Hyperthreading isn't a magic double-the-speed-of-your-processor feature. In fact, ti can slow a computer down. What it is nice for is for running multiple threads or programs more efficiently.
To make things fair, the
second processor in the G5 was switched off, as well as the other dual sysytems. Then, they all ran Jet3d. Even with un-optimized code and one processor, the G5 performance is impressive.
Please try reading the summary at least if not the article.
Oh right cool. I guess that's not so bad then. I was never particualrly enthralled with the idea of doing lots of chemistry or biology. And I've now decided that lots more maths would be pretty bad too. In fact, judging form recent exam results, perhaps a bit les physics would be helpful.
IRc, you can't do straight PHysics at cam.ac.uk, only natural sceicne, with a heavy physics component? Part of the reaons I go to ox.ac.uk and get to call you a dirty tab;^) Of course, maybe that's only a recent change. Anyway, getting back on topic, much as I hate to agree with tab, you're right and the lihgt is red-shifted. Wrote an essay partly on that for a Finals paper a couple of weeks ago.
Momentum is a vector quantity i.e. direction matters. If a photon has momentum p then after a perfect reflection, it has momentum -p relative to the original direction of momentum beore reflection, meaning that it has lost 2p of momentum, so whatever it reflected off must have gained 2p.
If you scroll up to the top of the page, you'll see alot of replies talking about this.
Basically, the equation you gave is a rough approximation that is valid at velocities significantly less than the speed of light, for masive objects. For photons, E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is frequency. It's a funky quantum physics thing. The magnitude of momentum (i.e. it's strength, with no reference to direction) is p = h/(lambda) where lambda is the wavelength.
Actually, the pressure is sufficient if you have a sufficiently light and sufficiently reflective material. Its just not necessarily practical to build a sail out of such a material and there are limits on how reflective a light material can be.
If you're bothered by photons having momentum and kinetic energy which is harnessed in the sail, consider the electromagnetic waves comeing from the sun instead. There is an energy flux over an area, called the Poynting vector (N = E x H), which allows you to calculate the pressure an electromagnetic wave exerts on an object (which varies depending on its reflectivity).
Actually, with the gravity of the sun, the angle of the sail and the direction of motion relative to the orbit the vessel is in, it is perfectly possible to tack. If you direct the sail so that your thrust is oppossing your orbital velocity or adding to it, you can alter the radius of your orbit.
No problem. I think I sounded a little cranky in the last post, so sorry about that. Battery life is better for Apple laptops, but only for the first year or two. After that, the batteries start to go off, just like any other laptop and life drops to an hour or less. Which is a real pain if you're a student since replacing them isn't financially viable. Of course, if you can afford a 17" laptop, you can likely afford a new battery every couple of years.
As for G5 laptops, IIRC, there isn't a huge heat differential between them and G4s. Certainly they're cooler than Intel/AMD designs. It's probably more the fact that there are two of them in the case that necessitates the multiple fans. And lots of big slow fans is quieter than a couple of fast fans, so that's doubtlesly part of the reason for the 9. I"m sure a single G5 would fit fine in a laptop. It'll be a while though before there are enough chips available to reliably supply towers and laptops though and Apple will want to leave a nice big power gap between the towers and everything else to revive sales. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw G5 laptops this time next year, but definitely not any time this side of Christmas.
You do realise that when they say 'dual' they acually mean that HT makes the processor appear to be a DP set up and that there's only actually one processsor in there, right? There are no multi-processor P4s. The MP enabled version of the chip is the Xeon. There is only one P4 in that laptop.
Sorry if it annoys you, but the US saved western civilization twice in the past century and while we know you will never thank us for it you could at least acknowledge that it happened.
The problem with the way you are saying it is that it can sound as if the US did it alone na dno-one else made a significant contribution. Could the US have won without the Russians? Well, no. With no war in Russia, Britain would likely have been defeated and all of Europe would have fallen. Could the US have won without Britain? Well, no. Nowhere to invade Germany from, no-one providing convoy assistance, no-one building radar, no-one breaking codes, no-one holding the Germans up in Africa. Without the other nations involved, Europe and big chunks of Africa would by under Nazi rule.
The US did not save western civilisation. The US, British, Soviets et. al. working together won the war. The hold any one country up as the be all and end all saviour of the world is a gross over-simplification and does a great dishonour to the millions of non-US poeople who served and died.
Now, I'm not saying that that was what you meant, but it's the way I imagine it would come across to many people and is part of the reason we end up with flame wars over the subject.
Well, I don't often have someone else using my iBook either, but nice to be able to show the feature off every once in a while:^) What's so super-slick about the mew cmd-tab interface?
Good to hear we don't need Quartz Extreme for Exposé - I'm stuck on an iBook 500 with 8MB Rage Mobility. Does the user switching work okay? With the funky spinning screen? Does the Finder remember your view preferences now? Always forgets whether I'm using list, column or icon view for each folder. I usually use column , but it seems to want icon most of the time or list, so this is my pet peeve.
First off, I've expressly stated that I don't believe I'm any better than anyone else. Anyone who claims they're better than anyone else has problems, in many, many ways. As for the Bible being wrotten by people with a 'vested interest', do you tihnk they had a vested interest in dying? Because that's what they did. Paul died in jail, John and Mathew were executed. The disciples almost without exception, were killed for preaching their beliefs. Sounds like they actually beleived what they were saying, rather than having an ulterior motive.
IIRC, Muslims say you can get into heaven without being a Muslim. Christianity says you must ask Jesus for forgiveness for your sins and accept God's love.
I'd say you're very self-centric
How am I being self-centred? When people swear using God's name, they're breaking his commands and demeaning his name, which I find offensive on behalf of God. That's being God-centred, not self-centred. If I was self-centred I wouldn't care what people were saying about God.
It depends on how you define "human". The bible gives mankind the right to rule nature, and by defining unbelievers as "subhuman", christians have held and traded slaves for centuries.
None of those actions were in the least bit Christian. Unbeleivers are most certianly not sub-human. It's arrogance like that that Jesus despised and one of the many reasons he rebuked the Pharisees and called them hypcrites. Anyone who thinks he's better than his fellow man just because he's a Christian (or for any reason) is being a self-righteous, unChristian hypocrite. At the very least, it is unloving to treat someone as sub-human until they convert. Jesus didn't say "I'm not going up on that cross until you lot convert"; he went up on it amidst mocking and jeering when all had abandoned him. We're called to follow Jesus and that means loving them, including when they don't believe.
If you define the deity by acceptance of (the earthly) Jesus taking part in it then the old testament god cannot be the same god as the god in the new testament.
I don't follow your reasoning there. We see the father very clearly at work in the OT and the Spirit is mentioned. John's gospel also tells us that Jesus was at work during creation. Why do you think that Jesus and the OT God are incompatible?
This is the very heracy for which the Gnostics where burned at the stake time after time, because it's Christian dogma it is the same god.
Since the Koran is clearly based on Judaic scripture (Ibrahim/Abraham and the tribes comes to mind), the god Muslims worship must be the same god the Jews worship
Rubbish. The LotR movie is based on the books, but the Boromir of the book is quite different fromt he Boromir of the movie. Even if the Koran is in part based on Judaic scripture, any deviation whatsoever means that it is looking at a different idea of God.
The "loving father" concept of this god is almost entrirely Christian, but there is more of a call to charity in the Koran then there is in Judaic scripture
Jesus summed up the Mosaic law as 'love the Lord your God with all you heart and mind and soul and strength and your 0enighbour as yourself'. I'd say that that has a pretty charitable bent.
As long as you don't think it's your (godgiven) right to rule the "fools" that believe in what you precieve to be a lie; no one can stop you.
I'm not aware of the Bible ever telling me that it's my right to go rule people, so don't worry about that one. In fact, it calls for us to be servants instead.
Did you know Jesus is a prophet in Islam?
Yes. But that's one of the big problems. It recognises him as only a prophet.
So muslims don't deny Jesus' teachings, they just don't believe it is the "final word".
Actually, they do deny his teachings. They deny for isntance that he is the Son of God, the incarnation of God on earth, the necessity and sufficiency of redemption by grace (IIRC, good works will get you into paradise and you don't have to actually believe in Allah) and a few other things. I'm not sufficiently well versed in what Islam teaches to go too far into this.
You do know that all of Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the same god, do you?
Actually, they don't. For instance we Christians worship Jesus as God, which the Jews and Muslims refuse to and the Muslim idea of God is very different to the Judeo-Christian one i.e. a distant god who requies you to earn a place in paradise rather than a loving father figure who offers it freely to everyone who simply asks for forgiveness and accepts his love. It's only the Muslims who claim that we all worship the same god and they most certianly do not speak for us.
Well, in my humble view it all comes down to being able to prove what you say. If you hold opinions about other people you can't prove, it's not only tolerant but also simply polite (not to mention smart) to not state those opinions as facts.
What point were you trying to make by quoting that? If you're trying to enlighten me in some way, wouldn't it be more helpful to point out wat exactly it is you feel I should be doing to others?
Nope, I think you'll find it just doesn't extend to your version of Christianity
My version of Christianity is that espoused by Jesus which is the only version that can really be called Christianity.
or any version of religion that's a bunch of holier-than-thou burn-in-hell orthodox I-can't-be-wrong arrogant claptrap
I don't think I'm any better than you. Religions usually claim that you get to heaven/paradise/nirvana/whereever by following rules, being a 'good' person, becoming deserving of a place there i.e. by being better than the people who don't get in. Christianity is different in that it says no-one can be good enough on their own merits and all have to rely on God's grace instead - they ask to be forgiven and out of love, God does so. No-one can boast that they get in to heaven by being better because it doesn't depend on how good we are. The Bible also says we should be humble and loving rather than arrogant.
Which historically is more than can be said for any (organised) religion; they always seem to get up to those religious wars to kill the heretics
The Bible is very clear that we are called to love our neighbour, which includes loving our enemies. It speaks against kiling people and instead calls for us to preach God's Gospel of love and forgiveness. In fact, we have all been heretcs. The idea of killing heretics is preposterous and the parable of the ungrateful servant alone would be enough to show it was wrong. It may have been done by people claiming to be Christians, but that doesn't make it a Christian action. In fact. taking Stalin's purges for a moment, or Pol Pot's 'social reforms' in Cambodia, they were perpetrated by atheists, but that doesn't mean that atheists want to commit mass murder. Judge Christianity by what it says rather than by what people do because people suck and fail to live up to its ideals, which is why we are so desperately in need of forgiveness and hence Christianity.
Now you see, that is a self-contradictory position to hold. You cannot say as an absolute truth that there is no absolute truth. And the very exclusion of a belief that claims other bleiefs are wrong on the basis that you want every belief to be accepted as possible defeats the idea of accepting every belief. If you want them all to possible then you are requiring mutually exclusive beliefs to be able to exist at the same time - a logical impossability.
Logic requires that we accept that not all beliefs can be simultaneously valid. Some must be wrong, therefore it is possible that all but one are wrong. Such is the position of Christianity, as Lewis very correctly realised. Yes, that's going to offend a lot of people particularly those who hold other beliefs, but:
1) It would not be loving to allow them to contineu with a belief that is wrong without at least telling them that
2) It's pretty offensive to see people putting something other than God first. And how many times a day do you hear someone exclaiming 'Jesus Christ!' or 'Oh my God!'? Bet that would be a lot less acceptable if it was Buddah or Allah being used instead. Respect for people's beliefs rarely seems to extend to cover Chrisitanity.
Slashdot Mirror
Hyperthreading isn't a magic double-the-speed-of-your-processor feature. In fact, ti can slow a computer down. What it is nice for is for running multiple threads or programs more efficiently.
Oh right cool. I guess that's not so bad then. I was never particualrly enthralled with the idea of doing lots of chemistry or biology. And I've now decided that lots more maths would be pretty bad too. In fact, judging form recent exam results, perhaps a bit les physics would be helpful.
IRc, you can't do straight PHysics at cam.ac.uk, only natural sceicne, with a heavy physics component? Part of the reaons I go to ox.ac.uk and get to call you a dirty tab ;^) Of course, maybe that's only a recent change. Anyway, getting back on topic, much as I hate to agree with tab, you're right and the lihgt is red-shifted. Wrote an essay partly on that for a Finals paper a couple of weeks ago.
Momentum is a vector quantity i.e. direction matters. If a photon has momentum p then after a perfect reflection, it has momentum -p relative to the original direction of momentum beore reflection, meaning that it has lost 2p of momentum, so whatever it reflected off must have gained 2p.
Basically, the equation you gave is a rough approximation that is valid at velocities significantly less than the speed of light, for masive objects. For photons, E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is frequency. It's a funky quantum physics thing. The magnitude of momentum (i.e. it's strength, with no reference to direction) is p = h/(lambda) where lambda is the wavelength.
Actually, the pressure is sufficient if you have a sufficiently light and sufficiently reflective material. Its just not necessarily practical to build a sail out of such a material and there are limits on how reflective a light material can be.
If you're bothered by photons having momentum and kinetic energy which is harnessed in the sail, consider the electromagnetic waves comeing from the sun instead. There is an energy flux over an area, called the Poynting vector (N = E x H), which allows you to calculate the pressure an electromagnetic wave exerts on an object (which varies depending on its reflectivity).
Actually, with the gravity of the sun, the angle of the sail and the direction of motion relative to the orbit the vessel is in, it is perfectly possible to tack. If you direct the sail so that your thrust is oppossing your orbital velocity or adding to it, you can alter the radius of your orbit.
Actually, both pressure and gravity vary with r squared, so as long as you can move out at one point, you will always be able to.
As for G5 laptops, IIRC, there isn't a huge heat differential between them and G4s. Certainly they're cooler than Intel/AMD designs. It's probably more the fact that there are two of them in the case that necessitates the multiple fans. And lots of big slow fans is quieter than a couple of fast fans, so that's doubtlesly part of the reason for the 9. I"m sure a single G5 would fit fine in a laptop. It'll be a while though before there are enough chips available to reliably supply towers and laptops though and Apple will want to leave a nice big power gap between the towers and everything else to revive sales. I wouldn't be surprised if you saw G5 laptops this time next year, but definitely not any time this side of Christmas.
You do realise that when they say 'dual' they acually mean that HT makes the processor appear to be a DP set up and that there's only actually one processsor in there, right? There are no multi-processor P4s. The MP enabled version of the chip is the Xeon. There is only one P4 in that laptop.
Didn't want to start into a another round of one upmanship. We know the truth. They'll realise it in time ;^)
The problem with the way you are saying it is that it can sound as if the US did it alone na dno-one else made a significant contribution. Could the US have won without the Russians? Well, no. With no war in Russia, Britain would likely have been defeated and all of Europe would have fallen. Could the US have won without Britain? Well, no. Nowhere to invade Germany from, no-one providing convoy assistance, no-one building radar, no-one breaking codes, no-one holding the Germans up in Africa. Without the other nations involved, Europe and big chunks of Africa would by under Nazi rule.
The US did not save western civilisation. The US, British, Soviets et. al. working together won the war. The hold any one country up as the be all and end all saviour of the world is a gross over-simplification and does a great dishonour to the millions of non-US poeople who served and died.
Now, I'm not saying that that was what you meant, but it's the way I imagine it would come across to many people and is part of the reason we end up with flame wars over the subject.
Well, I don't often have someone else using my iBook either, but nice to be able to show the feature off every once in a while :^) What's so super-slick about the mew cmd-tab interface?
Good to hear we don't need Quartz Extreme for Exposé - I'm stuck on an iBook 500 with 8MB Rage Mobility. Does the user switching work okay? With the funky spinning screen? Does the Finder remember your view preferences now? Always forgets whether I'm using list, column or icon view for each folder. I usually use column , but it seems to want icon most of the time or list, so this is my pet peeve.
Try http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/finder.html - there are plenty of nice screenshots on Apple's website.
Why do you recommend it?
Tell me, why do you think I'm wrong? I'm happy to have reasoned debate with anyone.
First off, I've expressly stated that I don't believe I'm any better than anyone else. Anyone who claims they're better than anyone else has problems, in many, many ways. As for the Bible being wrotten by people with a 'vested interest', do you tihnk they had a vested interest in dying? Because that's what they did. Paul died in jail, John and Mathew were executed. The disciples almost without exception, were killed for preaching their beliefs. Sounds like they actually beleived what they were saying, rather than having an ulterior motive.
IIRC, Muslims say you can get into heaven without being a Muslim. Christianity says you must ask Jesus for forgiveness for your sins and accept God's love.
How am I being self-centred? When people swear using God's name, they're breaking his commands and demeaning his name, which I find offensive on behalf of God. That's being God-centred, not self-centred. If I was self-centred I wouldn't care what people were saying about God.
None of those actions were in the least bit Christian. Unbeleivers are most certianly not sub-human. It's arrogance like that that Jesus despised and one of the many reasons he rebuked the Pharisees and called them hypcrites. Anyone who thinks he's better than his fellow man just because he's a Christian (or for any reason) is being a self-righteous, unChristian hypocrite. At the very least, it is unloving to treat someone as sub-human until they convert. Jesus didn't say "I'm not going up on that cross until you lot convert"; he went up on it amidst mocking and jeering when all had abandoned him. We're called to follow Jesus and that means loving them, including when they don't believe.
I don't follow your reasoning there. We see the father very clearly at work in the OT and the Spirit is mentioned. John's gospel also tells us that Jesus was at work during creation. Why do you think that Jesus and the OT God are incompatible?
Rubbish. The LotR movie is based on the books, but the Boromir of the book is quite different fromt he Boromir of the movie. Even if the Koran is in part based on Judaic scripture, any deviation whatsoever means that it is looking at a different idea of God.
Jesus summed up the Mosaic law as 'love the Lord your God with all you heart and mind and soul and strength and your 0enighbour as yourself'. I'd say that that has a pretty charitable bent.
I'm not aware of the Bible ever telling me that it's my right to go rule people, so don't worry about that one. In fact, it calls for us to be servants instead.
Yes. But that's one of the big problems. It recognises him as only a prophet.
Actually, they do deny his teachings. They deny for isntance that he is the Son of God, the incarnation of God on earth, the necessity and sufficiency of redemption by grace (IIRC, good works will get you into paradise and you don't have to actually believe in Allah) and a few other things. I'm not sufficiently well versed in what Islam teaches to go too far into this.
Actually, they don't. For instance we Christians worship Jesus as God, which the Jews and Muslims refuse to and the Muslim idea of God is very different to the Judeo-Christian one i.e. a distant god who requies you to earn a place in paradise rather than a loving father figure who offers it freely to everyone who simply asks for forgiveness and accepts his love. It's only the Muslims who claim that we all worship the same god and they most certianly do not speak for us.
It is my belief that they are facts :^)
Logic requires that we accept that not all beliefs can be simultaneously valid. Some must be wrong, therefore it is possible that all but one are wrong. Such is the position of Christianity, as Lewis very correctly realised. Yes, that's going to offend a lot of people particularly those who hold other beliefs, but:
1) It would not be loving to allow them to contineu with a belief that is wrong without at least telling them that
2) It's pretty offensive to see people putting something other than God first. And how many times a day do you hear someone exclaiming 'Jesus Christ!' or 'Oh my God!'? Bet that would be a lot less acceptable if it was Buddah or Allah being used instead. Respect for people's beliefs rarely seems to extend to cover Chrisitanity.