The ATLAS detector is about 7 stories high and half a football field long. The other general purpose detector on the LHC is 5 stories high and only about 25 meters (I think) long. That's why it's called the "Compact" Muon Solenoid.
It's incredibly impressive when you stand next to CMS (that's the only one I've been to), so the size of ATLAS must be mind-blowing.
A Higgs -> 4mu is probably how it would be discovered *if* it exists, of course. Plus, you have your more exotic decays; I bet they'll want to see a couple of those before they confirm the existence of the boson.
Of course, the article fails to mention that CMS has been doing the magnet test / cosmic challenge for a couple of months now.
Besides, it won't be discovered by ATLAS, but by CMS! (Guess which collaboration I'm with...)
It's funny that, when faced with a "shortage" of doctors and nurses, the response has been soaring health-care costs, higher pay for doctors, and more benefits to retain nurses. For example, if you are willing to work for the VA for a few years, they'll pay for your med school. Let's see that for the IT industry. There's been no politicians calling for the mass importation of Indian doctors (and there are quite a few qualified Indian doctors who will work for much less).
But, when the IT industry has the same "crisis", the response is to call for more foreign workers.
So, are we protectionist or not? (Or maybe it's because the healthcare industry has organized labor? I don't know.)
In one industry (IT), we simply push down wages with more workers. In another industry (health), we push up costs for the customers. Either way, consumers lose and businesses win.
Re:Keywords: Government. Health Care. Disaster
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
(Side note: The US is the only industrialized country without national healthcare, spends twice as much per patient in healthcare, and yet is not a world leader in healthcare - it often ranks last among industrialized nations in certain categories. It seems that the statistical odds are at least against private healthcare right now).
I would normally agree with you (big government bad, free market good), but you're forgetting one small thing: The Veteran's Administration.
Here was a crappy, failing hospital system run by the US government that has completely transformed itself in the last couple of years. It has successfully deployed a completely electronic patient bookkeeping system (a nurse friend has told me that most of the (privately owned) hospital she works at runs off 3x5 notecards). The administrative overhead is comparable to private hospitals. It is able to negotiate much deeper drug discounts than Medicare and other private hospitals. It works closely with medical schools so its personnel costs are much lower, yet it has experts in many veterans-related fields (things like PTSD, making fake limbs, etc). It rates as one of the top hospitals in quantitative healthcare surveys (which measure things like, "For patients with X, how many of the standard operating procedures Y are usually followed").
In fact, it's done its job so well that - while the costs of private healthcare have *far* outpaced inflation the last couple of years - its budget has been increased at a *slower* rate than inflation.
Of course, like any other large chain of hospitals, there are surgery mistakes and lawsuits. The mistakes are much lower than the national average but, because it's run by the government, are much higher profile when they do happen.
The VA is a good case study of how the government could do healthcare much better than private industry. Its success should be analyzed, studied, and possibly replicated at a much larger scale.
This is a perfect job for AFS:
- Mature, well-known clients available for all platforms.
- You can control how much you cache on the local disk.
- Control access through Kerberos, which can be transparently done on Windows (use your Active Directory server as the domain controller).
- Built with global, distributed file systems in mind.
- Already scales to many terrabytes at many different sites - not some half-cocked idea that someone has posted on a webpage, but never implemented.
We met with the SGI salesmen the other week. They confirmed the following:
1) IRIX is dead (SuSE will be used instead) 2) MIPS is dead (high end chips are itanium) 3) SGI graphics products are dead (go buy ATI)
If you're an idiot or a government contracter, they will still specially-engineer such systems for an obscene amount of money (technically, none of these are dead if you are the government with a service contract).
The new SGI will be selling fancy Itanium systems on the high end and basic Woodcrests linux clusters on the low end.
SGI still has extensive experience and knowledge building high-processor count boxes that act as a single system image. They're one of the only players who will sell you an entire rack of nice Itanium systems - oodles of processors, RAM, and ultra-large bandwidth - packaged nicely. If a multi-threaded application requiring > 100 GB of RAM is your bread and butter, they're still here for you. They also will integrate FPGAs directly on the same interconnect as your processor - not even IBM is doing that for general customers yet.
If they are to survive, it's working with these fancy uber-fast, uber-bandwidth interconnects between processors that allow large NUMA computers and having first-mover advantage with Itaniums and FPGAs on a none PCIe/PCI-X bus.
The only software they will be doing is anything directly related to getting these goals accomplished. No more compilers, debuggers, graphics software, OS, or (probably not) file systems for them. XFS will be maintained (and added to by the community, of course), but don't expect SGI-funded XFS2 to appear any time soon.
Overall, they've done a damn good job of cutting the fat and coming up with a roadplan for the future. The only downside is the fact they've put so much money into the Itanium that the company would sink if Intel cut the cord.
Of course, I too think that the entire theory is bunk, but there is one point you missed:
On a good year, the playstation division makes up for 60% of Sony's revenue. It's the base of the Sony house-of-cards. Remove it, and the company collapses entirely.
In other words, there's no point in selling the video-game division without selling the whole company. This is still ignoring the fact that there is no way a flagship Japanese company will ever be sold to an American company.
But I doubt that tech pundits ever think about those sorts of points.
Best Buy has a Westinghouse 42" LCD 1080p TV on sale for $1600. Locally, they knock it down to $1500 if you sign up for digital cable also.
Sure, I can buy a Samsung and get better color / MPEG filters for about $3300. At half the price, however, the Westinghouse looks especially gorgeous. I bought mine 2 days ago.
...the cost of insurance will continue to rise, and thus put even greater stress on what little social healthcare provision there is.
I'll excuse you because you're non-american, but I have a little surprise for you: by 2010, the American government is estimated to pay HALF the hospital bills through these "little social healthcare" provisions.
The government has massive, unwieldy programs (which sometimes aren't even allowed to use their size to get price discounts... thanks healthy industry lobbyists) such as the VA, Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid. While I don't mind helping out those in need, I find this fact outrageous.
Basically, I'm already paying for half of a national healthcare system, but getting zero of the benefits. Here's how I see it:
Due to the fact that old people, the primary benefactors of the social healthcare system, are the largest voting block in the US, these benefits will grow, not shrink. If I'm already paying for them and am never going to get my money back, I might as well pay a little more and benefit significantly from them.
I work one of the LHC expirements (low-level grad student, no one important), and this is utter crap.
Yes, there are physicists who are concerned. There is a chance that this could happen - one of those "if everything we know about high energy physics is completely wrong, this could happen". There is an approximately equal chance that Pat Buchanan will be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 2008. No physicist can prove that this won't happen - just like no physicist can actually prove that Superman doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, it's about the only way a reporter can "sexy up" a story about a particle accelerator. I can't wait to see the headlines in 2007 - "Will the Earth end tomorrow?" (subheading: "Respectable scientists say 'No'").
One begins to wonder what the "endgame" scenario for the respective manufacturers of the physics and AI cards we're seeing. I can foresee three distinct situations:
1) The CEOs, investors, and engineers are complete idiots, and expect all the gamers of the world to buy separate physics, AI, and graphics cards 2) They're hoping to provide chips to ATI or nVidia for a "game card" instead of a "graphics card", the next generation of expensive purchases for gamers 3) They're hoping to provide chips for the nextgen xbox / playstation / wii, hoping that their chips will be the ones to make gaming interesting again.
Well, it wouldn't be *that* bad if it wasn't also accompanied by a downturn in DNS quality. In the last 48 hours, Earthlink's shiny new DNS system returned a "Site not found" for the following domains:
The system must cache too, because I couldn't access news.yahoo.com for at least 30 minutes after I got the first incorrect NXDOMAIN response. If this doesn't improve after the holiday weekend, I'm going to cancel my account...
I work and live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I agree with most of the comments here - don't move out to middle America.
We have no crime, no overcrowding, no traffic, no city nuisances, relatively little stuck up rich people. Can you walk downtown at night with a $100 bill displayed prominently from your pocket? Last year, we had 3 homicides for - a big jump for this town of 225,000. If I want a "big town" feel, Omaha is 50 minutes away.
I personally like being able to get a nice, quality home for around $100k.
There's a lot of little problems with this approach, unfortunately. We don't know enough of the details of how a human body - or a human cell - works. A large-scale simulation of atomic particles may work to up to hundreds of thousands of particles, but our modelling breaks down at some point.
I hate to quote the concept of chaos, but a lot of dynamic systems in the world *are* chaotic. That is, an infinitely small error in the input conditions leads to arbitrarily large differences in results. This is why, even with the largest computers, we can't predict the weather for more than a few days in the future. We would have some results, but they'd be totally meaningless.
(As an offtopic note, the first time chaos was discovered, if memory serves, was by Lorenz while doing computer weather models. He got an interesting output from one of his models and wanted to repeat it. He rounded off the input parameters to about 7 digits, reran the simulation, and got a completely different outcome. Hard to predict things when they are chaotic!)
This is the danger of a large scale computer simulation when the model is just a guess. At least the physicists are lucky where the rules of physics are pretty well defined. There are no "laws" of biology.
You've all been had by a reporter with an overactive imagination talking to a researcher selling his own shit.
The MDGrape is a specialized processor (you can actually buy it commercially as a separate board for your computer) that does exactly one thing: particle simulation using traditional laws of physics. This will allow it to do computational molecular dynamics on the small scale or universe modeling on the large scale.
All it understands is data input in the form of particle positions and will output the new positions in the next time step.
Can you place two numbers in a register and ask it to add the results? No. Can it do any piece of the HPL benchmark required to get on the supercomputing list? No.
It does one thing, but it does it well. This whole article is like comparing the rendering capabilities of your new Nvidia GPU and the latest AMD CPU, then concluding AMD is full of idiots who can't engineer because the Nvidia chip renders more polygons.
Walmart.com
Get the $200 PC with a full 3 year replacement program ($15). Buy an old monitor from Goodwill (I got a nice 17" Gateway one for $10). It has Xandros, 128mb RAM, and a 1.5ghz processor.
It should be everything you need for a simple shop computer, and with the 3 year replacement plan (yes, that is FIFTEEN US dollars), neigh-disposable. Dust clog it up and cause it to catch fire? Turn it in for a new one. Keep backups if you have important data.
Slashdot Mirror
The ATLAS detector is about 7 stories high and half a football field long. The other general purpose detector on the LHC is 5 stories high and only about 25 meters (I think) long. That's why it's called the "Compact" Muon Solenoid.
It's incredibly impressive when you stand next to CMS (that's the only one I've been to), so the size of ATLAS must be mind-blowing.
A Higgs -> 4mu is probably how it would be discovered *if* it exists, of course. Plus, you have your more exotic decays; I bet they'll want to see a couple of those before they confirm the existence of the boson.
Of course, the article fails to mention that CMS has been doing the magnet test / cosmic challenge for a couple of months now.
Besides, it won't be discovered by ATLAS, but by CMS! (Guess which collaboration I'm with...)
It's funny that, when faced with a "shortage" of doctors and nurses, the response has been soaring health-care costs, higher pay for doctors, and more benefits to retain nurses. For example, if you are willing to work for the VA for a few years, they'll pay for your med school. Let's see that for the IT industry. There's been no politicians calling for the mass importation of Indian doctors (and there are quite a few qualified Indian doctors who will work for much less).
But, when the IT industry has the same "crisis", the response is to call for more foreign workers.
So, are we protectionist or not? (Or maybe it's because the healthcare industry has organized labor? I don't know.)
In one industry (IT), we simply push down wages with more workers. In another industry (health), we push up costs for the customers. Either way, consumers lose and businesses win.
(Side note: The US is the only industrialized country without national healthcare, spends twice as much per patient in healthcare, and yet is not a world leader in healthcare - it often ranks last among industrialized nations in certain categories. It seems that the statistical odds are at least against private healthcare right now).
I would normally agree with you (big government bad, free market good), but you're forgetting one small thing: The Veteran's Administration.
Here was a crappy, failing hospital system run by the US government that has completely transformed itself in the last couple of years. It has successfully deployed a completely electronic patient bookkeeping system (a nurse friend has told me that most of the (privately owned) hospital she works at runs off 3x5 notecards). The administrative overhead is comparable to private hospitals. It is able to negotiate much deeper drug discounts than Medicare and other private hospitals. It works closely with medical schools so its personnel costs are much lower, yet it has experts in many veterans-related fields (things like PTSD, making fake limbs, etc). It rates as one of the top hospitals in quantitative healthcare surveys (which measure things like, "For patients with X, how many of the standard operating procedures Y are usually followed").
In fact, it's done its job so well that - while the costs of private healthcare have *far* outpaced inflation the last couple of years - its budget has been increased at a *slower* rate than inflation.
Of course, like any other large chain of hospitals, there are surgery mistakes and lawsuits. The mistakes are much lower than the national average but, because it's run by the government, are much higher profile when they do happen.
The VA is a good case study of how the government could do healthcare much better than private industry. Its success should be analyzed, studied, and possibly replicated at a much larger scale.
This is a perfect job for AFS: - Mature, well-known clients available for all platforms. - You can control how much you cache on the local disk. - Control access through Kerberos, which can be transparently done on Windows (use your Active Directory server as the domain controller). - Built with global, distributed file systems in mind. - Already scales to many terrabytes at many different sites - not some half-cocked idea that someone has posted on a webpage, but never implemented.
Correction - Japan only allows the commercial fishing of tasty endangered species. You can go ahead and have all the others.
We met with the SGI salesmen the other week. They confirmed the following:
1) IRIX is dead (SuSE will be used instead)
2) MIPS is dead (high end chips are itanium)
3) SGI graphics products are dead (go buy ATI)
If you're an idiot or a government contracter, they will still specially-engineer such systems for an obscene amount of money (technically, none of these are dead if you are the government with a service contract).
The new SGI will be selling fancy Itanium systems on the high end and basic Woodcrests linux clusters on the low end.
SGI still has extensive experience and knowledge building high-processor count boxes that act as a single system image. They're one of the only players who will sell you an entire rack of nice Itanium systems - oodles of processors, RAM, and ultra-large bandwidth - packaged nicely. If a multi-threaded application requiring > 100 GB of RAM is your bread and butter, they're still here for you. They also will integrate FPGAs directly on the same interconnect as your processor - not even IBM is doing that for general customers yet.
If they are to survive, it's working with these fancy uber-fast, uber-bandwidth interconnects between processors that allow large NUMA computers and having first-mover advantage with Itaniums and FPGAs on a none PCIe/PCI-X bus.
The only software they will be doing is anything directly related to getting these goals accomplished. No more compilers, debuggers, graphics software, OS, or (probably not) file systems for them. XFS will be maintained (and added to by the community, of course), but don't expect SGI-funded XFS2 to appear any time soon.
Overall, they've done a damn good job of cutting the fat and coming up with a roadplan for the future. The only downside is the fact they've put so much money into the Itanium that the company would sink if Intel cut the cord.
Of course, I too think that the entire theory is bunk, but there is one point you missed:
On a good year, the playstation division makes up for 60% of Sony's revenue. It's the base of the Sony house-of-cards. Remove it, and the company collapses entirely.
In other words, there's no point in selling the video-game division without selling the whole company. This is still ignoring the fact that there is no way a flagship Japanese company will ever be sold to an American company.
But I doubt that tech pundits ever think about those sorts of points.
Well steveo, I have great news for you:
Best Buy has a Westinghouse 42" LCD 1080p TV on sale for $1600. Locally, they knock it down to $1500 if you sign up for digital cable also.
Sure, I can buy a Samsung and get better color / MPEG filters for about $3300. At half the price, however, the Westinghouse looks especially gorgeous. I bought mine 2 days ago.
I'll excuse you because you're non-american, but I have a little surprise for you: by 2010, the American government is estimated to pay HALF the hospital bills through these "little social healthcare" provisions.
The government has massive, unwieldy programs (which sometimes aren't even allowed to use their size to get price discounts
Basically, I'm already paying for half of a national healthcare system, but getting zero of the benefits. Here's how I see it:
Due to the fact that old people, the primary benefactors of the social healthcare system, are the largest voting block in the US, these benefits will grow, not shrink. If I'm already paying for them and am never going to get my money back, I might as well pay a little more and benefit significantly from them.
I work one of the LHC expirements (low-level grad student, no one important), and this is utter crap.
Yes, there are physicists who are concerned. There is a chance that this could happen - one of those "if everything we know about high energy physics is completely wrong, this could happen". There is an approximately equal chance that Pat Buchanan will be nominated as the Democrat candidate for president in 2008. No physicist can prove that this won't happen - just like no physicist can actually prove that Superman doesn't exist.
Unfortunately, it's about the only way a reporter can "sexy up" a story about a particle accelerator. I can't wait to see the headlines in 2007 - "Will the Earth end tomorrow?" (subheading: "Respectable scientists say 'No'").
One begins to wonder what the "endgame" scenario for the respective manufacturers of the physics and AI cards we're seeing. I can foresee three distinct situations:
1) The CEOs, investors, and engineers are complete idiots, and expect all the gamers of the world to buy separate physics, AI, and graphics cards
2) They're hoping to provide chips to ATI or nVidia for a "game card" instead of a "graphics card", the next generation of expensive purchases for gamers
3) They're hoping to provide chips for the nextgen xbox / playstation / wii, hoping that their chips will be the ones to make gaming interesting again.
I use Earthlink, and this annoys me to no end.
Well, it wouldn't be *that* bad if it wasn't also accompanied by a downturn in DNS quality. In the last 48 hours, Earthlink's shiny new DNS system returned a "Site not found" for the following domains:
1) news.yahoo.com
2) spreadsheet.google.com
3) www.myspace.com
The system must cache too, because I couldn't access news.yahoo.com for at least 30 minutes after I got the first incorrect NXDOMAIN response. If this doesn't improve after the holiday weekend, I'm going to cancel my account...
Pissed.
I, for one, welcome our underwhelming high-definition overlords!
I work and live in Lincoln, Nebraska. I agree with most of the comments here - don't move out to middle America.
We have no crime, no overcrowding, no traffic, no city nuisances, relatively little stuck up rich people. Can you walk downtown at night with a $100 bill displayed prominently from your pocket? Last year, we had 3 homicides for - a big jump for this town of 225,000. If I want a "big town" feel, Omaha is 50 minutes away.
I personally like being able to get a nice, quality home for around $100k.
Nebraska. Don't move here. We don't want you to.
There's a lot of little problems with this approach, unfortunately. We don't know enough of the details of how a human body - or a human cell - works. A large-scale simulation of atomic particles may work to up to hundreds of thousands of particles, but our modelling breaks down at some point.
I hate to quote the concept of chaos, but a lot of dynamic systems in the world *are* chaotic. That is, an infinitely small error in the input conditions leads to arbitrarily large differences in results. This is why, even with the largest computers, we can't predict the weather for more than a few days in the future. We would have some results, but they'd be totally meaningless.
(As an offtopic note, the first time chaos was discovered, if memory serves, was by Lorenz while doing computer weather models. He got an interesting output from one of his models and wanted to repeat it. He rounded off the input parameters to about 7 digits, reran the simulation, and got a completely different outcome. Hard to predict things when they are chaotic!)
This is the danger of a large scale computer simulation when the model is just a guess. At least the physicists are lucky where the rules of physics are pretty well defined. There are no "laws" of biology.
You've all been had by a reporter with an overactive imagination talking to a researcher selling his own shit. The MDGrape is a specialized processor (you can actually buy it commercially as a separate board for your computer) that does exactly one thing: particle simulation using traditional laws of physics. This will allow it to do computational molecular dynamics on the small scale or universe modeling on the large scale. All it understands is data input in the form of particle positions and will output the new positions in the next time step. Can you place two numbers in a register and ask it to add the results? No. Can it do any piece of the HPL benchmark required to get on the supercomputing list? No. It does one thing, but it does it well. This whole article is like comparing the rendering capabilities of your new Nvidia GPU and the latest AMD CPU, then concluding AMD is full of idiots who can't engineer because the Nvidia chip renders more polygons.
This is an old, old troll.
Check out
http://www.kottke.org/98/11/my-mac-sucks
to see the same post from 1998, but with a 8600/300mhz with 64 mb of RAM, instead of a Mac Mini.
Walmart.com Get the $200 PC with a full 3 year replacement program ($15). Buy an old monitor from Goodwill (I got a nice 17" Gateway one for $10). It has Xandros, 128mb RAM, and a 1.5ghz processor. It should be everything you need for a simple shop computer, and with the 3 year replacement plan (yes, that is FIFTEEN US dollars), neigh-disposable. Dust clog it up and cause it to catch fire? Turn it in for a new one. Keep backups if you have important data.