If repair was a consideration we'd be driving modern versions of the VW beetle, the 2CV or the many American cars where you could almost stand in the engine bay and get easy access to just about everything. The aim with cars is something designed to sell and not something easy to repair, so sadly economic reasons mean that if it's cheaper to make a design where you need to remove the trunk trim to replace a tail light than provide easy access then that's what happens. I don't like it either. To twist your car analogy into a computer one consider many Apple products - seen as good designs but ridiculously difficult to repair. This is an old example but it's one I've done myself and it was a stupidly complex procedure just to upgrade a CDROM drive to a DVD drive: http://wilko.me/emac/ I'm pretty sure someone won an award for that design and an insanely huge number were sold to the educational market. As far as Apple thought it was a good design. As far as people who replaced drives though - not a good design at all, but they were not paying the bills
Considering that most of the world economy relies on consumption so needs a lot of people for the rich and powerful to stay rich and powerful then I would suggest that your "they" have fuckall political power and are unlikely to ever get the resources to be a threat. Think about it - proposing something that is going to destroy the fortunes of both Republican and Democrat donors, not to mention the oil and gas profits of Russian kleptocrats and the export markets that fund the Chinese Communist Party. Which do you think is more likely to happen when "they" get serious - money for a secret lab or a cup of tea with Polonium stirred in? Have I expressed my opinion clearly enough to outline why I see your suggestion as unlikely to succeed?
I heard it's recently been pushed back to around three thousand years or less after some discoveries last year on an island north of Eastern Siberia. There's a Pyramid not a lot newer than that.
Rather not. Hearing about it from posts like yours is enough for me to get a bit of an idea and remind me of people I've met best described as kicked dogs snapping out at outsiders. Such stuff I think covers the entire political spectrum (and it IS politics here despite there being gender issues involved), but we notice it more in "unusual" cases, and it figuratively sells more papers.
The example above is applying the same transformation to a very large number of datasets and then after some hours or days each node writes out what it has done to some shared storage. In that case the "extremely hard to program" thing does not exist since a shell script or queueing system does the job - which is why there are a class of problems known as "embarrassingly parallel". It's not "millions of nodes" but it could be since the problem can be neatly divided into millions of independant parts that are taken on by whatever nodes are available over time. It's storage bottlenecks instead of scheduling that would be the problem with increasing scale. Some other stuff that is more dependant on what other nodes have done, such as FEA (finite element analysis), can use an interative process where the nodes are fully independant at step1, then the results are taken into account and the job reassigned with step2 with the altered data and so on until there is a good enough solution - the sort of stuff that's been done with computers since before the 1970s where a problem is divided into chunks with inputs and outputs in each element to cut down on complexity. You don't have to immediately know what the nodes working on adjacent parts have worked out until the next interation, which could be hours.
So in each stage in such cases you really only need to know if the job finished correctly. Having storage available to a lot of nodes at once is going to get harder with scale, but actual job management with "embarrassingly parallel" tasks is not a big deal with MPI, PBS/torque or even plain old ssh.
There are of course different problems where nodes do have to communicate with each other a lot but they are not "embarrassingly parallel". As the name suggests it's actually easy to deal with "embarrassingly parallel" problems since the answer looked for is really just a collection of results from a lot of small problems concatenated together in a useful order. A gap in the data at point C doesn't matter if you are currently interested in point D. It's the low hanging fruit of high performance computing but there are a lot of problems that it can solve.
Rubbish - geophysics alone is full of embarrassingly parallel problems. For instance, apply filter X to 10**8 traces. See also anything involving DNA, or to get far simpler, even types of finite element analysis which work with multiple passes. Give the nodes their job, then do something with all the bits they independantly produce for the next step - there's plenty of tasks that don't require constant interconnection.
Prop in a mind game? That's just finding an excuse after the fact for an expensive long running scam. It's a human example of the monkey shower experiment, where the monkey that had a reason to react (Hoover with his kickbacks) has long left the cage.
That's quite a lot but I think the core of the issue is more simple. It's a symptom of the cultural environment. If you are in a land where bare boobs on the beach are not a big deal then breastfeeding is not a big deal in any situation. If you are in a land where even strippers have to cover their nipples with "pasties" (had to look that up - not a vegetable pie but part of a costume for when losers pay to see strippers that don't even have bare boobs), then there is a far more juvenile attitude to breast feeding and it's seen by some as indecent exposure with a flimsy excuse.
There's a recent anime called "Rail Wars" (misleading title but trainspotting, guns and girls probably has less punch) which in a couple of episodes depicts a bicycle driven electrically assisted rail motor with regenerative braking - and it's a thing that does exist in reality. That's an extreme example of how little extra equipment is needed.
Is it 1968 again? Because a high speed rail project from back then has paid for itself many times over. In the years since then it's been worked out in what sort of situations it is likely to work and where not. Sprawling suburbia? Bad idea. From dense city to dense city? Seems to be working. Infrastructure costs are huge but running costs not, so there's a crossover with planes where infrastructure costs are not as huge (but still not trivial) but running costs are staggering. Nearly every major airport on the planet has an oil refinery next to it for a start.
A gross simplification is that people who worked in manufacturing and heavy industry didn't vote Tory, so Thatcher made sure to reduce the number of jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry. She used the one off North Sea oil boom profits to finance a change from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. She didn't hate technology, and was quite fond of nuclear power, but the people who worked in the area were less inclined to vote for her so they had to go. It is a prime example of putting The Party ahead of the Nation, Thatcher showed the world that it wasn't just commies that could do such a thing. Scotland was especially hard hit by the transition which is still causing enough discontent today that nearly half voted to leave the UK.
While we are being "honest" how does that compare to a placebo or even nothing other than an interviewer asking questions? Without something like that 70% is nothing, it's like saying that a 70% rough weather prediction is correct when 70% of the time the weather has historically been sunny. If there was not so much money wasted on this scam and it's "experts" there would be much less to worry about, but having a blind eye turned to people scamming police departments is not a good look.
IMHO the much large "conspiracy to lie" is those who pretend polygraphs work and fleece a lot of taxpayers money by selling the props and the "services". It sounds like a bad joke - invented by the writer of Wonder Woman and endorsed by the King of kickbacks, J. Edgar Hoover - yet it's STILL in use today!
I'll put a bet on a bunch of "patriotic" fanboys with photoshop plus a newspaper that wants to score brownie points with Putin and maybe not get it's journalists assassinated.
Thanks. You've very narrowly defined that group in such detail that it appeared no-one has to worry about the three of them - then I remembered this is a vast internet and there will be a lot of bunches of three. All those dogs that have been kicked and turned mean (obviously an analogy) can now visibly snap out at anyone that comes nearby, so we get to be aware of some people we just did not notice before.
Of course, the comet will also start shooting off monster steam blasts
Only if comets are balls of ice, like we used to think. Shooting off monster blasts of vaporized rock needs a lot more heat, so there's probably a chance to charge up the batteries before then:)
Slashdot Mirror
If repair was a consideration we'd be driving modern versions of the VW beetle, the 2CV or the many American cars where you could almost stand in the engine bay and get easy access to just about everything. The aim with cars is something designed to sell and not something easy to repair, so sadly economic reasons mean that if it's cheaper to make a design where you need to remove the trunk trim to replace a tail light than provide easy access then that's what happens. I don't like it either.
To twist your car analogy into a computer one consider many Apple products - seen as good designs but ridiculously difficult to repair. This is an old example but it's one I've done myself and it was a stupidly complex procedure just to upgrade a CDROM drive to a DVD drive:
http://wilko.me/emac/
I'm pretty sure someone won an award for that design and an insanely huge number were sold to the educational market. As far as Apple thought it was a good design. As far as people who replaced drives though - not a good design at all, but they were not paying the bills
Considering that most of the world economy relies on consumption so needs a lot of people for the rich and powerful to stay rich and powerful then I would suggest that your "they" have fuckall political power and are unlikely to ever get the resources to be a threat.
Think about it - proposing something that is going to destroy the fortunes of both Republican and Democrat donors, not to mention the oil and gas profits of Russian kleptocrats and the export markets that fund the Chinese Communist Party. Which do you think is more likely to happen when "they" get serious - money for a secret lab or a cup of tea with Polonium stirred in?
Have I expressed my opinion clearly enough to outline why I see your suggestion as unlikely to succeed?
I heard it's recently been pushed back to around three thousand years or less after some discoveries last year on an island north of Eastern Siberia. There's a Pyramid not a lot newer than that.
Already been tested in Russia but mostly as dog food.
How about mammoth DNA into chicken eggs? Here's an elephant example that's close enough :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meet_the_Feebles
Rather not. Hearing about it from posts like yours is enough for me to get a bit of an idea and remind me of people I've met best described as kicked dogs snapping out at outsiders. Such stuff I think covers the entire political spectrum (and it IS politics here despite there being gender issues involved), but we notice it more in "unusual" cases, and it figuratively sells more papers.
Excellent - almost as good as Lindt chocolate.
Sex!
Top suggestion.
The example above is applying the same transformation to a very large number of datasets and then after some hours or days each node writes out what it has done to some shared storage. In that case the "extremely hard to program" thing does not exist since a shell script or queueing system does the job - which is why there are a class of problems known as "embarrassingly parallel". It's not "millions of nodes" but it could be since the problem can be neatly divided into millions of independant parts that are taken on by whatever nodes are available over time. It's storage bottlenecks instead of scheduling that would be the problem with increasing scale.
Some other stuff that is more dependant on what other nodes have done, such as FEA (finite element analysis), can use an interative process where the nodes are fully independant at step1, then the results are taken into account and the job reassigned with step2 with the altered data and so on until there is a good enough solution - the sort of stuff that's been done with computers since before the 1970s where a problem is divided into chunks with inputs and outputs in each element to cut down on complexity. You don't have to immediately know what the nodes working on adjacent parts have worked out until the next interation, which could be hours.
So in each stage in such cases you really only need to know if the job finished correctly. Having storage available to a lot of nodes at once is going to get harder with scale, but actual job management with "embarrassingly parallel" tasks is not a big deal with MPI, PBS/torque or even plain old ssh.
There are of course different problems where nodes do have to communicate with each other a lot but they are not "embarrassingly parallel". As the name suggests it's actually easy to deal with "embarrassingly parallel" problems since the answer looked for is really just a collection of results from a lot of small problems concatenated together in a useful order. A gap in the data at point C doesn't matter if you are currently interested in point D. It's the low hanging fruit of high performance computing but there are a lot of problems that it can solve.
Rubbish - geophysics alone is full of embarrassingly parallel problems. For instance, apply filter X to 10**8 traces. See also anything involving DNA, or to get far simpler, even types of finite element analysis which work with multiple passes. Give the nodes their job, then do something with all the bits they independantly produce for the next step - there's plenty of tasks that don't require constant interconnection.
True - problems of modelling molecular interaction now benefit so that is a "smaller" problem :)
I didn't realise there was so much money involved.
Looks like Scam VS Scam.
Prop in a mind game? That's just finding an excuse after the fact for an expensive long running scam.
It's a human example of the monkey shower experiment, where the monkey that had a reason to react (Hoover with his kickbacks) has long left the cage.
That's quite a lot but I think the core of the issue is more simple. It's a symptom of the cultural environment.
If you are in a land where bare boobs on the beach are not a big deal then breastfeeding is not a big deal in any situation.
If you are in a land where even strippers have to cover their nipples with "pasties" (had to look that up - not a vegetable pie but part of a costume for when losers pay to see strippers that don't even have bare boobs), then there is a far more juvenile attitude to breast feeding and it's seen by some as indecent exposure with a flimsy excuse.
There's a recent anime called "Rail Wars" (misleading title but trainspotting, guns and girls probably has less punch) which in a couple of episodes depicts a bicycle driven electrically assisted rail motor with regenerative braking - and it's a thing that does exist in reality. That's an extreme example of how little extra equipment is needed.
Is it 1968 again? Because a high speed rail project from back then has paid for itself many times over. In the years since then it's been worked out in what sort of situations it is likely to work and where not.
Sprawling suburbia? Bad idea.
From dense city to dense city? Seems to be working.
Infrastructure costs are huge but running costs not, so there's a crossover with planes where infrastructure costs are not as huge (but still not trivial) but running costs are staggering. Nearly every major airport on the planet has an oil refinery next to it for a start.
A gross simplification is that people who worked in manufacturing and heavy industry didn't vote Tory, so Thatcher made sure to reduce the number of jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry. She used the one off North Sea oil boom profits to finance a change from a manufacturing economy to a service economy. She didn't hate technology, and was quite fond of nuclear power, but the people who worked in the area were less inclined to vote for her so they had to go.
It is a prime example of putting The Party ahead of the Nation, Thatcher showed the world that it wasn't just commies that could do such a thing. Scotland was especially hard hit by the transition which is still causing enough discontent today that nearly half voted to leave the UK.
While we are being "honest" how does that compare to a placebo or even nothing other than an interviewer asking questions? Without something like that 70% is nothing, it's like saying that a 70% rough weather prediction is correct when 70% of the time the weather has historically been sunny.
If there was not so much money wasted on this scam and it's "experts" there would be much less to worry about, but having a blind eye turned to people scamming police departments is not a good look.
Still - 22 years! That is so fucked up and is a strong incentive to turn petty crooks into murderers when the cops turn up.
Probably full of bullets, especially if Batman is on the screen.
Too soon?
IMHO the much large "conspiracy to lie" is those who pretend polygraphs work and fleece a lot of taxpayers money by selling the props and the "services".
It sounds like a bad joke - invented by the writer of Wonder Woman and endorsed by the King of kickbacks, J. Edgar Hoover - yet it's STILL in use today!
The "Breaking Bad" take on this with Badger and an undercover cop on a park bench is excellent.
I'll put a bet on a bunch of "patriotic" fanboys with photoshop plus a newspaper that wants to score brownie points with Putin and maybe not get it's journalists assassinated.
Thanks. You've very narrowly defined that group in such detail that it appeared no-one has to worry about the three of them - then I remembered this is a vast internet and there will be a lot of bunches of three.
All those dogs that have been kicked and turned mean (obviously an analogy) can now visibly snap out at anyone that comes nearby, so we get to be aware of some people we just did not notice before.
Only if comets are balls of ice, like we used to think. Shooting off monster blasts of vaporized rock needs a lot more heat, so there's probably a chance to charge up the batteries before then :)