The main problem is the banks. The solution is simple:
- If you are a bank that offers "essential" services, such as bank accounts, home loans, etc, you are not allowed to also participate in "risky" financial speculation practices (derivatives, shares, etc).
Forcing the separation of essential banking services from speculative practices is simple, and is not really that far from existing or previous legislation in various countries. It prevents the ridiculous situation where a government says they will underwrite the speculation of a private company, which is essentially the same thing as the government saying "Sure, have a great time at the casino. If you win you can keep the money, if you lose, we've got you covered."
Even better: start a government-owned organisation for essential banking services. The postal service is halfway there anyway, and goodness knows they could use the extra revenue.
As for FORTRAN, it's great for writing one thing well and fast, but it doesn't have any mechanisms for more high-level programming or code re-use, which means it is annoying to maintain, extend, or to even guarantee consistencies between the different subroutines of a large application. It also relies a lot more on what the compiler will do, while with C/C++ there is more control on what happens with regards to vectorization, parallelization or data transfers, which can be critical for heterogeneous systems.
Mod parent down. This is completely wrong. You clearly haven't looked at Fortran for about 30 years. Fortran has had modularity since Fortran 90, and modern Fortran has object orientation, inheritance and polymorphism. In terms of numerical performance the Fortran compiler will still leave the C++ compiler laying on the ground, weeping.
So what exactly is the high-level programming feature that C++ has that Fortran doesn't? Is the write-once, read-never quality that a lot of C++ code has, because I am happy to live without that particular "feature".
You're right, there is a lesson to be learned from this. And that is you shouldn't compare oranges to apples.
Dance is a performance art. So copyright has very little meaning because the cost of reproduction is very high - you have to be able to perform. While your argument may have some validity in the music industry, which IMO will certainly survive without copyright, I don't think dance's success by analogy can be applied to the book or film industry purely because they are such different creatures.
The book or film industry would be very different without copyright - I'm not saying they wouldn't survive or thrive but I think your analogy is misleading.
I looked at the graph that you wished... this one.
As a scientist (a theoretical physicist... FWIW) I do not understand how anyone can look at this graph and not be convinced that something is different this time around.
I mean c'mon... Forget the "hockey stick", the important part is the whole graph. Current CO2 levels are approaching 400ppm, i.e. 133% of the previous maximum of 300 ppm for the past 400,000 years. Surely that strongly suggests that we are contributing to the problem.
However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.
Physicists in my field (Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics) have been harnessing the computing power of existing GPUs to get teraflop performance on a desktop - handy if you don't have access to a supercomputer.
Just cause something is a GPU doesn't mean you can't get your hands dirty and make it do some real work.
Hangon... That sounds more like "Enslaving the GPU"
I am the eldest of five children. Of those five, I was the only one who had childhood asthma (the severity was such that I was being prescribed drugs for several years). My father quit smoking when I was three, before any of my other siblings were born. Take preceding statements, apply logic and see what you come up with.
You can say what you like about correlation and causation, but the fact of the matter is that secondary smoke is harmful, in particular to children.
As a smoker if you wish to slowly kill yourself, then I don't care. But don't exhale. Cause you have no control over the stuff that you breathe out after its left your mouth.
People are allowed to take risks and endanger their own lives. When they attempt to undertake actions that endanger other's lives or have a serious potential to harm others, that is in most cases against the law.
So, in my not so humble opinion sir, in the politest possible terms, I suggest that you take your rant and smoke it.
I'm little surprised no one has mentioned KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Its been included in the Linux kernel since 2.6.20 I think.
Its a module which promotes the Linux kernel to a hypervisor, allowing guest VMs to be run. I have Windows XP running as a guest on my Ubuntu machine at home.
It doesn't present my GTS 8800 as a 3D card to the guest OS though (although neither does Xen). It woule be good to know if there is a system which allows a better hardware representation to be presented to the guest OS.
10 minutes to figure out touch? Pfft... this is slashdot, we're talking at least an hour to figure out what to touch... oh wait, we're talking about encryption.
Advanced hair... yeah, yeah.
Exciting for some....
However, the next generation of this process could feasibly be new limbs or new organs... sign me up.
Well, are we talking about actual supercomputers, not just clusters? 'Cause if you're just trying to break these Teraflops records, you can just cram a ton of existing computers together into a cluster, and voila! lots of operations per second.
Actually, this method won't work for the benchmark that is used for the top 500 list, LINPACK. The difficulty is that to solve most problems in parallel, the processors need to talk to each other. This introduces an overhead into the program, and the amount of overhead depends on the interconnect. Programs which can be parallelised without a communication overhead are called trivially parallel. LINPACK is not trivially parallel, so if you took a whole lot of computers and banged them together over Ethernet, all you'd end up with is an expensive way to keep your network busy.
The beauty of the Altix systems is that the NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Architecture) is a really fast interconnect (speaking as someone who gets to run on them).
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem is the banks. The solution is simple:
- If you are a bank that offers "essential" services, such as bank accounts, home loans, etc, you are not allowed to also participate in "risky" financial speculation practices (derivatives, shares, etc).
Forcing the separation of essential banking services from speculative practices is simple, and is not really that far from existing or previous legislation in various countries. It prevents the ridiculous situation where a government says they will underwrite the speculation of a private company, which is essentially the same thing as the government saying "Sure, have a great time at the casino. If you win you can keep the money, if you lose, we've got you covered."
Even better: start a government-owned organisation for essential banking services. The postal service is halfway there anyway, and goodness knows they could use the extra revenue.
As for FORTRAN, it's great for writing one thing well and fast, but it doesn't have any mechanisms for more high-level programming or code re-use, which means it is annoying to maintain, extend, or to even guarantee consistencies between the different subroutines of a large application. It also relies a lot more on what the compiler will do, while with C/C++ there is more control on what happens with regards to vectorization, parallelization or data transfers, which can be critical for heterogeneous systems.
Mod parent down. This is completely wrong. You clearly haven't looked at Fortran for about 30 years. Fortran has had modularity since Fortran 90, and modern Fortran has object orientation, inheritance and polymorphism. In terms of numerical performance the Fortran compiler will still leave the C++ compiler laying on the ground, weeping.
So what exactly is the high-level programming feature that C++ has that Fortran doesn't? Is the write-once, read-never quality that a lot of C++ code has, because I am happy to live without that particular "feature".
You're right, there is a lesson to be learned from this. And that is you shouldn't compare oranges to apples.
Dance is a performance art. So copyright has very little meaning because the cost of reproduction is very high - you have to be able to perform. While your argument may have some validity in the music industry, which IMO will certainly survive without copyright, I don't think dance's success by analogy can be applied to the book or film industry purely because they are such different creatures.
The book or film industry would be very different without copyright - I'm not saying they wouldn't survive or thrive but I think your analogy is misleading.
I looked at the graph that you wished ... this one.
As a scientist (a theoretical physicist... FWIW) I do not understand how anyone can look at this graph and not be convinced that something is different this time around.
I mean c'mon ... Forget the "hockey stick", the important part is the whole graph. Current CO2 levels are approaching 400ppm, i.e. 133% of the previous maximum of 300 ppm for the past 400,000 years. Surely that strongly suggests that we are contributing to the problem.
However, you can't ignore the fact that Nehalem in fact can run physics.
... That sounds more like "Enslaving the GPU"
Physicists in my field (Lattice Quantum Chromodynamics) have been harnessing the computing power of existing GPUs to get teraflop performance on a desktop - handy if you don't have access to a supercomputer.
Just cause something is a GPU doesn't mean you can't get your hands dirty and make it do some real work.
Hangon
I am the eldest of five children. Of those five, I was the only one who had childhood asthma (the severity was such that I was being prescribed drugs for several years). My father quit smoking when I was three, before any of my other siblings were born. Take preceding statements, apply logic and see what you come up with.
You can say what you like about correlation and causation, but the fact of the matter is that secondary smoke is harmful, in particular to children.
As a smoker if you wish to slowly kill yourself, then I don't care. But don't exhale. Cause you have no control over the stuff that you breathe out after its left your mouth.
People are allowed to take risks and endanger their own lives. When they attempt to undertake actions that endanger other's lives or have a serious potential to harm others, that is in most cases against the law.
So, in my not so humble opinion sir, in the politest possible terms, I suggest that you take your rant and smoke it.
I'm little surprised no one has mentioned KVM, the Kernel-based Virtual Machine. Its been included in the Linux kernel since 2.6.20 I think.
Its a module which promotes the Linux kernel to a hypervisor, allowing guest VMs to be run. I have Windows XP running as a guest on my Ubuntu machine at home.
It doesn't present my GTS 8800 as a 3D card to the guest OS though (although neither does Xen). It woule be good to know if there is a system which allows a better hardware representation to be presented to the guest OS.
Advanced hair ... yeah, yeah.
Exciting for some....
However, the next generation of this process could feasibly be new limbs or new organs ... sign me up.
Well, are we talking about actual supercomputers, not just clusters? 'Cause if you're just trying to break these Teraflops records, you can just cram a ton of existing computers together into a cluster, and voila! lots of operations per second.
Actually, this method won't work for the benchmark that is used for the top 500 list, LINPACK. The difficulty is that to solve most problems in parallel, the processors need to talk to each other. This introduces an overhead into the program, and the amount of overhead depends on the interconnect. Programs which can be parallelised without a communication overhead are called trivially parallel. LINPACK is not trivially parallel, so if you took a whole lot of computers and banged them together over Ethernet, all you'd end up with is an expensive way to keep your network busy.
The beauty of the Altix systems is that the NUMA (Non Uniform Memory Architecture) is a really fast interconnect (speaking as someone who gets to run on them).
while ( voting_day() ) {
canditate = accept_vote();
if ( verify_requested ) {
print_your_vote(canditate);
};
actual_canditate = "Bush, G.W.";
add_vote(actual_canditate);
};