I was playing Battle for Middle Earth (an RTS) and was trying to find out what component was affecting performance. I had a desktop with a mediocre processor and good graphics card and a laptop with a good processor but mediocre graphics card.
The high res, high quality graphics staggered the laptop, but showed fine, in small quantities, on the desktop. But when I played on medium graphics settings on both computers, when actual battles came and there were large amounts of units on the screen, it was the laptop that handled it far better than the desktop.
So processing power does make a difference -- though this is in the days of modest Pentium 4s (1.6 GHz). I've got a now also modest Athlon 3700+ (single core) and it runs BFME and BFME2 just fine no matter what's on the screen.
It has a little friend (I'd say brother, but they aren't in any way related) called Backuppc which does disk-to-disk backups. It won't natively back up open Windows files, so database dumps or VSS scripting is needed.
It does, however, do pooling (industry calls it deduplication). I have the equivalent of 9 TB of backups (2 months of weekly fulls and daily incrementals) stored on less than one TB of space. The actual amount of raw data being backed is about 1.5 TB: 558 GB compressed and 188 GB uncompressed on disk (746 GB).
Bacula doesn't do deduplication so its d2d capabilities are limited. But its tape abilities are comparable to anything out there (if you don't mind losing the GUI).
Apple went down the drain due to slow processors and slower, buggy operating systems. The very early OS 7s (7.1, for example) were solid, fast...of course the fastest processor at the time was about 33 MHz. Then came 7.5.3 where Apple was on its knees and it was rumored to be the "last MacOS".
With the price point of Apple hardware higher than PCs and the advent of Windows NT taking over Graphic Designer's workstations, all of a sudden Apple had to work harder. Then came MacOS 8 and quickly 8.1 but what saved Apple was the switch from PowerPC to the G3 processor. Noticeably faster and at a time where Windows 95 and even 98 were snappy, some sort of speed bump was mandatory for the sluggish Apple hardware and software.
With the faster, more capable machines, ad agencies stuck with Apple, the iMac CRT came out and education loved that. Apple continued to put out interesting products, market 1000 times better than Microsoft, and when OS X was released, was back on their feet. iPods, iPhones helped raise them back to profitability.
For Mac to dominate:
1) Out of the box enterprise administration. What they have now is meh at best and always has been. Microsoft has made Active Directory very powerful without having to go to the command line.
2) Gaming.
3) God help me, the price. I can build or even buy a home computer that will do way more than any iMac can for the same price. To do something comparable to a $1000 PC, I need a $2000 Mac.
I was just watching gameplay footage from Lord of the Rings Online. Combat doesn't seem to have changed an inkling from Everquest -- your party surrounds a single mob, and you all stand around swinging weapons. BIP! Arrg! BOOM! Arrg! BAF! Arrg!
I just started playing Left 4 Dead which puts the excitement back into combat -- if a developer could convert that style of combat to a fantasy MMO, they'd be a lot more fun.
(In fact, I consider Zombie Horde rushes to be similar to Aragorn's taking on the orcs at the end of Fellowship...seemingly overwhelming odds but, dammit, you're a hero!)
I wonder who would have the most to gain by undermining Apple
Isn't it obvious? The Pear has been looking for vindication ever since the William Tell incident. And don't even get them started on the whole "discovery of gravity" thing...
Is there a site that shows an electromagnetic radiation map? Not that I think much of what we're walking through is any more dangerous than the Sun's rays, but I'd be curious as to where the most intense EM is on the planet.
they can start censoring it with the same crazy arbitrary rules
I think they'd probably also include PSAs as you surf...sites that you get redirected to and nothing will load until the 30 second "Don't Drink and Drive" segment ends.
Then, to avoid the PSAs you can pay more...but then you'll eventually get another form of advertisement, but you can pay more for "ad-free surfing between the hours of 7 and 10 PM!" which doesn't have random ads to disturb your workflow, only at 7, 8, and 9 PM there are 5 minute commercials.
Actually, if you knew anything about how federal funding works (NSF, and DARPA for example... I am sure NIH et al do the same) there is plenty of oversight. Most funding grants requires to provide report and justification on how, what, and by whom each penny in the grant was spent.
And, like most committees, are 95% clueless when it comes to anything electronic. They won't fund infrastructure costs (cooling, power) for research cluster server rooms, IT support to put it together, etc. But they'll definitely buy the boxes for you, and allow you to spend $600,000 on equipment worth $400,000. And the $200,000 you didn't save is the entire IT budget of the department including salaries who is going to construct and maintain this mess for you for the next 4 years until you find more money to squander.
And by "you" I don't mean...well..."you".;-)
As a researcher myself, I think the original poster has no idea on the amount of overhead that goes into managing a grant. $12K in the big scheme of things is not that much.
It IS that much relatively. Why spend $12,000 on one piece of "ooh, shiny!" when you can buy 2 or 3 pieces of "ugh, beige..." that perform 2 to 3 times as well (total)? You've basically just tossed money out the window? How much? Not much for you...but then you only get one vote too.
The last thing a PI needs is having to convince yet another person to do things the way he wants to do them. Especially if it's the PI's money being spent on equipment the PI will be using.
See, I don't talk with faculty on that level so I only hear rumors that that's how some think. To actually see it written down, and not tongue-in-cheek, is fascinating. Your world certainly rests on your shoulders. Your research and researchers count on you to obtain grant money, delegate duties, teach classes, write and assist in writing journal articles, etc.
IT has its own hurdles -- I manage a team of people and need to make sure they have duties for the day, week, month; I clean up what they break; I assist when they have questions; when any of our 15 administrative servers (god help us if email fails) have issues or any of our clusters have issues, it takes about 30 seconds for tickets to pile up, claiming lost research time and inability to do one's job, etc etc. We all have our responsibilities.
But you might take a load off your brain and let IT do their job. If Mac's help your morale, and you seem to need it, by all means use a Mac. But pick the right tool for the job. Use your grant money wisely to get your research done. If something runs well under Linux, buy 4 linux boxes, not one Mac.
PI = Principal Investigator...generally a faculty member at a research university in charge of a research group consisting of graduate students and possibly academic or staff researchers (postdocs, researchers, etc).
So working at a University, I'd like to say that we have a lot of people throwing a lot of money at Mac hardware, only to turn around and install Bootcamp or Parallels so they can run the science software needed to do their work and research. And they use federal grants to do this. I'm thinking there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item (it almost never is) or if Linux or Windows will do the job more efficiently (they usually do).
$12,000 dual quad core Mac that we had to spend two months rewriting code to compile that worked fine on an old Linux cluster. The professor could have gotten a lot more parallel processing power if he'd gone with a newer cluster rather than a single, decked out Mac.
I suppose one could define anything living as something with a soul. If you are actively attempting to survive -- humans, trees, frogs, bacteria -- then you could be defined as having a soul. But I would think having a soul would be, as stated, more towards consciousness and less towards natural tendencies (wolf's instinct, plant reaching for the sun, etc).
Something with a soul could be defined as something that is actively trying to survive, but may actively choose not to for some reason.
Such as, say, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 at the end of Terminator 2.;-)
Well, if antimatter can make a clean explosion rather than a radioactive cloud, we may end up using it after all. The ability to wipe out a city, a mountain, a dam without any fallout would be a huge threat because people might actually use it.
Exactly like those companies, though the degree is really the problem. Smoking will kill some people eventually, same as alcohol. And abuse of either, especially alcohol, can seriously affect your body and health. But neither is as extreme in the short term as even using (never mind abusing) cocaine, heroine, or crack. These drugs make the addictive qualities of nicotine look like cravings for pizza.
People have a responsibility to themselves, but a tough addiction is often beyond their personal control, and for someone to prey on that is wrong.
While an interesting story, I hope you don't believe that anyone put away for dealing illegal drugs is a "bad" person.
I disagree. A drug dealer is sometimes simply capitalizing on another person's addiction. They are as "evil" as any other greedy person who keeps another person down for a profit. Not always the case, but I would say the majority.
George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series has just been given the "production order" by HBO which had optioned it awhile back. It's just for a pilot but if it does well, they may do a season a book, which would be great for such a huge series.
If you've read Wheel of Time, you should try Song of Ice and Fire. Different writing style, more developed and interesting characters. (I'm biased...I barely got through the first WoT book, but loved the SoIaF series).
Well lets not get ahead of our self here. Depends on why the other man is kicking his ass.
Democrat! (See brief synopsis of joke below...)
Joke A democrat armed with a gun (a rarity to be sure) is getting mugged by a person with a knife. He ponders the difficult life this mugger may have had to be forced to stoop to mugging to survive. Was it a bad childhood? Fell in with the wrong crowd? Perhaps he's just homeless and hungry and really just wants to eat, or for someone to care.
A republican armed with a gun is getting mugged by a person with a knife. BANG!
A texan armed with a gun is getting mugged by a person with a knife. BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
Precisely. I'm not suggesting anyone else limit what you're saying. I'm suggesting you might do so. Not so much limit as just provide something worthwhile. Depending on the situation, something redundant like, "Hell no, we won't go!" may be perfect. At other times, rather than saying "McCain is a Bush robot" you might say, "The Republican party has gotten off track -- they aren't the R's I used to vote for so I'll shift my vote to a D this year, because I don't want to see this country dragged down any further."
Both equate to almost the same thing, but the latter presents itself as informed opinion, rather than empty rhetoric.
People often confuse "responsibility when choosing your words" with "not free speech". In the non-political sense it's called tact. I, of course, should have the right to say whatever I want. I can call McCain a Bush robot, or Obama a socialist pig. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. It's unintelligent, tactless, and completely biased and opinionated and does nothing to further any argument for or against my position.
So sure, say what you like, but don't expect it to get you anywhere unless there's a modicum of thought behind your words.
iPhones are nothing if not slippery -- though I guess the 3G version is less so. I haven't dropped mine out of my hands but I have had it slip out of my pocket. Running across the street it took a trip to the pavement twice and fell off the counter onto a tile floor once. Result? A couple 1/8 inch scratches on the bottom of the phone. It is also nothing if not durable.
When posed the question of how one might respond to cyberattacks on their own websites, the following responses were gathered:
McCain: My friends, I've been around the block a few times. I know what it's like to be hacked. I know what it's like to be crippled, to be seized by foreign powers and pried for information. My friends, I've been there, not 30 years ago I was......Internet? What's that now? Oh, like the tubes...
Obama: There is no classified data on those servers. There never was. I will not hide information from the people of America. I will not hide my concerns from foreign powers. We are a nation built on freedom and that includes freedom of information. If they want to know our bathroom schedules, we will let them know. Yes we can. If they want to know where I park my car in the afternoon, I will tell them. Yes we can. If they want to know the route my daughter takes to school...
Palin: Dog gone it, how am I going to know when my next hair appointment is? Oh, it's still there? But you said they stole it. Could we go back to the part just after, "You're my vice presidential choice"? I've been a little confused since then.
Stevens: You ask me if they'll get away with this? I'll tell you. "NO!!"
Bush: Thank Christ the Lord I am done with this job. Next question...
Absolutely true. But he's part of a Republican machine that, over the past 8 years, has made itself into a party of the ignorant and idiotic, the religious right being the base of that, and as the world has seen, they are dangerous. McCain is more central, smarter, better than today's Republican party. I might have voted for him (not over Obama), if he were bringing a different party with him.
Upgraded my Ubuntu server from Feisty (7.04) to Hardy (8.04). The path to Hardy includes Gutsy (7.10). The series of apt-get dist-upgrades went well...then I tried to run apache2. Error:
symbol lookup error:/usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64
I googled...turns out it doesn't remove an old libz file...certain things still refer to it./usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is the right one, while the links in/usr/local/lib/ point to/usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 which is the wrong one. Copy the former into the latter, redo the links, everything's hunky dory.
I think the difference here between Windows and Linux is that I wouldn't have upgraded Windows...I would have reinstalled (going from 2000 to 2003, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
I was playing Battle for Middle Earth (an RTS) and was trying to find out what component was affecting performance. I had a desktop with a mediocre processor and good graphics card and a laptop with a good processor but mediocre graphics card.
The high res, high quality graphics staggered the laptop, but showed fine, in small quantities, on the desktop. But when I played on medium graphics settings on both computers, when actual battles came and there were large amounts of units on the screen, it was the laptop that handled it far better than the desktop.
So processing power does make a difference -- though this is in the days of modest Pentium 4s (1.6 GHz). I've got a now also modest Athlon 3700+ (single core) and it runs BFME and BFME2 just fine no matter what's on the screen.
It has a little friend (I'd say brother, but they aren't in any way related) called Backuppc which does disk-to-disk backups. It won't natively back up open Windows files, so database dumps or VSS scripting is needed.
It does, however, do pooling (industry calls it deduplication). I have the equivalent of 9 TB of backups (2 months of weekly fulls and daily incrementals) stored on less than one TB of space. The actual amount of raw data being backed is about 1.5 TB: 558 GB compressed and 188 GB uncompressed on disk (746 GB).
Bacula doesn't do deduplication so its d2d capabilities are limited. But its tape abilities are comparable to anything out there (if you don't mind losing the GUI).
True...I guess I meant to say that the PowerPC chips before the G3's were slow. And slower coupled with OS 7.5+.
Apple went down the drain more from the clones.
Apple went down the drain due to slow processors and slower, buggy operating systems. The very early OS 7s (7.1, for example) were solid, fast...of course the fastest processor at the time was about 33 MHz. Then came 7.5.3 where Apple was on its knees and it was rumored to be the "last MacOS".
With the price point of Apple hardware higher than PCs and the advent of Windows NT taking over Graphic Designer's workstations, all of a sudden Apple had to work harder. Then came MacOS 8 and quickly 8.1 but what saved Apple was the switch from PowerPC to the G3 processor. Noticeably faster and at a time where Windows 95 and even 98 were snappy, some sort of speed bump was mandatory for the sluggish Apple hardware and software.
With the faster, more capable machines, ad agencies stuck with Apple, the iMac CRT came out and education loved that. Apple continued to put out interesting products, market 1000 times better than Microsoft, and when OS X was released, was back on their feet. iPods, iPhones helped raise them back to profitability.
For Mac to dominate:
1) Out of the box enterprise administration. What they have now is meh at best and always has been. Microsoft has made Active Directory very powerful without having to go to the command line.
2) Gaming.
3) God help me, the price. I can build or even buy a home computer that will do way more than any iMac can for the same price. To do something comparable to a $1000 PC, I need a $2000 Mac.
I was just watching gameplay footage from Lord of the Rings Online. Combat doesn't seem to have changed an inkling from Everquest -- your party surrounds a single mob, and you all stand around swinging weapons. BIP! Arrg! BOOM! Arrg! BAF! Arrg!
I just started playing Left 4 Dead which puts the excitement back into combat -- if a developer could convert that style of combat to a fantasy MMO, they'd be a lot more fun.
(In fact, I consider Zombie Horde rushes to be similar to Aragorn's taking on the orcs at the end of Fellowship...seemingly overwhelming odds but, dammit, you're a hero!)
I wonder who would have the most to gain by undermining Apple
Isn't it obvious? The Pear has been looking for vindication ever since the William Tell incident. And don't even get them started on the whole "discovery of gravity" thing...
Is there a site that shows an electromagnetic radiation map? Not that I think much of what we're walking through is any more dangerous than the Sun's rays, but I'd be curious as to where the most intense EM is on the planet.
they can start censoring it with the same crazy arbitrary rules
I think they'd probably also include PSAs as you surf...sites that you get redirected to and nothing will load until the 30 second "Don't Drink and Drive" segment ends.
Then, to avoid the PSAs you can pay more...but then you'll eventually get another form of advertisement, but you can pay more for "ad-free surfing between the hours of 7 and 10 PM!" which doesn't have random ads to disturb your workflow, only at 7, 8, and 9 PM there are 5 minute commercials.
Actually, if you knew anything about how federal funding works (NSF, and DARPA for example... I am sure NIH et al do the same) there is plenty of oversight. Most funding grants requires to provide report and justification on how, what, and by whom each penny in the grant was spent.
And, like most committees, are 95% clueless when it comes to anything electronic. They won't fund infrastructure costs (cooling, power) for research cluster server rooms, IT support to put it together, etc. But they'll definitely buy the boxes for you, and allow you to spend $600,000 on equipment worth $400,000. And the $200,000 you didn't save is the entire IT budget of the department including salaries who is going to construct and maintain this mess for you for the next 4 years until you find more money to squander.
And by "you" I don't mean...well..."you". ;-)
As a researcher myself, I think the original poster has no idea on the amount of overhead that goes into managing a grant. $12K in the big scheme of things is not that much.
It IS that much relatively. Why spend $12,000 on one piece of "ooh, shiny!" when you can buy 2 or 3 pieces of "ugh, beige..." that perform 2 to 3 times as well (total)? You've basically just tossed money out the window? How much? Not much for you...but then you only get one vote too.
The last thing a PI needs is having to convince yet another person to do things the way he wants to do them. Especially if it's the PI's money being spent on equipment the PI will be using.
See, I don't talk with faculty on that level so I only hear rumors that that's how some think. To actually see it written down, and not tongue-in-cheek, is fascinating. Your world certainly rests on your shoulders. Your research and researchers count on you to obtain grant money, delegate duties, teach classes, write and assist in writing journal articles, etc.
IT has its own hurdles -- I manage a team of people and need to make sure they have duties for the day, week, month; I clean up what they break; I assist when they have questions; when any of our 15 administrative servers (god help us if email fails) have issues or any of our clusters have issues, it takes about 30 seconds for tickets to pile up, claiming lost research time and inability to do one's job, etc etc. We all have our responsibilities.
But you might take a load off your brain and let IT do their job. If Mac's help your morale, and you seem to need it, by all means use a Mac. But pick the right tool for the job. Use your grant money wisely to get your research done. If something runs well under Linux, buy 4 linux boxes, not one Mac.
Anyway, best of luck with your PhD. ;-)
PI = Principal Investigator...generally a faculty member at a research university in charge of a research group consisting of graduate students and possibly academic or staff researchers (postdocs, researchers, etc).
So working at a University, I'd like to say that we have a lot of people throwing a lot of money at Mac hardware, only to turn around and install Bootcamp or Parallels so they can run the science software needed to do their work and research. And they use federal grants to do this. I'm thinking there should be an oversight committee to determine if a Mac is a necessary item (it almost never is) or if Linux or Windows will do the job more efficiently (they usually do).
$12,000 dual quad core Mac that we had to spend two months rewriting code to compile that worked fine on an old Linux cluster. The professor could have gotten a lot more parallel processing power if he'd gone with a newer cluster rather than a single, decked out Mac.
Now, a sense of humor, that would be something worth wishing for
Microsoft Bob?
I suppose one could define anything living as something with a soul. If you are actively attempting to survive -- humans, trees, frogs, bacteria -- then you could be defined as having a soul. But I would think having a soul would be, as stated, more towards consciousness and less towards natural tendencies (wolf's instinct, plant reaching for the sun, etc).
Something with a soul could be defined as something that is actively trying to survive, but may actively choose not to for some reason.
Such as, say, the Cyberdyne Systems Model 101 at the end of Terminator 2. ;-)
Well, if antimatter can make a clean explosion rather than a radioactive cloud, we may end up using it after all. The ability to wipe out a city, a mountain, a dam without any fallout would be a huge threat because people might actually use it.
Exactly like those companies, though the degree is really the problem. Smoking will kill some people eventually, same as alcohol. And abuse of either, especially alcohol, can seriously affect your body and health. But neither is as extreme in the short term as even using (never mind abusing) cocaine, heroine, or crack. These drugs make the addictive qualities of nicotine look like cravings for pizza.
People have a responsibility to themselves, but a tough addiction is often beyond their personal control, and for someone to prey on that is wrong.
While an interesting story, I hope you don't believe that anyone put away for dealing illegal drugs is a "bad" person.
I disagree. A drug dealer is sometimes simply capitalizing on another person's addiction. They are as "evil" as any other greedy person who keeps another person down for a profit. Not always the case, but I would say the majority.
George RR Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series has just been given the "production order" by HBO which had optioned it awhile back. It's just for a pilot but if it does well, they may do a season a book, which would be great for such a huge series.
If you've read Wheel of Time, you should try Song of Ice and Fire. Different writing style, more developed and interesting characters. (I'm biased...I barely got through the first WoT book, but loved the SoIaF series).
Well lets not get ahead of our self here. Depends on why the other man is kicking his ass.
Democrat! (See brief synopsis of joke below...)
Joke
A democrat armed with a gun (a rarity to be sure) is getting mugged by a person with a knife. He ponders the difficult life this mugger may have had to be forced to stoop to mugging to survive. Was it a bad childhood? Fell in with the wrong crowd? Perhaps he's just homeless and hungry and really just wants to eat, or for someone to care.
A republican armed with a gun is getting mugged by a person with a knife.
BANG!
A texan armed with a gun is getting mugged by a person with a knife.
BANG!
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
BANG!
Precisely. I'm not suggesting anyone else limit what you're saying. I'm suggesting you might do so. Not so much limit as just provide something worthwhile. Depending on the situation, something redundant like, "Hell no, we won't go!" may be perfect. At other times, rather than saying "McCain is a Bush robot" you might say, "The Republican party has gotten off track -- they aren't the R's I used to vote for so I'll shift my vote to a D this year, because I don't want to see this country dragged down any further."
Both equate to almost the same thing, but the latter presents itself as informed opinion, rather than empty rhetoric.
People often confuse "responsibility when choosing your words" with "not free speech". In the non-political sense it's called tact. I, of course, should have the right to say whatever I want. I can call McCain a Bush robot, or Obama a socialist pig. But just because I can doesn't mean I should. It's unintelligent, tactless, and completely biased and opinionated and does nothing to further any argument for or against my position.
So sure, say what you like, but don't expect it to get you anywhere unless there's a modicum of thought behind your words.
iPhones are nothing if not slippery -- though I guess the 3G version is less so. I haven't dropped mine out of my hands but I have had it slip out of my pocket. Running across the street it took a trip to the pavement twice and fell off the counter onto a tile floor once. Result? A couple 1/8 inch scratches on the bottom of the phone. It is also nothing if not durable.
This message sent from iPhone.
When posed the question of how one might respond to cyberattacks on their own websites, the following responses were gathered:
McCain: My friends, I've been around the block a few times. I know what it's like to be hacked. I know what it's like to be crippled, to be seized by foreign powers and pried for information. My friends, I've been there, not 30 years ago I was......Internet? What's that now? Oh, like the tubes...
Obama: There is no classified data on those servers. There never was. I will not hide information from the people of America. I will not hide my concerns from foreign powers. We are a nation built on freedom and that includes freedom of information. If they want to know our bathroom schedules, we will let them know. Yes we can. If they want to know where I park my car in the afternoon, I will tell them. Yes we can. If they want to know the route my daughter takes to school...
Palin: Dog gone it, how am I going to know when my next hair appointment is? Oh, it's still there? But you said they stole it. Could we go back to the part just after, "You're my vice presidential choice"? I've been a little confused since then.
Stevens: You ask me if they'll get away with this? I'll tell you. "NO!!"
Bush: Thank Christ the Lord I am done with this job. Next question...
McCain isn't the antichrist. Not by a long shot.
Absolutely true. But he's part of a Republican machine that, over the past 8 years, has made itself into a party of the ignorant and idiotic, the religious right being the base of that, and as the world has seen, they are dangerous. McCain is more central, smarter, better than today's Republican party. I might have voted for him (not over Obama), if he were bringing a different party with him.
Upgraded my Ubuntu server from Feisty (7.04) to Hardy (8.04). The path to Hardy includes Gutsy (7.10). The series of apt-get dist-upgrades went well...then I tried to run apache2. Error:
symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/libxml2.so.2: undefined symbol: gzopen64
I googled...turns out it doesn't remove an old libz file...certain things still refer to it. /usr/local/libz.so.1.2.3.3 is the right one, while the links in /usr/local/lib/ point to /usr/local/lib/libz.so.1.2.3 which is the wrong one. Copy the former into the latter, redo the links, everything's hunky dory.
I think the difference here between Windows and Linux is that I wouldn't have upgraded Windows...I would have reinstalled (going from 2000 to 2003, for example).