I've heard this argument over and over again. Are you sure that all the technology Americans invented had nothing to do with that? Are you sure we didn't use our natural resources far more effectively than other countries did? Because if you look at history there are certainly empires whose standards of living were definitely based upon what they could take from weaker peoples. I'm not sure that the US qualifies. The US already had its high standard of living before we started extracting resources from foreign lands. Which makes that line of reasoning pretty much fall apart. But anyway, I'm sure all your problems are other people's fault.

Ahem, except for the fact that the data says you are wrong... http://www.ted.com/talks/steve...

Maybe that's the problem that Apple was seeking to solve. My guess is that was their aim but got scared about trying to compete with the cable providers and content cartel. I think Jobs would have pushed forward regardless and been proven right, but the Harvard MBAs currently in charge would never take that kind of risk. Which is why Apple's market cap is 1/4 of what it was 2 years ago and that trend is likely to continue unless the watch becomes the type of must have accessory the smartphones became. I seriously doubt that and think the watch will be an exercise accessory and that's about it. Apple should think about starting a bank to take care of that giant pile of cash they have. Might be the best ROI opportunity they have left.

Spoken like someone who has never taught a group of 15 yr olds in a computer lab. I assure you, if it allows them to play games, get out of work, or look cool; the dumbest 15 year old kid will turn into a computer whiz in minutes. I've seen kids who can't speak with even passable grammar and terrible grades complete complex hacks to get around doing work. Many times the hack was harder and more useful than that lesson being taught. People are weird, kids are even weirder.

Being white has only been an advantage for about 500 years in the west. Before that, it was better to be Arab. Before that it was Mongolian. Then Chinese (or possibly Roman). Then there's a brief Greek period in there. Before that it goes back to the Arabs (Persians actually). Its generally been better to be male in a dominate culture, but if your culture is conquered it flipped to female damn quick.

The truth is that in the US its more about the amount of $$ your family has than anything. The rest of this stuff is all rounding errors and click bait. That and typical tribal groups fighting for control. If you don't understand this, you are both very lucky and a fool. My wish for you is to never have to actually learn these truths.

You are either being sarcastic or completely ignorant on this point. Sports are generally divided into categories based on factors including age and gender but not the way you describe. There are female only divisions for almost all sports (except the football in the US) and there is an open division for everyone. Its just that only males complete in that open division and typically so it gets called the men's or boy's section. But it is an open division for all competitors in every sport in which I have ever seen a competition. And generally this is the case as women perform significantly worse than their male counterparts, in a measurable way that can't be debated. For example, a typical male swimmer on a Division III NCAA team is usually about on par with the NCAA Division I women's champion. The Division I males are usually about 10% faster and this increases as the distance covered increases. Sports are one of those areas where male superiority can't really be debated. Even a judged sport such as gymnastics where the female division is more popular, the men do much more difficult routines despite the fact that the females in their sport represent a larger amount of female athletic talent (as gymnastics are more popular for females than males).

Women in fact are better welders on average than men. They just don't want those jobs for some reason, even though they are often high paying.

That's a pretty good way to think about it. A stream is really just a table without disk backing which means you have to be reading from the stream before you write to it. In a streaming system, select queries run forever (or at least with a timeout) and inserts must happen after a select query on the same stream is made for the data to be transmitted through the stream. In this way you can take a stream of incoming data provided by an insert statement(s) and send it to multiple different reading queries (ie selects) which only know they are reading from a named stream, not how data is being fed into that stream. In this way you can build up a graph of streams (plus views, and tables) that process incoming streaming of tuples and only dump said data to disk when you have finished transforming, analyzing it and whatever else you do with it. Generally, customers will "compress" their high volume incoming stream using a group by into a summary of the data which is then written to a data warehouse or database.

Its a distributed exec for Java processes. That's really it. It has crappy monitoring built in that's unnecessary due to SNMP but they built it in anyway because...well I don't know why.

Optimization is usually about creating a small inner loop at the expense of setup cost. You can see this in compilers/languages (creating an optimized binary vs a script interpreter), in databases (prepare vs execute), and in these types of big data systems. Hadoop can't and doesn't optimize its inner loop very well at all due to its basic programming interface. It stores each row in an array of Java objects. A better design would process buffers of data with non-copying access libraries to hide this abstraction.

Data processing systems can be thought of on a scale from simple, small systems that prepare each query quickly to scalable systems that take longer to optimize the query but execute it more quickly for each row. So MySQL for instance is at the quick/small end of the spectrum, Oracle near the middle, datawarehouses towards the larger and finally distributed and streaming systems at extremely large end of the spectrum. As you scale to millions of rows per second of throughput, you must have a very optimal inner loop and not touching disk frequently helps greatly. Hadoop does none of this well. SQLStream (see my post above) does it much much better via SQL.

The problem with "big data" is that there are no vendor specs and the implementations are sometimes questionable. There is a provider that does a better which is SQLStream (http://www.sqlstream.com) which has a streaming DB which is controlled via SQL. In addition to normal tables, you have streams which are relational typed conduits though which data flows and windows which are time (and row) based groups of tuples which can be used in agg queries with all the standard SQL functions (there's also Java UDXes and MED support). Designing your middleware on top of a SQL engine is a much better design pattern than doing it all with hand wired Java. All this and about 100x the throughput of a Hadoop program. Disclaimer: I'm an engineer at SQLStream.

That's nice and all, but what does that have to do with anything any poster has complained about in this forum. There's a difference between not giving the care correctly and giving the care correctly and then over charging by 5-10x.

BTW, you do realize that when you put one of your medical bills (assuming it has confusing codes and huge amounts of over-billing) in the mail, and that letter goes across state lines, under some interpretations of the law (decided case law, not someone's idea of what a statue means) then you are committing mail fraud with a RICO kicker. That means the law treats your organization like the mafia. Now, several things have to be true for this to kick in, but I've seen examples of all of those elements in most medical bills. So as soon as some lawyer gets wise, you guys are in for the mother of all class action lawsuits. Nobody will win except the lawyers and this is the only remedy we have currently under the law. That's pretty depressing.

I work in software and do music production on the side. I would say it has to do with the type of music and programming you are doing. Writing a database optimizer is much much much harder than producing an EDM track. And I would say there are far more people who could produce an EDM track than write a database optimizer. And the quality of each are going to be obvious to anyone that uses/hears either of those things. I think if you compared writing a corp web app and playing in a symphony you would find the converse to be true, that is there are fewer people who could play well enough to be in a symphony vs write a corp web app. So I think the real answer is it depends. If you think either music or software is harder or easier than the other, you probably are just more skilled at one of those things.

That's called a power distribution. And its what you would expect the distribution of programmers to be given that programmers are drawn from the extreme edge of the normal distribution programming skill in society at large.

You are wrong, that comparison is CO2 of keeping an old ICE car against CO2 of getting a new EV car. If you are getting a car anyway, the EV is far far far more green.