But besides that, I have to say, it's been proven with hard facts and my own experience that MacOSX is not an efficient OS. I don't know why they would even want to spend time hacking the kernel, or use MacOSX for a massive grid.
Additionally, the following people using OS X clusters to do biomedical research, and having won awards from Apple. But of course Apple wouldn't be unbiased in their opinions of OS X.
So can you describe your experience with Xgrid and why you think it's so bad. And regarding software, what problems do you see with the following software packages, or have you not used any?
Not to mention that if the aforementioned 'serious shit' wasn't seen when the car hit 88 MPH, there would have been some serious blood and gore as the speeding car smashed into Marty and the Doc.
How many scientists do the first test of their invention with their lives directly on the line like that? Well, now that I think about it, from some book I read when I was a kid, apparently the guy who invented the parachute did that when he jumped from a hot air balloon.
Meanwhile, financial companies, especially hedge funds, are increasingly choosing to set up shop in London rather than New York/Connecticut to escape the burdens of Sarbanes-Oxley and SEC registration.
Using your same logic, here in the US we should also repeal child labor laws, environmental regulation, and occupational safety laws, merely because many US companies will open shop in in other countries where there are looser pollution regulation, safety laws, etc. Think of how much business the US economy is missing out on due to these regulations pushed by 'liberals'.
The scary thing is that a typical pro-big-business Republican would agree wholeheartedly with my paragraph, without sensing its sarcasm.
That's only valid in the infinitesmal limit.
The general expression (either from standard classical thermodynamics, or from the microcanonical ensemble of statistical mechanics) is T=(dQ/dS) where the differential is a partial differential. So the entropy really is the integral of the expression (1/T dQ).
In fact, temperature (really inverse temperature) is nothing more than an integrating variable to map the inexact differential dQ (path dependent) to an exact differential dS (path independent).
Path refers to the path a process takes through an effective phase space of independent thermodynamic variables, the most common example taught in introductory classes being the p-V diagram (pressure, volume). Ie, a process in such a space will take you from some point p,V to another point p',V', and the heat dissipated in the process is path dependent, but the entropy difference between the two points is not.
Right now, astronomers have some serious blinders on literally and figuratively. [SNIP] The crazy double super secret invisible "cosmological constant" and "dark matter" sound more to me like modern day epicycles than actual scientific theory.
Actually, you'd be surprised. There are many models astronomers are proposing to explain the empirical evidence of both dark matter and dark energy. But the basic dark energy and dark matter theories actually fit the data quite well. Sure they're hacks, but they fit the data. Much of physics, believe it or not, is coming up with mathematical models to describe experiment, even if that model has no real justification based on known laws.
As a great example of this, see the Ginzburg-Landau theory, which models the superconducting phase transition VERY well, and was later rigourously proved to be a valid limiting case of the microscopic BCS theory. But the model is so accurate it's still used heavily by both theorists and experimentalists today.
But anyway, regarding your point, astronomers are actively looking to come up with new models that explain the data and also make physical sense. If you can come up with a decent mathematical model that accurately fits astronomical data, yet is also consistent w/ the laws of physics on length/time/energy scales we know so far, please submit to a journal, you'd be famous.
Very Old Theory. Scientists and Philosophers have been waving this theory around for at least 30 years.
Links please? And by links, I mean links to accepted scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles that describe such theories with rigorous mathematical detail, and are self-consistent with known laws of physics.
The fact you even mention philosophers is kind of ridiculous. It's very easy to propose any new hand-wavy theory like "hey, what if there is negative mass, or imaginary time* or parallel-universes", but actually forumlating a reasonable mathematically-intensive theory that reduces in some limit to known physical laws is MUCH HARDER.
Secondly, you didn't really read TFA, you read a majorly watered-down summary of it, look at the author's actual article in the journal Science if you want to invalidate or dismiss the authors' claims.
One of the authors of the article in question, Paul Steinhardt, is a damn smart physicist, I took a graduate-level cosmology class from him about a decade ago.
And regarding my 'diss' of philosophers in the second paragraph, I justify that because back when I was an undergrad I double majored in physics and philosophy. If you had referred to actual "natural philosophers" from 200+ years ago, back when physics and philosophy were merged, you might have some semblence of a point.
And finally, to end with a nice quote "Physics is Philosophy with Integrals" - Zlatko Tesanovic
* Just to put in an obligatory footnote, imaginary time is actually used quite often by physicists, and it corresponds to an inverse temperature.
Common sense and intuition are ridiculously bad tools for scientific inquiry. Esthetically-pleasing deductions with no empirical evidence are even worse.
Albert Einstein might disagree with you. Regarding intuition, special relativity was primarily the result of intuition regarding Maxwell's equations in different velocity frames. There was absolutely no empirical evidence to support this at the time, nor was there any reason to suppose 'c' is constant in any frame.
Taking it even further and more esoteric, his theory of General Relativity was formulated as a 'beautiful', yet simple, field theory that incorporated gravity and non-inertial frames of reference to special relativity. Now Einstein did suggest that one could perhaps measure a star's deviation during a solar eclipse, so at least he proposed a future experiment that could validate or invalidate GR. But the theory itself was just formulated as being aesthetically pleasing, in the physical-mathematical sense.
In fact, it goes back further. Maxwell's correction to Ampere's Law, for instance, made Maxwell's Equations look more symmetric, and also mandated charge continuity (ie, that charge is conserved). But at the time this wasn't really supported empirically.
Is it scalable to the power levels given by the Spallation source? How focused can the beam be? What is the energy dispersion of emitted neutrons, compared to the Spallation source?
Firstly, they're neutral, so the charge of electrons or lattice ions they scatter off of won't give any extra Coulomb repulsion, as it would if they used proton or electron beams for scattering.
Additionally, they're massive, so the interaction will be different than X-Ray scattering.
But one of the most important characteristics is that neutrons have a spin of 1/2, and this spin looks like a small magnetic moment. So the neutrons can give useful information about magnetic interactions in the sample. Many people are studying interesting ferromagntic or anti-ferromagnetic interactions of whole new classes of materials with neutron scattering. This is also important for spintronics, where the neutrons will scatter differently off of a particle if that particle is spin-up vs spin-down.
The neutrons interact nicely with the lattice in a crystal, and with the energies involved they are a great tool for looking directly at phonon modes of the sample.
But they're being boned either way, it's really the fault of the record labels, not Apple's. The record label doesn't need to put out as much overhead for physical media and distribution, (maybe advertising stays the same), but they're still taking the same cut they always have.
What it will do, though, is lower the incentive for newer bands to sign with the big labels, and go with more indie labels, because the distribution will be the same (assuming Apple doesn't start doing dirty things like making labels pay a $1M fee to include their songs on iTunes or something like that).
No, definitely RotN. In the greek games, which the Nerds have to win, one of the events is a tricycle race around the track. There are several laps, and each contestant needs to chug a beer at the end of each lap. Suffice to say, by the end of the race all the other teams fall off their tricycles, but the nerd keeps going to victory because his brothers gave him the chemically-impossible trichloro-methylene.
And the nerd could use digital photography to get the girl- instead of vector graphics.
They didn't use digital photography or vector graphics to get the girl, they used another standard staple of the geek - a Darth Vader mask. Just imagine the hordes of chicks that Tron-suit-guy could have wooed.
Somewhere where it's still legal to have an official university-sanctioned event where each contestant has to chug a beer after each lap of the tricycle race around the track? (Remember, it was the very-easy-to-synthesize trichloromethylene that negated the effects of alcohol).
That nicely sums up smug self-complacency by many conservatives. They're all for 'good Christian values' and 'family values', but when they shop in the nice well-lit air-conditioned walmart stores they are conveniently disassociated from the daily realities of 16-year-old factory workers putting in 60 hour workweeks in Singapore to produce that 12-pack of tubesocks for $3.
People here love to worship WMT for its lower prices, and they don't realize that buy shopping at WMT they're only putting themselves out of work. To keep costs low, they have to cut manufacturing costs as much as possible, which is why most of their products are outsourced.
So it's a weird cause-and-effect chain. People in industrial towns that have been unemployed are forced to buy products at WMT because they're so cheap, without realizing the overseas competition is what pushed them out of a job to begin with.
You know, the day the contractors actually took BLAME for the problems that went wrong, i might feel pity for poor old TRW. Everybody loves blaming NASA for problems with metric/imperial conversion when it was the contractors that fucked it up. Everybody loves blaming NASA for spending $200 for a $30 part when it's the contractors that bill the outrageous charges for it.
It's been happening since Apollo, and it's still going on today, with even some of the suppliers for the replacement camera to go up on a hopefully SM4, the contractors fucked up bigtime, made wrong filters, installed them wrong, damaged them, and are charging NASA double for their own fuckups.
As for the guy that responded to you, it was Perkin Elmer who built the mirror. And since you are giving TRW credit for building all of Hubble, and I'm too lazy to Google Hubble's history, I'd tend to believe you're exaggerating by claiming TRW entirely designed and built the Hubble all by themselves (except the primary mirror, of course)
Funny story, when I was sitting in on a comp sci class back in the mid-90's at my university, one of the first days the prof was going over basic unix shell commands. When he showed the redirects and pipe, one student said "Hey, this is like DOS" and the prof said, "No, DOS is like UNIX, poorly." Awesome.
Well, the poster wants something on Windows. I suggest two "classics", both of which can be easily accessed from the DOS command prompt. 'edlin' and 'debug'.
All the user-friendlyness of UNIX with the historic flavor of MS-DOS.
I wonder how many Windows geeks are here on slashdot that don't even know about those two programs.
I don't see how any self-respecting geek could be satisfied with a Mac mini as their main or only machine.
Hmmm, not all self-respsecting geeks are gamers, or have the financial resources to purchase screaming cutting-edge machines. I'd say the majority of linux hackers, for instance, use old, perhaps salvaged, machines, to do their hardcore 'geeking' jobs. At least in the golden age of linux, that is.
there's a lot of people who like the look of Apple hardware, but aren't sure about the OS - who'll now buy an Apptel machine. Apple couldn't give a flying-F, they make as much money off this guy as a complete Apple zealot.
Not so true. If many of these people try OS X and like it, there's a higher probability they'll stay with Apple for future purchases, and might even get some friends/relatives to switch too.
But more importantly, it's in Apple's best interest to get people to use and like OS X because there are many applications that Apple would like them to buy (eg, iWork,.Mac, Final Cut, etc). So IMHO it's not accurate to say Apple doesn't give a Flying Fsck about these guys.
Slashdot Mirror
What has been your experience with Apple's XServe Clusters ?
But regareding your hard facts and your experience, what do you know that the technicians who built the following systems don't?
So can you describe your experience with Xgrid and why you think it's so bad. And regarding software, what problems do you see with the following software packages, or have you not used any?
How many scientists do the first test of their invention with their lives directly on the line like that? Well, now that I think about it, from some book I read when I was a kid, apparently the guy who invented the parachute did that when he jumped from a hot air balloon.
Damn, who told you? It must have been the other NSA (the National Sarcasm Agency) who outed my secret identity.
Using your same logic, here in the US we should also repeal child labor laws, environmental regulation, and occupational safety laws, merely because many US companies will open shop in in other countries where there are looser pollution regulation, safety laws, etc. Think of how much business the US economy is missing out on due to these regulations pushed by 'liberals'.
The scary thing is that a typical pro-big-business Republican would agree wholeheartedly with my paragraph, without sensing its sarcasm.
That's only valid in the infinitesmal limit. The general expression (either from standard classical thermodynamics, or from the microcanonical ensemble of statistical mechanics) is T=(dQ/dS) where the differential is a partial differential. So the entropy really is the integral of the expression (1/T dQ).
In fact, temperature (really inverse temperature) is nothing more than an integrating variable to map the inexact differential dQ (path dependent) to an exact differential dS (path independent).
Path refers to the path a process takes through an effective phase space of independent thermodynamic variables, the most common example taught in introductory classes being the p-V diagram (pressure, volume). Ie, a process in such a space will take you from some point p,V to another point p',V', and the heat dissipated in the process is path dependent, but the entropy difference between the two points is not.
Not explicitly, it demonstrated that they couldn't see any evidence of an 'aether' through which light travelled.
[SNIP]
The crazy double super secret invisible "cosmological constant" and "dark matter" sound more to me like modern day epicycles than actual scientific theory.
Actually, you'd be surprised. There are many models astronomers are proposing to explain the empirical evidence of both dark matter and dark energy. But the basic dark energy and dark matter theories actually fit the data quite well. Sure they're hacks, but they fit the data. Much of physics, believe it or not, is coming up with mathematical models to describe experiment, even if that model has no real justification based on known laws.
As a great example of this, see the Ginzburg-Landau theory, which models the superconducting phase transition VERY well, and was later rigourously proved to be a valid limiting case of the microscopic BCS theory. But the model is so accurate it's still used heavily by both theorists and experimentalists today.
But anyway, regarding your point, astronomers are actively looking to come up with new models that explain the data and also make physical sense. If you can come up with a decent mathematical model that accurately fits astronomical data, yet is also consistent w/ the laws of physics on length/time/energy scales we know so far, please submit to a journal, you'd be famous.
Links please? And by links, I mean links to accepted scholarly peer-reviewed journal articles that describe such theories with rigorous mathematical detail, and are self-consistent with known laws of physics.
The fact you even mention philosophers is kind of ridiculous. It's very easy to propose any new hand-wavy theory like "hey, what if there is negative mass, or imaginary time* or parallel-universes", but actually forumlating a reasonable mathematically-intensive theory that reduces in some limit to known physical laws is MUCH HARDER.
Secondly, you didn't really read TFA, you read a majorly watered-down summary of it, look at the author's actual article in the journal Science if you want to invalidate or dismiss the authors' claims.
One of the authors of the article in question, Paul Steinhardt, is a damn smart physicist, I took a graduate-level cosmology class from him about a decade ago.
And regarding my 'diss' of philosophers in the second paragraph, I justify that because back when I was an undergrad I double majored in physics and philosophy. If you had referred to actual "natural philosophers" from 200+ years ago, back when physics and philosophy were merged, you might have some semblence of a point.
And finally, to end with a nice quote "Physics is Philosophy with Integrals" - Zlatko Tesanovic
* Just to put in an obligatory footnote, imaginary time is actually used quite often by physicists, and it corresponds to an inverse temperature.
Albert Einstein might disagree with you. Regarding intuition, special relativity was primarily the result of intuition regarding Maxwell's equations in different velocity frames. There was absolutely no empirical evidence to support this at the time, nor was there any reason to suppose 'c' is constant in any frame.
Taking it even further and more esoteric, his theory of General Relativity was formulated as a 'beautiful', yet simple, field theory that incorporated gravity and non-inertial frames of reference to special relativity. Now Einstein did suggest that one could perhaps measure a star's deviation during a solar eclipse, so at least he proposed a future experiment that could validate or invalidate GR. But the theory itself was just formulated as being aesthetically pleasing, in the physical-mathematical sense.
In fact, it goes back further. Maxwell's correction to Ampere's Law, for instance, made Maxwell's Equations look more symmetric, and also mandated charge continuity (ie, that charge is conserved). But at the time this wasn't really supported empirically.
Is it scalable to the power levels given by the Spallation source? How focused can the beam be? What is the energy dispersion of emitted neutrons, compared to the Spallation source?
Firstly, they're neutral, so the charge of electrons or lattice ions they scatter off of won't give any extra Coulomb repulsion, as it would if they used proton or electron beams for scattering.
Additionally, they're massive, so the interaction will be different than X-Ray scattering.
But one of the most important characteristics is that neutrons have a spin of 1/2, and this spin looks like a small magnetic moment. So the neutrons can give useful information about magnetic interactions in the sample. Many people are studying interesting ferromagntic or anti-ferromagnetic interactions of whole new classes of materials with neutron scattering. This is also important for spintronics, where the neutrons will scatter differently off of a particle if that particle is spin-up vs spin-down.
The neutrons interact nicely with the lattice in a crystal, and with the energies involved they are a great tool for looking directly at phonon modes of the sample.
Yeah, you're right, that was pretty impressive, he coded that whole animation bit in what, like 5 seconds?
What it will do, though, is lower the incentive for newer bands to sign with the big labels, and go with more indie labels, because the distribution will be the same (assuming Apple doesn't start doing dirty things like making labels pay a $1M fee to include their songs on iTunes or something like that).
No, definitely RotN. In the greek games, which the Nerds have to win, one of the events is a tricycle race around the track. There are several laps, and each contestant needs to chug a beer at the end of each lap. Suffice to say, by the end of the race all the other teams fall off their tricycles, but the nerd keeps going to victory because his brothers gave him the chemically-impossible trichloro-methylene.
They didn't use digital photography or vector graphics to get the girl, they used another standard staple of the geek - a Darth Vader mask. Just imagine the hordes of chicks that Tron-suit-guy could have wooed.
Yeah, totally. Us geeks can now all bonk the popular cheerleaders without the need to wear Darth Vader masks.
Somewhere where it's still legal to have an official university-sanctioned event where each contestant has to chug a beer after each lap of the tricycle race around the track? (Remember, it was the very-easy-to-synthesize trichloromethylene that negated the effects of alcohol).
People here love to worship WMT for its lower prices, and they don't realize that buy shopping at WMT they're only putting themselves out of work. To keep costs low, they have to cut manufacturing costs as much as possible, which is why most of their products are outsourced.
So it's a weird cause-and-effect chain. People in industrial towns that have been unemployed are forced to buy products at WMT because they're so cheap, without realizing the overseas competition is what pushed them out of a job to begin with.
You're the guy that's been writing those Wiki articles on behalf of WMT, aren't you?
It's been happening since Apollo, and it's still going on today, with even some of the suppliers for the replacement camera to go up on a hopefully SM4, the contractors fucked up bigtime, made wrong filters, installed them wrong, damaged them, and are charging NASA double for their own fuckups.
As for the guy that responded to you, it was Perkin Elmer who built the mirror. And since you are giving TRW credit for building all of Hubble, and I'm too lazy to Google Hubble's history, I'd tend to believe you're exaggerating by claiming TRW entirely designed and built the Hubble all by themselves (except the primary mirror, of course)
Kind of like DeValueing the voice of the Freeholders? Hmmm, where'd that Flowerpot go?
Funny story, when I was sitting in on a comp sci class back in the mid-90's at my university, one of the first days the prof was going over basic unix shell commands. When he showed the redirects and pipe, one student said "Hey, this is like DOS" and the prof said, "No, DOS is like UNIX, poorly." Awesome.
I wonder how many Windows geeks are here on slashdot that don't even know about those two programs.
Hmmm, not all self-respsecting geeks are gamers, or have the financial resources to purchase screaming cutting-edge machines. I'd say the majority of linux hackers, for instance, use old, perhaps salvaged, machines, to do their hardcore 'geeking' jobs. At least in the golden age of linux, that is.
Not so true. If many of these people try OS X and like it, there's a higher probability they'll stay with Apple for future purchases, and might even get some friends/relatives to switch too.
But more importantly, it's in Apple's best interest to get people to use and like OS X because there are many applications that Apple would like them to buy (eg, iWork,