Probably 8*), no offense taken and I hope, none given!
However this is a problem, people sometimes don't realise that there are different types of supercomputing problem which need to be approached in different ways. (I assume you do but some posters may not).
There are some problems, such as Seti@Home which are suitable for computation in a widely distributed environment. Each SETI Unit doesn't rely on any other to be analysed so it doesn't matter if it takes a long time to communicate between processors (if at all). Others, such as weather simulations require high speed, high bandwidth communication between each processor. In these cases even a Beowulf cluster is going to have far too little bandwith to be useful. This was the point I was trying to put accross. Grids are great for many things, however I'd still want a supercomputer for some problems.
I see it as a parallel evolution between the two methods. Supercomputers to give us the hardware, Grid systems to provide the software & make use of the hardware when it becomes affordable.
Rubbish. Talking as someone doing a PhD in the subject, Grid computing is *not* the answer to every high performance computing problem.
Latency issues are still going to be there and which would make Grid environments unsuitable for the majority of simulations. You can't do nuclear event simulations effectively if you have a multiple second delay in communicating between processors which you get in Grids.
On the other hand Grids do have several advantages in terms of providing similar TFLOPS for a much lower price, by using several geographically seperated systems you give access to more researchers and research in this area has a lot of practical spin offs in the future.
Its a good time to ....
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Its a recession. During boom times like the mid 90's companies were too busy dealing with sales and expanding like crazy to deal with demand. Now that most of the competition has died down, no one expects them to post record profits etc it gives people the chance to think about where to go next.
The web is all very well but HTTP et al. have some serious limitations and were never designed for most of the current technology. For example a dial up connection has the same bandwidth of a dedicated line in the 1970's so ASDL/Cable modems etc were never considered.
The reason for all the demand now is the scientific community and all the Grid projects around the world, just because there's a recession doesn't stop them and their data requirements make Google look like a small fry (20TB of data for Google vs 600TB for BaBar at SLAC).
The other issue is business - they've all got on the band wagon of internet sales as an extra sales channel so they can grow this, but its not going to be the sudden revenue increase it was initially. Web Services offer the opportunity for companies to increase productivity and efficency which is why the tech companies are investing in it now so when the economy changes and the corporate clients come back they have something new to go on about.
Try 40Gbit for the TeraGrid project between Chicago & LA. However most of the system is likely to be on 10Gbit and in the near future 20Gbit backbones.
PKI and Kerbero's - DOD & DOE have mandates for Kerberos in the short to medium term (5-10 years). Europe currently favours PKI with authenticated certificates (like PGP cert's) but only signed by one government agency.
However, the Globus toolkit was build on the GSSAPI which would allow it to run on anything you want to write an interface to.
Most of the UNiversity and REsearch Sites in the UK and Europe are already doing this. Of course we have LHC going on line in 2007 which means we need to since the amount of data generated (10+ PB a year) as well as our other experiments make todays stuff look kinda small.
Ok, lets be geeks and calculate average increase in sea level then...
surface area of the planet = 4*Pi*R^2 = 4 * 3.142 * 6376000 ^ 2 = 510,931,600m^2
assuming 3/4 is water ~ 361 million m^2
The ice chunk (using the previous posts comments) is equiv to a sheet 1cm thick covering 65 billion m^2 which when spread over the world equals an increase in water level of 1.8m. Oh Bugger! lets hope it doesn't all melt soon.
The British system is better, consumers are not allowed to give up their statutory rights even if they sign an agreement, if it is to their detriment. e.g. If you have to sign a contract stating you will not rip a cd to mp3 after purchasing it the company couldn't sue you if you did as you have the right to back up digital media for personel use. Its actually more likely the record company would be investigated for monopoly/anti-trust practices. But then we limit the amount of money politicians can spend and recieve. 1 UK National election costs less than a single Senate seat.
it
would be ignored just like the fact that it is illegal to *require* a person to give you their SSN
This would also be illegal in the UK under the data protection act, the only people who can request it are employers (since we generally pay tax at source rather than have to do our own accounts). Businesses here can only get the mimimum data they need and you can refuse to divulge anything else e.g. travel passes can include address detail in case they are lost (and the company likes you to fill this in for a variety of reasons); however, you don't have to even supply the companys with your real name providing you pay upfront rather than in arrears.
Yeah, but those rare hits are anecdotal in nature.
True, but still its always difficult to say what is happening now let alone a few years down the road. In the event of less than perfect knowledge, best guess sometimes has to do. I do agree that no one piece of legislation is likely to be the single cause of something like those senarios happening. However the cummulative effect and the precedent may have a longer ranging effect i.e. well we already let them put cameras in every street so why not in every home as well?
your argument doesn't even consider the positive benefits of such a system.
Such as? We have 5.5 million CCTV cameras in the UK and still have crime. It simply relocates and changes form. Unless cameras are everywhere they are just a comfort blanket for politicians who are unable to deal with the root causes of problems which are politically unpopular and/or expensive. Examples. Most house breakins / bag snatching is done to feed drug habits. CCTV will not stop this. An effective rehabilitation programme / medically prescribed and administered drugs for addicts would by removing the incentive. - Car thefts, CCTV will not stop this, effective imobilisers / fingerprint id to start the car would. Cameras are not the solution to all problems.
I see a national ID card as being a way to lessen the rampant identity thefts happening today
That is however a mainly American problem. There is better identity security in Europe through better data protection legislation which US industry has sucessfully "lobbied" to prevent. You don't need more data, you just need to use what you have to better effect.
This does of course raise the question of what format should be used? Can you think of any standard which was around 50 years ago which is still being seriously used?
What happens about data replication and consistency? And if all data is kept at one site what happens if its destroyed?
Ok, trying to take some of your points in order...
Btw: It should always raise a red flag in any discussion when someone starts citing a movie plot as a likely outcome
of real life events.
Ok, sorry. It was an example which I thought most/.ers would be familiar with. I accept that movies are a) not real life and b) over dramatisations however some of their ideas are interesting.
Possibly you would have said a century ago, that Jules Vernes fictional works were not a good example of what would happen in the future - but he did get the fact right that man can now go into space and that launching from the equator is the best way of doing this.
There are lots of example of science fiction becoming science fact so to say that its bad to use a movie plot as a possible outcome could be debated for quite a while. 8)
The US government already has reasonably easy access to pictures of most of its citizens, but hasn't performed the abuses you described
So? Preventative legislation now to stop abuses tommorrow is often a good thing. More importantly debate on what level of intrusion the government should be allowed is usually the sign of a healthy democracy.
What if that genetic defect showed guaranteed sociopathic behavior that made it a 99.9% certainty that the loan
would not be repaid? Why should a bank pay someone they know is a bad risk. They evaluate income, past
repayment of loans, age, and other factors. Why not go to something closer to the source?
That raises the whole nature / nuture debate. If you have a predisposition to an action then you are not responsible for it and therefore the criminal justice system is based on an invalid idea (free will) and should be scrapped.
It's all about raising the bar, and putting my secret
information encrypted with my PIN on a hard-to-compromise smart card would be a step in the right direction
So what happens if your card gets stolen and you can't prove your identity to get a new one? Or is the government expected to keep a copy of all your details online?
Why would you be at the scene of a crime and not want to talk to the police?
That would depend on the circumstances but more importantly what the police would/could do. Example - A theft of a valuable item. There is no security camera footage of the theft so the police gather all fingerprints from the area and obtain search warrents for the property of each person whose finger prints are at the scene (unrealistic I accept but not totally).
In the course of these searches they uncover something incriminating at the home of someone who did not take part in the theft but now is being prosecuted for something totally seperate. Would you class this as fair?
Everyone is a criminal from poor driving to 101 other trivial things. The current system deals with the worst offenders. What happens if the system can catch everyone?
Its all about who has what information about you.
An ID card could carry your full name, date of birth. Fine, no problem with this. Less hassle getting served at the bar 8).
Now add photo and the state has a current image of almost every citizen which could then be plugged into cctv systems at political demonstrations and immediately identify people opposed to the current government. Bye Bye Freedom of Speach and hello the ability to track someone where ever they go.
Fingerprints. The government doesn't have my fingerprints and I hope never will. Imagine you were at the scene of a crime, if the state already has your fingerprints they can match anyone who was there against their database, not just against known criminals.
Genetic finger print. Think of Gattaca and the eye lash being found by the police. Immediate identification with very small probability of error. Now tie this in to :
Banking - going for a loan? Any genetic defects and they'll increase the interest rate you're paying and demand cover in case you die before its repaid.
Insurance - any genetic abnormalities and then try getting insurance. Even worse if diseases such as HIV/AIDs were included in your information.
Finally the worst part Identity theft. Government ID card is supposed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that you are who you say you are. If you have a card with your photo on it, with your fingerprints and genetic fingerprint all matching then obviously you must be the person named on it with access to all your bank accounts, property deeds etc.
Anything I've missed?
Trust. As in lack there of. SETI had problems with people returning bogus results in the past and had to spend time (and several articles) on improving security and getting the same unit processed by several seperate users.
Lack of man power / time.
Dependability - e.g. an astronomer wants to run an analysis now! Is there any certainty that there will be x amount of processing power available? That your computer will still be on the network in 5 minutes time? That the unit will get processed in a reasonable real time?
It's ok for seti to send out a unit and not get it back for a week, or a month but not for things which have to be done right now. More importantly seti units are discrete, they dont depend on other units for the results. Physics data can & therefore any machine would have to have an always on connection to communicate with other machines. Bye Bye to your bandwidth.
On the other hand the UK gets around this by declaring that even if the consumer agrees to the EULA initially to install the software they still have all their legal rights for fair use, reliability etc. For example I could agree to the EULA of a CD-RW drive/software saying I will not copy music CD's, however UK legislation allows me to make a backup copy of any software or media which is in a format which could be damaged or destroyed so long as it is for my use only. Despite agreeing to the EULA I couldn't be prosecuted for piracy unless I distributed it.
So all we need is well worded legislation which protects the consumer at the cost of big business... good luck with Congress.
Is this trend to rent software actually a bad thing for companies? I work mostly in research/academia so a lot of our software is done in house and we dont have this problem (and the remainder's Linux etc) but I'd assume that both sides in business would benefit - the seller gets a constant revenue stream, no major bumps like the currently get with new releases (at least after Bug Fix 1 gets released *grin*) and the purchaser gets to see a fixed cost each quater rather than one off costs.
Ok, for the individual its not a good thing and don't get me started on the privacy issues of product activation but for a lot of things a continual rental model would be better and may stop quite the same level of boom & bust in the industry.
Well thats my $0.02 worth. Any opions from our corporate bretheran?
Actually its 2.6Gb in a rough figure eight using Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Belfast, London, Oxford and Southampton (I think these are the correct sigts, I may be out with a couple) with a double connection between the middle 4 nodes. Janet4 is in the process of being upgraded now. Anyway this is all mainly for the Grid - the undergrads aren't going to be allowed to use it and theres no way the public will get a lookin - thats what the telcos are there for.
I thought CS problems were large until I joined Particle Physics where I've got a Petabyte of data in 6 countrys to analyse in real time - the latency is a pain however. And LHC doesn't come online until 2006 so expect a few major upgrades before then. Five years and Europe has to have a massive spurt in bandwidth, computing power and distributed software or the physicists are going to have a $3billion machine sitting there generating data and not going to be able to do anything with it.
The main reason Australia has the number of marsupial species it does is because it got seperated from Europe / Americas at a time when both mamals and marsupials were expanding - everywhere else the mammals won.
Given this, you have to assume that introducing some species of mammals will have a negative impact on the local populations. Larger animals such as lions, elephants etc may not have much of an effect by themseleves but what happens if you start to introduce dung bettles etc? If you dont you'll be neck deep in elephant crap within a couple of years as its unlikely that there will be any local species designed to break it down. How will the smaller creatures which bred very fast going to react? Look at the rabbits - only 6 were initially released and not there are millions of the damned things, not even myxamatosis has an effect on them anymore. So what would insects be like?
The sad fact is that ecosystems are far too complex for us to recreate properly at the minute and introducing african specials to australian will simply result in a new hybrid which adapts to the local environment and not what you started with.
My vote goes for keeping the local species in place and finding ways of minimising their impact of african farmers and ensuring a decent revenue stream to make it worthwhile for the African governments to keep them alive.
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Before speaking first engage brain. Then stop and think again.
From a UK perspective we don't get software given as such but have meaningful "parnerships" with industry where they match government funding for research projects, usually meaning software. This gives them a zero opportunity cost, ensures all the students / researchers know their software (and will take this knowledge into industry a couple of years later) and get access to the latest research. It's not a problem, it's just part of the research business and doesn't usually cause too many problems.
I don't know too much about the US constitutional issues but the right of privacy (or right to be left alone according to the Supreme Court) doesn't usually extend to hiding from the gov.
I guess a single system would be good to tie in birth & death certificates, tax records, driving licences, medical stuff etc from the perspective of making it really hard to create false identities (or really easy if you happen to be the government) but what of identity theft?
All you'd need to do is get in the one system and you could take over someones life. Kinda scary. Especially if you could then reclassify someone as a terrorist at the stroke of a key.
Well the latency between the two sats would be distance/speed of light as there is just a vaccumm in between them. Its the time to downlink the info to the earth station which is the problem due to the atmosphere getting in the way which will increase the latency significantly.
Of course this could just end up as a hub/router with sats taking it in turn to transfer info and then have it down loaded to a base station which would save the hassle of having to include gear to transmit to earth on each one.
Sure there are. I'm in a small group of Physicists/Computer Science postgrads and we regularly go out bowling, theatres, cinema etc. Most importantly we take it in turns to forrage for free food from the various seminars and lectures on site *grin*.
However the point about techies being fairly antisocial is true. As a group we're currently reaching the conclusion that our work takes up so much of our time and focus that we tend to get quite passionate and "scare" the non-techies who we meet. Oh well if they're not interested in distributed hetrogeneous storage solutions (with customizable replication) thats their loss seems to be the general consensus.
On the other hand I really don't want to see my lot attempting base/soft-ball (too many arguments about the physical mechanics of it) or soccer (lets not even go there).
The Internet was never a military network. This seems to confuse many people buts its quite simple. ARPAnet was created to allow the computer science community to share resources since all the new CS departments in the 1960's were calling for more and more government funds to pay for bigger and faster computer systems. It was though that networking them would allow collaboration and sharing of big iorn machines. Futile hope I know 8)
The confusion is based on the fact that Paul Baran at RAND had designed a network which would have used inexpensive links with multiple redundancies to ensure that communications would not be disrupted in a command and control structure for the Nuclear deterant. This idea was also being developed seperately in the UK and called Packet Switching by Donald Davis at the UK National Physics Lab on the first system to use this technology. It was later used as a basis for ARPAnet.
The important point is that when the ARPAnet was created the inventors had never heard of the RAND report and the Air Force had turned down RANDs plan to build a test syestem. It was civilian to the core. However when the military absorbed ARPA to form DARPA the created a nonclassified system called MilNet. This came later and is not the same as saying the Internet is built on a military system
I work with people who are highly active in this field, environmental simulation requires closely coupled processors and large amounts of memory, which basically means supercomputers. The distributed approach wouldn't work as the latency between systems is too great (especially if people are not online 24/7 and we have to wait for them to be online) and we can't afford to not have results returned.
SETIs' strength is the fact that each unit is a seperate entity which does not require information from other units and if lost doesn't matter as each uniti is processed by several different clients to ensure accurate results and prevent cheating.
As to the initial question of why we're not attempting to solve all the other problems I think the techie community does do a lot in terms of energy saving, recycling and good works, its just a shame that the politicians aren't as smart or far looking enough to do the same.
Tell a man to improve the world and he'll do it in a century, tell him he has to get re-elected every four years and it may never happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably 8*), no offense taken and I hope, none given!
However this is a problem, people sometimes don't realise that there are different types of supercomputing problem which need to be approached in different ways. (I assume you do but some posters may not).
There are some problems, such as Seti@Home which are suitable for computation in a widely distributed environment. Each SETI Unit doesn't rely on any other to be analysed so it doesn't matter if it takes a long time to communicate between processors (if at all). Others, such as weather simulations require high speed, high bandwidth communication between each processor. In these cases even a Beowulf cluster is going to have far too little bandwith to be useful. This was the point I was trying to put accross. Grids are great for many things, however I'd still want a supercomputer for some problems.
I see it as a parallel evolution between the two methods. Supercomputers to give us the hardware, Grid systems to provide the software & make use of the hardware when it becomes affordable.
Latency issues are still going to be there and which would make Grid environments unsuitable for the majority of simulations. You can't do nuclear event simulations effectively if you have a multiple second delay in communicating between processors which you get in Grids.
On the other hand Grids do have several advantages in terms of providing similar TFLOPS for a much lower price, by using several geographically seperated systems you give access to more researchers and research in this area has a lot of practical spin offs in the future.
Its a recession. During boom times like the mid 90's companies were too busy dealing with sales and expanding like crazy to deal with demand. Now that most of the competition has died down, no one expects them to post record profits etc it gives people the chance to think about where to go next.
The web is all very well but HTTP et al. have some serious limitations and were never designed for most of the current technology. For example a dial up connection has the same bandwidth of a dedicated line in the 1970's so ASDL/Cable modems etc were never considered.
The reason for all the demand now is the scientific community and all the Grid projects around the world, just because there's a recession doesn't stop them and their data requirements make Google look like a small fry (20TB of data for Google vs 600TB for BaBar at SLAC).
The other issue is business - they've all got on the band wagon of internet sales as an extra sales channel so they can grow this, but its not going to be the sudden revenue increase it was initially. Web Services offer the opportunity for companies to increase productivity and efficency which is why the tech companies are investing in it now so when the economy changes and the corporate clients come back they have something new to go on about.
Try 40Gbit for the TeraGrid project between Chicago & LA. However most of the system is likely to be on 10Gbit and in the near future 20Gbit backbones.
PKI and Kerbero's - DOD & DOE have mandates for Kerberos in the short to medium term (5-10 years). Europe currently favours PKI with authenticated certificates (like PGP cert's) but only signed by one government agency.
However, the Globus toolkit was build on the GSSAPI which would allow it to run on anything you want to write an interface to.
Most of the UNiversity and REsearch Sites in the UK and Europe are already doing this. Of course we have LHC going on line in 2007 which means we need to since the amount of data generated (10+ PB a year) as well as our other experiments make todays stuff look kinda small.
Ok, lets be geeks and calculate average increase in sea level then ...
surface area of the planet = 4*Pi*R^2 = 4 * 3.142 * 6376000 ^ 2 = 510,931,600m^2
assuming 3/4 is water ~ 361 million m^2
The ice chunk (using the previous posts comments) is equiv to a sheet 1cm thick covering 65 billion m^2 which when spread over the world equals an increase in water level of 1.8m. Oh Bugger! lets hope it doesn't all melt soon.
Rights are waved all the time in agreements.
The British system is better, consumers are not allowed to give up their statutory rights even if they sign an agreement, if it is to their detriment. e.g. If you have to sign a contract stating you will not rip a cd to mp3 after purchasing it the company couldn't sue you if you did as you have the right to back up digital media for personel use. Its actually more likely the record company would be investigated for monopoly/anti-trust practices. But then we limit the amount of money politicians can spend and recieve. 1 UK National election costs less than a single Senate seat. it
would be ignored just like the fact that it is illegal to *require* a person to give you their SSN
This would also be illegal in the UK under the data protection act, the only people who can request it are employers (since we generally pay tax at source rather than have to do our own accounts). Businesses here can only get the mimimum data they need and you can refuse to divulge anything else e.g. travel passes can include address detail in case they are lost (and the company likes you to fill this in for a variety of reasons); however, you don't have to even supply the companys with your real name providing you pay upfront rather than in arrears.
Yeah, but those rare hits are anecdotal in nature.
True, but still its always difficult to say what is happening now let alone a few years down the road. In the event of less than perfect knowledge, best guess sometimes has to do. I do agree that no one piece of legislation is likely to be the single cause of something like those senarios happening. However the cummulative effect and the precedent may have a longer ranging effect i.e. well we already let them put cameras in every street so why not in every home as well?
your argument doesn't even consider the positive benefits of such a system.
Such as? We have 5.5 million CCTV cameras in the UK and still have crime. It simply relocates and changes form. Unless cameras are everywhere they are just a comfort blanket for politicians who are unable to deal with the root causes of problems which are politically unpopular and/or expensive. Examples. Most house breakins / bag snatching is done to feed drug habits. CCTV will not stop this. An effective rehabilitation programme / medically prescribed and administered drugs for addicts would by removing the incentive. - Car thefts, CCTV will not stop this, effective imobilisers / fingerprint id to start the car would. Cameras are not the solution to all problems.
I see a national ID card as being a way to lessen the rampant identity thefts happening today
That is however a mainly American problem. There is better identity security in Europe through better data protection legislation which US industry has sucessfully "lobbied" to prevent. You don't need more data, you just need to use what you have to better effect.
This does of course raise the question of what format should be used? Can you think of any standard which was around 50 years ago which is still being seriously used?
What happens about data replication and consistency? And if all data is kept at one site what happens if its destroyed?
Ok, trying to take some of your points in order ...
/.ers would be familiar with. I accept that movies are a) not real life and b) over dramatisations however some of their ideas are interesting.
Btw: It should always raise a red flag in any discussion when someone starts citing a movie plot as a likely outcome of real life events.
Ok, sorry. It was an example which I thought most
Possibly you would have said a century ago, that Jules Vernes fictional works were not a good example of what would happen in the future - but he did get the fact right that man can now go into space and that launching from the equator is the best way of doing this.
There are lots of example of science fiction becoming science fact so to say that its bad to use a movie plot as a possible outcome could be debated for quite a while. 8) The US government already has reasonably easy access to pictures of most of its citizens, but hasn't performed the abuses you described
So? Preventative legislation now to stop abuses tommorrow is often a good thing. More importantly debate on what level of intrusion the government should be allowed is usually the sign of a healthy democracy.
What if that genetic defect showed guaranteed sociopathic behavior that made it a 99.9% certainty that the loan would not be repaid? Why should a bank pay someone they know is a bad risk. They evaluate income, past repayment of loans, age, and other factors. Why not go to something closer to the source?
That raises the whole nature / nuture debate. If you have a predisposition to an action then you are not responsible for it and therefore the criminal justice system is based on an invalid idea (free will) and should be scrapped.
It's all about raising the bar, and putting my secret information encrypted with my PIN on a hard-to-compromise smart card would be a step in the right direction
So what happens if your card gets stolen and you can't prove your identity to get a new one? Or is the government expected to keep a copy of all your details online?
Why would you be at the scene of a crime and not want to talk to the police?
That would depend on the circumstances but more importantly what the police would/could do. Example - A theft of a valuable item. There is no security camera footage of the theft so the police gather all fingerprints from the area and obtain search warrents for the property of each person whose finger prints are at the scene (unrealistic I accept but not totally).
In the course of these searches they uncover something incriminating at the home of someone who did not take part in the theft but now is being prosecuted for something totally seperate. Would you class this as fair?
Everyone is a criminal from poor driving to 101 other trivial things. The current system deals with the worst offenders. What happens if the system can catch everyone?
Its all about who has what information about you.
An ID card could carry your full name, date of birth. Fine, no problem with this. Less hassle getting served at the bar 8).
Now add photo and the state has a current image of almost every citizen which could then be plugged into cctv systems at political demonstrations and immediately identify people opposed to the current government. Bye Bye Freedom of Speach and hello the ability to track someone where ever they go.
Fingerprints. The government doesn't have my fingerprints and I hope never will. Imagine you were at the scene of a crime, if the state already has your fingerprints they can match anyone who was there against their database, not just against known criminals.
Genetic finger print. Think of Gattaca and the eye lash being found by the police. Immediate identification with very small probability of error. Now tie this in to :
Banking - going for a loan? Any genetic defects and they'll increase the interest rate you're paying and demand cover in case you die before its repaid.
Insurance - any genetic abnormalities and then try getting insurance. Even worse if diseases such as HIV/AIDs were included in your information.
Finally the worst part Identity theft. Government ID card is supposed to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that you are who you say you are. If you have a card with your photo on it, with your fingerprints and genetic fingerprint all matching then obviously you must be the person named on it with access to all your bank accounts, property deeds etc. Anything I've missed?
And of course we need a "Cave" environment to run it in ...
There are several reasons why this hasn't been done.
- The amount of data is fairly trivial compared to the Particle Physics data (AstroGrid, EU DataGrid, Grid Forum
- Trust. As in lack there of. SETI had problems with people returning bogus results in the past and had to spend time (and several articles) on improving security and getting the same unit processed by several seperate users.
- Lack of man power / time.
- Dependability - e.g. an astronomer wants to run an analysis now! Is there any certainty that there will be x amount of processing power available? That your computer will still be on the network in 5 minutes time? That the unit will get processed in a reasonable real time?
It's ok for seti to send out a unit and not get it back for a week, or a month but not for things which have to be done right now. More importantly seti units are discrete, they dont depend on other units for the results.Physics data can & therefore any machine would have to have an always on connection to communicate with other machines. Bye Bye to your bandwidth.
The Register has an article on this story here
On the other hand the UK gets around this by declaring that even if the consumer agrees to the EULA initially to install the software they still have all their legal rights for fair use, reliability etc. For example I could agree to the EULA of a CD-RW drive/software saying I will not copy music CD's, however UK legislation allows me to make a backup copy of any software or media which is in a format which could be damaged or destroyed so long as it is for my use only. Despite agreeing to the EULA I couldn't be prosecuted for piracy unless I distributed it.
... good luck with Congress.
So all we need is well worded legislation which protects the consumer at the cost of big business
Is this trend to rent software actually a bad thing for companies? I work mostly in research/academia so a lot of our software is done in house and we dont have this problem (and the remainder's Linux etc) but I'd assume that both sides in business would benefit - the seller gets a constant revenue stream, no major bumps like the currently get with new releases (at least after Bug Fix 1 gets released *grin*) and the purchaser gets to see a fixed cost each quater rather than one off costs.
Ok, for the individual its not a good thing and don't get me started on the privacy issues of product activation but for a lot of things a continual rental model would be better and may stop quite the same level of boom & bust in the industry.
Well thats my $0.02 worth. Any opions from our corporate bretheran?
Actually its 2.6Gb in a rough figure eight using Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Leeds, Belfast, London, Oxford and Southampton (I think these are the correct sigts, I may be out with a couple) with a double connection between the middle 4 nodes. Janet4 is in the process of being upgraded now. Anyway this is all mainly for the Grid - the undergrads aren't going to be allowed to use it and theres no way the public will get a lookin - thats what the telcos are there for.
I thought CS problems were large until I joined Particle Physics where I've got a Petabyte of data in 6 countrys to analyse in real time - the latency is a pain however. And LHC doesn't come online until 2006 so expect a few major upgrades before then. Five years and Europe has to have a massive spurt in bandwidth, computing power and distributed software or the physicists are going to have a $3billion machine sitting there generating data and not going to be able to do anything with it.
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First to the Higgs gets the prize.
The main reason Australia has the number of marsupial species it does is because it got seperated from Europe / Americas at a time when both mamals and marsupials were expanding - everywhere else the mammals won.
Given this, you have to assume that introducing some species of mammals will have a negative impact on the local populations. Larger animals such as lions, elephants etc may not have much of an effect by themseleves but what happens if you start to introduce dung bettles etc? If you dont you'll be neck deep in elephant crap within a couple of years as its unlikely that there will be any local species designed to break it down. How will the smaller creatures which bred very fast going to react? Look at the rabbits - only 6 were initially released and not there are millions of the damned things, not even myxamatosis has an effect on them anymore. So what would insects be like?
The sad fact is that ecosystems are far too complex for us to recreate properly at the minute and introducing african specials to australian will simply result in a new hybrid which adapts to the local environment and not what you started with.
My vote goes for keeping the local species in place and finding ways of minimising their impact of african farmers and ensuring a decent revenue stream to make it worthwhile for the African governments to keep them alive. ----- Before speaking first engage brain. Then stop and think again.
From a UK perspective we don't get software given as such but have meaningful "parnerships" with industry where they match government funding for research projects, usually meaning software. This gives them a zero opportunity cost, ensures all the students / researchers know their software (and will take this knowledge into industry a couple of years later) and get access to the latest research. It's not a problem, it's just part of the research business and doesn't usually cause too many problems.
I don't know too much about the US constitutional issues but the right of privacy (or right to be left alone according to the Supreme Court) doesn't usually extend to hiding from the gov.
I guess a single system would be good to tie in birth & death certificates, tax records, driving licences, medical stuff etc from the perspective of making it really hard to create false identities (or really easy if you happen to be the government) but what of identity theft?
All you'd need to do is get in the one system and you could take over someones life. Kinda scary. Especially if you could then reclassify someone as a terrorist at the stroke of a key.
Well the latency between the two sats would be distance/speed of light as there is just a vaccumm in between them. Its the time to downlink the info to the earth station which is the problem due to the atmosphere getting in the way which will increase the latency significantly.
Of course this could just end up as a hub/router with sats taking it in turn to transfer info and then have it down loaded to a base station which would save the hassle of having to include gear to transmit to earth on each one.
Sure there are. I'm in a small group of Physicists/Computer Science postgrads and we regularly go out bowling, theatres, cinema etc. Most importantly we take it in turns to forrage for free food from the various seminars and lectures on site *grin*.
However the point about techies being fairly antisocial is true. As a group we're currently reaching the conclusion that our work takes up so much of our time and focus that we tend to get quite passionate and "scare" the non-techies who we meet. Oh well if they're not interested in distributed hetrogeneous storage solutions (with customizable replication) thats their loss seems to be the general consensus.
On the other hand I really don't want to see my lot attempting base/soft-ball (too many arguments about the physical mechanics of it) or soccer (lets not even go there).
The Internet was never a military network. This seems to confuse many people buts its quite simple. ARPAnet was created to allow the computer science community to share resources since all the new CS departments in the 1960's were calling for more and more government funds to pay for bigger and faster computer systems. It was though that networking them would allow collaboration and sharing of big iorn machines. Futile hope I know 8)
The confusion is based on the fact that Paul Baran at RAND had designed a network which would have used inexpensive links with multiple redundancies to ensure that communications would not be disrupted in a command and control structure for the Nuclear deterant. This idea was also being developed seperately in the UK and called Packet Switching by Donald Davis at the UK National Physics Lab on the first system to use this technology. It was later used as a basis for ARPAnet.
The important point is that when the ARPAnet was created the inventors had never heard of the RAND report and the Air Force had turned down RANDs plan to build a test syestem. It was civilian to the core. However when the military absorbed ARPA to form DARPA the created a nonclassified system called MilNet. This came later and is not the same as saying the Internet is built on a military system
Ok that was my 2c's worth. Any comments?
I work with people who are highly active in this field, environmental simulation requires closely coupled processors and large amounts of memory, which basically means supercomputers. The distributed approach wouldn't work as the latency between systems is too great (especially if people are not online 24/7 and we have to wait for them to be online) and we can't afford to not have results returned.
SETIs' strength is the fact that each unit is a seperate entity which does not require information from other units and if lost doesn't matter as each uniti is processed by several different clients to ensure accurate results and prevent cheating.
As to the initial question of why we're not attempting to solve all the other problems I think the techie community does do a lot in terms of energy saving, recycling and good works, its just a shame that the politicians aren't as smart or far looking enough to do the same.
Tell a man to improve the world and he'll do it in a century, tell him he has to get re-elected every four years and it may never happen.