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Probably not. One of the competing project groups (*) managed to get even better sound than Springer from an LP, The Beatles' "Help". We think this is because that was an unusually low density LP, but still.

(*) when we did our project.

Probably not. One of the competing project groups (*) managed to get even better sound than Springer from an LP, The Beatles' "Help". We think this is because that was an unusually low density LP, but still.

(*) when we did our project.

Heck, with that kind of connectivity you could probably meet the orange book requirements for C2 security.

Standard plug: We did roughly the same thing, but with 78 RPMs. Of course, it sounded much better, because of the lower resolution of 78 RPM disks.

http://www.s3.kth.se/signal/edu/projekt/students/0 3/lightblue/

What they are referring to aren't in fact the "traditional" arts, but the art of engineering. The art to build a useful structure of really small parts, still make it beatiful, and having an attractive design. What architects do when they build bridges or buildings, what mechanical engineers do when they build ingenous machinery, or what design engineer are doing when drawing that new car. It just couldn't be said that it's merely engineering - because it isn't. And it isn't just arts. Anyone knowing anything about algorithms knows that.

Sorry, but no. Windows 2000 will happily authenticate against non-AD kerberos realms.

You can also use PAM-Kerberos and PAM-LDAP to auth *nix against the AD. Microsoft made some extentions but they did not break the standard. Its there and it works in a standard way for clients that only understand that, and has more functionality if the client can understand that.

All you need is the ability to trap all the energy from both stars. Some kind of container whose inside is it's outside. I predict this will give rise to a whole new industry in Dyson-Klein Bottles.

Quoting Twelve Ways to Fool the Masses When Giving Performance Results on Parallel Computers:

2. Present performance figures for an inner kernel, and then represent these figures as the performance of the entire application.

It is quite difficult to obtain high performance on a complete large-scale scientific application, timed from beginning of execution through completion. There is often a great deal of data movement and initialization that depresses overall performance rates. A good solution to this dilemma is to present results for an inner kernel of an application, which can be souped up with artificial tricks. Then imply in your presentation that these rates are equivalent to the overall performance of the entire application.

4. Scale up the problem size with the number of processors, but omit any mention of this fact.

Graphs of performance rates versus the number of processors have a nasty habit of trailing off. This problem can easily be remedied by plotting the performance rates for problems whose sizes scale up with the number of processors. The important point is to omit any mention of this scaling in your plots and tables. Clearly disclosing this fact might raise questions about the efficiency of your implementation.

8. If MFLOPS rates must be quoted, base the operation count on the parallel implementation, not on the best sequential implementation.

We know that MFLOPS rates of a parallel codes are often not very impressive. Fortunately, there are some tricks that can make these figures more respectable. The most effective scheme is to compute the operation count based on an inflated parallel implementation. Parallel implementations often perform far more floating point operations than the best sequential implementation. Often millions of operations are masked out or merely repeated in each processor. Millions more can be included simply by inserting a few dummy loops that do nothing. Including these operations in the count will greatly increase the resulting MFLOPS rate and make your code look like a real winner.

10. Mutilate the algorithm used in the parallel implementation to match the architecture.

Everyone is aware that algorithmic changes are often necessary when we port applications to parallel computers. Thus in your parallel implementation, it is essential that you select algorithms which exhibit high MFLOPS performance rates, without regard to fundamental efficiency. Unfortunately, such algorithmic changes often result in a code that requires far more time to complete the solution. For example, explicit linear system solvers for partial differential equation applications typically run at rather high MFLOPS rates on parallel computers, although they in many cases converge much slower than implicit or multigrid methods. For this reason you must be careful to downplay your changes to the algorithm, because otherwise the audience might wonder why you employed such an inappropriate solution technique.

Have the scientists concidered that maybe its just a stage 3 civilization that's getting ready to pWn us?
Maybe its just a bunch of Matrioshka brains...
Or just wussy dyson shells....

YXA is another open source sip server. This one's written in Erlang which strikes me as a very good fit for this purpose (Erlang was originally developed by Ericsson for the specific purpose of developing high availability telephony applications). There are I believe some plans to integrate this with ejabberd.

http://www.it.kth.se/~vatn/research/handover-perf. pdf

Which Java chip? Fittingly there are several, and two support the full J2ME spec, including floating point.

Hope that helped...

Read about it and some other Java chips here.

...oh..wait.. maybe not.

Maybe this is a A Good Thing(tm), so we can help them find their way home.

Yes. Although MIT kerberos is the most used one. (on *ix platforms.)

Another one is Heimdal.

And of course, the Microsoft-tweaked Windows 2000 Kerberos.

When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.

When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.

When Microsoft bought Entropic, they released the source code for ESPS under a BSD-type license. ESPS is a very cool speech processing toolkit that used to be heavily used in research. Unfortunately, AFAIK the code doesn't compile out of the box. Some of the code from ESPS is however used in Snack/Wavesurfer.

I'm an engineering student. Working on a master's in information technology, specifically. Yes, this means a software developer. I wanted a fast and reliable calculator that had functions for most (all) the university-level maths I need to go through. IT has lots of maths in it, at least where I study.

I have read the posts but I can't seem to find the same problems in my 49g+. Will they develop over time? Maybe, but most of the complaints I read suggested that the problems existed from day 1. Guess my particular 49g+ must be a remarkable piece of engineering, then. :)

The Snack library (homepage here) provides high-level manipulation of a wide variety of audio formats (including MP3) to Python, Tcl and Ruby. It's already been used to write several applications including a sound editor and an MP3 player .

All of the scripting languages I listed also support the Tk widget set so you can get a GUI up and running quickly. Plus, since it's all cross-platform, you'll easily be able to port your work to *nix or MacOS.

The Snack library (homepage here) provides high-level manipulation of a wide variety of audio formats (including MP3) to Python, Tcl and Ruby. It's already been used to write several applications including a sound editor and an MP3 player .

All of the scripting languages I listed also support the Tk widget set so you can get a GUI up and running quickly. Plus, since it's all cross-platform, you'll easily be able to port your work to *nix or MacOS.

Dyson's original concept for a Dyson Sphere was not a solid sphere, but the idea that there would be sufficient solar collectors in orbit around the star to intercept its light. This is a form of SETI, detecting ET civilizations by seeing their sun's light degrade down to infrared heat radiation.

Well, here at KTH all our machines dualboots Windows 2000 and Fedora Core 2 and most courses dealing with computers are held in a Linux environment. This school has come a long way in the Linux transition. Of course, there is a need for Windows, but it's quite limited as we use Linux on a daily basis and it has progams for almost all tasks needed.

No, what the poster said was,

I'd love to see a picture of this as I don't know much about antennae.

OK, I follow you.

Thanks for that.

So if that's a goal of ours, perhaps it's a goal of another race's. And perhaps they got a head start on us, and that large percentage of "dark matter" actually consists of Dyson Spheres which capture everything, so are "undetectable" by us. That's pretty scary, to think that we just lost that much playground, and will eventually have to deal with the bully--on his own terms perhaps.

I mentioned this a year ago or so, and someone pointed me in the direction of Matrioshka Brains, so I will include some links for that as well. And an excellent discussion.

I would add to the last part that the larger planets could be taken apart by space elevators as well. They'd just start with the upper atmosphere; then work their way down. All the time the mass is getting smaller, and the elevators are pulling mass out so they can make themselves bigger in order to reach deeper. I think it's workable, and appears to be the most efficient way to do it--get the mass all out into "orbit" first. Actually, when you're about halfway done you can then start shipping what you mine off to other locations, and taking that amount of mass out of the elevators as well since they won't need to counterbalance as the planet's now smaller. (I don't know what the mathematical "middle point" where you start dismantling the elevators actually is--it could be something other than 50%.)

We could have "planet splitter seeds" which we shoot off to other stars, and they start with a tiny, correctly-placed elevator and build more of them as fast as is physically possible; the seed would be smart enough to calculate all the masses and start with the most effective one that would lead to the earliest date at which the entire mass of the star system is being used for computation.

The only problem is if we encounter life. Will our machines just assimilate it? Are the ones out there programmed to preserve us? Have they already done so?

Neato, thanks for mentoning your project.

We did this in a signal processing project, where we scanned old recordings and extracted the music. We tried Wiener fitlerning, but settled on spectral subtraction. Listen in. The problem is (as an anonymous coward so wisely pointed out) that you inevitably remove some of the wanted signal as well.

Yes, PAM creates more problems through its complexity, poor specification and an absolutely shocking API than it solves. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this bug was in the PAM library or a module.

Don't believe me? Try writing a program that doesn't block during authentication. Try writing something cross-platform (there are at least three subtly different PAM implementations). Still not convinced? Have a look at the hoops that OpenSSH has jump through to work around this and other issues. Don't get me started on the busted config file that doesn't separate mechanism from policy or the stupid idea of dynamically loading modules in a security context....

I'm surprised that the major distributions haven't moved on to something more sane. It's good that that Slackware, at least, has demonstrated some critical thinking and has not just mindlessly followed the flock.

(disclaimer: I am an OpenSSH developer, very jaded for working with PAM for too long. OTOH, I'm not the only one)

I am about to say something highly flameworthy, followed up by something not.

The flamebait is here: I would not mind one of these laptops purely on aesthetics. I *want* a laptop that sticks out from the throngs without having to paper the backs with a ton of stickers. I *want* people to notice it when I flip it up and start to work, or play a DVD.

The serious bit: The specs are fairly good. It includes a 802.11g card, DVD+-RW drive, 60 GiB removable HD, 1/2 GB RAM, AMD XP-M 2500 processor, 15" screen, ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 with 128 MB video card, and include coordinated optical mice. Those are not trivial specifications. Granted, it ain't top of the line. I know some gamers that are drooling at the 3d potential of this machine, and for most other work this should be able to handle the load.

And, there are a few people converting these heathen laptops to the One True Path, a little at a time (first link is painfully detailed hardware, second is travails of conversion)

Oh yeah, and the price should be mentioned: They are on par with 12" TiBooks.

If we consider pre installed machines, so does Linux.

How is the operating system "out of the box" if it comes pre-installed? What I mean is that given a PC, I can chuck a WinXP install CD in, boot from it, and be somewhat sure that I will have a working system when the install finishes. In my experience, this is rarely true for any but the most newbie-friendly of Linux distros. Though I admit RH9 was a huge step forward in this regard.

What you're saying is "If I do all the right things, and keep patching all the time, it's fairly secure.". Please name a modern OS this isn't true for.

It is exactly as you say. However, Linux proponents regularly call Windows insecure because of this fact, completely forgetting that Linux is the same.

For most people $650 is a bit too much to cough up.

Come on. Noone actually pays $650 for Photoshop. Everyone who needs it professionally gets a license from where they work (or a heavily subsidized price). Everyone who doesn't just gets it off their favourite warez network. So how much a certain piece of software costs is really irrelevant when comparing features, because to many users, price is not an issue anyway.

I'm going to skip over the "STFU NOOB" bit because I intended that one as a bit of a joke.

But please, tell me how much amount of your free time is consumed by inserting a boot CD and then asking it to install the working system to HD.

Last time I wanted to try Linux, it took several distros before I found one that would even install and boot without errors. Each one took roughly as long as Windows (some longer) to install. Once I had found one that worked, it was a pain getting everything looking and working the way I wanted, and installing software, mostly due to a great deal of the configuration having to be done through text files, and many drivers only being available as (broken) sources that I had to edit manually to compile. That, and Galleon kept crashing... So installing Linux, especially for a first-timer who is used to getting stuff working without outside help (as I have always been able to in Windows, at least for common tasks like installing software and drivers), can really be a HUGE waste of time.

One could of course argue that people who have so strong opinions about how something works, even though they they admit that they don't use it are idiots too...

I don't currently use Linux, but that doesn't mean that I haven't; in fact, I have. Then I stopped using it for reasons partially mentioned above. I do however work in technical support at a university where we do have to support Linux, so I'm "forced" to deal with it on a daily basis even though I don't run it on any of my own PC's.

I would guess they used the Faraday Effect for the measurement. The (linear) polarisation plane of a light beam passing through a media is rotated when a magnetic field is applied. This is due to the different change of the refractive index for the two circularly polarized beams (cw & ccw).

Or maybe he did, but he signed an NDA ;-)

We aleady do harvest light (or at least part of the energy of light) for later use anyway - solar cells connected to batteries (as used on satellites, ISS, etc). I don't think storing the light and then converting to required power is going to be that much more effcient than converting to power and storing in batteries.

Generating power in space and then "transmitting" back with lasers isn't a new idea, but does have certain drawbacks if anything goes wrong.

Probably safer to use a Dyson shell... lots more power available on one of those. Ringworlds just don't cut it.

Kids these days. Honestly.

I once did a 3D-visualized Prolog implementation of the towers of Hanoi for a course assignment. It used the VR system DIVE for visualization, the Hanoi implementation was a simple proof of concept of the rudimentary Prolog interface to DIVE that was the actual assignment... Sweet memories :)

(Un?)fortunately, the code is not publicly available.

Hi there, don't miss out on number three's hunk kid brother!

• OpenAFS
• arla

There are servers and clients for tons of operating systems, including every one you mentioned.

Do you mean a Dyson Sphere? link Actually, scientists have been planning since 1991 to blow up the moon, so maybe the sun is just the next step.

It may supprise some people to know that we Australians don't even have the largest steel arch bridge, the French hold that record with the Bayonne Arch

Umm... the Bayonne Arch isn't in France. It's in New York. The arch in Fayetteville, West Virginia is listed as the largest steel arch bridge in the world.

It's also possible to use SidPlay2/w (gui), command-line SidPlay2? or the oldish SIDAMP plugin for WinAmp 2, or any other sid players, to listen to SID files (with a more or less accurate sound? I don't know. I've never heard a real C64 in my life. :)

There's also GoatTracker on http://covertbitops.c64.org/ 's Tools section, for creating your own sid tunes (open source, SDL, has Windows binary).

Yeah, Chalmers is heavily into functional programming, specifically using Haskell

Most of the other unis tend to focus on algorithms and numerical analysis, notably The Royal Institute of Technology and Uppsala University. In general all the unis are more into computer engineering type research rather than comp sci.

Speaking of scanners and science. Remember this guy (as mentioned here)? We actually did something similar. 2400 dpi is enough for 78 rpm records, and you can get sound from vinyl. Of course, it's noisy, but you can still hear what the song is like.

Scanners have real world applications! :-)

At the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden we have Macintosh Tetris, typically performed in the Sing Sing building (yes, it's named after the New York prison), which is similar, but requires more precision and a larger number of machines.

I have translated the FFII demo page to Swedish.

I also cleaned up the code somewhat and put an XHTML doctype on the page.

Here're two AFS projects:
Arla
OpenAFS

Arla should run on BSD (at least on FreeBSD).

I envision the oceans eventually being depleted of economically recoverable tritium and deuterium. It might take a while, but the oil fields of Texas were once thought to be an endless resource. Maybe before that happens we can build a Dyson Sphere and blend in with the rest of the universe's dark matter.

Here's another one. Please use it - I want to see the Slashdot effect in action.

Just grab it here!

While WaveSurfer doesn't have the snap of a native Windows app doing the same thing, it is OK, but I found Raven (Java/Swing) to be a bit clunky.