Posts by CarbonLifeForm 86 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Sep 2014
It's new puritanism thanks to feminism.
The underlying thought isn't 'how dare you have sex' but rather 'how dare you abuse your power, white chauvinist pig' and yes, the scolds will call it rape due to the power imbalance.
It's not rape legally or in any rational sense of course, but to the Politically Correct crowd, it essentially is viewed as rape.
But you have to refactor your code before you have a prayer of achieving those numbers, which may be months of work.
I'm not an Intel fanboy. But my experience has been that making applications run faster rarely is about making one piece of it go blazing fast.
Most applications I've ever dealt with have been bandwidth limited, and the bandwidth limitation (once you push it out of the CPU or GPU) ends up in the memory, and once you push it out of the memory, it ends up in the mass storage.
So you $pend untold hours refactoring everything to make it run on the GPU because you're seeing this tenfold increase in kernel performance, and then your application is only 15% faster because the real problem is the connection between the supercomputer and mass storage.
Then you use one of these chips gets from Intel and maybe you only get 7% better, but you barely had to do any work in comparison other than make sure that you're vectorizing and stuff by looking at what the silly compiler is telling you.
And you notice the problem with the mass storage earlier and address it anyway!
The rich arent also just rich guys and gals spending their money on luxuries. Many of them own business. CBS ran a study on three families - single mother, dual income no kids college professors, and another couple who owned a company.
All got money back of course. The single mom's refund was the size of her paycheck ( she assumed she'd be owing more, not getting a paycheck sized bonus).
The DINKS got O (1000) dollars back, think 3K.
The business owner couple got 25K.
Horrors. Damn rich people. But these aren't idle rich people like the Kardashians. They owned i think a construction company. They were deeply shocked, as like everyone there it had been carefully explained to them by our media that the tax cut would raise taxes, on all except the true idle rich, because Trump.
So the couple decided to build a money pit and wallow in gold bullion a la Scrooge McDuck.
NO!!!!!
Our following of *idle* rich pseudo aristocrats has programmed us to expect all rich people are wankers who blow their money on stupid s%1t.
They looked at each other and said 'we can actually do that expansion.
But they must've lied for the camera. Money Pit!!!!
Land is finite (unless you build up, or move offworld!). But resources and land are not identical. People are a resource too.
I do understand your point, and it is true that the market rewards efficiency, hard work, luck, preparation, and capital, but the scarcity argument has been deployed many, many times and has yet to work. It just seems Malthusians and neo-Malthusians for example (not saying you are one!) are forever positing a catastrophe whose deadline is fast approaching, yet never seems to come true.
Look at the famines of the 20th century, and a true lack of food was almost never their cause.
So I'm confused. Do these "cosmic irradiation events" mess up other radiological dating, or not? You don't have to believe in a young earth to have healthy skepticism regarding some of our dating methods - an error of a century in antiquity can lead to gross errors in perception regarding chronology of events.
If archaeologists two thousand years hence screw up and think that WWII occurred in 2000, (only a 60 year difference) they'd be hard pressed to prove it happened, and might consider it a "legendary war", like the Trojan War was once thought to have been.
It's in their eventual interest to reach a settlement.
But I expect Google wants to pay much much much less than Oracle is going to want them to pay.
If Oracle said - hey, how about a dollar per line of code you copied - this would be over in a second.
But I expect it's more like "you've made X dollars off the Android platform over the years, and would have likely been unable to do so without our stolen IP. Hence, how about you pay us X % of the revenue accruing from worldwide sale of Android devices?" And out come the man-eating lawyers.
I'm sure the figures involved are enormous.
I wonder if the numbers were cooked a bit? If you want (as a company/polity/nation) to hire more people, and burly union guys are eyeing the automation salesman with barely concealed truncheons ;-) you can structure the factory job descriptions to make them harder to automate - and create a study to confirm the preordained conclusion.
Thus, Upper Management gets presented the result they subtly indicated they wanted ("robots can't do these jobs! We have maths on PowerPoint slides!"), local pols are happy, burly union guys put down the truncheons...
I'm not saying I know that is what *did* happen; but it's certainly a plausible reason why a highly unionized country might buck an automation trend which has been continuing worldwide for decades.
Clever but he was provably wrong even by the science of his time. The fact that he was important did not mean that he understood the physics even of his today. Godard was told that Rockets cannot work in a vacuum by I believe the New York Times. They too were probably wrong by the science of their time and of centuries before. Just because important people don't understand physics and make boneheaded pronouncements about impossibilities does not mean that every time somebody mentions physics and call something impossible or impractical they are wrong.
But in many ways that is beside the point. There is nothing about the hyperloop that is physically impossible. But it is a vacuum and that has engineering and logistical and safety considerations. It is accelerating *very quickly*. and we understand very well the physical ramifications of that. It also falls prey to amdahl's law, which in this case means speeding up a portion of a trip a lot just not necessarily improve the overall trip time all that much.
The bottom of our oceans gives clues as to what dark side inhabitants of these planets might look like and their food chain. In fact, it may be less of a strict separator than we think. Some creatures might require sunlight and stay in light, some abhor it and stay in dark, and some may go back and forth. Like deep water vent ecosystems.
Yup. The fudged results are used to influence economic decisions, and not just the public's. These benchmarks are used by OEMs to determine whether to build a machine around the latest Intel or AMD offering too. Fudging the results means a slightly less fast, but considerably cheaper chip, will be bypassed for an overpriced Intel chip at design time.
That means hundreds of thousands of laptops using one chip or the other, based on falsified results, and a likely reduced profit margin for the OEM.
The key point is - AMD does not allege that they were faster before and the test was lying about it. Their position is realistic. They admit they are slower. They doubtless will allege however that the test so exaggerated Intel's performance vs AMD that it allowed Intel to fraudulently obtain OEM business and maintain a higher price point than they would've had they been forced to compete.
There are additional tricks you can pull... if you use the Intel compiler, there was a situation a few years ago where there were multiple flags, all spelled similarly, all of which purportedly enabled AVX instructions. And there were different preambles to these flags, depending on whether the target chip was Intel or AMD.
As it turns out, a client I was working with looked at the assembly code produced and realized that depending on the AVX flag you threw, sometimes the resulting assembly code would be mysteriously free of AVX instructions. I was both mortified that Intel did this, and embarrassed that I hadn't thought of it.
Guess which AVX flag was publicized in Intel's Developer zone? The one that produced *no AVX instructions on an AMD chip*. Why?
I can only speculate :-), but when you are a company evaluating AMD chips and using the Intel compiler, you will likely look at the documentation, throw the switch and - oh look, AMD slow. Oh look, Intel fast. And plausible deniability obtains, because there *are* flags which work for both.
"Look how much faster Intel is. We really should stay with best of breed."
From the article:
"The work isolates lens epithelial stem or progenitor cells and preserves them in a surgical method that allows cataracts to be extracted."
They went to lens epithelial cells, and embryonic stem cells have not differentiated sufficiently to be called lens anything. So it sounds like it's non-embryonic, and possibly even self-donated.
True, and/or from radioactive decay.
Some people even claim that there may be in fact sustained fission reactions occurring near the Earth's core, not just radioactive decay - a fire, not just a smoldering heap. Who knows.
I am a much bigger fan of thorium fission than of fusion. We know how to do thorium, and it is in so many ways a better nuclear fuel than uranium. The perfect should never be the enemy of the good.
I remember the "Searched all of Gopherspace" missive fondly. I used gopher often for my Ph.D. literature searches.
It may have more applicability now-a-days than the author gives it credit. Being able to search docs worldwide without dealing with the Web's bloviatory excesses does have a certain appeal.
Hook it up to a NoSQL server and see what happens.
That's long been AMD's hope - that the market which gave Intel such a pile of cash is shifting away from Intel and towards lower power chips and instruction sets, so that one day the inflection point will leave Intel with a vanishing market and huge fixed assets and expenses to service.
It may be true in the long term.
Whether it'll be true in the *needed term* for AMD has yet to become clear.
I too expect a big brother to acquire them, and let Intel try to stop them. MSFT does come to mind so they can secure their supply of chips for Xbox (which uses AMD chips), but there are other options.
Thats essentially what Obama did... I spoke to Obama supporters before the first election and their expectations were, shall we say, bizarre. Most of them did not materialize. Guaranteed incomes, an end to actual and perceuved bias, an end to global warming, world peace everywhere. It gets you elected.
It's really embarrassing, our broadband. My biggest concern is however not improving broadband where it already exists, but rather just getting it into the smaller towns and communities.6
You can go a few dozen km from e. g. Miami and you may find the nearest DSL access point is 20 km away; effective broadband for DSL drops linearly with distance from the access point, so your actual broadband is horrible.
The current setup suffers from being too much corporate socialism. The federal regulators and large telcos are very chummy, and maintain this situation by carving out rent seeking arrangements.
While agriculture is certainly a natural application for exoskeletons, there's no reason all crops will continue being harvested in open fields. There's much research and success in growing crops under LED grow lamps. You avoid Malthusian limits from area when you can stack a dozen fields on top of each other in an a hectare. And as your farm looks more like a multilevel factory, your need to trudge about in anything, including an exoskeleton, vanishes.
Good point.
I fail to understand the gratuitous hand wringing in the article. If we are going to commercialize space, then filthy lucre will be part of the deal. It would seem extremely unfair to me for a private entity to spend a fortune to wrest value from space, only to be told when the hardware is done well done. It belongs to "humanity", and by humanity I mean Not You.
I expect there's been contamination already. Microbes are much hardier than we thought when this treaty was first created. Interplanetary space isn't an absolute quarantine. And if we explore Mars in person, eventually our germs will make it out, likely in the form of stealth extremeophiles we may not even be aware cane along for the ride.
One of Houston's esteemed US Representatives for life (Sheila Jackson-Lee) was embarrassed when the Houston Press ( an independent rag, not a Hearst owned paper like the Houston Chronicle) reported on numerous empty warehouses in her district whose addresses was used for voter registrations. While properly this is registration fraud, not voter fraud, the result is similar. And the nature of the voting system is irrelevant in this case - it's the registration and voter validation that is the issue. Our voter cards don't have pictures and aren't even laminated.
Full disclosure, I worked at AMD during Bulldozer.
If we get into misleading terminology, how often does Intel make clear that a hyperthtreaded core count is double the "real" core count?
The FPU is shared if there are two threads and us then 128 bit wide. If not shared, it us 256 bit wide. For integer workloads, the smaller fpu doesn't matter. For vector it does and you schedule every other core.
It's not laziness. It's speed and efficiency. Walmart stores are quite large. Just walking about takes a while. Then the bagging, the checkout queue, waking back to the lit, getting turned around, dodging loons on mobiles... It's a lot easier to call ahead with the order, park in a predetermined spot, pop the boot, and wait. An hour affair now reduced to a few minutes. Win.
Good point, and to a Yank, the number sounds about right. High density living is less common.But it certainly exists, and the solution of a common drop off point - say at he front office - may be the ticket.
But the question I think is more important is - what happens when a drone malfunctions and falls on your head?
They've recently had to walk back some of the anti fat crusade, as its become pretty clear much of the science implicating fat intake and heart disease was based on shaky studies. Also it's been noted that American obesity has gone up as fat content in everything has been ramped down and replaced with sugar.
Wonderful if this will be similar.
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