You should have said windows 3.1, or windows for workgroups. Just to see what the hell they would do.
Next time they ring I'm planning spend 20-30 minutes doing something like this.
A computer running slow? Oh yes I have I'm really glad you called... I'll just boot it up.... (sound FX of me wandering round the house) turn it on.. Oh its not working... (more faffing round) Oops it was unplugged... OK Booting... booting...
OK I've got the prompt w... i... n.... OK its starting... starting.... starting Argh Its bluescreened its a very poorly puppy I'm glad of your help. I'll try again (on the third attempt) OK I'm in windows just start up Mosaic it sometimes takes a couple of minutes... whats the weather like at your end? (after a few other network problems) OK I've downloaded your program double clicked on it Oh I've got an error saying that this is a 32 bit program and won't run on a 16 bit system... do you have one that supports Windows 3.1?
Had second thoughts about £4000 lasting long enough. If they can find a service that costs ~15p/hour (and it seems reasonable that they could) that would provide 24/7 computing power for a 3 year grant and better than that, any unused time/money could be kept and used on special occasions/rush jobs...
The point about restrictions on how the grant is spent still stand though:-(
4000 pounds wont get you very far at all on Amazon.
Let's say the researchers in question took 4x "High-CPU Extra Large Instance" from EC2. Each one of them sports the following:
7 GB of memory
20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each)
1690 GB of instance storage
64-bit platform
That's helluva lot of computing power right there, at $0.76 an hour. £4000 translates to about $6 316.8, which in terms of useable hours at 4x$0.76 would be roughly 2077 hours. 2077 hours is roughly 86 days of 24/7 computing. Thus it sounds like a good deal to me.
Spread this over a 3 year grant means they can do 2 hours computing a day. If they do more than that they will lose their compute cluster before the end of the project, just when there writing the next grant application. and I guarantee they will go over budget because if they get answers back instantly they won't bother/need to optimise their code. Workload expands to fill the available machine time
Looking at the numbers again I suspect that taking one of those machines, so they have ~8 hours a day
compute time. Ideally I think they'd want a service at ~$0.25/hour for a 24/7 service. Then they can compute away without worrying about budget and any unused time/money could be used on the big iron for special occasions/rush jobs.
You have a limited budget, so it's more cost effective for you to lease time on someone else's equipment for now.
In a fair and logical world this would be true.
In an academic setting there can be problems on what your allowed to spend the money on. If the £4000 is in the 'Computer Hardware' section of the grant buying AWS could count as a service and have to come out of the 'Consumables' section of the grant
The other important question that springs to mind is would £4000 last till the end of the grant. Knowing the typical research program I think it would be very hard to estimate this, and if they underestimate (or suddenly find they need to recompute the last years work) they may end up without their processing power at the end of the grant when they really need to get something pretty to go in the next grant application.
If they buy hardware it may be more expensive, but they can absolutely rely on it being available till the end of the grant (assuming there is a 3 year warentee and the University has some sort of building contents insurance)
and if they find they need more power they could still go to AWS.
For £200 million you could build a ship park it in the middle of the Atlantic
and get a 30ms advantage over servers located on either shore.
no its not my idea:-(
I came to computing from a biology Degree and PhD and I have to thank Slashdot for bringing me into Geek culture, for although its full of timesinks it has made me a better jobbing bioinformation and general IT guy:-)
How much does the average hotel spend troubleshooting their wireless? I'd say close to zero.
That's because the client base are transient and the hotel staff can shunt any dissatisfied customers
into call centre hell, there is minimal requirement for security (just enough to keep free-loaders in the carpark
out and if its not free non-paying guests) and finally it only needs to be fast enough to a bit of light surfing/email
(they don't want streaming media to cut into their pay per view revenue).
As for the rest your probably not bleak enough, boosting to cloud will be come the new money saving mantra
regardless of the costs.
I'm not so sure... Japan has the highest internet speeds and a more computers than the UK and 60% less than the States (correcting for population). I'd have thought a Japanese login is as trustworthy as a UK or US one. I suppose its where the target normally gets its connection from.
Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand? Is shrapnel really considered a terrorist threat nowadays? Or did he think its antimatter explosion would eradicate the entire city block?
So what your saying is that throwing a hand grenade into Oxford high-street should not be considered a terrorist threat?
If Foot and Mouth was prionic it would not be such a problem just stop feeding the animals brains and your sorted
You're implying that you think that prions are associated with "brains" (were you making a zombie joke too? It's not at all clear.) or central nervous system tissue.
Both:-) the whole Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka Mad Cow disease) was kicked off by adding the rendered remains of sick and injured animals
to cattle feed. In retrospect this was a bad idea.
The kuru/ scrapie/ CWD/ nvCJD/ BSE prion seems to be a characteristic of a protein that is strongly concentrated in CNS tissue. However as I understand the concept, there is precisely nothing to prevent the prion "effect" occuring in, for example, actin or myosin (the main contractile proteins of eucaryote cells).
I'd like to be proven wrong that a transmissible prion could be produced that affects muscle tissue, and is transmitted by muscle tissue. But now that I formulate the idea, it seems much more plausible that it'll be proved possible by someone making one. The weapons potential is interesting.
Its possible but unlikely for this to happen, the prion protein (PRNP) can exist in two stable configurations
normal and 'misfolded'. During protein biosynthesis there is cellular machinery that ensures that a newly made protein folds correctly and normally once made PRNP will hold its shape. However is a normal PRNP encounters a misfolded PRNP the latter can act as a template converting the normal to misfolded. Whats worse is that the misfolded version forms stable aggregates within the cell and builds up causing CJD.
This leads to the linked questions how does this start up and why is it unlikely to happen with other proteins?
The exact answer to the first question is not know, but it is suffice to say that, nothing is perfect and very very very rarely a cell will produce a misfolded PRNP (the affected individual having a mutation predisposing it helps).
Question 2 is down to evolution, to a first approximation any protein that has a tendency to be unstable and convert to a form that kills the organism is going to be very strongly selected against. If there was an actin variant that had a tendency to flip out and lead the other actins molecules in a assault on the cell, that variant it is long dead and out-competed by organisms with more predictable proteins. (This not to say its impossible if the instability confered an advantage (like Sickle-cell anemia) or the effects are mild or the issue it was very rare it could survive.)
Now could you make a new one? I'll have to say no. You have to remember that your target repertoire is fixed
you have about 20000 genes producing perhaps 100,000 proteins. Each of theses proteins has a only few stable configurations and have evolved to naturally fall into the correct shape. so now your looking for one that
has a secondary stable disease conformation,
the disease form needs to be very resistant to the normal protein degradation processes inside and outside the cell (so it can build up)
needs to be auto-catalytic ie able to convert normal protein to misfolded (so it can spread)
has not already done so and therefore appeared in the medical literature
As for its weapons potential even under the best circumstances its not going to be very fast CJD takes years to develop, a hypothetical actin prion would be really nasty and could kill quite quickly (say days to months) but I'd only expect to see something like that in moderatly hard SciFi.
I saw something about training bees to detect explosives (and other chemicals). Apparently you puff the vapour at the bee and give it a hit of sugar and for the next few hours it gets excited when it detects the same smell. Very sensitive but you have to retrain the insect every time you use it.
I never understand idiots like this, with all the free porn online now, why would anyone do this? Yes, I know they are sick but still.
When the first 1Tb disks came out I of course thought how much pr0n you could fit on that.... then realized that if I looked at 200 million naughty images, it would stop being a thrill or even meaningful it would be the norm... (think about it that's 1 photo a second 24/7 for 6 years)
Trevor Harwell was probably long past the point of desensitization, he was not looking for boobies, he was looking for trophies, the thrill of the hunt and the sense of violation. I'm not making excuses for him, what he did was sick and humiliating for his victims and he deserves prison time.... but oddly his motivation was perhaps a reaction to the utterly accessible sea of explicit porn on the net.
If you didnt already begin in a high school class, or at the very least on hobby projects?
I understand that for the British Airways pilot training program, prior flying experience is a disadvantage. They don't want have to untrain flyers with bad habits.
Now granted CS majors don't graduate totally free of blemish, but someone new to CS at least starts as a clean slate...
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked.
German tech did not suck,they had rocket and jet propelled aircraft, radio guided bombs the V1 and V2, the finest tanks in the field etc.
What sucked was there procurement process. Unlike the allies each service had their own committees R&D and proving grounds and the secret of success
was not to make a better mouse trap but get the ear of ah high ranking official (preferably Hitler) and keep pulling strings.
To quote the American investigators after the war:"Very defiantly we believe there were no other German proximity fuse is worth following up - there were more crackpot notions getting political support that we could have imagined" and "The device was made by a set of irresponsible inventors with no manufacturing connections. They would have been shut down without their political connections".
Their problem (aside from massive waste and duplication of effort and that Hitler cancelled and disbanded most of the German weapons research in 1940) was that their tech was too good but not appropriate to their situation Germany simply did not have the resources to make enough of it to win the war
I was in Japan a few years back and in need of some English language books to keep my boy happy...
About the only books I could get were Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Both were the UK editions
Speaking off the cuff (and joking apart), I'd go for Harry Potter, the big problem with a
bookcode is getting the same edition in different parts of the world. HP is ubiquitous
enough to make this possible and sad enough to make it a plausible part of a terrorist possessions.
Because if terrorists had a reliable key distribution network, they'd already be an army, not a loosely organized criminal band with minimal transportation infrastructure? One time pads are only as good as your distribution system. And the moment you run out of key bits and reuse them, your system is broken.
The problem, of course, is that even people who are quite good(and this guy obviously wasn't) have the nasty habit of coming up with ciphers that they cannot attack and mistaking them for secure ones...
And Boys and Girls this is why you don't use a crypto system that has not published the full details as to how it works!-)
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You should have said windows 3.1, or windows for workgroups. Just to see what the hell they would do.
Next time they ring I'm planning spend 20-30 minutes doing something like this.
A computer running slow? Oh yes I have I'm really glad you called... I'll just boot it up.... (sound FX of me wandering round the house) turn it on.. Oh its not working... (more faffing round) Oops it was unplugged... OK Booting ... booting...
OK I've got the prompt w... i... n.... OK its starting ... starting .... starting Argh Its bluescreened its a very poorly puppy I'm glad of your help. I'll try again (on the third attempt) OK I'm in windows just start up Mosaic it sometimes takes a couple of minutes... whats the weather like at your end? (after a few other network problems) OK I've downloaded your program double clicked on it Oh I've got an error saying that this is a 32 bit program and won't run on a 16 bit system ... do you have one that supports Windows 3.1?
Had second thoughts about £4000 lasting long enough. If they can find a service that costs ~15p/hour (and it seems reasonable that they could) that would provide 24/7 computing power for a 3 year grant and better than that, any unused time/money could be kept and used on special occasions/rush jobs...
The point about restrictions on how the grant is spent still stand though :-(
4000 pounds wont get you very far at all on Amazon.
Let's say the researchers in question took 4x "High-CPU Extra Large Instance" from EC2. Each one of them sports the following: 7 GB of memory 20 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each) 1690 GB of instance storage 64-bit platform
That's helluva lot of computing power right there, at $0.76 an hour. £4000 translates to about $6 316.8, which in terms of useable hours at 4x$0.76 would be roughly 2077 hours. 2077 hours is roughly 86 days of 24/7 computing. Thus it sounds like a good deal to me.
Spread this over a 3 year grant means they can do 2 hours computing a day. If they do more than that they will lose their compute cluster before the end of the project, just when there writing the next grant application. and I guarantee they will go over budget because if they get answers back instantly they won't bother/need to optimise their code. Workload expands to fill the available machine time
Looking at the numbers again I suspect that taking one of those machines, so they have ~8 hours a day compute time. Ideally I think they'd want a service at ~$0.25/hour for a 24/7 service. Then they can compute away without worrying about budget and any unused time/money could be used on the big iron for special occasions/rush jobs.
Normally university's gouge a slice of every grant to cover office costs.
You have a limited budget, so it's more cost effective for you to lease time on someone else's equipment for now.
In a fair and logical world this would be true.
In an academic setting there can be problems on what your allowed to spend the money on. If the £4000 is in the 'Computer Hardware' section of the grant buying AWS could count as a service and have to come out of the 'Consumables' section of the grant
The other important question that springs to mind is would £4000 last till the end of the grant. Knowing the typical research program I think it would be very hard to estimate this, and if they underestimate (or suddenly find they need to recompute the last years work) they may end up without their processing power at the end of the grant when they really need to get something pretty to go in the next grant application.
If they buy hardware it may be more expensive, but they can absolutely rely on it being available till the end of the grant (assuming there is a 3 year warentee and the University has some sort of building contents insurance) and if they find they need more power they could still go to AWS.
For £200 million you could build a ship park it in the middle of the Atlantic and get a 30ms advantage over servers located on either shore. no its not my idea :-(
Yeah, they're minus 100 points.
Not just funny insightful, adding civvies wandering around the battlefield is just a cheap and irritating way of hiking up the difficulty level.
I came to computing from a biology Degree and PhD and I have to thank Slashdot for bringing me into Geek culture, for although its full of timesinks it has made me a better jobbing bioinformation and general IT guy :-)
How much does the average hotel spend troubleshooting their wireless? I'd say close to zero.
That's because the client base are transient and the hotel staff can shunt any dissatisfied customers into call centre hell, there is minimal requirement for security (just enough to keep free-loaders in the carpark out and if its not free non-paying guests) and finally it only needs to be fast enough to a bit of light surfing/email (they don't want streaming media to cut into their pay per view revenue).
As for the rest your probably not bleak enough, boosting to cloud will be come the new money saving mantra regardless of the costs.
I'm not so sure... Japan has the highest internet speeds and a more computers than the UK and 60% less than the States (correcting for population). I'd have thought a Japanese login is as trustworthy as a UK or US one. I suppose its where the target normally gets its connection from.
Really? A bomb... that's a danger to people on the street... yet small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand? Is shrapnel really considered a terrorist threat nowadays? Or did he think its antimatter explosion would eradicate the entire city block?
So what your saying is that throwing a hand grenade into Oxford high-street should not be considered a terrorist threat?
You'll be fine just remember in the interview when Google when they ask "Are you Evil?" don't answer yes
You're implying that you think that prions are associated with "brains" (were you making a zombie joke too? It's not at all clear.) or central nervous system tissue.
Both:-) the whole Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka Mad Cow disease) was kicked off by adding the rendered remains of sick and injured animals to cattle feed. In retrospect this was a bad idea.
The kuru/ scrapie/ CWD/ nvCJD/ BSE prion seems to be a characteristic of a protein that is strongly concentrated in CNS tissue. However as I understand the concept, there is precisely nothing to prevent the prion "effect" occuring in, for example, actin or myosin (the main contractile proteins of eucaryote cells).
I'd like to be proven wrong that a transmissible prion could be produced that affects muscle tissue, and is transmitted by muscle tissue. But now that I formulate the idea, it seems much more plausible that it'll be proved possible by someone making one. The weapons potential is interesting.
Its possible but unlikely for this to happen, the prion protein (PRNP) can exist in two stable configurations normal and 'misfolded'. During protein biosynthesis there is cellular machinery that ensures that a newly made protein folds correctly and normally once made PRNP will hold its shape. However is a normal PRNP encounters a misfolded PRNP the latter can act as a template converting the normal to misfolded. Whats worse is that the misfolded version forms stable aggregates within the cell and builds up causing CJD.
This leads to the linked questions how does this start up and why is it unlikely to happen with other proteins?
The exact answer to the first question is not know, but it is suffice to say that, nothing is perfect and very very very rarely a cell will produce a misfolded PRNP (the affected individual having a mutation predisposing it helps).
Question 2 is down to evolution, to a first approximation any protein that has a tendency to be unstable and convert to a form that kills the organism is going to be very strongly selected against. If there was an actin variant that had a tendency to flip out and lead the other actins molecules in a assault on the cell, that variant it is long dead and out-competed by organisms with more predictable proteins. (This not to say its impossible if the instability confered an advantage (like Sickle-cell anemia) or the effects are mild or the issue it was very rare it could survive.)
Now could you make a new one? I'll have to say no. You have to remember that your target repertoire is fixed you have about 20000 genes producing perhaps 100,000 proteins. Each of theses proteins has a only few stable configurations and have evolved to naturally fall into the correct shape. so now your looking for one that
As for its weapons potential even under the best circumstances its not going to be very fast CJD takes years to develop, a hypothetical actin prion would be really nasty and could kill quite quickly (say days to months) but I'd only expect to see something like that in moderatly hard SciFi.
If Foot and Mouth was prionic it would not be such a problem just stop feeding the animals brains and your sorted
Your US blog post is an punishable by five years in prison or perhaps even more
You'll probably get away with this case as you need to post it "willfully" but I'd be more careful in future.
I saw something about training bees to detect explosives (and other chemicals). Apparently you puff the vapour at the bee and give it a hit of sugar and for the next few hours it gets excited when it detects the same smell. Very sensitive but you have to retrain the insect every time you use it.
I never understand idiots like this, with all the free porn online now, why would anyone do this? Yes, I know they are sick but still.
When the first 1Tb disks came out I of course thought how much pr0n you could fit on that.... then realized that if I looked at 200 million naughty images, it would stop being a thrill or even meaningful it would be the norm... (think about it that's 1 photo a second 24/7 for 6 years)
Trevor Harwell was probably long past the point of desensitization, he was not looking for boobies, he was looking for trophies, the thrill of the hunt and the sense of violation. I'm not making excuses for him, what he did was sick and humiliating for his victims and he deserves prison time.... but oddly his motivation was perhaps a reaction to the utterly accessible sea of explicit porn on the net.
No can do Eighth Amendment ;-(
If you didnt already begin in a high school class, or at the very least on hobby projects?
I understand that for the British Airways pilot training program, prior flying experience is a disadvantage. They don't want have to untrain flyers with bad habits.
Now granted CS majors don't graduate totally free of blemish, but someone new to CS at least starts as a clean slate ...
Anyway, the Americans were to focussed on giving nazi war criminals a cozy ride and failing miserably to realize that there was a reason the german lost the war, their tech sucked.
German tech did not suck ,they had rocket and jet propelled aircraft, radio guided bombs the V1 and V2, the finest tanks in the field etc.
What sucked was there procurement process. Unlike the allies each service had their own committees R&D and proving grounds and the secret of success was not to make a better mouse trap but get the ear of ah high ranking official (preferably Hitler) and keep pulling strings.
To quote the American investigators after the war:"Very defiantly we believe there were no other German proximity fuse is worth following up - there were more crackpot notions getting political support that we could have imagined" and "The device was made by a set of irresponsible inventors with no manufacturing connections. They would have been shut down without their political connections".
Their problem (aside from massive waste and duplication of effort and that Hitler cancelled and disbanded most of the German weapons research in 1940) was that their tech was too good but not appropriate to their situation Germany simply did not have the resources to make enough of it to win the war
I was in Japan a few years back and in need of some English language books to keep my boy happy... About the only books I could get were Harry Potter and His Dark Materials. Both were the UK editions
Could a book code be used?
Gee, I wonder which book they'd use...
Speaking off the cuff (and joking apart), I'd go for Harry Potter, the big problem with a bookcode is getting the same edition in different parts of the world. HP is ubiquitous enough to make this possible and sad enough to make it a plausible part of a terrorist possessions.
The inventor of fire never got a patent on it. Think of all the royalties he missed out on!
Actually Mr Ug did patent fire, but since Mr Errga had the patent on Money things were a bit moribund until both patents expired.
Because if terrorists had a reliable key distribution network, they'd already be an army, not a loosely organized criminal band with minimal transportation infrastructure? One time pads are only as good as your distribution system. And the moment you run out of key bits and reuse them, your system is broken.
Could a book code be used?
The problem, of course, is that even people who are quite good(and this guy obviously wasn't) have the nasty habit of coming up with ciphers that they cannot attack and mistaking them for secure ones...
And Boys and Girls this is why you don't use a crypto system that has not published the full details as to how it works!-)