From what (admittedly little) I know, the current turbines pose no significant threat to birds. Unlike older turbines, the new ones have large propellers that move relatively slowly, and tests have shown them to be easily detectable and avoidable by birds. I remember reading that many more birds die flying into glass windows on large buildings than by flying into wind turbines.
If it's any indication, my brother is an ornithologist and changed his stance a few years back to support wind turbines.
What effect did he have on politics, economics, the environment, diplomacy, transport, health...?
Why, no appreciable effect at all, but are any of these things more or less important than his cultural/musical impact? Are politics more important than music?
He may have had a huge effect on the music industry, but he didn't have much effect on the rest of the world - which amounts to quite a lot.
No, in fact he had a huge effect on the rest of the world. Even though his popularity had waned somewhat in the US, he was still enormously popular in Japan and many other places.
So 1 Hz equals 1 FlOp? And a 3.2 GHz CPU can do 3.2 gigaflops, right?
No, one hertz is one cycle of the processor.
Can they execute multiple FlOps per tick then?
Yes. A single processor will perform several steps in one cycle. Typically, the steps are something like:
1. fetch (an instruction from memory)
2. decode the instruction
3. execute the instruction
4. access (some memory location)
5. writeback (some values calculated during this cycle)
In reality, this cycle is usually more complex and processors are designed to predict certain events in order to pack more into a single processor cycle. On top of this, note that the processors used in this machine are all dual-core processors. This means that instead of the 4 processors listed on the hardware manifest, it's really more like 8 processors (well, not quite).
And do we care that these will bottleneck at the rather limited bus (even forgetting about the switch).
No.
Hey, those computer engineering classes I was forced to take as a part of my CS major have actually proven useful! Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
I'm anxious to try this out on a few images I have that need considerable work. The demo images are more than a little impressive. Excellent work! Thanks You!
I remember watching an episode of Nova some years ago that described the research of a Dr. V. S. Rachandran. It portrayed exactly what this article does - that it is genetically advantageous for humans, in terms of our survival, to believe in a higher power. Here's the requisite Wikipedia link.
The wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but the reasoning was something like: humans survive better in groups, and the notion of a god tends to cause people to gather in groups (not sure I agree, but that was the reasoning, anyway). He even had some physical evidence, which, if I remember correctly, was gathered from several patients who thought they were god after a particular part of their brain was damaged.
Anyway, I think this research has been done before.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: I was present at an undersea unexplained mass sponge migration.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Uhh, Ray, the sponges migrated about a foot-and-a-half.
Guess what: most species of cockroaches are even more successful than humans.
That explains why they (don't) have such great dominion over us: we go where they cannot go, we (in the U.S.) can often stop from going to where we are. That's some weak definition of 'successful' (I don't mean to say it's your definition).
Perhaps I should have included the qualifying term "evolutionarily" when I mentioned "successful". I assumed that qualifier because your original post dealt with evolution. To reiteriate, your concept of "dominion" does not pertain to evolution. To be successful in terms of evolution is simply to be able to survive the best. Cockroaches have done this for much longer than humans have. Therefore, in terms of evolution, they are more successful.
The concept of "dominion" is a personal opinion and belief. If the cockroaches could think, maybe they'd say "Hey, isn't it great that our human slaves make all this garbage for us? We just sit here and eat all day and breed. What great dominion we have over these humans." OK, that's silly, but I'm just trying to make the distinction between what the scientific theory of evolution is, and what is personal belief.
It's a common misconception that Christians and Republicans are environmental-hating (fill-in-the-blanks).
Oh, I hope not! My parents are devout Christians and two of the most environmentally-conscious people I know. Their belief is that God created the earth, and God created us to do his will, therefore we should be stewards of God's creation and protect it. This makes perfect sense to me, and all that I've read in the Bible.
But the truth is that the first National Parks and the Environmental Protection Agency were both the result of Republican Presidents (whether either were Christian, that's another story).
True, they were. I have to point out, though, that the republican and democratic parties have a history of exchanging viewpoints once every few decades. I probably would have been in Teddy Roosevelt's republican party. In his time, Deomcrats were the old sticks-in-the-mud, and the republicans were a fresh, new, young party. Today the republicans are a very different party. They're the ones that are viewed as the old-sticks-in-the-mud, and I would say they largely don't give a hoot about the environment. Today, I'm what you might call an environmentalist libertarian (no, it's not an oxymoron).
> You and your ilk will go about spouting on about 'Evolution this' and
> 'Evolution that' but give no mind to the fact that IF Evolution is real,
> then guess what: We, the humans, are on top of the game and when humans,
> in all our Natural Selection glory, get no pass for having come out on top.
This would be the arrogance that I've already seen mentioned in this thread.
Evolution is not about "Top" or "Bottom", it is about success or failure. We, as humans, are a VERY successful species. We have managed to greatly increase our numbers across the globe. Guess what: most species of cockroaches are even more successful than humans. They're EVERYWHERE, and roaches have been around for hundreds of millions of years - far longer than humans, or our other simian ancestors.
Dodos on the other hand were not very successful. Why? Because they were not very adaptable. Roaches are extremely adaptable. They can go into just about any place and find food and survive the conditions. Humans do the same. The difference with humans is that all other species on the planet adapt to their environment, but humans adapt the environment to suit their needs.
It's all a matter of perspective: If you believe that humans are superior to all other life forms, then of course, humans should get to do whatever they want. Extinction be damned. If you believe humans are another species on the planet, then we should be liable for our actions concerning other species. Evolution has nothing to do with it. It's a matter of faith.
> I say this as someone about to buy property in California, desperately terrified
> that I'll be told halfway through the project that they found some species I've
> never heard of and I'll lose every penny I have.
This is generally why you'd want to do environmental impact studies prior to purchasing land. There are consultants (read: biology/zoology/ecology scientists who want to make a buck) that specialize in just this kind of thing. My brother is one of them. If you need contact info...
Yes! It's my chance to become famous! After all, everyone wants to watch a geek sitting in front of a computer writing code. Man, now THAT's entertainment!
All psychopaths, lack the capability to feel guilt, thats why they commit murders in the first place.
disclaimer: I'm not a psychologist.
I think the term you're looking for is sociopath, not psychopath. In fact, from personal experience, I've known more than a few people who could be described as "psychopaths", and all of them were able to feel guilt like most of the other members of our society.
When I was a kid, I knew another kid who did not seem to have any sense of guilt. Later, when he was 18, he broke into a house with his brother and together they beat the owner to death with a baseball bat (and were later convicted of murder in a court). I guess he would be a sociopath like you describe above.
I'm an asterisk admin and user, and I try to stay active on the asterisk user mailing list. I know who both Fonality and Trixbox are, and I had to wonder why this made the front page of slashdot.
I guess it is important, though, because trixbox is an open source project, and the trixbox developers are now going to be paid to develop it. Fonality will reap the rewards when they install it for their clients. It's a good example of how an open source business can work.
And you like the Windows version of Outlook BETTER than the Mac version of Entourage?
Actually, yes. I like Outlook for Windows much better than Entourage for Mac. Entourage provides exactly zero flexibility over what is synced with an Exchange server and when. For some clients I have that have a lot of data and want to use Macs with an Exchange server, this effectively eliminates the possibility of using Entourage. Because it always syncs everything, when there is a lot of data in an account (500+ MB), it effectively becomes so slow it is unusable.
Outlook is also quite customizable in terms of how you view information. You can essentially set up a view to look at your data however you want. Not so with Entourage. There are some options, but largely, what you see is what you get (and that's not a good thing in this case, IMHO).
With one client, they're actually using a citrix server to deliver Outlook to Macs. This is OK for desktop users, but not so for road warriors.
I greatly look forward to the ability to run Outlook for Windows in OS X.
I haven't gotten a chance to test Outlook 2003 with Crossover 6. Anybody know if it works?
- Noah
P.S. If you're reading this, MBU: Why was the old Outlook for Mac OS 9 never ported to OS X? It seemed to work so nicely.
> And yeah, the lack of Apple groupware, too, but my company has > been having success rolling out Kerio MailServer on OS X > Servers-- at least to clients who don't want/have Blackberries.
How about Communigate Pro? It runs great on OS X, has built-in groupware capabilities, and you can use NotifyLink to get your data out to wireless devices of all flavors (except blackberries).
Funny thing: I'm doing just the same thing right now. I'm quitting my job to become a consultant (egad, I hope I get enough clients), and I'm in the process of setting up my own work area. I have an unusual office with limited space, so I'm actually building my own desk (it's good to engineer something physical, for a change). I'm going to echo what a lot of people have already said, but here's a few things I've learned about myself over the years:
1. A lot of people have already mentioned it, but a good chair is a must for me. It should support my back, and let my arms, shoulders, neck, and head all rest in relaxed, comfortable positions.
2. I need my monitor positioned directly in front me slightly below eye level while I'm working. I used to put my monitor off to the side. I'd sit twisted toward it all day and wonder why my back hurt. Hmm. I also need my monitor to be big enough that I can see it without straining my eyes while I sit back in my chair without leaning forward.
3. Clear desk space in front of me. I love a wall mounted LCD. I don't have this yet, but I've worked with them before, and they're GREAAAT! Somebody else said this, too, but lots shelves (with lots of paper trays). Get those piles of unfinished crappy paperwork off my desk. Oh, and hanging file folders: love 'em.
4. Lots of nice breaks. I need to move around and look at actual objects and people. I like to have other stuff to do in my office, like drawing paper and charcoal, and a guitar. I sometimes get so fixated on my little virtual reality that I almost revert to an autistic state if I don't have some real world interaction.
Slashdot Mirror
From what (admittedly little) I know, the current turbines pose no significant threat to birds. Unlike older turbines, the new ones have large propellers that move relatively slowly, and tests have shown them to be easily detectable and avoidable by birds. I remember reading that many more birds die flying into glass windows on large buildings than by flying into wind turbines. If it's any indication, my brother is an ornithologist and changed his stance a few years back to support wind turbines.
Why, no appreciable effect at all, but are any of these things more or less important than his cultural/musical impact? Are politics more important than music?
No, in fact he had a huge effect on the rest of the world. Even though his popularity had waned somewhat in the US, he was still enormously popular in Japan and many other places.
I had no idea what long tail theory is. I originally thought this summary was a joke, like one of those automatically generated jargon papers.
Yes. A single processor will perform several steps in one cycle. Typically, the steps are something like:
1. fetch (an instruction from memory)
2. decode the instruction
3. execute the instruction
4. access (some memory location)
5. writeback (some values calculated during this cycle)
In reality, this cycle is usually more complex and processors are designed to predict certain events in order to pack more into a single processor cycle. On top of this, note that the processors used in this machine are all dual-core processors. This means that instead of the 4 processors listed on the hardware manifest, it's really more like 8 processors (well, not quite).
No.
Hey, those computer engineering classes I was forced to take as a part of my CS major have actually proven useful! Oh wait, this is Slashdot.
I'm anxious to try this out on a few images I have that need considerable work. The demo images are more than a little impressive. Excellent work! Thanks You!
I remember watching an episode of Nova some years ago that described the research of a Dr. V. S. Rachandran. It portrayed exactly what this article does - that it is genetically advantageous for humans, in terms of our survival, to believe in a higher power. Here's the requisite Wikipedia link.
The wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but the reasoning was something like: humans survive better in groups, and the notion of a god tends to cause people to gather in groups (not sure I agree, but that was the reasoning, anyway). He even had some physical evidence, which, if I remember correctly, was gathered from several patients who thought they were god after a particular part of their brain was damaged.
Anyway, I think this research has been done before.
Dr. Raymond Stantz: I was present at an undersea unexplained mass sponge migration.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Uhh, Ray, the sponges migrated about a foot-and-a-half.
The concept of "dominion" is a personal opinion and belief. If the cockroaches could think, maybe they'd say "Hey, isn't it great that our human slaves make all this garbage for us? We just sit here and eat all day and breed. What great dominion we have over these humans." OK, that's silly, but I'm just trying to make the distinction between what the scientific theory of evolution is, and what is personal belief.
Oh, I hope not! My parents are devout Christians and two of the most environmentally-conscious people I know. Their belief is that God created the earth, and God created us to do his will, therefore we should be stewards of God's creation and protect it. This makes perfect sense to me, and all that I've read in the Bible.
True, they were. I have to point out, though, that the republican and democratic parties have a history of exchanging viewpoints once every few decades. I probably would have been in Teddy Roosevelt's republican party. In his time, Deomcrats were the old sticks-in-the-mud, and the republicans were a fresh, new, young party. Today the republicans are a very different party. They're the ones that are viewed as the old-sticks-in-the-mud, and I would say they largely don't give a hoot about the environment. Today, I'm what you might call an environmentalist libertarian (no, it's not an oxymoron).
> You and your ilk will go about spouting on about 'Evolution this' and
> 'Evolution that' but give no mind to the fact that IF Evolution is real,
> then guess what: We, the humans, are on top of the game and when humans,
> in all our Natural Selection glory, get no pass for having come out on top.
This would be the arrogance that I've already seen mentioned in this thread.
Evolution is not about "Top" or "Bottom", it is about success or failure. We, as humans, are a VERY successful species. We have managed to greatly increase our numbers across the globe. Guess what: most species of cockroaches are even more successful than humans. They're EVERYWHERE, and roaches have been around for hundreds of millions of years - far longer than humans, or our other simian ancestors.
Dodos on the other hand were not very successful. Why? Because they were not very adaptable. Roaches are extremely adaptable. They can go into just about any place and find food and survive the conditions. Humans do the same. The difference with humans is that all other species on the planet adapt to their environment, but humans adapt the environment to suit their needs.
It's all a matter of perspective: If you believe that humans are superior to all other life forms, then of course, humans should get to do whatever they want. Extinction be damned. If you believe humans are another species on the planet, then we should be liable for our actions concerning other species. Evolution has nothing to do with it. It's a matter of faith.
- Noah
> I say this as someone about to buy property in California, desperately terrified
> that I'll be told halfway through the project that they found some species I've
> never heard of and I'll lose every penny I have.
This is generally why you'd want to do environmental impact studies prior to purchasing land. There are consultants (read: biology/zoology/ecology scientists who want to make a buck) that specialize in just this kind of thing. My brother is one of them. If you need contact info...
Yes! It's my chance to become famous! After all, everyone wants to watch a geek sitting in front of a computer writing code. Man, now THAT's entertainment!
I think the term you're looking for is sociopath, not psychopath. In fact, from personal experience, I've known more than a few people who could be described as "psychopaths", and all of them were able to feel guilt like most of the other members of our society.
When I was a kid, I knew another kid who did not seem to have any sense of guilt. Later, when he was 18, he broke into a house with his brother and together they beat the owner to death with a baseball bat (and were later convicted of murder in a court). I guess he would be a sociopath like you describe above.
I'm an asterisk admin and user, and I try to stay active on the asterisk user mailing list. I know who both Fonality and Trixbox are, and I had to wonder why this made the front page of slashdot.
I guess it is important, though, because trixbox is an open source project, and the trixbox developers are now going to be paid to develop it. Fonality will reap the rewards when they install it for their clients. It's a good example of how an open source business can work.
Actually, yes. I like Outlook for Windows much better than Entourage for Mac. Entourage provides exactly zero flexibility over what is synced with an Exchange server and when. For some clients I have that have a lot of data and want to use Macs with an Exchange server, this effectively eliminates the possibility of using Entourage. Because it always syncs everything, when there is a lot of data in an account (500+ MB), it effectively becomes so slow it is unusable.
Outlook is also quite customizable in terms of how you view information. You can essentially set up a view to look at your data however you want. Not so with Entourage. There are some options, but largely, what you see is what you get (and that's not a good thing in this case, IMHO).
With one client, they're actually using a citrix server to deliver Outlook to Macs. This is OK for desktop users, but not so for road warriors.
I greatly look forward to the ability to run Outlook for Windows in OS X.
I haven't gotten a chance to test Outlook 2003 with Crossover 6. Anybody know if it works?
- Noah
P.S. If you're reading this, MBU: Why was the old Outlook for Mac OS 9 never ported to OS X? It seemed to work so nicely.
Having had both land on me at one point or another in my life, I beg to differ.
> And yeah, the lack of Apple groupware, too, but my company has
> been having success rolling out Kerio MailServer on OS X
> Servers-- at least to clients who don't want/have Blackberries.
How about Communigate Pro? It runs great on OS X, has built-in groupware capabilities, and you can use NotifyLink to get your data out to wireless devices of all flavors (except blackberries).
Funny thing: I'm doing just the same thing right now. I'm quitting my job to become a consultant (egad, I hope I get enough clients), and I'm in the process of setting up my own work area. I have an unusual office with limited space, so I'm actually building my own desk (it's good to engineer something physical, for a change). I'm going to echo what a lot of people have already said, but here's a few things I've learned about myself over the years:
1. A lot of people have already mentioned it, but a good chair is a must for me. It should support my back, and let my arms, shoulders, neck, and head all rest in relaxed, comfortable positions.
2. I need my monitor positioned directly in front me slightly below eye level while I'm working. I used to put my monitor off to the side. I'd sit twisted toward it all day and wonder why my back hurt. Hmm. I also need my monitor to be big enough that I can see it without straining my eyes while I sit back in my chair without leaning forward.
3. Clear desk space in front of me. I love a wall mounted LCD. I don't have this yet, but I've worked with them before, and they're GREAAAT! Somebody else said this, too, but lots shelves (with lots of paper trays). Get those piles of unfinished crappy paperwork off my desk. Oh, and hanging file folders: love 'em.
4. Lots of nice breaks. I need to move around and look at actual objects and people. I like to have other stuff to do in my office, like drawing paper and charcoal, and a guitar. I sometimes get so fixated on my little virtual reality that I almost revert to an autistic state if I don't have some real world interaction.
Have fun!