That would be 'vile' actually...
on
Hacking VIM
·
· Score: 2, Informative
vile = VI Like Emacs (http://invisible-island.net/vile/).
Maybe vim has caught up. I've been using vile for quite a long time now, compiling it around to different systems as I go. Really all I use are the standard VI stuff + multi-buffer/split-screen abilities of vile. I should probably update myself to vim.
So ban nukes (radiation) but not cigs. Despite twice the cancer deaths from cigs as nukes? Doesn't exactly make much sense to me, but hey, I'm just a computer scientist.
Correlation does not equal causation. I can point to a friend of mine from high school who was mostly bald by 25 and shaved the rest off to terminate the "mostly" part.
Radiation is dangerous. So are cars. In fact, I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that using cars in America is far more dangerous than the minor radioactivity released from all surface atomic testing + TMI and Chernobyl. But most likely you still drive to work, or to the store, every day.
Go read up on the tragedy of the commons and get back to me about that proposal. The biosphere in this case is the commons. While Nuke waste disposal is highly regulated and thus expensive, but dumping combustion results (or wacking birds with very large props) into the air is essentially "free", especially for other countries like China, despite the fact that it might cause that whole greenhouse thing, which may (or may not) raise sea levels, washing away many coastal cities we have.
Once you can account for that (unpaid) cost as part of the current generation methods, then you'll be rich beyond belief.
I, um, hate to point it out, but that giant mass up there that glows a lot is "burning fuel". Quite rapidly really. Also, the rotational energy (or magnetic) of the Earth isn't free. You might want to leave the magnetic part of it intact unless you particularly like being burnt to a crisp by UV rays, or having the solar wind cart away the atmosphere (see also: Mars).
Others have covered most of your objections quite well but I wanted to point out that the design of the reactor portion of a fission reactor has changed quite a bit since back when TMI and Chernobyl were built. Look into some of the newer designs like Pebble-bed reactors.
Coal or Nukes is like the choice between Vader or Palpatine for president. One way, you choke to death, the other way you get blasted with radiation! Frankly radiation is cooler, so I'll go with Palpatine.
I kid, I kid! Restarting the building of nukes is the smartest thing we could do. There's a lot smarter (see other comments about France's Nuke situation) things we could do, but we need to do something now, and this is something that can be done.
Unfortunately too much of America is scientifically stupid and they are likely to kill this before it can get going.
In some games, leveling up is (or has been) grinding. Take Asheron's Call. Your character stopped meaningfully improving (versus NPCs) at about level 100 to 110. Your skills were already within 5-10 points of cap (on a inverse tangent system, so the last couple points don't help very much as long as you're already ~30 points over the target skill). You weren't going to get enough skill points to really train new skills (skill points stopped at 125) before the "max" level of 126. You could earn XP to raise skills beyond that, but it was mostly irrelevant to the quality of your character.
If you calculated out the "level" of a toon based on XP in skills, some people were up at 250 or so, beyond 126. That's either a love for unattended combat macroing, or a love for the grind.
Smaller size means signals can propagate around the chip faster. It also means you need less signal-fixing/synchronization hardware, since it is simpler to get a signal synced up at a given clock rate. Smaller size generally means less power dissipated. Smaller feature sizes means the CPU is physically smaller (generally), so more CPUs fit on a silicon wafer. For each wafer they produce (a high but relatively fixed cost vs the number of CPUs on the wafer) they get more CPUs out (= cheaper). If a CPU is bad, that is a smaller percent of the wafer that was "wasted" on that CPU.
What do you think your Pentium's MMX instructions are? They're vector operations. Every machine on the list is already a hybrid between the two. They aren't dedicated individual vector processors under the command of a master GP-CPU, but a different version of hybridization.
I'd actually suggest that you'll probably see vector processors marginalized or pushed out eventually by stream processors: aka nvidia/ati graphics boards.
Well you're right, you could have gotten 5k pieces a few weeks ago -- I ordered 1350 bricks (on sale) for a grand total of $12.45. All 1x1 (light,dark) grey plates. Triple that plus a touch and you'd be under $50 for 5k bricks. Of course trying to construct much out of them might be a challenge.
Now if they'd just do some white and black I'd have all the goods for a mosaic or two.
Easy, at least so far: LEGO products. Done. Used to be made only in Denmark. They've expanded outside that (Switz., USA, Czech Rep., Mexico) but so far it doesn't include China. When the big deal about your product is the high quality standards, producing in China just doesn't make sense.
Even if you could create that ideal 1 gigawatt solar plant, it is only available part of the time (night, clouds). Our other major source of energy (coal) doesn't do the "turn up, turn down" thing so well. That's why you see electricity generated by sources other than coal and nukes -- oil and gas.
If you did create a solar utopia during the day, at night you're going to have to run something you can bring up and down easier, which probably means oil and gas or probably also nukes. Coal isn't going to do it for you. The last thing we need in the US right now is some "new good clean" energy technology that in a horrible twist of fate increases our need for oil and gas.
The price:piece ratio of the falcon is within the "normal" range for other lego sets, so I'm not sure where you're coming from. Go buy 5k of bricks from other sets and let me know your total. Biggest problem I see with it is actually managing to find a large flat surface sufficient to display the completed model. The lego ISD has similar issues.
Has Viacom (as a corporation) actually learned anything from this exchange? Probably not. They'll go on sending out questionable DMCA violations because most people will roll over and let Viacom have their way with no fight.
I'd much rather have seen him drag Viacom into court and cost them a lot of money -- because that's all that corporations seem to understand these days. Said loss of money would cause them to at least devote 5 seconds of some human's brain time to the question of "is sending out this DMCA takedown going to land us in court and cause us to lose a ton of money" before sending out future DMCA takedowns.
And that, in my opinion, would have been very good thing.
Linux Vendors (RedHat, SUSE, etc) are the UNIX of the future, not Apple. I'm speaking as someone who's used OS X in a large, heavy-utilization, production environment. Actually, to be specific, the plan was to use OS X, but that didn't work so we used Linux (on spare itanium hardware -- yuck). Then we got convinced to try OS X again and after about a year of troubles we kicked back to Linux (on Sun x86 hardware!) and it has been smooth sailing since.
Also speaking from a datacenter perspective, Sun has unusually nice machines. Apple has been learning, but the process has been somewhat slow, with some very questionable steps along the way -- who ever thought that using your server's case as the mounting hardware was a good idea?!?
As someone else working at a public university tech dept. I think this tiny "supercomputer" is the worst idea I've heard in at least a few weeks. Great, you can put a machine together that does this on $2,500. Who runs it? Who keeps it patched? Who fixes it when it breaks? Grad students and researchers are there to research. Paying whatever computer services organization on your campus to maintain it is going to cost more than the machine itself!
All the ~100 processor (that's ~12 quad-core dual-cpu nodes these days) clusters I see going in would be much better pooled into a central academic computing cluster. Adding 10 nodes to my cluster of 500+ really isn't going to have squat all impact on the administration time required for it. You'll get more than out of your standalone cluster: people building little clusters don't tend to keep them 100% busy. Large, multi-group collaboration clusters do tend to stay 100% busy due to staggered paper deadlines, etc. So when your nodes would otherwise be idle, someone else runs them and when you need compute power, you can overrun other's idle nodes. Plus you get to share services with everything lumped into a single large machine: DNS, DHCP, Network boot/install, file services, user database,...
That when he gets hits from googlebot it is the same way -- they aren't downloading/viewing/clicking his ads. Maybe he should ban googlebot too... (we can only hope)
I don't know why you felt guilt. It isn't like there's a contract that says, "to view this website you must view the ads." There are people who would like there to be said contract, but there isn't. Further, that'd be more or less a click-thru EULA which I'm not sure I personally find terribly valid anyway irrelevant of whatever their current state in the courts is.
I used to do the "block individual ad sites" thing. Then I found I was spending too much time blocking them, so AdBlock Plus it is. Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Could sites I might like fold due to it? Sure, it could happen. That's a risk I'm willing to take.
I'm continually amazed that I still get email from folks trying to install pieces of MUSH code I wrote nearly 10 years ago. As far as I know it would still work on the most recent version of PennMUSH, even if it is missing some key pieces of code (ex: chargen).
Marble Mouse USB from Logitech. The ball is about the size of a golf ball and operated with three fingers. Clicks are accomplished with thumb or little finger, but can also be hit in a wrist-roll left or right for an extended click. Has a scroll "button" pair.
Been using this or the previous PS/2 version for probably 5-7 years or so now. Love 'em! Used to sometimes use the old Atari trackballs (the pool ball size giant clunky things) back in the mid 90s, but the gritting up was a problem.
Clusters are supercomputers. Supercomputers are clusters. The only question is what purpose your machine is built for. Some problems aren't tightly coupled (or your machine is small) and so an interconnect like Gig-E is fine. Some problems are and you want one of the specialty interconnects: Myrinet, Infiniband, Quadrics Elan, or possibly even 10Gig-E.
Any machine you see in the top500 list that mentions any of those interconnects is a cluster. I don't really think you can classify #7 and #8 on that list as "not a supercomputer."
Even BG or the Cray XT series are really just clusters with a custom vendor-supplied fast interconnect (or interconnects).
Slashdot Mirror
vile = VI Like Emacs (http://invisible-island.net/vile/).
Maybe vim has caught up. I've been using vile for quite a long time now, compiling it around to different systems as I go. Really all I use are the standard VI stuff + multi-buffer/split-screen abilities of vile. I should probably update myself to vim.
So ban nukes (radiation) but not cigs. Despite twice the cancer deaths from cigs as nukes? Doesn't exactly make much sense to me, but hey, I'm just a computer scientist.
Correlation does not equal causation. I can point to a friend of mine from high school who was mostly bald by 25 and shaved the rest off to terminate the "mostly" part.
Indeed, natural uranium is so diluted it could never turn into a reactor by itself. Oh wait: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
Radiation is dangerous. So are cars. In fact, I think it is a fairly safe bet to say that using cars in America is far more dangerous than the minor radioactivity released from all surface atomic testing + TMI and Chernobyl. But most likely you still drive to work, or to the store, every day.
Worse the number of vista users who actually have a DX10 capable card is down around 8%.
Go read up on the tragedy of the commons and get back to me about that proposal. The biosphere in this case is the commons. While Nuke waste disposal is highly regulated and thus expensive, but dumping combustion results (or wacking birds with very large props) into the air is essentially "free", especially for other countries like China, despite the fact that it might cause that whole greenhouse thing, which may (or may not) raise sea levels, washing away many coastal cities we have.
Once you can account for that (unpaid) cost as part of the current generation methods, then you'll be rich beyond belief.
I, um, hate to point it out, but that giant mass up there that glows a lot is "burning fuel". Quite rapidly really. Also, the rotational energy (or magnetic) of the Earth isn't free. You might want to leave the magnetic part of it intact unless you particularly like being burnt to a crisp by UV rays, or having the solar wind cart away the atmosphere (see also: Mars).
But in the end, you can't beat the second law.
Others have covered most of your objections quite well but I wanted to point out that the design of the reactor portion of a fission reactor has changed quite a bit since back when TMI and Chernobyl were built. Look into some of the newer designs like Pebble-bed reactors.
Coal or Nukes is like the choice between Vader or Palpatine for president. One way, you choke to death, the other way you get blasted with radiation! Frankly radiation is cooler, so I'll go with Palpatine.
I kid, I kid! Restarting the building of nukes is the smartest thing we could do. There's a lot smarter (see other comments about France's Nuke situation) things we could do, but we need to do something now, and this is something that can be done.
Unfortunately too much of America is scientifically stupid and they are likely to kill this before it can get going.
In some games, leveling up is (or has been) grinding. Take Asheron's Call. Your character stopped meaningfully improving (versus NPCs) at about level 100 to 110. Your skills were already within 5-10 points of cap (on a inverse tangent system, so the last couple points don't help very much as long as you're already ~30 points over the target skill). You weren't going to get enough skill points to really train new skills (skill points stopped at 125) before the "max" level of 126. You could earn XP to raise skills beyond that, but it was mostly irrelevant to the quality of your character.
If you calculated out the "level" of a toon based on XP in skills, some people were up at 250 or so, beyond 126. That's either a love for unattended combat macroing, or a love for the grind.
Smaller size means signals can propagate around the chip faster. It also means you need less signal-fixing/synchronization hardware, since it is simpler to get a signal synced up at a given clock rate. Smaller size generally means less power dissipated. Smaller feature sizes means the CPU is physically smaller (generally), so more CPUs fit on a silicon wafer. For each wafer they produce (a high but relatively fixed cost vs the number of CPUs on the wafer) they get more CPUs out (= cheaper). If a CPU is bad, that is a smaller percent of the wafer that was "wasted" on that CPU.
What do you think your Pentium's MMX instructions are? They're vector operations. Every machine on the list is already a hybrid between the two. They aren't dedicated individual vector processors under the command of a master GP-CPU, but a different version of hybridization.
I'd actually suggest that you'll probably see vector processors marginalized or pushed out eventually by stream processors: aka nvidia/ati graphics boards.
Well you're right, you could have gotten 5k pieces a few weeks ago -- I ordered 1350 bricks (on sale) for a grand total of $12.45. All 1x1 (light,dark) grey plates. Triple that plus a touch and you'd be under $50 for 5k bricks. Of course trying to construct much out of them might be a challenge.
Now if they'd just do some white and black I'd have all the goods for a mosaic or two.
Easy, at least so far: LEGO products. Done. Used to be made only in Denmark. They've expanded outside that (Switz., USA, Czech Rep., Mexico) but so far it doesn't include China. When the big deal about your product is the high quality standards, producing in China just doesn't make sense.
Even if you could create that ideal 1 gigawatt solar plant, it is only available part of the time (night, clouds). Our other major source of energy (coal) doesn't do the "turn up, turn down" thing so well. That's why you see electricity generated by sources other than coal and nukes -- oil and gas.
If you did create a solar utopia during the day, at night you're going to have to run something you can bring up and down easier, which probably means oil and gas or probably also nukes. Coal isn't going to do it for you. The last thing we need in the US right now is some "new good clean" energy technology that in a horrible twist of fate increases our need for oil and gas.
The price:piece ratio of the falcon is within the "normal" range for other lego sets, so I'm not sure where you're coming from. Go buy 5k of bricks from other sets and let me know your total. Biggest problem I see with it is actually managing to find a large flat surface sufficient to display the completed model. The lego ISD has similar issues.
Has Viacom (as a corporation) actually learned anything from this exchange? Probably not. They'll go on sending out questionable DMCA violations because most people will roll over and let Viacom have their way with no fight.
I'd much rather have seen him drag Viacom into court and cost them a lot of money -- because that's all that corporations seem to understand these days. Said loss of money would cause them to at least devote 5 seconds of some human's brain time to the question of "is sending out this DMCA takedown going to land us in court and cause us to lose a ton of money" before sending out future DMCA takedowns.
And that, in my opinion, would have been very good thing.
Linux Vendors (RedHat, SUSE, etc) are the UNIX of the future, not Apple. I'm speaking as someone who's used OS X in a large, heavy-utilization, production environment. Actually, to be specific, the plan was to use OS X, but that didn't work so we used Linux (on spare itanium hardware -- yuck). Then we got convinced to try OS X again and after about a year of troubles we kicked back to Linux (on Sun x86 hardware!) and it has been smooth sailing since.
Also speaking from a datacenter perspective, Sun has unusually nice machines. Apple has been learning, but the process has been somewhat slow, with some very questionable steps along the way -- who ever thought that using your server's case as the mounting hardware was a good idea?!?
As someone else working at a public university tech dept. I think this tiny "supercomputer" is the worst idea I've heard in at least a few weeks. Great, you can put a machine together that does this on $2,500. Who runs it? Who keeps it patched? Who fixes it when it breaks? Grad students and researchers are there to research. Paying whatever computer services organization on your campus to maintain it is going to cost more than the machine itself!
...
All the ~100 processor (that's ~12 quad-core dual-cpu nodes these days) clusters I see going in would be much better pooled into a central academic computing cluster. Adding 10 nodes to my cluster of 500+ really isn't going to have squat all impact on the administration time required for it. You'll get more than out of your standalone cluster: people building little clusters don't tend to keep them 100% busy. Large, multi-group collaboration clusters do tend to stay 100% busy due to staggered paper deadlines, etc. So when your nodes would otherwise be idle, someone else runs them and when you need compute power, you can overrun other's idle nodes. Plus you get to share services with everything lumped into a single large machine: DNS, DHCP, Network boot/install, file services, user database,
I've never observed setting disk quotas to encourage people to "hit the cap." Why do you think bandwidth is different?
That when he gets hits from googlebot it is the same way -- they aren't downloading/viewing/clicking his ads. Maybe he should ban googlebot too... (we can only hope)
I don't know why you felt guilt. It isn't like there's a contract that says, "to view this website you must view the ads." There are people who would like there to be said contract, but there isn't. Further, that'd be more or less a click-thru EULA which I'm not sure I personally find terribly valid anyway irrelevant of whatever their current state in the courts is.
I used to do the "block individual ad sites" thing. Then I found I was spending too much time blocking them, so AdBlock Plus it is. Nuke 'em from orbit, it's the only way to be sure. Could sites I might like fold due to it? Sure, it could happen. That's a risk I'm willing to take.
I'm continually amazed that I still get email from folks trying to install pieces of MUSH code I wrote nearly 10 years ago. As far as I know it would still work on the most recent version of PennMUSH, even if it is missing some key pieces of code (ex: chargen).
Marble Mouse USB from Logitech. The ball is about the size of a golf ball and operated with three fingers. Clicks are accomplished with thumb or little finger, but can also be hit in a wrist-roll left or right for an extended click. Has a scroll "button" pair.
Been using this or the previous PS/2 version for probably 5-7 years or so now. Love 'em! Used to sometimes use the old Atari trackballs (the pool ball size giant clunky things) back in the mid 90s, but the gritting up was a problem.
Clusters are supercomputers. Supercomputers are clusters. The only question is what purpose your machine is built for. Some problems aren't tightly coupled (or your machine is small) and so an interconnect like Gig-E is fine. Some problems are and you want one of the specialty interconnects: Myrinet, Infiniband, Quadrics Elan, or possibly even 10Gig-E.
Any machine you see in the top500 list that mentions any of those interconnects is a cluster. I don't really think you can classify #7 and #8 on that list as "not a supercomputer."
Even BG or the Cray XT series are really just clusters with a custom vendor-supplied fast interconnect (or interconnects).