Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
As part of the announcement today of the Top500 list of supercomputers:
“When Sequoia is really firing on all cylinders, also sometime later this year, it will hit 20 petaflops per second. The way Livermore explains it, if every single person on earth worked nonstop on a calculator for an entire year, they could do the same number of calculations in 320 years that Sequoia cranks out in an hour.”
Via: Wired
Via: Wired
Wired’s interview this month with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is actually quite good, including two attitudes that I think could easily apply to studio practice and/or being an art student.
“Maintain a firm grasp of what’s obvious at all times”
and…
“‘It’s all about the long term.’ If everything you do needs to work on a three-year time horizon, then you’re competing against a lot of people. But if you’re willing to invest on a seven-year time horizon, you’re now competing against a fraction of those people, because very few companies are willing to do that. Just by lengthening the time horizon, you can engage in endeavors that you could never otherwise pursue… We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.”
Via: Wired, December 2011, pg 244
Rhett Allain at Wired has a great (and detailed) article about the real cost of data transfer per GB. He has created two ficticious users, Joe and Zelda; the former a “typical” user and the latter a “power” user. The above image is one of many graphs showing the costs per GB of various data plans.
By far my favorite, however, is looking at FedEx as a possible means of data transfer. Allain spells it out better than my summary could:
What if I wanted to transfer 2 TB of data (2048 GB) by shipping a 2 TB hard drive. What kind of data rate would this cost (per month)? Just to be crazy. First, I would have to buy a drive. Amazon has a 2 TB for $80 (shipping weight of 2 pounds). So, I would get this drive and I would transfer my data. How long would this take? If I can get a data transfer rate of 500 MBps, that would be around 1 hour. I think that is crazy (but what do I know?). Let me say it takes 5 hours to get my data on the drive.
Next, I need to ship it. Suppose I want to send it from New York to L.A. FedEX lists a 2 pound package delivered overnight as $103.69. It says delivery by 8:00 AM (I guess that is Pacific Time). Also, not sure about when I can drop it off. Let me just say that the total transit (from door to door) is about 12 hours.
What is the price per GB? Simple, 2048 GB divided by the cost of $183.69 gives $11 per GB $0.09 per GB (thanks @perry!). What kind of data speed would this be? Looks like about 48 MBps.
Fantastic.
Perhaps it’s because we’re in the middle of the BBC “Planets” series, perhaps because we just crossed Nevada, but this from Wired.com caught my eye:
The images below show Apollo 17 crew members on a 1972 geology field trip to south-central Nevada near the Pancake Range. Astronauts Eugene Cernan… and Harrison Schmitt wear backpacks and chest-mounted cameras as they would on the moon. The crater in the… photo is Lunar Crater, a 600-foot deep volcanic crater five-eights of a mile in diameter.
It looks like Mad Men meets sci fi and strangely believable.
Via: Wired article The Incredible Things NASA Did to Train Apollo Astronauts
