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You're wrong. Actually higgs to 4 leptons is one of the main channels through which ATLAS will look for the Higgs boson. Remember that you can have positively and negatively charged muons ... so electric charge conservation is certainly NOT violated. For more information, here's a physics poster which mentions the 4 lepton decay.

if you program in Java and need to do matrix stuff or, want fast data structures check out:
the CERN Colt Libraries

Check out the spam to "good" email ratio at CERN http://mmmservices.web.cern.ch/mmmservices/. When I started there in January, I seem to remember that it was something like 55%...

I'm having several problems with shared objected compiled with the ROOT librairies with OSX.
That's why I use while I still use Linux "on the desktop".

Again, I am being quite serious. If (hopefully when...) the LHC team confirms the Higgs, could they file for a patent on their discovery? The LHC's location (French/Swiss border) might complicate the process, but is it fesible?

Great, now try porting a complex Airy function to Java using those kinds of definitions. Welcome to writing numerical code in what amounts to assembly language.

You don't get it, and seemingly never will.

The great thing about Java (I think I've mentioned this before) is I don't have to port that code - it's already been done, and by people smarter than me and certainly a lot smarter than you!

CERN Java Libraries

CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.

I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.

I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002). There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:

- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
- KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists. :)
- LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"

Tim used a very simple markup language too, but it was easier to extend that many of the others floating around. For me, the beauty was the URL. You could link to almost anything and for me, this was the simple but revolutionary idea. When we had the Internet, we had Gopher, FTP and whatever but this brought it altogether.

Sir Tim deserves every accolade and award that he gets now. As everyone said, the invention wasn't patented, copyrighted or whatver so everyone decided to join in and the web was born.

For the institution too, CERN is one of the world's foremost particle physics laboratory, but I don't think they are ashamed that this is probably their single most important discovery for the ordinary person.

The article mentions "The five-year DES hopes to generate about 100 terabytes of data" that will be released to the public at regular intervals....

This kit is probably one example of why the world needs more 92 Tbs routers; sharing the data generated by this baby will probably be a task not unlike that faced by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. You're going to have to have a really nice architecture and set of protocols to be able to efficiently pass around these images - possibly this is where Grid Technology comes in to play....

Of course, then you'll need something to actually process the images on! I guess Intel and AMD still have a rosy future ahead of them...

Lob all you want, but dont forget that that same inept government developed the internet or at least what became the internet, and without it, you would still be posting comments like yours on dial up BBS's...

man, always these false claims. this for the net. ant btw, the phone was invented by p. reis.

false claims can be very unpleasant ;)

Lob all you want, but dont forget that that same inept government developed the internet or at least what became the internet, and without it, you would still be posting comments like yours on dial up BBS's...

Slight correction: the internet wasn't born in the US, though it is possible that it grew up in the US, the internet was definately born in CERN, a research center that is located half in Switzerland, and half in France.

Linux isn't an example either (firstly it's non-commercial, second it's a rewrite of Unix - the change is more social than technical).

And it was started by a Finnish-born Swede and undoubtedly most of the work on it historically and currently is non-American.


I guess the browser is THE standout example - now how long did it take for that to become a commodity item?

The WWW was created by a Brit while working in Switzerland. The Web didn't have American presence until a few months later.

Oh, and the extent of its innovativeness is arguable, given the existence of Gopher.

As others here have mentioned, this is going in the direction of Microsofts new Longhorn OS, which has some hefty system requirements. The dual core cpu is an interesting concept, an extension of Moores law, so that the computing power increase of 2x @18 months remains constant. Who cares how this is achieved, as long as its happening! What I find really interesting is the concept of usability...while slashdotters will easily find uses for these pc's, what will jane the nurse be doing? compositing home videos for her MSN messenger profile? A lot of the more powerful apps such as 3d modelling require learned skills and also talent to make something good.

Still, cpu's of this magnitude everywhere will help with CETI@home number crunching. Maybe the Terabyte storage mentioned in those Longhorn specs has something to do withCerns Large Hadron Collider going online. It is expected to produce 10 Petabytes of data a year. The data is going to be saved via the grid

The chinese have a saying, may you live in interesting times...

The CERN Fortran and C++ LIbraries are GPL. They include also very good graphical tools like paw

The CERN Fortran and C++ LIbraries are GPL. They include also very good graphical tools like paw

however, dont ask me about the name root

Igor

ROOT

It looks good, but I'm skeptical about its usefulness for me. ROOT already produces damn good output and fills most of my needs. And for everything else there's gnuplot.

But I will look at kst. If it's as good as they say it is, I may use it instead of gnuplot.

While I don't see any groundbreaking new ideas in Lynds' work, google sure has some interesting links, including the original paper and some strange facts.

Your links didn't work until I removed the extra spaces. Higgs Atlas

I would really suggest that you go and check out the COLT libraries from CERN: > CERN Colt project

How long have "relational databases" been around? 5 years or so?

The real commodities are standards. SQL is popular because there is an ANSI standard behind it. SELECT has a structure that all database backends understand. I can develop and INSERT statement that works with everything from sqlite to Oracle/PL.

Standards are the commodities of technology. Once you have standards, you can build on them to create your "Next Big Thing" because they allow you to tie in everyone elses "Other Big Thing".

There is some sort of description written by Turing himself

The DENIM Project might be something you could look into. It is a tool for web page and UI design but it should be easily adaptable for your needs (especially with its export to HTML). You could also try Visual Thought though it is no longer developing nor supported (but is more tailored to what you're describing than DENIM).

While we're on the topic of particle accelerators, mark your calendars for 2007 -- that's when the Large Hadron Collider will be completed in Switzerland, marking a significant step forward in particle physics.

Here's a brief description from the CERN website:

What is LHC? The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator which will probe deeper into matter than ever before. Due to switch on in 2007, it will ultimately collide beams of protons at an energy of 14 TeV . Beams of lead nuclei will be also accelerated, smashing together with a collision energy of 1150 TeV.

A TeV is a unit of energy used in particle physics. 1 TeV is about the energy of motion of a flying mosquito. What makes the LHC so extraordinary is that it squeezes energy into a space about a million million times smaller than a mosquito.

The LHC is the next step in a voyage of discovery which began a century ago. Back then, scientists had just discovered all kinds of mysterious rays, X-rays, cathode rays, alpha and beta rays. Where did they come from? Were they all made of the same thing, and if so what? These questions have now been answered, giving us a much greater understanding of the Universe. Along the way, the answers have changed our daily lives, giving us televisions, transistors, medical imaging devices and computers. On the threshold of the 21st century, we face new questions which the LHC is designed to address. Who can tell what new developments the answers may bring?

That is ridiculous! Why does being paid suddenly mean you can't collaborate!!!! *I'm* a paid programmer, and I collaborate with other paid programmers all over the world, in many, many different institutes (I work at cern) ... in fact, the web was developed (at CERN) as a method of helping (paid) physicists (and programmers) collaborate.

Aerogel is also used within particle physics for telling different types of particles apart in Cherenkov detectors.

In any transparent material particles will emit light in a cone around their trajectory when they are travelling faster than the speed of light in that material (analogous to sonic boom produced by plane going faster than speed of sound). From measuring the angle the light is emitted at we can work out the velocity. The range of velocities we are sensitive to depends on the refractive index of the material which is where aerogel comes into the game. We have gasses with refractive indices very close to one (n = 1.0005 for CF4) or glass with large refractive index (n=1.47 for quartz) but no normal material in between. Aerogel with a refractive index around 1.03 gives us new possibilities.

Within a particle physics experiment we can use a magnetic field to determine the momentum of a particle from the curvature of its trajectory. If we put this together with the measurement of its velocity from the Cherenkov detector we can work out the mass. This allows us to distinguish pions and kaons in an experiment like LHCb which is currently under construction. Here CF4 (gas), C4F10 (heavier gas) and aerogel are used to give coverage of a wide velocity range.

...interesting for Weta to have during production of RotK. They used many many terabytes of data.

Peanuts. The Large Hadron Collider (the newest particle physics toy at CERN) is expected to generate 5 PByte/yr, 100 PByte in total. That's 100,000 Tbyte.

...interesting for Weta to have during production of RotK. They used many many terabytes of data.

Peanuts. The Large Hadron Collider (the newest particle physics toy at CERN) is expected to generate 5 PByte/yr, 100 PByte in total. That's 100,000 Tbyte.

"...learning LUA takes exactly 1 hour."

I couldn't read the reference manual in one hour. I couldn't learn the quirks of co-routines in one hour.

I think there is a big, big misunderstanding about computer languages. The "quick and dirty" ones are incomplete and limited. The complete languages are necessarily complex. At one time, Perl was like Lua. Then it needed this and that until now it is beginning to be as complex as C++. The same will happen with Lua, I'm guessing, if it remains popular.

It seems that every self-motivated serious programmer writes at least one editor or one language or one compiler. Even I wrote a language and compiler -- for Hewlett-Packard data acquisition equipment.

I think Larry Wall didn't foresee the future when he started Perl. Did he begin Perl with the idea that it would eventually be object-oriented? Did he expect that he would spend his entire life developing his "report language"?

I'm tired of learning new languages. I don't see the point in it. I'll bet there are hundreds of thousands who learned Pascal in college who wish they had not wasted their time; except for Delphi, Pascal is dead.

For those who want an embedded scripting language, how about a C interpreter? Try Cint or Ch.

It is in early stages of desing and development, but is fully fucntional and comes with a complete toolkit and devloping framework, including a C++ interpreter (ROOTCINT), visualisation, object collection introspection and streaming interfaces from ROOT, autogenerated GUI for system and user C++ classes, object-collection monitor, cluster infrastructure using a hierarchical OO RPC system and visualisation with a GL renderer.

It is a complex design and still not a stable target, but it is already very usable. A a development environment, it provides for a very fast development cycle with advanced introspection and monitoring abilities. Autogenerated GUI also saves a lot of time.

It is in early stages of desing and development, but is fully fucntional and comes with a complete toolkit and devloping framework, including a C++ interpreter (ROOTCINT), visualisation, object collection introspection and streaming interfaces from ROOT, autogenerated GUI for system and user C++ classes, object-collection monitor, cluster infrastructure using a hierarchical OO RPC system and visualisation with a GL renderer.

It is a complex design and still not a stable target, but it is already very usable. A a development environment, it provides for a very fast development cycle with advanced introspection and monitoring abilities. Autogenerated GUI also saves a lot of time.

People have often told me that French is, in some ways, more expressive than English. But, I think there is nothing about English that cannot be fixed.

Similarly, why didn't Larry put his energetic and brilliant expressiveness into C? C (and later C++) needs that expressiveness.

C and C++ Interpreters exist. For example, CINT C/C++ Interpreter.

I think it would be great if GCC had a switch or an add-on that could turn it into an interpreter. GCC already as most of the rest of the kitchen sink: "GCC is the GNU Compiler Collection, which currently contains front ends for C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, and Ada, as well as libraries for these languages (libstdc++, libgcj,...). Further frontends are available."

An "ugly hack", as you say, it just a challenge waiting for a brilliant programmer like Larry to make it beautiful.

I think I have part of the answer to my question. I think Larry could not see into the future. I'm guessing he didn't realize that all languages either die or become complete. I'm guessing he might not have made Perl if he had realized that he would commit 16 years of his life to make a language that would lose its quick-and-easy aspect and become as complicated as any other.

OK so this is obviously only vendors of databases and RDBMS systems.

In a broader sense aren't such things as the wayback machine a database? What about the truly massive amounts of data gathered at research labs, e.g. CERN. Who's the daddy of these guys?

giving starving people food and water.
"Give a men a fish, and he will eat one day, teach him to fish, and he will eat all life." J.C.

I'm presently at the palexpo, helping organize this and I can tell you from what's around me, that people are more interested in IS as a tool for learning how to fish.

Cheers

> For that matter where did html/http (And the Internet itself for that matter)
> come from? I forget if it was academic or from DARPA. Not that I'd describe
> DARPA as corporate.

DARPA created the IP protocols and later when they gave the network away to corps it was renamed the Internet.

The web was made at Cern, which is a particle physics lab in Switzerland (For all of the past, and still now, the largest lab.)

you did read the part
I know there are certainly some problems with this design (the part of opening one extremity while the tunel is in vacuum seems to be the one needing more thinking) didn't you?
It would be somewhat similar to the effect a shuttle has when it reenters the atmosphere. If rentering the atmosphere is possible, with enough though that could be solved as well.

The second thing is that it will be extremely costly to build such a air-proof structure
Well, just take a look at the lhc tunnels: a 27 kilometer long, 100 meters deep, with cryogenic controled temperature, thousands tons of magnets, if something like that can be built why not my idea?
remember if the thing worked (which i think it could, but not sure of course) it would be usable as a public transportation device AND space launch device. Having at least big advantages in the former task over the current methods.

There's more than one cable system linking US with Europe, it just happens that several carriers (Above.Net being one) only have capacity through TAT-14.

Other carriers have working circuits on TAT-14 and another link (e.g. Apollo, Tyco, AC-1, Gemini) and may have some degraded service (depending on whether their transatlantic links are less than twice the size of their peak demand). FranceTelecom OpenTransit is an example of one of them.

Interestingly, not many EU ISPs use TAT-14 North route, since it has a propagation delay of around 110ms (which is 40ms or so more than TAT-14 South from the UK and more than most other transatlantic cables)

Most ISPs in Europe that I can see are fine. Certainly the big international transit ISPs (Sprint, L3, C&W, MCI et al) aren't showing any more trouble than normal.

At the risk of being accused of Karma whoring, This page and This wired article from the late 90s are are good summary and a great story about undersea cables, respectively, despite being a little out of date.

Well, not exactly. Here is the scoop as far as I can tell. The line mode browser and the NeXT browser apparently were developed simultaneously. The line mode browser seems to have been released a little earlier, and in any case, was the only browser most people would see until Mosaic came out. See here for a timeline.

The particle physics community largely uses root. It is by no means perfect, but it does provide many useful statistical tools.

Don't get me wrong, I'll keep my big box at home running KDE, and I'll keep playing with code, but for day-to-day computing I want an OS that is stable, has the powerful tools of unix, and is attractive to look at and use. This used to be linux/KDE but now is OSX. Whether you agree or not, YOU don't get it if you think that OSX is not threat to linux on the desktop, because I'm not alone in this respect!

IIRC it's called Cherenkov radiation, and has to do with subatomic particles being ejected from the fuel braking abruptly when they hit the water. this is really cool, because the particles in question are actually exceeding the speed of light (in the water medium) before they get slowed down enough.

(what kind of particles? i dunno. given that this is spent fuel we're talking about, possibly neutrons, possibly gamma or beta rays, i'm really not sure.)

CERN's own (opensource) solution CASTOR already manages 1.7 Petabyte.

Citation from here:

"The LHC itself is expected to run for 15-20 years, giving rise to a total data volume of between 75-100PB"

Everybody expects these numbers to be underestimated by at least a factor of 2.

Cheers, Rolf

According to recent talk of Richard M. Stallman at CERN, governments do not get Windows source code as such, but rather a means to look at it on Microsoft site.

There is not way to determine whether what they are looking at is what really running on their computers, thus defeating the whole point of having that access anyway

And by the way... CERN IS THE DEVIL!

What's their logo all about? 2 rings and 5 lines going out from it?? Rotate the logo and you'll see three 6's!!! SATANISTS!!! ;-)

I've been a big fan of distributed computing ever since distributed.net came out with their first client. The TCA Internet team used to be hot stuff back in the day as far as number crunchers (due primarily to me sticking the RC5 client on all three of the NOC's e450's as well as all the cube farm machines). So naturally, this interests me. I wanted to see what it took to get a grid-enabled machine. Costs involved. Scope of the project. The article's fine and all, but I knew I could go direct to the source. Not found. In fact, all of googles top 25 links to .ch sites seem to be down. Is this just me or did CERN disconnect their webserver and absorb the circuits into their grid or something?

http://eu-datagrid.web.cern.ch/eu-datagrid/

The original idea behind the web was that it was a simple distributed application for sharing information at places like CERN. They didn't worry about look-and-feel issues because they didn't think there would be any. If you're just using the web to share your informal notes on your latest particle physics experiment, you don't care exactly what your document elements look like, as long as the overall organization is clear to the reader. Thus the very first HTML specification says things like:

A list is a sequence of paragraphs, each of which is preceded by a special mark or sequence number.... The representation of the list is not defined here, but a bulleted list for unordered lists, and a sequence of numbered paragraphs for an ordered list would be quite appropriate.

HTML was also designed to make web pages easy to author. Which meant that web browsers had to be tolerant of small mistakes. Both these principles forced browser implementers to make a lot of choices about presentation without any guidance from the standards.

What the web's inventors didn't anticipate is that the web would become a mass medium. (So much so that most web users don't even grasp that the web and the internet are not the same thing.) When they saw this happening, they starting thinking about presentation issues and inventing style-sheet languages. But it took them years to thrash out new HTML and CSS specifications that dealt with these issues. But at the same time (1995 and thereabouts) Netscape was gearing up to deliver commerical web software. (Microsoft was still in denial about the Internet, and had launched MSN using proprietary client-server protocols.) Netscape wasn't willing to wait even a few months for W3C to deliver preliminary specifications: they saw their window of opportunity closing. So they invented their own. They took a lot of flack for this from people who pointed out that Netscape HTML violated all the rules of good markup. But Netscape wasn't interested in those issues -- they just wanted to deliver a browser that could display pretty web sites.

And of course when Microsoft joined the fray, they had the same attitude, only more so. So all the thousands of newly-minted web designers were indoctrinated to think in terms of tweaking proprietary HTML until it displayed correctly on one or two "preferred" browsers.

It's going to take a long time to reverse this mindset, and I doubt if it will ever disappear completely. It certainly doesn't help that no browser properly supports all the features of CSS2, which is the most important tool of the standard-complying web designer.

World Wide Web

Excuse me?