This has *nothing* to do with Sun. They are the 'other' SPARC that has no bearing on this particular battle (although would have been a better target if it weren't for the fact they've been around WAY longer than the SPARC mark benchmark and have more lawyers)
It's a question that from my interpretation of the article is valid but off-base.
They are not spending 32M on *using* a cloud. They are spending 32M to *build* a cloud. That is why they specified "thousands of nehalem processors"... they would have no knowledge of the underlying hardware if they were just talking about buying time on an existing cloud.
I could easily spend 32M on building my own cloud. Actually that wouldn't even build a very big cloud... at consumer prices (which we all know they wouldn't be paying) you spend roughly $180K for a fully loaded Dell blade chassis (16x double-quad nehalem boxes with gobs of ram and disk) Add to that rack / backup / power / etc all the costs of running the data center and the cloud computing software and your 32M gives you a nice but tiny compared to say Amazon EC2 cloud.
I'm sorry boss. I couldn't complete that project because the universe doesn't want the project to be completed and so a ripple in time undid the labors that I so diligently performed!
Do I get a promotion now for not pissing off the universe?
For all the good movies that they needlessly remake this is one I wish they would do and well. The logistics and culture of making the movie match the book back in 1987 probably led to the movie being the way it was although it still could have been better.. it really was terrible compared to the book or not.
Doing this movie on a LOTR scale with a good director and screenwriter could be fantastic! (Especially the ending which unfortunately would probably never make it to the screen in this post-9/11 world... too bad they didn't do it right the first time!)
Re:Women's issues in computing workplace
on
Coders At Work
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Curious: What employer asked/required you to work topless?...and where might I submit my application?
I just plain don't have the time to focus on any one thing for that long.. but anyway I digress:
The same way a computer multi-tasks is exactly why I find this study is flawed. The preface the study by saying that they were trying to find out why multi-taskers could do so so well. They then threw out this premise by saying that these multi-taskers single threaded performance was low while forgetting that their group in question was known to be good at multi-tasking.
I'll use, for example, a box I'm currently beating up for performance testing. Nice spanking new Nehalem based dual-quad w/ 48GB ram. When in Hyper-threaded mode the per-logical-core performance goes down by a significant amount (say 25%) but you have double the logical core to work with SO if you have a single threaded application to run you will do better on the non-HT mode but an application that can multi-thread well will do better on the HT mode.
I see similar situations here: Aside from questioning their test group (there is a big difference between someone with ADHD and say your average/.er who multi-tasks like most people breathe {(c)The Core;)} but anyway.. I agree that when I multi-task my per-task focus goes down a measurable amount BUT as long as I add in some protection routines to make sure that reduced performance != reduced accuracy I am able to accomplish more / unit time than someone who can only do one thing at a time even if they can maybe do a single task a bit faster than I can.
In my current job I find it impossible to NOT multi-task and, given the large amount of distraction coming in, someone who Can't multi-task will suffer because they are not allowed the single threaded environment they need.
I would have to addenda this. Up until a couple years ago I had that life and that job. I got paid, and well, for the hours I worked and still was able to live my own life (which is WHY I work)
Unfortunately, that only works if the hours keep coming. At some point you reach a critical mass which keeps your hours full and so your bank account but when the hours stopped coming I was hurting bad.. enough so that I eventually had to get a "day job"
Yes, there are bunches of trade-offs but as long as I maintain a spine with my employer it has been a nice load of stress off for a while to see the same nice big number appear in my account ever 2 weeks.
Some day I will return to my wonderful world of freedom but at least for a while I'm loving the indentured servitude that is salary.
*maybe* it's worth giving a try again.. I kept up with Word Perfect post 5.1 since I truly loved it (and still truly miss reveal codes)
What did I find: Corel turned it into an unusable and unstable piece of crap.
If they've managed to fix their mistakes then I would love to go back to using it but in the meantime it was not for lack of trying that I left WP and now spend most of my "pretty" document writing time in Word. (thank you work MSDN license for making it pseudo-free)
I find in my travels that a lot of business travelers consider themselves experts just because they fly a lot. These are the same people who need 6 bins because they have to practically strip naked to get through the metal detector and haven't checked a bag since 1987. If it takes you any more than 30 seconds to a minute to "prep" for the check once you are in everyone's way you are doing it wrong.
One of the best features of being Elite... you only have to wait for a short line of idiots, not the really long line of idiots.
Your argument is valid but does not actually counter the original statement. The testing team apparently did their job and found the bugs in the system. Yes, it would be nice if the original coders hadn't done such a great job of creating these bugs BUT this is not the problem (and in reality tends to not be feasible at least in total.. you can minimize bugs but rarely if ever eliminate their creation)
The problem is that the testing wasn't utilized! If the sole job of a testing team is to submit bug reports that can be ignored then why have your testing team? Save the money and just ship the first raw release. This product should have never made it out the door until those bug reports were resolved in some fashion (even if that "resolution" is marking the bug as "release acceptable, fixed in next version/patch"). In this case I would say it is the release team OR probably the management's fault that these bugs made it to the consumer. They paid a lot of money on a testing team and then ignored their feedback and cost themselves even more in customer dissatisfaction and support calls for bugs *they already knew about*.
Can someone explain to me why journalists continue to try to find obscure references for comparison?
"Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden."
This sentence while having some sort of dramatic effect tells the reader nothing. How many Swedens does Norway use? The US? Russia? Japan? Not to mention if you try to factor for the reality that there are data centers in Sweden using power.. are they eliminated from the Sweden unit and added to the worldwide data center total or are they included in both which makes the whole stat corrupted.
Have you seen the boxing scene at the beginning of "The Island" There's a fine line between how much reality you maintain as the player and what you have in the game. Maybe I want to run around in a jungle hunting the enemy BUT I don't want to be literally filled with lead when the bullets start flying..
I found selling computers at Best Buy to be great practice.. When someone who has never seen a computer in their life outside of a movie decides they need one (or is told by someone they need one) they come to Best Buy. (and this was '94-'98 when the internet was just coming into its own) Just when you think you've found the bottom of the computer knowledge barrel you find a hole, and a tunnel beneath it leading to the abyss.
That being said: if you're mean to the customer you will not get the sale. Trading off a paycheck vs. teaching monkeys how to throw their feces the *right* way is a good motivator.
TG sales was a temporary job but all of that patience practice was priceless (not to mention the ability to talk to *any* person's level of knowledge).
Actually... I worked at NCS/VUE (Now Pearson/VUE) and making truly customizable digital testing can get really screwy. Often our bigger business was the months of developing the tests more than the years of delivering them. That being said: A company like VUE that has been doing this for many, many years should be able to utilize their "testing" infrastructure to create voting stations. A ballot is just a series of questions.. the only difference is that with a vote technically every answer is correct so you just store the results without bias. Their software allows for the question types you need (select multiple, rank top 3, pick 1, etc). We even did statistics on how people tended to answer certain questions SO getting your vote result would just be a snap shot stats grab.
After that it's all logistics and hardware development.. VUE runs on COTS hardware and a locked down Windows (or at least did when I worked there)
All of this talk of multi-threading is missing one point.. why would this system need to be multi-threaded? You don't do something just because you can. This system could easily be developed with each station doing it's own tally. Then those tallies are brought together for the site then up the chain city/county/district/state/country. Using US number The 2000 census had just over 25K "places" in the US. If I estimated average 1000 voting stations per place (remember there are "places" that would only have one voting site and maybe even only one or two machines) A total of 25M tallies to count in one thread is not out of reach but that is irrelevant as given the hierarchy at the top you should only actually be merging 50 counts at central. Your biggest lists to tally would be farther down the branches for say a large city summing all of their voting stations. Still numbers that are quite easy to handle with minimal hardware.
The only reason for this to be massively parallel is if you have a small number of centralized machines running the election web-app style and frankly with all of the problems we've had with voting machines we're a LONG ways from taking that leap.
Vader could NOT be Amish. His suit (that keeps him alive) is already more technology than allowed. Add to that the light saber, Imperial Cruiser and Death Star and he is SO going to hell......and everyone knows Han Solo is Presbyterian...
Technically that would be me. At some point in Elementary school I was able to successfully connect with a friend of mine's 1200 baud modem with my voice. Can't say I was able to do much after that but it did say that the handshake was successful:)
Beyond that, although my Amiga 1000 went to a garage sale back in high school I still have and occasionally use my 2000 which has the MIDI adapter I used with my 1000 from 85 so that would be roughly a 24 year old MIDI box that still gets used. The keyboard I hook it up to is a couple years older than that and the TV at our cabin was bought with insurance money from me being sick as a baby which is just under 32 years old.
I still use a bit of Hungarian as it makes the code easier to read plus I can reuse variable names {{ especially in GUI code.. _lBLAH sits next to _tfBLAH for example }} PS I *hate* IDE generated GUI code!
"I don't need no steenking IDE!" Gimme a file browser and a term and I'm happy as a clam. I have gotten a bit more modern now.. running gvim and mvn instead of vi and make but the only time I've used IDEs is when some employer forced me (and they still spawned vim as my editor)
As far as finding anything in my code the parent is right: "find./ -name "*.java" -print | grep -v "\.svn" | grep -v "target\\" | xargs grep -in " makes for a fantastic alias:)
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RTFA (heck RTFS)
This has *nothing* to do with Sun. They are the 'other' SPARC that has no bearing on this particular battle (although would have been a better target if it weren't for the fact they've been around WAY longer than the SPARC mark benchmark and have more lawyers)
She is HOT!
Exactly.
It's a question that from my interpretation of the article is valid but off-base.
They are not spending 32M on *using* a cloud. They are spending 32M to *build* a cloud. That is why they specified "thousands of nehalem processors" ... they would have no knowledge of the underlying hardware if they were just talking about buying time on an existing cloud.
I could easily spend 32M on building my own cloud. Actually that wouldn't even build a very big cloud... at consumer prices (which we all know they wouldn't be paying) you spend roughly $180K for a fully loaded Dell blade chassis (16x double-quad nehalem boxes with gobs of ram and disk) Add to that rack / backup / power / etc all the costs of running the data center and the cloud computing software and your 32M gives you a nice but tiny compared to say Amazon EC2 cloud.
I'm sorry boss. I couldn't complete that project because the universe doesn't want the project to be completed and so a ripple in time undid the labors that I so diligently performed!
Do I get a promotion now for not pissing off the universe?
Cheers!
For all the good movies that they needlessly remake this is one I wish they would do and well. The logistics and culture of making the movie match the book back in 1987 probably led to the movie being the way it was although it still could have been better.. it really was terrible compared to the book or not.
Doing this movie on a LOTR scale with a good director and screenwriter could be fantastic! (Especially the ending which unfortunately would probably never make it to the screen in this post-9/11 world... too bad they didn't do it right the first time!)
Curious: What employer asked/required you to work topless? ...and where might I submit my application?
I just plain don't have the time to focus on any one thing for that long.. but anyway I digress:
The same way a computer multi-tasks is exactly why I find this study is flawed. The preface the study by saying that they were trying to find out why multi-taskers could do so so well. They then threw out this premise by saying that these multi-taskers single threaded performance was low while forgetting that their group in question was known to be good at multi-tasking.
I'll use, for example, a box I'm currently beating up for performance testing. Nice spanking new Nehalem based dual-quad w/ 48GB ram. When in Hyper-threaded mode the per-logical-core performance goes down by a significant amount (say 25%) but you have double the logical core to work with SO if you have a single threaded application to run you will do better on the non-HT mode but an application that can multi-thread well will do better on the HT mode.
I see similar situations here: Aside from questioning their test group (there is a big difference between someone with ADHD and say your average /.er who multi-tasks like most people breathe {(c)The Core ;)} but anyway.. I agree that when I multi-task my per-task focus goes down a measurable amount BUT as long as I add in some protection routines to make sure that reduced performance != reduced accuracy I am able to accomplish more / unit time than someone who can only do one thing at a time even if they can maybe do a single task a bit faster than I can.
In my current job I find it impossible to NOT multi-task and, given the large amount of distraction coming in, someone who Can't multi-task will suffer because they are not allowed the single threaded environment they need.
I would have to addenda this. Up until a couple years ago I had that life and that job. I got paid, and well, for the hours I worked and still was able to live my own life (which is WHY I work)
Unfortunately, that only works if the hours keep coming. At some point you reach a critical mass which keeps your hours full and so your bank account but when the hours stopped coming I was hurting bad.. enough so that I eventually had to get a "day job"
Yes, there are bunches of trade-offs but as long as I maintain a spine with my employer it has been a nice load of stress off for a while to see the same nice big number appear in my account ever 2 weeks.
Some day I will return to my wonderful world of freedom but at least for a while I'm loving the indentured servitude that is salary.
Not if the self-absorbed and self-entitled wench wins...
*maybe* it's worth giving a try again.. I kept up with Word Perfect post 5.1 since I truly loved it (and still truly miss reveal codes)
What did I find: Corel turned it into an unusable and unstable piece of crap.
If they've managed to fix their mistakes then I would love to go back to using it but in the meantime it was not for lack of trying that I left WP and now spend most of my "pretty" document writing time in Word. (thank you work MSDN license for making it pseudo-free)
It really is exciting watching a new life form as it stretches its legs!
What happens if whomever they sell the buildings to decides not to lease back? Or better yet evicts them for failing to pay rent?
I think a capital rotunda would make a fantastic music venue... how much are they asking? :)
BZZT! Incorrect sir.
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp
So.. Alexander was looking for his death?
I find in my travels that a lot of business travelers consider themselves experts just because they fly a lot. These are the same people who need 6 bins because they have to practically strip naked to get through the metal detector and haven't checked a bag since 1987. If it takes you any more than 30 seconds to a minute to "prep" for the check once you are in everyone's way you are doing it wrong.
One of the best features of being Elite... you only have to wait for a short line of idiots, not the really long line of idiots.
I'll add a few more.. no, no, no, no, no...
Your argument is valid but does not actually counter the original statement. The testing team apparently did their job and found the bugs in the system. Yes, it would be nice if the original coders hadn't done such a great job of creating these bugs BUT this is not the problem (and in reality tends to not be feasible at least in total.. you can minimize bugs but rarely if ever eliminate their creation)
The problem is that the testing wasn't utilized! If the sole job of a testing team is to submit bug reports that can be ignored then why have your testing team? Save the money and just ship the first raw release. This product should have never made it out the door until those bug reports were resolved in some fashion (even if that "resolution" is marking the bug as "release acceptable, fixed in next version/patch"). In this case I would say it is the release team OR probably the management's fault that these bugs made it to the consumer. They paid a lot of money on a testing team and then ignored their feedback and cost themselves even more in customer dissatisfaction and support calls for bugs *they already knew about*.
Wasteful.
Can someone explain to me why journalists continue to try to find obscure references for comparison?
"Data centers worldwide now consume more energy annually than Sweden."
This sentence while having some sort of dramatic effect tells the reader nothing. How many Swedens does Norway use? The US? Russia? Japan? Not to mention if you try to factor for the reality that there are data centers in Sweden using power.. are they eliminated from the Sweden unit and added to the worldwide data center total or are they included in both which makes the whole stat corrupted.
Dammit.
Have you seen the boxing scene at the beginning of "The Island" There's a fine line between how much reality you maintain as the player and what you have in the game. Maybe I want to run around in a jungle hunting the enemy BUT I don't want to be literally filled with lead when the bullets start flying..
I'd rather the birds were cooked outside the engine than in.
I found selling computers at Best Buy to be great practice.. When someone who has never seen a computer in their life outside of a movie decides they need one (or is told by someone they need one) they come to Best Buy. (and this was '94-'98 when the internet was just coming into its own) Just when you think you've found the bottom of the computer knowledge barrel you find a hole, and a tunnel beneath it leading to the abyss.
That being said: if you're mean to the customer you will not get the sale. Trading off a paycheck vs. teaching monkeys how to throw their feces the *right* way is a good motivator.
TG sales was a temporary job but all of that patience practice was priceless (not to mention the ability to talk to *any* person's level of knowledge).
Actually... I worked at NCS/VUE (Now Pearson/VUE) and making truly customizable digital testing can get really screwy. Often our bigger business was the months of developing the tests more than the years of delivering them. That being said: A company like VUE that has been doing this for many, many years should be able to utilize their "testing" infrastructure to create voting stations. A ballot is just a series of questions.. the only difference is that with a vote technically every answer is correct so you just store the results without bias. Their software allows for the question types you need (select multiple, rank top 3, pick 1, etc). We even did statistics on how people tended to answer certain questions SO getting your vote result would just be a snap shot stats grab.
After that it's all logistics and hardware development.. VUE runs on COTS hardware and a locked down Windows (or at least did when I worked there)
All of this talk of multi-threading is missing one point.. why would this system need to be multi-threaded? You don't do something just because you can. This system could easily be developed with each station doing it's own tally. Then those tallies are brought together for the site then up the chain city/county/district/state/country. Using US number The 2000 census had just over 25K "places" in the US. If I estimated average 1000 voting stations per place (remember there are "places" that would only have one voting site and maybe even only one or two machines) A total of 25M tallies to count in one thread is not out of reach but that is irrelevant as given the hierarchy at the top you should only actually be merging 50 counts at central. Your biggest lists to tally would be farther down the branches for say a large city summing all of their voting stations. Still numbers that are quite easy to handle with minimal hardware.
The only reason for this to be massively parallel is if you have a small number of centralized machines running the election web-app style and frankly with all of the problems we've had with voting machines we're a LONG ways from taking that leap.
Hmm..
Vader could NOT be Amish. His suit (that keeps him alive) is already more technology than allowed. Add to that the light saber, Imperial Cruiser and Death Star and he is SO going to hell... ...and everyone knows Han Solo is Presbyterian...
Technically that would be me. At some point in Elementary school I was able to successfully connect with a friend of mine's 1200 baud modem with my voice. Can't say I was able to do much after that but it did say that the handshake was successful :)
Beyond that, although my Amiga 1000 went to a garage sale back in high school I still have and occasionally use my 2000 which has the MIDI adapter I used with my 1000 from 85 so that would be roughly a 24 year old MIDI box that still gets used. The keyboard I hook it up to is a couple years older than that and the TV at our cabin was bought with insurance money from me being sick as a baby which is just under 32 years old.
Define equipment?
I still use a bit of Hungarian as it makes the code easier to read plus I can reuse variable names {{ especially in GUI code.. _lBLAH sits next to _tfBLAH for example }} PS I *hate* IDE generated GUI code!
"I don't need no steenking IDE!" Gimme a file browser and a term and I'm happy as a clam. I have gotten a bit more modern now.. running gvim and mvn instead of vi and make but the only time I've used IDEs is when some employer forced me (and they still spawned vim as my editor)
As far as finding anything in my code the parent is right: "find ./ -name "*.java" -print | grep -v "\.svn" | grep -v "target\\" | xargs grep -in " makes for a fantastic alias :)