Cinnamon here, but same basic theory. My anger about gnome 3 has decreased significantly since switching. I look at these threads more with amusement than with rage at this point.
If you are still on gnome3 and angry, it's really worth getting out while the getting is good.
I did something similar: worked 30 hours a week, lived in cheap housing, took 6 years to graduate, but did so debt free. Having said that, I have mixed feelings about it. Yes I worked hard and sacrificed to make it work. I was lucky too though and had opportunities other people don't necessarily have:
1) I had a good quality state school I could attend. 2) My parents let me live at home until I could find a good/cheap housing solution. 3) My parents helped me out with classes my first year until I got established. 4) I had good jobs in high school and was able to build a savings. 5) I managed to get a civil service position at the University that provided me with some free credits every semester.
It seems to me that in today's world it may not be enough to be responsible and diligent. I'm not sure I could have done it had I not had the opportunities I had.
The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution.
What I'm saying is: Maybe they would love to do just that, but everyone complains when they need a bigger budget because they are not going with the dirt cheap solutions anymore.
This isn't being paid for out of a budget, it's being paid for directly by the people that own the affected homes. I would have greatly appreciated it if they would have said "you can pay us $800, but you really shouldn't because we are going to hire the cheapest sloppiest contractor we can find". I would have gone and found someone else myself even if it cost a bit more.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city...
The big picture is that there is this liberal assumption floating around that anything the government does is bad and expensive, and everyone private enterprise does is cheap and good. And I'm saying that's bullshit.
There is a liberal assumption that private enterprise is good and government is bad? That seems to be the opposite of the typical meme I've heard...
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science.
No. But it's still a job that can be done well, or badly.
I'm just trying to make you think one step further, beyond "the city fucked this up" towards "why did they fuck this up?".
Look, I shouldn't have to worry about these things. If it's not the sidewalks, it's the gas lines (3 blocks from my home!):
I expect better than this from my government. I don't mind paying taxes to make sure infrastructure is maintained, but they are doing a hell of a job convincing me they aren't the right people to be doing it.
I'll bite. You seem to think that distributed computing, however you are defining that, is a better solution. I am going to assume your primary objection then is using infiniband (or some other low latency interconnect such as Numalink or Gemini). What then, would you propose to do with the class of problems that are rely on extremely low latency transmission of data between nodes?
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
Have you ever thought about the other explanation: They they do it cheaply and badly because everyone tries to save a few pennies on this job? I'm pretty sure had you hired a contractor, it would've been more than $800, but it would've been done properly.
That's not the other explanation, it's more or less what I'm complaining about. The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution. *Anyone* can do that. I naively assumed that the default option of letting the city handle it would be optimal. I mean, is it really that unreasonable to expect that the city should know how to find someone to install proper sidewalks at a reasonable price better than I do?
Everyone always expects the government to work great, but with an absolute minimum of budget. Well, newsflash, private corporations don't manage to do that, either. Many of them just have the advantage of getting infrastructure, etc. for free from the government.
Who's everyone? We are talking about city sidewalks...
Example: The rail company in Germany was made a private company about 10 years ago. The first few years, everything looks great, just like the consultants had promised. Then things started to go downhill, and still do. Because the first thing they started to save money on was such irritable costs as maintainance. With minimal maintainance, the tracks and stations work just fine... for a few years...
Government is sometimes wasteful, but often they are just more expensive because they don't cut corners as much as private companies do and because they take risks and explore frontiers that corporations rather not.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city... Anyway, had the city done a better job (even with a bit of extra work to make sure things were done right) I would have been grudgingly happy (despite wondering why my tax dollars are going toward building new sports stadiums when the old ones are fine instead of replacing our crumbling infrastructure). The problem here is that the government provided options was as, if not more, shoddy than private solutions.
NASA is crazy expensive, but they got a man to the moon in 8 years. And even with all the groundwork long done, private companies are still working out the details of reaching earth orbit after 11 years.
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science. I'm not talking about putting down advanced concrete formulations, subsurface heating, or crazy glow in the dark walking stripes. I just want them to level the dirt, throw down some aggregate, and use rebar so I'm not being forced to pay for this again in 10 years.
I live in Minneapolis. About 3-4 years ago we were told the city would be coming through assessing our sidewalk squares for cracks, shifting, etc. After the assessment, we were told that they would be replacing a number of the squares. We could pay the city $800 upfront or pay them over the next 5 years with our taxes (also incurring some additional interest overhead). Alternatively we could hire a licensed contractor from a list provided by the city at our own expense. Later on when they came through to pour the new sidewalks, I noticed at my neighbor's house that they didn't properly level the ground (or lay down a base). The concrete was only two inches deep in places and poured directly on the dirt. I suspect they didn't use rebar or any kind of structural support either. It's almost certain to crack again in the not-to-distant future.
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
I've got Mint on my wife's laptop and ubuntu with Cinnamon on mine. On my desktop I recently installed an SSD and did a new install. Had mint 15 been out I would have strongly considered it, but ultimately I decided that for now Ubuntu 13.04 + cinnamon is a pretty good combination. Not sure if that will continue to be the case, but for the moment I think it's about as good as it gets.
Having said that, Mint 14 on my wife's laptop has been rock solid and I'm guessing she will continue to happily use it for some time to come.
I don't totally disagree with your premise, but what the heck are you doing talking about genetics and proteomics in reference to giant supercomputers? If you know anything about proteomics codes, you know that the commonly used search engines like sequest and mascot were never designed to run on systems like that. Hell, they barely run on small clusters and yet people are getting enough science done that they just don't care. That doesn't mean that it's hard to find problems that need supercomputers though.
If you want to talk about the really big systems, you are talking about things like nuclear weapons simulations, astrophysics, molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanics. There are only a handful of guys that will actually make really good use of those systems and scores of folks that would otherwise be perfectly fine running on significantly smaller ones. Having smaller jobs backfill on the big machines when the really hardcore guys are off doing something else isn't such a bad situation though. It lets you get the big science done and still keep the machines being used efficiently in the interim.
Beyond that, just because some researchers aren't scaling their codes to those levels yet doesn't mean we should give up on big systems. There will always be people pushing the envelop and others playing catch up. Our job is to help the slow guys scale their codes when possible so they can do even better and more intensive science. Yes, not all problems require the big systems, but there are many that do, many that can be made to scale even when they don't appear to at first, and others that can serve as backfill to keep the systems busy. They have their place just as smaller clusters, cloud resources, and big data resources do.
I have a definite issue with this sort of a system. Why should I, a 5' 10" man have to pay more for weighing 180# than a woman that's 5' tall and weighing only 100#?
It's easy: Because it costs more to ship you.
Genetics has a huge impact there, this isn't the result of my choosing to be an extra 10" taller than the woman and carrying the requisite weight that entails, it's an issue of the genes that I was born with.
What's interesting about their approach is that it seems to ignore baggage, which is something which people can easily do something about. Sure, the morbidly obese can and should lose weight, but this seems like an awful lot of unwarranted discrimination against people who are taller and just larger regardless of causation.
None of this is the airline's problem. It's entirely reasonable for the airline to charge people based on how much it costs to fly them somewhere. In a lot of ways it's more honest than the current system where that 100lb woman is helping to subsidize your ticket.
I've got most of my machines running Ubuntu with the cinnamon repo and my wife's laptop running Mint. It's fantastic and I don't find myself missing gnome2 much. Takes a slight amount of readjustment and a bit of tweaking but it's not bad and I was die-hard gnome2 user. It's really worth the switch at this point.
As I sit here on my MacBook Air running Ubuntu, working on Ceph (ie getting stuff done!) while browsing slashdot. I've tried OSX many times, and I keep coming back to Linux because it's so much *more* productive, especially when working on code. The only thing I miss is netflix.
So whatever. I still have a soft spot for Apple hardware, but I'll stick with Linux thank-you-very-much.
Don't think I don't know what you are doing. It was clever of you to have invested $1M in Inktank to support Ceph. That got you a lot of hits on ceph.com. It may take me all year, but through the power of science I will eventually beat your record of who can drive more traffic to our website. Like a master ninja I will blind you with my amazing insights. Just look at my analysis of Ceph's write performance on different disk controllers. Yeah it didn't get as many hits as your little investment announcement, but this is just the beginning. So my questions is, do you want to just give up now?
Yeah, I still remember how I switched. I was trying to get Windows 95 to back up some files on my hard drive to tape using their goofy backup software. To make a long story short, Windows 95 ultimately ended up corrupting my hard drive and the backup. It was at that point that I switched to OS/2 for a while, then slackware, then redhat, then debian. I stuck with debian for a while, then switched to ubuntu and have been mostly ubuntu since. For a while I had a windows or OSX partition for games, but in the last year or so I haven't bothered since wine+native has been good enough. I haven't looked back.
I actually rebuilt the theme I used previous from gnome2 and my gnome3 fallback desktop pretty much looks exactly like my gnome2 desktop did. I even got the panel looking right which took some effort.
I use it, and have been using it since I switched from gnome 2. I even ported the theme I used so my desktop is pretty much exactly the same as it was before. The gnome devs don't owe me a thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to be pissed off at them for wasting their potential.
I think what's scary is that it seems like there are a significant number of people that care more about their relative status in society more than they care about the baseline. IE they would rather have more than their neighbor even if it meant both standards of living were lower than they would be otherwise. I think this is what fuels some very bad decisions that our society makes.
One of the things I have noticed over the years is that while there are still many comments for political or flame inducing articles, the number of comments for deep or technical articles has decreased pretty dramatically. I can only conclude that many of the highly technical people have left. Those of us that remain do so out of some combination of routine/tradition.
The Cynic in me says that you don't get to into the Top 5 by spending all of your budget on memory.:)
Practically speaking there are a lot of research codes out there that are using 1GB or less of memory per core. Our systems at MSI typically had somewhere between 2-3GB of memory per core and often were only using half of their memory or less. There's a good chance that TACC has looked at the kinds of computations that would happen on the machine and determined that they don't need more.
We had another much smaller cluster that had significantly more memory per node where we tried to push big memory people to use. They of course don't like it because they want to run on the big fancy glorious machine that gets mentioned in all of the press articles even though they aren't well suited to use it. Such is the way Academia works though.
Sadly it's a tragedy that seems all too common these days. The IT admins, software engineers and hardware engineers think they know how to do each other's jobs better than they do. Instead of working together, they try to build their own little power bases to control each other. If you've found a place to work where that's not the case, cherish it. In my experience it's not as common as one would hope.
There are a lot of places like that. There are other places where nearly every individual thinks they know everything because they know a thing or two about a given subject (be it computers, physics, law, etc). I'm about 10 years older than you. After working at a couple of different places my take away has been:
1) Try new things and don't be afraid to fail. 2) Don't be afraid to stop and re-evaluate if you are doing it wrong. 3) Be humble.
To answer your questions:
1) Probably somewhere around 35. 2) Very easily (Maybe sometimes too easily.) 3) Some people (and some companies) are more like that than others.
You might want to work for a startup if you want a more hands-on culture.
I'm at SC11 right now and just attended NIC's MIC presentation. The scaling looks fantastic according to various codes that they compiled to run on it, but what was notably absent was performance relative to traditional x86 chips. The final presenter even said that now that the technology has been demonstrated to work (with minimal porting effort required) the next step will be to optimize and improve performance. The take away is that relative to Intel's other chips, MIC performance wasn't impressive enough to include in the presentation. That's fine in my book because it's an ambitious project, but it sounds like there is still some work to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Cinnamon here, but same basic theory. My anger about gnome 3 has decreased significantly since switching. I look at these threads more with amusement than with rage at this point.
If you are still on gnome3 and angry, it's really worth getting out while the getting is good.
I did something similar: worked 30 hours a week, lived in cheap housing, took 6 years to graduate, but did so debt free. Having said that, I have mixed feelings about it. Yes I worked hard and sacrificed to make it work. I was lucky too though and had opportunities other people don't necessarily have:
1) I had a good quality state school I could attend.
2) My parents let me live at home until I could find a good/cheap housing solution.
3) My parents helped me out with classes my first year until I got established.
4) I had good jobs in high school and was able to build a savings.
5) I managed to get a civil service position at the University that provided me with some free credits every semester.
It seems to me that in today's world it may not be enough to be responsible and diligent. I'm not sure I could have done it had I not had the opportunities I had.
The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution.
What I'm saying is: Maybe they would love to do just that, but everyone complains when they need a bigger budget because they are not going with the dirt cheap solutions anymore.
This isn't being paid for out of a budget, it's being paid for directly by the people that own the affected homes. I would have greatly appreciated it if they would have said "you can pay us $800, but you really shouldn't because we are going to hire the cheapest sloppiest contractor we can find". I would have gone and found someone else myself even if it cost a bit more.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city...
The big picture is that there is this liberal assumption floating around that anything the government does is bad and expensive, and everyone private enterprise does is cheap and good. And I'm saying that's bullshit.
There is a liberal assumption that private enterprise is good and government is bad? That seems to be the opposite of the typical meme I've heard...
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science.
No. But it's still a job that can be done well, or badly.
I'm just trying to make you think one step further, beyond "the city fucked this up" towards "why did they fuck this up?".
Look, I shouldn't have to worry about these things. If it's not the sidewalks, it's the gas lines (3 blocks from my home!):
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/203710911.html
Or how about the bridges collapsing into the river?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-35W_Mississippi_River_bridge
I expect better than this from my government. I don't mind paying taxes to make sure infrastructure is maintained, but they are doing a hell of a job convincing me they aren't the right people to be doing it.
I'll bite. You seem to think that distributed computing, however you are defining that, is a better solution. I am going to assume your primary objection then is using infiniband (or some other low latency interconnect such as Numalink or Gemini). What then, would you propose to do with the class of problems that are rely on extremely low latency transmission of data between nodes?
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
Have you ever thought about the other explanation: They they do it cheaply and badly because everyone tries to save a few pennies on this job? I'm pretty sure had you hired a contractor, it would've been more than $800, but it would've been done properly.
That's not the other explanation, it's more or less what I'm complaining about. The city should be in the business of finding the best value, not the dirt cheapest solution. *Anyone* can do that. I naively assumed that the default option of letting the city handle it would be optimal. I mean, is it really that unreasonable to expect that the city should know how to find someone to install proper sidewalks at a reasonable price better than I do?
Everyone always expects the government to work great, but with an absolute minimum of budget. Well, newsflash, private corporations don't manage to do that, either. Many of them just have the advantage of getting infrastructure, etc. for free from the government.
Who's everyone? We are talking about city sidewalks...
Example: The rail company in Germany was made a private company about 10 years ago. The first few years, everything looks great, just like the consultants had promised. Then things started to go downhill, and still do. Because the first thing they started to save money on was such irritable costs as maintainance. With minimal maintainance, the tracks and stations work just fine... for a few years...
Government is sometimes wasteful, but often they are just more expensive because they don't cut corners as much as private companies do and because they take risks and explore frontiers that corporations rather not.
I'm not sure what any of this really has to do with shoddy sidewalks installed by the city... Anyway, had the city done a better job (even with a bit of extra work to make sure things were done right) I would have been grudgingly happy (despite wondering why my tax dollars are going toward building new sports stadiums when the old ones are fine instead of replacing our crumbling infrastructure). The problem here is that the government provided options was as, if not more, shoddy than private solutions.
NASA is crazy expensive, but they got a man to the moon in 8 years. And even with all the groundwork long done, private companies are still working out the details of reaching earth orbit after 11 years.
Sidewalks! It's literally not rocket science. I'm not talking about putting down advanced concrete formulations, subsurface heating, or crazy glow in the dark walking stripes. I just want them to level the dirt, throw down some aggregate, and use rebar so I'm not being forced to pay for this again in 10 years.
I live in Minneapolis. About 3-4 years ago we were told the city would be coming through assessing our sidewalk squares for cracks, shifting, etc. After the assessment, we were told that they would be replacing a number of the squares. We could pay the city $800 upfront or pay them over the next 5 years with our taxes (also incurring some additional interest overhead). Alternatively we could hire a licensed contractor from a list provided by the city at our own expense. Later on when they came through to pour the new sidewalks, I noticed at my neighbor's house that they didn't properly level the ground (or lay down a base). The concrete was only two inches deep in places and poured directly on the dirt. I suspect they didn't use rebar or any kind of structural support either. It's almost certain to crack again in the not-to-distant future.
I'm about as liberal as they come, but in this case it's pretty easy to see why people become disillusioned with government spending.
I've got Mint on my wife's laptop and ubuntu with Cinnamon on mine. On my desktop I recently installed an SSD and did a new install. Had mint 15 been out I would have strongly considered it, but ultimately I decided that for now Ubuntu 13.04 + cinnamon is a pretty good combination. Not sure if that will continue to be the case, but for the moment I think it's about as good as it gets.
Having said that, Mint 14 on my wife's laptop has been rock solid and I'm guessing she will continue to happily use it for some time to come.
I'm an HPC professional too.
I don't totally disagree with your premise, but what the heck are you doing talking about genetics and proteomics in reference to giant supercomputers? If you know anything about proteomics codes, you know that the commonly used search engines like sequest and mascot were never designed to run on systems like that. Hell, they barely run on small clusters and yet people are getting enough science done that they just don't care. That doesn't mean that it's hard to find problems that need supercomputers though.
If you want to talk about the really big systems, you are talking about things like nuclear weapons simulations, astrophysics, molecular dynamics, and quantum mechanics. There are only a handful of guys that will actually make really good use of those systems and scores of folks that would otherwise be perfectly fine running on significantly smaller ones. Having smaller jobs backfill on the big machines when the really hardcore guys are off doing something else isn't such a bad situation though. It lets you get the big science done and still keep the machines being used efficiently in the interim.
Beyond that, just because some researchers aren't scaling their codes to those levels yet doesn't mean we should give up on big systems. There will always be people pushing the envelop and others playing catch up. Our job is to help the slow guys scale their codes when possible so they can do even better and more intensive science. Yes, not all problems require the big systems, but there are many that do, many that can be made to scale even when they don't appear to at first, and others that can serve as backfill to keep the systems busy. They have their place just as smaller clusters, cloud resources, and big data resources do.
I have a definite issue with this sort of a system. Why should I, a 5' 10" man have to pay more for weighing 180# than a woman that's 5' tall and weighing only 100#?
It's easy: Because it costs more to ship you.
Genetics has a huge impact there, this isn't the result of my choosing to be an extra 10" taller than the woman and carrying the requisite weight that entails, it's an issue of the genes that I was born with.
What's interesting about their approach is that it seems to ignore baggage, which is something which people can easily do something about. Sure, the morbidly obese can and should lose weight, but this seems like an awful lot of unwarranted discrimination against people who are taller and just larger regardless of causation.
None of this is the airline's problem. It's entirely reasonable for the airline to charge people based on how much it costs to fly them somewhere. In a lot of ways it's more honest than the current system where that 100lb woman is helping to subsidize your ticket.
I've got most of my machines running Ubuntu with the cinnamon repo and my wife's laptop running Mint. It's fantastic and I don't find myself missing gnome2 much. Takes a slight amount of readjustment and a bit of tweaking but it's not bad and I was die-hard gnome2 user. It's really worth the switch at this point.
Mark
As I sit here on my MacBook Air running Ubuntu, working on Ceph (ie getting stuff done!) while browsing slashdot. I've tried OSX many times, and I keep coming back to Linux because it's so much *more* productive, especially when working on code. The only thing I miss is netflix.
So whatever. I still have a soft spot for Apple hardware, but I'll stick with Linux thank-you-very-much.
4. We are infact collectively having the pschotc episode.
Dear Shuttleworth,
Don't think I don't know what you are doing. It was clever of you to have invested $1M in Inktank to support Ceph. That got you a lot of hits on ceph.com. It may take me all year, but through the power of science I will eventually beat your record of who can drive more traffic to our website. Like a master ninja I will blind you with my amazing insights. Just look at my analysis of Ceph's write performance on different disk controllers. Yeah it didn't get as many hits as your little investment announcement, but this is just the beginning. So my questions is, do you want to just give up now?
Mark
(Nelson, not Shuttleworth!)
Yeah, I still remember how I switched. I was trying to get Windows 95 to back up some files on my hard drive to tape using their goofy backup software. To make a long story short, Windows 95 ultimately ended up corrupting my hard drive and the backup. It was at that point that I switched to OS/2 for a while, then slackware, then redhat, then debian. I stuck with debian for a while, then switched to ubuntu and have been mostly ubuntu since. For a while I had a windows or OSX partition for games, but in the last year or so I haven't bothered since wine+native has been good enough. I haven't looked back.
I actually rebuilt the theme I used previous from gnome2 and my gnome3 fallback desktop pretty much looks exactly like my gnome2 desktop did. I even got the panel looking right which took some effort.
I use it, and have been using it since I switched from gnome 2. I even ported the theme I used so my desktop is pretty much exactly the same as it was before. The gnome devs don't owe me a thing, but that doesn't mean that I'm not going to be pissed off at them for wasting their potential.
I think what's scary is that it seems like there are a significant number of people that care more about their relative status in society more than they care about the baseline. IE they would rather have more than their neighbor even if it meant both standards of living were lower than they would be otherwise. I think this is what fuels some very bad decisions that our society makes.
One of the things I have noticed over the years is that while there are still many comments for political or flame inducing articles, the number of comments for deep or technical articles has decreased pretty dramatically. I can only conclude that many of the highly technical people have left. Those of us that remain do so out of some combination of routine/tradition.
The Cynic in me says that you don't get to into the Top 5 by spending all of your budget on memory. :)
Practically speaking there are a lot of research codes out there that are using 1GB or less of memory per core. Our systems at MSI typically had somewhere between 2-3GB of memory per core and often were only using half of their memory or less. There's a good chance that TACC has looked at the kinds of computations that would happen on the machine and determined that they don't need more.
We had another much smaller cluster that had significantly more memory per node where we tried to push big memory people to use. They of course don't like it because they want to run on the big fancy glorious machine that gets mentioned in all of the press articles even though they aren't well suited to use it. Such is the way Academia works though.
Sadly it's a tragedy that seems all too common these days. The IT admins, software engineers and hardware engineers think they know how to do each other's jobs better than they do. Instead of working together, they try to build their own little power bases to control each other. If you've found a place to work where that's not the case, cherish it. In my experience it's not as common as one would hope.
There are a lot of places like that. There are other places where nearly every individual thinks they know everything because they know a thing or two about a given subject (be it computers, physics, law, etc). I'm about 10 years older than you. After working at a couple of different places my take away has been:
1) Try new things and don't be afraid to fail.
2) Don't be afraid to stop and re-evaluate if you are doing it wrong.
3) Be humble.
To answer your questions:
1) Probably somewhere around 35.
2) Very easily (Maybe sometimes too easily.)
3) Some people (and some companies) are more like that than others.
You might want to work for a startup if you want a more hands-on culture.
I was an enlightenment junkie back then myself...
^ This.
Here's a question for you: Which is the worse failure? The D student getting an F or the A student getting a D?
I'm at SC11 right now and just attended NIC's MIC presentation. The scaling looks fantastic according to various codes that they compiled to run on it, but what was notably absent was performance relative to traditional x86 chips. The final presenter even said that now that the technology has been demonstrated to work (with minimal porting effort required) the next step will be to optimize and improve performance. The take away is that relative to Intel's other chips, MIC performance wasn't impressive enough to include in the presentation. That's fine in my book because it's an ambitious project, but it sounds like there is still some work to do.