The fact that the result was displayed on a graph of 200 pixels for a summary for the public has jack to do with the production use of the data. Do you think businesses only produce reports for the shareholder meetings and banks only look at pie charts for making decisions on billions of dollars of assets. Your criticism is disingenuous at best and has nothing to do with the working product of the supercomputer.
As for the degrees of freedom, you have to recall that their working needs are different from yours. They require greater accuracy and the ability to work within a given time frame in a logistically workable manner. They took advantage of the resources they had and got the greatest level of accuracy they could by using all of those resources. In other words they wrote their program to take full advantage of the supercomputer that they had at their disposal.
Your also assuming that the single given job you have chosen to criticize is the only job that the supercomputer runs, which is a foolish assumption when you would know that the supercomputer runs many types of jobs. In this case the job represented is one that can take advantage of the DOE's available resources for a given problem, and be safely declassified for public consumption. Do you think the people working on this are going to throw away their career and go to prison to make a point on Slashdot?
I get the impression you have never worked with large scale computing needs and have only ever worked in a math lab in a University somewhere.
Except they also put other people in danger when they do so. Other ships in the area also would have felt obligated to take a risk with their own crews to try to save the crew of the Bounty if they were in the area. The Coast Guard is obligated by law to put their own lives on the line to save people when they reasonably can. These sailors risk their life and limb often enough without someone foolishly compelling them to do so on their behalf.
You also have the dangers presented by the wreck to navigation which can cause further risk to loss and limb. More than the lives of crew were at risk and the captain would have known this, even if his crew did not. His crew had no ability to get back home, no offer of a job if they got off and would have effectively been made homeless (some lived on the ship) if they got off. This was not a democracy and the crew were not in a position to vote.
Spoken by someone that otherwise firmly believes in letting people Darwin themselves out of existence.
The ship was originally built as a movie prop, cool to look at but lacking substance. It had decades of trouble as a result since it was of dubious seaworthiness for a very long time. The ship never should have been allowed to skirt maritime law the way it did.
The captain meant well, but his ship wasn't the measure of the dreams that sailed it. The Coast Guard needs to examine how this tragedy was ever allowed to persist for so long and change the law to make sure it never happens again. The loophole that allowed this ship to sail needs closed and the other such ships need safely regulated to museum duty.
Exchanges have been compromised, customers have lost money, basic protections are absent. It is used freely for the silk road drug trade, hiding money from governments and evading taxes. Can anyone seriously make the argument that it won't be regulated?
When people aren't having to drive to work they aren't putting load on infrastructure (roads, buses etc) at the same time as everyone else. That means they create less pollution than someone that has to drive to work. A person that doesn't contribute to traffic and likewise doesn't make that contribution to pollution is better for the community than the person that does. The greenest commute is the one you don't have to make.
I previously worked for a fortune 25 company that had one third of it's work force telecommute from home. They estimated that the cost of providing office space to tens of thousands of employees were well over a billion dollars a year. They also were able to claim credit for green savings for the environment in different manners (the greenest office building is the one you don't have to build).
They also had the benefit of being able to use the flexibility of telecommuting as a competitive advantage when hiring and retaining employees. They were also better able to monitor the employees that telecommuted than the ones in the office and so they were more productive. Yahoo's problem was strictly one of management failure, not one of telecommuting failure.
Business needs to see that needless filling of cubes just because is a waste of money of their own as well as their employees. Telecommuting is the responsible way of the future for environmental and quality of life reasons for the community at large.
Yahoo's failure was one of management, not of telecommuting itself.
You make some good points on sewing machines, guns and Gartner, and I would have to add that the inevitable cost of "toner" is another in to make on your side of things. I really have to disagree with how far you take things against the the do it yourself ethos though.
I'm pretty far from what you would call a prepper, yet I have my own vegetable patch, grow my own herbs, fix my own car, gather my own herbs, make my own compost and paint my own house. You might think I live in the country, however I live in a suburb in a carefully chosen wooded lot. A fairly significant number of people in North America and Australia are willing to fix things themselves whether for hobby, economic necessity or simply the job of working with their own hands.
I foresee 3D printers becoming popular with hobbyists and people performing repairs as it crosses domains (auto, toys, computers, rocketry etc). What I don't see is it ever entering the level of having one in every house. I think we certainly see the day where you go down to your local office supply store and they print something out for you on the spot from your own design.
Your competition is botnets, they consume no power to their owners and the return is hard to beat. Your far better off from a financial stand point to put those computers to sleep. Your also running against bit coins becoming always harder to make with time. Bottom line is that the cost of making them is more than the return. That is why botnets will free to make them, they aren't paying the costs.
Your going to have to argue with the countless studies that are done every year worldwide using Mathematica. Once you've convinced the academic community that their research is invalid because they used Mathematica you can come back to the table on this one.
For the meanwhile I have large numbers of academics that use it for research papers every single day. Mathematica is perfectly cable of presenting all work and creating reproducible work, it would never have been acceptable as the standard it is if it wasn't.
At this point your well and truly into religious territory though, and since I'm strictly agnostic when it comes to these things I'm not going to take this any farther.
If your local country values Windows for employment more than that is what you should use, because that is what will help/them/ build a future. Microsoft has educational versions of their products available for next to nothing worldwide
In this case, however, it's not religious: free software should be the only option in education and science.
You have just perfectly described religion when it comes to software. Perhaps you have English as a second language? Religion is when your chosen option is the only thing you will consider.
Onto your example of mathematics, I'm going to introduce you to a program called Mathematica. I believe a five second Google search will quickly show it's use in academia one of the world's leading academic programs for mathematics. An additional five second Google search will quickly show it's use in industry all over the world. You know places that pay good money in terms of careers, exactly the types of things that/schools/ are supposed to be concerned about.
As someone that works in one of the worlds largest Universities (Top 5 in the US) I think I can safely say that I'm fairly familiar with the subject of making sure students have what they need. I can also assure you that I will use and promote open source and Mac software on a fairly routine basis as well. A computer, it's operating system and it's software are simply tools, select the best for a given situation and always maintain an open mind.
Is it for a lab or is it for a production use? If it is for a lab, in the US with US pricing you can get 3 years of electronic software delivery + DVD for $1437. I quoted you the most expensive option by the way, it can easily go down to a $100 instead. I'm sure versions of this program outside the US would be even cheaper.
These rules are overdue for repeal and have been for at least a decade. I used to travel full time as a consultant for years and I can assure that on every single flight there are devices routinely left on and used when they are not supposed to be.
The empirical evidence is plain as day by way of millions of flights every year with every possible phone, game console, tablet that you could imagine that have/not/ crashed. This rule was made out of excessive paranoia and needs to be set aside as the act of sheer absurdity that it is.
Your putting religion ahead of usability, and that's a mistake. The purpose of a lab is to educate your students, not indoctrinate them in your in your religious beliefs. What can your students use in their country with the skills they would develop and make a career out of? Can you make a career out of a Raspberry Pi, or is it more of a really cool toy?
If your local country values Windows for employment more than that is what you should use, because that is what will help/them/ build a future. Microsoft has educational versions of their products available for next to nothing worldwide, so cost isn't an issue for Windows and Office.
If your local country is all about Ubuntu than you use that because that is what is valued. The only way to know that is to talk your local business leaders and find out what/they/ value. Do they value someone that knows how to run a Windows computer and use Excel or do they all use LibreOffice? Leave your personal religion out of this and give your students what they need for their future.
Microsoft is more determined than ever to prevent IE from becoming irrelevant as Firefox and Chrome scream past it by also including a faster release schedule.
The faster release schedule doesn't have a damn thing to do with Firefox and Chrome gaining ground over Internet Explorer. In fact the fast release schedule has blatantly hurt Firefox gaining ground over Internet Explorer as enterprise after enterprise has blatantly refused to distribute Firefox until they pull their head out of their ass on their release schedule. This causes a logistical support nightmare and the idea that this is going to/increase/ exposure through peoples works places is nonsensical. Firefox, go back rapidly releasing patches, instead of new versions, got it?
Internet Explorer losing ground has everything to do with two things. Experience and exposure.
When you use another browser you have a better experience because you can use things like Ad Block Plus or Flash Block to prevent your computer from being taken over by ads. You can use plugins to customize your experience for any number of other things in ways that you like. Internet Explorer simply doesn't support extensions that let the user improve their experience. You, the user, remain in/much/ greater control and as a result have a much better experience.
As for exposure that is an inevitable result of people being exposed to additional browsers through things like the browser choice menu in the European versions of Window and through smart phones. People are no longer in the position of having a browser monopoly and being quite so limited to a single default browser.
Math is why the presidents limo isn't run by solar power. The idea that you power something like that by solar is absurd. Solar power cars tend to way as little as possible. While I don't specifics any more than any other lay person the presidents limo is built on a heavy duty truck chassis, is armored and it weighs quite a bit. These are mutually exclusive things that probably won't be resolvable for a few centuries at best.
What can I say, I was wrong on a point? I'm okay with that, it was metaphorical anyway. Disagreement with me is something everyone is going to do on something, I don't take it personally.
I could be jerk next time if you want, but that just isn't my style.
I'm being trolled, however I'll indulge you anyways with a little history lesson as I sometimes answer rhetorical questions. They even have a pretty picture you can look at.
Woodsy? Get real, I'm a guy with many years of experience of making process happen in real world production environments. The littlest damn thing can bring down the biggest damn thing and I've seen it time and again. How do you thing the term 'bug' cam up, as a metaphor? Production is messy and has jack to do with ivory tower ideals.
Agreed, politics is by far the greatest impediment to deploying small scale nuclear reactors. I'd love to see small scale nuclear reactors deployed on a wide scale, it's the best green technology that we have. If you get down to it you/could/ fit one of those in a clean room. I was speaking more metaphorically than literally in this case.
Nature is very good at serving us humility in small bite size portions that can bring great things down. Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
No matter how well you design something nature can and will find a way to get in, and it is arrogance in the extreme to assume otherwise. About the only way to avoid something like that is to have a clean room environment, and I'm quite certain that you can't fit a nuclear power plant inside a clean room.
How is this any different from a lay person at Adobe switching over to Apple or vise versa? People go from one employer to another all the time anymore, so what? I guess the only thing that's notable is that we have a cool video of an iphone getting crushed, but that was just marketing.
If you can't be replaced you can't be promoted. If you can't be replaced you can't move on to something better without hurting your client. If your hurt your client by your leaving you will be remembered in a bad way.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the result was displayed on a graph of 200 pixels for a summary for the public has jack to do with the production use of the data. Do you think businesses only produce reports for the shareholder meetings and banks only look at pie charts for making decisions on billions of dollars of assets. Your criticism is disingenuous at best and has nothing to do with the working product of the supercomputer.
As for the degrees of freedom, you have to recall that their working needs are different from yours. They require greater accuracy and the ability to work within a given time frame in a logistically workable manner. They took advantage of the resources they had and got the greatest level of accuracy they could by using all of those resources. In other words they wrote their program to take full advantage of the supercomputer that they had at their disposal.
Your also assuming that the single given job you have chosen to criticize is the only job that the supercomputer runs, which is a foolish assumption when you would know that the supercomputer runs many types of jobs. In this case the job represented is one that can take advantage of the DOE's available resources for a given problem, and be safely declassified for public consumption. Do you think the people working on this are going to throw away their career and go to prison to make a point on Slashdot?
I get the impression you have never worked with large scale computing needs and have only ever worked in a math lab in a University somewhere.
Except they also put other people in danger when they do so. Other ships in the area also would have felt obligated to take a risk with their own crews to try to save the crew of the Bounty if they were in the area. The Coast Guard is obligated by law to put their own lives on the line to save people when they reasonably can. These sailors risk their life and limb often enough without someone foolishly compelling them to do so on their behalf.
You also have the dangers presented by the wreck to navigation which can cause further risk to loss and limb. More than the lives of crew were at risk and the captain would have known this, even if his crew did not. His crew had no ability to get back home, no offer of a job if they got off and would have effectively been made homeless (some lived on the ship) if they got off. This was not a democracy and the crew were not in a position to vote.
Spoken by someone that otherwise firmly believes in letting people Darwin themselves out of existence.
The ship was originally built as a movie prop, cool to look at but lacking substance. It had decades of trouble as a result since it was of dubious seaworthiness for a very long time. The ship never should have been allowed to skirt maritime law the way it did.
The captain meant well, but his ship wasn't the measure of the dreams that sailed it. The Coast Guard needs to examine how this tragedy was ever allowed to persist for so long and change the law to make sure it never happens again. The loophole that allowed this ship to sail needs closed and the other such ships need safely regulated to museum duty.
Exchanges have been compromised, customers have lost money, basic protections are absent. It is used freely for the silk road drug trade, hiding money from governments and evading taxes. Can anyone seriously make the argument that it won't be regulated?
This actually sounds like a good idea. Perhaps they got tired of the US having to rescue their sailors?
When people aren't having to drive to work they aren't putting load on infrastructure (roads, buses etc) at the same time as everyone else. That means they create less pollution than someone that has to drive to work. A person that doesn't contribute to traffic and likewise doesn't make that contribution to pollution is better for the community than the person that does. The greenest commute is the one you don't have to make.
I previously worked for a fortune 25 company that had one third of it's work force telecommute from home. They estimated that the cost of providing office space to tens of thousands of employees were well over a billion dollars a year. They also were able to claim credit for green savings for the environment in different manners (the greenest office building is the one you don't have to build).
They also had the benefit of being able to use the flexibility of telecommuting as a competitive advantage when hiring and retaining employees. They were also better able to monitor the employees that telecommuted than the ones in the office and so they were more productive. Yahoo's problem was strictly one of management failure, not one of telecommuting failure.
Business needs to see that needless filling of cubes just because is a waste of money of their own as well as their employees. Telecommuting is the responsible way of the future for environmental and quality of life reasons for the community at large.
Yahoo's failure was one of management, not of telecommuting itself.
You make some good points on sewing machines, guns and Gartner, and I would have to add that the inevitable cost of "toner" is another in to make on your side of things. I really have to disagree with how far you take things against the the do it yourself ethos though.
I'm pretty far from what you would call a prepper, yet I have my own vegetable patch, grow my own herbs, fix my own car, gather my own herbs, make my own compost and paint my own house. You might think I live in the country, however I live in a suburb in a carefully chosen wooded lot. A fairly significant number of people in North America and Australia are willing to fix things themselves whether for hobby, economic necessity or simply the job of working with their own hands.
I foresee 3D printers becoming popular with hobbyists and people performing repairs as it crosses domains (auto, toys, computers, rocketry etc). What I don't see is it ever entering the level of having one in every house. I think we certainly see the day where you go down to your local office supply store and they print something out for you on the spot from your own design.
Your competition is botnets, they consume no power to their owners and the return is hard to beat. Your far better off from a financial stand point to put those computers to sleep. Your also running against bit coins becoming always harder to make with time. Bottom line is that the cost of making them is more than the return. That is why botnets will free to make them, they aren't paying the costs.
How many animation studios were forced out of business? That seems to be Hollywood's favorite metric for Fx and computer animation.
Your going to have to argue with the countless studies that are done every year worldwide using Mathematica. Once you've convinced the academic community that their research is invalid because they used Mathematica you can come back to the table on this one.
For the meanwhile I have large numbers of academics that use it for research papers every single day. Mathematica is perfectly cable of presenting all work and creating reproducible work, it would never have been acceptable as the standard it is if it wasn't.
At this point your well and truly into religious territory though, and since I'm strictly agnostic when it comes to these things I'm not going to take this any farther.
You did RTFC, right?
You have just perfectly described religion when it comes to software. Perhaps you have English as a second language? Religion is when your chosen option is the only thing you will consider.
Onto your example of mathematics, I'm going to introduce you to a program called Mathematica. I believe a five second Google search will quickly show it's use in academia one of the world's leading academic programs for mathematics. An additional five second Google search will quickly show it's use in industry all over the world. You know places that pay good money in terms of careers, exactly the types of things that /schools/ are supposed to be concerned about.
Here is their website, as you can see their software is not free.
http://www.wolfram.com/mathematica/how-to-buy/education/higher-education.html
As someone that works in one of the worlds largest Universities (Top 5 in the US) I think I can safely say that I'm fairly familiar with the subject of making sure students have what they need. I can also assure you that I will use and promote open source and Mac software on a fairly routine basis as well. A computer, it's operating system and it's software are simply tools, select the best for a given situation and always maintain an open mind.
Is it for a lab or is it for a production use? If it is for a lab, in the US with US pricing you can get 3 years of electronic software delivery + DVD for $1437. I quoted you the most expensive option by the way, it can easily go down to a $100 instead. I'm sure versions of this program outside the US would be even cheaper.
https://www.dreamspark.com/institution/subscription.aspx
These rules are overdue for repeal and have been for at least a decade. I used to travel full time as a consultant for years and I can assure that on every single flight there are devices routinely left on and used when they are not supposed to be.
The empirical evidence is plain as day by way of millions of flights every year with every possible phone, game console, tablet that you could imagine that have /not/ crashed. This rule was made out of excessive paranoia and needs to be set aside as the act of sheer absurdity that it is.
Your putting religion ahead of usability, and that's a mistake. The purpose of a lab is to educate your students, not indoctrinate them in your in your religious beliefs. What can your students use in their country with the skills they would develop and make a career out of? Can you make a career out of a Raspberry Pi, or is it more of a really cool toy?
If your local country values Windows for employment more than that is what you should use, because that is what will help /them/ build a future. Microsoft has educational versions of their products available for next to nothing worldwide, so cost isn't an issue for Windows and Office.
If your local country is all about Ubuntu than you use that because that is what is valued. The only way to know that is to talk your local business leaders and find out what /they/ value. Do they value someone that knows how to run a Windows computer and use Excel or do they all use LibreOffice? Leave your personal religion out of this and give your students what they need for their future.
The faster release schedule doesn't have a damn thing to do with Firefox and Chrome gaining ground over Internet Explorer. In fact the fast release schedule has blatantly hurt Firefox gaining ground over Internet Explorer as enterprise after enterprise has blatantly refused to distribute Firefox until they pull their head out of their ass on their release schedule. This causes a logistical support nightmare and the idea that this is going to /increase/ exposure through peoples works places is nonsensical. Firefox, go back rapidly releasing patches, instead of new versions, got it?
Internet Explorer losing ground has everything to do with two things. Experience and exposure.
When you use another browser you have a better experience because you can use things like Ad Block Plus or Flash Block to prevent your computer from being taken over by ads. You can use plugins to customize your experience for any number of other things in ways that you like. Internet Explorer simply doesn't support extensions that let the user improve their experience. You, the user, remain in /much/ greater control and as a result have a much better experience.
As for exposure that is an inevitable result of people being exposed to additional browsers through things like the browser choice menu in the European versions of Window and through smart phones. People are no longer in the position of having a browser monopoly and being quite so limited to a single default browser.
Math is why the presidents limo isn't run by solar power. The idea that you power something like that by solar is absurd. Solar power cars tend to way as little as possible. While I don't specifics any more than any other lay person the presidents limo is built on a heavy duty truck chassis, is armored and it weighs quite a bit. These are mutually exclusive things that probably won't be resolvable for a few centuries at best.
What can I say, I was wrong on a point? I'm okay with that, it was metaphorical anyway. Disagreement with me is something everyone is going to do on something, I don't take it personally.
I could be jerk next time if you want, but that just isn't my style.
I'm being trolled, however I'll indulge you anyways with a little history lesson as I sometimes answer rhetorical questions. They even have a pretty picture you can look at.
Woodsy? Get real, I'm a guy with many years of experience of making process happen in real world production environments. The littlest damn thing can bring down the biggest damn thing and I've seen it time and again. How do you thing the term 'bug' cam up, as a metaphor? Production is messy and has jack to do with ivory tower ideals.
Agreed, politics is by far the greatest impediment to deploying small scale nuclear reactors. I'd love to see small scale nuclear reactors deployed on a wide scale, it's the best green technology that we have. If you get down to it you /could/ fit one of those in a clean room. I was speaking more metaphorically than literally in this case.
Nature is very good at serving us humility in small bite size portions that can bring great things down. Events like this should remind us that we are mere stewards of the planet and that the rest of the ecosystem will happily take over the best laid plans we have if we let our guard down even a little.
No matter how well you design something nature can and will find a way to get in, and it is arrogance in the extreme to assume otherwise. About the only way to avoid something like that is to have a clean room environment, and I'm quite certain that you can't fit a nuclear power plant inside a clean room.
How is this any different from a lay person at Adobe switching over to Apple or vise versa? People go from one employer to another all the time anymore, so what? I guess the only thing that's notable is that we have a cool video of an iphone getting crushed, but that was just marketing.
If you can't be replaced you can't be promoted. If you can't be replaced you can't move on to something better without hurting your client. If your hurt your client by your leaving you will be remembered in a bad way.