Having traveled in communist countries of the Warsaw Pact (two one-month long trips to the former Soviet Union, including over a month in Moscow) it's entirely possible that you are both correct. We're headed towards the exact socio-economic status that Russia hit during the early 90's if we aren't careful (and I hope to hell that I'm wrong.)
Read the reports he helped arrange after the fact, and watch the video he recorded on his iPhone. It becomes painfully obvious that he intended to get stopped, intended to get hassled, and ultimately intended for this ruling to come down that the TSA has to stop sliding down the slippery slope of fucking with people they search and stick to the real reason they exist - to prevent airplanes from getting hijacked and flown into buildings full of corporate executives, destroying the financial well being of America.
For what it's worth, I wasn't a Ron Paul supporter until I saw this (the guy was working on behalf of Ron Paul) - and now I am. And by 'supporter' I mean I know who he is and I'd vote for him if he ran again.
That the subsequent government had no interest in rebuilding them is easily explained. The early systems that controlled those systems were coded in COBOL
I'm guessing you weren't alive in 1979 when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and everybody inside taken hostage. For roughly 400 days they Iranians held those hostages. Why? Nobody remembers why, but they did it - and if nobody remembers why, it must not have been a very memorable reason (if any.) Let them build nukes and they can take entire nations hostage.
They've shown they will do it - that's not the question. The question is whether we will let them - in the same way we don't let Japan or Germany rebuild a formidable military. Pretty simple math, if you ask me.
That said, it's not rocket science, merely advanced physics. Surely I'm not the only person walking the streets that has a firm understanding of the fundamentals and given access to the right materials could build one.
It's been a while since my last chemistry class, but I'm thinking that the pyrolysis of wood is going to result in methanol in a gaseous state that then be condensed into liquid methanol (which is very suitable for fuel) - not carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas (neither of which is particularly well suited for cooking or powering regular vehicles.)
That said - forget distilling wood down into wood alcohol. How about using grain and distilling it down into ethanol. Now THAT is a science project a bunch of high school students will participate in (even if they don't actually consume the results - it's something they think they can relate to, and it will grab their attention.)
From what I'm reading, the biggest issue I see is people wondering 'What can I do with it?' THAT is what you can do with the cluster of workstations - proof of concept. Using the hardware you have laying around your test lab at work, you can build a prototype 'supercomputer' over regular GigE or 100BaseTX if that's all you've got. Demonstrate your proof of concept after you've used the same platform to code against, coming up with the same approach you would use on the real hardware since it's all running off the shelf OS's. See that when you run it on one machine it takes 9 hours, and when you add a second machine it only takes 7 hours (due in part to network latency and what have you.) Kick in a third and a fourth machine and it runs in only 5 hours - almost 50% the time when running on four machines vs. one machine.
With this, you will have already coded your prototype and been able to demonstrate the economy of scale and benefit of running the same application on a monster cluster from SGI - it all comes down to dollars vs. hours. If your application is modelling the impact of thousands of real life factors on the stock market and by giving yourself a 4 second advantage you can turn a $1,000 profit per day - the machine pays for itself in two months. If that same 4 second advantage is worth $10,000 a day - the purchase is a no-brainer.
Persistence of Vision is a ray tracing application that has a cluster version - that was used for a while for demoing and benchmarking the performance and scalability of clusters. It's a damn fine way to demo a Beowulf cluster, and if you actually need a bunch of images rendered it is pretty nice once you have it configured and running.
I did exactly that for a project in school a few years ago. It was pretty sweet demo, and it felt good to finally have built a Beowulf cluster of my own.
Same way you hook 130PB of data up to any server. Network Attached Storage (NAS) array. That said, what kind of modeling analysis are you doing that comes pre-loaded with 130PB of data?
You haven't heard about any genuine software innovations from IBM lately? How about the System S? Real-time stream processing for assertive data analysis, a sort of artificial intelligence system that you just feed streams of data and it identifies nifty nuggets of info it came up with via correlation. It's pretty bad ass, and I wish I could get my hands on it.
Actually your post is the closest to infer but not actually come out and say what I've been thinking in this thread. Want a one word fix for making science popular?
JOBS.
Why would any kid want to grow up to be an astronaut (or even work for NASA) when the only word we hear about the space program is budget cuts? Take a look at what a decade of outsourcing software development (I'm looking at you Bill Clinton, Mr. Two Million H1-B's in under eight years) did to the industry and the drive for kids to study Computer Science. Nuclear physicist? Chyea, it's not like the government has made positive growth towards actually using nuke plants to power the country in the past decade or two.
Someone else a few posts up (Gibbs-Duhem) also nailed it on the head. Want to encourage kids to foster their scientific discoveries - then stop punishing them when they do. Can you even buy Testes model rocket gear any more, or those chem lab kits with all the little bottles of chemicals?
Let the kids see existing adults prosper in the positions of scientist, and they will want to follow in their footsteps. If the only success stories they hear are from the ballers and the rappers - well why study science?
If I'm not mistaken, the liquid metal is just the first step - it takes the heat from the reactor away from the core into a transfer tank that super-heats water to produce steam that drives the stator that creates the electricity. Ultimately the reactors all seem to work on the principle of ${heat source} + water = steam to drive a turbine:: rotary motion of wires + magnets = electricity.
In theory a propulsion engine (boats, subs) could go directly from the steam driven shaft to a propeller, but I don't think they do this in practice. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me. Just thinking about it like that though, gives rise to the potential of nuclear driven steam locomotive engines (trains). Get a small and cheap enough nuke plant and in theory we could be using them to power steam driven cars. Hmmmm.
Or you could be the designated driver. Being the guy that takes responsibility for the others and lets them imbibe entirely too much alcohol, knowing they will be safe in your care - that is team building.
Send a glass of champagne over to one of the dancers across the room and when you see (as she gets closer, walking over to thank you personally for the drink) that she's dog ugly - you point at your friend and nod to her so she climbs up into his lap instead - that's team building.
Get pulled over by the cops on the way home, the other guys scared shitless even though they haven't actually done anything wrong (and since they had a DD, were actually doing it right) and you calmly handling the situation and getting off with little more than a warning - that is team building.
I'd say you might a lot out of such an experience with the right guys. I might be wrong, but plenty of people agree with me here. It's not about the strippers. It's about the guys on your team sticking together in that gray shadowy area between legal / moral and illegal / immoral. You face that together, you come out the other side a cohesive unit that handles the lesser mundane stuff in the office with no sweat at all - because you've already faced much gnarlier stuff together and handled it as a team.
Re:Think this one needs a Part 2
on
How To Hire a Hacker
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· Score: 3, Insightful
The folks in the first category could hurt you too. They're white/gray hat because they want to be, not because they have to be.
Actually that's because most 'team building exercises' suck.
You want to build the most amazing team that ever graced your workplace? Send the three or four of them to Vegas or Miami or someplace that has TROUBLE for them to get into under the pretenses of a training class or a seminar, and only get them one car. That will insure they get in a ton of trouble together. When they get back, they will be tighter than any team you've ever seen, and they will get serious amounts of amazing work done. And the three or four of them will work so well together for the rest of their tenure - they will kick the snot out of any teams built over an afternoon playing blindfolded Monopoly and drinking non-alcoholic beverages or whatever the current fad in weak ass team building exercises is this season.
Disclaimer - trouble in moderation. I'm talking going to strip clubs and drifting the rental car around corners, not burying a dead hooker in the desert. That said - a team that does the latter will be a LOT tighter than the team that does the former. Or so I've heard.
I'm just speaking from memory here, but as I recall there was an air-to-air launch mount for the Stinger. A few early prototypes of the Apache were paired with it in an attempt to attach a larger number of air-to-air missiles to the AH-64 (not to mention Stingers are hella cheaper than Sidewinders.)
Unless of course that isn't common knowledge, in which case I just made the entire thing up.
Actually NASA gets credit for a lot of it, but it was actually 'created' by The Aerospace Corporation out of El Segundo, CA. The Mercury and Gemini vehicles, the GPS, a few other things I'm sure I am forgetting.
I interviewed with them at a college job fair in 1990, only to get told that they were looking for someone with experience. God I wanted to work for those guys - I still carry Carl Billingsley's card in my wallet.
Doesn't work in Linux, as the GP asserted. Have to stick it in a Windows box just to run the uninstaller. As far as I'm concerned it's defective from the vendor and I personally don't buy any USB thumbdrives with U3 installed on them. If I accidentally buy one with it on there and realize it after I get it home and open the package, I take it back. Sorry, but no.
I think the point he was trying to make in a subtle fashion is the point you make fairly bluntly.
Perhaps the underlying point the blogger was trying to get across is : it's not cool when the government does it to the public, for the same reasons it's not cool when the public does it to the government - and perhaps it's going to take the public doing it to the government and having it pointed out as 'bad' so the government will stop doing it to the public.
I just saw a demo trailer for Forza 3 - it looks like the damage modeling gets taken to the next level and you can get airborne / flip the cars if you try hard enough.
As the rubber in the tires heats up, the way it interacts with the road changes - all the way through the temperature range (getting greasy at very high temperatures.) Granted it's probably all simulated using friction coefficient charts for the different temperatures, but it come across as interacting differently at the molecular level as the rubber changes in structure with abuse and temperature changes.
Take a look at Forza 2, or the upcoming Forza 3 if you want high fidelity in a racing console game. As I understand it, it models all the way down to the non-Newtonian physics level at the interaction between the tires and the road, with different interaction as the chemical compounds in the rubber heat across multiple levels. Any race sim that models the sheer angle (the twisting of the sidewalls in the tires during a hard cornering) and the weight of the drive shaft and flywheel with respect to how the difference in angular momentum affects acceleration - is a good sim in my book.
Disclaimer - only for the 360, and probably worth buying a used 360 just to play this one game.
Now that you mention it that way, it set my mind working. Specifically I've been considering Classmates forever - but I have one problem : I don't mind paying for content, but I have a big problem with giving these clowns my credit card number. I'm not going to use PayPal because they have no-recourse authority to take money out of my checking account. Getting one-time credit card numbers for online transactions isn't something I have dabbled with yet and as I don't understand it from a behind the scenes perspective I don't quite trust it.
I would pay for content if there was a way I could just hand over a $5 bill - but for a myriad of reasons (privacy, security, traceability, etc) I can't pay them.
At work we have a cafeteria and these little RFID cards are accepted for payment. In the cafeteria there is a reverse ATM machine where you can feed it cash and it charges your card. I'm able to limit my exposure, quickly enact micro transactions, and although it isn't completely anonymous it is anonymous enough. If the account gets compromised, I lose whatever cash was in the account and that's it. Like those iPod pre-pay cards. I can live with that.
If this guy wants to be the next big thing, forget charging for content - everybody and their dog is working on that. Figure out how to let the unwashed masses pay for content in an anonymous fashion with a limited exposure without ridiculous transaction fees and THAT will be worth more than every subscription fee he's ever dreamed of collecting.
100 lines of new code, or 10 lines of codes fixes a day. Agreed.
And for what it's worth - my home system is a cluster of four symmetrical multiprocessing PowerEdge servers on a GigE backbone, with enough memory in each box to run two virtual instances of Linux in VMware in order to create a pretty serious Beowulf cluster. When I'm not running it like that, I've got three 20" LCD displays coming out of one machine and I'm rconsole'd into the others in order to get the most horsepower available to a single user interface (given the resources I have, that's how I get the most of them) - when one machine is busy (regardless of whether it is RAM bound, CPU bound, I/O bound, or even rebooting) I have two hot spares one click away. I considered getting a fourth LCD, but the fourth machine is set aside as a file server / database server (running either Oracle 10 or Sybase 12.5 in a single CPU VM to stay compliant with the licensing agreement for the free version.)
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Having traveled in communist countries of the Warsaw Pact (two one-month long trips to the former Soviet Union, including over a month in Moscow) it's entirely possible that you are both correct. We're headed towards the exact socio-economic status that Russia hit during the early 90's if we aren't careful (and I hope to hell that I'm wrong.)
Read the reports he helped arrange after the fact, and watch the video he recorded on his iPhone. It becomes painfully obvious that he intended to get stopped, intended to get hassled, and ultimately intended for this ruling to come down that the TSA has to stop sliding down the slippery slope of fucking with people they search and stick to the real reason they exist - to prevent airplanes from getting hijacked and flown into buildings full of corporate executives, destroying the financial well being of America.
For what it's worth, I wasn't a Ron Paul supporter until I saw this (the guy was working on behalf of Ron Paul) - and now I am. And by 'supporter' I mean I know who he is and I'd vote for him if he ran again.
That the subsequent government had no interest in rebuilding them is easily explained.
The early systems that controlled those systems were coded in COBOL
I'm guessing you weren't alive in 1979 when the US Embassy in Iran was overrun and everybody inside taken hostage.
For roughly 400 days they Iranians held those hostages. Why? Nobody remembers why, but they did it - and if nobody remembers why, it must not have been a very memorable reason (if any.)
Let them build nukes and they can take entire nations hostage.
They've shown they will do it - that's not the question.
The question is whether we will let them - in the same way we don't let Japan or Germany rebuild a formidable military. Pretty simple math, if you ask me.
That said, it's not rocket science, merely advanced physics. Surely I'm not the only person walking the streets that has a firm understanding of the fundamentals and given access to the right materials could build one.
It's been a while since my last chemistry class, but I'm thinking that the pyrolysis of wood is going to result in methanol in a gaseous state that then be condensed into liquid methanol (which is very suitable for fuel) - not carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas (neither of which is particularly well suited for cooking or powering regular vehicles.)
That said - forget distilling wood down into wood alcohol. How about using grain and distilling it down into ethanol. Now THAT is a science project a bunch of high school students will participate in (even if they don't actually consume the results - it's something they think they can relate to, and it will grab their attention.)
From what I'm reading, the biggest issue I see is people wondering 'What can I do with it?'
THAT is what you can do with the cluster of workstations - proof of concept. Using the hardware you have laying around your test lab at work, you can build a prototype 'supercomputer' over regular GigE or 100BaseTX if that's all you've got. Demonstrate your proof of concept after you've used the same platform to code against, coming up with the same approach you would use on the real hardware since it's all running off the shelf OS's. See that when you run it on one machine it takes 9 hours, and when you add a second machine it only takes 7 hours (due in part to network latency and what have you.) Kick in a third and a fourth machine and it runs in only 5 hours - almost 50% the time when running on four machines vs. one machine.
With this, you will have already coded your prototype and been able to demonstrate the economy of scale and benefit of running the same application on a monster cluster from SGI - it all comes down to dollars vs. hours. If your application is modelling the impact of thousands of real life factors on the stock market and by giving yourself a 4 second advantage you can turn a $1,000 profit per day - the machine pays for itself in two months. If that same 4 second advantage is worth $10,000 a day - the purchase is a no-brainer.
Persistence of Vision is a ray tracing application that has a cluster version - that was used for a while for demoing and benchmarking the performance and scalability of clusters. It's a damn fine way to demo a Beowulf cluster, and if you actually need a bunch of images rendered it is pretty nice once you have it configured and running.
I did exactly that for a project in school a few years ago. It was pretty sweet demo, and it felt good to finally have built a Beowulf cluster of my own.
Same way you hook 130PB of data up to any server. Network Attached Storage (NAS) array.
That said, what kind of modeling analysis are you doing that comes pre-loaded with 130PB of data?
You haven't heard about any genuine software innovations from IBM lately?
How about the System S? Real-time stream processing for assertive data analysis, a sort of artificial intelligence system that you just feed streams of data and it identifies nifty nuggets of info it came up with via correlation. It's pretty bad ass, and I wish I could get my hands on it.
Actually your post is the closest to infer but not actually come out and say what I've been thinking in this thread.
Want a one word fix for making science popular?
JOBS.
Why would any kid want to grow up to be an astronaut (or even work for NASA) when the only word we hear about the space program is budget cuts?
Take a look at what a decade of outsourcing software development (I'm looking at you Bill Clinton, Mr. Two Million H1-B's in under eight years) did to the industry and the drive for kids to study Computer Science.
Nuclear physicist? Chyea, it's not like the government has made positive growth towards actually using nuke plants to power the country in the past decade or two.
Someone else a few posts up (Gibbs-Duhem) also nailed it on the head. Want to encourage kids to foster their scientific discoveries - then stop punishing them when they do. Can you even buy Testes model rocket gear any more, or those chem lab kits with all the little bottles of chemicals?
Let the kids see existing adults prosper in the positions of scientist, and they will want to follow in their footsteps. If the only success stories they hear are from the ballers and the rappers - well why study science?
Bah. DOS and Linux are very friendly.
They're just very discriminating about who they call 'friends'.
If I'm not mistaken, the liquid metal is just the first step - it takes the heat from the reactor away from the core into a transfer tank that super-heats water to produce steam that drives the stator that creates the electricity. :: rotary motion of wires + magnets = electricity.
Ultimately the reactors all seem to work on the principle of ${heat source} + water = steam to drive a turbine
In theory a propulsion engine (boats, subs) could go directly from the steam driven shaft to a propeller, but I don't think they do this in practice. If I'm wrong, someone will correct me. Just thinking about it like that though, gives rise to the potential of nuclear driven steam locomotive engines (trains). Get a small and cheap enough nuke plant and in theory we could be using them to power steam driven cars. Hmmmm.
Or you could be the designated driver. Being the guy that takes responsibility for the others and lets them imbibe entirely too much alcohol, knowing they will be safe in your care - that is team building.
Send a glass of champagne over to one of the dancers across the room and when you see (as she gets closer, walking over to thank you personally for the drink) that she's dog ugly - you point at your friend and nod to her so she climbs up into his lap instead - that's team building.
Get pulled over by the cops on the way home, the other guys scared shitless even though they haven't actually done anything wrong (and since they had a DD, were actually doing it right) and you calmly handling the situation and getting off with little more than a warning - that is team building.
I'd say you might a lot out of such an experience with the right guys. I might be wrong, but plenty of people agree with me here. It's not about the strippers. It's about the guys on your team sticking together in that gray shadowy area between legal / moral and illegal / immoral. You face that together, you come out the other side a cohesive unit that handles the lesser mundane stuff in the office with no sweat at all - because you've already faced much gnarlier stuff together and handled it as a team.
The folks in the first category could hurt you too. They're white/gray hat because they want to be, not because they have to be.
Actually that's because most 'team building exercises' suck.
You want to build the most amazing team that ever graced your workplace? Send the three or four of them to Vegas or Miami or someplace that has TROUBLE for them to get into under the pretenses of a training class or a seminar, and only get them one car. That will insure they get in a ton of trouble together. When they get back, they will be tighter than any team you've ever seen, and they will get serious amounts of amazing work done. And the three or four of them will work so well together for the rest of their tenure - they will kick the snot out of any teams built over an afternoon playing blindfolded Monopoly and drinking non-alcoholic beverages or whatever the current fad in weak ass team building exercises is this season.
Disclaimer - trouble in moderation. I'm talking going to strip clubs and drifting the rental car around corners, not burying a dead hooker in the desert.
That said - a team that does the latter will be a LOT tighter than the team that does the former. Or so I've heard.
I'm just speaking from memory here, but as I recall there was an air-to-air launch mount for the Stinger. A few early prototypes of the Apache were paired with it in an attempt to attach a larger number of air-to-air missiles to the AH-64 (not to mention Stingers are hella cheaper than Sidewinders.)
Unless of course that isn't common knowledge, in which case I just made the entire thing up.
Actually NASA gets credit for a lot of it, but it was actually 'created' by The Aerospace Corporation out of El Segundo, CA.
The Mercury and Gemini vehicles, the GPS, a few other things I'm sure I am forgetting.
I interviewed with them at a college job fair in 1990, only to get told that they were looking for someone with experience.
God I wanted to work for those guys - I still carry Carl Billingsley's card in my wallet.
Put it in the field and fly a Huey Gunship in the general vicinity.
If it runs, it's VC.
If it doesn't run, it's well disciplined VC.
I know what you're thinking ... "How do you shoot innocent laptops and desktops?"
It's easy - you just don't lead them as much!
Doesn't work in Linux, as the GP asserted. Have to stick it in a Windows box just to run the uninstaller.
As far as I'm concerned it's defective from the vendor and I personally don't buy any USB thumbdrives with U3 installed on them.
If I accidentally buy one with it on there and realize it after I get it home and open the package, I take it back. Sorry, but no.
I think the point he was trying to make in a subtle fashion is the point you make fairly bluntly.
Perhaps the underlying point the blogger was trying to get across is : it's not cool when the government does it to the public, for the same reasons it's not cool when the public does it to the government - and perhaps it's going to take the public doing it to the government and having it pointed out as 'bad' so the government will stop doing it to the public.
I just saw a demo trailer for Forza 3 - it looks like the damage modeling gets taken to the next level and you can get airborne / flip the cars if you try hard enough.
As the rubber in the tires heats up, the way it interacts with the road changes - all the way through the temperature range (getting greasy at very high temperatures.) Granted it's probably all simulated using friction coefficient charts for the different temperatures, but it come across as interacting differently at the molecular level as the rubber changes in structure with abuse and temperature changes.
Take a look at Forza 2, or the upcoming Forza 3 if you want high fidelity in a racing console game. As I understand it, it models all the way down to the non-Newtonian physics level at the interaction between the tires and the road, with different interaction as the chemical compounds in the rubber heat across multiple levels. Any race sim that models the sheer angle (the twisting of the sidewalls in the tires during a hard cornering) and the weight of the drive shaft and flywheel with respect to how the difference in angular momentum affects acceleration - is a good sim in my book.
Disclaimer - only for the 360, and probably worth buying a used 360 just to play this one game.
Now that you mention it that way, it set my mind working. Specifically I've been considering Classmates forever - but I have one problem :
I don't mind paying for content, but I have a big problem with giving these clowns my credit card number. I'm not going to use PayPal because they have no-recourse authority to take money out of my checking account. Getting one-time credit card numbers for online transactions isn't something I have dabbled with yet and as I don't understand it from a behind the scenes perspective I don't quite trust it.
I would pay for content if there was a way I could just hand over a $5 bill - but for a myriad of reasons (privacy, security, traceability, etc) I can't pay them.
At work we have a cafeteria and these little RFID cards are accepted for payment. In the cafeteria there is a reverse ATM machine where you can feed it cash and it charges your card. I'm able to limit my exposure, quickly enact micro transactions, and although it isn't completely anonymous it is anonymous enough. If the account gets compromised, I lose whatever cash was in the account and that's it. Like those iPod pre-pay cards. I can live with that.
If this guy wants to be the next big thing, forget charging for content - everybody and their dog is working on that. Figure out how to let the unwashed masses pay for content in an anonymous fashion with a limited exposure without ridiculous transaction fees and THAT will be worth more than every subscription fee he's ever dreamed of collecting.
100 lines of new code, or 10 lines of codes fixes a day. Agreed.
And for what it's worth - my home system is a cluster of four symmetrical multiprocessing PowerEdge servers on a GigE backbone, with enough memory in each box to run two virtual instances of Linux in VMware in order to create a pretty serious Beowulf cluster. When I'm not running it like that, I've got three 20" LCD displays coming out of one machine and I'm rconsole'd into the others in order to get the most horsepower available to a single user interface (given the resources I have, that's how I get the most of them) - when one machine is busy (regardless of whether it is RAM bound, CPU bound, I/O bound, or even rebooting) I have two hot spares one click away. I considered getting a fourth LCD, but the fourth machine is set aside as a file server / database server (running either Oracle 10 or Sybase 12.5 in a single CPU VM to stay compliant with the licensing agreement for the free version.)