ivany | 13 years ago | on: Bill Gates 2013 Annual Letter
ivany's comments
ivany | 13 years ago | on: How and why the US Justice Department over-prosecutes
that property is unprotected or poorly protected makes it less "trespassing."
You know that booking someone for trespassing is pretty difficult, right? They have to be depriving you of the use of your property AND refuse to leave. So if I set up camp on your front lawn, and you ask me to leave, and I do, I was not trespassing. I don't think AS was depriving anyone of the use of their property here, was he? So the analogy does not really hold.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street
One way to look at it: years ago, we dreamed that all of the menial tasks that we do would be done by robots, and that we could enjoy endless leisure while our robot servants labored under us. The first half of this dream is coming true. Unfortunately, the second half is not, and consequently we wind up with robots (or IT) doing the menial work instead of us while we sit unemployed.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Zynga Stock Dives as Facebook Keeps Backing Away
Zynga has nothing special, no competitive advantage, no intellectual capital, no special sauce to maintain their market share
You're absolutely right. Sadly their valuation, barely higher than the value of their real estate and cash pile, reflects this.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: “256 cores by 2013”?
Spot-on. I came to post this. A CPU core != a Xeon Phi core != a GPU "core". Memory architecture matters a LOT, and much of CPU area is devoted to cache and memory infrastructure. In a GPU, my understanding is every ~32 cores share a small cache and MMU, which makes some SIMD operations / algorithms more challenging to implement. Good for some algorithms, not so great for others.
I think the whole focus on "cores" misses lots of issues. Memory infrastructure is only one. Instruction-level parallelism (superscalar & out-of-order) execution is another - even single-core processors like ye olde Pentium can execute multiple instructions per cycle. It's very easy and tempting to look at the number of cores and use that as a rough estimate of system performance. But this approach will land you WAY off of real-world figures. It's akin to using the number of cylinders in a car's engine to determine how fast it is - sure, to the first order, cylinder count is correlated with engine output and hence car speed, but it's only a very rough correlation.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Drone crashes mount at civilian airports
A bit off-topic but per the NYU/Stanford "Living Under Drones" report[1], the use of military drones for "fighting terrorism" has been frightening, to say the least. It turns out that only about 2% of the people killed in Pakistan by drones are high-level terrorists, and collateral damage including women and children is a extremely common. Furthermore, "double-strike" standard operating procedure specifically targets first responders by hitting a target a second time minutes or hours after the first strike. The whole thing is pretty sick and based on the accounts in the report, drone activities terrorize the population as simply being near a terrorist (or someone profiled as a terrorist based on their behavior) can get you killed.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Dell releases powerful, well-supported Linux Ultrabook
:(
But true. Good news is that more and more vendors get this.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills
A similar problem is HR departments abusing the "knobs" on the position's requirements. For a software-based CRM company, they required something like 7 years of Java EE development experience for the lower level development positions, and 14+ for the team lead positions. How many 14 year Java developers are there? Furthermore, do you really need 14 years of experience in a particular language for this position? I think the HR desk is lamenting the lack of good applicants and turning up the "years of experience" knob, which is in all likelyhood counter-productive.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
Intel chipsets and processors have gotten very, very good with power management. With reasonable screen brightness and Wifi enabled, my X220 idles at ~8.5W. With a 90Wh battery this gives me ~10 hours on a plane, which is more than I can handle in one go. A tablet TDP (iPad) is about 5W which is 2x better. This is 2X better for a device with smaller screen, no spinning drive, no keyboard, and a much weaker processor.
Intel has been improving their power efficiency dramatically in the past few years. They have the most advanced fabs and arguably the best technology in the semiconductor industry. All the talk is about ARM and low-power computing but Intel is, watt for watt, a serious threat in the high-performance computing market.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
After running debian on an ARM box for the past ~5 years, my experience has been pretty favorable. If there's a solid community following (which is a good bet with this product given the hype around it) the drivers should be a non-issue. Installation went very smoothly for me. Everything else, if it can get built from source, should be fine. On my box apt-get install "just works" for almost all of the software I use, and maybe 75% of make installs go smoothly with relatively little tinkering required.
For getting actually work done, I use an x86 laptop. I wouldn't ever go back to using a netbook or any non-mainstream notebook with iffy linux support. It's just not worth your time to deal with technical issues. Buy the best tools that you can find (best being what works for you).
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
$250 is not exceptionally low cost for a netbook. Furthermore the power dissipation of the chromebook under load is only slightly better than a comparable atom system [1]. The idle performance is better, I will give them that. Still, the death of x86 in the face of ARM for performance-sensitive environments (even when power consumption is a factor) has been greatly exaggerated.
[1] http://www.anandtech.com/show/6422/samsung-chromebook-xe303-...
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Samsung's A15 Chromebook Loaded With Ubuntu Is Crazy Fast
Coming in even or slightly faster (in most benchmarks) than an Intel Atom D525 from over two years ago is "crazy fast"? I'm impressed with the Chromebook overall and I think it's a cool product but talk about a bait-and-switch title.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Ford Nucleon - a nuclear-powered concept car from 1958
I'll check it out! Thanks.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Trello has moved to AWS
Are there any safety issues associated with hauling a bucket of diesel up a staircase? I know it's not as volatile as gasoline but it's still not exactly the most fire-safe substance. Are they literally 5-gallon pails, or are they sealed containers?
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Do you really want to be making this much money when you're 50?
One reason I'm not confident that the supply problem will be solved anytime soon:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/11/col...
Given that college has been incredibly (over)promoted over the past 20 years and that CS jobs have become more lucrative if anything, the conclusion I drew from this is that there just aren't very many engineers on the margin.
ivany | 13 years ago | on: Facebook Wants You To Snitch On Friends Not Using Their Real Name
Every time fb does something scummy, and people act surprised, I am surprised. They've proven themselves to have the morals of a used car dealer. Why would you trust them, or be surprised when they act untrustworthy?
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." No?
ivany | 13 years ago | on: John Hunter [matplotlib.sourceforge.net] has died.
I used matplotlib extensively when I was doing research back in school. It even made it into the work I published (after I got ridiculed for using excel to make plots). Being able to pre-process my data with numpy and generate all of my plots automatically via matplotlib calls kept me sane.
John's contribution to the Python community was extensive (I don't know of any comparable plotting tools) and won't be forgotten.
ivany | 14 years ago | on: How the Baby Bells and the government destroyed competition for DSL (2006)
Very interesting article, for a number of reasons. Back in the 90s I was just a kid, but I distinctly recall the major changes in the telecom landscape happening then: DSL/Cable internet access becoming "a thing" as well as huge changes in telephone rates & rate structures. It's always interesting to read articles describing the history of market changes in retrospect. Also, it's eye-opening to learn how we got to where we are now (arguably crappy telecom infrastructure) and about the regulatory changes that guided us.
This piece is from 2006. What I'd really like to see is a similar article written today about the wireless telecom industry. Certainly the wireless telecom has been a pretty exciting industry in this past decade - smartphones are very, very mainstream now (if I had a Palm VII when I was in school, I would have undoubtedly been denounced as more of a dork than I already was) and sms/wireless internet access has arguably supplanted actual voice communication, at least in the younger crowd. At the same time, costs for these services have increased substantially. Just five years ago, I remember paying $30 for basic cell phone service. With a smart phone, can you even get voice+data for less than $60 or so? The pattern for industry consolidation is following the wired telecom's footsteps. I guess we'll see in the next few years if the wireless telecom market becomes as consolidated as the wired market is today.
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Wat. I'm sure lots of work that gets done at Microsoft is misguided or redundant. Welcome to working at a big company. The pay is competitive and the environment, from what I hear, is some of the best in the software industry. It's not some sweatshop where you're forced to toil for pennies; I bet a lot of people here would enjoy and benefit from the experience of "wasting their lives" at MSFT for a few years.