Comment Re:I don't get it ?? (Score 1) 399
now they can't call and whine without the person on the receiving end knowing who to blame.
Comment as a sailor (Score 1) 275
i would have to say that it always blows in the day, however in the evenings and during the night there is seldom any wind.
Comment Re:Novell already did this (Score 1) 460
ofcourse it is! I thought it was common knowledge that there was no internet prior to Internet Exploder?
Comment Re:How deep? (Score 1) 725
and there you're correct. but still, the proportional error is ~5 times bigger when measuring 24 times. And i do believe the keyword here is proportional, ofcourse if you have a 1% measurement error, it doesn't amount to much, but if you make it 5%, all of a sudden you're off. Congrats on a nice course.
Comment Re:How deep? (Score 1) 725
you my good sir obviously have not taken a class in statistics, as clearly, measuring 24 times would make for a huge margin of error. Better to grab a 2m "yardstick" and measure twice, and cut at a total of 2.5146 m
Comment Re:They never were (Score 0, Troll) 186
actually, i would recommend neither. Competing with fuel is just a bad idea, and can lead to food shortage in poor parts of the world. A More feasible solution is celluloic ethanol, i.e. from wood, corn stover, hemp and biogas (methane) from farms. but still this is nowhere near enough, and we need to change the way we think about transportation. And i can't believe that people still argue that there's no global warming. It's sort of like arguing that the earth is 6000 years old..
Comment Re:none (Score 1) 1117
sort of the same thing happened to me, and this was a result of a truce after me changing all backgrounds to a girl and a goat getting it. Hey i was 15, it was ok to be immature, and they had crazy lockdowns. Which they agreed to remove.
Biofuels Make Greenhouse Gases Worse 506
vortex2.71 sends us to the Seattle Times for an account of two studies published in the prestigious journal Science pointing to the conclusion that almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse-gas emissions than conventional fuels if the full emissions costs of producing these "green" fuels are taken into account. "The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months, as scientists took a closer look at the global environmental cost of their production. These plant-based fuels were originally billed as better than fossil fuels because the carbon released when they were burned was balanced by the carbon absorbed when the plants grew. But that equation proved overly simplistic because the process of turning plants into fuels causes its own emissions — for refining and transport, for example. These studies... for the first time take a detailed, comprehensive look at the emissions effects of the huge amount of natural land that is being converted to cropland globally to support biofuels development."
Submission + - Bush Urges Greenhouse Gas Targets (sanitysdemise.com)
Sanity's Demise writes: "President Bush, seeking to blunt international criticism of the U.S. record on climate change, on Thursday urged 15 major nations to agree by the end of next year on a global target for reducing greenhouse gases.
Bush called for the first in a series of meetings to begin this fall, bringing together countries identified as major emitters of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The list would include the United States, China, India and major European countries. After setting a goal, the nations would be free to develop their own strategies to meet the target.
http://www.sanitysdemise.com/forum/index.php?topic =535"
Submission + - Microwulf: A Personal, Portable Beowulf Cluster (calvin.edu)
Joel Adams writes: "Tim Brom and I recently completed Microwulf — a personal, portable Beowulf cluster measuring just 11" (W) x 12" (D) x 17" (H), making it small enough to sit on one's desk and be easily transported. The total cost of the system (using January 2007 prices) was $2470. The design consists of a "double-decker sandwich" of four MicroATX motherboards and AMD64 X2 CPUs, providing a total of 8 processing cores that communicate via Gigabit Ethernet. Software includes Ubuntu Linux, OpenMPI, MPICH, and assorted free high performance apps that run on top of MPI. The system is air-cooled and draws just 450 watts of power under load, so it can be plugged into a wall outlet.
Microwulf produces 26.25 Gflops of measured, double-precision performance on the standard supercomputing benchmark HP Linpack (using Goto BLAS). That gives Microwulf a price/performance ratio of $94.10/Gflop, or less than $0.10/Mflop. These ratios reflect measured performance for double-precision floating point operations, not (sales hype) peak performance or (rarely used in high performance computing) single-precision floating point operations. Microwulf's power/performance ratio is a fairly efficient 17.14 watts/Gflop under load.
At this size and price, a person can afford to have a personal Beowulf cluster on his or her desk. For those who want to build one, the design details and pictures are available at the project website. The design is easily tweaked to incorporate quad-core and many-core CPUs, as they become available and affordable. It will be fun in the coming years to see how low people can drive the price/performance and power/performance ratios by building similar systems using these new CPUs. Microwulf costs under $0.10/Mflop; who will be the first to build a general purpose cluster for under $0.01/Mflop?"
Microwulf produces 26.25 Gflops of measured, double-precision performance on the standard supercomputing benchmark HP Linpack (using Goto BLAS). That gives Microwulf a price/performance ratio of $94.10/Gflop, or less than $0.10/Mflop. These ratios reflect measured performance for double-precision floating point operations, not (sales hype) peak performance or (rarely used in high performance computing) single-precision floating point operations. Microwulf's power/performance ratio is a fairly efficient 17.14 watts/Gflop under load.
At this size and price, a person can afford to have a personal Beowulf cluster on his or her desk. For those who want to build one, the design details and pictures are available at the project website. The design is easily tweaked to incorporate quad-core and many-core CPUs, as they become available and affordable. It will be fun in the coming years to see how low people can drive the price/performance and power/performance ratios by building similar systems using these new CPUs. Microwulf costs under $0.10/Mflop; who will be the first to build a general purpose cluster for under $0.01/Mflop?"
Submission + - England gets a case of bad gas
anubi writes: Motorists in England are having a bad gas day.
Numerous sources are reporting motorists are having their cars fail shortly after a fillup, and as of yet, no one knows why.
Numerous sources are reporting motorists are having their cars fail shortly after a fillup, and as of yet, no one knows why.
Submission + - Open Access For Research Gaining Steam
An anonymous reader writes: The BBC reports
that open access to research is gaining steam as more than 20,000
people, including Nobel Prize winners, have signed a petition calling
for greater access to publicly-funded research. While publishers are
fighting open access, a growing number of funding agencies and
universities are making it a mandatory requirement.
Submission + - Friendster For Proteins
An anonymous reader writes: Your body is an internet, according to this Forbes story. From the article: "he body-as-network is becoming a dominant metaphor for future drug research...A budding field called systems biology, which borrows techniques from engineering, physics and computer science to understand the body's complex web of cause and effect."
And later on: Notre Dame physicist Albert-László Barabási and others have shown that molecular networks inside our bodies share some basic similarities with the Internet. Typical proteins make relatively few links to other proteins, just as most Web sites link to only a few others. But a small handful of "hub" proteins are like the Google (nasdaq: GOOG — news — people ) of the protein world, connected to dozens of other proteins. "Disease is a breakdown of the network," he says.
This big-picture idea was posited in the first half of the century by mathematicians and engineers. But the notion was eclipsed by the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA. Since then molecular biologists have adopted an atomistic focus, rushing to identify and understand one gene and protein at a time."
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0312/072.ht ml?partner=yahoomag
And later on: Notre Dame physicist Albert-László Barabási and others have shown that molecular networks inside our bodies share some basic similarities with the Internet. Typical proteins make relatively few links to other proteins, just as most Web sites link to only a few others. But a small handful of "hub" proteins are like the Google (nasdaq: GOOG — news — people ) of the protein world, connected to dozens of other proteins. "Disease is a breakdown of the network," he says.
This big-picture idea was posited in the first half of the century by mathematicians and engineers. But the notion was eclipsed by the 1953 discovery of the structure of DNA. Since then molecular biologists have adopted an atomistic focus, rushing to identify and understand one gene and protein at a time."
http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2007/0312/072.h
Where Can You Find Cheap DVI Video Cards? 89
iansmith wonders: "I have a new Gateway computer hooked to a flat screen monitor. The problem is the video out is only VGA which does not look as sharp as a DVI output. To help with this, and also to let me run dual displays, I want to add a video card to the machine. In the past I would just grab a standard VGA card for $20, plug it in and go, not needing fancy 3D graphics. I do not want to spend $300 for a gaming video card... does anybody make a video card with DVI out that is not a souped up 3D powerhouse, with a price tag to match? Even worse, all new machines seem to be PCI-Express and so that makes it even less likely I'll find something affordable. I can't even use an old 3D card from home. What would you all suggest I do?"
Submission + - Web of Life - A innovative GPL strategy game.
An anonymous reader writes: Hi,
I've just seen this site, about a strategy game with some really interesting concepts. It's been developed by a guy in his first couple of years in college, in Brazil.
Here's a brief:
"An isometric game with C++ and SDL.
Your beings should survive fighting with other beings, reproducting to make a massive attack and eating.
But sometimes you will have to eat some of your own live beings so that others could stay alive, well it's life.
First game done with the Ecosystem Engine ALIVE. (For more info about this Engine see the projects page). In this game the player control some animals and plants, and he/she should make them survive competing with the computer."
Here's a link for the project's page on SourceForge. Help is needed for devoloping a muliplayer protocol, more chars and compiling it for other plataforms than Windows XP and Linux.
I've just seen this site, about a strategy game with some really interesting concepts. It's been developed by a guy in his first couple of years in college, in Brazil.
Here's a brief:
"An isometric game with C++ and SDL.
Your beings should survive fighting with other beings, reproducting to make a massive attack and eating.
But sometimes you will have to eat some of your own live beings so that others could stay alive, well it's life.
First game done with the Ecosystem Engine ALIVE. (For more info about this Engine see the projects page). In this game the player control some animals and plants, and he/she should make them survive competing with the computer."
Here's a link for the project's page on SourceForge. Help is needed for devoloping a muliplayer protocol, more chars and compiling it for other plataforms than Windows XP and Linux.
