I was recently reminded of how badly Linux sucks when I went over some old code I'd written to get the CPU name and speed. The FreeBSD and OpenBSD implementations of this code each called a single sysctl for each result.
There are good reasons for exposing cpu info (and other kinds of OS data) as files, rather than gathering that data through system calls. Exposing the data as files makes that data usable to the range of tools people use on an OS (Unix) that supposedly treats everything as files. The data can be grepped, piped, opened, run through 'sed', cut, awked, etc. Exposing OS-internal data as files is done for the same reason that RDBMSes expose internal data as tables, and for the same reason that XML schema are XML documents themselves (this is why people complained about DTDs--they weren't XML).
Linux did not invent this idea. The inventors of Unix (Thompson and Ritchie) came up with the idea of exposing internal OS data as files, which they considered a natural extension of the Unix philosophy of treating everything as files.
You may disagree with it, or you may not be familiar with all the arguments for and against it. However you should refrain from just concluding that "LINUX SUCKS" because something was not the way you expected.
Whether the data should be exposed through files is an arguable point. It's not an area in which BSD is clearly factually superior. My own opinion is that gathering that data through files is better.
Just so you know, there's nothing more repellent than condescension coming from someone like you. You don't have enough going for you to pull it off. If anyone needs to grow up, it's you--not the libertarians.
In retrospect, perhaps I went a bit too far. Your post was repellent, but not so much that it warranted that degree of firmness. My apologies.
Although it was devastated in two massive wars, partly annexed and stripped of industrial infrastructure, it just kept growing and is now the third-largest economy in the world. Its name is Germany.
I'm not sure you should use Germany as an example of a robust economy. In many ways it's a model of eurosclerosis, and the Germans themselves acknowledge it.
Granted, Germany had very impressive growth during the 1960s. However that was widely acknowledged to be the result of their having adopted a policy of very limited intervention in the economy during the immediate postwar period (Freiburg school etc).
However, its economy has accelerated ahead of all its neighbors.
For the last 15 years, Germany has had real growth rates very similar to it's neighbors. None of them could be characterized as "accelerating".
The only successful economy in Western Europe recently has been Ireland, with a real growth rate more than twice that of Germany for over a decade now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Germany's mediocre economic performance can be attributed to socialized medicine. In all likelihood, socialized medicine wouldn't have that much of an impact on the economy, one way or the other. Nevertheless, I don't think Germany is the best example to demonstrate your point.
For those people, Libertarianism provides a certain simplicity without nuance which can be appealing.
Indeed, the post which you cited was terribly nuanced. I'm really very impressed.
In other words, bumper stickers that reinforce ideology are more interesting than policy analysis.
When I'm in need of policy analysis, I'll look to your older slashdot posts which you cite.
People heavily involved in technology are younger with less experience
Given the tone of your post, I'd hope you're not older than 20.
I was getting my MBA at the time.
You shouldn't advertise that fact.
As for point #3, here's an old example. A couple of years ago on Slashdot, there was a discussion about 911 services. A presumed libertarian said that we ought to privatize 911 services and not provide it to everyone who can't pay (and let charity help the rest).
...then you proceed to cite your own post from slashdot which is about as sophisticated as a high school econ handout. You come across as a schoolchild who expects a pat on the head.
Just so you know, there's nothing more repellent than condescension coming from someone like you. You don't have enough going for you to pull it off. If anyone needs to grow up, it's you--not the libertarians.
I read through a few of the posts here, and I think some of the posters are not experts in econ despite their claims.
Although I'm not an economist, I am interested in the topic and have read some books about it.
Some facts accepted by all trade economists:
1. When the United States has a "trade deficit", it means that foreigners are buying US bonds (typically treasuries), or are increasing their reserves of dollars. (If you count selling bonds and sending currency as exports then the trade deficit is always 0).
2.At some point in the future, foreigners will want their money back or will want to spend their dollar reserves, at which point the US will have to export more than it imports. Then the trade deficit will run the other way. There is no chance of other countries "cutting out" the US, because that would mean they sent us products and lent us money while getting nothing in return.
3. The trade deficit increases the standard of living for Americans in the short term. It means that we can buy more things at Wal-Mart and other places than we otherwise could. It does not affect our overall unemployment rate. The only problem with the trade deficit is that it can't be extended indefinitely, which means that at some point we will have to export more than we import, which will be unfortunate for us.
4. Although China accounts for a larger share of the trade deficit than any other single country, it accounts for much less than Europe and Japan combined.
5. The reason Europe and Japan export things to the US is because they want to pay for imports from the US, either now or in the future.
6. The trade deficit by itself is not necessarily a problem. The only problem is if there's a "hard landing" which means that Europe, Japan, and China demand their money back more quickly than the US economy can adjust, which would harm all parties.
Only actual chain reactions need be disclosed and the mushroom cloud should serve as public notice. Anything more would be a waste of taxpayer dollars.
I can't believe your post was modded up.
There was no chance of a nuclear detonation ("mushroom cloud") since a solution of reactor-grade Uranium running down the floor is not the same as an atomic bomb. It turns out that it's harder to make an atomic bomb than just dropping 4% U235 on the floor.
As always, when a nuclear accident is discovered, all sense of proportion will be thrown out the window. In this case, an accident which could have escalated into something which could possibly harmed one person (worst case) will result in nuclear power being presented as ''THE GRAVEST THREAT HUMANITY HAS EVER KNOWN'', whereas coal power which kills 150,000 people annually in this country (over 10 chernobyls) will be ignored.
The problem with hydrogen today is that most of it is made from fossil fuels, primarily natural gas, so the process of making pure hydrogen releases CO2.
I don't see the benefits of burning hydrogen in an ICE when that hydrogen comes from natural gas anyway. It would be far easier just to burn the natural gas in car engines. Cars powered by natural gas have been around since the 1970s, in urban taxi fleets etc.
What is the point in converting natural gas into a less transportable form (hydrogen)? Doing so simply moves the source of carbon emission from the car, to the natural gas reformer at a gas station.
I am not sure if you picked this up from the article but with one chip you get _64_ hardware based threads.
Those 64 threads do not execute simultaneously. Sun has lengthened the pipeline for Niagara2 and a added a "pick" stage where 2 threads per processor are chosen to execute. As a result, Niagara2 can execute 16 threads simultaneously. Compare that to an 8-way opteron system which executes only 8 threads simultaneously, but which is superscalar and executes at least 2 instructions/thread/cycle (with twice the cycles, bear in mind--3GHz). In other words, Niagara2 could theoretically execute (16*1.5) 24 billion instr/sec whereas the cheaper 8-way 3GHz opteron could (theoretically) execute more than twice that many. So, speaking of (theoretical maximum) throughput, the opteron clearly has an advantage.
Of course the opteron will stall for a long time on cache misses and therein lies the true Niagara advantage.
In our internal benchmarks a £20k T2000 with 1 x 8 core T1 outperformed a £100k+ V880 with 8 x 2 core Sparc. Freakin' cool and excellent value for money.
That is comparing proprietary hardware from Sun, to other proprietary hardware from Sun. The comparison is beside the point, since the V880 uses US-IVs which are in-order (!!), low clockspeed processors. US-IVs are undoubtedly outrun by x86.
The question is whether a £20,000 T2000 would outrun a £15,000 8-way Opteron system from Sun. The answer seems to be: yes, modestly, but only for very specific workloads which are severely affected by memory latency (like OLTP) or which are benefited by application-specific hardware in the Niagara cores (like SSL webserving).
The cool threads stuff is amazing and they are the only people doing anything quite like it.
Indeed, nobody else is taking the fine-grained multithreaded approach.
The "throughput computing" strategy was a brilliant move for Sun. It was the best thing they could have done. It was the only way they could make Sparc-compatible chips for commodity servers that are at least somewhat price competitive with x86 offerings. It was really the only way of saving the Sparc franchise.
There are a great many different subtypes of nicotine (more than 8 IIRC) with very different effects. There are also different kinds of nicotinic receptors in different areas of the body, etc.
Most of the nicotine drugs in development that I've read about target receptor subtypes different from those affected when you smoke.
With how much these machines cost, they would port the software to other hardware if the other hardware really worked better or cost less.
With enterprise computing, the cost of hardware is trivial compared to the cost of development. Most enterprise software has exactly one installation and re-writing it can cost tens of millions of dollars. Not to mention, re-writing always entails bugs which can cost a financial services company much more than either the hardware or the development.
Many of these companies have $100M IT budgets o rmore
It always interests me when some absolute monetary figure is used as a justification for some policy where capital intensiveness is not as issue. They may have $100M but they don't want to waste any of it. If they determine that it costs more to re-write their software than to buy another mainframe, then they'll buy another mainframe, whether they have $1M or $100M or $10B.
you don't think they can port their own software if they wanted to?
Whether they could port the software is not at issue. The question is whether it would be cheaper for them to do so than to buy another mainframe. The answer is no, so S/390 lives on.
One important reason for the refusal of mainframes to die, is the enormous body of non-portable software written for them. Non-portability is a key advantage. Non-portable applications are what kept people buying mainframes, what kept DOS alive for many years, and what kept people using Windows 3.1 and Windows ME when it sucked ass.
Non-portable applications were written for Mainframes and DOS because the systems were so old that portability wasn't really a consideration when those apps were written. In other words, non-portable apps are a side-effect of having an old system, and they cause the old system to linger.
...The problem with running Oracle on a Sun E10k, is that you can swap out the E10k. Your application code doesn't have to change. Same with java applications. But something written in COBOL that accesses weird hardware-specific data ports and weird OS APIs will keep that hardware around forever. Because those applications will never be rewritten. Because, when it comes time to re-write the apps (ie when you want to run them on another system) they will have decades of convoluted business logic embedded in them, making a re-write practically impossible.
My fascination is with how similar this is to the theory of free market economics.
The theory of "swarm behavior" had already been elucidated in economics several decades ago, and its applicability to biology (and simultaneous co-discovery in that field) was described at that time.
Von Hayek described "swarm theory" and how it operates in the price system of a modern economy. Hayek elucidated how the price system coordinates the activities of millions of people, each of whom has extremely limited information, and without any kind of central authority. Each person follows simple rules based on his own local information and the result is an allocation similar to what perfect information of all participants would have suggested. Decision-making is purely distributed in a free market, and information travels by means of "price signals" to coordinate the activities of far-flung individuals who have never heard of each other. You can see this principle at work with regard to the extremely complicated interactions in the global economy. An example is the "ripple effect" of prices where you place a demand for something, which in turns affects the demand for what's necessary to manufacture that thing, which in turn affects the demand for something else, etc, until some shop in Taiwan manufacturing a part for a sub-sub-contractor in something seemingly unrelated shifts his production away from transistors because for some reason (in fact for millions of different reasons) the demand for that kind of transistor has gone down. The shop owner in Taiwan made the correct allocative decision that optimally satisfies the needs of an unbelievably complex interaction, but he didn't know why or how. All he must do is pay attention to local price changes--the price of this component has gone down, so produce less of it. The result of all this, even though it's difficult to believe at first, is that free prices produce the optimal allocation even though each individual participant was acting on limited information and was using only simple rules.
Von Hayek also made the additional claim that the price system itself was never devised by anyone, but was the product of an evolutionary development which nobody understood when it was occurring. Hayek speculated that the price system would never have been consciously devised, but resulted from people following "what worked" based on their own local information. People who followed the price system bred more quickly (in the malthusian sense--fewer of them died) and spread civilization. Of course on this point Hayek acknowledged that he was being very speculative.
The spontaneous order of the market was the basis for Hayek's claim that communism would quickly collapse--not because of a lack of incentives, but because of the need for conscious control. Conscious control was not a benefit (as claimed) but was actually a fatal flaw, because even the supremely intelligent leaders could never achieve the kind of coordination and distributed information that a market could easily achieve. As a result, Hayek believed that claims of capitalism being "anarchic" and "disorderly" were actually compliments to it, because only distributed, spontaneous order could ever hope to contend with the complexity of a modern economy.
Hayek immediately pointed out that the same principle was applicable to biology. He was then informed that a similar change was already underway in that field. He was told that ants and bees used something similar, etc.
Another example of "swarm theory" in economics is the efficient market hypothesis, which relates to stock markets, and which is mentioned frequently in the book about "the wisdom of crowds."
I have been wondering if these new ultracapacitors might someday become practical "Shipstones". How close are ultracapacitors to, say, powering a car?
I should start by saying that I'm not an EE, however I've done some reading on this topic.
Ultracaps are still far from being practical for powering a car. Right now the best Ultracaps store 5-10 Wh/kg, which means they could only store enough energy to power a car for a few miles. Furthermore, the price of the ultracaps is about 10x too expensive for the car to be within the price range of what most consumers expect.
HOWEVER, Ultracaps have seen dramatic and encouraging improvements during the past 10 years. Ultracaps have decreased in cost/kjoule by a factor of about 3 over the last 5 years, and have seen dramatic improvements in energy density. At the current rate of improvement, in about 10 more years Ultracaps will be usable for plug-in hybrids that cost about the same as conventional vehicles and can run for 10-20 miles on electricity alone. Unlike batteries, ultracaps can be recharged extremely quickly and will not require replacement after repeated recharging.
Can you drain the power slowly from an ultracapactor, to run a car for a few hours, or do you have to drain it quickly? Does charge leak out slowly over time from an ultracapacitor, or can you make it fairly inert?
You can drain the ultracap slowly. However ultracaps can be more dangerous than batteries since they can discharge all their energy instantaneously.
Moving to native quad core has a lot of advantages and I'm actually excited to see how well this CPU will perform. Critics that claim that AMD lags behind in the process size would do well to note that AMD has ALWAYS lagged behind Intel in that category, and, yet, has managed to not only survive, but prosper.
AMD has always lagged behind in process technology, however they've usually only lagged behind by a few months. Now, however, the lag is more significant since Intel is moving to 45nm soon, while AMD is still in the transition to 65nm. I can't remember a time when AMD was nearly a full process generation behind.
..AMD has survived, true, but it hasn't prospered. AMD's split-adjusted stock price is about the same as it was in 1985. And AMD has taken significant losses in a great many of the intervening years.
When AMD has prospered, it usually was because Intel management had made some colossal strategic mistake and AMD exploited it. For example, Intel management decided not to design a successor core to the PPro/PII/PIII until AMD had released the Athlon, because of their confidence in Itanium. And Intel strenuously resisted going to 64 bit on x86, again to protect Itanium. And Intel delayed multicore processors. In all of those areas, AMD was able to beat Intel to the punch, not for technical reasons, but because the people who run Intel made strategic mistakes in direction, over and over again.
However Intel can bring colossal resources to bear, which matters because making CPUs is the most capital-intensive industry in the world. Intel has tremendous innate advantages because of their economy of scale and easy access to capital. Whenever AMD gains an advantage, Intel stops doing whatever stupid thing they were doing and re-commits themselves to beating AMD at the x86 game. When Intel isn't on the wrong path and isn't making silly mistakes in strategy, they almost always beat AMD and force AMD into heavy losses.
This time, Intel doesn't appear to be making any silly mistakes, which is terrible for AMD. Not that I think AMD will go bankrupt anytime soon, but I suspect AMD will have a few "lean" years, like they did when they were selling K6's.
There's nothing there. We already sent up a rover (at great expense) and what did it find? A desolate beige dirt landscape that's less remarkable than the scenery in West Texas.
If people want to see pink/beige rocks, they can go to Arizona.
There is no benefit whatsoever to having a person fly all the way out there, land, plant an American flag, then go back.
Overbreeding would be no problem if the overbreeders and their descendants were limited to a fixed plot of land. That way the descendants of people with sustainable breeding habits could live in a paradise while the overbreeders lived in hell on earth, died of starvation, and killed each other over precious water and living space.
Tragically, that is pretty much what happens in the world right now.
The problem is that ignorant poor people and some religious people are going to breed us to the point where things are unpleasant all the time at the best or downright ugly and murderous at the worst.
The catholic church has been outrageously stupid in encouraging high birth rates in 3rd world countries. But that hasn't been the main problem. In poor places, having many children (a few of which survive) is the only way of providing for one's own survival during retirement.
The article reports that one third of nestlings are malformed.
It's worth pointing out that the deformed nestlings were taken from shell cracks of the nuclear reactor itself.
It seems possible that the drastic differences recorded by the 2 researchers could be explained by the fact that one researcher was studying animals breeding on or around the reactor itself, whereas the other researcher was studying animals from the "exclusion zone" which extends for 18 miles in all directions.
When the state knowingly allows people to threaten others with physical harm for their religious views, then the state is condoning that action, thus tacitly approving the action, thus tacitly denying the freedom of religion guaranteed by the CA Constitution.
Even with regard to threats, there should be wide latitude (in my opinion) before the state intervenes. The Supreme Court has a well-established and reasonable (in my opinion) set of criteria that determines whether threatening speech isn't protected. In order for a threat to be banned, it must be a serious, clear, specific threat that is made in an environment in which it's likely to be carried out. For example, if you were a mafia boss and said "I order my henchmen to execute John Doe on October 13" then it wouldn't be protected speech, because it would have been a clear, imminent threat that was intended seriously and was made in an environment in which it would likely have been carried out.
In this case, the defendant was arrested for making obviously humorous remarks about cruise missiles, which apparently was a pun on Tom Cruise's name. The threat was neither clear nor specific, and obviously would not be carried out. In other words, he was prosecuted for making a joke at the expense of Scientology, and for picketing. Although I agree that people who seriously threaten religious people are not engaging in protected speech, this case seems to be quite different from that.
As to whether that law restricts your free speech, the claim is that "hate speech" is not protected by the Constitution
The constitution does not limit the kind of speech which it protects. Of course some interpretation must be made, but "hate speech" (ie oppositional speech) is precisely the kind which the constitution was written to protect.
particularly when it interferes with the right of others to worship freely.
Speech does not interfere with the right of others to worship freely. Even after a dissenting view, worshippers still are capable of walking through the temple door.
The logic is that allowing people to threaten religions is implicit State approval of those threats.
That's utterly absurd. Just because the state allows a person to voice his opinions, does not mean the state endorses his opinions. As an example, there are many people whom I allow to speak without trying to injure or confine them, but that doesn't constitute some kind of "implicit approval" of their opinions on my part. The idea was that the state would be neutral and its coercive powers could not be used by either side.
I believe Scientology abuses the law; but I also believe the law is necessary to protect people's right to worship freely.
Oppositional speech does not interfere with a person's right to worship freely.
...It amazes me how frail is the notion of free speech in a country where it supposedly is so much a part of the national character. Everyone is in favor of "free speech" until they list their exceptions: "speech should be absolutely free except when it opposes something I believe in, in which the speaker should be tossed in jail..." or "speech should be completely free as long as you don't speak against..."
It amazes me there could be such confusion on this elementary notion. It should be perfectly clear that "free speech" with the qualifications listed in the previous paragraph ("free except when the speaker offends...") has no meaning whatsoever. Free speech means precisely the right to OPPOSITIONAL speech. Oppositional speech is precisely the kind envisioned by the authors of the constitution and precisely the kind intended to be protected by that document. Nobody has ever tried to ban speech which is in accordance with accepted views and present leaders. That kind of "free speech" exists everywhere (even in the most tyrannical dictatorship) and so does not require protection from a constitution. "Free speech" in the sense of "agreeable speech" is a meaningless right because it imposes no serious restraint on the actions of the coercive authority.
A republican democracy is not just the right to vote and speak. Even in STALINIST RUSSIA (heh) you had the right to vote (for communism) and to speak (in favor of communism). The idea here (which apparently has been missed by a sizable portion of Americans, incredibly!) is that you can vote for, and speak for, what you believe in, EVEN WHEN the point of view is not sanctioned by someone else. Doing so does not interfere with the rights of the church, the state, worshippers, people with other opinions, etc.
I know others here have already offered this advice, but it bears repeating: stay with your current profession. Believe me, there are far worse predicaments in one's career than mild boredom. Most people work jobs that are positively repellent and stressful, for very little money. If you make a lot of money now and don't mind your job, then you're ahead of 99.5% of the world.
Keep in mind that if you expect to make similar money then you will have to re-train in something like law or medicine, which will take many years. Re-training would be difficult for someone in his mid-40s, since a person of that age would have few working years left after finishing school and paying back student loans.
The sole exception to this advice is if you've saved and invested money, such that you're now free to pursue other options regardless of the economic consequences. If that's you, then congratulations. But I doubt you're in that situation because if you were, you wouldn't be asking "what should I do now," since you'd already know. Presumably you already know what you like doing, regardless of money--nobody can tell you that.
Keep your job unless there's something else you like doing so much that it outweighs the financial loss. I assume that there is nothing else you'd tremendously prefer, since you don't know what else to do. So, you should stay with your current profession.
Gee, I don't know anyone who's been succuessfully doing this for years...
I'm certainly not suggesting these guys are the first to implement a shared-nothing parallel RDBMS. IBM has offered DB2 parallel edition which is shared-nothing for some time now. However IBM wants a ton of money for parallel edition, and DB2 has some legacy stuff which might not be useful in a shared-nothing architecture. An open-source shared-nothing RDBMS might be compelling.
I think the shared-nothing approach is the best one for an open-source RDBMS offering. Organizations which use open source will almost certainly want to use commodity, open hardware. Shared-nothing will allow them to do that.
I noticed that Stonebraker is the company founder. Stonebraker has contributed extensively to database research over the years.
He's known for advocating the "shared-nothing" approach to parallel databases. The shared-nothing approach means that nodes in the parallel database don't attempt memory or cache synchronization, and each node has its own commodity disk array. In a shared-nothing parallel database, the data is "partitioned" across servers. So, for example, rows with id's 1-10 would be on the first server, 11-20 on the second server, etc. Executing the SQL query "select * from table where id < 1000" would send requests to multiple commodity servers and then aggregate the results. The optimizer is modified to take into account network bandwidth and latency, etc.
My guess on what they're doing: they're working on a shared-nothing parallel RDBMS with an in-memory client similar to Oracle TimesTen.
The are a few drawbacks to the shared-nothing approach: 1) the RDBMS software is more difficult to implement; 2) since the data is partitioned, any transaction that updates tuples on more than one database node requires a two-phase distributed commit, which is much more expensive; and 3) some queries are more expensive because they require transmitting large amounts of data over the network rather than a memory bus, and in rare cases that network overhead cannot be eliminated by the optimizer.
The advantage, of course, is linear scalability by adding commodity hardware. No more need for $3M+ boxes.
I should start off by saying that I thought your post was utter bullshit times ten.
I'll try to address your points briefly.
Doctors spend long hours and lots of time schooling, followed by a period in which they work extremely long hours for next to nothing. That much is certain. What about Engineers and Programmers? We go through the same crap, but we don't make near as much as you do.
No. I am a professional programmer, and I can attest that the average programmer/engineer has a bachelor's degree. We don't go through anywhere near the same crap, since we didn't endure 5+ years of graduate school or 80 hr/week residencies.
What is it that makes you feel your time is worth $800.00 an hour? (I arrived at this figure by timing how long my physician spends with me vs. how much I pay them.)
I looked at my most recent medical bill and the "negotiated rate" was $150 for about half an hour. Part of that money obviously goes to office rent, paying the secretary, malpractice insurance, etc. The average doctor actually makes about $90/hr, so your estimate was off by a factor of about 9.
People would die without your help. What you are doing is nothing more than taking advantage of sick people, milking them for all they are worth.
Thus far, very few sick people have been "milked for all they're worth". I've been to the doctor several times and none of them demanded my current net worth.
It is tantamount to extortion, except you use illness instead of violence.
No. It's not extortion unless they caused the illness or are threatening to cause one, and then they charge you for a cure. Simply curing an illness (or treating it) is not extortion.
You think you're the only type of business that has overhead? Virtually every business pays an office staff, has to be insured, needs a building, etc.
Doctors don't claim that their business is the only one with overhead.
My plumber is more professional and friendly than any doctor I have ever seen. He comes to my home, does his job and courteously thanks me. He charges less than my doctor. If he can do it, why can't you?
Do you honestly not know why? Do you think it's the best use of a neurosurgeon's extremely scarce time to drive to people's houses? And, would it be possible to take your pipes to the plumber's office?
I will never trust you. You are a doctor... You are exceptionally greedy, and you wouldn't hesitate to prolong, rather than cure, any illness... You wouldn't hesitate to kill me by making me take medications that are dangerous
You should be extremely grateful they even take you as a patient.
But we are in the nightmare that we are BECAUSE we became dependant on one main fuel source; Oil. Coal and natural gas is heavily used and that is also a big issue. OTH, if we use a combination of Nukes, Wind, Solar, Geothermal, wave, etc then if one has to be taken out of the mix, no big deal. More importantly, none can create a true monopoly (or oligolpoly) as is the current case with Oil.
If we became dependent on nuclear alone, then it would pose no real problems, since we could easily and cheaply stockpile enough Uranium to last us centuries. France has done something similar, precisely in order to prevent any interruption of their power in the event of international calamity.
We ought to use a combination of solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear. Geothermal, nuclear, and hydroelectric are all clean sources of energy that are continuous, so they would be excellent for baseload power. Solar, on the other hand, would not be used for baseload power but for "peak shaving". Solar is excellent in that regard, because it's generating the most electricity during the peaks, because air conditioning generates most power spikes.
Wind is utterly useless. I can't see why Greenpeace favors it so heavily, other than their typical stupidity. Wind is intermittent which means wind power must be supplemented by a gas-fired plant for when the wind isn't blowing, which is often. In other words, wind is just a way of saving natural gas (when the wind is blowing) on a gas-fired plant. That has two problems. First, we still have the problem of fossil fuel exhaustion and carbon emissions--wind power only reduces the carbon emissions from a gas-fired plant. Second, we must build two power plants (gas and windmills) for an equivalent amount of energy, making it far more expensive than other sources.
Don't believe greenpeace cost estimates for wind power. Those estimates do not take into account the need to build a second power plant (gas-fired) for each gigawatt of windmills, or the cost of gas for when the wind isn't blowing.
Nuclear power is both cheaper and safer than the windmill/gas combination. Although the windmill/gas combination emits reduced amounts of C02 compared to gas alone, it still emits alot of C02 and other air pollutants. As such, the windmill/gas combination is far riskier to health and the environment than nuclear, not to mention more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
There are good reasons for exposing cpu info (and other kinds of OS data) as files, rather than gathering that data through system calls. Exposing the data as files makes that data usable to the range of tools people use on an OS (Unix) that supposedly treats everything as files. The data can be grepped, piped, opened, run through 'sed', cut, awked, etc. Exposing OS-internal data as files is done for the same reason that RDBMSes expose internal data as tables, and for the same reason that XML schema are XML documents themselves (this is why people complained about DTDs--they weren't XML).
Linux did not invent this idea. The inventors of Unix (Thompson and Ritchie) came up with the idea of exposing internal OS data as files, which they considered a natural extension of the Unix philosophy of treating everything as files.
You may disagree with it, or you may not be familiar with all the arguments for and against it. However you should refrain from just concluding that "LINUX SUCKS" because something was not the way you expected.
Whether the data should be exposed through files is an arguable point. It's not an area in which BSD is clearly factually superior. My own opinion is that gathering that data through files is better.
In retrospect, perhaps I went a bit too far. Your post was repellent, but not so much that it warranted that degree of firmness. My apologies.
I'm not sure you should use Germany as an example of a robust economy. In many ways it's a model of eurosclerosis, and the Germans themselves acknowledge it.
Granted, Germany had very impressive growth during the 1960s. However that was widely acknowledged to be the result of their having adopted a policy of very limited intervention in the economy during the immediate postwar period (Freiburg school etc).
For the last 15 years, Germany has had real growth rates very similar to it's neighbors. None of them could be characterized as "accelerating".
The only successful economy in Western Europe recently has been Ireland, with a real growth rate more than twice that of Germany for over a decade now.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not claiming that Germany's mediocre economic performance can be attributed to socialized medicine. In all likelihood, socialized medicine wouldn't have that much of an impact on the economy, one way or the other. Nevertheless, I don't think Germany is the best example to demonstrate your point.
Indeed, the post which you cited was terribly nuanced. I'm really very impressed.
When I'm in need of policy analysis, I'll look to your older slashdot posts which you cite.
Given the tone of your post, I'd hope you're not older than 20.
You shouldn't advertise that fact.
...then you proceed to cite your own post from slashdot which is about as sophisticated as a high school econ handout. You come across as a schoolchild who expects a pat on the head.
Just so you know, there's nothing more repellent than condescension coming from someone like you. You don't have enough going for you to pull it off. If anyone needs to grow up, it's you--not the libertarians.
I read through a few of the posts here, and I think some of the posters are not experts in econ despite their claims.
Although I'm not an economist, I am interested in the topic and have read some books about it.
Some facts accepted by all trade economists:
1. When the United States has a "trade deficit", it means that foreigners are buying US bonds (typically treasuries), or are increasing their reserves of dollars. (If you count selling bonds and sending currency as exports then the trade deficit is always 0).
2.At some point in the future, foreigners will want their money back or will want to spend their dollar reserves, at which point the US will have to export more than it imports. Then the trade deficit will run the other way. There is no chance of other countries "cutting out" the US, because that would mean they sent us products and lent us money while getting nothing in return.
3. The trade deficit increases the standard of living for Americans in the short term. It means that we can buy more things at Wal-Mart and other places than we otherwise could. It does not affect our overall unemployment rate. The only problem with the trade deficit is that it can't be extended indefinitely, which means that at some point we will have to export more than we import, which will be unfortunate for us.
4. Although China accounts for a larger share of the trade deficit than any other single country, it accounts for much less than Europe and Japan combined.
5. The reason Europe and Japan export things to the US is because they want to pay for imports from the US, either now or in the future.
6. The trade deficit by itself is not necessarily a problem. The only problem is if there's a "hard landing" which means that Europe, Japan, and China demand their money back more quickly than the US economy can adjust, which would harm all parties.
I realized the poster was joking but the joke was clearly intended to demonstrate a point.
I can't believe your post was modded up.
There was no chance of a nuclear detonation ("mushroom cloud") since a solution of reactor-grade Uranium running down the floor is not the same as an atomic bomb. It turns out that it's harder to make an atomic bomb than just dropping 4% U235 on the floor.
As always, when a nuclear accident is discovered, all sense of proportion will be thrown out the window. In this case, an accident which could have escalated into something which could possibly harmed one person (worst case) will result in nuclear power being presented as ''THE GRAVEST THREAT HUMANITY HAS EVER KNOWN'', whereas coal power which kills 150,000 people annually in this country (over 10 chernobyls) will be ignored.
I don't see the benefits of burning hydrogen in an ICE when that hydrogen comes from natural gas anyway. It would be far easier just to burn the natural gas in car engines. Cars powered by natural gas have been around since the 1970s, in urban taxi fleets etc.
What is the point in converting natural gas into a less transportable form (hydrogen)? Doing so simply moves the source of carbon emission from the car, to the natural gas reformer at a gas station.
Those 64 threads do not execute simultaneously. Sun has lengthened the pipeline for Niagara2 and a added a "pick" stage where 2 threads per processor are chosen to execute. As a result, Niagara2 can execute 16 threads simultaneously. Compare that to an 8-way opteron system which executes only 8 threads simultaneously, but which is superscalar and executes at least 2 instructions/thread/cycle (with twice the cycles, bear in mind--3GHz). In other words, Niagara2 could theoretically execute (16*1.5) 24 billion instr/sec whereas the cheaper 8-way 3GHz opteron could (theoretically) execute more than twice that many. So, speaking of (theoretical maximum) throughput, the opteron clearly has an advantage.
Of course the opteron will stall for a long time on cache misses and therein lies the true Niagara advantage.
That is comparing proprietary hardware from Sun, to other proprietary hardware from Sun. The comparison is beside the point, since the V880 uses US-IVs which are in-order (!!), low clockspeed processors. US-IVs are undoubtedly outrun by x86.
The question is whether a £20,000 T2000 would outrun a £15,000 8-way Opteron system from Sun. The answer seems to be: yes, modestly, but only for very specific workloads which are severely affected by memory latency (like OLTP) or which are benefited by application-specific hardware in the Niagara cores (like SSL webserving).
Indeed, nobody else is taking the fine-grained multithreaded approach.
The "throughput computing" strategy was a brilliant move for Sun. It was the best thing they could have done. It was the only way they could make Sparc-compatible chips for commodity servers that are at least somewhat price competitive with x86 offerings. It was really the only way of saving the Sparc franchise.
With that said, it relegates Sun to a niche.
There are a great many different subtypes of nicotine (more than 8 IIRC) with very different effects. There are also different kinds of nicotinic receptors in different areas of the body, etc.
Most of the nicotine drugs in development that I've read about target receptor subtypes different from those affected when you smoke.
With enterprise computing, the cost of hardware is trivial compared to the cost of development. Most enterprise software has exactly one installation and re-writing it can cost tens of millions of dollars. Not to mention, re-writing always entails bugs which can cost a financial services company much more than either the hardware or the development.
It always interests me when some absolute monetary figure is used as a justification for some policy where capital intensiveness is not as issue. They may have $100M but they don't want to waste any of it. If they determine that it costs more to re-write their software than to buy another mainframe, then they'll buy another mainframe, whether they have $1M or $100M or $10B.
Whether they could port the software is not at issue. The question is whether it would be cheaper for them to do so than to buy another mainframe. The answer is no, so S/390 lives on.
One important reason for the refusal of mainframes to die, is the enormous body of non-portable software written for them. Non-portability is a key advantage. Non-portable applications are what kept people buying mainframes, what kept DOS alive for many years, and what kept people using Windows 3.1 and Windows ME when it sucked ass.
Non-portable applications were written for Mainframes and DOS because the systems were so old that portability wasn't really a consideration when those apps were written. In other words, non-portable apps are a side-effect of having an old system, and they cause the old system to linger.
...The problem with running Oracle on a Sun E10k, is that you can swap out the E10k. Your application code doesn't have to change. Same with java applications. But something written in COBOL that accesses weird hardware-specific data ports and weird OS APIs will keep that hardware around forever. Because those applications will never be rewritten. Because, when it comes time to re-write the apps (ie when you want to run them on another system) they will have decades of convoluted business logic embedded in them, making a re-write practically impossible.
The theory of "swarm behavior" had already been elucidated in economics several decades ago, and its applicability to biology (and simultaneous co-discovery in that field) was described at that time.
Von Hayek described "swarm theory" and how it operates in the price system of a modern economy. Hayek elucidated how the price system coordinates the activities of millions of people, each of whom has extremely limited information, and without any kind of central authority. Each person follows simple rules based on his own local information and the result is an allocation similar to what perfect information of all participants would have suggested. Decision-making is purely distributed in a free market, and information travels by means of "price signals" to coordinate the activities of far-flung individuals who have never heard of each other. You can see this principle at work with regard to the extremely complicated interactions in the global economy. An example is the "ripple effect" of prices where you place a demand for something, which in turns affects the demand for what's necessary to manufacture that thing, which in turn affects the demand for something else, etc, until some shop in Taiwan manufacturing a part for a sub-sub-contractor in something seemingly unrelated shifts his production away from transistors because for some reason (in fact for millions of different reasons) the demand for that kind of transistor has gone down. The shop owner in Taiwan made the correct allocative decision that optimally satisfies the needs of an unbelievably complex interaction, but he didn't know why or how. All he must do is pay attention to local price changes--the price of this component has gone down, so produce less of it. The result of all this, even though it's difficult to believe at first, is that free prices produce the optimal allocation even though each individual participant was acting on limited information and was using only simple rules.
Von Hayek also made the additional claim that the price system itself was never devised by anyone, but was the product of an evolutionary development which nobody understood when it was occurring. Hayek speculated that the price system would never have been consciously devised, but resulted from people following "what worked" based on their own local information. People who followed the price system bred more quickly (in the malthusian sense--fewer of them died) and spread civilization. Of course on this point Hayek acknowledged that he was being very speculative.
The spontaneous order of the market was the basis for Hayek's claim that communism would quickly collapse--not because of a lack of incentives, but because of the need for conscious control. Conscious control was not a benefit (as claimed) but was actually a fatal flaw, because even the supremely intelligent leaders could never achieve the kind of coordination and distributed information that a market could easily achieve. As a result, Hayek believed that claims of capitalism being "anarchic" and "disorderly" were actually compliments to it, because only distributed, spontaneous order could ever hope to contend with the complexity of a modern economy.
Hayek immediately pointed out that the same principle was applicable to biology. He was then informed that a similar change was already underway in that field. He was told that ants and bees used something similar, etc.
Another example of "swarm theory" in economics is the efficient market hypothesis, which relates to stock markets, and which is mentioned frequently in the book about "the wisdom of crowds."
I should start by saying that I'm not an EE, however I've done some reading on this topic.
Ultracaps are still far from being practical for powering a car. Right now the best Ultracaps store 5-10 Wh/kg, which means they could only store enough energy to power a car for a few miles. Furthermore, the price of the ultracaps is about 10x too expensive for the car to be within the price range of what most consumers expect.
HOWEVER, Ultracaps have seen dramatic and encouraging improvements during the past 10 years. Ultracaps have decreased in cost/kjoule by a factor of about 3 over the last 5 years, and have seen dramatic improvements in energy density. At the current rate of improvement, in about 10 more years Ultracaps will be usable for plug-in hybrids that cost about the same as conventional vehicles and can run for 10-20 miles on electricity alone. Unlike batteries, ultracaps can be recharged extremely quickly and will not require replacement after repeated recharging.
You can drain the ultracap slowly. However ultracaps can be more dangerous than batteries since they can discharge all their energy instantaneously.
AMD has always lagged behind in process technology, however they've usually only lagged behind by a few months. Now, however, the lag is more significant since Intel is moving to 45nm soon, while AMD is still in the transition to 65nm. I can't remember a time when AMD was nearly a full process generation behind.
..AMD has survived, true, but it hasn't prospered. AMD's split-adjusted stock price is about the same as it was in 1985. And AMD has taken significant losses in a great many of the intervening years.
When AMD has prospered, it usually was because Intel management had made some colossal strategic mistake and AMD exploited it. For example, Intel management decided not to design a successor core to the PPro/PII/PIII until AMD had released the Athlon, because of their confidence in Itanium. And Intel strenuously resisted going to 64 bit on x86, again to protect Itanium. And Intel delayed multicore processors. In all of those areas, AMD was able to beat Intel to the punch, not for technical reasons, but because the people who run Intel made strategic mistakes in direction, over and over again.
However Intel can bring colossal resources to bear, which matters because making CPUs is the most capital-intensive industry in the world. Intel has tremendous innate advantages because of their economy of scale and easy access to capital. Whenever AMD gains an advantage, Intel stops doing whatever stupid thing they were doing and re-commits themselves to beating AMD at the x86 game. When Intel isn't on the wrong path and isn't making silly mistakes in strategy, they almost always beat AMD and force AMD into heavy losses.
This time, Intel doesn't appear to be making any silly mistakes, which is terrible for AMD. Not that I think AMD will go bankrupt anytime soon, but I suspect AMD will have a few "lean" years, like they did when they were selling K6's.
There's nothing there. We already sent up a rover (at great expense) and what did it find? A desolate beige dirt landscape that's less remarkable than the scenery in West Texas.
If people want to see pink/beige rocks, they can go to Arizona.
There is no benefit whatsoever to having a person fly all the way out there, land, plant an American flag, then go back.
Tragically, that is pretty much what happens in the world right now.
The catholic church has been outrageously stupid in encouraging high birth rates in 3rd world countries. But that hasn't been the main problem. In poor places, having many children (a few of which survive) is the only way of providing for one's own survival during retirement.
It's worth pointing out that the deformed nestlings were taken from shell cracks of the nuclear reactor itself.
It seems possible that the drastic differences recorded by the 2 researchers could be explained by the fact that one researcher was studying animals breeding on or around the reactor itself, whereas the other researcher was studying animals from the "exclusion zone" which extends for 18 miles in all directions.
Even with regard to threats, there should be wide latitude (in my opinion) before the state intervenes. The Supreme Court has a well-established and reasonable (in my opinion) set of criteria that determines whether threatening speech isn't protected. In order for a threat to be banned, it must be a serious, clear, specific threat that is made in an environment in which it's likely to be carried out. For example, if you were a mafia boss and said "I order my henchmen to execute John Doe on October 13" then it wouldn't be protected speech, because it would have been a clear, imminent threat that was intended seriously and was made in an environment in which it would likely have been carried out.
In this case, the defendant was arrested for making obviously humorous remarks about cruise missiles, which apparently was a pun on Tom Cruise's name. The threat was neither clear nor specific, and obviously would not be carried out. In other words, he was prosecuted for making a joke at the expense of Scientology, and for picketing. Although I agree that people who seriously threaten religious people are not engaging in protected speech, this case seems to be quite different from that.
The constitution does not limit the kind of speech which it protects. Of course some interpretation must be made, but "hate speech" (ie oppositional speech) is precisely the kind which the constitution was written to protect.
Speech does not interfere with the right of others to worship freely. Even after a dissenting view, worshippers still are capable of walking through the temple door.
That's utterly absurd. Just because the state allows a person to voice his opinions, does not mean the state endorses his opinions. As an example, there are many people whom I allow to speak without trying to injure or confine them, but that doesn't constitute some kind of "implicit approval" of their opinions on my part. The idea was that the state would be neutral and its coercive powers could not be used by either side.
Oppositional speech does not interfere with a person's right to worship freely.
...It amazes me how frail is the notion of free speech in a country where it supposedly is so much a part of the national character. Everyone is in favor of "free speech" until they list their exceptions: "speech should be absolutely free except when it opposes something I believe in, in which the speaker should be tossed in jail..." or "speech should be completely free as long as you don't speak against ..."
It amazes me there could be such confusion on this elementary notion. It should be perfectly clear that "free speech" with the qualifications listed in the previous paragraph ("free except when the speaker offends...") has no meaning whatsoever. Free speech means precisely the right to OPPOSITIONAL speech. Oppositional speech is precisely the kind envisioned by the authors of the constitution and precisely the kind intended to be protected by that document. Nobody has ever tried to ban speech which is in accordance with accepted views and present leaders. That kind of "free speech" exists everywhere (even in the most tyrannical dictatorship) and so does not require protection from a constitution. "Free speech" in the sense of "agreeable speech" is a meaningless right because it imposes no serious restraint on the actions of the coercive authority.
A republican democracy is not just the right to vote and speak. Even in STALINIST RUSSIA (heh) you had the right to vote (for communism) and to speak (in favor of communism). The idea here (which apparently has been missed by a sizable portion of Americans, incredibly!) is that you can vote for, and speak for, what you believe in, EVEN WHEN the point of view is not sanctioned by someone else. Doing so does not interfere with the rights of the church, the state, worshippers, people with other opinions, etc.
I know others here have already offered this advice, but it bears repeating: stay with your current profession. Believe me, there are far worse predicaments in one's career than mild boredom. Most people work jobs that are positively repellent and stressful, for very little money. If you make a lot of money now and don't mind your job, then you're ahead of 99.5% of the world.
Keep in mind that if you expect to make similar money then you will have to re-train in something like law or medicine, which will take many years. Re-training would be difficult for someone in his mid-40s, since a person of that age would have few working years left after finishing school and paying back student loans.
The sole exception to this advice is if you've saved and invested money, such that you're now free to pursue other options regardless of the economic consequences. If that's you, then congratulations. But I doubt you're in that situation because if you were, you wouldn't be asking "what should I do now," since you'd already know. Presumably you already know what you like doing, regardless of money--nobody can tell you that.
Keep your job unless there's something else you like doing so much that it outweighs the financial loss. I assume that there is nothing else you'd tremendously prefer, since you don't know what else to do. So, you should stay with your current profession.
I'm certainly not suggesting these guys are the first to implement a shared-nothing parallel RDBMS. IBM has offered DB2 parallel edition which is shared-nothing for some time now. However IBM wants a ton of money for parallel edition, and DB2 has some legacy stuff which might not be useful in a shared-nothing architecture. An open-source shared-nothing RDBMS might be compelling.
I think the shared-nothing approach is the best one for an open-source RDBMS offering. Organizations which use open source will almost certainly want to use commodity, open hardware. Shared-nothing will allow them to do that.
I noticed that Stonebraker is the company founder. Stonebraker has contributed extensively to database research over the years.
He's known for advocating the "shared-nothing" approach to parallel databases. The shared-nothing approach means that nodes in the parallel database don't attempt memory or cache synchronization, and each node has its own commodity disk array. In a shared-nothing parallel database, the data is "partitioned" across servers. So, for example, rows with id's 1-10 would be on the first server, 11-20 on the second server, etc. Executing the SQL query "select * from table where id < 1000" would send requests to multiple commodity servers and then aggregate the results. The optimizer is modified to take into account network bandwidth and latency, etc.
My guess on what they're doing: they're working on a shared-nothing parallel RDBMS with an in-memory client similar to Oracle TimesTen.
The are a few drawbacks to the shared-nothing approach: 1) the RDBMS software is more difficult to implement; 2) since the data is partitioned, any transaction that updates tuples on more than one database node requires a two-phase distributed commit, which is much more expensive; and 3) some queries are more expensive because they require transmitting large amounts of data over the network rather than a memory bus, and in rare cases that network overhead cannot be eliminated by the optimizer.
The advantage, of course, is linear scalability by adding commodity hardware. No more need for $3M+ boxes.
I should start off by saying that I thought your post was utter bullshit times ten.
I'll try to address your points briefly.
No. I am a professional programmer, and I can attest that the average programmer/engineer has a bachelor's degree. We don't go through anywhere near the same crap, since we didn't endure 5+ years of graduate school or 80 hr/week residencies.
I looked at my most recent medical bill and the "negotiated rate" was $150 for about half an hour. Part of that money obviously goes to office rent, paying the secretary, malpractice insurance, etc. The average doctor actually makes about $90/hr, so your estimate was off by a factor of about 9.
Thus far, very few sick people have been "milked for all they're worth". I've been to the doctor several times and none of them demanded my current net worth.
No. It's not extortion unless they caused the illness or are threatening to cause one, and then they charge you for a cure. Simply curing an illness (or treating it) is not extortion.
Doctors don't claim that their business is the only one with overhead.
Do you honestly not know why? Do you think it's the best use of a neurosurgeon's extremely scarce time to drive to people's houses? And, would it be possible to take your pipes to the plumber's office?
You should be extremely grateful they even take you as a patient.
If we became dependent on nuclear alone, then it would pose no real problems, since we could easily and cheaply stockpile enough Uranium to last us centuries. France has done something similar, precisely in order to prevent any interruption of their power in the event of international calamity.
We ought to use a combination of solar, geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear. Geothermal, nuclear, and hydroelectric are all clean sources of energy that are continuous, so they would be excellent for baseload power. Solar, on the other hand, would not be used for baseload power but for "peak shaving". Solar is excellent in that regard, because it's generating the most electricity during the peaks, because air conditioning generates most power spikes.
Wind is utterly useless. I can't see why Greenpeace favors it so heavily, other than their typical stupidity. Wind is intermittent which means wind power must be supplemented by a gas-fired plant for when the wind isn't blowing, which is often. In other words, wind is just a way of saving natural gas (when the wind is blowing) on a gas-fired plant. That has two problems. First, we still have the problem of fossil fuel exhaustion and carbon emissions--wind power only reduces the carbon emissions from a gas-fired plant. Second, we must build two power plants (gas and windmills) for an equivalent amount of energy, making it far more expensive than other sources.
Don't believe greenpeace cost estimates for wind power. Those estimates do not take into account the need to build a second power plant (gas-fired) for each gigawatt of windmills, or the cost of gas for when the wind isn't blowing.
Nuclear power is both cheaper and safer than the windmill/gas combination. Although the windmill/gas combination emits reduced amounts of C02 compared to gas alone, it still emits alot of C02 and other air pollutants. As such, the windmill/gas combination is far riskier to health and the environment than nuclear, not to mention more expensive.