...how many x86, off-the-shelf, 8-way SMP machines are there other than Sequent NUMA machines?
Intel has made 2-way and 4-way SMP accessible. So it is only natural that Linux has been made to work with these systems, flawed as they are by being based on PC architecture.
As far as MS and NT on a 32-cpu SMP machine, they worked with Sequent on that...
How many people can afford a Sun 64-CPU server? How many Linux kernel hackers work at a place where such a machine is their development toy?
...would this even be a point of conversation if the "majority" of society were not narcissistic self-promoting social junkies [to one degree or another] trying to figure out why the "geeks" exist in the first place?
Look at how loaded those words are:
mild Autism. ADD/ADHD. "Hacker". "Geek". "Nerd".
All are terms with some serious social stigma associated with them, in that they are not considered "normal", and at least 3 of them are something that "has to be fixed".
Histories of temporary employment make mortgage lenders skin crawl. Unless you really are netting $100K+/year contracting, and have been doing it for awhile, and have all your paper work, good luck...
[yes, I've bought a house as part of a relocation. yes, I've had the "must get a full-time job in 72 hours" contingency to deal with].
Hmm... how much of the serial processing debate is affected by the fact that most humans can only focus our attention on only one thing at a time, really, for details? Sure, there are peripheral triggers around the "attention space", but since we don't have eyes like chameleons, we're kind of stuck to some sort of parallel processing of serially-gathered detail information.
Ever wonder why chickens and pigeons do that "head thing" when they walk? Part of it is due to the latency they have in the rate of how fast their eyes focus (which is probably related to how fast their brains absorb detail). They keep their head steady until they have to move it to give their eyes a chance to focus...
Did anyone catch some little blurb, probably from Science News, that showed that the distribution of the different color-sensing cones is essentially random, yet when we look at, say a red wall, we see a uniform red wall...
Maybe the brain does a lot of serial processing of data from the optic nerve, but the optic nerve and retina also do a lot of signal processing in and of themselves.
I would rather think that we have lots of parallel/simultaneous subprocesses that are pipelined serially...
Student: "Is it a wave or a particle?" Physics Buddha: "Yes."
Humans dominant? Insects and bacteria rule the world...we conveniently get to live in it, and in our hubris, self-proclaim that we're "Kings of the world!"
"joebob fixed a nasty/esoteric bug dealing with 3c59x driver".
Does it need to highlight *exactly* what you contributed? No.
Do academic papers clearly delineate where one's work stops and another's starts? No.
For example, if I'm working off of some student's graduate thesis for my own work, unless I'm quoting directly, I talk to the person first, let him/her know what I'm doing, and go from there, in exchange for me clearly saying, "this idea of mine is clearly based on an idea first espoused by Dr. Soand So". Credit given. Pointer to the exact source listed in the references/bibliography. If you want to see the original, you get to look it up yourself.
....and, if you're really paranoid, you'll know the orbital "numbers" of that satellite. You'll know when it's watching you, and when it's watching someone else. Oddly enough, there is a group of people who "satellite spot", and it's not just Space [junk] Command and NASA...
Hmm... do you think the "artificial star" technique used by active-mirror astronomical mirror telescopes could be used in reverse by spy KH-class spy satellites to compensate for atmospheric turbulence?
some surplus camo netting from your favorite army-navy surplus store should work to obscure your house from satellite view. just make sure it matches the surrounding area... i.e., in Seattle don't use Desert cammo, and don't use woodland cammo in Phoenix... Or, more subtle, but this'll take a lot of time, and won't work in some areas, grow some big evergreen trees around your house, such that the crown obscures the outline of your house. But it'll only really worry your home insurance agent, not make everyone think that you take what Art Bell, et al., have to say too seriously, the way camo netting will.
the mirror trick might work good if you had it on a motorized mount to aim the sun straight up during the day, in theory. But they probably have good enough filters anyways.
...I like the way Canada's PM elections are done...it's all essentially done at once. Have to show up in every precinct-equivalent. Have to form your Cabinet based on representation split in Senate/House of Commons. You get run out of the PM job if your party fails miserably at Senate/House of Commons elections...
the US way of drawing out the election, in the "guise" of "informing" the people, is lame. Maybe it meant more in the days of big lag time in communications. But all it means now is more time for marketing, not discussing issues.
add to things the corporate nature of the media...
..the only way it will work is some sort of biometric key as well as a national-level ID number, which traditionally has been one of the major heebie-geebies thrown out by the Republicans in various issues [that they haven't liked. but they seem to like key escrow...] that would have been facilitated by such a thing.
Of course, they [Congress in general] still vote for exceptions to using SSNs as a de facto identification number [like your IRS taxid being your SSN, making claimed dependents have an SSN, etc.].
Hmmm... please show us these "well paid" suckers on the welfare system.
If you mean airplane companies, military contractors, people with mortgages, farmers [especially tobacco farmers], etc., professional sports franchises that get local governments to build their multi-million-dollar playgrounds for them, then OK.
If you think that the "welfare queens" are not representative of you, and worthy of all your scorn and penny-pitching, you're not looking hard enough.
You could even be a "welfare queen" and not even realize it (especially if you've invested in a mortgate)...
spare me the "bootstraps" stuff. It's like saying to clinically depressed people, "think happy thoughts and your depression will go away!".
Most of us not on welfare, even if we're close to it, have so many more advantages one way or the other than those on it [by choice or otherwise] that further discussion on this topic is pointless.
...but this doesn't change anything, at least in the US. It just shifts the mechanisms.
If you are sympathetic to the "old" Republican party, at least as for how the Govment spends and extor...er, "gets", its money, or at least moderate politics in general in the US, you can't help but notice how skewed the Republican Party has become because the Fightin' Fundies chose it, instead of the Democratic party, to coopt, rather than make their own party.
As far as voter turnout, if a "10% of the body *must* vote for the vote to be valid" could be a good thing to force for all elections. If 1% of the people vote for some loser, is it not clear what the 99% of those who did not vote seem to be saying?
It used to be that you had to provide a working model of your patent. But the PTO ran out of warehouse space some time ago, so they dropped this.
With software, most of the PTO people are probably a bunch of 40-year veteran govment employees, who's idea of a 'computor' is still the chick who plugs data into mechanical calculators. Or a bunch of people who think that AOL/hotmail is 'kewl'. In both cases, the complexity as well as fineness of detail that software patents seem to generate are probably over their head, the PTO is probably run by some govment appointee (hint hint) that sees each patent application processed as one more brownie favor the next time he/she has to ask congress for only 10% less money next FY instead of 50% less, if Congress is in a good mood, having long ago chosen to just go with the flow when someone on the oversight [sub]committee said, "if you actually try to do software patents like you do other, more physical patents, we're all out of jobs, if you know what I mean. So don't look too closely at those software patents. I like my box seats at... don't mess it up for me." you know, some of those off-the-record conversations that never happened...
Hmm... Permutation City has all this layed out in it. It was an OK read, but had an interesting premise to think about.
If one imagines one CPU in their computer, what would the CPU or a process think about all the wasted cycles it doesn't deal with or get to play with/interface? What would the CPU or process think if it could reference "real time" in relation to what it was doing? If a process could relate to the external world's time scale, would this represent some form of self awareness? What if the process/cpu was complaining about running too slow?
what about your alter-ego personality, would it be able to detect the passing of time?
...wouldn't you use the same things you always use, your expected application and its expected worst-case scenarios?
How would you test sorting algorithms, for instance? You pass it pre-ordered sets. You pass it big sets. You pass it small sets. You watch memory usage. You watch the stopwatch. You run it on a loaded system. You run it on an unloaded system. Etc.
In the end, you look at your results and say, "This is the algorithm for this project." But we like a one-size-fits-all solution, and GA/GP might not provide us with those.
Hmm... maybe what needs to happen with Computer Science and Genetic Programming/Genetic Algorithms is what has happened in Physics with Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic mechanics, both of which still cause problems for undergrads, grads, and laymen... (and even some PhDs...)
QM is not intuitive, and is based on statistical probabilities, not deterministic solutions. GA/GP seems to fit this realm as well.
The problem people will have is a genetic algorithm that might "evolve" for a tough problem that people can't exactly figure out deterministically how/why it works, except to examine its output for validity. This freaks people out. If such an algorithm is to be used in control software, then do what airplane engineers do on fly-by-wire systems: put in redundant systems that have some checks-and-balances with each other and more than one fail-over mode, in other words, cover your ass. The reason they do this in FBW is because FBW systems are essentially very dynamic open-loop feedback systems, and the goal is to keep the plane flying in a more-or-less non-chaotic mode, even at some extreme inputs, or if it is in a chaotic mode, make sure that it's recoverable from. With all the feedback loops in a plane...
The arguments people have against FBW in, say, passenger aircraft, has sounded an awful like the arguments people are using now against GA/GP. "We can't understand 100% the program, and don't have a 100% certainty about the program." My question is, why do we need to do this?
Look at other important control systems: We involve the most chaotic computer systems in the world as their main control system: people, don't we? Are not people fallable? Yes they are. Just look at Homer Simpson...
We even still let people fly airplanes, too. But I guess we've grown accustomed to the risks inherent in flying commercial air, and accept them so we don't have to drive across the pacific or Atlantic oceans...
Not all chips create the same, the same set of seq. downloaded to different chips (the same batch) might not create the same quality of result? Will this a problem? We can't growth every chip this way? well, as long as we are fixated on the electromechanical, industrial image of computers, rather than a more organic one, then, yes, these techniques will bug people.
for instance, I remember reading something about some genetic algorithm that did some funky sorting or filtering operation VERY well, but the researchers couldn't exactly understand why it worked (it was like a hypercomplicated regexp if I remember correctly). Sure, it could be unwound, but no one could figure out the 'why', and thus write a good analysis of how it would respond for different things.
And this is what I think scares people about genetic algorithms, etc. We are locked into black-and-white, deterministic systems, and think thusly about so many things. It escapes people that many of the things we use in real life are based on or made by non-deterministic, statistical systems.
I'm thinking of enzymatic reactions, recombinant-DNA bacteria that make drugs, etc., etc. Heck, even wood and meat, that are essentially very subjectively "graded", etc., even if a machine does it. We are surrounded, immersed in, subjective, non-deterministic systems. But we still want to see things deterministically.
Even at the very microscopic view of things, quantum mechanics, many scientists find QM disturbing, because it is non-deterministic, but they continue to use it and work with/on it because it seems to work.
Sure, we probably wouldn't feel safe with a nuclear reactor control system run by some genetically optimized computer control program, and would insist on having people watch over things, even if it could be determined that the computer was 99.999999999% reliable, vs. 85% for human operators. Funny how that is.
Slashdot Mirror
...how many x86, off-the-shelf, 8-way SMP machines are there other than Sequent NUMA machines?
Intel has made 2-way and 4-way SMP accessible. So it is only natural that Linux has been made to work with these systems, flawed as they are by being based on PC architecture.
As far as MS and NT on a 32-cpu SMP machine, they worked with Sequent on that...
How many people can afford a Sun 64-CPU server?
How many Linux kernel hackers work at a place where such a machine is their development toy?
...would this even be a point of conversation if the "majority" of society were not narcissistic self-promoting social junkies [to one degree or another] trying to figure out why the "geeks" exist in the first place?
Look at how loaded those words are:
mild Autism. ADD/ADHD. "Hacker". "Geek". "Nerd".
All are terms with some serious social stigma associated with them, in that they are not considered "normal", and at least 3 of them are something that "has to be fixed".
But being overly social is OK...???
Oh well.
hmm... major insurer based in San Antonio.
USAA?
there is one benefit worth being an employee for:
Buying a house.
Histories of temporary employment make mortgage lenders skin crawl. Unless you really are netting $100K+/year contracting, and have been doing it for awhile, and have all your paper work,
good luck...
[yes, I've bought a house as part of a relocation. yes, I've had the "must get a full-time job in 72 hours" contingency to deal with].
Hmm... how much of the serial processing debate is affected by the fact that most humans can only focus our attention on only one thing at a time, really, for details? Sure, there are peripheral triggers around the "attention space", but since we don't have eyes like chameleons, we're kind of stuck to some sort of parallel processing of serially-gathered detail information.
Ever wonder why chickens and pigeons do that "head thing" when they walk? Part of it is due to the latency they have in the rate of how fast their eyes focus (which is probably related to how fast their brains absorb detail). They keep their head steady until they have to move it to give their eyes a chance to focus...
Did anyone catch some little blurb, probably from Science News, that showed that the distribution of the different color-sensing cones is essentially random, yet when we look at, say a red wall, we see a uniform red wall...
Maybe the brain does a lot of serial processing of data from the optic nerve, but the optic nerve and retina also do a lot of signal processing in and of themselves.
I would rather think that we have lots of parallel/simultaneous subprocesses that are pipelined serially...
Student: "Is it a wave or a particle?"
Physics Buddha: "Yes."
Humans dominant? Insects and bacteria rule the world...we conveniently get to live in it, and in our hubris, self-proclaim that we're "Kings of the world!"
No, SUN=MSII is more likely to happen.
If Sun's current definition of "open source" is to be applied:
"Is it open? Yes, but if you use it for commercial use [even internal production use], you need to get [pay] for a non-development license."
Easy.
"joebob fixed a nasty/esoteric bug dealing with 3c59x driver".
Does it need to highlight *exactly* what you contributed? No.
Do academic papers clearly delineate where one's work stops and another's starts? No.
For example, if I'm working off of some student's graduate thesis for my own work, unless I'm quoting directly, I talk to the person first, let him/her know what I'm doing, and go from there, in exchange for me clearly saying, "this idea of mine is clearly based on an idea first espoused by Dr. Soand So". Credit given. Pointer to the exact source listed in the references/bibliography. If you want to see the original, you get to look it up yourself.
I don't see where the problems are.
....and, if you're really paranoid, you'll know the orbital "numbers" of that satellite. You'll know when it's watching you, and when it's watching someone else. Oddly enough, there is a group of people who "satellite spot", and it's not just Space [junk] Command and NASA...
Hmm... do you think the "artificial star" technique used by active-mirror astronomical mirror telescopes could be used in reverse by spy KH-class spy satellites to compensate for atmospheric turbulence?
Umm... in visible spectrum being able to discern tanks is a BFD. Freak the Govment out. Make some fake M-1 tanks and put them in your backyard.
w/o multispectral (i.e., IR), that fake M-1 tank won't look any different than a real M-1.
Now, let's talk about millimeter-wave radar...
I think a false-color picture taken by SPOT (the French company) was plastered on some Popular Mechanics issue or something.
Hasn't SPOT been selling 1-m resolution pictures for some time?
some surplus camo netting from your favorite army-navy surplus store should work to obscure your house from satellite view. just make sure it matches the surrounding area... i.e., in Seattle don't use Desert cammo, and don't use woodland cammo in Phoenix... Or, more subtle, but this'll take a lot of time, and won't work in some areas, grow some big evergreen trees around your house, such that the crown obscures the outline of your house. But it'll only really worry your home insurance agent, not make everyone think that you take what Art Bell, et al., have to say too seriously, the way camo netting will.
the mirror trick might work good if you had it on a motorized mount to aim the sun straight up during the day, in theory. But they probably have good enough filters anyways.
...I like the way Canada's PM elections are done...it's all essentially done at once. Have to show up in every precinct-equivalent. Have to form your Cabinet based on representation split in Senate/House of Commons. You get run out of the PM job if your party fails miserably at Senate/House of Commons elections...
the US way of drawing out the election, in the "guise" of "informing" the people, is lame. Maybe it meant more in the days of big lag time in communications. But all it means now is more time for marketing, not discussing issues.
add to things the corporate nature of the media...
..the only way it will work is some sort of biometric key as well as a national-level ID number, which traditionally has been one of the major heebie-geebies thrown out by the Republicans in various issues [that they haven't liked. but they seem to like key escrow...] that would have been facilitated by such a thing.
Of course, they [Congress in general] still vote for exceptions to using SSNs as a de facto identification number [like your IRS taxid being your SSN, making claimed dependents have an SSN, etc.].
Hillary has every right to run... in Arkansas.
there should be a better yardstick than "I have a condo [that I've never lived in] so I'm a 'citizen'".
It was about as genuine as some of the heinky stuff that George [not CW Post] Bush as far as where he lived or not that this should be a non-issue.
Oh well.
Hmmm... please show us these "well paid" suckers on the welfare system.
If you mean airplane companies, military contractors, people with mortgages, farmers [especially tobacco farmers], etc., professional sports franchises that get local governments to build their multi-million-dollar playgrounds for them, then OK.
If you think that the "welfare queens" are not representative of you, and worthy of all your scorn and penny-pitching, you're not looking hard enough.
You could even be a "welfare queen" and not even realize it (especially if you've invested in a mortgate)...
spare me the "bootstraps" stuff. It's like saying to clinically depressed people, "think happy thoughts and your depression will go away!".
Most of us not on welfare, even if we're close to it, have so many more advantages one way or the other than those on it [by choice or otherwise] that further discussion on this topic is pointless.
...but this doesn't change anything, at least in the US. It just shifts the mechanisms.
If you are sympathetic to the "old" Republican party, at least as for how the Govment spends and extor...er, "gets", its money, or at least moderate politics in general in the US, you can't help but notice how skewed the Republican Party has become because the Fightin' Fundies chose it, instead of the Democratic party, to coopt, rather than make their own party.
As far as voter turnout, if a "10% of the body *must* vote for the vote to be valid" could be a good thing to force for all elections. If 1% of the people vote for some loser, is it not clear what the 99% of those who did not vote seem to be saying?
I think this is what they do with software.
It used to be that you had to provide a working model of your patent. But the PTO ran out of warehouse space some time ago, so they dropped this.
With software, most of the PTO people are probably a bunch of 40-year veteran govment employees, who's idea of a 'computor' is still the chick who plugs data into mechanical calculators. Or a bunch of people who think that AOL/hotmail is 'kewl'. In both cases, the complexity as well as fineness of detail that software patents seem to generate are probably over their head, the PTO is probably run by some govment appointee (hint hint) that sees each patent application processed as one more brownie favor the next time he/she has to ask congress for only 10% less money next FY instead of 50% less, if Congress is in a good mood, having long ago chosen to just go with the flow when someone on the oversight [sub]committee said, "if you actually try to do software patents like you do other, more physical patents, we're all out of jobs, if you know what I mean. So don't look too closely at those software patents. I like my box seats at... don't mess it up for me." you know, some of those off-the-record conversations that never happened...
Hmm... Permutation City has all this layed out in it. It was an OK read, but had an interesting premise to think about.
If one imagines one CPU in their computer, what would the CPU or a process think about all the wasted cycles it doesn't deal with or get to play with/interface? What would the CPU or process think if it could reference "real time" in relation to what it was doing? If a process could relate to the external world's time scale, would this represent some form of self awareness?
What if the process/cpu was complaining about running too slow?
what about your alter-ego personality, would it be able to detect the passing of time?
Things like that...
...wouldn't you use the same things you always use, your expected application and its expected worst-case scenarios?
How would you test sorting algorithms, for instance? You pass it pre-ordered sets. You pass it big sets. You pass it small sets. You watch memory usage. You watch the stopwatch. You run it on a loaded system. You run it on an unloaded system. Etc.
In the end, you look at your results and say, "This is the algorithm for this project." But we like a one-size-fits-all solution, and GA/GP might not provide us with those.
Hmm... maybe what needs to happen with Computer Science and Genetic Programming/Genetic Algorithms is what has happened in Physics with Quantum Mechanics and Relativistic mechanics, both of which still cause problems for undergrads, grads, and laymen... (and even some PhDs...)
QM is not intuitive, and is based on statistical probabilities, not deterministic solutions. GA/GP seems to fit this realm as well.
The problem people will have is a genetic algorithm that might "evolve" for a tough problem that people can't exactly figure out deterministically how/why it works, except to examine its output for validity. This freaks people out. If such an algorithm is to be used in control software, then do what airplane engineers do on fly-by-wire systems: put in redundant systems that have some checks-and-balances with each other and more than one fail-over mode, in other words, cover your ass. The reason they do this in FBW is because FBW systems are essentially very dynamic open-loop feedback systems, and the goal is to keep the plane flying in a more-or-less non-chaotic mode, even at some extreme inputs, or if it is in a chaotic mode, make sure that it's recoverable from. With all the feedback loops in a plane...
The arguments people have against FBW in, say, passenger aircraft, has sounded an awful like the arguments people are using now against GA/GP.
"We can't understand 100% the program, and don't have a 100% certainty about the program." My question is, why do we need to do this?
Look at other important control systems: We involve the most chaotic computer systems in the world as their main control system: people, don't we? Are not people fallable? Yes they are. Just look at Homer Simpson...
We even still let people fly airplanes, too. But I guess we've grown accustomed to the risks inherent in flying commercial air, and accept them so we don't have to drive across the pacific or Atlantic oceans...
No, someone in the Pentagram has recommended DoD shift from non-NT to NT. Air Farce is doing it too, as is the Army.
I like it. Take a perfectly good working system and replace it with a much bigger, but less working, system...
Oh well, at least someone at the DoD can now say that they're using "commercial off-the-shelf systems" (and they probably own lots of MS stock).
for instance, I remember reading something about some genetic algorithm that did some funky sorting or filtering operation VERY well, but the researchers couldn't exactly understand why it worked (it was like a hypercomplicated regexp if I remember correctly). Sure, it could be unwound, but no one could figure out the 'why', and thus write a good analysis of how it would respond for different things.
And this is what I think scares people about genetic algorithms, etc. We are locked into black-and-white, deterministic systems, and think thusly about so many things. It escapes people that many of the things we use in real life are based on or made by non-deterministic, statistical systems.
I'm thinking of enzymatic reactions, recombinant-DNA bacteria that make drugs, etc., etc. Heck, even wood and meat, that are essentially very subjectively "graded", etc., even if a machine does it. We are surrounded, immersed in, subjective, non-deterministic systems. But we still want to see things deterministically.
Even at the very microscopic view of things, quantum mechanics, many scientists find QM disturbing, because it is non-deterministic, but they continue to use it and work with/on it because it seems to work.
Sure, we probably wouldn't feel safe with a nuclear reactor control system run by some genetically optimized computer control program, and would insist on having people watch over things, even if it could be determined that the computer was 99.999999999% reliable, vs. 85% for human operators. Funny how that is.