The most important sentence in that article: "If a 'go' decision is made to pursue the goal of a sustained petaflop, a final phase would be executed, with plans for completion at the end of 2007" The whole world is racing to build the world's first computer to sustain one petaflop. It's only a matter of time. I'm told the Japanese project (which is already underway) is expected to finish sometime around 2008/2009. Our project, C64, has been going since 1999, and I think it's got a really good shot of being the first. On the other hand, I find their claim that they can go from scratch to a petaflop computer by the end of next year (18 months from now) to be impossibly optimistic.
C64 takes a totally different approach to high performance computing. Most supercomputer architectures are built around a moderate to large number of very, very fast (and power-hungry) processors. For example, Big Mac at Virgina Tech had something like 10,000 pentium 4 class processors. Cyclops64 is have an *enormous* number of processors (on the order of a million), but running only at 500 mhz, making them much easier to cool). The idea is to give the programmer more thread units than he knows what to do with, running very close together at a low level.
BlueGene/L has a sister project, Cyclops64 (formerly known as BlueGene/C) due out sometime late in 2006 or early 2007. My research group is (a) helping IBM do hardware verification on it. and (b) developing the systems software for it [esp. the compiler]. Cyclops64 could very well blow BlueGene/L out of the water.
One word: durability. DVDs are good, but their fatal flaw is that they are too damned easy to break. Just ask any netflixian about the problem. The biggest motivator for upgrading to a new format would be a more durable format that didn't become useless after a year of wear and tear.
The RIAA has definitely figured out the solution to preventing people from trading bootleg music over peer to peer, and it's a very simple one - they stopped making music people want. That's why sales have been plummetting for half a decade, and it wouldn't surprise me if the peer to peer trend curve matched the sales curve almost identically.
Rock-paper-scissors was used in this case to determine which lawyer could choose the location for the deposition. A minor aspect of a minor part of the trial.
On the other hand, in New York City courts determine which judge is assigned to the case (a CONSIERABLY more important question) are by spinning a wooden wheel with all the judges' names on it. (I'm sorry I don't have a citation)
"XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings" - I don't think the music industry needs any help persuading people never again to buy their music - they're already doing such a fine job of that by themselves.
I'm the one who arranged for that seminar to be recorded (I convinced the department to pick up the $400 cost) To my knowledge, three copies were made - I got one (it's sitting on my shelf as I type this), department secretary Barbara Graham got one for the department, and Joseph (a guy in my research group) got the third and final copy. So - how did you end up with one? I am very curious to know.
Mills told me he was rather popular back around the year 2000;) {to the point of being called to the White House for a series of meeting about Y2K complaince)
More interestingly, Mills said that he fears a potential DOS against the entire internet would be to use an NTP hack to advance the clocks on all the caches, thus expiring their contents and causing the root servers to be flooded. This would effectively bring down DNS until the caches could be fixed.
Mills is a prof in my department and was my advisor back when I was an undergrad. He is a very smart guy (A bit of trivia about him - he was asked to consult for the Chinese government on the Great Firewall and turned down the offer for ethical reasons). He also prides himself on the fact that NTP has never had a serious (any?) security issue despite being around damn-near forever. One very neat observation he described during a seminar on NTP was that high CPU load increases CPU heat, and CPU heat increases clock drift. Thus, NTP can, in effect, be used to measure CPU loads remotely. Another thing is, assuming CPU load is constant, it can be used as a thermometer, and in practice he has used it to detect fan failures.
Warren Buffet's system is plain freaking common sense - if you don't understand it, don't risk your money on it. If all investors practiced this not-so-subtle bit of wisdom, Enron would never have gotten a dollar from the investors they ultimately defrauded.
You know, criminals used machine guns all the time in the 1920s and 1930s. And then they were outlawed. And you know what? You don't hear too much about criminals using them anymore. (There was that one out in LA in the late '90s but beyond that not much). So did outlawing the machine guns turn those criminals into law-abiding citizens? No, probably not. Did it limit the amount of damage they can do? Oh yes.
With SOX prevent any future finincial scandals? No, certainly not. Will it limit the amount of damage a dirty corporation can do? Absolutely. Might CEOs who would otherwise have gone dirty think twice when faced with committing black-letter felonies? Yep, I think so.
So what you are saying basically amount to - giving an honest accounting of a company is expensive? Ok, so be it. Companies that find a way to do this cheaply and effeciently will prosper (and have their standards adopted by others), and ones that don't will tank. And in the future, investors won't again have to worry about CEOs lying on balance sheets in order to cheat the market (at least not using the same bag of tricks that worked for Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/et al).
Yes, Enron was brought down by the market. In fact, that's how pretty much every finincial scandal ends - the company that caused it implodes and the government is left to pick up the pieces. The point of SOX is to prevent a repeat performance by a company using the same not-quite-illegal/barely-illegal tactics that Enron used.
The points I am making are that Enron's collapse was as bad as it was in significant (if not exclusive) part because a number of finicial companies (J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers according to this) were telling investors to buy Enron stock at the same time they were heavily invested in Enron. This is a clear conflict of interest. The auditors (Arthur Anderson) were caught an a different conflit of interest - they started thinking their fiduciary responsibility was to their client (Enron) instead of their investors (who got screwed when Arhtur Anderson got wiped out by the market, a punishment it richly deserved).
"First, investor confidence in the entire system would have collapsed. People would've started pulling their money out because, after Enron, a huge loophole in the system was found and all of a sudden no company with profit would have been considered safe." - this is not true. Warren Buffet, the richest investor in the planet, refuses to invest in any buisness that he doesn't understand. Accounting sheets don't have to be difficult to read - it depends on the accounting methods used. If a buisness is using a hard-to-understand one, stay the hell away and you won't get burned.
Enron, in point of fact, was a buisness that *nobody* understood, and that's why people loved it. They said people had trouble understanding their buisness model because it was so far ahead of its time. Instead, they were playing a compliated shell game to hide their debts
If the problem is that there are only 4 accounting firms (and, for the reocrd, Arthur Anderson wasn't the only one with credibility issues) the free market is *easily* capable of correcting this problem.
As far as consultancy, they shouldn't be doing it! It was illegal until the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. The merger of finicial institutions created the conflicts of intersts that led directly to Enron.
I'm 100% in favor of bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, a useful bit of post-Depression legislation that would probably have prevented Enron (or, at the very least, significantly reduced the overall damage). Glass-Steagall ruled that a company could not do both finincial analysis and investment banking, because it's a conflict of interest to be evalauting the same companies you have intestments in. Thanks to the Republicans, Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 (although, to be fair, Bill Clinton did sign the law repealing it).
Here's the title of the article: "Execs tell regulators Sarbanes-Oxley costs exceed benefits". Here's the slashdot title: "Sarbanes-Oxley Costs Exceed Benefits". Notice the difference?
Sarbanes-Oxley is a *very good thing* - it exists to prevent another Enron. It makes CEOs criminally liable for when their companies cook the books. Amazingly, for some inexplicable reason, they don't seem to like it. Everyone reading this should go over to Netflix and add Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room to their queues. It shows exactly how Enron was able to pull off the accounting shell-game that kept them afloat for years.
Slashdot Mirror
The most important sentence in that article: "If a 'go' decision is made to pursue the goal of a sustained petaflop, a final phase would be executed, with plans for completion at the end of 2007" The whole world is racing to build the world's first computer to sustain one petaflop. It's only a matter of time. I'm told the Japanese project (which is already underway) is expected to finish sometime around 2008/2009. Our project, C64, has been going since 1999, and I think it's got a really good shot of being the first. On the other hand, I find their claim that they can go from scratch to a petaflop computer by the end of next year (18 months from now) to be impossibly optimistic.
C64 takes a totally different approach to high performance computing. Most supercomputer architectures are built around a moderate to large number of very, very fast (and power-hungry) processors. For example, Big Mac at Virgina Tech had something like 10,000 pentium 4 class processors. Cyclops64 is have an *enormous* number of processors (on the order of a million), but running only at 500 mhz, making them much easier to cool). The idea is to give the programmer more thread units than he knows what to do with, running very close together at a low level.
BlueGene/L has a sister project, Cyclops64 (formerly known as BlueGene/C) due out sometime late in 2006 or early 2007. My research group is (a) helping IBM do hardware verification on it. and (b) developing the systems software for it [esp. the compiler]. Cyclops64 could very well blow BlueGene/L out of the water.
One word: durability. DVDs are good, but their fatal flaw is that they are too damned easy to break. Just ask any netflixian about the problem. The biggest motivator for upgrading to a new format would be a more durable format that didn't become useless after a year of wear and tear.
The RIAA has definitely figured out the solution to preventing people from trading bootleg music over peer to peer, and it's a very simple one - they stopped making music people want. That's why sales have been plummetting for half a decade, and it wouldn't surprise me if the peer to peer trend curve matched the sales curve almost identically.
Ceiling cat is watching you
All it takes is once, if that fine happens to be one hundred "beeeeeellion" dollars.
Rock-paper-scissors was used in this case to determine which lawyer could choose the location for the deposition. A minor aspect of a minor part of the trial.
On the other hand, in New York City courts determine which judge is assigned to the case (a CONSIERABLY more important question) are by spinning a wooden wheel with all the judges' names on it. (I'm sorry I don't have a citation)
"Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter"
2311 to be exact :)
Can you express that value in burning libraries of congress per second?
"XM subscribers will have little need ever again to buy legitimate copies of plaintiffs' sound recordings" - I don't think the music industry needs any help persuading people never again to buy their music - they're already doing such a fine job of that by themselves.
I'm the one who arranged for that seminar to be recorded (I convinced the department to pick up the $400 cost) To my knowledge, three copies were made - I got one (it's sitting on my shelf as I type this), department secretary Barbara Graham got one for the department, and Joseph (a guy in my research group) got the third and final copy. So - how did you end up with one? I am very curious to know.
I don't know where you are getting your numbers, but I asked him what the resolution is, and he said "well within one degree C"
Mills told me he was rather popular back around the year 2000 ;) {to the point of being called to the White House for a series of meeting about Y2K complaince)
More interestingly, Mills said that he fears a potential DOS against the entire internet would be to use an NTP hack to advance the clocks on all the caches, thus expiring their contents and causing the root servers to be flooded. This would effectively bring down DNS until the caches could be fixed.
Mills is a prof in my department and was my advisor back when I was an undergrad. He is a very smart guy (A bit of trivia about him - he was asked to consult for the Chinese government on the Great Firewall and turned down the offer for ethical reasons). He also prides himself on the fact that NTP has never had a serious (any?) security issue despite being around damn-near forever. One very neat observation he described during a seminar on NTP was that high CPU load increases CPU heat, and CPU heat increases clock drift. Thus, NTP can, in effect, be used to measure CPU loads remotely. Another thing is, assuming CPU load is constant, it can be used as a thermometer, and in practice he has used it to detect fan failures.
Warren Buffet's system is plain freaking common sense - if you don't understand it, don't risk your money on it. If all investors practiced this not-so-subtle bit of wisdom, Enron would never have gotten a dollar from the investors they ultimately defrauded.
You know, criminals used machine guns all the time in the 1920s and 1930s. And then they were outlawed. And you know what? You don't hear too much about criminals using them anymore. (There was that one out in LA in the late '90s but beyond that not much). So did outlawing the machine guns turn those criminals into law-abiding citizens? No, probably not. Did it limit the amount of damage they can do? Oh yes.
With SOX prevent any future finincial scandals? No, certainly not. Will it limit the amount of damage a dirty corporation can do? Absolutely. Might CEOs who would otherwise have gone dirty think twice when faced with committing black-letter felonies? Yep, I think so.
So what you are saying basically amount to - giving an honest accounting of a company is expensive? Ok, so be it. Companies that find a way to do this cheaply and effeciently will prosper (and have their standards adopted by others), and ones that don't will tank. And in the future, investors won't again have to worry about CEOs lying on balance sheets in order to cheat the market (at least not using the same bag of tricks that worked for Enron/Worldcom/Tyco/et al).
Yes, Enron was brought down by the market. In fact, that's how pretty much every finincial scandal ends - the company that caused it implodes and the government is left to pick up the pieces. The point of SOX is to prevent a repeat performance by a company using the same not-quite-illegal/barely-illegal tactics that Enron used.
The points I am making are that Enron's collapse was as bad as it was in significant (if not exclusive) part because a number of finicial companies (J.P. Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Credit Suisse First Boston, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Barclays, Deutsche Bank and Lehman Brothers according to this) were telling investors to buy Enron stock at the same time they were heavily invested in Enron. This is a clear conflict of interest. The auditors (Arthur Anderson) were caught an a different conflit of interest - they started thinking their fiduciary responsibility was to their client (Enron) instead of their investors (who got screwed when Arhtur Anderson got wiped out by the market, a punishment it richly deserved).
"First, investor confidence in the entire system would have collapsed. People would've started pulling their money out because, after Enron, a huge loophole in the system was found and all of a sudden no company with profit would have been considered safe." - this is not true. Warren Buffet, the richest investor in the planet, refuses to invest in any buisness that he doesn't understand. Accounting sheets don't have to be difficult to read - it depends on the accounting methods used. If a buisness is using a hard-to-understand one, stay the hell away and you won't get burned.
Enron, in point of fact, was a buisness that *nobody* understood, and that's why people loved it. They said people had trouble understanding their buisness model because it was so far ahead of its time. Instead, they were playing a compliated shell game to hide their debts
If the problem is that there are only 4 accounting firms (and, for the reocrd, Arthur Anderson wasn't the only one with credibility issues) the free market is *easily* capable of correcting this problem.
As far as consultancy, they shouldn't be doing it! It was illegal until the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. The merger of finicial institutions created the conflicts of intersts that led directly to Enron.
I'm 100% in favor of bringing back the Glass-Steagall Act, a useful bit of post-Depression legislation that would probably have prevented Enron (or, at the very least, significantly reduced the overall damage). Glass-Steagall ruled that a company could not do both finincial analysis and investment banking, because it's a conflict of interest to be evalauting the same companies you have intestments in. Thanks to the Republicans, Glass-Steagall was repealed in 1999 (although, to be fair, Bill Clinton did sign the law repealing it).
Here's the title of the article: "Execs tell regulators Sarbanes-Oxley costs exceed benefits". Here's the slashdot title: "Sarbanes-Oxley Costs Exceed Benefits". Notice the difference?
Sarbanes-Oxley is a *very good thing* - it exists to prevent another Enron. It makes CEOs criminally liable for when their companies cook the books. Amazingly, for some inexplicable reason, they don't seem to like it. Everyone reading this should go over to Netflix and add Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room to their queues. It shows exactly how Enron was able to pull off the accounting shell-game that kept them afloat for years.