due to its availability on the internet, and Eminem's whining. The original announcement from billboard is here. This breaks the usual trend of CDs being released on Tuesdays.
And, even though everyone in the industry seems to be complaining about how bootleg copies of his CD are hurting sales, early predictions will still put him on top of this week's Billboard 200 with over 300,000 albums sold. And since SoundScan tallies sales from Monday thru Sunday, this CD has only one legitimate day of sales to reach that level (minus the usual street date violations -- the album has been in the hands of the record stores since at least last Friday). This article focuses on some early sales reports.
The Simpsons have been around since 1987, when they appeared as shorts on the Tracey Ullman show.
And... The first full length Simpsons episode aired on 12/17/1989 (the Simpsons Christmas Special). This is just the day Fox decided to call the 10th anniversary, the day "Bart the Genius" (the pilot) aired.
Nope. Maggie Roswell, the voice of Maude Flanders, Helen Lovejoy and Miss Hoover left the show sometime in the fall. It is rumored that the characters voiced by her will die sometime this season.
I've looked through the dcypher website twice, and haven't seen any mention of the 10,000 Euro prize, or how it is divided. I'm not in this thing for the money, but before I'd consider running a dcypher client, I want to know how the money is being distributed.
I don't think it's worth getting worried about. If the banner advertising industry actually understood the demographics they were collecting, they might be able to show me banners I'd be interested in. I spend hours surfing the web, but I click on maybe one banner a month. From The Economist:
"... although marketers are waking up to the importance of the web as a new advertising medium, few know how to make the best use of it. Most still "spray and pray", throwing money at the web in the hope of reaching a mass-audience and building a brand, just as they did once before in the broadcast world."
But all this money spent on advertising on the web has done nothing to draw me in. Ads for internet companies work on TV, I've actually been tempted to check out websites after I've seen their ads on TV. But the banners that everyonne sees everywhere aren't much more than annoying.
I like my privacy as much as the next person, but I'll save my fights for a problem that's staring me in the face, threatning to do some serious damage... not a banner ad that I can just as easily ignore.
This system works for Fermi because they have different needs. As I was told, each node is given 4-6 gigs of data, and then 8 hours later, it sends the results back. All the limitations of a typical beowulf cluster you mentioned are valid, but this isn't a typical beowulf cluster.
Also, the machines ARE intel (as I posted earlier), PII's to be exact. Why? They're cheaper. Cost matters - even if you are the US government. The analysis programs are very small, so what's really needed in this situation is just a lot of processor time.
Well, maybe in a normal workplace, this would actually be considered. But being Fermi accelerates particles to near the speed of light, using ungodly amounts of power (something like $15 million worth a year), it isn't an issue.
From my tour of Fermi on Friday, I recall seeing a 600+ cpu custom cluster, which is a low 486 class machine, and a ~37 node dual PII 450 cluster, as well as some SGI stuff. I think I was told they would be purchasing a few hundred dual PII's, meant for clustering, each year for the next few years. I don't remember the specific numbers, but I know for a fact they are intel machines - because they are the biggest bang for the buck. Still, it's a lot. They run a custom version of PVM, that processes part of the 1 terabyte of data that is collected every second.
Seeing this talk, or possibly sittting 300 miles from home with a broken down car? Well, I was invited - Dan gave me and a group a tour of Fermi on Friday, and when he mentioned that Linus would be there Sunday, my mouth dropped open. But, the group was leaving Chicago at 1pm Sunday. And I couldn't convince anyone to drive 14 hours round trip to attend the talk, and give me a ride back to Minnesota. Damn. But oh well... the tour was worth it. Fermi has an incredible amount of computer power and data storage (3 Petabytes of data, IIRC). And to re-affirm what others have said, Dan is a great guy.
I guess it's incorret to say that Fox itself has been hyping the show a lot. But Simpsons fans sure have. Twenty or thirty of them have devoted time into creating a site for a show that hasn't even began yet. That, combined with the one-year advanced warning I (along with many others) got on the show, and a lot of media attention (Wired Magazine, and local papers, etc.)...
I just think that a lot of people are expecting a lot out of this show, and some of them are gonna be disappointed. And being that I'm expecting much less, come X-Files at 8pm, I won't have a sinking feeling in my stomach... saying "That's it?"
Generally when big buinsness promotes the crap out of a new show or movie, it's because it can't stand on it's own two feet when it actually debuts. This one's been hyped more than any TV show I can remember. I heard about it nearly a year ago, and it's been in countless publications since the Wired issue earlier this year.
I'm a fan of Groening and The Simpsons (maybe more than the next guy), but I'm not gonna hold my breath over this one. My guess is that if you've watched a few hours of Fox primetime over the last weeks, you've seen the funny lines from the first episode. Hopefully it'll be good, and not crash and burn in it's own hype like South Park did. But enough talk - watch it Sunday and make your own decisions.
Okay, this is getting out of hand. It seems that every day, I end up reading about someone suing someone else over search engine placement, netscape's "what's related", domain names, etc. When will it end? To me, the point isn't that someone's rights may have been violated, but that every company who's got a foot in the internet is only thinking about themselves. "Oh, our playboy website isn't getting enough visitors. Let's sue everyone so we can sell more magazines." Yes, I'm mainly concerned about this because I could be next... sued by Fox over my site. But really, what do all these lawsuits accomplish? Nothing.
Lawyers should be permanently banned from the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
And, even though everyone in the industry seems to be complaining about how bootleg copies of his CD are hurting sales, early predictions will still put him on top of this week's Billboard 200 with over 300,000 albums sold. And since SoundScan tallies sales from Monday thru Sunday, this CD has only one legitimate day of sales to reach that level (minus the usual street date violations -- the album has been in the hands of the record stores since at least last Friday). This article focuses on some early sales reports.
And... The first full length Simpsons episode aired on 12/17/1989 (the Simpsons Christmas Special). This is just the day Fox decided to call the 10th anniversary, the day "Bart the Genius" (the pilot) aired.
Nope. Maggie Roswell, the voice of Maude Flanders, Helen Lovejoy and Miss Hoover left the show sometime in the fall. It is rumored that the characters voiced by her will die sometime this season.
I've looked through the dcypher website twice, and haven't seen any mention of the 10,000 Euro prize, or how it is divided. I'm not in this thing for the money, but before I'd consider running a dcypher client, I want to know how the money is being distributed.
If the banner advertising industry actually understood the demographics they were collecting, they might be able to show me banners I'd be interested in. I spend hours surfing the web, but I click on maybe one banner a month. From The Economist:
"... although marketers are waking up to the importance of the web as a new advertising medium, few know how to make the best use of it. Most still "spray and pray", throwing money at the web in the hope of reaching a mass-audience and building a brand, just as they did once before in the broadcast world."
But all this money spent on advertising on the web has done nothing to draw me in. Ads for internet companies work on TV, I've actually been tempted to check out websites after I've seen their ads on TV. But the banners that everyonne sees everywhere aren't much more than annoying.
I like my privacy as much as the next person, but I'll save my fights for a problem that's staring me in the face, threatning to do some serious damage... not a banner ad that I can just as easily ignore.
Since I'm feeling sorry for anyone trying to get it from the planetquake mirror list:
q3test_1_05.exe
Also, the machines ARE intel (as I posted earlier), PII's to be exact. Why? They're cheaper. Cost matters - even if you are the US government. The analysis programs are very small, so what's really needed in this situation is just a lot of processor time.
Well, maybe in a normal workplace, this would actually be considered. But being Fermi accelerates particles to near the speed of light, using ungodly amounts of power (something like $15 million worth a year), it isn't an issue.
From my tour of Fermi on Friday, I recall seeing a 600+ cpu custom cluster, which is a low 486 class machine, and a ~37 node dual PII 450 cluster, as well as some SGI stuff. I think I was told they would be purchasing a few hundred dual PII's, meant for clustering, each year for the next few years. I don't remember the specific numbers, but I know for a fact they are intel machines - because they are the biggest bang for the buck.
Still, it's a lot. They run a custom version of PVM, that processes part of the 1 terabyte of data that is collected every second.
Seeing this talk, or possibly sittting 300 miles from home with a broken down car?
Well, I was invited - Dan gave me and a group a tour of Fermi on Friday, and when he mentioned that Linus would be there Sunday, my mouth dropped open. But, the group was leaving Chicago at 1pm Sunday. And I couldn't convince anyone to drive 14 hours round trip to attend the talk, and give me a ride back to Minnesota. Damn.
But oh well... the tour was worth it. Fermi has an incredible amount of computer power and data storage (3 Petabytes of data, IIRC). And to re-affirm what others have said, Dan is a great guy.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/television/phil252. html
I just think that a lot of people are expecting a lot out of this show, and some of them are gonna be disappointed. And being that I'm expecting much less, come X-Files at 8pm, I won't have a sinking feeling in my stomach ... saying "That's it?"
I'm a fan of Groening and The Simpsons (maybe more than the next guy), but I'm not gonna hold my breath over this one. My guess is that if you've watched a few hours of Fox primetime over the last weeks, you've seen the funny lines from the first episode. Hopefully it'll be good, and not crash and burn in it's own hype like South Park did. But enough talk - watch it Sunday and make your own decisions.
Lawyers should be permanently banned from the internet.