well if you read the man page on make you would see that the -j flag is used for number of jobs. Obviously he was trying to load the box down more than doing a normal make.
Actually, I read the man page, which is why I'm wondering why he would want to do this. Under VMWare his Linux installation can only use one processor, so he can either compile one thing at a time and essentially use 100% of that processor on that one thing, or he can compile two things at a time and use 50% of the processor for each job. Maybe you could benchmark the single-processor multitasking of Linux this way, but in general I don't think you'd ever want to use the -j 2 flag on a single-processor machine since it could only slow down the compile and make your computer less responsive.
I'm running Gentoo under VMware [vmware.com] on a dual 2.2 GHz Xeon (only 1 processor makes it through to the virtual machine, though)...I started up a kernel compile withmake -j 2...
Exactly what is the point of running make -j 2 if VMWare only takes advantage of 1 processor (except maybe for shits and giggles)?
That doesn't sound like something Photoshop can't fix. It's a phone which happens to have a built-in webcam--there's only so much picture quality you can expect.
Incidentally, resolution is directly proportional to the focal ratio of a lens, i.e. for a given focal length a smaller-diameter lens will take worse pictures than a larger-diameter lens, so a small lens is actually a good excuse for bad picture quality. Of course the resolution of digital cameras is primarily limited by the size of the pixels on the array, so the lenses in these cameras are probably pretty bad since there's no point in wasting money on a good lens when all that resolution is going to be wasted on a crappy CCD or CMOS array.
Or pick up a news magazine that targets intelligentsia like the Economist. Just recently, I picked up an issue with remarkably good coverage of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organization that publishes Science. In the science section of that issue was a remarkably lucid description of photonic-crystal optical fiber and how it works, and there was also excellent coverage of competing theories in evolutionary biology and of work being done with adaptive optics to study the human eye, IIRC. Of course, the journalism in the Economist tends to be head and shoulders above most other newspapers and news magazines, so maybe it's not so much a problem of bad science journalism as it is a problem with bad journalism.
If the title bar is supposed to be red but you're seeing green, I suggest that you slow down before your face hits the monitor...:-p
(For the non-physicists in the/. readership, this is a play on the red bumper sticker that says "If this sticker looks green, you're driving too fast!" Both that sticker and this comment refer to the relativistic doppler effect, which states that an object that appears red in its rest reference frame will appear green in a reference frame that is moving toward the object at an appropriate velocity on the order of the speed of light.)
Just out of curiousity, what lasers do you work with in the infrared that are eye-safe? The only ones I can think of offhand are the communications diodes at the (relatively) new 1.55 micron wavelength, and CO2 lasers. Communications lasers at 1.55 microns are probably going to be rated Class 1 (harmless) anyway because the beam is likely to be enclosed or confined by a fiber. CO2 lasers tend to be Class 4 because they are commonly used for laser machining and therefore are likely to be sufficiently powerful to burn one's cornea or skin. I know that helium-neon (HeNe) has usable laser lines around 2 and 3 microns, but I'm not aware of anyone using HeNes at those wavelengths.
In my field, the most popular lasers are mode-locked ultrafast solid-state lasers for ultrafast imaging or spectroscopy. The central wavelength for those lasers (Ti:sapphire is the big one, but I'm also aware of Cr:LiSAF, Cr:LiCAF, and Cr:fosterite) all tend to be in the very near infrared (~800 nm), plus they tend to have very high peak powers because they are mode-locked, so they are all rated Class 4 and most definitely are not eye-safe.
I've worked with IR lasers for a few years, they are much safer than visable light devices.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. A lot of infrared (IR) lasers (common examples are Nd:YAG or Ti:sapphire) operate in the near infrared, which makes them a lot more dangerous than visible lasers of the same power because the beam is invisible to the unaided eye, but the wavelength is short enough to penetrate the cornea and damage the retina. Even worse, you can't react to something you can't perceive, so the natural blink reflex that can protect the eye against low-power visible laser beams cannot protect the eye from IR beams. I think this is one reason why many IR lasers are rated Class IV, the most dangerous rating. (Another reason is that many IR lasers tend to be high-power lasers. It does you no good that the cornea absorbs the beam if the beam is sufficiently powerful to blow a hole through it...:-p)
I hadn't thought of security considerations...I remember being told that there are two bridges that connect Middle Eastern Turkey to East European Turkey across the mouth of the Black Sea, and that to try to photograph those bridges literally risks death because of the strategic importance of those bridges. When I wrote my comment, I was thinking more about touristy stuff like museums and cathedrals and concerts and plays.
I hadn't considered those scenarios...my mind is still in tourist mode since I just got back from a mini-vacation. Lots of tourist attractions, especially in Europe, have "no photography" rules--I know firsthand that a number of European museums have such rules, as did the Schloss Schonbrunn in Vienna and quite a few churches and chapels in England. For many of these places the motivation--to compel tourists to drop lots of money on overpriced guidebooks, postcards, and souvenirs--is purely selfish.
At what point do we end up with unenforceable "no camera" rules?
Forget about unenforcable--most "no camera" rules are rubbish. I can understand "no flash photography" because the flash damages ancient artwork or distracts performers, but passive recording of an image causes no real harm. The only damage that could result from passive photography is the dilution of intellectual property, but that is an abstract, socially-constructed danger--there is no real damage to property or safety.
I think they've been very clear that Spike's attempted rape of Buffy was morally wrong (just in the way they've mentioned that event in subsequent episodes). I agree that it's a very shocking scene to show on television, but that scene plays a very pivotal role in the overall story arc since it was the event that triggered Spike to leave and seek his soul.
I just flew a DC-10 to and from England this past weekend. IMHO, the flight was more comfortable than my aforementioned 777 experience. The exception was the rather rough landing on my return flight to Detroit, but that can be attributed directly to the pilot instead of the aircraft. Again, these observations are not statistically significant by any means, although some AC will probably post a comment to that effect, anyway.:-p
I did qualify my statements as just being my impressions based on those two flights, and made no claim that it was the result of any sort of statistically significant experiment. However, the 777 flight was sufficiently unstable for me to consider to be a statistically significant data point--no other flight I've been on (including commuter turboprops in severe turbulence) has been that rough.
These aircraft [the A380] will be super efficient, and fun to fly in.
I agree. All these people rave about the 777, but how many people have flown in one? I've flown from the U.S. to Britain twice, first in a Airbus A340 about 3 years ago, and in a Boeing 777 last year. To be honest, I felt that the 777 was a big step backwards. The A340 had a much smoother ride (the 777 got tossed around by turbulence like a commuter jet), and much cooler toys (video-on-demand at each seat in economy class). Granted, it could just have been the pilot or the weather in the first case, and the airline or the changed economics of the airline industry in the second case, but those were the impressions I walked away with. Anyone else care to share their experiences?
But please, don't pin the Middle East, a region that's been in conflict since Alexander the Great's death on the US.
I didn't mean to imply that the U.S. is the root cause of all the problems in the Middle East...I guess I wasn't all that clear on that point. My point is that we helped both Saddam and Osama get to where they are today, and that is symptomatic of the inconsistency and short-sightedness of American foreign policy.
Iraq's invasion of a sovereign nation, Kuwait, was the cause of the Gulf War.
More accurately, Iraq's invasion of a major oil-producing country was the cause of the Gulf War--our motivation was purely selfish and economic. If the U.S. really subscribed to the just war theory, we would have intervened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda before they became bloodbaths of "ethnic cleansing".
Incidentally, the U.S. is the primary cause of the current mess in the Middle East. In the 1980s, the U.S. provided weapons and funding to Iraq to fight Iran, and to Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets.
Yes, muslims do not eat pork. And yes, anyone who is sufficiently religious to consider it a good idea to die in a suicide bombing for one's faith is very likely to be sufficiently religious not to eat pork.
Actually, it's been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, and I believe that it's been found to be true in terrorist cases, that terrorists have engaged in activities that are forbidden by their religion in order to evade profiling--further proof that such "fundamentalists" are often hypocrites and an affront the the religion that they claim to follow. It also proves that profiling on religious practices is likely to fail.
Does this mean that everyone must already have the tunes licenced on their computer?
That's a good point. Strictly speaking, this is equivalent to broadcasting Internet radio. Whatever happened to the issue of charging royalties for broadcasting Internet radio, and would that apply in this case?
despite the constant improvements to the design of computer hardware and software, the keyboards we use are still a throwback to the early 1980s
Actually, the QWERTY layout is a relic from the days of mechanical typewriters, which would jam if you pressed two neighboring keys too quickly in succession. The QWERTY layout was design to slow down typing so that jams would be less frequent. Seeing as how most computers don't choke no matter how quickly you type, there is no reason to adhere to the QWERTY layout except that most people are accustomed to it. This is by far a more fundamental problem with keyboard layouts than the presence of a ~/` key or the absence of a "Copy" key.
Incidentally, if you never use the ~/` key, you obviously aren't playing enough Counter-Strike...:-p
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they have a MMU that can be used for untethered spacewalks? Or is this usually not carried?
Even if they had an MMU, i imagine that a tether would be desirable so that there is at least some sort of failsafe in case the MMU fails or misfunctions. In retrospect, that risk would have been acceptable, but you know what they say about hindsight...
Considering that most the the extensions at mozdev are in alpha or beta stage, signing wouldn't imply that they are safe, either. In any case, my point was that Verisign's signature implied that Xupiter was safe. If nominally-reputable signing authorities like Verisign sign unsafe packages, it negates the security and usefulness of a package signing system, and can be even more dangerous than having no package signing at all. I'd rather have a system that doesn't allow things to install unless I explicitly allow them to instead of a system that depends on a faulty assumption that no malicious software will get signed by a signing authority.
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That doesn't sound like something Photoshop can't fix. It's a phone which happens to have a built-in webcam--there's only so much picture quality you can expect.
Incidentally, resolution is directly proportional to the focal ratio of a lens, i.e. for a given focal length a smaller-diameter lens will take worse pictures than a larger-diameter lens, so a small lens is actually a good excuse for bad picture quality. Of course the resolution of digital cameras is primarily limited by the size of the pixels on the array, so the lenses in these cameras are probably pretty bad since there's no point in wasting money on a good lens when all that resolution is going to be wasted on a crappy CCD or CMOS array.
Or pick up a news magazine that targets intelligentsia like the Economist . Just recently, I picked up an issue with remarkably good coverage of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the organization that publishes Science. In the science section of that issue was a remarkably lucid description of photonic-crystal optical fiber and how it works, and there was also excellent coverage of competing theories in evolutionary biology and of work being done with adaptive optics to study the human eye, IIRC. Of course, the journalism in the Economist tends to be head and shoulders above most other newspapers and news magazines, so maybe it's not so much a problem of bad science journalism as it is a problem with bad journalism.
If the title bar is supposed to be red but you're seeing green, I suggest that you slow down before your face hits the monitor... :-p
/. readership, this is a play on the red bumper sticker that says "If this sticker looks green, you're driving too fast!" Both that sticker and this comment refer to the relativistic doppler effect, which states that an object that appears red in its rest reference frame will appear green in a reference frame that is moving toward the object at an appropriate velocity on the order of the speed of light.)
(For the non-physicists in the
Just out of curiousity, what lasers do you work with in the infrared that are eye-safe? The only ones I can think of offhand are the communications diodes at the (relatively) new 1.55 micron wavelength, and CO2 lasers. Communications lasers at 1.55 microns are probably going to be rated Class 1 (harmless) anyway because the beam is likely to be enclosed or confined by a fiber. CO2 lasers tend to be Class 4 because they are commonly used for laser machining and therefore are likely to be sufficiently powerful to burn one's cornea or skin. I know that helium-neon (HeNe) has usable laser lines around 2 and 3 microns, but I'm not aware of anyone using HeNes at those wavelengths.
In my field, the most popular lasers are mode-locked ultrafast solid-state lasers for ultrafast imaging or spectroscopy. The central wavelength for those lasers (Ti:sapphire is the big one, but I'm also aware of Cr:LiSAF, Cr:LiCAF, and Cr:fosterite) all tend to be in the very near infrared (~800 nm), plus they tend to have very high peak powers because they are mode-locked, so they are all rated Class 4 and most definitely are not eye-safe.
I hadn't thought of security considerations...I remember being told that there are two bridges that connect Middle Eastern Turkey to East European Turkey across the mouth of the Black Sea, and that to try to photograph those bridges literally risks death because of the strategic importance of those bridges. When I wrote my comment, I was thinking more about touristy stuff like museums and cathedrals and concerts and plays.
Yup. ;-)
I hadn't considered those scenarios...my mind is still in tourist mode since I just got back from a mini-vacation. Lots of tourist attractions, especially in Europe, have "no photography" rules--I know firsthand that a number of European museums have such rules, as did the Schloss Schonbrunn in Vienna and quite a few churches and chapels in England. For many of these places the motivation--to compel tourists to drop lots of money on overpriced guidebooks, postcards, and souvenirs--is purely selfish.
I think they've been very clear that Spike's attempted rape of Buffy was morally wrong (just in the way they've mentioned that event in subsequent episodes). I agree that it's a very shocking scene to show on television, but that scene plays a very pivotal role in the overall story arc since it was the event that triggered Spike to leave and seek his soul.
I just flew a DC-10 to and from England this past weekend. IMHO, the flight was more comfortable than my aforementioned 777 experience. The exception was the rather rough landing on my return flight to Detroit, but that can be attributed directly to the pilot instead of the aircraft. Again, these observations are not statistically significant by any means, although some AC will probably post a comment to that effect, anyway. :-p
I did qualify my statements as just being my impressions based on those two flights, and made no claim that it was the result of any sort of statistically significant experiment. However, the 777 flight was sufficiently unstable for me to consider to be a statistically significant data point--no other flight I've been on (including commuter turboprops in severe turbulence) has been that rough.
Incidentally, the U.S. is the primary cause of the current mess in the Middle East. In the 1980s, the U.S. provided weapons and funding to Iraq to fight Iran, and to Al Qaeda to fight the Soviets.
It's got a "props" key...how cool is that!
Incidentally, if you never use the ~/` key, you obviously aren't playing enough Counter-Strike...
Considering that most the the extensions at mozdev are in alpha or beta stage, signing wouldn't imply that they are safe, either. In any case, my point was that Verisign's signature implied that Xupiter was safe. If nominally-reputable signing authorities like Verisign sign unsafe packages, it negates the security and usefulness of a package signing system, and can be even more dangerous than having no package signing at all. I'd rather have a system that doesn't allow things to install unless I explicitly allow them to instead of a system that depends on a faulty assumption that no malicious software will get signed by a signing authority.
Sorry...I just can't read... :-p