I go by the national weather service's definition, which in my country is that the mean temperature is below 10ÂC for five consecutive days. This is likely to occur in my area some time near the first of October, but occurred several weeks ago further north.

I estimate my daily dose of background radiation to the equivalent of well over 100 bananas.

I don't have the acpi command, but here's the same info:
echo $[100 * $(</sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full) / $(</sys/class/power_supply/BAT0/energy_full_design)]
95

Indeed. The future of x86 seems to lie in cell-like heterogenous multicore. This is probably what will happen with Larrabee as well.

The technical difference is that while your Core i3 has its GPU as a separate die in the same packaging, AMD Fusion has the GPU(s) on the same die as the CPU(s). The Intel approach makes for shorter and faster interconnects, the AMD approach completely removes the interconnects. The main advantage is probably (as is alluded to in the summary) related to power consumption.

The trick isn't using /dev/zero, the trick is using the seek parameter. The dd command skips nearly 8 GiB into a newly created file and writes something there. This creates a file that is 8 GiB large, but with no data (not zero, just nothing at all) in the first 8191 MiB. Therefore, the system doesn't actually write anything there, and doesn't even allocate the storage. If you read from these blocks, you will get generated zeros. This is called a sparse file.

I have a hotkey that launches an xterm with octave in it.
(Octave is a mostly MatLab compatible numeric computation language: http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index.html

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