I see engineering people in two ways: those who can "think" and those who can "follow". Both types of people can either have engineering degrees, or simply have experience in the field. Honestly? It doesn't seem to matter. Some people are born thinkers. University can perhaps tell the non-thinkers how to logically work through a problem; however, I believe it's superficial and they cannot operate outside of the scope of their book training. This is evident in the IT field especially. The "go-to" people who can fix any problem or come up with the best designs are often non-degree holders these days.
I've had the same thing happen on MSN Messenger with trying to receive links from friends. We could exchange any link, BUT ONE would never show up -- and I believe that was youtube. All the other text would come through, just not that particular URL. Oddly, other times it works fine.
I am not sure how SOE came up with the notion that the player community wanted this. Those who attend focus groups are NOT representative of the true player demographic. *NO ONE* I know WANTS this new game style, and that is clear to see from the forums. It is NOT more attractive to the RPG audience (especially those with slower Internet connections) and 1% of the voiced community actually say they like it. What players wanted was simply more content and more flexibility. This new system does just the opposite. A majority of the customer base are dedicated players who maintain multiple paid accounts. I'm not sure how SOE's Market Analysis works, but common sense would indicate that the number of accounts lost by veteran players (given multiples, and their friends that follow) outweigh the number of new customers that will sign up for more than three months. Offering two items in replacement of years of character development for veteran players makes it clear that SOE is not listening to their customers.
So based on that rant, my question is: What does SOE do to ensure their current customer base needs are being met? Are there plans for future customer-relation discussions, polls, in-game moderated discussions with staff, web-based focus groups, etc. ?
There are many rumors that this change is being made so that SWG can be expanded to the console market given the new "twitch-based" combat style. With the way the key mapping is laid out (with no alternative layouts for players to choose from), it is very stressful on the hands and lots of beta users have complained of pain after a couple hours of playing (whereas many play for much longer periods in the current system). There is also no auto-attack or auto-run, which means we have to continually hold down keys and mouse button for long periods of time. Many in the community have had this as a main complaint on the new system. Is SOE aiming to make SWG a gamepad-based game now or are there plans on helping to reduce the physical stress caused by the new combat design?
I wish the government wouldn't be singled-out as this is a universal problem, no matter who owns the computer. The underlying problem, IMO, is that too many people want adminstrator rights to systems who know nothing about how to be an administrator. There's no one to enforce security policies and there are no realistic training requirements or credentials for users who operate these systems. This has become an increasing problem in the workplace as the number of systems and their pseudo-admins grow.
As many have said, someone MUST be held accountable for their lack of responsibility. If the admins/users wish to be lazy, and no one forces them not to be, then what's the motivation to be security-conscious? In businesses, government, institutions, only well-trained and competent people should be allowed to manage any device on the network. Many people think they are administrators, but just knowing how to update a system doesn't make you a good admin, and most don't even realize all the different layers of security that need to be considered. For home users, (I'll probably get bashed for this), the ISP's should play a bigger role in making sure their customers are responsible for any damage they cause, or even be the ones to offer security services to customers. I people would be double-checking access logs and services, running scans, and doing updates more frequently if they could be fined, fired, or otherwise held responsible for not keeping things secured.
$200 seems a little low. Any intrusion requires weeks, if not months, of investigation and forensic work. If the intruder connected to any other system, those need identified, users contacted, and systems "cleaned up" as well. The cost also should reflect if any system or service had to be pulled offline and if projects got delayed due to the incident. There's also the post-intrustion work which includes lessons learned -- implementing new password policies, stricter firewall rules, perhaps new hardware. I'd be more interested to see how much time was spent on this, including the work of security, system administrators, public relations, and all those fun meetings with management. I bet if they included that, it'd be more than $200k.
If these people realized how much effort went into fixing the damage they caused, maybe their conscience would stop them from doing so beforehand.. yeah, who am I fooling.
I don't believe the wording is not the same as it was yesterday, as the first thing we all noticed was that it was stated wrong or perhaps ambiguous to the reader. Having 512's running a SSI is by FAR not awesome -- as we've been doing that for years, on 1024's. Looks like the wording got changed since it was pointed out. It is still a cluster of 20 512's (Infiniband and 10GbE interconnects). If they were not clustered, then we couldn't say it's a 10240 system and be on the top of the Linpack charts.
nboscia_at_nas.nasa.gov (Networking for Project Columbia)
Ok, it's running one single Linux image. Is there any way we can download the ISO from somewhere, just for education purpose?
Sorry, the person who submitted the article didn't RTFA. It's not a single system image. They're a cluster of 512's running SGI Linux. I believe they are going to try for a 2048 SSI, but that has not yet happened. That'll probably be a seperate press release, if it works.
After reading the article I was curious as to how much room 10K or so processors take up.
The room is about 100 x 120 feet, and the Columbia cluster takes up about 85% of the floor (this is estimated!). What is more interesting is the temperature ranges within the room. There are different cooling techniques for the Altix 3000's and Vortex's. Within a few feet of walking, there can be a 15 degree change in temperature. I heard someone may do visualization of air flow dynamics in there, which is definately cool.
For those interested, we will be doing plenty of informative demos on Columbia at the SuperComputing 2004 conference (Pittsburgh, PA) coming up in a couple weeks, so stop by the booth!
I wonder how this compares to the one NASA is building, which is being collaborated with Intel and SGI. Since you can't base performance simply on the number of processors, it should be interesting.
Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path
If by "many", you mean old 7200's, then yeah. If by "many", you mean their flagship products with recent hardware, then you're quite wrong. If you went to their website and read product notes, you would see that the 12000, 10720, 6500, and 7600's all do hardware forwarding of IPv6 packets.
There are too many addresses
Exactly how is that a short-coming? It's not. That's like saying my computer has too much RAM to run calc. The point is to accomodate future needs and it does just that.
IPv6 addresses are too large. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive
I don't know what type of math that is using, but the idea behind IPv6 is to have smaller routing tables. Any IPv6 document gives details on this. You don't have nearly as many address blocks to deal with and it becomes much more manageable.
The IPv6 header is too large. IP networks have a requirement that the minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes..downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer
What networking technologies use such a low MTU in today's world? Generally, 1500 is used, even 9216 and 64K are common in LANs. While there is a slight overhead increase, it's not even noticable even to real-time applications, and given any modern networking technology, you won't notice any difference at all.
If this is an example of what most people are thinking about IPv6 out there, then the true barrier is misinformation (or lack of). And that's sad.:(
I am very thankful for such a wonderful cultural export from Japan. The article discussions Western animation and how the interviewees feel about it. While we (Americans) produce popular, and beautifully animated, CG work, I do not think it even compares to Japanese anime (either hand-drawn or CG).
I watch American animated movies by Pixar, Dreamworks, and the like, when I need to watch something light and uplifting. Afterwords I think to myself "Okay, that was fun", then never think about the movie again. There aren't many movies geered towards adult audiences. With Japanese anime, I'm touched at a deeper level and often left amazed at the storylines. Of course, I'm not talking about the comedy or under 13 series. I still think about series that I've watched years ago, trying to figure out the meaning behind them. Even movies/series coming out now in America from Japan have plots that I believe only the Japanese are capable of creating. After watching a series, I continue to think about its meaning and am left with a wonderful satisfying feeling. That's missing from the American movies (and definately not even close with any cartoon series).
It is the cultural aspect of anime that makes it so appealing, and I'll continue to go purchase anime DVD's, which is now far larger than my American collection.
I strongly agree with your statement. Teaching religions in high school can help in areas where students seem to be lacking the most these days. I believe that if students are opened up to the different philosophies of the world, they will better understand human psychology and culture. Perhaps it will reduce racism and promote analytical thinking (why is any one religion any better than another?).
I went to a high school in suburban Pennsylvania less than a decade ago. There was very little racial diversity (my class was 100% caucasian), and almost everyone was a Christian. Since I am not a Christian, I was made fun of and repeatedly reminded that I was "going to Hell." All I feel is sadness now. Sadness for the students' ignorance and for how hard it must have been for most to see and live in the real world. I blame the educational system. I was never taught about anything else until college, by which time I realized how much high-school failed to prepare me for the diverse world.
Students coming out of our (America) high school system seem to ever increasingly lack the ability to think on their own. Problem solving is key to a productive career. If students were allowed to debate fundamental philosophical questions, it would only benefit them. Having seen what our current educational system is producing, I have lost faith completely in it. It is embarrasing to me as an American to see this. I would very much prefer to move to Japan to raise children, knowing that their attitude towards schooling is far superior to America's.
I am not sure how one would fix America's schooling system, but perhaps the problem is not so much with funding, but instead requires a fundamental shift of our values. Students should want to learn as much as possible and contribute to extra-curricular activities. Whether or not someone in IT has perfect grammar doesn't matter - they need to be able to solve problems on their own or in a group to be useful. Teaching various world religions can help open that door, IMHO.
Managing large projects
on
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· Score: 5, Interesting
This makes me wonder how Microsoft, as well as many other large software corporations, manage security patches and quality assurance of their software. Is the problem with there being so many people working on different projects that they do not communicate and therefore things get overlooked, or is it due to the complexity of the software, or something else entirely? I couldn't imagine how someone could manage 'security' for Windows (or any similarly large project) and be 100% sure of what all the technical staff do. Does it come down to having more meticulous software engineers and rigorous testers? How would people recommend this be done? I'm sure the typical "make it open source!" answer will be given, but if that is not an option, how do companies who are more successful at this do it?
*WDM is very widely used today. Your major carriers all use them. Customers (universities, government, corporations, local ISP's) purchase (lease) individual wavelengths. It's quite a cool way of handling light (buying lambdas), and has been around for a quite bit now. Newer technologies, like MPLamdaS (that's lamba switching, not label switching), allow you to creative virtual wavelengths and do fun traffic engineering per lambda.
There is no good way to speak to a person in a fashion that doesn't specify gender
Hello ! In response to your issue concerning 'x', we feel that...
Your statement is exactly my point. Just because you cannot determine someone's gender, does that mean you call them male? If you answer 'yes', then you are part of the problem. No woman likes be addressed as a male. It is just as no guy (in most cases) would like to be addressed as Miss. You can use words like "you", "their", or actually::gasp:: use their name! Notice that I have no idea what gender you are, yet I successfully have not made any references to your gender. It's not hard - just requires thinking.
Amen. While currently a female in the IT field, I have been insulted so many times by the ignorance of males that it makes me want to go elsewhere. Typical things that happen:
* Guys automatically assume I am male (my name is a very common female name) and address me as Mr./Sir in emails.
* In meetings, I get no attention when I speak up about something. The males in the room just cut me off and speak over me. I have to be rude and interrupt multiple times before I can get something in.
* I do not get respected as an engineer. People (who do not know me directly) will go to the guys in my group instead of me, even though I am their senior.
* With customers, I am assumed to not be an engineer, but some admin person instead. This also includes being talked down to as if I didn't understand technical jargon.
* And of course, I get those guys whose eyes stare lower than my face when talking. Some say things that I find really insulting and I can't believe they still have jobs. These tend to be older guys, who grew up under a different work environment and haven't fully adapted to the modern one.
I keep hearing "We want more women in the field," but hey, I don't see the mentality for those guys to handle being around women. Not all, but definately a lot. Different ethnic groups also treat women differently. I won't point fingers, but some are obviously more comfortable with women in the workplace than others. In Silicon Valley, where I work, there is such a diverse mix that I get a lot of interaction with all types of people.
NASA does not care about money. It's US taxpayers' money
Thanks for the troll post.. you're a wonderful example of how uninformed citizens can be. FYI: The government defines NASA's budget each year, so there is a very high concern for money. It takes months upon months of civil servants fighting for funding out of that money pool. There are a lot of research programs, and not nearly enough money to fund them. Particularly, in the case of Columbia, there were massive layoffs to fund this. I'd like to see you make your statement to all those who now do not have jobs because of the lack of money (many were needed operational engineers, not just research staff). It's sad when people lose their jobs over something like this, but it did allow something good to happen. It's unfortunate that arrogant fools are blind to such politics.
NASA is not the sole user of the system. Anyone within the U.S. can use it. We support many university projects that require the use of supercomputers. This purchase is a benefit to the entire country, not just NASA.
It is most unfortunate that people are not aware of all that NASA does for them. A majority of all research projects are in collaboration with industry vendors, universities, non-profit organizations, scientific corporations, and so on. There are few that are specific only to NASA. The range of customer database is wonderful and there is such variety in the areas of research (not just aeronautics and space technology, but biology, earth science, nanotechnology, optics, and so on). We all help each other to advance our knowledge, and computers like this make it a lot faster.
The issue has become space to put the machines. As it is, the pre-existing supercomputers are being moved to other rooms and there is barely enough space to accomodate the 10k as it is. Many supercomputing facilities have a similar problem. There are not many rooms that have the environmental controls needed to run such massive systems.
As for the comment on making it 11x faster - the other systems serve a different purpose (customer base and funding source)... and they were moved to another location to make room for Columbia.
On a cool note, it looks like they are filming the building of this system so we can see one of those time-lapse videos.
The idea is not to run a single application on the 10k, it is to offer pieces of it to researchers based on their computing needs. We have current customers that use 1024-processor and 512-processor systems. With a [hopefully new] customer database, they can request any number of systems they need to do their computations on. This is also not just a NASA toy, it's available for all US researchers, as the press release states.
As far as Linux goes, it is definately nice to see that in place of IRIX. For those posters complaining about security, there will be special measures in place and staff devoted exclusively to the security of this system.
Our plan for 10GbE is to support researchers with huge datasets (in the terabytes) who use our supercomputing facility. We currently use GbE, which is not sufficient for transfering such large amounts of data. So we are upgrading to 10GbE and also getting WAN connectivity at that rate (not sure if this is going to be 10-GigE-WAN-PHY or not) so that researchers across the country can transfer their data in a matter of minutes or hours, as opposed to days or weeks.
For those posters who are complaining about not getting near GbE performance, you are not properly tuning your system and network. You need think big - large frame sizes (network, 9k - 64k), large TCP windows (system buffers - think MB for GbE and GB for 10GbE), large I/O read/write(system disk), and account for latency (calculate your bandwidth*delay product). I've gotten constant ~980 Mbps throughput on a GbE network that was tuned.
Most of the posts here are simply a male's opinion about what females like or dislike. No matter how much males believe "women like games like Tetris", it does not get any more truthful.
I like playing almost all genres of games: sports, RPG, strategy, action/adventure, 1st person shooters, etc. I am not turned away from or find it sexist that female game characters have large breasts. A lot of my favorite characters fall into this category (like Lulu from FFX). Is that to say that ALL anime is sexist? IMHO, no; it is simply the drawing style/appeal.You will find that a lot of females loved the Tomb Raider movie as well.
What draws me away from Tomb Raider is its lack of depth for the type of game it is. I feel "dumbed down" when playing it, which has nothing to do with the drawing of the game character. There are a variety of other similar games that offer me a better plot and design layout while giving that "fun" or "achieving" feeling during gameplay.
Slashdot Mirror
I see engineering people in two ways: those who can "think" and those who can "follow". Both types of people can either have engineering degrees, or simply have experience in the field. Honestly? It doesn't seem to matter. Some people are born thinkers. University can perhaps tell the non-thinkers how to logically work through a problem; however, I believe it's superficial and they cannot operate outside of the scope of their book training. This is evident in the IT field especially. The "go-to" people who can fix any problem or come up with the best designs are often non-degree holders these days.
I've had the same thing happen on MSN Messenger with trying to receive links from friends. We could exchange any link, BUT ONE would never show up -- and I believe that was youtube. All the other text would come through, just not that particular URL. Oddly, other times it works fine.
I am not sure how SOE came up with the notion that the player community wanted this. Those who attend focus groups are NOT representative of the true player demographic. *NO ONE* I know WANTS this new game style, and that is clear to see from the forums. It is NOT more attractive to the RPG audience (especially those with slower Internet connections) and 1% of the voiced community actually say they like it. What players wanted was simply more content and more flexibility. This new system does just the opposite. A majority of the customer base are dedicated players who maintain multiple paid accounts. I'm not sure how SOE's Market Analysis works, but common sense would indicate that the number of accounts lost by veteran players (given multiples, and their friends that follow) outweigh the number of new customers that will sign up for more than three months. Offering two items in replacement of years of character development for veteran players makes it clear that SOE is not listening to their customers.
So based on that rant, my question is: What does SOE do to ensure their current customer base needs are being met? Are there plans for future customer-relation discussions, polls, in-game moderated discussions with staff, web-based focus groups, etc. ?
There are many rumors that this change is being made so that SWG can be expanded to the console market given the new "twitch-based" combat style. With the way the key mapping is laid out (with no alternative layouts for players to choose from), it is very stressful on the hands and lots of beta users have complained of pain after a couple hours of playing (whereas many play for much longer periods in the current system). There is also no auto-attack or auto-run, which means we have to continually hold down keys and mouse button for long periods of time. Many in the community have had this as a main complaint on the new system. Is SOE aiming to make SWG a gamepad-based game now or are there plans on helping to reduce the physical stress caused by the new combat design?
I wish the government wouldn't be singled-out as this is a universal problem, no matter who owns the computer. The underlying problem, IMO, is that too many people want adminstrator rights to systems who know nothing about how to be an administrator. There's no one to enforce security policies and there are no realistic training requirements or credentials for users who operate these systems. This has become an increasing problem in the workplace as the number of systems and their pseudo-admins grow.
As many have said, someone MUST be held accountable for their lack of responsibility. If the admins/users wish to be lazy, and no one forces them not to be, then what's the motivation to be security-conscious? In businesses, government, institutions, only well-trained and competent people should be allowed to manage any device on the network. Many people think they are administrators, but just knowing how to update a system doesn't make you a good admin, and most don't even realize all the different layers of security that need to be considered. For home users, (I'll probably get bashed for this), the ISP's should play a bigger role in making sure their customers are responsible for any damage they cause, or even be the ones to offer security services to customers. I people would be double-checking access logs and services, running scans, and doing updates more frequently if they could be fined, fired, or otherwise held responsible for not keeping things secured.
$200 seems a little low. Any intrusion requires weeks, if not months, of investigation and forensic work. If the intruder connected to any other system, those need identified, users contacted, and systems "cleaned up" as well. The cost also should reflect if any system or service had to be pulled offline and if projects got delayed due to the incident. There's also the post-intrustion work which includes lessons learned -- implementing new password policies, stricter firewall rules, perhaps new hardware. I'd be more interested to see how much time was spent on this, including the work of security, system administrators, public relations, and all those fun meetings with management. I bet if they included that, it'd be more than $200k.
If these people realized how much effort went into fixing the damage they caused, maybe their conscience would stop them from doing so beforehand.. yeah, who am I fooling.
I don't believe the wording is not the same as it was yesterday, as the first thing we all noticed was that it was stated wrong or perhaps ambiguous to the reader. Having 512's running a SSI is by FAR not awesome -- as we've been doing that for years, on 1024's. Looks like the wording got changed since it was pointed out. It is still a cluster of 20 512's (Infiniband and 10GbE interconnects). If they were not clustered, then we couldn't say it's a 10240 system and be on the top of the Linpack charts.
nboscia_at_nas.nasa.gov
(Networking for Project Columbia)
Ok, it's running one single Linux image. Is there any way we can download the ISO from somewhere, just for education purpose?
Sorry, the person who submitted the article didn't RTFA. It's not a single system image. They're a cluster of 512's running SGI Linux. I believe they are going to try for a 2048 SSI, but that has not yet happened. That'll probably be a seperate press release, if it works.
After reading the article I was curious as to how much room 10K or so processors take up.
The room is about 100 x 120 feet, and the Columbia cluster takes up about 85% of the floor (this is estimated!). What is more interesting is the temperature ranges within the room. There are different cooling techniques for the Altix 3000's and Vortex's. Within a few feet of walking, there can be a 15 degree change in temperature. I heard someone may do visualization of air flow dynamics in there, which is definately cool.
For those interested, we will be doing plenty of informative demos on Columbia at the SuperComputing 2004 conference (Pittsburgh, PA) coming up in a couple weeks, so stop by the booth!
I wonder how this compares to the one NASA is building, which is being collaborated with Intel and SGI. Since you can't base performance simply on the number of processors, it should be interesting.
Cisco routers suck at IPv6. Many of cisco's routers use the router's CPU to process IPv6 packets instead of the fast-path
..downloading stuff will take 3.4% longer
:(
If by "many", you mean old 7200's, then yeah. If by "many", you mean their flagship products with recent hardware, then you're quite wrong. If you went to their website and read product notes, you would see that the 12000, 10720, 6500, and 7600's all do hardware forwarding of IPv6 packets.
There are too many addresses
Exactly how is that a short-coming? It's not. That's like saying my computer has too much RAM to run calc. The point is to accomodate future needs and it does just that.
IPv6 addresses are too large. The problem with a 64-bit network prefix is that routing tables become massive
I don't know what type of math that is using, but the idea behind IPv6 is to have smaller routing tables. Any IPv6 document gives details on this. You don't have nearly as many address blocks to deal with and it becomes much more manageable.
The IPv6 header is too large. IP networks have a requirement that the minimum MTU supported must be 576 bytes
What networking technologies use such a low MTU in today's world? Generally, 1500 is used, even 9216 and 64K are common in LANs. While there is a slight overhead increase, it's not even noticable even to real-time applications, and given any modern networking technology, you won't notice any difference at all.
If this is an example of what most people are thinking about IPv6 out there, then the true barrier is misinformation (or lack of). And that's sad.
I am very thankful for such a wonderful cultural export from Japan. The article discussions Western animation and how the interviewees feel about it. While we (Americans) produce popular, and beautifully animated, CG work, I do not think it even compares to Japanese anime (either hand-drawn or CG).
I watch American animated movies by Pixar, Dreamworks, and the like, when I need to watch something light and uplifting. Afterwords I think to myself "Okay, that was fun", then never think about the movie again. There aren't many movies geered towards adult audiences. With Japanese anime, I'm touched at a deeper level and often left amazed at the storylines. Of course, I'm not talking about the comedy or under 13 series. I still think about series that I've watched years ago, trying to figure out the meaning behind them. Even movies/series coming out now in America from Japan have plots that I believe only the Japanese are capable of creating. After watching a series, I continue to think about its meaning and am left with a wonderful satisfying feeling. That's missing from the American movies (and definately not even close with any cartoon series).
It is the cultural aspect of anime that makes it so appealing, and I'll continue to go purchase anime DVD's, which is now far larger than my American collection.
I strongly agree with your statement. Teaching religions in high school can help in areas where students seem to be lacking the most these days. I believe that if students are opened up to the different philosophies of the world, they will better understand human psychology and culture. Perhaps it will reduce racism and promote analytical thinking (why is any one religion any better than another?).
I went to a high school in suburban Pennsylvania less than a decade ago. There was very little racial diversity (my class was 100% caucasian), and almost everyone was a Christian. Since I am not a Christian, I was made fun of and repeatedly reminded that I was "going to Hell." All I feel is sadness now. Sadness for the students' ignorance and for how hard it must have been for most to see and live in the real world. I blame the educational system. I was never taught about anything else until college, by which time I realized how much high-school failed to prepare me for the diverse world.
Students coming out of our (America) high school system seem to ever increasingly lack the ability to think on their own. Problem solving is key to a productive career. If students were allowed to debate fundamental philosophical questions, it would only benefit them. Having seen what our current educational system is producing, I have lost faith completely in it. It is embarrasing to me as an American to see this. I would very much prefer to move to Japan to raise children, knowing that their attitude towards schooling is far superior to America's.
I am not sure how one would fix America's schooling system, but perhaps the problem is not so much with funding, but instead requires a fundamental shift of our values. Students should want to learn as much as possible and contribute to extra-curricular activities. Whether or not someone in IT has perfect grammar doesn't matter - they need to be able to solve problems on their own or in a group to be useful. Teaching various world religions can help open that door, IMHO.
This makes me wonder how Microsoft, as well as many other large software corporations, manage security patches and quality assurance of their software. Is the problem with there being so many people working on different projects that they do not communicate and therefore things get overlooked, or is it due to the complexity of the software, or something else entirely? I couldn't imagine how someone could manage 'security' for Windows (or any similarly large project) and be 100% sure of what all the technical staff do. Does it come down to having more meticulous software engineers and rigorous testers? How would people recommend this be done? I'm sure the typical "make it open source!" answer will be given, but if that is not an option, how do companies who are more successful at this do it?
*WDM is very widely used today. Your major carriers all use them. Customers (universities, government, corporations, local ISP's) purchase (lease) individual wavelengths. It's quite a cool way of handling light (buying lambdas), and has been around for a quite bit now. Newer technologies, like MPLamdaS (that's lamba switching, not label switching), allow you to creative virtual wavelengths and do fun traffic engineering per lambda.
There is no good way to speak to a person in a fashion that doesn't specify gender
...
::gasp:: use their name! Notice that I have no idea what gender you are, yet I successfully have not made any references to your gender. It's not hard - just requires thinking.
Hello ! In response to your issue concerning 'x', we feel that
Your statement is exactly my point. Just because you cannot determine someone's gender, does that mean you call them male? If you answer 'yes', then you are part of the problem. No woman likes be addressed as a male. It is just as no guy (in most cases) would like to be addressed as Miss. You can use words like "you", "their", or actually
Amen. While currently a female in the IT field, I have been insulted so many times by the ignorance of males that it makes me want to go elsewhere. Typical things that happen:
* Guys automatically assume I am male (my name is a very common female name) and address me as Mr./Sir in emails.
* In meetings, I get no attention when I speak up about something. The males in the room just cut me off and speak over me. I have to be rude and interrupt multiple times before I can get something in.
* I do not get respected as an engineer. People (who do not know me directly) will go to the guys in my group instead of me, even though I am their senior.
* With customers, I am assumed to not be an engineer, but some admin person instead. This also includes being talked down to as if I didn't understand technical jargon.
* And of course, I get those guys whose eyes stare lower than my face when talking. Some say things that I find really insulting and I can't believe they still have jobs. These tend to be older guys, who grew up under a different work environment and haven't fully adapted to the modern one.
I keep hearing "We want more women in the field," but hey, I don't see the mentality for those guys to handle being around women. Not all, but definately a lot. Different ethnic groups also treat women differently. I won't point fingers, but some are obviously more comfortable with women in the workplace than others. In Silicon Valley, where I work, there is such a diverse mix that I get a lot of interaction with all types of people.
NASA does not care about money. It's US taxpayers' money
Thanks for the troll post.. you're a wonderful example of how uninformed citizens can be. FYI: The government defines NASA's budget each year, so there is a very high concern for money. It takes months upon months of civil servants fighting for funding out of that money pool. There are a lot of research programs, and not nearly enough money to fund them. Particularly, in the case of Columbia, there were massive layoffs to fund this. I'd like to see you make your statement to all those who now do not have jobs because of the lack of money (many were needed operational engineers, not just research staff). It's sad when people lose their jobs over something like this, but it did allow something good to happen. It's unfortunate that arrogant fools are blind to such politics.
NASA is not the sole user of the system. Anyone within the U.S. can use it. We support many university projects that require the use of supercomputers. This purchase is a benefit to the entire country, not just NASA.
It is most unfortunate that people are not aware of all that NASA does for them. A majority of all research projects are in collaboration with industry vendors, universities, non-profit organizations, scientific corporations, and so on. There are few that are specific only to NASA. The range of customer database is wonderful and there is such variety in the areas of research (not just aeronautics and space technology, but biology, earth science, nanotechnology, optics, and so on). We all help each other to advance our knowledge, and computers like this make it a lot faster.
The issue has become space to put the machines. As it is, the pre-existing supercomputers are being moved to other rooms and there is barely enough space to accomodate the 10k as it is. Many supercomputing facilities have a similar problem. There are not many rooms that have the environmental controls needed to run such massive systems.
As for the comment on making it 11x faster - the other systems serve a different purpose (customer base and funding source)... and they were moved to another location to make room for Columbia.
On a cool note, it looks like they are filming the building of this system so we can see one of those time-lapse videos.
The idea is not to run a single application on the 10k, it is to offer pieces of it to researchers based on their computing needs. We have current customers that use 1024-processor and 512-processor systems. With a [hopefully new] customer database, they can request any number of systems they need to do their computations on. This is also not just a NASA toy, it's available for all US researchers, as the press release states.
As far as Linux goes, it is definately nice to see that in place of IRIX. For those posters complaining about security, there will be special measures in place and staff devoted exclusively to the security of this system.
Our plan for 10GbE is to support researchers with huge datasets (in the terabytes) who use our supercomputing facility. We currently use GbE, which is not sufficient for transfering such large amounts of data. So we are upgrading to 10GbE and also getting WAN connectivity at that rate (not sure if this is going to be 10-GigE-WAN-PHY or not) so that researchers across the country can transfer their data in a matter of minutes or hours, as opposed to days or weeks.
For those posters who are complaining about not getting near GbE performance, you are not properly tuning your system and network. You need think big - large frame sizes (network, 9k - 64k), large TCP windows (system buffers - think MB for GbE and GB for 10GbE), large I/O read/write(system disk), and account for latency (calculate your bandwidth*delay product). I've gotten constant ~980 Mbps throughput on a GbE network that was tuned.
Most of the posts here are simply a male's opinion about what females like or dislike. No matter how much males believe "women like games like Tetris", it does not get any more truthful.
I like playing almost all genres of games: sports, RPG, strategy, action/adventure, 1st person shooters, etc. I am not turned away from or find it sexist that female game characters have large breasts. A lot of my favorite characters fall into this category (like Lulu from FFX). Is that to say that ALL anime is sexist? IMHO, no; it is simply the drawing style/appeal.You will find that a lot of females loved the Tomb Raider movie as well.
What draws me away from Tomb Raider is its lack of depth for the type of game it is. I feel "dumbed down" when playing it, which has nothing to do with the drawing of the game character. There are a variety of other similar games that offer me a better plot and design layout while giving that "fun" or "achieving" feeling during gameplay.