I don't really understand what the fuck that link is supposed to prove other than you have been published. So what? I have been published before as well. Does being published mean you know what you are talking about? Nope. Logic flows from evidence and rational argument, and I see no evidence nor rational argument in your post.

Wait to make the problem impossible due to arbitrary and unrealistic expectations. Approximately 1.5 AMD servers will have the same computing power and cost about the same, except they will have more memory and throughput. Power consumption is a different issue, but then I digress.

I suspect what you mean is that I am a demon because I sided with Teh 3vil |31g |3r0th3r. Technology != evil. Its how its applied that matters. There are legitimate uses for such technology, such as identifying a person who is trying to enter their home, or a person who is trying to access their bank account, or even to identify a person known to make bombs and blow people up who try to board airplanes. Its not necessary to be a luddite to avoid abuses of technology. Fix the system rather than oppress scientific development and innovation. You can band together with like minded people and force laws into existence that protect you from abuse, or you can just stop being apathetic and never allow such abusive laws to pass.

The only reason I suspect its easier is that its easier to convince an admin in control of budget later that "HOLY SHIT! We don't have enough money in our budget to pay for the power our servers need to continue to operate and if we lose the servers we won't attract massive research grants!!! LOL" than, "Hey, why don't we try to spend more and get a higher performance and lower power consumption per CPU?" Of course there are other problems, such as the fact that it looks better when you purchase X number of nodes at Y performance for less than P number of nodes at Y performance when you leave power consumption out and X>P. The University system is just as rife with politics and bureaucratic nonsense as any other place, probably even worse actually.

I worked in Face Recognition as a research assistant for my MS. I was part of a group designing a robust end-to-end system for the purposes of identifying people in a wide variety of conditions. This problem seems easier because you can assume that the cars will be in one location within one time frame, the camera is fixed and everything in your data set will cross this line unless they break down, they will have almost identical 3D structure (unlike the face), and you can expect some identifying marks on the front end that crosses the finish line. As long as you have some sort of identifying marks, you can use standard face/object recognition techniques to identify the vehicle. There are some pretty advanced algorithms out there. The best out there when I was actively working in face recognition was STASM and Pittpatt. Better yet, if you had some unique identifier expected at some part of the vehicle, you can easily make the problem much easier. For example, have each one use an infrared identification tag located in precisely the same spot relative to the build of the vehicle.

Thats a tough one to find a citation for. Essentially, at the three universities I have worked and two of them I have collaborated with they had between 6/10 and 8/10 clusters running AMD processors. Some had NVidia clusters as well. Some had ones running Intel but they were older systems or were in use by departments other than Math/CS. This evidence may be anecdotal, but two of the universities are larger ones with large research budgets. Exclusive was a bit of a exaggeration in hind sight.

Yes, as I said, its cheaper. I did not mention performance per node but I did in a later post.

by cost-effective computer I meant cluster! Also, I would like to add I had high hopes for the bulldozer, so it was disappointing it was all marketing hype.

When you can save 8000 per server then invest it in something else it becomes a different issue. I am not trying to say AMD processors are superior, I am just saying factoring in all costs including power and and the lifespan of the unit, AMD wins a lot of the time. Every computer cluster at every University I have ever had access to used AMD processors (with the exception of some NVidia units), and this was for their CS departments. I suspect part of the issue is its easier to justify power budgets and not as easy to justify 8000 more per server to upper admins. Figuring you could buy 1.5 AMD servers for the price of 1 Intel server you end up with a more cost effective computer as far as total CPU performance and RAM capacity goes. Power consumption is not one of AMD's strong suits, and I remember one of our server admins told me the power bill once for the main cluster, it was sickening. I vaguely remember it being in the hundreds of thousands per year. It saddens me that AMD is in this situation, but I seem to remember a time where Intel was pulling some pretty anti-competitive moves, though AMD should have capitalized on its successes in the past. I seem to remember, at least for the desktop environment, the Athlon XP's had better gaming performance. I suppose thats a small market, however even that was an opportunity that could have been exploited better.

Fair enough. Yes, "The more comments the better" is a bad thing to say. "The more strategic comments the better" perhaps. I only meant that code should have appropriate commenting, not have absolutely no comments at all. It doesn't have to explain basic math or logic operations, but a sufficiently long math equation should have some explanation of what it is doing. For example, in matlab (x'Ax)/(x'x) should probably be commented as "Rayleigh Quotient" or something. At work I use C# for a trading platform and we hardly ever do any math statements that are complicated enough to need comments, but it does come up every once in awhile. Usually we just comment pretty much like you said.

AMD servers are way cheaper, and there are no performance issues most admins can't handle. What do you mean by performance? If you mean slower, then yes, but if you mean reliability than they are about the same. Why else do Universities almost exclusively use AMD processors in their clusters for cutting edge research? I can see your point if you are only buying 1-3 servers but you start saving shitloads of money when its a server farm.

Agreed. I am a PhD mathematics student and I can attest its extremely difficult to understand equations without context and written explanation. Im also a programmer (for my job) and I write my code to be very readable with proper formatting and self-explanatory variables/classes (as much as they can be), however even when I look at my OWN code from the distant past I need comments to sort out the macro-structure of it as well as to explain a complicated line quickly. If you don't remember what some class or function does, its easier to comment that line to briefly explain it rather than have to go look through everything and find it then logically deconstruct it to figure out what it does. Its just bad practice to not comment your code. The more comments the better, and also the more readable it is to other people that may have to use your code in the future. I have had too many times where I get code that takes twice as long to understand what it is doing just because the author didn't comment.

You assume thats what every person wants to do. Some people wanted to use their home equity for retirement. This is not that unreasonable nor irresponsible. Sell you home, downgrade to a cheap condo or rent an apt. use the rest as part of retirement. I met a lady on a cruise before the housing bubble burst that sold her home, used that with her retirement fund (which she said wasn't a lot) to finance an all expense paid cruise for the remaining 10 years of her life. Or what about people that require a nursing home? They could sell their house and retire to a good one, now they are stuck with free or cheap options. Ever been to a cheap nursing home? Nice come-back though.

A musician does not always make money off concerts. I for example work with people over the internet and compose music. I am not selling a song for .02, that is ludicrous, especially since both of you ignore the fact that a portion of this goes to the distributor. Its more than fair to pay .50 cents to a 1 dollar a song if it has no DRM. 0.02 per song is wishful thinking by freeloaders.

Because the big 3 cell phone companies want to monopolize the market. Anyone that isn't an idiot would see that the US government is in cahoots with large corporations such as these, and is actively trying to secure their profits with legislation at the expense of the people. These Wallstreet occupiers are a bunch of idiots, as the problem isn't that its wrong to work on Wallstreet, or its wrong to be a banker, or its wrong to be rich. What is wrong is that the laws allow corporations and a few bad apple wealthy people to legally bribe politicians into doing what they want rather than what the people wants. This is why we have draconian copyright laws, as well as legalized monopolies all over the place. Corporations should be completely banned from being able to contribute to political campaigns at all, even through secondary non-profit organizations or PAC's. Corporations should NOT be considered people and should have no rights as such. There also should be laws against big media from promoting any one candidate or black-listing them like they do Ron Paul (not that hes a great candidate, its just stupid that media can silence someone at a whim to promote the status quo).