I placed a G1G1 order near the end of 2007, and the only confirmation I ever received was a PayPal payment confirmation. Can anyone tell me if I should have received some sort of confirmation email from the OLPC Foundation itself?
I consider my G1G1 order to mostly be a charitable contribution, so I'm fine if it takes them quite a while to ship my laptop. But I'd like to have some sort of confirmation from OLPC to let me know that they even realize I placed one. Did other folks receiving any other sort of confirmation before being told that their laptop was supposed to ship at X date? I've tried contacting the OLPC folks, but I have never been able to reach anyone.
Although Subversion does a great job of being a better CVS than CVS, yes, it is hard to use. Let me clarify: It is easy to use for a small project with just a few developers. But for large projects with many developers scattered all over, it, or any centralized revision control system becomes a nightmare (to me, anyway). The biggest problem I have with Subversion/CVS-type systems is that eventually managing the branches becomes a nightmare, and it becomes really easy to screw stuff up.
My work became a lot easier when I started using distributed revision control systems. My favorite is Mercurial, a very fast and lightweight system written in Python. The main reason that I like it is that is by far the easiest to use revision control system that I have worked with. In addition to being fast, intuitive, supporting completely disconnected operation, and other great features, branching and merging is a breeze. And, most importantly, it makes it very easy for the developers on the large projects I work on to keep from stepping on each other's toes because everything is a branch . Whenever I checkout ("clone") the repository that we consider the "central" (or "trunk") repository, all of my commits happen in my local mirror of the repository, and when I am finished I "hg push" those changes back, merging them back into the "trunk". (My explanation may seem a little confusing, but the Mercurial development model is explained pretty well here.) The great thing about this model is that branching is the most natural thing in the world (in fact, everyone essentially always works on their own "branch") so it actually gets used. I have experienced too many cases with CVS or Subversion where something should have happened on its own branch but didn't because it was too confusing, too slow (with the bottleneck of the central server), etc.
Although Mercurial is still pretty young, it is mature enough that some very large projects (e.g., Mozilla) have moved to it. I urge everyone who is looking for a powerful, but intuitive and easy-to-use revision control system to take a look at it. I have used several revision control systems and Mercurial is the first one that really makes me feel more productive.
I never had a TI-89, but I had its bulkier cousin, the TI-92, and from the times I've played around with the TI-89, the symbolic manipulation capabilities seemed pretty similar.
Sure, Mathematica or Maple will run circles around the TI-92/89, but I recall that the TI-92 could actually do some pretty impressive things. I certainly found that it would symbolically integrate some things that I otherwise would have used an integral table for. It could also do some very hairy algebraic manipulation (and often reducing the result down to something nice). BTW, I don't recall just what basic functions it can integrate, but it certainly can do Gaussians -- I used my TI-92 extensively for prob/stat stuff where I was calculating Gaussian integrals quite frequently. I believe the TI-89 will do the same stuff (someone please correct me if I am mistaken), and it won't be so ridiculously bulky.
I finished my Ph.D. a couple of years ago so it's been quite a while since I've been in any situations where I've been constrained by test taking considerations. =) I use a computer for all that stuff these days. (Which certainly makes sense, since I'm a computational scientist by profession.) But from what I recall of the days when I was frequently using calculators, I don't think you can go wrong with the TI-89, especially since its use is explicitly allowed on a bunch of standardized tests in the US.
BTW, I also used an HP48G extensively in college. I've still got it and use it occasionally, and it has some nice features. And, yes, once you get used to it, RPN is pretty clever. I see a lot of people championing it in favor of the TI calculators on here, but I mostly think that's because of the geek style points it confers. The HP48G series is way better than the TI calculators that came before the TI-89/92, but compared to the TI-89/92 I think the HP48G series really show their age. My 48G is *way* slower to do complicated calculations, much slower in drawing and manipulating graphs, and its symbolic manipulation capabilities are a joke.
Folks don't poison others with Polonium very often because 1) Po is exceedingly rare and 2) once it's determined that it was used, it really narrows down the range of suspects because of (1). If you want to obtain Po, you'll very likely need connections at a government laboratory like Oak Ridge or Los Alamos... or, say, a weapons lab in Russia.
Of course, any would-be assassin would also want to be very careful with the stuff since it is more than 10^11 times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide, which one might imagine makes it pretty dangerous to handle.
...would pay to get an advantage in a long line to purchase basic staples like flour.
Limited supply of an item that's in demand is going to create long lines, whether it's in the Soviet Union or a country ruled by "capitalist decadence" like the USA. And some folks with more money than others are going to consider it worth their while to have someone do the waiting for them.
Sure, it's ridiculous that people are going to such lengths to get their hands on a toy, and the PS3 lines, Ebay auctions, etc. demonstrate that some folks have waaaay more money than is good for them. But they simultaneously demonstrate that our "ugly" capitalist economy deserves some praise, too: After all, it's great that people only have to wait in these long lines for luxury items instead of basic staples like food or soap. Capitalism has warts aplenty, but one should keep things in perspective.
But all that aside, focusing on folks paying other to wait in line for them as being "ugly" is ridiculous when people are being beaten up and robbed over a freakin' video game console!
Why do you think that FEM is rarely used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations? A quick Google search will indicate otherwise.
The choice of method for solving the equations does seem to vary quite a bit between disciplines. Engineers tend to love FEM, while, say, atmospheric modelers seem to prefer finite-volume or finite-difference approaches.
even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to.
I can't say for certain since I don't work there, but I supect that everyone is expected to "want to" work insane hours. Just like how NCAA athletes aren't "required" to come to "voluntary" workouts -- only if they actually want playing time! I know folks who interviewed at Google and decided not to accept the job because it seemed to them they would certainly have to work insane hours -- something they didn't want to do because they have a family, etc.
Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.
You are entirely correct. How a group of planetary scientists missed this is pretty strange, given that many planetary scientists are geologists! Apparently no planetary geologists were invited to this party.
Given that both uses are jargon specific to different and relatively unrelated fields, I really don't care.
The problem is that geology and astronomy are in fact very much related. Ever heard of planetary geology? I'll note that there are plenty of planetary geologists who are faculty members in astronomy, not geology departments.
Anyhow, the point is that it is easy to imageine how overloading "pluton" could result in a lot of unnecessary confusion in the planetary sciences, so it would make sense for the IAU to change it to something else.
A good guess might be that that parallel language will be something like the in-development "Chapel" language that Burton has been championing. And Burton certainly has a lot of experience working with threading (google Tera's MTA "Multithreaded Architecture" supercomputer). This hire may turn out to make sense for Microsoft.
I've had very positive experiences with Python, and I'm glad that it is making its way into lots of large, serious projects. Problem is, though, that as these projects get very large, there HAS to be an option to disable implicit variables, e.g., variables that can be used without first being declared. Try working with an old Fortran 77 code that is full of implicit variable usage, and you'll understand!
You raise good points, and the team at Virginia Tech did do something remarkable. That said, cost per flop of the LINPACK benchmark is interesting but not particularly meaningful. For instance:
"Another example is PNNL's 1936 processor Itanium2 cluster: 3.5Tflops less performance than System X, for $25 million"
What is not captured by the LINPACK scores is that PNNL's machine will absolutely spank the BigMac cluster at what the PNNL machine is intended for: running computational chemistry codes such as NWChem. A lot of the cash for the PNNL machine went into large memories and fast I/O that simply does not show up in the LINPACK benchmark. Furthermore, there are a lot of very high-profile scientific publications that have come out of the computational chemistry abilities of the PNNL machine. That's something else extremely important that doesn't show up in the rankings.
There are a lot of similar examples, but the PNNL one is one that I know something about, so I chose it. Basically, I'm saying to not read too much into those cost comparisons. It really is comparing Apples to oranges... er, HPs in this case. =)
I think in my original post, I didn't make clear what bothers me so much. Yes, obviously customers who spend lots of money are going to get some perks. But customer service reps need to have a minimum standard for decency in the treatment of a customer. Making a large business owner not wait for his meeting at the bank is one thing, but treating customers like garbage just because they don't have as much money is another. Getting somewhat slower service is different than being treated rudely by some customer service rep. or having to spend hours resolving a simple billing error. What bothers me is that it seems that many large companies are drifting way too far to the extremes of treating their lower-priority customers like dirt. Sure, that's capitalism, and no it shouldn't be illegal (notice I qualified with words like "almost"), but it doesn't mean that it doesn't suck. And, believe it or not, some companies that DO bother to spend a little more money on customer service see it pay off.
I'm simply lamenting the fact that companies like cell phone providers seem to use the facelessness of customer service transactions to provide "service" that seems increasingly worse. Sure, I can take my business elsewhere, but in a lot of cases, the question is "where"? For instance, it seems that every single cell phone provider gives crap service these days. Yeah, that's capitalism and no, it shouldn't be illegal, but hell, you would hope that some company would be decent or smart enough to think that they could gain an advantage over their competitors by making an effort to provide decent customer service.
I see that Royal Bank of Canada sends wealthier customers to the head of the phone queue, while making ones with smaller accounts wait and wait. This is a classic example of abusing the facelessness of phone transactions, leveraging it to their advantage. Could you imagine customers putting up with this kind of stuff in a face-to-face setting? You walk into the bank, and they tell you to go to the "poor people" line? Or say you go into a department store, only to be told that you will have to let other customers cut in front of you, because they are buying more expensive items? That sounds almost like it should be illegal. But hey, what do you expect for a gigantic, faceless corporation?
I'm assuming this is basically the same mutation that is present in Belgian Blue cattle. The mutation suppresses myostatin production, and thus muscle growth goes nearly unchecked. Google for a picture of one... they look like some sort of cross between cattle and a tank.
Hi, Fred. I remember meeting you at both of the ISEFs I attended. Your homebrewed cyclotron was definitely the most memorable project. My projects examined fractal elements in topographic features. The 1994 project wasn't that great but the '95 project was more sophisticated.
It's amusing that when I won my 1994 regional science fair (which enabled me to go to ISEF), I wasn't even there for the awards presentation. I wasn't really expecting anything, and anyway I was asleep, since I had stayed up for something like 36 hours to put the finishing touches on the project!
I participated in two ISEF's (1994 and 1995) when I was in high school. I think that very few events I have participated in conveyed the excitement of doing science and participating in the scientific community like those ISEFs have. I'm just about finished with my Ph.D. now, and of course I've been to plenty of "real" scientific conferences, but none have captured the excitement that I experienced at those ISEF's.
If anyone involved in organizing the ISEF reads Slashdot, I hope they read this testimonial. Participating in ISEF was very important for me and many of the other students, and the experience really helped cement my decision to pursue a career in the sciences. Thanks!
"Any tin-foil hats should be directed at Y-12. That's the DOD plant; X-10 is just DOE."
You're right, but let me clarify something:
The biggest weapons labs in the country are DOE, not DOD facilities. These are the "tri-labs": Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia. They are operated by the DOE's NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration).
The other major DOE labs (including ORNL) are operated by the DOE's Office of Science. These are non-weapons labs. For you conspiracy theorists out there, its pretty obvious that these are non-weapons labs. No guys standing around with M-16's etc., as you would find at a place like Los Alamos. Much, much less security.
"Will it be a specific application, or more of a 'gun for hire' computing facility, with CPU cycles open to all comers for their own projects?"
This will be what is known as a "user facility" at DOE. CPU time will be doled out on a competetive basis, i.e., if someone has a project they would like to use it for, they will submit a proposal which will then be reviewed against others.
I'm a bit puzzled as where they came up with these numbers. I'm a grad student at William & Mary, which they placed in the top 50, and I find that wireless coverage is pretty spotty here. Meanwhile, at my undergrad alma mater U. Tenn, Knoxville, wireless access even covers a bunch of the *agriculture* campus, yet it doesn't make the list at all.
No surprise -- makers of lists like these don't usually attempt to apply any scientific methodology.
The reason that Cray only holds 19th right now is because they have only deployed X1 systems using up to 256 nodes. When the number of nodes is increased, you will certainly see the Cray moving up the top 500 list -- the architecture is VERY scalable.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean this won't just give humans more time to do the important Wall Street banker things, like snorting coke off of hookers?!
I placed a G1G1 order near the end of 2007, and the only confirmation I ever received was a PayPal payment confirmation. Can anyone tell me if I should have received some sort of confirmation email from the OLPC Foundation itself?
I consider my G1G1 order to mostly be a charitable contribution, so I'm fine if it takes them quite a while to ship my laptop. But I'd like to have some sort of confirmation from OLPC to let me know that they even realize I placed one. Did other folks receiving any other sort of confirmation before being told that their laptop was supposed to ship at X date? I've tried contacting the OLPC folks, but I have never been able to reach anyone.
Although Subversion does a great job of being a better CVS than CVS, yes, it is hard to use. Let me clarify: It is easy to use for a small project with just a few developers. But for large projects with many developers scattered all over, it, or any centralized revision control system becomes a nightmare (to me, anyway). The biggest problem I have with Subversion/CVS-type systems is that eventually managing the branches becomes a nightmare, and it becomes really easy to screw stuff up.
My work became a lot easier when I started using distributed revision control systems. My favorite is Mercurial, a very fast and lightweight system written in Python. The main reason that I like it is that is by far the easiest to use revision control system that I have worked with. In addition to being fast, intuitive, supporting completely disconnected operation, and other great features, branching and merging is a breeze. And, most importantly, it makes it very easy for the developers on the large projects I work on to keep from stepping on each other's toes because everything is a branch . Whenever I checkout ("clone") the repository that we consider the "central" (or "trunk") repository, all of my commits happen in my local mirror of the repository, and when I am finished I "hg push" those changes back, merging them back into the "trunk". (My explanation may seem a little confusing, but the Mercurial development model is explained pretty well here.) The great thing about this model is that branching is the most natural thing in the world (in fact, everyone essentially always works on their own "branch") so it actually gets used. I have experienced too many cases with CVS or Subversion where something should have happened on its own branch but didn't because it was too confusing, too slow (with the bottleneck of the central server), etc.
Although Mercurial is still pretty young, it is mature enough that some very large projects (e.g., Mozilla) have moved to it. I urge everyone who is looking for a powerful, but intuitive and easy-to-use revision control system to take a look at it. I have used several revision control systems and Mercurial is the first one that really makes me feel more productive.
"...yet Congress members aren't held accountable for reading the material they discuss each day"
Hmm... sort of like how most people on Slashdot post all kinds of stuff but never RTFA. =)
I never had a TI-89, but I had its bulkier cousin, the TI-92, and from the times I've played around with the TI-89, the symbolic manipulation capabilities seemed pretty similar.
Sure, Mathematica or Maple will run circles around the TI-92/89, but I recall that the TI-92 could actually do some pretty impressive things. I certainly found that it would symbolically integrate some things that I otherwise would have used an integral table for. It could also do some very hairy algebraic manipulation (and often reducing the result down to something nice). BTW, I don't recall just what basic functions it can integrate, but it certainly can do Gaussians -- I used my TI-92 extensively for prob/stat stuff where I was calculating Gaussian integrals quite frequently. I believe the TI-89 will do the same stuff (someone please correct me if I am mistaken), and it won't be so ridiculously bulky.
I finished my Ph.D. a couple of years ago so it's been quite a while since I've been in any situations where I've been constrained by test taking considerations. =) I use a computer for all that stuff these days. (Which certainly makes sense, since I'm a computational scientist by profession.) But from what I recall of the days when I was frequently using calculators, I don't think you can go wrong with the TI-89, especially since its use is explicitly allowed on a bunch of standardized tests in the US.
BTW, I also used an HP48G extensively in college. I've still got it and use it occasionally, and it has some nice features. And, yes, once you get used to it, RPN is pretty clever. I see a lot of people championing it in favor of the TI calculators on here, but I mostly think that's because of the geek style points it confers. The HP48G series is way better than the TI calculators that came before the TI-89/92, but compared to the TI-89/92 I think the HP48G series really show their age. My 48G is *way* slower to do complicated calculations, much slower in drawing and manipulating graphs, and its symbolic manipulation capabilities are a joke.
Folks don't poison others with Polonium very often because 1) Po is exceedingly rare and 2) once it's determined that it was used, it really narrows down the range of suspects because of (1). If you want to obtain Po, you'll very likely need connections at a government laboratory like Oak Ridge or Los Alamos... or, say, a weapons lab in Russia.
Of course, any would-be assassin would also want to be very careful with the stuff since it is more than 10^11 times as toxic as hydrogen cyanide, which one might imagine makes it pretty dangerous to handle.
...would pay to get an advantage in a long line to purchase basic staples like flour.
Limited supply of an item that's in demand is going to create long lines, whether it's in the Soviet Union or a country ruled by "capitalist decadence" like the USA. And some folks with more money than others are going to consider it worth their while to have someone do the waiting for them.
Sure, it's ridiculous that people are going to such lengths to get their hands on a toy, and the PS3 lines, Ebay auctions, etc. demonstrate that some folks have waaaay more money than is good for them. But they simultaneously demonstrate that our "ugly" capitalist economy deserves some praise, too: After all, it's great that people only have to wait in these long lines for luxury items instead of basic staples like food or soap. Capitalism has warts aplenty, but one should keep things in perspective.
But all that aside, focusing on folks paying other to wait in line for them as being "ugly" is ridiculous when people are being beaten up and robbed over a freakin' video game console!
Why do you think that FEM is rarely used to solve the Navier-Stokes equations? A quick Google search will indicate otherwise.
The choice of method for solving the equations does seem to vary quite a bit between disciplines. Engineers tend to love FEM, while, say, atmospheric modelers seem to prefer finite-volume or finite-difference approaches.
even during the relatively rare crunch periods, people still go get lunch and dinner, which are (famously) always free and tasty, and they don't work insane hours unless they want to.
I can't say for certain since I don't work there, but I supect that everyone is expected to "want to" work insane hours. Just like how NCAA athletes aren't "required" to come to "voluntary" workouts -- only if they actually want playing time! I know folks who interviewed at Google and decided not to accept the job because it seemed to them they would certainly have to work insane hours -- something they didn't want to do because they have a family, etc.
Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.
You are entirely correct. How a group of planetary scientists missed this is pretty strange, given that many planetary scientists are geologists! Apparently no planetary geologists were invited to this party.
Given that both uses are jargon specific to different and relatively unrelated fields, I really don't care.
The problem is that geology and astronomy are in fact very much related. Ever heard of planetary geology? I'll note that there are plenty of planetary geologists who are faculty members in astronomy, not geology departments.
Anyhow, the point is that it is easy to imageine how overloading "pluton" could result in a lot of unnecessary confusion in the planetary sciences, so it would make sense for the IAU to change it to something else.
I think the following flash animation from JeffK of somethingawful.com fame sums up how a lot of Linux snobs feel about the OS:
l ey/
http://www.somethingawful.com/features/usarfreind
A good guess might be that that parallel language will be something like the in-development "Chapel" language that Burton has been championing. And Burton certainly has a lot of experience working with threading (google Tera's MTA "Multithreaded Architecture" supercomputer). This hire may turn out to make sense for Microsoft.
I've had very positive experiences with Python, and I'm glad that it is making its way into lots of large, serious projects. Problem is, though, that as these projects get very large, there HAS to be an option to disable implicit variables, e.g., variables that can be used without first being declared. Try working with an old Fortran 77 code that is full of implicit variable usage, and you'll understand!
Please, Python dev-team, hear our pleas!
You raise good points, and the team at Virginia Tech did do something remarkable. That said, cost per flop of the LINPACK benchmark is interesting but not particularly meaningful. For instance:
"Another example is PNNL's 1936 processor Itanium2 cluster: 3.5Tflops less performance than System X, for $25 million"
What is not captured by the LINPACK scores is that PNNL's machine will absolutely spank the BigMac cluster at what the PNNL machine is intended for: running computational chemistry codes such as NWChem. A lot of the cash for the PNNL machine went into large memories and fast I/O that simply does not show up in the LINPACK benchmark. Furthermore, there are a lot of very high-profile scientific publications that have come out of the computational chemistry abilities of the PNNL machine. That's something else extremely important that doesn't show up in the rankings.
There are a lot of similar examples, but the PNNL one is one that I know something about, so I chose it. Basically, I'm saying to not read too much into those cost comparisons. It really is comparing Apples to oranges... er, HPs in this case. =)
I think in my original post, I didn't make clear what bothers me so much. Yes, obviously customers who spend lots of money are going to get some perks. But customer service reps need to have a minimum standard for decency in the treatment of a customer. Making a large business owner not wait for his meeting at the bank is one thing, but treating customers like garbage just because they don't have as much money is another. Getting somewhat slower service is different than being treated rudely by some customer service rep. or having to spend hours resolving a simple billing error. What bothers me is that it seems that many large companies are drifting way too far to the extremes of treating their lower-priority customers like dirt. Sure, that's capitalism, and no it shouldn't be illegal (notice I qualified with words like "almost"), but it doesn't mean that it doesn't suck. And, believe it or not, some companies that DO bother to spend a little more money on customer service see it pay off.
I'm simply lamenting the fact that companies like cell phone providers seem to use the facelessness of customer service transactions to provide "service" that seems increasingly worse. Sure, I can take my business elsewhere, but in a lot of cases, the question is "where"? For instance, it seems that every single cell phone provider gives crap service these days. Yeah, that's capitalism and no, it shouldn't be illegal, but hell, you would hope that some company would be decent or smart enough to think that they could gain an advantage over their competitors by making an effort to provide decent customer service.
I see that Royal Bank of Canada sends wealthier customers to the head of the phone queue, while making ones with smaller accounts wait and wait. This is a classic example of abusing the facelessness of phone transactions, leveraging it to their advantage. Could you imagine customers putting up with this kind of stuff in a face-to-face setting? You walk into the bank, and they tell you to go to the "poor people" line? Or say you go into a department store, only to be told that you will have to let other customers cut in front of you, because they are buying more expensive items? That sounds almost like it should be illegal. But hey, what do you expect for a gigantic, faceless corporation?
I'm assuming this is basically the same mutation that is present in Belgian Blue cattle. The mutation suppresses myostatin production, and thus muscle growth goes nearly unchecked. Google for a picture of one... they look like some sort of cross between cattle and a tank.
Hi, Fred. I remember meeting you at both of the ISEFs I attended. Your homebrewed cyclotron was definitely the most memorable project. My projects examined fractal elements in topographic features. The 1994 project wasn't that great but the '95 project was more sophisticated.
It's amusing that when I won my 1994 regional science fair (which enabled me to go to ISEF), I wasn't even there for the awards presentation. I wasn't really expecting anything, and anyway I was asleep, since I had stayed up for something like 36 hours to put the finishing touches on the project!
I participated in two ISEF's (1994 and 1995) when I was in high school. I think that very few events I have participated in conveyed the excitement of doing science and participating in the scientific community like those ISEFs have. I'm just about finished with my Ph.D. now, and of course I've been to plenty of "real" scientific conferences, but none have captured the excitement that I experienced at those ISEF's.
If anyone involved in organizing the ISEF reads Slashdot, I hope they read this testimonial. Participating in ISEF was very important for me and many of the other students, and the experience really helped cement my decision to pursue a career in the sciences. Thanks!
"Any tin-foil hats should be directed at Y-12. That's the DOD plant; X-10 is just DOE."
You're right, but let me clarify something:
The biggest weapons labs in the country are DOE, not DOD facilities. These are the "tri-labs": Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia. They are operated by the DOE's NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration).
The other major DOE labs (including ORNL) are operated by the DOE's Office of Science. These are non-weapons labs. For you conspiracy theorists out there, its pretty obvious that these are non-weapons labs. No guys standing around with M-16's etc., as you would find at a place like Los Alamos. Much, much less security.
"Will it be a specific application, or more of a 'gun for hire' computing facility, with CPU cycles open to all comers for their own projects?"
This will be what is known as a "user facility" at DOE. CPU time will be doled out on a competetive basis, i.e., if someone has a project they would like to use it for, they will submit a proposal which will then be reviewed against others.
It's great to see people putting free textbooks online. It's nothing new, though. Check out
http://samizdat.mines.edu/
To see several on-line works (mostly geophysics stuff) that have been available for a number of years.
I'm a bit puzzled as where they came up with these numbers. I'm a grad student at William & Mary, which they placed in the top 50, and I find that wireless coverage is pretty spotty here. Meanwhile, at my undergrad alma mater U. Tenn, Knoxville, wireless access even covers a bunch of the *agriculture* campus, yet it doesn't make the list at all.
No surprise -- makers of lists like these don't usually attempt to apply any scientific methodology.
The reason that Cray only holds 19th right now is because they have only deployed X1 systems using up to 256 nodes. When the number of nodes is increased, you will certainly see the Cray moving up the top 500 list -- the architecture is VERY scalable.