No you corn-flecked turd. I didn't miss a single day of general relativity, or quantum field theory, or QFT in curved spacetimes, thank you very much. BTW, gravity is the only real branch of physics nowadays. You accelerator guys are just studying high-energy CHEMISTRY!!!
Is this the sort of thing you had in mind? I'm quite proud of this post, I just hope it makes it through the lameness filter
Oh yeah.:-) You captured the essence of Anonymous Coward-ness perfectly.
Dude, chill. It's called a joke. It requires a sense of humor. You should try it someday, it's really cool.
Slashdot is amazing. If you say 2+2 is 4, someone will either take offense, or have a strong position on the subject, or both.
For the record, I'm Whitey McWhite, and I've dated and have friends with people around the world, of many colors and races. Like Martin said, the content of your character, not the color of your skin. What color are Anonymous Cowards anyway?
I work in the field (sysadmin for a 800 node cluster), and this is pretty laughable. Microsoft is desperate for the "street cred" of being able to handle high performance computing. Sun, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple all have it. Microsoft doesn't.
If they want so much as the proverbial foot in the door, they must 1) release all (as in *ALL*) of the source code under a GPL or BSD license, 2) make it available for free to all comers, 3) have user's 3rd-party apps (ISE-TCAD, CFDRC, etc) ported, and 4) provide a knowledge base equal to (All Linux + BSD hackers) * Google.
The current concept of "channels" is about to go by the wayside. Instead of having to worry about whether Angel is about to be canceled, you will pay $20 a year directly to Warner Brothers for download access to the show, with no commercials.
I don't care about Comedy Central. I do care about South Park.
I don't care about the WB. I do care about Angel.
Within 5 years, you'll have a Tivo-like device that will allow you to "subscribe" to the show of your choice. You'll probably pay a little more than the current model, but just for the shows *you* care about, which means that good shows that couldn't find their niche on primetime TV *coughFireflycough* will be able to hang around because they depend on subscriptions instead of advertising dollars and demographics.
We're just a few days from bringing up a 300 processor cluster of the exact same type of computers they are using, so maybe I can shed some light. There are several reasons for picking Xeons over Athlons at the moment.
1. If your app uses double precision floating point, and you can recompile your app using SSE2, an Intel will easily beat the AMD. AMD does scalar floating point operations faster per clock. Intel does vector flops faster. Most interesting real-world problems use vector flops.
2. Memory bandwidth. Most chipsets can only deliver a fraction of their theoretical bandwidth. I've seen speed differences of 25% running code on identically configured machines, one having Intel E7500 and the other with a ServerWorks GC-LE (the ServerWorks smokes...) And those are *good* chipsets. I have yet to see an Athlon chipset that wasn't crap.
3. Managability. The x335's are pretty damned slick. I *love* the built-in KVM switch and remote diagnostics. You can daisy chain north of 21 nodes together (I think 35!) and you just have one cable coming off of them.
4. Total cost of ownership. Our previous p3 cluster was assembled (before I arrived) from Pricewatch parts. We initially experienced a 25% failure rate on memory, and spend an inordinate amount of time fixing random problems. 40 of the p3 nodes takes more than three times as much administrator time as 160 IBM x335's. Spending an extra $50,000 on good, quality parts is cheaper than hiring a competent sysadmin. Don't "efficient" yourself to death.
Having said all that, I'm *really* looking forward to Opteron. We're getting some in a week or so. 64 bit + SSE2 support is going hard to beat.
An even better question is this: could you tell the difference between an electron and a black hole with the mass and charge of an electron?
Black hole evaporation in the low mass limit always struck me as being similar to a high-energy particle spewing off particles to transition to a lower energy state (think muon -> electron + assorted neutrinos + gamma rays). Maybe we're all made of black holes and just haven't discovered it yet?
We have several IDE fileservers at work. Each box is equipped with two 3Ware 8-port controllers, and 16 removable drive bays. Stick a 17th drive in there as an OS drive, install Linux, and run benchmark of your choice. Once you're happy with the drives, just pull the bays and swap in new drives.
I'm the admin of a medium size cluster, and we currently use SystemImager (www.systemimager.org) to make backup images of our nodes. SystemImager is a really sweet program. Unfortunately, the stable version is a little behind the times when it comes to XFS, which we are pretty eager to use. Cloning software which works below the filesystem level is pretty helpful.
We just build a 2 TB fileserver using two 3Ware 7850 controllers, with eight 160 G Maxtor drives per controller. Each controller has RAID 5 across all it's drives. We split each RAID 5 partition into "inner" and "outer" partitions, and striped inner-to-inner and outer-to-outer using software RAID 0. Bonnie++ benchmarks show the "outer" array is getting > 241 MB/sec sustained read, and > 81 MB/sec sustained write.
Before I got a job as a Beowulf admin, I used to work at a company that refills and remanufactures printer cartridges. It is absolutely amazing the profit levels that HP, Canon, et. al. must make. We resell the cartridge for a fraction of the amount as the OEM's and make a handsome profit.
Think about it: you're spending $40 for a tiny package of carbon black. The printing industry has been taking notes from De Beers on how to extort money from carbon.
I remember reading in the literature about a survey of the masses of all known stellar-mass black holes, which led to the interesting discovery that, for reasons unknown, a majority of black holes mass about 7 Msun.
I can't help but wonder if a 14 Msun black hole is the remnant of a black hole merger. Maybe we'll be able to compare the black-hole-merger-grand-challenge problem with reality after all.
Disclaimer: I used to study gravity, not particle physics. That said...
Neutrinos only interact with other particles through the electroweak force (ignoring gravity for the moment). There are three bosons which "carry" the electroweak force, called W+, W-, and Z0. The discrepency with the Standard Model seems to occur with the Z0 (called the neutral current in the paper).
There are several things it could be other than a new force. The scientists will have to eliminate all forms of background noise and detector errors, the possibility that it was just some sort of hadron resonance, and a lot of other things.
It is amazing how sensitive particle experiments can be. I remember reading about one that had to filter out (among other things) the noise caused by the motion of the moon orbiting the earth in order to extract the signal.
As both a scientist and a Christian, I have never understood why most Christians hate the Big Bang theory and theory of evolution. They are just physical laws of the universe. Is gravity immoral?
You can neither prove nor disprove the existance of God based on those two theories, but I suspect it will take the 21st century of Galileo to smack some sense into Joe Christian's head.
*Good* science and *Good* religion will never contradict each other.
Any extrasolar comet passing through the solar system would move in a hyperbolic orbit. To the best of my knowledge, no one has seen even a single one.
An almost infinitely more likely possibility is that it some form of earthborn life blown into the atmosphere, or perhaps some weird type of bacteria that lives its entire life in the high atmosphere. Wierder things have happened.
They don't name the sword Daikatana... Otherwise it will be several years before they release it on the market, and consumers will discover that it is really just old Ginsu knifes oiled up a bit.
If processes can be patented, can I patent the process of getting a bad patent? If so then I'll make millions from the US Patent Office violating my intellectual property...
I did undergraduate research on iron-doped lithium niobate. While LiNb03 *could* be used to store data holographically, organic polymers do a much better job at lower cost.
LiNb03 is fragile (it's a crystal, drop it and your data's dead) and very expensive to produce. The crystals are grown using the same? process as silicon but has a much more complex crystal structure and is much harder to produce consistent crystals of good quality). A crystal about 5 cm x 5 cm x 1 mm cost several hundred dollars.
Get over it bucko. We're stuck here on Earth for a very long time. It's just simple arithmatic.Let's say there are one million people born every day. That means we would have to ship out one million people every day *just to keep the population the same*. There simply isn't enough fuel/rockets, not to mention you would probably send the environment into an apocalyptic greenhouse state from all the heat from the exhaust.
If you really want to get a lot of people into space, the space elevator/ring around the world is the only feasible way. Last time I checked, we knew what to make them from (Buckytubes are the only known substance that can handle the tension), but we don't know how to make thousands of miles of them, perfectly. That will require major advancements in nanotechnology, but It Could Happen (tm) in my lifetime.
OOTP: I met Prof. Hawking at the Texas Meeting in Chicago (don't ask why...). It was a symposium in rememberance of Chandrasekar, and he gave a very interesting talk. Right smart fellow.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe that explains Keanu Reeve's wooden performance...
No you corn-flecked turd. I didn't miss a single day of general relativity, or quantum field theory, or QFT in curved spacetimes, thank you very much. BTW, gravity is the only real branch of physics nowadays. You accelerator guys are just studying high-energy CHEMISTRY!!!
:-) You captured the essence of Anonymous Coward-ness perfectly.
Is this the sort of thing you had in mind? I'm quite proud of this post, I just hope it makes it through the lameness filter
Oh yeah.
Dude, chill. It's called a joke. It requires a sense of humor. You should try it someday, it's really cool.
Slashdot is amazing. If you say 2+2 is 4, someone will either take offense, or have a strong position on the subject, or both.
For the record, I'm Whitey McWhite, and I've dated and have friends with people around the world, of many colors and races. Like Martin said, the content of your character, not the color of your skin. What color are Anonymous Cowards anyway?
I guess they found a chink in our security. :-)
:)
Just kidding, folks
I work in the field (sysadmin for a 800 node cluster), and this is pretty laughable. Microsoft is desperate for the "street cred" of being able to handle high performance computing. Sun, IBM, Dell, HP, Apple all have it. Microsoft doesn't.
If they want so much as the proverbial foot in the door, they must 1) release all (as in *ALL*) of the source code under a GPL or BSD license, 2) make it available for free to all comers, 3) have user's 3rd-party apps (ISE-TCAD, CFDRC, etc) ported, and 4) provide a knowledge base equal to (All Linux + BSD hackers) * Google.
And that only gets their foot in the door.
The current concept of "channels" is about to go by the wayside. Instead of having to worry about whether Angel is about to be canceled, you will pay $20 a year directly to Warner Brothers for download access to the show, with no commercials.
I don't care about Comedy Central. I do care about South Park.
I don't care about the WB. I do care about Angel.
Within 5 years, you'll have a Tivo-like device that will allow you to "subscribe" to the show of your choice. You'll probably pay a little more than the current model, but just for the shows *you* care about, which means that good shows that couldn't find their niche on primetime TV *coughFireflycough* will be able to hang around because they depend on subscriptions instead of advertising dollars and demographics.
We're just a few days from bringing up a 300 processor cluster of the exact same type of computers they are using, so maybe I can shed some light. There are several reasons for picking Xeons over Athlons at the moment.
1. If your app uses double precision floating point, and you can recompile your app using SSE2, an Intel will easily beat the AMD. AMD does scalar floating point operations faster per clock. Intel does vector flops faster. Most interesting real-world problems use vector flops.
2. Memory bandwidth. Most chipsets can only deliver a fraction of their theoretical bandwidth. I've seen speed differences of 25% running code on identically configured machines, one having Intel E7500 and the other with a ServerWorks GC-LE (the ServerWorks smokes...) And those are *good* chipsets. I have yet to see an Athlon chipset that wasn't crap.
3. Managability. The x335's are pretty damned slick. I *love* the built-in KVM switch and remote diagnostics. You can daisy chain north of 21 nodes together (I think 35!) and you just have one cable coming off of them.
4. Total cost of ownership. Our previous p3 cluster was assembled (before I arrived) from Pricewatch parts. We initially experienced a 25% failure rate on memory, and spend an inordinate amount of time fixing random problems. 40 of the p3 nodes takes more than three times as much administrator time as 160 IBM x335's. Spending an extra $50,000 on good, quality parts is cheaper than hiring a competent sysadmin. Don't "efficient" yourself to death.
Having said all that, I'm *really* looking forward to Opteron. We're getting some in a week or so. 64 bit + SSE2 support is going hard to beat.
An even better question is this: could you tell the difference between an electron and a black hole with the mass and charge of an electron?
Black hole evaporation in the low mass limit always struck me as being similar to a high-energy particle spewing off particles to transition to a lower energy state (think muon -> electron + assorted neutrinos + gamma rays). Maybe we're all made of black holes and just haven't discovered it yet?
We have several IDE fileservers at work. Each box is equipped with two 3Ware 8-port controllers, and 16 removable drive bays. Stick a 17th drive in there as an OS drive, install Linux, and run benchmark of your choice. Once you're happy with the drives, just pull the bays and swap in new drives.
"Reliant's SSID is 16309..."
"I don't understand."
"You have to learn why things work on a starship"
"Each ship has it's own SSID to prevent an enemy from doing what we're attempting: using our Pringle's can to order Reliant to lower her shields."
802.11 is only used by terrorists and degrades our ability to conduct military strikes against Starbucks...
Two words: Beowulf clusters.
I'm the admin of a medium size cluster, and we currently use SystemImager (www.systemimager.org) to make backup images of our nodes. SystemImager is a really sweet program. Unfortunately, the stable version is a little behind the times when it comes to XFS, which we are pretty eager to use. Cloning software which works below the filesystem level is pretty helpful.
We just build a 2 TB fileserver using two 3Ware 7850 controllers, with eight 160 G Maxtor drives per controller. Each controller has RAID 5 across all it's drives. We split each RAID 5 partition into "inner" and "outer" partitions, and striped inner-to-inner and outer-to-outer using software RAID 0. Bonnie++ benchmarks show the "outer" array is getting > 241 MB/sec sustained read, and > 81 MB/sec sustained write.
Click here for the Bonnie++ results
Before I got a job as a Beowulf admin, I used to work at a company that refills and remanufactures printer cartridges. It is absolutely amazing the profit levels that HP, Canon, et. al. must make. We resell the cartridge for a fraction of the amount as the OEM's and make a handsome profit.
Think about it: you're spending $40 for a tiny package of carbon black. The printing industry has been taking notes from De Beers on how to extort money from carbon.
I remember reading in the literature about a survey of the masses of all known stellar-mass black holes, which led to the interesting discovery that, for reasons unknown, a majority of black holes mass about 7 Msun.
I can't help but wonder if a 14 Msun black hole is the remnant of a black hole merger. Maybe we'll be able to compare the black-hole-merger-grand-challenge problem with reality after all.
Actually the formula for the radius of a black hole is:
R = 3km * (Mass in solar units)
So a black hole with 14 solar masses would have a radius of 42 km.
Disclaimer: I used to study gravity, not particle physics. That said...
Neutrinos only interact with other particles through the electroweak force (ignoring gravity for the moment). There are three bosons which "carry" the electroweak force, called W+, W-, and Z0. The discrepency with the Standard Model seems to occur with the Z0 (called the neutral current in the paper).
There are several things it could be other than a new force. The scientists will have to eliminate all forms of background noise and detector errors, the possibility that it was just some sort of hadron resonance, and a lot of other things.
It is amazing how sensitive particle experiments can be. I remember reading about one that had to filter out (among other things) the noise caused by the motion of the moon orbiting the earth in order to extract the signal.
That said, I think they may be on to something.
Would the Apt tools under Debian constitute prior art?
As both a scientist and a Christian, I have never understood why most Christians hate the Big Bang theory and theory of evolution. They are just physical laws of the universe. Is gravity immoral?
You can neither prove nor disprove the existance of God based on those two theories, but I suspect it will take the 21st century of Galileo to smack some sense into Joe Christian's head.
*Good* science and *Good* religion will never contradict each other.
Any extrasolar comet passing through the solar system would move in a hyperbolic orbit. To the best of my knowledge, no one has seen even a single one.
An almost infinitely more likely possibility is that it some form of earthborn life blown into the atmosphere, or perhaps some weird type of bacteria that lives its entire life in the high atmosphere. Wierder things have happened.
Mindcraft unleashes its latest web server benchmarks pitting IIS against Netscape Navigator...
They don't name the sword Daikatana... Otherwise it will be several years before they release it on the market, and consumers will discover that it is really just old Ginsu knifes oiled up a bit.
If processes can be patented, can I patent the process of getting a bad patent? If so then I'll make millions from the US Patent Office violating my intellectual property...
I did undergraduate research on iron-doped lithium niobate. While LiNb03 *could* be used to store data holographically, organic polymers do a much better job at lower cost.
LiNb03 is fragile (it's a crystal, drop it and your data's dead) and very expensive to produce. The crystals are grown using the same? process as silicon but has a much more complex crystal structure and is much harder to produce consistent crystals of good quality). A crystal about 5 cm x 5 cm x 1 mm cost several hundred dollars.
Get over it bucko. We're stuck here on Earth for a very long time. It's just simple arithmatic.Let's say there are one million people born every day. That means we would have to ship out one million people every day *just to keep the population the same*. There simply isn't enough fuel/rockets, not to mention you would probably send the environment into an apocalyptic greenhouse state from all the heat from the exhaust.
If you really want to get a lot of people into space, the space elevator/ring around the world is the only feasible way. Last time I checked, we knew what to make them from (Buckytubes are the only known substance that can handle the tension), but we don't know how to make thousands of miles of them, perfectly. That will require major advancements in nanotechnology, but It Could Happen (tm) in my lifetime.
OOTP: I met Prof. Hawking at the Texas Meeting in Chicago (don't ask why...). It was a symposium in rememberance of Chandrasekar, and he gave a very interesting talk. Right smart fellow.