As a game player I don't care what the next generation engine wants in poly budget, I care what the framerate will be on the games I play today. Actually I rarely care too much about the average fps shown in benchmarks but rather the min fps, because it is the min fps that shows as stutter in the game. In the future if I need to I will buy a new card to play those more demanding games. Of course maybe I'm a bit weird, I buy the card that can achieve my minimum performance level for around $100, not the fastest most expensive card available.
That is true only of the most inefficient of solar cells like those used in solar calculators. For high efficiency cells that are produced today for power generation the energy payback for their building materials ranges from a few months to a year and a half. Considering a well maintained solar stack can last 25+ years you obviously are getting back many times more energy than you put in.
Doesn't suprise me at ALL. First Energy is the same company that operates the David Bessy nuclear plant that fell into such disrepair that the Federal Energy Commision ordered them not to restart it. The reason was an 8" hole in the reactor containment unit which had been eaten by corrosive acid! Even after the containment cap was replaced the commission was reluctant to allow the plant to restart as there were other worries about the plants safety and self-inspection records. Basically these guys suck and are the definition of what bad things happen when a formerly regulated monopoly is handed free infrastructure and told to make as much money as possible off it with minimal investment in a newly deregulated environment.
No, it would have reduced the death toll by about 90% assuming total loss of crew, passengers, and hijackers. The final death toll from 9/11 was only 2,819 according to the medical examiners reports from NY and Washington, of those 240 were aboard the airliners. To me the amazing thing is how few lives were lost. The twin towers alone hosted around 6,500 people daily, then there was the Pentagon offices which were mostly under construction at the time, etc. Still the origional poster WAS wrong, grenade resistant doors would have helped, but I think going forward they won't be nearly as effective as the non-passive passengers will be. No major US airline will be sucessfully hijacked within a generation because the passengers will NOT sit back and let it happen, in the past they did because that is what they were told to do and it was generally good advice, the hijackers made a political statement, got some people out of jail or whatever and then gave themselves up. Now everyone aboard will be fearing for their friends and loved ones so they will fight to the last man/woman.
Yep, a friend of my dad's setup his big reflecting telescope in the front yard and all the neighbors came over and looked at things. It was incredible before the nearly full moon came out. It was also great timing because we were in one of the minor meteor showers which would not normally be all that impressive but with such little light polution you could see almost all of the shooting stars that were falling at a rate of one per 3 minutes or so.
Typicaly they use home brewed explosives to try to level a building and fail miserably,
Terrorists typicaly speaking are stupid people fueled by cause and emotion not rational.
Right.... Tell that to the Israeli's who are on board buses or in markets that are blown up on a monthly if not weekly basis, or the people who had friends and family in either the Murry Federal building or the world trade center. Tell it to the Australians who had family in the Bali night club. As to the intelligence of the terrorists, again I think you vastly underestimate them, the footsoldiers in their war of terror may be ignorant, but the leaders and planners are anything but. The first attack on the trade centers was planned by a guy with a degree in engineering, and it might have worked had they not planted the bomb in the wrong spot (they planted it inside the structure of the building not under the supporting wall like he had instructed).
As to the likelyhood of terrorists attacking the power grid in the US, why not, taking out 2-3 major trunklines by taking out a single tower per line would result in several day blackouts as the lines were repaired, and if done in rural areas and done with timed explosives it could be accomplished with little chance of being caught.
This is exactly why I haven't used eBay since they bough PayPal. Before PayPal they had a service where I could directly place the funds in escro using my credit card. This worked well and the people who had the accounts that accepted this were generally merchants who did enough volume and had enough invested in their account that they were not going to defraud you. Sure it kept out some small sellers, but the things I looked for were generally auctioned several times a week, not once a year so being a bit more choosy about the vendors I dealt with wasn't a limiting factor. PayPal on the other hand has basically no anti-fraud protection mechanisms, and as you can see on paypalsucks.com often abuses the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. Until PayPal is regulated as a banking entity or eBay brings back a real escro system I will not be using it.
Mostly it has to do with saving the setup/teardown time for a normal phone call. Once you push the button on the walkie talkie feature the connection is open and you can start talking, no need to wait for a call setup and the phone to start dialing.
Phrack magazine had an article about this in issue 54. There is some preprocessing you need to do to eliminate things like power supply harmonics. Also you have to do it with the mic removed. The article can be found Here
Would you rather they simulate weapons or resume detonation testing of new designs?? The fact is the US has a VERY large and ever aging supply of weapons, most of the cycle time so far from the ASCI projects has gone towards stewardship of the existing crop of weapons, making sure that the stockpiles are safe and also that they will be effective(if god forbid they should be needed). Also, reduced consumption is the only thing that will reduce our environmental "problems". Personally I think anyone who thinks the US has much of an environmental problem needs to get out of LA/New York/whichever big city they live in. I have spent a lot of time enjoying the national parks of this great country and I can tell you that there are a lot of pristine wilderness areas and a lot of generally green land here (in fact the US landmass is one of the least densly populated non-desert areas in the world).
You have to be kidding, the SX-6 which powers the Earth Simulator already disipates well over 230W, this is as much as nearly 5 Athlon XP 1900+'s (47.7W typical), SPECfp2000 results is 634 for the Athlon, to be competitive on a SPEC/Watt ratio the SX-6 would have to score almost 3,200, or more than 50% higher than the highest published result. You are correct that the Athlon would be hampered by the memory bus, as well as the 4GB per process limit. My guess is the Opteron will probably be VERY competitive after a die shrink, and with the onboard memory controller it might also compete in the memory bandwidth arena assuming they integrate QDR support in the next rev. Finally IBM's fab's are good but fab tech has little to do with this.
Actually, the customized vector machines will usually achieve a MUCH higher %age of their theoretical peak computational capacity on certain "hard" problems then a cluster of comodity machines. The nearness of the nodes dictates that, if the average near neighbor latency is an order of magnitude faster then problems that are communications bound are going to be able to achieve much higher throughput on a tightly coupled cluster of faster, more specialized nodes then they would be able to on a larger more loosly coupled cluster of comodity systems. If your problem happens to be one which is trivially paralized and you are not hamstrung by limitations like the 4GB limit on 32bit CPU's then of course you should use the cluster of cheap systems, but if you have a problem which has no such mapping then the only way to effectivly achieve your goals might be a custom machine like the Cray SV series or the NEC SX series. Just because a particular machine has a bad track record doesn't mean that a whole class of systems should be condemned, on the contrary, many supercomputer centers have had good luck with their vector machines.
Woohoo, and now when your PC gets trojaned and sends a couple million emails while you are at work YOU can be bankrupted! Just what I want, not. What is likely to happen if spam gets bad enough is that the 6-10 largest ISP's will agree to only accept incoming email from each others SMTP servers, if you aren't a customer of one of them then get a free account of maybe a cheap one time cost account. Users found to be abusing the trusted system with spam will be banned permenantly.
Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird has great Bayesian spam filtering, accuracy for me after training on a training set of about 400 spam message was about 99.7% for the first couple months, then it started to creap towards 97%, so I went through and retrained it, brought it back up to 99.7% again. It also has a simple switch to not run filtering on anything from people in your personal address book (basically whitelist ppl in your address book before filtering even starts). I have only had one false positive out of over 3K legit messages recieved (not counting commercial email that wasn't technically spam but that I really didn't mind losing =)
The cost of network bandwidth, storage space, and CPU cycles that fighting spam costs is NOTHING compared to the opportunity cost on the time lost to manually filtering it. Laws won't work because the spamers will just move the servers and the shell companies offshore, in most cases their products are already illegal (like Viagra without a prescription) so they can already be prosecuted under existing laws, so why write new ones just because it starts on the internet???
Umm, you don't think China with its vast resources and large pool of educated personell can design missle guidence chips, don't make me laugh. Remember we designed accurate ICBM's in the 70's when computers were in their infancy, today it's a sucker who doesn't think any industrial country can do the same. Hell you don't even have to be all that industrialized, North Korea makes their own and they are about as poor a country as you can get (are they the only country in the world that spends a higher percentage of GPD on their military than the US?).
I'll say they will have to degrade, considering it costs over $22K/year to house a prisoner in the US (not counting amortization of the $100K per cell construction costs) it would be MUCH cheaper to just hire people for minimum wage =) Also most manufacturing has left the US and Japan, have standards of living suddenly plumeted into the toiket? No you say, maybe that's because we have become a service and idea driven economy, much like the enriched parts of China and India will become. Do I think that the wealth will be evenly distributed or that it will end hunger in either country? Don't be rediculous, I know better, but a sizable chunk of the population will be brought out the subsistance living they have today, at the very least it can't get much worse for them.
No, you may only transfer the liscense as part of a wholesale transfer of assets, you may not sell it to ANYONE. Basically the only one who can sell the software is the origional OEM, which is their right as it is their copyrighted works and they can do with it as they wish so long as their customers are willing to accept their agreement. (These are NOT clickware liscenses, they are bonified contracts).
You can't DO that, you can not mix GPL and non-GPL code in the same codebase like that. So long as the GPL is valid SCO can not distribute their IP in the manner they are attempting, even if it is invalid it means SCO and everyone else who uses the SCO code has no rights to the rest of the kernal so the only thing SCO can collect fees for is indemnity to past infringement, not forward ability to use linux with their IP.
Wrong, patent rights do not need to be asserted to be maintained. That is only true of trademark dilution, eg Kleenex and Xerox. With patents you may not be able to get back liabilities from the infringing company but you can be granted injunctive relief barring them from further infringing activity.
I think you could do it by expanding the files to a ram drive and loading win.exe from there, unlike NT kernal OS's the 95 lineage os's don't care about what drive the system was started from.
Why install off cd or DVD, just network install. In the two large corp environments I have worked in both Windows and Linux were net-installed, windows by using commercial installer products and linux using Redhat's Kickstart.
I doubt it Geicko is probably like most insurance companies, they probably have a very large developer base. I can't speak to Geicko specifically but Progressive is based near me and I know several people who work there. The reason Progressive is so tech focused is that they don't really sell insurance. Insurance is just a way to get volumes of dollars in house to build up their float. In most markets the amount of profit an insurance company can make per person is fairly tightly regulated, and Progressive will often be below even this level, because they want to build up volume. The services of actually offering and distributing on the insurance is just costs, which is why they try to minimize these operations through technology. It might seem to the consumer that the fast claims process is there for them but it is really there to minimize the number of claims adjusters they need in any given area. They also have their strong web presence which is convenient for customers and cheap for them to process. Minimizing these costs allows them to maxamize the profit from the return on their float. Other than developers their largest employment area is probably call centers, for those users it doesn't matter what they run, it's probably just an interface to a black screen app or a modern GUI on front of a similar backend, which can easily be developed for Linux, for the remaining part of the staff (adjusters, actuaries and admin staff), they will simply have training costs, probably not significant compared to the savings achievable on the whole enterprise, or they can leave those personell on Windows.
I remember Alan Cox stating that he was using a Media-GX based system to write and test the soundblaster layer for linux because the media-GX was a better fit to the SB standard then any of Creatives then current chips. He reasoned that if he could get closer to the origional standard then most clones would work, and aparantly he was right =)
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As a game player I don't care what the next generation engine wants in poly budget, I care what the framerate will be on the games I play today. Actually I rarely care too much about the average fps shown in benchmarks but rather the min fps, because it is the min fps that shows as stutter in the game. In the future if I need to I will buy a new card to play those more demanding games. Of course maybe I'm a bit weird, I buy the card that can achieve my minimum performance level for around $100, not the fastest most expensive card available.
That is true only of the most inefficient of solar cells like those used in solar calculators. For high efficiency cells that are produced today for power generation the energy payback for their building materials ranges from a few months to a year and a half. Considering a well maintained solar stack can last 25+ years you obviously are getting back many times more energy than you put in.
Doesn't suprise me at ALL. First Energy is the same company that operates the David Bessy nuclear plant that fell into such disrepair that the Federal Energy Commision ordered them not to restart it. The reason was an 8" hole in the reactor containment unit which had been eaten by corrosive acid! Even after the containment cap was replaced the commission was reluctant to allow the plant to restart as there were other worries about the plants safety and self-inspection records. Basically these guys suck and are the definition of what bad things happen when a formerly regulated monopoly is handed free infrastructure and told to make as much money as possible off it with minimal investment in a newly deregulated environment.
No, it would have reduced the death toll by about 90% assuming total loss of crew, passengers, and hijackers. The final death toll from 9/11 was only 2,819 according to the medical examiners reports from NY and Washington, of those 240 were aboard the airliners. To me the amazing thing is how few lives were lost. The twin towers alone hosted around 6,500 people daily, then there was the Pentagon offices which were mostly under construction at the time, etc. Still the origional poster WAS wrong, grenade resistant doors would have helped, but I think going forward they won't be nearly as effective as the non-passive passengers will be. No major US airline will be sucessfully hijacked within a generation because the passengers will NOT sit back and let it happen, in the past they did because that is what they were told to do and it was generally good advice, the hijackers made a political statement, got some people out of jail or whatever and then gave themselves up. Now everyone aboard will be fearing for their friends and loved ones so they will fight to the last man/woman.
Yep, a friend of my dad's setup his big reflecting telescope in the front yard and all the neighbors came over and looked at things. It was incredible before the nearly full moon came out. It was also great timing because we were in one of the minor meteor showers which would not normally be all that impressive but with such little light polution you could see almost all of the shooting stars that were falling at a rate of one per 3 minutes or so.
Typicaly they use home brewed explosives to try to level a building and fail miserably,
Terrorists typicaly speaking are stupid people fueled by cause and emotion not rational.
Right.... Tell that to the Israeli's who are on board buses or in markets that are blown up on a monthly if not weekly basis, or the people who had friends and family in either the Murry Federal building or the world trade center. Tell it to the Australians who had family in the Bali night club. As to the intelligence of the terrorists, again I think you vastly underestimate them, the footsoldiers in their war of terror may be ignorant, but the leaders and planners are anything but. The first attack on the trade centers was planned by a guy with a degree in engineering, and it might have worked had they not planted the bomb in the wrong spot (they planted it inside the structure of the building not under the supporting wall like he had instructed).
As to the likelyhood of terrorists attacking the power grid in the US, why not, taking out 2-3 major trunklines by taking out a single tower per line would result in several day blackouts as the lines were repaired, and if done in rural areas and done with timed explosives it could be accomplished with little chance of being caught.
This is exactly why I haven't used eBay since they bough PayPal. Before PayPal they had a service where I could directly place the funds in escro using my credit card. This worked well and the people who had the accounts that accepted this were generally merchants who did enough volume and had enough invested in their account that they were not going to defraud you. Sure it kept out some small sellers, but the things I looked for were generally auctioned several times a week, not once a year so being a bit more choosy about the vendors I dealt with wasn't a limiting factor. PayPal on the other hand has basically no anti-fraud protection mechanisms, and as you can see on paypalsucks.com often abuses the victim rather than the perpetrator of the crime. Until PayPal is regulated as a banking entity or eBay brings back a real escro system I will not be using it.
Mostly it has to do with saving the setup/teardown time for a normal phone call. Once you push the button on the walkie talkie feature the connection is open and you can start talking, no need to wait for a call setup and the phone to start dialing.
Phrack magazine had an article about this in issue 54. There is some preprocessing you need to do to eliminate things like power supply harmonics. Also you have to do it with the mic removed. The article can be found Here
Would you rather they simulate weapons or resume detonation testing of new designs?? The fact is the US has a VERY large and ever aging supply of weapons, most of the cycle time so far from the ASCI projects has gone towards stewardship of the existing crop of weapons, making sure that the stockpiles are safe and also that they will be effective(if god forbid they should be needed). Also, reduced consumption is the only thing that will reduce our environmental "problems". Personally I think anyone who thinks the US has much of an environmental problem needs to get out of LA/New York/whichever big city they live in. I have spent a lot of time enjoying the national parks of this great country and I can tell you that there are a lot of pristine wilderness areas and a lot of generally green land here (in fact the US landmass is one of the least densly populated non-desert areas in the world).
You have to be kidding, the SX-6 which powers the Earth Simulator already disipates well over 230W, this is as much as nearly 5 Athlon XP 1900+'s (47.7W typical), SPECfp2000 results is 634 for the Athlon, to be competitive on a SPEC/Watt ratio the SX-6 would have to score almost 3,200, or more than 50% higher than the highest published result. You are correct that the Athlon would be hampered by the memory bus, as well as the 4GB per process limit. My guess is the Opteron will probably be VERY competitive after a die shrink, and with the onboard memory controller it might also compete in the memory bandwidth arena assuming they integrate QDR support in the next rev. Finally IBM's fab's are good but fab tech has little to do with this.
Actually, the customized vector machines will usually achieve a MUCH higher %age of their theoretical peak computational capacity on certain "hard" problems then a cluster of comodity machines. The nearness of the nodes dictates that, if the average near neighbor latency is an order of magnitude faster then problems that are communications bound are going to be able to achieve much higher throughput on a tightly coupled cluster of faster, more specialized nodes then they would be able to on a larger more loosly coupled cluster of comodity systems. If your problem happens to be one which is trivially paralized and you are not hamstrung by limitations like the 4GB limit on 32bit CPU's then of course you should use the cluster of cheap systems, but if you have a problem which has no such mapping then the only way to effectivly achieve your goals might be a custom machine like the Cray SV series or the NEC SX series. Just because a particular machine has a bad track record doesn't mean that a whole class of systems should be condemned, on the contrary, many supercomputer centers have had good luck with their vector machines.
Woohoo, and now when your PC gets trojaned and sends a couple million emails while you are at work YOU can be bankrupted! Just what I want, not. What is likely to happen if spam gets bad enough is that the 6-10 largest ISP's will agree to only accept incoming email from each others SMTP servers, if you aren't a customer of one of them then get a free account of maybe a cheap one time cost account. Users found to be abusing the trusted system with spam will be banned permenantly.
Mozilla Mail/Thunderbird has great Bayesian spam filtering, accuracy for me after training on a training set of about 400 spam message was about 99.7% for the first couple months, then it started to creap towards 97%, so I went through and retrained it, brought it back up to 99.7% again. It also has a simple switch to not run filtering on anything from people in your personal address book (basically whitelist ppl in your address book before filtering even starts). I have only had one false positive out of over 3K legit messages recieved (not counting commercial email that wasn't technically spam but that I really didn't mind losing =)
The cost of network bandwidth, storage space, and CPU cycles that fighting spam costs is NOTHING compared to the opportunity cost on the time lost to manually filtering it. Laws won't work because the spamers will just move the servers and the shell companies offshore, in most cases their products are already illegal (like Viagra without a prescription) so they can already be prosecuted under existing laws, so why write new ones just because it starts on the internet???
Umm, you don't think China with its vast resources and large pool of educated personell can design missle guidence chips, don't make me laugh. Remember we designed accurate ICBM's in the 70's when computers were in their infancy, today it's a sucker who doesn't think any industrial country can do the same. Hell you don't even have to be all that industrialized, North Korea makes their own and they are about as poor a country as you can get (are they the only country in the world that spends a higher percentage of GPD on their military than the US?).
I'll say they will have to degrade, considering it costs over $22K/year to house a prisoner in the US (not counting amortization of the $100K per cell construction costs) it would be MUCH cheaper to just hire people for minimum wage =) Also most manufacturing has left the US and Japan, have standards of living suddenly plumeted into the toiket? No you say, maybe that's because we have become a service and idea driven economy, much like the enriched parts of China and India will become. Do I think that the wealth will be evenly distributed or that it will end hunger in either country? Don't be rediculous, I know better, but a sizable chunk of the population will be brought out the subsistance living they have today, at the very least it can't get much worse for them.
No, you may only transfer the liscense as part of a wholesale transfer of assets, you may not sell it to ANYONE. Basically the only one who can sell the software is the origional OEM, which is their right as it is their copyrighted works and they can do with it as they wish so long as their customers are willing to accept their agreement. (These are NOT clickware liscenses, they are bonified contracts).
You can't DO that, you can not mix GPL and non-GPL code in the same codebase like that. So long as the GPL is valid SCO can not distribute their IP in the manner they are attempting, even if it is invalid it means SCO and everyone else who uses the SCO code has no rights to the rest of the kernal so the only thing SCO can collect fees for is indemnity to past infringement, not forward ability to use linux with their IP.
Wrong, patent rights do not need to be asserted to be maintained. That is only true of trademark dilution, eg Kleenex and Xerox. With patents you may not be able to get back liabilities from the infringing company but you can be granted injunctive relief barring them from further infringing activity.
I think you could do it by expanding the files to a ram drive and loading win.exe from there, unlike NT kernal OS's the 95 lineage os's don't care about what drive the system was started from.
Why install off cd or DVD, just network install. In the two large corp environments I have worked in both Windows and Linux were net-installed, windows by using commercial installer products and linux using Redhat's Kickstart.
I doubt it Geicko is probably like most insurance companies, they probably have a very large developer base. I can't speak to Geicko specifically but Progressive is based near me and I know several people who work there. The reason Progressive is so tech focused is that they don't really sell insurance. Insurance is just a way to get volumes of dollars in house to build up their float. In most markets the amount of profit an insurance company can make per person is fairly tightly regulated, and Progressive will often be below even this level, because they want to build up volume. The services of actually offering and distributing on the insurance is just costs, which is why they try to minimize these operations through technology. It might seem to the consumer that the fast claims process is there for them but it is really there to minimize the number of claims adjusters they need in any given area. They also have their strong web presence which is convenient for customers and cheap for them to process. Minimizing these costs allows them to maxamize the profit from the return on their float. Other than developers their largest employment area is probably call centers, for those users it doesn't matter what they run, it's probably just an interface to a black screen app or a modern GUI on front of a similar backend, which can easily be developed for Linux, for the remaining part of the staff (adjusters, actuaries and admin staff), they will simply have training costs, probably not significant compared to the savings achievable on the whole enterprise, or they can leave those personell on Windows.
Yeah after that my dad made the joke that Bill G should buy a supertanker or aircraft carrier and show em both up =)
I remember Alan Cox stating that he was using a Media-GX based system to write and test the soundblaster layer for linux because the media-GX was a better fit to the SB standard then any of Creatives then current chips. He reasoned that if he could get closer to the origional standard then most clones would work, and aparantly he was right =)