yeah, they will kill without mercy who they see as enemy. But day in day out, in their daily dealings with one another, even when they have to deal with their "enemy" violent confrontations are rare not the norm. Even among the koi-san people of kalahari or the Fore people of New Guinea where warfare is constant, more than 90% of their interactions with one another is peaceful and honest.
It is true hunter-gatherers were free as a bird and found food with very little work. After agriculturalists took over by population expansion and confined the hunter gatherers to the most unproductive areas of the earth, like swamps, eserts and mountaintops. Still they worked very little. They were extremely hostile and brutal to other tribes and clans they come into contact with. Even within their bands if the size becomes too much it would split.
But within the band, they were very tightly bound by social customes, mores and taboos. Bragging, hoarding food, keeping food sources secret, keeping knowledge secret for personal benefit etc are strongly discouraged. You live in the group and mostly even the most able hunter or the most perceptive gatheress (men hunted and women gathered mostly) did not get any extra food rations as reward.
By the way, the Cain and Abel story is quite similar to the stories in Egyptian mythology and Mesopotamian mythologies. Cain was the farmer and Abel was the hunter. The story is considered to be some kind of folk memory of the struggles between hunters and farmers.
Who is this German foreign alien to impose an absolute speed limit? Our founding fathers did not create this country to obey some weird laws dreamt up by European commie librul snobbish scientists. I demand immediate congressional action to repeal the theory and the limits immediately. It will create gazillion new jobs.
One of the most confounding thing for an American (or an Indian American) trying to solve the cryptic crossword puzzles from the British newspapers is getting the rhyming slang based clues right. A subculture that does not want to be monitored would develop its own code words and pretty soon the brutal grep for keywords in the stream of messages would prove to be useless. It did not help Bobbies putting on tattered clothing and hanging around the seedy bars trying eavesdrop on the dips and their squeezes. It is not going to help the Govt snoopers for long either.
Cause
The most common hypothesis for the cause of motion sickness is that it functions as a defense mechanism against neurotoxins.[7] The area postrema in the brain is responsible for inducing vomiting when poisons are detected, and for resolving conflicts between vision and balance. When feeling motion but not seeing it (for example, in a ship with no windows), the inner ear transmits to the brain that it senses motion, but the eyes tell the brain that everything is still. As a result of the discordance, the brain will come to the conclusion that one of them is hallucinating and further conclude that the hallucination is due to poison ingestion. The brain responds by inducing vomiting, to clear the supposed toxin.
How a brain gets rewired to compensate for eye-glass frames moving with the head while the world does not is something beyond my understanding. Fighter pilots use HUD that projects some info at infinity that moves with aircraft reference frame along with canopy and instruments, while the horizon is independent. I am sure some humans are better at not getting motion sickness and others are worse. So it is not a given that google goggles would induce motion sickness. But it could. Especially for people prone to motion sickness.
Goggles from Google sounds nice. But all these displays strapped to the head, that projects an collimated image into the eye (the display will appear to float at infinity or at some distance from the eye) have a problem. They can induce motion sickness and head aches. The human brain is not used to part of the world to move with the head while other parts of the world stay fixed. We perceive in 3D with both stereoscopic vision and some amount of parallax. Our inner ear's idea of horizon and gravity should be in synch with the visual horizon. When they are out of synch, the body thinks throws an exception. Really, it throws up. In the evolutionary past, when these got out of synch it is probably because the animal ingested some poisonous substance. Throwing up is a decent defense against it. That is why motion sickness makes you throw up.
If I compressed a million emails, and then some user wanted to read email #502,922 — I'd have to "seek" through the preceding half-million or so to build the dictionary in order to decompress it. That's probably not feasible.
What the summary does not say was that, email number 502,922 is special cased and is stored in plain text at the head of the compression dictionary. So it will trivially fetch email number 502,922.
When we were a small company I decided on the priority of all my team's project my self. I would listen to all the project requests, feature requests, have an idea of how much work was needed for each. Then I would do what I thought was biggest bang for the buck. I was very sincere and worked hard. But it was kind of autocratic and when the company was small I had enough coffee machine talk and water cooler talk to satisfy all PMs their project will get attention, and that whatever I was doing was for the larger benefit of the company. I had full backing from the upper management. It was fine, we grew sales ten times in ten years.
Then we were acquired by a bigger company, we became a smaller sub assembly in a larger machine and I became a smaller cog in proportion. Initially all the new fangled process requirements, paperwork and bureaucracy looked like waste of time, time taken away from actually working on delivering features. But I realized what the upper management really wanted was accurate estimate of feature delivery dates, good reliable feedback etc and the paperwork was their way of asking for it. Then I learnt all the terminology. I specify my team capacity. "You can assign any priority you want for your work. I will give you the story points needed to get the work done. My team capacity is limited. You guys fight among yourselves and tell me what to schedule when. " is my position. It is actually working.
I was talking to my cousin who is a doctor. They have this new fangled iPad based prescription system. Its user interface has been designed by programmers for programmers. As usual they had this wonderful idea to offer edit boxes with drop down auto completion options. (Yeah, it is going towards "got the right Bob?" gmail extension). She completed a prescription, had a nagging suspicion that the down click did not register and the first prepopulated suggestion has been posted. But the form has vanished, no confirmation screen, no quick way to go back and check what she has just prescribed. She browsed hard found the prescription, it was wrong as she had suspected, cancelled it and re-entered the right one.
The moral of the story is, it aint no panacea. It will remove a bunch of current errors, but create a new set of errors
I asked her to demand that the drop down auto complete suggestion box to be populated with the Logo of the drug, not just the name in text, also a confirmation window to pop up and stay on top off all windows for two to three seconds. The confirmation window should, display prominently the drug logo in correct color, based on the dosage picture of a baby/boy or girl/ small man or woman/ big man or woman, the picture of the organ that will be affected by drug. Pretty soon the doctors will develop a mental image of what the confirmation screen should look like and if anything is wrong, a simple "touch anywhere to cancel" action.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently there was some woman scientist involved in the breakthrough who did not get full credit and acknowledgment.
On top of everything, the binary is a mismash of compiled executable chunks sitting in the interpreted code. Essentially the if a competitor or hacker gets the "executable" they can reverse engineer every bit of innovation you had done to cram your code into these tiny processors and reverse engineer your scientific algorithm at a very fine grain.
Then their sales critter create "buzz". Make misleading, almost lying, presentations about GPU programming and how it is going to achieve world domination.
So this is the year of the solar panels? Hope it goes as well as the year of Linux desktop.
She was painting zebras you insensitive clod. Just zebras which are mathematically mapped to the unit square. But that was her early black and white period. Now a days she is into painting invisible pink zebra striped unicorns.
It started in the 1920's or thereabouts.
It was about that time photography made big inroads and thousands of artists who made a decent living painting landscapes, river views, seascapes, and portraits of snooty rich people lost their means of earning a pay check. So they had to be "different" from photographs. "Realistic painting? Why would I pay you so much money for something a photogapher can do in a few minutes?". So art became "non-photograph".
All those guys who laughed at Geocities with over use of blinking letters and the icon for "Under construction" are already suffering enough by having to look at the hideous things on the facebook walls. But this is going to prove beyond doubt geocities was a just a decade before its time.
Come on guys, more opportunities for Faster Than Light travel. May be not yet for mortals but for the particles shot through a tunnel in alps, all it takes is a few bad connections and some inaccurate clocks, and superluminal speed becomes a reality.
I view a desire to do evil as being evil where you define an evil action as being evil. In that sense, we're both correct in the context of our own philosophy and incorrect in the context of each other's philosophy.
Fair enough.
One funny thing is, we both are convinced we arrived at our current belief system by logic. May be desire to see oneself as logical is also innate ;-)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2707959&cid=39248607 Since the late 1980s, the game theory, strategies to play iterated prisoner's dilemma etc have led to a fundamental understanding of how altruism and cooperation could evolve. Chapter 13, "Nice guys finish first" in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is a good starting point. But it is slightly dated, circa 1992. There are more recent materials too.
Almost all the savvy kids have been creating *two* on line avatars, one personal and one SFM. Safe for Mom. Now may be they will use SFM as SFE (Safe for Employers) or they will create yet another separate avatar for SFE. Looks like the only thing easier than creating on line avatars is creating corporations. "Corporations are people my friend". Now "Avatars are your friend my corporations".
Logical Conclusion:
Arrest everybody for being a pedophile. Just in case. You can always establish your innocence later.
Stop... Giving... them... ideas. OK? They might take you seriously. If they could, they would arrest everyone in sight. just in case.
To summarize: We both agree darkness lies in the heart of most people. We both agree that most people do not act out on those dark feelings. We both agree people develop some kind of checks and balances, a moral compass.
Where we differ is: You believe that this moral compass is acquired by faith in God, religious upbringing and a dash of fear of God, and lot trust in God for salvation. I believe this moral compass was developed by an evolutionary process.
The foundation for our respective beliefs: Your belief comes from reading about the discourses by learned people, in philosophy and you find their arguments cogent and convincing. My belief comes from the observations of altruistic behavior on animals and scientific theories that explain under what circumstances such altruism can arise. I find the evidence cogent and convincing.
I will never be able to convince you that our inner moral compass arose from a natural mechanistic process. But I will be very happy to be your neighbor, colleague and a fellow citizen.
No the evidence for altruism and cooperation is very strong and scientific. It is not based on folk psychology and reading between the lines to get the "true" moral lessons of some stone age mythology. Do yourself a favor. Find the Parade magazine article about "the golden rule" written by Carl Sagan circa 1992 to get a quick summary of how the evolution of cooperation. At around the same time Richard Dawkins added a new chapter to his ground breaking book, "The Selfish Gene". The Chapter 13, "Why nice guys finish first". You will understand that majority of the people are honest majority of the time. A small minority of people are dishonest most of the time. Majority of the people are dishonest occasionally. The system is rigged against the people who are dishonest majority of their time. They follow a high risk high reward strategy. A microscopic minority of these habitual offenders hit it spectacularly big, garner headlines and attention. But most of them lose, they remain at the bottom of the society. Even drug dealers several layers above street level thugs barely make ends meet. But our mind is evolved to think, what you see often is more likely to happen. Our mind is not evolved to get past seeing the taped broadcast and hearing about cruise ships hitting corals reefs in the Mediterranean seas 20 times over two days. That is what distorting your perception.
Mix crowd sourcing, cheap data connection, low labor cost of India together and what do you get? You can hire people in India to sit in front of their computers on 8 hour shifts breaking any captcha you throw at them.
When it comes to out-group interactions majority of it is based on hostility, and some level of dishonesty. Almost all religious texts talk about the "others" and how to defend against them. So with this broad frame work we could understand the building blocks of the society. We may actually understand "What's the matter with Kansas?".
The game theory predicts that we will never be able to drive the cheater population to zero. In both in-group and out-group interactions there will be cheaters who are more selfish. They hone their selfish skills practicing it against the "out-group" with social permission, but use it against the in-group for self promotion too. But cheaters can form only a small fraction of the society, again predicted by game theory. Thus my broad claim "in general human beings are honest and cooperating" has some basis.
The pendulum swings always to the extremes. If you look at it as it is going up, no it is coming down, aw shucks it is going up again, it looks like a stupid system. If you draw the free body diagram of the pendulum bob and calculate the restoring force you find that there is a restoring force, that is constantly trying to bring the bob to the equilibrium, and it is proportional to how far from the "norm" the bob has deviated, and actually you will see it as a smart system, but with a little too less damping.
At any given moment Democracy will be making decisions, will be pushing the extremes, and over shoot sane limits and seem to be very chaotic and dumb. But it has correction system built in, when one party over reaches, it will lose power and the pendulum will swing the other way.
So, yeah, people are not very smart when they elect the politicians, but the beauty of Democracy is that they don't have to be.
There is strong evidence to the contrary, that governments work, even dictatorships work, even authoritarian monarchies work, even in the "lawless" areas in the Hindukush mountains between Afganistan and Kazhakstan, there is order, there is a local law, a custom, a way of life where large number of people have large number of peaceful daily transactions. Yeah, they will kill without mercy who they see as enemy. But day in day out, in their daily dealings with one another, even when they have to deal with their "enemy" violent confrontations are rare not the norm. Even among the koi-san people of kalahari or the Fore people of New Guinea where warfare is constant, more than 90% of their interactions with one another is peaceful and honest.
But within the band, they were very tightly bound by social customes, mores and taboos. Bragging, hoarding food, keeping food sources secret, keeping knowledge secret for personal benefit etc are strongly discouraged. You live in the group and mostly even the most able hunter or the most perceptive gatheress (men hunted and women gathered mostly) did not get any extra food rations as reward.
By the way, the Cain and Abel story is quite similar to the stories in Egyptian mythology and Mesopotamian mythologies. Cain was the farmer and Abel was the hunter. The story is considered to be some kind of folk memory of the struggles between hunters and farmers.
Who is this German foreign alien to impose an absolute speed limit? Our founding fathers did not create this country to obey some weird laws dreamt up by European commie librul snobbish scientists. I demand immediate congressional action to repeal the theory and the limits immediately. It will create gazillion new jobs.
One of the most confounding thing for an American (or an Indian American) trying to solve the cryptic crossword puzzles from the British newspapers is getting the rhyming slang based clues right. A subculture that does not want to be monitored would develop its own code words and pretty soon the brutal grep for keywords in the stream of messages would prove to be useless. It did not help Bobbies putting on tattered clothing and hanging around the seedy bars trying eavesdrop on the dips and their squeezes. It is not going to help the Govt snoopers for long either.
Cause The most common hypothesis for the cause of motion sickness is that it functions as a defense mechanism against neurotoxins.[7] The area postrema in the brain is responsible for inducing vomiting when poisons are detected, and for resolving conflicts between vision and balance. When feeling motion but not seeing it (for example, in a ship with no windows), the inner ear transmits to the brain that it senses motion, but the eyes tell the brain that everything is still. As a result of the discordance, the brain will come to the conclusion that one of them is hallucinating and further conclude that the hallucination is due to poison ingestion. The brain responds by inducing vomiting, to clear the supposed toxin.
How a brain gets rewired to compensate for eye-glass frames moving with the head while the world does not is something beyond my understanding. Fighter pilots use HUD that projects some info at infinity that moves with aircraft reference frame along with canopy and instruments, while the horizon is independent. I am sure some humans are better at not getting motion sickness and others are worse. So it is not a given that google goggles would induce motion sickness. But it could. Especially for people prone to motion sickness.
Goggles from Google sounds nice. But all these displays strapped to the head, that projects an collimated image into the eye (the display will appear to float at infinity or at some distance from the eye) have a problem. They can induce motion sickness and head aches. The human brain is not used to part of the world to move with the head while other parts of the world stay fixed. We perceive in 3D with both stereoscopic vision and some amount of parallax. Our inner ear's idea of horizon and gravity should be in synch with the visual horizon. When they are out of synch, the body thinks throws an exception. Really, it throws up. In the evolutionary past, when these got out of synch it is probably because the animal ingested some poisonous substance. Throwing up is a decent defense against it. That is why motion sickness makes you throw up.
If I compressed a million emails, and then some user wanted to read email #502,922 — I'd have to "seek" through the preceding half-million or so to build the dictionary in order to decompress it. That's probably not feasible.
What the summary does not say was that, email number 502,922 is special cased and is stored in plain text at the head of the compression dictionary. So it will trivially fetch email number 502,922.
Then we were acquired by a bigger company, we became a smaller sub assembly in a larger machine and I became a smaller cog in proportion. Initially all the new fangled process requirements, paperwork and bureaucracy looked like waste of time, time taken away from actually working on delivering features. But I realized what the upper management really wanted was accurate estimate of feature delivery dates, good reliable feedback etc and the paperwork was their way of asking for it. Then I learnt all the terminology. I specify my team capacity. "You can assign any priority you want for your work. I will give you the story points needed to get the work done. My team capacity is limited. You guys fight among yourselves and tell me what to schedule when. " is my position. It is actually working.
The moral of the story is, it aint no panacea. It will remove a bunch of current errors, but create a new set of errors
I asked her to demand that the drop down auto complete suggestion box to be populated with the Logo of the drug, not just the name in text, also a confirmation window to pop up and stay on top off all windows for two to three seconds. The confirmation window should, display prominently the drug logo in correct color, based on the dosage picture of a baby/boy or girl/ small man or woman/ big man or woman, the picture of the organ that will be affected by drug. Pretty soon the doctors will develop a mental image of what the confirmation screen should look like and if anything is wrong, a simple "touch anywhere to cancel" action.