this document [216.239.41.104] alleges that the whole clustering thing began at NASA in 1994.
They must be talking about Beowulf in specific; clustering in general definitely goes back further than that. For example, I know that DEC was clustering Vaxen back in the 1980's. (I remember hearing in those days that CompuServe operated on a Vax cluster.)
The blurb doesn't explain what a beowulf cluster is, but explains what the origin of the name is. Are slashdot readers that ignorant?
About Old English literature? You bet, at least a substantial number of them are. And you'll find lit students who know all about Hrunting and Grendel's Mom, but are equally clueless about system clustering.
An aside to Lord-of-the-Rings-loving geeks: Tolkein was a scholar of Beowulf, and drew substantial inspiration from it. It isn't as easy a read as Tolkein (even in a Modern English translation; the original is barely recognisable as English), but you might enjoy it.
Kind of like you're doing right now, trying to smear and discredit "Zionists" by portraying them as lying spammers? This is a tradition that goes back at least a century, with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (an anti-semitic hoax) being a prime example.
Last time around, a change of only about 200 voters would have changed the outcome.
The Supreme Court isn't nearly that large. {wry grin}
Seriously, the margin of victory in the 2000 election was within the margin of error of the polling system. It works OK when there's a substantial margin between the leading candidates (e.g. Reagan over Mondale, Clinton over Dole), but it simply isn't capable of measuring with the precision that a very close race requires.
How about readability? Granted, 80 is completely arbitrary, but if you're in column 70something and you're still typing (and you're not coding in COBOL, in which case you get a free pass), your code is going to be difficult to read no matter how large your monitor is. Newspapers have real estate that makes a 21" monitor look cramped, but they still put their text in much narrower columns.
One of the things my programming instructors nagged us about was the formatting of our code. e.g. You could put an entire "for" loop on a single line, but unless it's a really simple one, that'd make it harder to read.
One of the things my graphic design instructros nagged us about was negative space. e.g. You could fill the entire page/screen, but that creates an atmosphere of clutter and chaos.
80 columns may not be the law anymore, but it's still a good idea.
The unemployment rate has been dropping for some time now.
The "unemployment rate" is a meaningless statistic, because it fails to account for how many people have A) taken worse jobs than the ones they had before, B) given up trying to find a job, or C) exhausted their benefits.
And your anecdotal example is a meaingless "statistic" as well.
There's no reason that employers should be held responsible for providing healthcare. The only reason it's part of the employment picture at all is because government-imposed wage freezes in the mid 20th century made it harder for employers to attract workers, so they started throwing in the stuff we now call "benefits" instead.
Today, the rising cost of health insurance has become one of the largest burdens on employers and a huge dis-incentive to job creation. Without that expectation of providing "bennies", employers could afford to pay substantially more in negotiable, discretionary cash.
Whether the burden of paying for healthcare should then be shifted to these better-paid workers to arrange for themselves through the free market (the libertarian approach), or shifted to the better-funded (because tax-paying workers are better paid) government to arrange for universal coverage (the socialist approach) is a very good, debatable question. But tying it directly to employment (the current republicrat approach) is neither humane nor sound economics.
Opt for a company that will give you a walled office over a cube nearly every time. It indicates they really do value you and they want you to be productive.
My last job was the first ever (read: "20 years") in which I had my own office with walls and a door. It was also the most miserable, gods-forsaken place I have ever worked. The places where the staff worked in cubes have been... OK. To my surprise, despite being an introverted anti-social hermit, I've been happiest working in places where the staff were put in an open office area. Putting you in a closed office may indicate that they value you, but putting you in a room where you'll be available to interact with everyone else apparently indicates that they appreciate you.
If you're getting taxed 50% on your income, you're either A) really really bad at figuring out a 1040 (in which case I pity you), or B) making way way more money than me to be in such a high tax bracket (in which case I don't). With such obviously hyperbolic rhetoric, I'd almost think you were running for public office or something.
My new job gives me perks like being able to go home at 3 or 4 PM every day, and I get to take computer equipment home with me for keeps. The catch is that the gear I can take is all 6+ years old, and I get to go home that early because the budget only covers paying me for 6.5 hours/day.
But seriously, I did take this job for "perks" of a sort, eagerly quitting a job that paid a couple thousand a year more. The perks include: a boss who treats me with respect, a department attitude that focuses on what we can do for people rather than what we won't do for them, the opportunity to do a variety of things from one day to the next, and yes: the assurance of always getting to go home while it's still light out (even in December) and the chance to play with (and make useful things out of) "obsolete" old-world Macs. These are the kind of perks that don't cost my employer anything (on their balance sheet), but which make a huge difference to me.
In theory you could teach a full computer science degree without even touching a computer.
No, because "science" is requires the application of the Scientific Method, which requires empirical testing of hypotheses. Unless by "not touching a computer" you count submitting jobs via punch cards or terminals.:)
I've never used any of those things on the job.... directly job related... useful on the job.
You seem to have confused going to college and getting educated, with a vocational training program and certification. Sounds like what you want is a two-year degree.
Serious touch-typing (as developed for 50-key typewriters) is a skill most of us don't need. It's useful for entering large amounts of alphanumeric text, but few of us do that very much. Heck, typing snarky remarks into Slashdot is probably the most typing many of us do. Even codemonkeys probably spend more time looking at code and/or manipulating it with the other keys and with mice, not actually typing it. Typing on a wide 104-key computer keyboard is physically more like playing am 88-key piano keyboard than it is like typing on a 50-key typewriter keyboard. Sure, it helps to be able to do that without looking, but it's not that great an advantage as it for the traditional typing mode of the secretary or the novelist, where speed and accuracy are (were) more advantageous.
I bought a used 500MHz G3 12" iBook last year, with a battery that (obviously) had already lost some of its charge capacity. During a recent power failure, as my web server, firewall, hub, and DSL router drew sustenance from my chugging generator, I sat with my iBook (unconnected to the generator) and continued alternating beween reading/. and working on a story I'm writing. A couple hours later, the electricity came back on. I switched the "work" machines back to the mains, shut off the generator... and continued for another hour or two on the iBook, on battery. It still had some charge left when I started getting tired, and put it away.
The iBook's various power-saving features were helpful, I'm sure, but the fact that it's running a leisurely 500MHz CPU must have helped. If you're concerned about battery life, look at the slowest models available. An older, slower machine with a fresh battery is probably going to keep you going the longest.
Not really, but at least you did more this time than just snap that everybody else is wrong, without any indication of what was right. Any ill-tempered jerk can do that. But now you've shown that you can also (sort of) explain what your point was.
Unfortunately you're wrong here. The person asking isn't just "different"; he's telling us he does have a problem, and he wants help with it. No one's "forcing him to live like everyone else"; he wants to live like other people.
But seriously, drinking heavily is not likely to help anyone at all with their sleeping problems. Sure, drinking a box of wine will put you to sleep, but it'll be low-quality, not-getting-any-rest sleep. Not to mention having to get up in the middle of the night to pee.
A suggestion for anyone having trouble with sleep, and who drinks: try cutting down or quitting for a while and see if that helps. I'm neither a puritan nor a health nut, but I can tell you that putting a cap on my nightly beer consumption has noticeably improved the quality of my sleeping (and my waking up).
Yeah, and "West Side Story" was just a singing and dancing retelling of "Romeo and Juliet", and "Le Morte d'Arthur" was just a novel-form retelling of the Christian gospels, and "The Wrath of Kahn" was just a movie-form retelling of "Moby Dick".
There aren't a whole lot of truly original story ideas out there. What matters is the telling.
Re:The future sucks, it always does
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Why does the future always suck...?
I guess you've never read early popular sci-fi, which was usually about the glories that technology would bring in The Future. That's what people believed in those days. The stuff you're reading (mostly written later) is a reaction to that, first acting as cautionary tales against conventional wisdom, and more recently confirming the common belief that Things Are Getting Worse. So the future isn't what it used to be.
I wouldn't be able to tell how hard I'm exercising. Which brings up the point that these turbines are going to have to be variable speed if they're going to accommodate humans' varying oxygen needs.
The best way to derail SCO's attempt to register "Unix System Laboratories" (a trademark they're not currently using) would be for someone to demonstrate that they're already using that mark in trade. Of course X/Open, the owners of the UNIX® trademark, also ought to have something to say about it.
I've got a Toshiba laptop whose LCD died, so it's now tethered to a cheap external LCD. And I... I... installed Windows ME on it.
But the greatest abuse I've given to my hardware has been to keep using it well after a respectible retirement age. Like a PC's Limited Turbo XT (bought from a kid named Mike Dell) that's had everything but its keyboard and power supply replaced over the past 17 years, which I still use as an emergency backup web/mail/dns server. Or a 15-year-old Mac SE, a monochrome Windows 3.1 laptop, and a 386 running Linux... all of which I'm running as web servers. (Sorry, no direct links; even a modest/.ing could be too much for them. There are links to them on my personal site under "Hobbies".)
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but it's a Grendel's Mother cluster that I'd be more afraid of. And as everyone knows, a Dragon cluster will whup a Beowulf cluster's butt.
They must be talking about Beowulf in specific; clustering in general definitely goes back further than that. For example, I know that DEC was clustering Vaxen back in the 1980's. (I remember hearing in those days that CompuServe operated on a Vax cluster.)
About Old English literature? You bet, at least a substantial number of them are. And you'll find lit students who know all about Hrunting and Grendel's Mom, but are equally clueless about system clustering.
An aside to Lord-of-the-Rings-loving geeks: Tolkein was a scholar of Beowulf, and drew substantial inspiration from it. It isn't as easy a read as Tolkein (even in a Modern English translation; the original is barely recognisable as English), but you might enjoy it.
Kind of like you're doing right now, trying to smear and discredit "Zionists" by portraying them as lying spammers? This is a tradition that goes back at least a century, with the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (an anti-semitic hoax) being a prime example.
The Supreme Court isn't nearly that large. {wry grin}
Seriously, the margin of victory in the 2000 election was within the margin of error of the polling system. It works OK when there's a substantial margin between the leading candidates (e.g. Reagan over Mondale, Clinton over Dole), but it simply isn't capable of measuring with the precision that a very close race requires.
How about readability? Granted, 80 is completely arbitrary, but if you're in column 70something and you're still typing (and you're not coding in COBOL, in which case you get a free pass), your code is going to be difficult to read no matter how large your monitor is. Newspapers have real estate that makes a 21" monitor look cramped, but they still put their text in much narrower columns.
One of the things my programming instructors nagged us about was the formatting of our code. e.g. You could put an entire "for" loop on a single line, but unless it's a really simple one, that'd make it harder to read.
One of the things my graphic design instructros nagged us about was negative space. e.g. You could fill the entire page/screen, but that creates an atmosphere of clutter and chaos.
80 columns may not be the law anymore, but it's still a good idea.
Yeah, that's the low-speed, centralised network that the other candidate in 2000 "took the initiative in creating".
The "unemployment rate" is a meaningless statistic, because it fails to account for how many people have A) taken worse jobs than the ones they had before, B) given up trying to find a job, or C) exhausted their benefits.
And your anecdotal example is a meaingless "statistic" as well.
Today, the rising cost of health insurance has become one of the largest burdens on employers and a huge dis-incentive to job creation. Without that expectation of providing "bennies", employers could afford to pay substantially more in negotiable, discretionary cash.
Whether the burden of paying for healthcare should then be shifted to these better-paid workers to arrange for themselves through the free market (the libertarian approach), or shifted to the better-funded (because tax-paying workers are better paid) government to arrange for universal coverage (the socialist approach) is a very good, debatable question. But tying it directly to employment (the current republicrat approach) is neither humane nor sound economics.
My last job was the first ever (read: "20 years") in which I had my own office with walls and a door. It was also the most miserable, gods-forsaken place I have ever worked. The places where the staff worked in cubes have been... OK. To my surprise, despite being an introverted anti-social hermit, I've been happiest working in places where the staff were put in an open office area. Putting you in a closed office may indicate that they value you, but putting you in a room where you'll be available to interact with everyone else apparently indicates that they appreciate you.
If you're getting taxed 50% on your income, you're either A) really really bad at figuring out a 1040 (in which case I pity you), or B) making way way more money than me to be in such a high tax bracket (in which case I don't). With such obviously hyperbolic rhetoric, I'd almost think you were running for public office or something.
But seriously, I did take this job for "perks" of a sort, eagerly quitting a job that paid a couple thousand a year more. The perks include: a boss who treats me with respect, a department attitude that focuses on what we can do for people rather than what we won't do for them, the opportunity to do a variety of things from one day to the next, and yes: the assurance of always getting to go home while it's still light out (even in December) and the chance to play with (and make useful things out of) "obsolete" old-world Macs. These are the kind of perks that don't cost my employer anything (on their balance sheet), but which make a huge difference to me.
No, because "science" is requires the application of the Scientific Method, which requires empirical testing of hypotheses. Unless by "not touching a computer" you count submitting jobs via punch cards or terminals. :)
You seem to have confused going to college and getting educated, with a vocational training program and certification. Sounds like what you want is a two-year degree.
Serious touch-typing (as developed for 50-key typewriters) is a skill most of us don't need. It's useful for entering large amounts of alphanumeric text, but few of us do that very much. Heck, typing snarky remarks into Slashdot is probably the most typing many of us do. Even codemonkeys probably spend more time looking at code and/or manipulating it with the other keys and with mice, not actually typing it. Typing on a wide 104-key computer keyboard is physically more like playing am 88-key piano keyboard than it is like typing on a 50-key typewriter keyboard. Sure, it helps to be able to do that without looking, but it's not that great an advantage as it for the traditional typing mode of the secretary or the novelist, where speed and accuracy are (were) more advantageous.
The iBook's various power-saving features were helpful, I'm sure, but the fact that it's running a leisurely 500MHz CPU must have helped. If you're concerned about battery life, look at the slowest models available. An older, slower machine with a fresh battery is probably going to keep you going the longest.
Not really, but at least you did more this time than just snap that everybody else is wrong, without any indication of what was right. Any ill-tempered jerk can do that. But now you've shown that you can also (sort of) explain what your point was.
Unfortunately you're wrong here. The person asking isn't just "different"; he's telling us he does have a problem, and he wants help with it. No one's "forcing him to live like everyone else"; he wants to live like other people.
P.S. Try using a laxative.
Then maybe you'd care to enlighten all of us and earn that "Informative" mod point?
A "7 ounce cup" is like a "15 ounce pound", a "90 cent dollar", a "47.87% majority" or a "63-bit G5": a contradiction in terms. It is... not logical.
A suggestion for anyone having trouble with sleep, and who drinks: try cutting down or quitting for a while and see if that helps. I'm neither a puritan nor a health nut, but I can tell you that putting a cap on my nightly beer consumption has noticeably improved the quality of my sleeping (and my waking up).
There aren't a whole lot of truly original story ideas out there. What matters is the telling.
I guess you've never read early popular sci-fi, which was usually about the glories that technology would bring in The Future. That's what people believed in those days. The stuff you're reading (mostly written later) is a reaction to that, first acting as cautionary tales against conventional wisdom, and more recently confirming the common belief that Things Are Getting Worse. So the future isn't what it used to be.
I wouldn't be able to tell how hard I'm exercising. Which brings up the point that these turbines are going to have to be variable speed if they're going to accommodate humans' varying oxygen needs.
The best way to derail SCO's attempt to register "Unix System Laboratories" (a trademark they're not currently using) would be for someone to demonstrate that they're already using that mark in trade. Of course X/Open, the owners of the UNIX® trademark, also ought to have something to say about it.
But the greatest abuse I've given to my hardware has been to keep using it well after a respectible retirement age. Like a PC's Limited Turbo XT (bought from a kid named Mike Dell) that's had everything but its keyboard and power supply replaced over the past 17 years, which I still use as an emergency backup web/mail/dns server. Or a 15-year-old Mac SE, a monochrome Windows 3.1 laptop, and a 386 running Linux... all of which I'm running as web servers. (Sorry, no direct links; even a modest /.ing could be too much for them. There are links to them on my personal site under "Hobbies".)