It has already been pointed out numerous times that a large percentage of the industrialized world speaks English as a second/third/fourth language, and this is certainly a huge advantage to using it as a 'universal' net language.
However, one thing that it seems many people have overlooked is how 'unenglish' English really is. The beauty of English is how easily it incorporates words from foreign sources. English is not a Romance language, yet there are countless Romance word roots that have been incorporated due to various influences over the centuries (damn Normans!) Not to mention influences from fellow Germanic languages, Norwegian, Indian, various Native American, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc. It is exactly for this reason that the English vocabulary dwarfs any of its competitors (1.2 Million words in the OED and counting...)
In actuality, English only retains a handful of words from the original language. Even Middle English texts over a few hundred years old are near-unreadable for many modern readers (Chaucer, for example), and Old English is completely undecipherable (the original Beowulf comes to mind). Compare this to Mandarin, for example, where the same texts have been widely read for thousands of years, and have changed minimally (simplified symbology being the only relatively modern change that I am aware of...)
The oft-quoted advantage of Latin is its 'deadness'. As there is no change in the language, texts will be understandable by all speakers ad nauseum. Similarly, the French academie (or however the hell they spell it) has made a concerted effort to reduce the change in that language, with a certain effect. However, it is this resistance to change that makes it a poor candidate for a modern language of technology (witness the CDROM debacle... it took several years for the academie to accept CDROM as a word, and when they did, they franco-cized it into cederom, or some such beast, making it unintelligible for many people who already understood the acronym. I wonder what they've done with DVD...) Similar protectionist facilities exist in many of the other, 'competitor' languages.
English will be a very powerful language for a long time. Not only does it enjoy a large installed base, and is already considered the de facto language of science and the internet, but it also has a open development facility that far outstrips many of its competitors. The looseness of authority (thus, adaptability) in developing new vocabulary is precisely why it is already the language of choice for science, and it is for this reason, as well as for the many aforementioned, that English will retain its dominance for a number of years to come. Whereas nearly every other language in the world struggles for protection from outside influence, English welcomes new and foreign diction with open arms.
Of course, for all I know, we could all be speaking Klingon next year.
Well darn, didn't go back and read this for a while... here goes: 20,000 HP is actually more than what is generated at the shaft by a number of soviet ballistic missile subs (18,000+ tons), which is capable of driving them roughly 30 knots. These boats are roughly 100 times the weight of a whale (usually 150 tons or less), which immediately points to a 100 fudge factor. Realistically, weight is really a poor means of comparing things here, though. More appropriately, we should consider displacement (vis your method), or correctly, surface area, velocity contour, and flow regime. Your calculations are using an absurd model, and the only reason that you are within 2 orders of magnitude is because of scaling.. If we considered minnows versus submarines using your model, this would be readily apparent. (and I'd imagine you'd have problems staying within 100x) Basically, you have treated a torpedo as a large pump. This is physically unreasonable because you are assuming travel normal to local gravity. (thus incurring no g*z losses). In reality, all of your losses are due to either viscous energy dissipation or friction. This is reasonably similar to the pre-Gallilean assumption that acceleration due to gravity increases with mass. The reason nobody realized that this model was so poor was that nobody tried an experiment with a 10 gram chunk of lead versus a 10000 kg chunk of lead; within the very limited region of their experiments, and with those pesky aerodynamic effects, the model looked reasonable. For the same reason, x and x^2 look similar in a limited range (say 0 to 1) -- you'll never be off by much. But extend this to a range of 0 to 1000, and now you're off by 3 orders of magnitude. I'm as big a fan of the 'back of the napkin' calculation as anybody, but please, *please* use appropriate models.
Consider a blue whale with a radius of 2m, going at a speed of 13.4 m/s (Fastest recorded peak speed). The amount of water this whale has to push aside is pi*(2m)^2*13.4m/s=168.4 m3/s
That's 168 tons of water per second. Now this water has to be pushed around at around 13.4 m/s too, which corresponds to a kinetic energy of 89.78 kJ/ton of water. Combining the two results gives us 15.1 MW of power required to move our whale.
This calculation is beyond approximate... It's absurd.
A 20,000 HP whale would be cool, but I'd imagine it could also do better than 30 knots. Unfortunately, your calculations need some basis in reality before they make any sort of reasonable approximation (even with a fudge factor of 100x).
Others have duly explained why your computation is basically nonapplicable to the situation, so in the future, please(!) make sure you use the appropriate physical principles before filling others' heads with misinformation.
For referential information on Blue Whales, check out: http://www.acsonline.org/factpack/bluewhl.htm
Shield laws are nice, but I don't believe that they would provide any protection from Federal prosecuters.
Whether or not there is a long-standing tradition, it is *not* Federally recognized that reporters have any right or obligation to protect sources. Thus, you realistically cannot make any promises about disclosure to your sources beyond "I'll try" (you are susceptible to search, seizure, wiretapping, etc., etc. etc., after all).
The way I read this, the lesson to be learned is that in a sensitive situation, perhaps it would be better to give away a bit less information in the interview to avoid this sort of legal attention. Or perhaps move to Sealand.;)
Brilliant! -- and to think, all those "experts" they have at DOE didn't notice this...
Think about this for just a sec... If you take a fairly communications intensive benchmark (such as linpack), which clusters do you expect to give you the best "bang for the buck"? We know that performance will be a function of 1) processor speed, 2) number of processors, and 3) communication speed/bandwidth. Obviously, those clusters with the least comms overhead will have the advantage. Now, do you expect a machine with 10^2 procs to have the same comms speed/bandwidth available per processor as a machine with 10^4 procs?
So on one hand, you could say ASCI Red is an inefficient POS, and with respect to a benchmark like linpack, you'd be somewhat correct. On the other hand, given a less communications-bound benchmark (like a prime-number sieve, or something distributed.net-esque), ASCI Red would look a lot better.
Now this brings about one more topic: Why do they use linpack as a benchmark, and not something with fewer comms? For "Real-world" applications on supercomputers (as they apply to science/engineering), most of the computational effort is spent doing operations on sparse matrices (i.e., matrices that are mostly zeros). One way of handling these operations is to do them in the same manner as a dense matrix (multiplying/adding all the zeros), which is horridly inefficient. The preferable alternative is to spend a great deal of time "looking" for work to do on nonzero entries. This "looking" is faster than performing all the unnecessary computation, but obviously implies more communication. Thus, putting the machines with more processors at a disadvantage.
Happily, though, there are plenty of people with computational needs that aren't terribly comms intensive, who would rather have the 9000 processors than awesome comms speed, because for us, that's what makes our codes run faster. (That and we don't sit in a queue all day waiting for a block of cpu's to free up)
Quake Analogy: Your pals across the street share a T1 and play on the same server with the same number of people all the time. With their nice ping, they each average 1024 frags/hour (gotta be even powers o' 2). Now you have a LAN party, and 64 other people (of equal "talent") get on the same server, abusing your T1, lagging it out, and you each average 16 frags/hour. Thus, looking at the first situation, they look like a butt-stomping, fragging machine. Whereas in the second situation, you look like a bunch of gay pansys. However, is it really fair to say that you're a worse quaker just because your ping sucks compared to that lpb across the street?
The same principle (a variant of Amdahl's Law, as it's known in academic circles) applies to supercomputers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well done. Recommend using rm -rf /bin/laden, though. Might as well get his family while you're at it.
...give them three weeks notice.
Enjoy your time off!
-Will
It has already been pointed out numerous times that a large percentage of the industrialized world speaks English as a second/third/fourth language, and this is certainly a huge advantage to using it as a 'universal' net language.
However, one thing that it seems many people have overlooked is how 'unenglish' English really is. The beauty of English is how easily it incorporates words from foreign sources. English is not a Romance language, yet there are countless Romance word roots that have been incorporated due to various influences over the centuries (damn Normans!) Not to mention influences from fellow Germanic languages, Norwegian, Indian, various Native American, Japanese, Chinese, etc., etc. It is exactly for this reason that the English vocabulary dwarfs any of its competitors (1.2 Million words in the OED and counting...)
In actuality, English only retains a handful of words from the original language. Even Middle English texts over a few hundred years old are near-unreadable for many modern readers (Chaucer, for example), and Old English is completely undecipherable (the original Beowulf comes to mind). Compare this to Mandarin, for example, where the same texts have been widely read for thousands of years, and have changed minimally (simplified symbology being the only relatively modern change that I am aware of...)
The oft-quoted advantage of Latin is its 'deadness'. As there is no change in the language, texts will be understandable by all speakers ad nauseum. Similarly, the French academie (or however the hell they spell it) has made a concerted effort to reduce the change in that language, with a certain effect. However, it is this resistance to change that makes it a poor candidate for a modern language of technology (witness the CDROM debacle... it took several years for the academie to accept CDROM as a word, and when they did, they franco-cized it into cederom, or some such beast, making it unintelligible for many people who already understood the acronym. I wonder what they've done with DVD...) Similar protectionist facilities exist in many of the other, 'competitor' languages.
English will be a very powerful language for a long time. Not only does it enjoy a large installed base, and is already considered the de facto language of science and the internet, but it also has a open development facility that far outstrips many of its competitors. The looseness of authority (thus, adaptability) in developing new vocabulary is precisely why it is already the language of choice for science, and it is for this reason, as well as for the many aforementioned, that English will retain its dominance for a number of years to come. Whereas nearly every other language in the world struggles for protection from outside influence, English welcomes new and foreign diction with open arms.
Of course, for all I know, we could all be speaking Klingon next year.
Well darn, didn't go back and read this for a while... here goes: 20,000 HP is actually more than what is generated at the shaft by a number of soviet ballistic missile subs (18,000+ tons), which is capable of driving them roughly 30 knots. These boats are roughly 100 times the weight of a whale (usually 150 tons or less), which immediately points to a 100 fudge factor. Realistically, weight is really a poor means of comparing things here, though. More appropriately, we should consider displacement (vis your method), or correctly, surface area, velocity contour, and flow regime. Your calculations are using an absurd model, and the only reason that you are within 2 orders of magnitude is because of scaling.. If we considered minnows versus submarines using your model, this would be readily apparent. (and I'd imagine you'd have problems staying within 100x) Basically, you have treated a torpedo as a large pump. This is physically unreasonable because you are assuming travel normal to local gravity. (thus incurring no g*z losses). In reality, all of your losses are due to either viscous energy dissipation or friction. This is reasonably similar to the pre-Gallilean assumption that acceleration due to gravity increases with mass. The reason nobody realized that this model was so poor was that nobody tried an experiment with a 10 gram chunk of lead versus a 10000 kg chunk of lead; within the very limited region of their experiments, and with those pesky aerodynamic effects, the model looked reasonable. For the same reason, x and x^2 look similar in a limited range (say 0 to 1) -- you'll never be off by much. But extend this to a range of 0 to 1000, and now you're off by 3 orders of magnitude. I'm as big a fan of the 'back of the napkin' calculation as anybody, but please, *please* use appropriate models.
Consider a blue whale with a radius of 2m, going at a speed of 13.4 m/s (Fastest recorded peak speed). The amount of water this whale has to push aside is pi*(2m)^2*13.4m/s=168.4 m3/s
That's 168 tons of water per second. Now this water has to be pushed around at around 13.4 m/s too, which corresponds to a kinetic energy of 89.78 kJ/ton of water. Combining the two results gives us 15.1 MW of power required to move our whale.
This calculation is beyond approximate... It's absurd.
A 20,000 HP whale would be cool, but I'd imagine it could also do better than 30 knots. Unfortunately, your calculations need some basis in reality before they make any sort of reasonable approximation (even with a fudge factor of 100x).
Others have duly explained why your computation is basically nonapplicable to the situation, so in the future, please(!) make sure you use the appropriate physical principles before filling others' heads with misinformation.
For referential information on Blue Whales, check out: http://www.acsonline.org/factpack/bluewhl.htm
Shield laws are nice, but I don't believe that they would provide any protection from Federal prosecuters.
;)
Whether or not there is a long-standing tradition, it is *not* Federally recognized that reporters have any right or obligation to protect sources. Thus, you realistically cannot make any promises about disclosure to your sources beyond "I'll try" (you are susceptible to search, seizure, wiretapping, etc., etc. etc., after all).
The way I read this, the lesson to be learned is that in a sensitive situation, perhaps it would be better to give away a bit less information in the interview to avoid this sort of legal attention. Or perhaps move to Sealand.
Brilliant! -- and to think, all those "experts" they have at DOE didn't notice this...
Think about this for just a sec... If you take a fairly communications intensive benchmark (such as linpack), which clusters do you expect to give you the best "bang for the buck"? We know that performance will be a function of 1) processor speed, 2) number of processors, and 3) communication speed/bandwidth. Obviously, those clusters with the least comms overhead will have the advantage. Now, do you expect a machine with 10^2 procs to have the same comms speed/bandwidth available per processor as a machine with 10^4 procs?
So on one hand, you could say ASCI Red is an inefficient POS, and with respect to a benchmark like linpack, you'd be somewhat correct. On the other hand, given a less communications-bound benchmark (like a prime-number sieve, or something distributed.net-esque), ASCI Red would look a lot better.
Now this brings about one more topic: Why do they use linpack as a benchmark, and not something with fewer comms? For "Real-world" applications on supercomputers (as they apply to science/engineering), most of the computational effort is spent doing operations on sparse matrices (i.e., matrices that are mostly zeros). One way of handling these operations is to do them in the same manner as a dense matrix (multiplying/adding all the zeros), which is horridly inefficient. The preferable alternative is to spend a great deal of time "looking" for work to do on nonzero entries. This "looking" is faster than performing all the unnecessary computation, but obviously implies more communication. Thus, putting the machines with more processors at a disadvantage.
Happily, though, there are plenty of people with computational needs that aren't terribly comms intensive, who would rather have the 9000 processors than awesome comms speed, because for us, that's what makes our codes run faster. (That and we don't sit in a queue all day waiting for a block of cpu's to free up)
Quake Analogy:
Your pals across the street share a T1 and play on the same server with the same number of people all the time. With their nice ping, they each average 1024 frags/hour (gotta be even powers o' 2). Now you have a LAN party, and 64 other people (of equal "talent") get on the same server, abusing your T1, lagging it out, and you each average 16 frags/hour. Thus, looking at the first situation, they look like a butt-stomping, fragging machine. Whereas in the second situation, you look like a bunch of gay pansys. However, is it really fair to say that you're a worse quaker just because your ping sucks compared to that lpb across the street?
The same principle (a variant of Amdahl's Law, as it's known in academic circles) applies to supercomputers.