What if instead of trying to address everything that way, they break up the computing and move it to the data... so that RAM is tied directly to the logic that would use it.
It's been tried.
See Thinking Machines Corporation. Not many problems will decompose that way, and all the ones that will can be decomposed onto clusters.
The history of supercomputers is full of weird architectures intended to get around the "von Neumann bottleneck". Hypercubes, SIMD machines, dataflow machines, associative memory machines, perfect shuffle machines, partially-shared-memory machines, non-coherent cache machines - all were tried, and all went to the graveyard of bad supercomputing ideas.
The two extremes in large-scale computing are clusters of machines interconnected by networks, like server farms and cloud computing, and shared-memory multiprocessors with hardware cache consistency, like almost all current desktops and servers. Everything else, with the notable exception of GPUs, has been a failure. Even the Cell, the most widely deployed non-standard architecture ever, was only used in the PS3, and was more trouble than it was worth.
There are major outages, but the entire country of Egypt is not off line. Cairo is hard to reach, but Alexandria seems to be up via some routes. Delay on the last link to the Alexandria gateway is about 70ms.
Intel has this strange desire to be a consumer products company, even though they don't sell any consumer products. Yet, the "Intel Inside" campaign was a huge success. Now we'll probably hear something like "Intel - It Just Sounds Better".
Bullshit like that works for Monster Cable: "Any Ethernet cable can deliver Web content. However, HD video, digital music, multiplayer games played on your computer or game console, and digital media players demand the fastest connection possible. Monster® Advanced(TM) High Speed Ethernet delivers blazing fast CAT 6 speed up to10 Gbps, so your home entertainment network will be future ready for even higher definition movies, music, and games." Yes, that's for an Ethernet cable.
The good news is that this will provide an incentive for producing low-cost high-quality face recognition software.
There will also be face recognition outsourcing services.
And, if the Facebook account is entirely fake (created, perhaps, by Facebook Demon), this won't slow down login, since the program has already seen its own pictures.
We need mandatory data retention for bars and restaurants. Bars and restaurants should be required to retain audio and video surveillance data for six months, in case it's needed by law enforcement.
Implementation should begin with Washington, D.C., to retain evidence of political corruption.
We already have plenty of ways to deliver large bombs to targets, ranging from ICBMs to trucks. Shooting them from the moon doesn't help.
If you're going to attack assets in Earth orbit, they're far closer to Earth than the moon.
The "helium-3" thing is a crock. We can't even build a deuterium fusion reactor, and that's easier than a helium-3 one. The only advantage to helium-3 fusion is that there are fewer radioactive byproducts. We can make helium-3; tritium decays into helium-3, and we can and do make tritium in fission reactors. That's probably cheaper than trying to mine a sizable fraction of the moon's surface for a very low density of He3.
Imagine if Christopher Columbus came back from the New World, and no one returned in his footsteps.
It's more like when Captain Thomas Bladen Capel came back from Rockall in 1810, and no one returned until 1896. Somebody made another visit in 1955, and put up a plaque. There was another visit in 1985. Someone is planning a visit in 2011 as a promotion for a charity.
Time to stencil "Abandon In Place" on Pad 39A, as has been done with older unused pads at Kennedy. Maybe put in a Son et lumière (show)", like the Pyramids. Future generations will come to look at the ruins.
10 years as CEO of a Fortune 500 company isn't a bad record. The average is 6.5 years. Schmidt leaves with Google much larger than when he started, profitable, and in good condition. He's done far better than the CEOs of most of the Fortune 500 in the last decade.
The IEEE tracks salaries in electrical engineering. Around 1970, engineers and lawyers made about the same amount of money.
Real estate agents were down at the level of used car salespeople.
The US does not need more scientists and engineers. If it did, salaries would go up.
Their web site just screams "scam"
Also, that $30 per barrel figure is bogus: "We estimate our costs for diesel to be as low as $30 per barrel equivalent. This is based on an industrial-scale plant of at least 1,000 acres, producing our commercial target of 15,000 gallons diesel/acre/year, and taking into account our total expected costs and existing, applicable credits.". In other words, even if it works, it's a scheme to exploit subsidies.
It's not a fundamentally hopeless idea. It's basically a scheme for photosynthesis inside what look like hot-water solar heating panels. Photosynthesis is neither fast nor efficient. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar powered photosynthesis is 11%. That's an upper limit, and the Joule people don't give the actual number for their process, which has to be lower. Photovoltaic panels are already above 11%.
It's not clear that their system would be much cheaper than photovoltaics per unit area. Half the cost of solar panel installations is in the installation job itself. Solar hot water heating panels that last for a decade or two aren't cheap. (The low-end ones tend to rot, be torn up in storms, or crack as the plasticizers are cooked out.) These guys aren't just heating; they have a chemical reaction going inside the things. They'll probably have to flush their system occasionally, and they'll need more pumps, plumbing, and controls than simple hot water panels.
Ethanol from cellulose (not corn) is probably more promising. That works now, but it's marginal on cost. It runs off agricultural waste like straw or cheap crops grown in open fields; you don't have to build giant farms of panels.
I think I'd rather have the laser burn table that they used to cut out various parts of the Thing-o-Matic (such as the plywood shell), than a machine that prints stuff from plastic.
The desk-sized laser cutters are the most popular machines at TechShop. They're easy to use, easy to program (all they need is line art), and will cut up to 3/8" plywood. The size limit is 18" x 24". They'll cut wood and many plastics, but not metals - that takes a much more powerful model.
Making small plastic parts by injection molding is an incredibly cheap operation in quantity. Making one-off parts with a MakerBot like device is a slow, expensive process, and the surface quality will be lower. On the other hand, cutting stuff out of sheet stock with laser cutters, plasma cutters, and water-jet cutters is fast; it's useful as a production process.
So basically, you nuke one and they make twenty more in it's place.
Right. That's what clobbered Craigslist. Crowdsourced "flagging" vs. Craigslist Auto Poster: Auto Poster wins.
Craiglist tried email verification. They tried phone verification. They tried CAPCHAs. Nothing worked. Google Places uses the same techniques. Google tried postcard verification, and there are at least three known schemes for getting around that.
Google has a dilemma. If their search engine takes you directly
to the place you want to go, they don't make any money. For a
good analysis of this, see "Google Sucks All the Way to the Bank",
by Jill Whalen She is,
unfortunately, right. It's essential for Google's success that
some of their own ads be more relevant than their search results.
Part of their revenue comes from sending users on
a side-trip to AdWords-heavy pages. We've measured this, using a
browser plug-in which reports AdWords appearances to us.
About 36% of domains with AdWords (counting domain names, not traffic) are what we consider "bottom feeders", junk sites with a commercial
purpose but no identifiable business behind them.
On the local search front, spam in Google Places is even worse
than in their main search results. This, though, appears to be
due to ineptitude, not malice. Google added a business search
system to Google Maps a year or two ago; that's what Google Places
really is. You've been able to go to a Google Maps page and search
for businesses for some time now. Few people knew this.
Then, in October 2010, Google merged the map search results
into their main search results. "Places" results suddenly got
top billing in Google. The "search engine optimization" (SEO)
industry swung into action, and began spamming Google Places
on a massive scale. (We have a paper on this, which has been
mentioned by Techdirt, the New York Observer, etc. It's an amusing
read.) Recommendation spamming, which had been going on for a while
at a low level, grew substantially once recommendations started
affecting Google search results.
This, incidentally, is why Blekko won't work. If they get
enough market share to matter, techniques will be developed to spam
them into meaninglessness.
Stopping web spam is technically quite possible. We do it
by finding the business behind the web site, and doing some automated
due diligence. We check business records, SEC filings, BBB ratings,
and Dun and Bradstreet to verify business legitimacy. We down-rate
most of the junk. We try to err in the down-rating direction, taking
the position that it's the job of a company to demonstrate their
legitimacy by using their real name and address on their web site,
which has to match real-world business records. Our demo site demo site for this
shows what search is like if you take a hard line on spam.
Our approach requires more of a hard-ass attitude than
Google's business model can perhaps afford. With Bleekko
making Google look foolish, though, and Bing slowly improving,
Google may have to actually do something that works, even if it cuts into revenue from the spam.
There have been a few previous schemes like this. Fileopen has one for PDF files. None have been very successful. They all rely on some central server for routine use of the content.
I had no idea the "music industry" deliberately delayed product releases after airplay.
Where do you buy CDs now? All the record stores around here closed long ago, except for some little places in the Hispanic neighborhood that sell Latino stuff. Starbucks gave up on selling music, to concentrate on, like, coffee.
The local Target has some CDs, between menswear and computers. Ordering physical CDs on line seems silly.
Maybe someone should have that option, but where I worked and likely most everywhere else, it was forbidden to tell others how much you made. This conditioning is stupid.
It is illegal in the US, under the National Labor Relations Act, for the employer to forbid employees to discuss pay with each other. Because organizing a union involves discussing pay, and workers have the right to organize, workers have the right to discuss pay with each other.
Bear in mind how Facebook works internally. It's a large number of programs intercommunicating through a remote procedure call system.
There's no one big "build". The interfaces between programs are well defined, and changing out programs individually is normal.
Could be worse. It could be Friendfinder, which was so successful with phony ads and spam that they now own Penthouse. They just made a bid for Playboy Inc., but Hefner turned it down and is taking Playboy private.
Slashdot Mirror
What if instead of trying to address everything that way, they break up the computing and move it to the data... so that RAM is tied directly to the logic that would use it.
It's been tried. See Thinking Machines Corporation. Not many problems will decompose that way, and all the ones that will can be decomposed onto clusters.
The history of supercomputers is full of weird architectures intended to get around the "von Neumann bottleneck". Hypercubes, SIMD machines, dataflow machines, associative memory machines, perfect shuffle machines, partially-shared-memory machines, non-coherent cache machines - all were tried, and all went to the graveyard of bad supercomputing ideas.
The two extremes in large-scale computing are clusters of machines interconnected by networks, like server farms and cloud computing, and shared-memory multiprocessors with hardware cache consistency, like almost all current desktops and servers. Everything else, with the notable exception of GPUs, has been a failure. Even the Cell, the most widely deployed non-standard architecture ever, was only used in the PS3, and was more trouble than it was worth.
There are major outages, but the entire country of Egypt is not off line. Cairo is hard to reach, but Alexandria seems to be up via some routes. Delay on the last link to the Alexandria gateway is about 70ms.
SVN may be up, but SVN browse code (via a web browser, what they call "ViewVC") is still failing.
Intel has this strange desire to be a consumer products company, even though they don't sell any consumer products. Yet, the "Intel Inside" campaign was a huge success. Now we'll probably hear something like "Intel - It Just Sounds Better".
Bullshit like that works for Monster Cable: "Any Ethernet cable can deliver Web content. However, HD video, digital music, multiplayer games played on your computer or game console, and digital media players demand the fastest connection possible. Monster® Advanced(TM) High Speed Ethernet delivers blazing fast CAT 6 speed up to10 Gbps, so your home entertainment network will be future ready for even higher definition movies, music, and games." Yes, that's for an Ethernet cable.
The good news is that this will provide an incentive for producing low-cost high-quality face recognition software. There will also be face recognition outsourcing services.
And, if the Facebook account is entirely fake (created, perhaps, by Facebook Demon), this won't slow down login, since the program has already seen its own pictures.
$37,500 starting salary... (Stupid new Slashdot layout breaks italics.)
With an engineering degree and experience. Pathetic.
We need mandatory data retention for bars and restaurants. Bars and restaurants should be required to retain audio and video surveillance data for six months, in case it's needed by law enforcement.
Implementation should begin with Washington, D.C., to retain evidence of political corruption.
We already have plenty of ways to deliver large bombs to targets, ranging from ICBMs to trucks. Shooting them from the moon doesn't help. If you're going to attack assets in Earth orbit, they're far closer to Earth than the moon. The "helium-3" thing is a crock. We can't even build a deuterium fusion reactor, and that's easier than a helium-3 one. The only advantage to helium-3 fusion is that there are fewer radioactive byproducts. We can make helium-3; tritium decays into helium-3, and we can and do make tritium in fission reactors. That's probably cheaper than trying to mine a sizable fraction of the moon's surface for a very low density of He3.
Imagine if Christopher Columbus came back from the New World, and no one returned in his footsteps.
It's more like when Captain Thomas Bladen Capel came back from Rockall in 1810, and no one returned until 1896. Somebody made another visit in 1955, and put up a plaque. There was another visit in 1985. Someone is planning a visit in 2011 as a promotion for a charity.
Time to stencil "Abandon In Place" on Pad 39A, as has been done with older unused pads at Kennedy. Maybe put in a Son et lumière (show)", like the Pyramids. Future generations will come to look at the ruins.
I would guess that for those graduating now or within the past few years, engineers make significantly more than lawyers.
You may be right. I know several corporate law firms laying off sizable numbers of lawyers. You can now outsource routine legal work to India.
10 years as CEO of a Fortune 500 company isn't a bad record. The average is 6.5 years. Schmidt leaves with Google much larger than when he started, profitable, and in good condition. He's done far better than the CEOs of most of the Fortune 500 in the last decade.
The IEEE tracks salaries in electrical engineering. Around 1970, engineers and lawyers made about the same amount of money. Real estate agents were down at the level of used car salespeople.
The US does not need more scientists and engineers. If it did, salaries would go up.
Their web site just screams "scam" Also, that $30 per barrel figure is bogus: "We estimate our costs for diesel to be as low as $30 per barrel equivalent. This is based on an industrial-scale plant of at least 1,000 acres, producing our commercial target of 15,000 gallons diesel/acre/year, and taking into account our total expected costs and existing, applicable credits.". In other words, even if it works, it's a scheme to exploit subsidies.
Also, they announced this before, 18 months ago, and still don't have a demo. They should at least be showing a panel or two by now.
It's not a fundamentally hopeless idea. It's basically a scheme for photosynthesis inside what look like hot-water solar heating panels. Photosynthesis is neither fast nor efficient. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar powered photosynthesis is 11%. That's an upper limit, and the Joule people don't give the actual number for their process, which has to be lower. Photovoltaic panels are already above 11%.
It's not clear that their system would be much cheaper than photovoltaics per unit area. Half the cost of solar panel installations is in the installation job itself. Solar hot water heating panels that last for a decade or two aren't cheap. (The low-end ones tend to rot, be torn up in storms, or crack as the plasticizers are cooked out.) These guys aren't just heating; they have a chemical reaction going inside the things. They'll probably have to flush their system occasionally, and they'll need more pumps, plumbing, and controls than simple hot water panels.
Ethanol from cellulose (not corn) is probably more promising. That works now, but it's marginal on cost. It runs off agricultural waste like straw or cheap crops grown in open fields; you don't have to build giant farms of panels.
I think I'd rather have the laser burn table that they used to cut out various parts of the Thing-o-Matic (such as the plywood shell), than a machine that prints stuff from plastic.
The desk-sized laser cutters are the most popular machines at TechShop. They're easy to use, easy to program (all they need is line art), and will cut up to 3/8" plywood. The size limit is 18" x 24". They'll cut wood and many plastics, but not metals - that takes a much more powerful model.
Making small plastic parts by injection molding is an incredibly cheap operation in quantity. Making one-off parts with a MakerBot like device is a slow, expensive process, and the surface quality will be lower. On the other hand, cutting stuff out of sheet stock with laser cutters, plasma cutters, and water-jet cutters is fast; it's useful as a production process.
So basically, you nuke one and they make twenty more in it's place.
Right. That's what clobbered Craigslist. Crowdsourced "flagging" vs. Craigslist Auto Poster: Auto Poster wins.
Craiglist tried email verification. They tried phone verification. They tried CAPCHAs. Nothing worked. Google Places uses the same techniques. Google tried postcard verification, and there are at least three known schemes for getting around that.
Google has a dilemma. If their search engine takes you directly to the place you want to go, they don't make any money. For a good analysis of this, see "Google Sucks All the Way to the Bank", by Jill Whalen She is, unfortunately, right. It's essential for Google's success that some of their own ads be more relevant than their search results. Part of their revenue comes from sending users on a side-trip to AdWords-heavy pages. We've measured this, using a browser plug-in which reports AdWords appearances to us. About 36% of domains with AdWords (counting domain names, not traffic) are what we consider "bottom feeders", junk sites with a commercial purpose but no identifiable business behind them.
On the local search front, spam in Google Places is even worse than in their main search results. This, though, appears to be due to ineptitude, not malice. Google added a business search system to Google Maps a year or two ago; that's what Google Places really is. You've been able to go to a Google Maps page and search for businesses for some time now. Few people knew this.
Then, in October 2010, Google merged the map search results into their main search results. "Places" results suddenly got top billing in Google. The "search engine optimization" (SEO) industry swung into action, and began spamming Google Places on a massive scale. (We have a paper on this, which has been mentioned by Techdirt, the New York Observer, etc. It's an amusing read.) Recommendation spamming, which had been going on for a while at a low level, grew substantially once recommendations started affecting Google search results.
This, incidentally, is why Blekko won't work. If they get enough market share to matter, techniques will be developed to spam them into meaninglessness.
Stopping web spam is technically quite possible. We do it by finding the business behind the web site, and doing some automated due diligence. We check business records, SEC filings, BBB ratings, and Dun and Bradstreet to verify business legitimacy. We down-rate most of the junk. We try to err in the down-rating direction, taking the position that it's the job of a company to demonstrate their legitimacy by using their real name and address on their web site, which has to match real-world business records. Our demo site demo site for this shows what search is like if you take a hard line on spam.
Our approach requires more of a hard-ass attitude than Google's business model can perhaps afford. With Bleekko making Google look foolish, though, and Bing slowly improving, Google may have to actually do something that works, even if it cuts into revenue from the spam.
Ten years is a long time for a Fortune 500 CEO. The average is about 6.5 years.
There have been a few previous schemes like this. Fileopen has one for PDF files. None have been very successful. They all rely on some central server for routine use of the content.
I had no idea the "music industry" deliberately delayed product releases after airplay.
Where do you buy CDs now? All the record stores around here closed long ago, except for some little places in the Hispanic neighborhood that sell Latino stuff. Starbucks gave up on selling music, to concentrate on, like, coffee. The local Target has some CDs, between menswear and computers. Ordering physical CDs on line seems silly.
Do you know if it is legal to make someone sign a contract saying they will not organics a union?
Hell, no. That's called a yellow-dog contract, and it's been illegal since 1932.
Maybe someone should have that option, but where I worked and likely most everywhere else, it was forbidden to tell others how much you made. This conditioning is stupid.
It is illegal in the US, under the National Labor Relations Act, for the employer to forbid employees to discuss pay with each other. Because organizing a union involves discussing pay, and workers have the right to organize, workers have the right to discuss pay with each other.
The problem here is that the company lied to its employees. Now they have to face the consequences.
Bear in mind how Facebook works internally. It's a large number of programs intercommunicating through a remote procedure call system. There's no one big "build". The interfaces between programs are well defined, and changing out programs individually is normal.
These are the guys who run PrisonHookup.com.
Could be worse. It could be Friendfinder, which was so successful with phony ads and spam that they now own Penthouse. They just made a bid for Playboy Inc., but Hefner turned it down and is taking Playboy private.