The beach in MonteCarlo is completely imported gravel, very comfy to lay on, and the particles are not small enough to shift. I imagine this beach will be in a "cove" which is not subject to the longshore currents and rearranging that many natural beaches (like Daytona) are.
It should only cost the guy $5K in legal fees to fight this, I'd give him 50% chance of winning - not bad odds on the whole, if he can find a shyster to take the case.
I suppose the big question is what is the computing need out there.
I called "silly" on the massive parallelizing of very limited SIMD units because of the limited scope of applications. Financial? Yes, there is one options pricing algorithm that can be tackled very nicely with massive SIMD, but the rest of the financial industry needs less specific computing hardware. GPU cores are getting more capable, and they will eventually find a sweet spot where they are useful for video encoding and other things that lots of people actually do. Kudos to NVidia for trying to make GPUs more accessible, it will find some interesting niches, but what I see listed in the parent's post is pretty much a copy of the applications that were known two years ago, before CUDA launched.
You can claw your way up to 16 cores today if you work with 4 socket motherboards...
The data I work with isn't typically "fully massaged", there are a lot of sparse areas to consider quickly to identify areas that need more attention.
I still find cases where the algorithms can be sped up more than 10x by eliminating un-necessary work - this might not happen in more mature fields, but especially in cases where the new programmer has implemented something, there's usually more speed to be gained in a good code review than by throwing any amount of hardware at the problem.
I signed up for CUDA when it launched (early '07?), due to conditional execution, only about 20% of what we were crunching at the time would have benefited. We were far better off optimizing and parallelizing to take advantage of 8 slightly memory bound cores that could actually do a conditional execution.
As a programmer who does a great deal of data crunching, I sincerely hope that Intel's 80+ core CPU comes along quickly to crush the silliness out of people who are trying to find applications for GPU "cores."
I'm glad that people are out there buying graphics cards that can render the latest games in QuadHD resolution at 120 frames per second... it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
Taoism: Shit happens.
Confucianism: Confucius say, "Shit happens."
Buddhism: If shit happens, it isn't really shit.
Zen Buddhism: Shit is, and is not.
Zen Buddhism #2: What is the sound of shit happening?
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.
Islam: If shit happens, it is the will of Allah.
Islam #2: If shit happens, kill the person responsible.
Islam #3: If shit happens, blame Israel.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.
Presbyterian: This shit was bound to happen.
Episcopalian: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve the right wine with it.
Methodist: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve grape juice with it.
Congregationalist: Shit that happens to one person is just as good as shit that happens to another.
Unitarian: Shit that happens to one person is just as bad as shit that happens to another.
Lutheran: If shit happens, don't talk about it.
Fundamentalism: If shit happens, you will go to hell, unless you are born again. (Amen!)
Fundamentalism #2: If shit happens to a televangelist, it's okay.
Fundamentalism #3: Shit must be born again.
Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to us?
Calvinism: Shit happens because you don't work.
Seventh Day Adventism: No shit shall happen on Saturday.
Creationism: God made all shit.
Secular Humanism: Shit evolves.
Christian Science: When shit happens, don't call a doctor - pray!
Christian Science #2: Shit happening is all in your mind.
Unitarianism: Come let us reason together about this shit.
Quakers: Let us not fight over this shit.
Utopianism: This shit does not stink.
Capitalism: That's MY shit.
Communism: It's everybody's shit.
Feminism: Men are shit.
Chauvinism: We may be shit, but you can't live without us...
Commercialism: Let's package this shit.
Impressionism: From a distance, shit looks like a garden.
Idolism: Let's bronze this shit.
Existentialism: Shit doesn't happen; shit IS.
Existentialism #2: What is shit, anyway?
Stoicism: This shit is good for me.
Hedonism: There is nothing like a good shit happening!
Mormonism: God sent us this shit.
Mormonism #2: This shit is going to happen again.
Wiccan: An it harm none, let shit happen.
Scientology: If shit happens, see "Dianetics", p.157.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Knock Knock Shit happens.
Jehovah's Witnesses #2: May we have a moment of your time to show you some of our shit?
Jehovah's Witnesses #3: Shit has been prophesied and is imminent; only the righteous shall survive its happening.
Moonies: Only really happy shit happens.
Hare Krishna: Shit happens, rama rama.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit!
Zoroastrianism: Shit happens half on the time.
Church of SubGenius: BoB shits.
Practical: Deal with shit one day at a time.
Agnostic: Shit might have happened; then again, maybe not.
Agnostic #2: Did someone shit?
Agnostic #3: What is this shit?
Satanism: SNEPPAH TIHS.
Atheism: What shit?
Atheism #2: I can't believe this shit!
Nihilism: No shit.
I looked through the SoHo NAS market pretty thoroughly before settling on a QNAP TS-109 for my needs. It does NOT have the kind of bandwidth you are looking for, it is better than many of the other low-power boxes, but all of the low power boxes are CPU limited in terms of bandwidth.
For the same money as a dedicated NAS box, you can get a low-end PC with Linux that will kick the NAS box to the curb on performance. The drawbacks of the Linux box are:
Size
Power Consumption (related: Noise and Heat)
Configuration effort
Size may not be a problem for you, and if you want 4 disk 7200RPM SATA II Raid 0 performance (or better), you're not going to be in a particularly small box anyway. Same goes for power consumption - 4 drives are starting to be quite a load in their own right. Which leaves: configuration effort - the NAS boxes are mostly plug and play, you might spend a couple of hours installing Debian (or similar) with Samba support, but after the initial setup, maintenance should be similar (backups, regular prayers to the spindle bearing and head crash deities).
The place where a Linux box can get out of hand is its flexibility and configurability, you can always slap a new application server on there for some purpose or another - if you resist that temptation and keep it simple as a NAS, the Linux box should be every bit as reliable and trouble free as a NAS.
Before 2008, SSDs were too small to use, or more expensive than the rest of your computer combined. In 2008, capacity increased and price dropped to a point where SSDs were a viable option for less than a 50% total system price premium you can now have an SSD that holds the OS, any normal (non-media intensive) apps you use, and a reasonable amount of data (excluding video or massive music/photo collections, which belong on a NAS device anyway.)
Things will only continue to get better for SSD, but flash memory has been playing hard-drive catch-up for more than a decade now, and it likely will be another decade before solid state storage is larger, faster (linear access) and cheaper than rotating media. What happened in 2008 was just SSDs overtaking the basic capacity needs of modern OSs at an affordable (to some) price.
The point of games is to "entertain" - i.e. waste time. If you want to "meet up" with other (paid content) game players before launching, Home is at least more interesting/diverting than the battle.net text login screen.
By its placement, Home will always be lame, noone would want it to compete with purchased titles. If it can compliment them and provide a "universal pre-play lobby" that all the PS=3 games can use for players to "hook up", then I think it will be "successful."
Just an opinion (based on experience as a user of PCs since before suspend-to-memory existed) - suspend-to-memory works, really well, except when it doesn't.
With each new OS (Win95, 2K, XP, OS X, Vista), I have given suspend-to-memory a fair shot at working for me, I turn it on, I use it, it's usually less than a month before it screws up and causes me to have to hard-reset the machine to get back to a working state. This is on notebooks and desktops from all types of manufacturers, Dell to Apple to Gateway to Homebuilt, even a few "Corporate managed" fleet machines.
I have no idea why they (OS and hardware vendors) can't make it work right, I just know as a user that I get more consistent and predictable performance from my PCs if I don't use it.
Yep, if your PCs are managed enough that you can get them all to boot up before most people will use them and shut down after most people have gone home - that's a good solution. And, the A/C factor might add a cost factor of 2-3x in the summer (with a somewhat balancing reduction in heating costs in the winter, depending on where you are.)
Devil's advocate will now raise the (dismissed in the article summary as outdated) concern of heat cycling your chips and any marginal solder joints they may have, as well as starting and stopping your hard drive's spindle and any wear effects on the bearings. I have had many 8-10 year no-failures computers that chug along nicely being run 24-7, they get retired because they are hopelessly out of date. I have also had many computers with significant (motherboard, hard drive) failures after 3-5 years of daily power cycling...
Many is a word, that only leaves you guessing
guess about a thing, you really ought to know...
The "power saving" features I'm most annoyed with are the ones that do things like spin down the hard drive, so that when someone walks into my office to talk to me, we chat, the hard drive spins down, then we need to know something from the PC and there is an additional 15 second delay in getting that information because it has "gone to sleep."
Multiply that by 5x per week, and factor in that you are now delaying two (or more) people who all cost significantly more than $15 per hour, and the fact that you are impacting highly productive time with these delays and the whole "save money by reducing wasted energy" argument is turning herring red.
I am reminded of the "automatic" lights in our University classrooms that would switch off because the prof wasn't loud or animated enough to keep them on. When the automated lights-out systems worked smoothly they were fine, but those that caused the profs to have to break and go throw erasers at the sensors twice an hour were taking small but significant lecture time away from dozens of people who were paying thousands of dollars for the course.
Let's do some generous math: $75 per year - and your average computer using employee might cost the company $30,000 per year. Be more generous still and assume that employee has 2000 productive hours per year - that puts the employee's time cost at $15 per hour. So, the energy saved is equivalent to 5 hours of the employee's time - per year. That's 1 minute and 12 seconds per day.
Has anyone here ever experienced a cold-boot time of less than 1 minute and 12 seconds in a "commercial grade" operating system? How about any screen saver / drive sleep schemes that cost less than 72 seconds per day in actual use?
Now, for all your computer users who aren't productive 2000 hours a year and cost more than $15 per hour - these numbers only get worse. Economically, it just doesn't make sense, unless your employee's are hourly and the timeclock is behind the bootup process.
It (opinion) is not slander, either. However, nothing stops any idiot from filing a motion in court, no matter how inane.
If you get a Lawyer to do it for you, the filed motion also has a fair chance of requiring the appearance of the other party, regardless of merit (or complete lack thereof.)
What's needed is a clear method of redress for frivolous lawsuit - say $500 base fine payable to the offended party, plus a generous per-diem on top if the situation manages to drag on beyond a single appearance. The ISP in this case could then at least be compensated for their harassment, but instead, they have to file countersuit (also paying fees to the court), obtain judgement and then attempt to collect on that judgement.
Here, the courts make a judicious attempt to get cases settled before coming to trial - which does nothing to reduce the harassment factor, but at least keeps the judges' calendars a little clearer.
sound like an overbearing self-appointed oracle of all wisdom. I'll give you a hint, it's human nature, not doctor-nature.
It is human nature, but the medical profession conspires to nurture this quality of Doctor as God, starting with the hazings in med-school and residency and continuing through practice.
That attitude and bearing might serve them well in an emergency medical situation where instant recognition of authority is a good thing. It can be counterproductive when arguing about a more slowly developing topic that has no clear answers.
Some of the best help we have gotten has come from people who aren't getting money for what they're doing
Even among the paid professionals, there are many who genuinely do help out of compassion and do a good job because that is an intrinsic reward, not because they're getting more money for doing a better job (often it's the opposite)
The most effective interventions for us have not involved anything more expensive that the time and effort of competent, caring people - usually us
The money is a huge issue, and its debatable whether the circus surrounding the money has made things better or worse for our sons. The attention and recognition can be a good thing sometimes, and its comforting to think that at least law enforcement, DCF and the various other "interventional agencies" will have some understanding if we're ever tangling with them because our kids are "out of control," but, otherwise, I wonder if all the fuss has really been a net positive for us.
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Dubai is small enough that security can be handled like it is in places like MonteCarlo - quietly, discretely, and very very effectively.
The beach in MonteCarlo is completely imported gravel, very comfy to lay on, and the particles are not small enough to shift. I imagine this beach will be in a "cove" which is not subject to the longshore currents and rearranging that many natural beaches (like Daytona) are.
It should only cost the guy $5K in legal fees to fight this, I'd give him 50% chance of winning - not bad odds on the whole, if he can find a shyster to take the case.
I suppose the big question is what is the computing need out there.
I called "silly" on the massive parallelizing of very limited SIMD units because of the limited scope of applications. Financial? Yes, there is one options pricing algorithm that can be tackled very nicely with massive SIMD, but the rest of the financial industry needs less specific computing hardware. GPU cores are getting more capable, and they will eventually find a sweet spot where they are useful for video encoding and other things that lots of people actually do. Kudos to NVidia for trying to make GPUs more accessible, it will find some interesting niches, but what I see listed in the parent's post is pretty much a copy of the applications that were known two years ago, before CUDA launched.
There are cases where CUDA is brilliant, just not my cases :-(
You can claw your way up to 16 cores today if you work with 4 socket motherboards...
The data I work with isn't typically "fully massaged", there are a lot of sparse areas to consider quickly to identify areas that need more attention.
I still find cases where the algorithms can be sped up more than 10x by eliminating un-necessary work - this might not happen in more mature fields, but especially in cases where the new programmer has implemented something, there's usually more speed to be gained in a good code review than by throwing any amount of hardware at the problem.
All depends on your app... if it's Crysis, these things rock.
I signed up for CUDA when it launched (early '07?), due to conditional execution, only about 20% of what we were crunching at the time would have benefited. We were far better off optimizing and parallelizing to take advantage of 8 slightly memory bound cores that could actually do a conditional execution.
As a programmer who does a great deal of data crunching, I sincerely hope that Intel's 80+ core CPU comes along quickly to crush the silliness out of people who are trying to find applications for GPU "cores."
I'm glad that people are out there buying graphics cards that can render the latest games in QuadHD resolution at 120 frames per second... it makes the integrated graphics in eee class PCs that much better when the tech trickles down 5 years later.
Taoism: Shit happens.
Confucianism: Confucius say, "Shit happens."
Buddhism: If shit happens, it isn't really shit.
Zen Buddhism: Shit is, and is not.
Zen Buddhism #2: What is the sound of shit happening?
Hinduism: This shit has happened before.
Islam: If shit happens, it is the will of Allah.
Islam #2: If shit happens, kill the person responsible.
Islam #3: If shit happens, blame Israel.
Catholicism: If shit happens, you deserve it.
Protestantism: Let shit happen to someone else.
Presbyterian: This shit was bound to happen.
Episcopalian: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve the right wine with it.
Methodist: It's not so bad if shit happens, as long as you serve grape juice with it.
Congregationalist: Shit that happens to one person is just as good as shit that happens to another.
Unitarian: Shit that happens to one person is just as bad as shit that happens to another.
Lutheran: If shit happens, don't talk about it.
Fundamentalism: If shit happens, you will go to hell, unless you are born again. (Amen!)
Fundamentalism #2: If shit happens to a televangelist, it's okay.
Fundamentalism #3: Shit must be born again.
Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to us?
Calvinism: Shit happens because you don't work.
Seventh Day Adventism: No shit shall happen on Saturday.
Creationism: God made all shit.
Secular Humanism: Shit evolves.
Christian Science: When shit happens, don't call a doctor - pray!
Christian Science #2: Shit happening is all in your mind.
Unitarianism: Come let us reason together about this shit.
Quakers: Let us not fight over this shit.
Utopianism: This shit does not stink.
Capitalism: That's MY shit.
Communism: It's everybody's shit.
Feminism: Men are shit.
Chauvinism: We may be shit, but you can't live without us...
Commercialism: Let's package this shit.
Impressionism: From a distance, shit looks like a garden.
Idolism: Let's bronze this shit.
Existentialism: Shit doesn't happen; shit IS.
Existentialism #2: What is shit, anyway?
Stoicism: This shit is good for me.
Hedonism: There is nothing like a good shit happening!
Mormonism: God sent us this shit.
Mormonism #2: This shit is going to happen again.
Wiccan: An it harm none, let shit happen.
Scientology: If shit happens, see "Dianetics", p.157.
Jehovah's Witnesses: Knock Knock Shit happens.
Jehovah's Witnesses #2: May we have a moment of your time to show you some of our shit?
Jehovah's Witnesses #3: Shit has been prophesied and is imminent; only the righteous shall survive its happening.
Moonies: Only really happy shit happens.
Hare Krishna: Shit happens, rama rama.
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit!
Zoroastrianism: Shit happens half on the time.
Church of SubGenius: BoB shits.
Practical: Deal with shit one day at a time.
Agnostic: Shit might have happened; then again, maybe not.
Agnostic #2: Did someone shit?
Agnostic #3: What is this shit?
Satanism: SNEPPAH TIHS.
Atheism: What shit?
Atheism #2: I can't believe this shit!
Nihilism: No shit.
I looked through the SoHo NAS market pretty thoroughly before settling on a QNAP TS-109 for my needs. It does NOT have the kind of bandwidth you are looking for, it is better than many of the other low-power boxes, but all of the low power boxes are CPU limited in terms of bandwidth.
For the same money as a dedicated NAS box, you can get a low-end PC with Linux that will kick the NAS box to the curb on performance. The drawbacks of the Linux box are:
Size may not be a problem for you, and if you want 4 disk 7200RPM SATA II Raid 0 performance (or better), you're not going to be in a particularly small box anyway. Same goes for power consumption - 4 drives are starting to be quite a load in their own right. Which leaves: configuration effort - the NAS boxes are mostly plug and play, you might spend a couple of hours installing Debian (or similar) with Samba support, but after the initial setup, maintenance should be similar (backups, regular prayers to the spindle bearing and head crash deities).
The place where a Linux box can get out of hand is its flexibility and configurability, you can always slap a new application server on there for some purpose or another - if you resist that temptation and keep it simple as a NAS, the Linux box should be every bit as reliable and trouble free as a NAS.
Before 2008, SSDs were too small to use, or more expensive than the rest of your computer combined. In 2008, capacity increased and price dropped to a point where SSDs were a viable option for less than a 50% total system price premium you can now have an SSD that holds the OS, any normal (non-media intensive) apps you use, and a reasonable amount of data (excluding video or massive music/photo collections, which belong on a NAS device anyway.)
Things will only continue to get better for SSD, but flash memory has been playing hard-drive catch-up for more than a decade now, and it likely will be another decade before solid state storage is larger, faster (linear access) and cheaper than rotating media. What happened in 2008 was just SSDs overtaking the basic capacity needs of modern OSs at an affordable (to some) price.
The point of games is to "entertain" - i.e. waste time. If you want to "meet up" with other (paid content) game players before launching, Home is at least more interesting/diverting than the battle.net text login screen.
By its placement, Home will always be lame, noone would want it to compete with purchased titles. If it can compliment them and provide a "universal pre-play lobby" that all the PS=3 games can use for players to "hook up", then I think it will be "successful."
Just an opinion (based on experience as a user of PCs since before suspend-to-memory existed) - suspend-to-memory works, really well, except when it doesn't.
With each new OS (Win95, 2K, XP, OS X, Vista), I have given suspend-to-memory a fair shot at working for me, I turn it on, I use it, it's usually less than a month before it screws up and causes me to have to hard-reset the machine to get back to a working state. This is on notebooks and desktops from all types of manufacturers, Dell to Apple to Gateway to Homebuilt, even a few "Corporate managed" fleet machines.
I have no idea why they (OS and hardware vendors) can't make it work right, I just know as a user that I get more consistent and predictable performance from my PCs if I don't use it.
Yep, if your PCs are managed enough that you can get them all to boot up before most people will use them and shut down after most people have gone home - that's a good solution. And, the A/C factor might add a cost factor of 2-3x in the summer (with a somewhat balancing reduction in heating costs in the winter, depending on where you are.)
Devil's advocate will now raise the (dismissed in the article summary as outdated) concern of heat cycling your chips and any marginal solder joints they may have, as well as starting and stopping your hard drive's spindle and any wear effects on the bearings. I have had many 8-10 year no-failures computers that chug along nicely being run 24-7, they get retired because they are hopelessly out of date. I have also had many computers with significant (motherboard, hard drive) failures after 3-5 years of daily power cycling...
Many is a word, that only leaves you guessing
guess about a thing, you really ought to know...
The "power saving" features I'm most annoyed with are the ones that do things like spin down the hard drive, so that when someone walks into my office to talk to me, we chat, the hard drive spins down, then we need to know something from the PC and there is an additional 15 second delay in getting that information because it has "gone to sleep."
Multiply that by 5x per week, and factor in that you are now delaying two (or more) people who all cost significantly more than $15 per hour, and the fact that you are impacting highly productive time with these delays and the whole "save money by reducing wasted energy" argument is turning herring red.
I am reminded of the "automatic" lights in our University classrooms that would switch off because the prof wasn't loud or animated enough to keep them on. When the automated lights-out systems worked smoothly they were fine, but those that caused the profs to have to break and go throw erasers at the sensors twice an hour were taking small but significant lecture time away from dozens of people who were paying thousands of dollars for the course.
Let's do some generous math: $75 per year - and your average computer using employee might cost the company $30,000 per year. Be more generous still and assume that employee has 2000 productive hours per year - that puts the employee's time cost at $15 per hour. So, the energy saved is equivalent to 5 hours of the employee's time - per year. That's 1 minute and 12 seconds per day.
Has anyone here ever experienced a cold-boot time of less than 1 minute and 12 seconds in a "commercial grade" operating system? How about any screen saver / drive sleep schemes that cost less than 72 seconds per day in actual use?
Now, for all your computer users who aren't productive 2000 hours a year and cost more than $15 per hour - these numbers only get worse. Economically, it just doesn't make sense, unless your employee's are hourly and the timeclock is behind the bootup process.
Having time != spending time productively
It (opinion) is not slander, either. However, nothing stops any idiot from filing a motion in court, no matter how inane.
If you get a Lawyer to do it for you, the filed motion also has a fair chance of requiring the appearance of the other party, regardless of merit (or complete lack thereof.)
What's needed is a clear method of redress for frivolous lawsuit - say $500 base fine payable to the offended party, plus a generous per-diem on top if the situation manages to drag on beyond a single appearance. The ISP in this case could then at least be compensated for their harassment, but instead, they have to file countersuit (also paying fees to the court), obtain judgement and then attempt to collect on that judgement.
Here, the courts make a judicious attempt to get cases settled before coming to trial - which does nothing to reduce the harassment factor, but at least keeps the judges' calendars a little clearer.
sound like an overbearing self-appointed oracle of all wisdom. I'll give you a hint, it's human nature, not doctor-nature.
It is human nature, but the medical profession conspires to nurture this quality of Doctor as God, starting with the hazings in med-school and residency and continuing through practice.
That attitude and bearing might serve them well in an emergency medical situation where instant recognition of authority is a good thing. It can be counterproductive when arguing about a more slowly developing topic that has no clear answers.
Sorry, the gut call wasn't directed personally at you - actually, it sounds like a pretty good sig line.
I say that it's not all about the money because:
The money is a huge issue, and its debatable whether the circus surrounding the money has made things better or worse for our sons. The attention and recognition can be a good thing sometimes, and its comforting to think that at least law enforcement, DCF and the various other "interventional agencies" will have some understanding if we're ever tangling with them because our kids are "out of control," but, otherwise, I wonder if all the fuss has really been a net positive for us.
And, in the modern western working couple ethic you essentially have no wives, since you don't need to support them....
Dunno, for the remaining males, this sounds like good news?