i would like to recommend 'turing omnibus' and 'the magic machine' by a. k. dewdney. there are some available on amazon right now for $0.01 and $0.35 respectively! it is a collection of topics drawn from the old computer recreations column in scientific american. topics are laid out in pseudocode so it is not tied to any language in particular and thus remain timeless. really, no programmer's library is complete without at least one of these fine books.
depending on the nature of your research group (academic, government, military, private...) you may well be able to have cluster time free for the asking. from my experience you may have to 'apply for a grant' which is really filling out a form. the cluster i have access to has many nodes with 64 gig of ram and all nodes are stuffed with gpus as well. it never makes sense to spend money on computer equipment that you will spend a year or more learning to use. do as much development on borrowed equipment as you can and when you have working software already implemented, buy hardware as needed. good luck!
if you look at a graph of the stock price of silicon graphics (i just tried to get this at google finance, but the historical information was unavailable) you see it peaks right about the time windows 95 was released. up until then, anyone trying to do serious (be sure to screw your face into a grimace when you say that) computing turned to unix and shunned dos and win 3.1. but with the release of windows 95 people got more ambitious about what they thought could be accomplished with commodity hardware and windows. if only they realized that 15 years later they would be almost on par with *nix;-)
i agree. i ran some memory through a week of memtest86 with no problems reported except that in the end, all my problems went away when i started swapping memory sticks and determined which one was the culprit.
save your money. if you really need time on a cluster you should apply for a grant from the ohio supercomputer center, ncsa, or investigate the offerings from your own institution. applying for a grant may sound daunting, but it really involves little more than filling out a form and asking for some cluster time. good luck!
there are two likely futures we are all collectively hurtling toward. one in which all of our culture is tied up with various so called 'rights' by a small number of intellectual property holding companies or the future in which all people are free to share any bit of information with their fellow human beings that they like. my kids are heading for the latter one.
so if one were to use a screwdriver to break into a computer case then the hardware store that sold (distributed) the screwdriver would be liable? this means that the uk has mandated open hardware!
first, i was just noting to a friend recently that i dropped out of high school and then went on to get a college degree, but i had never met anyone else who had done the same, so congrats!
i'll have to side with the community college folks here. the real trick is to work problems. it is very easy for me to read some math text and be thinking "i see, this get bigger, this gets smaller, and the whole enchilada converges to 'the answer'" but true understanding only comes with actually working a few examples, which i am far more likely to do in a structured environment.
another option is to tutor kids who are learning what you want to know and that provides some incentive to keep ahead of the material.
i am redoing my bathroom and i thought it would be great to paper the walls (and if i have any leftover, my arse) with sco stock certificates. do they even really exist or is it all done electronically?
i stopped getting calls when i told everyone i would not support windows anymore. i am happy to help a relative or friend with foss, but my mindshare will not go to redmond. if anyone asks you for windows support, all you need to do is start raving about microsoft and the gpl and richard stallman and digital rights management, and sco, and whatever else might be topical on slashdot;-) until they look elsewhere.
just one year ago, at the ripe old age of 41, i picked up a baritone ukulele and things finally started to gel. i had taken a guitar class in college and didn't do especially well despite the fact it was a pretty easy class, and i tried to play the banjo for a while but that didn't work well either. the baritone ukulele is tuned like the high 4 strings on a guitar, so most any instructional materials for a guitar are easily usable. here's exactly what you need:
a baritone ukulele. mine was $50 new at a music store. i highly recommend getting it from a music store because you can get a 'professional setup'
a chord chart. available across the web.
a song book. i just started going through _rise_up_singing_ and trying to play anything i knew. also you can get chords and lyrics for most any song you can think of on the web. your public library is a great place to find guitar music (which works great for a baritone ukulele)much of which is even classified as easy.
a pick. i prefer a thin one.
an electronic tuner. a guitar one works great. you can use some of the software listed here but that won't help you around the campfire.
time to play.
if you start digging it, you can readily move to the guitar because of the commonalities they share, but the best reason to stay with the baritone ukulele is: diminished expectations. as soon as you whip out a guitar, people expect you play like eric clapton.
anyway, i'm having a blast with my uke, and i just want to reiterate that it is never too late to start.
you cannot set up a lab (10-30 computers or so) let kids use it and expect things to hum along smoothly with either the microsoft offering or the apple offering. so who is ready for prime time?
i have quit doing tech support for windows. i will happily help someone with a linux issue (close family and friends anyway) but for windows, i won't do it. if anyone asks you what you charge, hold your pinkie up to your lips and say "one million dollars an hour!"
i have 3 domains that don't have anything whatsoever objectionable to the chinese government, however i am told by friends they cannot be reached from china, probably because the folks i am hosting them with are also hosting something objectionable.
tips for travel in china: take few clothes and only one nasty old pair of shoes, and buy shoes and clothes there. (note this may not be a great plan if you are particularly large)
a cyber cafe is a door that is ajar through which one can see a computer.
hard disk storage is still accurately described by moore's law, so it dosen't make any sense to buy storage you need right now. if you need a terabyte now, then get whatever you need. if it is going to take a year to fill up a terabyte then start small and build up to a terabyte. when you get to a terabyte, you can take the money you saved and buy a 2 terabyte nas, backup the first one and have another terabyte to fill up.
i bought a 160 gig drive last year and for various tedious technical reasons the computer i put it in only recognized 120 gig. i went ahead and formatted it anyway figuring i would try to get at that final 40 gig when i needed it, only i haven't needed it yet, so i spent too much for that drive.
i have a windows 98 partition and the only reason i haven't wiped it out yet is print shop. yes, one theoretically has the functionality of print shop in the gimp, but it is great to pick your paper, pick your layout add some text and graphics and go.
the most dishonest aspect of nuclear power in the united states is that when a utility builds a nuclear plant, the stockholders of the utility get rich, the contractors who build the plant get rich, and when the time comes to decomission the plant, the rate payers get the shaft.
i am doing just this very thing. i have an amd 586 (basically a glorified 486) box running (i am loathe to confess) windows 98 and doing the internet connection sharing. i have messed around with freesco and coyote linux in order to get windows out of my critical path, however there is always some hitch like it won't disconnect or it wont dial when a client makes a request. i hate to say it but the win98 internet connection sharing provides me with dhcp and it just works for all my windows, linux and even irix clients. although i am using an external serial modem (because i really wanted to do this with linux and have already spent way too much time trying) this is an excellent solution for using a winmodem.
at work we have a running joke regarding legacy hardware that only has windows drivers. we stick it in a box running windows and send the data to network drives using samba. we call this 'the windows compatibility layer'
rendering is processor intensive (usually) and not io intensive so you will probably do just fine with plain old 100 mbit ethernet. take the money you save on networking and spend it on more nodes.
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i would like to recommend 'turing omnibus' and 'the magic machine' by a. k. dewdney. there are some available on amazon right now for $0.01 and $0.35 respectively! it is a collection of topics drawn from the old computer recreations column in scientific american. topics are laid out in pseudocode so it is not tied to any language in particular and thus remain timeless. really, no programmer's library is complete without at least one of these fine books.
depending on the nature of your research group (academic, government, military, private...) you may well be able to have cluster time free for the asking. from my experience you may have to 'apply for a grant' which is really filling out a form. the cluster i have access to has many nodes with 64 gig of ram and all nodes are stuffed with gpus as well. it never makes sense to spend money on computer equipment that you will spend a year or more learning to use. do as much development on borrowed equipment as you can and when you have working software already implemented, buy hardware as needed. good luck!
if you look at a graph of the stock price of silicon graphics (i just tried to get this at google finance, but the historical information was unavailable) you see it peaks right about the time windows 95 was released. up until then, anyone trying to do serious (be sure to screw your face into a grimace when you say that) computing turned to unix and shunned dos and win 3.1. but with the release of windows 95 people got more ambitious about what they thought could be accomplished with commodity hardware and windows. if only they realized that 15 years later they would be almost on par with *nix ;-)
i agree. i ran some memory through a week of memtest86 with no problems reported except that in the end, all my problems went away when i started swapping memory sticks and determined which one was the culprit.
save your money. if you really need time on a cluster you should apply for a grant from the ohio supercomputer center, ncsa, or investigate the offerings from your own institution. applying for a grant may sound daunting, but it really involves little more than filling out a form and asking for some cluster time. good luck!
succinct, pithy, nice!
yeah, that'll protect my data.
there are two likely futures we are all collectively hurtling toward. one in which all of our culture is tied up with various so called 'rights' by a small number of intellectual property holding companies or the future in which all people are free to share any bit of information with their fellow human beings that they like. my kids are heading for the latter one.
1 in 10 is better than the chances a sourceforge.net project has.
so if one were to use a screwdriver to break into a computer case then the hardware store that sold (distributed) the screwdriver would be liable? this means that the uk has mandated open hardware!
in this system, all email is cc'd to president@whitehouse.gov
you know, for all the people who have nothing to hide.
first, i was just noting to a friend recently that i dropped out of high school and then went on to get a college degree, but i had never met anyone else who had done the same, so congrats!
i'll have to side with the community college folks here. the real trick is to work problems. it is very easy for me to read some math text and be thinking "i see, this get bigger, this gets smaller, and the whole enchilada converges to 'the answer'" but true understanding only comes with actually working a few examples, which i am far more likely to do in a structured environment.
another option is to tutor kids who are learning what you want to know and that provides some incentive to keep ahead of the material.
good luck!
cryptozoologist
i am redoing my bathroom and i thought it would be great to paper the walls (and if i have any leftover, my arse) with sco stock certificates. do they even really exist or is it all done electronically?
the day after your boss gets an iphone.
i stopped getting calls when i told everyone i would not support windows anymore. i am happy to help a relative or friend with foss, but my mindshare will not go to redmond. if anyone asks you for windows support, all you need to do is start raving about microsoft and the gpl and richard stallman and digital rights management, and sco, and whatever else might be topical on slashdot ;-) until they look elsewhere.
just one year ago, at the ripe old age of 41, i picked up a baritone ukulele and things finally started to gel. i had taken a guitar class in college and didn't do especially well despite the fact it was a pretty easy class, and i tried to play the banjo for a while but that didn't work well either. the baritone ukulele is tuned like the high 4 strings on a guitar, so most any instructional materials for a guitar are easily usable. here's exactly what you need:
a baritone ukulele. mine was $50 new at a music store. i highly recommend getting it from a music store because you can get a 'professional setup'
a chord chart. available across the web.
a song book. i just started going through _rise_up_singing_ and trying to play anything i knew. also you can get chords and lyrics for most any song you can think of on the web. your public library is a great place to find guitar music (which works great for a baritone ukulele)much of which is even classified as easy.
a pick. i prefer a thin one.
an electronic tuner. a guitar one works great. you can use some of the software listed here but that won't help you around the campfire.
time to play.
if you start digging it, you can readily move to the guitar because of the commonalities they share, but the best reason to stay with the baritone ukulele is: diminished expectations. as soon as you whip out a guitar, people expect you play like eric clapton.
anyway, i'm having a blast with my uke, and i just want to reiterate that it is never too late to start.
have fun and good luck!
you cannot set up a lab (10-30 computers or so) let kids use it and expect things to hum along smoothly with either the microsoft offering or the apple offering. so who is ready for prime time?
i have quit doing tech support for windows. i will happily help someone with a linux issue (close family and friends anyway) but for windows, i won't do it. if anyone asks you what you charge, hold your pinkie up to your lips and say "one million dollars an hour!"
i have 3 domains that don't have anything whatsoever objectionable to the chinese government, however i am told by friends they cannot be reached from china, probably because the folks i am hosting them with are also hosting something objectionable.
tips for travel in china:
take few clothes and only one nasty old pair of shoes, and buy shoes and clothes there. (note this may not be a great plan if you are particularly large)
a cyber cafe is a door that is ajar through which one can see a computer.
everything is delicious
have fun!
hard disk storage is still accurately described by moore's law, so it dosen't make any sense to buy storage you need right now. if you need a terabyte now, then get whatever you need. if it is going to take a year to fill up a terabyte then start small and build up to a terabyte. when you get to a terabyte, you can take the money you saved and buy a 2 terabyte nas, backup the first one and have another terabyte to fill up.
i bought a 160 gig drive last year and for various tedious technical reasons the computer i put it in only recognized 120 gig. i went ahead and formatted it anyway figuring i would try to get at that final 40 gig when i needed it, only i haven't needed it yet, so i spent too much for that drive.
i have a windows 98 partition and the only reason i haven't wiped it out yet is print shop. yes, one theoretically has the functionality of print shop in the gimp, but it is great to pick your paper, pick your layout add some text and graphics and go.
the most dishonest aspect of nuclear power in the united states is that when a utility builds a nuclear plant, the stockholders of the utility get rich, the contractors who build the plant get rich, and when the time comes to decomission the plant, the rate payers get the shaft.
i am doing just this very thing. i have an amd 586 (basically a glorified 486) box running (i am loathe to confess) windows 98 and doing the internet connection sharing. i have messed around with freesco and coyote linux in order to get windows out of my critical path, however there is always some hitch like it won't disconnect or it wont dial when a client makes a request. i hate to say it but the win98 internet connection sharing provides me with dhcp and it just works for all my windows, linux and even irix clients. although i am using an external serial modem (because i really wanted to do this with linux and have already spent way too much time trying) this is an excellent solution for using a winmodem.
at work we have a running joke regarding legacy hardware that only has windows drivers. we stick it in a box running windows and send the data to network drives using samba. we call this 'the windows compatibility layer'
they are the most hackable desktop dvd players imaginable
rendering is processor intensive (usually) and not io intensive so you will probably do just fine with plain old 100 mbit ethernet. take the money you save on networking and spend it on more nodes.