I was wondering, how is it that opening a simple document file can be (in any possible way!) challenging for a modern dual-core, multi-GHz processor? What spectacular abuse of code and machine cycles is necessary to transform a process that is at worst O(N) or maybe O(N*N) into something "slow"?
I usually understand and tolerate code bloat, but with hard disks running at 50Mb/s, memory at 5000MB/s and processors at >5000MIPS, some code should really receive performance tuning. By the way, I use LaTeX and it can easily render more than a 100 pages to print-quality (not screen quality) in very few seconds. Then again, I don't expect the guys at MS to beat Knuth.
I've been a long-time user of AMD products and I haven't been happy. The problems have been less with the chips than with the chipsets, but what good is a processor without a quality motherboard?
It would be accurate to say that the first K7 had some lousy chipsets. Then again, I own one and it routinely reaches 40+ days of uptime (note that this is an el-cheapo box that I use as proxy server). The newer Athlon XPs had decent chipsets, with some exceptions. You may have suffered with some of them. The Athlon64 chipsets are objectively quite good. There is a selection of ATI, NVidia and VIA to chose from and all major manufacturers make overclocker grade motherboards with top components. Especially now that the memory controller is on-die, the chipset is not as important as it used to be.
In conclusion, I don't think you can really say that the new AMD processors don't have quality motherboards and chipsets.
As far as performance-per-watt is concerned, for those saying that doesn't matter, think again! This can be a significant difference for enterprise customers. In the datacenter, less-power-consuming and less-heat-producing processors are higly desirable.
Performance per watt in the AMD side has been MUCH better until intel made their new, shiny 0.65nm Core and suddenly "invented" this concept. It used to be GHz when Intel used the NetBurst architecture, now it is performance per watt. Note that AMD was the first to supply power saving for server and desktop processors. All in all, the difference between Athlon64 and Pentium 4 was MUCH bigger than the advantage of new Intel processors over Athlon64. Even the new Athlon64 AM2 3800+ dual cores are rated at 65W (and 89W) versions.
Finally, "AMD is cheaper" is a myth in the current market place. Dell doesn't do AMD yet. If you want to buy pre-built machines off the assembly line, you can choose between an AMD machine from HP/Compaq, IBM, or Sun.. or a machine from Dell. Guess which will be the cheapest? Guess which will have the best warranty? It won't be any of the AMD machines.
I have to agree with you here. Not because of Dell (Dell is a minor player in my country) but because the prices for cheap dual core AMD processors are much higher than the cheap Pentium dual cores. If you want dual core, AMD will make you pay.
If, on the other hand, you are looking for REAL cheap, Sempron is a great way to go. I repaired my mother's PC with a Sempron 64 3000+ (with Cool and quiet) plus an Asus motherboard and this thing is amazing. Costed approximately 130E WITH motherboard and runs extremely cool with the stock cooler (idles at 991 MHz, 1.1v).
Now second, Quake 3 was a brilliant engine. However, there was very little game on top of such a beauty. Looking past the aesthetics, it was the same damn thing as Quake 2. We have a gauntlet, a machinegun, a shotgun, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher, a railgun, and an uber weapon. And everybody used rocket launchers so it didn't really matter anyways. Tack on deathmatch and CTF and you have yourself a rehashed multiplayer FPS.
Unreal Tournament had a flurry of guns (I really don't want to list them all), but most importantly, it had unique features. Get tired of domination? There's CTF. Oh wait, CTF is really boring. We have assault. And boy, we have assault.
First of all, I own UT and UT2004 and have played them extensively. In my opinion, Q3A is still a great game not because of the graphics (which I still find extremely good) but because it is like a sport. You can spend countless hours bouncing a ball and shooting it through a hoop. In the exact same way, IF you enjoy Q3A, you keep playing because of the exceptionally balanced gameplay. The pace is very fast (much faster than UT2003), the movements are "natural" and the basic concept is simple but hard to master. I don't see why you need more weapons or complex game types to make something fun. The basic elements are there and Q3A is still one of the few games I fire up for a quick match once in a while.
Not all people like Q3A, just like many people don't like basketball or baseball. For those that do like what Q3A has to offer, very few games come close. Trying to make Q3A into something else would simply please a different (not necessarily bigger) audience.
BTW, I think Q4 is exceptionally good, but I miss the bots. Finding a decent server can be very hard. Being able to play a quick game against bots when a server is not available would be a nice bonus in my opinion.
Just leave the radioactive waste in the open, add something that attracts animals, and let the future civilizations figure it out from the three-headed buffalo in the region.
Interestingly enough, the radioactive site of Chernobyl is now full of (seemingly normal!) wild life. It seems that, in a peculiar sense, man is a greater threat to the environment than radio active waste. That being said, a population can survive a very high ambient level of radio activity if its members manage to have children before they die of cancer. This is not hard to do for many mammals.
I like the idea of encrypting partitions. I like the idea of encrypting a full hard disk at the hardware level even more. Seagate's solution is completely transparent to the operating system and should incur no overhead. This is the way to go.
3. Regardless of the treatment, many seriously believe "fixing" this, particularly the down or depressed side will decrease or neutralize the creative side of those who are exceptionally creative. I know many friends who are careful about the medications they take and insist upon some trial & error not just on the effectiveness axis, but the suppression of creativity. If the latter is lost or decreased, they'd rather do without medication (with or without their physican's knowledge).
From what I know, this is mostly associated with the manic phase of the bipolar disorder. Lowered mood is NOT creative. Naturally, an (abnormaly) elevated mood will (over)drive people into creating or doing things they would not normally try.
This can be particularly convincing when it comes to performing arts because an elevated mood and a sense of "grandeur" is usually communicated to the audience. I have met a hypo-maniac (I would dare characterize him clinically maniac, but I don't know him that well) dancer that impressed his audience not so much with the quality of his performance but with his personality.
In my opinion, if you need drugs you are by definition so depressed that you can't function normally and can't be creative. Psychiatrists are supposed to consider creative thinking as a sign that you don't NEED drugs, not as a sign that you'll be better off depressed.
Lets say your company has a 4-way hub that can be plugged into the system of choice... imagine the cooling such a thing would require in order to keep from burning up in its enclosed plastic or (more likely) metal box.
The new socket AM2 dual core Athlon X2 3800+ will be available in both "normal" 89W versions and ALSO 65W and 35W (!!) versions. The 89W number is already lower than what the Athlon (original one, not XP) 1400 would require. Simply put, these processors are not power hungry. Furthermore, you can even enable Cool&Quiet power management. My Athlon 3200+ is running at 1000MHz, 1.1V with very low power consumption while I'm typing. Modern processors are expected to require less energy, not more.
Not to mention the noise... oh good god the noise. My dual core 3800+ at home is quite loud... I can only imagine what a few of those bad boys sitting on your desk would sound like under full load.
There are at least 3 major sources of noise: (a) cpu cooler, (b) graphics card cooler and (c) PSU. Many graphics cards (including most modern nvidia cards) allow you to turn their fan down during 2D operation using something like Riva Tuner or nvclock (for linux). I have currently turned off the fan of my Geforce 6600GT and the temperature is reasonable (less than 50 degrees celsius). The stock cpu cooler is a decent performer and does not produce much noise. If you think it causes too much noise, I would suggest going for the Zalman 7700Cu or 9500 coolers. They are remarkably quiet and also very efficient. A quiet PSU will cost you a lot (90+$), so it's a second option. Consider the Zalman 460W or other products from reputable companies (OCZ, Tagan, Antec). You can also install cheap Akasa Pax.Mate sound insulation. In conclusion, your system does NOT have to be noisy simply because it's a dual core 3800+. Even faster systems can be made to run quiet with little extra expense and careful planning. Top of the line systems may require watercooling but, if you are paying 3000+$ for a computer you can propably afford the extra ~200$.
Only reason I can think of is that you're suggesting that you might want to put a faster cpu in later on. Is that it? If so...is that a really common thing to do? Because it seems kinda....well, dumb to me. You unplug your existing cpu and stick it in a box. Then buy another one that's only a few percent faster. Then unplug that 3 months later...and stick it in a box. Seems like a waste of money to me.
Well, it depends on how and when you upgrade. Consider Socket 939 for example. You can buy a base system with a Sempron 2600+ (60$??) or a high end dual core Athlon FX60 (1000$??). The second processor is more than twice as fast than the Sempron. Even if it doesn't make any sense to upgrade right now, you can evetually find a new faster processor 12 or 18 months later at a reasonable cost. Most importantly, you can eventually get a used FX60 two years later from a friend or in ebay.
As an example, a friend of mine started with a cheap socket A Athlon 1800+, later he bought a new 2500+ (reasonably priced) and now he got a used Athlon 3200+ from ebay (40$, I think). Unfortunately, he has reached the top of the line for socket A and cannot do any future upgrades.
The end results is: if you PLAN to upgrade frequently you buy a 150-200$ processor every year then go for the fastest you can get on ebay for a low price. If you don't plan to upgrade, just buy a ~300-350$ processor upfront and forget about it. People that like messing with computers may choose the first path, most people would prefer the second path.
And just in case you aren't aware, 32-bit single-precision floats are essentially worthless for anyone doing even the simplest mathematical calculations; for instance, with 32-bit single-precision floats, integer granularity is lost at 2 ^ 24 = 16M, i.e.
The error in floating point calculations is supposed to be roughly 2^-N, where N is the number of bits. Although some ALGORITHMS can be unstable, because they use series of operations that greatly increase error, many useful algorithms can be accurately implemented with floating point operations. I think that single precision floats are OK for many purposes and double precision floats have to be abused in order to produce bad results. Higher precision floats are primarily useful for programmers that don't know how to maintain precision.
Anyway, even arbitrary precision algorithms (like those in libgmp) have to be based on hardware operations. In that sense, if you actually require absolute precision (like predicting the weather or working in NASA or something) you can still implement arbitrary precision with 32-bit floats or 32-bit ints or even byte operations by carefully avoiding overflow.
To sum this up: for those that don't need much precision (games/video/audio) 32-bits can be enough with careful programming. Those that DO need absolute precision wouldn't care about 64 or 128 bits but can use the most appropriate hardware operations, including 32-bit floats, to implement arbitrary precision algorithms on TOP of the hardware.
I had a casual glance at the official problem descriptions and I think that the general public is extremely unlikely to offer any meaningful contribution at all. I don't even get 10% of the words and I think I know basic science reasonably well.
It all boils down to whether you think an infinite number of monkeys (monkeys being non-experts in this case) can produce the works of Shakespeare. Even if they do, they propably wouldn't know the difference because they lack the meta-cognitive abilities to differentiate crap from genious. Furthermore, specialization works up to a certain point for this kind of mega-problems. You can write something interesting in Wikipedia with respect to, say, Chinese steam engines of 1960 without having an engineering PhD, but you can't add anything to the solution of these problems without having at least graduate mathematics training.
I suppose the only value in this "experiment" is to bring together the 0.001% of the people around the world that know what they are talking about and to give them the possibility to collaborate (if they already don't...) and some visibility (funding, fame, wild hot naked girls etc). I fully support this effort in that sense but I don't expect this "wiki" thing to be of real use for non-experts.
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P.S. Try reading the official description for the Hodge conjecture...
I was disappointed with the Hi-Fi specs but, to be honest, this is for MP3s, not SACD or DVD-audio. Typical 128Kbps compression has a high cutoff point close to the 16KHz that the Hi-Fi can do. Furthermore, this is a +/- 3dB response curve reported for the Hi-Fi (most people would have great difficulty hearing a 3dB drop in the high range). I would assume that the speakers can actually reach 20KHz with a ~5-7dB drop that is OK for everyday listening. Most disturbing is the very high price. I'm pretty sure that less stylish speakers from Creative can outperform the Hi-Fi for less than 300$. (then again, nobody would be impressed by a Creative loudspeaker set in your living room...)
We have 50 P2/400s with 128 MB RAM that run XP quite well.
What do you mean "quite well"? I think microsoft recommends at least
256MB for XP. In practice, Win XP with 128 MB RAM is barely usable. You can propably
type something in Word without swapping all the time. I regularly use XP machines with 128MB
RAM and I think they should be downgraded to Win98 or upgraded to 512MB. As a matter of fact, I can
easily notice the difference between 512MB and 1GB using XP. Modern Linux also requires ~512MB, if you
need all the bells and whistles.
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P.S. Of course, some people do think it is normal to wait 45 seconds for Acrobat Reader to start...
I'm currently running my Athlon64 3200+ at 1GHz (VCore also lowered by a significant amount). The clock frequency never jumps above 1000 while I'm writing text, browsing, listening to MP3s (or all of these together). As a matter of fact, you need to really pound the machine to force it to go above 1GHz. The power consumption is very very low and the CPU temperature is almost equal to the case temperature (should be less than 40C for the CPU right now).
Unless you are already living off the grid, growing all your own food, and never traveling farther from your home than you can walk, you have no moral standing to criticize my choice of vehicles.
So there are only two possible choices? Living like an African peasant or driving huge SUVs? That's silly. Using a Prius instead of a Hummer makes a small difference in your quality of life (prestige and penis envy aside). Growing your food instead of buying it from a super market mean a major change in the way you live. It's not even part of our civilization anyomore.
The point is simple: for a given way of life and type of civilization (i.e. Western civilization) you can consume between 1x and 10x. It is ridiculous to claim that just because we embrace our way of life, that is by default quite "expensive", we should just let go and consume even more!
That being said, there is no reason to feel guilt over an SUV or a sport's car, provided that one's overall way of life is reasonable otherwise. I like sport's cars myself and drive one regularly, but I always try to save energy if possible.
You had to fly to one Star Destroyer, inspect some containers, kill some ships, then get over to the other end of the battle area to protect your Interdictor from about a dozen wings of Z-95s with heavy rockets. Just as you were taking out one wing, another would have already launched and started firing rockets. Keep in mind, this was on MEDIUM difficulty.
I still remember that mission! I had collected a dozen medals/high scores etc but could not beat that! It was exremely frustrating. I still wonder whether there was an "obvious" way to do it that I did not discover. Anyway, might try to play this once more on my shiny Athlon64 with my shiny optical mouse. See if the magic is still there...
So many people insist on avoiding Google (or other online providers) because of privacy issues. I don't understand this. If privacy/confidentiality is an important issue for a company then that company should use encryption. Public key encryption is not an obscure, bleeding edge technology and I'm really wondering why so few people use it. I've been using Gmail quite extensively and if I really need to exchange sensitive information, I simply encrypt it.
Anyway, I really hope more people would use encryption for emails. It should be standard, like placing your letters inside an envelope, note a "geek thing". I have been signing my emails and attaching my key number since the late nineties and NOBODY EVER ASKS what the f*ck is that signature thing! (Oh, and I use mutt and thunderbird)
but a lot of features have been put into interfaces that are not using the GPU, but still heavly depend on CPU (dragging windows around that always update for example or the afor mentioned alpha transparancy aswell as themeability). This things _could_ run better on GPU's because, that's exactly what they are made for. 2D has left the building if you ask me and as 3D can do 2D emulation of some sort (think bios/bootup, old games stuff) we don't need 2D at all anymore.
I don't disagree with that. But this is not standard 2d functionality. For example, I never use transparent windows or a picture background (I use plain color). Naturally, if you try to run newer functions, you have to emulate those and it costs. It is cheaper to run these in native 3d where they are available.
To make it clear: I don't believe current generation desktops (like the one I use, without fancy stuff) are going to become less processor+memory intensive simply by going to 3d, which is what the parent poster implied. However, a 3d environment will allow new functionality that may be very costly right now (for the exact same reason that it is hard to run games in software OpenGL). These are two different things and I stand by my original statement.
Anyway, I'm almost certain the end result will be much more processor/memory intensive, even though it may look 10x cooler. (also, cool is not necessarily productive)
A good 3d interface actually consumes *less* processor and memory resources than a traditional interface, because it can use the 3D card instead.
I have seen this argument too many times. Do you think that the 7800GTX is unable to do basic Bitmap block transfers that have been available since the days of ISA graphics cards? Do you assume that the processor is actually running all the "2d" functions? Why don't you try turning hardware acceleration all the way down and then see how the processor does at scrolling text. The 3d cards are not "dumb" or incapable of 2d. They are simply "good enough" for 2d, meaning that nobody ever bothers to optimize for that sort of stuff or advertise it. I'm sure that anyone who tried running X11 under linux with generic VESA FB drivers (dumb) instead of native drivers has noticed the difference between using the cards 2d or the processor.
Anyway, it IS true that modern 3d cards are much better in 3d than in 2d, mostly because they are already quite good for 2d, to the point that noone notices any difference. Furthermore, 3d is the main selling point. Even though a 3d desktop could run faster than a 2d desktop (because the 3d functions of the GPU are much more optimized), it would require more memory and processor resources, which is one of the reasons why Vista will require modern hardware to run.
Anatomically speaking, the hand is most comfortable when semi-prone, meaning at ~45 degrees. Both the horizontal and the vertical positions are not as natural and require some strain to maintain. The Logitech G5 is excellent, as far as I can say (Logitech Mice are teh b3st).
The point of search engines is to let you find what you want. If I'm using the words BMW germany, I'm EXPECTING to find www.bmw.de (or some other site responding to the actual company). The Google algorithm is judged against what people expect. In this case, since BMW is the legitimate owner of its trademark I suppose the BMW keyword should return their site, instead of some BMW tuner's shop in Poland, for example. If the BMW site came first when searching for "Porsche" that would have been a problem and would seriously violate the point of a search engine.
In this case, Google is preventing the people from reaching the site they most propably want. It's their rules, of course, but these rules are supposed to serve a certain purpose. Not just to intimidate.
In terms of absolute performance, I believe AMD's chips are fine. But in terms of performance per watt, they are absolutely horrible. Intel-based machines will run much cooler and quieter, and last a lot longer on batteries, simply because the CPU is enormously more efficient.
Works like "horrible" or "enormously" are a bit excessive, don't you think? It's not like the AMD notebooks run for 30 mins and the Intel ones for 8 hours. This review (http://www.mobilityguru.com/2005/09/06/the_turion _64_inside_story_part_ii/page13.html) for example shows competitive performance from a Turion notebook. As a matter of fact, the Turion has a longer battery life when playing games even though it carries a slightly smaller battery. I am prepared to accept that the "Centrino" architecture has been polished (and this includes the design of the whole notebook, battery selection, accessories etc) and Centrino notebooks may be better overall--not just because of the chip. Furthermore, I even expect intel chips to have slightly longer battery life (despite the review that I linked above!). But the difference is slight, not enormous, and may change in the future.
Most medical doctors and researchers still think that junk DNA is junk. What is to say that the 90% of the DNA that has a unknown function might have something to do with activation/inactivation of genes?
Your hypothesis is quite reasonable and (unsurprisingly) several researchers have already proposed this and are working on it. The majority of DNA is composed of so-called "repetitive elements" (a lot of DNA in humans is made of the "Alu" sequence, ~30-40% quoting from memory), some of which are transposable and this includes large sequences such as LINE1 etc. These sequences are relatively mobile and can move from place to place and possibly regulate adjacent genes or confer certain structural properties. In that sense, this DNA does not code any genes but it certainly isn't random. Another element of regulation that has called a lot of interest lately is the existence of micro-RNA "genes" that are not translated but are transcribed to small RNA molecules that have a powerful impact on whole sets of regular genes.
Actually, a good percentage of lung cancers aren't caused by smoking. I don't recall the percentage, but it's significant.
I have to disagree. Most studies estimate that ~90% of lung cancer patients are smokers. Furthermore, the incidence of cancer in smokers is also increased for other tumor types like oral cancer, laryngeal cancer (this one is practically an exclusive disease of smokers!) and bladder cancer. As a rough estimate, in our research database we have 71 lung cancer patients, 68 of which were smokers.
I could also argue about the prognosis of smokers vs non-smokers, since not all cancers are the same. Stage IIIB, high grade is not the same as stage IIA, low grade, for example. However, this is a more delicate issue and it doesn't really matter that much. As a rule of thumb I'd say (this my estimate, of course) that if someone manages to reach 50-60 pack years (e.g. 30 years * 2 packs per day) and NOT get cancer he is extremely lucky (although he might have died from myocardial infarct or something else before getting cancer).
Well, I do IHC as part of my PhD and everybody knows that you have to keep a strict standardised procedure to get comparable results. We routinely "standardise" new antibodies until we get a clean signal and we also use other methods to verify the results (like Western Blot). Anyway, the "research" antibodies are rarely of sufficient quality to rely on them for everyday medical uses, because they need very precise handling (you wouldn't want to rely on an alpha version of something, would you?). On the other hand, most commercial "tested" antibodies that are used in hospitals are very robust and provide consistent results with very slight differences. We jokingly say that "you could spit in the solution and it would still work".
At a design level, IHC is often problematic because of several key facts, especially the fact that it has to be "evaluated" by someone, using rather lax criteria. As as general rule, most observers obtain widely different results (i.e. 5-10% difference is considered very low, while 20-30% can be quite common).
I personally don't trust IHC that much, but those applications that make it to medical use have been tested many times and are reliable or at least more reliable than previous methods. In the future, new methods that combine IHC with automated fractal analysis, for example, could improve error margins. The linked article seems to promote an automated type of analysis (didn't read the nasty details) and is naturally expected to "magnify" the shortcomings of traditional IHC. I would welcome this type of technology in my lab (hate to evaluate IHC slides, let the computer do it!).
As far as I am concerned both of them give POP access and I can use them through my favorite application (say, Thunderbird). The concept of web e-mail should be the exception (remote access, public terminal) and not the norm, I think. Anyway, I prefer the flexibility of a stand-alone application but I keep using a Yahoo/Gmail account so that I'm not tied to a specific ISP or institution.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually understand and tolerate code bloat, but with hard disks running at 50Mb/s, memory at 5000MB/s and processors at >5000MIPS, some code should really receive performance tuning. By the way, I use LaTeX and it can easily render more than a 100 pages to print-quality (not screen quality) in very few seconds. Then again, I don't expect the guys at MS to beat Knuth.
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Not all people like Q3A, just like many people don't like basketball or baseball. For those that do like what Q3A has to offer, very few games come close. Trying to make Q3A into something else would simply please a different (not necessarily bigger) audience.
BTW, I think Q4 is exceptionally good, but I miss the bots. Finding a decent server can be very hard. Being able to play a quick game against bots when a server is not available would be a nice bonus in my opinion.
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This can be particularly convincing when it comes to performing arts because an elevated mood and a sense of "grandeur" is usually communicated to the audience. I have met a hypo-maniac (I would dare characterize him clinically maniac, but I don't know him that well) dancer that impressed his audience not so much with the quality of his performance but with his personality.
In my opinion, if you need drugs you are by definition so depressed that you can't function normally and can't be creative. Psychiatrists are supposed to consider creative thinking as a sign that you don't NEED drugs, not as a sign that you'll be better off depressed.
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As an example, a friend of mine started with a cheap socket A Athlon 1800+, later he bought a new 2500+ (reasonably priced) and now he got a used Athlon 3200+ from ebay (40$, I think). Unfortunately, he has reached the top of the line for socket A and cannot do any future upgrades.
The end results is: if you PLAN to upgrade frequently you buy a 150-200$ processor every year then go for the fastest you can get on ebay for a low price. If you don't plan to upgrade, just buy a ~300-350$ processor upfront and forget about it. People that like messing with computers may choose the first path, most people would prefer the second path.
P.
Anyway, even arbitrary precision algorithms (like those in libgmp) have to be based on hardware operations. In that sense, if you actually require absolute precision (like predicting the weather or working in NASA or something) you can still implement arbitrary precision with 32-bit floats or 32-bit ints or even byte operations by carefully avoiding overflow.
To sum this up: for those that don't need much precision (games/video/audio) 32-bits can be enough with careful programming. Those that DO need absolute precision wouldn't care about 64 or 128 bits but can use the most appropriate hardware operations, including 32-bit floats, to implement arbitrary precision algorithms on TOP of the hardware.
P.
It all boils down to whether you think an infinite number of monkeys (monkeys being non-experts in this case) can produce the works of Shakespeare. Even if they do, they propably wouldn't know the difference because they lack the meta-cognitive abilities to differentiate crap from genious. Furthermore, specialization works up to a certain point for this kind of mega-problems. You can write something interesting in Wikipedia with respect to, say, Chinese steam engines of 1960 without having an engineering PhD, but you can't add anything to the solution of these problems without having at least graduate mathematics training.
I suppose the only value in this "experiment" is to bring together the 0.001% of the people around the world that know what they are talking about and to give them the possibility to collaborate (if they already don't...) and some visibility (funding, fame, wild hot naked girls etc). I fully support this effort in that sense but I don't expect this "wiki" thing to be of real use for non-experts.
P.
P.S. Try reading the official description for the Hodge conjecture...
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P.S. Of course, some people do think it is normal to wait 45 seconds for Acrobat Reader to start...
Installing and running cpufreq is relatively easy and the savings are considerable. For newbie linux users I have an explanatory step-by-step post http://pkt3141592.blogspot.com/2005/07/fun-with-li nux-cpufreq-driver.html on the subject in my (almost abandoned) blog.
Running a Turion is a hard-core option, but PowerNow should be enabled in ALL Athlon64 desktops.
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The point is simple: for a given way of life and type of civilization (i.e. Western civilization) you can consume between 1x and 10x. It is ridiculous to claim that just because we embrace our way of life, that is by default quite "expensive", we should just let go and consume even more!
That being said, there is no reason to feel guilt over an SUV or a sport's car, provided that one's overall way of life is reasonable otherwise. I like sport's cars myself and drive one regularly, but I always try to save energy if possible.
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Anyway, I really hope more people would use encryption for emails. It should be standard, like placing your letters inside an envelope, note a "geek thing". I have been signing my emails and attaching my key number since the late nineties and NOBODY EVER ASKS what the f*ck is that signature thing! (Oh, and I use mutt and thunderbird)
P.
To make it clear: I don't believe current generation desktops (like the one I use, without fancy stuff) are going to become less processor+memory intensive simply by going to 3d, which is what the parent poster implied. However, a 3d environment will allow new functionality that may be very costly right now (for the exact same reason that it is hard to run games in software OpenGL). These are two different things and I stand by my original statement.
Anyway, I'm almost certain the end result will be much more processor/memory intensive, even though it may look 10x cooler. (also, cool is not necessarily productive)
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Anyway, it IS true that modern 3d cards are much better in 3d than in 2d, mostly because they are already quite good for 2d, to the point that noone notices any difference. Furthermore, 3d is the main selling point. Even though a 3d desktop could run faster than a 2d desktop (because the 3d functions of the GPU are much more optimized), it would require more memory and processor resources, which is one of the reasons why Vista will require modern hardware to run.
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In this case, Google is preventing the people from reaching the site they most propably want. It's their rules, of course, but these rules are supposed to serve a certain purpose. Not just to intimidate.
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I could also argue about the prognosis of smokers vs non-smokers, since not all cancers are the same. Stage IIIB, high grade is not the same as stage IIA, low grade, for example. However, this is a more delicate issue and it doesn't really matter that much. As a rule of thumb I'd say (this my estimate, of course) that if someone manages to reach 50-60 pack years (e.g. 30 years * 2 packs per day) and NOT get cancer he is extremely lucky (although he might have died from myocardial infarct or something else before getting cancer).
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At a design level, IHC is often problematic because of several key facts, especially the fact that it has to be "evaluated" by someone, using rather lax criteria. As as general rule, most observers obtain widely different results (i.e. 5-10% difference is considered very low, while 20-30% can be quite common).
I personally don't trust IHC that much, but those applications that make it to medical use have been tested many times and are reliable or at least more reliable than previous methods. In the future, new methods that combine IHC with automated fractal analysis, for example, could improve error margins. The linked article seems to promote an automated type of analysis (didn't read the nasty details) and is naturally expected to "magnify" the shortcomings of traditional IHC. I would welcome this type of technology in my lab (hate to evaluate IHC slides, let the computer do it!).
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