Actually I believe that a higher than average number of physicists belive in some kind of "God", whereas a lower than average number of biologists, geneticists do. Just try and find a physics based popular science book that doesn't have a final "what does this mean about God" type chapter in it, probably the last chapter. Even many pure tetx books have one of those in it. I think most physicists would not deny the possibility of a God.
OK thats fine if your job is looking after a network. You have the time, knowledge and motivation to stay up to date. On the desktop is a different story however. Most users just don't bother. The sad truth is that even a programmer I know who ought to know better still uses Win95 at home and if they can't be persuaded to make sure they're PC's are secure who can be? Personally I don't understand linux or bsd or whatever. I'm a programmer with 5+ years development on windows plus some time on VMS but I've never had the time or reason to get to know linux or BSD. I tried once and gave up after a few weeks because I couldn't get it to be stable. I was trying to customise stuff and configure it, and to be honest I was probably making a real mess. The problem with linux is that if you don't know what you are doing but have to try and admin your system you can very quickly start to feel totally overwhelmed with little or no help at hand. No good games, bad development enviroments compared to Visual C++, and frustratingly confusing file system model for someone who has really only known windows. I can't think of any reason why I would now choose to run linux as my primary desktop OS. On a server or firewall, yes maybe, but more likely I'd run a BSD, but untill I have the need for a seperate server or firewall at home, I'll be sticking to XP, secure in the knowledge that as long as I run a software firewall, anti-virus software, keep up to date with patches, use firebird instead of IE and am moderately sensible, the chances of my system being hacked are pretty minimal.
no no no. if you must have 2 CPUs go for 2 low end opteron chips. They'll scale almost linearly compared to rougly 50% for dual celerons, Xeons, Althon XP's etc.
I wouldn't say that intel and AMD are against dual CPU machines on the desktop exactly, its just that they cost too much for most users, and most of the time money is better spent on a high end single processor machine than a dual processor one. Of course that is mostly to do with the fact that most SMP systems available up until now haven't scaled very well, not least because with Athlon MP's and Xeons the second CPU has to share the available bandwith with the first. Now though there is the Opteron dual processor system and for the first time low end SMP systems scale memory bandwidth linearly with the number of CPUs so a system with 2 CPU's operates almost twice as fast as a single CPU machine, whereas before you'd be lucky to get a 50% improvement. What will be intersting to see in 2005 will be the dual core Athlon FX type chips. These will basically be 2 of the current Athlon 64 (754 pin) CPU's on a single die each with it's own single channel memory controller. The question is, what are they going to call these chips? They'll have a PR rating of about 6800, just using 2 of the currently available cores!!
Anyone is able to patch it who knows that the bug exists. Of course this requires all linux users to subscribe to security advisories or regularly check for new vulnerabilities. Then they need to have learnt how to merge the patched code and compile the kernel. Somehow I see this as a problem for my 80 year old grandmother, but she is quite capable of saying "Yes" when her Windows XP machine tells her she needs to let it update itself.
How much time do you spend checking for new problems in your OS and all the rest of your software? Wouldn't that be time better spent working or doing something fun? Of course you probably are such a sad case that patching your kernel IS fun, in which case knock yourself out, but stop looking down your nose at those that actually choose to have a life.
One of the great quotes regarding scientific progress decribes it as the process of discounting a theory which is wrong in favour of a theory which is more subtly wrong.
wheras now you can only be accused of wanting somebodies children to die of parkinsons some time in the future because you won't allow stem cell research now.
well there certainly seems to be a better chance of finding it there than wherever you were posting from. At least we are able to maintain our concentration from the start of a sentence until the end of it.
the problem with the evolution model is that someone who bases a business on a fork which is unpopular could suddenly find themselves left out in the wilderness. I think the point that the doctor was trying to make was that forking is bad for software customers, because following a bad fork can cost a large amount of money to correct and so adds to the TCO.
As usual/.r's look at the issue from the developers standpoint and fail to realise that anything which keeps developers in a job or doing more coding adds to the TCO. Thus merging is expensive, doing in house maintainance is expensive, replacing a dead branch with a live one is expensive, not least in additional training costs.
You've got to remember that software is a tool that just has to be kept useful. It doesn't need to have a good life.
You'll find that Ars has some very nice articles on many hardware topics including PPC970 internals, x86-64, pipelining and superscalar execution, general cpu stuff, memory tech including the bandwidth and latency.
Actually the microsoft article says that the manufacturers of those types of device can licence the FAT technology for 25c per item. What it doesn't say explicitly, but could be implied by the article, is that everyone else who uses FAT has to talk to microsoft to agree other licencing terms.
Except that there are already Athlon 64 laptops available, and next year AMD plans to produce 64 bit chips which dissapate just 30 watts of heat, compared to the 70-90 of todays chips. These will make mobile 64 bit computing a serious possibility, even for those on a budget. Compare this to Intels plans for 100 Watts of heat waste from their next range of chips and you begin to see that AMD's future is very bright.
You're confused. They don't require you to have > 2Gb of physical RAM, they need you to have > 2Gb of virtual address space. So that's 256 Mb RAM + 1.75 Gb free disk space. At worst.
Actually a lot of that 2Gb could be taken up with stuff that hasn't been loaded yet, or with stuff that might never be loaded.
Of course, you're making the classic American mistake, which is to think left and right, democrat and republican. Even under Clinton, supposedly a left wing guy, America was pretty far to the right of most European countries. The truth is BOTH democrats and Republicans are broadly conservative and both are controlled by a cabal of rich businessmen. While you can only realistically choose from two parties who cater mostly for vested interests who control the selection of candidates through the supply of money, what you have is in practice a fascist state (which is basically defined as the merger of the state and corporations) that just happens to look like a democracy. When people think fascist they think of Hitler and Mussolini where they came to power by election and took over as dictators. However, it works the other way too. If the state is taken over by corporation who then install a puppet president, then you still have a fascist state, but one that looks OK if you don't look too hard.
The only way for there to be a real change in America is for everyone to boycott the two main parties and get someone else in power. Someone who doesn't owe their presidency to big oil or big media.
The other extremely worrying thing of course is the unholy alliance between big business, the government and far right Christian extremism, people who believe that the second coming of Christ won't happen until the Jewish people are all back in a fully restored Israel.
I really don't know why you Americans are so concerned about the voting system because it really doesn't matter. You only have a choice of one corporate whore over another, and neither can get as far as getting the party nomination without being effectively approved by the vested interests and power brokers who really run your country. Face facts, it really is a choice of Kang or Kodos, the voting system is pure window dressing.
Don't forget, choice is an illusion created by those with power to control those without.
well we Brits may be the only other major contributor of troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean to say the British people support the war. In fact, according to this article at the Times newspaper (A generally conservative UK paper) only 1 in 4 Brits support the shrub's handling of Iraq, and he can expect to meet significant protests when he comes to see us next week. Personally I expect to see people burning the stars and stripes on the streets of London, and while I have many American friends, and think that American people in general are nice, friendly and sincere, I think your government is borderline fascist, with an unhealthy mix of Christian fundamentalism and neocons. Interestingly mussolini once said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it involves the merger of corporates and the and state and if corporatism doesn't neatly describe the current state of US politics and also coincidentally in so called "red" china then I don't know what does.
This article details, amongst other things how US taxpayers are eploited by US corporates to subsidize their ventures in China. Through the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank, corporate investments in China are subsidized, and any losses incurred are socialized -- while the profits remain private and legitimate market competition is undermined.
Of course many of the people who directly benefited financially from this are directors of companies who invested in China who now have significant influence on the current administration, not least Dick Cheney who now is I'm sure also benefiting quite nicely from Halliburton's sorry, America's, current adventure in Iraq.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to one-up you. I'm fairly impressed that my former personal tutor when I studied physics at aber, Geraint Thomas, managed to get his name and work on the front page of the Times. The thing that occured to me when I saw the picture was that Dr Geraint Thomas IIRC was a supporter of Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist party) and a former colleage of Prof. Phil Williams, the Plaid Cymru member of the welsh assembly who died this year (I was actually sitting in Dr Thomas' office when we heard Phil had been elected), and that perhaps he would not be all that upset if the picture on the front page of the Times were true. Or at least, I bet a small grin managed to escape his beard at the thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I believe that a higher than average number of physicists belive in some kind of "God", whereas a lower than average number of biologists, geneticists do. Just try and find a physics based popular science book that doesn't have a final "what does this mean about God" type chapter in it, probably the last chapter. Even many pure tetx books have one of those in it. I think most physicists would not deny the possibility of a God.
Kudos for the blackadder reference. Nice job!!
OK thats fine if your job is looking after a network. You have the time, knowledge and motivation to stay up to date. On the desktop is a different story however. Most users just don't bother. The sad truth is that even a programmer I know who ought to know better still uses Win95 at home and if they can't be persuaded to make sure they're PC's are secure who can be? Personally I don't understand linux or bsd or whatever. I'm a programmer with 5+ years development on windows plus some time on VMS but I've never had the time or reason to get to know linux or BSD. I tried once and gave up after a few weeks because I couldn't get it to be stable. I was trying to customise stuff and configure it, and to be honest I was probably making a real mess. The problem with linux is that if you don't know what you are doing but have to try and admin your system you can very quickly start to feel totally overwhelmed with little or no help at hand. No good games, bad development enviroments compared to Visual C++, and frustratingly confusing file system model for someone who has really only known windows. I can't think of any reason why I would now choose to run linux as my primary desktop OS. On a server or firewall, yes maybe, but more likely I'd run a BSD, but untill I have the need for a seperate server or firewall at home, I'll be sticking to XP, secure in the knowledge that as long as I run a software firewall, anti-virus software, keep up to date with patches, use firebird instead of IE and am moderately sensible, the chances of my system being hacked are pretty minimal.
not only that, but a gravastar on the outside might explain why the expansion is speeding up. Just a thought.
no no no. if you must have 2 CPUs go for 2 low end opteron chips. They'll scale almost linearly compared to rougly 50% for dual celerons, Xeons, Althon XP's etc.
I wouldn't say that intel and AMD are against dual CPU machines on the desktop exactly, its just that they cost too much for most users, and most of the time money is better spent on a high end single processor machine than a dual processor one. Of course that is mostly to do with the fact that most SMP systems available up until now haven't scaled very well, not least because with Athlon MP's and Xeons the second CPU has to share the available bandwith with the first. Now though there is the Opteron dual processor system and for the first time low end SMP systems scale memory bandwidth linearly with the number of CPUs so a system with 2 CPU's operates almost twice as fast as a single CPU machine, whereas before you'd be lucky to get a 50% improvement. What will be intersting to see in 2005 will be the dual core Athlon FX type chips. These will basically be 2 of the current Athlon 64 (754 pin) CPU's on a single die each with it's own single channel memory controller. The question is, what are they going to call these chips? They'll have a PR rating of about 6800, just using 2 of the currently available cores!!
Anyone is able to patch it who knows that the bug exists. Of course this requires all linux users to subscribe to security advisories or regularly check for new vulnerabilities. Then they need to have learnt how to merge the patched code and compile the kernel. Somehow I see this as a problem for my 80 year old grandmother, but she is quite capable of saying "Yes" when her Windows XP machine tells her she needs to let it update itself.
How much time do you spend checking for new problems in your OS and all the rest of your software? Wouldn't that be time better spent working or doing something fun? Of course you probably are such a sad case that patching your kernel IS fun, in which case knock yourself out, but stop looking down your nose at those that actually choose to have a life.
But if God made using stem cells for theraputic cloning possible, then we're allowed to do it.
OK so he made murder possible and yes, we are allowed to do it, it's just that we'll all be judged individually on our actions when he meet Him.
If there is no clear moral reason not to allow theraputic cloning then it should be left for each individuals concience.
I agree. May God strike all those who participate in stem cell research dead if he doesn't like it.
What? They're still alive. I guess God must be in favour of stem cell research then. Clone away!
One of the great quotes regarding scientific progress decribes it as the process of discounting a theory which is wrong in favour of a theory which is more subtly wrong.
Sadly I can't remember who said it.
wheras now you can only be accused of wanting somebodies children to die of parkinsons some time in the future because you won't allow stem cell research now.
Yes thats obviously the logical choice.
well there certainly seems to be a better chance of finding it there than wherever you were posting from. At least we are able to maintain our concentration from the start of a sentence until the end of it.
the problem with the evolution model is that someone who bases a business on a fork which is unpopular could suddenly find themselves left out in the wilderness. I think the point that the doctor was trying to make was that forking is bad for software customers, because following a bad fork can cost a large amount of money to correct and so adds to the TCO.
/.r's look at the issue from the developers standpoint and fail to realise that anything which keeps developers in a job or doing more coding adds to the TCO. Thus merging is expensive, doing in house maintainance is expensive, replacing a dead branch with a live one is expensive, not least in additional training costs.
As usual
You've got to remember that software is a tool that just has to be kept useful. It doesn't need to have a good life.
You'll find that Ars has some very nice articles on many hardware topics including PPC970 internals, x86-64, pipelining and superscalar execution, general cpu stuff, memory tech including the bandwidth and latency.
Give it a read.
Actually the microsoft article says that the manufacturers of those types of device can licence the FAT technology for 25c per item. What it doesn't say explicitly, but could be implied by the article, is that everyone else who uses FAT has to talk to microsoft to agree other licencing terms.
Quite right. By 2038 computing power will be measured in qubits
maybe.
Except that there are already Athlon 64 laptops available, and next year AMD plans to produce 64 bit chips which dissapate just 30 watts of heat, compared to the 70-90 of todays chips. These will make mobile 64 bit computing a serious possibility, even for those on a budget. Compare this to Intels plans for 100 Watts of heat waste from their next range of chips and you begin to see that AMD's future is very bright.
You're confused. They don't require you to have > 2Gb of physical RAM, they need you to have > 2Gb of virtual address space. So that's 256 Mb RAM + 1.75 Gb free disk space. At worst.
Actually a lot of that 2Gb could be taken up with stuff that hasn't been loaded yet, or with stuff that might never be loaded.
I happy he's here. It makes it so much easier to smack him around the head.
Of course, you're making the classic American mistake, which is to think left and right, democrat and republican. Even under Clinton, supposedly a left wing guy, America was pretty far to the right of most European countries. The truth is BOTH democrats and Republicans are broadly conservative and both are controlled by a cabal of rich businessmen. While you can only realistically choose from two parties who cater mostly for vested interests who control the selection of candidates through the supply of money, what you have is in practice a fascist state (which is basically defined as the merger of the state and corporations) that just happens to look like a democracy. When people think fascist they think of Hitler and Mussolini where they came to power by election and took over as dictators. However, it works the other way too. If the state is taken over by corporation who then install a puppet president, then you still have a fascist state, but one that looks OK if you don't look too hard.
The only way for there to be a real change in America is for everyone to boycott the two main parties and get someone else in power. Someone who doesn't owe their presidency to big oil or big media.
The other extremely worrying thing of course is the unholy alliance between big business, the government and far right Christian extremism, people who believe that the second coming of Christ won't happen until the Jewish people are all back in a fully restored Israel.
I really don't know why you Americans are so concerned about the voting system because it really doesn't matter. You only have a choice of one corporate whore over another, and neither can get as far as getting the party nomination without being effectively approved by the vested interests and power brokers who really run your country. Face facts, it really is a choice of Kang or Kodos, the voting system is pure window dressing.
Don't forget, choice is an illusion created by those with power to control those without.
well we Brits may be the only other major contributor of troops in Iraq, but that doesn't mean to say the British people support the war. In fact, according to this article at the Times newspaper (A generally conservative UK paper) only 1 in 4 Brits support the shrub's handling of Iraq, and he can expect to meet significant protests when he comes to see us next week. Personally I expect to see people burning the stars and stripes on the streets of London, and while I have many American friends, and think that American people in general are nice, friendly and sincere, I think your government is borderline fascist, with an unhealthy mix of Christian fundamentalism and neocons. Interestingly mussolini once said that fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it involves the merger of corporates and the and state and if corporatism doesn't neatly describe the current state of US politics and also coincidentally in so called "red" china then I don't know what does.
This article details, amongst other things how US taxpayers are eploited by US corporates to subsidize their ventures in China. Through the Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank, corporate investments in China are subsidized, and any losses incurred are socialized -- while the profits remain private and legitimate market competition is undermined.
Of course many of the people who directly benefited financially from this are directors of companies who invested in China who now have significant influence on the current administration, not least Dick Cheney who now is I'm sure also benefiting quite nicely from Halliburton's sorry, America's, current adventure in Iraq.
Yes, Phil Williams will be sorely missed. RIP.
Tom Mason.
Phys. atmos phys 95-98
Prince Charles studied at Aber in 1969.
I'm sorry, but I'm going to one-up you. I'm fairly impressed that my former personal tutor when I studied physics at aber, Geraint Thomas, managed to get his name and work on the front page of the Times. The thing that occured to me when I saw the picture was that Dr Geraint Thomas IIRC was a supporter of Plaid Cymru (Welsh Nationalist party) and a former colleage of Prof. Phil Williams, the Plaid Cymru member of the welsh assembly who died this year (I was actually sitting in Dr Thomas' office when we heard Phil had been elected), and that perhaps he would not be all that upset if the picture on the front page of the Times were true. Or at least, I bet a small grin managed to escape his beard at the thought.