Funny that, my ancient, secondhand Libretto runs Win 95, and I still use it for email and web surfing and Excel spreadsheets when I'm sat at the airport.
Yes it is all relative. Linux cannot run the software I need at work on a day to day basis, therefore it is worthless, at work.
Even at home I would be hardpushed to run Linux instead of say NT4, which cost me, oh thirty bucks I think, and installed with a minimum of intervention on my part. So, basically, if Linux takes me half an hour longer to set up and use, then NT is cheaper. Even ignoring nstall time, since OO takes a couple of minutes to start every time, whereas Excel fires up instantly, if I use NT for fifteen days I am ahead.
And of course, the MS license says I can use Office at home for free, so I didn't have to pay for that.
Um, you are obviously an operating system coder of great ability, since you can detect from screenshots of an alpha that little has changed under the bonnet.
However, I just had a tiny little suspicion that maybe they get the invisible things working first and just stick any old gui over the top to get it usable.
But obviously you know far more about these things than me, so I must be wrong.
Well, if you don't like it, assuming you are a USAn, you shouldn't have voted for it. It is (or will be within a year) a Federal requirement that airbag equipped cars have a black box.
I think the approximate answer to your rhetorical questions is: How long will it be before the 60% of drivers on the road who are just plain incompetent will be driven by robots?
Let's face it North American University teams don't win the World Solar Challenge, and part of the reason for that is that it is not their main objective (to be charitable).
As you say the correct strategy would be to drive most of the night. You only lose a couple of minutes for a driver change, most teams swap drivers every 4 hours. the driver often falls asleep immediately they get out of the car.
The main reasons running at night should not be encouraged are
1) the rest of the crew need to sleep as well, you'd end up needing three-four drivers for every vehicle in the convoy, which can be ten vehicles.
2) Asutralian Wildlife gets active after dark. Hitting a roo or an emu in a solar car would be 'game over'. Several support cars have been smashed up in the past after dark as people drive to towns for a shower etc, by hitting roos.
3) The battery size is limited to 5 kWh, 3 hours running at 100 kph, or maybe 9 hours at 70 kph. As you can see, there is a great advantage in slowing down, and getting even less sleep.
Some sites are blocked by some sort of net-nanny filter. It is kind enough to tell you why it is being blocked, and who to complain to if you do actually need to see the site for business reasons.
In the example given I could see the whole article. We could not introduce a policy blocking the word 'lesbian' since we are a company that officially worships at the altar of Diversity.
I am trying to think of a (manufacturing) business related case for allowing our users to see the word 'porn', but it is a bit of a struggle.
No, I haven't. I am well aware that properly strutured problems should be able to achieve more of a benefit from multi cpu setups. Most supercomputers are designed around specific tasks, and I suspect have the programs re-written around the number of processors.
has a reasonable sounding discussion, note the average speed up for a 20% increase in clock speed is 17%, and the average increase (which he specifically says is a bad idea) for 2 processors is around 40%.
Tests on dual cpu vs single cpu are probably a bad guide when trying to establish a general rule, but (a) I'm pretty sure I didn't invent it and (b) what do YOU propose instead?
Incompatible with Excel, eg charts don't plot correctly when imported.
Slow to load (Excel opens in 5 seconds, OO in 30seconds plus), and slows down when spreadsheets get large. I can see it is ok for budgets and so on, but for big projects it just dies on its feet.
Unreliable - when it gets slow it tends to lock up.
If you have an ftp address I can send you equivalent Excel and OO spreadsheets. I will be interested to hear if there is something intrinsically wrong in my comments. FWIW this big project was started in OO and I had to switch to Excel to get it to solve in a reasonable amount of time.
Um, red face. I don't have a link. I worked it out a while back looking at benchmarks on multi cpu boards, but assumed it was common knowledge. Isn't it?
It would appear that 15-20% more gets done in a G5 processor cycle by these figures.
Most numerical tasks scale proportional to clock speed, and proportional to number of cpus^0.5 (very roughly).
So your cluster would have a predicted performance of 900MHz*10^.5, 2.846 GHz.
Your G5 should have a performance of 2GHz*2^.5, 2.828 Ghz.
So by this simple rule the dual G5/should/ be as quick, and you seem to be saying that it is 15-20% quicker. I'm happy to accept that it is a good result, but it is not really a blinding result.
For sheer number crunching per dollar you should be buying trailing edge current technology, I think - probably an Athlon 2 GHz cluster. After all, your Pentium cluster is using the CPU from a console, almost.
Good catch. My Internet PC is a 400 MHz AMD with 128 M of memory, running NT4.
Typically I would run: Mozilla email Firebird Browser OO spreadsheet MathCad carsim EditPad Agnitum antivirus Outpost firewall
Plus other bits and pieces
All at once, with no stability issues. In fact it is very rare that I have/any/ problems with that PC./This/ PC is some sort of monster with W2000 and even running serious simulation software in the background doesn't stop me running and using all the usual stuff in the foreground.
Sorry, all these Word users may well be happy (I use Editpad, I'm an engineer not a secretary) but OO's spreadsheet is slow, unreliable and incompatible.
"99% of their friends doc's can be opened, which is better than MS office self...
Oh really
Are you seriously claiming that 1% of MS Office docs cannot be opened by MS Office?
I open between 1 and 10 Office documents every day sent to me by someone else. In the last year perhaps ONE of those failed to open, ie more like 0.1% failure rate.
Also, OO cannot handle Excel spreadsheets properly. I am not going to waste my time replotting every graph just because some programmer can't be bothered to write an import filter that works.
and on a single user machine what precisely is the benefit of that?
It would take me a couple of weeks worth of evenings to reinstall my PC as-is, it has data on it that has taken 10 years to accumulate. The relative value of my data compared with the hardware cost of the machine and the effort to rebuild it is astronomical. Now admittedly I have many many CDs of backups of data, but I bet there is some recent stuff that would have slipped through the net.
Losing the system is annoying. Losing my data would be worse than a broken leg.
"the hacker part of me demands that anyone who has a web page learn HTML: it's not that hard, and it's like having a driver's license -- it's a lowest common denominator of skill. "
It is not hard admittedly, but there are programs out there (Visual Page for instance) that produce reasonably clean html code.
If an author (say) wants to make a webpage then I can see no real problem with him using a wysiwyg page generator. The communication is the key, not the medium.
I'll take it as read that you drive a car, can you double declutch, and find and fix a broken plug lead?
The way I heard it, HTML was designed as a machine written human readable language, there was no intent originally that we would sit there and edit it by hand. (Or is that an urban legend?)
Slashdot Mirror
Funny that, my ancient, secondhand Libretto runs Win 95, and I still use it for email and web surfing and Excel spreadsheets when I'm sat at the airport.
Guess how often it 'crashes'?
Oh go on.
Never. In two years.
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/02/23/1251212.s html
Yes it is all relative. Linux cannot run the software I need at work on a day to day basis, therefore it is worthless, at work.
Even at home I would be hardpushed to run Linux instead of say NT4, which cost me, oh thirty bucks I think, and installed with a minimum of intervention on my part. So, basically, if Linux takes me half an hour longer to set up and use, then NT is cheaper. Even ignoring nstall time, since OO takes a couple of minutes to start every time, whereas Excel fires up instantly, if I use NT for fifteen days I am ahead.
And of course, the MS license says I can use Office at home for free, so I didn't have to pay for that.
Um, you are obviously an operating system coder of great ability, since you can detect from screenshots of an alpha that little has changed under the bonnet.
However, I just had a tiny little suspicion that maybe they get the invisible things working first and just stick any old gui over the top to get it usable.
But obviously you know far more about these things than me, so I must be wrong.
Amen brother
I like driving fast and on the edge of control. For that I drive on circuits.
The rest of the time I am in a 2 dimensional field with random asteroids. I don't have a hyperspace button and my defence shield has only one life.
Well, if you don't like it, assuming you are a USAn, you shouldn't have voted for it. It is (or will be within a year) a Federal requirement that airbag equipped cars have a black box.
I think the approximate answer to your rhetorical questions is: How long will it be before the 60% of drivers on the road who are just plain incompetent will be driven by robots?
The other 40% will be as well.
"Same goes for other top cars"
In some bizarro world definition of 'top'.
Let's face it North American University teams don't win the World Solar Challenge, and part of the reason for that is that it is not their main objective (to be charitable).
I fell asleep reading this predictable tripe.
A waste of electrons.
Read my third point in the previous post.
As you say the correct strategy would be to drive most of the night. You only lose a couple of minutes for a driver change, most teams swap drivers every 4 hours. the driver often falls asleep immediately they get out of the car.
The main reasons running at night should not be encouraged are
1) the rest of the crew need to sleep as well, you'd end up needing three-four drivers for every vehicle in the convoy, which can be ten vehicles.
2) Asutralian Wildlife gets active after dark. Hitting a roo or an emu in a solar car would be 'game over'. Several support cars have been smashed up in the past after dark as people drive to towns for a shower etc, by hitting roos.
3) The battery size is limited to 5 kWh, 3 hours running at 100 kph, or maybe 9 hours at 70 kph. As you can see, there is a great advantage in slowing down, and getting even less sleep.
No, why do you ask?
and the Americans don't get irony. Everybody knows that.
Spoiler
Despite the evidence such as TV shows like Becker and Seinfeld.
Thank you for that. I'll bear those exclellent examples in mind.
Would they be allowed to selectively edit content?
Say, by hiding whistleblower contact details? Or changing employment law details?
But I agree with a sensible restriction.
Some sites are blocked by some sort of net-nanny filter. It is kind enough to tell you why it is being blocked, and who to complain to if you do actually need to see the site for business reasons.
In the example given I could see the whole article. We could not introduce a policy blocking the word 'lesbian' since we are a company that officially worships at the altar of Diversity.
I am trying to think of a (manufacturing) business related case for allowing our users to see the word 'porn', but it is a bit of a struggle.
No, I haven't. I am well aware that properly strutured problems should be able to achieve more of a benefit from multi cpu setups. Most supercomputers are designed around specific tasks, and I suspect have the programs re-written around the number of processors.
n 2c pu.html
http://futuretech.mirror.vuurwerk.net/spec95oct
has a reasonable sounding discussion, note the average speed up for a 20% increase in clock speed is 17%, and the average increase (which he specifically says is a bad idea) for 2 processors is around 40%.
Tests on dual cpu vs single cpu are probably a bad guide when trying to establish a general rule, but (a) I'm pretty sure I didn't invent it and (b) what do YOU propose instead?
Incompatible with Excel, eg charts don't plot correctly when imported.
Slow to load (Excel opens in 5 seconds, OO in 30seconds plus), and slows down when spreadsheets get large. I can see it is ok for budgets and so on, but for big projects it just dies on its feet.
Unreliable - when it gets slow it tends to lock up.
If you have an ftp address I can send you equivalent Excel and OO spreadsheets. I will be interested to hear if there is something intrinsically wrong in my comments. FWIW this big project was started in OO and I had to switch to Excel to get it to solve in a reasonable amount of time.
Um, red face. I don't have a link. I worked it out a while back looking at benchmarks on multi cpu boards, but assumed it was common knowledge. Isn't it?
It would appear that 15-20% more gets done in a G5 processor cycle by these figures.
and my time is 150 bucks an hour charge out rate. Figure that out over a year, even if we pay that much for a seat of Office, which I strongly doubt.
Most numerical tasks scale proportional to clock speed, and proportional to number of cpus^0.5 (very roughly).
/should/ be as quick, and you seem to be saying that it is 15-20% quicker. I'm happy to accept that it is a good result, but it is not really a blinding result.
So your cluster would have a predicted performance of 900MHz*10^.5, 2.846 GHz.
Your G5 should have a performance of 2GHz*2^.5, 2.828 Ghz.
So by this simple rule the dual G5
For sheer number crunching per dollar you should be buying trailing edge current technology, I think - probably an Athlon 2 GHz cluster. After all, your Pentium cluster is using the CPU from a console, almost.
Good catch. My Internet PC is a 400 MHz AMD with 128 M of memory, running NT4.
/any/ problems with that PC. /This/ PC is some sort of monster with W2000 and even running serious simulation software in the background doesn't stop me running and using all the usual stuff in the foreground.
Typically I would run:
Mozilla email
Firebird Browser
OO spreadsheet
MathCad
carsim
EditPad
Agnitum antivirus
Outpost firewall
Plus other bits and pieces
All at once, with no stability issues. In fact it is very rare that I have
Sorry, all these Word users may well be happy (I use Editpad, I'm an engineer not a secretary) but OO's spreadsheet is slow, unreliable and incompatible.
"99% of their friends doc's can be opened, which is better than MS office self...
Oh really
Are you seriously claiming that 1% of MS Office docs cannot be opened by MS Office?
I open between 1 and 10 Office documents every day sent to me by someone else. In the last year perhaps ONE of those failed to open, ie more like 0.1% failure rate.
Also, OO cannot handle Excel spreadsheets properly. I am not going to waste my time replotting every graph just because some programmer can't be bothered to write an import filter that works.
and on a single user machine what precisely is the benefit of that?
It would take me a couple of weeks worth of evenings to reinstall my PC as-is, it has data on it that has taken 10 years to accumulate. The relative value of my data compared with the hardware cost of the machine and the effort to rebuild it is astronomical. Now admittedly I have many many CDs of backups of data, but I bet there is some recent stuff that would have slipped through the net.
Losing the system is annoying. Losing my data would be worse than a broken leg.
"the hacker part of me demands that anyone who has a web page learn HTML: it's not that hard, and it's like having a driver's license -- it's a lowest common denominator of skill. "
It is not hard admittedly, but there are programs out there (Visual Page for instance) that produce reasonably clean html code.
If an author (say) wants to make a webpage then I can see no real problem with him using a wysiwyg page generator. The communication is the key, not the medium.
I'll take it as read that you drive a car, can you double declutch, and find and fix a broken plug lead?
The way I heard it, HTML was designed as a machine written human readable language, there was no intent originally that we would sit there and edit it by hand. (Or is that an urban legend?)