You're right, "cloud computing" is a hopelessly vague term, and the headline by itself does very little to describe what these projects are. In the standard set of buzzwords, "infrastructure as a service" probably comes closest.
But read the first link text carefully -- these are "projects to create cloud computing testbeds". Not creating clouds; creating testbeds in which cloud experiments can be conducted. The users of these testbeds are NOT users of a "cloud"; the users of these testbeds bring up their OWN clouds (or other experiments). In commercial clouds such as EC2, users have control over one or more VMs; instead, these projects are intended to give users control over everything, down to and including the hardware (compute servers, switches, network links...).
As the CloudLab web page says, "the bare metal's the limit".
That is true. Perhaps a better example would be John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who broke the law motivated partly by a desire for tea without an artificially inflated price.
No, breaking the law isn't always wrong. But pointing that out is not a Slashdot first: it has been done before by many people, such as Julius Caesar, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela, to name a few.
You're right that most oil is left underground because it's too expensive to recover.
You're wrong that large amounts of oil will be recovered from old fields if market conditions make it attractive enough.
The reason why so much oil is unrecoverable is not that it takes too much money to extract it; it's because it takes too much energy. Oil extraction, processing, and transport are energy-intensive tasks (and are getting increasingly intensive as the easily recovered oilfields are depleted). If the energy you expend drilling, pumping, refining and moving the oil exceeds the energy you ultimately generate when you burn it, then you would have been better off leaving it in the ground.
Think of it this way: you can imagine somebody being willing to spend $20, $50, or $100 or more on a barrel of oil. Perhaps even $1000 if they want it very, very badly. But nobody, ever, will want to pay two barrels of oil for a barrel of oil.
Sherman is wrong. There's an enormous difference between a security hole in DRM software and standard software: normally, any software I install on my machine is running with my permission and knowledge, performing a function that I chose and doing it for my benefit. Sony were trying to get their code onto end users' computers without those users understanding exactly what is was doing, and naturally the software functioned entirely for the benefit of Sony and not the users.
Richard Stallman clearly explained the problem and explained all the issues that Sherman doesn't want us to think about in an essay called Can you trust your computer?. If Stallman had the marketing clout of the RIAA's members and vice versa, I suspect we wouldn't be in this situation today.
Whoever came up with the idea that strange quarks can mysteriously transmute "everything they touch" into strange quarks needs to go back to high school. Here's a few of the conservation laws such a reaction would violate:
1) Conservation of charge. The strange quark has charge -1/3e; "conversion" of any other quark besides the down and bottom (which have equal charge) would violate charge conservation which is known to be preserved in all interactions.
2) Conservation of mass/energy. The strange quark has mass ~150MeV; up or down quarks (which compose nucleons) mass only 5 or 7 MeV respectively so any reaction producing a strange quark from an up or down requires massive additional energy (and so is not self-sustaining).
3) Conservation of strangeness. Preserved in all but the weak interaction.
So if strange quarks really are the King Midas of subatomic particles, they have to violate an awful lot of conservation principles. Sorry, it's not going to happen in our universe.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right, "cloud computing" is a hopelessly vague term, and the headline by itself does very little to describe what these projects are. In the standard set of buzzwords, "infrastructure as a service" probably comes closest.
But read the first link text carefully -- these are "projects to create cloud computing testbeds". Not creating clouds; creating testbeds in which cloud experiments can be conducted. The users of these testbeds are NOT users of a "cloud"; the users of these testbeds bring up their OWN clouds (or other experiments). In commercial clouds such as EC2, users have control over one or more VMs; instead, these projects are intended to give users control over everything, down to and including the hardware (compute servers, switches, network links...).
As the CloudLab web page says, "the bare metal's the limit".
No; medical care is a right. (See Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)
That is true. Perhaps a better example would be John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who broke the law motivated partly by a desire for tea without an artificially inflated price.
No, breaking the law isn't always wrong. But pointing that out is not a Slashdot first: it has been done before by many people, such as Julius Caesar, Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela, to name a few.
You're right that most oil is left underground because it's too expensive to recover.
You're wrong that large amounts of oil will be recovered from old fields if market conditions make it attractive enough.
The reason why so much oil is unrecoverable is not that it takes too much money to extract it; it's because it takes too much energy. Oil extraction, processing, and transport are energy-intensive tasks (and are getting increasingly intensive as the easily recovered oilfields are depleted). If the energy you expend drilling, pumping, refining and moving the oil exceeds the energy you ultimately generate when you burn it, then you would have been better off leaving it in the ground.
Think of it this way: you can imagine somebody being willing to spend $20, $50, or $100 or more on a barrel of oil. Perhaps even $1000 if they want it very, very badly. But nobody, ever, will want to pay two barrels of oil for a barrel of oil.
Sherman is wrong. There's an enormous difference between a security hole in DRM software and standard software: normally, any software I install on my machine is running with my permission and knowledge, performing a function that I chose and doing it for my benefit. Sony were trying to get their code onto end users' computers without those users understanding exactly what is was doing, and naturally the software functioned entirely for the benefit of Sony and not the users.
Richard Stallman clearly explained the problem and explained all the issues that Sherman doesn't want us to think about in an essay called Can you trust your computer?. If Stallman had the marketing clout of the RIAA's members and vice versa, I suspect we wouldn't be in this situation today.
Cheers,
Gary.
Whoever came up with the idea that strange quarks can mysteriously transmute "everything they touch" into strange quarks needs to go back to high school. Here's a few of the conservation laws such a reaction would violate:
1) Conservation of charge. The strange quark has charge -1/3e; "conversion" of any other quark besides the down and bottom (which have equal charge) would violate charge conservation which is known to be preserved in all interactions.
2) Conservation of mass/energy. The strange quark has mass ~150MeV; up or down quarks (which compose nucleons) mass only 5 or 7 MeV respectively so any reaction producing a strange quark from an up or down requires massive additional energy (and so is not self-sustaining).
3) Conservation of strangeness. Preserved in all but the weak interaction.
So if strange quarks really are the King Midas of subatomic particles, they have to violate an awful lot of conservation principles. Sorry, it's not going to happen in our universe.