Does any major piece of software that folks use come from UT? I can think of famous projects from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, Cornell... But I can't think of a single one from UT.
National Instruments, of Austin, TX, sells a graphical programming language, called LabVIEW, which has about a 90% market share in the research sector [both for-profit and "not-for-profit"], and which is moving aggressively into the automation sector [i.e. the factory floor].
So, in other words, he's a typical liberal, right?
Right:
Google Founders Cut Salaries to $1
MSNBC Reports that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and CEO Eric Schmidt all slashed their salaries to $1 last year. Since you do not have to pay FICA, Medicare, or income taxes on the capital gains associated with stock sales, they stand to substantially decrease their tax burden. Is this a breach of the company's "do no evil" mission statement, or just an example of people who love their jobs so much they don't need to be paid to go to work?
According to a representative of the county, '...We have $30 million in unfunded retirement liabilities. We need the money.'
eebra82: So what if the public demand is of bigger interest?
By day, Eric Schmidt is a tax-n-spend, save-the-whales, let's-do-it-for-the-chil'run utopian kook:
Elton John helps raise money for Gore
ATHERTON, Calif. (Reuters) - Flamboyant rock star Elton John, making his first foray into American politics after three decades of performing in the United States, endorsed Vice President Al Gore at a ritzy Silicon Valley fund-raiser. John, the entertainer at a $10,000-a-plate dinner Tuesday, began his set with "Your Song." But before his next number, he showed his political stripes to the business leaders of America's technological mecca...
The fund-raiser, at the home of Novell Corp. Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, raised $3.25 million for the Democratic National Committee...
Frankly, I don't see Google [or anyone else] replicating M$FT's COM/DCOM functionality anytime in the near future.
Actually, now that I think about it, I can see a way that Google could replicate the COM/DCOM functionality, but they would need to work in partnerships with other companies, and it would take a fair amount of effort [on the order of hundreds - or even thousands - of man-years' worth of labor].
Hmmm... maybe I should patent that approach before I open my big mouth.
It could if Google came out with a spreadsheet or word processor that works over the web in something like xml and saves files in gmail. If its made to web standards and works in any platform browser than they they'll be indirectly taking on ms's os as well since people wont have to have windows to use it.
Anti-monopolist whining and blather to the contrary notwithstanding, the secret to M$FT's dominance on the desktop is COM/DCOM cut-n-paste functionality. You can cut a few rows from an Excel spreadsheet and paste them in a Word document. You can cut a picture from a Word document and paste it in a Powerpoint presentation. You can cut a Powerpoint graphic and paste it in a Paint window. Etc etc etc...
Last I checked, neither OSX nor Linux had anything that even remotely resembled COM's flexibility or third-party vendor support. Hell, I tried using the Adobe Suite on OSX 10.2 last year [helping some idiot "scientist" put together a conference presentation], and I couldn't even cut and paste simple pictures from one Adobe application to another - I had to save to disk and use "File | Open" instead.
For that matter, do any of you even know how Acrobat works? All that Acrobat does, and I mean ALL that it does, is simple import Word documents and paginate them [or, to be more precise - spiffify their pre-existing pagination]. That's it. For all intents and purposes, Acrobat has no word-processing functionality whatsoever - all the heavy lifting and straining is done in Word [and the rest of M$Office], and afterwords, Acrobat simply imports the Word document and [re-]paginates it. [For a mere $500? What a bargain!]
Frankly, I don't see Google [or anyone else] replicating M$FT's COM/DCOM functionality anytime in the near future.
Look, if that's your attitude, then you're part of the problem, and we would be wasting our time if we even tried to have a conversation about the phenomenon.
those who download music online are also likely to cheat at schools/universities...
Just last week I was surfing the coder-for-hire sites, and, in addition to the ridiculous, asinine demands people were making [$100,000 projects for opening bids of $100 - the sort of thing that would starve an already emaciated Bangalorean peasant], I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Just last week I was surfing the coder-for-hire sites, and, in addition to the ridiculous, asinine demands people were making [$100,000 projects for opening bids of $100 - the sort of thing that would starve an already emaciated Bangalorean peasant], I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Well, I once knew a girl who wanted to become a lawyer so she could "buy a Porsche". We had something going, but when I heared that, it was an instant no-go. I might be a geek desperate for sex, but I'm not that desperate. She quit school a year later. It's not money that matters, it's passion.
You might be interested to read this story and the thread that ensued [with more than 1200 replies and more than 15,000 views]:
Why should the RIAA care about movies or TV shows? Do you mean the MPAA?
Originally, I was going to add the MPAA, but they might actually care, since they're thinking of things like re-run rights and DVD rights and the like.
But the RIAA is 100% advertising-driven, so as long as you take the time to view the ads [or, in the case of radio, to listen to the ads between the songs], then they don't give a damn how you came to be in a position view [or listen to] them [the advertisements].
What the RIAA fears above all else is that people will use software to fast-forward through the advertisements, or the excise the advertisements altogether.
What if I were to download "The Simpsons" from last nights free broadcast? I'm not uploading anything, just downloading and watching it, then deleting it after I watch it. Can I be arrested for this or is it copyright violations?
Did the copy you download contain the commercials, or were they excised?
And if it contained the commercials, did you take the time to watch them?
The commercials are all the RIAA cares about. As long as you took the time to watch the commercials, then everyone will be happy in Tinseltown.
Again, absolutely, manifestly false. SPENGLER!!!
on
Keeping the Lights On
·
· Score: 1
This myth that you seem to be invested in believing [or worshipping?] probably wasn't true thirty years ago - in the 1970s - when it was a pseudo-intellectual fad enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame.
Frankly, to believe that the earth's population is expanding - rather than beginning its descent into a death spiral - is akin to believing that the earth is flat, rather than round.
Again, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the work that "SPENGLER" is doing at the Asia Times:
What a load of rubbish. With virtually every country in the world experiencing soaring levels of unemployment amongst both skilled and unskilled workers, I think there are plenty of people to take their places. The world's populating is spiralling upwards out of control. There are more than enough young people to take over!
What you have said is absolutely false. The world is in the middle of a population implosion the likes of which we haven't seen since the Black Plague.
If you are at all curious about these things, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the work that a pseudonymous author is doing at the Asia Times, under the name "Spengler":
I would urge you to read everything he has written on the subject.
PS: No one knows what will happen to these nations as they enter their death spirals. Almost all socio-economic models are based on the idea of a expanding population, and no one knows what will happen to these societies as their populations begin to contract.
By means of comparison, almost all financial models are based on an assumption of an increasing money supply [what we call "inflation"]. However, the only time this nation ever experienced a monetary deflation [when the Federal Reserve foolishly contracted the money supply in the late 1920s], we entered a two decade long economic calamity so terrible that it is now known as "The Great Depression".
How exactly would a spreadsheet, with formulas and macros and pivot tables, be expressed as HTML anyway?
1) In theory, they could certainly be saved using jscript/vbscript. And if you throw in the W3C DOM, then you can do just about anything you can imagine [the DOM is pretty awesome if you have the time to learn it].
Of course, whether M$FT has gone to the trouble of writing the relevant "Excel -> JScript" or "Excel -> VBScript" translators, I know not.
2) On a more fundamental point, if your only copy of the "formulas and macros and pivot tables" is embedded with the data in the Excel spreadsheet, then you're dealing with a rather egregious violation of a fundamental dictum from Comp Sci 101, Introduction to Database Theory: Thou shalt not comingle business logic and raw data.
The Microsoft Office formats themselves aren't that great. I work at a investment company which relies heavily on Excel. Over the years they've been using a few spreadsheets that has been around since Office 2000 at least. When we upgraded again to Office 2003, we had a few sheets exhibiting really, really strange behavior such the sheets wouldn't update unless you do a cut and paste first. We ended up having to simply rebuild those sheets cell by cell in Excel 2003. Once that was done, everything was many times faster and no more strange behaviors. The resulting file was also many times smaller. If we had access to those formats, at least we could have looked at it and see what was going on. Some of the traders have become so annoyed by the degree of control Microsoft has over what an user can do that they joke, "Microsoft is trying to protect me from myself again".
Pretty much every MSOffice utility has an option to "Save as Web Page (*.htm; *.html)", and they've had this option since at least Office2000.
If you save your document to HTML, you can then open it in a text editor [notepad, vi, emacs, whatever], alter the offending code, and then open it back up in the original MSOffice program [Excel, Word, Powerpoint, whatever] and go about your business.
This method has saved my bacon about a gazillion times.
For instance, just the other day, it saved me from the "Word must end in a paragraph, so if your document ends in a table then Word automatically appends an empty paragraph and you get a final blank page that you can't delete" bug: I simply saved the Word document to HTML, excised the offending "<p>", re-opened it in Word, and, la voila, the final blank page was gone.
"Fornication" is an English word, never found in the original text. This may shock you, but language can be ambiguous. Thus, translations can be wrong. This is why Muslims consider only Arabic versions of the Qur'an to be correct. Sometimes I wish Christians did the same.
Nobody remembers this now, but Harvard University was founded by a bunch of evil white puritan dudes so that their evil white puritan spawn could be taught to read the New Testament in its original Greek, without all the overhead of the {Greek -> Latin} and {Latin -> English} interventions.
As an aside, the word in question here is porneia, and there's a great deal of controversy about what it might have meant to the first century ear. One theory is that porneia meant "abomination", so that a man and a woman were not to divorce unless they came to discover that their marriage was an abomination - for instance, if they were to learn, after marrying, that they were in fact half-brother and half-sister. Cf Pierre Jourde's Lost Land, or - SPOILER ALERT - John Sayles's Lone Star, or, of course, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.
Finally, while we're on the subject of Harvard, you might be interested in her motto, Veritas, or "Truth":
And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil. For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved. But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought in God. http://www.bartleby.com/108/43/3.html#S10
Then said Jesus to those Jews which believed on him, If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. http://www.bartleby.com/108/43/8.html#S33
Why do ye not understand my speech? even because ye cannot hear my word. Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do: he was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it. And because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me? He that is of God heareth God's words: ye therefore hear them not, because ye are not of God. http://www.bartleby.com/108/43/8.html#S34
Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest; and how can we know the way? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. http://www.bartleby.com/108/43/14.html#S58
If ye love me, keep my commandments. And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you. I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you. http://www.bartleby.com/108/43/14.html#S59
Other things like large matrix multiplications or FFTs or N-body problems do not scale as well. In these cases as you subdivide the problem into smaller pieces for your larger number of machines, the computation on each processor will quickly become small while the communication between processors will become more significant.
But has anyone attempted to create a systematic [or systematizable] framework within which you might be able to prove that a certain problem was necessarily non-parallelizable?
Cf Lagrange/Abel/Galois et al proving the non-existence of solution algorithms for fifth-order equations.
Or Turing proving the non-existence of halting algorithms.
There are other problems where this is just out of the question... Tightly coupled problems just cannot be run efficiently even on clusters of workstations(COWs).
If I can grab you attention for just a sec: Do you know of any books [or treatises or papers] that deal with the question of whether [some given class of] problems might be provably non-parallelizable?
Heck, if you could just give me a few keywords to Google, I'd be really grateful.
Just yesterday, I was surfing some code-for-hire sites, like RentACoder, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
People were asking for what I would consider to be $50,000-$100,000 worth of custom software, but were listing the projects with opening bid estimates at like $100.
Good grief, I thought: Bangalorean peasants would starve to death if they bid on those contracts.
As for SpecOps Labs, I sure as hell didn't RTFA, but just glancing at the headlines would lead me to believe that they are asking for $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 [or maybe even $100,000,000] worth of software to be written for a measly $10 grand.
Kinda surrealistic, if you ask me.
PS: The other thing I couldn't believe about RentACoder et al was the sheer audacity of those damned college students who are openly advertising for people to write their programming assignments for them. What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Actually, the chain of events went Physics degree -> playing bass in a band and sleeping on strange people's floors -> working at http://www.acxiom.com/ -> then moving on.
Okay, the "playing bass in a band and sleeping on strange people's floors" provides much better context.
And I had wondered why a physics major would have been "lucky" to get a job as a database gearhead in 1997, at the very nascence of the great dot-com bubble.
This is a serious question for ackdesha - not a spam or a troll or whatever.
ackdesha, you wrote: Fresh out of college with a physics degree, I was lucky enough to be hired into a good situation using Oracle everyday to manage a large pharm. corp's marketing DB.
Again, not a troll, but a serious question: Wasn't this extraordinarily depressing - to have been a physics major and then immediately turn around and get dumped in a 9-5 doing DB work for a marketing department?
I've had some incredibly depressing jobs in my life - but what you're describing sounds like it could make a guy positively suicidal.
Slashdot Mirror
Make sure your control software can talk to everything you need on the plant floor.
Check out LabVIEW 8.0, just released three days ago.
My mod points expired a couple of days ago.
Could someone please mod this up?
Thanks.
Unlike many of their competitors [e.g. Agilent], National Instruments weathered the dot-com/dot-bomb tech debacle pretty well...
Here's a better graphic of what I was talking about:
Or this:Does any major piece of software that folks use come from UT? I can think of famous projects from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, Cornell
National Instruments, of Austin, TX, sells a graphical programming language, called LabVIEW, which has about a 90% market share in the research sector [both for-profit and "not-for-profit"], and which is moving aggressively into the automation sector [i.e. the factory floor].
PS: Ironically, LabVIEW 8.0 was just announced yesterday.
PPS: Unlike many of their competitors [e.g. Agilent], National Instruments weathered the dot-com/dot-bomb tech debacle pretty well:
So, in other words, he's a typical liberal, right?
Right:
Cap gains [20%] are for the beautiful people; taxes [50%+] are for the serfs.According to a representative of the county, '...We have $30 million in unfunded retirement liabilities. We need the money.'
eebra82: So what if the public demand is of bigger interest?
By day, Eric Schmidt is a tax-n-spend, save-the-whales, let's-do-it-for-the-chil'run utopian kook:
By night, he's an evil, conniving, mercantilist schmuck who abuses every tax loophole he can get his grubby little paws on.PS: This clown damn near bankrupted Novell. Don't come crying to me when, five years from now, Google's getting trounced by Yahoo! and MSN.
Frankly, I don't see Google [or anyone else] replicating M$FT's COM/DCOM functionality anytime in the near future.
Actually, now that I think about it, I can see a way that Google could replicate the COM/DCOM functionality, but they would need to work in partnerships with other companies, and it would take a fair amount of effort [on the order of hundreds - or even thousands - of man-years' worth of labor].
Hmmm... maybe I should patent that approach before I open my big mouth.
It could if Google came out with a spreadsheet or word processor that works over the web in something like xml and saves files in gmail. If its made to web standards and works in any platform browser than they they'll be indirectly taking on ms's os as well since people wont have to have windows to use it.
Anti-monopolist whining and blather to the contrary notwithstanding, the secret to M$FT's dominance on the desktop is COM/DCOM cut-n-paste functionality. You can cut a few rows from an Excel spreadsheet and paste them in a Word document. You can cut a picture from a Word document and paste it in a Powerpoint presentation. You can cut a Powerpoint graphic and paste it in a Paint window. Etc etc etc...
Last I checked, neither OSX nor Linux had anything that even remotely resembled COM's flexibility or third-party vendor support. Hell, I tried using the Adobe Suite on OSX 10.2 last year [helping some idiot "scientist" put together a conference presentation], and I couldn't even cut and paste simple pictures from one Adobe application to another - I had to save to disk and use "File | Open" instead.
For that matter, do any of you even know how Acrobat works? All that Acrobat does, and I mean ALL that it does, is simple import Word documents and paginate them [or, to be more precise - spiffify their pre-existing pagination]. That's it. For all intents and purposes, Acrobat has no word-processing functionality whatsoever - all the heavy lifting and straining is done in Word [and the rest of M$Office], and afterwords, Acrobat simply imports the Word document and [re-]paginates it. [For a mere $500? What a bargain!]
Frankly, I don't see Google [or anyone else] replicating M$FT's COM/DCOM functionality anytime in the near future.
Look, if that's your attitude, then you're part of the problem, and we would be wasting our time if we even tried to have a conversation about the phenomenon.
The first time I posted it, I left out the quote from the article.
Sorry.
those who download music online are also likely to cheat at schools/universities...
Just last week I was surfing the coder-for-hire sites, and, in addition to the ridiculous, asinine demands people were making [$100,000 projects for opening bids of $100 - the sort of thing that would starve an already emaciated Bangalorean peasant], I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Just last week I was surfing the coder-for-hire sites, and, in addition to the ridiculous, asinine demands people were making [$100,000 projects for opening bids of $100 - the sort of thing that would starve an already emaciated Bangalorean peasant], I was just appalled at the number of spoiled, self-obsessed, ingrate college students who were advertising for coders to write their CompSci and Engineering projects for them.
What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
Well, I once knew a girl who wanted to become a lawyer so she could "buy a Porsche". We had something going, but when I heared that, it was an instant no-go. I might be a geek desperate for sex, but I'm not that desperate. She quit school a year later. It's not money that matters, it's passion.
You might be interested to read this story and the thread that ensued [with more than 1200 replies and more than 15,000 views]:
One chick in particular, a BMW-driving lawyerette, took quite a hammering from her fellow posters.Why should the RIAA care about movies or TV shows? Do you mean the MPAA?
Originally, I was going to add the MPAA, but they might actually care, since they're thinking of things like re-run rights and DVD rights and the like.
But the RIAA is 100% advertising-driven, so as long as you take the time to view the ads [or, in the case of radio, to listen to the ads between the songs], then they don't give a damn how you came to be in a position view [or listen to] them [the advertisements].
What the RIAA fears above all else is that people will use software to fast-forward through the advertisements, or the excise the advertisements altogether.
What if I were to download "The Simpsons" from last nights free broadcast? I'm not uploading anything, just downloading and watching it, then deleting it after I watch it. Can I be arrested for this or is it copyright violations?
Did the copy you download contain the commercials, or were they excised?
And if it contained the commercials, did you take the time to watch them?
The commercials are all the RIAA cares about. As long as you took the time to watch the commercials, then everyone will be happy in Tinseltown.
This myth that you seem to be invested in believing [or worshipping?] probably wasn't true thirty years ago - in the 1970s - when it was a pseudo-intellectual fad enjoying its fifteen minutes of fame.
Frankly, to believe that the earth's population is expanding - rather than beginning its descent into a death spiral - is akin to believing that the earth is flat, rather than round.
Again, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the work that "SPENGLER" is doing at the Asia Times:
If you are the type of person who suffers from even the slightest twinge of curiosity, then please, please read his work.What a load of rubbish. With virtually every country in the world experiencing soaring levels of unemployment amongst both skilled and unskilled workers, I think there are plenty of people to take their places. The world's populating is spiralling upwards out of control. There are more than enough young people to take over!
What you have said is absolutely false. The world is in the middle of a population implosion the likes of which we haven't seen since the Black Plague.
If you are at all curious about these things, I cannot overemphasize the importance of the work that a pseudonymous author is doing at the Asia Times, under the name "Spengler":
I would urge you to read everything he has written on the subject.PS: No one knows what will happen to these nations as they enter their death spirals. Almost all socio-economic models are based on the idea of a expanding population, and no one knows what will happen to these societies as their populations begin to contract.
By means of comparison, almost all financial models are based on an assumption of an increasing money supply [what we call "inflation"]. However, the only time this nation ever experienced a monetary deflation [when the Federal Reserve foolishly contracted the money supply in the late 1920s], we entered a two decade long economic calamity so terrible that it is now known as "The Great Depression".
How exactly would a spreadsheet, with formulas and macros and pivot tables, be expressed as HTML anyway?
1) In theory, they could certainly be saved using jscript/vbscript. And if you throw in the W3C DOM, then you can do just about anything you can imagine [the DOM is pretty awesome if you have the time to learn it].
Of course, whether M$FT has gone to the trouble of writing the relevant "Excel -> JScript" or "Excel -> VBScript" translators, I know not.
2) On a more fundamental point, if your only copy of the "formulas and macros and pivot tables" is embedded with the data in the Excel spreadsheet, then you're dealing with a rather egregious violation of a fundamental dictum from Comp Sci 101, Introduction to Database Theory: Thou shalt not comingle business logic and raw data.
The Microsoft Office formats themselves aren't that great. I work at a investment company which relies heavily on Excel. Over the years they've been using a few spreadsheets that has been around since Office 2000 at least. When we upgraded again to Office 2003, we had a few sheets exhibiting really, really strange behavior such the sheets wouldn't update unless you do a cut and paste first. We ended up having to simply rebuild those sheets cell by cell in Excel 2003. Once that was done, everything was many times faster and no more strange behaviors. The resulting file was also many times smaller. If we had access to those formats, at least we could have looked at it and see what was going on. Some of the traders have become so annoyed by the degree of control Microsoft has over what an user can do that they joke, "Microsoft is trying to protect me from myself again".
Pretty much every MSOffice utility has an option to "Save as Web Page (*.htm; *.html)", and they've had this option since at least Office2000.
If you save your document to HTML, you can then open it in a text editor [notepad, vi, emacs, whatever], alter the offending code, and then open it back up in the original MSOffice program [Excel, Word, Powerpoint, whatever] and go about your business.
This method has saved my bacon about a gazillion times. For instance, just the other day, it saved me from the "Word must end in a paragraph, so if your document ends in a table then Word automatically appends an empty paragraph and you get a final blank page that you can't delete" bug: I simply saved the Word document to HTML, excised the offending " <p> ", re-opened it in Word, and, la voila, the final blank page was gone.
"Fornication" is an English word, never found in the original text. This may shock you, but language can be ambiguous. Thus, translations can be wrong. This is why Muslims consider only Arabic versions of the Qur'an to be correct. Sometimes I wish Christians did the same.
Nobody remembers this now, but Harvard University was founded by a bunch of evil white puritan dudes so that their evil white puritan spawn could be taught to read the New Testament in its original Greek, without all the overhead of the {Greek -> Latin} and {Latin -> English} interventions.
As an aside, the word in question here is porneia, and there's a great deal of controversy about what it might have meant to the first century ear. One theory is that porneia meant "abomination", so that a man and a woman were not to divorce unless they came to discover that their marriage was an abomination - for instance, if they were to learn, after marrying, that they were in fact half-brother and half-sister. Cf Pierre Jourde's Lost Land, or - SPOILER ALERT - John Sayles's Lone Star, or, of course, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex.
Finally, while we're on the subject of Harvard, you might be interested in her motto, Veritas, or "Truth":
Other things like large matrix multiplications or FFTs or N-body problems do not scale as well. In these cases as you subdivide the problem into smaller pieces for your larger number of machines, the computation on each processor will quickly become small while the communication between processors will become more significant.
But has anyone attempted to create a systematic [or systematizable] framework within which you might be able to prove that a certain problem was necessarily non-parallelizable?
Cf Lagrange/Abel/Galois et al proving the non-existence of solution algorithms for fifth-order equations.
Or Turing proving the non-existence of halting algorithms.
There are other problems where this is just out of the question... Tightly coupled problems just cannot be run efficiently even on clusters of workstations(COWs).
If I can grab you attention for just a sec: Do you know of any books [or treatises or papers] that deal with the question of whether [some given class of] problems might be provably non-parallelizable?
Heck, if you could just give me a few keywords to Google, I'd be really grateful.
Thanks.
Doesn't seem like much money to me
Just yesterday, I was surfing some code-for-hire sites, like RentACoder, and I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
People were asking for what I would consider to be $50,000-$100,000 worth of custom software, but were listing the projects with opening bid estimates at like $100.
Good grief, I thought: Bangalorean peasants would starve to death if they bid on those contracts.
As for SpecOps Labs, I sure as hell didn't RTFA, but just glancing at the headlines would lead me to believe that they are asking for $1,000,000 to $10,000,000 [or maybe even $100,000,000] worth of software to be written for a measly $10 grand.
Kinda surrealistic, if you ask me.
PS: The other thing I couldn't believe about RentACoder et al was the sheer audacity of those damned college students who are openly advertising for people to write their programming assignments for them. What the hell ever happened to academic integrity?
God, I feel like a dinosaur.
Actually, the chain of events went Physics degree -> playing bass in a band and sleeping on strange people's floors -> working at http://www.acxiom.com/ -> then moving on.
Okay, the "playing bass in a band and sleeping on strange people's floors" provides much better context.
And I had wondered why a physics major would have been "lucky" to get a job as a database gearhead in 1997, at the very nascence of the great dot-com bubble.
But now it all makes sense.
This is a serious question for ackdesha - not a spam or a troll or whatever.
ackdesha, you wrote: Fresh out of college with a physics degree, I was lucky enough to be hired into a good situation using Oracle everyday to manage a large pharm. corp's marketing DB.
Again, not a troll, but a serious question: Wasn't this extraordinarily depressing - to have been a physics major and then immediately turn around and get dumped in a 9-5 doing DB work for a marketing department?
I've had some incredibly depressing jobs in my life - but what you're describing sounds like it could make a guy positively suicidal.