and if you wanted to compare "average" (median) profit per division with the overall company profit, this might be useful... sounds like it wasn't, in this context.
or at least virtual flashcrowds - that's what we are. Created by anything with a high-traffic audience and an "interesting" link to a web-site that's the equivalent of a pretty but weak wooden bridge; we're the juggernaut that decides to park on it to catch the view.
that flashcrowd idea - Larry Niven, 1971 (1973?) see:
You make some good points. I'd just like to mention that backups don't always contain what one hopes they do.
You might be unusually thorough and check all of your backups (week after week) to verify that a) the content matches what's on disk b) the content matches what you expect
but not everyone is so thorough. The less thorough might get caught by a more sophisticated attack that corrupts backups for a few weeks then cripples the system...
Oh, I agree, and I'd go further - a single image over 512 procs is more than cool, it's very good engineering.
As with many things, the compute problems that get thrown at "supercomputers" or big clusters or whatever, will vary enormously. Some will require lots of CPU but have little need for a large network connection. Others will work much better with this sort of highly-connected system - low-latency, high bandwidth, single system image. There are some parts of problem space that best fit machines like the Altix (or the IRIX equivalent - Origin350/Origin3000).
this comment looks perfectly reasonable ("just because your campus' super computer is not in the top 500 shouldn't relegate it to atari 2600 status") so what's it doing at -1?
Look, although your point is sensible (i.e. it is possible to mislead/lie etc with distorted graphs or statistics), your inference here is less so. The graph has a vary large error bar for the zebra finch - and that is what is responsible for the large graph area. If you bother to look at the plot you can see that most of the points fall into the range regarded as typical.
routine stuff at work - I use a gell-ink pen or a pencil
at home I sometimes use a fountain pen (when I've got a bit more time...)
and for those calligraphic moments a combination of all of the above, plus calligraphy nibs and open ink bottles, and a Rotring for more extremely detailed work.
one size most definitely does not fit all situations
... and "Safari" (You know that's a web browser, right?).
well, no, actually I didn't. And around here (small fragment of a big multinational) it's a part of an application framework...
IMO short labels according to function are better than names. And if there's a choice I'd prefer to see the function first and the app name bracketed second, as
function (app1)
function (app2)
By the way, what does iDVD do that iMovie doesn't (and vice versa)?
wow, hadn't realised the Pinks had stopped playing music and started going for SCO... well I suppose they had to slow down one day.
(hmm, quick search of Amazon still turns up a set of albums... and suggests "you may also like 'In Search Of Space' by Hawkwind" - good heavens, they've been peeking at my LP collection!)
...and not very general. Interesting for its comments on what's being tried out in R-FS & Plan9 but certainly doesn't manage to be a general summary of what's going on.
How about the changes coming in 2.6 (like xfs support built in)?
The article makes some good points but for me it could have done with rewriting to make it more general, separate the analysis of filesystem implementation problems from technical detail, and included more examples from other file systems.
Tezro uses the SGI-engineered Vpro (tm...)V12 graphics - Tezro at a glance
The Onyx4 is the one using ATI graphics cards in parallel.
Maybe the Tezro2 will use ATI cards sometime next year, as the graphics engine changes filter down. It's roughly what's happened before (Octane replaced Indigo2, using I2 'Impact' graphics engine. Later VPro graphics system came in.)
3 books set in a "near future" UK changed by the effects of global warming and economic distuption. SciFi thrillers with an interesting background and good characterisations.
I enjoyed all three. His other work is good too but this trilogy seems closer to a straightforward summer read. Or if you're really quick, a straightforward weekend read...
But many people want some of the bells and whistles. They also having changing needs. That's where an application like Apache can make sense, though as always you should spend time choosing something that meets your needs.
Which takes time. But if it's important you should be taking time, I'd suggest.
I think Apache is a decent example of an application that's mature enough to provide useful flexibility, useful performance, and still be managable. Finally, it's unlikely to disappear which will be important for anything other than very short term projects or those where you just install and forget.
what do you think most people are drinking when they turn on the tap, unless they live near the head of a river, or get water sourced from a spring or borehole? If it comes out of a river it's been through a few other people before...
I realise that's not quite what you're talking about with "purified sewage" but in many cases that's what people in cities drink today.
"The Mythical Man Month" is old, and isn't yet another methodology that washes whiter than white. But it's small, easy to read, and needs reading by most people involved with managing software development. Then they won't believe that getting more developers will lead to faster development.
Or maybe I'm making a mistake - maybe all of you have read this already...
[Fred Brooks, ISBN for my edition = 0-201-83595-9, details on amazon]
The idea is you have a problem (algorithm) that you implement on an FPGA; you run it a large number of times; you thereby get a speed improvement over running the problem on a general purpose chip.
At least that's the idea. What I've not seen are good examples of benchmarks run on FPGA vs. common general purpose chips (P-III, P-IV, etc).
One additional interesting idea is that you can combine FPGAs with an evolutionary computing-style optimiser to get the best efficiency (speed).
the MIPS/Itanium systems the parent refers to are (I assume) the SGI Origin and Altix multiprocessor servers, both 64bit, the first MIPS/IRIX, the second Itanium/Linux:
and of course it's an invention that is patented, not information.
But the way patents are worded is often a bit vague, with layers of claims (we claim 1. this specific use of this thing, and 2. this slightly more general use, and 3, this all-encompassing use). The layers can make it hard to decide what the "real" claim is.
And enforceability is another matter altogether - often it's down to competitors chosing to contest a patent, and then slugging it out in the courts.
my reading of the article was that they were talking about flavours of Unix. So applying that context to this statement made me think of changes to Linux, not to an app running over the top of it. So I reckon you're taking issue with the article is a little unfair, given that this is journalism, not technical writing...
hmm, but don't internal projects usually use libraries as part of a build, rather than modifying them - so wouldn't it be a closed app with GPL libraries?
sounds like a touch of FUD here, or have I got it wrong?
Well, we're using mason because some of the things we wanted were easy in mason - caching, very modular components, allows pragmatic use of Perl snippets next to HTML fragments.
And some of the newer features we'll be making use of soon.
It's for an in-house web interface to obscure little bits of code (chemoinformatics/chemistry design/property prediction) that have been wrapped up to allow our 'normal' scientists to use them. Many people have produced web-style interfaces to research tools like this. Mason helped us produce this interface 18 months ago with very little resource (i.e. 1 software developer). We're now extending it with slightly more resource. I'm a very happy mason user.
Slashdot Mirror
and if you wanted to compare "average" (median) profit per division with the overall company profit, this might be useful... sounds like it wasn't, in this context.
Were you able to correct him?
or at least virtual flashcrowds - that's what we are. Created by anything with a high-traffic audience and an "interesting" link to a web-site that's the equivalent of a pretty but weak wooden bridge; we're the juggernaut that decides to park on it to catch the view.
that flashcrowd idea - Larry Niven, 1971 (1973?) see:
You make some good points. I'd just like to mention that backups don't always contain what one hopes they do.
You might be unusually thorough and check all of your backups (week after week) to verify that
a) the content matches what's on disk
b) the content matches what you expect
but not everyone is so thorough. The less thorough might get caught by a more sophisticated attack that corrupts backups for a few weeks then cripples the system...
Just a thought.
Oh, I agree, and I'd go further - a single image over 512 procs is more than cool, it's very good engineering.
As with many things, the compute problems that get thrown at "supercomputers" or big clusters or whatever, will vary enormously. Some will require lots of CPU but have little need for a large network connection. Others will work much better with this sort of highly-connected system - low-latency, high bandwidth, single system image. There are some parts of problem space that best fit machines like the Altix (or the IRIX equivalent - Origin350/Origin3000).
this comment looks perfectly reasonable ("just because your campus' super computer is not in the top 500 shouldn't relegate it to atari 2600 status") so what's it doing at -1?
Look, although your point is sensible (i.e. it is possible to mislead/lie etc with distorted graphs or statistics), your inference here is less so. The graph has a vary large error bar for the zebra finch - and that is what is responsible for the large graph area. If you bother to look at the plot you can see that most of the points fall into the range regarded as typical.
...on the situation
one size most definitely does not fit all situations
ah, thanks, that's helpful. Based on the names I'd assumed one played movies and the other, er, played movies from DVD...
shows the problem with very short names, I suppose.
well, no, actually I didn't. And around here (small fragment of a big multinational) it's a part of an application framework...
IMO short labels according to function are better than names. And if there's a choice I'd prefer to see the function first and the app name bracketed second, as
- function (app1)
- function (app2)
By the way, what does iDVD do that iMovie doesn't (and vice versa)?wow, hadn't realised the Pinks had stopped playing music and started going for SCO... well I suppose they had to slow down one day.
(hmm, quick search of Amazon still turns up a set of albums... and suggests "you may also like 'In Search Of Space' by Hawkwind" - good heavens, they've been peeking at my LP collection!)
(Oh, and yes of course I know this is off topic)
...who produce useful tools for data visualisation? Advanced Visual Systems
I can't see them being pleased with a different meaning for the AVS acronym...
...and not very general. Interesting for its comments on what's being tried out in R-FS & Plan9 but certainly doesn't manage to be a general summary of what's going on.
How about the changes coming in 2.6 (like xfs support built in)?
The article makes some good points but for me it could have done with rewriting to make it more general, separate the analysis of filesystem implementation problems from technical detail, and included more examples from other file systems.
Tezro uses the SGI-engineered Vpro (tm...)V12 graphics - Tezro at a glance
The Onyx4 is the one using ATI graphics cards in parallel.
Maybe the Tezro2 will use ATI cards sometime next year, as the graphics engine changes filter down. It's roughly what's happened before (Octane replaced Indigo2, using I2 'Impact' graphics engine. Later VPro graphics system came in.)
Yup, 1996 is when I was running intranet pages (chemistry/computational chemistry/molecular modelling) off the Indy I had on my desk.
Ran very nicely, even coped with that while I was doing my mol. modelling work at the same time...
3 books set in a "near future" UK changed by the effects of global warming and economic distuption. SciFi thrillers with an interesting background and good characterisations.
I enjoyed all three. His other work is good too but this trilogy seems closer to a straightforward summer read. Or if you're really quick, a straightforward weekend read...
But many people want some of the bells and whistles. They also having changing needs. That's where an application like Apache can make sense, though as always you should spend time choosing something that meets your needs.
Which takes time. But if it's important you should be taking time, I'd suggest.
I think Apache is a decent example of an application that's mature enough to provide useful flexibility, useful performance, and still be managable. Finally, it's unlikely to disappear which will be important for anything other than very short term projects or those where you just install and forget.
what do you think most people are drinking when they turn on the tap, unless they live near the head of a river, or get water sourced from a spring or borehole? If it comes out of a river it's been through a few other people before...
I realise that's not quite what you're talking about with "purified sewage" but in many cases that's what people in cities drink today.
so not much output in the fields of, say, particle physics, astronomy, chemistry, materials science, ...
By the way, just out of interest, was he wrong? Were those articles in J. Appl. Physiol. out when he was still alive?
"The Mythical Man Month" is old, and isn't yet another methodology that washes whiter than white. But it's small, easy to read, and needs reading by most people involved with managing software development. Then they won't believe that getting more developers will lead to faster development.
Or maybe I'm making a mistake - maybe all of you have read this already...
[Fred Brooks, ISBN for my edition = 0-201-83595-9, details on amazon]
The idea is you have a problem (algorithm) that you implement on an FPGA; you run it a large number of times; you thereby get a speed improvement over running the problem on a general purpose chip.
At least that's the idea. What I've not seen are good examples of benchmarks run on FPGA vs. common general purpose chips (P-III, P-IV, etc).
One additional interesting idea is that you can combine FPGAs with an evolutionary computing-style optimiser to get the best efficiency (speed).
the MIPS/Itanium systems the parent refers to are (I assume) the SGI Origin and Altix multiprocessor servers, both 64bit, the first MIPS/IRIX, the second Itanium/Linux:
Origin
Altix
and of course it's an invention that is patented, not information.
But the way patents are worded is often a bit vague, with layers of claims (we claim 1. this specific use of this thing, and 2. this slightly more general use, and 3, this all-encompassing use). The layers can make it hard to decide what the "real" claim is.
And enforceability is another matter altogether - often it's down to competitors chosing to contest a patent, and then slugging it out in the courts.
IANAL, by the way... just a scientist (IAJAS?)
my reading of the article was that they were talking about flavours of Unix. So applying that context to this statement made me think of changes to Linux, not to an app running over the top of it. So I reckon you're taking issue with the article is a little unfair, given that this is journalism, not technical writing...
hmm, but don't internal projects usually use libraries as part of a build, rather than modifying them - so wouldn't it be a closed app with GPL libraries?
sounds like a touch of FUD here, or have I got it wrong?
Well, we're using mason because some of the things we wanted were easy in mason - caching, very modular components, allows pragmatic use of Perl snippets next to HTML fragments.
And some of the newer features we'll be making use of soon.
It's for an in-house web interface to obscure little bits of code (chemoinformatics/chemistry design/property prediction) that have been wrapped up to allow our 'normal' scientists to use them. Many people have produced web-style interfaces to research tools like this. Mason helped us produce this interface 18 months ago with very little resource (i.e. 1 software developer). We're now extending it with slightly more resource. I'm a very happy mason user.