Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
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What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
Got a link to the Washington Post story?
See this post for links.
Also, arguing that only one Israeli died indicates that Israel warned "its citizens" (and, therefore had a hand in the attack) is pretty ridiculous.
First of all, the entire Washington post story states that the warning contained no reference to the WTC. Some of the articles on the various sites managed to clip that fact out. Secondly, I could find anything on the number of Israelis killed let alone the number that should be there.
Finally, if you really do believe this, you'd have to believe that some 1000 people got a warning and haven't shared it over the last 2 years. I don't care what group you are talking about, there is no way that could happen.
First of all, this really depends on where you are. In engineering fields there is a large balance of political viewpoints. I'd say the conservatives may out number the liberals where I work. (Large public college.) Where I did my undergraduate the guy with the nick-name "the liberal" was a Republican. My freshman year I debated for the Dems on the radio, because they couldn't find anyone else who was planning on voting for a Dem and willing to admit it.
But the real issue is still different. In college there is still a very strong bit of peer preasure to "belong". Not as strong as High School, but still there. This is enforced by people (loudly) complaining about folks they disagree with. So all opinions tend to be shot down. As conserative opinions are usually in the minority in liberal arts colleges, they tend to have more shots taken at them than the liberal opinions do....
Re:Best examples of heresy I can think of
on
What You Can't Say
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· Score: 1
I'd like evidence other than somone's blog. He sites newspapers with no dates, bylines, or page numbers... The other articles are just as vague. No names, nothing....
I've been involved in arguments like this (but directed at Scientology). When people have actual proof, or even actual newspaper articles, they clearly cite them. When they are making stuff up they usually say things like "in the New York Times in October."
I don't think it's the schools trying to hold them down as much as it's the parents who don't want to give their kids an ounce of independence before their 18th birthday, even when many show it by the time they are 10.
As a college teacher who has had a number of 16 year olds and younger as my advisees (and even a 9 year old as a student in a college class!) I can say that such students are often not mature enough for college. I can think of one who did really well, and two or three who were, I think, worse off for being in college at that age (although they all did at least average in the classroom).
For whatever reason I was having problems downloading the slide show from my home computer, though I had no problem from work. I've mirrored it if anyone wants to look at it.
It is a SIMD machine. It looks like they've put some real thought into the software, which is the hard part in something like this. The debugger certainly looks pretty.
The ported C code on slide 13 is a bit scary. The intermediate language appears to rely on the compiler to distribute the workload to the PEs (otherwise why is the loop the same in both.) I'd much prefer the intermediate language give you complete control of the PEs rather than letting the compiler do it for you.
It does look like there are actual dies out there. Maybe not functional, but built. Also, it looks like the PE communication is more limited than I'd like. There are only two communcation ports. I'd expect four if they want this architecture to scale past 64 PEs.
Other comments.
"multi-treaded" is as close to a false description as you can get. Only one thread (instruction stream) runs at a time. Sure, you get 64 data streams but that is SIMD, not MT.
The peak GFLOPS numbers are actually really really poor compared to a P4. 25 vs. 12? And while both are much higher than actually achievable on real programs, the P4 is probably easier to come close on.
64 PEs on chip? It looks like there only 12 million logic transistors. Which after the main core means that only slightly more than 100,000 transistors are spent per PE. I'd really expect to see a whole lot more logic transistors. The Itanium 2 (which uses a newer process) has about 75 million logic transistors ((see here). Doing the same here would give space for more than 256 PEs.
Given the above issues I don't think this thing is going to take off anytime soon for "super computer" purposes. The big win is high FLOPS per Watt, which isn't all that important for SCs (well not that important). As part of a graphics processor or DSP I could see potential. I still think that in a few years (say 5 to 10) this type of thing will be a coprossesor on a fair number of those Linux clusters used for scientific computing. But this one isn't there yet.
I've seen people toss around $16,000 as a price point, but I can't find that anywhere. I assume I'm missing something obvious. At that price it is useless. It needs to be under $1,000, and really wants to be a lot cheaper than that to be interesting.
Don't have the numbers, but I do know we aren't even close to them. It was something around 10^-18 Watts for a 32 bit add (I could be off by a huge amount but it was very very small). I remember thinking "that isn't going to be important for a long long time."
For the last 10 years or so I've been thinking about how to do just this. What I'm 99% sure they are doing is SIMD on a massive scale. The Maspar (and especially the Maspar-2) were computers along this line.
The basic idea is to have lots of "processing elements" that are basically ALUs with a bit of additional smarts (for branches mainly). Each PE has its own memory. The main processor (probably not the PC CPU) tells each PE what to do. Thus the Single Instruction Multiple Data. Things are a bit more complex then this (branches, pointers, and a few other things cause some problems.) but not too much worse. PE to PE communication is also interesting (the Maspar was a toroid as I recall).
The two basic problems with this type of a design are:
You either need a special programming language (and someone who understands the language and understands the problem really well) or a very very good compiler to get anything out of it.
The application range is quite limited. Not as limited as supercomputer people seem to think (I mean I've written genetic algorithm code for the Maspar that scales wonderfully.) but still quite limited.
There are also a huge number of other problems. Caches don't generally do a darn thing for massive SIMD computers (if one processing element misses, they all do.) The memory usually has two types of pointers (one to the PE memory and one to global memory).
I may contact the company to see if they want to hire a short-term consultant. hummm.... Have PhD will travel?
Secondly, fvwm is simply a windowing system. The Redhat/Gnome thing I have is a full-fledged GUI where the GUI handles nearly everything (printers, system settings, sound, etc.) rather than using config files.
I've been a Unix user for around 12 years and a Linux user for about 3. Something wacky happened to my Debian set-up so they re-installed the now standard (here) RedHat. During this process I learned (again) about the cost of switching over.
First of all, it looks like fvmw2, which I've been using for years isn't a standard rpm supported by the RedHat folks. So I moved to gnome, something I'd been planning for a while. Wow, what a nasty thing. You name it, it didn't work. Printing was a mess (it wouldn't change the default printer and it really really hated the 103 printers in the printcap file.) I couldn't figure out how to set things (like turn off the system beep from the terminal) and found nasty hacks to get around them. It refuses to use my good sound card and instead uses the on-board card. Etc. etc. etc.
My point? I'm still trying to figure out which of these statements is true (may be more than one):
Attempts to make linux GUI driven is doomed to failure.
Gnome (at least as supplied by Redhat) is has serious problems. (If it is going to ignore me when I set a default printer, an error message would be nice!)
I've had OS crashes on my XP box (well hangs that I need to power cycle) fairly often. Mostly Mozilla (I'm still running 1.0) and an old DOS application (CharGen for 3.0 D&D). I first got this machine a few weeks after XP came out and for months it would crash many times a day. Also the clock was always wrong (but the clock in cygwin would be right.)
After many updates and installing the first service pack things got much better. But I still have Mozilla crash once a week and it hangs the box once a month. Other vendor installed software (itouch) crashes on a weekly basis, but that never harms anything. Finally I have to reboot every now and again as it seems to lose track of the wireless network. Sometimes plugging and unplugging the wireless USB device solves the problem, sometimes it needs a reboot.
All told my Linux box at work is a lot more stable.
Actually, "The Wire" on HBO has a character like this. She is a lesbian, and it is getting a fair amount of attention this season. But the "lesbian sub-plot" is more about domestic relationships than anything else.
I work in the maths department of a University, and yes.. it's very much like this. We sit around all day in small groups, staring at blackboards, "battling with proofs". Just like in that wonderful movie with the violent australian, "A Beautiful Mind".
No.
I'm a computer scientist who does a bit of theory. By far the very best, most enjoyable and most rewarding thing I've done as a graduate student is work on proofs. Usually in small groups, often on a blackboard (although I prefer having colors so a white board is much prefered). There is a fair amount of reading involved but it can be fun...
Nowdays I teach, which I enjoy, but occasionally do some math where all I do is sit around and think. Now if I could just find someone to do the write-ups (which I hate). I don't do anything horribly insightful (although some of it has been published) but it is fun!
The law prohibits verbatim copying of copyrighted materials.
Not always. When working on a program and taking contributions from others the rule of thumb is that if it is less than 1 page don't worry about it too much. Fair use and the like protect you. It is like quoting from a book.
Not saying 80 lines isn't enough for a court to rule infringment but the number of lines does matter.
giga = 10^9, and an 80 GB hard drive has 80 x 10^9 (10 billion) bytes. This is standard notation that has been in use for at least a hundred years.
Actually, hard drives changed from using 2^20 for "megabyte" to using 10^6 in about 1992 as I recall.
This is standard even in most other parts of computing (anything engineering-oriented especially). For example, that 128kbps mp3 you downloaded is 128000 bits/second, not 128*1024 bits/second.
DRAM is still measured as a base 2 number as is flash, ROMs, and other memory devices. As far as I know only hard drives uses the base 10 value. (What do CD-ROMs use?)
As a further note, the official terms for the base 2 and base 10 values were approved in '98.
While a game (nethack) is only the basis for the project, games do lend themselves to fun algorithm problems. In general being a computer gamer doesn't help being a programmer all that much, but those people tend to be more modivated and excited about programming.
In a word, no. The joy of RSA is that the Xbox has a key (the public key) which can be used to decript the message, but can't to used to encript the message (for which you need the private key). A different key is needed for that. Now, if you could factor the public key you could recreate the private key.
Hope that helps (and is right!)
Re:Dichotomy of story type splits Trek fans
on
Critics Pan Nemesis
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· Score: 1
Nice points. How about having sole rights for 15 years, and then only commerical rights for something like 25 or 30 years? So PG could use the text at 15, but no one could sell the work, other than the author, for 25-30 years?
Slashdot Mirror
Finally, if you really do believe this, you'd have to believe that some 1000 people got a warning and haven't shared it over the last 2 years. I don't care what group you are talking about, there is no way that could happen.
First of all, this really depends on where you are. In engineering fields there is a large balance of political viewpoints. I'd say the conservatives may out number the liberals where I work. (Large public college.) Where I did my undergraduate the guy with the nick-name "the liberal" was a Republican. My freshman year I debated for the Dems on the radio, because they couldn't find anyone else who was planning on voting for a Dem and willing to admit it.
But the real issue is still different. In college there is still a very strong bit of peer preasure to "belong". Not as strong as High School, but still there. This is enforced by people (loudly) complaining about folks they disagree with. So all opinions tend to be shot down. As conserative opinions are usually in the minority in liberal arts colleges, they tend to have more shots taken at them than the liberal opinions do....
I'd like evidence other than somone's blog. He sites newspapers with no dates, bylines, or page numbers... The other articles are just as vague. No names, nothing....
I've been involved in arguments like this (but directed at Scientology). When people have actual proof, or even actual newspaper articles, they clearly cite them. When they are making stuff up they usually say things like "in the New York Times in October."
Mark
As a college teacher who has had a number of 16 year olds and younger as my advisees (and even a 9 year old as a student in a college class!) I can say that such students are often not mature enough for college. I can think of one who did really well, and two or three who were, I think, worse off for being in college at that age (although they all did at least average in the classroom).
Really? I didn't see anything about such special hardware. Could you point it out to me?
thanks.
Mark
It is a SIMD machine. It looks like they've put some real thought into the software, which is the hard part in something like this. The debugger certainly looks pretty.
The ported C code on slide 13 is a bit scary. The intermediate language appears to rely on the compiler to distribute the workload to the PEs (otherwise why is the loop the same in both.) I'd much prefer the intermediate language give you complete control of the PEs rather than letting the compiler do it for you.
It does look like there are actual dies out there. Maybe not functional, but built. Also, it looks like the PE communication is more limited than I'd like. There are only two communcation ports. I'd expect four if they want this architecture to scale past 64 PEs.
Other comments.
Given the above issues I don't think this thing is going to take off anytime soon for "super computer" purposes. The big win is high FLOPS per Watt, which isn't all that important for SCs (well not that important). As part of a graphics processor or DSP I could see potential. I still think that in a few years (say 5 to 10) this type of thing will be a coprossesor on a fair number of those Linux clusters used for scientific computing. But this one isn't there yet.
I've seen people toss around $16,000 as a price point, but I can't find that anywhere. I assume I'm missing something obvious. At that price it is useless. It needs to be under $1,000, and really wants to be a lot cheaper than that to be interesting.
Don't have the numbers, but I do know we aren't even close to them. It was something around 10^-18 Watts for a 32 bit add (I could be off by a huge amount but it was very very small). I remember thinking "that isn't going to be important for a long long time."
I couldn't find any number on the web.
Mark
The basic idea is to have lots of "processing elements" that are basically ALUs with a bit of additional smarts (for branches mainly). Each PE has its own memory. The main processor (probably not the PC CPU) tells each PE what to do. Thus the Single Instruction Multiple Data. Things are a bit more complex then this (branches, pointers, and a few other things cause some problems.) but not too much worse. PE to PE communication is also interesting (the Maspar was a toroid as I recall).
The two basic problems with this type of a design are:
There are also a huge number of other problems. Caches don't generally do a darn thing for massive SIMD computers (if one processing element misses, they all do.) The memory usually has two types of pointers (one to the PE memory and one to global memory). I may contact the company to see if they want to hire a short-term consultant. hummm.... Have PhD will travel?
This needs to be a slashdot poll!
"Best SCO headline that wasn't"
Ok, I'll bite
First of all, I obviously meant fvwm2.
Secondly, fvwm is simply a windowing system. The Redhat/Gnome thing I have is a full-fledged GUI where the GUI handles nearly everything (printers, system settings, sound, etc.) rather than using config files.
Sorry I was less than 100% clear.
First of all, it looks like fvmw2, which I've been using for years isn't a standard rpm supported by the RedHat folks. So I moved to gnome, something I'd been planning for a while. Wow, what a nasty thing. You name it, it didn't work. Printing was a mess (it wouldn't change the default printer and it really really hated the 103 printers in the printcap file.) I couldn't figure out how to set things (like turn off the system beep from the terminal) and found nasty hacks to get around them. It refuses to use my good sound card and instead uses the on-board card. Etc. etc. etc.
My point? I'm still trying to figure out which of these statements is true (may be more than one):
5 years is even more scary
I've had OS crashes on my XP box (well hangs that I need to power cycle) fairly often. Mostly Mozilla (I'm still running 1.0) and an old DOS application (CharGen for 3.0 D&D). I first got this machine a few weeks after XP came out and for months it would crash many times a day. Also the clock was always wrong (but the clock in cygwin would be right.)
After many updates and installing the first service pack things got much better. But I still have Mozilla crash once a week and it hangs the box once a month. Other vendor installed software (itouch) crashes on a weekly basis, but that never harms anything. Finally I have to reboot every now and again as it seems to lose track of the wireless network. Sometimes plugging and unplugging the wireless USB device solves the problem, sometimes it needs a reboot.
All told my Linux box at work is a lot more stable.
Thanks, but in this context "it's" is a contraction for "it is."
:-)
If you are going to be a grammar-nazi at least be good at it.
Actually, "The Wire" on HBO has a character like this. She is a lesbian, and it is getting a fair amount of attention this season. But the "lesbian sub-plot" is more about domestic relationships than anything else.
Nowdays I teach, which I enjoy, but occasionally do some math where all I do is sit around and think. Now if I could just find someone to do the write-ups (which I hate). I don't do anything horribly insightful (although some of it has been published) but it is fun!
The law prohibits verbatim copying of copyrighted materials.
Not always. When working on a program and taking contributions from others the rule of thumb is that if it is less than 1 page don't worry about it too much. Fair use and the like protect you. It is like quoting from a book.
Not saying 80 lines isn't enough for a court to rule infringment but the number of lines does matter.
Actually, hard drives changed from using 2^20 for "megabyte" to using 10^6 in about 1992 as I recall.
DRAM is still measured as a base 2 number as is flash, ROMs, and other memory devices. As far as I know only hard drives uses the base 10 value. (What do CD-ROMs use?)
As a further note, the official terms for the base 2 and base 10 values were approved in '98.
Mark Brehob
While a game (nethack) is only the basis for the project, games do lend themselves to fun algorithm problems. In general being a computer gamer doesn't help being a programmer all that much, but those people tend to be more modivated and excited about programming.
Warning: IANAC - I am not a cryptographer.
In a word, no. The joy of RSA is that the Xbox has a key (the public key) which can be used to decript the message, but can't to used to encript the message (for which you need the private key). A different key is needed for that. Now, if you could factor the public key you could recreate the private key.
Hope that helps (and is right!)
Voyager had a plot?
I'm thinking it might be a good idea to archive those sites which may be going away soon.
Workable?