"64 bit is coming to desktops, there is no doubt about that," he said. "But apart from Photoshop, I can't think of desktop applications where you would need more than 4 gigabytes of physical memory, which is what you have to have in order to benefit from this technology."
"We're just making up numbers here," Dongarra cautioned. "We don't have real numbers yet. If they get 80 percent, it will be slightly faster than (ASCI Q, the current No. 2 on the Top 500 list)."
Then a little later, the article says:
Lockhart cautioned that even if Big Mac beat most of the machines in the current Top 10, the list, which is compiled twice a year, is a moving target. Lockhart said there are four or five new supercomputers coming online that also may qualify for places in the Top 10.
So to summarize, the data aren't in and nobody will really know where the machine ranks until all the data are in. About the only outcome one would expect is that the machine would outperform older technology.
At 5:58 EDT, Shenzhou 5 will be visible over Boston At 11:28 GMT, it'll be visible over Chicago. Last chance at 5:59 PDT to see it over the West Coast.
...they're slow. Postscript gets around the speed issue by caching a glyph once it's rendered at a specific resolution and then using the rendered bitmap instead of re-rendering the vectors. It's kind of pointless to re-render every icon on a desktop every time it's exposed.
Nemesis was Richard Muller's idea to explain Raup and Sepkoski's thesis that mass extinctions are periodic. It was an off the cuff proposal to counter Alvarez's criticism that there couldn't be any rational explanation that would support periodic asteroid hits. Nemesis would have to have an orbit about 2 light years in diameter and a period of 26 million years to explain Raup and Sepkoski's data.
Planet X is an proposed tenth planet with an orbital period of less than 1000 years. When Pluto was discovered, astronomers thought that was the planet that was responsible for Uranus' orbital perterbation. Then in the 70's and 80's Uranus' orbit didn't quite sync with predictions that accounted for Pluto. The discrepancy suggested that there may be yet another object lurking in the Kuiper belt.
In any event, the the two hypothesis are addressing different issues. A good write up can be found here.
You can't always compare one countries science education against another because they use different methods of implementation in their education process.
To get around your objection that some countries segregate students after 8th grade, they tested 4th and 8th graders in all the participating countries. Bottom line was that if you are an American who scored in the top 5% on your math tests, you're just a bit above average compared to Taiwan, Japan and Singapore.
Wonder why all the IT jobs are going overseas? There's one very good reason.
To answer your question, we havent goen into space for the same reason we never really colonized antartica: becuase no one wants to live in hell and there is no way to convince people that space is a land of milk and honey.
Antartica may have more to offer than the Artic, an equally inhospitable place. We're not in Antartica because we've signed treaties saying we'll leave it alone. Mount Erebus, a volcano in Antartica, is the only place I know of where you can breathe fumes that contain gold.
I'm not sure but I thought they couldn't do smaller scale tests because scaling was at the heart of their problem. It was a "nobody has built a carbon anything that big" problem and someone had to be first.
I talked with one of the x-33 project managers in 96 before the tanks came apart and he told me then that they were underfunded. There was very little room in the budget for faliures along the way.
Your comment about politics made me wonder if Goldwin's cheaper-better-faster mantra not working out on X-33 had anything to do with NASA getting cold feet.
What makes this remarkable is that even NASA had trouble with testing their incarnation of an Aerospike engine...
Can you back that up? From what I read, the aerospike tests went fine. A friend, one of the Shuttle engine designers and who was in contact with the linear aerospike group at Rocketdyne, said he heard that the aerospike delivered the expected thrust during its ground tests. So what troubles are you referring to?
I often wondered if NASA didn't screw up cancelling the X-33. The only major failure that I know of in that project was the fuel tank and given that it was the one of the only two they ever made, it seemed like giving up cooking because your first few tries end up tasting lousy. When the X-33 tried to recover from the tank failure by testing the craft with temporary aluminum replacement tanks, NASA pulled the plug because the extra weight of the temporary tanks would compromise the test rocket's performance. Seemed short sighted at the time and I've never seen anything since that indicated it was the right thing to do.
If the article is accurate, the managers should be charged with involuntary manslaughter. Again, if the article has the facts right which, for the Times, has become iffy.
OTOH, if the Times is right and the managers do go to jail, it might serve to rectify the problem that Feynman first fingered back when the Challenger blew up. That will be something shuffling the NASA management won't achieve.
Your dichotomy of citizen vs. corporation ignores the fact that some individuals are also corporations. Your "I shouldn't have to receive..." take is a claim that your convenience is paramount. That's your belief. Mine is that we should be very careful of encroaching on people's first amendment right to express themselves - even if they're doing it just to feed themselves.
It's interesting that you raise spam because they are indeed linked issues. My spam filter takes care of 90% of the drek I get each day. That leaves me 15-20 emails a day that I have to filter manually. All told, SPAM costs me maybe a minute a day to deal with. Balance that minute against legislation that can't possibly stem the flow without imposing draconian costs and I'm for letting my filters handle any spammers that come my way.
"But wait! Aren't filters the equivalent of a no trepassing sign?" you ask. Yes, they're very similar. The key difference is I'm not asking the state to enforce my choices - I'm doing it myself and dealing with the residue myself.
Bit of history - I come from a ranching family - we grew beef on the hoof. We had no trepassing signs and they handled most people. We still had people wander onto our land and almost all would apologize and leave when told they were trespassing. The few jerks who wouldn't, well we dealt with them too. Bottom line, we didn't want people bothering us and we dealt with those that did. It just wasn't a big deal.
Your background is different - maybe you are used to people doing for you what you could do yourself. I don't know. I just know that I've seen far too many cases of people giving up something and getting little in return. To me, first amendment rights are very precious and I'm not about to give them up just because it makes someone's life a little bit easier. You and I are different people - you appear to believe that "there oughta be a law." I believe we've got too many as it is and before we add another one, it better benefit more than it costs. So there it is - you and I are different and it looks like we just can't agree. Nonetheless, I'll defend your right to call me and tell me about your beliefs.
Your right to swing your fist ends at my face. Agreed
Your right to enter my property ends at my "no trespassing" sign. Maybe. Say you're beating your kids, does your "no trespassing" sign prevail over your child's right not to be beaten? What if your house is on fire? Oops! Can't enter to save your ass, the "no trepassing" sign is more important!
Your right to free speech ends at my notice that I don't wish to be disturbed. Your right to invoke the state's muscle to enforce your desire not to be disturbed by a phone call doesn't start just because you say so. If I want to call you, I have that right - the first amendment trumps your "no trespassing" sign.
I'm not interested in calling you. What I am interested in is seeing that we don't incrementally erode our rights for the sake of convenience. A telemarketer's call is a nuisance to be sure, but it is only a nuisance. It's not some depradation that requires a law to rectify when a simple "I'm not interested" and hanging up will suffice.
Beware the encroachment of government, even when you happen to approve of a particular encroachment. The next time, the government may encroach on you.
You don't need protection from telemarketers. You can just hang up the phone. But no, that's not enough. You want the right to call a cop to enforce your view of the world on someone else. Even if it means violating the first amendment.
If that's what being a liberterian is, you can keep it.
This is no different than me simply walking away from someone who is saying something I don't want to hear, or telling the peddler on my doorstep to go away. I'm just telling them (the telemarketers) to go away in advance.
It's different than just walking away because you've precluded their speaking to you at all.
The law buys us the small convenience of not having to say "No, I'm not interested in hearing this" at the expense of stifling someone's right to speak to us. To paraphrase Huey Long, "This isn't a law against you or me, it's a law against that fellow behind the tree."
Congress can only pass federal laws which in this case means only inter-state phone calls are affected. If the phone call originates in my own state, the law doesn't apply. I guess that means the telemarketing jobs won't be going to India any time soon.
The thing that bothers me about legislation like this is how freely people are willing to trample on free speech. To me, it's just not that big a deal to hang up on a telemarketer that it's worth sacrificing free speech rights for. I don't like telemarketers but I really dislike seeing rights incrementally eroded even more. Telemarketers may be the current black sheep but who's next?
But if it's an issue of Free Speech, the congress won't have the authority to grant the FTC this authority.
Except the Supreme Court has already held that commercial speech doesn't have the same protection as individual speech. The question is probably going to end back up in the Supreme Court as it's not clear how much latitiude Congress has in a case like this.
As annoying as telemarketing calls are, they do serve a function. Just because 50 million people believe that they shouldn't have to be bothered saying "I'm not interested." doesn't necessarily mean Congress can shut the industry down. Clearly, somebody is interested otherwise the calls wouldn't keep coming.
If JPL had just asked, I would have suggested sending Galileo down the center of the polar eye.
Cassini sent the movie of Jupiter's pole as it flew by on its way to Saturn. Given the enormous winds on Jupiter, the eye could extend a dive into the atmosphere a lot further than going in anywhere else as the pressure has got to be substantially lower inside the eye. Getting a signal out of there would be tricky but just try and imagine what's at the bottom of the eye.
If you actually worked at JPL, you would have known about Zubrin's idea. It's relatively common knowledge. If you hadn't heard about Zubrin but really do work at JPL then it's clear why you don't belong at JPL.
If you plan on keeping the car longer than 100,000 miles, factor in the cost of replacing the batteries. When I looked at getting a Prius, batteries cost around $2,000. It's not a deal-breaker because the mileage compensates for the cost but you should be aware of it and budget accordingly.
Clearly you're not. The problem is clearly stated - any competitor that attempts to reverse engineer the format so that a user can edit their documents with another tool besides Word is SOL. Unless Msoft makes the code to edit the documents public, not bloody likely, then it's just another attempt to lock up the office market.
If you look at the top500 list, you see Lawrence Livermore's Linux cluster is at 3rd place. It's an 1100 node cluster of 2.4 GHZ P4's. Looks like Apple is a bit late to the party if they're only shooting for #5.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you mean in Seine?
At 5:58 EDT, Shenzhou 5 will be visible over Boston
At 11:28 GMT, it'll be visible over Chicago.
Last chance at 5:59 PDT to see it over the West Coast.
Orbit details at space weather.
...they're slow. Postscript gets around the speed issue by caching a glyph once it's rendered at a specific resolution and then using the rendered bitmap instead of re-rendering the vectors. It's kind of pointless to re-render every icon on a desktop every time it's exposed.
Planet X is an proposed tenth planet with an orbital period of less than 1000 years. When Pluto was discovered, astronomers thought that was the planet that was responsible for Uranus' orbital perterbation. Then in the 70's and 80's Uranus' orbit didn't quite sync with predictions that accounted for Pluto. The discrepancy suggested that there may be yet another object lurking in the Kuiper belt.
In any event, the the two hypothesis are addressing different issues. A good write up can be found here.
You can compare countries by giving students the same test. That's exactly what the The Third International Math and Science Study (TIMMS) did.
To get around your objection that some countries segregate students after 8th grade, they tested 4th and 8th graders in all the participating countries. Bottom line was that if you are an American who scored in the top 5% on your math tests, you're just a bit above average compared to Taiwan, Japan and Singapore.
Wonder why all the IT jobs are going overseas? There's one very good reason.
Antartica may have more to offer than the Artic, an equally inhospitable place. We're not in Antartica because we've signed treaties saying we'll leave it alone. Mount Erebus, a volcano in Antartica, is the only place I know of where you can breathe fumes that contain gold.
I talked with one of the x-33 project managers in 96 before the tanks came apart and he told me then that they were underfunded. There was very little room in the budget for faliures along the way.
Your comment about politics made me wonder if Goldwin's cheaper-better-faster mantra not working out on X-33 had anything to do with NASA getting cold feet.
Can you back that up? From what I read, the aerospike tests went fine. A friend, one of the Shuttle engine designers and who was in contact with the linear aerospike group at Rocketdyne, said he heard that the aerospike delivered the expected thrust during its ground tests. So what troubles are you referring to?
I often wondered if NASA didn't screw up cancelling the X-33. The only major failure that I know of in that project was the fuel tank and given that it was the one of the only two they ever made, it seemed like giving up cooking because your first few tries end up tasting lousy. When the X-33 tried to recover from the tank failure by testing the craft with temporary aluminum replacement tanks, NASA pulled the plug because the extra weight of the temporary tanks would compromise the test rocket's performance. Seemed short sighted at the time and I've never seen anything since that indicated it was the right thing to do.
OTOH, if the Times is right and the managers do go to jail, it might serve to rectify the problem that Feynman first fingered back when the Challenger blew up. That will be something shuffling the NASA management won't achieve.
It's interesting that you raise spam because they are indeed linked issues. My spam filter takes care of 90% of the drek I get each day. That leaves me 15-20 emails a day that I have to filter manually. All told, SPAM costs me maybe a minute a day to deal with. Balance that minute against legislation that can't possibly stem the flow without imposing draconian costs and I'm for letting my filters handle any spammers that come my way.
"But wait! Aren't filters the equivalent of a no trepassing sign?" you ask. Yes, they're very similar. The key difference is I'm not asking the state to enforce my choices - I'm doing it myself and dealing with the residue myself.
Bit of history - I come from a ranching family - we grew beef on the hoof. We had no trepassing signs and they handled most people. We still had people wander onto our land and almost all would apologize and leave when told they were trespassing. The few jerks who wouldn't, well we dealt with them too. Bottom line, we didn't want people bothering us and we dealt with those that did. It just wasn't a big deal.
Your background is different - maybe you are used to people doing for you what you could do yourself. I don't know. I just know that I've seen far too many cases of people giving up something and getting little in return. To me, first amendment rights are very precious and I'm not about to give them up just because it makes someone's life a little bit easier. You and I are different people - you appear to believe that "there oughta be a law." I believe we've got too many as it is and before we add another one, it better benefit more than it costs. So there it is - you and I are different and it looks like we just can't agree. Nonetheless, I'll defend your right to call me and tell me about your beliefs.
Agreed
Your right to enter my property ends at my "no trespassing" sign.
Maybe. Say you're beating your kids, does your "no trespassing" sign prevail over your child's right not to be beaten? What if your house is on fire? Oops! Can't enter to save your ass, the "no trepassing" sign is more important!
Your right to free speech ends at my notice that I don't wish to be disturbed.
Your right to invoke the state's muscle to enforce your desire not to be disturbed by a phone call doesn't start just because you say so. If I want to call you, I have that right - the first amendment trumps your "no trespassing" sign.
I'm not interested in calling you. What I am interested in is seeing that we don't incrementally erode our rights for the sake of convenience. A telemarketer's call is a nuisance to be sure, but it is only a nuisance. It's not some depradation that requires a law to rectify when a simple "I'm not interested" and hanging up will suffice.
Beware the encroachment of government, even when you happen to approve of a particular encroachment. The next time, the government may encroach on you.
If that's what being a liberterian is, you can keep it.
It's different than just walking away because you've precluded their speaking to you at all.
The law buys us the small convenience of not having to say "No, I'm not interested in hearing this" at the expense of stifling someone's right to speak to us. To paraphrase Huey Long, "This isn't a law against you or me, it's a law against that fellow behind the tree."
Congress can only pass federal laws which in this case means only inter-state phone calls are affected. If the phone call originates in my own state, the law doesn't apply. I guess that means the telemarketing jobs won't be going to India any time soon.
The thing that bothers me about legislation like this is how freely people are willing to trample on free speech. To me, it's just not that big a deal to hang up on a telemarketer that it's worth sacrificing free speech rights for. I don't like telemarketers but I really dislike seeing rights incrementally eroded even more. Telemarketers may be the current black sheep but who's next?
They do that and taxes will have come a long way.
Except the Supreme Court has already held that commercial speech doesn't have the same protection as individual speech. The question is probably going to end back up in the Supreme Court as it's not clear how much latitiude Congress has in a case like this.
As annoying as telemarketing calls are, they do serve a function. Just because 50 million people believe that they shouldn't have to be bothered saying "I'm not interested." doesn't necessarily mean Congress can shut the industry down. Clearly, somebody is interested otherwise the calls wouldn't keep coming.
Cassini sent the movie of Jupiter's pole as it flew by on its way to Saturn. Given the enormous winds on Jupiter, the eye could extend a dive into the atmosphere a lot further than going in anywhere else as the pressure has got to be substantially lower inside the eye. Getting a signal out of there would be tricky but just try and imagine what's at the bottom of the eye.
I have a friend who spent last year in South Korea. He was hurting for cash so he could only afford the low-end service - 22 mbps.
And I thought T1 was fast...
If you actually worked at JPL, you would have known about Zubrin's idea. It's relatively common knowledge. If you hadn't heard about Zubrin but really do work at JPL then it's clear why you don't belong at JPL.
If you plan on keeping the car longer than 100,000 miles, factor in the cost of replacing the batteries. When I looked at getting a Prius, batteries cost around $2,000. It's not a deal-breaker because the mileage compensates for the cost but you should be aware of it and budget accordingly.
A Heisenbug is a bug that goes away when you look for it and reappears when you stop looking.
Clearly you're not. The problem is clearly stated - any competitor that attempts to reverse engineer the format so that a user can edit their documents with another tool besides Word is SOL. Unless Msoft makes the code to edit the documents public, not bloody likely, then it's just another attempt to lock up the office market.
Damn, I wish Jackson had kept his yap shut.
If you look at the top500 list, you see Lawrence Livermore's Linux cluster is at 3rd place. It's an 1100 node cluster of 2.4 GHZ P4's. Looks like Apple is a bit late to the party if they're only shooting for #5.