Note well that historically, MOST parallel computers have profited the MOST from parallelizing totally linear tasks. Not the tasks themselves -- embarrassingly parallel tasks, simply running many instances of completely independent code or many instances of code that is extremely coarse grained so that one can run almost all of the task as linear code with only infrequent communications with a "central" controller. Classic examples are plain old multitasking of the operating system with code that doesn't make heavy use of bottlenecked resources (the reason most users see some small benefit from e.g. quad core vs single core processors, as there is enough often enough work being done to keep 3-4 cores busy at least some of the time without much blocking, and this keeps the processor itself from thrashing by providing the illusion of parallelism through multitasking with time slices. It works best if the cores have independent caches and contexts and if there is sufficient task affinity. Also, classic "master-slave" parallel computing, where e.g. a Monte Carlo computation might spawn N slaves, each one with its own random number generator seed, and run N "independent" samplings of some process that are only infrequently aggregated back to the master. Again, the characteristic is lots of nearly independent serial computation with only short, infrequent, non-blocking, non-synchronous communications back to some collection point. Two programs that often were used to demonstrate the awesome advantages of scaling at the limits of Amdahl's law were parallel povray (rendering can be broken up into nearly independent subtasks in master-slave) and a parallel Mandlebrot set generator/displayer (where each point has to be tested independently, so whole subsets of the relevant parts of the complex plane could be distributed to different processors and independently computed, with the master collecting and displaying the results.

Sadly (well, not really:-) modern processors are so damn fast you can get to the accessible bottom of the Mandlebrot set with almost no perceptible delay from rubber banding even with a single core, so the latter isn't so dramatic, but the point remains -- quite a lot of work that can be done with multiple cores (arguably MOST of the work that can efficiently and easily be done with multiple cores) is trivial parallelism, not parallel programming. Instance 1 is the richest source of advantage for a parallel system, and tasks that will scale out to 1000 cores are almost certainly ONLY going to be trivially/embarrassingly parallel tasks because Amdahl's law and the complexity of unblocking communications between subtasks is a royal bitch at 1000 processors no matter how you architect things. SETI at home, maybe. Solving a system of partial differential equations on a volume with long range interactions not so much.

The fundamental problem with 2 and 3 is that they have to be hand coded. Really pretty much period. Sure, you can get away with getting some advantage from using e.g. a parallel linear algebra program as a link step in a program that can run on serial resources, but typically the gains you can get are limited and will not scale well, certainly not to anywhere near 1000 cores, even for case 2. To use 1000 cores for a tightly coupled parallel computation where every core talks to every other core per step of the computation -- well, that just isn't going to happen without an incredible (literally) boost in interprocessor communication speed, reduction in communication latency, elimination of resource blocking at both the hardware and kernel level. The problem at some point becomes NP complete (I suspect, of course pending the issue of whether P = NP etc) and simply working out ways for the communications to proceed in a self-avoiding pattern to eliminate collisions or delays due to asynchronicity is itself a "hard problem", forget the problem you're actually trying to solve.

So I'm largely with Linux on this one. Advantages to parallelism at the OPERATING SYSTEM level probably saturate in almost all contexts long before one can put 1000 cores to use. Even if you provision every core with its own L1, its own L2, its own L3, even if you have unprecedented mastery at the hardware level of locking in parallel pathways to main memory, you have some serious hardware limitations and economic tradeoffs to consider. Here is a nice little article outlining some of the tradeoffs between comparatively expensive L1 and less expensive L2:

http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

I can believe that 64 cores can still be manipulated in ways that are beneficial, in server environments where there are likely to be 64 semi-independent threads (that only rarely seek to access shared blocking resources) that can be kept on-chip and in both chip context and and cache. 128 cores I start to get to be very skeptical. By 1024 cores, there just isn't going to be MUCH benefit except for a tiny fraction of the work people might buy CPUs to do, and the effort of writing sufficiently efficient code to put all those cores to work is itself a daunting, expensive thing to consider.

rgb

Agreed that "greenies" aren't the only ones making billions off of CO2 hysteria -- see the Koch brothers in the article below:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

but there are lots of people seeking to make money in the carbon and carbon trading game, and IIRC Gore is indeed one of them. A description of the billions at play already can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

where the number given is "60 billion dollars" which certainly counts as "billions" in any marketplace where people make a margin on all trades. The bulk of the people making money of of CO2 hysteria are, however, not Greenpeace volunteers or the like -- they are the same extremely wealthy individuals and companies who both "run civilization" and incidentally own the big energy companies worldwide. If you looked at where directly invested money intended to combat CO_2 goes (e.g. research money) a substantial fraction goes directly to the energy industry in the form of research grants, another substantial fraction goes to the energy industry in the form of subsidies. But the real payoff for the big carbon-based energy companies is, paradoxically, in the artificial inflation of carbon based energy costs to the consumer. Again, power companies make marginal profits, generally at what amounts to a fixed (publicly regulated) margin. The only way for them to increase profits at fixed production is to raise prices. The only way to raise prices in a world where coal is plentiful and cheap is to create an artificial scarcity, which has the added benefit of stretching out the lifetime of profitability of the resource to the owner. I would argue -- although it is difficult to put specific numbers to this since it is difficult to see just what fraction of the cost of a kilowatt-hour is directly attributable to the global warming hysteria, and because the media is strangely reluctant to follow the money (perhaps because they are predominantly owned by the same wealthy people, perhaps because they profit from things that rouse strong feelings, like an impending global catastrophe) -- that the increased marginal profits to the global energy industry due to catastrophe-driven price increases dwarfs all other money being made in association with the hysteria and is the great invisible elephant in the debate.

As Br'er Rabbit once said, "Don't through me into that briar patch, oh please no no no..."

I am, however, curious as to why you'd ask for citations and then refer to the billions being made off of "denying" climate change by (specifically) two large oil companies. Surely you understand that oil companies are nearly irrelevant to global warming, a small fraction (around 13%) of greenhouse emissions relative to coal fired electrical plants, industrial energy production, etc:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

and

http://www.epa.gov/climatechan...

The oil companies are perfectly happy to skim billions off of the artificial renewables industry that has been created by the hysteria, and until this year have been both investing and making billions from it. But the bottom has apparently fallen out of this:

http://www.eenews.net/stories/...

very likely driven by the increased supply of oil and gasoline that is reflected in oil prices dropping by nearly 1/3 this year. They are suffering far more from a SURPLUS of oil that leads to low prices and hence a serious hit on their profits than they ever suffered from global warming hysteria in a world where demand is nearly copmletely inelastic and generally growing. It also appears that the profitability of sustainables is taking a (in my opinion) well-deserved hit as it becomes clearer that a number of the technologies are simply not ready for prime time and can be broadly implemented only with a substantial subsidy.

Following the money is a very good idea, actually -- quite independent of what you think about global warming and whether or not a total climate sensitivity under (possibly well under) 2 C is likely to lead to catastrophe, especially a futures catastrophe relative to the ongoing right-now catastrophe of misdirected economic resources in a world where 1/3 of the population live in a state of 18th century abject energy poverty around the globe.

Personally, after "Follow the money" I echo most the sentiments "Do the math" put down above. Planting trees is not the answer. However, the EPA does rank "Land Use Change and Forestry" at 17% and "Agriculture" at 14% higher than transportation at 13%, so perhaps there are greater absolute reductions in CO_2 production to be reaped in altering the ways we interact with the biosphere than there are in picking on Exxon, much as it is the company everybody loves to hate except when they are filling their car.

In a few years, solar technology, energy storage technology, and possibly energy transportation technology will have all improved to the point where trying to armtwist their adoption is no longer necessary -- the key parameters are the amortization schedule on the investment (which is still too long in most locations), the fact that without cheap and energy-density efficient storage OR a globe-spanning energy transportation network that can reach from the sunlit tropics to the sun-poor arctic circle, solar is never going to replace fuel-based energy production where I'm deliberately non-specific about what fuel -- nuclear fission, nuclear fusion (if Lockheed-Martin is correct in their assertion that they've got fusion licked and will go commercial within five years), or coal, and reliability (no point in investing if the cells are poorly made and fail at a rate that eats ROI post amortization). Trying to force adoption of an immature technology by fiat is both unlikely to work and actively counterproductive as it encourages profiteering on the subsidies and passes artificially high prices back to consumers where JUST WAITING for the technology to mature will eventually make it a no-brainer that is adopted as fast as companies can adopt it not because it is "green" but because THEY MAKE THE MOST MONEY that way.

In many places, solar is right on that margin already. I could probably put rooftop solar on my own house (in North Carolina) and recover my amortized investment in around 15 years, a time that (again, paradoxically) is stretched out by the fact that I already have super insulation, energy efficient windows, high efficiency heaters and AC so that the dollar cost of electricity per month is barely sufficient to pay for the money needed to install the system. I'd be a lot happier if I could drop the initial investment by a factor of two, cut my amortization time down to 5-10 years at most, and have a lot more assurance that the solar cells used are going to be warranted reliable for 20 years or more with minimal maintenance. Regardless, inside 10 to 20 years the threshold is going to be passed that makes this a no-brainer pretty much everywhere in the lower temperate through the tropical zones, and this would have been the case even if nobody even hypothesized a CO2-climate connection. Power companies, of course, can get better economies of scale, and Duke power is installing solar grids all over the state already and it will be interesting to see if they cut the rooftop solar market off at the knees.

That's the last thing worth pointing out. Economies are complex entities. An investment that would have been solidly profitable back when my house was energy inefficient and energy costs were high is unprofitable if either energy costs drop or I increase the energy efficiency of the house. If Lockheed-Martin DOES have fusion licked -- and they aren't the kind of company to make egregious public claims as they'll be punished in the marketplace if they do and they don't pan out -- then every single cent invested in renewable energy production due to CO_2 hysteria is going to be a dead loss waste of time, a trillion dollar global hit on the economy, even as everybody benefits enormously in the long run. If we FAIL to develop an economically viable truly global carbon-free energy grid, be it based on PV solar, LFTR, fusion, whatever, then if the Bern model for CO_2 is correct, there is no foreseeable point in the future where we will not be adding more CO_2 to the atmosphere based on current technologies or models. RCP8.5 is probably unlikely and always has been, and RCP4.5 or RCP6.5 are likely to lead to at most around 2 C warming by the late 21st century given the observation that a total climate sensitivity of around 1.8 C best fits HadCRUT4 from 1850 to the present. But there are huge, nay, absolutely enormous uncertainties, and markets hate uncertainties. These are real risks, and have real impacts on real lives.

Even if in the long run, fusion is an enormous blessing and kicks us into a type 2 civilization likely enough to last more than a few hundred more years, it could have a devastating effect on the global economy in the short run. The same is true of many other enabling or critical technologies. Led lights are great, but insanely expensive. If their cost dropped to $1 per 100 watt equivalent bulb, if one could build LED based lights as bright as existing streetlights, it would change everything -- my household energy footprint would go down by another 1/3 (making it even harder to amortize solar, incidentally), humanity could stop pissing away carbon by the ton lighting the night even when there are no humans present to see or use the light. Super batteries would change everything, where by super battery I mean something with energy storage density comparable to gasoline or coal, reversible, inexpensive, no memory effect, easily manufactured or remanufactured. We are getting remarkably close to this already -- IIRC within a factor of 10, working on within a factor of 3. Give me a thousand dollar pile that fits in a cubic meter of my back yard and can hold and deliver 100+ kW-hours and solar is instant no-brainer, not just for me but for nearly everybody. A solar cell that costs $0.25/watt installed and that will last for 50 years. High (enough) temperature superconductors. Affordable electronics smart enough to turn on lights in your house and heat your house and cool your house to the precise extent that you actually use the light, the heat, the cool air. In the long run, MANY of these technologies are likely to mature. If they are allowed to mature at their own pace, the economy will probably bend around them without breaking, and any of them will have a large impact on at least some of the carbon dioxide production worldwide.

rgb

Bigger Bigger example, push the red button in a nuclear power plant, yes the control rods will react, but if you don't cool the heat from radiactive decay away, you will get a Fukushima.

During WWII, the major target of bombing runs was the infrastructure used to make the weapons. That means blast furnaces were damaged far more than they were by these hackers. It ditto the electricity generation infrastructure - which was coal fired power plants at the time. They were all rebuilt.

Next time it will be the nuclear power plants, which are effectively nuclear bombs with a big red target painted on the top. Had Europe been using nuclear power plants during WWII there would be places in it still uninhabitable now.

But we have the best democracy you can fine anywhere.

Grammar nazi here. You wrote "fine", an adjective. A "fine anywhere" isn't a thing. You wanted the verb "buy".

and then writing science fiction. I don't even disbelieve what they say, it's just being said without any sort of consideration of either the cost or the benefit. Hey, I can write novels about mining the asteroid belt, extracting He3 from moon rock for fusion fuel, building orbital space cities, and settling the moon too, except that Heinlein and many others already did most of this, and all of their novels presuppose some method of getting around that doesn't cost a gazillion dollars and thousands of megajoules per kilogram moved. With that kind of cost, why hire crack smokers to write SF? There is a lot of work a lot closer to home that is ALREADY too expensive for the benefit.

In the meantime, time to write another SF novel: "The Floating Cities of Venus". Yeah, got a nice ring to it.

rgb

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.

Obviously, it would be crazy to staff such critical projects largely with a handful of unpaid volunteers working in their spare time.

The people who do this have a number of reasons. Some do it open source software garners job offers. Some do it because they or the businesses they work for need free software to exist, and it's a self perpetuating loop - the more free software there is the more people contribute to it, so the more they have to chose from. For some it's like attending church - it feels right. For some it's a nice social group to be in. None of these reasons means they or the system they contribute to are crazy.

As for the free loaders - without legions of these "free loaders" free software would not exist. Few would bother to put the effort into Linux, or X, or Debian if there weren't legions of users out there to test it, and give feedback, find bugs, suggest improvements. They are a necessary part of the system. A system that for all its faults, works as least as well as any other commercial way of developing software if you go by deployments.

It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.

And double time on Sundays.

Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.

Mod parent up.

"HTTPS Everywhere" is security theater. Most stuff doesn't need to be encrypted. Worse, as the parent post points out, it causes the creation of security holes. This weakens security for the few things that need to be encrypted.

We don't need "value added services" in the middle of the network. Not for secure content, anyway. Perhaps some content should be signed, but not encrypted, so it can be cached, but not modified. Cloudflare, which decrypts everything that goes through it, is a huge security hole.

You're probably right. Although I've had a standard transmission car go through 100% of its clutch plate and they are not cheap to replace. But what is? And how many cars have standard transmissions any more? And of those, how many go through a whole clutch plate before they die from some other cause. Toyota's magnetic regenerative braking system suggests that one "can" mass produce the requisite magnetic coupling, but there probably isn't a compelling reason to do it in this case.

The other point being that it could be designed only to replace the kinetic friction parts of a transmission, the parts that synchronize the system. The gearing itself can probably still be mechanical. Not having to replace clutch plates, for example, might be a nice and relatively easily doable thing.