Re: Shaved my beard yesterday.
Don't look at me, I never get a cut of that money
4248 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Same here. My first programming was on a CDC 7600 and much later did loads more serious work on the J932 and SV1e. Cray didn't just provide good hardware, but also cracking good compilers. They could recognize just about the most obfusticated bunch of for-loops as a matrix multiplication and replace the code by some optimized routine from their library. What I really liked about both the SV1e and J932 is how these shared-memory machines managed to attain an average performance of roughly 2/3rds of the theoretical peak. Some really nifty scheduling going on, which is VERY hard to accomplish on clusters.
Brilliant case of doing something "just because". More of this kind of harmless weirdness can make the world a better place (in a small way), simply by putting a smile on peoples' faces.
I wonder if he has photographs of the increase as a function of time. Could be publishable in Annals of Improbable Research. Might even be a candidate for an Ig Nobel Prize.
There is a subtle distinction between infinite and unbounded, ask any mathematician. I certainly do not want an infinite number of items, but I might not want to set a rigid bound. This is the subtle distinction between implementing a list as a static array or a dynamic data structure like a linked list. More than a decade ago one PhD student here scorned LaTeX, and wrote his thesis in MS Word, calling us LaTeX users old-fashioned, stuck-in-the-mud, conservative, etc. There were one or two sniggers when his equation editor stopped working after 128 equation objects were in the file. He phoned the helpline, and they simply told him to split the thesis into smaller chunks, each containing no more than 128 equation objects. Now this was an old version of MS-Word, and the problem may since have bee sorted, but having the limit in the first place is odd, especially given the phrase "Object Link Embedding" used for the implementation method. The phrase suggests an underlying dynamic structure, which clearly wasn't there.
Of course, I might not want infinitely many equations, but I would hesitate to set a fixed upper limit.
In principle, SPICE should work. However, to work accurately SPICE needs an accurate model of the gravitational field around the planet. For Earth, decades of data gathering have yielded a good model, but it is still being refined. For Mars, the data are far more sparse, I would assume, so the model is not nearly as good, I would assume. It might be good enough, of course
SNAP ;-)
The UX305 I have does support multi-touch and swipes on the touchpad, and that is a definite step up from my older laptops. I haven't compared it directly to the MacBook, so cannot say which is better. I have worked on earlier MacBooks and got on perfectly well (give me bash, emacs, LaTeX and a compiler and I am quite happy ;-)). OS-wars are SO last century ;-)
My UX305 model has 4GB which actually is enough for my work on the laptop (8GB would be nicer, of course, but that model, with 256GB SSD was beyond my budget). I have a 16GB desktop for heavier lifting, and a 512GB compute server at work for more serious stuff. Replacing the disk is something I may well consider. I was thinking that if I clone the windows disk image and it doesn't work, I could put back the original disk, and put the bigger SSD in my desktop (which has only HDD). If it does work, I would wipe the 128GB one and install that in the desktop.
I have bought one some weeks back and really like it. Excellent travel laptop. Haven't put Linux on it just yet. Apart from work, I use mine to capture solar H-alpha mosaic images, and the SSD keeps up with the full-HD 128FPS camera I use for that. It is also really fast processing the 60-odd GB of data I collect for each mosaic. Much faster than a Core i5 HDD machine I have. I will put Linux on when I get that external USB3 SSD to stream the captured data onto, so I can split the 128GB disk into a Linux and Windows partition.
"Lets just hope Hollywood never depicts a car bomb, we'd all get arrested driving to work."
Only if you look Arabic (to a cop, that is)
Regarding the poor kid: Appalling behaviour by the police and the school principal, but alas not unexpected. The principal is rather unprincipled, methinks
I think you should draw the line when they implement the GPP-feature. Not necessarily for ethical reasons, but just because Sirius Cybernetics is bound to get something HORRIBLY wrong in "your plastic pal who's fun to be with".
That, and inevitably the genuine people personality will be thoroughly annoying in some way
I am not at all opposed to a little introspection by Google, but I am not sure Putin sees them as a crazed tyrant. I think he just sees them as a potential source of protection moneyfines.
"That's a nice data centre you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it"
Which may plunge us into a mini ice age!! (Or not, of course)
Runs for cover ;-)
<sermon>
Seriously, as a scientist (not climate science, I hasten to add) I find the bickering and mud-slinging (perpetrated by both sides) tiresome and unhelpful in the extreme. As scientists we are bound to disagree, but at least keep the discussion civil
</sermon>
And anyway, not burning up non-renewable fuels might be a good idea whatever the truth about global warming. We might need that stuff in the future for other things
My preference depends very much on the quality. Generally I go for rare (and I do not mean the "rare" I sometimes get in the UK, which is more like medium, I mean rare as in "saignant" in France), and in the best cases I will even have it "bleu" as the French say (very, very rare).
That however is purely my taste. If a guest at my house wants his steak well done, or medium, I just leave them in the pan a bit longer, while the juices settle in my own.
Back to cachopo: really interesting "Cordon Bleu on steroids"
Darn, I am hungry now
Very well worded indeed. I am seriously alarmed at windows hogging a whole 3GB on my new 128GB SSD lappy. I will see if I can clean up the disk forthwith. I would love to ditch the last vestiges of windows on my machines, but there are some data acquisition and image processing tools that I have not yet been able to replace OR run under WIN or in a VM. More's the pity
Haven't seen this kind of fix-gear bike hear yet (this being the Netherlands, and me being a cycle commuter, I get to see LOTS of bikes). The only single speed bikes I have used a lot myself had back-pedal breaks and certainly a freewheel. These types are still popular here, what with the Netherlands being so flat, there is not much use for the lower two thirds of the 24 speeds of my current bike Koga-Miyata (fun in Dartmoor, though)
Given an ice cube of size of approximately 10cc, That would yield some 1.75x1015 ice cubes. At two cubes per drink we could make 8.75x1014 gin and tonics. This means roughly 120,000 drinks per person for the entire population of earth, equating to 32.8 years of partying at 10 drinks per day (modest enough I would say)
From the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) report
“He noted that some of Bradbury's stories have definitely slated against the United States and its capitalistic form of government”
(my emphasis)
Interesting use of the word "capitalistic." Given the influence (then and now) of big money, it is perhaps a more important distinction than democratic.
I am also perennially amused by a certain group of Americans who shout at the top of their voices that America is the land of the free, and yet don't like liberals. Maybe they should look up the etymology of the word liberal. Just a thought
Many other Americans despair rather than smile at the attitude of these fellow countrymen
The Cassini-Huygens missions has been such a huge success, it is sad (but inevitable) that it should end soon. A toast to the scientists and engineers who have worked so hard to make this a success. Looking forward to the extreme close ups of Enceladus and the other last fruits of the mission
OA costs can certainly be a problem. Our research foundation does pay for those costs (as do EU programmes, I gather). In other countries the situation is worse. A key problem is that new OA journals lack the impact factor of established journals, making setting up a new journal (OA or otherwise) difficult. IEEE allows you to choose a model in certain journals at least, I understand. That might be the best way forward: established journals offering a choice.
IEEE allows the authors to place the material on their website, provided that IEEE copyright notice is included, and that the server prominently displays a notice alerting readers to their obligations with respect to copyrighted material. An example is this one here (bottom of page in particular). This is a very good way of doing things I feel. Elseviers is FAR more restrictive, which is why I prefer publishing with IEEE.
There is a big move towards open-access publishing. This allows anyone to access the paper, but is more costly for the authors. However, given the total cost of a typical research project, open access publishing costs are insignificant
I do not think they would make ANY mention of "improved functionality" in that case, they would simply take a page out of their version of the BOFH excuse generator for patching. After all "correcting several buffer overflow errors" sounds perfectly plausible. Maybe the vague "improvements to enhance the functionality" clause simply is a euphemism for "bricks/borks fewer machines than the previous update"
Or if you do not want to be cynical, it might refer to some modest algorithmic improvements somewhere in this huge amount of code. I have often made a series of incremental improvements to code (improving memory efficiency, slight improvements to speed, etc) in image processing and visualisation code in various releases, and not bothered to specify each and every one.
Whatever the meaning I will not be installing it on any machine of mine any time soon.