Well, I'm not in the US, I'm in Canada, so you can trust me;)
Seriously though, if you want to check up on me, I can send you all of the intermediate results (partial sums of the sequence), and you can 1. verify that they add up to the result I gave, and 2. take partial sums at random and verify that they are correct.
A complete triple-check of the results would only take 600,000 cpu hours, actaully, so you could even do that if you like.
Seriously, come on guys. A couple months ago all the pundits were telling us how great P2P was going to be; now (at least some of them) are telling us why it won't work. RIGHT NOW ALL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT IS VAPORWARE!
Why can't the pundits wait until they have something to talk about before they start talking.
While power can be supplied via the USB cable, it is limited to 100mA (low-power devices) or 500mA (high-power devices). Thus, the maximum power delivered is 2.5W -- far less than the 10-25 W which a typical hard drive uses.
Broadly, the IAU group agrees that a planet should independently orbit a star, possess enough gravity to shape itself into a sphere and weigh at least 100,000 billion billion grams. EB173 just misses the last mark, Boss says.
Judging by this definition, earth's moon should be considered a planet. It is easily massive enough, and it has greater gravitational attraction to the sun than it does to the earth.
A planet which shares the same orbit as the earth, sure, but still a planet.
The original idea of "burning in" a system was to catch infant mortality: if a system is going to fail, it will probably fail during the first few days, especially if it is heavily loaded. While this is useful for determining if an overclocked system is stable, it doesn't increase overclocking potential.
However, "melt-in" does work. Modern thermal compounds soften when they are heated, resulting in better thermal contact between processor and heatsink. With a good heatsink/fan combination, however, the thermal compound rarely gets warm enough for this to occur. Consequently, running at high voltage, with cpu-intensive code, which generates more heat than would normally be generated, may be necessary.
An alternative which works equally well is to stop the fan for a few minutes. With less air, the heatsink will heat up sufficiently for the thermal compound to change state.
I don't know about the US, but in Canada calculus is simply not covered in high school. In contrast, my british cousins are learning basic integral and differential calculus for their O-levels (grade 10 equivalent IIRC).
At least in mathematics, students in the UK are consistantly two years ahead of their Canadian counterparts.
Well, I guess that is one solution to the processors-are-faster-than-the-network problem: Slow the processors down.
Seriously, the hole point of distributed computing is to be able to solve large problems quickly. Having a thousand computers running your code doesn't help you when they are running everything inside a Java sandbox -- it will end up slower than a single computer running a C implementation of the code.
When companies pay their employees with cash, they deduct the expense and pay less taxes because the employees are paying taxes on that same amount.
When companies pay their employees with options, they deduct the expense and pay less taxes because the employees are paying taxes on that same amount.
So what?
I'd be worried if this wasn't the case, because it would mean that companies which compensated their employees with options would be paying much more in taxes than if they compensated their employees with the same value of cash.
1. Memory latency doesn't scale. You could build a 386 running at 500MHz now, but it wouldn't have 500MHz memory, so it would perform far less than 20 times as fast as a 25MHz 386.
2. Transistors. If you've got lots of them, why not use them? Going from the P5 to the P6 improved performance by 50% on any manufacturing process; going from 486 to Pentium, and 386 to 486 yielded even larger gains.
Come on, this is just a classical gravitational model piped into an OpenGL model. There are no visual distortion caused by the black hole, and no relativistic physics anywhere.
If you're going to call it a black hole simulation, do it right. Otherwise, call it a solar system simulation.
My question is, who will be the first sysadmin to get fired for pushing distributed clients on all the corporate workstations without the bosses knowing?
Aaron Blosser. Actually he got permission but apparently not from the right people.
Server and User Hardware - also not free, wear and tear, etc.
"Real" supercomputers have these costs too; if you count them here, you should add them to the cost of "real" supercomputers.
Server Bandwidth - SETI uses about $22,000/month of taxpayer funded bandwidth last I asked, more by now.
User Bandwidth - not everyone has Cable/DSL ya know. Bandwidth isn't that cheap outside the.us.
Asymptotically, bandwidth is cheap. The cost of bandwidth is dropping by a factor of two every 8 months (Gilder's law), while the cost of computing power drops by a factor of two every 18-24 months.
The bigger issue is latency. Partial pivoting (ie, linpack) *must* have low latency. Many other algorithms also require low latency.
The big problem is going to be finding algorithms which work even with high latency interconnects.
ICANN should rename.com to.co.us, and then open up registration for the.com TLD again. The.com TLD is de facto a US hierarchy, so the DNS might as well reflect that fact, right?
And if new technology is outlawed on the basis of its possible disreputable use, it's potential good will be blithely overlooked.
The Napster case is not about how Napster *can* be used to make illegal copies of music, it is about how Napster was *intended* to be used to make illegal copies of music.
I don't see anything wrong with setting a precedent which says that you cannot provide a service specifically intended for the sole purpose of aiding people in committing a crime. Would even the most rabid gun lobbyists support the sale of a gun whose manufacturer advertises is "perfect for holding up banks"?
They say they have 40,000 users and want to provide 50MB per user.
Ok, but how much are people *really* going to use? The university I am at has about 20,000 users, and provides each with 50MB of disk space (to be used for everything including webspace). In total about 100GB is used, so the average per person is only 5MB. Since this includes much more than just webspace, I'm guessing that you'd find that 200GB would be more than enough for your users.
Other notes which might be of interest; my university runs apache on solaris, with the file system on a separate NFS-mounted box. The webserver (which is also FTP server and telnet server) is a four processor SUN box IIRC.
Mobile processors have been disabling their caches while in low-power mode for 5 or more years.
The only thing remotely new is that they are only disabling part of the cache at once, instead of the entire cache. Then again, that's probably enough for a patent these days...
You might want to check out getting a Cobalt RAQ 2 or RAQ 3 server. I'm thinking of picking up one myself.
I strongly suggest otherwise. From my own experience with a RAQ3 server, I can say that they are overpriced, underpowered, unstable, and generally a PITA. And whlie they have a nice interface, there are surprisingly simple things, like catch-all everything@domain email which you can't do.
Not to mention the general irritation of being told to wait two weeks for a Cobalt-approved patch for a security hole.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm not in the US, I'm in Canada, so you can trust me ;)
Seriously though, if you want to check up on me, I can send you all of the intermediate results (partial sums of the sequence), and you can 1. verify that they add up to the result I gave, and 2. take partial sums at random and verify that they are correct.
A complete triple-check of the results would only take 600,000 cpu hours, actaully, so you could even do that if you like.
I tried submitting this when it was news and it got rejected (2000-09-11 12:24:13 The quadrillionth bit of Pi is zero (articles,science) (rejected)).
I guess things have to get into a major newspaper before they are considered newsworthy.
BTW, the original announcement is here.
Colin Percival
Author, PiHex
Including inadvertant ones. Some robots are rather poorly behaved, and will "rapid-fire" index a site.
When your webserver crashes under this sort of attack, it is useful to be able to examine your logs and block the associated addresses.
Seriously, come on guys. A couple months ago all the pundits were telling us how great P2P was going to be; now (at least some of them) are telling us why it won't work. RIGHT NOW ALL THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT IS VAPORWARE!
Why can't the pundits wait until they have something to talk about before they start talking.
Oh wait, it's because they are pundits.
While power can be supplied via the USB cable, it is limited to 100mA (low-power devices) or 500mA (high-power devices). Thus, the maximum power delivered is 2.5W -- far less than the 10-25 W which a typical hard drive uses.
Broadly, the IAU group agrees that a planet should independently orbit a star, possess enough gravity to shape itself into a sphere and weigh at least 100,000 billion billion grams. EB173 just misses the last mark, Boss says.
Judging by this definition, earth's moon should be considered a planet. It is easily massive enough, and it has greater gravitational attraction to the sun than it does to the earth.
A planet which shares the same orbit as the earth, sure, but still a planet.
The original idea of "burning in" a system was to catch infant mortality: if a system is going to fail, it will probably fail during the first few days, especially if it is heavily loaded. While this is useful for determining if an overclocked system is stable, it doesn't increase overclocking potential.
However, "melt-in" does work. Modern thermal compounds soften when they are heated, resulting in better thermal contact between processor and heatsink. With a good heatsink/fan combination, however, the thermal compound rarely gets warm enough for this to occur. Consequently, running at high voltage, with cpu-intensive code, which generates more heat than would normally be generated, may be necessary.
An alternative which works equally well is to stop the fan for a few minutes. With less air, the heatsink will heat up sufficiently for the thermal compound to change state.
The Oxford English Dictionary lists it as "email".
Good enough for me.
I don't know about the US, but in Canada calculus is simply not covered in high school. In contrast, my british cousins are learning basic integral and differential calculus for their O-levels (grade 10 equivalent IIRC).
At least in mathematics, students in the UK are consistantly two years ahead of their Canadian counterparts.
Well, I guess that is one solution to the processors-are-faster-than-the-network problem: Slow the processors down. Seriously, the hole point of distributed computing is to be able to solve large problems quickly. Having a thousand computers running your code doesn't help you when they are running everything inside a Java sandbox -- it will end up slower than a single computer running a C implementation of the code.
When companies pay their employees with cash, they deduct the expense and pay less taxes because the employees are paying taxes on that same amount.
When companies pay their employees with options, they deduct the expense and pay less taxes because the employees are paying taxes on that same amount.
So what?
I'd be worried if this wasn't the case, because it would mean that companies which compensated their employees with options would be paying much more in taxes than if they compensated their employees with the same value of cash.
1. Memory latency doesn't scale. You could build a 386 running at 500MHz now, but it wouldn't have 500MHz memory, so it would perform far less than 20 times as fast as a 25MHz 386.
2. Transistors. If you've got lots of them, why not use them? Going from the P5 to the P6 improved performance by 50% on any manufacturing process; going from 486 to Pentium, and 386 to 486 yielded even larger gains.
They seem to think that doubleclick is perfectly fine.
Calculate Pi, of course!
Obviously they are expecting to have lots of bugs -- I mean, you put things on the desktop you expect people to use often, right?
Come on, this is just a classical gravitational model piped into an OpenGL model. There are no visual distortion caused by the black hole, and no relativistic physics anywhere.
If you're going to call it a black hole simulation, do it right. Otherwise, call it a solar system simulation.
My question is, who will be the first sysadmin to get fired for pushing distributed clients on all the corporate workstations without the bosses knowing?
Aaron Blosser. Actually he got permission but apparently not from the right people.
Electricity - min 5-10$/month
.us.
Server and User Hardware - also not free, wear and tear, etc.
"Real" supercomputers have these costs too; if you count them here, you should add them to the cost of "real" supercomputers.
Server Bandwidth - SETI uses about $22,000/month of taxpayer funded bandwidth last I asked, more by now.
User Bandwidth - not everyone has Cable/DSL ya know. Bandwidth isn't that cheap outside the
Asymptotically, bandwidth is cheap. The cost of bandwidth is dropping by a factor of two every 8 months (Gilder's law), while the cost of computing power drops by a factor of two every 18-24 months.
The bigger issue is latency. Partial pivoting (ie, linpack) *must* have low latency. Many other algorithms also require low latency.
The big problem is going to be finding algorithms which work even with high latency interconnects.
ICANN should rename .com to .co.us, and then open up registration for the .com TLD again. The .com TLD is de facto a US hierarchy, so the DNS might as well reflect that fact, right?
And if new technology is outlawed on the basis of its possible disreputable use, it's potential good will be blithely overlooked.
The Napster case is not about how Napster *can* be used to make illegal copies of music, it is about how Napster was *intended* to be used to make illegal copies of music.
I don't see anything wrong with setting a precedent which says that you cannot provide a service specifically intended for the sole purpose of aiding people in committing a crime. Would even the most rabid gun lobbyists support the sale of a gun whose manufacturer advertises is "perfect for holding up banks"?
They say they have 40,000 users and want to provide 50MB per user.
Ok, but how much are people *really* going to use? The university I am at has about 20,000 users, and provides each with 50MB of disk space (to be used for everything including webspace). In total about 100GB is used, so the average per person is only 5MB. Since this includes much more than just webspace, I'm guessing that you'd find that 200GB would be more than enough for your users.
Other notes which might be of interest; my university runs apache on solaris, with the file system on a separate NFS-mounted box. The webserver (which is also FTP server and telnet server) is a four processor SUN box IIRC.
A browser should not correct for people's fuckups that deviate from the standard.
"Be generous in what you accept and strict in what you produce", right?
Mobile processors have been disabling their caches while in low-power mode for 5 or more years.
The only thing remotely new is that they are only disabling part of the cache at once, instead of the entire cache. Then again, that's probably enough for a patent these days...
What would Perl be like if it was coded by a native Japanese speaker?
Well, to an English speaker, it would probably look like line noise.
Rather like it does right now.
You might want to check out getting a Cobalt RAQ 2 or RAQ 3 server. I'm thinking of picking up one myself.
I strongly suggest otherwise. From my own experience with a RAQ3 server, I can say that they are overpriced, underpowered, unstable, and generally a PITA. And whlie they have a nice interface, there are surprisingly simple things, like catch-all everything@domain email which you can't do.
Not to mention the general irritation of being told to wait two weeks for a Cobalt-approved patch for a security hole.