Slashdot Mirror

wytcld writes: "CNN reports astronomers are pushing for a radio telescope on the 'dark side of the moon' (do real astronomers call it the 'dark side,' when it gets plenty of light?). The proposal by Yuki David Takahashi is amazing mostly because a guy just starting work on his Master's is managing major press for it. Still, a nice dream."

nknouf writes: "A recent article on Salon talks about how college radio stations that webcast could face fee increases from $623/year to $10,000 to $20,000 per year. What's more interesting is information that Congress is considering a bill called the Music On-Line Competition Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Chris Cannon, R-Utah and Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Va. The bill aims to "break the hammerlock the recording industry has over music distribution." My favorite quote, from Rep. Cannon: Napster is "one of the coolest inventions of modern times.""

camusflage writes: "The New York Times has a story that some physicists think it might be possible to make black holes at the under construction Large Hadron Collider at CERN, slated to come online in 2006. Trying to allay concerns about a man-made black hole blipping us out of existence, they say "The same calculations ... predict that around 100 such black holes a year are `organically' and apparently safely produced in the earth's atmosphere in cosmic ray collisions." As long as we can keep critters from building nests in the singularity, we should be okay."

Booker writes "According to this article, a study by the Voting Technology Project (a joint venture of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is recommending that Internet voting be significantly delayed for further study. "The teams expressed even less enthusiasm for Internet voting, which `has all the problems of absentee voting and adds problems of security,' said MIT computer scientist Ron Rivest. `At least a decade of further research on the security of home computers is needed before Internet voting can come in.'" They do recommend better use of technology in voting, just not on the net - yet. They also report that between 4 million and 6 million votes were lost last November due to faulty equipment or other snafus. Read the report for yourself for all the info."

Booker writes "According to this article, a study by the Voting Technology Project (a joint venture of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) is recommending that Internet voting be significantly delayed for further study. "The teams expressed even less enthusiasm for Internet voting, which `has all the problems of absentee voting and adds problems of security,' said MIT computer scientist Ron Rivest. `At least a decade of further research on the security of home computers is needed before Internet voting can come in.'" They do recommend better use of technology in voting, just not on the net - yet. They also report that between 4 million and 6 million votes were lost last November due to faulty equipment or other snafus. Read the report for yourself for all the info."

PineGreen writes: "Tomorrow, MAP Satellite is to be launched. MAP is the first space mission to measure Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) fluctuations after the famous COBE who was first to detect fluctuations in the CMB. It is supposed to do the job with an unprecedented accuracy. There were several successful balloon experiments (Boomerang, Maxima) and interferometer experiments (VSA, DASI, CBI), some of which still haven't published their data. But of course, we are all waiting for the big European Planck mission in 2007. Measuring CMB fluctuations can tell us a lot about the universe in which we live, its constituents and its geometrical properties."

streak asks: "After listening to a talk given in my Law & Technology class by Karl Auerbach, who is on the Board of Directors of ICANN, I started to question the legitimacy of it. It seems that ICANN just kinda sprang up out of nowhere and stated that they have the right to administer the internet. But does anyone hold them accountable?" With the recent news of their fight with the IETF, is it finally time to question ICANN's authority?

"ICANN is really a government no matter how much they deny it. They create laws that affect people internationally and levy taxes in the form of fees for doamin registration. It can control anyone's presence on the internet by taking away your domain name and your IP address as they see fit.

The popular opinion of ICANN seems to be that they serve to exclude people rather than include them. This was exemplified by the fact a the most recent election that only 5 seats were up when there should have been a lot more (apparently some members self-lengthed their terms from 1 to 4 years)...

So as I understand it, ICANN was just sort of created by the Commerce Department without regards to any outside opinions. It seems like the Commerce Department is extending governmental rights to ICANN since the Commerce Department pretty much goes along with whatever they say. Why should ICANN receive so much weight in the mind of the Commerce Department? Perhaps we, as Internet users, should petition the Commerce Department for changes we want to top-level domains and other naming issues. To this end, I think we should question the foundation of ICANN.

I am not saying that the Internet shouldn't have a governing body, but perhaps it should have been created through a system that drew on input of Internet users, instead of shutting them out."

RickMuller asks: "I'm interested in molecular graphics, a field entirely dominated by OpenGL. I would love to see something more web-friendly come along. I've worked with VRML and Java3D, and have been very puzzled why these technologies didn't become ubiquitous. Now there are new 3D efforts by Adobe and Macromedia (the Adobe Atmosphere download is available as a beta-download and is way cool!). The press is heralding this as the 3D web revolution. Why should these technologies succeed when VRML or Java3D failed?"

Over the past few months, several questions regarding wiring home LANs have been submitted to the Ask Slashdot bin. These questions cover just about every aspect a person might be faced with when trying to wire a home, so I thought it was best to just collect them all in one go. I figure there are a number of people out there who have done this (I just got finished wiring mine, for that matter), and that there are many more out there who have been searching around for assistance. So if you've ever been interested in building a home LAN from the ground up, or if you have already done so and would like to comment on your experiences, please pull up a chair and share what's on your mind.

Wired, or Wireless? RickMuller asks: "I have a cable modem feeding into an ethernet hub in my house, of off which I string anywhere from 2-5 different computers. Currently these are all clustered near the cable modem itself. I would like to be able to spread the computers through my house, and particularly to be able to bring my laptop to other parts of the house and still be able to work online. I'm considering either hiring an electrician to wire the walls, or finding some wireless format. Wireless is definitely cooler, but I'm a little bit scared off by the 'tower of babel' of different formats. Plus the expense is a consideration. Can anyone else offer an opinion on wireless vs. wired at home, and if wireless, which wireless format?"

Sticking with the open solution is always the best, so I would go with an IEEE 802.11 based network for the wireless segment. Are there any wireless cards that do not grok 802.11? If so, then I'd stay well away from these unless the cost savings are really huge, which I doubt.

Building the Home of the 21st Century! Cactii submits: "My wife and I are thinkng about buying a home soon. We both have our own ideas about what the place is going to be like and the immediate improvements we will make to the existing structure of the house. My ideas involve electronic interfaces to different areas of the house. Wiring the house for a network and using the computer for almost everything that it can be used for.

First off - I'm going to wire the living room or family room into a total entertainment center. It'll have the usual stereo, TV, DVD, VCR, etc... However there'll also be a computer connected to a proxy server that allows instant internet access. The computer will allow us to surf the net and download MP3's to be played right off the computer hard drive through the stereo and other things as well.

I've been looking around for other 'Wired Home' solutions and all I've found were some programs and electronic gizmos that offer only a piece of the solution. X10.com is about as close to a solution as anything but I don't want all these little boxes hanging off of the wall plugs.

Has anybody found anything more integral? More of a total solution?"

Wiring A Home With an Eye on the Future? Oroborus asks: "My parents are building a new house from ground up, and want to try to be as 'forward compatible' as possible. They've asked for my help in incorporating as much technology as possible, and in preparing it for any future technology that we can forsee. The problem is that though they're excited by technology, they're not all that conversant with it, and anything they include will have to be extremely user friendly. My initial thought is to wire the house with shielded ethernet cable with all the drops in the basement, to be wired to a hub/router later. But they've got high hopes for a 'smart home', how else can they prepare for the future?"

A tough job, but maybe with a bit of thought, such things can be prepared for. How would you wire a home with an eye on making it so that future capabilities can be added in without painful construction bills?

Wiring Hostile Home Environments? Old Man Kensey issues the following query: "I've been annoying my roommate by populating every possible room in our apartment with a terminal of some kind (X over the Ethernet, null-modem PPP, or serial). There are two rooms I have not yet found suitable equipment for, though -- the kitchen and the bathroom. The bathroom has the obvious hazards, besides being pretty small, but the kitchen is even more hostile an environment. Besides water, you have various kinds of food and food-related goo, microwave radiation, heat, high humidity, and general cramped space.

Has anybody out there found cheap, readily-available equipment (serial terminals, etc.) that will withstand the worst hazards of a typical American home? How about cheap modifications like enclosures that fit in small spaces and might protect, say, a PowerBook-Duo-size laptop? I'm willing to deal with having to power up and down, but I'd like to have something that doesn't compromise the actual operation of the equipment (enclosures that block cooling fan vents, for example)."

You Can Wire in More Than a LAN, You Know... Cosimo Leipold asks: "I've recently purchased a house that is still under construction. The developer asked me what I wanted wired. Has anyone expiremented with what you can wire in a home sucesfully? The developer has no 'computer experience' of course, so beyond RJ-45 he didn't know what was feasible. He tells me that the cost of wiring is pretty minimal since the house has little more than the frame up at this point. I'm looking to the slashdot community for cool ideas as to what I can wire. (RJ-45, sound, s-video, intercom, etc). I'm thinking this might be a great chance to get X10 in. Ideas?"

It seems that a lot of people have discovered X10 for home automation, but is that the only game in town? Sure, it might be the most affordable, but for those people with larger pocket books, are there other alternatives that might offer more features for a larger pricetag?

...and Along the Same Vein, Why Not Wire for Sound? Last, but most certainly not least, wiremonkey puts this question on the table: "I hear a lot of talk about wiring homes, but very few people are thinking about anything except network/telephone wiring. I'm interested in how fellow geeks have wired their houses for audio. Right now, I have a system built around a Samson 24 channel mixer and two amplifiers. My audio sources include computers, CD players, ham radios, a tape deck, DVD, VCR, and TV. The current system lets me listen to different things in two 'zones' - the computer room vs. the rest of the house (I like my computers to beep in the computer room, but not the bedroom - yet I like my CD player to play music in both rooms). Note that I always have one compter's audio playing throughout the house, as it announces my telephone calls.

I'm looking at ways of distributing the control of the audio 'mix' to two locations (right now, you have to be at the main mixer to adjust something). I would locate the video equipment and an additional CD player in the living room, while I would locate the computer equipment and auxilary audio gear (tape deck, ham radio, another CD player) in the computer room. I'd like to be able to hear any audio source from any room. I'm a serious listener, and I hate 60hz hum (the current unbalanced audio lines I use cause nothing but problems with hum)! In addition, I live in a high RF environment, with HF, VHF, and UHF transmitters and 100 watts of power per band. I get sick of hearing my automated packet station while listening to Bach! At the same time, I would prefer not to run 20+ balanced lines between the two locations. What have you done in your house? What were the 'professional touches' that you added? What did you wish you did differently?

(Yes, I know there are turn-key systems that do this - however, I don't feel like spending $2000+ for a system which won't let me listen to my computer and CDs at the same time!)"

Ragetech writes: "According to this NY Times article Dr. Jack Ng, a physicist at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, has theorized that LIGO, the "Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, may be capable of detecting quantum foam. (free registration needed, yada yada)"

joecool12321 writes: "Although Richard Feynman spoke about quantum computers in 1981, technology is only now starting to catch up. This article at Scientific American discusses recent developments towards the goal of 'infinite computing,' and research is showing that scalibility may not be far away, and thus scalable qbits."

Mateorabi asks: "We just saw in a previous Slashdot article on how advances are being made in converting between electrical energy and torque motions. Does any sort of material have similar properties for contraction/expansion motions? I have in mind something like a plastic that would contract a good distance under an applied voltage: similar to the properties of human muscle tissue in behavior and strength. Wouldn't such a be a perfect for use in artficial limbs (+ lots of other stuff too)?"

Ali Hassani asks: "I was looking around for a cheap place to buy CD-Rs and I stubbled upon a website talking about 99-minute CDs Have people had success in using in these CDs on normal audio players? I know that the new Beatles CD has something like 26 tracks and I was wondering if any high capacity CDs are being used currently by the music industry."

alanb0 writes: "The LIGO project, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to look for gravity waves and confirm general relativity, announced 'first lock' on Friday, which is analogous to 'first light' for a new telescope. Here's a story about it ..."

ElJefe asks: "I've got to give a presentation next weekend on my summer research. The paper that I wrote up has a lot of equations in it, and so will the presentation. I wrote the paper using Lyx, and really like its equation editing features. Unfortunately, I'm doing the presentation in Powerpoint, and it's equation editor sucks (although it's fine otherwise). You also can't embed equations in text; they have to be free-floating objects. Does anybody know if there's some sort of Powerpoint-like application, either for Windows or Linux, that can give me the usefullness of Powerpoint with the the freedom of Lyx (or even LaTeX)?"

Vekkypoo's bud writes: "Researchers at the Palomar Observatory have measured the most accurate value of a stellar distance to date. Using the Palomar Testbed Interferometer, the distance to the star Zeta Geminorum in the constellation Gemini is 1100 lightyears. That's accurate to about 13%. While that seems like a large error margin, it's actually three times more accurate than the best previous measurement. Check it out here."

RickMuller writes: "There is a Caltech Press Release here that talks about a new 3D video compression algorithm by Caltech's Peter Schroeder and Bell Labs' Wim Sweldens that they claim is 12 times smaller than MPEG4 and 6 times smaller than the previously best published algorithm. The algorithm uses wavelets for the data compression. Potential applications in real estate (digital walk-throughs of houses) are cited in the article. Anyone figure out a way to wire this stuff up to Q3 Arena yet? The results were presented in a talk at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans."

RickMuller writes: "There is a Caltech Press Release here that talks about a new 3D video compression algorithm by Caltech's Peter Schroeder and Bell Labs' Wim Sweldens that they claim is 12 times smaller than MPEG4 and 6 times smaller than the previously best published algorithm. The algorithm uses wavelets for the data compression. Potential applications in real estate (digital walk-throughs of houses) are cited in the article. Anyone figure out a way to wire this stuff up to Q3 Arena yet? The results were presented in a talk at SIGGRAPH 2000 in New Orleans."

BigTed writes: "This story found at bottomquark says 1.9 million images from the most thorough space survey ever made - The Two-Micron All Sky Survey - have been released by astronomers. Sponsored by NASA and the National Science Foundation, they have been made publicly available. This site over at NASA has more information and links to all those pictures."

Nostradumbass told us about HandHeldCrime. This is cool for people that like to read on their Palm. jleader shared a link to a revolutionary new airplane design being built at the Van Nuys airport in Los Angeles. As if you couldn't tell from his name, linuxsucks_dot_com thinks that Linux Sucks! Use it as a tool, not as flamebait. SEWilco told us about a little cyber kid-leashing, and while you?re making sure the kids are where they need to be, kawlyn told us about the x86 Still. Beinoni shared a link to some interesting nonlinear emergent phenomena. An Anonymous Coward sent in a link to an interesting Scientific American story about anti-aging. dolanh sent in a cool question: What was your first computer? Okay, you caught me. My first real computer of note was an Apple //c. Still have the monitor. Zeitgeist gave us a link to a tool for the paranoid, Mindguard.

A few weeks ago you asked the multi-talented Chris McKinstry questions, about the telescope projects he's involved with (ESO's Very Large Telescope -- VLT -- and the OverWhelmingly Large telescope -- OWL), about his project to synthesize AI by collecting a database of answers to questions common and obscure, and about the possibilities of discovering extraterrestrial life. Read what he has to say on everything from humans leaving the solar system to telescopes staying here on Earth. [Updated 5 Aug by t:] Chris notes for the record: "The opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily the opinions of the European Southern Observatory."

1) GAC
by Dungeon Dweller

I have an active interest in artificial intelligence. I study it as part of my major, and hope to do research in it in the future. As a young man coming up in the world, I am hoping to enter into research eventually, am entering into research at my university (WVU).

Your project reminds me of several projects/theories that have been discussed before. In the psychological debate, your system depends entirely upon nurture, it would seem. I like that kind of system and research. I do have a few questions.

1. What separates this from other projects in the field?
2. Where did you draw your inspiration for this project?
3. What kind of support staff do you recommend to an individual who has never led research before, but would like to? (I ask this of many of my professors who conduct research)
4. Where are you getting the bulk of your input for this project?
5. What do you hope to learn from this project?
6. At what time will you consider this project a success?

I know that I posed a lot of questions, but several could be answered in combination, I just didn't want to ask 2 questions at the same time.

Chris McKinstry:

Question 1-1:

There are three primary features of the MindPixel Digital Mind Modeling Project (also known by GAC -- for Generic Artificial Consciousness -- which is public interface to the project) that distinguish it from other large scale knowledge projects such as CYC.

1. The first phase is a completely public, internet based effort. All the data it will be collecting will come from average people, with no specific training in AI or psychology. It is like seti@home in many respects, except that we're not after your CPU's cycles, but rather your humanness. We're actually seeking to extract the entire content of an average person's mind bit by literal bit from millions of different internet users. We're not trying to write the algorithm for consciousness, but rather create the world's most rigorous fitness test (a Dawkinsian continuous variable) and get it into the hands of researchers who will attempt to make systems that will learn or evolve into consciousness by feeding back against this fitness test. Not only will we be collecting consensus fact, but also consensus emotion. (When the project is fully operational, in addition to collecting information about each MindPixel's truth or falsity, we will also collect emotional data based on Mehrabian's PAD model of emotion.)
2. The second phase of the project involves releasing the data collected to the scientific community and providing those researchers with some funds (generated by advertising to the people supplying the data) to conduct their research. As a side note, Jeff Elman's page contrains information about recurrent neural networks that are very good at processing just the kind of data that this project will collect and distribute. Specifically his 1990 article, Finding Structure in Time (PDF) is one of the most important neural network papers ever written; it strongly influenced me.
3. Finally, the project is a meritocracy. People will gain voting rights that will give them a say in every aspect of how the project is run, from data collection and use to the distribution of data and research funds, based entirely on the amount of data they have contributed to the project. The more work you do, the stronger your voice becomes.

Question 1-2:

My primary inspiration for the project comes from observation: I observed that computers are stupid and know nothing of human existence. I concluded a very long time ago that either we had to write a "magic" program that was able to go out in the world and learn like a human child, or we just had to sit down and type in ALL the data. When I was studying psychology in the late 80's I wanted to begin to gnaw the bullet and start getting people to type in ALL the data. It was my plan then to get people to enter data as part of an intro psych course, or get the university to allow me ask people for data when they logged on to the university's computer system. I was never able to get permission for either and the idea sat on the shelf until I downloaded my first copy of NCSA's Mosaic in 1994. I saw in following my first hyperlink, a different path.

I decided to collect my data via the internet. But, the problem was, that I needed to think of a standard format for the data; some way of representing human knowledge that an average person could learn quickly. That idea didn't come to me until I was preparing an entry for the 1995 Loebner Prize. Jackie, my program, was a stimulus response creature. You would ask her a full text question, and she scan her database for a canned full text response. My idea for the Loebner competition was to have her talk to a lot of people a get a lot of canned responses (at the time I was consulting for a large insurance company and brought Jackie to work everyday where she could talk to my colleagues) As well, I stored the responses in a number of different ways: phonetically using soundex, again with all the words in each stimulus sorted alphabetically, and also with a primitive concept token system. So, if there was no direct match, she would look for a phonetic match or sorted or conceptual match. Essentially I was breaking down each stimulus and standardizing it like a Fourier transform breaks down a waveform.

Then suddenly Hugh Loebner changed the rules. No longer was passing a text based Turing Test good enough for him. Now he would only award his prize if the system passed a full audio/video Inquisition. I hit the roof! Hell, there were tens of thousands of people on the planet that couldn't pass that kind of test! Anyone blind or deaf are just two obvious examples. I withdrew Jackie in a loud protest, stating that intelligence didn't depend on the bandwidth of the communication channel; intelligence could be communicated with one bit! If you locked a person in a box I could detect them with a series of yes/no questions and nothing more. And there all of a sudden, I had my answer (and a quick paper - The Minimum Intelligent Signal Test - An Objective Turing Test in Canadian Artificial Intelligence, issue 41.) There was a minimum intelligent signal, and it was just one bit. I would store my model of the human mind in binary propositions. I would make a digital model of the mind.

I realized within minutes that a giant database of these propositions could be used to train a neural net to mimic a conscious, thinking, feeling human being! I thought, maybe I'm missing something obvious. So, I emailed Marvin Minsky and asked him if he thought it would be possible to train a neural network into something resembling human using a database of binary propositions. He replied quickly saying "Yes, it is possible, but the training corpus would have to be enormous." The moment I finished reading that email, I knew I would spend the rest of my life building and validating the most enormous corpus I could.

Question 1-3:

Support staff! I recommend using the entire planet as support staff! Seriously, don't even dream about it. Almost every researcher I know works on their own or with a handful of collaborators. When you're a big cheese you might get a student or two, but other than that you'll get nothing more than shared use of a departmental secretary. You'll definitely be writing all your own code for a very long time.

Question 1-4:

I can't tell you that yet because at the time I wrote this, the project was not yet online (should be now though.) What I can tell you is that in 1995 I did try to collect this same data, using a web based form that sent an email back to me. I managed to collect some 450,000 items. This time, I expect to collect more and higher quality data and I expect it to come from a wide cross section of the internet public. I should also note MindPixels will be collected in multiple languages, which opens up the future prospect of mapping the sampled human languages to each other concept by concept. It will be very interesting to see exactly how an artificial consciousness trained in English differs at the conceptual level from one trained in say, Spanish.

Question 1-5:

I hope to learn what the human conceptual network looks like. I hope that in a few years I will be able to access a map of all the concepts in the head of an average person or to have learned why I can't.

Question 1-6:

I will consider the project a complete success when the cover of Science announces that for the first time in history there exists an artificial system that has passed a scientifically strong form of the Turing Test known as the Minimum Intelligent Signal Test.

2) How do you guys do it?
by pc486

With exptremely high magnification, how in heck do you keep the telescope still enough to take photos?

The slightest movement ought to mean millions of miles so thoes pesky little earthquakes should be a problem. Not to mention how you guys move the telescope accurately?

Chris: You're quite right about the system being very sensitive; if I walk on the azimuth platform of a VLT telescope while we're observing, I will destroy the observation. For normal tracking we use a software system called Tpoint written by a well known telescope genius named Pat Wallace (Pat has a wonderful and detailed article about telescope pointing that anyone seriously interested in telescope pointing should read); the same system is in use on telescopes all over the world. Basically what we do is build a pointing model for each of our telescopes. This involves pointing each telescope to a number of different points uniformly covering the sky. At each sample point, we observe a guide star and record how it moves from the center of the field over about one minute of tracking time. After we have collected enough data, we build a computer model of the telescope's tracking error. Then we basically run the model backwards into the telescope control system and thus apply corrections that try to cancel out the tracking errors of the telescope. This of course can't correct for any unusual vibrations, we rely on normal guide star tracking and hydraulic isolation of the telescope for that. And baring a large earthquake, Tpoint, automatic guide star corrections and the isolation work pretty well (In the event of a large earthquake, there are giant airbags that inflate to protect the mirror from damage.)

3) How can we help?
by Mignon

You probably know about SETI At Home, which lets people volunteer spare CPU time to processing radio-telescope data, in a (so far vain) attempt to find extra-terrestrial intelligence. Is there a similar way that we can help process some of the data that you gather?

As a simple example, one could compute the differences between a sequence of pictures of the same portion of the sky, looking for anomalies like giant asterioids on their way to wiping us all out.

Chris: seti@home is one of the most impressive demonstrations of how the world of science has changed. There are now over 2 million average people working together for a common scientific goal. I just wish they sold advertising to raise funds for other worthy (meritocratically determined) projects. It really bugs me that my Pentium III 450 which has done over 7000 hours of seti@home processing since last June, hasn't shown me a single science supporting ad. What a waste!

Now as for your idea of doing the same thing in optical wavelengths, I think in it there is a great deal of merit. There are a whole pile on new survey telescopes coming online soon that will be useful for just what you proposed. And if you read ahead to my answer to question 11, you'll see I do think it is a problem we have to pay attention to. (As well, I know of at least two virtual telescope projects; the NRC's National Virtual Telescope. See NVO White Paper (PDF) and ESO's ASTROVIRTEL which seek to allow data mining of previously collected telescope data.

In general, I think the future will see a lot more distributed processing projects doing useful science. The question remains whether or not it is more cost effective to build supercomputers for critical projects or harness the CPU's of private citizens, and I think the answer will need to be determined on a case by case basis. As well, there will be some projects (my own for example) where the CPU cycles are incidental; where what we want to harvest is not your electricity and capital equipment, but actually your humanity.

4) Division between Science and Spirituality
by ParticleGirl

I am continuously frustrated that people's general perception seems to be that science and art, spirituality, and so forth are divided by an uncrossable schism. People feel the need to pit science against spirituality; logic against intuition. It is a rare thing that people accept the idea that these are different ways of approaching the same reality. As a dreamer and artist as well as a respected scientist, what do you say to people who doubt that scientists can be spiritual and artistic people?

Chris: Science for me at least, is concerned with the external, the measurable; while art is concerned with the internal and immeasurable. Every scientist knows measurement can only go so far; that nature at its most fundamental is immeasurable. Unfortunately many scientists turn away from what they can't measure (and conversely, many artists turn from measurement) instead of finding some way, any way to express it. It is this turning away or fear of the immeasurable (or many artist's converse fear of reduction to measurement) that creates doubt; that separates science from art. The scientist can learn that one does not become any less of a scientist for attempting to express the inexpressible or attempting to measure the immeasurable, just as the artist can learn that because we are neurons and our neurons atoms, doesn't mean we are any less human.

5) CCD or what?
by paRcat

What kind of imaging does a telescope of this scale use? Is it an OWLCCD or something else? What kind of resolution? And how far away would an object need to be before the resolution becomes a shortcoming?

Chris: I actually can't answer this question. I am only aware of one discussion regarding instrumentation for the OWL and I haven't read it yet. See FROM ISAAC TO GOLIATH, OR BETTER NOT!? INFRARED INSTRUMENTATION CONCEPTS FOR 100M CLASS TELESCOPES (PDF) on the OWL project page.

6) Yeah, they're big ...
by viper21

But what do you do with them?

What kind of work do the telescopes at your facility generally do? Do local astronomers get to come in and do research or are the scopes reserved for some large project?

Chris: There is a very wide spectrum of observing programs for the VTL; from the study of comets in our solar system to the detection and measurement of objects on the edge of the observable universe. The VTL operates in two primary modes: visitor and service. In visitor mode, scientists actually travel to Chile and execute their observing program interactively with the support of operations personnel like myself who know the telescope and control system intimately and staff astronomers that know the instruments and science. Visitor mode is best utilized when the program contains interactive components, for example when what the observer does next depends on the results of what he has just completed. In service mode, observers don't travel to Chile but instead submit observing programs that don't have a large interactive component. Service programs are executed by staff astronomers and the data is automatically returned to the observer upon completion. Service mode is much like the old batch mode of mainframe computers. In both service and visitor modes, the programs that get time are determined by an observing program committee made up of scientists from all over the world based on scientific merit. And yes, a portion of the time (I believe it is 10%) automatically goes to Chilean astronomers in exchange for Chile's donation of the land for the project.

7) How parellelizable?
by Omnifarious

How parallelizable is the problem of micro-adjusting small portions of a large deformable mirror to correct for atmospheric distortion?

I remember a Scientific American article stating that you'd have to devote a top-of-the-line Cray to continuously recalculate the deformations needed given data from the guide star, or laser simulated guide star. If this problem is highly parallelizable, you may be able to get away with _much_ cheaper hardware.

I'm sure the idea has occured to you, but I want to know what your thoughts are on it.

Chris: My experience with deformable mirrors is entirely practical and I'm really not qualified to comment on the theory behind them. However, speaking from a practical standpoint, the VLT's 450 force actuators (150 per operating telescope) are each activated about 1000 times per night, night after night almost without error (7 non-critical electronic failures up to May of this year). I see no obvious reason why it shouldn't scale smoothly to 130 or 150 meters with current computer technology. And we certainly don't have any supercomputers doing the deformation calculations.

8) Why single-mirror?
by jd

I could have been mis-reading the article, but it seemed to me as though the idea was to build a single-mirror system. On the other hand, in radio astronomy, and in the insect world, arrays are considered the norm. Is there some advantage that a single mirror gives that cannot be duplicated using multiple smaller mirrors? (Simpler optics is an obvious one, paradoxically. :) Or is this (at least in part) NerdTrek III: The Search for Sponsors, where a record-setting single telescope is going to get more interest than a comparable array?

(A supplementary question, to go along with this. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that optical arrays are practical. Do you see any possibility of optical astronomers adopting the same line as radio astronomers, in trying to build an effective 1Km+ optical telescope, using an array?)

Chris: Actually, it isn't a single mirror. It is "filled aperture" telescope. The aperture is filled with many smaller mirrors, just like Keck. And as for optical arrays (interferometers), the VLT (called VLTI in this mode) will be the first real large scale test of such a system. But that stage of the project is still a few years away. In short, we'll have to wait and see how effective it is before we even consider giant optical interferometers.

9) funding
by jmayes

What's the biggest hurdle to hop over in getting funding for projects like OWL? And how did you pull it off?

Chris: The biggest hurdle for getting funding for projects like OWL, is getting funding for construction! Construction of OWL hasn't been funded, so nothing has really been pulled off, yet. But, if the public really wants projects like this to go ahead, then they need to be active about it. If you're in Europe, write your representatives and mention OWL by name and direct them to the OWL project page. If you're not in Europe, urge your representatives to find some way to participate in this project or projects like it.

10) Terrestrial Optical Telescopes
by pb

What are the benefits of having an Earth-bound, optical telescope? Or rather, what can a larger optical telescope find better from Earth that we can't already find on other wavelengths and from other venues (i.e. The Hubble)?

If there are no advantages here, is it more cost-effective, or what?

Chris: What you should actually ask is what advantage does a space based telescope have over a ground based telescope? The only thing you gain from being in space for an optical telescope is better image quality due to lack of atmospheric turbulence. By for every other measure (maintenance, support, materials, etc.) being in space is much, much more expensive and limited. Which is why the Hubble and it's 2.4 meter primary cost a number of times more than the projected cost of of the 100 meter OWL. Recent advances in computer technology (adaptive and active optics) have greatly reduced the advantage that being in space provides at optical wavelengths. For some non-optical telescopes (x-ray, IR, gamma ray) there will always be an advantage to being in orbit.

11) might as well ask it now..
by Blue Lang

I noticed in your 'fave books' section that you have the blind watchmaker, et al.

so, with an eye towards dawkins' views on evolution, what's your personal take on the probability (not the possibility) of humans locating extraterrestrial life without going outside the solar system?

Chris: Actually I'm quite pessimistic about the prospects of us locating ETL, AND independently about leaving the solar system. My main reason for this is that I doubt our civilization can last long enough. Not that I think we're going to self-destruct, but rather I think that nature is going to do it for us. It is my opinion that it is much more PROBABLE that we are driven into or close to extinction by an asteroid collision, than it is we will detect ETL or travel outside the solar system. This is one of the major reasons I strongly support construction of self-supporting Lunar and Martian colonies (and sky survey telescopes!) I just don't like us having all our eggs in the one basket called Earth. Having said all that, if we survive, I am confident we will eventually detect ETL, and that we will leave the solar system.

ElJefe asks: "I'm currently working on a project that will let students at my school buy and sell used textbooks from other students. For the site, I'd like to be able to enter an ISBN number, and have that bring up all relevant information (author, title, etc.). Basically, I'm looking for something analagous to CDDB or freedb, but for books instead of music. Does such a thing already exists? Are there copyright issues with creating such a database?" ISBN is an acronym for 'International Standard Book Number'.

ElJefe asks: "I'm currently working on a project that will let students at my school buy and sell used textbooks from other students. For the site, I'd like to be able to enter an ISBN number, and have that bring up all relevant information (author, title, etc.). Basically, I'm looking for something analagous to CDDB or freedb, but for books instead of music. Does such a thing already exists? Are there copyright issues with creating such a database?" ISBN is an acronym for 'International Standard Book Number'.

Adam Blake writes "CNN reports that NASA has designed a robotic spacewalker called the Robonaut which will perform satellite repairs and other duties typically performed by spacewalking astronauts. It is controlled remotely via a virtual reality interface and bears a small, apparently 'coincidental' resemblance (in the face) to intergalactic bounty hunter Boba Fett."

Once&FutureRocketman writes "The New York Times has this article (no login required) about a technology that allows publishers of paper media to embed hyperlinks directly in the article in machine-readable format. The system is a little clumsy at this point, but the intent is clear: a seamless integration of the Internet and Real Life."

RickMuller asks: "I'm a quantum chemist, and every so often I'm forced to sit down and derive equations. On occasion I've used Mathematica or Maple to simplify the process, but only rarely because (i) they're not much better than plain paper and pen, and (ii) they're proprietary software, and if I'm going to learn someone's arcane command syntax, I want to make sure it's open source so I can compile and run it everywhere I need it. I want to know if there is a reliable symbolic math package that is open source. I'm familiar with the CALC package in Emacs, which is quite good except that one needs to be running Emacs to use it. I would like to know if there is a viable alternative. Anyone? "

Bender writes "CNet is reporting that Amazon has acquired the rights (at least in the USA) to 'Affiliate Programs.' This may have an adverse consequence on things like CDNow banners."

neverever writes "I just saw a reference to a talk given today (Thursday) at MIT by Steve Potter from MIT who is doing work on growing neurons in a petri dish with electrodes so that the neural network can be hooked up to a virtual body running inside a simulation. They are also going to be using some fancy imaging techniques to watch the network in operation. Check out this for a story about it or this for their research site. "

neverever writes "I just saw a reference to a talk given today (Thursday) at MIT by Steve Potter from MIT who is doing work on growing neurons in a petri dish with electrodes so that the neural network can be hooked up to a virtual body running inside a simulation. They are also going to be using some fancy imaging techniques to watch the network in operation. Check out this for a story about it or this for their research site. "

Great answers to this week's interview questions. Mick Morgan, of the UK's CCTA [Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency] has turned this Q&A session into a truly detailed primer on how to choose the hardware and operating system behind a high-profile Web site - and has dispelled quite a few myths in the process. You'll want to read this interview even if you're not into server mechanics. It contains enough personal insight and wit to be of interest even to Slashdot's least-technical readers. (Click below to see what we mean!)

fprintf asks:
Seems like a simple question, but why Linux? It seems like all the other high powered sites are using BSD of one variant or another.

...and...

Raul Acevedo asks:
In the original Sunday Times article, you are quoted as saying:

"... you can't beat them [Linux on Intel] in the bangs for your buck department. It blows Sun out of the water..."

Could you elaborate on how Linux compares to Solaris? Did you mean that Linux blows Sun out of the water in terms of price/performance (which is obvious since Linux is free), or just in general for your particular needs?

I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on Linux vs. Solaris, not just in terms of price, but overall performance, reliability, maintainability, and ease of use. As a developer, I'm seeing Linux considered as an alternative to Solaris in many places, but there's little factual (or even anecdotal) information comparing the two.

ANSWER:

I'll take these two together since the answers overlap.

In retrospect, I wish I /had/ chosen OpenBSD ;-)

And I would certainly choose OpenBSD over GNU/Linux if I were building a firewall, or an intrusion detection system (based on say, Marcus Ranum's NFR) where packet capture at wire speed was important. (No - that tells you nothing about CCTA's network architecture....)

The choice of GNU/Linux seems to have caused all sorts of interest (witness this interview itself) when a *BSD may not have been so "controversial". Frankly I'm a little surprised at the reaction the choice seems to have generated. After all, we are just talking about web servers here. Many ISPs choose GNU/Linux on Intel for exactly the same reasons I have done - best value for money for the task in hand.

Let's put this into perspective first though - and dispel a few myths which seem to have cropped up in the press. I have emphatically /not/ ditched Solaris in favour of GNU/Linux. I still have 14 operational Solaris boxes running on the network. I have GNU/Linux running on 5 Dell Poweredge 2300s (with half a gig of RAM each - the Times article suffered from poor editing). I also run GNU/Linux on my desktop in the office, on my laptop and desktop machine at home and on a couple of internal servers handling DNS and proxy services for CCTA.

The GNU/Linux choice came about for two reasons:

• - I had operational experience of GNU/Linux on a day to day basis.
• - I was faced with replacing life expired Sun hardware (including a SPARC 1000E and a couple of Sparc 20s) as part of the normal process of hardware/maintenance/upgrade.

Having bought a Redhat distribution for my laptop, whenever I needed a quick solution to problem that would normally involve buying another box (such as building a secondary internal DNS server, or a local SMB server) I could simply recycle an old desktop PC with GNU/linux at practically zero cost.

On the second point. When the usual business planning round came up and I had to make decisions about hardware replacement for some of the older servers, it was obvious GNU/Linux on Intel could be a much cheaper option than simple replacement of the Sun hardware. Consider: a Dual 450MHz Pentium II, with 27 gig of disk, internal DDS3 and CDROM and half a gig of RAM costs less than £5000; a dual 300MHz UltraSPARC 2 with similar configuration costs around three times that. Question. Do I need to spend that kind of money simply to run a Web server? So I ran some tests and concluded that - no I didn't need to spend that kind of money (taxpayers money I should add) and plumped for the GNU/Linux on Intel combination on the purely pragmatic grounds of best value for money for the job in hand.

For the purpose of testing I took as a benchmark the maximum real life hit rate I had ever seen on one of the Solaris servers - around 1.5-2 million hits in a day. (By hit, I mean http GET or POST request). Then I doubled that as working assumption of a realistic maximum load in my environment.

For testing I took a fairly standard, but reasonably specced PC (a single Pentium 450MHz processor, 256Mb ECC SDRAM, single 18Gb LVD 10,000 RPM SCSI disk) and loaded Redhat Linux 5.2 running Apache 1.3.3. (Because that was what I had to hand). Apart from the Web server, I turned off all other daemons. I then loaded that server with a complete copy of my main www.open.gov.uk web.

In order to simulate a real life load, I had to find some way of grabbing a randomised list of URLS from the server which reflected the real world as closely as possible. After some testing with a variety of home spun scripts and commmand line web testers (such as webgrab) it quickly became clear that I would bog down the clients long before I made any real demands on the server. Some searching around and questions of colleagues lead me to http://alumni.caltech.edu/~dank/fixing-overloaded-web-server.html which is a useful site pointing to benchmarks and tools. This pointed me to http_load at http://www.acme.com/software/http_load/ which turned out to be pretty nifty since it runs in a single process. And of course, being OSS, I could tweak the code slightly to match my requirements. Thus armed I built some lists of URLs which were deliberately chosen to represent small text/HTML files, medium sized gif/jpeg files and large PDFs since this is the real life world on the public web servers. In load testing the server I then fired up just three client machines (one SPARC 5 running Solaris and two low end Pentiums running GNU/Linux since that was all I had to hand).

In peak load testing over a sustained 4 hour period I managed to get the server to deliver over 13,000 Mbytes in just under 500,000 HTTP transfers. During that period, CPU utilisation never went above 10%, and was usually around the 5% mark. Disk utilisation was minimal. The network connection rate was much higher than anything I'd seen in real life on the existing external servers (some 500 established connections during snapshots on the load testing period). Also during the test, Apache complained that it had reached the MaxClients setting (then 150) with no adverse effects.

Given that such a reasonably low end server handled most of what I could throw at it in my test environment, I concluded that GNU/Linux on only slightly beefier hardware made eminent sense.

----------

anthonyclark asks:
Do you get many cracker/script kiddie attacks on the various web sites you run?

ANSWER:

Yes ;-)

Any high profile site is going to attract unwelcome visitors. My job is made harder, and more stressful, by such attention - but that is what I am paid for. My friends know that I have nightmares about waking up to find graffiti (which is all it is) on one of my customers sites.

Like any other conscientious sysadmin I take a personal interest in the security of my servers. Naturally I will use all the tools at my disposal to minimise the vulnerabilities. But of course I get unwelcome attention.

A plea to the community if I may. And here I can do no better than quote from Fyodor's article in Phrack Volume 8 issue 54 where he discusses remote OS fingerprinting:

"A worse possibility is someone scanning 500,000 hosts in advance to see what OS is running and what ports are open. Then when someone posts (say) a root hole in Sun's comsat daemon, our little cracker could grep his list for 'UDP/512' and 'Solaris 2.6' and he immediately has pages and pages of rootable boxes. It should be noted that this is SCRIPT KIDDIE behavior. You have demonstrated no skill and nobody is even remotely impressed that you were able to find some vulnerable .edu that had not patched the hole in time. Also, people will be even _less_ impressed if you use your newfound access to deface the department's web site with a self-aggrandizing rant about how damn good you are and how stupid the sysadmins must be."

Sysadmins are not stupid. They are simply usually overworked and have to balance the need to provide services to their customer base with the need to minimise the risks to those services. Attacking public servers (whoever owns them) merely serves to irritate sysadmins, and usually nobody else.

I was not overjoyed to notice comments on /. of the form "whoo, so the Royal Web site has moved to Linux. I've got a rootkit with your name on it" (you know who you are). Consider. I have just moved some high profile web sites to the OS of choice to you readers. You want to see that OS taken seriously. Scribbling graffiti all over such a web site would have all sorts of negative impacts on the perceptions of people who matter.

Besides, you'd upset me.

----------

chromatic asks:
If you could add or change three things about Linux to make your job easier or more enjoyable, what would they be?

ANSWER:

1. The ability to read BUGTRAQ, evaluate the threat, consider vulnerability to that threat and auto patch or upgrade accordingly. It should then email me saying "I'm OK now, you can go back to reading /.".

2. An artificial intelligence based real time log watcher and network daemon which could learn network connect patterns and modify either the stack or the services running accordingly. The system should be capable of real-time blocking (a la portsentry) of "hostile" connects, co-operation with external IDS systems and firewalls, real-time reconfiguration of external security components, real-time alerts to other hosts on the lines of "hey guys, I'm being hit by X, watch it." It should then email me saying "I'm OK now, you can go back to reading /." :-)

3. An ASCII character based version of rogue. I miss it.

----------

Ryandav asks:
What kind of redundancy do you build into the server system for such a large and important site, ie. round-robin style servers or large, beefy superboxes, etc...

ANSWER:

You can see from answer above that I do not use "large, beefy superboxes". Frankly you don't need to to run a Web server. Nor do I use round robin DNS or other load balancing such as CISCO local director. In my experience of the sites I run, I don't need to do so. None of the sites gets hit hard enough to warrant the additional complexity of mirrored, load balanced servers. Our most popular site by far is the Royal Household site. That takes around 2-2.5 million hits per week (though I expect that to go up slightly now). The highest consistent hit rate I have seen is around 1.5-2 million hits per day. Any of the servers I have could cope with that. The redundancy we build in is in having backup hardware ready to run.

----------

wowbagger asks:
To what extent is the Royal Family involved with the site (e.g. content creation)?

ANSWER:

The Royal Family take an active interest in both of the royal web sites (one of which is hosted by the Press Association - www.royalinsight.gov.uk -). This interest includes both the current content of the sites, as well as future developments. The Queen herself launched royal.gov.uk in March 1997.

jd asks:
What's the official reaction to these sites running Linux? Assuming the British Government, and Her Majesty, are aware that their public image on the Internet is being presented via software that is non-traditional and non-commercial, what do they think of it all?

ANSWER:

The priority for the heavily visited royal web site is accessibility, balanced of course by reliability and security. These are the important issues, rather than the nature of the server operating system.

----------

Dicky asks:
What is your background? Are you a techie, an admin person, or an other? Do you use Linux personally? If so, did you come from a Unix, Windows or other background?

ANSWER:

I am a techie (though some of my friends and colleagues are a little less complimentary than that). My background is in Unix sysadmin and network management. I joined CCTA in 1993 from the UK Treasury where I was responsible for their Unix based OA system. Prior to that I was responsible for IT security in the Treasury. I have done some small systems development work in the past on MS/DOS machines (way before windows really took off) and CP/M micros. Most of my early career was in specialist support areas such as statistics, though I did a short stint in policy for a while in the mid to late 80's - didn't like it much.

Yes, I use GNU/Linux personally. It is my preferred platform for home use.

Dicky also asks:
And a related question: What is the primary system around your department?

ANSWER:

Depends what you mean by my department. In my area of responsibility the main systems are all *nix based. But the corporate desktop is NT4.

----------

Brian Knotts asks:
The obvious question: Does the Queen read Slashdot? :-/

ANSWER:

No. The Queen's interest in Internet matters is non-technical, although she sees on her visits to a wide variety of organisations the increasingly imaginative uses for the Internet.

----------

Simon Brooke asks: I've been very pleased lately to see Open.Gov's clear policy statement on the use of open standards. I'm personally involved in working with some large UK companies on their own Web standards policies, and having this to point to has been extremely useful to me. How difficult was it to get buy in to these standards by all the people who 'own' different Government sites, and how difficult is it to enforce?

I notice, for example, that the Scottish Parliament's web site, and my local Council's Web site, do not yet conform. Without wishing to point fingers at specific organisations, is it your intention to cajole all sites within .gov.uk to conform to these standards? Is it appropriate for members of the public to draw administrators of these sites attention to these standards?

ANSWER:

CCTA has long been a standards based organisation. My colleague Neil Pawley is CCTA's representative to W3C. Neil is also lead designer on the open.gov.uk site. Since CCTA is a member of W3C it is entirely appropriate that we should take a lead in using standards set by that organisation. Using HTML4, CSS2 and XHML1 for example on a real life server gives us valuable information on usability issues such as browser compatibility. Much of the feedback we have received has been very positive. On occasion we have had to deviate slightly from the standards where their use causes our public difficulty because of some incompatibility with a particular client setup. That experience itself is very helpful, since it allows us to feed back into the standards making process.

CCTA has an advisory role on best practice in the use of IS/IT in the UK Public sector. We have no authority to mandate particular standards, nor would we seek to do so. If the use of standards is to be effective in any way, it is because the standards themselves make sense in the real world (witness the growth in the use of the TCP/IP protocol set at the expense of the OSI standards).

Simon Brooke adds... Oh, and, by the way, keep up the good work!

We intend to.

Thanks for your interest. It has been educational for me.

-- Mick Morgan

-- end --

Next week: John Vranesevich of AntiOnline.

cmalek has sent us a review of Paul E. Cerruzi's A History Of Moderning Computing, which delves into the past of the machines we use today. To read more about your computer's ancestors, click below. A History of Modern Computing author Paul E. Cerruzi pages 398 publisher MIT Press, 1998 rating 8/10 reviewer Chris Malek ISBN 0-262-03255-4 summary A thorough treatment of the history of computing in the US; a must read book for any computer enthusiast. In 1951, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation brought into the world the UNIVAC, an event which marks the real beginning of our computer and information age. This was not the first "computer" of course; the ENIAC (which Eckert and Mauchly had built during the Second World War) was the first stored program electronic computer. As well, such electro-mechanical calculators as the Mark I, the Zuse Z machines, the ABC had all preceeded it. UNIVAC, however, was created in a fundamentally different spirit than its predecessors, which were used exclusively by government funded military agencies and scientists: it was meant to be sold as a commodity.

In 1948, hearing of Eckert and Mauchly's plans, Howard Aiken (builder of Harvard's Mark I) said that computers would never be a marketable product, since in the U.S., only a handful of them would find use. He was wrong: by 1953, businesses (who could afford one) as well as government agencies were lining up for them, and when they got them, the machines changed the way they processed data. IBM, seeing early in UNIVAC a threat to their punched card tabulator business, responded by announcing the IBM 701 in 1952, and the modern computer age and computer industry had taken its first tentative steps.

In A History of Modern Computing, Paul E. Ceruzzi, Curator of the Department of Space History at the National Air and Space Museum, weaves the fascinating tale of computing in the United States between 1945 and 1995, and "woven" is an appropriate adjective for this book. He takes the standpoint that a technology cannot be viewed in isolation: it must be taken as one participant in a complex system. He calls this philosophy "social construction:" technology evolves as the result of pressures from many interacting forces in society, and in turn causes the society itself to evolve, thus changing the evolutionary pressures on the technology.

It is the evolution of this system, not merely the technology in it, that Ceruzzi is concerned with in A History of Modern Computing. As we watch the computer change from scientific instrument to commercial product, see the emergence of first mainframes, then minicomputers, and finally the personal computer, Cerruzi shows how this development was affected by many forces, of which the following are but a few: IBM, Digital, GE and the Seven Dwarves; NASA, the military and other government agencies; the Cold War, the space race, and the 60's counterculture. We also see how these are all, in turn, affected by computers.

The influence of NASA's Manned Space Program in the 1960's is illustrative of this interaction at work. At the time, computing was done exclusively by batch processing -- a series of jobs run in succession, without human intervention. Computers were simply too costly to run for most sites to allow users direct interactive access -- a typical system rented for $20,000 - $40,000 per month, with a purchase price in the millions. The Manned Space Program, with its essentially unlimited budgets, and its 1970 deadline to put a man on the Moon, was one place at which such real-time computing was not only cost feasible, but necessary (in order to quickly determine whether the orbit resulting from a launch would be stable, or whether the mission should be aborted, for example).

Working with several generations of IBM mainframes, and with the help of IBM engineers, NASA evolved their own software, a real-time system called Mercury Monitor, into a powerful real-time extension of the IBM/360 operating system, which was soon adopted by other commercial installations. By the early 1970's, this modified OS became a fully supported IBM product. Most importantly,

"These modifications of [the IBM/360 OS] could not have happened without the unique nature of the Apollo mission .... Such modifications were not even permitted by IBM for most other customers, who typically leased and did not own equipment. NASA's modifications did show that a large commercial mainframe could operate in other than batch mode." (p 124)

The book is well illustrated, with many images of computers and people, and these illustrations add much to text. It is aimed at a general audience, and the prose reads well and easily. At 312 pages of text, Ceruzzi manages to pack in a satisfying level of detail without overwhelming the reader. It is not a highly technical book; those seeking to know details about how each computer worked will be disappointed. Ceruzzi does not shirk the technical aspects: he is simply more interested in the impact of a technology rather than its workings. For those so inclined, it is well footnoted, and the footnotes are well worth reading. It also has an extensive bibliography.

One drawback that some may see is that this is a history of computing in the United States, and even though there was work being done in other countries, notably England and Japan, this is only touched upon briefly. He does warn you that he's going to do this, however. And because I know it's going to come up, no, there is no mention of Linux, or Linus Torvalds, or Richard Stallman, or free software. He does have a whole chapter on UNIX and networked computers, however.

Ceruzzi also emphasizes real-world practical applications of ideas, and the role of university-based computer science research is largely left out. He is also a bit brief and somewhat vague about the years leading up to the creation of UNIVAC. For example, while he does mention the Mark I, and Howard Aiken, he fails to mention that it was in fact IBM who constructed the machine under Aiken's direction, and that the idea of the computer was not new to them with the 701. Finally, for a book published in 1998, the fact that only 8 pages are spent on the Internet and its implications is a bit odd.

In total, however, A History of Modern Computing serves as a worthy companion to other books published already (such as A History of Computing Technology, Williams, 1985 and The Computer From Pascal to Von Neumann, Goldstine, 1972), and will be enjoyed by anyone interested in learning how computing in the United States arrived in its current state.

Pick this book at at Amazon.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Defining "Computer"
1. The Advent of Commercial Computing, 1945-1956
2. Computing Comes of Age, 1956-1964
3. The Early History of Software, 1952-1968
4. From Mainframe to Minicomputer, 1959-1969
5. The Go-Go Years and the System/360, 1961-1975
6. The Chip and Its Impact, 1965-1975
7. The Personal Computer, 1972-1977
8. Augmenting Human Intellect, 1975-1985
9. Workstations, UNIX, and the Net, 1981-1995
Conclusion: The Digitization of the World Picture
Notes
Bibliography
Index

At Amazon.com:

• A History of Computing Technology
• The Computer From Pascal to Von Neumann

Andrew Childs writes "The 1999 Nobel Prizes in the sciences have been announced. The physics prize goes to Gerardus 't Hooft and Martinus Veltman "for elucidating the quantum structure of electroweak interactions in physics." The chemistry prize goes to Ahmed Zewail "for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy." And the prize in physiology or medicine goes to Gunter Blobel "for the discovery that proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell." "

kmb asks: "I recently bought a Gateway PC with an integrated Creative Labs Sound Blaster AudioPCI 64D sound card. Apparently Gateway is the only vendor to use this particular card and also apparently it differs in some sometimes significant ways from the other SB AudioPCI 64 cards. I've looked at a few web pages, but this is my first time trying to do anything with a PC sound card and besides which, most of the info I've seen is Windows-specific. I'm running RedHat 6.0 and ended up installing the ALSA-project sound drivers because I wasn't having much success with the OSS drivers. I've gotten some apps to record, but the card still isn't acting the way I expect it to. (For instance, I'd really like to get Slab 3.0 working, but even though I can see the VU meter picking up the sound input, when I go to record I get nada.) So, does anyone have configuration and/or driver tips or specs or anything about this particular card?"

Arrigo writes "Several people reported that the new Palm V and IIIx are available at some CompUSA stores. More details (and pictures!) at: Palmstation. Should I go get one? hmmmm... " Methinks my trusty old PalmPro is officially due to be replaced by a Palm V. Just gotta find one of these buggers now.

jsm writes " Using a little-understood property of twin particles called "entanglement", researchers at Caltech have used two beams of light to transport a third beam of light a distance of one yard. Essentially, they're making a copy of the original beam, so it's arguable whether the beam has been transported or merely duplicated. Still, it may be applicable to larger objects (philosopher's stone, anyone?)." I hope this means that someday I can get around without using a car.

Our favorite company has been having difficulties remembering what they innovated (ever) lately. So much so, that on the one hand they claim Linux is a competitor (built by a single individual...) and on the other don't see Linux as a threat because no company owns it. (This last statement was not made by Microsoft itself, but probably reflects what they believe. However, even if Linux were to dominate the PC market, they would still be a dominant force: webTV and Dreamcast are two very effective means of dominating the market of those who would like to access the internet (and want to play games) while not having the money to buy a complete PC. WinCE targets both the above and many PDAs, while Embedded NT will attack markets such as hospital equipment (adding new meaning to the phrase "Oh my God!") and network routers. True, Linux ports may be attempted to some of these platforms, but if they cannot run the games, who will use them?) Now we need only wait until Monday for the fun and games to begin. However students at the Auburn University have already started to have their fun. Read on below. shaldannon writes "Mark showed up a Microsoft recruiting agent tonight in front of an audience of 200+. The Auburn University chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery hosted a meeting for its membership at which Microsoft recruiters spoke on the subject of 'why Microsoft is the place to work.'

Mark, an easy-going guy who also runs the Linux Support Services site, showed up in his green penguin shirt. As the meeting progressed, the recruiter, named Colleen, asked eight volunteers to come forward to help her demonstrate the composition and duties of a Microsoft product team.

I nudged Mark, and we both headed to the front to participate. A half dozen Linux users in the room began to nudge each other and grin when they saw Mark's shirt, which has a quote by the great Linus on the back. The recruiter asked for someone with vision to step forward, to represent the "Project Leader." Mark was the natural choice--because his vision is Linux--but she was totally oblivious to this.

The meeting progressed, with the recruiter going through the various positions in a software team while some of the Linux users in the back (John, in particular) passed notes around explaining the irony of the situation to the rest of the audience.

Towards the end, she asked where we thought Microsoft got ideas for its products. From on stage, behind her, Mark piped up with "from other companies!" She turned and observed, "Someone in here is a smartass," not realizing that Mark was flaunting the greatest challenge to Microsoft, right on his chest--the happy penguin."

Thanks also to Cowering In Fear, ColonelPanic, and Dan Kegel for some of the material used here.

Rob Cresswell writes "I know its not very linux/gnome/etc... related, but look at this link. Seems a few holdouts have axed the H1-visa extension that passed in the house and senate (last week?). This is yet another example of out government being out of touch with the convergence of reality and the tech industries. For the full story: poke here Even the proposed number of visas is very small. We all know the gap between open people and open jobs in our industries and we've all watched the US slide behind the world -- what's the deal? I, for one, plan to find the vote list on this one" Ho hum, one /. editor's wife may not be able to find a job because of this...

Glenn W. Bach writes "Version 2 of the XDND Drag-And-Drop protocol is finally finished. The major new feature is the ability to specify arbitrary actions independently of the data types. The protocol is described at link. This protocol is supported by JX and Qt, and will soon be supported by Gtk, so programs written for Gnome, programs written for KDE, and programs like Code Crusader and Arrow will all be able to work together on the same desktop. The related file dragging protocol described here guarantees that the Gnome and KDE file managers will be interchangeable. The full (and growing) list of supporters is kept over here. "

Glenn W. Bach writes "Version 2 of the XDND Drag-And-Drop protocol is finally finished. The major new feature is the ability to specify arbitrary actions independently of the data types. The protocol is described at link. This protocol is supported by JX and Qt, and will soon be supported by Gtk, so programs written for Gnome, programs written for KDE, and programs like Code Crusader and Arrow will all be able to work together on the same desktop. The related file dragging protocol described here guarantees that the Gnome and KDE file managers will be interchangeable. The full (and growing) list of supporters is kept over here. "

Glenn W. Bach writes "Version 2 of the XDND Drag-And-Drop protocol is finally finished. The major new feature is the ability to specify arbitrary actions independently of the data types. The protocol is described at link. This protocol is supported by JX and Qt, and will soon be supported by Gtk, so programs written for Gnome, programs written for KDE, and programs like Code Crusader and Arrow will all be able to work together on the same desktop. The related file dragging protocol described here guarantees that the Gnome and KDE file managers will be interchangeable. The full (and growing) list of supporters is kept over here. "

Glenn W. Bach writes "Version 2 of the XDND Drag-And-Drop protocol is finally finished. The major new feature is the ability to specify arbitrary actions independently of the data types. The protocol is described at link. This protocol is supported by JX and Qt, and will soon be supported by Gtk, so programs written for Gnome, programs written for KDE, and programs like Code Crusader and Arrow will all be able to work together on the same desktop. The related file dragging protocol described here guarantees that the Gnome and KDE file managers will be interchangeable. The full (and growing) list of supporters is kept over here. "

Aaron Denney writes "Some scientists in Japan found quite a bit of evidence that neutrinos do have mass. This has quite a few implications to cosmology and the evolution of the universe, as well as requiring some revisions to the currently accepted particle physics models. "

John Lindal wrote in to tell us that Code Crusader 0.13.1 is now out. This looks like a pretty cool code editor that is designed mainly for C++, and will work with vi, Emacs or XEmacs, or its own editor. It features a nice looking Class Browser that you OOP folks will dig (and you hardcore C guys will just find unnecessary *grin*)

John Lindal wrote in to tell us that Code Crusader 0.13.1 is now out. This looks like a pretty cool code editor that is designed mainly for C++, and will work with vi, Emacs or XEmacs, or its own editor. It features a nice looking Class Browser that you OOP folks will dig (and you hardcore C guys will just find unnecessary *grin*)

John Lindal writes "The long-awaited release of Code Crusader 0.13.0 is finally here. For the first time, the source is freely available to allow easy porting to new UNIX platforms. Among other important new features, version 0.13.0 provides regular expression search and replace, better integration with make, unlimited depth undo, support for HTML and man pages, and Drag-And-Drop via the XDND protocol. The binary and source distributions can be downloaded via ftp. "

John Lindal writes "The long-awaited release of Code Crusader 0.13.0 is finally here. For the first time, the source is freely available to allow easy porting to new UNIX platforms. Among other important new features, version 0.13.0 provides regular expression search and replace, better integration with make, unlimited depth undo, support for HTML and man pages, and Drag-And-Drop via the XDND protocol. The binary and source distributions can be downloaded via ftp. "

John Lindal writes "The long-awaited release of Code Crusader 0.13.0 is finally here. For the first time, the source is freely available to allow easy porting to new UNIX platforms. Among other important new features, version 0.13.0 provides regular expression search and replace, better integration with make, unlimited depth undo, support for HTML and man pages, and Drag-And-Drop via the XDND protocol. The binary and source distributions can be downloaded via ftp. "

I know that many of you, just like me are just waiting for this to hit the mainstream, but check out this article where you can learn about researchers who are experimenting with directly interfacing rats brains and computers. Now when I can get some sort of hi speed net connection into my brain, life will be perfect. Thanks to Harry McKee for sending the nerdiest article so far in 1998.