In my area it's either light pollution or crime. Having been the victim of a couple of car break-ins because we didn't have the outside lights on, I choose light pollution.
It's either that or armed guards, and electric is cheaper.
Considering a lot of light pollution is mostly a matter of inefficiency... Since you think it's a choice between light pollution and crime, I have to assume that you think that shooting vast amount of light into the sky somehow feeds the moon god, who in turn stops crime out of gratitude.
Seriously, a big part of the problem is with street lights that don't point all of there light toward the ground. Sure, a really well lit ground will bounce some light back up, but some lights literally just shine right up into the sky.
Also, in many cases excessively bright lights are used, which results in pools of blinding brilliance with pools of pitch black between them. In that case, the solution to make people feel safer is not to make the light brighter, but more even (and possibly dimmer) so that you can't hide in the harsh shadows.
What's wrong with posting MPG files for people to download? Every site these days is Flash video, or insists and assumes you're running a Web browser, wrapping their video file in Flash controls and burying the actual URL to the actual file people want to see under a dozen redirects.
All I want is the URL so I can play it with mplayer. I have no intention of putting Flash on my machine. Is that so danged difficult??
No, it's actually trivially easy to have both a flash player and a simple download link. They haven't invented any new magic that makes simple, correct, "old school" solutions not work. They just ignore them.::sigh:: for the one or two videos I have on my website, this is exactly what I do, and also what I recommend for all my clients. For better or worse, I don't have many clients.
I grew up with video games where the blob of pixels barely resembles anything. The power of gameplay, lasting gameplay far outstrips graphics. Not that a little eye candy doesn't hurt. I guess the core problem is that nothing Intel produces can run time optimize "Lair" into "Tetris" or otherwise correct for this.
That is certainly a valid point to make, but Doom was a great game. So was Mario 64, Thief, Warcraft II. All games that required graphics to be great. Doom with bad graphics couldn't have had the flickering lighting that made some rooms so creepy. Mario 64 would have been a completely different game if the N-64 hadn't been 3D, Thief needed shadows, and Warcraft II had much higher system requirements than Warcraft, and it was a better game. Ray tracing could potentially unlock some new quirks that could translate into great gameplay. Accurate real time dynamic reflections could make for some fascinating funhouse mirror levels, just for an example off the top of my head. More accurate shadows could be an advance in stealth games.
Sure, there would probably be only one or two games that get it right, and twenty or thirty that just tack some raytracing on to make it easier to market. Remember the FPS market after Doom came out? There were a zillion shitty Doom clones on the market. But, the concept of a shooting game with a first person perspective certainly hasn't gone away.
You can blow off everything else as normal office politics. But this one I simply don't get. It makes me feel like I'm in elementary school. Because I took the time to wear an ironed shirt, and maybe add some accessories like a belt or a necklace, that means it's appropriate to for male co-workers to "gently rib" me about my clothing? But what is the joke? Why say anything? I really don't get it.
The gentle ribbing is a sort of sign of respect. It means, "you are strong enough for me to playfully harass you." My best friends and I often have conversations that an outsider would think were brutal fights between bitter enemies, while strangers get polite and distant language. If somebody will start making fun of you for standing out from the group, it just means that you are a part of the group in the first place.
I just had the perfect idea for future debates. Ask a question within 30 seconds. If it isn't a valid question, you get shot with a taser. If the person debating evades the question or doesn't actually answer the question, that person gets hit. It would bring life and ratings back to US political debates.
You know, I think this event is an abuse of power, and excessive force. But, if everybody in the debate knew what they had agreed to, I would have absolutely no problem watching the debates just as you suggest. Can we also do something to candidates who use logical fallacies during a debate, or outright lie. Maybe arm a bunch of historians and skilled debate referees with paint guns in the front row. You would get an on-person score card for honesty while you watch them talk.
...where the police are looking for a violent killer, and then their surveillance locates him, and they all breathe a sigh of relief, as they assume that's the hard part done - all they have to do now is arrest him.
I can't help thinking that there's a wee bit more work to do than just find out what encryption method is being used.
Then again, maybe your average slashdotter thinks that 'breaking encryption' is as easy as 'guessing the algorithm used':-).
Well, sure, it'll be none trivial to get a key. OTOH, there are a lot of Wii owners with an interest in finding it, so it might not be infeasible to imagine a distributed computing project with many thousands of nodes cranking away for a year.
They didn't just distance themselves from the company, they were going to relaunch it under a totally new name/look while still making sure it couldn't be tracked back to them. Doesn't this constitute entrapment?
Generally speaking, entrapment only applies to law enforcement and the government. RIAA still isn't there yet, thankfully. OTOH, a good lawyer could probably spin it as morally equivalent in principle for a jury.
IMO, not directly affected. One-time pads are still useful.
The only catch might exist if there is an algorithm for a quantum computer to find a [secret, shared] key that produces a plaintext in a human language. That's probably the only way to break the OTP (aside from stealing the key.) However this is also easy to obscure - roughly speaking, create a ZIP file and apply a OTP to it. If the OTP's plaintext is not recognizable as such there is no way to accept the key and start working on the second layer of encryption.
The whole point of a One time Pad is that there is no such thing as an algorithm to crack it without quite some information in addition to the ciphertext. The beauty of a One Time Pad is that you can crank through every possible key, but that doesn't get you anything. Sure, you may wind up with some keys that take the ciphertext and make perfectly intelligible English out of it, but there are an enourmous number of messages of a given length, and any of them could be an equally valid. So, cracking a message properly encrypted with a OTP basically amounts to creanking through every possible bit combination the same length as the message, and then guessing arbitrarily which one is the "solution."
In practice, the only time OTP's get broken is when they are used wrong. For example, a message is enciphered with a particular pad, transmitted, and then through a beaurocratic fuckup, the same message also gets transmitted as plaintext. Then, somebody fucks up and uses the same OTP (now a TTP!) on another message. the cryptanalyst gives the old captured OTP a whirl and gets lucky. The OTP is only vulnerable to the CHF algorithm. (Cascading Human Fuckups.)
By the way, can we reunify with you guys? We'll even pay back taxes on tea. Probably a damned sight cheaper than what the IRS is nailing us for these days.:P By way of apology, we'll let you export your chavs to Colorado or some other crappy state.
What? How dare you?! Well, I do like British accents. We'll only take the chavs that look like Billie Piper, though.
In fact, I am an experienced IT professional, and I have only a vague idea what you are talking about. The fact is, I do not spend my time studying the innards of Linux: I have other kinds of issues that I worry about. I am sure I could get a WiFi card working on Linux if I put my mind to it, and edit the right files, find the right drivers, and upgrade the BIOS as required, but I have no inclination to spend the many hours required to learn all those picky details - which I will then forget because I will not use them again. The fact is, if one has to do this, you can kiss Linux goodbye for the typical user.
I am also an experienced IT professional. I have a pretty good idea what is being talked about, and I have a pretty thorough layman's knowledge of the inner workings of Linux. I generally find Linux easier to get working than Windows. For example, I recently got a cheap webcam that took an hour to make work in Linux by building a kernel module which went flawlessly, and it was a week before I managed to use it for anything in Windows. So, I think that I qualify as a well informed power user when it comes to Linux, but probably not a true expert.
IMO, sound and wireless are crap on Linux. Those are the only two classes of hardware that I shy away from under Linux, and tend to have much better luck with on Windows. I've still never had a wireless card just work out of the box without any trouble under Linux. As a community, I think we can't just say wireless is "good enough" as it is, een if some cards work perfectly on some distributions. Once vendors really open up their wireless specs, and the vast majority of everything can be 100% supported by 100% open source software, then I expect that Linux will work just like magic, just like I find it does with every wired Ethernet hardware I have ever thrown at it. (which is a hell of a lot more than I can say about Windows!!!)
I haven't seen it yet it airs next friday in the USA for the first time.
Well, you're in for a treat and a half. This is an episode that really thinks through the possible mindfucks of time travel, and gets it all into one story. And it's spooky as hell, too - I imagine it's caused more than its share of nightmares:-)
I'll just jump in and say ++ to how great that episode was. It's like after 40 years, somebody working on the show finally said, "Hey man... our main character travels through fucking time. That's kind of trippy. I mean, you completely mess with causality when you get to travel arbitrarily." I had a few complaints about that episode, but far and away my biggest complaint was the fact that it wasn't a two parter!
Side note: In addition to the story being quite well written and well directed... The actress who plays the guest character is quite hot. They should bring her back as a companion if possible.
The history of mathematics is a really fascinating subject. Somewhere I have a history of 0 called something like The Nothing that Is. It puts math in a context, and stops it from being magic that nobody could have thought up on their own. The book on zero is really quite short, and quite easy reading, even for somebody not well versed in math, and it makes it all the way to explaining Calculus in a reasonably accessible way.
Through the history of math, you get all sorts of interesting characters, exotic locales, conflict about how things should be done, and who invented what, etc. It's not exactly a way to bring math into writing, but there is a lot of writing already done about math that you may want to check out and see if it is of any use for you classroom.
Fairly Hard SF like some Arthur c Clarke can also be a great and interesting introduction to some stuff like the principles of celestial mechanics in a way that would stick better for most students than just throwing equations at them.
Suing the person that's meant to be mediating the dispute is taking things a little far, even for him... If he keeps suing the judges and courts, who's going to finally judge the case, and where? If you want to use the legal system to your advantage, you can't sue it... I would have thought a lawyer would realise that.
AFAIR, this won't be Jack' first time filing against a judge in one of his cases. Whenever he doesn't like a judge, he has convinced himself that suing the judge will result in a conflict of interest, and force the judge to recuse himself, allowing him to arbitrarily judge-shop until he finds somebody he thinks will kow-tow to his bullshit for fear of being sued.
Unfortunately for Jack, there is no clear precedent requiring a judge to recuse himself if he gets sued by someone involved in a case he is judging. Naturally, this is because such a precedent would enable exactly what Jack wants. IIRC, the last judge he sued didn't recuse himself because of being sued, but eventually did recuse himself because there was a conflict of interest arising from the fact that the judge was filing a formal complaint about Jack being an asshat.
Who launches a multimillion satellite to space without making sure that it fully uses resources left onboard before retiring? Even if four separate fuel tanks are necessary, they can be just connected by small pipes and fuel can be redistributed with a pump powered by satellite's solar cells. It's not a rocket science!
Short answer : The pump will weight more than the wasted fuel, so your solution probably just shortened the lifetime instead of extending it.
And, that's assuming that the pump doesn't break. You just added a mechanical part which has to operate under extremes of temperature, and survive the vibration of a launch. Also, the pump itself will vibrate and emit some heat. You need to be sure that if the pump does work in vacuum, survive launch, and work in extreme temperatures, that it doesn't break anything else. And that it doesn't shift the power budget enough that you need bigger solar panels. (Can't reduce broadcast power for the times you need the pump - that amounts to downtime, which reduces the effective lifetime!)
Oh, also, an ordinary sort of pump won't work on liquids in vacuum, in 0g, etc. You'll need something inert you can pump in and out of the fuel tanks to push the fuel around. But, it won't stay put very nicely, so there is a major engineering challenge there. And, you wind up needing a pump for the inert gas for each fuel tank in all likely hood, in addition to the pumping apparatus that you need to move the fuel between tanks.
...do they have the technology to fake it as well as we did?
Go watch Daywatch.
Now, the Russians may not be able to come up with a plot I find comprehensible, but they certainly have the visual effects technology to beat anything made in America in 1969.:)
The 64-bit designation refers to the width of the address bus*. For example, IA-32 processors have been able to handle 64 bit integers for ages.. so a 64-bit address-capable processor handling 128 bit numbers is nothing new.
Technically, the "bit designation" of a platform is defined as the largest number on the spec sheet which marketing is convinced customers will accept as truthful. Seriously, over the years different processors and systems have been "16 bit" or "32 bit" for any number of odd and wacky reasons. for example, the Atari Jaguar was widely touted as a 64 bit platform, and the control processor was a Motorola 68000. The Sega Genesis also had a 68k in it, and was a 16 bit platform. The thing is, Atari's marketing folks decided that since the graphics processor worked in 64 bit chunks, they could sell the system as a 64 bt platform. C'est la vie. It's an issue that doesn't just crop up in video game consoles -- I just find the Jaguar a particularly amusing example.
But, yeah, having a CPU sold as one "bitness" and being able to work with a larger data size than the bitness is not unusual. The physical address bus width is indeed one common designator of bitness, just as you say. Another is the internal single address width, or the total segmented address width. Also, the size of a GPR is popular. On many platforms, some or all of those are the same number, which simplifies things.
An Athlon64, for example, has 64 bit GPR's, and in theory a 64 bit address space, but it actually only cares about 48 bits of address space, and only 40 of those bits can actual be addressed by current implimentations.
A 32 it Intel Xeon has 32 bit GPR's, but an 80 bit floating point unit, the ability to do 128 bit SSE computations, 32 bit individual addresses, and IIRC a 36 bit segmented physical address space. but, Intel's marketing knew that customers wouldn't believe it if they called it anything but 32 bit since it could only address 32 bits in a single chunk. (And, they didn't want it to compete with IA64!)
But what I've been looking for, and am amazed that I can't seem to find, is a complete collection of all of the instructions for a current (or any recent) AMD processor. Yea, there are lots of documents that break out a small specialized subset of the instruction set, like this PDF. But without a full instructionset reference it doesn't do me much good. One would think that important information like this would be easy to lay one's hands on, particularly in the information age and when the information in question is the instruction set for a large CPU manufacturer who matains their own large website, but if such a document exists I sure can't find it. I even obtained some reference CDs from AMD hoping it might be there, but no luck.
I'm not sure it exists as a single comprehensive document. My AMD64 Architecture Reference Manual set is five books, if I recall correctly. They were shipped to me for free several years ago, so AMD doesn't keep the information a secret.
I think a single PDF document covering every single instruction in a current CPU in sufficient detail to be useful would almost certainly be so large as to be quite unwieldy. After all, a lot of people use the Adobe PDF reader software! And, even assuming you can view the document, you still have a pain in the ass trying to search it to find whatever you need.
One of the problems with supercomputers is that there aren't really very many of them, because of the size and cost. It means that the tools you use to run your supercomputing applications are similarly unusual. The skills to use and develop on parallel systems are then equally scarce. Access to a supercomputer isn't exactly common.
Yes, 8 cores of Athlon64 is faster than 8 cores of low power VIA CPU's from several years ago, but the concept isn't revolutionary, and there isn't a lot of headline worthy engineering that goes into a project like this... I'm sure it's a very handy tool, and I'm not suggested it shouldn't have been built, or that it was entirely trivial to build, but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.
Well, we already have a significant number of people who don't remember a time when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. And, if Hillary gets two terms, Chelsea and the Bush twins could conceivable run against each other with a populace that has gotten used to 35+ years of familial duopoly...
Even advancements in multi-core technology would not require a 3.x series kernel (unless I'm mistaken in my belief that the 2.6.x series supports multi-core CPU's), simply because once you cam make a dual-core CPU functional with the kernel, expanding that functionality to 4, 8, or even 64 cores is simply an expanding of the current code. And even if the current kernel does not support multi-core CPU's, that would be more of a 2.8.x series, rather than an entirely new kernel version.
If I recall correctly, that would have been running on a 2.4 kernel. Cores in a single socket vs. distinct CPU's is a really minor distinction, so all the work done to make Altix work will basically run just fine on a hypothetical Intel Core 4 Sixtyfourdro. So, 2.8 really shouldn't need to much work in terms of being able to handle the "new" multiprocessing.
That's because the Ipod has it's very own hardware MP3 player. Faster, more efficient, less flexible.
Does it? I thought it just had a really low-power CPU and highly optimised - as in assembler - software. If the iPod was based on hardwired chips that did MP3 and only MP3, Rockbox would never have worked on it.
The iPod certainly does have a general purpose CPU in it. ARM of varying flavor, in fact. However, that doesn't make it impossible for it to also have a hardware MP3 decoder. I don't know for sure if the iPod actually uses an MP3 chip, though. I seem to recall that first gen. iPods did need a hardware MP3 decoded, but it became less important with more modern versions and faster CPU's.
The video playback, however, does currently rely on a dedicated chip to handle it on an iPod. the little ARM chips just don't have the muscle to handle H.264 and all the other new video buzz words, and putting in a general purpose CPU that could do it would require too much power for an iPod.
Once more journals start using this, expect to see more variety in the videos.
Personally I'm interested in data compression and information theory.
I hope so. I'm not really a bio guy, so I can't understand most of what is up there. I'm no expert in physics, or hardcore CS, but I at least have enough of an interest in those fields that I might have a shot of getting some benefit from watching the videos.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering a lot of light pollution is mostly a matter of inefficiency... Since you think it's a choice between light pollution and crime, I have to assume that you think that shooting vast amount of light into the sky somehow feeds the moon god, who in turn stops crime out of gratitude.
Seriously, a big part of the problem is with street lights that don't point all of there light toward the ground. Sure, a really well lit ground will bounce some light back up, but some lights literally just shine right up into the sky.
Also, in many cases excessively bright lights are used, which results in pools of blinding brilliance with pools of pitch black between them. In that case, the solution to make people feel safer is not to make the light brighter, but more even (and possibly dimmer) so that you can't hide in the harsh shadows.
No, it's actually trivially easy to have both a flash player and a simple download link. They haven't invented any new magic that makes simple, correct, "old school" solutions not work. They just ignore them.
Bah, why remember. Whenever you want to check, just pull it out and have a look. That way you can be sure what you have: A Duo Ex Machina.
That is certainly a valid point to make, but Doom was a great game. So was Mario 64, Thief, Warcraft II. All games that required graphics to be great. Doom with bad graphics couldn't have had the flickering lighting that made some rooms so creepy. Mario 64 would have been a completely different game if the N-64 hadn't been 3D, Thief needed shadows, and Warcraft II had much higher system requirements than Warcraft, and it was a better game. Ray tracing could potentially unlock some new quirks that could translate into great gameplay. Accurate real time dynamic reflections could make for some fascinating funhouse mirror levels, just for an example off the top of my head. More accurate shadows could be an advance in stealth games.
Sure, there would probably be only one or two games that get it right, and twenty or thirty that just tack some raytracing on to make it easier to market. Remember the FPS market after Doom came out? There were a zillion shitty Doom clones on the market. But, the concept of a shooting game with a first person perspective certainly hasn't gone away.
The gentle ribbing is a sort of sign of respect. It means, "you are strong enough for me to playfully harass you." My best friends and I often have conversations that an outsider would think were brutal fights between bitter enemies, while strangers get polite and distant language. If somebody will start making fun of you for standing out from the group, it just means that you are a part of the group in the first place.
You know, I think this event is an abuse of power, and excessive force. But, if everybody in the debate knew what they had agreed to, I would have absolutely no problem watching the debates just as you suggest. Can we also do something to candidates who use logical fallacies during a debate, or outright lie. Maybe arm a bunch of historians and skilled debate referees with paint guns in the front row. You would get an on-person score card for honesty while you watch them talk.
Well, sure, it'll be none trivial to get a key. OTOH, there are a lot of Wii owners with an interest in finding it, so it might not be infeasible to imagine a distributed computing project with many thousands of nodes cranking away for a year.
Generally speaking, entrapment only applies to law enforcement and the government. RIAA still isn't there yet, thankfully. OTOH, a good lawyer could probably spin it as morally equivalent in principle for a jury.
The whole point of a One time Pad is that there is no such thing as an algorithm to crack it without quite some information in addition to the ciphertext. The beauty of a One Time Pad is that you can crank through every possible key, but that doesn't get you anything. Sure, you may wind up with some keys that take the ciphertext and make perfectly intelligible English out of it, but there are an enourmous number of messages of a given length, and any of them could be an equally valid. So, cracking a message properly encrypted with a OTP basically amounts to creanking through every possible bit combination the same length as the message, and then guessing arbitrarily which one is the "solution."
In practice, the only time OTP's get broken is when they are used wrong. For example, a message is enciphered with a particular pad, transmitted, and then through a beaurocratic fuckup, the same message also gets transmitted as plaintext. Then, somebody fucks up and uses the same OTP (now a TTP!) on another message. the cryptanalyst gives the old captured OTP a whirl and gets lucky. The OTP is only vulnerable to the CHF algorithm. (Cascading Human Fuckups.)
He can't open his eyes right now -- too much solar energy.
What? How dare you?! Well, I do like British accents. We'll only take the chavs that look like Billie Piper, though.
I am also an experienced IT professional. I have a pretty good idea what is being talked about, and I have a pretty thorough layman's knowledge of the inner workings of Linux. I generally find Linux easier to get working than Windows. For example, I recently got a cheap webcam that took an hour to make work in Linux by building a kernel module which went flawlessly, and it was a week before I managed to use it for anything in Windows. So, I think that I qualify as a well informed power user when it comes to Linux, but probably not a true expert.
IMO, sound and wireless are crap on Linux. Those are the only two classes of hardware that I shy away from under Linux, and tend to have much better luck with on Windows. I've still never had a wireless card just work out of the box without any trouble under Linux. As a community, I think we can't just say wireless is "good enough" as it is, een if some cards work perfectly on some distributions. Once vendors really open up their wireless specs, and the vast majority of everything can be 100% supported by 100% open source software, then I expect that Linux will work just like magic, just like I find it does with every wired Ethernet hardware I have ever thrown at it. (which is a hell of a lot more than I can say about Windows!!!)
I'll just jump in and say ++ to how great that episode was. It's like after 40 years, somebody working on the show finally said, "Hey man... our main character travels through fucking time. That's kind of trippy. I mean, you completely mess with causality when you get to travel arbitrarily." I had a few complaints about that episode, but far and away my biggest complaint was the fact that it wasn't a two parter!
Side note: In addition to the story being quite well written and well directed... The actress who plays the guest character is quite hot. They should bring her back as a companion if possible.
The history of mathematics is a really fascinating subject. Somewhere I have a history of 0 called something like The Nothing that Is. It puts math in a context, and stops it from being magic that nobody could have thought up on their own. The book on zero is really quite short, and quite easy reading, even for somebody not well versed in math, and it makes it all the way to explaining Calculus in a reasonably accessible way.
Through the history of math, you get all sorts of interesting characters, exotic locales, conflict about how things should be done, and who invented what, etc. It's not exactly a way to bring math into writing, but there is a lot of writing already done about math that you may want to check out and see if it is of any use for you classroom.
Fairly Hard SF like some Arthur c Clarke can also be a great and interesting introduction to some stuff like the principles of celestial mechanics in a way that would stick better for most students than just throwing equations at them.
Glammahawarteyropoopskidoofart.
AFAIR, this won't be Jack' first time filing against a judge in one of his cases. Whenever he doesn't like a judge, he has convinced himself that suing the judge will result in a conflict of interest, and force the judge to recuse himself, allowing him to arbitrarily judge-shop until he finds somebody he thinks will kow-tow to his bullshit for fear of being sued.
Unfortunately for Jack, there is no clear precedent requiring a judge to recuse himself if he gets sued by someone involved in a case he is judging. Naturally, this is because such a precedent would enable exactly what Jack wants. IIRC, the last judge he sued didn't recuse himself because of being sued, but eventually did recuse himself because there was a conflict of interest arising from the fact that the judge was filing a formal complaint about Jack being an asshat.
Short answer : The pump will weight more than the wasted fuel, so your solution probably just shortened the lifetime instead of extending it.
And, that's assuming that the pump doesn't break. You just added a mechanical part which has to operate under extremes of temperature, and survive the vibration of a launch. Also, the pump itself will vibrate and emit some heat. You need to be sure that if the pump does work in vacuum, survive launch, and work in extreme temperatures, that it doesn't break anything else. And that it doesn't shift the power budget enough that you need bigger solar panels. (Can't reduce broadcast power for the times you need the pump - that amounts to downtime, which reduces the effective lifetime!)
Oh, also, an ordinary sort of pump won't work on liquids in vacuum, in 0g, etc. You'll need something inert you can pump in and out of the fuel tanks to push the fuel around. But, it won't stay put very nicely, so there is a major engineering challenge there. And, you wind up needing a pump for the inert gas for each fuel tank in all likely hood, in addition to the pumping apparatus that you need to move the fuel between tanks.
Go watch Daywatch.
Now, the Russians may not be able to come up with a plot I find comprehensible, but they certainly have the visual effects technology to beat anything made in America in 1969.
Some people may be confused by similar words:
developeer: a person who is a member of a non-hierarchical development group. in practice, some developeers are more equal than others.
develope: Related to an Antelope, but with Satanic horns. (The spelling is archaic)
developes: "The Envelopes" ("Da Evelopes") as spoken of by a Chicago native with a terrible case of the sniffles.
Technically, the "bit designation" of a platform is defined as the largest number on the spec sheet which marketing is convinced customers will accept as truthful. Seriously, over the years different processors and systems have been "16 bit" or "32 bit" for any number of odd and wacky reasons. for example, the Atari Jaguar was widely touted as a 64 bit platform, and the control processor was a Motorola 68000. The Sega Genesis also had a 68k in it, and was a 16 bit platform. The thing is, Atari's marketing folks decided that since the graphics processor worked in 64 bit chunks, they could sell the system as a 64 bt platform. C'est la vie. It's an issue that doesn't just crop up in video game consoles -- I just find the Jaguar a particularly amusing example.
But, yeah, having a CPU sold as one "bitness" and being able to work with a larger data size than the bitness is not unusual. The physical address bus width is indeed one common designator of bitness, just as you say. Another is the internal single address width, or the total segmented address width. Also, the size of a GPR is popular. On many platforms, some or all of those are the same number, which simplifies things.
An Athlon64, for example, has 64 bit GPR's, and in theory a 64 bit address space, but it actually only cares about 48 bits of address space, and only 40 of those bits can actual be addressed by current implimentations.
A 32 it Intel Xeon has 32 bit GPR's, but an 80 bit floating point unit, the ability to do 128 bit SSE computations, 32 bit individual addresses, and IIRC a 36 bit segmented physical address space. but, Intel's marketing knew that customers wouldn't believe it if they called it anything but 32 bit since it could only address 32 bits in a single chunk. (And, they didn't want it to compete with IA64!)
I'm not sure it exists as a single comprehensive document. My AMD64 Architecture Reference Manual set is five books, if I recall correctly. They were shipped to me for free several years ago, so AMD doesn't keep the information a secret.
I think a single PDF document covering every single instruction in a current CPU in sufficient detail to be useful would almost certainly be so large as to be quite unwieldy. After all, a lot of people use the Adobe PDF reader software! And, even assuming you can view the document, you still have a pain in the ass trying to search it to find whatever you need.
Revolutionary? Everything old is new again...
http://www.mini-itx.com/projects/cluster/
http://news.taborcommunications.com/msgget.jsp?mi
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/bladecenter/ -- a 7U chassis that holds 14 blades, and is a bit spendy, but not completely unreasonable for some situations
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8177 -- My personal favorite, this page talks about several small portable miniclusters that have been made over the last six or seven years...
Yes, 8 cores of Athlon64 is faster than 8 cores of low power VIA CPU's from several years ago, but the concept isn't revolutionary, and there isn't a lot of headline worthy engineering that goes into a project like this... I'm sure it's a very handy tool, and I'm not suggested it shouldn't have been built, or that it was entirely trivial to build, but in the end, it's just four ordinary motherboards and ethernet.
Well, we already have a significant number of people who don't remember a time when there wasn't a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. And, if Hillary gets two terms, Chelsea and the Bush twins could conceivable run against each other with a populace that has gotten used to 35+ years of familial duopoly...
Linux ran just fine on 64 CPU systems back at the start of 2003 when SGI announced Altix. See, for example: http://linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reports/4612/1
If I recall correctly, that would have been running on a 2.4 kernel. Cores in a single socket vs. distinct CPU's is a really minor distinction, so all the work done to make Altix work will basically run just fine on a hypothetical Intel Core 4 Sixtyfourdro. So, 2.8 really shouldn't need to much work in terms of being able to handle the "new" multiprocessing.
The iPod certainly does have a general purpose CPU in it. ARM of varying flavor, in fact. However, that doesn't make it impossible for it to also have a hardware MP3 decoder. I don't know for sure if the iPod actually uses an MP3 chip, though. I seem to recall that first gen. iPods did need a hardware MP3 decoded, but it became less important with more modern versions and faster CPU's.
The video playback, however, does currently rely on a dedicated chip to handle it on an iPod. the little ARM chips just don't have the muscle to handle H.264 and all the other new video buzz words, and putting in a general purpose CPU that could do it would require too much power for an iPod.
I hope so. I'm not really a bio guy, so I can't understand most of what is up there. I'm no expert in physics, or hardcore CS, but I at least have enough of an interest in those fields that I might have a shot of getting some benefit from watching the videos.