[update] This pretty much says it all. [update 2] … and … they … fold. A bad deal, about to be voted into law. As they said, elections have consequences. Whatever happens, they (WH and Senate) now own it. No cuts, just taxes. Even though our problem is way too much spending and mis-targeted tax increases. Less than 10 hours into the new year for us here in GMT-5. There is some aspect of humanity whereby many view this as a hopeful time, a chance to “begin anew”.

[update] There’sa good piece on the impact upon the potential negotiations and its impact upon one party. As I noted below, any deal done between 1-Jan and now will be a bad deal. The only way to get real spending cuts is to go over the cliff, so lets do this. I don’t care about the political fortunes impact. I care about the long term impact upon the country of out of control spending.

For the last 4 years, we’ve had significant year over year growth. We set records every year. 2 years ago was a barn stormer of a year. Last year reset the definition of barn storming for us. And this year. Yes, this year. I’ve hinted that we were following a hard/fast growth path. Some folks who read this know the trajectory we are on. 38% growth over last year. Which was 60% growth over the year before.

A few months ago,we had a new addition to our family. This is Captain, and he is what is called a rescue dog. The organization that rescued him doesn’t have that as their primary mission, they build shelters and provide food for dogs whom are chained up outside. Our Captain was one such. He was badly abused, and 4 months later, has major trust issues, and bad nightmares. He has recovered from the physical abuse.

If you haven’t figured it out, I’ve been busy. This is the very good sort of busy. Rich at InsideHPC.com (you read this, right? Regularly? Right? You should if you don’t) did a whole set of interviews at SC12. There’s some very cool stuff in them. Here’s ours. I’ll tell you the funny stuff at the end. So this is like 8:30am. I’ve not had my coffee, so my brain is stuck in POST mode, and I am subject to race conditions (mouth stumbling ahead of single brain cell that might be awake).

Create a big file … [root@jr5-lab test]# dd if=/dev/zero of=big.file.1 bs=1 count=1 seek=1P 1+0 records in 1+0 records out 1 byte (1 B) copied, 0.000159797 seconds, 6.3 kB/s [root@jr5-lab test]# ls -alF total 4 drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 23 Dec 19 17:33 ./ drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 73 Nov 6 11:07 ../ -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1125899906842625 Dec 19 17:33 big.file.1 [root@jr5-lab test]# ls -alFh total 4.0K drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 23 Dec 19 17:33 .

I’d been holding off on posting anything on this for a while to see if any group steps up to support it. It looks like this is simply not happening. One shouldn’t infer anything about the Microsoft platforms w.r.t. HPC as a result of this one case. However, in light of the absorption of the HPC group into the larger server group, and other reorganizations, its hard to draw a positive conclusion about the longevity of Microsoft’s HPC efforts.

… there are SOOO MANY things to update, pay attention to … Yeah, its heaven for those of us blessed with ADHD (squirrel!), but it takes away time from important things. And of course, there is at least a little irony in blogging about this and having it auto-tweeted. The world doesn’t need more social media.

Call this a hypothesis based upon observation. Its harder for smart people to admit they are incorrect about something, than it might be for the population as a whole. My rationale works like this … the smarter you are, the more defensive you are of that ‘status’ if you will, and so you tend to act in a way to reinforce prior decisions, regardless of their actual (quantifiable) correctness. That is, you are more afraid of the consequences of admitting to being wrong, as compared to actually being wrong.

Last year, it was a What is and what should never be. I look some liberal artistic license with the title, and altered its meaning. But the song itself is about thinking about a brighter future. My family was just getting started down the path of a cancer diagnosis and treatment. My wife was diagnosed, and without explaining precisely why, the doctors urged us to move rapidly. I think we understand now, why they did.