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According to their site the first release was on 6/8/98. Not sure if distributed.net was before that, but you weren't running it "more then a year before seti".

They were way off on the user stats by nearly an order of magnitude. The statistics page shows over 4,800,000 users.

Cell phone batteries do not need cost $50. Even very nice ones don't cost that much. In the mass quantities they purchase, I suspect the Ipod battery costs Apple less than $15, perhaps much less.
If you're accustomed to paying that much for a battery, I can only suppose you tend to purchase batteries and cell phone accessories at your local cell phone store.
Those stores typically have quite reasonable deals on the actual cell phones, but they charge ridiculous amounts for phone accessories. It's the "movie theater" business model. Sell the tickets at cost in order to profit on the popcorn sales. Many local cell phone stores charge up to a 500% mark-ups on cell phone accessories.
If you shop the net, OEM lithium cell phone batteries can often be had in the 15 to 20 dollar range. Even cheaper for non-OEM, aftermarket models.
And to correct one of your other mistakes, lithium ion batteries do not have a memory effect. They simply have a finite number of charge/discharge cycles. Battery Faq
You also suggest it's the user's problem if they keep their Ipod away from a charging source for too long? I see... That must be why all cell phones have built in, non-replaceable batteries requiring users to bring the phone home all the time in order to recharge it... Apple has done most of the Ipod design very well, but as regards batteries, they have failed the ease of use test.
And since clearly a good part of this $99 fee is pure profit to Apple, every time another unit is sent in for service, it furthers Apple's incentive to continue building devices featuring non-replaceable batteries. Nasty cycle that.

I got my masters degree in engineering (M.Sc. - E) two days ago and for my thesis I used several open source tools designs for electrical engineering.

A site gathering many tools and aiming to be a complete design and analysis package is, gEDA: GPL Electronic Design Automation.

Another promising project is SystemC, which is an open source HDL (Hardware description language). The language is C-based and easy to learn (if you know C). With some (very expensive) commercial tools from Synopsys, it is possible to translate SystemC code to VHDL and do synthesis.

Moving a bit more towards software, but for embedded devices, a project from Berkeley is TinyOS. Completely open source.

Many things can be done without spending a dime but actual engineering, i.e. a product, does require commercial products before a design can be shipped of to the factory. But a startup can go a long way before spending anything on commercial software, very much like many software companies have done for many years now.

<>!*''#
^@`$$-
*!'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~|**SYSTEM HALTED

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
carat at back-tick dollar dollar dash
splat bang tick dollar underscore
percent splat waka waka number four
ampersand right-paren dot dot slash
curly bracket tilde pipe splat splat crash

Taken from the 1337/poetry section of william wu's site

<>!*''#
^@`$$-
*!'$_
%*<>#4
&)../
{~|**SYSTEM HALTED

waka waka bang splat tick tick hash
carat at back-tick dollar dollar dash
splat bang tick dollar underscore
percent splat waka waka number four
ampersand right-paren dot dot slash
curly bracket tilde pipe splat splat crash

Taken from the 1337/poetry section of william wu's site

Old S@H protocol was full of security flaws. Due to lack of verification of returned data it was possible to modify the workunits. And people did it, just to make them compute fast. In the fisrt 100 places of current Top 1000 list there is at least 10 cheaters. I've heard some time ago that approx 30% of workunits results returned to Berkeley was fake.
BOINC prevents this. S@H will now able to verify iof returned result is real or cheated.

From this page:
Status
BOINC is under development. The source code and bug-tracking database are available. We are currently conducting a beta test of BOINC using the SETI@home and Astropulse applications. The public release will be announced on the SETI@home web site. Several other distributed computing projects are evaluating BOINC.

Guess it will be some time yet.

The term for what you're describing is misappropriation. A misappropriated trade secret is still considered secret and anyone that uses it is committing a crime. At least that was the theory before cases like DeCSS and Verance/SDMI/Felten where the trade secret holders are desperately trying to apply the old rules to the international internet.

The key cases on the misappropriation doctrine seems to be E. I. DuPont de Nemours Powder Co. v. Masland where a competitor took aerial photos of a chemical plant & claimed it was reverse engineering. The reasonableness of a measure to discover inner workings was at issue.

It's still a wierd area. Printed circuit board layouts can be copyrighted but you can look at one, extract a schematic and lay out your own board. The circuit design could receive patent protection, but not trade secret protection.

ObLink

When you are consuming that cotton candy masquerading as content, try to remember that Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.

Whatever happened to the word "citizen"? Everywhere I look today, I see only consumers. Even my local--state run--driver's license office refers to me as a consumer, and hopes I enjoy their product. It's sickening, and scary.

... a lot can happen between Europe and Africa in just 750 million years.

Is this the same network as BARWAN? Or do they just share the name?

My sympathies. Honestly. This might be the right point in time to mention a solution to the l0z3r problem we had at Berkeley.

Vice Provost of information technology Ray Neff (he of the Berkeley CSUA Ray Neff Risk Tournament, so the lore goes, one day decided that Berkeley needed something on the level of CMU's Andrew system.

So Ray buckled on his suit and trusty sheaf of purchase order forms, and bought several thousand Sun 3/50 workstations and 4/whatever servers (yes, those of SMD disks.) As the story claims, this put Sun on the map, more or less.

The reaction to this, given that he put the UC CS department into hock for several years, appears to have been "you bought _what_?" Needless to say, ole' Ray wasn't given the chance to get long in the tooth in that job.

4 megs of memory, b&w 19" monitors, swap over the net. On a shared 10mbit segment. Yee-haa!

The upshot of all this is that, if someone logged onto one of these things via the modem annex to do something pointless like, oh, I dunno, CS61B homework, the machine became useless, I say USELESS for dooshing (slang for playing Netrek, the greatest game ever written.)

Good thing a certain Mr. Mehlhaff (evil ERic, to be exact) wrote a nice little proggie called "N0H0Z3RZ". ~> bin/N0H0Z3RZ would grab all ttys left of the machine's 38 total (1 being used for a twm xterm from which to start a netrek client.) All this, of course, after a swift L1-A (L1 being the equivalent of 'stop', for you post-type 3 keyboard sun weenies) to drop the box into OBP for a few minutes while waiting for the idiot currently logged in via modem to get off, then 'go' to get back to the really relevant bits.

Whacking Klingons.

It makes me nostalgic for the days when technology mattered, really.

Ben didn't know the first Thing about space travel...

According to http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/numusers.html there are over half a million active (returned > 0 WU(s) last 28 days) users at the moment.

They aren't just looking for radio signals, they are also looking at visible and infrared light. It's called optical SETI. Look at Optical SETI at Berkeley, or Google for it.

Running a little off-topic here, but I feel I need to quote this from the article:

SETI@home is now our planet's largest supercomputer, averaging 60 teraflops, thanks to 4.7 million SETI@home volunteers in 226 countries.

Three years ago I created one extra seti account by mistake, for which I processed 3 packets.

According to the seti@home individual user stats page, this account has processed more packets than 46.361% of their users.

I wonder if they count the idle and non-active user accounts when they claim 4.7 million users?

If not, it's probably safe to exclude about 50% of that user mass.

This looks like the named them to me (at least the Gaussians). Personally, I don't know if I want to be known for finding the signal. Jodi Foster's character sure got alot of negative attention in Contact.

They do.

here.

Click on each of the signals.

Last year in my Computer Science Theory class on one of my homework assignments we had to write an algorithm for Optimal Gerrymandering. (Problem 2)

Unfortunately its not a complete commercial quality product, but I thought Denim would make an excelent program for kids to learn to make web pages. Its exceedingly simple and I think any child that can read could use it easily.

I think I do see your point, but I guess a distinction can be made between tools, i.e. methods, reagents, protocols (and to some extent labware) that are necessary for basic science and the drug development process. In the end, cheap access to basic biotech techniques may be beneficial for big pharma, as well, cutting down research costs.

These are good points -- R&D tools are a bit more removed from the horrible economics of the new drug application process. (What is the success rate of new tools? What is the effective investment required to develop a new tool?). Yet I am sure that the companies that develop and use these tools see them as creating competative advantage. Moreover, I cannot help but think that the people that develop new tools and methods are not partially motivated by the financial windfall associated with sales of such tools.

In theory, true experimenters should have access to the patented processes under fair use ( citation of cases ). Unfortunately, I have read (at a link lost to the sands of time) that patent holders are disputing university researcher's fair use rights because of university IP policies. The trend of academic researchers or their universities selling or licensing the fruits of academic research knocks the legs out from under the researcher's claims to non-profit fair use.

Even open access for tools would have unintended consequences. If reagents were not covered by patents, production of these chemicals would move to low-cost producer countries such as China. This could be a good thing by further reducing the cost of supplies for research. Or it might be a very bad thing by bankrupting Western pharmaceutical tool companies.

It would seem that there are economic forces that would reduce tool innovation in the absense of patents/monopolies and forces that would increase pharmaceutical innovation based on depatented tools. Perhaps the short-term would see more drug innovation with wider access to tools and the long-term would see declines in innovation as funding for tool creation drops. I don't know the answer to that one, but you raise very good issues.

Without a good security these wireless meshes soon will become a plaything for script kiddies.

See TinySec. Hopefully Naveen and Chris won't kick my ass.

Good stuff, the more areas of human activity that the free software way of producing things spreads to the better, another science thing is featured on the front page of Creative Commons at the moment, PLoS:

The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."

Science and education seem to be areas where this is taking off at the moment, the design of things seems to be happening at a lot slower rate. Perhaps the lack of free CAD software to compete with AutoCAD is one of the main things holding this back?

I'm looking forward to the day when I can buy a washing machine and vacuum cleaner that are build from designs under GPL style licences...

This stuff uses an open source OS, TinyOS which is written in and includes the language nesC, "an extension to the C programming language designed to embody the structuring concepts and execution model of TinyOS. TinyOS is an event-driven operating system designed for sensor network nodes that have very limited resources (e.g., 8K bytes of program memory, 512 bytes of RAM)."

Over the last couple of days I downloaded and installed TinyOS 1.1.0 for windows (146Mb!) which includes nesC, an emulator, a tutorial and cygwin. To my slight surprise it all auto-installed and worked perfectly and can even generate cute graphical self-documentation.

NesC is interesting for at least a couple of reasons - compile-time detection of race conditions, and bi-directional interfaces which specify both the commands which must be implemented by an interface "providers" (ie "servers") and the events (or callbacks) which must be implemented by the interface's "users" (ie "clients").

I'd say that bi-directional interfaces are a significent step in the evolution of object-oriented design, which are being echoed (at a higher level, and in a different technical culture) in the choreography languages of Web Services.

If you enjoy the challenge of learning a new language which is small, different, timely and purposeful, I'd recommend TinyOS and nesC.

This stuff uses an open source OS, TinyOS which is written in and includes the language nesC, "an extension to the C programming language designed to embody the structuring concepts and execution model of TinyOS. TinyOS is an event-driven operating system designed for sensor network nodes that have very limited resources (e.g., 8K bytes of program memory, 512 bytes of RAM)."

Over the last couple of days I downloaded and installed TinyOS 1.1.0 for windows (146Mb!) which includes nesC, an emulator, a tutorial and cygwin. To my slight surprise it all auto-installed and worked perfectly and can even generate cute graphical self-documentation.

NesC is interesting for at least a couple of reasons - compile-time detection of race conditions, and bi-directional interfaces which specify both the commands which must be implemented by an interface "providers" (ie "servers") and the events (or callbacks) which must be implemented by the interface's "users" (ie "clients").

I'd say that bi-directional interfaces are a significent step in the evolution of object-oriented design, which are being echoed (at a higher level, and in a different technical culture) in the choreography languages of Web Services.

If you enjoy the challenge of learning a new language which is small, different, timely and purposeful, I'd recommend TinyOS and nesC.

Having said that, it's not quite as cut-and-dried as you mention. The primary differences from conventional wireless networks like 802.11 are (1) miniaturization, (2) strict power constraints, (3) disposable nature (i.e. ultra-low cost components req'd), and (4) self-organizing. AFAIK it's still an area of active and open research.

The most important link
in the whole article.

The Diebold employee Ken Clark admits that numerous state counties had requested the .mdb files to not have passwords.

I wouldn't really agree with that..

But it does seem true that math is "the young man's game".
(To quote the great mathematician GH Hardy)

Some of history's great mathematicians never lived to see their 30th birthday. Galois, and Abel for instance.

There are counterexamples, of course, the chemist Joel Hildebrand published his last research paper at over 100 years of age.

Ask Igor seems to be an implementation of delta debugging. You can use the delta program to implement this on your own system. You choose a test program (or 'harness') and an input that causes the harness to exit with success; for example your harness might run some executable and test to see if it segfaults - if so success. Then you give an initial input that passes the test (eg causes the segfault). Delta chops out lines of text to find a minimal (or at least 1-minimal, see the website) test case that passes the test (causes the segfault).

This is slightly different to Ask Igor, which takes two different files and finds the important difference between them. But similar in spirit (if much simpler). Apparently the Ask Igor code will be made available for download after it has been used 1000 times from the website.

I agree with Cliff. With the possible exception of teaching programming, computers in schools are an unnecessary distraction. Here's a background piece about his book on the subject.

And generate all sorts of weapons-gradd material in the process.

Only if you use the stupid, 70s-era method of reprocessing, i.e. extracting the plutonium. The 'light' (electrometallurgical) reprocessing used by the Integral Fast Reactor or Advanced Fast Reactor merely separates heavy from light. The light stuff decays quickly; so glassify it and bury it. Heavy stuff goes back into the reactor as fuel. The heavy stuff includes

• Fissile material; like U-235 and plutonium
• Fertile material like U-238; which can be bred into fissile material
• Dangerously-radioactive actinides, which are partially destroyed by neutron bombardment

It's not clear from declassified documents whether it's possible to build an A-bomb from spent fuel. This would certainly be very dangerous for the bomb-builders, and the resulting bomb will probably fizzle -- something between a radiological bomb and a true fission bomb.

Oh yeah -- 'Integral' means the reprocessing facility is on site with the reactor; for security.

Part of the "war on terrorism" should be developing energy sources that allow us to totally eliminate nuclear power

Great! Now tell us your ideas on how to do this. The US should set an example for other countries, so start with this country. Build more gas-fired power plants? This will drive up the demand for gas; driving up the price of gas, and making home heat more expensive for lots of people. Build more coal plants and pollute the air? Create an Energy Gestapo to enforce conservation?

Aside from all that, even if fusion becomes a reality, I'd still like to see breeder reactors built if only to burn up the spent fuel instead of burying it.

Incidentally, maybe it's just my browser (IE, I'm at work, I don't get a choice) but there's some creepy code breakage on the new releases page.

Give the "hunk-of-junk" to me... I'm sure I can find many... uses, for it... **cough** SETI@HOME **cough**

That's not what CSP stands for anymore.

Constraint Satisfaction Problems

Okay, it's another thing that CSP stands for. You should check out the new and growing area of CSPs. It's a great way of solving NP-complete / combinatorial search problems e.g. planning, scheduling, timetabling, hardware verification etc.

Well, it's not any more corrupt than one company owning the platform that 90% of the world operates on, then claiming that all the little fish can compete fairly against them and that they have no advantage owning the system....

If the Republicans own the voting system (and yes, I *know* they don't legally own the system, just as Microsoft doesn't *legally* own SCO), I highly doubt that they would use it to benefit themselves. I mean, come on! That would be unethical.

As to aliens: without proof that they exist, he refuses to care.

That's the purpose of seti@home.

Perhaps NASA shouldn'd have dropped funding of SETI in the first place :)

So Georgia Tech don't really have their own heli UAV's which can perform searches and formate in flight?

Have a look: HERE and especially HERE

Not to mention Berkeley who are it it too.

In fact there are a plethora of companies and universities across the globe who already have advanced UAV helicopter designs so what on earth makes Steadicopter's design unique?

Yes, I know, someone is going to say it; nobody else has exactly the same design but thats not really the point.

Yes, we do.

I can't tell you about the secret launch facility or the antimatter weapons. Soon all your base are belong to hippies.

UC berkley has a command and control center? All Ic could find was the one for the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, is there an actual program there to train "technicians" for the space economic boom that will be coming? Hopefully not stalled out like nuclear power because of daft policy positions based on the emotional panic induced in those who remain wholly ignorant of technology. Damn you hippies, you have a c&c center, now I am considering moving back to emeryville.

You can read all about that on the SETI@home site. A lot of manmade noise has to be taken into account when looking at promising signals. So far every really interesting looking signal has turned out to be man made.

Here is a news link about this grant.

• Dreyfus, H and Stuart E. Dreyfus, Mind over Machine
  
• Socrates, Euthyphro
  
• From Socrates to Expert Systems: The Limits and Dangers of Calculative Rationality
  

You mean the "If voting could really change things, it would be illegal"-Diebold?

What you really need is a distributed, serverless filesystem - one which lets you store files on all your disk drives on the LAN, with automatic redundancy of data (so if a machine goes down or its storage becomes unavailable, you still have a copy of your data blocks on one or more of the other machines) and ability to access those files from any machine on the LAN. A serverless filesystem is one in which the participating machines act as peers - i.e. no master server. Distributed and serverless filesystems are a hot research area right now but I'm sorry to say that they're not yet ready for the mainstream.

I went through the "is CODA right for me?" phase, and also "is InterMezzo right for me?" and also spent tens of hours researching distributed filesystems and cluster filesystems online ... my conclusion is that the area is still immature, I will let the pot simmer for a few more years (hopefully not many), and use NFS with one or two servers in the meantime.

My situation: desire for scalable and fault-tolerant distributed filesystem for home use with minimal maintenance or balancing effort. Emphasis on scalable - I want to be able to grow the filesystem essentially without limit. I also don't want to spend much time moving data between partitions. And last but not least, the bigger the filesystem grows, the less able I will be to back it up properly. I want redundancy so that if a disk dies the data is mirrored onto another disk, or if a server dies then the clients can continue to access the filesystem through another server.

All that seems to be quite a tall order. I checked out CODA, afs, PVFS, sgi's xfs, frangipani, petal, NFS, InterMezzo, berkeley's xfs, jfs, Sistina's gfs and some project Microsoft is doing to build a serverless filesystem based on a no-trust paradigm (that's quite unusual for Microsoft!).

Berkeley's xFS (now.cs.berkeley.edu/Xfs) sounded the most promising but it appears to be a defunct project. The source code is online however, so maybe somebody can resurrect it. Frangipani sounds interesting also, and maybe a little more alive than xFS.

On the other hand CODA, afs, intermezzo and Lustre are all in active development. afs IMHO suffered from kerberitis, i.e. once you start using kerberos it invades everything and it has lots of problems (which I read about on the openAFS list every day). AFS doesn't support live replication either - replication is done in a batch sense.

CODA doesn't scale and doesn't have expected filesystem semantics. For 80 gigs of server space I would require 3.2 gigs of virtual memory, and there's a limit to the size of a CODA directory (256k) which isn't seen in ordinary filesystems. There's also the full-file-download "feature". CODA is good for serving small filesystems to frequently disconnected clients but it is not good for serving the gigabyte AVIs which I want to share with my family.

InterMezzo is a lot more lightweight than CODA and will scale a lot better, but it's still a mirroring system rather than a network filesystem. I might use that to mirror my remote server where I just want to keep the data replicated and have write access on both the server and the client, but it's again not a solution for my situation.

The best thing about intermezzo is that it sits on top of a regular filesystem, so if you lose intermezzo the data is still safe in the underlying filesystem. CODA creates its own filesystem within files on a regular filesystem, and if you lose CODA then the data is trapped.

Frangipani is based on sharing data blocks, so like NFS it should be suitable for distributing files of arbitrary size. I need to look at it in a lot more detail; this is probably the right way to build a cluster filesystem for the long haul. For the short term, Intermezzo is probably the right way for a lot of people: it copies files from place to place on top of existing filesystems.

I got motivated to look at Frangipani again. No sour

This pretty much shows how questionable Michael Doyle's integrity really is and goes towards his evilness when he knew of the prior art and still filed for the patent.

Intermezzo and Coda both do this, but I don't think there's any windows versions available. There are some Microsoft things available too, but obviously those aren't for linux. NBD (which everyone else has mentioned) isn't distributed, so that's not really what you're looking for.

What you might be able to do is put together a microcosm of Freenet or something like it, running on just your home computers. There may be other Peer-to-Peer solutions available that are faster/more stable. Do some searching on peer-to-peer distributed storage networks. I know of two researchy ones: OceanStore and Chord. Good luck!

I haven't checked into it much, but I remembered the DIBS (Distributed Internet Backup System -- Slashdot article here). I would imagine that it could be modifed (maybe not trivially) to support real-time disk operations, since it is open-source. However, although I don't know much about Python, I have a feeling this may suffer in performance from being written in a (semi-)interpreted language. Python lovers want to flame me for incriminating their programming language?

Now, as you probably know, Michael Doyle (Eolas's CEO and sole formal employee as I understand it), wrote to the net about his technology and eventually intent to patent this. So of course people (including me) wrote back informing him of prior arts. I'm not a lawyer but as I understand it one is supposed to disclose to the PTO any relevant prior art for the PTO examiner to assess. Doyle and I exchange letters, and I told him about this embedded capability in Viola, gave him a paper on viola, which contains pointers leading to more information including even the viola browser source code. Doyle ends up mentioning the browsers Cello and Mosaic, but interestingly not Viola! Now, Viola came before both Cello and Mosaic, and non of those two other browsers had any kind of embedded interactive capability at the core of the discussions.

Some sources tell me that Microsoft will appeal Eolas case by bringing up Perry Pei-Yuan Wei, a Berkeley student that in 1991 created a browser called Viola capable of rendering the built-in plugged-in applications, later to be knows as applets.

Here's an example of the chess app being used in Viola in 1991, which questions Eolas patent.

Some sources tell me that Microsoft will appeal Eolas case by bringing up Perry Pei-Yuan Wei, a Berkeley student that in 1991 created a browser called Viola capable of rendering the built-in plugged-in applications, later to be knows as applets.

Here's an example of the chess app being used in Viola in 1991, which questions Eolas patent.