Shahriar Afshar's 2004 double slit experiment
pretty much invalidates a common belief in Quantum Mechanics, namely Bohr's duality principle. In his experiment, photons behave as waves and particles at the same time.
Almost all science in the US is actually done in SI. Why ? Simply because the imperial system is incomplete.
1 Volt, for instance, is 1 kgm^2s^3A^1. It has both the meter and the kilogram in it. There is no imperial equivalent for it. Messing around with both SI and imperial will only lead to problems (IIRC a Mars probe failed because of "conversion errors").
I agree that, as long as you can *vectorize* your scientific code, SPARC should work well. Otherwise, keeping the fp units busy can be extremely tough, even if you work very hard . Why ? To put it simply, SPARCs execute instructions in-order, so you're limited to instructions that are from the same basic block, as opposed to new x86s (K6+, PII+), which execute out-of-order, and can thus do at the same time operations from different basic blocks.
Now, the problem is that automatic vectorization works well-enough only if your language is Fortran (which has no dynamic memory). I guess that's ok, since a lot of libraries are in Fortran. But the language itself is grotesque (after all, it's the first real programming language), and a lot of people just write their stuff from scratch.
At the same time, manual vectorization can make your code completely unreadable.
No, I wouldn't pay a buck an hour for a Sun processor. They're simply the worst for scientific computing. They work very well for server benchmarks, where all you need really is just lots of caches and lots of execution contexts, but not for number crunching.
If they were Opterons, it would make sense though.
The founders of America were puritans. That's pretty much opposite to "scientists". Their descendants voted for Bush because of "moral values". America never really experienced an "age of reason", and it shows.
That was 20 years ago. These days, compilers are likely to produce better machine code than a human being.
The problem is that high performance microprocessors are simply too complex. How many assembly hackers actually understand out-of-order execution (which pretty much all desktop processors do, with the notable exception of Transmeta) ? How many are aware that branches can sometimes severely degrade performance and thus do tricks like predication with conditional moves or loop unrolling ? How many perform loop pipelining, to eliminate data stalls/waits ?
Calling people "communists" because they fight for consumer rights is very insulting and just dumb. I find it very disturbing that people can get away with such nasty insults without having to apologize.
It's the Swiss Army knife of backing up. It can backup stuff over samba, ssh/rsync, ssh/rsyncd, ssh/tar, direct file access (in other words it doesn't need special software installed on the clients). It keeps a single copy of multiple, identical files, so backing up a bunch of Windoze machines can be done with decent amount of space.
Restore is also straightforward - it can be done in place, or by downloading a zip/tar file.
In the beginning, it simply was a "write once, run anywhere" for the desktop market. Nothing wrong there. Once it ended up on the server side, it was quite effective at eating up Sun's market share, however, as it brought good performance, scalability, stability to the PC market.
He's definitely done more work than 99.99% of the
slashdot crowd.
Yet, strangely, he doesn't feel compelled to get political about everything and the kitchen sync, he doesn't drag the community in pointless debates, he doesn't alienate commercial partners, and he also doesn't imply he knows what's best for everybody.
Yes, I am very grateful for the software he wrote. Yes, what I've done so far in my life is like a firefly to the sun, compared to what he did. But that doesn't mean that I'm not entitled to a critical opinion, especially towards his "political" enterprises.
P.S. one should be careful about labeling someone "communist" - after all, communism killed an estimated number of 100 million people (more than fascism, albeit over a longer period of time)
Current flash cards that are used for consumer electronic products employ controllers that do wear distribution. Without such controllers, the FAT filesystem would kill them really fast.
For "raw flash" a filesystem designed with wear distribution in mind is JFFS2.
And yeah, I concur with tmpfs for/tmp. I'd make it default for all distros.
... is what I call the spreadshit approach. Pretty much like a student who has no idea what to write on an exam, and out of desperation writes whatever he/she can think of (and prays to the God of Partial Credit), so does SCO try every possible judicial technicality (no matter how preposterous it is) to delay the final judgement.
Just keep in mind that they're not here to win. Their purpose is to drag Linux through legal mud for as long as they can, allowing their overlords MS to spread even more FUD.
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Shahriar Afshar's 2004 double slit experiment pretty much invalidates a common belief in Quantum Mechanics, namely Bohr's duality principle. In his experiment, photons behave as waves and particles at the same time.
1 Volt, for instance, is 1 kgm^2s^3A^1. It has both the meter and the kilogram in it. There is no imperial equivalent for it. Messing around with both SI and imperial will only lead to problems (IIRC a Mars probe failed because of "conversion errors").
Esp. when its flagship products are monopolies.
K Einstein :)
From a country that simply doesn't have the notion of free speech, and also prohibited asymmetric cryptography ?
Now, the problem is that automatic vectorization works well-enough only if your language is Fortran (which has no dynamic memory). I guess that's ok, since a lot of libraries are in Fortran. But the language itself is grotesque (after all, it's the first real programming language), and a lot of people just write their stuff from scratch.
At the same time, manual vectorization can make your code completely unreadable.
If they were Opterons, it would make sense though.
And why exactly do you say that India was the richest nation 100 years ago ?? Or that's what you call an agricultural "paradise" ?
The 65th bit is the evil one.
The founders of America were puritans. That's pretty much opposite to "scientists". Their descendants voted for Bush because of "moral values". America never really experienced an "age of reason", and it shows.
Too bad Nehru and her daughter weren't.
Namely, inflation. Only the stock market gives you return above the inflation level.
The problem is that high performance microprocessors are simply too complex. How many assembly hackers actually understand out-of-order execution (which pretty much all desktop processors do, with the notable exception of Transmeta) ? How many are aware that branches can sometimes severely degrade performance and thus do tricks like predication with conditional moves or loop unrolling ? How many perform loop pipelining, to eliminate data stalls/waits ?
And yeah, a good compiler does all this.
That's more than nazism, albeit on a considerably larger timeframe.
Here's the book
Calling people "communists" because they fight for consumer rights is very insulting and just dumb. I find it very disturbing that people can get away with such nasty insults without having to apologize.
Restore is also straightforward - it can be done in place, or by downloading a zip/tar file.
I believe Fred Cohen, the father of computer virusology, has shown that detecting whether a piece of code is legitimate or is a virus is undecidable.
In the beginning, it simply was a "write once, run anywhere" for the desktop market. Nothing wrong there. Once it ended up on the server side, it was quite effective at eating up Sun's market share, however, as it brought good performance, scalability, stability to the PC market.
It does work with Linux, but rather poorly. It's easier in fact to synchronize a PocketPC device with Linux (multisync).
Yet, strangely, he doesn't feel compelled to get political about everything and the kitchen sync, he doesn't drag the community in pointless debates, he doesn't alienate commercial partners, and he also doesn't imply he knows what's best for everybody.
Yes, I am very grateful for the software he wrote. Yes, what I've done so far in my life is like a firefly to the sun, compared to what he did. But that doesn't mean that I'm not entitled to a critical opinion, especially towards his "political" enterprises.
P.S. one should be careful about labeling someone "communist" - after all, communism killed an estimated number of 100 million people (more than fascism, albeit over a longer period of time)
Free software.
Just program the "doors" with your public key, and have them "challenge-response" the private one.
Oh, wait a sec ... I meant the other way around.
For "raw flash" a filesystem designed with wear distribution in mind is JFFS2.
And yeah, I concur with tmpfs for /tmp. I'd make it default for all distros.
Just keep in mind that they're not here to win. Their purpose is to drag Linux through legal mud for as long as they can, allowing their overlords MS to spread even more FUD.
you should say - "they can only store value-challenged bits"!