More informative might be the CPU2000 benchmark figures at SPEC. Lots of CPUs tested for both integer and FP performance and throughput. LINPACK is a linear algebra library. I think the SPEC FP benchmark includes codes that do lots of linear algebra (among other things).
they showed research on researchers using EarthSim to see shockwave propogation
To be slightly pedantic, earthquake waves are not shock waves. They are perfectly ordinary elastic waves. A shock is produced by a body moving through a medium faster than the speed of sound in that medium (e.g., a sonic boom). That doesn't mean that one couldn't be shocked by earthquakes, though;)
I have always worked under the assumption that the best tool for the job is the tool that works best for you, whether you are a carpenter, a computer programmer, or a novelist. You don't like pen and paper; perhaps someone else finds that using pen and paper forces a certain amount of reflection while writing. I don't think the author here was claiming that his work was more pure because he used an Apple IIe or vi, but rather that he found the doo-dads of modern word processing to be a distraction. Perhaps some writers will find his article to be helpful; perhaps some won't. So why do you call people who don't write and think like you do stupid? I have seen many students at the tech school where I'm a graduate student laugh derisively at anyone who is not an engineer; it's dismaying to see similar attitudes in the creative community.
I think that "Earth-like" principally means that water can exist in a liquid form and probably that oxygen (or maybe something else?) is available for something like respiration. Water is practically unique in its properties, so it's difficult to think of any other substance that might take its place. Note that those microbes on the moon would be in a dormant form (spores?), not actively exchanging energy with their environment.
I suspect that this is just a spinoff of some research. Poke around on the MIT Media website, and you find various projects on music recognition and analysis. I'll bet this was some grad student sitting around saying "hey, we could take this thing we did and very easily make an audio stream out of it." Probably not the object of the project, just an amusing spin-off.
In line with what others have said in reply to this comment, they have probably done something akin to eigenvalue analysis. This math is stuff that's on the edge of my comprehension, but I bet they are taking a bunch of songs and extracting the time series that "best represents" all of the songs. Umm... basis functions... err principal components... something like that. I need to go study now...
I wouldn't be too fast in saying the agenda is "pro-pollution". The specifically note that endocrine disruptors may have effects at very low doses, contradicting (in this case) the principle of hormesis. Since some ingredients in common plastics are cited as possible endocrine disruptors, the plastics industry is not at all happy about the prospect of regulation.
As (another?) CO resident, I can probably tell you why we have high skin cancer rates here: altitude. Most of the population here resides at altitudes above 5000 feet, some much higher. Thus the filtering effects of those few thousand feet of air on UV radiation are lost. The ozone layer takes out much of the UV, but not all.
Note he said "10^10..., probably more". And yes, homeopathic medicines are diluted past the point where even one molecule of the original substance remains in the solution. Various promoters of homeopathy have tried to claim that water somehow "remembers" the former presence of the substance. A paper even made it into Nature, with much controversy. Their lab methods were later found to be lacking (Google for "Benveniste" and "Randi" for more information on this little episode).
Want to see some of the original discussion on this patent? Go to this discussion on the www-talk mailing list from 1995, including posts from Mike Doyle of Eolas and other players (including Pei Wei, whose work Microsoft claims as prior art).
If you look at claim 1 of the patent (5838906) , the key seems to be a combination of 4 things: a browser, hypermedia (text with "clickable" links), a client-server architecture over a network, and dowloadable program code, executed on the client, that communicates both with the browser and bi-directionally with the server. The Eolas technology page claims the first public demonstration in 1993. Was there anyone else who had all 4 components in one thing in 1993?
If you look at the Eolas website, you'll see that it was founded as a spinoff of the U. of California, and in fact UC was a plantiff in the suit. The founder of Eolas was the guy in the patent. Looks like he is/was involved in medical imaging applications.
Microsoft are a bunch of johnny-come-latelys. Kibo was doing this 12 years ago. MS is just a little more sophistimacated. (OK, it's not quite the same, but I thought a little credit should be given to He Who Greps).
This has been done; a few years ago, someone thought they saw a planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri (the dwarf companion to the binary Alpha system). But this has apparently not been confirmed. See this link for more information. As far as beaming transmissions at it, I'll bet somebody has done that. And I'll bet that radio telescopes have been pointed at it.
They are also probably responsible for more life on this planet than anything else combined. I've heard estimates that about 50% of Earth's biomass is made up of bacteria. And this article includes a couple of interesting statistics. It is estimated that there are 10^30 bacteria on Earth. However, it's also estimated that there are 10^31 (note that extra zero) bacteriophages (viruses that prey on bacteria). So, remember, your role in life is as a bacteria culturing medium. And the bacteria serve as munchies for the phages. I, for one, welcome our new viral overlords (sorry, couldn't resist).
There seems to be an impression in some comments that this machine has some sort of special design that's only applicable to climate modeling problems. In fact, this is a vector-based supercomputer, applicable to any problem where you need to perform vector operations (i.e., operating on large arrays of numbers in parallel).
Certain numerical operations can be performed blindingly fast on these types of machines. Each arithmetic processor on this machine has 72 vector registers, each of which can hold 256 elements. Then you can perform operations on all 256 elements of 1 or more registers simultaneously! If the algorithm can keep the vector units fed, they will scream.
Since keeping data flowing to the processors is critical to speed, the high-speed interconnects (~12GB/s) are a must for any problem that is not completely localized. It's all about matching the problem to the hardware. There may well be problems for which a commodity cluster just can't get the job done like this can. Remember that each node of a cluster consumes power, produces heat, and takes up space. The raw cost of hardware is not the only consideration.
IANAA (I Am Not An Archeologist), but I wonder if there's any chance that some of that DNA comes from the people digging him out. An untrained hiker or cop accidentally nicks a finger on an arrowhead, etc. I would assume that they can distinguish 5000 year old blood from 10 year old blood, but I don't know if this is true. I think this post is sufficiently uninformed for/.
At Yellowstone, one of the world's largest volcanoes, there are indications that something is going on. There's a big bulge on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, but nobody is sure how long it's been there. It's emitting lots of hot water, though, and there is plentiful evidence of large hydrothermal (i.e. superheated steam) eruptions in Yellowstone's recent past. Also, trails in Norris Geyser Basin have been closed because the ground temperature is near 200 degrees Farenheit. While this is probably hydrothermal, not magmatic, activity, if Yellowstone ever does decide to have another major eruption (as it last did 600K years ago), you can pretty much count on massive worldwide social disruption. Ever wonder what it would be like if all food production in the western U.S. were to go away?
Slashdot Mirror
More informative might be the CPU2000 benchmark figures at SPEC. Lots of CPUs tested for both integer and FP performance and throughput. LINPACK is a linear algebra library. I think the SPEC FP benchmark includes codes that do lots of linear algebra (among other things).
To be slightly pedantic, earthquake waves are not shock waves. They are perfectly ordinary elastic waves. A shock is produced by a body moving through a medium faster than the speed of sound in that medium (e.g., a sonic boom). That doesn't mean that one couldn't be shocked by earthquakes, though ;)
Hasn't the confectionery industry already done this? I hope these NASA folks know to watch out for Vermicious Knids.
I have always worked under the assumption that the best tool for the job is the tool that works best for you, whether you are a carpenter, a computer programmer, or a novelist. You don't like pen and paper; perhaps someone else finds that using pen and paper forces a certain amount of reflection while writing. I don't think the author here was claiming that his work was more pure because he used an Apple IIe or vi, but rather that he found the doo-dads of modern word processing to be a distraction. Perhaps some writers will find his article to be helpful; perhaps some won't. So why do you call people who don't write and think like you do stupid? I have seen many students at the tech school where I'm a graduate student laugh derisively at anyone who is not an engineer; it's dismaying to see similar attitudes in the creative community.
Good point re: oxygen. Where would hot methane plumes have come from, though?
I think that "Earth-like" principally means that water can exist in a liquid form and probably that oxygen (or maybe something else?) is available for something like respiration. Water is practically unique in its properties, so it's difficult to think of any other substance that might take its place. Note that those microbes on the moon would be in a dormant form (spores?), not actively exchanging energy with their environment.
This invention was created at the University of Tulsa, a private institution. There is a University of Oklahoma at Tulsa, but that's a different entity, part of the state university system.
The situation is much the same in my current hometown, where we have a University of Denver (private) and a University of Colorado-Denver (public).
I suspect that this is just a spinoff of some research. Poke around on the MIT Media website, and you find various projects on music recognition and analysis. I'll bet this was some grad student sitting around saying "hey, we could take this thing we did and very easily make an audio stream out of it." Probably not the object of the project, just an amusing spin-off.
In line with what others have said in reply to this comment, they have probably done something akin to eigenvalue analysis. This math is stuff that's on the edge of my comprehension, but I bet they are taking a bunch of songs and extracting the time series that "best represents" all of the songs. Umm... basis functions... err principal components... something like that. I need to go study now...
I wouldn't be too fast in saying the agenda is "pro-pollution". The specifically note that endocrine disruptors may have effects at very low doses, contradicting (in this case) the principle of hormesis. Since some ingredients in common plastics are cited as possible endocrine disruptors, the plastics industry is not at all happy about the prospect of regulation.
As (another?) CO resident, I can probably tell you why we have high skin cancer rates here: altitude. Most of the population here resides at altitudes above 5000 feet, some much higher. Thus the filtering effects of those few thousand feet of air on UV radiation are lost. The ozone layer takes out much of the UV, but not all.
Note he said "10^10..., probably more". And yes, homeopathic medicines are diluted past the point where even one molecule of the original substance remains in the solution. Various promoters of homeopathy have tried to claim that water somehow "remembers" the former presence of the substance. A paper even made it into Nature, with much controversy. Their lab methods were later found to be lacking (Google for "Benveniste" and "Randi" for more information on this little episode).
Want to see some of the original discussion on this patent? Go to this discussion on the www-talk mailing list from 1995, including posts from Mike Doyle of Eolas and other players (including Pei Wei, whose work Microsoft claims as prior art).
If you look at claim 1 of the patent (5838906) , the key seems to be a combination of 4 things: a browser, hypermedia (text with "clickable" links), a client-server architecture over a network, and dowloadable program code, executed on the client, that communicates both with the browser and bi-directionally with the server. The Eolas technology page claims the first public demonstration in 1993. Was there anyone else who had all 4 components in one thing in 1993?
If you look at the Eolas website, you'll see that it was founded as a spinoff of the U. of California, and in fact UC was a plantiff in the suit. The founder of Eolas was the guy in the patent. Looks like he is/was involved in medical imaging applications.
Microsoft are a bunch of johnny-come-latelys. Kibo was doing this 12 years ago. MS is just a little more sophistimacated. (OK, it's not quite the same, but I thought a little credit should be given to He Who Greps).
This has been done; a few years ago, someone thought they saw a planet in orbit around Proxima Centauri (the dwarf companion to the binary Alpha system). But this has apparently not been confirmed. See this link for more information. As far as beaming transmissions at it, I'll bet somebody has done that. And I'll bet that radio telescopes have been pointed at it.
They are also probably responsible for more life on this planet than anything else combined. I've heard estimates that about 50% of Earth's biomass is made up of bacteria. And this article includes a couple of interesting statistics. It is estimated that there are 10^30 bacteria on Earth. However, it's also estimated that there are 10^31 (note that extra zero) bacteriophages (viruses that prey on bacteria). So, remember, your role in life is as a bacteria culturing medium. And the bacteria serve as munchies for the phages. I, for one, welcome our new viral overlords (sorry, couldn't resist).
There seems to be an impression in some comments that this machine has some sort of special design that's only applicable to climate modeling problems. In fact, this is a vector-based supercomputer, applicable to any problem where you need to perform vector operations (i.e., operating on large arrays of numbers in parallel).
Certain numerical operations can be performed blindingly fast on these types of machines. Each arithmetic processor on this machine has 72 vector registers, each of which can hold 256 elements. Then you can perform operations on all 256 elements of 1 or more registers simultaneously! If the algorithm can keep the vector units fed, they will scream.
Since keeping data flowing to the processors is critical to speed, the high-speed interconnects (~12GB/s) are a must for any problem that is not completely localized. It's all about matching the problem to the hardware. There may well be problems for which a commodity cluster just can't get the job done like this can. Remember that each node of a cluster consumes power, produces heat, and takes up space. The raw cost of hardware is not the only consideration.
If you'd like to see what these people are up to for yourself, here is a link to their website. Lots of performance data, lists of projects, etc.
it's the full moon right now. Not the best time to be observing meteors.
Barbarian multiclassed with Rouge? You mean he was a drag queen?
IANAA (I Am Not An Archeologist), but I wonder if there's any chance that some of that DNA comes from the people digging him out. An untrained hiker or cop accidentally nicks a finger on an arrowhead, etc. I would assume that they can distinguish 5000 year old blood from 10 year old blood, but I don't know if this is true. I think this post is sufficiently uninformed for /.
At Yellowstone, one of the world's largest volcanoes, there are indications that something is going on. There's a big bulge on the bottom of Yellowstone Lake, but nobody is sure how long it's been there. It's emitting lots of hot water, though, and there is plentiful evidence of large hydrothermal (i.e. superheated steam) eruptions in Yellowstone's recent past. Also, trails in Norris Geyser Basin have been closed because the ground temperature is near 200 degrees Farenheit. While this is probably hydrothermal, not magmatic, activity, if Yellowstone ever does decide to have another major eruption (as it last did 600K years ago), you can pretty much count on massive worldwide social disruption. Ever wonder what it would be like if all food production in the western U.S. were to go away?
Building and installing Nethack ca. 1990 taught me much about makefiles. At least I knew C before I started, though.