chubbard

When he says "He wrote FAT on an airplane" he means with pencil and paper since FAT is so old that there were no laptops to do that on. Which maybe he figured out all of the specs, but he didn't put code down and debug it. Of course in those days writing it on paper was quite common before people typed it into the computer. And that is quite impressive in and of itself. Most of the time people treated that activity as if they were coding so they were very precise. Now a days we're fast, but we aren't as precise.

So the author doesn't believe in homework or at least admits he thinks its pointless, and so does his son. My my my I wonder where a smart little boy learned that from?

Well if we ruin this economy we can just create a new one. :-) And I think that's what people will do. If this society offers you nothing then just start your own (see the New Delhi slums as an example). That's what Mennonites, Quakers, Amish and other groups do. They are loosely connected to the economy and aren't as affected by this as people fully involved with the global economy.

In a way activities like urban farming and doomsday preppers share a value system we'll see on a rise. The value system shared between these two activities is being self sufficient and control of your own destiny. We'll see this value of self sufficiency rise as the economy provides less and less to the unemployed. No one wants a hand out.

"Gentlemen start your bitchin!1!!1!!"

There it is. I wondered how far I'd have to read before we had a Java hate comment. Never fails.

Entertainment is one thing, diplomacy is completely another.

Ah yes Dennis Rodman is such a reliable source of information. He has to suck up to low life dictators. He's broke as shit! At this point Rodman is hoping to be anyone's lapdog just for rent money. There are people in prison camps for things their grandfathers did in North Korea. At least the people in the US had a trial by their peers for something they were actually were accused of doing.

I get the feeling the author of that piece didn't quite understand what the "subsidy" represented, hence why the author didn't explain it very well. If I can sum up what you said these bigger banks get better credit ratings because rating agencies give them better ratings because of their size and perceived safety. Overtime these small changes give them an edge in lending rates.

So I thought this article was pretty opaque. They didn't really discuss the subsidy enough. They just said there was a subsidy that allowed the banks to borrow money at a reduced rate. Who is giving them this preferential treatment? How do those particular banks get that subsidy? Why not charge all banks the same rate and let the size of these banks eat themselves. It's not a hard concept to swallow if you've had economics 101. Law of diminishing returns which happens to any business when it gets too large. But, I think it didn't really layout a case for why this subsidy exists.

tl;df. I guess the point was that he couldn't assimilate into civilian life and the military didn't help him after an otherwise glorious end to a career he can't talk about. There you go now you don't have to read the wall of text.

This story seemed overly dramatic about the fallen hero angle. I don't doubt civilian life is difficult to adapt to. I've seen it first hand. But, it seems more like society is more in love with seeing their military heros fall from grace rather than succeed, and that's probably what we really need to fix. It still feels like we're haunted by the ugly perceptions we developed about our vets during Vietnam.

This method is also referred to as Mayan Multiplication which isn't necessarily exclusive to Japan or a technique the Japanese invented. It's not Mayan either, but just a neat technique to make multiplying numbers easier. Although it might be hard to perform in your head this way.

The babylonians, egyptians, and romans had their own techniques because multiplication by hand is not easy, and it's time consuming. Techniques like these enabled those civilizations to build wonderful engineering marvels. The point is these techniques don't violate math or subvert teaching math because it's not the same thing.

This subject was originally called arithmetic when I was in school which was different than math. Arithmetic was the rudimentary techniques for how numbers were added/subtracted/multiplied/divided where math was word problems that required you know arithmetic to solve but also required logic and abstraction. So yes arithmetic != math, but that doesn't mean teaching arithmetic is NOT useful. They are different concepts that are related, but not the same.

I think this is perfectly fine to teach someone this. The whole computation isn't math argument is a misplaced. We're talking about 2nd or 3rd grade students. They'll learn math at the higher levels again.

"intimacy - a close, familiar, and usually affectionate or loving personal relationship with another person or group." Therefore, you can't experience intimacy by yourself. It requires at least another person.

But an article about antique dimensional analysis is just not on the same level in difficultly or interest as how someone observed a natural phenomenon and explained it with empirical evidence.

"...Sun (light) traverses 2,202 yojanas in half a nimisha"

Yes, but how did he measure it?

That was a touching story, and I'm sorry to hear about your father's death. My best friend's father was an alcoholic. I watched as my best friend struggled trying to build a relationship with him. I don't think he ever had any of the touching moments you described with his father, and I think it still affects him to this day.

It sounds like you have good memories about him, and knew that he loved you. And for the most part that's all we can ask from our fathers.

Normally titles like this are just insipid articles of link bait, but I agree this is a handy feature. Thanks!

There is a big difference between interpreted rhino vs. compile rhino. The Rhino wikipedia page claims compiling to byte code "... produced the best performance, often beating the C implementation of JavaScript run with just-in-time". However, the benchmarks I've seen put Rhino compiled to byte code at about 60% slower than comparable Java code.

Roughly performance tests have shown: Java Performance (ms) * 1.6 = Compiled Rhino Performance (ms). So Rhino is about 60% slower than comparable Java code if you compile it to byte code on average.

Rhino has pretty good performance. It's about 1.6x Java's performance which made it pretty darn fast for most scripting languages built on the JVM. I would expect this new project will follow the ScriptEngine API so you could swap out a Rhino interpreter with Nasborn engine. This would make it easy to compare how much the InvokeDynamic instruction can contribute to performance boost. I wonder if it can achieve near Java performance parity.

Why not become a contractor and you are in control of how much you work because you really work for yourself? You might not control when you are on a project, but work hard for 3-4 months build up income, then when its done take some time off an live off what you built up. No need to leave money on the table because you don't think you need it now. Go travel, tour with your band, sit on your couch and eat cheesy poofs and pot pie, whatever. You can work as much or as little as you like.

Before you brush this off what you're talking about is a very tenuous relationship with your employer that isn't providing you any stability, AND more than likely you'll loose your benefits. Those are the same things you'd be giving up if you went freelance so there is little downside to freelance vs part time.

So if the Chinese are just replacing people with robots why can't America, or really any nation, do that now? Or why didn't they do that sooner? If we want to bring back manufacturing why not start with robots? It might not bring back the mass amount of jobs, but it will bring back more exports and stabilize the trade deficit. The robot repairmen will stay busy that's for sure.

Mexico is pwned, send in the drones.

The Federal government would be insane to legalize drugs at the federal level even if they wanted to do that. Better to try a test out and see how it goes before doing it across the US. But, with this last election we are going to see if this experiment works by proxy of legalization in several of the states.

Everyone's comfort level of accepting new technology is graded on a spectrum. 3D printing is probably at the beginning of the early adopters/innovator stage. The people in this stage have to invision what jobs 3D printing can be applied to and test those ideas in the market place. I think we see that taking shape with companies going public, and other rapid prototyping companies adopting 3D printing and combing it with injection molds, etc. The economics of these ideas and the ideas themselves are being tested with the manufacturing community. These ideas have to cross the chasm between innovators and majority adopters/pragmatists before real adoption will start, and it has to do it on several verticals like: consumer, manufacturers, etc. Each crossing of the chasm will be different in each vertical. I think right now 3D printing has much more promise in crossing the chasm with manufacturing over say consumer, but that could changed depending on the innovators finding applications of it.

But that can be said for any basis of any tool or technology. Your use of CNC matching creates a dependency on that tool, and it's advantages and disadvantages. You've locked yourself into that tool if you don't want to change the way you work. A shift to any other tool will come with modifications to your work, and I don't think that is unique to 3D printers.

Every point he makes is absolutely correct, and I think comparing them to computers as a rising technology is apples to oranges. For one computers made most of its improvements exponentially because the number of transistors doubled every 18 months. 3D printers don't have an equivalent part, like the transistor, that just simply scaling up makes things perform better. The things holding back are outlined in his article: limited choice of materials, lower quality of the part, slow print times, high cost for mass producing, inability to mass produce, etc. All of this will improve with time, but it won't be on the same time scale as computers.

Now there are somethings I don't think he discussed that change manufacturing because it requires imagining a different way of working. These are the more transformative changes that might have no previous equivalent to compare them to.

For example, the ability to have a de-centralized, agile work force. My wife worked for a company where the M.E. were in the states, but software teams were in Europe. They were constantly sending manufactured parts with people as they physically traveled between offices. It was far cheaper to do this than ship the boards and cases of manufactured products to the team. However, with a 3D printer they could email the CAD drawing to the other office and in a day they could print it out. This is a big change in how fast things could be turned around, and save $1000's of dollars, allowing them to iterate faster.

Another change is 3D printing molds for doing injection molding. Some rapid prototyping shops already do this today. Creating the molds is time consuming, but 3D printing gives you faster turn around. And also more complex molds. This plays to 3D printings strengths low cost for low volume one offs. The quality of the part could be a problem, but hopefully that will improve with time.

I agree with what the author said, but I see the real limit right now is our own imagination for how 3D printers enable us to do new things we can't do now. This is where I see 3D printers are like computers as making something that was impossible before possible. These are much harder to predict. In a way it wasn't just computers that transformed us as much as the internet. Maybe there a companion technology that changes much of these assumptions made.

If we find a problem that 3D printers do better than anything else some of his assumptions could really change. For example, his assessment of 3D printers in homes right now is 100% accurate, but there might be some application we didn't see today for which 3D printers push into the home without significant changes to technology.

Man this article has created all sorts of strange discussions. I've watched in on G+, Facebook and now here, and eventually they get soooo derailed talking about odd ball stuff not really related. I guess this means Mr. Christensen is onto something stirring up this much discussion.

One thing is common among all of the discussions which is the fixation on the tax proposal, but I think it was just a swag at what a policy might look like. I thought the real interesting part of his observation is that we are rewarding efficiency innovation too much and transformative innovation almost nothing. Try and develop a new power system not based on fossil fuels and see how much money people want to give you when your time horizon is 10-20 years out. It is the transformative innovation that recreates jobs for the jobs lost through efficiency innovation. I think that is the more important discussion over a regressive capital gain tax. Remember, most entrepreneurship would qualify for preferential capital gains taxation (except for ISO options oddly) because even the efficiency innovation takes more than 1 year to payback.

His tax would mostly affect wall street and the trader mentality: HFT, ETFs, day traders, etc. Remember people buying or selling securities don't actually give companies money directly. Companies only get more money when the issue more shares (or hold their own shares). If I buy a share for 1 day or 10 years the company doesn't benefit at all from my action.

If you look at the green energy movement a few years back was going to be very transformative, but VCs backed off when it was hard to turn a profit as quickly as information technology. It's that kinda of calculus that needs changing if we really want to do what Christensen is outlining.

Prior to the introduction of the Federal reserve system which would be 1913. And prior to 1913 boom-bust cycles were more common and quite harsh. I think that's what he's referring to. As to 50% fluctuations I can't say if that's true or not, but I know busts happened much more frequently and took much longer to work through.

Yes he addresses this. If all you do is make things more efficient then you have no where for the displaced to go. That's why transformative innovation is needed and is currently missing. Transformative innovation needs a longer time to grow so it needs longer term investing before seeing a payout hence a retooling of our tax system that favors investment for the longer term.

We know there is a problem related to new job growth, he mentions that its taking longer for our economy to recover from the last recessions. And, he points out exactly what is missing from that economy too.

But, doesn't our current system have negative externalities that distort behavior? Or is this just some academic test that is impossible to ever really attain?