Everybody seems to know about everything
June 16th, 2009 | Published in Blog
Wow. I was surfing through some facebook groups and comments. It is interesting to see that a lot of people seem to know quite a lot of stuff, whether philosophy, sciences, arts, humanity, life and relationships. You see one comment, you see 100 refutes. Even if I start a topic on “systematic dicotyledonous demarcation of UTP based connections”, or “sodomization of unidentified 256-bit encapsulated packets over authenticated network zone in 802.11 multinomial multihomed environment”.
The pressure to impress is tremendously HUGE these days.
Like when I was playing basketball with Aidan and Patrick, we wanted to show what we’ve got. We got tapao-ed by noobs, missing easy points and shooting long range like Shaq O Neal!
In pool, everybody wants to BEAT Melvyn. Whatever it takes, whatever concentration levels that is required (that will cause us to go crazy), we still play at our highest level. In a Pippo v Patrick game, the competitive level goes down. Miss simple shots, make crazy shots. The victor will just say, ‘oh, yeah… [smiles]“. But if you beat Melvyn in a race to 5 game, you go do the dance, you treat your friends to shots of your favourite Vodka or JD, make the DJ play poker face on repeat, fist pump and twit about it~!
The human mind is the hardest to decipher. The f
Here are the fastest supercomputers in the world. A new list will be drawn for June 2009. Expect the charts to be shifted when performance across the top 10 increases over 10% every 6 months!
TOP 10 Systems – 11/2008
1 Roadrunner – BladeCenter QS22/LS21 Cluster, PowerXCell 8i 3.2 Ghz / Opteron DC 1.8 GHz , Voltaire Infiniband
2 Jaguar – Cray XT5 QC 2.3 GHz
3 Pleiades – SGI Altix ICE 8200EX, Xeon QC 3.0/2.8 GHz
4 BlueGene/L – eServer Blue Gene Solution
5 Blue Gene/P Solution
6 Ranger – SunBlade x6420, Opteron QC 2.3 Ghz, Infiniband
7 Franklin – Cray XT4 QuadCore 2.3 GHz
8 Jaguar – Cray XT4 QuadCore 2.1 GHz
9 Red Storm – Sandia/ Cray Red Storm, XT3/4, 2.4/2.2 GHz dual/quad core
10 Dawning 5000A – Dawning 5000A, QC Opteron 1.9 Ghz, Infiniband, Windows HPC 2008
To put in numbers, the number 1 supercomputer has a rated peak performance of 1,456,704 Gigaflops (billlions of floating point operations per second). To put in perspective, a modern 2GHz Core2Duo pumps out 10 Gigaflops of processing power (assuming the software is optimised). That makes this supercomputer about 150,000 TIMES faster! Isn’t that insane?
Nuclear simulation models which would take 2000 years to complete on a single Core 2 Duo will now be computed in 5 days, paving way for many new exciting discoveries.
Which brings me to, innvoation. Back when computers were non existent, the human race produced the most interesting and significant discoveries and works of art. Things like, electricity, gravity, Mozart, Bethoven, Mona Lisa, tall towers that actually stood up against teh forces at that time.
Once the “computer” became popular in the 80s and mainstream by the turn of the millenium, whoa… we started becoming less innovative and creative. We argue over where to eat, what twitter / facebook short vanity URLs we want (I’m guilty of domain whoring too), whether to buy a car with 148 Horsepower or 155 HP, whose turn is it to break in a game of pool, and all that! So rediculous lah~!
People are scared of accountability. People do not want to take responsibility.
Example: If we want to go Penang in July, you let the Penang people choose where to eat and what to do. At the end of the trip you say, “Aiyah.. you recommend all the lousy place wan, so dirty, so smelly, so expensive.”, I TOLD YOU we should have gone [there and there]. What the cock~!”
Or in an assignment, your idea gets rejected and the marks your group get is below average. You point fingers. In most cases, the guy who points fingers and makes accusations is the one who either contributes the least, or is the reason why the group failed. Even though my part is 100% correct and that you are the weakest link, it is just not logical to argue about who is wrong. Doesn’t make any good.
I agree with Patrick that “you learn more from your mistakes and failures”. A company exec said in a talk, “In the interview, I ask the employee, how have you failed before? And if he haven’t yet fail, I’ll say – Go work and fail first, then apply to join my company again”.
A friend gave me a copy of The Painted House – John Grisham as a birthday gift back in high school. I misplaced it. Now I borrow one from the library, because I never got past Chapter 1. Hehehhe….. Also planning to read Early Civilizations of South East Asia and Law Contract!
Oh, if you’re curious to what the above two phrases meant, and started Wiki-ing for an answer; don’t bother. They’re both BS statements I created trying to mimic the explanation of BitTorrent and hacking online backing over Wifi! Have a nice day!
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