I know that AMD didn't, but I like to think that the code name for this chip honors Robert Barton. He was the chief designer of a whole line of Burroughs computers, including the 5500 through the 6800. Of all the commercial systems I've ever laid hands on, these were the most innovative.
Even better at 5:30 EST - 52 in 30min
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 2
Random reinforcement is a terrible force. I set my alarm to get me up in time to see the predicted second wave and I'm glad I did.
Shortly before dawn, about 5:15 to 5:45, I spotted 52 more meteors. Full moon was fairly far down in the west but the city lights and rosy fingers of dawn were still there to contend with. I envy the people who could see colors!
Re:Total count: 20 in about 90 minutes
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 2
Well, yes, I'm fairly confident that once I understand what's going on here, it will be consistent with known physics. But I'm still looking to understand and you've chosen to be snide rather than to provide information.
Here's the state of my current understanding of this phenomenon:
We have a periodic comet whose orbit intersects earth's orbit at about the position earth occupies every 18-19 November. Over time, bits of the comet have been separated from the main body. The forces that caused the separation of these bits have not been so great as to drive them into wildly different orbits. As we learned from Galileo, two objects of different mass fall at the same rate, therefore these bits have retained roughly the same orbit as their parent body, but occupy a different position along the orbital course. Each time the comet passes near the sun, more bits break off -- some lighter bits are driven away entirely, but bigger bits just get perturbed slightly. These perturbations serve to stretch out the original mass of the comet. Eventually, with enough time, the entire mass of the comet would tend towards a fairly uniformly distribution along this orbital path to form a sort of ring like the rings of Saturn, but for the time being, it's a lumpy, lopsided ring. The 31-year periodicity of the Leonid activity corresponds to the 31-year period of the cometary orbit. At the peaks, the earth is passing through the denser parts of the lumps along the ring while at less intense times, the earth passes through the comet's orbit at points where the ring is thin and sparse.
Total count: 20 in about 90 minutes
on
Meet The Leonids
·
· Score: 2
Not a dud, but hardly the stuff of legends. I was lucky to have two bright ones shortly after I started to watch -- these helped me locate the putative point of origin, even though, for the most part, I could see very few stars in that sector of the sky because of the lights of Manchester, NH. There I saw a lot of the little guys whose trails weren't much longer than a couple of times the moon's diameter.
Now I gotta read up on this stuff. Why is this stuff hanging around at just this point in the earth's orbit? Our planet has to hustle around the sun to keep from falling in...why haven't these little bits of comet debris fallen into the sun.
Here in Southern New Hampshire the skies are clear even if they're not dark (full moon plus all the man-made light). I just saw 5 meteors in about 15 minutes of watching, 3 whose trails stretched nearly halfway across the sky and the other 2 were little ones.
Sorry about those of you whose weather is working against them. I'm going back out to watch after grabbing another couple of layers of blanket.
I think you've pegged it. I hadn't gotten around to dumping the old contents yet and the little guys have not turned into maggots. I guess I'll continue the experiment a while longer....
Yep. It's my fault, it appears I neglected draining off the excess "worm tea" for too long and catastrophically unbalanced the micro-ecosystem. The other, smaller, worm bin is still happy, so I have an ongoing source of critters.
You're right. They're still really small and thin, so it's hard to tell exactly. They don't yet look like what I'm used to maggots looking like. I'll have to convey the entire bin contents out to the outdoor compost pile tomorrow just to avoid problems and start this bin over.
This guy is going to get an experience both with composting and with his web site. At least he'll learn something, I hope.
My worm composter bin had been running along happily for a few years and today I discovered that the red wrigglers were all dead or nearly dead and little tiny white worms had taken over (nematodes?).
What I find interesting is that two of the experiments were not experiments at all in the traditional sense. They were thought experiments: Galileo is generally thought not to have dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- instead, his writings describe a thought experiment involving two unequal weights tied together with a rope. And Young's double slit experiment was also a thought experiment -- the verification came many years later.
I've been volunteering answers at AskMe.com for a couple of years now. For a lot of questions where Ask Slashdot is not the right place, AskMe has a suitable place to ask or answer questions.
In any case, it's divided up into suitable subject-based channels so you don't bother everyone with questions about your love life or Windows-only device -- your question is mainly looked at by people who specialize in answering questions in that particular subject area.
Now, as a company, AskMe.com has more or less left the retail question answering site on autopilot while it markets its software to companies to create knowledge sharing intranets. I do not know how people ordinarily discover AskMe any more -- must be by word-of-mouth (like this). The community of active question answerers is still fairly large despite many months of neglect. There are at least 500 people more active than I am (a few have answered 10,000 questions!) and probably another 1000 or so who are less active.
I have to agree. SI seconds are already the metric time base and choosing something as variable as a "day" as a base unit does not sit right.
Science fiction writers can indulge in speculation on this kind of subject and work them out in some detail without necessarily getting themselves laughed at as this proposal deservedly does: Vernor Vinge's Qeng Ho spacefaring culture in A Deepness in the Sky used a metric convention along the lines you suggest: keep the second, larger human-sized units were referred to as ksecs (about a quarter of an hour), megasecs (slightly less than two weeks), etc. Between cold sleep and interstellar journeys at.3 lightspeed, there could be a lot of discrepancy between one's personal time and objective time. You could fall back to talking in quaint planet-based time units as needed, but for really keeping track you stuck to seconds and metric (Greek) prefixes (all a little odd given that the spoken language was speculated to be descended from Chinese).
As too often happens, the newspaper report leaves out much detail that might help us laypeople assess whether this judgement is consistent with justice, or is just a fluke.
In my (much lower priced) real estate dealings, the price negotiation has always been done by phone with a realtor or two in between. The price negotiation merely established the number that would appear on the Purchase&Sale agreement, which would have various other contingencies written into it. The price negotiation would never be considered the whole contract, but it would be binding in the sense that no other number could appear on the P&S.
In this situation, it appears as if the seller had another buyer on the line. Whether the negotiation of a backup contract would be in bad faith would depend on how you conducted yourself. The internal evidence from the quoted emails was that the seller implied that once the price was settled on, no other steps were required before closing the deal.
I think if I were deciding this case, I'd have wanted to punish the seller for bad faith negotiation but ultimated decided that the buyer did not yet have a valid contract -- probably on the basis that the contract isn't valid until consideration (the ernest money is offered and accepted).
[Hmm. I hit return at the wrong place and may have posted something utterly blank.]
I will long remeber encountering Fred Hoyle's science fiction. My favorite is "The Black Cloud" in which Hoyle posited intelligent space-borne entities whose internal communication was radio waves. It was excellent hard-science science fiction for its day and remains interesting today.
Hoyle's steady state hypothesis and his ideas about panspermia were interesting, but seemed to fall at the fringes of his solid science -- speculations developed in scientific dress rather than presented as science fiction entertainment.
While not entirely foolproof, one way to make something look crackpot is to a) make a claim that X contradicts a well accepted scientific principle and then b) stir in a lot of flummery mentioning newly discovered phenomena or relatively recent theories. The a) part gets attention (it's working) and the b) part makes it look like you're being scientific.
One of the more valuable experiences I had as a graduate student was to take several of the "crackpot" letters (all the professors I knew would get a few of these every year) and work out in some detail the explanation for what was wrong with the "innovation" being proposed. It was really practice for being a critical peer reviewer, though I didn't realize it until later. Finding the hidden flaw in "obviously" crackpot material was often extremely hard work.
I have a great fondness for people who earnestly try to find new perspectives from which to examine scientific problems. Richard Dawkins, in writing The Selfish Gene, created some stimulating currents in evolutionary thinking through just such a perspective change. I was fully convinced by at least one quantum mechanics revisionist, A. Lande, Quantum Mechanics in a New Key (1973) but I've never found anyone else who's looked at it.
Vacuum fluctuations make sense to me, even though I have little more than Hawking's popularizations to go on. Quantum gravity, I don't know what to think yet. Whether I believe in them or not makes no difference in the appearance of being crackpot -- they just look like trendy, misdirecting camouflage to dress up a minor mystery about some strange happenings when you collapse a strong magnetic field.
Of course, the trouble with this sort of crap detector is, even though it allows you to dismiss a lot of claptrap out of hand, it will likely cause you to incorrectly ignore, once in your lifetime, something that looked crackpot but eventually turned out to be important.
This white paper is interesting, if non-objective. In my opinion, the authors are insufficiently careful to distinguish between irreducible architectural advantages and disadvantages and the (temporary) advandates and disadvantages resulting from current implementation decisions. They are also a little slippery about identifying which features are already present in Alpha implementations and which are not yet delivered (e.g. SMT).
The implementation of simultaneous multithreading is something I very much would like to see. I'm impressed that they're able to do it as simply as this paper seems to imply.
One Alpha advantage (one that I think falls in the irreducible category) that I've never seen Digital/Compaq play up is the angle of binary compatibility of the Alpha instruction stream across different implementaions of Alpha. A binary executable that the compiler has tuned/targeted to a specific implementation of Alpha will still run, perhaps not quite optimally, on a later implementation.
Out-of-order execution is key, here. Because the programmer (or compiler) have to be explicit (with memory barrier instructions) about dependencies that might otherwise be hidden, the instruction stream in the binary executable file documents an idealized instruction execution order -- but any execution order that achieves the same result is also acceptable.
More outstanding data fetches, larger out-of-order instruction queue and wider simultaneous issue all work together to transparently make the old code work better. I haven't seen where increasing the VLIW bundle from 3 instructions to 6 instructions, for instance, would be as transparent -- so there's a much stronger need to recompile and maintain separate binaries targeting the various implementations of IA64.
I bought the book and immediately read it. It's great!
Now I realize that many of you already knew that, but I'm speaking as someone who hadn't already seen UF on the web (aside from a brief visit when/. announced this book was in the works).
The deconstructionists will have a great time analyzing this text -- there's more subtext than in Dilbert, more in-jokes, and both a lighter and a darker kind of humor running through.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that AMD didn't, but I like to think that the code name for this chip honors Robert Barton. He was the chief designer of a whole line of Burroughs computers, including the 5500 through the 6800. Of all the commercial systems I've ever laid hands on, these were the most innovative.
Random reinforcement is a terrible force. I set my alarm to get me up in time to see the predicted second wave and I'm glad I did.
Shortly before dawn, about 5:15 to 5:45, I spotted 52 more meteors. Full moon was fairly far down in the west but the city lights and rosy fingers of dawn were still there to contend with. I envy the people who could see colors!
Well, yes, I'm fairly confident that once I understand what's going on here, it will be consistent with known physics. But I'm still looking to understand and you've chosen to be snide rather than to provide information.
Here's the state of my current understanding of this phenomenon:
We have a periodic comet whose orbit intersects earth's orbit at about the position earth occupies every 18-19 November. Over time, bits of the comet have been separated from the main body. The forces that caused the separation of these bits have not been so great as to drive them into wildly different orbits. As we learned from Galileo, two objects of different mass fall at the same rate, therefore these bits have retained roughly the same orbit as their parent body, but occupy a different position along the orbital course. Each time the comet passes near the sun, more bits break off -- some lighter bits are driven away entirely, but bigger bits just get perturbed slightly. These perturbations serve to stretch out the original mass of the comet. Eventually, with enough time, the entire mass of the comet would tend towards a fairly uniformly distribution along this orbital path to form a sort of ring like the rings of Saturn, but for the time being, it's a lumpy, lopsided ring. The 31-year periodicity of the Leonid activity corresponds to the 31-year period of the cometary orbit. At the peaks, the earth is passing through the denser parts of the lumps along the ring while at less intense times, the earth passes through the comet's orbit at points where the ring is thin and sparse.
Not a dud, but hardly the stuff of legends. I was lucky to have two bright ones shortly after I started to watch -- these helped me locate the putative point of origin, even though, for the most part, I could see very few stars in that sector of the sky because of the lights of Manchester, NH. There I saw a lot of the little guys whose trails weren't much longer than a couple of times the moon's diameter.
Now I gotta read up on this stuff. Why is this stuff hanging around at just this point in the earth's orbit? Our planet has to hustle around the sun to keep from falling in...why haven't these little bits of comet debris fallen into the sun.
Here in Southern New Hampshire the skies are clear even if they're not dark (full moon plus all the man-made light). I just saw 5 meteors in about 15 minutes of watching, 3 whose trails stretched nearly halfway across the sky and the other 2 were little ones.
Sorry about those of you whose weather is working against them. I'm going back out to watch after grabbing another couple of layers of blanket.
I think you've pegged it. I hadn't gotten around to dumping the old contents yet and the little guys have not turned into maggots. I guess I'll continue the experiment a while longer....
Yep. It's my fault, it appears I neglected draining off the excess "worm tea" for too long and catastrophically unbalanced the micro-ecosystem. The other, smaller, worm bin is still happy, so I have an ongoing source of critters.
You're right. They're still really small and thin, so it's hard to tell exactly. They don't yet look like what I'm used to maggots looking like. I'll have to convey the entire bin contents out to the outdoor compost pile tomorrow just to avoid problems and start this bin over.
This guy is going to get an experience both with composting and with his web site. At least he'll learn something, I hope.
My worm composter bin had been running along happily for a few years and today I discovered that the red wrigglers were all dead or nearly dead and little tiny white worms had taken over (nematodes?).
OK, I read the article again.
Even more interesting, the ones I picked out as gedanken experiments were ranked 1 and 2.
The passage I remembered from Galileo's Discourses Concerning Two New Sciences has been thoughtfully excerpted and placed online.
What I find interesting is that two of the experiments were not experiments at all in the traditional sense. They were thought experiments: Galileo is generally thought not to have dropped cannonballs from the Leaning Tower of Pisa -- instead, his writings describe a thought experiment involving two unequal weights tied together with a rope. And Young's double slit experiment was also a thought experiment -- the verification came many years later.
In any case, it's divided up into suitable subject-based channels so you don't bother everyone with questions about your love life or Windows-only device -- your question is mainly looked at by people who specialize in answering questions in that particular subject area.
Now, as a company, AskMe.com has more or less left the retail question answering site on autopilot while it markets its software to companies to create knowledge sharing intranets. I do not know how people ordinarily discover AskMe any more -- must be by word-of-mouth (like this). The community of active question answerers is still fairly large despite many months of neglect. There are at least 500 people more active than I am (a few have answered 10,000 questions!) and probably another 1000 or so who are less active.
I have to agree. SI seconds are already the metric time base and choosing something as variable as a "day" as a base unit does not sit right.
.3 lightspeed, there could be a lot of discrepancy between one's personal time and objective time. You could fall back to talking in quaint planet-based time units as needed, but for really keeping track you stuck to seconds and metric (Greek) prefixes (all a little odd given that the spoken language was speculated to be descended from Chinese).
Science fiction writers can indulge in speculation on this kind of subject and work them out in some detail without necessarily getting themselves laughed at as this proposal deservedly does: Vernor Vinge's Qeng Ho spacefaring culture in A Deepness in the Sky used a metric convention along the lines you suggest: keep the second, larger human-sized units were referred to as ksecs (about a quarter of an hour), megasecs (slightly less than two weeks), etc. Between cold sleep and interstellar journeys at
As too often happens, the newspaper report leaves out much detail that might help us laypeople assess whether this judgement is consistent with justice, or is just a fluke.
In my (much lower priced) real estate dealings, the price negotiation has always been done by phone with a realtor or two in between. The price negotiation merely established the number that would appear on the Purchase&Sale agreement, which would have various other contingencies written into it. The price negotiation would never be considered the whole contract, but it would be binding in the sense that no other number could appear on the P&S.
In this situation, it appears as if the seller had another buyer on the line. Whether the negotiation of a backup contract would be in bad faith would depend on how you conducted yourself. The internal evidence from the quoted emails was that the seller implied that once the price was settled on, no other steps were required before closing the deal.
I think if I were deciding this case, I'd have wanted to punish the seller for bad faith negotiation but ultimated decided that the buyer did not yet have a valid contract -- probably on the basis that the contract isn't valid until consideration (the ernest money is offered and accepted).
[Hmm. I hit return at the wrong place and may have posted something utterly blank.]
I will long remeber encountering Fred Hoyle's science fiction. My favorite is "The Black Cloud" in which Hoyle posited intelligent space-borne entities whose internal communication was radio waves. It was excellent hard-science science fiction for its day and remains interesting today.
Hoyle's steady state hypothesis and his ideas about panspermia were interesting, but seemed to fall at the fringes of his solid science -- speculations developed in scientific dress rather than presented as science fiction entertainment.
While not entirely foolproof, one way to make something look crackpot is to a) make a claim that X contradicts a well accepted scientific principle and then b) stir in a lot of flummery mentioning newly discovered phenomena or relatively recent theories. The a) part gets attention (it's working) and the b) part makes it look like you're being scientific.
One of the more valuable experiences I had as a graduate student was to take several of the "crackpot" letters (all the professors I knew would get a few of these every year) and work out in some detail the explanation for what was wrong with the "innovation" being proposed. It was really practice for being a critical peer reviewer, though I didn't realize it until later. Finding the hidden flaw in "obviously" crackpot material was often extremely hard work.
I have a great fondness for people who earnestly try to find new perspectives from which to examine scientific problems. Richard Dawkins, in writing The Selfish Gene, created some stimulating currents in evolutionary thinking through just such a perspective change. I was fully convinced by at least one quantum mechanics revisionist, A. Lande, Quantum Mechanics in a New Key (1973) but I've never found anyone else who's looked at it.
Vacuum fluctuations make sense to me, even though I have little more than Hawking's popularizations to go on. Quantum gravity, I don't know what to think yet. Whether I believe in them or not makes no difference in the appearance of being crackpot -- they just look like trendy, misdirecting camouflage to dress up a minor mystery about some strange happenings when you collapse a strong magnetic field.
Of course, the trouble with this sort of crap detector is, even though it allows you to dismiss a lot of claptrap out of hand, it will likely cause you to incorrectly ignore, once in your lifetime, something that looked crackpot but eventually turned out to be important.
If you've seen the video of the floating frog, you're aware that paramagnetism affects can be found in a broader range of materials.
Bringing up vacuum fluctuations and quantum gravity certainly makes it look like crackpot science.
Richard Powers, also the author of Galatea 2.2.
This white paper is interesting, if non-objective. In my opinion, the authors are insufficiently careful to distinguish between irreducible architectural advantages and disadvantages and the (temporary) advandates and disadvantages resulting from current implementation decisions. They are also a little slippery about identifying which features are already present in Alpha implementations and which are not yet delivered (e.g. SMT).
The implementation of simultaneous multithreading is something I very much would like to see. I'm impressed that they're able to do it as simply as this paper seems to imply.
One Alpha advantage (one that I think falls in the irreducible category) that I've never seen Digital/Compaq play up is the angle of binary compatibility of the Alpha instruction stream across different implementaions of Alpha. A binary executable that the compiler has tuned/targeted to a specific implementation of Alpha will still run, perhaps not quite optimally, on a later implementation.
Out-of-order execution is key, here. Because the programmer (or compiler) have to be explicit (with memory barrier instructions) about dependencies that might otherwise be hidden, the instruction stream in the binary executable file documents an idealized instruction execution order -- but any execution order that achieves the same result is also acceptable.
More outstanding data fetches, larger out-of-order instruction queue and wider simultaneous issue all work together to transparently make the old code work better. I haven't seen where increasing the VLIW bundle from 3 instructions to 6 instructions, for instance, would be as transparent -- so there's a much stronger need to recompile and maintain separate binaries targeting the various implementations of IA64.
I bought the book and immediately read it. It's great!
/. announced this book was in the works).
Now I realize that many of you already knew that, but I'm speaking as someone who hadn't already seen UF on the web (aside from a brief visit when
The deconstructionists will have a great time analyzing this text -- there's more subtext than in Dilbert, more in-jokes, and both a lighter and a darker kind of humor running through.