well here is why it is great. you can use this to easily set up a combination web/file/email/proxy/whatever server for a school and just drop it into their existing computer lab. obviously if you want to have photoshop (to take your example), you'd have to have it installed on each computer in a lab, but giving a lot of people accounts would be quite easy for them with os x server. obvioulsy a high school would not have need for a full rack of these, but something like a university trying to break into technology would not have such a hard time setting up a load-balancing system with shell, email, ftp, etc. accounts for students and staff. plus, the management of this server is just so damned easy. that's where TCO factors in...it seems that with the software they give you any idiot can do it. (well anyone with reasonable tech experience). basically, i want one...i will soon be getting rid of my bed to move in the 42U rack to hold these puppies.
As a student of Columbia University, I find it particularly amusing that on their field trip, one student refers to Columbia's Science Department. Columbia, like most universities, does not have a "Science Department," but in fact has different departmentes for different sciences (e.g., biology, physics, chemistry). There is not even a "School of Science" here as an umbrella institution for the science departments, just Arts and Sciences and Engineering. Also, that genetics lab that they were in was in fact the main room of our administration building, which houses the president's office, deans' offices, etc. The equipment was added digitally, I guess.
I also find it particularly fitting that a movie about a spider has the most bugs of any movie...sorry, couldn't resist.
Re:Where does spiderman get all that stuff from?
on
Comic Book Physics
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· Score: 1
in the movie the webs were part of the mutation, caused by glands in his arms. in the comics, he gained the ability to create web fluid and used his science know-how to make wrist bands that would shoot the webs out. thus, in the comics his web supply was very finite (and in fact ran out many times) but in the movie, it was natural and hence effectively limitless. basically, you were right on both accounts and just failed to realize that the movie and comic are different. hope this helps.
All I have to say to the nay-sayers who will say that it is ridiculous to teach a physics course based on comic books is that this is the coolest thing a physics department could do. I am a physics major at my school and am becoming increasingly disillusioned with how tedious and boring my physics classes are getting, and how little I learn about the real world from them. I am not saying that comics are the real world, but if the approach this course takes is to say "this is realistic, while this is not" then that does help people to understand the real world. I would take a course like this in a second. Done right, this could be one of the most fun courses one takes in college.
There is however the probelm that you kind of ruin the coolness of comic book heroes who somewhat defy the laws of physics, by flying, shooting lasers from their eyes, moving things with their mind, etc. Although I know quite a bit of physics and know that many of these things are impossible, I still enjoy comics very much and am able to suspend my disbelief. I think that using a course like this to get people interested in physics is much better than the standard "Physics for Poets" my school offers which just go over the basics of many areas of physics in unsatisfactory depth and rigor, leaving the students frustrated and uninterested. I say that most anything that gets more people thinking from an analytical point of view is good.
Does anyone know the approximate release cycle time? Suse 8.0 sounds great and looks even better, but experience has taught me better than to install anything that is x.0. Maybe I am wrong in this instance, but I am strongly considering moving to Suse and doing a fresh install on my system, but I would be more comfortable installing 8.1 without assurances that 8.0 is truly production-quality software. I have not really been tracking the Suse release schedule, so I was wondering if anyone could either quell my concerns or let me know when 8.1 should be expected.
I kind of wish that this review went into a little more detail with respect to getting nonstandard content to be viewed. All it seems to say is that with Opera and Netscape, you need to manually configure PDF viewing and that these browsers support most Netscape plugins. It does give the specifics of whether this person was able to get Java, Flash, etc. running in these browsers easily, what kind of configuration was required, and other headaches possibly encountered. I am currently running Mozilla on Win2K and I am yet to get Java to work, although I haven't tried recently. Maybe I am missing something, but each time i try to install Java, my system hangs. It's about the only thing I run Netscape/IE for. Anyway, I am hoping to move to Linux soon, but want to be sure that I will be able to smoothly run Java applets and Flash and other things of that sort (I guess those two are the most important). Anyway, does anyone have any comments on their experience with this? I'd like to know.
Although their days were numbered even before the merger was announced, it will be truly sad to see this combination go. I never really had the chance to get down and dirty with such a system, but Alpha is legendary in performance. I remember when Intel chips were under 200MHz (maybe even under 100) and Alpha was over 500, and that was without any pipeline-shifting nonsense. Ahh, those were the days... It is sad that Alpha never really got off the ground. I wonder what exactly it was that prevented Alpha-based machines from taking a position like Sun or IBM's systems have...ubiquitous in the network world. I guess Alpha was pitched as more of a number crunching box. Anyone who cares to comment...
I just hope that IA-64 is all it's cracked up to be since it seems that pretty much every maker of quality RISC processors is dumping their product for IA-64 homoginization (at least, HP/Compaq...IBM's PowerPC will live on as far as i know, but how long?) Even Sun is considering IA-64 based products I believe. We will see, I guess.
Mr Gates also said that the discounts that Microsoft would have to offer under the proposals for stripped-down versions of Windows would lead to savings for computer makers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Mr Gates said his group's sales to computer manufacturers were worth between $6bn-$7bn a year, and that the discounts could reach 25 per cent of those revenues.
Isn't part of the point of this whole bloody anti-trust suit that Microsoft charges more for Windows than is economically efficient (one of the common problems with monopolies). Obviously price cuts will significantly affect profits, but that should not dissuade the decision, since it is one of the issues to begin with. Microsoft had a stronghold on the OS market and can thus lock OEMs into very restrictive and expensive contracts. This is one of the things that needs to be fixed by the anti-trust suit. The government (and to some extent the people) has decided that Microsoft is making more money than it should and in the process, hurting consumers.
I think ultimately the Sony came out on top in this comparison because there was not a price category in the awarding of stars. Had there been, the Sony would have gotten one or no stars and the Apple would have gotten three or four (depending on your tastes...i probably would have given it four given the features included). In either case, this would have resulted in a tie at worst and a win for Apple at best. The bottom line is that the apple seems the better buy when price is considered. I currently use Windows 2000, but have used Mac OS X extensively and Win XP Pro some. It seemed that Mac OS X was configured nearly optimally configured out of the box. Win XP on the other hand was very annoying to use with too much to read in order to accomplish anything nontrivial. Turning off all the hand-holding makes it more manageable, although this takes time and one can never be sure when a dialogue with a paragraph of text is going to show up. This is article is the first I have seen to favor Win xp over Mac OS X, especially for ease of use. The difference between these operating systems alone would be reason enough for me to use a Mac over a Win box. The comparison is also a litlte unfair, because for th price of the Viao, one could afford one of those sweet dual G4s with a flat panel display or a powerbook (minus the dvd burner, which could be added as a firewire external for the price difference). Essentially, I would never by 3500 for a wintel box, while the Mac offerings at that price point are quite enticing, although i will never be able to afford that kind of hardware. Ironically, when I bought my computer, it was price that motivated me to get a Dell over an Apple since at the time, the only cheap Apples were the old iMacs with the tiny CRT displays and I wanted a bigger monitor. Hopefully Apple will maintain good offerings for the price and keep improving OS X.
i remember the pgcc project aimed to distribute a pentium optimized version of gcc. i believe that the stampede linux project (defunct, resurrected and defunct again) used pgcc to deliver an optimized complete linux distribution. looking at what appears to be pgcc's website, it appears that pgcc is inactive as well ("last change: 2000-12-27"). Does anyone know the actual status of this project or have any information? It's last release is gcc 2.95.2.1 so direct comparison is not quite possible, but how does pgcc compare against intel's cc performance-wise? the only value i can see in an intel cc is performance improvements. because intel obviously has all the specs on their processors, they can heavily optimize the compiler output. since they are not opening their source or specs completely, some people who are willing to pay can at least get the performance gains, but if something like pgcc can offer similar performance, there seems to be no point. any comments...
while this is great news, will similar techniques work on other pollutants such as carbon monoxide and partially-combusted hydrocarbons? even though we all learned in high school chemistry that combustion of a hydrocarbon produces CO2 and water, this is not the full picture. Most combustion reactions are not complete combustions so that the products are lower hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and other ugly things in addition to CO2 and water. If CO2 is the big greenhouse gas, this is a great thing for the environment, but it is only a partial step toward "repairing the earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial-age levels" since there are many [harmful] impurities in the air besides CO2.
this looks like too much responsibility for crappy software writers to handle. while rebooting is annoying, a freshly rebooted system has completely clean memory. if things just stay in memory permanently, programs with memory leaks will be a huge problem. obviously [i hope!] there would be a way to clear out the memory, but even so, the problem of having to reboot computers seems more of a software problem than a hardware problem.
in each of their vector code examples, they divide n by 4 which seems to be because there are 4 altivec units on the powerpc chip. what happens when there are more units/chip? i think i may be missing something, though because this seems highly illogical. can someone please clear this up for me? i'm thinking maybe it has more to do with the fact that the 128bit unit can handle four floating point words per cycle (as stated toward the beginning of the article). in this case, would you divide n by 8 for 16-bit integers (and thus experience a ~8x performance increase)? can someone help me to get out of the dark? thanks...
my university uses munkres's topology for its intorductory (senior undergraduate-level) course in topology. the book's first section is mostly point-set and the second seems to be algebraic. unfortunately, i have not gotten much beyond chapter two, but an older undergrad whom i have spoken to says it is "very nice." munkres also has a book on algebraic topology alone called elements of algebraic topology. best of luck.
only ze germans could come up with something so ridiculous. it'll make a great junior high school party game over there, i'm sure. sure beats playing "deep-throat the kielbasa" and wishing their parents saved some beer for them...
i'm not a racist, i swear...all in good fun, i hope
my best example of such a distinction is super smash brothers for n64. the physics are completely unrealistic, as characters can "rejump" in mid-air, send other players blasting off the screen, and other ridiculous things. this is not necessarily bad physics, just programmers taking liberty with the laws of dynamics. it is not confusing and makes game play that much better.
it is bad physics, however, when i punch someone and instead of that person following the direction of the impulse that should have been imparted by the impact, he travels in the opposite direction. this is just confusing and makes the game annoying at time. still, it's a kick-ass game:-).
that being said, i am done with mechanics for the rest of my undergraduate carrer (which mind you
what happened to the end of the summary...the bit about rolling naked in a pile of money? that is one of the funniest lines i've seen on/. lately...what gives?
i thought i remembered the idea of a skinnable slash being kicked around a while back, and that it would be in 2.0, but no sign of it anywhere. anyone know what happened to that? not the most useful of features, i know, but a nice hack. just curious...
this is actually not such a bad idea. if you think about it, porn sites don't really want kids looking at their sites, they want people with credit cards, so there is not much incentive for them to falsify their rating and make themselves appear "kid-friendly" or whatever the rating will be. in fact, sites will probably strive on very porn-intensive ratings (if they can live up to the hype). kid-friendly sites will obviously not make themselves appear not to be just that. the only problem will be the fringe sites (the article mentions gay advocacy groups), which some parents may actually not want their kids to see, but will not consider themselves to be objectionable. other instances like this will be one big problem with this system. the other is acceptance. obviously, if sites do not opt into the system, it will fail. quite an interesting proposal/experiment, though, and certainly much better than uncle sam censoring things.
As far as the iMac is concerned, "i" stands for internet, since it was supposed to be a computer designed for internet access (& home use, etc). The iMac was so amazingly successful, that the "i" prefix found its way into other products, even if it doesn't make sense to call something iMovie (or even iTunes, really...certainly not iDVD). The "i" has come to denote association with Apple's consumer line, essentially.
As far as Compaq's iPaq is concerned, the "i" stands for "i stole this prefix from apple in the hopes that i could make some money off of their marketing." It's no coincidence that it rhymes with iMac.
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one little problem...no sound card. i think even the usb speakers need a sound card to function, though i may be wrong--in which case, game on!
well here is why it is great. you can use this to easily set up a combination web/file/email/proxy/whatever server for a school and just drop it into their existing computer lab. obviously if you want to have photoshop (to take your example), you'd have to have it installed on each computer in a lab, but giving a lot of people accounts would be quite easy for them with os x server. obvioulsy a high school would not have need for a full rack of these, but something like a university trying to break into technology would not have such a hard time setting up a load-balancing system with shell, email, ftp, etc. accounts for students and staff. plus, the management of this server is just so damned easy. that's where TCO factors in...it seems that with the software they give you any idiot can do it. (well anyone with reasonable tech experience). basically, i want one...i will soon be getting rid of my bed to move in the 42U rack to hold these puppies.
As a student of Columbia University, I find it particularly amusing that on their field trip, one student refers to Columbia's Science Department. Columbia, like most universities, does not have a "Science Department," but in fact has different departmentes for different sciences (e.g., biology, physics, chemistry). There is not even a "School of Science" here as an umbrella institution for the science departments, just Arts and Sciences and Engineering. Also, that genetics lab that they were in was in fact the main room of our administration building, which houses the president's office, deans' offices, etc. The equipment was added digitally, I guess.
I also find it particularly fitting that a movie about a spider has the most bugs of any movie...sorry, couldn't resist.
in the movie the webs were part of the mutation, caused by glands in his arms. in the comics, he gained the ability to create web fluid and used his science know-how to make wrist bands that would shoot the webs out. thus, in the comics his web supply was very finite (and in fact ran out many times) but in the movie, it was natural and hence effectively limitless. basically, you were right on both accounts and just failed to realize that the movie and comic are different. hope this helps.
All I have to say to the nay-sayers who will say that it is ridiculous to teach a physics course based on comic books is that this is the coolest thing a physics department could do. I am a physics major at my school and am becoming increasingly disillusioned with how tedious and boring my physics classes are getting, and how little I learn about the real world from them. I am not saying that comics are the real world, but if the approach this course takes is to say "this is realistic, while this is not" then that does help people to understand the real world. I would take a course like this in a second. Done right, this could be one of the most fun courses one takes in college.
There is however the probelm that you kind of ruin the coolness of comic book heroes who somewhat defy the laws of physics, by flying, shooting lasers from their eyes, moving things with their mind, etc. Although I know quite a bit of physics and know that many of these things are impossible, I still enjoy comics very much and am able to suspend my disbelief. I think that using a course like this to get people interested in physics is much better than the standard "Physics for Poets" my school offers which just go over the basics of many areas of physics in unsatisfactory depth and rigor, leaving the students frustrated and uninterested. I say that most anything that gets more people thinking from an analytical point of view is good.
Does anyone know the approximate release cycle time? Suse 8.0 sounds great and looks even better, but experience has taught me better than to install anything that is x.0. Maybe I am wrong in this instance, but I am strongly considering moving to Suse and doing a fresh install on my system, but I would be more comfortable installing 8.1 without assurances that 8.0 is truly production-quality software. I have not really been tracking the Suse release schedule, so I was wondering if anyone could either quell my concerns or let me know when 8.1 should be expected.
I kind of wish that this review went into a little more detail with respect to getting nonstandard content to be viewed. All it seems to say is that with Opera and Netscape, you need to manually configure PDF viewing and that these browsers support most Netscape plugins. It does give the specifics of whether this person was able to get Java, Flash, etc. running in these browsers easily, what kind of configuration was required, and other headaches possibly encountered. I am currently running Mozilla on Win2K and I am yet to get Java to work, although I haven't tried recently. Maybe I am missing something, but each time i try to install Java, my system hangs. It's about the only thing I run Netscape/IE for. Anyway, I am hoping to move to Linux soon, but want to be sure that I will be able to smoothly run Java applets and Flash and other things of that sort (I guess those two are the most important). Anyway, does anyone have any comments on their experience with this? I'd like to know.
Although their days were numbered even before the merger was announced, it will be truly sad to see this combination go. I never really had the chance to get down and dirty with such a system, but Alpha is legendary in performance. I remember when Intel chips were under 200MHz (maybe even under 100) and Alpha was over 500, and that was without any pipeline-shifting nonsense. Ahh, those were the days... It is sad that Alpha never really got off the ground. I wonder what exactly it was that prevented Alpha-based machines from taking a position like Sun or IBM's systems have...ubiquitous in the network world. I guess Alpha was pitched as more of a number crunching box. Anyone who cares to comment...
I just hope that IA-64 is all it's cracked up to be since it seems that pretty much every maker of quality RISC processors is dumping their product for IA-64 homoginization (at least, HP/Compaq...IBM's PowerPC will live on as far as i know, but how long?) Even Sun is considering IA-64 based products I believe. We will see, I guess.
the release says that OpenVMS will be ported (yet again) to Itanium. it lives on...
What is SigmaPad? I've never heard of it and a google search turned up nothing. A free alternative to Mathematica would be sweet...
sorry about the subject, i just typed in random characters so i could preview the article, but forgot to change it. cheers, spec
I think ultimately the Sony came out on top in this comparison because there was not a price category in the awarding of stars. Had there been, the Sony would have gotten one or no stars and the Apple would have gotten three or four (depending on your tastes...i probably would have given it four given the features included). In either case, this would have resulted in a tie at worst and a win for Apple at best. The bottom line is that the apple seems the better buy when price is considered. I currently use Windows 2000, but have used Mac OS X extensively and Win XP Pro some. It seemed that Mac OS X was configured nearly optimally configured out of the box. Win XP on the other hand was very annoying to use with too much to read in order to accomplish anything nontrivial. Turning off all the hand-holding makes it more manageable, although this takes time and one can never be sure when a dialogue with a paragraph of text is going to show up. This is article is the first I have seen to favor Win xp over Mac OS X, especially for ease of use. The difference between these operating systems alone would be reason enough for me to use a Mac over a Win box. The comparison is also a litlte unfair, because for th price of the Viao, one could afford one of those sweet dual G4s with a flat panel display or a powerbook (minus the dvd burner, which could be added as a firewire external for the price difference). Essentially, I would never by 3500 for a wintel box, while the Mac offerings at that price point are quite enticing, although i will never be able to afford that kind of hardware. Ironically, when I bought my computer, it was price that motivated me to get a Dell over an Apple since at the time, the only cheap Apples were the old iMacs with the tiny CRT displays and I wanted a bigger monitor. Hopefully Apple will maintain good offerings for the price and keep improving OS X.
i remember the pgcc project aimed to distribute a pentium optimized version of gcc. i believe that the stampede linux project (defunct, resurrected and defunct again) used pgcc to deliver an optimized complete linux distribution. looking at what appears to be pgcc's website, it appears that pgcc is inactive as well ("last change: 2000-12-27"). Does anyone know the actual status of this project or have any information? It's last release is gcc 2.95.2.1 so direct comparison is not quite possible, but how does pgcc compare against intel's cc performance-wise? the only value i can see in an intel cc is performance improvements. because intel obviously has all the specs on their processors, they can heavily optimize the compiler output. since they are not opening their source or specs completely, some people who are willing to pay can at least get the performance gains, but if something like pgcc can offer similar performance, there seems to be no point. any comments...
while this is great news, will similar techniques work on other pollutants such as carbon monoxide and partially-combusted hydrocarbons? even though we all learned in high school chemistry that combustion of a hydrocarbon produces CO2 and water, this is not the full picture. Most combustion reactions are not complete combustions so that the products are lower hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide and other ugly things in addition to CO2 and water. If CO2 is the big greenhouse gas, this is a great thing for the environment, but it is only a partial step toward "repairing the earth's atmosphere to pre-industrial-age levels" since there are many [harmful] impurities in the air besides CO2.
this looks like too much responsibility for crappy software writers to handle. while rebooting is annoying, a freshly rebooted system has completely clean memory. if things just stay in memory permanently, programs with memory leaks will be a huge problem. obviously [i hope!] there would be a way to clear out the memory, but even so, the problem of having to reboot computers seems more of a software problem than a hardware problem.
in each of their vector code examples, they divide n by 4 which seems to be because there are 4 altivec units on the powerpc chip. what happens when there are more units/chip? i think i may be missing something, though because this seems highly illogical. can someone please clear this up for me? i'm thinking maybe it has more to do with the fact that the 128bit unit can handle four floating point words per cycle (as stated toward the beginning of the article). in this case, would you divide n by 8 for 16-bit integers (and thus experience a ~8x performance increase)? can someone help me to get out of the dark?
thanks...
my university uses munkres's topology for its intorductory (senior undergraduate-level) course in topology. the book's first section is mostly point-set and the second seems to be algebraic. unfortunately, i have not gotten much beyond chapter two, but an older undergrad whom i have spoken to says it is "very nice." munkres also has a book on algebraic topology alone called elements of algebraic topology.
best of luck.
only ze germans could come up with something so ridiculous. it'll make a great junior high school party game over there, i'm sure. sure beats playing "deep-throat the kielbasa" and wishing their parents saved some beer for them...
i'm not a racist, i swear...all in good fun, i hope
cool sounding? i originally thought it was pronouced "aww-diggy" which sounds pretty lame to me. oh well. enjoy, i guess.
my best example of such a distinction is super smash brothers for n64. the physics are completely unrealistic, as characters can "rejump" in mid-air, send other players blasting off the screen, and other ridiculous things. this is not necessarily bad physics, just programmers taking liberty with the laws of dynamics. it is not confusing and makes game play that much better.
:-).
it is bad physics, however, when i punch someone and instead of that person following the direction of the impulse that should have been imparted by the impact, he travels in the opposite direction. this is just confusing and makes the game annoying at time. still, it's a kick-ass game
that being said, i am done with mechanics for the rest of my undergraduate carrer (which mind you
what happened to the end of the summary...the bit about rolling naked in a pile of money? that is one of the funniest lines i've seen on /. lately...what gives?
i thought i remembered the idea of a skinnable slash being kicked around a while back, and that it would be in 2.0, but no sign of it anywhere. anyone know what happened to that? not the most useful of features, i know, but a nice hack. just curious...
this is actually not such a bad idea. if you think about it, porn sites don't really want kids looking at their sites, they want people with credit cards, so there is not much incentive for them to falsify their rating and make themselves appear "kid-friendly" or whatever the rating will be. in fact, sites will probably strive on very porn-intensive ratings (if they can live up to the hype). kid-friendly sites will obviously not make themselves appear not to be just that. the only problem will be the fringe sites (the article mentions gay advocacy groups), which some parents may actually not want their kids to see, but will not consider themselves to be objectionable. other instances like this will be one big problem with this system. the other is acceptance. obviously, if sites do not opt into the system, it will fail. quite an interesting proposal/experiment, though, and certainly much better than uncle sam censoring things.
As far as Compaq's iPaq is concerned, the "i" stands for "i stole this prefix from apple in the hopes that i could make some money off of their marketing." It's no coincidence that it rhymes with iMac.