processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers.
I always hear this, but I've never seen anything terribly definitive on it. I'd like to see how fast a Cray for 12 years ago, and a modern top-of-the-line Desktop PC with a hot graphics processor could solve a problem designed to run on that Cray from 12 years ago. Metrics are nice and all to attempt to judge processing power between different machines, but in the end the only thing that matters is real world performance on an actual problem.
Wi-Fi was supposed to reduce complications, not create new ones.
No. Wi-Fi was supposed to let you maintain a network connection without wires. For the most part it does that fairly well, just not as well as a wired connection.
If anyone is relying on wi-fi for an always-on, never breaks technology, they're fooling themselves. What wireless technology works like that? Cell phones have been around for at least 30 years and we all still know it's not as reliable as a land line.
Years ago, shortly after the Pentium first came out and the then astounding "x million flops/second" numbers were floating around, I wondered how far we were behind the power of supercomputers. I remember doing some rough calculations and finding that only a few pentiums could do the calculations of a Cray 1. I don't remember the specifics of how many pentiums/cray, or how rough the calculation was, but that's largely unimportant for my point.
So I have to wonder, what's the equivalent supercomputer that a modern, hefty desktop is capable of performing at? 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Have super-computers accelerated in terms of the speed of increased computing power, stayed the same, or fallen behind desktops?
All I have to do is stimulate the right part of your brain with the right electromagnetic field. It was an interesting experiment, as everyone knew that something was being done to their brain, yet most people still felt that the experience indicated the actual presence of the divine.
Is this for real? How powerful of a magnetic field do you need? How localized? Sounds like a nifty carnival ride you could bottle and sell at shopping malls (I'm only half joking)
Oh, you mean the ones that planned the attack? The US is slowly picking them off.
See, the problem here is that "slowly" part. Why the hell did we go into Iraq when we should have been concentrating everything at taking down Al-Queda? I'll grant you that the OP is a nutcase that thinks the administration is a bunch of boobs on purpose (guess he's never run into a real gang of incompetents that back each other up).
The US has lost so much internationally because of this idiotic Iraq war. After 9/11 we had the whole world behind us and it was hard to say no to helping us find Bin Laden. That kind of thing takes international co-operation, not empty threats of "dead or alive" (you can't threaten someone when you don't even know where they are). Now less than 6 years later we've squandered all of that on a failed war and Bin Laden still runs free. Now we've got everyone chasing at their own shadows with the "find the terrorist" business.
you'll find that they are incredibly capable people...
They're capable, but yet they can't get the facts right about Iraq? They're capable, but yet they've seriously screwed up the Iraq war in multiple ways? They're capable, but yet Paul Wolfowitz gets caught in a conflict of interest giving his girlfriend a position of authority in the World Bank? Somehow these things don't come from capable people.
Seems like the actual evidence points to them being ass-clowns that screw up left and right, but until now have been able to talk their way out of it, or make friends who can do it for them.
You can talk conspiracy theories all day long, but until you actually have evidence instead of motivations, it's nonsense. You can make up anything you damn well please if all you have is motivations to guide you.
The signing statements will take a ruling by the courts to make them invalid. Congress can't do squat about them. The warrantless wiretapping is also a court issue. Declaring war on another nation was approved by the congress.
Patriot act, homeland security, and the crony AG are all approved by congress. They failed to make a no-confidence vote in him, not that it matters since only the President can fire him.
The point here is that the President only has power because the Congress has been mostly rubber-stamping what he does. They've been a _little_ better lately with the Democrats taking over, but even then they wind up handing over more money for the Iraq war.
George Bush and his gang of crap can certainly be blamed for being extrodinarly terrible politicians, leaders, and decision makers. I'm not sure you can blame them for having too much power when the rest of the system isn't acting properly to stop that. I'm also not sure the President really has that much power to begin with, as some of the power you're referring to is in the Congress, which is using its power to not do anything. (Yes, I do believe not acting when you can is an expression of power).
when people actually had the backbone to stand up and protest like they meant it?
I believe there was also this thing called the.. draft. Where people could be sent off to a war and potentially die. There were also a LOT more troops and a LOT more casualties, so I'd bet everyone knew at least one person who died, or had a friend/family member who knew someone who died. I'd bet everyone knew someone that was IN vietnam. As far as the Iraq war goes, I'm 3 degrees of seperation from someone who died, and I'd bet even THAT is rare.
The point being, this war has a lot less personal connections to it than Vietnam did. It has nothing to do with "backbone". For the most part people are motivated by what affects them. No one is going to be drafted (especially people on a college campus), and a much smaller percentage of the populace is personally connected to it. So it really shouldn't be surprising that no one is rioting in the streets because of it. On the other hand we did have an election driven by ending this war, so it's not a total disconect.
The next question is: What sort of classified information and research is done at universities? How much of it? What are the counter-intelligence ramifications? What is the appropriate response?
You'd think that anyone requiring security clearance is working on something super-duper secret that we can't share with the enemies. You'd think that.. but that assumes that the world works on some level of sanity.
A friend of mine worked on a physics project funded by the DOE about 10 years ago. I remember him telling me about it and being impressed. He quickly gave me the real story. I don't remember exactly what the research entailed, but it wasn't secret, it wasn't some weapons research, it was just a dumb bureocratic requirement.
So don't take any solace that this only applies to people who need security clearance. Security clearance is a joke.
If Sept. 11 was done by "real terrorists" why hasn't anyone in the Bush Administration ever appeared concerned with apprehending them????
This statement pre-supposes that the Bush Administration isn't a set of totally incompetent doofuses. You only need to look as far as not finding WMDs in Iraq,how the Iraq was has gone (i.e. complete disaster), Katrina, abu-grave, gitmo, domestic spying, Scooter Libby, political firing of US Attorneys... the list goes on, to realize that this administration is just terrible at everything.
Why should not going after Bin Laden be any surprise? At the heart of every conspiracy theory is the belief that the people at the top are ultra powerful and completely in control of everything. In the real world you sometimes get boobs like George Bush and his gang of suck in charge.
That's the only one that makes any sense. The rest are really just "you're a non-conformist, let's chase you down". Which sounds more like biases within the goverment/military than anything that's actually useful.
I notice you can't actually point to anything credible. Basically, why should I believe the FBI that these are anything but normal behavior? We KNOW that non-spies do ALL these things, and it's not like there's no potential for harm here in false positives. Discouraging people from working late hours, or having an interest outside the narrow parameters of work is bad thing. Do we really need more robots that do as they're told and don't go anywhere outside the norm?
It's a pretty standard set of criteria that's probably been in use since the mid-'50s... and is very usefull.
Do you have any evidence to show it's useful? It sure sounds like nonsense paranoia to me. And it's not like we haven't had a large set of high level officials that've been busted for espionage after years spent doing it. Aldrich Ames comes to mind. He operated for at least 9 years as a foreign spy right under the noses of the CIA. I don't know what brought him down, but I doubt it was someone noticing he worked late hours.
The guidelines are for people with security clearance
Pfft. It's not well known, but "security clearance" doesn't mean you're working on something with national security. A friend of mine had to get some kind of security clearance years ago to work on a physics project funded by the DOE. It didn't have anything to do with national security, bomb making, or the like.
It appears that that paragraph is a gross exaggeration of what the FBI is proposing,
I don't know, it sounds pretty accurate to me. Oh you can still DO any of those things, just do to many or the wrong ones and you're an espionage suspect. further in the article University spokespeople talk about a possible "chilling effect", not about the kind of wholesale assault on freedoms suggested.
chilling effects aren't a wholesale assault on freedom? What's the difference? If people are afraid of working late , or expressing interest outside of narrow parameters because they think they'll be thought a spy how is that not an assault of freedom?
Good god. It's like we're trying to establish the freaking Stasi here in the United States!
It took me maybe an hour to fully implement it a few years ago (most of which was just reading), so why WOULDN'T you try it? There's really no downside other than having to maintain a list of outgoing mail servers. And unlike something like domainkeys, you don't have to go around messing with your mailserver configuration. If it gives you some kind of problem, it only takes a few minutes to disable it.
So, because the iPhone uses GSM, it'll only work with two US carries, and THE REST OF THE WORLD.
Bzzzt.
GSM is a communications standard that doesn't specify the frequency it runs on. For this thing to work with "the rest of the world" it has to support the frequencies in use where you are and it also has to not be locked to a single provider.
Also, GSM isn't as universal as you think. Japan for instance uses GSM + some other layers/technologies.
...as with every phone before it, if it's on AT&T's network, it's GSM. That means no, you can't use it on verizon, yes, you can use it on T-Mobile.
Ever heard of locked phones? Just because the phone uses GSM doesn't mean it'll work on anyone but AT&T. There's unlocking methods available, but that doesn't mean they'll work.
Until then, they will remain a second rate search engine.
Yahoo doesn't see itself as a search engine, they see themselves as a portal. Of course the demographic they're aiming for has changed recently.
I'm not sure why anyone would go to Yahoo anymore. I used to house all crap "we need an email address" email at yahoo, but after having to read about some idiotic thing Britney or Paris did, or some foolish article about "Office tips you should follow!" for the umpteenth time on the front page of Yahoo, I've moved my crap email to Google.
Yahoo seems to think it's ideal customer is the bubble-headed bleach blond who's thinking about being a "career man/woman" now. It's basically Glamor on the Internet. I'm sure there's a market for that, but it seems strange that was supposed to be a billion dollar company is aiming for that small demographic.
Really people should have the same expectation of privacy in an email as they do with a postcard. None at all. It is clear text.
Bzzt...
My phone line isn't encrypted either, and in fact physically available for tapping to anyone in the building, yet I have a high degree of expectations of privacy.
Before cell phones went digital, anyone with a television tuned to a UHF channel could listen to cell phone conversations, but yet there was still an expectation of privacy from government taps.
You seem to think just because you understand the technology, you understand the law. You're wrong.
If BB can't survive with its much lower overhead and cash reserve to get it through rough patches, what makes you think several mom and pop video stores would?
Maybe they're more willing to accept lower profits? Or perhaps a greater ability to adapt to the local market? Big chains aren't necessarily the best competitors.
It was built to shelter people against radiation, not water.
The article is quite misleading. The "survive a nuclear attack" thing was just a boast about how strong the vault was. It wasn't a fallout shelter, it was a vault designed to hold a car for 50 years. On that level it failed miserably.
So tests that force students to do a lot of guessing may still be good tools for evaluating their professional qualifications.
I think when the poster is referring to "guessing", he's defining it as able to determine the right answer no better than chance. I'm not sure if "educated guessing" changes the outcome of his analysis or not.
What a worthless post. He gave one situation where guessing is more important than knowledge, but didn't at all address the specifics of the tests he was talking about.
The specifics of the test don't matter, since his criticism is a statistical one, not one of the specific questions. The one situation he gave was used to try to illustrate a mathematical point, not offered as a proof. While it's certainly not something that's publishable and isn't very rigourous, I think it's a very interesting post. If you have a criticism of his conclusions, offer it up. But there's nothing wrong with his methodology as far as I can tell.
My wife has one ForTwo and gets 50mpg AVERAGE, see the difference here? AVERAGE not highway mileage, in the highway it goes closer to 65mpg or more
If we go by just you, people from Europe have a problem with reading comprehension. The article (and the website) says the model that's going to be sold in the US is shooting for 40 mpg.
There's really no reason to be insulting here just because the majority of us think this car is ugly, and impractical. There's plenty of econo boxes that're just as cheap and get about the same mileage as 40 mpg. I'll throw in unsafe, because if you get hit with an SUV in one of those things, you're dead. I don't care how much you believe in Mercedes or engineers. At a certain point you just can't fight physics.
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processing performance (gigaflops) of a CPU, is no longer the interesting part of a supercomputer. (It never really was) memory bandwidth, interconnect bandwidth and latency, and I/O performance are the more interesting features of supers.
I always hear this, but I've never seen anything terribly definitive on it. I'd like to see how fast a Cray for 12 years ago, and a modern top-of-the-line Desktop PC with a hot graphics processor could solve a problem designed to run on that Cray from 12 years ago. Metrics are nice and all to attempt to judge processing power between different machines, but in the end the only thing that matters is real world performance on an actual problem.
Wi-Fi was supposed to reduce complications, not create new ones.
No. Wi-Fi was supposed to let you maintain a network connection without wires. For the most part it does that fairly well, just not as well as a wired connection.
If anyone is relying on wi-fi for an always-on, never breaks technology, they're fooling themselves. What wireless technology works like that? Cell phones have been around for at least 30 years and we all still know it's not as reliable as a land line.
Years ago, shortly after the Pentium first came out and the then astounding "x million flops/second" numbers were floating around, I wondered how far we were behind the power of supercomputers. I remember doing some rough calculations and finding that only a few pentiums could do the calculations of a Cray 1. I don't remember the specifics of how many pentiums/cray, or how rough the calculation was, but that's largely unimportant for my point.
So I have to wonder, what's the equivalent supercomputer that a modern, hefty desktop is capable of performing at? 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Have super-computers accelerated in terms of the speed of increased computing power, stayed the same, or fallen behind desktops?
All I have to do is stimulate the right part of your brain with the right electromagnetic field. It was an interesting experiment, as everyone knew that something was being done to their brain, yet most people still felt that the experience indicated the actual presence of the divine.
Is this for real? How powerful of a magnetic field do you need? How localized? Sounds like a nifty carnival ride you could bottle and sell at shopping malls (I'm only half joking)
Oh, you mean the ones that planned the attack? The US is slowly picking them off.
See, the problem here is that "slowly" part. Why the hell did we go into Iraq when we should have been concentrating everything at taking down Al-Queda? I'll grant you that the OP is a nutcase that thinks the administration is a bunch of boobs on purpose (guess he's never run into a real gang of incompetents that back each other up).
The US has lost so much internationally because of this idiotic Iraq war. After 9/11 we had the whole world behind us and it was hard to say no to helping us find Bin Laden. That kind of thing takes international co-operation, not empty threats of "dead or alive" (you can't threaten someone when you don't even know where they are). Now less than 6 years later we've squandered all of that on a failed war and Bin Laden still runs free. Now we've got everyone chasing at their own shadows with the "find the terrorist" business.
you'll find that they are incredibly capable people
They're capable, but yet they can't get the facts right about Iraq? They're capable, but yet they've seriously screwed up the Iraq war in multiple ways? They're capable, but yet Paul Wolfowitz gets caught in a conflict of interest giving his girlfriend a position of authority in the World Bank? Somehow these things don't come from capable people.
Seems like the actual evidence points to them being ass-clowns that screw up left and right, but until now have been able to talk their way out of it, or make friends who can do it for them.
You can talk conspiracy theories all day long, but until you actually have evidence instead of motivations, it's nonsense. You can make up anything you damn well please if all you have is motivations to guide you.
The signing statements will take a ruling by the courts to make them invalid. Congress can't do squat about them. The warrantless wiretapping is also a court issue. Declaring war on another nation was approved by the congress.
Patriot act, homeland security, and the crony AG are all approved by congress. They failed to make a no-confidence vote in him, not that it matters since only the President can fire him.
The point here is that the President only has power because the Congress has been mostly rubber-stamping what he does. They've been a _little_ better lately with the Democrats taking over, but even then they wind up handing over more money for the Iraq war.
George Bush and his gang of crap can certainly be blamed for being extrodinarly terrible politicians, leaders, and decision makers. I'm not sure you can blame them for having too much power when the rest of the system isn't acting properly to stop that. I'm also not sure the President really has that much power to begin with, as some of the power you're referring to is in the Congress, which is using its power to not do anything. (Yes, I do believe not acting when you can is an expression of power).
when people actually had the backbone to stand up and protest like they meant it?
I believe there was also this thing called the.. draft. Where people could be sent off to a war and potentially die. There were also a LOT more troops and a LOT more casualties, so I'd bet everyone knew at least one person who died, or had a friend/family member who knew someone who died. I'd bet everyone knew someone that was IN vietnam. As far as the Iraq war goes, I'm 3 degrees of seperation from someone who died, and I'd bet even THAT is rare.
The point being, this war has a lot less personal connections to it than Vietnam did. It has nothing to do with "backbone". For the most part people are motivated by what affects them. No one is going to be drafted (especially people on a college campus), and a much smaller percentage of the populace is personally connected to it. So it really shouldn't be surprising that no one is rioting in the streets because of it. On the other hand we did have an election driven by ending this war, so it's not a total disconect.
The next question is: What sort of classified information and research is done at universities? How much of it? What are the counter-intelligence ramifications? What is the appropriate response?
You'd think that anyone requiring security clearance is working on something super-duper secret that we can't share with the enemies. You'd think that.. but that assumes that the world works on some level of sanity.
A friend of mine worked on a physics project funded by the DOE about 10 years ago. I remember him telling me about it and being impressed. He quickly gave me the real story. I don't remember exactly what the research entailed, but it wasn't secret, it wasn't some weapons research, it was just a dumb bureocratic requirement.
So don't take any solace that this only applies to people who need security clearance. Security clearance is a joke.
If Sept. 11 was done by "real terrorists" why hasn't anyone in the Bush Administration ever appeared concerned with apprehending them????
This statement pre-supposes that the Bush Administration isn't a set of totally incompetent doofuses. You only need to look as far as not finding WMDs in Iraq,how the Iraq was has gone (i.e. complete disaster), Katrina, abu-grave, gitmo, domestic spying, Scooter Libby, political firing of US Attorneys... the list goes on, to realize that this administration is just terrible at everything.
Why should not going after Bin Laden be any surprise? At the heart of every conspiracy theory is the belief that the people at the top are ultra powerful and completely in control of everything. In the real world you sometimes get boobs like George Bush and his gang of suck in charge.
Or, in other words
That's the only one that makes any sense. The rest are really just "you're a non-conformist, let's chase you down". Which sounds more like biases within the goverment/military than anything that's actually useful.
I notice you can't actually point to anything credible. Basically, why should I believe the FBI that these are anything but normal behavior? We KNOW that non-spies do ALL these things, and it's not like there's no potential for harm here in false positives. Discouraging people from working late hours, or having an interest outside the narrow parameters of work is bad thing. Do we really need more robots that do as they're told and don't go anywhere outside the norm?
It's a pretty standard set of criteria that's probably been in use since the mid-'50s
Do you have any evidence to show it's useful? It sure sounds like nonsense paranoia to me. And it's not like we haven't had a large set of high level officials that've been busted for espionage after years spent doing it. Aldrich Ames comes to mind. He operated for at least 9 years as a foreign spy right under the noses of the CIA. I don't know what brought him down, but I doubt it was someone noticing he worked late hours.
The guidelines are for people with security clearance
Pfft. It's not well known, but "security clearance" doesn't mean you're working on something with national security. A friend of mine had to get some kind of security clearance years ago to work on a physics project funded by the DOE. It didn't have anything to do with national security, bomb making, or the like.
It appears that that paragraph is a gross exaggeration of what the FBI is proposing,
I don't know, it sounds pretty accurate to me. Oh you can still DO any of those things, just do to many or the wrong ones and you're an espionage suspect.
further in the article University spokespeople talk about a possible "chilling effect", not about the kind of wholesale assault on freedoms suggested.
chilling effects aren't a wholesale assault on freedom? What's the difference? If people are afraid of working late , or expressing interest outside of narrow parameters because they think they'll be thought a spy how is that not an assault of freedom?
Good god. It's like we're trying to establish the freaking Stasi here in the United States!
It took me maybe an hour to fully implement it a few years ago (most of which was just reading), so why WOULDN'T you try it? There's really no downside other than having to maintain a list of outgoing mail servers. And unlike something like domainkeys, you don't have to go around messing with your mailserver configuration. If it gives you some kind of problem, it only takes a few minutes to disable it.
So, because the iPhone uses GSM, it'll only work with two US carries, and THE REST OF THE WORLD.
Bzzzt.
GSM is a communications standard that doesn't specify the frequency it runs on. For this thing to work with "the rest of the world" it has to support the frequencies in use where you are and it also has to not be locked to a single provider.
Also, GSM isn't as universal as you think. Japan for instance uses GSM + some other layers/technologies.
please name me one remotely desirable phone that AT&T has ever had that was not unlocked? It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when.
Given how much rigmarole? Not everyone wants to go through a bunch of nonsense just to unlock a phone, buy some special cable, or whatever.
Ever heard of locked phones? Just because the phone uses GSM doesn't mean it'll work on anyone but AT&T. There's unlocking methods available, but that doesn't mean they'll work.
Until then, they will remain a second rate search engine.
Yahoo doesn't see itself as a search engine, they see themselves as a portal. Of course the demographic they're aiming for has changed recently.
I'm not sure why anyone would go to Yahoo anymore. I used to house all crap "we need an email address" email at yahoo, but after having to read about some idiotic thing Britney or Paris did, or some foolish article about "Office tips you should follow!" for the umpteenth time on the front page of Yahoo, I've moved my crap email to Google.
Yahoo seems to think it's ideal customer is the bubble-headed bleach blond who's thinking about being a "career man/woman" now. It's basically Glamor on the Internet. I'm sure there's a market for that, but it seems strange that was supposed to be a billion dollar company is aiming for that small demographic.
Really people should have the same expectation of privacy in an email as they do with a postcard. None at all.
It is clear text.
Bzzt...
My phone line isn't encrypted either, and in fact physically available for tapping to anyone in the building, yet I have a high degree of expectations of privacy.
Before cell phones went digital, anyone with a television tuned to a UHF channel could listen to cell phone conversations, but yet there was still an expectation of privacy from government taps.
You seem to think just because you understand the technology, you understand the law. You're wrong.
If BB can't survive with its much lower overhead and cash reserve to get it through rough patches, what makes you think several mom and pop video stores would?
Maybe they're more willing to accept lower profits? Or perhaps a greater ability to adapt to the local market? Big chains aren't necessarily the best competitors.
It was built to shelter people against radiation, not water.
The article is quite misleading. The "survive a nuclear attack" thing was just a boast about how strong the vault was. It wasn't a fallout shelter, it was a vault designed to hold a car for 50 years. On that level it failed miserably.
It looks to me like whoever designed the vault didn't think about water, or at least had little idea about underground vaults. Looking at this picture:
http://www.motoring.co.za/index.php?fArticleId=38
doesn't make this vault look terribly waterproof.
So tests that force students to do a lot of guessing may still be good tools for evaluating their professional qualifications.
I think when the poster is referring to "guessing", he's defining it as able to determine the right answer no better than chance. I'm not sure if "educated guessing" changes the outcome of his analysis or not.
What a worthless post. He gave one situation where guessing is more important than knowledge, but didn't at all address the specifics of the tests he was talking about.
The specifics of the test don't matter, since his criticism is a statistical one, not one of the specific questions. The one situation he gave was used to try to illustrate a mathematical point, not offered as a proof. While it's certainly not something that's publishable and isn't very rigourous, I think it's a very interesting post. If you have a criticism of his conclusions, offer it up. But there's nothing wrong with his methodology as far as I can tell.
My wife has one ForTwo and gets 50mpg AVERAGE, see the difference here? AVERAGE not highway mileage, in the highway it goes closer to 65mpg or more
If we go by just you, people from Europe have a problem with reading comprehension. The article (and the website) says the model that's going to be sold in the US is shooting for 40 mpg.
There's really no reason to be insulting here just because the majority of us think this car is ugly, and impractical. There's plenty of econo boxes that're just as cheap and get about the same mileage as 40 mpg. I'll throw in unsafe, because if you get hit with an SUV in one of those things, you're dead. I don't care how much you believe in Mercedes or engineers. At a certain point you just can't fight physics.