Slashdot Mirror

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.

Here's a brief summary of anti-nuclear activism in California. The abandonment of plans to build a nuclear power plant in Bodega Bay in 1964 is one example of greens (and others leftists) shooting down a plant. The author who's work is summarized believes environmentalist sentiment was key in fomenting opposition to nuclear power in California (though he is sympathetic w/ the activists).

From what little I know, it seems like nuclear power is unjustly hampered by the stigma which is attached to nuclear weapons. Also, while there are real environmental and logistical concerns, nuclear power seems to be one of the most efficient energy choices available today. I think a lot of environmentalists (and a portion of the public) just like to jump on the bandwagon against anything which represents industrial progress -- they have no qualms about slowing human progress down to a standstill.

Here's a random debate I found on google, with some seemingly informed opinions.

Here's a take on the Nemesis theory from The Nine Planets.

The original Planet X (where X stood for unknown value, not Roman ten) was derived from small perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, which in turn had been the way Neptune and Uranus were discovered, through gravitational effects on the orbits of their inner neighbors.

The search for Planet X began in earnest around the turn of the 20th century. Percival Lowell (justly famed but also justly taken with a grain of salt) claimed to have found it at least once. But it wasn't until Clyde Tombaugh engaged in the tedious exercise of studying thousands of glass photographic plates (using a special machine like a ViewFinder) that he found a blip that moved from one to the other. This was Pluto.

Pluto, alas, was far too small to have caused the perturbations ascribed to Planet X, so the controversy continued for a number of years. Only in the 1980s was it finally proven that the perturbations in Neptune's orbit were due to imprecise measurements from Earth-based observatories. Voyager 2 was instrumental in demonstrating this point by determining Neptune's mass during its flyby to a much higher degree than was formerly possible.

Now that Neptune is known to be, as it were, unperturbed, all but a few diehards agree there is no Planet X.

Read the Search for Planet X for detailed information.
----

for $28 Million but remained on the Atari board. Don't know if anybody could have brought Atari out of the '84 crash, or the Tramiel rein; maybe a successful partnership with Nintendo, but it's all just speculation over what 'could have been' now.

Then again, if you vote republican, maybe you can get rid of those pesky public schools, too, what with the voucher plan and all :) Go W!

For those interested in seeing the inside of one of these things without going to the UK or stealing one here's a link with lots of photos.

Have been researching vidgame history and found this blurb about Ralph Baer designing video games for the Pentagon in 1966, which led to the Magnavox Oddessy, Atari Pong, etc.

There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.

Consider the following questions:

• How do things work?
• How does consciousness work?
• Does consciousness ever work differently?
• How is it that we are aware?

These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well. Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".

Of all religious devotees, Mystics are the most scientific, since they constantly try to find the truth through observation, trial, and error. Mystics generally find that the the written word takes second place to first hand repeatable experiments, usually in the form of meditation.

If there is any one thing that would make a mystic out of a scientifically minded person (assuming that the scientist hasn't already taking Socrates' advice to heart and studying their own awareness), it would have to be the hard problem of consciousness, which is essentially, the problem of how we are ever aware of anything at all; why it is that there is something like to be a person (or a butterfly).

If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.

Let me put it a completely different way:

If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:

1. Get a book telling you what the truth is, and then say, "Oh, okay; I'll just go along with what this says here."
2. Give up, and say that the problems too hard for you; let someone else bother with such things.
3. Get yourself a DSL connection with the spirit world, have a few chat sessions with God, play around with some different dimensions, and try and figure out what the hell is going on and try to have have some fun.

(Necessary plug: Personally, I practice Surat Shabda Yoga).

Koha is probably the most complete system out there. 2 other projects that are attempting this (and also trying to work together) are the Open Source Digital Library System, which in fact maps MARC into a relational database, and the Avanti project is a project that is building an API for a library circulation system. These two projects are now looking at how they can interact together, so as not to duplicate effort. Both also could use help from interested developers, btw :-).

Open Source Digital Library System

Note: Those of you simply suggesting ordinary databases don't have a clue as to what is actually involved. Yes, you need a database. But that is only one of MANY pieces that make up and automated library system. Commercial software for this stuff can cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars.

An open source system would be welcome, indeed.

No, it did. Here:

"The essence of the refutation is that the Demon cannot see the molecules unless he uses a flashlight, and thus spends energy."

There's another article here that says that this analysis is incorrect though: http://www.consciousness.arizo na.edu/quantum/qc2.htm and http://www.realbooks.com/revie ws/0615/braindrain.htm as well.

( Read More... | 768 comments | Your Rights Online )

Miniskirt-clad girls save universe
Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday August 18, @08:25AM
from the roketto-ga-sugoi dept.
AnimeNewsNetwork.com is reporting that earlier this morning in Tokyo, five girls in color-coded blouses and miniskirts transformed into scantily-clad superheroes. The five girls then screamed, hurled glowing balls of energy, and screamed some more at a thirty-tentacled monster. Still no word on whether this is connected to the large humanoid robots spotted battling last week in Osaka.

( Read More... | 168 comments )

Slashback: Frisson, Sesquipedalianity, Responsitivitiness
Posted by timothy on Tuesday August 08, @10:45AM
from the beware-the-froomious-bandersnatch dept.
It was a dark and stormy night. In a salutiferous octastyle basement, an ultracrepidarian man was hermtically hunched over a piperaceous desk beneath a ornate mazarine, typing furiously away on an obumbrate keyboard. Meanwhile, in a meandrine corner of the world, several setose seeds were being entrenched in the muculent minds of the hoi polloi.

( Read More... | 9235 bytes in body | 214 comments )

Traffic Cops' "Justice" and Napster
Posted by JonKatz on Friday August 18, @11:30AM
from the post-hellmouth-world dept.
Just as Shadowrun predicted, The Corporate Republic took another step in assailing geeks today by handing Shawn Fanning a $L00 speeding ticket. This narcissism is harmful because it shrinks the creative universe of media workers and disconnects them from the new global conversation taking place online. Hubcaps have sparked a cultural and economic revolution that is just beginning to be understood. Will we see an increase in the number of Chickdrivers receiving "closed" traffic tickets as well, or will the Edge power a paradigm shift to "open" community-based traffic laws?

( Read More... | 598235 bytes in body | 657 flames | Features )

Ask Slashdot: Are Corporations Trying To Make Money?
Posted by Cliff on Friday August 18, @1:25PM
from the yet-another-article-from-the-something-to-think-ab out dept.
www.sorehands.com writes: "Today I visited Yahoo and was shocked to see a banner advertisement - I thought I'd managed to block every form of advertisement possible with Junkbusters. After thinking about it some, I realized Yahoo was probably running advertisement in a crass, commercialized attempt to make money off of my web-surfing habits! Could there be any other corporations out there engaged in similarly devious practices?" An interesting question here: Are some companies attempting to turn a profit, and, if so, what can we do to prevent it?

( Read More... | 3082 bytes in body | 345 comments )

Autospy of a Furby
Posted by michael on Friday August 18, @3:43PM
from the deja-vu dept.

Vladinator writes "Ever wonder what it's like to take apart a Furby? I don't, because I saw this on Slashdot two years ago, but I needed some karma so I submitted it anyway. Fawking trolls!" Those of who you started reading Slashdot this week may not have seen this page yet, so I'm re-running this classic for you three newbies.

( Read More... | 1 FIRST POST! )

Interstate Highway Boycott Planned
Posted by emmett on Friday August 18, @6:25PM
from the fight-the-power dept.
Bowie J. Poag writes: "You guys are idiots and VA sucks, but being the nice guy that I am [Update: 08/18 11:11 AM by CT: Further investigation reveals that he isn't ] I thought I'd let you know that know Wired is reporting that a boycott is being proposed against the interstate highway system for its treatment of Shawn Fanning. The interstate highway sucks almost as much as anime! PROPAGANDA RULES!!!!!" It's good to see that some people are taking the battle for free (as in Willy) highways into their own hands.

( Read More... | 218 comments )

Holland Convenience Store Switches To Linux
Posted by Hemos on Friday August 18, @9:33PM
from the key-victory-for-open-source dept.
Today while visiting my local 7-11 in Holland, MI, I noticed that their inventory computer was running Linux! Best of all, a representative from the store assured me, due to complaints from Bruce Perens, that the store may consider GPLing its inventory "sometime in the future." Looks like another business has finally "got it" and adopted the tenets of the free software movement.

( Read More... | 164 comments )

Napster? Napster Napster
Posted by CmdrTaco on Friday August 18, @11:25PM
from the napster dept.
Napster Napster Napster. Napster, Napster Napster Napster! Napster Napster (Napster) Napster Napster Napster, Napster Napster Napster. "Napster Napster Napster," Napster Napster. Napster Napster, Napster Napster Napster.

( Read More... | 304 comments | Napster!! )

This is all that vax is really good for.

Alas, the VAX 4000 is considerably smaller than the 11/780, but maybe we could still get a drink or two inside... {grin}

Anybody catch the VAXBar link? I *want* one of these!

So, they could make their "documentary" Life Afterlife!

Read it here.

If you pay somebody, you can prove anything. Now the researchers have a book out and go on speaking tours. They basically created the research to make money.

See http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/titan/voyag er.html and http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/titan/titan. html .

I think those are much higher resolution...

See http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/titan/voyag er.html and http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/titan/titan. html .

I think those are much higher resolution...

Check these out:

Hubble Space Telescope Images of Titan's Surface
Other Titan Info/Statistics

nf

Canar dun said:

I also believe in speciation to some degree. If animals have tendencies only to mate with others that look similar to themselves, eventually they'll segregate, and a "species", by definition of the term, will be born. However, this does not explain for the addition of entire chromosomes and these chromosomes actually making sense and so on. Not one mammal descended from the first mammalian species has lost any of the five fingers.

To be honest, on reading this I'm smelling a furry critter with horns who lives under bridges and has a strange craving for Cuban cabra sandwiches :). If so, good job. You got me. :)

If this is NOT a troll, though...well, it seems someone has never been to a farm or a livestock show. :)

There is an entire class of mammals--the Arctiodactylia or "even-hooved" animals--that has lost one, and sometimes three, of the original five toes mammals had. Probably the most common member of the order in the US right now is the common cow; just to to a farm or a petting zoo, and count the number of toes on a cow. (Or deer, or any such critters. It's only the largest order of herbivorous animals on the planet; I'm sure you can find a member or two.)

For that matter, the second-largest order of herbivorous mammals has a large family that actually has lost two to four toes in its history. (I'm talking about the equines. In fact, we have one of the better fossil records that detail how they've lost toes throughout their evolution--they went from five to three to one toe. In fact, you occasionally have the rare "throwback" horse born with three toes; the loss of the last two toes occured fairly late in horse evolution. At least one "cousin" of the equines, the tapir, has three toes, and rhinos have five. If you want to see examples, just look at a zoo or at a horse-farm or go down to the track. Heck, watch the Kentucky Derby if you want. :)

For that matter, the entire "felid" branch of the Carnivora (which includes cats, "civet cats" and "genet cats", hyenas, and some older forms like Smilodon) has lost the fifth toe on its hind feet, and their front first toe is reduced to a dewclaw (which is the state of fifth toes in canids such as wolves, dogs and foxes, too; expect them to lose the hind dewclaws in a few million years). The main reason cats still have dewclaws on their front toes is that kitties can use them fairly well as thumbs, especially if not declawed (if you want them to demonstrate, get a can of cat-treats and let kitty fetch her own out). I will leave out the obvious joke about what will happen when cats evolve opposable thumbs and thus no longer need humans as their thralls for world dominance. :)

For that matter...we'll take it beyond mammals. The other major group besides the synapsids (one of the two great lineages of land animals besides amphibians; synapsids include mammals, theraspids or "proto-mammals", and "mammal-like reptiles" like Dimetrodon) happens to be the same group that reptiles and archosaurs belong to, including birds. They, too, have a fairly extensive history of digit-loss:

Last toe digit (our equivalent of our pinkies) lost sometime near when archosaurs first evolved; even modern crocs, which are the modern representatives of one of two branches of the archosaurs (the other being the bird/dino branch), only have four toes

Fourth toe (rough equivalent of ring finger turns non-functional in theropod dinosaurs during early evolution (about the time they separated from hererrasaurs, in the late Triassic)

Fourth finger lost in most theropod dinosaurs around evolution of the Maniraptora (the subclass of theropods that includes birds, as well as most of the meat-eating cast of the Jurassic Park movies besides dilophosaurs and compys), around early-mid Jurassic

Third finger (equivalent to the "flip the bird" finger) lost in tyrannosaurs

Fourth toe lost entirely in ornithomimosaurs

Sometime during development of powered flight (late Jurassic-early Cretaceous) finger claws lost and second and third fingers fuse while thumb develops as alula

In surviving theropod dinosaurs (aka birds) all have lost except thumb and first two fingers on front limbs and first two fingers were fused (there may have been a reversal in phorusracoid birds, which largely hunted as large land predators in the Americas until 2 million BC to 100,000 years ago); many, if not most, ground-running birds have lost the fourth toe entirely, in most birds it is a dewclaw, and only a very few birds (perching birds) use the fourth toe at all as a functional digit

I won't get into snakes. There is recent evidence they evolved from mosasaurs (a type of swimming reptile), and they not only lost digits but limbs altogether (the only snakes with limbs today are boids, which have claws used for mating attached to very tiny legs; early snakes have more substantial limbs, but nothing huge).

But perhaps, well, mere synapsid/reptilian split critters aren't enough. Let's throw amphibians in, too. :)

At least one sub-branch of amphibians has lost limbs as well (caecilans); there are several branches of frogs that have reduced digits to four per limb, too.

For that matter...the main reason most animals have five limbs is that five limbs is an incredibly ancient structure--literally coming about before land animals (we are now starting to find fossils of animals at around this time--we now know they evolved as swimmers first and evolved limbs to scoot about on bottom, and early "tetrapods" had varying numbers of digits per limb (some with five, some with seven or even eight digits per limb).

For more info on this, including some good lineages, you might want to go here or here.

As for Pascal's Wager...well, the wager relies on five very big assumptions:

that such a thing as God exists

that such a thing as Hell exists

that a God would be enough of a ratbastard as to throw someone into a place of eternal torment just because the poor sot hadn't ever heard of aforementioned God and/or disagreed with the "official" account based on empirical evidence

that what folks see as God might not be the processes of Nature, or that God may well have created stuff by evolution

that people are meant to blindly follow a leader instead of use the brains that God and/or evolution gave them in the first place so as to better understand the mysteries of life :)

Myself, well...if there is a God (which...if there is one, I think it might be Nature, but that's only my viewpoint) Sie either honestly doesn't give a damn one way or the other (in which case God is basically Nature, and the whole idea of appealing to a God is moot unless you mean something like apologising to cows before you eat them), or isn't enough of a ratbastard to chuck someone into a pit because the fossils pretty much show not only that horses evolved from tapir-like critters but that birds evolved from very close cousins of Deinonychus and we all came eventually from fishy-looking critters. If Sie is such a ratbastard, I'm not afraid to say that not only would I gladly burn in Hell in such a case, but such a ratbastard neither deserves my worship nor my respect. :) (And no, I don't buy the whole "Fossils were there to test us" crap, either...that makes God out not only to be a complete ratbastard, but a troll and a cruel ratbastard who gets his jollies off sending people to Hell for basically his idea of a practical joke. In which case, He can go straight to Hell, if you pardon the expression.)

Load balancing? Easy to write, hard to make work well. You need to compare the cost of migration to the benefits of balancing, and you need to make decisions based on partial and outdated information. Many early systems thrashed because everybody would migrate to the idle processor, which then became overloaded, so everybody migrated somewhere else, etc.

Speaking of migration, it's a mess. The only system I know of that implemented migration fully was Locus, out of UCLA. The trouble is that whenever a process has a dependency on or a hook into its environment, that connection must be migrated too. Open files, working directory, sockets, controlling tty, signals, process parent/child relationships, and many more details must be handled. Not fun, and the benefits turned out to be mostly minor (though I do recall writing a cool version of "find" that migrated itself to the machine that stored the current subtree as it ran).

The issue of supporting distributed applications is generally considered to be separate from writing a truly distributed OS. Most of what a distributed application needs can be provided by a good communications library. To some extent, we're still learning exactly what such a library should have. What about SETI@home is specialized to it, and what's universal? I don't think we've completely figured it out.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of major concerns and design issues that must be addressed in a distributed OS. We have fairly good solutions to some, but most have not yet been solved:

• Process control. How much process migration is a Good Thing? How do you decide what machine to use to start a process, and when do you decide to migrate it to another?
• Communication and synchronization. What facilities does a distributed application need? How do we make those easy to use?
• Reliability. How do we deal with the inevitable machine failures?
• Replication. What processes and data should be duplicated on different systems? Are you doing the replication for performance, for reliability, or both? How do you manage updates to replicated data? How do you keep replicated process synchronized?
• Lack of global knowledge. How do you make decisions based on partial information?
• Naming. What names to things have. Do you have a shared global namespace, or a private one? How do you resolve names? What do you do when people and objects move?
• Scalability. How does the system behave when the number of computers/users/programs jumps by a factor of 10 or 100? (This is a place where Napster doesn't do real well.)
• Compatibility. How do you support existing software? Do you run on only one kind of hardware, or many?
• Security. Who gets to run on what machine?

Finally, I should note that the list of projects at U of Arizona might appear to be complete, but it omits a lot of important projects. Four that jump to my mind are Locus and Ficus from UCLA (though the latter is more of a distributed filesystem than an OS), Coda from CMU (again a DFS, rather well-known to Linux folks), and of course the extremely important Network of Workstations work out of UC Berkeley, which led to Inktomi and Hotbot.

Load balancing? Easy to write, hard to make work well. You need to compare the cost of migration to the benefits of balancing, and you need to make decisions based on partial and outdated information. Many early systems thrashed because everybody would migrate to the idle processor, which then became overloaded, so everybody migrated somewhere else, etc.

Speaking of migration, it's a mess. The only system I know of that implemented migration fully was Locus, out of UCLA. The trouble is that whenever a process has a dependency on or a hook into its environment, that connection must be migrated too. Open files, working directory, sockets, controlling tty, signals, process parent/child relationships, and many more details must be handled. Not fun, and the benefits turned out to be mostly minor (though I do recall writing a cool version of "find" that migrated itself to the machine that stored the current subtree as it ran).

The issue of supporting distributed applications is generally considered to be separate from writing a truly distributed OS. Most of what a distributed application needs can be provided by a good communications library. To some extent, we're still learning exactly what such a library should have. What about SETI@home is specialized to it, and what's universal? I don't think we've completely figured it out.

The following is a non-exhaustive list of major concerns and design issues that must be addressed in a distributed OS. We have fairly good solutions to some, but most have not yet been solved:

• Process control. How much process migration is a Good Thing? How do you decide what machine to use to start a process, and when do you decide to migrate it to another?
• Communication and synchronization. What facilities does a distributed application need? How do we make those easy to use?
• Reliability. How do we deal with the inevitable machine failures?
• Replication. What processes and data should be duplicated on different systems? Are you doing the replication for performance, for reliability, or both? How do you manage updates to replicated data? How do you keep replicated process synchronized?
• Lack of global knowledge. How do you make decisions based on partial information?
• Naming. What names to things have. Do you have a shared global namespace, or a private one? How do you resolve names? What do you do when people and objects move?
• Scalability. How does the system behave when the number of computers/users/programs jumps by a factor of 10 or 100? (This is a place where Napster doesn't do real well.)
• Compatibility. How do you support existing software? Do you run on only one kind of hardware, or many?
• Security. Who gets to run on what machine?

Finally, I should note that the list of projects at U of Arizona might appear to be complete, but it omits a lot of important projects. Four that jump to my mind are Locus and Ficus from UCLA (though the latter is more of a distributed filesystem than an OS), Coda from CMU (again a DFS, rather well-known to Linux folks), and of course the extremely important Network of Workstations work out of UC Berkeley, which led to Inktomi and Hotbot.

• Mach was the "granddaddy" of distributed OS work, with most of the recent efforts going into GNU Hurd.
• There's Mosix that builds a NOW atop Linux
• The MIT Parallel and Distributed OS Group should be mentioned; efforts include the Exokernel
• Plan 9 has an interesting model for splitting work across "compute servers" and "file servers" and "display servers."
• Distributed Operating Systems lists lots of them...
• Sun's Spring was the basis for much of what is in CORBA;
• Sprite provided a Unix-like distributed OS that provided much of what is being used now to build journalling filesystems
• Amoeba was Tanembaum's successor to Minix; note that Python was one of the side-effects of the Amoeba project...

Each has some somewhat different insights to bring to the table; there is no unambiguous way of saying "this is all vastly superior."

There's a huge list of various operating system projects here: http://www.cs.arizona.edu/peo ple/bridges/os/full.html.
I find all the "pure" distributed OS stuff (systems build from the ground up to do distributed processing and not much else)relatively uninteresting on its own, but a lot of good ideas from those projects can filter into general purpose operating systems, especially when you start talking about clustering or even NUMA. You might want to see MOSIX for a cool, distributed/clusterd Linux version.
--JRZ

From a quick search on Google.

A listing of the major OS research projects involving distributed operating systems

Pluto was given "planet" status only as a reward to the discoverer

Uhhhh... interesting statement, but I have to disagree. When Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930, he was searching for a ninth planet predicted to exist because of discrepancies between the predicted and actual orbits of Uranus (and Neptune) -- the precise reason that the planet Neptune had been discovered, in fact (here's a detailed story of the whole affair). At the time, no one had any notion that Pluto would be so small: it was predicted to be between two and seven times the mass of Earth, and everyone expected it to be dim -- why else would it be so hard to find?

As it turned out, the most likely cause for Uranus and Neptune's orbital discrepancies is probably observational error, and Pluto just happened to be in the approximate neighborhood being searched. If it were discovered today, we might not call it a "planet" -- it's only the largest (so far) of a number of objects in the Kuiper belt -- but this has been the subject of a lot of controversy, and it's been officially decided to keep calling it a planet.

At the time it was discovered, no one had any notion that things would turn out this way, so it was just considered a planet and named as such. No special considerations or rewards -- just ignorance of the future, as always...

---

It would be more accurate to say that the Moon is not considered a planet because of one little detail. Doesn't orbit the Sun, but rather the Earth. Something orbiting the Sun is either a planet, comet, or asteroid. Something orbiting a planet is a moon.

I agree, though, the Pluto/Charon pair (Charon, pluto's moon, is probably 12.5% of the size of Pluto (that number has an accuracy of +/-35%, one of the things this mission wants to clarify) - relatively, the largest moon in the Solar system) should probably be considered a pair of minor planets/captured asteroids or Oort objects. However, that is unlikely to happen.

Ian's last name is Murdock, not Murdoch. See e.g. his old homepage

The "other" moon of earth is not gravitionally captured by earth. Instead its movement around the sun is synchronized with the earth in a way that make it looks like a moon, as seen from earth.

A link is here . And if you got a lot of time to kill, you could also visit this place.

considering the kind of magnetic field titan is supposed to have, a sork of electro-levitating parafoil could work out quite nicely, and not have any of the power issues the you'd have with a helicopter.

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

i think even if you spend 1 billion $ for a 100m aperture telescope on earth, that a e.g. 20m telescope in orbit will be better. Also i think that there's too much "competition" in the huge telescope market, we've got the GTC, the LBT, the SALT, the VISTA, the LAMOST, the DMT, the CELT, the XLT, the OWL, the LSST, the GSMT, the MAXAT, the ELT. Why? why not make only one bigger/better on earth, or even in space? the 2.4m HST proved the bettest scope is in space.
--
BeDevId 15453 - Download BeOS R5 Lite free!

Of course, you can continue to disagree if you like, but if you'd like to see some data and application take a virtual visit back to our alma mater's experimental econ lab or maybe look around at the competition in arizona.

Neat stuff. The Caltech lab eventually got seriously involved in influencing policy about auctioning the airwaves, in electricity trading for California, and in pollution markets with SCAQMD. A lot happened since we were undergrads.

Now, I will grant you that the lab has revealed that individual choice is fubared, as is quite a bit of game theory. But markets work pretty much like the textbooks suggested they did.

Paul J. Brewer
Caltech b.s.89 fizz-sucks/ph.d 95 ec0n

As far as we know the 'gravity only' type of calculation that the Grape boards perform is sufficient to describe the motion of this matter.

However, there is indeed great interest in performing hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, mostly because then we can attempt to calculate where and how the stars are forming in the galaxy. Dealing with the gas expicitly also allows us to follow things like shock fronts in the gas and to attempt to calculate the thermal properties of the gas. Of course this is all rather complicated stuff so we have to make gross approximations. And remember, even with that massive grape board if you describe a galaxy with a million particles, they are still going to each be representing at least 10 to 100 thousand solar masses. We are still a long way off from being able to describe the milky way on a 'star by star' basis.

Two really good URL's for people who are interested in reading some of the technical details of this stuff are the web pages of my advisor Matthias Steinmetz and one of the fathers of modern galaxy simulations Josh Barnes.

Note that Matthias's simulations (check out the pictures and movies) are all done with a high end workstation and a handfull of Grape 3 boards.

Cheers

Good reply, you obviously know what you're talking about. However the main reason you use a ground based telescope is that you require a detector the size of a football pitch to see enough gamma rays of this energy to say anything useful. Thus it's impractical to launch one into space. Instead you use the atmosphere as your detector. Space based telescopes exist already which see lower energy gamma radiation from blazars, such as CGRO . I should also mention the experiment which discovered very high energy gamma rays from blazars, using the Cerenkov technique: The Whipple experiment (a blatant plug for my own PhD experiment!).

Any thoughts?

1. Its been (successfully, imo) superceded by Icon (cf http://www.cs.arizona.edu/icon)
2. While Icon and Snobol are both good tools for text processing (and GUI facilities have been added to Icon), neither has any kind of a built-in interface to the operating system (there is, eg, no direct way to open a socket in Icon)

-y

/Erik

UNIX was built before networks really existed. It was built for connecting many terminals to one mainframe and working at the same time. And NOT distributing anyting out to other mainframes.
Yes, it can be distributed to a certain degree(a lot more than some other OSes) but not as much as OSes that where built for distributed computing, such as plan 9.
There's a list of other distributed OSes at this page.

/Erik

If you enjoy pulp science fiction, try Ben Bova's _MARS_. It's an easy breezy read.

If you want a 3-book-long lovemaking session to the planet Mars, I highly suggest Kim Stanley Robinson's _RED MARS_, _GREEN MARS_, and _BLUE MARS_. They get progressively more boring and uninspired as the series progresses through more and more abstract characters, but they are still extremely decent reads that make a slight effort to represent Mars in all it's beauty. The franchise milker _THE MARTIANS_ is also out as of a few months ago. Haven't checked it out, but I expect it to be just as fatally flawed as the others. Oh well.

Oh yeah, and there is now an official Mars Flag or something. It's three vertical stripes going [RED] [GREEN] [BLUE}. Quite cool.

Mars is vastly more interesting than you might expect. Read up on it if you like.

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/t np/mars.html is an EXCELLENT start if you want to learn more about the planet at a glance.

http://www.marssociety.org links you to the Mars Society, a delusional group of Mars Freaks who want to settle the planet or something. But they're still cool.

http://space.jpl.nasa.gov/ has a very supercool solar system simulator that can show you what the planets look like from almost anywhere at almost any time. It's quite accurate and cool. Not open source yet, but i'm sure with some coaxing and good project management, they might be willing to release it. It's written in C and shit, so it'd port pretty easy i'd imagine. The data sets might not be public domain though. Oh well. Go see it anyway.

Enjoy.

It's true that Sega makes many of the best arcade games (though I think Namco and Atari are both better), but there is a more compelling reason for them to depart the arcade market.

This reason, simply enough, is that they've lost their steam. Let's take a quick look at Sega Videogame History.

1985 - Sega Master System is released to run against the NES. The SMS is a More Powerful Hardware Platform than the NES, but it has only a fraction of the games that the NES has. It's a flop. Note also that the controllers sucked. The NES controllers were nearly bulletproof, you could beat someone to death with them. Five points if you ever tried.

1989 - Sega Genesis hits the shelves. NEC's TG-16 was released six months before it came out, and it was a good system, but it didn't have enough games. The Genesis came with Altered Beast, and EA jumped on the bandwagon (Starting the trend of the Genesis becoming the primary platform for sports fans; The PSX later took this title.) Sonic came along and became one of the most popular titles (and characters) of all time. This was the only time that Sega and Game Developers got along.

1990 - Sega Game Gear is released. It's basically a portable master system. It's fairly pricy and never enjoys much success.

1995 - Sega Saturn is released. This was a great system, it had two CPUs, it's faster than PSX, and with the exception of the lack of transparency in hardware, it's just better all around. There was an upgrade to play VCDs, and a 4mb ram upgrade (ALA N64, which of course came years later.) However, Sega kills it in the US by not releasing any worthwhile development tools, making it excessively difficult to use the second CPU.

The message here, basically, is that Sega can't keep their developer relations going. EA has already dropped out of the DC development partners, and is focussing on PS2. Using WinCE was a classic overcorrection. "We can't come up with our own dev tools, so let's just use someone else's OS!" Sega has shown, time and time again, that they and developers just can't get along.

It's true that Sega makes many of the best arcade games (though I think Namco and Atari are both better), but there is a more compelling reason for them to depart the arcade market.

This reason, simply enough, is that they've lost their steam. Let's take a quick look at Sega Videogame History.

1985 - Sega Master System is released to run against the NES. The SMS is a More Powerful Hardware Platform than the NES, but it has only a fraction of the games that the NES has. It's a flop. Note also that the controllers sucked. The NES controllers were nearly bulletproof, you could beat someone to death with them. Five points if you ever tried.

1989 - Sega Genesis hits the shelves. NEC's TG-16 was released six months before it came out, and it was a good system, but it didn't have enough games. The Genesis came with Altered Beast, and EA jumped on the bandwagon (Starting the trend of the Genesis becoming the primary platform for sports fans; The PSX later took this title.) Sonic came along and became one of the most popular titles (and characters) of all time. This was the only time that Sega and Game Developers got along.

1990 - Sega Game Gear is released. It's basically a portable master system. It's fairly pricy and never enjoys much success.

1995 - Sega Saturn is released. This was a great system, it had two CPUs, it's faster than PSX, and with the exception of the lack of transparency in hardware, it's just better all around. There was an upgrade to play VCDs, and a 4mb ram upgrade (ALA N64, which of course came years later.) However, Sega kills it in the US by not releasing any worthwhile development tools, making it excessively difficult to use the second CPU.

The message here, basically, is that Sega can't keep their developer relations going. EA has already dropped out of the DC development partners, and is focussing on PS2. Using WinCE was a classic overcorrection. "We can't come up with our own dev tools, so let's just use someone else's OS!" Sega has shown, time and time again, that they and developers just can't get along.

It's true that Sega makes many of the best arcade games (though I think Namco and Atari are both better), but there is a more compelling reason for them to depart the arcade market.

This reason, simply enough, is that they've lost their steam. Let's take a quick look at Sega Videogame History.

1985 - Sega Master System is released to run against the NES. The SMS is a More Powerful Hardware Platform than the NES, but it has only a fraction of the games that the NES has. It's a flop. Note also that the controllers sucked. The NES controllers were nearly bulletproof, you could beat someone to death with them. Five points if you ever tried.

1989 - Sega Genesis hits the shelves. NEC's TG-16 was released six months before it came out, and it was a good system, but it didn't have enough games. The Genesis came with Altered Beast, and EA jumped on the bandwagon (Starting the trend of the Genesis becoming the primary platform for sports fans; The PSX later took this title.) Sonic came along and became one of the most popular titles (and characters) of all time. This was the only time that Sega and Game Developers got along.

1990 - Sega Game Gear is released. It's basically a portable master system. It's fairly pricy and never enjoys much success.

1995 - Sega Saturn is released. This was a great system, it had two CPUs, it's faster than PSX, and with the exception of the lack of transparency in hardware, it's just better all around. There was an upgrade to play VCDs, and a 4mb ram upgrade (ALA N64, which of course came years later.) However, Sega kills it in the US by not releasing any worthwhile development tools, making it excessively difficult to use the second CPU.

The message here, basically, is that Sega can't keep their developer relations going. EA has already dropped out of the DC development partners, and is focussing on PS2. Using WinCE was a classic overcorrection. "We can't come up with our own dev tools, so let's just use someone else's OS!" Sega has shown, time and time again, that they and developers just can't get along.

It's true that Sega makes many of the best arcade games (though I think Namco and Atari are both better), but there is a more compelling reason for them to depart the arcade market.

This reason, simply enough, is that they've lost their steam. Let's take a quick look at Sega Videogame History.

1985 - Sega Master System is released to run against the NES. The SMS is a More Powerful Hardware Platform than the NES, but it has only a fraction of the games that the NES has. It's a flop. Note also that the controllers sucked. The NES controllers were nearly bulletproof, you could beat someone to death with them. Five points if you ever tried.

1989 - Sega Genesis hits the shelves. NEC's TG-16 was released six months before it came out, and it was a good system, but it didn't have enough games. The Genesis came with Altered Beast, and EA jumped on the bandwagon (Starting the trend of the Genesis becoming the primary platform for sports fans; The PSX later took this title.) Sonic came along and became one of the most popular titles (and characters) of all time. This was the only time that Sega and Game Developers got along.

1990 - Sega Game Gear is released. It's basically a portable master system. It's fairly pricy and never enjoys much success.

1995 - Sega Saturn is released. This was a great system, it had two CPUs, it's faster than PSX, and with the exception of the lack of transparency in hardware, it's just better all around. There was an upgrade to play VCDs, and a 4mb ram upgrade (ALA N64, which of course came years later.) However, Sega kills it in the US by not releasing any worthwhile development tools, making it excessively difficult to use the second CPU.

The message here, basically, is that Sega can't keep their developer relations going. EA has already dropped out of the DC development partners, and is focussing on PS2. Using WinCE was a classic overcorrection. "We can't come up with our own dev tools, so let's just use someone else's OS!" Sega has shown, time and time again, that they and developers just can't get along.

• VMS has been around a little while and has quite an assortment of abilities.
• Bridges' OS list

I bet you really like him.
I bet you really might be him.


"Probability. You know, like two to one, three to one, five to
four against. It said two to the power of one hundred thousand to
one against. That's pretty improbable you know."


You are probably Stuart
Do you what he really is ?
Do you know who else is that?

Hint.. The most hated author on /.

It's a real shame he works for us while having these faggish little Commie views. I bet all of you have those views. Right? Little libertarian bastards.



~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~,'~-,'~ ,'~-,'~

I haven't read Emperor, but Penrose's concepts are further explored at Stuart Hameroff's website . It explains a helluva lot without invoking any God(dess) which, to me, is much more convincing than any theory that does.

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious by mentioning (Sir) Roger Penrose's 'The Emperor's New Mind and Douglas Hofstadter's 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'.
Both are scientists of excellent pedigree, check out the links if you're interested. They study consciousness from a physical/mathematical viewpoint, and the interesting thing is that they reach quite different conclusions.

This page has several (technical!) articles on Penrose's ideas about consciousness.

These books are pretty old, though (ENM '89 and GEB '79). Could anyone recommend some more recent books along the same line?

Satellite debris also interferes with astronomical observations. The incredibly sensitive instruments professional astronomers use can be "thrown off" by passing satellites and man-made debris. Even more threatening, just recently the French were stopped from launching a huge balloon ring satellite to commemorate Paris' Eiffel Tower's one hundredth anniversary. Many astronomers opposed the ring satellite, as it would have been the size and visual brightness of the full Moon as viewed from the ground and would have interfered with observations. They were also concerned that it might start companies advertising in space with huge satellite "billboards", which some are considering! Along with light pollution on the ground from ever-growing cities, astronomers - and those who just enjoy looking at the stars - are having their work cut out for them.