The walls may help shield from debris in the event of a EF-1 to 3 (which granted is the vast majority of tornadoes). But there isn't much on this earth (above ground, anyway) that's going to survive a direct hit from an EF-5 tornado.
My dad saw the track left by one that hit in Alabama years ago. The thing sucked up everything, including grass, in a 1/2 mile wide path. The only thing left behind was orange clay. There wasn't a single intact structure left, not even foundations.
Closest thing humanity has to a EF-5 -proof structure is probably the pyramids in Giza, and I'm not sure about that either.
"Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
I'm assuming Wednesday is the Steambox announcement. You guys *really* need something with with a "3" in it for a launch. I don't think "Half-Life: Source" is gonna cut it.
AES was standardized in 2001, so it just barely makes it under the wire. 3DES and Diffie-Hellman are also good targets. Or it may be referring to a popular foreign/military cipher, like GOST, IDEA, etc.
Over the past few years I have read about mind-boggling exploits in protocols WEP, WPS, and now IPMI. I have always thought it was either "idiot programmer who doesn't understand security 101" or "NSA". I think it's fairly obvious that a number of these things probably are their doing. Wonder if they are legally liable for the cost imposed on others to fix/repair/restore?
Space-based solar doesn't make a lot of sense until we get a whole lot closed to a Kardashev Type I civilization than we actuallly are. There's simply no way that firing panels into space on a $100 million dollar rocket is more cost effective than sticking them on the ground where Bob the Electrician can install and maintenance them.
It does make sense though in some *very* limit circumstances. If you frequently work in areas that have no power infrastructure, and can afford the jaw-dropping premium of space-based power. Those two facts suggest this is the public face of some kind of military or intelligence project.
Muscle power is purely a function of size or volume. Some people's muscle is inherently stronger than others, whether by nature or nurture.
I grew up working in the field, building houses with my dad, and otherwise getting the crap worked out of me from an early age. Went to grad school, and would regularly see the jocks working out at the gym who had much more muscle mass than me, but I could take their max weight, add 20%, and do more reps. I enjoyed watching them boggle at that.
On the flip side, there was a fellow grad student from Eritrea. Scrawny, wiry guy, maybe 140 lbs soaking wet. His bicep/tricep cross-section wasn't much bigger than my wrist. He challenged me to an arm-wrestling contest one day, and instantly and with little exertion pounded my knuckles into the table multiple times until I learned my lesson.
He reminded me somewhat of those stories you hear about Abraham Lincoln and how surprisingly strong he was.
The phone companies have long since proven they aren't going to make any further substantial investment in their copper networks, and are simply determined to milk them for as long as possible. They are in fact actively trying to shed their copper networks and go wireless, which has less regulation and higher profit margins.
The odds of AT&T/Verizon making a huge investment in technology that will be lucky to last a couple of years (fiber scales to 10 Gb fairly simply, and cable can probably get close with future revisions of DOCSIS), in a domain they are actively withdrawing from, is pretty much zero.
Both GNOME 3 and Unity simply aren't very useful for power users. Cinnamon and MATE are both useful substitutes until Gnome/Canonical start listening to their customer base again.
If antimatter is gravitationally repulsed by matter, then it could help explain dark matter. Instead of requiring a huge expansion of the Standard Model, it may simply be that the vacuum is gravitationally polarized.
There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.
The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.
If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.
When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.
(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)
You *do* know that Matlab has been supporting GPU computing for some time now? We bought an entire cluster of several hundred nVidia GTX 480's for the explicit purpose of GPU computing.
It depends very specifically on the application. There are some fields that are currently tied to nVidia due to "legacy" code (a strange term for code that can't be 1-2 years old) that is written in CUDA. If so, you can buy an equivalent nVidia.
If you're writing your own app (which if they're studying combinatorics seems likely) then rewriting the core loop in OpenCL is reasonable.
OpenCL is a higher-level abstraction, and you do lose some performance compared to CUDA, but it's worth it in my opinion simply for portability.
I've been working in academic HPC for over a decade. Unless you are building a simple 2-3 node cluster to learn how a cluster works (scheduler, resource broker and such things), it's not worth your time. What you save in hardware, you'll lose in lost time, electricity, cooling, etc.
If you're interested in actual research, take one computer, install an AMD 7950 for $300, and you will almost certainly blow the doors off a cluster cobbled from old Core 2 Duo's, and you'll save more than $300 in electricity.
I'm hard of hearing. It's not because of noise, I actually can't stand loud sounds at all. It just runs in the family. I've got it, so does dad, so did grandpa, and so on.
While *any* advance in restoring hearing is nice, how about concentrating on helping those of us who never had a choice, rather than those who just stood too close to the speakers?
I don't think those games will be "exclusive", not in the traditional sense.
Microsoft/Sony seem to be aiming for a Christmas 2013 release for their new consoles.
If Valve were to release their Steam box in, say, July, with HL3/L4D3/TF3/P3 as launch titles, they would have 6 months of exclusivity simply because the competing platforms haven't been released yet. And that 6 months would be enough to let them steal a *lot* of potential Xbox 720/PS4 customers away. I know I'd buy one in a split second.
I suspect Valve will surprise us this year. We know they have their Steam console coming out this year. But the XBox 720 and Playstation 4 are also coming out.
So Valve has to be running right out of the gate. My hunch is that they have Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, perhaps even Portal 3 either sitting on the shelf, or close enough that they could ship within a few months. Those title are to Valve what Mario is to Nintendo, or Halo is to XBox. Drop them all at once, and I suspect you'l sell a fark-ton of Valve boxes overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
The walls may help shield from debris in the event of a EF-1 to 3 (which granted is the vast majority of tornadoes). But there isn't much on this earth (above ground, anyway) that's going to survive a direct hit from an EF-5 tornado.
My dad saw the track left by one that hit in Alabama years ago. The thing sucked up everything, including grass, in a 1/2 mile wide path. The only thing left behind was orange clay. There wasn't a single intact structure left, not even foundations.
Closest thing humanity has to a EF-5 -proof structure is probably the pyramids in Giza, and I'm not sure about that either.
and has moved on to AAAAAARRRGHHS! That's the only way I can explain this week's perpetual 3-trollage.
The final video this morning had one more picture encoded in the audio.
http://i.imgur.com/DloO0OO.png
"Then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three."
I'm assuming Wednesday is the Steambox announcement. You guys *really* need something with with a "3" in it for a launch. I don't think "Half-Life: Source" is gonna cut it.
http://xkcd.com/927/
AES was standardized in 2001, so it just barely makes it under the wire. 3DES and Diffie-Hellman are also good targets. Or it may be referring to a popular foreign/military cipher, like GOST, IDEA, etc.
Over the past few years I have read about mind-boggling exploits in protocols WEP, WPS, and now IPMI. I have always thought it was either "idiot programmer who doesn't understand security 101" or "NSA". I think it's fairly obvious that a number of these things probably are their doing. Wonder if they are legally liable for the cost imposed on others to fix/repair/restore?
Space-based solar doesn't make a lot of sense until we get a whole lot closed to a Kardashev Type I civilization than we actuallly are. There's simply no way that firing panels into space on a $100 million dollar rocket is more cost effective than sticking them on the ground where Bob the Electrician can install and maintenance them.
It does make sense though in some *very* limit circumstances. If you frequently work in areas that have no power infrastructure, and can afford the jaw-dropping premium of space-based power. Those two facts suggest this is the public face of some kind of military or intelligence project.
I obviously meant to say "Muscle power *isn't* purely a function of...".
Muscle power is purely a function of size or volume. Some people's muscle is inherently stronger than others, whether by nature or nurture.
I grew up working in the field, building houses with my dad, and otherwise getting the crap worked out of me from an early age. Went to grad school, and would regularly see the jocks working out at the gym who had much more muscle mass than me, but I could take their max weight, add 20%, and do more reps. I enjoyed watching them boggle at that.
On the flip side, there was a fellow grad student from Eritrea. Scrawny, wiry guy, maybe 140 lbs soaking wet. His bicep/tricep cross-section wasn't much bigger than my wrist. He challenged me to an arm-wrestling contest one day, and instantly and with little exertion pounded my knuckles into the table multiple times until I learned my lesson.
He reminded me somewhat of those stories you hear about Abraham Lincoln and how surprisingly strong he was.
http://www.lincolnportrait.com/physical_man.html
The phone companies have long since proven they aren't going to make any further substantial investment in their copper networks, and are simply determined to milk them for as long as possible. They are in fact actively trying to shed their copper networks and go wireless, which has less regulation and higher profit margins.
The odds of AT&T/Verizon making a huge investment in technology that will be lucky to last a couple of years (fiber scales to 10 Gb fairly simply, and cable can probably get close with future revisions of DOCSIS), in a domain they are actively withdrawing from, is pretty much zero.
Both GNOME 3 and Unity simply aren't very useful for power users. Cinnamon and MATE are both useful substitutes until Gnome/Canonical start listening to their customer base again.
If antimatter is gravitationally repulsed by matter, then it could help explain dark matter. Instead of requiring a huge expansion of the Standard Model, it may simply be that the vacuum is gravitationally polarized.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1106.0847.pdf
(I'm a big fan of Hajdukovic. Whether he's right or wrong, he asks fascination questions).
There is indeed a profound shortage of STEM workers, in much the same sense that there is a profound shortage of 2014 Corvettes on sale for $10.
The past twenty years has been dominated by the MBA and the JD. The same people who demand outrageous salaries on the premise that they are indispensible, seemingly have a difficuly time understanding supply-and-demand when it applies to other people.
If you are capable of getting a degree in a STEM field, then you are likely more intelligent and rational than the average person. And an intelligent, rational person is less likely to commit to years of graduate work given the low salaries and job security that seem to be the norm. Why work and sweat so hard, when your CEO is just going to send your job to India so he can get his quarterly bonus.
When STEM grad students can expect $100k job offers out of the gate, and MBAâ(TM)s have to live with their parents to make ends meet, I bet our âoeshortageâ of STEM workers vanishes rather quickly.
(Have both a MBA and most of a Ph.D. in physics. Gave up the Ph.D. after I met brilliant people in my field who were in their 10th year as a postdoc and needing food stamps to make ends meet.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
The researchers got the result they wanted, so they didn't bother to check if they were actually correct.
And actually, that's being kind.
In the 30+ years I've been gaming, Grim Fandango was the best game I ever played. Such an absolute joy, and an ending that was worth the journey.
If I had to choose between Grim Fandango 2 and Half-Life 3, GF2 it would be.
You *do* know that Matlab has been supporting GPU computing for some time now? We bought an entire cluster of several hundred nVidia GTX 480's for the explicit purpose of GPU computing.
It depends very specifically on the application. There are some fields that are currently tied to nVidia due to "legacy" code (a strange term for code that can't be 1-2 years old) that is written in CUDA. If so, you can buy an equivalent nVidia.
If you're writing your own app (which if they're studying combinatorics seems likely) then rewriting the core loop in OpenCL is reasonable.
OpenCL is a higher-level abstraction, and you do lose some performance compared to CUDA, but it's worth it in my opinion simply for portability.
I've been working in academic HPC for over a decade. Unless you are building a simple 2-3 node cluster to learn how a cluster works (scheduler, resource broker and such things), it's not worth your time. What you save in hardware, you'll lose in lost time, electricity, cooling, etc.
If you're interested in actual research, take one computer, install an AMD 7950 for $300, and you will almost certainly blow the doors off a cluster cobbled from old Core 2 Duo's, and you'll save more than $300 in electricity.
My favorite book on impacts. Scarier than any Stephen King novel you'll ever read, because it's real.
http://www.amazon.com/Rain-Iron-And-Ice-Bombardment/dp/0201154943/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360966611&sr=8-1&keywords=rain+of+iron+and+ice
But that's just it. Publishers *do* get money from resale.
If I know I can pay $60 for a game when it first comes out, play it for a week or two and then sell it, I'll buy it opening day.
But since I can't resell it, I wait for that sucker to hit the bargain bin before I even consider it.
...will shoot lens flares instead.
I'm hard of hearing. It's not because of noise, I actually can't stand loud sounds at all. It just runs in the family. I've got it, so does dad, so did grandpa, and so on.
While *any* advance in restoring hearing is nice, how about concentrating on helping those of us who never had a choice, rather than those who just stood too close to the speakers?
I don't think those games will be "exclusive", not in the traditional sense.
Microsoft/Sony seem to be aiming for a Christmas 2013 release for their new consoles.
If Valve were to release their Steam box in, say, July, with HL3/L4D3/TF3/P3 as launch titles, they would have 6 months of exclusivity simply because the competing platforms haven't been released yet. And that 6 months would be enough to let them steal a *lot* of potential Xbox 720/PS4 customers away. I know I'd buy one in a split second.
I suspect Valve will surprise us this year. We know they have their Steam console coming out this year. But the XBox 720 and Playstation 4 are also coming out.
So Valve has to be running right out of the gate. My hunch is that they have Half-Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Team Fortress 3, perhaps even Portal 3 either sitting on the shelf, or close enough that they could ship within a few months. Those title are to Valve what Mario is to Nintendo, or Halo is to XBox. Drop them all at once, and I suspect you'l sell a fark-ton of Valve boxes overnight.