I live near the border, in a city with a mixture of white people and brown people. Some of the latter are here illegally. Turns out most of the white people here see them contributing usefully to the economy and don't mind their presence.
And you don't have to cross the border for the 4th Amendment to not apply. If I want to drive to the next state over on the most direct highway route, I have to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint, where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.
The way these things tend to work is that you have internet-facing "login nodes" (with ssh servers but no GUI) that people can ssh into. They're typically pretty beefy machines (8- or 16-core with tons of ram). One of the things you can ask them to do is to submit the serious HPC jobs to a queue.
There's another machine whose sole purpose is to coordinate transfers from some parallel high-performance filesystem(s).
Finally, there are the thousands of actual compute nodes, which are not internet-facing, and which one communicates with using the "queue submit" feature. You send stuff to their stdin, you get stuff from their stdout, just like an ordinary linux program.
I do scientific high-performance computing, and there is simply no reason anyone would want to run Windows on a supercomputer.
Linux has native, simple support for compiling the most common HPC languages (C and Fortran). It is open source and extensively customizable, so it's easy to make whatever changes need to be made to optimize the OS on the compute nodes, or optimize the communication latency between nodes. Adding support for exotic filesystems (like Lustre) is simple, especially since these file systems are usually developed *for* Linux. It has a simple, robust, scriptable mechanism for transferring large amounts of data around (scp/rsync) and a simple, unified mechanism for working remotely (ssh). Linux (the whole OS) can be compiled separately from source to optimize for a particular architecture (think Gentoo).
What advantage does Windows bring to a HPC project?
And this isn't even about defense. Build as many of these things as you like, I guarantee I could put that money to better use in building an army. RPG rounds are a whole lot cheaper than Space Marines, or whatever they're trying to build.
Raytheon is all about getting contracts to do bullshit, independent of any actual real military need.
It is also illegal in the US, but the threat has to be credible. Are threats with no credibility (i.e. a man with no arms saying "I'm going to strangle you!") still illegal in the UK?
3) all settings files SHOULD be hidden from normal users, be it the registry files, config files or whatever other settings files, if a NORMAL user has need of these to be exposed then the developers have FAILED.
Wrong, or at least I hope to the powers that be that this is wrong.
It is FAR EASIER to open a config file (with comments if it's complicated) and change what I need than to dig through a maze of tabs and menus looking for the magic option I want.
The writing there is no more disturbing than going to the BBC News and seeing that my tax money is going to blindfold people and run electricity through their genitalia at Abu Ghraib, yet Google has no problem advertising on the BBC.
... where "rights" means rights guaranteed by law.
Google can choose to do business with whomever they want. But while this isn't a legal problem it's still the symptom of a problem: that prudish Christians have far too much sway in our country, and that Google actually takes seriously the idea that some idiot with a cross up his bum might whine loudly enough for it to impact Google.
The fact that Google's response wasn't "sorry if this site mentions tits, many of us have them, go away now" is a problem, and not a problem with Google necessarily; it's a problem with our society, and the whiny Christians that get their way in it.
Roach burrow micro isn't to exploit lack of detection (although it's really good in that case); it is to exploit the nutty healing rate of burrowed roaches. Protoss need either immortals or splash (colossi or storm) to kill mass roach. Immortals are too narrow, and with burrow to absorb splash damage you can mitigate it -- especially storm -- to a large degree.
Another one is marine micro vs. banelings. With 1000 APM you can make stimrines essentially not countered by banelings any more, which opens the door to abusing TvZ.
The AI does not get double resources (although on Very Hard and Insane it does get an extra amount, but not double), and it does not do the absolute best it can. I guarantee you that if given the source code I could improve it, by simply exploiting the hell out of its APM advantage. The reason is that the AI has imperfections designed in; it is designed to respond somewhat superficially like a human opponent and not exploit godly micro tricks that a 2000+ APM computer could use. Here are a few things to get started: roach burrow micro; hidden queens in overlords microing transfuse, perhaps on dancing mutalisks; blink micro tricks; rotating damaged infantry in and out of bunkers; thorship micro.
Yes, making a proper strategic AI is very hard. But the included AI has a lot of room to improve in tactics, just by virtue of the ridiculous APM it can exploit.
Funny, there are branches of the government that do a very good job at serving the populace without being perverted by ulterior motives. The Forest Service comes to mind. But nobody thinks of them, because they mostly stay of the way and do their job.
Our military contracting industry is in the business of getting more and more contracts to do useless things. They are not in the business of making useful weapons and the people paying them are not in the business of serving America's best interests.
If real private industry, or science, wanted laser-powered helicopters we'd build them at a fraction of the cost that the taxpayers are paying for this shit.
I have a Toyota Yaris with a 100 HP = 70 kW gasoline engine. I've only gone up to 105 mph in it, but I wasn't running the engine flat out; I'd guess it can go 120-125 over level ground, and that's what a quick Google turned up.
If we assume quadratic wind resistance is the dominant retarding force, then it'll take my car 14 kW to sustain 55 mph. I imagine the new car might be more aerodynamic and/or smaller, so it's probably around 10 kW.
It's true, though. High explosives aren't chosen for fantastic energy density; they're chosen for their ability to release stored chemical energy very quickly. They contain both reactant and oxidizer, and thus they can release their energy quickly. Gasoline won't burn in a vacuum, but TNT will still explode.
You could do even worse and walk through security with a piece of obsidian.
Obsidian keeps a wickedly sharp edge when it's broken, and it stays sharp. The Aztecs used essentially sticks with bits of obsidian embedded in them as weapons of war, and they were absolutely brutal.
When I was in Tokyo/Narita, they had these nifty little tubes with a microwave emitter and antenna in them. Send a pulse of 2.4GHz microwaves into a drink bottle, same stuff as your microwave oven uses, and check if it resonates strongly. I bet the things cost under a hundred bucks to make.
All the "liquid explosives" people are worried about are not mostly water. All of the crap people take on planes to drink is mostly water. Yet the TSA won't let me take a bit of juice or water through security? What a crock.
I asked a TSA guy about this, and he said that "we're developing new x-ray scanning technology that can check drinks, but it won't be ready until 2012, and it is very expensive."
Huh? The Japanese have solved this problem with a fucking microwave oven, and we're wanking about with this ridiculous security theater?
Slashdot Mirror
The Right has too many Americans scared shitless of the brown people to the south. Will never happen.
I live near the border, in a city with a mixture of white people and brown people. Some of the latter are here illegally. Turns out most of the white people here see them contributing usefully to the economy and don't mind their presence.
And you don't have to cross the border for the 4th Amendment to not apply. If I want to drive to the next state over on the most direct highway route, I have to go through a Border Patrol checkpoint, where the 4th amendment doesn't apply.
If I had mod points you'd get one.
There should be seeing-eye bears.
"Thug McThuggerson, TSA agent, was mauled and eaten when he tried to fondle a bear's crotch. Film at 11."
Evince works just fine here!
Spreadsheets are coding, just a different sort...
Oh, of course.
The way these things tend to work is that you have internet-facing "login nodes" (with ssh servers but no GUI) that people can ssh into. They're typically pretty beefy machines (8- or 16-core with tons of ram). One of the things you can ask them to do is to submit the serious HPC jobs to a queue.
There's another machine whose sole purpose is to coordinate transfers from some parallel high-performance filesystem(s).
Finally, there are the thousands of actual compute nodes, which are not internet-facing, and which one communicates with using the "queue submit" feature. You send stuff to their stdin, you get stuff from their stdout, just like an ordinary linux program.
Wait, people do high performance computing on SPREADSHEETS?
My world just exploded. Iluvatar, can't they find some schmuck to code them in Perl, even?
The computers involved in the ssh transfers can do the encryption in their sleep. The login nodes involved here are seriously beefy.
The computational burden is small enough that nobody cares, really.
I do scientific high-performance computing, and there is simply no reason anyone would want to run Windows on a supercomputer.
Linux has native, simple support for compiling the most common HPC languages (C and Fortran). It is open source and extensively customizable, so it's easy to make whatever changes need to be made to optimize the OS on the compute nodes, or optimize the communication latency between nodes. Adding support for exotic filesystems (like Lustre) is simple, especially since these file systems are usually developed *for* Linux. It has a simple, robust, scriptable mechanism for transferring large amounts of data around (scp/rsync) and a simple, unified mechanism for working remotely (ssh). Linux (the whole OS) can be compiled separately from source to optimize for a particular architecture (think Gentoo).
What advantage does Windows bring to a HPC project?
No kidding.
And this isn't even about defense. Build as many of these things as you like, I guarantee I could put that money to better use in building an army. RPG rounds are a whole lot cheaper than Space Marines, or whatever they're trying to build.
Raytheon is all about getting contracts to do bullshit, independent of any actual real military need.
It is also illegal in the US, but the threat has to be credible. Are threats with no credibility (i.e. a man with no arms saying "I'm going to strangle you!") still illegal in the UK?
Poor jokes in poor taste are not crimes.
Only in a truly free market.
We've long passed the point where cell service is a true free market, with any real competition.
3) all settings files SHOULD be hidden from normal users, be it the registry files, config files or whatever other settings files, if a NORMAL user has need of these to be exposed then the developers have FAILED.
Wrong, or at least I hope to the powers that be that this is wrong.
It is FAR EASIER to open a config file (with comments if it's complicated) and change what I need than to dig through a maze of tabs and menus looking for the magic option I want.
And I've read it.
The writing there is no more disturbing than going to the BBC News and seeing that my tax money is going to blindfold people and run electricity through their genitalia at Abu Ghraib, yet Google has no problem advertising on the BBC.
... where "rights" means rights guaranteed by law.
Google can choose to do business with whomever they want. But while this isn't a legal problem it's still the symptom of a problem: that prudish Christians have far too much sway in our country, and that Google actually takes seriously the idea that some idiot with a cross up his bum might whine loudly enough for it to impact Google.
The fact that Google's response wasn't "sorry if this site mentions tits, many of us have them, go away now" is a problem, and not a problem with Google necessarily; it's a problem with our society, and the whiny Christians that get their way in it.
Roach burrow micro isn't to exploit lack of detection (although it's really good in that case); it is to exploit the nutty healing rate of burrowed roaches. Protoss need either immortals or splash (colossi or storm) to kill mass roach. Immortals are too narrow, and with burrow to absorb splash damage you can mitigate it -- especially storm -- to a large degree.
Another one is marine micro vs. banelings. With 1000 APM you can make stimrines essentially not countered by banelings any more, which opens the door to abusing TvZ.
-1, Misinformed
The AI does not get double resources (although on Very Hard and Insane it does get an extra amount, but not double), and it does not do the absolute best it can. I guarantee you that if given the source code I could improve it, by simply exploiting the hell out of its APM advantage. The reason is that the AI has imperfections designed in; it is designed to respond somewhat superficially like a human opponent and not exploit godly micro tricks that a 2000+ APM computer could use. Here are a few things to get started: roach burrow micro; hidden queens in overlords microing transfuse, perhaps on dancing mutalisks; blink micro tricks; rotating damaged infantry in and out of bunkers; thorship micro.
Yes, making a proper strategic AI is very hard. But the included AI has a lot of room to improve in tactics, just by virtue of the ridiculous APM it can exploit.
Funny, there are branches of the government that do a very good job at serving the populace without being perverted by ulterior motives. The Forest Service comes to mind. But nobody thinks of them, because they mostly stay of the way and do their job.
You must be new here ("here" meaning the USA).
Our military contracting industry is in the business of getting more and more contracts to do useless things. They are not in the business of making useful weapons and the people paying them are not in the business of serving America's best interests.
If real private industry, or science, wanted laser-powered helicopters we'd build them at a fraction of the cost that the taxpayers are paying for this shit.
I have a Toyota Yaris with a 100 HP = 70 kW gasoline engine. I've only gone up to 105 mph in it, but I wasn't running the engine flat out; I'd guess it can go 120-125 over level ground, and that's what a quick Google turned up.
If we assume quadratic wind resistance is the dominant retarding force, then it'll take my car 14 kW to sustain 55 mph. I imagine the new car might be more aerodynamic and/or smaller, so it's probably around 10 kW.
It's true, though. High explosives aren't chosen for fantastic energy density; they're chosen for their ability to release stored chemical energy very quickly. They contain both reactant and oxidizer, and thus they can release their energy quickly. Gasoline won't burn in a vacuum, but TNT will still explode.
You could do even worse and walk through security with a piece of obsidian.
Obsidian keeps a wickedly sharp edge when it's broken, and it stays sharp. The Aztecs used essentially sticks with bits of obsidian embedded in them as weapons of war, and they were absolutely brutal.
When I was in Tokyo/Narita, they had these nifty little tubes with a microwave emitter and antenna in them. Send a pulse of 2.4GHz microwaves into a drink bottle, same stuff as your microwave oven uses, and check if it resonates strongly. I bet the things cost under a hundred bucks to make.
All the "liquid explosives" people are worried about are not mostly water. All of the crap people take on planes to drink is mostly water. Yet the TSA won't let me take a bit of juice or water through security? What a crock.
I asked a TSA guy about this, and he said that "we're developing new x-ray scanning technology that can check drinks, but it won't be ready until 2012, and it is very expensive."
Huh? The Japanese have solved this problem with a fucking microwave oven, and we're wanking about with this ridiculous security theater?