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Because I have a strong feeling this is going to be asked:

For those of you who were wondering, you too can switch off one of your Mac's dual CPU's with the Apple CHUD Tools. Look near the bottom of the page. It'll make you appreciate your second processor ;)

Personally though, I want to see how well it runs Seti@Home.

Ahhhrrrrggg. Its too late for me. You can read more here at my blog. I had to replace my power supply just a month ago. I paid $75 with shipping and tax for a Zalman ZM300A-APF which is high on the list you linked to. There's nothing custom about it, unless you mean how its fan speed is thermo-controlled. At least its silent relative to my Noise Control Silverado. I could have paid half of what I did...

Here's Prof. Edward Lee's research group's website on Heterogeneous Modeling and Design and some more technical publications regarding soft walls.

Here's Prof. Edward Lee's research group's website on Heterogeneous Modeling and Design and some more technical publications regarding soft walls.

This improper usage really bugs me, too. For everyone who hasn't yet figured it out, (including the Slashdot "editorial" staff)

The proper spelling of Berkeley [berkeley.edu] is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," "Berkely," "Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music [berklee.edu].

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do they think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL [lanl.gov] and LBNL [lbl.gov], the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize [princeton.edu] for inventing the frickin LASER [geocities.com] is a professor there.

Finally, without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. At the very least, the person submitting the article (and the Slashdot "editors") should be able to figure out the proper spelling that way.

This story is about researchers from the University of California at Berkeley (a.k.a. U.C. Berkeley or Cal), not the University of Berkley.

Uh, there's no such thing (at least as far as I know) as the "University of Berkley", only the University of California at Berkeley ... you insensitive clod!

I don't know about you who use WEP, but please STOP.

It is BROKEN.

Use IPSec. There are many tutorials for using IPSec in tunnel mode as a replacement for WEP. Google it. I wrote the 3rd or 4th one down - it isn't that hard, guys. Please don't use WEP, it really isn't smart.

Captcha's are a *generic* means of differentiating a human user from a 'bot, which is not inherently a vision thing. Not providing an accomodation for the vision-impaired is not just lazy, but specifically discriminatory, though presumably out of ignorance rather than malice. In short, there's no excuse for such discrimination.

There's no reason a user couldn't opt whether to use an audio or visual captcha, and therefore accomodate either visual or auditory impairments.

And YES, there are various experimenters developing better and better recognition algorithms such that it is a bit of an arms race. Creating a good captcha is not quite as easy as one might think. Check this paper for some discussion on the subject.

• Spam Museum
• The Official SPAM Home Page
• Spam Carving Contest
• Amazing and Fabulous Spam Site
• Uncle Mikey's House of Spam
• The Ultimate SPAM gift catalog
• Bob Bragner's "Hormhell" page
• Uncle Kevin's Spam page
• Spamland
• on and on...

This is in strong contrast to the dbms-which-ought-not-be-named which provided hours of entertainment and overtime with its special features, the latest being the special slammer/sapphire feature.

I need to finish my OS for when Linux goes down in flames. Then I can be the author of the most popular free OS instead of the least popular.

Isn't that what open source is all about? Who is most popular?

Try these OSes on for size:
Retro Forth
AtheOS
VSTa
TinyOS

While I worked at the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, one of the graduate students there Matt Delco worked on RTPtv, which is basically TV-quality Motion-JPEG between two machines.

1. You needed a special encoder and decoder card to decode 30fps (60 fields per second) Motion-JPEG sent over RTP. This card costs $400.

2. You needed 20Mbps for a excellent video transmission, plus 1.4Mbps for excellent audio transmission.

3. This enabled you to receive TV-quality video and audio over the Internet. (That's what excellent refers to up there.)

4. You can buy two cheap Linux boxes (mini-ATX?micro-ATX) including the $400 card for a total of about $1500 each. $3000 total.

But you need to have that 21.4Mbps sustained data transfer. We used Internet2 and internal 100Mbps switched networks. That's the kicker.

While I worked at the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center, one of the graduate students there Matt Delco worked on RTPtv, which is basically TV-quality Motion-JPEG between two machines.

1. You needed a special encoder and decoder card to decode 30fps (60 fields per second) Motion-JPEG sent over RTP. This card costs $400.

2. You needed 20Mbps for a excellent video transmission, plus 1.4Mbps for excellent audio transmission.

3. This enabled you to receive TV-quality video and audio over the Internet. (That's what excellent refers to up there.)

4. You can buy two cheap Linux boxes (mini-ATX?micro-ATX) including the $400 card for a total of about $1500 each. $3000 total.

But you need to have that 21.4Mbps sustained data transfer. We used Internet2 and internal 100Mbps switched networks. That's the kicker.

Right now he's getting a great deal of play in the media for his prescience, not becuse 1984 came true, but because he helped create a vocabulary (thoughtcrime, Big Brother etc...) that can be used to view current events in a new (disturbing) way.

For example, check out Google News through truespeak filter at berkeley (or any news site, just replace the second http address).

His language casts a new light on what's going on, for issues of computer privacy to foreign and domestic policy...

True fans can sheck out Students for an Orwellian Society which continues in the vein. (And, to be clear, it's satire guys, satire)

It would be good if pure research were put into the "public domain", particularly when it is paid for by tax dollars.

There is an interesting NYT article today about a call for federally funded research to be more freely available, instead of in expensive and restrictive journals. It's about time- there are many expensive for-profit journals, whose worth is determined by reputations established primarily by the refereeing process. Referees are usually academics not paid by journals. Since the NSF or NIH is often paying for the researcher (who is doing the hardest work) and the universities are paying for the referees (who are doing the next hardest part of the work) and the labs and resources are usually paid for by universities (often the greatest expense) it is remarkable that the
journals have been getting away with making big piles of money for essentially being clearinghouses and middlemen. In mathematics, there has been some resistance, including some from bigshots, to these journal monopolies, but change towards cheaper/free/non-profit journals has been slow. I choose to submit my research to reaonable journals on this criteria, but that means that I will never submit my work to some of the most prestigious ones. In medicine, where journals often restrict researchers from even discussing their results with colleagues or media until the article appears, this could be a massive chage. Many scientific journals do not permit you to post your own research on your web page and hopefully this overdue movement towards free distribution gathers momentum.

-Lucas

• How does this compare with BOSS?
• Is your system free software (i.e., GPL type license)?
• Can we see it?
• Can we see the code?
• If not, can you tell us how it works?

1. The World's Fastest Computer is trying to figure out this planet,
2. The World's Second-Fastest Computer is a volunteer effort to figure out if anybody's on other planets, cure cancer, and do other good things on this planet, and
3. The Next Fastest Four Computers are trying to figure out how to blow up this planet.

1. The World's Fastest Computer is trying to figure out this planet,
2. The World's Second-Fastest Computer is a volunteer effort to figure out if anybody's on other planets, cure cancer, and do other good things on this planet, and
3. The Next Fastest Four Computers are trying to figure out how to blow up this planet.

Where is the SETI network? I didn't see it listed. I would think it qualifies as a supercomputer. As SUN has said in the past, "the network is the computer". You can see how many teraflops it averages on the total statistics page.

This would be great for furnishing the game room of the one-millionth scale model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater

Berkeley has been working on mini and micro rotary engines for a little while now. Rotaries are really better for this application as they have less moving parts. Their mini rotary engine is about the size of a penny while their micro rotary engine has a rotor of size 1mm! Rotaries have no valves which makes them much easier to produce at this size.

Berkeley has been working on mini and micro rotary engines for a little while now. Rotaries are really better for this application as they have less moving parts. Their mini rotary engine is about the size of a penny while their micro rotary engine has a rotor of size 1mm! Rotaries have no valves which makes them much easier to produce at this size.

Berkeley has been working on mini and micro rotary engines for a little while now. Rotaries are really better for this application as they have less moving parts. Their mini rotary engine is about the size of a penny while their micro rotary engine has a rotor of size 1mm! Rotaries have no valves which makes them much easier to produce at this size.

...they've been working on a different approach specifically with PDAs. The technique uses spacial orientation for scrolling and zooming to give a peephole view of a larger picture.

Here's a link to the main researcher's website incluiding papers, videos and posters.

Here is an old 1998 research paper that describes some of the preliminary work on such a system. It looks like research into this kind of thing is at least 5-6 years along. Honda doesn't make crap so I'm sure that it is pretty far along by now.

I drove a Mercedes SL500 a few months ago. It has the radar controlled cruise control, etc on it. If you go too hot into a corner, it can brake individual wheels too help control the skid. The kind of stuff that you can't do on your own.

There are a lot of the "I understand physics so I'm a better driver" kind of posts. Accidents happen fast and not always because of things that you do. It isn't only stupid people that get into them. You can be doing everything right and still get killed.

Anything that helps in a split second live and death instance I am all for. In many cases these systems can kick in and do their thing much faster than you can and they can do things that you can't like brake individual wheels, tighten the seatbelt, deploy and airbag, and just about anything else that you can imagine. These little differences can be the difference between surviving and not.

Another thing that this helps is to avoid stupid accidents while you are talking on a cell phone, playing with your mp3 player, eating, and other things that you really shouldn't do but everyone does. Most of us spend so much time in our cars that it would be nice to see things totally automated where we could relax, get work done, etc. Wasn't that all supposed to be working by now? Who's in charge of that project? You're late.

My undergrad programming used this tool to catch cheaters. It does work pretty well!!
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html

It is based on something like this:

• Preprocess the code (replace all variables with the letter 'V', strip the comments, replace white space strings with a single character)
• Divide the result into fixed sized units of length k that overlap, each starting at a succeeding character. They call these k-grams
• Efficiently calculate a hash for each of these k-grams
• Divide the result into windows that contain a number of these k-grams
• Within each window, use a method of selecting a subset of these k-grams that does not depend on position, but rather on the k-gram itself, such as the minimum hash value within that window; if there are ties, select the right-most hash value within the window
• The result is the fingerprint of the code
• Any document with fingerprints in common has some code in common with the original source

It is based on something like this:

• Preprocess the code (replace all variables with the letter 'V', strip the comments, replace white space strings with a single character)
• Divide the result into fixed sized units of length k that overlap, each starting at a succeeding character. They call these k-grams
• Efficiently calculate a hash for each of these k-grams
• Divide the result into windows that contain a number of these k-grams
• Within each window, use a method of selecting a subset of these k-grams that does not depend on position, but rather on the k-gram itself, such as the minimum hash value within that window; if there are ties, select the right-most hash value within the window
• The result is the fingerprint of the code
• Any document with fingerprints in common has some code in common with the original source

It is based on something like this:

• Preprocess the code (replace all variables with the letter 'V', strip the comments, replace white space strings with a single character)
• Divide the result into fixed sized units of length k that overlap, each starting at a succeeding character. They call these k-grams
• Efficiently calculate a hash for each of these k-grams
• Divide the result into windows that contain a number of these k-grams
• Within each window, use a method of selecting a subset of these k-grams that does not depend on position, but rather on the k-gram itself, such as the minimum hash value within that window; if there are ties, select the right-most hash value within the window
• The result is the fingerprint of the code
• Any document with fingerprints in common has some code in common with the original source

During the Munich IETF 1997(?) I used rdist (part of Irix) to copy files from one machine to 40 others, as someone thought NFS was not an option.

When I had a set of (permanently running...) Unix workstations last, I used sh for-loops and ssh to run commands.

During another cluster project I was happy to use NFS to share files, and used rsh over ssh as it was ways faster.

Oh, and if you ever need to render mpegs from jpegs, check out the UCB's excellent "mpeg_encode", which does all the load balancing on a set of machines all by itself. Yumm!

- Hubert

My personal problem with this watch is that I'm left-handed, but keep my watch on my left hand. Now, try writing graffiti on a 1.5" watch face with your wrong hand. It ain't easy!

Now if only the watch was color and use a peephole display...

...doesn't the result of splitting H2O using another energy source result in more energy than was used to do the splitting? Not unless I'm miss-remembering the laws of thermodynamics (you might be thinking of potential energy). Thermodynamics

And I don't agree with your opinion that cars would be 10-100 times more expensive, maybe initially. Look at all technology how prices drop real quickly. The problem isn't the technology as much as the materials - you need a high quality electrolyte membrane between the electrode and anode. This means your materials to make the cell are made of expensive metals that aren't dependant on technology. They break down, bond and degrade under the performance requirements of a car.

In the interest of exploring the current potential cost of a fuel cell power plant I'll give you an example -
fuel cell
Here's a currently available home fuel cell technology that provides 1.2kw. For $8k. The EV1 (ford's electric car) uses 102 KW for roughly 137 HP. To power this car with a fuel cell you'd need 82 of these units, running about $680,000. Not including the cost of the engine and 'carrying case' - the seats, body, breaks, wheels. The cost of the hydrogen (note that it's derived from natural gas or PROPANE... a petroleum product, not electrolyzed water) is $100 per bottle. That means a tank of gas for those 82 units powering your car will run $8,200. Ouch.

How many technological breakthroughs in materials and science will we need to make that fuel cell cost the same (and weigh less) as the batteries in an EV1? Even with Moores Law (technology doubling at half the price) we're looking at roughly 12 years. But since fuel cells are dependant on materials sciences (not technology), Moores law will probably be a bit slower.

I'm a big fan of the fuel cell, it's just that it's touted benefits are a far... FAR cry from reality. It's like the 'American Idol' of the energy world - a lot of hype, but talent? Not so much. (It's funny, I held the same position you do about 2 years ago. Someone challenged me, I got a stick up my ass and tried to prove him wrong, and in the process swore never to admit to him that he's right. ;))

One other thing to consider - lead acid batteries can be recycled with water cheaply. Fuel cells... pretty much can't unless someone's figured out how to unbond gold from nickle.

Here, here, and here are just some of the reasons! ;-)

[...]
In the cell, DNA is modified biochemically by a variety of enzymes, which are tiny protein machines that read and process DNA according to nature's design. There is a wide variety and number of these "operational" proteins, which manipulate DNA on the molecular level. For example, there are enzymes that cut DNA and enzymes that paste it back together. Other enzymes function as copiers, and others as repair units. Molecular biology, Biochemistry, and Biotechnology have developed techniques that allow us to perform many of these cellular functions in the test tube. It's this cellular machinery, along with some synthetic chemistry, that makes up the palette of operations available for computation. Just like a CPU has a basic suite of operations like addition, bit-shifting, logical operators (AND, OR, NOT NOR), etc. that allow it to perform even the most complex calculations, DNA has cutting, copying, pasting, repairing, and many others. And note that in the test tube, enzymes do not function sequentially, working on one DNA at a time. Rather, many copies of the enzyme can work on many DNA molecules simultaneously. This is the power of DNA computing, that it can work in a massively parallel fashion.
[...]

From here, someone else mentioned it in another post. Biology isn't the same, but it does have properties that are very close -- and they can be intergrated as the Author implies with his questions. Your evolution argument has nothing to do with the fact that biology can be applied to computers and that -- as the Author brought up -- computing theory might change thanks to biology. Read this page to get a better idea of where the Author is coming from.

Jake Lead
Salk Institute

That isn't the whole story, and the running backwards analogy is just plain wrong.

Have you heard of something called parallel computation? RSA is doing it right here with DNA computing.

I suggest you read some background on what this means in terms of the nature of modern day computing, there's a good article here. Here's something from the second page of the article:


Now let's consider how you would solve a nontrivial example of the traveling salesman problem (# of cities > 10) with silicon vs. DNA. With a von Neumann computer, one naive method would be to set up a search tree, measure each complete branch sequentially, and keep the shortest one. Improvements could be made with better search algorithms, such as pruning the search tree when one of the branches you are measuring is already longer than the best candidate. A method you certainly would not use would be to first generate all possible paths and then search the entire list. Why? Well, consider that the entire list of routes for a 20 city problem could theoretically take 45 million GBytes of memory (18! routes with 7 byte words)! Also for a 100 MIPS computer, it would take two years just to generate all paths (assuming one instruction cycle to generate each city in every path). However, using DNA computing, this method becomes feasible! 10^15 is just a nanomole of material, a relatively small number for biochemistry. Also, routes no longer have to be searched through sequentially. Operations can be done all in parallel.


This is a huge deal for computing. Huge.

I went to Berkeley too. Have you heard of The Berkeley Initiative in Soft Computing (BISC)? Read their website, it will also increase your understanding as to how fuzzy logic translates into efficiencies and more to the point, performance. Not to mention the potential for efficent and high levels of data storage in DNA. The possibilites are amazing! A detailed understanding of evolutionary biology in the context of fuzzy logic and modern day computer computation (especially parallel) will blow your mind in terms of how things came to be, and how they fit so perfectly with certain operations. This is really the next big thing.

G.R. Bouchard, PhD
Associate Professor of Biophysics

Perhaps they'll add some more work units to their setiathome stats?

Greenpeace reports that between 1950 and 1993 there have been 380 nuclear weapons accidents, some involving the accidental "dirty bomb" incidents, such as the dispersion of nuclear materials over Palomares in southern Spain.

Now according to the the National Human Radiobiology Tissue Repository who studied the Palomares incident as well as many other cases, a 78 year old person with elevated Pu in their bones will only have a 0.14285 probability of dying this year, whereas a normal american 78 year old will have an average probaility of dying this year of 0.12780.

We're already dropping nuclear material all over ourselves, and for the most part, you aren't going to hear about it until it's declassified.

Furthermore, have you been to Hiroshima and stood under the peace dome? Have you seen the children playing in the schools at Nagasaki?

The oppertunites for using peaceful nuclear power to explore space far outweigh the risks. Those accidents haven't degraded my environmental quality. I'm sure that a deliberate attack on myself would, but even that will heal with time.

We are talking about the power to reach out and travel the cosmos.

the chinese ming Emperor Zhu Di built a massive navy which traded extensively in the pacific, reached africa and almost discovered america.

When Emperor Zhu died, his sucessor was advised to lessen the tax burden of the navy, and burned all the ships. Result? Other more outward looking seafaring nations whipped them.

If we don't have deep space capability, then we are dead meat when we come across those who do. Especially if they are ex-earth colonists who decide to return. No chance of benevolance through alien genetics there.

Most of the examples I've seen in the comments so far are full of information. It is up to you to turn that information into knowledge. I'd say that websites containing actual knowledge as opposed to information are few if not nonexistent.

Sorry to be so pedantic, but the speaker at my college graduation said something along the lines of, "seek knowledge, not information" and it's the one thing from his speech that has stuck with me. Use information to gain knowledge, and use knowledge to gain wisdom. It is only through the power of the willing human mind that each transforms into the next.

But anyway, back to your regularly scheduled links full of cool information...

Imagine if all the companies that used embedded linux in their devices like the linksys and belkin routers were to install seti or any other distributed number crunshing item to tap the unused processor power of the devices....

Only at frequences that resonate with water (2.4ghz) like your microwave oven or your WiFi card. In the case of the WiFi card it isn't a big deal since the power is very low.

That's a common misconception. The resonant frequency of water is not at 2.45 GHz (the freq of microwave ovens). There is an absorption peak around 22 GHz for liquid water. (See How a microwave oven works and the graph from Ask Mr. SETI.) Of course, the molecules of water interact more than those of a gas, so things are a bit more complicated.

2.45 GHz was chosen as a compromise that would heat water, fats/oils, etc, as well as what was easily manufacturable back then.

In any case your are very likely correct. Neither WiFi cards nor diagnostic devices will be emitting very strong microwaves.

LMAO!! UC Berkeley itself has a lax policy on cheating... that might be why. You get -5% if you cheat. I think there should be an automatic expulsion. I one saw someone blantantly using a big-ass crib sheet in an upper div CS course that was closed-book, closed-notes and graded on a scale. You can bet your ass I told the TA, because that's just unacceptable. I also know that cheating is rampant, which is also as repungnant. Most of the cheating involves courses that have hours and hours of problem sets. Since I did not cheat, it took me hours and hours to complete and I did not always finish on time because there was just too much to do. In addition, I know there were people that cheated that got As, while I had to make do w/ Bs and Cs, even though I know more than them and learned the material.

As this applies to the SCO / *nix thing, the truth of the matter is that people cheat and cut corners everyday. Not to be an -ist or -ism, but the people these companies hire are not of necessarily the highest caliber or experience, or even legal citizens, most all companies are guilty of this... finding the cheapest and easiest, the people they hire are often desperate (in fear of death, sometimes) to get into the US or someplace similar. Desperate people do desperate things, so you inevitably get what you pay for.

Btw, I read in the paper that unemployed immigrants can get unemployment insurance. Great, now that the immigrants are here, there's no jobs to be had for more established people. Time to move to Russia.

As lore would have it, the original USL suit against BSD and Berkely University broke up on the rocks for a similar reason.

As lore would have it, the proper spelling of Berkeley is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," Berkely," Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music.

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do you think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL and LBNL, the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize for inventing the frickin LASER is a professor there.

Without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. If you can't even properly spell the name of the operating system to which you're referring, why even bother to make any comment at all?

As lore would have it, the original USL suit against BSD and Berkely University broke up on the rocks for a similar reason.

Er...

That would be the University of California, whose main campus is in Berkeley, California.

As near as I can tell from the popular articles, and the web page referenced in the New Scientist article, "Fast TCP" is not a new protocol, but rather better congestion control for standard TCP. I'm not a network guru by any means, so please take the comments below with a grain of salt.

Currently, TCP implementations use a standard trick to play nice with small router queues. Using precise timing would be better. I hassled Mike Karels over it about 10-15 years ago, but the consensus at the time was that the hardware wasn't up to it. Now it is. Also, modern routers have gotten clever about queue management, which screws up the trick.

The new proposal is to take advantage of modern HW to measure latencies. Existing TCP could thus be used more efficiently, by allowing larger amounts of data to be outstanding on the network without trashing routers.

It is not widely understood that in 1988 the Internet DOSed itself because of a protocol design issue, and Van Jacobsen got everybody to fix it by a consensus change to the reference implementation of TCP. These articles appear to report (badly) ongoing research into that issue.

North Korea can barely keep its electrical grid up - not to mention feed its people.

Like the United States?

Both of these statements are preposterous. The first requires that you have a truly bizarre defintion of "abject poverty", the second is flat-out wrong. (And that's from a site decrying the "unfair" wealth distribution).

I've been listening to Radio 1 Xtra for a while. I find it kind of lame that I have to turn to the British government of all places to hear good hip-hop on the radio when I live in the San Francisco Bay area, #4 radio market in the US. At least we have good college radio.

At this point the only commercial radio I listen to is classical, I can't really see it making radio that much less diverse. At a point advertisers don't want to have to buy time on 5 similar stations.

Seems like /. is in the list, with less than a thousand units returned. Way to go!