I'm an alumni of the U of I, and I work here as well. I get these notifications. I thought I'd bring up 2 points:

1. Fortunately, given the spring break, the actual number of people on campus able to read this was was quite low.
2. Unfortunately, we just had a fire on Green street 2 days ago, and we got an alert from the same system informing us about it. So this warning was probably taken very seriously for those 12 minutes.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the system and I was impressed by the very explicit letter from the chief both explaining the error and accepting the blame for the mistake. She also detailed the upcoming efforts to address the error. I'd like to see the same level of accountability from my ISP or phone company.

Hmmm, can't say that my first attempt to use Bing gave me any Lindsay L. results, but noscript did put up a cross site scripting hijack after I attempted to "disable" a helpful toolbar with my facebook info proudly displayed.

I'm positive I don't need any search provider tapping into my facebook info- and I certainly don't want to be reminded of it on the front page! That's like, TSA scary.

Ignoring the blatant invasion of my privacy for a moment, I'm happy to say my (small sample size, insert disclaimer here) test of Google vs Bing revealed that the "best all mountain skis" works differently in Google versus Bing. Google gave a list of places to buy "the best all mountain skis" as the top listings, whereas Bing gave a set of review sites telling me which ones were the best.

Not sure how to rate one result as better than the other, they're just different. Perhaps Google feels that their users know what they want, so they just point them at it. Perhaps Bing believes that their users want to learn what is the best choice for them. Hard to put a metric on that. I'd hazard an informed guess that both search providers weigh their results according to desires of their users, as measured by click through rates. Bing users might want more hand holding, whereas Google users might want less distractions before they learn the location of something.

All that being said, I'm still not using a search engine that displays my facebook account info. Yuck. I don't care if this is Facebook's fault, I don't want to see it on a random search page as part of the interface.

Terraforming is great, if you have someplace else to practice. Trying to terraform the earth with our current level of knowledge about the process and possible side effects is like doing experimental brain surgery on yourself. If we screw it up, we have no place else to go. Paraphrasing the Tick, I like the Earth, I keep all my stuff there. Let's practice terraforming on Mars, first, to get the bugs out. Until then, let's not make things worse here by accident.

My biggest gripe about this whole debate are the countless numbers of people who fail to think at all, and believe that we can ignore the mounting evidence that there even is an issue. Until they recognize the warning signs the scientists keep point out, we really can't have a debate about the issue and what to do about it. Humanocentric or not, the planet seems to be getting hotter. Perhaps all those scientists are reading things incorrectly, or drawing the wrong conclusions, but even with a chance that they are on to something ought to cause all of us to be very concerned. And not just about the gas mileage for SUV's.

Um, I was referring to Direct, the "SSTS without the space shuttle" design, not the Ares I "Stick". I was looking at the actual design for Direct's J-130 model right here. It's a stage 1.5 design with all engines ground lit and the boosters jettisoned during flight, just like the SSTS.
I do agree with your statement about the Ares I:

But that's not what I was talking about. :)

As my argument about "single stage", I was referring to the fact that the design already gets 77mT to orbit with just a single (OK, 1.5 stage counting the SRB's) stage and that there was room for more growth, like a second stage, if you needed more lift and were willing to pay extra for it. Did I mention the option to use 5 segment SRB's? I could go on... It's just that the J-130 is the cheapest option for a new HLV, and it leverages all the work and research that went into the SSTS program, rather than throwing it away.

That's a good thing, in my opinion.

Per the official design from the Direct team (sorry for the pdf, that's what they have), it's 77,835kg to 30nmx100nm orbit for the regular NASA GR&A's. It's only down to 70mt if you arbitrarily factor in an additional 10% margin. Which doesn't account for their own internal 15% margin that isn't documented. I like engineers who give themselves leeway.

Short answer, yes, the 1.5 stage J-130 does 77mT to orbit per NASA rules.

This potential bill means congressional support behind a Direct version of a shuttle replacement or something close enough not to matter. Direct is a design to replace the space shuttle with a rocket that puts the cargo and capsule on top of the tank, and moves the shuttle engines on the bottom of the tank. Without having to lift the load of the space shuttle itself, the rocket gets 77mT of cargo to orbit.

Re-using all the major shuttle components provides the cheapest possible option for a Heavy Lift Vehicle, not to mention the quickest, as a Direct design could be flying by 2013. The current plan from the administration doesn't even decide on a HLV design until 2015, let alone start the process of building and testing it. This is not a barrel of pork. Yes, somebody will make some money, but this is the cheapest option at the moment to keep a US heavy lift capability in the near future, and it will be built here in the US.

Current US lift capability stops at only 25mT in the Shuttle cargo bay to Low Earth Orbit. By funding a Direct style vehicle, we get a minimum of 75 mT to orbit without a second stage. This a very good thing. With further development of a second stage, the payload capacity increases to 115mT+. Not only that, but by putting the payload on top of the vehicle, a direct style rocket can support a payload as wide as 12m across (shuttle can only do 5m). So we get the ability to send more per launch and save over the life of a large project. For example, five flights of Direct would have been sufficient to build the ISS, versus the 40 shuttle launches it actually took.

By re-using the same engines and boosters as the space shuttle, we save billions (maybe $10 billion over time) in research and launch facility changes necessary for other designs (Ares would have required 2 new pad designs and new crawlers at a $1 billion a pop). The cost per launch for Direct will be less expensive as well. For comparison, recovery of the shuttle SRB's, refurbishment of the shuttle and launch costs per launch have averaged out to about $1.3 billion per launch. A Direct will cost somewhere north of $200 million for the launch vehicle, plus operating costs, but won't include refurbishment or recovery operations. For the immediate future NASA says it will launch the last shuttle in 2011, and after we'll be paying the Russians $20-30 million per seat for rides in a Soyuz

We save time in that we can have an un-manned cargo version of the vehicle doing test flights by 2013, whereas the engine testing alone for a liquid-fueled booster would take 5 years by the current plan. as all the parts are already man-rated (save for the modified ET), we could be launching Orion capsules on a Direct as soon as the Orions finish development in 2015 or so.

If this passes, I'll be one very happy space fan.

Hmmm, didn't see that. Given that it takes the place of two full racks, maybe you're supposed to put it on a pedestal in place of them.

Something like this for easy access.

Or, maybe you could rotate it 90 degrees and mount it CPU-access-side up. At 10U that's only 15", so it should fit in a 19" rack. :-)

Seriously, if you don't plan to do hot swap on the CPU boards, you'd be OK in a normal rack. I'm not sure I'd trust hot swap for CPU boards anyways.

This is a good start- SM10000 System Overview

Interconnect is 1.28 Tbps or 2.5 Gbps per core.

I/O includes a minimum or 8 gige or 2 10-gige, which can be increased to 64 gige or 16 10-gige links per chassis.

This unit runs as 512 system images using stock 32 bit OS's. Each CPU may have 1 or 2 GB's of ram and up to 64 local drives may be installed and divided among the CPU's with the included management software. The unit supports PXE boot, so the system images may run off local disk or from a ram image.

Just to note, the Atom z530 is a single core, 32 bit only CPU, if that matters.

I couldn't tell you if the 16 10-gige links would seriously limit this box or not. You'd have to show me a data center with more than 160 Gbps of internet connectivity first. :) And that's assuming you only purchased one of these suckers, because you'd need that much per chassis.

Here are some possible reasons to consider the upgrade to win 7 from a hardware perspective...

• support for more than 3.2GB of ram with 64 bit with Win 7
• native USB 3 support planned
• native support for 4k sections on new drives, which is needed for drives larger than 2TB
• better support for multiple cpus, especially as number of cpu cores goes past 4
• native support for SSD's (TRIM, 4k offset, etc)
• Win 7 install via usb and no drivers on floppy (or need to slipstream)

Do these mean that Win 7 is a no-brainer for businesses? Probably not, as most of these hardware issues aren't relevant for all those old systems.
New purchases however, would definitely merit a look. Give it a year, and Win 7 becomes much more obvious.

The article comparing values uses the highest price motherboard available for AMD for a "midrange" system, then claims that the Intel-based total system is a value. If you spend $350 on a 6-core processor, then spending $140 on a high-end motherboard is reasonable. If you're spending $99 for a low end AMD quad, you're probably in the market for more reasonably priced motherboard (~$100) to go with it. The comparison is valid for the high-end AMD cpus, but not their budget stuff, as a $40 drop in price is a big deal for a system with a $100 cpu.

That being said, being able to overclock this thing is directly aimed at the enthusiast market. "I got 6 cores, w00t!" "Yeah, well I'm at 4GHZ on a quad, so there!" It definitely improves the competition between the high end AMD hexa-cores and the midrange Intel quads, and makes the Intel option more appealing to the enthusisast.

The Constellation program was supposed to re-use as many of the space shuttle components to design and build launch system to get us back to the moon. The Program of record was severely flawed in several ways-

1. $20 billion already spent since 2005 with just 1 test flight (and nothing flew on that test that would have flown operationally)
2. $3 billion a year for the next 8 years for more development before the system was ready for a moon shot
3. 2 separate launch vehicles, with completely different stages, engines and boosters, none of which came directly from the Space Shuttle.
4. The Ares 1 didn't have the lift capability to loft the Orion, and the Orion had to lose capability in an attempt to make it lighter
5. The Ares 5 was so heavy and big, that all of the launch equipment (lauch towers, crawlers, VAB, etc) had to be rebuilt, costing billions
6. Most damning was that serious safety issues exist with the crew launch vehicle ARES 1 (dead zones, Thrust Oscillation) which haven't been solved

I'm all for going back to the moon and the US creating a Heavy lift Space program under NASA's guidance. But Constellation is not the right program.

I'd be all for something along the lines of DIRECT heavy lift system to continue the US presence in manned space flight.

From paragraph 0 of the GPL v2, thanks for the link, btw.

"This License applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License."

"Activities other than copying, distribution and modification are not covered by this License; they are outside its scope."

So the GPL doesn't limit your rights for things outside of copying, distro and mods.

Section 4 then steps in-

"You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License.

GPL code doesn't have additional restrictions on it. Once you accept GPL as the basis for your work, you don't get to distribute the modified work with extra terms. So GPL code doesn't have restrictions on things other than copy, distro, and mods. And since it expressly doesn't restrict you in areas other than those 3, you're free to examine and study it to your heart's content.

So there ya go- have fun studying, examining reduplicating the functionality, style and format of the code in question. Just don't copy the code verbatim, or in such as a fashion as to be considered a direct copy.

A reasonable person could see the GPL as encouraging the re-use of ideas, whether by modifying the original code and redistributing it, or by re-implementing those ideas in new code.

It's not about what you need, but what the companies developing computer hardware can do to keep their customers in the hunt for new hardware. If they don't improve their products to the point where you're willing to shell out your hard-earned dollars, they won't make profit. What they can't do at the moment is make faster/more efficient CPU's/GPU's that have a good value. If they build a faster single CPU, the cost goes up. If the CPU is more efficient, the cost to build it goes up. Most people won't buy new hardware unless they 1) have no choice or 2) perceive a real value. As so many people have enough computing power for their needs, option 1 doesn't happen enough to generate real profits for a firm. That leaves option 2, and the technology is at a point where it's not possible create real value in a faster, single CPU now.

What they can do right now is build CPU's and GPUs with more cores, and then make the claim that you, the consumer, need more cores. For a graphics card, that's mostly true, as the computing environment for graphics hardware is already able to use more cores, it's just a matter of whether you already have enough graphics power for your needs. Unfortunately, it's not true that more cores are better for CPU's. Your single user desktop isn't able to effectively use even 4 cores, except in certain specialized cases, let alone the 6, 8 or 12 cores in CPU's that have been recently developed.

The original article is a call for changes to Windows to use those cores, not because you need more cores, but because you will have more cores in the new machines, whether you want them or not. And if you have them, you might as well find a way to use them.