There are radio waves above "light" and below "light" on the spectrum. It's just a matter of how fast you shake your electrons.
And the real genius of fiber right now is being able to multiplex sub-frequency lamdas thru a single fiber. Not simply increasing the freq. indefinitely.
There are certainly photons "above light" in the spectrum, but we don't call them radio. Radio waves are below Microwaves, which are below IR, which is below visible. Above visible, you get UV, X Rays, and Gamma Rays. X and Gamma rays are generally not considered "radio" because they behave quite differently in practice.
I'd also be interested in architectures, does Ubuntu support anywhere near the same range?
Not even close. My Alpha and SPARC boxes both run Debian, for example. My MIPS boxes run Irix, but apparently they could be made to run Debian as well.
I'm a bit of a die-hard debian user because for me it works well and doesn't try to hide settings and operations like ubuntu sometimes does. This is one of the things that put me off windows and I don't like it replicated on Linux in the name of ease of use. I also realise this puts me firmly in the "geek that likes to tinker" category.
You just need to write an X86 emulator as a fragment shader. Part of me actually wants to see somebody attempt this, and get a PC OS running on a video card. (Larrabee doesn''t count, using x86 to start with spoils the fun.)
The thing is, piecemeal insurance is the most viable in a world where insurers can cherry-pick the least risky (or most risky) individuals. Insurance, after all, is about mitigating risk, and a fuller knowledge of one's exposure to risk is a good thing.
The thing is, people don't really want health insurance, when you get down to it. Maybe they want a little. But what they really want is some sort of health plan, and often one that other people pay for.
Sure, health insurance as a business model is viable when businessmen can eliminate risk from the insured pool. It just isn't viable as a way to care for a society. I think that's the point that was being made. Costs are distrubuted in insurance because you get a very wide pool of people involved, and everybody pays in. OTOH, if you get genetic segregation of health insurance plans, you have only very risky people in a particular pool, and they all have to pay very high rates. If they can't afford that, then you wind up with a bunch of people dead, which is a higher cost to society than a few extra dollars for insurance.
I agree that most people aren't interested in "health insurance." People want health. Health care, medical care, to be healthy. Health insurance is just a particular way to try and reduce the potentially extreme personal costs of getting health. And, once you get a completely nationalised health system, you effectively have a system equivalent to insurance with the largest possible pool. You pay taxes instead of premiums, but the risk is distributed through the entire society, so the people with the lowest risk probably pay slightly more as tax, but the people with the highest risk pay substantially less. (Of course, that assumes that the *for profit* health insurance companies don't actually make a profit any higher that the cost of government stupidity, while in practice the profits of doing health insurance tend to be enormous. This is likely an invalid assumption, no matter how cockheaded the government implementation is.)
Or, at least, Progress Quest with the addition of an option to play it. Frankly, I don't see why adding an option to play a game is defensibly patentable. I mean, I could choose not to play it without any special technology at all!
Just download a phone directory and spam everyone with generated accusations. They would either have to disconnect the whole country or rethink this utter stupidity.
No, just do it for any politician who has any relation to this, and any government office that has any relation to this, and anybody in the local equivalent of the RIAA. You want an easy way to get the word out to your fellow abused citizens, and you want to attack the ability of the asshats to respond. Seriously, if there is no legal repurcussion to reporting an infraction, New Zealanders need to start organising clubs, distributing target name lists, and making sure that nobody related to this abuse of power is allowed on the internet.
The lawmakers have aparently waltzed into a situation that makes it trivially easy and non-dangerous to organise a strong social movement against copyright abuse. Here in America, I'd be guilty of Perjury if I started issuing DMCA complaints against anybody and everybody.
I don't know about 'regiments', but they most certainly did field units of archers during their history.
From what I gather from the other poster, and my extremely spotty knowledge of both military history and roman history, archers should have been an upgrade for another unit, rather than a separate unit. In Rome:TW, if you wanted the minimum number of sword guys and bow guys, you would have one unit of each, which means basically equal numbers, which wouldn't have been consistent with Roman tactics. Archers were attached to a particular unit instead of being distinct.
Doesn't sound like they are pimping a historically accurate simulation, sounds like they are pimping a war game set in Rome. I see nothing wrong with this.
You have to remember that for games, reality often has to take a back seat because reality is often not fun (and also often not fully simulatable). In the case of a Roman game, well if you had historically accurate armies it would likely be impossible to win as anyone but Rome. There's a reason Rome was so successful in conquering. It isn't as though if you took some guy who plays video games and put them in charge of the army of a nation Rome conquered that they'd be able to make things turn out so differently.
Certainly, there's nothing wrong with shitting all over history. I think the important thing is to remember that there isn't a "right" way to make a game. If you use a vague historical context, you are making a game which will appeal to a different group of people than if you make a super accurate historical simulator. There exist groups of people that are really into military history, and for them it really is fun to get as close to the reality as practical. Just like some guys enjoy coding in assembly. For that sort of group, removing accuracy for the sake of fun can actually make it less interesting and less fun. Obviously, that's an extremely narrow group, but since they have the most interest in the genre, they also tend to be quite vocal in complaining about historical inaccuracies.
Personally, I'd love to see an RTS that gets naval combat a *lot* closer to a realistic model than any RTS model that I've played before. Not everybody would play it, but I'd consider complex navies to be a really big selling point in an RTS. (Specifically, I'm imagining a game with a lot of customizations on individual ships, for example. You can pick how many guns you want on a ship, what the displacement should be, etc.)
Not quite. CUDA looks a lot like C in that it has C-family syntax but the biggest limitation it has is that there is no application stack - which means no recursion. CUDA also lacks the idea of a pointer, although you can bypass this by doing number to address translation (as in, the number 78 means look up tex2D(tex, 0.7, 0.8)). The GPU also has other shortcomings, in that most architectures like to have all their shaders running the same instruction at the same time. For this code
if (pixel.r
Yeah, you wind up with some strange idioms on parallel systems like that which would be insanely idiotic on a more ordinary platform... (Just a random example based on your example which avoids branches. Depending on the actual task, there are probably better ways to do this.)
A = (pixel.r pixel.g){ Aresult =//do stuff A }
B = (pixel.g pixel.b){ Bresult =//do stuff B }
C = (pixel.g==pixel.b){ Cresult =//do stuff C }
answer = A*Aresult + B*Bresult + Cresult*C;
That way, you are brute forcing your way through three times as much work that you should need to do, but you avoid branches. If the A condition is false, then you multiply Aresult by zero. The strange hoops you have to jump through on these types of platforms are why you should always take vendor press releases with a certain grain of salt...
Teach them to Rule the World: Freeciv Teach them the value of running over hookers: GTA 1&2 Teach them the awesomeness of fighting robots: One Must Fall 2097 Teach them to conquer the world in a different way: C&C Red Alert 3 And finally, teach them to conquer the world of worms (you never know): Wormux
Red Alert 3 isn't free. Red Alert, however is. Releasing Red Alert is a promotional move in the hopes that you'll be interested in the series and buy Red Alert 3. That said, Red Alert is good fun, and well worth the download. I've been playing through the soviet campaign. Also, "Ground Control" has been available for free for a while. It's a sort of "tactics only" RTS that still looks decent for something that was written to run on a PII with a TNT.
Now if only "Moon Project" was available for free like Ground Control, I'd be in cheapskate underappreciated RTS heaven. Moon Project was like a game made of pure marshmallow win.
Others have already given him the best solution for his case - DVDs. Overnight them, and he is done. Latency may be a bit much, but not that much more than doing it over DSL or dialup.
I don't like the DVD option. If it was a matter of sending out to "the other site," that'd be one thing. But, if you need to burn hundreds of DVD's for all the locations it suddenly becomes practically a full time job that could be replaced with a shell script and the WAN. I mean, 300 stores, assuming 15 minutes per DVD (including everything -- verify the data, put it in the envelope, print the envelope label, take it to the mail room, etc.) makes for almost 80 hours (about two work weeks!) of work. If your data needs grow to where you need two DVD's, or you add more remote locations, then it literally becomes a matter of a full month of work to get each month's backups out.
My inclination would be to not bother with RSS, and just sftp the torrent to each remote location as a push. But, that's a minor matter of which technology you happen to be more familiar with. (If he can implement the RSS plan faster than it takes him to look up sftp command line switches, then more power to him -- I'm certainly the other way around.) But, somebody posted some information about dsync which seems even better than that - bit torrent style peer sharing, and rsync style efficient replication. All as one tool. Minimizes the needed upload from the central site from (4 GB * number of stores) every month to just (1*changed data). I truly can't imagine DVD's being better.
Nonsense, OpenOffice Word has a ton of problems with mathematical formulas, also I've had problems with images that open fine on msword but don't under OpenOffice. Otherwise it works well, I've moved from Word to OpenOffice.
In my experience, OpenOffice certainly does open some documents in a way that looks strange. In the vast majority of those cases, those documents also look strange when moving between different versions of Word. So, compatibility isn't absolutely 100% perfect with a specific version of word, but it is damn near 100% compatibility if you consider "Word" as a whole, rather than "Word" as the exact specific version of Word you happen to have installed on the specific system you use most.
And, most of those documents are indeed stuff like formulae which aren't widely used, and for which Word is sometimes not really the best tool for the job. When I worked in academia IT, I had the insane good fortune to work in a department where everybody was comfortable with the idea of using latex for their papers. I think I had to deal with fewer than half a dozen issues related to latex in the whole time I worked there. OTOH, when I was in Windows support, I'd call half a dozen MS Word issues a light week!
I agree absolutely, and Microsoft will have to cave in because the thought of every school kid in the country using Linux and OpenOffice would give them nightmares. I would like to see the Education departments really use Linux laptops, but they do not have the guts to carry it through.
You aren't even thinking of the potential consequences if Australia pisses off MS bad enough. Clippy is going to say, "It looks like you are writing a letter about going to Australia. You should know that it doesn't exist. It sank. And, it sucked when it existed. You should tell people to never go near that part of the world. Ever."
Every travel website which uses IIS will stop listing flights to Australia. It won't show up in the Windows time zone selection map in the date and time control panel.
Is Australia prepared to face the sort of war that a pissed MS could bring them?
People still defragment hard drives? NTFS isn't resistant to fragmentation?
For light use, with certain types of workloads, it is really not a big deal. It's certainly not as bad as FAT16 under Windows 95 was. 7200 RPM drives are now common, so seek times are less of an issue than they were with the 5400/4200 RPM drives of yore. NTFS is inherently a better file system than FAT16/32 ever was. And, the specific NTFS implementation in Windows has been carefully tuned by tons of experts over the years such that Windows Vista's NTFS implementation is lightyears ahead of NT4's.
That said, it can still be extremely beneficial to defragment. If you consistently run your drive nearly full, with a high turnover rate for your files, things can become quite badly fragmented. And, depending on what you are doing, that came mean a horrible performance hit. Start a big application with tons of plugins that has to read over a thousand files to start, and the difference can be amazingly noticeable. Try to play a video with a reasonably large buffer, and you may never see the fragmentation issues be bad enough to make the video skip.
So, yes, NTFS is resistant to bad fragmentation. No, it isn't immune.
And, yes, referencing 4200 RPM hard drives is a bit extreme. I know a lot of people were still using FAT by the time that 7200 RPM drives were common. OTOH, they should have known better. In the 21st century, the only justification for FAT was either as a filesystem of last resort for data interchange because so many things could read it, or for running legacy systems where performance wasn't a significant issue.
'If you try and teach Java as a first course, you force the student to accept too much magic without understanding any of it.'
I have to disagree here. We had to program our own list/sorted list/vector/tree and only at the end of the first semester the teacher said "everything you did already exist in the java librairies" that was one heck of a moment:P
Respectfully, you really haven't disproved my point. Stuff like garbage collection still happens automatically. You don't get to actually see a real memory address. You just have to accept a lot of stuff happening which you can't see or control when you develop in Java. Even if you try to minimise your use of the standard library.
Though, it certainly sounds like you got your hands dirty as best as possible, and I do respect that. Java is a language that you learn and then feel powerful because you say, "I can make the machine do things." Assembly is a language that you learn and then feel powerful because you say, "I know what the machine is doing."
After a first course in Java, you couldn't possibly write a Java compiler. After a first course in ASM, you could probably write a self hosting assembler. That's what I mean when I talk about having to accept magic that you don't understand in Java.
I had this conversation when i tried to explain this to my dad. (Whos not too far off 70) What eventually convinced him was the fact that the authors do *not* do this for free. they do it so they get the reputation, the bug fixes, and the enhancements from others.
Ha. I've run into a similar problem before explaining it to people, and I usually just blame with F/OSS movement on "Computer Hippies."
But, seriously, to a really closed-minded person, I think the free bug fixes angle may be a compelling argument. I write some software that's useful to me. But, I'm only one person, I don't have infinite imagination, resources, or skill. So, I let other people see my work, and then sombody sends in a suggestion. I go, "ooh, it would be fun to have that button in my tool." So, I add in their suggestion, and then it becomes useful to a greater number of people. Now, more people are looking at my work, and offering a few suggestions. That results in an even better tool. Which, naturally also has a ripple effect so that more people are looking at it, and some people decide it's so useful to them that they spend a significant chunk of their own time working on the project.
Suddenly, it has gone from "Hey Bob, you might find this handy." right up to a big project with a large team of maintainers and contributors around the world. Which is great, because now it has all the features that I wouldn't have been able to add if I'd been working alone. Keeping it to myself wouldn't have gotten me anything. But, given away the information has given me an amazingly huge return on investment.
I think an important aspect of this explanation is that it has to be based on the fact that "just some guy" can make software. A lot of people simply don't believe that. They think you need a big office building with big industrial drill presses and equipment to machine the bits or something. Once you can establish the seed that just some guy can write a program, sort of like almost anybody can try writing a love poem for a girl he likes, or something -- then you have a foundation where OSS can potentially make sense. A school boy wouldn't charge the girl in his class money to hear his sappy poem, right?
And, don't underestimate the computer hippies angle. What do they get out of it? They get to stick it to the man. The more people use free software, the more the grip of evil corporations on intellectual progress is loosened. (You don't need to insist this is true. Just that there exist a group who think this way.)
Choose a simple 8-bit micro such as an AVR first, or an ARM. Something with a RISC architecture is nice and clean.
I agree 100% with the ASM suggestion. Really, seriously. If I were picking the curriculum, it'd probably be S360 or MIPS, but anything would be great. Heck, even just use an emulator for the fictitious assembly language in Knuth's 'The Art of Computer Programming.'
Teach the student what the computer does, then teach them various ways of expressing it like OO. If you try and teach Java as a first course, you force the student to accept too much magic without understanding any of it.
Introduction to programming isn't what it used to be. Twenty or thirty years back that was often the first exposure a student had to programming. These days you'd be seriously concerned if a student showed up to a programming course and hadn't dabbled a bit at home.
Heck, even ten years ago, most students probably had never programmed anything. Twenty years ago, every computer at least came with BASIC or something, so kids could play around. But, computers were still fairly uncommon in the home. Ten years ago, computers were much more common, but having dev tools installed on your computer was not a given. Now, Linux has become common enough that anybody who has never used it just isn't very interested in computers. gcc is available for Windows. Python is available, etc. It's only within the past ten years that it has once again become a given that your ordinary home computer can trivially be used to write programs again.
Strictly speaking - Photon Rocket. You can make one with just energy and a light bulb. But, you are dealing with a propulsion system that has all the thrust of a flashlight. In general, you will need to be very, very patient with such a device. If you have the engineering resources to put up nuclear fuel for your atomic reactor or whatever, then you can probably just as well use rocket fuel instead. AFAIK, nobody has ever built one and used it in space.
A simple reply: "Go sell crazy someplace else. We're full up here." Ages ago, while selling computers at $BIGCOMPSTORE, I had a guy come in who was convinced that the people at Netscape were spying on him (this was back about '99). He insisted that he needed a new computer, and wanted a Mac because they don't have the same "intrusion issues Windows computers have." He buys one... Has us remove the modem and network port. Goes home. Three days later, he's back in and "this computer is infected too!" He was insistent that the fiends at Netscape had used a satellite to beam in programs to spy on him via IrDA. We politely took the computer back, then refused to sell him another, as this was the 5th one in a month he'd bought then returned, and the manager suggested he seek medical attention. The world is just chock full of crazy. Of course, that just means they fit in at/.
I've spent some time in retail, too. I found the best way to deal with psychos was in the service department instead of by selling them stuff. Labor need not be refundable. I mean, it's not like we ever told them they work they wanted us to do to keep XYZ from spying on them was recommended. We always told them that it was wildly unlikely that the spying was a real issue. However, if they wanted us to do something specifc, we made sure they understood labor was not refundable and went ahead.
erm. A beowulf cluster won't perform worse than any individual machine in it. The limitation is the cpu to memory path, which becomes saturated when you have N cores. And in a beowulf, you'd have many many of those paths, meaning you would still get a speedup - BUT each individiual machine is limited as per TFA.
Well, strictly speaking, a beowulf cluster *need not* perform worse, but there is no guarantee that it won't fuckups happen. A moronic process migration controller may decide it is bored and move a process from one machine to another, and then you incur massive communication delays between processes compared to if they were all on the same machine. Different usage models have different best-cases, so if things are tuned wrong, you can accidentally waltz right into a worst case. Assume that everything is tuned for a workload where you have extremely high disk I/O for each process, so you want things running on as many machines as possible so that all disks are used. Then assume you run some fluid sim on that wrongly tuned cluster, and suddenly the interprocess communication requirements dominate compared to running on a single machine.
Of course, you were responding to a joke, so it's probably silly to nit pick your nit pick of a goof.
Carts certainly had drawbacks, but you had to love the load time on an N64. With modern hardware X times more powerful than an N64, we have to wait much, much longer to do stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
There are certainly photons "above light" in the spectrum, but we don't call them radio. Radio waves are below Microwaves, which are below IR, which is below visible. Above visible, you get UV, X Rays, and Gamma Rays. X and Gamma rays are generally not considered "radio" because they behave quite differently in practice.
Not even close. My Alpha and SPARC boxes both run Debian, for example. My MIPS boxes run Irix, but apparently they could be made to run Debian as well.
You just need to write an X86 emulator as a fragment shader. Part of me actually wants to see somebody attempt this, and get a PC OS running on a video card. (Larrabee doesn''t count, using x86 to start with spoils the fun.)
When you come to the conclusion that SCOTUS has ignored the existing text of the constitution, why bother adding more to it?
Sure, health insurance as a business model is viable when businessmen can eliminate risk from the insured pool. It just isn't viable as a way to care for a society. I think that's the point that was being made. Costs are distrubuted in insurance because you get a very wide pool of people involved, and everybody pays in. OTOH, if you get genetic segregation of health insurance plans, you have only very risky people in a particular pool, and they all have to pay very high rates. If they can't afford that, then you wind up with a bunch of people dead, which is a higher cost to society than a few extra dollars for insurance.
I agree that most people aren't interested in "health insurance." People want health. Health care, medical care, to be healthy. Health insurance is just a particular way to try and reduce the potentially extreme personal costs of getting health. And, once you get a completely nationalised health system, you effectively have a system equivalent to insurance with the largest possible pool. You pay taxes instead of premiums, but the risk is distributed through the entire society, so the people with the lowest risk probably pay slightly more as tax, but the people with the highest risk pay substantially less. (Of course, that assumes that the *for profit* health insurance companies don't actually make a profit any higher that the cost of government stupidity, while in practice the profits of doing health insurance tend to be enormous. This is likely an invalid assumption, no matter how cockheaded the government implementation is.)
Or, at least, Progress Quest with the addition of an option to play it. Frankly, I don't see why adding an option to play a game is defensibly patentable. I mean, I could choose not to play it without any special technology at all!
No, actually St. Peter has no idea that Roland is coming. He was using an extension to block everything related to him.
No, just do it for any politician who has any relation to this, and any government office that has any relation to this, and anybody in the local equivalent of the RIAA. You want an easy way to get the word out to your fellow abused citizens, and you want to attack the ability of the asshats to respond. Seriously, if there is no legal repurcussion to reporting an infraction, New Zealanders need to start organising clubs, distributing target name lists, and making sure that nobody related to this abuse of power is allowed on the internet.
The lawmakers have aparently waltzed into a situation that makes it trivially easy and non-dangerous to organise a strong social movement against copyright abuse. Here in America, I'd be guilty of Perjury if I started issuing DMCA complaints against anybody and everybody.
From what I gather from the other poster, and my extremely spotty knowledge of both military history and roman history, archers should have been an upgrade for another unit, rather than a separate unit. In Rome:TW, if you wanted the minimum number of sword guys and bow guys, you would have one unit of each, which means basically equal numbers, which wouldn't have been consistent with Roman tactics. Archers were attached to a particular unit instead of being distinct.
Also, I could be completely wrong.
Certainly, there's nothing wrong with shitting all over history. I think the important thing is to remember that there isn't a "right" way to make a game. If you use a vague historical context, you are making a game which will appeal to a different group of people than if you make a super accurate historical simulator. There exist groups of people that are really into military history, and for them it really is fun to get as close to the reality as practical. Just like some guys enjoy coding in assembly. For that sort of group, removing accuracy for the sake of fun can actually make it less interesting and less fun. Obviously, that's an extremely narrow group, but since they have the most interest in the genre, they also tend to be quite vocal in complaining about historical inaccuracies.
Personally, I'd love to see an RTS that gets naval combat a *lot* closer to a realistic model than any RTS model that I've played before. Not everybody would play it, but I'd consider complex navies to be a really big selling point in an RTS. (Specifically, I'm imagining a game with a lot of customizations on individual ships, for example. You can pick how many guns you want on a ship, what the displacement should be, etc.)
Look on the bright side -- all the time you save by not editing your post can be spent playing Red Alert!
Red Alert 3 isn't free. Red Alert, however is. Releasing Red Alert is a promotional move in the hopes that you'll be interested in the series and buy Red Alert 3. That said, Red Alert is good fun, and well worth the download. I've been playing through the soviet campaign. Also, "Ground Control" has been available for free for a while. It's a sort of "tactics only" RTS that still looks decent for something that was written to run on a PII with a TNT.
Now if only "Moon Project" was available for free like Ground Control, I'd be in cheapskate underappreciated RTS heaven. Moon Project was like a game made of pure marshmallow win.
I don't like the DVD option. If it was a matter of sending out to "the other site," that'd be one thing. But, if you need to burn hundreds of DVD's for all the locations it suddenly becomes practically a full time job that could be replaced with a shell script and the WAN. I mean, 300 stores, assuming 15 minutes per DVD (including everything -- verify the data, put it in the envelope, print the envelope label, take it to the mail room, etc.) makes for almost 80 hours (about two work weeks!) of work. If your data needs grow to where you need two DVD's, or you add more remote locations, then it literally becomes a matter of a full month of work to get each month's backups out.
My inclination would be to not bother with RSS, and just sftp the torrent to each remote location as a push. But, that's a minor matter of which technology you happen to be more familiar with. (If he can implement the RSS plan faster than it takes him to look up sftp command line switches, then more power to him -- I'm certainly the other way around.) But, somebody posted some information about dsync which seems even better than that - bit torrent style peer sharing, and rsync style efficient replication. All as one tool. Minimizes the needed upload from the central site from (4 GB * number of stores) every month to just (1*changed data). I truly can't imagine DVD's being better.
In my experience, OpenOffice certainly does open some documents in a way that looks strange. In the vast majority of those cases, those documents also look strange when moving between different versions of Word. So, compatibility isn't absolutely 100% perfect with a specific version of word, but it is damn near 100% compatibility if you consider "Word" as a whole, rather than "Word" as the exact specific version of Word you happen to have installed on the specific system you use most.
And, most of those documents are indeed stuff like formulae which aren't widely used, and for which Word is sometimes not really the best tool for the job. When I worked in academia IT, I had the insane good fortune to work in a department where everybody was comfortable with the idea of using latex for their papers. I think I had to deal with fewer than half a dozen issues related to latex in the whole time I worked there. OTOH, when I was in Windows support, I'd call half a dozen MS Word issues a light week!
You aren't even thinking of the potential consequences if Australia pisses off MS bad enough. Clippy is going to say, "It looks like you are writing a letter about going to Australia. You should know that it doesn't exist. It sank. And, it sucked when it existed. You should tell people to never go near that part of the world. Ever."
Every travel website which uses IIS will stop listing flights to Australia. It won't show up in the Windows time zone selection map in the date and time control panel.
Is Australia prepared to face the sort of war that a pissed MS could bring them?
For light use, with certain types of workloads, it is really not a big deal. It's certainly not as bad as FAT16 under Windows 95 was. 7200 RPM drives are now common, so seek times are less of an issue than they were with the 5400/4200 RPM drives of yore. NTFS is inherently a better file system than FAT16/32 ever was. And, the specific NTFS implementation in Windows has been carefully tuned by tons of experts over the years such that Windows Vista's NTFS implementation is lightyears ahead of NT4's.
That said, it can still be extremely beneficial to defragment. If you consistently run your drive nearly full, with a high turnover rate for your files, things can become quite badly fragmented. And, depending on what you are doing, that came mean a horrible performance hit. Start a big application with tons of plugins that has to read over a thousand files to start, and the difference can be amazingly noticeable. Try to play a video with a reasonably large buffer, and you may never see the fragmentation issues be bad enough to make the video skip.
So, yes, NTFS is resistant to bad fragmentation. No, it isn't immune.
And, yes, referencing 4200 RPM hard drives is a bit extreme. I know a lot of people were still using FAT by the time that 7200 RPM drives were common. OTOH, they should have known better. In the 21st century, the only justification for FAT was either as a filesystem of last resort for data interchange because so many things could read it, or for running legacy systems where performance wasn't a significant issue.
Respectfully, you really haven't disproved my point. Stuff like garbage collection still happens automatically. You don't get to actually see a real memory address. You just have to accept a lot of stuff happening which you can't see or control when you develop in Java. Even if you try to minimise your use of the standard library.
Though, it certainly sounds like you got your hands dirty as best as possible, and I do respect that. Java is a language that you learn and then feel powerful because you say, "I can make the machine do things." Assembly is a language that you learn and then feel powerful because you say, "I know what the machine is doing."
After a first course in Java, you couldn't possibly write a Java compiler. After a first course in ASM, you could probably write a self hosting assembler. That's what I mean when I talk about having to accept magic that you don't understand in Java.
Ha. I've run into a similar problem before explaining it to people, and I usually just blame with F/OSS movement on "Computer Hippies."
But, seriously, to a really closed-minded person, I think the free bug fixes angle may be a compelling argument. I write some software that's useful to me. But, I'm only one person, I don't have infinite imagination, resources, or skill. So, I let other people see my work, and then sombody sends in a suggestion. I go, "ooh, it would be fun to have that button in my tool." So, I add in their suggestion, and then it becomes useful to a greater number of people. Now, more people are looking at my work, and offering a few suggestions. That results in an even better tool. Which, naturally also has a ripple effect so that more people are looking at it, and some people decide it's so useful to them that they spend a significant chunk of their own time working on the project.
Suddenly, it has gone from "Hey Bob, you might find this handy." right up to a big project with a large team of maintainers and contributors around the world. Which is great, because now it has all the features that I wouldn't have been able to add if I'd been working alone. Keeping it to myself wouldn't have gotten me anything. But, given away the information has given me an amazingly huge return on investment.
I think an important aspect of this explanation is that it has to be based on the fact that "just some guy" can make software. A lot of people simply don't believe that. They think you need a big office building with big industrial drill presses and equipment to machine the bits or something. Once you can establish the seed that just some guy can write a program, sort of like almost anybody can try writing a love poem for a girl he likes, or something -- then you have a foundation where OSS can potentially make sense. A school boy wouldn't charge the girl in his class money to hear his sappy poem, right?
And, don't underestimate the computer hippies angle. What do they get out of it? They get to stick it to the man. The more people use free software, the more the grip of evil corporations on intellectual progress is loosened. (You don't need to insist this is true. Just that there exist a group who think this way.)
I agree 100% with the ASM suggestion. Really, seriously. If I were picking the curriculum, it'd probably be S360 or MIPS, but anything would be great. Heck, even just use an emulator for the fictitious assembly language in Knuth's 'The Art of Computer Programming.'
Teach the student what the computer does, then teach them various ways of expressing it like OO. If you try and teach Java as a first course, you force the student to accept too much magic without understanding any of it.
Heck, even ten years ago, most students probably had never programmed anything. Twenty years ago, every computer at least came with BASIC or something, so kids could play around. But, computers were still fairly uncommon in the home. Ten years ago, computers were much more common, but having dev tools installed on your computer was not a given. Now, Linux has become common enough that anybody who has never used it just isn't very interested in computers. gcc is available for Windows. Python is available, etc. It's only within the past ten years that it has once again become a given that your ordinary home computer can trivially be used to write programs again.
Strictly speaking - Photon Rocket. You can make one with just energy and a light bulb. But, you are dealing with a propulsion system that has all the thrust of a flashlight. In general, you will need to be very, very patient with such a device. If you have the engineering resources to put up nuclear fuel for your atomic reactor or whatever, then you can probably just as well use rocket fuel instead. AFAIK, nobody has ever built one and used it in space.
I've spent some time in retail, too. I found the best way to deal with psychos was in the service department instead of by selling them stuff. Labor need not be refundable. I mean, it's not like we ever told them they work they wanted us to do to keep XYZ from spying on them was recommended. We always told them that it was wildly unlikely that the spying was a real issue. However, if they wanted us to do something specifc, we made sure they understood labor was not refundable and went ahead.
Well, strictly speaking, a beowulf cluster *need not* perform worse, but there is no guarantee that it won't fuckups happen. A moronic process migration controller may decide it is bored and move a process from one machine to another, and then you incur massive communication delays between processes compared to if they were all on the same machine. Different usage models have different best-cases, so if things are tuned wrong, you can accidentally waltz right into a worst case. Assume that everything is tuned for a workload where you have extremely high disk I/O for each process, so you want things running on as many machines as possible so that all disks are used. Then assume you run some fluid sim on that wrongly tuned cluster, and suddenly the interprocess communication requirements dominate compared to running on a single machine.
Of course, you were responding to a joke, so it's probably silly to nit pick your nit pick of a goof.
Carts certainly had drawbacks, but you had to love the load time on an N64. With modern hardware X times more powerful than an N64, we have to wait much, much longer to do stuff.
Trouuuuuuuuut! Trout!
What, nobody watched the Middleman?