Saxon math is either great or horrible, depending on your learning style. Saxon is one of the few curriculums that still places an emphasis on drilling with lots of problems. For many people, the lack of repetition is the biggest thing holding back their understanding, so Saxon's stuff is near-perfect. For other people (including myself), the mechanics are easily handled once the intuitive concept is understood. That makes Saxon's stuff feel like torture to me (and apparently, to you).
When I'm recommending a math curriculum to a hommeschooling friend, I try to take the time to evaluate their learning style. Some kids really need a curriculum like Saxon's, but others get my copy of Foerster's Algebra. It really depends on the student.
This is an advertisement that was banned, not a web site in the normal search results. Google would still be every bit as useful if they banned ads randomly or didn't show ads at all.
So far, Google has a pretty good track record of not hand-tweaking their results (at least in the US).
Actually, the problem isn't with the horsepower. It's the '07 transmissions that really suck. I'm not sure about the Dutch, but Toyota is definitely stonewalling over the issue.
Well, admittedly, the last time I compiled a recent kernel on a really old pc, it was without X running and on a non-preemptible kernel, with two swap drives. How bad was that debian box?
800Mhz is plenty when you have (relatively) huge caches and fast RAM, as well as the headroom of being able to triple your speed on demand. Have you tried actually limiting the Athlon to 800Mhz? You'll start noticing some really long pauses, especially if you take out all but one of your RAM modules. With a 500Mhz P3 and more 384Mb RAM, Firefox is sluggish even on simple web sites.
Compiling a kernel wouldn't be too bad on the fit-pc. It can be done in under 30min on a pc with half the performance. However, given the lack of RAM and how slow the hard drive is, building glibc and gcc would take days, and things like GNOME and KDE would be worse than most slashdotters would joke about.
I understood that perfectly, however, it is still interesting to compare the two. They share quite a bit of hardware, even though they are for completely different applications. The processors differ by a speed grade, and they have the same amount of RAM. Where the XO-1 has wifi, the fit-pc has 2 ethernet ports. I'd guess the wifi probably costs a bit more. The XO-1 has 1Gb flash, whereas the fit-pc has a 40Gb hard drive. Again, I'd wager the flash is a bit more expensive than the hard drive. And when you add in the display and other components of the XO-1, it really makes the tiny-pc look over-priced. Also, is seems silly for the fit-pc to have an analog video output instead of digital.
My Borland C++ 2 and Sidekick 2 manuals are both dated 1991, and Turbo C 2 shipped in 1989, so those aren't prior art. Anybody know when the 1.0 releases of those were, or Lotus Magellan 1.0?
Also, would anything in Lotus 1-2-3 (released in 1983) be prior art?
Which is, of course, a completely useless and disingenuous answer to a person who already has the graphics memory sitting around, and wants to know if it is better than a hard drive.
You seem to be advocating wasting perfectly good VRAM in favor of buying more system RAM. If the VRAM is essentially free (ie. comes with the system no matter what), there is no good reason not to try to put it to good use.
Also, your "No" is completely unqualified. You offer no details of how VRAM performs worse as swap space than hard drives, let alone actual benchmarks or citations. (And I have the feeling that most graphics memory would be significantly better than your average IDE hard drive for swapping.)
No programs would have direct access to the video RAM, any more than they have access to the address space of other running programs. Only the kernel itself would be able to control what gets swapped out to vram.
Seriously, you write as though your brain hasn't been used since the heyday of Windows 3.1. Go learn what a real operating system is these days.
The majority of boot time is spent initializing drivers and bringing the system to a usable state. The 3 seconds it takes for the BIOS to init the disk, locate the MBR, load the bootloader, and jump to it is negligible compared to the tedious hardware scanning and initialization done by the OS itself when it is finally loaded by the bootloader. Hmmm... You must not have heard of ACPI. Every PC I've used that supports it takes more than 5 seconds to start loading grub, and some take a lot longer because of the timeouts for entering the BIOS configuration utility.
If you want to speed up the boot sequence, take a look at cutting the number of attached devices down to the bare minimum. Don't start any services during init. Do as little as possible to get the system to its usable state and you'll have minimized the boot time. Unfortunately, technology just doesn't work that way. System requirements (of both a hardware and a software nature) will require that you perform extra initialization at boot time, so any possible gains are already offset by the increased load. We already have bootchart. It works, and can be used to configure a system that spends less time loading services than in the bios-controlled hardware probing.
The neat thing about stuff like LinuxBIOS and flash-based booting is that your system can theoretically send out a DHCP request before the hard drives have spun up. If you have enough flash space, you should also be able to put part of your X server in there, so that the graphics card can be put in the right mode and be ready to display the log-in prompt (or desktop) within a few seconds of when the OS starts getting data from the hard drive.
Getting off of x86 may be one way to optimize the boot process, but how many of us really have the wherewithal to make an architecture jump from x86? This bit seems a bit odd, since the only x86-specific stuff in this issue is the BIOS itself, and the article is about replacing that. The actual processor architecture isn't a bottleneck.
Nope. Other than the display and the keyboard, the 33s is a good calculator. It isn't worthy of Fiorina.
But you can blame her for completely killing their calculator business for several years. (They left the assembly lines running for a while, but fired all the engineers at ACO). She's also responsible for making sure that none of the good bits of HP were left after the spin-off of Agilent (excepting the aforementioned calculator business she killed) and she is responsible for the assimilation of Compaq (for which she also killed off all the good bits of the company, including what was left of the Alpha business).
...then that would imply that the universe is a finite set... Where the hell do you get that? I get the feeling you have no clue what cardinality means (in the context of set theory).
Well, for starters, you haven't exactly solved any partial differential equations to show off how serious you are. Nor have you made any predictions. All you've done is say "this might be happening because..."
The paper in question proposes a cosmology that would be rather elegant mathematically and also explain some outstanding questions, including the apparent presence of dark energy, while still allowing general relativity to hold in our "universe". Unfortunately, the only prediction the paper makes it that the universe as we know it will cease to exist at some point in the future. Calculating the date is left as an exercise for the reader (but they do give you the equations needed).
Really? What country are you talking about? Here in the US, the telco won't sell me more than 6Mbps when the line can handle 8. And many people opt for the slower, cheaper connections going down to 768kbps. I'd be very surprised if more than 2% of the customers were within 512kbps of the line capacity.
Forgetting your Econ 101 class? Price ceilings only help the poor when you make sure the poor are first in line. Otherwise, they end up helping the rich just as much (and in the real world, often more so).
To get a good first approximation of the aerodynamic characteristics of the X-wing, all you need to do is import the design into X-Plane. It's been done with other research designs, and that's probably all it would have taken to show that it would fall apart.
Not likely. Intel is currently developing their 32nm technology, and IBM has tested 29.9nm lithography. That's only around 600 times the Bohr radius (radius of a hydrogen atom). Within the next 10 years or so, we will have reached the fundamental limits on the size of a silicon transistor, and once those chips are brought to market, that's it. If Moore's law continues at all, it will be applied to something like quantum computers, not semiconductors.
Of course, there are many parts of a CPU that traditionally don't scale as well as the basic transistor, so with continued work, we can probably keep shrinking CPUs. But we'll be doing it in small increments with increasing marginal costs, not by the factors of 2 we've been seeing for the past 20 years.
You make some good points about getting humans to actually follow the random search patterns, but I don't think we need to worry too much about terrorists being able to steal the schedules. Because they are random, they don't need to be generated very far in advance, leaving would-be infiltrators at most a few hours to steal the information, plan the timing of an attack, and execute it. Even though the actual window of opportunity for slipping through security won't be reduced, it becomes much much harder to take advantage of a temporary gap.
Using random patrol patterns gets rid of the biggest known weakness of routine patrols. Only time will tell if the problems introduced by random patrolling are worse. In the meantime, I have no qualms with using the method that has fewer obvious exploits.
No, it doesn't calculate using the faulty value. It just looks like it does because (in the examples you quoted) the result is also within the range of values that triggers the rendering bug.
Touch screens aren't a reliable and efficient way to input numbers. A well-designed keyboard with good tactile feedback is still the best way to go.
What do you find clumsy about current programmable calculators? Most of HP's scientific calculators have had keystroke-based programming, and the current generation of graphing calculators can be programmed in C. Also, the vast majority of HP's calculator market has always been professionals.
Come to think of it, you must not have heard of their calculator business. You should check them out, as those machines are far more than toys.
You didn't read the post I linked to, did you? The bootloader and OS update code should be in ROM, not Flash. That solves the problem completely, and has a negligible impact on the cost of the device.
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Saxon math is either great or horrible, depending on your learning style. Saxon is one of the few curriculums that still places an emphasis on drilling with lots of problems. For many people, the lack of repetition is the biggest thing holding back their understanding, so Saxon's stuff is near-perfect. For other people (including myself), the mechanics are easily handled once the intuitive concept is understood. That makes Saxon's stuff feel like torture to me (and apparently, to you).
When I'm recommending a math curriculum to a hommeschooling friend, I try to take the time to evaluate their learning style. Some kids really need a curriculum like Saxon's, but others get my copy of Foerster's Algebra. It really depends on the student.
This is an advertisement that was banned, not a web site in the normal search results. Google would still be every bit as useful if they banned ads randomly or didn't show ads at all.
So far, Google has a pretty good track record of not hand-tweaking their results (at least in the US).
Actually, the problem isn't with the horsepower. It's the '07 transmissions that really suck. I'm not sure about the Dutch, but Toyota is definitely stonewalling over the issue.
Well, admittedly, the last time I compiled a recent kernel on a really old pc, it was without X running and on a non-preemptible kernel, with two swap drives. How bad was that debian box?
Mac Mini: 1.83 Ghz Core 2 Duo
Tiny-PC: 500Mhz Geode
Looks like about an eighth the processor and a quarter the RAM, for more than a third of the price.
800Mhz is plenty when you have (relatively) huge caches and fast RAM, as well as the headroom of being able to triple your speed on demand. Have you tried actually limiting the Athlon to 800Mhz? You'll start noticing some really long pauses, especially if you take out all but one of your RAM modules. With a 500Mhz P3 and more 384Mb RAM, Firefox is sluggish even on simple web sites.
Compiling a kernel wouldn't be too bad on the fit-pc. It can be done in under 30min on a pc with half the performance. However, given the lack of RAM and how slow the hard drive is, building glibc and gcc would take days, and things like GNOME and KDE would be worse than most slashdotters would joke about.
I understood that perfectly, however, it is still interesting to compare the two. They share quite a bit of hardware, even though they are for completely different applications. The processors differ by a speed grade, and they have the same amount of RAM. Where the XO-1 has wifi, the fit-pc has 2 ethernet ports. I'd guess the wifi probably costs a bit more. The XO-1 has 1Gb flash, whereas the fit-pc has a 40Gb hard drive. Again, I'd wager the flash is a bit more expensive than the hard drive. And when you add in the display and other components of the XO-1, it really makes the tiny-pc look over-priced. Also, is seems silly for the fit-pc to have an analog video output instead of digital.
No flash. Fewer USB ports than the XO-1. Lame.
(And Gentoo? WTF!?)
My Borland C++ 2 and Sidekick 2 manuals are both dated 1991, and Turbo C 2 shipped in 1989, so those aren't prior art. Anybody know when the 1.0 releases of those were, or Lotus Magellan 1.0?
Also, would anything in Lotus 1-2-3 (released in 1983) be prior art?
Which is, of course, a completely useless and disingenuous answer to a person who already has the graphics memory sitting around, and wants to know if it is better than a hard drive.
You seem to be advocating wasting perfectly good VRAM in favor of buying more system RAM. If the VRAM is essentially free (ie. comes with the system no matter what), there is no good reason not to try to put it to good use.
Also, your "No" is completely unqualified. You offer no details of how VRAM performs worse as swap space than hard drives, let alone actual benchmarks or citations. (And I have the feeling that most graphics memory would be significantly better than your average IDE hard drive for swapping.)
Mod parent overrated.
No programs would have direct access to the video RAM, any more than they have access to the address space of other running programs. Only the kernel itself would be able to control what gets swapped out to vram.
Seriously, you write as though your brain hasn't been used since the heyday of Windows 3.1. Go learn what a real operating system is these days.
The neat thing about stuff like LinuxBIOS and flash-based booting is that your system can theoretically send out a DHCP request before the hard drives have spun up. If you have enough flash space, you should also be able to put part of your X server in there, so that the graphics card can be put in the right mode and be ready to display the log-in prompt (or desktop) within a few seconds of when the OS starts getting data from the hard drive. Getting off of x86 may be one way to optimize the boot process, but how many of us really have the wherewithal to make an architecture jump from x86? This bit seems a bit odd, since the only x86-specific stuff in this issue is the BIOS itself, and the article is about replacing that. The actual processor architecture isn't a bottleneck.
Nope. Other than the display and the keyboard, the 33s is a good calculator. It isn't worthy of Fiorina.
But you can blame her for completely killing their calculator business for several years. (They left the assembly lines running for a while, but fired all the engineers at ACO). She's also responsible for making sure that none of the good bits of HP were left after the spin-off of Agilent (excepting the aforementioned calculator business she killed) and she is responsible for the assimilation of Compaq (for which she also killed off all the good bits of the company, including what was left of the Alpha business).
...then that would imply that the universe is a finite set... Where the hell do you get that? I get the feeling you have no clue what cardinality means (in the context of set theory).Well, for starters, you haven't exactly solved any partial differential equations to show off how serious you are. Nor have you made any predictions. All you've done is say "this might be happening because..."
The paper in question proposes a cosmology that would be rather elegant mathematically and also explain some outstanding questions, including the apparent presence of dark energy, while still allowing general relativity to hold in our "universe". Unfortunately, the only prediction the paper makes it that the universe as we know it will cease to exist at some point in the future. Calculating the date is left as an exercise for the reader (but they do give you the equations needed).
Really? What country are you talking about? Here in the US, the telco won't sell me more than 6Mbps when the line can handle 8. And many people opt for the slower, cheaper connections going down to 768kbps. I'd be very surprised if more than 2% of the customers were within 512kbps of the line capacity.
Forgetting your Econ 101 class? Price ceilings only help the poor when you make sure the poor are first in line. Otherwise, they end up helping the rich just as much (and in the real world, often more so).
To get a good first approximation of the aerodynamic characteristics of the X-wing, all you need to do is import the design into X-Plane. It's been done with other research designs, and that's probably all it would have taken to show that it would fall apart.
Why wait?
Not likely. Intel is currently developing their 32nm technology, and IBM has tested 29.9nm lithography. That's only around 600 times the Bohr radius (radius of a hydrogen atom). Within the next 10 years or so, we will have reached the fundamental limits on the size of a silicon transistor, and once those chips are brought to market, that's it. If Moore's law continues at all, it will be applied to something like quantum computers, not semiconductors.
Of course, there are many parts of a CPU that traditionally don't scale as well as the basic transistor, so with continued work, we can probably keep shrinking CPUs. But we'll be doing it in small increments with increasing marginal costs, not by the factors of 2 we've been seeing for the past 20 years.
You make some good points about getting humans to actually follow the random search patterns, but I don't think we need to worry too much about terrorists being able to steal the schedules. Because they are random, they don't need to be generated very far in advance, leaving would-be infiltrators at most a few hours to steal the information, plan the timing of an attack, and execute it. Even though the actual window of opportunity for slipping through security won't be reduced, it becomes much much harder to take advantage of a temporary gap.
Using random patrol patterns gets rid of the biggest known weakness of routine patrols. Only time will tell if the problems introduced by random patrolling are worse. In the meantime, I have no qualms with using the method that has fewer obvious exploits.
No, it doesn't calculate using the faulty value. It just looks like it does because (in the examples you quoted) the result is also within the range of values that triggers the rendering bug.
Touch screens aren't a reliable and efficient way to input numbers. A well-designed keyboard with good tactile feedback is still the best way to go.
What do you find clumsy about current programmable calculators? Most of HP's scientific calculators have had keystroke-based programming, and the current generation of graphing calculators can be programmed in C. Also, the vast majority of HP's calculator market has always been professionals.
Come to think of it, you must not have heard of their calculator business. You should check them out, as those machines are far more than toys.
You didn't read the post I linked to, did you? The bootloader and OS update code should be in ROM, not Flash. That solves the problem completely, and has a negligible impact on the cost of the device.