I'm a big Newegg fan, but the hard drive packing comment is definitely true. If I were to mail a hard drive back to Seagate the way Newegg often mails drives to customers (wrapped in 2 layers of bubble wrap, thrown into box of peanuts), Seagate would void my warranty. The weight of the drive has usually popped half of the bubbles by the time I receive the box. Thankfully, none of the drives I've purchased have been DOA, but this shipping practice must increase the infant mortality rate somewhat.
A quick Google puts the number of US cell phone users in 2005 at 208 million. A number of cell providers will give you a "free" phone every two years, and many people take advantage of that. I'd guess the cell phone number is plausible if you assume slightly less than 50% turn over rate per year and include growth in the cell phone market since the 2005 numbers were published.
I know this is mostly a snarky comment, but I'm curious what you think is lacking in the debugging. I used to write a lot of Python (and hope to get back to it soon) and the debugging tools were never one of the things that annoyed me.
C will give you a good base for learning how the system calls and libraries work, but Python is a lot more fun and better for any program where being close to the metal is not important.
And seriously, if you use a decent text editor, in a few weeks you'll forget Python's indentation conventions ever bothered you.
Because people who get the joke are going to laugh and move on. Only people who don't get the joke, or who want to make a lame follow-on joke, are going to hit the submit button. (Or people who are annoyed by the previous groups.)
Self-selection bias explains a lot about the stuff you find on the Internet.
True, but the ZFS-FUSE author also had to port over some Solaris-specific utility code that ZFS depended on. From what I remember following the ZFS-FUSE development initially, that was almost as time consuming as writing the FUSE wrapper.
I don't know about the patents, but the current major obstacle is the license. ZFS, as part of the OpenSolaris kernel, is available under the CDDL. The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, ruling out ZFS inclusion directly in the Linux kernel. Sun has hinted that they could dual license the Solaris kernel under CDDL and GPL, but that hasn't happened yet. Small parts of the ZFS filesystem code have been GPLed so they could be added to grub to support booting ZFS root filesystems.
There is a userspace port of the ZFS code and utilities which avoids the license problem by using FUSE to separate the filesystem code into a separate process: ZFS-FUSE.
If Sun were to ever dual-license ZFS, the ZFS-FUSE codebase would be a good place to start for porting the code to direct kernel inclusion. (Note: Sun, via their subsidiary, Cluster File Systems, now employes the author of ZFS-FUSE to use his port as an optional backend for the Lustre file system.)
I've seen a number of "Chinese factory" spam emails. These tend to be Chinese companies which specialize in things like engine parts, motors, giant inflatable fabric store displays, etc. I would classify these as gullible merchants who are desperate to find American customers, and have been convinced that spam is the way to do it. The hit rate for industrial water pump spam has got to be even lower than drug/herbal enhancement spam....
Right, such changes in the magnetic field might happen "quickly" on geologic timescales, but would be very slow on human timescales. Such a flip won't be like an EMP going off.
You make quite a leap in step #5. There is no indication that Firefox sends any of the current browser cookies to Google in step #3. Google could certainly log IP addresses in step #3, which is the real privacy issue here.
The cosmic rays in orbit are way, way worse than any problems you run into putting a data center at sea. The magnetic domains on a hard disk platter might survive that kind of radiation (or maybe not...), but the silicon will go bonkers unless you have fat transistors and a large amount of error-correction circuitry in place. A fleet of super-expensive Pentium Pros in orbit just doesn't sound that appealing.:)
An underground data center on the Moon is almost easier to do... (Even better if you can put your device fabrication nearby.)
No argument to the last point, but to be fair, statistical reasoning is easiest to apply to situations where you have many trials. This includes things like determining the uncertainty in the prevalence of mad cow disease, deciding the optimal testing regime for sprockets given the know costs of failure, and so on.
It's not so clear how this applies to risk of fatality, though. Certainly from the meat producer standpoint, there is a statistical procedure to decide how much testing is acceptable. They only need to weigh the cost of the test against the expected cost of court judgements from fatalities. A large meat packer would have the required sample size, in cows tested and court cases, to ensure that such decisions would tend toward the expectation when averaged over long periods of time.
From the consumer perspective, things are totally different. When you are dealing with a risk that can kill you, the cost of losing the random draw is very, very high. You only live once, so it isn't like you can average over many lifetimes of eating beef (or driving your car, or having open heart surgery). Nevertheless, we are still able to take such risks without being able to quantify the outcomes. It's a human irrationality which makes life livable.
Tolerance of fatal risk is ultimately an emotional question, which explains why there would be demand for 100% testing, even at high cost. The real question is: What is the false negative rate of the test? 100% testing will not give 100% certainty about the BSE content of the beef supply, and people should be made aware of that.
On the CUDA forums, we've gone back and forth about this, and the diagrams that people base this statement on are backwards. There are 16 multiprocessors (to use the NVIDIA terminology), each with 8 stream processors per multiprocessor. The 8 stream processors on each multiprocessor run the same instruction at once, but on separate register files. Multiprocessors, however, are completely independent, so in principle, one could imagine partitioning the resources between physics simulation and 3D rendering. This sort of partitioning has not been made available through CUDA yet, but hopefully this means we will see it soon.
You are correct that these 128 stream processors (however you slice them) are the main compute engine. There is additional circuitry to do hardware accelerated video decoding, but NVIDIA has not exposed that functionality to 3rd party programmers, and it isn't used during 3D rendering.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned CUDA yet, which is Nvidia's existing entry into the world of general purpose GPU computing. So far their target market is mostly dedicated calculations with limited interoperability with OpenGL/DirectX, but I expect we'll see future cards that can partition their compute resources between multiple tasks, like rendering and physics. Hopefully, porting over the PhysX SDK will help grow the GPGPU toolset, and make it easier to use.
(CUDA already transforms the 8800 GTX into quite an impressive array processor. With 128 floating point units and 768 MB of fast, fast memory, this card is chewing up the data-parallel compute tasks I'm throwing at it.)
I used to think that maybe frequency of submission got a tag promoted to the front page. Given the very improbable tags that sometimes appear, there must be some mechanism which allows a tag to appear even if only one user types it. Maybe, as you suggest, the system gives a random subset of users "front page tagging power" periodically. If that's the case, then I would imagine that switching to a frequency-based display of tags would clean up the front page. "Meme tags" like "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" would still be there, but the random smart-assing would be reduced.
Tags are the distilled essence of smart ass commentary. Rather than waste time rehashing a tired point, now you can just type "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" and move on. Time saving at its finest!
It is very fitting that this tag has become the most popular. Every story about anything new is filled with armchair critique about the fatal flaws in the new device/process/scientific discovery/program from a/. user who assumes the experts involved have at least as superficial a knowledge of the field as they do. "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" is the rallying cry of ignorant skepticism which is trying to pass itself off as insight. (Informed skepticism, on the other hand, is both useful and rare.)
Of course, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" has been so overused, now it has also become a form of self-parody.:)
Actually, those hazardous materials were all natural and already in the ground: Meteor Crash in Peru Caused Mysterious Illness. Noxious fumes created by hot meteor smashing into arsenic-tainted water.
Agreed. Hopefully we'll see more of technologies like Z-RAM, which sounds like it has great promise. You get the speed of SRAM, but with only one transistor per bit, and greater density than DRAM. That should lower the power consumption significantly for current cache sizes, or allow much larger caches.
Galactic rotation curves are only one of the pieces of evidence of dark matter. There is also a lot of evidence due to weak lensing that there are large invisible mass distributions. The Bullet Cluster is an especially impressive observation of two clusters colliding. The shockwave from the baryonic gases smacking into each other has separated the hydrogen from the dark matter, as seen when you overlay the xray map and the mass distribution reconstructed with weak lensing. Modified theories of gravity can most easily explain discrepancies when the visible matter and apparent invisible matter are concentric (such as in rotation curves). Then you just need to tweak the radial force strength at large distance. But in a system like the bullet cluster, the visible and dark matter have been separated, and that's a lot harder to explain with modified gravity. (Not that people aren't trying, of course...)
Astronomers fought long and hard against dark matter, but grudgingly accepted it after it became more and more difficult to explain galactic rotation curves, weak lensing, the large scale structure of galactic clusters, and the power spectrum of variations in the cosmic microwave background without it. It all fits together much better when you introduce a very weakly interacting source of mass into the soup that makes up the universe. (Weakly interacting enough to become a nearly collisionless fluid early on during the expansion of the universe.) The smoking gun will be the detection of dark matter in a controlled lab setting. Those searches are just now beginning to ramp up.
Yes, this phrase is almost always used when the writer actually means that a result "defies my intuition about the physical world" which is not the same as "defies the laws of physics." If our physical intuition always matched the actual behavior of the universe, then it would not have taken us hundreds of years to figure out the things we now know.
Observations which do not match up with our best understanding of the universe do happen (and are how we improve science), but they are not nearly as frequent as the articles which use this phrase.:)
It is worth pointing out that OS X is extremely user friendly while simultaneously being extremely developer friendly. Apple has embraced a lot of UNIX culture, bundling an entire BSD userspace, including Perl, Python, (and with 10.5, now Ruby), X, ssh, emacs, etc. While not installed by default, the DVD includes an entire IDE, as well as all the gcc command line utilities. Apple is also pretty good about (eventually) turning features they write for applications into generic libraries that all applications can use. Great examples of this include all the Core Animation/Image/Data frameworks, as well as the Spotlight infrastructure.
Apple, however, does not want you to mess with their applications. The ability to modify and make plugins for apps is generally very limited. Alternate music file formats are second-class citizens in iTunes, even with full Quicktime plugin support, and modifying Safari seems to always require scary-looking runtime hacks. If you don't like an Apple application, your only recourse is generally to take their libraries and try to roll your own from scratch. (Or fire up fink and compile your favorite Linux app instead.)
This I think is the problem with the iPhone. Apple is treating the whole phone package like one of their applications, and repel anyone who wants to extend or modify it. Hopefully with the release of the SDK in a few months, they will transition to an "iPhone/iPod Touch as platform" mentality, and bring some of the developer-friendly attitude from OS X over.
Slashdot Mirror
Self-selection bias. The people most likely to hit the reply button will be angry, bitter and/or annoyed.
I'm a big Newegg fan, but the hard drive packing comment is definitely true. If I were to mail a hard drive back to Seagate the way Newegg often mails drives to customers (wrapped in 2 layers of bubble wrap, thrown into box of peanuts), Seagate would void my warranty. The weight of the drive has usually popped half of the bubbles by the time I receive the box. Thankfully, none of the drives I've purchased have been DOA, but this shipping practice must increase the infant mortality rate somewhat.
A quick Google puts the number of US cell phone users in 2005 at 208 million. A number of cell providers will give you a "free" phone every two years, and many people take advantage of that. I'd guess the cell phone number is plausible if you assume slightly less than 50% turn over rate per year and include growth in the cell phone market since the 2005 numbers were published.
Almost. That should be $width_of_paper * 2**37.
CUDA is already doing great things in molecular dynamics, which bears some similarity to FEA:
HOOMD Benchmarks
A single 8800 GTX reaching 75% of the performance of a 32 node cluster isn't bad. I imagine the GTX 280 would easily beat the cluster.
I know this is mostly a snarky comment, but I'm curious what you think is lacking in the debugging. I used to write a lot of Python (and hope to get back to it soon) and the debugging tools were never one of the things that annoyed me.
C will give you a good base for learning how the system calls and libraries work, but Python is a lot more fun and better for any program where being close to the metal is not important.
And seriously, if you use a decent text editor, in a few weeks you'll forget Python's indentation conventions ever bothered you.
Because people who get the joke are going to laugh and move on. Only people who don't get the joke, or who want to make a lame follow-on joke, are going to hit the submit button. (Or people who are annoyed by the previous groups.)
Self-selection bias explains a lot about the stuff you find on the Internet.
True, but the ZFS-FUSE author also had to port over some Solaris-specific utility code that ZFS depended on. From what I remember following the ZFS-FUSE development initially, that was almost as time consuming as writing the FUSE wrapper.
I don't know about the patents, but the current major obstacle is the license. ZFS, as part of the OpenSolaris kernel, is available under the CDDL. The CDDL is incompatible with the GPL, ruling out ZFS inclusion directly in the Linux kernel. Sun has hinted that they could dual license the Solaris kernel under CDDL and GPL, but that hasn't happened yet. Small parts of the ZFS filesystem code have been GPLed so they could be added to grub to support booting ZFS root filesystems.
There is a userspace port of the ZFS code and utilities which avoids the license problem by using FUSE to separate the filesystem code into a separate process: ZFS-FUSE.
If Sun were to ever dual-license ZFS, the ZFS-FUSE codebase would be a good place to start for porting the code to direct kernel inclusion. (Note: Sun, via their subsidiary, Cluster File Systems, now employes the author of ZFS-FUSE to use his port as an optional backend for the Lustre file system.)
I've seen a number of "Chinese factory" spam emails. These tend to be Chinese companies which specialize in things like engine parts, motors, giant inflatable fabric store displays, etc. I would classify these as gullible merchants who are desperate to find American customers, and have been convinced that spam is the way to do it. The hit rate for industrial water pump spam has got to be even lower than drug/herbal enhancement spam....
Right, such changes in the magnetic field might happen "quickly" on geologic timescales, but would be very slow on human timescales. Such a flip won't be like an EMP going off.
Wow, ok, I stand corrected. Building the protocol around cookie transmission is a very bad idea. Hopefully that bug gets taken seriously.
You make quite a leap in step #5. There is no indication that Firefox sends any of the current browser cookies to Google in step #3. Google could certainly log IP addresses in step #3, which is the real privacy issue here.
The cosmic rays in orbit are way, way worse than any problems you run into putting a data center at sea. The magnetic domains on a hard disk platter might survive that kind of radiation (or maybe not...), but the silicon will go bonkers unless you have fat transistors and a large amount of error-correction circuitry in place. A fleet of super-expensive Pentium Pros in orbit just doesn't sound that appealing. :)
An underground data center on the Moon is almost easier to do... (Even better if you can put your device fabrication nearby.)
No argument to the last point, but to be fair, statistical reasoning is easiest to apply to situations where you have many trials. This includes things like determining the uncertainty in the prevalence of mad cow disease, deciding the optimal testing regime for sprockets given the know costs of failure, and so on.
It's not so clear how this applies to risk of fatality, though. Certainly from the meat producer standpoint, there is a statistical procedure to decide how much testing is acceptable. They only need to weigh the cost of the test against the expected cost of court judgements from fatalities. A large meat packer would have the required sample size, in cows tested and court cases, to ensure that such decisions would tend toward the expectation when averaged over long periods of time.
From the consumer perspective, things are totally different. When you are dealing with a risk that can kill you, the cost of losing the random draw is very, very high. You only live once, so it isn't like you can average over many lifetimes of eating beef (or driving your car, or having open heart surgery). Nevertheless, we are still able to take such risks without being able to quantify the outcomes. It's a human irrationality which makes life livable.
Tolerance of fatal risk is ultimately an emotional question, which explains why there would be demand for 100% testing, even at high cost. The real question is: What is the false negative rate of the test? 100% testing will not give 100% certainty about the BSE content of the beef supply, and people should be made aware of that.
On the CUDA forums, we've gone back and forth about this, and the diagrams that people base this statement on are backwards. There are 16 multiprocessors (to use the NVIDIA terminology), each with 8 stream processors per multiprocessor. The 8 stream processors on each multiprocessor run the same instruction at once, but on separate register files. Multiprocessors, however, are completely independent, so in principle, one could imagine partitioning the resources between physics simulation and 3D rendering. This sort of partitioning has not been made available through CUDA yet, but hopefully this means we will see it soon.
You are correct that these 128 stream processors (however you slice them) are the main compute engine. There is additional circuitry to do hardware accelerated video decoding, but NVIDIA has not exposed that functionality to 3rd party programmers, and it isn't used during 3D rendering.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned CUDA yet, which is Nvidia's existing entry into the world of general purpose GPU computing. So far their target market is mostly dedicated calculations with limited interoperability with OpenGL/DirectX, but I expect we'll see future cards that can partition their compute resources between multiple tasks, like rendering and physics. Hopefully, porting over the PhysX SDK will help grow the GPGPU toolset, and make it easier to use.
(CUDA already transforms the 8800 GTX into quite an impressive array processor. With 128 floating point units and 768 MB of fast, fast memory, this card is chewing up the data-parallel compute tasks I'm throwing at it.)
Tags are definitely the new Slashdot graffiti.
I used to think that maybe frequency of submission got a tag promoted to the front page. Given the very improbable tags that sometimes appear, there must be some mechanism which allows a tag to appear even if only one user types it. Maybe, as you suggest, the system gives a random subset of users "front page tagging power" periodically. If that's the case, then I would imagine that switching to a frequency-based display of tags would clean up the front page. "Meme tags" like "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" would still be there, but the random smart-assing would be reduced.
Tags are the distilled essence of smart ass commentary. Rather than waste time rehashing a tired point, now you can just type "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" and move on. Time saving at its finest!
It is very fitting that this tag has become the most popular. Every story about anything new is filled with armchair critique about the fatal flaws in the new device/process/scientific discovery/program from a /. user who assumes the experts involved have at least as superficial a knowledge of the field as they do. "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" is the rallying cry of ignorant skepticism which is trying to pass itself off as insight. (Informed skepticism, on the other hand, is both useful and rare.)
Of course, "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" has been so overused, now it has also become a form of self-parody. :)
Actually, those hazardous materials were all natural and already in the ground: Meteor Crash in Peru Caused Mysterious Illness. Noxious fumes created by hot meteor smashing into arsenic-tainted water.
Agreed. Hopefully we'll see more of technologies like Z-RAM, which sounds like it has great promise. You get the speed of SRAM, but with only one transistor per bit, and greater density than DRAM. That should lower the power consumption significantly for current cache sizes, or allow much larger caches.
Galactic rotation curves are only one of the pieces of evidence of dark matter. There is also a lot of evidence due to weak lensing that there are large invisible mass distributions. The Bullet Cluster is an especially impressive observation of two clusters colliding. The shockwave from the baryonic gases smacking into each other has separated the hydrogen from the dark matter, as seen when you overlay the xray map and the mass distribution reconstructed with weak lensing. Modified theories of gravity can most easily explain discrepancies when the visible matter and apparent invisible matter are concentric (such as in rotation curves). Then you just need to tweak the radial force strength at large distance. But in a system like the bullet cluster, the visible and dark matter have been separated, and that's a lot harder to explain with modified gravity. (Not that people aren't trying, of course...)
Astronomers fought long and hard against dark matter, but grudgingly accepted it after it became more and more difficult to explain galactic rotation curves, weak lensing, the large scale structure of galactic clusters, and the power spectrum of variations in the cosmic microwave background without it. It all fits together much better when you introduce a very weakly interacting source of mass into the soup that makes up the universe. (Weakly interacting enough to become a nearly collisionless fluid early on during the expansion of the universe.) The smoking gun will be the detection of dark matter in a controlled lab setting. Those searches are just now beginning to ramp up.
Yes, this phrase is almost always used when the writer actually means that a result "defies my intuition about the physical world" which is not the same as "defies the laws of physics." If our physical intuition always matched the actual behavior of the universe, then it would not have taken us hundreds of years to figure out the things we now know.
Observations which do not match up with our best understanding of the universe do happen (and are how we improve science), but they are not nearly as frequent as the articles which use this phrase. :)
It is worth pointing out that OS X is extremely user friendly while simultaneously being extremely developer friendly. Apple has embraced a lot of UNIX culture, bundling an entire BSD userspace, including Perl, Python, (and with 10.5, now Ruby), X, ssh, emacs, etc. While not installed by default, the DVD includes an entire IDE, as well as all the gcc command line utilities. Apple is also pretty good about (eventually) turning features they write for applications into generic libraries that all applications can use. Great examples of this include all the Core Animation/Image/Data frameworks, as well as the Spotlight infrastructure.
Apple, however, does not want you to mess with their applications. The ability to modify and make plugins for apps is generally very limited. Alternate music file formats are second-class citizens in iTunes, even with full Quicktime plugin support, and modifying Safari seems to always require scary-looking runtime hacks. If you don't like an Apple application, your only recourse is generally to take their libraries and try to roll your own from scratch. (Or fire up fink and compile your favorite Linux app instead.)
This I think is the problem with the iPhone. Apple is treating the whole phone package like one of their applications, and repel anyone who wants to extend or modify it. Hopefully with the release of the SDK in a few months, they will transition to an "iPhone/iPod Touch as platform" mentality, and bring some of the developer-friendly attitude from OS X over.