While the there is a good point buried in that question, the speed of light through dirt and rock, just like any other opaque materials, is, well, zero.
Help me understand something here... isn't EC2 really one gargantuan cluster far bigger than 30,000 cores? So why is it news that it ran a big job? Was there some significant step forward in software that allowed features that were not previously available on EC2?
Don't forget to add up power, cooling, sysadmin time...
If the friend's research group is in an academic institution, power and cooling are outside of the acquisition budget, along with space, network, etc., as those are typically part of overhead. Depending on the institution, sysadmin services are too. Often the institution will even have embarrassingly large discounts with hardware and software vendors (at my institution, a licensed copy of Matlab, for example, is about $100 per seat per year).
GBP 4000 buys a rackfull of modern computers that can be run as long as you want. It can be used to explore ideas without concern for cost. In contrast, once the GBP 4000 has been paid to a cloud service, the money is gone. Given that the pressures for a new researcher are already immense (and I speak from recent first-hand experience) not worrying about running out of compute resources, even if it means the instantaneously available compute power is somewhat lower than what you could get from a cloud service.
If this new research group is going to be competing for research funds, for example, then the compute resource is going to be highly utilized for the first 12-18 months to get preliminary results in order to write grants. I can't imagine that GBP 4000 is going to last long enough. Looking at Rackspace, as another poster suggested, they charge about USD 350 per decent configuration (8GB RAM / 320 GB disk) per month. That single server is going to last 18 months before the money is gone. If the memory demands of the computation aren't so large, then the charges are lower, say USD 45 per month (1GB RAM / 40 GB disk), then you get to use 7 virtual machines for the same 18 months.
Given that a highly capable system can be purchased new for USD 500, the same money gives the researcher about a dozen real machines for 18 months, and beyond (buying off-lease machines can easily double the amount of hardware). From my perspective as a researcher, there's no comparison: when money is tight, buy your own hardware and take advantage of the services provided by your institution.
Interestingly, I find that American-born scientists have a better ability to think in different scales than European ones precisely because the US uses Imperial units. American scientists hearing that the temperature outside is going to be 25C think, "um, wait a sec, oh, yeah, that will be comfortably warm," whereas European scientists hearing that the temperature is going to be 77F are completely baffled. Being able to think and converse independent of units is an important skill that European scientists tend to lack. Even if the entire world were converted to SI, there are still multiple ways of measuring given quantities (e.g., percent by weight, by volume, by molecular count, etc.) that have different scales for the same observation, and being able to rapidly shift from one to another is an important skill.
Another failure of Slashdot editing in basic facts checking. The article states 1 km. The stratosphere is between 10 and 50 km, so 1,000 km would go well above that. The nominal edge of the atmosphere is about 600 km. Someone got a little too excited with the zeros, methinks.
This is not a technical or legal question. It is a question about relationships. I'll take a stab, but, seriously, it does not belong on Slashdot. It belongs on some advice column.
As I understand it, you have a roommate who partakes in risky behavior that you have requested he stop. He does not agree to your request. It seems therefore that you need a new roommate since you do not wish to expose yourself to any potential risk and -- this is the important part -- you and he do not have sufficiently compatible lifestyles. You need a new living situation, whether that be by leaving and finding a new apartment on your own, or kicking this fellow out.
Any other discussions about relative liability or that include technological solutions, while potentially fascinating, are completely and utterly missing the point. This is not a technical or legal problem: it is a problem about relationships.
One of the things that makes small hardware a ton of fun to play with is the ability to develop code with a simulator that can show far more detail than is available on the real hardware.
Will you have a highly instrumented simulator available?
Not only that there is a significant amount of additional security with a fax machine: as far as the sender is concerned, there is a single point of receipt that is in a known location. With email, there may be indefinitely many copies intentionally or inadvertently made going to more than one recipient.
On occasion, I've had to sign various reasonably important (at least to me) legal documents. When there has been time pressure, my lawyers have always accepted a faxed copy, but *only* when the hardcopy is to follow by mail.
Once we have depleted sufficient raw materials, all of those trash dumps will look mighty attractive as resources to mine.
Recall that most of the resources we are supposedly squandering came from relatively poor concentrations in the rocks below us and require significant energy to extract and concentrate. Trash dumps are actually quite rich in certain elements and, eventually, will prove an important source. They are conveniently rich in each of the elements we use most!
A seriously casual search with Google shows this is not a new or original idea. Use the search term landfill mining, of which currently the first result is from Wikepedia
from August 18th, about 2 weeks ago. Coincidence? Founder / CEOs don't normally leave after the first 5 years of a startup. Is there more to the bankruptcy story than what's in the OP's article?
I still, from time to time, need to purchase test equipment. When I see a used HP unit for sale, that is always my primary choice: if it still works when I plug it in, chances are it will far outlive my needs.
Anecdotally, I bought a used HP industrial power supply to build a rack-based research computer some years ago. The power supply (5V at something crazy like 500 A) looked a little beaten up but produced the most solid and quietest voltage I've ever used (and, yes, I did check with a scope and dummy loads). That was from the era when HP was not just good, but balls-to-the-wall the best engineered products money could buy.
Then this crap with Compaq started, and it's been all downhill from there. Probably started earlier.
I've similarly posted in many climate threads about my friend's research dating back 15 years now that strongly suggested that cosmic DUST (not ray) accretion is a strong climate driver, based on variations in the Earth's orbit sweeping out slightly different parts of space and thus accreting different amounts of dust. Just like the Perseid meteor shower changes slightly each year because the relative position between the Earth and that quasi-static dust lane changes from year to year, the Earth encounters more or less dust along its entire orbit, and any periodicity in the orbital variation changes dust accretion. Dust accretion is strongly suspected to influence terrestrial cloud dynamics, and, therefore climate.
Here's my friend's article (in Nature, so this isn't some fly-by-night idea, but rigorous science, and, knowing the second author well, as I do, I can vouch that it is *highly* rigorous and objective science): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v378/n6557/abs/378600a0.html But don't take my word for it: the article has 89 references according to Google Scholar (about 3x the impact factor of Nature, so raising their statistics). There were a couple of follow-up articles as well.
This is one of the big questions for dark matter. Is dark matter really just non-luminous normal matter that we're just either really bad at detecting or really bad at estimating? Are the assumptions of the distributions of dark matter, as extended presumably from luminous matter, correct? Do more stars just burn out and go cold, rather than go nova, than we think? Sure, these are naive musings from someone with only a highly limited knowledge of the field, but they're fun to think about, and rarely get any expert discussion when you see articles about related new discoveries.
My understanding, from the various articles read, is that the only thing removed from the grant proposal is the person's explicitly-given ethnicity and gender. The name, institute, and all the other information on the individual, is left in.
I can confirm that this is the case. A lot is left in. The NIH reviewers specifically have a full resume in an NIH-dictated style called a biosketch. They know the name, educational and professional history, and publication record of the applicant. They also can, and do, look up the grant award record of the applicant.
An application of mine just got dinged because one of the reviewers said I was too qualified (yes, *too* qualified, confused me and the program officer too).
The review process is not double blind, nor even single blind from the reviewer's perspective. It is blind only from the applicant's perspective, but even then, applicants are given enough evidence to be able to make reasonably accurate guesses as to who reviewed the grant, since the full committee list is public knowledge, and most of the committee members are well-known, along with their areas of expertise and writing style.
I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.
To my understanding, PDF is not designed for reflow. It is designed for a fixed page size, not a variable one. Reflow is an exclusively web-centric idea.
As someone who has typeset thousands of pages of scientific documents to professional standards as well as has designed a handful of web sites, designing documents for proper viewing under reflow is much, much harder than doing the same with a fixed page size. Unless of course you don't care about where images and figures appear relative to the text, and you don't have formulas or expressions with non-standard breaking points, or you don't care about correct line breaks and even paragraph filling.
Because there's an appearance of conflict of interest. This fellow writes blog articles. It is likely that he gets direct monetary benefit from hits on his site. Therefore, the motivation for his submitting is not necessarily in the best public interest.
It may be that everything is on the up-and-up, but it would not necessarily appear so.
The submitting author's UID is coondoggie. The article's stated author is Michael Cooney. Perhaps we can have conflict-of-interest information more explicit, Taco, please?
"Intentionally misleading and fraudulent," would be more acurate phrasing. And a more appropriate reaction would be to throw the case out, followed by disbarment proceedings for the lawyers.
You don't travel internationally much by air, I'm guessing. There are much stricter limits on carry-on bags in Europe than in the US (although the US has recently started to get a little stricter). You are not able, for example, to carry a briefcase for your laptop, a camera bag for your camera, *and* a roll-aboard. You would need to have at least one fewer pieces with you, sometimes two, depending on how strict the enforcement is, and how big your camera bag and briefcase are.
Having one bag for laptop and camera would be important, especially if that one bag would be about the same size as a briefcase.
There's no need to run to conspiracy theories when standard business practices explain the observed behavior: Intel is looking to increase its profits. Instead of selling you two things together for one price, they can sell them separately for slightly more, increasing profit rate.
If, at the same time, they've realized that they are losing the CPU cooler business at the high-end, and that most of the manufacturing cost that goes into a heat sink is not being used by the end consumer, they save money by not including a cooler in the retail package, and discounting the wholesale price slightly. That particular consumer market segment sees no difference since they don't use the stock cooler, and Intel saves money, again increasing profit rate.
Intel makes money hand-over-fist on CPUs. I have not heard a good argument that they should enter the cooler market.
Disclaimer: I'm a lay person when it comes to things like quantum physics.
From my understanding of the arguments and analogies given in the article, the explanation is that vacuum does has a digravitational constant (the gravitational equivalent of the dielectric constant) greater than 1 in strong gravitational fields.
But, by the same quantum fluctuations getting polarized argument, shouldn't vacuum also have a dielectric constant greater than 1 in strong electrical fields?
Can't we test that last hypothesis pretty easily? Is it already known?
The crux of the article's hypothesis, that anti-matter has opposite-sign gravity, seems like an attractive idea and one that should also be easily testable once sufficient anti-matter can be manufactured and contained.
Slashdot Mirror
While the there is a good point buried in that question, the speed of light through dirt and rock, just like any other opaque materials, is, well, zero.
Help me understand something here ... isn't EC2 really one gargantuan cluster far bigger than 30,000 cores? So why is it news that it ran a big job? Was there some significant step forward in software that allowed features that were not previously available on EC2?
Don't forget to add up power, cooling, sysadmin time...
If the friend's research group is in an academic institution, power and cooling are outside of the acquisition budget, along with space, network, etc., as those are typically part of overhead. Depending on the institution, sysadmin services are too. Often the institution will even have embarrassingly large discounts with hardware and software vendors (at my institution, a licensed copy of Matlab, for example, is about $100 per seat per year).
GBP 4000 buys a rackfull of modern computers that can be run as long as you want. It can be used to explore ideas without concern for cost. In contrast, once the GBP 4000 has been paid to a cloud service, the money is gone. Given that the pressures for a new researcher are already immense (and I speak from recent first-hand experience) not worrying about running out of compute resources, even if it means the instantaneously available compute power is somewhat lower than what you could get from a cloud service.
If this new research group is going to be competing for research funds, for example, then the compute resource is going to be highly utilized for the first 12-18 months to get preliminary results in order to write grants. I can't imagine that GBP 4000 is going to last long enough. Looking at Rackspace, as another poster suggested, they charge about USD 350 per decent configuration (8GB RAM / 320 GB disk) per month. That single server is going to last 18 months before the money is gone. If the memory demands of the computation aren't so large, then the charges are lower, say USD 45 per month (1GB RAM / 40 GB disk), then you get to use 7 virtual machines for the same 18 months.
Given that a highly capable system can be purchased new for USD 500, the same money gives the researcher about a dozen real machines for 18 months, and beyond (buying off-lease machines can easily double the amount of hardware). From my perspective as a researcher, there's no comparison: when money is tight, buy your own hardware and take advantage of the services provided by your institution.
Interestingly, I find that American-born scientists have a better ability to think in different scales than European ones precisely because the US uses Imperial units. American scientists hearing that the temperature outside is going to be 25C think, "um, wait a sec, oh, yeah, that will be comfortably warm," whereas European scientists hearing that the temperature is going to be 77F are completely baffled. Being able to think and converse independent of units is an important skill that European scientists tend to lack. Even if the entire world were converted to SI, there are still multiple ways of measuring given quantities (e.g., percent by weight, by volume, by molecular count, etc.) that have different scales for the same observation, and being able to rapidly shift from one to another is an important skill.
Another failure of Slashdot editing in basic facts checking. The article states 1 km. The stratosphere is between 10 and 50 km, so 1,000 km would go well above that. The nominal edge of the atmosphere is about 600 km. Someone got a little too excited with the zeros, methinks.
This is not a technical or legal question. It is a question about relationships. I'll take a stab, but, seriously, it does not belong on Slashdot. It belongs on some advice column.
As I understand it, you have a roommate who partakes in risky behavior that you have requested he stop. He does not agree to your request. It seems therefore that you need a new roommate since you do not wish to expose yourself to any potential risk and -- this is the important part -- you and he do not have sufficiently compatible lifestyles. You need a new living situation, whether that be by leaving and finding a new apartment on your own, or kicking this fellow out.
Any other discussions about relative liability or that include technological solutions, while potentially fascinating, are completely and utterly missing the point. This is not a technical or legal problem: it is a problem about relationships.
One of the things that makes small hardware a ton of fun to play with is the ability to develop code with a simulator that can show far more detail than is available on the real hardware.
Will you have a highly instrumented simulator available?
Not only that there is a significant amount of additional security with a fax machine: as far as the sender is concerned, there is a single point of receipt that is in a known location. With email, there may be indefinitely many copies intentionally or inadvertently made going to more than one recipient.
On occasion, I've had to sign various reasonably important (at least to me) legal documents. When there has been time pressure, my lawyers have always accepted a faxed copy, but *only* when the hardcopy is to follow by mail.
Once we have depleted sufficient raw materials, all of those trash dumps will look mighty attractive as resources to mine.
Recall that most of the resources we are supposedly squandering came from relatively poor concentrations in the rocks below us and require significant energy to extract and concentrate. Trash dumps are actually quite rich in certain elements and, eventually, will prove an important source. They are conveniently rich in each of the elements we use most!
A seriously casual search with Google shows this is not a new or original idea. Use the search term landfill mining, of which currently the first result is from Wikepedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_mining
Yeah, the editing has been going downhill for some time now, and with Taco's departure, there is no hope left.
Except when you want an archival copy of something.
Reading through the Solyndra web site, there's the following announcement of the departure of their Founder and CEO
http://www.solyndra.com/2011/08/chris-gronet-takes-on-advisory-role-for-solyndra/
from August 18th, about 2 weeks ago. Coincidence? Founder / CEOs don't normally leave after the first 5 years of a startup. Is there more to the bankruptcy story than what's in the OP's article?
Was, yes.
I still, from time to time, need to purchase test equipment. When I see a used HP unit for sale, that is always my primary choice: if it still works when I plug it in, chances are it will far outlive my needs.
Anecdotally, I bought a used HP industrial power supply to build a rack-based research computer some years ago. The power supply (5V at something crazy like 500 A) looked a little beaten up but produced the most solid and quietest voltage I've ever used (and, yes, I did check with a scope and dummy loads). That was from the era when HP was not just good, but balls-to-the-wall the best engineered products money could buy.
Then this crap with Compaq started, and it's been all downhill from there. Probably started earlier.
I've similarly posted in many climate threads about my friend's research dating back 15 years now that strongly suggested that cosmic DUST (not ray) accretion is a strong climate driver, based on variations in the Earth's orbit sweeping out slightly different parts of space and thus accreting different amounts of dust. Just like the Perseid meteor shower changes slightly each year because the relative position between the Earth and that quasi-static dust lane changes from year to year, the Earth encounters more or less dust along its entire orbit, and any periodicity in the orbital variation changes dust accretion. Dust accretion is strongly suspected to influence terrestrial cloud dynamics, and, therefore climate.
Here's my friend's article (in Nature, so this isn't some fly-by-night idea, but rigorous science, and, knowing the second author well, as I do, I can vouch that it is *highly* rigorous and objective science): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v378/n6557/abs/378600a0.html But don't take my word for it: the article has 89 references according to Google Scholar (about 3x the impact factor of Nature, so raising their statistics). There were a couple of follow-up articles as well.
This is one of the big questions for dark matter. Is dark matter really just non-luminous normal matter that we're just either really bad at detecting or really bad at estimating? Are the assumptions of the distributions of dark matter, as extended presumably from luminous matter, correct? Do more stars just burn out and go cold, rather than go nova, than we think? Sure, these are naive musings from someone with only a highly limited knowledge of the field, but they're fun to think about, and rarely get any expert discussion when you see articles about related new discoveries.
My understanding, from the various articles read, is that the only thing removed from the grant proposal is the person's explicitly-given ethnicity and gender. The name, institute, and all the other information on the individual, is left in.
I can confirm that this is the case. A lot is left in. The NIH reviewers specifically have a full resume in an NIH-dictated style called a biosketch. They know the name, educational and professional history, and publication record of the applicant. They also can, and do, look up the grant award record of the applicant.
An application of mine just got dinged because one of the reviewers said I was too qualified (yes, *too* qualified, confused me and the program officer too).
The review process is not double blind, nor even single blind from the reviewer's perspective. It is blind only from the applicant's perspective, but even then, applicants are given enough evidence to be able to make reasonably accurate guesses as to who reviewed the grant, since the full committee list is public knowledge, and most of the committee members are well-known, along with their areas of expertise and writing style.
I'm finding more authors are publishing to PDF using one column. In those cases it just work. Pinch-zooming works but the text rarely (if ever) re-flows the way web pages do in Chrome.
To my understanding, PDF is not designed for reflow. It is designed for a fixed page size, not a variable one. Reflow is an exclusively web-centric idea.
As someone who has typeset thousands of pages of scientific documents to professional standards as well as has designed a handful of web sites, designing documents for proper viewing under reflow is much, much harder than doing the same with a fixed page size. Unless of course you don't care about where images and figures appear relative to the text, and you don't have formulas or expressions with non-standard breaking points, or you don't care about correct line breaks and even paragraph filling.
Because there's an appearance of conflict of interest. This fellow writes blog articles. It is likely that he gets direct monetary benefit from hits on his site. Therefore, the motivation for his submitting is not necessarily in the best public interest.
It may be that everything is on the up-and-up, but it would not necessarily appear so.
The submitting author's UID is coondoggie. The article's stated author is Michael Cooney. Perhaps we can have conflict-of-interest information more explicit, Taco, please?
Is it not possible to sell 30-day time codes on the open market, say through some well-known auction site?
"Intentionally misleading and fraudulent," would be more acurate phrasing. And a more appropriate reaction would be to throw the case out, followed by disbarment proceedings for the lawyers.
Harumph.
You don't travel internationally much by air, I'm guessing. There are much stricter limits on carry-on bags in Europe than in the US (although the US has recently started to get a little stricter). You are not able, for example, to carry a briefcase for your laptop, a camera bag for your camera, *and* a roll-aboard. You would need to have at least one fewer pieces with you, sometimes two, depending on how strict the enforcement is, and how big your camera bag and briefcase are.
Having one bag for laptop and camera would be important, especially if that one bag would be about the same size as a briefcase.
There's no need to run to conspiracy theories when standard business practices explain the observed behavior: Intel is looking to increase its profits. Instead of selling you two things together for one price, they can sell them separately for slightly more, increasing profit rate.
If, at the same time, they've realized that they are losing the CPU cooler business at the high-end, and that most of the manufacturing cost that goes into a heat sink is not being used by the end consumer, they save money by not including a cooler in the retail package, and discounting the wholesale price slightly. That particular consumer market segment sees no difference since they don't use the stock cooler, and Intel saves money, again increasing profit rate.
Intel makes money hand-over-fist on CPUs. I have not heard a good argument that they should enter the cooler market.
Disclaimer: I'm a lay person when it comes to things like quantum physics.
From my understanding of the arguments and analogies given in the article, the explanation is that vacuum does has a digravitational constant (the gravitational equivalent of the dielectric constant) greater than 1 in strong gravitational fields.
But, by the same quantum fluctuations getting polarized argument, shouldn't vacuum also have a dielectric constant greater than 1 in strong electrical fields?
Can't we test that last hypothesis pretty easily? Is it already known?
The crux of the article's hypothesis, that anti-matter has opposite-sign gravity, seems like an attractive idea and one that should also be easily testable once sufficient anti-matter can be manufactured and contained.