Currently, Teslas are the single-precision future. All my work is in double precision (64-bit), which is where most GPUs are much much slower. IIRC, the next generation GPUs are going to have respectable double precision performance, but they're way down the road- hopefully I'll have moved on to a job where it doesn't matter by then.
Hell, I consider it a victory when I've gotten a code translated from FORTRAN 77 to Fortran 95. GPUs? I'll wait until next decade. More normal cores are low-hanging fruit I can use with any MPI code *now*.
Tropospheric CO2 and O3 run around on a roughly 10,000 year cycle, between 150-275 ppm for CO2. This has been shown through ice cores in Antarctica, and other methods proven to give us a real look at historic atmospheric data. In the last 150 years, CO2 has gone through the roof.
In addition, global O3 concentrations used to be around 10 ppb. Currently, in the midwest region of the USA, it stands around 40 ppb. Through PopFACE and AspenFACE experiements, along with work done all over the world, it has been proven that even today's elevated O3 levels negatively impacts the ability for trees to act as a carbon sink, which then results in more CO2 in the air.
Where does this lead us? CO2 accounts for roughly 9-26% of the greenhouse effect, which is both undisputed and, overall, a Very Good Thing for life on Earth (it's what tempers the climate on the surface). In laboratory experiments, it also has been shown that in columns of air composed similarly to our atmosphere at different points in history, heat is trapped by the test atmospheres in amounts similar to what we're seeing here on the ground on earth when you crank up the CO2 levels to how we've cranked them up.
I haven't discussed models here at all. I've only discussed experiments and statistical analysis based on observational data.
In exchange for getting the USSR's nukes from the former republics, the Russian Federation agreed to take on all debts and treaty obligations of the USSR, meaning that the treaty applies to Russia (Also See: the uproar over Russia withdrawing from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty)
New editions of textbooks aren't simply re-numbered versions of old ones (proven empirically with three classes of mine; in one, the prof published a translation table as the 10th & 11th Editions were the *exact same thing* as the 12th, except for re-numbered problems and pages)
The "enormous amount of work to make a good academic text" fixes clear factual errors in the book with future editions. Muddy, wrong, and incorrect textbooks are just as bad as muddy, wrong, and incorrect web sites on one's quest for knowledge. I shouldn't be paying $160 for a textbook where every lecture involves corrections in the textbook.
Professors already work for free on textbooks. Around here, it's part of the job; we publish a rather widely-respected and used textbook, and the profs who wrote it it (a $40 book/workbook combo) make enough off of the book to treat their families to a fancy restaurant every once in a while, but that's about it. I enjoyed the course, and I found the book invaluable, and I'd have personally paid $50 for it if that extra $10 from every copy sold went directly to the authors (who I work with every day and respect). $50 extra per copy though? No.
I work directly (full-time programming gig) with those producing and teaching from textbooks, and they all tend to look down on those who view textbooks as a reliable income source. Most all of the textbooks written around here are to provide affordable alternatives to useless expensive ones, and the ones we produce tend to become the widely-used one in a few years.
But hey, if all of these professors want to be too busy milking their students for money than teaching or doing research... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - they're hurting everyone involved.
I bash ZFS after using it, researching it, and trying to write a homebrew fsck utility for it after a pool decided it wasn't going to import anymore.
It's another FS in its first generation, and therefore it sucks just as bad as other young filesystems. I'll think about trying it again in a few years.
Agreed. After an accidental power loss to several drive bays on our SAN, our 30-TB ZFS pool didn't want to import anymore. Spent a week debugging the kernel to discover *where* it was breaking, and then writing something to munge the on-disk data structures until the "self-repair" utilities could take over. Apparently the uberblocks (ZFS version of superblocks) got munged pretty much everywhere, and the label headers and uberblocks weren't matching up. Any FS that claims perfect data security to the point of not requiring a fsck program should never require the error message saying "you're boned, flatten and restore from backups," which is the only error message I've ever seen it give.
Also, it's slow in creation and handling of small files. Our system (approx 100 users on a 45 node HPC cluster) takes about an hour to unzip the gcc source (takes like 10 minutes on my MacBook). Huge files get the full throughput of the SAN, but small ones take forever.
Lastly, ZFS doesn't let you remove volumes from the pool, or add singly into a RaidZ.
We're most likely going to figure out how to migrate back to Linux/LVM/XFS, and not even think about AdvFS. 'Exciting', indeed.
So... one particular avenue of attack succeeded on one system and failed on the others, so it must be less secure overall? That's great logic there, buckaroo.
--
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
ZFS: Because you're fscked when you actually do need to fsck.
I'm an undergrad assistant sysadmin and a programmer for a department here at UIUC. As a sysadmin, one of my primary responsibilities is maintaining and running our 41-node Linux cluster and the associated mass storage system. As a programmer, I'm responsible for hacking on a climate model that will be a rather big deal once it works, due to it running a very fine resolution model of the global system.
Something I've noticed is that once a professor has gotten done modeling something, the immediate response is doubling the resolution of the model. Or quadruple it. And then they want to do that, and make the model track five times the amount of variables in the system. And then they're going to be plugging another model into the original model that might even square the amount of computational power necessary. And lastly, they're going to want to also take the model from investigating 10 years worth of time, to possibly the next two centuries.
Scientist-type computing needs are basically gaseous; they will fill to expand whatever space they're given. There will always be a necessity for far-above-normal number crunching capability; people are constantly capable of figuring out available_computrons^2 ways of using a given amount of computing power. When there's 1024-core CPUs in desktops, professors are going to be wanting millions of vector processors because their.00001 degree global climate/biology model only processes in real time (1 model day / day) given their available resources. Today I'm working on a.1 degree model that has to run on Cobalt at the NCSA due to its massive memory and processor requirements (28 CPUs to make it run at real time with 18 GB of ram per CPU at 28 CPUs. Memory need scales linearly, processing power doesn't, so you'll need more than a linear increase in processors for a linear increase in model speed).
Weeeeeeell, technically, there's Cygwin and Windows Services for Unix (which essentially is Unix on top of the Windows kernel) to support POSIX. However, before I could afford a seperate machine for Windows apps I need, I tried both, and they suck immensely. By "suck immensely", I mean that they're both for "I have that one app I need from POSIX-land." Both have an air of "Win32 is Win32, and POSIX is POSIX, and n'er the twain shall meet." Made it less than fun to run the system.
How far of a tree you maintain really depends on what you're using and how much you customize it. If you're typically doing desktop deployments, most of the software packages you're going to be using will be mature and stable (Firefox, OO.o, KDE/GNOME, etc). Where I work, we have some odd bits of hardware here and there that require us to maintain a couple of kernel source trees to keep the hardware working.
If you want to follow the Microsoft model and run your own site-local update repository, it's simple to add that to the distribution's repository list, and have the update function run once every however often you want. With Linux, if you've customized packages (such as our custom kernels), you can place them in there.
In some cases, local fixes may be problematic to get upstream to the package/software maintainers, but in my experience no harder than Microsoft (though if the MS devs sneer at you, you don't find out, which may or may not be a plus compared to F/OSS).
As far as dependency goes, it's easier to switch from one distro of Linux to another, and most Linux software tends to encourage use of file formats and network protocols that one can hook in to (for example, if you don't like OpenOffice.org, switch to another office suite that supports OpenDocument, and you don't lose any work). The dependency on high-priced consultants and higher ideas is the same, but you're not as dependent on specific implementations nearly as much.
I use one of those at work, I like it. I don't know if it really has mechanical keyswitches, but it feels and sounds good anyway.
Where I work, I support the Windows desktops; my co-worker who supports the Linux clusters has the same keyboard, but it's a standard 101 key layout (no windows keys), has a marbleized blue-grey pastic casing, and has a Silicon Graphics logo instead of Dell. Same keyboard otherwise. Very cool.
All governments gain power by consent of the governed. This is as true in the United States as it is in Denmark as it is in China. If enough of the population ceases to grant the government their concent at the same time, the government is powerless, null, and void. Governments, however, keep said consent via fear. This fear comes via two ways: "You'd be worse off without this government" and when not enough of a critical mass of the population witholds their consent, they get squashed (see: Tiananmen Square). As a counterpoint, look at the August Coup in the former Soviet Union, where the soldiers openly rebelled against Communist "hardliners".
I think part if the issue is that even though the Archives can review the documents, all they can do is say "We don't think this ought to be secret." It's still up to the CIA/DIA to re-de-classify them, which they may or may not do.
I agree with you on the fact that they're finding problems is how the system is supposed to work, however, IMHO, it's not working enough. Just because it finds errors, it can't do anything about it to fix them, except report back up to an administration that is less than sympathetic to issues of public oversight of its actions.
To the tune of Disney's theme song for their "Tiki Room" attraction:
In the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web,
in the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web,
All the geeks sing and the hackers croon!
In the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web!
I was part of a high school hybrid car project, where we took a 2000 VW Beatle donated to us from VW America, and turned it into a soydiesel -> battery -> powertrain hybrid (called a "serial powertrain"; modern hybrids use "parallel powertrains"). Electrics get really good acceleration (Electric motors put out oodles of torque in the low RPM range, or at least ours did), but proper usage requires different driving habits than people are used to, such as regenerative breaking, and massive use of the batteries tends to generate not small amounts of hydrogen gas. We were almost seriously considering adding a hood scoop to it just to get more airflow to where we were storing the batteries- our previous project, a 1960's vintage bug, a pure electric, had a hydrogen explosion on the battery trailer that we were using before we could mount the batteries in the car.
Slashdot Mirror
Computer Science without a bit of an education on history and economics gives us BitCoin.
Currently, Teslas are the single-precision future. All my work is in double precision (64-bit), which is where most GPUs are much much slower. IIRC, the next generation GPUs are going to have respectable double precision performance, but they're way down the road- hopefully I'll have moved on to a job where it doesn't matter by then. Hell, I consider it a victory when I've gotten a code translated from FORTRAN 77 to Fortran 95. GPUs? I'll wait until next decade. More normal cores are low-hanging fruit I can use with any MPI code *now*.
I do all my development on IA-64! Donkey.
MSVC++ code runs pretty damn slow on my UltraSPARC running OpenBSD.
Tropospheric CO2 and O3 run around on a roughly 10,000 year cycle, between 150-275 ppm for CO2. This has been shown through ice cores in Antarctica, and other methods proven to give us a real look at historic atmospheric data. In the last 150 years, CO2 has gone through the roof.
In addition, global O3 concentrations used to be around 10 ppb. Currently, in the midwest region of the USA, it stands around 40 ppb. Through PopFACE and AspenFACE experiements, along with work done all over the world, it has been proven that even today's elevated O3 levels negatively impacts the ability for trees to act as a carbon sink, which then results in more CO2 in the air.
Where does this lead us? CO2 accounts for roughly 9-26% of the greenhouse effect, which is both undisputed and, overall, a Very Good Thing for life on Earth (it's what tempers the climate on the surface). In laboratory experiments, it also has been shown that in columns of air composed similarly to our atmosphere at different points in history, heat is trapped by the test atmospheres in amounts similar to what we're seeing here on the ground on earth when you crank up the CO2 levels to how we've cranked them up.
I haven't discussed models here at all. I've only discussed experiments and statistical analysis based on observational data.
In exchange for getting the USSR's nukes from the former republics, the Russian Federation agreed to take on all debts and treaty obligations of the USSR, meaning that the treaty applies to Russia (Also See: the uproar over Russia withdrawing from the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty)
I work directly (full-time programming gig) with those producing and teaching from textbooks, and they all tend to look down on those who view textbooks as a reliable income source. Most all of the textbooks written around here are to provide affordable alternatives to useless expensive ones, and the ones we produce tend to become the widely-used one in a few years. But hey, if all of these professors want to be too busy milking their students for money than teaching or doing research... they are more than welcome to it, but I guarantee them this - they're hurting everyone involved.
I bash ZFS after using it, researching it, and trying to write a homebrew fsck utility for it after a pool decided it wasn't going to import anymore.
It's another FS in its first generation, and therefore it sucks just as bad as other young filesystems. I'll think about trying it again in a few years.
Agreed. After an accidental power loss to several drive bays on our SAN, our 30-TB ZFS pool didn't want to import anymore. Spent a week debugging the kernel to discover *where* it was breaking, and then writing something to munge the on-disk data structures until the "self-repair" utilities could take over. Apparently the uberblocks (ZFS version of superblocks) got munged pretty much everywhere, and the label headers and uberblocks weren't matching up. Any FS that claims perfect data security to the point of not requiring a fsck program should never require the error message saying "you're boned, flatten and restore from backups," which is the only error message I've ever seen it give.
Also, it's slow in creation and handling of small files. Our system (approx 100 users on a 45 node HPC cluster) takes about an hour to unzip the gcc source (takes like 10 minutes on my MacBook). Huge files get the full throughput of the SAN, but small ones take forever.
Lastly, ZFS doesn't let you remove volumes from the pool, or add singly into a RaidZ.
We're most likely going to figure out how to migrate back to Linux/LVM/XFS, and not even think about AdvFS. 'Exciting', indeed.
So... one particular avenue of attack succeeded on one system and failed on the others, so it must be less secure overall? That's great logic there, buckaroo.
ZFS: Because you're fscked when you actually do need to fsck.I'm an undergrad assistant sysadmin and a programmer for a department here at UIUC. As a sysadmin, one of my primary responsibilities is maintaining and running our 41-node Linux cluster and the associated mass storage system. As a programmer, I'm responsible for hacking on a climate model that will be a rather big deal once it works, due to it running a very fine resolution model of the global system.
Something I've noticed is that once a professor has gotten done modeling something, the immediate response is doubling the resolution of the model. Or quadruple it. And then they want to do that, and make the model track five times the amount of variables in the system. And then they're going to be plugging another model into the original model that might even square the amount of computational power necessary. And lastly, they're going to want to also take the model from investigating 10 years worth of time, to possibly the next two centuries.
Scientist-type computing needs are basically gaseous; they will fill to expand whatever space they're given. There will always be a necessity for far-above-normal number crunching capability; people are constantly capable of figuring out available_computrons^2 ways of using a given amount of computing power. When there's 1024-core CPUs in desktops, professors are going to be wanting millions of vector processors because their .00001 degree global climate/biology model only processes in real time (1 model day / day) given their available resources. Today I'm working on a .1 degree model that has to run on Cobalt at the NCSA due to its massive memory and processor requirements (28 CPUs to make it run at real time with 18 GB of ram per CPU at 28 CPUs. Memory need scales linearly, processing power doesn't, so you'll need more than a linear increase in processors for a linear increase in model speed).
Weeeeeeell, technically, there's Cygwin and Windows Services for Unix (which essentially is Unix on top of the Windows kernel) to support POSIX. However, before I could afford a seperate machine for Windows apps I need, I tried both, and they suck immensely. By "suck immensely", I mean that they're both for "I have that one app I need from POSIX-land." Both have an air of "Win32 is Win32, and POSIX is POSIX, and n'er the twain shall meet." Made it less than fun to run the system.
I dunno, I rather like the notion of a 4 socket 8 core machine (32 cores of awesome). Then again, I maintain a computational cluster. YMMV.
How far of a tree you maintain really depends on what you're using and how much you customize it. If you're typically doing desktop deployments, most of the software packages you're going to be using will be mature and stable (Firefox, OO.o, KDE/GNOME, etc). Where I work, we have some odd bits of hardware here and there that require us to maintain a couple of kernel source trees to keep the hardware working.
If you want to follow the Microsoft model and run your own site-local update repository, it's simple to add that to the distribution's repository list, and have the update function run once every however often you want. With Linux, if you've customized packages (such as our custom kernels), you can place them in there.
In some cases, local fixes may be problematic to get upstream to the package/software maintainers, but in my experience no harder than Microsoft (though if the MS devs sneer at you, you don't find out, which may or may not be a plus compared to F/OSS).
As far as dependency goes, it's easier to switch from one distro of Linux to another, and most Linux software tends to encourage use of file formats and network protocols that one can hook in to (for example, if you don't like OpenOffice.org, switch to another office suite that supports OpenDocument, and you don't lose any work). The dependency on high-priced consultants and higher ideas is the same, but you're not as dependent on specific implementations nearly as much.
I use one of those at work, I like it. I don't know if it really has mechanical keyswitches, but it feels and sounds good anyway.
Where I work, I support the Windows desktops; my co-worker who supports the Linux clusters has the same keyboard, but it's a standard 101 key layout (no windows keys), has a marbleized blue-grey pastic casing, and has a Silicon Graphics logo instead of Dell. Same keyboard otherwise. Very cool.
OK, I know this is both OT and dumb at once, but this is Slashdot, so whatever...
Isn't the guy compiling OO.o multiple times a day about 10 years behind or so, according to MS?
OK, so that was stupider than I thought. Still posting.
All governments gain power by consent of the governed. This is as true in the United States as it is in Denmark as it is in China. If enough of the population ceases to grant the government their concent at the same time, the government is powerless, null, and void. Governments, however, keep said consent via fear. This fear comes via two ways: "You'd be worse off without this government" and when not enough of a critical mass of the population witholds their consent, they get squashed (see: Tiananmen Square). As a counterpoint, look at the August Coup in the former Soviet Union, where the soldiers openly rebelled against Communist "hardliners".
I think part if the issue is that even though the Archives can review the documents, all they can do is say "We don't think this ought to be secret." It's still up to the CIA/DIA to re-de-classify them, which they may or may not do.
I agree with you on the fact that they're finding problems is how the system is supposed to work, however, IMHO, it's not working enough. Just because it finds errors, it can't do anything about it to fix them, except report back up to an administration that is less than sympathetic to issues of public oversight of its actions.
Does this mean I get OpenSolaris CDs in my Big Kid's Meal?
In VI America, you use text editor. In Stallman Russia, text editor uses you!
To the tune of Disney's theme song for their "Tiki Room" attraction:
In the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web,
in the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web,
All the geeks sing and the hackers croon!
In the wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-wiki-web!
That's nt the point he was trying to make.
I'd *really* like to see the level of DDOS that it takes to bring a Tier 1 to it's knees.
I was part of a high school hybrid car project, where we took a 2000 VW Beatle donated to us from VW America, and turned it into a soydiesel -> battery -> powertrain hybrid (called a "serial powertrain"; modern hybrids use "parallel powertrains"). Electrics get really good acceleration (Electric motors put out oodles of torque in the low RPM range, or at least ours did), but proper usage requires different driving habits than people are used to, such as regenerative breaking, and massive use of the batteries tends to generate not small amounts of hydrogen gas. We were almost seriously considering adding a hood scoop to it just to get more airflow to where we were storing the batteries- our previous project, a 1960's vintage bug, a pure electric, had a hydrogen explosion on the battery trailer that we were using before we could mount the batteries in the car.
That, sir, is why you need a hybridized El Camino.