You're thinking of the "New World Symphony"
(Symphony no. 9 in E minor). Or the
"American Quartet" (String Quartet no. 12 in F).
(Both composed while he was living in the US,
and making use of themes he heard there.)
The "cost" of turning on a flourescent light being higher than leaving it running is an urban myth.
Not really an urban myth. It was actually true
in the early days of flourescents, and that's how
the "myth" got started. Modern designs are much
better.
However, turning the bulb off will shorten its
life. It seems that bulbs only deteriorate when
powering on. So
one can calculate the break-even point based
on bulb and electricity costs.
You are correct. A "two die module" would
have two separate pieces of silicon, interconnected
through one of several techniques.
But this is/., where you're supposed to cheer for
AMD and mock everything Intel ever does.
Just remember this, and you can get lots of 'Informative'
mod points, even if you don't understand even the
most basic terms of chip manufacturing. At
least that's what I can figure by looking at what
gets modded up around here.
...MOVE! Nobody's forcing you to live
in New York. You're free to move to New Hampshire
or some other tax-free-as-in-beer state.
There are only a few alternatives to Microsoft,
which has a 90% market share. There are 50
states to choose from, the largest of which has
only 10% of the market for residents. So it looks
like state taxpayers have more choice than those
who pay the "Microsoft tax.".
Of course, maybe you can't move because your job
is in New York. Well, your employer voluntarily
made the decision to locate in New York, and
you're always free to get another job.
(Note: this is meant as a parody of the "using
Microsoft is voluntary" argument, not necessarily
an endorsement of New York's taxes.)
If they had done a better job of checking the
applicant's identity, maybe they wouldn't have
the problem.
It used to be, you had to show up in an office
to get something as simple as phone service.
But hey, that's too inconvenient for today.
Gotta make things easy for the applicant, so they'll
be more likely to do it.
Making people show up would introduce an extra
check into the process. At least the thieves
would need to go through the trouble of making
fake IDs.
The Vehicle Assembly Building is a sight too.
I took the standard tour, and as the bus approached
the building, the scale played tricks on my mind.
I saw what looked like an ordinary cubish building
not far ahead, and I figured we'd get there in
half a minute. But the bus kept going, and going,
and the building got bigger and bigger. The
thing is freakin' huge! It was built to hold
4 Saturns fully assembled. The U.N.
building could fit through each of its 4 doors.
The Stars and Stripes are painted on the side,
and each stripe is wider than the tour bus.
The building is still used (for the shuttle),
so preservation is not an issue.
I don't like the way the place has been
Disneyfied -- I would've preferred something
a little more raw. It's a pilgrimage, dammit,
not a theme park!
Though I guess it's unavoidable, given that half the theme parks in the U.S. are in that area.
If it makes it more palatable for the kids,
maybe that's a good thing.
And I supposed they were forced to rape
all those (non-Western) "comfort women" and use
live Chinese (i.e., non-Western) civilians for bayonet practice.
(And it was the West's fault, too!)
declared the bad guys, nuked, occupied
Oh, my, how awful. BTW, the Germans were
"forced" into WW2, called the bad guys,
occupied and divided in two for forty years
and they don't seem to be very racist now,
besides the marginalized skinheads.
(Disclaimer: my wife is Chinese, so yes, I'm
biased. Revisionist apologists piss me off.)
Bottom line, if in doubt, HTML. If HTML won't work because the person posting it is too anal about formatting...
Caller: "I'd like to ask some questions about
the document you sent me. OK, in the second
paragraph starting on page 4, which starts with
"In case of a system problem..."
You: "In my copy, that paragraph starts with
"If you need to reformat the disk..." You need
to set your font size to 10, and make sure you have 1-inch margins when you print. Oh, and be sure you use a variable-width font. Because I don't want to be anal about format!
I hate that something like this even need linux support. I mean, it's basicaly a modem - it should emulate a simple piece of hardware and work on any combination of hardware and software without fancy client software.
That would be the case if you had genuine
hardware. If you actually had a modem,
which is a "modulator-demodulator,"
you'd just talk to its serial interface.
The problem is, most "modems," especially the
ones in many laptops, cut out a lot of the
modulating/demodulating circuitry, and leave it
up to the CPU to do a lot of the signal processing.
This shaves a few bucks off the cost of a unit,
which is big in a low-margin, highly-competitive
market, especially if the laptop vendor doesn't
mention to the customer that his CPU will slow
down every time he uses his "modem."
Unfortunately, a lot of vendors feel that
exposing the API's to their "modems," wireless
cards, etc., would expose the designs to their
competitors (who presumably don't have
debuggers and other such tools). The annoying
thing is that many of them turn around and
say they can't afford to write a Linux driver
to support a "fringe" market.
The best measure of CPU performance remains the price/performance ratio. That is, for a given amount of money, how fast will a CPU perform a given task?
By that reasoning, a Civic has better "performance"
than a Porsche, because it can go half as fast as
the Ferrari, but only costs 1/5 as much.
All chip makers (yes, even AMD) charge a premium
for their fastest chips. If you want a chip
that's 10% faster, you'll usually pay more than
10% extra. And there are people who are willing
to pay that, either to impress their friends or
because the extra speed improvement is actually
useful to them.
if Disney owned the music played in Fantasia, would it be much different from them using public domain music?
One of the pieces, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du
Printemps (in the prehistoric
section) was still under copyright, and Disney
paid both Stravinsky and his publisher. Stravinsky
later claimed that Disney threatened to violate
his copyright if he didn't take what was offered,
because the copyright was Russian, and the US
and USSR weren't officially recognizing each
others' copyrights at the time. (He also
complained about how they butchered his music.)
...because it's not really research, but advertising for Microsoft, through MS Research.
When Cornell got funding from MS to build a
Beowulf cluster with NT (talk about a
"cluster f***"), the project head at Cornell
became quite the shill for his sponsors. Every
time I've heard him talk, he talks about how great Windows
is and how Linux sucks. Once, when someone in the
audience asked him why they didn't use Linux, he
didn't just come out and say because MS was a
sponsor, which would've been a legitimate
answer. (Nothing wrong with sticking to the
products of the people footing the bill.)
Instead, he made some wisecrack like
"we don't want to spend 2 hours a day recompiling
our kernel."
Every other speaker I've heard who talks about
clusters and compares OSes says the choice of
OS isn't much of an issue (beyond costs) because
most of the time, people just launch MPI jobs
from a head node and never log on to the
cluster nodes in the first place. So it
generally comes down to the performance of the
MPI library.
So yes, people who've experienced previous
Cornell PR might conclude that this will be yet
another shilling opportunity, and that they
will be sure to mention that it runs XP in
every other sentence.
I don't mean to imply that because one guy from
Cornell's a shill, that everyone else will be.
But I do notice that one of them is already
claiming they "couldn't have written the software without XP Embedded." The argument seems to be
because they could test it by running the code
much faster on
regular desktops. But you could do the same
thing with a Linux-based approach.
Sorry, but the MPAA does not get to dictate how many friends I have, how large my home is, or what is legally, morally, or socially considered "home".
The GP mentioned a limit of 12-15 people watching
a movie at home. I don't know if such a rule
actually exists, but I can imagine how one would
come about.
At first, you have a general principle, which
works as long as everyone respects the boundaries.
For instance, you can show your DVD at home,
to your friends, but
you can't make copies for others or set up a cinema and have people pay you to watch it.
(Otherwise, how would studios legitimately
make money?) Reasonable people will see that
there's a large gap, and nobody will try
crossing it.
Then some smart-ass comes along and decided he
wants to play games with the definitions. So
he has a giant room, has 400 people come over
and say they've just become his friends. "But
I'm just inviting a few friends over to watch
my movies!" (Kind of like how certain "atheletic
clubs" were set up to get around anti-boxing
laws; the boxers and all spectators had to join
the club, and that made it legal.)
Then the other side has to start tightening the
definitions by elaborating all the borderline
cases. After the semantic arms race has gone on
for awhile, the official rules are highly
contorted and take up 20 pages.
This happens everywhere. Look at professional
sports -- a lot of the highly details rules were
put there to deal with one case where someone
was able to beat the system for one game by
doing something that clearly violated the spirit
of some more general rule, but not the letter.
Stations been doing this for at least 10 years in Australia
Radio stations in the seventies (maybe earlier)
in my hometown (San Diego)
would do things like call numbers they picked out
of the phone book at random, and if whoever
answered would win something if they could name
the song they just finished playing.
Typically the prize was N dollars, where
N was the radio station's frequency in
MHz.
True Distributed Computing is the way to go and shows positive results. Now we just need to tinker with it some more!
It's too bad that whoever modded this Insightful
doesn't know much about parallel applications.
DC is fine and very cost-effective for its niche
of applications, which is those that are
"embarassingly parallel." This is (somewhat
circularly) defined as being very easy to
parallelize on a DC machine. What characterizes
these apps is very low communications between
different tasks, which works for DC because the
high network latency doesn't get in the way.
I've love to see you try to put Conjugate
Gradiant (CG) on a distributed system. It
involves large matrix-vector multiplies that
inherently require lots of vector fragments
passing between the processors. CG is one of the
8 NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and if you look at
Beowulf papers that use NAS, you'll see that they
often leave out CG because performance is so bad.
If it's low on a Beowulf, where the network is
presumed to be local and dedicated, it will
totally suck on anything with a typical
high-latency/low-bandwidth network.
That's all I can remember, but then there are also settings within applications that you'll want to remove, such as in Outlook XP, select menu item Tools, Customize, Options tab: check "Always show full menus". Other applications will have similar settings.
Thanks. I'll try that and see if that helps.
I'm glad Windows has such ease of use!
In Linux, I'd probably have to edit a *.rc file
somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
You're thinking of the "New World Symphony" (Symphony no. 9 in E minor). Or the "American Quartet" (String Quartet no. 12 in F). (Both composed while he was living in the US, and making use of themes he heard there.)
Not really an urban myth. It was actually true in the early days of flourescents, and that's how the "myth" got started. Modern designs are much better.
However, turning the bulb off will shorten its life. It seems that bulbs only deteriorate when powering on. So one can calculate the break-even point based on bulb and electricity costs.
You are correct. A "two die module" would have two separate pieces of silicon, interconnected through one of several techniques.
But this is /., where you're supposed to cheer for
AMD and mock everything Intel ever does.
Just remember this, and you can get lots of 'Informative'
mod points, even if you don't understand even the
most basic terms of chip manufacturing. At
least that's what I can figure by looking at what
gets modded up around here.
When I first read that, I thought, "of course
any Windows machine is a POS."
Or maybe not -- they killed their calculators, right?
There are only a few alternatives to Microsoft, which has a 90% market share. There are 50 states to choose from, the largest of which has only 10% of the market for residents. So it looks like state taxpayers have more choice than those who pay the "Microsoft tax.".
Of course, maybe you can't move because your job is in New York. Well, your employer voluntarily made the decision to locate in New York, and you're always free to get another job.
(Note: this is meant as a parody of the "using Microsoft is voluntary" argument, not necessarily an endorsement of New York's taxes.)
If they had done a better job of checking the applicant's identity, maybe they wouldn't have the problem.
It used to be, you had to show up in an office to get something as simple as phone service. But hey, that's too inconvenient for today. Gotta make things easy for the applicant, so they'll be more likely to do it.
Making people show up would introduce an extra check into the process. At least the thieves would need to go through the trouble of making fake IDs.
The Vehicle Assembly Building is a sight too. I took the standard tour, and as the bus approached the building, the scale played tricks on my mind. I saw what looked like an ordinary cubish building not far ahead, and I figured we'd get there in half a minute. But the bus kept going, and going, and the building got bigger and bigger. The thing is freakin' huge! It was built to hold 4 Saturns fully assembled. The U.N. building could fit through each of its 4 doors. The Stars and Stripes are painted on the side, and each stripe is wider than the tour bus. The building is still used (for the shuttle), so preservation is not an issue.
I don't like the way the place has been Disneyfied -- I would've preferred something a little more raw. It's a pilgrimage, dammit, not a theme park! Though I guess it's unavoidable, given that half the theme parks in the U.S. are in that area. If it makes it more palatable for the kids, maybe that's a good thing.
Don't you mean "point it and light it"?
Maybe that's why they lost the war!
And I supposed they were forced to rape all those (non-Western) "comfort women" and use live Chinese (i.e., non-Western) civilians for bayonet practice. (And it was the West's fault, too!)
declared the bad guys, nuked, occupied
Oh, my, how awful. BTW, the Germans were "forced" into WW2, called the bad guys, occupied and divided in two for forty years and they don't seem to be very racist now, besides the marginalized skinheads.
(Disclaimer: my wife is Chinese, so yes, I'm biased. Revisionist apologists piss me off.)
Caller: "I'd like to ask some questions about the document you sent me. OK, in the second paragraph starting on page 4, which starts with "In case of a system problem..."
You: "In my copy, that paragraph starts with "If you need to reformat the disk..." You need to set your font size to 10, and make sure you have 1-inch margins when you print. Oh, and be sure you use a variable-width font. Because I don't want to be anal about format!
Don't feel bad. Legal understanding comes slowly to a lot of us in the geek world too.
He made a joke. Normally, that would get +5 Funny, except that he's spoofing right-wingers. In /. land, that counts as insightful.
Injecting "Bush is an idiot" posts into random threads is a sure fire way to boost your karma.
That would be the case if you had genuine hardware. If you actually had a modem, which is a "modulator-demodulator," you'd just talk to its serial interface.
The problem is, most "modems," especially the ones in many laptops, cut out a lot of the modulating/demodulating circuitry, and leave it up to the CPU to do a lot of the signal processing. This shaves a few bucks off the cost of a unit, which is big in a low-margin, highly-competitive market, especially if the laptop vendor doesn't mention to the customer that his CPU will slow down every time he uses his "modem."
Unfortunately, a lot of vendors feel that exposing the API's to their "modems," wireless cards, etc., would expose the designs to their competitors (who presumably don't have debuggers and other such tools). The annoying thing is that many of them turn around and say they can't afford to write a Linux driver to support a "fringe" market.
By that reasoning, a Civic has better "performance" than a Porsche, because it can go half as fast as the Ferrari, but only costs 1/5 as much.
All chip makers (yes, even AMD) charge a premium for their fastest chips. If you want a chip that's 10% faster, you'll usually pay more than 10% extra. And there are people who are willing to pay that, either to impress their friends or because the extra speed improvement is actually useful to them.
... they probably figure Godzilla was just too
big to fit on Noah's Ark.
Yes, but it took so long. When I saw it, I was thinking of the scene in Spartacus where Spartacus is crucified and his wife is saying "...please DIE!"
One of the pieces, Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (in the prehistoric section) was still under copyright, and Disney paid both Stravinsky and his publisher. Stravinsky later claimed that Disney threatened to violate his copyright if he didn't take what was offered, because the copyright was Russian, and the US and USSR weren't officially recognizing each others' copyrights at the time. (He also complained about how they butchered his music.)
And why would Congress knowingly cut off one of their sources of bribes^H^H^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions for the next 50,000 congressional elections?
When Cornell got funding from MS to build a Beowulf cluster with NT (talk about a "cluster f***"), the project head at Cornell became quite the shill for his sponsors. Every time I've heard him talk, he talks about how great Windows is and how Linux sucks. Once, when someone in the audience asked him why they didn't use Linux, he didn't just come out and say because MS was a sponsor, which would've been a legitimate answer. (Nothing wrong with sticking to the products of the people footing the bill.) Instead, he made some wisecrack like "we don't want to spend 2 hours a day recompiling our kernel."
Every other speaker I've heard who talks about clusters and compares OSes says the choice of OS isn't much of an issue (beyond costs) because most of the time, people just launch MPI jobs from a head node and never log on to the cluster nodes in the first place. So it generally comes down to the performance of the MPI library.
So yes, people who've experienced previous Cornell PR might conclude that this will be yet another shilling opportunity, and that they will be sure to mention that it runs XP in every other sentence.
I don't mean to imply that because one guy from Cornell's a shill, that everyone else will be. But I do notice that one of them is already claiming they "couldn't have written the software without XP Embedded." The argument seems to be because they could test it by running the code much faster on regular desktops. But you could do the same thing with a Linux-based approach.
The GP mentioned a limit of 12-15 people watching a movie at home. I don't know if such a rule actually exists, but I can imagine how one would come about.
At first, you have a general principle, which works as long as everyone respects the boundaries. For instance, you can show your DVD at home, to your friends, but you can't make copies for others or set up a cinema and have people pay you to watch it. (Otherwise, how would studios legitimately make money?) Reasonable people will see that there's a large gap, and nobody will try crossing it.
Then some smart-ass comes along and decided he wants to play games with the definitions. So he has a giant room, has 400 people come over and say they've just become his friends. "But I'm just inviting a few friends over to watch my movies!" (Kind of like how certain "atheletic clubs" were set up to get around anti-boxing laws; the boxers and all spectators had to join the club, and that made it legal.)
Then the other side has to start tightening the definitions by elaborating all the borderline cases. After the semantic arms race has gone on for awhile, the official rules are highly contorted and take up 20 pages.
This happens everywhere. Look at professional sports -- a lot of the highly details rules were put there to deal with one case where someone was able to beat the system for one game by doing something that clearly violated the spirit of some more general rule, but not the letter.
But it would take him 15 minutes to sing it to you.
Radio stations in the seventies (maybe earlier) in my hometown (San Diego) would do things like call numbers they picked out of the phone book at random, and if whoever answered would win something if they could name the song they just finished playing. Typically the prize was N dollars, where N was the radio station's frequency in MHz.
It's too bad that whoever modded this Insightful doesn't know much about parallel applications.
DC is fine and very cost-effective for its niche of applications, which is those that are "embarassingly parallel." This is (somewhat circularly) defined as being very easy to parallelize on a DC machine. What characterizes these apps is very low communications between different tasks, which works for DC because the high network latency doesn't get in the way.
I've love to see you try to put Conjugate Gradiant (CG) on a distributed system. It involves large matrix-vector multiplies that inherently require lots of vector fragments passing between the processors. CG is one of the 8 NAS Parallel Benchmarks, and if you look at Beowulf papers that use NAS, you'll see that they often leave out CG because performance is so bad. If it's low on a Beowulf, where the network is presumed to be local and dedicated, it will totally suck on anything with a typical high-latency/low-bandwidth network.
Thanks. I'll try that and see if that helps. I'm glad Windows has such ease of use! In Linux, I'd probably have to edit a *.rc file somewhere.