The Knoppix autodetection is awesome. I have a cheap monitor/videocard that I have never been able to get working properly at resolutions above 800x600 in any distro, and no matter how much I played with the Xfree86 settings.
Knoppix booted and perfectly autodetected every bit of my hardware. X came up perfectly, so did sound. It worked immediately on first boot! I believe it's all GPL so why not include a lot of the stuff they worked on. It would make debian much better.
One of the ways is to use otherwise seemingly useless calculations to verify the given supercomputer is calulating correctly. And calculating the digits of Pi is one that can be verified relatively easily by other algorithms or computers.
If the calculation of the model simulation for that cure for cancer is off in the 1.4trillionth digit calculated, compound that millions of times and your cancer drug could be the next thalidomide.
You've essentially given the power series representation for 4*ATAN(1) which will converge to pi, albeit very slowly I believe O(-4). There are some great formulas due to Ramanujan that have quartic O(4) and quintic O(5) convergence.
In English the series you've given will give an additional correct digit of pi for every 4 (on average) more terms you calculate. A quintic algorithm will give you five *times* more correct digits for each additional term. See here
I believe most of the calculations done now on supercomputers use quartic algorithms for memory efficiency though I don't know what they used for this latest one.
The practical answer is that it can be used to verify the accuracy of the supercomputer it is run on.
The other answer is why not. Its a challenge just like any other. The mathematics behind the formulas that are used to generate thse digits are exremely elegant and can be very interesting. Many of the most startling discoveries of formulas to compute the digits of pi were made by the indian mathemetican Ramanujan who died in his twenties and had no formal mathematical training.
A good start at exploring why this can be interesting can be found at The PI Pages
http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1671.51282
So too much of just about anything is probably bad.
But I see your point in that much of what we eat is
probably not good for us.
But you can never avoid all danger
So eat, drink and be merry!!
The studies did show that it worked on adults too. Supposedly the colors you see regularly actually do affect cognitive function. I don't believe it had any effect--just as many kids slept in class. But how do you test anything like that objectively anyway? (I know how it's supposed to be done, but I disagree that it can be done correctly)
We thought it ws pretty funny then and called them the mauve and teal 'learning' colors.:)
Tim
The only really funny thing about this post is that it is so true that nobody can really comment on it.
And since they can't comment on it it will get much less/. mindshare than other garbage posts do. Ah well, that's the way of/.
Every Linux user seems to think MS would use Linux, but they don't need to even deal with the GPL if they use code from the BSD's. Most would say that they already have borrowed from at least the Berkely TCP stack (finally)
Is this the end of the world? No. If MS code is better we all benefit a little. Just think how much better at least US productivity would be if MS code wasn't so freeking buggy. If business apps didn't crash 10 times a day...
Tim
Is the power grids, not just power production capacity. I can't believe no one has brought that up. The power grid is so old and so near broken down, that even if more power plants were built, very soon the power grid would break down completely.
Listen to the power engineers. The power grid can only handle so much power. if more is put through then it can handle, well then obviously... And CA is very close to this limit even if they don't build more power production capacity.
The problem is that there is no economic incentive for the power companies to invest in the power grid. They don't get any revenue from it so they don't do it. Now CA is screwed because it will take years to upgrade the power grid even if they started now. Add that to the fact that the power production capacity is too low and voila you have a terrible situation that will get MUCH worse before it gets better.
I must say KDE2 is impressive in what it has been able to accomplish and the features it has in it. Konqueror is amazing.
But please, please, please, work on stability! Many apps crash once upon startup and then work fine when tried again, others never start (killustrator)
The functionality that it has gotten is great, but not great when applications crash all the time. I can get Windows to do that all day.
The best thing KDE could do for the free unix desktop is to institute a full feature freeze and go into full time debugging mode. If KDE were as stable as FreeBSD and Linux it would really take off. As it is now I have to try to explain to everybody that it's not the OS that is unstable, it's the windowing evironment. "the what???" They have been cultured to equate the OS with the gui.
But as free unix users we have become acustomed to a much higher level of stability. We should expect the same from our desktop environment. So once again please institute a feature freeze to make kde as solid as it should be.
Tim
Slashdot Mirror
The Knoppix autodetection is awesome. I have a cheap monitor/videocard that I have never been able to get working properly at resolutions above 800x600 in any distro, and no matter how much I played with the Xfree86 settings.
Knoppix booted and perfectly autodetected every bit of my hardware. X came up perfectly, so did sound. It worked immediately on first boot! I believe it's all GPL so why not include a lot of the stuff they worked on. It would make debian much better.
One of the ways is to use otherwise seemingly useless calculations to verify the given supercomputer is calulating correctly. And calculating the digits of Pi is one that can be verified relatively easily by other algorithms or computers.
If the calculation of the model simulation for that cure for cancer is off in the 1.4trillionth digit calculated, compound that millions of times and your cancer drug could be the next thalidomide.
You've essentially given the power series representation for 4*ATAN(1) which will converge to pi, albeit very slowly I believe O(-4). There are some great formulas due to Ramanujan that have quartic O(4) and quintic O(5) convergence.
In English the series you've given will give an additional correct digit of pi for every 4 (on average) more terms you calculate. A quintic algorithm will give you five *times* more correct digits for each additional term. See here
I believe most of the calculations done now on supercomputers use quartic algorithms for memory efficiency though I don't know what they used for this latest one.
The practical answer is that it can be used to verify the accuracy of the supercomputer it is run on.
The other answer is why not. Its a challenge just like any other. The mathematics behind the formulas that are used to generate thse digits are exremely elegant and can be very interesting. Many of the most startling discoveries of formulas to compute the digits of pi were made by the indian mathemetican Ramanujan who died in his twenties and had no formal mathematical training.
A good start at exploring why this can be interesting can be found at The PI Pages
http://webmd.lycos.com/content/article/1671.51282
So too much of just about anything is probably bad.
But I see your point in that much of what we eat is
probably not good for us.
But you can never avoid all danger
So eat, drink and be merry!!
The studies did show that it worked on adults too. Supposedly the colors you see regularly actually do affect cognitive function. I don't believe it had any effect--just as many kids slept in class. But how do you test anything like that objectively anyway? (I know how it's supposed to be done, but I disagree that it can be done correctly) :)
Tim
We thought it ws pretty funny then and called them the mauve and teal 'learning' colors.
could you ask your friend to make that script or at least the mp3 available? That does sound really funny.
Tim
The only really funny thing about this post is that it is so true that nobody can really comment on it. /. mindshare than other garbage posts do. Ah well, that's the way of /.
...
And since they can't comment on it it will get much less
Every Linux user seems to think MS would use Linux, but they don't need to even deal with the GPL if they use code from the BSD's. Most would say that they already have borrowed from at least the Berkely TCP stack (finally)
Is this the end of the world? No. If MS code is better we all benefit a little. Just think how much better at least US productivity would be if MS code wasn't so freeking buggy. If business apps didn't crash 10 times a day
Tim
Is the power grids, not just power production capacity. I can't believe no one has brought that up. The power grid is so old and so near broken down, that even if more power plants were built, very soon the power grid would break down completely.
Listen to the power engineers. The power grid can only handle so much power. if more is put through then it can handle, well then obviously...
And CA is very close to this limit even if they don't build more power production capacity.
The problem is that there is no economic incentive for the power companies to invest in the power grid. They don't get any revenue from it so they don't do it. Now CA is screwed because it will take years to upgrade the power grid even if they started now. Add that to the fact that the power production capacity is too low and voila you have a terrible situation that will get MUCH worse before it gets better.
I must say KDE2 is impressive in what it has been able to accomplish and the features it has in it. Konqueror is amazing.
But please, please, please, work on stability! Many apps crash once upon startup and then work fine when tried again, others never start (killustrator)
The functionality that it has gotten is great, but not great when applications crash all the time. I can get Windows to do that all day.
The best thing KDE could do for the free unix desktop is to institute a full feature freeze and go into full time debugging mode. If KDE were as stable as FreeBSD and Linux it would really take off. As it is now I have to try to explain to everybody that it's not the OS that is unstable, it's the windowing evironment. "the what???" They have been cultured to equate the OS with the gui.
But as free unix users we have become acustomed to a much higher level of stability. We should expect the same from our desktop environment. So once again please institute a feature freeze to make kde as solid as it should be.
Tim