'Occasionally, Microsoft's recommendations verge on the absurd. For example, you might not think it necessary to admonish developers to "not use slang that may be considered profane or derogatory, such as 'pimp' or 'bitch,'" but apparently it is.'
IT skews dramatically male, and those men skew dramatically towards the socially inept. Making explicit rules about not using profane or derogatory slang in your UI is completely appropriate.
Having been recently thrown out and banned from Staples, Bestbuy, and Futureshop, for setting the IE Homepage on the display computers to the small local competitor down the street, I had no where to reasonably go but online.
Shoulda gone to the small local competitor down the street...
"If you can't get rich off of that over the course of your career, you are doing it wrong" -- remember, this discussion was started by an article in which a med school graduate and research scientist reinvented the trapezoid method of integration, presumably because he never learned it in math class. So we're not talking math geniuses here.
Computer programs have already beaten Go professionals at 7-stone handicap games. Mogo and Many Faces of Go have both done it for sure, and Zen is very competitive with both of them. If you go to http://gokgs.com/ and sign into the Computer Go room you'll see that Zen is ranked 3 dan and ManyFaces is ranked 2 dan, and they routinely win games off strong amateur humans. Both Zen and ManyFaces are single-box SMP programs, and the algorithm they use is a Monte Carlo algorithm so it should scale to hundreds of machines, while Mogo already runs on 600 processors...
So Go programs are getting there. Not as fast as chess, but they're still getting there.
Microsoft can't possibly withdraw from China -- it has a huge investment there that has nothing to do with the search engine market. Microsoft Research Asia is headquartered in Beijing; and a number of product teams have development teams in Shanghai (disclosure: including mine). They just opened a 4000-FTE office complex in one of Shanghai's technical districts.
So I doubt Microsoft is going to close down Bing China out of principle.
Microsoft routinely grosses more than Hollywood does at the domestic box office.
Hmm, that's an apples-to-oranges comparison because that's Microsoft's international gross income compared to Hollywood's domestic income. But still... I thought it somewhat eye-popping.
I don't know if Parallel Extensions is worth $8 billion, but it's a huge deal and the cornerstone of the ManyCore/Multicore work MS is doing. It's pretty freaking cool. (And the Mono folks have already implemented it...)
It's not the same principle at all. This ruling is based on the fact that Blizzard distributes its software under an end user license. The GPL is not an end user license. The GPL gives you a blanket right to make copies of the software for any reason, to modify those copies as you see fit, and to use the software in any manner you like. The only thing you may not do without following the GPL is distribute modified copies to other people.
What "class" would that be? I imagine it would explicitly exclude Free clusters.
This cluster has appeared in the last three Top 500 lists. In June and November 2007 it had a performance of 62.68 TFlops with 70% efficiency, running Linux. In June 2008 it had a performance of 68.48 TFlops with 77% efficiency, running Windows HPC Server 2008.
Here's the problem. On codes which need lots of data interchange, communication speed becomes the bottleneck. I don't know of anyone running a serious fluid dynamics or weather code, which are this kind of data-interchange-limited application, who gets anything near peak performance on "real-world" problems using ASCI machines. Sure, ASCI White (a 10000-node cluster) was billed as a 10-Teraflops supercomputer. Who cares, when you get 10% of peak performance if you're lucky?
NOAA wanted to buy a supercomputer in the mid-90s, for weather and climate simulations. They did the requirements analysis and decided that a Japanese vector supercomputer was what they needed -- nobody in the U.S. made them anymore. Seymour Cray flipped out -- a government organization buying foreign supercomputers? heresy! -- pulled a bunch of strings, and very soon thereafter Japanese supercomputers faced a stiff tariff because the Japanese were "dumping" their product on the U.S. market. Of course, that meant NOAA couldn't get their NEC. They ended up buying some American-made cluster and getting their piss-poor 5% of peak performance.
Well, two years ago, Japan brought Earth Simulator online. It's cluster of 5000 vector processors; it boasted 30 Teraflops peak performance, which was 3 times as fast as the then-current number one machine, ASCI White. And a group from NOAA went over to Japan on invitation to check the machine out. They spent on the order of a week adapting some of their current codes to the ES architecture and fired them up.
And got 66% of peak performance right off the bat.
How'd that happen? Well, ES cost on the order of $100 million. (By the way, as a rule, if your 'supercomputer' cost less than $10 million, it's not really a supercomputer.) Of that, about $50 million went into developing the processor interconnect -- it's a 5000-way(!) crossbar, for you EE types. With an interconnect that big and fast, the communication bottleneck which dooms the big physics codes suddenly disappears.
So, yeah, the U.S. supercomputer market at its own seed corn. To see Earth Simulator jump to the top of the Top 500 was something of a slap in the face; to see it get 20 Teraflops on real-world problems was a terrible blow to the prestige of the U.S. supercomputing community. And not one we're going to easily recover from.
It's a good thing you didn't quote the first part of your parent's comment, because this post is an argument for segregation. (Or, against the 1964 civil rights law.)
I personally don't find it very interesting that there are only a finite number of truncatable primes, because it's not clear whether that's an artifact of base 10 or not. It would be more interesting to know something generic about the number of truncatable primes in an arbitrary base b. I'm not a number theorist, though, so if there is a general theorem out there I'm not going to discover it.
One is not a prime, and there are good reasons why not. One is that the statement of the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, which says that any number can be uniquely factored into a product of powers of prime numbers, would be needlessly complicated if 1 were a prime.
Re:Water is easy to simulate!
on
Shrek 2 How-To
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· Score: 1
I agree (and I do N-S solvers for a living). Of course, it's easier to render Navier-Stokes simulations than it is to render artistic illustrations, because as computational physicists we only care about the properties of the water (velocity, vorticity, pressure), so that's what we display.
It's only "easier" to do computational fluid dynamics in the sense that the complexity of what we can simulate is so much lower than what people want to animate for films. It would be easy for artists to render a good-looking illustration of even the most complex flows we spend months computing.
On the other hand, films only have to make things "look real", whereas computational physicists have to make them "be real". You wouldn't want to fly in a airline designed only through artists conceptualizations!
A Python front end for Gcc could be fun.
And nearly impossible. I suspect that Python's way too dynamic to be handled by anything but a run-time interpreter.
Slashdot Mirror
'Occasionally, Microsoft's recommendations verge on the absurd. For example, you might not think it necessary to admonish developers to "not use slang that may be considered profane or derogatory, such as 'pimp' or 'bitch,'" but apparently it is.'
IT skews dramatically male, and those men skew dramatically towards the socially inept. Making explicit rules about not using profane or derogatory slang in your UI is completely appropriate.
I find it far more likely that this has something to do with Office 365: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/online-software.aspx
Because "CUDA" and "GPGPU" are such obvious bits of terminology ... ?
Having been recently thrown out and banned from Staples, Bestbuy, and Futureshop, for setting the IE Homepage on the display computers to the small local competitor down the street, I had no where to reasonably go but online.
Shoulda gone to the small local competitor down the street...
Especially because North Korea's macro is so bad...
"If you can't get rich off of that over the course of your career, you are doing it wrong" -- remember, this discussion was started by an article in which a med school graduate and research scientist reinvented the trapezoid method of integration, presumably because he never learned it in math class. So we're not talking math geniuses here.
Did you miss the part of the artlcle where the TITECH team working on the Linux Top500 run on Tsubame also had to rewrite their HPL stack?
So Go programs are getting there. Not as fast as chess, but they're still getting there.
Microsoft can't possibly withdraw from China -- it has a huge investment there that has nothing to do with the search engine market. Microsoft Research Asia is headquartered in Beijing; and a number of product teams have development teams in Shanghai (disclosure: including mine). They just opened a 4000-FTE office complex in one of Shanghai's technical districts. So I doubt Microsoft is going to close down Bing China out of principle.
Microsoft routinely grosses more than Hollywood does at the domestic box office.
Hmm, that's an apples-to-oranges comparison because that's Microsoft's international gross income compared to Hollywood's domestic income. But still ... I thought it somewhat eye-popping.
Windows 7 now features a math input panel, which converts handwritten mathematics to MathML. You can see screenshots at this link: http://www.gottabemobile.com/2008/10/29/windows-7-math-input-panel-screenshots
I definitely approve of companies patenting technology I never want to see anywhere.
Linux has been at it for 15 years and (as indicated by an earlier slashdot story this very day) sound is still broken out of the box on Ubuntu.
And you still can't reliably cut and paste between apps.
Not exactly ready for prime time.
- Parallel Extensions to .NET
- Surface
- Photosynth
- WorldWide Telescope
I don't know if Parallel Extensions is worth $8 billion, but it's a huge deal and the cornerstone of the ManyCore/Multicore work MS is doing. It's pretty freaking cool. (And the Mono folks have already implemented it...)
It's not the same principle at all. This ruling is based on the fact that Blizzard distributes its software under an end user license. The GPL is not an end user license. The GPL gives you a blanket right to make copies of the software for any reason, to modify those copies as you see fit, and to use the software in any manner you like. The only thing you may not do without following the GPL is distribute modified copies to other people.
What "class" would that be? I imagine it would explicitly exclude Free clusters.
This cluster has appeared in the last three Top 500 lists. In June and November 2007 it had a performance of 62.68 TFlops with 70% efficiency, running Linux. In June 2008 it had a performance of 68.48 TFlops with 77% efficiency, running Windows HPC Server 2008.
http://www.top500.org/system/details/8757
http://www.top500.org/system/ranking/8757
We know that they did not bother with such technicalities. They explicitly refused to get an order from the FISA court, when Qwest asked for one.
It does collect dust over time. But that dust is blown away by Martian dust devils every so often.
The University of Arizona Mathematics department installed chalkboards near the elevators on each floor in the math building. They were a huge hit.
Here's the problem. On codes which need lots of data interchange, communication speed becomes the bottleneck. I don't know of anyone running a serious fluid dynamics or weather code, which are this kind of data-interchange-limited application, who gets anything near peak performance on "real-world" problems using ASCI machines. Sure, ASCI White (a 10000-node cluster) was billed as a 10-Teraflops supercomputer. Who cares, when you get 10% of peak performance if you're lucky? NOAA wanted to buy a supercomputer in the mid-90s, for weather and climate simulations. They did the requirements analysis and decided that a Japanese vector supercomputer was what they needed -- nobody in the U.S. made them anymore. Seymour Cray flipped out -- a government organization buying foreign supercomputers? heresy! -- pulled a bunch of strings, and very soon thereafter Japanese supercomputers faced a stiff tariff because the Japanese were "dumping" their product on the U.S. market. Of course, that meant NOAA couldn't get their NEC. They ended up buying some American-made cluster and getting their piss-poor 5% of peak performance. Well, two years ago, Japan brought Earth Simulator online. It's cluster of 5000 vector processors; it boasted 30 Teraflops peak performance, which was 3 times as fast as the then-current number one machine, ASCI White. And a group from NOAA went over to Japan on invitation to check the machine out. They spent on the order of a week adapting some of their current codes to the ES architecture and fired them up. And got 66% of peak performance right off the bat. How'd that happen? Well, ES cost on the order of $100 million. (By the way, as a rule, if your 'supercomputer' cost less than $10 million, it's not really a supercomputer.) Of that, about $50 million went into developing the processor interconnect -- it's a 5000-way(!) crossbar, for you EE types. With an interconnect that big and fast, the communication bottleneck which dooms the big physics codes suddenly disappears. So, yeah, the U.S. supercomputer market at its own seed corn. To see Earth Simulator jump to the top of the Top 500 was something of a slap in the face; to see it get 20 Teraflops on real-world problems was a terrible blow to the prestige of the U.S. supercomputing community. And not one we're going to easily recover from.
It's a good thing you didn't quote the first part of your parent's comment, because this post is an argument for segregation. (Or, against the 1964 civil rights law.)
I personally don't find it very interesting that there are only a finite number of truncatable primes, because it's not clear whether that's an artifact of base 10 or not. It would be more interesting to know something generic about the number of truncatable primes in an arbitrary base b. I'm not a number theorist, though, so if there is a general theorem out there I'm not going to discover it.
There is more good information about why one is not a prime at utm.edu's primes website.
I agree (and I do N-S solvers for a living). Of course, it's easier to render Navier-Stokes simulations than it is to render artistic illustrations, because as computational physicists we only care about the properties of the water (velocity, vorticity, pressure), so that's what we display. It's only "easier" to do computational fluid dynamics in the sense that the complexity of what we can simulate is so much lower than what people want to animate for films. It would be easy for artists to render a good-looking illustration of even the most complex flows we spend months computing. On the other hand, films only have to make things "look real", whereas computational physicists have to make them "be real". You wouldn't want to fly in a airline designed only through artists conceptualizations!
A Python front end for Gcc could be fun. And nearly impossible. I suspect that Python's way too dynamic to be handled by anything but a run-time interpreter.