There's a reason why the US government of today dwarfs the US government of only 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people
Because we live in a vastly more complex society that requires significantly more oversight to effectively function? Because society has grown beyond the point where any person can know everything required to function unaided?
I recommend reading the programmer's guide to a modern graphics architecture; Caching is essential to them.
Modern GPU architectures face the same clock speed/bus speed disparity and memory latency problems as CPUs and have taken their response much farther. They have several thousand registers per core and an L1 size & speed cache per processor group. Cache misses carry a typical penalty of several hundred cycles.
It doesn't take an old machine to make kde 4.x unusable.
Now that I think about it, kde 4.x is like the hot but totally completely brainless girlfriend... Nice eyecandy, initially very pleasing and exciting, then rapidly becomes tiresome as the reality that most of your interaction occurs outside of the bedroom sets in.
Likewise, kde 4.x is very pretty and the first half hour is spent checking out all the cute/neato things it does. Horray, kmail finally keeps responding while checking mail in! Konqueror supports more of web 2.0!
Then the dream begins to crack: Why does my desktop's framerate crash to a slideshow when I first move a wobbly window? Why does my desktop require me to install a complete SQL server for something that doesn't work worth a damn anyway?
Then you wake up and the house is on fire: Wait, I swear Konqueror used to fit twice as many file icons on this page... Did its html engine just completely stop updating the display on some random webpage? Why does it seem to randomly forget settings?
Then you call the fire department and realize that everything 4.x does, 3.5.10 does faster, better, more stably and while using half the ram.
Every new version that's released I try out, and since 4.2 (when the showstopping breakage was mostly fixed) every time I end up going back to 3.5 muttering about how they don't seem to have fixed a damned thing.
Excuse me? There plenty criticisms you can make of electric motors and the exotic materials needed for supermagnets, but radioactive is not one of them.
I really, really hope they manage to stop it before it abrades away the kink in the pipe that's slowed it down so far or we're in for a whole lot of hurt...
Most practical problems can be solved with marginally acceptable accuracy without computers. In "the old days," modeling efforts were utterly crippled by the lack of computers so we had to give everything a good margin for safety and hope it was enough.
Try to design an engine that meets modern emissions requirements without a computer.
Try to make detailed predictions about the behavior of any circuit containing multiple transistors without a computer.
Try to design a modern-scale bridge without a computer.
Well, perhaps it's time that corporate shipping planners got a reminder that if you do just in time shipping & supply with zero buffer, eventually the supply chain will blink or shut down for a week due to uncontrollable acts of nature and you'll be boned.
I understand that this doesn't apply to live-shipment items like tulips or medical radioisotopes, but I find it disturbing how much of our economy has been reorganized into something resembling a program that will crash if there's so much as a cache miss in the name of efficiency. Then again, I'm very conservative when it comes to matters of economic robustness - the economy of Vinge's Namqem and the food supply for Asimov's Trantor are my idea of worst-case "how in the name of Christ could anyone anywhere have ever thought this was a good idea?!" scenarios.
It's so difficult to build a ship that could reach.01-.1c that they were designing it in the 50s and calling it "Project Orion." Getting 100K times more power from a unit of mass than you can with chemicals is easy with nukes.
This isn't a BEC. When a boson gas is cooled, the chemical potential that results from an integral over states has to be raised towards zero. The Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition occurs when the chemical potential reaches zero, at which point the single-particle ground state energy and the thermal energy are the same. At that point the integral representation that is used to calculate chemical potential breaks down and when temperature is lowered further the average excitation level rapidly approaches zero (everything plunges into the ground state).
The researchers in TFA created a piezoelectric harmonic oscillator just large enough to be visible. Then they spent several years creating a driver circuit that would only raise it to the first excited state. I believe the superposition results when they turn the driver circuit off when it had only evolved the waveform some fraction of the way between n=0 and n=1.
The supposition is that there's no limit on the size at which QM applies, only that you have to get the system cold enough to avoid thermal excitation and prevent interaction with the rest of the world.
The thing I've never been able to wrap my head around is how one can look at e.g. this resonator - whose "actual" waveform exists in an outer product space formed by the Hilbert space for every constituent particle - as just a harmonic oscillator and ignore all the other interactions. I've got a vague idea of what's supposed to be done, I just can't grok it...
After the initial euphoria of transparent composited windows wore off, I became afraid that Kde 4 would be a Windows Vista. I now realize that it's far worse than Vista. I've been trying to use KDE 4 since it came out and given up every time. Without exception I go back to 3.5 after a few days because I don't want to go insane. Waiting seconds on end for windows to restore. Experiencing a slideshow when I try to resize them instead of a smooth size-change. Hearing my disk thrash after opening email, a few konqueror tabs and a PDF or two. The agonizing fail that is Amarok 2.x (How in the fuck did something that doesn't pause with 100% reliability when I press "pause" ever get out the door? Yes, this happens about once a day). Basically the only time I'm not repressing a simmering annoyance when using it is when playing fullscreen games or typing into a text console.
I remember being so excited that KDE 4 was gonna be the first compositing desktop and do all this neat stuff... Holy shit. It's like a kid comes down to the tree on Christmas day, and not only are all the wonderful presents gone but his parents say "there is no Santa." Not only is 4.x not better than or even on par with 3.5, as of 4.3 it's still a massive step back in speed, responsiveness and memory usage.
At first I sneered at people who said KDE 4 would take until 4.5 to become usable. Yet here we are, after 4 significant releases, and it's barely reached beta quality.
Accepting a surveillance state because surveillance in and of itself isn't evil and can in principle be good is a bit like thinking f(t) is stable because you can in principle set A equal to zero.
It's only vortices and turbulence until you get to some characteristic length dictated by viscosity. Then again, good luck getting to that point with any computer in the near future.
(1/10)^n for integer n is irrational in base 2 and the truncation was unavoidable.
The real WTF is that they used a 24 bit mantissa where a one part per million error would be fatal, particularly where truncation would accumulate at a linear rate. We've known since the days when "calculator" meant someone doing menial math to carry "somewhat more than twice as many digits as desired in the final result."
I'm not saying that what the killer did was justified. I'm saying that given what we know Bull was working on and for who, to pretend he was killed for trying to build an orbital launch cannon is disingenious.
You might have mentioned something minor, like the fact that he was working with Saddam Hussein because Hussein was willing to fund him, at the time he was killed.
But that's way too obvious a reason... it was a conspiracy by the very groups who stood to benefit from reduced launch costs that killed him. Mm-hmm.
Those who demand "proof" of climate change before we do anything to fight it will find some way to ignore this. They'll keep pretending there's "no evidence" and that it's a "librul conspiracy" until it becomes undeniable (I'm betting til the dams surrounding a port city fail) because they don't believe in doing anything proactive.
Then when the engineers say it's too late to do anything except build a 300 foot tall dam around every coastline in the world, it'll be their fault for not fixing it.
Which is why the Republicans resolutely opposed Clinton's massive illegal wiretapping program and his creation of a massive homeland security bureaucracy, as well as ongoing attempts by the Democrats to use the government to control people's marriage and reproductive choices since the 70s. And let's not even get started on the utterly obscene debts that Clinton, Carter and Johnson ran up.
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There's a reason why the US government of today dwarfs the US government of only 100 years ago, both in revenue and power over the people
Because we live in a vastly more complex society that requires significantly more oversight to effectively function? Because society has grown beyond the point where any person can know everything required to function unaided?
I recommend reading the programmer's guide to a modern graphics architecture; Caching is essential to them.
Modern GPU architectures face the same clock speed/bus speed disparity and memory latency problems as CPUs and have taken their response much farther. They have several thousand registers per core and an L1 size & speed cache per processor group. Cache misses carry a typical penalty of several hundred cycles.
Assume I can fly...
Oh wait.
It doesn't take an old machine to make kde 4.x unusable.
Now that I think about it, kde 4.x is like the hot but totally completely brainless girlfriend... Nice eyecandy, initially very pleasing and exciting, then rapidly becomes tiresome as the reality that most of your interaction occurs outside of the bedroom sets in.
Likewise, kde 4.x is very pretty and the first half hour is spent checking out all the cute/neato things it does. Horray, kmail finally keeps responding while checking mail in! Konqueror supports more of web 2.0!
Then the dream begins to crack: Why does my desktop's framerate crash to a slideshow when I first move a wobbly window? Why does my desktop require me to install a complete SQL server for something that doesn't work worth a damn anyway?
Then you wake up and the house is on fire: Wait, I swear Konqueror used to fit twice as many file icons on this page... Did its html engine just completely stop updating the display on some random webpage? Why does it seem to randomly forget settings?
Then you call the fire department and realize that everything 4.x does, 3.5.10 does faster, better, more stably and while using half the ram.
Every new version that's released I try out, and since 4.2 (when the showstopping breakage was mostly fixed) every time I end up going back to 3.5 muttering about how they don't seem to have fixed a damned thing.
I'm about to get a pair of nVidia C2050s so I'm really getting kick out of being one of those jagoffs.
Suck it, Poisson equation. Suck all 16 million cells in under 90 seconds (under 10 once the 2050s arrive).
Next question please?
Excuse me? There plenty criticisms you can make of electric motors and the exotic materials needed for supermagnets, but radioactive is not one of them.
11M gallons = 261K bbl. 261Kbbl / (50Kbbl/day) = 5.2 days.
I really, really hope they manage to stop it before it abrades away the kink in the pipe that's slowed it down so far or we're in for a whole lot of hurt...
Most practical problems can be solved with marginally acceptable accuracy without computers. In "the old days," modeling efforts were utterly crippled by the lack of computers so we had to give everything a good margin for safety and hope it was enough.
Try to design an engine that meets modern emissions requirements without a computer.
Try to make detailed predictions about the behavior of any circuit containing multiple transistors without a computer.
Try to design a modern-scale bridge without a computer.
Well, perhaps it's time that corporate shipping planners got a reminder that if you do just in time shipping & supply with zero buffer, eventually the supply chain will blink or shut down for a week due to uncontrollable acts of nature and you'll be boned.
I understand that this doesn't apply to live-shipment items like tulips or medical radioisotopes, but I find it disturbing how much of our economy has been reorganized into something resembling a program that will crash if there's so much as a cache miss in the name of efficiency. Then again, I'm very conservative when it comes to matters of economic robustness - the economy of Vinge's Namqem and the food supply for Asimov's Trantor are my idea of worst-case "how in the name of Christ could anyone anywhere have ever thought this was a good idea?!" scenarios.
It's so difficult to build a ship that could reach .01-.1c that they were designing it in the 50s and calling it "Project Orion." Getting 100K times more power from a unit of mass than you can with chemicals is easy with nukes.
This isn't a BEC. When a boson gas is cooled, the chemical potential that results from an integral over states has to be raised towards zero. The Bose-Einstein condensate phase transition occurs when the chemical potential reaches zero, at which point the single-particle ground state energy and the thermal energy are the same. At that point the integral representation that is used to calculate chemical potential breaks down and when temperature is lowered further the average excitation level rapidly approaches zero (everything plunges into the ground state).
The researchers in TFA created a piezoelectric harmonic oscillator just large enough to be visible. Then they spent several years creating a driver circuit that would only raise it to the first excited state. I believe the superposition results when they turn the driver circuit off when it had only evolved the waveform some fraction of the way between n=0 and n=1.
The supposition is that there's no limit on the size at which QM applies, only that you have to get the system cold enough to avoid thermal excitation and prevent interaction with the rest of the world.
The thing I've never been able to wrap my head around is how one can look at e.g. this resonator - whose "actual" waveform exists in an outer product space formed by the Hilbert space for every constituent particle - as just a harmonic oscillator and ignore all the other interactions. I've got a vague idea of what's supposed to be done, I just can't grok it...
Half the time they need to get into someone's computer and you get a glimpse of it running, it's Linux.
"Hey, I recognize that directory structure..."
I hate to agree but... he's right.
After the initial euphoria of transparent composited windows wore off, I became afraid that Kde 4 would be a Windows Vista. I now realize that it's far worse than Vista. I've been trying to use KDE 4 since it came out and given up every time. Without exception I go back to 3.5 after a few days because I don't want to go insane. Waiting seconds on end for windows to restore. Experiencing a slideshow when I try to resize them instead of a smooth size-change. Hearing my disk thrash after opening email, a few konqueror tabs and a PDF or two. The agonizing fail that is Amarok 2.x (How in the fuck did something that doesn't pause with 100% reliability when I press "pause" ever get out the door? Yes, this happens about once a day). Basically the only time I'm not repressing a simmering annoyance when using it is when playing fullscreen games or typing into a text console.
I remember being so excited that KDE 4 was gonna be the first compositing desktop and do all this neat stuff... Holy shit. It's like a kid comes down to the tree on Christmas day, and not only are all the wonderful presents gone but his parents say "there is no Santa." Not only is 4.x not better than or even on par with 3.5, as of 4.3 it's still a massive step back in speed, responsiveness and memory usage.
At first I sneered at people who said KDE 4 would take until 4.5 to become usable. Yet here we are, after 4 significant releases, and it's barely reached beta quality.
Writing this really sucked but it's the truth.
Because terrorism historically results in hard-right authoritarian douches being thrown out of power and kept out of power.
f(t) = A * exp(kt) + B * exp(-kt)
Accepting a surveillance state because surveillance in and of itself isn't evil and can in principle be good is a bit like thinking f(t) is stable because you can in principle set A equal to zero.
It's only vortices and turbulence until you get to some characteristic length dictated by viscosity. Then again, good luck getting to that point with any computer in the near future.
As long as he didn't accidently the whole bottle...
(1/10)^n for integer n is irrational in base 2 and the truncation was unavoidable.
The real WTF is that they used a 24 bit mantissa where a one part per million error would be fatal, particularly where truncation would accumulate at a linear rate. We've known since the days when "calculator" meant someone doing menial math to carry "somewhat more than twice as many digits as desired in the final result."
Price of copper: $2.90/lb
Price of silver: $16.50/oz
Silver's traded between $15 and $20/oz for most of this year and last.
I'm not saying that what the killer did was justified. I'm saying that given what we know Bull was working on and for who, to pretend he was killed for trying to build an orbital launch cannon is disingenious.
You might have mentioned something minor, like the fact that he was working with Saddam Hussein because Hussein was willing to fund him, at the time he was killed.
But that's way too obvious a reason... it was a conspiracy by the very groups who stood to benefit from reduced launch costs that killed him. Mm-hmm.
Those who demand "proof" of climate change before we do anything to fight it will find some way to ignore this. They'll keep pretending there's "no evidence" and that it's a "librul conspiracy" until it becomes undeniable (I'm betting til the dams surrounding a port city fail) because they don't believe in doing anything proactive.
Then when the engineers say it's too late to do anything except build a 300 foot tall dam around every coastline in the world, it'll be their fault for not fixing it.
I thought the sarcasm was obvious... Apparently it's not enough so.
The preceding post was a mockery of the "Republicans oppose big intrusive government" claim.
Which is why the Republicans resolutely opposed Clinton's massive illegal wiretapping program and his creation of a massive homeland security bureaucracy, as well as ongoing attempts by the Democrats to use the government to control people's marriage and reproductive choices since the 70s. And let's not even get started on the utterly obscene debts that Clinton, Carter and Johnson ran up.