Slashdot Mirror

The tables for mapping CJK onto Unicode are not present in 21.3, but they were posted to gnu.emacs.sources by Dave Love around April 2002, and are available somewhere on his FTP site. 21.4 will have the tables, and dynamically load them as needed, and that can be got from CVS now (and is reasonably stable, certainly more stable than the unicode branch).

Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).

Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.

It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.

The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).

http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/

NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.

All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).

The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.

I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.

The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.

I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.

Kevin Purcell
Beamline 6 (and 1)
University of Liverpool.

Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).

Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.

It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.

The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).

http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/

NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.

All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).

The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.

I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.

The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.

I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.

Kevin Purcell
Beamline 6 (and 1)
University of Liverpool.

Daresbury in addition to being the birthplace of Lewis Carrol (Charles Luttwidge Dodgson -- there's a neat stained glass window in the church where his father was vicar) was also the site of the first dedicated storage ring for generating synchrotron radiation (i.e. polarized light from IR to hard X-ray).

Originally the site was created to extend particle physics in the North of England (to include a collaboration of the "northern universities": Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Hull. A particle physics 5GeV electron synchrotron called NINA was built there in the early to mid 1970s and did some useful work.

It also attracted a new group of condensed matter physicists (surface scientists too) who used the synchrotron radiation emitted to do spectroscopy and diffraction of various sorts (photelectron spectrosocopy in the extreme UV and soft X-ray where the SR sources are particularly bright compared to other sources). They set up the SRF to try out these ideas.

The NSF (Nuclear Structure Facility -- for doing energetic heavy ion collisions -- nothing to do with nuclear weapons!) was built there in the late 1970s. That's the tower you can see in the site pictures. Unfortunatly SERC killed nuclear structure work in the UK in 1990. They pulled funding for the NSF and told people to look for beamtime at other sites outside the country. In fact the Recoil Seperator ended up at Oak Ridge, TN (so they didn't keep that expertise in the country).

http://www.srs.ac.uk/srs/

NINA was decomissioned in the late 1970s and it was decided to build the Synchrotron Radition Source (SRS) using part of the old NINA site (and the NINA linac, I think) to provide a dedicated SR source in the UK for chemists, biologists, martials scientists and physicists.

All though this time a theory group was based there and a large regional computing facility (that used to have a Cray 1 in the good old days from 1979 to 1983) that was a major node on JANET (the academic network in the UK).

The SRS was comissioned in 1982. This is where the 20 years mentioned in the article comes in -- opened in 1982 and closed in 2003(ish). I not sure if they'll keep the SRS open although the parameters for the SRS and DIAMOND are rather different. DIAMOND is good for high brightness X-ray studies but not so good for soft X-ray or XUV uses.

I worked there as a (suface science) grad student (from Liverpool University) and got my PhD working on the TGM and GIM and SEXAFS stations on beamline 6 and later did some work on Beanline 1 when I worked at the Surface Science Center at Liverpool University.

The site had a lot of experitise for machine physics (the epople who understand how to keep the electrons going around the ring), beamline and monochromator design. I suspect some of these will move down south and another nothern resource will be lost.

I'm sure the RAL people are happy (the decision as made almost 2 years ago) but they don't have a site who boundary is formed by the Bridgewater Canal. Perhaps it's heading the same way as that old tech.

Kevin Purcell
Beamline 6 (and 1)
University of Liverpool.

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If cars were open sourced, there would be at least five steering wheels in the cockpit, each operating differently -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo.

Yes, the Pentium IV PCs certainly look good compared to high end Unix workstations.....found some nice charts here Still, I prefer to admin and work with Unix workstations over Wintel PC's (and by the way, the Sun Ultra 5 and 10 and other PC-architecture machines are crap, avoid them!) As to what is cool about them? one cool thing is that the boot PROM will let you boot into any partition or from any mass storage device.....ever boot your PC (with empty hard disk) from a tape? Or booted and installed a system from another over network with no boot media on new virgin machine? Also, can hook terminal or PC to serial port and have full console access to boot PROM. How about dual 3D graphics cards for CADD or scientific visualization? No problems getting device drivers for native OS. No need to buy seperate SCSI card because built in (except in PC-type crap systems)! And Linux and *BSD support most of devices because there just aren't as many (admins like this). Also, end user has much more difficult time bringing game CD or floppies or other such crap from home to screw up system!

I am saying that MIPS processors are no longer being used in the manufacturing of new computers, nor are Alpha processors.

The Alpha based supercomputers that are numbers 3 and 4 on the list were installed in 2001 and the one that's number 6 was installed this year. Clearly, the Alpha is nearly dead, but it's not quite dead yet.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that fewer than 10,000 Alpha systems were ever sold

The three supercomputers I just mentioned (nos 3, 4, and 6) have a combined count of 7600 CPU's. Admittedly, that's only three systems, but your statement is just ridiculous.

Also, The hammer and Itanium processors will far exceed the Alpha on floating point operations. I mean, if they can't beat a four year old processor, they shouldn't be in business.

Floating point operations have never been Intel's strong suit. For similar clock speeds, their CPU's get roundly trounced by Alpha, PPC, and others as well. I found an interesting page here that contains some enlightening comparisons. An 833 MHz Alpha beats a Pentium 4/2000 on the Specfp2000 benchmark, and it remains generally comparable throughout the tests. I suspect that Intel will beef up their results with the Itanium, but they have had the benefit of all the Dec/Compaq experience now that they own it.

One thing I love about the Alpha is how incredibly cool it runs. It's amazing to open the case of my 533 MHz AlphaPC to look at relatively sparsely populated motherboard and note that the CPU has but a modest heat sink and no fan.

Reality check. PC100 SDRAM CPU to memory is about 200MB/s according to STREAM. Drives don't get better than perhaps 45MB/s for outer diameter of platter and more like 25MB/s for inner diameter, but this is for a strictly linear transfer from platter to RAM and does not accomodate the +7ms AVERAGE seek time.

I'm a little worried that if this gets too 'faddy' that people could start looking for biological metaphors and ignore other eqeually effective, or perhaps more effective solutions.

For example, from the review above:

genetic algorithms may find patterns of credit card fraud and help us find better jet turbine blades

The genetic algorithm is a great algorithm for optimization problems. However, its not significantly more effective than the simulated annealing algorithm or the less-known controlled random search algorithm.

Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but getting too caught up in the metaphors these algorithms and techniques are based on will unnecessarily shackle your thinking. Of course, the opposite is also true. Refusing to embrace metaphors at all will leave you without the insights that we use metaphors to see, so don't take me too seriously :).

A recent camparison of many platforms (including various Alpha and two K7's) with benchmarks related to computational chemistry is here. http://www.dl.ac.uk/CFS/benchmarks /compchem.html The K7's hold up well in a broader range of benchmarks.