I'm a senior majoring in physics and doing research on the the Epoch of Reionization with a radio cosmology group. Most people, at least in the research group, are on mac's as am I. This, I suspect, is mostly due to them being unix boxes with a nice GUI. I'm not sure what software people studying GR normally use but I end up using a lot of Mathematica, IDL, and Python. My little macbook air seems to work well enough, I can do development, run some stuffy locally for quick tests, and spin all the big stuff off onto a cluster. I have noticed that doing some fun integrals in Mathematica involving QM can easily spike my CPU's for a bit but the convenience is worth it. Something that is easy to take to lab meetings to show people your pretty data is fairly important.
In my experience most scientific software, such as those listed above, seems to be available on Mac/Windows/Linux and work about the same. One downside to running Windows though would be that if you are going to be interacting much with a cluster a Linux/Mac system will allow you to more accurately test things locally such as bash/zsh/fish scripts that fire off your analysis program on a cluster or reorganize large amounts of data. A fairly easy workaround would probably be to just install Cygwin on Windows but I have little experience with that.
I work as a sys admin at a medium sized medical research institute, one of the things I made sure to do was to add nagios scrips to throw alerts for important licenses, certs, and domain names. I'm not sure why an organization as huge as Sony Online would not have added these kinds of checks to whatever monitoring system they are using. Having had this happen to me once nearly a decade ago with a SSL cert I can promise that the 10min of coding to add in a check is much more pleasant than a day of meetings to describe to everyone what went wrong.
I don't often recommend SUN products with the exception of Solaris but Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition has actually proven to be a very stable solution. I don't believe its open source but I believe it is free. There is also an identity synchronization tool that allows you to sync your LDAP to AD servers if needed. Handles multimaster replication between however many nodes flawlessly with very good performance in my experience. It'll run on Windows,Linux, or of course Solaris.
If money was not a contraint I'd probably go with a top of the line Powerbook with the extra heafty graphics card to power the 30in. cinema display. Using the laptop instead of a desktop allows you to pop off to the coffee shop / bar to do work when your house gets boring. Add on to that the http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ Contoured keyboards (I know alot of people here have said they love their normal flat keyboard but personally I LOVE this thing I didn't realize how much pain my wrists were in until I started using it *WARNING* it will take about 2 weeks to get used to).
As for a desk I personally like a good solid hard wood slab type desk. I'm not sure about the rest of you but I don't like the monitor to shake etc.. when I'm trying or moving stuff around on the desk.
As for IDE, go with what you know/like, personally I like Emacs others don't.
May I be one of hopefully many in saying WTF?? How is the BSA allowed to even infiltrate our PUBLIC school system, I mean what goes on at these meetings
BSA REP: "We will give you enough money to buy 10 more computers if you let us brainwash the kids"
Director of school: "I'm not sure thats a good idea, have you ever read 1984?"
BSA REP: "Of course I have, I'll make it 11 computers and I won't let RIAA charge you for illegal music downloads"
Director of school: "But i havn't downloaded any illegal music"
While kind of a blackhat tool I find it quite useful occasionally in tracking in real time what is going on with the network. It allows you to sniff the entire network including over switches via arp poisining and intercept / reinject packets and generally get a feel for what is going on in the network. ( http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ ). This combined with ethereal usually do the trick.
And since this thing losses its information after a minute or two of being out of the mothership. So how exactly are you supposed to run a tab at a bar without having to be completly dorky and saying something like "can I have my card back for a minute I need to finger print auth it again".
I run a Zope / BSD Jail hosting company and so far being that we drop all executable attachments we have experienced 0.001 load increase due to this thing, even while hosting 1000+ domains which not being that large of number, still we have experienced a large number of viruses (virii) previous to blocking executables.
On the advise of some friends and professors a couple of years ago I was tested for and diagnosed with ADHD. A little background quickly for anyone that hasn't been tested in awhile. No one is diagnosed ADD anymore its only ADHD now, within a few years according to the doctors ADHD is supposed to be phased out as a diagnosis and everyone with ADHD (read everyone that was also diagnosed ADD) will then be diagnosed autistic) (nice how they like to change names and create more blanket terms for things.
So anyways I've read up on the subject a fair bit, one piece I came across attributed some of the ADD/ADHD effects to a variety of difficiences. Apparently atleast part of it can stem from a dopamine deficiency (this chemical helps signals travel along your brain so if you are missing a bit then things kind of get.. well. scattered) the vitamine that helps product this chemical in your body is calcium so if you are sensitive to milk (have times where you just have to drink it then you are probably sensitive to it). You should cut out milk and start taking around 1000mg of calcium daily. Also all of those B6 vitamines are very good for your brain and act slightly as mood stabalizers. Get some Super-B and pop a couple of those a day, magnesium and zinc are also very helpful for the brain you can probably find a calcium/magnesium/zinc pill that has around 33% of your daily of each.. pop 3.
Another oddity I've found is Yerba Mate (google it) . It has a whole ton of weird stuff in it that I have found if taken for atleast a month will SIGNIFICANTLY normalize my mood and help with concentration. Oh and natural lighting is a must, spent the extra money and get full spectrum lighting for any area you are going to be working in for large amounts of time (room/office/bathroom) etc..
dolphin, whale both very complex and intelligent species. And even then your limiting it to the assumpsion that earth is the only place in the universe that has life..
What was the quote from Hitchhikers Guide? "Man belived himself more intelligent then dolphines because they had not built huge buildings and learned math etc.., and dophin belived themselves to be more intelligent because they had not built huge building, learned math etc..."
Well by the looks of it the 3 button mouse thinggy plugs into a PS/2 port (and its made by IBM so I'll almost garentee its a ps/2 port) so any ps/2 device should work in it.. what would really be nice is if you could plug in a regular ps/2 keyboard. It would be nice to just carry around a regular keyboard sometimes, say a plain ride, taking notes in class, or any other time you want to have privacy...
We do this all the time... sleep. Our bodies have a built in system of doing very complex tasks in the mind and not allowing our bodies move (if I remember from bio its because of our ancestors lived in the trees and it wouldn't be good to fall out during a vivid dream;) ) but that would also solve the feedback problem, we don't have to necessarly provide all the feedback, in dreams if feels like your walking we just have to learn how to trigger the brain to provide its own feedback.. and yes I know I make it sound alot easier then it is:)
or better yet for awhile the gov't was playing with a REALLY big gun to shoot stuff into space... they were getting close befor the project was terminated (something about the head designer dying) but how about something like that with a modern twist.. say large rail gun.. even just to shoot up sats or small payloads...
My physics is a bit rusty but if a microscopic black hole formed wouldn't it actually be "A Good Thing" (tm) since it would be so small we should be able to suspend it in a magnetic field after it is charged of course and simply extract energy out of it.. creating a almost limitless and clean power supply?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a senior majoring in physics and doing research on the the Epoch of Reionization with a radio cosmology group. Most people, at least in the research group, are on mac's as am I. This, I suspect, is mostly due to them being unix boxes with a nice GUI. I'm not sure what software people studying GR normally use but I end up using a lot of Mathematica, IDL, and Python. My little macbook air seems to work well enough, I can do development, run some stuffy locally for quick tests, and spin all the big stuff off onto a cluster. I have noticed that doing some fun integrals in Mathematica involving QM can easily spike my CPU's for a bit but the convenience is worth it. Something that is easy to take to lab meetings to show people your pretty data is fairly important.
In my experience most scientific software, such as those listed above, seems to be available on Mac/Windows/Linux and work about the same. One downside to running Windows though would be that if you are going to be interacting much with a cluster a Linux/Mac system will allow you to more accurately test things locally such as bash/zsh/fish scripts that fire off your analysis program on a cluster or reorganize large amounts of data. A fairly easy workaround would probably be to just install Cygwin on Windows but I have little experience with that.
I work as a sys admin at a medium sized medical research institute, one of the things I made sure to do was to add nagios scrips to throw alerts for important licenses, certs, and domain names. I'm not sure why an organization as huge as Sony Online would not have added these kinds of checks to whatever monitoring system they are using. Having had this happen to me once nearly a decade ago with a SSL cert I can promise that the 10min of coding to add in a check is much more pleasant than a day of meetings to describe to everyone what went wrong.
I don't often recommend SUN products with the exception of Solaris but Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition has actually proven to be a very stable solution. I don't believe its open source but I believe it is free. There is also an identity synchronization tool that allows you to sync your LDAP to AD servers if needed. Handles multimaster replication between however many nodes flawlessly with very good performance in my experience. It'll run on Windows,Linux, or of course Solaris.
Good luck, LDAP is a pain in the ass ;)
If money was not a contraint I'd probably go with a top of the line Powerbook with the extra heafty graphics card to power the 30in. cinema display. Using the laptop instead of a desktop allows you to pop off to the coffee shop / bar to do work when your house gets boring. Add on to that the http://www.kinesis-ergo.com/ Contoured keyboards (I know alot of people here have said they love their normal flat keyboard but personally I LOVE this thing I didn't realize how much pain my wrists were in until I started using it *WARNING* it will take about 2 weeks to get used to).
As for a desk I personally like a good solid hard wood slab type desk. I'm not sure about the rest of you but I don't like the monitor to shake etc.. when I'm trying or moving stuff around on the desk.
As for IDE, go with what you know/like, personally I like Emacs others don't.
They have, its called an iPod :)
May I be one of hopefully many in saying WTF?? How is the BSA allowed to even infiltrate our PUBLIC school system, I mean what goes on at these meetings
BSA REP: "We will give you enough money to buy 10 more computers if you let us brainwash the kids"
Director of school: "I'm not sure thats a good idea, have you ever read 1984?"
BSA REP: "Of course I have, I'll make it 11 computers and I won't let RIAA charge you for illegal music downloads"
Director of school: "But i havn't downloaded any illegal music"
BSA REP: "Thats what they all say!"
While kind of a blackhat tool I find it quite useful occasionally in tracking in real time what is going on with the network. It allows you to sniff the entire network including over switches via arp poisining and intercept / reinject packets and generally get a feel for what is going on in the network. ( http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/ ). This combined with ethereal usually do the trick.
And since this thing losses its information after a minute or two of being out of the mothership. So how exactly are you supposed to run a tab at a bar without having to be completly dorky and saying something like "can I have my card back for a minute I need to finger print auth it again".
I run a Zope / BSD Jail hosting company and so far being that we drop all executable attachments we have experienced 0.001 load increase due to this thing, even while hosting 1000+ domains which not being that large of number, still we have experienced a large number of viruses (virii) previous to blocking executables.
On the advise of some friends and professors a couple of years ago I was tested for and diagnosed with ADHD. A little background quickly for anyone that hasn't been tested in awhile. No one is diagnosed ADD anymore its only ADHD now, within a few years according to the doctors ADHD is supposed to be phased out as a diagnosis and everyone with ADHD (read everyone that was also diagnosed ADD) will then be diagnosed autistic) (nice how they like to change names and create more blanket terms for things.
.. well. scattered) the vitamine that helps product this chemical in your body is calcium so if you are sensitive to milk (have times where you just have to drink it then you are probably sensitive to it). You should cut out milk and start taking around 1000mg of calcium daily. Also all of those B6 vitamines are very good for your brain and act slightly as mood stabalizers. Get some Super-B and pop a couple of those a day, magnesium and zinc are also very helpful for the brain you can probably find a calcium/magnesium/zinc pill that has around 33% of your daily of each.. pop 3.
So anyways I've read up on the subject a fair bit, one piece I came across attributed some of the ADD/ADHD effects to a variety of difficiences. Apparently atleast part of it can stem from a dopamine deficiency (this chemical helps signals travel along your brain so if you are missing a bit then things kind of get
Another oddity I've found is Yerba Mate (google it) . It has a whole ton of weird stuff in it that I have found if taken for atleast a month will SIGNIFICANTLY normalize my mood and help with concentration. Oh and natural lighting is a must, spent the extra money and get full spectrum lighting for any area you are going to be working in for large amounts of time (room/office/bathroom) etc..
Jon Ringuette
iMeme.net
I think this could be a very lucritive time for sites like www.anonymizer.com....
dolphin, whale both very complex and intelligent species. And even then your limiting it to the assumpsion that earth is the only place in the universe that has life..
What was the quote from Hitchhikers Guide? "Man belived himself more intelligent then dolphines because they had not built huge buildings and learned math etc.., and dophin belived themselves to be more intelligent because they had not built huge building, learned math etc..."
Well by the looks of it the 3 button mouse thinggy plugs into a PS/2 port (and its made by IBM so I'll almost garentee its a ps/2 port) so any ps/2 device should work in it .. what would really be nice is if you could plug in a regular ps/2 keyboard. It would be nice to just carry around a regular keyboard sometimes, say a plain ride, taking notes in class, or any other time you want to have privacy...
We do this all the time... sleep. Our bodies have a built in system of doing very complex tasks in the mind and not allowing our bodies move (if I remember from bio its because of our ancestors lived in the trees and it wouldn't be good to fall out during a vivid dream ;) ) but that would also solve the feedback problem, we don't have to necessarly provide all the feedback, in dreams if feels like your walking we just have to learn how to trigger the brain to provide its own feedback.. and yes I know I make it sound alot easier then it is :)
Welcme to tbe Brave New World my friends.. How much longer befor we start sending these people to an island so they do not 'infect' the rest of us?
or better yet for awhile the gov't was playing with a REALLY big gun to shoot stuff into space... they were getting close befor the project was terminated (something about the head designer dying) but how about something like that with a modern twist.. say large rail gun.. even just to shoot up sats or small payloads...
yea but they also named the second one TMA2 and that was no way near the moon ;)
as long as in doing this they did not accidentally break the monolith...
My physics is a bit rusty but if a microscopic black hole formed wouldn't it actually be "A Good Thing" (tm) since it would be so small we should be able to suspend it in a magnetic field after it is charged of course and simply extract energy out of it.. creating a almost limitless and clean power supply?