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Comment Re:Question and answer (Score 3, Interesting) 189

Based on the professional scientists I have worked with they can't do it either. Based on the level of fraud in scientific papers that have been found for new drugs it seems that very very few actually can do it to those thresholds. Sure they can lie at that level but they can't do science at that level.

Comment Re:IBM not immune to webbie disease (Score 3, Insightful) 156

What is worse is that those clueless people have cratered the market for people that actually know what they are doing. I have had customers try to outsource something, fail but then come back and try to negotiate a price in the ballpark of what they outsourced the project for even though the outsourced project did not work. They try to argue that they at least have a ballpark estimate to work from. Even had one customer turn off the ordering system on their site that tied into the inventory tracking system because the new system was just about to go online ... that was about 3 years ago and the new system never did get online at all.

That is a major reason I went back to school to change fields. Well that and how do you get something more exciting than DNA editing to cure diseases?

Comment Re: Don't stop your meds! (Score 1) 218

Mania, or the manic phase of bipolar disorders, are completely different from straight depression. The drugs used to treat "just depression" can trigger severe manic episodes. Additionally, mania and manic phases are often accompanied by the psychosis views that I disclaimed. That makes the rationality of the medication harder for the person to understand.

Comment Re:mobile is for a quick check on the go (Score 1) 382

However works on the galaxy note series of items so long as you are using the spen. However what I have learned is to mostly work on removing hover wherever possible since it is non-obvious to many people. The bootstrap menus do a nice job of making a menu that works without hover and is immediately obvious what it does and how it works.

Comment Re:One suggestion... (Score 1) 218

I haven't had an internship in several years (unrelated illnesses) but when I was still working while doing my undergrad CS degree, I was very forward about suffering depression and anxiety/panic disorders. Not a single person cared in a negative way, and if I missed a meeting because of a panic attack I'd get help from coworkers (programming some stuff for a tai-chi exercise game, seifu was working with us on that one). The other students understood, mostly, and even opened up about their issues.

Part of that is setting, I'm sure. The university undergrad scene is much younger than the "old guard industry programmers". But staying silent just means that the "old guard" never have to learn or accept; they can just go on being ignorant of these issues. And that doesn't help anyone.

It's still a very personal choice. You have to make the decision that fits you best.

Comment Re:Don't stop your meds! (Score 1) 218

In a previous life, I worked with mostly medicated kids in a clinical K-12 setting. It was absolutely the norm for them to be inconsistent with their meds.

I've been told that the segment of people on meds for psychological disorders who go off their meds when they shouldn't, at some point in their treatment, approaches 100 percent. (And when I say "when they shouldn't have," I mean the solution for the problems that inevitably arise ends up being to get back on the meds, or similar ones.)

I could almost believe that. Most of the drugs are still in the "we think this is how they work" category. You have a psychological disturbance that results in paranoia (which can and does happen to people even with no diagnosed illness or even on medication), and the medication is an easy thing to lash out at. Or you experience tons of the listed side effects (either real or imagined, it wouldn't matter) and can't convince a doctor to change the medicine. The latter happened to me, real side effect was losing memory; found notes that I had told the doctor several times over a year, and he did nothing. I called their 'emergency assist' phone, left a message that I would stop unless I heard back from them. Never did, so I went cold turkey and switched doctors after the weekend was over.

Had mine been for anything other than pain and depression and insomnia, that withdrawal could have been hilariously amusing; instead I just sat up reading a book for over 48 hours til I passed out.

But my depression is a strange one; mild sufferers (by the DSM meaning of mild depression or any other illness or axis) of illnesses with no Axis 1 or 2 components who doesn't suffer from delusions aren't likely to stop taking meds that work. Additionally, barring a massive incident, most non-psychosis and non-paranoia disorder sufferers are very likely to stay on a med that works; without something that alters perception of reality, they have no reason to go back to the pain and suffering of before. Incidents like moving (the wait list for a psychiatrist here was over a year!), insurance covering a different doctor, losing a job/house/etc, that are outside the individuals' control shouldn't be counted.

Comment Re:Ours goes to 11 (Score 4, Insightful) 110

Let's see, the tiny amount of L1/2/3 cache currently is dictated by the energy budget of the CPU. Looking at the energy budget of the 4900MQ and the 4960HQ chips, you can take some wild arse guessing to get that the 2 megs of L3 cache sacrificed got back enough to power the 128 megs of L4. Then consider that there is only 64K (yes, kilobytes) of L1 or 256K L2 per core on the Haswell chips, and at 3.9GHz desktop chips you are looking at 84 watts of power dissipated . . . you can start to work out how much of that is due to leakage current from the 6 transistor L1/2/3 cache design.

Let's face it, SRAM isn't tiny, it leaks amps like a sieve at the tiny process size that everything is done at now days, and it's main advantage is that it doesn't take a controller to access and it's bloody fast and the bandwidth can be pretty sizable. A gig of SRAM on die would, I suspect, heat a small room; that much DRAM per core would slow the cores down due to the inherent latency of accessing DRAM.

So, sure, DRAM chips may be cheap, but putting them on the CPU die would be horrid. And SRAM still isn't cheap; either in die space, energy budget, or dollars!

Comment Re:So in the real world? (Score 5, Informative) 110

Photoshop? Considering that the adobe rgb or other color spaces combined with the file sizes of some of the larger images coming out of cameras, your gains in latency would really depend on Photoshop and the OS being able to handle the L4 cache and keep the right part of the image in the cache. Video editing, with file sizes into the gigabyte range would probably see no gains at all. Video conversion, with a program that keeps a reasonably sized buffer, should see a good performance gain; but it would require code that knows the L4 is available or the OS to predict that L4 is a good place to put a 10-50-100MB buffer. The real gain will be in common things: playing a video, browsing the web (seen how much memory a bit of javascript or the JRE can eat up lately? Or Silverlight/Flash?) and email clients (cache all your email in L4 for faster searching).

As for battery life, I have no idea. It might use more power, since DRAM requires constant power to refresh data where SRAM is pretty stable; but the lower leakage of using a single transistor instead of 6 might prove to be a benefit. It would take a good bit of time and some pretty good test code to figure the difference, I suspect.

Comment Re:What do they see? (Score 2) 102

We don't even know what you see now. We don't know if we see the same colors the same things etc. Remember we are taught that a certain color is red. So long as what you see is consistent we both have the same name for the same color but we don't know if they look the same to both of us. In the end so long as it works that is all that really matters.

Comment Re:And I thought I was inefficient (Score 1) 327

I have heard of sleep and resting. I think it is a myth that is promoted by business majors. :)

I technically have next week off for thanksgiving break but mostly professors see it as a time where you don't have class and can spend even more time getting work done so .... not really a break. It is so strange but every engineer that talks to us tells us that work is less than half as hard as school. :) At least I get out in may.

Comment And I thought I was inefficient (Score 1) 327

I use about 10kWh per month. There are lots of things I could do to make things more efficient still like more efficient devices, better insulation etc.

I have multiple computers that are always on, refrigerator, stove, oven, water heater, furnace, AC etc. I also spend a fair bit of each day at home (studying, working etc).

Either I am insanely low or that poll is designed for people that leave their AC on full blast with the windows open in the summer.

Comment Re:Slavery hack (Score 1) 332

And yet if you are sitting on a jury in a trial, they can and have made laws requiring you not to talk about what you've learned til after the trial. Is that not also a law abridging freedom of speech? Gag orders on the press covering a trial also exist; same question.

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