I got my PhD in math and took a few grad-level physics class since.
TeX-based notes in many math classes is very doable. I got to the point during my math degree that I could type equations way faster than the professor could write in the board. I still type faster than I write on the board when I teach. Functional analysis and algebra were the best for typewritten notes; numerical analysis was the worst due to the number of matrices.
TeX-based notes in a physics class (especially less theoretical ones) is a slow-moving disaster. Visualization and diagrams (at least for me) are way more important in physics than they were for my math classes.
e911 may be required for cell phones, but it's not required by the cell companies.
A few folks died in Nebraska in a snow storm because 911 wasn't able to locate where the cell call was coming from (they were lost). This got the community in an uproar about getting e911 actually working NOW.
Luckily for all involved, it turned out that those who died were on acid. Because that makes folks worth less as human beings, everyone dropped the idea of making sure e911 is working.
A company called Powerset developed the open-source alternative to BigTable called HBase. This was developed as an Apache Software Foundation project under the Apache license.
Microsoft bought Powerset for a bucket of money because their search technology based of Hbase was pretty damned good. This was last year. This year, the folks behind powerset - as Microsoft employees - were given the go-ahead to continue committing to the ASF project and they continue to make it better. For what I can see, they aren't keeping anything juicy in-house.
It's honest-to-goodness MS committing to an Apache project.
It's a very friendly "competition". While it *may* be possible for the Tevatron to locate the Higgs before LHC turn-on, it doesn't negate the fact that the LHC will use energies an order of magnitude higher than the Tevatron.
Fermilab - which is where the Tevatron is located - also has a huge number of people working on CMS - one of the LHC detectors.
Most of the "US vs Europe" mentality and the "OMG we're losing our physics crown to some other lab" is a sidebar injected by the media and politicians. Otherwise, it can be very dry (aka, non-newsworthy) work punctuated by moments of "Eureka!"
I think using a BlueGene for run-of-the-mill data processing would be a horrible waste of money. There's simply no need for things like a parallel filesystem or PB of RAM or low-latency interconnects. You want to "scale out" for distributed processing like you're talking about, not "scale up".
No, I'd bet intelligence gathering is done on Google-like processor farms.
Turns out, there's a *lot* of parents who either don't give two shits about their kids' education or really would like to participate, but happen to be working multiple jobs.
Parents are some of the *worst* folks to deal with when it comes to their children's education: they find it hard to believe that their little Johnny doesn't deserve an A because he was up in his room studying *all night long*. I know a few who would call up their children's college professors because their dumbass kids didn't do any work, demanding to know why the professor didn't give them an A / wipe their ass / whatever the parent wants.
I know of parents who don't want exit exams because they knew their kids couldn't pass them. A system which is based on the guidance of the parents would be the worst in the world -- it would give incentive to making parents happy, and the way to do that is give good grades to every dumbass which passed through its doors.
On the other hand, there is a clear case for browsers that you can bring to trial -- Microsoft utilized its monopoly position in the OS market to force competitors out of business.
The EU has a pretty clear case, a company that can file a complaint, etc.
It's not the bundling of the browser which is illegal - it's utilizing the monopoly to kill others.
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy. They may have 60-hour work-weeks in asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals and pollution in factories. It's unfair if we have to compete with regulations that they don't have.
Or, they're a country like Brazil. Their buildings may not be as nice, but they don't have 60 hour work-weeks or asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals.
Heck, in fact, whenever I visit with coworkers there, they always feel bad for me: the workweek is shorter and they have better vacation time.
Sorry, but since when in the last few years have you gotten excited by the new Intel product inside the Mac?
For me, the minor version bumps are irrelevant and predictable. The things like the iPhone, MacBook Air, new MacBook form factor are much more exciting.
Getting excited over the new Intel processors is something that Dell does. Making customers drool over the new look of the MacBook and want to buy it is what Apple does.
In the industry, you see similar ambitions usually followed by failure.
The truth is, you can't just buy a honking computer and declare "users will come". You start small, build up institutional technical knowledge and a user base who is increasingly educated about HPC. Scientists new to computing will have no friggin' clue how to use the resources, and most often won't use them efficiently or often.
Start with a resource big enough to provide an incentive for using your resource and come to that computing area - then start building it larger and larger if you have the money.
But what happens when you have the very nice bank salesman saying no, it's not a big commitment - we just have you refinance out of it in 2 years, we promise.
Older people do believe what bankers tell them because, well, bankers are nice men in shiny suits who are supposed to help them out. Is someone really a liability if they are following the advice of someone they're supposed to be able to trust?
Ever made an investment? Ever put money in a bank? Are you *sure* your bank is FDIC insured, or maybe they just bought a plaque third-hand claiming they are? We all have our levels of trust or distrust; some folks were making a decision based on historical facts (i.e., bankers won't give you a loan you can't afford because it puts them out of business). Well, that fact certainly has changed...
Lots of people probably followed bankers' advice as much or more than their pastor. On the other hand, I currently rate bankers up there with sleezeball used car salesmen.
Pretty picture, but not the one you want...
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 5, Informative
That picture is from smashing the beam into the collimator, not from passing the beam through ATLAS.
This is one of the final tests that you perform before passing the beam through - the result though is that millions of muons from the beam smash and deflect off the collimator, touching off all the different parts of the detectors. That's why you see so many energy deposits (green) throughout ATLAS.
When you're just circulating beams, the only thing you see are Cosmics and BeamHalo - any muons which collide with remaining gas particles upstream of the detector and basically circle right outside of the beam. Here's some pictures of CMS beam halo:
Actually, I think the touch-screen approach works for a lot of the functions of the iPhone - the trick is that you want to be looking at it when operating it.
On the remote control, however, you usually memorize the locations of everything the first week and don't look at it after that.
That said, the lower-end harmony remotes absolutely rock.
My university is about 2 miles from the fiber backbone which connects Denver to Chicago. I believe it's the primary line from the East Coast to West Coast. Tons and tons of capacity.
However, after doing a cost analysis, the university bought IRUs on fiber to a peering point about 150 miles south of us solely because the cost of tapping in to the nearby fiber would have been insane. In fact, that was the last option - it would have been cheaper to buy fiber from here to Chicago, 500 miles away.
Ask yourself why the employees need the SSN access in the first place!
Tell your DBA to create a view which replaces the SSN with some other random number for every possible person with DB access. That way, folks doing data mining or data quality will be happy.
If your devs need SSN access to develop your application, ask them why the hell they need to work on the production DB!
There's eventually going to be folks who need access to the real data. Hire a large football player, dress him in a suit, and have a "come to jesus" moment with any employee to make sure they understand how serious this is.
That's a pretty bad example. Congratulations, you just learned the UI widget for adding something.
Now, in most every single Mac native application (and the good ports), you know when you are "adding X", there will always be a button with a + symbol at the bottom corner.
Let's take Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac as an example of "you can write FORTRAN in every language". Say you want to set the default format to the old binary one instead of OpenXML.
Word: Hit preferences. It's a System-Preferences like presentation of a matrix of icons. Hit compatibility. Nothing there. Hit "Save". Ah, "Save Word files as... (dropdown to.doc)"
Excel: Hit preferences. Again, a System-Preferences matrix of icons. Hit "Save". Nothing there. Hit "Compatibility" - ah, a different layout of dropdown box.
Powerpoint: Hit preferences. It's a tabbed interface. Go to the "Save" tab and hit "Save powerpoint files as... (dropdown to.ppt)"
So, there are 2 layouts of preferences (tabbed versus icon matrix) and two places where this dropdown is hidden (save versus compatibility), and two different styles for the dropdown. No two apps are the same.
But yes, you do get buttons with labels. Just not a consistent GUI...
Yes, but as we're finding out with oil - the period of adjustment can be pretty painful.
This is the government's role in the economy. It should provide the "seed research" for things which will become problems in 10 years, but aren't economically feasible to solve now.
By funding forward-looking research, the government can help ease transition shocks for the population.
Just like they should have slowly deflated the housing bubble starting in 2003, they should have been working on alternate energy back in the 90s so the new tech would be available for businesses now.
The government funding alternate energy sources now is just silly - businesses are doing that much more efficiently because it's economically feasible. The time for the government to make that pain go away was 5-10 years ago.
""" In addition, it is investigating ways to allow users to connect remotely to the cluster. It expects to complete the project and move the cluster into production by March 2009. """
By time the cluster in the case study allows users to remotely log in, the hardware will have lost at least 1/2 of its value.
While more work is needed to make things user friendly, you have to remember that the funding is there for CPUs; not many folks are forward looking enough to realize researchers really need funding into making stuff easier.
Slashdot Mirror
I got my PhD in math and took a few grad-level physics class since.
TeX-based notes in many math classes is very doable. I got to the point during my math degree that I could type equations way faster than the professor could write in the board. I still type faster than I write on the board when I teach. Functional analysis and algebra were the best for typewritten notes; numerical analysis was the worst due to the number of matrices.
TeX-based notes in a physics class (especially less theoretical ones) is a slow-moving disaster. Visualization and diagrams (at least for me) are way more important in physics than they were for my math classes.
e911 may be required for cell phones, but it's not required by the cell companies.
A few folks died in Nebraska in a snow storm because 911 wasn't able to locate where the cell call was coming from (they were lost). This got the community in an uproar about getting e911 actually working NOW.
Luckily for all involved, it turned out that those who died were on acid. Because that makes folks worth less as human beings, everyone dropped the idea of making sure e911 is working.
Until the next accident...
Actually, you're not even close.
A company called Powerset developed the open-source alternative to BigTable called HBase. This was developed as an Apache Software Foundation project under the Apache license.
Microsoft bought Powerset for a bucket of money because their search technology based of Hbase was pretty damned good. This was last year. This year, the folks behind powerset - as Microsoft employees - were given the go-ahead to continue committing to the ASF project and they continue to make it better. For what I can see, they aren't keeping anything juicy in-house.
It's honest-to-goodness MS committing to an Apache project.
It's a very friendly "competition". While it *may* be possible for the Tevatron to locate the Higgs before LHC turn-on, it doesn't negate the fact that the LHC will use energies an order of magnitude higher than the Tevatron.
Fermilab - which is where the Tevatron is located - also has a huge number of people working on CMS - one of the LHC detectors.
Most of the "US vs Europe" mentality and the "OMG we're losing our physics crown to some other lab" is a sidebar injected by the media and politicians. Otherwise, it can be very dry (aka, non-newsworthy) work punctuated by moments of "Eureka!"
Indeed.
Which is why all my doctor friends are now ecstatic that most of those applications are on the iPhone.
Apple FTW!
I'm sorry, I don't believe it.
I think using a BlueGene for run-of-the-mill data processing would be a horrible waste of money. There's simply no need for things like a parallel filesystem or PB of RAM or low-latency interconnects. You want to "scale out" for distributed processing like you're talking about, not "scale up".
No, I'd bet intelligence gathering is done on Google-like processor farms.
Do you have any friends who are teachers?
Turns out, there's a *lot* of parents who either don't give two shits about their kids' education or really would like to participate, but happen to be working multiple jobs.
Parents are some of the *worst* folks to deal with when it comes to their children's education: they find it hard to believe that their little Johnny doesn't deserve an A because he was up in his room studying *all night long*. I know a few who would call up their children's college professors because their dumbass kids didn't do any work, demanding to know why the professor didn't give them an A / wipe their ass / whatever the parent wants.
I know of parents who don't want exit exams because they knew their kids couldn't pass them. A system which is based on the guidance of the parents would be the worst in the world -- it would give incentive to making parents happy, and the way to do that is give good grades to every dumbass which passed through its doors.
On the other hand, there is a clear case for browsers that you can bring to trial -- Microsoft utilized its monopoly position in the OS market to force competitors out of business.
The EU has a pretty clear case, a company that can file a complaint, etc.
It's not the bundling of the browser which is illegal - it's utilizing the monopoly to kill others.
Further, many times those countries are cheaper because they lack regulations that keep us safe and healthy. They may have 60-hour work-weeks in asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals and pollution in factories. It's unfair if we have to compete with regulations that they don't have.
Or, they're a country like Brazil. Their buildings may not be as nice, but they don't have 60 hour work-weeks or asbestos-festered offices or work with dangerous chemicals.
Heck, in fact, whenever I visit with coworkers there, they always feel bad for me: the workweek is shorter and they have better vacation time.
Sorry, but since when in the last few years have you gotten excited by the new Intel product inside the Mac?
For me, the minor version bumps are irrelevant and predictable. The things like the iPhone, MacBook Air, new MacBook form factor are much more exciting.
Getting excited over the new Intel processors is something that Dell does. Making customers drool over the new look of the MacBook and want to buy it is what Apple does.
Zimbabwe, physically, is actually one of the best places to grow corn in Africa. They were once a breadbasket of the region.
Of course now, the entire economy has completely collapsed, so much of the country is starving.
That aside, it's a decent place to grow some corn.
In the industry, you see similar ambitions usually followed by failure.
The truth is, you can't just buy a honking computer and declare "users will come". You start small, build up institutional technical knowledge and a user base who is increasingly educated about HPC. Scientists new to computing will have no friggin' clue how to use the resources, and most often won't use them efficiently or often.
Start with a resource big enough to provide an incentive for using your resource and come to that computing area - then start building it larger and larger if you have the money.
The worst thing in the world is idle cycles.
:) Actually, the danger is that the helium replaces all the oxygen in the tunnel and they all die.
You say:
"""
A mortgage is a huge commitment.
"""
But what happens when you have the very nice bank salesman saying no, it's not a big commitment - we just have you refinance out of it in 2 years, we promise.
Older people do believe what bankers tell them because, well, bankers are nice men in shiny suits who are supposed to help them out. Is someone really a liability if they are following the advice of someone they're supposed to be able to trust?
Ever made an investment? Ever put money in a bank? Are you *sure* your bank is FDIC insured, or maybe they just bought a plaque third-hand claiming they are? We all have our levels of trust or distrust; some folks were making a decision based on historical facts (i.e., bankers won't give you a loan you can't afford because it puts them out of business). Well, that fact certainly has changed...
Lots of people probably followed bankers' advice as much or more than their pastor. On the other hand, I currently rate bankers up there with sleezeball used car salesmen.
That picture is from smashing the beam into the collimator, not from passing the beam through ATLAS.
This is one of the final tests that you perform before passing the beam through - the result though is that millions of muons from the beam smash and deflect off the collimator, touching off all the different parts of the detectors. That's why you see so many energy deposits (green) throughout ATLAS.
When you're just circulating beams, the only thing you see are Cosmics and BeamHalo - any muons which collide with remaining gas particles upstream of the detector and basically circle right outside of the beam. Here's some pictures of CMS beam halo:
http://cmsdoc.cern.ch/cms/performance/FirstBeam/cms-e-commentary.htm
Plain ran out of time? ... or CRAZY CONSPIRACY THEORY!?!
Actually, I think the touch-screen approach works for a lot of the functions of the iPhone - the trick is that you want to be looking at it when operating it.
On the remote control, however, you usually memorize the locations of everything the first week and don't look at it after that.
That said, the lower-end harmony remotes absolutely rock.
Doesn't always work like that.
My university is about 2 miles from the fiber backbone which connects Denver to Chicago. I believe it's the primary line from the East Coast to West Coast. Tons and tons of capacity.
However, after doing a cost analysis, the university bought IRUs on fiber to a peering point about 150 miles south of us solely because the cost of tapping in to the nearby fiber would have been insane. In fact, that was the last option - it would have been cheaper to buy fiber from here to Chicago, 500 miles away.
Ask yourself why the employees need the SSN access in the first place!
Tell your DBA to create a view which replaces the SSN with some other random number for every possible person with DB access. That way, folks doing data mining or data quality will be happy.
If your devs need SSN access to develop your application, ask them why the hell they need to work on the production DB!
There's eventually going to be folks who need access to the real data. Hire a large football player, dress him in a suit, and have a "come to jesus" moment with any employee to make sure they understand how serious this is.
That's a pretty bad example. Congratulations, you just learned the UI widget for adding something.
Now, in most every single Mac native application (and the good ports), you know when you are "adding X", there will always be a button with a + symbol at the bottom corner.
Let's take Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac as an example of "you can write FORTRAN in every language". Say you want to set the default format to the old binary one instead of OpenXML.
Word: Hit preferences. It's a System-Preferences like presentation of a matrix of icons. Hit compatibility. Nothing there. Hit "Save". Ah, "Save Word files as ... (dropdown to .doc)"
Excel: Hit preferences. Again, a System-Preferences matrix of icons. Hit "Save". Nothing there. Hit "Compatibility" - ah, a different layout of dropdown box.
Powerpoint: Hit preferences. It's a tabbed interface. Go to the "Save" tab and hit "Save powerpoint files as ... (dropdown to .ppt)"
So, there are 2 layouts of preferences (tabbed versus icon matrix) and two places where this dropdown is hidden (save versus compatibility), and two different styles for the dropdown. No two apps are the same.
But yes, you do get buttons with labels. Just not a consistent GUI...
Maybe this is why Congress has a below 10% approval rating? The lowest of any US government institution, EVER?
Hell, that must mean that FEMA had a higher approval rating during Katrina than Congress has now.
Yes, but as we're finding out with oil - the period of adjustment can be pretty painful.
This is the government's role in the economy. It should provide the "seed research" for things which will become problems in 10 years, but aren't economically feasible to solve now.
By funding forward-looking research, the government can help ease transition shocks for the population.
Just like they should have slowly deflated the housing bubble starting in 2003, they should have been working on alternate energy back in the 90s so the new tech would be available for businesses now.
The government funding alternate energy sources now is just silly - businesses are doing that much more efficiently because it's economically feasible. The time for the government to make that pain go away was 5-10 years ago.
As a Louisiana teacher, you should rejoice because now you have a legal basis to teach:
1) Any theory Ron Paul may preach.
2) Flat Earth hypothesis.
3) Greek views of gravity.
4) Spontaneous generation.
The damn scientists have left all these in the dust, and we can now put them on their rightful mantle!
From your case study:
"""
In addition, it is investigating ways to allow users to connect remotely to the cluster. It expects to complete the project and move the cluster into production by March 2009.
"""
By time the cluster in the case study allows users to remotely log in, the hardware will have lost at least 1/2 of its value.
While more work is needed to make things user friendly, you have to remember that the funding is there for CPUs; not many folks are forward looking enough to realize researchers really need funding into making stuff easier.
And usually, if folks owe you enough favors, you can get them for free... :)