To correct myself, the panzerfaust was actually a recoilless gun, not a rocket propelled one. So if possible, the original comparison with the Katyusha is even more wrong.
Uh, in what bizarre historical revisionism were the T-34s better than many of the panzers?
When it was introduced in 1941 it was clearly superior to the panzer III and IV which was what the germans had at the time. It was mainly inept leadership and tactics (as a result of stalins previous purges) that prevented the Russians from causing devastating losses to the wehrmacht. Only in 1943 did the Germans field tanks that were superior (Panther and Tiger). But these were produced in fairly limited numbers (less than 10000 total including the Tiger II in 1944) compared to the T-34.
The Russian kyatusha rockets also paled in comparison to the panzerfaust.
Uh, the Katyusha was rocket artillery, and the Panzerfaust an infranty AT rocket. I don't see how you can compare them.
The US military budget is only as large as the rest of the world combined. The military-industrial complex would like to significantly increase it further (duh). It's up to the civilian leadership to say enough is enough.
The swollen armed forces of the US have been unnecessary for quite some time. I'm surprised people haven't cottoned on a long time before now.
Depending on who you ask, the US is responsible for about half of the worlds military spending (or if you add up US close allies as well, then it's about 2/3 of world spending). It has actually increased quite a lot this decade, largely as a result of gulf wars episode II and afghanistan. I think it's rather abundantly clear that the cold war never ended for the military-industrial complex. There's nothing out there that could even begin to challenge the US military for at least several decades, yet the billions keep rolling in for procuring large numbers of high end systems that will be obsolete within a few decades anyway.
The GUI exposes the most common preferences (look at System / Preferences or System / Administration). For the more obscure preferences, there is something remarkably similar to Registry Editor; it's called gconf-editor. (It's a measure of the success of Ubuntu that I haven't really needed to use gconf-editor for anything in years. The standard preferences are doing it for me.)
The GNOME guys were heavily flamed on Slashdot for making something that looks like the Windows Registry but I think it's a good idea. If two processes both try to write a text file, there is a possible race condition where the first process updates the file and the second process clobbers the update from the first one. The GConf system manages the updates, so that doesn't happen. Yet the back-end storage of data is still plain text files, so if you have to boot in single-user mode to recover after a disaster, you can still just use your favorite text editor to tweak the settings.
I agree. In some ways gconf is registry done right; e.g. using a bunch of xml files, which are hand editable in an emergency, instead of a binary database.
The next step, IMHO, would be to extend this model to allow an administrator to manage many desktops/servers over the network. Admins could use a GUI admin console on their workstation (or perhaps web-based these days), allowing them to easily configure their entire network from one point, with type/value-checking to prevent mistakes. Now this doesn't need to be done from scratch, e.g. WBEM is an existing standard widely used in the proprietary software world for both remote management and monitoring. There exists free software WBEM agents such as OpenPegasus, but little else (e.g. management consoles, providers for most software packages).
You're wrong. Enough highly enriched uranium in one place will cause a chain reaction.
The reason why nuclear weapons compress the material using chemical explosives is that the threshold mass is dependent on the density. Compressing the material lowers the threshold so that the material will cross from subcritical to supercritical => mushroom cloud.
As for the elevator shaft, there's no way that could compress the material enough to make any difference. Presumably the thing they're worried about is that the geometry of the shaft could cause the liquid to collect into a compact shape allowing it to reach criticality (the geometry matters as well as the density).
Actually, battleships weren't particularly great for shelling beaches. They had a quite low rate of fire, and the shells had a much lower percentage of weight as explosive due to structural requirements compared to smaller calibre shells. For the price of a battle ship you could get a dozen light cruisers with 127 or 155mm guns, able to provide a much more effective barrage against e.g. infantry positions (remember, many small bombs are better than a few big one for area targets, see e.g. cluster bombs).
Now, back in the day battleships were decent for bombarding point targets like bunkers etc., but nowadays there's guided missiles/bombs for that. And even back in WWII, the biggest things available for hitting fortified point targets were airplane dropped bombs (Tall Boy & Grand Slam).
Now, shells might be cheaper than bombs + fuel (I doubt it matters, fuel is cheap), but that discounts the cost of a BB with extremely limited use (shore bombardment of area targets close to the coast vs. anything in range for a bomber plane).
Not per wheel. The diesel electric train still has a normal transmission and the wheels are not rotated separately. You simply do not need that on rails.
Not a transmission really, just a reduction gearing. Also, typically a traction motor drives only one axle. With electronic per-axle slip control. So in spirit it has more in common with the electronically controlled per-wheel motor system you describe than with a traditional car/truck system with one engine, transmission, differential(s) etc., the only difference being that each motor controls two wheels on a stiff axle as railroad curves are not steep enough to warrant a differential.
Keeping track of 'minor purchases'?? Whose business is it that I buy a pack of cigarettes or some condoms or whatever? Why is the government so interested in this petty stuff unless it intends to use this info against me someday? Why does the government have cause to know who I hang with, who I sleep with?
With the number of silly laws around (in any country, not just China) you probably break half a dozen laws every day going about your daily business. Imagine the government knowing all your offences? Say something inconvenient about the government, they pick one from the list and you go to jail (or worse). Of course, in some countries the government doesn't even need a list of offences, they just stamp you with some label ("terrorist" being the current favourite) and whisk you away.
Here's the General Electric AC6000, the most powerful locomotive in the world
Perhaps the most powerful diesel-electric locomotive (?), but there are electric locomotives much more powerful than that. At about 4400 KW, the AC6000 is outclassed by e.g. this Italian one at 6000 KW, not to mention the IORE at 2x5400 KW, although I guess that one can be debated since it seems to be a two-part locomotive(?).
Also high-speed trains have pretty powerful locomotives, e.g. Eurostar has two locomotives providing a total of 12240 KW.
I have often wondered if there is a benefit in this for internal combustion engines as well. You could do away with quite a bit of plumbing around the engine and get better performance by feeding pure oxygen into the engine. Maybe it would help with low-performing biofuels.
You could probably make it work with extensive modifications to the engine. But it's not economically viable. Compressed or liquified pure oxygen is expensive, bulky and extremely dangerous. If you want more power, it's cheaper to just get a bigger engine.
The difference in the article is that a) this is a publicity stunt with no requirement for long range b) fuel cells are astronomically expensive, so perhaps this works out as they can use a smaller and cheaper fuel cell.
That said, the delay in developing these quad core procs shouldn't put that big a dent in the pocket / market share of AMD simply because it's a niche market that has yet to be widely adopted.
From what I've heard, the Intel quad cores are selling like hot cakes for running virtual machines.
And it's not only quad core, Barcelona also brings a bunch of core improvements, sorely needed to keep AMD competetive with Core2.
Well yes, but that kind of decentralization into per-cpu structures etc. has nothing to do with breaking up your kernel into a bunch of user space processes and using IPC instead of function calls.
According to TFA, the uS DoE has an order in for one of these things, so a good 'practical' and eventually 'real' use is to number crunch the movement of energy throughout the US, since there are now people selling electricity back into the grid, there has been talk for several months about needing a system to monitor this. They may also use it to calculate the best routing for black/brownout areas or predict area that will be in need of more power in the near future and help the engineers place their generating stations.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the division of the DOE that actually is buying supercomputers is the NNSA, who use their gear for somewhat more nefarious purposes.
Please re-read what I said. If you understand biases, you are in a better position to DISCARD them when looking at what was presented, not make them the basis of a decision.
Sorry, there is really no way around it. If you want to decide whether the science is correct or not, you have to understand it. It doesn't help if you know any potential bias of the presenter. Yes, by necessity this means that non-scientists really have no objective way of evaluating climate science. Hence their views on the matter can be ignored as they are not based on the science but rather something else (whatever that is).
So what is the non-scientist to do if he wants to know something about a scientific field? Beyond educating themselves, I guess the obvious thing is to look for a report made by a bunch of scientists describing the scientific consensus in an easy to understand way. But at this point, the non-scientist just has to trust the science rather than evaluating the science on its own merits. So if the non-scientist doesn't like the conclusions he can of course claim it's a grand conspiracy or whatever. Or call for a witch hunt, made easier by first arguing that the people with the wrong opinions must first declare themselves as witches. Woohoo, welcome to politics, savior of mankind.
That's a user-initiated workaround for a design limitation.
In your opinion.
I agree with Havoc Pennington on this: everytime the user has to select options to make the computer do things that are totally obvious, the software is broken.
Indeed, but the situation is seldom as simple as that. That's why you have options, to cater to the needs of different situations and the preferences of different people. E.g. in my opinion, sloppy focus is the blindingly obvious and correct way, but many others feel different (perhaps they are used to OS:s where click-to-focus is the only option). So having an option makes sense.
The example the parent poster gave was right to the point: if the dependency resolver finds no dependencies, it should install the package without bothering the user with questions. .. and then yum would get bug reports complaining that the behavior is inconsistent depending on whether the package installation needs extra packages to satisfy dependencies or not.
Programs should not have to ask the user to work around their design flaws.
But what you consider a design flaw might be what other people consider a feature. That's why you have options to alter the behavior of the program.
Slashdot Mirror
Such as the Talon?
Probably the same reason we pick our noses in our cars, despite everyone being able to see us. It feels more private and anonymous than it really is.
I don't do this anymore. Once, when in the process of picking my nose, I hit a bump and got a really nasty nosebleed. So there.
the Panzerfaust an infranty AT rocket
To correct myself, the panzerfaust was actually a recoilless gun, not a rocket propelled one. So if possible, the original comparison with the Katyusha is even more wrong.
Uh, in what bizarre historical revisionism were the T-34s better than many of the panzers?
When it was introduced in 1941 it was clearly superior to the panzer III and IV which was what the germans had at the time. It was mainly inept leadership and tactics (as a result of stalins previous purges) that prevented the Russians from causing devastating losses to the wehrmacht. Only in 1943 did the Germans field tanks that were superior (Panther and Tiger). But these were produced in fairly limited numbers (less than 10000 total including the Tiger II in 1944) compared to the T-34.
The Russian kyatusha rockets also paled in comparison to the panzerfaust.
Uh, the Katyusha was rocket artillery, and the Panzerfaust an infranty AT rocket. I don't see how you can compare them.
The US military budget is only as large as the rest of the world combined. The military-industrial complex would like to significantly increase it further (duh). It's up to the civilian leadership to say enough is enough.
The swollen armed forces of the US have been unnecessary for quite some time. I'm surprised people haven't cottoned on a long time before now.
Depending on who you ask, the US is responsible for about half of the worlds military spending (or if you add up US close allies as well, then it's about 2/3 of world spending). It has actually increased quite a lot this decade, largely as a result of gulf wars episode II and afghanistan. I think it's rather abundantly clear that the cold war never ended for the military-industrial complex. There's nothing out there that could even begin to challenge the US military for at least several decades, yet the billions keep rolling in for procuring large numbers of high end systems that will be obsolete within a few decades anyway.
The GUI exposes the most common preferences (look at System / Preferences or System / Administration). For the more obscure preferences, there is something remarkably similar to Registry Editor; it's called gconf-editor. (It's a measure of the success of Ubuntu that I haven't really needed to use gconf-editor for anything in years. The standard preferences are doing it for me.)
The GNOME guys were heavily flamed on Slashdot for making something that looks like the Windows Registry but I think it's a good idea. If two processes both try to write a text file, there is a possible race condition where the first process updates the file and the second process clobbers the update from the first one. The GConf system manages the updates, so that doesn't happen. Yet the back-end storage of data is still plain text files, so if you have to boot in single-user mode to recover after a disaster, you can still just use your favorite text editor to tweak the settings.
I agree. In some ways gconf is registry done right; e.g. using a bunch of xml files, which are hand editable in an emergency, instead of a binary database.
The next step, IMHO, would be to extend this model to allow an administrator to manage many desktops/servers over the network. Admins could use a GUI admin console on their workstation (or perhaps web-based these days), allowing them to easily configure their entire network from one point, with type/value-checking to prevent mistakes. Now this doesn't need to be done from scratch, e.g. WBEM is an existing standard widely used in the proprietary software world for both remote management and monitoring. There exists free software WBEM agents such as OpenPegasus, but little else (e.g. management consoles, providers for most software packages).
Algae biodiesel might happen some day. It's no silver bullet though, see e.g some points raised by an expert in the field.
Who hasn't slept with a hooker in GTA, then ran her over and took the cash?
I prefer to use the baseball bat.
You're wrong. Enough highly enriched uranium in one place will cause a chain reaction.
The reason why nuclear weapons compress the material using chemical explosives is that the threshold mass is dependent on the density. Compressing the material lowers the threshold so that the material will cross from subcritical to supercritical => mushroom cloud.
As for the elevator shaft, there's no way that could compress the material enough to make any difference. Presumably the thing they're worried about is that the geometry of the shaft could cause the liquid to collect into a compact shape allowing it to reach criticality (the geometry matters as well as the density).
Actually, battleships weren't particularly great for shelling beaches. They had a quite low rate of fire, and the shells had a much lower percentage of weight as explosive due to structural requirements compared to smaller calibre shells. For the price of a battle ship you could get a dozen light cruisers with 127 or 155mm guns, able to provide a much more effective barrage against e.g. infantry positions (remember, many small bombs are better than a few big one for area targets, see e.g. cluster bombs).
Now, back in the day battleships were decent for bombarding point targets like bunkers etc., but nowadays there's guided missiles/bombs for that. And even back in WWII, the biggest things available for hitting fortified point targets were airplane dropped bombs (Tall Boy & Grand Slam).
Now, shells might be cheaper than bombs + fuel (I doubt it matters, fuel is cheap), but that discounts the cost of a BB with extremely limited use (shore bombardment of area targets close to the coast vs. anything in range for a bomber plane).
Not per wheel. The diesel electric train still has a normal transmission and the wheels are not rotated separately. You simply do not need that on rails.
Not a transmission really, just a reduction gearing. Also, typically a traction motor drives only one axle. With electronic per-axle slip control. So in spirit it has more in common with the electronically controlled per-wheel motor system you describe than with a traditional car/truck system with one engine, transmission, differential(s) etc., the only difference being that each motor controls two wheels on a stiff axle as railroad curves are not steep enough to warrant a differential.
Keeping track of 'minor purchases'?? Whose business is it that I buy a pack of cigarettes or some condoms or whatever? Why is the government so interested in this petty stuff unless it intends to use this info against me someday? Why does the government have cause to know who I hang with, who I sleep with?
With the number of silly laws around (in any country, not just China) you probably break half a dozen laws every day going about your daily business. Imagine the government knowing all your offences? Say something inconvenient about the government, they pick one from the list and you go to jail (or worse). Of course, in some countries the government doesn't even need a list of offences, they just stamp you with some label ("terrorist" being the current favourite) and whisk you away.
Here's the General Electric AC6000, the most powerful locomotive in the world
Perhaps the most powerful diesel-electric locomotive (?), but there are electric locomotives much more powerful than that. At about 4400 KW, the AC6000 is outclassed by e.g. this Italian one at 6000 KW, not to mention the IORE at 2x5400 KW, although I guess that one can be debated since it seems to be a two-part locomotive(?).
Also high-speed trains have pretty powerful locomotives, e.g. Eurostar has two locomotives providing a total of 12240 KW.
Uh oh..
I have often wondered if there is a benefit in this for internal combustion engines as well. You could do away with quite a bit of plumbing around the engine and get better performance by feeding pure oxygen into the engine. Maybe it would help with low-performing biofuels.
You could probably make it work with extensive modifications to the engine. But it's not economically viable. Compressed or liquified pure oxygen is expensive, bulky and extremely dangerous. If you want more power, it's cheaper to just get a bigger engine.
The difference in the article is that a) this is a publicity stunt with no requirement for long range b) fuel cells are astronomically expensive, so perhaps this works out as they can use a smaller and cheaper fuel cell.
Hopefully we might soon be able to let copper cabling die.
/ 25/2046208
Cheap high speed optical chips: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07
Flexible, robust optical cables: http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=41171
I think you need OS-level threads if you want to utilize multiple cores, so user-level cooperative threads sound a bit useless in this context.
That said, the delay in developing these quad core procs shouldn't put that big a dent in the pocket / market share of AMD simply because it's a niche market that has yet to be widely adopted.
From what I've heard, the Intel quad cores are selling like hot cakes for running virtual machines.
And it's not only quad core, Barcelona also brings a bunch of core improvements, sorely needed to keep AMD competetive with Core2.
Well yes, but that kind of decentralization into per-cpu structures etc. has nothing to do with breaking up your kernel into a bunch of user space processes and using IPC instead of function calls.
Religion notwithstanding, it will become microkernel-like, because a monolithic kernel just doesn't scale. It's as simple as that.
Nice theory. Unfortunately it seems the kernel developers that are actually working on making Linux scale to NUMA systems with O(10000) processors disagree with you: https://ols2006.108.redhat.com/2007/Reprints/lame
According to TFA, the uS DoE has an order in for one of these things, so a good 'practical' and eventually 'real' use is to number crunch the movement of energy throughout the US, since there are now people selling electricity back into the grid, there has been talk for several months about needing a system to monitor this. They may also use it to calculate the best routing for black/brownout areas or predict area that will be in need of more power in the near future and help the engineers place their generating stations.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the division of the DOE that actually is buying supercomputers is the NNSA, who use their gear for somewhat more nefarious purposes.
I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?
You can stuff 4096 cores (1024 chips) per rack. Precisely because the chips are a slow low power design.
Please re-read what I said. If you understand biases, you are in a better position to DISCARD them when looking at what was presented, not make them the basis of a decision.
Sorry, there is really no way around it. If you want to decide whether the science is correct or not, you have to understand it. It doesn't help if you know any potential bias of the presenter. Yes, by necessity this means that non-scientists really have no objective way of evaluating climate science. Hence their views on the matter can be ignored as they are not based on the science but rather something else (whatever that is).
So what is the non-scientist to do if he wants to know something about a scientific field? Beyond educating themselves, I guess the obvious thing is to look for a report made by a bunch of scientists describing the scientific consensus in an easy to understand way. But at this point, the non-scientist just has to trust the science rather than evaluating the science on its own merits. So if the non-scientist doesn't like the conclusions he can of course claim it's a grand conspiracy or whatever. Or call for a witch hunt, made easier by first arguing that the people with the wrong opinions must first declare themselves as witches. Woohoo, welcome to politics, savior of mankind.
That's a user-initiated workaround for a design limitation.
In your opinion.
I agree with Havoc Pennington on this: everytime the user has to select options to make the computer do things that are totally obvious, the software is broken.
Indeed, but the situation is seldom as simple as that. That's why you have options, to cater to the needs of different situations and the preferences of different people. E.g. in my opinion, sloppy focus is the blindingly obvious and correct way, but many others feel different (perhaps they are used to OS:s where click-to-focus is the only option). So having an option makes sense.
The example the parent poster gave was right to the point: if the dependency resolver finds no dependencies, it should install the package without bothering the user with questions.
Programs should not have to ask the user to work around their design flaws.
But what you consider a design flaw might be what other people consider a feature. That's why you have options to alter the behavior of the program.