Maybe that just indicates it is time to get serious about code reuse. The problems that are solved on the large supercomputers aren't trivial problems. Load balancing, remeshing as the problem state changes, and duplicate state detection in search trees are all things that have been studied and done successfully on very large machines.
SBC er, I mean, AT&T DSL doesn't reach my house (I'm in-town, but still apparently out of range). That leaves the local cable monopoly... or *maybe* a local fixed-wireless group. Or dialup. There's always dialup.
The desktop PC should be idle most of the time. User input is really slow and in general the machine is waiting on the user, not the other way around. However, ask yourself who's time is more valuable, the machine you bought for $1,500 that lasts 3 years (at least, that's hardware update cycle around my work), or the person you pay $150,000 over a similar time frame? (give or take on location, entry-level position) Pay 10% more ($150) for the computer to save the person 0.1% ($150) of their time? That's an even trade at least. That 0.1% of the person's time, by the way, is 28.8 seconds per (8-hour) workday.
How often has a site locked up your web browser? How much time do you spend waiting on a on-boot virus scanner (memory, boot sector, enable on-access-scan) to run against your machine? I'm not bothered when beagle fires up an auto-index on a multi-core machine. I never notice the performance hit of it. How long does an entry-level developer spend kicking their shoes back while a compile runs (trivial to parallelize to some degree)?
Speaking of the developer, if he's writing games, there better be each of the 13 other available cores busy running AIs. The more cycles you can throw at them, the better they can play without blatant cheating. Some games get an exception to this (mostly online MMOs, but also puzzle/etc games) but even there there can be useful things to do. How about voice chat software (MMOs) that does open-mic-feedback analysis and automatically filters out anything it is sending to the speakers?
Just IMHO. No, desktops can't really currently make good use of a 8+ core machine. The jury is out on quad cores at the moment, but dual-cores are a performance boon over singles.
Personally I'd do it for the challenge. Of course, I'm more likely to be a bot author than bot user. Actually, that's a provably true fact since I've written a bot for good old Asheron's Call. Wrote my own crafting-money-run bot and fed it to all my friends. It was actually a heck of a lot of fun to develop, trying to deal with navigation (the feedback in AcTool was pretty primitive), deal with conditionals and error cases -- which it did quite well. I could track my success/progress in development by seeing how many pyreals/hour it was generating.
Back to the WoW topic. I've said it about other games. I'll say it about WoW: Blizzard can't win. Look even if they can shut down WOW Glider, writing up a Linux version of a bot and running WoW under wine means you're undetectable (other than by behavioral analysis) unless they want to ban all Linux/wine users.
If they did, a hypervisor would be a great place to hide the bot. While banning machines that have a hypervisor in place would be great if we get a massive round of hypervisor-malware in a couple years, I'm thinking Blizzard doesn't have the balls to make that stick. They'd loose too many virus/malware-infected customers.
Even if they did, now the bot gets written for a Linux box which is also the router for WoW on Windows. Hook it up via FW for memory access against windows (or use a NE2000 ethernet board and build a custom driver (source is out there) that has some backdoors...) and you've got the encryption key. Now all you need is to generate fake mouse/keyboard events however you like -- via your "trojan" NE2k driver, or via a custom Linux USB driver + USB cable and presto: undetectable bot.
Blizzard can raise the bar, but they can't win.
And remember: exploit early, exploit often! -Asheron's Call
Between the PS3 patching itself and Rock Band patching itself, and both refusing to run in network enabled mode (for score tracking and/or store access) I'm not clear that the PS3 is less annoying. The patching has to happen RIGHT NOW when SONY SAYS, whereas I can (but shouldn't) leave Windows to patch later, rather than when I want to play RIGHT NOW. Also, for all the faults of Windows, it (or Linux) can download updates in the background while I play, rather than spending 5-10 minutes doing nothing but downloading.
Maybe it is just Sony/PS3s that are defective, but I'll tell you I patch my PC/PC games less (patch Tuesdays, MMO update days about 1/month, often pre-downloaded just like windows).
The other bits? Like my multi-computer-generation old cdrom, hard drive, sound card (or use onboard), or case/PSU? Yes, motherboard-cpu-ram goes as a bundle and you usually don't get to carry anything forward of that set to the new machine. But the bits around it sure should, as should the PSU if you got a quality one in the first place.
Yes it means your disk and cd may be a bit slower than the newest versions, but they aren't going to be that much slower. At least until we get reasonably priced SSDs.
I have an opinion of Apple as a corporation and it tends to get me in hot water when I express it. Even when nicely expressed, Apple does NOT like being criticized or having folks publish that their products do not work as advertised.
But I would agree that there's no reason they have to be hated. Who's the largest plastic block toy maker? The Lego Group. (Okay, they aren't particularly large as a toy company, but still, run with it) But they're really far far better than even Google with "do no evil" -- they let fans scan and publish old building instructions that they are no longer producing kits for. They only require a very reasonable 5-year span of do-not-publish.
You're right, my Firefox can't make use of both cores on my machine. That's okay by me though while the number of cores is small (2-8). Why? I've got a Rhythmbox running in the background and it needs some CPU power. Then there's about 10 open gnome-terms that occasionally need to update themselves as irc chatter or a compile progresses. There's Thunderbird poking at the imap server occasionally, not to mention monitoring apps (Intermapper, so that means Java which is a pig) and a load average applet running on my task bar/etc. Sure, the two cores I have often sit idle. On the bright side, when I do have a compile or large (multi-gig) logfile analysis running on my machine, it can hog one core while the other keeps my browser, window manager, and friends responsive to the user (aka me).
That said, I wouldn't mind a really good message passing framework. BeOS was nice for that and it had a lot less crashy/deadlock/etc problems than I would have expected.
One correct answer is simply a result of a badly written question, but that's what the not-so-good students want. Give them all the information (and nothing extra) so they can plug it into an equation and write a number down. God forbid you give them extra (irrelevant) information, or that you should ask them to solve for something unusual in an equation. If you do, the students will whine about how you write "hard/unfair questions" and ask how many questions you are writing on an exam (with dread).
Another large part of the problem is that interesting questions are harder to grade. Which question is more interesting, or open to a wider range of answers: (I had a prof I TA'd for use this as an exam question ~ 6 years ago)
Name three parallel computers: _____________, _______________, _____________
versus
Which of the following companies is known for their supercomputers: A) Ford B) McDonalds C) Cray D) None of the Above
I had to hit google to try to verify a bunch of the stuff generated. Mostly it was wrong, but there were a few ones that were out there, but correct. Heck of a lot slower to grade than multiple-choice though, and a lot more argument with students over what qualifies as "parallel" enough to be a valid answer for the test question. I asked the prof in question to come up with a new way of asking it that wasn't totally open-ended. I don't know if he went to multi-choice, or perhaps a select three from this list (containing more than three correct answers).
Or maybe accounting? Looks like some sort of depreciation calculation run against a "lock box". C'mon Wired, you think you could have at least found a picture of engineering homework...
Problem: Getting humans (and the supplies to sustain/return them) down to Mars is hard. Problem: Rover's ping times are a real dog.
Solution: Put a human in orbit of Mars. No crazy problems getting him (better: them) to the surface or back up to Mars-orbit. Delay will be basically zero compared to the Earth->Mars link now. Sure he can't wipe off solar panels, but he can say, "hey interesting rock let's go dig it."
Not that flying an ISS equivalent (large habitat for extended occupation) to and from Mars is going to be easy, but it might be easy compared to trying to drop something on the surface.
I have one of those "stupid shake flashlights" that I haven't touched for months. It still turns on at the press of a button. Some of the others we have around here are more the dead-in-10-seconds type. I'm not sure what it is about this one (particularly quality capacitor? The double-coil rather than single-coil in the others?) but I certainly wish finding the good ones was easier.
You're going to hit a lot of firewalls, many of them at the ISP level, that block your ping or traceroutes from going through. I wouldn't count on that as reliable.
Much like spam, you can legislate against this as much as you want, but with the equipment to do sequencing (currently) and creation (future) getting cheaper and cheaper all the time how do you expect to actually stop it? Also, we're likely to start having true miracle cures -- grow-your-own-replacement-heart in a lab. Or kidney. Lung has cancer? Just grow a new one and entirely remove the old.
You can rant and rave about religion and violating god's creation all you want, but this is just a tool. It will get used for good and for evil, your goal should be to embrace it and ensure that it gets used for more of the former than the latter.
Congrats. Now go do that in England, or the US's pacific northwest. Do it where the gov't doesn't subsidize it. Now get all you friends to do it and watch as the power company collapses, yet your houses are dark at night (look up "base load" and think about it till you understand why solar can't do it alone).
I would love one of these. I am so sick of being forced to commute along this predetermined, crowded and narrow little route along with hundreds of thousands of others every day. All that tension, stress, and road rage, not to mention the speed traps. It is so dangerous and inefficient.
There's this thing around some places called PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION(*). Maybe you should give up the car and try it?
(*): Not available in all areas. May be overcrouded, running late, or on strike.
Brett Winterford travelled to Redmond as a guest of Microsoft
There you have it folks. No more discussion required and everyone who's defending Microsoft is welcome to leave apologies as replies! This is just more of them using money to try to brand their software as some sort of open standard when it isn't.
Blaming the problems on a poor, or outdated, business model might work to salve people's conscience but the weasel words still don't hide the fact that what is being done is illegal.
I blame the problems on the fact that they've bought legislation to make it illegal. Copyright was not meant to be a forever thing, the public domain is there for a reason. If you can't get your money out of something you created in 28 years, you lose.
Frankly, with the ever-advancing speed of technology, I tend to suspect that digital media (that means both books published as E-books, CDs, and any digital computer program) really needs an even shorter copyright life.
From what I've seen of the bionicle that has invaded my collection in bulk brick buys, the parts aren't actually custom. They're standard parts, just a different standard than old time NxM brick'ers are used to.
Is that we have way more people who want to play than we have instruments to play! 4 (or 3 when one is broken and getting fixed) instruments really has a hard time holding up 10 players! It was extra-worse when we had a guitar out for (non-cross-ship) repair. We've lost two guitars and one foot pedal so far -- they needed to build in a lot more durability in those, c'mon folks, engineering like this is not rocket science.
Also: bring back the strum bar microswitches! (GH1/2/'80s stock guitars)
There is no way OS X is going to be the one to break the Windows monopoly. Not until Apple gets something resembling an Enterprise/Production (pick your word) mentality.
That means among other things:
* The ability to apply only SOME of an update (not 10.5.1, but just parts of that I care about) * The ability to roll-back an update (currently: "reinstall and patch up to the update before") * Better QA. (search for wifi woes nearly every other 10.4 update, or AD/samba woes in 10.5.0)
Their product support lifecycle also needs to be something longer than (effectively) a year and a half. Yes, technically they claim to still support older OSes like 10.3, but realistically not so much. Problems with the OS? Bugs to be fixed? Just upgrade to 10.5! That isn't a business solution.
Most non-savvy users have a hard enough time learning one OS. If the place they work says, "thou shalt use windows!" then guess what they'll use at home?
On many of these electrics, you do need to plug-in to get your initial charge. Isn't that causing just as much, if not more, pollution than burning oil locally? No, it's causing less. ICEs are some of the least efficient thermal->mechanical work conversion techniques we have. If you trust Wikipedia, the ICE is around 20% efficient with a peak of 37% under ideal conditions. Coal plants can hit 36%-38% with some new designs hitting the high 40%s. Nukes follow similar to coal plants. DC motors are around 85-90% efficient for brushless designs, so even factoring that in, the coal->DC motor is more efficient. I'm not counting transmission(transportation) costs or the cost you pay for transformers/battery charging(refining).
Also, it is a lot easier to make carbon neutral/free fixed power plants. Nuke powered cars are probably never going to quite catch on, adding a windmill to a car is just stupid... (but I keep seeing idiots suggest it)
I know I read an article this year that spoke of the CO2 emissions for just peddling a bike or taking a walk, so even not using machinery seems to have an impact. That whole breath in O2 and exhale CO2 thing. Not to mention the carbon costs to make all the food (and mechanized processing of said food), cook it, and even eat/digest it.
> That includes silencing critics when they're able to.
You win at the internet.
I've caught a lot of flack for talking about the failure-rate statistics of our apple supercomputer. Luckily my boss' opinion of that sort of crap from a vendor is rated on a scale of zero to negative infinity and is a pretty large value.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that just indicates it is time to get serious about code reuse. The problems that are solved on the large supercomputers aren't trivial problems. Load balancing, remeshing as the problem state changes, and duplicate state detection in search trees are all things that have been studied and done successfully on very large machines.
Yes, in many areas they are a de-facto monopoly.
SBC er, I mean, AT&T DSL doesn't reach my house (I'm in-town, but still apparently out of range). That leaves the local cable monopoly... or *maybe* a local fixed-wireless group. Or dialup. There's always dialup.
The desktop PC should be idle most of the time. User input is really slow and in general the machine is waiting on the user, not the other way around. However, ask yourself who's time is more valuable, the machine you bought for $1,500 that lasts 3 years (at least, that's hardware update cycle around my work), or the person you pay $150,000 over a similar time frame? (give or take on location, entry-level position) Pay 10% more ($150) for the computer to save the person 0.1% ($150) of their time? That's an even trade at least. That 0.1% of the person's time, by the way, is 28.8 seconds per (8-hour) workday.
How often has a site locked up your web browser? How much time do you spend waiting on a on-boot virus scanner (memory, boot sector, enable on-access-scan) to run against your machine? I'm not bothered when beagle fires up an auto-index on a multi-core machine. I never notice the performance hit of it. How long does an entry-level developer spend kicking their shoes back while a compile runs (trivial to parallelize to some degree)?
Speaking of the developer, if he's writing games, there better be each of the 13 other available cores busy running AIs. The more cycles you can throw at them, the better they can play without blatant cheating. Some games get an exception to this (mostly online MMOs, but also puzzle/etc games) but even there there can be useful things to do. How about voice chat software (MMOs) that does open-mic-feedback analysis and automatically filters out anything it is sending to the speakers?
Just IMHO. No, desktops can't really currently make good use of a 8+ core machine. The jury is out on quad cores at the moment, but dual-cores are a performance boon over singles.
Personally I'd do it for the challenge. Of course, I'm more likely to be a bot author than bot user. Actually, that's a provably true fact since I've written a bot for good old Asheron's Call. Wrote my own crafting-money-run bot and fed it to all my friends. It was actually a heck of a lot of fun to develop, trying to deal with navigation (the feedback in AcTool was pretty primitive), deal with conditionals and error cases -- which it did quite well. I could track my success/progress in development by seeing how many pyreals/hour it was generating.
Back to the WoW topic. I've said it about other games. I'll say it about WoW: Blizzard can't win. Look even if they can shut down WOW Glider, writing up a Linux version of a bot and running WoW under wine means you're undetectable (other than by behavioral analysis) unless they want to ban all Linux/wine users.
If they did, a hypervisor would be a great place to hide the bot. While banning machines that have a hypervisor in place would be great if we get a massive round of hypervisor-malware in a couple years, I'm thinking Blizzard doesn't have the balls to make that stick. They'd loose too many virus/malware-infected customers.
Even if they did, now the bot gets written for a Linux box which is also the router for WoW on Windows. Hook it up via FW for memory access against windows (or use a NE2000 ethernet board and build a custom driver (source is out there) that has some backdoors...) and you've got the encryption key. Now all you need is to generate fake mouse/keyboard events however you like -- via your "trojan" NE2k driver, or via a custom Linux USB driver + USB cable and presto: undetectable bot.
Blizzard can raise the bar, but they can't win.
And remember: exploit early, exploit often! -Asheron's Call
Between the PS3 patching itself and Rock Band patching itself, and both refusing to run in network enabled mode (for score tracking and/or store access) I'm not clear that the PS3 is less annoying. The patching has to happen RIGHT NOW when SONY SAYS, whereas I can (but shouldn't) leave Windows to patch later, rather than when I want to play RIGHT NOW. Also, for all the faults of Windows, it (or Linux) can download updates in the background while I play, rather than spending 5-10 minutes doing nothing but downloading.
Maybe it is just Sony/PS3s that are defective, but I'll tell you I patch my PC/PC games less (patch Tuesdays, MMO update days about 1/month, often pre-downloaded just like windows).
The other bits? Like my multi-computer-generation old cdrom, hard drive, sound card (or use onboard), or case/PSU? Yes, motherboard-cpu-ram goes as a bundle and you usually don't get to carry anything forward of that set to the new machine. But the bits around it sure should, as should the PSU if you got a quality one in the first place.
Yes it means your disk and cd may be a bit slower than the newest versions, but they aren't going to be that much slower. At least until we get reasonably priced SSDs.
I have an opinion of Apple as a corporation and it tends to get me in hot water when I express it. Even when nicely expressed, Apple does NOT like being criticized or having folks publish that their products do not work as advertised.
But I would agree that there's no reason they have to be hated. Who's the largest plastic block toy maker? The Lego Group. (Okay, they aren't particularly large as a toy company, but still, run with it) But they're really far far better than even Google with "do no evil" -- they let fans scan and publish old building instructions that they are no longer producing kits for. They only require a very reasonable 5-year span of do-not-publish.
You're right, my Firefox can't make use of both cores on my machine. That's okay by me though while the number of cores is small (2-8). Why? I've got a Rhythmbox running in the background and it needs some CPU power. Then there's about 10 open gnome-terms that occasionally need to update themselves as irc chatter or a compile progresses. There's Thunderbird poking at the imap server occasionally, not to mention monitoring apps (Intermapper, so that means Java which is a pig) and a load average applet running on my task bar/etc. Sure, the two cores I have often sit idle. On the bright side, when I do have a compile or large (multi-gig) logfile analysis running on my machine, it can hog one core while the other keeps my browser, window manager, and friends responsive to the user (aka me).
That said, I wouldn't mind a really good message passing framework. BeOS was nice for that and it had a lot less crashy/deadlock/etc problems than I would have expected.
One correct answer is simply a result of a badly written question, but that's what the not-so-good students want. Give them all the information (and nothing extra) so they can plug it into an equation and write a number down. God forbid you give them extra (irrelevant) information, or that you should ask them to solve for something unusual in an equation. If you do, the students will whine about how you write "hard/unfair questions" and ask how many questions you are writing on an exam (with dread).
Another large part of the problem is that interesting questions are harder to grade. Which question is more interesting, or open to a wider range of answers: (I had a prof I TA'd for use this as an exam question ~ 6 years ago)
Name three parallel computers:
_____________, _______________, _____________
versus
Which of the following companies is known for their supercomputers:
A) Ford B) McDonalds C) Cray D) None of the Above
I had to hit google to try to verify a bunch of the stuff generated. Mostly it was wrong, but there were a few ones that were out there, but correct. Heck of a lot slower to grade than multiple-choice though, and a lot more argument with students over what qualifies as "parallel" enough to be a valid answer for the test question. I asked the prof in question to come up with a new way of asking it that wasn't totally open-ended. I don't know if he went to multi-choice, or perhaps a select three from this list (containing more than three correct answers).
- A (only slightly bitter) former CS TA
Or maybe accounting? Looks like some sort of depreciation calculation run against a "lock box". C'mon Wired, you think you could have at least found a picture of engineering homework...
Problem: Getting humans (and the supplies to sustain/return them) down to Mars is hard.
Problem: Rover's ping times are a real dog.
Solution: Put a human in orbit of Mars. No crazy problems getting him (better: them) to the surface or back up to Mars-orbit. Delay will be basically zero compared to the Earth->Mars link now. Sure he can't wipe off solar panels, but he can say, "hey interesting rock let's go dig it."
Not that flying an ISS equivalent (large habitat for extended occupation) to and from Mars is going to be easy, but it might be easy compared to trying to drop something on the surface.
I have one of those "stupid shake flashlights" that I haven't touched for months. It still turns on at the press of a button. Some of the others we have around here are more the dead-in-10-seconds type. I'm not sure what it is about this one (particularly quality capacitor? The double-coil rather than single-coil in the others?) but I certainly wish finding the good ones was easier.
You're going to hit a lot of firewalls, many of them at the ISP level, that block your ping or traceroutes from going through. I wouldn't count on that as reliable.
Much like spam, you can legislate against this as much as you want, but with the equipment to do sequencing (currently) and creation (future) getting cheaper and cheaper all the time how do you expect to actually stop it? Also, we're likely to start having true miracle cures -- grow-your-own-replacement-heart in a lab. Or kidney. Lung has cancer? Just grow a new one and entirely remove the old.
You can rant and rave about religion and violating god's creation all you want, but this is just a tool. It will get used for good and for evil, your goal should be to embrace it and ensure that it gets used for more of the former than the latter.
Congrats. Now go do that in England, or the US's pacific northwest. Do it where the gov't doesn't subsidize it. Now get all you friends to do it and watch as the power company collapses, yet your houses are dark at night (look up "base load" and think about it till you understand why solar can't do it alone).
There's this thing around some places called PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION(*). Maybe you should give up the car and try it?
(*): Not available in all areas. May be overcrouded, running late, or on strike.
There you have it folks. No more discussion required and everyone who's defending Microsoft is welcome to leave apologies as replies! This is just more of them using money to try to brand their software as some sort of open standard when it isn't.
I blame the problems on the fact that they've bought legislation to make it illegal. Copyright was not meant to be a forever thing, the public domain is there for a reason. If you can't get your money out of something you created in 28 years, you lose.
Frankly, with the ever-advancing speed of technology, I tend to suspect that digital media (that means both books published as E-books, CDs, and any digital computer program) really needs an even shorter copyright life.
From what I've seen of the bionicle that has invaded my collection in bulk brick buys, the parts aren't actually custom. They're standard parts, just a different standard than old time NxM brick'ers are used to.
Is that we have way more people who want to play than we have instruments to play! 4 (or 3 when one is broken and getting fixed) instruments really has a hard time holding up 10 players! It was extra-worse when we had a guitar out for (non-cross-ship) repair. We've lost two guitars and one foot pedal so far -- they needed to build in a lot more durability in those, c'mon folks, engineering like this is not rocket science.
Also: bring back the strum bar microswitches! (GH1/2/'80s stock guitars)
There is no way OS X is going to be the one to break the Windows monopoly. Not until Apple gets something resembling an Enterprise/Production (pick your word) mentality.
That means among other things:
* The ability to apply only SOME of an update (not 10.5.1, but just parts of that I care about)
* The ability to roll-back an update (currently: "reinstall and patch up to the update before")
* Better QA. (search for wifi woes nearly every other 10.4 update, or AD/samba woes in 10.5.0)
Their product support lifecycle also needs to be something longer than (effectively) a year and a half. Yes, technically they claim to still support older OSes like 10.3, but realistically not so much. Problems with the OS? Bugs to be fixed? Just upgrade to 10.5! That isn't a business solution.
Most non-savvy users have a hard enough time learning one OS. If the place they work says, "thou shalt use windows!" then guess what they'll use at home?
Especially given the companies under discussion.
Also, it is a lot easier to make carbon neutral/free fixed power plants. Nuke powered cars are probably never going to quite catch on, adding a windmill to a car is just stupid... (but I keep seeing idiots suggest it) I know I read an article this year that spoke of the CO2 emissions for just peddling a bike or taking a walk, so even not using machinery seems to have an impact. That whole breath in O2 and exhale CO2 thing. Not to mention the carbon costs to make all the food (and mechanized processing of said food), cook it, and even eat/digest it.
Looks more like a light aircraft, sans wing, to me.
> That includes silencing critics when they're able to.
You win at the internet.
I've caught a lot of flack for talking about the failure-rate statistics of our apple supercomputer. Luckily my boss' opinion of that sort of crap from a vendor is rated on a scale of zero to negative infinity and is a pretty large value.