...and instead of being helpful the employees are reduced to bullying their customers in order to meet the quotas that keep the company in the black...
Well, that certainly explains why the guys at the local EB Games near my house are such raving wankers. One of them actually yelled at me for buying a PS2 rather than an XBox, and continued doing so even after I patiently explained that I wasn't interested in spending my hard-earned money on a product from a convicted monopolist who seems to take pleasure in making my job harder. (Needless to say, I haven't been back to that particular store much since that incident.)
suppose Lucas permitted Joss Whedon to create the Star Wars tv show?
A friend and I were discussing George Lucas' skill (or, more accurately, lack thereof) at writing dialogue and thought the same thing. Lucas has a knack for coming up with good stories, but lousy dialogue; his best movies have been where somebody like Lawrence Kasdan wrote a script from his story. Whedon's probably the best dialogue writer I can think of off the top of my head, and he appears to be a huge Star Wars nerd (eg. regarding how reading The Killer Angels led to Firefly: "This led me to the Millenium Falcon, as most things do."). Heck, half of Firefly's charm was that it was basically Star Wars without all the Jedi stuff that ended up being the focus of the prequels. (The other half of Firefly's charm had everything to do with Kaylee...)
Of course, given that both Lucas and Whedon appear to be control freaks of epic proportions, it'll probably never happen.
...but given the way Intel keeps underspecifying their memory interfaces, you'll still only ever be able keep one (or maybe two) cores busy when continuously streaming data to and from memory at full bandwidth. Can we please get back to a memory-bandwidth-to-floating-point-performance ratio of about 1 byte per flop?
I went through one of Ad Astra's Attack Vector: Tactical demos at Origins, and frankly I found its gameplay to be way too complex to be much fun. If I wanted to think that hard about orbital mechanics, I'd just pull out the book from the orbital mechanics class that I took as an undergrad. OTOH, a buddy of mine (who is much more into minis and tabletop wargaming than I am) absolutely loves the game.
Whoever reviewed Serenity for them seemed to have a big ol' chip on his shoulder for some reason. I gave up reading it when he said that "Firefly" was on the WB.
As long as he doesn't try to fight a war on two fonts.
To paraphrase Londo Mollari: "Only an idiot fights a war on two fonts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fonts!"
I think Herr Lucas would have just as much to fear from the estates of Akira Kurosawa and E.E. "Doc" Smith as from that of Frank Herbert. Heck, Lucas is on record about how The Hidden Fortress inspired parts of Star Wars.
This would be a very bad precedent to set, in any case. Copyright doesn't apply to ideas; it applies to words, sounds, or images on a fixed medium. Unless the authors of HBHG can show that Brown misappropriated text of theirs, I fail to see how this is anything other than a SCOG-style extortion lawsuit.
The problem with just increasing eg. NSF's budget for funding graduate research programs is that they've historically not been interested in funding "practical" stuff. In fact, a proposal to NSF that is mostly implementation of existing concepts rather than pie-in-the-sky research is going to get rejected out of hand most of the time.
The other thing is: Do we really want CS grad students producing software for people other than themselves? (The software engineering practices in most of the CS research projects I've seen have been abysmal.)
HPF is one of those things that sounds like a great idea... until you read through a book on it and realize that they never how to talk about how to do minor things like, say, I/O. The only machine I've ever heard anybody crow about HPF performance on is the Earth Simulator, and it's not as hard to make codes perform well when you have that much memory bandwidth to throw at the problem.
Most of the codes on the Blue Gene/L at LLNL are coming from earlier ASCI systems and are most likely MPI+Fortran/C codes, possibly with OpenMP around the inner loops in some cases.
Yeah, well, I used to say that Jamie and Adam are engineers playing at science, but in fact they are mechanics playing at science.
Actually, it's worse than that. They're special effects people playing at science, and I think we all know how good the "science" is in your average Hollywood blockbuster. I find their show amusing (particularly when they're playing with explosives), but scientific it ain't.
You must go to radically different comic shops than I do; the main one I frequent is ~20% manga, I would guess. I've also noticed or so that most mainstream book stores (like Borders or Barnes and Noble) have more shelf space allocated for manga than they do for American comics and graphic novels.
Software patents -- at least in their current form(s) of existence -- might be a Bad Solution, but they're hardly evil. They are evil only if you believe that authors should hold no rights over their creation (because "Information wants to be free").
Nice straw man.
When you get right down to it, software are just expressions of mathematics, and math is not supposed to be patentable. Some folks (eg. RSA) have managed to get patents on algorithms by starting their patent with "Using a digital computer" and then describe their math, which is what opened this particular Pandora's box in the first place.
To put it another way: Imagine how screwed the worlds of physics, engineering, and scientific computing would have been if the guys who came up with the FFT algorithm had patented it.
Considering how much a Cray costs, I'd think they could splurge for a few Virtexes to load an FPU on.
Well, the XD-1 isn't your normal Cray machine; it's the product of a Canadian company called Octiga Bay that Cray bought last year. The XD-1 is basically a blade-based Opteron cluster with a custom InfiniBand interface (renamed "Rapid Array" for inexplicable marketing reasons) and the capability to add a couple FPGAs per blade. It is not a mainframe with vector processors and huge amounts of memory bandwidth, which is what most people think of in relation to Cray.
I disagree that double precision should be assumed a requirement for all scientific apps. Most of scientific computing is simulation, and I would argue unrealistic models are almost always a bigger problem than numerical precision!
The scientists developing the simulations typically understand the limitations of their models, though. If you ask a physicist or chemist their opinion, they will not be satisfied with the 6-8 digits of precision available from 32-bit floating point. Also, when validating an old code on a new platform, you're generally comparing results with something that did exclusively 64-bit floating point (like a DEC Alpha or an older Cray vector system).
The fact of the matter is that folks who do scientific computing have had machines that do 64-bit floating point well for so long that a processor that doesn't do 64-bit FP well isn't going to be taken seriously. (This is why most scientific computing types didn't take Macs serious for clusters before the G5; the much-hyped AltiVec unit was useless to them, because it didn't do 64-bit FP.)
Windows was already 64 bit when the DEC Alpha came out. Which was somewhere between 1992-95 IIRC.
Except that the DEC Alpha port of Windows NT was 32-bit only. IIRC, Microsoft never officially released a 64-bit version of Windows that ran on Alpha, and it was DEC/Compaq who did most of the development on it before it was cancelled.
Do you really think a vanilla kernel from www.kernel.org will run on a 256 processor Altix?
Actually, vanilla Linux 2.6 can be used on an Altix, if it's built correctly; I know people who've done it. However, SGI only supports their officially blessed (read: heavily modified) kernel source trees.
It seems like this should be pretty easy to challenge with prior art. For instance, emacs has had XML-specific editing capabilities since at least 1999 (and likely earlier):
The author of that OSNews article is trying to push her own agenda. She seems to think that GNOME should be doing focus group research, and has fairly specific ideas of how that should be done. When some of the GNOME devs pointed out that her ideas weren't workable in their opinions, she took it personally and kept trying to push her ideas -- without making any significant effort to refute the devs' points, I might add. Finally, people got so fed up with this discussion (which is pretty off-topic for the mailing list where it took place to start with) that they told her to take it elsewhere.
Underlying it all is a sense of entitlement, a feeling that her ideas are so good and so important that the GNOME devs should implement them without further discussion. Since she's neither a paying customer nor able/willing to develop the features she wants herself, the GNOME devs chose to ignore her... and rightly so, in my book.
Actually, only maybe a dozen sites have done sizeable Mac-based HPC clusters (>100 nodes), but Apple has made inordinate amounts of noise about them. The driving factor is usually marketing, as the actual costs of the Apple h/w (once you consider everything, including racks, power control, etc.) is at best comparable with (and at worst 20-40% more than) similarly specced P4 or Opteron hardware from a dozen different large cluster integrators.
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A friend and I were discussing George Lucas' skill (or, more accurately, lack thereof) at writing dialogue and thought the same thing. Lucas has a knack for coming up with good stories, but lousy dialogue; his best movies have been where somebody like Lawrence Kasdan wrote a script from his story. Whedon's probably the best dialogue writer I can think of off the top of my head, and he appears to be a huge Star Wars nerd (eg. regarding how reading The Killer Angels led to Firefly: "This led me to the Millenium Falcon, as most things do."). Heck, half of Firefly's charm was that it was basically Star Wars without all the Jedi stuff that ended up being the focus of the prequels. (The other half of Firefly's charm had everything to do with Kaylee...)
Of course, given that both Lucas and Whedon appear to be control freaks of epic proportions, it'll probably never happen.
...but given the way Intel keeps underspecifying their memory interfaces, you'll still only ever be able keep one (or maybe two) cores busy when continuously streaming data to and from memory at full bandwidth. Can we please get back to a memory-bandwidth-to-floating-point-performance ratio of about 1 byte per flop?
I went through one of Ad Astra's Attack Vector: Tactical demos at Origins, and frankly I found its gameplay to be way too complex to be much fun. If I wanted to think that hard about orbital mechanics, I'd just pull out the book from the orbital mechanics class that I took as an undergrad. OTOH, a buddy of mine (who is much more into minis and tabletop wargaming than I am) absolutely loves the game.
Decipher was at Origins this year? I sure as heck didn't see 'em.
My alma mater (Ohio State University) gives out Bachelors of Science in engineering, as do most of the other Big Ten universities to my knowledge.
I wonder if the "40% of engineers have a Bachelor's" statistic is reflecting that many engineers go on to get to a Master's degree or PhD?
--Troy
Whoever reviewed Serenity for them seemed to have a big ol' chip on his shoulder for some reason. I gave up reading it when he said that "Firefly" was on the WB.
This would be a very bad precedent to set, in any case. Copyright doesn't apply to ideas; it applies to words, sounds, or images on a fixed medium. Unless the authors of HBHG can show that Brown misappropriated text of theirs, I fail to see how this is anything other than a SCOG-style extortion lawsuit.
The other thing is: Do we really want CS grad students producing software for people other than themselves? (The software engineering practices in most of the CS research projects I've seen have been abysmal.)
Most of the codes on the Blue Gene/L at LLNL are coming from earlier ASCI systems and are most likely MPI+Fortran/C codes, possibly with OpenMP around the inner loops in some cases.
Actually, it's worse than that. They're special effects people playing at science, and I think we all know how good the "science" is in your average Hollywood blockbuster. I find their show amusing (particularly when they're playing with explosives), but scientific it ain't.
You must go to radically different comic shops than I do; the main one I frequent is ~20% manga, I would guess. I've also noticed or so that most mainstream book stores (like Borders or Barnes and Noble) have more shelf space allocated for manga than they do for American comics and graphic novels.
Nice straw man.
When you get right down to it, software are just expressions of mathematics, and math is not supposed to be patentable. Some folks (eg. RSA) have managed to get patents on algorithms by starting their patent with "Using a digital computer" and then describe their math, which is what opened this particular Pandora's box in the first place.
To put it another way: Imagine how screwed the worlds of physics, engineering, and scientific computing would have been if the guys who came up with the FFT algorithm had patented it.
Well, the XD-1 isn't your normal Cray machine; it's the product of a Canadian company called Octiga Bay that Cray bought last year. The XD-1 is basically a blade-based Opteron cluster with a custom InfiniBand interface (renamed "Rapid Array" for inexplicable marketing reasons) and the capability to add a couple FPGAs per blade. It is not a mainframe with vector processors and huge amounts of memory bandwidth, which is what most people think of in relation to Cray.
--Troy
The scientists developing the simulations typically understand the limitations of their models, though. If you ask a physicist or chemist their opinion, they will not be satisfied with the 6-8 digits of precision available from 32-bit floating point. Also, when validating an old code on a new platform, you're generally comparing results with something that did exclusively 64-bit floating point (like a DEC Alpha or an older Cray vector system).
The fact of the matter is that folks who do scientific computing have had machines that do 64-bit floating point well for so long that a processor that doesn't do 64-bit FP well isn't going to be taken seriously. (This is why most scientific computing types didn't take Macs serious for clusters before the G5; the much-hyped AltiVec unit was useless to them, because it didn't do 64-bit FP.)
Except that the DEC Alpha port of Windows NT was 32-bit only. IIRC, Microsoft never officially released a 64-bit version of Windows that ran on Alpha, and it was DEC/Compaq who did most of the development on it before it was cancelled.
BTW, IBM's SAN File System appears to do more or less everything that ZFS does, and it's available for Linux.
Actually, vanilla Linux 2.6 can be used on an Altix, if it's built correctly; I know people who've done it. However, SGI only supports their officially blessed (read: heavily modified) kernel source trees.
(From http://www.lysator.liu.se/projects/about_psgml.htm l):
That doesn't make Microsoft trying to patent this any less slimey, though...
--Troy
"GNOME developers ignore Eugenia Loli-Queru's crackpot ideas"
The author of that OSNews article is trying to push her own agenda. She seems to think that GNOME should be doing focus group research, and has fairly specific ideas of how that should be done. When some of the GNOME devs pointed out that her ideas weren't workable in their opinions, she took it personally and kept trying to push her ideas -- without making any significant effort to refute the devs' points, I might add. Finally, people got so fed up with this discussion (which is pretty off-topic for the mailing list where it took place to start with) that they told her to take it elsewhere.
Underlying it all is a sense of entitlement, a feeling that her ideas are so good and so important that the GNOME devs should implement them without further discussion. Since she's neither a paying customer nor able/willing to develop the features she wants herself, the GNOME devs chose to ignore her... and rightly so, in my book.
I think your tinfoil hat may be just a shade too tight...