The fuel economy isn't actually that bad considering how much weight they're hauling.
According to NASA, the external tank holds 526,126 gallons. Let's double that to take into account the SRB's and any fuel that's on the Shuttle itself and we get 1,052,252 gallons. That should be a very high estimate of the fuel in gallons. The Shuttle travels at over 17,000 mph so on a 10 day mission, that's 4,080,000 miles.
That's 3.88 mpg. According to Bridgestone, a typical semi-truck gets around 4.5 mpg on the highway...
Actually, there is one other American citizen caught by this as well. I forget his name off the top of my head. For a period of time, they were talking about John Walker Lindh would also be denied a lawyer. Also, while they're not American citizens, it bothers me that we are locking up foreign nationals without a trial or lawyers or even prisoner of war status.
In any case, this guy was one person. If it's legal for him, where, exactly, is the line where it become acceptable? And who has the power to decide? The whole point of our legal system is that you have a trial before locking people up. It was pretty darn clear that Jeffrey Dahmer was a threat to society and guilty of multiple murders, but he still got a lawyer and a trial.
It would also be nice if your documentation were to include a
specific example of a specific United States citizen who was
denied access to a lawyer in a specific court case.
Ok, I'll bite. Take a look on Google for Jose Padilla. The link I posted is just one article (from a probably biased news source), but this case has been covered on every mainstream US news source that I've ever heard of. He is a US citizen, arrested on US soil and held without charges or access to a lawyer for 2 years. Finally, there's a Supreme Court case that is going to decided if he has the right to a lawyer, but the Justice Department is arguing that he shouldn't.
So, it would appear that under certain circumstances, we have lost the right to due process, at least in the view of the Bush adminitration. Hopefully sanity will prevail and he'll eventually be provided a lawyer and actually charged with a crime.
As the article I posted points out, the point isn't whether or not Jose Padilla is guilty (and he may well be), the point is that he hasn't been proven guilty by a jury as the constitution requires.
I see nothing wrong with this either, unless, in your analogy, OO was using a documented API that Microsoft changed. If you're using a hack to an undocumented API, and then selling that to customers as a supported product, well, you deserve what you get.
Microsoft, as a legally defined monopoly, may have fewer rights in this area than companies that don't meet the legal definition of monopoly, but I see nothing fundamentally wrong with making changes to an undocumented API that break someone's cute hack whether the hack is opensource or from a company like Real.
Actually, you have no clue whether Apple went out of their way to break this or not. While it's quite likely that they did, it's equally plausible that they fixed a bug or added a feature that caused the breakage. We also don't know how, exactly, Real was fooling the iPod. What if they were exploiting a buffer overflow and Apple fixed it?
Besides, the longer Apple allows Real's stuff to work, the harder it will be for them to break it if there is a valid technical reason to do so in the future.
Yes, there is still a Cray museum there. I don't think it's officially owned by Cray or SGI anymore, though. I was in it a few years ago. They have some of the much older stuff (CDC machines, the Cray 1, Cray 2, etc). Not sure if they have a T90 or T3E, but I probably wouldn't have noticed since I've seen so many in our machine rooms...
Well, sort of. The J90 was a Cray design almost entirely. It came from Chippewa Falls (the historic design place of all Cray hardware). Its predecessor (the Y-MP-EL series) came from a startup company that Cray bought several years before J90 was done. This system was, for all practical purposes, done when we bought OctigaBay (now called Cray Canada) in April.
Going to more CPU's in the Opteron model still takes a lot of work. From what I've heard, the current chips lose quite a bit of performance due to the cache coherency protocol (ccNUMA memory using MOESI consistancy model) running at 8 processors. The chips themselves only have 3 links coming off of them, which means that at most, you can build 3D topologies of chips. Anything bigger than a cube in 3D gets to be rather slow. So.... To get beyond 8 processors in a true global-memory ccNUMA configuration, AMD is going to need to a) extend their coherency protocol to deal with that and b) come up with a way (external HyperTransport switch, perhaps?) to get more dimmensions off their chips. 6 is the minimum to do a 3D torus configuration (which is the topology of a Cray T3E and a Cray X1). SGI Origins, which are also ccNUMA boxes, uses a 4D hypercube.
Not exactly. If I want to send you to my web site, I don't give you my IP address, I give you my host name. However, if I want you to call my cell, I have to give you my cell phone number. Therefore, in order to change cell phone numbers, I would have to contact people outside my control. If I have a sane network, I control the assignment of hostnames to IP addresses. That means that I can switch IP's "easily" but can't switch cell phones easily.
A judge can order whatever they want, however, the recipient can appeal the subpeona all the way to the US Supreme Court if they choose. One thing you *can't* do is appeal, destroy all the documents during the appeal, and then claim you don't have them any more...
In any case, Congress also has the power to subpeona and there is presently an appeal to a subpeona that requested documents from Dick Cheney's energy task force. That case is, I believe, pending in the US Supreme Court. So you definetly can appeal.
I have several thousand dollars of wireless microphones that opperate in at least one of the frequency ranges we're talking about here (170MHz to 210 MHz). If the signal from the WiFi is strong enough, I'm going to have several thousand dollars of paperweights instead... I'd like to see more details on exactly what frequencies they plan to allocate and how much power will be allowed. I specifically bought my microphones such that they wouldn't conflict with existing TV stations.
1) I suspect that you will find that once you pay for Infiniband, Myrinet, etc... you will have paid quite a lot of money for your "cheap" cluser". In fact, you may have even gotten into the price range of a Cray.
2) It's not just the bandwidth, it's the latency between nodes that is helpful. If you have a large application that is sitting on a barrier waiting to proceed, you don't need much bandwidth to tell everyone to go, but you sure as heck want to be able to tell them quickly! Not having to go through the Northbridge and over a PCI bus then through the network then back through the PCI bus and the Northbridge on the far side is a big win.
3) 800MB/s is "nothing" for a Cray. Each node (16 processors) in a Cray X1 has links that do 1.6GB/sec. And we have 16 of them per node...
4) You say "Running an app on a cluster or a big smp box is just about the same". This would be disputed by anyone who has had to optimize an application for both. The OS on the X1 doesn't just have "hooks" to access/lock/sync memory across processors, the memory is simply mapped into your address space and you access it. That means no syscalls, another thing that can slow you down. You simply manipulate the memory whether it's local or remote.
5) A Cray (and an SGI) is not a "big SMP box". It's a NUMA system.
Yeah, unfortunately, Linpack is not the best bechmark of system performance out there. For instance, it doesn't really stress the memory interconnect between processors. This is why you can bolt together a cluster of machines and get good Linpack numbers.
However, to answer the original poster, our (Cray's) definition of "fast" is probably pretty close to NEC's definition. The goal here is to build a machine that's not just the fastest on benchmarks, but really is the fastest in the world on most real problems. Remember that one of the reasons the NEC machine is fast on real problems is that it is a vector architecture with good memory bandwidth between processors. Seymore Cray invented vector computing and our machines have a *lot* of memory bandwidth:)
Re:People more receptive to ads during search?
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Speculating About Gmail
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· Score: 2, Informative
In their FAQ Question #6 they say that they don't currently support POP/IMAP but might in a future service which you might have to pay for.
Yeah, I think "budget pinch" is an understatement given that this is community theater:) What I *really* want is an ETC Expression (or similar) board, but they aren't exactly cheap. Unfortunately, it sounds like from what you're saying the experience with using a PC will be less than fantastic though. Thanks for the info, though. I'll take a look at the Whole Hog PC.
You can buy small theater lighting dimmers. One of the cheapest brands doesn't use DMX (but it uses something similar called Microplex), but it should be fine for what you describe. It's made by a company called NSI and it's about $79 for 4 channels of control. You have to buy a control board as well, but you'll have to do that for any solution. The board prices vary, but I think you can get a cheap one for about $100 on eBay and it can control up to 16 or so channels at a time. Other companies you might want to look into that make cheap DMX or Microplex dimmers are: Martin, Leprecon and Rosco. Type "DMX dimmer" into eBay for a nice long list of options. In any case, I strongly recommend something like this over X10.
Um, yeah. I do know how to use Google. It's not exactly rocket science. However, that project seems to lack a useable user interface. When I'm designing operating systems, I'll take a command line any day, but that doesn't really work in a theater...
The Write Brothers patented the heck out of their airplane and it would seem that there are quite a few of those around. If I invested millions of dollars to develop a spacecraft, why shouldn't I get to build it myself? I can see where most software patents are pretty lame, but a civilian spacecraft has to have invented some pretty non-obvious technology.
In any case, the patent would expire in N years (20? I think?) and after that, everyone would have the design so it wouldn't destroy the future of humanity. At worst, it would make the next 20 years of spaceflight a bit more difficult.
I can't really answer that exactly, but yes, it's a lot longer than the commodity processor crowd. Then again, a typical Cray upgrade is "everything" (memory, interconnect, system bus, processor, etc) whereas the 6 to 12 month cycle on processors seems to usually be just the processor.
The only reason you can overclock a commodity processor is that the manufacturers are either a) selling you a faster part underclocked or b) are being extremely conservative about the speeds to improve their yield. A Cray is basically "overclocked" (or, more accurately, clocked to the theoretical max) when we ship it.
Decreasing size is certainly a very good way to increase clock rate. Making a machine faster, however, usually involves more than just the clock rate including:
- changing chip fab technology
- putting more processor pipes in the processor
- increasing cache size, etc...
Cray (and I suspect most of our competition) uses basically every trick in the book to get the next machine faster than the current machine.
We actually *have* brought stuff back from space many times. There have been a number of large orbital experiment platforms that were taken up and down on the Shuttle. One, in particular, was taken up right before Challenger and was retrieved sometime in the 90's on a different shuttle flight (I forget the name and am too lazy to look it up). Also, there was one instance where a commercial satelite that didn't make it into orbit was retrieved. I'm not saying that those limited instances justify the design, but it *has* been used.
Well, I work for one of the companies that sells "classified" computers to the government. Typically, the sale itself isn't classified (especially since Cray is a public company) and sometimes, there's even a press release (that's one of ours from this spring). What "classified" usually means is that access to the system and the data on the system is classified. I don't have a security clearance, hence I can't look at, say, a crash dump from one of those sites. So, for your questions:
1) The NSA, Army, various other US and foreign government agencies.
2) Cray, SGI, IBM, HP (look at the Top 500 list for a good reference) and others. The Top 500 even lists a number of systems as "classified".
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The fuel economy isn't actually that bad considering how much weight they're hauling.
According to NASA, the external tank holds 526,126 gallons. Let's double that to take into account the SRB's and any fuel that's on the Shuttle itself and we get 1,052,252 gallons. That should be a very high estimate of the fuel in gallons.
The Shuttle travels at over 17,000 mph so on a 10 day mission, that's 4,080,000 miles.
That's 3.88 mpg. According to Bridgestone, a typical semi-truck gets around 4.5 mpg on the highway...
Actually, there is one other American citizen caught by this as well. I forget his name off the top of my head. For a period of time, they were talking about John Walker Lindh would also be denied a lawyer. Also, while they're not American citizens, it bothers me that we are locking up foreign nationals without a trial or lawyers or even prisoner of war status.
In any case, this guy was one person. If it's legal for him, where, exactly, is the line where it become acceptable? And who has the power to decide? The whole point of our legal system is that you have a trial before locking people up. It was pretty darn clear that Jeffrey Dahmer was a threat to society and guilty of multiple murders, but he still got a lawyer and a trial.
It would also be nice if your documentation were to include a
specific example of a specific United States citizen who was
denied access to a lawyer in a specific court case.
Ok, I'll bite. Take a look on Google for Jose Padilla. The link I posted is just one article (from a probably biased news source), but this case has been covered on every mainstream US news source that I've ever heard of. He is a US citizen, arrested on US soil and held without charges or access to a lawyer for 2 years. Finally, there's a Supreme Court case that is going to decided if he has the right to a lawyer, but the Justice Department is arguing that he shouldn't.
So, it would appear that under certain circumstances, we have lost the right to due process, at least in the view of the Bush adminitration. Hopefully sanity will prevail and he'll eventually be provided a lawyer and actually charged with a crime.
As the article I posted points out, the point isn't whether or not Jose Padilla is guilty (and he may well be), the point is that he hasn't been proven guilty by a jury as the constitution requires.
Microsoft, as a legally defined monopoly, may have fewer rights in this area than companies that don't meet the legal definition of monopoly, but I see nothing fundamentally wrong with making changes to an undocumented API that break someone's cute hack whether the hack is opensource or from a company like Real.
Besides, the longer Apple allows Real's stuff to work, the harder it will be for them to break it if there is a valid technical reason to do so in the future.
Yes, there is still a Cray museum there. I don't think it's officially owned by Cray or SGI anymore, though. I was in it a few years ago. They have some of the much older stuff (CDC machines, the Cray 1, Cray 2, etc). Not sure if they have a T90 or T3E, but I probably wouldn't have noticed since I've seen so many in our machine rooms...
Well, sort of. The J90 was a Cray design almost entirely. It came from Chippewa Falls (the historic design place of all Cray hardware). Its predecessor (the Y-MP-EL series) came from a startup company that Cray bought several years before J90 was done. This system was, for all practical purposes, done when we bought OctigaBay (now called Cray Canada) in April.
Going to more CPU's in the Opteron model still takes a lot of work. From what I've heard, the current chips lose quite a bit of performance due to the cache coherency protocol (ccNUMA memory using MOESI consistancy model) running at 8 processors. The chips themselves only have 3 links coming off of them, which means that at most, you can build 3D topologies of chips. Anything bigger than a cube in 3D gets to be rather slow.
So.... To get beyond 8 processors in a true global-memory ccNUMA configuration, AMD is going to need to a) extend their coherency protocol to deal with that and b) come up with a way (external HyperTransport switch, perhaps?) to get more dimmensions off their chips. 6 is the minimum to do a 3D torus configuration (which is the topology of a Cray T3E and a Cray X1). SGI Origins, which are also ccNUMA boxes, uses a 4D hypercube.
Not exactly. If I want to send you to my web site, I don't give you my IP address, I give you my host name. However, if I want you to call my cell, I have to give you my cell phone number. Therefore, in order to change cell phone numbers, I would have to contact people outside my control. If I have a sane network, I control the assignment of hostnames to IP addresses. That means that I can switch IP's "easily" but can't switch cell phones easily.
In any case, Congress also has the power to subpeona and there is presently an appeal to a subpeona that requested documents from Dick Cheney's energy task force. That case is, I believe, pending in the US Supreme Court. So you definetly can appeal.
I have several thousand dollars of wireless microphones that opperate in at least one of the frequency ranges we're talking about here (170MHz to 210 MHz). If the signal from the WiFi is strong enough, I'm going to have several thousand dollars of paperweights instead... I'd like to see more details on exactly what frequencies they plan to allocate and how much power will be allowed. I specifically bought my microphones such that they wouldn't conflict with existing TV stations.
Gah! I hate replying to my own posts, but I misspelled "Seymour Cray"!
Seymour Cray on Clusters: "If you had to plow a field, which would you rather have, one strong oxen or 1024 chickens?"
2) It's not just the bandwidth, it's the latency between nodes that is helpful. If you have a large application that is sitting on a barrier waiting to proceed, you don't need much bandwidth to tell everyone to go, but you sure as heck want to be able to tell them quickly! Not having to go through the Northbridge and over a PCI bus then through the network then back through the PCI bus and the Northbridge on the far side is a big win.
3) 800MB/s is "nothing" for a Cray. Each node (16 processors) in a Cray X1 has links that do 1.6GB/sec. And we have 16 of them per node...
4) You say "Running an app on a cluster or a big smp box is just about the same". This would be disputed by anyone who has had to optimize an application for both. The OS on the X1 doesn't just have "hooks" to access/lock/sync memory across processors, the memory is simply mapped into your address space and you access it. That means no syscalls, another thing that can slow you down. You simply manipulate the memory whether it's local or remote.
5) A Cray (and an SGI) is not a "big SMP box". It's a NUMA system.
6) I also do supercomputing for a living.
However, to answer the original poster, our (Cray's) definition of "fast" is probably pretty close to NEC's definition. The goal here is to build a machine that's not just the fastest on benchmarks, but really is the fastest in the world on most real problems. Remember that one of the reasons the NEC machine is fast on real problems is that it is a vector architecture with good memory bandwidth between processors. Seymore Cray invented vector computing and our machines have a *lot* of memory bandwidth
In their FAQ Question #6 they say that they don't currently support POP/IMAP but might in a future service which you might have to pay for.
Yeah, I think "budget pinch" is an understatement given that this is community theater :) What I *really* want is an ETC Expression (or similar) board, but they aren't exactly cheap. Unfortunately, it sounds like from what you're saying the experience with using a PC will be less than fantastic though. Thanks for the info, though. I'll take a look at the Whole Hog PC.
You can buy small theater lighting dimmers. One of the cheapest brands doesn't use DMX (but it uses something similar called Microplex), but it should be fine for what you describe. It's made by a company called NSI and it's about $79 for 4 channels of control. You have to buy a control board as well, but you'll have to do that for any solution. The board prices vary, but I think you can get a cheap one for about $100 on eBay and it can control up to 16 or so channels at a time. Other companies you might want to look into that make cheap DMX or Microplex dimmers are: Martin, Leprecon and Rosco. Type "DMX dimmer" into eBay for a nice long list of options.
In any case, I strongly recommend something like this over X10.
Um, yeah. I do know how to use Google. It's not exactly rocket science. However, that project seems to lack a useable user interface. When I'm designing operating systems, I'll take a command line any day, but that doesn't really work in a theater...
Do you randomly troll through old /. threads and swear at random people who make typos? Get a life, loser.
In any case, the patent would expire in N years (20? I think?) and after that, everyone would have the design so it wouldn't destroy the future of humanity. At worst, it would make the next 20 years of spaceflight a bit more difficult.
I can't really answer that exactly, but yes, it's a lot longer than the commodity processor crowd. Then again, a typical Cray upgrade is "everything" (memory, interconnect, system bus, processor, etc) whereas the 6 to 12 month cycle on processors seems to usually be just the processor.
A Cray is basically "overclocked" (or, more accurately, clocked to the theoretical max) when we ship it.
Decreasing size is certainly a very good way to increase clock rate. Making a machine faster, however, usually involves more than just the clock rate including:
- changing chip fab technology
- putting more processor pipes in the processor
- increasing cache size, etc...
Cray (and I suspect most of our competition) uses basically every trick in the book to get the next machine faster than the current machine.
We actually *have* brought stuff back from space many times. There have been a number of large orbital experiment platforms that were taken up and down on the Shuttle. One, in particular, was taken up right before Challenger and was retrieved sometime in the 90's on a different shuttle flight (I forget the name and am too lazy to look it up). Also, there was one instance where a commercial satelite that didn't make it into orbit was retrieved. I'm not saying that those limited instances justify the design, but it *has* been used.
Well, I work for one of the companies that sells "classified" computers to the government. Typically, the sale itself isn't classified (especially since Cray is a public company) and sometimes, there's even a press release (that's one of ours from this spring). What "classified" usually means is that access to the system and the data on the system is classified. I don't have a security clearance, hence I can't look at, say, a crash dump from one of those sites. So, for your questions:
1) The NSA, Army, various other US and foreign government agencies.
2) Cray, SGI, IBM, HP (look at the Top 500 list for a good reference) and others. The Top 500 even lists a number of systems as "classified".
3) Uh, well, people *do* know about them.