Every time I see an argument like this I want to shoot someone. "We shouldn't use X, it's a finite resource! We should use wave or wind or solar power!"
As if those aren't also finite resources, powered by the sun / the moon's / earth's motion. Yeah, they'll keep going for a long time sure. Coal and oil were going to last forever when we first started using them too -- long enough we wouldn't need to worry.
Isn't there a nice little MIPS 3000 processor sitting in there, providing the PS1 emulation? I'd guess they've been farming produciton of that out to SGI, tho I suppose they could have bought the rights to do it themselves.
You're playing to level. No kidding it's going to be boring, that's likely playing FFT to get all your crew to level 99. (Or worse as friend's I've known, use degenerator traps to level up as a high gain class, level down as a low gain, lather, rinse, repeat.)
Go out to do missions. Go to get badges. Go do task forces. Read the clues you get in story arcs. Find a roleplaying supergroup and actually role-play rather than blast the enemy to smithereens. Teach newbies the ropes.
One of the other great things about paragon city is even if you've quit and are now returning 6 months later, your equipment hasn't been outdated by the new stuff most other games use to keep people on the treadmill. There was a level cap boost providing a small additional treadmill, but if you're doing missions and such I doubt you'll notice the levels going by -- heck, last mission set I had I intentionally got a whole level of debt to retard my progress -- I was levelling TOO FAST to see the content (20-25 range).
That can be annoying itself, but hey at least I di dn't have to street sweep!
While I like the theory of renewable resources, the Green party takes it somewhere it shouldn't be taken.
I think it's great they want to fund research into renewable resources. (by the way, does Nuclear research fit in there? If you say it isn't renewable, none of your other sources are either because Fusion is what powers the Sun which is pretty much powering every other "renewable" energy source.)
Unfortunatly there's about 1-2 billion people working on rapidly industrialization of their countries. We don't have time for 50 years of research into renewables. (nor the ability to produce such a quantity of them to service the whole planet)
Mother Earth is already running low-level fission piles in her crust. Heck, fission may be (probably is) what's powering all this wonderful geothermal energy that's "renewable".
Last time similar music sites came up I tagged a Magnatune comment on it but didn't catch much moderation (too late in the day I guess).
Gotta love em tho. How many other record companies have a phrase: "We are not evil." AND have a symbol that looks at first glance like it's flipping someone off?
Electric cars don't burn fuel while sitting stopped for hours at a time on the freeway.
There's also the note that internal combustion engines are amazingly energy inefficient compared to other forms of power generation. A coal plant, with an effecitvly infinite supply of water, no weight limitations, and all the space it needs can do a lot to increase it's efficiency. Plus it's easier to scrub the coal exhaust. Heavy? Large? No problemo.
That and, if you hadn't noticed, we have a LOT of coal in the US. We don't have a lot of oil.
FUD, FUD, and wrong. Crey stockholder eh?
on
Linux Clustering
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sad to see this little knowledge about parallel computing on slashdot: blatantly wrong information marked as informative. +5 no less.
Let's address this first: there are two common memory architectures, distributed memory (a cluster) and shared memory (a 'traditional' supercomputer). Each can emulate the other. Saying a cluster doesn't have enough memory, presumably at each node, is really saying: "I don't really understand message passing."
This would be more important if datasets were actually large. Unfortunatly for your argument they aren't. A handfull of nodes and they'll hold the whole simulation easily in memory (albeit it'd take years to run because there's so few CPUs at work.)
How would I know? Well, I work with the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets aka CSAR at UIUC, one of five DoE ACSI sites in the country. I manage their supercomputer, which is getting upgraded from 200 P3-class dual proc PCs to 640 dual proc Xserve G5s. Before that I was a grad student working with them, albeit not on the CSAR simulation but instead on a related grant, the CPSD.
Now, there are computing problems which clusters aren't good at (or at least that's the traditional claim. My master's thesis and advisor would seem to dispute that this is actually the case.) However, most problems as the interview says, run just fine on clusters. Physical simulations (which covers CSAR's rockets to the national labs nuclear weapon research to hurricane/weather simulation, all the way down to protein folding and atomic and sub-atomic scale crystal formation simulation) need to know about what's in the area you're working on, and what's in nearby areas.
Occasionally you'll find an oddball like galactic simulation (or molecular dynamics) that needs to compute gravity across the whole universe. Fortunatly we have multigrid methods and a friendly gravity equation to solve this problem: get real data from those near you. Average those far from you and use that instead.
Then of course there's the idea that even "traditional" supercomputer problems that don't run well on clusters can be run efficiently on clusters IF you move beyond 1 process per CPU. Load up 10, 20, 100, 1000 little workers on a processor. Get fast context switching between them (not OS level!). Use message passing rather than shared memory (locking, ick!) to communicate. One worker blocked waiting for network data? Process the next one! If you've tuned things right you'll find you always have work to do.
Sounds crazy? Supercomputing '02 didn't think so: http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/research/moldyn/
Like magnatune.com in particular. I've bought a few things off that that I really liked (one was a gift actually, and the recipiant really likes it).
It's very cool you can pay what you think the album is worth, from $5 to more and as an added bonus get full quality wavs of the music when you buy the album (as opposed to just the mp3s you can download and try for free).
Average population density is quite possibly the most retarded statistic to be using here. I'm not a stats person, but I know enough about the techs involved and stats to know that's stupid.
You aren't trying to cover 90% of the land, you're trying to cover 90% of the people. If you're somewhere that's built a lot denser than the US (which most of Europe is, having lived/visited there for 2 years (England)), you can cover 90% of the people in a smaller geographic area. This is important since it effects how many distribution points ("central office") you need. That's probably where the real cost comes in -- buying equipment etc.
The other point worth noting in a discussion like this: who looses if we get good high speed broadband into the homes? Probably the media companies -- If you can trade DVDs effectivly or perhaps even broadcast your own shows easily (for independant media groups), wouldn't that be something they probably don't want? Now ask yourself who controls a lot of the pipes distribution? Yeah...
300 Gflop peak for $100k is a freakin bargain in the supercomputer world.
What was big mac pushing, around 3-5 Tflop at a price tag of $6mil? This thing is talking pushing 3 Tflop at a price tag of $1mil and has next to 0 heating and cooling problems compared to the mac.
The problem is that their interconnect isn't really fast enough. Well, sorta. I know there's another Apple Xserve cluster of around 3k CPUs using only gig-e to connect them. They're doing a different sort of parallel processing problem than most other people tho. (aka one like rendering that's embaressingly parallel)
A friend just has his SPACE AGE (tm) HVAC system replaced because they couldn't find a compresser coil small enough and energy efficient enough to be installed today.
It definatly looked like it was from the space age, looking at (and inside) it.
So that's like, what, $10/month for entertainment versus $10/movie without popcorn and a drink at the theater for 3 hours entertainment (max). Even factoring in the price of expansions it's still cheap entertainment. (tho really that's an everquest and clones thing. Asheron's Call has had 1 and will finally have it's second expansion out sometime next year)
CoH hasn't been nearly as bad for the casual gamer as a lot of the other games. There's no uber loot you must spend forever camping to get (tho I hear it may be introduced shortly but I haven't seen it yet at 34th level). I'm probably best described as "casual hardcore". I have a job, tho I'm still renting. I have a girlfriend. I play other games like a D&D campaign, host a real-life board game night on friday nights at our place, cook, work, sleep, etc.
CoH is also cool in that if your friends get ahead of you in level, when you next group and fight the system will tend to rapidly bring you up to your level. One of my friends who joined late was around 18 when I and a couple others were around 24. By the time we hit 25 he had hit 21 and by the time we hit 26 he'd hit 24. When we hit 27, he hit 27 shortly thereafter.
Now he's 38 and I'm 34 and I'm looking forward to getting "powerleveled" as I team with him.;-)
Of course, CoH doesn't have any PVP at the moment. Frankly I think I prefer it that way. If I'm going to go against humans, I'm going to go where a huge time investment in their character won't help them (aka go FPS or maybe Planetside).
I sure don't have the horsepower to move a normal car for any reasonable distance. You think perhaps bikes (or horse&buggy since I was just in Amish country) should be illegal and only fat gas-guzzling SUVs allowed?
They ought to just outlaw the stupid things. Studies (no URL offhand, look it up in New Scientist cause that's where I saw it.) give trucks/large vans/suvs about twice the chance to kill a pedestrial (or presumably bicyclist and probably motorbiker too, they're all the same height without the protective metal shell) who they hit in a collision than a normal car.
I can understand the need for some people to have trucks or vans. Most people who have them have them for a good reason (except for the jacked-up SUV wannabe twats). I have yet to see a good reason for a SUV that isn't better filled by a minivan. Possible exception of towing a trailer, but there are minis with plenty of power for most towing too.
Course I guess as a leftie I win, because I don't need to buy $50 of extra equipment to have my hands sitting perfectly for gaming. Left hand on the trackball, right on the arrow keys for movement, number pad nearby for weapon switching, near cntl and backslash for triggering things, numpad . for reload, 0 for crouch...
The only thing I don't have is good auto-chat stuff, but for what I tend to play I either have teamspeak up or want to type a full message (both hands, for speed).
Who wants to be taught by someone who barely speaks at all, much less barely speaks english. Most of the foreign TA/graduate students I delt with during my undergrad/masters spoke far too quietly for a classroom or didn't have good english at all.
I know I dropped more than one class due to a high quality (tm) TA. And as a grad, I loved the "no contact" theory -- foreign students who couldn't pass the SPEAK test got to be TAAs (Teaching Assistant Assistants) -- aka they "helped" us TAs. Like, we were supposed to be able to assign them to write homeworks, solutions, etc. Except at least for the TAA we had, she was too dumb to be able to solve undergrad book problems I found boring as an undergrad. I'd heard similar stories from other TAs too.
I always loved moo2, but it did have some serious issues. Like not being able to fit all my doomstars into a battle. Or having to attack the enemy world a few times to actually kill their fleet because they did the same thing I did.
Then there's ship design twinkery. Not that I didn't love it but hey.
I do miss moo1's 32k ship strategy. Who needs big ships when you can have 32k little ships (no shields, no hull) each with 1 gun (biggest you can fit) and a good targetting computer. BAM!
Are you living 10 years ago or something? I've had way more Quantum/Maxtor/IBM drives fail than seagates OTHER than in the period 10 years ago with stiction.
In any case I'll be able to comment on this soon enough as I'm about to run 600+ seagate 80 GB sata drives.
Or maybe he just thinks he could make even more money if he could innovate, rather than having to follow the pack. That is after all what he wrote, and by all accounts his risk taking has paid off wonderfully.
Now, what should scare you is why he wants to innovate. It's possible he's recognising that quite possibly the best way to get rich right now is to figure out some innovation that'll actually work, patent the stucker, and get it started in the marketplace. The reason this isn't working in computers right now is because you can't get it started with the industry giants (intel/amd/microsoft/apple).
Slashdot Mirror
Every time I see an argument like this I want to shoot someone. "We shouldn't use X, it's a finite resource! We should use wave or wind or solar power!"
As if those aren't also finite resources, powered by the sun / the moon's / earth's motion. Yeah, they'll keep going for a long time sure. Coal and oil were going to last forever when we first started using them too -- long enough we wouldn't need to worry.
The scary thing is that more people are concerned about the president's religious preferences/beliefs than his intelligence.
That should scare you.
Isn't there a nice little MIPS 3000 processor sitting in there, providing the PS1 emulation? I'd guess they've been farming produciton of that out to SGI, tho I suppose they could have bought the rights to do it themselves.
You mean china, india, mexico, or taiwan where they probably outsourced CD production to? Or was that just the programming?
You're playing to level. No kidding it's going to be boring, that's likely playing FFT to get all your crew to level 99. (Or worse as friend's I've known, use degenerator traps to level up as a high gain class, level down as a low gain, lather, rinse, repeat.)
Go out to do missions. Go to get badges. Go do task forces. Read the clues you get in story arcs. Find a roleplaying supergroup and actually role-play rather than blast the enemy to smithereens. Teach newbies the ropes.
One of the other great things about paragon city is even if you've quit and are now returning 6 months later, your equipment hasn't been outdated by the new stuff most other games use to keep people on the treadmill. There was a level cap boost providing a small additional treadmill, but if you're doing missions and such I doubt you'll notice the levels going by -- heck, last mission set I had I intentionally got a whole level of debt to retard my progress -- I was levelling TOO FAST to see the content (20-25 range).
That can be annoying itself, but hey at least I di dn't have to street sweep!
While I like the theory of renewable resources, the Green party takes it somewhere it shouldn't be taken.
I think it's great they want to fund research into renewable resources. (by the way, does Nuclear research fit in there? If you say it isn't renewable, none of your other sources are either because Fusion is what powers the Sun which is pretty much powering every other "renewable" energy source.)
Unfortunatly there's about 1-2 billion people working on rapidly industrialization of their countries. We don't have time for 50 years of research into renewables. (nor the ability to produce such a quantity of them to service the whole planet)
Mother Earth is already running low-level fission piles in her crust. Heck, fission may be (probably is) what's powering all this wonderful geothermal energy that's "renewable".
Last time similar music sites came up I tagged a Magnatune comment on it but didn't catch much moderation (too late in the day I guess).
Gotta love em tho. How many other record companies have a phrase: "We are not evil." AND have a symbol that looks at first glance like it's flipping someone off?
Electric cars don't burn fuel while sitting stopped for hours at a time on the freeway.
There's also the note that internal combustion engines are amazingly energy inefficient compared to other forms of power generation. A coal plant, with an effecitvly infinite supply of water, no weight limitations, and all the space it needs can do a lot to increase it's efficiency. Plus it's easier to scrub the coal exhaust. Heavy? Large? No problemo.
That and, if you hadn't noticed, we have a LOT of coal in the US. We don't have a lot of oil.
Sad to see this little knowledge about parallel computing on slashdot: blatantly wrong information marked as informative. +5 no less.
Let's address this first: there are two common memory architectures, distributed memory (a cluster) and shared memory (a 'traditional' supercomputer). Each can emulate the other. Saying a cluster doesn't have enough memory, presumably at each node, is really saying: "I don't really understand message passing."
This would be more important if datasets were actually large. Unfortunatly for your argument they aren't. A handfull of nodes and they'll hold the whole simulation easily in memory (albeit it'd take years to run because there's so few CPUs at work.)
How would I know? Well, I work with the Center for Simulation of Advanced Rockets aka CSAR at UIUC, one of five DoE ACSI sites in the country. I manage their supercomputer, which is getting upgraded from 200 P3-class dual proc PCs to 640 dual proc Xserve G5s. Before that I was a grad student working with them, albeit not on the CSAR simulation but instead on a related grant, the CPSD.
Now, there are computing problems which clusters aren't good at (or at least that's the traditional claim. My master's thesis and advisor would seem to dispute that this is actually the case.) However, most problems as the interview says, run just fine on clusters. Physical simulations (which covers CSAR's rockets to the national labs nuclear weapon research to hurricane/weather simulation, all the way down to protein folding and atomic and sub-atomic scale crystal formation simulation) need to know about what's in the area you're working on, and what's in nearby areas.
Occasionally you'll find an oddball like galactic simulation (or molecular dynamics) that needs to compute gravity across the whole universe. Fortunatly we have multigrid methods and a friendly gravity equation to solve this problem: get real data from those near you. Average those far from you and use that instead.
Then of course there's the idea that even "traditional" supercomputer problems that don't run well on clusters can be run efficiently on clusters IF you move beyond 1 process per CPU. Load up 10, 20, 100, 1000 little workers on a processor. Get fast context switching between them (not OS level!). Use message passing rather than shared memory (locking, ick!) to communicate. One worker blocked waiting for network data? Process the next one! If you've tuned things right you'll find you always have work to do.
Sounds crazy? Supercomputing '02 didn't think so: http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/research/moldyn/
Like magnatune.com in particular. I've bought a few things off that that I really liked (one was a gift actually, and the recipiant really likes it).
It's very cool you can pay what you think the album is worth, from $5 to more and as an added bonus get full quality wavs of the music when you buy the album (as opposed to just the mp3s you can download and try for free).
So what you're saying is that you'd like to not compile the usb-storage or associated modules, so people can't store stuff on the usb bus?
Maybe I don't get it. Then there's always just chmoding things so they'd have to be root anyway to mess with the usb devices...
Average population density is quite possibly the most retarded statistic to be using here. I'm not a stats person, but I know enough about the techs involved and stats to know that's stupid.
You aren't trying to cover 90% of the land, you're trying to cover 90% of the people. If you're somewhere that's built a lot denser than the US (which most of Europe is, having lived/visited there for 2 years (England)), you can cover 90% of the people in a smaller geographic area. This is important since it effects how many distribution points ("central office") you need. That's probably where the real cost comes in -- buying equipment etc.
The other point worth noting in a discussion like this: who looses if we get good high speed broadband into the homes? Probably the media companies -- If you can trade DVDs effectivly or perhaps even broadcast your own shows easily (for independant media groups), wouldn't that be something they probably don't want? Now ask yourself who controls a lot of the pipes distribution? Yeah...
300 Gflop peak for $100k is a freakin bargain in the supercomputer world.
What was big mac pushing, around 3-5 Tflop at a price tag of $6mil? This thing is talking pushing 3 Tflop at a price tag of $1mil and has next to 0 heating and cooling problems compared to the mac.
The problem is that their interconnect isn't really fast enough. Well, sorta. I know there's another Apple Xserve cluster of around 3k CPUs using only gig-e to connect them. They're doing a different sort of parallel processing problem than most other people tho. (aka one like rendering that's embaressingly parallel)
Yes.
A friend just has his SPACE AGE (tm) HVAC system replaced because they couldn't find a compresser coil small enough and energy efficient enough to be installed today.
It definatly looked like it was from the space age, looking at (and inside) it.
Multi User Shared Hallucination Operating System?
MUSH-OS.
Damn I feel old now.
DM complexity doesn't scale linearly with the number of players, but exponentially. Good luck, you'd sure as heck need it.
You'd be better off working on research into how to get computers to be able to make up/tell coherent stories on the fly.
I believe I saw Ken Troop listed on the D&D Online team from Turbine.
Anyone who remembers his stint as AC1 lead, or the mess that is AC2 should know enough to stay well the hell away from games he's working on.
So that's like, what, $10/month for entertainment versus $10/movie without popcorn and a drink at the theater for 3 hours entertainment (max). Even factoring in the price of expansions it's still cheap entertainment. (tho really that's an everquest and clones thing. Asheron's Call has had 1 and will finally have it's second expansion out sometime next year)
;-)
CoH hasn't been nearly as bad for the casual gamer as a lot of the other games. There's no uber loot you must spend forever camping to get (tho I hear it may be introduced shortly but I haven't seen it yet at 34th level). I'm probably best described as "casual hardcore". I have a job, tho I'm still renting. I have a girlfriend. I play other games like a D&D campaign, host a real-life board game night on friday nights at our place, cook, work, sleep, etc.
CoH is also cool in that if your friends get ahead of you in level, when you next group and fight the system will tend to rapidly bring you up to your level. One of my friends who joined late was around 18 when I and a couple others were around 24. By the time we hit 25 he had hit 21 and by the time we hit 26 he'd hit 24. When we hit 27, he hit 27 shortly thereafter.
Now he's 38 and I'm 34 and I'm looking forward to getting "powerleveled" as I team with him.
Of course, CoH doesn't have any PVP at the moment. Frankly I think I prefer it that way. If I'm going to go against humans, I'm going to go where a huge time investment in their character won't help them (aka go FPS or maybe Planetside).
I sure don't have the horsepower to move a normal car for any reasonable distance. You think perhaps bikes (or horse&buggy since I was just in Amish country) should be illegal and only fat gas-guzzling SUVs allowed?
They ought to just outlaw the stupid things. Studies (no URL offhand, look it up in New Scientist cause that's where I saw it.) give trucks/large vans/suvs about twice the chance to kill a pedestrial (or presumably bicyclist and probably motorbiker too, they're all the same height without the protective metal shell) who they hit in a collision than a normal car.
I can understand the need for some people to have trucks or vans. Most people who have them have them for a good reason (except for the jacked-up SUV wannabe twats). I have yet to see a good reason for a SUV that isn't better filled by a minivan. Possible exception of towing a trailer, but there are minis with plenty of power for most towing too.
Course I guess as a leftie I win, because I don't need to buy $50 of extra equipment to have my hands sitting perfectly for gaming. Left hand on the trackball, right on the arrow keys for movement, number pad nearby for weapon switching, near cntl and backslash for triggering things, numpad . for reload, 0 for crouch...
The only thing I don't have is good auto-chat stuff, but for what I tend to play I either have teamspeak up or want to type a full message (both hands, for speed).
Maybe that's actually the case of the latter.
Who wants to be taught by someone who barely speaks at all, much less barely speaks english. Most of the foreign TA/graduate students I delt with during my undergrad/masters spoke far too quietly for a classroom or didn't have good english at all.
I know I dropped more than one class due to a high quality (tm) TA. And as a grad, I loved the "no contact" theory -- foreign students who couldn't pass the SPEAK test got to be TAAs (Teaching Assistant Assistants) -- aka they "helped" us TAs. Like, we were supposed to be able to assign them to write homeworks, solutions, etc. Except at least for the TAA we had, she was too dumb to be able to solve undergrad book problems I found boring as an undergrad. I'd heard similar stories from other TAs too.
I always loved moo2, but it did have some serious issues. Like not being able to fit all my doomstars into a battle. Or having to attack the enemy world a few times to actually kill their fleet because they did the same thing I did.
Then there's ship design twinkery. Not that I didn't love it but hey.
I do miss moo1's 32k ship strategy. Who needs big ships when you can have 32k little ships (no shields, no hull) each with 1 gun (biggest you can fit) and a good targetting computer. BAM!
This is a non-issue if you test before you deploy.
"Hey look we were supposed to hit that apple with our beam but instead we felled the tree. Maybe we better doublecheck that new software."
Are you living 10 years ago or something? I've had way more Quantum/Maxtor/IBM drives fail than seagates OTHER than in the period 10 years ago with stiction.
In any case I'll be able to comment on this soon enough as I'm about to run 600+ seagate 80 GB sata drives.
Or maybe he just thinks he could make even more money if he could innovate, rather than having to follow the pack. That is after all what he wrote, and by all accounts his risk taking has paid off wonderfully.
Now, what should scare you is why he wants to innovate. It's possible he's recognising that quite possibly the best way to get rich right now is to figure out some innovation that'll actually work, patent the stucker, and get it started in the marketplace. The reason this isn't working in computers right now is because you can't get it started with the industry giants (intel/amd/microsoft/apple).