Because of the damage it took from pieces of WTC 1&2 falling on it, and the weakening of its foundations from the impacts of 1&2 collapsing right next to it. Next question?
Oh, I thought it was from burning diesel fuel. You probably know more than FEMA or I do and are most likely 100% correct. Thanks for clearing it up for us.
I love how my sig evokes difinitive answers to something that is widely debated among the "experts". Actually, it seems as though your a little pissed that I ask that question. Good.
Come back and say that when the next degree versus certs debate comes up... A majority of Slashdotters think that people who get certs are just lemmings with no real skills.
Most people that get certs are just lemmings with no real skills:) I have no certs and no formal computer training, but my skills have been demonstrated and never questioned.
Why do these people need a degree and more importantly why do companies act like these people are untouchables without spending tens of thousands on a "well rounded" education when all they really need is a kid with an MCSE and maybe a CCNA?
There is more to college than getting a degree. Hell, you can buy a degree, up to a PhD anywhere. But there are networking and social skills that are learned with a degree. Its like a rite of passage. When you have a college degree, your "one of us". In fact, it also depends on where you get your degree if your going to be a member of certain circles. I wouldn't be any more smart if I had a PhD, but there is some kind of expectation that a person that got their PhD can do things that people without a PhD cannot do.
You got to convince people its broken first. Right now its only the educated that think the education system is broken, and they are very much in the minority.
It's a system designed to keep young people out of the work force (because work is mostly illusory these days anyways) , to keep them in debt and create a class of permanent woker/paupers with the illusion of being 'educated'.
Wow, that says a mouthful. I remember when I was laid off and unemployed, that it sucked that I had to find a "real job" instead of something like a labor or simple service job. Why? Because of my student loans. I figured that it would take me roughly $12/hour just to pay my minimum bills, and that was being guaranteed full time 40 hours a week, etc.
His verdict is not what you'd expect: the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate.
I agree 100%.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
Again, I agree, but I have one thing to add. The US education system also serves as a babysitter up through undergraduate degrees. Education also helps keep unemployment down, and in the case of "higher" education, people are out of the workforce and they are _paying_ into the economy.
And yeah, educated people are a pain in the ass for the "establishment". Try to get some menial "regular" job with a PhD. Who wants a person who is skilled in critical thinking and independant thought to ask people "Do you want to biggie size that?"
In fact, education is overexaggerated. I routinely ask people "What percentage of the population has a college degree?" And I routinely get answers about 50-60% while it has been 20% for a long time, and it is increasing. I don't remember what its at now, but nowhere near 50%.
I consider myself lucky in that I have done standard unskilled services work (convenience store clerk) and manual labor (landscaping and construction). I did construction when I was in college, and let me tell you, I felt very stupid for a month or so, even though I'm a good "booksmart" kind of guy. One skill I was really lacking was basic teamwork. Plus I did not know the vocabulary for the work, and basic stuff like using a level, plumbob, tape measure, etc.
The reasons that I don't have a problem with the education system not educating are twofold. 1) People don't need to be educated and 2) those few that do need educating and are bright will get it.
You can also see the role of being educated in our breeding habits. The more educated one is the fewer offspring they will have, and the inverse is true as well. Poor, uneducated people here in the US have tons off kids. Since kids when they are young are a liability, they tend to keep the poor poor. But one thing that I've noticed about the poor and their offspring, is that the children are more likely to take care of their parents when they are older. Whereas the wealthier/educated crowd are more independant in their old age because they do "smart" stuff like invest their money, have retirement funds, etc.
Slashdot is trying to make sure that they represent a variety of viewpoints... from the USA.
I'm not sure where you are from, but here in the US it is difficult to find anyone to intellectually talk about politics with. From what I understand, politics discussions in most other countries (especially those with parliamentary systems) are as commonplace as weather conversations here. In fact, other countries even talk about US politics, where most Americans are oblivious that there are other countries, let alone politics in other countries. OK, that was an exaggeration, but not too bad of one. Although I havn't dug too deeply myself, I would say that the front page stuff that has talked about Kerry, I still don't know what he is about or what he stands for. I know that he's against the War in Iraq, but I don't really know why.
I will say that I was shocked to see the US flag as the/. graphic, but/. has never known to be very international.
Typical licensees are restaurants, night clubs and radio stations.
Yeah, and you too can license music for your home (at least how I read it). These licenses for restraunts and night clubs do not say anything about acquiring the music itself. In fact, if you go to a record store and buy RIAA CDs personally, you do not have the right to play that in a restraunt or night club without a BMI license.
Anyway, my point being is that for $15 bucks a year (assuming you have less than 250 people regularly come to your home) you can legally license basically all of the recorded music to play in your home and this license does not even mention that you must also legally buy the music from the RIAA. So borrowing CDs or getting them from a p2p source seems to me OK because you have the license to play the music.
It doesn't state that the GPU is better at processing audio, just that in many instances it is mostly idle and thus available.
In terms of information processing, I would guess that most everyone would believe that faster is better. This product is supposed to make audio processing via the GPU 8 times faster than using the multipurpose CPU (40 Gflops/s vs 5).
I would consider that "better".
or perhaps dual processors
Being that computers can take up to what, 9 graphics cards now, hmmmm.
The thing that moved me to nVidia was the lack of quality in the Windows drivers...
The thing that moved me from Windows/Linux dualboot to Linux fulltime in 1997 or so were driver issues with whatever video card I had at the time and a DirectX "upgrade" that left my Windows system unusable. It wasn't worth my time to reinstall.
The thing that moved me from Linux to Mac OS X was the lack of this kind of bullshit. (I had to recompile X from CVS in 2001 to get it to support my laptop's video card an Intel 810 I believe, maybe an 815, don't remember). I don't even know where or what drivers are in OS X, and I don't care. It just works, and it works well. I just checked and I have an ATI card in my Mac.
Granted I do not play (computer) games, so my "needs" are different than those that do.
Another Mastercard knockoff:
PC with Lindows: $1,500 + time monkeying around with drivers and rebooting
PC with Linux: $1,500 + time monkeying around with kernels, drivers, restarting X and/or rebooting
Mac with OS X: $1,500
Reclaiming my time not monkeying around with drivers and rebooting: Priceless
1) Cell phone use by passengers saved the White House on September 11th. Passengers were able to learn what happened at the World Trade Center, and correctly deduced that the plane was going to be used as a weapon.
Well, thank God that when this new technology is available we can go back in time and save the White House again. A quick google search on the topic raises more questions than answers.
Cell phones in the hands of passengers is the best chance that NORAD has of learning that a plane has been hijacked before it can be used to hit anything.
If this is anywhere remotely true, I think we should demand our tax money back for anything spent on defense. If the folks at NORAD have no existing technology besides the hope of a civilian telephoning them about a hijacked plane.... WTF, I'm pretty sure that NORAD has things like realtime satellite images, realtime feeds from air traffic controllers, or at least a damn cable modem like I have at my house so they can use that internet thing to go to websites like this one (NOTE: you have to replace the XXX with the letter 'a'. I guess the lameness filter or something will not allow urls to "tracker.php" because of torrents or something???).
In the 21st Century, the only way to be safe is to build a plane that is immune to cell phone interference.
Who moderated this as Interesting and Insightful??? Besides the NORAD statement, this is a pretty silly statement. I have heard nothing about there being serious issues from current planes not being immune to cell phone interference. Yes, some planes can get interference. Commercial airplanes have a myriad of electronics on them that are as old as the 60s and 70s. Also, the interrerence is most likely from analog "cell" phones, not the newer digital (non "cell" ones).
Anything less is delusional folly.
I'm not even going to comment on this.
Question: Is there some way to have a more professional version of slashdot? I love this site, but sometimes I find the insight, experience, and knowledge of highschool and college kids to be a little lacking in at least experience and knowledge. I'm not trying to be harsh here. I have friends in college. I was once a knowitall teenager and a knowmorethanall 20something, but now I'm a little more mature (not much, but a little). It would really be nice to have something beyond friends and foes, something more like "peers" and "not peers", or something to keep a post like this getting modded up to +5 Interesting (with Insightful as well).
At first I didn't think that you quoted the whole sentence, but you did. It starts with "For example,". It never says that they used a PC. Plus, I don't know of any computer that can survive outside of a server room that money can buy that has peripherals faster than what you can get on a PC. Plus, assuming that the data that was transfered from some kind of storage device (it may very well have been cached into RAM first, or even done in parallel from more than one computer), I don't know of any storage device that can handle anything near 7.5Gbps (7.5*1024/8 = 960 MBs). The fastest storage I know of is fibre channel that can sustain 400 MBs.
This is a pretty impressive feat that is pushing the envelope of all existing computer and networking hardware.
Also, at the end of the article it says:
The technology used in setting this record included S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.
The AMD servers specs can be found here. I don't know if you consider that a "PC" or not. The best offerings in the Itanium department is from HP, and you can look at those guys here. Again, I don't know if you conder those a PC or not, but at least at the lower end of the Itanium family they use the same PCI architecture that PCs use.
This question is how to migrate from Windows to the Mac, not buy a Mac and use it the same silly way that Windows does. Go and download Quicksilver. If you know how to type at least 3 or 4 characters you can use Quicksilver. Trust me, there is no better way to launch an application.
Btw, yes, I do have my Applications folder in my dock, but I don't remember the last time I used it. I'm guessing that its for the rare time that I use some program that I don't use that much and can't remember the name of it, but like I said, I don't remember when that was.
While I originally applauded SETI's efforts, I'm beginning to find this a bit ridiculous. When you lose your dog, you don't normally wait for it to find you: you look for it. We're basically sitting here waiting for a message, when we should be physically searching. Chances are any life worth finding in our neck of the universe won't be communicating via radio signals anyway.
I think the latest Mars expedition was a good step: look for livable areas, later look for life. Don't sit around waiting for it to come to you.
I never thought I would see a comparison between a lost dog and looking for aliens, but OK.
However, the fundamental difference here is that when you loose your dog, you have some sort of prior knowledge that the dog existed, you noticed that the dog is now gone (or you even saw it run off), and the range of distance is proportional to the time the dog has been missing subtracting the fact that dogs even when given infinite time to wander around, they don't wander too far. At least its very unlikely that the dog would go into another continent and is practically impossible for the thing to wander off of this planet.
With these alien guys, its a little different. We have no prior knowledge that they exist. If they do exist, we do not know where they hang out, etc.
When people look for things, and they don't know exactly where they are (eg, treasure hunting, search and rescue, etc), the typical method of investigation is to divide up the known area for the lost thing, and do some rudimentary scan (heat, visible scan, radar, sonar, etc) that will give some kind of signal that is different from the ambient environment. Once a signal is detected, it is then further examined to see if the signal was a false positive or really what they are looking for.
This is the method that the SETI people are using. We know what the ambient "noise" level is in the universe, we know what we are emitting into space, so anything that is not noise or us is worth investigating as coming from "them".
Don't knock what the SETI people are doing. I don't know the total number involved, by this I mean directly involved/employed at the SETI project, not people donating idle CPU cycles. But lets say its 100,000 people (a gross over estimate, but OK for example). There are over 6 billion people on this earth, so that is about 0.001% of the population that are working on something that would be one of the biggest events in human history if intelligent life were to be found. More of the population are in jail, beggers in the street, politicians, salesmen, or do other seemingly usless activities by comparison.
Hmm, lets see what reality shows are coming on tonight!
Think of it, the city could reduce costs in other areas such as, say water meter reading - instead of having guy go out with a scanner to each meter, it could transmit to the office when necessary.
Yeah, its got to be cheaper to give a each of blue collar guys laptops with wireless connections vs their clipboard that they give to one person with a computer./sarcasm
I have never, ever experienced any cost savings due to more efficient technogagets in terms of lower bills (that goes for "tax cuts" as well).
Personally, I seriously doubt this will ever happen unless the Philly government is intending to use this service to spy on their citizens, and I don't think that is going to happen either. Being all the hastles that ISPs have with the legal actions of their users, and the questionable obligation to report the identity of their users, I do not think that a government for free or nearly free would want to get into that game.
At this point if I were someone looking for a free credit card, I'd probably...
go through the trash at a restaurant or gas station and look at the receipts. Its a little more blue collar, but I'm guessing its safer and easier than "finding" the same information that billions of people have easy access to.
The 90% marketing thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with the body of the post, but I agree with the post and not the subject.
The post implies that culture of the market depends on the "hype" of the product. And I agree with this. Yes, I assume there are tennis shoes that go for $100 or so. Currently, I am wearing a pair of sandles that I found at a music festival after I lost my flipflops in the mud:) However, I own an HDTV that I paid over $1,500 for. I would guess a younger, more jock type of person would pay $100 for the tennis shoes ($5 for the shoes and sweatshop labor for the shoe, and $95 to the thug athlete who's name is on the shoe). However, a geek like me is paying $1,500 for a TV that could be purchased for $100 or so (about 700 for the TV, and a good percentage of the money going to pay for engineers, etc like me for the TV).
My point being that culture determines the maket, this culture can be influenced by marketing via ads and whatnot, but take another example -- cell phones.
Here in the US, we can't figure out why there are phones with cameras, text messaging, etc. Most everyone I know has a cell phone. I can't think of any of them that have a camera phone. The only time I've seen or heard of anyone get text messages here is when a friends phone got spambombed with porn text messages until her phone's memory was full.
I saw on TV where Avril Lavine was doing a tour in Japan, and _everyone_ had a cellphone with a camera in it and they were all taking pictures of the girl with their phones up in the air as far as their arm would reach. I understand that in Japan text messages are used for things other than porn spambombs.
Marketing has to preach to the choir. I don't think that marketing has convinced that senor citizens here in the US "need" a 4x4 suv to drive 25mph to church and to visit their grandkids, I think its more culture.
Agreed, Apple has been dinged with this for years, but someone somewhere thinks that its better, easier, or something to use both hands to perform a "right/context" click (control + click for those that don't use Macs). Not to mention, that this would be a bit tricky with my powerbook for a left handed person becasause the only control button is on the left hand side of the keyboard.
OTOH, I recently bought a logitech 3 button mouse with a scroll thingy and it "just works" (for the most part). I had to configure via Expose (don't ask what this is if you don't know) to perform control+click when depressing the right button.
The only exception is that in X11 the scroll does not work, but the 3 button configuration works flawlessly.
I'm so impressed and I'm sure the RIAA is too impressed how much credibility and power is given to the RIAA. Those guys are chuckling and counting their money and planning their next kiddie and grandma lawsuit.
FWIW, the RIAA has nothing to do with the licensing of broadcast or performance material, only recorded material. The licensing for broadcast and performance material comes from ASCAP and BMI. If fact, one can license most all of the music in the world for $15 a year for audiences with less than 250 people.
One of the nastiest pieces of code that I had to do maintenance work on involved a smartcard application where one of the data elements was a simple integer that the programmer before me decided to encode in ascii text randomly in hex or decimal. It was easy to figure out for numbers 10 and below, but for those other numbers... I'm glad I don't work there any more.
Is it just me or almost all sodas overpriced at a movie theater? I mean, come on, they are selling crappy sugar and soda water drinks for outrageous (compatatively) prices....
Give me a break. There is overpricing and taxing of luxury items all over the place. The taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, parking at a "special event", and so on.
Now if one's life is that significantly changed by having a 30 second pop song playing instead of the 30-50 standard rings that comes with the phone for free, then yeah, you have to pay the 10 bucks or whatever a ringtone costs, otherwise pick one of the 30-50 standard rings. Maybe I'm old, but I remember when you had the choice between 1 ring on a phone -- maybe with the option to not ring at all, or a "high" or "low" volume ring, but otherwise it was a mechanical hammer repeatedly pounding on a metal bell for 2 seconds or so with 1 second or so of silence.
Why is it that people expect so much, but are unwilling to pay for it?
Re:Nuclear fusion?
on
Odds-on Science
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Because one million tons, dropping in two half a million ton blasts, has enough kinetic energy to devistate the surrounding area, making the surrounding buildings structurally unstable?
But it was only WTC 7, none of the other buildings spontainiously collapsed.
Because they were on fire for the entire day, ignored in the greater tragedy? Because they stored large tanks of diesal which caught fire shortly before the buildings collapsed?
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
Slashdot Mirror
Because of the damage it took from pieces of WTC 1&2 falling on it, and the weakening of its foundations from the impacts of 1&2 collapsing right next to it. Next question?
Oh, I thought it was from burning diesel fuel. You probably know more than FEMA or I do and are most likely 100% correct. Thanks for clearing it up for us.
I love how my sig evokes difinitive answers to something that is widely debated among the "experts". Actually, it seems as though your a little pissed that I ask that question. Good.
Come back and say that when the next degree versus certs debate comes up... A majority of Slashdotters think that people who get certs are just lemmings with no real skills.
:) I have no certs and no formal computer training, but my skills have been demonstrated and never questioned.
Most people that get certs are just lemmings with no real skills
Why do these people need a degree and more importantly why do companies act like these people are untouchables without spending tens of thousands on a "well rounded" education when all they really need is a kid with an MCSE and maybe a CCNA?
There is more to college than getting a degree. Hell, you can buy a degree, up to a PhD anywhere. But there are networking and social skills that are learned with a degree. Its like a rite of passage. When you have a college degree, your "one of us". In fact, it also depends on where you get your degree if your going to be a member of certain circles. I wouldn't be any more smart if I had a PhD, but there is some kind of expectation that a person that got their PhD can do things that people without a PhD cannot do.
You got to convince people its broken first. Right now its only the educated that think the education system is broken, and they are very much in the minority.
It's a system designed to keep young people out of the work force (because work is mostly illusory these days anyways) , to keep them in debt and create a class of permanent woker/paupers with the illusion of being 'educated'.
Wow, that says a mouthful. I remember when I was laid off and unemployed, that it sucked that I had to find a "real job" instead of something like a labor or simple service job. Why? Because of my student loans. I figured that it would take me roughly $12/hour just to pay my minimum bills, and that was being guaranteed full time 40 hours a week, etc.
His verdict is not what you'd expect: the school system cannot be fixed, Gatto asserts, because it has been designed not to educate.
I agree 100%.
The true purpose of schooling, according to Gatto, is to produce an easily manageable workforce to serve employers in a mass-production economy. Actual education is a secondary and even counterproductive result since educated people tend to be more difficult to control.
Again, I agree, but I have one thing to add. The US education system also serves as a babysitter up through undergraduate degrees. Education also helps keep unemployment down, and in the case of "higher" education, people are out of the workforce and they are _paying_ into the economy.
And yeah, educated people are a pain in the ass for the "establishment". Try to get some menial "regular" job with a PhD. Who wants a person who is skilled in critical thinking and independant thought to ask people "Do you want to biggie size that?"
In fact, education is overexaggerated. I routinely ask people "What percentage of the population has a college degree?" And I routinely get answers about 50-60% while it has been 20% for a long time, and it is increasing. I don't remember what its at now, but nowhere near 50%.
I consider myself lucky in that I have done standard unskilled services work (convenience store clerk) and manual labor (landscaping and construction). I did construction when I was in college, and let me tell you, I felt very stupid for a month or so, even though I'm a good "booksmart" kind of guy. One skill I was really lacking was basic teamwork. Plus I did not know the vocabulary for the work, and basic stuff like using a level, plumbob, tape measure, etc.
The reasons that I don't have a problem with the education system not educating are twofold. 1) People don't need to be educated and 2) those few that do need educating and are bright will get it.
You can also see the role of being educated in our breeding habits. The more educated one is the fewer offspring they will have, and the inverse is true as well. Poor, uneducated people here in the US have tons off kids. Since kids when they are young are a liability, they tend to keep the poor poor. But one thing that I've noticed about the poor and their offspring, is that the children are more likely to take care of their parents when they are older. Whereas the wealthier/educated crowd are more independant in their old age because they do "smart" stuff like invest their money, have retirement funds, etc.
Comments?
Slashdot is trying to make sure that they represent a variety of viewpoints... from the USA.
/. graphic, but /. has never known to be very international.
I'm not sure where you are from, but here in the US it is difficult to find anyone to intellectually talk about politics with. From what I understand, politics discussions in most other countries (especially those with parliamentary systems) are as commonplace as weather conversations here. In fact, other countries even talk about US politics, where most Americans are oblivious that there are other countries, let alone politics in other countries. OK, that was an exaggeration, but not too bad of one. Although I havn't dug too deeply myself, I would say that the front page stuff that has talked about Kerry, I still don't know what he is about or what he stands for. I know that he's against the War in Iraq, but I don't really know why.
I will say that I was shocked to see the US flag as the
Typical licensees are restaurants, night clubs and radio stations.
Yeah, and you too can license music for your home (at least how I read it). These licenses for restraunts and night clubs do not say anything about acquiring the music itself. In fact, if you go to a record store and buy RIAA CDs personally, you do not have the right to play that in a restraunt or night club without a BMI license.
Anyway, my point being is that for $15 bucks a year (assuming you have less than 250 people regularly come to your home) you can legally license basically all of the recorded music to play in your home and this license does not even mention that you must also legally buy the music from the RIAA. So borrowing CDs or getting them from a p2p source seems to me OK because you have the license to play the music.
Read the PDF license application here.
Am I missing something here, or is this too simple?
It doesn't state that the GPU is better at processing audio, just that in many instances it is mostly idle and thus available.
In terms of information processing, I would guess that most everyone would believe that faster is better. This product is supposed to make audio processing via the GPU 8 times faster than using the multipurpose CPU (40 Gflops/s vs 5).
I would consider that "better".
or perhaps dual processors
Being that computers can take up to what, 9 graphics cards now, hmmmm.
The thing that moved me to nVidia was the lack of quality in the Windows drivers...
The thing that moved me from Windows/Linux dualboot to Linux fulltime in 1997 or so were driver issues with whatever video card I had at the time and a DirectX "upgrade" that left my Windows system unusable. It wasn't worth my time to reinstall.
The thing that moved me from Linux to Mac OS X was the lack of this kind of bullshit. (I had to recompile X from CVS in 2001 to get it to support my laptop's video card an Intel 810 I believe, maybe an 815, don't remember). I don't even know where or what drivers are in OS X, and I don't care. It just works, and it works well. I just checked and I have an ATI card in my Mac.
Granted I do not play (computer) games, so my "needs" are different than those that do.
Another Mastercard knockoff:
PC with Lindows: $1,500 + time monkeying around with drivers and rebooting
PC with Linux: $1,500 + time monkeying around with kernels, drivers, restarting X and/or rebooting
Mac with OS X: $1,500
Reclaiming my time not monkeying around with drivers and rebooting: Priceless
1) Cell phone use by passengers saved the White House on September 11th. Passengers were able to learn what happened at the World Trade Center, and correctly deduced that the plane was going to be used as a weapon.
Well, thank God that when this new technology is available we can go back in time and save the White House again. A quick google search on the topic raises more questions than answers.
Cell phones in the hands of passengers is the best chance that NORAD has of learning that a plane has been hijacked before it can be used to hit anything.
If this is anywhere remotely true, I think we should demand our tax money back for anything spent on defense. If the folks at NORAD have no existing technology besides the hope of a civilian telephoning them about a hijacked plane.... WTF, I'm pretty sure that NORAD has things like realtime satellite images, realtime feeds from air traffic controllers, or at least a damn cable modem like I have at my house so they can use that internet thing to go to websites like this one (NOTE: you have to replace the XXX with the letter 'a'. I guess the lameness filter or something will not allow urls to "tracker.php" because of torrents or something???).
In the 21st Century, the only way to be safe is to build a plane that is immune to cell phone interference.
Who moderated this as Interesting and Insightful??? Besides the NORAD statement, this is a pretty silly statement. I have heard nothing about there being serious issues from current planes not being immune to cell phone interference. Yes, some planes can get interference. Commercial airplanes have a myriad of electronics on them that are as old as the 60s and 70s. Also, the interrerence is most likely from analog "cell" phones, not the newer digital (non "cell" ones).
Anything less is delusional folly.
I'm not even going to comment on this.
Question: Is there some way to have a more professional version of slashdot? I love this site, but sometimes I find the insight, experience, and knowledge of highschool and college kids to be a little lacking in at least experience and knowledge. I'm not trying to be harsh here. I have friends in college. I was once a knowitall teenager and a knowmorethanall 20something, but now I'm a little more mature (not much, but a little). It would really be nice to have something beyond friends and foes, something more like "peers" and "not peers", or something to keep a post like this getting modded up to +5 Interesting (with Insightful as well).
At first I didn't think that you quoted the whole sentence, but you did. It starts with "For example,". It never says that they used a PC. Plus, I don't know of any computer that can survive outside of a server room that money can buy that has peripherals faster than what you can get on a PC. Plus, assuming that the data that was transfered from some kind of storage device (it may very well have been cached into RAM first, or even done in parallel from more than one computer), I don't know of any storage device that can handle anything near 7.5Gbps (7.5*1024/8 = 960 MBs). The fastest storage I know of is fibre channel that can sustain 400 MBs.
This is a pretty impressive feat that is pushing the envelope of all existing computer and networking hardware.
Also, at the end of the article it says:
The technology used in setting this record included S2io's Xframe 10 GbE server adapter, Cisco 7600 Series Routers, Newisys 4300 servers using AMD Opteron processors, Itanium servers and the 64-bit version of Windows Server 2003.
The AMD servers specs can be found here. I don't know if you consider that a "PC" or not. The best offerings in the Itanium department is from HP, and you can look at those guys here. Again, I don't know if you conder those a PC or not, but at least at the lower end of the Itanium family they use the same PCI architecture that PCs use.
Noooooooooooooooooo!
This question is how to migrate from Windows to the Mac, not buy a Mac and use it the same silly way that Windows does. Go and download Quicksilver. If you know how to type at least 3 or 4 characters you can use Quicksilver. Trust me, there is no better way to launch an application.
Btw, yes, I do have my Applications folder in my dock, but I don't remember the last time I used it. I'm guessing that its for the rare time that I use some program that I don't use that much and can't remember the name of it, but like I said, I don't remember when that was.
While I originally applauded SETI's efforts, I'm beginning to find this a bit ridiculous. When you lose your dog, you don't normally wait for it to find you: you look for it. We're basically sitting here waiting for a message, when we should be physically searching. Chances are any life worth finding in our neck of the universe won't be communicating via radio signals anyway.
I think the latest Mars expedition was a good step: look for livable areas, later look for life. Don't sit around waiting for it to come to you.
I never thought I would see a comparison between a lost dog and looking for aliens, but OK.
However, the fundamental difference here is that when you loose your dog, you have some sort of prior knowledge that the dog existed, you noticed that the dog is now gone (or you even saw it run off), and the range of distance is proportional to the time the dog has been missing subtracting the fact that dogs even when given infinite time to wander around, they don't wander too far. At least its very unlikely that the dog would go into another continent and is practically impossible for the thing to wander off of this planet.
With these alien guys, its a little different. We have no prior knowledge that they exist. If they do exist, we do not know where they hang out, etc.
When people look for things, and they don't know exactly where they are (eg, treasure hunting, search and rescue, etc), the typical method of investigation is to divide up the known area for the lost thing, and do some rudimentary scan (heat, visible scan, radar, sonar, etc) that will give some kind of signal that is different from the ambient environment. Once a signal is detected, it is then further examined to see if the signal was a false positive or really what they are looking for.
This is the method that the SETI people are using. We know what the ambient "noise" level is in the universe, we know what we are emitting into space, so anything that is not noise or us is worth investigating as coming from "them".
Don't knock what the SETI people are doing. I don't know the total number involved, by this I mean directly involved/employed at the SETI project, not people donating idle CPU cycles. But lets say its 100,000 people (a gross over estimate, but OK for example). There are over 6 billion people on this earth, so that is about 0.001% of the population that are working on something that would be one of the biggest events in human history if intelligent life were to be found. More of the population are in jail, beggers in the street, politicians, salesmen, or do other seemingly usless activities by comparison.
Hmm, lets see what reality shows are coming on tonight!
This is getting offtopic, but how is this true --
:)
Furthermore, from the moon, even the continents are barely visible.
?? Being that from Earth we can see details like craters and seas and the moon is what 1/6th the size of the Earth?
Just curious. I've never been to the moon and don't really have any plans
Think of it, the city could reduce costs in other areas such as, say water meter reading - instead of having guy go out with a scanner to each meter, it could transmit to the office when necessary.
/sarcasm
Yeah, its got to be cheaper to give a each of blue collar guys laptops with wireless connections vs their clipboard that they give to one person with a computer.
I have never, ever experienced any cost savings due to more efficient technogagets in terms of lower bills (that goes for "tax cuts" as well).
Personally, I seriously doubt this will ever happen unless the Philly government is intending to use this service to spy on their citizens, and I don't think that is going to happen either. Being all the hastles that ISPs have with the legal actions of their users, and the questionable obligation to report the identity of their users, I do not think that a government for free or nearly free would want to get into that game.
Just my 2 cents.
At this point if I were someone looking for a free credit card, I'd probably...
go through the trash at a restaurant or gas station and look at the receipts. Its a little more blue collar, but I'm guessing its safer and easier than "finding" the same information that billions of people have easy access to.
It seems like the Segway fits here. Vast hype, vast expectations, little impact two and a half years after introduction.
And things come and go too.
Apple introduced the 1st pda in 1993 or somewhere around there, and noone bought them.
Then in the couple of years before and after 2000, PDAs were very desireable devices.
Now they are coming out of fashion.
The 90% marketing thing doesn't seem to have anything to do with the body of the post, but I agree with the post and not the subject.
:) However, I own an HDTV that I paid over $1,500 for. I would guess a younger, more jock type of person would pay $100 for the tennis shoes ($5 for the shoes and sweatshop labor for the shoe, and $95 to the thug athlete who's name is on the shoe). However, a geek like me is paying $1,500 for a TV that could be purchased for $100 or so (about 700 for the TV, and a good percentage of the money going to pay for engineers, etc like me for the TV).
The post implies that culture of the market depends on the "hype" of the product. And I agree with this. Yes, I assume there are tennis shoes that go for $100 or so. Currently, I am wearing a pair of sandles that I found at a music festival after I lost my flipflops in the mud
My point being that culture determines the maket, this culture can be influenced by marketing via ads and whatnot, but take another example -- cell phones.
Here in the US, we can't figure out why there are phones with cameras, text messaging, etc. Most everyone I know has a cell phone. I can't think of any of them that have a camera phone. The only time I've seen or heard of anyone get text messages here is when a friends phone got spambombed with porn text messages until her phone's memory was full.
I saw on TV where Avril Lavine was doing a tour in Japan, and _everyone_ had a cellphone with a camera in it and they were all taking pictures of the girl with their phones up in the air as far as their arm would reach. I understand that in Japan text messages are used for things other than porn spambombs.
Marketing has to preach to the choir. I don't think that marketing has convinced that senor citizens here in the US "need" a 4x4 suv to drive 25mph to church and to visit their grandkids, I think its more culture.
Agreed, Apple has been dinged with this for years, but someone somewhere thinks that its better, easier, or something to use both hands to perform a "right/context" click (control + click for those that don't use Macs). Not to mention, that this would be a bit tricky with my powerbook for a left handed person becasause the only control button is on the left hand side of the keyboard.
OTOH, I recently bought a logitech 3 button mouse with a scroll thingy and it "just works" (for the most part). I had to configure via Expose (don't ask what this is if you don't know) to perform control+click when depressing the right button.
The only exception is that in X11 the scroll does not work, but the 3 button configuration works flawlessly.
unless the RIAA asked them too
I'm so impressed and I'm sure the RIAA is too impressed how much credibility and power is given to the RIAA. Those guys are chuckling and counting their money and planning their next kiddie and grandma lawsuit.
FWIW, the RIAA has nothing to do with the licensing of broadcast or performance material, only recorded material. The licensing for broadcast and performance material comes from ASCAP and BMI. If fact, one can license most all of the music in the world for $15 a year for audiences with less than 250 people.
One of the nastiest pieces of code that I had to do maintenance work on involved a smartcard application where one of the data elements was a simple integer that the programmer before me decided to encode in ascii text randomly in hex or decimal. It was easy to figure out for numbers 10 and below, but for those other numbers... I'm glad I don't work there any more.
Hmm, 8*1GHz = 8GHz which is >> 3 GHz, which does not account for superlinear speedup if your code has good on CPU cache hits.
In other words, I'm not suprised that an 8 x 1GHz box is faster than a single 3GHz one.
I don't really understand what the big deal is comparing the heat outputs of the P4 and Opteron is anyway,
Here is probably the only appropriate call for:
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those!
Seriously, heat output and power consumption become a big deal when you have a room full of servers.
Is it just me or almost all sodas overpriced at a movie theater? I mean, come on, they are selling crappy sugar and soda water drinks for outrageous (compatatively) prices....
Give me a break. There is overpricing and taxing of luxury items all over the place. The taxes on cigarettes, alcohol, parking at a "special event", and so on.
Now if one's life is that significantly changed by having a 30 second pop song playing instead of the 30-50 standard rings that comes with the phone for free, then yeah, you have to pay the 10 bucks or whatever a ringtone costs, otherwise pick one of the 30-50 standard rings. Maybe I'm old, but I remember when you had the choice between 1 ring on a phone -- maybe with the option to not ring at all, or a "high" or "low" volume ring, but otherwise it was a mechanical hammer repeatedly pounding on a metal bell for 2 seconds or so with 1 second or so of silence.
Why is it that people expect so much, but are unwilling to pay for it?
Because one million tons, dropping in two half a million ton blasts, has enough kinetic energy to devistate the surrounding area, making the surrounding buildings structurally unstable?
But it was only WTC 7, none of the other buildings spontainiously collapsed.
Because they were on fire for the entire day, ignored in the greater tragedy? Because they stored large tanks of diesal which caught fire shortly before the buildings collapsed?
Fire has never caused a steel structure to spontainously collapse before this.
Makes sense to me.
Sleep tight.