Very well said. This is how I feel on a daily basis. But what in the world to do about it?
I truly believe that there is just no hope.
The self-interest that has set itself into the people of this country will be our ultimate undoing. As people clamor for the government to give _them_ more everyone will turn a blind eye toward what would actually be good for the _whole country_.
50% of people don't pay taxes any more. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this group of non-taxpaying citizens can just continue to vote themselves "more" until the whole thing collapses in on itself.
My only hope: That it doesn't happen in my lifetime....
Thanks for putting together a truly thoughtful and well written post on this subject!
It is interesting to watch the responses to this article. Really good arguments on both sides... but one thing that is continually striking me lately is why people are so quick to trust the Government over Corporations.
I think that people have some misguided understanding of what really goes on here. They think that since they get to cast a vote that somehow the politicians are all working in our best interest and that we have "control" over them. While "Corporations" aren't beholden to the people at all. That couldn't be further from the truth.
The only thing that we have control over is our money. It takes money to get people elected and fund the projects the government runs and it takes money to keep companies running. The only way to "vote" is with dollars.
With that in mind... I actually prefer the Corporation over Government. The Corporation can't just _demand_ you give them money while Governments can just create laws to take as much as they like.
Even in the case of "monopolies" like local ISPs... you do still have the choice of not using the internet at all. Yes, that's not much of a choice... but at least it's not _law_ that you have to give them money and you won't be going to jail if you don't sign up for internet access.
If the US government _were_ actually a Corporation... it would have failed a long time ago and would have had to file for bankruptcy and a new government would have had to be brought up to take its place... hopefully with better fiscal responsibility so that it could stay alive longer.
Listen up people: Quit thinking that the Government is the answer! I currently work for the government and have been for the last 8 years or so... and let me tell you that giving this inefficient beast _more_ power is a TERRIBLE idea...
"So now, real-world projects that use C++ for the useful things it does provide have to maintain coding guidelines to avoid shooting themselves in the foot too often."
How is that not the case for _any_ modern language? Anyone write terrible code in any language. I've seen some Python that made me want to rip my eyeballs out (used tons of esoteric functionality... coupled with a design that made me question the person's sanity).
Coding guidelines are a good idea no matter the language. Keep everything consistent and make sure that the code remains maintainable into the future...
When you really need speed AND you want OOP there is nothing better than C++.
It turns out that operator overloading is quite useful in these situations as well (like A*b doing a matrix vector multiply).
However, I would love to have speed AND some of the features of Objective-C that you point out here. Generally when I want things like add members at run-time or swizzling I generally turn to Python instead of Objective-C... but I will say that that kind of stuff doesn't come up much in my day-to-day numerical library work...
Disclaimer: I maintain and develop several largish C++ numerical libraries as my day job;-)
It is happening in some places. A friend of mine has a daughter in elementary school. He can log in and review her homework scores, grades and quiz scores (even seeing the answers) any time he wishes. He can log in during the day and literally see the scores for the quiz she just took.
Firstly, it's cool and all that you built your own boxes... that's a great way to go if you can (ie you have the time and expertise to support the group when things go wrong) but it isn't really relevant to the discussion about the price of OEM workstations (that come with warranties and support, etc). Your group might not need that stuff, but for people that do, building it yourself isn't an option. Not to dog on you or anything... just that different groups have different needs.
Ok... with that out of the way... I'm _not_ off base on the price.
Click "Configure a Boxx System"... put in your email.
Select the "WS DUAL XEON X5650 2.66GHz, 12MB cache, 1333 MHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI (Six-Core) " processor (because that's what the starting Dual-core Mac Pro has in it).
Now. There are some inequities (graphics cards aren't the same, better HD in the Boxx workstation, etc).... but it's pretty clear that Apple isn't "Overpriced".
Why do we have to keep discussing this every single damn time Mac Pros are brought up???
If you don't want to assemble your own workstations and you really do need WORKSTATION class components... a Mac Pro is a great workstation and falls in line with all the other high-end workstations on the market in terms of price.
I run a scientific computing group at a national laboratory... we have over 30 people developing massively parallel, multiphysics, simulation tools.... all with Mac Pro workstations and Mac laptops.
Macs are UNIX workstations with a good GUI and they don't break every time you do an OS update (like the one Ubuntu box we keep just for testing did just this morning).
We can do all of our development in a great environment and still be able to throw our code out on our supercomputers when the problems get large.
Competition is a basic human need... the want to compete and come out on top is intrinsic in all of us. We want to come out on top of everything... including being associated with a group that comes out on top of another group.
This competition is one of the reasons pure communism can never work. Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"... what they mean by that is that they don't want others to have more than them (ie they want _more_ than others!;-)
In the absence of competition you generate bored, unhappy people.... that will eventually tear down their own society...
I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:
1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.
Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.
Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.
What do you mean by "only one of my compilers actually takes advantage of the multiple cores when it is compiling"?
Are you on Windows? Because any compiling done in linux with a "make" based (or similar) build system can use as many cores as you can throw in a machine (regardless of the actual compiler it's running). It should be the same in Windows...
Don't look to your compiler to be multithreaded... look at the build system (i.e. in Visual Studio there should be an option somewhere to tell it how many processors to use while compiling). For make you just do "make -j8" to use 8 "jobs" total for compiling (i.e. 8 instances of the compiler will be running).
Here is a test for one of my software projects doing "make -j#" where # is 1,4,8,12,16,24:
That is on my dual 6-core hyperthreaded Mac workstation (so it had 12 "real" cores and 12 "hyperthreads"). You can see that hyperthreads definitely aren't as good as real cores... but do provide some speedup. That said, I thank God every time I compile (which is all day long) for the cores he has bestowed upon me...
Good to hear that you are already on SSD... because parallel compiling does need speedy disk to keep the processors humming. The timings above are for two 256GB SSD's in RAID0.
Traditional Light Water Reactors (LWRs) using "fuel rods" use cylindrical fuel (called pellets) stacked perfectly on top of each other inside a tube (the "rod") that is just barely large enough to admit the pellets. So this wouldn't apply there...
(If you would like to see _me_ explaining some simulations of nuclear fuel rods (among other things) check out this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-2VfET8SNw )
However, as I mentioned in a comment below, this _does_ have applications to generating geometry and meshes for simulations of pebble bed reactors (PBRs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
EXCEPT: PBRs definitely don't qualify for the 2.7013 restriction....
This is how science is done. It's a _ton_ of tiny small steps towards an eventual achievement that will have broader impact on society as a whole.
The fact that the media only latches on to the end-goal achievements gives a false sense of "magic" about science and leads to the average person believing that "scientists just get lucky"... and that it really isn't "hard" to achieve these things....
I too would love to see more of these types of stories on Slashdot... a lot of the typical trolls seem to have left Slashdot. Maybe we can actually refocus it on niche news of interest to scientists and nerds in general...
No - the wireless industry is not a free market. Spectrum is a very closely held resource carefully distributed to 3 or 4 major players... so free market forces can't fix this. If there was an infinite amount of spectrum and anyone could jump in and make a new wireless company... then there could be proper free market forces.
I'm not saying we should just let people go crazy with spectrum either (spectrum chaos would be bad for everyone). How to handle wireless pricing going forward is definitely going to become a problem.
I work with some of the largest supercomputers in the world... and I can tell you that this is BS. There is no way this guy got someone to give him enough cash to put this together without:
1. A Plan of what to buy / build 2. A sound reasoning behind what would be done with the machine.
Beyond that... that isn't even that large of a cluster. There are numerous computers on the east coast larger than that... at universities and government research labs (i.e. http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/ although maybe he doesn't consider Oak Ridge to be on the "East Coast").
If the components "have become increasingly commoditized"... then capitalism will fix this. Some enterprising person will come along and start up a new company making hearing aids for half the current asking price and the market will fix itself. If the components really are specialized enough that they can demand the prices they have now then that won't happen (and then there is nothing wrong with the current prices).
This is actually exactly what the "story" is about... it is asking if the current market is overpriced... and if so is there going to a "bubble" where the market for hearing aids falls due to some disruptive company (or technology shift).
This is actually capitalism at work!
If there were just a single supplier (like the government) then there would be no incentive to innovate (do you honestly think that hearing aids now are the same as they were 10 years ago? My grandfather says they are orders of magnitude better (he is almost completely deaf). They would just keep pumping out "The Citizen's Hearing Aid" for years to come and that would be your only choice...
I don't really understand why people are so quick to jump to socialism for answers when things are expensive. In most cases they are expensive because they can be, because they were hard to make / invent... and if that isn't the case then capitalism "fixes" it through market forces. Yes, there are some markets where competition doesn't work... but I hardly think that hearing aids is one of those....
Not that I agree witht the article... but I think they are assuming you already own a car... and are thinking of buying a bike to be "greener".
In that scenario you've already expended the carbon for manufacturing the car and they are trying to tell you how much you would have to bike to break even on carbon after purchasing a bike...
I'm a scientist... so I do read quite a few journals / journal articles every month... but only in my specific area. To keep up with science in general I like the coverage over at Arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/science/
It covers a really wide range of topics and is generally very insightful. They also always link to publications on the particular subject so you can read more if the story really piqued your interest.
The supercomputer I use daily is one of these new AMD based ones in the TOP500. It is a sweet machine. My software (custom engineering simulation written in C++) scales perfectly on it all the way out to over 10,000 cores.
The memory architecture is really excellent as well. With our old Intel based cluster we wouldn't load up every core on the node because of memory contention. But hyper-transport with NUMA completely negates the need to do that. We routinely fully load the nodes on the new machine without any trouble at all.
If AMD keeps it up they are going to find a lot of business in the high-end computing segment.
Hah - I just started a ~10000 proc job on the machine sitting in position 99....
I also regularly run jobs on Jaguar (#3)....
The advances in supercomputing in the last year have been simply astounding. GPUs are changing the game of course.... but the density of CPUs is getting insane. Being able to plug 4x12 core processors into a 1U mobo is getting crazy. Can't wait to see where it goes in the next year!
Slashdot Mirror
Very well said. This is how I feel on a daily basis. But what in the world to do about it?
I truly believe that there is just no hope.
The self-interest that has set itself into the people of this country will be our ultimate undoing. As people clamor for the government to give _them_ more everyone will turn a blind eye toward what would actually be good for the _whole country_.
50% of people don't pay taxes any more. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that this group of non-taxpaying citizens can just continue to vote themselves "more" until the whole thing collapses in on itself.
My only hope: That it doesn't happen in my lifetime....
Thanks for putting together a truly thoughtful and well written post on this subject!
It is interesting to watch the responses to this article. Really good arguments on both sides... but one thing that is continually striking me lately is why people are so quick to trust the Government over Corporations.
I think that people have some misguided understanding of what really goes on here. They think that since they get to cast a vote that somehow the politicians are all working in our best interest and that we have "control" over them. While "Corporations" aren't beholden to the people at all. That couldn't be further from the truth.
The only thing that we have control over is our money. It takes money to get people elected and fund the projects the government runs and it takes money to keep companies running. The only way to "vote" is with dollars.
With that in mind... I actually prefer the Corporation over Government. The Corporation can't just _demand_ you give them money while Governments can just create laws to take as much as they like.
Even in the case of "monopolies" like local ISPs... you do still have the choice of not using the internet at all. Yes, that's not much of a choice... but at least it's not _law_ that you have to give them money and you won't be going to jail if you don't sign up for internet access.
If the US government _were_ actually a Corporation... it would have failed a long time ago and would have had to file for bankruptcy and a new government would have had to be brought up to take its place... hopefully with better fiscal responsibility so that it could stay alive longer.
Listen up people: Quit thinking that the Government is the answer! I currently work for the government and have been for the last 8 years or so... and let me tell you that giving this inefficient beast _more_ power is a TERRIBLE idea...
"So now, real-world projects that use C++ for the useful things it does provide have to maintain coding guidelines to avoid shooting themselves in the foot too often."
How is that not the case for _any_ modern language? Anyone write terrible code in any language. I've seen some Python that made me want to rip my eyeballs out (used tons of esoteric functionality... coupled with a design that made me question the person's sanity).
Coding guidelines are a good idea no matter the language. Keep everything consistent and make sure that the code remains maintainable into the future...
C++ is great for numerical libraries.
When you really need speed AND you want OOP there is nothing better than C++.
It turns out that operator overloading is quite useful in these situations as well (like A*b doing a matrix vector multiply).
However, I would love to have speed AND some of the features of Objective-C that you point out here. Generally when I want things like add members at run-time or swizzling I generally turn to Python instead of Objective-C... but I will say that that kind of stuff doesn't come up much in my day-to-day numerical library work...
Disclaimer: I maintain and develop several largish C++ numerical libraries as my day job ;-)
It is happening in some places. A friend of mine has a daughter in elementary school. He can log in and review her homework scores, grades and quiz scores (even seeing the answers) any time he wishes. He can log in during the day and literally see the scores for the quiz she just took.
This is all in a fairly small town in Idaho...
Firstly, it's cool and all that you built your own boxes... that's a great way to go if you can (ie you have the time and expertise to support the group when things go wrong) but it isn't really relevant to the discussion about the price of OEM workstations (that come with warranties and support, etc). Your group might not need that stuff, but for people that do, building it yourself isn't an option. Not to dog on you or anything... just that different groups have different needs.
Ok... with that out of the way... I'm _not_ off base on the price.
Go here:
http://boxxtech.com/products/3DBOXX/8550.asp?prodid=8550
Click "Configure a Boxx System"... put in your email.
Select the "WS DUAL XEON X5650 2.66GHz, 12MB cache, 1333 MHz, 6.4 GT/s QPI (Six-Core) " processor (because that's what the starting Dual-core Mac Pro has in it).
Click Update Total: $6,659.00
Now go here: http://store.apple.com/us/configure/Z0M4?
Select 12GB of RAM. Total: $5,449.00
Now. There are some inequities (graphics cards aren't the same, better HD in the Boxx workstation, etc).... but it's pretty clear that Apple isn't "Overpriced".
Why do we have to keep discussing this every single damn time Mac Pros are brought up???
If you don't want to assemble your own workstations and you really do need WORKSTATION class components... a Mac Pro is a great workstation and falls in line with all the other high-end workstations on the market in terms of price.
I run a scientific computing group at a national laboratory... we have over 30 people developing massively parallel, multiphysics, simulation tools.... all with Mac Pro workstations and Mac laptops.
Macs are UNIX workstations with a good GUI and they don't break every time you do an OS update (like the one Ubuntu box we keep just for testing did just this morning).
We can do all of our development in a great environment and still be able to throw our code out on our supercomputers when the problems get large.
You sir, are wrong.
And for everyone saying Mac Pros are expensive... they are not. They are priced similarly to their competition (which is, gasp!, other workstations!) like these: http://www.boxxtech.com/products/3DBOXX/8920.asp?prodid=8920
Competition is a basic human need... the want to compete and come out on top is intrinsic in all of us. We want to come out on top of everything... including being associated with a group that comes out on top of another group.
This competition is one of the reasons pure communism can never work. Despite what people say they don't really want everything to be "equal"... what they mean by that is that they don't want others to have more than them (ie they want _more_ than others! ;-)
In the absence of competition you generate bored, unhappy people.... that will eventually tear down their own society...
If you're interested in modeling this phenomenon you can do so using the Laplace-Young equation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young%E2%80%93Laplace_equation
I did part of my Master's thesis using it... for some examples see here: http://www.cfdlab.ae.utexas.edu/labstaff/carey/GFC_Papers/Carey216.pdf
I live in a relatively small city in Idaho and just signed up for a 50Mbps (seriously... and I really do get that!) for ~$50 a month (this is with CableOne in case anyone is interested).
It has a cap at 50GB a month (which is already pretty generous) but it also has a couple of other niceties:
1. If you go over it's only 50 cents per gigabyte... which I think is pretty fair.
2. Any traffic between midnight and 6 AM is completely unmetered. So if you have a big download to do (like a new game on Steam) just start it after midnight and you're good to go.
Overall I'm extremely happy with the service. Streaming over Vudu and Netflix is awesome... downloading game patches happens instantly... And my wife can listen to Pandora while I play an online game without issue.
Hopefully more parts of the country will get service like this.
What do you mean by "only one of my compilers actually takes advantage of the multiple cores when it is compiling"?
Are you on Windows? Because any compiling done in linux with a "make" based (or similar) build system can use as many cores as you can throw in a machine (regardless of the actual compiler it's running). It should be the same in Windows...
Don't look to your compiler to be multithreaded... look at the build system (i.e. in Visual Studio there should be an option somewhere to tell it how many processors to use while compiling). For make you just do "make -j8" to use 8 "jobs" total for compiling (i.e. 8 instances of the compiler will be running).
Here is a test for one of my software projects doing "make -j#" where # is 1,4,8,12,16,24:
1 : 15m9.614s
4 : 3m57.947s
8 : 2m6.354s
12 : 1m33.426s
16 : 1m25.559s
24 : 1m17.345s
That is on my dual 6-core hyperthreaded Mac workstation (so it had 12 "real" cores and 12 "hyperthreads"). You can see that hyperthreads definitely aren't as good as real cores... but do provide some speedup. That said, I thank God every time I compile (which is all day long) for the cores he has bestowed upon me...
Good to hear that you are already on SSD... because parallel compiling does need speedy disk to keep the processors humming. The timings above are for two 256GB SSD's in RAID0.
Right line of thinking... but wrong application.
Traditional Light Water Reactors (LWRs) using "fuel rods" use cylindrical fuel (called pellets) stacked perfectly on top of each other inside a tube (the "rod") that is just barely large enough to admit the pellets. So this wouldn't apply there...
(If you would like to see _me_ explaining some simulations of nuclear fuel rods (among other things) check out this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-2VfET8SNw )
However, as I mentioned in a comment below, this _does_ have applications to generating geometry and meshes for simulations of pebble bed reactors (PBRs) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
EXCEPT: PBRs definitely don't qualify for the 2.7013 restriction....
I completely agree...
This is how science is done. It's a _ton_ of tiny small steps towards an eventual achievement that will have broader impact on society as a whole.
The fact that the media only latches on to the end-goal achievements gives a false sense of "magic" about science and leads to the average person believing that "scientists just get lucky"... and that it really isn't "hard" to achieve these things....
I too would love to see more of these types of stories on Slashdot... a lot of the typical trolls seem to have left Slashdot. Maybe we can actually refocus it on niche news of interest to scientists and nerds in general...
"One caveat is that the diameter of the cylinder can be at most 2.7013 times as large as the diameter of the spheres being packed."
Around here we need a fast packing algorithm for generating geometry for simulations of Pebble Bed Reactors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
We have quite a bit of code to do these problems... and we never actually end up computing perfect packing... we just hope to get close....
Maybe someone will see a way to extend this to more general ball packing problems....
"She was turned off by the iPad because she couldn't find the apostrophe."
FFR: Just hold down comma for a moment....
No - the wireless industry is not a free market. Spectrum is a very closely held resource carefully distributed to 3 or 4 major players... so free market forces can't fix this. If there was an infinite amount of spectrum and anyone could jump in and make a new wireless company... then there could be proper free market forces.
I'm not saying we should just let people go crazy with spectrum either (spectrum chaos would be bad for everyone). How to handle wireless pricing going forward is definitely going to become a problem.
I work with some of the largest supercomputers in the world... and I can tell you that this is BS. There is no way this guy got someone to give him enough cash to put this together without:
1. A Plan of what to buy / build
2. A sound reasoning behind what would be done with the machine.
Beyond that... that isn't even that large of a cluster. There are numerous computers on the east coast larger than that... at universities and government research labs (i.e. http://www.nccs.gov/computing-resources/jaguar/ although maybe he doesn't consider Oak Ridge to be on the "East Coast").
If the components "have become increasingly commoditized"... then capitalism will fix this. Some enterprising person will come along and start up a new company making hearing aids for half the current asking price and the market will fix itself. If the components really are specialized enough that they can demand the prices they have now then that won't happen (and then there is nothing wrong with the current prices).
This is actually exactly what the "story" is about... it is asking if the current market is overpriced... and if so is there going to a "bubble" where the market for hearing aids falls due to some disruptive company (or technology shift).
This is actually capitalism at work!
If there were just a single supplier (like the government) then there would be no incentive to innovate (do you honestly think that hearing aids now are the same as they were 10 years ago? My grandfather says they are orders of magnitude better (he is almost completely deaf). They would just keep pumping out "The Citizen's Hearing Aid" for years to come and that would be your only choice...
I don't really understand why people are so quick to jump to socialism for answers when things are expensive. In most cases they are expensive because they can be, because they were hard to make / invent... and if that isn't the case then capitalism "fixes" it through market forces. Yes, there are some markets where competition doesn't work... but I hardly think that hearing aids is one of those....
Not that I agree witht the article... but I think they are assuming you already own a car... and are thinking of buying a bike to be "greener".
In that scenario you've already expended the carbon for manufacturing the car and they are trying to tell you how much you would have to bike to break even on carbon after purchasing a bike...
I'm a scientist... so I do read quite a few journals / journal articles every month... but only in my specific area. To keep up with science in general I like the coverage over at Arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/science/
It covers a really wide range of topics and is generally very insightful. They also always link to publications on the particular subject so you can read more if the story really piqued your interest.
If you want FIPS on iOS all you have to do is use Good Technologies app: http://good.com/
Trust me when I say that many government entities are using this to support iOS and Android....
I swear that sometimes I think Ayn Rand was a prophet...
This headline is almost directly out of one of her books...
The supercomputer I use daily is one of these new AMD based ones in the TOP500. It is a sweet machine. My software (custom engineering simulation written in C++) scales perfectly on it all the way out to over 10,000 cores.
The memory architecture is really excellent as well. With our old Intel based cluster we wouldn't load up every core on the node because of memory contention. But hyper-transport with NUMA completely negates the need to do that. We routinely fully load the nodes on the new machine without any trouble at all.
If AMD keeps it up they are going to find a lot of business in the high-end computing segment.
Nicely done, but crazy pedantic. Surely there are larger language crimes being committed elsewhere that need your attention!
Hah - I just started a ~10000 proc job on the machine sitting in position 99....
I also regularly run jobs on Jaguar (#3)....
The advances in supercomputing in the last year have been simply astounding. GPUs are changing the game of course.... but the density of CPUs is getting insane. Being able to plug 4x12 core processors into a 1U mobo is getting crazy. Can't wait to see where it goes in the next year!