On Par Or No, Vector CPUs Got Cluster-fucked
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 1
For around about the last five years, it didn't matter whether clusters were the best or even a reasonable solution to a number of problems, which I'm not sure was only 10% of the then market.
AFAIK, the cluster proponents sold the NSF and the DoD's HPC office on the idea that they would solve the limitations of "pile of PC" systems in software, the result being that both organizations basically mandated clusters for all new projects. Imagine the CIO of an aerospace firm requiring WinNT henceforth for any application of computing resources and you get the idea.
The net result was that advances in vector computing stopped in the US. SGI sold a handful of existing Crays, but that was it. Otherwise, you needed to go to NEC, Fujitsu, or Siemens for iron. The only reason Cray has even a prayer is because there are one or two agencies of the US Federal government that need up to date vector processing, and ain't gonna buy from a foreign supplier that may either cut 'em off or screw with the systems for political reasons.
So, while on one hand Becker and his buddies provided a great service to the difusion of parallel applications to a wider market, their politicking to be the high end solution end-all be-all moved the development and manufacture of high-end systems offshore. Becker is the Sam Walton of parallel computing. Good job, brother.
Although many parties and interest groups field Presidential candidates for PR and to motivate the rank and file, ultimately a party needs executives and legislators at the Federal, State, and local level to move on it's agenda.
What progress has the Libertarian Party made in this regard? How many US elective offices of any sort are currently held by people who ran as a Libertarian, and are registered as a Libertarian or Independent?
All Dr. Samuelson is saying is that when you move value-added activities out of the US, the capital and labor thereby freed for other things ain't neccessarily going to go on to create even greater value doing something else. This should be obvious.
That it's not is because most senior politicians, media moguls, and the economists they put on the air keep parroting the party line stated by Dr. Bhagwati:
Off shoring yields net economic losses only when foreign nations are closing the innovation gap with the United States.
The above is true.
"But we can change the terms of trade by moving up the technology ladder,"
The above is an assumption. If the assumption is wrong, we're fucked.
The policy implications, he added, include increased investment in science, research and education.
True, and increasingly, the capital to do R&R is moving out of the US. Meanwhile, funding for education ain't happening. Investors and power brokers have decided to draw on the "education equity" created elsewhere, and that didn't cost them a thing. Back in the US, rather than make education happen over a broad base, more and more people are focusing on cutting their kid and their taxes out of the equation. This will leave us with fewer bright lights surrounded by more dim bulbs. Not a winning scenario.
And Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs.
So where are we going to get the money for that? Tax the added profits back out of the offshoring corp? No, tax those of us still working in the US.
Ah, gotcha. Now I can feel free to split hairs. Most of the rockets out of Vandenberg are satellite launches. Many are randomly selected ICBMs from the arsenal to see how well they're aging, and give the launch crews some practice. A few are targets for the ABM test launches out on Kwaj, about 1000 miles southwest of me. So, none of the launches you're watching are ineffective, unless they go into the drink before their time.
As for ABMs themselves, to say they're ineffective against decoys broadbrushes the topic a bit, IHO. Missiles based in Alaska will have this problem, because the warheads are still exoatmospheric. If, at some point, we base on the mainland, or heavens be, out here in the 50th state, the RVs will be dropping into air and rapidly sorting themselves out. In any case, the Chinese aren't in a position to poop 500 missiles yet. Anybody other than the Russians are going to be sending a very limited package. Given that non-proliferation has had it's day, it seems dumb to continue leaving ourselves wide open. Just how much is worthwhile to spend will naturally be a bone of contention. Whether someone tries to slip a nuke in the back door on a container doesn't negate the utility of protecting the front.
Rather than just fly off the handle with assumptions, I'll ask what "not effective" means. Are the satellites not achieving orbit? Are the ICBM RVs not making it to Kwaj? Usually?;)
Granted, it's crappy opsec, but there's nothing to be done about the fact that a major spaceport is run next to a metro area of 20mil, and this ain't the PRC. Due to the location, the USAF has published mariner's and aviator's alerts for years. As another post pointed out, the exact launch window isn't bandied about.
...and while we're at providing the back story, the reasons Quark dropped the ball porting Xpress to OS X are these:
1) The CEO preferred to milk the Mac market for a while longer, which may have in part been because...
2) The development positions (but not the developers) were moved to India at or immediately before the start of the port effort. The new crew had serious problems getting up the learning curve for the legacy Xpress code and OS X simultanously.
In fact, the whole sorry story is a case study for when not to offshore a software project.
...at first you will need a highend expensive player, and later you'll be able to purchase a fully functional chinese player for a fraction of the price.
A side note: all dvd drives and players are made in China. There may be some stereo tweeks out there doing custom boxes, but the drives are all sourced from the same 10 or so plants.
Of course, they'll start innovating, too, but what's wrong with that?...
And when they start catching up to us there, then what? Of course, at a certain point, they will catch up to us, but so what?... But that won't be for a very long time.
Yeah, I know, inhabitants of large industrious nations always think their time in the sun will last forever. And yet, they never do. Even the Indians and the Chinese, which have seen their nations come and go big time over the last 2K years or so. And that thing or things that takes them out of the limelight always plays out a bit differently each time. Watching the US now reminds me of Spain after having grown fat on the riches of the New World, just before their loooooong fall.
It just pisses me off to listen to the excuses why we dive head first into waters we know not.
I'll give credit to our dear analyst for actually trying to reason thru why offshoring everything in sight is a good thing, rather than just waving her hands. However, this just makes it clearer than she's full of shit.
Example #1: Design and interface must be done together with the customer, but coding and maintenance do not require close proximity with customers and can be done by less costly programmers abroad. The higher-wage jobs, involving design and interface, must still be performed in the U.S.
Good try, but wrong. There are times when the designer and the coding monkey can be safely separated, but in general you're asking for trouble. Prepare to be IMing a lot. The offshore outfits are becoming better designers in any case, and soon the US designer's employer is going to be shipping his/her job out to be where the code is written.
Example #2: The value to the U.S. economy of cheaper outsourced software and IT services is that it reduces the price of customized software. Econometric estimates are that, to an even greater degree than IT hardware, demand for software and services increases more than one-for-one with reductions in price. Therefore, as prices fall, demand for services and software rises more than one-for-one, diffusing IT into the lagging sectors and deepening the use of IT in the leading sectors, thus increasing demand for workers with IT skills in all sectors.
So with cheap custom software, more businesses will use it and the user employees become computer skilled. The first assumption I'll buy into, assuming that an easy and cheap local consultant is available at the start of the coding chain. If this plays out to the scale she thinks, therein lies the benefit to US IT workers. The second assumption is complete crap. Someone using a customized Access database front end is no more "computer literate" than someone using Word, all else being equal.
Example #3: Meanwhile, U.S. IT jobs continue to move up the IT skills ladder. Demand increases for workers with the skills needed to design, customize, and utilize IT applications...
Nope. This assumes the US always holds the high ground. However, as more development and design occurs overseas, and the host countries become ever more developed and self-sufficient, this falls apart. They sell to us, and by and large don't need anything back... except our increasingly worthless dollars.
I wasn't too encouraged when I read the physorg.com spam filter story, noticing that two of their top 5 news stories in the sidebar were "Researchers say Tunguska Event was an UFO Crash: Debris of Alien Spaceship found", and "Tunguska Event: New Details and Sensational Theory". Too bad the links pointed to subscriber-only pages. Has The Enquirer spun off science/tech reporting to a new site?
Re: the brain surgeons that managed to slip crap papers by their HS English instructors: good for you! Like a previous poster said, How many more comparitive literature people do we really need these days? It's not like they have many job prospects or much to really contribute to society at large.
This explains why the superior writing and speaking abilities I developed in seminar during my BA Political Science moved me ahead of my comparatively inarticulate peers during and after my BSCS. Jesus, if you're just looking for a trade, try ITT.
I don't see why some conservatives spend so much time grousing about students being molded by commie fag profs. When students are so busy triaging "learning" out of the equation, why worry?
Using non-idiomatic English when emailing non-English speaking ISPs usually works, since there's usually either someone in the office who can parse standard English, or they can get a pretty good translation outta the Fish or Google.
Occasionally, I've attempted putting in the extra work and translated before sending. My half-assed method is to write the note (without the log entries), run it through one of the above translators, and then run the result through the translator back to English. If I can make sense of the final result, I send the original non-English translation. I've gotten some nice non-English thank-you notes this way.
I don't see any 16 processor machines that run OS X
"Haven't you heard of this one running OSX on 2200 processors"
The Virginia Tech cluster isn't a machine, it's a pile of PCs communicating via MPI, like any other Beowulf cluster. What the previous poster meant was OS support for SMP... CPUs in one box handled by one instance of the OS. I'd be more than happy to see a 4 or 16 CPU Apple, but there ain't one. Anyway, as others have said, I think this Solaris ploy is aimed at IBM RS/6000 boxes, not Macs.
Wheelan is just reiterating Macro Econ 101 with flair. Look, I like reading The Economist too, and I realize that once the outsourcing wave got started, other businesses were going to follow the money, and there wasn't going to be an easy way to stop them. That doesn't mean it's automatically good for the Republic, and if those with blind faith in creative destruction of the national economy turn out to be flat wrong, somehow "I told you so" just doesn't quite say it. You don't seem to grasp that everything is on the table. This rush to force US workers to complete across the board with all workers everywhere else in the world is revolutionary. Not the act itself, but the rapidity, scale, and breath of occupations covered. Not just the investment in labor, but investment in the creation of the intellectual property that leads to more labor.
For those fond of the saying "a rising tide raises all boats", I'll add that the US seems to be testing "a rising flood washes out all structures", and we may have a long way to go downstream before we find the new sea level.
Oh God that's funny. Either you're trolling, or an econ undergrad in the afterglow of his/her last lecture.
Ok kid, let's deal with your assumptions. First, you're assuming that when "you" are put out of work due to outsourcing to wherever, the person holding "your" former job will make more efficient use of capital, and "you" will eventually either find or create a position that economically justifies your income (be it more or less than before). No argument there.
Americans are sold this idea with the stated understanding that when they are forced to find or create new opportunities, it will improve their lives... they'll make more because of their superior entrepreneurial abilities. Therefore, this is good for the country as a whole.
While this has in general been true, the past isn't indicative of future performance. Read the prospectus. What you're missing is that the difusion of technology and business practices from the OECD to the rest of the world means that entrepeneurial breakthroughs are not the sole provence of the US. India and China are rapidly reaching the point where they don't need to buy anything from the US to grow their economies. So if a US company relocates their value added activities overseas, much - if not most - of that value stays overseas. The stockholders and/or CEO may realise additional profits, but the rest of the capital has been transfered overseas, and to a large extent stays there. And the reinvestment of profits seems to be going there too, since the perception is that the returns are higher.
The net result is that the upper 1% of the economy are fattening their own portfolos in exchange for transfering large wads of the remaining value out of the US on a scale we've never seen before. You can hope that this will help the US as a whole, but the fact is that this is unexplored territory. If you're a patriot, THAT ought to concern you.
I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
Most of those users are liars. H/w makers like Dell are switching components all the time. It's hard enough for Microsoft trying to corral this mess, and the PC trade rags would crucify Apple for each and every h/w compatibility issue out there. "Sure, it's pretty, but it's so limited." The moment the people you're talking to found themselves having to put out as much effort to get things rolling as they currently do with Windows, they'd bail.
Anyway, as has been pointed out any number of times, Apple makes it's bucks on h/w. For it to generate the profit in s/w-only that it current does selling the whole package, it would have to sell - say - five or six times the number of OSX licenses than it does computers. And, it would need to make this happen in two or three quarters max or their stockholders would slay the board of directors in their sleep.
Hmm, increase OS market share to 15 or 18% in six months? Yeah, right.
The CS article at one point lists the transition from prepping women for the typing pool vs. prepping all for college as a reason for not offering typing classes.
I don't know which college these school districts are pushing the kids towards nowadays, but both my BA Poly Sci and BSCS required plenty of typing. After handing in my first hunt-n-pecked paper back in community college, I BEGGED the typing instructor to sign my class add slip.
Most people not taught to type aren't going to be content creators, just content editors. If people are going to college to expand their possibilities, they ought to be given the option to create, rather than buy term papers. Best place to pick up the enabling skill of typing is before college. Will typing be supplanted at some point? Sure, but I ain't bettin' the future of my 12 year old on it happening in the next six years.
>> The man just said it is not an accident if you contribute directly to it
And he was factually incorrect. It is a term that describes the entire incident, the term itself does not infer nor assign who the victim is or the level of blame for the person who caused "the accident".
I'm aware of the dictionary definition, and it's my contention that the perpetrators of most "accidents" are hiding behind it. God knows, it's a pain in the ass to regularly check the safety features on a car every now and then when firing it up in the morning. It's a pain to maintain distance from the vehicle in front when moving or stopped. Most of us elect to ease off on the anal retentiveness - me included - based on our previous experience that we'll successfully pull off a day's driving, or activities in general. However, sometimes we don't, and as much as we wish it weren't, it's a fuck-up, not a God-reached-down-and-blinded-me accident.
I'm not saying that Wes needed to go Japanese on us, but neither should some pop-psych jump on the ass of someone who utters the popular assertion that for Wes to make things right, he oughta make sure the freshly minted orphans get a good shot at making it to adulthood without getting lost in the shuffle, ie: "for the rest of their lives".
I disagree. Adding social pressure is an excellent way to modify undesirable behavior.
To call an event an accident is to assume your contribution to the event was beyond your reasonable ability to control. If a 4000lbs bomb goes off behind you and you push the car ahead into traffic, that's probably an accident.
If your tires are getting bald, if you don't check your brakes regularly, your windshield is dirty, adjusting the radio, thinking about mating, etc, then there's a strong possibility that a rear-ender is in fact a fuck-up, not an accident. He is responsible for making the kids orphans.
How Wes deals emotionally with his actions is personal. How he deals with it financially is a legal and business decision. How society deals with people not giving due consideration to what they're doing is by guilty-tripping them, en mass. As a result, other people are made better aware of Wes' fuck-up, and adding up the personal, financial, and social costs, may be less likely to repeat any number of automotive fuck-ups.
Regular reading: - Economist - New Yorker (harder hitting w/ Tina Brown out, the "what's playing" section reminds me how far in the sticks I live) - Road & Track - Smithsonian - Natl. Geo (ok, mostly photo-viewing) - Aviation Week (what I design today...) - World Airpower Review (...blows up our neighbors tomorrow)
When I'm bored out of my skull: - People - InStyle (gets me in touch w/ my inner L.A.)
While in HMO waiting room: - Harper's Bazaar (man, the ads in the 1st twenty pages are HOT) - Cosmo
Granted, there are a lot of DIY antennas that do wonders adding gain to 802.11 signals. I don't think the can will do it for a mesh, though. If I preach to the converted, my pardons: the benefits of a wireless mesh come from each node being able to tie in to one or more adjacent mesh nodes in any direction. This usually assumes an omni antenna. A couple of Pringle's cans would be used as high gain, very directional antennas to connect a distant network base station (wired to DSL, T-1, OC-48, or whatever) to the mesh.
When the Nokia mesh starter kit first hit the market in 2001, it ran about US$8000 for three mesh nodes, base station, and control software. Additional nodes ran about US$600 each. In 2003, the kit dropped to about $5600. Even at that price, recouping the initial investment would have taken a while if one tried to stay competitive with dsl/cable. This provider charges about US$150/month, which will pay the bills, but I can't imagine how these people stay in business.
My take on Rooftop vs. DIY 802.11b meshes was that it's a classic tradeoff between sweat-equity and turnkey. I think Nokia may have overestimated the premium it could charge for a turnkey package. Googling for Nokia Rooftop and poking around Nokia's website leads me to believe they've discontinued the product.
The Meshcube seems much more reasonable, if it's got the range to pull together a loose mesh.
Your points are good. The wee problem in the US is that the moment you talk about distributing the wealth more equilably, the wealthy and the wannabes yell "Socialist!" and intelligent discussion is over.
Anyway, the original article is a red herring. The outsourcers and their apologists have been busy trying to divert everyone's attention from the job losses and tech transfer. The basic argument for outsourcing is that workers in the US will discover/create higher value activities when their current tasks move elsewhere. This is much like the assumption that real estate always rises. True, until it's not.
In my case, I've been weighing Airport Express+iTunes 4.6 vs. a Squeezebox, and I wanted to know whether the boatload of various 128, 192, and 256 kbs mpeg files I've got were going to sound good enough to bother streaming to my mid-range stereo. In addition, if I didn't get a Squeezebox, I wanted a cheap and moderately non-butt ugly way of remote controlling iTunes.
Fortunately I'd already picked up a Powerbook 3400 on eBay ($65) and an Oronoco Wavelan card from a garage sale ($5) as a Debian/PPC plaything.
On the MacOS 9 boot partition, I added iTunes 1.1, IE 5, the Macast mp3 player, and "iHam on iRye". If I could run iTunes 4.5 on the Powerbook as well as the iMac in the upstairs office, my job would be done, but I was left with trying out a number of streaming servers. Many of the servers on OSX use iTunes as a backend (nicecast, for instance), which sucks up added CPU cycles on my 400MHz iMac, and with the three I tried, I couldn't quite figure out the correct URL to connect to from the Powerbook. I looked at gnump3d, which doesn't use iTunes, but haven't tried it yet. I had played with the Squeezebox' server, the slimserver, a year ago, so gave the update another try. The instructions provided a URL format even I could grok, and the resulting stream played on both iTunes 1.1 and Macast on the Powerbook. Using IE (or whatever browser), I can surf to the Slimserver's web interface to select playlists, and after plugging the Powerbook's line out into my stereo, the result wasn't too bad.
What makes a really slick remote control is iHam on iRye, an iTunes 4.x remote control that works on MacOS 9.x and X. Not Windows, for better or worse. It provides an iTunes-like interface, and it seems I can even select webcasts. Provided that the Airport Express' stereo line out provides a signal of at least the same quality as the PB 3400, I may have found my ultimate solution.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK, the cluster proponents sold the NSF and the DoD's HPC office on the idea that they would solve the limitations of "pile of PC" systems in software, the result being that both organizations basically mandated clusters for all new projects. Imagine the CIO of an aerospace firm requiring WinNT henceforth for any application of computing resources and you get the idea.
The net result was that advances in vector computing stopped in the US. SGI sold a handful of existing Crays, but that was it. Otherwise, you needed to go to NEC, Fujitsu, or Siemens for iron. The only reason Cray has even a prayer is because there are one or two agencies of the US Federal government that need up to date vector processing, and ain't gonna buy from a foreign supplier that may either cut 'em off or screw with the systems for political reasons.
So, while on one hand Becker and his buddies provided a great service to the difusion of parallel applications to a wider market, their politicking to be the high end solution end-all be-all moved the development and manufacture of high-end systems offshore. Becker is the Sam Walton of parallel computing. Good job, brother.
What progress has the Libertarian Party made in this regard? How many US elective offices of any sort are currently held by people who ran as a Libertarian, and are registered as a Libertarian or Independent?
That it's not is because most senior politicians, media moguls, and the economists they put on the air keep parroting the party line stated by Dr. Bhagwati:
Off shoring yields net economic losses only when foreign nations are closing the innovation gap with the United States.
The above is true.
"But we can change the terms of trade by moving up the technology ladder,"
The above is an assumption. If the assumption is wrong, we're fucked.
The policy implications, he added, include increased investment in science, research and education.
True, and increasingly, the capital to do R&R is moving out of the US. Meanwhile, funding for education ain't happening. Investors and power brokers have decided to draw on the "education equity" created elsewhere, and that didn't cost them a thing. Back in the US, rather than make education happen over a broad base, more and more people are focusing on cutting their kid and their taxes out of the equation. This will leave us with fewer bright lights surrounded by more dim bulbs. Not a winning scenario.
And Mr. Samuelson and Mr. Bhagwati agree that the way to buffer the adjustment for the workers who lose in the global competition is with wage insurance programs.
So where are we going to get the money for that? Tax the added profits back out of the offshoring corp? No, tax those of us still working in the US.
As for ABMs themselves, to say they're ineffective against decoys broadbrushes the topic a bit, IHO. Missiles based in Alaska will have this problem, because the warheads are still exoatmospheric. If, at some point, we base on the mainland, or heavens be, out here in the 50th state, the RVs will be dropping into air and rapidly sorting themselves out. In any case, the Chinese aren't in a position to poop 500 missiles yet. Anybody other than the Russians are going to be sending a very limited package. Given that non-proliferation has had it's day, it seems dumb to continue leaving ourselves wide open. Just how much is worthwhile to spend will naturally be a bone of contention. Whether someone tries to slip a nuke in the back door on a container doesn't negate the utility of protecting the front.
Rather than just fly off the handle with assumptions, I'll ask what "not effective" means. Are the satellites not achieving orbit? Are the ICBM RVs not making it to Kwaj? Usually? ;)
Granted, it's crappy opsec, but there's nothing to be done about the fact that a major spaceport is run next to a metro area of 20mil, and this ain't the PRC. Due to the location, the USAF has published mariner's and aviator's alerts for years. As another post pointed out, the exact launch window isn't bandied about.
1) The CEO preferred to milk the Mac market for a while longer, which may have in part been because...
2) The development positions (but not the developers) were moved to India at or immediately before the start of the port effort. The new crew had serious problems getting up the learning curve for the legacy Xpress code and OS X simultanously.
In fact, the whole sorry story is a case study for when not to offshore a software project.
A side note: all dvd drives and players are made in China. There may be some stereo tweeks out there doing custom boxes, but the drives are all sourced from the same 10 or so plants.
And when they start catching up to us there, then what? Of course, at a certain point, they will catch up to us, but so what?
Yeah, I know, inhabitants of large industrious nations always think their time in the sun will last forever. And yet, they never do. Even the Indians and the Chinese, which have seen their nations come and go big time over the last 2K years or so. And that thing or things that takes them out of the limelight always plays out a bit differently each time. Watching the US now reminds me of Spain after having grown fat on the riches of the New World, just before their loooooong fall.
It just pisses me off to listen to the excuses why we dive head first into waters we know not.
Example #1:
Design and interface must be done together with the customer, but coding and maintenance do not require close proximity with customers and can be done by less costly programmers abroad. The higher-wage jobs, involving design and interface, must still be performed in the U.S.
Good try, but wrong. There are times when the designer and the coding monkey can be safely separated, but in general you're asking for trouble. Prepare to be IMing a lot. The offshore outfits are becoming better designers in any case, and soon the US designer's employer is going to be shipping his/her job out to be where the code is written.
Example #2:
The value to the U.S. economy of cheaper outsourced software and IT services is that it reduces the price of customized software. Econometric estimates are that, to an even greater degree than IT hardware, demand for software and services increases more than one-for-one with reductions in price. Therefore, as prices fall, demand for services and software rises more than one-for-one, diffusing IT into the lagging sectors and deepening the use of IT in the leading sectors, thus increasing demand for workers with IT skills in all sectors.
So with cheap custom software, more businesses will use it and the user employees become computer skilled. The first assumption I'll buy into, assuming that an easy and cheap local consultant is available at the start of the coding chain. If this plays out to the scale she thinks, therein lies the benefit to US IT workers. The second assumption is complete crap. Someone using a customized Access database front end is no more "computer literate" than someone using Word, all else being equal.
Example #3:
Meanwhile, U.S. IT jobs continue to move up the IT skills ladder. Demand increases for workers with the skills needed to design, customize, and utilize IT applications...
Nope. This assumes the US always holds the high ground. However, as more development and design occurs overseas, and the host countries become ever more developed and self-sufficient, this falls apart. They sell to us, and by and large don't need anything back... except our increasingly worthless dollars.
I wasn't too encouraged when I read the physorg.com spam filter story, noticing that two of their top 5 news stories in the sidebar were "Researchers say Tunguska Event was an UFO Crash: Debris of Alien Spaceship found", and "Tunguska Event: New Details and Sensational Theory". Too bad the links pointed to subscriber-only pages. Has The Enquirer spun off science/tech reporting to a new site?
This explains why the superior writing and speaking abilities I developed in seminar during my BA Political Science moved me ahead of my comparatively inarticulate peers during and after my BSCS. Jesus, if you're just looking for a trade, try ITT.
I don't see why some conservatives spend so much time grousing about students being molded by commie fag profs. When students are so busy triaging "learning" out of the equation, why worry?
Occasionally, I've attempted putting in the extra work and translated before sending. My half-assed method is to write the note (without the log entries), run it through one of the above translators, and then run the result through the translator back to English. If I can make sense of the final result, I send the original non-English translation. I've gotten some nice non-English thank-you notes this way.
"Haven't you heard of this one running OSX on 2200 processors"
The Virginia Tech cluster isn't a machine, it's a pile of PCs communicating via MPI, like any other Beowulf cluster. What the previous poster meant was OS support for SMP... CPUs in one box handled by one instance of the OS. I'd be more than happy to see a 4 or 16 CPU Apple, but there ain't one. Anyway, as others have said, I think this Solaris ploy is aimed at IBM RS/6000 boxes, not Macs.
For those fond of the saying "a rising tide raises all boats", I'll add that the US seems to be testing "a rising flood washes out all structures", and we may have a long way to go downstream before we find the new sea level.
Ok kid, let's deal with your assumptions. First, you're assuming that when "you" are put out of work due to outsourcing to wherever, the person holding "your" former job will make more efficient use of capital, and "you" will eventually either find or create a position that economically justifies your income (be it more or less than before). No argument there.
Americans are sold this idea with the stated understanding that when they are forced to find or create new opportunities, it will improve their lives... they'll make more because of their superior entrepreneurial abilities. Therefore, this is good for the country as a whole.
While this has in general been true, the past isn't indicative of future performance. Read the prospectus. What you're missing is that the difusion of technology and business practices from the OECD to the rest of the world means that entrepeneurial breakthroughs are not the sole provence of the US. India and China are rapidly reaching the point where they don't need to buy anything from the US to grow their economies. So if a US company relocates their value added activities overseas, much - if not most - of that value stays overseas. The stockholders and/or CEO may realise additional profits, but the rest of the capital has been transfered overseas, and to a large extent stays there. And the reinvestment of profits seems to be going there too, since the perception is that the returns are higher.
The net result is that the upper 1% of the economy are fattening their own portfolos in exchange for transfering large wads of the remaining value out of the US on a scale we've never seen before. You can hope that this will help the US as a whole, but the fact is that this is unexplored territory. If you're a patriot, THAT ought to concern you.
I dont know of any serious computer users that I have talked to that wouldn't switch to OS X instead of windoze.
Most of those users are liars. H/w makers like Dell are switching components all the time. It's hard enough for Microsoft trying to corral this mess, and the PC trade rags would crucify Apple for each and every h/w compatibility issue out there. "Sure, it's pretty, but it's so limited." The moment the people you're talking to found themselves having to put out as much effort to get things rolling as they currently do with Windows, they'd bail.
Anyway, as has been pointed out any number of times, Apple makes it's bucks on h/w. For it to generate the profit in s/w-only that it current does selling the whole package, it would have to sell - say - five or six times the number of OSX licenses than it does computers. And, it would need to make this happen in two or three quarters max or their stockholders would slay the board of directors in their sleep.
Hmm, increase OS market share to 15 or 18% in six months? Yeah, right.
I don't know which college these school districts are pushing the kids towards nowadays, but both my BA Poly Sci and BSCS required plenty of typing. After handing in my first hunt-n-pecked paper back in community college, I BEGGED the typing instructor to sign my class add slip.
Most people not taught to type aren't going to be content creators, just content editors. If people are going to college to expand their possibilities, they ought to be given the option to create, rather than buy term papers. Best place to pick up the enabling skill of typing is before college. Will typing be supplanted at some point? Sure, but I ain't bettin' the future of my 12 year old on it happening in the next six years.
And he was factually incorrect. It is a term that describes the entire incident, the term itself does not infer nor assign who the victim is or the level of blame for the person who caused "the accident".
I'm aware of the dictionary definition, and it's my contention that the perpetrators of most "accidents" are hiding behind it. God knows, it's a pain in the ass to regularly check the safety features on a car every now and then when firing it up in the morning. It's a pain to maintain distance from the vehicle in front when moving or stopped. Most of us elect to ease off on the anal retentiveness - me included - based on our previous experience that we'll successfully pull off a day's driving, or activities in general. However, sometimes we don't, and as much as we wish it weren't, it's a fuck-up, not a God-reached-down-and-blinded-me accident.
I'm not saying that Wes needed to go Japanese on us, but neither should some pop-psych jump on the ass of someone who utters the popular assertion that for Wes to make things right, he oughta make sure the freshly minted orphans get a good shot at making it to adulthood without getting lost in the shuffle, ie: "for the rest of their lives".
To call an event an accident is to assume your contribution to the event was beyond your reasonable ability to control. If a 4000lbs bomb goes off behind you and you push the car ahead into traffic, that's probably an accident.
If your tires are getting bald, if you don't check your brakes regularly, your windshield is dirty, adjusting the radio, thinking about mating, etc, then there's a strong possibility that a rear-ender is in fact a fuck-up, not an accident. He is responsible for making the kids orphans.
How Wes deals emotionally with his actions is personal. How he deals with it financially is a legal and business decision. How society deals with people not giving due consideration to what they're doing is by guilty-tripping them, en mass. As a result, other people are made better aware of Wes' fuck-up, and adding up the personal, financial, and social costs, may be less likely to repeat any number of automotive fuck-ups.
Hey, it worked for me.
Regular reading:
- Economist
- New Yorker (harder hitting w/ Tina Brown out, the "what's playing" section reminds me how far in the sticks I live)
- Road & Track
- Smithsonian
- Natl. Geo (ok, mostly photo-viewing)
- Aviation Week (what I design today...)
- World Airpower Review (...blows up our neighbors tomorrow)
When I'm bored out of my skull:
- People
- InStyle (gets me in touch w/ my inner L.A.)
While in HMO waiting room:
- Harper's Bazaar (man, the ads in the 1st twenty pages are HOT)
- Cosmo
Granted, there are a lot of DIY antennas that do wonders adding gain to 802.11 signals. I don't think the can will do it for a mesh, though. If I preach to the converted, my pardons: the benefits of a wireless mesh come from each node being able to tie in to one or more adjacent mesh nodes in any direction. This usually assumes an omni antenna. A couple of Pringle's cans would be used as high gain, very directional antennas to connect a distant network base station (wired to DSL, T-1, OC-48, or whatever) to the mesh.
My take on Rooftop vs. DIY 802.11b meshes was that it's a classic tradeoff between sweat-equity and turnkey. I think Nokia may have overestimated the premium it could charge for a turnkey package. Googling for Nokia Rooftop and poking around Nokia's website leads me to believe they've discontinued the product.
The Meshcube seems much more reasonable, if it's got the range to pull together a loose mesh.
Anyway, the original article is a red herring. The outsourcers and their apologists have been busy trying to divert everyone's attention from the job losses and tech transfer. The basic argument for outsourcing is that workers in the US will discover/create higher value activities when their current tasks move elsewhere. This is much like the assumption that real estate always rises. True, until it's not.
Fortunately I'd already picked up a Powerbook 3400 on eBay ($65) and an Oronoco Wavelan card from a garage sale ($5) as a Debian/PPC plaything.
On the MacOS 9 boot partition, I added iTunes 1.1, IE 5, the Macast mp3 player, and "iHam on iRye". If I could run iTunes 4.5 on the Powerbook as well as the iMac in the upstairs office, my job would be done, but I was left with trying out a number of streaming servers. Many of the servers on OSX use iTunes as a backend (nicecast, for instance), which sucks up added CPU cycles on my 400MHz iMac, and with the three I tried, I couldn't quite figure out the correct URL to connect to from the Powerbook. I looked at gnump3d, which doesn't use iTunes, but haven't tried it yet. I had played with the Squeezebox' server, the slimserver, a year ago, so gave the update another try. The instructions provided a URL format even I could grok, and the resulting stream played on both iTunes 1.1 and Macast on the Powerbook. Using IE (or whatever browser), I can surf to the Slimserver's web interface to select playlists, and after plugging the Powerbook's line out into my stereo, the result wasn't too bad.
What makes a really slick remote control is iHam on iRye, an iTunes 4.x remote control that works on MacOS 9.x and X. Not Windows, for better or worse. It provides an iTunes-like interface, and it seems I can even select webcasts. Provided that the Airport Express' stereo line out provides a signal of at least the same quality as the PB 3400, I may have found my ultimate solution.