noedig

This is exactly the reason. Academia is a business just like any other. Academics do what they are incentivized to do. I guarantee that if NSF, DOE, NIH and the other US government funding agencies made publishing your code a requirement for funding, and actually checked that you did, you would see everyone start doing it immediately. Right now NSF requires a "data management plan" as part of the proposal, which includes information about sharing, reusing and archiving data and code, but nobody ever checks that you followed the plan after the money is awarded.

Yes. I currently work in academic CS and my group regularly writes papers in LaTeX, Word, and Google Docs.

#1 is the reason I abandoned Fedora too. Things change so quickly and break so often that it was too much effort to maintain the machines I was using it on. I replaced it with CentOS.

I agree with your sentiments about Java. I wish I could just have my GOPATH contain 1) the source directory for my project, and 2) one or more directories with versioned Go source tarballs for my dependencies (gar files?).

If the goal is to fix Go package management, then I seriously doubt that using anything from Python as inspiration is going to be helpful

This captures exactly the reason I am thinking about leaving academia. I got into research because I like doing research, but you can't have a career in research anymore. After completing a PhD, the only way to have a career is to spend all your time writing grant proposals, attending workshops, organizing meetings, cultivating useless collaborations, and promoting yourself. There is no time left for research, and teaching becomes a burden to avoid at all cost. You have to get PhD students and postdocs to do all the work, and take as much credit for their ideas and efforts as you can. Academia has become a dead-end job for people who want to do research.

I wonder if we will need to have a license to operate a self-driving car. Certainly we will need a driver's license in the short-term, but after some time when people trust that self-driving cars work, will we decide that it is no longer necessary for the person using the car to know how to drive? If so, then that seems like it would open up a pretty anonymous way to travel. Of course, the vehicle will probably be licensed, but if you rent it from a company, then they company will know who is using the car, but the government will not. Will the government require rental companies to check ID's and provide them with the information? Maybe, but they already do that, and the government would need a warrant to get the information.

I was thinking the same thing. When is something just a library, and when is it something more? Think about concurrency in Go. Goroutines are cool, but what makes them more than just a cooperative threading library? Channels? Those are just concurrent data structures. The special sauce in Go is the select structure. It allows you to easily express control flow that cannot be expressed without select (or at least not easily). What is the special sauce in these probabilistic programming languages? What could not be implemented using a library?

That's cool, but I wish they had spent the time making Google Maps usable again.

This is a good site to visit if you have these kinds of data transfer issues: http://fasterdata.es.net

"Defense attorney Joshua Insley still believes that police used a stingray to find Taylor. He cited a letter in which prosecutors said they were prohibited by the Department of Justice from disclosing information about methods used in their investigation.

The portable device was developed for the military to help zero in on cellphones. It mimics a cellphone tower to force nearby phones to connect to it.

Records shows that the Baltimore Police Department purchased a stingray for $133,000 in 2009."

ESNet has a good website for high-performance data transfers: http://fasterdata.es.net

In addition to host and network tuning guides they also have a list of data transfer tools, including HPN-patched sftp and scp, but they recommend GridFTP because it supports parallel streams: http://fasterdata.es.net/data-transfer-tools/gridftp/

The head of HP Labs explained this in his talk. He said it is called "the machine" because 1) they are researchers, not marketing people, and 2) they started thinking of it as not just another server, but a whole new architecture that scales from phones to data centers (as in, THE machine, the only one you need).

I think HP has a bigger vision here. They aren't looking to build a new car, only this car has electric batteries, they want to build a plane. They announced two OS projects: a modified version of Linux that runs on this new machine, and an entirely new operating system based on fundamentally different assumptions. They only care about Linux as a stopgap, because it allows people to start using this machine while they come up with something better.

Memristors are new technology considering that you can't buy a computer that uses memristors yet.

I think it is more of a dig on academic operating systems research, which some say hasn't made any major breakthroughs since the 1980's, possibly because we have been stuck on the same architecture for so long.

IMO, the focus on Windows vs UNIX/Linux or HP vs MS is really missing the point though. If you build a computer as they are suggesting, using non-volatile memory without a deep memory hierarchy, and with an optical interconnect that enables low-latency memory access across a datacenter, then that changes a huge number of the assumptions that led to the operating systems we have now. In order to really take advantage of such a machine, you really need to invent new operating systems. You can hack Linux to run on it, which is what they said they are doing, but you will lose some of the benefits of the hardware because the architecture assumptions are baked into the fundamental design of existing OSes. File systems are one example that is easy to think about. Virtual memory. But consider anything that an OS does and how this new architecture changes it. Consider loading executables to start a process, for example. If there is no difference between memory and disk, then you don't even need to load executables into memory. All files would be memory-mapped in some huge global address space. Programs could jump from memory in one machine to a whole different machine (VM migration? HA?). It really changes everything. We would need new R&D, some of it very fundamental, in order to understand and build systems to take full advantage of such technology. That's all HP is saying in this announcement.

Memristor's aren't the only interesting thing--they also said it would use new optical interconnect techology, which would contribute much of the speed and energy efficiency improvements.

I saw something like this the other day at a stop sign. Normally there is a lot of traffic going through this stop sign at rush hour, but it doesn't get backed up. The other day there was a police car sitting near the stop sign. It caused a huge backup that stretched for several blocks. Turns out people were being extra careful to come to a complete stop for a few seconds because of the police car, and that caused the line to move more slowly than normal.

When I worked at AT&T some years ago they had an entire team of about 50 developers and testers working on identifying problems in AT&T's myriad billing and provisioning systems. This team developed applications that analysts used to reconcile billing with account features, usage, taxes, discounts, etc. This team was very successful in finding both under billings and over billings. One project identified something like $100M in annual under billings. Another project found so many switch/bill mismatches that they just decided to cancel it because they didn't have the manpower to manually correct all the problems or deal with all the customers calling to complain that their bill went up or their feature disappeared.