Before anyone complains about why they make robotics fishes instead of say, a robotic trash picker or something more useful, robotics have been useful in helping us understand biology. While most of us tend to look at robots as tools to serve some purpose of ours, some scientists see robots as models. They formulate a theory and build a robotic model to tend if that theory works. Why not a simulation? Because in the paraphrased words of someone I can't remember, "When you build a robot, you get the rest of the world for free."
One very interesting example of this is when they made a robotic pike or some species of fish that propels through water in a more efficient way than we previously thought was possible. Someone came up with a theory that its movements generate eddies that help propel it along more efficiently. So, they built a robotic model to test this theory and it worked. It did swim like a pike. Does that mean that really is how pikes swim? Not necessarily but it does give some credibility to the theory.
In any case, building robotic models of lifeforms isn't as pointless as it may seem. It's not always just for entertainment.
Gates argued that Sony's new high-definition DVD standard, called Blu-ray, needed to be changed so it would work smoothly with personal computers running on Microsoft's Windows operating system.
How do you like it NOW Mr. Gates? Incompatibility keeping something from working on your platform? How do you like the taste of your own medicine?
My biggest issue is with people trying to make the Wikipedia a primary source. I don't want to have to reference/cite everything on there but people just going on and on about a topic based only on their opinion really annoys me. The Wikipedia is supposed to be informatic but not so indepth that it becomes a collection of theses. If I try to edit some of these things out, they just trump me with their expert knowledge. That's great; I can't argue with them but they're turning the Wikipedia into a public forum for their opinion which might not be the most accepted view. There has to be a balance between being so shallow as to be useless and so indepth that it's only useful to experts.
That's really cool but I've always found the Gentoo community to be extremely supportive. That's one of my reasons for using Gentoo. I've learned so much from using Gentoo and just getting help from the community. Before Gentoo, compiling the kernel scared me but the Gentoo Handbook was excellent. When I screwed up because I forgot to compile my NIC drivers, I was able to get help from the forums on how to to boot with the LiveCD and start from where I left off. I've had another user with a similar problem as me on how to use Kerberos with AD. After he found the solution, he messaged me to offer to lead me through it.
Even dual Opterons with 4 GBs of RAM cannot handle some of the Excel spreadsheets used in the financial industry. Many gamers can't afford or are unwilling to shell out $3,000+ every 12-18 months for a workstation but that's pennies for a finance firm.
Forgot to add, just in case anyone wonders what the experience of owning a robotic dog was like, it only made me wish I had a real puppy instead. That's about as far as the human-robot relationship got. It was somewhat disappointing since I had a dog back home.
I got one of the first models as part of my "severance package" from my employer. It had belonged to the our remote office where I was an intern. My boss told us if it disappear he wouldn't care. Anyways, I had it and fixed it up. It was somewhat amusing in its ability to track down it's special pink ball. But the thing was really damn slow. I mean it was very apparent that it was a robot in the way it moved. It wasn't fluid at all. But it was an amazing piece of engineering. When I got it the leg was broken. I tried to fix it but it was too hard. Thankfully the it was modular in design. I eventually ordered a new leg for it. The legs, tail, and even the head can come off and be changed.
I showed it to my AI professor once and he told me that Sony sent these out to universities when they first came out so researchers could play with them. Then he showed me the thing that made it so amazing. No matter how you oriented the AIBO, it can always stand upright. If you put it on its side, it will move its legs so it rolls over until its belly is on the ground and then proceed to get up. You can't put it with its back side down because of the head (Sony designed it that way on purpose). Its ability to stand up is probably the most amusing part. Otherwise, it wasn't all the great, IMO. I eventually gave it to boss' kids because I thought it would amuse and inspire them more than it did for me and hopefully one of them would go into AI someday.
You know, ever since reading that book, I've come to this silly notion that there might be other books like it. That's very, very rare. Maybe C the Programming Language is close. Most other programming books just can't strike a balance between being indepth but also to the point. I was reading a book on WMI the other day and the author proceed to explain the history of WMI! He started with SNMP and then DMI, etc. then he explains why schema, etc. What I wanted wasn't until most of the way through the book and even that chapter wasn't very good. I ended up just Googling and found the one example everyone provides for creating WMI providers. The code was maybe 3 pages long but that's all it took for me to do what I needed.
The Perl book was like those 3 pages with commentaries but for a few hundred pages instead. Even though Perl's philosophy is TIMTOWTDI, the book somehow manages to forsee any problems or questions that I would even up having as I read along. It gave a lot of details with useful examples but still managed to keep it all very central and never felt like he was straying from the topic. I got started on Perl with only some reading over dinner (I started, not mastered Perl at that point). Maybe it was Perl that made it so easy. I don't know. It was very amazing in retrospect. I still have that book and it was one of a small box of books I took with me when I moved after college even though I don't program in it anymore. That book is legendary.
Posts like these are what makes me read Slashdot. I would have probably never found the article because I'm not generally into web comics. All I read is PA. But nonetheless I found it interesting. Slashdot is how I stay current with all the aspects of geek pop culture, if there is such a thing. Geekdom is very diverse and broad indeed.
Seriously guys, not only is this a dupe, but the summary:
There is currently a major conflict between the US and the rest of the world about the control of the Internet...
is such an over statement that it's almost misleading. We're not going to war with the world over this. It's a dispute. The only war so far are the flame wars that broke out on Slashdot when this was posted the first time. The Iraq War was a major conflict; this is a dispute that might have serious consequences on the Internet. Let's be a little more precise.
No, I'm not new to Slashdot. Yes, I'll probably be modded down for this but this is just so silly.
1. Anyone know how high they can scale in terms of speed in the near future?
2. It seems like magneticism is somewhat harder to contain than electricity, even though they're the same thing. What I mean is that we heard about leakage in processors as we get smaller and smaller dies. How is interference from other units controlled/mitigated in these chips?
I am definitely NOT a physicists so these question might sound lame but this is the first time I've heard of these chips and the article don't say much. Maybe I'm getting way ahead right now. New computational technology is always very cool, which I hope these chips are in the literal sense as well.
Amen! I volunteered at the Dallas Convention Center a week after the storm. I can't say enough times how I HATE FEMA. They couldn't get their network connections works for a few days so we ended up doing their job by registering people on the FEMA site on our donated computers. One day, they just commandeered our PCs.
One of them told us, "People don't need Internet and email. They need money!" Yes, they need money but they also need to find their family too! You have no idea how helpful the Internet was to those people in locating each other, even though most were computer illiterate and had us operate the computers. Many thanks to Yahoo and MSNBC. The MSNBC site was extremely helpful the first night they got to Dallas because the Red Cross site wasn't very easy to use. It was a general disaster victim registration site that was slow and required your mother and father's names. Then by other organization's good intentions, we ended up with multiple sites that we need to search to find people. Finally Yahoo stepped in and created a web search that would search all the major ones.
Anyways, to the original poster, if you have no experience don't go! Donate material and help collect them but you won't be much help.
Modding my question up was probably the wrong thing to do but I don't think it was a redundant or even a moronic question since many of us have absolutely no experience or knowledge about clustering, other than hearing "Beowulf" being repeated over and over here. Given that, the question asks if Beowulf is the dominant cluster in the Linux world and if there are others, how do they compare? I don't see where in the article these questions are answered. Given that the first real reply to my question was modded up +4 informative, I think there were other readers who were also interested as well. Not all of us are cluster or Linux experts.
Your post made me shiver and realize how lucky I am to be in a well run Windows shop, which is possible as long as you hire the right guys and management doesn't get carried away with marketing and try to micromanage IT.
the machine would basically, putting it in Windows terms, core dump or blue screen at random.
Blue screen is a Windows thing but core dump is not.
Crest Electronics is trialling Microsoft's Windows Server Update Service, which allows automatic patching for the operating system and other Microsoft software on servers and desktop machines across a corporate network. Its benefits are one of the key reasons why Mr Horton stands by his decision to switch from Linux to Windows.
"We run Linux on our web server and for an accounting package with great success and we do use the auto-patching in those environments,"
I work in a Windows shop but we don't do automatic patching. We don't patch until we've done extensive testing on our own to make sure it works in our environment first. SUS/WUSS/whatever is great in the sense that it allows you to control how patches to your Windows workstations are distributed. You can change the workstations' auto-update behavior so they only update from your SUS servers, etc. But the automatic update thing, from what I've heard, is rarely used in a production environment. In fact, Microsoft gives you a considerable amount of control over its behavior, probably because in recognition of the dangers of auto updating in a production environment.
Mr Horton disagrees: "It might be fine for things like security patches, which don't impact SAP certification rules but with some patches you still actually have to check the release levels and then check against the SAP site. Otherwise SAP might ask you to roll back to the previous version before they will support it."
Give me a break! The same thing happens in the Windows environment. It took Bloomberg and our other vendors a while before they supported Windows XP SP2. When SP2 first came out, a lot of vendors blamed SP2 for problems that may or may not have been SP2's fault. It took Windows vendors a while to adpot SP2 as well.
In any case, the whole patching issue he takes with Linux seems absurd. Just a few days ago, I think our server guys patched their cluster with a Microsoft service pack. Now the cluster refuses to fail over properly. Patching in a production environment is ALWAYS a big headache if you want to do it right. Unfortunately for our server guys, we don't have a spare cluster sitting around for them to test patches on like they normally do with other servers.
Thanks. By components, you mean software components or hardware? What are some of these common components? What I'm trying to get at is if there is some way of kick starting a cluster computing project other than Beowulf (or I assume that's why it's well known), even if it means you have to do some in house development?
Jokes aside, when people say Linux cluster, do they usually mean Beowulf? Or are there other clusters and how do they compare? How difficult is it to setup a Beowulf cluster?
I don't see how anyone can argue against using Open Source in a democractic process or having the code be open to examination. Being open seems in line with the spirit of democracy and akin to the idea of transparency.
transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.
Closeness and secrecy tend to be associated with dictatorships and tyranny.
Byron Rashed, senior marketing communications manager of SSH Communications Security, claimed that SSH's product is better suited for enterprise-scale business applications than a similar open-source product from OpenSSH.
Come on. Stop feeding the troll. He's a marketing droid. He comes from a tradition of making outlandish claims or at best distortion of truth. It's his job to drive sales for SSH. We should treat what marketing people say the same way we treat any advertisement. Take it with a block of salt. Obviously an open source implementation of SSH competes, and have done so very successfuly, with SSH. This is their attempt to win back the market. It's not worth giving too much thought to.
My question is, do the developers suffer from the same Civilization Disease as the players? What I mean is telling yourself, "Just one more turn..." and the next thing you know, the sun is out again, the dog's starved to death, and your cloth is back in fashion again. I really hope not because I can't wait that long for Civ IV.
That little blog post had one minor insight: Employers want more hours and laptops help them achieve that by letting workers take work home. But it does nothing to back up its big claim of declining desktops. I've yet to see a laptop with the power equal to dual Xeons with 4 Gb of RAM. In the finance world, the trend is towards more powerful desktop. The gap between those workstations and laptop haven't been getting smaller. More importantly, there's another trend, more desktop space as in multiple monitors. We are using 4 21" LCDs. Some of our traders want more. So the gap might be widening in some instances. Also, the trend is not all that new. People have been taking work home in the form of papers for decades. So now they're just replacing work in paper form with work in laptop form. Lastly, how many people actually use laptops as their primary computer at work? It's usually consultants who do this.
In any case, minor insight, no better than some of the modded up comments I've read here. I don't see how that deserved a headline.
So if they censor words like "democracy", I take it that the Chinese cannot access their own constitution then since that word is right there in their preamble. Maybe it's better for the Chinese government that their own people can't read their constitution so they don't know how they're being robbed and cheated in plain sight.
Slashdot Mirror
I kid, I kid.
One very interesting example of this is when they made a robotic pike or some species of fish that propels through water in a more efficient way than we previously thought was possible. Someone came up with a theory that its movements generate eddies that help propel it along more efficiently. So, they built a robotic model to test this theory and it worked. It did swim like a pike. Does that mean that really is how pikes swim? Not necessarily but it does give some credibility to the theory.
In any case, building robotic models of lifeforms isn't as pointless as it may seem. It's not always just for entertainment.
How do you like it NOW Mr. Gates? Incompatibility keeping something from working on your platform? How do you like the taste of your own medicine?
My biggest issue is with people trying to make the Wikipedia a primary source. I don't want to have to reference/cite everything on there but people just going on and on about a topic based only on their opinion really annoys me. The Wikipedia is supposed to be informatic but not so indepth that it becomes a collection of theses. If I try to edit some of these things out, they just trump me with their expert knowledge. That's great; I can't argue with them but they're turning the Wikipedia into a public forum for their opinion which might not be the most accepted view. There has to be a balance between being so shallow as to be useless and so indepth that it's only useful to experts.
Unbelivable community unity.
Even dual Opterons with 4 GBs of RAM cannot handle some of the Excel spreadsheets used in the financial industry. Many gamers can't afford or are unwilling to shell out $3,000+ every 12-18 months for a workstation but that's pennies for a finance firm.
Forgot to add, just in case anyone wonders what the experience of owning a robotic dog was like, it only made me wish I had a real puppy instead. That's about as far as the human-robot relationship got. It was somewhat disappointing since I had a dog back home.
I showed it to my AI professor once and he told me that Sony sent these out to universities when they first came out so researchers could play with them. Then he showed me the thing that made it so amazing. No matter how you oriented the AIBO, it can always stand upright. If you put it on its side, it will move its legs so it rolls over until its belly is on the ground and then proceed to get up. You can't put it with its back side down because of the head (Sony designed it that way on purpose). Its ability to stand up is probably the most amusing part. Otherwise, it wasn't all the great, IMO. I eventually gave it to boss' kids because I thought it would amuse and inspire them more than it did for me and hopefully one of them would go into AI someday.
I checked Slashdot first and quite a bit more freqently than PA. I haven't even checked PA when I made that post.
The Perl book was like those 3 pages with commentaries but for a few hundred pages instead. Even though Perl's philosophy is TIMTOWTDI, the book somehow manages to forsee any problems or questions that I would even up having as I read along. It gave a lot of details with useful examples but still managed to keep it all very central and never felt like he was straying from the topic. I got started on Perl with only some reading over dinner (I started, not mastered Perl at that point). Maybe it was Perl that made it so easy. I don't know. It was very amazing in retrospect. I still have that book and it was one of a small box of books I took with me when I moved after college even though I don't program in it anymore. That book is legendary.
Posts like these are what makes me read Slashdot. I would have probably never found the article because I'm not generally into web comics. All I read is PA. But nonetheless I found it interesting. Slashdot is how I stay current with all the aspects of geek pop culture, if there is such a thing. Geekdom is very diverse and broad indeed.
There is currently a major conflict between the US and the rest of the world about the control of the Internet...
is such an over statement that it's almost misleading. We're not going to war with the world over this. It's a dispute. The only war so far are the flame wars that broke out on Slashdot when this was posted the first time. The Iraq War was a major conflict; this is a dispute that might have serious consequences on the Internet. Let's be a little more precise.
No, I'm not new to Slashdot. Yes, I'll probably be modded down for this but this is just so silly.
2. It seems like magneticism is somewhat harder to contain than electricity, even though they're the same thing. What I mean is that we heard about leakage in processors as we get smaller and smaller dies. How is interference from other units controlled/mitigated in these chips?
I am definitely NOT a physicists so these question might sound lame but this is the first time I've heard of these chips and the article don't say much. Maybe I'm getting way ahead right now. New computational technology is always very cool, which I hope these chips are in the literal sense as well.
One of them told us, "People don't need Internet and email. They need money!" Yes, they need money but they also need to find their family too! You have no idea how helpful the Internet was to those people in locating each other, even though most were computer illiterate and had us operate the computers. Many thanks to Yahoo and MSNBC. The MSNBC site was extremely helpful the first night they got to Dallas because the Red Cross site wasn't very easy to use. It was a general disaster victim registration site that was slow and required your mother and father's names. Then by other organization's good intentions, we ended up with multiple sites that we need to search to find people. Finally Yahoo stepped in and created a web search that would search all the major ones.
Anyways, to the original poster, if you have no experience don't go! Donate material and help collect them but you won't be much help.
Modding my question up was probably the wrong thing to do but I don't think it was a redundant or even a moronic question since many of us have absolutely no experience or knowledge about clustering, other than hearing "Beowulf" being repeated over and over here. Given that, the question asks if Beowulf is the dominant cluster in the Linux world and if there are others, how do they compare? I don't see where in the article these questions are answered. Given that the first real reply to my question was modded up +4 informative, I think there were other readers who were also interested as well. Not all of us are cluster or Linux experts.
Your post made me shiver and realize how lucky I am to be in a well run Windows shop, which is possible as long as you hire the right guys and management doesn't get carried away with marketing and try to micromanage IT.
Blue screen is a Windows thing but core dump is not.
Crest Electronics is trialling Microsoft's Windows Server Update Service, which allows automatic patching for the operating system and other Microsoft software on servers and desktop machines across a corporate network. Its benefits are one of the key reasons why Mr Horton stands by his decision to switch from Linux to Windows.
"We run Linux on our web server and for an accounting package with great success and we do use the auto-patching in those environments,"
I work in a Windows shop but we don't do automatic patching. We don't patch until we've done extensive testing on our own to make sure it works in our environment first. SUS/WUSS/whatever is great in the sense that it allows you to control how patches to your Windows workstations are distributed. You can change the workstations' auto-update behavior so they only update from your SUS servers, etc. But the automatic update thing, from what I've heard, is rarely used in a production environment. In fact, Microsoft gives you a considerable amount of control over its behavior, probably because in recognition of the dangers of auto updating in a production environment.
Mr Horton disagrees: "It might be fine for things like security patches, which don't impact SAP certification rules but with some patches you still actually have to check the release levels and then check against the SAP site. Otherwise SAP might ask you to roll back to the previous version before they will support it."
Give me a break! The same thing happens in the Windows environment. It took Bloomberg and our other vendors a while before they supported Windows XP SP2. When SP2 first came out, a lot of vendors blamed SP2 for problems that may or may not have been SP2's fault. It took Windows vendors a while to adpot SP2 as well.
In any case, the whole patching issue he takes with Linux seems absurd. Just a few days ago, I think our server guys patched their cluster with a Microsoft service pack. Now the cluster refuses to fail over properly. Patching in a production environment is ALWAYS a big headache if you want to do it right. Unfortunately for our server guys, we don't have a spare cluster sitting around for them to test patches on like they normally do with other servers.
Thanks. By components, you mean software components or hardware? What are some of these common components? What I'm trying to get at is if there is some way of kick starting a cluster computing project other than Beowulf (or I assume that's why it's well known), even if it means you have to do some in house development?
Jokes aside, when people say Linux cluster, do they usually mean Beowulf? Or are there other clusters and how do they compare? How difficult is it to setup a Beowulf cluster?
transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.
Closeness and secrecy tend to be associated with dictatorships and tyranny.
Damn. There goes Plan A.
Come on. Stop feeding the troll. He's a marketing droid. He comes from a tradition of making outlandish claims or at best distortion of truth. It's his job to drive sales for SSH. We should treat what marketing people say the same way we treat any advertisement. Take it with a block of salt. Obviously an open source implementation of SSH competes, and have done so very successfuly, with SSH. This is their attempt to win back the market. It's not worth giving too much thought to.
My question is, do the developers suffer from the same Civilization Disease as the players? What I mean is telling yourself, "Just one more turn..." and the next thing you know, the sun is out again, the dog's starved to death, and your cloth is back in fashion again. I really hope not because I can't wait that long for Civ IV.
In any case, minor insight, no better than some of the modded up comments I've read here. I don't see how that deserved a headline.
So if they censor words like "democracy", I take it that the Chinese cannot access their own constitution then since that word is right there in their preamble. Maybe it's better for the Chinese government that their own people can't read their constitution so they don't know how they're being robbed and cheated in plain sight.