... Google failed to appreciate how popular its new terms would be, and sold out in less than an hour, so it will take 3 more weeks until the next shipment of terms arrives.
I pity Amazon, having to wait 3 more weeks for terms.
[No, not bitter at all about being backordered, why do you ask...]
Why Societies Need Dissent - Cass Sunstein The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose Liars and Outliers - Bruce Schneier Diplomacy - Henry Kissenger Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams Free to Choose - Milton Friedman Cosmos - Carl Sagan Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb Meditations - Marcus Aurelius Bible
I care about as much for Terabit over copper, as I do for Terabit over caloric, phlogiston, or aether. Short-haul Terabit over fiber would be quite sufficient for our use-case (network never leaves the NOC, which I suspect is probably the major use case, long-haul is a smaller though higher margin market) and is *much* easier to pull off.
I manage several petabytes of storage on a large compute cluster, and we could use Terabit ethernet yesterday. Network fabric throughput is our limiting factor on pushing data out.
One senses that vendors went for the 400 Gb standard on the premise of "why sell one network upgrade when you can sell two at twice the price", and not from actually catering to customer's needs.
It's similar to the current 40 Gb/100 Gb standards. No one that I know actually wants 40 Gb. I can bond 4 x 10 Gb and get that already. But vendors want that double upgrade fee from those companies that have to have every ephemeral competitive advantage.
I have an MBA, but in my defense I also have several years of grad work in theoretical physics and over a decade as senior sysadmin at a large academic compute cluster, so I hope I have enough street cred when I say this.
Don't confuse the body of knowledge, with the kind of people who are attracted to it. Economics, finance, org behavior, strategy are all legitimate domains of knowledge, and can be just as interesting and thought-provoking as theoretical physics.
I got the MBA because a) I like the math-ier parts of business and b) ageism exists in technology, so it's best to add another leg to your stool while you can.
A MBA degree is like a can of car wax. Put wax on a Ferrari, you'll have a shiny race car. Put it on a turd, and at the end you'll still just have a turd. What you take out of a MBA program is largely what you bring into it, and a lot of people don't bring much other than a desire for a promotion with a six-figure salary.
In theory, if civilization is destroyed by the Flame Deluge, the monks should be able to reconstruct your data on paper using nothing more than a magnifying glass.
I was reading about this on another site, and the average was reported as 6.7 Mbs, but 60% of users were 4 Mbs or below, which means that the median user is getting around half the speed of the average user.
The average is a poor statistic for measuring bandwidth. It's like putting 9 hobos and Bill Gates in a room and saying that on average everyone is a millionaire.
He is a long-term investor (in the Warren Buffet mold) who puts out a quarterly newsletter of investment advice. He just released his latest a few days ago, and it's highly bearish on the future because of resource demands.
The ones who say "don't worry about the future, science will take care of it" would probably consider jumping off the Empire State Building to be ok, because they did it and they've fallen 30 floors and nothing bad has happened, therefore jumping off the ESB is perfectly safe...
Since it's election season, I posed a question about broadband availability to the 10 candidates for our local state representative. Only 3 responded, and... Outside of Google lighting a fire, my parents are literally going to die of old age before they get broadband.
Isn't brown people, or gay people, or Muslims. It's crazy. Crazy is the root cause behind most of mankind's problems, be that war or criminal behavior or just everyday sociopathic behavior.
We need a "war on crazy", free mental healthcare for all and easing the ability for family and friends to compel treatment, coupled with increased government spending on treatment for mental illnesses.
Except there's more money to be made in cleaning up after other people's crazy (defense and police and corrections spending) than there is in trying to prevent it. So it'll never happen.
Thermodynamics began in 1650, but the first air conditioner wasn't invented until 1820.
Maxwell's work on electrodynamics was published in 1861, but radio wasn't invented until 30 years later.
Quantum mechanics was first formulated in modern form in the 1920's, but the integrated circuit wasn't built until 1956.
Today, Higgs is a scientific curiosity, and a validation of the Standard Model. While I suspect it will take longer than 20 years for practical applications of Higgs to emerge, the science and engineering required to build the accelerator are already leading to breakthroughs in material science, computation, and engineering today. Today's accelerator is tomorrow's medical proton beam to cure cancer. And maybe, just maybe, the grandkids will get warp drive out of it.
Or, we could go bomb some more brown people and give more tax cuts to billionaires. Which seems like a better long-term investment?
What insurance are you talking about? I live in Tennessee, and have top-of-the-line (for us regular folks, anyway) Blue Cross, and having shelled out a used car's worth of money for mine, I can tell you for a fact they aren't covered at all.
Someone once told me this, and it makes sense to me...
It takes a lot of money to fund a lab in medicine, biology, chemistry, experimental physics, but computer science, theoretical physics, and mathematics basically require just a computer or pencil/paper.
Because Russia is relatively poorer and has fewer labs relative to its population compared to, say, the USA, Russia's brightest minds naturally gravitate towards the "cheap" sciences, and that largely explains why they punch substantially above their weight in those fields.
I've also heard it's due to Russia's love of chess, which score one for them, I *really* wish would catch on here.
Either way, they're definitely doing something right.
I've been running them through my own cracker (doing so helps me to find new patterns I can use to audit our passwords at work). Almost 3 million cracked so far. No "correct horse battery staple", but getting there.
I'd still go with at least a 10 character computer-generated random password with a mix of all character types.
I live in Nashville, TN, and the only physical stores we have are Best Buy and Radio Shack. Our former CompUSA franchise was the high-water mark of sophistication before it went under.
Last week my brother and I traveled to San Diego on vacation, and since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to stop by Fry's and see what the hubbub was about. It's the frickin' geek Promised Land. I felt like a 10 year old kid wandering around the starship Enterprise.
Why can't we have nice things too? Atlanta has *2* Fry's, *2* Microcenters, and a TigerDirect. Nashville has precisely bupkis (BestBuy equals zero for any value you plug into it).
MBA's love to cluster because they assume their competitor sees gold in them thar hills and it's harder to be blamed for a bad decision when your competitor is doing it too. But doesn't it make sense to open a store somewhere else, someplace where you would *BE* the market?
If you were to take the 3 million solar mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and plop it into the solar system where the sun is, the Schwartzchild radius would be well within the orbit of Mercury. We wouldn't lose a single planet, though an earth "year" would shrink to roughly 2 hours. Hold your fist at arm's length. That's how big it would appear in the sky.
Now imagine trying to see something like that, from 4 billion light years away, moving faster than galactic escape velocity. The only reason you can see it at *all* is that it's still siphoning galactic gas into its accretion disk. Once it hits intergalactic space, you'll never see it again.
Three million solar masses sounds huge, but is a microscopic fraction of the Milky Way's total mass (1-4 trillion solar masses). Given the quantity of matter orbiting near the center of a galaxy, I'd believe it likely that even if the central black hole were ejected, a new one would form in short (cosmologically speaking) time. So core ejection may not be a one-off, but a common event during galaxy collisions. In which case, there might be enough of them to partly explain dark matter (though certainly not enough to explain it all).
We also know there is a relationship between the mass of the central black hole, and the "tightness" of the arms in a spiral galaxy. But how would core ejection affect this? Given the speed of light, the outer regions of a galaxy would be tightly wound, while the inner region would be loosely wound (after core ejection). Wouldn't that look an awful lot like a barred spiral?
I would imagine that auto manufacturers would get a huge initial sales boost for something like this as society converts over. But consider the ramifications:
Taxis and car rentals become fungible. You need a car, you call a number, and it appears 30 minutes later.
The proverbial "two car family" becomes "one car + on-call spare". Why sink tens of thousands in a car that you only use occasionally?
I expect car rental companies will grow, auto manufacturers will shrink (instead of selling X spare cars to families which are only occasionally used, they sell a much smaller Y spare cars to rental companies, which see a much higher usage rate).
Car rental companies who buy by the tens of thousands have more negotiating strength that the average person. That means a reduced profit margin for the manufacturer.
So between the drop in individual sales and the drop in profit margin, I expect the auto industry is going to be more competitive than before. "Competitive" does not usually make stockholders very happy.
Given the strategic position auto manufacturing has in national economies, expect bail-outs instead of bankruptcies. This will further hurt competitor's bottom-line.
Think the auto industry is cutthroat today? Just wait.
I was the first person at our office to try Ubuntu, way back in the Dapper Drake days. It spread like a virus so that pretty much all our Linux users were using Ubuntu. We even rolled it out to about 100 servers. But Canonical has ceased listening to what I need, and started telling me what I want. The best thing I can say about Unity is at least it isn't Gnome Shell.
So you see Canonical, it isn't me, it's you. Until you come to your senses, I'm sticking with Mint Debian edition. It has the Gnome 2 desktop like God intended. Rebuild the humanity icon pack and the Ambiance theme and your desktop can look exactly like the Ubuntu of olde, only minus the suck.
Until Ubuntu come to their senses and either ditches Unity or makes its usability and feature set on par with Gnome 2/MATE, that's where I'll be.
I'm with the group at Vanderbilt developing the storage filesystem for LSST, and it has some interesting challenges.
1. It requires redundancy at the server, rack, and site level. 2. Both data and metadata have to scale both in volume and in throughput (GB/sec or transactions/sec) separately of each other. 3. It has to work on the WAN level (GPFS & Lustre don't scale beyond the LAN yet). 4. It should optionally have HSM functionality so you can offload stuff to tape. 5. The data must be maintained in perpetuity so researchers years/decades from now can use it. 6. It must be portable across operating systems so Windows/Mac/Linux/etc users can all access the data. 7. All of this should be completely transparent to the user. 8. And it has to be done on the cheap (scientists definition of cheap, not CIO's definition).
Yeah, it can be (and is) being done. We're already using our filesystem to store 2+PB of data for the CERN CMS-HI experiment on commodity hardware. But I can tell you it is a substantially harder problem than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
... Google failed to appreciate how popular its new terms would be, and sold out in less than an hour, so it will take 3 more weeks until the next shipment of terms arrives.
I pity Amazon, having to wait 3 more weeks for terms.
[No, not bitter at all about being backordered, why do you ask...]
Actually, you can read all the shorts here:
http://localroger.com/
Good times too. Reminds me a bit of Niven.
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/12/21/17846/757
LocalRoger wrote several shorts based in this universe. I though they were great, and am still waiting for a book.
Why Societies Need Dissent - Cass Sunstein
The Road to Reality - Roger Penrose
Liars and Outliers - Bruce Schneier
Diplomacy - Henry Kissenger
Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams
Free to Choose - Milton Friedman
Cosmos - Carl Sagan
Guns, Germs, and Steel - Jared Diamond
Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
Bible
I care about as much for Terabit over copper, as I do for Terabit over caloric, phlogiston, or aether. Short-haul Terabit over fiber would be quite sufficient for our use-case (network never leaves the NOC, which I suspect is probably the major use case, long-haul is a smaller though higher margin market) and is *much* easier to pull off.
And FWIW, physicist, not CS/CE.
I manage several petabytes of storage on a large compute cluster, and we could use Terabit ethernet yesterday. Network fabric throughput is our limiting factor on pushing data out.
One senses that vendors went for the 400 Gb standard on the premise of "why sell one network upgrade when you can sell two at twice the price", and not from actually catering to customer's needs.
It's similar to the current 40 Gb/100 Gb standards. No one that I know actually wants 40 Gb. I can bond 4 x 10 Gb and get that already. But vendors want that double upgrade fee from those companies that have to have every ephemeral competitive advantage.
Slackware -> Debian -> RHEL -> Debian -> Fedora -> Debian -> FreeBSD -> Linux -> Ubuntu -> Debian -> Mint Debian -> Debian.
While most distros have their strength, it's *really* hard to beat Debian.
I have an MBA, but in my defense I also have several years of grad work in theoretical physics and over a decade as senior sysadmin at a large academic compute cluster, so I hope I have enough street cred when I say this.
Don't confuse the body of knowledge, with the kind of people who are attracted to it. Economics, finance, org behavior, strategy are all legitimate domains of knowledge, and can be just as interesting and thought-provoking as theoretical physics.
I got the MBA because a) I like the math-ier parts of business and b) ageism exists in technology, so it's best to add another leg to your stool while you can.
A MBA degree is like a can of car wax. Put wax on a Ferrari, you'll have a shiny race car. Put it on a turd, and at the end you'll still just have a turd. What you take out of a MBA program is largely what you bring into it, and a lot of people don't bring much other than a desire for a promotion with a six-figure salary.
Actually listen to your users and do what they say. It's so radical it just might work.
http://ollydbg.de/Paperbak/
http://olydbg.de/Paperbak/
In theory, if civilization is destroyed by the Flame Deluge, the monks should be able to reconstruct your data on paper using nothing more than a magnifying glass.
For reference:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Average-US-Broadband-Connection-Now-67-Mbps-120700
I was reading about this on another site, and the average was reported as 6.7 Mbs, but 60% of users were 4 Mbs or below, which means that the median user is getting around half the speed of the average user.
The average is a poor statistic for measuring bandwidth. It's like putting 9 hobos and Bill Gates in a room and saying that on average everyone is a millionaire.
He is a long-term investor (in the Warren Buffet mold) who puts out a quarterly newsletter of investment advice. He just released his latest a few days ago, and it's highly bearish on the future because of resource demands.
http://www.gmo.com/websitecontent/GMOQ2Letter.pdf
The ones who say "don't worry about the future, science will take care of it" would probably consider jumping off the Empire State Building to be ok, because they did it and they've fallen 30 floors and nothing bad has happened, therefore jumping off the ESB is perfectly safe...
under either incumbant ISP's or our politicians. Lack of widespread broadband isn't a technical problem. It's purely political.
I posted this on Slashdot months ago:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2497294&cid=37860766
Since it's election season, I posed a question about broadband availability to the 10 candidates for our local state representative. Only 3 responded, and... Outside of Google lighting a fire, my parents are literally going to die of old age before they get broadband.
http://www.mathewbinkley.org/?p=392
Isn't brown people, or gay people, or Muslims. It's crazy. Crazy is the root cause behind most of mankind's problems, be that war or criminal behavior or just everyday sociopathic behavior.
We need a "war on crazy", free mental healthcare for all and easing the ability for family and friends to compel treatment, coupled with increased government spending on treatment for mental illnesses.
Except there's more money to be made in cleaning up after other people's crazy (defense and police and corrections spending) than there is in trying to prevent it. So it'll never happen.
My condolences to all those affected.
Thermodynamics began in 1650, but the first air conditioner wasn't invented until 1820.
Maxwell's work on electrodynamics was published in 1861, but radio wasn't invented until 30 years later.
Quantum mechanics was first formulated in modern form in the 1920's, but the integrated circuit wasn't built until 1956.
Today, Higgs is a scientific curiosity, and a validation of the Standard Model. While I suspect it will take longer than 20 years for practical applications of Higgs to emerge, the science and engineering required to build the accelerator are already leading to breakthroughs in material science, computation, and engineering today. Today's accelerator is tomorrow's medical proton beam to cure cancer. And maybe, just maybe, the grandkids will get warp drive out of it.
Or, we could go bomb some more brown people and give more tax cuts to billionaires. Which seems like a better long-term investment?
What insurance are you talking about? I live in Tennessee, and have top-of-the-line (for us regular folks, anyway) Blue Cross, and having shelled out a used car's worth of money for mine, I can tell you for a fact they aren't covered at all.
Someone once told me this, and it makes sense to me...
It takes a lot of money to fund a lab in medicine, biology, chemistry, experimental physics, but computer science, theoretical physics, and mathematics basically require just a computer or pencil/paper.
Because Russia is relatively poorer and has fewer labs relative to its population compared to, say, the USA, Russia's brightest minds naturally gravitate towards the "cheap" sciences, and that largely explains why they punch substantially above their weight in those fields.
I've also heard it's due to Russia's love of chess, which score one for them, I *really* wish would catch on here.
Either way, they're definitely doing something right.
I've been running them through my own cracker (doing so helps me to find new patterns I can use to audit our passwords at work). Almost 3 million cracked so far. No "correct horse battery staple", but getting there.
I'd still go with at least a 10 character computer-generated random password with a mix of all character types.
Length Password
40 1234567890123456789012345678901234567890
24 sociological imagination
24 linkedinlinkedinlinkedin
23 newlinkedinpassword1234
22 harekrishnaharekrishna
I live in Nashville, TN, and the only physical stores we have are Best Buy and Radio Shack. Our former CompUSA franchise was the high-water mark of sophistication before it went under.
Last week my brother and I traveled to San Diego on vacation, and since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to stop by Fry's and see what the hubbub was about. It's the frickin' geek Promised Land. I felt like a 10 year old kid wandering around the starship Enterprise.
Why can't we have nice things too? Atlanta has *2* Fry's, *2* Microcenters, and a TigerDirect. Nashville has precisely bupkis (BestBuy equals zero for any value you plug into it).
MBA's love to cluster because they assume their competitor sees gold in them thar hills and it's harder to be blamed for a bad decision when your competitor is doing it too. But doesn't it make sense to open a store somewhere else, someplace where you would *BE* the market?
If you were to take the 3 million solar mass black hole in the center of the Milky Way, and plop it into the solar system where the sun is, the Schwartzchild radius would be well within the orbit of Mercury. We wouldn't lose a single planet, though an earth "year" would shrink to roughly 2 hours. Hold your fist at arm's length. That's how big it would appear in the sky.
Now imagine trying to see something like that, from 4 billion light years away, moving faster than galactic escape velocity. The only reason you can see it at *all* is that it's still siphoning galactic gas into its accretion disk. Once it hits intergalactic space, you'll never see it again.
Three million solar masses sounds huge, but is a microscopic fraction of the Milky Way's total mass (1-4 trillion solar masses). Given the quantity of matter orbiting near the center of a galaxy, I'd believe it likely that even if the central black hole were ejected, a new one would form in short (cosmologically speaking) time. So core ejection may not be a one-off, but a common event during galaxy collisions. In which case, there might be enough of them to partly explain dark matter (though certainly not enough to explain it all).
We also know there is a relationship between the mass of the central black hole, and the "tightness" of the arms in a spiral galaxy. But how would core ejection affect this? Given the speed of light, the outer regions of a galaxy would be tightly wound, while the inner region would be loosely wound (after core ejection). Wouldn't that look an awful lot like a barred spiral?
So many interesting questions, so few answers...
I would imagine that auto manufacturers would get a huge initial sales boost for something like this as society converts over. But consider the ramifications:
Taxis and car rentals become fungible. You need a car, you call a number, and it appears 30 minutes later.
The proverbial "two car family" becomes "one car + on-call spare". Why sink tens of thousands in a car that you only use occasionally?
I expect car rental companies will grow, auto manufacturers will shrink (instead of selling X spare cars to families which are only occasionally used, they sell a much smaller Y spare cars to rental companies, which see a much higher usage rate).
Car rental companies who buy by the tens of thousands have more negotiating strength that the average person. That means a reduced profit margin for the manufacturer.
So between the drop in individual sales and the drop in profit margin, I expect the auto industry is going to be more competitive than before. "Competitive" does not usually make stockholders very happy.
Given the strategic position auto manufacturing has in national economies, expect bail-outs instead of bankruptcies. This will further hurt competitor's bottom-line.
Think the auto industry is cutthroat today? Just wait.
I was the first person at our office to try Ubuntu, way back in the Dapper Drake days. It spread like a virus so that pretty much all our Linux users were using Ubuntu. We even rolled it out to about 100 servers. But Canonical has ceased listening to what I need, and started telling me what I want. The best thing I can say about Unity is at least it isn't Gnome Shell.
So you see Canonical, it isn't me, it's you. Until you come to your senses, I'm sticking with Mint Debian edition. It has the Gnome 2 desktop like God intended. Rebuild the humanity icon pack and the Ambiance theme and your desktop can look exactly like the Ubuntu of olde, only minus the suck.
Until Ubuntu come to their senses and either ditches Unity or makes its usability and feature set on par with Gnome 2/MATE, that's where I'll be.
I'm with the group at Vanderbilt developing the storage filesystem for LSST, and it has some interesting challenges.
1. It requires redundancy at the server, rack, and site level. 2. Both data and metadata have to scale both in volume and in throughput (GB/sec or transactions/sec) separately of each other.
3. It has to work on the WAN level (GPFS & Lustre don't scale beyond the LAN yet).
4. It should optionally have HSM functionality so you can offload stuff to tape.
5. The data must be maintained in perpetuity so researchers years/decades from now can use it.
6. It must be portable across operating systems so Windows/Mac/Linux/etc users can all access the data.
7. All of this should be completely transparent to the user.
8. And it has to be done on the cheap (scientists definition of cheap, not CIO's definition).
Yeah, it can be (and is) being done. We're already using our filesystem to store 2+PB of data for the CERN CMS-HI experiment on commodity hardware. But I can tell you it is a substantially harder problem than you think.