Racism has nothing to do with it. Bigotry, maybe, but racism is systemic, not individual.
There are a lot of people who think the main problem the U.S. has is a lack of racial purity. You comment is sadly just one example of many.
Here's the problem with that theory and thus the foundation of Libertarianism and the Republican party: our economic system has massive feedback loops. Ever heard the phrase, "it takes money to make money?"
That statement is right on. And furthermore, the more money you have, the more you'll make. There's a massive positive feedback loop for the wealthy.
There's also a negative feedback loop for the poor. Poor people have to pay for food and clothing, etc. Credit debt racks up, leading to higher interest rates, inability to get loans, all sorts of penalties and other fees which result in the poor getting poorer.
Thus the kind of capitalism Republicans and Libertarians support inevitably leads to a huge and increasing wealth gap, to the point of complete polarization. We're seeing it already. We're in it right now. This is a new Gilded Age and it's entirely caused by the economic policies advocated by Goldwater, implemented by Reagan and strengthened by both Bush administrations.
Our current system is not sustainable. Libertarianism would make it even worse.
I don't see how they get to 2 TFLops.
512-bit = 64 bit * 8 way SIMD or 32 bit * 16 way SIMD. Let's go with the bigger of these two and say we are performing 16 single Floating point operations per clock-cycle per core. 16 operations per clock-core * 32 cores * 2 Billion clocks per second = 1024 Single Precision GFlops.
Most likely there is a muladd unit, which would double the peak FLOPS.
That's no joke. It's not at all unusual to have to wait hours for tens of thousands of core files to be produced on large HPC machines.
Debugging at scale is a really, really hard problem.
Racism isn't about personal views. That's bigotry and there's plenty of that.
Racism is about power. It's about using the power of privilege to keep one's place at the top. And there are lots and lots of white folks who are perfectly happy to let that happen.
Look at the numbers of African American men in jail compared to whites. Look at the economic trends. Look at the education results.
This stuff doesn't happen because African Americans are inherently inferior, have a poor culture or any of the other nonsense the Republican party likes to spout. It happens because there are systems in place that make it happen. In some cases these systems were deliberately constructed. In others they are "unintended consequences." But whatever the cause of those systems, the fact that they exist is a prima facie case for racism.
Because racism is about power, you will sometimes hear people say that African Americans can't be racist. That's not to say they can't be bigoted. But African Americans simply do not hold power over other race groups to leverage privilege the way whites do. That's what people are talking about when they say this.
Your post is an excellent example of why we need to be talking about this stuff in the U.S. and why so many African Americans are so strongly backing Obama. He is a symbol of hope that, possibly, we can start turning our culture around and African Americans can have a real voice in what happens in this country.
McCain is actually far closer to Bush and basically just tries to extend Bush's disastrous fiscal policies.
All too true. What scares me is that the "maverick" label of McCain has stuck. He's no maverick. Look at how he accepted the endorsement of nutcase pastor Hagee until he was finally called out on it. And even then, he didn't actually address the comments Hagee made.
McCain scares me because people actually believe he will be different than Bush. Remember how Bush put forth the image of his "common man" lifestyle and "compassionate conservatism." Hmm...how well does that hold up against the track record of the corporate corruption and lawlessness actively supported by his administration?
McCain has one of the most conservative voting records of anyone in the Senate but somehow people think he's a moderate.
It seems every election Slashdot has an article on which candidate is better "for the geeks." This is along with hundreds of articles about which candidate is better for X Y Z group.
This is a symptom of the sickness in our society today. Everyone thinks in terms of, "what's best for me," rather than, "what's best for our country." It is exactly the kind of thinking that led us into our current mess of endless war, deficit spending, a falling dollar and the housing crash. People voted for the candidate who said the right thing on a narrow issue rather than looking at the broad profile and thinking about how position and policy statements would affect us in the large.
It's easy to campaign to individual desires. It's much harder to campaign on the idea that together we are much stronger than we are as individuals. We've had some examples of this: Both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Lincoln. But ever since Goldwater, individualistic politics has ruled the day.
I see this attitude starting to change, but it's slow. I, along with other politically-minded people I know, have pledged to contribute our stimulus checks to funding a fall public event in St. Paul, MN that will bring this conversation to a larger group of people. The stimulus checks themselves are another symptom of the rampant hyper-individualism of our society. They send the message that you, as an individual, are more important to the economy than our combined efforts. Well, I reject that notion and what better way to make a point of it than using that money to collectively support an effort that works to restore balance among the needs of the individual and the needs of the community?
Too bad I don't see and computing (computer science or engineering) colleagues on the list of groups. We need real reform in our industry.
I pretty much gave up on academia in the computing field after becoming disgusted at what I saw in graduate school. We are by far the most unscientific engineering discipline around and it's costing us.
Encouraging release and discussion of negative results is by far the most useful thing this collaborative effort will bring. I can't tell you how many times I talked to students who all looked at the same thing and all concluded it didn't work. Researchers waste many hours rediscovering failures that other groups may have encountered years prior. But our ridiculous notion that any paper that doesn't show a 10% improvement is unpublishable means that this information never gets exchanged.
The other big failure in our field is the absolutely unreproduceable nature of results. So many assumptions go unstated in papers that it is impossible to recreate the experiment. Believe me, I've tried multiple times. I have yet to read a software engineering paper and try to implement the idea where I did not have some major question about how the thing is supposed to work.
Part of the problem is that the peer reviewers of these papers are not professors but rather their students. This has pluses and minuses. The students are often closer to the actual work than the professors and can have insights the professor will not. On the other hand, their relative lack of experience means that they aren't necessarily thinking about reproduceability or making sure all details are fully disclosed. The "peer" in "peer review" should include people at all levels in the discipline.
We need comprehensive reform in the computer science and engineering field. I would start with the following:
Encourage publication of negative results
Positive results must be reproduceable
Any software used in published experiments must be released with full source code (helps reproduceability)
Ensure that reviewers at multiple experience levels sign off on any peer reviewed article
I'm sure there are more things to be done. I'd publish a paper about this but I can't prove a 10% improvement to the process.
There are lots of good comments here and I think one can make a strong argument for either type of school. It really comes down to your life goals.
But here's the kicker. You probably don't know what your life goals are yet. None of us really do because our lives are ever-changing. What's in our interest today may not be in our interest tomorrow.
I went to a strong liberal arts school that also had strong law and businesses schools and decent, but not top-tier science and engineering schools. For me this was the right choice, though I didn't realize just how right it was until years after I graduated.
For a lot of people, college/university is a change to widen horizons. I did some of that in college and even more in grad school. I majored in engineering in college but because it is a Catholic liberal arts school, I was required to take theology and philosophy as well as seminar courses. This helped me out a lot in later years as I became a better writer and more in tune with my strongest values and beliefs. These liberal arts classes teach you how to logically form arguments and debate. They're not the end-all, be-all but there are a good foundation to build on.
I decided to go to a top engineering school for graduate work. That's almost a necessity. The combination of the two schools has been very good for me. In graduate school and in work life afterward, I became very interested in politics and getting involved in public life. The one course I wish I had taken is political science. It probably should be required in this country (the U.S.). The liberal arts education allowed me to quickly get up to speed on political life. Yes, anyone can get involved but if you have some sense of history and philosophical thought you can connect more readily with others around issues, debate and be effective. Politics requires reading, forming relationships and having an awareness of what's come before. Liberal arts courses help train you for that.
Now, that's been important for me. I think it's important for everyone to at least be somewhat involved in politics and public life but not everyone will be as deeply involved as I and others are. What the liberal arts give you is flexibility. You'll learn skills that are widely applicable.
I believe training in the fine arts is important for an engineer. That doesn't have to happen in college. Taking lessons on a musical instrument when young, learning to paint, etc. will exercise the creative part of your brain. Engineering is as much art as science. It's a crime that arts are the first thing to go during budget cuts at the local school level.
And PLEASE, take a writing course (unless you test out). I can't count the number of times I've cringed at how engineers write. This is a supremely important skill to have. You need to be able to communicate effectively if you're going to form productive working relationships with your fellow engineers and especially with management. If I had my way (which I don't yet), I would require interviewees to submit some kind of essay just to be able to gauge where they're at with this skill.
Finally, one of the most useful things I was ever directed to do in an engineering class is to read "Soul of a New Machine." The book is an eye opener. I've always remembered the scene where Tom West is interviewing candidates and asks them what they do outside work. If any of them answers "computers," they go to the bottom of the candidate list. Well-roundedness and the ability to get away from work is important.
The end of the internet tax subsidy is long overdue. Why should local businesses be at a disadvantage to mail-order companies that have zero commitment in the local community? These local businesses (most of them small businesses) provide the vast majority of jobs in a particular region. Exempting mail-order houses from certain responsibilities essentially encourages outsourcing of jobs.
It's not true that the mail order industry pays for what it uses through fuel taxes and other fees. Sales taxes are an important resource for local units of government. Roads get built with them. Transit gets built and operated. Services get provided.
Taxes are the way we invest in our community and our common future. Why should some companies be exempted from their civic responsibility?
Look, can we get beyond the "government is always inefficient" meme? It's just not true. Many government projects come in on schedule and on budget. Some project are late and over budget. Guess what? It happens in the private sector too.
Government is actually more accountable to the people than private corporations are. Numerous cost controls are in place. Public officials are elected. I have not seen the same level of scrutiny in the private sector.
So let's move beyond the ultra conservative and libertarian talking points, ok?
Obama talks a good game, but why should I trust his intentions?
Here's why I'm caucusing for Obama. He was a Gamaliel organizer. I'm very familiar with the organization as I put lots of time into the ISAIAH project in Minnesota. Gamaliel is a national network of grassroots faith-based community organizing groups.
People in Gamaliel are sending out a positive message about faith, values and progressive politics. These are people who are pounding the ground in the poor neighborhoods, in the white exurbs, in the demographically-changing inner-ring suburbs and in rural America. These are people who know how to get things done in our political process.
Obama has the kind of experience we need in a leader, Clinton does not. Obama deeply understands the needs of poor and working-class America because he spent an awful lot of his life organizing them. We need leaders who understand what it's like in the real world. Nothing that Clinton says convinces me she has a clue.
Obama talks about hope because once you start getting into the community organizing world and see how incredibly powerful it can be, you have no choice but to have hope.
So Gates thinks the Free Market (tm) solves everything. Big surprise. It is the dominant worldview of our culture.
And it's wrong.
Think about what this really says. It says that the Free Market is omnipotent, omnipresent and perfect. It says that the Free Market always does the right thing, always maximizes benefit for individuals and for society, always works better than any other possible mechanism.
In other words, the market is God
This is at the heart of the current tension in the alliance between market conservatives and religious conservatives. The religious conservatives are figuring out just how diametrically opposed market conservatism is to their core beliefs.
This concept of market as God pairs nicely with our other Big Lies:
Bootstrap Individualism -- The real message being that we exist only as individuals and the health of the community is secondary, that we don't actually need a community at all, that "personal responsibility" solves all problems.
Small Government is Good -- The real message being that government is bad, bad, BAD and is some "other" thing that exists outside of human beings and we can't possible participate in it.
We are a Racially Equitable Society -- The real message being that white people and culture are inherently better.
If you examine the messages being put out by ALL political parties you will find that they tap into one or more of these themes. We've been shaped to think this way over decades, starting with the Goldwater campaign.
It's time to think something different, like that we actually can have hope, that we don't have to fear each other, that we need to honestly confront the racial issues in our society and that our government exists to come together and make decisions for the common good.
The subject of subsidies is somewhat bogus. Yes, roads get tax dollars, but they are more than paid for -- by a large margin -- by gasoline taxes. Likewise, taxes on air travel are pretty heavy. Rail subsidies are quite different, they are paid mostly by people who don't use trains for travel.
This is a bogus argument. First off, roads are nowhere near paid for by gasoline taxes. The most generous estimate I've seen is that Minnesota state and federal highways are about 50% covered by fuel taxes and other user fees. I don't have numbers for other states, but I can't imagine it's far off. Note that this doesn't cover the cost of county, city and other local roads, which are almost exclusively paid for through property taxes.
Then there is a whole list of subsidies that are not generally accounted for on the road side. Parking is a prime example. We chew up lots of very valuable real estate to build "free" parking lots. Then there's on-street parking, municipal parking ramps which generally don't pay for themselves and so on.
Judging rail by a standard that "most of the cost is paid for by those who don't use it" is also bogus in the context of comparing it to highways. I don't use 99.98% of the federal highways in this country yet I still pay for them. I don't use 99.98% of Minnesota state highways but I still pay for them. I don't use 99.98% of Hennepin county roads but I still pay for them.
It is in fact good that I pay for them. It keeps the cost burden on any one individual or group relatively low. People in Minnesota are getting whacked by huge property tax increases because our "no new taxes" Governor Pawlenty twice vetoed a transportation bill that would have sent more state money to local units of government to help with their road maintenance. Now, rather than using statewide resources, cities and counties are forced to raise the funds from a much smaller group of people, resulting in disproportionately large tax increases on those groups.
Finally, those abandoned rail corridors are gold for any unit of government farsighted enough to snatch them up. We're using them in Minnesota to build commuter bike trails and as cheap right-of-way for future LRT lines. These corridors are going to become more and more important for commuters and short-to-mid-distance intercity travel as gas prices continue to soar and we find we can't expand our freeways anymore due to cost and geographic constraints.
You have a very strange notion of what public transit is supposed to do.
Public transit does not exist primarily to benefit automobile users. It is wrong to gauge the effectiveness of transit by trying to estimate how much it has impacted congestion (this is impractical to do in any real sense anyway). The purpose of transit is to provide an alternative to driving -- to avoid the congestion entirely.
And no transportation system pays for itself. There is always subsidy involved and that's a good thing. It's part of the commons, a public resource which should get public support and have public accountability. One cannot have public accountability with a privatized entity.
Who, in their right mind, would devote thousands of development hours cobbling something together, then cast it into the wind where basement developers use "what they want, and [get] rid of what they don't?"
And of course the usual suspects like Sun and IBM.
Free Software can most definitely be an important part of a business strategy. For example, the company I work for uses it to leverage testing resources of the community. We also get bug fixes back from the community. We think it makes a lot of sense for a large community to share core development responsibility, the sort of stuff you find in university textbooks that is not proprietary in any way.
In the future, companies aren't going to make money selling operating systems, word processors or basic compiler implementations. They're going to make money modifying the OS to run well on custom hardware, selling plugins to do fancy document formatting and developing new compiler optimizations that make all of this run well on their
proprietary computer system.
Re:It's about votes, not pandering.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Amen.
There's a rebirth of social organization happening in this country. Unions like SEIU are finally throwing off the stale leadership of ineffective labor coalitions and are taking charge themselves. They're doing this by building leaders within their own ranks who are politically savvy and tuned into what power is really about.
This ain't your daddy's "Christian Right." The religious right is essentially a group of patsys co-opted to advance a conservative economic agenda. When you look at the actual issue campaigns of the religious right, almost none of the went anywhere. The only victory they might claim is a set of state constitutional amendments to ban equal unions for GLBT people. But even that was motivated by election politics, not the values underlying the issue itself. The religious right was and is being used by the conservatives. They're starting to wise up to that.
On the other hand, this new breed of faith activists is more than willing to take both sides of the aisle to task. There's a discipline to building public relationships with other people and especially with public officials. These groups and the new power-oriented unions understand what that is and that it is what is at the core of political power.
Otherwise known as vector computing, MIMD is a generic term for VLIW architectures. I.e. instruction/data are bundled to be processed together in parallel.
Nope. The terms are pretty easy to figure out given their definition:
SISD: Single Instruction Single Data -- Uniprocessing
SIMD: Single Instruction Multiple Data -- Each single instruction operating on multiple data. Vectorization, SSE, Altivec, single-issue VLIW with scalar operations, etc.
MIMD: Multiple Instruction Multiple Data -- Different instructions operating on different data. Multithreading, Superscalar, Scalar Multiprocessing, multiple-issue VLIW using scalar operations, etc.
MISD: Multiple Instruction Single Data -- Different instructions each operating on the same data. Sounds useless but is used for redundant execution in multithreaded codes to avoid synchronization and also for hardware error detection and correction (the S/390 has multiple redundant cross-checked cores, for example).
Of course, these get mixed-and-matched. For example, every vector processor has scalar instructions so it uses at least SISD and SIMD. Those processors can be put in multiprocessor machines so those systems are also MIMD. So the applicability of the term depends on the context (within a core, within a socket, within a system, the particular code at issue, etc.)
One of my Computer Science Profs said something similar. He argued that C and C++
are basically the same outdated shit and professionals would only use Java in real-world
applications.
Then your professor is a fool. When Java can do metaprogramming, we can talk. It's an invaluable tool for trading off run-time flexibility for speed. Most polymorphism is in fact completely static.
We are not at the end of network technology. You're talking about essentially consumer-level stuff. There's a vast amount of network technology out there that goes beyond what Infiniband provides.
Software that needs very high bandwidth won't work on a cluster and probably won't work very well on a single-socket desktop either. Right tool for the right job and all that. There are plenty of codes out there that want tens or hundreds of thousands of cores. Some can even run on clusters. Others need something a bit meatier.
So you're using 'non-standard' features and you're suprised that other implementations don't have them? Do you really care about portability then or not?
You're looking at this very differently from the way most developers look at it. It's no longer necessary to write a portable Makefile because we have a make (GNU make) that is itself portable. You write your Makefile to that specification, avoiding the greatest-common-subset (a.k.a. dumbest-possible-subset) problem and expect GNU make to be installed everywhere. The features of GNU make are so incredibly useful that they are now de facto standards. Any userland that doesn't support them is broken.
The same argument applies to textutils. Shells are a little more problematic simply because for some reason some admins don't like to install additional shells and set up/etc/passwd correctly. So we still need to deal with dumb, dumb, DUMB Solaris shell problems. Try bootstrapping gcc on Solaris for a wonderfully painful example.
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Racism has nothing to do with it. Bigotry, maybe, but racism is systemic, not individual. There are a lot of people who think the main problem the U.S. has is a lack of racial purity. You comment is sadly just one example of many.
So, your contention is that the U.S.'s main problem is all the African Americans and Latinos? Wow.
That statement is right on. And furthermore, the more money you have, the more you'll make. There's a massive positive feedback loop for the wealthy.
There's also a negative feedback loop for the poor. Poor people have to pay for food and clothing, etc. Credit debt racks up, leading to higher interest rates, inability to get loans, all sorts of penalties and other fees which result in the poor getting poorer.
Thus the kind of capitalism Republicans and Libertarians support inevitably leads to a huge and increasing wealth gap, to the point of complete polarization. We're seeing it already. We're in it right now. This is a new Gilded Age and it's entirely caused by the economic policies advocated by Goldwater, implemented by Reagan and strengthened by both Bush administrations.
Our current system is not sustainable. Libertarianism would make it even worse.
I don't see how they get to 2 TFLops. 512-bit = 64 bit * 8 way SIMD or 32 bit * 16 way SIMD. Let's go with the bigger of these two and say we are performing 16 single Floating point operations per clock-cycle per core. 16 operations per clock-core * 32 cores * 2 Billion clocks per second = 1024 Single Precision GFlops.
Most likely there is a muladd unit, which would double the peak FLOPS.
That's no joke. It's not at all unusual to have to wait hours for tens of thousands of core files to be produced on large HPC machines. Debugging at scale is a really, really hard problem.
Bull.
Racism isn't about personal views. That's bigotry and there's plenty of that.
Racism is about power. It's about using the power of privilege to keep one's place at the top. And there are lots and lots of white folks who are perfectly happy to let that happen.
Look at the numbers of African American men in jail compared to whites. Look at the economic trends. Look at the education results.
This stuff doesn't happen because African Americans are inherently inferior, have a poor culture or any of the other nonsense the Republican party likes to spout. It happens because there are systems in place that make it happen. In some cases these systems were deliberately constructed. In others they are "unintended consequences." But whatever the cause of those systems, the fact that they exist is a prima facie case for racism.
Because racism is about power, you will sometimes hear people say that African Americans can't be racist. That's not to say they can't be bigoted. But African Americans simply do not hold power over other race groups to leverage privilege the way whites do. That's what people are talking about when they say this.
Your post is an excellent example of why we need to be talking about this stuff in the U.S. and why so many African Americans are so strongly backing Obama. He is a symbol of hope that, possibly, we can start turning our culture around and African Americans can have a real voice in what happens in this country.
All too true. What scares me is that the "maverick" label of McCain has stuck. He's no maverick. Look at how he accepted the endorsement of nutcase pastor Hagee until he was finally called out on it. And even then, he didn't actually address the comments Hagee made.
McCain scares me because people actually believe he will be different than Bush. Remember how Bush put forth the image of his "common man" lifestyle and "compassionate conservatism." Hmm...how well does that hold up against the track record of the corporate corruption and lawlessness actively supported by his administration?
McCain has one of the most conservative voting records of anyone in the Senate but somehow people think he's a moderate.
This really bothers me.
It seems every election Slashdot has an article on which candidate is better "for the geeks." This is along with hundreds of articles about which candidate is better for X Y Z group.
This is a symptom of the sickness in our society today. Everyone thinks in terms of, "what's best for me," rather than, "what's best for our country." It is exactly the kind of thinking that led us into our current mess of endless war, deficit spending, a falling dollar and the housing crash. People voted for the candidate who said the right thing on a narrow issue rather than looking at the broad profile and thinking about how position and policy statements would affect us in the large.
It's easy to campaign to individual desires. It's much harder to campaign on the idea that together we are much stronger than we are as individuals. We've had some examples of this: Both Roosevelts, Kennedy, Lincoln. But ever since Goldwater, individualistic politics has ruled the day.
I see this attitude starting to change, but it's slow. I, along with other politically-minded people I know, have pledged to contribute our stimulus checks to funding a fall public event in St. Paul, MN that will bring this conversation to a larger group of people. The stimulus checks themselves are another symptom of the rampant hyper-individualism of our society. They send the message that you, as an individual, are more important to the economy than our combined efforts. Well, I reject that notion and what better way to make a point of it than using that money to collectively support an effort that works to restore balance among the needs of the individual and the needs of the community?
But what you don't understand is that it's just a cynical game set up by the folks under 500 to maintain our power.
Too bad I don't see and computing (computer science or engineering) colleagues on the list of groups. We need real reform in our industry.
I pretty much gave up on academia in the computing field after becoming disgusted at what I saw in graduate school. We are by far the most unscientific engineering discipline around and it's costing us.
Encouraging release and discussion of negative results is by far the most useful thing this collaborative effort will bring. I can't tell you how many times I talked to students who all looked at the same thing and all concluded it didn't work. Researchers waste many hours rediscovering failures that other groups may have encountered years prior. But our ridiculous notion that any paper that doesn't show a 10% improvement is unpublishable means that this information never gets exchanged.
The other big failure in our field is the absolutely unreproduceable nature of results. So many assumptions go unstated in papers that it is impossible to recreate the experiment. Believe me, I've tried multiple times. I have yet to read a software engineering paper and try to implement the idea where I did not have some major question about how the thing is supposed to work.
Part of the problem is that the peer reviewers of these papers are not professors but rather their students. This has pluses and minuses. The students are often closer to the actual work than the professors and can have insights the professor will not. On the other hand, their relative lack of experience means that they aren't necessarily thinking about reproduceability or making sure all details are fully disclosed. The "peer" in "peer review" should include people at all levels in the discipline.
We need comprehensive reform in the computer science and engineering field. I would start with the following:
I'm sure there are more things to be done. I'd publish a paper about this but I can't prove a 10% improvement to the process.
There are lots of good comments here and I think one can make a strong argument for either type of school. It really comes down to your life goals.
But here's the kicker. You probably don't know what your life goals are yet. None of us really do because our lives are ever-changing. What's in our interest today may not be in our interest tomorrow.
I went to a strong liberal arts school that also had strong law and businesses schools and decent, but not top-tier science and engineering schools. For me this was the right choice, though I didn't realize just how right it was until years after I graduated.
For a lot of people, college/university is a change to widen horizons. I did some of that in college and even more in grad school. I majored in engineering in college but because it is a Catholic liberal arts school, I was required to take theology and philosophy as well as seminar courses. This helped me out a lot in later years as I became a better writer and more in tune with my strongest values and beliefs. These liberal arts classes teach you how to logically form arguments and debate. They're not the end-all, be-all but there are a good foundation to build on.
I decided to go to a top engineering school for graduate work. That's almost a necessity. The combination of the two schools has been very good for me. In graduate school and in work life afterward, I became very interested in politics and getting involved in public life. The one course I wish I had taken is political science. It probably should be required in this country (the U.S.). The liberal arts education allowed me to quickly get up to speed on political life. Yes, anyone can get involved but if you have some sense of history and philosophical thought you can connect more readily with others around issues, debate and be effective. Politics requires reading, forming relationships and having an awareness of what's come before. Liberal arts courses help train you for that.
Now, that's been important for me. I think it's important for everyone to at least be somewhat involved in politics and public life but not everyone will be as deeply involved as I and others are. What the liberal arts give you is flexibility. You'll learn skills that are widely applicable.
I believe training in the fine arts is important for an engineer. That doesn't have to happen in college. Taking lessons on a musical instrument when young, learning to paint, etc. will exercise the creative part of your brain. Engineering is as much art as science. It's a crime that arts are the first thing to go during budget cuts at the local school level.
And PLEASE, take a writing course (unless you test out). I can't count the number of times I've cringed at how engineers write. This is a supremely important skill to have. You need to be able to communicate effectively if you're going to form productive working relationships with your fellow engineers and especially with management. If I had my way (which I don't yet), I would require interviewees to submit some kind of essay just to be able to gauge where they're at with this skill.
Finally, one of the most useful things I was ever directed to do in an engineering class is to read "Soul of a New Machine." The book is an eye opener. I've always remembered the scene where Tom West is interviewing candidates and asks them what they do outside work. If any of them answers "computers," they go to the bottom of the candidate list. Well-roundedness and the ability to get away from work is important.
The end of the internet tax subsidy is long overdue. Why should local businesses be at a disadvantage to mail-order companies that have zero commitment in the local community? These local businesses (most of them small businesses) provide the vast majority of jobs in a particular region. Exempting mail-order houses from certain responsibilities essentially encourages outsourcing of jobs.
It's not true that the mail order industry pays for what it uses through fuel taxes and other fees. Sales taxes are an important resource for local units of government. Roads get built with them. Transit gets built and operated. Services get provided.
Taxes are the way we invest in our community and our common future. Why should some companies be exempted from their civic responsibility?
Look, can we get beyond the "government is always inefficient" meme? It's just not true. Many government projects come in on schedule and on budget. Some project are late and over budget. Guess what? It happens in the private sector too.
Government is actually more accountable to the people than private corporations are. Numerous cost controls are in place. Public officials are elected. I have not seen the same level of scrutiny in the private sector.
So let's move beyond the ultra conservative and libertarian talking points, ok?
Here's why I'm caucusing for Obama. He was a Gamaliel organizer. I'm very familiar with the organization as I put lots of time into the ISAIAH project in Minnesota. Gamaliel is a national network of grassroots faith-based community organizing groups.
People in Gamaliel are sending out a positive message about faith, values and progressive politics. These are people who are pounding the ground in the poor neighborhoods, in the white exurbs, in the demographically-changing inner-ring suburbs and in rural America. These are people who know how to get things done in our political process.
Obama has the kind of experience we need in a leader, Clinton does not. Obama deeply understands the needs of poor and working-class America because he spent an awful lot of his life organizing them. We need leaders who understand what it's like in the real world. Nothing that Clinton says convinces me she has a clue.
Obama talks about hope because once you start getting into the community organizing world and see how incredibly powerful it can be, you have no choice but to have hope.
So Gates thinks the Free Market (tm) solves everything. Big surprise. It is the dominant worldview of our culture.
And it's wrong.
Think about what this really says. It says that the Free Market is omnipotent, omnipresent and perfect. It says that the Free Market always does the right thing, always maximizes benefit for individuals and for society, always works better than any other possible mechanism.
In other words, the market is God
This is at the heart of the current tension in the alliance between market conservatives and religious conservatives. The religious conservatives are figuring out just how diametrically opposed market conservatism is to their core beliefs.
This concept of market as God pairs nicely with our other Big Lies:
If you examine the messages being put out by ALL political parties you will find that they tap into one or more of these themes. We've been shaped to think this way over decades, starting with the Goldwater campaign.
It's time to think something different, like that we actually can have hope, that we don't have to fear each other, that we need to honestly confront the racial issues in our society and that our government exists to come together and make decisions for the common good.
This is a bogus argument. First off, roads are nowhere near paid for by gasoline taxes. The most generous estimate I've seen is that Minnesota state and federal highways are about 50% covered by fuel taxes and other user fees. I don't have numbers for other states, but I can't imagine it's far off. Note that this doesn't cover the cost of county, city and other local roads, which are almost exclusively paid for through property taxes.
Then there is a whole list of subsidies that are not generally accounted for on the road side. Parking is a prime example. We chew up lots of very valuable real estate to build "free" parking lots. Then there's on-street parking, municipal parking ramps which generally don't pay for themselves and so on.
Judging rail by a standard that "most of the cost is paid for by those who don't use it" is also bogus in the context of comparing it to highways. I don't use 99.98% of the federal highways in this country yet I still pay for them. I don't use 99.98% of Minnesota state highways but I still pay for them. I don't use 99.98% of Hennepin county roads but I still pay for them.
It is in fact good that I pay for them. It keeps the cost burden on any one individual or group relatively low. People in Minnesota are getting whacked by huge property tax increases because our "no new taxes" Governor Pawlenty twice vetoed a transportation bill that would have sent more state money to local units of government to help with their road maintenance. Now, rather than using statewide resources, cities and counties are forced to raise the funds from a much smaller group of people, resulting in disproportionately large tax increases on those groups.
Finally, those abandoned rail corridors are gold for any unit of government farsighted enough to snatch them up. We're using them in Minnesota to build commuter bike trails and as cheap right-of-way for future LRT lines. These corridors are going to become more and more important for commuters and short-to-mid-distance intercity travel as gas prices continue to soar and we find we can't expand our freeways anymore due to cost and geographic constraints.
You have a very strange notion of what public transit is supposed to do.
Public transit does not exist primarily to benefit automobile users. It is wrong to gauge the effectiveness of transit by trying to estimate how much it has impacted congestion (this is impractical to do in any real sense anyway). The purpose of transit is to provide an alternative to driving -- to avoid the congestion entirely.
And no transportation system pays for itself. There is always subsidy involved and that's a good thing. It's part of the commons, a public resource which should get public support and have public accountability. One cannot have public accountability with a privatized entity.
Hmm, let's see...
And of course the usual suspects like Sun and IBM.
Free Software can most definitely be an important part of a business strategy. For example, the company I work for uses it to leverage testing resources of the community. We also get bug fixes back from the community. We think it makes a lot of sense for a large community to share core development responsibility, the sort of stuff you find in university textbooks that is not proprietary in any way.
In the future, companies aren't going to make money selling operating systems, word processors or basic compiler implementations. They're going to make money modifying the OS to run well on custom hardware, selling plugins to do fancy document formatting and developing new compiler optimizations that make all of this run well on their proprietary computer system.
Amen.
There's a rebirth of social organization happening in this country. Unions like SEIU are finally throwing off the stale leadership of ineffective labor coalitions and are taking charge themselves. They're doing this by building leaders within their own ranks who are politically savvy and tuned into what power is really about.
And it's not just labor that is waking up. Faith-based community organizing is really taking off. Groups at the state level are engaging in serious power politics. And the right is taking notice. You know you're making an impact when an opposition group calls for a "<Name of your group> Watch."
This ain't your daddy's "Christian Right." The religious right is essentially a group of patsys co-opted to advance a conservative economic agenda. When you look at the actual issue campaigns of the religious right, almost none of the went anywhere. The only victory they might claim is a set of state constitutional amendments to ban equal unions for GLBT people. But even that was motivated by election politics, not the values underlying the issue itself. The religious right was and is being used by the conservatives. They're starting to wise up to that.
On the other hand, this new breed of faith activists is more than willing to take both sides of the aisle to task. There's a discipline to building public relationships with other people and especially with public officials. These groups and the new power-oriented unions understand what that is and that it is what is at the core of political power.
Interesting times, indeed.
Nope. The terms are pretty easy to figure out given their definition:
Of course, these get mixed-and-matched. For example, every vector processor has scalar instructions so it uses at least SISD and SIMD. Those processors can be put in multiprocessor machines so those systems are also MIMD. So the applicability of the term depends on the context (within a core, within a socket, within a system, the particular code at issue, etc.)
You can do the same with C and C++.
Then your professor is a fool. When Java can do metaprogramming, we can talk. It's an invaluable tool for trading off run-time flexibility for speed. Most polymorphism is in fact completely static.
The moderators are woefully uninformed.
We are not at the end of network technology. You're talking about essentially consumer-level stuff. There's a vast amount of network technology out there that goes beyond what Infiniband provides.
Software that needs very high bandwidth won't work on a cluster and probably won't work very well on a single-socket desktop either. Right tool for the right job and all that. There are plenty of codes out there that want tens or hundreds of thousands of cores. Some can even run on clusters. Others need something a bit meatier.
You're looking at this very differently from the way most developers look at it. It's no longer necessary to write a portable Makefile because we have a make (GNU make) that is itself portable. You write your Makefile to that specification, avoiding the greatest-common-subset (a.k.a. dumbest-possible-subset) problem and expect GNU make to be installed everywhere. The features of GNU make are so incredibly useful that they are now de facto standards. Any userland that doesn't support them is broken.
The same argument applies to textutils. Shells are a little more problematic simply because for some reason some admins don't like to install additional shells and set up /etc/passwd correctly. So we still need to deal with dumb, dumb, DUMB Solaris shell problems. Try bootstrapping gcc on Solaris for a wonderfully painful example.
Lilypond. Orders of magnitude better than Rosegarden.