Slashdot Mirror

SGI Indigo Esspresso

VAXbar

SGI Challege Fridge

This is exactly what persistient OS'es try to avoid. If the whole system is persistient, then not of this suspend/resume voodo is needed because the state of the OS persists for ever anyway.

check out this for some examples of what I mean.

Actually, if you want to play with a persistent programming environment, download a Smalltalk environment. Smalltalk environments are able to serialize themselves to image files. When subsequently re-serialized, the state of all the objects in the system at the time of serialization is restored.

What the fuck? I was trying to find a web project called the "Tree of Life". I started with the obvious choices. When I entered www.treeoflife.net, I got a MS page for NT 4.o Option Pack. What does this have to do with the Tree of Life? I get the impression that any .net that has not been used has been bought by MS. When I entered www.treeoflife.org I got the QWest home page, i.e. www.qwest.com. What the double fuck? Is QWest suddenly a non-profit? What are they doing with treeoflife.org. This ia a new age of cybersquatting, where huge Corporatiions are buyinjg up any domain that they can get there greedy corporate hands on. Then they link it to some meaningless unrelated page, thus claiming that they are indede using it. After this I was expecting a link to the Illuminati when I typed treeoflife.gov! At least "treeoflife.com" is a real comercial concern, specializing in "Natural Foods". BTW, the Tree of Life Home Page is http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/

For a long time, Charales has been one of the prime suspects in being the sister group of the land plants

This however has nothing to do with primordial scum! Charales are advanced green algae that looks something like a submerged moss. I need to read the article, but i suspect the reason Nature would publish this is that they used some new fancy algorith to calculate the phylogenetic trees.

For a long time, Charales has been one of the prime suspects in being the sister group of the land plants

This however has nothing to do with primordial scum! Charales are advanced green algae that looks something like a submerged moss. I need to read the article, but i suspect the reason Nature would publish this is that they used some new fancy algorith to calculate the phylogenetic trees.

It looks like a Cephalopod to me

1: If this is an ancient group, maybe the two longer arms on squid are a specialization.

2: Well, ordinary squid tentacles does get thinner toward the ends too.

3: Most jellyfish have several more than 10 tentacles. The two 'wings' looks like the same structure are the fins on squid and cuttlefish to me. There are other squid that have 10 equally long arms, the Belemnoidea.

Read more about Cephalopods at http://phylogeny.arizona.edu/tree/eukaryotes/anima ls/mollusca/cephalopoda/coleoidea/coleoidea.html

I am a biologist, but not a marine biologist. I do hope someone catches one of these creatures. Wonder what its closest relatives (among other Cephalopods)are...

So here's a link describing the NP complete problem (I think, I probably should read the whole thing first).

You are right, Dijsktra's algorithm will solve the general case shortest path from any source to every other reachable point.

>Not to mention the fact that one side of the
>moon faces the sun at all times! Any solar
>collectors on Earth are subject to day/night
>cycles. The moon would rarely be impacted, when
>the lunar eclipses happen.

Doh! One side of the moon always faces the EARTH! (synchronous rotation). We had never seen the far side of the moon until we sent something "back there" to take pictures.

So: that being the case, is it really possible that one side of the moon is always bathed in the light of the sun? If so, then how did we ever get visible pictures of the OTHER SIDE of the moon? Did we use a gigantic flashbulb, or something? ;)

Map of the entire surface including the far side

The Far Side of the Moon Consider how this picture would look if it had been taken during a "full moon:" since during a full moon the entire side of the moon that is facing the Earth is lit up, only the portion of the moon in this photograph that is said to be visible from Earth (see the pic's caption) would have any sunlight on it.

Far Side of the Moon, with animation showing the same side of the moon always toward the Earth. This doesn't show where the sun is in relation to the animation; but figure that the sun is way off the screen from the animation...the darkened part of the moon in the animation is representing the side of the moon we never see from Earth, NOT how the light hits the moon (the Earth does not illuminate the moon, although it does sometimes reflect a little of the sun's light onto the dark portion of the quarter moon...)

So, taking this into account, will it be useful to build these lasers on the moon, especially the power plant?

Apollo 11 Laser Ranging Retroreflector Experiment. "Laser beams are used because they remain tightly focused for large distances. Nevertheless, there is enough dispersion of the beam that it is about 7 kilometers in diameter when it reaches the Moon and 20 kilometers in diameter when it returns to Earth. Because of this very weak signal, observations are made for several hours at a time. By averaging the signal for this period, the distance to the Moon can be measured to an accuracy of about 3 centimeters (the average distance from the Earth to the Moon is about 385,000 kilometers)."

Add to this, the fact that the moon wobbles...

Ah yes, here's a thought... ;)

Guess why they had to throw it away? Y2K problems, of course. ;-)

No one can deny that old hardware rocks, but old hardware still in production use just fuckin' rules. These days, floppy drives are one of the least reliable standard components of a PC, but this floppy drive lasted decades of constant use. Wow.

-- The_Messenger

One thing you have to realize is that in todays economy, there are a great deal many "sharp linux/unix admins" who are out of work.

Take me for example, I was a linux/unix admin for several years at a dept in my old University. After that job, I went and worked in Linux app development at Intel. After the shizit hit the fan last year in the tech sector (it really started showing in Aug. of 2000, but hit my division hard in Jan. of 2001) I found myself out of work- unneeded and unwanted. I went 9 months without a job (I did a contract here and there, but never enough to make ends meet). Now I'm working as a Win32 Admin at a fraction of what I used to get paid simply because I am so desperate.

If there are others like me (and I know there are quite a few) we'd be more than happy to reset passwords for morons, or troubleshoot Wine installations of Office 97, or whatever. Hey, we need money too ;-)

Well... the best reference on the multicellularity topic is probably Lynn Margulis's volume Five Kingdoms in which she points out all of the taxa in which multicellularity of one type or another has evolved. I think she defines anywhere between seven and eleven separate origins to multicellularity, depending on how you define the term and on the exact relationships between groups. Don't bank on her overall phylogeny of the Eucaryotes, though.

There's at least one (maybe two? It's been a while since I've been really up on this) obligately multicellular prokaryotic lineage - they cluster together in these rather cool-looking treelike thingies. Once one delves into the diversity of life beyond the "textbook" examples there's some pretty amazing variety out there.

Within the eucaryotes it's a whole different story of course - the three Great Big Multicellular Radiations are of course the Animals, Plants, and Fungi. However there's several other smaller lineages which appear to have come up with the multicellular solution on their own - slime molds and several algal lineages are the only ones which leaps to my mind right now because it's late, but again Lynn's book details all of them. These really do appear to be independant, convergent origins as they all appear to be derived from demonstrably unicellular sets of taxa. The really big step was the quantum leap in genomic complexity (and probably redundancy) inherent in the change from prokaryotes to eucaryotes. There's a lot of really exciting work being done in this area right now, based upon hard analysis of full genomes from both groups. The full story is way stranger than anything we learned in high school (spoiler: maybe it was a triple-endosymbiosis which concurrently resulted in both the eucaryotic genome and the mitochondrion). For some basic outlines of this stuff go here.

I know it seems foolish now, but I want to see the technology advancing at this rate in anticipation of real 3D displays. How many FPS do you think the NV25 could pull at 1200x1200x1200? There are a host of companies and researchers working on displays that have cubic resolutions such as this, and while the usual approach has been shining lasers at points in a plastic space treated with rare earth elements, I believe R&D at the major companies is focused on multi layering transparent LCDs (can't find any links just now :().

The demand for copious amounts of pixel data is looming and as such, there is a ways to go in the realm of graphics horsepower if we are ever going to get high definition 3D displays working. The notion of 3D displays made of many physical layers is not only feasable, but surely right around the corner. For the example of a 17" monitor, the form factor would almost be the same using a 1200-deep sandwich of pixel thick layers of LCD emulsion...

I suspect the material technology is available, but the datapath to drive such a display will have to be fast and wide in the extreme compared to the graphics systems available today. And the problem is made worse considering there will be no more backface culling to hide behind (yes, pun). Consider:

2d display, bits-per-second
1280 px X 1024px X 32bpp X 24fps = 1,006,632,960 (billion)

Volumetric 3D Display, bits-per-second
1280 px X 1024px X1024 X 32bpp X 24fps = 1,030,792,151,040 (quadrillion)

As you can see, your standard game of quake jumps two entire orders of magnitude more demanding on a video card by adopting a volumetric display strategy. That's some heavy minimum requirements. We may see the day when we all switch back to 8-bit diplays for a while as technology races to keep up with the next big leap in display technology.

Coupled with demanding framerate needs and the order of magnitude more polys that'll need rendering, the NV25 we drool over today will seem as crude and worthless as the CGA adaptor of only 10 years ago, and it'll all be here before you know it.

Was Are you ready for Calc III. This, and alot more math software can be had from the UofA Math Software Page.

Hey Timothy, UofA is here, and the school you're talking about is here

Yay! The U of A's optics department is second to none. Here's the homepage for that department:

http://www.optics.arizona.edu/Directory/default.as p

The FoxNews article is pretty slim, and I can't find "paper-thin OLED" on that departmental page, though I suspect the "Administrative and Research Web Sites" link would be a good start...

Yay! The U of A's optics department is second to none. Here's the homepage for that department:

http://www.optics.arizona.edu/Directory/default.as p

The FoxNews article is pretty slim, and I can't find "paper-thin OLED" on that departmental page, though I suspect the "Administrative and Research Web Sites" link would be a good start...

Not trusting the headline whores at fox news, I did a little searching on google and found this article published in June of 2000. It has a better review of the actually technology from a pure science point of view, rather than the "marketing press release as if it were a product" garbage that was posted.

There is a better story on the UA newspaper. And here is the link to research department. Not much here yet except for an animation.

There is a better story on the UA newspaper. And here is the link to research department. Not much here yet except for an animation.

Ordinary stony asteroids, which have a rather crumbly composition,
must be larger than 50 meters across (half the size of a football
field) to do any damage at the ground. Such a projectile packs about.
10 megatons of energy, comparable to the largest nuclear bomb.

But from this page about the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa:

The total energy released by the four main events of the 1883 eruption was equivalent to 200 megatons of TNT. Most of this energy was released by the third paroxysmal explosion which has been estimated to be equivalent to an explosion of 150 megatons of TNT.

There's a guy named Pat Bridges who keeps a big list of OS project and the like, his page is here.

I don't know about any linux exokernel projects, but linux.org might have some relevant stuff on their projects page.

Yes but my understanding from the article is that the problem isn't finding the asteroids, it's in long-term tracking of them to get proper orbits. The big telescopes can easily find them, they just don't have time to track them long enough to get good orbital elements. That's why you would want a distributed network of small automated telescopes. For example NEAT discovered 5 new NEAs just this month. SpaceWatch is also doing a pretty good job of finding stuff, as is the Catalina Sky Survey.

Yes but my understanding from the article is that the problem isn't finding the asteroids, it's in long-term tracking of them to get proper orbits. The big telescopes can easily find them, they just don't have time to track them long enough to get good orbital elements. That's why you would want a distributed network of small automated telescopes. For example NEAT discovered 5 new NEAs just this month. SpaceWatch is also doing a pretty good job of finding stuff, as is the Catalina Sky Survey.

If you compare 2.4.11 to anything, please compare it to the latest -ac kernels from Alan, where the traditional 2.4 VM is actually working very well. There's NO sense in comparing 2.4.11 to 2.4.9; the VM in 2.4.9 and its kin -- it was just plain broken.

Side note: In Rik's VM, please remember to not just look at swap used as a gauge of whether you're swapping or not. All anonymous pages are mapped to swap, so the space is simply allocated. You can create a huge image in GIMP and lots of swap will be allocated, but without a drop of disk I/O! Use vmstat and look at the 'si' and 'so' columns to see if you're actually writing pages to swap. Or look in /proc/meminfo and subtract "SwapCached" from the amount of swap you think you're using. That's the amount of *written* swap you're using (a better comparison to 2.4.10). This needs to be made sensible in 2.5, if this VM is to be resurrected.

Andrea's work has cleaned up the handling of inactive pages (which could have been done under the old system), and the new "classzone" approach and VM balancing isn't documented anywhere outside the code itself. In addition, there are very normal loads where it performs badly compared to the -ac tree. Here is a test suite that tests different aspects of aging and swapping, and the results as provided to linux-kernel. 2.4.10 (patched with Andrea's VM tweaks) swapped more pages, took longer, and had to swap more pages back in when the tests completed (i.e. it could have chosen better pages to swap out). It also caused XMMS to skip mp3 playback throughout the tests, whereas -ac didn't.

Nothing's perfect of course; a process that randomly walks through pages performs better in 2.4.10 since it's more streamlined and not trying to be as "intelligent" about page handling. Rik's code could no doubt be improved here.

That's the great thing about open source: let the best idea win! No doubt in 2.5 we'll see these two VM schemes hash it out in much more complete form (i.e. lose the remaining kernel 2.2-isms, maybe add physical page mapping, almost certainly swapfs -- mostly for Rik's scheme; I'm not sure what the next steps for Andrea's VM should be).

Hardly. The wired article, barely 200 words, doesn't even begin to explain why someone would want to map cyberspace.

This pretty old NY Times article (http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/go/recognition/nytimes0 999.htm) explains things much better. And I'm sure there are even better references out there.

Or maybe agrep. Isn't approximate matching more useful for this kind of task?

Children under 18 aren't allowed to go to R-rated movies, so why would we allow them to go into a school or a library and see X-rated material?"

Why bother with that Internet thing when we can pull those nasty books off the shelves and burn them to keep such filth out of childrens' minds, eh?

Good idea, Herr Doktor!
Seig Heil!

chump: AI hasn't progressed in 50 years. Its a failure.
me: for starters: Backprop, RBF, HMM, SVM, SOFM, ART, plus tons of symbolic side that I don't know about, people are mapping neuronal layers in the auditory and vision systems. Just because there isn't "strong AI" yet doesn't mean the field has failed. Physics doesn't have a grand unified theory, medicine can't make people live forever, etc. & we don't consider those fields failures. NNets are being moved out of the research labs and into everyday products, much like computing technology not too long ago.

chump: AI won't go anywhere until they acknowledge that they need (insert random physical property of the brain hypothesized in a pop science book or documentary)
me1: Penrose should stick to physics
me2: Tilden's analog/BEAM is a 3rd rate neural network implemented in hardware. Its incapable of doing anything more than oscillations. Analog hardware is irrelevant; modern computers are quite capable of doing floating point arithmetic.

Are you equipped for it?

Well, the VAXBar was built from the empty shell of a parts machine anyway.

-53C is the global average, rather than the equatorial average. Mars gets as warm as 27 C. The pressure is also dependent on the altitude, just as it is on Earth, and Valles Marinaris is 7 km deep. The highest pressure is up to about 9 millibars, well above the 6 millibars of the triple point of water. (See the nine planets for a handy reference).

In low-lying equatorial regions, you can temporarily get conditions that support liquid water.

Agreed. That's why I hate my university's IT department. Why can't they create a solution (SMTP-AUTH) rather than create new problems (blocking external IP addresses and forcing users to compose and send mail through a slow telnet connection). The climate maybe improving: last year they implemented a webmail system (although I dislike that, too; webmail has too much latency and terrible search capabilities, among many other faults), and this year, they scrapped the telnet daemon in favor of SSH. None of those, however, can replace being able to send mail from the client of your choice. So if you work at CCIT at the University of Arizona, please consider my plea...

Agreed. That's why I hate my university's IT department. Why can't they create a solution (SMTP-AUTH) rather than create new problems (blocking external IP addresses and forcing users to compose and send mail through a slow telnet connection). The climate maybe improving: last year they implemented a webmail system (although I dislike that, too; webmail has too much latency and terrible search capabilities, among many other faults), and this year, they scrapped the telnet daemon in favor of SSH. None of those, however, can replace being able to send mail from the client of your choice. So if you work at CCIT at the University of Arizona, please consider my plea...

Which is a pretty remarkable prediction, considering that at present, atom holography is one of the projects at the Gedanken Laboratory, which means that it is currently only a theoretical speculation. In fact, most of the way-out stuff being discussed here is in the Gedanken Lab at present.

From pure theory to experimental demonstration in two or three years is a little hard to believe. I think I spy with my little eye a bit of self-promotion here, but it may just be unbounded scientific optimism.

Tim

Which is a pretty remarkable prediction, considering that at present, atom holography is one of the projects at the Gedanken Laboratory, which means that it is currently only a theoretical speculation. In fact, most of the way-out stuff being discussed here is in the Gedanken Lab at present.

From pure theory to experimental demonstration in two or three years is a little hard to believe. I think I spy with my little eye a bit of self-promotion here, but it may just be unbounded scientific optimism.

Tim

Atom holography is another stunning idea. Instead of making an image in light as done in conventional holography, atom optics would make the hologram of atoms.

"What this means is, we could make a real, 3-dimensional replica of some object. We could copy objects." Meystre said

Sort of a man page on the Bootid meteor shower, you geeks will love it.

Any non-anecdotal evidence to back up that might broad brush you've got there?

Just 'cause you don't like jocks or fratboys doesn't mean they're rapists.


No, that's backwards. I don't like them because they're mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging rapists. Even though it's not my broad brush, I can't let this go, so try this:

Erhart and Sandler, Campus gang rape: Party Games?, Association of American Colleges, 1985.
[Vast majority of campus gang rapes committed by fraternity members or athletes.]

I found it here.


Or this:

From a sample of sorority, 24% had experienced an attempted rape, 17% were victims of a completed rape. Almost half of these rapes and attempted rapes were perpetrated in a fraternity house. (Copenhaver, Grauerholz, Sex role, vol. 24, nos. 1,2, 1991.)

Found that one here. I don't think those girls were hanging out with the Physics club, do you? More?

Bernstein, Nina "Behind Some Fraternity Walls, Brothers in Crime." New York Times 6 May 1996, late ed. sec A 1+. Bernstein reports that nationally, fraternitites spend one-third of their budgets, "some $30 million dollars a year," to pay liability costs. Discusses specific aspects of date and acquaintance rape in the University of Georgia's Greek community.

Boeringer, Scot B. "Influences of Fraternity Membership, Athletics, and Male Living Arrangements on Sexual Aggression." Violence Against Women, 2(1996): 134-148. Abstract: Investigates fraternal membership, intercollegiate athletic participation and sex composition of living arrangements as possible correlates of sexual coercion. Greater rape proclivity in athletes; More significant use of intoxicants and nonphysical verbal coercion in obtaining sex by fraternity members.

Found those two here. Face it, those motherfuckers exhibit all the moral judgment and respect for others you'd witness with a pack of wild, snarling dogs. Defend them at your peril.

Nor really... The AI in games is minimal at best when compared to the capabilities of AI in a theoretical sense. The problem is that AI is difficult to design and takes alot of time, and developers are out to make money, so they invest in technologies that will immerse the player in the game to get them addicted to it.

Its a new type of addiction for me, because I'm not playing to see how far I get, or see how big my avatar will get, its to see what he does next when he's off my leash. Was he watching when I was throwing the rocks, and start throwing villagers? Was he watching me pickup and move villagers to do the same?

So, it may be a long time before some really sophisticated AI gets into games, if ever. Think about it, if a chess computer can beat the world champion, don't you think there are strategies in many of these games that would be similarly difficult to beat?

If you want cutting-edge AI, don't look at games, look at OSCAR at the U of Arizona, or at the MIT Media Lab , or at the stuff going on at CMU or RPI. That's where the real progress and research is being done. Not in some programming sweatshop at EA.

There is a project called CyPRG going on with several professors, one (Todd La Porte)at George Mason University in Virginia, one at U Arizona and one in Denmark at the University of Roskilde. They are rating government websites for what they call "openness" and are coming up with very interesting results. I happen to know Todd, and he and I are working together on some related stuff. Give them a look-see.

There is a project called CyPRG going on with several professors, one (Todd La Porte)at George Mason University in Virginia, one at U Arizona and one in Denmark at the University of Roskilde. They are rating government websites for what they call "openness" and are coming up with very interesting results. I happen to know Todd, and he and I are working together on some related stuff. Give them a look-see.

This one? vaxbar

One of these would be nice!

"Emergent properties of the combination of genes" have been known for decades to be the dominant factor in genotype-to-phenotype translation. AI computer scientists working on genetic algorithms have called this epistasis, borrowing the word from biology (see here), and giving it a slightly broader meaning:

"You have epistasis when the expression of a given gene has a significant effect on the expression of other genes, thereby inducing the fact that a genotype of N genes cannot be analyzed by observing the effect of each gene separately". The unwritten corollary being: "which is quite a pain in the ass".

Genetic algorithms work best (in comparison to other methods) when the problem space is highly-yet-not-too-highly epistatic. See this page for extensive information, or just try a Google search.

from an article at dpreview.com (examining a different OEL being produced by Sanyo and Kodak:)

The new 5.5-inch panel has a quarter-VGA resolution (240 x 320 pixels) with a brightness of 200 candela per square meter. It consumes 2 watts running at 10 volts. Yoneda claimed that the power consumption is lower than comparably-sized LCDs, which eat 2.5 W on average. The pixel transistors are optimized to maintain uniform brightness over the surface of the panel. The aperture ratio is about 50 percent, an improvement over the 30 percent ratio of the earlier 2.4-inch panel.

and this, from the University of Arizona's Optical Sciences Center (discussing Organic LEDs, full authors' credits on page:)

Recently, organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) have attracted a lot of attention, mainly due to their simplicity of fabrication, low operating voltage and power consumption, large view angle, high brightness and efficiency, ultra-thin structure, mechanical flexibility, and light weight.1 Their potential use in display applications, such as ultra-thin flat panel, roll-up, and head-mounted displays is being seriously considered by numerous companies.

So to answer your question, it looks like the technology as it currently stands performs roughly as well as backlit LCDs, with perhaps even a slight advantage. This technology takes the middleman of backlighting out of the equation by using electroluminescent materials in the first place. Thus, the above claims make some sense, as you are only pumping power to the pixels themselves, and not the pixels and the backlight.

On a bit of a tangent, this looks to be similar to the LEP technology Slashdot reported about some time ago (see Cambridge Display's homepage for more info.)

First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.

The fact that the gravitational force the sun exhibits on the moon is greater than the gravitational force the earth exhibits on the moon is irrelevant. The sun exerts a force on both the earth and moon and causes a (rougly) equal acceleration on the two bodies.

Tidal forces are a result of differences in gravitational forces from one side of a body to another. Since the sun is so far away these differences are much smaller than those the earth experiences from the moon, and those that the moon experiences from the earth. It isn't the strength of the gravitational field that matters, but rather the field gradient that is important. Because of the proximity of the earth to the moon, this gradient is much greater so the tidal forces of the earth on the moon and vice versa are much more pronounced.

Check out the following links.

From the astronomy department at the university of Arizona Check the bottom of the page.

From the physics and astronomy department at the University of Tenessee

From the physics department at UNLV. There is a good discussion here about why the tidal bulge leads the moon. It also touches on the effect of the solar tidal forces. It isn't to pull the moon away though, but instead to tidal lock to the sun.

You are correct about the length of the day during the dinosaurs, I don't know where I got that number, but loosing 10 hours in a few hundred million years does seem too rapid in hind site.

Basically, exmh rocks.

More:

I waver yet, wondering if I'll keep using exmh, or to consider VM inside emacs. I've tried netscape's mail interface and, despite many good features, I dislike not being able to use emacs as my text editor.

The only difference is that the company towns have gotten bigger, sometimes encompassing entire nations. But the same elements of vigilante justice ("Death to those who bounced a check due to our own incompetence!") and sheer disregard for human life, still apply.

-E

Finally a subject on which I have a decent contribution to make. I wrote a technical report on the technologies behind the current fastest supercomputers and on up-and-coming innovations. This gives a high-level overview of ASCI Red, IBM's Blue Gene, and the HTMT (superconducting technology based) project. Follow this link to the LaTeX2HTML version or download the Postscript version.