I've never heard of this "Minnesota" place
I will concede that indeed the Minnesota I grew up in (back in the 80s and 90s) was nothing like the Minnesota that exists now.
I grew up in Minnesota - which is what the M in MECC stood for - and we had Number Munchers, Word Munchers, Oregon Trail, and a variety of other educational games. All for the trusty Apple IIgs. If anything like those is available when my own (as of yet unborn) children reach school age, I would also support those titles in the classroom.
One of the first logic-based problems I remember from school was a "lights-out" bonus round from one of the Munchers.
Although Zaphod has already demonstrated that black buttons on a black interface with black labels and lights that illuminate black also works very well.
Considering they have ran the HP-UX (HP Unix) OS on a variety of architectures, I'm rather surprised they didn't bring it to the x86 and use this laptop to launch it.
Granted, I couldn't imagine that porting an operating system is a trivial task, but I would think it could be a bit of a minor triumph to pull it off on a small POSIX laptop...
And if by year's end you can't watch a movie put out by Sony without owning a blu-ray player, then that will drive up blu-ray sales.
Not for me. I go out of my way to avoid giving Sony any money. I never liked the money-grubbing tactics of th big-time marketers, and when they came out with the rootikit on their audio disks, that just put the final nail in the coffin. I haven't knowingly purchased a Sony product in over two years.
True, it is certainly possible to avoid buying Sony products. However, considering how many movies are put out by their studios now, the movie-buying public will in general have a hard time avoiding all things Sony. It would take a lot of people consciously deciding to not purchase Sony products in order to have an effect on this - hence your decision will be drowned out by the money coming out of other peoples' wallets.
other sneaky tactics - like no longer making regular DVD drives
They don't need to stop making DVD drives, they just need to stop making DVD discs. And considering the size of the studios that are owned by Sony, it wouldn't be all that difficult for them to make a move towards that.
And if by year's end you can't watch a movie put out by Sony without owning a blu-ray player, then that will drive up blu-ray sales.
Why, oh why can't I get these in the US? I would love a phone that is a *good* NES emulator.
IANAL (of course), but my guess would be that certain other countries - not to name names - tend to exhibit much less concern for copyright protection than here in the US.
Which can mean that those certain other countries will sometimes have access to these nefarious products that we may never see on this side of the pond.
True, the main distinction between terrorism and business (at least in the US) is that one is a crime that hurts or mains large groups of people, and the other was twisted into an excuse for invading a sovereign nation on the other side of the world.
Didn't the GDI engineers have the same ability? IIRC, in the first C&C either side could take over a building with a lone engineer. Then C&C:RA required either a van full of them, or some damage to the building ahead of time.
Since Command & Conquer had terrorist engineers years ago. Really, taking over several blocks worth of power stations - to sell them for profit (and to screw up your opponents' grid) - is a pretty high feat of terrorism.
I remember this kid when I was in school. He was not a popular kid.
Wow, I thought at a certain point they'd just let you out of the fourth grade with an exception...
My understanding is that the list of Fastest Supercomputers is for supercomputers that are publicly funded - which is why we don't see any mention of google or microsoft clusters. But yet the summary claims that this one has not taken any government funding.
So then how can this cluster claim to be fourth fastest, when they really are not competing with the publicly funded clusters of the main list?
Obviously, we cannot expect the big corporate supercomputers to spill their beans to contest this, but it doesn't really look like it would be fair to compare this non-publicly-funded supercomputer to those that are.
The only difference is the onboard electronics.
That is not entirely true. Indeed, usually the failure points in hard drives end up being the moving parts themselves - think of how many drives you've owned that have died from bad bearings or slipped heads. And when the manufacturers choose which heads and bearings to use, its not a one-size-fits-all game.
Disk drives with any interface can be built to the same degree of reliability. They can, but they aren't.
While you can argue back and forth whether or not SCSI is still faster than SATA, and which has the better transfer rates in what situation, they really missed one of the biggest advantages of SCSI hardware:
MTBF
SCSI drives have generally had 10x higher MTBF ratings, which means a lot when you're installing a drive in a server that needs to run for five nines. Sure, the difference in access is great, but its really the longevity that counts. Your gaming box can cope with a drive that is only supposed to stand up to a year or two of usage - you'll need more storage for your porn by then anyways - but server hard drives need to be able to take a beating constantly, and longer.
That was why I was always willing to dish out the extra coin for SCSI drives for my servers back when I was an admin.
BTW, IMHO, Gene Wilder was a way better Willy Wonka than the Michael Jackson-esque Johnny Depp in the remake.
I for one was disappointed that neither Willy Wonka had a goatee. When I first read the book in 4th grade, that was the first time I had ever encountered the word goatee. And then I went to see the movie and Gene Wilder was goatee-less. In the new one, Johnny Depp is also goatee-less.
remainder of your life in jail isn't *that* good a deal.
Yeah, and we sure are good at catching al-qaeda guys, aren't we? Yep, I'm sure of it - bin Laden's gonna fall any day now.
I'm probably not the only person who has received the "live or die" email claiming to come from a hitman. If by the email someone could take a body for $9,000 or less, and then by the story sell it for $250,000, then there is certainly money to be made.
I learned BASIC back in the days of the C64. I then learned Perl when I decided to try my hand at bioinformatics. I picked up C++ at the same time. But there was one language that was used regularly there that always made me feel like a fool.
SQL.
Everything about it seemed backwards and inside out to me. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around "accountant-speak" and "normal forms" (still not sure WTF that means). Yet i know it will likely be in my future. Too much data resides in tables now, and too much data interpretation comes down to data(base) mining. Even the perl::sql modules couldn't save me completely.
So I would say, if you plan for a career that is data-driven, learn SQL if you haven't already. It certainly doesn't seem to get easier to pick up as you wait longer - or at least it hasn't for me.
Did you have a mandatory curfew at 10pm every night that was enforced by the city?
As a matter of fact, yes. Children out past curfew without adults could be picked up by the police. Thats been common in the US for a long time. My parents had the same curfew, and the same curfew siren (also operated by the city) blared every night.
Do you really think a curfew at 10pm is going to stop teenagers from joining gangs?
Certainly not. But most crimes involving juveniles are committed after dark. So if you enforce a curfew, you can at least contain the threat somewhat.
all that generation did was eat, drink, do drugs, and have sex
Do you honestly believe that nothing of value was accomplished in those 20 years? If that was really all that happened, then wouldn't one expect at least a dip in population expansion, from all the drunks that would be crashing cars and the children that would be stillborn from drug-addicted parents?
Its no wonder people characterize members of your generation as whiners. You have no respect for your elders. What else do you feel entitled to? I'm sure you'll let us know...
Since they save power in the usual way (by reducing voltage) they're probably slower than stock chips.
Yes, I do recall that the Transmeta chips were a fair amount slower than the Intel / AMD chips that were out at the same time, though in some regards one could say they made up for it with far better battery life in laptops.
This doesn't matter in a lot of imbedded applications but it won't attract the gamer crowd.
I can't speak for everyone, but I wasn't planning to run duke nukem forever on a low-power system... But I can think of plenty of typical household applications that would be well suited to a cpu that consumes less power.
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I will concede that indeed the Minnesota I grew up in (back in the 80s and 90s) was nothing like the Minnesota that exists now.
Damn, I miss the good old days.
I think BadAnalogyGuy is lost in the libraries of congresses worth of data that will be served by this system.
I grew up in Minnesota - which is what the M in MECC stood for - and we had Number Munchers, Word Munchers, Oregon Trail, and a variety of other educational games. All for the trusty Apple IIgs. If anything like those is available when my own (as of yet unborn) children reach school age, I would also support those titles in the classroom.
One of the first logic-based problems I remember from school was a "lights-out" bonus round from one of the Munchers.
'=o='
I dunno... How much storage is really in there?
Nah, I probably don't want to know.
Although Zaphod has already demonstrated that black buttons on a black interface with black labels and lights that illuminate black also works very well.
Considering they have ran the HP-UX (HP Unix) OS on a variety of architectures, I'm rather surprised they didn't bring it to the x86 and use this laptop to launch it.
Granted, I couldn't imagine that porting an operating system is a trivial task, but I would think it could be a bit of a minor triumph to pull it off on a small POSIX laptop...
Not for me. I go out of my way to avoid giving Sony any money. I never liked the money-grubbing tactics of th big-time marketers, and when they came out with the rootikit on their audio disks, that just put the final nail in the coffin. I haven't knowingly purchased a Sony product in over two years.
True, it is certainly possible to avoid buying Sony products. However, considering how many movies are put out by their studios now, the movie-buying public will in general have a hard time avoiding all things Sony. It would take a lot of people consciously deciding to not purchase Sony products in order to have an effect on this - hence your decision will be drowned out by the money coming out of other peoples' wallets.
They don't need to stop making DVD drives, they just need to stop making DVD discs. And considering the size of the studios that are owned by Sony, it wouldn't be all that difficult for them to make a move towards that.
And if by year's end you can't watch a movie put out by Sony without owning a blu-ray player, then that will drive up blu-ray sales.
IANAL (of course), but my guess would be that certain other countries - not to name names - tend to exhibit much less concern for copyright protection than here in the US.
Which can mean that those certain other countries will sometimes have access to these nefarious products that we may never see on this side of the pond.
Wrong. The question is "does it run Linux".
Sheesh, you must be new here...
True, the main distinction between terrorism and business (at least in the US) is that one is a crime that hurts or mains large groups of people, and the other was twisted into an excuse for invading a sovereign nation on the other side of the world.
Didn't the GDI engineers have the same ability? IIRC, in the first C&C either side could take over a building with a lone engineer. Then C&C:RA required either a van full of them, or some damage to the building ahead of time.
Since Command & Conquer had terrorist engineers years ago. Really, taking over several blocks worth of power stations - to sell them for profit (and to screw up your opponents' grid) - is a pretty high feat of terrorism.
You mean Command & Conquer: Red Alert Counterstrike, right? Since C&C had terrorist engineers long before that FPS came out...
Wow, I thought at a certain point they'd just let you out of the fourth grade with an exception...
My understanding is that the list of Fastest Supercomputers is for supercomputers that are publicly funded - which is why we don't see any mention of google or microsoft clusters. But yet the summary claims that this one has not taken any government funding.
So then how can this cluster claim to be fourth fastest, when they really are not competing with the publicly funded clusters of the main list?
Obviously, we cannot expect the big corporate supercomputers to spill their beans to contest this, but it doesn't really look like it would be fair to compare this non-publicly-funded supercomputer to those that are.
That is not entirely true. Indeed, usually the failure points in hard drives end up being the moving parts themselves - think of how many drives you've owned that have died from bad bearings or slipped heads. And when the manufacturers choose which heads and bearings to use, its not a one-size-fits-all game.
Disk drives with any interface can be built to the same degree of reliability. They can, but they aren't.
While you can argue back and forth whether or not SCSI is still faster than SATA, and which has the better transfer rates in what situation, they really missed one of the biggest advantages of SCSI hardware:
MTBF
SCSI drives have generally had 10x higher MTBF ratings, which means a lot when you're installing a drive in a server that needs to run for five nines. Sure, the difference in access is great, but its really the longevity that counts. Your gaming box can cope with a drive that is only supposed to stand up to a year or two of usage - you'll need more storage for your porn by then anyways - but server hard drives need to be able to take a beating constantly, and longer.
That was why I was always willing to dish out the extra coin for SCSI drives for my servers back when I was an admin.
... read this and think this was supposed to be a way to setup wireless networks at boxing matches?
I for one was disappointed that neither Willy Wonka had a goatee. When I first read the book in 4th grade, that was the first time I had ever encountered the word goatee. And then I went to see the movie and Gene Wilder was goatee-less. In the new one, Johnny Depp is also goatee-less.
Yeah, and we sure are good at catching al-qaeda guys, aren't we? Yep, I'm sure of it - bin Laden's gonna fall any day now.
I'm probably not the only person who has received the "live or die" email claiming to come from a hitman. If by the email someone could take a body for $9,000 or less, and then by the story sell it for $250,000, then there is certainly money to be made.
I learned BASIC back in the days of the C64. I then learned Perl when I decided to try my hand at bioinformatics. I picked up C++ at the same time. But there was one language that was used regularly there that always made me feel like a fool.
SQL.
Everything about it seemed backwards and inside out to me. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around "accountant-speak" and "normal forms" (still not sure WTF that means). Yet i know it will likely be in my future. Too much data resides in tables now, and too much data interpretation comes down to data(base) mining. Even the perl::sql modules couldn't save me completely.
So I would say, if you plan for a career that is data-driven, learn SQL if you haven't already. It certainly doesn't seem to get easier to pick up as you wait longer - or at least it hasn't for me.
As a matter of fact, yes. Children out past curfew without adults could be picked up by the police. Thats been common in the US for a long time. My parents had the same curfew, and the same curfew siren (also operated by the city) blared every night.
Do you really think a curfew at 10pm is going to stop teenagers from joining gangs?
Certainly not. But most crimes involving juveniles are committed after dark. So if you enforce a curfew, you can at least contain the threat somewhat.
all that generation did was eat, drink, do drugs, and have sex
Do you honestly believe that nothing of value was accomplished in those 20 years? If that was really all that happened, then wouldn't one expect at least a dip in population expansion, from all the drunks that would be crashing cars and the children that would be stillborn from drug-addicted parents?
Its no wonder people characterize members of your generation as whiners. You have no respect for your elders. What else do you feel entitled to? I'm sure you'll let us know...
Yes, I do recall that the Transmeta chips were a fair amount slower than the Intel / AMD chips that were out at the same time, though in some regards one could say they made up for it with far better battery life in laptops.
This doesn't matter in a lot of imbedded applications but it won't attract the gamer crowd.
I can't speak for everyone, but I wasn't planning to run duke nukem forever on a low-power system... But I can think of plenty of typical household applications that would be well suited to a cpu that consumes less power.