Sorta like the first cell phone law (can't talk on the phone but can text message on the phone). It sounds like a case of "we need to something so we can say we're doing something, even if it's stupid." Then when interviews come up ("what did you do for this-or-that issue?") politicians can talk around it by referencing legislation that they passed to "help climate change," knowing that most people will smile and nod and think they are doing well and not actually look up the legislation to see just what brilliant ideas were in it...
"It seems that if it is possible to fertilise enough ocean to make a difference to climate, we would need to turn vast ocean ecosystems into giant plankton farms," says Caldeira.
That explains it more to me (from the article).
Didn't realize they wanted to see if they could do it in the ocean on a widespread scale.:)
I thought I saw 12 somewhere, hehe. However, that's only the Dell. I presume the 384 ones would be 24 slots.
In perusing some RAM pages, I noticed that there's a DDR2 DIMM that uses 10W. I presume a 16GB DIMM will use more than a 1GB DIMM, so 10W is probably a better guess at power usage per DIMM? That'd still only be 120W though.
I agree that it's easy to say now, hindsight is 20/20, etc.
But it still seems like a significant, hm, waste. 300 square kilometers (Google tells me that 300 (square kilometers) = 115.830648 square miles) isn't exactly a small area. Maybe it had to be that big for some reason, I don't know.
Yes, I know it's an experiment, but experiments try to leave as little to chance as possible. Or should, anyways... try to hold all other variables constant and all that. Why couldn't they do this in a controlled environment instead of the Atlantic ocean?
It's hard to believe nobody saw this coming. Hey, let's create a massive amount of food in the ocean and let it sink to the bottom. Did they think the ocean dwellers were just going to let it be for the sake of science or something?
I don't know, it sounds kinda stupid to me.
"Mom, I want to see how dog food reacts to the sun, so I'm going to fill Sparky's bowl and let it sit for a week."
Slightly confused... you can disable swap... and if you have enough RAM, I would imagine you can not swap at all, just load everything in RAM. I've never run a system that used 192GB ram+swap, so 192gb ram would be more than enough;)
Hmm, I don't know. Not according to here... And according to an AMD page, "Energy-efficient DDR2 memory uses up to 30% less power than DDR1 and up to 58% less power than FBDIMM."
According to here a DDR2 DIMM needs 4.4 watts. Let's round up to 10 watts and say each DIMM is, oh, 4gb (pretty low, I'd say). That's 48 DIMMs to get up to 192, 96 to get up to 384. At a whopping 10 watts (pretty high) that's still ~ 500W for 192gb and ~1000W for 384gb. Cut the wattage down to 5W per DIMM and you get half (250W, 500W). >1000W "home user" power supplies aren't too uncommon these days (1600W on tigerdirect.com...)
With 384GB RAM, get a good UPS and generator and run your entire system in RAM. Use a hard drive in case the power goes out (dump to hard drive). Seems like this would be a rather fast system. Forget about "no swapping," just don't use any disk at all... hehe.
I try.:P:) Hopefully I didn't get too biting... in part, I was probably responding to the idea that some people do seem to have a "managers are all out to get you, so it doesn't matter what you do to them" mentality, no matter who the manager is. I'm actually fairly new to the whole business world thing, but even with good employees, the sort of corporate gossip and frustration (lack of patience and understanding, etc) is kinda... weird, to me.
The for-our-division method seems like it would be a better way. My group uses a number of free/open source tools and some of them have been picked up on by other groups that we work with. I'd still contend that the situation you describe would be more manager to manager, not employee to manager. I personally kinda want my manager to succeed (and, thankfully, that is reciprocated) because it seems that if he succeeds, his whole group succeeds and we all look good... hopefully for good reason (I don't like the phrase "makes us look good," I don't want to look good... I want to be good..:P )
The Internet Archive also works with about 100 physical libraries around the world whose curators help guide deep Internet crawls. The Internet Archive's massive database is mirrored to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt, for disaster recovery purposes.
Either way, you are basically steering the project manager into a bad decision.
If I were a manager and one of my IT guys DIDN'T warn me that this or that wouldn't work, and I paid a lot of company money for it, I'm faced with two options, in my mind...
My IT guy was ignorant. (not good for IT guy)
My IT guy (especially if I just shot down his suggestion) wasn't particularly interested in seeing a non-his-suggestion idea work.
Maybe I'd make a weird manager, I don't know, but I'd rather have my IT guy be completely honest. Either way, no manager is going to be HAPPY with their IT guys that can't get an expensive (what do they care if it's complicated, they are paying you to figure these sorts of things out) solution working, and isn't going to be happy if his idea turns out to be a bad one, and isn't going to be happy if his idea was not only not cautioned against but supported by his IT guys. Who then couldn't get it to work.
If the manager is smart, you can even allow him to be part of the solution. If not, he or she can take the fall for the expensive mistake.
It sounds to me like you are assuming a stupid manager and a genius IT guy (who, by the way, couldn't get this "ridiculously complicated and expensive" solution to work). It also sounds like the IT guy is rather arrogant... in my experience, anyways, managers tend to not like arrogant IT guys, hehe.
Anyway. Honesty seems to work. My current manager is all for doing stuff in free (and legal) ways if it actually works. And he wants me to be honest about whether or not it's going to work, how much work it's going to require me to do, how much upkeep, how many problems I foresee running into because it's free and/or unsupported, etc.
It definitely looks more polished than OO.org, I agree. But still less pretty/polished than MS Office. I'm not an anti-ribbon person, I don't really care either way... but having used Office 2003, 2007, OO.org, and Symphony actually all fairly extensively, I would take MS Office over OO.org/Symphony.
But it's hard to say no to Free.:) (but that doesn't prevent me from saying MS Office is a better polished product, and if someone wants to pay for that, then I have no problem with that..)
Hm. So you talk up a non-free (expensive) solution. You then watch the manager take all credit. You expect all blame to go on manager. Right. What's your credibility now? If I was your manager and you talked up this expensive proprietary product and it crashed and burned AND made me look bad, you're not going to be sticking around too long.
I've used Lotus Symphony (and use OpenOffice at home). To me, it actually seems slower than MS Office and is a little bit of a pain to work with at times. Unfortunately for me, saying MS Office was "nicer" is not a hip thing to do on Slashdot, but it's unfortunately true. At least in my case.
Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning R 3.5 billion (about US$ 575 million at the time).
In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider.
In March 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects.
Sounds like he started his own company and sold it. Like a normal business entrepreneur. Unless I'm mistaken, Thawte isn't F/OSS... and he's definitely not getting rich on Canonical/Ubuntu (yet, at least). And they even sell t-shirts;)
Exactly! I find it annoying that people point to Ubuntu as if Canonical was a perfect example of an open source company. Canonical would not exist if Shuttleworth didn't have a lot of money. He's not making anything on this Ubuntu thing, as far as I know.
Not to say Canonical is bad or Ubuntu stinks, I use it at home actually... but it's being supported by one of those evil corporate people that made money in business. (I don't think made money == evil, but you know...)
If you're not incredibly worried about the "breaking" part, and can run "startx" in the event that something dies, and choose "xorg" (or xmesa if xorg ends up not working), PuppyLinux is really pretty good. Not sure it comes with openoffice by default though, would have to check on that. It can be a little hard to use. Good side though: it is very fast to boot, uses very little RAM, and actually boots from CD or USB very quickly as well... so you can try it out.
Another cool thing about Puppy is that you can leave whatever is on there alone... it can work by booting off a CD or USB drive and save changes into a file on the hard drive (using NTFS or FAT or whatever filesystem is on there), so you don't ever have to "install" it.
If you're looking to try something out, you might try it. It's a little clunky though if you're used to something like Ubuntu and the nice, clean gnome interface, etc. But, IIRC, it uses ~80mb ram after boot on my parent's quite old laptop. That's pretty good.
I should say it wasn't exactly slow... it was mostly the video response time that was really slow. Meaning, moving a single window around the screen stuttered. I just did a default install.
Come to think of it, though, I might have only had 128mb ram in it at the time. I thought it was 256 though, I could be wrong.
But Macs are pretty and EVERYONE knows that Windows is bad, so as long as we keep up the Microsoft critique about their security, we can ignore Macs... especially since so few people use them, it's not worth it (except in contests) to exploit them...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorta like the first cell phone law (can't talk on the phone but can text message on the phone). It sounds like a case of "we need to something so we can say we're doing something, even if it's stupid." Then when interviews come up ("what did you do for this-or-that issue?") politicians can talk around it by referencing legislation that they passed to "help climate change," knowing that most people will smile and nod and think they are doing well and not actually look up the legislation to see just what brilliant ideas were in it...
Maybe I'm cynical. :)
Or, maybe I like black cars. Who knows.
"It seems that if it is possible to fertilise enough ocean to make a difference to climate, we would need to turn vast ocean ecosystems into giant plankton farms," says Caldeira.
That explains it more to me (from the article).
Didn't realize they wanted to see if they could do it in the ocean on a widespread scale. :)
The trend that anything big blue acquires seem to die a slow and agonizing death isn't helping either. [citation needed]
I haven't heard about the trend lately. IBM seems to be doing generally pretty well.
I thought I saw 12 somewhere, hehe. However, that's only the Dell. I presume the 384 ones would be 24 slots.
In perusing some RAM pages, I noticed that there's a DDR2 DIMM that uses 10W. I presume a 16GB DIMM will use more than a 1GB DIMM, so 10W is probably a better guess at power usage per DIMM? That'd still only be 120W though.
I agree that it's easy to say now, hindsight is 20/20, etc.
But it still seems like a significant, hm, waste. 300 square kilometers (Google tells me that 300 (square kilometers) = 115.830648 square miles) isn't exactly a small area. Maybe it had to be that big for some reason, I don't know.
Yes, I know it's an experiment, but experiments try to leave as little to chance as possible. Or should, anyways... try to hold all other variables constant and all that. Why couldn't they do this in a controlled environment instead of the Atlantic ocean?
It's hard to believe nobody saw this coming. Hey, let's create a massive amount of food in the ocean and let it sink to the bottom. Did they think the ocean dwellers were just going to let it be for the sake of science or something?
I don't know, it sounds kinda stupid to me.
"Mom, I want to see how dog food reacts to the sun, so I'm going to fill Sparky's bowl and let it sit for a week."
Next day. "Mom, Sparky ate the dog food." Duh? :)
Slightly confused... you can disable swap... and if you have enough RAM, I would imagine you can not swap at all, just load everything in RAM. I've never run a system that used 192GB ram+swap, so 192gb ram would be more than enough ;)
Hmm, I don't know. Not according to here... And according to an AMD page, "Energy-efficient DDR2 memory uses up to 30% less power than DDR1 and up to 58% less power than FBDIMM."
According to here a DDR2 DIMM needs 4.4 watts. Let's round up to 10 watts and say each DIMM is, oh, 4gb (pretty low, I'd say). That's 48 DIMMs to get up to 192, 96 to get up to 384. At a whopping 10 watts (pretty high) that's still ~ 500W for 192gb and ~1000W for 384gb. Cut the wattage down to 5W per DIMM and you get half (250W, 500W). >1000W "home user" power supplies aren't too uncommon these days (1600W on tigerdirect.com...)
With 384GB RAM, get a good UPS and generator and run your entire system in RAM. Use a hard drive in case the power goes out (dump to hard drive). Seems like this would be a rather fast system. Forget about "no swapping," just don't use any disk at all... hehe.
but people like to own what they buy
Would you mind telling that to the government? They keep thinking they own what I buy.
I try. :P :) Hopefully I didn't get too biting... in part, I was probably responding to the idea that some people do seem to have a "managers are all out to get you, so it doesn't matter what you do to them" mentality, no matter who the manager is. I'm actually fairly new to the whole business world thing, but even with good employees, the sort of corporate gossip and frustration (lack of patience and understanding, etc) is kinda ... weird, to me.
The for-our-division method seems like it would be a better way. My group uses a number of free/open source tools and some of them have been picked up on by other groups that we work with. I'd still contend that the situation you describe would be more manager to manager, not employee to manager. I personally kinda want my manager to succeed (and, thankfully, that is reciprocated) because it seems that if he succeeds, his whole group succeeds and we all look good... hopefully for good reason (I don't like the phrase "makes us look good," I don't want to look good... I want to be good.. :P )
The Internet Archive also works with about 100 physical libraries around the world whose curators help guide deep Internet crawls. The Internet Archive's massive database is mirrored to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt, for disaster recovery purposes.
[subject correction]
PB, not TB... hehe.
Either way, you are basically steering the project manager into a bad decision.
If I were a manager and one of my IT guys DIDN'T warn me that this or that wouldn't work, and I paid a lot of company money for it, I'm faced with two options, in my mind...
Maybe I'd make a weird manager, I don't know, but I'd rather have my IT guy be completely honest. Either way, no manager is going to be HAPPY with their IT guys that can't get an expensive (what do they care if it's complicated, they are paying you to figure these sorts of things out) solution working, and isn't going to be happy if his idea turns out to be a bad one, and isn't going to be happy if his idea was not only not cautioned against but supported by his IT guys. Who then couldn't get it to work.
If the manager is smart, you can even allow him to be part of the solution. If not, he or she can take the fall for the expensive mistake.
It sounds to me like you are assuming a stupid manager and a genius IT guy (who, by the way, couldn't get this "ridiculously complicated and expensive" solution to work). It also sounds like the IT guy is rather arrogant... in my experience, anyways, managers tend to not like arrogant IT guys, hehe.
Anyway. Honesty seems to work. My current manager is all for doing stuff in free (and legal) ways if it actually works. And he wants me to be honest about whether or not it's going to work, how much work it's going to require me to do, how much upkeep, how many problems I foresee running into because it's free and/or unsupported, etc.
It definitely looks more polished than OO.org, I agree. But still less pretty/polished than MS Office. I'm not an anti-ribbon person, I don't really care either way... but having used Office 2003, 2007, OO.org, and Symphony actually all fairly extensively, I would take MS Office over OO.org/Symphony.
But it's hard to say no to Free. :) (but that doesn't prevent me from saying MS Office is a better polished product, and if someone wants to pay for that, then I have no problem with that..)
So open format standards are more important than overall software quality? Not sure I really agree with that.
Hm. So you talk up a non-free (expensive) solution. You then watch the manager take all credit. You expect all blame to go on manager. Right. What's your credibility now? If I was your manager and you talked up this expensive proprietary product and it crashed and burned AND made me look bad, you're not going to be sticking around too long.
I've used Lotus Symphony (and use OpenOffice at home). To me, it actually seems slower than MS Office and is a little bit of a pain to work with at times. Unfortunately for me, saying MS Office was "nicer" is not a hip thing to do on Slashdot, but it's unfortunately true. At least in my case.
I'm willing to accept that and concede your point... I can't find the quote though (with an admittedly short google search).
Yeah, what's with the wanting to show how their hardware is better than Intel's, anyways.
Hm. To get rich?
According to wikipedia:
Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995, which specialised in digital certificates and Internet security and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning R 3.5 billion (about US$ 575 million at the time).
In September 2000, Shuttleworth formed HBD Venture Capital, a business incubator and venture capital provider.
In March 2004 he formed Canonical Ltd., for the promotion and commercial support of free software projects.
Sounds like he started his own company and sold it. Like a normal business entrepreneur. Unless I'm mistaken, Thawte isn't F/OSS... and he's definitely not getting rich on Canonical/Ubuntu (yet, at least). And they even sell t-shirts ;)
Exactly! I find it annoying that people point to Ubuntu as if Canonical was a perfect example of an open source company. Canonical would not exist if Shuttleworth didn't have a lot of money. He's not making anything on this Ubuntu thing, as far as I know.
Not to say Canonical is bad or Ubuntu stinks, I use it at home actually... but it's being supported by one of those evil corporate people that made money in business. (I don't think made money == evil, but you know...)
RAM/CPU, do you know?
If you're not incredibly worried about the "breaking" part, and can run "startx" in the event that something dies, and choose "xorg" (or xmesa if xorg ends up not working), PuppyLinux is really pretty good. Not sure it comes with openoffice by default though, would have to check on that. It can be a little hard to use. Good side though: it is very fast to boot, uses very little RAM, and actually boots from CD or USB very quickly as well... so you can try it out.
Another cool thing about Puppy is that you can leave whatever is on there alone ... it can work by booting off a CD or USB drive and save changes into a file on the hard drive (using NTFS or FAT or whatever filesystem is on there), so you don't ever have to "install" it.
If you're looking to try something out, you might try it. It's a little clunky though if you're used to something like Ubuntu and the nice, clean gnome interface, etc. But, IIRC, it uses ~80mb ram after boot on my parent's quite old laptop. That's pretty good.
I should say it wasn't exactly slow... it was mostly the video response time that was really slow. Meaning, moving a single window around the screen stuttered. I just did a default install.
Come to think of it, though, I might have only had 128mb ram in it at the time. I thought it was 256 though, I could be wrong.
But Macs are pretty and EVERYONE knows that Windows is bad, so as long as we keep up the Microsoft critique about their security, we can ignore Macs... especially since so few people use them, it's not worth it (except in contests) to exploit them...