The official went on to say that he totally heard that the Justice department has a big basket of puppies waiting in the office to give to Julian [Assange] if he just drops by by next week.

There's several potential problems with renting out time on another university's cluster. For one there may simply be a lot of bureaucratic steps involved in renting out resources from another university. The second is that some cluster you don't own might not support your particular software/platform/project.

One attractive aspect of cloud services is the customer gets to load on whatever wonky configuration they want into a virtualized instance. Using someone else's cluster may not provide that sort of flexibility. Being able to load an EC2 instance with the same (or similar enough) configuration as your work laptop is a feature. Researchers aren't necessarily developers so the code/configuration they need to run may be very messy. A "cloud compute" service is more attractive in that case than a highly optimized HPC cluster.

A very real use case for this sort of set up is "man my laptop doesn't have the power to churn through all this data, let me upload my project as-is to Amazon and throw a few petaflops at it". I've seen a few people use AWS for things like rendering 3D scenes (Blender et al). It's a nice option to have a few teraflops at your disposal when you need them for a relatively low price.

Basically this article translates to "Amazon has a lot of computers and this guy rented out a bunch of them at once".

No the article translates to "if you've got embarrassingly parallel workloads you can use EC2 to churn through it without a massive infrastructure outlay of your own". Amazon isn't just renting out the actual CPUs but the power, HVAC, storage, and networking to go along with it. Infrastructure and maintenance is a huge cost of HPC and puts it out of reach for many smaller projects.

You're entirely correct that a massive Rpeak value isn't impressive in terms of actual purpose-built super computers but reporting of the Rpeak is only half of the story. The lede buried in the reporting is that for $33,000 a professor was able to take off the shelf software and run it on a 1.21 petaflop parallel cluster. That's high teraflop to petaflop computing at relatively small research grant prices. I think that's the interesting fact out of this story.

Browsers have been slowly becoming self-contained OSs for a decade now.

That's an overly narrow view. Yeah, if you're dealing with sensitive data then btsync probably isn't for you. But for making sure that you've got backups of your music, photos, etc it's by far and away the simplest and most headache-free backup system I've ever used. But frankly, if your data is that sensitive, you shouldn't be storing it on a 3rd party server anyway.

As for losing access to your data, there is no centralized server - it's all P2P. BtSync could get hit by an asteroid tomorrow and I'll still be able to get to my data just fine. Sync is purely a synchronization protocol. All your data is in the native directories on the respective machines. Encryption is something you have to handle seperately. (BT is planing integrated encrpytion in future Sync releases but I'm not sure I would trust a closed source security system for any data)

Also, there is an OSS effort to reverse engineer the Sync protocol and to release an open source client. When that comes out, I'll probably switch over but in the meantime, Sync is a great way to keep files backed up.

Bitorrent sync is a very simple way to go if you don't want to be too worried about backup administration. Just set up a read-only share for directories on the remote machine and put password protected encryption on the remote share.

That will give you at least some measure of protection from the remote server owner reading your files and they won't be able to nuke your local copies. Btsync is the most no-fuss, transparent backup solution I've used so far. I've got 4 personal machines that it's syncing right now and aside from a couple minor issues in earlier releases, it's been reliable, fast and has a minimal amount of administration you have to deal with.

...That's one rainbow world down, we'll be swimming in sweet, sweet Melnorme trade credits in no time now.

Nintendo's biggest weakness is clearly their complete distain and disregard for supporting online play. From tedious friend codes, to a lack of headset/mic support, to their stubborn insistence in going their own way with an online marketplace, their online/connectivity factor is woefully neglected and abused.

It's not so much disdain as it is compliance with the law. I wouldn't agree Nintendo's first party games are chilidish as many people exclaim but they do tend to be child friendly. This means that Nintendo has a large population of players under the age of 13. This is an important point because there's a lot of regulation around online services and children. Specifically the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act. The Wikipedia entry covers the major provisions of the law but it boils down to collecting just about any information from children under 13 is a really tricky situation.

Because of COPPA and other laws in the same vein more traditional online identities are not really practical if you intend the services to be used by children. With Friend Codes two players have to provide each with their personal code for each game. Ostensibly (and likely in the eyes of the law) these codes are not personally identifiable nor do they provide any sort of 1-to-1 correspondance to any particular person. It's just a code that corresponds to a particular game inserted into a particular console.

The lack of headphone support is likely largely informed by Nintendo's demographics as well. Instead of having to build all kinds of filtering or restrictions into a chat system they just don't bother including one. Since the multi-player focus of many Nintendo properties is for local split-screen play adding support for network voice chat is probably pretty low on the priority list.

I'll agree with you about their marketplace. It's not well thought out or at least the logic behind it is not obvious to anyone outside of the company. It's taken far too long to get any sort of parity between the Wii, Wii-U, and 3DS stores. The Virtual Console is the worst offender as there's no universal availability between devices for different titles. There's no reason an old NES game can't be played on a Wii and 3DS. If you've got a hacked console with an open source emulator you're in a better spot than going through the official channels.

I'll second that. You haven't known pain until you try to get Ultima 7 to run on a system with a Proaudio Spectrum 16 sound card.

I'm pretty sure the parent was being sarcastic, man.

We've sent a number of automated missions to Mars and we should send quite a few more. To paraphrase myself from another reply; we lose a Mars probe due to a conversion error and no one cars, we lose a single astronaut and the whole program is shuttered.

For the money it would take to develop the infrastructure to send that one good field geologist to Mars we could send many probes designed by good field geologists with all their important tools built-in. If the probes last beyond their initial missions they can continue on with secondary missions. Look at the Mars Exploration Rovers, Deep Space 1, or the Voyager probes for great examples of this.

Once a human's food or water runs out their mission ends. Growing/recycling food and water sounds great but is extremely complicated and something we're barely able to do in LEO aboard the ISS. The ECLSS system on the ISS breaks down with alarming regularity. It's a learning experience to be sure but it's something that would need to be perfected and then re-perfected for any manned mission outside of LEO where resupply is unavailable.

There's currently about a dozen active deep space missions including three Martian orbiters and two rovers. Robots can send back pretty pictures that make good magazine covers and desktop backgrounds (in addition to doing science) and they continue to get funding. There's also no sense of hurt national pride if one of them unceremoniously litho-brakes during a mission. Lose a Mars probe due to Imperial-Metric conversion error and no one bats an eye, lose some astronauts and everyone freaks out.

The principal investigator for the Mars rovers said that if he were on Mars he could do in 45 seconds what the rovers do in a day.

I think you're talking about Steve Squyers, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover missions. He's a really smart guy and he's not wrong in his statement you're quoting. To wit, Apollo 17 astronauts collected about 110kg of lunar rocks during 22 total hours of EVA and drove a grand total of 36km while the Spirit rover only drove about 3.6km and examined (but did not collect) about 25 rocks over the course of 8 months.

However you simply cannot use this data to imply that humans sent into space are magically more productive than robotic probes. A field geologist would need to do a day's worth of work in 45 seconds on Mars because they would die of asphyxiation in about three minutes. To prevent that they would need to carry around their own oxygen. To keep it from floating free it would need to be contained in some sort of mask. The freezing temperatures would then kill that geologist within a few hours so instead of a mask they would need a whole insulated airtight suit. To keep from dying of dehydration within three days they would need water. Now that they would survive the night they would need food or else they would be ineffectual in their explorations after a few days and dead of starvation within a few weeks.

From there it only gets worse. In order to do really interesting work the field geologist would need some tools, not the least of which is a camera and a transceiver to talk back with Earth about their findings. To do anything more complicated would likely require more complicated tools. To keep these out of the elements (dust storms, intense UV radiation, Martian attack, etc) the field geologist would likely need some sort of habitat.

So really the field geologist needs literally tons of logistics behind them to do the work of an automated probe. That's a lot of non-mission specific mass to send to Mars just to support the single capable field geologist. With the extra mass comes expense and added complexity of the whole system.

Why not skip the extra bullshit and send more automated probes to Mars that were designed by an army of field geologists? You could send a dozen such missions for the same cost as a single manned mission and end up covering every major geologic region of the planet. You could also fill up its orbit with a squadron of multispectral imaging satellites that could relay data as well as collect their own.

I understand the desire to plant a human being on Mars but at the same time the pragmatic part of me interested in the actual science would rather see a dozen automated missions sent first. Putting inanimate objects in space is Hard, putting living things in space and getting them home still alive in Very Hard, putting people on the surface of other bodies is Extremely Hard, and putting people on the surface of other bodies having them do useful work while there is a damn moonshot (pun intended). Getting them home from said body is a "nice to have" and a minor miracle when it occurs.

Humans can be more effective in some places than robots but they're not necessarily more efficient than robots. If you've got limited will/funds the robot is usually the better option.

FreeBSD hosts interesting work with respect to TCP congestion control. An earlier version (I think FreeBSD 8.0) introduced modular congestion control algorithms, and this version introduces CAIA Delay-Gradient (CDG) congestion control algorithm. The check in is here: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=252504, and an interesting (if slightly esoteric) slide deck is here: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/slides/slides-84-iccrg-2.pdf.

Marry me.