"No, I don't really see it. If one person comes in and claims the million with a solid esp power, everyone else with the same power or similar would land on them and they would have to give out a whole lot more millions."
Each person would have to pass a test. There is nothing that says they have to just start giving out a million dollars to everyone who claims to have a certain power. So far none have even passed the preliminary test.
"Besides, it wouldn't be the first time that financial considerations have held back valuable information."
I'm pretty sure that if a paranormal wanted to be tested by the randi foundation purely for the betterment of science and NOT take the million dollars that he'd accept. Further, I suspect the test would be no different. Remember, the randi foundation doesn't do the testing. That's done by universities and other houses of reason.
All of this is a red herring of course. Because there has not been a single repeatable successful paranormal experiment in all of science history. No valuable information is being held back for "financial reasons". What is true, is that financial movitavation is the ONLY reason "paranormals" exist in the first place. If you want a solid theory of why they exist, science isn't needed, look no further than Econ 101.
No, the purpose of the organization is to debunk pseudoscience. If you claim something is true, prove it, else, don't "make definitive statements about things" you are not "relatively certain of". I'm relatively certain btw, that there isn't any such thing as a legitmate paranormal.
What they are saying is, that you have to prove beyond doubt that what you claim is true, is in fact true. The reason paranormals don't agree to the rules is because they are a bunch of frauds.
It says right in the FAQ that it's an adversarial process. That is, they don't believe you to begin with and it's up to you to prove it. However, I don't think they care as much as you think about the one million dollars in the same way that you or I would. It does not belong to "james randi", it belongs to the organization which is a non-profit.
That is, there is no basis for your implication that being out a cool million is reason for JREF to be fraudulent or to design tests that are not passable by a legitimate paranormal. It probably only seems that way because there isn't any such thing as a legitimate paranormal.
Christ, at least be honest. The test protocol is agreed to by BOTH the participant and the James Randi Foundation. What this says is that applicants won't agree to a proper test protocol. If you say that ghosts exist why wouldn't you agree to ruling out EVERY possible alternative explanation. The rules aren't "arbitrary", they are designed to eliminate any chance that the "paranormal" is misrepresenting his claims and are agreed to by the paranormal. A true paranormal would welcome the strictest of tests because it would prove beyond doubt that, at the very least, his skills are genuine. If you could prove that you could talk to the dead you would be rich beyond your dreams as you would have the entire world as your client.
The fact that nobody has ever been tested is testament to the fact that "Paranormals" are a bunch of frauds. At best they're entertaining, at worst they're criminals.
As this excerpt from the FAQ points out. Finger pointing is pointless. Either you have the skill or you don't and since you have to agree to the test protocol you can't claim that it was some set of "arbitrary" rules.
Since 1964 parnormals have had the opportunity to put up or shut up, yet in over fourty years, none have.
The Challenge started in 1964 when James Randi put up $1,000 of his own money to the first person who could provide objective proof of the paranormal [1]. Since then, the prize money has grown to the current $1,000,000, and the rules regarding the Challenge have gotten more and more official and legal. It is vital that you understand this fact before you apply. The contract signifies your willingness to adhere to the Challenge rules. If you do not feel that you can abide by the rules, you should not apply, because NO rules will be circumvented on your behalf. So don't even ask.
1.2. Why is there a Challenge in the first place?
During a live radio panel discussion, James Randi was challenged by a parapsychologist to "put [his] money where [his] mouth is", and Randi responded by offering to pay $1,000 to anyone who demonstrated a paranormal power under satisfactory observational conditions. [2]
1.3. How many applicants have there been for the Challenge?
Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied [3]. Between 1997 and February 15, 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications.
1.4. How many people have passed the preliminary test?
None. Most applicants never agree to a proper test protocol, so most are never tested.
1.5. How many people have passed the formal test? No one has ever taken the formal test, as one must first pass the preliminary test.
2.1. What do you mean by "mutually agreed upon"?
"Mutually agreed upon" means that neither side can force the other side into doing or saying something that they don't want to, and that if no agreement can be reached, the application process is terminated, with no blame or fault attributed to either side. It's easy to point fingers after a Challenge claim comes to an impasse and say that the other side was being unreasonable. This phrase is used to insure that finger-pointing has no merit.
I also know several people who are not religious and they believe in Santa Claus. Of course, all of them are under six years of age, so we might want to forgive their irrational ignorance this one time.
It's already been done. So if you are the "brilliant scientist" with evidence, just give the the amazing randi" a call and you can be a "brilliant scientist" with a million dollars.
As there is no basis for that belief there is no reason to believe it so. This is exactly the position we all take. That is, without basis we generally disbelieve something to be true. If it's eighty degrees in the shade and you are relaxing on the beach and complain to your friends that you're feeling chilly, your friends probably won't believe you. You would have to provide some basis for them to react and take your statements seriously. As soon as you do, they will look for the rational explanation why you are chilly outside on the beach on a sunny day.
So of course we don't believe in invisible pink unicorns. There is no basis for such belief. The rational person would, however, change his mind about that belief should some convincing argument be provided. It is normal, however, to not believe something is true until a satisfying argument to believe it is true is provided.
Of course, it isn't difficult to construct an argument that suggests such beings don't likely exist. Such an argument might discuss what properties a physical object would need to be invisible, what biological properties it would have to have in order to be pink and have a single vertical horn. Further, we could discuss where such an animal would live, how large it might be, and given that it were sufficiently large why we haven't encountered such a being to date. This might all present a probablistic argument that such beings don't exist, at the very least, on this planet.
But, all of that really isn't relavant. There is a huge body of evidence that the earth is NOT three thousand years old and WAS NOT created, neither COULD it be created, in seven days. Hence, while it is reasonable to not believe in "invisible pink unicorns", it is not reasonable to believe in "young earth creationist" poppycock. Thus, there is clearly a difference between the disbeliever of unicorns and the believer of young earth creationism; the former is rational, the latter either ignorant, stupid, or dishonest, or some mix of all three.
But, taking stuff apart doesn't make you brilliant. Most of us geeks took things apart when we were kids. People around us said the same things you're saying about so and so's kid. The kid is stumped with java because he's having to go beyond instant gratification and actually learn something. There is a fundamental difference between just discovering random facts and learning ideas that have depth. Just because he can play video games or memorize oodles of random computer facts, or fankly, even put a network together, doesn't mean much. I'm not saying the kid isn't smart, most geeks are "smart", few are brilliant.
It's good for him to struggle. He'll find out if he's really brilliant. His response that the ideas are stupid is just his ego combined with youth. Does he think math is stupid too?
My point is that visual studio isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that mucking about with computers is equivalent to learning difficult things. Whipping up some crappy kid-app in Visual Basic is about as difficult as Whipping up some crappy speakers in woodshop. It no more makes you a programmer, or dare I say, a computer scientist, than building the crappy speaker makes you an acoustic engineer.
The kids problem isn't visual studio, the kids problem is that the stuff he's done requires tinkering and doing but no hard thinking. Now he's being forced to think and it sounds like he's finding out that it's not quite as easy as just doing. That's good!
I don't think they're talking about open standards, just mutually beneficial closed standards. You know, if you make a camera, and you sell a lot of them, you can "partner" with MS so your camera works with xbox360. You're gonna sign a non-disclosure, etc etc.
It strikes me as more of an invite to manufacturers than any "opening" of microsoft.
As far as mini-itx articles go, that one IS more interesting.
However, so what.
1) You don't need the cluster to be in the classroom for people to use it to learn about clusters. That's why we have ssh.
2) If you want to talk about installing the software to build a cluster, two to four old cpus will serve the same purpose and you can just conveniently group students up by lab tables.
3) If you want to talk about experimenting with parallel architectures, you need more i/o capability for things like hypercubes etc, otherwise, see 2.
4) If you need a cluster to get real work done then you're backpedaling by using via CPUS.
The overhead of a communication in a 64 way cluster is non-trivial and you aren't going to overcome that with a couple of 100baseT ports and some consumer switches. VIA claims that this will help clusters move "out of the server room and into classrooms and offices". What exactly do they think is the office application for a 64 way cluster of underpowered cpus that can't be solved by a more traditional server. As far as classrooms are concerned, see above.
While I think the dual cpu motherboard is neat, it would be a LOT neater at about $200. While $400 isn't that bad it is approaching the price of conventional dual processor motherboards + cpus. Yes you can fit four cpus into one u of rack space, so what, you're gonna need at least four to compete. I use a dual cpu system to do some of my work. My application is "trivially parallelizable" so I could make use of the limited i/o on the via boards without great loss. However, when I looked into building a small cluster with via boards I estimated that I would have needed something like sixteen of them (single cpu) to compete with a dual cpu athlon system. Say four were competitive, that's only 4*$400=$1600. But, $1600 will build four dual core athlon 64 systems. Or you can build a couple of dual opteron systems. Either way the via systems will not be able to keep up.
Once you get past the neato factor there isn't much advantage to the VIA stuff unless power consumption or raw size are your primary concern. Building a cluster out of them sort of misses the point of why you build a cluster in the first place.
VIA is banking on the size advantage, however, there are only a few applications where size trumps power. Embedded applications certainly fit this category, but traditional servers and clusters, not really. For embedded markets the price of the VIA boards is attractive. For the consumer market however, the value just doesn't seem to be there. Now, if they'd make boards with the pentium m, that might be worth talking about.
Seriously, until mini-itx motherboards come down in price there doesn't seem to be any advantage, imnsho, over a MAC-Mini. Factor in the time you spend dorking around with the miniitx and it gets worse. Oh, and just about every case I've seen is just plain ugly. Modded cases are like ringtones, even if you think yours is an exception, it isn't, they all suck.
Yes, but you can't have a conversation about operating systems without at least one amiga fanboy piping in about how good the amiga OS was. If I remember correctly, it could multitask. That is, it could display one grainy image of a reflective ball while another one rendered. Oh, and you could program it in basic. What more do you want from an OS?
It's used for embedded applications. Yes, I know linux is also. For some applications, however, all you need or want is a dos compatible file system and an easy way to input and output text information or simple vga graphics. With an embeddable DOS, and an old copy of TurboC (or Quickbasic, believe it or not), a few hours spent rewriting the startup code, just about any old-school engineer can be up and running. The code is understandable by one person AND you can buy licenses for cheap. Yes there's no charge for GPL'd code, but, it comes with strings attached which often seem like a poor risk compared to the oem cost of something like DRDos.
The general perception was that windows was that thing you needed to make pagemaker work. GUIs were not all that popular in the work environment at the time because they just slowed things down.
The internet made multitasking a legitimate necessity. Today it seems absurd that we wouldn't be able to keep our im windows open while we download files and stream music all in the background of our actual work. Back then, however, multitasking was like the solution looking for a problem. The first version of windows didn't provide any form of multitasking and later versions didn't multitask dos apps. Desqview, however did, and before windows 3.0/3.1, desqview was the multitasking solution of choice for those people who really needed it.
People did want to switch between tasks quickly but there were lighter weight solutions than windows for that. Products like sidekick and expanded memory print buffers (one of the few ways to use more than a meg in even a 286) gave people the quasi-multitasking solutions they needed to get their work done. It was precisely the explosion of applications for windows 3.1 that made windows successful. Before 3.0/3.1 few people used windows because there wasn't any point in using it. Until native windows applications came along, windows was just a silly, bloated, guified app switcher that just got in the way.
I ALWAYS put my data on its own partition. If I need to reinstall my OS it just isn't an issue. Keep in mind I use linux and have no idea how friendly modern microsoft os's are to such an arrangement.
The office-in-home is a red flag from what I've heard. Of course, I'm not telling you to lie on your taxes, however, you probably wouldn't get audited for a similar deduction spread out over office supplies and mileage.
ymmv.
Slashdot Mirror
"No, I don't really see it. If one person comes in and claims the million with a solid esp power, everyone else with the same power or similar would land on them and they would have to give out a whole lot more millions."
Each person would have to pass a test. There is nothing that says they have to just start giving out a million dollars to everyone who claims to have a certain power. So far none have even passed the preliminary test.
"Besides, it wouldn't be the first time that financial considerations have held back valuable information."
I'm pretty sure that if a paranormal wanted to be tested by the randi foundation purely for the betterment of science and NOT take the million dollars that he'd accept. Further, I suspect the test would be no different. Remember, the randi foundation doesn't do the testing. That's done by universities and other houses of reason.
All of this is a red herring of course. Because there has not been a single repeatable successful paranormal experiment in all of science history. No valuable information is being held back for "financial reasons". What is true, is that financial movitavation is the ONLY reason "paranormals" exist in the first place. If you want a solid theory of why they exist, science isn't needed, look no further than Econ 101.
No, the purpose of the organization is to debunk pseudoscience. If you claim something is true, prove it, else, don't "make definitive statements about things" you are not "relatively certain of". I'm relatively certain btw, that there isn't any such thing as a legitmate paranormal.
I responded to your other point in another post.
What they are saying is, that you have to prove beyond doubt that what you claim is true, is in fact true. The reason paranormals don't agree to the rules is because they are a bunch of frauds.
It says right in the FAQ that it's an adversarial process. That is, they don't believe you to begin with and it's up to you to prove it. However, I don't think they care as much as you think about the one million dollars in the same way that you or I would. It does not belong to "james randi", it belongs to the organization which is a non-profit.
That is, there is no basis for your implication that being out a cool million is reason for JREF to be fraudulent or to design tests that are not passable by a legitimate paranormal. It probably only seems that way because there isn't any such thing as a legitimate paranormal.
Christ, at least be honest. The test protocol is agreed to by BOTH the participant and the James Randi Foundation. What this says is that applicants won't agree to a proper test protocol. If you say that ghosts exist why wouldn't you agree to ruling out EVERY possible alternative explanation. The rules aren't "arbitrary", they are designed to eliminate any chance that the "paranormal" is misrepresenting his claims and are agreed to by the paranormal. A true paranormal would welcome the strictest of tests because it would prove beyond doubt that, at the very least, his skills are genuine. If you could prove that you could talk to the dead you would be rich beyond your dreams as you would have the entire world as your client.
The fact that nobody has ever been tested is testament to the fact that "Paranormals" are a bunch of frauds. At best they're entertaining, at worst they're criminals.
As this excerpt from the FAQ points out. Finger pointing is pointless. Either you have the skill or you don't and since you have to agree to the test protocol you can't claim that it was some set of "arbitrary" rules.
Since 1964 parnormals have had the opportunity to put up or shut up, yet in over fourty years, none have.
Taken from http://www.randi.org/
1.1. What's the history of the Challenge?
The Challenge started in 1964 when James Randi put up $1,000 of his own money to the first person who could provide objective proof of the paranormal [1]. Since then, the prize money has grown to the current $1,000,000, and the rules regarding the Challenge have gotten more and more official and legal. It is vital that you understand this fact before you apply. The contract signifies your willingness to adhere to the Challenge rules. If you do not feel that you can abide by the rules, you should not apply, because NO rules will be circumvented on your behalf. So don't even ask.
1.2. Why is there a Challenge in the first place?
During a live radio panel discussion, James Randi was challenged by a parapsychologist to "put [his] money where [his] mouth is", and Randi responded by offering to pay $1,000 to anyone who demonstrated a paranormal power under satisfactory observational conditions. [2]
1.3. How many applicants have there been for the Challenge?
Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied [3]. Between 1997 and February 15, 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications.
1.4. How many people have passed the preliminary test?
None. Most applicants never agree to a proper test protocol, so most are never tested.
1.5. How many people have passed the formal test?
No one has ever taken the formal test, as one must first pass the preliminary test.
2.1. What do you mean by "mutually agreed upon"?
"Mutually agreed upon" means that neither side can force the other side into doing or saying something that they don't want to, and that if no agreement can be reached, the application process is terminated, with no blame or fault attributed to either side.
It's easy to point fingers after a Challenge claim comes to an impasse and say that the other side was being unreasonable. This phrase is used to insure that finger-pointing has no merit.
I also know several people who are not religious and they believe in Santa Claus. Of course, all of them are under six years of age, so we might want to forgive their irrational ignorance this one time.
It's already been done. So if you are the "brilliant scientist" with evidence, just give the the amazing randi" a call and you can be a "brilliant scientist" with a million dollars.
"So, do you think invisible pink unicorns exist?"
As there is no basis for that belief there is no reason to believe it so. This is exactly the position we all take. That is, without basis we generally disbelieve something to be true. If it's eighty degrees in the shade and you are relaxing on the beach and complain to your friends that you're feeling chilly, your friends probably won't believe you. You would have to provide some basis for them to react and take your statements seriously. As soon as you do, they will look for the rational explanation why you are chilly outside on the beach on a sunny day.
So of course we don't believe in invisible pink unicorns. There is no basis for such belief. The rational person would, however, change his mind about that belief should some convincing argument be provided. It is normal, however, to not believe something is true until a satisfying argument to believe it is true is provided.
Of course, it isn't difficult to construct an argument that suggests such beings don't likely exist. Such an argument might discuss what properties a physical object would need to be invisible, what biological properties it would have to have in order to be pink and have a single vertical horn. Further, we could discuss where such an animal would live, how large it might be, and given that it were sufficiently large why we haven't encountered such a being to date. This might all present a probablistic argument that such beings don't exist, at the very least, on this planet.
But, all of that really isn't relavant. There is a huge body of evidence that the earth is NOT three thousand years old and WAS NOT created, neither COULD it be created, in seven days. Hence, while it is reasonable to not believe in "invisible pink unicorns", it is not reasonable to believe in "young earth creationist" poppycock. Thus, there is clearly a difference between the disbeliever of unicorns and the believer of young earth creationism; the former is rational, the latter either ignorant, stupid, or dishonest, or some mix of all three.
People don't want to switch because they think they need office. Simple as that.
No offense,
But, taking stuff apart doesn't make you brilliant. Most of us geeks took things apart when we were kids. People around us said the same things you're saying about so and so's kid. The kid is stumped with java because he's having to go beyond instant gratification and actually learn something. There is a fundamental difference between just discovering random facts and learning ideas that have depth. Just because he can play video games or memorize oodles of random computer facts, or fankly, even put a network together, doesn't mean much. I'm not saying the kid isn't smart, most geeks are "smart", few are brilliant.
It's good for him to struggle. He'll find out if he's really brilliant. His response that the ideas are stupid is just his ego combined with youth. Does he think math is stupid too?
My point is that visual studio isn't the problem. The problem is thinking that mucking about with computers is equivalent to learning difficult things. Whipping up some crappy kid-app in Visual Basic is about as difficult as Whipping up some crappy speakers in woodshop. It no more makes you a programmer, or dare I say, a computer scientist, than building the crappy speaker makes you an acoustic engineer.
The kids problem isn't visual studio, the kids problem is that the stuff he's done requires tinkering and doing but no hard thinking. Now he's being forced to think and it sounds like he's finding out that it's not quite as easy as just doing. That's good!
ymmv.
"My friend quit EQ that day." Sounds like your friend grew just a little bit that day.
Wikipedia to the rescue
Wow, that's an advanced move.
I don't think they're talking about open standards, just mutually beneficial closed standards. You know, if you make a camera, and you sell a lot of them, you can "partner" with MS so your camera works with xbox360. You're gonna sign a non-disclosure, etc etc.
It strikes me as more of an invite to manufacturers than any "opening" of microsoft.
As far as mini-itx articles go, that one IS more interesting.
However, so what.
1) You don't need the cluster to be in the classroom for people to use it to learn about clusters. That's why we have ssh.
2) If you want to talk about installing the software to build a cluster, two to four old cpus will serve the same purpose and you can just conveniently group students up by lab tables.
3) If you want to talk about experimenting with parallel architectures, you need more i/o capability for things like hypercubes etc, otherwise, see 2.
4) If you need a cluster to get real work done then you're backpedaling by using via CPUS.
The overhead of a communication in a 64 way cluster is non-trivial and you aren't going to overcome that with a couple of 100baseT ports and some consumer switches. VIA claims that this will help clusters move "out of the server room and into classrooms and offices". What exactly do they think is the office application for a 64 way cluster of underpowered cpus that can't be solved by a more traditional server. As far as classrooms are concerned, see above.
While I think the dual cpu motherboard is neat, it would be a LOT neater at about $200. While $400 isn't that bad it is approaching the price of conventional dual processor motherboards + cpus. Yes you can fit four cpus into one u of rack space, so what, you're gonna need at least four to compete. I use a dual cpu system to do some of my work. My application is "trivially parallelizable" so I could make use of the limited i/o on the via boards without great loss. However, when I looked into building a small cluster with via boards I estimated that I would have needed something like sixteen of them (single cpu) to compete with a dual cpu athlon system. Say four were competitive, that's only 4*$400=$1600. But, $1600 will build four dual core athlon 64 systems. Or you can build a couple of dual opteron systems. Either way the via systems will not be able to keep up.
Once you get past the neato factor there isn't much advantage to the VIA stuff unless power consumption or raw size are your primary concern. Building a cluster out of them sort of misses the point of why you build a cluster in the first place.
VIA is banking on the size advantage, however, there are only a few applications where size trumps power. Embedded applications certainly fit this category, but traditional servers and clusters, not really. For embedded markets the price of the VIA boards is attractive. For the consumer market however, the value just doesn't seem to be there. Now, if they'd make boards with the pentium m, that might be worth talking about.
ymmv.
Seriously, until mini-itx motherboards come down in price there doesn't seem to be any advantage, imnsho, over a MAC-Mini. Factor in the time you spend dorking around with the miniitx and it gets worse. Oh, and just about every case I've seen is just plain ugly. Modded cases are like ringtones, even if you think yours is an exception, it isn't, they all suck.
Yes, but you can't have a conversation about operating systems without at least one amiga fanboy piping in about how good the amiga OS was. If I remember correctly, it could multitask. That is, it could display one grainy image of a reflective ball while another one rendered. Oh, and you could program it in basic. What more do you want from an OS?
It's used for embedded applications. Yes, I know linux is also. For some applications, however, all you need or want is a dos compatible file system and an easy way to input and output text information or simple vga graphics. With an embeddable DOS, and an old copy of TurboC (or Quickbasic, believe it or not), a few hours spent rewriting the startup code, just about any old-school engineer can be up and running. The code is understandable by one person AND you can buy licenses for cheap. Yes there's no charge for GPL'd code, but, it comes with strings attached which often seem like a poor risk compared to the oem cost of something like DRDos.
You'd think north dakota would want to hold on to the four or five computer literate people that live there.
The general perception was that windows was that thing you needed to make pagemaker work. GUIs were not all that popular in the work environment at the time because they just slowed things down.
The internet made multitasking a legitimate necessity. Today it seems absurd that we wouldn't be able to keep our im windows open while we download files and stream music all in the background of our actual work. Back then, however, multitasking was like the solution looking for a problem. The first version of windows didn't provide any form of multitasking and later versions didn't multitask dos apps. Desqview, however did, and before windows 3.0/3.1, desqview was the multitasking solution of choice for those people who really needed it.
People did want to switch between tasks quickly but there were lighter weight solutions than windows for that. Products like sidekick and expanded memory print buffers (one of the few ways to use more than a meg in even a 286) gave people the quasi-multitasking solutions they needed to get their work done. It was precisely the explosion of applications for windows 3.1 that made windows successful. Before 3.0/3.1 few people used windows because there wasn't any point in using it. Until native windows applications came along, windows was just a silly, bloated, guified app switcher that just got in the way.
I ALWAYS put my data on its own partition. If I need to reinstall my OS it just isn't an issue. Keep in mind I use linux and have no idea how friendly modern microsoft os's are to such an arrangement.
Precisely. By the way, once you give up television it only takes about six months for you not to miss it at all. ymmv.
Slashdot needs a funnier mod, cause if I had mod points....
The office-in-home is a red flag from what I've heard. Of course, I'm not telling you to lie on your taxes, however, you probably wouldn't get audited for a similar deduction spread out over office supplies and mileage. ymmv.
That would imply sexual intercourse, thus we can infer from the contrapositive, that it's not possible for geeks to have children.