This is as bad as when people were saying spending increases in government programs were "cuts" because the spending increase wasn't as large as some people wanted in the first place.
I do have to wonder why a Illinois Representative pushed on this so hard though, if she didn't think that her state would be able to stake some claim to that money. I really have to wonder what the modivation there is.
NCSA, to my knowledge, pushes a lot more computational science (weather, cosmology, etc), than straight CS on it's supercomputers and (now) it's clusters. There may be groups that do traditional core CS type of work, but it's not the PIs using the clusters/supercomputers. Perhaps I misunderstand what you're saying here.
The two things NCSA is most known for Mosaic and NCSA telnet, but that work was done in the software development group was broken up a long time ago.
Beware the politics behind all this talk. Some of this MAY have to do with cluster vs. big iron, but I'm not entirely sure that's the only thing about this. There's politics involved. I'm not talking about Democrat vs. Republican here. I'm talking intra-super-computer center politics.
The Ohio supercomputer Center and the Pittsburg center are not currently part of the NSF Supercomputer program. NCSA (in Illinois) and SDSC (San Diego) are. The other two WERE part of the program, and they're still pissed about getting cut from the original program.
You'll notice a few of things in the article:
First, NSF funds the current supercomputer program, not DOE. DOE will get the funding (and make the award) for this program, if it goes throught.
Second, a Illinois rep is gunning for this. Presumably that rep wants to give NCSA a good shot at the big iron. (Pork barrel poltics, the old fashioned way). Presumably this is to keep NCSA going in case NSF ever decides to cut funding. Whether they actually get a DOE program remains to be seen.
Third, the other supercomputer center mentioned in the article is Ohio. Again, currently not funded under the NSF program. I'm SURE they're gonna gun for the new stuff, so I'm not surprised they're complaining about clusters. Whether they believe it's the wrong way to go or not, I'm not sure. I think this is purely to get the money going so they have a shot at it.
It'll be interesting to see whether this actually gets through the funding stage or not. It'll be a LOOONG time before this money is awarded. If they passed it TODAY, it would take a year and a half, maybe two, to actually award the money.
Well, that's an interesting definition of "public" that doesn't appear to be anyone else's.
Despite that fact, you are correct... most of the work that's run on those things is done by people that aren't part of the supercomputer centers, or the ANL. (There are a few "chief scientists" that DO run their work there, so I wouldn't say it's the 99.99-whatever% that another poster did).
It's NOT available for the general public's use though. Even if you work at those places, that doesn't give you ANY certainty that you'll get to run anything on it....it's likely you WON'T, unless you are running tests or something like that.
The new numbers for the latest quarter are coming out soon, so we'll have more to go on then.
I do find it a little distrubing that I'm even saying something like that.... The short term mentality for success is putting a lot of un-needed pressure on companies.
Anyway, like a previous poster said, this is the quarterly, "Oh, Sun's gonna die soon" thread. Don't believe it.
Look at SGI. They were going great during the early nineties and had their legs cut out from under 'em when the ATI/NVidia wars started and people realized they didn't need to buy those mondo-expensive graphics systems anymore.
Yet, they're still alive. Barely, but they're still alive.
It takes a lot to kill a company, and Sun's not going anywhere anytime soon. They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.
What's next, get someone in the White House because they reveal....gasp!... Kerry is a Democrat?
Give me a break! I find it hilarious that the rest of the whole Wilson thing is being completely ignored by the people that roared about it when it first alleged. Where's the outrage there???
This is just the last thread of hope people have over the whole Wilson scandal which will unravel just like the rest of it has.
Wilson did in fact lie as has already been documented in many places over the last few days. So what's your point? That it's no big deal? Sure seemed like a big deal to everyone when they thought he wasn't lying. It should be just as big of a deal now that we found out he was lying.
But then, that would be admitting the president was right all along.
Iraq said they didn't have them anymore. Iraq said they were destroyed, and now we find that was a lie too. They were still in possession of WMD. Stockpiles? No, but those were likely to have been shipped out of the country, which should scare the hell out of anyone.
Last year, the president talked about how Saddam helped Zarqawi in Iraq. see this reference.
Here's another article, that's really worth reading, and I encourage everyone to do so...here's a clip from it:
THE ADMINISTRATION'S CRITICS, including several of the Democratic presidential candidates, have alluded to new "evidence" they say confirms Iraq and al Qaeda had no relationship before the war. They have not shared that evidence.
Even as the critics withhold the basis for their allegations, evidence on the other side is piling up. Ansar al-Islam--the al Qaeda cell formed in June 2001 that operated out of northern Iraq before the war, notably attacking Kurdish enemies of Saddam--has stepped up its activities elsewhere in the country. In some cases, say national security officials, Ansar is joining with remnants of Saddam's regime to attack Americans and nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq. There is some reporting, unconfirmed at this point, that the recent bombing of the U.N. headquarters was the result of a joint operation between Baathists and Ansar al-Islam.
And there are reports of more direct links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden. Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.
For one thing, the meeting was reported in the press at the time. It also fits a pattern of contacts surrounding Operation Desert Fox, the series of missile strikes the Clinton administration launched at Iraq beginning December 16, 1998. The bombing ended 70 hours later, on December 19, 1998. Administration officials now believe Hijazi left for Afghanistan as the bombing ended and met with bin Laden two days later.
Earlier that year, at another point of increased tension between the United States and Iraq, Hussein sought to step up contacts with al Qaeda. On February 18, 1998, after the Iraqis repeatedly refused to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into sensitive sites, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a hawkish speech about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Said Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."
The following day, February 19, 1998, according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's security forces, agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an or
What, those mustard gas and sarin canisters that the Polish troops recently aren't WMD? read it here.
Iraq and Al-Qaeda cooperative ties not the case?
You haven't really read that report have you? Or listened to all the senators that had to get on TV to say that while there was no evidence that there was a direct tie to 9/11, there certainly was that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were in bed together. Check this for one of the stories about that.
Who's to say that the NYTs last mistake was the yellow cake thing? It's certainly is not. I heard a report within the last couple of days that Libya is going to say in September (don't know why they're waiting) that Iraq was working with them on nuclear stuff. No news reports on that yet (not that I expected it them yet), but it sure would be pretty damning if it ended up being true.
Don't think that could happen? Well, everyone was SO SURE about the yellow cake, just a few months ago....
This shouldn't be a surprise. Look at the headlines they give in 50 point type, and then when it turns out to be wrong it doesn't even make front page news.
Yellow cake in Niger, for example, they hail him as nearly a god when he says there was no such thing, and that turns out to be wrong...see herehereherehere hereand here.
They've finally run a story about it, but wouldn't it have been a lot better for them to have investigated those Wilson allegations themselves, when they first happened?
The biggest downside for really good employees is that they're reduced to the least common denominator when it comes to Unions. Did a really great job? Well, too bad...here's your Union negotiated raise, instead of the one you WOULD have gotten, which was much higher.
Not to mention that it'd be damn near impossible to fire anyone, for cause or not.
As for the giga-corps, I'd say there was abuse on both sides. Employees CAN because of unions, and they DO. They get CRAZY salaries, and short of commiting a crime they CAN NOT BE FIRED. If they stand around all day and you call 'em on it, the union stands on THEIR side, not on the side of "hey, actually do your job".
You must be talking about Motorola in Plantation. They've done this for at least the last 20 years. No lie. You'd think with the change of upper management over the last couple of years, and the change of direction that particular plant has taken would have made a difference by now, but apparently it hasn't.
The thing is, back in the day, they tended to hire kids right out of college and work 'em to death just like you describe. After a few years, they figure out they're being taken advantage of, and most move on. I'd be curious if they're still using the same tactics.
Slashdot Mirror
....And yet, monster.com and hotjobs.com are bursting with companies wanting to hire people.
Weird, eh?
No, zero is nothing. 32,000 is an addition.
This is as bad as when people were saying spending increases in government programs were "cuts" because the spending increase wasn't as large as some people wanted in the first place.
Geesh
And the key thing to note is that 32,000 jobs were ADDED.
I thought you couldn't trademark a title of a book or song.....?
They doubled it to 40 projectors, and 40 machines some time ago. There was an article posted about it here.
I do have to wonder why a Illinois Representative pushed on this so hard though, if she didn't think that her state would be able to stake some claim to that money. I really have to wonder what the modivation there is.
NCSA, to my knowledge, pushes a lot more computational science (weather, cosmology, etc), than straight CS on it's supercomputers and (now) it's clusters. There may be groups that do traditional core CS type of work, but it's not the PIs using the clusters/supercomputers. Perhaps I misunderstand what you're saying here.
The two things NCSA is most known for Mosaic and NCSA telnet, but that work was done in the software development group was broken up a long time ago.
Beware the politics behind all this talk. Some of this MAY have to do with cluster vs. big iron, but I'm not entirely sure that's the only thing about this. There's politics involved. I'm not talking about Democrat vs. Republican here. I'm talking intra-super-computer center politics.
The Ohio supercomputer Center and the Pittsburg center are not currently part of the NSF Supercomputer program. NCSA (in Illinois) and SDSC (San Diego) are. The other two WERE part of the program, and they're still pissed about getting cut from the original program.
You'll notice a few of things in the article:
First, NSF funds the current supercomputer program, not DOE. DOE will get the funding (and make the award) for this program, if it goes throught.
Second, a Illinois rep is gunning for this. Presumably that rep wants to give NCSA a good shot at the big iron. (Pork barrel poltics, the old fashioned way). Presumably this is to keep NCSA going in case NSF ever decides to cut funding. Whether they actually get a DOE program remains to be seen.
Third, the other supercomputer center mentioned in the article is Ohio. Again, currently not funded under the NSF program. I'm SURE they're gonna gun for the new stuff, so I'm not surprised they're complaining about clusters. Whether they believe it's the wrong way to go or not, I'm not sure. I think this is purely to get the money going so they have a shot at it.
It'll be interesting to see whether this actually gets through the funding stage or not. It'll be a LOOONG time before this money is awarded. If they passed it TODAY, it would take a year and a half, maybe two, to actually award the money.
new == "knew"
Took a week, but here we go:
You want someone else other than Novak? Fine:
Ok, there were two other "breeches" of Plame.
I think this is a dead issue, because the CIA already new the cover was blown before the Novak column ever came out.
As for the conspiracy theory about Tenet and the White house, well... it's just a conspiracy theory.
If only people would give Sun and Java this same consideration.
Whoa..you're so off-base on this it's not funny.
The TeraGrid people (ANL, Ian Foster, etc) are the ones that coined the term "Grid" in the first place!
You might not like their use of that term, but since they're the ones that came up with it in the first place, they're more right than you are.
How is this any different than any other tech marketing campaign?
Microsoft bombards us with Windows-everything
Intel bombards us with "Intel-inside", Pentium-whatever
This is no different. These want people to recognize the brand, so they'll think there is "value add" in whatever they're buying.
Whether or not there really IS "value add" remains to be seen.
Well, that's an interesting definition of "public" that doesn't appear to be anyone else's.
Despite that fact, you are correct... most of the work that's run on those things is done by people that aren't part of the supercomputer centers, or the ANL. (There are a few "chief scientists" that DO run their work there, so I wouldn't say it's the 99.99-whatever% that another poster did).
It's NOT available for the general public's use though. Even if you work at those places, that doesn't give you ANY certainty that you'll get to run anything on it....it's likely you WON'T, unless you are running tests or something like that.
I'm going by what McNealy stated on-stage at JavaOne several weeks ago.
The new numbers for the latest quarter are coming out soon, so we'll have more to go on then.
I do find it a little distrubing that I'm even saying something like that.... The short term mentality for success is putting a lot of un-needed pressure on companies.
Anyway, like a previous poster said, this is the quarterly, "Oh, Sun's gonna die soon" thread. Don't believe it.
Look at SGI. They were going great during the early nineties and had their legs cut out from under 'em when the ATI/NVidia wars started and people realized they didn't need to buy those mondo-expensive graphics systems anymore.
Yet, they're still alive. Barely, but they're still alive.
It takes a lot to kill a company, and Sun's not going anywhere anytime soon. They have $7 BILLION in cash in the bank right now, have a strong R&D budget.
They're not going anywhere. Either is McNealy.
it wasn't much of a secret that she worked for the CIA. She was listed in "Who's Who in America" for crying out loud! She's an analyst, not even a covert operative!
What's next, get someone in the White House because they reveal....gasp!... Kerry is a Democrat?
Give me a break! I find it hilarious that the rest of the whole Wilson thing is being completely ignored by the people that roared about it when it first alleged. Where's the outrage there???
This is just the last thread of hope people have over the whole Wilson scandal which will unravel just like the rest of it has.
Wilson did in fact lie as has already been documented in many places over the last few days. So what's your point? That it's no big deal? Sure seemed like a big deal to everyone when they thought he wasn't lying. It should be just as big of a deal now that we found out he was lying.
But then, that would be admitting the president was right all along.
Last year, the president talked about how Saddam helped Zarqawi in Iraq. see this reference.
Here's another article, that's really worth reading, and I encourage everyone to do so...here's a clip from it:
Thanks to the followup poster that got in a response before I had time to.
If you actually spent the time to read the postings I cited, or even did a Google News search yourself, you'd find out how very wrong you are.
What, those mustard gas and sarin canisters that the Polish troops recently aren't WMD? read it here.
Iraq and Al-Qaeda cooperative ties not the case?
You haven't really read that report have you? Or listened to all the senators that had to get on TV to say that while there was no evidence that there was a direct tie to 9/11, there certainly was that Al-Qaeda and Iraq were in bed together. Check this for one of the stories about that.
Or try reading this.
Who's to say that the NYTs last mistake was the yellow cake thing? It's certainly is not. I heard a report within the last couple of days that Libya is going to say in September (don't know why they're waiting) that Iraq was working with them on nuclear stuff. No news reports on that yet (not that I expected it them yet), but it sure would be pretty damning if it ended up being true.
Don't think that could happen? Well, everyone was SO SURE about the yellow cake, just a few months ago....
Wilson said that the attempt at the transaction never occurred, and he was wrong. See the previous references.
Well, sure... especially since it was the Washington Post that really broke Watergate. That's just another thing the NYT didn't take the lead on.
This shouldn't be a surprise. Look at the headlines they give in 50 point type, and then when it turns out to be wrong it doesn't even make front page news.
Yellow cake in Niger, for example, they hail him as nearly a god when he says there was no such thing, and that turns out to be wrong...see here here here here
here and here.
They've finally run a story about it, but wouldn't it have been a lot better for them to have investigated those Wilson allegations themselves, when they first happened?
That's only one of the latest...
The biggest downside for really good employees is that they're reduced to the least common denominator when it comes to Unions. Did a really great job? Well, too bad...here's your Union negotiated raise, instead of the one you WOULD have gotten, which was much higher.
Not to mention that it'd be damn near impossible to fire anyone, for cause or not.
As for the giga-corps, I'd say there was abuse on both sides. Employees CAN because of unions, and they DO. They get CRAZY salaries, and short of commiting a crime they CAN NOT BE FIRED. If they stand around all day and you call 'em on it, the union stands on THEIR side, not on the side of "hey, actually do your job".
Either way, it sucks.
You must be talking about Motorola in Plantation. They've done this for at least the last 20 years. No lie. You'd think with the change of upper management over the last couple of years, and the change of direction that particular plant has taken would have made a difference by now, but apparently it hasn't.
The thing is, back in the day, they tended to hire kids right out of college and work 'em to death just like you describe. After a few years, they figure out they're being taken advantage of, and most move on. I'd be curious if they're still using the same tactics.