The point is that by doubling your supercomputer size, you gain one day of weather forecast. Yes, that is a very small gain, in some mathematical sense; however, if you are a farmer and you're planning your harvest, that's huge. Same if you're a fisherman and want to stay out there as long as possible until the winter storm actually hits. For society, this information is expensive to obtain, but the returns on the investment are great.

Yes, you are right. But due to sensitivity to initial conditions and a positive Lyapunov exponent, the number of days you are able to forecast scales only logarithmically with your computing power, even with near-perfect knowledge of the initial conditions. So yes, bigger is better when it comes to weather prediction.

There is no paywall. Optics Express is open access.

You obviously did not study quantum mechanics.

I like the idea. Personally, I often carry a polarizer in a back pocket. Now, I have yet another reason.

Cray has several of the Top 10 supercomputers on earth, especially in the US. They're pretty nice to work with, too.

I have one (macbook pro), it looks pretty much like the old "matte" displays to me. It is certainly not made of glass, and nowhere near as shiny as those models.

Mod parent up. I write fortran code, and I can't be bothered with this android crap. I have an android phone now, and that's definitely the last time I'm getting one. Story is exactly that of the charts - vendor promises "Android 2.2 will be here soon", then a long wait, then "Android 2.1 is here, woot! We're not going to upgrade to newer versions, f*** you, customer". So my phone is in the red for its entire lifetime, which is pretty short, because the battery conked out, and I'm guessing that the new one I got will, too.

I agree, same system here - but if you're running all 4 cores at full tilt it's going to make some noise. What laptop doesn't?

I call BS. Statisticians frequently recommend against going with the trends, because they change so quickly. When I started out in college, IT was going crap, just after the dotcom bubble burst. These days, IT is doing rather well. Financial analysts can't see 5 years into the future, how are kids at age 18 going to do that? Of course, it's no surprise that an arts degree is going to get you unemployed, but that's a different story imho.

Instead of wrist rests, try sweatbands. I love mine - also great if your laptop has sharp edges.

I've never tried, but why shouldn't it? LaTeX is a compiler; surely a project of 1000 files could be compiled. Also, there are other ways, such as defining 1000 macros in a single file.

WYSIWYG is a downside IMHO. The UNIX philosophy says "use text, it is a general interface". Also, you can have conditionals in LaTeX code. Oh well, people and their preferences differ, so secretaries probably disagree with me. Of course you could chuck text strings in a database if you wanted to avoid files in a filesystem, too. Heck, you can probably even awk | grep | sed | latex, if you want to - as I said, text is universal, there's a million ways of working with it.

It may be true that LaTeX is more used in academic publishing, but how is LaTeX not about reuse of content? Define your own commands to write similar equations, easily and portably generate documents from a simple script or program, \include{subdocument}, and a thousand other ways of reuse content makes LaTeX the working environment which allows the MOST reuse, as far as I can tell. Auto-generation of all sorts of references, an index, and so forth also reduces manual labor to an extent I have never seen Word (or whatever) even approach. Please, do correct me if I am wrong, because if something exists that is even better than LaTeX, I'll want to know!

Actually Fortran is alive and well and still has no real rivals in the high performance computing scene.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll be trying out LibreOffice now. In the meantime, can someone have a look at their downloads page? 3 screenfuls of Mac PPC (>5 year old machines!) language packs before anything else is not at all sensible. Kthxbai!