So there has been some public input to how it runs then. Great. But who is UD?
I figured this stuff was probably written more to scratch an itch than for money, which does put it into a slightly dimmer light IMO.
I've not attempted to convert to the BOINC project yet, again it seems that a linux client is something they only do when all the other projects for winderz are caught up. Sad, really.
Personally, I think its a great idea. But saddly the windows centric attitude seems to still be all-pervasive.
And that pisses me off no little bit. When someone downloads a windows client for one of those things, its typically setup to run as a screen-blanker, and at full priority. It it has entertaining doodads output on the screen it wastes cpu cycles, lots of them in doing those graphics, plus it only runs when the blanker is on. Thats often less than half the time the machine is turned on.
One of the reasons I run setiathome on my linux boxes is that its a background task, running at a nice of 19. It runs full time, including in between the keypresses as I type this, with no effect on the machine because litterally anything else that needs the cpu to get its job done gets full use of the cpu for as long as it takes to finish what its doing, like moving my keystrokes into this messages display buffer. But as I said, its munching away on that data in between my keystrokes right now.
Thats one hell of a waste of resources that could become available to the likes of folding@home if they were to make it as user friendly and invisible as setiathome is.
I submit that one linux box, running 24/7/365 as mine do, can do 5 to 10x the work in a day that a winderz box of equal power can do during the few hours each evening when its booted.
So where is the linux client to take advantage of those cycles otherwise wasted in letting the cpu cool if the box isn't running setiathome, cycles we have a plethora of?
Seems like a great question to moi.
OTOH, I tried to run folding@home on this box, but that was an unmitigated disaster, it was such a cpu hog I actually had trouble getting the tools to kill it to run. It was running at a nice=0. You could renice it, but by the time you got to a top screen, it had detected and fixed itself back to 0.
Folding@home is no doubt a worthwhile project, but any software that treats its contributors, who aren't getting a cent for their trouble and aggravation, that badly doesn't deserve to get my spare cycles. Now if they take lessons from setiathome and make it into a no effect other than a hot cpu, then it gets a bit more interesting.
Or have they fixed that squawk in the year since I tried it last? I haven't had the interest to go look after my first bad experience.
If you think its going to be nothing more than a free downloadable utility, I have a bridge in Brooklin to sell you, in fine shape, only 27 million, which it will make back in tolls in not more than 5 years.
Yeah, sure I do... Watch the next winderz viri's payload. Bet on it, if you can find a sucker here to take that bet. I'd suspect that would be a bit of a stretch though, at least for/. readers, which more than occasionally exhibit intelligence above the average Joe Sixpack. Thats what makes it interesting.
Humm, and I can't read? This is WordPerfect 8 for Linux, I'm sitting here reading the box as I type. The barcode label has an insert that reads "WP80LINUXPENGO" and it claims to work with "Debian. RedHat, Suse, TurboLinux, Mandrake, Slackware and all major linux distributions."
Unforch at the time they wrote the installer, the average kernel was in the early 2.2's and by the time the kernel got to middle 2.2's, and I'd compiled me a new one that fit my hardware better, its hardcoded installer would no longer recognize that it was being told to install in a linux system.
I even copied the installer to the hard drive and tried to hack it to accept a later kernel, but I've no idea what language it was written in. It resembled swahili as far as this old (now 70) asm, ARexx, C & Basic09 coder could tell. I even called Corel, and got told that support was $100 per incident, which left a bad taste in my mouth that probably 200 gallons of beer in the years since has not washed away. Thats why I said Corel owed me $75. Getting that back MIGHT wash it away.
I screwed around with it for an hour or so each evening over 3 or 4 days, finally said screw it, took it back to the store and pointed to the 30 day warranty printed right on the box. Got told to go pound sand since the box was unsealed. So I put it on the shelf, figuring someday it might be a collectors item, but probably after man blows hisself to kingdom come and the next dominant rad-hard species takes over whats left of this planet. At the rate we're going, we won't leave the next occupants much to work with though...
OTOH, I'm a vi man myself. Been using some flavor of it since about '86 or so.
If you want better teachers, offer better pay, and better people will apply for the jobs. If we paid high school teachers $50-60k, you'd have some very qualified candidates leaving their current jobs to teach instead.
While I agree with this, let me point out that the pay isn't any more important in the classroom than effective discipline. And in that dept the teachers hands may as well be tied behind her back. Here in WV its become so outragious that my wife got put on report for pulling two scrapping young 4th graders apart during recess one afternoon about a decade back now. If she hadn't been tenured, more by her membership in the teachers union than anything else, she would probably have been fired. The average parent today simply will not tolerate a teacher laying a hand on their little angel, why we'll sue! And often as not they win outragious amounts of money that wind up coming out of the operating budget, further reducing the available resources and maintainance of the school system.
So my plea, if your are going to throw money at what you perceive as a salary problem, then lets throw an equal amount into lobbyists to get the laws changed enough that disruptive, destructive behaviour can be effectively, quickly delt with without the threats of huge legal consequences so that the real job, pouring information into hungry heads, can be done that much more effectively. Thats how to get your moneys worth in the long run.
First off, there is not any great amount of M$ software at this location, windoze is not allowed on the premises.
Second off, I have a copy of WordPerfect 8 here, sitting on the shelf, never been installed. Paid $75 for it with taxes and all.
Why isn't it installed? Well, lets just say that in Corels infinite paranoia, they made gawd damned sure it would only run on one specific linux, theirs, of a certain release only and untouched by human hands for any updates etc.
But they didn't say that on the box of course because that would have torpedoed what sales they had. When I found it wouldn't install on RedHat by straceing the installer, I took it back to the store,and was basicly told to go pound sand, the box has been opened so we cannot refund.
Of course the fscking box was opened, how the hell else was I supposed to find out if it would install? Some sort of magic xray eyed genie to peek at the tracks on the cd and see if it would work? Mmm, well lets just say that those are in somewhat short supply around here, they are all out watching what J-Lo and Ben are up to next.
As far as I'm concerned, Corel, now Novell, owes me 75 bucks. Or a working copy of WordPerfect 8.
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
I didn't spell that out well enough I guess, when I said 2.3 degrees absolute, I was refering to absolute zero, or about 455 degrees below on the farenheit(sp) scale we US types normally use, or about -271 in C. The upper atmosphere is much warmer than that, typically -70F or so at the altitudes our airplanes can reach.
Nope, its in central CA, one of the back ways into an MD kids camp north of Sonora, very well posted at the boundaries, lemme see if I can find it on a current atlas.
Humm, It seems my 25 year old memory is somewhat mistaken, its named Calaveras Big Trees State Park, on SR 4, between Arnold and Darrington, both of which you could easily miss if you blinked going through them when I was there in 1981. Oh, and the road doesn't stretch out in front of you in there either, but turns to miss a General Sherman sized pine tree of some sort every 75 feet or so. Keeps the oil in the steering gear well warmed up you see. If I wasn't so busy driving, it would have been a very enjoyable trip through there. As it was, we were late getting a stepson & stepdaughter of mine down to the annual MD camps opening ceremonies in time, so I was pushing and the tires were complaining loudly in the corners. What looked like maybe an hours drive from Tahoe into there was more like 3, that road is a lot twistier than it looks on the maps.
Sadly Michael has now passed, but he got almost 30 years out of Myotonic MD. His kid sister, and girls are not normally susceptable to that hereditarily speaking, is also in pretty poor shape, running on borrowed time if you will. The middle brother has some joint problems, and has the characteristic bald spot of the disease, but is working (& making very good money) clear to the other end of the country as he nears 40 years of age.
If you live near there, look it up, and waste some gas to go see it, take a picnic lunch, pull off and use one of the many tables scattered about in there. Sit back and relax, and take a deep breath of some of the purest air you'll breath for a while. You will be glad you did. It will give you a new perspective on just how big (or small) you personally are.
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
So you are saying that this iron core has a small core of its own, of probably liquid fissil materiel and that keeps it hot? While possible, given the relative rarity of that materiel on the surface, and the mixing effects of the planets rotational period, I can't quite see that its sufficient to maintain the core in a molten state in the face of 4.6 billion years of cooling from the night sky. The rocky covering we live on would seem to me to be a pretty good insulator given that there are quite a few miles of it in most places.
If a sufficient amount of the heavy radioactives have settled to the center of the core, has anyone calculated how big it would have to be, and what actual heavy element it would take to keep it hot in the face of half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute for the last 4.6 billion years? It would, I'd think, have to be something with only a low level of radioactivity and a half life in the billions of years to keep it from going critical in a mass aggregation of the size required to get the required heat.
OTOH, at that depth and pressure, a semi-steady critical reaction might even be possible. Any "hiroshimas" would be very well contained by the surrounding molten iron, probably to within 1 to 20 feet for the maximum diameter of the fireball if an area went critical. We might hear a click now and then.
But my common sense then says that is not the case as that background noise would have rendered our navys hydrophones deaf to the noise of the ship/sub screws that we used, and use, to track underwater (and surface based stuff like an illicite test) goings on from several thousands of miles away.
Yes, I've read that, but the print media authors who make that statement have never satisfied me by defining the materiel and required quantities to achieve this on a billions of years time scale. I tend to go by the available clues, but those are forever hidden from our fragile & fleeting existance here on the surface. 7 miles into the mohole is as deep as man has ever been and came back to tell his grandchildren about it. What goes on down there, if anything, we can only surmise and play what if scenarios endlessly, based on what we can hear. And we don't hear much from the middle of the core.
Of course, Planet Earth is constantly gaining energy on a daily basis thanks to the generosity of The Sun.
And I believe that statement is not the actual scenario. If it was, we would long since have been toasted, say about 4.5 billion years ago because this planet started out far hotter then than it is now.
This planet, for all its cold weather here and there, still has a molten iron core from its original formation days. It loses heat to the night sky, heat both from the previous daytime solar influx over the past few weeks AND a certain amount of heat coming up from below as this iron core continues its several billion year cooldown.
One should never forget that the tempurature of the clear night sky is about 2.3 degrees absolute, and thats damned cold. Give thanks for these few miles of air, it not only has oxygen for us to breath, but often furnishes a very effective insulating blanket with its clouds of water vapor.
My take is that the night time heat loss exceeds that of the solar influx by a very small but measurable amount. Probably far less than 0.001% of the total, but there none the less. Perhaps someone who has studied this can further comment with some solid facts?
As far as the buildings not taking any energy out of the moving air because they don't move, there is still some net loss of energy from the viscosity losses if nothing else. Since the buildings are generally a much larger cross section than the windmill blades, I'd think that it would be a tossup as to which disturbs the air flow more.
Big trees OTOH, would seem to effect it to a much higher degree simply because they have so much more surface area per foot sticking up for the air to eddy and swirl about, losing energy in the process as it moves by.
In the really tall tree areas, like in Big Trees National Monument in central CA, what might be a 35 mph wind swaying the tops of those 300 foot trees, is reduced to a very gentle breeze at ground level. You are not really aware of it till you look up wondering where the wind noise is coming from.
Ditto for some of the high country that I've walked around on in Colorado. 14 foot of powder at 10,800 feet in February, makes for real work getting around when you have a microwave site sitting on the very peak of the mountain thats died and must be fixed. That rocky peak might have a 50mph 'breeze' carrying a 3 foot thick blanket of heavy powder going by it, but drop 200 feet down the hill into the trees and even 20 below becomes tolerable if you are dressed right.
But that last 1/4 mile from the end of trees to the shack, and back to the trees when you are done could kill you very easily. Been there, done that, carrying 25-35 pounds of tool boxes, spare parts and test gear, several times. On North Mountain, TBE. Thankfully, theres not that much snow to slog thru at the peak, the wind keeps it cleared away rather nicely.
Why not have them give back to the community or something constructive?
I've got something constructive the community could do with him. First, confiscate his ill gotten bank account and divy it up amongst the recipients, each getting a minumum of a 1 cent check, and the processing expenses all charged against the perp, over and above whats in his account.
Then set him up in a pillory & charge the public a penny a whack with a cat of 9 tails, unless that member of the public can bring a printout of his spam, in which case his swings are paid for, the perp is charged $100 a whack. Until he expires, then it'll be one less spammer we'll have to hunt down and kill the same day we do it for all the lawyers.
As you can tell, I don't have a hell of a lot of use for those sub-human types that think any way to make a buck is ok as long as they don't get caught. They could probably have applied that same level of intelligence toward being a productive member of the human race, made just as much money honestly, and slept a hell of a lot better at night. If they had wanted to...
With predictable results. What gets me is that no matter whom is put forth as a candidate for an impending empty seat, the other party will skewer them until they say screw it, the character assassination being done is inexcusable. Its no wonder the Pres has to wait and do recess appointments.
FWIW, I don't recall that our West Virginia Attorney General has ever signed onto that settlement. Darrel McGraw somewhat resembles a pit bull on such things.
the only friend he'll have left is the people. And we all know that's just not enough these days...
It would be, IF the media didn't filter the news so well, thereby giving the people a very different slant on the man than his real life record might show him to be.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... people put WAY too much weight on the power of the presidency. In candidate ads, news articles,/. posts, and conversations, I hear/read of all these magical powers that just don't exist.
Ahh, but you missed the most obvious way to put the lie to that statement. I give you the DOJ v M$ as a case in point. IIRC the judge who was supposed to rule, and we all expected the ruling to be against M$ from the public statements made (a definite no-no according to some), was replaced by a GWB puppet, with the expected results, business as usual for M$.
So yes, the President can find a way, and the more circuituous that path back to him, the better its swept away, drowned out by the other public noises.
Cheers, Gene
Paul is amazingly correct
on
Good Bad Attitude
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I scanned on down the list to see what sort of replies I might find, thinking if someone has said it, why should I repeat and bore.
Unforch, in about the first 75 or so posts, I didn't see a reply that even indicated the poster had actually read the article!
Color me an old fool maybe, but Paul has hit the nail of the problem square on the head, and his essay should be required reading for every congress-critter on the face of the planet, the american ones in particular. They are not just stiffling innovation, the innovation that made america what it was in the first 2/3rds of the past century, they are choking it to death and will not be satisfied until even the reflexive heaving of the chest, long after the heart has stopped, has itself stopped. Only when it is well and truely inspected by the attending physician and declared dead will the likes of Jack Valanti be happy.
I don't know how to make it any clearer to our senators and representatives, the damage they have done in the last 25 years, than to make Pauls essay required reading, and to have them say in public that they have read it and agree with Paul, and will work to revert these onerous laws, and do it before they get our votes on Nov 2nd. If they don't, then don't re-elect the incumbent, its that simple. We need a thorough house (senate too) cleaning that breaks the chain of $$$ command between hollywood, congress and yes, even the Supremes. If we don't do it now, by the next time election day rolls around, the disneys and the diebolds will have total control of the country, to rape and pillage as they please instead of undercover like they are doing now. Most of the Bill of Rights will either be ignored, or legislated out of existence. I give you the so-called Patriot Act as the worst example, but don't worry, they'll think up even worse ones given another 2, 4 or 6 years.
When that day comes, and if I'm still around, you'll recognize the likes of me, we'll be the ancient ones saying "I told you so". We remember when america stood for freedom, freedom to go out and make a million if you had a better idea, not spend the rest of your life and all your income in court trying to prove prior art against some copycat. We'll also have plenty of ammo loaded for when it gets noisy, and if it gets noisy before the message is heard, it will be a lot noisier than the Boston Tea Party was. We were relatively few then, but not anymore.
still, if you can do a big enough telescope down here to do essentially hubbles job better than it does on the orbit, then it does compare against hubble favorably.
That depends on the wavelength being observed. The search for signs of water for instance, cannot be done from the surface as our own air filters that out, very well.
But, the phb attitude seems to prevail all too often. Stupid mistakes have slammed our fingers in the press on several occasions of late, stuff that would never have happened if the inch/foot system was never allowed on the premises when doing the mars mission planning. Thats whats wastefull of resources, and its entirely the phb's fault because he grew up in the inch/foot/yard/miles system IMO. It has no business being used anyplace in a scientific endeavor except maybe to explain to Joe Sixpack in language he can relate to. And if we quit doing that even, maybe Joe Sixpack would eventually come around. Witness the debacle that making our gasolene pumps do dual displays 2 decades ago.
It was a golden opportunity to educate the Joe and Jill Sixpacks of the land, but they left the gallons display active and pissed in their own cherrios by doing it. Nobody paid any attention to the liters display, none, nada, and a golden educational opportunity was lost when the phb's found nobody was using that other, (it costs money to do it you see) display, so it went away.
I thought the Green Bank facility was all of it. The web page itself doesn't mention anything in Virginia. I live in WV, and as a semi-retired broadcast engineer whose transmitter facility is inside the Quiet Zone and must deal with the restrictions that places on us, and one who actually has an interest in such things as they are doing at G.B., I have visited the place on several occasions. I'm also doing setiathome virtually since it started, ranking 99.28% high in the amount of data processed.
You may have a headquarters in Charlottesville, but I suspect more real science is done at Green Bank WV or Soccorro NM at the VLA. Saddly, when I was in NM for a couple of years back in the late 70's, the VLA wasn't past the drawing board stage.
it doesn't really count as a plus if the earthside telescope can beat it(quite the opposite).
Sorry, you are missing the point about the HST. It is doing things that no earth based scope can ever do. Because its above the atmosphere, there are NO artifacts of atmospheric band limiting it has to deal with. That effectively continuous broadband spectrum, extending from the near ultraviolet to the far infrared allows it to take in and process light that is 100% absorbed by the moisture and other contaminants in our atmosphere.
All things considered, that effect alone is worth, and I'm making a SWAG here, at least half an F-Stop over the whole operating bandwidth, and many F-Stops of increased sensitivity at some frequencies.
No, the HST is not doing what the Webb can do when and if it gets up, but then the Webb cannot do much of the HST's job either, each being designed for completely different objectives.
And if your congress critter doesn't understand that difference, work to elect one that does, its all valuable science.
I didn't play with Flex more than a couple of days when somebody gave me what was probably a pirated copy. I was already into os9 level one then and rapidly becoming an enthusiast, which I am to this day.
I'd give yours a shot, but theres no windows here at all, 100% liunx, or the coco3 in the basement.
Does your emulator run pure 6809, or can it run 6309 stuff too?
I moved an old slow 233 p2 out to the shop a while back, put Fedora Core 2 on it and I'm designing the mechanicals to put some stepper motors on the handwheels of my micromill and let something like linuxCNC do the precision work for me. I've got good strong motors, and good motor drivers & psu enough to overdrive for decent speeds but will need to hack up something like an 8255 output circuit on a pci card to drive them with. Slow progress as it looks as if I'm going to have to drag out the mig welder and make the motor mounts out of little pieces of plate steel. Carving them out of solid alu will take too long and might not be rigid enough. They must mount to the handwheeel bearing bosses as all this moves with the work table as it moves. Its about 5" from the mount bosses to the motor, and 4 90 degree turns to get to the motor mounting bolts. I could do it in a brake, but don't have one anywhere near stout enough for the 12 gauge steel it would take to do it somewhere near right..
Yup, there was a real cpu, particularly after hitachi got done with their so called workalike that was actually a brand new design. THE OS for it was of course os9, but by the time we got done taking advantage of the new commands the 6309 had in it, os9 was running 2x faster at the same clock speed, and it was called nitros9 then. I still have one coco3 with a 6309 in it setup and running in the basement, fully expanded, 1GB hard drive, 2 monitors with seperate shells running on each. It was my workhorse machine for over a decade, until the siren song of the amiga distracted me. Now of course its linux that distracts me. But there was a period when I ate and slept with hex codes in my head because I wrote the most productive stuff in assembler.
Sigh, and then you get old and arthritic and sit around recalling the good old days.
There is no boring science. There are only boring speakers. And you're quite wrong about Fourier transforms. If you don't have an interest in the world around you, that doesn't make the world boring, it makes you boring.
Amen, I wish I'd written that. I'm 70, and have been making electrons do usefull work for about 57 of those years because I was interested
I started out fixing the neighbors radios for cigarette money when I was 13, and was working at a major brand tv wholesaler fixing the tv's the dealers couldn't fix for Iowa and the north half of Missouri by the time I was 16. Drifting over to tv broadcast engineering in 62, after testing the fuel regulators that put John Glenn up, and helping build the cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the ultimate abyss, the Marianas Trench off the Phillipines. I could go on but then you'd get the message that while I've had an interesting life so far, I'm boreing in actual fact. So I'll do like Andy Capp and shaddup.
Arexx, is a language thats very fondly remembered here. Other posters have mentioned it, but it was true, on the Amiga, Arexx is a standard, and any program that was worth wasteing the drive space on had an 'arexx port' that it opened and listened on as it launched. This port was advertised to the rest of the system just as if it was a file on the hard drive. Any other program could ADDRESS that port, send it messages and get replies thru it. This made an extremely powerfull facility out of what looked to be a simple script with a slight flavor of c src code to it but without any housekeeping like basic DIM's, C's #define and such. It did have a few types IIRC. You could use such a construction if you wanted to, and I think it made the code cleaner & more stable if you did.
As an example, on the amiga, there is a program for cron like uses, the only one that ever worked, called EzCron, written by moi and another co-worker at the tv station because we needed it to get stuff done in the middle of the night when we weren't there. Unlike any other cron-like util available at the time, this one used less than 1% of the cpu and was completely programmable, in real time too, from its matching gui.
Because this naturally blended in with some x-10 stuffs, an equally usable daemon and gui pair called EzHome came into being from the two of us about a year later.
I eventually stumbled across a true compiler for arexx, called rexxplus, and we then compiled those 2 programs for even faster execution and reduced cpu usage even when the interpretor, RexxMast, was not running. However, the program you were running with it more than likely needed RexxMast anyway so it was best left running to service the other stuff.
The ready availability of the trace output meant that a program that had to running by 5pm today, probably could be stumbling but running as a concept proof by 2pm when you were told about the requirement in the 10:30 staff meeting.
To this day, we have an old A2000 with an 040 card in it running the script I wrote that translates the teleprompter scripts from our newsroom server into the news storys you can read on the web page. You can read them about 5 minutes after the cast itself goes to air if the amiga hasn't crashed. Uptimes run just long enough we forget its there, (2-4 months) and it runs headless so a crash may not be immediately noticed. And neither I nor that script are in any way responsible for the attrocious spelling you'll encounter there. Nobody ever said a journalism major had to actually spell correctly, except maybe the prof that taught the class. But we did it with an Amiga, and ARexx, and did it first in March or April of 1997, possibly the first in the tv broadcasting business to do it for all I know. I might add that it took CBS another year to play catchup.:-)
Yeah, I liked ARexx, it let you get things done quickly, and given enough time to fine tune things, done right. Gawd how I wish we had that for linux, but this regina/rexx is a pale horse compared to Arexx. No 'ports', although I have heard rumors about that being added from time to time. I believe the expression is RSN?(tm):)
Slashdot Mirror
So there has been some public input to how it runs then. Great. But who is UD?
I figured this stuff was probably written more to scratch an itch than for money, which does put it into a slightly dimmer light IMO.
I've not attempted to convert to the BOINC project yet, again it seems that a linux client is something they only do when all the other projects for winderz are caught up. Sad, really.
CHeers, Gene
Personally, I think its a great idea. But saddly the windows centric attitude seems to still be all-pervasive.
And that pisses me off no little bit. When someone downloads a windows client for one of those things, its typically setup to run as a screen-blanker, and at full priority. It it has entertaining doodads output on the screen it wastes cpu cycles, lots of them in doing those graphics, plus it only runs when the blanker is on. Thats often less than half the time the machine is turned on.
One of the reasons I run setiathome on my linux boxes is that its a background task, running at a nice of 19. It runs full time, including in between the keypresses as I type this, with no effect on the machine because litterally anything else that needs the cpu to get its job done gets full use of the cpu for as long as it takes to finish what its doing, like moving my keystrokes into this messages display buffer. But as I said, its munching away on that data in between my keystrokes right now.
Thats one hell of a waste of resources that could become available to the likes of folding@home if they were to make it as user friendly and invisible as setiathome is.
I submit that one linux box, running 24/7/365 as mine do, can do 5 to 10x the work in a day that a winderz box of equal power can do during the few hours each evening when its booted.
So where is the linux client to take advantage of those cycles otherwise wasted in letting the cpu cool if the box isn't running setiathome, cycles we have a plethora of?
Seems like a great question to moi.
OTOH, I tried to run folding@home on this box, but that was an unmitigated disaster, it was such a cpu hog I actually had trouble getting the tools to kill it to run. It was running at a nice=0. You could renice it, but by the time you got to a top screen, it had detected and fixed itself back to 0.
Folding@home is no doubt a worthwhile project, but any software that treats its contributors, who aren't getting a cent for their trouble and aggravation, that badly doesn't deserve to get my spare cycles. Now if they take lessons from setiathome and make it into a no effect other than a hot cpu, then it gets a bit more interesting.
Or have they fixed that squawk in the year since I tried it last? I haven't had the interest to go look after my first bad experience.
Cheers, gene
If you think its going to be nothing more than a free downloadable utility, I have a bridge in Brooklin to sell you, in fine shape, only 27 million, which it will make back in tolls in not more than 5 years.
/. readers, which more than occasionally exhibit intelligence above the average Joe Sixpack. Thats what makes it interesting.
Yeah, sure I do... Watch the next winderz viri's payload. Bet on it, if you can find a sucker here to take that bet. I'd suspect that would be a bit of a stretch though, at least for
Cheers, Gene
Humm, and I can't read? This is WordPerfect 8 for Linux, I'm sitting here reading the box as I type.
The barcode label has an insert that reads "WP80LINUXPENGO" and it claims to work with "Debian. RedHat, Suse, TurboLinux, Mandrake, Slackware and all major linux distributions."
Unforch at the time they wrote the installer, the average kernel was in the early 2.2's and by the time the kernel got to middle 2.2's, and I'd compiled me a new one that fit my hardware better, its hardcoded installer would no longer recognize that it was being told to install in a linux system.
I even copied the installer to the hard drive and tried to hack it to accept a later kernel, but I've no idea what language it was written in. It resembled swahili as far as this old (now 70) asm, ARexx, C & Basic09 coder could tell. I even called Corel, and got told that support was $100 per incident, which left a bad taste in my mouth that probably 200 gallons of beer in the years since has not washed away. Thats why I said Corel owed me $75. Getting that back MIGHT wash it away.
I screwed around with it for an hour or so each evening over 3 or 4 days, finally said screw it, took it back to the store and pointed to the 30 day warranty printed right on the box. Got told to go pound sand since the box was unsealed. So I put it on the shelf, figuring someday it might be a collectors item, but probably after man blows hisself to kingdom come and the next dominant rad-hard species takes over whats left of this planet. At the rate we're going, we won't leave the next occupants much to work with though...
OTOH, I'm a vi man myself. Been using some flavor of it since about '86 or so.
But, no Cheers when talking about Corel, Gene
If you want better teachers, offer better pay, and better people will apply for the jobs. If we paid high school teachers $50-60k, you'd have some very qualified candidates leaving their current jobs to teach instead.
While I agree with this, let me point out that the pay isn't any more important in the classroom than effective discipline. And in that dept the teachers hands may as well be tied behind her back. Here in WV its become so outragious that my wife got put on report for pulling two scrapping young 4th graders apart during recess one afternoon about a decade back now. If she hadn't been tenured, more by her membership in the teachers union than anything else, she would probably have been fired. The average parent today simply will not tolerate a teacher laying a hand on their little angel, why we'll sue! And often as not they win outragious amounts of money that wind up coming out of the operating budget, further reducing the available resources and maintainance of the school system.
So my plea, if your are going to throw money at what you perceive as a salary problem, then lets throw an equal amount into lobbyists to get the laws changed enough that disruptive, destructive behaviour can be effectively, quickly delt with without the threats of huge legal consequences so that the real job, pouring information into hungry heads, can be done that much more effectively. Thats how to get your moneys worth in the long run.
Cheers, Gene
Frankly, I've never ran either one.
First off, there is not any great amount of M$ software at this location, windoze is not allowed on the premises.
Second off, I have a copy of WordPerfect 8 here, sitting on the shelf, never been installed. Paid $75 for it with taxes and all.
Why isn't it installed? Well, lets just say that in Corels infinite paranoia, they made gawd damned sure it would only run on one specific linux, theirs, of a certain release only and untouched by human hands for any updates etc.
But they didn't say that on the box of course because that would have torpedoed what sales they had. When I found it wouldn't install on RedHat by straceing the installer, I took it back to the store,and was basicly told to go pound sand, the box has been opened so we cannot refund.
Of course the fscking box was opened, how the hell else was I supposed to find out if it would install? Some sort of magic xray eyed genie to peek at the tracks on the cd and see if it would work? Mmm, well lets just say that those are in somewhat short supply around here, they are all out watching what J-Lo and Ben are up to next.
As far as I'm concerned, Corel, now Novell, owes me 75 bucks. Or a working copy of WordPerfect 8.
No Cheers this time, Gene
Thanks to the greenhouse effect (carbon dioxide, remember?) the Earth surface is not black-body radiator. The air at high altitudes, where there is not enough CO2 above to absorb its heat radiation, is much colder.
I didn't spell that out well enough I guess, when I said 2.3 degrees absolute, I was refering to absolute zero, or about 455 degrees below on the farenheit(sp) scale we US types normally use, or about -271 in C. The upper atmosphere is much warmer than that, typically -70F or so at the altitudes our airplanes can reach.
Cheers, Gene
Nope, its in central CA, one of the back ways into an MD kids camp north of Sonora, very well posted at the boundaries, lemme see if I can find it on a current atlas.
Humm, It seems my 25 year old memory is somewhat mistaken, its named Calaveras Big Trees State Park, on SR 4, between Arnold and Darrington, both of which you could easily miss if you blinked going through them when I was there in 1981. Oh, and the road doesn't stretch out in front of you in there either, but turns to miss a General Sherman sized pine tree of some sort every 75 feet or so. Keeps the oil in the steering gear well warmed up you see. If I wasn't so busy driving, it would have been a very enjoyable trip through there. As it was, we were late getting a stepson & stepdaughter of mine down to the annual MD camps opening ceremonies in time, so I was pushing and the tires were complaining loudly in the corners. What looked like maybe an hours drive from Tahoe into there was more like 3, that road is a lot twistier than it looks on the maps.
Sadly Michael has now passed, but he got almost 30 years out of Myotonic MD. His kid sister, and girls are not normally susceptable to that hereditarily speaking, is also in pretty poor shape, running on borrowed time if you will. The middle brother has some joint problems, and has the characteristic bald spot of the disease, but is working (& making very good money) clear to the other end of the country as he nears 40 years of age.
If you live near there, look it up, and waste some gas to go see it, take a picnic lunch, pull off and use one of the many tables scattered about in there. Sit back and relax, and take a deep breath of some of the purest air you'll breath for a while. You will be glad you did. It will give you a new perspective on just how big (or small) you personally are.
Cheers, Gene
The earth core would actually cool down within a couple of million years. It stays hot because of natural radioactivity.
So you are saying that this iron core has a small core of its own, of probably liquid fissil materiel and that keeps it hot? While possible, given the relative rarity of that materiel on the surface, and the mixing effects of the planets rotational period, I can't quite see that its sufficient to maintain the core in a molten state in the face of 4.6 billion years of cooling from the night sky. The rocky covering we live on would seem to me to be a pretty good insulator given that there are quite a few miles of it in most places.
If a sufficient amount of the heavy radioactives have settled to the center of the core, has anyone calculated how big it would have to be, and what actual heavy element it would take to keep it hot in the face of half the surface being a black body radiator to a night sky tempurature of 2.3 degrees absolute for the last 4.6 billion years? It would, I'd think, have to be something with only a low level of radioactivity and a half life in the billions of years to keep it from going critical in a mass aggregation of the size required to get the required heat.
OTOH, at that depth and pressure, a semi-steady critical reaction might even be possible. Any "hiroshimas" would be very well contained by the surrounding molten iron, probably to within 1 to 20 feet for the maximum diameter of the fireball if an area went critical. We might hear a click now and then.
But my common sense then says that is not the case as that background noise would have rendered our navys hydrophones deaf to the noise of the ship/sub screws that we used, and use, to track underwater (and surface based stuff like an illicite test) goings on from several thousands of miles away.
Yes, I've read that, but the print media authors who make that statement have never satisfied me by defining the materiel and required quantities to achieve this on a billions of years time scale. I tend to go by the available clues, but those are forever hidden from our fragile & fleeting existance here on the surface. 7 miles into the mohole is as deep as man has ever been and came back to tell his grandchildren about it. What goes on down there, if anything, we can only surmise and play what if scenarios endlessly, based on what we can hear. And we don't hear much from the middle of the core.
Cheers, Gene
Of course, Planet Earth is constantly gaining energy on a daily basis thanks to the generosity of The Sun.
And I believe that statement is not the actual scenario. If it was, we would long since have been toasted, say about 4.5 billion years ago because this planet started out far hotter then than it is now.
This planet, for all its cold weather here and there, still has a molten iron core from its original formation days. It loses heat to the night sky, heat both from the previous daytime solar influx over the past few weeks AND a certain amount of heat coming up from below as this iron core continues its several billion year cooldown.
One should never forget that the tempurature of the clear night sky is about 2.3 degrees absolute, and thats damned cold. Give thanks for these few miles of air, it not only has oxygen for us to breath, but often furnishes a very effective insulating blanket with its clouds of water vapor.
My take is that the night time heat loss exceeds that of the solar influx by a very small but measurable amount. Probably far less than 0.001% of the total, but there none the less. Perhaps someone who has studied this can further comment with some solid facts?
As far as the buildings not taking any energy out of the moving air because they don't move, there is still some net loss of energy from the viscosity losses if nothing else. Since the buildings are generally a much larger cross section than the windmill blades, I'd think that it would be a tossup as to which disturbs the air flow more.
Big trees OTOH, would seem to effect it to a much higher degree simply because they have so much more surface area per foot sticking up for the air to eddy and swirl about, losing energy in the process as it moves by.
In the really tall tree areas, like in Big Trees National Monument in central CA, what might be a 35 mph wind swaying the tops of those 300 foot trees, is reduced to a very gentle breeze at ground level. You are not really aware of it till you look up wondering where the wind noise is coming from.
Ditto for some of the high country that I've walked around on in Colorado. 14 foot of powder at 10,800 feet in February, makes for real work getting around when you have a microwave site sitting on the very peak of the mountain thats died and must be fixed. That rocky peak might have a 50mph 'breeze' carrying a 3 foot thick blanket of heavy powder going by it, but drop 200 feet down the hill into the trees and even 20 below becomes tolerable if you are dressed right.
But that last 1/4 mile from the end of trees to the shack, and back to the trees when you are done could kill you very easily. Been there, done that, carrying 25-35 pounds of tool boxes, spare parts and test gear, several times. On North Mountain, TBE. Thankfully, theres not that much snow to slog thru at the peak, the wind keeps it cleared away rather nicely.
Cheers, Gene
Why not have them give back to the community or something constructive?
I've got something constructive the community could do with him. First, confiscate his ill gotten bank account and divy it up amongst the recipients, each getting a minumum of a 1 cent check, and the processing expenses all charged against the perp, over and above whats in his account.
Then set him up in a pillory & charge the public a penny a whack with a cat of 9 tails, unless that member of the public can bring a printout of his spam, in which case his swings are paid for, the perp is charged $100 a whack. Until he expires, then it'll be one less spammer we'll have to hunt down and kill the same day we do it for all the lawyers.
As you can tell, I don't have a hell of a lot of use for those sub-human types that think any way to make a buck is ok as long as they don't get caught. They could probably have applied that same level of intelligence toward being a productive member of the human race, made just as much money honestly, and slept a hell of a lot better at night. If they had wanted to...
Cheers, Gene
With predictable results. What gets me is that no matter whom is put forth as a candidate for an impending empty seat, the other party will skewer them until they say screw it, the character assassination being done is inexcusable. Its no wonder the Pres has to wait and do recess appointments.
Cheers, Gene
FWIW, I don't recall that our West Virginia Attorney General has ever signed onto that settlement. Darrel McGraw somewhat resembles a pit bull on such things.
Cheers, Gene
the only friend he'll have left is the people. And we all know that's just not enough these days...
It would be, IF the media didn't filter the news so well, thereby giving the people a very different slant on the man than his real life record might show him to be.
Cheers, Gene
I've said it before, and I'll say it again... people put WAY too much weight on the power of the presidency. In candidate ads, news articles, /. posts, and conversations, I hear/read of all these magical powers that just don't exist.
Ahh, but you missed the most obvious way to put the lie to that statement. I give you the DOJ v M$ as a case in point. IIRC the judge who was supposed to rule, and we all expected the ruling to be against M$ from the public statements made (a definite no-no according to some), was replaced by a GWB puppet, with the expected results, business as usual for M$.
So yes, the President can find a way, and the more circuituous that path back to him, the better its swept away, drowned out by the other public noises.
Cheers, Gene
I scanned on down the list to see what sort of replies I might find, thinking if someone has said it, why should I repeat and bore.
Unforch, in about the first 75 or so posts, I didn't see a reply that even indicated the poster had actually read the article!
Color me an old fool maybe, but Paul has hit the nail of the problem square on the head, and his essay should be required reading for every congress-critter on the face of the planet, the american ones in particular. They are not just stiffling innovation, the innovation that made america what it was in the first 2/3rds of the past century, they are choking it to death and will not be satisfied until even the reflexive heaving of the chest, long after the heart has stopped, has itself stopped. Only when it is well and truely inspected by the attending physician and declared dead will the likes of Jack Valanti be happy.
I don't know how to make it any clearer to our senators and representatives, the damage they have done in the last 25 years, than to make Pauls essay required reading, and to have them say in public that they have read it and agree with Paul, and will work to revert these onerous laws, and do it before they get our votes on Nov 2nd. If they don't, then don't re-elect the incumbent, its that simple. We need a thorough house (senate too) cleaning that breaks the chain of $$$ command between hollywood, congress and yes, even the Supremes. If we don't do it now, by the next time election day rolls around, the disneys and the diebolds will have total control of the country, to rape and pillage as they please instead of undercover like they are doing now. Most of the Bill of Rights will either be ignored, or legislated out of existence. I give you the so-called Patriot Act as the worst example, but don't worry, they'll think up even worse ones given another 2, 4 or 6 years.
When that day comes, and if I'm still around, you'll recognize the likes of me, we'll be the ancient ones saying "I told you so". We remember when america stood for freedom, freedom to go out and make a million if you had a better idea, not spend the rest of your life and all your income in court trying to prove prior art against some copycat. We'll also have plenty of ammo loaded for when it gets noisy, and if it gets noisy before the message is heard, it will be a lot noisier than the Boston Tea Party was. We were relatively few then, but not anymore.
No Cheers this time, Gene
still, if you can do a big enough telescope down here to do essentially hubbles job better than it does on the orbit, then it does compare against hubble favorably.
That depends on the wavelength being observed. The search for signs of water for instance, cannot be done from the surface as our own air filters that out, very well.
But, the phb attitude seems to prevail all too often. Stupid mistakes have slammed our fingers in the press on several occasions of late, stuff that would never have happened if the inch/foot system was never allowed on the premises when doing the mars mission planning. Thats whats wastefull of resources, and its entirely the phb's fault because he grew up in the inch/foot/yard/miles system IMO. It has no business being used anyplace in a scientific endeavor except maybe to explain to Joe Sixpack in language he can relate to. And if we quit doing that even, maybe Joe Sixpack would eventually come around. Witness the debacle that making our gasolene pumps do dual displays 2 decades ago.
It was a golden opportunity to educate the Joe and Jill Sixpacks of the land, but they left the gallons display active and pissed in their own cherrios by doing it. Nobody paid any attention to the liters display, none, nada, and a golden educational opportunity was lost when the phb's found nobody was using that other, (it costs money to do it you see) display, so it went away.
Cheers, Gene
I thought the Green Bank facility was all of it. The web page itself doesn't mention anything in Virginia. I live in WV, and as a semi-retired broadcast engineer whose transmitter facility is inside the Quiet Zone and must deal with the restrictions that places on us, and one who actually has an interest in such things as they are doing at G.B., I have visited the place on several occasions. I'm also doing setiathome virtually since it started, ranking 99.28% high in the amount of data processed.
You may have a headquarters in Charlottesville, but I suspect more real science is done at Green Bank WV or Soccorro NM at the VLA. Saddly, when I was in NM for a couple of years back in the late 70's, the VLA wasn't past the drawing board stage.
Cheers, Gene
am now a staff astronomer at NRAO in Virginia.
Humm, the last time I was there, it was still in Green Bank, West Virginia. Near the town of Davis.
Did they move it just in the last year?
Cheers, Gene
it doesn't really count as a plus if the earthside telescope can beat it(quite the opposite).
Sorry, you are missing the point about the HST. It is doing things that no earth based scope can ever do. Because its above the atmosphere, there are NO artifacts of atmospheric band limiting it has to deal with. That effectively continuous broadband spectrum, extending from the near ultraviolet to the far infrared allows it to take in and process light that is 100% absorbed by the moisture and other contaminants in our atmosphere.
All things considered, that effect alone is worth, and I'm making a SWAG here, at least half an F-Stop over the whole operating bandwidth, and many F-Stops of increased sensitivity at some frequencies.
No, the HST is not doing what the Webb can do when and if it gets up, but then the Webb cannot do much of the HST's job either, each being designed for completely different objectives.
And if your congress critter doesn't understand that difference, work to elect one that does, its all valuable science.
Cheers, Gene
I didn't play with Flex more than a couple of days when somebody gave me what was probably a pirated copy. I was already into os9 level one then and rapidly becoming an enthusiast, which I am to this day.
I'd give yours a shot, but theres no windows here at all, 100% liunx, or the coco3 in the basement.
Does your emulator run pure 6809, or can it run 6309 stuff too?
I moved an old slow 233 p2 out to the shop a while back, put Fedora Core 2 on it and I'm designing the mechanicals to put some stepper motors on the handwheels of my micromill and let something like linuxCNC do the precision work for me. I've got good strong motors, and good motor drivers & psu enough to overdrive for decent speeds but will need to hack up something like an 8255 output circuit on a pci card to drive them with. Slow progress as it looks as if I'm going to have to drag out the mig welder and make the motor mounts out of little pieces of plate steel. Carving them out of solid alu will take too long and might not be rigid enough. They must mount to the handwheeel bearing bosses as all this moves with the work table as it moves. Its about 5" from the mount bosses to the motor, and 4 90 degree turns to get to the motor mounting bolts. I could do it in a brake, but don't have one anywhere near stout enough for the 12 gauge steel it would take to do it somewhere near right..
Tomorrow is another day though.
Cheers, Gene
Yup, there was a real cpu, particularly after hitachi got done with their so called workalike that was actually a brand new design. THE OS for it was of course os9, but by the time we got done taking advantage of the new commands the 6309 had in it, os9 was running 2x faster at the same clock speed, and it was called nitros9 then. I still have one coco3 with a 6309 in it setup and running in the basement, fully expanded, 1GB hard drive, 2 monitors with seperate shells running on each. It was my workhorse machine for over a decade, until the siren song of the amiga distracted me. Now of course its linux that distracts me. But there was a period when I ate and slept with hex codes in my head because I wrote the most productive stuff in assembler.
Sigh, and then you get old and arthritic and sit around recalling the good old days.
Cheers, Gene
There is no boring science. There are only boring speakers. And you're quite wrong about Fourier transforms. If you don't have an interest in the world around you, that doesn't make the world boring, it makes you boring.
Amen, I wish I'd written that. I'm 70, and have been making electrons do usefull work for about 57 of those years because I was interested
I started out fixing the neighbors radios for cigarette money when I was 13, and was working at a major brand tv wholesaler fixing the tv's the dealers couldn't fix for Iowa and the north half of Missouri by the time I was 16. Drifting over to tv broadcast engineering in 62, after testing the fuel regulators that put John Glenn up, and helping build the cameras that were on the Trieste when it went down into the ultimate abyss, the Marianas Trench off the Phillipines. I could go on but then you'd get the message that while I've had an interesting life so far, I'm boreing in actual fact. So I'll do like Andy Capp and shaddup.
Cheers, Gene
One word: Infinitely
Cheers, Gene
Arexx, is a language thats very fondly remembered here. Other posters have mentioned it, but it was true, on the Amiga, Arexx is a standard, and any program that was worth wasteing the drive space on had an 'arexx port' that it opened and listened on as it launched. This port was advertised to the rest of the system just as if it was a file on the hard drive. Any other program could ADDRESS that port, send it messages and get replies thru it. This made an extremely powerfull facility out of what looked to be a simple script with a slight flavor of c src code to it but without any housekeeping like basic DIM's, C's #define and such. It did have a few types IIRC. You could use such a construction if you wanted to, and I think it made the code cleaner & more stable if you did.
:-)
:)
As an example, on the amiga, there is a program for cron like uses, the only one that ever worked, called EzCron, written by moi and another co-worker at the tv station because we needed it to get stuff done in the middle of the night when we weren't there. Unlike any other cron-like util available at the time, this one used less than 1% of the cpu and was completely programmable, in real time too, from its matching gui.
Because this naturally blended in with some x-10 stuffs, an equally usable daemon and gui pair called EzHome came into being from the two of us about a year later.
I eventually stumbled across a true compiler for arexx, called rexxplus, and we then compiled those 2 programs for even faster execution and reduced cpu usage even when the interpretor, RexxMast, was not running. However, the program you were running with it more than likely needed RexxMast anyway so it was best left running to service the other stuff.
The ready availability of the trace output meant that a program that had to running by 5pm today, probably could be stumbling but running as a concept proof by 2pm when you were told about the requirement in the 10:30 staff meeting.
To this day, we have an old A2000 with an 040 card in it running the script I wrote that translates the teleprompter scripts from our newsroom server into the news storys you can read on the web page. You can read them about 5 minutes after the cast itself goes to air if the amiga hasn't crashed. Uptimes run just long enough we forget its there, (2-4 months) and it runs headless so a crash may not be immediately noticed. And neither I nor that script are in any way responsible for the attrocious spelling you'll encounter there. Nobody ever said a journalism major had to actually spell correctly, except maybe the prof that taught the class. But we did it with an Amiga, and ARexx, and did it first in March or April of 1997, possibly the first in the tv broadcasting business to do it for all I know. I might add that it took CBS another year to play catchup.
Yeah, I liked ARexx, it let you get things done quickly, and given enough time to fine tune things, done right. Gawd how I wish we had that for linux, but this regina/rexx is a pale horse compared to Arexx. No 'ports', although I have heard rumors about that being added from time to time. I believe the expression is RSN?(tm)
Cheers, Gene