I should further clarify perhaps, that GOOD science runs from hypothesis to data gathering, testing, and conclusion, while POOR science starts with the conclusion, then gathers evidence, rarely tests (or does not test rigorously enough, or only tests certain applications in which the original conclusion would prove to be true while avoiding or dismissing other testing which might find flaw with it).
"good" science? It's a perfectly valid methodology to devise a theory that isn't supported by evidence and then look for the evidence. I really see no problem with it, and why we should think of it as "bad" science. "bad" science would be science that isn't testable, falsifiable, ignores data, reaches conclusions that don't logically follow, etc. I have no idea if the guy in question produces good science or bad science (as defined above), but then I'm not really addressing that at all.
It seems here that we have a researcher who started with a conclusion and is trying to find data to support it, rather than starting with a hypothesis, gathering data, and forming a conclusion
While I don't know much about the research in question, this statement struck me as wildly wrong. Theories are quite often developed before there's data to support that theory. The most well known of those is special and general relativity. At the time Einstein created these theories there was very little data to support it. General relativity might have accurately predicted the orbit of mercury where newtonian physics didn't, but that wasn't the only explanation at the time. The data to support relativity was only produced after people started looking for it. You're correct though that much of science has theories to explain evidence previously gathered. You're wrong that science doesn't work the other way around though. It happens all the time.
Nothing in concept. The practice is another matter. Many breeders have screwed up the gene pool of certain dog breeds and introduced multiple genetic problems (hip displasia for instance). They select for aesthetic qualities and not often enough for good companion dog qualities, or eliminating genetic disease.
Also most dog breeds were selected as working dogs, not companion dogs. As a result we have dogs that are too aggressive, or have too much need to heard (people, other dogs, etc).
Cloning is a pretty stupid solution though. Personally I think dogs are doing to be the first animals that are genetically engineered. There's certainly a market for it, as well as a need. Of course, they might be genetically engineered for some silly aesthetic purposes at first.
One correlation I do know about is that a very high percentage of Schizophrenics smoke. Some people suspect they might be self medicating (and I think if you schizophrenics they say they are).
Does that mean nicotine, or some nicotine like substance might be useful in treating schizophrenia? Maybe. It also might mean that nicotine causes or contributes to schizophrenia, or that schizophrenics are just more likely to get addicted.
It's interesting though, and I'm not sure if anyone has more evidence as to the link between the two.
you can be in a situation where you have a given supply of hardware, and need to know how best to use it - which amounts to much the same thing.
Sure, but you're talking about a specific piece of hardware. Sometimes you DO have a given hardware box and need to find software that works well on it. But how is a benchmark run on a totally different piece of hardware going to help you?
Benchmarks like these might give you kind of general ideas about the software, like "postgresql is in the same class as Oracle in terms of performance", but that's about it. It's a fuzzy answer, but in general I think that's all you're going to get from any Benchmark. I think that's what's really going on here, nothing more.
Solving real world problems are rarely as simple as the benchmarks. It's even tougher with something like a database where there's no standard intensive operations like Quake III, or lame mp3 encoder, or even gzip that people tend to care about.
You cannot compare benchmarks without SOMETHING standard between them.
The thing that's standard is the benchmarking software.
If I were to buy a database server, do I really care which component of the solution is providing me with the great performance, or do I just want the performance? At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is the performance that comes out of the box.
It doesn't really matter if "Postgresql" is faster than "MySQL", because they always run on a certain physical computer. What matters is "I need to accomplish X,Y and Z. I have A dollars to spend. Which solutions accomplishes X, Y and Z the best within my budget? You can't separate the software from the hardware and get an answer that's very meaningful.
This benchmark isn't the last word on anything. Even a benchmark run on the exact same hardware means very little if you have a 2 core machine instead of 8.
This was some time ago (read: long enough ago that the statute of limitations applies)
The statute of limitations may have run out, but the statute of douchebaggery is quite a bit longer. Copying ANYTHING from someones computer and keeping it is just plain wrong in my view. I'm not even talking about copyright here, just general snooping and invasion of privacy.
I really dislike going into a Best Buy. I always get this dirty kind of feeling from 80% of the people who work their. They give the impression of being just scumbag salesmen that can't hide the fact they're scumbag salesmen. Geeksquad guys stealing porn is hardly surprising.
A few months ago I was looking at TVs, and the sales guy was this young kid who just oozed sleeze. (If you've ever met a bad sales guy you know what I mean). He was trying to push a certain TV. I went over to Circuit City a few blocks away to see if they had any better prices. I actually wound up buying the same model this BB salesguy was trying to sell me, but the CC guy didn't try to push too hard. He of course tried to upsell my on an HDTV, but he at least had the instincts to back off a little.
Recently I was at Best Buy because they had nice quality speakers really cheap. I checked the website price, and went to the store. The price at the store was higher than the website price, so I asked the sales guy. He went to a terminal, went to the INTERNAL website (the dodge I already knew about from a few lawsuits against BB for this deceptive practice), and proclaimed I was incorrect. Of course I complained and eventually got the website price.. but it left me feeling even more uneasy about how Best Buy isn't the most honest, or trustworthy retailer.
Oh, and don't forget about the racketeering lawsuit filed against Best Buy. Not so great a track record.
So the court has ruled that as long as the government keeps it's mouth shut about who it was spying on, no one can ever sue the government over un-constitutional spying. Great. No plaintiffs, no lawsuit, no broken laws.
Of course at SOME point, maybe in 20 years or so, the names of who the government was spying on will have to become a non-secret, and thus available under a FOIA request.
Here's a suggestion for the complainers : if you believe $87 is terribly overpriced
I think $87 is expensive compared to other battery replacement costs. Who cares if the cost is actual labor and not profit?
The point is Apple doesn't really care about maintenance costs, or maintenance inconvenience. They care about aesthetics. People are pissed off because apples value of aesthetics causes usability problems. Who wants to send in a phone just to replace something as trivial as a battery, which is a component guaranteed to wear out?
I think these concerns are certainly valid, but it doesn't affect me as I'll never buy an overpriced phone with a 2 year expensive plan attached to it anyway.
By including that header, does it mean that I'm required to open source my plugin?
I think the point the OP was making is that if the GPL doesn't apply, you have no license to use the header. (Assuming you can copyright something as trivial as a header of course). Copyright law DOES have case law precedent. In this case I have no idea the extent it goes as far as something like a header, but you're starting to get down to the nitty-gritty.
Grow up. That "ancient code" running on the "dinosaur OS" have probably been doing so 24x7 for the last 40 years without a single hickup.
And this is supposed to be something of merit? The world changes. I'll be willing to bet that 40 year old code is like a boat anchor pulling down any business still running it. No one wants to change it because it costs too much for any new feature.
As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem.
I'm not sure what language you're talking about here, but I write in Java. When something miss-behaves I get a thrown exception and a line number. Most of the time you can do exactly what you're saying and find out what went wrong. The same is true for most any interpreted language. I don't really see why the Mainframe is somehow superior. This pretty much insures that properly maintained mainframe programs will always be more reliable than PC based ones.
Pure nonsense. Debugging is only one aspect of programming (and I take issue that it's somehow easier on a mainframe). Software is constantly in flux, and a reliable program is far more reliant on the programmer that wrote it than the hardware or environment it runs on. There's also a reason people have moved away from the popular Mainframe languages like COBOL and towards object oriented languages like Java or C++. (See maintainibility, complexity, and code re-use. I suppose you can run Java on a Mainframe... but from a programmers perspective I don't see why it matters.
I find it kind of strange you're touting the programming strengths of Mainframes. The only good thing I've heard about them is the reliability, speed, processing power, etc of the hardware.
Re:Some want to see the demise of the mainframe?
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The Mainframe Still Lives!
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· Score: 1, Informative
Why would anyone want to see the demise of the mainframe, or any other particular technology?
Because they're a burden to maintain, but have developed "traction" because they've invaded every part of a business.
I don't do mainframe stuff (and hope I never will), but the little I've heard is ugly. Ancient COBOL (yick) code written 40 years ago running on a dinosaur OS.
They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is.
I'm no economist, but this statement confuses me. You're really saying that it was somehow better when someone could say "one dollar equals.1 ounces of gold! (or whatever it was). I'm confused. What's the reference point of what.1 ounces of gold equals... one dollar? Why is referencing the value of a dollar to the value of gold somehow "better"? There's nothing magic about gold.. it's just rare.
Money is meaningless outside of the context of exchanging it for stuff you want. As long as a dollar can be exchanged for things people want, it has value. The minute it doesn't, it's worthless. That's the only reference point that matters. $1 = x% of stuff I want.
You pay "extra" because T-Mobile still has to operate a voip server and route your call.
_I_ have a freaking VOIP server, it's really not that expensive. It takes a little more processing power than a webserver, but it's not really all that heavyweight. The costs of running a voip are minuscule compared to operating a cell tower and the rest of the network to get the call to t-mobile. Connecting via voip reduces t-mobiles costs on increasing coverage and signal strength.
The cost reductions for T-mobile are quite substantial here. The fact that they're trying to sell this for an extra $10 a month is evidence that t-mobile doesn't really "get" voip. Sure, they have to pay for the call completion costs to the PSTN, but those are small. Furthermore, I believe the $10 a month is an introductory price. The REAL price is $20!.
For comparison, there's already a bunch of VOIP providers that can give you VOIP for around $10 a month, and you get a lot of extra services with that as well (multiple lines, etc). They don't require a special phone, long term contracts, etc. If you want VOIP, just sign up with them. I even have t-mobile as my provider, have a wrt-54g AP, and I'd never consider signing up and paying $10 a month for this rotten deal, much less $20 a month.
The only interest I have in a wi-fi phone is one where I could ditch t-mobile (or any other cell-phone provider) entirely when I'm away on vacation somewhere outside the network. Of course that's direct competition with the cell phone providers, so they're never going to be onboard with that.
As for the "lack of discipline," I really don't think we can fault developers. Deciding on a framework should be the job of an architect.
Hrrmmm. In an ideal world that's true. Many projects don't have a dedicated architect whose job it is to just evaluate frameworks all day though. Software development has a history of not being very ideal, one reason being it's still an actively developing field. I've looked into frameworks again recently, and picking one is like picking a religion. Everyone touts the good aspects and doesn't like to admit all the downsides. I've also talked to a couple developers at large shops, and at least one said he experienced a mix of different java framework technologies in use. My experience has been similar, having worked with a project with its own MVC implementation, no MVC, and worked with struts 1.
So I can see how someone might say there's too many frameworks, or that projects can't seem to stick with one technology even with Java. I wound up choosing Struts 2 just because it seemed the most flexible, being able to incorporate other frameworks within it.
However, one does have to wonder if the public fear of all things nuclear didn't contribute to the downfall of such devices.
I doubt it. People were afraid of all things nuclear in the 70s and 80s as well. I also think knowledge of the nuclear battery in pacemakers wasn't very widespread (I never knew about it, and while not a medical expert I'm fairly well informed).
My guess is it's much like the article says. A 10 year lifespan is long enough to consider replacing the unit with better technology. I bet it's also considerably cheaper to use a lithium power source than a Pu-238 one.
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
People blog about the most mundane things. They post pictures about their dog, and how cute he was when he snuggled up with the cat. Someone blogging about a boring, obvious idea is at least 10 times more interesting than that.
You might not blog about something you considering boring or obvious, and I doubt I would either.. but then I also wouldn't blog about my dog and cat snuggling. The point being that some people just like to talk. I'm sure you'd get the same kind of mundane invention blogging as exists in more general blog posts.
Funny, I can only recall two of the dire predictions you're referencing, both of which likely have some truth to them. Namely: g) The planet is cooling down, and we're headed for an ice age.
Global dimming is very real, and has a strong mitigating fact on global warming. I don't know about ice ages here, or who was promoting this whole thing, but I'll bet this was just a popular media hysteria (more below). h) Global warming will cause more hurricanes.
What I've heard is that global warming will cause more intense hurricanes. We're not going to know if this one is true or not for years though.
I think your general point though is kind of moot. I don't think ANY of the scare stories you posted were generally accepted among scientists of the respected field they encompass. Those scare stories and "we're real close" stories are promoted by the media, and maybe a few scientists who stand to benefit from them, or just plain bad scientists. The media just wants to sell eyeballs, so sensational science stories, no matter how inaccurate are good eyeball bait on slow news days.
The problem is that people aren't trained to spot flaws in reasoning and argument. They largely rely on "experts" to do that. The media then marches in a guy with a degree who either voluntarily co-operates and plays up the big story, or they create the whole big story by selective questioning and manipulation. So people eat it up, until they acquire the "down home cynicism". Unfortunately they don't tend to see that the real problem is the source of information, not science itself.
The point being, the problem can't be solved be "scientists" not trying to sensationalize things. There's always going to be either a few bad apples, or a media empire willing to pump up the story of the day. People just need to stop buying into all the garbage the media puts out about science. I'm sure there's multiple ways for that to happen, one of which is better education about science (through schools or other outlets).
Much of the software which is run at the NCSA is home-grown software written by computational scientists, not computer scientists.
I've seen code written by computational guys before. While not really terrible, it's not terribly re-usable or maintainable. Obviously these guys don't study computer science, but I truly think there's gains to be made if they understood the tool they were using better.
For many of these massively parallel codes, written on top of MPI, fault tolerance really isn't all that easy. For a commercial production code on the order of Gaussian, this may be doable, but for bleeding-edge research codes, it may be a better use of the (human) time to push the algorithms rather than worry about fault-tolerance. From the user's perspective, jobs that are killed due to a hardware failure have their service units refunded, so there isn't a huge incentive to worry about it.
As long as your job runs under 6 hours, sure. But if it takes over 6 hours, you're already doing some kind of saving and re-starting. That's probably about 80% of what I'm talking about, just on a larger scale. I bet ou're right though, it's all going to come to a head as there's more and more components that could fail, so it has to be fixed at a higher level, or the programmer level. Maybe you can fix the problem with virtualization, but how much of a performance hit do you take, or how much costlier is the machine?
The most surprising thing in the article was how inelegantly they've solved the problem with inevitable hardware failure. That is, limiting runs to only 6 hours. It seems like there just HAS to be a better way to handle the problem than this! Virtualization sounds a bit tricky, so why not just write the software to handle hardware errors in the first place? I.e. produce results, check to see if there was a hardware failure, if so, re-do.
Maybe they already do this, and the reporter didn't catch it. But it'd surprise me if they didn't have better solutions than just hoping nothing bad happens during a run.
The campaign manager found a website project manager to construct and maintain the site.
Yup, and that's exactly where the bias towards one OS or another comes in. Campaign mangers don't just look in a phone book for a provider of something as important as a website provider or maintainer, they either know someone, or ask their buddies (who in turn knows someone). They didn't intend to choose linux, but exactly what the OP was talking about comes out through the connections between people.
Maybe we should have a bit more respect this time.
Dark humor has always been a way for people to take the edge off a horrible tragedy. Also, the vast majority of us here have never talked to Reiser, or even met him. I'd suggest that kind of thing disturbs you so much you shouldn't read any stories like this rather than trying to impossible task of modifying the behavior of tens of thousands of other people.
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I should further clarify perhaps, that GOOD science runs from hypothesis to data gathering, testing, and conclusion, while POOR science starts with the conclusion, then gathers evidence, rarely tests (or does not test rigorously enough, or only tests certain applications in which the original conclusion would prove to be true while avoiding or dismissing other testing which might find flaw with it).
"good" science? It's a perfectly valid methodology to devise a theory that isn't supported by evidence and then look for the evidence. I really see no problem with it, and why we should think of it as "bad" science. "bad" science would be science that isn't testable, falsifiable, ignores data, reaches conclusions that don't logically follow, etc. I have no idea if the guy in question produces good science or bad science (as defined above), but then I'm not really addressing that at all.
It seems here that we have a researcher who started with a conclusion and is trying to find data to support it, rather than starting with a hypothesis, gathering data, and forming a conclusion
While I don't know much about the research in question, this statement struck me as wildly wrong. Theories are quite often developed before there's data to support that theory. The most well known of those is special and general relativity. At the time Einstein created these theories there was very little data to support it. General relativity might have accurately predicted the orbit of mercury where newtonian physics didn't, but that wasn't the only explanation at the time. The data to support relativity was only produced after people started looking for it. You're correct though that much of science has theories to explain evidence previously gathered. You're wrong that science doesn't work the other way around though. It happens all the time.
What's wrong with selective breeding?
Nothing in concept. The practice is another matter. Many breeders have screwed up the gene pool of certain dog breeds and introduced multiple genetic problems (hip displasia for instance). They select for aesthetic qualities and not often enough for good companion dog qualities, or eliminating genetic disease.
Also most dog breeds were selected as working dogs, not companion dogs. As a result we have dogs that are too aggressive, or have too much need to heard (people, other dogs, etc).
Cloning is a pretty stupid solution though. Personally I think dogs are doing to be the first animals that are genetically engineered. There's certainly a market for it, as well as a need. Of course, they might be genetically engineered for some silly aesthetic purposes at first.
One correlation I do know about is that a very high percentage of Schizophrenics smoke. Some people suspect they might be self medicating (and I think if you schizophrenics they say they are).
Does that mean nicotine, or some nicotine like substance might be useful in treating schizophrenia? Maybe. It also might mean that nicotine causes or contributes to schizophrenia, or that schizophrenics are just more likely to get addicted.
It's interesting though, and I'm not sure if anyone has more evidence as to the link between the two.
you can be in a situation where you have a given supply of hardware, and need to know how best to use it - which amounts to much the same thing.
Sure, but you're talking about a specific piece of hardware. Sometimes you DO have a given hardware box and need to find software that works well on it. But how is a benchmark run on a totally different piece of hardware going to help you?
Benchmarks like these might give you kind of general ideas about the software, like "postgresql is in the same class as Oracle in terms of performance", but that's about it. It's a fuzzy answer, but in general I think that's all you're going to get from any Benchmark. I think that's what's really going on here, nothing more.
Solving real world problems are rarely as simple as the benchmarks. It's even tougher with something like a database where there's no standard intensive operations like Quake III, or lame mp3 encoder, or even gzip that people tend to care about.
You cannot compare benchmarks without SOMETHING standard between them.
The thing that's standard is the benchmarking software.
If I were to buy a database server, do I really care which component of the solution is providing me with the great performance, or do I just want the performance? At the end of the day the only thing that really matters is the performance that comes out of the box.
It doesn't really matter if "Postgresql" is faster than "MySQL", because they always run on a certain physical computer. What matters is "I need to accomplish X,Y and Z. I have A dollars to spend. Which solutions accomplishes X, Y and Z the best within my budget? You can't separate the software from the hardware and get an answer that's very meaningful.
This benchmark isn't the last word on anything. Even a benchmark run on the exact same hardware means very little if you have a 2 core machine instead of 8.
This was some time ago (read: long enough ago that the statute of limitations applies)
The statute of limitations may have run out, but the statute of douchebaggery is quite a bit longer. Copying ANYTHING from someones computer and keeping it is just plain wrong in my view. I'm not even talking about copyright here, just general snooping and invasion of privacy.
I really dislike going into a Best Buy. I always get this dirty kind of feeling from 80% of the people who work their. They give the impression of being just scumbag salesmen that can't hide the fact they're scumbag salesmen. Geeksquad guys stealing porn is hardly surprising.
A few months ago I was looking at TVs, and the sales guy was this young kid who just oozed sleeze. (If you've ever met a bad sales guy you know what I mean). He was trying to push a certain TV. I went over to Circuit City a few blocks away to see if they had any better prices. I actually wound up buying the same model this BB salesguy was trying to sell me, but the CC guy didn't try to push too hard. He of course tried to upsell my on an HDTV, but he at least had the instincts to back off a little.
Recently I was at Best Buy because they had nice quality speakers really cheap. I checked the website price, and went to the store. The price at the store was higher than the website price, so I asked the sales guy. He went to a terminal, went to the INTERNAL website (the dodge I already knew about from a few lawsuits against BB for this deceptive practice), and proclaimed I was incorrect. Of course I complained and eventually got the website price.. but it left me feeling even more uneasy about how Best Buy isn't the most honest, or trustworthy retailer.
Oh, and don't forget about the racketeering lawsuit filed against Best Buy. Not so great a track record.
So the court has ruled that as long as the government keeps it's mouth shut about who it was spying on, no one can ever sue the government over un-constitutional spying. Great. No plaintiffs, no lawsuit, no broken laws.
Of course at SOME point, maybe in 20 years or so, the names of who the government was spying on will have to become a non-secret, and thus available under a FOIA request.
Here's a suggestion for the complainers : if you believe $87 is terribly overpriced
I think $87 is expensive compared to other battery replacement costs. Who cares if the cost is actual labor and not profit?
The point is Apple doesn't really care about maintenance costs, or maintenance inconvenience. They care about aesthetics. People are pissed off because apples value of aesthetics causes usability problems. Who wants to send in a phone just to replace something as trivial as a battery, which is a component guaranteed to wear out?
I think these concerns are certainly valid, but it doesn't affect me as I'll never buy an overpriced phone with a 2 year expensive plan attached to it anyway.
By including that header, does it mean that I'm required to open source my plugin?
I think the point the OP was making is that if the GPL doesn't apply, you have no license to use the header. (Assuming you can copyright something as trivial as a header of course). Copyright law DOES have case law precedent. In this case I have no idea the extent it goes as far as something like a header, but you're starting to get down to the nitty-gritty.
Grow up. That "ancient code" running on the "dinosaur OS" have probably been doing so 24x7 for the last 40 years without a single hickup.
And this is supposed to be something of merit? The world changes. I'll be willing to bet that 40 year old code is like a boat anchor pulling down any business still running it. No one wants to change it because it costs too much for any new feature.
As a programmer perhaps the most telling thing I can say about the difference is that when your mainframe application dumps, you can actually analyze the dump and learn everything you need to know in most cases to fully diagnose the problem.
I'm not sure what language you're talking about here, but I write in Java. When something miss-behaves I get a thrown exception and a line number. Most of the time you can do exactly what you're saying and find out what went wrong. The same is true for most any interpreted language. I don't really see why the Mainframe is somehow superior.
This pretty much insures that properly maintained mainframe programs will always be more reliable than PC based ones.
Pure nonsense. Debugging is only one aspect of programming (and I take issue that it's somehow easier on a mainframe). Software is constantly in flux, and a reliable program is far more reliant on the programmer that wrote it than the hardware or environment it runs on. There's also a reason people have moved away from the popular Mainframe languages like COBOL and towards object oriented languages like Java or C++. (See maintainibility, complexity, and code re-use. I suppose you can run Java on a Mainframe... but from a programmers perspective I don't see why it matters.
I find it kind of strange you're touting the programming strengths of Mainframes. The only good thing I've heard about them is the reliability, speed, processing power, etc of the hardware.
Why would anyone want to see the demise of the mainframe, or any other particular technology?
Because they're a burden to maintain, but have developed "traction" because they've invaded every part of a business.
I don't do mainframe stuff (and hope I never will), but the little I've heard is ugly. Ancient COBOL (yick) code written 40 years ago running on a dinosaur OS.
They're not demanding to know what the reference point of "one dollar" is.
I'm no economist, but this statement confuses me. You're really saying that it was somehow better when someone could say "one dollar equals
Money is meaningless outside of the context of exchanging it for stuff you want. As long as a dollar can be exchanged for things people want, it has value. The minute it doesn't, it's worthless. That's the only reference point that matters. $1 = x% of stuff I want.
You pay "extra" because T-Mobile still has to operate a voip server and route your call.
_I_ have a freaking VOIP server, it's really not that expensive. It takes a little more processing power than a webserver, but it's not really all that heavyweight. The costs of running a voip are minuscule compared to operating a cell tower and the rest of the network to get the call to t-mobile. Connecting via voip reduces t-mobiles costs on increasing coverage and signal strength.
The cost reductions for T-mobile are quite substantial here. The fact that they're trying to sell this for an extra $10 a month is evidence that t-mobile doesn't really "get" voip. Sure, they have to pay for the call completion costs to the PSTN, but those are small. Furthermore, I believe the $10 a month is an introductory price. The REAL price is $20!.
For comparison, there's already a bunch of VOIP providers that can give you VOIP for around $10 a month, and you get a lot of extra services with that as well (multiple lines, etc). They don't require a special phone, long term contracts, etc. If you want VOIP, just sign up with them. I even have t-mobile as my provider, have a wrt-54g AP, and I'd never consider signing up and paying $10 a month for this rotten deal, much less $20 a month.
The only interest I have in a wi-fi phone is one where I could ditch t-mobile (or any other cell-phone provider) entirely when I'm away on vacation somewhere outside the network. Of course that's direct competition with the cell phone providers, so they're never going to be onboard with that.
As for the "lack of discipline," I really don't think we can fault developers. Deciding on a framework should be the job of an architect.
Hrrmmm. In an ideal world that's true. Many projects don't have a dedicated architect whose job it is to just evaluate frameworks all day though. Software development has a history of not being very ideal, one reason being it's still an actively developing field. I've looked into frameworks again recently, and picking one is like picking a religion. Everyone touts the good aspects and doesn't like to admit all the downsides. I've also talked to a couple developers at large shops, and at least one said he experienced a mix of different java framework technologies in use. My experience has been similar, having worked with a project with its own MVC implementation, no MVC, and worked with struts 1.
So I can see how someone might say there's too many frameworks, or that projects can't seem to stick with one technology even with Java. I wound up choosing Struts 2 just because it seemed the most flexible, being able to incorporate other frameworks within it.
However, one does have to wonder if the public fear of all things nuclear didn't contribute to the downfall of such devices.
I doubt it. People were afraid of all things nuclear in the 70s and 80s as well. I also think knowledge of the nuclear battery in pacemakers wasn't very widespread (I never knew about it, and while not a medical expert I'm fairly well informed).
My guess is it's much like the article says. A 10 year lifespan is long enough to consider replacing the unit with better technology. I bet it's also considerably cheaper to use a lithium power source than a Pu-238 one.
It would take a lot of time, effort, and money to make the website something worthwhile.
Eh, A talented web developer could setup a useful site in a weekend or two. To make it good would take a few months longer. It's not like we're talking about something extraordinarily complex here, just a site to post ideas that has a few fields to enter keywords, categories, and free text. Then make it searchable.
It wouldn't take any money to speak of, and it's even in the best interest of software developers, so there's motivation to do so. Hell, it's even in the best interests of large software companies as it takes some burden off them for obvious software patents. The only people it's NOT in the best interest of is scumbag IP companies who don't produce anything but lawyers who sue other companies who actually DO produce things.
The problem with this is that the vast majority of prior art is so obvious that no one would think of cataloging it beforehand.
People blog about the most mundane things. They post pictures about their dog, and how cute he was when he snuggled up with the cat. Someone blogging about a boring, obvious idea is at least 10 times more interesting than that.
You might not blog about something you considering boring or obvious, and I doubt I would either.. but then I also wouldn't blog about my dog and cat snuggling. The point being that some people just like to talk. I'm sure you'd get the same kind of mundane invention blogging as exists in more general blog posts.
Funny, I can only recall two of the dire predictions you're referencing, both of which likely have some truth to them. Namely:
g) The planet is cooling down, and we're headed for an ice age.
Global dimming is very real, and has a strong mitigating fact on global warming. I don't know about ice ages here, or who was promoting this whole thing, but I'll bet this was just a popular media hysteria (more below).
h) Global warming will cause more hurricanes.
What I've heard is that global warming will cause more intense hurricanes. We're not going to know if this one is true or not for years though.
I think your general point though is kind of moot. I don't think ANY of the scare stories you posted were generally accepted among scientists of the respected field they encompass. Those scare stories and "we're real close" stories are promoted by the media, and maybe a few scientists who stand to benefit from them, or just plain bad scientists. The media just wants to sell eyeballs, so sensational science stories, no matter how inaccurate are good eyeball bait on slow news days.
The problem is that people aren't trained to spot flaws in reasoning and argument. They largely rely on "experts" to do that. The media then marches in a guy with a degree who either voluntarily co-operates and plays up the big story, or they create the whole big story by selective questioning and manipulation. So people eat it up, until they acquire the "down home cynicism". Unfortunately they don't tend to see that the real problem is the source of information, not science itself.
The point being, the problem can't be solved be "scientists" not trying to sensationalize things. There's always going to be either a few bad apples, or a media empire willing to pump up the story of the day. People just need to stop buying into all the garbage the media puts out about science. I'm sure there's multiple ways for that to happen, one of which is better education about science (through schools or other outlets).
Much of the software which is run at the NCSA is home-grown software written by computational scientists, not computer scientists.
I've seen code written by computational guys before. While not really terrible, it's not terribly re-usable or maintainable. Obviously these guys don't study computer science, but I truly think there's gains to be made if they understood the tool they were using better.
For many of these massively parallel codes, written on top of MPI, fault tolerance really isn't all that easy. For a commercial production code on the order of Gaussian, this may be doable, but for bleeding-edge research codes, it may be a better use of the (human) time to push the algorithms rather than worry about fault-tolerance. From the user's perspective, jobs that are killed due to a hardware failure have their service units refunded, so there isn't a huge incentive to worry about it.
As long as your job runs under 6 hours, sure. But if it takes over 6 hours, you're already doing some kind of saving and re-starting. That's probably about 80% of what I'm talking about, just on a larger scale. I bet ou're right though, it's all going to come to a head as there's more and more components that could fail, so it has to be fixed at a higher level, or the programmer level. Maybe you can fix the problem with virtualization, but how much of a performance hit do you take, or how much costlier is the machine?
The most surprising thing in the article was how inelegantly they've solved the problem with inevitable hardware failure. That is, limiting runs to only 6 hours. It seems like there just HAS to be a better way to handle the problem than this! Virtualization sounds a bit tricky, so why not just write the software to handle hardware errors in the first place? I.e. produce results, check to see if there was a hardware failure, if so, re-do.
Maybe they already do this, and the reporter didn't catch it. But it'd surprise me if they didn't have better solutions than just hoping nothing bad happens during a run.
The campaign manager found a website project manager to construct and maintain the site.
Yup, and that's exactly where the bias towards one OS or another comes in. Campaign mangers don't just look in a phone book for a provider of something as important as a website provider or maintainer, they either know someone, or ask their buddies (who in turn knows someone). They didn't intend to choose linux, but exactly what the OP was talking about comes out through the connections between people.
Maybe we should have a bit more respect this time.
Dark humor has always been a way for people to take the edge off a horrible tragedy. Also, the vast majority of us here have never talked to Reiser, or even met him. I'd suggest that kind of thing disturbs you so much you shouldn't read any stories like this rather than trying to impossible task of modifying the behavior of tens of thousands of other people.