Southwest has their quirks (poor boarding procedures for people with kids, some people really don't like open seating, etc), but they continue to allow each passenger two checked bags for free. They also don't charge explicit fees for ticket changes, though you have to pay the difference in seat prices if they have gone up. So far, they seem to be doing OK, so at least one airline hasn't had to go super-crazy with the unbundling to stay profitable. (Instead they just made their frequent flier awards much harder to use than 5 years ago.)
I think the only "extra charge" option is their Early Bird checkin, which basically gets you on the plane first for $10.
Super-Kamiokande would light up like Christmas from a supernova only 600 light years from Earth. (Hopefully they still have a trigger configured to save such data, despite being used now as a target for the T2K experiment.) Super-K is 10x larger than Kamiokande-II and Kamiokande-II was able to detect 11 events from a supernova that was 250x further away than Betelgeuse. Granted, not all supernova have the same intensity, but still, I think we'd have a pretty good view from here.
Guess? You didn't say anything about the design of Google's Storage API. (Which is fine by me, since the basic premise of this thread is stupid. The storage API is designed to match the S3 API, and isn't targeting end-users in the first place.)
I assume they used the word "bucket," because that's what Amazon calls the same abstraction in S3. And that's really the target audience for this storage system: developers who are currently using Amazon S3 or are familiar with it. The idiot complaining about this API is angry that he went to a hardware store and didn't find the pipes already in the shape of his sprinkler system, possibly because he doesn't know what a hardware store is.
I tend to think of your taxonomy in terms of design outcomes:
4. Sufficiently engineered 3. Over-engineered 2. Under-engineered 1. Doesn't work or works on accident.
That is to say, average developers tend to nail the common case, but lack the experience or knowledge to spot the corner cases. Your "above average" developer wants to demonstrate his knowledge by optimizing for as many corner cases as possible at the expense of simplicity in the common case. The well-above average developer can balance the common and the exceptional.
Both over and under-engineered solutions are "bad," but the under-engineered solution usually has the advantage of less code to delete when you have to redesign everything.:)
To be perfectly honest, I would be skeptical of any sociological conclusions drawn by primetime TV news programs, which are famous for peddling sensationalist moral panics about "the kids these days." They tend to be heavy on anecdotal evidence and cherry-picked expert testimony.
For one year during the middle of my CS degree, the department tried to enforce a rule that said that no student was allowed to view code in electronic or print form written by another student. We (and possibly some of the instructors) pushed back on this rule until it was repealed with good reason. While certainly it made certain kinds of leeching unambiguously disallowed, it also eliminated cooperative debugging, which we found incredibly helpful. I learned more about practical coding, and working with other programmers debugging other people's code than I ever did debugging my own code (or even writing it in the first place).
Yeah, most of the cheating I heard about in my CS program 10 years ago was not from people who were necessarily lazy or "party-people" or whatever the usual stereotype is. Most of the temptation to cheat was for people who were completely in over their head with the entire subject and felt backed into a corner. They were wedged between a lack of preparation and social pressure to succeed. ("I did OK in math class, and I like using my computer, so why can't I do this?") The first time many of them had ever thought critically about the structure and function of a computer was day one of CS 101 (consider trying to do college algebra if you had never seen mathematical operators before) and they just got more behind as time went on. This was not helped by the cattle herd design of public university classes.
The ethically smart ones got extra tutoring from classmates and teaching assistants, or worst case, switched degrees when they realized they were hopelessly behind. The not so smart ones abused the help of their friendly/naive classmates or found some other way to BS through the material. Most of the time, this didn't work out even on semester timescales, but I do remember one group project where a guy couldn't write a single line of code unprompted, yet somehow had landed a job at IBM to start at the end of the semester.
I don't have any sympathy for people who cheat in classes, but I agree that characterizing the problem as simple laziness or the "moral bankruptcy of the kids these days" teaches you nothing about how to address the problem. Sadly, the solution probably involves things that are socially or economically infeasible: Smaller intro classes, actual focus on pedagogy and not teaching fads in intro classes, de-emphasis of 4-year degrees as a prerequisite for white-collar employment, more investment and advertisement in focused two-year programs for technical fields, etc.
And we don't have to use Highlander Rules when considering drive technologies. There's no reason that one has to build a storage array right now out of purely SSD or purely HDD. Sun showed in some of their storage products that by combining a few SSDs with several slower, large capacity HDDs and ZFS, they could satisfy many workloads for a lot less money. (Pretty much the only thing a hybrid storage pool like that can't do is sustain very high IOPS of random reads across a huge pool of data with no read locality at all.)
I hope we see more filesystems support transparent hybrid storage like this...
Then at least you'll save wear-and-tear on your plugs for devices that are really off when turned off. (Like your washer and dryer, for example. I would be surprised if they draw power when off.)
Because recoil due to conservation of momentum, not conservation of energy. The "projectiles" (ok, summing over many, many projectiles with the laser) leave with the same kinetic energy, but the rest mass of the photon is zero. Since we're dealing with photons, we would really need to do the math with conservation of relativistic 4-momentum to get the right answer. (Newtonian conservation of momentum says there would be no recoil at all from a laser, but that's not quite true. It's just really, really tiny.)
I don't see this as an either/or proposition. Backing up protects you from data loss, which comes in many forms:
* Sudden hardware or software failure * Silent hardware/software failure (or user failure) resulting in corruption you only discover later * Theft/fire/natural disaster
At the same time you want: * Easy backup procedure (if it is too hard, you won't do it) * Fast restore procedure
A sensible backup plan needs to address all of these needs. Incremental tape backups with rotation to an offsite vault is one option which covers most of these things, but isn't particularly easy or automated. RAID is very easy and convenient, but only covers a very narrow range of hardware failures. (If you listen closely, you can hear the screams in the distance of a RAID user who just lost data to software-induced filesystem corruption. Hence the mantra "RAID is not backup.")
Network (blah, blah, "cloud," blah) backup services are a great option for cheap offsite backup that is extremely convenient and continuous. But you should supplement it with some kind of local, fast backup as well. That way you can recover quickly from hard drive failure and corrupted filesystems, but still have a Plan B if your house floods. (Or if you local backup turns out not to be broken when you need it!) Moreover, many network backup services will mail a hard drives for a fee if disaster strikes and you need to restore everything.
In my case, I use CrashPlan and Time Machine to do this. CrashPlan backs up changed files every 15 minutes to several offsite locations. I also plug a Time Machine disk into my laptop periodically to make a local snapshot. Restoration is quick in the common case, but I also have coverage for extraordinary events as well as backups when I travel without my external disk.
I think often people confuse "altruism" with "long term self-interest," and that may be the issue Google is considering here. In the short term, you can make it hard for tenants to move out, and maybe gain a little bit of rent that you would not have otherwise gotten. However, people talk and, in the long term, behavior like that can lose you potential customers. You will be forced to drop your rent in order to keep your units full.
(This relates to the best description of "business ethics" I've heard: Ethical business requires that you balance the needs of and try to act in the best interest of your owners, employees and customers. Otherwise, in the long run, you will find yourself without capital, labor, or revenue. Thus, business ethics is about long term self-interest, not some kind of abstract altruism. Sometimes the "long run" takes a really long time, encouraging people to risk unethical behavior, of course.)
Making it easier to leave Google applications helps grow your potential customer base in the future (such as those who are wary of lock in), at the risk of losing current customers who are unhappy with your service. That is a motivation well-rooted in self-interest, as long as you think your product is better than everyone else's.
The GeForce 9 series was a rebrand/die shrink of GeForce 8, but the GTX 200 series has some major improvements under the hood:
* Vastly smarter memory controller including better batching of reads, and the ability to map host memory into the GPU memory space * Double the number of registers * Hardware double precision support (not as fast as single, but way faster than emulating it)
These sorts of things probably don't matter to people playing games, but they are huge wins for people doing GPU computing. The GTX 200 series has also seen a minor die shrink during the generation, so I don't know if the next generation will be more of a die shrink or actually include improved performance. (Hopefully the latter to keep up with Larrabee.)
From the page: "Sloppy reduction allowed us to make our code branch-free and thereby very efficient on the PS3's 4-way SIMD Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs)."
This sounds promising for CUDA. If this code is really branch-free, it should fly on a GTX 285. NVIDIA's GT200 chips have a lot more raw compute power, but less flexibility, than the Cell processor on the PS3. The usual CUDA performance killer is irregular memory read patterns and highly divergent branching.
This makes sense, of course. If disk rotation speeds stay fixed, and areal densities increase, then the number of bits per second passing under the head has to go up. As long as hard drive manufacturers can keep increasing storage capacity, they will get speed increases at the same time. (If you need to use longer error-correcting codes on the platter to achieve these densities, that can fight against these gains.)
I picked up the Kindle DX on release day (much to my amazement, as I figured the initial stock would go entirely to preorders) and then took it on a 2 week trip. I'm quite pleased with it, although I definitely believe that it will only appeal to a narrow market.
Pros:
The e-ink display really needs to be seen to understand the benefit. Over time, more and more of my reading material has become electronic, and I had not appreciated how much reading long documents on my backlit laptop LCD was leading to eye-fatigue. The result was that I tended to read on my laptop in short bursts, taking frequent breaks and losing focus. With a passive display like this, I find that I naturally read for longer intervals. Contrast is not as good as paper, but being able to read in direct light really changes your reading behavior.
The form factor is perfect for full page document reading. A netbook or small laptop, while useful for other things, is a horrible document reader. The clamshell form factor is the wrong orientation for reading pages, and if you try to turn it to read in portrait mode, you have a keyboard sticking out the side for no reason. I tried reading with a sideways 12" laptop on the bus as a graduate student, and it was pretty annoying. Anyone suggesting a real computer as an alternative to the Kindle DX should at least begin with a tablet PC.
As a reader, the software mostly gets out of your way. The power switch just puts the system to sleep, so you can pick up the DX and be reading where you were last in about 4 seconds. Your last location is remembered in all documents, as you would expect. More sophisticated controls would be nice, but aren't a deal-breaker.
The built-in cellular data link is not spectacular, but gets the job done. I really enjoy being able to read something, then if I encounter an unfamiliar concept, I can just start typing a phrase and hit "wikipedia". xkcd's comment about the Kindle being our manifestation of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is very true.
The browser is definitely limited, but very convenient when you are traveling. I don't have a fancy phone, so this is the only device I own which provides nearly universal Internet access. (Yeah, I'm late to the party.) Not having a stupid cell contract to use the web browser is a huge plus.
Battery life and weight are good. I tend to leave the wireless radio on, but even with that extra drain, I normally have to recharge every few days. At 1 lb., it is the weight of a thin hardback. You won't read it for long periods by holding it out in front of your face (see "gorilla arms"), but it doesn't take much support to a corner or an elbow to comfortably hold it.
Being able to read the first chapter of books free is kind of neat. I don't usually buy books for the Kindle with the store, because I consider DRM-crippled data to be disposable. It is a great way to find new books to buy in dead-tree format, though.
PDF rendering works fine. I have encountered one image in one PDF that rendered strange, but otherwise viewing PDFs has met my expectations.
Cons:
Some people say other readers have a better e-ink display. This is my first e-ink device, so I can't comment on that.
If you are used to reading on an LCD, it will take you a little bit to adjust. The first thing I noticed when I got the DX is that I have very poor lighting in my apartment for reading. With a backlit display, I never noticed. However, the DX needs external light, just like paper.:)
This is not a speedy device, nor a speedy internet connection. The browser is very slow, especially on complex websites.
The economics of the cellular link are worrying. Since it is effectively pre-paid in the cost of the device itself, Amazon does not have a strong financial incentive to improve the built-in browser. More web use means more money they have to pay to Sprint on your behalf. You see the effects of this in o
Amen, but to add to this: If you are going to institute some kind of usage billing, it is *absolutely* critical you give people the tools to monitor their usage. At a minimum, there should be a web page that customers can view their current usage (no more than 24 hours old) relative to the quota. For bonus points, give people the ability to get email updates when they pass predefined levels, or if their one-day usage exceeds some value.
If you are putting 130W into the CPU, then I would expect nearly 130W coming out in heat. Otherwise, that means the CPU is storing energy somewhere. Initially, it will store some energy as the chip heats to above room temperature, but then it should rapidly hit a steady state where power in = power out.
Slashdot Mirror
Southwest has their quirks (poor boarding procedures for people with kids, some people really don't like open seating, etc), but they continue to allow each passenger two checked bags for free. They also don't charge explicit fees for ticket changes, though you have to pay the difference in seat prices if they have gone up. So far, they seem to be doing OK, so at least one airline hasn't had to go super-crazy with the unbundling to stay profitable. (Instead they just made their frequent flier awards much harder to use than 5 years ago.)
I think the only "extra charge" option is their Early Bird checkin, which basically gets you on the plane first for $10.
Super-Kamiokande would light up like Christmas from a supernova only 600 light years from Earth. (Hopefully they still have a trigger configured to save such data, despite being used now as a target for the T2K experiment.) Super-K is 10x larger than Kamiokande-II and Kamiokande-II was able to detect 11 events from a supernova that was 250x further away than Betelgeuse. Granted, not all supernova have the same intensity, but still, I think we'd have a pretty good view from here.
Guess? You didn't say anything about the design of Google's Storage API. (Which is fine by me, since the basic premise of this thread is stupid. The storage API is designed to match the S3 API, and isn't targeting end-users in the first place.)
I assume they used the word "bucket," because that's what Amazon calls the same abstraction in S3. And that's really the target audience for this storage system: developers who are currently using Amazon S3 or are familiar with it. The idiot complaining about this API is angry that he went to a hardware store and didn't find the pipes already in the shape of his sprinkler system, possibly because he doesn't know what a hardware store is.
I tend to think of your taxonomy in terms of design outcomes:
4. Sufficiently engineered
3. Over-engineered
2. Under-engineered
1. Doesn't work or works on accident.
That is to say, average developers tend to nail the common case, but lack the experience or knowledge to spot the corner cases. Your "above average" developer wants to demonstrate his knowledge by optimizing for as many corner cases as possible at the expense of simplicity in the common case. The well-above average developer can balance the common and the exceptional.
Both over and under-engineered solutions are "bad," but the under-engineered solution usually has the advantage of less code to delete when you have to redesign everything. :)
To be perfectly honest, I would be skeptical of any sociological conclusions drawn by primetime TV news programs, which are famous for peddling sensationalist moral panics about "the kids these days." They tend to be heavy on anecdotal evidence and cherry-picked expert testimony.
For one year during the middle of my CS degree, the department tried to enforce a rule that said that no student was allowed to view code in electronic or print form written by another student. We (and possibly some of the instructors) pushed back on this rule until it was repealed with good reason. While certainly it made certain kinds of leeching unambiguously disallowed, it also eliminated cooperative debugging, which we found incredibly helpful. I learned more about practical coding, and working with other programmers debugging other people's code than I ever did debugging my own code (or even writing it in the first place).
Yeah, most of the cheating I heard about in my CS program 10 years ago was not from people who were necessarily lazy or "party-people" or whatever the usual stereotype is. Most of the temptation to cheat was for people who were completely in over their head with the entire subject and felt backed into a corner. They were wedged between a lack of preparation and social pressure to succeed. ("I did OK in math class, and I like using my computer, so why can't I do this?") The first time many of them had ever thought critically about the structure and function of a computer was day one of CS 101 (consider trying to do college algebra if you had never seen mathematical operators before) and they just got more behind as time went on. This was not helped by the cattle herd design of public university classes.
The ethically smart ones got extra tutoring from classmates and teaching assistants, or worst case, switched degrees when they realized they were hopelessly behind. The not so smart ones abused the help of their friendly/naive classmates or found some other way to BS through the material. Most of the time, this didn't work out even on semester timescales, but I do remember one group project where a guy couldn't write a single line of code unprompted, yet somehow had landed a job at IBM to start at the end of the semester.
I don't have any sympathy for people who cheat in classes, but I agree that characterizing the problem as simple laziness or the "moral bankruptcy of the kids these days" teaches you nothing about how to address the problem. Sadly, the solution probably involves things that are socially or economically infeasible: Smaller intro classes, actual focus on pedagogy and not teaching fads in intro classes, de-emphasis of 4-year degrees as a prerequisite for white-collar employment, more investment and advertisement in focused two-year programs for technical fields, etc.
Now if every possible subset of developers has to meet, then you have a problem.... :)
And we don't have to use Highlander Rules when considering drive technologies. There's no reason that one has to build a storage array right now out of purely SSD or purely HDD. Sun showed in some of their storage products that by combining a few SSDs with several slower, large capacity HDDs and ZFS, they could satisfy many workloads for a lot less money. (Pretty much the only thing a hybrid storage pool like that can't do is sustain very high IOPS of random reads across a huge pool of data with no read locality at all.)
I hope we see more filesystems support transparent hybrid storage like this...
For $26, you can measure the power of each device on and off and figure out who the actual power hogs are:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16882715001
Then at least you'll save wear-and-tear on your plugs for devices that are really off when turned off. (Like your washer and dryer, for example. I would be surprised if they draw power when off.)
Wow, you definitely win there. :)
Because recoil due to conservation of momentum, not conservation of energy. The "projectiles" (ok, summing over many, many projectiles with the laser) leave with the same kinetic energy, but the rest mass of the photon is zero. Since we're dealing with photons, we would really need to do the math with conservation of relativistic 4-momentum to get the right answer. (Newtonian conservation of momentum says there would be no recoil at all from a laser, but that's not quite true. It's just really, really tiny.)
Gah, total format failure. Forgot I was in HTML mode. You get the idea, though.
Minor nit: Mac OS X (until Snow Leopard) had to deal with 4 architectures $ file /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib: Mach-O universal binary with 4 architectures /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib (for architecture ppc7400): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library ppc /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib (for architecture ppc64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library ppc64 /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib (for architecture i386): Mach-O dynamically linked shared library i386 /usr/lib/libbz2.dylib (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit dynamically linked shared library x86_64
I don't see this as an either/or proposition. Backing up protects you from data loss, which comes in many forms:
* Sudden hardware or software failure
* Silent hardware/software failure (or user failure) resulting in corruption you only discover later
* Theft/fire/natural disaster
At the same time you want:
* Easy backup procedure (if it is too hard, you won't do it)
* Fast restore procedure
A sensible backup plan needs to address all of these needs. Incremental tape backups with rotation to an offsite vault is one option which covers most of these things, but isn't particularly easy or automated. RAID is very easy and convenient, but only covers a very narrow range of hardware failures. (If you listen closely, you can hear the screams in the distance of a RAID user who just lost data to software-induced filesystem corruption. Hence the mantra "RAID is not backup.")
Network (blah, blah, "cloud," blah) backup services are a great option for cheap offsite backup that is extremely convenient and continuous. But you should supplement it with some kind of local, fast backup as well. That way you can recover quickly from hard drive failure and corrupted filesystems, but still have a Plan B if your house floods. (Or if you local backup turns out not to be broken when you need it!) Moreover, many network backup services will mail a hard drives for a fee if disaster strikes and you need to restore everything.
In my case, I use CrashPlan and Time Machine to do this. CrashPlan backs up changed files every 15 minutes to several offsite locations. I also plug a Time Machine disk into my laptop periodically to make a local snapshot. Restoration is quick in the common case, but I also have coverage for extraordinary events as well as backups when I travel without my external disk.
I think often people confuse "altruism" with "long term self-interest," and that may be the issue Google is considering here. In the short term, you can make it hard for tenants to move out, and maybe gain a little bit of rent that you would not have otherwise gotten. However, people talk and, in the long term, behavior like that can lose you potential customers. You will be forced to drop your rent in order to keep your units full.
(This relates to the best description of "business ethics" I've heard: Ethical business requires that you balance the needs of and try to act in the best interest of your owners, employees and customers. Otherwise, in the long run, you will find yourself without capital, labor, or revenue. Thus, business ethics is about long term self-interest, not some kind of abstract altruism. Sometimes the "long run" takes a really long time, encouraging people to risk unethical behavior, of course.)
Making it easier to leave Google applications helps grow your potential customer base in the future (such as those who are wary of lock in), at the risk of losing current customers who are unhappy with your service. That is a motivation well-rooted in self-interest, as long as you think your product is better than everyone else's.
The GeForce 9 series was a rebrand/die shrink of GeForce 8, but the GTX 200 series has some major improvements under the hood:
* Vastly smarter memory controller including better batching of reads, and the ability to map host memory into the GPU memory space
* Double the number of registers
* Hardware double precision support (not as fast as single, but way faster than emulating it)
These sorts of things probably don't matter to people playing games, but they are huge wins for people doing GPU computing. The GTX 200 series has also seen a minor die shrink during the generation, so I don't know if the next generation will be more of a die shrink or actually include improved performance. (Hopefully the latter to keep up with Larrabee.)
From the page: "Sloppy reduction allowed us to make our code branch-free and thereby very efficient on the PS3's 4-way SIMD Synergistic Processing Units (SPUs)." This sounds promising for CUDA. If this code is really branch-free, it should fly on a GTX 285. NVIDIA's GT200 chips have a lot more raw compute power, but less flexibility, than the Cell processor on the PS3. The usual CUDA performance killer is irregular memory read patterns and highly divergent branching.
This makes sense, of course. If disk rotation speeds stay fixed, and areal densities increase, then the number of bits per second passing under the head has to go up. As long as hard drive manufacturers can keep increasing storage capacity, they will get speed increases at the same time. (If you need to use longer error-correcting codes on the platter to achieve these densities, that can fight against these gains.)
oops. 15 cents/MB
I picked up the Kindle DX on release day (much to my amazement, as I figured the initial stock would go entirely to preorders) and then took it on a 2 week trip. I'm quite pleased with it, although I definitely believe that it will only appeal to a narrow market.
Pros:
Cons:
In fact, Lustre (a distributed filesystem for clusters) will be using the ZVOL layer precisely for this reason in a future release of the OS.
Amen, but to add to this: If you are going to institute some kind of usage billing, it is *absolutely* critical you give people the tools to monitor their usage. At a minimum, there should be a web page that customers can view their current usage (no more than 24 hours old) relative to the quota. For bonus points, give people the ability to get email updates when they pass predefined levels, or if their one-day usage exceeds some value.
If you are putting 130W into the CPU, then I would expect nearly 130W coming out in heat. Otherwise, that means the CPU is storing energy somewhere. Initially, it will store some energy as the chip heats to above room temperature, but then it should rapidly hit a steady state where power in = power out.