Please create an account to participate in the Slashdot moderation system

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I know what those keys are for. Especially because I write daily in German, Portuguese, Spanish and occasionally in a couple of other languages, besides English.

And you know why the apple ones were created, and why they didn't use the already existing modifiers, right? And then why microsoft made those, as well. You can find it on the web.

You might not like the symbol (on the alt case, but never mind - the new keyboards call it alt now). I like the cmd symbol, which is the symbol for touristic landmarks in nordic countries.

Oh, and I am hardly a kid anymore.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I have had notebooks before that. They had mice and trackpads. Look at this one from hp, idiot:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/wpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/HP-omnibook-300-pop-out-mouse.jpg

I had those pop-out trackballs, some with the trackball over the keyboard, and even with trackballs right next to the screen. So the "magical palm rest" might be a necessity, but no one did it before.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

I have in my lenovo three indiscernible hieroglyphs: one that turns out to be the old-generation of the windows logo, one that engages the right click on the mouse (why?), and one called Alt-Gr. It seems that Microsoft took what was bad, made it worse and it is now a standard. Never mind the rest of incomprehensible bullshit I have on this keyboard, like "fn" in blue, but also the whole enter key in blue. Or keys for page back and page forth, right next to the up arrow. Or....

Nah, I am fine with the alt key looking like an alternative line.

Comment Re:another design cue from apple? (Score 1) 408

No. Before, notebooks had the keyboard farther from the screen, touching the device's borders. Apple came with the idea of a palm rest, AFAIR.

Some even had printers after the keyboard, like this one:

http://cdn.ttgtmedia.com/rms/computerweekly/photogalleries/233641/194_20_dan-darcys-1993-canon-bj-notebook-bn22.jpg

Cloud

Ask Slashdot: Scientific Computing Workflow For the Cloud? 80

diab0lic writes "I have recently come into the situation where I need to run cloud computing on demand for my research. Amazon's EC2 Spot Instances are an ideal platform for this as I can requisition an appropriate instance for the given experiment {high cpu, high memory, GPU instance} depending on its needs. However I currently spin up the instance manually, set it up, run the experiment, and then terminate manually. This gets tedious monitoring experiments for completion, and I incur unnecessary costs if a job finishes while I'm sleeping, for example. The whole thing really should be automated. I'm looking for a workflow somewhat similar to this:
  1. Manually create Amazon machine image (AMI) for experiment.
  2. Issue command to start AMI on specified spot instance type.
  3. Automatically connect EBS to instance for result storage.
  4. Automatically run specified experiment, bonus if this can be parameterized.
  5. Have AMI automatically terminate itself upon experiment completion.

Something like docker that spun up on-demand spot instances of a specified type for each run and terminated said instance at run completion would be absolutely perfect. I also know HTCondor can back onto EC2 spot instances but I haven't really been able to find any concise information on how to set up a personal cloud — I also think this is slight overkill. Do any other Slashdot users have similar problems? How did you solve it? What is your workflow? Thanks!"

Comment Re:Not Surprising for HP (Score 1) 57

That. And everything else.

American cars are ugly, spend too much fuel, can't withstand bad roads, are too slow and steer too badly to be driven fast as well, and their quality sucks in general. That's why GM has a whole design/engineering team in Germany, to sell cars to the rest of the world.

Too bad that when the japanese started taking over the american market, their cars started to suffer from the same effects: too big, too shabby, too slow, too soft.

Comment Re:Barrier? (Score 1) 96

It's just speech. It's a milestone. It's not difficult to exceed one exaflops (the name stands for operations per second, it's not a plural) once you got to, say, 0.99 exaflops. Scientists like to talk in orders of magnitude. Right now we are in the tens of petaflops, but didn't get yet to hundreds. Tiahne-2 gets to 55 pflops, but its sustained speed is a bit bigger than half of that.

Problem is much more about how to get there. It's not just machinery. Is how to actually write and debug programs at that scale. As we cannot make the cores much faster than what we have today, the solution is to add more cores.

The added cores increase the stress on the network, and makes programming such thing much more difficult. Good luck debugging a race condition on one million processes.

Other problems arise from things as mundane as equipment breaking. Think that if you have a single broken memory chip during the execution of a program, the whole computation is either compromised or just lost. And with millions of cores, comes millions of motherboards, power supplies, I/O system, storage, all kinds of electronic components which are subject to problems.

So, while technically, it's not a barrier per se, this huge number of variables that makes things exponentially more complex than what we have today is indeed a barrier. As someone asked here, we cannot just make a cluster of tianhe-2s. The thing would be breaking all the time, spending so much electricity and manpower for maintenance that its uptime would be smaller than a windows 98 unpatched machine connected to an open network.

Slashdot Top Deals

If you think the system is working, ask someone who's waiting for a prompt.

Working...