The "X11 locks up while scrolling too much/too fast" problem annoys me too. I've found that disabling backing store seems to help; add the "-bs" option to the last line in/etc/X11/xdm/Xservers.
Regarding the next sentence: "That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000..."
Something doesn't seem right here. 720 gigaflops / 16 minis = 45 Gflops per mini. Fastest processor currently available in a mini is a 1.42 GHz G4, which means that that G4 must be capable of just under 32 floating-point operations per clock cycle to hit 45 Gflops. If he's actually talking about the 1.25 GHz G4, that works out to an even 36 floating-point operations per clock. Ignoring for now the problem of relying on theoretical peak performance when evaluating hardware for a cluster of machines---can the G4 really do 30+ floating point operations per clock??
I agree 100%. I'm very interested in this subject and was hoping to read a well-written article, but that piece was just gibberish. The author can't even distinguish between ToEE interface problems (the radial menu issue), ToEE AI problems (the Meld to Stone issue), and real problems adapting d20 rules to the computer. What a waste of time.
There are ways to disagree with the article and the author without getting up on a soapbox and pulling out the "we're too generous, they're too ungrateful" rhetoric. You clearly couldn't find one, which is why I posted the reply I did. You're the example of the zealot that gives Linux users a bad name in the non-Linux-using world.
Space and cooling were issues at LANL, which is why the designers chose the Shuttle boxes instead of desktop cases or 1U rackmount cases (or even Blade servers). 294 desktop cases wouldn't fit in the room, but 1U cases would generate too much heat in too small a space, and the AC system couldn't handle it. And since replacing the entire AC system wasn't really viable, the Shuttle cases were the best option.
I've seen people confuse "there" and "their" so many times that I'm practically immune to it now, but confusing "their" and "they're"?? One is a contraction, the other is possessive. Come on!
Thanks for the correction. I was going to say "replace 'Geologic time' with 'Hubble time'", but even that's not right. After doing some more reading (http://www.glassnotes.com/WindowPanes.html, e.g.), I feel a little more informed.
The idea that glass flows on ~100 year time scales is one of the most pervasive misconceptions in science. Glass flows on geologic time scales, not on ~100 year time scales.
Already, farther down on this page, there are posters calling other posters "pedophiles". Please, before you start flaming each other, stop and read the law and the decision.
This decision does not make child pornography legal. Child pornography, involving real children, is not protected under the First Amendment.
It's there, but it's small (in an angle-subtended sense - it's roughly 30 microarcseconds in size). No current instruments can resolve the event horizon of the black hole. Of course, many observations of the inner regions of the Galactic Center have been made over the past twenty years, and many spectral features have been associated with emission coming from within a few tens of Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon. Sgr A* (the name for the radio source associated with the black hole and its immediate environment) is actually fairly bright at radio wavelengths, so in that sense we can "see" the region right around the black hole.
In the next ten years or so, VLBI techniques will probably improve to the point that we can image the Galactic Center and see the shadow of the black hole against the rest of the radiating gas there. Pretty exciting stuff! See this space.com article for discussion and images.
Black holes are generally divided into two categories based on their mass: there are "galactic" black holes like Cygnux X-1, which are ~10 solar mass black holes often found in binary systems within our own galaxy, and then there are "supermassive" black holes with masses of ~10 million suns that sit at the centers of other galaxies.
The black hole at the Galactic Center is often described as "massive" because its mass is "only" 2.6 million solar masses - lower than typical "supermassive" black holes by a factor of 5-10. In addition, the spectrum of Sgr A* (the name for the black hole at the Galactic Center, or at least for the radio source now associated with the region immediately surrounding the black hole) is fainter at almost all wavelengths than the spectrum of "typical" supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, so we call it "massive", and we stop short of calling the center of our galaxy an active galactic nucleus.
are you retarded..the lep was shtdown because the experiment was finished
Different experimenters have different ideas about when an experiment is finished, and the shutdown of LEP was not as simple as you apparently believe.
The "other group" refered to in the article, who claimed to have found the Higgs just before LEP was scheduled to be shut down, had a vested interest in keeping the experiment running; they had put a lot of time, money, and effort into it, and since LEP had almost enough energy to probe most of the energy range where the Higgs would most likely be found, they wanted to keep going for a few more months. The group that discovers the Higgs will most likely be awarded the Nobel prize in a few years, so the actual discovery of the Higgs effectively carries a very large cash prize.
Now that LEP has been shut down (despite the claim that the Higgs had been seen), the Higgs will most likely be discovered at Fermilab. It's possible that the group at LEP who claimed to have seen the Higgs was just trying to keep the experiment running long enough to legitimately discover it themselves.
It should be mentioned that the LEP group has claimed to have seen the Higgs several times over the past few years, and each time (including this latest one) more careful reanalysis of the data has revealed no legitimate signal.
They haven't ruled out the existence of the Higgs by any means.
LEP couldn't probe the entire range of energies where the Higgs might reside, and there wasn't compelling evidence that they would be able to. That's why LEP was shut down; scientists at CERN wanted to begin work on LHC, which will replace LEP by 2005 (IIRC).
Now the search for (and discovery of?) the Higgs will probably take place at Fermilab and LHC.
And this business of requiring a "major restructuring" of current physics models is just exaggeration. People propose extensions to the standard model all the time; it's just that the standard model has described current observations and predicted new (and eventually confirmed) ones very well. There's no need to throw the entire thing out.
So is information addiction. It's pathetic the amount of time I spent sucking down worthless piles of information on the net.
Somehow this struck a chord.
When I was growing up, my family kept our computer in the living room, so that my parents could see how much my sister and I used it, and pretty much once a day my mother would tell me to get off the computer and go do something else - "stop tying up the phone line", etc. (I discovered the magic of local BBSs at an early age). I'm glad that she did; I think that focusing too much time on any one pursuit is unhealthy, and I'm sure I'll nag my kids the same way.
But at some point my mom's attitude, and my attitude, and seemingly everyone's attitude (at least, that I knew) about computers changed. My family got real internet access a little while before I went off to college, and we discovered pretty much simultaneously something that I take for granted now - there's a lot of information on the internet. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there's a lot of good stuff too.
I know a lot more about current events all over the world now than I ever did when I was growing up. I now read lots of science/technology/computer-oriented web sites like/. and Ars, and follow links to stories, and links from those stories to other pages, following topics as far as my interest goes. If I have more questions, I go to google, or Usenet, or (now - a fantastic resource) groups.google.com. I don't have to stop learning about a topic when I get to the end of one web page, because there are almost certainly many more web pages accessible with a few clicks.
If I had a question about some random topic when I was growing up, I'd ask my parents, or my teachers at school, or I'd look in the encyclopedia (we actually had a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica at home). But my parents might not know the answer, and of course my teachers weren't available 24 hours a day, and the encyclopedia was just one source.
And I used to pick up new topics of interest from friends, or classes in school. Again, I'd learn about the topic from those friends, or from classes, or the textbooks we had. Now I run into new ideas in/. posts, in web forums, on news or other random web pages, and they're introduced to me by people I don't actually know. I no longer need to find a friend with a particular hobby to get involved in something new or to learn about a new topic.
I "surf" the web a lot, but I don't think of it as "information addiction". Maybe that's because it doesn't ever interfere (much) with other things that I have to do, or that I want to do away from the computer. I seriously feel like I've learned something new every time I finishing browsing, and every time I shut down my computer for the night. I'm a reasonable well-rounded person (in my own imagination, at least:-)), and I don't think that the time I spend online is pathetic at all. On the contrary, I often think that the increase in immersion in information that occured (and is still occuring) as a result of the growth of the internet is empowering, and fascinating, and exciting, and I enjoy the time that I spend online.
My bookmarks list consists of a whole bunch of sites that I found years ago. I have sites that I check frequently (i.e. daily), others that I check every few days, and others that are useful references for specific topics that I refer to when I need them. I've found that, now that I've built up a set of "useful" sites, I just don't feel the need or desire to seek out new ones. It takes a lot for a new site to become a "must-visit-daily" site for me.
Quantum mechanics doesn't just deal with fermions - bosons are allowed too.:-)
In fact, the distinction between fermions and bosons is apparent in quantum mechanics (symmetry or antisymmetry of the wave function) but can't be derived from it. Quantum field theory actually motivates the distinction.
-Gabe
Slashdot Mirror
The "X11 locks up while scrolling too much/too fast" problem annoys me too. I've found that disabling backing store seems to help; add the "-bs" option to the last line in /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers.
Regarding the next sentence: "That's a 720 gigaflop micro-supercomputer that costs less than $9,000..."
Something doesn't seem right here. 720 gigaflops / 16 minis = 45 Gflops per mini. Fastest processor currently available in a mini is a 1.42 GHz G4, which means that that G4 must be capable of just under 32 floating-point operations per clock cycle to hit 45 Gflops. If he's actually talking about the 1.25 GHz G4, that works out to an even 36 floating-point operations per clock. Ignoring for now the problem of relying on theoretical peak performance when evaluating hardware for a cluster of machines---can the G4 really do 30+ floating point operations per clock??
-Gabe
I agree 100%. I'm very interested in this subject and was hoping to read a well-written article, but that piece was just gibberish. The author can't even distinguish between ToEE interface problems (the radial menu issue), ToEE AI problems (the Meld to Stone issue), and real problems adapting d20 rules to the computer. What a waste of time.
-Gabe
There are ways to disagree with the article and the author without getting up on a soapbox and pulling out the "we're too generous, they're too ungrateful" rhetoric. You clearly couldn't find one, which is why I posted the reply I did. You're the example of the zealot that gives Linux users a bad name in the non-Linux-using world.
-Gabe
And now you've just held yourself up as an example of exactly the sort of "shrieking geek" she was talking about.
-Gabe
A gravitational wave detector is being built in space; it's called LISA.
-Gabe
... it's called LISA.
-Gabe
Space and cooling were issues at LANL, which is why the designers chose the Shuttle boxes instead of desktop cases or 1U rackmount cases (or even Blade servers). 294 desktop cases wouldn't fit in the room, but 1U cases would generate too much heat in too small a space, and the AC system couldn't handle it. And since replacing the entire AC system wasn't really viable, the Shuttle cases were the best option.
-Gabe
I've seen people confuse "there" and "their" so many times that I'm practically immune to it now, but confusing "their" and "they're"?? One is a contraction, the other is possessive. Come on!
-Gabe
An amp is a unit of current. A watt is a unit of power.
-Gabe
"A more massive object will hit the earth faster than a less massive object, if the drop tests are carried out independently."
Still not true.
The forces on the two falling objects are different, but the accelerations are the same.
a1 = Fe1/m1 = G*me/r^2
a2 = Fe2/m2 = G*me/r^2 = a1
If each object is dropped from rest, each accelerates at the same rate, and each reaches the earth at the same time.
-Gabe
Thanks for the correction. I was going to say "replace 'Geologic time' with 'Hubble time'", but even that's not right. After doing some more reading (http://www.glassnotes.com/WindowPanes.html, e.g.), I feel a little more informed.
-Gabe
The parent of this comment needs to be modded up.
The idea that glass flows on ~100 year time scales is one of the most pervasive misconceptions in science. Glass flows on geologic time scales, not on ~100 year time scales.
-Gabe
Already, farther down on this page, there are posters calling other posters "pedophiles". Please, before you start flaming each other, stop and read the law and the decision.
This decision does not make child pornography legal . Child pornography, involving real children, is not protected under the First Amendment.
-Gabe
It's there, but it's small (in an angle-subtended sense - it's roughly 30 microarcseconds in size). No current instruments can resolve the event horizon of the black hole. Of course, many observations of the inner regions of the Galactic Center have been made over the past twenty years, and many spectral features have been associated with emission coming from within a few tens of Schwarzschild radii of the event horizon. Sgr A* (the name for the radio source associated with the black hole and its immediate environment) is actually fairly bright at radio wavelengths, so in that sense we can "see" the region right around the black hole.
In the next ten years or so, VLBI techniques will probably improve to the point that we can image the Galactic Center and see the shadow of the black hole against the rest of the radiating gas there. Pretty exciting stuff! See this space.com article for discussion and images.
-Gabe
Black holes are generally divided into two categories based on their mass: there are "galactic" black holes like Cygnux X-1, which are ~10 solar mass black holes often found in binary systems within our own galaxy, and then there are "supermassive" black holes with masses of ~10 million suns that sit at the centers of other galaxies.
The black hole at the Galactic Center is often described as "massive" because its mass is "only" 2.6 million solar masses - lower than typical "supermassive" black holes by a factor of 5-10. In addition, the spectrum of Sgr A* (the name for the black hole at the Galactic Center, or at least for the radio source now associated with the region immediately surrounding the black hole) is fainter at almost all wavelengths than the spectrum of "typical" supermassive black holes in active galactic nuclei, so we call it "massive", and we stop short of calling the center of our galaxy an active galactic nucleus.
-Gabe
are you retarded..the lep was shtdown because the experiment was finished
Different experimenters have different ideas about when an experiment is finished, and the shutdown of LEP was not as simple as you apparently believe.
The "other group" refered to in the article, who claimed to have found the Higgs just before LEP was scheduled to be shut down, had a vested interest in keeping the experiment running; they had put a lot of time, money, and effort into it, and since LEP had almost enough energy to probe most of the energy range where the Higgs would most likely be found, they wanted to keep going for a few more months. The group that discovers the Higgs will most likely be awarded the Nobel prize in a few years, so the actual discovery of the Higgs effectively carries a very large cash prize.
Now that LEP has been shut down (despite the claim that the Higgs had been seen), the Higgs will most likely be discovered at Fermilab. It's possible that the group at LEP who claimed to have seen the Higgs was just trying to keep the experiment running long enough to legitimately discover it themselves.
It should be mentioned that the LEP group has claimed to have seen the Higgs several times over the past few years, and each time (including this latest one) more careful reanalysis of the data has revealed no legitimate signal.
-Gabe
They haven't ruled out the existence of the Higgs by any means.
LEP couldn't probe the entire range of energies where the Higgs might reside, and there wasn't compelling evidence that they would be able to. That's why LEP was shut down; scientists at CERN wanted to begin work on LHC, which will replace LEP by 2005 (IIRC).
Now the search for (and discovery of?) the Higgs will probably take place at Fermilab and LHC.
And this business of requiring a "major restructuring" of current physics models is just exaggeration. People propose extensions to the standard model all the time; it's just that the standard model has described current observations and predicted new (and eventually confirmed) ones very well. There's no need to throw the entire thing out.
-Gabe
So is information addiction. It's pathetic the amount of time I spent sucking down worthless piles of information on the net.
/. and Ars, and follow links to stories, and links from those stories to other pages, following topics as far as my interest goes. If I have more questions, I go to google, or Usenet, or (now - a fantastic resource) groups.google.com. I don't have to stop learning about a topic when I get to the end of one web page, because there are almost certainly many more web pages accessible with a few clicks.
/. posts, in web forums, on news or other random web pages, and they're introduced to me by people I don't actually know. I no longer need to find a friend with a particular hobby to get involved in something new or to learn about a new topic.
Somehow this struck a chord.
When I was growing up, my family kept our computer in the living room, so that my parents could see how much my sister and I used it, and pretty much once a day my mother would tell me to get off the computer and go do something else - "stop tying up the phone line", etc. (I discovered the magic of local BBSs at an early age). I'm glad that she did; I think that focusing too much time on any one pursuit is unhealthy, and I'm sure I'll nag my kids the same way.
But at some point my mom's attitude, and my attitude, and seemingly everyone's attitude (at least, that I knew) about computers changed. My family got real internet access a little while before I went off to college, and we discovered pretty much simultaneously something that I take for granted now - there's a lot of information on the internet. Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there's a lot of good stuff too.
I know a lot more about current events all over the world now than I ever did when I was growing up. I now read lots of science/technology/computer-oriented web sites like
If I had a question about some random topic when I was growing up, I'd ask my parents, or my teachers at school, or I'd look in the encyclopedia (we actually had a copy of Encyclopedia Britannica at home). But my parents might not know the answer, and of course my teachers weren't available 24 hours a day, and the encyclopedia was just one source.
And I used to pick up new topics of interest from friends, or classes in school. Again, I'd learn about the topic from those friends, or from classes, or the textbooks we had. Now I run into new ideas in
I "surf" the web a lot, but I don't think of it as "information addiction". Maybe that's because it doesn't ever interfere (much) with other things that I have to do, or that I want to do away from the computer. I seriously feel like I've learned something new every time I finishing browsing, and every time I shut down my computer for the night. I'm a reasonable well-rounded person (in my own imagination, at least:-)), and I don't think that the time I spend online is pathetic at all. On the contrary, I often think that the increase in immersion in information that occured (and is still occuring) as a result of the growth of the internet is empowering, and fascinating, and exciting, and I enjoy the time that I spend online.
-Gabe
I absolutely agree.
My bookmarks list consists of a whole bunch of sites that I found years ago. I have sites that I check frequently (i.e. daily), others that I check every few days, and others that are useful references for specific topics that I refer to when I need them. I've found that, now that I've built up a set of "useful" sites, I just don't feel the need or desire to seek out new ones. It takes a lot for a new site to become a "must-visit-daily" site for me.
-Gabe
Thank you. I've been waiting for someone to point this out (and get the details right).
-Gabe
Ah, I was wondering about that too. Maybe he should have said "x86 hardware" instead, then...
-Gabe
Quantum mechanics doesn't just deal with fermions - bosons are allowed too. :-)
In fact, the distinction between fermions and bosons is apparent in quantum mechanics (symmetry or antisymmetry of the wave function) but can't be derived from it. Quantum field theory actually motivates the distinction.
-Gabe
No, not releasing the source would hide many security problems. Probably only temporarily.
-Gabe
Ask That Hindenburg Announcer Guy
Ask A Wiccan
Ask The Voice-Over From The Dukes of Hazzard
Ask an Attorney About Open Source Licensing