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Ok, that's really cool that the chip designers put 'easter eggs' on chips. I especially like these:

Tux On A chip!

The Enterprise

Stay puff marshmellow man

GodZilla!

Disclaimer The Wave of the future! Put your EULA on the chip.

Neat stuff.

Ok, that's really cool that the chip designers put 'easter eggs' on chips. I especially like these:

Tux On A chip!

The Enterprise

Stay puff marshmellow man

GodZilla!

Disclaimer The Wave of the future! Put your EULA on the chip.

Neat stuff.

Ok, that's really cool that the chip designers put 'easter eggs' on chips. I especially like these:

Tux On A chip!

The Enterprise

Stay puff marshmellow man

GodZilla!

Disclaimer The Wave of the future! Put your EULA on the chip.

Neat stuff.

Ok, that's really cool that the chip designers put 'easter eggs' on chips. I especially like these:

Tux On A chip!

The Enterprise

Stay puff marshmellow man

GodZilla!

Disclaimer The Wave of the future! Put your EULA on the chip.

Neat stuff.

Ok, that's really cool that the chip designers put 'easter eggs' on chips. I especially like these:

Tux On A chip!

The Enterprise

Stay puff marshmellow man

GodZilla!

Disclaimer The Wave of the future! Put your EULA on the chip.

Neat stuff.

It's Australian for Russian cubism, mate!

Some more microscopy pics of chips, concentrating on some of the funny things designers put on their layouts is at Silicon Zoo. Cartoon characters, signs, messages and a marriage dedication... :)

a grrl & her server

today is the 10th anniversary of Tallahassee Freenet. Cinco de Mayo!
20K users, free dialup, community forums, etc. They sell used donated equipment from time to time, and have had library grant money in the past. Initially set up by Florida State University. Tallahassee Freenet

The IntelPlay site has a good QX3 FAQ as well as the product's 3/29/02 obituary. We can only hope they are clearing out stock before introducing the new improved version, but I doubt it - Intel is discontinuing ALL Intelplay toys, not just the microscope. With MTV style advertising like this it's no wonder it failed to find a continuing market niche as a classic toy - it takes longer than a 10 second attention span to do science. Some gross-out photos are here, as well as a comparison of a QX3 vs.Zeiss dissection scope as well as a comparison of the QX3 and another "inexpensive educational toy" called the Pocketscope. The main Pocketscope site talks about how to add video and lighting to their superior optics. Tinkering with, adjusting, modifying and using the QX3 is discussed here, here and here. More places to buy a QX3 before they go universally out of stock are GlobalMart, Erwincomputers, and Amazon.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has an excellent page dedicated to the Intel QX3, including a cool QX3 digital image photo gallery. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in what these little toys can do.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has an excellent page dedicated to the Intel QX3, including a cool QX3 digital image photo gallery. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in what these little toys can do.

The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has an excellent page dedicated to the Intel QX3, including a cool QX3 digital image photo gallery. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in what these little toys can do.

Those words were in Cyrillic (of course)... see them on the chip here!

The best current RNG testing suite is DIEHARD. It uses a large number of tests to make sure that the numbers are random enough for most purposes. More information about RNGS and testing them can be found at the pLab which is one of most comprehensive sites on RNGs on the net.

A 3D-capable desktop is infeasible, and I'll tell you why right now. (This is OT as high hell, but oh well..)

Depth perception. You look at your current desktop, and everything is using a "pieces of paper" paradigm. This is an easy to understand paradigm, and there's a reason; your brain can easily perceive and interpret it. Everything that you see can easily be transformed into a 2D image, which is how the brain processes everything it sees.

3D screws this up, because now you have to worry about depth as well; is something hiding under that pile? How big is it? Is it far away or close-up? This is hard to tell, from your brain's point of view, without further clues. To give these 3D depth cues, your brain needs a different image for each eye.

So fine, let's imagine that 3D display surfaces are ubiquitous, so we can rely on these depth queues. Now we have a new problem; visual distraction. Do an experiment for me. Sit down at your desk, and carefully place a piece of paper on the desk vertically in front of you. This is now the document you'll be working on. Now try and sit in such a way that you can see all of the paper, read it, be able to work on it, and still not be distracted by the depth of the desk around you, the wall in front of you, etc. (If you have your desk against a wall, this probably isn't too hard, because the wall isn't very far away; you'll have to pick a place with a far depth behind it.)

What you'll find is you're tending to lean in closer to the paper so you don't see as much of what's around you. This suggests that this is the best way to keep from being distracted in this manner.. but this is essentially the same as a maximized window, correct? So what added benefit does our 3D give us?

Now lets say you want to jump to another window quickly; how would you do this? Well, we'd like to take the visual hint from the Windows taskbar here, to create some sort of list of stuff opened. How would this be represented? What we want; all apps to be visible all the time (otherwise it's no better than the win 3.1 alt-tab screen) and a quick way of accessing them. ... Can you come up with anything that doesn't sound like the taskbars of the 2D desktop of today?

Now let's get back to the desktop paradigm. Simply put, there are two ways you could set this up; a room paradigm, where you move around and look at/interact with stuff, or a box/pit paradigm.

The room paradigm is nice, because you can make your desktop as big as you want and then wander around it. The downside, though, is that you've again increased the complexity, adding "travel time" to get from one place to another. Of course, one could always bookmark certain 3D locations, but I'd consider this to be a bit of a kludge; I shouldn't need to bookmark common locations in my desktop just to get work done.

The box/pit idea's a bit cleaner, in that it's a lot easier to understand for someone just getting started. You don't need to worry about moving around; you're staring into your monitor, and it's kind of like a pit that goes in from the screen. You can use a 3D pointing device to move around stuff inside the pit, and pull it to the front. The downside to this is that you're essentially .. well ... it's kind of reminiscient of your current desktop, don't you think?

The last big strike against a 3D desktop is the input device. The mouse is a great input device for moving around in 2D, but once we hit 3D, we have problems. For instance, take the case of moving something, using the room paradigm. How do we grab stuff and move it? Well, we could take a page from System Shock, and have an inventory, and grab stuff, move to destination, and drop it. But does this seem quicker to you than *click* drag and *unclick* drop? Plus the additionaly requirement of people needing to know how to play a 3D shooter to be able to get around..

Likewise, with the pit paradigm, we're faced with another task; we can see everywhere in the pit, but how do we specify how deep to put something? We find that we can no longer do this easily with a mouse, unless we use the wheel for depth. (And we all know how precise the mouse wheel is.) We can also rule out 3D position-based input devices; can you imagine holding your hands steady for hours without support, while working at your computer? (Talk about unergonomic.)

Anyways, you can see why I'm saying true 3D desktops are unfeasible. Sure, they look nice and everything, but where's the speed advantage? How do they make the user's life easier? The only 3D interfaces I've seen are ButtonFly and the one from Jurassic Park. In the former, the menus look cool, but they don't provide any speed advantage. Likewise in the latter example; the cast in the movie almost get eaten by the raptors 'cause the interface impeded their ability to easily/quickly find and activate the locks. Do you want to be eaten by raptors? ; )

Yes, 3D is cool, but I don't think I'd want it for my desktop. Now if the 3D were only being used for the hardware acceleration of the resizing, etc., that I can understand. But as a native environment for the desktop... no, I wouldn't like that one bit.

Violations of rights is Violation of rights is Violation of rights. It doesn't matter if you are a us citizen or not. I believe the constitution said that "ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL". Maybe i misread that.

Either way, history has shown that laws supposadly aimed at "non-us citizens" have been extended to us citizens eventually. Know about RICO? That law was supposed to apply only to people in the mafia. Later, abortion protesters and stock brokers were prosecuted under that law. Money Laundering laws and Asset seizure? These were only supposed to apply to the "evil" drug lords. Now innocet americas who have not been accused of a crime can have their property stolen by law enforcement.

And as for Lincoln, Washington, and FDR, they were in REAL WARS, not some fictional crusades like the "War" on Crime, the "War" on Drugs, and the "War" on Terrorism.

viking099 writes "File swapping programs such as Morpheus, Grokster, and Kazaa (all based on the same software from FastTrak) have grown over 480% in the past 4 months, and are set to break the 1.57 million concurrent connection record that Napster set." So who exactly is surprised by this?

For work like this, I like my QX3. Cheap and powerful.

There's a short review of its capabilities here, but this site has some amazing hacks that enable it to do darkfield, polarized, Rheinberg, or even simulated Hoffman modulation contrast viewing.

For work like this, I like my QX3. Cheap and powerful.

There's a short review of its capabilities here, but this site has some amazing hacks that enable it to do darkfield, polarized, Rheinberg, or even simulated Hoffman modulation contrast viewing.

For work like this, I like my QX3. Cheap and powerful.

There's a short review of its capabilities here, but this site has some amazing hacks that enable it to do darkfield, polarized, Rheinberg, or even simulated Hoffman modulation contrast viewing.

• Here is a not-too-technical report on buckyballs, their properties, etc.

• Pretty pictures!!!

• According to
• this article, buckyballs hold the record for highest-temperature superconductor.

• A report (fairly technical) on research into building buckballs...

• And
• here's a report on single buckyball transistors.

It's the national gubberment's version, hosted by Florida State Univerity. It covers, surprisingly enough, the entire US.

For those fearing goat sex here's the url:

http://www.nws.fsu.edu/buoy/

see here for a bunch more on ZUIs

While I think that Raskin is over the top with some things he's right that the fundamental metaphors for human-computer interaction haven't changed much from the advent of the GUI at PARC.

actually it's very rare that someone gets fucked in the ass in prison. Well except for the gay dudes who like it and do it by choice. Most prisoners are very homophobic and would never do it. Most likely Dmitri is playing cards, lifting weights, or watching cable tv right now...

Really? Do you have experience in this area? I do. My company does a lot of work with prisons, and I guarantee that this does actually happen a great deal. I also have a family member who has a pretty checkered past and has done quite a few years in prison, and though he won't speak about it directly, he made it pretty clear that that stuff still happens. So, I'd like to see your evidence to support your case.

I have evidence. Check here and here if you want a lot of references. Or, try this on Google.

Then tell me that this is a thing of the past.

I've also done some testing with other transcendental numbers, such as e (2.718281828...), and they all seem to show great randomness properties, in the information-theoretic sense at least. However, I have a feeling to "trust" Pi more than e, given that you can write e in form of continued fractions with repeating patterns, and nobody has yet found a pattern in the continued fractions of Pi.

There's nothing about transcendental numbers that makes their digits random; pi and e happen to be special. For instance, the first number proven to be transcendental was (some variation on) 0.101001000100001000001...; that sequence isn't random by any definition.

As for my pseudo-random library project, my programming skills are quite bad, but if you have some knowledge of scientific computing (multiplication algorithms using FFTs, for example), you can contact me and I might revive the idea.

I'd recommend to anyone interested in projects like this to look at George Marsaglia's page; his tester may help you avoid releasing crap. You can also search Usenet archives (i.e., Google) for some generator source code he's posted. Knuth also has a very detailed treatment of pseudo-random number generation in TAOCP vol. 2.

Out of mild curiosity I followed the ROT-13 link and was confused by the last comment on Netscape's page. Are they serious that it will decode but not encode? :)

I'm not using Netscape so I can't test this myself... so as a public service to all those unfortunate people unable to properly encode ROT-13 without doing so manually, I offer this link.

The only thing that annoyed me about the Tux on a chip page was that they attributed the original idea of using a penguin as a centrepiece for Linux to Linus Torvalds. We know that this is not true, that Linus merely endorsed the penguin, and the idea was Larry Ewing. Just a minor detail, but I do like seeing people get credit that is due.
____________________________________________ _________________

Other things on a chip. I especially like tux on a chip.

--

Other things on a chip. I especially like tux on a chip.

--

Four people are credited with designing the 4004: Ted Hoff, Stan Mazor, Federico Faggin and Masatoshi Shima.

There are evidently bad feelings between Faggin and Hoff because Faggin feels he did all of the real work, and Hoff got much of the credit. Many accounts do not give Shima any credit, only giving credit to the three Intel engineers (Shima was an engineer at Busicom, a Japanese calculator company at the time, and later became an Intel engineer).

Interview with Shima (extremely interesting and detailed)

Another interview with Shima

Interview with Hoff

An e-mail from Mazor, and nice pictures of the 4004

A really nice picture of the 4004

A picture of three of the engineers (no Shima) years later

A picture of all four engineers

Federico Faggin's initials on the 4004 -- the only initials on the chip

This would be awfully boring. I like all the loads of different chips, that different manufacturers make so unique. Sure this means Intel will patent basic machine instructions, but compiler writers would be bored out of their skulls very quickly. Also, it helps many among us profit off of the different stocks, whereas a collective design wouldn't allow for as much market fluctation. And we wouldn't get to see as many nifty hidden pictures in the chips if they were all designed by committee.

Batch systems have been around a long time in the HPC world. Gridware was orginally developed by GENIAS Software GmbH. GENIAS produced a batch scheduler called Codine, which was a commercial version of DQS. In fact, Sun's Grid Engine FAQ even states that Sun Grid Engine is a new name for CODINE.

Of course, DQS/Codine/Grid isn't the only batch-scheduling/cycle-scavenging game around. Other players are:

• Condor
• openPBS and it's commercial version PBS Pro
• Load Leveler (which IIRC is IBM's commercial implementation derived from Condor)
• LSF which is the product Sun was previously co-marketing until they purchased Gridware (probably because of the high per CPU cost of LSF).
• and lots of others that I've forgotten, many based on the once-common NQS/NQE batch system.
• There are also systems like Legion that represent a sort of ``next step'' computing enviroment.

Many of these predate newcomers like SETI@home and Mosix by serveral years. Most also provide hooks into parallel computing APIs like MPI, PVM, openMP, or something similar.

Batch scheduling and cycle-scavening are old concepts. Having wasted away my years as a graduate student submitting large quantum chem jobs to Crays, it's nice to see lots of groups continuing to squeeze every useful cycle out of existing hardware. Sun's recent annoucements are just the latest update to an old product---not a new idea, and not a Mosix/SETI rip-off.

Once high-speed mobile internet service becomes more common, I expect to see streaming audio superceding conventional radio. These satellite audio broadcasting systems won't deliver enough bang for the buck compared to what mobile high-speed IP offers.

-Isaac

Im an undergrad MIS student at fsu. and im working on a sourceforge project with a couple of my professors. they didnt seem to mind the open source thing at all, infact they thought it was a wonderfull idea.

It's energy esource?
http://www.ametsoc.org/AMS/newsltr/nl_03_00.html
I've been trying to dig up an article I read about how something like this was caused to form naturally. No luck so far, but I suspect it may have been this researcher's project.
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~meyers/fig/vortex.html

The only downside is that you need an AA or higher. You can get more information at http://www.fsu.edu/~distance.

I am halfway through my first class in this program, and the quality is level is high. The instructors reply to email very quickly, and the web based software is easy and efficient to use. If you can get an AA with your 70 credits, this is definately the way to go.

Projekt is one of my favourite labels. Most of their bands tend to be of the etereal/darkwave persusasion, but they're more recently signed bands have a little more mainstream sound. Mira, an incredible new band, is a classic example of a band whose success is largely due to MP3s. Also worth checking out are Love Spirals Downwards (is moving in the Drum and Bass direction, although their earlier stuff is closer to shoegazer...kinda a 4AD sound) and Black Tape for a Blue Girl (more traditional ethereal). If you're into that type of music, definitely check them out...even if you're not, they may be worth checking. They're classic examples of bands that would be huge if people actually preferred quality and originality in their music.

Hey!

If you want a good source of random numbers, try downloading DIEHARD for Linux.

There are also some RNG links at SecurityFocus.

My copy of diehard includes 'makewhat.exe', a FAST RNG. It makes 11MB chunks of data in... like... less than a second with the faster generators. Check it you if you want.

Michael Tandy

> GTK+ has both C and C++ to play with, libglade, bindings to lots of other languages.

This actually matters in some circles. I have seen an ad for a commercial product built using the Ada bindings for GTK+. The product sells for $4995US/pop. (No, I didn't leave out a decimal point.) Someone is taking GTK very seriously.

I know there aren't likely very many Ada fans here, but the GtkAda crew deserves kudos on general principle. In addition to "just" providing the bindings, they have produced PostScript documentation for GtkAda to the tune of 328 pages, and have extended their bindings beyond "pure" GTK+ to include the excellent GtkExtra widgets for plotting, spreadsheet-style cells, and dumping plots and text generated by your programs to PostScript files. All under the GPL, with an LGPL-like exclusion for link-only usage.

I know of at least 3 more non-trivial projects underway using GtkAda, though I might reasonably be accused of pushing vaporware if I said much more about them at this time.

--

I have a Creative DXR3 decoder card, and the Hollywood drivers work with it (which is ideal because some versions of the HW card allow unlimited region changes).
In fact, I remember reading somewhere that the DXR3 is pretty much the same as the HW boards.
Win 32 drivers available here

True engineers don't sign their products; do you see any credits on your car stereo, or on a box of crackerjacks?

I don't know...have you looked closely enough?

Molecular Expressions - Chip Shots - Microscopy of Integrated Circuits

I think in a lot of ways, you get out what you put into something. I'm not sure programming is something you want to tackle online if you don't know much about it to begin with.
Florida State University offers a full CS degree online. It is offered with a concentration in software engineering, I believe.

Personally, I use LAME because it's fastest and not noticably worse (perhaps better) than the alternatives I've seen.

My preferred ripping/encoding frontend is Paloma. It does CDDB lookup, calls cdparanoia and an encoder, and stores your MP3s in a relational database. I really like the ability to generate playlists based on arbitrary queries of the database. It's very slick.

Paloma also supports division of the files into "buckets" of a fixed size. Say, 650MB. Useful if you want to burn your collection onto multiple CDRs, either for backup or to carry around with a laptop.

I only have about 10GB of MP3s so far, but I just bought a 27GB drive to store most of the rest of my collection, and I expect I'll fill it soon.

One suggestion for speeding the process of converting your collection, if you have several hundred CDs: Buy another CDROM drive! It only costs $30, and it speeds things up by a lot.

is molecular expressions:
http://www.micro.magnet.fsu.edu/micro/gallery.html

I saw this a few days ago-pretty cool.

http://micro.magnet.fsu.ed u/creatures/pages/calr12K.html