An even longer standing goal is to be able to run faster processors. If the new heat sink enables that at the same operating cost, it will sell even at $100.
On a side note, the increasing efficiency of machines has reduced hiring. A more efficient heat sink makes it that much cost-effective to jam multiprocessing computers into every nook, thus taking over activities that people used to do. As the saying goes the implications are enormous.
Well, ok, technically there's not much they can get from you if you clam up. Passwords are not that easy to remember. You can probably "forget" and that will be the end of it. You may as well forget if the machine is taken away.
Besides, if you keep typing the wrong password, either the system will lock you out or you can claim malfunction.
Under a lie detector test, you can claim a new password is the password. Forgot to inform the computer that it's the new password? It's not your fault the computer isn't smart enough to update itself. You told the truth.
If programmers are so stupid that looking at their code elicits comments that they need to write code correctly, then they need more than a code review. They need supervision.
Other than that, you people have way more time on your hands than I do.
rd
Now there's a segue. One of the learning techniques in machine learning is called "supervised learning" where the machine is trained on a specific data set, and the desired machine action is known in advance. The idea is to be able to tell if the machine is learning correctly.
The code review, in my opinion, is a method to teach certain aspects of writing code. The ultimate purpose of the code is to satisfy the requirements for the code, but this achievement can be made in many bad ways. The code reviewer might not know better than the code reviewee, but if the coder feels there is an opportunity to learn better coding, then the coder may feel less resistant to a code review.
Sometimes coders are under pressure to rush their work. The code is likely not the best, and a code review would not add value unless the reviewer can provide instruction on how to produce a quantum improvement jump under the same circumstances.
The aspirations of these supercomputer builders knows no bounds. They build an 8 petaflop system, and think the computer is just K. 80 petaflops will probably just be OK, and 800 might be A-OK.
I Think the problem is that "Johnny" doesn't like programming. Why fix that?
I've programmed for a long time, and I know that programming really isn't a fun thing to do. Sometimes I have to call functions that have strange side effects or don't actually do everything that is advertised in documentation.
A program in the simplistic von Neumann machine is a sequence of steps. Easy enough to teach. A program in the modern computer is an unpredictable beast talking to third party systems and involves flaky workarounds. That sounds like a real video game, but why make it a career choice? If Johnny wants win the game, he might take a hint from a chess player, steeped in the art of patience: "wait for the software industry to make life easier for programmers and in the meantime find something better to do."
One wonders if he was moving around pretty frequently, and this just happened to be where they caught up with him, or if a mansion outside the capital is actually a good-enough hiding spot
Not a bad hidey hole, provided you actually live the lifestyle. Can't be living like he's in a cave in the burbs.
I mean, why bother living in a small apartment downtown when I can get a sprawling, waste of space out in the 'burbs, and drive 20 miles each way?
Driving where?? To work? To balance the equation, cancel the conspicuous consumption, cancel the demand, cancel the work, and the result is more unemployment. So we have the root of the problem - too many people due to too much sex. What the government really wants is to meter your sex life, but that's directly correlated to vehicular mileage. Can the whole idea be this stupid?
A smart way to improve the economy would be to make SPACIOUS housing affordable, thereby encouraging families and shopping. The financial system let people lose their heads and pay more than they could earn, even for squishy little houses, which rapidly go back under water and sit in foreclosure. The government needs to expedite the process for builders to put up multi-family dwellings with thousands of square feet per family so that people don't have to waste time and energy driving. Multi-family units need less land, and built in volume may be far more affordable. It's not the quick fix desired before election day, but higher fuel prices are already a distance tax, and that's solving more problems than I can shake a stick at.
If government is looking for a way to stimulate, support the development of neighborhoods composed of high-rise multi-family units that appeal to the wealthy but average people can afford.
Any truly intelligent life would've detected us and fled
The tragic truth may take on a couple of possible forms:
- Intelligent life forms typically evolve to be just like us. The conditions favoring life and evolution in all likelihood culminates in intelligent primates. Out of the chaos of the second law of thermodynamics, societies of intelligentsia will wind up with all our shortcomings. We can't trust them, and they can't trust us. Hell, we can't trust us.
- When we finally get face time with alien intelligence, it might not be intelligent life. Get off my lawn.
cheap components that seem to last *just* long enough to get the laptop past the warranty period
With laptop prices at phenomenally lows relative to the performance specs what do you expect?
Buy the fastest you can find from a brand that really tries to impress with high performance for low cost rather than a big name, as they will gladly hose you. The key is to buy the highest end from the eager-to-please manufacturer, even if it costs a few hundred more because they will ensure the best quality. The midrange machines from the same company tend to be really crappy because they don't think those machines would attract much market share due to the lack of brand recognition.
It worked for me. If I tried to buy a similarly powerful machine from HP, it would have cost about $1000 more, and I would have spent all my time being aggravated. The highest priced machines from the big names not only are overpriced, but they are so overpriced that the quality is not assured because sales are actually expected to be low. When I first laid eyes on an HP Envy laptop, it was practically double the price of most performance laptops, and aside from being the early bird with a Core i7 offering, there was nothing really special. The usability of a laptop of such a price was iffy. It was really hot and pressing the trackpad to drag didn't feel entirely pleasant. Given the name of Envy, I definitely expected something that would set the tone but all I found was a hard sell. The one thing I appreciated was that HP was making some effort to improve ergonomics, a move that was prodded by Apple. Apple is an example of a company that is highly reputation conscious so quality and longevity matter.
But that would only really work if the above-mentioned oil producing states basically agreed not to sell to anyone else, thus removing themselves from the global oil market. I can't imagine the oil companies in those countries wanting to do that, nor can I imagine the governments, who profit from it as well, cutting themselves off at the knees just so you can get cheap prices at the pump.
Irrefutable? Consider the scenario that the rest of the world is running low on oil the way China believes the rest of the world is being depleted of rare earth metals, it would become a geographical matter. Consumption within sovereign borders takes priority over worldwide sales. If anything is exported, it would be value-added products rather than the raw stuff, in short, PROFIT!.
Far be it from me to say whether Wikileaks is a great fount of truth. Smoke and fire typically exist in close proximity, but for decades we have been exhorted to read the writing on the wall. A day is fast approaching that the well will run dry. Do lemmings fall off a cliff because the ones at the back don't have anyone telling them "The precipice is nigh" or "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it... Oh it's not built"?
In the light of planning to switch to alternative fuels it's shocking to see how pervasive oil is in society. A prolonged uptick in gasoline prices would overturn the vast majority of lifestyles, such is the complacency. And it's that very complacency that has allowed Wikileaks to cause such a cafuffle. In spite of the informedness that we feel with the Internet, the changes in many of our lives has hardly been extraordinary.
Despite lurches in prices of housing, food, and fuel, most people have allowed the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay to rise into the stratosphere. Now Wikileaks is continually alerting the masses to brace themselves for troublesome times, and my suggestion to these masses is to go to your bosses and demand pay hikes, but in the long run also become business owners or at the very least more qualified to be worthy of higher responsibilities as that would be the safe bet to maintaining income levels that purchase the lifestyle.
Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall?
Eat, drink and be merry, for in 10 minutes you may be dead.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
In human scaled values and times, now versus later leans a lot towards now.
Just...no. Stop it right now. Stop before something bad happens.
I relegated The Matrix series to "interesting but irksome". Perhaps more Matrix movies have their place in our high-tech world. The films artistically rendered AI and computing ideas to suit the masses. Mixed up with a handful of bizarre premises, they amused despite a thin plot.
In the interim the public's knowledge of the computing world has evolved, and it would be sensible to have a Control-Alt-Delete edition of the Matrix. Rather than spiraling off with the same storyline, a new story to support the thesis that mankind needs to be afraid, very afraid of the might of computers would be appealing.
In a way we are building a Matrix all around us right now, without having to be put into dreamland. What we accept as reality is increasingly (slow at the moment, but quickening) a constructed facade behind which machines make decisions. Ultimately machines will be the ones wearing the pants.
A case in point is cars that drive themselves. If Google didn't let the cat out of the bag, how long would people have gone around blissfuly ignorant of the shenanigans?
big problem with ranking supercomputers via Linpack is that it doesn't advance supercomputer design. The net result is a pissing match over scalability, where winning is dependent upon who can cram the most cores into a single room. The real innovatiors should be recognized for their efforts to reduce space, power and cost, or finding new algorithms to crunch the numbers in more efficient or useful ways
Don't know about you but the sudden urgency to enter Linpack pissing matches has been suppressed since the operation. The need for speed continues unabated. The common way of thinking has it ranking well on Linpack is merely a side effect of having built a better mousetrap, errr supercomputer.
As much as I applaud innovation, measuring this innovation ought to involve algorithms that already run on many platforms, not new algorithms. That way, comparing Apples to PCs won't raise eyebrows. A Linpack test by itself may be insufficient so bring on the other programs.
Hell, why not require registration for every edit on Wikipedia?
Leaving out all philosophical idealism, I see vandalism from some registered users. Registration won't stop the assholes.
The Slashdot way of filtering out the bad may be useful though. If the idiots can be modded down, their changes can be filtered out in normal usage. Slashdot modding works at a posting level, but Wikipedia could implement it on a user level.
We haven't had a major terrorist incident in the US for a while. Why?
A: There hasn't been any credible ability to do so by the bad guys B: Nobody wants to harm the US any more C: The counterterrorism efforts have prevented such an attack
For ANY of the above choices, how do you know? I mean, REALLY know, not just guessing or trying to shout louder than the guy next to you whose opinion is different than yours?
Reminds me of the logic
"Why are you doing all this intelligence?"
"To keep the pick one: (terrorists, space aliens) away."
"But there hasn't been a major terror incident / alien invasion recently!"
Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops,
But according to the news Jaguar is able to mosey along at 1.75 petaflops, and Tianhe is rolling along at 2.5. The petaflops barrier was broken a few years ago, so Tianhe is basically a product of Moore's law.
If the machine can track you the next thing is it wants to control you. Who doesn't feel like giving Big Brother the slip? Big Brother is the guilty conscience come into reality, ready to find fault and curtail life's evil little pleasures.
The best way to fool Big Brother is to let it think it knows the truth, to invent reality.
Slashdot Mirror
An even longer standing goal is to be able to run faster processors. If the new heat sink enables that at the same operating cost, it will sell even at $100.
On a side note, the increasing efficiency of machines has reduced hiring. A more efficient heat sink makes it that much cost-effective to jam multiprocessing computers into every nook, thus taking over activities that people used to do. As the saying goes the implications are enormous.
The CAN take you to Gitmo for a rubber hose massage.
Well, ok, technically there's not much they can get from you if you clam up. Passwords are not that easy to remember. You can probably "forget" and that will be the end of it. You may as well forget if the machine is taken away.
Besides, if you keep typing the wrong password, either the system will lock you out or you can claim malfunction.
Under a lie detector test, you can claim a new password is the password. Forgot to inform the computer that it's the new password? It's not your fault the computer isn't smart enough to update itself. You told the truth.
If programmers are so stupid that looking at their code elicits comments that they need to write code correctly, then they need more than a code review. They need supervision.
Other than that, you people have way more time on your hands than I do.
rd
Now there's a segue. One of the learning techniques in machine learning is called "supervised learning" where the machine is trained on a specific data set, and the desired machine action is known in advance. The idea is to be able to tell if the machine is learning correctly.
The code review, in my opinion, is a method to teach certain aspects of writing code. The ultimate purpose of the code is to satisfy the requirements for the code, but this achievement can be made in many bad ways. The code reviewer might not know better than the code reviewee, but if the coder feels there is an opportunity to learn better coding, then the coder may feel less resistant to a code review.
Sometimes coders are under pressure to rush their work. The code is likely not the best, and a code review would not add value unless the reviewer can provide instruction on how to produce a quantum improvement jump under the same circumstances.
The ESO astronomers are made of silica and alumina dust?
Har har. They should have known without even looking that it's made of beetle juice.
The aspirations of these supercomputer builders knows no bounds. They build an 8 petaflop system, and think the computer is just K. 80 petaflops will probably just be OK, and 800 might be A-OK.
I Think the problem is that "Johnny" doesn't like programming. Why fix that?
I've programmed for a long time, and I know that programming really isn't a fun thing to do. Sometimes I have to call functions that have strange side effects or don't actually do everything that is advertised in documentation.
A program in the simplistic von Neumann machine is a sequence of steps. Easy enough to teach. A program in the modern computer is an unpredictable beast talking to third party systems and involves flaky workarounds. That sounds like a real video game, but why make it a career choice? If Johnny wants win the game, he might take a hint from a chess player, steeped in the art of patience: "wait for the software industry to make life easier for programmers and in the meantime find something better to do."
I'll walk into a post office and rob them without a mask. I'll take all the money I can and run away
Creating jobs idea: installing security and selling pepper spray.
Thanks for raising the cost of living.
For the list: doctor heal thyself
Seriously, isn't there a public fund to pay for emergencies?
One wonders if he was moving around pretty frequently, and this just happened to be where they caught up with him, or if a mansion outside the capital is actually a good-enough hiding spot
Not a bad hidey hole, provided you actually live the lifestyle. Can't be living like he's in a cave in the burbs.
I mean, why bother living in a small apartment downtown when I can get a sprawling, waste of space out in the 'burbs, and drive 20 miles each way?
Driving where?? To work? To balance the equation, cancel the conspicuous consumption, cancel the demand, cancel the work, and the result is more unemployment. So we have the root of the problem - too many people due to too much sex. What the government really wants is to meter your sex life, but that's directly correlated to vehicular mileage. Can the whole idea be this stupid?
A smart way to improve the economy would be to make SPACIOUS housing affordable, thereby encouraging families and shopping. The financial system let people lose their heads and pay more than they could earn, even for squishy little houses, which rapidly go back under water and sit in foreclosure. The government needs to expedite the process for builders to put up multi-family dwellings with thousands of square feet per family so that people don't have to waste time and energy driving. Multi-family units need less land, and built in volume may be far more affordable. It's not the quick fix desired before election day, but higher fuel prices are already a distance tax, and that's solving more problems than I can shake a stick at.
If government is looking for a way to stimulate, support the development of neighborhoods composed of high-rise multi-family units that appeal to the wealthy but average people can afford.
Any truly intelligent life would've detected us and fled
The tragic truth may take on a couple of possible forms:
- Intelligent life forms typically evolve to be just like us. The conditions favoring life and evolution in all likelihood culminates in intelligent primates. Out of the chaos of the second law of thermodynamics, societies of intelligentsia will wind up with all our shortcomings. We can't trust them, and they can't trust us. Hell, we can't trust us.
- When we finally get face time with alien intelligence, it might not be intelligent life. Get off my lawn.
cheap components that seem to last *just* long enough to get the laptop past the warranty period
With laptop prices at phenomenally lows relative to the performance specs what do you expect?
Buy the fastest you can find from a brand that really tries to impress with high performance for low cost rather than a big name, as they will gladly hose you. The key is to buy the highest end from the eager-to-please manufacturer, even if it costs a few hundred more because they will ensure the best quality. The midrange machines from the same company tend to be really crappy because they don't think those machines would attract much market share due to the lack of brand recognition.
It worked for me. If I tried to buy a similarly powerful machine from HP, it would have cost about $1000 more, and I would have spent all my time being aggravated. The highest priced machines from the big names not only are overpriced, but they are so overpriced that the quality is not assured because sales are actually expected to be low. When I first laid eyes on an HP Envy laptop, it was practically double the price of most performance laptops, and aside from being the early bird with a Core i7 offering, there was nothing really special. The usability of a laptop of such a price was iffy. It was really hot and pressing the trackpad to drag didn't feel entirely pleasant. Given the name of Envy, I definitely expected something that would set the tone but all I found was a hard sell. The one thing I appreciated was that HP was making some effort to improve ergonomics, a move that was prodded by Apple. Apple is an example of a company that is highly reputation conscious so quality and longevity matter.
But that would only really work if the above-mentioned oil producing states basically agreed not to sell to anyone else, thus removing themselves from the global oil market. I can't imagine the oil companies in those countries wanting to do that, nor can I imagine the governments, who profit from it as well, cutting themselves off at the knees just so you can get cheap prices at the pump.
Irrefutable? Consider the scenario that the rest of the world is running low on oil the way China believes the rest of the world is being depleted of rare earth metals, it would become a geographical matter. Consumption within sovereign borders takes priority over worldwide sales. If anything is exported, it would be value-added products rather than the raw stuff, in short, PROFIT!.
Far be it from me to say whether Wikileaks is a great fount of truth. Smoke and fire typically exist in close proximity, but for decades we have been exhorted to read the writing on the wall. A day is fast approaching that the well will run dry. Do lemmings fall off a cliff because the ones at the back don't have anyone telling them "The precipice is nigh" or "We'll cross that bridge when we come to it ... Oh it's not built"?
In the light of planning to switch to alternative fuels it's shocking to see how pervasive oil is in society. A prolonged uptick in gasoline prices would overturn the vast majority of lifestyles, such is the complacency. And it's that very complacency that has allowed Wikileaks to cause such a cafuffle. In spite of the informedness that we feel with the Internet, the changes in many of our lives has hardly been extraordinary.
Despite lurches in prices of housing, food, and fuel, most people have allowed the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay to rise into the stratosphere. Now Wikileaks is continually alerting the masses to brace themselves for troublesome times, and my suggestion to these masses is to go to your bosses and demand pay hikes, but in the long run also become business owners or at the very least more qualified to be worthy of higher responsibilities as that would be the safe bet to maintaining income levels that purchase the lifestyle.
You can tell by the plastique duct taped to the torso.
But the algorithm is easily debugged: plug in phone at the end
Philip Zimbardo talks about a similar study he did with kids and marshmallows they could eat now or get two instead if they waited ten minutes. Kids who were willing to wait did better in general in life in our society. Of course, one may ask, were they happier overall?
Eat, drink and be merry, for in 10 minutes you may be dead.
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.
In human scaled values and times, now versus later leans a lot towards now.
Just...no. Stop it right now. Stop before something bad happens.
I relegated The Matrix series to "interesting but irksome". Perhaps more Matrix movies have their place in our high-tech world. The films artistically rendered AI and computing ideas to suit the masses. Mixed up with a handful of bizarre premises, they amused despite a thin plot.
In the interim the public's knowledge of the computing world has evolved, and it would be sensible to have a Control-Alt-Delete edition of the Matrix. Rather than spiraling off with the same storyline, a new story to support the thesis that mankind needs to be afraid, very afraid of the might of computers would be appealing.
In a way we are building a Matrix all around us right now, without having to be put into dreamland. What we accept as reality is increasingly (slow at the moment, but quickening) a constructed facade behind which machines make decisions. Ultimately machines will be the ones wearing the pants.
A case in point is cars that drive themselves. If Google didn't let the cat out of the bag, how long would people have gone around blissfuly ignorant of the shenanigans?
When they're going down the track, they can say "We built this city on rock and roll!"
It's like comparing hitting a coffee cup with a tennis ball
Roger Federer can knock a can off your head with his serve. That would put him into the 486 class.
Why would you care to see one on your desktop? Do you have any use for one?
You got that right. I've never used more than 639 K of RAM either.
Space doesn't do you a damned bit of good if you haven't got food and water.
The cannibals will provide the solution to this one.
big problem with ranking supercomputers via Linpack is that it doesn't advance supercomputer design. The net result is a pissing match over scalability, where winning is dependent upon who can cram the most cores into a single room. The real innovatiors should be recognized for their efforts to reduce space, power and cost, or finding new algorithms to crunch the numbers in more efficient or useful ways
Don't know about you but the sudden urgency to enter Linpack pissing matches has been suppressed since the operation. The need for speed continues unabated. The common way of thinking has it ranking well on Linpack is merely a side effect of having built a better mousetrap, errr supercomputer.
As much as I applaud innovation, measuring this innovation ought to involve algorithms that already run on many platforms, not new algorithms. That way, comparing Apples to PCs won't raise eyebrows. A Linpack test by itself may be insufficient so bring on the other programs.
Hell, why not require registration for every edit on Wikipedia?
Leaving out all philosophical idealism, I see vandalism from some registered users. Registration won't stop the assholes.
The Slashdot way of filtering out the bad may be useful though. If the idiots can be modded down, their changes can be filtered out in normal usage. Slashdot modding works at a posting level, but Wikipedia could implement it on a user level.
Playing devil's advocate here...
We haven't had a major terrorist incident in the US for a while. Why?
A: There hasn't been any credible ability to do so by the bad guys
B: Nobody wants to harm the US any more
C: The counterterrorism efforts have prevented such an attack
For ANY of the above choices, how do you know? I mean, REALLY know, not just guessing or trying to shout louder than the guy next to you whose opinion is different than yours?
Reminds me of the logic
"Why are you doing all this intelligence?"
"To keep the pick one: (terrorists, space aliens) away."
"But there hasn't been a major terror incident / alien invasion recently!"
"Then it works!"
Tianhe-1A is theoretically able to do more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second (one petaflop) at peak speed. Tianhe-1A 's peak performance reaches 1.206 petaflops,
But according to the news Jaguar is able to mosey along at 1.75 petaflops, and Tianhe is rolling along at 2.5. The petaflops barrier was broken a few years ago, so Tianhe is basically a product of Moore's law.
If the machine can track you the next thing is it wants to control you. Who doesn't feel like giving Big Brother the slip? Big Brother is the guilty conscience come into reality, ready to find fault and curtail life's evil little pleasures.
The best way to fool Big Brother is to let it think it knows the truth, to invent reality.