I'm suprised that nobody has mentioned anything about Prolog (and been modded up). It takes your pattern matching and then adds on a depth-first-search with backtracking and can execute all matching versions of a fuction.
It's kinda like have a non-deterministic computer.
We were at the state Knowledge Bowl tourney and, somewhere in the middle of the 2nd round, we were in a 4-5 question set of "parts of speech" or somesuch. I accidentally hit the buzzer before the reader could completely get out the "what" at the start of the question. My team-mates glared at me, thinking that, for certain, I had blown the point. I said the first thing that came to mind...
"Past Participle"...and it was right. Unfortunately, we got smoked that round.
Wow. I didn't realize that we had enough crusty old curmudgeons to get this modded up.
"Back in my day... Kids today...". Whatever. Piracy has always been a factor in the world of Personal Computers and probably always will be. I'm not sure kind of sheltered world you grew up in but piracy was just as strong and alive in the mid 80s as it is today. The only things that have really changed are the methods of distribution and the number of people who have computers.
Anyone starting a PC software house & expecting their software to not be pirated is delusional; the industry is based on there being a large enough percentage of users actually deciding to pay for the software that they can make a profit. I doubt you can point out a single desirable piece of software that has not had significantly pirated yet somehow the software industry has grown immensely since the birth of the PC....and I'm sorry your parents didn't love you enough to buy you a car. I'm sure that you'll get over it some day.
What the hell does refusing service to customers that are more trouble than they're worth have to do with the free market? If anything, it gives them the same freedom to pass over high-maintenance customers in favor of easy to please ones that it gives customers to choose those who are selling their widgets for less.
If they realize the advertised price is wrong, they have to take it down; they can't simply, after the fact, say "we messed up" and charge you the correct price.
If you follow these things, any reasonable online retailer that realizes they've posted an incorrect price will send out a notice saying "this price is fucked up, if you still want the item, it'll cost you $MORE_MONEY".
The best they can do, at that point, is reject the sale; if you take the 'offer' thing further, submitting an order is an 'offer' to give them money for the goods, if they want more they need to renegotiate the deal.
If you've ever talked to anyone who's been to an established Fry's, you'll know that you can't expect the service to last. Fry's has quite possibly the worst reputation of all the major electronics retailers; the only thing they have going for them is their rock-bottom prices (actually beating online retailers fairly regularly).
The only reason they're well staffed is 'cuz the manager hired twice the people they need knowing they'll have to fire half of them soon. The only reason the staff is attentive is that they don't want to be part of the half that get canned.
Give it 6mo and all you'll have left will be the floats & those will be half melted & flat...
In the rest of the industrialized world, service staff makes a decent wage, in much of the US, wait-staff can legally get paid $2-3/hr (in places where minimum wage is $7-8/hr). They also know that you're (the collective you refering to 'europeans' in general; and yes... as far as the average uneducated USian is concerned, an Australian is a Euro) not used to tipping, with 'gratuities' simply tacked on to your bill like another tax, so any time spent with you is time that is -not- going towards some other customer.
If you realize that they're getting taxed based on the assumption that they're making at least a certain percentage of sales (10-15% in most places), regardless of how much you tip, you can see why customers that aren't expected to tip aren't getting good service; where else can you take money from somebody's pocket and expect them to be nice to you?
Looking at the link attached to the poster's name, it appears he's doing some sort of bioinformatics work, as such he should probably have some grant money and/or VC funding supporting this work. As such, 'cheap' is relative; it's always easier to spend Other People's Money.
Secondly, Is all the data -really- worth keeping around? For how long? I can believe a TB/mo of data but have a hard time imagining of it all being something you'd want to use 6mo down the road; only saving things that are important might make the job a lot easier.
On another point - you can probably compress this data down significantly; multi-hundred-megabyte files consisting of nothing but 'A', 'T', 'G' and 'C' should be able to compress down by a factor of at least 4. Both Windows and Linux allow you to automatically compress data on filesystems which would make a large dent in your storage requirements.
Comparing version numbers of Windows and Windows NT is senseless. It's not like Windows became NT; they were completely separate codebases had parallel development for a number of years....and you left out ME.
They should've just adopted an existing versioning system such as the one GNU Emacs uses and called it Java 15.0 to avoid creating any unnecessary confusion.
How does wearing a baseball hat & not shaving stop him from being concerned with money? He's just as much a concerned liberal as the average gansta rapper is a professional killer that kills people for fun.
Late in the 1970s, things started getting interesting. The magic point was called "3M", which stood for "1 MIP, 1 Megabyte, 1 million pixels", and the price on that was JUST BARELY within reach of an individual.
That seems like an incredibly lopsided system. 1 MIP and 1 MB go together well enough, but 1 million pixels on a computer like that? That gives you one operation per pixel per second, so you can... umm... fill the whole framebuffer with a single color & change it once per second?
Looking at the machine on my desk, I've got 2-3000 MIPS, 1000 MB and only 3/4 million pixels (1024x768); even if I was doing dual 1600x1200 heads, I'd still have less than 4M pixels. That whole "3M" thing seems like a pretty useless goal that's matching units that shouldn't be paired; your CPU should be a few orders of magnitude faster than the number of pixels you have for the display to be of any use...
In short - the Department of Homeland Security is now saying that people should stop using Internet Explorer. It was only a matter of time before the holes in IE to be exploited to spread something truly malicious rather than just push adware & spyware onto your system.
Outlook and Outlook Express aren't all that much better.
Fortunately, the Mozilla project ( http://www.mozilla.org ) have some -very- good applications to fill in for these applications: Firefox for web and Thunderbird for mail as well as the whole Mozilla (aka Netscape) suite of tools (browser, mail, chat, web editor and kitchen sink). Personally, I think that Firefox+Thunderbird feel a bit nicer and more polished than Mozilla; it's probably just a nicer set of default options (links open in new browser tabs on middle click, pop-up blocking by default, etc).
I'm sure you know some people that could probably use a copy of this message; forward away.
You're obviously not hanging out in the right places if nobody recognizes your TWM setup & calls you on it; they might not neccessarily be impressed, but -everyone- comments on it when they see you using TWM.
Well, if you read the court documents, you'll see that the guy suing the ISP is in a bad position; he's selling webhosting to people who sell webhosting to others on servers coloed at the ISP. He's a useless middleman in the deal & has refused attempts at being bought out by the ISP already.
The basis of his case is that he is completely dependant upon the ISP to do his business & they're rasing his rates to a point where he can't keep his business going, possibly in order to force him to sell. I'm not going to say that the ISP is being nice, but they're not entirely out of line.
Even with the network being temporarily re-routed, this guy is fucked; he has a single supplier for what he's selling & his supplier wants to start selling directly to his customers. If he was smart, he'd have set up his own datacenter by now.
The problem is that, in 'preventing damage' to the plaintif, the defendant is getting fucked around. While the TRO is better than an actual judgement, it still creates a bullshit situation for the ISP & all of their upstream providers to deal with.
Xeon's generally bench lower than equivalently clocked P4s. Why? For games the 800MHz FSB helps a lot more than the large cache (look at how little the performance for the P4-EE is actually boosted in gaming by doubling it's cache).
That's not to say that there aren't a number of applications where the Xeon is a better processor, but clock-for-clock and dollar-for-dollar, unless you can need SMP, it gets blown out by P4s and A64s (not to mention that it scales for shit compared to an Opteron).
Why would they design something like this and force it to use a Xeon?
For starters, the Xeon is still stuck at a 533MHz FSB, limiting its performance. Add in the fact that they're ridiculously overpriced & most games show little to no performance improvement when running on an SMP system. A single P4 or Athlon64 will stomp the Xeon in almost all gaming situations.
Of course, with this tech a ways away & there not really being any PCI-E motherboards on the market now that Intel's recalled them all, I guess they're betting on high-end enthusiast boards to ship with the second x16 slot by the time this thing is actually ready for market...
Really, the biggest application for this kinda power that I can forsee would be game developers who want to see how well their games scale for next-gen video hardware...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm suprised that nobody has mentioned anything about Prolog (and been modded up). It takes your pattern matching and then adds on a depth-first-search with backtracking and can execute all matching versions of a fuction.
It's kinda like have a non-deterministic computer.
I'm pretty sure you could do this with Lisp and some macros...
Here's one for you, along the same vein...
...and it was right. Unfortunately, we got smoked that round.
We were at the state Knowledge Bowl tourney and, somewhere in the middle of the 2nd round, we were in a 4-5 question set of "parts of speech" or somesuch. I accidentally hit the buzzer before the reader could completely get out the "what" at the start of the question. My team-mates glared at me, thinking that, for certain, I had blown the point. I said the first thing that came to mind...
"Past Participle"
You neglect to mention that, until a year or two ago, the student version of Maya was still several hundred dollars.
Wow. I didn't realize that we had enough crusty old curmudgeons to get this modded up.
...and I'm sorry your parents didn't love you enough to buy you a car. I'm sure that you'll get over it some day.
"Back in my day... Kids today...". Whatever. Piracy has always been a factor in the world of Personal Computers and probably always will be. I'm not sure kind of sheltered world you grew up in but piracy was just as strong and alive in the mid 80s as it is today. The only things that have really changed are the methods of distribution and the number of people who have computers.
Anyone starting a PC software house & expecting their software to not be pirated is delusional; the industry is based on there being a large enough percentage of users actually deciding to pay for the software that they can make a profit. I doubt you can point out a single desirable piece of software that has not had significantly pirated yet somehow the software industry has grown immensely since the birth of the PC.
I remember seeing these while on vacation in San Diego in 1990. If anything, using CDs make these things faster & cheaper than the cassette models.
Why do you think I don't have a cellphone?
Where I work, there's a user that has no problem calling the support staff up at 8-9p because he can't read his email.
From across the country.
when all of campus is unreachable from the internet...
What the hell does refusing service to customers that are more trouble than they're worth have to do with the free market? If anything, it gives them the same freedom to pass over high-maintenance customers in favor of easy to please ones that it gives customers to choose those who are selling their widgets for less.
Sorry about the sloppy preposition use.
If they realize the advertised price is wrong, they have to take it down; they can't simply, after the fact, say "we messed up" and charge you the correct price.
If you follow these things, any reasonable online retailer that realizes they've posted an incorrect price will send out a notice saying "this price is fucked up, if you still want the item, it'll cost you $MORE_MONEY".
The best they can do, at that point, is reject the sale; if you take the 'offer' thing further, submitting an order is an 'offer' to give them money for the goods, if they want more they need to renegotiate the deal.
If you've ever talked to anyone who's been to an established Fry's, you'll know that you can't expect the service to last. Fry's has quite possibly the worst reputation of all the major electronics retailers; the only thing they have going for them is their rock-bottom prices (actually beating online retailers fairly regularly).
The only reason they're well staffed is 'cuz the manager hired twice the people they need knowing they'll have to fire half of them soon. The only reason the staff is attentive is that they don't want to be part of the half that get canned.
Give it 6mo and all you'll have left will be the floats & those will be half melted & flat...
You've got a couple things...
In the rest of the industrialized world, service staff makes a decent wage, in much of the US, wait-staff can legally get paid $2-3/hr (in places where minimum wage is $7-8/hr). They also know that you're (the collective you refering to 'europeans' in general; and yes... as far as the average uneducated USian is concerned, an Australian is a Euro) not used to tipping, with 'gratuities' simply tacked on to your bill like another tax, so any time spent with you is time that is -not- going towards some other customer.
If you realize that they're getting taxed based on the assumption that they're making at least a certain percentage of sales (10-15% in most places), regardless of how much you tip, you can see why customers that aren't expected to tip aren't getting good service; where else can you take money from somebody's pocket and expect them to be nice to you?
Looking at the link attached to the poster's name, it appears he's doing some sort of bioinformatics work, as such he should probably have some grant money and/or VC funding supporting this work. As such, 'cheap' is relative; it's always easier to spend Other People's Money.
Secondly, Is all the data -really- worth keeping around? For how long? I can believe a TB/mo of data but have a hard time imagining of it all being something you'd want to use 6mo down the road; only saving things that are important might make the job a lot easier.
On another point - you can probably compress this data down significantly; multi-hundred-megabyte files consisting of nothing but 'A', 'T', 'G' and 'C' should be able to compress down by a factor of at least 4. Both Windows and Linux allow you to automatically compress data on filesystems which would make a large dent in your storage requirements.
Please do the Internet a favor and kill yourself before you spell ridiculous incorrectly again.
Comparing version numbers of Windows and Windows NT is senseless. It's not like Windows became NT; they were completely separate codebases had parallel development for a number of years. ...and you left out ME.
They should've just adopted an existing versioning system such as the one GNU Emacs uses and called it Java 15.0 to avoid creating any unnecessary confusion.
A 9600 (the non-pro version) runs quite happily with passive cooling, you just need to look around a bit to find one (Sapphire makes one).
WTF are you talking about?
How does wearing a baseball hat & not shaving stop him from being concerned with money? He's just as much a concerned liberal as the average gansta rapper is a professional killer that kills people for fun.
Late in the 1970s, things started getting interesting. The magic point was called "3M", which stood for "1 MIP, 1 Megabyte, 1 million pixels", and the price on that was JUST BARELY within reach of an individual.
That seems like an incredibly lopsided system. 1 MIP and 1 MB go together well enough, but 1 million pixels on a computer like that? That gives you one operation per pixel per second, so you can... umm... fill the whole framebuffer with a single color & change it once per second?
Looking at the machine on my desk, I've got 2-3000 MIPS, 1000 MB and only 3/4 million pixels (1024x768); even if I was doing dual 1600x1200 heads, I'd still have less than 4M pixels. That whole "3M" thing seems like a pretty useless goal that's matching units that shouldn't be paired; your CPU should be a few orders of magnitude faster than the number of pixels you have for the display to be of any use...
More importantly...
How would you install Windows onto SATA hard-drives, hardware RAID or a new SCSI card?
You need to add drivers to recognize the devices and the installer can only read them off of floppies.
You're obviously not hanging out in the right places if nobody recognizes your TWM setup & calls you on it; they might not neccessarily be impressed, but -everyone- comments on it when they see you using TWM.
Well, if you read the court documents, you'll see that the guy suing the ISP is in a bad position; he's selling webhosting to people who sell webhosting to others on servers coloed at the ISP. He's a useless middleman in the deal & has refused attempts at being bought out by the ISP already.
The basis of his case is that he is completely dependant upon the ISP to do his business & they're rasing his rates to a point where he can't keep his business going, possibly in order to force him to sell. I'm not going to say that the ISP is being nice, but they're not entirely out of line.
Even with the network being temporarily re-routed, this guy is fucked; he has a single supplier for what he's selling & his supplier wants to start selling directly to his customers. If he was smart, he'd have set up his own datacenter by now.
The problem is that, in 'preventing damage' to the plaintif, the defendant is getting fucked around. While the TRO is better than an actual judgement, it still creates a bullshit situation for the ISP & all of their upstream providers to deal with.
Xeon's generally bench lower than equivalently clocked P4s. Why? For games the 800MHz FSB helps a lot more than the large cache (look at how little the performance for the P4-EE is actually boosted in gaming by doubling it's cache).
That's not to say that there aren't a number of applications where the Xeon is a better processor, but clock-for-clock and dollar-for-dollar, unless you can need SMP, it gets blown out by P4s and A64s (not to mention that it scales for shit compared to an Opteron).
Why would they design something like this and force it to use a Xeon?
For starters, the Xeon is still stuck at a 533MHz FSB, limiting its performance. Add in the fact that they're ridiculously overpriced & most games show little to no performance improvement when running on an SMP system. A single P4 or Athlon64 will stomp the Xeon in almost all gaming situations.
Of course, with this tech a ways away & there not really being any PCI-E motherboards on the market now that Intel's recalled them all, I guess they're betting on high-end enthusiast boards to ship with the second x16 slot by the time this thing is actually ready for market...
Really, the biggest application for this kinda power that I can forsee would be game developers who want to see how well their games scale for next-gen video hardware...