Posts by bob, mon! 192 posts • joined 27 Sep 2007
Way back when I was in college, I was told that an engineering equation was "good enough" if it was accurate to 3 decimal places; a physics equation was good enough if it was within an order of magnitude; and an astrophysics equation was good enough if the units came out correctly.
That was in the days when slide rules ruled....
I can only hope that this data slurpage applies to the free version. My school system (consisting of 14 state universities) has chosen zoom as its official standard teleconferencing software. I have zero options to change to any other platform. And even if I could, getting people to use zoom was and is an exercise in on-the-fly training, and anything else would have that problem and no official support.
Well, maybe the corporate legal team actually did due diligence and checked out the Ts &Cs. Who knows?
Quoting from the abstract:
"Remarkably, the new structure appears to be undulating and its three-dimensional structure is well described by a damped sinusoidal wave on the plane of the Milky Way, with an average period of about 2 kiloparsecs and a maximum amplitude of about 160 parsecs."
Rural Pennsylvania. Rural (western) New York, rural Vermont, New Hampshire. Rural Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc.
I'm 2 hours from New York City (at 70 mph), and 4 hours from Pittsburgh. Lots of small towns in between, but lots of farms, forests, state hunting lands and the like as well. My nearest neighbor is across the road, but the next nearest is 1/8 mile away. No cable out here, never mind fibre. Some days "IP over avian carrier" seems like a viable option.
"Can you do 3Mb up with a low bandwidth modem on a long phone line?"
AHHHAHAHAHA*kaffkaff* No.
I get less than 100 KB/s (so 800Kb/s) up on a good day... and Verizon DSL doesn't give me good days. I just now got a 44.1KB/s upload of a 300MB file. Yawnnn....
Of course, a true "low bandwidth modem" would be the 300-Baud unit I started out with, back in the previous millennium.
"let z;" - z is a... let? letter? letcher? lett?
It's lettuce. Green, leafy, and silly in a program.
I use C when Assembly isn't good enough...
Seriously: do-while versus while? (Versus for???). Look at the machine code. A decent compiler generates the same code for any version, and it's the most efficient implementation the architecture can provide. Those higher level constructs are so YOU, the programmer, can remember what you meant 6 months from now.
That's all you can say about the paper? I met it in grad school in the 1980's, and still have my copy. It's delightful! Here's an excerpt:
"Encouraged by this success, as minor as it is, the Blefuscuians tried to pull another fast one. This time it was on the VAX, the sacred machine which all the Little-Endians worship."
Look for IEN 137 if you want to understand where big.LITTLE came from. Or here's an online copy: https://montcs.bloomu.edu/Readings/ien137.txt
True GigE will be a boon for beowulf clusters running MPI or whatever over Ethernet, as the node interconnect is a bottleneck.
I just built up a 4-node RPi 3B+ cluster for class use, now i need to justify getting 4 new RPi 4's. Also glad to hear that the boards can run on 2.5A, since the cluster doesn't have any peripherals and the current generation of multiport USB P.S.'s max out at 2.5A per port.
Next step - find out whether 64-bit Devuan will run on the new board.
Their list of laptops includes the T440s - "not affected", and the T460s - "affected". So where does that leave my T450s??? "Sort of affected"? "Deeply moved"? "Concerned, but not really bothered"?
Fortunately, Lenovo also listed the relevant firmware numbers, and a reboot and BIOS check suggests that I have an older, unaffected version of the ME firmware. Sure wish they'd included my machine in the list though, makes me feel somewhat abandoned.
Poul Anderson had a short story as well... its point being that high-gravity inhabitants would be smaller than humans, not larger as other authors at the time had imagined.
Much too long ago for me to remember the title, alas.
In a lot of personal computers post-IBM-PC, the RAM didn't use ECC or even parity bits, because it was cheaper not to (and "it's only a personal computer").
I had a Zenith system (Z-150) with a jumper on the motherboard, that you could set if you wanted to buy and install the additional memory chips to support parity. The default was "no parity memory", though.
Wow, someone else actually bought Ohio Scientific! My first personal computer was an OSI C4MP --- 6502 processor, something like 16KB of memory, and a 5.25" floppy.
Sort of an Apple II alternative, but OSI's attitude was that they built the hardware, the OS was your problem. As in, create a disk file by first loading the monitor routines from the system floppy, using it to manually allocate as many sectors on the target floppy as you expected the file to need, then load the editor from the system floppy, edit the file (typically in BASIC), swap the target floppy back in and save the file to the disk. If you got cheapthrifty and allocated too few sectors, nothing for it but to discard all your work, de-allocate the file and start over with more sectors.
Double-sided floppies? Cut a read/write notch on the other side, and put the floppy in the drive upside-down.
Old phart icon, 'cuz that was in the 1970s.
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