Here's an interesting link: Obesity 'may be largely genetic'. Here it claims that your environment doesn't make much difference to your weight and it is mostly genetic. As your metabolism uses such a large fraction of your energy intake, it is clear that changes in this will affect your weight the most.
Have a look at btrfs. It's getting there, and has quite a few exciting features and is well integrated with the linux kernel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
I'd love to see a web server spawn a separate process for every page access. If you look at Linux (and other unixes) you'd find that forking processes is a very cheap operation. This is unlike Windows where it is very expensive. Using processes in Unix is a sensible idea for many programs and works well (see Apache, many MTAs...).
Go and read "A long way down" by Nick Hornby. It's a book about people with people, some with terrible lives, wanting to kill themselves. But it is tremendously uplifting.
One of the most annoying features of OpenOffice are all those modal dialog boxes. Why do I have to keep closing the formatting dialog whenever I switch between different bits of text? It really slows down repetitive operations. Many of the dialogs could become non-model, giving a much smoother feel to the whole program.
I am obviously in the minority of users who pay for Skype services. I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. Using Skype-Out at a rate of around £0.1/minute is significantly cheaper than any comparable Telecom or other "cheap calls" organisation. I know quite a few other people who use Skype in the same manner. I spend around £5 per month on Skype. Why not check out http://www.telesave.co.uk/ who offer 2.5 pence/minute for Australia. I've used them for ages - cheap as skype but more convenient.
You can use the electricity to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, then use a fuel cell to convert it back again. I've no idea how efficient this can be, however.
I laughed upon my schoolmates with their puny 6502 with three 8-bit instruction registers. My blistering 4MHz Z80 came complete with several 16bit registers (with an alternative set), lots of fancy addressing modes, and my favourite the LDIR instruction. How could I ever do without that wonderful memory copying instruction?
The 6502, for comparison, felt like some sort of masochist's apparatus!
It's not very hard to install linux on cluster nodes. You just need to take a root file system installed somewhere, and replicate it for each node. You don't actually need to install it on each computer. If you do, then kickstart is perfectly able to install on machines without graphics card (I know, as I've installed it on an old alpha with a serial console).
If you go the replication route, you then adjust the file system for each machine (change IP address, ssh key, etc). We run a set of linux (i386 and x86_64) computers running Scientific Linux with the root directories NFS mounted off a server. Pretty easy, and you update the software in the usual way.
Being picky, MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) is a more important journal than Astronomy and Astrophysics, at least currently (impact 5.3 vs 4.2).
That's a good question - this is termed the "cooling flow problem". We expect to see lots of gas cooling in relaxed clusters (not the colliding one discussed here) as the gas is dense in the central regions. However there's a lack of evidence of cool gas, so most people think something is heating it (although there are many solutions possible http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0010509). The ideal candidate is the central supermassive black hole (AGN), however it is difficult to understand how this process works. One idea is that sound waves can transport the energy from the black hole into the cluster, heating it (see e.g. http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/05_releases/press _120105.html)
Yes - it took me a few seconds to work out which observation they're talking about. There are so many nice Chandra cluster observations. I always have this problem understanding what the boiled down content in the press release is on about. However it is a very interesting cluster and a nice demonstration of the existence of dark matter. I was thoroughly convinced of the existence of dark matter by the talk anyway:-)
We use initrd do to diskless booting. The initrd does dhcp and mounts an nfs partition as root and switches over to that. This is quite cool as the initrd can be quite intelligent, for instance using different root disks depending on which computer it runs on.
Objects with larger surface areas can be placed within objects of smaller surface areas.
Imagine an object consisting of lots of parallel plates, placed together with gaps on a base. Imagine decreasing the gap spacing and adding more plates. You can decrease the gap spacing more and more, add more plates, and the surface area will keep increasing. The surface area will soon become larger than a surrounding cube.
I would recommend my own program Veusz! It is written in Python and is designed for publication-quality output. It doesn't do 3D plotting however, but I think the user interface is quite nice.
I don't believe in pink fairies on the far side of Mars. Just because the possibility exists, I can't go round all day uumming and ahhing over the existence of such things.
If there's no evidence for something, there's no point saying "I may or may not believe in this", it's better to be skeptical and say "I won't believe it unless there's evidence to back it up". Using Occam's Razor, it's better to believe in the simpler option which is "There's no god", unless there's evidence for it.
Some people may find god a good working hypothesis, but I haven't seen any justification for that, except making themselves feel better.
Slashdot Mirror
You can get 8GB USB flash drives for £28, which is around $56, so we're getting there...
Here's an interesting link: Obesity 'may be largely genetic'. Here it claims that your environment doesn't make much difference to your weight and it is mostly genetic. As your metabolism uses such a large fraction of your energy intake, it is clear that changes in this will affect your weight the most.
Obesity 'may be largely genetic'
I take from this that certain genes give you the predisposition to obesity if there are lots of calories around.
Have a look at btrfs. It's getting there, and has quite a few exciting features and is well integrated with the linux kernel:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Btrfs
I wonder what happens if other countries legally decide that tasers can kill people? How many other countries allow tasers to be used by police etc?
This is being done by Sky, that channel with such great programmes, such as..... mmmm..... Simpsons repeats, Star trek repeats...
Have they actually made anything worthwhile before?
Go and read "A long way down" by Nick Hornby. It's a book about people with people, some with terrible lives, wanting to kill themselves. But it is tremendously uplifting.
One of the most annoying features of OpenOffice are all those modal dialog boxes. Why do I have to keep closing the formatting dialog whenever I switch between different bits of text? It really slows down repetitive operations. Many of the dialogs could become non-model, giving a much smoother feel to the whole program.
Take a look at Veusz if you want proper scientific charting on Windows, Linux and MacOS. [plug]
You can use the electricity to convert water to hydrogen and oxygen, then use a fuel cell to convert it back again. I've no idea how efficient this can be, however.
I laughed upon my schoolmates with their puny 6502 with three 8-bit instruction registers. My blistering 4MHz Z80 came complete with several 16bit registers (with an alternative set), lots of fancy addressing modes, and my favourite the LDIR instruction. How could I ever do without that wonderful memory copying instruction?
The 6502, for comparison, felt like some sort of masochist's apparatus!
It's not very hard to install linux on cluster nodes. You just need to take a root file system installed somewhere, and replicate it for each node. You don't actually need to install it on each computer. If you do, then kickstart is perfectly able to install on machines without graphics card (I know, as I've installed it on an old alpha with a serial console).
If you go the replication route, you then adjust the file system for each machine (change IP address, ssh key, etc). We run a set of linux (i386 and x86_64) computers running Scientific Linux with the root directories NFS mounted off a server. Pretty easy, and you update the software in the usual way.
Being picky, MNRAS (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society) is a more important journal than Astronomy and Astrophysics, at least currently (impact 5.3 vs 4.2).
That's a good question - this is termed the "cooling flow problem". We expect to see lots of gas cooling in relaxed clusters (not the colliding one discussed here) as the gas is dense in the central regions. However there's a lack of evidence of cool gas, so most people think something is heating it (although there are many solutions possible http://uk.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0010509). The ideal candidate is the central supermassive black hole (AGN), however it is difficult to understand how this process works. One idea is that sound waves can transport the energy from the black hole into the cluster, heating it (see e.g. http://chandra.harvard.edu/press/05_releases/press _120105.html)
Yes - it took me a few seconds to work out which observation they're talking about. There are so many nice Chandra cluster observations. I always have this problem understanding what the boiled down content in the press release is on about. However it is a very interesting cluster and a nice demonstration of the existence of dark matter. I was thoroughly convinced of the existence of dark matter by the talk anyway :-)
We use initrd do to diskless booting. The initrd does dhcp and mounts an nfs partition as root and switches over to that. This is quite cool as the initrd can be quite intelligent, for instance using different root disks depending on which computer it runs on.
Sniff sniff
Unix Gurus in Hell
What a wonderful comic strip!
Don Knuth finally sells out
Objects with larger surface areas can be placed within objects of smaller surface areas.
Imagine an object consisting of lots of parallel plates, placed together with gaps on a base. Imagine decreasing the gap spacing and adding more plates. You can decrease the gap spacing more and more, add more plates, and the surface area will keep increasing. The surface area will soon become larger than a surrounding cube.
I would recommend my own program Veusz! It is written in Python and is designed for publication-quality output. It doesn't do 3D plotting however, but I think the user interface is quite nice.
Jeremy
I don't believe in pink fairies on the far side of Mars. Just because the possibility exists, I can't go round all day uumming and ahhing over the existence of such things.
If there's no evidence for something, there's no point saying "I may or may not believe in this", it's better to be skeptical and say "I won't believe it unless there's evidence to back it up". Using Occam's Razor, it's better to believe in the simpler option which is "There's no god", unless there's evidence for it.
Some people may find god a good working hypothesis, but I haven't seen any justification for that, except making themselves feel better.
For those fans in the UK: apparently (after listening to Front Row) the first episode will show on TV on Saturday 26th March. Looking forward to it...
I'd better go and buy a sofa so I'll have something to hide behind if Davros appears...