Overall my experience has been ok, except on laptops. I am still not quite sure if it's hibernate/suspend itself in the kernel,or the interaction with Nvidia drivers. Under both Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 11/13 I had issues. Both Dell and Lenovo T60. On Ubuntu 10 it was so bad, that some menus got sticky from time to time, they would stick to the desktop. You would have to kill the app. Kind of annoying. So far this hasn't happened on Ubuntu 12, and - knock on wood - the suspend has been muchj more reliable. Oddly enough Ubuntu has disabled hibernate, but that's another story. So,overall, my experience has been ok, but could be better.
totally agree. there are many occasions where you want to silence the click. What about nature photography? Right now SLR cameras, by their very nature, cannot turn the click off, but those press conferences sure sound silly with that battery of clicking overshadowing what the president says. But imagine if cameras were invented without them, this would never have happened. What about video cameras, will they require a beeping noise like a truck that's backing up? The more you find analogies, the sillier this law is looking. Albeit, in Japan it's the law.
Not to mention that "Virtual Telescope" is too close to "Virtual Observatory" which is used in a VERY different context these days. See for example http://www.ivoa.net/
I can't imagine them keeping your laptop if you just given them your hard drive. Anybody should have backups of your important material anyways, though I will admit I also bring an external HD on international trips which partially serves as a backup device. Can anybody think of a reasonable argument they keep your laptop if you just hand them the HD?
And more seriously, as others have noted too, it is mostly to the inconvenience of all of us, the real malicious ones have far more clever ways to hide material in innocent looking devices and files. It's not hard, i've seen that covered on slashdot before. And obscurity is often a far more effective way to hide things than security!
certainly many eons from now. After all, the parsec is based on the distance from the earth to the moon, which isn't some natural constant (which the speed of light MIGHT have as an advantage). SI beats them all. But then again, who remembers 24600000000000000000000 m (hoping i didn't miss a 0:-)
"the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to the main plane of the galaxy"
typical science reporting. totally wrong. if that chap had bothered to READ and understand the original article or web site, he would have read "It also shows that the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to a line joining the sun and the center of the galaxy."
meaning the bar is in the galactic plane, not sticking out as the space.com article suggests
Just for the record, I still find it amusing that astronomers always seem to need to report in numbers astronomers don't even use. I know of no single person that uses the lightyear, in galactic astronomy we use the kilo-parsec (kpc). The pc and lj are pretty close to each other, 3.26 between the two. So that 27,000 lightyear bar would be 8.2 kpc. It must be the total length, since the sun is about 8 kpc from the center of the milky way.
I've always wondered why we , as a community, don't beat them at their own game. There is more of us then them, so if only 10% of us would carpet bomb them with fake requests, calling their 800 numbers, whatever they want back, wouldn't that piss them off. In fact, you start with one company (my current favorite is Gevalia Coffee, who can't stop mailing me despite repeated phone calls and email requests, they hired a 3rd party to "spam"), and work you way down slowly and methodically. THat will teach normal companies to stop doing it. There probably are a few hard cases to crack, but it seems there aren't all that many companies around who do it.
I don't quite understand yet how they encode the
accuracy. Bit depth? Well, in astronomy there have
been for quite some time now two competing efforts
to have a scheme of efficiently searching the sky.
different outset, two angular coordinates with funny
non-cartesian properties. They also come up with
a single bit pattern to designate an area on
the globe:
HTM (hierarchical triangular mesh)
and
HEALPix.
actually the HTM group at Hopkins has close ties
to the MS Research group in the Bay area, under
guidance of Jim Gray.
It's fascinating stuff, as this makes searching
large databases a lot more efficient. Something
that is useful for the Virtual Observatory efforts.
As long as Apple ships an operating system that cannot distinguish files called 'Foo' and 'foo', i'm not convinced. This dreaded "feature" has cost me numerous headeaches already (the type of error messages you get from the various tools when this is encountered is actually humorous and worthy a webpage:-)
i've really lost confidence in redhat with their Fedora move, though they are in their right to do what they did. Now, with any kind of problem, be it software or hardware, or installation, it will come with a whole decision tree what distribution you have... i am now counting 4 (fedora, AS, ES, WS). Where does it end? And suppose I have WS, and i want to run some service that's not in ES, ok so i can go out and download BIND and run a local caching nameserver or so... but what a pain. I use redhat to get work done, and I have so far been fairly happy with the robustness i get from them. If i want to tinker (and i do), i have plenty of other choices.
Via my university I can probably get that 'cheap' version, and despite that i starting paying redhat now for support last year, i have now decided to pull out and am looking for something else.
enough people did answer that. but in that vain
I should comment that some collegues of mine
added some assembler code (incidentally for
the same Nbody code). He's been using the 3DNow
SIMD instruction set on the AMD directly, and
was able to get about 2 billion PP interactions
in 45 seconds, which translates to about 2 Gflop
on a 1.2 GHz AMD (his math). With 8-10 of such
athlons they could compete wiht the Grape5 in speed. Of course that's still far from the Grape6
speed. But depending on your problem and budget,
you can still get pretty far with COTS.
Slashdot Mirror
right, who cares. my current few years old desktop is 100 times a cray-2.... some random program that i use, so it's biased, but yes, who cares.
Overall my experience has been ok, except on laptops. I am still not quite sure if it's hibernate/suspend itself in the kernel,or the interaction with Nvidia drivers. Under both Ubuntu 10 and Fedora 11/13 I had issues. Both Dell and Lenovo T60. On Ubuntu 10 it was so bad, that some menus got sticky from time to time, they would stick to the desktop. You would have to kill the app. Kind of annoying. So far this hasn't happened on Ubuntu 12, and - knock on wood - the suspend has been muchj more reliable. Oddly enough Ubuntu has disabled hibernate, but that's another story.
So,overall, my experience has been ok, but could be better.
totally agree. there are many occasions where you want to silence the click. What about nature photography? Right now SLR cameras, by their very nature, cannot turn the click off, but those press conferences sure sound silly with that battery of clicking overshadowing what the president says. But imagine if cameras were invented without them, this would never have happened.
What about video cameras, will they require a beeping noise like a truck that's backing up? The more you find analogies, the sillier this law is looking. Albeit, in Japan it's the law.
Not to mention that "Virtual Telescope" is too close to "Virtual Observatory" which is used in a VERY different context these days.
See for example http://www.ivoa.net/
I can't imagine them keeping your laptop if you just given them your hard drive. Anybody should have backups of your important material anyways, though I will admit I also bring an external HD on international trips which partially serves as a backup device. Can anybody think of a reasonable argument they keep your laptop if you just hand them the HD?
And more seriously, as others have noted too, it is mostly to the inconvenience of all of us, the real malicious ones have far more clever ways to hide material in innocent looking devices and files. It's not hard, i've seen that covered on slashdot before. And obscurity is often a far more effective way to hide things than security!
certainly many eons from now. After all, the parsec is based on the distance from the earth to the moon, :-)
which isn't some natural constant (which the speed
of light MIGHT have as an advantage). SI beats them
all. But then again, who remembers
24600000000000000000000 m
(hoping i didn't miss a 0
"the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to the main plane of the galaxy"
typical science reporting. totally wrong. if that
chap had bothered to READ and understand the original article or web site, he would have
read
"It also shows that the bar is oriented at about a 45-degree angle relative to a line joining the sun and the center of the galaxy."
meaning the bar is in the galactic plane, not sticking out as the space.com article suggests
http://www.news.wisc.edu/11405.html seems a far better reference.
Just for the record, I still find it amusing that
astronomers always seem to need to report
in numbers astronomers don't even use. I know
of no single person that uses the lightyear, in
galactic astronomy we use the kilo-parsec (kpc).
The pc and lj are pretty close to each other,
3.26 between the two. So that 27,000 lightyear bar
would be 8.2 kpc. It must be the total length, since the sun is about 8 kpc from the center of
the milky way.
I've always wondered why we , as a community,
don't beat them at their own game. There is
more of us then them, so if only 10% of us
would carpet bomb them with fake requests,
calling their 800 numbers, whatever they
want back, wouldn't that piss them off.
In fact, you start with one company
(my current favorite is Gevalia Coffee,
who can't stop mailing me despite repeated
phone calls and email requests, they hired
a 3rd party to "spam"), and work you way down
slowly and methodically. THat will teach normal
companies to stop doing it.
There probably are a few hard cases to crack,
but it seems there aren't all that many companies
around who do it.
I don't quite understand yet how they encode the accuracy. Bit depth? Well, in astronomy there have been for quite some time now two competing efforts to have a scheme of efficiently searching the sky. different outset, two angular coordinates with funny non-cartesian properties. They also come up with a single bit pattern to designate an area on the globe: HTM (hierarchical triangular mesh) and HEALPix. actually the HTM group at Hopkins has close ties to the MS Research group in the Bay area, under guidance of Jim Gray. It's fascinating stuff, as this makes searching large databases a lot more efficient. Something that is useful for the Virtual Observatory efforts.
As long as Apple ships an operating system that :-)
cannot distinguish files called 'Foo' and 'foo',
i'm not convinced. This dreaded "feature" has cost
me numerous headeaches already (the type of
error messages you get from the various tools
when this is encountered is actually humorous
and worthy a webpage
i've really lost confidence in redhat with their Fedora move, though
they are in their right to do what they did. Now, with any kind of problem,
be it software or hardware, or installation, it will come with a whole
decision tree what distribution you have... i am now counting 4 (fedora,
AS, ES, WS). Where does it end? And suppose I have WS, and i want to run
some service that's not in ES, ok so i can go out and download BIND
and run a local caching nameserver or so... but what a pain. I use redhat
to get work done, and I have so far been fairly happy with the robustness
i get from them. If i want to tinker (and i do), i have plenty of other
choices.
Via my university I can probably get that 'cheap' version, and despite
that i starting paying redhat now for support last year, i have now
decided to pull out and am looking for something else.
enough people did answer that. but in that vain I should comment that some collegues of mine added some assembler code (incidentally for the same Nbody code). He's been using the 3DNow SIMD instruction set on the AMD directly, and was able to get about 2 billion PP interactions in 45 seconds, which translates to about 2 Gflop on a 1.2 GHz AMD (his math). With 8-10 of such athlons they could compete wiht the Grape5 in speed. Of course that's still far from the Grape6 speed. But depending on your problem and budget, you can still get pretty far with COTS.