Right -- I intentionally didn't count that, since the point I was trying to make was that netbooks are suitable for much more than dumb terminal use (counting "facebook client" as a dumb-terminal-type application). Today I was using my netbook to ssh to a 10,000+ CPU computer in Texas to generate data and my dinky quadcore desktop at home to analyze it, neither of which the netbook would be able to handle on its own (although I wouldn't be surprised if Atoms power the next generation of supercomputers... how do they compare with Opterons in flops/watt?)
I'm surprised by that, though. How much bandwidth does it take to send game-type 3D renders through the network? That's impressive.
Microsoft's line about netbooks being only suited for rudimentary computing tasks is full of shit.
I'm typing this on a eeepc: 1.6GHz Atom cpu, 2GB ram, blah blah blah. Microsoft (and others) may have this attitude that netbooks are only suitable for checking email, updating Facebook status, and the like... and that you need a "real computer" for "real computing". That's absurd.
Yes, they're not the most powerful computers around. But they're about as powerful as desktops of five years ago. I run dozens of Firefox tabs, Skype, OpenOffice, GIMP, Picasa, Pidgin, my camera's timelapse software (Olympus Studio), and other stuff, often at the same time... with no problems at all, and with plenty of CPU to spare. Of course I can do this -- people were loading old desktops this hard and nobody complained that they weren't "suitable for serious computing". If I wanted to run apache and serve webpages on this machine I certainly could -- I did it on my old crappy desktop when I was an undergrad, after all!
Saying that a netbook isn't a real computer is like saying a Toyota Yaris isn't a real car just because it only has a 100 hp engine. Sure, if you want to tow things you need something different -- just like if you want to play Crysis you need a desktop (replacement), and if you want to do lattice quantum chromodynamics you need a supercomputer.
A netbook is a small, full-featured computer that can make use of all of the flexibility of a full-featured operating system.
Right now many of these companies have been granted a public monopoly on RF spectrum. The public had better be getting something in return for this; as soon as we're not, as soon as it's no longer in the public interest to grant exclusive license to broadcast on a given frequency to Verizon, that license ought to go away.
I, a student, volunteer to sing in a choir. A professor gets paid in part because he conducts this choir, and part of his job is to put on good concerts -- if he doesn't, he gets fired.
These concerts are free to the public, are recorded and broadcast, and provide high-quality music at a low cost.
The system works pretty well if you like the sort of music that universities consider of academic interest: classical, jazz, ethnic, electronic, and so on. If you're after metal, well, not many universities have an Institute of Gratuitous-Umlaut Studies.
Fortunately, the styles of music that university music programs promote are exactly those that it's hard to get mainstream label support for (because 16-year-olds typically don't like them), so everyone's covered.
I have an old Panasonic camera that spits out ginormous 20MB RAW files (12 bits per pixel, padded with zeroes to 16 bits, times 10 million pixels), and it writes one in about 2.5-3 seconds.
The "quenched" approximation has nothing to do with treating quarks and antiquarks separately: at high energies the spin and "particle-antiparticle" degrees of freedom mix, so you can't only look at quarks and not antiquarks.
Quenched QCD involves ignoring "dynamical" quarks -- those in quark-antiquark loops -- entirely.
There are much bigger computers around in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore that are used to model thermonuclear weapons sitting around in storage to see if they'll still go pop when we push the Big Red Button.
The scientific community would like to use these machines for something useful, and in fact the scientists at Los Alamos have allowed some folks from my lattice QCD group to use a bit of spare time on it. Unfortunately the UNIX security features aren't enough; they weren't allowed to ftp our data out, and instead had to send the guy with the security clearance in with a pencil and paper to write down a page full of numbers. This is because of the ludicrous security procedures surrounding this Classified Machine. As you might imagine, this isn't a terribly efficient way to do things in a field where tens of gigabytes are sftp'd across the country without blinking.
If we are ever in a situation where we're genuinely concerned with whether or not a given one of our nukes will still go pop, we are Already Fucked (tm). That's like modelling exactly what happens if a 10-km-radius asteroid hits the earth: at that point, we don't really care.
This isn't to say that the nation's resources should be used for building giant computers for scientific research. The discussion about how to allocate our research funding is a difficult one. But if we're going to invest so much in computational power, it seems prudent to use it for something other than checking to see whether our e-peen is still hard.
It says something depressing about our country that the top of the supercomputer list is used predominantly for military purposes.
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Lots of people used it. Not everyone has access to a low-latency connection to the Internet all the time, and frankly the Battle.net servers don't either.
There's no way to see how someone drives over the Internet, so I can see how you might make that judgment, but I more often get criticism from passengers from driving *too* cautiously: stopping at lights that I could have made it through, not passing people when I could have, leaving large amounts of following distance, and so on.
You would have had to see this guy to believe how badly he was driving. I do many thousands of miles on the interstate every year, and this guy is the worst (non-drunk) driver I have ever seen. Most people on the road (and I've seen a lot of them) are courteous and don't warrant extreme measures to get around; this fellow was the exception.
There's no situation where a teenager needs to drive over 80, probably; that only occurs on the highway, and most parents probably aren't going to let their teenagers drive on the interstate.
My objection to this isn't so much that it prevents kids from doing things they might need to do for safety, but that someone who does the right thing only because they have no opportunity to do the wrong thing isn't really responsible.
Just as with alcohol in the USA, you know those kids -- when they finally get unfettered access to their cars -- are going to drive like maniacs and cause all sorts of wrecks.
Don't lecture me about physics, please; I (ABD in physics PhD program) know a little bit about it.
I do drive quite conservatively, especially when it comes to following distances; on the highway I usually leave something more like a five-second gap (yes, that big) when conditions allow.
Read my other post; in the one anecdote about speed being safe (which I specifically said wasn't the point, if you actually read the parent), the whole point of driving fast for a little while was *not* to endanger people (in my case, my passengers and myself). Slowing down wasn't an option either; someone driving 10-20mph below the traffic pattern in the middle of a large pack is *not* safe.
Defensive driving 101: on the highway, be where the other cars aren't.
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THIS.
Holy fuck, this.
Why do we *still* have windows you can't fucking minimize until you answer their inane questions?
Right -- I intentionally didn't count that, since the point I was trying to make was that netbooks are suitable for much more than dumb terminal use (counting "facebook client" as a dumb-terminal-type application). Today I was using my netbook to ssh to a 10,000+ CPU computer in Texas to generate data and my dinky quadcore desktop at home to analyze it, neither of which the netbook would be able to handle on its own (although I wouldn't be surprised if Atoms power the next generation of supercomputers... how do they compare with Opterons in flops/watt?)
I'm surprised by that, though. How much bandwidth does it take to send game-type 3D renders through the network? That's impressive.
Microsoft's line about netbooks being only suited for rudimentary computing tasks is full of shit.
I'm typing this on a eeepc: 1.6GHz Atom cpu, 2GB ram, blah blah blah. Microsoft (and others) may have this attitude that netbooks are only suitable for checking email, updating Facebook status, and the like ... and that you need a "real computer" for "real computing". That's absurd.
Yes, they're not the most powerful computers around. But they're about as powerful as desktops of five years ago. I run dozens of Firefox tabs, Skype, OpenOffice, GIMP, Picasa, Pidgin, my camera's timelapse software (Olympus Studio), and other stuff, often at the same time ... with no problems at all, and with plenty of CPU to spare. Of course I can do this -- people were loading old desktops this hard and nobody complained that they weren't "suitable for serious computing". If I wanted to run apache and serve webpages on this machine I certainly could -- I did it on my old crappy desktop when I was an undergrad, after all!
Saying that a netbook isn't a real computer is like saying a Toyota Yaris isn't a real car just because it only has a 100 hp engine. Sure, if you want to tow things you need something different -- just like if you want to play Crysis you need a desktop (replacement), and if you want to do lattice quantum chromodynamics you need a supercomputer.
A netbook is a small, full-featured computer that can make use of all of the flexibility of a full-featured operating system.
Then that's a fundamental flaw with the call center model that needs to be fixed, not a justification for a bad decision.
Ah, if the telcos would only develop that sort of spine when Bush came calling wanting wiretap access...
Right now many of these companies have been granted a public monopoly on RF spectrum. The public had better be getting something in return for this; as soon as we're not, as soon as it's no longer in the public interest to grant exclusive license to broadcast on a given frequency to Verizon, that license ought to go away.
THIS.
Our military does not exist for the benefit of our citizens, and has not for a long time.
This happens, actually, at universities.
I, a student, volunteer to sing in a choir. A professor gets paid in part because he conducts this choir, and part of his job is to put on good concerts -- if he doesn't, he gets fired.
These concerts are free to the public, are recorded and broadcast, and provide high-quality music at a low cost.
The system works pretty well if you like the sort of music that universities consider of academic interest: classical, jazz, ethnic, electronic, and so on. If you're after metal, well, not many universities have an Institute of Gratuitous-Umlaut Studies.
Fortunately, the styles of music that university music programs promote are exactly those that it's hard to get mainstream label support for (because 16-year-olds typically don't like them), so everyone's covered.
Seems like the better thing to do is to sell a GPS device with a SD slot.
You plug in your SD card, it looks at the time all the photos were taken, remembers where you were then, and appends the coordinates.
That's bizarre.
I have an old Panasonic camera that spits out ginormous 20MB RAW files (12 bits per pixel, padded with zeroes to 16 bits, times 10 million pixels), and it writes one in about 2.5-3 seconds.
Their new professional DSLR looks like a very solid product.
Their compact cameras are overpriced and underperform compared to the competition.
That's a lot more userfriendly than Windows.
Linux: "There's a problem. If you're technically able, here is a fix."
Windows: "There is a problem. You're boned, sorry."
Properly implement sudo (kdesudo, etc.) in a version of Windows that doesn't suck and I might.
Could a botnet shut down a water supply?
Not if the people managing the water supply have done their homework. How are you going to DDoS a water treatment plant?
I mean, I know we use the metaphor "clogging the pipes", but it's just a metaphor...
The "quenched" approximation has nothing to do with treating quarks and antiquarks separately: at high energies the spin and "particle-antiparticle" degrees of freedom mix, so you can't only look at quarks and not antiquarks.
Quenched QCD involves ignoring "dynamical" quarks -- those in quark-antiquark loops -- entirely.
A/V sync can probably be dealt with automatically, by finding scene cuts and matching them with nearby, sudden shifts in the audio.
It can't, because Crysis is not multithreaded. If you can figure out a way to parallelize it, then you certainly could run Crysis on it.
There are much bigger computers around in Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore that are used to model thermonuclear weapons sitting around in storage to see if they'll still go pop when we push the Big Red Button.
The scientific community would like to use these machines for something useful, and in fact the scientists at Los Alamos have allowed some folks from my lattice QCD group to use a bit of spare time on it. Unfortunately the UNIX security features aren't enough; they weren't allowed to ftp our data out, and instead had to send the guy with the security clearance in with a pencil and paper to write down a page full of numbers. This is because of the ludicrous security procedures surrounding this Classified Machine. As you might imagine, this isn't a terribly efficient way to do things in a field where tens of gigabytes are sftp'd across the country without blinking.
If we are ever in a situation where we're genuinely concerned with whether or not a given one of our nukes will still go pop, we are Already Fucked (tm). That's like modelling exactly what happens if a 10-km-radius asteroid hits the earth: at that point, we don't really care.
This isn't to say that the nation's resources should be used for building giant computers for scientific research. The discussion about how to allocate our research funding is a difficult one. But if we're going to invest so much in computational power, it seems prudent to use it for something other than checking to see whether our e-peen is still hard.
It says something depressing about our country that the top of the supercomputer list is used predominantly for military purposes.
There is a queueing system. If you want to run a job on a machine like this, you log into the control node (which is just a linux box) and submit your job to the queue, including how many CPU's you need for it and how much time you need on them.
A scheduling algorithm then determines when the various jobs waiting in the queue get to run, and sends mail to their owners when they start and stop.
On many machines there is a debug queue with low limits for number of CPU's and runtime, and thus fast turnover; this is used to run little jobs to ensure everything is working right before you submit the big job to the main queue.
Each project has an al
No LAN play in Diablo 3 = fail.
Lots of people used it. Not everyone has access to a low-latency connection to the Internet all the time, and frankly the Battle.net servers don't either.
There's no way to see how someone drives over the Internet, so I can see how you might make that judgment, but I more often get criticism from passengers from driving *too* cautiously: stopping at lights that I could have made it through, not passing people when I could have, leaving large amounts of following distance, and so on.
You would have had to see this guy to believe how badly he was driving. I do many thousands of miles on the interstate every year, and this guy is the worst (non-drunk) driver I have ever seen. Most people on the road (and I've seen a lot of them) are courteous and don't warrant extreme measures to get around; this fellow was the exception.
I like your list. :)
There's no situation where a teenager needs to drive over 80, probably; that only occurs on the highway, and most parents probably aren't going to let their teenagers drive on the interstate.
My objection to this isn't so much that it prevents kids from doing things they might need to do for safety, but that someone who does the right thing only because they have no opportunity to do the wrong thing isn't really responsible.
Just as with alcohol in the USA, you know those kids -- when they finally get unfettered access to their cars -- are going to drive like maniacs and cause all sorts of wrecks.
Mmm, troll.
Don't lecture me about physics, please; I (ABD in physics PhD program) know a little bit about it.
I do drive quite conservatively, especially when it comes to following distances; on the highway I usually leave something more like a five-second gap (yes, that big) when conditions allow.
Read my other post; in the one anecdote about speed being safe (which I specifically said wasn't the point, if you actually read the parent), the whole point of driving fast for a little while was *not* to endanger people (in my case, my passengers and myself). Slowing down wasn't an option either; someone driving 10-20mph below the traffic pattern in the middle of a large pack is *not* safe.
Defensive driving 101: on the highway, be where the other cars aren't.