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Plus there are third parties who also give great support

Or Bill Gates: http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=528

"Existing cedar tree was determined by Gates to be in the wrong location and moved 6 inches."

And yet, Steve Jobs is seen as the dictatorial perfectionist...

Or Bill Gates:
http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=528

"Existing cedar tree was determined by Gates to be in the wrong location and moved 6 inches."

As I understand it most of the nuclear research simulations that it would be nice to run simply cannot be done on any modern machines. If it's only a few particles they can be simulated on a laptop but the interesting interactions need to simulate millions or billions of points with every single one of them influencing every other one in the simulation.

As a simple example, a genetic algorithm was used to program some reconfigurable FPGA chips. A layout was grown on the chip the did the job but broke just about every rule for FPGA design. There were parts of the layout on the chip that were not connected to any circuit but removing them made the device fail to work. Transferring the layout to a different chip got you a non-working circuit. It would be great to be able to simulate this ... not a chance it's too big, by so very many orders of magnitude.

http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73

From what I've read on the subject of machine evolution (mostly articles for the layperson), the end results are often completely baffling. It works, but the reason why isn't very obvious. In a few cases, I recall reading about evolved antenna schematics & shapes that worked REALLY well, but made absolutely no sense, or took advantage of things that engineers normally consider flaws/problems to be overcome in design.

I think this is the original http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15621085.000-creatures-from-primordial-silicon--let-darwinism-loose-in-an-electronics-lab-and-just-watch-what-it-creates-a-lean-mean-machine-that-nobody-understands-clive-davidson-reports.html. Full text here http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73.

I've wondered if he ever figured out what the useless cells were for.

...Stu

You may be thinking of this work, also reported in New Scientist.

There's a detail story at CREATURES FROM PRIMORDIAL SILICON, which describes the work of Adrian Thompson and others.

Makes me remember this story.

Reminds me of an old joke

And then we have the old favorite, Microsoft vs Psychic Friends: http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_ id=704

I guess you can argue that at a given time a computer of any size will have a certain pattern of 0s and 1s that will cause it to behave in a predictable way (even though the prediction itself might take an incredibly long time to figure out), but we still have no clue whether that's true of biological systems too so I thought I'd leave that one out (and that's before we even get to things like http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_ id=73 where disconnected circuits can still affect the outcome by induction with nearby circuits...)

The Quadro Pounder!!!!

"Does Jabba the Hutt look like a bitch?"

"Feel the Force, motherfucker."

That was my first thought too. Maybe we'll finally get to here some of these lines on the big screen. Or maybe not. ;)

It's an old one, but...

Microsoft Tech Support vs. Psychic Friends Network: Which Provides Better Support for Microsoft Products?

You need the supported version of Redhat, but you don't need a supported version of Windows? You do know that Microsoft won't give you any support at all, right? Unless you call the support line and pay per incident. (And they have been unfavorably compared to the psychic friend's network.)

Just configure the machines correctly and you should rarely (never?) need to update them. It's a client machine, why does it need sshd or anything else? Setup a basic iptables rule to drop everything incoming.

Sure, there's a bit of admin cost, but not much more than the install process for Win2k and in Linux it's easily scriptable. No problems "ghosting" many machines from one, no problems copying config info (in nice seperate files) from one to another, etc.

There are a ton of updates for Linux systems but rarely for the kernel or any external service a user would need. Even when they are, the usual severity is priv escalation, meaning you need an account already. In other words, just like a Windows machines by default. When needed it's just as easy to push updates to a bunch of machines (or set them to pull from a specific server) with a few lines of perl and a crontab entry.

Finally, Linux admins scale better. Add ten times the machines and the admin job isn't much more complex. (Except for hardware problems.)

I really wish all the users I deal with used Linux. I'd get so much more Slashdot time.

story

Master bathtub can be filled to the right temperature and depth by Gates as he drives home from work.