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On October 28, 1955, shortly after 9:00 p.m., William Henry Gates III was born. He was born into a family with a rich history in business, politics, and community service. His great-grandfather had been a state legislator and mayor, his grandfather was the vice president of a national bank, and his father was a prominent lawyer. [Wallace, 1992, p. 8-9] Early on in life, it was apparent that Bill Gates inherited the ambition, intelligence, and competitive spirit that had helped his progenitors rise to the top in their chosen professions. In elementary school he quickly surpassed all of his peer's abilities in nearly all subjects, especially math and science. His parents recognized his intelligence and decided to enroll him in Lakeside, a private school known for its intense academic environment. This decision had far reaching effects on Bill Gates's life. For at Lakeside, Bill Gates was first introduced to computers. http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Gates.Mirick.html

Another site said that he was already wealthy from his inheritance, and yet another said that DOS cost him $50,000 (which would be more today). He was already upper class. The fact is, it's easier to go from $X million to $46 billion than from hillbilly to even $4.6 million. So what I meant was that Bill Gates is not truly, in my opinion, a self-made billionaire, at least not nearly on the order of those from a true middle or lower class family. It's just much easier to "jump on the next big thing" (what Bill Gates did) when you have real capital than when you have little or none. Therefore, I didn't think he fit in the list of "new money" billionaires the great greandparent stated, unless money only refers to a billion dollars or more.

HR 2281

I assume this has long since been defeated. Otherwise it would "prevent computer users from protecting their privacy online by removing cookies from their computer. Additionally, if cookies are used as a copyright protection system it would be unlawful to manufacture a device that removes the cookie from the system."

> I'm sure the University of Virginia is really happy that they've wasted thousands of man-hours developing computatinon software on Power.

I really hope you're not talking about Virginia Tech when you say "University of Virginia"... They're the enemy, you know ;)

of the Trinity test can be found at the Nuclear Weapon Archive, and Trinity site, and even the DOE is trying to make a buck on the side by selling the movie.

Just recently, Apple had been seeing some reasonable success in scientific/HP computing (see http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html, http://www.apple.com/science/profiles/colsa/) and seemed keen to promote small xServe clusters to scientists http://www.apple.com/science/.

It would seem that the advantages of a xServe cluster (altivec, 64-bit and good performance per watt) would be lost when Apple produces an x86 version when compared to a (inevitably) cheaper x86 Linux system. and, although this is probably quite a small market, it would be sad to see Apple loose it.

Does anyone have any opinions to how the loss of PPC will affect Apple in this area - are researchers more interested in OS than price:performance ?

Notice the lack of factual evidence in your claims that Dvorak is not superior. Obviously you have never *used* Dvorak before and are biased against it. The simple fact is that in the English language there are more words that can be produced from the home row of the Dvorak layout than the QWERTY layout. This results in dramatically less hand movement for a given work. Several people have designed programs to calculate the difference statistically - look for yourself: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html
You cannot argue with demonstrable facts - that's the basis of science, you moron! Your sociological arguement may be perfectly valid from a sociological point of view, but again that does not affect the fact that there is measureably less effort required to type in Dvorak. However, I do agree with you on the off the cuff comment you conclude with - keyboards are available that are specific to RSI.

"This applet compares the standard Qwerty keyboard layout with the more efficient Dvorak layout. Type in or cut and paste some text and hit the calculate button. Get ready to be shocked at the difference!" Link But it wouldn't work on my visit! Dvork might be a myth, but the description of the myth provides no evidence that qwerty is the best. I find it easy to swap.

Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.

Nonsense. I pasted the text of your article into a keyboard compare applet, which is an objective test. When typing the text you typed, the Dvorak keyboard scores better in ALL the important metrics that it covers, including:

• percentage of keystrokes in home row:
  qwerty, 34.06%; dvorak, 67.55%
• percentage of keystrokes that required using the same hand as the previous keystroke:
  qwerty, 36.26%; dvorak, 23.40%
• percentage of keystrokes that required using the same finger as the previous keystroke:
  qwerty, 5.909%; dvorak, 2.317%

Given that moving from the home row slows you down, and given that alternating hands and (to a lesser extent) alternating fingers gives you a level of parallelism that increases speed (kind of like superscalar processors process parts of instructions in parallel with multiple execution units that each has its own ALU), the Dvorak layout seems to be scoring better.

While we're on the subject of alternating hands, a friend of mine told me an amusing anecdote about some programmers he knew that were having an ongoing typing competition around the office. They had written some program to spit out random text (composed of words strung together from /usr/dict/words, I think), record how long it takes the user to type it, and compute and record the score. One of the programmers hit upon an idea: he could improve his score if he hacked the testing program to spit out only words that had a high degree of alternation between the hands. That is, one-handed words "aftertaste" and "lollipop" would be avoided, and highly-alternating words like "enchantment" and "proficiency" would be favored. As the story goes, this cheat gave them the ability to get higher scores than the competition, even when taking the test while others watched to verify that nothing fishy was going on. (All that's necessary is to make the program key off some environment variable set in your .profile or whatever.)

Though that anecdote is only from memory, ask yourself whether "aftertaste" and "lollipop" are indeed to type on a QWERTY keyboard than than "enchantment" and "proficiency" are. I think you'll agree that maximizing alternation between hands is an important characteristic of a good keyboard layout. Furthermore, based on that applet, it seems clear that the Dvorak layout does a better job than the QWERTY layout does of maximizing alternation between hands when typing English prose.

I'm 21-years-old and typed in QWERTY for seven years starting at age 12, ultimately reaching 130+ words per minute. Rather than study for a test at uni two years ago, I decided to start learning DVORAK. For the rest of the semester lab reports were hard to write and after a week, I was a steady 40 wpm on Dvorak but my QWERTY speed dropped to about 50 wpm--after such a loss, there was no turning back! After four months exclusively on Dvorak I was at 90 wpm and by the half-year mark I was at 120 wpm.

As for people who compare switching back-and-forth between keylayouts to bilingualism, they either (a) do not speak from experience or (b) do not type fast on either layout. Occasionally switching back to QWERTY is a REAL PAIN. The only words I can type fast on QWERTY include the URL to my uni's webmail page, my first and last name (email login), and email password. I've found that I only reach tolerable QWERTY speeds if I'm going back to QWERTY on a daily basis. I also think it helps to use the EXACT SAME KEYBOARD IN THE EXACT SAME LOCATION to really rev up QWERTY rates quickly. Of course, the latter statement sounds like psychobabble, but my muscle memory seems to benefit from these constants.

If you haven't garnered these from DVORAK fan sites, here are some little tidbits:

* 'a' and 'm' are the only keys that are not moved between QWERTY and ANSI Dvorak (more on ANSI later...)
* the Dvorak home row includes aoeu ih htns - (spaces insert for readibilty)
* as an OS X user, I find Dvorak much more amenable to common keyboard shortucts. Quit is cmd+Q and Close Window is cmd+w, which makes for easy muscle-memorisation on a Powerbook keyboard with the keys physically rearranged for Dvorak (http://www.geocities.com/rjpoling/MacOS/dvorak/dv orak_powerbook.jpg)

As for ANSI mentioned above, here's the real doozey: August Dvorak initially proposed an alternate number-row layout in his book Typewriting Behavior (1936, I think?). Rather than 12345 67890, Dvorak liked 75319 02468 (again, spaces inserted for readability). In theory, I don't know how much this helps. In practice, it's kinda useful these days since the '@' character is easily accessed with the index finger. This alternate number layout was NOT included in the standard ANSI Dvorak layout, but keymap files may be easily modified by true fanatics. On OS X, I highly recommend Ukelele (http://www.sil.org/computing/catalog/show_softwar e.asp?id=94). I'm two-weeks into learning the alternate layout and am finally getting good at it.

In sum, the Dvorak layout markedly reduces finger movement for standard English text (http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePag e.html); it seems to not be so helpful to developers. If you type fast on QWERTY now, you'll lose a lot of it after learning Dvorak. You may be able to get good enough at QWERTY but it won't be soon after learning Dvorak and it won't be fast and your boss will look at you funny when you're hunting and pecking.

Hope this helps.

Jon

I've been using Dvorak for about three years now. I used to do tech support for several computer labs at a major university and I would type all day long. Like yourself, even though I used proper posture, aids, and so forth, my hands would hurt from all the constant typing at the end of the day.

Once I switched over to Dvorak, I never had any pain again. I can type faster, longer, and more accurately now. For about a week during the transition, it sucked because my muscle memory was inbetween QWERTY and Dvorak, but once you get past that hurdle, you'll have no problems.

As part of my job, whenever I'm not on my machine, I have to type in QWERTY. That happens alot since, well, no one else but myself uses Dvorak. I've not lost any memory of QWERTY and I do not have to hunt and peck. You could say I'm bikeyboardal. It's just like knowing two languages. So long as you're speaking both, you're not going to forget either. Same with QWERTY and Dvorak.

Brooks' site is probably the best overall Dvorak site on the web:

http://www.mwbrooks.com/dvorak/

There's also a yahoo message board, altkeyboards, where Dvorak newbies and oldies discuss all manner of minutiae about that layout and others:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/altkeyboards/

If you're still skeptical of the benefits of Dvorak, use this QWERTY/Dvorak comparison applet and see for yourself.

http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/compare.htm l

Except C was created in 71 by extending B. And C++ was created in 83 (http://www.intap.net/~drw/cpp/cpp01_03.htm). And it can be compiled anywhere you have a C/C++ compiler. Java, from 1991 (http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~wwwbtb/book/chap1/java_hist. html), is what you are talking about when you say "debug everywhere" because it's not compiled, but interpreted, and thus any given interpreter might not work on another platform like the programmer had it working in his particular environment.

I always found it to be the worst one I've ever used, including Solaris and HP-UX.

If you think the Mac GUI (even pre Mac OS X) is worse than Solaris, you've got some serious issues :-)

You're very unspecific in your criticism, but just to pick one: The global menu is a huge advantage compared to Windows' window-based menu. First of all, you can easily and consistently have applications without open windows. Second, and more importantly, Fitt's Law applies, making the Mac menu a lot easier and faster to use than the Windows menu, which is way harder to target correctly.

The application menu (I guess that's what you mean by "Finder menu") is gone in Mac OS X, by the way.

Of course, switching always involves learning. However, my girlfriend has switched to a Mac from Windows about three months ago, and it was very easy. I told her how to use the Dock to start applications, and that was basically all she needed to know to get started. Later, she came back to ask about to turn on Trackpad clicking, and that was it. It's not rocket science, really.

Saying that "any OS has problems" is meaningless. Of course every OS has problem. That doesn't mean there's no difference. Every person has money, it's the amount that makes you rich.

1. textual summary: text creates reinforcement/redundancy
2. annotate the images: arrows, circled regions and call-outs help the viewer know what's important and what it is.
3. legends: color images, especially, need a legend or textual explanation of the color scheme.
4. supporting metadata: information such as subject, scale, time (relative to some event), etc. helps create meaningful context.
5. contrasting image pairs: Image pairs or sequences help cue viewers to the significant features or establish a pattern. Showing before & after, normal vs. abnormal, enhanced vs. non-enhanced, overview vs. detail, plain vs. peanut, etc. helps explain what's what.

Perhaps you'd like to check out CRITICALITY ACCIDENTS from 1943-1970. Plenty of people saw large fission reactions first-hand and lived a day or two afterwards.

From about three quarters of the way down the page :
At that time, the screwdriver apparently slipped and the upper shell fell into position around the fissionable material. Of the eight people in the room, two were directly engaged in the work leading to this incident.

The "blue glow" was observed, a heat wave felt, and immediately the top shell was slipped off and everyone left the room. The scientist who was demonstrating the experiment received sufficient dosage to result in injuries from which he died nine days later. The scientist assisting received sufficient radiation dosage to cause serious injuries and some permanent partial disability.

"er, Whoops."

A java app that might change your mind on the dvorak layout: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/comparePage .html

For those who don't want to deal with trackerless torrents/ /Magnet URIs, etc. (see above), which are faster...

This torrent below will give you a smaller torrent, so a slower download - you have been warned:

One torrent of the torrent:
http://www.iddl.vt.edu/~jackie/imps_chapter1_DAVEN PORT_928735.avi.torrent

And may /. have mercy on my tracker.

http://www.iddl.vt.edu/~jackie/eclipsesetup.exe.to rrent/

Oh please. You're talking about an engineer here, not a soldier. An engineer has no duty. They have a job. [ ... ]

No duty? Go read this story (all the way through) and then try saying that again with a straight face. (If you can, the true nature of your moral character will be revealed.)

There is no "duty" to go back later and fix those bugs. [ ... ] The only "duty" anybody has is to do what is in their best economic interest. [ ... ]

There is always a cost! That's not a "business/accounting/shareholder standpoint", that's economic fact.

So, are you suggesting that engineers everywhere should subordinate their sense of moral, ethical, and social responsibility to the "facts" of economics? That a faulty bridge should not be repaired because of the "opportunity cost" to the engineering firm? That an easily-punctured gas tank shouldn't be relocated because the re-engineering costs exceed the anticipated court-imposed liability payouts? That a medical device that infects or disfigures its users shouldn't be fixed or recalled because those dollars can be, "better leveraged," elsewhere?

The moment you start to affect other people's lives -- and make them pay for the privilege -- you are expected to accept responsibility for the effect you have. The precise degree of responsibility is under constant debate, and highly situation-dependent. But the responsibility exists, and it is subordinate to your economic models. Caveat Emptor is not, nor should it be, the whole of the law.

Dollars are ephemeral; but reputations, good and bad, can last for millennia.

Schwab

Here, compare the two keyboards side-by-side with your own text!

So it is a myth that QWERTY was designed so that keys hit generally in succession were on opposite ends of the keyboard to forestall jamming? Try this website: http://www.acm.vt.edu/~jmaxwell/dvorak/compare.htm l and compare a few sentences.

I also thought this website was pretty neat, and you can test the code yourself: http://www.visi.com/~pmk/evolved.html. I think this website has been on slashdot before, but I can't remember.

The Dvorak calculator compares dvorak with qwerty on any text. The fonts are a bit screwed up but it's still pretty cool.

• Java Demonstration of Dvorak and Qwerty Finger Movement Distances
• Letter Frequencies in the English Language - How many of the more frequent letters are on Dvorak's home row, and how many in Qwerty's? Did it ever seem completely stupid that "e" isn't on the home row in Qwerty? That's because it is, and Dvorak fixes that.
• Words Possible on Certain Rows - One snippet: in Dvorak, using the home row alone one can type 99 of the 1000 most common English words. Qwerty's home row allows for only 15.

Virginia Tech has the same thing, and I'm sure many more do as well.

For all you guys thinking that the keyboard is the way to go: are you still referring to qwerty?

True, compared to the mouse the keyboard is an insanely precise HCI device, mainly because (once you have learned the dimensions of your specific keyboard) you 'just know' where everything is, and your muscle memory will outperform any positionally non-absolute device (mouse/trackpoint/touchpad/joystick).

But don't think that's as good as it gets.

Even for the much-celebrated keyboard, improvements are possible. Case in point: the actual layout of the keys. Yes, I am a qwerty-to-Dvorak convert, and let me tell you it's an improvement. Granted, a few key combos (such as Ctrl-ZXCV) are blasted from a nice row to all over the keyboard (but for historic reasons personally I prefer the "Ctl-Insert" style anyway, in spite of my Macintosh heritage).

Typing plain text (such as this) is not only faster, it is noticeably more comfortable. Plus, as a nerd/geek I gotta appreciate the amount of exercise it saves me, even if it's just af the ten-finger variety. ;-)

Compare for yourself:
Dvorak and qwerty layouts side-by-side
This post is two-thirds of the finger movement in Dvorak, with more than 61% of all hits on the home row, compared to just some 30% using qwerty.

Is this where I have to post a link to an article discussing the Therac-25? O.K, I will.

Hint: Just because it's tested, doesn't mean it works.

Not only that, much of the basic information about the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear weapons was openly published by the US decades ago in the book The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.

AFAIK, Ocean engineering is essentially Aeronautical engineering, with water as the fluid medium.

Take a look here

I never trusted Windows Update anyway.

Try Daisy: http://vtntug.w2k.vt.edu/daisy.htm

I take it you haven't read any of the "Why War" correspondence between Einstein and Freud (can be found here), though most of what is there is part of Freud's letters. "Not that much" is really lowballing it.

Buy games online? Why, Sega tried that over 10 years ago with 'Sega Channel'. You'd subscribe, hook your Sega up to your cable TV, and get to play games instead of buy them. See http://fiddle.visc.vt.edu/courses/ee4984/Projects1 995/gutolazz.html for some info.

People liked it the last time I posted it here, so here it is again. Visual Guide to installing RealPlayer - a step by step guide to turning off every annoying feature of RealPlayer. Yes, it takes a minute to do, but so does configuring QuickTime. It refers to the Windows version but is very close to the other versions as well.

I think the current RealOne player is garbage.

Could you be a little more specific? I stream terabytes of data with Real without much of a problem. The client has finally been cleared out of all of the crud - if you want a step by step guide you can read mine here and the server's finally stablized to the point that they run for months without restarting the server application.

At least the original RealAudio wasn't nearly as bad, but it still consumed a lot of RAM and CPU cycles on my 68040.

A 225K stream in the current version of RealPlayer takes up 7-15% of my 2.0GHz Pentium-4M that I just tested it on.

Having worked with or investigated the three common streaming mediums, I think that Real offers the best quality for things such as Powerpoint presentations or capturing writing on a document camera. For larger (640x480) movies, I've found that QuickTime with Sorenson 3 seems a little better. However, QuickTime for Windows can be tremendously unstable and generally brings Windows down with it as well. It's also much harder than Real to get working on the client end.

Windows Media has never impressed me much - it's a variant of MPEG4 without much going for it other than the fact it's free. When Comedy Central went from Real to Windows Media, I noticed a drop in quality, even though they went up in bandwidth.

As far as what's being done with streaming media, I use the streaming legal music services (alternate between Napster and Real Rhapsody) and am happy with them - I've got more than enough bandwidth to use them at work and they let me listen to the stuff I don't like enough to buy but want to hear every now and then. It's helping improve education - many of the students I work for enjoy being able to review the lectures after the fact. It means we can place movies online for them to watch without them having to go to the library to watch a physical copy (that someone else may have already checked out).

Granted I'm playing loosely with the definition of improvisation. Improvisation is probably better applied to Jazz or a cadenza, so maybe it's my bad, but I think there's room to move within a broad definition of improvisation. Other than the obligatory years of piano lessons as a kid and an ongoing love of jazz and classical music I haven't the education or musical ability to back my usage up.

Because unless you decide to pick up a computer and brain someone with it they are not a lethal weapon.

The issue is not the consequences of mis-use, but the complexity of learning proper use.

Anyway - bad software kills. Probably the best known incident is the Therac 25 software failure.

Peter G. Neumann notes over 700 deaths in 24 incidents - and that was just by 1986. (All software developers should read PGN's RISKS Forum.) Some more fatal incidents can be found here.

Imagine layering a room with this, and getting images on all 6 sides

It's not exactly what you describe, but there's the VT-CAVE. It needs LCD shutter glasses and displays on the front, right, and left walls, and on the floor.

This is already being done by at least one vendor.

http://www.liebert.com/dynamic/displayproduct.asp? id=1077&cycles=60hz

Liebert cools the Virginia Tech XServe cluster.

From http://www.tcf.vt.edu/faq.html

Q: How much heat does System X generate?
A: Each rack full of equipment generates in excess of 8 kilowatts of heat on a continuous basis and the machine consists of about 40 racks. That's like 240 hair dryers on high constantly in 1000 square feet of space.

Q: How is System X cooled?
A: System X uses a Liebert Extreme Density cooling system that is fed off of a chilled water loop. There are two 125 ton Carrier water chillers that provide roughly 3 million BTUs of cooling capacity. This chilled water loop is heat exchanged in the Liebert XDP units with a R-134A refrigerant loop that is fed to the rack mounted liquid-to-air heat exchangers. We only use about 110 tons of the 250 ton capacity.

I haven't been at Tech since '99 (Electrical Engineering), but the CS department then was still on Wintel boxes. A few years before I arrived, the CS department was using DEC Alphas. Now, they've got the System X supercomputer from Apple, but I wasn't aware that the CS department was recommending Macs for students. In fact, a quick look at the prospective students page shows that the CS department links to the engineering department's computer recommendation page, which is still recommending Wintel boxes.

I can see the reason that a CS department would go to Linux/BSD/OSX boxes, since g++ will work as well or better than anything on Windows (Dev-C++ is good, but still has some faults). For engineering, as stated by another poster, a lot of the required programs are Windows only, which is unfortunate. But I see that things are improving on that front: LabView, MatLab, PSpice... available in OS X now. So maybe things will change...

Virginia Tech uses XServes in their super computer:

http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html/

Form Wikipedia:

"It is touted as "the world's most powerful and cheapest homebuilt supercomputer."

A cpu chip is a layered silicon sandwich consisting of transistors, resistors and capacitors.

Two or three transistors are combined to create a nand gate http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electro nic/nand.html#c2 which can be paired to form a nand gate latch or flip-flop http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/electro nic/nand.html#c1

The flip-flop is the basic component of the discreet electronic computational device. It represents either a one, or a zero.

Three flip-flops, representing the A register, the B register and the Accumulator are wired so that the A and the B register are compared, the results are placed in the accumulator.

The results of a 0 + 0 = 0
The results of a 1 + 0 = 1
The results of a 0 + 1 = 1
The results of a 1 + 1 = 0 (and the carry bit is set)

This is addition in its simplest form.

Repeating this operation over multiple bits, allows an integer of fixed length to be summed.

Subtraction is handled by a handy trick that is available only to binary. The trick is that if you invert a bit and add, the result is subtraction. This is called the ones complement.

Computers do subtraction by ADDING the ones complement.

Multiplication is handled by repetition of the ADD operation.

Division is done by Repeated Subtraction http://courses.cs.vt.edu/~cs1104/BuildingBlocks/di vide.020.html

Upon this foundation we build microcode. Upon the microcode we can build an Assembler Language, and from Assembler, we build Perl.

And yes, in Perl, you can add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers in any base you want.

Perhaps I should have been more clear in my original post... Computers are dumb. At their heart, they can only add ones and zeros.

I lie about age, gender, dob, country of birth, etc on every online form I've ever filled out. What makes these guys think other people don't do this too?

Also, it seems that US universities will continue to be THE hot place for ID theft. Here's an interesting page that descibes how the liberal ideology in IT management at US universities that, IMO, is the main reason they are continually and successfully hacked.

I think you're a bit misguided...

today i can create on a home PC in hours what ILM would have taken years

Technically, yes, but you need a lot of really skilled writers and animators to create the movie in the first place. Merely having the capability to render photorealistic 3D images does not by itself make a good movie -- look at the difference between Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within and any Pixar production to see that.

with the rise of even schools having massive renderfarms (like the g5 one)

Again, I think you're mistaken. I assume you're referring to the Terascale cluster at Virginia Tech, but it's not a "renderfarm", it's a supercomputer cluster designated for scientific research. Check out their web page here, they have details about what kind of jobs they'll accept.

I found it odd that there aren't any pics of the machine on those sites, so I looked around... Here are some pics of the prototype at top, and the finished version at bottom. It looks like it's going to be in classic "IBM black", like the 2001 monolith : )

Some more pics of the prototype.

For comparison, the Earth simulator and big mac.

Anyone know what kind of facilities blue gene will be housed at? The one for the earth simulator looks like something out of a movie, IBM better be able to compete on the 'cool factor'. : )

And does anyone else get the warm and fuzzy feelings from looking at these pics, even though there's nothing you could possibly use that much power for? Ahhh, power...

Here's another from kubuntu with KDE 3.4 and default transparency options
Pretty, eh?

It's stable and it's wonderful:
Kubuntu with default transparency and shadow options
Pretty eh?

From Shane Sidebottom's Masters thesis:

One factor that is not often examined in the flicker research conducted in psychophysics is individual variability. Some people are more sensitive to flicker than others (Rogowitz 1986). To develop an accurate flicker standard for the general population, the nature of the distribution of flicker sensitivity in the population must be considered. Individual differences may be attributable to many factors, such as gender, age, or personality. Young people are more sensitive to flicker than older people (Kim and Mayer, 1994). Women are more sensitive to flicker than men are (Maxwell, 1992). Personality has been cited by psychologists as affecting flicker perception (Amir and Ali, 1989). The factors that lead to individual variation in flicker sensitivity may be of little real use to those designing displays for the average user; however, knowledge of the extent of individual variability is useful.

There's more (plus a graph!), and the references should keep you occupied for a while. As to *why* -- well, *why* is a question that can keep researchers busy for quite a while.

... and the G4 which is so much cheaper than equivalent PCs that they built a cluster supercomputer out of them...

You sure you're not talking about VirginiaTech's G5 12.25 Tflops cluster?

Anyways, I totally agree with your point(s). Most people saying Macs are more expensive are not only ignoring the "cost-effectiveness" of the OS, but also the value of a silent, small and/or safe computer.

The Amazon link is a.) overwhelmed, and b.) flash. Eww!

Enjoy the following mirrors:
-http://216.69.167.204/hitchhikersguide-1.mov

-http://www.waxy.org/archive/2005/02/16/hitchhik.s html

-http://filebox.vt.edu/users/jkbrooks/pictures/hit chhikersguide.mov

Link to higher rez QT version

Get it before the server asplodes :)

Get a load of Xserves, install Xgrid or something else, plug in, process (it seems it takes about no time to assemble and it runs osX).

Add more Xserves to get more power...

Get a load of Xserves, install Xgrid or something else, plug in, process (it seems it takes about no time to assemble and it runs osX).

Add more Xserves to get more power...