Anyone with seizures has that risk, it's just thankfully so small for many that it can be overlooked. It's also a lot more common than is often portrayed. Seizures aren't just grand mal. Anyone who gets regular severe nightmares (no, not from reading Slashdot) should get themselves checked. Anyone on lithium should also get checked, as lithium reduces the brain's seizure threshold. Personally, I'm not even convinced all seizures are detected by EEG - they're 8-bit devices, if I'm reading the plots correctly, and only a very few sections are ever examined. They're infinitely better than nothing, but I would think we could have much better medical imaging of the electrical activity by now.
There are many forms of epilepsy, ranging from spurious signals being sent down neural pathways through to what used to be called "brain storms" (massive, violent electrical impulses across large swathes of the brain). They are most definitely neurological and experiments have shown how to induce temporal lobe seizures with high magnetic fields. They are dangerous and can be a progressive condition (ie: every seizure causes damage and can lead to increased risk of worsening seizures.) It doesn't help that a lot of anti-seizure medication is now associated with higher suicide risk. Because these epileptic seizures suffered by people witnessing these images caused actual damage to the brain, this is not merely an inconvenience or harassment but grievous bodily harm, an act of violence that caused brain damage to victims.
Novel interconects (the Transputer's serial links, VIA, SCADA, InfiniBand, VXI, SGI's brick scheme, Lightfleet's optical interconnect, entanglement, multi-frequency optics, deep space links) are a dime a dozen - and again many are either not American or were produced in an International consortium of which America was but part, merely reinforcing my point. The field of network engineering is rife with new technologies. This is a Good Thing, because richness of thought produces quality of product. It is also an inevitable thing, if progress is to happen. Why applaud the inevitable? It was going to happen eventually. The only reason there aren't more, very powerful and very wonderful, interconnects is that they're expensive to develop. Besides, a good topology often outweighs a bad interconnect, which is why most of the development is traditionally there.
Danger, danger, left-field high-velocity incoming! Last I heard, Kerrighd is French, MOSIX is Israeli, most chips were Taiwanese or Chinese, Linux is Finnish, BSP is from England (as is the Transputer and Occam). Only a really sick bastard assumes that non-(country of choice) must be (some other country of choice). Parallelism has always been an international effort and it's bigots and nationalists who delay it. Your attitude is reverse racism, as sick and perverse as clasic racism. I doubt you bothered to look to see how many contributors of these key systems were from India, or if they could even have been from there. Lazy as well as insufferable.
What does it take to make a supercomputer? Well, very fast switches, very low-latency, high-bandwidth interconnects, and decent CPUs. (You don't need mega-fast CPUs, you just need lots of them.)
Let's start with the switches. You can parallelize network traffic - fragment the packets, stick full headers on each fragment, switch the fragments in parallel, reassemble, have the queue re-order inbound traffic by sequence number. (That last step isn't too hard, you have some fraction of the sequence number and the full fragment number map to a unique address in a permanently allocated ring buffer. Copy the payload to that address and the packets are in sequence order, not delivery order.) So, instead of having individual switches that are fast, bank the switches up and have the combined virtual switch run very fast. You can do that on exportable commodity hardware.
Or, you could sneak through Homeland Security (who have much more interest in nipple rings than dangerous weapons) a bunch of 24-channel 5Gb/channel InfiniBand switches. You wouldn't need many of those to get a decent Quake LAN party, and not many more before you could run weapons design software. It is unclear how many are required to run Vista, once service pack 1 is installed.
Interconnects. Obviously, InfiniBand is hellishly fast. So is SCI. 10 Gb ethernet, ideally with iWarp extensions, would be much slower but still perfectly good for a commodity cluster. If you scrap the idea of having machine-to-machine communication and do memory-to-memory communication, you could actually use PCI-e 2.0 as one gigantic interconnect. Ideally, you'd have the memory appear as two separate devices - slave and master - so that direct memory-to-memory RDMA could be initiated. A lot of very similar work has already been done by US supercomputer giants, and given how many have either been bought, gone bankrupt, or otherwise vanished, it's reasonable to suppose large quantities of such RAM could have "migrated" overseas.
CPUs - well, there are some respectable 16-bit pile-of-pc clusters. One was reviewed on Slashdot some time back. Even a cluster of Cell processors, if large enough and well-enough programmed, could be very effective. A hostile nation wouldn't need high-end 4x4 multi-threaded multi-core SMP systems, although again given how juvenile airport security is, I can't imagine it would be hard for someone to export, say, a couple of hundred motherboards at that spec.
Ok, what about OS? Who needs one? Anyone with a copy of OSKit or something similar can work at almost bare metal levels as if they had a full OS. If they did want a full OS, then NetBSD or MOSIX would be quite sufficient. Or they could take an OS project like Exopc and add high-performance networking to it.
Software? If you've a decent copy of BLAS, LAPACK and some solvers, tightly optimized for the platform, you're set. Those core maths functions are critical. Since the functions and API are fixed, it would not be impossible for someone wanting raw power to have put them into an FPGA, SoG or ASIC. Collective operations are also nasty, but they too can be done entirely in hardware, giving you orders of magnitude speedup over conventional software solutions. Synchronizing is the third killer, but there are meta schedulers to handle that and you could again place those on dedicated hardware.
In short, although I couldn't afford to build a top 500 machine, it is only the affording of it that is a problem, and foreign countries are quite well aware of that. Especially after China built its first (publicly-announced) Government-funded Beowulf. Supercomputing is easy, it's the price tag that isn't.
There are hundreds of libraries, yes. That's part of the problem. Too many different ways of slicing the same pie, leading to solutions that are not efficient when trying to get them to play nice with each other.
The next problem is that parallelism is not, as a rule, CPU-bound but network-bound. All the libraries in the world won't work when the network clogs and chokes.
The third problem is that coders are taught serial methods. Parallel thinking is very different from serial thinking. You run into problems that do not exist in the serial world, even on a timeslicing system like Linux. True parallelism, like true clockless computing, is a nightmare to do well. You can't just shove another library in and hope things'll work.
The fourth problem is the level of connectedness. Globus is a great toolkit for some things, but you wouldn't use it for programming a vector computer or - most likely - even a Beowulf cluster. It's a gridding solution and a damn good one, but grids are all it will do well. On the flip-side, solutions like bproc and MOSIX are superb mechanisms for optimally using a fairly tight cluster, but you'd never sanely use them on a grid. The latencies would make the very features that make those solutions useful in a cluster useless on a WAN-based grid.
I'm not sure I'm keen on Java on any parallel solution other than gridding. It's too slow, its threading model is still in its infancy, and the sandboxing makes RDMA an absolute nightmare to do safely. In fact, the very definition of sandboxing is that external entities can't go around poking bits of data into memory, which is the entire essence of RDMA - CPUless networking.
Regardless, there are some things that C++ and Java simply cannot do well that other, parallel-specific languages like Pi-Occam can do with extreme ease and safety. It is possible to prove an Occam program is safe. You cannot do likewise with a C++ or Java program.
Parallelism isn't just about more threads on one CPU. In a totally generalized parallel scenario, there may be any number of threads - a few tens of thousands would not be unusual - running on systems that may be SMP, multi-core, multi-threaded, vectored, clockless, or any combination of the above, where those systems may be on a tightly-coupled or loosely-coupled cluster, and where the cluster may be homogenous or heterogeneous, SSI or multi-imaged, where memory may be local, NUMA or distributed, and where these systems/clusters may be gridded over wide-area networks that may or may not be reliable or operational at any given time, and where threads, processes and entire operating systems may migrate from system to system without user intervention or awareness on the part of the application.
The number of true parallel experts in the world probably number less than a dozen. No, I'm not one of them. I'm good, I understand the problem-space better than the average coder, but I've talked to some of the experts out there and they're as far beyond any traditional programmer as a traditional programmer is beyond the chipmunk. A network engineer might consider themselves OK if they can set up OSPF optimally across a traditional star network of star networks. Any traditional routing protocol over a mesh without getting flaps and maintaining a reasonable level of fault tolerence would be considered tough. A butterfly network, a torroidal network or a hypercube would leave said network engineer a gibbering wreck. Modern supercomputers do not take up buildings. Modern supercomputers take up a few rooms. The interconnects take up entire buildings. And the air conditioning on top systems can be measured in football stadia.
OpenMOSIX is largely dead, because it was impossible to reconcile those who wanted load-balancing with those who wanted HPC. It's not that they can't be reconciled in theory, it's that the mindsets are too different to cram into one brain.
If one solution could solve parallelism, the Transputer would be the only processor in use today and Intel would
There are a whole host of factors that are involved in the deaths of startups and the deaths of parallel technologies. I'm going to have to be careful, for NDA reasons, but here are some I have personally witnessed. These are not from the same company and I've not included anything that could identify the companies concerned. This list is intended for the purposes of showing why companies in general are often so unsuccessful, as there's no way I happened to witness wholly unique circumstances in each such company.
Sales people replacing engineers for engineering duties
Falsifying technical documentation
Refusal to sell products to paying customers
Refusal to consult with customers on what they wanted
Presenting falsified data to venture captialists
Falsifying personnel records
Bribing news media
Falsifying server logs
All these practices are commonplace. Not even just in startups. I've seen them in multinational corporations, too, and the results are usually the same - managers get rich, projects get cancelled, divisions/startups get scrapped. This is why I posted in an earlier discussion on Motorolla that the people who are most likely to have the vision needed to succeed are the people least likely to have any position that would allow them to do anything with that vision. Technically and socially competent people are never managers.
In the end, sick people produce nothing and cost lots in lost productivity and lost knowledge. Poor nutrition in schools cost children their minds - quite literally. The brain can only build from certain foods and is disrupted or damaged by others. Lost minds, lost money.
Why the emphasis on money? Because not even nothing is free. Nothing is one of the most expensive commodities out there. Reducing costs is stupid, if it leads to reduced return. You want the best return for the cost, for each individual and for the group as a whole, which requires careful and judicious social intervention. Hands-off approaches are disasters in the making and, frankly, I can find nothing clever about libertarian idealism. However, heavy-handedness is just as stupid. Swiss watchmakers should be considered far better role-models than sumo wrestlers.
Well, the only rogue kernel thread I can think of is Ollie North. If he's been attached, kill -9 will not work. You might still be able to fix the problem, if kgdb is in a usable state. Rebooting the planet will piss off Deep Thought, who is currently close to his high score on Astro Pinball.
Everyone knows Bruce Banner used his superpowers to stop people taking over the world. Besides, Strangelets are just highly parallelized Doctor Stranges, using Linux threadlets, and everyone knows Doctor Strange is one of the Good Guys.
...is that Enceladus has a chemical makeup far and away closer to a comet than to a Saturnian body, but cannot be a captured comet. The speculation I've read suggests it may have been bombarded by so many comets that the overall chemistry may have changed, but we've a name for objects like that -- dust. Being smashed into by objects that must have been many times the mass of the original moon, for there to have been a significant effect, would have reduced the proto-Enceladus into puree-of-moon.
I'm wondering if that, in fact, happened - that there was one almighty pulverization and the modern Enceladus is the result of the lighter material condensing around a surviving fragment of sufficient size to act as a nucleus. In that case, though, there should be another moon formed from the heavier material condensing around another fragment, showing an abnormally high density, in much the same way that the Earth and its moon unevenly divide the material of the original planet.
So far, I've not seen anything that suggests that is the case, but since so little is actually known, I guess it's well within the realms of possible at this point.
Vulnerabilities aren't disclosed on being discovered, so we don't know how long either vendor knew about the bug in advance; if Microsoft only ever allows disclosure at time of patch release, they will always have a zero delay. If Apple always notifies at the time the bug is considered serious, their delays would automatically be longer.
Also, although we can guess at the total number of vulnerabilities per kilo-lines of code, we don't know what insider information either company has on bugs, although the total is likely to be in the thousands for both, as software is complex and fixing is riskier than ignoring minor gremlins.
Such good advice, pity I never take it. There's something about their delinquent, childish arguing style that makes me think the Victorians may have made a mistake in abandoning the workhouses.
No, these are not the same tribes. The tribes that do not possess numbers are existant now, the tribes that came down to mesoamerica very much are not. Oh, and it wasn't a sea at the time, so quit blathering and grow up. Even a juvenile troll like yourself should be able to comprehend such a trivial thought.
No, it is not conceivable that numbers were invented at various times by various cultures. If numbers were magically erased from human culture right now, it would indeed be impossible for humankind to reinvent them. They would probably invent something that filled a similar role, but they would not be the same thing, nor could they ever be the same.
No, I was thinking about the light bulb topic. The fillament light bulb is but one form of light bulb. Not all light bulbs use fillaments. Do we then say that the fillament light bulb is an invention, or merely an innovation on long-existing techniques for generating light by means of electrical processes? If the latter, then the number of times the light bulb has been developed is of no importance. What is important is that the idea had an origin, the rest is merely evolution. But even evolution has unique paths. No two mutations are absolutely identical. A given mutation, once identified, therefore has one and only one point of origin.
Oh, and your reality is the continuous creation drivel serious science abandoned years ago. Ideas evolve, but all evolution is unique.
Invention and innovation are two different things. Learn the difference.
Secondly, none of those people invented numbers. Numbers were invented long before the Romans, long before South America was ever inhabited. These cultures merely developed their own representational systems, picked number bases that worked well with what they wanted to do, the things usually associated with innovation, not invention. For that matter, with the exception of a few isolates, most languages have a common ancestor.
Numbers date back past the earliest cave-paintings, where numeracy is clearly demonstrated, placing its invention long before humans migrated through Asia and over the northern land bridge into the Americas. Before cave paintings, there were ritual areas that were used by early humans (and possibly pre-human hominids) that show clear knowledge of counting.
Compared to these, what possible significance can the Toltecs have, or Roman numerals? They adapted a system that was hundreds, if not thousands, of times more ancient than they are to modern civilization. History is big. The South American empires were one, maybe two, thousand years old at most. My old home town has remains over ten thousand years old, and that's relatively modern compared to human existance - humans had reached Britain at least twice prior to that, at least once was before the last wave of ice covered much of the country. Britain itself was occupied only recently, though. Europe was settled very late on and Britain was not much more than some hills in the middle of a plain that included much of what is now the English Channel and Irish Sea.
In other words, spend more time listening and you'll learn more than you can possibly imagine.
The television was invented by Logi Baird, something every British schoolboy knows. It was colour, too. It wasn't "popularized" back then, but so what? This idea of "an idea whose time has come" doesn't hold water in reality, it's a fiction popularized by marketroids and other non-inventor types to make themselves feel important. Popularizing is inevitable. Once a product exists, people will work on making it cheaper, more practical, more popular. Sooner or later, someone is going to hit on the winning formula. It's inevitable. The initial work? That's not inevitable. Entire human tribes exist where there is no concept of numbers. Numeracy doesn't exist for them. It's not that they have no words for numbers, they cannot recognize quantitative differences at all. (I suspect they now get hired to do market research and opinion polls.) True inventions are extremely rare and not at all guaranteed. They never occur simultaneously in multiple locations, those tend to be innovations from a seed idea that was actually invented some time earlier. Inventions are random mutations of thought. They have building blocks but no true precursor and are spontaneous in nature. If you can name me even ten true inventors, not innovators, you're doing better than most.
DNA stands for Douglas Noel Adams. Seriously, most people thought the same about Apple for a long time. I think many corporations have gone through phases of being run by clowns. Some, such as Commodore, allowed the clowns to run them to the ground (and then leave with the cash that was left). Others, such as Hewlett-Packard, seem to have revived quite nicely.
Motorola's problems stem from egos, empire-and-glory-day-worship, lack of invention, lack of freshness and lack of inspiration. Give it four or five years in the hands of a berserker tech-warrior, and if it survives, it'll command the kind of respect it once had.
Politicians the world over are always for strict interpretation. The stricter the better, with leather, whips, dungeons and Cynthia Payne's phone book...
(For those too young to remember, that is not an oblique open source joke. It's a managerial style joke.)
Seriously, Motorola would be trivial to turn around. I could manage it in a fraction of the time it would take most executives to, and I'm cheap at the price. So could many geeks who have a similarly broad-based background and no patience with waffling. (Waffling should be left to waffle irons.)
Of course, no geek capable of running Motorola will ever be offered the job. We're far too outspoken, way too radical, most (myself included) have never been contaminated with a Harvard business degree, and most (again myself included) have managed to avoid managerial roles because we can't stand having zombies as co-workers. (Holy water supersoakers aren't enough.
Motorola won't hire anyone dangerous enough to succeed. And this is a mission where you need someone who is dangerous, a wildcard, unpredictable. You don't hire a banker to pull off a commando raid, you don't hire a businessman to rescue a disintegrating corporate giant. If they had any sense, they'd be looking for a troublemaker. They WANT Motorola to cause trouble. Causing trouble means they're still breathing. This troublemaker must be able to come up with novel, irrational, but totally brilliant solutions to the current engineering problems. Only problem is, The Doctor doesn't like being pinned down like that.
There is one other option, which has a better chance of success. Start a new company, a company that, businesswise, should logically not exist, that makes no sense given current attitudes, but sells like nothing else. Then openly and outright offer each and every (decent) engineer at Motorola the option of jumping ship. Don't buy the IP, buy the workforce. What's Motorola going to do? Sue each person individually over non-compete? And will the courts even listen to such a case if Motorola isn't producing anything worth a damn to compete with? Yes, it's playing with fire, but look at every single brilliant engineer, every single brilliant company owner, anyone who has ever truly risen far enough above the masses to see anything worthwhile - they all played with fire, in the most insane and dangerous ways possible. And they made it work for them.
MySQL is not a serious competitor any more in the FLOSS world. It has lost the edge on speed, lacks features, and the licensing issue is getting to be a pain. Although old, Community Edition Ingres compares remarkably well on speed and features, and the license is GPL, lining us up for another superb BSD-vs-GPL showdown. The main drawback with Ingres is that distros don't provide it as an option, otherwise we'd be watching the battle of the goliaths by now.
You might not have to. If you set up a series of wireless access points with corner antenna or directional antenna, you can pretty much cover the whole building with a fraction of the hardware you'd need for a true ad-hoc wireless cloud. Locked-down WAPs also offer a (marginally) better opportunity for security. Oh, and if the floor you are on has a Faraday cage, there's no leakage to the outside world, meaning that you could always tweak the power levels up just a touch. Total cost of all that? About the same as if you did build a wireless cloud.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone with seizures has that risk, it's just thankfully so small for many that it can be overlooked. It's also a lot more common than is often portrayed. Seizures aren't just grand mal. Anyone who gets regular severe nightmares (no, not from reading Slashdot) should get themselves checked. Anyone on lithium should also get checked, as lithium reduces the brain's seizure threshold. Personally, I'm not even convinced all seizures are detected by EEG - they're 8-bit devices, if I'm reading the plots correctly, and only a very few sections are ever examined. They're infinitely better than nothing, but I would think we could have much better medical imaging of the electrical activity by now.
There are many forms of epilepsy, ranging from spurious signals being sent down neural pathways through to what used to be called "brain storms" (massive, violent electrical impulses across large swathes of the brain). They are most definitely neurological and experiments have shown how to induce temporal lobe seizures with high magnetic fields. They are dangerous and can be a progressive condition (ie: every seizure causes damage and can lead to increased risk of worsening seizures.) It doesn't help that a lot of anti-seizure medication is now associated with higher suicide risk. Because these epileptic seizures suffered by people witnessing these images caused actual damage to the brain, this is not merely an inconvenience or harassment but grievous bodily harm, an act of violence that caused brain damage to victims.
Novel interconects (the Transputer's serial links, VIA, SCADA, InfiniBand, VXI, SGI's brick scheme, Lightfleet's optical interconnect, entanglement, multi-frequency optics, deep space links) are a dime a dozen - and again many are either not American or were produced in an International consortium of which America was but part, merely reinforcing my point. The field of network engineering is rife with new technologies. This is a Good Thing, because richness of thought produces quality of product. It is also an inevitable thing, if progress is to happen. Why applaud the inevitable? It was going to happen eventually. The only reason there aren't more, very powerful and very wonderful, interconnects is that they're expensive to develop. Besides, a good topology often outweighs a bad interconnect, which is why most of the development is traditionally there.
Danger, danger, left-field high-velocity incoming! Last I heard, Kerrighd is French, MOSIX is Israeli, most chips were Taiwanese or Chinese, Linux is Finnish, BSP is from England (as is the Transputer and Occam). Only a really sick bastard assumes that non-(country of choice) must be (some other country of choice). Parallelism has always been an international effort and it's bigots and nationalists who delay it. Your attitude is reverse racism, as sick and perverse as clasic racism. I doubt you bothered to look to see how many contributors of these key systems were from India, or if they could even have been from there. Lazy as well as insufferable.
Let's start with the switches. You can parallelize network traffic - fragment the packets, stick full headers on each fragment, switch the fragments in parallel, reassemble, have the queue re-order inbound traffic by sequence number. (That last step isn't too hard, you have some fraction of the sequence number and the full fragment number map to a unique address in a permanently allocated ring buffer. Copy the payload to that address and the packets are in sequence order, not delivery order.) So, instead of having individual switches that are fast, bank the switches up and have the combined virtual switch run very fast. You can do that on exportable commodity hardware.
Or, you could sneak through Homeland Security (who have much more interest in nipple rings than dangerous weapons) a bunch of 24-channel 5Gb/channel InfiniBand switches. You wouldn't need many of those to get a decent Quake LAN party, and not many more before you could run weapons design software. It is unclear how many are required to run Vista, once service pack 1 is installed.
Interconnects. Obviously, InfiniBand is hellishly fast. So is SCI. 10 Gb ethernet, ideally with iWarp extensions, would be much slower but still perfectly good for a commodity cluster. If you scrap the idea of having machine-to-machine communication and do memory-to-memory communication, you could actually use PCI-e 2.0 as one gigantic interconnect. Ideally, you'd have the memory appear as two separate devices - slave and master - so that direct memory-to-memory RDMA could be initiated. A lot of very similar work has already been done by US supercomputer giants, and given how many have either been bought, gone bankrupt, or otherwise vanished, it's reasonable to suppose large quantities of such RAM could have "migrated" overseas.
CPUs - well, there are some respectable 16-bit pile-of-pc clusters. One was reviewed on Slashdot some time back. Even a cluster of Cell processors, if large enough and well-enough programmed, could be very effective. A hostile nation wouldn't need high-end 4x4 multi-threaded multi-core SMP systems, although again given how juvenile airport security is, I can't imagine it would be hard for someone to export, say, a couple of hundred motherboards at that spec.
Ok, what about OS? Who needs one? Anyone with a copy of OSKit or something similar can work at almost bare metal levels as if they had a full OS. If they did want a full OS, then NetBSD or MOSIX would be quite sufficient. Or they could take an OS project like Exopc and add high-performance networking to it.
Software? If you've a decent copy of BLAS, LAPACK and some solvers, tightly optimized for the platform, you're set. Those core maths functions are critical. Since the functions and API are fixed, it would not be impossible for someone wanting raw power to have put them into an FPGA, SoG or ASIC. Collective operations are also nasty, but they too can be done entirely in hardware, giving you orders of magnitude speedup over conventional software solutions. Synchronizing is the third killer, but there are meta schedulers to handle that and you could again place those on dedicated hardware.
In short, although I couldn't afford to build a top 500 machine, it is only the affording of it that is a problem, and foreign countries are quite well aware of that. Especially after China built its first (publicly-announced) Government-funded Beowulf. Supercomputing is easy, it's the price tag that isn't.
The next problem is that parallelism is not, as a rule, CPU-bound but network-bound. All the libraries in the world won't work when the network clogs and chokes.
The third problem is that coders are taught serial methods. Parallel thinking is very different from serial thinking. You run into problems that do not exist in the serial world, even on a timeslicing system like Linux. True parallelism, like true clockless computing, is a nightmare to do well. You can't just shove another library in and hope things'll work.
The fourth problem is the level of connectedness. Globus is a great toolkit for some things, but you wouldn't use it for programming a vector computer or - most likely - even a Beowulf cluster. It's a gridding solution and a damn good one, but grids are all it will do well. On the flip-side, solutions like bproc and MOSIX are superb mechanisms for optimally using a fairly tight cluster, but you'd never sanely use them on a grid. The latencies would make the very features that make those solutions useful in a cluster useless on a WAN-based grid.
I'm not sure I'm keen on Java on any parallel solution other than gridding. It's too slow, its threading model is still in its infancy, and the sandboxing makes RDMA an absolute nightmare to do safely. In fact, the very definition of sandboxing is that external entities can't go around poking bits of data into memory, which is the entire essence of RDMA - CPUless networking.
Regardless, there are some things that C++ and Java simply cannot do well that other, parallel-specific languages like Pi-Occam can do with extreme ease and safety. It is possible to prove an Occam program is safe. You cannot do likewise with a C++ or Java program.
Parallelism isn't just about more threads on one CPU. In a totally generalized parallel scenario, there may be any number of threads - a few tens of thousands would not be unusual - running on systems that may be SMP, multi-core, multi-threaded, vectored, clockless, or any combination of the above, where those systems may be on a tightly-coupled or loosely-coupled cluster, and where the cluster may be homogenous or heterogeneous, SSI or multi-imaged, where memory may be local, NUMA or distributed, and where these systems/clusters may be gridded over wide-area networks that may or may not be reliable or operational at any given time, and where threads, processes and entire operating systems may migrate from system to system without user intervention or awareness on the part of the application.
The number of true parallel experts in the world probably number less than a dozen. No, I'm not one of them. I'm good, I understand the problem-space better than the average coder, but I've talked to some of the experts out there and they're as far beyond any traditional programmer as a traditional programmer is beyond the chipmunk. A network engineer might consider themselves OK if they can set up OSPF optimally across a traditional star network of star networks. Any traditional routing protocol over a mesh without getting flaps and maintaining a reasonable level of fault tolerence would be considered tough. A butterfly network, a torroidal network or a hypercube would leave said network engineer a gibbering wreck. Modern supercomputers do not take up buildings. Modern supercomputers take up a few rooms. The interconnects take up entire buildings. And the air conditioning on top systems can be measured in football stadia.
OpenMOSIX is largely dead, because it was impossible to reconcile those who wanted load-balancing with those who wanted HPC. It's not that they can't be reconciled in theory, it's that the mindsets are too different to cram into one brain.
If one solution could solve parallelism, the Transputer would be the only processor in use today and Intel would
All these practices are commonplace. Not even just in startups. I've seen them in multinational corporations, too, and the results are usually the same - managers get rich, projects get cancelled, divisions/startups get scrapped. This is why I posted in an earlier discussion on Motorolla that the people who are most likely to have the vision needed to succeed are the people least likely to have any position that would allow them to do anything with that vision. Technically and socially competent people are never managers.
Why the emphasis on money? Because not even nothing is free. Nothing is one of the most expensive commodities out there. Reducing costs is stupid, if it leads to reduced return. You want the best return for the cost, for each individual and for the group as a whole, which requires careful and judicious social intervention. Hands-off approaches are disasters in the making and, frankly, I can find nothing clever about libertarian idealism. However, heavy-handedness is just as stupid. Swiss watchmakers should be considered far better role-models than sumo wrestlers.
Well, the only rogue kernel thread I can think of is Ollie North. If he's been attached, kill -9 will not work. You might still be able to fix the problem, if kgdb is in a usable state. Rebooting the planet will piss off Deep Thought, who is currently close to his high score on Astro Pinball.
Everyone knows Bruce Banner used his superpowers to stop people taking over the world. Besides, Strangelets are just highly parallelized Doctor Stranges, using Linux threadlets, and everyone knows Doctor Strange is one of the Good Guys.
I'm wondering if that, in fact, happened - that there was one almighty pulverization and the modern Enceladus is the result of the lighter material condensing around a surviving fragment of sufficient size to act as a nucleus. In that case, though, there should be another moon formed from the heavier material condensing around another fragment, showing an abnormally high density, in much the same way that the Earth and its moon unevenly divide the material of the original planet.
So far, I've not seen anything that suggests that is the case, but since so little is actually known, I guess it's well within the realms of possible at this point.
Also, although we can guess at the total number of vulnerabilities per kilo-lines of code, we don't know what insider information either company has on bugs, although the total is likely to be in the thousands for both, as software is complex and fixing is riskier than ignoring minor gremlins.
No, these are not the same tribes. The tribes that do not possess numbers are existant now, the tribes that came down to mesoamerica very much are not. Oh, and it wasn't a sea at the time, so quit blathering and grow up. Even a juvenile troll like yourself should be able to comprehend such a trivial thought.
No, it is not conceivable that numbers were invented at various times by various cultures. If numbers were magically erased from human culture right now, it would indeed be impossible for humankind to reinvent them. They would probably invent something that filled a similar role, but they would not be the same thing, nor could they ever be the same.
No, I was thinking about the light bulb topic. The fillament light bulb is but one form of light bulb. Not all light bulbs use fillaments. Do we then say that the fillament light bulb is an invention, or merely an innovation on long-existing techniques for generating light by means of electrical processes? If the latter, then the number of times the light bulb has been developed is of no importance. What is important is that the idea had an origin, the rest is merely evolution. But even evolution has unique paths. No two mutations are absolutely identical. A given mutation, once identified, therefore has one and only one point of origin.
Oh, and your reality is the continuous creation drivel serious science abandoned years ago. Ideas evolve, but all evolution is unique.
Secondly, none of those people invented numbers. Numbers were invented long before the Romans, long before South America was ever inhabited. These cultures merely developed their own representational systems, picked number bases that worked well with what they wanted to do, the things usually associated with innovation, not invention. For that matter, with the exception of a few isolates, most languages have a common ancestor.
Numbers date back past the earliest cave-paintings, where numeracy is clearly demonstrated, placing its invention long before humans migrated through Asia and over the northern land bridge into the Americas. Before cave paintings, there were ritual areas that were used by early humans (and possibly pre-human hominids) that show clear knowledge of counting.
Compared to these, what possible significance can the Toltecs have, or Roman numerals? They adapted a system that was hundreds, if not thousands, of times more ancient than they are to modern civilization. History is big. The South American empires were one, maybe two, thousand years old at most. My old home town has remains over ten thousand years old, and that's relatively modern compared to human existance - humans had reached Britain at least twice prior to that, at least once was before the last wave of ice covered much of the country. Britain itself was occupied only recently, though. Europe was settled very late on and Britain was not much more than some hills in the middle of a plain that included much of what is now the English Channel and Irish Sea.
In other words, spend more time listening and you'll learn more than you can possibly imagine.
The television was invented by Logi Baird, something every British schoolboy knows. It was colour, too. It wasn't "popularized" back then, but so what? This idea of "an idea whose time has come" doesn't hold water in reality, it's a fiction popularized by marketroids and other non-inventor types to make themselves feel important. Popularizing is inevitable. Once a product exists, people will work on making it cheaper, more practical, more popular. Sooner or later, someone is going to hit on the winning formula. It's inevitable. The initial work? That's not inevitable. Entire human tribes exist where there is no concept of numbers. Numeracy doesn't exist for them. It's not that they have no words for numbers, they cannot recognize quantitative differences at all. (I suspect they now get hired to do market research and opinion polls.) True inventions are extremely rare and not at all guaranteed. They never occur simultaneously in multiple locations, those tend to be innovations from a seed idea that was actually invented some time earlier. Inventions are random mutations of thought. They have building blocks but no true precursor and are spontaneous in nature. If you can name me even ten true inventors, not innovators, you're doing better than most.
This would indeed have been a fine achievement, but for the problem that the game was golf.
Motorola's problems stem from egos, empire-and-glory-day-worship, lack of invention, lack of freshness and lack of inspiration. Give it four or five years in the hands of a berserker tech-warrior, and if it survives, it'll command the kind of respect it once had.
Politicians the world over are always for strict interpretation. The stricter the better, with leather, whips, dungeons and Cynthia Payne's phone book...
Steve Jobs is less like The Doctor and more like Roger Delgado's Master, or a well-manicured Cyberman.
Seriously, Motorola would be trivial to turn around. I could manage it in a fraction of the time it would take most executives to, and I'm cheap at the price. So could many geeks who have a similarly broad-based background and no patience with waffling. (Waffling should be left to waffle irons.)
Of course, no geek capable of running Motorola will ever be offered the job. We're far too outspoken, way too radical, most (myself included) have never been contaminated with a Harvard business degree, and most (again myself included) have managed to avoid managerial roles because we can't stand having zombies as co-workers. (Holy water supersoakers aren't enough.
Motorola won't hire anyone dangerous enough to succeed. And this is a mission where you need someone who is dangerous, a wildcard, unpredictable. You don't hire a banker to pull off a commando raid, you don't hire a businessman to rescue a disintegrating corporate giant. If they had any sense, they'd be looking for a troublemaker. They WANT Motorola to cause trouble. Causing trouble means they're still breathing. This troublemaker must be able to come up with novel, irrational, but totally brilliant solutions to the current engineering problems. Only problem is, The Doctor doesn't like being pinned down like that.
There is one other option, which has a better chance of success. Start a new company, a company that, businesswise, should logically not exist, that makes no sense given current attitudes, but sells like nothing else. Then openly and outright offer each and every (decent) engineer at Motorola the option of jumping ship. Don't buy the IP, buy the workforce. What's Motorola going to do? Sue each person individually over non-compete? And will the courts even listen to such a case if Motorola isn't producing anything worth a damn to compete with? Yes, it's playing with fire, but look at every single brilliant engineer, every single brilliant company owner, anyone who has ever truly risen far enough above the masses to see anything worthwhile - they all played with fire, in the most insane and dangerous ways possible. And they made it work for them.
That was designed by Ratbert. ISO was run by engineers, but appears to have been taken over by plastic pink flamingos.
MySQL is not a serious competitor any more in the FLOSS world. It has lost the edge on speed, lacks features, and the licensing issue is getting to be a pain. Although old, Community Edition Ingres compares remarkably well on speed and features, and the license is GPL, lining us up for another superb BSD-vs-GPL showdown. The main drawback with Ingres is that distros don't provide it as an option, otherwise we'd be watching the battle of the goliaths by now.
A and B negotiate policy as a thread distinct from A and B. BARIER(until A and B complete). A and B continue in isolated threads.
You might not have to. If you set up a series of wireless access points with corner antenna or directional antenna, you can pretty much cover the whole building with a fraction of the hardware you'd need for a true ad-hoc wireless cloud. Locked-down WAPs also offer a (marginally) better opportunity for security. Oh, and if the floor you are on has a Faraday cage, there's no leakage to the outside world, meaning that you could always tweak the power levels up just a touch. Total cost of all that? About the same as if you did build a wireless cloud.
If the hare was tripped, would that be tortoise interference?