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As an aside, universities should also get rid of all the adult daycare bullshit. I have to pay thousands of dollars every year in 'student activity fees' for the PhD program I'm in (Clemson, no problem naming & shaming). These fees are going toward things like 'Chocolate Milk Night,' 'Dave & Buster's Night,' 'Decorate a Mug Night,' and 'Tie Dye a T-shirt Night.' Not making that up, that's the sort of absolutely idiotic things people are going further into debt for.

$60/yr, with the assumption that you enroll for summer semesters.

You are, however, apparently paying thousands of dollars per year towards a PhD and filing to learn how to estimate quantities within even an order of magnitude, successfully engage in trivial research of such quantities, or cite to sources. I know how you can save quite a bit of money...

I suggest we wait until they actually do something and then act.

In the past, Torrent traffic DID cause performance problems on DOCSIS networks
https://people.cs.clemson.edu/...
http://bennett.com/2007/11/doc...

On a side note, ISPs can and do change the egress path for traffic leaving their network to address latency, peer link imbalances, etc.
There's no good reasons to stop them from doing this.

How do you feel about business internet connections getting better SLA and prioritization over residential customers on the same ISP network?

Servo is being written to be provably memory correct and thread safe.

While I think it is true that Rust is a major step forward in this area, Servo is emphatically not "provably correct" - it just encapsulates the unverified stuff in "unsafe" blocks. Yes, this matters in practice: the first Ariane 5 rocket launch failed catastrophically because Ada's default protection against numerical overflow had been manually disabled in a critical piece of code.

Also, since the "proof" system (the Rust language standard and compiler) has not itself been proven correct, even "safe" code is not "proven" to really be safe. Yes, this matters in practice: for years, the Java standard library (among many others) contained a "formally verified" sorting algorithm that would fail due to integer overflow, because the formal verification had been performed without giving consideration to overflow.

No one in the world today has the tools necessary to prove any program correct on real non-trivial hardware, because the execution environment is too complex and buggy to model fully and correctly. Formal "proofs" are, in practice, just another means of finding some problems that were missed by other methods of quality assurance.

Greetings Sarah Lahav,

Seriously though, whenever addressing a techie crowd, never use the ' cloud ' word. What people unskilled in the art don't realize is that a virtual machine in 'the cloud' is virtually (sic) the same as a rack mounted PC. You still need someone to install and configure your business systems and no one is going to do that for free, certainly not your cloud provider. As for the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the firewall, someone else more advanced in the arts once put it better. The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security. For instance RPC over HTTP, specifically designed to bypass the firewall. ref

"Peace through strength" sounds like straight up Orwell double-speak from 1984, except it's not being used in a fictitious setting.

Orwellian might be more like war is peace. or making war for peace.

"Peace through Strength" sounds like a reasonable thing to me. I can't imagine having peace through weakness.

"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice."

"I could have ended the war in the month. I could have made Vietnam look like a mud puddle"

Exactly. One should never ever go to war unless one is prepared to win it. Limited warfare does not have a good track record.

"You've got to forget about this civilian. Whenever you drop bombs, you're going to hit civilians."

If you are going to be in a war - you will kill civilians. A blunt, yet completely true statement.

"The only summit meeting that can succeed is the one that does not take place."

Perhaps Barry was commenting on the negotiations with the North Vietnamese:

http://www.clemson.edu/caah/hi...

Highlighted by months of arguments over the shape of the table. Perhaps in that context, his remark might not seem odd.

It appears that some folks might take possibly get excited over out of context one liners, and completely ignore his more substantive statements. He was pro choice, pro gay rights, anti fundamentalist, and fiscally conservative, and socially "leave people the hell alone" (my quote)

None of which applies to the Republican party today.

And strong on defense? Yeah, that too. My kinda guy. My kind of conservative

I posted most of this elsewhere. I don't mean to be disrespectful to you or your parent's experiences (I'm just a "newbee" myself), but a good bit of what you write isn't quite correct.

In summer, a typical worker bee lives for about 6 weeks. 8 weeks, maybe 10, if she has one of the rare posts of guardians at the bee colony's entry, or is one of the even fewer bees that feed the queen.

No. Most worker bees go through a predictable lifecycle. See, e.g., http://www.clemson.edu/extension/county/oconee/programs/beekeeping/Honey_Bee_Life_Cycle_in_Pictures.pdf

1-2 days old: Cleaning duty
3-5 days old: Feeding older larva (nurse)
6-11 days old: Feeding younger larva (nurse)
12-17 days: comb maintenance and production (wax)
18-21 days: guard bee duty
22+ days: field bee (foraging)

It's relatively rare for a bee to have only one duty over its entire lifespan, though this can happen. Sometimes phases are skipped in the spring if a colony really needs foragers, for instance.

Bees literally work themselves to death. The replenishment rate is, during summer, 100%; this is taken care of by the queen.

More than 100%! Colonies expand rapidly in the spring and into summer.

A typical bee colony has between 10,000 and 40,000 bees in high summer, then goes into winter with about 1,000 bees, clumped around the queen to keep her warm, and comes out of winter with 400 to 600 bees.

40,000 is on the low ends of most estimates I read for summer population. Some estimates are up to 100,000 bees!

When you buy "package bees" to install in a hive, the typical size is 3 lbs of bees. This is over 10,000 bees, and is a small "starter" colony. So, I think your estimate of 10,000 to 40,000 bees for full, established summer population is very low.

Finally, FAR more than 300-400 bees survive the winter. I do not think a colony that overwintered with only 400 bees would be viable.

We are talking about apis mellifera carnica here, the so-called Italian bee, which is the variety most commonly used by beekeepers.

A. Mellifera Carnica is the "Carniolan" bee. It's another somewhat common breed of honey bee, but nowhere near as common as the Italian bee--Apis Mellifera Ligustica.

An entire colony dying in spring or early summer is, normally, an extremely rare event, and indicates either an epidemy, or severe poisoning.

Colonies death in spring is not at all uncommon. Colonies are actually at very great risk in the spring. When the queen starts breeding again and the hive starts growing, resources that have been stored since the previous summer are used up very rapidly. The bees leave the cluster and start moving around. A few bouts of bad spring weather that disrupts the early nectar flow or an unexpected hard freeze can destroy a colony that survived all winter long. If a spring colony has depleted all reserves and there's a nectar death and cold weather, things go bad fast!

Colony death in summer is more unusual.

Varroa mites are a known cause, but are a largely contained phenomenon now, at least in professional bee-keeping circles.

Somewhat. Effective treatments have become available only in the last several year. Near constant monitoring is still required.

Feral bees have come close to being wiped out nationwide. This is by no means a problem that is linked to just the much vilified commercial beekepers.

What remains, is ... poisoning. Neonicotinoids or something else.

Speculation and hyperbole. There are thousands of reasons hives can die. I do not believe the neonic connection has yet been proven, though with Europe banning, we should have some good data coming in over the next few years.

I keep bees as well, though I am not hugely experienced. I don't mean to disrespect the other post, but it's riddled with errors.

So you don't have to actually read all of my post--do you have ANY citation for hives that normally and naturally survive decades or centuries? I am not familiar with this claim and would like to read more.

In summer, a typical worker bee lives for about 6 weeks. 8 weeks, maybe 10, if she has one of the rare posts of guardians at the bee colony's entry, or is one of the even fewer bees that feed the queen.

No. Most worker bees go through a predictable lifecycle. See, e.g., http://www.clemson.edu/extension/county/oconee/programs/beekeeping/Honey_Bee_Life_Cycle_in_Pictures.pdf

1-2 days old: Cleaning duty
3-5 days old: Feeding older larva
6-11 days old: Feeding younger larva
12-17 days: comb maintenance and production (wax)
18-21 days: guard bee duty
22+ days: field bee (foraging)

It's relatively rare for a bee to have only one duty over its entire lifespan, though this can happen. Sometimes phases are skipped in the spring if a colony really needs foragers, for instance.

Bees literally work themselves to death. The replenishment rate is, during summer, 100%; this is taken care of by the queen.

More than 100%! Colonies expand rapidly in the spring and into summer.

A typical bee colony has between 10,000 and 40,000 bees in high summer, then goes into winter with about 1,000 bees, clumped around the queen to keep her warm, and comes out of winter with 400 to 600 bees.

40,000 is on the low ends of most estimates I read for summer population. Some estimates are up to 100,000 bees!

When you buy "package bees" to install in a hive, the typical size is 3 lbs of bees. This is over 10,000 bees, and is a small "starter" colony. So, I think your estimate of 10,000 to 40,000 bees for summer population is very low.

Finally, FAR more than 300-400 bees survive the winter. I do not think a colony that overwintered with only 400 bees would be viable.

We are talking about apis mellifera carnica here, the so-called Italian bee, which is the variety most commonly used by beekeepers.

A. Mellifera Carnica is the "Carniolan" bee. It's another decently common breed of honey bee, but nowhere near as common as the Italian bee--Apis Mellifera Ligustica.

An entire colony dying in spring or early summer is, normally, an extremely rare event, and indicates either an epidemy, or severe poisoning.

Colonies death in spring is not at all uncommon. Colonies are actually at very great risk in the spring. When the queen starts breeding and the hive starts growing, resources that have been stored since the previous summer are used up very rapidly. A few bouts of bad spring weather that disrupts the early nectar flow or an unexpected hard freeze can destroy a colony that survived all winter long.

Death in summer is more unusual.

Varroa mites are a known cause, but are a largely contained phenomenon now, at least in professional bee-keeping circles.

Somewhat. Effective treatments have become available only in the last several year. Near constant monitoring is still required.

What remains, is ... poisoning. Neonicotinoids or something else.

Speculation and hyperbole. There are thousands of reasons hives can die. I do not believe the neonic connection has yet been proven, though with Europe banning, we should have some good data coming in over the next few years.

"We've been in a malware arms race since the 1990s. Malicious hackers keep building new viruses, worms, and trojan horses, while security vendors keep building better detection and removal algorithms to stop them."

This document from 2005 sets out why relying on detecting malware doesn't work. 'The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security'

"Do you imagine an internet, 20 years from now, where we don't have to worry about what links we click or what attachments we open? Or is it the other way around, with threats so hard to block and DDoS attacks so rampant that the internet of the future is not as useful as it is now?"

I don't have to imagine, I'm doing so right now on this Ubuntu desktop, and DDoS attacks are only viable because of all those compromised Windows computer desktops out there on the Internet. Meanwhile for those still afflicted, how about getting the security vendors to design a 'computer' that don't run malware by clicking on a URL or opening an email attachment?

http://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/stretch.html

Amdahl discussed his original idea for lookahead with John Backus "two or three times". "And John thought what I had proposed initially, he couldn't do a compiler for. So we went ahead and redid it. And we came out with the thing that was the look-ahead structure of the STRETCH." [p. 71, Norberg]. Amdahl recalls that "principally the look-ahead pre-fetched instructions to see branch instructions early enough so that we could get the succeeding instruction and data for each of the two alternative branch paths"

The CDC6600 a more advanced form in 1964.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-order_execution

Arguably the first machine to use out-of-order execution was the CDC 6600 (1964), which used a scoreboard to resolve conflicts. In modern usage, such scoreboarding is considered to be in-order execution, not out-of-order execution, since such machines stall on the first RAW (Read After Write) conflict. Strictly speaking, such machines initiate execution in-order, although they may complete execution out-of-order.

From the same source:

About three years later, the IBM 360/91 (1966) introduced Tomasulo's algorithm, which made full out-of-order execution possible.

How stupid! The concept of multi-threading has been around since the 1950s.

Every day now I'm still amazed at how little newer members of the technology community actually know about the history, at least some concept, of where modern computing originated.

Here is a reference to a study that concluded "Contrary to some theories, we find no evidence of signicant recent increases in storm strength or US landfall strike probability. We do, however, find recent increases in storm frequencies circa 1995". It was a rigorous statistical study. The paper can be found here: http://www.clemson.edu/media-relations/archive/newsroom/articles/2009/september/Lund.pdf

See this paper: http://www.clemson.edu/media-relations/archive/newsroom/articles/2009/september/Lund.pdf. The number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin is increasing somewhat, but neither the strength nor the chance of making US landfall is increasing in any statistically meaningful way.

That's scotch he is drinking...

And our ancestors, bless them, learned how to make whiskey without knowing a thing about protons and electrons.

I have mixed feelings on the subject of the article. I learned a lot about chemistry in high school and a little bit in the freshman chemistry class I took in college, but I couldn't remember a thing to help my kid when she took it last year. All I could remember was that my high school chemistry teacher was in her first year out of college and that she had been a Bengal Babe at Clemson University. This helped me pay attention in class and influenced my college choice. So it was a complete waste of time.

On the other hand, taking chemistry was useful in helping build my character, just like being in the Boy Scouts and the marching band. It kind of reminds me of Robert Benchley's quote on dog ownership:

A boy can learn a lot from a dog: obedience, loyalty, and the importance of turning around three times before lying down.

30ms seems to be the most common figure cited. 50ms was an aggregate of other studies I found (from a simple google search) which were typically in the 40-60ms range.

http://biae.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction.htm

Pastel was an extended Pascal compiler developed by LLNL for the S-1 supercomputer project
http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/s1.html

It, and several other significant pieces of software, including the SCALD hardware design language
were made freely available by LLNL. I have one version of the compiler, which was donated to the
Computer History Museum by one of its authors. I have been looking for the other pieces since the
late 80's.

If you look at the GNU Manifesto, RMS was also looking at using the MIT Trix kernel in the early days
of the project.

The 1970's called, it said you are low tech. Here's an example of a single TTL board from a VAX. There must be about 300 individual TTL chips from the 7400 series on it (where one chip has 4 nand on it, etc). The left 29 boards in this VAXare the cpu.

It is very noble to build your own CPU architecture with your own instruction set, however building CPUs out of gates in individual chips is just an exercise in wasting money when you can do the same thing on FPGAs, like the guy that built an entire Cray-1 on an FPGA development board. A more impressive project, the visual 6502 in javascript, made by scanning the actual chip and rebuilding the circuit out of individual transistors on the die, proves you don't even need hardware.

"sensor malfunctions leading to brakes seizing"

Did a search, found nothing at all that mentions that (and if an ABS sensor malfunctions, the ABS system shuts down, but you still have your normal breaking system like on any car without ABS

"or the engine cutting out (leading to a loss of power steering)"

Big deal. It's not hard to steer a car without power steering. In fact, the faster you're moving the easier. Power steering really only helps when you're not moving or moving very slowly.

"anti-lock brake systems failing when near powerful transmitters"

The only thing I could really find was from Clemson University:

"Early ABS systems on both aircraft and automobiles were susceptible to EMI. Accidents occurred when brakes functioned improperly because EMI disrupted the ABS control system" ... "For automobile systems, the solution was to ensure, if EMI occurred, that the ABS system degrade gracefully to normal braking -- essentially an automatic version of the aircraft manual switch. Eventually, automobile ABS was qualified by EMI testing prior to procurement."
http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/pdf/nasa-rp1374.pdf , NASA Reference Publication 1374

I think more of what you said is hysteria, or you've never had a motor die for whatever reason while you're driving (which I have)

Hate to burst your bubble...but 'printing' cells is not a new concept...from 2007

You're wrong. Shielding which is effective against high frequency electric fields can also be effective against high frequency magnetic fields. The changing magnetic field induces eddy currents in the shielding which creates opposing magnetic fields, shaping and directing the intruding magnetic field.

Lower magnetic fields can also be shaped with high permeability materials.

Here is a helpful link which explains the issues surrounding electric/magnetic shielding in more detail.

http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/emc/tutorials/Shielding02/Practical_Shielding.html

That's neat. The Earth's magnetic field has a period on the order of tens of millions of years. Does that count as a high frequency magnetic field?

You're wrong. Shielding which is effective against high frequency electric fields can also be effective against high frequency magnetic fields. The changing magnetic field induces eddy currents in the shielding which creates opposing magnetic fields, shaping and directing the intruding magnetic field.

Lower magnetic fields can also be shaped with high permeability materials.

Here is a helpful link which explains the issues surrounding electric/magnetic shielding in more detail.

http://www.cvel.clemson.edu/emc/tutorials/Shielding02/Practical_Shielding.html

I'd suggest appealing to Google or the brothers that did tapestries for the Met. What are these maps of? Is there a society for the place that they cover where you could appeal for funds under the pretense that you publicly release the maps?

Assuming all those avenues are exhausted, let's look at some cheap and dirty DIY methods. I'm assuming you've got a MP digital camera. There are sub $100 ten megapixel cameras out there but don't get anything with a fancy digital zoom. Next you'll need mosaicking software or if you're into software, you can try your own implementation of the KLT algorithm.

First off, practice all of this on layed out newspapers while developing your preferred methodology.

Your cheapest and most haphazard option is going to be lay the maps flat on the floor and cut a length of string with a washer on it (two to three feet?). Try to use brightly diffused lighting so that is normalized in the mosaics with no shots of your shadow over the maps. Now this is backbreaking but hold the camera flat over the map with the string extended in front of it so you can keep the distance to the map consistent. Don't angle the camer as this will slightly distort that tile and hinder the mosaicking. Put plastic bags on your feet if you need to walk on the maps. Take a picture, move a few feet in a grid style, take another picture. Rinse, wash, repeat until you have images covering all of the map. Collect the images and put them on the computer and verify the mosiacking works before preparing the map for storage forever.

A better method would be similar but to construct a large wooden rectangular box with plexiglass as a top so that you can fit this structure over the largest of the maps. Then cut holes in the plexiglass so that you can set your camera at a plane level to the surface of the map into the plexiglass. You might want to put an adapter on your camer that allows the lens and flash to be free of obstruction. You could make the tiles more uniform and save your back some work but you need to build and buy the materials for the structure. I think this is more time consuming but your best bet and will allow you to gather more images with less distortion.

Above all, remember to save the original images! It's probable that later better algorithms will be developed to normalize the images, remove distortions, light problems, shadows and increase clarity on your overlapping sections. If you do the plexiglass route, you could manufacture it so that every bit of the map is photographed three or four times.

Not professional, not flawless but cheap and dirty. Hope this helps.

As for the geocoding, what are the maps of? You should actually check out the feature extraction of the KLT algorithm and consider using that methodology for syncing these up with maps. That will require human intervention though to identify the features, I'm sure.

a more professional color scheme with purple and orange.

Professional? Maybe, if you went to Clemson. Is this the price for getting their official endorsement ("Clemson students are encouraged to use Ubuntu."?

Well unfortunately there are a number of studies that would disagree with you.

Just got a new Thinkpad. Nvidia graphics, Intel networking chipsets. Getting this working properly was a bunch of fucking around, and the wireless networking still isn't quite right.

If you want detailed examples of the pain, check out ThinkWiki or Clemson Linux Initiative.

I love to be able to tweak things endlessly when I'm building a server for maximum performance, so I love the openness and flexibility of Linux. But for a desktop or laptop, I want it to just fucking work, and I've never had that experience on Linux.

If you've go an available head of water, you can use a hydraulic ram pump to keep a reservior full, and use a turbine to generate your electricity.

It's a handy way of using gravity, and is essentially free (you're using the power of the water that would flow downhill anyway).

To see what I mean, take a look at the Clemson Linux Initiative. It contains in detail the painful steps necessary to get common laptops working with common distributions. Normal people don't have a hope of figuring out and performing all that jiggery-pokery, and so their experience is "Linux doesn't work."

The part I don't understand is that the patent has expired. Software pattents expire 14 years after they are granted http://www.clemson.edu/research/ottSite/ottStart_I ntelectPatents.htm#Duration. That is in 1991 according to the link that was provided in the summary. So I guess that they can sue for any infrigement before 2005. After that there is no protection on the idea. Going after the current version of OSX seems dumb because it is not covered by the patent.

Botulism toxin is toxic if ingested. That's was the food poisoning "Botulism" is, eating food contaminated with botulism toxin.
http://hgic.clemson.edu/factsheets/HGIC3680.htm

While researching a bit on reaction times, I stumbled upon this link from Clemson's biology department:
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reaction .htm

It's a pretty good literature review on the various studies done on Reaction Time and the various factors relating to it. Some pearls:

Many researchers have confirmed that reaction to sound is faster than reaction to light, with mean auditory reaction times being 140-160 msec and visual reaction times being 180-200 msec (Galton, 1899; Woodworth and Schlosberg, 1954; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980). Perhaps this is because an auditory stimulus only takes 8-10 msec to reach the brain (Kemp et al., 1973), but a visual stimulus takes 20-40 msec (Marshall et al., 1943).

Simple reaction time shortens from infancy into the late 20s, then increases slowly until the 50s and 60s, and then lengthens faster as the person gets into his 70s and beyond (Welford, 1977; Jevas and Yan, 2001; Luchies et al., 2002; Rose et al., 2002; Der and Deary, 2006). Luchies et al.(2002) also reported that this age effect was more marked for complex reaction time tasks, and Der and Deary (2006) concurred. Reaction time also becomes more variable with age (Hultsch et al., 2002). Welford (1980) speculates on the reason for slowing reaction time with age. It is not just simple mechanical factors like the speed of nervous conduction. It may be the tendency of older people to be more careful and monitor their responses more thoroughly (Botwinick, 1966). When troubled by a distraction, older people also tend to devote their exclusive attention to one stimulus, and ignore another stimulus, more completely than younger people (Redfern et al., 2002).

At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006).

The authors concluded that left-handed people have an inherent reaction time advantage. In an experiment using a computer mouse, Peters and Ivanoff (1999) found that right-handed people were faster with their right hand (as expected), but left-handed people were equally fast with both hands. The preferred hand was generally faster. However, the reaction time advantage of the preferred over the non-preferred hands was so small that they recommended alternating hands when using a mouse. Bryden (2002), using right-handed people only, found that task difficulty did not affect the reaction time difference between the left and right hands.

There are a lot more good summaries in that article. I also remember being in a Science Museum and one of the exhibits claimed that the best reaction times on their particular exhibit in traditional studies were seasoned Aircraft Pilots.

Errr, no, it was not a "new idea at Intel." It was an idea that had been festering at HP for awhile under the moniker PA-WW, and had acquired a thoroughly pervasive case of Kitchen Sink Syndrome. It ended up at Intel through a combination of factors, probably not the least of which was Intel's growing realization that x86 was getting hard to scale. (Intel may have been emboldened by the Mac 68K to PPC switch as well, given that had happened just before Intel joined forces w/ HP.) Thing is, when they took on EPIC in the early-to-mid 90s, I don't think they realized just how tall the ivory tower they were acquiring actually was.

This study considered the hypothesis that on some tasks men and women might employ different information processing strategies...Results demonstrated a near-significant overall reaction time advantage for male participants.

in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003). Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females). In comparison, Engel (1972) reported a reaction time to sound of 227 msec (male) to 242 msec (female). Botwinick and Thompson (1966) found that almost all of the male-female difference was accounted for by the lag between the presentation of the stimulus and the beginning of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction times were the same for males and females. In a surprising finding, Szinnai et al. (2005) found that gradual dehydration (loss of 2.6% of body weight over a 7-day period) caused females to have lengthened choice reaction time, but males to have shortened choice reaction times. Adam et al. (1999) reported that males use a more complex strategy than females.

don't forget about the Parallel Virtual File System (PVFS)

-metric

How do you edit mime-types, then?

Gnome 2.10 is fairly recent, and it doesn't have a mimetype editor
http://www.ces.clemson.edu/linux/fc4_desktop.shtml #gmime

Does 2.12?

Or do you just not use mime-types?

Jesse Helms? Strom Thurmond? The Southern Manifesto? Yeah, real upstanding bunch.

All the people who reelected Reagan in 1984 would probably disagree with you. "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"

Are you better off than you were 25 years ago? To the tune of $8.2 Trillion better off? No, not in the slightest. I've got a quote you might recognize... "To continue this long trend [deficit spending] is to guarantee tremendous social, cultural, political, and economic upheavals... government is not the solution to our problem; Government is the problem." -- Ronald Reagan, 1981

Oh, you don't remember that? Let me refresh your memory with the #1 and #2 google search results.... Oops!! I guess hearing that Ronald Reagan uttered the words "Government is the problem" just isn't politically correct any more. You'll have to check the other results for ronald reagan 1981 inaugural address because #1 & #2 have simply edited that little bit out. Hmmm, I wonder how long it will be before results 1-30 don't mention the actual words spoken. But hey, now we're way off topic.

Mind you, I'm not arguing for the Democrats. I'm simply pointing to evidence of the truth contained in the article we're supposed to be discussing. Did you even think before you typed out your post? It sounds like you retrieved duckspeak directly from memory to me.

Regardless of that, how exactly would intel be optimize my code?

Ten YEARS ago HP told us that Risc is going away and that EPIC/Itanium is the way of the future. Remember, their Intel/EPIC announcement happened back in 1993.

My bet is that HP continues being a Windtel/x86 leader and that RISC (thanks to Cell and Niagra) move on with out them.

(oh, you said "Risk" is going away, not Risc. Well, that's more likely now that Carley's gone)

Forgot to click the anonymous box Matthew?

I think the parent should be modded down because Grendel is a Troll!

I love the internet, such friendly people.

Not quite. You rolled the ring around by pushing it with the end of the stick. Starting it was a trick involving hanging the ring from the end of the stick (the part with the U-shaped piece of metal sticking forward from it) and driving the stick forward and down to fling the ring forward in a rotating motion.

Here's a line-art drawing of it.

This is exciting and all, but the really importing thing about PARL is that they were the only ones at Clemson willing to host our site.
</SELF-PLUG>

and explore out from there... (If anyone's lost on the reference, read Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson)

Now that HP will stop making Itanium servers...

Re-read the original post, please. HP is discontinuing Itanium workstations, not servers.

For all its flaws, Itanium does have more headroom to grow than the x86-64 architecture. The whole reason HP and Intel got into bed over Itanium and its EPIC architecture was because it's getting harder and harder to wring more performance out of a chip by adding parallel instruction pipelines. In order to crank clockspeeds higher, those pipelines have to get longer and longer (witness Prescott's 31-stage pipeline). The more pipelines you have and the longer they are, the worse is the penalty for branch misprediction.

It's this problem that led HP and Intel to VLIW, where the parallelism is explicitly compiled into the code, reducing or eliminating the need for a lot of transistors that currently break code down into parallel-izable chunks and try to predict branches.

Unless somebody invents a new way of architecting chips that will eliminate or substantially reduce the branch misprediction penalty without substantially breaking x86 compatibility, Itanium (or something like it) will eventually reign supreme.

No, this is capitalism for you.

That inspired me enough to have a little fun with the Gimp.

Capitalism Own4g3

Hyper-focus? I have no idea what you mean. I simply made note of apparent misunderstanding on your part and then used that to question the validity of your conclusion. Perhaps you're being a little hyper-sensative?

By the way, just to be clear. After much study and thought I have found that there is no perfectly safe, or even acceptably safe method of building nuclear power plants on earth.

I do agree designs are better. Are they perfect? Hardly. Every engineer will tell you there's no such thing as a perfect system. For example, the nuclear power industry tried quite hard from the get go to build "safe" reactors, Here is the result:

http://www.nuclearfiles.org/hitimeline/nwa/index.h tml
http://www.ieer.org/reports/accident.html
http://www.ccnr.org/CANDU_Safety.html
http://www.lbl.gov/nsd/education/ABC/wallchart/cha pters/15/7.html
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/cndscot/trisaf/ch4.ht m
http://www.clemson.edu/ep/radiat3.htm
http://www.sea-us.org.au/no2reactor/rr-oops.html

Once you've read through as many studies on operator error in control rooms as I have, then we can talk. In the interm, perhaps you should trust me when I say, it can't safely be done.

As well, the economics are not as good as you've been led to believe. See:

Nuclear Power is Uneconomical

Since its beginning, nuclear power has cost this country over $492,000,000,000 -- nearly twice the cost of the Viet Nam War and the Apollo Moon Missions combined. In return for this investment, we have an energy source that, until the mid-1980's, gave us less energy in this country than did the burning of firewood! In the U.S., nuclear power contributes only 20-22% of our electricity, and only 8-10% of our total energy consumption. In Illinois these percentages are much greater due to Commonwealth Edison's over-reliance on nuclear power.

Since 1950, nuclear power has received over $97,000,000,000 in direct and indirect subsidies from the federal government, such as deferred taxes, artificially low limits on liability in case of nuclear accidents, and fuel fabrication write-offs. No other industry has enjoyed such privilege.

According to a recent study conducted by the Citizens Utility Board, Commonwealth Edison's customers now pay the highest electric bills in the Midwest, due primarily to the over-reliance on nuclear power plants.

Many costs for nuclear power have been deliberately underestimated by government and industry such as the costs for the permanent disposal of nuclear wastes, the "decommissioning" (shutting-down and cleaning-up) of retired nuclear power plants, and nuclear accident consequences. In January, 1994, Commonwealth Edison acknowledged that it had to nearly double its estimate for reactor decommissioning -- from $2.3 billion to as much as $4.1 billion!
http://www.neis.org/literature/Brochures/npfacts.h tm

Comparing C++ compilers

This paper compares C++ compilers to see which ones follow the ISO standards.

these It's been awhile since I've seen one, but commercially made units are also available. Basically you trade off volume for head.

A friend of mine recently discovered that Clemson University has made all of our student personal information available to the world after a simple Google search. The information can be found directly also. What recourse does a student have when his or her personal information is published like this? And how can we make sure that this will never be done again?

A friend of mine recently discovered that Clemson University has made all of our student personal information available to the world after a simple Google search. The information can be found directly also. What recourse does a student have when his or her personal information is published like this? And how can we make sure that this will never be done again?

A friend of mine recently discovered that Clemson University has made all of our student personal information available to the world after a simple Google search. The information can be found directly also. What recourse does a student have when his or her personal information is published like this? And how can we make sure that this will never be done again?