When I was young, eager and naive I worked at a place that was doing some pretty heavyweight simulations which took a good three-four days on a (I think) quad-processor Sun box.
It was quite a big site and had a relatively high turnover of decent hardware. Next to the IT support team's area was a room about 6 yards by 10 yards almost full to the ceiling with older monitors, printers and a shitload of commodity PC's. And I'd just stated reading about mainstream acceptance of linux clustering for paralellizable apps.
Cue the lightbulb winking into life above my head!
I approached my boss, with the idea to get those old boxes working again as a cluster and speed things up for the modelling team. He was quite interested and said he'd look into it. He fired up Excel and started plugging in some estimates...
Later that day I saw him and asked him what he thought. He shook his head. "It's a non-starter" he said. Basically, if the effort involved in getting a cluster up and working - including porting of apps - was more than about four man-weeks, it's cheaper and a lot safer just to dial up the Sun rep, invoke our massive account (and commensurate discount) with them and buy a beefier model from the range. And the existing code would run just fine with no modifications.
A useful lesson for me in innovation risk and cost.
Kevin Warwick may be a "well-known figure in nerd subculture", but among nerds in the know, he's widely regarded as a shameless self-promoter, all-round media-tart and frankly, a bit of a joke.
His claims and ideas put him more into the realms of science fiction author / futurologist, rather than serious scientist / engineer.
One time, we had an all-hands meeting scheduled for 08:00 sharp. Basically it was a "come to jesus" meeting because a milestone had been missed, bonus payments would not be forthcoming and therefore upper management need not spend lunchtime pondering the wonderful range of paint jobs that BMW offers.
We had a flexitime system back then, wherein the latest you could arrive for work was 10:00 am, so by specifying 08:00, it was made crystal clear that this was a serious event. Furthermore, we were told to bring along our current status, achievements, slippage etc. No problem - I'd collated this info into a tidy little spreadsheet the night before, all I needed to do was print it out.
I arrived at work a little later than I intended - about 07:40 - and switched on my PC.
[NB - the messages below are approximate in content and order. I was far too pissed-off to recall them exactly at a later date.]
"Applying security policy"...
"Updating system settings"...
"Checking user info"...(by now it was 07:50 and my fingernails were embedded in my palms)
Finally! A login dialog! I enter my details and hit return.
The login dialog kind of grays-out and sits there...
And still it sits there..
"Starting windows desktop"...
Sweet Jesus, a windows desktop at 07:55! But Wait - What's this?
Three dos boxes appear on the screen, all doing something or other and each sternly warning me not to touch the mouse or keyboard. Give me strength!
At 07:58 I get to interact with the required apps and fire off two copies of my status report. I got into the meeting last and at 08:01. The boss said, with not an ounce of humor, that it was good of me to turn up and is it ok if we start now? Not a good start...
Long, boring (although I was anything but bored at the time) but a real-life example of how achingly slow the corporate bootup / login process can be. If you have difficulty visualising my frustration and rage, have a look at "Office Space", specifically the part where Peter is trying to quickly shut down his machine and duck out early.
I'd never noticed or known how slow the process was before that day because I'd usually switch the machine on, then head off to the stand-alone network where the testing is carried out and get all those machines started up. By the time I'd done that and grabbed a coffee to take back to my desk the login prompt would be up and it would be a relatively short wait to get started.
Always liked that one myself - as much as Bradbury's story about the man who rebelled against the omnipresent communications devices that infested the near future, The Murderer.
Sometimes science fiction entertains, sometimes it bores, sometimes it warns...
Have a look at Professer John Adams' analysis of people's understanding, assessment amd reaction to various sources of risk... He's spent a lifetime studying the whole field of "risk", and his idea of risk amplification seems to be gaining traction within the field:
If you like The Beatles, it's well worth looking at composer Howard Goodall's analysis of their music and development. Not at all dull and dry, but accessible, entertaining and informative.
...games like return to castle wolfenstein aren't sold in germany...
Dunno about games like return to castle wolfenstein not being sold in Germany, but RTCW was most definitely sold in germany.
They swapped one texture (the swastika) for another (the stylised "W" Wolfenstein logo) and had you fighting not against nazis, but against some secret sect called "The Wolves".
Not the same game? Dunno, but I guess after ten minutes' play you'd forget which one you were playing...
I love the self-assurance of the ignorant. Quite cute, really...
I work with ex-submariners. One of the reasons that they hated and feared a real reactor SCRAM was that the sub was essentially relying on its forward motion to maintain it's depth.
Yes, it was negatively buoyant, but the slight upward pitch of its planes enabled it to "fly" through the water. Supposedly, you get much more responsive control that way, rather than wallowing in the water while you wait for tanks to fill or empty. Very important, when you're trailing an aggressive Russian sub...
When the reactor shuts down and the screw stops turning, the damn thing will sink until the control team get the tanks set for neutral or positive buoyancy. Not a comfortable time as the boat heads down and the hull groans and creaks and everyone starts to wonder if there's enough high pressure air in reserve to blow the tanks.
Mainly OT, but by God and by golly, major navies do FLY their subs.
Quite right. Digging further, the 1 + 1 = 2 was more of a corollary to Russell's thesis rather than a result in itself. It was always the page count statistic that stuck in my mind, rather than the thrust of the work...
Yes, nowadays there is no doubt. T'was not always the case, though... It took noted logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell some time and effort to prove precisely that equation.
"...From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2".
This is on page 362 (!) of his mighty tome Principia Mathematica. Until he had completed his precise and rigorous proof, there was quite definitely some doubt.
Perhaps because the current system has the built-in assumption that you won't usually get caught, so perfect enforcement would make the fines and points against your license stack up way faster than designed?
Absolutely agree.
In the past, there was a degree of error and slop in the sytem that amounted to a certain amount of judicial forgiveness.
Sure, if you drive like an asshat 100% of the time you'd get caught out fairly quickly, fined and points added to your license. Conversely, if you drove carefully most of the time and occasionaly busted a speed limit, you might go an entire lifetime with a clean license.
Again I too believe that the criminal justice system assumes that if did get caught out, then you probably do this kind of stuff fairly often and so the penalties are somewhat higher, perhaps,
than the single offence warrants.
Which is fine under the old system, but when we edge towards a situation of near-total surveillance, then it becomes somewhat unbearable...
Other OS vendors get along just fine without tying their operating systems to particular hardware. They just charge enough for the OS to pay for the cost of developing it. Nothing's stopping Apple from doing the same thing.
But, in the final analysis, Apple are a hardware company.
Their OS is a way of selling the hardware.
Their (some would say) beautiful industrial design is another selling point.
As is percieved exclusivity, so God (Steve?) help them if they were ever to become something other than niche...
that depends how much do you rely on goods that travel by ship on salt water?
Zinc anodes are used as an corrosion point for salt water. So Instead of eating the steel hulls in the ships Zinc anodes take the damage. On salt water boats they have to be replaced annually or more.
without zinc world wide shipping will come to a halt a decade later
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
It's incredible how many people start wading into all kinds of issues with the intent of improving safety without the first notion of what risk really is and how we humans evaluate and cope with it.
Anybody who's work may impact public safety should be forced at gunpoint to at least read Risk by John Adams. It has much to say about the effects of public safety initiatives and their unintended consequences.
For instance, after the introduction of compulsory seatbelt legislation in the UK, the number of motorists who were killed or seriously injured decreased somewhat. Unfortunately more cyclists and pedestrians were killed or seriousy injured in collisions with motor vehicles, such that the overall number of road deaths increased. Adams attributes the increase to drivers' assessment of their own level of risk being reduced, hence they tended to drive more quickly and in a more dangerous fashion, until their personal risk threshold was restored.
"...The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars..."
In light of what I said previously, look out for a rise in the overall number of people KSI on India's roads...
"...For example, a balloon filled with helium doesn't use any energy to stay in the air...."
Indeed not, but you've spent a significant amount of enegy in isolating the helium, manufacturing the balloon and filling it with the gas. TANSTAAFL triumphs yet again!
Slashdot Mirror
When I was young, eager and naive I worked at a place that was doing some pretty heavyweight simulations which took a good three-four days on a (I think) quad-processor Sun box.
It was quite a big site and had a relatively high turnover of decent hardware. Next to the IT support team's area was a room about 6 yards by 10 yards almost full to the ceiling with older monitors, printers and a shitload of commodity PC's. And I'd just stated reading about mainstream acceptance of linux clustering for paralellizable apps.
Cue the lightbulb winking into life above my head!
I approached my boss, with the idea to get those old boxes working again as a cluster and speed things up for the modelling team. He was quite interested and said he'd look into it. He fired up Excel and started plugging in some estimates...
Later that day I saw him and asked him what he thought. He shook his head. "It's a non-starter" he said. Basically, if the effort involved in getting a cluster up and working - including porting of apps - was more than about four man-weeks, it's cheaper and a lot safer just to dial up the Sun rep, invoke our massive account (and commensurate discount) with them and buy a beefier model from the range. And the existing code would run just fine with no modifications.
A useful lesson for me in innovation risk and cost.
Kevin Warwick may be a "well-known figure in nerd subculture", but among nerds in the know, he's widely regarded as a shameless self-promoter, all-round media-tart and frankly, a bit of a joke.
His claims and ideas put him more into the realms of science fiction author / futurologist, rather than serious scientist / engineer.
Here's a gem, courtesy of The Reg: Captain Cyborg pushes kid chipping via Maddy abduction case
Absolutely true.
One time, we had an all-hands meeting scheduled for 08:00 sharp. Basically it was a "come to jesus" meeting because a milestone had been missed, bonus payments would not be forthcoming and therefore upper management need not spend lunchtime pondering the wonderful range of paint jobs that BMW offers.
We had a flexitime system back then, wherein the latest you could arrive for work was 10:00 am, so by specifying 08:00, it was made crystal clear that this was a serious event. Furthermore, we were told to bring along our current status, achievements, slippage etc. No problem - I'd collated this info into a tidy little spreadsheet the night before, all I needed to do was print it out.
I arrived at work a little later than I intended - about 07:40 - and switched on my PC.
[NB - the messages below are approximate in content and order. I was far too pissed-off to recall them exactly at a later date.]
"Applying security policy"...
"Updating system settings"...
"Checking user info"...(by now it was 07:50 and my fingernails were embedded in my palms)
Finally! A login dialog! I enter my details and hit return.
The login dialog kind of grays-out and sits there...
And still it sits there..
"Starting windows desktop"...
Sweet Jesus, a windows desktop at 07:55! But Wait - What's this?
Three dos boxes appear on the screen, all doing something or other and each sternly warning me not to touch the mouse or keyboard. Give me strength!
At 07:58 I get to interact with the required apps and fire off two copies of my status report. I got into the meeting last and at 08:01. The boss said, with not an ounce of humor, that it was good of me to turn up and is it ok if we start now? Not a good start...
Long, boring (although I was anything but bored at the time) but a real-life example of how achingly slow the corporate bootup / login process can be. If you have difficulty visualising my frustration and rage, have a look at "Office Space", specifically the part where Peter is trying to quickly shut down his machine and duck out early.
I'd never noticed or known how slow the process was before that day because I'd usually switch the machine on, then head off to the stand-alone network where the testing is carried out and get all those machines started up. By the time I'd done that and grabbed a coffee to take back to my desk the login prompt would be up and it would be a relatively short wait to get started.
That would be It's Such a Beautiful Day
Always liked that one myself - as much as Bradbury's story about the man who rebelled against the omnipresent communications devices that infested the near future, The Murderer.
Sometimes science fiction entertains, sometimes it bores, sometimes it warns...
...Nazis you shall have!
Check out these "specialised" sets:
Creator holding the main set
All available sets
Main compound
Four prisoners behind the wire
Scientific experiments
Beatdown!
Enjoy!
Might be able to sneak it in if you phrase it something like that...
No idea, but in order to cover more bases so to speak, don't they also need to know the RGB value for "stink" too?...
Word!
I can't even believe that someone was enough of a pussy to even post the origninal!
MAIMED, FFS! like missing a finger or an eye! How fucking clumsy or stupid would you have to be? Oh, right - as clumsy and stupid as the OP...
Fucking hell, Darwin must be rotating at 50,000rpm right now...
Have a look at Professer John Adams' analysis of people's understanding, assessment amd reaction to various sources of risk... He's spent a lifetime studying the whole field of "risk", and his idea of risk amplification seems to be gaining traction within the field:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000512.php
Damn! two "Part 5"'s! Sorry, of course "Part 5" mark II is really "Part 6"...
If you like The Beatles, it's well worth looking at composer Howard Goodall's analysis of their music and development. Not at all dull and dry, but accessible, entertaining and informative.
'Tis (mainly) on YouTube...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 - can't find the damn thing. Curses!
Part 5
Part 5
Really, I can't recommend this enough.
Dunno about games like return to castle wolfenstein not being sold in Germany, but RTCW was most definitely sold in germany.
They swapped one texture (the swastika) for another (the stylised "W" Wolfenstein logo) and had you fighting not against nazis, but against some secret sect called "The Wolves".
Not the same game? Dunno, but I guess after ten minutes' play you'd forget which one you were playing...
I love the self-assurance of the ignorant. Quite cute, really...
I work with ex-submariners. One of the reasons that they hated and feared a real reactor SCRAM was that the sub was essentially relying on its forward motion to maintain it's depth.
Yes, it was negatively buoyant, but the slight upward pitch of its planes enabled it to "fly" through the water. Supposedly, you get much more responsive control that way, rather than wallowing in the water while you wait for tanks to fill or empty. Very important, when you're trailing an aggressive Russian sub...
When the reactor shuts down and the screw stops turning, the damn thing will sink until the control team get the tanks set for neutral or positive buoyancy. Not a comfortable time as the boat heads down and the hull groans and creaks and everyone starts to wonder if there's enough high pressure air in reserve to blow the tanks.
Mainly OT, but by God and by golly, major navies do FLY their subs.
Quite right. Digging further, the 1 + 1 = 2 was more of a corollary to Russell's thesis rather than a result in itself. It was always the page count statistic that stuck in my mind, rather than the thrust of the work...
Yes, nowadays there is no doubt. T'was not always the case, though... It took noted logician and philosopher Bertrand Russell some time and effort to prove precisely that equation.
This is on page 362 (!) of his mighty tome Principia Mathematica. Until he had completed his precise and rigorous proof, there was quite definitely some doubt.
Absolutely agree.
In the past, there was a degree of error and slop in the sytem that amounted to a certain amount of judicial forgiveness.
Sure, if you drive like an asshat 100% of the time you'd get caught out fairly quickly, fined and points added to your license. Conversely, if you drove carefully most of the time and occasionaly busted a speed limit, you might go an entire lifetime with a clean license.
Again I too believe that the criminal justice system assumes that if did get caught out, then you probably do this kind of stuff fairly often and so the penalties are somewhat higher, perhaps, than the single offence warrants.
Which is fine under the old system, but when we edge towards a situation of near-total surveillance, then it becomes somewhat unbearable...
First as tragedy, then as farce...
All they need to do is employ the services of John Malkovich
Job done!
You sure about that?
How about we ask some rape victims about this hierarchy of evil?
Now we ask some murder victims. Except they haven't got much to say, so you maybe you're right...
Other OS vendors get along just fine without tying their operating systems to particular hardware. They just charge enough for the OS to pay for the cost of developing it. Nothing's stopping Apple from doing the same thing.
But, in the final analysis, Apple are a hardware company.
Their OS is a way of selling the hardware.
Their (some would say) beautiful industrial design is another selling point.
As is percieved exclusivity, so God (Steve?) help them if they were ever to become something other than niche...
T'ain't necessarily so. Are we running out of Aluminium? Al works just fine as a sacrifical anode.
Have a look here for starters...
It's incredible how many people start wading into all kinds of issues with the intent of improving safety without the first notion of what risk really is and how we humans evaluate and cope with it.
Anybody who's work may impact public safety should be forced at gunpoint to at least read Risk by John Adams. It has much to say about the effects of public safety initiatives and their unintended consequences.
For instance, after the introduction of compulsory seatbelt legislation in the UK, the number of motorists who were killed or seriously injured decreased somewhat. Unfortunately more cyclists and pedestrians were killed or seriousy injured in collisions with motor vehicles, such that the overall number of road deaths increased. Adams attributes the increase to drivers' assessment of their own level of risk being reduced, hence they tended to drive more quickly and in a more dangerous fashion, until their personal risk threshold was restored.
"...The vehicle is aimed at improving driving safety by getting India's masses off their motorbikes and into cars..."
In light of what I said previously, look out for a rise in the overall number of people KSI on India's roads...
T&K.
"...So this method will give us 1/4 of the delta-v needed to get to low orbit..."
Yeah, all very ingenious, but you're completely neglecting any notion of fluid mechanics.
*Your* water is massless, has zero viscosity and flows without frictional loss through pipes of any dimension...
T&K
"...Yep, Einstein goes straight to jail too. Quote is Newton's..."
In that case, Newton should probably go to jail for taking the piss out of ("mocking" for out US cousins) Robert Hooke, who wasn't amazingly tall...
T&K
"...For example, a balloon filled with helium doesn't use any energy to stay in the air...."
Indeed not, but you've spent a significant amount of enegy in isolating the helium, manufacturing the balloon and filling it with the gas. TANSTAAFL triumphs yet again!