SGI has some real interesting Linux based "supercomputers" that they were showing at LinuxWorld. I don't know if the Cray units are the same hardware - probably they are.
There is a very fast NUMA (non-uniform memory access) interconnect in each case (about the size of a washing machine). So you can access memory on another board only slightly slower than on your local memory.
You can have up to 4 processors per board. Then you can connect together multiple washing machines with (I think) Infiniband.
You still want to access local memory if you can as that gives lowest latency. Work is going on in the kernel to better support this kind of architecture. Linux (or at least open source) is really important to these machines because you do need to be able to modify the kernels.
A bunch of PCs work real well when your problem can be partitioned. What kills you is high levels of synchronisation activity - whether signalling or updating because that's when latency kills you. For some apps you may have as much or even more compute horsepower in your PCs than the supercomputer but it spends all its time twiddling thumbs.
So for many hard applications these machines really are the bee's rollerskates.
While as a musician myself I hate to see musicians getting ripped off, in reality, the software in question only makes simpler something that can be done with a fair amount of ease without the software (think ftp and a bulletin board) so if the decision had gone the other way it would have been a legal recognition of luddism.
What musicians need to do is find ways to use these systems to sell product, and from the judgement it seems some are already doing just that.
Does anyone here have personal experience of using the systems in this way that they can share?
They didn't even mention their inability to spell words like colour, and centre. Haven't seen recent English versions of their manuals but they used to not be bothered to fix their spelling for the English speaking world.
They insist of giving people a Software License rather than a Licence. On the other hand, given the amount of porn on the internet, maybe they got it right!
Of course, this is by no means only a Microsoft problem. Most Americans don't even understand there is a problem here.
I'm not even a Christian and I would recognize at least some of the words. After all there is a large body of fine settings of the text that are important musically as well as religously.
So I would find it hard to believe the original statement without some supporting evidence.
HP used to make a lot of cool tools as well - Oscilliscopes and such.
Their calculators were very cool
They were in at the begginning of the laser printer market. My Laserjet III is still going strong (did have to replace the power supply once but that was a job I could do myself with a screwdriver)
They have a pretty good claim to having invented the personal computer even though they never sold huge numbers since they were aimed at labs rather than end users. IBM can also put in a claim on that front with their APL desktop machine (HP's ran Basic or their own algebraic langauge, depending on model). We are talking early to mid 70's here.
They used to make PCs that you could run over with a truck - I know someone who did that on a loading dock and it kept on working.
And they made a cool range of mini-computers (although their OS and compilers were somewhat of a pain to use). In at least one of the early models you could actually add your own instructions using writable control store.
Unfortunately for this definition, as given, the Moon's orbit is always concave towards the Sun. So the Moon orbits both the Earth and the Sun for some reasonable definition of "orbits".
Performance enhancing drugs injure and even kill people - look at the number of NFL linemen who keel over at 40. So if you allow them in competition you are condoning the injuring and killing of people to gain success.
And don't imagine its just an issue of personal choice. That it is not is perfectly clear in team sports where players are asked to "take one for the team" but even in individual sports the pressures to perform make it very hard for individuals to make informed choices.
In an individual sport like Tennis, for example, the pressure causes lots of good teenagers burn out from trying to meet parental and other expectations even (presumably) without taking performance drugs. The pressure is very real even when not deliberately applied.
Given this, all sports association have a moral duty to try to prevent use of such drugs. To do otherwise is to recklessly endanger the children taking up your sport.
> Is it just me or does this seem equivalent to signing away your soul to Satan?
Its just you. Satan would never ask for your immortal soul and $299. Just your soul and you don't even have to pay shipping and handling.
Patches cause breakages. I have seen a Windows NT machine rendered useless by applying Microsoft patches - they flat out broke a commonly used system call.
So there is no way Hospitals should be patching these machines without a proper testing and approval cycle.
And with new patches arriving every week, how can the manufacturers possibly stay current?
The only responsible course of action is to get these machines off the network.
It does raise an interesting question. Suppose you put these machines behind individual firewalls. Is it possible to guarantee that they will not get infected while providing any useful services through the firewall? If so, what are the providable services?
It would be nice to be able to remove all removable media devices as well to prevent infection by that vector. This would require that one do all data takeup over the firewalled network, so at least secure ftp would be desirable.
Its very troubling that Apple is seeking to keep the iPod proprietary. This gives them a monopoly over what you can listen to on that machine, and that is very bad for musicians, as well as for the listening public.
Allowing monopolies to develop in this area is not in the public interest.
What we need is a law that requires makers of media playing equipment to release the specifications required to interface to those machines. This would in no way impact the protections of DMCA (whether good or bad) because it would only protect translations into the machine format, not out of it.
This is a plain and simple case of "demanding money with menaces" which is illegal most places.
Now the case on jurisdiction will be interesting. Presumably the menaces were delivered over the Internet from Russia. So where was the crime committed? Are they subject to extradition?
Are you using a Direct box? An active one would be best.
There are two issues that may be causing trouble.
If you have balanced ins on your interface an unbalanced interface can cause hum. A direct box with a ground lift can help.
Guitar outputs are high impedance. You may be trying to drive a low impedance input. A hi to low converting direct box will help. However if its a transformer based direct box it also reduces the signal coming out (in voltage terms). An active direct box can avoid this but, of course, the active direct box itself will introduce some noise - it just should be less noise than you are currently getting.
I have read that some of the corrections to Newtonian gravity that arise from General Relativity can be accounted for in a Newtonian Framework by accounting for the finite propgation speed of gravity but I have not worked my way through those calculations.
If gravity travelled instantaneously there would be a preferred frame in which to do physics, since it would give us a universal clock, and that would break the principle of equivalence.
In 25 years (or 50 in England) when the government archives are released, I wonder how many will be readable. This will be a serious problem for historians. I expect it already is a problem but it will get much worse - back in 1979 data formats were still fairly trivial, and paper documents were still pervasive, but complexity has increased immensely since and many documents are electronic only.
What we need are Open Document Standards that the government is required by law to use for all data, whether made public or not, so as to protect the data for the future.
An update to the freedom of information act (in the US) would seem to be one way to achieve this and I believe the GAO has the ability to enforce this and handle the neccesary waiver process in a realistic way.
And while open source doc formats does not imply use of open source software its clear that open source has an important role to play here by providing a means of verification. Its a compelling case where there is a clear societal need for open source software.
A martian month is either 7 hours 39 minutes or 30 hours 18 minutes, depending upon whether you use Phobos or Deimos as your moon.
So actually they've been there at least 200 months Martian time!
:-)
Its real cool to see them have such a success. They should keep this project up as long as possible. Hubble too. To do anything else is to waste our money.
And don't buy from a home stereo outlet anything you can get from a pro-sound store.
Especially for speakers you can spend 1/2 to 1/4 the amount for pro gear for a given level of quality. The markup on consumer stuff must be huge and a lot of even quite expensive stuff can sound bad.
Every one is talking about RF interference and indeed that by itself should rule out these systems, but what about audio.
I used to live in a town that used Zellwigger equipment to turn on off-peak hotwater systems at night. You would get this ~ 1000Hz sound through your stereo when they turned it on.
Audio power supplies are simply not designed to stop frequencies in that range. A well designed power ssupply will work better at RF because its a known problem - the big ripple capacitors have enough inductance to be inneffective at RF so you put a few picofarads of tag-tantalum or similar across them to shunt the RF.
But when you start imposing RF on the power system, I doubt that even this is going to filter it out. The result is going to be large amounts of RF to your audio amp, some of which is going to get rectified and which will reduce the headroom of your amp even if rectification does not introduce audible noise.
So I think this is another reason this was a bad idea.
Exactly so. If the Economist has a stance, it is economic rationalist. I certainly don't always agree with them either - the item on shorter terms for corporate criminals was a case in point - and they do tend to point out that the sky is falling rather frequently with barely disguised glee, but its certainly one of the most intelligently written weeklies.
Their founder was an opponent of the corn laws back in the nineteenth century. These were a very poor set of protectionist laws in Britain at the time designed to put a floor under the price of corn (ie, wheat).
They caused a lot of misery and economic dislocation while doing little to help farmers. Some of the chief beneficiaries were speculators who would pile up cheap foreign wheat in bonded warehouses until the price of domestic wheat reached the trigger point at which imports were allowed, and then import these entire stocks at once.
If I remember correctly, he was also an opponent of Mercantalism.
So, in this tradition, they support free trade, and free markets.
Supporting free markets does not make them right wing. The right in general supports unregulated markets. This is not the same thing as a free market since an unregulated market permits, for example, forming of Cartels to manipulate the market.
So in the US, for example, the difference is seen in practice by Republican government's unwillingness to enforce trade practice and monopoly laws. The Microsoft case was a fine example of exactly this.
I once worked for a company where my boss would sometimes bring his parrot to work.
No really. It was a very well behaved parrot. Only swore at the marketing types.
OK, I made that last bit up.
Now the one thing I really want is windows that open. Even if they close automatically when there is too much difference between outside and inside. Most of the year, the air in most office buildings is worse than the air outside.
In hot climates perhaps they could set things up to change the air completely overnight while its cool so at least its nice inside at the start of the day.
So - learning to fly a plane costs perhaps 10 times what it costs to learn to drive a car, even assuming you didn't have your dad teach you how to drive the car. Does this mean we should go to Europe (from the US) by taxi?
Unless you control for how much the trainees learn and how useful they are after training the comparison is meaningless. I don't expect they did that. In any case it would be real hard to measure with any accuracy. For example, how do you compare being able to bring up Windows explorer and being able to use its limited functionality to being able to do wizzy things with "find".
>You do realize that you are talking about a
> company that has almost $60 Billion (with a B) > just in reserves alone.
Yeah, but I hear they are planning to hire George W early next year as CFO.
A minor detail - AM antennas are often not as long as 1/4 of the wavelength would require. At 500Khz, that would be 3x10^8/5*10^5*1/4=150 Metres (~500 feet). Instead there is a "hat" on the top which acts as a capacitor that tunes the shortened antenna for the frequency.
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There is a very fast NUMA (non-uniform memory access) interconnect in each case (about the size of a washing machine). So you can access memory on another board only slightly slower than on your local memory.
You can have up to 4 processors per board. Then you can connect together multiple washing machines with (I think) Infiniband.
You still want to access local memory if you can as that gives lowest latency. Work is going on in the kernel to better support this kind of architecture. Linux (or at least open source) is really important to these machines because you do need to be able to modify the kernels.
A bunch of PCs work real well when your problem can be partitioned. What kills you is high levels of synchronisation activity - whether signalling or updating because that's when latency kills you. For some apps you may have as much or even more compute horsepower in your PCs than the supercomputer but it spends all its time twiddling thumbs.
So for many hard applications these machines really are the bee's rollerskates.
What musicians need to do is find ways to use these systems to sell product, and from the judgement it seems some are already doing just that.
Does anyone here have personal experience of using the systems in this way that they can share?
They insist of giving people a Software License rather than a Licence. On the other hand, given the amount of porn on the internet, maybe they got it right!
Of course, this is by no means only a Microsoft problem. Most Americans don't even understand there is a problem here.
So I would find it hard to believe the original statement without some supporting evidence.
HP used to make a lot of cool tools as well - Oscilliscopes and such.
Their calculators were very cool
They were in at the begginning of the laser printer market. My Laserjet III is still going strong (did have to replace the power supply once but that was a job I could do myself with a screwdriver)
They have a pretty good claim to having invented the personal computer even though they never sold huge numbers since they were aimed at labs rather than end users. IBM can also put in a claim on that front with their APL desktop machine (HP's ran Basic or their own algebraic langauge, depending on model). We are talking early to mid 70's here.
They used to make PCs that you could run over with a truck - I know someone who did that on a loading dock and it kept on working.
And they made a cool range of mini-computers (although their OS and compilers were somewhat of a pain to use). In at least one of the early models you could actually add your own instructions using writable control store.
Of course, there's a simple fix.
I think the defintion should be its a moon if you can't hit a six iron clear off of it.
Of course this means that if I am the standard golfer some of those boulders in the rings are moons.
And don't imagine its just an issue of personal choice. That it is not is perfectly clear in team sports where players are asked to "take one for the team" but even in individual sports the pressures to perform make it very hard for individuals to make informed choices.
In an individual sport like Tennis, for example, the pressure causes lots of good teenagers burn out from trying to meet parental and other expectations even (presumably) without taking performance drugs. The pressure is very real even when not deliberately applied.
Given this, all sports association have a moral duty to try to prevent use of such drugs. To do otherwise is to recklessly endanger the children taking up your sport.
> Is it just me or does this seem equivalent to signing away your soul to Satan? Its just you. Satan would never ask for your immortal soul and $299. Just your soul and you don't even have to pay shipping and handling.
So there is no way Hospitals should be patching these machines without a proper testing and approval cycle.
And with new patches arriving every week, how can the manufacturers possibly stay current?
The only responsible course of action is to get these machines off the network.
It does raise an interesting question. Suppose you put these machines behind individual firewalls. Is it possible to guarantee that they will not get infected while providing any useful services through the firewall? If so, what are the providable services?
It would be nice to be able to remove all removable media devices as well to prevent infection by that vector. This would require that one do all data takeup over the firewalled network, so at least secure ftp would be desirable.
Allowing monopolies to develop in this area is not in the public interest.
What we need is a law that requires makers of media playing equipment to release the specifications required to interface to those machines. This would in no way impact the protections of DMCA (whether good or bad) because it would only protect translations into the machine format, not out of it.
Now the case on jurisdiction will be interesting. Presumably the menaces were delivered over the Internet from Russia. So where was the crime committed? Are they subject to extradition?
There are two issues that may be causing trouble.
If you have balanced ins on your interface an unbalanced interface can cause hum. A direct box with a ground lift can help.
Guitar outputs are high impedance. You may be trying to drive a low impedance input. A hi to low converting direct box will help. However if its a transformer based direct box it also reduces the signal coming out (in voltage terms). An active direct box can avoid this but, of course, the active direct box itself will introduce some noise - it just should be less noise than you are currently getting.
I have read that some of the corrections to Newtonian gravity that arise from General Relativity can be accounted for in a Newtonian Framework by accounting for the finite propgation speed of gravity but I have not worked my way through those calculations.
If gravity travelled instantaneously there would be a preferred frame in which to do physics, since it would give us a universal clock, and that would break the principle of equivalence.
In 25 years (or 50 in England) when the government archives are released, I wonder how many will be readable. This will be a serious problem for historians. I expect it already is a problem but it will get much worse - back in 1979 data formats were still fairly trivial, and paper documents were still pervasive, but complexity has increased immensely since and many documents are electronic only.
What we need are Open Document Standards that the government is required by law to use for all data, whether made public or not, so as to protect the data for the future.
An update to the freedom of information act (in the US) would seem to be one way to achieve this and I believe the GAO has the ability to enforce this and handle the neccesary waiver process in a realistic way.
And while open source doc formats does not imply use of open source software its clear that open source has an important role to play here by providing a means of verification. Its a compelling case where there is a clear societal need for open source software.
On the other hand, unlike Fresno, the streets are not paved with tomatoes.
So actually they've been there at least 200 months Martian time!
Its real cool to see them have such a success. They should keep this project up as long as possible. Hubble too. To do anything else is to waste our money.
Especially for speakers you can spend 1/2 to 1/4 the amount for pro gear for a given level of quality. The markup on consumer stuff must be huge and a lot of even quite expensive stuff can sound bad.
I used to live in a town that used Zellwigger equipment to turn on off-peak hotwater systems at night. You would get this ~ 1000Hz sound through your stereo when they turned it on. Audio power supplies are simply not designed to stop frequencies in that range. A well designed power ssupply will work better at RF because its a known problem - the big ripple capacitors have enough inductance to be inneffective at RF so you put a few picofarads of tag-tantalum or similar across them to shunt the RF.
But when you start imposing RF on the power system, I doubt that even this is going to filter it out. The result is going to be large amounts of RF to your audio amp, some of which is going to get rectified and which will reduce the headroom of your amp even if rectification does not introduce audible noise.
So I think this is another reason this was a bad idea.
Their founder was an opponent of the corn laws back in the nineteenth century. These were a very poor set of protectionist laws in Britain at the time designed to put a floor under the price of corn (ie, wheat).
They caused a lot of misery and economic dislocation while doing little to help farmers. Some of the chief beneficiaries were speculators who would pile up cheap foreign wheat in bonded warehouses until the price of domestic wheat reached the trigger point at which imports were allowed, and then import these entire stocks at once.
If I remember correctly, he was also an opponent of Mercantalism.
So, in this tradition, they support free trade, and free markets.
Supporting free markets does not make them right wing. The right in general supports unregulated markets. This is not the same thing as a free market since an unregulated market permits, for example, forming of Cartels to manipulate the market.
So in the US, for example, the difference is seen in practice by Republican government's unwillingness to enforce trade practice and monopoly laws. The Microsoft case was a fine example of exactly this.
No really. It was a very well behaved parrot. Only swore at the marketing types.
OK, I made that last bit up.
Now the one thing I really want is windows that open. Even if they close automatically when there is too much difference between outside and inside. Most of the year, the air in most office buildings is worse than the air outside.
In hot climates perhaps they could set things up to change the air completely overnight while its cool so at least its nice inside at the start of the day.
Unless you control for how much the trainees learn and how useful they are after training the comparison is meaningless. I don't expect they did that. In any case it would be real hard to measure with any accuracy. For example, how do you compare being able to bring up Windows explorer and being able to use its limited functionality to being able to do wizzy things with "find".
>You do realize that you are talking about a > company that has almost $60 Billion (with a B) > just in reserves alone. Yeah, but I hear they are planning to hire George W early next year as CFO.
Puzzle 2 is finding a way to remain interested in some puzzle competition when you could be off Dalek bashing in your time machine.
(Sadly, I believe "The Puzzler" adventure of Doctor Who has been lost)
A minor detail - AM antennas are often not as long as 1/4 of the wavelength would require. At 500Khz, that would be 3x10^8/5*10^5*1/4=150 Metres (~500 feet). Instead there is a "hat" on the top which acts as a capacitor that tunes the shortened antenna for the frequency.