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Please could you explain how a single e-mail app. is going to have any effect on evolution?

definition
Architectures and Compilers to Support Reconfigurable Computing
brass

There is also a direct trade-off between more general purpose systems and systems custom tailored to a task. Good examples are Deep Blue and Blue Gene. Both of these systems are designed with a particular task in mind (i.e. chess and protein folding) and therefor are able to leverage knowledge about the problem space to constrain the kind of hardware, the particular low-level instructions and the information flow within the system while achieving signifigantly greater performance on a small class of problems. I work with clusters that are used in scientific communities that have various researchers working on various problems. In these cases, the questions are about basic applicability of a particular problem to a particular architecture. For example a cluster with high-speed interconnects made of good COTS hardware will allow a user with a very granular problem to effectively use the cluster and it will also allow a user who needs the high speed interconnect because the problem space demands a high degree of internal communication. But the first researcher might also be able to make use of a grid of (for instance) many more computers with a total lower cost because (s)he doesn't need the high speed interconnect. The Earth Simulator gains a lot of performance (on a class of problems) because of the underlying vector processor architecture. Given the right internal bus it is conceivable that adding vector processor daughter boards to the next generation of COTS clusters could achieve similar results--but, of course, only for problem spaces that make efficient use of such processors and aren't bottlenecked by the communication requirements.

Real answers are always more complicated. For example: the equations needed for nuclear simulation will probably require dedicated hardware (as the need for protein folding has lead to Blue Gene) to achieve the results that the Pentagon needs. But for many super computing tasks, the flexibility of COTS clusters will still be compelling, especially for areas where the algorithms are not yet fully developed (e.g. brain simulation). An interesting keynote at OLS 2003 argued that (some of) the problems are not going to be the local computing power but the need to move large quantities of data between research labs across the world and combine computational systems using the 'grid.' (For a down home examples of problems that have been successfully tackled through course granular distribution just look at SETI@Home and Distributed.Net. So its not just the flops anymore...

I would say more, but the interrogation system is sooooo fucked up -- people would think I am making things up.

Here is a quote from of a historical article written in 1996 discussing what the Voila Browser was, if you are having difficulty finding any information about it. It was released in the 1991-1993 timeframe. I am not sure if the full article mentioned the actual release dates of particular features.

The World Wide Web - past, present and future, July 17, 1996 By Tim Berners-Lee, excerpt from his speech at the British Computer Society Basically, he had something very like Java, and as he went ahead and wrote something very much like Hot Java, the language was called 'Viola' and the browser was called 'ViolaWWW'. It didn't take off very quickly because you had to first install 'Viola' nobody understood why you should install an interpreter, and then this 'WWW' in a Viola library area. You had to be system administrator to do all that stuff, it wasn't obvious. But in fact what he did was really ahead of his time. He actually had Applets running. He had World Wide Web pages with little things doing somersaults and what have you.

Now it should be clear why it is prior art. Not sure where you can still find copies of Voila to try for yourself.

1998 is the date that the patent was issued and has nothing to do with the date required for prior art. The patent was filed on October 17, 1994, this is the date that you have to consider when looking at prior art.

You know, you're right, but I didn't even bother to look at the Filed date, because I glanced at the dozen references dated 1989 through 1997 and figured it would be hard to reference a 1997 patent in 1995. Eolas should probably forget this "browser plugin" junk and patent their time machine! ;-)

Looks like the Java applets don't count

Are you sure? I mentioned 1995 as the date the public got to play with Java - Sun had a Java-enabled browser running internally in 1994, and so probably had the idea of running applets from hypertext documents (the idea, the only thing Eolas created while Sun built a working implementation) years before (like when they started Java in 1991 or when they thought of hooking it up to Mosaic in 1993).

In any case, it's not like Sun was the only one working on that sort of thing. This guy appears to have had working "infringing" code in 1991.

And you know who has some of the best prior art? Microsoft. They'd had "applet inside a word processor document" and "applet inside a spreadsheet document" technology working for years; does anybody really think that "applet inside a hypertext document" technology would have eluded them if it were not for the wonderful inventors at Eolas? Eolas just managed to be one of the first companies to pull off the "take existing invention or task, add 'with the internet' to the description, file patent" scam that's made the patent office a joke today.

My objection to most software patents stands. If you're doing something that an expert would consider to be an obvious extension to the current state of the art, you don't have something patentable.

I also find it interesting that they use the word vaccine, when nobody really knows if HIV is a virus, or even exists. It's fascinating, but try it...go on google and type, say "polio virus image." You'll find dozens of scanning electron microscope images of the virus itself. Here it is attacking a cell...here it is with a special dye so you can see these structures...etc. Now try it with HIV. "HIV virus image." You'll find pictures of cultures that the author says are infected with HIV, and you'll find artists conceptions of the virus...but no actual virus.

It's never been isolated. It's difficult, but not THAT hard to isolate a virus. Get a culture going, put it in a centrifuge, spin it around, and things will seperate based on their densities. Do this for enough people who you know have the disease, and you'll find the criter they all have in common. Then culture it, and see what antibodies you find. You'd think with the hundreds of billions of dollars we've dumped into HIV research over 20 years, using the brightest minds in medicine, we'd have more than that.

All scientists have ever found are a bunch of non-specific antibodies, and when you test "HIV positive," all they're really saying is that you have several of these antibodies they think might result from HIV infection. None of the HIV tests (elisa, western blot) have ever even been approved by the FDA.

There are many scientists who doubt AIDS is actually caused by a virus, and may be something else entirely. Check virusmyth.net for more information. Also, this interview, with, among others, Dr. Peter Duesberg, professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at UC Berkeley, makes some fascinating points about why AIDS may not be caused by a virus.

They already use systems like this to track semis, it's called AVL (Automatic Vehicle Location).

You can find the results of a study done on this system, including benefits and costs here

He sounds like he has a drive to succeed...maybe you should contact him.

The problem is, the Unicode consortium sees that Berber is already set w/ Latin, as well as Arabic, and apparently feels that that's sufficient and hence there's no need for their native script.

The Unicode consortium is not a rich organization - pretty much all the work is done by volunteers and people paid by other organizations. If you want Berber in, then send your check to Script Encoding Initiative and they'll work on it. If no one cares enough to send their checks in, and no other organization cares enough to take up the cause, then there's probably no need for it.

The Smart Dust Project at UC Berkeley, which seeks to create a wireless network of sensors each of which is one cunic milimeter in size. These "micro motes" create an ad-hock network to communicate between each other and relay information back to a central computer. The motes are cheap and self powered so they can be placed a variety of places.

Here's a good article on the motes and what they are all about.

Along with "Smart Buildings", the "Smart Kindergarten" would seem like the perfect non-military application for this emerging technology.

Berkely has released background/overview article to clear up some confusion that slashdot readers may have.

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) has been solved, machine translation (MT) may advance to a higher plane of equality with human translators who spend years learning the nuances and subtleties of their target human languages.

Computer science has found the Holy Grail of AI in the Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind that led directly to the free AI source code of the Mind-1.1 Tutorial AI described in the AI For You textbook of artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Association for Computing Machinery has published an article on the robot Mind.Forth AI, and a well-known AI expert has favorably reviewed the Fiber-Concept Theory of Mind.

Traditional Artificial Intelligence Textbooks are suddenly obsolete, outmoded, or desperately in need of thorough revision and updating to teach Automatic Machine Translation now that AI has been solved.

Now that artificial intelligence (AI) has been solved, machine translation (MT) may advance to a higher plane of equality with human translators who spend years learning the nuances and subtleties of their target human languages.

Computer science has found the Holy Grail of AI in the Concept-Fiber Theory of Mind that led directly to the free AI source code of the Mind-1.1 Tutorial AI described in the AI For You textbook of artificial intelligence and robotics.

The Association for Computing Machinery has published an article on the robot Mind.Forth AI, and a well-known AI expert has favorably reviewed the Fiber-Concept Theory of Mind.

Traditional Artificial Intelligence Textbooks are suddenly obsolete, outmoded, or desperately in need of thorough revision and updating to teach Automatic Machine Translation now that AI has been solved.

1. as i stated, my post was to make no point. the sole objective was to get some cards on the table because in many cases of national liberation struggle, and espescially in the tibet issue, there is a lot misunderstanding and ignorance of history. your point, however, is pretty much spot on.

2. the "whiner" thing is a mild exercise in irony.

3. for the record, i think the occupation of tibet is Bad Thing. i am most definitely not an apologist for mao. when i say left wing i refer more to something along the lines of this.

The antivirus vendors can only release their updated file - AFTER the virus has started to spread, the receive a copy and patch and test. This could take *DAYS*.

Some people think that a properly created worm/virus could spread over the entire available host populations in under 15 min from release.

More Info Worhal Virus

Add atachement mangeling, removal, and remove vunerable email client for example; Outlook with with it's own exploits and it's embeded HTML (Explorer) with it's own list of exploits are unacceptable for a networked computing environment.

Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde

Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde

Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.

University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.

Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic electronics come into play.

Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.

Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.

The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.

Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.

The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde

uhh... no.

The Arecibo radio telescope is a fixed dish, which rotates along with the Earth. As the beam of the dish passes a constant power signal source in the sky, the power of the received signal will increase, peak, and decrease following a gaussian profile.

You are correct in the limitations of the dish, however. By pointing the detectors at different places on the dish, the beam can be moved in relation to the plane of the Earth's rotation. The Seti@Home equipment at Arecibo is capable of tracking +1 to +35 degrees declination, and has a beam width of 0.1 degrees. Thus it is only able to see 28% of the sky.

Seti@Home Whitepaper

I used to think we were simply looking into outer space with the SETI project and hearing complete silence. Well, that doesn't seem to be the case. Even in the 'relatively quiet' radio bands, there's still a whole lot of signal going on, and by and large we can't tell it from noise.

The article mentioned is a bit humble when saying 'oh yes, there were more than 166 candidates'. Yes, there were a 'few' more, and it was pretty tough to pare the list down to something the Arecibo could be solidly used for, according to the Planetary Society

Nor is the search in the radio band the be-all end-all to all the observation techniques; to that effect, there are a number of other observations and techniques underway.

I suppose the "saddest" thing at the moment is that we honestly cannot currently tell the difference between "nobody's out there" and "ten billion civilizations are out there", due to our narrow and infrequent observation bands, our simplifying assumptions, and our limited processing power (think of the difference another 50... or even 10 years will make to that).

I suppose an additional question we might have to face if we hear an ET signal: how many people will play it backwards and hear Elvis or the Devil?

the SETI@home screensaver analyzes the data many times over trying a great variety of possible doppler accelerations. Actually, the screensaver first takes the raw data and mathematically "undoes" a specific doppler acceleration or "chirp". It then feeds the resulting "de-accelerated" data to the FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) routines. This is called "De-chirping" the data. SETI@home tries to do this at many points between -50 Hz/sec to +50 Hz/sec. At the finest frequency resolution of 0.075 Hz we check for 5409 different chirp rates between -10 Hz/sec and +10 Hz/sec!

-- "About the SETI@Home screensaver

That seems horribly inefficient!

Have the SETI people ever heard of cepstral techniques?

There should be no need to iterate thousands of times over the pattern recognition algorithms when you can just take anouther FFT of the log magnitude spectrum to eliminate doppler shift (the same as what audio engineers would call 'pitch.') Cepstral analysis has been eliminating pitch in audio signal processing for decades. Too bad nobody told the astronomers.

What a waste of all those CPU cycles!

William Freeman has a good page on his MIT AI lab homepage about doing the same thing except using kites to take pictures. (Btw, check out William T Freemans MIT e-mail address...)
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/wtf/kite.html

And another link to a good site is Charles Benton's site.
http://www.arch.ced.berkeley.edu/kap/

Its interesting to note that there are lots of methos for creating unstructured panoramas. Where you have a set of images and the algorithm does its best to determine how to stick the images together to form a panorama. You could imagine a similar algorithm using these images to auotmatically create aerial maps... might make a good paper.

...as Kite Aerial Photography. Same idea, except you suspend the camera from a kite.

Cepheids have periods on the order of weeks, not years... check out this.

"If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution."
--Famous misquote of Emma Goldman

Sometimes, people just want to have fun. Fear not; some people have already figured out that organized coincidences can be effective protests. See: Critical Mass bike rides. More will figure this out over time. Right now, just enjoy it!

Side note: The story behind the quote is here.

They already exist in R&D, and they do everything a driver can do, including backing up to a dock.

My partner and I lucked into the Nike missile base being manned. It's really cool. We even got to go up on the missile lift. :)

There are also a variety of gun emplacements and bunkers that you can wander around on. You can also get inside them, but they're mostly barricaded and I have no idea how safe or unsafe they are.

Over in the East Bay, there's the Lawrence Hall of Science, which is an okay hands-on science museum, but is immediately recognizable as the home of Colossus from Colossus: The Forbin Project . It also has a spectacular view of most of the bay.

Another famously cool science museum in SF is the Exploratorium.

The world needs no more than one computer, it's just very spread out.

[quote]Asked if he believed the huge scale of the universe meant there was intelligent life out there somewhere, he told the paper.

"Seventy thousand million million million is a big number ... it's inevitable."[/quote]

Good thing i'm keeping my seti@home client running all the time... we're bound to find something sometime!

Posted AC to avoid the appearance of Karma Whoring.

AMANDA Maps Cosmic Neutrinos

It's probably just as well the link wasn't included in the original story, 'cause I bet it won't take many downloads of those multi-meg .jpg files to bring the server to its knees!

Marvin Minsky and Dean Edmonds built the first neural network computer in 1951. ... Minksy was later to prove influential theorems showing the limitations of neural network research.

This may be the theorem that single-layer feed-forward NNs can only represent linearly separable functions (e.g. AND and OR, but not XOR).

• A few publications
  
  
• RFC 3453: The Use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) in Reliable Multicast
  
  
• Priority Encoding Transmission (with some info on Tornado)
  
  
• Slashdot - EETimes on Digital Fountain
  
  

• A few publications
  
  
• RFC 3453: The Use of Forward Error Correction (FEC) in Reliable Multicast
  
  
• Priority Encoding Transmission (with some info on Tornado)
  
  
• Slashdot - EETimes on Digital Fountain
  
  

In response to those that (for good reasons) do not like PDF files we made a quick and dirty conversion into HTML. The HTML version is avalable here.

There's no Mac support for the higher-capacity Nomad products due to a tiff between Creative Labs and Apple people... and it all started going sour right around the date of release for the iPod. Anyway, if you are a OS X nerd that buys one of these things myself and a few others are trying to get either Gnomad2 or GnomeDAP up and running under Gnome 2.0 using libnjb (current cvs). Wish us luck...

Granted, the power bill is gonna be a little high, and granted there has to be a SETI client for PS2 first....

Thanks for the hint. I will think it over and promote it. After all our german Setigroup is more successfull than some countries ;-)

Thanks for the hint. I will think it over and promote it. After all our german Setigroup is more successfull than some countries ;-)

Clifford Stoll talks about this a lot in his book (from back in the day, yes, but the points are still relevant (obviously, with this article)) Silicon Snake Oil. It's officially required reading for any internet junkies, as it will make you rethink all your opinions of technology.

We recently got a moderate grant from NSF to persue our hydrogen survey and a search for giant pulses from ETs, evaporating black holes and/or pulsars.

Right now we only have a small quantity of gift funds to use toward developing SETI@HOME II and SERENDIP V.

Of course there's always the chance that gift funds pot will get larger.

We recently got a moderate grant from NSF to persue our hydrogen survey and a search for giant pulses from ETs, evaporating black holes and/or pulsars.

Right now we only have a small quantity of gift funds to use toward developing SETI@HOME II and SERENDIP V.

Of course there's always the chance that gift funds pot will get larger.

Not sure why someone would write an article about SETI with that many links without puting a link the the actual SETI@Home web site.

SETI@Home

Yes, so true...

*flips out a Verizon cell phone, dons the dorky glasses and...*

"Can you hear me now?"

One of the biggest uses would have to be travel. Buy an electric car and never pay for fuel again. Start using propeller based planes or switch to super-fast electric trains. Maybe we could even have jets with ION propulsion. Ten times the propulsion for the same amount of fuel. Now we're talking about economical space travel. The cost of a trip to orbit could become affordable to about everyone. We could take the time to get to mars down from nine months to under 1.

Hey,
I'll sell you the apple I've just eaten and remixed if you want.
I'll even sell you apple pie and cider.
and if your really getting fussy there's always the
first rule of thermodynamics

Take a look at Mike Stonebraker's work.

And for me! I am soooo gonna kick some ass in 'Data Units Completed'.

It was Ivan Sutherland that built HMDs as early as 1966.
Here's a biography and here's a link
with one more image of a HMD.