Slashdot Mirror

As you can see, firebird, maxdb, mysql and postgresql all support encrypted connections.

Oracle can be configured to as well.

Instructions for JDBC (java database clients) encryption.

That should be enough options for now - so pick your favorite poison :-)

First:

http://geoimages.berkeley.edu/GeoImages/Starrs/HUNGLOW.html

but, then:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=359841&cid=21351357

Earth's field and low field MRI are actually relatively common. There has even been NMR work done at ~1uT in a shielded chamber.

Earth's field and low field MRI are actually relatively common. There has even been NMR work done at ~1uT in a shielded chamber.

Image quality (specifically, resolution/distortion) is related to the homogeneity of the static field. The earth's field is very homogeneous and can therefore yield a high quality image. The pre-polarizing field does not have to be homogeneous as it is not on when the image is read out, but gives a substantial boost to polarization and therefore the image signal-to-noise.

There is some more information about low field MRI in this paper.

Consider also the increase in awareness of grid computing, and not just the individual apps. This led to BOINC, leading to the ease of installing and multitasking between World Community Grid, Rosetta@Home, and so many other projects with 'practical' applications that have produced real results -- projects that to date didn't have a grid computing infrastructure to harness for their needs. That infrastructure sprung from the mindshare generated by SETI@Home.

So let SETI keep searching for E.T. As far as I'm concerned, if the only thing that ever came out of Seti was SETI@Home, and the only thing of value that came out of that was BOINC, that's enough of a contribution to society to justify its continued existence.

Obviously SETI isn't limited to SETI@Home, but there is the point that the distributed computing power being applied to SETI@Home could be applied to projects like Stanford's Folding@home which promises to yield much more directly applicable knowledge about protein synthesis.

Many of the distributed projects via BOINC have more directly applicable results than SETI@Home.

That said, any basic research is defined by its lack of direct results. Early research into the atom looked like it had very little use until we discovered x-rays (accidentally) and nuclear power (intentionally). Saying "why is Benjamin Franklin bothering to fly that kite, what good is this 'electricity' he talks about?" would cut off a lot of research that later proves useful in completely unanticipated ways. And, yes, I know the story of the kite is partially folklore (a Frenchman may have been the first to use the electricity from lightning), but it's good folklore that makes the point.

I'm sure creationist would see evidence of a race of skeletons being proof that evolution was false since there is no way a race of skeletons could evolve.

A great job of PR! Hopefully, there is really something to it. At the moment, it seems that they have set up a million dollars of high vacuum cryo equipment (I'm guessing) and transmitted audio from one side of the room to the other. You can "rent" web access to their paper for two days for $25 from the ACS. So much for taxpayer-funded open source literature...

Their project page has videos, simulations, and audio playback samples: NSF Nanotube Radio

Here is their journal abstract:

"We have constructed a fully functional, fully integrated radio receiver from a single carbon nanotube. The nanotube serves simultaneously as all essential components of a radio: antenna, tunable band-pass filter, amplifier, and demodulator. A direct current voltage source, as supplied by a battery, powers the radio. Using carrier waves in the commercially relevant 40-400 MHz range and both frequency and amplitude modulation techniques, we demonstrate successful music and voice reception."

I'm willing to bet that you occasionally shopped at the garden center.

Some but I also saved seeds. Where I live now, in Minnesota which shares a border with Canada, I pretty much have to buy seedlings. Now if I had a greenhouse I could start seeds perhaps a month before the last frost date in the greenhouse then I wouldn't need to buy seedlings. Or I could garden hydroponically all year, there's a hydroponic garden store within a few blocks of me. Fertilizer? I compost everything I can, I even add old food or peels such as from bananas and grind any bones to add. I have 2 cats and the corn based litter I also put in the compost. Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

Well, GMO'd work animals would still be beneficial. If you could get the local disease resistance of the zebra with the domestication and utility of a mule - that could be very useful.

In the Andes of South America many people such as Native American Indians use llamas for this, no GMOs needed. They are used much like mules for hauling cargo. Some places in Africa and Southeast Asia use elephants for the same thing. If instead of slaughtering elephants for the ivory more were domesticated they could be used the same way.

imagine wild animals constantly getting into your garden - monkeys and other such things.

At one tyme I used fox urine to control deer where I lived. It was also good for rabbits. Farmers in Africa are catching on to the use of peppers and other natural methods to control pests. Here's a study on the use of Indigenous Technical Knowledge and Use of Forest Plant Products for Sustainable Control of Crop Pests in Ogun State, Nigeria.

If it wasn't for conflicts and politics many would be have enough food without GMOs or chemical inputs.

I strongly disagree. Even the West would have trouble feeding itself without chemical fertilizer - and even that would require giving up most meat and grains. Grain in particular is very dependent on chemical fertilizer. In the West we could survive, though, because we can afford it.

Do you have any evidence? Here's some links, including scientific studies, to support my position: A study, "Comparisons of organic and conventional chemical farming systems" shows that organic farming can be just as productive, if not more so, as conventional western farming. Another shows organics can produce 3 tymes as much as conventional. An article from "New Scientist" is about how "Organic farming could feed the world."

Logo is actually a pretty powerful subset of lisp. Its missing a few crucial elements but you can do an entire computer science curriculum in logo.

The turtle was the worst thing to ever happen to Logo. Logo is a full featured language capable of doing anything other languages can. But because we were all introduced to the turtle at relatively young ages and nobody ever showed us how to do anything more than draw simple pictures we all concluded that it was only a toy and not for serious use. Only now, years later, do I realize how wrong that was.

For those who want to rediscover Logo and learn what it was *really* all about you can go to the website of Brian Harvey, a logo guru:

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/

On this website you can download a nice series of textbooks about Logo and also download the Berkeley Logo implementation of the language. I was surprised to find that Logo is a functional programming language. I am also studying Lisp, Scheme, Haskell, and Erlang and find the whole concept of functional programming to be very interesting. It is getting hot again and will become a critical part of programming if we are to take advantage of multi-core cpu's.

I am constantly amazed by just how vast this industry really is. I wish it hadn't taken me so long to realize this and I am saddened that so many people coming out of school these days have no clue that there is anything other than Java and Dot Not out there.

I've recently been playing with Logo, I'm a veteran of the dev trenches and have gone through SICP.

I picked up all the 80s books I could find that used Logo to teach geometry, algebra, music, language etc. I'm currently working my way through them. There is of course the Compu Sci series from Berkeley http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/v1-toc2.html That I'm planning to go through next.

So for those of you who turned your nose up at logo because it's too simple for you may need to turn that statement around. Think Lisp without the parens.

...or will the new antenna rollout use the same BOINC client as I'm using now?

The RAMP project's hardware would be a good place to start. They have 105 FPGAs per rack. There's enough FPGA-space in each rack to simulate 1008 general purpose CPUs.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php has been up for at least a half year, probably a lot more too. Why you would want to see the lectures in crappy youtube quality is beyond me...

Actually, in addition to the endorphins, neurons exposed to capsaicin fire repeatedly until they exhaust their supply of neurotransmitters. They continue to fire even when depleted due to the neurotoxic effect of the substance, but no sensation is transmitted. The effect can even damage or kill neurons with excessive exposure, making capsaicin a "double-edged sword" in medicinal use.

UC Berkeley's lectures, the ones that do get recorded, had been available online for years. Cool stuff, but for most part, the number of recorded lectures is very limited.

http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php

study that suggests hov lanes don't work.

These are already available on the UCB site. I do like the YouTube format better, but the selection from the Berkeley site is currently larger. They have some great analog transistor design classes there.

They already had a website for that - http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ I guess this moving those videos to YouTube was the next logical step.

UC Berkeley has been webcasting their classes for several years now. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/ It looks like they're just offloading the storage and network to youtube now.

This is a rather nice book:

Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/

Amazon link for the reviews (no, no referer tricks, don't worry)
http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Information-Retrieval-Ricardo-Baeza-Yates/dp/020139829X

Google maps happily takes kml

EG, see here:
Cool Eyecandy Map
is from the kml file http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/dad.kml

This isn't the first time computer scientists have pointed out that Excel is wrong, or at the best, misleading.

Thanks, Slashdot, for deleting my reference

Neal Stephenson did an article for Wired on the laying of global fiber optic cable about a decade ago. It's a long read but a good one (kind of like Snow Crash was). He travels around the world following the laying of FLAG (Fiber Link Around the Globe). He covers everything from laying the cable, to the landing points, to over-land connections, to telco monopolies, to everything else. If you're a geek and into submarine cable laying, then the article below is almost required reading. http://econ161.berkeley.edu/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html

The hopeful social outcome of all this increase in productivity was talked about as far back as 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
in a letter sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964 called "The Triple Revolution".

Actually, the increase is more like a doubling every 1.5 years, which is about seven cycles in ten years, or more like 128X. But the rate of increase itself has been increasing too. Price has also been dropping. This makes effectively a 1000X increase in price/performance per decade at the current rates.

By the time any toddler of today is finishing graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade) multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!) According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

At lower previous rates, over 30 years, we see a million times improvement. As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such). (somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation). Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit, but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there, producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple, since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster, though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/internet.htm )
See also:

Check out Usable Interaction Design
Also relevant: Capability security.
E Language
Capability Security

Our masters program made use of a IRC channel to talk during some lectures, and it was completely a mixed bag. I could see that the professor would be suspicious of the typing and students looking at screens instead of them, but in some cases, having the TA on the backchannel was an excellent addition to the lecture, we could ask tangent questions and get the reply all without breaking the flow of the speaker. On team even did a visualization of the backchannel

Besides, and I am not exaggerating, the $35,000 Apple is promising probably wouldn't even cover the cost of tasking a union city crew to remove the meters, rebuild the sidewalk and put the meters someplace else.

There are a couple of things to note here. Firstly, SDRAM and SRAM behave very differently. Synchronous dynamic RAM can retain charge in the capacitors for quite some time after being powered down and there is very little one can do about it, but the paper discusses static RAM. With static RAM there is a difference between being "powered off" and having the Vcc rail clamped to ground. Active clamping of the power line is much more effective at clearing the RAM than even just disconnecting it from the power supply, for reasons which become obvious when you look at a classic six transistor CMOS RAM circuit. Without clamping, bias will remain for exactly the same reason that SRAM doesn't consume much power; current only flows when the data changes.

As for it being a good RNG; the state of RAM on power-up is probably a lousy "random number generator", but the statistics in the paper suggest it is a fairly good "source of randomness". There's a big difference between bias and unpredictability (think about dice with '1' on five of the sides and '0' on the remaining side). You wouldn't want to use the state without putting it through a compression function first, but it's a much better seed than using clock()!

[...] how this is any different than having two billiard balls, one is red and one is blue.

Exactly! That's the question everybody should ask when they hear about "spooky action", but for some reason, I have rarely seen it asked.

The answer is: there's a difference that can be seen in the thought experiment proposed by Einstein and some other people, which is explained in this Wikipedia article: EPR paradox.

However, when I first read this article, I didn't understand any of it, because it assumes lots of knowledge about Physics. I finally understood it when I read this lecture. It starts by showing how to mathematically represent a quantum state (e.g., spin) and in the last section it answers exactly your question.

You might want to look into fast marching and level set methods:

http://math.berkeley.edu/~sethian/2006/level_set.h tml

They precisely tackle the problem you face: variable wave speeds. You essentially grow out the interface (boundary of your wave) on a fixed cartesian grid in a Dijkstra like fashion (based on the local speed of information propogration). You can then visualize the evolution of the front in MATLAB 3D surface plotters. Good luck with your search and I hope this helps!

"What website uses real media these days anyway?"

The BBC for one.

Computers are increasing by a factor of about 1000X in performance per
price per decade. By the time any toddler of today is finishing
graduate school, computers will be about 1000X (for the first decade)
multiplied (not added) by 1000X (for the second decade) or about
a million times faster than they are now -- just like computers are
about a million times faster than twenty to thirty years ago (at
constant dollars, or so MIPS per $). Related links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?pr intable=1
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/0126.html
http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
(The rate of exponential growth itself is even increasing!)
According to that last link, those AI computers had about 1 MIPS
processing power. (And it's a funny idea Hans Moravec had, and I think
correct, that only for the last decade or so has AI been taking
advantage of faster desktop CPUs going beyond 1 MIPS..)

As an example, compare the late 1970s Apple II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II
with todays' (2007) eight core Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/
Then --> Now (approximate increase)
CPU: 1 Mhz --> 8 * 3 Ghz (8000X faster, but about another 100X internal
improvements from wider data operations and pipelining and such).
(somewhere in x100000 to x1000000)
RAM: 4K --> 4GB RAM just starting to be common. (x1000000)
Disk: 300K disks --> 300 gigabyte disks. (x1000000)
And all for about the same price (adjusted for inflation).
Some other considerations:
Bandwidth: 11 bytes/sec modem at $10 / hour --> 800000 bytes/second by
cable at $60 / month (about x10000 faster, well that doesn't quite fit,
but its still a big improvement -- and if you factor in the cost for
continuous access, there is probably another 10x or 100X boost in there,
producing effectively close to a x1000000 improvement of price/performance)
Printing: about 1000 characters per minute for $1200 printer -> 10 pages
per minute each with millions of color pixels -- with the printer often
now free with the computer (not sure how to call this as a multiple,
since quality has changed so much).

So, here are possible specs for a personal computer of 2027 if it was a
million times faster than today's:
CPU: 8 * 3 Ghz --> 8000 X 3 THz (1000X more CPUs each 1000X faster,
though I think it likely such systems might just instead have a million
processors at about today's speeds, perhaps interweaving memory and
processing power)
RAM: 4GB --> 4000TB (enough to hold all of the current surface internet
in RAM, see:
http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/ho w-much-info-2003/internet.htm
)
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyte
for MB, GB, TB, PB, EB series and their meaning
DISK: 300GB --> 300PB (which is 300,000 TB)
For reference, a DVD movie uncompressed is about 5GB.
Note that, according to:
http://elegans.uky.edu/blog/?p=49
300 TB would allow you to record your entire life in video for 16hr/day
for 100 years at 500MB/hr. So you could do that for 1000 people on just
your own $3000 2027AD personal computer. Or you could just perhaps store
the interesting bits of life video for perhaps a hundred thousand people
or so. Needless to say,

There used to be a javascript page that could beat any human player in rock paper scissors at (Broken link), but that link doesn't work anymore. There are still 4 hits for "emin/writings/lz_rps/index.html" on google though. Anyway, the basic idea used LZ compression to figure out the player's internal "random" play style, and it could easily beat most people every throw after as few as 20 rounds.

It looks like the latest crop of rock paper scissors programs can beat the naive LZ implementation at The Second International RoShamBo Programming Competition.

Personally, I believe in micro-evolution, aka adaptation, but macro-evolution, the changing of one species into another, is still up for serious critical debate

No, it isn't.

and I've yet to see any sort of proof

That's because you haven't looked.

(Oh, and why don't your religious compatriots demand such stringent "proof" from the Bible?)

Looks like a great tool to me:

http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/softscissors/

I just wanted to point out that it spells Berkeley. Honest mistake, since it's wrong in the original post.

An old joke, but truth is duplicating the bug just might help solve the problem.

I wonder if they have any plans to be part of the BOINC project. After being a seti@home user for several years, then finally following it over to BOINC, I can't help but think of BOINC every time I hear something about distributed computing.

I know BOINC isn't the end-all-be-all of distributed computing, but it seems they gathered a large following once Seti@home project moved there, especially with what I would newbies or laymen to distributed computing in general. It might seem a smart move considering the variety of projects they already have along with their current userbase.

Well, these problems aren't exactly new. Take a look at this report by Matt Bishop dated Feb/2006: "Security Analysis of the Diebold AccuBasic Interpreter" http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~daw/papers/accubasic .pdf

Since MacOSX is BSD based, I would be willing to bet that similar projects and support can be found (but, I Am Not A Mac Fanboy).

On Windows, you are pretty much stuck using either NTFS or FAT. FAT volumes can not be created in windows larger than 32GB. Although, you could create the partition using 3rd party tools to get beyond that limitation. I have had some success mounting ext3 partitions using Ext2 Installable File System For Windows or Ext2 File System Driver for Windows.

Personally, from my experience, VFAT or NTFS are about your only options.

Here's a couple of articles I read:

Facts about the brain
Rods and Cones

There are around 125 millions rods and 6 million cones in each eye, with the percentages of each color/wavelength (red = 64%, green=32%, blue=2%)

No Sense

The human eye has 100 million neurons per per eye of five types, but there are only around 1 million neurons per optic nerve (arranged in bundles of 1000).

Thank you. This claim in the Reuters article blows me away: "They said the finding casts doubt on theories that babies are born knowing all the possible sounds in all of the world's languages."

What modern linguist / cognitive linguist actually thinks this??? It boggles my mind that the people fighting this retarded "language war" are so one-sided either way. Anyone seriously interested in current research in the direction this field is going might be into Jerome Feldman's work on the Neural Theory of Language at UC Berkeley. It's still in its early stages but (as far as I know) he's the first to offer a genuine "bridging theory" between neuroscience and language / linguistics, while building on the excellent work of many others, notably George Lakoff.

It's a breath of fresh air to deal with real research for once instead of armchair science (so sorry, Chomsky).

Talk to the UC Berkeley Financial Aid Office