I did the same thing with the Pixel (typing on it now). Put fedora 18 on it with kernel 3.9, which supports the trackpad. I did this after reading Linus Torvalds' experience doing the same thing, and being in a situation where my eeePC was feeling rather old and clunky. The screen on the Pixel is fantastic - simply stunning. Is it worth $1300? With 4 GB of RAM and a 32 GB SSD, probably not for most people. I'm a scientist who does a lot of coding and graphical visualization, most of which is run on other computers, and it has proved to be worth it for me. I really like the feel of the keyboard, although I miss some of the keys that are on a standard keyboard.
The PIxel is a strange beast, but Google has the money to try these things and if the screen on this thing becomes more common it will be good for everyone - although the touch capability of the screen doesn't do anything for me (who wants to put fingerprints on their laptop!).
College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback.
Oh there is feedback all right - it's called student opinion surveys. For those of us on the tenure track, getting bad enough feedback can cost you tenure - and your job.
I am an early user on the Blue Waters petaflop machine (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/). Mean time to failure for such a huge machine becomes a real issue when you have about 700,000 cores and who knows how many spinning hard drives and all that network infrastructure. However I and my research collaborators have managed to get jobs through that take on the order of 12 hours of wallclock time without a hardware fault, which is amazing IMO. I do wonder whether we can simply continue to expand the same basic computing infrastructure to a 10-20 PFLOP machine. There will have to be redundancy built into the hardware of any such machine such that if a compute node goes offline it seamlessly offloads it to another. Writing fault tolerant massively parallel code is possible but very challenging and most scientists won't or can't do it.
I had no idea getting dressed was so mentally taxing to some people.
The president, I can understand (he's always in the public eye) but the others? Whatever, dudes, you have/had more money than God, if you want to wear the same clothes every day, knock yourself out, but don't give me this bullshit about expending energy on deciding what socks to put on in the morning.
I was in Boulder, Colorado for a while a couple years back. Those bumper stickers are everywhere. Then again, it's easy to proclaim platitudes when you are wealthy enough to be able to afford to live in Boulder.
One day out of the corner of my eye I saw, not "COEXIST", but "CRAPFEST". Every time I see one of those dopey bumper stickers, I think, CRAPFEST. Which is kind of what organized religions really are, a big, giant crapfest.
Yes, it's 80 pages long and still requires a fair amount of context.
I am so sick and tired of idiots blathering on about (a) lazy selfish goddammed overpaid teachers or (b) without unions we'd all be working 752 days a week in sweatshops.
I'm in a union, been down this road before, it sucked ass. I still have a love/hate relationship with unions. But unlike binary data, things in the real world are rarely black and white.
Andrew C. Oliver is a professional cat herder who moonlights as a software consultant. He started programming when he was 8 and cut his teeth on GW Basic, BASICA, and dBase III+. He is most known for founding the POI project, which is now hosted at Apache. He also was one of the early developers at JBoss before it merged with Red Hat. He is a former board member and current helper at the Open Source Initiative. He is president and founder of Open Software Integrators, a professional services firm with offices in Durham, N.C., and Chicago, Ill.
When I first read about their CS department going away, I wondered immediately if there is more to the story than meets the eye. At my university we have a hugely dysfunctional CS department - many faculty blatantly abuse their tenure. They just got their MS program cut, in fact, but nobody's complaining because everyone knows it was a lousy program due to lousy faculty. I have to wonder if there are reasons for dismantling the program that go far beyond budgetary issues. If it were a healthy department I doubt it would be on the chopping block in the first place. But, I speculate.
Getting rid of a department doesn't mean you get rid of all the courses being taught, nor does it mean you even get rid of the degree. I suspect many if not most faculty will be absorbed into other departments if they do end up deleting the department. For instance, many CS faculty could end up in engineering or math.
All I'm saying is these situations are generally more complex than they appear on the surface. Yes, public universities are in bad shape these days, but one thing I've noticed having watched this happen around me is that situations like this really bring to light some of the existing problems that were there all along but were manageable until the axe came down.
fraud is rampant and that people honestly trying to do science are less likely to be recognized and obtain tenure
Dr. Weatherman PhD here. The above is mostly rubbish amplified by the media and those philosophers in Insane Clown Posse.
The first thing you need to realize is that all universities are different, and the requirements for obtaining tenure vary dramatically from place to place. I would presume for condensed matter physics you're not going to be at a small liberal arts college, teaching a heavy load to undergraduates, but you will be seeking out a research intensive (call them R1) university where you will, if you are lucky, interview well and get an offer with a nice startup package so you can begin to build your research program. While I am tenured at a school which tries to be both undergrad focused and research focused (the best - or worst - of both worlds) I have a pretty good feeling for what the R1 schools require. While it still varies from place to place, your national and international reputation in the field will be a major factor in determining tenure, as well as your ability to land grants and publish (the latter tends to help the former).
If I were you, I'd be asking myself the following questions: Am I willing to work 60-80 hours a week for 7 years at (comparitively speaking) low pay doing what is necessary to obtain tenure? And doing basically the same things afterwards (maybe at a slightly less vigorous clip) to obtain promotion etc.? What aspects of academia interest you the most - research? Teaching? Service? Are you willing to post-doc for a few years while putting your resume out there and interviewing? Would you settle for a non-faculty position at a research lab?The job market - in general - is pretty bad right now in academia in the US. I don't know specifically about your specific field of interest, but there are generally a lot more applicants than open positions, and in many cases, retirements are not being filled with new searches at state funded schools whose state funding has been shrinking every year. If I were you, I'd go for it and get the PhD if it's what you love to do. As much as I bitch about the job to my colleagues I consider myself to be a lucky bastard to have such a cool job where I get to do nifty science (for me, on supercomputers) and do everything I can to get those around eager weather nerd undergrads onto their own career path, whether it be grad school, the private sector, or, god help me, TV. So anyway I say go for it if you really really love learning new things and want to never stop trying to answer questions about the world around you. For me, that's mostly what it's all about.
I live in Lower Asscrack (small midwestern city) on a 1/4 acre lot and my wife and I have been composting for years. We rake the leaves and use them as mulch for the flowerbeds and garden, and compost vegetables etc. which is raked into the soil in the spring. We aren't serious about gardening but it's really no big deal and it's kind of neat to see a hundred pounds of vegetable matter/plants etc. turn into nice rich black peaty compost. After doing this for about 10 years we have some excellent soil as the leaves from years ago have turned into topsoil by now.
I lived in Boulder, CO for a while recently. There are like 5 recycle buckets. But you figure it out. For those people who are moaning about having to figure out what recyclables go where: EABOD and STFU you whiny vaginas. Such a small inconvenience clearly will not ruin you busy important lives.
Neat, but for any job that isn't embarrassingly parallel, communication latency and speed will kill you when your nodes are spread across continents. If you're not doing any communication, well then groovy. Usually these large core servers are only 'earning their keep' when you're taking advantage of very fast interconnect hardware and doing things that can't be done by just a bunch of CPUs.
Does the UK/Europe have federally funded, shared computational resources for researchers? In the US we have what used to be called the Teragrid (now XSEDE) which is a network of supercomputers that are available for researchers. You have to write a proposal for machine time, but they're not all that difficult to get. The main disadvantage is that you have to submit your jobs via a queueing system, so your jobs usually don't start right away (having your own hardware does have its advantages) but the big shared resources have their advantages - you don't have to worry about maintenance, they usually have reliable archival resources, and every X years they usually replace the hardware with something faster.
I stopped reading after the author said three times in the first page that science was "proving" this or that. Unless you are a mathematician, you are not proving anything. So I can't really take this guy too seriously.
The scientific process is basically about experimenting/analyzing/hypothesizing/ruminating. Good scientists are overwhelming conservative in their conclusions because good scientists understand "the box" within which they are working.
The fact that early studies are overturned with new analysis is exactly what makes the scientific process so powerful. When new studies call into question the results of earlier studies it is called progress. If a new study shows that a previous study used questionable statistical approaches, then future reviewers can cite this new knowledge to keep new studies from using these flawed approaches. The scientific process and the peer-review process is certainly not perfect, but I have yet to hear from its detractors of a better alternative.
I don't recall anything during the billions of years prior to being born. I suspect after I die it will be similar. Just nothing, and no consciousness to experience it.
Being alive is really quite a trip and a rare gift. I plan on making the best of it. Life is for the living.
Actually, there are only a handful of variables in a weather simulation. For a typical cloud-scale simulation you have the three components of wind, moisture, temperature, pressure, and precipitation variables. Say, 13 variables. That is not why you need supercomputers.
The reason you need supercomputers to do weather simulations is all about resolution, both spatial and temporal. Weather simulations break the atmosphere into cubes, and the more cubes you have, the better you resolve the flow. All weather simulations are underresolved; to properly model the turbulent flow in the atmosphere you need to get down to cubes that are roughly a centimeter on a side. As you double the resolution (halve the length of each of the four lines that makes up a cube face) you require eight times as many cubes. In weatherspeak, we talk about gridpoints instead of cubes where it's understood that each gridpoint represents the center of one of these cubes. In the computer model, they are represented as three dimensional floating (or double precision) point arrays. So take a 3D array and double the number of calculations on each of the thee for: loops, and you've got eight times as many calculations and eight times more memory required.
And it gets worse. When you double the resolutions, you need to halve the time step. Weather models step forward in time in discrete intervals, and now in addition to more calculations for each time step (eight times as many for doubling the resolution in three dimensions) now you need to go in steps that are half as large. This means 16 times more calculations, and eight times as much memory, to double the resolution.
And many of the calculations that are being made in the innermost loop involve things like divides, non-integers powers, square roots, etc... expensive calculations. And then because it's a massively parallel simulation, you have to do internode communications - which adds overhead and can be rather a bother. Then there's the hundreds of TB of data the model is dumping to disk. Now let's render that, shall we? Somebody call Pixar.
I am working on a project to simulation a thunderstorm which will produce a tornado in a "natural" way. The tornado needs to be adequately resolved. This simulations will have grid spacing of 10 meters. It requires a computer which hasn't been fully built yet (Blue Waters, in Urbana, google it). The time step will be 0.01 seconds, and the model will run for two hours of model time. It will take days of wallclock time. Keep in mind this model will have a physical domain not much bigger than about half the area of Oklahoma. Imagine global climate modeling now, and now you're talking 4 km resolution being all you can do.
This is why we need supercomputers to do high resolution weather simulations.
Yep. Any "open distributed alternative" will fall flat because what makes the mother of all social networking site useful, is that everybody frickin' uses it. You could delete your account in protest and start up OpenFrobnitzBook or whatever and have fun updating your status to the other pathetic losers who also deleted their facebook accounts out of protest.
Two easy facebook rules:
1. Tweak your privacy options to your liking 2. Before you post, pretend your future (or current) employer is reading
This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.
Yes, they're great, I have one running Voyage Linux (stripped down Debian).
But Alix doesn't have gigabit ethernet, which sucks. Also, Linux has major problems with wireless G (google stuck beacon) so I'm hesitant to try the same approach with N.
Professors should post their slides on the web, and students should spend their time listening, thinking, and asking questions instead of writing. Anything less and students become mere stenographers, only retaining long enough to commit to paper.
You are assuming we all lecture from that awful abomination known as PowerPoint.
For some of my classes that works fine, and I do post them when I use them.
For thermodynamics it doesn't. You're going to have to watch me work through the equations on the whiteboard, and that's from paper notes and my head.
Slashdot Mirror
Piece of cake, right?
I did the same thing with the Pixel (typing on it now). Put fedora 18 on it with kernel 3.9, which supports the trackpad. I did this after reading Linus Torvalds' experience doing the same thing, and being in a situation where my eeePC was feeling rather old and clunky. The screen on the Pixel is fantastic - simply stunning. Is it worth $1300? With 4 GB of RAM and a 32 GB SSD, probably not for most people. I'm a scientist who does a lot of coding and graphical visualization, most of which is run on other computers, and it has proved to be worth it for me. I really like the feel of the keyboard, although I miss some of the keys that are on a standard keyboard.
The PIxel is a strange beast, but Google has the money to try these things and if the screen on this thing becomes more common it will be good for everyone - although the touch capability of the screen doesn't do anything for me (who wants to put fingerprints on their laptop!).
College professors sing to a captive audience with no feedback.
Oh there is feedback all right - it's called student opinion surveys. For those of us on the tenure track, getting bad enough feedback can cost you tenure - and your job.
I am an early user on the Blue Waters petaflop machine (http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/BlueWaters/). Mean time to failure for such a huge machine becomes a real issue when you have about 700,000 cores and who knows how many spinning hard drives and all that network infrastructure. However I and my research collaborators have managed to get jobs through that take on the order of 12 hours of wallclock time without a hardware fault, which is amazing IMO. I do wonder whether we can simply continue to expand the same basic computing infrastructure to a 10-20 PFLOP machine. There will have to be redundancy built into the hardware of any such machine such that if a compute node goes offline it seamlessly offloads it to another. Writing fault tolerant massively parallel code is possible but very challenging and most scientists won't or can't do it.
I had no idea getting dressed was so mentally taxing to some people.
The president, I can understand (he's always in the public eye) but the others? Whatever, dudes, you have/had more money than God, if you want to wear the same clothes every day, knock yourself out, but don't give me this bullshit about expending energy on deciding what socks to put on in the morning.
I was in Boulder, Colorado for a while a couple years back. Those bumper stickers are everywhere. Then again, it's easy to proclaim platitudes when you are wealthy enough to be able to afford to live in Boulder.
One day out of the corner of my eye I saw, not "COEXIST", but "CRAPFEST". Every time I see one of those dopey bumper stickers, I think, CRAPFEST. Which is kind of what organized religions really are, a big, giant crapfest.
First of all, WTF does this have to do with tech? This is one of the most inappropriate stories for a News for Nerds site.
But, since we're all nerds, we do our homework, right?
Anyone who wants to engage in an informed discussion about this issue should, at the very least, read the fact finder's report:
http://www.ctunet.com/blog/text/FactFinderCOMPLETE.pdf
Yes, it's 80 pages long and still requires a fair amount of context.
I am so sick and tired of idiots blathering on about (a) lazy selfish goddammed overpaid teachers or (b) without unions we'd all be working 752 days a week in sweatshops.
I'm in a union, been down this road before, it sucked ass. I still have a love/hate relationship with unions. But unlike binary data, things in the real world are rarely black and white.
Wait, I'm an idiot. He specifically says he doesn't have a degree. Stupid small font. Carry on.
Andrew C. Oliver is a professional cat herder who moonlights as a software consultant. He started programming when he was 8 and cut his teeth on GW Basic, BASICA, and dBase III+. He is most known for founding the POI project, which is now hosted at Apache. He also was one of the early developers at JBoss before it merged with Red Hat. He is a former board member and current helper at the Open Source Initiative. He is president and founder of Open Software Integrators, a professional services firm with offices in Durham, N.C., and Chicago, Ill.
And he has a degree in computer science.
They should have used self-sealing stem bolts, they don't have this problem.
No. Fucking. Way.
When I first read about their CS department going away, I wondered immediately if there is more to the story than meets the eye. At my university we have a hugely dysfunctional CS department - many faculty blatantly abuse their tenure. They just got their MS program cut, in fact, but nobody's complaining because everyone knows it was a lousy program due to lousy faculty. I have to wonder if there are reasons for dismantling the program that go far beyond budgetary issues. If it were a healthy department I doubt it would be on the chopping block in the first place. But, I speculate.
Getting rid of a department doesn't mean you get rid of all the courses being taught, nor does it mean you even get rid of the degree. I suspect many if not most faculty will be absorbed into other departments if they do end up deleting the department. For instance, many CS faculty could end up in engineering or math.
All I'm saying is these situations are generally more complex than they appear on the surface. Yes, public universities are in bad shape these days, but one thing I've noticed having watched this happen around me is that situations like this really bring to light some of the existing problems that were there all along but were manageable until the axe came down.
fraud is rampant and that people honestly trying to do science are less likely to be recognized and obtain tenure
Dr. Weatherman PhD here. The above is mostly rubbish amplified by the media and those philosophers in Insane Clown Posse.
The first thing you need to realize is that all universities are different, and the requirements for obtaining tenure vary dramatically from place to place. I would presume for condensed matter physics you're not going to be at a small liberal arts college, teaching a heavy load to undergraduates, but you will be seeking out a research intensive (call them R1) university where you will, if you are lucky, interview well and get an offer with a nice startup package so you can begin to build your research program. While I am tenured at a school which tries to be both undergrad focused and research focused (the best - or worst - of both worlds) I have a pretty good feeling for what the R1 schools require. While it still varies from place to place, your national and international reputation in the field will be a major factor in determining tenure, as well as your ability to land grants and publish (the latter tends to help the former).
If I were you, I'd be asking myself the following questions: Am I willing to work 60-80 hours a week for 7 years at (comparitively speaking) low pay doing what is necessary to obtain tenure? And doing basically the same things afterwards (maybe at a slightly less vigorous clip) to obtain promotion etc.? What aspects of academia interest you the most - research? Teaching? Service? Are you willing to post-doc for a few years while putting your resume out there and interviewing? Would you settle for a non-faculty position at a research lab?The job market - in general - is pretty bad right now in academia in the US. I don't know specifically about your specific field of interest, but there are generally a lot more applicants than open positions, and in many cases, retirements are not being filled with new searches at state funded schools whose state funding has been shrinking every year. If I were you, I'd go for it and get the PhD if it's what you love to do. As much as I bitch about the job to my colleagues I consider myself to be a lucky bastard to have such a cool job where I get to do nifty science (for me, on supercomputers) and do everything I can to get those around eager weather nerd undergrads onto their own career path, whether it be grad school, the private sector, or, god help me, TV. So anyway I say go for it if you really really love learning new things and want to never stop trying to answer questions about the world around you. For me, that's mostly what it's all about.
I live in Lower Asscrack (small midwestern city) on a 1/4 acre lot and my wife and I have been composting for years. We rake the leaves and use them as mulch for the flowerbeds and garden, and compost vegetables etc. which is raked into the soil in the spring. We aren't serious about gardening but it's really no big deal and it's kind of neat to see a hundred pounds of vegetable matter/plants etc. turn into nice rich black peaty compost. After doing this for about 10 years we have some excellent soil as the leaves from years ago have turned into topsoil by now.
I lived in Boulder, CO for a while recently. There are like 5 recycle buckets. But you figure it out. For those people who are moaning about having to figure out what recyclables go where: EABOD and STFU you whiny vaginas. Such a small inconvenience clearly will not ruin you busy important lives.
Neat, but for any job that isn't embarrassingly parallel, communication latency and speed will kill you when your nodes are spread across continents. If you're not doing any communication, well then groovy. Usually these large core servers are only 'earning their keep' when you're taking advantage of very fast interconnect hardware and doing things that can't be done by just a bunch of CPUs.
Does the UK/Europe have federally funded, shared computational resources for researchers? In the US we have what used to be called the Teragrid (now XSEDE) which is a network of supercomputers that are available for researchers. You have to write a proposal for machine time, but they're not all that difficult to get. The main disadvantage is that you have to submit your jobs via a queueing system, so your jobs usually don't start right away (having your own hardware does have its advantages) but the big shared resources have their advantages - you don't have to worry about maintenance, they usually have reliable archival resources, and every X years they usually replace the hardware with something faster.
I stopped reading after the author said three times in the first page that science was "proving" this or that. Unless you are a mathematician, you are not proving anything. So I can't really take this guy too seriously.
The scientific process is basically about experimenting/analyzing/hypothesizing/ruminating. Good scientists are overwhelming conservative in their conclusions because good scientists understand "the box" within which they are working.
The fact that early studies are overturned with new analysis is exactly what makes the scientific process so powerful. When new studies call into question the results of earlier studies it is called progress. If a new study shows that a previous study used questionable statistical approaches, then future reviewers can cite this new knowledge to keep new studies from using these flawed approaches. The scientific process and the peer-review process is certainly not perfect, but I have yet to hear from its detractors of a better alternative.
I don't recall anything during the billions of years prior to being born. I suspect after I die it will be similar. Just nothing, and no consciousness to experience it.
Being alive is really quite a trip and a rare gift. I plan on making the best of it. Life is for the living.
No mention of the 6,475,248 correct statements in the report.
Actually, there are only a handful of variables in a weather simulation. For a typical cloud-scale simulation you have the three components of wind, moisture, temperature, pressure, and precipitation variables. Say, 13 variables. That is not why you need supercomputers.
The reason you need supercomputers to do weather simulations is all about resolution, both spatial and temporal. Weather simulations break the atmosphere into cubes, and the more cubes you have, the better you resolve the flow. All weather simulations are underresolved; to properly model the turbulent flow in the atmosphere you need to get down to cubes that are roughly a centimeter on a side. As you double the resolution (halve the length of each of the four lines that makes up a cube face) you require eight times as many cubes. In weatherspeak, we talk about gridpoints instead of cubes where it's understood that each gridpoint represents the center of one of these cubes. In the computer model, they are represented as three dimensional floating (or double precision) point arrays. So take a 3D array and double the number of calculations on each of the thee for: loops, and you've got eight times as many calculations and eight times more memory required.
And it gets worse. When you double the resolutions, you need to halve the time step. Weather models step forward in time in discrete intervals, and now in addition to more calculations for each time step (eight times as many for doubling the resolution in three dimensions) now you need to go in steps that are half as large. This means 16 times more calculations, and eight times as much memory, to double the resolution.
And many of the calculations that are being made in the innermost loop involve things like divides, non-integers powers, square roots, etc... expensive calculations. And then because it's a massively parallel simulation, you have to do internode communications - which adds overhead and can be rather a bother. Then there's the hundreds of TB of data the model is dumping to disk. Now let's render that, shall we? Somebody call Pixar.
I am working on a project to simulation a thunderstorm which will produce a tornado in a "natural" way. The tornado needs to be adequately resolved. This simulations will have grid spacing of 10 meters. It requires a computer which hasn't been fully built yet (Blue Waters, in Urbana, google it). The time step will be 0.01 seconds, and the model will run for two hours of model time. It will take days of wallclock time. Keep in mind this model will have a physical domain not much bigger than about half the area of Oklahoma. Imagine global climate modeling now, and now you're talking 4 km resolution being all you can do.
This is why we need supercomputers to do high resolution weather simulations.
Yep. Any "open distributed alternative" will fall flat because what makes the mother of all social networking site useful, is that everybody frickin' uses it. You could delete your account in protest and start up OpenFrobnitzBook or whatever and have fun updating your status to the other pathetic losers who also deleted their facebook accounts out of protest.
Two easy facebook rules:
1. Tweak your privacy options to your liking
2. Before you post, pretend your future (or current) employer is reading
This will assist you in deciding whether it's a good idea to post those hilarious drunken half-naked pictures of you groping that dude dressed up in a Grimace costume.
Yes, they're great, I have one running Voyage Linux (stripped down Debian).
But Alix doesn't have gigabit ethernet, which sucks. Also, Linux has major problems with wireless G (google stuck beacon) so I'm hesitant to try the same approach with N.
Pretty simple, really. In an authoritarian environment, if you undermine authority, authority will come down on you.
Professors should post their slides on the web, and students should spend their time listening, thinking, and asking questions instead of writing. Anything less and students become mere stenographers, only retaining long enough to commit to paper.
You are assuming we all lecture from that awful abomination known as PowerPoint.
For some of my classes that works fine, and I do post them when I use them.
For thermodynamics it doesn't. You're going to have to watch me work through the equations on the whiteboard, and that's from paper notes and my head.
I thought it was a sweet ad. At the end, though, I had him googling "divorce lawyer."