These ITAP (formerly PUCC) clusters are in the Math buidling. You're thinking of some of the ECE clusers in the MSEE machine room and in MSEE214. We still have those too, but they're limited to ECE research use (i.e., me!).
The guy who ran the cluster in Civil (Moffett, quoted in the article) moved over to ITAP and helped start this thing about 1.5 years ago or so.
As far as I know, the donation from Sun had nothing to do with creating this cluster--that's just media spin. It may have something to do with growing it or new applications, but the cluster has been around for a while. It was created to help offload work from the IBM SP, which had a multi-week wait for CPU time until they brought the recycled machines online.
The idea is pretty solid though. Purdue gets rid of computer lab machines every 2-3 years, and rather than sending them off to salvage (literally a dump), they stick them in a machine room and use Condor/PBS to schedule jobs. Very useful to those of us grad students who need a lot of CPU throughput to do work. And believe me, a lot more than just rendering projects is going on--folks from many departments use these things.
And since the university has it's own power plant, it doesn't have to pay retail prices for the elctricity that runs them (or anything else).
For those who are stat-hungry, this system currently has about 700 total CPUs on the main system, all Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs. There's also 200 Athlons, but they're technically owned by somebody else (i.e., they're not recycled). As of right now, the 1-minute load on the main system 893 (we're pretty busy right now). There are 598 jobs awaiting CPUs. I've personally run 250 jobs today, and I'll be kicking of another 200 in about an hour (big research deadline soon).
There are several hundred more machines available for use, but they are not up yet due to lack of floor space, cooling capacity, network connections, and/or power. Much to the annoyance of those that could really use more compute time.
When complaining to these folks, realize they fall into two categories.
Some of them are libertarians or strict constitutionalists who vote against anything that isn't explicitly written in the Constitution. I kind of respect those guys for that; the DNC list can be managed very well at the state level, like here in IN.
The others were either bought by telemarketers or represent telemarketer districts. Since they think protecting a few low-paying jobs is more important than protecting everyone's privacy at home, they certainly deserve a host of complaints.
There's other monopoly-style utilities, such as electric, water, and maybe even cable that don't have as many stupid taxes tacked on.
We have the flat 3% federal phone tax, imposed during the Spanish-American War as a *luxury* tax. I hardly think phones are a luxury any more.
We have the Al Gore Tax (Universal Service Charge), ostensibly to provide internet service to schools and phones the "poor" or those in rural areas. That's 9-15% for most people Yet something like 85%+ of public schools have internet access. I have no idea how poor you have to be to get some of this money, but it must be poorer than undergrads or grad students with no income, because I know of no students getting relief. As for rural areas, they were all wired 50+ years ago, and none of my relatives living on farms more than 20 miles from the nearest town get any relief either.
Then we have the 911 tax, which sort of makes sense. But you would think that would come out of city funds paid by sales/property/income taxes. After all, what about the sales tax I already pay on my phone bill?
Then we have the "number portability" fee, which I've been paying for years on both cell and landline, yet when I ask Sprint/Verizon if my number is portable, they say no.
And now we have the "carrier cost recovery charge," which telcos are tacking on to cover other "regulatory" burdens.
And more.
It's ridiculous. Why is a basic service like voice comm targeted for so many taxes?
> The airlines, of course, have dodged responsibility for the lax security they > provided which enabled 9/11
Lax security had nothing to do with 9/11; not a single prohibted item made it through that day. 9/11 occurred because we were'nt prepared for nontraditional hijackings, crews were trained to surrender to hijackers, and the USA did not (and does not) adequately deter Islamic wackos from killing USA civilians.
Taking away pocket knives and knitting needles is a feel-good measure by politicians to satisfy the sheeple.
I have a sneaking hunch that the guy who thought this up has never driven through some of the territories he wants to connect.
If he's serious, a prerequisite for managing this project should be a drive through I-70 in Kansas, I-70 and I-15 in Utah (I-70 in Utah has the longest stretch of Interstate with no services, 104 miles from Salina to Green River), and the mountains of I-70 in Colorado. Or maybe the I-80 corridor instead.
How are underfunded volunteers going to put a high-bandwidth connection through these areas?
Polite and responsive, absolutely. Cowering in fear, no way.
I would never discuss philosophy of civil liberties with an on-duty screener; it's not their job and I direct that to my congresscritter. But I see nothing wrong with asking to see a supervisor if a misguided screener tries to take away a non-prohibited item. If that's grounds for detention and an orange suit, so be it. (At least in the pre-TSA days, it may have been. A reporter was
detained in LA for taking photographs.)
That said, I've had a number of positive experiences with screeners. Even a few lighthearted chats about me winning some sort of award for "most electronics." Apparently, she thought a laptop, spare battery, power brick, floppy drive, wireless card, cell phone, alarm clock, walkman, and gps constituded "a lot." Who knew?:) But to her credit, she thoroughly screened my bag by hand while keeping it in my line of sight in less than 2 minutes, and she had me on my way. Competence is a great thing when it happens!
I carry a tiny little GPS unit (etrex legend) in my carry-on whenever I travel, primarily for navigation and/or hiking at destination but also for geek-entertainment. It's about the size of my cell phone.
TSA Security has never bothered me about it or ever even seemed to notice it. The day some idiot tries to take it away will be the day I miss my flight and he has a long meeting with me and his supervisor.
I've discreetly used it on a handful of flights without ever asking permission. (It's kind of fun to identify a specific town/road/mountain that you want to see from the air.) I've never flaunted it in front of flight crews, but not really hidden it either. (I've only gotten a signal lock if holding it directly to the window or on the armrest of the window seat.)
If asked to turn it off, I would. Usually, it just garners a bit of interest from nearby passengers. I think most people assume it's a gameboy of some sort.
They've done a very good job making the poor flight attendants *believe* that cell phones are a threat to safety or whatever. I'm not suprised the poor woman was terrified.
The USA regs seem to be that if the door is closed, the phones must be off unless the captain specifically says otherwise. A few months ago, I'm sitting on a flight in Chicago, door closed, but sitting at the gate for a long time due to a legit mechanical problem (oil leak in starboard engine). The plane is clearly not going anywhere. Yet, the attendants keep coming on the PA every few minutes to sternly remind people that the door is closed and cell phones can't be used.
I chatted with the crew a bit after everyone disembarked and pointed out that people were just trying to tell their coworkers and family they would be late and that they should back off a bit. They seemed slightly sympathetic, but gave the usual, common-sense not allowed, "ve ver folloving orderz" excuse that regs prohibit cell phones when the door is closed.
It's this sort of thing that causes air rage. I didn't even need to call anyone, and it made me mad to see the people around me mistreated.
The problem for the cable co's is that the internet was/is based on the "dumb network, smart device" model where all the network does is push data across wires and the connected devices do all of the computing, etc.. That fundamental paradigm doesn't mesh well with their business plan which has consumers paying extra $ for each "device" (tv, fridge, toaster, computer, etc.) and corresponding services we hook up to the network. NAT is a prime example of how the "dumb" network neither sees nor cares what is behind the data it moves.
Instead of what they want, big cable seems to be stuck with a scheme where all they can really sell is bandwidth, not connections. That's not what they want because tacking on more fees for each toaster consumers add costs the cable co. much less than providing X additional gigabytes/month of bandwidth for the same additional fee.
In addition to spewing porn (and popup windows), the domain also has a link where you can basically "bid" (offers less than $500 explicitly ignored) for the domain.
Looks like bad faith to me.
If someone registered the.org of my university's.edu and did this sort of thing, I'm sure the university would either 1) cave in and buy the domain or 2) sue their bad faith pants off. This registration seems to serve no purpose other than to frustrate the previous owner of the domain and/or collect a high price for squatting.
A simple solution for me is to have an *extremely* short answering machine message: "Please leave a message at the tone" said very quickly. My answering machine message is so short that the tele-spamming autodialiers don't recognize it as a machine and go ahead and connect to the telemarketer instead of disconnecting.
For a few months the result was a lot of messages saying "Hello . . . Hello . . . Are you there?" But the telemarketers then think it is a "broken" line, take the number off the list, and soon there are fewer telemarketers.
Simple and free.
Some details on this sort of thing are at http://www.scn.org/~bk269/bug.html
The first such attack in my logs was at 1333 GMT (0833 CDT). All attacks are within my class B so far (206.230). There seem to be a few hundred of them so far, and the DSL line I share with the rest of my apartment building is getting a bit sluggish.
Another machine I have on another class B (128.46) started getting hit around the same time, but not all of its attacks are from within the subnet.
Slashdot Mirror
These ITAP (formerly PUCC) clusters are in the Math buidling. You're thinking of some of the ECE clusers in the MSEE machine room and in MSEE214. We still have those too, but they're limited to ECE research use (i.e., me!).
The guy who ran the cluster in Civil (Moffett, quoted in the article) moved over to ITAP and helped start this thing about 1.5 years ago or so.
As far as I know, the donation from Sun had nothing to do with creating this cluster--that's just media spin. It may have something to do with growing it or new applications, but the cluster has been around for a while. It was created to help offload work from the IBM SP, which had a multi-week wait for CPU time until they brought the recycled machines online.
The idea is pretty solid though. Purdue gets rid of computer lab machines every 2-3 years, and rather than sending them off to salvage (literally a dump), they stick them in a machine room and use Condor/PBS to schedule jobs. Very useful to those of us grad students who need a lot of CPU throughput to do work. And believe me, a lot more than just rendering projects is going on--folks from many departments use these things.
And since the university has it's own power plant, it doesn't have to pay retail prices for the elctricity that runs them (or anything else).
For those who are stat-hungry, this system currently has about 700 total CPUs on the main system, all Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs. There's also 200 Athlons, but they're technically owned by somebody else (i.e., they're not recycled). As of right now, the 1-minute load on the main system 893 (we're pretty busy right now). There are 598 jobs awaiting CPUs. I've personally run 250 jobs today, and I'll be kicking of another 200 in about an hour (big research deadline soon).
There are several hundred more machines available for use, but they are not up yet due to lack of floor space, cooling capacity, network connections, and/or power. Much to the annoyance of those that could really use more compute time.
When complaining to these folks, realize they fall into two categories.
Some of them are libertarians or strict constitutionalists who vote against anything that isn't explicitly written in the Constitution. I kind of respect those guys for that; the DNC list can be managed very well at the state level, like here in IN.
The others were either bought by telemarketers or represent telemarketer districts. Since they think protecting a few low-paying jobs is more important than protecting everyone's privacy at home, they certainly deserve a host of complaints.
Seriously.
There's other monopoly-style utilities, such as electric, water, and maybe even cable that don't have as many stupid taxes tacked on.
We have the flat 3% federal phone tax, imposed during the Spanish-American War as a *luxury* tax. I hardly think phones are a luxury any more.
We have the Al Gore Tax (Universal Service Charge), ostensibly to provide internet service to schools and phones the "poor" or those in rural areas. That's 9-15% for most people Yet something like 85%+ of public schools have internet access. I have no idea how poor you have to be to get some of this money, but it must be poorer than undergrads or grad students with no income, because I know of no students getting relief. As for rural areas, they were all wired 50+ years ago, and none of my relatives living on farms more than 20 miles from the nearest town get any relief either.
Then we have the 911 tax, which sort of makes sense. But you would think that would come out of city funds paid by sales/property/income taxes. After all, what about the sales tax I already pay on my phone bill?
Then we have the "number portability" fee, which I've been paying for years on both cell and landline, yet when I ask Sprint/Verizon if my number is portable, they say no.
And now we have the "carrier cost recovery charge," which telcos are tacking on to cover other "regulatory" burdens.
And more.
It's ridiculous. Why is a basic service like voice comm targeted for so many taxes?
> The airlines, of course, have dodged responsibility for the lax security they
> provided which enabled 9/11
Lax security had nothing to do with 9/11; not a single prohibted item made it through that day. 9/11 occurred because we were'nt prepared for nontraditional hijackings, crews were trained to surrender to hijackers, and the USA did not (and does not) adequately deter Islamic wackos from killing USA civilians.
Taking away pocket knives and knitting needles is a feel-good measure by politicians to satisfy the sheeple.
I have a sneaking hunch that the guy who thought this up has never driven through some of the territories he wants to connect.
If he's serious, a prerequisite for managing this project should be a drive through I-70 in Kansas, I-70 and I-15 in Utah (I-70 in Utah has the longest stretch of Interstate with no services, 104 miles from Salina to Green River), and the mountains of I-70 in Colorado. Or maybe the I-80 corridor instead.
How are underfunded volunteers going to put a high-bandwidth connection through these areas?
I would never discuss philosophy of civil liberties with an on-duty screener; it's not their job and I direct that to my congresscritter. But I see nothing wrong with asking to see a supervisor if a misguided screener tries to take away a non-prohibited item. If that's grounds for detention and an orange suit, so be it. (At least in the pre-TSA days, it may have been. A reporter was detained in LA for taking photographs.)
That said, I've had a number of positive experiences with screeners. Even a few lighthearted chats about me winning some sort of award for "most electronics." Apparently, she thought a laptop, spare battery, power brick, floppy drive, wireless card, cell phone, alarm clock, walkman, and gps constituded "a lot." Who knew? :) But to her credit, she thoroughly screened my bag by hand while keeping it in my line of sight in less than 2 minutes, and she had me on my way. Competence is a great thing when it happens!
mdp
I carry a tiny little GPS unit (etrex legend) in my carry-on whenever I travel, primarily for navigation and/or hiking at destination but also for geek-entertainment. It's about the size of my cell phone.
TSA Security has never bothered me about it or ever even seemed to notice it. The day some idiot tries to take it away will be the day I miss my flight and he has a long meeting with me and his supervisor.
I've discreetly used it on a handful of flights without ever asking permission. (It's kind of fun to identify a specific town/road/mountain that you want to see from the air.) I've never flaunted it in front of flight crews, but not really hidden it either. (I've only gotten a signal lock if holding it directly to the window or on the armrest of the window seat.)
If asked to turn it off, I would. Usually, it just garners a bit of interest from nearby passengers. I think most people assume it's a gameboy of some sort.
They've done a very good job making the poor flight attendants *believe* that cell phones are a threat to safety or whatever. I'm not suprised the poor woman was terrified.
The USA regs seem to be that if the door is closed, the phones must be off unless the captain specifically says otherwise. A few months ago, I'm sitting on a flight in Chicago, door closed, but sitting at the gate for a long time due to a legit mechanical problem (oil leak in starboard engine). The plane is clearly not going anywhere. Yet, the attendants keep coming on the PA every few minutes to sternly remind people that the door is closed and cell phones can't be used.
I chatted with the crew a bit after everyone disembarked and pointed out that people were just trying to tell their coworkers and family they would be late and that they should back off a bit. They seemed slightly sympathetic, but gave the usual, common-sense not allowed, "ve ver folloving orderz" excuse that regs prohibit cell phones when the door is closed.
It's this sort of thing that causes air rage. I didn't even need to call anyone, and it made me mad to see the people around me mistreated.
mdp
The problem for the cable co's is that the internet was/is based on the "dumb network, smart device" model where all the network does is push data across wires and the connected devices do all of the computing, etc.. That fundamental paradigm doesn't mesh well with their business plan which has consumers paying extra $ for each "device" (tv, fridge, toaster, computer, etc.) and corresponding services we hook up to the network. NAT is a prime example of how the "dumb" network neither sees nor cares what is behind the data it moves.
Instead of what they want, big cable seems to be stuck with a scheme where all they can really sell is bandwidth, not connections. That's not what they want because tacking on more fees for each toaster consumers add costs the cable co. much less than providing X additional gigabytes/month of bandwidth for the same additional fee.
--mdp
In addition to spewing porn (and popup windows), the domain also has a link where you can basically "bid" (offers less than $500 explicitly ignored) for the domain.
.org of my university's .edu and did this sort of thing, I'm sure the university would either 1) cave in and buy the domain or 2) sue their bad faith pants off. This registration seems to serve no purpose other than to frustrate the previous owner of the domain and/or collect a high price for squatting.
Looks like bad faith to me.
If someone registered the
--mdp
A simple solution for me is to have an *extremely* short answering machine message: "Please leave a message at the tone" said very quickly. My answering machine message is so short that the tele-spamming autodialiers don't recognize it as a machine and go ahead and connect to the telemarketer instead of disconnecting.
For a few months the result was a lot of messages saying "Hello . . . Hello . . . Are you there?" But the telemarketers then think it is a "broken" line, take the number off the list, and soon there are fewer telemarketers.
Simple and free.
Some details on this sort of thing are at http://www.scn.org/~bk269/bug.html
--mdp
The first such attack in my logs was at 1333 GMT (0833 CDT). All attacks are within my class B so far (206.230). There seem to be a few hundred of them so far, and the DSL line I share with the rest of my apartment building is getting a bit sluggish.
Another machine I have on another class B (128.46) started getting hit around the same time, but not all of its attacks are from within the subnet.
--mdp
It's been a while since I've lived in Dayton,OH, but I still think they have the semiannual "Computerfest." One of them is normally in late August.
They also have "Hamvention" in Dayton which is similar but with a focus toward Ham radio.
Both events are usualy at Hara Arena.