I have bought 3 Logitech optical mice in the past year. They are all USB, however they all came with a converter so you could use them on a PS/2 port. I would imagine adaptors also exist to go form a usb port to a ps/2 device.
Re:Quick Summary... and a Why?
on
Xbox Linux Cluster
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· Score: 4, Insightful
" but I would think you could buy just as powerful of a MB/CPU/RAM combo (actually, you could get a better CPU easily) cheaper..."
I think his point was to test if this is true or not. A lot of people posting about this story seem to be saying things like "well duh! everyone knows it would be slower," but they are saying these things in the absence of data. Suppose his cluster would have performed exceptionally well and was ridiculously easy to set up? The purpose of research is to test theories out and see if they hold up. The theory or idea he was testing in this case was the applicability of X-Box machines to making a cheap cluseter.
"it hardly pushes the cause of Free Software forward to pollute machines that would otherwise be 100% Free with little bits of wholly un-Free software"
Correct me if I am wrong, but the drivers are free, right? Just because software isn't open source doesn't mean they are not free. Would I have to buy an NVIDIA card to be able to download their drivers? No, I could just go to their website and download them. In my mind, free software is anything you (technically/legally) don't have to pay for to obtain and use.
In other gaming news, I just read over at Linuxgames that there is now a Linux version public beta of Serious Sam the First Encounter. It will even install the game from the cd for you. I tried it, and it runs with no hitches on my AthlonXP 1800+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
So are you saying that if I have a set of speakers that are digital only (no analog in), and I play a drm-enabled song in windows, no sound will come out of the speakers? As technology pushes into the future, I imagine digital speakers will become far more commonplace than analog.
Actually, benchmarks against "windoze" drivers are irrelevant if you are only interested in running linux. The question I want to know is this: when I get a new computer should I go with ATI or NVIDIA? Which performs better with fewer driver problems under linux?
The problem with going to see a launch, especially if it's a long trip, is that you don't know whether or not it will be cancelled due to weather or other problems. For example, my dad was selected from a drawing of Boeing employees (formerly McDonnell Douglass) that had done work on the development of the Space Shuttle to go see a launch. They flew him and my mom down to Florida, but the launch got cancelled because the weather wasn't right. I also have a friend that tried to go see a shuttle launch that got cancelled by weather.
This reminds me of Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs were engineered to be lysine deficient and all female. A lot of good that did right? Of course something like this is just a worst case scenario story. I always found the concept interesting though.
Actually, if I'm not mistaken you can just install the base tgz package, which is a fully functional, basic, bootable, root filesystem. You can use this for things like this: http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta/unix/xterminal/
I don't have a 666mhz processor, but I do have a 486 firewall/ipmasq machine with a case that still has the clockspeed indicator digits on the front. When the turbo button is on, it says 666, when off, 69. I love that case.
It was clocked at around 26mph with the stock motor. Since then I've put a 12 turn racing motor in that boosted the speed up into the high 30's roughly. I haven't been able to get it radar clocked again, but I do know it will catch up to and pass cars driving down the street easily if they're doing around 25-30.
Re:I've always wanted to do that...
on
Go X10 Speed Racer!
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· Score: 5, Funny
That reminds me of something that happened to me once. Myself and a friend used to go to a Best Buy parking lot around midnight and race our R/C cars until around 4am. Anyway, once a cop saw us up there, and he drove up behind my R/C car with his lights and siren on. I thought I was in trouble for loitering in a parking lot late at night, but instead when he finally got to where I was, he opened his window and said "I've always wanted to do that! Pull over an R/C car." He even was nice enough to clock our cars at full speed with his radar gun.
Aside from that, I would really like to try and mount a camera to my car. I tried it with a small camcorder once, but it flipped the car every time I tried to turn.
Well, this is somewhat true. However, I've had many an occasion when I tried to open up a word document with OpenOffice, and it mangled all the graphics. I then had to spend a long time fixing hte document so it looks right in OO. Text always converts fine for me, but when you're involved in a research group where M$ word documents with graphics are being exchanged regularly, OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Until they get it to where it flawlessly converts word files, I don't think it will be feasable for people in a situation like mine. This is my last hurdle to completely freeing myself of Microsoft products forever.
Hmm, they got rid of the Geology GRE a couple years back as well. I never did figure out why, and I don't think people were posting questions from it online. Maybe they're just trying to get rid of the subject GRE tests?
First of all, stuff isn't *that* flat out there overall, and the flat areas are usually resistant to erosion units such as the Shinarump Conglomerate/Sandstone, and the Kaibab limestone to name a couple. In the cases formations like this are flat lying, the areas tend to be flat. Where these formations are tilted, they form ridges. Also, how can you say the great unconformity is so "neatly" planed off? It's not visible in hardly anywhere but the Grand Canyon itself. You can't see the contact regionally. Perhaps if you have some 3d-seismic data to show me that shows the contact regionally is totally flat, you're argument would hold some water (no pun intended). I also mentioned Lake Bonneville in Utah. The regions that were the lake-bed tend to be very flat. Up on the hills you can even see wave-cut terraces that used to be the shores.
Second point: the river eating through "harder" rocks. What "harder" rocks are you speaking of? The Vishnu Schist and the Zoroaster Granite? I think you should go take a basic geochemistry course. Silicate minerals in such rocks like feldspars, micas, amphiboles, pyroxenes, etc are the *first* think to chemically break down in the presence of water. They turn to clays *very* quickly geologically speaking. Combine this chemical weathering with the mechanical weathering of the river, and such rocks will weather faster.
Third point: I've never been downstream of the Grand Canyon honestly and I don't know anything about those silty deposits you speak of. However I do know that alluvial fans do *not* form at the mouth of rivers. They form where fast-moving high-energy streams come out of the mountains and hit a broad flat plain and just dump all their material. Perhaps you are thinking of a delta? Not all rivers form deltas. Sometimes deltas can be removed too. Point is, there doesn't necessarily have to be a pile of those exact sediments from the Grand Canyon lying there somewhere that we can see. Also, there are lots of other rocks in the region that are of very similar composition to those in the Grand Canyon.
Fourth Point: For a creature to be fossilized, specific conditions have to occur. First of all, it has to be buried rapidly. Second of all, hard parts are helpful. Third of all it helps of hte chemical conditions are reducing. Also, I was talking about rocks regionally when I said Triassic, etc...not necessarily in the canyon. The canyon itself goes through a large fold called a monocline which is capped by the Kaibab limestone. What kind of critters are you talking about in the Coconino sandstone? If you are implying marine creatures, you are sorely mistaken because it is a windblown sandstone. This is clearly obvious from the huge festoon cross-beds characteristic of windblown sandstones so often in that whole area.
As for your bigger picture, the Earth is always going through cycles of erosion and uplift. Do you think that uplift and mountain building events would suddenly stop if the surface of the Earth were to suddenly be waethered to a cue-ball?
Anyway, I'm going to stop arguing with you, as you're obviously an overly-Christian zealot who is blinded by a book that was written a few thousand years ago by some people who we don't even really know wrote it. It's people like you that get evolution banned from being taught in states like Kansas. And by the way, I happen to be Catholic, so don't think these words are coming from an atheist. Anyway, I'm leaving to a teaching assistant for my University's geology field camp out in Southwest Utah early tomorrow morning. Perhaps we can have this discussion again when I return after 5 weeks of observing and describing rocks in the region.
"* how did those enormous, flat rock horizons get there, made of various materials, without as much as a dimple in them where a small creek interrupted the expanse?"
It's very dry, little creeks don't last long. Also, Lake Bonneville used to cover most of Utah, a good portion of Nevada, and part of Arizona. The remnants of this lake are what we call The Great Salt Lake. There was no "flood" but rather an extremely large lake (several million years ago, can't remember exact age right now).
"# how did the tiny, little Colorado River get to carve out that big wide channel, uphill much of the way? Did the river form in the channel, or the channel form around the river?"
Simple, the river was there before it was going "uphill". As the Colorado plateau uplifted during the forming of the rockies, the river ate down through the rock instead of being uplifted with it.
"how did those huge silt deposits, consisting of material compatible with that missing from the Canyon, get to be heaped up downstream of it?"
Sediments usually do heap up downstream of where they were eroded.
"why are many of the fossils in each layer have been aligned in one direction? Is Islam older than we thought, and they were all facing Mecca when they died? (-:"
Which fossils in which rock formation? The rocks out there are mostly Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous, and there are some stream deposits and marine deposits. When critters die underwater and there is a current, they tend to align a certain way.
There have actually been hundreds of switches in the past couple several tens of million years. We know this because we can examine the orientation of the magnetic field of minerals in oceanic basalts on either side of spreading centers (ie mid-Atlantic ridge) in the ocean. When field orientation is plotted on a map of the seafloor, bands of alternating magnetic fields show up very nicely. The bands will just about exactly parallel the spreading center quite well. That's pretty damn cool if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
I have bought 3 Logitech optical mice in the past year. They are all USB, however they all came with a converter so you could use them on a PS/2 port. I would imagine adaptors also exist to go form a usb port to a ps/2 device.
" but I would think you could buy just as powerful of a MB/CPU/RAM combo (actually, you could get a better CPU easily) cheaper..."
I think his point was to test if this is true or not. A lot of people posting about this story seem to be saying things like "well duh! everyone knows it would be slower," but they are saying these things in the absence of data. Suppose his cluster would have performed exceptionally well and was ridiculously easy to set up? The purpose of research is to test theories out and see if they hold up. The theory or idea he was testing in this case was the applicability of X-Box machines to making a cheap cluseter.
Seeing as this story is completely redundant, wouldn't all those posts being moderated as such be *on* topic? :)
"it hardly pushes the cause of Free Software forward to pollute machines that would otherwise be 100% Free with little bits of wholly un-Free software"
Correct me if I am wrong, but the drivers are free, right? Just because software isn't open source doesn't mean they are not free. Would I have to buy an NVIDIA card to be able to download their drivers? No, I could just go to their website and download them. In my mind, free software is anything you (technically/legally) don't have to pay for to obtain and use.
In other gaming news, I just read over at Linuxgames that there is now a Linux version public beta of Serious Sam the First Encounter. It will even install the game from the cd for you. I tried it, and it runs with no hitches on my AthlonXP 1800+ with a GeForce 4 Ti 4200.
So are you saying that if I have a set of speakers that are digital only (no analog in), and I play a drm-enabled song in windows, no sound will come out of the speakers? As technology pushes into the future, I imagine digital speakers will become far more commonplace than analog.
"I mean, we are already flooded with pop music on MTv..."
That's funny, last time I checked MTV didn't play music videos anymore, only stupid "reality" shows.
Actually, benchmarks against "windoze" drivers are irrelevant if you are only interested in running linux. The question I want to know is this: when I get a new computer should I go with ATI or NVIDIA? Which performs better with fewer driver problems under linux?
Has anyone benchmarked the new drivers vs. NVIDIA yet? I'd be curious to see how well they perform.
The problem with going to see a launch, especially if it's a long trip, is that you don't know whether or not it will be cancelled due to weather or other problems. For example, my dad was selected from a drawing of Boeing employees (formerly McDonnell Douglass) that had done work on the development of the Space Shuttle to go see a launch. They flew him and my mom down to Florida, but the launch got cancelled because the weather wasn't right. I also have a friend that tried to go see a shuttle launch that got cancelled by weather.
Heh...I'm guessing they *didn't* get John Carmack to design the onboard computer :)
"They are having some server problems so I have included portions from the article here"
:)
Heh...perhaps they are using one of those Wal-Mart pc's for their server
Yep, they were bought out by VIA a while back, who in turn continues to develop Cyrix cpu's.
I'm fully aware that it was a movie and before that a novel, seeing as I've read the book and seen the movie. Notice that I said story above:
"Of course something like this is just a worst case scenario story."
My point was to note that other people have been thinking of things like this for a while, and *STORIES* have been written about it.
This reminds me of Jurassic Park. The dinosaurs were engineered to be lysine deficient and all female. A lot of good that did right? Of course something like this is just a worst case scenario story. I always found the concept interesting though.
"...and more on lessening heat dissipation..."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't you want to *increase* heat dissipation?
Actually, if I'm not mistaken you can just install the base tgz package, which is a fully functional, basic, bootable, root filesystem. You can use this for things like this: http://www.menet.umn.edu/~kaszeta/unix/xterminal/
I don't have a 666mhz processor, but I do have a 486 firewall/ipmasq machine with a case that still has the clockspeed indicator digits on the front. When the turbo button is on, it says 666, when off, 69. I love that case.
It was clocked at around 26mph with the stock motor. Since then I've put a 12 turn racing motor in that boosted the speed up into the high 30's roughly. I haven't been able to get it radar clocked again, but I do know it will catch up to and pass cars driving down the street easily if they're doing around 25-30.
That reminds me of something that happened to me once. Myself and a friend used to go to a Best Buy parking lot around midnight and race our R/C cars until around 4am. Anyway, once a cop saw us up there, and he drove up behind my R/C car with his lights and siren on. I thought I was in trouble for loitering in a parking lot late at night, but instead when he finally got to where I was, he opened his window and said "I've always wanted to do that! Pull over an R/C car." He even was nice enough to clock our cars at full speed with his radar gun.
Aside from that, I would really like to try and mount a camera to my car. I tried it with a small camcorder once, but it flipped the car every time I tried to turn.
Well, this is somewhat true. However, I've had many an occasion when I tried to open up a word document with OpenOffice, and it mangled all the graphics. I then had to spend a long time fixing hte document so it looks right in OO. Text always converts fine for me, but when you're involved in a research group where M$ word documents with graphics are being exchanged regularly, OpenOffice just doesn't cut it. Until they get it to where it flawlessly converts word files, I don't think it will be feasable for people in a situation like mine. This is my last hurdle to completely freeing myself of Microsoft products forever.
Hmm, they got rid of the Geology GRE a couple years back as well. I never did figure out why, and I don't think people were posting questions from it online. Maybe they're just trying to get rid of the subject GRE tests?
To reply to all of your points:
First of all, stuff isn't *that* flat out there overall, and the flat areas are usually resistant to erosion units such as the Shinarump Conglomerate/Sandstone, and the Kaibab limestone to name a couple. In the cases formations like this are flat lying, the areas tend to be flat. Where these formations are tilted, they form ridges. Also, how can you say the great unconformity is so "neatly" planed off? It's not visible in hardly anywhere but the Grand Canyon itself. You can't see the contact regionally. Perhaps if you have some 3d-seismic data to show me that shows the contact regionally is totally flat, you're argument would hold some water (no pun intended). I also mentioned Lake Bonneville in Utah. The regions that were the lake-bed tend to be very flat. Up on the hills you can even see wave-cut terraces that used to be the shores.
Second point: the river eating through "harder" rocks. What "harder" rocks are you speaking of? The Vishnu Schist and the Zoroaster Granite? I think you should go take a basic geochemistry course. Silicate minerals in such rocks like feldspars, micas, amphiboles, pyroxenes, etc are the *first* think to chemically break down in the presence of water. They turn to clays *very* quickly geologically speaking. Combine this chemical weathering with the mechanical weathering of the river, and such rocks will weather faster.
Third point: I've never been downstream of the Grand Canyon honestly and I don't know anything about those silty deposits you speak of. However I do know that alluvial fans do *not* form at the mouth of rivers. They form where fast-moving high-energy streams come out of the mountains and hit a broad flat plain and just dump all their material. Perhaps you are thinking of a delta? Not all rivers form deltas. Sometimes deltas can be removed too. Point is, there doesn't necessarily have to be a pile of those exact sediments from the Grand Canyon lying there somewhere that we can see. Also, there are lots of other rocks in the region that are of very similar composition to those in the Grand Canyon.
Fourth Point: For a creature to be fossilized, specific conditions have to occur. First of all, it has to be buried rapidly. Second of all, hard parts are helpful. Third of all it helps of hte chemical conditions are reducing. Also, I was talking about rocks regionally when I said Triassic, etc...not necessarily in the canyon. The canyon itself goes through a large fold called a monocline which is capped by the Kaibab limestone. What kind of critters are you talking about in the Coconino sandstone? If you are implying marine creatures, you are sorely mistaken because it is a windblown sandstone. This is clearly obvious from the huge festoon cross-beds characteristic of windblown sandstones so often in that whole area.
As for your bigger picture, the Earth is always going through cycles of erosion and uplift. Do you think that uplift and mountain building events would suddenly stop if the surface of the Earth were to suddenly be waethered to a cue-ball?
Anyway, I'm going to stop arguing with you, as you're obviously an overly-Christian zealot who is blinded by a book that was written a few thousand years ago by some people who we don't even really know wrote it. It's people like you that get evolution banned from being taught in states like Kansas. And by the way, I happen to be Catholic, so don't think these words are coming from an atheist. Anyway, I'm leaving to a teaching assistant for my University's geology field camp out in Southwest Utah early tomorrow morning. Perhaps we can have this discussion again when I return after 5 weeks of observing and describing rocks in the region.
"* how did those enormous, flat rock horizons get there, made of various materials, without as much as a dimple in them where a small creek interrupted the expanse?"
It's very dry, little creeks don't last long. Also, Lake Bonneville used to cover most of Utah, a good portion of Nevada, and part of Arizona. The remnants of this lake are what we call The Great Salt Lake. There was no "flood" but rather an extremely large lake (several million years ago, can't remember exact age right now).
"# how did the tiny, little Colorado River get to carve out that big wide channel, uphill much of the way? Did the river form in the channel, or the channel form around the river?"
Simple, the river was there before it was going "uphill". As the Colorado plateau uplifted during the forming of the rockies, the river ate down through the rock instead of being uplifted with it.
"how did those huge silt deposits, consisting of material compatible with that missing from the Canyon, get to be heaped up downstream of it?"
Sediments usually do heap up downstream of where they were eroded.
"why are many of the fossils in each layer have been aligned in one direction? Is Islam older than we thought, and they were all facing Mecca when they died? (-:"
Which fossils in which rock formation? The rocks out there are mostly Triassic/Jurassic/Cretaceous, and there are some stream deposits and marine deposits. When critters die underwater and there is a current, they tend to align a certain way.
There have actually been hundreds of switches in the past couple several tens of million years. We know this because we can examine the orientation of the magnetic field of minerals in oceanic basalts on either side of spreading centers (ie mid-Atlantic ridge) in the ocean. When field orientation is plotted on a map of the seafloor, bands of alternating magnetic fields show up very nicely. The bands will just about exactly parallel the spreading center quite well. That's pretty damn cool if you ask me.