Posts by Pperson

Re: Climate-change sceptics

> ...and refuse to even CONSIDER the possibility that the people who make Billions

Maybe it's a kind of low-level fear; if you consider it could be your fault then you have to do something about it. But what are you going to do? Protests make no difference, voting is hopeless "lesser-evilism" anyways, you don't have enough money to make a dent, and to take personal responsibility and ditch your car / electricity / etc will require a huge effort which many people are already too stressed (emotionally and financially) to be able to implement. So to remain sane you deny it. I'm not quite sure how I remain sane sometimes, to be honest!

> ...scientists are engaged in a mega-conspiracy to defraud the public to gain research grants

And there's the other side: scientists ("scientists"?) aren't exactly saints and certainly will beef up their claims and statements ("novely and significance" in the parlance) in the competition for grants and exposure. Few if any people given airtime in this debate are truly impartial - that's the way the media distorts debates unfortunately (people who are impartial are 'boring' and also not likely to claw for media attention).

Basically, you are going to have to make up your own mind and decide what you are going to do about it. Which seems to apply to most major questions of substance nowadays.

Re: Let us centralise all our support into just 2 locations...

Reading articles and posts on this over the years, it seems to me that outsourcing doesn't tend to work and 'insourcing' often fails to work too (perhaps less badly than outsourcing, but still - not exactly inspiring to think that insourcing could be 'less bad' than outsourcing: bad is bad). But outsourcing and insourcing *could* be (and occassionally has been) done well. So the question is, what's the actual problem? Studies always point at "mismanagement" and "incompetence" but how come these are allowed to happen - repeatedly? Is there a whole network of kickbacks, corporate infiltration and bribery going on that is kept quiet? It'd explain things better than "people are incompetent", because that doesn't say why incompetence is getting so richly rewarded.

Re: Parallel code easily transfered to very different architecture?

Right on Michael! I do get tired of hearing/reading these people (and to some extent the Reg itself) talk as if parallel computing is GREAT when in fact it's just forced on us by the dead-ending of CPU speeds. Then there is the insinuation that it's the coders' fault for not being able to take advantage of it - because of course everything boils down to a matrix operation, right? Never mind problems due to parallel memory access bottlenecks, de-synching, etc etc. But you only find this stuff out the hard way, it's like a dirty secret of the industry.

Hey Reg, how about an article on the *other* side of the parallel coin? You know, the one that says "honestly, this parallel thing isn't nearly what they hype it to be".

Re: Deserving

Hmm. So by that logic:

- If you leave your door unlocked, you deserve to have your house burgled

- If you thoughtlessly leave your wallet somewhere, you deserve to have your identity stolen and credit card bills racked up

- If you walk around in revealing clothes, you deserve to get raped

- If you don't wear a bullet-proof vest, you deserve to be shot through the chest

- If you state non-conformist opinions aloud, you deserve to be put in a concentration camp

... damn, I just realised that half of these are already standard policy! OK, Benjamin 4 - you win.

Re: "the result of someone's power play"

> Someone schooled in science would say "... We do not have enough data to show that the poor results were a causal factor in the resignation. More information is necessary."

True, I don't have evidence as to what I am saying. That's what a scientific case needs, so scientifically we merely have two unconnected facts: the mistake and the resignation.

But I'm not giving a scientific case, I'm telling my opinion based on my own experience in science and those that I know. And I have seen+heard this sort of thing plenty of times in various forms where I knew the inner workings, hence I shared my opinion. But you're right, I wrote it a bit 'statement-of-fact'-ually, which it isn't: fair point.

Re: It is sad...

> but it is how the market operates

An interesting comment! Maybe a system that is inexorably bringing the vast majority of us down to poverty wages isn't quite a system we should be agreeing to, even if only for the sake of self-interest? (unless you are somebody extracting the surplus of course - I wouldn't want to suggest that you go against your own self-interest!)

Re: This doesn't get us mch further, does it?

> It just poses another question. Why do these mesons and their anti-particles decay differently?

Ah, you've stumbled upon the truth about science: there is no ultimate answer, it's all about keeping scientists in a job to come up with the next question. Now they will have to find you and silence you.

Re: Ummm...

Wow really? You must live in a pretty nice place then. Or maybe it was awful back in 1980 too? Where I live the pollution is noticeably worse, visibility has gone down, the water now tastes kind of metallic / weird and hot-(40's)-but-humid days during summer are becoming the norm from the equally-hot-(40's)-but-at-least-dry days of 20-30 years ago. Boy, I really hate the hot+humid days...

Be interested to see what anecdotes others have about the area they live in.

Re: Human FLOPS

Ah, we can't *consciously* do ten million flops per second. But maybe we are doing them *unconsciously* all the time while processing the world. Example: those people who can find the n-th root of huge numbers faster than a computer. Sure, to them it feels like manipulating colours or something, but how are they arriving at the correct answer unless they are tapping into some kind of serious processing ability that maybe exists at the cellular level in everybody, just more directly accessible by them?

Actually, sounds like a bargain

Put 1/1000-th of your wealth into something (that's like $250 or something for mere mortals like you or me), get plenty of kudos for it *and* get the first commercialisation opportunity to make huge amounts of money off of any useful ideas/inventions they come up with.

Re: Brick

> But doesn't that mean that the future is written in stone, immutable and the whole universe a timeless brick?

It might, unless you think of it differently and speculate that the past, present and future are in fact happening together and we lifeforms just separate it out into the three to make sense of it all (or really two, because there is no 'present'). Then the idea is that we work out the contents of our lives while at the same 'time' living it. Because how can we tell the past didn't change if we have no separate reference point outside of the flow of time? An analogy is writing a program - you run it once, it has a bug and crashes (=dies prematurely). You find the bug occurs early in the code (=childhood) and fix it, then re-run the program. The program itself never knew the original buggy code, but you are both the program and the programmer so you are both ignorant AND in control. Then you hit more bugs, and decide it's not worth fixing the program anymore because you're sick of fixing it so you just let it crash, quit and go to another company (=giving up and going to heaven? Well, it's heaven for the first few weeks at the other company anyways... :-)

A weird idea I agree, but quantum entanglement is weird like that too!

Re: Maybe

> a law should be passed that means you can only stand for parliament, if you have scientific or

> technical expertise

That's called a 'technocracy', which China is (supposedly) the closest equivalent to at the moment since much of the CCP leadership holds engineering or natural science degrees. Unfortunately, having a degree doesn't automatically make you less of a greedy grasper, it just means your lies are put together structurally sound. Which in politics probably makes it *worse* since it's harder to prove the lies.

Re: No direct linkage

Yes things aren't so clear cut, as kevin 3 also points out. But it depends on what they are measuring power use against: transistor counts or MIPS/FLOPS. Worse, if it's the latter, and I take the conservative approach you suggest and say that doubling the transistors nowadays only improves actual performance by ~70% (or whatever), then it the research suggests modern CPUs (and GPUs) should be using *less* power than a 286 (because the computations are lagging behind the transistor counts, so power efficiency would be outpacing computations). But this clearly isn't the case, or I wouldn't be needing that 1000W PSU. So am I wrong or did the researchers fudge the numbers to get a good headline? I can imagine mobile chips being competitive with a 486, but certainly not an i7 or Phenom II.

Don't worry...

...they'll steal your idea next year and call it their own revolutionary innovation.

Re: AMD innovative

Uh sorry to be a denier Zog, but while it is true that AMD really had a very good chip with the Athlon compared to Intel's Pentium IV, they then did exactly what Intel had done and sat on their laurels to maximise profit. Because facilitating good research is obviously a waste of money if your current chip is better than your rival's. Hey, can't blame 'em: Intel does the same. Funnily enough, Intel only got back in it by accident with Core (from the mobile guys) and the tables were turned. And we haven't moved since (4Ghz anyone?) and are now in hype mode trying to flog parallel processing.

Re: Battery life

No mistake - that's simply how much juice Android phones and the like suck down in comparison to Nokia's E-series phones.

Met a few scientists too

> the WORD and must be OBEYED UTTERLY WITHOUT QUESTION!

I've met a few 'real' scientists too, and - being humans - they tend to do exactly the same thing. Just with their favourite theory rather than the bible. Main difference seems to be that science is basically polytheism (polytheorism?), so people aren't able to get quite so narrow-minded (but not from lack of trying!). Perhaps the same holds true for adherents to polytheistic systems? I guess that's why monotheism spread so well - absolute belief is definitely an impressive sight, regardless of whether it is religious or scientific.

Re: Bidding War

1% is still more than the 0% that the Bahamas and a few other places charge. Kind of hard to be more 'competitive' than that.

Re: SSD failures

Yeah, I've known a few people with SSD drives who have had their SSD die in the same way (become unrecognisable / useless all of a sudden). Other flash-based mem such as USB thumdrives tend to do the same. Anecdotally, it doesn't really seem to me that SSDs fail gracefully or with much warning, but the vendors et al all consistently claim they're way better than magnetic HDDs. So I don't know what to think.

Anybody know of any actual studies on failure rates/failure effects for *real* usage of SSDs as opposed to the vendor's "we tested it with 1,000,000 back-to-back writes in our lab"?

Re: unmitigated BS

Data < Information < Knowledge

Re: Legally Required

Precisely! (Legal) lying, (legal) cheating, (legal) stealing, generally being a (law-abiding) nasty piece of work - all of it is *legally required* of our companies. Don't you love our civilization?