4chan has attracted the WSJ for god's sake, you can't deny their (our?) influence over the internet. After watching Fannie and Freddie's stock price all day, I burst out laughing when I found out that WSJ had done an article on the butthole of the Internet.
You think that nobody has a real interest in parallel computing? Intel's put their money on it already - they've allotted $20 million between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois to research parallel computing, both in hardware and software.
I am a EECS student at Cal right now and I have heard talks by the UC Berkeley PARLab professors (Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, the man who brought us RAID and RISC), and all of them say that the computing industry is going to radically change unless we figure out how to efficiently use parallelism. This is the first time in history that software performance is beginning to lag behind how fast we can make our hardware. The failure of the frequency scaling to continue to improve system performance has been shown in the failure of the NetBurst microarchitecture - remember the Prescott? And the failure of the Tejas and Jayhawk? Building faster chips is over, it's a mechanical engineering issue - we can make chips put out more heat per area than the surface of the sun. Quoting professor Hennessey from Stanford:
"...when we start talking about parallelism and ease of use of truly parallel computers,
we're talking about a problem that's as hard as any that computer science has faced.... I
would be panicked if I were in industry.... you've got a very difficult situation."
To whoever is saying that parallelism is just a fad, you're really missing a lot of what's going on in the computing world. We've already switched to dual- and quad-core CPU's, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.
"The conservative government, led by the Liberal Democratic Party"
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think? Not really.
American conventions of liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans is simply an *American* labeling of political affiliations. And even then it's just a function of our current time period
To give you a domestic example of this being switched, remember those crazy "Radical Republicans" of the late 1850's, early 1860's that has the "Radical" notion that blacks were human beings too?
Or to show you how foreign countries don't use the same nomenclature, there's the National Democratic Party of Germany which is "viewed by its opponents and the mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi organization".
How can we be sure that the whole "Humans need somewhere other than Earth to live if we are going to prevent ourselves from dying out" argument is not just pseudo-scientific technobabble? I am not arguing against it, but I feel like to the uninformed (I RTFA and they are a set of very knowledgeable people) the prospects for life on *insert_planet_here* are slightly warped out of proportions. TFA said that "within the next century" we will be commuting to space.....somehow I feel like this is being said based on a weak argument. If someone said "Within the next century, we will have technologies X, Y, and Z, which will make spaceflight much cheaper and more reliable," then I would believe them.
Instead it sounds like what is in the back of their mind is "Well 100 years is a long time and by then we should have it down pat." Sort of like 2001: A Space Odyssey - Back then the argument would have been "Well 2001 is a long ways away, we should have moon bases by then, right?"
Yet another analogy could be the concept of Strong AI. From Wikipedia:
Modern AI research began in the middle 50s. The first generation of AI researchers were convinced that strong AI was possible and that it would exist in just a few decades. As AI pioneer Herbert Simon wrote in 1965: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."
Are we just assuming that we have the knowledge to tackle the issues necessary to having regular space travel? Or are we so ignorant that we don't even know what stands in our way? Is everyone just trying to make the world of Cowboy Bebop / Outlaw Star / Star Trek / Star Wars happen in their lifetime?
Except for those of us who are Boomers, who will treat the rest of you as serfs. We are a special class of citizens who impose a rule on the rest of you, as our two-tier society continues down the path towards the Master-Serf relationship.
Okay thank you for sensationalizing what I hoped to be a rational question explained by the informative Slashdot crowd
What I've figured out through reading more comments is that this is the fear scenario that the Slashdot crowd can envision all too well because we are the people with careers that involve the technology required to make this all work:
A centralized ID with RFID chips will be standard among all American citizens
Unknown to the general populace, the chip will be scanned using sensors in various public places
After recognizing the individual, a query gets wrapped up and sent to the fed RDBMS:
INSERT into citizen_activities (id, place, time) VALUES ("L520-AC38-F09C", "Transit Station 64C", NOW());
Very soon, the government can track all of our activities
I am not the kind of person that adamantly says "It's an ID, stop whining over it, just get one!" with complete disregard to the actual political issues at hand. But in this case, I really don't know what the real issues ARE. Here's my understanding:
The federal government is going to issue a federal ID card
It is going to be absolutely mandatory for everyone to get one
Because everyone is supposed to have one at all times, we will face strict penalties for not having in on you
That's not so bad IMHO, because in comparison, isn't it practically mandatory for everyone to have a driver's license these days? Yeah, sure, there are people that don't drive, but the 95% of us who do, pretty much have to carry it on us at all times. How is this any different and/or an invasion of civil liberties? I can understand "ZOMG they can plant a chip in it and find me at my favorite whorehouse/stripclub/_insert_shady_place_" but you can pretty much say that about anything.....
x86 has its market, the personal computer, but its legacy architecture should not be allowed to spread anywhere it has not already tainted.
Remember Why Do We Use x86 CPUs? I thought x86 is something we want to eventually move away from (Remember VAX?), not something we want to spread.
It's a lot like when people used to let high school math coaches claim to have solved Fermat's Little Theorem. We all knew they didn't, but there's a lot to be said for the puzzle of locating the coaches' mistakes.
Fermat's Little Theorem was proved pretty early on. From Wikipedia:
Euler first published a proof in 1736 in a paper entitled "Theorematum Quorundam ad Numeros Primos Spectantium Demonstratio" What you're thinking of is Fermat's Last Theorem
How did you get an A with a 58%? Grading curves are crap. If you only know 58%, you should only be rewarded with a 58, not a 90. If you're the top person in the class, and only know 58%, something is definately wrong, but you should not pass. SRSLY? Have you ever taken a class at a university?
I go to UC Berkeley, but the MO of universities is to assign a professor to a class that is either within his field of research or is a fundamental part of what he/she does at the school (i.e. physics profs. in math). Professors are there because they are intellectuals and researchers, usually not because they love to teach. Because they have such vast knowledge and probably aren't very good at discerning how much their students are absorbing, they write impossibly hard exams, simply because they can't understand anything more basic. As a result, the top grade might be 58%. But knowing 58% on a difficult test might require the same level of knowledge as it takes to get a 90% on a easy exam.
In everything up till high school it was pretty easy to go back to that 90-80-70 standard because all the material was so elementary teachers could easily make tests to place students in those categories. At universities, the material is so much more complex that it's pointless/impossible to write exams to those arbitrarily defined 90-80-70 categories. Think of an exam in which half of the points are based on knowledge of the fundamentals, and the rest is on complicated, hazy, trivial bits of knoweldge. In that case it's totally fine for a 58% to be an A since he understood (probably) most of the fundamentals and a few of the smaller facts.
BTW: Even the you are a reasonably talented individual, I doubt you'll get grades in the 70%-100% range your whole life....
Yes, it is pretty neat that they could power a conventional off-the-shelf lightbulb wirelessly, but this is nothing 100% radical and new. In freshman-level Electromagnetism in college my professor (Prof. George Smoot of Nobel 2006 fame) demonstrated exactly this - a standard light bulb with two antennas sticking out of it could be powered wirelessly by EM waves. Nothing special, and hardly any "sophisticated" technology - an A.C. power source with antennas and a lightbulb with antennas aligned with the power source antennas.
I assume you speak of Richard Feynman, the physicist that played bongo drums at a strip club? The physisict who would ask girls at a bar if they would sleep with him before he even bought them a drink? The one who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics on quantum electrodynamics? The professor at CalTech?
All this is from his autobiography, a good read for all of geekdom, though to the OP's point it does make us feel way smarter than we really are.
Re:It would be a great first language
on
Beginning Ruby
·
· Score: 1
As a young EE/CS student at UC Berkeley, I started out last semester with SICP - the MIT Scheme book. Like the ideas the rest of you folk are promoting, we were taught high level concepts using Scheme, then we took the language to learn more computer-sciency ideas such as writing evaluators/interpreters and understanding serialization.
In regards to the "learn assembly and C first" comments, we learn C and Assembly in our third programming course in about a span of a month. Only a week and a half of C, and poof, you're expected to know it. They structure the progression Scheme -> Java -> C/Assembly/Logic gates because they want students to learn the general concepts/feel of writing code before going after the hard-to-read, older, procedural, strongly-typed stuff.
As a Berkeley computer-scientist-in-training, it was funny.
But it is kind of painful when you see those kids with their Google t-shirts that imply "Yeah, I worked at Google, got paid a small fortune, and know someone who can get me a job there when I graduate."
A friend told me his friend in Texas got a $45/hr internship at Google. I call BS, that's more than $90K in a year. For a college freshman? I think not...-1 offtopic
Although it is unclear at this time which Linux distributions the bank is using, the fact Novell is associated with a statement that claims Linux has a higher total cost of ownership than Windows will surprise and anger many in the open-source community.
Wow that's a surprise....
Anyways TFA said that the bank was running a bunch of different Linux distros. I would tend to think that running a bunch of different flavors of Linux would cause compatibility problems that raise their TCO...hence the reason why moving to Novell/MS would be cheaper.
Honestly. I'm a skeptic of religion because it proclaims that some invisible "being" is responsible for our world. There's no physical evidence to back that up (I don't want to start a debate here though, this is just my opinion). For the EXACT SAME REASON I feel like UFO's, extraterrestrials, ghosts, poltergeists, etc. are all not real. Nothing to really back it up. Am I the only skeptic or do people actually believe in this ish?
Honestly, I feel like I would be inclined to buy stuff still if I wasn't deathly afraid of getting slapped with a lawsuit. Because they're doing all these deplorable practices against some innocent people, they're losing me as a POTENTIAL customer.
Well I got hit by something similar. I downloaded a torrent of Green Street Hooligans, didn't even watch it. Recieved an email from the campus computer folk, told me that Universal informed them of my "copyright infringement", and if I delete the file immediately and tell them that I did so, nothing would happen, but if I did it again, I would lose my Internet connection.
I don't remember if they said what would happen if I didn't delete the file (which I did, I'm not going to stick my neck out for the principle of it) but I'm sure it would have been ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA is doing this too - intercepting communications out of your friendly campus and then telling the campus to enforce their restrictions. Way to scare your customers. How do they stay in business?
Any other people get busted/almost-busted/pseudo-busted at their university?
Yes, I used to spend countless hours tweaking and overclocking my computer in order to get those extra FPS in CS Source and HL2. Now i just really don't care - I'm still 18, the "peak" age that everybody wants to market to, but I just lack the time or desire to pour hours on end into video games. School, life, and girls are more important to me now, and this videogaming thing has been slipping away.
I used to play 4 hours of video games a day back when I was a "hardcore gamer", it's just not worth it anymore. Has anybody else feel their killer instinct slip away?
I downloaded Green Street Hooligans through BitTorrent, Universal sent the campus computing people a notice that I had violated a copyright, campus computing people send me a notice to delete the file immediately, and if it happens again my Intarweb is banned till I leave the dorms.
I won't lie, I can sympathize with this, this is exactly what they're fighting, I just never knew you could actually get caught that easily. This all happened in a week of downloading the movie. And I never even watched it!
Really, the evidence for "dark matter" has been made through its effects - it bends light, and makes galaxies spin at a different rate than what we're currently observing. Scientists have inferred its existance from its effects. Not a really bad practice, but as the other posts around here indicate, we've got a long way to figuring out what the hell is really going on.
Slashdot Mirror
4chan has attracted the WSJ for god's sake, you can't deny their (our?) influence over the internet. After watching Fannie and Freddie's stock price all day, I burst out laughing when I found out that WSJ had done an article on the butthole of the Internet.
You think that nobody has a real interest in parallel computing? Intel's put their money on it already - they've allotted $20 million between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois to research parallel computing, both in hardware and software.
I am a EECS student at Cal right now and I have heard talks by the UC Berkeley PARLab professors (Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, the man who brought us RAID and RISC), and all of them say that the computing industry is going to radically change unless we figure out how to efficiently use parallelism. This is the first time in history that software performance is beginning to lag behind how fast we can make our hardware. The failure of the frequency scaling to continue to improve system performance has been shown in the failure of the NetBurst microarchitecture - remember the Prescott? And the failure of the Tejas and Jayhawk? Building faster chips is over, it's a mechanical engineering issue - we can make chips put out more heat per area than the surface of the sun. Quoting professor Hennessey from Stanford:
"...when we start talking about parallelism and ease of use of truly parallel computers, we're talking about a problem that's as hard as any that computer science has faced. ... I
would be panicked if I were in industry. ... you've got a very difficult situation."
To whoever is saying that parallelism is just a fad, you're really missing a lot of what's going on in the computing world. We've already switched to dual- and quad-core CPU's, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.
There's something a little odd about that name, don't you think? Not really.
American conventions of liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans is simply an *American* labeling of political affiliations. And even then it's just a function of our current time period
To give you a domestic example of this being switched, remember those crazy "Radical Republicans" of the late 1850's, early 1860's that has the "Radical" notion that blacks were human beings too?
Or to show you how foreign countries don't use the same nomenclature, there's the National Democratic Party of Germany which is "viewed by its opponents and the mainstream media as a de facto neo-Nazi organization".
Here's an example on VWVortex
Not an unusual thing in the automotive industry, perhaps.
How can we be sure that the whole "Humans need somewhere other than Earth to live if we are going to prevent ourselves from dying out" argument is not just pseudo-scientific technobabble? I am not arguing against it, but I feel like to the uninformed (I RTFA and they are a set of very knowledgeable people) the prospects for life on *insert_planet_here* are slightly warped out of proportions. TFA said that "within the next century" we will be commuting to space.....somehow I feel like this is being said based on a weak argument. If someone said "Within the next century, we will have technologies X, Y, and Z, which will make spaceflight much cheaper and more reliable," then I would believe them.
Instead it sounds like what is in the back of their mind is "Well 100 years is a long time and by then we should have it down pat." Sort of like 2001: A Space Odyssey - Back then the argument would have been "Well 2001 is a long ways away, we should have moon bases by then, right?"
Yet another analogy could be the concept of Strong AI. From Wikipedia:
Are we just assuming that we have the knowledge to tackle the issues necessary to having regular space travel? Or are we so ignorant that we don't even know what stands in our way? Is everyone just trying to make the world of Cowboy Bebop / Outlaw Star / Star Trek / Star Wars happen in their lifetime?What I've figured out through reading more comments is that this is the fear scenario that the Slashdot crowd can envision all too well because we are the people with careers that involve the technology required to make this all work:
INSERT into citizen_activities (id, place, time) VALUES ("L520-AC38-F09C", "Transit Station 64C", NOW());
- The federal government is going to issue a federal ID card
- It is going to be absolutely mandatory for everyone to get one
- Because everyone is supposed to have one at all times, we will face strict penalties for not having in on you
That's not so bad IMHO, because in comparison, isn't it practically mandatory for everyone to have a driver's license these days? Yeah, sure, there are people that don't drive, but the 95% of us who do, pretty much have to carry it on us at all times. How is this any different and/or an invasion of civil liberties? I can understand "ZOMG they can plant a chip in it and find me at my favorite whorehouse/stripclub/_insert_shady_place_" but you can pretty much say that about anything.....So why is this such a big deal to everyone?
x86 has its market, the personal computer, but its legacy architecture should not be allowed to spread anywhere it has not already tainted. Remember Why Do We Use x86 CPUs? I thought x86 is something we want to eventually move away from (Remember VAX?), not something we want to spread.
I go to UC Berkeley, but the MO of universities is to assign a professor to a class that is either within his field of research or is a fundamental part of what he/she does at the school (i.e. physics profs. in math). Professors are there because they are intellectuals and researchers, usually not because they love to teach. Because they have such vast knowledge and probably aren't very good at discerning how much their students are absorbing, they write impossibly hard exams, simply because they can't understand anything more basic. As a result, the top grade might be 58%. But knowing 58% on a difficult test might require the same level of knowledge as it takes to get a 90% on a easy exam.
In everything up till high school it was pretty easy to go back to that 90-80-70 standard because all the material was so elementary teachers could easily make tests to place students in those categories. At universities, the material is so much more complex that it's pointless/impossible to write exams to those arbitrarily defined 90-80-70 categories. Think of an exam in which half of the points are based on knowledge of the fundamentals, and the rest is on complicated, hazy, trivial bits of knoweldge. In that case it's totally fine for a 58% to be an A since he understood (probably) most of the fundamentals and a few of the smaller facts.
BTW: Even the you are a reasonably talented individual, I doubt you'll get grades in the 70%-100% range your whole life....
Yes, it is pretty neat that they could power a conventional off-the-shelf lightbulb wirelessly, but this is nothing 100% radical and new. In freshman-level Electromagnetism in college my professor (Prof. George Smoot of Nobel 2006 fame) demonstrated exactly this - a standard light bulb with two antennas sticking out of it could be powered wirelessly by EM waves. Nothing special, and hardly any "sophisticated" technology - an A.C. power source with antennas and a lightbulb with antennas aligned with the power source antennas.
Jetway Magic Twin MiniQ Computer
One of our favorite things on slashdot! The obligatory "This isn't news, I've been doing it for X years!" post
If someone could elaborate on what ZFS is, I believe our discussion may prove to stay more on-topic.
In communist Russia, phones steal YOU!
I assume you speak of Richard Feynman, the physicist that played bongo drums at a strip club? The physisict who would ask girls at a bar if they would sleep with him before he even bought them a drink? The one who won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics on quantum electrodynamics? The professor at CalTech?
All this is from his autobiography, a good read for all of geekdom, though to the OP's point it does make us feel way smarter than we really are.
As a young EE/CS student at UC Berkeley, I started out last semester with SICP - the MIT Scheme book. Like the ideas the rest of you folk are promoting, we were taught high level concepts using Scheme, then we took the language to learn more computer-sciency ideas such as writing evaluators/interpreters and understanding serialization.
In regards to the "learn assembly and C first" comments, we learn C and Assembly in our third programming course in about a span of a month. Only a week and a half of C, and poof, you're expected to know it. They structure the progression Scheme -> Java -> C/Assembly/Logic gates because they want students to learn the general concepts/feel of writing code before going after the hard-to-read, older, procedural, strongly-typed stuff.
As a Berkeley computer-scientist-in-training, it was funny.
But it is kind of painful when you see those kids with their Google t-shirts that imply "Yeah, I worked at Google, got paid a small fortune, and know someone who can get me a job there when I graduate."
A friend told me his friend in Texas got a $45/hr internship at Google. I call BS, that's more than $90K in a year. For a college freshman? I think not...-1 offtopic
Anyways TFA said that the bank was running a bunch of different Linux distros. I would tend to think that running a bunch of different flavors of Linux would cause compatibility problems that raise their TCO...hence the reason why moving to Novell/MS would be cheaper.
Honestly. I'm a skeptic of religion because it proclaims that some invisible "being" is responsible for our world. There's no physical evidence to back that up (I don't want to start a debate here though, this is just my opinion). For the EXACT SAME REASON I feel like UFO's, extraterrestrials, ghosts, poltergeists, etc. are all not real. Nothing to really back it up. Am I the only skeptic or do people actually believe in this ish?
Honestly, I feel like I would be inclined to buy stuff still if I wasn't deathly afraid of getting slapped with a lawsuit. Because they're doing all these deplorable practices against some innocent people, they're losing me as a POTENTIAL customer.
Well I got hit by something similar. I downloaded a torrent of Green Street Hooligans, didn't even watch it. Recieved an email from the campus computer folk, told me that Universal informed them of my "copyright infringement", and if I delete the file immediately and tell them that I did so, nothing would happen, but if I did it again, I would lose my Internet connection.
I don't remember if they said what would happen if I didn't delete the file (which I did, I'm not going to stick my neck out for the principle of it) but I'm sure it would have been ugly. I wouldn't be surprised if the RIAA is doing this too - intercepting communications out of your friendly campus and then telling the campus to enforce their restrictions. Way to scare your customers. How do they stay in business?
Any other people get busted/almost-busted/pseudo-busted at their university?
As if I needed another reason to not buy a Dell.
Yes, I used to spend countless hours tweaking and overclocking my computer in order to get those extra FPS in CS Source and HL2. Now i just really don't care - I'm still 18, the "peak" age that everybody wants to market to, but I just lack the time or desire to pour hours on end into video games. School, life, and girls are more important to me now, and this videogaming thing has been slipping away.
I used to play 4 hours of video games a day back when I was a "hardcore gamer", it's just not worth it anymore. Has anybody else feel their killer instinct slip away?
I downloaded Green Street Hooligans through BitTorrent, Universal sent the campus computing people a notice that I had violated a copyright, campus computing people send me a notice to delete the file immediately, and if it happens again my Intarweb is banned till I leave the dorms.
I won't lie, I can sympathize with this, this is exactly what they're fighting, I just never knew you could actually get caught that easily. This all happened in a week of downloading the movie. And I never even watched it!
Really, the evidence for "dark matter" has been made through its effects - it bends light, and makes galaxies spin at a different rate than what we're currently observing. Scientists have inferred its existance from its effects. Not a really bad practice, but as the other posts around here indicate, we've got a long way to figuring out what the hell is really going on.