CBS arranged an all-star line-up of their jazz stable at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival in 1977 and released two double LPs of the event. The assembled musicians were a crosscut of trad and fusion Jazz - Dexter Gordon, George Duke, Alphonso Johnson, Billy Cobham, Bob James, Stan Getz, Bobbi Humphrey, Benny Golson, Eric Gale, Woody Shaw, Maynard Ferguson, Eric Gale, Hubert Laws, and others.
If those names together sound like some kind of Jazz wet dream, well, yeah, it is! And, in part because of the cross-the-board "burning monsters," the whole collection comes off like some kind of "Jazz encylopedia." If someone from another planet lands in your yard and says "-click- What is this 'Jazz' -buzzzz- -click-?", take him inside and drop the needle down on Volume I, Side 1, Track 1 and just keep flipping the records.
This is actually how I got started. There was an institutionalized minicomputer, sponsored by a teacher, run by a small set of students, used by a slightly larger group of students.
I'd stay very low on details with the faculty - just say "to learn how to program." Just tell them you need some castoff hardware and some cabling, maybe an Ethernet switch, depending on how you're set up.
You may want to keep your operation totally off the school LAN and just sneakernet stuff over from Internet-connected machines.
All we had was a BASIC interpreter and every once in a great while, like at night or on a weekend, they'd reboot it so you could do FORTRAN.
Linux machines - sheesh, pick your language, as long as it's not MS-only.
Actually, my BS detector went off in a few places in the linked article.
"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge." Not on my planet, bucko.
"'allows focusing almost two orders of magnitude higher than is possible with conventional lenses'..." Exactly what numerical quantity corresponds with "focusing?"
"the amount of information that could be stored on optical media would be vastly increased..." I thought that was limited by the wavelength of light used to record and read the information.
"By reversing the mathematical signs of the three main properties of all optical materials -- permittivity, permeability and refractive index -- Veselago showed that light going one way in normal materials would reverse direction in metamaterials." 1) Sure, if I start flipping signs in long-accepted equations that describe phenomena in the natural world, I can come up with all kinds of breakthroughs - antigravity, to say the least! 2) But if I set up a conventional refractive/reflective (I specifically omit "diffractive") optical system of any sort, can't I also run the light the other way identically?
Now, I think I recall an article in Scientific American some time back about structures made up of nanoantennae whose macroscopic optical properties were counterintuitive, but I don't think what I'm reading here speaks to that.
Well, when I saw the story, I thought, fine - everyone should only buy MS *hardware* - joysticks, keyboards, mice, steering wheels. *Yhat* might actually sting, albeit a little.
But, yes, "free" (beer) software is no harm done to MS.
I have a Pioneer SX series receiver from 1978. I still use it routinely and I have only had to have it serviced once. Is there a way I can have it "evaluated," i.e., checked against specs, for a reasonable amount of money?
I very much agree with this person's point. It seems to be the hardest thing to convey about Linux to people who don't know anything about it.
It's the notion that Linux behaves how it behaves and does what it does not because of a laundry list some marketroids produced but because of the predominant will of the people who wrote the code, and that it is THOSE people who really control Linux. Furthermore, if I want to be one of THOSE people, I don't have to get an unobtainable job with a certain company; I can just decide to be and get involved with what I want to get involved with.
I ask because of the line in the news story saying that Compaq divested itself of Alpha and the people behind it - was VMS support cut adrift (in reality, never mind officially)?
And, what are the choices for a shop that runs a still-valuable COBOL-on-VMS-on-Alpha app? Is it Itanium or nothing? And what of a VMS-on-Itanium COBOL compiler? Is this just a very tiny corner to have been painted into?
I was also going to suggest Hoover Dam. You can stay there all day, and I understand that there is a little-publicized but pricey "behind the scenes" tour that I'm sure is to die for. The experience would be especially useful if you could actually get one of the guides aff to yourself for a while - they'll bend your ear about everything and anything Dam. While looking at it, ponder that if not for it - and you'd never be able to get something like it built in this day and age; forget it - we might well be speaking Japanese or German now.
Although Hoover Dam (initially, Boulder Dam, IIRC) was primarily built for flood control, the electric power generation made it possible for a giant aircraft industry to grow and flourish in California. Now, if only our current administration weren't so fossil-fuel-besotted...
I had read about the Segway, but when I saw one demoed with my own eyes, I was profoundly astonished. I suddenly felt I was in the 21st century. When I say that, I realize that there isn't much about the Segway that couldn't have been developed years earlier (I'm not talking about possible novel improvements in energy density of batteries or the like). Say what you will (and I'm about to), but I think that *some* of the hype is deserved.
But, after the demo, I really started to wonder about the real usability of the thing and I think I came upon a kind of Achilles' heel that I don't think the design of the Segway addresses: uneven surfaces that induce a roll. Imagine a perfectly flat sidewalk, and then imagine that on the right half of the sidewalk I lay down some humps - let's make them 1/2" high and 6" wide, and let me space their centers 12" apart. Now, on the left side of the sidewalk, let me lay down similar humps similarly, except I'll offset them relative to the other set such that they are in line with the gaps in the other set.
Now, here I come with my Segway at four feet per second. I get to the bumps, and each wheel is forced up and down 1/2" four times a second. Aren't my Segway's handlebars going to be jerking from side to side very rapidly, displacing maybe 3"-4" or so? What's that going to be like to hold on to?
I also wonder about "failure modes," i.e., one-person collisions and falls. Also, what happens when there's a gyro failure? I can imagine the thing falling over like a leaf rake if the pitch gyro stopped working.
You know who I would like to see in a scientist role in a really good movie, perhaps of the sort you describe? George Takei (Sulu of Star Trek fame, if there are any/.ers who don't know). I don't know if his acting skills are sharp enough to really come through, but these days, he's got this incredible voice and whenever I see him interviewed or whatever I always wonder, why don't I see more of this guy?
There's a reason to not go hemispherical. You want to capture as much forward-component of moving explosion product as you can, yes, but you also don't want to have to push around too much pusher plate. That being said, you could do the math to determine what size of circular flat plate is optimal. I get the feeling that the actual shape of the plate wouldn't matter a whole lot (hemishpere, cone, paraboloid, etc.) - you'd just be adding useless mass.
I've heard of the Orion ship for years and I've always found the notion very intriguing, but the notion of a ground-based launch using actual Orion propulsion just makes me laugh, regardless of how well it might work!
Prior to reading this/. review, I had heard that it was in fact the Cavalier Corporation and not Coca-Cola who was consulted for their experience inautomatically handling and dispensing cylindrical objects.
Used to be, you turned to HP when you needed a transistor tester, a logic analyzer, a microcomputer with CRT display and built-in printer that you could hook up to a lot of other equipment but was small enough to carry under your arm, an oscilloscope, a precision function generator, the kind of calculator you needed when you were through "screwing around," a minicomputer to run avionics test systems - basically most everything you would need to design, build, and test complex electronic equipment.
Now, you turn to HP when you want to buy a PC from a department store that runs a second-rate, security-compromised OS whose basic goal when you first turn it on appears to be to sell you stuff.
I don't claim to be an RDBMS guru, but I have worked with Oracle8i and I nearly freaked at the pricing (and it wasn't even going to be my or my employer's money!) - not just how much but their ridiculous "clock-speed-multiplier" scheme.
Even though I think it stinks, Oracle has every right to price stuff that way if that's what they want to do. However, I really have to ask, did anyone even evaluate whether or not a PostGreSQL solution would have met the fundamental requirement (I'm not talking about a kind of bogus trumped-up requirement that, in essence, says "product must behave just like Oracle[add appellation du jour here]")? If I were making their decisions for them (and I probably should be!), I would make every effort to use an Open Source solution unless my requirement is just so specialized and so out-there that Oracle was the only thing that could do it.
I guess I should say that you can get around the expand/contract problem somewhat by leasing, but I wouldn't do it unless I know I'm going to expand and contract again. I've seen companies pay laughably serious money every month or quarter for salvage-grade hardware.
I'm not real happy with the "Go Dell" part of this suggestion. First, in any town of decent size, there are plenty of PC builders who would love your business and, if they are good, DESERVE it. You can speak with the very manager who will direct the building of your boxes, and you can be confident that you can get the machines built the way you want them, without any vendor-specific drivers or "short" components (i.e., not-quite adequate components that help the vendor's margin at your expense).
A good builder will give you a good warranty plus onsite service if you need it, and you won't have to hunt around endlessly for the drivers you need on a giant website covering literally hundreds of models. I want my machines to be made out of widely-used, well-documented components that are not necessarily aimed at just running Windows.
You should get out of the mindset of the desktop machines being terribly special or important. I want them to be nearly interchangeable and nearly disposable. Thin-client approaches aid this goal; you can start eliminating hard drives and anything higher than low-end CPUs, and administratively you can kiss goodbye repetitive imaging and other per-seat installation activities. You can even keep 486es and low Pentiums in operation as long as they have good video. You can put your money and attention toward good, hardened session servers, nice monitors, and very effective Ethernet switchgear. See, it's not necessarily a matter of what is cheapest; it's a matter of not trading away your self-determination for money. I also believe that it's good citizenship to do business with good local vendors instead of giant companies for whom your business is only 1/100,000th of a year's haul. As for licensing, I find it insane to have OS licenses bundled with machines; a vendor who can't sell me OS-less machines doesn't need to sell me machines. I'll negotiate my licensing separately, thank you - better yet, I'll eschew Windows altogether so I can expand my desktop plant without a cost for extra licenses and I can contract my desktop plant without having licenses I can't use, representing sunk cost without returned value.
I can't accept a blanket statement of "AMD is NOT the way to go for a business." My primary Windows and Linux desktop systems at home and my file server are all AMD-based (two Slot As and a T-Bird). They all run 24/7 and are beaten relentlessly. When I'm not pushing around multi-hundred-MB audio files on them, they're running SETI@Home. Of the three, only the Windows machine has to be periodically rebooted; the other two run for weeks on end.
I DID have trouble with one particular Slot A Athlon - the first one I ever got. It wouldn't reliably run with the mobo set to the rated speed; a slight reduction made it run for weeks on end until it just wouldn't run for any length of time anymore. It also acted up in another mobo, so I have to chalk it up to a bad CPU that got worse.
My opinion is that a categorical rejection of AMD chips is uncalled for, but as long as I'm comfortable that the hardware holds up, why shouldn't I use what gives me the better value? It's not as though Intel is immune from hardware-level bugs.
You know, he's going to be at work whether he does this or not. So it'll eat into his/.-trolling time. Seriously, though, you can't simply take the number of hours he spends at this and multiply it by his hourly rate to get a "cost." Oh, you can do it as an exercise but the dollar figure you get isn't as valid as the cost of, say, the mobos.
Personally, I don't see where he really needs to do this in the first place, unless his SETI@Home stats need a little help...
Regarding the G@H project, let me just ask an open question, because I really don't know the answer. If you wanted to set in motion "super-race" genomics (a longtime staple of science fiction), is this not the sort of process you might do? Might F@H be the thing you'd do to make a killer super-virus?
I keep coming back to that Carl Sagan notion that the same tech you'd develop and deploy to make asteroids miss the earth is the exact same tech you'd use to make them HIT the earth - the logic being how long must you wait for a civilization wrecking asteroid or comet hit (tens to hundreds of thousands of years?) vs. how long do you have to wait for a madman to gain control of a technologically advanced nation (tens of years?).
S@H has the virtue that, even if a decoded message from space aliens turns out to be "Yo, what are YOU lookin' at? You wanna piece o' me??" and we answer in some way as to pick a fight, nothing can really come of it for centuries.
If you are willing to accept that the SETI@Home client actually does what they say it does and the same goes for the protein folding, then there is one difference between the two projects that, IMHO, can make one want to run the former but not the latter.
If one or more result is found from SAH (i.e., signal of intelligent origin found), the result isn't "owned" by anyone nor would it be likely to be withheld for any sort of gain by the party that holds the answer. The SAH team could hardly claim a result has been found and NOT reveal the coordinates without causing a riot. No, if they get a result, they'll release the coordinates, after which time everything on Earth that's big, round, and concave is going to be pointed in that direction, and then scientists all around the world will all have the same raw signal data from which they can draw conclusions.
On the other hand, the protein folding results can be used for any number of purposes for the gain of the people who have the information. And, if the protein folding project could lead to curing diseases, is it not reasonable that it could also be used to CAUSE them, accidentally or deliberately? There's an inscrutability and opacity to the PF project that the SAH project doesn't have.
This is what has kept me from running the PF client (aside perhaps from lack of a Linux client if that is in fact still the case) - the feeling that my computers might wind up making, say, Glaxo-Wellcome twenty times bigger than Microsoft.
...at an auto show in Atlanta. I only caught the tail end of the presentation and wasn't able to hear the fellow talking, but I have to say that it was an astonishing sight - FINALLY something to really make me think that I'm in the 21st century. From the outside, it really appeared as though the Segway was reading the driver's mind. He also had a little rig set up - imagine a 2" cube with a steep ramp up to one side and another on an adjacent side. He rode it up one ramp (that it did not change attitude in the transition was uncanny to watch), pivoted it to the left, and rode it down the other side.
I am not going to say that this is the answer to all our prayers, but I don't believe that these things are just going to fade away, either.
I can say with confidence that we're going to need sidewalks. Lots of sidewalks. Wide ones. And improved electricity generation and distribution.
When I was at GT, the final lab project in Automated Test Equipment (EE class) was a two-person thing. And, I wound up doing just about all of the work. However, it wasn't because my lab partner was a know-nothing; he wasn't. In fact, he was quite sharp. It's just that I had a big jones for the lab project and the whole class, for that matter. It was my lab partner who wound up getting screwed out of the experience, but really, I just don't see how I could have sandbagged for his benefit. My point is that pairing or grouping up on a project just doesn't work well unless there is a specific reason to have multiple people, perhaps because the people have different specialties that have to be made use of to achieve success.
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
What of the two alloys that make up most of the products shown in Popular Science: unobtainium and unaffordium? You know, those 11-ounce bicycles that cost $35,000?
Slashdot Mirror
CBS arranged an all-star line-up of their jazz stable at the famous Montreux Jazz Festival in 1977 and released two double LPs of the event. The assembled musicians were a crosscut of trad and fusion Jazz - Dexter Gordon, George Duke, Alphonso Johnson, Billy Cobham, Bob James, Stan Getz, Bobbi Humphrey, Benny Golson, Eric Gale, Woody Shaw, Maynard Ferguson, Eric Gale, Hubert Laws, and others.
If those names together sound like some kind of Jazz wet dream, well, yeah, it is! And, in part because of the cross-the-board "burning monsters," the whole collection comes off like some kind of "Jazz encylopedia." If someone from another planet lands in your yard and says "-click- What is this 'Jazz' -buzzzz- -click-?", take him inside and drop the needle down on Volume I, Side 1, Track 1 and just keep flipping the records.
This is actually how I got started. There was an institutionalized minicomputer, sponsored by a teacher, run by a small set of students, used by a slightly larger group of students.
I'd stay very low on details with the faculty - just say "to learn how to program." Just tell them you need some castoff hardware and some cabling, maybe an Ethernet switch, depending on how you're set up.
You may want to keep your operation totally off the school LAN and just sneakernet stuff over from Internet-connected machines.
All we had was a BASIC interpreter and every once in a great while, like at night or on a weekend, they'd reboot it so you could do FORTRAN.
Linux machines - sheesh, pick your language, as long as it's not MS-only.
Actually, my BS detector went off in a few places in the linked article.
"Light passing through a flat glass lens will diverge." Not on my planet, bucko.
"'allows focusing almost two orders of magnitude higher than is possible with conventional lenses'..." Exactly what numerical quantity corresponds with "focusing?"
"the amount of information that could be stored on optical media would be vastly increased..." I thought that was limited by the wavelength of light used to record and read the information.
"By reversing the mathematical signs of the three main properties of all optical materials -- permittivity, permeability and refractive index -- Veselago showed that light going one way in normal materials would reverse direction in metamaterials." 1) Sure, if I start flipping signs in long-accepted equations that describe phenomena in the natural world, I can come up with all kinds of breakthroughs - antigravity, to say the least! 2) But if I set up a conventional refractive/reflective (I specifically omit "diffractive") optical system of any sort, can't I also run the light the other way identically?
Now, I think I recall an article in Scientific American some time back about structures made up of nanoantennae whose macroscopic optical properties were counterintuitive, but I don't think what I'm reading here speaks to that.
Well, when I saw the story, I thought, fine - everyone should only buy MS *hardware* - joysticks, keyboards, mice, steering wheels. *Yhat* might actually sting, albeit a little.
But, yes, "free" (beer) software is no harm done to MS.
Does ANYONE really benefit in the long term in relationships with Microsoft, either as user or partner?
Got a question for you, shanep -
I have a Pioneer SX series receiver from 1978. I still use it routinely and I have only had to have it serviced once. Is there a way I can have it "evaluated," i.e., checked against specs, for a reasonable amount of money?
I very much agree with this person's point. It seems to be the hardest thing to convey about Linux to people who don't know anything about it.
It's the notion that Linux behaves how it behaves and does what it does not because of a laundry list some marketroids produced but because of the predominant will of the people who wrote the code, and that it is THOSE people who really control Linux. Furthermore, if I want to be one of THOSE people, I don't have to get an unobtainable job with a certain company; I can just decide to be and get involved with what I want to get involved with.
I ask because of the line in the news story saying that Compaq divested itself of Alpha and the people behind it - was VMS support cut adrift (in reality, never mind officially)?
And, what are the choices for a shop that runs a still-valuable COBOL-on-VMS-on-Alpha app? Is it Itanium or nothing? And what of a VMS-on-Itanium COBOL compiler? Is this just a very tiny corner to have been painted into?
I was also going to suggest Hoover Dam. You can stay there all day, and I understand that there is a little-publicized but pricey "behind the scenes" tour that I'm sure is to die for. The experience would be especially useful if you could actually get one of the guides aff to yourself for a while - they'll bend your ear about everything and anything Dam. While looking at it, ponder that if not for it - and you'd never be able to get something like it built in this day and age; forget it - we might well be speaking Japanese or German now.
Although Hoover Dam (initially, Boulder Dam, IIRC) was primarily built for flood control, the electric power generation made it possible for a giant aircraft industry to grow and flourish in California. Now, if only our current administration weren't so fossil-fuel-besotted...
I had read about the Segway, but when I saw one demoed with my own eyes, I was profoundly astonished. I suddenly felt I was in the 21st century. When I say that, I realize that there isn't much about the Segway that couldn't have been developed years earlier (I'm not talking about possible novel improvements in energy density of batteries or the like). Say what you will (and I'm about to), but I think that *some* of the hype is deserved.
But, after the demo, I really started to wonder about the real usability of the thing and I think I came upon a kind of Achilles' heel that I don't think the design of the Segway addresses: uneven surfaces that induce a roll. Imagine a perfectly flat sidewalk, and then imagine that on the right half of the sidewalk I lay down some humps - let's make them 1/2" high and 6" wide, and let me space their centers 12" apart. Now, on the left side of the sidewalk, let me lay down similar humps similarly, except I'll offset them relative to the other set such that they are in line with the gaps in the other set.
Now, here I come with my Segway at four feet per second. I get to the bumps, and each wheel is forced up and down 1/2" four times a second. Aren't my Segway's handlebars going to be jerking from side to side very rapidly, displacing maybe 3"-4" or so? What's that going to be like to hold on to?
I also wonder about "failure modes," i.e., one-person collisions and falls. Also, what happens when there's a gyro failure? I can imagine the thing falling over like a leaf rake if the pitch gyro stopped working.
I'd love to play with this. Where can the be had over here?
You know who I would like to see in a scientist role in a really good movie, perhaps of the sort you describe? George Takei (Sulu of Star Trek fame, if there are any /.ers who don't know). I don't know if his acting skills are sharp enough to really come through, but these days, he's got this incredible voice and whenever I see him interviewed or whatever I always wonder, why don't I see more of this guy?
There's a reason to not go hemispherical. You want to capture as much forward-component of moving explosion product as you can, yes, but you also don't want to have to push around too much pusher plate. That being said, you could do the math to determine what size of circular flat plate is optimal. I get the feeling that the actual shape of the plate wouldn't matter a whole lot (hemishpere, cone, paraboloid, etc.) - you'd just be adding useless mass.
I've heard of the Orion ship for years and I've always found the notion very intriguing, but the notion of a ground-based launch using actual Orion propulsion just makes me laugh, regardless of how well it might work!
Prior to reading this /. review, I had heard that it was in fact the Cavalier Corporation and not Coca-Cola who was consulted for their experience inautomatically handling and dispensing cylindrical objects.
Sorry, but it's incorrect to say that x/0 = infinity. The division operation is not defined for a denominator of zero.
Take:
1. The first syllable of your first name
2. The make of car you drive
3. The last prescription medicine you took
Sincerely,
- Jef-Audi Guaifenesin
Used to be, you turned to HP when you needed a transistor tester, a logic analyzer, a microcomputer with CRT display and built-in printer that you could hook up to a lot of other equipment but was small enough to carry under your arm, an oscilloscope, a precision function generator, the kind of calculator you needed when you were through "screwing around," a minicomputer to run avionics test systems - basically most everything you would need to design, build, and test complex electronic equipment.
Now, you turn to HP when you want to buy a PC from a department store that runs a second-rate, security-compromised OS whose basic goal when you first turn it on appears to be to sell you stuff.
I don't claim to be an RDBMS guru, but I have worked with Oracle8i and I nearly freaked at the pricing (and it wasn't even going to be my or my employer's money!) - not just how much but their ridiculous "clock-speed-multiplier" scheme.
Even though I think it stinks, Oracle has every right to price stuff that way if that's what they want to do. However, I really have to ask, did anyone even evaluate whether or not a PostGreSQL solution would have met the fundamental requirement (I'm not talking about a kind of bogus trumped-up requirement that, in essence, says "product must behave just like Oracle[add appellation du jour here]")?
If I were making their decisions for them (and I probably should be!), I would make every effort to use an Open Source solution unless my requirement is just so specialized and so out-there that Oracle was the only thing that could do it.
I guess I should say that you can get around the expand/contract problem somewhat by leasing, but I wouldn't do it unless I know I'm going to expand and contract again. I've seen companies pay laughably serious money every month or quarter for salvage-grade hardware.
I'm not real happy with the "Go Dell" part of this suggestion. First, in any town of decent size, there are plenty of PC builders who would love your business and, if they are good, DESERVE it. You can speak with the very manager who will direct the building of your boxes, and you can be confident that you can get the machines built the way you want them, without any vendor-specific drivers or "short" components (i.e., not-quite adequate components that help the vendor's margin at your expense).
A good builder will give you a good warranty plus onsite service if you need it, and you won't have to hunt around endlessly for the drivers you need on a giant website covering literally hundreds of models. I want my machines to be made out of widely-used, well-documented components that are not necessarily aimed at just running Windows.
You should get out of the mindset of the desktop machines being terribly special or important. I want them to be nearly interchangeable and nearly disposable. Thin-client approaches aid this goal; you can start eliminating hard drives and anything higher than low-end CPUs, and administratively you can kiss goodbye repetitive imaging and other per-seat installation activities. You can even keep 486es and low Pentiums in operation as long as they have good video. You can put your money and attention toward good, hardened session servers, nice monitors, and very effective Ethernet switchgear.
See, it's not necessarily a matter of what is cheapest; it's a matter of not trading away your self-determination for money. I also believe that it's good citizenship to do business with good local vendors instead of giant companies for whom your business is only 1/100,000th of a year's haul.
As for licensing, I find it insane to have OS licenses bundled with machines; a vendor who can't sell me OS-less machines doesn't need to sell me machines. I'll negotiate my licensing separately, thank you - better yet, I'll eschew Windows altogether so I can expand my desktop plant without a cost for extra licenses and I can contract my desktop plant without having licenses I can't use, representing sunk cost without returned value.
I can't accept a blanket statement of "AMD is NOT the way to go for a business." My primary Windows and Linux desktop systems at home and my file server are all AMD-based (two Slot As and a T-Bird). They all run 24/7 and are beaten relentlessly. When I'm not pushing around multi-hundred-MB audio files on them, they're running SETI@Home. Of the three, only the Windows machine has to be periodically rebooted; the other two run for weeks on end.
I DID have trouble with one particular Slot A Athlon - the first one I ever got. It wouldn't reliably run with the mobo set to the rated speed; a slight reduction made it run for weeks on end until it just wouldn't run for any length of time anymore. It also acted up in another mobo, so I have to chalk it up to a bad CPU that got worse.
My opinion is that a categorical rejection of AMD chips is uncalled for, but as long as I'm comfortable that the hardware holds up, why shouldn't I use what gives me the better value? It's not as though Intel is immune from hardware-level bugs.
You know, he's going to be at work whether he does this or not. So it'll eat into his /.-trolling time. Seriously, though, you can't simply take the number of hours he spends at this and multiply it by his hourly rate to get a "cost." Oh, you can do it as an exercise but the dollar figure you get isn't as valid as the cost of, say, the mobos.
Personally, I don't see where he really needs to do this in the first place, unless his SETI@Home stats need a little help...
Regarding the G@H project, let me just ask an open question, because I really don't know the answer. If you wanted to set in motion "super-race" genomics (a longtime staple of science fiction), is this not the sort of process you might do? Might F@H be the thing you'd do to make a killer super-virus?
I keep coming back to that Carl Sagan notion that the same tech you'd develop and deploy to make asteroids miss the earth is the exact same tech you'd use to make them HIT the earth - the logic being how long must you wait for a civilization wrecking asteroid or comet hit (tens to hundreds of thousands of years?) vs. how long do you have to wait for a madman to gain control of a technologically advanced nation (tens of years?).
S@H has the virtue that, even if a decoded message from space aliens turns out to be "Yo, what are YOU lookin' at? You wanna piece o' me??" and we answer in some way as to pick a fight, nothing can really come of it for centuries.
If you are willing to accept that the SETI@Home client actually does what they say it does and the same goes for the protein folding, then there is one difference between the two projects that, IMHO, can make one want to run the former but not the latter.
If one or more result is found from SAH (i.e., signal of intelligent origin found), the result isn't "owned" by anyone nor would it be likely to be withheld for any sort of gain by the party that holds the answer. The SAH team could hardly claim a result has been found and NOT reveal the coordinates without causing a riot. No, if they get a result, they'll release the coordinates, after which time everything on Earth that's big, round, and concave is going to be pointed in that direction, and then scientists all around the world will all have the same raw signal data from which they can draw conclusions.
On the other hand, the protein folding results can be used for any number of purposes for the gain of the people who have the information. And, if the protein folding project could lead to curing diseases, is it not reasonable that it could also be used to CAUSE them, accidentally or deliberately? There's an inscrutability and opacity to the PF project that the SAH project doesn't have.
This is what has kept me from running the PF client (aside perhaps from lack of a Linux client if that is in fact still the case) - the feeling that my computers might wind up making, say, Glaxo-Wellcome twenty times bigger than Microsoft.
...at an auto show in Atlanta. I only caught the tail end of the presentation and wasn't able to hear the fellow talking, but I have to say that it was an astonishing sight - FINALLY something to really make me think that I'm in the 21st century. From the outside, it really appeared as though the Segway was reading the driver's mind. He also had a little rig set up - imagine a 2" cube with a steep ramp up to one side and another on an adjacent side. He rode it up one ramp (that it did not change attitude in the transition was uncanny to watch), pivoted it to the left, and rode it down the other side.
I am not going to say that this is the answer to all our prayers, but I don't believe that these things are just going to fade away, either.
I can say with confidence that we're going to need sidewalks. Lots of sidewalks. Wide ones. And improved electricity generation and distribution.
When I was at GT, the final lab project in Automated Test Equipment (EE class) was a two-person thing. And, I wound up doing just about all of the work. However, it wasn't because my lab partner was a know-nothing; he wasn't. In fact, he was quite sharp. It's just that I had a big jones for the lab project and the whole class, for that matter. It was my lab partner who wound up getting screwed out of the experience, but really, I just don't see how I could have sandbagged for his benefit. My point is that pairing or grouping up on a project just doesn't work well unless there is a specific reason to have multiple people, perhaps because the people have different specialties that have to be made use of to achieve success.
I guess one thing that is really good about group/pair work is that it's about the only way you can get a shot at the hotties who otherwise would just look right past you.
What of the two alloys that make up most of the products shown in Popular Science: unobtainium and unaffordium? You know, those 11-ounce bicycles that cost $35,000?