The research I do is often done on HPC. We've got a little in-house cluster that can do our jobs at about 10% of the efficiency of a HPC, for less than 1% of the price. Why? Our computing requires massive data IO, so we just built our cluster around that. Drives, backplane, all geared to the highest IO we could do. Processors are wimpy, and the cheapest we could go. When I watch jobs, the IO is saturated, the processors are running at about 30-50%, the ram is nearly saturated.
If we'd just bought HPC time, or tried to get that sort of setup in-house, it would have been a massive waste of money. And I wouldn't get to fuck around with it like I can our little cluster.
Like you pointed out, just picking off the top 500 list is stupid. It doesn't address the need at hand. I'm glad I don't have a pointy-haired boss. She's demanding, but very, very reasonable...
I didn't finish Half-Life. I'm an old-school FPS player who used to do things like try to make it through Doom with just a pistol, conserving all the rest of the ammo. Did that in half-life. Had a full stock of just about everything, since you can crowbar most things to death with some creative strafing. I got to the tentacle in the pit, and unleashed hell upon it. It didn't die. I was blowing the hell out of it - full load of grenades, full load of shotgun ammo - it was screaming and thrashing, but it wouldn't die.
Come to find out, you have to push buttons on walls to kill it, after having run by it a couple of times. Fuck that. I get punished for conserving ammo, by being forced to sneak, dodge and jump past something? You put something unklllable in a game, despite someone being able to empty all the ammo they could carry into it? I'd have been fine to have wasted all my ammo killing it, only to head past and find there was another way to make it die. But something unkillable with no indication that was the case turned me off. I never went back.
I'll agree with that. A current prof I have encourages us to look at previous tests he's given. He occasionally gives us samples. Why? Because he writes his own tests, a new one each time.
During my 5 years of teaching, I always did a cost-benefit analysis of writing new tests. I recognized that if I didn't write a new one, students might have access to the old one. I fully expected that.
I have no sympathy for this prof or the school. Take the time, and write a new version of the test each time. It's either that, or you have to deal with crap like this. If I were a student, I'd be pissed off. I'd expect a lot better for my money than a "test bank" that a large number of people have access to.
Um, I didn't say "call the phone company". I assumed that most people would have a friend or relative with power and access to the internet, somewhere in the world.
About every couple of months my sister will be out somewhere and want the number for something. She calls me, I look it up, she writes it down, hangs up, and calls it.
How is this so hard for people here to figure out?
As I said below, if you have a phone that works, chances are that you know someone with power who can look up the number for you if you call them. If you don't have a working phone, you don't need that number anyway.
I mean, if you have a phone that works, you have the ability to call people and ask them to find a number for you. If you don't have a phone that works, a phone book won't help you anyway.
Even now, there's a damn good chance they'll just block the DNS entry. And how hard is it going to be to post "66.102.13.105" to twitter, facebook, or any other such site?
IPv6 will make it easier, but even now, all a site has to do, at the absolute most is change their IP address and then hit the social networking sites to spread it. Hell, I bet someone could hack together a p2p distributed "dns" program in less than a few hours. A bit of pgp to authenticate a site, and they'd be able to push a new IP address to the p2p cloud any time they needed to. A few hours, and everyone around the world would have the update.
Blacklists will never stand any sort of reasonable chance from any sort of "IT" person. The ability to extend that to the masses is trivial.
In the graduate program I'm in, I can assure you that there's no internet-based cheating on homework. When 2/3 of the class sits around for 8 hours jointly working on a single problem out of a 5 problem set, the chance of finding someone on the internet able to solve it is probably pretty limited. Especially so when the professor is impressed that the group of us solved it, because he never could, and just intended it as an exercise for us to discover how complicated the problem is.
While this is an extreme case, as a few other people have said, STEM classes generally involve "I'm going to watch you do it" sort of activities. Tests, labs, etc. The majority of humanities are "go home and return with something" sorts of classes. When you graduate with a STEM degree, you've generally been forced to take a bit of humanities. When you graduate in humanities, you very well might never have taken any sort of engineering, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc. The pool of people able to cheat on STEM is significantly lower than the pool of people able to cheat on humanities due to this, and the order of magnitude less people who get STEM degrees.
This is a link from yesterday that I saved. It's worth your 2 minutes to read the first half of that page. It deals with book piracy, but the principle is pretty much the same.
That's that part that I just don't understand. Even if I don't know the candidate, I pick the one that has lied the least. Anything else and I'm just supporting lying.
The idea is that some forms of investment are taxed at the time of investment. Thus, it's somewhat unfair to tax them again when you draw up on them. The idea is that you get taxed when you put money in while working, but when you retire, you don't get taxed (penalized) when you use the money you dutifully stocked away. If you have to plan on ever increasing taxes, it's much harder to plan for retirement. When you're drawing on investments, it makes a big difference if you're paying 0%, 5%, 10% or 20% tax. It's much easier to plan financially when you know you're going to pay 5% tax on the way in, and the return on your funds is tax free.
That said, there's a world of difference between "retiring with a steady income of $30k per year" and "retiring a billionaire". I do believe that there should be some tax difference between the two, no matter how similar their investments might be.
And why wouldn't they? Did you see what happened this election?
My state went from light blue to dark red. We've got like 2 democrats left in the House, every other major elected position is republican.
With outcomes like that, why would you expect the republicans to do anything but lie and stall? That seems to work wonders. And it once again leads me to idle thoughts about how we could require an IQ test for voting, as a way to weight votes. If you think that the democrats started death panels and are utter failures for not stopping two wars and fixing the economy in 2 years, your vote shouldn't count for much. It's not reliable in the least.
there are some places you can't get to without flying.. pro tip - take a look at a world atlas and look for all those places separated or surrounded by water
Some day someone will invent some sort of "floating car" that will allow us to cross water. It will be awesome.
Would it? I think it would come down to it being challenged on the constitutional merits of the executive order. If Obama said, "Copyright lasts for 14 years, like it did back in the day", someone would have to challenge that is not promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
It would be interesting to see that argued in court against our current laws. Which one more closely adheres to the constitution?
A woman died near my parent's house a couple of years ago, at 3 in the afternoon, on a dry road, doing 60+ around a corner marked 30. She started to slide, overcorrected, went off the corner and on the way down the bank, rolled the car 90 degrees, and wrapped it around a tree roof-first. Happened to be the same corner my sister went off (headed the other direction) in the rain at 50+ about seven years prior. She only took out the sign marking the corner and a telephone pole with the nose of the car, and was unhurt.
I really, REALLY don't see the scenario the GP listed above happing on that corner more frequently than these two totally preventable accidents. When it comes down to it, yes, the AI will cause accidents. But probably far less than people cause themselves doing stupid shit like going ridiculously fast around sharp bends, putting on makeup while driving, texting, reading newspapers and books, getting/giving blowjobs, etc.
It's been like this for a long time. Just in the last six months or so it's seemed to get really bad. At least this summary isn't an outright falsehood like many in the last week.
I don't know if lawsuits will be that big of a problem. The automation has already started. It will just be a gradual trickle-up, with a lot of legalese you have to sign off on in order to have these automations.
Mercedes already has the option for active object avoidance systems - cruise which detects slower vehicles in front of you and matches their speed 150' behind them, blind spot avoidance systems, IR night vision, rear camera, parking assistance.
In 10 years, that will all be standard on about every car - just as ABS, airbags, and satnav have started to become standard features on all but the most inexpensive cars. Sure, there will be questions at first, and some lawsuits. There always is with new technology. But new technology also starts with the rich, due to it being prohibitively expensive when it's first introduced. Merceds will hammer out the bugs. Then it will trickle down to the rest. It happens with just about every new technology.
When Mercedes has had all that tech for 10 years, and it's trickled down to mid-class cars, what are they going to do to get rich folks to keep buying their cars? They're going to have to innovate. And that will just be building upon all those features that they've refined for over a decade.
Sweet...I can put 3 gallons of gas in my car in about 1 minute...beats this by 5 minutes. While I'm all for saving the atmosphere, the real issue is that liquid hydrocarbons are DAMN convenient. From an energy-density standpoint, they are ridiculously inexpensive compared to any conceivable alternative for the last 1000 years, and next 50 years, at least.
Best thing I ever saw to counteract this was a seminar by a Columbia professor who calculated that if we could manufacture carbon-capture devices on the order of 1/10 our automotive production per year. His idea was not to sequester carbon, but to just return it to fuel. Why? Because we're steeped in a carbon economy as it is. Might as well not fight the system, and do some good along the way.
No, cheap shit is expensive to replace, in the quantities that need replacing. The answer is simple, rugged ass shit. I taught for 5 years - the tables I had in my science classrooms were pretty much indestructible. The ridiculous chair-desk-hybrids got destroyed on a regular basis. I watched it happen. I had one class moved 3 times in one year due to administrative incompetence. 2 of the classes had desks, the 3rd had tables and chairs. No damage to the table and chairs. Damage to a desk or two in each of the other two classes. The more parts you have, the more potential for failure. And kids stress shit like you wouldn't believe. Kid sticks his foot under the leg of the desk, and when his friend sits on it, hollers because it hurts, and tries to flip the desk with his foot - stupid crap like that. Give them a solid wood table, with 4 stout legs held on with a 3/8" lag bolt, and there's not much they can do to it. Every few years it will need a sanding, but that's about it.
I had 12 tables in my science classroom from the 60-70s. They'll be there for another couple of decades. The only thing that will happen to them is that they'll eventually sand the 3/4" wood thin enough that it might break. But that will take a *lot* of sanding....
I find it hard to believe that 12 tables which have already been though 40-50 years of abuse will be more expensive than the chair-desk hybrids that I saw having a lifespan of under 5 years.
When I was teaching HS science, I was happy every day that I had 5' tables in my classes instead of desks. 2 students per table, chairs got put up on them at the end of the day so the custodians could sweep under them. (Which was easy, since they had 3' of space to get a broom under.) As needed, I could arrange them well spaced out, (tests, eg.) in pairs to make square tables of 4 students each, in a big circle so everyone was facing each other (debates, eg.) push them all aside for demonstrations, in L shapes so that I had groups of 4 with no students having the board behind them...it was awesome.
When I was told we'd be meeting in the rooms with the stupid-ass chair-desks, I generally requested we move the meeting elsewhere. I'm sorry, but those aren't good for anyone. I don't know how the hell they became the standard - it can't be cheaper to buy them than it is to buy a truckload of plastic chairs on metal frames and flat, featureless wooden tables with big square legs. The tables in my science classroom were 5 major pieces and a bolt - a big flat piece with a 2" deep square cut into it underneath, and 4 big solid legs attached with a 3/8" bolt. "Maintenance" involved sanding off the graffiti every couple of years, and me tightening the bolt with a wrench when a leg got wobbly, about once a month or two.
I can't work at the traditional school desk. I never thought students could either. Comparing the classes I taught on plain tables vs the ridiculous chair-desk-spawns-of-hell, the classes with tables were far better. (And one year I had a class moved 3 times - the classrooms without tables were the worst for student morale, performance, and behavior.)
Roughly 8am - 3pm, sometimes a half-hour to an hour earlier on each end, rarely a half-hour later. The school I taught at started at 8:20am and ended at 3:00pm. Personally, I'd have loved it if it started at 10am. I hit my stride at about 10-10:30 generally. No matter how early I went to bed, I'm usually dragging before 9am.
Slashdot Mirror
That you're not using IQ correctly....?
The research I do is often done on HPC. We've got a little in-house cluster that can do our jobs at about 10% of the efficiency of a HPC, for less than 1% of the price. Why? Our computing requires massive data IO, so we just built our cluster around that. Drives, backplane, all geared to the highest IO we could do. Processors are wimpy, and the cheapest we could go. When I watch jobs, the IO is saturated, the processors are running at about 30-50%, the ram is nearly saturated.
If we'd just bought HPC time, or tried to get that sort of setup in-house, it would have been a massive waste of money. And I wouldn't get to fuck around with it like I can our little cluster.
Like you pointed out, just picking off the top 500 list is stupid. It doesn't address the need at hand. I'm glad I don't have a pointy-haired boss. She's demanding, but very, very reasonable...
I didn't finish Half-Life. I'm an old-school FPS player who used to do things like try to make it through Doom with just a pistol, conserving all the rest of the ammo. Did that in half-life. Had a full stock of just about everything, since you can crowbar most things to death with some creative strafing. I got to the tentacle in the pit, and unleashed hell upon it. It didn't die. I was blowing the hell out of it - full load of grenades, full load of shotgun ammo - it was screaming and thrashing, but it wouldn't die.
Come to find out, you have to push buttons on walls to kill it, after having run by it a couple of times. Fuck that. I get punished for conserving ammo, by being forced to sneak, dodge and jump past something? You put something unklllable in a game, despite someone being able to empty all the ammo they could carry into it? I'd have been fine to have wasted all my ammo killing it, only to head past and find there was another way to make it die. But something unkillable with no indication that was the case turned me off. I never went back.
I'll agree with that. A current prof I have encourages us to look at previous tests he's given. He occasionally gives us samples. Why? Because he writes his own tests, a new one each time.
During my 5 years of teaching, I always did a cost-benefit analysis of writing new tests. I recognized that if I didn't write a new one, students might have access to the old one. I fully expected that.
I have no sympathy for this prof or the school. Take the time, and write a new version of the test each time. It's either that, or you have to deal with crap like this. If I were a student, I'd be pissed off. I'd expect a lot better for my money than a "test bank" that a large number of people have access to.
Um, I didn't say "call the phone company". I assumed that most people would have a friend or relative with power and access to the internet, somewhere in the world.
About every couple of months my sister will be out somewhere and want the number for something. She calls me, I look it up, she writes it down, hangs up, and calls it.
How is this so hard for people here to figure out?
As I said below, if you have a phone that works, chances are that you know someone with power who can look up the number for you if you call them. If you don't have a working phone, you don't need that number anyway.
Call someone with power?
I mean, if you have a phone that works, you have the ability to call people and ask them to find a number for you. If you don't have a phone that works, a phone book won't help you anyway.
Even now, there's a damn good chance they'll just block the DNS entry. And how hard is it going to be to post "66.102.13.105" to twitter, facebook, or any other such site?
IPv6 will make it easier, but even now, all a site has to do, at the absolute most is change their IP address and then hit the social networking sites to spread it. Hell, I bet someone could hack together a p2p distributed "dns" program in less than a few hours. A bit of pgp to authenticate a site, and they'd be able to push a new IP address to the p2p cloud any time they needed to. A few hours, and everyone around the world would have the update.
Blacklists will never stand any sort of reasonable chance from any sort of "IT" person. The ability to extend that to the masses is trivial.
In the graduate program I'm in, I can assure you that there's no internet-based cheating on homework. When 2/3 of the class sits around for 8 hours jointly working on a single problem out of a 5 problem set, the chance of finding someone on the internet able to solve it is probably pretty limited. Especially so when the professor is impressed that the group of us solved it, because he never could, and just intended it as an exercise for us to discover how complicated the problem is.
While this is an extreme case, as a few other people have said, STEM classes generally involve "I'm going to watch you do it" sort of activities. Tests, labs, etc. The majority of humanities are "go home and return with something" sorts of classes. When you graduate with a STEM degree, you've generally been forced to take a bit of humanities. When you graduate in humanities, you very well might never have taken any sort of engineering, calculus, chemistry, physics, etc. The pool of people able to cheat on STEM is significantly lower than the pool of people able to cheat on humanities due to this, and the order of magnitude less people who get STEM degrees.
Did you miss that this was Japan, an overcrowded island nation, which has turned a garbage dump into an airport?
For 95% of the other countries in the world, this would stupid. For Japan, not so much. They really don't have a lot more habitable land to use.
This is a link from yesterday that I saved. It's worth your 2 minutes to read the first half of that page. It deals with book piracy, but the principle is pretty much the same.
That's that part that I just don't understand. Even if I don't know the candidate, I pick the one that has lied the least. Anything else and I'm just supporting lying.
The idea is that some forms of investment are taxed at the time of investment. Thus, it's somewhat unfair to tax them again when you draw up on them. The idea is that you get taxed when you put money in while working, but when you retire, you don't get taxed (penalized) when you use the money you dutifully stocked away. If you have to plan on ever increasing taxes, it's much harder to plan for retirement. When you're drawing on investments, it makes a big difference if you're paying 0%, 5%, 10% or 20% tax. It's much easier to plan financially when you know you're going to pay 5% tax on the way in, and the return on your funds is tax free.
That said, there's a world of difference between "retiring with a steady income of $30k per year" and "retiring a billionaire". I do believe that there should be some tax difference between the two, no matter how similar their investments might be.
And why wouldn't they? Did you see what happened this election?
My state went from light blue to dark red. We've got like 2 democrats left in the House, every other major elected position is republican.
With outcomes like that, why would you expect the republicans to do anything but lie and stall? That seems to work wonders. And it once again leads me to idle thoughts about how we could require an IQ test for voting, as a way to weight votes. If you think that the democrats started death panels and are utter failures for not stopping two wars and fixing the economy in 2 years, your vote shouldn't count for much. It's not reliable in the least.
there are some places you can't get to without flying .. pro tip - take a look at a world atlas and look for all those places separated or surrounded by water
Some day someone will invent some sort of "floating car" that will allow us to cross water. It will be awesome.
Indeed. But complaining gets you bad karma. I should know...
Would it? I think it would come down to it being challenged on the constitutional merits of the executive order. If Obama said, "Copyright lasts for 14 years, like it did back in the day", someone would have to challenge that is not promoting "the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries".
It would be interesting to see that argued in court against our current laws. Which one more closely adheres to the constitution?
A woman died near my parent's house a couple of years ago, at 3 in the afternoon, on a dry road, doing 60+ around a corner marked 30. She started to slide, overcorrected, went off the corner and on the way down the bank, rolled the car 90 degrees, and wrapped it around a tree roof-first. Happened to be the same corner my sister went off (headed the other direction) in the rain at 50+ about seven years prior. She only took out the sign marking the corner and a telephone pole with the nose of the car, and was unhurt.
I really, REALLY don't see the scenario the GP listed above happing on that corner more frequently than these two totally preventable accidents. When it comes down to it, yes, the AI will cause accidents. But probably far less than people cause themselves doing stupid shit like going ridiculously fast around sharp bends, putting on makeup while driving, texting, reading newspapers and books, getting/giving blowjobs, etc.
It's been like this for a long time. Just in the last six months or so it's seemed to get really bad. At least this summary isn't an outright falsehood like many in the last week.
I don't know if lawsuits will be that big of a problem. The automation has already started. It will just be a gradual trickle-up, with a lot of legalese you have to sign off on in order to have these automations.
Mercedes already has the option for active object avoidance systems - cruise which detects slower vehicles in front of you and matches their speed 150' behind them, blind spot avoidance systems, IR night vision, rear camera, parking assistance.
In 10 years, that will all be standard on about every car - just as ABS, airbags, and satnav have started to become standard features on all but the most inexpensive cars. Sure, there will be questions at first, and some lawsuits. There always is with new technology. But new technology also starts with the rich, due to it being prohibitively expensive when it's first introduced. Merceds will hammer out the bugs. Then it will trickle down to the rest. It happens with just about every new technology.
When Mercedes has had all that tech for 10 years, and it's trickled down to mid-class cars, what are they going to do to get rich folks to keep buying their cars? They're going to have to innovate. And that will just be building upon all those features that they've refined for over a decade.
That's one of the reasons I'm trying to find the next slashdot. Any leads?
Sweet...I can put 3 gallons of gas in my car in about 1 minute...beats this by 5 minutes. While I'm all for saving the atmosphere, the real issue is that liquid hydrocarbons are DAMN convenient. From an energy-density standpoint, they are ridiculously inexpensive compared to any conceivable alternative for the last 1000 years, and next 50 years, at least.
Best thing I ever saw to counteract this was a seminar by a Columbia professor who calculated that if we could manufacture carbon-capture devices on the order of 1/10 our automotive production per year. His idea was not to sequester carbon, but to just return it to fuel. Why? Because we're steeped in a carbon economy as it is. Might as well not fight the system, and do some good along the way.
No, cheap shit is expensive to replace, in the quantities that need replacing. The answer is simple, rugged ass shit. I taught for 5 years - the tables I had in my science classrooms were pretty much indestructible. The ridiculous chair-desk-hybrids got destroyed on a regular basis. I watched it happen. I had one class moved 3 times in one year due to administrative incompetence. 2 of the classes had desks, the 3rd had tables and chairs. No damage to the table and chairs. Damage to a desk or two in each of the other two classes. The more parts you have, the more potential for failure. And kids stress shit like you wouldn't believe. Kid sticks his foot under the leg of the desk, and when his friend sits on it, hollers because it hurts, and tries to flip the desk with his foot - stupid crap like that. Give them a solid wood table, with 4 stout legs held on with a 3/8" lag bolt, and there's not much they can do to it. Every few years it will need a sanding, but that's about it.
I had 12 tables in my science classroom from the 60-70s. They'll be there for another couple of decades. The only thing that will happen to them is that they'll eventually sand the 3/4" wood thin enough that it might break. But that will take a *lot* of sanding....
I find it hard to believe that 12 tables which have already been though 40-50 years of abuse will be more expensive than the chair-desk hybrids that I saw having a lifespan of under 5 years.
When I was teaching HS science, I was happy every day that I had 5' tables in my classes instead of desks. 2 students per table, chairs got put up on them at the end of the day so the custodians could sweep under them. (Which was easy, since they had 3' of space to get a broom under.) As needed, I could arrange them well spaced out, (tests, eg.) in pairs to make square tables of 4 students each, in a big circle so everyone was facing each other (debates, eg.) push them all aside for demonstrations, in L shapes so that I had groups of 4 with no students having the board behind them...it was awesome.
When I was told we'd be meeting in the rooms with the stupid-ass chair-desks, I generally requested we move the meeting elsewhere. I'm sorry, but those aren't good for anyone. I don't know how the hell they became the standard - it can't be cheaper to buy them than it is to buy a truckload of plastic chairs on metal frames and flat, featureless wooden tables with big square legs. The tables in my science classroom were 5 major pieces and a bolt - a big flat piece with a 2" deep square cut into it underneath, and 4 big solid legs attached with a 3/8" bolt. "Maintenance" involved sanding off the graffiti every couple of years, and me tightening the bolt with a wrench when a leg got wobbly, about once a month or two.
I can't work at the traditional school desk. I never thought students could either. Comparing the classes I taught on plain tables vs the ridiculous chair-desk-spawns-of-hell, the classes with tables were far better. (And one year I had a class moved 3 times - the classrooms without tables were the worst for student morale, performance, and behavior.)
Roughly 8am - 3pm, sometimes a half-hour to an hour earlier on each end, rarely a half-hour later. The school I taught at started at 8:20am and ended at 3:00pm. Personally, I'd have loved it if it started at 10am. I hit my stride at about 10-10:30 generally. No matter how early I went to bed, I'm usually dragging before 9am.