How would one measure the destruction Microsoft caused? The wasted time? The wasted money, the wasted lifes?
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.
I think he meant the time 'wasted' or perhaps just used working with Microsoft Windows. Rebooting, configuring/reinstalling every few months, etc.
Every reboot required during the install or upgrade of a Microsoft product multiplied by an install base of hundreds of millions of machines is a big number.
(Not that this is really relevant to Bill Gates's work today)
Wat. I'm sure lots of work that gets done at Microsoft is misguided or redundant. Welcome to working at a big company.
You misunderstood me, I don't really care about the fate of anyone working there. I am more thinking about the brain space wasted with deceptive marketing claims, the money extracted from people, not to mention schools, and the horrible waste of people investing in learning about the MS ecosystem and the proliferating it. Microsoft learned to eat chalk, and the hard and scary way it learned to open up a little, but Mr. Bill Gates was once perfectly looking forward to the internet being a flop and everybody using MSN, to name just one of dozens examples clearly mapping the ugly underbelly. And far from silentely trying to improve the world without caring about the credit too much, MS was always keen on talking about stuff they didn't come up with as if they did, without technically lying.
Microsoft isn't special in that regard, sure, but to me even the best achievements are seen on the background of corporate armbandism and become morally worthless at best.
I am perfectly fine with someone who owes their life to the Gates foundation loving the guy, and happy for every life saved. But when it comes to me thinking Bill Gates is "cool", it just doesn't work out that way. So when someone else implies I kinda have to agree that this is all super awesome, I resist. Yes it is, but it doesn't make up for the other stuff, not one iota. Apologizing for all the lies and FUD about Linux, now that would be something... because hey, if people save money that way, they can buy healthy food, or go to a doctor of their choosing, and that's good thing, right? right?
Why is it always that we first allow a bunch of clowns to run just about everything, and then are grateful for the breadcrumbs they let trickle down? I am sure there are many people in China singing the praises of some party members who helped them get surgery or whatever. Yes, and? Take a step back, see the individual parts and how they fit together. Suddenly it's much less impressive, and the real heroes turn out to be the ones giving their lives to help others who DID NOT first sell a bunch of drugs or whatever to get the means to do so.
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.
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.
Well the fantasy was that we could go through this transition without a period of displacement and upheaval. That much is inevitable. Hopefully we can find a path through the increasing reality of technology unemployment that could reduce the stress on those at the edges of it.
Who will get paid when robots can do all of the work? Should robots get paychecks? Are people who use robots stealing from poor people since the robot is stealing the poor person's job? These are the questions we must answer before the robots take over hr and accounting.
Why would anyone need to get paid if robots are doing all the work? And if no one needs to be paid, why does anything need to cost?
Capitalism is nothing more than a system for allocating finite resources. If, for all practical intents and purposes, nothing is finite anymore then there's no reason to keep around a finite resources system.
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.
I'm wondering why you say that a 'CPU core' is different from a Xeon Phi core. I've looked a bit into the Xeon Phi microarchitecture and I don't see any fundamental differences (well, I guess it depends on how you define 'fundamental') compared to other processors.
For a recent example, google discussions about the CPU in the iPhone 5. It has two cores but a hugely improved memory bus. That makes it comparable in speed to some four-core phones at the same clock speed.
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.
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.
kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.
I'm ready to jump ship too. It's gotten ridiculous. I wonder if they keep track of which mods are hellbanning people. Is it just a few bad apples or is it systemic? I've seen so many thoughtful, but invisible posts lately that it makes me feel sort of sick.
It's not necessarily a person - I think PG has a machine-learning algorithm that's trained on the decisions of actual human mods, and then uses various features of the comment history to determine whether to hell-ban.
I don't actually mind censoring, but censoring someone without them knowing, and allowing them to contribute while thinking that their contributions are actually benefitting someone, is insane. In fact, just typing that out made me realize that I have to leave until they fix this issue.
That's how most large sites handle abuse & anti-spam protection. One of the cardinal rules of spam-defense is that you don't let spammers know that you've caught them, you just silently quarantine their spam. Otherwise, they'll adopt countermeasures and you're stuck in a rat race.
I think PG's testing the hypothesis of "What if we don't have to be 100% sure? What if we probabilistically ban people based on comments that are likely to have no value? Will that result in a higher or lower community quality?"
Presumably the assumption is that some good people will be banned and leave, and some other good people will just leave out of sympathy, but it's better to have good people leave than have bad people enter the community. It's an interesting hypothesis, and HN has been going strong for 5+ years now with minimal moderation effort, though I have to admit that it seems to violate basic rules of fairness and empathy. Then again, a lot of businesses are built on being unfair to people.
My argument is that you have some obligation to the person you are hellbanning, that a decent person can't just probabilistically waste a year of a stranger's life as part of an experiment on community quality.
Yes, absolutely. I remember back when Java was only a few years old, it was common to see jobs where the company wanted 5-6 years of experience. Now, it could have been agency recruiters who had no idea what they were talking about, or it could have been coming from HR. But the result is the same: flagged for spam.
I believe age discrimination is being split into two chunks:
1) Some people with a mistaken belief that correlation does imply causation think that just because some programmers have let their skillsets atrophy implies that one should stay away from older programmers.
2) Older people by virtue of experience, skillsets are pricing themselves out of the job market. I have an older friend who is a phenomenal hacker but doesn't like going into management. He found himself either being offered VP of Engg type roles which required way more management than he was willing to do or being given Engineering roles with way less money than he was prepared to accept. Also, once you get a family, the amount of leeway you have in accepting a tiny fraction of what you are worth in exchange for money and stocks becomes quite limited.
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.
That's a 6x larger battery, and it most likely scores only 3x faster in browser tests (this dual core A15 can score under 700 ms in Sunspider). And that's disregarding the much lower price and weight of this machine.
X2xx seem to be nice laptops; i'm afraid to buy one though because I had quite bad experience with intel laptops including my 2009 and 2010 macbook pro's; they just conk out after 3 hours with new batteries. And I check often to see what is running and work almost only in the terminal (must say, since i replaced the native terminal of mac os x with iterm3 http://www.iterm2.com/ it is much better). The other intel laptops I had didn't even (ever) make that (even the ones with tiny screens). And I don't buy the cheapest stuff.
On the other hand; my S2, iPad 1, Pandora and Zaurus easily make 10 hours. I don't spare them from hard work but they do much better. On the Pandora & Zaurus I can work normally mostly (despite the tiny screens), so I don't mind a 10 inch screen (but preferably with an insane high res like the Nexus 10) at all.
Agreed about one thing, Intel is finally starting to care about power efficiency. The CPUs have been solid since the Pentium M days, but the chipsets feel more neglected.
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).
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.