\6/22   Supercomputers: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4111866.stm

6/22    Is this for real?  http://www.i-am-asian.com   -John
        \_ unfortunately, yes. -nivra
        \_ I won't drop my discrimination lawsuit until they start offering
           99-cents Kung Pao Select and McRoll!  -- yuen

6/21    Competition For Jobs, Partners Sparks Height Craze In China.
        Height Stretching Machines:
        http://www.local6.com/money/4574140/detail.html
        \_ I will be as a god! --erikred
           \_ Oh you know you already are, big boy.  -John

6/21    http://www.loveit-or-leaveit.com/flash/americafuckyeah.html
        Video music of Trey Parker's remake of "America, Fuck Yeah" song

6/21    So I'm in my late 20s and I've noticed that many of the nerdy,
        awkward, and unpopular kids in HS have turned quite successful.
        Many of them are doctors and lawyers. On the other hand, many
        of the popular kids are now doing menial jobs. For example one is
        still doing retail and the other one doing import/export crap.
        Is this odd, or do you guys think there's a logical explanation?
        \_ I think this depends very strongly on where you went to highschool.
           All the really popular kids in my highschool went to college, most
           to top colleges, and an irritatingly large fraction are now lawyers.
           I had quite a few friends in highschool, but I think if any one of
           the people I knew who were happy and successful at my highschool
           had gone to a typical middle America football-first type school
           we'd be hated because of being different.  In highschool, normal=
           popular, and in America at large ignorant=normal.
           \_ Lots of lawyers because those people drank their way through
              college while pursuing a degree in anthropology or something.
              While working at KFC as a manager for $12/hour they decide
              to do something with their lives and end up going to law
              school (true story). Engineers often don't bother with grad
              school, because they get good jobs right out of school. I know
              so many nitwits who are now lawyers that I fear for myself if
              I ever need serious legal advice. (There are smart lawyers
              to be sure, but you have to sift through a lot of flotsam
              to find them.)
              \_ Is it that easy to get into law school?  I thought it's as
                 hard as getting into med school, where you need to have
                 maintained a good GPA in undergrad.  Not something you can fix
                 after graduation.
                 \_ I'm in LS now and I'm surprised at how many "characters"
                    there are. I have no idea how these people managed to
                    get decent scores on the LSAT or decent UG GPAS, my only
                    guess is that a humanities major somehow prepares you to
                    get by w/ very little work and LOTS of bs/guessing.
                    The only upshot of there being so many bad students is
                    that if you study like you studied in engineering you can
                    get mostly A's/B's (unlike in engineering where you could
                    still easily end up with a C).
                 \_ It is *way* easy to get into law school. Plenty of
                    jerkoffs went somewhere like San Jose State and majored
                    in Sociology or English with a 3.2 GPA and got into
                    law schools a *bit* less prestigious than Harvard Law.
                    I got A's in all my classics classes *AT CAL* (let
                    alone CSU) while spending all my time studying for
                    engineering, chemistry, physics and math classes. Same
                    with all the anthropology classes I took. My roommate
                    at Cal majored in Spanish and went to law school. He
                    was Hispanic and already spoke it fluently before
                    entering Cal. I am not sure he ever had any homework
                    other than reading and a few papers.
           \_ Where did you go to High School?
              \_ A public school in West Hartford, CT.
           \_ I wonder how many of your ignorant "normal" Americans can write
              a post that doesn't generate massive parsing errors.
        \_ Uh, the unpopular nerdy kids were the smart ones?
        \_ Import/export has a potential to make one quite rich. I know
           many people who made small fortunes doing that. What I found
           is that the mediocre students were more likely to have graduate
           degrees. It seems odd, but the reason is (I presume) that they felt
           they *had* to go to school. So many of my mediocre classmates
           are lawyers (especially), psychologists, doctors, MBAs, and such.
           None even touched science or engineering and yet they did quite
           well financially. I think that overall scientists/engineers are
           smarter and work harder with fewer financial rewards. By the
           way, the girls that were kinda cute are now extremely hot and
           the hot girls look mostly run-down. If only we could go back to make
           decisions then based on what we know now...
           \_ What's the difference between hot and cute? And yes all the hot
              people became losers. This one hot girl got pregnant and she
              never even went to college. On the other hand I got my BS/MS...
              made good money in the Valley and have a nice house and a nice
              car. ha ha, SUCKERS! That's for dissing us nerdy people.
              \_ So, do you have a hot wife? If not, I would say that all
                 that other crap is just your way of dealing with the fact
                 that hot chicks don't like you and never did. I submit
                 you not knowing the difference between hot and cute as
                 evidence.
           \_ There is no save/restore feature in the Life game.  Maybe it'll
              be available in an upcoming patch you can download.
           \_ In my high school, very few of the popular kids even *went* to
              college, are you kidding?
           \_ ^Import/export^Real estate
              \_ Almost anything has the potential to make one quite rich.
              \_ Agreed. And the popular kids/jocks have nice cars and are
                 pretty successful, at least financially speaking. But unlike
                 many motd'ers, I didn't think that they were all assholes.
                 They went to either Cal States or UC's. --LA HS Guy
        \_ I went to school in San Jose and I've seen this phenomenon too.
           Most of the popular kids (ie the ones that played sports, drank,
           had gf's) didn't end up in high paying jobs or going to good
           schools. The nerdy kids (debate, AP classes, Community College)
           ended up going to top schools and mostly went on to grad degrees.
           The moral of the story is that if you optimize for short term
           "fun" you often do so at the expense of long term security, but
           if you choose to optimize for long term security, you may have
           to pay a short term price (not being "fun").
           To some extent these aren't "choices" per se: your parents don't
           really care about education and prefer to see you have fun, so
           you start haning w/ the "fun" crowd OR your parents can't afford
           for you to participate in all those "fun" activities so you stop
           going to them and start studying in the library instead OR you
           just can't handle the math need to survive the "nerdy" classes
           so you stop being interested in studying and start pursuing "fun"
           instead.
           Personally, I think the kids that turned out the best weren't
           necessarily either the popular kids or the nerdy one (some of
           these people have the biggest damn ego's you've ever seen) but
           the ones who were able to put some balance into their lives.

6/22    Was this U2 shot down over Iran?
        http://csua.org/u/cgw
        \_ If you don't know, how would any of us know?
        \_ Which is better, U2 or SR-71?
           \_ SR-71, or originally RS-71, and before that A-12, was better
              but now is retired.
              \_ Huh?  The A-12 was never built, and it wasn't a
                 reconnaissance plane.
              \_ Hmmm.. this guy seems to think the SR-71 is back in
                 service.  Has anyone heard that before?
                 http://www.area51zone.com/aircraft/sr71.shtml
                 \_ The SR-71 program was cancelled in the late 80s/early 90s,
                    reactivated around 1994, and re-deactivated in the late
                    90s. NASA also used them for a while to escort landing
                    Space Shuttles, since they were the only things fast
                    enough to keep up with the re-entry speeds. -gm
                    \_ Why were landing Space Shuttles escorted?  It's not like
                       the escorting planes could do something when things went
                       wrong on the Shuttles.
                       \_ I think it was to perform visual inspections for
                          damage, that sort of thing. Maybe also to measure
                          wind and such, since the Shuttles are just really big
                          gliders. -gm

6/22    Every year the House approves one of these idiotic flag burning
        amendments, and every year the Senate lets it die.  Is this the
        most important thing that they could be doing?
        http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050622/ap_on_go_co/flag_burning
        \_ Was the Terry bill?  They love looking like they're doing something.
        \_ What's more important than rallying the base?
        \_ they should attach it to one of the annual fund the troops
           bills
           \_ Amendments take a bit more than that to pass.

6/22    I'm doing some performance tuing of a multithreaded application on a
        dual-Xeon with hyperthreading.  Windows reports 4 cores and counts
        1 core @ 100% as 25% CPU usage.  I realize this is a fuzzy question,
        but what's a reasonable real-world limit for CPU usage in this
        situation, since there aren't really 4 cores?  This app has a mix of
        MMX computation, unaccelerated floating-point math, bus I/O, and a
        lot of pointer dereferencing / irregular memory access patterns.
        \_ Turn off hyperthreading.
           \_ Since I currently get around 60% reported CPU usage, it would
              seem hyperthreading is helping performance about 20%, right?
              \_ The general wisdom is that hyperthreading increases GUI
                 responsiveness but decreases overall performance by 0-5%.
                 I'm sure there's an example where hyperthreading increases
                 overall performance, but I can't think of one.
              \_ Run your app with it on and off. Compare the run times.
                 \_ Just tried that.  Hyperthreading on:  200 seconds
                                      Hyperthreading off: 220 seconds
        \_ I'm doing the same with a simulation app.  It hits the memory bus
           and CPU most.  HT actually slowed our system down considerably.  A
           dual xeon gave us about 2x speed improvement.  The dual opteron did
           the same.  We're now checking a dual opteron with each package
           having dual core.  I say this as a former Intel employee who likes
           Intel--HT sucks for anything other than casual use.  Hard. -emarkp
           \_ I agree.  If yer doing simulations or anything else hardcore,
              turn off HT.  If yer doing Word and net browsing, by all means
              turn it on because it's a more pleasant user experience.
              Or wait until the Athlon dual-cores drop from $630.
              Or don't wait and get an Intel dual-core for $250 if your room is
              too cold.
        \_ OK, so aside from dissing hyperthreading, nobody has given actual
           information on what is a realistic maximum load for a 2-Xeon
           hyperthreading system. -OP
           \_ I think you should rephrase your question. What are you
              asking? What parameter(s) do you wish to change that are
              under your control? The load should be 2 at most, since
              there are 2 CPUs. Play with it and see what happens when you
              run more processes.
        \_ Do you have two dual-core CPUs with hyperthreading enabled?
           That implies eight logical CPUs.
           If you disabled hyperthreading, then you have four logical CPUs
           and four real cores.  You should get theoretical 100% usage on
           each core.  The simplest way to do this is to write a C program
           with a while (1) loop and run it four times.
           We have an old 700 MHz 4-CPU machine at work, and I can get about
           that running Linux with top.
           For one or more real-world apps that each uses multiple threads,
           it really depends on the threading implementation in each program,
           followed by how good the kernel is at handing out tasks to 4+ CPUs.
           I can easily imagine a two-thread program that uses 100% CPU on
           one CPU and 25% CPU on a second.
           \_ I have two dual-core dual processor machines with hyperthreading
              enabled ......
              \_ So each machine has one dual-core with hyperthreading?
                 Yeah, then that means four logical CPUs, two real cores,
                 per computer.
                 You can only expect a maximum of 100% CPU usage over the
                 two logical CPUs that sit on one physical core.
                 Anyways, if you run four while (1) C programs you should
                 get 200% total over the four CPUs as reported by top.
                 Same thing for Windoze if you have four CPU graphs.

6/22    What is 'THE STANDARD' way to transfer between BART and Caltrain in
        downtown SF?  I've tried walking and it takes 21 minutes and is not so
        pedestrian friendly.  I don't know how much I should trust MUNI having
        almost no experience with it...
        \_ The problem with the Metro is that the Caltrain bound trains don't
           come very often, so it will likely take you just as long to get
           there via the Metro as it would walking.  It will be more
           pedestrian friendly than trying to walk, though.  I will note that
           the Muni Metro is probably the only form of mass transit in the
           Bay Area that makes BART seem great.
           \_ And yet Muni carries more passengers per day than all the other
              transit systems in the Bay Area put together.
              \_ Wow.  Where can I see the numbers for various systems?
              \_ Is "Metro" the light-rail thingie in SF? The Muni buses seemed
                 fine when I used them a long time ago. The drivers seemed to
                 drive pretty fast.
        \_ i think there's a regular bus between montgomery BART and
           townshend caltrain station
        \_ Which BART and Caltrain stations are your origin and destination?
           Would it make more sense to transfer at the Milbrae Intermodal?
        \_ Wait for the new train/bus superstation to get built.
           \_ 5 years >>> 21 minutes.
        \_ Take the N Judah. It takes 12 minutes and runs every 6 or 7. It
           is also on the nextbus network, so you can either go look at the
           sign and see when the next one will be running or check the
           schedule on your cell phone.
           schedule on your cell phone. If it looks like the wait is too
           long, you can always catch the 15 or 30 or 45. -ausman

6/22    Dear motd custodian, please wake up and do you job. Keep motd clean
        and neat. I've been doing your job for the past few days. Lazy ass.
        \_ Sorry, I've got this class presentation tonight so I haven't
           looked at the motd for a few days. I was hoping the 'liberal ==
           communist' and the 'bush == hitler' people would be censoring
           each other thus keeping the motd relatively clean.

6/22    I have weird problems with soda email today - cannot receive or send
        any emails. I know I'm slightly over quota but my grace period isn't
        here yet. I use pine.  Anyone have similar problems today? Thanks :)
        \_ Soda's load gets high and then sendmail sits back and just queues
           for a while until the load goes back below 10 or so.  That's
           probably the problem. - jvarga
        \_ The grace period means nothing to the filesystem.  It's how long
           you have to take care of it yourself. Get yourself below quota,
           and your problems will cease.
        \_ Mail root, or post your name.  Motd can't help you.
          \_ my username is jdynin. I will also email root but I'm not sure
             if my email will reach them :)
             \_ You don't have any other email address you could use?
                Come on.  A little critical thinking here.
                \_ You also need to work on your critical thinking skills.
                   \_ Log into yahoo.  send mail to root@csua.berkeley.edu.
                      Yo, my login is XXXX.  What's up with this quota thing?
                      not hard.
                      \_ How does jdynin know that root can receive email,
                         if she is unsure her problem is quota-based?  Think
                         harder.
          \_ I also have not received any email on csua for the last 7
             hours.  I typically get on the order of nearly 100 spams per
             day, so it is almost unheard of that I would just not happen
             to get any email today.  -!op
        \_ I concur on not getting e-mail.
           I don't have a quota problem.
           telnet to port 25 and 465 and you notice a problem.
           Maybe root is working on it right this very moment.  Maybe not.
        \_ Is it likely that incoming mail is lost for good, or just
           delayed?
           \_ If it's less than 5 days (give or take), it's just delayed
        \_ OK, it seems I was able to get mail that was sent after 2:30 PM
           today.  I can send mail OK now too. Anyone knows if the mail that
           was sent to me or that I sent this morning is lost forever? -op
           \_ Senders to you should have gotten a message delayed message
              from their server. You should get it fine later. Outbound
              mail should have bounced back to you, if you could send
              it at all. Did you get bounces?
              \_ No, I did not get any bounces from the emails I sent out. I
                 did get one of those "your message coudln't be delivered for
                 4 hours" emails for the email I sent out this morning. It
                 seems my emails are slowly reaching their recipients, and my
                 morning inbound email is slowly reaching me.  Thanks for your
                 help! -op

6/22    Has apple made a statement on how long they will continue providing
        security updates for Mac OS X 10.3?
        \_ As far as I can tell, Apple has no written policy on EOL for
           their software.  -tom

6/22    Anyone have experience with the HP 2550L color laser printer?  It's on
        sale @ CostCo for $360, and I'm considering it.  The criticisms I've
        seen are that: 1) it's loud, and 2) it has no proper paper tray.  I can
        live with both of those problems.
        \_ What are you intending to do with your color?  Color laser
           printers don't print true color, they dither, so if you're looking
           to print photographs or other detailed images, the quality will
           be better on a good inkjet.  If you're just printing bar graphs
           the color laser is OK.  -tom
           \_ Inkjets dither too.  They do tricks with the inks these days,
              but they're still dithering.  Dye sublimation are the only
              ones that don't.
           \_ I'm not planning on photos.  I do my digital photos at CostCo.
              Yes, it's for the color drawings, etc.  I use color lasers at
              work.  I'm just not familiar with this model.
              \_ We have one here.  There is an optional tray you can purchase.
                 I haven't noticed this one being loud, but I don't think it's
                 in heavy use yet.  It seems to do an OK job. --scotsman
                 \_ Okay thanks.  The amazon reviews mentioned the optional
                    tray but that it was kind of expensive.  My old inkjet is
                    dying and I'd really like to have a laser.

6/22    Celequest (http://www.celequest.com has an immediate opening for an intern.
        Anyone looking for an internship can email your resume sweiss@celequest.
        Looking for someone experienced in Java, XML, Databases, J2EE, SQL, or
        a good combination of the above. I know this doesn't belong on the motd,
        but we want to fill this position quickly.  -steve
        \_ Only political flame wars belong on the motd!
        \_ Is it sweiss@celequest.com?

6/22    When I burn an iso image using the "Disk Utility" in OS X (Tiger)
        and I then use readcd on a linux box to verify the md5sum of the
        burned cd, the md5sum of the CD doesn't match the md5sum of the
        origional iso file. Is OS X modifying the iso image before it
        burns it or something? Seems strange.
        \_ Does this match on any of your other burned-CDs vs. ISO files?
           \_ Yeah, if I burn the same image on my linux box using
              cdrecord and then read it back with readcd, the md5sum is
              the same, the file size is the same. identical. I'm testing
              another tiger mac to see if it does the same thing.
              Wierdest is that the cd that mac burns makes a smaller image.
              Confirmed on an iMac G5 and an iBook G4 both running tiger.
              I'd love to know what part of the CD is getting changed.