Big thanks to everyone who replied! Those are the kinds of answers I was looking for. I have a friend who farms and he has some enormous machines in his fields. I felt the same way about supercomputers as I did about his farming equipment: "Good grief! That must be useful for something or he wouldn't have bought it, but I can't imagine what I'd ever use such a thing for."
Special thanks to everyone who didn't interpret that as an attack on supercomputing or make "640KB ought to be enough for everybody" jokes. I'm ignorant, not dumb.:-)
Thanks! That's what I was wondering about. So is that the problem they're trying to solve: current models are too coarse and scientists think they can get more accurate results by increasing the points/partitions/whatever?
First, I'm entirely ignorant of supercomputing. I don't know the first thing about it. I'm asking this out of sheer lack of knowledge in the field:
What do you need a computer that fast for?
I mean, specifically, what can you do on something that fast that you couldn't do on one 1,000 (or 1,000,000) times slower? What kind of tasks need that much processing power? For example, you normally hear about them being used for things like weather simulation. Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?
The whole idea is fascinating to me, but without ever having even been near the field, I can't imagine what a dataset or algorithm would look like that would take so much power to chew through.
HTML can be loaded incrementally, XHTML can't, as you can only validate the document when you have all of it.
Sure you can. It's called a streaming parser, and SAX (for Java) started in 1997. This isn't exactly new technology. And in any case, parsing well-formed XML is always easier than hacking at tag soup.
I believe that apps on mobile phones are a transitory phenomenon. They are/were necessary to make content available on the relatively small screens and to implement touch input (as most websites at the time were built for mouse input).
The iOS 4 update broke the radar displays on two different weather apps I have. Living in "tornado alley", weather apps and doppler radar are pretty important pieces of daily life. When the weather radio went off last night, I tried pulling up the Weather Underground website and it redirected me to their (new?) mobile site.
Except for the initial page load time, it was every bit as nice as the standalone apps I'd been using. It has animated doppler radar, you can pinch the screen and drag it to zoom and move around, and it pretty much feels exactly like a native app. If this is what the future of web applications has in store, I'd have to agree with you completely.
I am also willing to bet that my friends have far more interesting jobs and hobbies than yours,
No offense, but not likely. My wife's a surgeon so a lot of our friends are other doctors, and they usually have cool things to talk about. A good friend restores classic Mustangs for a living and always has a funny story. I have a couple of pals at startups and I like seeing what that's like. An old high school classmate just moved to Hawaii to study marine biology. A few others are college professors now (including one who's updating his Facebook status as he's getting halfway through a tour of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia). My cousin just got her degree in mine engineering. My wife's cousin just got her doctorate in aerospace engineering. These are all personal friends - some nearby, and some flung to the far corners of the world.
Perhaps you're right. Maybe I have a lower standard of "interesting" and "funny" than you do. Or perhaps I can see the interesting and funny in the words of my real-life friends on Facebook and Twitter, and I have real-life friends that make it easy by saying interesting and funny things.
Actually, we save "fun" for when we see each other in real life and get away from anything connected.
Truly? You never send each other a funny email or call to tell them something interesting that happened? I'm glad that you have offline fun with your friends. I had a great time hanging out at a softball tournament all weekend, and appreciate how nice it is to spend good times over beer and a grill full of hamburgers and hotdogs. Still, sometimes while we're all stuck at our respective offices, I'll think of something to tell one of my real-life friends. When that happens, I'll usually email them or direct-message them on Twitter.
I just don't get why some people - seemingly including you - think that it has to be either/or; that you can't have fun offline and online. Again, maybe I'm so incredibly lucky that my friends are the only people in the world capable of writing interesting things and sending them to me. Somehow I doubt that.
Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.
Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.
I'm serious. I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day. If you don't, then that's because of the people generating the content you're reading.
The merger should be blocked because it does not serve a really good purpose.
Erm, what? I think the merger should be blocked, too, but not because "it does not serve a really good purpose". People and corporations do a lot of things that seem rather dumb to me, but I find the idea of stopping them on that reason alone to be pretty scary.
On FreeBSD, sudo portinstall net/mpd5 and editing a config file to configure your IP addresses installs a working PPTP server that an Apple i* can use. Although you may not approve, my boss likes having an easy-to-configure VPN when he's on the road. I like being able to securely surf and IM from open WiFi. IPSEC might be the "better" way, but there's a lot to be said for having something working 5 minutes into trying it for the first time.
I wouldn't want the news of my upcoming demise originating from the same site responsible for informing millions that Lance Armstrong woke up and is preparing a delicious sandwich.
You just described every major newspaper. In other current events, Britney got a haircut.
I don't really get the Twitter dislike. It's a primary source, with all the advantages and disadvantages of not going through an editorial filter before you read it.
Oh, sure. I meant that as illustration that it can potentially be much, much worse. If the customer has a bully pulpit, such as if I were Commander Taco and not some guy that no one's likely to read unless they specifically come looking for what I have to say, then it could get ugly quickly. How many companies would like to lose 10,000,000 customers overnight?
There is an old rule in business that one happy customer tells 10 people, one unhappy customer tells 100 people. With the Internet, they probably now tell 1000 or more people.
Now I know what I am saying is offtopic, but why do I always read "British Pornographic Industry" when fast-reading through any website where it is mentioned?
I have no idea. The porn industry seems to be profitable.
I've wondered that, too. Wouldn't a massive overdose of, say, oxycontin be sufficient to render anyone dead, or at least comatose so that a followup drug could stop their heart painlessly?
Absolutely. But the message was not light, it was professional and serious in every way.
That was my first thought. Why is everyone treating Twitter is inherently frivolous, as though every message was automatically surrounded by clowns and purple dancing hippos? In this case, the message sounded exactly like something that might have been given at a press conference: it was informational, solemn, terse, and clear.
I'm coming to the conclusion that some people have such a sociopathic sense of entitlement that they are unfit for living among humans. Anyone who takes steps to use force of law (which ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun) to steal from society without regard is a dirty pirate and should be dealt with as such.
I work for a small, 50-person company. The town I live in is currently experiencing a "100 year flood" and a lot of local businesses are closed right now. Tuesday night, my employer called every worker to ask for volunteers to move heavy boxes full of paperwork out of our basement in case water started rushing in. Within an hour, about 50 people showed up (including spouses, boyfriends/girlfriends, and kids). When we were done, the boss sent out for pizza and beer and everyone hung out in the breakroom. Today, the company paid for massage therapists to come in to the office and give free massages to everyone who helped out, with all the spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends invited to come in to participate.
We don't monitor or filter our employee's Internet access in any way, other than to put a spam and virus filter on the mailserver. Our company is very pragmatic: if an employee's personal habits don't cause a problem or cut into their productivity, then the bosses don't care. Because of all this, we have the most incredibly loyal environment of anyplace I've ever worked. Our turnover is practically zero with most attrition due to people moving or going back to college. If someone did spend more time than they should doing something not work related, they'd probably get a talking-to from their coworkers before the bosses ever found out about it.
Oh, and our little 50-person company has been in business for more than 30 years, and in 2009 we processed more than a billion dollars worth of revenue. Yes, billion, as in each employee handled $20,000,000 in business on average last year.
Some companies treat their employees as adversaries and watch them like thieves. My company treats us like family members, and in exchange we treat our jobs with respect and care. We're doing so much business that we can hardly keep up with it. If I ever strike out on my own and end up hiring my own workers, I know which path I'll try to follow.
I want to challenge this. This has been posted 10+ times in this discussion with nothing to back it up. Why would the activities of an individual in the company result in shutting down the company and sending anyone to jail? That makes no sense.
Excellent point! On the one hand, we'll gripe at how BP and other corporations can practically cause extinction events without so much as a slap on the hand. On the other, we'll patiently explain that if Jane in Accounting catches a glimpse of Britney getting out of a car on Joe's desktop, then the whole chain of command is going to PMITA prison.
Slashdot Mirror
Big thanks to everyone who replied! Those are the kinds of answers I was looking for. I have a friend who farms and he has some enormous machines in his fields. I felt the same way about supercomputers as I did about his farming equipment: "Good grief! That must be useful for something or he wouldn't have bought it, but I can't imagine what I'd ever use such a thing for."
Special thanks to everyone who didn't interpret that as an attack on supercomputing or make "640KB ought to be enough for everybody" jokes. I'm ignorant, not dumb. :-)
Thanks! That's what I was wondering about. So is that the problem they're trying to solve: current models are too coarse and scientists think they can get more accurate results by increasing the points/partitions/whatever?
First, I'm entirely ignorant of supercomputing. I don't know the first thing about it. I'm asking this out of sheer lack of knowledge in the field:
What do you need a computer that fast for?
I mean, specifically, what can you do on something that fast that you couldn't do on one 1,000 (or 1,000,000) times slower? What kind of tasks need that much processing power? For example, you normally hear about them being used for things like weather simulation. Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?
The whole idea is fascinating to me, but without ever having even been near the field, I can't imagine what a dataset or algorithm would look like that would take so much power to chew through.
HTML can be loaded incrementally, XHTML can't, as you can only validate the document when you have all of it.
Sure you can. It's called a streaming parser, and SAX (for Java) started in 1997. This isn't exactly new technology. And in any case, parsing well-formed XML is always easier than hacking at tag soup.
I believe that apps on mobile phones are a transitory phenomenon. They are/were necessary to make content available on the relatively small screens and to implement touch input (as most websites at the time were built for mouse input).
The iOS 4 update broke the radar displays on two different weather apps I have. Living in "tornado alley", weather apps and doppler radar are pretty important pieces of daily life. When the weather radio went off last night, I tried pulling up the Weather Underground website and it redirected me to their (new?) mobile site.
Except for the initial page load time, it was every bit as nice as the standalone apps I'd been using. It has animated doppler radar, you can pinch the screen and drag it to zoom and move around, and it pretty much feels exactly like a native app. If this is what the future of web applications has in store, I'd have to agree with you completely.
Why do Americans say "Indian giving" for this sort of behaviour?
Because we won.
I am also willing to bet that my friends have far more interesting jobs and hobbies than yours,
No offense, but not likely. My wife's a surgeon so a lot of our friends are other doctors, and they usually have cool things to talk about. A good friend restores classic Mustangs for a living and always has a funny story. I have a couple of pals at startups and I like seeing what that's like. An old high school classmate just moved to Hawaii to study marine biology. A few others are college professors now (including one who's updating his Facebook status as he's getting halfway through a tour of Europe, northern Africa, and Asia). My cousin just got her degree in mine engineering. My wife's cousin just got her doctorate in aerospace engineering. These are all personal friends - some nearby, and some flung to the far corners of the world.
Perhaps you're right. Maybe I have a lower standard of "interesting" and "funny" than you do. Or perhaps I can see the interesting and funny in the words of my real-life friends on Facebook and Twitter, and I have real-life friends that make it easy by saying interesting and funny things.
Actually, we save "fun" for when we see each other in real life and get away from anything connected.
Truly? You never send each other a funny email or call to tell them something interesting that happened? I'm glad that you have offline fun with your friends. I had a great time hanging out at a softball tournament all weekend, and appreciate how nice it is to spend good times over beer and a grill full of hamburgers and hotdogs. Still, sometimes while we're all stuck at our respective offices, I'll think of something to tell one of my real-life friends. When that happens, I'll usually email them or direct-message them on Twitter.
I just don't get why some people - seemingly including you - think that it has to be either/or; that you can't have fun offline and online. Again, maybe I'm so incredibly lucky that my friends are the only people in the world capable of writing interesting things and sending them to me. Somehow I doubt that.
Even here on Slashdot, the number of posts I've seen regarding to our favourite N word goes through the roof
Nokia? Netbook? Details, man!
Except I can find redeeming content on various parts of other websites that provide actual information. I don't with twitter, or facebook.
Then your friends are boring. I guess I just hang out with more interesting people.
I'm serious. I see something interesting or funny on Facebook or Twitter at least a few times a day. If you don't, then that's because of the people generating the content you're reading.
The merger should be blocked because it does not serve a really good purpose.
Erm, what? I think the merger should be blocked, too, but not because "it does not serve a really good purpose". People and corporations do a lot of things that seem rather dumb to me, but I find the idea of stopping them on that reason alone to be pretty scary.
You're probably right. I just never got to the point of trying, since configuring PPTP was so easy and it works reliably.
On FreeBSD, sudo portinstall net/mpd5 and editing a config file to configure your IP addresses installs a working PPTP server that an Apple i* can use. Although you may not approve, my boss likes having an easy-to-configure VPN when he's on the road. I like being able to securely surf and IM from open WiFi. IPSEC might be the "better" way, but there's a lot to be said for having something working 5 minutes into trying it for the first time.
I wouldn't want the news of my upcoming demise originating from the same site responsible for informing millions that Lance Armstrong woke up and is preparing a delicious sandwich.
You just described every major newspaper. In other current events, Britney got a haircut.
I don't really get the Twitter dislike. It's a primary source, with all the advantages and disadvantages of not going through an editorial filter before you read it.
Oh, sure. I meant that as illustration that it can potentially be much, much worse. If the customer has a bully pulpit, such as if I were Commander Taco and not some guy that no one's likely to read unless they specifically come looking for what I have to say, then it could get ugly quickly. How many companies would like to lose 10,000,000 customers overnight?
There is an old rule in business that one happy customer tells 10 people, one unhappy customer tells 100 people. With the Internet, they probably now tell 1000 or more people.
I've told 55,956 people so far. Don't underestimate the affect of high search rankings (even when it happens on accident).
Now I know what I am saying is offtopic, but why do I always read "British Pornographic Industry" when fast-reading through any website where it is mentioned?
I have no idea. The porn industry seems to be profitable.
I've had a fully usable, full desktop browser in my front jeans pocket for 3 years,
I thought you were just happy to see us.
the whole time drinking the milkshake of other phone users.
That's what she said!
Not a troll, just curious why this is so hard?
I've wondered that, too. Wouldn't a massive overdose of, say, oxycontin be sufficient to render anyone dead, or at least comatose so that a followup drug could stop their heart painlessly?
Absolutely. But the message was not light, it was professional and serious in every way.
That was my first thought. Why is everyone treating Twitter is inherently frivolous, as though every message was automatically surrounded by clowns and purple dancing hippos? In this case, the message sounded exactly like something that might have been given at a press conference: it was informational, solemn, terse, and clear.
Maybe because it wasn't? Have you read any of her work? Or do you just get the liberal Cliff's notes?
That might be an idiom you're not familiar with. Replace "riffing on" with "making variations on" and I think you'll get the gist of what he meant.
I'm coming to the conclusion that some people have such a sociopathic sense of entitlement that they are unfit for living among humans. Anyone who takes steps to use force of law (which ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun) to steal from society without regard is a dirty pirate and should be dealt with as such.
I welcome a calm, reasoned discussion of the topic's many nuances.
I work for a small, 50-person company. The town I live in is currently experiencing a "100 year flood" and a lot of local businesses are closed right now. Tuesday night, my employer called every worker to ask for volunteers to move heavy boxes full of paperwork out of our basement in case water started rushing in. Within an hour, about 50 people showed up (including spouses, boyfriends/girlfriends, and kids). When we were done, the boss sent out for pizza and beer and everyone hung out in the breakroom. Today, the company paid for massage therapists to come in to the office and give free massages to everyone who helped out, with all the spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends invited to come in to participate.
We don't monitor or filter our employee's Internet access in any way, other than to put a spam and virus filter on the mailserver. Our company is very pragmatic: if an employee's personal habits don't cause a problem or cut into their productivity, then the bosses don't care. Because of all this, we have the most incredibly loyal environment of anyplace I've ever worked. Our turnover is practically zero with most attrition due to people moving or going back to college. If someone did spend more time than they should doing something not work related, they'd probably get a talking-to from their coworkers before the bosses ever found out about it.
Oh, and our little 50-person company has been in business for more than 30 years, and in 2009 we processed more than a billion dollars worth of revenue. Yes, billion, as in each employee handled $20,000,000 in business on average last year.
Some companies treat their employees as adversaries and watch them like thieves. My company treats us like family members, and in exchange we treat our jobs with respect and care. We're doing so much business that we can hardly keep up with it. If I ever strike out on my own and end up hiring my own workers, I know which path I'll try to follow.
I want to challenge this. This has been posted 10+ times in this discussion with nothing to back it up. Why would the activities of an individual in the company result in shutting down the company and sending anyone to jail? That makes no sense.
Excellent point! On the one hand, we'll gripe at how BP and other corporations can practically cause extinction events without so much as a slap on the hand. On the other, we'll patiently explain that if Jane in Accounting catches a glimpse of Britney getting out of a car on Joe's desktop, then the whole chain of command is going to PMITA prison.