Actually (and I'm speaking as an English guy in Germany), the changes were mostly made by the British after the first wave of Americans went to America. American English, where it differs from British English, is mostly closer to the English we were speaking in Shakespearean times.
For more information on this, I reccommend Bill Bryson's book Made in America, which covers the development of the English language in America. It's highly accessible, interesting, amusing and well-written. His The Mother Tongue is a similarly good volume on the development of the English language itself.
They originally based the meter on this, that and the next thing. Then, some time later, they set about measuring the speed of light. After a while, their measurements of the speed of light were becoming more accurate than their definition of what a meter was. So, presto, they defined a meter in terms of a fraction of the distance that light travels in a second. No point measuring the speed of light any more, since the unit of measurement is based on it.
If you bought it with your credit card, talk to your credit card company. You should be able to get a full refund, with the possible exception of the service fee for the month for which you did have service.
However, he states that regular apps that donot require larger than 32-bit ints will see no performance increase on x86-64. My question is this: Would it be possible to "double up" the calculations by cramming more data into a single instruction if one were only using 32bit ints?
Not really. Say you wanted to do two 32-bit additions, adding 0x00000001 to 0x00000002 and 0x00000005 to 0x00000004. Theoretically, you could combine this into one 64-bit addition, adding 0x0000000100000005 to 0x0000000200000004. This would produce 0x0000000300000009, and everyone would leave happy. The problem comes when you want to add 0x00000001 to 0x00000002 and 0x00000001 to 0xffffffff. You end up with the single 64-bit addition of 0x0000000100000001 to 0x00000002ffffffff. The result's 0x0000000400000000. Not what you'd expect.
This is just an example - by pretty much all other primitive operations, you get the same or similar effects. Granted, if the compiler was clever enough to know the bounds of certain values there, it could work some of this out, but I've yet to meet the compiler that is.
You've pretty much got this situation now, and it's going to start getting more defined. Red Hat are producing their Advanced server distro. Mandrake/Lindows/whoever pretty much target the desktop environment. Slackware/Gentoo pretty much target geeks. As things settle down more, I imagine there'll be more niche-targeting, leaving three or four generalised distributions (bog standard RH, for example) which can do everything and are specialised toward nothing particular and a bunch of specifically targeted distributions, concentrating on their chosen niche (server, desktop, geek, embedded, maybe even stuff like a CAD/CAM distro, video-editing distro, for high-margin vertical-market niches).
The rule for all the umlauted characters is that when you can't put the umlaut there, you put an e afterward.
Die Änderung -> Die Aenderung (pronounced approximately "End-er-ung", the change), Die Lösung -> Die Loesung ("Ler-zung", the solution), Die Übergabe -> Die Uebergabe ("Uwber-gabe" - like the sound on the end of the word "who", the transfer/handover).
Munich's proper name is München, so the transliteration's more like Muwnchen. The ch there isn't a 'ck' - think more of the softish 'ch' in 'Loch', not the hard 'ck' in 'lock'.
Probably - ß actually stands for a double s. Thus, Straße can be written Strasse and Fußball can be written Fussball. I'd guess the 'oo' bit is either someone's misspelling based on football, or someone who thought it was 'Füßball' (note umlaut), which without German characters would be written 'Fuessball' and pronounced roughly 'Foosball' (though with a short 'a' - as in 'ran').
AFAIR, it wasn't there in NT4 by default, at least pre-SP3 - you had to create it. I'm betting this feature isn't implemented in 9x, but the absence of the registry key isn't final proof one way or the other:-)
I don't know if it works in 95, but certainly in NT, it only worked if you set a particular registry entry. Something like HKEY_L_M\Software\Microsoft\Command Shell\CompletionChar set to '9' (ASCII TAB).
RCS limitations? Be nice to see some of the most prominent listed if they are such a big deal.
I'm betting you use cvs annotate (aka cvs blame) quite a lot, right? Consider the fact that in order to provide this functionality, CVS first internally converts its RCS file into SCCS format, then uses the temporary SCCS file to provide the annotation. RCS simply doesn't have the capability to sensibly provide this functionality on the fly.
You have the choice not to watch TV broadcasts, under which circumstances you don't need a TV license. I challenge you to find a single person in the UK who both watches TV and has never watched the BBC. I'll happily admit that there probably are some out there, but they're so rare that I'm pretty confident you'll not be able to find one.
If you give people a choice, they'll not pay the TV license (tax, whatever), which means the BBC has to compete on the same commercial basis as everyone else. Which means they can't afford to take the same risks they do now, they can't afford to produce slightly more esoteric programming, etc. - they have to appeal to the advertisers/subscribers just like everyone else. I'm English but live in Germany - having seen the comparison between the quality of TV in both places, I'd happily pay more than the current license fee to avoid the horror that is German TV (and from what I've seen of US TV, it's worse, not better).
IANAL either, but my guess would be the answer would be a firm no. Aside from anything else, if the answer were Yes, there'd be the possibility of a manufacturer selling product X and giving away component Z (which features all the groovy patent-protected stuff, but will only work with product X) away...
Although the code-is-speech argument has been fairly well proved, I imagine speech can infringe patents in much the same way it can infringe trademarks.
In what way do you perceive some dodgy, non-metric unit like miles as making calculations easier? Why not define it as 319.1 billion rods?
I guess part of the reason for AU is to give the man in the street something to understand in news stories (since so many people *don't* understand light years). I doubt anyone really does any calculation with it.
Ok, I got off (actually, stayed on) my butt and found this:
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's) Three RTG's provide electric power to Voyager. The generators produce about 1800 watts of heat by the radioactive decay of plutonium. The heat is then converted to about 400 watts of electric power by thermocouplers. The RTG's are mounted on a boom to protect the scientific instruments from excess heat and radioactivity.
and this, which discusses RTGs in the context of Cassini and safety.
It's got its own radiation source which is used for power generation (ditto the Pioneer craft). Since this is doubtless running continually whether we want it to or not, it's running out. So it's not batteries per se, but a question of the half life of the element in question. Solar power's out of the question at these distances, hence the need for this power source.
You learned that in your 'theory' class eh? Well the practical class teaches you that you need both fault tolerant software and a pretty high level of basic stability.
Please, try not to be so patronising. No, I didn't learn it in theory class, it's common sense. If by "pretty high level of basic stability" you mean "machines don't need rebooting once a week", you are of course right. If you mean "machines must need rebooting less than once a year", well, that'd obviously be lovely, but as I'm sure you'd be the first to admit, it's not really needed. Since the latter's what I (and, I believe, most people) define as a 'high' level of stability, you don't need this high level of stability in your cluster.
Obviously, building (more importantly, maintaining) clusters (running Linux or anything else) isn't trivial, but it's wrong to make it out to be one of the Black Arts.
This type of processing is the reason people used to pay a hefty premium for systems from folk like DEC who had lots of experience filling a room with machines and getting them to work reliably.
Perhaps you should tell that to Google, who seem to have realised you can make Linux work stably enough to run a cluster of 10,000 machines. I'm not saying there's no place in the world for commercial Unix, but the single vendor argument was always weak and remains so. If I pay Red Hat (for example) the same amount of money I pay DEC (Compaq/HP, whatever), there's no reason to expect I won't get the same level of support.
Separately, there's the consideration of whether I'm better off paying DEC/Sun/X this enormous chunk of change for their premium "we don't randomly close your tickets" support level vs. just supporting my large cluster in-house. Clusters are, oddly enough, the place where this comparison leans closest toward the in-house argument - hundreds/thousands of sets of identical hardware means you only have to solve the hardware/software compatibility issues once, only have to keep one type of replacement hardware around, etc.
If you have a system that is using multiple processors in a single computational task you have to have both software that is designed for fault tolerance and a very high level of basic reliability.
Actually, part of the point of clustering is that you don't need enormous levels of fault tolerance. You only need the systems to be as fault-tolerant as the rate at which you can replace them (though, sure, it's nice to have them quite a lot more fault-tolerant than that).
If you have a render wall of 256 processors and each one in standalone mode runs for a week without a crash...then you have some incredibly unstable software. This isn't a "designed for fault-tolerance", it's not even normal - it's less stable than your average Windows-based desktop system. It's fallacious to use this example to attempt to support your arguments.
Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker.
You can probably filter this down to be a bit less patronising, but here goes:
The VCR is a TV without a screen. Look through the ventilation grille on the back of your TV, there's all sorts of electronics you can see in there and only part of it's the screen. The VCR has all the same stuff, but instead of a screen, it's got a tape player. It does all the same stuff as the TV does, but instead of throwing it up on screen when it's done all the stuff needed to get a picture, it throws it down on tape. Later, it can read it back off the tape, follow a kind of reverse of the process and spit it back out as if the TV station was transmitting it, which the TV then receives as if it were just another TV station.
You might need to gloss over details (like 'tuner' - what were you thinking?), but I think even my grandparents could follow this explanation. If they couldn't, there's enough flexibility there for me to explain things a bit more...
Maybe insurance companies should offer discounts to those of us with common sense enough to buy and configure motherboards that have a "Power Off on High Temperature" option in the BIOS.
The fact that they don't is probably sufficient indicator that the incidence of overheating motherboards burning people's houses down is very low indeed.
So how would you solve disagreements between the gov't and citizenry? Forfeiture? Imprisonment? Bills of Attainder?
Talking to one another might not be a bad start. Then, say, arbitration. Then, if all else fails and the two positions are still mutually incompatible, with no compromise acceptable to both sides, litigate.
Slashdot Mirror
Because IBM are indemnifying their AIX customers.
the changes the US have made to the language
Actually (and I'm speaking as an English guy in Germany), the changes were mostly made by the British after the first wave of Americans went to America. American English, where it differs from British English, is mostly closer to the English we were speaking in Shakespearean times.
For more information on this, I reccommend Bill Bryson's book Made in America, which covers the development of the English language in America. It's highly accessible, interesting, amusing and well-written. His The Mother Tongue is a similarly good volume on the development of the English language itself.
They originally based the meter on this, that and the next thing. Then, some time later, they set about measuring the speed of light. After a while, their measurements of the speed of light were becoming more accurate than their definition of what a meter was. So, presto, they defined a meter in terms of a fraction of the distance that light travels in a second. No point measuring the speed of light any more, since the unit of measurement is based on it.
All four of my GSM phones are tri-band.
If you bought it with your credit card, talk to your credit card company. You should be able to get a full refund, with the possible exception of the service fee for the month for which you did have service.
However, he states that regular apps that donot require larger than 32-bit ints will see no performance increase on x86-64. My question is this: Would it be possible to "double up" the calculations by cramming more data into a single instruction if one were only using 32bit ints?
Not really. Say you wanted to do two 32-bit additions, adding 0x00000001 to 0x00000002 and 0x00000005 to 0x00000004. Theoretically, you could combine this into one 64-bit addition, adding 0x0000000100000005 to 0x0000000200000004. This would produce 0x0000000300000009, and everyone would leave happy. The problem comes when you want to add 0x00000001 to 0x00000002 and 0x00000001 to 0xffffffff. You end up with the single 64-bit addition of 0x0000000100000001 to 0x00000002ffffffff. The result's 0x0000000400000000. Not what you'd expect.
This is just an example - by pretty much all other primitive operations, you get the same or similar effects. Granted, if the compiler was clever enough to know the bounds of certain values there, it could work some of this out, but I've yet to meet the compiler that is.
You've pretty much got this situation now, and it's going to start getting more defined. Red Hat are producing their Advanced server distro. Mandrake/Lindows/whoever pretty much target the desktop environment. Slackware/Gentoo pretty much target geeks. As things settle down more, I imagine there'll be more niche-targeting, leaving three or four generalised distributions (bog standard RH, for example) which can do everything and are specialised toward nothing particular and a bunch of specifically targeted distributions, concentrating on their chosen niche (server, desktop, geek, embedded, maybe even stuff like a CAD/CAM distro, video-editing distro, for high-margin vertical-market niches).
DRTFA! :-)
It could be my band's CD which we've recorded? It could be a bootleg live CD of a band which allows bootlegs?
There are any number of possibilities for legally sharing tracks.
The rule for all the umlauted characters is that when you can't put the umlaut there, you put an e afterward.
Die Änderung -> Die Aenderung
(pronounced approximately "End-er-ung", the change), Die Lösung -> Die Loesung
("Ler-zung", the solution),
Die Übergabe -> Die Uebergabe ("Uwber-gabe" - like the sound on the end of the word "who", the transfer/handover).
Munich's proper name is München, so the transliteration's more like Muwnchen. The ch there isn't a 'ck' - think more of the softish 'ch' in 'Loch', not the hard 'ck' in 'lock'.
Probably - ß actually stands for a double s. Thus, Straße can be written Strasse and Fußball can be written Fussball. I'd guess the 'oo' bit is either someone's misspelling based on football, or someone who thought it was 'Füßball' (note umlaut), which without German characters would be written 'Fuessball' and pronounced roughly 'Foosball' (though with a short 'a' - as in 'ran').
AFAIR, it wasn't there in NT4 by default, at least pre-SP3 - you had to create it. I'm betting this feature isn't implemented in 9x, but the absence of the registry key isn't final proof one way or the other :-)
I don't know if it works in 95, but certainly in NT, it only worked if you set a particular registry entry. Something like HKEY_L_M\Software\Microsoft\Command Shell\CompletionChar set to '9' (ASCII TAB).
RCS limitations? Be nice to see some of the most prominent listed if they are such a big deal.
I'm betting you use cvs annotate (aka cvs blame) quite a lot, right? Consider the fact that in order to provide this functionality, CVS first internally converts its RCS file into SCCS format, then uses the temporary SCCS file to provide the annotation. RCS simply doesn't have the capability to sensibly provide this functionality on the fly.
You have the choice not to watch TV broadcasts, under which circumstances you don't need a TV license. I challenge you to find a single person in the UK who both watches TV and has never watched the BBC. I'll happily admit that there probably are some out there, but they're so rare that I'm pretty confident you'll not be able to find one.
If you give people a choice, they'll not pay the TV license (tax, whatever), which means the BBC has to compete on the same commercial basis as everyone else. Which means they can't afford to take the same risks they do now, they can't afford to produce slightly more esoteric programming, etc. - they have to appeal to the advertisers/subscribers just like everyone else. I'm English but live in Germany - having seen the comparison between the quality of TV in both places, I'd happily pay more than the current license fee to avoid the horror that is German TV (and from what I've seen of US TV, it's worse, not better).
IANAL either, but my guess would be the answer would be a firm no. Aside from anything else, if the answer were Yes, there'd be the possibility of a manufacturer selling product X and giving away component Z (which features all the groovy patent-protected stuff, but will only work with product X) away...
Although the code-is-speech argument has been fairly well proved, I imagine speech can infringe patents in much the same way it can infringe trademarks.
In what way do you perceive some dodgy, non-metric unit like miles as making calculations easier? Why not define it as 319.1 billion rods?
I guess part of the reason for AU is to give the man in the street something to understand in news stories (since so many people *don't* understand light years). I doubt anyone really does any calculation with it.
Ok, I got off (actually, stayed on) my butt and found this:
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTG's)
Three RTG's provide electric power to Voyager. The generators produce about 1800 watts of heat by the radioactive decay of plutonium. The heat is then converted to about 400 watts of electric power by thermocouplers. The RTG's are mounted on a boom to protect the scientific instruments from excess heat and radioactivity.
and this, which discusses RTGs in the context of Cassini and safety.
It's got its own radiation source which is used for power generation (ditto the Pioneer craft). Since this is doubtless running continually whether we want it to or not, it's running out. So it's not batteries per se, but a question of the half life of the element in question. Solar power's out of the question at these distances, hence the need for this power source.
This story (with the same URL) was posted here. I know duplicate-URL checking wouldn't help everything, but it could at least catch stuff like this...
You learned that in your 'theory' class eh? Well the practical class teaches you that you need both fault tolerant software and a pretty high level of basic stability.
Please, try not to be so patronising. No, I didn't learn it in theory class, it's common sense. If by "pretty high level of basic stability" you mean "machines don't need rebooting once a week", you are of course right. If you mean "machines must need rebooting less than once a year", well, that'd obviously be lovely, but as I'm sure you'd be the first to admit, it's not really needed. Since the latter's what I (and, I believe, most people) define as a 'high' level of stability, you don't need this high level of stability in your cluster.
Obviously, building (more importantly, maintaining) clusters (running Linux or anything else) isn't trivial, but it's wrong to make it out to be one of the Black Arts.
This type of processing is the reason people used to pay a hefty premium for systems from folk like DEC who had lots of experience filling a room with machines and getting them to work reliably.
...then you have some incredibly unstable software. This isn't a "designed for fault-tolerance", it's not even normal - it's less stable than your average Windows-based desktop system. It's fallacious to use this example to attempt to support your arguments.
Perhaps you should tell that to Google, who seem to have realised you can make Linux work stably enough to run a cluster of 10,000 machines. I'm not saying there's no place in the world for commercial Unix, but the single vendor argument was always weak and remains so. If I pay Red Hat (for example) the same amount of money I pay DEC (Compaq/HP, whatever), there's no reason to expect I won't get the same level of support.
Separately, there's the consideration of whether I'm better off paying DEC/Sun/X this enormous chunk of change for their premium "we don't randomly close your tickets" support level vs. just supporting my large cluster in-house. Clusters are, oddly enough, the place where this comparison leans closest toward the in-house argument - hundreds/thousands of sets of identical hardware means you only have to solve the hardware/software compatibility issues once, only have to keep one type of replacement hardware around, etc.
If you have a system that is using multiple processors in a single computational task you have to have both software that is designed for fault tolerance and a very high level of basic reliability.
Actually, part of the point of clustering is that you don't need enormous levels of fault tolerance. You only need the systems to be as fault-tolerant as the rate at which you can replace them (though, sure, it's nice to have them quite a lot more fault-tolerant than that).
If you have a render wall of 256 processors and each one in standalone mode runs for a week without a crash
Now, every once in a while I get asked this question: how is it that a VCR can record a TV show when the TV isn't turned on? Yeah, I can hear the snickers. But I get this from a lot of basically intelligent people. And the frustrating thing is, I've never found an explanation that makes sense to the asker.
You can probably filter this down to be a bit less patronising, but here goes:
The VCR is a TV without a screen. Look through the ventilation grille on the back of your TV, there's all sorts of electronics you can see in there and only part of it's the screen. The VCR has all the same stuff, but instead of a screen, it's got a tape player. It does all the same stuff as the TV does, but instead of throwing it up on screen when it's done all the stuff needed to get a picture, it throws it down on tape. Later, it can read it back off the tape, follow a kind of reverse of the process and spit it back out as if the TV station was transmitting it, which the TV then receives as if it were just another TV station.
You might need to gloss over details (like 'tuner' - what were you thinking?), but I think even my grandparents could follow this explanation. If they couldn't, there's enough flexibility there for me to explain things a bit more...
Maybe insurance companies should offer discounts to those of us with common sense enough to buy and configure motherboards that have a "Power Off on High Temperature" option in the BIOS.
The fact that they don't is probably sufficient indicator that the incidence of overheating motherboards burning people's houses down is very low indeed.
So how would you solve disagreements between the gov't and citizenry? Forfeiture? Imprisonment? Bills of Attainder?
Talking to one another might not be a bad start. Then, say, arbitration. Then, if all else fails and the two positions are still mutually incompatible, with no compromise acceptable to both sides, litigate.