Recent content by Matthew Daws

Noworkia, Yes, that's right, on Earth, everything under pressure is really hot: I mean, I can't even pick up the gas canister I take hiking, it's so hot! And deep-sea divers have to wear protective heat equipment. More seriously, the equations you quote relate to *work done* on a gas: if I...

Train: Yeah, right, well, here in Europe we just admitted Sri Lanka; Russia joined years ago, and Kazakhstan is right next to France. Perhaps you need to look at a map... The US comes in at 30 (odd you didn't talk about the top 50, eh?) while the UK falls in at no. 46, but we're not part of...

The Mirror article someone quoted gets about as close to any reasonable "alternative" explaination that I'd go to: it also explains why the bus bomb went off later, and why one eyewitness saw that bomber looking scared and messing about with his bag. But the evidence is flimsy at best: it's a...

The issue here is that what do you mean by the symbols "1", "+" and "2"? Once you've defined them, a "proof" that 1+1=2 is almost completely trivial (because 2 is pretty much DEFINED to be 1+1). --Matt

I think the confusion arises because we are putting a rather human spin on what "sucessful" means. Suppose, hypothetically, that a single mutation of a virus causes the virus to both become 100% deadly, but also allows it to become increadibly good at infecting and spreading. This is a clear...

Because we value human well-being, and believe that the American health care system could be made better so that poor Americans (or, indeed, all Americans) got better healthcare? I don't think that's hard to understand at all. Now, you can argue to the cows come home about whether an...

Okay, this is fine: it's a belief which I broadly agree with in some sense (i.e. fiscal conservative). However, I see little evidence that Bush is not doing exactly what Kerry said he'd do! Only Bush seems to, at present, not be balancing the book terribly well (so he can truthfully say he's...

There's a less than perfect county map Here!!

Ah! This sounds plausible: it's a pitty I don't have some better statistics. But I have read elsewhere that cities tend to vote Democrate for whatever reason. This would fit with the Mid-West results as well, I guess.

I was thinking about adding to the thread on "What this election means for the country and the Democratic party" but thought it would be too off topic. Firstly, look at Flash map which gives a breakdown by state, and a history, all in flash. I live in the UK, but my girlfriend is from NY, so...

Another point is that AMD64 is not simply a 32-bit x86 extended to 64bits. AMD also doubled the number of registers available in both x86 and SSE (2/3) modes. Theoretically, this should have a large effect on performance in a way that simply moving to 64-bits does not, in general. Of course...

This is the problem: there isn't a SSE2 sine function! There is an x87 sine function, and modern compilers (e.g. Intel's or the next version of GCC) inline it, and so never call the math library (doing this trick manually with some macros with exp() and pow() increases massively the speed of a...

Following on from this (though everyone else seems to have lost interest), I'm now even more confused. A google search seems to bring up the following information (it's summed up at XBitLabs message board) It appears that the *hardware* at present does support x87 under all 64-bit modes...

I think that Sandorski is alluding to the fact that the US doesn't have troops in the Balkans at present. I cannot confirm this, but they are certainly out of Bosnia: Wiki (scroll down, where you'll see that an EU peace-keeping force is currently in place). Cheers, --Matt

soa123: Weird! I'm reading the "AMD64 Architecture Programmer's Manual Vol 1" To quote some things: In a section labelled "advantages of x87", we have Which was the point I was making. I'd be very surprised if x87 was ever turned off, as then a lot of scientific code couldn't be run. In...