[Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"

[Geoff Galitz]

I've never really bought the argument that biofuels are causing a food
shortage considering that there is still so much unused farmland in the US
and farming practices here in the EU.  I must admit this out of my field so
I have no real evidence to support my suspicion, but there have been a
trickle of articles from publications like Der Spiegel and the NY Times
which indicate there is some suspicion these shortages have just as much to
do with commodity speculation and manipulation.


http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/12/business/speculate.php
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,559550,00.html (in English)



Geoff Galitz
Blankenheim NRW, Deutschland
http://www.galitz.org


-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On
Behalf Of Vincent Diepeveen
Sent: Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 16:07
To: Jon Aquilina
Cc: Beowulf Mailing List; Mark Hahn
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists"

Even worse,
Why is there subsidy on bio fuels that get produced out of food eaten  
by poor people?

This causes as we speak people dying as they can no longer for a cent  
or so buy food made out
of it; the prices have doubled if not more for such types of cheap  
food because of subsidy in the
1st world countries for this.

I assume EU will take measures to turn back those subsidies on bio fuels
that get produced out of food that feeds billions, who now hardly can  
afford to buy food anymore as
it gets burned for energy in first world countries, whereas  
commercially spoken it cannot get burned,
it is just because of subsidy it can exist.

Even better i would be in favour of a ban on bio fuels that are  
outright food products in 3d world countries.

When i just walked previous week into a shop and my sister was  
interested in a new washing machine,
i pointed her to the fact that the thing she was interested in, was  
eating 3.8 kW, versus the 100 euro more expensive
thing next to it was eating 1.14 kW. It is something that only very  
few will notice.

It is easy to cheaply produce equipment that eats more power than  
equipment of competitors, that is the fundamental problem.

Vincent - speaking for himself

On Jun 25, 2008, at 8:43 AM, Jon Aquilina wrote:

> how much does a sugar glass window cost now that sugar and other  
> things are being used for bio fuels?
>
> On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca> wrote:
>
> More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and
> for small memory machines.
>
> the only justice I can see in that is that there hasn't been all  
> that much effort to get bigpages widely/easily used.  in  
> particular, I don't
> see that scheduler or general memory-management issues in linux are
> particularly biased for desktop or against HPC.
>
>
> That's funny, because I've heard people get scared that it was the  
> complete
> opposite. That Linux was driven by Big Iron, and that no one cared  
> about
> the "little desktop guy" (Con Kolivas is an interesting history  
> example).
>
> Con didn't play the game right - you have to have the right  
> combination of social engineering (especially timing and proactive  
> response) and good tech
> kungfoo.  kernel people are biased towards a certain aesthetic that  
> doesn't
> punish big-picture redesigns from scratch, but _does_ punish  
> solutions in search of a problem.
>
> so the question is, if you had a magic wand, what would you change  
> in the kernel (or perhaps libc or other support libs, etc)?  most  
> of the things I can think of are not clear-cut.  I'd like to be  
> able to give better info from perf counters to our users (but I  
> don't think Linux is really in the way).  I suspect we lose some  
> performance due to jitter
> injected by the OS (and/or our own monitoring) and would like to  
> improve,
> but again, it's hard to blame Linux.  I'd love to have better  
> options for cluster-aware filesystems.  kernel-assisted network  
> shared memory?
>
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>
> -- 
> Jonathan Aquilina
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