I had the priviledge of having Damien as my instructor a few weeks back for an OO Perl class that my company sponsored. It was undoubtedly the best class I have ever taken. Damien does a fantastic job of relating the subject matter in a clear matter, at the audience's level. I would love to say it was perfect, but there was just one problem:
There was room for 30 people in the room, but only 10 attended.
Damien registered his disappointment at the low turnout, because heh, he needs to make money too. If you haven't seen him, believe me, it is worth the time and money.
Anyone think that we could get him on the tour circuit again? I bet a few PerlMongers groups could organize a couple of lectures (hopefully better than our Chicago PM did) in your area. Look into it, you will be glad you did.
I have had DSL for a year now, and it has been a great, if occasionally bumpy, ride. I live in downtown Chicago, in the S.E. Lakeview/North Lincoln Park area, where DSL became available last summer/fall. My initial ISP was EarthCafe, who is/was a reseller for Telocity, who resells for Rhythyms. My connnection is 768/768, and it usually tests out to that. I pay $50/month for this, with a static IP and a couple of mail addresses.
When I got connected (with EarthCafe) it was awesome!!! The guy came on the day scheduled (about 2 weeks), and was 1/2 hour early!!! Hookup was no problem, even though I was going against a Linux box. I told the guy to give me the IP info, and I configured it. Viola! Happy days!!!
I wish I could say it was happily ever after from there, but it wasn't. In December of last year, Telocity told me the "Good News". They were taking over my account. This meant I had to change my e-mail, which is always a pain in the ass, but not much else. Ok, no big deal. Fast forward to May.
On May 13, my service failed. It just stopped, for no reason. I tryed to call Telocity's help desk (it was a Saturday) and I was on hold for 2 hours, but never got through to a technician.
On Monday, I tried calling again in the evening, but after holding for over an hour, I still didn't get through.
Every day, same story. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Finally, on May 24, I got through, and the technicial support person walked through the router setup with me. He covered all the basic crap a newbie might fsck up. I used to admin UNIX networks, so I recognized all the steps. Finally he realized that I wasn't clueless, and he agreed to check with their networking guys.
Over the course of the next 30 days, I followed up with the tech guys every 5 days. I got nowhere. My service was still down. After a while the problem was traced back to Ameritech, but they weren't doing jack to fix it. Finally, about 45 days after my service had failed, I talked to the guy who interfaced Telocity with Ameritech.
I told him to tell Ameritech that I would dump Telocity, but also cancel my local and long distance phone service and go cellular only, unless the matter was resolved.
Viola. Service restored.
Still, not the end of story. I was only getting about 1/3 of the bandwidth I had before. At this point I was really pissed. I threatened to bring a class action lawsuit, along with other digruntled DSL users, against Telocity for breach of contract and "slamming". I was reaching, but I figured that their change of service provider and service level could be creativly used by a good lawyer (of whom I know several) in the same context as long distance slammming by telcos, which is also illegal.
Guess what? Today I am back a 768 synchronous and loving it. But the moral of the story is that you have to do the thinking for both parties, and be prepared for some brinkmanship with the local telco.
On a related note, my client right now is SBC/Ameritech, and DSL (project Pronto) is their biggest initiative. Take it from me, do yourself a favor and steer clear of them if you can.
My first copy was borrowed, and I didn't need tech support. From my perspective, Red Hat's RPM was a big selling point. Back when I started working with Linux ('97) I really liked the package manager, even though it kinda sucked at first. Now it is just a matter of "ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality...
I can get whatever I want from the web at monster speeds, so the distro doesn't matter to me anymore, but I still buy every other release from RedHat because supporting them means supporting the community. My attitude is by all means chose whomever you want, but support at least one distro.
We all make choices and these choices collectively do make a difference. I applaud the original poster because he/she/it is right. Don't support organizations you hate. You vote with every dollar you spend.
BTW, it is you whose attitude is jaded and cynical. You apparently accept without question others framing your worldview (via the media) and the national discourse. This is the most harrowing aspect of your post. Wake up and smell what you are shoveling.
Here here. As an alum I am glad to see that there is still a modicrum of integrity at our University. I had a feeling that Purdue would be one of the schools the the DoJ would call upon for this nasty little task.
Knowing that Purdue refused to lend their name to a shady venture like this actually makes me more likely to donate to the school. But then they probably thought of that angle too.:-)
RT2 in Linux is awesome! BTW, I bought all 3 Quakes (I & II online, III at the expo in Manhattan) so I wonder where they are getting their numbers... are they including on line retailers? Of course, one guy (me) isn't going to make any difference, just wondering which retailers they took into account...
Warning! Wandering and sometimes slightly offtopic, stay with me to the end!
Firstly,
>There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
>You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree nd call it freedom.
Well said!
> set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Our society (USA) is not really democratic, and I am not talking about the representative aspect of it. I really am worried about the lack of concern for the rights of individuals by those in positions of power. I don't want to sound like Jon Katz here (although I know I will anyway) but the present arangement of electoral votes being all but decided by special interest groups (especially corporations) will inevitably destroy the rights of the average citizen.
Governance by humanity is failing.
Even, or more to the point especially, my father, sees his rights eroding. This is a man who is 78, and has seen a lot. He grew up in the great depression, fought in WWII, and raised children throuth the 50's, 60's, and 70's (yeah, there are 10 of us;_) ) and has seen the change. His position is that our elected representatives no longer look at the rights of citizens first and foremost.
Governance by humanity is failing.
The technologies developed developed in the middle part of the century served to enslave us by giving us controlled, censured, moderated information. TV and radio are controlled by those who want to control us. The internet could be the spark that will burn the whole rotten mess down. _Provided that it stays free_. The only way (until recently) to guarantee freedom on the internet was to mirror "unpopular" information on foreign hosts, but that approach is suspect. The US weilds too much influence to depend upon it.
Freenet, by making information truly anonomous, distributed, and secure could prove a much superior approach. Of course it has its own technical hurdles to overcome, but it is a start.
What this rant:-) is trying to get to is that technological change _can_ facillitate societal change. How society changes is up to us as individuals, which is the big caveat. I only hope that we (in the US) have not grown so lazy and fat that we refuse to make improvements when opportunity presents itself.
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" *or something like that*
Purdue's CS and engineering schools are (maybe were, it's been a while) pretty well subsidized by military/national security agencies. Prof. Gene Spafford and his students/peers do some great research in the area of computer security, and out of this come products like tripwire. Now, tripwire is still free for Linux users, but more "corporate" OS's need to purchase and license the software.
I think this is a big win for everyone. The fruits of government money go back to the private sector, but there is also a revenue stream associated with it which (hopefully) Purdue sees a slice. Non-commercial entitities get the product for free.
The incentives that are now in place via the patenting issues that Jon brings up do expose the potential for abuse, but they doesn't have to be abused. The administration is directly responsible and completely accountable for how the university wields this newfound power. Because this is academia, one would hope that they have somewhat higher ethical standards than someone whose job is strictly tied to a bottom line. As a last resort, public universities have their presidents appointed by a board of trustees, so there is some measure of oversight in place.
Even though this (Netscape bug) is not open source, any bets as to how long it takes before M$ starts targeting Linux as "insecure" because of this bug? I can see it now... 60 second commercial on ABC running one of their golf tournaments... a panicked young exec talking to a senior citizen (obviously his boss) about how their open source system was wide open...
Firstly, thank you to Dan for making this public. Secondly, what are we to do about it? I don't control Netscape's source, but I really like my pr0n. What to do, what to do...
>Real supercomputers solve problems that require massive communications between the nodes.
Unless they are data & process partitioned/independent processes.
>So pretty much everything depends on the "switches" they'll use to connect the nodes
This still does not guarantee good performance. An R/S6000SP has a fantastic interconnect, but can still run like a dog if there are too many processes dependent upon each other.
Not that what you are saying is wrong. You obviously know something about the subject (I've been reading your posts):-) but a good app hopefully does not have too much communication between nodes, or serialized data streams.
I keep hearing about these projects, and the means by which the nodes of these machines are connected, but what I really want to know is how these clusters are programmed. More to the point, how is it data and process parallelism implemented (or not) when you are talking about a high complexity environment and a fairly low level of abstraction.
I write software for MPP & large scale SMP machines, but I use tools like Ab Initio or Torrent Orchestrate to abstract away much of the complexity for traffic control, checkpointing, hash partitioning data, etc... in my cursory examination of PVM and the MPI implementation, it seems pretty primitive, and the code must be a nightmare to implement properly, much less maintain.
Is anyone working on a GNU componentized approach similar to the commercial packages I mentioned earlier to take care of this? Is anyone interested in doing this? This could be a pretty cool project.
The other reservation I have when I look at the whole beowulf architecture is the node latency issue. Unless you have highly partitioned code, with independent processes, these machines are gigantic toasters, spending most of their lives waiting for IO. A well designed, partitioned app should be CPU bound. Most of the business apps I develop don't exhibit these (well partitioned) characteristics all the way through the process. It makes me wonder how effective these machines really are.
By triangulating observatories around the world, they were able to follow the trail of clean, slightly damp socks from my laundry basket, and establish a trajectory to this planet.
Religious establishments to a large degree reflect the positions taken by the society they exist in, by extension the individuals drawn from it. Which are in kind molded by the religions within it. I find myself in the odd (for me) position of defending institutions which I don't particularly care for. While I too revile the heinious actions that have been done in the name of god, I cannot help but think that they were done by people who chose to ignore basic precepts of most religions: Don't kill, don't steal, yada yada yada...
Although it is easy to discard religious institutions and the morals they teach as the cause of many undesireable acts, don't forget that those actions were in direct conflict with the teachings themselves. Which leads me to my view on morality & religion:
Think before you act, try to do the things which cause the least harm, and question all authority.
This moment brought to you by a person who was brought up Catholic.:-)
Where guidance becomes subversion is tricky to define, because morals are really laws/guidelines that are imposed by other people, perhaps in conflict with our desires. But crapping in a toilet as opposed to your kitchen sink is also a guideline that most of us follow without question. As is not putting a bullet in the a-hole with the SUV that is tailgating me, or stealing that yummy new SGI workstation. We (or at least I) don't do these things because of a fundamental way of making choices: I use my philosophy when making choices, your mileage may vary.
Where religious frameworks are useful is setting these philosophies / decision making processes in place with people who lack sufficient reasoning ability to completely comprehend their environment & their actions. (Children) This is best done where? How about where they spend most of their time? By the parents? That would be my choice, but society at large (in the US, at least) keeps sliding toward the view that someone else has to take responsibility too.
That leaves religion as the quick and easy fix. Which is irresponsible for parents to take, but "socially acceptable" in many persons eyes.
>Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses
Although I agree with your (and many others) posts on the principal that religious teachings have no place in a faith-neutral place like a public school, I do take exception to this statement. I personally do not partake in religion anymore, but it certainly does have a place in public life, to the extent that it does not intrude upon my rights. Kids should have moral guidance, preferably instilled in them by their parents, but religious institutions in general do a good job as well.
I don't oppose religion being in the public eye anymore than I oppose scientific, artistic, or gay/lesbian issues being in the public eye. I vehemently oppose mandating special treatment for these institutions (and scientific, and artistic, and gay/lesbian rights) from the top-down by govermment agencies.
NOT FREE UNTIL YOU GET INTO THE REAL WORLD!!! That is a joke if there ever was one... The freedom that you enjoy as a student is far superior to the "freedom" that you have as a member of the working world. That is no BS. When I was at Purdue, some of the crap that the administration pulled was fsck'ing annoying, but once you get into the real world, it only gets worse. Now I treasure my time at Purdue. The only exception to this is the way that the administration has cracked down on the greek system. I have become very upset with the way that Purdue handles the greek system (I was on the local board for Acacia after I left school) and as a result they will never see a penny of alumnus money from me until they change their ways. The fact is that money makes the world go round. College is a mild intro to this. The key thing, though, is that you have the power to abstain from perpetuating the sick system that is in place right now. GO VOTE!!! Check out the candidates and TALK to them. Let them know that you are holding them accountable for their actions. Money buys marketing, but money does not buy a vote at the poll. Inform your friends and family about policy. Inform yourself. The internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, but we still need to be heard and seen at the polls. The only bad thing about a community like slashdot is that it becomes very insular, in that we don't hear the opinions of others who are either not as well informed or do not have the benefit of our collective experience. These persons vote too (on average, 50% of the time) and need to be educated on issues that affect them, whether they know it or not. The real issue is whether we as a group are willing to step up and take the responsibility to be leaders and visionaries, not just clones who despise the opression we see around us. See you at the polls.
O.K. time to set the record straight on the WTO's purpose and how this relates to MicroSoft's appeal. The WTO is an international organization that was brought into being in 1995, and is really just a successor to GATT, which was set up in the Bretton Woods agreement after WWII. It was set up more or less to expand the scope of GATT to include those countries which were not part of the Bretton Woods agreement.
GATT, as some of you might remember, was essentially a forum for the settlement of grievances between countries that related to trade. It allowed a forum for countries to decide as a group whether or not barriers or subsidies within a member country was "unfair" or "predatory". It also sought to lower the barriers to trade between all countries, as these barriers have a negative effect on the efficient allocation of resources globally.
Countries have the ability to tax and subsidize activities as they please, within the boundaries of their own nation. What this means in the international realm is that it is harder/easier to sell certain things to other countries. By creating artificial barriers to trade via taxes, a government can protect a local (by which I mean local to that country) industry from competitors outside of that country. It can also subsidize an industry (via tax relief, guaranteed prices, buying up a percentage of production to raise prices, etc.) to help local industries be profitable enough to continue/expand. Here in the USA, there are many instances of that type of behavior in our agriculture, steel, manufacturing industries.
Now that e-commerce is becoming widespread, issues related to protectionism get really interesting. The internet respects no boundaries, and doesn't care about where the buyer and seller are. If international barriers on e-commerce are not imposed, then goods and services can be exchanged without the intervention of sovereign governments, right! All the sudden protectionist taxes become meaningless, because the normal flow is short-circuted. This has got to have the bureaucrats in a tizzy, because their carefully crafted walls have suddenly sprung leaks.
In general, this is good for the average consumer. I say in general, because it affects people in different ways. If the price of imported socks becomes 50 cents versus $5.00 because you can buy them on line, everybody wins, right? But how about the textiles plant in South Carolina that has to close shop and lay off thousands of workers because they can no longer produce socks at a competitive price? (BTW, the textiles industry is the most protected industry in the USA. Some estimates say it costs every US family an average of about $1500 per year.)
So you see, this stuff gets pretty complex, because there are trade-offs involved. If you open your doors to the world completely, you are vulnerable to having entire industries killed off. This may be as a result of honest competition, or maybe that foreign countries industry is being subsidized by their government so they can sell their stuff cheap, then since the domestic industry is gone, they can raise their prices at will (some would argue that Japan did exactly this to the US steel industry in the 80's, I say bullshit.)
What M$ is making a play for is to be able to open up markets, independent of government intervention, provided it is over the internet. Honestly, I think this is a pretty good thing, but it opens up a pandora's box because subsidies to industries are a lot harder internationally than tarrifs.
This diatribe has gone on long enough. To get a real understanding, you need a degree in Economics (like I did, and it's still not enough) If enough people are interested in more, maybe I'll post something on my home page.
Slashdot Mirror
I had the priviledge of having Damien as my instructor a few weeks back for an OO Perl class that my company sponsored. It was undoubtedly the best class I have ever taken. Damien does a fantastic job of relating the subject matter in a clear matter, at the audience's level. I would love to say it was perfect, but there was just one problem:
There was room for 30 people in the room, but only 10 attended.
Damien registered his disappointment at the low turnout, because heh, he needs to make money too. If you haven't seen him, believe me, it is worth the time and money.
Anyone think that we could get him on the tour circuit again? I bet a few PerlMongers groups could organize a couple of lectures (hopefully better than our Chicago PM did) in your area. Look into it, you will be glad you did.
Thanks again Damien!!!
I have had DSL for a year now, and it has been a great, if occasionally bumpy, ride. I live in downtown Chicago, in the S.E. Lakeview/North Lincoln Park area, where DSL became available last summer/fall. My initial ISP was EarthCafe, who is/was a reseller for Telocity, who resells for Rhythyms. My connnection is 768/768, and it usually tests out to that. I pay $50/month for this, with a static IP and a couple of mail addresses.
When I got connected (with EarthCafe) it was awesome!!! The guy came on the day scheduled (about 2 weeks), and was 1/2 hour early!!! Hookup was no problem, even though I was going against a Linux box. I told the guy to give me the IP info, and I configured it. Viola! Happy days!!!
I wish I could say it was happily ever after from there, but it wasn't. In December of last year, Telocity told me the "Good News". They were taking over my account. This meant I had to change my e-mail, which is always a pain in the ass, but not much else. Ok, no big deal. Fast forward to May.
On May 13, my service failed. It just stopped, for no reason. I tryed to call Telocity's help desk (it was a Saturday) and I was on hold for 2 hours, but never got through to a technician.
On Monday, I tried calling again in the evening, but after holding for over an hour, I still didn't get through.
Every day, same story. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Finally, on May 24, I got through, and the technicial support person walked through the router setup with me. He covered all the basic crap a newbie might fsck up. I used to admin UNIX networks, so I recognized all the steps. Finally he realized that I wasn't clueless, and he agreed to check with their networking guys.
Over the course of the next 30 days, I followed up with the tech guys every 5 days. I got nowhere. My service was still down. After a while the problem was traced back to Ameritech, but they weren't doing jack to fix it. Finally, about 45 days after my service had failed, I talked to the guy who interfaced Telocity with Ameritech.
I told him to tell Ameritech that I would dump Telocity, but also cancel my local and long distance phone service and go cellular only, unless the matter was resolved.
Viola. Service restored.
Still, not the end of story. I was only getting about 1/3 of the bandwidth I had before. At this point I was really pissed. I threatened to bring a class action lawsuit, along with other digruntled DSL users, against Telocity for breach of contract and "slamming". I was reaching, but I figured that their change of service provider and service level could be creativly used by a good lawyer (of whom I know several) in the same context as long distance slammming by telcos, which is also illegal.
Guess what? Today I am back a 768 synchronous and loving it. But the moral of the story is that you have to do the thinking for both parties, and be prepared for some brinkmanship with the local telco.
On a related note, my client right now is SBC/Ameritech, and DSL (project Pronto) is their biggest initiative. Take it from me, do yourself a favor and steer clear of them if you can.
Damn straight. Ban MK 1,3,4 and the second movie. The first one was kinda cool, though. :-)
My first copy was borrowed, and I didn't need tech support. From my perspective, Red Hat's RPM was a big selling point. Back when I started working with Linux ('97) I really liked the package manager, even though it kinda sucked at first. Now it is just a matter of "ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality...
I can get whatever I want from the web at monster speeds, so the distro doesn't matter to me anymore, but I still buy every other release from RedHat because supporting them means supporting the community. My attitude is by all means chose whomever you want, but support at least one distro.
Not often enough to matter!
We all make choices and these choices collectively do make a difference. I applaud the original poster because he/she/it is right. Don't support organizations you hate. You vote with every dollar you spend.
BTW, it is you whose attitude is jaded and cynical. You apparently accept without question others framing your worldview (via the media) and the national discourse. This is the most harrowing aspect of your post. Wake up and smell what you are shoveling.
Here here. As an alum I am glad to see that there is still a modicrum of integrity at our University. I had a feeling that Purdue would be one of the schools the the DoJ would call upon for this nasty little task.
:-)
Knowing that Purdue refused to lend their name to a shady venture like this actually makes me more likely to donate to the school. But then they probably thought of that angle too.
Go Boilers!!! (And Brees!!!)
http://bbspot.com/News/2000/7/new_macs.html
Great. Now I will have to use shielded cables for all my external connections, and educate both my machines on how to say /dev/null.
:-)
On the bright side, my Win95 box is completely safe. Nothing ruins the moment like 16 bit code.
It depends on what your definition of "is" is. :-)
Exactly. And that's when I cash in big time! :-)
RT2 in Linux is awesome! BTW, I bought all 3 Quakes (I & II online, III at the expo in Manhattan) so I wonder where they are getting their numbers... are they including on line retailers? Of course, one guy (me) isn't going to make any difference, just wondering which retailers they took into account...
One more thing. _Stop the madness!_
:(
Warning! Wandering and sometimes slightly offtopic, stay with me to the end!
:-) is trying to get to is that technological change _can_ facillitate societal change. How society changes is up to us as individuals, which is the big caveat. I only hope that we (in the US) have not grown so lazy and fat that we refuse to make improvements when opportunity presents itself.
Firstly,
>There are some who would stop the technology because they like the way the rules used to be. Even if they are the majority, they will fail in the end. They always have.
>You can call it fascism. I respectfully disagree nd call it freedom.
Well said!
> set up the mechanisms which insure democratic governance of Humanity by Humanity instead of Technology.
Our society (USA) is not really democratic, and I am not talking about the representative aspect of it. I really am worried about the lack of concern for the rights of individuals by those in positions of power. I don't want to sound like Jon Katz here (although I know I will anyway) but the present arangement of electoral votes being all but decided by special interest groups (especially corporations) will inevitably destroy the rights of the average citizen.
Governance by humanity is failing.
Even, or more to the point especially, my father, sees his rights eroding. This is a man who is 78, and has seen a lot. He grew up in the great depression, fought in WWII, and raised children throuth the 50's, 60's, and 70's (yeah, there are 10 of us;_) ) and has seen the change. His position is that our elected representatives no longer look at the rights of citizens first and foremost.
Governance by humanity is failing.
The technologies developed developed in the middle part of the century served to enslave us by giving us controlled, censured, moderated information. TV and radio are controlled by those who want to control us. The internet could be the spark that will burn the whole rotten mess down. _Provided that it stays free_. The only way (until recently) to guarantee freedom on the internet was to mirror "unpopular" information on foreign hosts, but that approach is suspect. The US weilds too much influence to depend upon it.
Freenet, by making information truly anonomous, distributed, and secure could prove a much superior approach. Of course it has its own technical hurdles to overcome, but it is a start.
What this rant
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance" *or something like that*
Yes it does!
Purdue's CS and engineering schools are (maybe were, it's been a while) pretty well subsidized by military/national security agencies. Prof. Gene Spafford and his students/peers do some great research in the area of computer security, and out of this come products like tripwire. Now, tripwire is still free for Linux users, but more "corporate" OS's need to purchase and license the software.
I think this is a big win for everyone. The fruits of government money go back to the private sector, but there is also a revenue stream associated with it which (hopefully) Purdue sees a slice. Non-commercial entitities get the product for free.
The incentives that are now in place via the patenting issues that Jon brings up do expose the potential for abuse, but they doesn't have to be abused. The administration is directly responsible and completely accountable for how the university wields this newfound power. Because this is academia, one would hope that they have somewhat higher ethical standards than someone whose job is strictly tied to a bottom line. As a last resort, public universities have their presidents appointed by a board of trustees, so there is some measure of oversight in place.
Even though this (Netscape bug) is not open source, any bets as to how long it takes before M$ starts targeting Linux as "insecure" because of this bug? I can see it now... 60 second commercial on ABC running one of their golf tournaments... a panicked young exec talking to a senior citizen (obviously his boss) about how their open source system was wide open... Firstly, thank you to Dan for making this public. Secondly, what are we to do about it? I don't control Netscape's source, but I really like my pr0n. What to do, what to do...
>Real supercomputers solve problems that require massive communications between the nodes.
Unless they are data & process partitioned/independent processes.
>So pretty much everything depends on the "switches" they'll use to connect the nodes
This still does not guarantee good performance. An R/S6000SP has a fantastic interconnect, but can still run like a dog if there are too many processes dependent upon each other.
Not that what you are saying is wrong. You obviously know something about the subject (I've been reading your posts):-) but a good app hopefully does not have too much communication between nodes, or serialized data streams.
I keep hearing about these projects, and the means by which the nodes of these machines are connected, but what I really want to know is how these clusters are programmed. More to the point, how is it data and process parallelism implemented (or not) when you are talking about a high complexity environment and a fairly low level of abstraction.
I write software for MPP & large scale SMP machines, but I use tools like Ab Initio or Torrent Orchestrate to abstract away much of the complexity for traffic control, checkpointing, hash partitioning data, etc... in my cursory examination of PVM and the MPI implementation, it seems pretty primitive, and the code must be a nightmare to implement properly, much less maintain.
Is anyone working on a GNU componentized approach similar to the commercial packages I mentioned earlier to take care of this? Is anyone interested in doing this? This could be a pretty cool project.
The other reservation I have when I look at the whole beowulf architecture is the node latency issue. Unless you have highly partitioned code, with independent processes, these machines are gigantic toasters, spending most of their lives waiting for IO. A well designed, partitioned app should be CPU bound. Most of the business apps I develop don't exhibit these (well partitioned) characteristics all the way through the process. It makes me wonder how effective these machines really are.
By triangulating observatories around the world, they were able to follow the trail of clean, slightly damp socks from my laundry basket, and establish a trajectory to this planet.
Just don't be the guy wearing the red shirt when you land on their planet. :-)
Religious establishments to a large degree reflect the positions taken by the society they exist in, by extension the individuals drawn from it. Which are in kind molded by the religions within it. I find myself in the odd (for me) position of defending institutions which I don't particularly care for. While I too revile the heinious actions that have been done in the name of god, I cannot help but think that they were done by people who chose to ignore basic precepts of most religions: Don't kill, don't steal, yada yada yada...
:-)
Although it is easy to discard religious institutions and the morals they teach as the cause of many undesireable acts, don't forget that those actions were in direct conflict with the teachings themselves. Which leads me to my view on morality & religion:
Think before you act, try to do the things which cause the least harm, and question all authority.
This moment brought to you by a person who was brought up Catholic.
Where guidance becomes subversion is tricky to define, because morals are really laws/guidelines that are imposed by other people, perhaps in conflict with our desires. But crapping in a toilet as opposed to your kitchen sink is also a guideline that most of us follow without question. As is not putting a bullet in the a-hole with the SUV that is tailgating me, or stealing that yummy new SGI workstation. We (or at least I) don't do these things because of a fundamental way of making choices: I use my philosophy when making choices, your mileage may vary.
Where religious frameworks are useful is setting these philosophies / decision making processes in place with people who lack sufficient reasoning ability to completely comprehend their environment & their actions. (Children) This is best done where? How about where they spend most of their time? By the parents? That would be my choice, but society at large (in the US, at least) keeps sliding toward the view that someone else has to take responsibility too.
That leaves religion as the quick and easy fix. Which is irresponsible for parents to take, but "socially acceptable" in many persons eyes.
That's my view. I could be wrong.
>Religion, the crutch that it is, has no place in public life, mine or anyone elses
Although I agree with your (and many others) posts on the principal that religious teachings have no place in a faith-neutral place like a public school, I do take exception to this statement. I personally do not partake in religion anymore, but it certainly does have a place in public life, to the extent that it does not intrude upon my rights. Kids should have moral guidance, preferably instilled in them by their parents, but religious institutions in general do a good job as well.
I don't oppose religion being in the public eye anymore than I oppose scientific, artistic, or gay/lesbian issues being in the public eye. I vehemently oppose mandating special treatment for these institutions (and scientific, and artistic, and gay/lesbian rights) from the top-down by govermment agencies.
NOT FREE UNTIL YOU GET INTO THE REAL WORLD!!! That is a joke if there ever was one... The freedom that you enjoy as a student is far superior to the "freedom" that you have as a member of the working world. That is no BS. When I was at Purdue, some of the crap that the administration pulled was fsck'ing annoying, but once you get into the real world, it only gets worse. Now I treasure my time at Purdue. The only exception to this is the way that the administration has cracked down on the greek system. I have become very upset with the way that Purdue handles the greek system (I was on the local board for Acacia after I left school) and as a result they will never see a penny of alumnus money from me until they change their ways. The fact is that money makes the world go round. College is a mild intro to this. The key thing, though, is that you have the power to abstain from perpetuating the sick system that is in place right now. GO VOTE!!! Check out the candidates and TALK to them. Let them know that you are holding them accountable for their actions. Money buys marketing, but money does not buy a vote at the poll. Inform your friends and family about policy. Inform yourself. The internet is a great way to reach a lot of people, but we still need to be heard and seen at the polls. The only bad thing about a community like slashdot is that it becomes very insular, in that we don't hear the opinions of others who are either not as well informed or do not have the benefit of our collective experience. These persons vote too (on average, 50% of the time) and need to be educated on issues that affect them, whether they know it or not. The real issue is whether we as a group are willing to step up and take the responsibility to be leaders and visionaries, not just clones who despise the opression we see around us. See you at the polls.
O.K. time to set the record straight on the WTO's purpose and how this relates to MicroSoft's appeal. The WTO is an international organization that was brought into being in 1995, and is really just a successor to GATT, which was set up in the Bretton Woods agreement after WWII. It was set up more or less to expand the scope of GATT to include those countries which were not part of the Bretton Woods agreement.
GATT, as some of you might remember, was essentially a forum for the settlement of grievances between countries that related to trade. It allowed a forum for countries to decide as a group whether or not barriers or subsidies within a member country was "unfair" or "predatory". It also sought to lower the barriers to trade between all countries, as these barriers have a negative effect on the efficient allocation of resources globally.
Countries have the ability to tax and subsidize activities as they please, within the boundaries of their own nation. What this means in the international realm is that it is harder/easier to sell certain things to other countries. By creating artificial barriers to trade via taxes, a government can protect a local (by which I mean local to that country) industry from competitors outside of that country. It can also subsidize an industry (via tax relief, guaranteed prices, buying up a percentage of production to raise prices, etc.) to help local industries be profitable enough to continue/expand. Here in the USA, there are many instances of that type of behavior in our agriculture, steel, manufacturing industries.
Now that e-commerce is becoming widespread, issues related to protectionism get really interesting. The internet respects no boundaries, and doesn't care about where the buyer and seller are. If international barriers on e-commerce are not imposed, then goods and services can be exchanged without the intervention of sovereign governments, right! All the sudden protectionist taxes become meaningless, because the normal flow is short-circuted. This has got to have the bureaucrats in a tizzy, because their carefully crafted walls have suddenly sprung leaks.
In general, this is good for the average consumer. I say in general, because it affects people in different ways. If the price of imported socks becomes 50 cents versus $5.00 because you can buy them on line, everybody wins, right? But how about the textiles plant in South Carolina that has to close shop and lay off thousands of workers because they can no longer produce socks at a competitive price? (BTW, the textiles industry is the most protected industry in the USA. Some estimates say it costs every US family an average of about $1500 per year.)
So you see, this stuff gets pretty complex, because there are trade-offs involved. If you open your doors to the world completely, you are vulnerable to having entire industries killed off. This may be as a result of honest competition, or maybe that foreign countries industry is being subsidized by their government so they can sell their stuff cheap, then since the domestic industry is gone, they can raise their prices at will (some would argue that Japan did exactly this to the US steel industry in the 80's, I say bullshit.)
What M$ is making a play for is to be able to open up markets, independent of government intervention, provided it is over the internet. Honestly, I think this is a pretty good thing, but it opens up a pandora's box because subsidies to industries are a lot harder internationally than tarrifs.
This diatribe has gone on long enough. To get a real understanding, you need a degree in Economics (like I did, and it's still not enough) If enough people are interested in more, maybe I'll post something on my home page.