If you are some group performing research that requries lots of power but aren't focused in a CS-related field, you may not have the resources to go use the (often arcane) parallel (MPI) debuggers etc. and churn out a top-grade program for a supercomputer. An MS solution might indeed be cheaper...
If you lack in-house expertise at implementing parallel algorithms (or parallelizing yours), then you have to shop around for someone who can help you. As long as you need that kind of help, you probably won't be buying something, you'll be using someone else's cluster.
Looking at it another way, if you can't learn MPI you have no business running a cluster. It won't do you any good.
Central control is happening, and will happen.. like it or not.
I fear you may be correct, but I hope you are not.
(Off-topic rant: I'm one of those folks who wish porn were a little more difficult to find, and I don't like spam any more than you do. But I don't want bloggers chilled, dissidents persecuted, or any of that. Free speech is free speech, and I don't know, and wouldn't want to decide, where to draw the line. I certainly don't want the government deciding, when no one is forced to go to a particular we site or help pay for its upkeep.)
Back on topic. I think, or hope, that the Djinn is out of the bottle on controlling the net. People the world over have learned about layered communications, encryption, and levels of indirection. Quite possibly, content control is no longer possible.
Another point I think is important is that porting can help you find bugs. Try compiling your code on some weird compiler and system instead of your favorite. Usuallly (for nontrivial programs) you'll get a different set of warnings, and sometimes you'll luck out and the thing will crash. Then you get to look at your program and find that error, which probably would have come up only after users started to bang on it.
If you can use #ifdef to avoid a bug, you haven't found it yet.
You come to Slashdot to talk about independent thought?
I've raised my kids to know they are Created, not simply overevolved pond scum. The how of our getting here is not so important as the why of it. We're here to do the right thing and to help those around us.
Still, they know that only the fit survive to breed. They know that the survival of the human race is important, that one human person, whether old and used up or conceived last week, is more valuable than a hundred planets full of other species. They know that folowing ideas and principles (such as liberty and justice) can be worth all the people on a hundred planets.
They know that their children and their ideas are how they will be judged. Independent thought is a requirement, and can't be trained out of a person anyway.
So take care when spouting off about things you don't understand.
For instance, in base 16, 3 * F (45 dec) is 2D, and 2+D=F.
This leads to a (slow) algorithm for primality check. For a given number r, simply (hah!) check all the bases up to about log_b(r) to see if all your base r belong to us.
A disruptive technology thwarts all attempts to stop it.
The web, both its Light and its Darkness, is an unavoidable result of the transistor.
Trying to control disruptive technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history. The only thing to do is to spot the inexorable trend and adapt to it.
... or, to appease the jackbooted grammar thugs, you only get that for which you pay.
Universities are in the business of selling degrees. They do whatever they can to make the value of a degree in general and their degree in particular seem as high as possible.
One of the greatest benefits of a university degree is the network of contacts one can develop. Graduate students especially have an expectation of a relationship with one or more professors, but also with other graduate students. Those relationships tend to last past graduation.
If you are going for an online graduate degree, make sure you get one that allows close contact with the others in the program.
"Sometimes I think that people feel that the MPAA is a bunch of Luddites," Brad Hunt, chief technical officer of the MPAA, said in an interview Wednesday afternoon. "In this case, we are trying to incent the consumer to embrace the digital conversion, the digital connection...and that's why we need to drive this technology forward."
Of all the disingenuous malarky. "Incent the consumer". Since when did "incent" become synonymous with "bufu"?
They want to keep me from making copies of stuff I buy, so if it gets ruined I have to buy another one. Or so I can only play it from the media I bought it on.
Guess what, pally: most of the stuff I listen to is on sweet old vinyl. I want to preserve the music from my analog media, and the best way to do that is digitally. But don't try to tell me I can't do whatever I want with something I buy, as long as I don't try to give it to someone else.
I would accuse Moglen of putting forth a straw man argument about putting each clause up for a vote, but it's clear from the description that someone had suggested that. How stupid.
I expect that the GPL3 will be looked over and hashed about by enough people. Hopefully it will be a fine license for the near future, and not just for the recent past.
Amortized over the life of a power plant, the startup cost is negligeable.
The real gotcha will be maintenance. What happens when one of God's happy sea creatures swims afoul of the power plant, taking it offline on Super Bowl Sunday? Or more pointedly, foul weather at sea is not like foul weather on land. There's no place to get away from it, except perhaps underwater.
I guess they'll have to have a fleet of submarines for maintenance. Maintenance is where the real costs will be, too.
... of harmonics? That is, how on earth (or wherever) are they going to keep a giant 20,000-mile long (minimum) string from vibrating, tearing itself away from its moorings and giving passengers a severe case of lawnmower shakes? Awful hard to do the random weighting thing they do with high-tension power lines when you want a robot to climb it (fast).... or terrorist attacks? Yah, I know that's passe and overrated as a topic, and that it applies to any transport medium. But it still ought to be dealt with at the design stage rather than afterwards, I think.... or birds? Doesn't anyone care about birds?:-).
You leave off the country identifier to get to sites inside your country, but add it when going international.
That could be extended in a natural way by saying anyone inside, e.g., the ibm.com.us domain only need refer to "http://www" to get to http://www.ibm.com.us/". In other words, the parts of the URL that match your domain need not be supplied.
Scenario: this startup approaches Yahoo to be bought out. Yahoo, being a survivor of the Bubble, feigns interest (or perhaps is genuinely interested - we may never know). Nuance previews the technology they've developed to apply search queries over the phone. Yahoo doesn't care for that particular technology, but likes the engineers. They don't like all the engineers, and they don't like the management.
Rather than fund technology that won't fly, paying millions of dollars to a bunch of know-nothing empty suits, they decide to hire the engineers to work on something else, or on a better way to do the same thing.
The reason we may never know whether this was an underhanded theft of technology or a bunch of valiant sailors deserting a sinking ship is that Yahoo may now offer a settlement to the Nuance suits. They'll get their money, shut up, and go away. Yahoo gets the good parts of Nuance, but doesn't have to pay really big bucks to the parasites.
Or Yahoo could play hardball and stick to the story I've just painted. They could end up paying less to the lawyers than the Nuance suits would cost. And any publicity is good publicity.
Slashdot Mirror
If you lack in-house expertise at implementing parallel algorithms (or parallelizing yours), then you have to shop around for someone who can help you. As long as you need that kind of help, you probably won't be buying something, you'll be using someone else's cluster.
Looking at it another way, if you can't learn MPI you have no business running a cluster. It won't do you any good.
I fear you may be correct, but I hope you are not.
(Off-topic rant: I'm one of those folks who wish porn were a little more difficult to find, and I don't like spam any more than you do. But I don't want bloggers chilled, dissidents persecuted, or any of that. Free speech is free speech, and I don't know, and wouldn't want to decide, where to draw the line. I certainly don't want the government deciding, when no one is forced to go to a particular we site or help pay for its upkeep.)
Back on topic. I think, or hope, that the Djinn is out of the bottle on controlling the net. People the world over have learned about layered communications, encryption, and levels of indirection. Quite possibly, content control is no longer possible.
But I couldn't find the right wording.
Another point I think is important is that porting can help you find bugs. Try compiling your code on some weird compiler and system instead of your favorite. Usuallly (for nontrivial programs) you'll get a different set of warnings, and sometimes you'll luck out and the thing will crash. Then you get to look at your program and find that error, which probably would have come up only after users started to bang on it.
If you can use #ifdef to avoid a bug, you haven't found it yet.
You come to Slashdot to talk about independent thought?
I've raised my kids to know they are Created, not simply overevolved pond scum. The how of our getting here is not so important as the why of it. We're here to do the right thing and to help those around us.
Still, they know that only the fit survive to breed. They know that the survival of the human race is important, that one human person, whether old and used up or conceived last week, is more valuable than a hundred planets full of other species. They know that folowing ideas and principles (such as liberty and justice) can be worth all the people on a hundred planets.
They know that their children and their ideas are how they will be judged. Independent thought is a requirement, and can't be trained out of a person anyway.
So take care when spouting off about things you don't understand.
For any base b, the sum of the digits (in base b) of a multiple of (b-1) add to a multiple of (b-1). The proof is fairly simple: http://www.pseudorandom.co.uk/2002/maths/divby9/.
For instance, in base 16, 3 * F (45 dec) is 2D, and 2+D=F.
This leads to a (slow) algorithm for primality check. For a given number r, simply (hah!) check all the bases up to about log_b(r) to see if all your base r belong to us.
Unlike the folks in Indiana, who dabble in all manner of regulatory digressions:
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.htmlNo, this guy is not full of hot air. He's not all bluster.
The technology does blow everything else away.
Yes, it will succeed, and not just in vertical markets.
It really took some gust to work on this.
----
Now I have to go back to bed in a fit of self-loathing.
It would be news if the Chinese goverment declared something to be legal.
A disruptive technology thwarts all attempts to stop it.
The web, both its Light and its Darkness, is an unavoidable result of the transistor.
Trying to control disruptive technology puts you squarely on the wrong side of history. The only thing to do is to spot the inexorable trend and adapt to it.
Free software is next.
Or else, global Bird Flu. Hard to tell.
Whatever. Mods are all on crack tonight.
>already in the workforce
That's a good point.
... or, to appease the jackbooted grammar thugs, you only get that for which you pay.
Universities are in the business of selling degrees. They do whatever they can to make the value of a degree in general and their degree in particular seem as high as possible.
One of the greatest benefits of a university degree is the network of contacts one can develop. Graduate students especially have an expectation of a relationship with one or more professors, but also with other graduate students. Those relationships tend to last past graduation.
If you are going for an online graduate degree, make sure you get one that allows close contact with the others in the program.
Of all the disingenuous malarky. "Incent the consumer". Since when did "incent" become synonymous with "bufu"?
They want to keep me from making copies of stuff I buy, so if it gets ruined I have to buy another one. Or so I can only play it from the media I bought it on.
Guess what, pally: most of the stuff I listen to is on sweet old vinyl. I want to preserve the music from my analog media, and the best way to do that is digitally. But don't try to tell me I can't do whatever I want with something I buy, as long as I don't try to give it to someone else.
I would accuse Moglen of putting forth a straw man argument about putting each clause up for a vote, but it's clear from the description that someone had suggested that. How stupid.
I expect that the GPL3 will be looked over and hashed about by enough people. Hopefully it will be a fine license for the near future, and not just for the recent past.
Amortized over the life of a power plant, the startup cost is negligeable.
The real gotcha will be maintenance. What happens when one of God's happy sea creatures swims afoul of the power plant, taking it offline on Super Bowl Sunday? Or more pointedly, foul weather at sea is not like foul weather on land. There's no place to get away from it, except perhaps underwater.
I guess they'll have to have a fleet of submarines for maintenance. Maintenance is where the real costs will be, too.
The VIM development team just announced that emacs is obsolete.
Oh, wait, they did.
... of harmonics? That is, how on earth (or wherever) are they going to keep a giant 20,000-mile long (minimum) string from vibrating, tearing itself away from its moorings and giving passengers a severe case of lawnmower shakes? Awful hard to do the random weighting thing they do with high-tension power lines when you want a robot to climb it (fast). ... or terrorist attacks? Yah, I know that's passe and overrated as a topic, and that it applies to any transport medium. But it still ought to be dealt with at the design stage rather than afterwards, I think. ... or birds? Doesn't anyone care about birds? :-).
It would be easier to say:
.de land, whereas if a US-dweller wanted to get to a German IBM site, he'd say
http://www.ibm.com/
to get to the German ibm.com site if you're in
http://www.ibm.com.de/
You leave off the country identifier to get to sites inside your country, but add it when going international.
That could be extended in a natural way by saying anyone inside, e.g., the ibm.com.us domain only need refer to "http://www" to get to http://www.ibm.com.us/". In other words, the parts of the URL that match your domain need not be supplied.
I always thought "dark matter" was a kind of special pleading, an appeal to magic in the face of the unknown.
Oh, yeah. Geez, I feel dumb.
Dogbert, evil HR manager, finally gets his due. Gotta love that!
Scenario: this startup approaches Yahoo to be bought out. Yahoo, being a survivor of the Bubble, feigns interest (or perhaps is genuinely interested - we may never know). Nuance previews the technology they've developed to apply search queries over the phone. Yahoo doesn't care for that particular technology, but likes the engineers. They don't like all the engineers, and they don't like the management.
Rather than fund technology that won't fly, paying millions of dollars to a bunch of know-nothing empty suits, they decide to hire the engineers to work on something else, or on a better way to do the same thing.
The reason we may never know whether this was an underhanded theft of technology or a bunch of valiant sailors deserting a sinking ship is that Yahoo may now offer a settlement to the Nuance suits. They'll get their money, shut up, and go away. Yahoo gets the good parts of Nuance, but doesn't have to pay really big bucks to the parasites.
Or Yahoo could play hardball and stick to the story I've just painted. They could end up paying less to the lawyers than the Nuance suits would cost. And any publicity is good publicity.
It was a joke.
I hope never to live in a country in which the President is responsible for the quality of the movies.
I don't even want the President taking care of hurricane cleanup. That's a state and local matter.
It's all George Bush's fault.
He doesn't care about movies.
I know he's too busy with his bicycling career and all to go to movies. I just want to know that he cares.