mollusk

Perhaps more nerd than than geek:

I have won over 1000 straight Freecell games.

Big whoop.

mattm

Windows 8 preview build is available: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/home/

New boot times are close to 10 seconds (w/ ssd hd) - details & video here.

MikeyBoyAz

That only matters if you turn your computer off. what matters is if they get the CPU tasking strategy optimized for the up and coming 8 core intel with hyperthreading... too many cores that the last ones just sit idle... which is useless.

In other news... Anyone hear Intel acquired McAfee antivirus?... rumor is they will be making a hardware based virus protection... sweet if you ask me.

mollusk

Two weeks ago Spawn2 came down stairs carrying on old computer: IBM PC 365, dual Pentium Pros at 200 MHz and 1 MB on chip cache. It was a screamin' machine for its time running NT3.51, but its time is long gone. He said that he tried to boot it up, but it was dead. I asked him if he wanted me to fix it and he did. He likes retro electronics for some reason.

The old power supply was fried, but I found a replacement on-line for $20 with free shipping. It arrived today and I put it in after giving the innards of the box a good cleaning. Booted right up!

The last OS on it was some version of Suse Linux. It took me about a dozen guesses before hit on the correct root password.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with this antique, but it does run. I think that once I had BeOS running on it for fun. I just might try that again just for $hits and giggles.

Or because it is an IBM machine perhaps I should seek out a really old version of OS/2.

kensuf

I threw out my warp media about a year or two ago. Sorry pal.

mollusk

i know a guy that probably has Warp and even older versions of OS/2.

I did put a Creative SoundBlaster16 card in that box, speaking of antiques. My recollection is that DMA channels and IRQ's are all set via jumpers so setting it up with a new OS with PnP is a bit of a headache. I think that I still have the original manuals for it somewhere.

soma5

Ah. Another Freecell addict.

carleton

+ NoScript (https://noscript.net/)

This keeps any cross-site scripting or any scripting from happening that you don't authorize. It takes a few days to setup your "white list" (approved sites) as you proceed with your normal browsing routines, but it's amazing. Plus you can temporarily approve sites then revoke the permissions when you are done. I see very few ads now. Maybe 5% or what the normal person might see on the web.

waterrockets 

Conjugate gradient optimizer. Whew, yeah, it's been a while. I really really enjoy the curve balls I get from our customer. This project is a blast.

Now I'm just wondering if the performance will be acceptable on a phone in Java, or if I'll need to fire up the NDK and implement the tough stuff in C++.

Enthalpic

It’s not antique or even collectible; it is electronic waste. Sadly due to the fragile -and yet ironically non-biodegradable- nature of plastic, actual antiques will be of increasing rarity when compared to periods where wood or metal was the primary medium.

LesterOfPuppets

Shhh, don't say that in front of my NeXT slab or 8088 or Vic-20 or ZX80. Dang, my spare room is like an electronic superfund site!

kensuf

SB16 ain't nothing. Tell me you've got an adlib card and we'll talk.

SalsaPodio

I have discovered the difference between graduate level materials thermo and undergraduate.

Undergraduate: Learn thermo functions and kind of how to use them. Basically plug and chug once you know what you're doing

Graduate: Professor says that you should be able to derive all thermodynamic functions from 1st and 2nd laws, including maxwell equations and all partial derivatives. Once you finally derive all the equations then you use them in the exact same way as in undergraduate thermo.

I hate this class.

carleton

That was also the difference between undergraduate Calculus 1/2/3 and Honors Calculus 1/2/3 at my college.

SalsaPodio

It's just really annoying. I understand completely how to use the equations and what information they can give in terms of thermodynamic equilibrium. I wouldn't care too much, but I know there is going to be a question on the exam tomorrow that will ask to derive U, G, H, and A. It's just a waste of time.

kensuf

Tell it to Mollusk. He teaches that stuff.

carleton

Give a man a fish and he can eat for a day...

mollusk

I agree with the prof. This is grad school. "Plug and chug" teaching of engineering is actually outdated even for undergrads. I've been preaching this for over 20 years, but things move at a glacial pace in education. (Yes, there is a joke there about receding recently.) If it is "plug and chug" then it probably fits on a floppy and floppys have been outmoded for a good long time. You don't want an education that is so easily mimicked with a simple computer program. This course should not be about getting numerical answers. This course should be about getting a deep understanding of the subject matter.

Real thermo is beautiful and elegant. And it is the only "classical" pillar of physics that is still standing. Don't think about the course for learning how to analyse mixtures of gases with different phase diagrams that are being cooled (even though you should be learning this!), but rather as getting to the real meaning of the first and second laws as well as the reason for the zero-th law and third laws.

kensuf

I should ask you to speak next semester when we teach the scuba kids the ideal gas law. All they really need to know is leave a tank in the trunk of your car on a hot summer day and the pressure may go up enough to pop a burst disk, but you could really blow their minds .

SalsaPodio

I see what you're saying and I probably explained myself incorrectly.

I really want to understand thermo. For instance, my research deals with the Mo-Ni-Al-Ir-Hf system. I'm developing a new high temperature materials system based off of Mo, which has inherently poor oxidation, so I'm coating a (Mo)-NiAl alloy with a Ir-Hf modified NiAl for oxidation resistance. I am doing so through a combination of electroplating, pack cementation, and some other interesting things. From what I've said you can see that there are a lot of interfaces with different chemistries and a lot of high temperature processing, giving enough solid state diffusion for some interesting things to happen. I would love to have a more thorough understanding of thermo to get a better grasp of what kind of phases I should be expecting given my experimental parameters (coating thickness, pack time/composition, annealing temperature), but there is also a lot of kinetics involved.

The thermo class I'm in right now involves the professor putting up a slide of equations and letting us look at them for a few minutes. Then he proceeds to the next slide. It's absolutely awful. I just don't want to sound like I want the equations handed to me, because that's not it at all. Well now it's back to studying for the test.

mollusk

It is a bit more complicated than that. Any CO2 in the tank goes supercritical and so ideal gas law doesn't apply for it.

mollusk

Stay awake when the discussion involved chemical potentials, enthalpy of formation, etc. And get a good book about thermo. Adkins book "Equilibrium Thermodynamics" is a good intro. And then read Pippard's book. Adkins "dumbs" Pippard down a little bit.

Enthalpic

Mollusk would probably just beat the hell out of a program like Gaussian then, when he discovers that it doesn't fully meet his needs, recode the thing from scratch.

SalsaPodio

Your name reminds me of enthalpy, then I think that volume is the partial differential of enthalpy with respect to pressure, holding volume constant. I think I'm almost ready for the test, but probably not.

mollusk

But just to "F" with everyone it will be native to Inferno/programmed in Limbo. You could make it run like hell on your non-Apple smart phone.