Slashdot Mirror

Allan M. Konrad
P.O. Box 4023
Berkeley, CA 94704

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

So Brian's web page:

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

VB is not a programming language. It is a cancerous agglutination of stupid stuff with no evidence of design or consistency. (And I know what I'm talking about, I've had to write lots of VB code at work.) Also, kids are smarter than you think. They're learning natural languages, a few funny characters like { and } doesn't faze them at all.

As far as the feared GOTO keyword, I never need to use it in VB

The goto is just a tool; use it where it makes sense. If you have three levels of nested blocks and you need to exit from the innermost, you shouldn't be writing code, son - go back to school and learn about design.

Really, only one thing needs to be said here: LOGO. It's freely available on all kinds of platforms, kids like it, and has very few stupid things about it. And UCB Logo is open source! Go look at http://http.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh/. On MS-Windows, MSW Logo.

If you really like procedural languages, have you considered Unicon, an extension of Icon that has integrated graphics, is object-oriented and has POSIX system calls? It even runs on NT! I've taught ten-year-olds to use it and they loved it. (Of course it runs under all kinds of Unix machines.)

-s

Text and hypertext processing Dynamic and interactive graphics; Video Personal data management, including e-mail and networking Programming It is all ther in the next gen of LOGOBOXER

boxer. One of the guys that wrote "Turtle Geomoty" is behind this OO LOGO on crack! Check it out. very neet stuff.

boxer Is the next genereaton of LOGO

Python is showing lots of promise as well -- its interactive, fairly simple syntax, has turtle graphics, but not the wealth of books for the younger set (actually, none). However, you must check out Alice - interactive 3D graphics for the web, with scripting for animations done in Python. Thats what I'm starting my 10 year old daughter on, falling back to logo if that doesn't work out.

Boxer is the new incarnation of LOGO. It is OO. Scary good and even easyer to learn than LOGO.

Ther is a programing environment designed to teach kids how to program it is called boxer it is based on logo. It is amazing!! Right now it only works on a Mac. The project is based out of the berkeley school of education. And the auther has a new book out on the topic called Changing minds Get it, read it, do it. You will not be disapointes. I am still trying to get over the BS that I picked up by learning to program in BASIC. But I still have good habits from my LOGO days. Did I mention that Boxer is OO?

More reasonable alternatives would include:

• Modula-3 , in which is written Spin.
• Or perhaps Oberon, which has been used to construct several OS-like environments.
• Or perhaps even Eiffel, whose Design By Contract approach makes claims that C++ can provide anything describable as rock solid look very silly.
• Based on the number of language compilers being built using ML, I'd think it to perhaps be a candidate. The ability to do heavy-duty static type inference would, not unlike with Eiffel, make claims of C++ being "rock solid" look pretty sad.

Yes, these languages don't have syntax that slavishly resembles C. But it's not as if the actual semantics of C++ or Java are actually that much like C...

Some felt that the BIOS switch was not secure enough. The serial number can also be reactivated from Windows with a utility that Intel provides, but it requires a reboot before it goes into operation. Here's a rundown of the whole serial number thing. Theoretically, the number might be switched on again without the user's knowledge and then invisbly read after the next restart. Personally I'm not at all concerned about the PSN, though.

When I used to live in SF, I had all these things you're talking about.
Omnisky Minstrel 3 modem, with GoAmerica coverage, Top Gun Postman for email (Set up a new POP account to mirror my email), and ProxiWeb as my web browser.

Postman and ProxiWeb are free (as in beer).

Stock quotes/Weather/traffic/movie showtimes all provided by my.yahoo.com. Driving directions by Mapquest (they have palm pilot version of their page, although I forget the URL)

--

I equate "Critics of the DMCA" with "Readers of Slashdot and Linux users." Perhaps this is silly... are there other large groups of people organized against the DMCA? I think librarians in general probably are... but I also think that /. readers & Linux activists may have more political/PR clout than they realize.

Or I could be on crack. :)

No comment. ;-)

As a small bit of historical background, DMCA was enacted in 1998, but there have been legislative proposals to deal with technological circumvention measures since about 1995, IIRC. Many Law Professors were concerned about those proposals from the beginning, fought them, fought DMCA, before ever enacted.

Obviously, the fight was not successful, but the outgrowth of that early work still influences the legal debate today. See, for example, this paper by Professor Pamela Samuelson at Berkeley, published virtually right after DMCA became law, still frequently cited.

well spoken.

i think this may be a good time for people to remember what Thoreau's Civil Disobedience essay is all about.

- jonathan.

• The relevance of mentioning "Big Iron" is that this is what made Ellison rich.

  Oracle doesn't get its revenue flows from selling Network Computers with StrongARM chips; that was a loss. It makes its money off selling licenses and services for the DBMS products.

• I will believe that PostgreSQL (which is quite distinct from Postgres ) has "serious corporate backing," as compared to ODS, when we see availability of at least two of the following:
  • An XA interface is produced for PostgreSQL
  • Tuxedo becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • MQSeries becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Talarian becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tibco TIB becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • Tengah becomes available for PostgreSQL
  • R/3 can run atop PostgreSQL
  • PeopleSoft can run atop PostgreSQL

  Those are good examples of "enterprise" software that integrates with ODS and (on the middleware side) are used to allow ODS to be used to build very large scalable applications.

  Substitute MySQL for PostgreSQL as needed here...

By the way, Michael Stonebraker answered the question, Is there a connection between the Ingres and Postgres projects? back in 1994 with the clear answer of NO .

http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/ic2d/

We're at UC Berkeley grad school CS researching user interfaces. You can check out the other stuff we're doing too.

http://guir.berkeley.edu/

http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/ic2d/

We're at UC Berkeley grad school CS researching user interfaces. You can check out the other stuff we're doing too.

http://guir.berkeley.edu/

Posted on Slashdot last year. A Mac Plus that runs at 1Ghz.
Maybe those old Macs still have a life after all?

SETIatHome is getting some significant results.

I think we should have Hubble to take a look at the source of the hottest signals.

OT: I wish the SETI site would provide a little more discussion of what these apparent hits mean. I think it just means there is a definite source of some sort of signal, but I don't know if it means there is any indication the source is other than a natural phenomenon or errata. The 3/29/00 Newsletter which was published after the latest strong Gaussians was processed says they haven't found any other than "be radio frequency interference, or test signals we inject into the data stream to monitor system, or improperly processed work units" so far. But if that is case, why do they leave them on the statistics page?

SETIatHome is getting some significant results.

I think we should have Hubble to take a look at the source of the hottest signals.

OT: I wish the SETI site would provide a little more discussion of what these apparent hits mean. I think it just means there is a definite source of some sort of signal, but I don't know if it means there is any indication the source is other than a natural phenomenon or errata. The 3/29/00 Newsletter which was published after the latest strong Gaussians was processed says they haven't found any other than "be radio frequency interference, or test signals we inject into the data stream to monitor system, or improperly processed work units" so far. But if that is case, why do they leave them on the statistics page?

SETIatHome is getting some significant results.

I think we should have Hubble to take a look at the source of the hottest signals.

OT: I wish the SETI site would provide a little more discussion of what these apparent hits mean. I think it just means there is a definite source of some sort of signal, but I don't know if it means there is any indication the source is other than a natural phenomenon or errata. The 3/29/00 Newsletter which was published after the latest strong Gaussians was processed says they haven't found any other than "be radio frequency interference, or test signals we inject into the data stream to monitor system, or improperly processed work units" so far. But if that is case, why do they leave them on the statistics page?

I would suggest that if you were seriously thinking about a Digital Library project, you should familiarize yourself with the "state of the art" and what others are doing in real-world projects in this area.

I find that a lot of the work out there is very research oriented, and conducted by library science folks really, really concerned with "getting it right". It's a little *too* anal for my purposes, but you have to admit, all the 'i's are dotted and the 't's crossed.

I just wrapped up design on an object-oriented framework for a Digital Library project (modeled on my earlier work for Early English Books Online http://wwwlib.umi.com/eebo), and I found the work being done at Cornell very valuable as an inspiration. The Making of America II project is also an excellent overview of a well-thought-out Digital Library project.

So, for those interested in a little theory and practice, check these links out:

Digital Library Links and Resources:
http://www.ifla.org/II/diglib.htm

Cornell Digital Library Research Group
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/

Making of America II
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/MOA2/

FEDORA (an architecture for information storage and retrieval, *very* nice).

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/cdlrg/FEDORA. html

In most cases the easiest thing to do is simply buy more hardware and replicate. This is easy to do if you're serving up static (or even dymamic) web pages that don't need to share any state across multiple web servers. This is feasible because in many situations the bottleneck of the site is the web server and dynamic page generation itself, not access to the back-end database. For really large sites, a replicated/clustered database is going to be needed, not just a single machine running MySQL.

The Application Server industry has started to provide some solutions for building scalable web sites -- for example, IBM WebSphere, BEA WebLogic, and other systems provide a platform for building web-based applications, which generally consist as a middleware layer between an HTML/presentation 'front end' (i.e., a web server) and a database 'back end'. These middleware systems support replication and clustering to increase efficiency. Replicating the front-end web servers is easy, and many products support this. You can even buy fancy network switches which load-balance HTTP requests across multiple web servers. Replicating the back-end database is much harder, but that's how companies like Oracle earn their money.

Not surprisingly nearly all heavily-loaded Web sites have to do a huge amount of work to get all of this working right. One thing you might ask is whether the process of building a scalable Web site could be made simpler. That's the goal of the research project I work on at UC Berkeley, called Ninja.

Matt Welsh, mdw@cs.berkeley.edu

• I met one girl who had nineteen job offers.
  
• Met a girl who had been picked up in a limo, taken to probably the most expensive restaraunt in San Francisco, returned in limo, and sent flowers the next day, by like 8 different companies (Oracle, MS, etc.).
  
• Met a guy whose friend is getting 6 figures when he graduates (so he claims).
  
• Met a guy who didn't have to buy himself dinner for two weeks because recruiters were doing it
  

Java IMHO is a hardcore OO language.

Some have dared go further

You're right about one thing:

nobody has a decent idea of how to fairly organize really large groups of people

But capitalism isn't a "body" or a "union" or even a "corporation". Capitalism is a natural(1) system that promotes the common good without requiring the compulsion, or compliance, or even the knowledge of any of its participants. Read about Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand", or Leonard Read's "I, Pencil".

(For the benefit of greenrd:)

1. Natural (system): In this context, any social structure that arises out of the self-interest of each of the participants. This is in contrast with "managed" systems that are planned and organized by a single person, or by a committee that is small in comparison with the total number of participants.

I noted that the Minix license, as quoted, does not include the advertising clause. What part of this do you not understand?

I referred to the change notice posted by UC Berkeley because I couldn't find a copy of the full text of the earlier version of the BSD license. However, it is the same clause 3 which effects the advertising clause. You'll note (if you bother to follow the two thoughtfully provided links) that this clause three isn't present in the Minix license.

Minix was never issued under the prior version of the BSD license, so no, the change notice doesn't affect Minix. You appear to be confused on this point.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

The license is quoted in full at the Deja archive. The advertising clause afflicted only the "old" BSD license, the language is included in the notice which rescinded this clause.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Scope out Kuro5hin

I'm not an apologist for NASA (heh -- you ought to hear some of the stories I can tell), but you ought to realize that there's plenty of science done without them (yes, even space and planetary science), and plenty of science interest independent of NASA on the part of the media.

If you want to bash 'em, do it on reasonable grounds; don't try to link it to something else entirely...

---

Any professional asttronomers or planet finders out there care to comment?

I'm not a professional in the field (I've used my physics degree to bootstrap myself into engineering consulting), but my field of interest was astrophysics, so I'll take a swing at it. Lotsa questions, though...

Remember, all these observations are INDIRECT. They are estimating the size of the planet by the solar wobble caused by the tug of gravity by these planets on their suns. Now, whose to say that this tug is caused by 1 super-jovian sized planet or 5-11 terran sized planets?

That information comes from the Doppler data: compare the present discovery with a system which has multiple planets. In the first case, you'll see a simple periodic variation in the Doppler shift -- a distorted sine curve, if you will, but one which has a single periodic structure which corresponds to the period of the planet. In the second case, there are three periods -- one for each of the three planets -- so they stack up on top of each other, to form a complex periodic structure. The second plot on that page shows the second and third planets' Doppler curve, with the very short-period inner planet removed; you see a long-period sinusoidal curve (the outer planet's), with a shorter-period curve (the second planet's) making about 5 "ripples" in the long-period curve (meaning that the second planet orbits about 5 times for each orbit of the outer one -- 241 days to 1309 days, in fact).

I won't go into the details -- there's plenty of that on the second link -- but it's just a matter of analysis of the data, fitting a model to it, and making a few wise choices if you find that the simplest models won't do. And BTW, it would take a lot more than a handful of terrestrial planets to equal the mass of a super-jovian -- although Jupiter is about 11 Earth diameters wide, it is much more massive (around 80 terrestrial masses, IIRC -- but don't quote me on that, I don't have a text or a link handy).

Whose to say these Saturn like and jovian like planets don't have moons in orbit that are in a "habitable zone?".

That may very well be the case, but we won't find that out with the present equipment. More reason to keep searching, and to get better instruments!

I wonder if we could detect anything but Jupiter from our ouwn sun's wobble? How big a planet does old Sol's wobble say is in orbit around it - 2 Jupiters or 1 jupiter and 8 to 9 others? How does an Oort cloud or Kuiper belt of material affect these calculations?

Right now, we'd might be able to detect Jupiter and possibly Saturn -- but both of those planets are in more-distant orbits than what we've found so far, so detection would be more difficult. The Doppler method would completely miss everything else in the Solar system. (Again, the mass of the rest of the system, after Jupiter and a bit from Saturn, is trivial...)

The Oort cloud and Kuiper belt don't have much effect at all -- orbits of stuff out there are quite long (hundreds of years and way up), compared to the few days to a few years for all the extrasolar planets detected so far. And as far as we know, the masses of bodies in both aren't very large -- in fact, they don't even detectably perturb the orbits of the planets in the Solar system, and we've been looking for that for a long time. Even if something quite large was out there, it would take hundreds to thousands of years of watching to detect it -- either here or in the extrasolar planetary systems.

Until we have a spaced based interferometer array (which I beleive NASA is trying to get funding for)which can do DIRECT imaging of these planets, we will not know of any reall numbers and sizes.

Actually, we do know one planet's mass and size, because it passed between us and the disk of its star; that allows us to remove the uncertainty in mass (from Doppler data, we only know a lower limit on the planet's mass) because we now know the plane of the orbit, and from the measured dimming of the star's light, we know the size of the planet.

But that's a rare case, and I won't argue that we don't need a space-based interferometer array.

Good questions, all of them -- and I hope I've answered them, at least partially.

---

Any professional asttronomers or planet finders out there care to comment?

I'm not a professional in the field (I've used my physics degree to bootstrap myself into engineering consulting), but my field of interest was astrophysics, so I'll take a swing at it. Lotsa questions, though...

Remember, all these observations are INDIRECT. They are estimating the size of the planet by the solar wobble caused by the tug of gravity by these planets on their suns. Now, whose to say that this tug is caused by 1 super-jovian sized planet or 5-11 terran sized planets?

That information comes from the Doppler data: compare the present discovery with a system which has multiple planets. In the first case, you'll see a simple periodic variation in the Doppler shift -- a distorted sine curve, if you will, but one which has a single periodic structure which corresponds to the period of the planet. In the second case, there are three periods -- one for each of the three planets -- so they stack up on top of each other, to form a complex periodic structure. The second plot on that page shows the second and third planets' Doppler curve, with the very short-period inner planet removed; you see a long-period sinusoidal curve (the outer planet's), with a shorter-period curve (the second planet's) making about 5 "ripples" in the long-period curve (meaning that the second planet orbits about 5 times for each orbit of the outer one -- 241 days to 1309 days, in fact).

I won't go into the details -- there's plenty of that on the second link -- but it's just a matter of analysis of the data, fitting a model to it, and making a few wise choices if you find that the simplest models won't do. And BTW, it would take a lot more than a handful of terrestrial planets to equal the mass of a super-jovian -- although Jupiter is about 11 Earth diameters wide, it is much more massive (around 80 terrestrial masses, IIRC -- but don't quote me on that, I don't have a text or a link handy).

Whose to say these Saturn like and jovian like planets don't have moons in orbit that are in a "habitable zone?".

That may very well be the case, but we won't find that out with the present equipment. More reason to keep searching, and to get better instruments!

I wonder if we could detect anything but Jupiter from our ouwn sun's wobble? How big a planet does old Sol's wobble say is in orbit around it - 2 Jupiters or 1 jupiter and 8 to 9 others? How does an Oort cloud or Kuiper belt of material affect these calculations?

Right now, we'd might be able to detect Jupiter and possibly Saturn -- but both of those planets are in more-distant orbits than what we've found so far, so detection would be more difficult. The Doppler method would completely miss everything else in the Solar system. (Again, the mass of the rest of the system, after Jupiter and a bit from Saturn, is trivial...)

The Oort cloud and Kuiper belt don't have much effect at all -- orbits of stuff out there are quite long (hundreds of years and way up), compared to the few days to a few years for all the extrasolar planets detected so far. And as far as we know, the masses of bodies in both aren't very large -- in fact, they don't even detectably perturb the orbits of the planets in the Solar system, and we've been looking for that for a long time. Even if something quite large was out there, it would take hundreds to thousands of years of watching to detect it -- either here or in the extrasolar planetary systems.

Until we have a spaced based interferometer array (which I beleive NASA is trying to get funding for)which can do DIRECT imaging of these planets, we will not know of any reall numbers and sizes.

Actually, we do know one planet's mass and size, because it passed between us and the disk of its star; that allows us to remove the uncertainty in mass (from Doppler data, we only know a lower limit on the planet's mass) because we now know the plane of the orbit, and from the measured dimming of the star's light, we know the size of the planet.

But that's a rare case, and I won't argue that we don't need a space-based interferometer array.

Good questions, all of them -- and I hope I've answered them, at least partially.

---

Any professional asttronomers or planet finders out there care to comment?

I'm not a professional in the field (I've used my physics degree to bootstrap myself into engineering consulting), but my field of interest was astrophysics, so I'll take a swing at it. Lotsa questions, though...

Remember, all these observations are INDIRECT. They are estimating the size of the planet by the solar wobble caused by the tug of gravity by these planets on their suns. Now, whose to say that this tug is caused by 1 super-jovian sized planet or 5-11 terran sized planets?

That information comes from the Doppler data: compare the present discovery with a system which has multiple planets. In the first case, you'll see a simple periodic variation in the Doppler shift -- a distorted sine curve, if you will, but one which has a single periodic structure which corresponds to the period of the planet. In the second case, there are three periods -- one for each of the three planets -- so they stack up on top of each other, to form a complex periodic structure. The second plot on that page shows the second and third planets' Doppler curve, with the very short-period inner planet removed; you see a long-period sinusoidal curve (the outer planet's), with a shorter-period curve (the second planet's) making about 5 "ripples" in the long-period curve (meaning that the second planet orbits about 5 times for each orbit of the outer one -- 241 days to 1309 days, in fact).

I won't go into the details -- there's plenty of that on the second link -- but it's just a matter of analysis of the data, fitting a model to it, and making a few wise choices if you find that the simplest models won't do. And BTW, it would take a lot more than a handful of terrestrial planets to equal the mass of a super-jovian -- although Jupiter is about 11 Earth diameters wide, it is much more massive (around 80 terrestrial masses, IIRC -- but don't quote me on that, I don't have a text or a link handy).

Whose to say these Saturn like and jovian like planets don't have moons in orbit that are in a "habitable zone?".

That may very well be the case, but we won't find that out with the present equipment. More reason to keep searching, and to get better instruments!

I wonder if we could detect anything but Jupiter from our ouwn sun's wobble? How big a planet does old Sol's wobble say is in orbit around it - 2 Jupiters or 1 jupiter and 8 to 9 others? How does an Oort cloud or Kuiper belt of material affect these calculations?

Right now, we'd might be able to detect Jupiter and possibly Saturn -- but both of those planets are in more-distant orbits than what we've found so far, so detection would be more difficult. The Doppler method would completely miss everything else in the Solar system. (Again, the mass of the rest of the system, after Jupiter and a bit from Saturn, is trivial...)

The Oort cloud and Kuiper belt don't have much effect at all -- orbits of stuff out there are quite long (hundreds of years and way up), compared to the few days to a few years for all the extrasolar planets detected so far. And as far as we know, the masses of bodies in both aren't very large -- in fact, they don't even detectably perturb the orbits of the planets in the Solar system, and we've been looking for that for a long time. Even if something quite large was out there, it would take hundreds to thousands of years of watching to detect it -- either here or in the extrasolar planetary systems.

Until we have a spaced based interferometer array (which I beleive NASA is trying to get funding for)which can do DIRECT imaging of these planets, we will not know of any reall numbers and sizes.

Actually, we do know one planet's mass and size, because it passed between us and the disk of its star; that allows us to remove the uncertainty in mass (from Doppler data, we only know a lower limit on the planet's mass) because we now know the plane of the orbit, and from the measured dimming of the star's light, we know the size of the planet.

But that's a rare case, and I won't argue that we don't need a space-based interferometer array.

Good questions, all of them -- and I hope I've answered them, at least partially.

---

SOAR (Searchable Online Archive of Recipes) is pretty close to what you propose, only with all food, not just Pizza. And, it's under a pretty free license, basically "copy but don't claim it's your own work."

http://bwrc.eecs.berkele y.edu/CIC/summary/local/summary.pdf

lotsa juicy stuffs... has some tech specs too...
but remember that spec isn't the be-all end-all measure of a machine, just a neat l'il tool for cpu power, nothing else (sometimes not EVEN for cpu power... ie. it can't measure everything)...

All good things,

• Ethernet run through the walls for the network
• Entertainment computer in living room for:
  • Playing DVD's
  • Playing CD's
  • Playing MP3's (see below)
  • Streaming Video
  • Listen to KFOG over the net
  • Look up movies/actors/etc in the IMDB
  • Check out movies and music at The Listology
  • Rent videos from Kozmo
• WebCams in my Dad's bedroom so I can keep an eye on him while working (and kids, eventually)
• Kitchen Computer for:
  • Looking up recipes at SOAR
  • Ordering groceries from WebVan
  • Listening to music while I cook (see above)
  • Maybe hooking up my BarCode reader for easier ordering
  • Be ready for the controllable microwave oven, coffee pot, etc.
• Bedroom computer (possibly an iMac?) to:
  • Do all the stuff that the living room machine does
  • Read Slashdot in bed
  • "etc" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more...)
• My work computers and my wife's
• The internet gateway machine (I wish I could afford a FreeGate box!)
• The File Server with big hard drive to share files and hold 400 CD's worth of MP3's (for instant access anywhere in the house)
• Wireless link to my Land Rover to upload stories, pics, etc. from the road

Okay, so it's not that high-tech, but some of the technologies that make it possible for someone with no time to figure out include:

• IP Forwarding
• Samba
• NetATalk (eventually)
• The overall elegance of ethernet
• A lot of very helpful friends

All I need now are simple instructions for setting up a webcam under Linux (and a source of cheap webcams), to get NetATalk up and running (My wife's a school teacher, and has mac's at home to match the ones at school) and to find something that will let a Linux box see a directory on another system as if it were one of its one (like mapping a network drive with Windows/Samba.)

This is fun stuff!

• Jolt Coders
  
• Beer Coders
  

Check out William Kahan's web page for some good information on floating point arithmetic. Kahan was a consultant to Intel for the design of the 8087 FPU.

Aah, that brings back memories. I remember printing out that web guide and a Paleontology web site sometime in 1993 and emailing it to someone. I had attempted to explain this amazing new "World Wide Web" thing to her but she could not comprehend it. Heh, heh.. oh for the days of all grey backgrounds and images which were impervious to having text wrapped around them.

Genomic (and anti-genomics) Links [To Top]

Mapping the Icelandic Genome. "An Anthropology of the scientific, political, economic, religious, and ethical issues surrounding the deCode Project and its global implications." Contains useful pointers.

Indigenous people's coalition against biopiracy.

The Human Genome Diversity Project as explained by Stanford Professor and posted on the U.N. website.

Various UN reports on the Genome question.

An Outline : Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) Background.

Cultural Survival has issue 20.2 (sum 1996) dedicated to 'Genes, People, and Property' issues.

The archive for discover magazine. Nov. 1994 issue has a few articles about genome and diversity.

The gene letter. The Nov. 96 issue has an HGDP article.

High school lesson plan for teaching students about the HGDP.

"The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome." An excellent book review with bibliography and online resources.

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has a Bibliography Page about the HGP.

Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the HGP.

The Human Genome Diversity Project: Scientific, Social and Ethical Issues .

A list of articles from Native-L mailing list, listing all articles related to HGDP posted to the list.

Six papers given at various genome-related conferences. Topics include:

*"Why Human Genetics is a Social Science"
* "Racism, Eugenics, and the Burdens of History"
* "Scientific and Folk Idea About Heredity"
* "The Spectrum of Human Variation"
* "The Human Germ-Plasm Project: Eugenics in the 1920s and the 1990s."

Native net letter to HGDP scientists.

Pilot Projects for a Human Genome Diversity Project - Special Competition.

Molecular Anthropology Symposium at Stanford.

Seeds of Destruction. A must read for anyone who eats french fries or is concerned with genetically modified crops.

Also see Patents and Jumpstations.

Comics [To Top]

Angels of Health/Medicine Cartoon by Quino. Here is another one of a dis-orderly girl.

Patent$ and Thing$ [To Top]

An Upside article discussing patents and its history. Very informative.

Gene Patents and Bioethics.

6,000 human gene patents sought in BBC News and also the Washington Post.

American Society of Human Genetics Position Paper on Patenting of Expressed Sequence Tags.

of course the list is continually updated, ... hope this helps, bobbaqATyouknowHOO

Genomic (and anti-genomics) Links [To Top]

Mapping the Icelandic Genome. "An Anthropology of the scientific, political, economic, religious, and ethical issues surrounding the deCode Project and its global implications." Contains useful pointers.

Indigenous people's coalition against biopiracy.

The Human Genome Diversity Project as explained by Stanford Professor and posted on the U.N. website.

Various UN reports on the Genome question.

An Outline : Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) Background.

Cultural Survival has issue 20.2 (sum 1996) dedicated to 'Genes, People, and Property' issues.

The archive for discover magazine. Nov. 1994 issue has a few articles about genome and diversity.

The gene letter. The Nov. 96 issue has an HGDP article.

High school lesson plan for teaching students about the HGDP.

"The Gene Wars: Science, Politics, and the Human Genome." An excellent book review with bibliography and online resources.

National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) has a Bibliography Page about the HGP.

Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) of the HGP.

The Human Genome Diversity Project: Scientific, Social and Ethical Issues .

A list of articles from Native-L mailing list, listing all articles related to HGDP posted to the list.

Six papers given at various genome-related conferences. Topics include:

*"Why Human Genetics is a Social Science"
* "Racism, Eugenics, and the Burdens of History"
* "Scientific and Folk Idea About Heredity"
* "The Spectrum of Human Variation"
* "The Human Germ-Plasm Project: Eugenics in the 1920s and the 1990s."

Native net letter to HGDP scientists.

Pilot Projects for a Human Genome Diversity Project - Special Competition.

Molecular Anthropology Symposium at Stanford.

Seeds of Destruction. A must read for anyone who eats french fries or is concerned with genetically modified crops.

Also see Patents and Jumpstations.

Comics [To Top]

Angels of Health/Medicine Cartoon by Quino. Here is another one of a dis-orderly girl.

Patent$ and Thing$ [To Top]

An Upside article discussing patents and its history. Very informative.

Gene Patents and Bioethics.

6,000 human gene patents sought in BBC News and also the Washington Post.

American Society of Human Genetics Position Paper on Patenting of Expressed Sequence Tags.

of course the list is continually updated, ... hope this helps, bobbaqATyouknowHOO

Oops, that's here for the online book on Structured Audio.

MPEG 4 Structured Audio is a good base language for building music apps -- our web page has an online tutorial about the standard, and a MP4-SA to C translator that produces runtimes that can work in real-time. It's a "meta-answer" to the Ask Slashdot question; it's probably not going to help today, but I think its the right techology for Linux to build on.

Mark Miller (who has a really cool web page on advanced OS stuff) used to have a page on Hydra; seems to be gone now, unfortunately.

Hydra was a capability-based system, and is likely moreso a parent of EROS than it is a child of Multics...

I must have been watching the OTHER WTO protests in Seattle that week, since that's not what I saw. Whipping on over to cnn.com, and doing a search for "seattle wto protests" yields two articles at the top of a long list. The first is a classical "free trade is good, even though sometimes it's hard to see that" argument, but the second says, more or less "the protests worked, people are thinking".

I do look down on most civil disobedience because there are better ways to go about making a change happen, specifically when dealing with the US government. Throwing rocks and bottles and staging sit ins does nothing to help reverse or modify the policies or the DMCA.

I'd argue that throwing rocks and bottles never helps anything, and nonviolent civil disobedience is probably not the most effective tack for changing the DMCA. However, nonviolent civil disobedience has a long history as an effective tool to work towards positive change.

Obvious examples are Mahatma Ghandi and the Indian liberation movement, Martin Luther King Jr, and the civil rights movement. Even today, your distasteful "long hairs" are using it effectively in smaller battles, such as the recently-ended tree sit in the Pacific Northwest. Maybe you're convinced that Ghandi could have written to the British governer of India and had much better results, but somehow, I doubt it. Many issues, including the WTO, require the attention of the public at large to start a change.

Thoreau wrote the now classic essay Civil Disobedience over a century ago, and it argues the point of civil protest in social action more eloquently than I can, here.

Please, don't denegrate a culture or method of social activism you obviously either don't want to or can't understand.

Check out this Mac Plus (circa 1980s) running at 1 GHz.

http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~schrier/plus.html

Nachos prior to your modifications is a very very simple OS. Originally you start with the threads section and modify their code in order to show problems with Concurrent Programming. Then you show the proper way to do programming and create Semaphore, Locks, and Condtion variables, and your own special Synchronization Primitive. After which we program a Building with N Elevators with N people. This is half the semester, and I don't remember what we're doing after this, but we went as far as creating our own memory/process manager/allocator.

This is quite a fast paced and intense class. Difficult...yes...worth it, I'm sure.

Nachos prior to your modifications is a very very simple OS. Originally you start with the threads section and modify their code in order to show problems with Concurrent Programming. Then you show the proper way to do programming and create Semaphore, Locks, and Condtion variables, and your own special Synchronization Primitive. After which we program a Building with N Elevators with N people. This is half the semester, and I don't remember what we're doing after this, but we went as far as creating our own memory/process manager/allocator.

This is quite a fast paced and intense class. Difficult...yes...worth it, I'm sure.

"s another side note to this, Lucent Tech. has an EBL system just about at proof of concept called SCAPEL. Hope this clears up a few of the wrong ideas and helps people understand what this is all about."

Might I point out that here on slashdot back in October or November was an announcement that Lucent had reached a resolution of .05 microns using SCALPEL. Then let's not forget the UC Berkeley student who made an even smaller transistor two weeks later. Something like 0.018 microns or so. This IBM announcement is not really anything new. Here is the press release.

Electron beam lithography is nothing new, nor is IBM the only one developing it. In fact, there have been much smaller transistors made (such as the 18 nanometer transistor made here at UC-Berkeley using e-beam lithography).

The drawback to direct-write electron beam lithography is that you have to directly trace the circuit you are trying to print in most cases, while in optical lithography you can expose an entire die (or multiple die) at once. There have been improvements made over the years, using techniques such as parallel writing, but it's still slow. Even using a more conventional masked resist and scanning the beam across the wafer using vector or raster methods, there are problems with electron scattering and such.

This article is pretty short on technical content, so it may be that IBM has developed a way to make e-beam lithography fast enough to be used in a production environment for chips (it is already used for making photomasks). That would definitely be a significant development. We'll have to wait and see, I guess.

Also, keep in mind that just because they have a lithography tool that can write 80 nanometer lines does not mean that the rest of the processing equipment (etching, planarization, etc.) could support it. There would need to be advances in those tools as well.

My other question is, what do we do with tens of billions of transistors? If we jump three orders of magnitude in the number of transistors on a chip, is it really going to do us any good, at least with current circuit design techniques? I think testing a circuit like that would be a nightmare.

-Jason